was so, indeed, with Byron himself; his really bitter moments were
his frivolous moments. He went on year after year calling down fire
upon mankind, summoning the deluge and the destructive sea and all the
ultimate energies of nature to sweep away the cities of the spawn of
man. But through all this his subconscious mind was not that of a
despairer; on the contrary, there is something of a kind of lawless
faith in thus parleying with such immense and immemorial brutalities. It
was not until the time in which he wrote "Don Juan" that he really lost
this inward warmth and geniality, and a sudden shout of hilarious
laughter announced to the world that Lord Byron had really become a
pessimist.

One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his
metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a
hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of
horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding _pas de quatre_. He may
arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the
most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk
in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood
alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:

"Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull decay;
'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast,
But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past."

That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron.

The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the
unconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the most
uncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their
nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the
whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident,
and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotional
artifices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard,
political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the
time that he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of
that buried and subconscious happiness which is in all of us, and which
may emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spears
of the enemy.

POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE

The general critical theory common in this and the