thing
by translation is a compliment to the man, a disparagement to tho artist.
Very few pages of his verse even aspire to perfection; hardly a stanza
will bear the minute word-by-word dissection which only brings into
clearer view the delicate touches of Keats or Tennyson; his pictures with
a big brush were never meant for the microscope. Here the contrast between
his theoretic worship of his idol and his own practice reaches a climax.
If, as he professed to believe, "the best poet is he who best executes his
work," then he is hardly a poet at all. He is habitually rapid and
slovenly; an improvisatore on the spot whore his fancy is kindled, writing
_currente calamo_, and disdaining the "art to blot." "I can never recast
anything. I am like the tiger; if I miss the first spring, I go grumbling
back to my jungle." He said to Medwin, "Blank verse is the most difficult,
because every line must be good." Consequently, his own blank verse is
always defective--sometimes execrable. No one else--except, perhaps,
Wordsworth--who could write so well, could also write so ill. This fact in
Byron's case seems due not to mere carelessness, but to incapacity.
Something seems to stand behind him, like the slave in the chariot, to
check the current of his highest thought. The glow of his fancy fades with
the suddenness of a southern sunset. His best inspirations are spoilt by
the interruption of incongruous commonplace. He had none of the guardian
delicacy of taste, or the thirst after completeness, which mark the
consummate artist. He is more nearly a dwarf Shakespeare than a giant
Popo. This defect was most mischievous where he was weakest, in his dramas
and his lyrics, least so where he was strongest, in his mature satires. It
is almost transmuted into an excellence in the greatest of these, which
is by design and in detail a temple of incongruity.

If we turn from his manner to his matter, we cannot claim for Byron any
absolute originality. His sources have been found in Rousseau, Voltaire,
Chateaubriand, Beaumarchais, Lauzun, Gibbon, Bayle, St. Pierre, Alfieri,
Casti, Cuvier, La Bruyore, Wieland, Swift, Sterne, Le Sage, Goethe, scraps
of the classics, and the Book of Job. Absolute originality in a late age
is only possible to the hermit, the lunatic, or the sensation novelist.
Byron, like the rovers before Minos, was not ashamed of his piracy. He
transferred the random prose of his own letters and journals to his
dramas, and with th