Live and let live! That must be our motto in literary criticism as it is our motto in other things. I am not going to let myself call Byron a blackguard because of something a little hard and insensitive in him which happens to get upon my own nerves. He was a fine genius. He wrote noble verses. He has a beautiful face. Women are, as a rule, less sensitive than men in these matters of sexual brutality. It may be that they have learned by bitter experience that the Byrons of this world are not their worst enemies. Or perhaps they feel towards them a certain maternal tenderness; condoning, as mothers will do, with an understanding beyond the comprehension of any neurotic critic, these roughnesses and insensitivenesses in their darlings. Yes--let us leave the reputation of this great man, as far as his sexual lapses are concerned, to the commonsense and tact of women. He was the kind of man that women naturally love. Perhaps we who criticise him are not altogether forgetful of that fact when we put our finger upon his aristocratic selfishness and his garish brilliance. And perhaps the women are right. It is pleasant at any rate to think so; pleasant to think that one's refined and gentle aunts, living noble lives in cathedral close and country vicarage, still regard this great wayward poet as a dear spoilt child and feel nothing of that instinctive suspicion of him which they feel toward so many "Byrons de nos jours." When I recall the peculiarly tender look that came into the face of one beautiful old lady--a true "grande dame" of the old-fashioned generation--to whom I mentioned his name, and associate it with the look of weary distaste with which she listened to my discourses upon more modern and more subtle rebels, I am tempted to conclude that what womanly women really admire in a man is a certain energy of action, a certain drastic force, brilliance and hardness, which is the very opposite of the nervous sensitiveness and receptive weakness which is the characteristic of most of us men of letters. I am tempted to go so far as to maintain that a profound atavistic instinct in normal women makes them really contemptuous in their hearts of any purely aesthetic or intellectual type. They prefer poets who are also men of action and men of the world. They prefer poets who "when they think are children." It is not hardness or selfishness or brutality which really alarms them. It is intellect, it is subtlety, it is, above all, _irony._ Byron's unique achievement as a poet is to have flung into poetry the essential brutality and the essential sentiment of the typical male animal, and, in so far as he has done this, all his large carelessness, all his cheap and superficial rhetoric, all his scornful cynicism, cannot hide from us something primitive and appealing about him which harmonises well enough with his beautiful face and his dramatic career.