I have never been able to understand why it has been so often supposed that Lord Byron was actuated in the composition of his different works by any other motive than enjoyment: perhaps no poet had ever less of an ulterior purpose in his mind during the fits of inspiration (for the epithet may be applied correctly to him and to the moods in which he was accustomed to write) than this singular and impassioned man.  Those who imagine that he had any intention to impair the reverence due to religion, or to weaken the hinges of moral action, give him credit for far more design and prospective purpose than he possessed.  They could have known nothing of the man, the main defect of whose character, in relation to everything, was in having too little of the element or principle of purpose.  He was a thing of impulses, and to judge of what he either said or did, as the results of predetermination, was not only to do the harshest injustice, but to show a total ignorance of his character.  His whole fault, the darkest course of those flights and deviations from propriety which have drawn upon him the severest animadversion, lay in the unbridled state of his impulses.  He felt, but never reasoned.  I am led to make these observations by noticing the ungracious, or, more justly, the illiberal spirit in which The Prophecy of Dante, which was published with the Marino Faliero, has been treated by the anonymous author of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron.

Of The Prophecy of Dante I am no particular admirer.  It contains, unquestionably, stanzas of resounding energy, but the general verse of the poem is as harsh and abrupt as the clink and clang of the cymbal; moreover, even for a prophecy, it is too obscure, and though it possesses abstractedly too many fine thoughts, and too much of the combustion of heroic passion to be regarded as a failure, yet it will never be popular.  It is a quarry, however, of very precious poetical expression.

It was written at Ravenna, and at the suggestion of the Guiccioli, to whom it is dedicated in a sonnet, prettily but inharmoniously turned.  Like all his other best performances, this rugged but masterly composition draws its highest interest from himself and his own feelings, and can only be rightly appreciated by observing how fitly many of the bitter breathings of Dante apply to his own exiled and outcast condition.  For, however much he was himself the author of his own banishment, he felt when he wrote these haughty verses that he had been sometimes shunned.

CHAPTER XXXVI

Table of Contents

The Tragedy of “Sardanapalus” considered, with Reference to Lord Byron’s own Circumstances—“Cain”