adored then is what it adores now, not a poet's genius, which is far beyond its ken, but the pedestal on which his genius has lifted him. It must surely be with a grim feeling of humour that the idealist and the lover of poetry reflects upon this chapter of Byron's story.

Byron very wisely left the storm to wear itself out. He went up the Rhine to Switzerland, and there he met and fraternised with Shelley and the entire Shelley group. Among these were Jane Clairmont, the beautiful, romantic, dark-eyed daughter of Mary Shelley's stepmother by her first husband (Vol. II. p. 703). This lady had imbibed the views of that remarkable set upon marriage, and between her and Byron a liaison took place. The result of the intimacy was a daughter, Allegra, whom she dearly loved. Writers upon Byron are generally unjust towards Jane Clairmont; but, on the whole, the ugliest chapter in Byron's life would seem to be that which deals with her. She had given him all that a woman can give without getting in return what the world considers the immense compensation of the marriage-tie. Byron inveigled the child from her, and placed it in a Catholic convent, knowing that by so doing the child would become alienated from its freethinking mother. If Byron had placed the child in the convent from conscientious motives, the case would have been different. But not Jane Clairmont herself was more irreligious than Byron; there was no excuse for him. The fact that Jane Clairmont in after-years changed her views about religious and social matters, and, indeed, went so far as to join the Catholic Church, does not in the least palliate Byron's conduct at this period of their lives. Allegra died in her fifth year; and there was an end of the mischief.

Byron moved on, and at last settled in Venice for a time. According to his own account, his life at Venice was very much what the life of Childe Harold had been at Newstead-that is to say, one of lawlessness and debauchery of every kind. But of this chapter of the Byron legend some portion is, no doubt, the outcome of Byron's peculiarly trivial kind of vanity. Even Shelley's evidence as to these debaucheries was, no doubt, largely based upon Byron's own reports, and upon gossip flowing from these reports. The best evidence against Byron's impeachment of himself is the work he got through at Venice during these two years: debauchery and strenuous work do not go together. In 1818 he drifted into the most amazing relations with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli and her obliging husband. He positively lived with this bewildering pair in 1819 and 1820, at Ravenna. In the summer of 1820 he went to Pisa, still working so hard that it is difficult to conceive how he found time for the loose life of which he boasted. Immoral his life no doubt was; but as it was during these years that he produced his most virile work, it must have been less so than he would

In the

have the world believe. In 1822 Shelley was drowned, and Byron, Trelawny, and others were present at the cremation of the body on the shore. From what Trelawny told the present writer, Byron on this occasion comported himself in the manner that was to be expected of him. About this time Byron joined Leigh Hunt in a newspaper called the Liberal, which was a failure. same year he left Pisa for Genoa, and there pursued his literary labours, still with unswerving energy. During the seven years that elapsed from his abandonment of England to his death, the work he produced was enormous in quantity. If the quality had been equally great, his position among the nineteenth-century poets would not have been the uncertain one that he now holds. For in regard to the question of quantity and quality poetic critics seem to be divided. Some contend that there are two kinds of poetic genius-the genius which has the power of expressing itself in quintessential forms, and the genius which, lacking this power, manifests itself in marvellous fecundity, producing a kind of literature more diffuse, but still of a comparatively high class. Others affirm that in poetry quality is everything, quantity nothing-that the few fragments which we have of Sappho will be as fresh as when they were first written centuries after Byron's mass of work, so much of which is only second-rate, has been forgotten. The third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, however, written at this time, are greatly superior to the first and second cantos; but even here Byron shows no power of 'using the sieve for noble words,' which Dante speaks of. If there is any truth in the canon of criticism that while eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard,' these two cantos consist of eloquence rather than of poetry. Yet so rich is our literature that in any other poetry save that of Greece and that of England it would take a high rank. The work at this period included many of his dramas. Manfred, Cain, Marino Faliero, The Deformed Transformed, Sardanapalus, Werner, Heaven and Earth, &c., were all written with great haste and in the most slovenly manner. There are qualities, however, in Heaven and Earth which place this drama above the others. As dramatic work they are all failures; but three of them as dramatic poems-Heaven and Earth, Cain, and Manfred-deserve more attention than it is now the fashion among competent critics to give to them. Manfred is, surely, in spite of all its melodramatic characteristics and in spite of its indebtedness to Goethe as to tone, a very impressive poem. Like all his other poems, it

makes the reader believe that the hero and the author are one. Manfred, like the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, shows the influence upon Byron of the neo-romantic movement, which he at first resisted. The Alpine mood is much worked in Manfred, and yet criticism is compelled to ask the question-Did Byron really know, and

dingles of England whose fascination when fully known makes this island the Paradise of the world, or by the seashore or among the great European hills, widens the soul and makes tender the heart. But upon Byron's frivolity and cynicism, or affected cynicism, it had no influence apparently; he remained a worldling to the last. His love of the sea, however, was genuine. And no wonder, for while swimming in the ocean billows the lame man was a true athlete and no sham.' On deck the martyr to fat was no more trammelled by fleshly conditions than other men.

