Charles Kingsley - Literary and General Lectures and Essays стр 8.

As moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.

At all events, Byron never set to work to consecrate his own sin into a religion and proclaim the worship of uncleanness as the last and highest ethical development of pure humanity.  NoByron may be brutal; but he never cants.  If at moments he finds himself in hell, he never turns round to the world and melodiously informs them that it is heaven, if they could but see it in its true light.

The truth is, that what has put Byron out of favour with the public of late has been not his faults but his excellences.  His artistic good taste, his classical polish, his sound shrewd sense, his hatred of cant, his insight into humbug above all, his shallow, pitiable habit of being always intelligiblethese are the sins which condemn him in the eyes of a mesmerising, table-turning, spirit-rapping, spiritualising, Romanising generation, who read Shelley in secret, and delight in his bad taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and pompous sentimentalism.  The age is an effeminate one, and it can well afford to pardon the lewdness of the gentle and sensitive vegetarian, while it has no mercy for that of the sturdy peer proud of his bull neck and his boxing, who kept bears and bull-dogs, drilled Greek ruffians at Missoloughi, and had no objection to a pot of beer; and who might, if he had reformed, have made a gallant English gentleman; while Shelley, if once his intense self-opinion had deserted him, would have probably ended in Rome as an Oratorian or a Passionist.

We would that it were only for this count that Byron has had to make way for Shelley.  There is, as we said before, a deeper moral difference between the men, which makes the weaker, rather than the stronger, find favour in young mens eyes.  For Byron has the most intense and awful sense of moral lawof law external to himself.  Shelley has little or none; less, perhaps, than any known writer who has ever meddled with moral questions.  Byrons cry is, I am miserable because law exists; and I have broken it, broken it so habitually, that now I cannot help breaking it.  I have tried to eradicate the sense of it by speculation, by action; but I cannot

There is a moral law independent of us, and yet the very marrow of our life, which punishes and rewards us by no arbitrary external penalties, but by our own consciousness of being what we are:

This idea, confused, intermitted, obscured by all forms of evilfor it was not discovered, but only in the process of discoveryis the one which comes out with greater and greater strength, through all Corsairs, Laras, and Parasinas, till it reaches its completion in Cain and in Manfred, of both of which we do boldly say, that if any sceptical poetry at all be right, which we often question, they are right and not wrong; that in Cain, as in Manfred, the awful problem which, perhaps, had better not have been put at all, is nevertheless fairly put, and the solution, as far as it is seen, fairly confessed; namely, that there is an absolute and eternal law in the heart of man which sophistries of his own or of other beings may make him forget, deny, blaspheme; but which exists eternally, and will assert itself.  If this be not the meaning of Manfred, especially of that great scene in the chamois hunters cottage, what is?If this be not the meaning of Cain, and his awful awakening after the murder, not to any mere dread of external punishment, but to an overwhelming, instinctive, inarticulate sense of having done wrong, what is?

Yes; that law exists, let it never be forgotten, is the real meaning of Byron, down to that last terrible Don Juan, in which he sits himself down, in artificial calm, to trace the gradual rotting and degradation of a man without law, the slave of his own pleasures; a picture happily never finished, because he who painted it was taken away before he had learnt, perhaps when he was beginning to turn back fromthe lower depth within the lowest deep.

Now to this whole form of consciousness, poor Shelleys mind is altogether antipodal.  His whole life through was a denial of external law, and a substitution in its place of internal sentiment.  Byrons cry is: There is a law, and therefore I am miserable.  Why cannot I keep the law?  Shelleys is: There is a law, and therefore I am miserable.  Why should not the law be abolished?Away with it, for it interferes with my sentimentsAway with marriage, custom and faith, the foulest birth of time.We do not wish to follow him down into the fearful sins which he defended with the small powers of reasoningand they were peculiarly smallwhich he possessed.  Let any one who wishes to satisfy himself of the real difference between Byrons mind and Shelleys, compare the writings in which each of them treats the same subjectnamely, that frightful question about the relation of the sexes, which forms, evidently, Manfreds crime; and see if the result is not simply this, that Shelley glorifies what Byron damns.  Lawless love is Shelleys expressed ideal of the relation of the sexes; and his justice, his benevolence, his pity, are all equally lawless.  Follow your instincts, is his one moral rule, confounding the very lowest animal instincts with those lofty ideas of might, which it was the will of Heaven that he should retain, ay, and love, to the very last, and so reducing them all to the level of sentiments.  Follow your instinctsBut what if our instincts lead us to eat animal food?  Then you must follow the instincts of me, Percy Bysshe Shelley.  I think it horrible, cruel; it offends my taste.  What if our instincts lead us to tyrannise over our fellow-men?  Then you must repress those instincts.  I, Shelley, think that, too, horrible and cruel.  Whether it be vegetarianism or liberty, the rule is practically the samesentiment which, in his case, as in the case of all sentimentalists, turns out to mean at last, not the sentiments of mankind in general, but the private sentiments of the writer.  This is Shelley; a sentimentalist pure and simple; incapable of anything like inductive reasoning; unable to take cognisance of any facts but those which please his taste, or to draw any conclusion from them but such as also pleases his taste; as, for example, in that eighth stanza of the Ode to Liberty, which, had it been written by any other man but Shelley, possessing the same knowledge as he, one would have called a wicked and deliberate liebut in his case, is to be simply passed over with a sigh, like a young ladys proofs of table-turning and rapping spirits.  She wished to see it soand therefore so she saw it.

For Shelleys nature is utterly womanish.  Not merely his weak points, but his strong ones, are those of a woman.  Tender and pitiful as a woman; and yet, when angry, shrieking, railing, hysterical as a woman.  The physical distaste for meat and fermented liquors, coupled with the hankering after physical horrors, are especially feminine.  The nature of a woman looks out of that wild, beautiful, girlish facethe nature: but not the spirit; not

The lawlessness of the man, with the sensibility of the woman. . . .  Alas for him!  He, too, might have discovered what Byron did; for were not his errors avenged upon him within, more terribly even than without?  His cries are like the wails of a child, inarticulate, peevish, irrational; and yet his pain fills his whole being, blackens the very face of nature to him: but he will not confess himself in the wrong.  Once only, if we recollect rightly, the truth flashes across him for a moment, and the clouds of selfish sorrow: