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Byron And Goethe - An Essay - Comparison And Contrasts
Byron And Goethe - An Essay - Comparison And Contrasts
I stood one day in a Swiss village at the foot of the Jura, and watched
the coming of the storm. Heavy black clouds, their edges purpled by the
setting sun, were rapidly covering the loveliest sky in Europe, save that of
Italy. Thunder growled in the distance, and gusts of biting wind were driving
huge drops of rain over the thirsty plain. Looking upwards, I beheld a large
Alpine falcon, now rising, now sinking, as he floated bravely in the very
midst of the storm and I could almost fancy that he strove to battle with it.
At every fresh peal of thunder, the noble bird bounded higher aloft, as if in
answering defiance. I followed him with my eyes for a long time, until he
disappeared in the east. On the ground, about fifty paces beneath me, stood a
stork; perfectly tranquil and impassive in the midst of the warring elements.
Twice or thrice she turned her head towards the quarter from whence the wind
came, with an indescribable air of half indifferent curiosity; but at length
she drew up one of her long sinewy legs, hid her head beneath her wing, and
calmly composed herself to sleep.
I thought of Byron and Goethe; of the stormy sky that overhung both; of
the tempest-tossed existence, the life-long struggle, of the one, and the
calm of the other; and of the two mighty sources of poetry exhausted and
closed by them.
Byron and Goethe - the two names that predominate, and, come what may,
ever will predominate, over our every recollection of the fifty years that
have passed away. They rule; the master-minds, I might almost say the
tyrants, of a whole period of poetry; brilliant, yet sad; glorious in youth
and daring, yet cankered by the worm i` the bud, despair. They are the two
representative poets of two great schools; and around them we are compelled to
group all the lesser minds which contributed to render the era illustrious.
The qualities which adorn and distinguish their works are to be found,
although more thinly scattered, in other poets their contemporaries; still
theirs are the names that involuntarily rise to our lips whenever we seek to
characterize the tendencies of the age in which they lived. Their genius
pursued different, even opposite routes; and yet very rarely do our thoughts
turn to either without evoking the image of the other, as a sort of necessary
complement to the first. The eyes of Europe were fixed upon the pair, as the
spectators gaze on two mighty wrestlers in the same arena; and they, like
noble and generous adversaries, admired, praised, and held out the hand to
each other. Many poets have followed in their footsteps; none have been so
popular. Others have found judges and critics who have appreciated them calmly
and impartially; not so they: for them there have been only enthusiasts or
enemies, wreaths or stones; and when they vanished into the vast night that
envelops and transforms alike men and things - silence reigned around their
tombs. Little by little, poetry had passed away from our world, and it seemed
as if their last sigh had extinguished the sacred flame.
A reaction has now commenced; good, in so far as it reveals a desire for
and promise of new life; evil, in so far as it betrays narrow views, a
tendency to injustice towards departed genius, and the absence of any fixed
rule or principle to guide our appreciation of the past. Human judgment, like
Luther`s drunken peasant, when saved from falling on one side, too often
topples over on the other. The reaction against Goethe, in his own country
especially, which was courageously and justly begun by Menzel during his
lifetime, has been carried to exaggeration since his death. Certain social
opinions, to which I myself belong, but which, although founded on a sacred
principle, should not be allowed to interfere with the impartiality of our
judgment, have weighed heavily in the balance; and many young, ardent, and
enthusiastic minds of our day have reiterated with Bonne that Goethe is the
worst of despots; the cancer of the German body.
The English reaction against Byron - I do not speak of that mixture of
cant and stupidity which denies the poet his place in Westminster Abbey, but
of literary reaction - has shown itself still more unreasoning. I have met
with adorers of Shelley who denied the poetic genius of Byron; others who
seriously compared his poems with those of Sir Walter Scott. One very much
overrated critic writes that "Byron makes man after his own image, and woman
after his own heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding
slave." The first forgot the verses in which their favorite hailed
"The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent;^1
[Footnote 1: Adonais.]
the second, that after the appearance of "The Giaour" and "Childe Harold," Sir
Walter Scott renounced writing poetry.^2 The last forgot that while he was
quietly writing criticisms, Byron was dying for new-born liberty in Greece.
