He speaks his impressive epitaph over human greatness and the wrecks of great cities, because it is the natural impulse of the natural man; and his moralisings, always so personal, are generally what would seem to most people the obvious thought under the circumstances. When he is most moved, by some indignation, which in verse and prose always made him write best, he seems to resign himself to what was noblest in him: the passion for liberty (a passion strong enough to die for, as he proved), the passion against injustice, the passion of the will to live and the will to know, fretting against the limits of death and ignorance. It was then that 'thoughts which should call down thunder' came to him, calling down thunder indeed, on the wrongs and hypocrisies of his time and country, as a moralist more intellectually disinterested, further aloof from the consequences of his words, could not have done.

Byron had no philosophy; he saw no remedy or alternative for any evil, least of all in his own mind, itself more tossed than the world without him. He had flaming doubts, stormy denials; he had the idealism of revolt, and fought instead of dreaming. His idolatry of good is shown by his remorseful consciousness of evil, morbid, as it has seemed to those who have not realised that every form of spiritual energy has something of the divine in it, and is on its way to become divine. 'Cain' is a long, restless, proud, and helpless questioning of the powers of good and evil, by one who can say:

'I will have nought to do with happiness

Which humbles me and mine,'

with a pride equal to Lucifer's; and can say also, in all the humility of admitted defeat:

'Were I quiet earth,

That were no evil.'

'Obstinate questionings,' resolving themselves into nothing except that pride and that humility of despair, form the whole drama in which Byron has come nearest to abstract thinking,

in his 'gay metaphysical style,' as he called it. "Think and endure' is Lucifer's last counsel to Cain. 'Why art thou wretched?' he has already asked him; and been answered: 'Why do I exist?' Cain's arraignment of God, which has nothing startling to us, who have read Nietzsche, raised all England in a kind of panic; religion itself seemed to be tottering. But Byron went no further in that direction; his greater strength lay elsewhere. Dropping heroics, he concludes, at the time that he is writing 'Don Juan,' that man 'has always been and always will be an unlucky rascal,' with a tragic acquiescence in that summary settlement of the enigma, laughingly. Humour was given us that we might disguise from ourselves the consciousness of our common misery. Humour turned by thought into irony, which is humour thinking about itself, is the world's substitute for philosophy, perhaps the only weapon that can be turned against it with success. Byron used the world's irony to condemn the world. He had conquered its attention by the vast clamour of his revolt; he had lulled it asleep by an apparent acceptance of its terms; now, like a treacherous friend, treacherous with the sublime treachery of the intellect, he drove the nail into its sleeping forehead.

And so we see Byron ending, after all the 'daring, dash, and grandiosity' (to use Goethe's words, as they are rendered by Matthew Arnold) of his earlier work, a tired and melancholy jester, still fierce at heart. Byron gives us, in an overwhelming way, the desire of life, the enjoyment of life, and the sense of life's deceit, as it vanishes from between our hands, and slips from under our feet, and is a voice and no more. In his own way he preaches 'vanity of vanities,' and not less cogently because he has been drunk with life, like Solomon himself, and has not yet lost the sense of what is intoxicating in it. He has given up the declamation of despair, as after all an effect, however sincere, of rhetoric; his jesting is more sorrowful than his outcries, for it shows him to have surrendered.

'We live and die,

But which is best, you know no more than I.'

All his wisdom (experience, love of nature, passion, tenderness, pride, the thirst for knowledge) comes to that in the end, not even a negation.

1

RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM (1788-1845) 1

THE REV. Richard Harris Barham was a great creator of nonsense, and he had a prodigious faculty for versifying. He wrote entirely for his own amusement; or, as a friend said of him: 'The same relaxation which some men seek in music, pictures, cards, or newspapers, he sought in verse.' Most of his rhymes were written down at odd moments, often after midnight, and with a facility, his son tells us, 'which not only surprised himself, but which he actually viewed with distrust; and he would not unfrequently lay down his pen, from an apprehension that what was so fluent must of necessity be feeble.' In all this helter-skelter of 'mirth and marvels,' begun for Bentley's 'Miscellany' in 1837, when he was nearly fifty years of age, there is nothing feeble in all the fluency. No verse that has been written in English goes so fast or turns so many somersaults on the way. He said once, of a poem which he did not care for, 'that the only chance to make it effective was to strike out something newish in the stanza, to make people stare.' If that was ever his aim, he attained it, and not in his rhymes only. The rhymes are marvellous, and if they are not the strictest, have the most spontaneous sound of any in English. The clatter of 'atmosphere and that must fear,? the gabble of

