Chapter XVIII: Section VI: The Malady of the Age

So lived and so died this unhappy great man; the malady of the age had no more distinguished prey. Around him, like a hecatomb, lie the others, wounded also by the greatness of their faculties and their immoderate desires--some ending in stupor or drunkenness, others worn out by pleasure or work: these driven to madness or suicide; those beaten down by impotence, or lying on a sick-bed; all agitated by their too acute or aching nerves; the strongest carrying their bleeding wound to old age, the happiest, having suffered as much as the rest, and preserving their scars, though healed. The concert of their lamentations has filled their century, and we stood around them, hearing in our hearts the low echo of their cries. We were sad like them, and like them inclined to revolt. The reign of democracy excited our ambitions without satisfying them; the proclamation of philosophy kindled our curiosity without satisfying it. In this wide-open career, the plebeian suffered for his mediocrity, and the sceptic for his doubt. The plebeian, like the sceptic, attacked by a precocious melancholy, and withered by a premature experience, abandoned his sympathies and his conduct to the poets, who declared happiness impossible, truth unattainable, society ill-arranged, man abortive or marred. From this unison of voices an idea arose, the centre of the literature, the arts, the religion of the age, to-wit, that here is a monstrous disproportion between the different parts of our social structure, and that human destiny is vitiated by this disagreement.

What advice have they given us to cure this? They were great; were they wise? "Let deep and strong sensations rain upon you; if the human mechanism breaks, so much the worse! Cultivate your garden, bury yourself in a little circle, re-enter the flock, be a beast of burden. Turn believer again, take holy water, abandon your mind to dogmas, and your conduct to manuals of devotion. Make your way; aspire to power, honours, wealth." Such are the various replies of artists and citizens, Christians and men of the world. Are they replies? And what do they propose but to satiate one's self, to become stupid, to turn aside, to forget? There is another and a deeper answer which Goethe was the first to give, the truth of which we begin to conceive, in which issue all the labor and experience of the age, and which may perhaps be the subject-matter of future literature: "Try to understand yourself, and things in general." A strange reply, which seems hardly new, whose scope we shall only hereafter discover. For a long time yet men will feel their sympathies thrill at the sound of the sobs of their great poets. For a long time they will rage against a destiny which opens to their aspirations the career of limitless space, to shatter them, within two steps of the goal, against a wretched post which they had not seen. For a long time they will bear like fetters the necessities which they ought to have embraced as laws. Our generation, like the preceding, has been tainted by the malady of the age, and will never more than half get rid of it. We shall arrive at truth, not at tranquillity. All we can heal at present is our intellect; we have no hold upon our feelings. But we have a right to conceive for others the hopes which we no longer entertain for ourselves, and to prepare for our descendants the happiness which we shall never enjoy. Brought up in a more wholesome air, they will have, mayhap, a wholesomer heart. The reformation of ideas ends by reforming the rest, and the light of the mind produces serenity of heart. Hitherto, in our judgments on men, we have taken for our masters the oracles and poets, and like them we have received for undoubted truths the noble dreams of our imagination and the imperious suggestions of our heart. We have bound ourselves to the partiality of religious divinations, and the inexactness of literary divinations, and we have shaped our doctrines according to our instincts and our vexations. Science at last approaches, and approaches man; it has gone beyond the visible and palpable world of stars, stones, plants, amongst which man disdainfully confined her. It reaches the heart provided with exact and penetrating implements, whose justness has been proved, and their reach measured by three hundred years of experience. Thought, with its development and rank, its structure and relations, its deep material roots, its infinite growth through history, its lofty bloom at the summit of things, becomes the object of science--an object which, sixty years ago, it foresaw in Germany, and which, slowly and surely probed, by the same methods as the physical world, will be transformed before our eyes, as the physical world has been transformed. It is already being transformed, and we have left behind us the light in which Byron and the French poets had considered it. No, man is not an abortion or a monster; no, the business of poetry is not to disgust or defame him. He is in his place, and completes a chain. Let us watch him grow and increase, and we shall cease to rail at or curse him. He, like everything else, is a product, and as such it is right he should be what he is. His innate imperfection is in order, like the constant abortion of a stamen in a plant, like the fundamental irregularity of four facets in a crystal. What we took for a deformity, is a form; what seemed to us the subversion of a law, is the accomplishment of a law. Human reason and virtue have for their foundation instincts and animal images, as living forms have for their instruments physical laws, as organic matters have for their elements mineral substances. What wonder if virtue or human reason, like living form or organic matter, sometimes fails or decomposes, since like them, and like every superior and complex existence, they have for support and control inferior and simple forces, which, according to circumstances, now maintain it by their harmony, now mar it by their discord? What wonder if the elements of existence, like those of quantity, receive, from their very nature, the immutable laws which constrain and reduce them to a certain species and order of formation? Who will rise up against geometry? Who, especially, will rise up against a living geometry? Who will not, on the contrary, feel moved with admiration at the sight of those grand powers which, situated at the heart of things, incessantly urge the blood through the limbs of the old world, disperse it quickly in the infinite network of arteries, and spread over the whole surface the eternal flower of youth and beauty? Who, finally, will not feel himself ennobled, when he finds that this pile of laws results in a regular series of forms, that matter has thought for its goal, that nature ends in reason, and that this ideal to which, amidst so many errors, all the aspirations of men cling, is also the end to which aim, amidst so many obstacles, all the forces of the universe? In this employment of science, and in this conception of things, there is a new art, a new morality, a new polity, a new religion, and it is in the present time our task to try and discover them.