All judged, too many in each country still judge, the two poets, Byron and
Goethe, after an absolute type of the beautiful, the true, or the false, which
they had formed in their own minds; without regard to the state of social
relations as they were or are; without any true conception of the destiny or
mission of poetry, or of the law by which it, and every other artistic
manifestation of human life, is governed.
[Footnote 2: Lockhart.]
There is no absolute type on earth: the absolute exists in the Divine
Idea alone; the gradual comprehension of which man is destined to attain;
although its complete realization is impossible on earth; earthly life being
but one stage of the eternal evolution of life, manifested in thought and
action; strengthened by all the achievements of the past, and advancing from
age to ages towards a less imperfect expression of that idea. Our earthly life
is one phase of the eternal aspiration of the soul towards progress, which is
our law; ascending in increasing power and purity from the finite towards the
infinite; from the real towards the ideal; from that which is, towards that
which is to come. In the immense storehouse of the past evolutions of life
constituted by universal tradition, and in the prophetic instinct brooding in
the depths of the human soul, does poetry seek inspiration. It changes with
the times, for it is their expression; it is transformed with society, for -
consciously or unconsciously - it sings the lay of Humanity; although,
according to the individual bias or circumstances of the singer, it assumes
the hues of the present, or of the future in course of elaboration, and
foreseen by the inspiration of genius. It sings now a dirge and now a cradle
song; it initiates or sums up.
Byron and Goethe summed up. Was it a defect in them? No; it was the law
of the times, and yet society at the present day, twenty years after they have
ceased to sing, assumes to condemn them for having been born too soon. Happy
indeed are the poets whom God raises up at the commencement of an era, under
the rays of the rising sun. A series of generations will lovingly repeat their
verses, and attribute to them the new life which they did but foresee in the
germ.
Byron and Goethe summed up. This is at once the philosophical explanation
of their works, and the secret of their popularity. The spirit of an entire
epoch of the European world became incarnate in them ere its decease, even as
- in the political sphere - the spirit of Greece and Rome became incarnate
before death in Caesar and Alexander. They were the poetic expression of that
principle, of which England was the economic, France the political, and
Germany the philosophic expression: the last formula, effort, and result of a
society founded on the principle of individuality. That epoch, the mission of
which had been, first through the labors of Greek philosophy, and afterwards
through Christianity, to rehabilitate, emancipate, and develop individual man
appears to have concentrated in them, in Fichte, in Adam Smith, and in the
French school des droits de l`homme, its whole energy and power, in order
fully to represent and express all that it had achieved for mankind. It was
much; but it was not the whole; and therefore it was doomed to pass away. The
epoch of individuality was deemed near the goal; when lo! immense horizons
were revealed; vast unknown lands in whose untrodden forests the principle of
individuality was an insufficient guide. By the long and painful labors of
that epoch the human unknown quantity had been disengaged from the various
quantities of different nature by which it had been surrounded; but only to be
left weak, isolated, and recoiling in terror from the solitude in which it
stood. The political schools of the epoch had proclaimed the sole basis of
civil organization to be the right to liberty and equality (liberty for all),
but they had encountered social anarchy by the way. The philosophy of the
epoch had asserted the sovereignty of the human Ego, and had ended in the mere
adoration of fact, in Hegelian immobility. The Economy of the epoch imagined
it had organized free competition, while it had but organized the oppression
of the weak by the strong; of labor by capital; of poverty by wealth. The
Poetry of the epoch had represented individuality in its every phase; had
translated in sentiment what science had theoretically demonstrated; and it
had encountered the void. But as society at last discovered that the destinies
of the race were not contained in a mere problem of liberty, but rather in the
harmonization of liberty with association - so did poetry discover that the
life it had hitherto drawn from individuality alone was doomed to perish for
want of aliment; and that its future existence depended on enlarging and
transforming its sphere. Both society and poetry uttered a cry of despair: the
death-agony of a form of society produced the agitation we have seen
constantly increasing in Europe since 1815: the death-agony of a form of
poetry evoked Byron and Goethe. I believe this point of view to be the only
one that can lead us to a useful and impartial appreciation of these two great
spirits.
