Part 5

The letters to Lady Melbourne reveal him in an extraordinary light, even for an amorist. While attempting to arrange a match with Lady Melbourne’s niece he fills the greater part of his letter to her with the backwash of his intrigue with her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb, and with stories of intrigues with various other ladies. Byron, like many amorists, seems never to have realised that adventures are to the adventurous in love as in other matters, but to have looked on himself as a man pestered by women when he was only a man pestered by ordinary greed and extraordinary opportunity. If he could not shift the blame for his sins on to the woman, he would even shift it on to her husband. “He literally provoked and goaded me into it,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne, about the husband of Lady Frances Webster, at a time when he seemed to be falling almost seriously in love with Lady Frances. No one who cares for scandalous literature should miss these letters in which Byron writes off to Lady Melbourne rapturous accounts of every step in the wooing of the wife of his host. “I am glad they amaze you,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne concerning the Websters; “anything that confirms and extends one’s observations on life and character delights me.” It does not appear to have occurred to him that, amazing though the Websters were, they were but as copper to gold compared to his own amazing self. Lady Frances, at least, would have been considerably amazed if she had known that, every time she sighed, the fat young poet who adored her heliographed the fact from Yorkshire to London. In one of his letters he tells of a game of billiards with his hostess, in the course of which he slipped a love-letter to her. Just at that moment, “who should enter the room but the person who ought at the moment to have been in the Red Sea, if Satan had any civility”--in other words, Webster, his host and her husband. Even as he is writing the description of the incident to Lady Melbourne, Byron makes a parenthesis to tell her that Webster has again come into the room (“I am this moment interrupted by the _Marito_, and write this before him. He has brought me a political pamphlet in MS. to decipher and applaud; I shall content myself with the last; oh, he is gone again”). Ultimately, however, Byron spared Lady Frances--at least, that is how he put it. He protested to Lady Melbourne that he loved the lady and would have sacrificed everything for her, and that Lady Melbourne wronged him to think otherwise. “I hate sentiment,” he told her, “and, in consequence, my epistolary levity makes you believe me as hollow and heartless as my letters are light.” The truth is, Byron _was_, in many of his relations, heartless. He kissed and told, and he enjoyed telling, at least, as much as he enjoyed kissing. He tells Lady Melbourne, for instance, about the “exquisite oddity” of Lady Frances’s letters--“the simplicity of her cunning and her exquisite reasons”:

She vindicates her treachery to [Webster] thus: after condemning deceit in general, and hers in particular, she says: “But then remember it is to deceive _un marito_, and to prevent all the unpleasant consequences, etc., etc.”

It is clear that Lady Frances, though pure, shocked Byron, just as Byron, though impure, shocks the average reader. She even besought him to go on writing to her husband:

Again, she desires me to write to _him kindly_, for she believes he cares for nobody but _me_!

Byron could never understand unconventional behaviour. “Is not all this a comedy?” he asks Lady Melbourne.

Byron, as we read his letters and poems together, seems to lead the double life of an actor. There is the Byron who stands in the middle of the stage in the fierce light that beats upon a poet, and who declaims--how gloriously!--:

The mountains look on Marathon-- And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dreamed that Greece might still be free; For standing on the Persians’ grave, I could not deem myself a slave.

And there is Byron behind the scenes--the Byron who might have been invented by Mr. Shaw as an example of the moral irresponsibility of the artistic temperament. It may be doubted whether any artist of the first rank could have written such a letter as Byron wrote to Hobhouse in 1818, announcing that his illegitimate daughter, Allegra, had been brought out to Italy from England by Shelley. His reference to the child runs:

Shelley has got to Milan with the bastard, and its mother; but won’t send the shild, unless I will go and see the mother. I have sent a messenger for the shild but I can’t leave my quarters, and have “sworn an oath.” Between attorneys, clerks, and wives, and children, and friends, my life is made a burthen.