'And so like a dragon he
Looked in his agony,'

with even the more elaborately manufactured

1 (1) Ingoldsby Legends, first series, 1840; second series, 1843; third series, 1847. (2) Lyrics, 1881.

'twisting dom

estic and foreign necks all over Christendom,'

have so easy a jingle as they go galloping over the page, that we are hardly conscious how artificial they really are. With the rhymes go rhythms, so bold, swift, and irreverent, and with pauses so alarming that one is never able, if one has read them as a child, to get out of one's head the solemn thrill of 'Open lock

To the Deadman's knock!'

or the ghastly gaiety in the sound of

'Hairy-faced Dick at once lets fly,

And knocks off the head of young Hamilton Tighe.'

Under all the extravagance, like a light through a lantern, there is meaning, let wildly loose, but with something macabre, grim, ghastly, above all haunted, in it. Barham's material came to him partly out of old books, which he read to catch from them a harsh Protestant laughter against Catholics; but for the better part from legends which he found in his own neighbourhood. A scholar revels throughout these unclerical rhymes, drawing wicked and harmless imps out of book and bottle as he pores, past midnight, over his black-letter folios and his port. And so we find, in these poems made up of fear, fun, and suspense, a kind of burlesque which is not quite like any other, so jolly is it as it fumbles with death, murder, tortures, and terrors of the mind. Here is burlesque of that excessive kind which foreigners see in the tragic laughing white clown in the arena, with his touch of mortal colour in the cheeks. And it is full of queer ornament, as in this interior of Bluebeard's castle, furnished as if by Beardsley:

'It boasts not stool, table, or chair,

Bloudie Jacke!

But one Cabinet, costly and grand,
Which has little gold figures

Of little gold niggers,

With fishing-rods stuck in each hand;

It's japanned,

And it's placed on a splendid buhl stand.'

Was there ever a gayer and ghastlier farce than in this very poem, 'Bloudie Jacke of Shrewsberrie,' which goes to the jingling of bells, in a metre invented as if to fit into an interval between Poe and Browning? To be so successfully vulgar in 'Misadventures at Margate' is to challenge the lesser feats of Hood, and the prose of a narrative like 'The Leech of Folkestone' (part of what the writer called 'prose material to serve as sewing-silk and buckram') is, for all its oddity, almost as chilling to the blood as Sheridan Lefanu's in his book of vampires, 'In a Glass Darkly.' But where Barham is most himself, and wonderful in his way, is in the cascading of cadences rhymed after this fashion:

"There's Setebos, storming because Mephistopheles
Gave him the lie,

Said he'd "blacken his eye,"

And dashed in his face a whole cup of hot coffee-lees.'

Not Butler nor Byron nor Browning, the three best makers of comic rhyme, has ever shown so supreme an inventiveness in the art.

REV. HENRY HART MILMAN (1791-1868)1

Or Milman's plays three are Biblical and lifeless; one, 'Fazio,' is moving, for all its childishness of construction, its scenes of a few lines, the naïveté with which the speeches follow one another with too carefully irregular a logic of the passions. There is a quaint, unnatural neatness in these small scenes, with their brief statement, not action, written after the Elizabethan manner by one who has often a firm vigour in

1 (1) The Apollo Belvidere, 1810. (2) Fazio, 1815. (3) Samor, 1818. (4) The Fall of Jerusalem, 1820. (5) The Belvidere Apollo, 1821. (6) The Martyr of Antioch, 1822. (7) Belshazzar, 1822. (8) Anne Boleyn, 1826. (9) Mahābhārāta (translated from the Sanscrit), 1835. (10) Poetical Works, 3 vols., 1839. (11) Agamemnon (translation), 1865. (12) Bacchae (translation), 1865.