Act 5 — THE GENIUS OF BYRON.

———

BY REV. J. N. DANFORTH.

———

Twenty-five years ago it was announced, in an Edinburgh Journal, by Sir Walter Scott: “That mighty genius, which walked among men as something superior to ordinary mortality, and whose powers were beheld with wonder, and something approaching to terror, as if we knew not whether they were of good or of evil, is laid as soundly to rest as the poor peasant, whose ideas never went beyond his daily task. The voice of just blame, and that of malignant censure, are at once silenced; and we feel almost as if the great luminary of heaven had suddenly disappeared from the sky, at the very moment when every telescope was leveled for the examination of the spots which dimmed its brightness.” Thus did the great “Wizard of the North” open his beautiful tribute to the memory of the Noble Enchanter of the South, within whose fascinated circle had been drawn the beauty, fashion, genius and literature of England. It was as if the light of one star answered to that of another, or as if the music of the one responded to the dying strains of the other—each in his exalted sphere, when the “Great Unknown” thus uttered his voluntary eulogy on a kindred genius, not to say imperial rival, of the first magnitude, if the magnanimous spirit of the former could so conceive of any cotemporary. The first fervor of admiring enthusiasm of the genius of Byron having been cooled by the lapse of time, we are enabled to form a more judicious estimate of it, and of the treasures it poured forth with such lavish profusion. It is not now the image of the young lord we see in the brilliant saloon, surrounded by gay admirers, with a face of classic beauty, expressive eyes, an exquisite mouth and chin, hands aristocratically small and delicately white, while over his head strayed those luxuriant, dark-brown curls, that seem to constitute the mystery of finishing beauty about the immortal brow of man and womankind, and quite to defy the art of the sculptor. It is not such an one we see—a living, moving form, like our own; but we think of the ghastly image of death, we revert to the form mouldering in its subterranean bed, relapsing into as common dust as that of the poorest beggar. But the MIND remains—that which has stamped its burning thoughts on the poetic page; it survives, imperishable, in another, an etherial sphere. It has sought congenial companionship in one of the two states of perpetual being, as inevitably demonstrated by reason as taught by revelation. Byron himself might scorn to aspire after celestial purity and glory, but he could draw with a dark and flagrant pencil the terrors of remorse and retribution. He believed in the future existence of the soul, whatever words of ominous meaning might at times be inserted to complete a line or to indulge a whim of fancy. “Of the immortality of the soul,” said he, “it appears to me there can be but little doubt, if we attend for a moment to the action of mind; it is in perpetual activity. I used to doubt it, but reflection has taught me better. It acts also so very independent of the body—in dreams, for instance. . . I have often been inclined to materialism in philosophy, but could never bear its introduction into Christianity, which appears to me essentially founded on the soul. For this reason Priestly’s materialism always struck me as deadly. Believe the resurrection of the body, if you will, but not without the soul.” Thus there were times when the “divinity stirred within him,” and the soul asserted its regal prerogatives, and vindicated its own expectations of the future. Nay, the sentiment must have been habitual, for how often is it naturally implied in the ardor of composition, as in those beautiful lines:

“Remember me! Oh, pass not thou my grave,

Without one thought whose relics there recline.

The only pang my bosom dare not brave,

Would be to find forgetfulness in thine.”

But our chief concern is with the Poet Byron, not with the Philosopher or the Peer. It has been said that in reviewing the lives of the most illustrious poets—the class of intellect in which the characteristic features of genius are most strongly marked—we shall find that, from Homer to Byron, they have been restless and solitary spirits, with minds wrapped up, like silk-worms, in their own tasks, either strangers or rebels to domestic ties, and bearing about with them a deposit for posterity in their souls, to the jealous watching and enriching of which most all other thoughts and considerations have been sacrificed. In accordance with this theory, Pope said: “One misfortune of extraordinary geniuses is, that their very friends are more apt to admire than to love them.” True, they have often “dwelt apart,” have been so engaged in cultivating the imaginative faculty, as to become less sensible to the objects of real life, and have substituted the sensibilities of the imagination for those of the heart. Thus Dante is accused of wandering away from his wife and children to nurse his dream of Beatrice, Petrarch to have banished his daughter from his roof, while he luxuriated in poetic and impassioned ideals, Alfieri always kept away from his mother, and Sterne preferred, in the somewhat uncouth language of Byron, “whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother.” But did not Milton love his daughter with an intense tenderness? Than Cowper who a more filial and devoted son to the memory of his mother? A fond father as well as faithful son was Campbell. Burns, too, delighted in his “fruitful vine,” and “tender olive plants.” In Wordsworth the beauty and purity of domestic life shone forth to the end. Southey had a home of love and peace. Scott was a model of a husband and father. Nothing can exceed the exquisite tenderness of some passages in his diary at the death of his wife. Goldsmith was neither husband nor father, yet his fine poetry never alienated his heart from the softer scenes and sympathies of life. It seemed rather to augment their claims, and the clear current from the fountain of the imagination is seen to flow right through the channel of the heart, sparkling with beauty and murmuring natural music in the enchanted ear. Even the voluptuous Moore is said to have repaired his fame and prolonged his days by settling down into the sobrieties of domestic life.

