Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I

Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley

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Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I Essay 3: Byron
Author: John Morley
Release Date: March 22, 2007 [EBook #20879]
Language: English
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CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
BY
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. I.
ESSAY 3: BYRON

London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1904

BYRON
Byron's influence in Europe 203
In England 204
Criticism not concerned with Byron's private life 208
Function of synthetic criticism 210
Byron has the political quality of Milton and Shakespeare 212
Contrasted with Shelley in this respect 213
Peculiarity of the revolutionary view of nature 218
Revolutionary sentimentalism 220
And revolutionary commonplace in Byron 222
Byron's reasonableness 223
Size and difficulties of his subject 224
His mastery of it 224
The reflection of Danton in Byron 230
The reactionary influence upon him 232
Origin of his apparent cynicism 234
His want of positive knowledge 235
?sthetic and emotional relations to intellectual positivity 236
Significance of his dramatic predilections 240
His idea of nature less hurtful in art than in politics 241
Its influence upon his views of duty and domestic sentiment 242
His public career better than one side of his creed 245
Absence of true subjective melancholy from his nature 246
His ethical poverty 249
Conclusion 250

BYRON.
It is one of the singular facts in the history of literature, that the most rootedly conservative country in Europe should have produced the poet of the Revolution. Nowhere is the antipathy to principles and ideas so profound, nor the addiction to moderate compromise so inveterate, nor the reluctance to advance away from the past so unconquerable, as in England; and nowhere in England is there so settled an indisposition to regard any thought or sentiment except in the light of an existing social order, nor so firmly passive a hostility to generous aspirations, as in the aristocracy. Yet it was precisely an English aristocrat who became the favourite poet of all the most high-minded conspirators and socialists of continental Europe for half a century; of the best of those, that is to say, who have borne the most unsparing testimony against the present ordering of society, and against the theological and moral conceptions which have guided and maintained it. The rank and file of the army has been equally inspired by the same fiery and rebellious strains against the order of God and the order of man. 'The day will come,' wrote Mazzini, thirty years ago, 'when Democracy will remember all that it owes to Byron. England, too, will, I hope, one day remember the mission--so entirely English yet hitherto overlooked by her--which Byron fulfilled on the Continent; the European r?le given by him to English literature, and the appreciation and sympathy for England which he awakened amongst us. Before he came, all that was known of English literature was the French translation of Shakespeare, and the anathema hurled by Voltaire against the "drunken savage." It is since Byron that we Continentalists have learned to study Shakespeare and other English writers. From him dates the sympathy of all the true-hearted amongst us for this land of liberty, whose true vocation he so worthily represented among the oppressed. He led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe.'[1]
[Footnote 1: See also George Sand's Preface to Obermann, p. 10. 'En m��me temps que les institutions et les coutumes, la litt��rature anglaise passa le d��troit, et vint regner chez nous. La po��sie britannique nous r��v��la le doute incarn�� sous la figure de Byron; puis la litt��rature allemande, quoique plus mystique, nous conduisit au m��me r��sultat par un sentiment de r��verie plus profond.'
The number of translations that have appeared in Germany since 1830 proves the coincidence of Byronic influence with revolutionary movement in that country.]
The day of recollection has not yet come. It is only in his own country that Byron's influence has been a comparatively superficial one, and its scope and gist dimly and imperfectly caught, because it is only in England that the partisans of order hope to mitigate or avoid the facts of the Revolution by pretending not to see them, while the friends of progress suppose that all the fruits of change shall inevitably fall, if only they keep the forces and processes and extent of the change rigorously private and undeclared. That intense practicalness which seems to have done so many great things for us, and yet at the same moment mysteriously to have robbed us of all, forbids us even to cast a glance at what is no more than an aspiration.