In recent decades the Comic Spirit, after a century of sleeping-sickness, has been struggling with imperfect success to reassert herself in literature. And to her renewed vitality, it seems, is due something of the fresh interest in Byron—her recreant son. His poetry has not yet had its full and clear day. It was mistily worshipped by his contemporaries. The Victorians partly mispraised it and partly reacted from it. The poetic spirit of our own time, rejecting Victorianism and casting back for inspiration to the early writers of the century, has loved the Shelleyan dream and the “colorful” imagery of Keats. But Byron could offer neither. Moreover, though recent writers have re-created a cult and a cant of free individualism that is often reminiscent of Byron, they have patently desired not to be Byronic—so strongly has this poet inoculated his posterity against Byronism! Critics and interpreters of Byron have recently done him some good service. But they have allowed his poetry and his personality to remain too closely intertwined; and sometimes they have continued, in one guise or another, the legend of his Titanism. Matthew Arnold, while professing a balanced and disillusioned view of Byron, did much to strengthen the illusion that he was essentially, or potentially, a Titan. In 1881 Arnold still felt so strongly the pull of his boyhood's hero that, adopting for once a Swinburnian hyperbole, he insisted on Byron's “splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength.” How ironic that word “imperishable” appears when Arnold goes on, in maturer vein, to state that Byron “has no light, cannot lead us from the past to the future”; and that he “shattered himself to pieces” in attacking the bourgeois cant of the earlier nineteenth century! For sincerity and strength are “imperishable” in proportion as they cut through the passing forms to the perennial forces of human cant. Olympus itself is antagonist of the true Titan. He makes no compromise with its minions and, when he falls, falls deep. Byron made the compromise called “Byronism,” and fell—into the arms of fairly congenial Guiccioli, “with her sleek tresses” (as Leigh Hunt pictures her) and “none of her graces entirely free from art.”