It is impossible to exaggerate the slovenliness of Byron's work at the worst; it is bad enough in his rhymed verse, but in his blank verse it is intolerable. Yet, as regards the best portion of his poetry that written in the ottava rimasome of our most thoroughly equipped critics are apt to do him less than justice. In comparing him with Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, we should not forget that there are two kinds of 'narrative poetry.' The temper of the one is idealistic; the temper of the other is realistic. In the former kind of narrative the poem depends largely upon the beauty of the poetic form, as in Julian and Maddalo, The Revolt of Islam, The Eve of St Agnes, Isabella, Lamia, and especially in Christabel. In the latter it depends upon a more externally truthful representation of the life of Nature and the life of man, as in Marmion and as in the serious portions of Don Juan. In its own Ene Don Juan is as successful as are the poems of Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley in theirs. Don Juan does exactly what it sets out to do; it competes with prose narrative in lucidity and in truthfulness of representation, and yet it remains a poem. To demand also that it shall be steeped in the moonlight magic of Christabel, or in the rich poetic dyes of Keats's Lamia or Eve of St Agnes, is as absurd as to demand that these last-named poems should touch life as closely as Don Juan touches life. In such a richly coloured picture of fairy life as that going on in Madeline's moonlit chamber the puerile talk of the lovers is not, and should not be, challenged by any true reader of

In that debatable land between poetry and prose where the poetic sieve is not used, Byron has no peer save Scott; and although his imagination was immeasurably behind Scott's, there are passages in Don Juan which show the genuine seeing power. The shipwreck scene is one of these. That this famous scene is not comparable with such concentrated vision as is found in Shakespeare's sea-paint

sea-painting in The Ancient Mariner, too, is so far above it that the two pictures can scarcely be compared. But it is not enough to say against Byron's sea-picture that the scenic business was a mere collection of actual recorded incidents which had occurred in actual shipwrecks; a man without an imagination or with a feeble imagination might have collected all these details, and might have marshalled them with as much dexterity as Byron has done, and yet have failed to fuse them-have failed to inform them with dramatic life. To say, therefore, as so many critics have said, that Byron was without imagination would be wrong, though it would be right to say that his imagination was not of the first class. And the episode of Haidée which follows the shipwreck is so beautiful and so full of life that it is difficult to imagine the time when it will not be read with the deepest interest. Underlying all the cynicism and disagreeable swagger which is so offensive in Don Juan, Byron shows in this episode (and shows, perhaps, for the first time) that he had a true feeling for the pathos of woman's relations to man -her trustfulness, her ignorance of masculine guile and sin, the fatality that attends her love when she gives, as she so often does give, more than she receives. And yet even here the reader, perhaps, feels that the good work as regards the 'use of the sieve for noble words' ought to have been better.

It would be hard to exaggerate the splendour and triumph of Don Juan. And here we touch upon the very core of Byron's poetic work. The mere fact that almost all the best portion of that work is written in ottava rima, the stanza which especially lends itself to the use of a diction common to verse and prose, is alone sufficient to indicate his place among poets. Every stanzaic arrangement of lines, as has been said in discussing Childe Harold, has its metrical meaning, the instinctive understanding of which is necessary to every poet who works in it. Although Fairfax and Keats and others have used the ottava rima for entirely serious poetry, its metrical motive is what may be called jauntiness, and this makes it very

