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gloomy Titan who, unable to storm Olympus, sequesters himself in his cavern with his pride, his passions and his crimes.⁵)

His sky, does not show a galaxy of luminous stars and brilliant constellations; some lurid or blood-red meteor shoots across the gloomy space or eclipses the heavenly bodies. His pictures are intensely coloured; but the outlines are vague, indistinct, floating. There is no psychological development of his characters visible; they are what they are, but how they became so we do not see, and therefore generally cannot understand them, cannot, as the French say„nous couler dans leur peau’. Their crimes, their guilt, the something awful that throws the gloom over their life and about their person, in most cases remains a mystery, is only darkly hinted at; but if they are wicked, they are grand and they claim our sympathy much more than the tame world with which they are at war.

All this is neither specifically English, nor is it healthy reading for our youth. Humour is altogether incompatible with this gloomy grandeur and Titan pathos. Wherever Byron is gay, he is profligate. And yet his merely sensual and voluptuous scenes and characters, without that mysterious background of crimes against God and nature, are perhaps the least objectionable.

How then, if we are not injust in our estimation, how shall we account for the universal admiration, the enthusiasm which he excited, the unequalled success which he obtained by the first cantos of Childe Harold, and which never deserted him through his literary career and scarcely began to wane years after his death? For, there is no denying it, though some set themselves against the„Satanic school“, and many more affected to be shocked at his licen- tiousness and to condemn his destructive and irreligious, or at least un-orthodox tendeneies, for a whole generation and more not only England but all Europe were Byron-mad. The depth of his thoughts, the power of his diction, the lofty originality of his genius were the very ideal of the period, he was eminently what the Germans at that time called„genial“. A poet or whoever thought himself such, could not dream a fairer dream than that of being Lord Byron, and those who did not pretend to creative genius, but still felt themselves„genial“, backed their pretensions by an unrestrained admiration for him and liked to quote his lines that seemed to be expressly written for them:

„Many are poets who have never penn'd Their inspirations, and perchance the best.“

No higher praise for a man or his work, than to be called„truly Byronish“. His type of gloomy, contemptuous, reckless grandeur had become the mould in which every one endea- voured to cast his mind and even his outward appearance. He himself was a meteor in the

*) V. Macaulag(Moore's Life of Lord Byron)„It is hardly too much to say, that Lord Byron could exhibit only one man and only one woman, a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection etc.“

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