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Guiseppe Mazzini |
Guiseppe Mazzini, Byron and Goethe
Mazzini labored
for the freedom of Italy, but was exiled. Byron and Goethe also
battled for liberty. Mazzini wrote an essay in which he compared
Byron to a soaring eagle and Goethe to a contented stork.
(Byron arrived in Greece to fight for Greek freedom, Jan. 5, 1824.)
(Byron arrived in Greece to fight for Greek freedom, Jan. 5, 1824.)
I STOOD one day in a
Swiss village at the foot of the Jura, and watched the coming of the
storm. Heavy black clouds, their edges purpled by the setting sun,
were rapidly covering the loveliest sky in Europe, save that of
Italy. Thunder growled in the distance, and gusts of biting wind were
driving huge drops of rain over the thirsty plain. Looking upwards, I
beheld a large Alpine falcon, now rising, now sinking, as he floated
bravely in the very midst of the storm and I could almost fancy that
he strove to battle with it. At every fresh peal of thunder, the
noble bird bounded higher aloft, as if in answering defiance. I
followed him with my eyes for a long time, until he disappeared in
the east. On the ground, about fifty paces beneath me, stood a stork;
perfectly tranquil and impassive in the midst of the warring
elements. Twice or thrice she turned her head towards the quarter
from whence the wind came, with an indescribable air of half
indifferent curiosity; but at length she drew up one of her long
sinewy legs, hid her head beneath her wing, and calmly composed
herself to sleep.
I thought of Byron and
Goethe; of the stormy sky that overhung both; of the tempest-tossed
existence, the life-long struggle, of the one, and the calm of the
other; and of the two mighty sources of poetry exhausted and closed
by them.
Byron and Goethe—the
two names that predominate, and, come what may, ever will
predominate, over our every recollection of the fifty years that have
passed away. They rule; the master-minds, I might almost say the
tyrants, of a whole period of poetry; brilliant, yet sad; glorious in
youth and daring, yet cankered by the worm i’ the bud, despair.
They are the two representative poets of two great schools; and
around them we are compelled to group all the lesser minds which
contributed to render the era illustrious. The qualities which adorn
and distinguish their works are to be found, although more thinly
scattered, in other poets their contemporaries; still theirs are the
names that involuntarily rise to our lips whenever we seek to
characterize the tendencies of the age in which they lived. Their
genius pursued different, even opposite routes; and yet very rarely
do our thoughts turn to either without evoking the image of the
other, as a sort of necessary complement to the first. The eyes of
Europe were fixed upon the pair, as the spectators gaze on two mighty
wrestlers in the same arena; and they, like noble and generous
adversaries, admired, praised, and held out the hand to each other.
Many poets have followed in their footsteps; none have been so
popular. Others have found judges and critics who have appreciated
them calmly and impartially; not so they: for them there have been
only enthusiasts or enemies, wreaths or stones; and when they
vanished into the vast night that envelops and transforms alike men
and things—silence reigned around their tombs. Little by little,
poetry had passed away from our world, and it seemed as if their last
sigh had extinguished the sacred flame.
A reaction has now
commenced; good, in so far as it reveals a desire for and promise of
new life; evil, in so far as it betrays narrow views, a tendency to
injustice towards departed genius, and the absence of any fixed rule
or principle to guide our appreciation of the past. Human judgment,
like Luther’s drunken peasant, when saved from falling on one side,
too often topples over on the other. The reaction against Goethe, in
his own country especially, which was courageously and justly begun
by Menzel during his lifetime, has been carried to exaggeration since
his death. Certain social opinions, to which I myself belong, but
which, although founded on a sacred principle, should not be allowed
to interfere with the impartiality of our judgment, have weighed
heavily in the balance; and many young, ardent, and enthusiastic
minds of our day have reiterated with Bönne that Goethe is the worst
of despots; the cancer of the German body.
The English reaction
against Byron—I do not speak of that mixture of cant and stupidity
which denies the poet his place in Westminster Abbey, but of literary
reaction—has shown itself still more unreasoning. I have met with
adorers of Shelley who denied the poetic genius of Byron; others who
seriously compared his poems with those of Sir Walter Scott. One very
much overrated critic writes that “Byron makes man after his own
image, and woman after his own heart; the one is a capricious tyrant,
the other a yielding slave.” The first forgot the verses in which
their favorite hailed
“The pilgrim of
eternity, whose fame
Over his living head
like Heaven is bent;
the second, that after
the appearance of “The Giaour” and “Childe Harold,” Sir
Walter Scott renounced writing poetry. The last forgot that while he
was quietly writing criticisms, Byron was dying for new-born liberty
in Greece. All judged, too many in each country still judge, the two
poets, Byron and Goethe, after an absolute type of the beautiful, the
true, or the false, which they had formed in their own minds; without
regard to the state of social relations as they were or are; without
any true conception of the destiny or mission of poetry, or of the
law by which it, and every other artistic manifestation of human
life, is governed.
