The Crown of Wild Olive Part 63

Not altogether so; but indeed the _Vocal_ piety seemed conclusively to have retired (or excursed?) into that mossy hermitage, above Little Langdale. The _Un_vocal piety, with the uncomplaining sorrow, of Man, may have had a somewhat wider range, for aught we know: but history disregards those items; and of firmly proclaimed and sweetly canorous religion, there really seemed at that juncture none to be reckoned upon, east of Ingleborough, or north of Criffel. Only under Furness Fells, or by Bolton Priory, it seems we can still write Ecclesiastical Sonnets, stanzas on the force of Prayer, Odes to Duty, and complimentary addresses to the Deity upon His endurance for adoration. Far otherwise, over yonder, by Spezzia Bay, and Ravenna Pineta, and in ravines of Hartz. There, the softest voices speak the wildest words; and Keats discourses of Endymion, Sh.e.l.ley of Demogorgon, Goethe of Lucifer, and Burger of the Resurrection of Death unto Death--while even Puritan Scotland and Episcopal Anglia produce for us only these three minstrels of doubtful tone, who show but small respect for the 'unco guid,' put but limited faith in gifted Gilfillan, and translate with unflinching frankness the _Morgante Maggiore_.[184]

Dismal the aspect of the spiritual world, or at least the sound of it, might well seem to the eyes and ears of Saints (such as we had) of the period--dismal in angels' eyes also a.s.suredly! Yet is it possible that the dismalness in angelic sight may be otherwise quartered, as it were, from the way of mortal heraldry; and that seen, and heard, of angels,--again I say--hesitatingly--_is_ it possible that the goodness of the Unco Guid, and the gift of Gilfillan, and the word of Mr.

Blattergowl, may severally not have been the goodness of G.o.d, the gift of G.o.d, nor the word of G.o.d: but that in the much blotted and broken efforts at goodness, and in the careless gift which they themselves despised,[185] and in the sweet ryme and murmur of their unpurposed words, the Spirit of the Lord had, indeed, wandering, as in chaos days on lightless waters, gone forth in the hearts and from the lips of those other three strange prophets, even though they ate forbidden bread by the altar of the poured-out ashes, and even though the wild beast of the desert found them, and slew.

This, at least, I know, that it had been well for England, though all her other prophets, of the Press, the Parliament, the Doctor's chair, and the Bishop's throne, had fallen silent; so only that she had been able to understand with her heart here and there the simplest line of these, her despised.

I take one at mere chance:

'Who thinks of self, when gazing on the sky?'[186]

Well, I don't know; Mr. Wordsworth certainly did, and observed, with truth, that its clouds took a sober colouring in consequence of his experiences. It is much if, indeed, this sadness be unselfish, and our eyes _have_ kept loving watch o'er Man's Mortality. I have found it difficult to make any one now-a-days believe that such sobriety can be; and that Turner saw deeper crimson than others in the clouds of Goldau.

But that any should yet think the clouds brightened by Man's _Im_mortality instead of dulled by his death,--and, gazing on the sky, look for the day when every eye must gaze also--for behold, He cometh with the clouds--this it is no more possible for Christian England to apprehend, however exhorted by her gifted and guid.

'But Byron was not thinking of such things!'--He, the reprobate! how should such as he think of Christ?

Perhaps not wholly as you or I think of Him. Take, at chance, another line or two, to try:

'Carnage (so Wordsworth tells you) is G.o.d's daughter;[187]

If _he_ speak truth, she is Christ's sister, and Just now, behaved as in the Holy Land.'

Blasphemy, cry you, good reader? Are you sure you understand it? The first line I gave you was easy Byron--almost shallow Byron--these are of the man in his depth, and you will not fathom them, like a tarn,--nor in a hurry.

'Just now behaved as in the Holy Land.' How _did_ Carnage behave in the Holy Land then? You have all been greatly questioning, of late, whether the sun, which you find to be now going out, ever stood still. Did you in any lagging minute, on those scientific occasions, chance to reflect what he was bid stand still _for_? or if not--will you please look--and what, also, going forth again as a strong man to run his course, he saw, rejoicing?

'Then Joshua pa.s.sed from Makkedah unto Libnah--and fought against Libnah. And the Lord delivered it and the king thereof into the hand of Israel, and he smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein.' And from Lachish to Eglon, and from Eglon to Kirjath-Arba, and Sarah's grave in the Amorites' land, 'and Joshua smote all the country of the hills and of the south--and of the vale and of the springs, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed--as the Lord G.o.d of Israel commanded.'

