years before, had arrived in London with the manuscript of Childe Harold' in his trunk. He was at war with himself. Unable to share Shelley's easy self-confidence in his own right-doing, he was tortured by a sense of sin. He could not thrust it away. His cry of remorse in Manfred' is genuine, and the gloom of his tragic view of life is blackened by the stern religious creed in which he believed, as Lady Byron said of him, only 'too much,' and which taught him that he must endure a pre-ordained retribution for offences which he was predestined to commit. But he bitterly resented what he believed to be the methods of his condemnation and what he knew to be the characters of his self-appointed judges. His hopes were 'sapped,' his name blighted'; but it was the 'unjust wound' that rankled, and 'Life's life lied away' by petty perfidies and the 'subtle venom' of malicious whispers. Free of the corporation' he had been one of the society which now made him an outcast. He knew from the inside its social insincerities, its moral hypocrisies-condemning in public the vices which it practised in private, the tyranny of its narrow conventions of custom, law, and religion, its political corruption, its patronage and fear of the wealth of the middle class, its contempt for their habits and ideas by which it profited, its iron hand which held down the people, in want and ignorance, by ferocious legislation. And it was to a different Europe that he carried the bitterness of his brooding thoughts. The hopes of twenty years had been crushed, and their miseries seemed to have been endured in vain. It was a disillusioned, discouraged world. The old order was restored, its lesson unlearnt. Rulers who gambled with human life as a pawn in their dynastic or diplomatic game were again installed in absolute power. The Gospel of the Holy Alliance was acclaimed. A heavy atmosphere of repression settled down on the world, stifling peoples who were struggling towards freedom and awakening to individual liberty. Thus, between Byron's personal feelings and those of revolutionary Europe there was a close parallel. Aristocrat though he was, the cause of democracy was his own. Such were the conditions, within and without, in which Byron entered on the work of his maturity. Practically the whole of the

poetry on which his poetic reputation rests was written on foreign soil.

During the first five years of his exile the duality of his character and of his pursuits is strongly contrasted. The public knows, and from himself, the depths of degradation to which he sank; it is apt to forget the heights of poetry to which he rose, and the enormous industry with which he prepared himself for his amazing literary output. With one side of his nature, he sought a refuge from his misery in soul-numbing dissipation; with the other, he made a manly effort to force a way of escape by intense intellectual labour. To this period belong, besides many other poems and plays, the last two Cantos of 'Childe Harold,' 'The Prisoner of Chillon,' 'Manfred,' 'Mazeppa,' 'Beppo,' 'Cain,' 'Sardanapalus,' 'The Vision of Judgment,' and the first five Cantos of 'Don Juan,' to say nothing of the fine but rugged 'Prophecy of Dante,' or such shorter pieces as Darkness,' 'Prometheus,' and 'The Dream.' Byron's versatility is strikingly displayed; the range of subject is as wide as the treatment is varied. Nor was it the work of a man who was superficial in preparation or inaccurate in statement. Byron was insensible to the craving of the literary artist for perfection of finish. On the other hand, his standard of truth both to Nature and to history was fastidious, and even, for his times, exacting. He not only observed carefully the scenes that he described; he was also a diligent student of authorities for the historical facts and details which formed the background of poems or of plays.

On the literary value of this mass of poetry critics differ widely. There is, however, at least one point on which there can be no dispute. Drawing his materials mainly from Switzerland and Southern Europe, Byron did more than any other poet or writer of the age to break down our insularity, on one side by familiarising his countrymen with the scenery, art, and literature of the Continent, and, on the other, by making known to foreigners the existence of English poetry. From him successive generations have learnt, and probably will continue to learn, much that it is an enrichment of their lives to know and, still more, to feel. With his lines ringing in their ears, and quickening their pulses,

hundreds of thousands of travellers have traversed the field of Waterloo, stood on the Bridge of Sighs at Venice, or visited Rome and the moon-lit Coliseum. To persons of mature age and education many of the allusions now sound commonplace; if so, it is partly because, very largely through Byron's poetry, they have become common knowledge. Other persons, old as well as young, are still not only interested, but stirred, by his power of bringing out the associations and suggestions that should be evoked by famous spots or works of art. It may not be the highest gift. Byron supplies few profound thoughts. He rather gives poetic utterance to the inarticulate impressions of ordinary minds. feels, and makes them feel, the definite emotions by which they ought to be moved. But it is no mean glory that, for a century, he has been a guide and teacher to generations of travellers, and has retained the power to enhance their pleasures, widen their interests, and touch their hearts.