There is no absolute
type on earth: the absolute exists in the Divine Idea alone; the
gradual comprehension of which man is destined to attain; although
its complete realization is impossible on earth; earthly life being
but one stage of the eternal evolution of life, manifested in thought
and action; strengthened by all the achievements of the past, and
advancing from age to ages towards a less imperfect expression of
that idea. Our earthly life is one phase of the eternal aspiration of
the soul towards progress, which is our law; ascending in increasing
power and purity from the finite towards the infinite; from the real
towards the ideal; from that which is, towards that which is to come.
In the immense storehouse of the past evolutions of life constituted
by universal tradition, and in the prophetic instinct brooding in the
depths of the human soul, does poetry seek inspiration. It changes
with the times, for it is their expression; it is transformed with
society, for—consciously or unconsciously—it sings the lay of
Humanity; although, according to the individual bias or circumstances
of the singer, it assumes the hues of the present, or of the future
in course of elaboration, and foreseen by the inspiration of genius.
It sings now a dirge and now a cradle song; it initiates or sums up.
Byron and Goethe summed
up. Was it a defect in them? No; it was the law of the times, and yet
society at the present day, twenty years after they have ceased to
sing, assumes to condemn them for having been born too soon. Happy
indeed are the poets whom God raises up at the commencement of an
era, under the rays of the rising sun. A series of generations will
lovingly repeat their verses, and attribute to them the new life
which they did but foresee in the germ.
Byron and Goethe summed
up. This is at once the philosophical explanation of their works, and
the secret of their popularity. The spirit of an entire epoch of the
European world became incarnate in them ere its decease, even as—in
the political sphere—the spirit of Greece and Rome became incarnate
before death in Cæsar and Alexander. They were the poetic expression
of that principle, of which England was the economic, France the
political, and Germany the philosophic expression: the last formula,
effort, and result of a society founded on the principle of
individuality. That epoch, the mission of which had been, first
through the labors of Greek philosophy, and afterwards through
Christianity, to rehabilitate, emancipate, and develop individual man
appears to have concentrated in them, in Fichte, in Adam Smith, and
in the French school des droits de l’homme, its whole energy and
power, in order fully to represent and express all that it had
achieved for mankind. It was much; but it was not the whole; and
therefore it was doomed to pass away. The epoch of individuality was
deemed near the goal; when lo! immense horizons were revealed; vast
unknown lands in whose untrodden forests the principle of
individuality was an insufficient guide. By the long and painful
labors of that epoch the human unknown quantity had been disengaged
from the various quantities of different nature by which it had been
surrounded; but only to be left weak, isolated, and recoiling in
terror from the solitude in which it stood. The political schools of
the epoch had proclaimed the sole basis of civil organization to be
the right to liberty and equality (liberty for all), but they had
encountered social anarchy by the way. The philosophy of the epoch
had asserted the sovereignty of the human Ego, and had ended in the
mere adoration offact, in Hegelian immobility. The Economy of the
epoch imagined it had organized freecompetition, while it had but
organized the oppression of the weak by the strong; of labor by
capital; of poverty by wealth. The Poetry of the epoch had
represented individuality in its every phase; had translated in
sentiment what science had theoretically demonstrated; and it had
encountered the void. But as society at last discovered that the
destinies of the race were not contained in a mere problem of
liberty, but rather in the harmonization of liberty with
association—so did poetry discover that the life it had hitherto
drawn from individuality alone was doomed to perish for want of
aliment; and that its future existence depended on enlarging and
transforming its sphere. Both society and poetry uttered a cry of
despair: the death-agony of a form of society produced the agitation
we have seen constantly increasing in Europe since 1815: the
death-agony of a form of poetry evoked Byron and Goethe. I believe
this point of view to be the only one that can lead us to a useful
and impartial appreciation of these two great spirits.
There are two forms of
individuality; the expressions of its internal and external, or—as
the Germans would say—of its subjective and objective life. Byron
was the poet of the first, Goethe of the last. In Byron the Ego is
revealed in all its pride of power, freedom, and desire, in the
uncontrolled plenitude of all its faculties; inhaling existence at
every pore, eager to seize “the life of life.” The world around
him neither rules nor tempers him. The Byronian Ego aspires to rule
it; but solely for dominion’s sake, to exercise upon it the Titanic
force of his will. Accurately speaking, he cannot be said to derive
from it either color, tone, or image; for it is he who colors; he who
sings; he whose image is everywhere reflected and reproduced. His
poetry emanates from his own soul; to be thence diffused upon things
external; he holds his state in the centre of the universe, and from
thence projects the light radiating from the depths of his own mind;
as scorching and intense as the concentrated solar ray. Hence that
terrible unity which only the superficial reader could mistake for
monotony.
