Yet to forget Byron of Cain and Don Juan for the mummer of Childe Harold and The Giaour is merely to be almost incomprehensibly stupid. All this romantic verse was scarcely more than patched hand-me-downs from Walter Scott. Byron the satirist and scoffer, the reader of the gospels, makes good food, even nowadays. What matter if a somewhat boisterous ghost did haunt Howells in Venice? Without being unnecessarily irreverent towards the whirligig of time, wise men should credit most of its revenges to the entirely conventional hatred of the young for the old. Then, too, in our great school of comparative criticism, the aptest praise of Rabelais, for instance, has always been a sneer at Milton.
Human emotion, however, is something more intricate. With Byron himself the most poignant of all experiences seems to have been his constantly recurring sensation of the impersonal passing of time. This consciousness makes for three things: history, egotism, and one kind of poetry. Those of us who lack it may have compensations, but have missed one part of life. For us Byron is the stick of a spent rocket primarily, perhaps, because no lusty, live age can properly appreciate any methods but its own. Instinctively, we divide our poetic grandfathers into two groups: those who died in British beds, and those who did not. This, it might be argued, is the only sensitive discrimination. Of the latter, Byron still has much to answer for: although he seriously looked to England as "the star of the future," as did Shelley, for recompense he pleased his vanity scribbling Don Juan and armed his body-servants with gilt helmets. As evidence of the persistence of this person after a century, we are oftered two fat volumes.
