And yet, out of all this writing which is hardly literature, this poetry which is hardly verse, there comes, even to the reader of to-day, for whom "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme" is as dead and buried as Napoleon, some inexplicable thrill, appeal, potency; Byron still lives, and we shall never cease to read almost his worst work, because some warmth of his life comes through it. Almost everything that he wrote was written for relief, and its effect on us is due to something never actually said in it; it is a kind of wild dramatic speech of some person in a play, whose words become weighty, tragic and pathetic because of the fierce light thrown upon them by a significant character and by transfiguring circumstances. When Byron wrote to Murray, "You might as well want a midnight all stats as rhyme all perfect," he was theorizing over his own failure to achieve sustained excellence on any one level Luckily he carried the theory, in his own downright way, into practise, and, in the "versified Aurora Borealis" of the great comic poems, the defect turns into a quality, and creates what is really a new poetical form. Byron is a heroical Buffoon, the great jester of English poetry; and he is this because he is the only English poet who is wholly buoyant, arrogant and irresponsible. "I never know the word which will come next," he boasts, in _Don Juan_, and for once, improvisation becomes a means to an end, almost an end in itself. It is in the comic verse, strangely enough, that the first real mastery over form shows itself: a genius for rhyme which becomes a new music and decoration, as of cap and bells on the head of sober marching verse, and a genius for plain statement which leaves prose behind in mere fighting force, and glorifies fighting force with a divine natural illumination. THE END End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Dramatis Personae, by Arthur Symons