Byron appears at the
close of one epoch, and before the dawn of the other; in the midst of
a community based upon an aristocracy which has outlived the vigor of
its prime; surrounded by a Europe containing nothing grand, unless it
be Napoleon on one side and Pitt on the other, genius degraded to
minister to egotism; intellect bound to the service of the past. No
seer exists to foretell the future: belief is extinct; there is only
its pretence: prayer is no more; there is only a movement of the lips
at a fixed day or hour, for the sake of the family, or what is called
the people; love is no more; desire has taken its place; the holy
warfare of ideas is abandoned; the conflict is that of interests. The
worship of great thoughts has passed away. That which is, raises the
tattered banner of some corpse-like traditions; that which would be,
hoists only the standard of physical wants, of material appetites:
around him are ruins, beyond him the desert; the horizon is a blank.
A long cry of suffering and indignation bursts from the heart of
Byron: he is answered by anathemas. He departs; he hurries through
Europe in search of an ideal to adore; he traverses it distracted,
palpitating, like Mazeppa on the wild horse; borne onwards by a
fierce desire; the wolves of envy and calumny follow in pursuit. He
visits Greece; he visits Italy; if anywhere a lingering spark of the
sacred fire, a ray of divine poetry, is preserved, it must be there.
Nothing. A glorious past, a degraded present; none of life’s
poetry; no movement, save that of the sufferer turning on his couch
to relieve his pain. Byron, from the solitude of his exile, turns his
eyes again towards England; he sings. What does he sing? What springs
from the mysterious and unique conception which rules, one would say
in spite of himself, over all that escapes him in his sleepless
vigil? The funeral hymn, the death-song, the epitaph of the
aristocratic idea; we discovered it, we Continentalists; not his own
countrymen. He takes his types from amongst those privileged by
strength, beauty, and individual power. They are grand, poetical,
heroic, but solitary; they hold no communion with the world around
them, unless it be to rule over it; they defy alike the good and evil
principle; they “will bend to neither.” In life and in death
“they stand upon their strength”; they resist every power, for
their own is all their own; it was purchased by
“Superior
science—penance—daring—
And length of
watching—strength of mind—and skill
In knowledge of our
fathers.”
Each of them is the
personification, slightly modified, of a single type, a single
idea—the individual; free, but nothing more than free; such as the
epoch now closing has made him; Faust, but without the compact which
submits him to the enemy; for the heroes of Byron make no such
compact. Cain kneels not to Arimanes; and Manfred, about to die,
exclaims:
“The mind, which is
immortal, makes itself
Requital for its good
and evil thoughts—
Is its own origin of
ill, and end—
And its own place and
time, its innate sense,
When stripped of this
mortality, derives
No color from the
fleeting things without,
But is absorbed in
sufferance or in joy;
Born from the knowledge
of its own desert.”
They have no kindred:
they live from their own life only; they repulse humanity, and regard
the crowd with disdain. Each of them says: “I have faith in
myself”; never, “I have faith in ourselves.” They all aspire to
power or to happiness. The one and the other alike escape them; for
they bear within them, untold, unacknowledged even to themselves, the
presentiment of a life that mere liberty can never give them. Free
they are; iron souls in iron frames, they climb the Alps of the
physical world as well as the Alps of thought; still is their visage
stamped with a gloomy and ineffaceable sadness; still is their
soul—whether, as in Cain and Manfred, it plunge into the abyss of
the infinite, “intoxicated with eternity,” or scour the vast
plain and boundless ocean with the Corsair and Giaour—haunted by a
secret and sleepless dread. It seems as if they were doomed to drag
the broken links of the chain they have burst asunder, riveted to
their feet. Not only in the petty society against which they rebel
does their soul feel fettered and restrained; but even in the world
of the spirit. Neither is it to the enmity of society that they
succumb; but under the assaults of this nameless anguish; under the
corroding action of potent faculties “inferior still to their
desires and their conceptions”; under the deception that comes from
within. What can they do with the liberty so painfully won? On whom,
on what, expend the exuberant vitality within them? They are alone;
this is the secret of their wretchedness and impotence. They “thirst
for good”—Cain has said it for them all—but cannot achieve it;
for they have no mission, no belief, no comprehension even of the
world around them. They have never realized the conception of
Humanity in the multitudes that have preceded, surround, and will
follow after them; never thought on their own place between the past
and future; on the continuity of labor that unites all the
generations into one whole; on the common end and aim, only to be
realized by the common effort; on the spiritual post-sepulchral life
even on earth of the individual, through the thoughts he transmits to
his fellows; and, it may be—when he lives devoted and dies in
faith—through the guardian agency he is allowed to exercise over
the loved ones left on earth.
Gifted with a liberty
they know not how to use; with a power and energy they know not how
to apply; with a life whose purpose and aim they comprehend not; they
drag through their useless and convulsed existence. Byron destroys
them one after the other, as if he were the executioner of a sentence
decreed in heaven. They fall unwept, like a withered leaf into the
stream of time.
“Nor earth nor sky
shall yield a single tear,
Nor cloud shall gather
more, nor leaf shall fall,
Nor gale breathe forth
one sigh for thee, for all.”
They die, as they have
lived, alone; and a popular malediction hovers round their solitary
tombs.
This, for those who can
read with the soul’s eyes, is what Byron sings; or rather what
humanity sings through him. The emptiness of the life and death of
solitary individuality has never been so powerfully and efficaciously
summed up as in the pages of Byron. The crowd do not comprehend him:
they listen; fascinated for an instant; then repent, and avenge their
momentary transport by calumniating and insulting the poet. His
intuition of the death of a form of society they call wounded
self-love; his sorrow for all is misinterpreted as cowardly egotism.
They credit not the traces of profound suffering revealed by his
lineaments; they credit not the presentiment of a new life which from
time to time escapes his trembling lips; they believe not in the
despairing embrace in which he grasps the material universe—stars,
lakes, alps, and sea—and identifies himself with it, and through it
with God, of whom—to him at least—it is a symbol. They do,
however, take careful count of some unhappy moments, in which,
wearied out by the emptiness of life, he has raised—with remorse I
am sure—the cup of ignoble pleasures to his lips, believing he
might find forgetfulness there. How many times have not his accusers
drained this cup, without redeeming the sin by a single virtue;
without—I will not say bearing—but without having even the
capacity of appreciating the burden which weighed on Byron! And did
he not himself dash into fragments the ignoble cup, so soon as he
beheld something worthy the devotion of his life?
Goethe—individuality
in its objective life—having, like Byron, a sense of the falsehood
and evil of the world round him—followed exactly the opposite path.
After having—he, too, in his youth—uttered a cry of anguish in
his Werther; after having laid bare the problem of the epoch in all
its terrific nudity, in Faust, he thought he had done enough, and
refused to occupy himself with its solution. It is possible that the
impulse of rebellion against social wrong and evil which burst forth
for an instant in Werther may long have held his soul in secret
travail; but that he despaired of the task of reforming it as beyond
his powers. He himself remarked in his later years, when commenting
on the exclamation made by a Frenchman on first seeing him: “That
is the face of a man who has suffered much”; that he should rather
have said: That is the face of a man who has struggled
energetically;” but of this there remains no trace in his works.
Whilst Byron writhed and suffered under the sense of the wrong and
evil around him, he attained the calm—I cannot say of victory—but
of indifference. In Byron the man always ruled, and even at times,
overcame the artist: the man was completely lost in the artist in
Goethe. In him there was no subjective life; no unity springing
either from heart or head. Goethe is an intelligence that receives,
elaborates, and reproduces the poetry affluent to him from all
external objects: from all points of the circumference; to him as
centre. He dwells aloft alone; a mighty watcher in the midst of
creation. His curious scrutiny investigates, with equal penetration
and equal interest, the depths of the ocean and the calyx of the
floweret. Whether he studies the rose exhaling its Eastern perfume of
the sky, or the ocean casting its countless wrecks upon the shore,
the brow of the poet remains equally calm: to him they are but two
forms of the beautiful; two subjects for art.
Goethe has been called
a pantheist. I know not in what sense critics apply this vague and
often ill-understood word to him. There is a materialistic pantheism
and a spiritual pantheism; the pantheism of Spinoza and that of
Giordano Bruno; of St. Paul; and of many others—all different. But
there is no poetic pantheism possible, save on the condition of
embracing the whole world of phenomena in one unique conception: of
feeling and comprehending the life of the universe in its divine
unity. There is nothing of this in Goethe. There is pantheism in some
parts of Wordsworth; in the third canto of “Childe Harold,” and
in much of Shelley; but there is none in the most admirable
compositions of Goethe; wherein life, though admirably comprehended
and reproduced in each of its successive manifestations, is never
understood as a whole. Goethe is the poet of details, not of unity;
of analysis, not of synthesis. None so able to investigate details;
to set off and embellish minute and apparently trifling points; none
throw so beautiful a light on separate parts; but the connecting link
escapes him. His works resemble a magnificent encyclopædia,
unclassified. He has felt everything but he has never felt the whole.
Happy in detecting a ray of the beautiful upon the humblest blade of
grass gemmed with dew; happy in seizing the poetic elements of an
incident the most prosaic in appearance—he was incapable of tracing
all to a common source, and recomposing the grand ascending scale in
which, to quote a beautiful expression of Herder’s “every
creature is a numerator of the grand denominator, Nature.” How,
indeed, should he comprehend these things, he who had no place in his
works or in his poet’s heart for humanity, by the light of which
conception only can the true worth of sublunary things be determined?
“Religion and politics,” said he, “are a troubled element for
art. I have always kept myself aloof from them as much as possible.”
Questions of life and death for the millions were agitated around
him; Germany re-echoed to the war songs of K&oml;rner; Fichte, at
the close of one of his lectures, seized his musket, and joined the
volunteers who were hastening (alas! what have not the Kings made of
that magnificent outburst of nationality!) to fight the battles of
their fatherland. The ancient soil of Germany thrilled beneath their
tread; he, an artist, looked on unmoved; his heart knew no responsive
throb to the emotion that shook his country; his genius, utterly
passive, drew apart from the current that swept away entire races. He
witnessed the French Revolution in all its terrible grandeur, and saw
the old world crumble beneath its strokes; and while all the best and
purest spirits of Germany, who had mistaken the death-agony of the
old world for the birth-throes of a new, were wringing their hands at
the spectacle of dissolution, he saw in it only the subject of a
farce. He beheld the glory and the fall of Napoleon; he witnessed the
reaction of down-trodden nationalities—sublime prologue of the
grand epopee of the peoples destined sooner or later to be
unfolded—and remained a cold spectator. He had neither learned to
esteem men, to better them, nor even to suffer with them. If we
except the beautiful type of Berlichingen, a poetic inspiration of
his youth, man, as the creature of thought and action; the artificer
of the future, so nobly sketched by Schiller in his dramas, has no
representative in his works. He has carried something of this
nonchalance even into the manner in which his heroes conceive love.
Goethe’s altar is spread with the choicest flowers, the most
exquisite perfumes, the first-fruits of nature; but the Priest is
wanting. In his work of second creation—for it cannot be denied
that such it was—he has gone through the vast circle of living and
visible things; but stopped short before the seventh day. God
withdrew from him before that time; and the creatures the poet has
evoked wander within the circle, dumb and prayerless; awaiting until
the man shall come to give them a name, and appoint them to a
destination.
No, Goethe is not the
poet of Pantheism; he is a polytheist in his method as an artist; the
pagan poet of modern times. His world is, above all things, the world
of forms: a multiplied Olympus. The Mosaic heaven and the Christian
are veiled to him. Like the pagans, he parcels out Nature into
fragments, and makes of each a divinity; like them, he worships the
sensuous rather than the ideal; he looks, touches, and listens far
more than he feels. And what care and labor are bestowed upon the
plastic portion of his art! what importance is given—I will not say
to the objects themselves—but to the external representation of
objects! Has he not somewhere said that “the beautiful is the
result of happy position?”
Under this definition
is concealed an entire system of poetic materialism, substituted for
the worship of the ideal; involving a whole series of consequences,
the logical result of which was to lead Goethe to indifference, that
moral suicide of some of the noblest energies of genius. The absolute
concentration of every faculty of observation on each of the objects
to be represented, without relation to the ensemble; the entire
avoidance of every influence likely to modify the view taken of that
object, became in his hands one of the most effective means of art.
The poet, in his eyes, was neither the rushing stream a hundred times
broken on its course, that it may carry fertility to the surrounding
country; nor the brilliant flame, consuming itself in the light it
sheds around while ascending to heaven; but rather the placid lake,
reflecting alike the tranquil landscape and the thunder-cloud; its
own surface the while unruffled even by the lightest breeze. A serene
and passive calm with the absolute clearness and distinctness of
successive impressions, in each of which he was for the time wholly
absorbed, are the peculiar characteristics of Goethe. “I allow the
objects I desire to comprehend, to act tranquilly upon me,” said
he; “I then observe the impression I have received from them, and I
endeavor to render it faithfully.” Goethe has here portrayed his
every feature to perfection. He was in life such as Madame Von Arnim
proposed to represent him after death; a venerable old man, with a
serene, almost radiant countenance; clothed in an antique robe,
holding a lyre resting on his knees, and listening to the harmonies
drawn from it either by the hand of a genius, or the breath of the
winds. The last chords wafted his soul to the East; to the land of
inactive contemplation. It was time: Europe had become too agitated
for him.
