more sincerity, and the
lambs of our democratic age would all show something of that
leonine splendour.

There is nothing in Byron so far above the commonplace that he is
out of the reach of average humanity. He is made of the same clay as
we all are made of. His vanity is our vanity, his pride our pride, his
vices our vices.

We are on the common earth with him; on the natural ground of our
normal human infirmities; and if he puts us to shame it is only
because he has the physical force and the moral courage to be
himself more audaciously and frankly than we dare to be.

His genius is no rare hot-house flower. It is no wild and delicate
plant growing in a remote and inhuman soil. It is simply the
intensification, to a point of fine poetic fury, of emotions and
attitudes and gestures which we all share under the pressure of the
spirit of youth.

It is for this reason--for the reason that he expressed so completely
in his wayward and imperious manner the natural feelings of normal
youthfulness--that he became in his own day so legendary and
symbolic a personage, and that he has become in ours a sort of
flaming myth. He would never have become all this; he would never
have stirred the fancy of the masses of people as he has; if there
were not in his temperament something essentially simple, human,
and within the comprehension of quite ordinary minds.

It might indeed be maintained that what Oscar Wilde is to the rarer
and more perverse minority, Byron is to the solid majority of
downright simple philistines.

The average British or American "plain blunt man" regards, and
always will regard, such writers as Shelley and Poe and Verlaine
and Wilde with a certain uneasy suspicion. These great poets must
always seem to him a little weird and morbid and apart from
common flesh and blood. He will be tempted to the end to use in
reference to them the ambiguous word "degenerate." They strike
him as alien and remote. They seem to have no part or lot in the
world in which he lives. He suspects them of being ingrained
immoralists and free-lovers. Their names convey to his mind
something very sinister, something dangerous to the foundations of
society.

But the idea of Byron brings with it quite different associations. The
sins of Byron seem only a splendid and poetic apotheosis of
such aperson's own sins. The rebelliousness of Byron seems a
rebelliousness not so much deliberate and intellectual as instinctive
and impulsi