more deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe in this
popularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulterated
pessimism is an oddity; it is almost a contradiction in terms. Men would
no more receive the news of the failure of existence or of the
harmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing than
they would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or dance a
breakdown when they were condemned to be hanged. When the pessimist is
popular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but
because he shows some things to be good.

Men can only join in a chorus of praise, even if it is the praise of
denunciation. The man who is popular must be optimistic about something,
even if he is only optimistic about pessimism. And this was emphatically
the case with Byron and the Byronists. Their real popularity was founded
not upon the fact that they blamed everything, but upon the fact that
they praised something. They heaped curses upon man, but they used man
merely as a foil. The things they wished to praise by comparison were
the energies of Nature. Man was to them what talk and fashion were to
Carlyle, what philosophical and religious quarrels were to Omar, what
the whole race after practical happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing
which must be censured in order that somebody else may be exalted. It
was merely a recognition of the fact that one cannot write in white
chalk except on a black-board.

Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the
desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and
depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in
winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in
storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older
earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young