Shelley, for his part, when he is writing to Byron to ask what he is to do with the child (which has been left on his hands month after month), never mentions it but with a delight at least equal to his anxiety to get rid of it. “I think,” he tells Byron, “she is the most lovely and engaging child I ever beheld.” Shelley’s letters to Byron are the letters of a good man, but they are not good letters. They are the formal utterances of an angel. Byron’s letters, on the other hand, are good letters, though they are not the letters of a good man. They are the informal utterances of a man possessed by a devil. But whether he was as black as he painted himself it is impossible to be sure. When little Allegra died at the age of five, he prepared an inscription for her tomb ending with the verse: “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.” If he had been all heartless, he could never have written his greatest lyrics. His letters, for the most part, take us into the comic recesses of his mind: perhaps this comic Byron is the immortal Byron. But in the letters, as in the legend of his death and in his poems, there are hints of that greater Byron whom Shelley tried to summon into being--a Byron who would have been Byron with a touch of Shelley--a nobler being a little more remote from the splendour of Hell, a candidate for Paradise.

VIII

SHELLEY

Matthew Arnold has had a bad time of it during the Shelley centenary celebrations. He has been denounced in nearly every paper in England, as though, in his attitude to Shelley, he had shown himself to be a malicious old nincompoop. As a matter of fact, Matthew Arnold talked a great deal of common sense about Shelley, and, though he underestimated his genius, how many of the overestimators of Shelley have even praised him so nobly as he is praised in that unforgettable image--“a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”? Yet these are the words with which Matthew Arnold’s critics quarrel most angrily. It is not enough for them that he called Shelley a beautiful angel. It is a compliment that few poets, few saints even, have deserved. The partisans demand, however, it seems, that he shall also be proclaimed an effectual angel. In one sense, of course, no great poet is ineffectual. We might as well call a star ineffectual. In a more limited sense, however, a great poet who is also a theorist may be ineffectual, and Shelley, in whom the poet and the theorist are all but inseparable, was undoubtedly ineffectual in this meaning of the word.

He sang a philosophy of love, and one effect of his philosophy was the suicide of Harriet Westbrook. He was, in this instance, ineffectual in not being able to translate his theory into experience in such a way that what was beautiful in theory would also be beautiful in experience. Where a theory was concerned, he did not recognise facts; he recognised only the theory. Thus, his theory that love is “the sole law which should govern the moral world” led him in _Laon and Cythna_ (later transformed into _The Revolt of Islam_) to make the lovers brother and sister. This circumstance was, he declared, “intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life.” It was introduced “merely to accustom men to that charity and toleration which the exhibition of a practice widely differing from their own has a tendency to promote.” Who but an ineffectual angel would have thought of dragging idealised incest into a work of art solely with a view to the improvement of his readers’ morals? He did not wish his readers to practise incest: he merely wished to make them practise charity.

Shelley, indeed, was a man always hastening towards an ideal world which at the touch of experience turned into a mirage. His political, like his ethical, theories had something mirage-like about them. He was a prophet who was so absorbed in the vision of the Promised Land that he had little thought to spare for the human nature that he was trying to incite to make the journey. His own imagination travelled fast as a ray of light, but he could not take human beings with him on so swift a journey. Hence, if he has been effectual, he has been so as an inspiration to the few. He has been ineffectual as regards achieving the earthly paradise he foretold in _The Mask of Anarchy_ and _Prometheus Unbound_.

It ought, then, to be possible to appreciate Shelley without abusing Matthew Arnold. Every genius is limited, and we shall not admire the genius the less but the more if we recognise its limitations so clearly that we come to take them for granted. Thus, if we attempt to define Shelley’s genius as a poet, we have to start by recognising that there is a formless quality in most of his work when it is compared to the work of Keats or Wordsworth. His poems do not seem to be quite vertebrate--to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Their path is as indeterminate as the path of the lark fluttering in the air. With Keats we stand still to survey the earth. With Wordsworth we walk. But Shelley, like his skylark, is a “scorner of the ground,” and our feet do not always touch the earth when we are in his company. Even when he journeys by land or water, he rushes us along as though the air were the only element, and we are dizzied by the speed with which we are carried from landscape to landscape. In _Alastor_, scene succeeds scene faster than the eye can seize it.

