Chapter CXCVIII

The lady watch’d her lover--and that hour
Of Love’s, and Night’s, and Ocean’s solitude,
O’erflow’d her soul with their united power:
Amidst the barren sand and rocks so rude,
She and her wave-worn love had made their bower
Where nought upon their passion could intrude;
And all the stars that crowded the blue space
Saw nothing happier than her glowing face.’

“The man who wrote this had the tremendous driving force of passion, the sweeping vision, and the commanding utterance, the swiftness, and the splendour which belongs only to the gods and the Titans, and because Byron does not sit on the tranquil mountain in the serene spaces with Virgil, Praxiteles, Racine, Leopardi, Milton, Mozart, and Raphael, he is none the less more than mortal. He may have been cast out of the heaven of pure art; but the story of his divine downfall has been written in the sky like a constellation and hangs there for ever; a permanent comet. One generation may forget him, being interested in other and later appearances in the firmament of poetry, but there will always be men to look and to wonder in any generation. Of such was your great scholar Arthur Strong, who knew Russian as well as I do from having learnt it out of a book, who was not only perhaps the man of the widest and deepest reading of our generation in Europe, but whose power of appreciation was as delicate as a microphone and as wide as the sea. He, alas! is now ‘famous, calm, and dead’; and he admired Byron because he considered him to be an inspired poet and a writer of good verse. ‘The French,’ he once said to me, ‘are like the Persians, they stand no nonsense about poetry. To them it is either good or bad verse.’ Opinions differ, and opinions of the same man about the same thing differ under the influence of time. For instance, Swinburne’s blame of Byron has been recently quoted; but his praise of Byron in the first volume of _Essays and Studies_ is, to my mind, the finest thing he ever wrote, and the last word of what can be said in praise of Byron. In that essay, in which he speaks of Byron having ‘the imperishable excellence and sincerity and strength,’ he was of the opinion that Byron wrote good verse. Personally I cannot think that the man who wrote the following lines:--