Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art,
prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be
remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours and
proved that this painful greenish grey of the æsthetic twilight in
which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the
greyness of death, but the greyness of dawn.




OPTIMISM OF BYRON


Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of
Byron. The age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when
we wake in the morning, a thing incredible and centuries away. And the
world of Byron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world,
where men were romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently, in
bowers, and the very word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery.
Roses and nightingales recur in their poetry with the monotonous
elegance of a wall-paper pattern. The whole is like a revel of dead men,
a revel with splendid vesture and half-witted faces.

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the
less ready shall we be to make use of the word "artificial." Nothing in
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