Murray, he writes: 'I have not an idea if it is good or bad.. You may put it into the fire if you like, and Gifford don't like.' He sends the first part of Heaven and Earth,' saying: 'I wish the first part to be published before the second, because if it don't succeed it is better to stop there than to go on in a fruitless experiment.' Such indifference, partly but not wholly pose though it may be, such dependence on outside judgments and the mere whim of the public, on 'success,' shows us, with singular clearness, Byron's lack of conviction, of reverence, of serious feeling for art. It brings out the strain of commonness which we find in the greatest of those to whom action was more than thought, the external world more real than the inner world; the commonness which seems to be part of a very masculine genius, to which contemplation has not brought the female complement of energy; the commonness which made Napoleon, at that very epoch, fall just so far short of greatness.

Byron's fame, which was never, like that of every other English poet, in his lifetime, a merely English reputation, has been kept alive in other countries, more persistently than in our own, and comes back to us now from abroad with at times almost the shock of a new discovery. It is never possible to convince a foreigner that Byron is often not even correct as a writer of verse. His lines, so full of a kind of echoing substance, ring true to the ear which has not naturalised itself in English poetry; and, hearing them march so directly and with such obvious clangour, the foreigner is at a loss to understand why one should bring what seems to him a petty charge against them. The magic of words, in which Byron is lacking, the poverty of rhythm, for which he is so conspicuous, do not tell with any certainty through the veil of another idiom. How many Englishmen know quite how bad, as verse, is the verse of the French Byron, as he has been called, Alfred de Musset, and quite why it is bad? And as Byron's best verse, even more than Musset's, is worldly verse, it is still more difficult to detect a failure in accent, in that finer part of what Byron calls the poetry of speech'; so delicate a difference separating what may be almost the greatest thing in poetry, a line of Dante, from something, like too much of Byron, which is commoner than the commonest prose.

Byron's theory of poetry and his practice were two very different things, both faulty, and telling against one another. His theory was that the finest English poetry is to be found in Pope: what I firmly believe in as the Christianity of English poetry, the poetry of Pope.' Admitting frankly that he had not followed so correct a master with any sort of attention, he

apologised on the ground that it is easier to perceive the wrong than to pursue the right.' But I have lived in far countries abroad,' he tells us, or in the agitating world at home, which was not favourable to study or reflection, so that almost all I have written has been mere passion-passion, it is true, of different kinds, but always passion.' And he adds: 'But then I did other things besides write.'

on

'We are all wrong, except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell,' he laments, going on his own way, all the same, for good and evil. And his own way, until he accustomed himself frankly to 'wandering with pedestrian Muses,' as he tells us in 'Don Juan,' and thus adding to the ground a splendour which he could not capture from the skies, was a very uneven way with many turnings. My qualities,' he tells us of his school days at Harrow,' were much more oratorical and martial than poetical, and Dr. Drury, my grand patron, had a great notion that I should turn out an orator, from my fluency, my turbulence, my voice, my copiousness of declamation, and my action.' The criticism justified itself; Byron's qualities in verse are indeed 'much more oratorical than poetical'; and, in all his earlier work, theory accentuated this natural tendency so fatally that we have to scrape off a great deal of false glitter if we are to find the good metal which is often enough to be found, even in the metrical romances, with their pseudo-romance, founded direct observation, their pseudo-passion, doing injustice to a really passionate nature, their impossible heroes, not without certain touches of just self-portraiture, their impossible heroines, betraying after all a certain first-hand acquaintance with the 'dreadful heart of woman.' In narrative verse Byron finally made for himself a form of his own which exactly suited him, but in lyrical verse he never learnt to do much that he could not already do in the Hours of Idleness.' His 'last lines' are firmer in measure, graver in substance, but they are written on exactly the same principle as the 'Well! thou art happy' of 1808. There is the same strained simplicity of feeling, in which a really moved directness comes through the traditional rhetoric of the form. Every stanza says something, and it says exactly what he means it to say, without any of the exquisite evasions of a more purely poetic style; without, too, any of the qualifying interruptions of a more subtle temperament. Byron's mind was without subtlety; whatever he felt he felt without reservations, or the least thinking about feeling: hence his immediate hold upon the average man or woman, who does not need to come to his verse, as the verse of most other poets must be approached, with a mind already prepared for

that communion. There is force, clearness, but no atmosphere; everything is seen detached, a little bare, very distinct, in a strong light without shadows.