Such were Byron and
Goethe in their general characteristics; both great poets; very
different, and yet, complete as is the contrast between them, and
widely apart as are the paths they pursue, arriving at the same
point. Life and death, character and poetry, everything is unlike in
the two, and yet the one is the complement of the other. Both are the
children of fatality—for it is especially at the close of epochs
that the providential law which directs the generations assumes
towards individuals the semblance of fatality—and compelled by it
unconsciously to work out a great mission. Goethe contemplates the
world in parts, and delivers the impressions they make upon him, one
by one, as occasion presents them. Byron looks upon the world from a
single comprehensive point of view; from the height of which he
modifies in his own soul the impressions produced by external
objects, as they pass before him. Goethe successively absorbs his own
individuality in each of the objects he reproduces. Byron stamps
every object he portrays with his own individuality. To Goethe,
nature is the symphony; to Byron it is the prelude. She furnishes to
the one the entire subject; to the other the occasion only of his
verse. The one executes her harmonies; the other composes on the
theme she has suggested. Goethe better expresses lives; Byron life.
The one is more vast; the other more deep. The first searches
everywhere for the beautiful, and loves, above all things, harmony
and repose; the other seeks the sublime, and adores action and force.
Characters, such as Coriolanus or Luther, disturbed Goethe. I know
not if, in his numerous pieces of criticism, he has ever spoken of
Dante; but assuredly he must have shared the antipathy felt for him
by Sir Walter Scott; and although he would undoubtedly have
sufficiently respected his genius to admit him into his Pantheon, yet
he would certainly have drawn a veil between his mental eye and the
grand but sombre figure of the exiled seer, who dreamed of the future
empire of the world for his country, and of the world’s harmonious
development under her guidance. Byron loved and drew inspiration from
Dante. He also loved Washington and Franklin, and followed, with all
the sympathies of a soul athirst for action, the meteor-like career
of the greatest genius of action our age has produced, Napoleon;
feeling indignant—perhaps mistakenly—that he did not die in the
struggle.
When travelling in that
second fatherland of all poetic souls—Italy—the poets still
pursued divergent routes; the one experienced sensations; the other
emotions; the one occupied himself especially with nature; the other
with the greatness dead, the living wrongs, the human memories.
And yet,
notwithstanding all the contrast, which I have only hinted at, but
which might be far more elaborately displayed by extracts from their
works; they arrived—Goethe, the poet of individuality in its
objective life—at the egotism of indifference; Byron—the poet of
individuality in its subjective life—at the egotism (I say it with
regret, but it, too, it egotism) of despair: a double sentence upon
the epoch which it was their mission to represent and to close!
Both of them—I am not
speaking of their purely literary merits, incontestable and
universally acknowledged—the one by the spirit of resistance that
breathes through all his creations; the other by the spirit of
sceptical irony that pervades his works, and by the independent
sovereignty attributed to art over all social relations—greatly
aided the cause of intellectual emancipation, and awakened in men’s
minds the sentiment of liberty. Both of them—the one, directly, by
the implacable war he waged against the vices and absurdities of the
privileged classes, and indirectly, by investing his heroes with all
the most brilliant qualities of the despot, and then dashing them to
pieces as if in anger;—the other, by the poetic rehabilitation of
forms the most modest, and objects the most insignificant, as well as
by the importance attributed to details—combated aristocratic
prejudices, and developed in men’s minds the sentiment of equality.
And having by their artistic excellence exhausted both forms of the
poetry of individuality, they have completed the cycle of its poets;
thereby reducing all followers in the same sphere to the subaltern
position of imitators, and creating the necessity of a new order of
poetry; teaching us to recognize a want where before we felt only a
desire. Together they have laid an era in the tomb; covering it with
a pall that none may lift; and, as if to proclaim its death to the
young generation, the poetry of Goethe has written its history, while
that of Byron has graven its epitaph.
And now farewell to
Goethe; farewell to Byron! farewell to the sorrows that crush but
sanctify not—to the poetic flame that illumines but warms not—to
the ironical philosophy that dissects without reconstructing—to all
poetry which, in an age where there is so much to do, teaches us
inactive contemplation; or which, in a world where there is so much
need of devotedness, would instill despair. Farewell to all types of
power without an aim; to all personifications of the solitary
individuality which seeks an aim to find it not, and knows not how to
apply the life stirring within it; to all egotistic joys and griefs:
“Bastards of the
soul;
O’erweening slips of
idleness: weeds—no more—
Self-springing here and
there from the rank soil;
O’erflowings of the
lust of that same mind
Whose proper issue and
determinate end,
When wedded to the love
of things divine,
Is peace, complacency,
and happiness.”