There are two forms of individuality; the expressions of its internal and
external, or - as the Germans would say - of its subjective and objective
life. Byron was the poet of the first, Goethe of the last. In Byron the Ego is
revealed in all its pride of power, freedom, and desire, in the uncontrolled
plenitude of all its faculties; inhaling existence at every pore, eager to
seize "the life of life." The world around him neither rules nor tempers him.
The Byronian Ego aspires to rule it; but solely for dominion`s sake, to
exercise upon it the Titanic force of his will. Accurately speaking, he cannot
be said to derive from it either color, tone, or image; for it is he who
colors; he who sings; he whose image is everywhere reflected and reproduced.
His poetry emanates from his own soul; to be thence diffused upon things
external; he holds his state in the centre of the universe, and from thence
projects the light radiating from the depths of his own mind; as scorching and
intense as the concentrated solar ray. Hence that terrible unity which only
the superficial reader could mistake for monotony.
Byron appears at the close of one epoch, and before the dawn of the
other; in the midst of a community based upon an aristocracy which has
outlived the vigor of its prime; surrounded by a Europe containing nothing
grand, unless it be Napoleon on one side and Pitt on the other, genius
degraded to minister to egotism; intellect bound to the service of the past.
No seer exists to foretell the future: belief is extinct; there is only its
pretence: prayer is no more; there is only a movement of the lips at a fixed
day or hour, for the sake of the family, or what is called the people; love is
no more; desire has taken its place; the holy warfare of ideas is abandoned;
the conflict is that of interests. The worship of great thoughts has passed
away. That which is, raises the tattered banner of some corpse-like
traditions; that which would be, hoists only the standard of physical wants,
of material appetites: around him are ruins, beyond him the desert; the
horizon is a blank. A long cry of suffering and indignation bursts from the
heart of Byron: he is answered by anathemas. He departs; he hurries through
Europe in search of an ideal to adore; he traverses it distracted,
palpitating, like Mazeppa on the wild horse; borne onwards by a fierce desire;
the wolves of envy and calumny follow in pursuit. He visits Greece; he visits
Italy; if anywhere a lingering spark of the sacred fire, a ray of divine
poetry, is preserved, it must be there. Nothing. A glorious past, a degraded
present; none of life`s poetry; no movement, save that of the sufferer turning
on his couch to relieve his pain. Byron, from the solitude of his exile, turns
his eyes again towards England; he sings. What does he sing? What springs from
the mysterious and unique conception which rules, one would say in spite of
himself, over all that escapes him in his sleepless vigil? The funeral hymn,
the death-song, the epitaph of the aristocratic idea; we discovered it, we
Continentalists; not his own countrymen. He takes his types from amongst those
privileged by strength, beauty, and individual power. They are grand,
poetical, heroic, but solitary; they hold no communion with the world around
them, unless it be to rule over it; they defy alike the good and evil
principle; they "will bend to neither." In life and in death "they stand upon
their strength"; they resist every power, for their own is all their own; it
was purchased by
"Superior science - penance - daring -
And length of watching - strength of mind - and skill
In knowledge of our fathers."
Each of them is the personification, slightly modified, of a single type,
a single idea - the individual; free, but nothing more than free; such as the
epoch now closing has made him; Faust, but without the compact which submits
him to the enemy; for the heroes of Byron make no such compact. Cain kneels
not to Arimanes; and Manfred, about to die, exclaims:
"The mind, which is immortal, makes itself
Requital for its good and evil thoughts -
Is its own origin of ill, and end -
And its own place and time, its innate sense,
When stripped of this mortality, derives
No color from the fleeting things without,
But is absorbed in sufferance or in joy;
Born from the knowledge of its own desert."
They have no kindred: they live from their own life only; they repulse
humanity, and regard the crowd with disdain. Each of them says: "I have faith
in myself"; never, "I have faith in ourselves." They all aspire to power or to
happiness. The one and the other alike escape them; for they bear within them,
untold, unacknowledged even to themselves, the presentiment of a life that
mere liberty can never give them. Free they are; iron souls in iron frames,
they climb the Alps of the physical world as well as the Alps of thought;
still is their visage stamped with a gloomy and ineffaceable sadness; still is
their soul - whether, as in Cain and Manfred, it plunge into the abyss of the
infinite, "intoxicated with eternity," or scour the vast plain and boundless
ocean with the Corsair and Giaour - haunted by a secret and sleepless dread.