[Footnote 144: Byron's Works, ed. Moore, 17 vols. 1832; "Life," I. 102.]

[Footnote 145: Ibid. 63.]

[Footnote 146: Ibid. 69.]

[Footnote 147: Ibid. 137.]

[Footnote 148: Ibid. 26.]

[Footnote 149: Byron's Works, "Life," I. 53.]

[Footnote 150: Ibid. III. 83.]

[Footnote 151: Ibid. III. 20, March 28, 1814.]

[Footnote 152: Ibid. IV. 81; Letter to Moore, Feb. 12, 1818.]

[Footnote 153: Byron's Works, "Life," V. 96, Feb. 2, 1821.]

[Footnote 154: Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," VII. 323.]

[Footnote 155: "If I was born, as the nurses say, with a 'silver spoon in my mouth,' it has stuck in my throat, and spoiled my palate, so that nothing put into it is swallowed with much relish--unless it be cayenne.... I see no such horror in a dreamless sleep, and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not make tiresome."]

[Footnote 156: "I like Junius: he was a good hater. I don't understand yielding sensitiveness. What I feel is an immense rage for forty-eight hours."]

[Footnote 157: Byron's Works, "Life," I. 41.]

[Footnote 158: In "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."]

[Footnote 159: Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," III. 389.]

[Footnote 160: Ibid. V. 141.]

[Footnote 161: Moore's "Life of Byron," III. 12, March 10, Thor's day. The last part of the sentence is a quotation from "Macbeth," V. 5.]

[Footnote 162: Ibid. IV. 169, note.]

[Footnote 163: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 67, Jan. 9, 1821.]

[Footnote 164: Ibid. V. 60, Jan. 6, 1821.]

[Footnote 165: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 97, February 2, 1821.]

[Footnote 166: Ibid. 95.]

[Footnote 167: Ibid. VI. 206.]

[Footnote 168: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 33, Ravenna, Nov. 18, 1820.]

[Footnote 169: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 265.]

[Footnote 170: Ibid. V. 150, Ravenna, May 3, 1821.]

[Footnote 171: "All the styles of the day are bombastic. I don't except my own; no one has done more through negligence to corrupt the language."]

[Footnote 172: See his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."]

[Footnote 173: Thirty thousand copies of "The Corsair" were sold in one day.]

[Footnote 174: Byron's Works, VIII; "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. I. 6.]

[Footnote 175: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. I. 19.]

[Footnote 176: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. III. 7-15.]

[Footnote 177: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. IV. 1 and 2.]

[Footnote 178: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. I. 39 and 40.]

[Footnote 179: Ibid. c. IV. 93 and 94.]

[Footnote 180: For example, "as weeping Beauty's cheek at Sorrow's tale."]

[Footnote 181: Here are verses like Pope, very beautiful and false: "And havock loath so much the waste of time, She scarce had left an uncommitted crime, One hour beheld him since the tide he stemm'd, Disguised, discover'd, conquering, ta'en condemn'd, A chief on land, an outlaw on the deep, Destroying, saving, prison'd, and asleep!"]

[Footnote 182: Moore's "Life," IV. 345.]

[Footnote 183: Byron's Works, X., "The Prisoner of Chillon," c. VII. 234.]

[Footnote 184: Byron's Works, X., "The Prisoner of Chillon," c. VIII. 236.]

[Footnote 185: Ibid, XI., "Mazeppa," c. XIII. 167.]

[Footnote 186: Byron's Works, X., "The Siege of Corinth," c. XI. 116.]

[Footnote 187: Byron's Works, X., "The Siege of Corinth," c. XVI. 123.]

[Footnote 188: Byron's Works, X; "Lara," c. 2, st. 17-20, 60.]

[Footnote 189: Byron's Works, X; "Darkness," 283.]

[Footnote 190: Byron's Works, IV. 320; Letter to Mr. Murray, Ravenna, June 7, 1820.]

[Footnote 191: The angel of holy loves, the angel of the ocean, the choirs of happy spirits. See this at length in the "Martyrs."]

[Footnote 192: "Magna peccatrix." S. Lucæ. VII. 36: "Mulier Samaritana." S. Johannis, IV; "Maria Ægyptiaca" (Acta Sanctorum), etc.]

[Footnote 193: Goethe's "Faust," translated by Theodore Martin. Prologue in Heaven.]

[Footnote 194: Goethe sings: "Wer ruft das Einzelne zur allgemeinen Weihe Wo es in herrlichen Accorden schlägt?"]

[Footnote 195: Byron's Works, XI; "Manfred," II. 2, 32.]

[Footnote 196: Ibid.; "Manfred," III. 1, 56.]

[Footnote 197: Ibid.; "Manfred," II. 2, 35.]

[Footnote 198: Byron's Works, XI; "Manfred," II. 4, 47.]

[Footnote 199: Byron's Works, XI; "Manfred," II. 4, 49.]

[Footnote 200: Ibid. III. 4. 70.]

[Footnote 201: Southey, Preface to "A Vision of Judgment."]

[Footnote 202: Byron's Works, XVII; "Don Juan," c. 11, st. LXVII.]

[Footnote 203: Ibid. VI. 18; Letter 512, April 5, 1823.]

[Footnote 204: Ibid. II. 303; Journal, December 17, 1813.]

[Footnote 205: Alfred de Musset.]

[Footnote 206: See his terrible satirical poem, "The Vision of Judgment," against Southey, George IV, and official pomp.]

[Footnote 207: Byron's Works, XVI. 131; Preface to "Don Juan," cantos VI., VII., and VIII.]

[Footnote 208: "Don Juan" is a satire on the abuses in the present state of society, and not a eulogy of vice.]

[Footnote 209: Stendhal, "Mémoires sur Lord Byron."]

[Footnote 210: Byron's Works, III. 333; Letter to Murray, Venice, January 2, 1817.]

[Footnote 211: Ibid. III. 363; Letter to Moore, Venice, March 25, 1817.]

[Footnote 212: Byron's Works, IV. 279; Letter to Murray. Ravenna, February 7, 1820.]

[Footnote 213: Ibid. XI; "Beppo," c. XLIII-XLV. 121.]

[Footnote 214: See Stendhal, "Vie de Giacomo Rossini," and Dean Stanley's "Life of Dr. Arnold." The contrast is complete. See also Mme. de Staël's "Corinne," where this opposition is very clearly grasped.]

[Footnote 215: Byron's Works, V. 127; Letter to Mr. Murray, Ravenna, February 16, 1821.]

[Footnote 216: Ibid. XVI; "Don Juan," c. VI. st. LXVI-LXVIII.]

[Footnote 217: Byron's Works, "Don Juan," c. VI. st. LX.]

[Footnote 218: Byron's Works, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st. CLXXVII-CLXXXVIII.]

[Footnote 219: Ibid, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st CXC.]

[Footnote 220: Ibid. c. II. st. CXCII.]

[Footnote 221: Byron says (V. October 12, 1820), "Don Juan is too true, and would. I suspect, live longer than Childe Harold. The women hate many things which strip off the tinsel of sentiment."]

[Footnote 222: "Don Juan," c. VII. st. 2. "I hope it is no crime to laugh at all things. For I wish to know what, after all, are all things--but a show?"]

[Footnote 223: Byron's Works, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st. XIX-XXIII.]

[Footnote 224: Ibid. c. III. st. V.]

[Footnote 225: Ibid. c. III. st. XXIII.]

[Footnote 226: Ibid. c. II. st. CLXXVIII., CLXXIX.]

[Footnote 227: Byron's Works, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st. LXXXI.]

[Footnote 228: Byron had before him a dozen authentic descriptions.]

[Footnote 229: Byron's Works, XVI; "Don Juan," c. VII. st. 7.]

[Footnote 230: See his "Vision of Judgment."]

CHAPTER THIRD

THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

Part I.--The Past