Selections from the poetry of Lord Byron

Contents

Introduction : page

I, Two Aspects of Byron : the Man and the Poet , v

II. The Personal Byron vi

Introduction

I

There are two aspects of Byron, almost equally attractive to the modern reader, although attractive in different ways. There is the personal Byron, vehemently masculine in most of his habits and doings, yet, as Moore and others who knew him report, strangely. feminine in some of his traits, and perhaps again, as Goethe felt, as strangely immature and like a child as soon as he turned to reflection: the whole compound a brilliant meteoric genius that dazzled the eyes of Europe for a short generation. To us this Byron becomes a fascinating psychological study, a document in humanity, baffling our analysis, as he himself baffled his own analysis. For this study it is plain that we need all the evidence obtainable, letters, journals, the testimony alike of friends, of enemies, and of indifferent contemporaries, as well as all the verses, the bad with the good, which flowed so readily from his incontinent pen. On the other hand there is Byron the poet, whom, it is true, we cannot altogether separate from the personal Byron, but whom we should judge, as we judge other poets, by the best half of his work, in which, as Matthew Arnold, a poet writing of a poet, so finely says:

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"Nature herself seemed to take the pen from him as she took it from Wordsworth, and to write for him as she wrote for Wordsworth, though in a different fashion, with her own penetrating simplicity."

II

Our enjoyment of Byron as a poet then is greater if we confine ourselves to Byron at his best. But Byron's poetry at its best is constantly personal, subjective, and overflowing with Byron the man. So that fully to understand Byron at his best in poetry we are driven to study the personal, the inferior, the prose Byron. And here we are perpetually beset with the paradox of Byron's nature, with the difficulty of disentangling the real Byron from the false Byron. For, contradictory and complex as are most modern characters, few have been more so than Byron. A histrionic strain was prominent in him from the beginning, and it was and is an offence to sincere and candid souls that not only at times his sentiments were evidently put on and worn for effect, but also not infrequently he himself did not know his own real sentiments, but was the dupe of his own imaginings. Nevertheless it is important to recognize that, although seldom apparent in his life from day to day, or in much of his verse from line to line, a fiery and desperate sincerity was at bottom and essentially the motive force of Byron's character as of Byron's poetry. After we have read all that he wrote, no less than after reading only the inspired portions, and after following his career step by step, the general impression of this returns to us and abides with us.

The war of the members, the contradictory elements in Byron, are ^evident. Byron himself, given to self-

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analysis, did not fail to notice them. In a letter to Miss Milbanke (Sept. i6, 1 8 14?) he relates that his head had just been examined by Spurzheim the craniologist,

*' a discoverer of faculties and dispositions from the heads. . . . He says all mine are strongly marked, but very antithetical, for everything developed in or on this same skull of mine has its opposite in great force, so that, to believe him, my good and evil are at perpetual war."

The war of good and evil in the human breast is no new or peculiar thing; but Byron's poetry is, as was his life, a field where the conflict appears pre-eminently desperate and magnificent.

'' He taught us little ; but our soul Had/i"// him like the thunder's roll.

With shivering heart the strife we saw Of passion with eternal law."

All the passions, at one time or another, were at strife within his soul. And yet, early as was the maturity of his passionate nature, we can trace the development of it through several stages. His ancestry and his parentage explain much. His genius remains underivable, but his energy, his courage, his love of adventure, and the seeds of much that developed later into evil and vice with him seem to hold from the paternal line; his irritability, waywardness, generosity, and occasional self-devotion, the strain of fitful morbidity in him, and perhaps his latent enthusiasm, from the maternal.

His physical malformation — his congenital lameness — reacted upon his sensitive and suspicious nerves

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and resulted in a vice of temperament. His sudden / and unexpected change of fortune, making him heir to a peerage w^hen still a child, was in its effects a misfortune. Worst of all, however, was the influence upon his life of his mother's violent, capricious, and hysterical temper. To this Byron, notwithstanding his paradoxical affection for her, often alludes with bitterness. Thus in a letter to his half-sister Augusta, written in i8i i, before his cynicism was anything more than youthful and nascent, he writes:

"You must excuse my being a little cynical, knowing how my temper was tried in my nonage ; the manner in which I was brought up must necessarily have broken a meek spirit, or rendered a fiery one ungovernable ; the effect it has had on mine I need not state."

Afterwards it was the world at large and especially the times in which he lived which had the greatest influence in the formation of the character of the great English protagonist of a revolutionary age.

