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referring particularly to that affair, hints fairly enough at the causes of Byron's condition generally.

"My circumstances," he writes, "have been and are in a state of great confusion; my health has been a good deal disordered, and my mind ill at ease for a considerable period. Such are the causes (I do not name them as excuses) which have frequently driven me into excess, and disqualified my temper for comfort. Something also may be attributed to the strange and desultory habits which becoming my own master at an early age, and scrambling about, over and through the world, may have induced. I still, however, think that, if I had had a fair chance, by being placed in even a tolerable situation, I might have gone on fairly. But that seems hopeless,—and there is nothing more to be said."

After this the last step is to the wilful cynicism of "Don Juan" or the melancholy note of such passages as these from letters and journals of his later years:

"What is the reason that I have been, all my lifetime, more or less ennuyé? and that, if anything, I am rather less so now than I was at twenty, as far as my recollection serves? I do not know how to answer this, but presume that it is constitutional,—as well as the waking in low spirits, which I have invariably done for many years. Temperance and exercise, which I have practised at times, and for a long time together vigorously and violently, made little or no difference. Violent passions did; when under their immediate influence-it is odd, but-I was in agitated, but not in depressed spirits. .. I feel a something which makes me think that, if I ever reach near to old age, like Swift, 'I shall die at top' first. Only I do not dread idiotism or madness On the contrary, I think some quieter stages of both must be preferable to much of what men think the possession of their senses. (Journal, Jan. 6, 1821.)

so much as he did.

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"As I grow older, the indifference-not to life, for we love it by instinct-but to the stimuli of life, increases." (Letter to Shelley, Apr. 26, 1821.)

"I am not sure that long life is desirable for one of my temper and constitutional depression of spirits,-which of course I sup

press in society; but which breaks out when alone, and in my writings, in spite of myself." (Letter to Murray, Sept. 20, 1821.)

Byron, in truth, like the young Elizabethans, and especially like Marlowe, whom he so strangely resembles in some points of temperament and history, crowded much living into few years, -having anticipated life, as he phrased it, in his youth.

66

'My passions," he writes in his "Detached Thoughts," "were developed very early. . . . Perhaps this was one of the reasons which caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts,-having anticipated life.”

He bought his knowledge of life dearly, for his own ultimate content. For his poetry, that is perhaps a different matter. If the great lyrical poet is he who coins his passionate experience into the minted gold of song, such a poet was Byron. Byron's experience and his knowledge of life were necessarily but those of one man and essentially in one vein, and, so, limited and imperfect. He did not live a life of many phases like Goethe's, nor was he capable of what was peculiar to men like Wordsworth on the one hand or Shelley on the other. His intuitions were not so subtle and fine as those of Keats or of Coleridge. But at any rate his inner life had been intense and passionate, and his outer life had led him to a broader outlook upon men and nations than that of any of the others except Goethe's. This is one thing at least which recommends Byron to men of the world and to men of other tongues. "The pity of these men," he writes to Murray in 1821 with a curious mixture of aristocratic vanity and of penetration, speaking of some of the chief poets his contemporaries, "is that they never

lived in high life nor in solitude: there is no medium for the knowledge of the busy or the still world." One side of the busy world at least Byron knew; only he was self-deceived into thinking that this side of the world was the world, the great world of men. we find him writing to Murray in 1820:

Thus

"You talk of refinement :-are you all more moral? are you so moral? No such thing. I know what the world is in England, by my own proper experience of the best of it at least of the loftiest; and I have described it every where as it is to be found in all places."

III

Ir Shakspere's dramatic genius was happy in coming in the great dramatic age of our literature, Byron's genius, all high restive impatience, fuming revolt, and Titanic fire and force, was no less happy in coming in the great revolutionary age. And yet Byron came too late to find himself in sympathy with his own times. He caught the inspiration of the movement of enthusiastic liberalism, progress, and re-birth, which preceded him. He was deeply influenced by Rousseau, by the example of Plutarch's heroes, of Washington, and of Napoleon, so long as Napoleon seemed to stand for reconstruction and the new order. But he saw the early hopes of reform crumble and he lived the greater part of his years in an age of temporary reaction, when England turned panic-stricken from the excesses of the French Revolution, when the Habeascorpus act was suspended for long periods of time and. every democratic manifestation was rigidly suppressed, and when the iniquitous Holy Alliance dominated the

politics of the continent of Europe. So that Byron's world in all its professed beliefs, political, religious, and social, was not with him. This opposition doubtless stirred his spirit and stimulated his genius as nothing else could. We can imagine Byron quite in his element and at home in the days of the early Revolution, or in the days of Fielding and Dr. Johnson in England, if he could have been reconciled to any place or any time, for there is a strong residuum of sympathy with eighteenth-century ways of thinking and feeling in the early Byron as in the later prose Byron; and this, which is another of the contradictions in his character, must be borne in mind in any attempt to comprehend the whole of his genius. We can also imagine Byron more at his ease in the later days of reform which came after his death and the later revolutions which had their beginning in Italy, Spain, and Greece, and for which he gave up his life. But he fell in an age of reaction and against his age he strongly battled. That his audience was so large through all these years proves that the struggle had not been given up and that men's minds were still a fertile soil for the seeds of revolutionary enthusiasms.

Much of Byron's opposition to his age was temperamental, the isolation of a lonely, jealous, and intractable nature. Much of it was purely personal resentment against the England and the Englishmen who had turned against him in 1816 at the time of the scandal of Lady Byron's separation from him. "I abhor the nation and the nation me," he writes to Murray in 1817, and this feeling remained with him pretty constantly to the end. But whatever its genesis

it was essentially a sincere enough antipathy to what was narrow and provincial and false in the ideals and the life of the England of the first quarter of this century, especially of that section of the life of England which Byron had touched and known.

Already in 1811 through his first journey abroad Byron had freed himself from what he calls "the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an islander." The effect of his later life was to emancipate him pretty thoroughly from the domination of current English ideals and prejudices. Byron i in his way is fundamentally a poet of emancipation,perhaps too exclusively so, but effectively so at least. And we can trace in his life step by step how he freed himself and was set free by others from all the sanctions and bonds of the social order from which he emerged. The impatience, the resolution not to submit and endure, which is the keynote of his character, could ́ brook nothing but this complete emancipation. After it came, he, or at least his poetry, was the better for His relief finds expression in a letter to Moore in 1822:

it.

"As my success in society was not inconsiderable, I am surely not a prejudiced judge upon the subject, unless in its favour; but I think it, as now constituted, fatal to all great original undertakings of every kind. I never courted it then, when I was young and high in blood, and one of its 'curled darlings'; and do you think I would do so now, when I am living in a clearer atmosphere? One thing only might lead me back to it, and that is to try once more if I could do any good in politics; but not in the petty politics I see now preying upon our miserable country."

All of the picturesque superficies of the society of his day Byron had come in contact with and reflects in his

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