Part 1 (2/2)

OPTIMISM OF BYRON

Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of Byron The age that has just passed fro, a thing incredible and centuries away And the world of Byron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world, where men were romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently, in bowers, and the very word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery

Roses and nightingales recur in their poetry with the ance of a wall-paper pattern The whole is like a revel of dead men, a revel with splendid vesture and half-witted faces

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be toin the world has ever been artificial Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and ele, like love and hate and the fear of death Vanitydeserts, in the herood or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss

The rely on the present position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is ree or spirit, we think it not savage or terrible, but merely artificial There are many instances of this: a fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds When we see some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorial woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent explosions of her frightful energy We sirown under a glass case When we see soantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation

We almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box, artificially carved and artificially coloured So it is with the great convulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism The volcano is not an extinct volcano now; it is the dead stick of a rocket It is the remains not of a natural but of an artificial fire

But Byron and Byronis that is represented by such a view as this: their real value andare indeed little understood The first of the mistakes about Byron lies in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist True, he treated hiht knowledge of Byron without knowing that he had the se of hient man The real character of what is known as Byron's pessimism is better worth study than any real pessi peculiarity of this curious world of ours that al in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably extolled to the disadvantage of everything else

One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe has been declared to be alone capable of ion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion, money, simplicity, mysticisrave Square are every one of theood that they redeem the evil of an otherwise indefensible world Thus, while the world is almost always condemned in summary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in detail after detail

Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessi thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously a them Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the House of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of thedepartises a life of labour in the fields Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar, and swears that it is the only room in the house Even the blackest of pessimistic artists enjoys his art At the precise moment that he has written so of joy in the achieveratitude, with the scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird

Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far as words and explanations go, founded upon his pessi majority, almost every individual of which despised the ard the ree to cease to believe in this popularity of the pessimist The popularity of pure and unadulterated pessimism is an oddity; it is almost a contradiction in terms Men would no more receive the news of the failure of existence or of the harmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing than they would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or dance a breakdohen they were condeed When the pessimist is popular it s to be bad, but because he shows soood

Men can only join in a chorus of praise, even if it is the praise of denunciation The , even if he is only optimistic about pessimism And this was emphatically the case with Byron and the Byronists Their real popularity was founded not upon the fact that they bla They heaped curses upon s they wished to praise by coies of Nature Man was to them what talk and fashi+on were to Carlyle, what philosophical and religious quarrels were to Omar, what the whole race after practical happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing which must be censured in order that sonition of the fact that one cannot write in white chalk except on a black-board

Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the desolate and inhuman in nature was theman can elect deliberately to walk alone in winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older earth, weand very happy There is a certain darkness which we see in hen seen in shadoe see it again in the night that has just buried a gorgeous sunset The wine seems black, and yet at the same time powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at the sareen Such was the darkness which lay around the Byronic school Darkness with them was only too dense a purple They would prefer the sullen hostility of the earth because a like their own firesides

Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and lamentation The last movement of pessimisorical designs Here we have to deal with a pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial life Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessiainst artificiality; the new pessia step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has positively an affectation of affectation And it is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere; in their lights and garlands and ribbons we read their indwelling despair

It was so, indeed, with Byron himself; his really bitter moments were his frivolousdown fire upon e and the destructive sea and all the ultiies of nature to sweep away the cities of the spawn of h all this his subconscious mind was not that of a despairer; on the contrary, there is so with such immense and immemorial brutalities It was not until the time in which he wrote ”Don Juan” that he really lost this inarhter announced to the world that Lord Byron had really become a pessimist

One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his metre He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a hypocrite in his prosody And all the tie is of horror and e _pas de quatre_ He es, heverdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on so and all the blood alive in the body, the lips :

”Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away, When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull decay; 'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast, But the tender blooone ere youth itself be past”

That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron

The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the unconscious opti conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their nature de as the world But the whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident, and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under e into prominence in the face of a cold, hard, political necessity In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the tian to live He heard suddenly the call of that buried and subconscious happiness which is in all of us, and which rass of a meadow or the spears of the eneeneral critical theory common in this and the last century is that it was very easy for the ilish poetry

The classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do So far as that goes, oneanyone to try It may be easier really to have wit, than really, in the boldest and ination But it is iination than to pretend to have wit A e in a sham rhapsody, because it ible But a e in a shaible A man may pretend to be a poet: he can norabbits out of a hat without having learnt to be a conjuror Therefore, it may be submitted, there was a certain discipline in the old antithetical couplet of Pope and his followers If it did not perreat geniuses, neither did it perreat liberty of folly which is used by the majority of small writers A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, but at least a fool could not be a poet If we take, for the sake of example, such a line as Pope's:

”damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,”