Other traits, essential in Byron, seem latent or patent from his youth. There is his pride, — of which he was not a little proud.

*'To the charge of pride I suspect I must plead guilty," he writes to Miss Milbanke in 1813 (with some complacency and in the role of the interesting lover), "because when a boy and a very young one it was the constant reproach of schoolfellows and tutors. ... It was, however, originally defensive — for at that time my hand like Ishmael's was against every one's and every one's against mine."

Practically all of Byron's heroes are types of that proud disdain which Dante and mediaeval writers on ethics denominated superbia. Such are Childe Harold,

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Manfred, Lucifer in "Cain," the mysterious Giaour, and many others. But pride is an inclusive quality, and the common attribute of the soul in revolt. Then there is Byro'n's suspiciousness and distrust, — the recurrent feeling that every one's hand was against him. There is his melancholy and his moodiness and his love of solitude. There is his improvident extravagance, balanced in later years by freaks of avarice; his *' silent rages" and "high impatient temper" ("as to temper," he writes in 1813, "unluckily I have the reputation of a very bad one"); his little superstitions; his mobility of mood and his wayward inconsistency; his combativeness (" I like a row, and always did from a boy," he writes); his detestation of cant and hypocrisy, as fervent as that of Swift or o| Carlyle, but degenerating into bravado and a ' ' habit of inverse hypocrisy" which too often led him to assume a vice when he had it not. There are, too, his other poses and chosen mannerisms, — his pose of blighted affections, of mystery and gloom, of man-ofthe-world-liness; his sentiment, rarely degenerating into sentimentality; his eccentricity, his misanthropy, and his cynicism. His misanthropy was partly assumed and a mere mood, but also partly real, and the reaction of his revolutionary nature against the cant and conventionality of much of the life around him. In 1808 he writes to his sister from Newstead:

**I live here much in my own manner, that is, alone, for I could not bear the company of my best friend above a month ; there is such a sameness in mankind upon the whole, and they grow so much more disgusting every day, that, were it not for a portion of ambition, and a conviction that in times like the present we ought to perform our respective duties, I should live

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here all my life in unvaried solitude. ... I flatter myself I have made some improvements in Newstead, and, as I am independent, I am happy, as far as any person unfortunate enough to be born into this world can be said to be so. " ^

And in 1811 to his friend Harness he writes:

"The circumstances you mention at the close of your letter is another proof in favour of my opinion of mankind. Such you will always find them — selfish and distrustful. I except none. The cause of this is the state of society."

His cynicism was perhaps as real as cynicism ever can be — that is to say, essentially assumed and sentimental; although in ** Don Juan" and through his later years it is often truculent and lurid and audaciously expressed. Yet Byron's cynicism, like his other passions, was never cold.

In later years Byron's character hardened while it matured. There was a time in Italy when the baser qualities overruled the rest, and he became something of the " Inglese italianato " of the proverb. But this time was short. At no time had he manifested or cared to possess many of the neutral virtues, and his early years had been marked and marred by dissipation and vices, probably however not greatly beyond the not infrequent custom of his times and class. Moreover, much that is in his letters on this subject is, more suo, mainly pose and display. - Yet Byron was always frank, if sometimes more than frank, and as ingenuous as his imaginative temperament would permit him to be. A passage in one of his letters to IMoore, written after the break with Lady Byron in 18 16, although

^ Compare with this the passage in ''Childe Harold," C. Ill, stanzas 113, 114.

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referring particularly to that affair, hints fairly enough at the causes of Byron's condition generally.

''My circumstances," he writes, " have been and are in a state of great confusion ; my health has been a good deal disordered, and my mind ill at ease for a considerable period. Such are the causes (I do not name them as excuses) which have frequently driven me into excess, and disqualified my temper for comfort. Something also may be attributed to the strange and desultory habits which becoming my own master at an early age, and scrambling about, over and through the world, may have induced. I still, however, think that, if I had had a fair chance, by being placed in even a tolerable situation, I might have gone on fairly. But that seems hopeless, — and there is nothing more to be said."