To return to Byron. He might be said to be unfortunate in his cradle. His young days were brought under sinister influences and associations. The youth that is deprived of a healthy maternal guardianship, is to be pitied. Such was Byron’s lot. Alternately indulged and abused, petted and irritated, his temper was formed in a bad mould. Never could he forget the feeling of horror and humiliation that came over him when his mother, in one of her fits of passion, called him a “lame brat.”

Now, as men of genius, being by a law of genius itself susceptible of strong impressions, are in the habit of reproducing those impressions in their works, a man of a sensitive poetic temperament, like Byron, and one so highly, so dangerously endowed with intellect, and a vigorous power of expression, would give to all these thoughts and associations a local habitation, a living permanence in poetry, romance, and even in history, so far as it could be turned to such a purpose. In his Deformed Transformed, Bertha says: “Out, hunchback!” Poor Arnold replies: “I was born so, mother!” If, then, we find the traits of misanthropy, scorn, hate, revenge, and others of the serpent brood, so often obtruding themselves in his poetry as to compel us to believe they were combined with the very texture of his thoughts and the action of his imagination, imparting to it a sombre and menacing aspect, we must refer much of this melancholy idiosyncracy to his early education. He was always grieving over the malformation of his foot. Far more lamentable was the malformation of his mental habits. But this, unlike the other, could be corrected. He should have exerted himself to achieve so noble a victory. Instead of this he resigned himself to the strength of the downward current, and was finally dashed among the rocks, where other stranded wrecks uttered their warning voice in vain. There did he take up the affecting lamentation:

“The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree

I planted—they have torn me, and I bleed.

I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.”

Goethe said of him, that he was inspired with the genius of Pain. The joyous, cheerful spirit that pervades the works of men who, like Scott and Southey, were educated under auspicious influences, and by a healthy process grew up to manhood with an habitual regard to the sacred sanctions annexed to their physical and moral being, contrasts strongly with the morbid, gloomy, and often bitter and sarcastic temper of that poetry, which seems to flow as if from some poisoned fountain of Helicon. Sometimes, indeed, he forgets his fancied wrongs and real woes, as when walking amid the ruins of imperial Rome, and kindred contiguities, he throws himself back into the very bosom of classic antiquity, and pours out the purest strains of eloquence, enriched with the glowing sunlight of poetry. For a time the shadow of the evil spirit appears to depart from him, and the true glory of his genius shines forth without a cloud, while the sentiments that rise in his soul ascend to a pitch of moral sublimity beyond which the ambition of the human imagination could not desire to go. In the fourth canto of Childe Harold his power of conception and expression culminated, and the publication of that poem called forth a judgment of the Lord Chief Justice of the Bench of Literature, Francis Jeffrey, which almost deserves a coequal immortality with the poem itself, and it is impossible to account for this splendid piece of criticism being left out of the recent collection of the elegant Critic and Essayist, except on the supposition that the most accomplished judges of other men’s works are some times incompetent to fix the right estimate of their own. Genius does not always accurately weigh its own productions, since Milton preferred his Paradise Regained to his Paradise Lost, and Byron himself was inveterately attached to a poem, or rather a translation, to restrain him from publishing which cost the strongest efforts of his most influential friends.

