SUSSEX III 



I feel that Chaucer was the equal of those of whom he 

 wrote, as Homer was the equal of Achilles and Odysseus, 

 just as Byron was the peer of the noblest of the Doges 

 and of the ruined Emperor whom he addressed as — 



Vain fro ward child of Empire ! say 

 Are all thy playthings snatched away ? 



Byron is one of the few poets whose life it was ever 

 necessary to write. His acts were representative; from 

 his Harrow meditations on a tomb to his death on the 

 superb pedestal of Missolonghi, they are symbolic. His 

 life explains nearly everything in his poetry. The life 

 and the poetry together make an incomparable whole. 

 Most lives of poets stand to their work as a block of 

 unhewn marble stands to the statue finished and unveiled; 

 if the marble is not as much forgotten as was Pygmalion's 

 when Galatea breathed and sighed. Byron's poetry with- 

 out his life is not finished; but with it, it is like a statue 

 by Michael Angelo or Rodin that is actually seen to 

 grow out of the material. He was a man before he was 

 a poet. Other poets may once have been men; they are 

 not so now. We read their lives after their poetry and 

 we forget them. It is by their poetry that they survive 

 — blithe or pathetic or glorious, but dim, ghosts who are 

 become a part of the silence of libraries and lovers' hearts. 

 They are dead but for the mind that enjoys and the voice 

 that utters their verse. I had not the smallest curiosity 

 about Mr. Swinburne when he was alive and visible. 

 When I think of him, I think of Rosamund speaking to 

 Eleanor or Tristram to Isoud; he has given up his life 

 to them. But with Byron it is different. If all record of 

 him could be destroyed, more than half of him would be 

 lost. For I think that it is upon the life and the portraits 



