Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 2

change
rigorously private and undeclared. That intense practicalness which
seems to have done so many great things for us, and yet at the same

moment mysteriously to have robbed us of all, forbids us even to cast a
glance at what is no more than an aspiration. Englishmen like to be able
to answer about the Revolution as those ancients answered about the
symbol of another Revolution, when they said that they knew not so
much as whether there were a Holy Ghost or not. The same want of
kindling power in the national intelligence which made of the English
Reformation one of the most sluggish and tedious chapters in our
history, has made the still mightier advance of the moderns from the
social system and spiritual bases of the old state, in spite of our two
national achievements of punishing a king with death and emancipating
our slaves, just as unimpressive and semi-efficacious a performance in
this country, as the more affrontingly hollow and halt-footed
transactions of the sixteenth century.
Just because it was wonderful that England should have produced
Byron, it would have been wonderful if she had received any
permanently deep impression from him, or preserved a lasting
appreciation of his work, or cheerfully and intelligently recognised his
immense force. And accordingly we cannot help perceiving that
generations are arising who know not Byron. This is not to say that he
goes unread; but there is a vast gulf fixed between the author whom we
read with pleasure and even delight, and that other to whom we turn at
all moments for inspiration and encouragement, and whose words and
ideas spring up incessantly and animatingly within us, unbidden,
whether we turn to him or no.
For no Englishman now does Byron hold this highest place; and this is
not unnatural in any way, if we remember in what a different shape the
Revolution has now by change of circumstance and occasion come to
present itself to those who are most ardent in the search after new paths.
An estimate of Byron would be in some sort a measure of the distance
that we have travelled within the last half century in our appreciation of
the conditions of social change. The modern rebel is at least
half-acquiescence. He has developed a historic sense. The most hearty
aversion to the prolonged reign of some of the old gods does not hinder
him from seeing, that what are now frigid and unlovely blocks were
full of vitality and light in days before the era of their petrifaction.

There is much less eagerness of praise or blame, and much less faith in
knife and cautery, less confidence that new and right growth will
naturally and necessarily follow upon demolition.
The Revolution has never had that long hold on the national
imagination in England, either as an idol or a bugbear, which is
essential to keep the poet who sings it in effective harmony with new
generations of readers. More than this, the Byronic conception was as
transitional and inadequate as the methods and ideas of the practical
movers, who were to a man left stranded in every country in Europe,
during the period of his poetic activity. A transitional and unstable
movement of society inevitably fails to supply a propulsion powerful
enough to make its poetic expression eternal. There is no better proof of
the enormous force of Byron's genius than that it was able to produce
so fine an expression of elements so intrinsically unfavourable to high
poetry as doubt, denial, antagonism, and weariness. But this force was
no guarantee for perpetuity of influence. Bare rebellion cannot endure,
and no succession of generations can continue nourishing themselves
on the poetry of complaint, and the idealisation of revolt. If, however, it
is impossible that Byron should be all to us that he was to a former
generation, and if we find no direct guidance in his muse, this is no
reason why criticism should pass him over, nor why there may not be
something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom and genuine
modernism of his poetic spirit, to an age that is apparently only
forsaking the clerical idyll of one school, for the reactionary
mediævalism or paganism, intrinsically meaningless and issueless, of
another.
More attention is now paid to the mysteries of Byron's life than to the
merits of his work, and criticism and morality are equally injured by
the confusion between the worth of the verse he wrote, and the virtue or
wickedness of the life he lived. The admirers of his poetry appear
sensible of some obligation to be the champions of his conduct, while
those who have diligently gathered together the details of an accurate
knowledge of the unseemliness of his conduct, cannot bear to think that
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