The St. Louis Republic. [volume] (St. Louis, Mo.) 1888-1919, 1901-03-10
Byron a Poet
of the Second Class.

Byron says Mr.. Salisbury, seems to
me a poet distinctly Of the second class,
and not even Of the best kind Of second.
tnasmuch as his greatness is chiefly derived
from q sort OF parody. a sort OF imitation
OF the qualities of the first. His verse is to
the greatest poetry what melodrama is to
tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what
~pinchbeck Is to gold" Such. however un-
popular they may be, are my own candid
sentiments. for though from childhood I
could n did read all our great poets with
pleasure. 1t was not with the kind of pleas
ure which Byron in his satire and his decla-
nation could occasionally give me. He Is
monotonous. he is rhetorical. his versifi-
cation is often incredibly bad, and he is
more obscure. mainly by dint Of hurry, bad
printing and bad grammar, than Mr..
Browning. Thus Byron leaves us impressed
as with a vast, even volcanic, yet dandiied
force. unframed and often misdirected.
Either by nature. or in reaction, he pro-
fessed sympathy with the Augustan school
OF Queen Anne's reign, and sided with Pope
In the long quarrel as to whether Pope Is
q poet.
Even the modern opponents of Byron
must recognize in him qualities which won
the admiration and affection Of Scott and
Shelley. In Shelley we had a true child Of
the revolution. the Anfklarung. and the lat
er Eighteenth Century. His boyhood trifed
with emica science probably not then
popular with the human boy) his Adde'S
cence was given to converting schoolgirls
into dear little atheists" His social ideas,
like those Of some advanced moderns,
aimed at the absolute destruction Of the
family: and the moral of "Laon and Cynth-
ma" went far behind the morals OF the most
backward savages. who make incest a cap
ital offense. Shelley, a boy all his life, was
moro boyishly devoted to destruction than
even the ewest writers on the relations of
the sexes. In making all things new"
both he and they are, in fact, relapsing on
a condition Of society which. II it ever ex-
listed. is SO old that 1t may be called pre-
human" and is contrary to Nature. as far
as We can study human nature In the least
developed Of tribes. His ideas conducted
Shelley to the tragedy and farce of his ca
reer: his desertion Of one young wife, fol-
lowed by her suicide. and his marriage with
another. in entire opposition to his own
opinions. In literature he began at school
with a devout following Of Mrs. Radclire;
while, in Queen Nab" and "Alastor'' Wig
orous but vague and misty "Childe Harold"
wandering in No Mans Land. he first dis
played his originality in poetical form. His
personal character being noble and gener-
GUS in the highest degree, his sympathy
with the poor and the oppressed being q
true passion, Shelley's errors. arose from
the fixed idea that Utmost every human Or
dinance must, being old. be necessarily bad.
He would recognize that there is. after all,
something right in the sixth commandment,
but did not draw the inference that a CLEAN
of reason might also be found In most of
the rest Of the Decalogue. The state of So
ciety then, as always. provoked revolt, but
the state OF society was grierous. not be-
cause its moral laws were bad, but because
Its laws were not obeyed.
Keats. but three years younger than Shell
ley Q7s0 was more . true child of tho
Nineteenth Century. His social ideas.
though Of course liberal, were more In
allegiance; he was moro exclusively an art
list: and his art was more controlled by
the revived Elizabethanism of Leigh Hunt
Q7sD. That singular man. who had SO
much taste. and SO much of 1t bad; so in
tense a theory Of social benevolence, and
SO keen a belief that It was more blessed |
to receive than to give. lowed little'' Din |
the way Of literature) ito any but the old |
and many contemporaries owed |
not a little to him." Few owed more, for |
good or bad. than K~eats-Virgil he had
found out for himself. and had translated |
when a schoolboy. Spencer. too. he found |
for himself. and Greece he discovered |
afresh in Lempriere's dictionary and in |
Homer. But this superficial |
euphuism and elaborate verbal quaintness
he partly derived at second hand from |
Hunt. ]