It seems as if they were doomed to drag the broken links of the chain they
have burst asunder, riveted to their feet. Not only in the petty society
against which they rebel does their soul feel fettered and restrained; but
even in the world of the spirit. Neither is it to the enmity of society that
they succumb; but under the assaults of this nameless anguish; under the
corroding action of potent faculties "inferior still to their desires and
their conceptions"; under the deception that comes from within. What can they
do with the liberty so painfully won? On whom, on what, expend the exuberant
vitality within them? They are alone; this is the secret of their wretchedness
and impotence. They "thirst for good" - Cain has said it for them all - but
cannot achieve it; for they have no mission, no belief, no comprehension even
of the world around them. They have never realized the conception of Humanity
in the multitudes that have preceded, surround, and will follow after them;
never thought on their own place between the past and future; on the
continuity of labor that unites all the generations into one whole; on the
common end and aim, only to be realized by the common effort; on the spiritual
post-sepulchral life even on earth of the individual, through the thoughts
he transmits to his fellows; and, it may be - when he lives devoted and dies
in faith - through the guardian agency he is allowed to exercise over the
loved ones left on earth.
Gifted with a liberty they know not how to use; with a power and energy
they know not how to apply; with a life whose purpose and aim they comprehend
not; they drag through their useless and convulsed existence. Byron destroys
them one after the other, as if he were the executioner of a sentence decreed
in heaven. They fall unwept, like a withered leaf into the stream of time.
"Nor earth nor sky shall yield a single tear,
Nor cloud shall gather more, nor leaf shall fall,
Nor gale breathe forth one sigh for thee, for all."
They die, as they have lived, alone; and a popular malediction hovers
round their solitary tombs.
This, for those who can read with the soul`s eyes, is what Byron sings;
or rather what humanity sings through him. The emptiness of the life and death
of solitary individuality has never been so powerfully and efficaciously
summed up as in the pages of Byron. The crowd do not comprehend him: they
listen; fascinated for an instant; then repent, and avenge their momentary
transport by calumniating and insulting the poet. His intuition of the death
of a form of society they call wounded self-love; his sorrow for all is
misinterpreted as cowardly egotism. They credit not the traces of profound
suffering revealed by his lineaments; they credit not the presentiment of a
new life which from time to time escapes his trembling lips; they believe not
in the despairing embrace in which he grasps the material universe - stars,
lakes, alps, and sea - and identifies himself with it, and through it with
God, of whom - to him at least - it is a symbol. They do, however, take
careful count of some unhappy moments, in which, wearied out by the emptiness
of life, he has raised - with remorse I am sure - the cup of ignoble pleasures
to his lips, believing he might find forgetfulness there. How many times have
not his accusers drained this cup, without redeeming the sin by a single
virtue; without - I will not say bearing - but without having even the
capacity of appreciating the burden which weighed on Byron! And did he not
himself dash into fragments the ignoble cup, so soon as he beheld something
worthy the devotion of his life?
Goethe - individuality in its objective life - having, like Byron, a
sense of the falsehood and evil of the world round him - followed exactly the
opposite path. After having - he, too, in his youth - uttered a cry of anguish
in his Werther; after having laid bare the problem of the epoch in all its
terrific nudity, in Faust, he thought he had done enough, and refused to
occupy himself with its solution. It is possible that the impulse of rebellion
against social wrong and evil which burst forth for an instant in Werther may
long have held his soul in secret travail; but that he despaired of the task
of reforming it as beyond his powers. He himself remarked in his later years,
when commenting on the exclamation made by a Frenchman on first seeing him:
"That is the face of a man who has suffered much"; that he should rather have
said: That is the face of a man who has struggled energetically;" but of this
there remains no trace in his works. Whilst Byron writhed and suffered under
the sense of the wrong and evil around him, he attained the calm - I cannot
say of victory - but of indifference. In Byron the man always ruled, and even
at times, overcame the artist: the man was completely lost in the artist in
Goethe. In him there was no subjective life; no unity springing either from
heart or head. Goethe is an intelligence that receives, elaborates, and
reproduces the poetry affluent to him from all external objects: from all
points of the circumference; to him as centre. He dwells aloft alone; a mighty
watcher in the midst of creation. His curious scrutiny investigates, with
equal penetration and equal interest, the depths of the ocean and the calyx of
the floweret. Whether he studies the rose exhaling its Eastern perfume of the
sky, or the ocean casting its countless wrecks upon the shore, the brow of the
poet remains equally calm: to him they are but two forms of the beautiful; two
subjects for art.