After this the last step is to the wilful cynicism of *' Don Juan " or the melancholy note of such passages as these from letters and journals of his later years:

"What is the reason that I have been, all my lifetime, more or less ennuy^ ? and that, if anything, I am rather less so now than I was at twenty, as far as my recollection serves ? I do not know how to answer this, but presume that it is constitutional, — as well as the waking in low spirits, which I have invariably done for many years. Temperance and exercise, which I have practised at times, and for a long time together vigorously and violently, made little or no difference. Violent passions did ; when under their immediate influence — it is odd, but — I was in agitated, but not in depressed spirits. ... I feel a something which makes me think that, if I ever reach near to old age, like Swift, 'I shall die at top ' first. Only I do not dread idiotism or madness so much as he did. On the contrary, I think some quieter stages of both must be preferable to much of what men think the possession of their senses. " (Journal, Jan. 6, 1821.)

" As I grow older, the indifference — not to life, for we love it by instinct — but to the stimuli of life, increases." (Letter to Shelley, Apr. 26, 182 1.)

" I am not sure that long life is desirable for one of my temper and constitutional depression of spirits, — which of course I sup.

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press in society ; but which breaks out when alone, and in my writings, in spite oi myself." (Letter to Murray. Sept. 20. 1821.)

Byron, in truth, like the young Elizabethans, and especially like INIarlowe, whom he so strangely resembles in some points of temperament and history, crowded much living into few years, — having anticipated life, as he phrased it, in his youth.

'■' My passions," he writes in his •• Detached Thoughts," •• were developed very early. . . . Perhaps this was one of the reasons which caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts, — having anticipated life.''

He bought his knowledge of life dearly, for his own ultimate content. For his poetr}^, that is perhaps a different matter. If the great lyrical poet is he who coins his passionate experience into the minted gold of song, such a poet was Byron. Byron's experience and his knowledge of life were necessarily but those of one man and essentially in one vein, and, so, limited and imperfect. He did not live a life of many phases like Goethe's, nor was he capable of what was peculiar to men like \\'ords\vorth on the one hand or Shelley on the other. His intuitions were not so subtle and fine as those of Keats or of Coleridge. But at any rate his inner life had been intense and passionate, and his outer life had led him to a broader outlook upon men and nations than that of any of the others except Goethe's. This is one thing at least which recommends Byron to men of the world and to men of other tongues. "The pity of these men," he writes to IMurray in 1821 with a curious mixture of aristocratic vanity and of penetration, speaking of some of the chief poets his contemporaries, "is that they never

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lived in high Hfe nor in solitude: there is no medium for the knowledge of the busy or the still world." One side of the busy world at least Byron knew; only he was self-deceived into thinking that this side of the w^orld was the world, the great world of men. Thus we find him writing to Murray in 1820:

** You talk of refinement : — are you all more moral ? are you so moral ? No such thing. / know what the world is in England, by my own proper experience of the best of it — at least of the loftiest ; and I have described it every where as it is to be found in all places."

Ill

If Shakspere's dramatic genius was happy in coming in the great dramatic age of our literature, Byron's genius, all high restive impatience, fuming revolt, and^ Titanic fire and force, was no less happy in coming in ! the great revolutionary age. And yet Byron came too late to find himself in sympathy with his own times. He caught the inspiration of the movement of enthusiastic liberalism, progress, and re-birth, which preceded him. He was deeply influenced by Rous- ■ seau, by the example of Plutarch's heroes, of Washington, and of Napoleon, so long as Napoleon seemed to stand for reconstruction and the new order. But he saw the early hopes of reform crumble and he lived the greater part of his years in an age of temporary reaction, when England turned panic-stricken from the excesses of the French Revolution, when the Habeascorpus act was suspended for long periods of time and every democratic manifestation was rigidly suppressed, and when the iniquitous Holy Alliance dominated the

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politics of the continent of Europe. So that Byron's world in all its professed beliefs, political, religious, and social, was not with him. '^'This opposition doubtless stirred his spirit and stimulated his genius as nothing else could. We can imagine B}Ton quite in his element and at home in the days of the early Revolution, or in the days of Fielding and Dr. Johnson in England, if he could have been reconciled to any place or any time, — for there is a strong residuum of sympathy with eighteenth-century ways of thinking and feeling in the early Byron as in the later prose Byron; and this, which is another of the contradictions in his character, must be borne in mind in any attempt to comprehend the whole of his genius. We can also imagine Byron more at his ease in the later days of reform which came after his death and the later revolutions which had their beginning in Italy, Spain, and Greece, and for which he gave up his life. But he fell in an age of reaction and against his age he strongly battled. That his audience was so large through all these years proves that the struggle had not been given up and that men's minds were still a fertile soil for the seeds of revolutionary enthusiasms.

