the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many
works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity
and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental
thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in
darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around
him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity
is a voice out of the abyss.

The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the present
position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is
remote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not
savage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of
this: a fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds. When we see
some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorial
woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent
explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe
that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some
of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks,
we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. We
almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box,
artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with the great
convulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism. The volcano is not an
extinct volcano now; it is the dead stick of a rocket. It is the remains
not of a natural but of an artificial fire.

But Byron and Byronism were something immeasurably greater than anything
that is represented by such a view as this: their real value and meaning
are indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about Byron lies
in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated himself
as such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of Byron