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The reviews which followed the publication of the Lyrical Ballads were
nearly all unfavourable. Even Southey discovered nothing in The Ancient
Mariner but "a Dutch attempt at German sublimity." A certain learned
pig thought it "the strangest story of a cock and bull that he ever saw
on paper," and not a single critic, not even the one or two who had any
praise to offer, discerned the secret of the book. The publisher was so
alarmed that he hastily sold his stock. Nevertheless Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and his sister quietly went off to Germany without the least
disturbance of their faith, and the Ballads are alive to this day.

SOME NOTES ON MILTON

Much of the criticism on Milton, if not hostile, is apologetic, and it
is considered quite correct to say we "do not care" for him. Partly
this indifference is due to his Nonconformity. The "superior"
Englishman who makes a jest of the doctrines and ministers of the
Established Church always pays homage to it because it is RESPECTABLE,
and sneers at Dissent. Another reason why Milton does not take his
proper place is that his theme is a theology which for most people is no
longer vital. A religious poem if it is to be deeply felt must embody a
living faith. The great poems of antiquity are precious to us in
proportion to our acceptance, now, as fact, of what they tell us about
heaven and earth. There are only a few persons at present who perceive
that in substance the account which was given in the seventeenth century
of the relation between man and God is immortal and worthy of epic
treatment. A thousand years hence a much better estimate of Milton will
be possible than that which can be formed to-day. We attribute to him
mechanic construction in dead material because it is dead to ourselves.
Even Mr. Ruskin who was far too great not to recognise in part at least
Milton's claims, says that "Milton's account of the most important event
in his whole system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is
evidently unbelievable to himself; and the more so, that it is wholly
founded on, and in a great part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod's
account of the decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans. The
rest of his poem is a picturesque drama, in which every artifice of
invention is visibly and consciously employed; not a single fact being
for an instant conceived as tenable by any living faith" (Sesame and
Lilies, section iii.).

Mr. Mark Pattison, quoting part of this passage, remarks with justice,
"on the contrary, we shall not rightly apprehend either the poetry or
the character of the poet until we feel that throughout Paradise Lost,
as in Paradise Regained and Samson, Milton felt himself to be standing
on the sure ground of fact and reality" (English Men of Letters--Milton,
p. 186, ed. 1879).

St. Jude for ages had been sufficient authority for the angelic revolt,
and in a sense it was a reasonable dogma, for although it did not
explain the mystery of the origin of evil it pushed it a step further
backwards, and without such a revolt the Christian scheme does not well
hold together. So also with the entrance of the devil into the serpent.
It is not expressly taught in any passage of the canonical Scriptures,
but to the Church and to Milton it was as indisputable as the presence
of sin in the world. Milton, I repeat, BELIEVED in the framework of his
poem, and unless we can concede this to him we ought not to attempt to
criticise him. He was impelled to turn his religion into poetry in
order to bring it closer to him. The religion of every Christian if it
is real is a poem. He pictures a background of Holy Land scenery, and
he creates a Jesus who continually converses with him and reveals to him
much more than is found in the fragmentary details of the Gospels. When
Milton goes beyond his documents he does not imagine for the purpose of
filling up: the additions are expression.

Milton belonged to that order of poets whom the finite does not satisfy.
Like Wordsworth, but more eminently, he was "powerfully affected" only
by that "which is conversant with or turns upon infinity," and man is to
him a being with such a relationship to infinity that Heaven and Hell
contend over him. Every touch which sets forth the eternal glory of
Heaven and the scarcely subordinate power of Hell magnifies him.
Johnson, whose judgment on Milton is unsatisfactory because he will not
deliver himself sufficiently to beauty which he must have recognised,
nevertheless says of the Paradise Lost, that "its end is to raise the
thoughts above sublunary cares," and this is true. The other great epic
poems worthy to be compared with Milton's, the Iliad, Odyssey, AEneid,
and Divine Comedy, all agree in representing man as an object of the
deepest solicitude to the gods or God. Milton's conception of God is
higher than Homer's, Virgil's, or Dante's, but the care of the Miltonic
God for his offspring is greater, and the profound truth unaffected by
Copernican discoveries and common to all these poets is therefore more
impressive in Milton than in the others.