Much of Byron's opposition to his age was temperamental, the isolation of a lonely, jealous, and intractable nature. Much of it was purely personal resentment against the England and the Englishmen who had turned against him in 1816 at the time of the scandal of Lady Byron's separation from him. '* I abhor the nation and the nation me," he writes to Murray in 181 7, and this feeling remained with him pretty constantly to the end. But whatever its genesis

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it was essentially a sincere enough antipathy to what was narrow and provincial and false in the ideals and j the life of the England of the first quarter of this century, especially of that section of the life of England which Byron had touched and known.

Already in 1811 through his first journey abroad Byron had freed himself from what he calls " the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an islander." The effect of his later life was to emancipate him pretty thoroughly from the domination of current English ideals and prejudices. Byron in his way is fundamentally a poet of emancipation, — lx' perhaps too exclusively so, but effectively so at least. And we can trace in his life step by step how he freed himself and was set free by others from all the sanctions and bonds of the social order from which he emerged. The impatience, the resolution not to submit and endure, which is the keynote of his character, could brook nothing but this complete emancipation. After it came, he, or at least his poetry, was the better for it. His relief finds expression in a letter to Moore in 1822:

"As my success in society was not inconsiderable, I am surely not a prejudiced judge upon the subject, unless in its favour ; but I think it, as now constituted, fatal to all great original undertakings of every kind. I never courted it then, when I was young and high in blood, and one of its ' curled darlings ' ; and do you think I would do so now, when I am living in a clearer atmosphere ? One thing only might lead me back to it, and that is to try once more if I could do any good in politics ; but not in the petty politics I see now preying upon our miserable country."

All of the picturesque superficies of the society of his day Byron had come in contact with and reflects in his

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letters or his verse, — the dandyism, the club life and the high play, the dissipation in fashionable society, the blue-stockings and the rage for literary lions, the waltz in its newness, the salons, the literary breakfasts at Rogers', the pugilism, the calamities and quarrels of authors, and the rest. The constructive ideals of his greater verse are concerned with other things, but his satiric and destructive verse is largely directed against

^ the abuses of English society. In the ' ' Age of Bronze, ' ' a poem on the revival of the movement for national liberty in 1820, in which Byron shows himself most openly the poet of the Revolution, after reviewing the aspects of contemporary Continental politics, he turns to satirize the vices of England and especially the greed of her dominant class, the landlords. After the close of the Napoleonic wars, during which, owing to the exclusion of the greater part of foreign competition, these gentry had profited exceedingly by the high rents they were able to exact from the farmers of their lands,

; they set themselves doggedly against reform and lower rents. These Byron attacks :

'' Alas, the country ! how shall tongue or pen Bewail her now z/wcountry gentlemen ?

The last to bid the cry of warfare cease. The first to make a malady of peace.

For wliat were all these country patriots bom? To hunt, and vote, and raise the price of com ? But com, like every mortal thing, must fall, Kings, conquerors, and markets most of all. And must ye fall with every ear of grain ? Why would you trouble Buonaparte's reign ? He was your great Triptolemus ; his vices Destroy'd but realms, and still maintain'd your prices ;

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He amplified to every lord's content The grand agrarian alchymy, hight rent.

Why did the tyrant stumble on the Tartars, And lower wheat to such desponding quarters ? Why did you chain him on yon isle so lone ? The man was worth much more upon his throne. True, blood and treasure boundlessly were spilt, But what of that ? the Gaul may bear the guilt ; But bread was high, the farmer paid his way, And acres told upon the appointed day.

****** Up, up again, ye rents ! exalt your notes, Or else the ministry will lose their votes, And patriotism, so delicately nice, Her loaves will lower to the market price.

****** See these inglorious Cincinnati swarm.

Farmers of war, dictators of the farm ; Their ploughshare was the sword in hireling hands, Their fields manured by gore of other lands ; Safe in their barns, these Sabine tillers sent Their brethren out to battle. Why ? For rent ! Year after year they voted cent, per cent.. Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions. Why? For rent ! They roar'd, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant To die for England. Why then live ? For rent ! The peace has made one general malcontent Of these high-market patriots ; war was rent ! Their love of country, millions all mis-spent, How reconcile ? by reconciling rent !

