with pessimism. The grounds and the nature of this struggle have been set forth in the foregoing. The poet once for all accepts the emotional criterion of the worth of life. Determining to see in the harmonious emotional life the best life, feeling as the most certain of principles that “there is a lower and a higher,” the poet seeks to picture the perfect existence thus defined. Failure means for him pessimism; not von Hartmann’s really quite harmless “eudämonologischer Pessimismus,” but the true pessimism of the broken will, that has tried all and failed. The life that ought to be, cannot be; the life that is, is hollow and futile: such will be the result of disappointed idealism. In our time, the idealistic poets that are not pessimists have all fought more or less consciously the same battle with pessimism. Think only of the “Excursion,” or of the “In Memoriam,” or again of “Faust,” that epitome of the thought of our century.
But before we allow ourselves a word on the relation of “Faust” to our problem, let us look a little more closely at Byron. “Faust” is the crown of modern poetic effort. If that fails as a solution, all in this field has thus far been lost. But in Byron there is a confessed, one may add a professed, moral imperfection, whose nature throws light, not so much on the solution of the problem of pessimism, as on the problem itself.
The development of Byron’s poetry has two very marked periods, the sentimental and the critical. The sentimental Byron of the years before 1816 is not of very great present interest. The Byron of
