r
camp-followers of the Moral Ideal have been driven to follow; the way,
namely, of making him out to be a great leader in the war of the
liberation of humanity, and a great interpreter of the wild magic of
nature.

I must confess I cannot see Byron in either of these lights. He scoffs
at kings and priests, certainly; he scoffs at Napoleon; he scoffs at the
pompous self-righteousness of his own race; he scoffs at religion
and sex and morality in that humorous, careless, indifferent
"public-school" way which is so salutary and refreshing; but when you ask
for any serious devotion to the cause of Liberty, for any definite
Utopian outlines of what is to be built up in the world's future, you
get little or nothing, except resounding generalities and conventional
rhetoric.

Nor are those critics very wise who insist on laying stress upon
Byron's contributions to the interpretation of Nature.

He could write "How the big rain comes dancing to the earth!" and
his flashing, fitful, sun-smouldering pictures of European rivers and
plains and hills and historic cities have their large and generous
charm.

But beyond this essentially human and romantic, attitude to Nature
there is just nothing at all.

"Roll on, thou deep and dark-blue Ocean, roll!"

I confess I caught a keener thrill of pleasure from that all-too-famous
line when I suddenly heard it uttered by one of those garrulous
ghosts in Mr. Masters's Spoon River cemetery, than I ever
did when in childhood they made me learn it.

But, for all that, though it is not an easy thing to put into words,
there is a certain grandiose and sonorous beauty, fresh and free and
utterly unaffected, about these verses, and many others in "Childe
Harold."

As for those long plays of Byron's, and those still longer narrative
poems, nothing will induce me to read a line of them again. They
have a singularly dusty smell to me; and when I think of them even,
I suffer just such a withering sensation of ineffable boredom as I
used to experience waiting in a certain ante-room in Tunbridge
Wells where lived an aged retired general. I associate them with
illustrated travels in Palestine.

How Goethe could read "Manfred" with any pleasure passes my
comprehension. "Cain" has a certain charm, I admit; but of all forms
of all literature the thing which is called Poetic Drama seems to me
the most dreary. If poets cannot write for the stage they had better
confine themselves to honest st