In studying Byron one is always face to face with the question: Can intention, in art, ever excuse performance? Can (one is tempted to say) the sum of a number of noughts arrive at an appreciable figure? Wordsworth often wearies us by commonplace of thought and feeling, by nervelessness of rhythm, by deliberate triviality; Coleridge sometimes offers us metaphysics for poetry; Browning gives us busy thinking about life for meditation; there is not a scene in Shakespeare which is perfect as a scene of Sophocles is perfect; but with Byron the failure is not exceptional, it is constant; it is like the speech of a man whose tongue is too large for his mouth. There are indeed individual good lines in Byron, a great number of quite splendid lines, though none indeed of the very finest order of poetry; but there is not a single poem, not a single passage of the length of Kubla Khan,' perhaps not a single stanza, which can be compared as poetry with a poem or passage or stanza of Keats or Shelley, such as anyone will find by merely turning over the pages of those poets for five minutes at random. What is not there is precisely the magic which seems to make poetry its finer self, the perfume of the flower, that by which the flower is remembered, after its petals have dropped or withered. Even Browning abandons himself at times to the dream which floats, musically or in soft colour, through the senses of his mind. But Byron, when he meditates, meditates with fixed attention; if he dreams, he dreams with open eyes, to which the darkness is aglow with tumultuous action; he is at the mercy of none of those wandering sounds, delicate spirits of the air, which come entreating their liberty from the indefinite, in the releasing bondage of song. He has certain things to say, he has certain impulses to embody; he has, first, a certain type of character, then a view of the world which is more obviously the prose than the poetic view of the world, but certainly a wide view, to express; and it remains for him, in this rejection or lack of all the lesser graces, to be either Michael Angelo or Benjamin Haydon.

Or, at least, so it would seem; and yet, so it does not seem to be. Byron is not Michael Angelo, not merely because his conceptions were not as great as Michael Angelo's, but because he had not the same power of achieving his conceptions, because he had not the same technical skill. When Michael Angelo left great naked vestiges of the rock still clinging about the emerging bodies of his later sculpture, it was not because

he could not finish them with the same ivory smoothness as the 'Pietà' in St. Peter's; it was because he had found out all the art of man's visible body, and had apprehended that deeper breathing of the spirit of life, which is in the body, yet which is not the body; and was caught in the agony of the last conflict with the last mystery. To leave an appealing or terrifying or lamentable incompleteness, where before there had been the clear joy of what is finished and finite-there, precisely, was the triumph of his technique. But Byron is not Haydon, because he is not a small man struggling to be a great man, painting large merely because he cannot paint small, and creating chaos on the canvas out of ambition rather than irresistible impulse. He is fundamentally sincere, which is the root of greatness; he has a firm hold on himself and on the world; he speaks to humanity in its own voice, heightened to a pitch which carries across Europe. No poet had ever seemed to speak to men so directly, and it was through this directness of his vision of the world, and of his speech about it, that he became a poet, that he made a new thing of poetry.

Look for instance at his epithets and at his statements, and you will find, whenever he is at his best, an unparalleled justness of expression, a perfect hitting of the mark, which will sometimes seem rather the vigour of prose than the more celestial energy of poetry, but not always. When, in the 'Vision of Judgment,' George III is brought pompously to the gate of Heaven and is seen to be nothing but

'An old man

With an old soul, and both extremely blind'; when, in Childe Harold,' Napoleon is seen

when

'With a deaf heart which never seemed to be
A listener to itself';

'France got drunk with blood to vomit crime';

when Cromwell

'Hewed the throne down to a block';

when history is defined as 'the Devil's scripture,' Rome as the Niobe of nations,' ivy as the garland of eternity'; when Castlereagh's speeches are summed up:

'Nor even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze
From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil,
That turns and turns to give the world a notion
Of endless torment and perpetual motion';

there is at least, in all these vivid and unforgettable phrases, a heat of truth which has kindled speech into a really imaginative fervour. Seen in the form which perhaps more immediately impressed the world, as being liker to the world's notion of poetry

‘Admire—exult—despise-laugh-weep-for here
There is such matter for all feeling: Man!'—

it is sheer rhetoric, and, for all its measure of personal sincerity, becomes false through over-emphasis. The closer Byron's writing seems to come to prose the nearer it really comes to poetry, because it comes nearer to humanity and to the world, his subject-matter, which appears to take him for its voice, rather than to be chosen by him with any conscious selection.

Byron loved the world for its own sake, and for good and evil. His quality of humanity was genius to him, and stood to him in the place of imagination. Whatever is best in his work is full of this kind of raw or naked humanity. It is the solid part of his rhetoric, and is what holds us still in the apparently somewhat theatrical address to the Dying Gladiator and the like. Speaking straight, in Don Juan' and 'The Vision of Judgment,' it creates almost a new kind of poetry, the poetry of the world, written rebelliously, but on its own level, by a man to whom the world was the one reality. Only Byron, and not Shelley, could lead the revolt against custom and convention, against the insular spirit of England, because to Byron custom and convention and the insular spirit were so much more actual things. Rage first made him a poet : the first lines of verse he ever wrote were written at the age of nine, against an old lady whom he disliked; and when the weak and insincere sentimentalities of the Hours of Idleness' had been scourged by Brougham in the Edinburgh,' it was a most human desire for revenge which stirred him instantly into a vigorous satirist. His very idealism was a challenge and a recoil. He went about Europe like a man with a hazel wand in his hand, and wherever the forked branch dipped, living water rose to him out of the earth. Every line he wrote is a reminiscence, the reminiscence of a place or a passion. His mind was a cracked mirror, in which everything reflected itself directly, but as if scarred. His mind was never to him a kingdom, but always part of the tossing democracy of humankind. And so, having no inner peace, no interior vision, he was never for long together the master or the obedient vassal of his imagination; and he has left us tumultuous fragments, in which beauty comes and goes fitfully, under pained disguises, or like