Byron, though he felt himself the equal of Satan, never quite ventured to put himself in the place of God. This next step in the growth of pride was taken by Nietzsche, who says: “If there were Gods, how could I endure it to be not God! Therefore there are no Gods.” Observe the suppressed premiss of this reasoning: “Whatever humbles my pride is to be judged false.” Nietzsche, like Byron, and even to a greater degree, had a pious upbringing, but having a better intellect, he found a better escape than Satanism. He remained, however, very sympathetic to Byron. He says:
“The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly sensitively suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger
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that man may bleed to death through the truth that he recognizes.” Byron expresses this in immortal lines:
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
Sometimes, though rarely, Byron approaches more nearly to Nietzsche’s point of view. But in general Byron’s ethical theory, as opposed to his practice, remains strictly conventional.
The great man, to Nietzsche, is godlike; to Byron, usually, a Titan at war with himself. Sometimes, however, he portrays a sage not unlike Zarathustra–the Corsair, in his dealings with his followers,
Still sways their souls with that commanding art That dazzles, leads, yet chills the vulgar heart.
And this same hero “hated man too much to feel remorse.” A footnote assures us that the Corsair is true to human nature, since similar traits were exhibited by Genseric, king of the Vandals, by Ezzelino the Ghibelline tyrant, and by a certain Louisiana pirate.
Byron was not obliged to confine himself to the Levant and the Middle Ages in his search for heroes, since it was not difficult to invest Napoleon with a romantic mantle. The influence of Napoleon on the imagination of nineteenth-century Europe was very profound; he inspired Clausewitz, Stendhal, Heine, the thought of Fichte and Nietzsche, and the acts of Italian patriots. His ghost stalks through the age, the only force which is strong enough to stand up against industrialism and commerce, pouring scorn on pacifism and shopkeeping. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is an attempt to exorcize the ghost, but a vain one, for the spectre has never been more powerful than at the present day.
During the Hundred Days, Byron proclaimed his wish for Napoleon’s victory, and when he heard of Waterloo he said, “I’m damned sorry for it.” Only once, for a moment, did he turn against his hero: in 1814, when (so he thought) suicide would have been more seemly than abdication. At this moment, he sought consolation in the virtue of Washington, but the return from Elba made this effort no longer necessary. In France, when Byron died, “It was remarked in many newspapers that the two greatest men of the century, Napoleon and
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Byron, had disappeared almost at the same time.” * Carlyle, who, at the time, considered Byron “the noblest spirit in Europe,” and felt as if he had “lost a brother,” came afterwards to prefer Goethe, but still coupled Byron with Napoleon:
“For your nobler minds, the publishing of some such Work of Art, in one or the other dialect, becomes almost a necessity. For what is it properly but an altercation with the Devil, before you begin honestly Fighting him? Your Byron publishes his Sorrows of Lord George, in verse and in prose, and copiously otherwise: your Bonaparte presents his Sorrows of Napoleon Opera, in an all-too stupendous style; with music of cannon-volleys, and murder-shrieks of a world; his stage-lights are the fires of Conflagration; his rhyme and recitative are the tramp of embattled
Hosts and the sound of falling Cities.” â€
It is true that, three chapters further on, he gives the emphatic command: “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.” But Byron was in his blood, whereas Goethe remained an aspiration.
To Carlyle, Goethe and Byron were antitheses; to Alfred de Musset, they were accomplices in the wicked work of instilling the poison of melancholy into the cheerful Gallic soul. Most young Frenchmen of that age knew Goethe, it seems, only through The Sorrows of Werther, and not at all as the Olympian. Musset blamed Byron for not being consoled by the Adriatic and Countess Guiccioli–wrongly, for after he knew her he wrote no more Manfreds. But Don Juan was as little read in France as Goethe’s more cheerful poetry. In spite of Musset, most French poets, ever since, have found Byronic unhappiness the best material for their verses.
To Musset, it was only after Napoleon that Byron and Goethe were the greatest geniuses of the century. Born in 1810, Musset was one of the generation whom he describes as “conçus entre deux batailles” in a lyrical description of the glories and disasters of the Empire. In Germany, feeling about Napoleon was more divided. There were those who, like Heine, saw him as the mighty missionary of liberalism, the destroyer of serfdom, the enemy of legitimacy, the man who made hereditary princelings tremble; there were others who saw him as Antichrist, the would-be destroyer of the noble German nation,
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* Maurois, Life of Byron.
€ Sartor Resartus, Book II, Ch. VI.
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the immoralist who had proved once for all that Teutonic virtue can only be preserved by unquenchable hatred of France. Bismarck effected a synthesis: Napoleon remained Antichrist, but an Antichrist to be imitated, not merely to be abhorred. Nietzsche, who accepted the compromise, remarked with ghoulish joy that the classical age of war is coming, and that we owe this boon, not to the French Revolution, but to Napoleon. And in this way nationalism, Satanism, and hero-worship, the legacy of Byron, became part of the complex soul of Germany.
Byron is not gentle, but violent like a thunderstorm. What he says of Rousseau is applicable to himself. Rousseau was, he says,
He who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence . . .
yet he knew How to make madness beautiful, and cast O’er erring deeds and thoughts, a heavenly hue.
But there is a profound difference between the two men. Rousseau is pathetic, Byron is fierce; Rousseau’s timidity is obvious, Byron’s is concealed; Rousseau admires virtue provided it is simple, while Byron admires sin provided it is elemental. The difference, though it is only that between two stages in the revolt of unsocial instincts, is important, and shows the direction in which the movement is developing.
Byron’s romanticism, it must be confessed, was only half sincere. At times, he would say that Pope’s poetry was better than his own, but this judgement, also, was probably only what he thought in certain moods. The world insisted on simplifying him, and omitting the element of pose in his cosmic despair and professed contempt for mankind. Like many other prominent men, he was more important as a myth than as he really was. As a myth, his importance, especially on the Continent, was enormous.
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CHAPTER XXIV Schopenhauer
SCHOPENHAUER ( 1788-1860) is in many ways peculiar among philosophers. He is a pessimist, whereas almost all the others are in some sense optimists. He is not fully academic, like Kant and Hegel, nor yet completely outside the academic tradition. He dislikes Christianity, preferring the religions of India, both Hinduism and Buddhism. He is a man of wide culture, quite as much interested in art as in ethics. He is unusually free from nationalism, and as much at home with English and French writers as with those of his own country. His appeal has always been less to professional philosophers than to artistic and literary people in search of a philosophy that they could believe. He began the emphasis on Will which is characteristic of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy; but for him Will, though metaphysically fundamental, is ethically evil–an opposition only possible for a pessimist. He acknowledges three sources of his philosophy, Kant, Plato, and the Upanishads, but I do not think he owes as much to Plato as he thinks he does. His outlook has a certain temperamental affinity with that of the Hellenistic age; it is tired and valetudinarian, valuing peace more than victory, and quietism more than attempts at reform, which he regards as inevitably futile.
Both his parents belonged to prominent commercial families in Danzig, where he was born. His father was a Voltairian, who regarded England as the land of liberty and intelligence. In common with most of the leading citizens of Danzig, he hated the encroachments of Prussia on the independence of the free city, and was indignant when it was annexed to Prussia in 1793-so indignant that he removed to Hamburg, at considerable pecuniary loss. Schopenhauer lived there with his father from 1793 to 1797; then he spent two years in Paris, at the end of which his father was pleased to find that the
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boy had nearly forgotten German. In 1803 he was put in a boardingschool in England, where he hated the cant and hypocrisy. Two years later, to please his father, he became a clerk in a commercial house in Hamburg, but he loathed the prospect
