Poetry in general came within the sweep of his denunciations of 'sentimentalism'and 'vague generalities.'It was the 'production of a rude age';the silly jingling which might be suitable to savages,but was needless for the grown-up man,and was destined to disappear along with the whole rubbish of mythology and superstition in whose service it had been enlisted.There is indeed a natural sympathy between any serious view of life and a distrust of the aesthetic tendencies,theologians of many different types have condemned men for dallying with the merely pleasurable,when they ought to be preoccupied with the great ethical problems or the safety of their souls.James Mill had enough of the old Puritan in him to sympathise with Carlyle's aspiration,'May the devil fly away with the fine arts!'to such men it was difficult to distinguish between fiction and lying;and if some concession might be made to human weakness,poets and novelists might supply the relaxations and serve to fill up the intervals of life,but must be sternly excluded if they tried to intrude into serious studies,Somehow love of the beautiful only interfered with the scientific investigation of hard facts.
Poets,indeed,may take the side of reform,or may perhaps be naturally expected to take that side.
The idealist and the dreamer should be attracted most powerfully by the visions of a better world and the restoration of the golden age.Shelley was among the most enthusiastic prophets of the coming era.His words,he hoped,were to be 'the trumpet of a prophecy'to 'unawakened earth.'
Shelley had sat at the feet of Godwin,and represented that vague metaphysical dreaming to which the Utilitarians were radically hostile.To the literary critic,Shelley's power is the more remarkable because from a flimsy philosophy he span an imaginative tissue of such magical and marvellous beauty.But Shelley dwelt in an ethereal region,where ordinary beings found breathing difficult.There facts seemed to dissolve into thin air instead of supplying a solid and substantial base.His idealism meant unreality.His 'trumpet'did not in fact stimulate the mass of mankind,and his fame at this period was confined to a few young gentlemen of literary refinement.The man who had really stirred the world was Byron;and if the decline of Byron's fame has resulted partly from real defects,it is partly due also to the fact that his poetry was so admirably adapted to his contemporaries.Byron at least could see facts as clearly as any Utilitarian,though fact coloured by intense passion,He,like the Utilitarians,hated solemn platitudes and hypocritical conventions.I have noticed the point at which he came into contact with Bentham's disciples.His pathetic death shortly afterwards excited a singularly strong movement of sympathy.'The news of his death,'said Carlyle at the time,'came upon my heart like a mass of lead;and yet the thought of it sends a painful twinge through all my being,as if I had lost a brother.'At a later time he defines Byron as 'a dandy of sorrows and acquainted with grief.'21That hits off one aspect of Byronism,Byron was the Mirabeau of English literature,in so far as he was at once a thorough aristocrat and a strong revolutionist.He had the qualification of a true satirist.His fate was at discord with his character.He was proud of his order,and yet despised its actual leaders.
He was ready alternately to boast of his vices and to be conscious that they were degrading.He shocked the respectable world by mocking 'Satanically,'as they held,at moral conventions,and yet rather denounced the hypocrisy and the heartlessness of precisians than insulted the real affections.
He covered sympathy with human suffering under a mask of misanthropy,and attacked war and oppression in the character of a reckless outlaw.Full of the affectation of a 'dandy,'he was yet rousing all Europe by a cry of pure sentimentalism.It would be absurd to attribute any definite doctrine to Byron,His scepticism in religious matters was merely part of a general revolt against respectability.What he illustrates is the vague but profound revolutionary sentiment which indicated a belief that the world seemed to be out of joint,and a vehement protest against the selfish and stolid conservatism which fancied that the old order could be preserved in all its fossil institutions and corresponding dogmas.
