DR. KARL ELZE'S LIFE OF BYRON.*

Tars volume possesses the merit of being eminently readable. It smelts into almost portable shape the immense mass of materials. relative to Byron, and gives a picture of the man which is,. perhaps, as perfect as any now attainable. We have been struck by its lucid clearness, its rapidity of movement, and by the deci- sion of Dr. Elze's judgments. Of the correctness of those judg- ments who shall speak ? He blames the husband, but more the. wife. He condones the offences of the brilliant man of genius from a philosophic largeness of view ; he cannot abide that touch of puritan narrowness which undoubtedly existed in Lady Byron, but which she shares in common with Fox, Wesley, and Channing. Imagine either of those three great men placed in intimate contacb. with Lord Byron, and how would their spiritual bristles have stood erect? For such strictness of appreciation Dr. Elze has no. sympathy, and we think he deals very hard measure.

As for the great fatal whisper which haunted Byron living, and swelled into loud accusation nearly fifty years after his death, Dr. Elze poohpoohs it—we can use no other word—and better so Theelements of tragedy lie thick in his life, without entering on that disputed point ; and his many sinful acts are so absolutely certain, that an enormous wickedness,—the evidence of which has. been shown to be wholly untrustworthy,—need neither be assumed nor condemned to make the portrait true. If we speak of Byron from a Christian point of view, it must be as of one who perilled his- soul with the strangest lightness ; if we speak of him from the philosophic stand- point, then of madness who can reason ? He seems to us, as we read the condensed story of his life, the strangest mortal mixture ever forming the stuff of a man ; so much that was generous in him, and yet a hard core of rebellion in the- very centre. We can conceive that had this core once melted, smitten by sorrow—(such as he never really felt), or by the miracle- of divine grace,—he might have become a decent monk of La. Trappe, a fiery Crusader of the type of Bernard or Francis, but. a good English Christian, busied with schools in Leicestershire,. never !

Some of his faults and absurdities are, we think, well attributed by Dr. Elze to the parvenu elements in his career. "In fact, when we remember how he came to the peerage only through a. concatenation of accidents, when we think of the poor and. decayed condition from which he was elevated suddenly to an equal dignity with the noblest families of the realm, it might. almost be said that his position, in this respect, bore some resem- blance to that of a parvenu. All who were not of aristocratio birth, with the single exception of his friend Moore, he regarded as beneath him, and the few cases of friendship with persons of the middle-class which we meet with in his youth were exceptions, springing from youthful exuberance of feeling. How often, in.

reference to the Countess Guiccioli, does he dwell on the fact that. she was his equal in birth and rank ! but for this, his conduct to her would, in all probability, have been very different." Another

• Lord Byron: a Biography. With a CrUical Essay on his Place in Literature. By Karl Base. London: Murray.

riticism which has struck us in this book is that after all there was much that was feminine in Byron. After describing his great beauty, Dr. Elze continues : "A feminine character betrayed itself unmistakably in his outer man. His head resembled the beardless Apollo ; he had, in fact, little beard, and in Italy, for the first time, wore a thin moustache. His short curly locks, very unlike the straight hair characteristic of Englishmen, his large eyes, his long eyelashes, the transparent paleness of his cheeks, his full lips, are all rather feminine than masculine features. The Sultan, when he saw him in the suite of the English Ambassador, is said to have taken him for a woman in disguise, and Byron was possi- bly thinking of himself when he makes his Don Juan appear in the harem disguised as a woman. That All Pacha admired his aristocratic, small hands has been already mentioned. His voice was soft and melodious,—" d'une beante phenomenale," as the Countess Guiccioli says, in her idolatry ; the little son of Lord Holland, who did not know him, described him as "the gentle- man with the beautiful voice." The view is, we confess, quite new to us ; but we are struck with its truth, for even intel- lectually Byron's mind was rather of an intensified feminine order, than capable of what is commonly called masculine breadth of view. We use these words merely in their conventional sense, conscious that nature makes no such accurate distinction, and that to innumerable women principles are of more value than feelings ; indeed, of such was Lady Byron herself. We are convinced that she would not have budged an inch from a conscien- tious carrying out of the Poor Law on her estates, had she once been convinced that it was calculated to bring about the best result. Byron, on the contrary, would have emptied his purse (whether its contents were his own or not) at the first tale of distress. Lord Broughton says of him, "His very weaknesses were amiable ; and as has been said, a portion of his virtues were of a feminine character, so that the affection felt for him was as that for a favourite and sometimes forward sister." In " Sardana- palus," the hero says of himself :—

" I am the very slave of circumstance

And impulse,—borne away with every breath ! Misplaced upon the throne,—misplaced in life. I know not what I could have been, bat feel I am not what I should be,—let it end."

In the appendix the reader will find a long extract from the memoirs of William Harness, the clergyman. It is the tenderest testimony of all. Byron and he had been schoolfellows at Harrow, and it is curious to see bow tolerant is Harness's judgment and how much he loved the wild man. "Byron," says he, "had one pre- eminent fault,—a fault which must be considered as deeply criminal by every one who does not, as I do, believe it to have resulted from monomania. He had a morbid love of a bad reputation. There was hardly an offence of which he would not, with perfect indifference, accuse himself. An old schoolfellow who met him on the Continent told me that he would continually write paragraphs against himself in the foreign journals, and delight in their republication in the English news- papers as in the success of a practical joke."

Of Byron's place in literature Dr. Elze speaks with some fresh- ness, from a German point of view. He considers that "in the four principal orders of poetry the literature of England has producedfour poets of unsurpassed genius : Shakespeare in dramatic ; Milton in reflective poetry, so far as this may be regarded as a special class ; Scott in epic; and Byron in lyrical-poetical,--the latter being

understood in its most comprehensive sense as subjective poetry. That Scott wrote his chief works in prose and not in metrical form is a mere external distinction, which may be disregarded in our estimate." He then marks his sense of Byron's greatness, but sums up his intellectual estimate by saying that the poet never 46 advanced beyond negation, neither in politics nor in religion, and

that in this lay his weakness, but also his strength ; for upon the spirit of negation depended the whole of his almost overpower- ing influence on the intellectual and political development of the time in which he lived The state of the world was one great dissonance, and Byron, who possessed the special organ of its expression, became the poet of this

'When the policy of the Holy Alliance,' says Gervi- CUB, believed that it had averted for ever the aberrations of the

spirit of revolution by the subjugation of France, then this English poet knit again the thread which a million of soldiers had been called forth to sever for ever. American republicanism, German free-thinking, French love of revolution, Anglo-Saxon radicalism seemed to live again in the genius of this one man.' A connected system of thought was not what was wanted ; this was supplied from other sources. Men were content to find their own feelings expressed in Byron, and his high rank and independent social posi- tion imparted to his radicalism a greater weight and a more seductive and contagious brilliancy." Dr. Else goes so far as to say that not only was the ultimate deliverance of Greece from Turkish rule greatly due to the apparently abortive attempts of Byron for her freedom, but that the regeneration and unity of Italy may be partly traced to the same influence." The Countess Guiccioli, who then saw no resource left to her oppressed country- men but to go back to the composition of operas, has lived to see the fulfilment of the youthful hopes for which she and her rela- tives sacrificed so much. It is not too much to say that Byron essentially contributed to these two great ends, not indeed by the action of his immediate interference, but by his indirect influence on public opinion." To this observation of Dr. Mee we will only add that perhaps the present condition of both Greece and Italy might be more satisfactory if the influence brought to bear on their liberation had been of a healthier kind.

Byron's influence in Germany may be said to have found its culminating expression in Heinrich Heine. The poets of Young Germany considered "strongly marked lives, ardent passions, the soarings of genius above the common social order, as the indispen- sable requisite for the poet who was right only when in open antagonism with the world." In France, Victor Hugo "even accepted the name of the Satanic School as an epithet of honour. Lamartine was the representative of the Continental side of the world-sorrow called forth by Childs Harold ; Masset of its cynical side generated by Don Juan ; while Delavigne, in his Messiniennes, became the inspired singer of freedom. The mere names of these poets show how the impulses received from Byron spread themselves in ever-widening circles." If BO, so much the worse ! One can forgive a great deal to Byron if we look on him as England's own, though erring son ; but for whatever share he took in lowering the moral atmosphere in France, history has scored a sad reckoning against his name.

The heart which would fain excuse him is forced to recoil even from the summing up-of this author's friendly pen, and to say it would have been well had Europe not heeded the historic motto, " Crede Byron."