Goethe has been called a pantheist. I know not in what sense critics
apply this vague and often ill-understood word to him. There is a
materialistic pantheism and a spiritual pantheism; the pantheism of Spinoza
and that of Giordano Bruno; of St. Paul; and of many others - all different.
But there is no poetic pantheism possible, save on the condition of embracing
the whole world of phenomena in one unique conception: of feeling and
comprehending the life of the universe in its divine unity. There is nothing
of this in Goethe. There is pantheism in some parts of Wordsworth; in the
third canto of "Childe Harold," and in much of Shelley; but there is none in
the most admirable compositions of Goethe; wherein life, though admirably
comprehended and reproduced in each of its successive manifestations, is never
understood as a whole. Goethe is the poet of details, not of unity; of
analysis, not of synthesis. None so able to investigate details; to set off
and embellish minute and apparently trifling points; none throw so beautiful a
light on separate parts; but the connecting link escapes him. His works
resemble a magnificent encyclopaedia, unclassified. He has felt everything but
he has never felt the whole. Happy in detecting a ray of the beautiful upon
the humblest blade of grass gemmed with dew; happy in seizing the poetic
elements of an incident the most prosaic in appearance - he was incapable of
tracing all to a common source, and recomposing the grand ascending scale in
which, to quote a beautiful expression of Herder`s "every creature is a
numerator of the grand denominator, Nature." How, indeed, should he comprehend
these things, he who had no place in his works or in his poet`s heart for
humanity, by the light of which conception only can the true worth of
sublunary things be determined? "Religion and politics,"^3 said he, "are a
troubled element for art. I have always kept myself aloof from them as much as
possible." Questions of life and death for the millions were agitated around
him; Germany re-echoed to the war songs of Korner; Fichte, at the close of one
of his lectures, seized his musket, and joined the volunteers who were
hastening (alas! what have not the Kings made of that magnificent outburst of
nationality!) to fight the battles of their fatherland. The ancient soil of
Germany thrilled beneath their tread; he, an artist, looked on unmoved; his
heart knew no responsive throb to the emotion that shook his country; his
genius, utterly passive, drew apart from the current that swept away entire
races. He witnessed the French Revolution in all its terrible grandeur, and
saw the old world crumble beneath its strokes; and while all the best and
purest spirits of Germany, who had mistaken the death-agony of the old world
for the birth-throes of a new, were wringing their hands at the spectacle of
dissolution, he saw in it only the subject of a farce. He beheld the glory and
the fall of Napoleon; he witnessed the reaction of down-trodden nationalities
- sublime prologue of the grand epopee of the peoples destined sooner or later
to be unfolded - and remained a cold spectator. He had neither learned to
esteem men, to better them, nor even to suffer with them. If we except the
beautiful type of Berlichingen, a poetic inspiration of his youth, man, as the
creature of thought and action; the artificer of the future, so nobly sketched
by Schiller in his dramas, has no representative in his works. He has carried
something of this nonchalance even into the manner in which his heroes
conceive love. Goethe`s altar is spread with the choicest flowers, the most
exquisite perfumes, the first-fruits of nature; but the Priest is wanting.
In his work of second creation - for it cannot be denied that such it was - he
has gone through the vast circle of living and visible things; but stopped
short before the seventh day. God withdrew from him before that time; and the
creatures the poet has evoked wander within the circle, dumb and prayerless;
awaiting until the man shall come to give them a name, and appoint them to a
destination.
[Footnote 3: Goethe and his Contemporaries.]
