evolution, and took form in every
possible kind of protest, from a dishevelled neckcloth up to a
profession of atheism. Byron elaborated the common emotion, as the
earliest modern poets elaborated the common speech. He gave it
inflections, and distinguished its moods, and threw over it an air of
system and coherency, and a certain goodly and far-reaching
sonorousness. This is the usual function of the spiritual leader, who
leaves in bulk no more in the minds of those whom he attracts than he
found, but he leaves it articulate with many sounds, and vivid with the
consciousness of a multitude of defined impressions.

That the whole movement, in spite of its energy, was crude,
unscientific, virtually abortive, is most true. That it was presided
over by a false conception of nature as a benign and purifying power,
while she is in truth a stern force to be tamed and mastered, if society
is to hold together, cannot be denied of the revolutionary movement
then, any more than it can be denied of its sequels now. Nor need we
overlook its fundamental error of tracing half the misfortunes and woes
of the race to that social union, to which we are really indebted for
all the happiness we know, including even this dignifying sensibility of
the woes of the race; and the other half to a fictitious entity styled
destiny, placed among the nethermost gods, which would be more rightly
regarded as the infinitely modifiable influence exercised by one
generation of ourselves upon those that follow.

Every one of these faults of thought is justly chargeable to Byron. They
were deeply inherent in the Revolution. They coloured thoughts about
government, about laws, about morals. They effected a transformation of
religion, but, resting on no basis of philosophical acceptance of
history, the transformation was only temporary. They spread a fantastic
passion of which Byron was himself an example and a victim, for
extraordinary outbreaks of a peculiar kind of material activity, that
met the exigences of an imperious will, while it had not the irksomeness
of the self-control which would have exercised the will to more
permanent profit. They destroyed faith in order, natural or social,
actual or potential, and substituted for it an enthusiastic assertion of
the claims of the individual to make his passions, aspirations, and
convictions, a final and decisive law.

Such was the moral state which Byron had to render and interpret. His
relation to it