THE BYRONIZERS.
WHILE waiting, as every reasonable person will wait, for more evidence than has as yet been published, on Mrs. Stowe's inaccurate accusation, and taking for what it is worth the altogether inconclusive reasoning of Lord Byron's admirers—(it is worth noting that none of those who were formally entrusted with either Lady or Lord Byron's view of the separation, unless Mrs. Stowe be an exception, have yet spoken, neither Lady Byron's trustees, nor Dr. Lushington, nor Lord Russell who took counsel, we believe, with Mr. Moore on the destruction of Lord Byron's diary),---it is rather interesting to note the kind of people who. take Byron's side, and the sort of feeling, independently of evidence, which prompts them to take it.
That the British public is, on the whole, vehemently Byronite we have already admitted, and it is so of course independently of evidence. But the chief and characteristic organs of the British public have in this instance been—not the Times, which, after assuming the truth of Mrs. Stowe's narrative, was compelled, in dismay at the anger of the public, to hedge against its own evident opinion, but which still publishes in its large type very effective epistolary onslaughts on Byron—but the Standard, and Conservative papers in general, Martin Farquhar Tupper, William Howitt, Mr. Alfred Austin, and the celebrated General Butler. General Butler's elaborate cross-examination of Mrs. Stowe's evidence is, we take it, rather to be set down to dislike of the New England party of virtue than to any uncontrollable sympathy with Lord Byron ; though we dare say, among the rebels against Puritanism in the Puritan States, there are not a few who indulge a passion for the one modern Titan who has covered his rebellion with a cloud of glory. Mr. Howitt repre- sents rather the British grudge against Lady Byron than any special admiration for Lord Byron ; —a tendency very deeply rooted in the unjust and ignorant English tradition, and not quite without a sort of colour of reason given to it by the unfortunate errors of judgment which have imparted to Lady Byron's whole conduct in relation to her husband, full of marvellous patience and self-denial as on any hypothesis it undoubtedly was, an external appearance of pallid, frigid, and patronizing criticism, which has prejudiced the public far more than a grave expression of unutterable indignation, followed by absolute silence, probably her wisest line of conduct, could have done. There is something irritating, even to observers, in the language of unimpassioned criticism when it proceeds from the close neighbourhood of such violent passions as Lord Byron's, and the tone of some of the published letters of Lady Byron, the one, for instance, criticizing " Childe Harold," and some of those in " Moore's Life" which must have been written under intense suppressed feeling but have the air rather of cold displea- sure than of an unutterable sense of wrong, had prepared the public to accept greedily Mr. Howitt's ungenerous account of his com- munications with her on totally different matters, much of the oddity of which could doubtless be explained away if we once had the complete facts. Mr. Tupper, however,—except in so far as he is a Brother-Poet, who aspires to have his name written (say) next to Byron's in letters of imperishable glory,—represents the genuine British-Philistine state of mind about Byron, the state of mind that calls Byron's gigantic and insatiable lusts and sins "errors," as if they had been mere incidents of his career, that believes, no doubt, implicitly in Byron's humbug, in his moody grandeur, his pseudo-romance, his Lara-aspect, in short, and is indignant at any hypothesis or suggestion which exposes the utter hollowness of the sentiment poured forth under the splendid disguise of that wonderful and unrivalled wealth of words. Lord Byron, with all his unequalled force, and all his wit and humour, and a power of mockery never yet ap- proached in literature, was absolutely devoid of even second-rate powers of speculative thought, and was a sheer " philistine " in all matters of criticism, a blind worshipper of Pope and his school in poetry, unable to enter genuinely into any one original poet of his time, even Shelley, of whom personally he saw so much. His numerous letters, expressly written to be seen and discussed by a large circle, are utterly barren of intellectual interest beyond the humorous power of mystification which they undoubtedly exhibit, and the light they throw upon his own proud, mean, and malicious nature. And it is precisely this absolute common-place- ness about this wonderful man's intellect, this utter barrenness of mind, disguised in his poetry by a fire and an eloquence such as the world has never known, before or since, which will make him for ever the heroic poet of a common-place Briton. Englishmen will probably to the end of time call his audacious sins 'errors,' and deprecate any harsh judgment of a poet who could do what Mr. Tupper cannot,—make every one marvel at the trail of meteoric splendour with which a vulgar passion or a selfish and common- place ambition comes sweeping on in his stately verse till it quite overawes the imaginations of men. Even the virtuous Mr. Tupper, with Britons in general, will pardon common- place views to a young lord who could write so grandly, and will insist on believing that he was his true self in his sublimest moods, and only yielding to the overwhelming temptation of a passionate nature when he scoffed and sinned. Yet even these people cannot pardon anything unnatural in Byron, and they won't be able to repeat, "There is a pleasure in the path- less woods," and to recall the "Farewell" and "The Dream," and to shudder at the melodramatic dreads, and thrill with the soft sentiments, and feel their pulse bound to the empty aspirations of Byron's gorgeous strains, without feeling, what will be quite new to them, that if Mrs. Stowe's story is true, Byron was a wretch who had no right to give to their common-place but worthy feelings such magnificent voice as he did.
