Count Tolstoi being without the blue powder that makes Shakespeare fizz for him has to write a book in which he explains that Shakespeare knows nothing of human nature and could not draw a living character. This does not damage Shakespeare’s reputation as a playwright, but it destroys Count Tolstoi’s reputation as a critic. Byron produces the same effect; people who dislike Byron get very angry if one says that he is a great poet, and quote you a long list of the errors in syntax which are to be found in his works. Now, the reason I want to talk about Byron is that being a foreigner and living far off from the literary fashions of London, far from the catchwords and quarrels of cliques and coteries, I am a much more impartial judge of Byron than any Englishman can be. The obvious retort to this is that foreigners admire Byron because they cannot appreciate the nicety, the lights and shades, the values of the English language. In my case you will admit the argument does not hold good; to a Russian who knows English from his childhood and has a knowledge and appreciation of the world’s literature, the manipulation of the English language and the apprehension of its values is child’s play compared to the manipulation of the Russian language. The argument of a foreigner’s inability to appreciate the values of the language may be true of a Frenchman or of a German; it is not true of an Italian critic such as Nencioni, who translated Browning, nor is it true of a Russian critic such as myself, who has run to seed and made a hash of life from having appreciated literature and the arts wisely and too well, and has, thank heavens, written nothing at all. To go back to Byron, the mistake people make with regard to him seems to me that they judge him by a wrong standard. They apply to him the standards which appertain to other things. To judge Byron by the standard of Tennyson is like criticising Michael Angelo by the standard of Benvenuto Cellini. They apply a magnifying glass to the picture, at which they should look from a distance of several yards. They criticise a frieze as if it were a carved cherry-stone. To this I reply that other men such as Goethe judge him by the standard of Shakespeare, and criticise him with the finest discrimination and find him good. “Read all that Goethe says about Byron in ‘Eckerman,’ not merely the oft-quoted phrases of his being the greatest genius of the nineteenth century, but all his _obiter dicta_ with regard to Byron, and you will be struck by their profound wisdom and incredible acuteness. “But a better reply is to quote what is perhaps the most hackneyed of hackneyed Byronic quotations, two stanzas of which I learned in the nursery, but which, I dare say, you have never read-- CXL