" People fancy that the dignity of human life demands
that artists at least should be Ouidaesque, but the true dignity of the
artist is to be sublimely simple rather than simply sublime. The finest
art--be it literature, music, or painting--is, after all that inspiration
can do has been done, a matter of painful pegging away; and the finest
artists will be found quietly occupying themselves with their art without
pose or fuss. That side of the business is largely monopolised by the
little men. But even the big men sometimes fall victims to the popular
conception, as when a Byron stagily takes the centre of the universe, and
looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. We do not need biographical
scandal-mongers to tell us what "the real Lord Byron" was like. He was
like "Don Juan," his own poem; shrewd, cynical, worldly, with flashes of
exquisite feeling. The poem which is cut out of young ladies' editions of
Byron is the one that represents him most truly in his blend of
sensualism and idealism, whereas the Brocken figure is but Byron as he
appeared to himself in his stormiest and gloomiest moments, and even that
phantasm artistically draped and limelit by a poet's imagination. If
people realised how much Byron wrote in his pitiable span of thirty-six
years, how much hard labour went to make those cleverly-rhymed stanzas of
"Childe Harold" or "Don Juan," despite Swinburne's accusation of
botchery, they would see that he really had very little time to be
wicked.
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