Shelley, indeed, is the poet of metamorphosis. He loves the miraculous change from shape to shape almost more than he loves any settled shape. This aspect of his genius reveals itself most richly in “The Cloud.” Here is the very music of the changing shape. “I change, but I cannot die,” is the cloud’s boast:

For after the rain, when with never a stain, The pavilion of heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams, Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.

Shelley, too, could create these beautiful and unsubstantial shapes from hour to hour, feeling that each was but a new metamorphosis of universal beauty. “The Cloud” is the divine comedy of metamorphosis. The “Hymn of Pan” is its tragedy:

I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the dædal Earth, And of Heaven--and the giant wars, And Love, and Death, and Birth-- And then I changed my pipings-- Singing how down the vale of Menalus I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed: Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed: All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

Here Shelley is aware of the human dissatisfaction--a dissatisfaction that many people feel when reading his poetry--with a life that is too full of mirages and metamorphoses.

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed: Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

It is the confession of the ineffectual angel, who had sung:

Poets are on this cold earth, As chameleons might be, Hidden from their early birth In a cave beneath the sea. Where light is, chameleons change! Where love is not, poets do: Fame is love disguised: if few Find either, never think it strange That poets range.

For this, too, had been a song of metamorphosis.

This love of metamorphosis may, from one point of view, be thought to have limited Shelley’s genius, but it limited only to intensify. It was this that enabled him to pass from wonderful image to wonderful image without a pause in that immortal procession of similes in “The Skylark.” Every poet has this gift to some extent--the gift by which the metamorphosis of the thing into the image takes place--but Shelley had it in disproportionate abundance because the world of images meant so much more to him than did the world of experience. Not that he was blind to the real world, as we see from his observation of rooks in the morning sun in “The Euganean Hills”:

So their plumes of purple grain, Starred with drops of golden rain, Gleam above the sunlight woods, As in silent multitudes On the morning’s fitful gale Through the broken mist they sail.

No naturalist could have been more accurate in his description than this. Shelley, indeed, claimed for himself in the preface to _Laon and Cythna_ that, in his imagery, he was essentially and supremely a poet of experience:

I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, and cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds. I have conversed with living men of genius. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to me like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. Such are the sources from which the materials for the imagery of my Poem have been drawn.

All this was true, but Shelley was too impatient of experience to rely on it when there was a richer world of images at hand. Images--images passing into each other--meant more to him than experience as he wrote such lines as

My soul is an enchanted boat Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.

He said himself of the poet that

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, But feeds on the aërial kisses Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.

There was never another poet of whom this was so true as of himself. Even when he writes

A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,

or,

I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown,

he seems to shed upon things a light brought from that haunted world. There is more colour in Keats than in Shelley, but there is more light in Shelley than in Keats. Did he not speak of the poet as “hidden in the light of thought”? His radiance is different in kind from that of any other poet. For it is the radiance of a world in which things are not made of substances but of dreams--a world in which we walk over rainbows instead of bridges and ride not upon horses but upon clouds.

IX

PLUTARCH’S ANECDOTES

Anecdotes, like most other forms of literary entertainment, have been spoken ill of by grave persons, but seldom by the wise. “How superficial,” wrote Isaac Disraeli, “is that cry of some impertinent pretended geniuses of these times who affect to exclaim, ‘Give me no anecdotes of an author, but give me his works!’ I have often found the anecdotes more interesting than the works.” And he pointed out that “Dr. Johnson devoted one of his periodical papers to a defence of anecdotes.” The defence was hardly needed. The imagination of mankind has by universal consent paid honour to the anecdote, and Montaigne is supreme among essayists, and Plutarch among biographers, by virtue of anecdotes as well as of wisdom. Plutarch himself has given the anecdote its just praise in the opening paragraph of his life of Alexander, when he explains: “It is not Histories I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice--nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fell, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities.” Hence the general appetite for trifling facts about great men is not a mere vice of gossips. It may help to preserve a detail which will give a later man of genius a clue to a character--the character of a man or the character of a book. The theory that we can criticise a poet more profoundly by leaving aside the ordinary facts of his life as though he had never existed in the flesh is an absurd piece of pedantry. The life of Shelley throws a flood of light on the poetry of Shelley. It contains in itself a profound criticism of the genius of Shelley--a genius that was of the air rather than of the earth--a genius at once noble and incongruous with the world in which men live.

