(Reprinted, with corrections, by permission from the "Contemporary
Review," August, 1881.)

Mr. Matthew Arnold has lately published a remarkable essay {133} upon
Lord Byron. Mr. Arnold's theory about Byron is, that he is neither
artist nor thinker--that "he has no light, cannot lead us from the past
to the future;" "the moment he reflects, he is a child;" "as a poet he
has no fine and exact sense for word and structure and rhythm; he has
not the artist's nature and gifts." The excellence of Byron mainly
consists in his "sincerity and strength;" in his rhetorical power; in
his "irreconcilable revolt and battle" against the political and social
order of things in which he lived. "Byron threw himself upon poetry as
his organ; and in poetry his topics were not Queen Mab, and the Witch of
the Atlas, and the Sensitive Plant, they were the upholders of the old
order, George the Third and Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington
and Southey, and they were the canters and tramplers of the great world,
and they were his enemies and himself."

Mr. Arnold appeals to Goethe as an authority in his favour. In order,
therefore, that English people may know what Goethe thought about Byron
I have collected some of the principal criticisms upon him which I can
find in Goethe's works. The text upon which Mr. Arnold enlarges is the
remark just quoted which Goethe made about Byron to Eckermann: "so bald
er reflectirt ist er ein Kind"--AS SOON AS HE REFLECTS HE IS A CHILD.

Goethe, it is true, did say this; but the interpretation of the saying
depends upon the context, which Mr. Arnold omits. I give the whole
passage, quoting from Oxenford's translation of the Eckermann
Conversations, vol. i. p. 198 (edition 1850):-