He was then a voluntary exile from his native land, that noble England, which should be dear to all great men, because the mother of so many; he was nursing many fictitious sorrows; affecting a scorn for his country he could not feel; defying the judgments of men to which he was painfully sensitive; mourning over the blasted blossoms of domestic happiness; seeking new sources of gratification, or old gratifications in new forms; in the midst of all he plunges into the arcana of classic lore; he dives into the crystal depths of classic antiquity, to draw forth beautiful gems, dripping with the sparkling element, untainted by its passage through centuries of time. He reconstructs the whole scene to our view, mingling his illustrations from those severer arts with the sweet and graceful touches of a pencil that seems capable of catching and delineating every form of beauty that can engage the fancy or awaken the imagination. We have been filled with admiration, we have been fired with enthusiasm, at some of these magnificent strains of poetry, noble ideas, burning thoughts, assuming precisely the dress, the costume, which best became them. Whether the poet takes us along the bank of some classic stream, places us before some romantic city, flies over the battle-field, luxuriates in a moonlight scene, lingers amid broken columns and bubbling fountains, gazes on the splendid remnants of statues that almost seem instinct with the breath of life, conducts us to the roaring of the cataract, across whose dread chasm, “the hell of waters,” is arched here and there the lovely Iris, with her seven-fold dyes, “like Hope upon a death-bed,” then upward passes and beholds the solemn mountains, the Alps or Appenines, scenes of heroic daring and suffering, contemplates the mighty ocean, “dark, heaving, boundless, endless and sublime, the image of eternity,” over whose bosom ten thousand fleets have swept, and left no marks; finally, if he leads us back to the Eternal City, not as in her pride of place and power, but as oppressed with the “double night of ages,” as the “Niobe of nations,” the “lone mother of dead empires,” sitting in solitude, “an empty urn within her withered hands,” and draws mighty lessons from all these objects, in all this we behold the splendor of true genius; we feel its power; we wonder at the gifts of God thus bestowed; we tremble at the responsibility of the man thus rarely endowed by his Creator. That regal imagination, disdaining at times the vulgarities to which a depraved heart would subject it, asserts its native dignity, and as it ranges among more quiet scenes utters, with the solemnity of a prophet, such a lesson as this:

“If from society we learn to live,

’Tis solitude should teach us how to die.

It hath no flatterers; vanity can give

No hollow aid; alone, man with his God must strive.”

Besides that ORIGINALITY, which is a distinguishing attribute of the genius of Byron, there is in his language a power of concentration, which adds greatly to its vigor; some condensing process of thought is going on, the result of which is much meaning in few words, and those words kept under the law of fitness with more than military precision, yet without constraint. Few feeble words or straggling lines disfigure his poetry. That infamous effusion of a putrid mind, Don Juan, has most of them, while it has also some exquisite gems of beauty. As the last offspring of a teeming mind, it evidences a progress in sensual depravity, and an effrontery in publishing it to the world, seldom adventured by the most reckless contemner of the opinion of his fellow men, or the most impious blasphemer of the majesty of God. Indeed, his moral sense must have reached that region said to be inhabited by demons, who “impair the strength of better thoughts,”

“Making the sun like blood, the earth a tomb,

The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom.”

It was of this last, deeply characteristic work, that Blackwood’s Magazine said, at the time: “In its composition there is unquestionably a more thorough and intense infusion of genius and vice, power and profligacy, than in any poem which had ever been written in the English, or indeed in any other modern language.” No poem, perhaps, ever exhibited a more remarkable mixture of ease, strength, fluency, gayety, mock-seriousness, and even refined tenderness of sentiment along with coarse indecency. Love, honor, purity, patriotism, chastity, religion, are all set forth or set at naught, just as suits the present, vagrant fancy of the author. The Edinburgh Review justly said: “We are acquainted with no writings so well calculated to extinguish in young minds all generous enthusiasm and gentle affection, all respect for themselves, and all love for their kind; to make them practice and profess hardly what it teaches them to suspect in others, and actually to persuade them that it is wise and manly, and knowing, to laugh, not only at self-denial and restraint, but at all aspiring ambition, and all warm and constant affection.”

The opinion of admiring and impartial critics, indeed, was, that the tendency of his writings was to destroy all belief in the reality of virtue, to make constancy of devotion ridiculous; not so much by direct maxims and examples of an imposing or seducing kind, as by the habitual exhibition of the most profligate heartlessness in the persons who had been represented as actuated by the purest and most exalted emotions, and in the lessons of that same teacher who, a moment before, was so pathetic and eloquent in the expression of the loftiest conceptions.

