0 that the time would come when his
'rank and private history will not be regarded in estimating his
poetry,' he took no account of future editions enlarged and annotated,
or of biographies of _The Real Lord Byron_; whereby it has come to
pass, as we suspect, that the present world knows more of Byron's
private history than of his poems. His faults and follies stand out
more prominently than ever; his story is more attractive reading than
most romances; and the stricter morality of the day condemns him more
severely than did the society to which he belonged. Psychological
speculation is now so much more practised in literature than formerly,
there is so much more interest in 'the man behind the book,' that
serious moral delinquencies, authentically recorded and eagerly read,
operate more adversely than ever in affecting the public judgment upon
Byron's poetry, because they provide a damaging commentary upon it.
His contemporaries--Coleridge, Keats, Shelley--lived so much apart
from the great world of their day that important changes in manners
and social opinion have made much less difference in the standard by
which their lives are compared with their work. Their poetry,
moreover, was mainly impersonal. Whereas Byron, by stamping his own
character on so much of his verse, created a dangerous interest in the
man himself; and his _empeiria_ (as Goethe calls it), his too
exclusively worldly experience, identified him with his particular
class in society, rendering him largely the responsible representative
of a libertinism in habits and sentiments that was more pardonable in
his time than in our own. His poetry belongs also in another sense to
the world he lived in: it is incessantly occupied with current events
and circumstance, with Spain, Italy, and Greece as he actually saw
them, with comparisons of their visible condition and past glories,
with Peninsular battlefields, and with Waterloo. Of worldliness in
this objective meaning his contemporaries had some share, yet they
instinctively avoided the waste of their power upon it; and so their
finest poetry is beautiful by its detachment, by a certain magical
faculty of treating myth, romance, and the mystery of man's
sympathetic relations with universal Nature.

A recent French critic of Chateaubriand, who defines the 'romantisme'
of that epoch as no more than a great waking up of the poetic spirit,
says that the movement was moral and psychological generally before it