hatically did, in
the truly modern atmosphere, was bound by all the conditions of the
atmosphere to have mastered what we may call the natural history of his
own ideas and convictions; to know something of their position towards
fact and outer circumstance and possibility; above all to have some
trusty standard for testing their value, and assuring himself that they
do really cover the field which he takes them to cover. People with a
faith and people living in frenzy are equally under this law; but they
take the completeness and coherency of their doctrine for granted. Byron
was not the prey of habitual frenzy, and he was without a faith. That is
to say, he had no firm basis for his conceptions, and he was aware that
he had none. The same unrest which drove men of that epoch to Nature,
haunted them to the end, because they had no systematic conception of
her working and of human relations with her. In a word, there was no
science. Byron was a warm admirer of the genius and art of Goethe, yet
he never found out the central secret of Goethe's greatness, his
luminous and coherent positivity. This is the crowning glory of the
modern spirit, and it was the lack of this which went so far to
neutralise Byron's hold of the other chief characteristics of that
spirit, its freedom and spaciousness, its humaneness and wide
sociality, its versatility and many-sidedness and passionate feeling for
the great natural forces.

* * * * *

This positivity is the cardinal condition of strength for times when
theology lies in decay, and the abstractions which gradually replaced
the older gods have in their turn ceased to satisfy the intelligence and
mould the will. All competent persons agree that it is the first
condition of the attainment of scientific truth. Nobody denies that men
of action find in it the first law of successful achievement in the
material order. Its varied but always superlative power in the region of
aesthetics is only an object of recent recognition, though great work
enough has been done in past ages by men whose recognition was informal
and inexpress. It is plain that, in the different classes of aesthetic
manifestation, there will be differences in objective shape and colour,
corresponding to the varied limits and conditions of the matter with
which the special art has to deal; but the critic may expect to find in
all a profound unity of subjective impression, and that, the impressio