How nobly different was Burns, the peer of Byron in genius—analogous to him, as well in the strength of passion as in the beauty of imagination; attracted, like him, by the Circean cup, absorbed at times in his convivialities, but never jesting with virtue, jeering at religion, or scorning the recollections of a pious home and a praying father. They rose by the force of their genius—they fell by the strength of their passions; but the fall of the one was only a repetition of the lapses of apostate humanity—guilty, indeed, but profoundly self-lamented, often expiated in tears wept on the bosom of domestic affection. The fall of the other was like that of the arch-angel ruined, defying Omnipotence, even when rolling in agony on a sea of fire. Even when feeding his fancy and invigorating his imagination amid the rural charms and sublimities of Switzerland, Byron thus writes in his journal: “I am a lover of nature and an admirer of beauty. I can bear fatigue and welcome privation, and have seen some of the noblest views in the world. But in all this, the recollection of bitterness, and more especially of more recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory around, above, and beneath me.” Or, as expressed in another form:

“——I have thought

Too long and darkly, till my brain became,

In its own eddy, boiling and o’er wrought—

A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame.”

Why all this? A part of the secret is disclosed by himself, in a letter to his friend Dallas: “My whole life has been at variance with propriety, not to say decency. . . . My friends are dead or estranged, and my existence a dreary void.” It had not been so had passion been held in check by principle, instead of principle being subjected to passion. There is, indeed, too much reason to believe the truth, that in connection with great versatility of powers, there is too often found a tendency to versatility of principle. So the unprincipled Chatterton said: “he held that man in contempt who could not write on both sides of a question.” Byron delights in sketching the most odd and opposite sorts and styles of pictures, and in abruptly bringing into rude collision the most opposite principles, as if he would amuse himself with the shock while he distresses the sensibilities of others. His powers were mighty, various, beautiful; but they needed adjustment. There was no regular balance-wheel in his intellectual and moral system. In another, or more painful sense, than the pensive and drooping genius of Cowper expressed it, might Byron say:

“The howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tossed,

Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost,

And day by day some current’s thwarting force

Sets me more distant from a prosperous course.”

His refined and exquisite sense of the beautiful in poesy could not be surpassed. His pictures of mortal loveliness are quite inimitable, and there is at times in the strains of his muse, in the very structure of his language, a tenderness, which it would seem impossible could co-exist with that severity so often, so naturally sharpening into sarcasm, as if it were a part of the staple of his mind. The lash of criticism having first roused up the dormant energies of his genius, his first impulse was to seize the sharpest weapons of satire he could find, and even the poisoned arrows of vituperation and slander, and with a power and precision of archery seldom surpassed, to take his full measure of retaliation. Nay, he became so fond of the sport, or so unable otherwise to satisfy his revenge, that he multiplied innocent victims, assailing his own relations, and even the noble, generous, genial Scott, whose maxim it was never to provoke or be provoked, especially in his intercourse with the irritable tribe of authors. Firmly and calmly Scott resolved to receive the fire of all sorts of assailants, who were engaged in the “raving warfare of satire, parody, and sarcasm.” This sudden, bellicose production of Byron’s impulsive genius—English Bards and Scotch Reviewers—cost even him shame and sorrow the rest of his life. But still he was ever fond of sailing on that quarter. His impulses must ever be of the fiery, fitful kind. It is a wonder that, among all his paradoxes and peregrinations, he did not pay a visit to the Dead Sea. That would have been a congenial pilgrimage for Childe Harold; and, then, for such a drake as he was to swim in its waters! The exploit of Leander was only repeated by him from Sestus to Abydos. The other would have been an original feat, worthy of the taste of a man who preferred drinking out of a skull to the usual mode of potation out of the ordinary goblets of civilization.

Severe, scornful, passionate, vengeful, as he often was, how do those stern features relax, and the milder sensibilities rise into tender exercise, when, as a father in exile, he writes:

“My daughter! with thy name this song begun,

My daughter! with thy name thus much shall end.

I see thee not—I hear thee not—but none

Can be so wrapt in thee; thou art the friend

To whom the shadows of far years extend;

Albeit my brow thou never shouldst behold,

My voice shall with thy future visions blend,

And reach into thy heart—when mine is cold,

A token and a tone, even from thy father’s mould.”