specially adapted for worldly verse like that of Beppo, Don Juan, and the Vision of Judgment. This jauntiness is properly expressed by the fifth and sixth lines of ottava rima, which mock, so to speak, the metrical meaning of the previous quatrain. Frere, in Whistlecraft, could by mastery over double rhymes achieve the jaunty. But although a recognition of difficulty overcome is undoubtedly an element of the pleasure we derive from the ottava rima, it is far from being the most important element. The supreme charm of jauntiness in the ottava rima is seen when, and when only, it shows, as in Byron, that the really precious things of poetry, wit, and wisdom, which to any other poet would be a burden, this poet in the very playfulness of his strength can carry jauntily. For, to show that the poet can do playfully all that the heroic does seriously is the work of the serio-comic ottava rimaItalian or English. The reader should feel that here is one who could scale Parnassus if he would, but that in the riot of his power he lingers to disport himself on its lower slopes. But then it is essential to have the power before you can play with it. Here is the difficulty; and now it is that we come to the secret why the serio-comic ottava rima is not to be achieved by the mere word-kneader, knead he never so wisely. It is not born of artifice at all; it is the natural expression of a mood-the mood of the full-blooded man who has lived. It is true enough that Whistlecraft inspired Beppoin writing which poem Byron at once found his feet. The author of Whistlecraft was wiped out of existence by the genius of his imitator; for Whistlecraft was inspired by jauntiness and clever rhyme-manipulation only. Now, although the ottava rima is the natural medium of jauntiness, that quality is just as much an impertinence in ottava rima as it is in any other measure, and as it is in real life, unless the poet makes jauntiness a good weight-carrier, as Byron does in his superb satirical poems in this measure. The same horse whose prancings in his box, unburdened by saddle or rider, seem so clumsy and ridiculous, looks a very different creature when he caracoles with ten stone upon his back. An eloquent and well-equipped Byron enthusiast, the late Professor John Nichol, in his monograph on Byron in 'English Men of Letters,' alludes to certain comparisons between Don Juan and the feats of the Japanese acrobats printed in defence of Byron against the sneers of one of the imitators of Don Juan, Moultrie, by the present writer twenty-five years ago. The gist of the comparison was that in seeing a man jauntily touch the strings of a guitar there is nothing exhilarating at all. But when one of those marvellous Japanese acrobats, whose incredible feats strike the spectator with wonder and delight, displays his jauntiness, jauntily touches the strings of his guitar as he balances on his shoulder a long bamboo pole which is curved to a segment

of a circle by the weight of another acrobat twisting and twirling like a monkey at the toptwisting and twirling there in the perfectly contented knowledge that absolute safety to his own neck lies in the genius of the man belowthen the jauntiness of such guitar-playing as that adds to the wonder of a performance whose wonderfulness is already overwhelming. That comparison was, of course, made in support of the present writer's contention that so amazing and so easy is the masterful power of Don Juan, so perpetually does the poem seem to show that Byron could, had he chosen, have given us serious poetry of a high kind, that if all his other work save that written in the ottava rima-the l'ision of Judgment, Beppo, and Don Juan-could be annihilated and forgotten, his position among English poets would be incomparably greater than it is now. For we should then have credited him with potentialities in serious poetry far beyond any of his actual achievements. Keats's fine definition of poetry would then have seemed to be exemplified by the work of Byron :

'Tis the supreme of power;

'Tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.

The instinct for prose locutions which give life to such poems as Beppo and Don Juan, coupled with the admirable writing in his letters and diary, shows that had Byron turned to prose fiction he might have been the most brilliant novelist of his time. Although it is a mistake to suppose that Byron was brought more into touch with actual life than were most of the men of his class for it seems to be forgotten that he moved in English society for a very short time --he nevertheless did see quite enough of life to depict it faithfully and brilliantly; and his powers of observation were those of the novelist rather than of the poet. Very likely he might have taken the same place in the novel that Scott took in the romance. As has been said above, his sensitivity to the class distinctions of his time was that of a member of the middle-class rather than that of the born aristocrat, and this would have enabled him to write a society novel as true to life as though he had belonged to the class to which Thackeray and Trollope belonged.

In 1822 Byron removed from Pisa to Genoa. In the following year his friends Hobhouse and Kinnaird invited him to join a movement for recovering the independence of Greece. On the 14th of July in that year he set out for Greece; in the expedition everything went wrong, though not entirely, or perhaps mainly, through want of practical sagacity on Byron's part. On 5th January 1824 he landed at Missolonghi, and still everything went wrong. To crown all, the Greeks quarrelled among themselves, and funds were not forthcoming. In a little while he caught a dangerous fever, and, weakened as his constitution was by the semi-starvation to which he had subjected

himself, he succumbed, and he died 19th April in that year. His body was brought to England and buried close to Newstead, in the little church of Hucknall-Torkard.

