as well as of violent passions, and that the needle fluctuated between
the two?

All depends upon the mood in which one approaches a character. I
confess myself that the one thing which seems to me important and
interesting is to get at the truth about a man. In the investigation of
character there is nothing to be said for being a partisan and for
indulging in special pleading, so as to minimise faults and magnify
virtues. My own belief is that Byron was an essentially worthless
character, the prey of impulse, the slave of desire, thirsting for
distinction above everything. There is nothing in his letters or in his
recorded speech that would make one think otherwise; his life was
devoted to the pursuit of pleasurable excitement, and he cared little
what price he paid for it He never seems to me to have admired
gentleness or self-restraint or modesty, or to have desired to attain
them. Indeed, I think he gives the lie to all the theories that assert
that genius and influence must be based on some essential worthiness
and greatness of soul.

XLVIII

It is often said that poets have no biographies but their own works,
but that is only a half-truth. It is to me one of the most delightful
things in the world to follow the footsteps of a poet about, in scenes
perhaps familiar to myself; to see how the simple sights of earth and
sky struck fire from his mind, to realise what he thought about under
commonplace conditions. I have often stayed, for instance, at
Tan-yr-allt in North Wales, where Shelley spent some months, and where
the strange adventure of the night-attack by the assassin occurred--a
story never satisfactorily unravelled; it was a constant pleasure there
to feel that one was looking at the fine crags which Shelley loved, so
nobly weather-stained and ivy-hung, that one was threading the same
woodland paths, and rambling on the open moorland where he so often
paced. The interest, the inspiration of the process comes from the fact
that one sees how genius transmutes the dull elements of life, those
elements which are in reach of all of us, into thoughts rich and
strange. I often think of the plum-tree in the tiny garden of Wentworth
Place, where Keats, one languid spring day, sate to hear the
nightingale sing, and scribbled the _Ode_ on loose half-sheets of
paper, careless if they were preserved or no. It makes one discern the
quality of genius to realise how there is food for it everywhere, and
how li