ed, who have no longer any need to spend money, or to write
letters, or to compose books What a melancholy situation!"[181]

He died, and has left a blemished name; with his crying faults,--his
intemperate susceptibility, his unscrupulousness in passion, his
inconceivable attacks on his enemies, his still more inconceivable
attacks on his friends, his want of generosity, his sensuality, his
incessant mocking,--how could it be otherwise? Not only was he not one
of Mr. Carlyle's "respectable" people, he was profoundly
_dis_respectable; and not even the merit of not being a Philistine can
make up for a man's being that. To his intellectual deliverance there
was an addition of something else wanting, and that something else was
something immense: the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needful moral
deliverance. Goethe says that he was deficient in _love_; to me his
weakness seems to be not so much a deficiency in love as a deficiency in
self-respect, in true dignity of character. But on this negative side of
one's criticism of a man of great genius, I for my part, when I have
once clearly marked that this negative side is and must be there, have
no pleasure in dwelling. I prefer to say of Heine something positive. He
is not an adequate interpreter of the modern world. He is only a
brilliant soldier in the Liberation War of humanity. But, such as he is,
he is (and posterity too, I am quite sure, will say this), in the
European poetry of that quarter of a century which follows the death of
Goethe, incomparably the most important figure.

What a spendthrift, one is tempted to cry, is Nature! With what
prodigality, in the march of generations, she employs human power,
content to gather almost always little result from it, sometimes none!
Look at Byron, that Byron whom the present generation of Englishmen are
forgetting; Byron, the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary
power, I cannot but think, which has appeared in our literature since
Shakespeare. And what became of this wonderful production of nature? He
shattered himself, he inevitably shattered himself to pieces against the
huge, black, cloud-topped, interminable precipice of British
Philistinism. But Byron, it may be said, was eminent only by his genius,
only by his inborn force and fire; he had not the intellectual equipment
of a supreme modern poet; except for his genius he was an ordinary
nineteenth-century English gentleman, with little culture and with no