whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of the same class are, it is supposed, sufficiently chastised. . . . At length our anger is satiated. Our victim is ruined and heart-broken. And our virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years more.

III

So it happened with Byron. But a hundred years is a long while: and I cannot agree with Mr. Coleridge, Byron's latest and best editor, when he wistfully opines that "perhaps, even yet, the time has not come for a definite and positive appreciation of his genius. The tide of feeling and opinion must ebb and flow many times before his rank and station among the poets of all time will be finally determined." Surely, in 1918, we can hold our minds aloof from the passions of 1818 (amid which the fourth and last canto of Childe Harold appeared) and judge Byron's claim dispassionately, even as we can judge the claim of Burns, another poet whose private life, if you will, came short of edifying. Is Byron's poetry great poetry? Is it genuine poetry? Does it ring true? Is it sincere? Yes, there we have― for all poetry, greater or less-the critical wordsincerity. Though poetry speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not sincerity, it is become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.

We shall apply that crucial test later. For the moment we must deal with some awkward preliminaries, since to speak bluntly-a great deal of Byron's writing before 1816 forces on us the question, Whether it be poetry at all? Well, if we would do our critical duty, and be clear about Byron, let us have it out even with that question, though it involve our making some damaging, almost desperate, admissions.

To begin with, no ear trained upon the exquisite lyric of Shelley, with its jet and fall, its modulated runs, pauses, linked lapses-all natural as movement of water is natural-can miss to detect Byron's lyrical gift as cheap, almost null. Take a chorus from Heaven and Earth and set it beside a chorus from Prometheus Unbound, and it reads like a schoolboy's exercise—

Oh son of Noah! mercy on thy kind!

What! wilt thou leave us all-all-all behind?

But let us take a lyrical stanza or two

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,-

which, with the rest of Hebrew Melodies reads to me, I confess, like turgid school-exercise work: or

Oh! what is more brave than the dark Suliote,
In his snowy camese and his shaggy capote?

To the wolf and the vulture he leaves his wild flock,
And descends to the plain like a stream from the rock,

Then the Pirates of Parga that live by the waves,
And teach the pale Franks what it is to be slaves-.

I protest that my tongue stammers against continuing. Now remember that readers of the Regency admired that by the thousand, and then set it beside these long neglected stanzas by Shelley—

Pause not! The time is past! Every voice cries, Away! Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood:

Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy

stay:

Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.

Away, away! to thy sad and silent home;

Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth;

Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,
And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth.

Thou in the grave shalt rest-yet till the phantoms flee Which that house and heath and garden made dear to thee erewhile,

Thy remembrance, and repentance, and deep musings are not free

From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile.

Surely, after that, the thumped-out rhythm of even the best lyric of Byron's is hard to pass: and we have had Tennyson, too, and Swinburne to educate us: Swinburne, for example:

And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,
Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
The Mænad and the Bassarid;

And soft as lips that laugh and hide

The laughing leaves of the trees divide,

And screen from seeing and leave in sight,
The god pursuing, the maiden hid.

I am hardy-and hardier, being one who deplores the almost complete tyranny of the lyric in these days-to claim that it has at any rate trained the Englishman's lyrical ear: and so must own that the foreigners— especially the German, who makes no account of this defect in Byron, himself lacking the instruction, even

the vocal apparatus, to detect it can bring little or nothing to help Byron against his countryman's damaging criticism.

For a second point: Byron, who wrote much in blank verse, had, to the end, small sense of it. Of the slide of casura by which Milton's organic line almost draws tears by its very perfection, he had no sense at all; as none for the handling by which Shakespeare at the last tamed it, not only to "perform at point" anything from a shearers' feast to the broken outcry of royal Lear, but set it humming to the soul in all undersounds and oversounds. By a perversity Byron chose to admire the line of Pope, which, admirable in itself, of all lines least suited our poet's genius: while his own careless fluidity precluded that neatness which the Popian line most demands. In plain words, Byron did not take enough trouble a source of failure in many walks of life. When the good Sir Walter Scott, reviewing Cain, wrote that in this "very grand and tremendous drama," Lord Byron "has certainly matched Milton on his own ground," the mountain brought forth a little mouse predestined for Matthew Arnold to play with, in Matthew Arnold's pretty feline way. But the mischief goes down beyond carelessness: the carelessness being but symptomatic. Too often Byron's blank verse has no nerve of life. There resides the malady of such lines as:

Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in
His everlasting face, and tell him that

His evil is not good

(at which Arnold scoffed) or:

Unless you keep company

With him (and you seem scarce used to such high
Society) you can't tell how he approaches.

These defects-and not a few others, from clumsiness of dramatic touch down to sheer bad grammar, vulgarly bad grammar-stare at us out of Byron's page. But poetry can have all these faults and remain poetryremain even high poetry-so it be fervent, imaginative, and (above all) sincere.

IV

What, then, of Byron's sincerity? You will know M. Scherer's dictum: "This beautiful and blighted being is at bottom a coxcomb. He posed all his life long." I shall presently try to show that four words in that judgment convert the whole to a falsehood. But again let the devil's advocate have his way for a while with Byron the man. I shall in this audience presume a knowledge at least of the main facts of his life. You know that he was well born, if it be well born to come of a line of strong men, arrogant under title of nobility, eminently unlike their poorer neighbours, and ablethough too often in sinister ways-to assert this unlikeness for superiority, warranting a claim to be a law to themselves. You know the story of the fifth-the "wicked"-Lord Byron; how he killed his kinsman and neighbour Chaworth by some sinister sword-play in a darkened room in Piccadilly, and thereafter (having escaped by verdict of his peers) lived out a mad and morose life-by report a haunted one-at Newstead, shooting at bottles for distraction, and absolutely ignoring the brat at Aberdeen who, in default of direct issue, was to succeed him.

You know that the father of this brat was Captain John Byron, a spendthrift and heartless rake; that the mother was a vulgar, doting, illiterate Scotch heiress,