Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 5

feel that there is in the
first a volatile and unseizable element that is quite distinct from the
imagination and force and high impressiveness, or from any indefinable
product of all of these united, which form the glory and power of the
second? We may ask in the same way whether Manfred, where the
spiritual element is as predominant as it ever is in Byron, is worth half
a page of Prometheus.

To perceive and admit this is not to disparage Byron's achievements.
To be most deeply penetrated with the differentiating quality of the
poet is not, after all, to contain the whole of that admixture of varying
and moderating elements which goes to the composition of the broadest
and most effective work. Of these elements, Shelley, with all his rare
gifts of spiritual imagination and winged melodiousness of verse, was
markedly wanting in a keen and omnipresent feeling for the great
course of human events. All nature stirred him, except the
consummating crown of natural growth.
We do not mean anything so untrue as that Shelley was wanting either
in deep humanity or in active benevolence, or that social injustice was a
thing indifferent to him. We do not forget the energetic political
propagandism of his youth in Ireland and elsewhere. Many a furious
stanza remains to show how deeply and bitterly the spectacle of this
injustice burnt into his soul. But these pieces are accidents. They do not
belong to the immortal part of his work. An American original,
unconsciously bringing the revolutionary mind to the climax of all
utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when
considered as the members of a political organisation.'[2] Shelley's
position was on a yet more remote pinnacle than this. Of mankind he
was barely conscious, in his loftiest and divinest flights. His muse
seeks the vague translucent spaces where the care of man melts away in
vision of the eternal forces, of which man may be but the fortuitous
manifestation of an hour.
[Footnote 2: Thoreau.]
Byron, on the other hand, is never moved by the strength of his passion
or the depth of his contemplation quite away from the round earth and
the civil animal who dwells upon it. Even his misanthropy is only an
inverted form of social solicitude. His practical zeal for good and noble
causes might teach us this. He never grudged either money or time or
personal peril for the cause of Italian freedom, and his life was the
measure and the cost of his interest in the liberty of Greece. Then again
he was full not merely of wit, which is sometimes only an affair of the
tongue, but of humour also, which goes much deeper; and it is of the

essence of the humoristic nature, that whether sunny or saturnine, it
binds the thoughts of him who possesses it to the wide medley of
expressly human things. Byron did not misknow himself, nor
misapprehend the most marked turn of his own character when he
wrote the lines--
I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in
which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with
the universe and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
It was this which made Byron a social force, a far greater force than
Shelley either has been or can be. Men read in each page that he was
one of like passions with themselves; that he had their own feet of clay,
if he had other members of brass and gold and fine silver which they
had none of; and that vehement sensibility, tenacious energy of
imagination, a bounding swell of poetic fancy, had not obliterated, but
had rather quickened, the sense of the highest kind of man of the world,
which did not decay but waxed stronger in him with years. His
openness to beauty and care for it were always inferior in keenness and
in hold upon him to his sense of human interest, and the superiority in
certain respects of Marino Faliero, for example, where he handles a
social theme in a worthy spirit, over Manfred, where he seeks a
something tumultuously beautiful, is due to that subordination in his
mind of æsthetic to social intention, which is one of the most strongly
distinctive marks of the truly modern spirit. The admirable wit both of
his letters, and of pieces like the Vision of Judgment and Don Juan,
where wit reaches as high as any English writer has ever carried it,
shows in another way the same vividness and reality of attraction
which every side of human affairs possessed for this glowing and
incessantly animated spirit.
In spite of a good many surface affectations, which may have cheated
the lighter