There is nothing which the most gifted of men can create that is not
mixed up with earth, and Milton, too, works it up with his gold. The
weakness of the Paradise Lost is not, as Johnson affirms, its lack of
human interest, for the Prometheus Bound has just as little, nor is
Johnson's objection worth anything that the angels are sometimes
corporeal and at other times independent of material laws. Spirits
could not be represented to a human mind unless they were in a measure
subject to the conditions of time and space. The principal defect in
Paradise Lost is the justification which the Almighty gives of the
creation of man with a liability to fall. It would have been better if
Milton had contented himself with telling the story of the Satanic
insurrection, of its suppression, of its author's revenge, of the
expulsion from Paradise, and the promise of a Redeemer. But he wanted
to "justify the ways of God to man," and in order to do this he thought
it was necessary to show that man must be endowed with freedom of will,
and consequently could not be directly preserved from yielding to the
assaults of Satan.

Paradise Regained comes, perhaps, closer to us than Paradise Lost
because its temptations are more nearly our own, and every amplification
which Milton introduces is designed to make them more completely ours
than they seem to be in the New Testament. It has often been urged
against Paradise Regained that Jesus recovered Paradise for man by the
Atonement and not merely by resistance to the devil's wiles, but
inasmuch as Paradise was lost by the devil's triumph through human
weakness it is natural that Paradise Regained should present the triumph
of the Redeemer's strength. It is this victory which proves Jesus to be
the Son of God and consequently able to save us.

He who has now become incarnated for our redemption is that same Messiah
who, when He rode forth against the angelic rebels,

"into terror chang'd
His count'nance too severe to be beheld,
And full of wrath bent on his enemies."

It is He who

"on his impious foes right onward drove,
Gloomy as night:"

whose right hand grasped

"ten thousand thunders, which he sent
Before him, such as in their souls infix'd
Plagues."
(P. L. vi. 824-38.)

Now as Son of Man he is confronted with that same Archangel, and he
conquers by "strong sufferance." He comes with no fourfold visage of a
charioteer flashing thick flames, no eye which glares lightning, no
victory eagle-winged and quiver near her with three-bolted thunder
stored, but in "weakness," and with this he is to "overcome satanic
strength."

Milton sees in the temptation to turn the stones into bread a devilish
incitement to use miraculous powers and not to trust the Heavenly
Father.

"Why dost thou then suggest to me distrust,
Knowing who I am, as I know who thou art?"
(P. R. i. 355-6.)

Finding his enemy steadfast, Satan disappears,

"bowing low
His gray dissimulation,"
(P. R. i. 497-8.)

and calls to council his peers. He disregards the proposal of Belial to
attempt the seduction of Jesus with women. If he is vulnerable it will
be to objects

"such as have more shew
Of worth, of honour, glory, and popular praise,
Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck'd;
Or that which only seems to satisfy
Lawful desires of Nature, not beyond."
(P. R. ii. 226-30.)

The former appeal is first of all renewed. "Tell me," says Satan,

"'if food were now before thee set
Would'st thou not eat?' 'Thereafter as I like
The giver,' answered Jesus."
(P. R. ii. 320-22.)

A banquet is laid, and Satan invites Jesus to partake of it.

"What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat?
These are not fruits forbidd'n."
(P. R. ii. 368-9.)

But Jesus refuses to touch the devil's meat -

"Thy pompous delicacies I contemn,
And count thy specious gifts no gifts, but guiles."
(P. R. ii. 390-1.)

So they were, for at a word

"Both table and provision vanish'd quite,
With sound of harpies' wings and talons heard."
(P. R. ii. 402-3.)

If but one grain of that enchanted food had been eaten, or one drop of
that enchanted liquor had been drunk, there would have been no Cross, no
Resurrection, no salvation for humanity.

The temptation on the mountain is expanded by Milton through the close
of the second book, the whole of the third and part of the fourth. It
is a temptation of peculiar strength because it is addressed to an
aspiration which Jesus has acknowledged.

"Yet this not all
To which my spirit aspir'd: victorious deeds
Flam'd in my heart, heroic acts."
(P. R. i. 214-16.)

But he denies that the glory of mob-applause is worth anything.

"What is glory but the blaze of fame,
The people's praise, if always praise unmixt?
And what the people but a herd confus'd,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, and, well weigh'd, scarce worth the praise?"
(P. R. iii. 47-51.)

To the Jesus of the New Testament this answer is, in a measure,
inappropriate. He would not have called the people "a herd confus'd, a
miscellaneous rabble." But although inappropriate it is Miltonic. The
devil then tries the Saviour with a more subtle lure, an appeal to duty.

"If kingdom move thee not, let move thee zeal
And duty; zeal and duty are not slow;
But on occasion's forelock watchful wait.
They themselves rather are occasion best,
Zeal of thy father's house, duty to free
Thy country from her heathen servitude."
(P. R. iii. 171-6.)

But zeal and duty, the endeavour to hurry that which cannot and must not
be hurried may be a suggestion from hell.

"If of my reign prophetic writ hath told
That it shall never end, so when begin
The Father in His purpose hath decreed."
(P. R. iii. 184-6.)

Acquiescence, a conviction of the uselessness of individual or organised
effort to anticipate what only slow evolution can bring, is
characteristic of increasing years, and was likely enough to be the
temper of Milton when he had seen the failure of the effort to make
actual on earth the kingdom of Heaven. The temptation is developed in
such a way that every point supposed to be weak is attacked. "You may
be what you claim to be," insinuates the devil, "but are rustic."

"Thy life hath yet been private, most part spent
At home, scarce view'd the Galilean towns,
And once a year Jerusalem."
(P. R. iii. 232-4.)

Experience and alliances are plausibly urged as indispensable for
success. But Jesus knew that the sum total of a man's power for good is
precisely what of good there is in him and that if it be expressed even
in the simplest form, all its strength is put forth and its office is
fulfilled. To suppose that it can be augmented by machinery is a
foolish delusion. The

"projects deep
Of enemies, of aids, battles and leagues,
Plausible to the world"
(P. R. iii. 395-3.)

are to the Founder of the kingdom not of this world "worth naught."
Another side of the mountain is tried. Rome is presented with Tiberius
at Capreae. Could it possibly be anything but a noble deed to

"expel this monster from his throne
Now made a sty, and in his place ascending,
A victor people free from servile yoke!"
(P. R. iv. 100-102.)

"AND WITH MY HELP THOU MAY'ST." With the devil's help and not without
can this glorious revolution be achieved! "For him," is the Divine
reply, "I was not sent." The attack is then directly pressed.

"The kingdoms of the world, to thee I give;
For, giv'n to me, I give to whom I please,
No trifle; yet with this reserve, not else,
On this condition, if thou wilt fall down
And worship me as thy superior lord."
(P. R. iv. 163-7.)

This, then, is the drift and meaning of it all. The answer is taken
verbally from the gospel.

"'Thou shalt worship
The Lord thy God, and only Him shalt serve.'"
(P. R. iv. 176-7.)

That is to say, Thou shalt submit thyself to God's commands and God's
methods and thou shalt submit thyself to NO OTHER.

