a forerunner of the self-reflecting analytical
style that is common in our own day; for there is a Byronic echo in
the 'divine despair' of Tennyson. The melancholy brooding spirit,
dissatisfied with society and detesting complacency, had for some time
been in the air; it had affected the literature of France and Germany;
Werther, Obermann, and Rene are all moulded on the same type with
Childe Harold; yet Sainte-Beuve rightly says that this identity of
type does not mean imitation--it means that the writers were all in
the same atmosphere. There is everywhere the same reaction against
philosophic optimism and the same antipathy to the ways of mankind 'so
vain and melancholy,' They sought refuge from inborn ennui or
irritability among the mountains, on the sea, or in distant voyages,
and they instinctively embodied these moods and feelings in various
personages of fiction, in the solitary wanderer, in the fierce outlaw,
in the man 'with chilling mystery of mien,' who rails against heaven
and humanity. Their literature, in short, however overcoloured it may
have been, did represent a generally prevailing characteristic among
men of excessive sensibility at a time of stir and tumult in the world
around them; it was not a mere unnatural invention, though we must
leave to the psychologist the task of tracing a connection between
this mental attitude and the circumstances that generated it. But the
self-occupied mind has no dramatic power, and so their repertory
contained one single character, a reproduction of their own in
different attitudes and situations. Chateaubriand may be said never to
have dropped his mask; whereas Byron, whose English sense of humour
must have fought against taking himself so very seriously, relieved
his conscience by lapses into epigram, irony, and persiflage. Thus in
the same year (1818), and from the same place (Venice), he produced
the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, full of deep longing for unbroken
solitude:

'There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and Music in its roar;'

and also _Beppo_, a satirical sketch of the loose and easy Venetian
society in which he was actually living. Here, again, his somewhat
ribald letters from Venice do his romantic poetry some wrong; but in
fact he had a diabolic pleasure in betraying himself, and his
_Memoires d'Outre Tombe_, if they had