And will they not repay the treasures lent ? No : down with everything, and up with rent ! Their good, ill, health, wealth, joy, or discontent, Being, end, aim, religion — rent, rent, rent ! "

^ But Byron's chief satiric animus was against the corruption and the cant of the day. It was, writes Mr. Henley,

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'' a dreadful age, no doubt: for all its solid foundations of faith and dogma in the Church and of virtue and solvency in the State, a fierce, drunken, gambling, 'keeping,' adulterous, high-living, hard-drinking, hard-hitting, brutal age. But it was Byron's ; and ' Don Juan ' and ' The Giaour ' are as naturally its outcome as '■ Absalom and Achitophel ' is an expression of the Restoration, and ' In Memoriam ' a product of Victorian England.

"As to the cant of the day," writes Byron in 1819, " I despise it, as I have ever done all its other finical fashions, which become you as paint became the ancient Britons." And in 182 1 : '■'■ And after all, what is the higher society of England ? According to my own experience and to all that I have seen and heard (and I have lived there in the very highest and what is called the best) no way of life can be more corrupt. ... In England the only homage which they pay to virtue is hypocrisy. I speak of course of the tone of high life, — the middle ranks may be very virtuous."

And once again in a passage in his *' Letter on Bowles' Strictures on Pope " :

"The truth is that in these days the gTZXid. primuni mobile oi England is c^nt ; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral ; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. It is the fashion, and while it lasts will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the time. I say cant, because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions ; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer and more divided amongst themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum."

Byron certainly was not one of those who exist only by taking the tone of the time. However mixed were his motives, and however exaggerated the indictment he draws, the whole course of his life, as of his writings, was sincerely in protest against what was fundamentally outworn and false and hypocritical in the social organization of the day. The smug unintelligence of the

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contemporary treatment of Byron alone is sufficient to furnish the measure of the age.

IV

The substance of Byron's criticism of life, translated into prose, is mainly interesting from the historical point of view and in its relation to his times. The high revolutionary spirit, the passionate outcry against all that imposes upon and enslaves the human will, the yearning after an ideal quite other than and different from that towards which most human life is aiming, the apotheosis of struggle and energy and boundless force, which mark Byron at his greatest, are rather matters of spirit than of substance, and can be felt and recognized as interpenetrating his poetry, but cannot be subtracted and isolated from it.

Among the positive ideas of Byron's mind, among the few fixed principles ^ to which he was constant, a «^ love of liberty in all the senses of the word and a t sympathy with freedom and free institutions were perhaps the most constant. And this in spite of certain deductions that must be allowed on the score of the more superficial prejudices engendered by Byron's aristocratic training and associations. In this matter Byron thoroughly attested his sincerity by his acts, in his short parliamentary career, in his participation in the Carbonari movement in Italy, as well as by his

^ " Lord Byron's was a versatile and still a stubborn mind ; it wavered, but always returned to certain fixed principles." (Colonel Stanhope — associated with Byron in Greece — as quoted in Moore's Life of Byron.)

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self-devotion and fatal self-sacrifice in the cause of Greek emancipation. The superficial Byron, Byron the lord, the Byron of the letters and the controversial tracts, may at times appear as a lukewarm republican. As, for example, when in the course of his controversy with Southey he writes as follows:

''It is the fashion to attribute everything to the French Revolution and the French Revolution to everything but its real cause. That cause is obvious — the government exacted too much, and the people could neither give nor bear more. . . . Acts, — acts on the part of government, and not w^ritings against them, have caused the past convulsions, and are tending to the future. I look upon such as inevitable, thovigh no revolutionist : I wish to see the English constitution restored, and not destroyed. Bom an aristocrat, and naturally one by temper, with the greater part of my present property in the funds, what have / to gain by a revolution? "

But with this utterance should bo compared what Byron wrote to Leigh Hunt in 1816 explaining why he was not more active in Parliament. The corruption and conservatism of the House, he hints, make it useless for him to address it,

''feeling, as I trust I do, independently. However, when a proper spirit is manifested ' without doors, ' I will endeavour not to be idle within. Do you think such a time is coming ? Methinks there are gleams of it. My forefathers were on the other side of the question in Charles' days, and the fruit of it was a title and the loss of an enormous property. If the old struggle comes on, I may lose the one, and shall never regain the other ; but no matter : there are things, even in this world, better than either."

Or again, when in 1821 he writes:

"There must be an universal republic, — and there ought to be." Or his enthusiasm for the liberation of Italy:

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"It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object — the very poetry of politics. Only think — a free Italy ! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus."