Chapter CXLI

He heard it, but he heeded not--his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away;
He reck’d not of the life he lost nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
_There_ were his young barbarians all at play,
_There_ was their Dacian mother--he, their sire,
Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday--
All this rush’d with his blood--Shall he expire,
And unavenged?--Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire!’

“By so doing I may be applying the wrong test myself, since it is a commonplace of criticism that Byron must be judged by the whole and not by fragments; but I maintain that just as if some one were to examine a limb hacked off a statue by Michael Angelo or a horse’s head from the Parthenon frieze he would say the hand who wrought such a fragment was a mighty hand; so it is with this short quotation; it is impossible to read it without being convinced that the man who wrote it was more than a ‘clever man.’ He was a poet. He was a great poet. Because to have said--

‘his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away,’

in this connection signifies that he had the gift by the use of the simplest possible and most ordinary words of piercing the heart and brain with the divine stab which only great poetry can inflict.

“Other poets can do other things. But because Virgil and Keats touch you with a wand that produces a ravishing enchantment, because Shelley and Coleridge lift you into unimagined heavens of light and music, because Shakespeare takes your breath away by the potent magic of his phrases, that does not prove that Byron has not in his fashion achieved what is generally accepted as being one of the highest achievements of poetry: that is to say, the achievement of making style disappear and of knocking you on the head with poetry made out of the language of every day.

“Goethe is usually thought to be a great poet. But Goethe’s claim to greatness as a poet rests on this achievement, on nothing less and on nothing more. When he is at his best, as in the first part of _Faust_ and in a dozen lyrics, he gets beyond and above style and writes--

‘Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’

or

‘Mein Ruh ist hin,’

or

‘Wer nie sein Brot mit Thränen ass,’

or

‘Von wem Ich’s habe, dass sag Ich Euch nicht,’

or

‘Denkt Ihr an mich ein Augenblickchen nur,’

or

‘Es war ein König in Thule,’

or

‘Heiss mich nicht reden, heiss mich schweigen,’

and the world agrees that when he writes like this he is ‘grand comme le monde.’ Nobody disputes the fact because he wrote masses and masses of inferior work. The point is that only a very great poet could have written

‘Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’

and the rest.

“I maintain that only a great poet could have written the ‘Dying Gladiator’; that only a great poet could have written the song that begins--

‘She walks in beauty like the night;’

and the song that ends

‘In silence and tears;’

the stanzas beginning

‘The moon is up, and yet it is not night’

(not a bad line?) The stanzas on Waterloo and Rome, or, to take a slighter instance, I contend that only a great poet could have written this little song--