d, because it is felt that no
fiercest polemical cannonading can drive away the impalpable darkness
of error, but only the slow and silent presence of the dawning truth.
_Cain_ remains, a stern and lofty statement of the case against that
theological tradition which so outrages, where it has not already too
deeply depraved, the conscience of civilised man. Yet every one who is
competent to judge, must feel how infinitely more free the mind of the
poet would have been, if besides this just and holy rage, most laudable
in its kind, his intellectual equipment had been ample enough and
precise enough to have taught him, that all the conceptions that races
of men have ever held, either about themselves or their deities, have
had a source in the permanently useful instincts of human nature, are
capable of explanation, and of a historical justification; that is to
say, of the kind of justification which is, in itself and of its own
force, the most instant destruction to what has grown to be an
anachronism.

Byron's curiously marked predilection for dramatic composition, not
merely for dramatic poems, as _Manfred_ or _Cain_, but for genuine
plays, as _Marino Faliero_, _Werner_, the _Two Foscari_, was the only
sign of his approach to the really positive spirit. Dramatic art, in its
purest modern conception, is genuinely positive; that is, it is the
presentation of action, character, and motive in a self-sufficing and
self-evolving order. There are no final causes, and the first moving
elements are taken for granted to begin with. The dramatist creates, but
it is the climax of his work to appear to stand absolutely apart and
unseen, while the play unfolds itself to the spectator, just as the
greater drama of physical phenomena unfolds itself to the scientific
observer, or as the order of recorded history extends in natural process
under the eye of the political philosopher. Partly, no doubt, the
attraction which dramatic form had for Byron is to be explained by that
revolutionary thirst for action, of which we have already spoken; but
partly also it may well have been due to Byron's rudimentary and
unsuspected affinity with the more constructive and scientific side of
the modern spirit.

His idea of Nature, of which something has been already said, pointed in
the same direction; for, although he made an abstraction and a goddess
of her, and was in so far out of the right modern way of thinking about
these outer forces, it is to