LORD BYRON (1788–1824)
1. His Life. George Gordon Byron, sixth Lord Byron, was as proud of his ancestry as he was of his poetry, and his ancestors were as extraordinary as was his poetry. They stretched back to the Norman Conquest, and included among them a notorious admiral, Byron’s grandfather. The poet’s father was a rake and a scoundrel. He married a Scottish heiress, Miss Gordon of Gight, whose money he was not long in squandering. Though the poet was born in London, his early years were passed in Aberdeen, his mother’s native place. At the age of ten he succeeded his grand-uncle in the title and in the possession of the ruinous Abbey of Newstead, and Scotland was left behind for ever. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, where he showed himself to be heir to the ancestral nature, dark and passionate, but relieved by humor and affection. All his life through Byron cultivated the somber and theatrical side of his disposition, which latterly became a byword; but there can be little doubt that his “Byronic” temperament was not entirely affected. His mother, a foolish, unbalanced woman, warped the boy’s temper still more by her frequent follies and frenzies. The recollection of the tortures he underwent in the fruitless effort to cure him of a malformity of his foot remained with him till his death.
Leaving the university (1807), he remained for a while at Newstead, where with a few congenial youths he plunged into orgies of puerile dissipation. In the fashion of the time, he gloried in the reputation he was acquiring for being a dare-devil, but he lived to pay for it. Wearying of loose delights, he traveled for a couple of years upon the Continent. He had previously taken his seat in the House of Lords, but made no mark in political affairs.
Then with a sudden bound he leaped into the limelight. His poem on his travels became all the rage. He found himself the darling of society, in which his youth, his title, his physical beauty, his wit, and his picturesque and romantic melancholy made him a marvel and a delight. He married a great heiress (1814), but after a year his wife left him, for reasons that were not publicly divulged. Regarding his conduct dark rumors grew apace; his popularity waned, and in the face of a storm of abuse he left England for good (1816). For the last eight years of his life he wandered about the Continent, visiting Italy, and there meeting Shelley. Finally the cause of Greek independence caught his fancy. He devoted his money, which was inconsiderable, and the weight of his name, which was gigantic, to the Greeks, who proved to be very ungrateful allies. He died of fever at Missolonghi, and his body was given a grand funeral in the England that had cast him out.
2. His Poetry. Byron’s first volume was a juvenile effort, Hours of Idleness (1807), which was little more than the elegant trifling of a lord who condescends to be a minor poet. This frail production was roughly handled by The Edinburgh Review, and Byron, who never lacked spirit, retorted with some effect. He composed a satire in the style of Pope, calling it English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). The poem is immature, being often crudely expressed, and it throws abuse recklessly upon good writers and bad; but in the handling of the couplet it already shows some of the Byronic force and pungency. The poem is also of interest in that it lets us see how much he is influenced by the preceding age.
Next view in state, proud prancing on his roan,
The golden-crested haughty Marmion,
Now forging scrolls, now foremost in the fight,
Not quite a felon, yet but half a knight,
The gibbet or the field prepared to grace;
A mighty mixture of the great and base.
And think’st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance,
On public taste to foist thy stale romance,
Though Murray with his Miller may combine
To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line?
Then followed the two years of travel, which had their fruit in the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). The hero of the poem is a romantic youth, and is very clearly Byron himself. He is very grand and terrible, and sinister with the stain of a dark and awful past. He visits some of the popular beauty-spots of the Continent, which he describes in Spenserian stanzas of moderate skill and attractiveness. The poem is diffuse, but sometimes it can be terse and energetic; the style is halfheartedly old-fashioned, in deference to the stanza. Byron is to do much better things, but already he shows a real appreciation of nature, and considerable dexterity in the handling of his meter.
On, on the vessel flies, the land is gone,
And winds are rude in Biscay’s sleepless bay.
Four days are sped, but with the fifth, anon,
New shores descried make every bosom gay;
And Cintra’s mountain greets them on their way,
And Tagus dashing onward to the deep,
His fabled golden tribute bent to pay;
And soon on board the Lusian pilots leap.
And steer ’twixt fertile shores where yet few rustics reap.
Childe Harold brought its author a dower of fame, which in the next few years he was to squander to the uttermost. In the intervals of society functions he produced poetic tales in astonishing profusion: The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos in 1813, The Corsair and Lara in 1814, The Siege of Corinth and Parisina in 1815. These tales deal with the romantic scenes of the East; they almost uniformly reproduce the young Byronic hero of Childe Harold; and to a great extent they are mannered and stagy. Written in the couplet form, the verse is founded on that of the metrical tales of Scott, whom Byron was not long in supplanting in popular favor, although the masculine fervor of Scott’s poems is lacking from his work. In sentiment his lines are often sickly enough, yet they sometimes have a vehemence that might be mistaken for passion, and a tawdriness that imitates real beauty.
