s made possible the Ode that is the
high-tide mark of modern English inspiration, but it was parodied in page
on page of maundering rusticity. Byron saw the danger, but was borne
headlong by the rapids. Hence the anomalous contrast between his theories
and his performance. Both Wordsworth and Byron were bitten by Rousseau;
but the former is, at furthest, a Girondin. The latter, acting like Danton
on the motto "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace," sighs after _Henri
Quatre et Gabrielle_. There is more of the spirit of the French Revolution
in _Don Juan_ than in all the works of the author's contemporaries; but
his criticism is that of Boileau, and when deliberate is generally absurd.
He never recognized the meaning of the artistic movement of his age, and
overvalued those of his works which the Unities helped to destroy. He
hailed Gifford as his Magnus Apollo, and put Rogers next to Scott in his
comical pyramid. "Chaucer," he writes, "I think obscene and contemptible."
He could see no merit in Spenser, preferred Tasso to Milton, and called
the old English dramatists "mad and turbid mountebanks." In the same
spirit he writes: "In the time of Pope it was all Horace, now it is all
Claudian." He saw--what fanatics had begun to deny--that Pope was a great
writer, and the "angel of reasonableness," the strong common sense of both
was a link between them; but the expressions he uses during his
controversy with Bowles look like jests, till we are convinced of his
earnestness by his anger. "Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age
can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great moral poet of all
times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence....
Your whole generation are not worth a canto of the _Dunciad_, or anything
that is his." All the while he was himself writing prose and verse, in
grasp if not in vigour as far beyond the stretch of Pope, as Pope is in
"worth and wit and sense" removed above his mimics. The point of the
paradox is not merely that he deserted, but that he sometimes imitated his
model, and when he did so, failed. Macaulay's judgment, that "personal
taste led him to the eighteenth century, thirst for praise to the
nineteenth," is quite at fault. There can be no doubt that Byron loved
praise as much as he affected to despise it. His note, on reading the
_Quarterly_ on his dramas, "I am the most unpopular man in England," is
like the cry of a child under chastisement; but he