souls of men living in "a society that the inward faith had abandoned, but which clung to every outward ordinance, which only remembered that man had property, and forgot that he had a spirit," should be stirred in some such way as this. That it was thus stirred is one of the capital facts of the moral history of this age, a fact evidenced alike by the bitterness of the denunciation with which the "satanic" influence of the poet was assailed, and by the new impulse which he gave to the forces of revolt and emotional discontent with existing conditions.

This influence was European in its extent. To us, Byron is only one of the half dozen great English poets of his time, and from a strictly literary point of view not the most important. But to Europe at large he was, and has remained, the single commanding figure in the English literature of the period. From the standpoint of Continental appreciation, Byron was the only English poet who counted; he stood first, and the rest were nowhere. Even in our own time, this exaggeration of his importance prevails in the general European criticism of English poetry. It is only within the last few years that French criticism, for example, has discovered Burns, and Shelley, and Wordsworth, while German criticism, with all its receptiveness for the literature of other nations, has not yet done anything like relative justice to the claims of Byron's great contemporaries. The explanation of this critical aberration is not difficult. Mr. Swinburne

has explained it in part, although with his customary vehemence of exaggeration, by saying that Byron's poetical form is so bad that it becomes improved by translation. He writes:

"On taking up a fairly good version of 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' in French or Italian prose, a reader whose eyes and ears are not hopelessly sealed against all distinction of good from bad in rhythm or in style will infallibly be struck by the vast improvement which the text has undergone in the course of translation. The blundering, floundering, lumbering, and stumbling stanzas, transmuted into prose and transfigured into grammar, reveal the real and latent force of rhetorical energy that is in them: the gasping, ranting, wheezing, brokenwinded verse has been transformed into really effective and fluent oratory. . . . It is impossible to express how much 'Childe Harold' gains by being done out of wretchedly bad metre into decently good prose: the New Testament did not gain more by being translated out of canine Greek into divine, English."

But this is not the whole of the explanation. The laudation of Byron on the part of Continental critics results chiefly from the fact that he gave voice to ideals and aspirations that were the common property of the enlightened part of European opinion, and that were less distinctively English than they were French or German, Italian or Spanish, Russian, Polish, or Scandinavian. The effectiveness of Byron's appeal is properly to be judged only when we take into account its influence upon such different types of men as Goethe, Taine, Mazzini, Castelar, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Paludan-Müller. These men, each in his own way, besides many others less

prominent, have given eloquent testimony to the elemental energy with which the poetry of Byron stirred the waters of European thought. We find his influence everywhere in the European literature of the century. We find it in the greater literatures of the Continent, and we find it also in the lesser literatures of Greece, and Portugal, and the Balkan States. We find it in Hugo, Lamartine, Delavigne, Musset, and Flaubert. We find it in Wilhelm Müller, Chamisso, Platen, Immermann, Börne, and Heine. We find it, in short, wherever literature has sought to renew its life, to escape from the bondage of tradition, and to reassert the claims of the individual spirit. This influence has been so great partly because Byron dealt with large and simple ideas, and partly because his work reflected so many of the external happenings of his time and so many of the feelings and impulses which those happenings were arousing in the souls of the generation that had outlived the early reaction against the revolutionary movement, and were again pressing forward toward the realisation of its fundamental aims. When Byron "was struck hard by events," says Professor Dowden, "there came a resonant response; his strangely discordant powers were for the moment fused, and he uttered his feelings with incomparable energy and directness. Pride and passion, love and hatred, grief and joy, flowed together and flowed forth in one strong, abounding stream."

The quality which we call Byronism may be illus

trated by countless passages from the poet's writings. Probably the most typical passages are to be found in "Childe Harold," which Byron himself called "a fine indistinct piece of poetical desolation." We find it, for example, in this stanza:

"He, who grown aged in this world of woe,

In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life,
So that no wonder waits him; nor below
Can love, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife,
Cut to his heart again with the keen knife
Of silent, sharp endurance; he can tell

Why thought seeks refuge in lone caves yet rife
With airy images, and shapes which dwell

Still unimpair'd, though old, in the soul's haunted cell."

Again we find it in this:

"Existence may be borne, and the deep root
Of life and sufferance makes its firm abode
In bare and desolated bosoms; mute
The camel labours with the heaviest load,
And the wolf dies in silence,-not bestow'd
In vain should such example be; if they,
Things of ignoble or of savage mood,

Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay
May temper it to bear,-it is but for a day."

And still again we find it in these:

"And if my voice break forth, 'tis not that now
I shrink from what is suffer'd: let him speak
Who hath beheld decline upon my brow,
Or seen my mind's convulsion leave it weak;
But in this page a record will I seek.
Not in the air shall these my words disperse,
Though I be ashes; a far hour shall wreak
The deep prophetic fulness of this verse,

And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse!

"That curse shall be Forgiveness.—Have I not—
Hear me, my mother Earth! behold it, Heaven!—
Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?

Have I not suffer'd things to be forgiven?
Have I not had my brain sear'd, my heart riven,
Hopes sapp'd, name blighted, Life's life lied away?
And only not to desperation driven,

Because not altogether of such clay

As rots into the souls of those whom I survey."

It is easy to say that there is something morbid in these self-revelations. What the robust judgment of Carlyle thought about them is well known, and in our modern reaction against Byronism we have probably been too apt to join with Carlyle in his scorn of all such caterwaulings. We are inclined to ask with Arnold

"What helps it now, that Byron bore,

With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart,
Through Europe to the Ætolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?"

But we must remember that Arnold himself was one of the stoutest defenders of Byron's poetical fame, and it may also be profitable to recall the fact that Mazzini, who stood for something very different from Byronism, who supplemented the revolutionary demand for the rights of man with an insistent appeal for the equal recognition of the duties of man, could write of Byron in such terms as these:

"Never did the eternal spirit of the chainless mind' make a brighter apparition amongst us. He seems at times a transformation of that immortal Prometheus, of whom he has written so nobly; whose cry of agony, yet of futurity, sounded