Passages like these might be quoted without end from Byron, and they
explain why he is and must be amongst the immortals. He may have been
careless in expression; he may have been a barbarian and not a e?f???,
as Mr. Matthew Arnold affirms, but he was GREAT. This is the word which
describes him. He was a mass of living energy, and therefore he is
sanative. Energy, power, is the one thing after which we pine in this
sickly age. We do not want carefully and consciously constructed poems
of mosaic. Strength is what we need and what will heal us. Strength is
true morality, and true beauty. It is the strength in Byron that
falsifies the accusation of affectation and posing, which is brought
against him. All that is meant by affectation and posing was a mere
surface trick. The real man, Byron, and his poems are perfectly
unconscious, as unconscious as the wind. The books which have lived and
always will live have this unconsciousness in them, and what is
manufactured, self-centred, and self-contemplative will perish. The
world's literature is the work of men, who, to use Byron's own words -


"Strip off this fond and false identity;"


who are lost in their object, who write because they cannot help it,
imperfectly or perfectly, as the case may be, and who do not sit down to
fit in this thing and that thing from a commonplace book. Many
novelists there are who know their art better than Charlotte Bronte, but
she, like Byron--and there are more points of resemblance between them
than might at first be supposed--is imperishable because she speaks
under overwhelming pressure, self-annihilated, we may say, while the
spirit breathes through her. The Byron "vogue" will never pass so long
as men and women are men and women. Mr. Arnold and the critics may