John Lord

“ Nor do we envy the man who can study either the life or the writings of the great poet and patriot without aspiring to emulate, not indeed the sublime works with which his genius has enriched our literature, but the zeal with which he labored for the public good, the fortitude with which he endured every private calamity, the lofty disdain with which he looked down on temptations and dangers, the deadly hatred which he bore to bigots and tyrants, and the faith which he so sternly kept with his country and with his fame. ”

“ Had the prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, and in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination. ”

“ She sacrificed everything for the young English poet,--her splendid home, her relatives, her honor, and her pride. Never was there a sadder episode in the life of a man of letters. If Byron had married such a woman in his early life, how different might have been his history! With such a love as she inspired, had he been faithful to it, he might have lived in radiant happiness, the idol and the pride of all admirers of genius wherever the English language is spoken, seated on a throne which kings might envy. So much have circumstances to do with human destinies! ”

“ In the same year appeared the Life of Heyne,--the great German scholar, pushing his way from the depths of poverty and obscurity, by force of patient industry and genius, to a proud position and a national fame. "Let no unfriended son of genius despair," exclaims Carlyle. "If he have the will, the power will not be denied him. Like the acorn, carelessly cast abroad in the wilderness, yet it rises to be an oak; on the wild soil it nourishes itself; it defies the tempest, and lives for a thousand years." ”

“ Had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,--that he should not be wise for himself;--it must even go into the world's history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement. ”

“ Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes to value his memory equally with his invention. ”

“ Surely, we may pardon in Byron what we excuse in Goethe in the delineation of unique characters,--the great creations which belong to the realm of the imagination alone. The imputation that the sayings of his fallen fiends were the cherished sentiments of the poet himself, may have been one cause of his contempt for the average intelligence of his countrymen, and for their inveterate and incurable prejudices. Nothing in Dante is more intense and concentrated in language than the malediction of Eve upon her fratricidal son:--
"May the grass wither from thy feet! the woods
Deny thee shelter! ”

“ But of those feelings he was the master, and not the slave. Like the hero of Homer, he enjoyed all the pleasures of fascination; but he was not fascinated. He listened to the song of the Sirens; yet he glided by without being seduced to their fatal shore. He tasted the cup of Circe; but he bore about him a sure antidote against the effects of its bewitching sweetness. The illusions which captivated his imagination never impaired his reasoning powers. The statesman was proof against the splendor, the solemnity, and the romance which enchanted the poet. ”

“ One thing is certain, that no works of fiction have had such universal popularity both in England and America for so long a period as the Waverley Novels. Scott reigned as the undisputed monarch of the realm of fiction and romance for twenty-five years. He gave undiminished entertainment to an entire generation--and not that merely, but instruction--in his historical novels, although his views were not always correct,--as whose ever are? He who could charm millions of readers, learned and unlearned, for a quarter of a century must have possessed remarkable genius. ”

“ To a few of the great choir of singers of the past Tennyson admittedly owed something, both in tradition and in art,--for each new impulse has caught and embodied not a little of the spirit and temper, as well as the culture and inspiration, of the old,--but his it was to impart new and fresher thought and a wider range of harmony and emotion than had been reached by almost any of his predecessors, and to speak to the mind and soul of his time as none other has spoken or could well speak. ”

“ Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare.
What the sonnets and the dramas reveal of the poet's mind and character.
His unique creative power, wisdom of life, and great gifts of imagination.
Equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs.
Notable traits in the poet's character and disposition; his tone pure, sovereign, and cheerful.
Despite his genius, he shares the halfness and imperfection of humanity.
A seer who saw all things to convert them into entertainments, as master of the revels to mankind. ”

“ Here Burns and he go hand in hand, although as a poet Scott declared that he was not to be named in the same day with the most unfortunate man of genius that his country and his century produced. How singular that in all worldly matters the greater genius should have been a failure, while he, who as a born poet was the lesser light, should have been the greatest popular success of which Scotland can boast! And yet there is something almost as pathetic and tragical in the career of the man who worked himself to death, as in that of the man who drank himself to death. ”

“ Then, too, what man of seventy will agree with a man of thirty as to the comparative merits of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand? How few read "Uncle Tom's Cabin," compared with the multitudes who read that most powerful and popular book forty years ago? How changing, if not transient, is the fame of the novelist as well as of the poet! With reference to him even the same generation changes its tastes. What filled us with delight as young men or women of twenty, is at fifty spurned with contempt or thrown aside with indifference. ”

“ Who is the best authority for truthfulness in the description of Spanish people, Cervantes or Byron? The spiritual loftiness portrayed in the lives of Spanish heroes and heroines, mixed up as it was with the most ludicrous pictures of common life, has made the Spaniard's work of fiction one of the most treasured and enduring monuments of human fame; whereas the insulting innuendoes of the English poet have gone far to rob him of the glory which he had justly won in his earlier productions, and to make his name a doubt. ”

“ How far the poetry of Byron has proved a blessing to the world must be left to an abler critic than I lay claim to be. In him the good and evil went hand in hand in the eternal warfare which ancient Persian sages saw between the powers of light and darkness in every human soul,--a consciousness of which warfare made Byron himself in his saddest hours wish he had never lived at all. ”

“ No one can escape from moral accountability, whether in a seductive paradise, or in a dungeon, or in a desert. The only stability, for society must be in the character of its individual members. Before pleasure comes duty,--to family, to friends, to country, to self, and to the Maker.
This sense of moral accountability Byron seems never to have had, in regard to anybody or anything, his self-indulgence culminating in an egotism melancholy to behold. ”