He

The most devastating charge that has been made against Byron's romantic poetry, both of his youth and of his maturity, is that of affectation. Carelessness of form might be atoned by energy and strength; but insincerity is unpardonable, especially in work which is largely self-expressive. It is impossible to combat impressions with arguments. Yet the suspicion of genuineness has in many minds originated in inevitable reaction, in altered conditions of life, or in external characteristics of the man. Byron's contemporaries felt the potent magic of the living poet in his expressions of individual feelings, and his personifications of his individual character. The longer the interval after his death, the weaker grew the personal spell. A generation arose, material, restrained, comfortable, to whom the disturbing note of passion seemed forced and unnatural. Men doubted the sincerity of an emotion which they did not feel themselves. They knew Byron's vanity of birth, his vulgarity of taste, his love of tawdry finery, his want of dignity and reticence. They saw him riding, by the side of Lady Blessington, on his heavily gilded saddle, in his blue gold-banded cap, and his ridiculous little green tartan jacket. They read his own story of degraded amours with women of the lowest class. They

asked, not altogether unreasonably, whether such a man could have sincerely felt the great and elevating emotions which are expressed in his poetry. Some even found in his expedition to Greece a mere straining to produce a theatrical effect.

Yet the man is not so easily read. Judgments founded on such external evidence fail to account for the energy, industry, concentration, and effort that are involved in the production of a vast and varied mass of poetry, none perhaps without flaw, but none, as his bitterest critic added, without value. So strongly is the difficulty felt that, in order to find affectation somewhere, it has been suggested that his account of his dissipations is itself a pose. It is on such points as these that the omission of his intellectual occupations from his full and intimate correspondence becomes intensely significant. As has been said, one side, and that the most important side, of his existence finds no place in his letters. No one knows what proportion of his passion is devoted, for instance, to Marianna Segati and what to Childe Harold'; what were the dominant currents of his thoughts during the twenty-four hours of the day; which were the superficialities and which the realities of his life; which was the essential man-the dandy and the libertine or the poet.

In dealing with Byron's youthful and ephemeral verse, it was suggested that the charge of affectation might not be well-founded, because the feelings which he expressed in semi-dramatic form were not only personal to himself but representative of the times in which he lived. His 'Harrys and Larrys, Pilgrims and Pirates,' embodied the weariness of the age, the suppressed energy that sought an outlet in a thousand directions, the craving for a larger liberty which consumed his own world as well as himself. Still more strikingly is this blend of feeling characteristic of his later poetry. In the first shock of exile he had spoken in his own person and for himself alone. The appeal may repel; but it was prompted by a very human craving for sympathy. By the time that he regained his selfcontrol, he had realised the full extent of his ruin. At odds with rulers, at war with the governing classes of his own country, in revolt against their conventions in

conduct, morals, and religion, he was disillusioned, an outcast and an exile. Between his individual mood and that of the oppressed peoples of a disappointed Europe there was a real unity. Whether by poetic instinct, or with conscious aim, he expressed their feelings in expressing his own. His poetry was, in a deeper and fuller sense than before, not only personal but representative. His insurgent notes of question and denial, of defiance and revolt, burn with a personal passion which is at white heat from the furnace of his own brooding embittered thoughts. Thus regarded, his self-expression assumes a new depth and range. It is true that, as Arnold says, he displayed to the world the pageant of a bleeding heart. But it was a pageant, and not the peep-show which reveals the querulousness of a disappointed egoist. The heart is that of Europe as well as his own, and, if he wept, it was not tears but blood.

A similar train of thought suggests that in other forms of Byron's romantic poetry the intensity of feeling is genuine. He threw his personal passion into revolutionary creeds. He threw it also into history. The arrogance of genius is capable of flights which, however daring, may be emotionally sincere. When in Childe Harold' he chants his Vanitas Vanitatum,' it is not merely the fall of Empires of which he is thinking. The theme is an expression of his own fallen fortunes, and, again, it is this personal ring which gives a melancholy sincerity to the sonorous declamation. He identifies Venice and Rome with himself. The faded splendours of their ruin and decay are not more in his mind than all that he himself had lost. In Tasso, pining in his cell, at once the glory and the shame' of Ferrara, in Dante, dying in exile far from ungrateful Florence,' in Bonivard, imprisoned in his dungeon below Lake Leman, a martyr to the cause of liberty, he found, as it were, personifications of his own fate. Or, to come to his own times, when he writes of Napoleon, dethroned, fallen and a prisoner, he is thinking of the triumphs and glories of the kingdoms of the world which he had himself tasted and forfeited. It is, therefore, not only possible, but probable, that, with an elemental force of personal passion behind his words, Byron's romantic poetry is