Twelve Types | Page 8

may
arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with
the most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some
walk in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the
blood alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:
'Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away, When
the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull decay; 'Tis not upon
the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast, But the tender bloom of
heart is gone ere youth itself be past.'
That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of
Byron.
The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the
unconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the most
uncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their
nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the
whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident,
and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotional
artifices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard,
political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the time
that he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of that
buried and sub-conscious happiness which is in all of us, and which
may emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the

spears of the enemy.

POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
The general critical theory common in this and the last century is that it
was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. The
classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes,
one may justifiably answer by asking any one to try. It may be easier
really to have wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring sense,
to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have
imagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a sham
rhapsody, because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to be
unintelligible. But a man cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it is
the ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet:
he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits
out of a hat without having learnt to be a conjuror. Therefore, it may be
submitted, there was a certain discipline in the old antithetical couplet
of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the great liberty of
wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses, neither did it permit of
the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority of small writers.
A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, but at least a fool
could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake of example, such a line as
Pope's
'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,'
the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written
such a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.
Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with
such an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man:
'A being darkly wise and rudely great.'
Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than that
old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would really
be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound. The

one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of writing
'A being darkly wise and rudely great,'
the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses,
would produce something like the following:--
'A creature Of feature More dark, more dark, more dark than skies, Yea,
darkly wise, yea, darkly wise: Darkly wise as a formless fate And if he
be great If he be great, then rudely great, Rudely great as a plough that
plies, And darkly wise, and darkly wise.'
Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt to
spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet
might manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope.
There is, of course, an idea in our time that the very antithesis of the
typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have occasion more
than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever been artificial.
But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element of paradox runs
through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the realm