“ He would be a political or military hero,--a man of action, not of literary leisure.
Every lover of liberty must respect Byron's noble aspirations to assist the Greeks. It was a new field for him, but one in which he might retrieve his reputation,--for it must be borne in mind that his ruling passion was fame, and that he had gained all he could expect by his literary productions. Whether loved or hated, admired or censured, his poetry had placed him in the front rank of literary geniuses throughout the world. As a poet his immortality was secured. ”

“ Yet there is not a trace of egotism.
One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation but for its grace: he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies in sunshine ”

“ But when we remember the enthusiasm with which the novels of Scott were at first received, the great sums of money which were paid for them, and the honors he received from them, he may well claim a renown and a popularity such as no other literary man ever enjoyed. His eyes beheld the glory of a great name; his ears rang with the plaudits of idolaters; he had the consciousness of doing good work, universally acknowledged and gratefully remembered. Scarcely any other novelist ever created so much healthy pleasure combined with so much sound instruction. ”

“ Two generations have passed away since Byron's mortal remains were committed to the dust, and the verdict of his country has not since materially changed,--admiration for his genius alone. The light of lesser stars than he shines with brighter radiance. What the enlightened verdict of mankind may be two generations hence, no living mortal can tell. The worshippers of intellect may attempt to reverse or modify the judgment already passed, but the impressive truth remains that no man, however great his genius, will be permanently judged aside from character. ”

“ In these splendid tales of knight-errantry we have the full flower of the poet's genius, narrated in the true romantic spirit, but with an ideality and imagination quite Tennysonian, and with a spiritualistic touch in harmony with "the voice of the age" that reminds us that,--
"Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they." ”

“ In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,--in the Cyclopaean architecture of Egypt and India, in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,--the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new age, which sees the works and asks in vain for a history. ”

“ A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments as if they were people who had lived under his roof ”

“ That great battle was fought for no single generation, for no single land. The destinies of the human race were staked on the same cast with the freedom of the English people. Then were first proclaimed those mighty principles which have since worked their way into the depths of the American forests, which have roused Greece from the slavery and degradation of two thousand years, and which, from one end of Europe to the other, have kindled an unquenchable fire in the hearts of the oppressed, and loosed the knees of the oppressors with an unwonted fear. ”

“ It seemed to Carlyle that Goethe entered into the sorrows, the solemn questionings and affirmations of the soul, seeking emancipation from dogmas and denials alike, and, in the spirit of Plato, resting on the certitudes of a higher life,--calm, self-poised, many-sided, having subdued passion as he had outgrown cant; full of benignity, free from sarcasm; a man of mighty and deep experiences, with knowledge of himself, of the world, and the whole realm of literature ”

“ His theories are all plausible; and all are enforced with matchless eloquence of style, but not with eloquence of thought or true feeling, like the soaring flights of Pascal,--in every respect his superior in genius, because more profound and lofty. Rousseau's writings, like his life, are one vast contradiction, the blending of truth with error,--the truth valuable even when commonplace, the error subtle and dangerous,--so that his general influence must be considered bad wherever man is weak or credulous or inexperienced or perverse. ”

“ His rank added to his éclat, since not many noblemen were distinguished for genius or literary excellence. His singular beauty of face and person, despite his slight lameness, attracted the admiring gaze of women. What Abélard was in the schools of philosophy, Byron was in the drawing-rooms of London. People forgot his antecedents, so far as they were known, in the intoxication of universal admiration and unbounded worship of genius. No poet in English history was ever seated on a prouder throne, and no heathen deity was ever more indifferent than he to the incense of idolaters. ”

“ It is not our intention to attempt anything like a complete examination of the poetry of Milton. The public has long been agreed as to the merit of the most remarkable passages, the incomparable harmony of the numbers, and the excellence of that style which no rival has been able to equal and no parodist to degrade; which displays in their highest perfection the idiomatic powers of the English tongue, and to which every ancient and every modern language has contributed something of grace, of energy, or of music. ”

“ The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms. They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them stoics, had cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. ”

“ Nor does the Memoir, as a revelation of the poet's intellectual and personal life, fall away, on any page of it, from the high plane on which it has been prepared and written. There is no undue invasion, which a son's pride might be apt to make, of domestic privacy, and no dealing with irrelevant topics or elaboration of those set forth with becoming modesty and restraint; far less is there the discussion of any subject, for a trivial or vain purpose. Throughout the work we meet with no unnecessary lifting of veils or treatment of themes merely to satisfy morbid curiosity. ”

“ He was not a freethinker. He was not a Royalist. In his character the noblest qualities of every party were combined in harmonious union. From the Parliament and from the court, from the conventicle and from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepulchral circles of the Roundheads, and from the Christmas revel of the hospitable Cavalier, his nature selected and drew to itself whatever was great and good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious ingredients by which those finer elements were defiled. Like the Puritans, he lived
"As ever in his great taskmaster's eye." ”

“ How could a great artist like Byron put sentiments into the mouth of Cain such as would be harmless in the essays of a country parson? If he painted Lucifer, he must make him speak like Lucifer, not like a theological professor. Nothing could be more ungenerous and narrow than to abuse Byron for a dramatic poem in which some of his characters were fiends rather than men. We have no more right to say that he was an infidel because Cain or Lucifer blasphemed, than to say that Goethe was an atheist because Mephistopheles denied God. ”