Chapter II: Byron

Last night I went to see my old friend Dimitri Nikolaievitch A----. I found him, as usual, in the little den which he shares with a bullfinch, a lizard, and a fox terrier on the sixth floor of a huge sordid barrack. As usual, he was smoking, and there was a lack of buttons on his coat.

“So you’ve come to talk politics,” he said, “and I am not going to talk politics with you. I am going to talk literature with you--a far more interesting subject. No Russian knows anything about politics or really cares about politics; we are an artistic (I mean artistic, not æsthetic) nation; we have been forced to take notice of politics because our Government went just beyond the limit of incapacity and general idiocy that a nation can stand; but that does not make our political ideas any the more interesting. Whereas our ideas on literature are really interesting, because all the defects of our nature, owing to which we are such bad politicians, help to make us good judges of literature. We have neither the sublime and contented ignorance of the British, nor the Chinese Wall-like narrow-mindedness of the French, nor the complicated misapprehension of the Teutons; we are absolutely open-minded and catholic; we can understand and assimilate everything and anything; there is no hard bar in our nature; it is all plastic, pliant, and receptive. There is nothing we cannot appreciate; a Frenchman--even an extremely clever Frenchman like M. Bourget--cannot possibly appreciate either the humour or the style or the point of a Scotch writer of genius such as Stevenson or the works of Jacobs or a book like the _Diary of a Nobody_. We can; that’s the difference. That is why our politicians are so bad and our non-politicians so intelligent.” “That is all very well,” I answered, “but I have to write political letters to my newspaper and I want your views--people in England prefer politics to literature.” “I quite understand that,” answered Dimitri Nikolaievitch, “but for all that I refuse to talk politics to-day. I am going to talk to you about Byron, a subject which few Englishmen are interested in, I believe, and if what I say won’t do for a political letter send it to the literary page of your newspaper. In the _Morning Post_, which I take in in the hope of seeing my name mentioned now and then, I noticed that one of the most delightful of English writers, Mr. Andrew Lang, lately raised the question as to who was right about Byron, his detractors or the people who praised him. Now, it is an odd thing, which I have noticed, that people accept their likes and dislikes about most things with decent resignation. If they don’t like chicken or roast beef or Mozart’s music, or Rembrandt’s pictures, or Homer’s verse, they say so and pass on. Not so with Shakespeare and Byron. These two authors have the effect which a red rag has on a bull on the people who dislike them. If a man dislikes Shakespeare he feels it incumbent on himself to proclaim the fact on the housetops, as though it were a great discovery, oblivious of the fact that people and literature are like a Seidlitz powder, the man must have the complementary blue powder which when mixed with the white powder of the book produces a fizzing combustion in a glass of water. Count Tolstoi being without the blue powder that makes Shakespeare fizz for him has to write a book in which he explains that Shakespeare knows nothing of human nature and could not draw a living character. This does not damage Shakespeare’s reputation as a playwright, but it destroys Count Tolstoi’s reputation as a critic. Byron produces the same effect; people who dislike Byron get very angry if one says that he is a great poet, and quote you a long list of the errors in syntax which are to be found in his works. Now, the reason I want to talk about Byron is that being a foreigner and living far off from the literary fashions of London, far from the catchwords and quarrels of cliques and coteries, I am a much more impartial judge of Byron than any Englishman can be. The obvious retort to this is that foreigners admire Byron because they cannot appreciate the nicety, the lights and shades, the values of the English language. In my case you will admit the argument does not hold good; to a Russian who knows English from his childhood and has a knowledge and appreciation of the world’s literature, the manipulation of the English language and the apprehension of its values is child’s play compared to the manipulation of the Russian language. The argument of a foreigner’s inability to appreciate the values of the language may be true of a Frenchman or of a German; it is not true of an Italian critic such as Nencioni, who translated Browning, nor is it true of a Russian critic such as myself, who has run to seed and made a hash of life from having appreciated literature and the arts wisely and too well, and has, thank heavens, written nothing at all. To go back to Byron, the mistake people make with regard to him seems to me that they judge him by a wrong standard. They apply to him the standards which appertain to other things. To judge Byron by the standard of Tennyson is like criticising Michael Angelo by the standard of Benvenuto Cellini. They apply a magnifying glass to the picture, at which they should look from a distance of several yards. They criticise a frieze as if it were a carved cherry-stone. To this I reply that other men such as Goethe judge him by the standard of Shakespeare, and criticise him with the finest discrimination and find him good.

“Read all that Goethe says about Byron in ‘Eckerman,’ not merely the oft-quoted phrases of his being the greatest genius of the nineteenth century, but all his _obiter dicta_ with regard to Byron, and you will be struck by their profound wisdom and incredible acuteness.

“But a better reply is to quote what is perhaps the most hackneyed of hackneyed Byronic quotations, two stanzas of which I learned in the nursery, but which, I dare say, you have never read--