ecause I suffer from this psychological limitation; because I
prefer Sterne to Fielding, and Lamb to Dickens; I should condemn
myself as an un-catholic fanatic if I presumed to turn my personal
lack of youthful aplomb and gallant insouciance into a grave artistic
principle.

Live and let live! That must be our motto in literary criticism as it is
our motto in other things. I am not going to let myself call Byron a
blackguard because of something a little hard and insensitive in him
which happens to get upon my own nerves. He was a fine genius. He
wrote noble verses. He has a beautiful face.

Women are, as a rule, less sensitive than men in these matters of
sexual brutality. It may be that they have learned by bitter
experience that the Byrons of this world are not their worst enemies.
Or perhaps they feel towards them a certain maternal tenderness;
condoning, as mothers will do, with an understanding beyond the
comprehension of any neurotic critic, these roughnesses and
insensitivenesses in their darlings.

Yes--let us leave the reputation of this great man, as far as his sexual
lapses are concerned, to the commonsense and tact of women.

He was the kind of man that women naturally love. Perhaps we who
criticise him are not altogether forgetful of that fact when we put our
finger upon his aristocratic selfishness and his garish brilliance.

And perhaps the women are right.

It is pleasant at any rate to think so; pleasant to think that one's
refined and gentle aunts, living noble lives in cathedral close and
country vicarage, still regard this great wayward poet as a dear spoilt
child and feel nothing of that instinctive suspicion of him which they
feel toward so many "Byrons de nos jours."

When I recall the peculiarly tender look that came into the face of
one beautiful old lady--a true "grande dame" of the old-fashioned
generation--to whom I mentioned his name, and associate it with the
look of weary distaste with which she listened to my discourses
upon more modern and more subtle rebels, I am tempted to conclude
that what womanly women really admire in a man is a certain
energy of action, a certain drastic force, brilliance and hardness,
which is the very opposite of the nervous sensitiveness and receptive
weakness which is the characteristic of most of us men of letters. I
am tempted to go so far as to maintain that a profound atavistic
instinct in normal women makes them really contemptuous in their
hear