THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW

No. 479.-APRIL, 1924.

Art. 1.-THE POETRY OF BYRON.

1. Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame. By Samuel C. Chew. Murray, 1924. 2. Poems of Lord Byron, selected and arranged in chronological order, with a Preface, by H. J. C. Grierson, Litt.D. Chatto and Windus, 1923.

He has

MR CHEW has achieved a remarkable feat. written a book on Byron which approaches the subject from a new point of view. The cumulative effect of his work is great. He has collected, arranged, and illustrated with great skill and industry the literary matter which, in England alone, has accumulated round the work and personal history of Byron. If to the English criticisms, tributes, protests, eulogies, satires, imitations, forgeries, were added those of the Continent and of the New World, the bulk would be mountainous in its range and vastness. Byron has had his full share of fame. His poetry has been translated into every European language. He has been talked and written about, not only by his contemporaries but by posterity, for a century after his Ideath. Within the last few months he has been the subject of a play, and has appeared on the films.' Today it is announced by a fashionable modiste that, in commemoration of his centenary, his open collar is to be reintroduced in female attire. No man of letters has more continuously and more powerfully captivated the imagination of the public, abroad as well as at home. That is a historical fact which cannot be gainsaid or overlooked. For good or for evil, Byron probably

Vol. 241.-No. 479,

remains the most widely celebrated figure, not even Shakespeare excepted, in English literature.

Among many puzzling features in Byron's history, not the least curious is the uncertainty of his literary position. Most writers, after being applauded or neglected by their contemporaries, are definitely assigned. their level by posterity. On Byron's worth as a poet, men of letters have differed widely and are still divided. Was Goethe right in choosing him as the 'representative of the modern era' and 'undoubtedly the greatest talent of our Century'; or Matthew Arnold in ranking him with Wordsworth; or Swinburne in dismissing his Muse with contemptuous disdain as a 'draggle-tailed drab '? 'Set a poet to catch a poet' seems to be a maxim which is only true of the irritable race' in their calmer moments. At other times their effervescent temperaments bubble over into excessive adulation or undue depreciation. No doubt the divergence of the judgments is partly due to the times and circumstances when they were passed. Goethe wrote in the age of which both he and Byron were products; the two younger men at a period which was in almost every respect the exact opposite of the revolutionary era. Of the diversion of placing and misplacing poets in an order of merit there has been too much. Nor can a literary critic be expected to reach complete agreement on their relative positions until some more or less unanimous answer can be given to the time-honoured question, What is poetry? If Arnold is right that the true test of poetry is its sound subject-matter and criticism of life, Byron's place is high; if Swinburne is right that its essential qualities are form and music, he must take a lower place. No definition of poetry has yet been devised which gives universal satisfaction. None is likely to be forthcoming. Poetry, like Nature, abhors monotony. It possesses the elusive charm of variety, and depuis le feu Protée nothing is more infinite in the number of its disguises. It may perhaps be urged with equal force that categorical æsthetics are useless, or that popular estimates are of no value. The point need not be argued. It is possible to agree with the critics and side with the people. In matters of taste the final judgment of the public intuitively recognises poetic genius wherever it finds

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exceptional power to stimulate thought or to command emotion.

Another source of the conflict of judgment is the difficulty of separating the man from his poetry. The writings of most poets can be discussed apart from their characters. Their work can be detached from their secluded lives; their literary output is to a large extent impersonal. But in the case of Byron it is difficult, especially in these days of psychological speculation, to keep the two distinct. So much of his verse is selfexpression that it is closely blended with his personality. He sinned abundantly, not only against society, but against his art. One set of critics have so detested his character that they seemed hardly to know themselves whether they were protesting against his breaches of propriety or of prosody,—whether they were condemning the looseness of his diction or of his life,—whether they were most offended by his moral or by his literary outrages. Yet there were others who have found in the self-drawn pictures of his defiance of public opinion and rebellion against hypocrisies and conventions a zest and fascination which concealed the obvious defects of his verse. No doubt the romance of his private personal history has kept him, & as a man, in the public eye; but whether, as a poet, it has injured or raised his reputation be open to question.

may

If the blend of his poetry with his personality makes it difficult for critics to be dispassionate in their attitude towards Byron as a poet, the impartial study of his character becomes the duty of those who wish to form an unbiased estimate of the value of his literary work. The wild rumours and exaggerations of the days of the Regency are no longer possible. The truth is more fully known, and, admittedly, it is bad enough. In his letters Byron has written a detailed story of his life without knowing that he was writing it. By so doing he has subjected himself to a severer and more unsparing test than any other man has undergone.

