A History of English Literature

no comment. Whatever allowances charity may demand on the score of tainted
heredity, his character was far too violent and too shallow to approach to
greatness.
As a poet he continues to occupy a conspicuous place (especially in the
judgment of non-English-speaking nations) through the power of his volcanic
emotion. It was this quality of emotion, perhaps the first essential in
poetry, which enrolled among his admirers a clear spirit in most respects
the antithesis of his own, that of Matthew Arnold. In 'Memorial Verses'
Arnold says of him:
He taught us little, but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder's roll.
With shivering heart the strife we saw
Of passion with eternal law.
His poetry has also an elemental sweep and grandeur. The majesty of Nature,
especially of the mountains and the ocean, stirs him to feeling which often
results in superb stanzas, like the well-known ones at the end of 'Childe
Harold' beginning 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll'! Too
often, however, Byron's passion and facility of expression issue in bombast
and crude rhetoric. Moreover, his poetry is for the most part lacking in
delicacy and fine shading; scarcely a score of his lyrics are of the
highest order. He gives us often the blaring music of a military band or
the loud, swelling volume of an organ, but very seldom the softer tones of
a violin or symphony.
To his creative genius and power the variety as well as the amount of his
poetry offers forceful testimony.
In moods of moral and literary severity, to summarize, a critic can
scarcely refrain from dismissing Byron with impatient contempt;
nevertheless his genius and his in part splendid achievement are
substantial facts. He stands as the extreme but significant exponent of
violent Romantic individualism in a period when Romantic aspiration was
largely disappointed and disillusioned, but was indignantly gathering its
strength for new efforts.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1832. Shelley resembles Byron in his
thorough-going revolt against society, but he is totally unlike Byron in
several important respects. His first impulse was an unselfish love for his
fellow-men, with an aggressive eagerness for martyrdom in their behalf; his
nature was unusually, even abnormally, fine and sensitive; and his poetic
quality was a delicate and ethereal lyricism unsurpassed in the literature
of the world. In both his life and his poetry his visionary reforming zeal
and his superb lyric instinct are inextricably intertwined.
Shelley, born in 1792, belonged to a family of Sussex country gentry; a
baronetcy bestowed on his grandfather during the poet's youth passed from
his father after his own death to his descendants. Matthew Arnold has
remarked that while most of the members of any aristocracy are naturally
conservative, confirmed advocates of the system under which they enjoy
great privileges, any one of them who happens to be endowed with radical
ideas is likely to carry these to an extreme. In Shelley's case this
general tendency was strengthened by reaction against the benighted Toryism
of his father and by most of the experiences of his life from the very
outset. At Eton his hatred of tyranny was fiercely aroused by the fagging
system and the other brutalities of an English school; he broke into open