ts of any purely aesthetic or intellectual type. They prefer poets
who are also men of action and men of the world. They prefer poets
who "when they think are children." It is not hardness or selfishness
or brutality which really alarms them. It is intellect, it is subtlety, it
is, above all, _irony._ Byron's unique achievement as a poet is to
have flung into poetry the essential brutality and the essential
sentiment of the typical male animal, and, in so far as he has done
this, all his large carelessness, all his cheap and superficial rhetoric,
all his scornful cynicism, cannot hide from us something primitive
and appealing about him which harmonises well enough with his
beautiful face and his dramatic career.

Perhaps, as a matter of fact, our literary point of view in these later
days has been at once over-subtilized and underfed. Perhaps we
have grown morbidly fastidious in the matter of delicacies of style,
and shrinkingly averse to the slashing energy of hard-hitting,
action-loving, self-assertive worldliness.

It may be so; and yet, I am not sure. I can find it in me to dally with
the morbid and very modern fancy that, after all, Byron has been a
good deal overrated; that, after all, when we forget his personality
and think only of his actual work, he cannot be compared for a
moment, as an original genius, with such persons--so much less
appealing to the world-obsessed feminine mind--as William Blake
or Paul Verlaine!

Yes; let the truth be blurted out--even though it be a confession
causing suffering to one's pride--and the truth is that I, for one,
though I can sit down and read Matthew Arnold and Remy de
Gourmont and Paul Verlaine, for hours and hours, and though it is
only because I have them all so thoroughly by heart that I don't read
the great Odes of Keats any more, shall _never again,_ not even for
the space of a quarter of an hour, not even as a psychological
experiment, turn over the pages of a volume of Byron's Poetical
Works!

I think I discern what this reluctance means. It means that primarily
and intrinsically what Byron did for the world was to bring into
prominence and render beautiful and appealing a certain fierce
rebellion against unctuous domesticity and solemn puritanism. His
political propagandism of Liberty amounts to nothing now. What
amounts to a great deal is that he magnificently and in an engaging,
though somewhat brutal manner, broke the rules of a bourgeois
social code.

A