Whether Mr. Alfred Austin, who has reprinted, —from the Standard, we believe,—with additions, his "Vindication of Lord Byron," belongs to the same school of Byronizers as Mr. Tupper it is not very easy to say. As far as we can make out, he, too, is taken in by Lord Byron's hollow idealism, by his moods of false sentiment and gloomy passion ; at least, he praises rapturously the last two cantos of " Childe Harold," and does not indicate (what, however, his object in writing did not require him to indi- cate), any special admiration of Lord Byron's really great works, his poems of mockery, such as "The Vision of Judgment" and "Don Juan." But the leniency with which a writer who parades his ardent study of Byron's letters and of all the Byroniana, speaks of what we must call, quite independently of the truth or falsehood of Mrs. Stowe's story, the unutterably melo- dramatic, false, mean, and cruel character of Byron,—if we are to judge it, at least, by ordinary standards, and not make allow- ance for a fundamental taint of nature,—would suggest that Mr. Alfred Austin may possibly represent a different school of Byron- izers. Whether he does or not—and very likely he really belongs to the Tupperian Byronizers —we are satisfied that there is a school that cherishes Byron for representing the practical rebel- lion against the morality which makes itself so strongly felt in English society, and yet representing this rebellion not from the heretical and speculative point of view, like Shelley, but from that of simple defiance. Byron in morals, as in everything else, really acquiesced absolutely in the conventional notions, but while acquiescing in them he defied them, and dis-
London: Chapman and Hall.
tinguiahed himself by a daring revolt against them. He was a rebel, in short, without a cause. He fought against God and social morality because he chose, not because he did not believe in God and social morality. He not only fought against them, but by the splendour and pungency of his mockery he gave an unquestionable grandeur to revolt for the sake of revolt, defiance and blasphemy for the sake of defiance and blasphemy. We are persuaded that there is a section of Byronizers who rather exult in the spectacle of a man, removed by station above the herd, setting so completely at defiance laws which have seemed to them rigid, oppressive, limiting to human nature. Not that they would like to be as Byron. It is not for every one to be independent of circumstances as he was. Perhaps even agreeing with him at bottom that these laws are divine laws, though so oppressive, such persons may have more compassion for their own souls than he had, and shudder at the very thought of following in his footsteps. Still, it is a relief to their imaginations that such a man has been, and that he has given a glow of real splendour to rebellion. When their own minds mutter rebellion they feel a thrill of sympathy with him. They feel the moral law chiefly as a stringent limitation, and all the insatiable side of their nature sympathizes with one who broke through it at every point. They feel for him as for a sort of Titan who broke a just, it may be, and necessary, but intoler- able yoke. Yet they are revolted by the suggestion of any unnatural sin in Byron, because they have regarded him hitherto as precisely the representative of the natural, in all its caprices of genuine desire, againt the supernatural,—as the representative of the naturalness of insatiable passions, but not as a con- spirator against nature. The unnatural is even more removed from what they sympathize with, than the supernatural. The latter may be entitled to real awe. The former is as much opposed to the lawlessness which they half admire, as it is to law. Room for the insatiable, satisfaction for each want and instinct, as it rises, whether forbidden by divine law or not,—in a word, practical Antinomianism, has received a sort of crown in Byron's fame which excites a great deal of secret sympathy. It is possible, too, for the public to feel a sort of admiration for that very kind of thing in a peer,—a peer quite removed from their sphere both by romantic circumstances and poetic gifts,—which in one of them- selves they would bitterly and even cruelly crush.
The strange thing is that any real student of Byron should fail to see the deliberate and malicious cruelty in him, which is as strictly unnatural as any sin now laid to his charge, and has a very close connection with that kind of moral evil. Cruelty as a mere incident, and a necessary incident, to selfishness, is one thing ; the cruelty which is deliberate and unnecessary, which is a pleasure in itself, is quite another. And that there was this in Byron any real student of his writings ought to be ashamed of himself not to see. It is, in fact, something very near akin to cruelty which is at the bottom of the unequalled mockery—the diabolic laughter of the mockery—in "Don Juan" and in "The Vision of Judgment." The delight with which Byron lays bare, in the former of these poems, the hollow idealism of the sentiment which had made the very fabric of his earlier pieces, is the first sign of sincerity in him as a poet, but it is the sincerity of cruelty. The hideous lampoons against those for whom, if we are to believe him in his melo- dramatic moods, he felt so much tenderness, breathe the very spirit of deliberate cruelty. And there, is just the same thing abounding in his correspondence. As the masterly letter in last Saturday's Times, signed " A Reader of Byron's Letters," pointed out,- Byron showed mercy to none—neither mother nor mother- in-law, nor wife, nor mistress. He showed them all up in prose and in verse. He coarsely sneered at the woman who has brought all this scandal upon the public by her worthless defence of his fame. He wrote letters of such low abuse against women —women, too, said to have had a special claim upon his tender- ness—that their publication has, we are told, since been threatened by villains coming into possession of them as a means of extorting money. He treated a literary friend whom he got over to Italy to help him, and then abandoned, with a cynical neglect which brought down on him the disgust and indignant anger of Shelley. If ever there were a man full of cruelty it was Lord Byron. Be Mrs. Stowe's story true or false, the Byronizers who talk of it as a fearful blot on a comparatively fair fame talk non- sense. The unmeasured lust and cruelty combined in Lord Byron would be estimated very much the same by any man of sense, whether this last and most unpleasant story be true or false. The insatiable element in him was not simply Antinomian, it was malign. He seems to us to have thirsted insatiably after evil, much in the same way in which a spiritual mind insatiably thirsts after God.
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