The Morality Of Byron’s Poetry.  “The Corsair.”

[This is an abstract of an essay four times as long written many years ago.  Although so much has been struck out, the substance is unaltered, and the conclusion is valid for the author now as then.]

Byron above almost all other poets, at least in our day, has been set down as immoral.  In reality he is moral, using the word in its proper sense, and he is so, not only in detached passages, but in the general drift of most of his poetry.  We will take as an example “The Corsair.”

Conrad is not a debauched buccaneer.  He was not—

               “by Nature sent
To lead the guilty—guilt’s worst instrument.”

He had been betrayed by misplaced confidence.

“Doom’d by his very virtues for a dupe,
He cursed those virtues as the cause of ill,
And not the traitors who betray’d him still;
Nor deem’d that gifts bestow’d on better men
Had left him joy, and means to give again,
Fear’d—shunn’d—belied—ere youth had lost her force,
He hated man too much to feel remorse,
And thought the voice of wrath a sacred call,
To pay the injuries of some on all.”

Conrad was not, and could not be, mean and selfish.  A selfish Conrad would be an absurdity.  His motives are not gross—

      “he shuns the grosser joys of sense,
His mind seems nourished by that abstinence.”

He is protected by a charm against undistinguishing lust—

“Though fairest captives daily met his eye,
He shunn’d, nor sought, but coldly pass’d them by;”

and even Gulnare, his deliverer, fails to seduce him.

Mr. Ruskin observes that Byron makes much of courage.  It is Conrad, the leader, who undertakes the dangerous errand of surprising Seyd; it is he who determines to save the harem.  His courage is not the mere excitement of battle.  When he is captured—

“A conqueror’s more than captive’s air is seen,”

and he is not insensible to all fear.

“Each has some fear, and he who least betrays,
The only hypocrite deserving praise.

* * * * *

One thought alone he could not—dared not meet—
‘Oh, how these tidings will Medora greet?’”

Gulnare announces his doom to him, but he is calm.  He cannot stoop even to pray.  He has deserted his Maker, and it would be baseness now to prostrate himself before Him.

“I have no thought to mock his throne with prayer
Wrung from the coward crouching of despair;
It is enough—I breathe—and I can bear.”

He has no martyr-hope with which to console himself; his endurance is of the finest order—simple, sheer resolution, a resolve that with no reward, he will never disgrace himself.  He knows what it is

“To count the hours that struggle to thine end,
With not a friend to animate, and tell
To other ears that death became thee well,”

but he does not break down.

Gulnare tries to persuade him that the only way by which he can save himself from tortures and impalement is by the assassination of Seyd, but he refuses to accept the terms—

“Who spares a woman’s seeks not slumber’s life”—

and dismisses her.  When she has done the deed and he sees the single spot of blood upon her, he, the Corsair, is unmanned as he had never been in battle, prison, or by consciousness of guilt.

“But ne’er from strife—captivity—remorse—
From all his feelings in their inmost force—
So thrill’d—so shudder’d every creeping vein,
As now they froze before that purple stain.
That spot of blood, that light but guilty streak,
Had banish’d all the beauty from her cheek!”

The Corsair’s misanthropy had not destroyed him.  Small creatures alone are wholly converted into spite and scepticism by disappointment and repulse.  Those who are larger avenge themselves by devotion.  Conrad’s love for Medora was intensified and exalted by his hatred of the world.

“Yes, it was Love—unchangeable—unchanged,
Felt but for one from whom he never ranged;”

and she was worthy of him, the woman who could sing—

“Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,
Lonely and lost to light for evermore,
Save when to thine my heart responsive swells,
Then trembles into silence as before.

There, in its centre, a sepulchral lamp
Burns the slow flame, eternal—but unseen;
Which not the darkness of despair can damp,
Though vain its ray as it had never been.”

He finds Medora dead, and—

         “his mother’s softness crept
To those wild eyes, which like an infant’s wept.”

If his crimes and love could be weighed in a celestial balance, weight being apportioned to the rarity and value of the love, which would descend?

The points indicated in Conrad’s character are not many, but they are sufficient for its delineation, and it is a moral character.  We must, of course, get rid of the notion that the relative magnitude of the virtues and vices according to the priest or society is authentic.  A reversion to the natural or divine scale has been almost the sole duty preached to us by every prophet.  If we could incorporate Conrad with ourselves we should find that the greater part of what is worst in us would be neutralised.  The sins of which we are ashamed, the dirty, despicable sins, Conrad could not have committed; and in these latter days they are perhaps the most injurious.

We do not understand how moral it is to yield unreservedly to enthusiasm, to the impression which great objects would fain make upon us, and to embody that impression in worthy language.  It is rare to meet now even with young people who will abandon themselves to a heroic emotion, or who, if they really feel it, do not try to belittle it in expression.  Byron’s poetry, above most, tempts and almost compels surrender to that which is beyond the commonplace self.

It is not true that “The Corsair” is insincere.  He who hears a note of insincerity in Conrad and Medora may have ears, but they must be those of the translated Bottom who was proud of having “a reasonable good ear in music.”  Byron’s romance has been such a power exactly because men felt that it was not fiction and that his was one of the strongest minds of his day.  He was incapable of toying with the creatures of the fancy which had no relationship with himself and through himself with humanity.

A word as to Byron’s hold upon the people.  He was able to obtain a hearing from ordinary men and women, who knew nothing even of Shakespeare, save what they had seen at the theatre.  Modern poetry is the luxury of a small cultivated class.  We may say what we like of popularity, and if it be purchased by condescension to popular silliness it is nothing.  But Byron secured access to thousands of readers in England and on the Continent by strength and loveliness, a feat seldom equalled and never perhaps surpassed.  The present writer’s father, a compositor in a dingy printing office, repeated verses from “Childe Harold” at the case.  Still more remarkable, Byron reached one of this writer’s friends, an officer in the Navy, of the ancient stamp; and the attraction, both to printer and lieutenant, lay in nothing lower than that which was best in him.  It is surely a service sufficient to compensate for many more faults than can be charged against him that wherever there was any latent poetic dissatisfaction with the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life he gave it expression, and that he has awakened in the people lofty emotions which, without him, would have slept.  The cultivated critics, and the refined persons who have schrecklich viel gelesen, are not competent to estimate the debt we owe to Byron.