Farewell, a long
farewell to the past! The dawn of the future is announced to such as
can read its signs, and we owe ourselves wholly to it.
The duality of the
Middle Ages, after having struggled for centuries under the banners
of emperor and pope; after having left its trace and borne its fruit
in every branch of intellectual development; has reascended to
heaven—its mission accomplished—in the twin flames of poesy
called Goethe and Byron. Two hitherto distinct formulæ of life
became incarnate in these two men. Byron is isolated man,
representing only the internal aspect of life; Goethe isolated man,
representing only the external.
Higher than these two
incomplete existences; at the point of intersection between the two
aspirations towards a heaven they were unable to reach, will be
revealed the poetry of the future; of humanity; potent in new
harmony, unity, and life.
But because, in our own
day, we are beginning, though vaguely, to foresee this new social
poetry, which will soothe the suffering soul by teaching it to rise
towards God through humanity; because we now stand on the threshold
of a new epoch, which, but for them, we should not have reached;
shall we decry those who were unable to do more for us than cast
their giant forms into the gulf that held us all doubting and
dismayed on the other side? From the earliest times has genius been
made the scapegoat of the generations. Society has never lacked men
who have contented themselves with reproaching the Chattertons of
their day with not being patterns of self-devotion, instead of
physical or moral suicides; without ever asking themselves whether
they had, during their lifetime, endeavored to place aught within the
reach of such but doubt and destitution. I feel the necessity of
protesting earnestly against the reaction set on foot by certain
thinkers against the mighty-souled, which serves as a cloak for the
cavilling spirit of mediocrity. There is something hard, repulsive,
and ungrateful in the destructive instinct which so often forgets
what has been done by the great men who preceded us, to demand of
them merely an account of what more might have been done. Is the
pillow of scepticism so soft to genius as to justify the conclusion
that it is from egotism only that at times it rests its fevered brow
thereon? Are we so free from the evil reflected in their verse as to
have a right to condemn their memory? That evil was not introduced
into the world by them. They saw it, felt it, respired it; it was
around, about, on every side of them, and they were its greatest
victims. How could they avoid reproducing it in their works? It is
not by deposing Goethe or Byron that we shall destroy either
sceptical or anarchical indifference amongst us. It is by becoming
believers and organizers ourselves. If we are such, we need fear
nothing. As is the public, so will be the poet. If we revere
enthusiasm, the fatherland, and humanity; if our hearts are pure, and
our souls steadfast and patient, the genius inspired to interpret our
aspirations, and bear to heaven our ideas and our sufferings, will
not be wanting. Let these statues stand. The noble monuments of
feudal times create no desire to return to the days of serfdom.
But I shall be told,
there are imitators. I know it too well; but what lasting influence
can be exerted on social life by those who have no real life of their
own? They will but flutter in the void, so long as void there be. On
the day when the living shall arise to take the place of the dead,
they will vanish like ghosts at cock-crow. Shall we never be
sufficiently firm in our own faith to dare to show fitting reverence
for the grand typical figures of an anterior age? It would be idle to
speak of social art at all, or of the comprehension of humanity, if
we could not raise altars to the new gods, without overthrowing the
old. Those only should dare to utter the sacred name of progress,
whose souls possess intelligence enough to comprehend the past, and
whose hearts possess sufficient poetic religion to reverence its
greatness. The temple of the true believer is not the chapel of a
sect; it is a vast Pantheon, in which the glorious images of Goethe
and Byron will hold their honored place, long after Goetheism and
Byronism shall have ceased to be.
When, purified alike
from imitation and distrust, men learn to pay righteous reverence to
the mighty fallen, I know not whether Goethe will obtain more of
their admiration as an artist, but I am certain that Byron will
inspire them with more love, both as man and poet—a love increased
even by the fact of the great injustice hitherto shown to him. While
Goethe held himself all of from us, and from the height of his
Olympian calm seemed to smile with disdain at our desires, our
struggles, and our sufferings—Byron wandered through the world,
sad, gloomy, and unquiet; wounded, and bearing the arrow in the
wound. Solitary and unfortunate in his infancy; unfortunate in his
first love, and still more terribly so in his ill-advised marriage;
attacked and calumniated both in his acts and intentions without
inquiry or defence; harassed by pecuniary difficulties; forced to
quit his country, home, and child; friendless—we have seen it too
clearly since his death—pursued even on the Continent by a thousand
absurd and infamous falsehoods, and by the old malignity of a world
that twisted even his sorrows into a crime; he yet, in the midst of
inevitable reaction, preserved his love for his sister and his Ada;
his compassion for misfortune; his fidelity to the affections of his
childhood and youth, from Lord Clare to his old servant Murray, and
his nurse Mary Gray. He was generous with his money to all whom he
could help or serve, from his literary friends down to the wretched
libeller Ashe. Though impelled by the temper of his genius, by the
period in which he lived, and by that fatality of his mission to
which I have alluded, towards a poetic individualism, the inevitable
incompleteness of which I have endeavored to explain, he by no means
set it up as a standard. That he presaged the future with the
provision of genius is proved by his definition of poetry in his
journal—a definition hitherto misunderstood, but yet the best I
know: “Poetry is the feeling of a former world and of a future.”
