century, occupies a position not wholly unlike that of Swift at the opening of the eighteenth. Have we a Swift? We have, in prose, Bernard Shaw; but I will not dwell on the difference in power, or on Swift’s vastly sounder humanity. We certainly have had no Byron. In one sense, in the sense in which Flaubert said, “Tous les époques sont atroces,” every age is fodder for the satirist. In another sense, our own age seems especially vulnerable. But the paralysis of great literary art which has been caused by the world-convulsion, and which seems to have inhibited the largest kinds of poetry, has also left poetic satire comparatively mute. Moreover, if we look far back, do we find any English satire in rhyme that approaches Don Juan, if we reckon quality, variety, and mass all together? The Dunciad shows great power; but who except a student can read it for amusement? Absalom and Achitophel is a great and finished production, but it is only of the middle length.
In trying to sketch an answer to a few leading questions I have naturally left a great deal out. Nothing has been said of the Byron who went to Greece, who upheld the freedom of little nations, and who exclaimed that “the peoples will conquer in the end.” Nor has anything been said of his sufferings or of their problematical causes. People will always make books about Byron, as they do about Hamlet; for it is the man that tells us most about himself, who remains the most mysterious. These are only stray notes on Byron’s art and genius; they are an effort to intimate what he still can say to us when all mere enthusiasm, and all mere revulsion, have cleared themselves away.