If the time is not even yet come for speaking with any confidence as to Byron's final place in the poetical literature of England, it is because the force which may be called the genius of personality is as effective for a time in keeping a poet alive as the most perfect exercise of artistic genius. In the popular imagination he is still, as a figure, more striking than any other in the galaxy of illustrious poets among whom he lived. And even among people of culture, though a deal of the magic associated with his name has faded away, a considerable remnant of that magic is vital still. To that great mass of intelligent people who read prose with avidity, but who read poetry only under the stress of the voice of authority, Byron is the only name among the poets of his period who is known at all, unless we except Scott, whose fame as a poet gains enormously by his fame as a prose writer. Any fresh incident connected with Byron's life, any fresh anecdote related concerning him, is at once circulated in every newspaper and read with avidity, not by students of poetry merely, but by people to whom the names of Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats are mere names. critics still explain this by affirming that Byron's poetry is finer than that of his contemporaries; but these are few and of very little importance, for Ruskin, with all his genius, was an extremely bad critic of poetry. By far the larger number of critics, and these are among the best equipped, now hold the opposite opinion-the opinion so strenuously put forward years ago by Landor. Some, indeed, go so far as to affirm that Byron's verse is not poetry at all, but a third something between poetry and prose. The view taken by the present writer is midway between these two.

Some

It is not necessary to go to the length of Landor in depreciation of the poet in order to see how excessive are Matthew Arnold's laudations of him. Arnold goes even so far as to speak of him in the same breath with Dante.

In criticising Byron it must never be forgotten that there is the poetry of art and the poetry of impulse, and that the great masters have both. No competent English critic, except Matthew Arnold, has ever claimed for Byron that he is to be ranked among the great masters. And Arnold's exaggerated estimate of Byron's poetry may very likely be traced to his reverence for the opinion of Goethe. There is every reason for understanding, without accepting, Goethe's views upon this subject. Apart from the fact that no foreigner can really judge of the finer and more subtle effects of English poetic-art, it must be remembered that the countrymen of Goethe do not use the words Dichtkunst, Dichtung, and Dichter in exactly the same way

as English critics use the corresponding words 'poetic-art,' 'poetry,' and 'poet.' In England the idea of perfect artistic verse is always included in the idea of poetry.

Now, although much of Byron's work is only poetry in solution, and suffers terribly when it is criticised as poetry, it can be fairly and justly estimated under the head of Dichtung. Dichtung can include a vast mass of material which, according to the English definition of the word poetry, can only be called 'worldly verse.' This is why, notwithstanding certain recent well-meaning and praiseworthy efforts to reinstate Byron in the position he once held, his rank in the courts of universal criticism still remains, and will always remain, below that of his five great contemporaries.

Moreover, this has to be said, that brilliant as is his best work-Don Juan, the Vision of Judgment, and Beppo—it would be difficult to say what is the message to his fellow-men of a poet whom such work represents. Not that we can expect any poets to be fully adequate to these modern ages of the world. Yet it is the artist's paramount duty to represent, not, indeed, the accidental forms, but the temper and the spirit of his time. To perform this duty in the grand but simple age of Pericles, to perform it in the age of Dante and even in the age of Shakespeare, there was requisite not much more than poetic genius; to perform it in the time of Byron something more was required, something which is not commonly found alongside the power of song save in the greatest names the wide intelligence and the keen sagacity that enable men to pierce through the complex conventions beneath which the heart of the age palpitates at one time as much as at another, and to see, even in the darkest days, where lies that eternal core of beauty of which, as Spenser teaches, physical beauty is but the type and the token-to see that, in the deepest of all senses, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.' Shelley taught, in the Prometheus Unbound, the sublimity of resignation before those great inscrutable powers -conscious or unconscious—in the grip of which Man is and must always remain helpless. Wordsworth taught the noble effects upon the human mind and soul of gazing into the eyes of Nature as she lies dreaming of Man's destiny. Coleridge, although he in his more precious. work like the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, cannot be said to have taught,. or to have attempted to teach, any set ethical lesson; yet, inasmuch as his beautiful pictures impress the mind with the near presence of those powers of the unseen world which govern, while they seem not to govern, all that is seen, suggests, perhaps, a truth that is greater than all. Keats taught a kind of Sufistic beauty-worship which is far more profound in its teaching than is generally supposed. His words above quoted remind us that even his, the most purely artistic of all

English poetry, steeped as it is in every kind of physical luxury, shows by the sudden flash of many a pregnant line how alive the poet was, even in his Latmian dreams, to the waking life in the valley below-how open were his ears to that 'still sad music of humanity' which is the soul of all true literature. Even in his most perfect artistic work we get such magnificent bursts of humanism as the stanza in the 'Ode to a Nightingale' beginning,

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird.

