William Minto

“ In the desolation of his youth, in his moodiness, in his distempered mobility between the extremes of laughter and tears, in his yearning for sympathy, his intensity of friendship, his dark fits of misanthropy, his habit of brooding over the mysteries of life, Byron unconsciously played the character of Hamlet with the world for his stage, and left a kindred problem for the wonder of mankind, a problem which no analysis can make clear, and which every one may pray that it be not given them to understand. ”

“ The work of a man so keenly alive to the impressions of the hour, so closely bound up with his generation as Byron, runs a risk of perishing when the things that most deeply stir that generation have ceased to stir mankind. The secret of his tremendous power was his passionate sympathy with his own time. By the accidents of birth and circumstances, he was placed in opposition to the existing order of things, and his daring temper made him the exponent of the spirit of revolution. ”

“ Soon after the publication of his satire, Byron, in June 1809, left for his travels on the Continent; and one would have expected that the young lord, with the wreath of triumph still fresh on his head after his first literary battle, would have gone on his journey with satisfaction and hopeful curiosity. He sailed in deep dejection, with all the bitterness of a man who feels himself friendless and solitary, and he returned after two years wandering in Spain, Albania, Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor, sadder than before. ”

“ No man can become a genius by resolving to attend; but if he attends very much in some one direction by natural impulse, then he may be said to have a genius, whatever may be his field of work. No genius is of much avail for great literary productions without attention. Dickens could never have gathered together his amazing variety of characters and abundance of incidents without attention. ”

“ For when the fragile little boy was sent into his cousin's blacking warehouse, he entered a better school, as it happened, than his father could have chosen for him. It was an infinitely more painful school than Harrow or Eton, but for one whose destined work was to describe the poorer houses and streets of London, and the many varieties of life, odd and sad, laughter-moving and pitiful, that swarmed in them, it was a more instructive school, it was the true road to knowledge. ”

“ We are only concerned to show how the kind of plot that he adopted, and the numerous branches, offshoots, and meanderings which he permitted himself were imposed upon him by circumstances of publication and composition,—were, in fact, necessary to success under those circumstances. A great deal too much has been made of the want of plot in Dickens's novels, as if it were a weakness, as if he had been incapable of constructing a plot,—the truth being that his method was deliberately adopted as that best suited to the position in which he found himself. ”

“ The delight in homely sociability and cheerfulness, in the innocent efforts of simple people to make merry, the kindly satire of their little vanities and ambitions, the hearty ridicule of dry fogies who shut themselves up in selfish cares and reserves, and of sour mischief-makers who take pleasure in conspiring against the enjoyment of their neighbours,—these tendencies, which remained with Dickens to the last, are strongly marked in the Sketches, though lighter-hearted in their expression than in his later works. ”

“ What may be called the comedy novel, the novel of Thackeray in Dickens's generation, is much less sure of enduring fame, because the sentiments on which it rests, being the product of a particular knot of circumstances, are more fugitive, and pass sooner into the province of the historian. The novels of Dickens will live longer because they take hold of the permanent and universal sentiments of the race,—sentiments which pervade all classes, and which no culture can ever eradicate. ”

“ The serene way in which she clung to and promoted the maid, Mrs Clermont, in the face of Byron's intolerable dislike to the woman, was gall and wormwood to him. An even-tempered man might have lived with such a person comfortably on terms of mutual politeness; but for a haughty-tempered, violent, fitful, moody man it would have been impossible to find a more incompatible partner. ”

“ The portrait of the most remarkable figure in the literature of this century is still too often made up on the principle of putting in all the shadows and leaving out all the lights. Not only the facts of his own life, but even the records and traditions of his ancestry, are partially selected in this way. It is true, no doubt, that a man's immediate ancestors must be supposed to have most influence on his character, and that Byron's immediate ancestors were far from being quiet, respectable people. ”