Both in auto

biography and in biography there is room for discretion in the selection and handling of materials. But in his letters there has been none. Byron has not posed for his portrait in his robes either as a peer or poet. On the contrary, he has, so to speak, snap-shotted

as a

himself stark-naked in a variety of unconscious attitudes His passing moods and wayward impulses, his means nesses and generosities, his severe abstinences, hi degraded dissipations, his gusts of ferocity-now serious [ now comic-his outbursts of boyish gaiety, his fits o melancholy, his amazing vitality and cleverness, are recorded by himself in unstudied, uncorrected letters never intended for the general public. The wealth o material is so abundant, and in many respects so con flicting, that no two persons are likely to form exactly the same impression of the strangely compounded being who, with all his glaring faults, never lost the devoted affection of his men-friends, his personal servants, an his dogs.

The letters do not even express Byron at his best; h took, as his friends complained, a Puckish pleasure i making himself out to be worse than he really was Nor does his voluminous correspondence, full though i is of personal and intimate details, by any means tell th whole story. It omits, and the omission is significant his poetic work. Here he took no man into his con fidence. He never discussed the ideas which were seeth ing in his brain or the difficulties that he encountered in bringing them into shape. He kept his literary life to himself. He shut the door of his workshop on the world. He consulted no one on the choice or treatment of a subject. Weak and irresolute in other matters as he often was, in his poetry he pursued his own path with✨ fine courage in the isolation and independence of conscious power. When a poem was written-and not before-he discussed it with his friends and often accepted their criticism with almost pathetic humility. As a revelation, therefore, of the man, the letters are incomplete. One part of his life, and that the most important part, is withheld from view. He was greater than he allows his letters to show him to be, and greater by the mass of his poetic achievements.

In 1834, Tennyson was commenting on the Preface to Sir Henry Taylor's 'Philip van Artevelde.' 'It may be,' he said, that Taylor' does not take sufficiently into consideration the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart and new pulses,

and so are we kept going. Blessed be those that grease the wheels of the old world, insomuch as to move on is better than to stand still.' The verdict is as just as it is generous. It lays stress on that quality in Byron's verse which gives him an irrefutable claim to a high place in the development of our imaginative literature. He did what Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, either individually or collectively, did not do, could not do, and, except in a relatively small circle, never have done. He made the world feel and poetry popular. This does not mean that he was superior to his four contemporaries in poetic genius, or that his influence on poetry has been so deep and permanent as that of any one of the four. His work was done in a different field, and there no one can dispute the claim made for him by Tennyson. It is not merely that his masculine strength and almost fierce virility vitalised the anæmic verse of the day, infused passion into its insipidities, coloured with definiteness and particularity its vague general descriptions. His influence was larger and more cosmopolitan. At a time of stifling repression, liberty, he stirred the imaginations and quickened the emotions of the public in the New World as well as in

To be popular, it may be suggested, a poet must be a mediocrity. In a sense the suggestion is true. Immediate popularity with the general public is only gained at a price. If an appeal is direct and effective over a wide area, it must be made to average men; the deeper and richer veins of thought must be more or less unworked. The language in which it is couched must be, above everything else, direct, strong, natural, masculine. The subjects must be taken from the actualities of present life-from current events, contemporary politics, familiar sentiments, and strong emotions; they cannot be chosen because they lend themselves to philosophical meditation, subtle studies in colour, intricate harmonies of sound, or revivals of the thought and feeling of the past. The poet must not write as a recluse or as a visionary, but as a man of the world in which he lives and which he sees around him. To a great extent Byron paid the price of his vast and immediate popularity.