No, Goethe is not the poet of Pantheism; he is a polytheist in his method
as an artist; the pagan poet of modern times. His world is, above all things,
the world of forms: a multiplied Olympus. The Mosaic heaven and the Christian
are veiled to him. Like the pagans, he parcels out Nature into fragments, and
makes of each a divinity; like them, he worships the sensuous rather than the
ideal; he looks, touches, and listens far more than he feels. And what care
and labor are bestowed upon the plastic portion of his art! what importance is
given - I will not say to the objects themselves - but to the external
representation of objects! Has he not somewhere said that "the beautiful is
the result of happy position?"^4
[Footnote 4: In the Kunst und Alterthum, I think.]
Under this definition is concealed an entire system of poetic
materialism, substituted for the worship of the ideal; involving a whole
series of consequences, the logical result of which was to lead Goethe to
indifference, that moral suicide of some of the noblest energies of genius.
The absolute concentration of every faculty of observation on each of the
objects to be represented, without relation to the ensemble; the entire
avoidance of every influence likely to modify the view taken of that object,
became in his hands one of the most effective means of art. The poet, in his
eyes, was neither the rushing stream a hundred times broken on its course,
that it may carry fertility to the surrounding country; nor the brilliant
flame, consuming itself in the light it sheds around while ascending to
heaven; but rather the placid lake, reflecting alike the tranquil landscape
and the thunder-cloud; its own surface the while unruffled even by the
lightest breeze. A serene and passive calm with the absolute clearness and
distinctness of successive impressions, in each of which he was for the time
wholly absorbed, are the peculiar characteristics of Goethe. "I allow the
objects I desire to comprehend, to act tranquilly upon me," said he; "I then
observe the impression I have received from them, and I endeavor to render it
faithfully." Goethe has here portrayed his every feature to perfection. He was
in life such as Madame Von Arnim proposed to represent him after death; a
venerable old man, with a serene, almost radiant countenance; clothed in an
antique robe, holding a lyre resting on his knees, and listening to the
harmonies drawn from it either by the hand of a genius, or the breath of the
winds. The last chords wafted his soul to the East; to the land of inactive
contemplation. It was time: Europe had become too agitated for him.
Such were Byron and Goethe in their general characteristics; both great
poets; very different, and yet, complete as is the contrast between them, and
widely apart as are the paths they pursue, arriving at the same point. Life
and death, character and poetry, everything is unlike in the two, and yet the
one is the complement of the other. Both are the children of fatality - for it
is especially at the close of epochs that the providential law which directs
the generations assumes towards individuals the semblance of fatality - and
compelled by it unconsciously to work out a great mission. Goethe contemplates
the world in parts, and delivers the impressions they make upon him, one by
one, as occasion presents them. Byron looks upon the world from a single
comprehensive point of view; from the height of which he modifies in his own
soul the impressions produced by external objects, as they pass before him.
Goethe successively absorbs his own individuality in each of the objects he
reproduces. Byron stamps every object he portrays with his own individuality.
To Goethe, nature is the symphony; to Byron it is the prelude. She furnishes
to the one the entire subject; to the other the occasion only of his verse.
The one executes her harmonies; the other composes on the theme she has
suggested. Goethe better expresses lives; Byron life. The one is more vast;
the other more deep. The first searches everywhere for the beautiful, and
loves, above all things, harmony and repose; the other seeks the sublime, and
adores action and force. Characters, such as Coriolanus or Luther, disturbed
Goethe. I know not if, in his numerous pieces of criticism, he has ever spoken
of Dante; but assuredly he must have shared the antipathy felt for him by Sir
Walter Scott; and although he would undoubtedly have sufficiently respected
his genius to admit him into his Pantheon, yet he would certainly have drawn a
veil between his mental eye and the grand but sombre figure of the exiled
seer, who dreamed of the future empire of the world for his country, and of
the world`s harmonious development under her guidance. Byron loved and drew
inspiration from Dante. He also loved Washington and Franklin, and followed,
with all the sympathies of a soul athirst for action, the meteor-like career
of the greatest genius of action our age has produced, Napoleon; feeling
indignant - perhaps mistakenly - that he did not die in the struggle.
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