Varied Types | Page 7

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
as words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was
adored by an overwhelming majority, almost every individual of which
despised the majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the

matter a little more deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe
in this popularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and
unadulterated pessimism is an oddity; it is almost a contradiction in
terms. Men would no more receive the news of the failure of existence
or of the harmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular
rejoicing than they would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or
dance a breakdown when they were condemned to be hanged. When
the pessimist is popular it must always be not because he shows all
things to be bad, but because he shows some things to be good.
Men can only join in a chorus of praise, even if it is the praise of
denunciation. The man who is popular must be optimistic about
something, even if he is only optimistic about pessimism. And this was
emphatically the case with Byron and the Byronists. Their real
popularity was founded not upon the fact that they blamed everything,
but upon the fact that they praised something. They heaped curses upon
man, but they used man merely as a foil. The things they wished to
praise by comparison were the energies of Nature. Man was to them
what talk and fashion were to Carlyle, what philosophical and religious
quarrels were to Omar, what the whole race after practical happiness
was to Schopenhauer, the thing which must be censured in order that
somebody else may be exalted. It was merely a recognition of the fact
that one cannot write in white chalk except on a black-board.
Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the
desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and
depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in
winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in
storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older
earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young
and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when
seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a
gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time
powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at
the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such
was the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with
them was only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen

hostility of the earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own
hearts were flaming like their own firesides.
Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and
lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in
Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with
a pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of
the cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of
artificial life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism
towards the restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the
new pessimism is a revolt in its favour.
The Byronic young man had an affectation of sincerity; the decadent,
going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has positively an
affectation of affectation. And it is by their fopperies and their
frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere; in their
lights and garlands and ribbons we read their indwelling despair. It was
so, indeed, with Byron himself; his really bitter moments were his
frivolous moments. He went on year after year calling down fire upon
mankind, summoning the deluge and the destructive sea and all the
ultimate energies of nature to sweep away the cities of the spawn of
man. But through all this his subconscious mind was not that of a
despairer; on the contrary, there is something of a kind of lawless faith
in thus parleying with such immense and immemorial brutalities. It was
not until the time in which he wrote "Don Juan" that he really lost this
inward warmth and geniality, and a sudden shout of hilarious laughter
announced to the world that Lord Byron had really become a pessimist.
One of the best tests