Byron, who professed to hate his fellows, was of them even more than for
them, and so appealed to them through a broader sympathy, and held them
with a firmer hand. By virtue of his passion, as well as his power, he was
enabled to represent the human tragedy in which he played so many parts,
and to which his external universe of cloudless moons, and vales of
evergreen, and lightning-riven peaks, are but the various background. He
set the "anguish, doubt, desire," the whole chaos of his age, to a music
whose thunder-roll seems to have inspired the opera of _Lohengrin_--a
music not designed to teach or to satisfy "the budge doctors of the Stoic
fur," but which will continue to arouse and delight the sons and daughters
of men.
Madame de Stael said to Byron, at Ouchy, "It does not do to war with the
world: the world is too strong for the individual." Goethe only gives a
more philosophic form to this counsel when he remarks of the poet, "He put
himself into a false position by his assaults on Church and State. His
discontent ends in negation.... If I call _bad_ bad, what do I gain? But
if I call _good_ bad, I do mischief.
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