Poet as he was, he preferred activity for good, to all that his art
could do. Surrounded by slaves and their oppressors; a traveller in
countries where even remembrance seemed extinct; never did he desert
the cause of the peoples; never was he false to human sympathies. A
witness of the progress of the Restoration, and the triumph of the
principles of the Holy Alliance, he never swerved from his courageous
opposition; he preserved and publicly proclaimed his faith in the
rights of the peoples and in the final triumph of liberty. The
following passage from his journal is the very abstract of the law
governing the efforts of the true party of progress at the present
day: “Onwards! it is now the time to act; and what signifies self,
if a single spark of that which would be worthy of the past can be
bequeathed unquenchably to the future? It is not one man, nor a
million, but the spirit of liberty which must be spread. The waves
which dash on the shore are, one by one, broken; but yet the ocean
conquers nevertheless. It overwhelms the armada; it wears the rock;
and if the Neptunians are to be believed, it has not only destroyed
but made a world.” At Naples, in the Romagna, wherever he saw a
spark of noble life stirring, he was ready for any exertion; or
danger, to blow it into a flame. He stigmatized baseness, hypocrisy,
and injustice, whencesoever they sprang.
Thus lived Byron,
ceaselessly tempest-tossed between the ills of the present and his
yearnings after the future; often unequal; sometimes sceptical; but
always suffering—often most so when he seemed to laugh; and always
loving, even when he seemed to curse.
Never did “the
eternal spirit of the chainless mind” make a brighter apparition
amongst us. He seems at times a transformation of that immortal
Prometheus, of whom he has written so nobly; whose cry of agony, yet
of futurity, sounded above the cradle of the European world; and
whose grand and mysterious form, transfigured by time, reappears from
age to age, between the entombment of one epoch and the accession of
another; to wail forth the lament of genius, tortured by the
presentment of things it will not see realized in its time. Byron,
too, had the “firm will” and the “deep sense”; he, too, made
of his “death a victory.” When he heard the cry of nationality
and liberty burst forth in the land he had loved and sung in early
youth, he broke his harp and set forth. While the ChristianPowers
were protocolizing or worse—while the Christian nations were doling
forth the alms of a few piles of ball in aid of the Cross struggling
with the Crescent; he, the poet, and pretended sceptic, hastened to
throw his fortune, his genius, and his life at the feet of the first
people that had arisen in the name of the nationality and liberty he
loved.
I know no more
beautiful symbol of the future destiny and mission of art than the
death of Byron in Greece. The holy alliance of poetry with the cause
of the peoples; the union—still so rare—of thought and
action—which alone completes the human Word, and is destined to
emancipate the world; the grand solidarity of all nations in the
conquest of the rights ordained by God for all his children, and in
the accomplishment of that mission for which alone such rights
exist—all that is now the religion and the hope of the party of
progress throughout Europe, is gloriously typified in this image,
which we, barbarians that we are, have already forgotten.
The day will come 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 rôle 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
“intoxicated barbarian.” 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.
England will one day
feel how ill it is—not for Byron but for herself—that the
foreigner who lands upon her shores should search in vain in that
temple which should be her national Pantheon, for the poet beloved
and admired by all the nations of Europe, and for whose death Greece
and Italy wept as it had been that of the noblest of their own sons.
In these few
pages—unfortunately very hasty—my aim has been, not so much to
criticise either Goethe or Byron, for which both time and space are
wanting, as to suggest, and if possible lead, English criticism upon
a broader, more impartial, and more useful path than the one
generally followed. Certain travellers of the eleventh century relate
that they saw at Teneriffe a prodigiously lofty tree, which, from its
immense extent of foliage, collected all the vapors of the
atmosphere; to discharge them, when its branches were shaken, in a
shower of pure and refreshing water. Genius is like this tree, and
the mission of criticism should be to shake the branches. At the
present day it more resembles a savage striving to hew down the noble
tree to the roots.
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