Writers, however, may make a dozen different uses of anecdotes. The anecdote may be anything from a jest to an awakening touch of portraiture, and from that to a fable that reveals a piece of new or old truth to the imagination. It is not open to dispute that the great writers of anecdotes are not those who believe in anecdotes for anecdotes’ sake. They are those who everywhere see signs and connections, and for whom an anecdote is a pattern in little suggesting a pattern of life itself. Plutarch speaks of himself as looking for “the signs of the soul in men,” and the phrase gives some notion of the moral and spiritual pattern into which his anecdotes are woven.

I doubt if a more virtuous imagination ever applied itself to literature. Plutarch’s unending quest was virtue, and no illustrious man ever sat to him for a portrait without discovering to him virtues that he would never have revealed to a scandalmonger such as Suetonius. It was as though moral dignity were the chief of the colours on Plutarch’s palette. He was fond of contrasting his heroes with one another, but, even when he took for heroes men who were mortal enemies, he would penetrate deep into the heart of each in search of some hidden or imprisoned nobleness. He cannot paint an Alcibiades or a Sulla as a model for children, but even in them he seems to perceive and reverence a greatness of spirit in ruins--some brightness of charm or courage beyond the scope of little men. No other writer except Shakespeare has had the same power of setting before the imagination characters that remain noble though undone by great vices. To do this is, to some extent, in the common tradition of tragedy, but there is in Shakespeare and Plutarch a certain sweetness and warmth of understanding--something even more than an enthusiasm for the best in full view and admission of the worst--unlike anything else in literature. It was not an accident that Shakespeare drew so freely and so confidently on Plutarch. The geniuses of the two men were akin.

Plutarch, no doubt, was more consciously ethical than Shakespeare, but he was ethical not after the manner of the narrow propagandist, but after the manner of the imaginative artist. He does not write of model characters. He knows that there are no perfect human beings. He recognises the goodness in bad men, and the badness in good men. No biographer has been more keenly aware of the corruptibility of human nature. Hence the characters in his Lives are real men, with not a fault (and hardly the rumour of a fault) hidden. He will not bear false witness for the sake of making great men appear better than they are. He achieves the difficult feat of praising virtue without either canting or lying. He is not afraid to hold the mirror up to nature and to show us virtue fighting a doubtful battle in a corrupt and tragic scene. He does not believe that the virtuous man is necessarily secure either from corruption or defeat, but he believes that virtue itself is secure from defeat. His recurrent theme is the Christian theme: “Fear not them that kill the body.” He is the painter, not only of illustrious lives, but of illustrious deaths. He feels a spectator’s elation as he watches a noble fifth act. He obtains from the spectacle of virtue impavid amid the ruins an æsthetic as well as an ethical pleasure. If any man wishes to make a study of the æsthetics of virtue, he will find abundant material in Plutarch. Plutarch writes of the tragic hero as of a man playing a fine part finely. He delights in the moving speeches, in the very gestures. He makes us conscious of a rhythm of nobleness running through human life, as when he describes the conduct of the Spartan women who fled with Cleomenes (the quasi-Socialist king) to Egypt, and who were murdered by their cruel hosts. He first wins our sympathies for the wife of Panteus, “most noble and beautiful to look upon,” and tells us how she was but lately married to Panteus, so that “their misfortunes came to them in the heyday of their love.” He then describes how this great lady behaved when she was overtaken by death in company with the mother and children of the king: