Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/192

180 yachting and his neighbour's wife; it was all of a piece. He knew no more about managing a boat than he did about managing himself or other people, and the last of his catastrophes settled the business for ever. And yet he had a distinct faculty for coming back on himself, and, though his turning his experiences of all sorts to artistic use was only an unconscious instinct, still the instinct certainly existed. But he could not curb his magnanimity; he could not become more of an artist. When he had exploited his emotions it was always to find that they had also exploited him, and he turned away at once with a shudder from his expression of them as from 'a part of him already dead.' There lies the essential insincerity of his sincerity. Only an inspired amateur could have fooled himself every time in the way Shelley did, and found nothing but an empty husk for after-use.

Byron's glory is this: that at the darkest hour which the cause of liberty and progress has known in the century, when the furtherance of that cause was utterly hopeless in the domain of action, he asserted it with irresistible power in the domain of literature. The sword was shattered: Byron seized the pen. Defeat and disaster were everywhere: he rallied the scattered ranks, and, in a mad assault on the conquerors, checked their ruthless pursuit and