civilization. Rousseau had found an eloquent pupil in the founder of nineteenth century literature in France, but in place of the intensity and diseased ardour of Rousseau, which made him an initiator, we find in Chateaubriand a dissolving spirit of reverie, a measureless sigh of regret, a background of melancholy horizons, washed in for their artistic effect. After the clear and hard thinking of the eighteenth century, came the daydream of the sentimentalist; after the advance, a pause; after energy, lassitude; after hope, recollection. Were Catholicism and feudalism fallen, and in ruins? De Maistre, "the Catholic Hobbes of the Revolution," would come and rebuild the Bastille for the human spirit; Chateaubriand, "poet-laureate of Christianity," would come to sit upon the ruins and sing. The faith of Chateaubriand, as far as he possessed a faith, was that of the eighteenth century, he was a deist but his sentiment belongs to the nineteenth century. A dying mother had grieved over his lack of Christian belief; the beauties of Christianity supplied charming themes for tender rhetoric; in fine, there was a vacancy for a laureate, and he would wear the poetic wreath. The historical sentiment for Christianity in Chateaubriand may, perhaps, indicate an advance from the school of evidential writers in England, who were so busily engaged for half a century in proving that the apostles were neither enthusiasts nor impostors; but Chateaubriand's historical sentiment is not robust,--a martyr interests him as a moonlight ruin might,—very charming things may be said about each of them. Nor did he possess a political any more than a religious faith; what he really represents is the void left by the loss of faiths. "Je me suis toujours étonné," wrote Chateaubriand of his contemporary Chamfort, "qu'un homme qui avait tant de connaissance des hommes, eût pu épouser si chaudement une cause quelconque." The sadness of 'René is not a strenuous pain; it is vague and veiled, the romanticism of sorrow, a musical reverie with no definite theme, a grief not uniform, grey, monotonous, but one shot through with a play of shifting colours. Sentimentalism is the feminine of cynicism; the genius of Chateaubriand may be described as the feminine correlative of the genius of Byron. Chateaubriand, in a passage inspired by characteristic vanity, draws a parallel between himself and Byron, each the founder of a new literature, each of noble rank, and be somewhat querulously complains that the English poet nowhere makes due acknowledgment of obligations to his French predecessor. But "Childe Harold" is in every way the offspring of a more masculine imagination than "René." Although its central figure has been taken for a representative of the English jeunesse dorée, few young English aristocrats, it may be suspected, could have felt with Childe Harold the largeness of European interests, in the past and in the present, in the material and in the moral orders. As we read the poem we assist at the rise and fall of empires, in the court, the camp, the council-chamber. Under the veil of superficial cynicism there appears in "Childe Harold " a robust enthusiasm for what is great, beautiful, and heroic in European history; in no way of mere sentimental reverie, but with a strong ardour of imagination, the glories of former ages live again in the verse of Byron, and connect themselves with the life of his own day. The monuments of old renown, the memorials of patriot, of warrior, of poet, Dante, "the starry Galileo," Ariosto, Rousseau, Voltaire, the castles of the Rhine, the cathedrals of Italy, the Apollo, the Laocoon, are none of them forgotten or disregarded. The sated voluptuary displays a vigorous delight in the presence or the recollection of each of these. Byron's pleasure in nature, in art, in human character, in the memorials of history, has indeed nothing in it subtle or exquisite; but he sees the large features of things, reads off their obvious significance, and receives from them an ample though not an exquisite emotion. There is in "Childe Harold" a historical sense, not scientific, and applying itself only to an obtrusive class of facts, yet real and vital; and while the poem deals so much with the past, it is in spirit essentially modern. If Childe Harold devours all the material of enjoyment which nature and society, the present and the past, afford, still his heart remains craving and unsatisfied. Obermann had withdrawn from the world, unable to sustain its tumults and agitations. René had spent his powers in a waste of imagination, in desire apart from action, in the luxury of self-observing tender emotion. Childe Harold flings himself on life, and when he falls back defeated of joy, gathers up his force, wave-like, to fling himself upon life again. The ethical ideal of the eighteenth century had represented as the most precious elements of human character a wise temperance, moderated desires, a cheerful resignation, a tolerant and pliant temper, good sense; for one who set before him such an ideal no great disenchantment or disillusion was possible. "Never elated while one man's oppress'd Never dejected while another's bless'd;" such is the equable frame of mind that Pope commends. And when the ardour of religious desire seizes upon us what, according to Johnson, should be our prayer? "Yet when the sense of sacred presence fires, "Je sens en moi l'infini," exclaimed Napoleon, maker of our century's epics in the world of action, himself so great, so petty, the conqueror of the Pyramids, the captive of St. Helena. "Je sens en moi l'infini," exclaimed also Byron, and this infinite of egoism left him in the end like Napoleon, defeated and defrauded, narrowed into the bounds of a solitary, small, and sterile island in the great ocean of human existence-or would have left him so, had not Greece summoned him and Missolonghi set him free. Byron has been spoken of as the representative poet of revolution, and the fact that in his hands English poetry became for the first time European poetry,— interesting in Weimar, in Florence, in Paris, hardly less than in London,-is evidence that Byron possesses more than a national significance. The positive dogmas, however, of the French Revolution occupy a small place in Byron's poetry. In its political results the Revolution seemed to him a huge failure; yet it impressed his imagination as so wonderful a phenomenon, a manifesta tion of popular power so striking and so new, that all promises for the future became through it credible. Only ruins indeed remained, ruins wherewith to build anew dungeons and thrones; yet such cannot be the order of things for ever: "But this will not endure nor be endured! Mankind have felt their strength, and made it felt." And so Byron at once believed and doubted the gospel of Revolution. What he absolutely disbelieved was the gospel of the Holy Alliance. He profoundly expressed the feeling of the moral void, and the failure of all attempts to fill that void by the infinite of egoism, by pleasure, by passion, by the ambition of the imagination; and he illustrated through all changes of circumstances and temper, one thing constantly—a disdain of checks, a force of reckless individualism, which formed part of the revolutionary spirit. This it is which gives unity to the mixed and otherwise incoherent elements of which Byron was compounded. An English noble, proud of his rank, yet an enemy to caste; a fighter in the ranks of the children of light, yet not without a strong touch of the Philistine in him; corrupted by the evil days of the Regency and hating their corruption; a scoffer at orthodoxy, yet never delivered from a half-faith in the popular theology of England; a leader of the Romantic movement, yet a worshipper of the poetry of Pope; mean and generous, posing himself for admiration, yet possessing at bottom a sincerity of his own; an Apollo placed upon the limping limb of a Vulcan. Care for his own moral being was not at any time that which could have given direction and coherence to |