Omitting the Athenian and philosophic episode, which is unnecessary and
a little unworthy even of the Christian poet, we encounter not an
amplification of the Gospel story but an interpolation which is entirely
Milton's own. Night gathers and a new assault is delivered in darkness.
Jesus wakes in the storm which rages round Him. The diabolic hostility
is open and avowed and He hears the howls and shrieks of the infernals.
He cannot banish them though He is so far master of Himself that He is
able to sit "unappall'd in calm and sinless peace." He has to endure
the hellish threats and tumult through the long black hours

"till morning fair
Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray,
Who with her radiant finger still'd the roar
Of thunder, chas'd the clouds, and laid the winds,
And grisly spectres, which the Fiend had rais'd
To tempt the Son of God with terrors dire.
But now the sun with more effectual beams
Had cheer'd the face of earth, and dri'd the wet
From drooping plant, or dropping tree; the birds,
Who all things now beheld more fresh and green,
After a night of storm so ruinous,
Clear'd up their choicest notes in bush and spray
To gratulate the sweet return of morn."
(P. R. iv. 426-38.)

There is nothing perhaps in Paradise Lost which possesses the peculiar
quality of this passage, nothing which like these verses brings into the
eyes the tears which cannot be repressed when a profound experience is
set to music.

The temptation on the pinnacle occupies but a few lines only of the
poem. Hitherto Satan admits that Jesus had conquered, but he had done
no more than any wise and good man could do.

"Now show thy progeny; if not to stand,
Cast thyself down; safely, if Son of God;
For it is written, 'He will give command
Concerning thee to His angels; in their hands
They shall uplift thee, lest at any time
Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.'"
(P. R. iv. 554-9.)

The promise of Divine aid is made in mockery.

"To whom thus Jesus: 'Also it is written,
Tempt not the Lord thy God.' He said, and stood:
But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell."
(P. R. iv. 560-2.)

It is not meant, "thou shalt not tempt ME," but rather, "it is not
permitted me to tempt God." In this extreme case Jesus depends on God's
protection. This is the devil's final defeat and the seraphic company
for which our great Example had refused to ask instantly surrounds and
receives him. Angelic quires

"the Son of God, our Saviour meek,
Sung victor, and from heavenly feast refresh't,
Brought on His way with joy; He unobserv'd,
Home to His mother's house private return'd."
(P. R. iv. 636-9.)

Warton wished to expunge this passage, considering it an unworthy
conclusion. It is to be hoped that there are many readers of Milton who
are able to see what is the value of these four lines, particularly of
the last.

It is hardly necessary to say more in order to show how peculiarly
Milton is endowed with that quality which is possessed by all great
poets--the power to keep in contact with the soul of man.

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, hut 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.

BYRON, GOETHE, AND MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD

(Reprinted, with corrections, by permission from the "Contemporary
Review," August, 1881.)

Mr. Matthew Arnold has lately published a remarkable essay {133} upon
Lord Byron. Mr. Arnold's theory about Byron is, that he is neither
artist nor thinker--that "he has no light, cannot lead us from the past
to the future;" "the moment he reflects, he is a child;" "as a poet he
has no fine and exact sense for word and structure and rhythm; he has
not the artist's nature and gifts." The excellence of Byron mainly
consists in his "sincerity and strength;" in his rhetorical power; in
his "irreconcilable revolt and battle" against the political and social
order of things in which he lived. "Byron threw himself upon poetry as
his organ; and in poetry his topics were not Queen Mab, and the Witch of
the Atlas, and the Sensitive Plant, they were the upholders of the old
order, George the Third and Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington
and Southey, and they were the canters and tramplers of the great world,
and they were his enemies and himself."

Mr. Arnold appeals to Goethe as an authority in his favour. In order,
therefore, that English people may know what Goethe thought about Byron
I have collected some of the principal criticisms upon him which I can
find in Goethe's works. The text upon which Mr. Arnold enlarges is the
remark just quoted which Goethe made about Byron to Eckermann: "so bald
er reflectirt ist er ein Kind"--AS SOON AS HE REFLECTS HE IS A CHILD.

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