De Senancourt had none, Byron
abounded. His work is in much the glorification of revolutionary
commonplace. Melodramatic individualism reaches its climax in that long
series of Laras, Conrads, Manfreds, Harolds, who present the fatal
trilogy, in which crime is middle term between debauch and satiety, that
forms the natural development of an anti-social doctrine in a
full-blooded temperament. It was this temperament which, blending with
his gifts of intellect, gave Byron the amazing copiousness and force
that makes him the dazzling master of revolutionary emotion, because it
fills his work with such variety of figures, such free change of
incident, such diversity of passion, such a constant movement and
agitation. It was this never-ceasing stir, coupled with a striking
concreteness and an unfailing directness, which rather than any markedly
correct or wide intellectual apprehension of things, made him so much
more than any one else an effective interpreter of the moral tumult of
the epoch. If we look for psychological delicacy, for subtle moral
traits, for opening glimpses into unobserved depths of character,
behold, none of these things are there. These were no gifts of his, any
more than the divine gift of music was his. There are some writers whose
words but half express the indefinable thoughts that inspired them, and
to whom we have to surrender our whole minds with a peculiar loyalty and
fulness, independent of the letter and printed phrase, if we would
liquefy the frozen speech and recover some portion of its imprisoned
essence. This is seldom a necessity with Byron. His words tell us all
that he means to say, and do not merely hint nor suggest. The matter
with which he deals is gigantic, and he paints with violent colours and
sweeping pencil.

* * * * *

Yet he is free from that declamation with which some of the French poets
of the same age, and representing a portion of the same movement, blow
out their cheeks. An angel of reasonableness seems to watch over him,
even when he comes most dangerously near to an extravagance. He is
equally free from a strained antithesis, which would have been
inconsistent, not only with the breadth of effect required by Byron's
art, but also with the peculiarly direct and forcible quality of his
genius. In the preface to _Marino Faliero_, a composition that abounds
in noble passages, and rests on a fine and original conception of
character, he men