“ The attention of the public once caught by his sympathy with them, it was rivetted by the theatrical fascination of the character of the pilgrim, whom they persisted in identifying with himself. Young, a man of genius, a lord, and unhappy unhappy with a sorrow that could not be repressed, here was a mystery over which speculation could never tire. On Byron himself the first effect of his fame was almost to endanger his poetic gift. He became acquainted with Moore, and went into the fashionable world as a "lion." ”

“ The Sketches had at once attracted attention. No wonder, for in them we find already in full swing the unflagging delight in pursuing the humorous side of a character, and the inexhaustible fertility in inventing ludicrous incidents, which had only to be displayed on a large scale to place him at once on a pinnacle of fame. There are many of them, such as the Parish, the Boarding House, Mr Minns and his Cousin, and the misplaced attachment of Mr John Dounce, which show Dickens's humour at its very richest. ”

“ She is the presiding genius of his series of Eastern Tales; he has recorded the fact that when he drew the portrait of Zuleika his whole soul was full of her memory, and her image was again before him when he described the relationship between Zara and the disguised Gulnare. Conrad, with all his conscious villany, had one redeeming passion " love unchangeable, un changed." The Giaour, too, loved but one; he learnt that lesson, he said, from the birds; he despised " the fool still prone to range," and " envied not his varied joys." ”

“ Who Thyrza was can probably never be known, but in trying to convey the impression that she was merely imaginary, probably with the intention of shielding his friend's memory, by declaring him innocent of a relationship unsanctioned by society, Moore really did Byron an injustice. The poor girl, whoever she was, and however much she was deified after her death by his imagination, would really seem to have been his grand passion. ”

“ In Shakespeare's play we get a certain historical perspective, in which the love of Antony and Cleopatra appears in its true proportions beneath the firmament that overhangs human affairs. In Dryden's play this love is our universe; all the other concerns of the world retire into a shadowy, indistinct background. ”

“ From a moral point of view, Dryden's next appearance as a poet is not creditable. To those who regard the poet as a seer with a sacred mission, and refuse the name altogether to a literary manufacturer to order, it comes with a certain shock to find Dryden, the hereditary Puritan, the panegyrist of Cromwell, hailing the return of King Charles in Astræa Redux, deploring his long absence, and proclaiming the despair with which he had seen "the rebel thrive, the loyal crost." ”

“ We do right to call him undramatic still, because a dramatic genius is doing constantly and by the law of his nature what Byron could only do rarely and with a limited range. But it is wrong to say that he was always drawing himself. There are considerable intervals between Sardanapalus, Marino Faliero, Alp, Lara, and Manfred, although in those and in all his leading characters we are more struck with what they have in common with their author, the affinity that led him to deal with their fortunes, than we are with their separate individualities. ”

“ A placid, good-tempered woman, with strong good sense, and a boundless affection, which could forget and forgive his most unreason able outbreaks, might have lived with him happily enough, finding in his sunny moods of playfulness and endearment ample compensation for his fits of gloominess and violence. But Lady Byron was very far from being a woman of that mould. A wife who could coldly ask Byron "when he meant to give up his bad habit of making verses," possessed a terrible power of annoying such a man ”

“ The plot of Don Sebastian is more intricate than that of All for Love. It has also more of the characteristics of his heroic dramas; the extravagance of sentiment and the suddenness of impulse remind us occasionally of The Indian Emperor; but the characters are much more elaborately studied than in Dryden's earlier plays, and the verse is sinewy and powerful. It would be difficult to say whether Don Sebastian or All for Love is his best play; they share the palm between them. Dryden's subsequent plays are not remarkable. ”

“ If we rise from a comparison of the plays with an impression that the Elizabethan drama is a higher type of drama, taking Dryden's own definition of the word as "a just and lively image of human nature," we rise also with an impression of Dryden's power such as we get from nothing else that he had written since his Heroic Stanzas, twenty years before. ”