Thus, with a certain style of uniformity everywhere observable, especially in his characters, there is much variety of thought, emotion and passion, evidential of great fertility of mind. If he does reproduce the same hero under different names, and even give strong indications of his identification with himself, still the wand of the enchanter invests him with so many brilliant aspects, places him in so many imposing attitudes, as to produce all the effect of novelty. His muse less delights in planning incidents and grouping characters, than in working out, as with the sculptor’s energetic art, single, stern, striking models of heroic humanity, albeit stained with dangerous vices. His very genius has been declared to be inspired with the classic enthusiasm that has produced some of the most splendid specimens of the chisel; “his heroes stand alone, as upon marble pedestals, displaying the naked power of passion, or the wrapped up and reposing energy of grief.” Medora, Gulnare, Lara, Manfred, Childe Harold, might each furnish an original from which the sculptor could execute copies, that would stand the proud impressive symbols of manliness or of loveliness, satisfying even those intense dreams of beauty which poets and lovers sometimes indulge in their solitary musings.

“There, too, the goddess loves in stone, and fills

The air around with beauty; we inhale

The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instils

Part of its immortality.” Childe Harold.

This poem, indeed, is a perfect gallery of art, whose paintings and statues are drawn and fashioned from the life, with the skill of a consummate master and the facility of a powerful creative, divinely endowed genius. He places his hand on the broad canvas of life, and behold the figures that rise under his magic pencil! They are, indeed, too often dark, stern, mysterious and awful, stained with vices, and pre-doomed, for their guilt, to the pains of a terrible reprobation. With such characters the genius of Byron had a strange sympathy. Hence his admiration of that historical passage in the Scriptures, in which the crime and the doom of Saul is so solemnly set forth at the tomb of the prophet Samuel, whose sepulchral slumbers were so rudely disturbed by the intrusion of the anxious and distressed monarch, now forsaken by his God. Shakspeare, having finished off one of these dark and repulsive pictures, as in his Macbeth or Lear, passes to the sketching of more cheerful and even humorous portraits; but Byron, for the most part, delights to dwell in darkness. Thus, in this poem, when the curse is imprecated, the time midnight, the scene the ruined site of the temple of the Furies, the auditors the ghosts of departed years, the imprecator a spirit fallen from an unwonted height of glory to the depths of wo. Principals and accessaries assume the sombre coloring of his imagination, from which, however, at times, shoots a gleam of beauty, that imparts loveliness to the whole scene. Milton, with his almost perfect sense of beauty, and the fitness of things, would never have put such words as these in the mouth of his Eve:

“May the grass wither from thy foot! the woods

Deny thee shelter—earth a home—the dust

A grave! the sun his light! and Heaven her God!”

Cain.

It was quite suitable for Byron to talk so in his Cain, but he has not unsettled the position of the world’s estimate of its first mother, so firmly established by Milton. He was, at the time, perhaps, thinking of himself as Cain, and of his own mother as in one of her imprecating paroxysms. Alas, that he should have gone on in lawless indulgence, insulting, both in poetry and practice, the sanctity of domestic, heaven-constituted, earth-blessing ties, until, after an abortive, ill-directed struggle for poor Greece, he sunk into an early grave, at 36 aet., the very meridian of life! He was never satisfied with his earthly lot, not even with the rare gifts of his genius, nor with the achievements it made. He professed to consider a poet, no matter what his eminence, as quite a secondary character to a great statesman or warrior. As he had failed in the first character, he resolved to try the second, and strike for the liberty he had sung. But Fame had no place for him in this part of her temple. With the rest of the tuneful tribe, he descends to the judgment of posterity as a Poet; with all men of genius above the million, as more deeply responsible than they to the author of all mercies; with all men whatever, as a MORAL AND IMMORTAL BEING, accountable at the tribunal of God.

The mind would fail in any attempt to estimate the immense influence of his genius and writings upon the youthful mind and morals of the past generation—an influence to be augmented in a geometrical ratio in the future. What is written, is written, constituting a portion of the active influence circulating in the world—not to be recalled, not to be extinguished, but to move on to the end of time, and finally to be met by its originator, where all illusions will vanish, and all truth, justice and purity be vindicated.