gical and
marvellous beauty. But Shelley dwelt in an ethereal region, where
ordinary beings found breathing difficult. There facts seemed to
dissolve into thin air instead of supplying a solid and substantial
base. His idealism meant unreality. His 'trumpet' did not in fact
stimulate the mass of mankind, and his fame at this period was
confined to a few young gentlemen of literary refinement. The man who
had really stirred the world was Byron; and if the decline of Byron's
fame has resulted partly from real defects, it is partly due also to
the fact that his poetry was so admirably adapted to his
contemporaries. Byron at least could see facts as clearly as any
Utilitarian, though fact coloured by intense passion. He, like the
Utilitarians, hated solemn platitudes and hypocritical conventions. I
have noticed the point at which he came into contact with Bentham's
disciples. His pathetic death shortly afterwards excited a singularly
strong movement of sympathy. 'The news of his death,' said Carlyle at
the time, 'came upon my heart like a mass of lead; and yet the thought
of it sends a painful twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a
brother.' At a later time he defines Byron as 'a dandy of sorrows and
acquainted with grief.'[630] That hits off one aspect of Byronism.
Byron was the Mirabeau of English literature, in so far as he was at
once a thorough aristocrat and a strong revolutionist. He had the
qualification of a true satirist. His fate was at discord with his
character. He was proud of his order, and yet despised its actual
leaders. He was ready alternately to boast of his vices and to be
conscious that they were degrading. He shocked the respectable world
by mocking 'Satanically,' as they held, at moral conventions, and yet
rather denounced the hypocrisy and the heartlessness of precisians
than insulted the real affections. He covered sympathy with human
suffering under a mask of misanthropy, and attacked war and oppression
in the character of a reckless outlaw. Full of the affectation of a
'dandy,' he was yet rousing all Europe by a cry of pure
sentimentalism. It would be absurd to attribute any definite doctrine
to Byron. His scepticism in religious matters was merely part of a
general revolt against respectability. What he illustrates is the
vague but profound revolutionary sentiment which indicated a belief
that the world seemed to be out of joint, and a vehement protest
against the selfish and stolid con