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Byronism, romanticism, reminiscences of the French Revolution, of the Dekabrists and the worship of Napoleon; faith in destiny, in one's star, in strength of will; pose and fine phrases and a miserable sense of the emptiness of life; uneasy pangs of petty vanity and genuine strength and daring; generous impulses and defective education, ignorance; aristocratic airs and delight in trivial foppery.... But enough of these general reflections.
But the generation of English youth who had grown up with Thackeray, Dickens, and Tennyson as their intellectual nourishment, seemed to me little likely to be infected with Byronism, and might read his poetry with a degree of impunity which the young people of his own time did not enjoy.
Kipling brought a new violence and wonder, a sort of debased Byronism, into the imagination of youth; at least, he put a crown upon the violence and wonder which youth had long previously discovered for itself in penny dreadfuls and in its rebellion against conventions and orthodoxies. It may be protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr. Kipling's genius as a poet.
Southey said that he was no more ashamed of having been a republican than of having been a boy. Well, people catch Byronism, and get over it, much as Southey got over his republicanism. In fact Byron himself lived long enough though he died at thirty-six to outgrow his purely "Byronic" phase, and to smile at it as knowingly as we do.
Envious undergraduates sought to parody his unaffected lack of zeal and fear; it was a kind of new Byronism more composed and dignified. "Nothing really mattered"; among other things, this formula embraced the dons; and though he always meant to be civil, the effect on the college authorities was one of startling rudeness.
When we see some of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. We almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box, artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with the great convulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism.
It contains wit, character, passion, plot, conversations full of spirit and insight, letters sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the death of the heroine be somewhat frigid and artificial, the last days of the hero strike the only note of what we now call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and Byron himself.
It contains wit, character, passion, plot, conversations full of spirit and insight, letters sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the death of the heroine be somewhat frigid and artificial, the last days of the hero strike the only note of what we now call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and Byron himself.
It is on the question how much of true poetry lies behind and independent of the scenery and properties of Byronism, that the great debate arises. Was the author of the poems from Childe Harold to Don Juan really gifted with the poetical "sincerity and strength" which have been awarded him by a critic of leanings so little Byronic in the ordinary sense of Matthew Arnold?
It is perhaps to the neglect of physical exercise that we find amongst students so frequent a tendency towards discontent, unhappiness, inaction, and reverie, displaying itself in contempt for real life and disgust at the beaten tracks of men, a tendency which in England has been called Byronism, and in Germany Wertherism. Dr.
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