On Byron and Tom Moore

Ithink there is something about Byron and his biography, and many of their comrades and contemporaries, that has not been said. This is very probably because it is not at all easy to say. I fear my own attempt to say it will sound curiously vague j and yet to my own mind it is very vivid. I feel it about Byron 3 I feel it about Byron's friend Moore f I even feel it about Moore's friend the Prince Regent. Byron as an individual was the least defensible of the three 5 but I am not going to enter here into the controversy about his private life. It will be enough to say that, upon the blackest hypothesis, the story is an excellent illustration of a truth very valuable in all confessions: that we never know the best that can be said, till we know the worst that can be said. The worst that can be said of Byron, if it was true, was not so bad as many might reasonably have supposed when it was partially hidden. It was not a sort of precocious perversion from the cradle, but a later coincidence that had the ill-luck if not the innocence of Oedipus. But putting this business altogether on one side, nobody will pretend that Byron was not a pretty aggressively bad manj and he certainly did not pretend it himself.

But it is exactly here that we have the first intellectual injustice to Byron. The very term "Byronic" has come to stand, not merely for melancholy, but for an insincere and merely melodramatic melancholy. He is represented as a swaggering and shallow fool, always parading fictitious feelings and posing as solitary only in order to attract society. Now the enemies of Byron really cannot have it both ways. They cannot accuse him of the blackest crimes, taunt him with brooding on them, and then tell him that he had nothing to brood about. They cannot accuse him, first of being a profligate, and then of being a humbug when he professed to be a profligate. His trouble cannot have been as deep as hell and as shallow as an Adelphi play. He cannot have been as black as he was painted, if he painted himself blacker than he was. And if he had been ten times blacker than anybody could possibly be, he would still have some right in reason and justice to have the case against him put intelligibly in black and white. At present the case is rather parallel to that which the stupidest sort of English people used to make against the French duel. The French duellist was called a murderer for having killed a man, and then called a coward for not having killed him. The truth was, of course, that the larger number of duels were of a normal and intermediate sort, in which men ran some sort of relative but real risk. But where there was nothing deadly there could not have been anything murderous 5 and where there was anything murderous there cannot have been anything unreal. So, in the poetry and pose of Byron, where there was anything guilty there must at least have been the realism of guilt.

My own reading of the riddle may be wrong, but it is extremely simple. It is that Byron was naturally a man not only of great force but of great freshness of passions j and some of these were bad passions, which he never had a reasonable religion to control. Consequently he did abominable things j as any one of us would have done if, during certain periods, he had done anything he felt inclined to do. But precisely because of his fundamental freshness, he remained young enough really to feel remorse. If he was Manfred, it proves that he was not Mephistopheles. The really dried-up diabolists do not have remorse, at least in that moral sense j a decadent Roman emperor or a Nietzschean maniac would never have poured out pessimism so warm and emotional as Byron's. There is something boyish in the sulks of Byron, precisely because he has not entirely lost the reactions into rage and sorrow which come in boyhood. Being a tolerably bad boy, and not having the heroic charity of a complete penitent, he mixed up his remorse for his own conduct with liberal cursings and vituperations of the conduct of other people. But that is exactly what anybody does do who is still young enough to be sulky. To put the point another way, there was one respect in which Byron really was not so black as he painted himself. There was one point in which he really was only a stage villain, confessing a fictitious crime. But this fiction also is one of the facts of boyhood. This insincerity also is part of the sincerity of sulks. He really was entirely wrong when he said that his heart was dead and his feelings were cold as ashes j that all freshness had gone out of him, and that nothing moved him any more.

For this tentative interpretation I will plead one small detail of defence. It does make some sort of sense of Byron's poetry, and the other views can make nothing but nonsense of it. If ever there was a gift of rhyme and rhetoric that had not lost its freshness, it was the gift of Byron. If ever there were poems, bad or good, that might have been written by an inspired boy, or possibly an intoxicated boy, they were the poems of Byron. And they are depreciated now, not at all because they are stale, but because criticism is not fresh enough to feel their freshness. Their very crudity and obviousness is part of something too simple for most modern minds to enjoy. Stevenson, in his fascinating essay on the toy theatre, has some very exact phrase about "those direct clap-trap appeals which a man is dead and buriable when he does not answer." I would not say that the excellent and sometimes exquisite critics of more recent times are dead or buriabkj but I do say that their type of criticism necessarily misses the very meaning and purpose of those direct appeals. In one sense, indeed, artistic effects of the Byronic sort are not things to be criticized at all. In this case there is a real meaning in the modern substitution of the word "appreciation" for the word "criticism." These are not things that we criticize, but things which we appreciate — or do not appreciate. But those who depreciate, because they cannot appreciate, are simple people who have got hold of the wrong subject for their particular sort of appreciation.

It is illogical to argue with people who are not roused by the noise of a bugle, or by a dramatic toast suddenly proposed at a banquet, or by a blow given in public, or a voice calling on a mob to rise. And it is illogical to argue with those who never happen to have found themselves, when in a state of towering high spirits and hilarity, swinging down the road and reciting the cheerful lines, "Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away," rising to a specially soaring gaiety with the turn of the words, "Then the mortal coldness of the soul like death itself comes down." These lines have a thousand faults, like their author, for they are alive as he was, and it was the one thing about himself that he did not know. As for their merits, an analysis of them would be entirely unsuitable to their nature. But I will mention one of the merits of the Byronic poetry in conclusion, because it is a symbol of all the rest, and that is its swiftness. Let anyone who does not know what I mean open the book and read two lyrics, the first that occur to me — the lines to Tom Moore, "My boat is on the shore and my bark is on the sea," and the verses beginning "We'll go no more a-roving." They are both very short poems, but they are much shorter than they look. They can be read, and should be read, almost in a breath, one verse leading to another as one line to another. The whole lyric goes swift and straight to its end like a single arrowy and he who appreciates it will have learned something of the nature of arrows and the nature of songs, and of why Apollo was an archer.