The speeches of the Doge are
solemn, but prolix, if not ostentatious, and--perhaps the vital
defect--his cause fails to enlist our sympathies. Artistically, this play
was Byron's most elaborate attempt to revive the unities and other
restrictions of the severe style, which, when he wrote, had been
"vanquished in literature." "I am persuaded," he writes in the preface,
"that a great tragedy is not to be produced by following the old
dramatists, who are full of faults, but by producing regular dramas like
the Greeks." He forgets that the statement in the mouth of a Greek
dramatist that his play was not intended for the stage, would have been a
confession of failure; and that Aristotle had admitted that even the Deity
could not make the Past present. The ethical motives of Faliero are,
first, the cry for vengeance--the feeling of affronted or unsatiated
pride,--that runs through so much of the author's writing, and second, the
enthusiasm for public ends, which was beginning to possess him. The
following lines have been pointed out as embodying some of Byron's spirit
of protest against the more selfish "greasy domesticity" of the Georgian
era:--
I.
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