" The answer is obvious: as long as
men call _bad_ good, there is a call for iconoclasts: half the reforms of
the world have begun in negation. Such comments also point to the common
error of trying to make men other than they are by lecturing them. This
scion of a long line of lawless bloods--a Scandinavian Berserker, if there
ever was one--the literary heir of the Eddas--was specially created to
wage that war--to smite the conventionality which is the tyrant of England
with the hammer of Thor, and to sear with the sarcasm of Mephistopheles
the hollow hypocrisy--sham taste, sham morals, sham religion--of the
society by which he was surrounded and infected, and which all but
succeeded in seducing him. But for the ethereal essence,--
The fount of fiery life
Which served for that Titanic strife,
Byron would have been merely a more melodious Moore and a more
accomplished Brummell. But the caged lion was only half tamed, and his
continual growls were his redemption. His restlessness was the sign of a
yet unbroken will. He fell and rose, and fell again; but never gave up the
struggle that keeps alive, if it does not save, the soul.
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