The Poets of the Dawn – 2 131mind and temperament, not, that is to say, always dominated
by the aesthetic, imaginative or inspired strain in their being,
but doubled here by a man of action and passion, there by a
moralist and preacher, in each too a would-be “critic of life”,
who gets into the way of the poet and makes upon him ille-
gitimate demands; therefore they are readily prone to fall away
to what is, however interesting it may otherwise be, a lower, a
not genuinely poetic range of substance and speech. But both
in the deepest centre or on the highest peak of their inspiration
are moved by powers for which their heavily or forcibly intel-
lectualised language of poetry was no adequate means. It is only
when they escape from it that they do their rare highest work.
Byron, no artist, intellectually shallow and hurried, a poet by
compulsion of personality rather than in the native colour of his
mind, inferior in all these respects to the finer strain of his great
contemporaries, but in compensation a more powerful elemental
force than any of them and more in touch with all that had begun
to stir in the mind of the times, — always an advantage, if one
knows how to make use of it, for a poet’s largeness and ease of
execution, — succeeds more amply on the inferior levels of his
genius, but fails more in giving an adequate voice to his highest
possibility. Wordsworth, meditative, inward, concentrated in his
thought, is more often able by force of brooding to bring out
the voice of his greater self, but flags constantly, brings in a
heavier music surrounding his few great clear tones, drowns his
genius at last in a desolate sea of platitude. Neither arrives at
that amplitude of achievement which might have been theirs in a
more fortunate time, if ready forms had been given to them, or if
they had lived in the stimulating atmosphere of a contemporary
culture harmonious with their personality.
Byron’s prodigious reputation, greater and more prolonged
on the continent than in his own country, led perhaps to too
severely critical an undervaluing when his defects became
nakedly patent in the fading away of the helpful glamour of
contemporary sympathies. That is the penalty of an exaggerated
fame lifted too high on the wings or the winds of the moment.
But his fame was no accident or caprice of fortune; it was his due