Twelve Types | Page 6

THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of Byron.
The age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when we
wake in the morning, a thing incredible and centuries away. And the
world of Byron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman
world, where men were romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently,
in bowers, and the very word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery.
Roses and nightingales recur in their poetry with the monotonous
elegance of a wall-paper pattern. The whole is like a revel of dead men,
a revel with splendid vesture and half-witted faces.
But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the
less ready shall we be to make use of the word "artificial." Nothing in
the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many
works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity
and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing,
like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in
darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around
him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a

voice out of the abyss.
The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the present
position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is
remote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not
savage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of
this: a fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds. When we see
some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the
equatorial woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature;
silent explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to
believe that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When
we see some of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to
gigantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour
of Creation. We almost believe that they are toys out of a child's
play-box, artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with the
great convulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism. The
volcano is not an extinct volcano now; it is the dead stick of a rocket. It
is the remains not of a natural but of an artificial fire.
But Byron and Byronism were something immeasurably greater than
anything that is represented by such a view as this: their real value and
meaning are indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about
Byron lies in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated
himself as such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of
Byron without knowing that he had the smallest amount of knowledge
of himself that ever fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The real
character of what is known as Byron's pessimism is better worth study
than any real pessimism could ever be.
It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost
everything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably
extolled to the disadvantage of everything else.
One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe
has been declared to be alone capable of making life worth living.
Books, love, business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion,
money, simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a life
close to Belgrave Square are every one of them passionately

maintained by somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an
otherwise indefensible world. Thus while the world is almost always
condemned in summary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in
detail after detail.
Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The
work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously
among them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the
House of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind.
Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a
life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar
and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest of
pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he has
written some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation, his one
pang of joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of gratitude,
with the scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird.
Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far