"Then look around and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest."
If these proud personal touches, of which there are so many scattered through his work, offend our artistic modern sense we must remember that the same tone, the same individual confession of quite personal emotion, is to be found in Dante and Milton and Goethe.
The itching mock-modesty of the intellectual altruist, ashamed to commit himself to the personal note, is not an indication of a great nature. It is rather a sign of a fussy self-consciousness under the eyes of impertinent criticism.
What drives the modern philosopher to jeer at Byron is really a sort of envy of his splendid and irresponsible personality, that personality whose demonic energy is so radiant with the beautiful glamour of youth.
And what superb strength and high romance there are in certain of his verses when the magnificent anger of the moment has its way with him!
Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
On Suli's rock and Parga's shore
Exists the remnant of a line
Such as our Doric mothers bore—
No one can help confessing that poetry of this kind, "simple, sensuous and passionate"—to use the great Miltonic definition—possesses, for all its undeniable rhetoric, a large and high poetic value.
And at its best, the poetry of Byron is not mere rhetoric. Rhetoric undoubtedly is there. His mind was constantly, like most simple minds when touched to large issues, betrayed by the sweet treachery of rhetoric; but I feel confident that any really subtle critic of the delicate differences between 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!