en one poetic vein and another, must feel,
though he might not be able to express the fineness of the distinction,
that there is something here--some breath, some tone, some air,
some atmosphere, some royal and golden gesture--which is
altogether beyond the reach of all mere eloquence, and sealed with
the indescribable seal of poetry.

This real poetic element in Byron--I refer to something over and
above his plangent rhetoric--arrests us with all the greater shock of
sudden possession, for the very reason that it is so carelessly, so
inartistically, so recklessly flung out.

He differs in this, more than in anything else, from our own poetic
contemporaries. Our clever young poets know their business so
appallingly well. They know all about the theories of poetry: they
know what is to be said for Free Verse, for Imagism, for
Post-Impressionism: they know how the unrhymed Greek chorus lends
itself to the lyrical exigencies of certain moods: they know how
wonderful the Japanese are, and how interesting certain Indian
cadences may be: they know the importance of expressing the Ideal
of Democracy, of Femininity, of Evolution, of Internationalism.
There really is nothing in the whole field of poetic criticism which
they do not know--except the way to persuade the gods to give us
genius, when genius has been refused!

Byron, on the contrary, knows absolutely nothing of any of these
things. "When he thinks he is a child"; when he criticises he is a
child; when he philosophises, theorises, _mysticizes,_ he is a
hopeless child. A vast amount of his poetry, for all its swing and
dash and rush, might have been written by a lamentably inferior
hand.

We come across such stuff to-day; not among the literary circles, but
in the poets' corners of provincial magazines. What is called
"Byronic sentiment," so derided now by the clever young
psychologists who terrorise our literature, has become the refuge of
timid old-fashioned people, quite bewildered and staggered by new
developments.

I sympathise with such old-fashioned people. The pathetic
earnestness of an elderly commercial traveller I once met on the
Pere Marquette Railway who assured me that Byron was "some
poet" remains in my mind as a much more touching tribute to the
lordly roue than all the praise of your Arnolds and Swinburnes.

He is indeed "some poet." He is the poet for people who feel the
magic of music and the grandeur of imagination, without being able
to la