REFERENCES TO THE GREAT ROMANCES ix 66 practice is rather unique, for he not only refers freely to such world-famous romances as Richardson's "Sir Charles Grandison," Butler's Hudibras," Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," Smollett's "Roderick Random" and and "Humphrey Clinker," Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" and "Sentimental Journey," Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" and "Tom Jones," Voltaire's "Candide," and Le Sage's "Gil Blas; he even levies toll on his contemporary, Scott, and treats Sir Walter's verse and prose tales with that full "liberty of quotation" which is the compliment generally paid to classics only. In his quotations again Byron exhibits most clearly his love of the stage. He cites Shakespeare in his Letters no cases of misquotation which the Letters and Journals afford are those in which Byron unconsciously paraphrases or parodies the lines he is quoting. He commences his "Extracts from a Diary” with the sentence-placed in inverted commas- "A sudden thought strikes me," quite oblivious of the fact that he is altering a famous line of "Antony and Cleopatra":"On the sudden a Roman thought hath struck him." And when he tells Francis Hodgson that he has been riding on "hollow, pampered jades of Asia," he is probably unaware of the fact that he is making nonsense of a speech written by that very same Marlowe whose Faustus he so contemptuously declares he has never read. Yet the "pampered jades" are obviously Marlowe's,-witness the following lines taken from the 4th scene of the 4th act of the 2nd part of "Tamburlaine the Great," the scene in which Tamburlaine addresses the conquered kings whom he has harnessed to his chariot : "Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia! What! can ye draw but twenty miles a day, less than one hundred and fifty-six times, either making use of stock extracts from the tragedies, or adopting from comedies, tragedies, or histories some ludicrous image or "fighting speech." To a man of his peculiar temperament a temperament which so often oscillated between arrogance and humour, which was ever too turbulent and too generous to smile placidly at the human comedy and to "endure a while and see injustice done -a play like the first part of "King Henry IV.,' with its welcome contrast of fiery impetuosity in Hotspur, with calculating geniality in Falstaff, seems to have been peculiarly sympathetic-it is quoted on twenty-one occasions. "Macbeth" was evidently a greater favourite: the tyrant's moods of defiance and of despair find such a responsive echo in the breast of Byron, that he cites the tragedy no less than thirty-six times. But in this connection there is a circumstance even more extraordinary than this record of one hundred and fifty-six Shakespearean quotations, and that is the fact that Byron's Letters contain excerpts taken from twenty-two other dramatic authors. Some of these-Massinger and Otway, Farquhar and Vanbrugh, Addison and Dryden, Goldsmith and Sheridan-are legitimately connected with our literature, but the rest, even the best of them-Murphy, Hoadley, and the Colmansare merely the popular playwrights of the time, playwrights whose works Byron must have seen in those early days in which he was interested in the stage and helped to manage Drury Lane. To obtain a possible parallel to this instance of a great poet's condescension, you must imagine Tennyson quoting A NOXIOUS ANTINOMY xi Tom Robertson or James Albery in a letter to Edward Fitzgerald, or Mr Swinburne and Mr WattsDunton "swopping jokes" culled from Mr Carton and Mr Jones. The parallel is, of course, quite inconceivable, and I only draw it to set in high relief that contempt of purely literary canons of taste that Byron so often delighted to express. He quotes Andrews and Kenney precisely as he quotes Cowper or Campbell, Coleridge, Southey, or Moore. He finds in their farces the particular tag he wants, and, for his own purposes of letter-writing, "Better Late Than Never and "Raising the Wind" stand exactly on the same level with "The Ancient Mariner and "The Pleasures of Hope." The fact is that, throughout his life, despite its pre-occupation with literature, Byron was never weary of protesting against the notion that books are as important a matter as the world with which they deal. He liked living romances better than writing them, and though he never succeeded in finding a career in the world of action, he always confessed to quote Mr Chesterton's amusing dichotomy-that he preferred the society of gentlemen to that of literary men. His cry seems ever to have been what was Verlaine's cry later in the century-"Don't let's talk literature. He knew and loathed "the envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness" that are inseparably annexed to a literary life led by a member of a literary circle, and he was urgent in promulgating-and with a more downright sincerity than Stevenson's the pestilent heresy that the world is alive and that books are dead-a heresy, by the way, which Mr Swinburne ingeniously exposes in the preface to the new and collected edition of his Poems. But I have by no means counted the tale of allusions that makes the Letters so piquant. Himself the great champion of the Augustan school of English Poetry, Byron was bound by his theories of his art, by his love for the finished epigram, as distinct from the imaginative suggestion, of the poetic phrase to pay the due meed of reference to "the little nightingale of Twickenham." Yet, while he performs this duty most loyally, exalting Pope to the heights of Parnassus in his controversial pamphlets, and quoting from his works in the Letters no less than thirty-six times, it is to Johnson, the great critic in this school of verse-making wits, that he makes the most frequent appeal. Byron is for ever celebrating Johnson as literary dictator on the one hand, and as master of epigram and of retort on the other. His "Rasselas," his Drury Lane Prologue, his Lives of the Poets, and his "Vanity of Human Wishes," are all cited; indeed the great satire is quoted on several occasions, and is once the subject of an elaborate eulogy. Byron's most interesting allusions to Johnson, however, are such as take the form of quotations made from Boswell's "Life," and to an examination of these quotations I therefore propose to devote the remaining portion of my space. Now, inasmuch as most of these phrases are borrowed to accentuate some particularly truculent expression of Byron's own opinions, it is only natural that four of the most important should be taken from places in which Johnson gives his uncompromising judgment of the Fingal controversy. The scathing answer made by the Doctor to Blair's question "whether any man of a modern age could have written such poems TWO WELL-KNOWN LETTERS OF JOHNSON'S xiii man as those attributed to Ossian (The Life, 1763, May 24th) "Yes, sir, many men, many women, and many children," is introduced on two occasions, once in an attack on the playwright Sotheby, again in a suggested criticism of Byron's own verse; and the no less famous dictum (The Life, 1783), "Sir, a might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it," is twice applied to Wordsworth's poetry. In like fashion, Johnson's well-known letter to Macpherson is twice drawn upon. The latter half of the sentence "Any violence offered me I shall do my best to repel; and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me" is quoted in an inverted form, in reference to a literary attack, and again in allusion to one of Leigh Hunt's poems; and the concluding passage of the letter, "what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove," is cited in a very plain-spoken letter which Byron wrote to his solicitor, Hanson, at a time when Lady Byron was suspected of an intention to take with her Ada, the sole offspring of the marriage, on a visit to the Continent. In this place I may suitably note that Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield is also laid under contribution; the memorable sentence, "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?" being alluded to in a letter sent by Byron to the honorary secretary to the Greek Committee. Another of Johnson's most crushing replies, his retort on Hannah More's flattery, "Dearest lady, consider with yourself what your flattery is worth, before you |