Scott, our greatest imaginative writer of the nineteenth century, the greatest, perhaps, since Shakespeare, taught the beauty of a dauntless and manly chivalry such as he, rightly or wrongly, imagined feudality to be, and such as fired his own heroic and noble soul.

But what is taught by Byron's only important work, Don Juan? He has often been called the poet of liberty, and certainly his sonnet Chillon, his highest reach in serious quintessential poetry, does express very nobly the feelings of those who really and truly worship liberty above everything else. But did he really love liberty as Shelley and others have loved it? How could he love liberty, the object of whose flighty adoration was Napoleon, the greatest tyrant, if the greatest genius, that has ever trampled on the liberties of Europe? His admiration of Napoleon, indeed, was positively comic; he carried it so far as to get a great coach, in which he could sleep and take meals, in imitation of Napoleon's famous carriage, carrying a bed, a library, and a cooking apparatus. Perhaps there were certain points of resemblance between the great Corsican captain and his English adorer. One was the detachment and taciturnity in the society of women, before mentioned; another was the capacity of being, when occasion seemed to demand it, rude to women. Napoleon was surely the only man except himself who could have written the letter he wrote to Lady Caroline Lamb when he wanted to break off an entanglement that had become troublesome. He has often I been called the poet of revolt; but when we are asked what he revolted against, it is difficult to find an answer. As regards the great fundamental human scheme upon which all attempts at civilisation up to now have been built, the scheme of hereditary honour and dishonour - the scheme resulting in those autocracies, royalties, oligarchies, aristocracies, whose proper functions, the true poets of revolt tell us, have now ceased-no man, not even Carlyle himself, was more dominated by this sophism than was Byron. He was as blind as though he had lived in the Middle Ages to the fact that honour and dishonour must in that true civilisation towards which we are slowly creeping be considered strictly personal. That he revolted against the hypocrisy and Puritan cant of Great Britain is true, and here, to be sure, his work might have done good service; for undoubtedly there is more

hypocrisy among the Anglo-Saxon race, whether it flourish in England, the United States, or the British Colonies, than in all the world besides. But, unluckily, Byron made the world see that his revolt against hypocrisy and cant was only part of a much larger revolt-a revolt of a very mischievous kind-a revolt of the fine gentleman against all those moral curbs and restraints without which society would rapidly fall to pieces. Consequently, since he wrote, British hypocrisy and cant have been more rampant than ever. It is difficult to avoid saying that what Byron really taught was the sacred rights of fine gentlemanism-the sacred privilege of the patrician to do as he likes. This is why, among the great writers of the world, no place can properly be found for Byron. And again, can a great writer be le fanfaron de vices qu'il n'avait pas, as his most charitable critic, Walter Scott, declares him to have been? To indulge in senseless bravado, to take pride in posing as a breaker of moral laws, would be impossible to any man who had anything to say to the world worth saying. Poets and great poets -men of genius and great men of genius-do, undoubtedly, show the weakness of the flesh only too often do, undoubtedly, yield to the appetites as much as common men; but it is with reluctance they yield. Self-scorn, and not boasting, follows their fall. He who wrote the wonderful sonnet beginning,

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame, would surely not have understood a flâneur like Byron. Plenty of instances of great poets weakly yielding to sin there are; but is there an instance in all literature of a great poet posing as le fanfaron de vices qu'il n'avait pas ?

To Thyrza.

Without a stone to mark the spot,

And say, what Truth might well have said, By all, save one, perchance forgot, Ah! wherefore, art thou lowly laid? By many a shore and many a sea

Divided, yet beloved in vain ; The Past, the Future fled to thee,

To bid us meet-no-ne'er again! Could this have been-a word, a look,

That softly said, 'We part in peace,' Had taught my bosom how to brook,

With fainter sighs, thy soul's release. And didst thou not, since Death for thee Prepared a light and pangless dart, Once long for him thou ne'er shalt see,

Who held, and holds thee in his heart? Oh! who like him had watched thee here? Or sadly marked thy glazing eye, In that dread hour ere Death appear,

When silent Sorrow fears to sigh, Till all was past? But when no more

'Twas thine to reck of human woe, Affection's heart-drops, gushing o'er, Had flow'd as fast-as now they flow.