ical passions
to their inmost core. The Byronic hero went to clasp repose in a frenzy.
All crimson and aflame with passion, he groaned for evening stillness.
He insisted on being free, in the corroding fetters of resentment and
scorn for men. Conrad sought balm for disappointment of spirit in
vehement activity of body. Manfred represents the confusion common to
the type, between thirst for the highest knowledge and proud violence of
unbridled will. Harold is held in a middle way of poetic melancholy,
equally far from a speechless despair and from gay and reckless licence,
by contemplation of the loveliness of external nature, and the great
exploits and perishing monuments of man in the past; but he, equally
with the others, embodies the paradoxical hope that angry isolation and
fretful estrangement from mankind are equivalent to emancipation from
their pettiness, instead of being its very climax and demonstration. As
if freedom of soul could exist without orderly relations of intelligence
and partial acceptance between a man and the sum of surrounding
circumstances. That universal protest which rings through Byron's work
with a plangent resonance, very different from the whimperings of punier
men, is a proof that so far from being free, one's whole being is
invaded and laid waste. It is no ignoble mood, and it was a most
inevitable product of the mental and social conditions of Western Europe
at the close of the eighteenth century. Everlasting protest, impetuous
energy of will, melancholy and despondent reaction;--this is the
revolutionary course. Cain and Conrad; then Manfred and Lara and Harold.

* * * * *

In studying that portion of the European movement which burst forth into
flame in France between the fall of the Bastille and those fatal days of
Vendemiaire, Fructidor, Floreal, Brumaire, in which the explosion came
convulsively to its end, we seem to see a microcosm of the Byronic
epos. The succession of moods is identical. Overthrow, rage, intense
material energy, crime, profound melancholy, half-cynical dejection. The
Revolution was the battle of Will against the social forces of a dozen
centuries. Men thought that they had only to will the freedom and
happiness of a world, and all nature and society would be plastic before
their daring, as clay in the hands of the potter. They could only
conceive of failure as another expression for inadequate will. Is not
this one of the notes