“ The most interesting and complete portrait of Byron is perhaps that drawn by Lady Blessington, who saw him at Genoa a few months before his departure for Greece. It is not so favourable as some, but it is peculiarly valuable because taken from a definite point of view, that of a clever woman of the world and practised critic of appearance and manner. ”

“ The ordinary histories, which he searched through with care, ascribed it to an old man's jealousy of a young wife, but this Byron's instinct rejected. He passed hours in the hall of the great council, stared at the record of Faliero's decapitation, lingered about the tomb, and called up and realized every recorded circumstance of his life, keenly studied the characters of living Venice. ”

“ It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. ”

“ Dickens was not written out, but he was growing old, and the animal spirits which fed the flame of his marvellous humour began to show symptoms of exhaustion. The quality of his humour was unimpaired, but the quantity had suffered diminution.
Dickens established his first weekly periodical from a desire to draw closer the relations between himself and his readers. He drew those relations still closer in 1858, by beginning a series of public readings of his own works. He had long hungered for this way of giving body and substance to his feeling of success. ”

“ My conversation is slow and dull; my humour saturnine and reserved; in short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company or make repartees. So that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend. ”

“ It is often made a question whether there was any falling off of power in the later works of Dickens. David Copperfield would generally be named as the novel in which his power was at its zenith. The question is not one that can be answered by an unqualified yes or no. There is certainly no falling off in descriptive power. The idiom of his dialogue is finer; the wit is perhaps keener and more swift. His characters are more sharply defined; the force with which they are drawn is more delicate. ”

“ Dryden had studied the ancient classics for himself, and their method of uniformity and elaborate finish commended itself to his robust and orderly mind. In itself the poem is a magnificent tribute to the memory of Cromwell. Now that the glittering style of the so-called "metaphysical poets" has gone very far out of fashion, it requires an effort, a deliberate dismissal of prejudice, to enjoy such a poem. A poet writing now on such a man would present his grandeur in a much more direct and simple way. ”

“ Such stormful and melancholy poetry as his must always be at the height of its popularity in times of conflict. The disturbed state of the Continent is more favourable to its spirit than the piping times of peace which have prevailed for a generation in England. ”

“ If Lady Byron had been such a woman we have no right to blame her because she was not the separation, in all probability, would never have taken place. The vast majority in English society resented the publication of the Farewell as an unworthy attempt to put his wife in the wrong, by holding up her unforgiving temper for public reprobation. ”

“ In no point of the novelist's art, whether in the general construction or in the execution of details, is there any sign of failing power; on the contrary the power seems to have become firmer and more sure from practice. ”

“ Byron himself was too poor, as Moore has remarked, to keep a harem, had such been his wish. He is known to have had a romantic passion for a girl who used to travel with him in England in boy's clothes; but whoever thinks he was satiated with this poor creature's devotion to him, should read the concluding stanzas of the second canto of Childe Harold, where the poet speaks in his own person, and laments her death in language utterly out of keeping with the dark unfeeling mood of his "modern Timon." ”

“ If Dickens had been asked why his novels were likely to live, he would probably have answered that it was because he put more work into them than any of his contemporaries. He was fond of insisting that genius meant attention. ”

“ To look for the causes of moodiness and melancholy in material circumstances is a very foolish quest; but we may be certain that insufficiency of this world's money, and the daily vexations and insults to which his rank was thereby exposed, had much more to do with Byron's youthful gloom than satiety of this world's pleasures. ”

“ But his going abroad was really a most fortunate step both for his happiness and for the exercise of his genius. Abroad he consented to the sale of Newstead, and his income enabled him to live without being subject to the constant indignities which were such a torture to him at home. There also he found the solitude which he had always desired. "Society," he wrote in a letter to Moore, "as now constituted, is fatal to all great original undertakings of every kind," and in his case certainly this was true. His first place of residence abroad was Diodati, a villa in the neighbourhood of Geneva. ”