Thus 'it is written:' though you perhaps do not so often hear _these_ texts preached from, as certain others about taking away the sins of the world. I wonder how the world would like to part with them! hitherto it has always preferred parting first with its Life--and G.o.d has taken it at its word. But Death is not _His_ Begotten Son, for all that; nor is the death of the innocent in battle carnage His 'instrument for working out a pure intent' as Mr. Wordsworth puts it; but Man's instrument for working out an impure one, as Byron would have you to know. Theology perhaps less orthodox, but certainly more reverent;--neither is the Woolwich Infant a Child of G.o.d; neither does the iron-clad 'Thunderer'

utter thunders of G.o.d--which facts, if you had had the grace or sense to learn from Byron, instead of accusing him of blasphemy, it had been better at this day for _you_, and for many a savage soul also, by Euxine sh.o.r.e, and in Zulu and Afghan lands.

It was neither, however, for the theology, nor the use, of these lines that I quoted them; but to note this main point of Byron's own character. He was the first great Englishman who felt the cruelty of war, and, in its cruelty, the shame. Its guilt had been known to George Fox--its folly shown practically by Penn. But the _compa.s.sion_ of the pious world had still for the most part been shown only in keeping its stock of Barabbases unhanged if possible: and, till Byron came, neither Kunersdorf, Eylau, nor Waterloo, had taught the pity and the pride of men that

'The drying up a single tear has more Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.'[188]

Such pacific verse would not indeed have been acceptable to the Edinburgh volunteers on Portobello sands. But Byron can write a battle song too, when it is _his_ cue to fight. If you look at the introduction to the _Isles of Greece_, namely the 85th and 86th stanzas of the 3rd canto of _Don Juan_,--you will find--what will you _not_ find, if only you understand them! 'He' in the first line, remember, means the typical modern poet.

'Thus usually, when he was asked to sing, He gave the different nations something national.

'Twas all the same to him--"G.o.d save the King"

Or "ca ira" according to the fas.h.i.+on all; His muse made increment of anything From the high lyric down to the low rational: If Pindar sang horse races, what should hinder Himself from being as pliable as Pindar?

'In France, for instance, he would write a chanson; In England a six-canto quarto tale; In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on The last war--much the same in Portugal; In Germany, the Pegasus he'd prance on Would be old Goethe's--(see what says de Stael) In Italy he'd ape the 'Trecentisti;'

In Greece, he'd sing some sort of hymn like this t' ye.

Note first here, as we did in Scott, the concentrating and foretelling power. The 'G.o.d Save the Queen' in England, fallen hollow now, as the 'ca ira' in France--not a man in France knowing where either France or 'that' (whatever 'that' may be) is going to; nor the Queen of England daring, for her life, to ask the tiniest Englishman to do a single thing he doesn't like;--nor any salvation, either of Queen or Realm, being any more possible to G.o.d, unless under the direction of the Royal Society: then, note the estimate of height and depth in poetry, swept in an instant, 'high lyric to low rational.' Pindar to Pope (knowing Pope's height, too, all the while, no man better); then, the poetic power of France--resumed in a word--Beranger; then the cut at Marmion, entirely deserved, as we shall see, yet kindly given, for everything he names in these two stanzas is the best of its kind; then Romance in Spain on--the _last_ war, (_present_ war not being to Spanish poetical taste), then, Goethe the real heart of all Germany, and last, the aping of the Trecentisti which has since consummated itself in Pre-Raphaelitism! that also being the best thing Italy has done through England, whether in Rossetti's 'blessed damozels' or Burne Jones's 'days of creation.'

Lastly comes the mock at himself--the modern English Greek--(followed up by the 'degenerate into hands like mine' in the song itself); and then--to amazement, forth he thunders in his Achilles voice. We have had one line of him in his clearness--five of him in his depth--sixteen of him in his play. Hear now but these, out of his whole heart:--

'What,--silent yet? and silent _all_?

Ah no, the voices of the dead Sound like a distant torrent's fall, And answer, "Let _one_ living head, But one, arise--we come--we come:"

--'Tis but the living who are dumb.'

Resurrection, this, you see like Burger's; but not of death unto death.

'Sound like a distant torrent's fall.' I said the _whole_ heart of Byron was in this pa.s.sage. First its compa.s.sion, then its indignation, and the third element, not yet examined, that love of the beauty of this world in which the three--unholy--children, of its Fiery Furnace were like to each other; but Byron the widest-hearted. Scott and Burns love Scotland more than Nature itself: for Burns the moon must rise over c.u.mnock Hills,--for Scott, the Rymer's glen divide the Eildons; but, for Byron, Loch-na-Gar _with Ida_, looks o'er Troy, and the soft murmurs of the Dee and the Bruar change into voices of the dead on distant Marathon.

