Isles of Greece and kindred pieces. They have all his vivida vis, but seem to be of a lower and louder kind of poetry, with its own rights, no doubt; but they suffer at once when confronted with the sublimer note of Shelley in his mood of patriot or humanitarian ardour:
The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return:
Of that ineffable or transcendental note Byron can claim little. But for all that he has a “song his very own.”
3. My third question, which is partly the same as the second, is this: What has Byron to say to our sense of beauty? What kind of feeling has he for beauty—visible beauty—and how far does he manage to get it into his language? Here we are embarrassed by the fact that he came to be more and more ashamed of his feeling, and that it is part of his method, latterly, to interrupt in a brutal way his expression of it. He pours out mockeries and vulgarities and squalors and anticlimaxes in the same breath, when he is describing something or somebody lovely. Here, no doubt, he is true to himself, and it is all part of his method; but we need not feel that we are sentimental if we are sometimes indignant. It is as though Byron could not fix his gaze for long at a time on what is well and fair. One of the old-fashioned reviewers put this point when he remarked that Byron aims “at what we must term the suicidal success of extinguishing in laughter the refined emotions he had raised.” I shalt not give examples, which are on every page. But we must not count amongst these interruptions such gay, human, and corrective passages as temper the idyll of Juan and Haidee. That, surely, in point of clean plastic beauty and harmonious execution, is still Byron’s masterpiece. I do not understand, after reading it again, why some good critics deny to Byron any quality of greatness. Here he is simple, natural, and sincere; the bathing, the handmaid cooking the eggs and coffee, the young sculptured figures who live in the moment—all this is as well done, I dare to say, in verse as that other idyll of Richard Feverel and Lucy is done in prose;—in a prose which, as has more than once been said, is crying out to become verse. Byron’s feeling for external beauty is doubtless not of the subtlest, but it is strong. Nothing is intimate, unearthly, speculative; little is left to the imagination; he sets to work our realising faculty, and makes us see, not dream. I will not quote the description of the couple wandering “over the shining
