exquisite pastoral of the loves of Juan and Haidee. Where are we to look for anything more delicately perfect than the stanzas descriptive of the island maid and her sublime unconscious innocence of entranced affection? Set here in the midst of this fierce, sardonic composition, it is like a smiling islet in an angry sea. The bitterness and scorn, the invective and ridicule roll back from it as the waves recoil from the white sands of the beach that seem to offer them no resistance, and its beauty shines the brighter from its surroundings. Or take the fine heroic episode of the death of the Pacha and his five sons in the eighth canto, and it will be difficult to deny the presence in Don Juan, as clearly as in any contemporary composition, of the chivalric temper. It is, as Goethe said, "a work full of soul," whatever its misanthropy and cynicism. In Don Juan, as one might expect, Byron often recurs to the sentiments he made familiar in Childe Harold-ambition, fame, the glory of the world, what are they but a fitful fury, a little whirling of the dust before it settles?

'I've stood upon Achilles' tomb

And heard Troy doubted; time will doubt of Rome."
"I pass each day where Dante's bones are laid:
A little cupola, more neat than solemn,
Protects his dust, but reverence here is paid

To the bard's tomb, and not the warrior's column:
The time must come when both alike decayed,
The chieftain's trophy, and the poet's volume,
Will sink where lie the songs and wars of earth,
Before Pelides' death and Homer's birth."

"What is the end of Fame? 'tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper:

Some liken it to climbing up a hill,

Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour;

For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,

And bards burn what they call their 'midnight taper;'

To have when the original is dust

A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust."

No poet perhaps, no English poet certainly, has found more eloquent speech for this philosophy to which men return when the things they have been taught or have believed fail them, but Byron's creed

66 The dreary Fuimus of all things human,"

is relieved in Don Juan by the divine quality of action. He kept his word, as he claimed

"You have now

Had sketches of love, tempest, travel, war,

All very accurate, you must allow,

And epic, if plain truth should prove no bar."

To the episodes of "love, tempest, travel, war," to the solid core of invigorating, health-giving circumstances, absent from Childe Harold, Don Juan owes its easy superiority, its spring and buoyancy, its air of largeness. We are out of doors, under the bright sunlight or the stars, afloat on the current of life. Here too, for the first time, as Swinburne said, his style "is beyond all praise or blame, a style at once swift and supple, light and strong, various and radiant." One rises from it with some understanding of his European fame.

Byron's star has been for a generation or more if not in eclipse, certainly overcast. He has been in the descendent rather than the ascendant during the latter half of the nineteenth century. While Tennyson filled the horizon of readers and while Wordsworth was slowly climbing to his station among the greater luminaries, Byron receded from his former pride of place. But in England only; on the continent of Europe his star has never paled its fire. “He led the genius of Britain,” said Mazzini, “ on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe." After Shakespeare he seems to all countries not English the greatest poet of his race. It is and will remain impossible for us to accept this verdict, and difficult for the foreigner to understand our rejection of it. He will ascribe our judgment to our insular morality, to our Puritanism. He perceives Byron's breadth and freedom, his bold design, his dazzling eloquence, he will not perceive the absence of the delicate tints, the subtle graces, the haunting cadences, the exquisite and refined phrasing which we associate with the masters of our language; he will not perceive his "feeble and faulty sense of metre." Among us Byron speaks to the many, to an audience not fastidious in the aesthetic and technical values. To the connoisseur in the art of poetry, then, he proves disappointing. Yet it is of the highest moment that a reputa

tion should rest upon a broad popular basis. If it does so, and passes the critical test even with difficulty, it takes an altogether different rank from those reputations which pass the critical test with much to spare, but make no wide or general appeal. Though Byron did not belong to the highest type of creative minds, though his imagination was limited by his experience, though his expression is often rhetorical rather than just or exquisite, after these and all other necessary deductions have been made, the undeniable splendour and attraction of the man and his poetry remain. If you argue that he belongs to the negative, the iconoclastic movement, that we miss in him the spiritual, the reconstructive touch, I answer that he is none the less dæmonic. He is not easily to be numbered with the saints, but it is not the saints only who are magnificent. Byron is magnificent also

Beholding whom, men think how fairer far

Than all the steadfast stars, the wandering star."

CHAPTER XIV

NARRATIVE POETRY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

TENNYSON, MORRIS, ARNOLD

"I almost feel hopeless about Alfred now—I mean about his doing what he was born to do," wrote Fitzgerald, after the publication of The Princess, a view assuredly remote from the popular one, which found Tennyson everywhere and at all times flawless and consummate. Anything more whole-hearted than his acceptance by his own generation need never be looked for. plant of slower growth than Scott's or Byron's, his fame appeared to root itself more firmly, and so increased with the years as to place him high above all rivals. During his lifetime—so immense was the attraction-Poe's reiterated declaration that of poets he was "the greatest that ever lived" seemed a pardonable exaggeration. A cloud of glory encircled him, a veritable halo rested upon his head. For long, therefore, criticism of Tennyson --and what a prodigious volume of it poured through journals and reviews-was praise of Tennyson. Hardly at all in public utterances, here and there only in private letters or conversations, one met with a certain dubiety or hesitation. Fitzgerald alone among Tennyson's friends made no effort to conceal his disappointment. He had looked for a work of epic proportions and epic grandeur, something to match the great things in poetry, and looked in vain. Then came The Idylls of the King, in which, it was abundantly proclaimed, Tennyson had passed the final test, and Fitzgerald's last hopes expired. Something had gone wrong," the cursed inactivity of the nineteenth century had spoiled him or he "had not the wherewithal to work on."

The judgments of contemporaries are sometimes curious, rarely trustworthy, but of the verdicts upon Tennyson Fitzgerald's more nearly represents, perhaps, the opinions of to-day. Yet

that these will prevail there remains room for doubt. Not the verdicts of a poet's own generation only, those of the generation succeeding his own are also open to suspicion. To judge of a work of art we must stand well away from it, as clear of the retreating wave of reaction as of the advancing wave of enthusiasm. Few of us probably now believe that Tennyson is best represented by The Idylls of the King, or if he is best represented by them, that his station in English poetry is with Spenser or Milton, perhaps not even with Byron or Keats. Childe Harold, for example, may be read when Tennyson's Arthur and Guinevere are forgotten. The question how far Tennyson succeeded in his longer poems is still among his admirers an open question, and as an open question intelligent curiosity may be employed upon it. May not, we may ask, the depreciation of Tennyson, which has undoubtedly set in, have already gone too far? Is perfect success ever attained, and in the Idylls has he not achieved all that was possible? Or again, are we sure that the Arthurian story, rejected by Milton, was as suitable for epic treatment as it was alluring? These and questions like these, more easily, indeed, asked than answered, suggest themselves, but they are secondary to the question how far in the treatment of this theme Tennyson succeeded in capturing the human interest of the familiar story, in heightening the large and lovely elements, in fashioning to new shapes of tragic sadness or immortal beauty the wonderful figures of the ancient legend.

Let us note the character of the legend and his manner of handling it. How will it strike the reader who knows the romances, who takes pleasure in the version of that supreme editor, Malory? It will strike him that the marvels have become of less, the symbolism of more account, that while new interpretations have been offered of it, the story as a story has faded. This is no less than a great change. The Arthurian story, whatever its origin, took up a transfigured matter not its own, fables the most beautiful, the fables which belong to the childhood of the race, the floating marvellous tales with which all primitive peoples explain to themselves the