Yet take the parallel from Scott, by a field of homelier rest:--

'And silence aids--though the steep hills Send to the lake a thousand rills; In summer tide, so soft they weep, The sound but lulls the ear asleep; Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude, So stilly is the solitude.

Naught living meets the eye or ear, But well I ween the dead are near; For though, in feudal strife, a foe Hath laid our Lady's Chapel low, Yet still beneath the hallowed soil, The peasant rests him from his toil, And, dying, bids his bones be laid Where erst his simple fathers prayed.'

And last take the same note of sorrow--with Burns's finger on the fall of it:

'Mourn, ilka grove the cushat kens, Ye hazly shaws and briery dens, Ye burnies, wimplin' down your glens Wi' toddlin' din, Or foamin' strang wi' hasty stens Frae lin to lin.'

As you read, one after another, these fragments of chant by the great masters, does not a sense come upon you of some element in their pa.s.sion, no less than in their sound, different, specifically, from that of 'Parching summer hath no warrant'? Is it more profane, think you--or more tender--nay, perhaps, in the core of it, more true?

For instance, when we are told that

'Wharfe, as he moved along, To matins joined a mournful voice,'

is this disposition of the river's mind to pensive psalmody quite logically accounted for by the previous statement (itself by no means rhythmically dulcet,) that

'The boy is in the arms of Wharfe, And strangled by a merciless force'?

Or, when we are led into the improving reflection,

'How sweet were leisure, could it yield no more Then 'mid this wave-washed churchyard to recline, From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine!'

--is the divinity of the extract a.s.sured to us by its being made at leisure, and in a reclining att.i.tude--as compared with the meditations of otherwise active men, in an erect one? Or are we perchance, many of us, still erring somewhat in our notions alike of Divinity and Humanity,--poetical extraction, and moral position?

On the chance of its being so, might I ask hearing for just a few words more of the school of Belial?

Their occasion, it must be confessed, is a quite unjustifiable one. Some very wicked people--mutineers, in fact--have retired, misanthropically, into an unfrequented part of the country, and there find themselves safe, indeed, but extremely thirsty. Whereupon Byron thus gives them to drink:

'A little stream came tumbling from the height And straggling into ocean as it might.

Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray, Close on the wild wide ocean,--yet as pure And fresh as Innocence; and more secure.

Its silver torrent glittered o'er the deep As the shy chamois' eye o'erlooks the steep, While, far below, the vast and sullen swell Of ocean's Alpine azure rose and fell.'[189]

Now, I beg, with such authority as an old workman may take concerning his trade, having also looked at a waterfall or two in my time, and not unfrequently at a wave, to a.s.sure the reader that here _is_ entirely first-rate literary work. Though Lucifer himself had written it, the thing is itself good, and not only so, but unsurpa.s.sably good, the closing line being probably the best concerning the sea yet written by the race of the sea-kings.

But Lucifer himself _could_ not have written it; neither any servant of Lucifer. I do not doubt but that most readers were surprised at my saying, in the close of my first paper, that Byron's 'style' depended in any wise on his views respecting the Ten Commandments. That so all-important a thing as 'style' should depend in the least upon so ridiculous a thing as moral sense: or that Allegra's father, watching her drive by in Count G.'s coach and six, had any remnant of so ridiculous a thing to guide,--or check,--his poetical pa.s.sion, may alike seem more than questionable to the liberal and chaste philosophy of the existing British public. But, first of all, putting the question of who writes, or speaks, aside, do you, good reader, _know_ good 'style' when you get it? Can you say, of half-a-dozen given lines taken anywhere out of a novel, or poem, or play, That is good, essentially, in style, or bad, essentially? and can you say why such half-dozen lines are good, or bad?

I imagine that in most cases, the reply would be given with hesitation, yet if you will give me a little patience, and take some accurate pains, I can show you the main tests of style in the s.p.a.ce of a couple of pages.

I take two examples of absolutely perfect, and in manner highest, _i.

e._ kingly, and heroic, style: the first example in expression of anger, the second of love.

(1) 'We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us, His present, and your pains, we thank you for.

When we have match'd our rackets to these b.a.l.l.s, We will in France, by G.o.d's grace, play a set, Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.'