his life? The truth is, that he employs most of his time in sleeping, dining, yawning, working like a horse, amusing himself like an ape. According to Byron, he is an animal; except for a few minutes, his nerves, his blood, his instincts lead him. Routine works over it all, necessity whips him on, the animal advances. As the animal is proud, and moreover imaginative, it pretends to be marching for its own pleasure, that there is no whip, that at all events this whip rarely touches its flanks, that at least his stoic back can make as if it did not feel it. It is harnessed in imagination with the most splendid trappings, and thus struts on with measured steps, fancying that it carries relics and treads on carpets and flowers, whilst in reality it tramples in the mud, and carries with it the stains and stinks of every dunghill. What a pastime to touch its mangy back, to set before its eyes the sacks full of flour which load it, and the goad which makes it go!2 What a pretty farce! It is the eternal farce; and not a sentiment thereof but provides him with an act: love in the first place. Certainly Donna Julia is very lovable, and Byron loves her; but she comes out of his hands, as rumpled as any other. She has virtue, of course; and better, she desires to have it. She plies herself, in connection with Don Juan, with the finest arguments; a fine thing are arguments, and how proper they are to check passion! Nothing can be more solid than a firm purpose, propped up by logic, resting on the fear of the world, the thought of God, the recollection of duty; nothing can prevail against it, except a tête-à-tête in June, on a moonlight evening. At last the deed is done, and the poor timid lady is surprised by her outraged husband; in what a situation! There anent read the book. Of course she will be speechless, ashamed and full of tears, and the moral reader duly reckons on her remorse. My dear reader, you have not reckoned on impulse and nerves. To-morrow she will feel shame; the business is now to overwhelm the husband, to deafen him, to confound him, to save Juan, to save herself, to fight. The war having begun, it is waged with all kinds of weapons, firstly with audacity and insults. The single idea, the present need, absorbs all others: it is in this that woman is a woman. This Julia cries lustily. It is a regular storm: hard words and recriminations, mockery and defiance, fainting and tears. In a quarter of an hour she has gained twenty years' experience. You did not know, nor she either, what an actress can emerge, all on a sudden, unforeseen, out of a simple woman. Do you know what can emerge from yourself? You think yourself rational, human; I admit it for to-day; you have dined, and you are 1 Byron says (v., Oct. 12, 1820), 'Don Juan is too true, and would, I suspect, live longer than Childe Harold. The women hate many things which strip off the tinsel of sentiment.' 2 Don Juan, c. vii. st. 2. I hope it is no crime to laugh at all things. For I wish to know what, after all, are all things—but a show? at ease in a pleasant room. Your machine does its duty without disorder, because the wheels are oiled and well regulated; but place it in a shipwreck, a battle, let the failing or the plethora of blood for an instant derange the chief pieces, and we shall see you howling or drivelling like a madman or an idiot. Civilisation, education, reason, health, cloak us in their smooth and polished cases; let us tear them away one by one, or all together, and we laugh to see the brute, who is lying at the bottom. Here is our friend Juan reading Julia's last letter, and swearing in a transport never to forget the beautiful eyes which he caused to weep so much. Was ever feeling more tender or sincere? But unfortunately Juan is at sea, and sickness sets in. He cries out: 'Sooner shall earth resolve itself to sea, Than I resign thine image, oh, my fair! ... (Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick.). (For God's sake let me have a glass of liquor; Pedro, Battista, help me down below). Julia, my love !(You rascal, Pedro, quicker)— (Here he grew inarticulate with retching.) . Love's a capricious power . . . But vulgar illnesses don't like to meet; Many other things cause the death of Love: ''Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign Of human frailty, folly, also crime, That love and marriage rarely can combine, A sad, sour, sober beverage.2 An honest gentleman, at his return, May not have the good fortune of Ulysses; . The odds are that he finds a handsome urn To his memory-and two or three young misses Born to some friend, who holds his wife and riches, And that his Argus bites him by-the breeches.'3 These are the words of a sceptic, even of a cynic. Sceptic and cynic, it is in this he ends. Sceptic through misanthropy, cynic through bravado, a sad and combative humour always impels him; southern 1 Byron's Works, xv.; Don Juan, c. ii. st. xix.-xxiii. Ibid. c. iii. st. v. 3 Ibid. c. iii. st. xxiii. voluptuousness has not conquered him; he is only an epicurean through contradiction and for a moment: 'Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after. Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication.'1 You see clearly that he is always the same, in excess and unhappy, bent on destroying himself. His Don Juan, also, is a debauchery; in it he diverts himself outrageously at the expense of all respectable things, as a bull in a china shop. He is always violent, and often ferocious; black imagination brings into his stories horrors leisurely enjoyed, -despair and famine of shipwrecked men, and the emaciation of the raging skeletons feeding on each other. He laughs at it horribly, like Swift; more, he plays the buffoon over it, like Voltaire: 'And next they thought upon the master's mate, As fattest; but he saved himself, because, He had been rather indisposed of late; And that which chiefly proved his saving clause, By general subscription of the ladies.' 2 With his specimens in hand,3 Byron follows with a surgeon's exactness all the stages of death, satiation, rage, madness, howling, exhaustion, stupor; he wishes to touch and exhibit the naked and ascertained truth, the last grotesque and hideous element of humanity. Look again at the assault on Ismail,-the grape-shot and the bayonet, the street massacres, the corpses used as fascines, and the thirty-eight thousand slaughtered Turks. There is blood enough to satiate a tiger, and this blood flows amidst an accompaniment of jests; it is in order to rail at war, and the butcheries dignified with the name of exploits. In this pitiless and universal demolition of all human vanities, what subsists ? What do we know except that life is 'a scene of all-confess'd inanity,' and that men are, 'Dogs, or men !-for I flatter you in saying That ye are dogs-your betters far-ye may What does he find in science but deficiencies, and in religion but mummeries? Does he so much as preserve poetry? Of the divine 1 Byron's Works, xv. ; Don Juan, c. ii. st. clxxviii., clxxix. 2 Ibid. c. ii. st. lxxxi. 3 Byron had before him a dozen authentic descriptions. See his Vision of Judgment. mantle, the last garment which a poet respects, he makes a rag to stamp upon, to wring, to make holes in, out of sheer wantonness. At the most touching moment of Haidée's love, he vents a buffoonery. He concludes an ode with caricatures. He is Faust in the first verse, and Mephistopheles in the second. He employs, in the midst of tenderness or of murder, penny-print witticisms, trivialities, gossip, with a pamphleteer's vilification and a buffoon's whimsicalities. He lays bare the poetic method, asks himself where he has got to, counts the stanzas already done, jokes the Muse, Pegasus, and the whole epic stud, as though he wouldn't give twopence for them. Again, what remains? Himself, he alone, standing amidst all this ruin. It is he who speaks here; his characters are but screens; half the time even he pushes them aside, to occupy the stage. He lavishes upon us his opinions, recollections, angers, tastes; his poem is a conversation, a confidence, with the ups and downs, the rudeness and freedom of a conversation and a confidence, almost like the olographic journal, in which, by night, at his writing-table, he opened his heart and discharged his feelings. Never was seen in such a clear glass the birth of a lively thought, the tumult of a great genius, the inner life of a genuine poet, always impassioned, inexhaustibly fertile and creative, in whom suddenly, successively, finished and adorned, bloomed all human emotions and ideas,-sad, gay, lofty, low, hustling one another, mutually impeded like swarms of insects who go humming and feeding on flowers and in the mud. He may say what he will; willingly or unwillingly we listen to him; let him leap from sublime to burlesque, we leap then with him. He has so much wit, so fresh a wit, so sudden, so biting, such a prodigality of knowledge, ideas, images picked up from the four corners of the horizon, in heaps and masses, that we are captivated, transported beyond limits; we cannot dream of resisting. Too vigorous, and hence unbridled,—that is the word which ever recurs when we speak of Byron ; too vigorous against others and himself, and so unbridled, that after spending his life in braving the world, and his poetry in depicting revolt, he can only find the fulfilment of his talent and the satisfaction of his heart, in a poem in arms against all human and poetic conventions. To live so, a man must be great, but he must also become deranged. There is a derangement of heart and mind in the style of Don Juan, as in Swift. When a man jests amidst his tears, it is because he has a poisoned imagination. This kind of laughter is a spasm, and you see in one man a hardening of the heart, or madness; in another, excitement or disgust. Byron was exhausted, at least the poet was exhausted in him. The last cantos of Don Juan drag: the gaiety became forced, the escapades became digressions; the reader began to be bored. A new kind of poetry, which he had attempted, had given way in his hands in the drama he only attained to powerful declamation, his characters had no life; when he forsook poetry, poetry forsook him; he went to Greece in search of action, and only found death. VI. So lived and so ended this unhappy great man; the malady of the age had no more distinguished prey. Around him, like a hecatomb, lie the rest, wounded also by the greatness of their faculties and their immoderate desires, some extinguished in stupor or drunkenness, others worn out by pleasure or work; these driven to madness or suicide; those beaten down by impotence, or lying on a sick-bed; all agitated by their too acute or aching nerves; the strongest carrying their bleeding wound to old age, the happiest having suffered as much as the rest, and preserving their scars, though healed. The concert of their lamentations has filled their age, and we stood around them, hearing in our hearts the low echo of their cries. We were sad like them, and like them inclined to revolt. The institution of democracy excited our ambitions without satisfying them; the proclamation of philosophy kindled our curiosity without contenting it. In this wideopen career, the plebeian suffered for his mediocrity, and the sceptic for his doubt. The plebeian, like the sceptic, attacked by a precocious melancholy, and withered by a premature experience, delivered his sympathies and his conduct to the poets, who declared happiness impossible, truth unattainable, society ill-arranged, man abortive or marred. From this unison of voices an idea sprang, the centre of the literature, the arts, the religion of the age,-that there is, namely, a monstrous disproportion between the different parts of our social structure, and that human destiny is vitiated by this disagreement. What advice have they given us for its remedy? They were great; were they wise? 'Let deep and strong sensations rain upon you; if your machine breaks, so much the worse!' 'Cultivate your garden, bury yourself in a little circle, re-enter the flock, be a beast of burden.' "Turn believer again, take holy water, abandon your mind to dogmas, and your conduct to handbooks.' 'Make your way; aspire to power, honours, wealth.' Such are the various replies of artists and citizens, Christians, and men of the world. Are they replies? And what do they propose but to satiate one's self, to become beasts, to turn out of the way, to forget? There is another and a deeper answer, which Goethe was the first to give, which we begin to conceive, in which issue all the labour and experience of the age, and which may perhaps be the subject-matter of future literature: Try to understand yourself, and things in general.' A strange reply, seeming barely new, whose scope we shall only hereafter discover. For a long time yet men will feel their sympathies thrill at the sound of the sobs of their great poets. For a long time they will rage against a destiny which opens to their aspirations the career of limitless space, to shatter them, within two steps of the goal, against a wretched post which they had not seen. For a long time they will bear like fetters the necessities which they must embrace as laws. Our generation, like the preceding, has been |