In 1816 Byron was hounded out of England, and his wanderings are chronicled in the third (1816) and fourth (1817) cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In meter and general scheme the poem is unaltered, but in spirit and style the new parts are very different from the first two cantos. The descriptions are firmer and terser, and are often graced with a fine simplicity; the old-fashioned mannerisms are entirely discarded; and the tone all through is deeper and more sincere. There is apparent an undercurrent of bitter pessimism that is only natural under the circumstances, though he dwells too lengthily upon his misfortunes. The following stanza is a fair specimen of this later and simpler style:
They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died;
The mountain village where his latter days
Went down the vale of years, and ’tis their pride—
An honest pride—and let it be their praise,
To offer to the passing stranger’s gaze
His mansion and his sepulchre; both plain
And venerably simple, such as raise
A feeling more accordant with his strain
Than if a pyramid formed his monumental fane.
During these years on the Continent he was not idle. Some of his longer poems are The Prisoner of Chillon (1816) and Mazeppa (1819), the last of his metrical tales. He also composed a large number of lyrics, most of them only mediocre in quality; and he added several great satirical poems, the most notable of which are Beppo (1818), The Vision of Judgment (1822), directed mainly against Southey, and, the longest of all, Don Juan.
In range, in vigor, and in effectiveness Don Juan ranks as one of the greatest of satirical poems. It was issued in portions during the years 1819–24, just as Byron composed it. It is a kind of picaresque novel cast into verse. The hero, like that of the picaresque novel, has many wanderings and adventures, the narration of which might go on interminably. At the time of its publication it was denounced by a shocked world as vile and immoral, and to a great extent it deserves the censure. In it Byron expresses the wrath that consumes him, and all the human race comes under the lash. The strength and flexibility of the satire are beyond question, and are freely revealed in bitter mockery, in caustic comment, and in burning rage. The stanzas, written in ottava rima, are as keen and supple as a tempered steel blade. The style is a kind of sublimated, half-colloquial prose, showing a disdainful abrogation of the finer poetical trappings; but in places it rises into passages of rare and lovely tenderness. When affliction came upon him, in the words of Lear he had vowed a vow:
No, I’ll not weep;
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Will break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep.
But sometimes the poet prevails over the satirist, and the mocking laughter is stifled with the sound of bitter weeping.
The first extract given below shows Byron in his bitter and cynical mood; the tone of the second and third is far removed from such asperity:
(1) Ovid’s a rake, as half his verses show him,
Anacreon’s morals are a still worse sample,
Catullus scarcely has a decent poem,
I don’t think Sappho’s Ode a good example,
Although Longinus tells us there is no hymn
Where the sublime soars forth on wings more ample;
But Virgil’s songs are pure, except that horrid one
Beginning with “Formosum Pastor Corydon.”
Lucretius’ irreligion is too strong
For early stomachs to prove wholesome food;
I can’t help thinking Juvenal was wrong,
Although no doubt his real intent was good,
For speaking out so plainly in his song,
So much indeed as to be downright rude;
And then what proper person can be partial
To all those nauseous epigrams of Martial?
(2) Round her she made an atmosphere of life;
The very air seemed lighter from her eyes,
They were so soft and beautiful, and rife
With all we can imagine of the skies,
As pure as Psyche ere she grew a wife—
Too pure even for the purest human ties;
Her overpowering presence made you feel
It would not be idolatry to kneel.
Her eyelashes, though dark as night, were tinged—
It is the country’s custom—but in vain;
For those large black eyes were so blackly fringed,
The glossy rebels mocked the jetty stain,
And in her native beauty stood avenged:
Her nails were touched with henna; but again
The power of art was turned to nothing, for
They could not look more rosy than before.
(3) Thus lived—thus died she; never more on her
Shall sorrow light or shame. She was not made
Through years or moons the inner weight to bear,
Which colder hearts endure till they are laid
By age in earth: her days and pleasures were
Brief, but delightful—such as had not stayed
Long with her destiny; but she sleeps well
By the sea-shore whereon she loved to dwell.
That isle is now all desolate and bare,
Its dwelling down, its tenants passed away;
None but her own and father’s grave is there
And nothing outward tells of human clay;
Ye could not know where lies a thing so fair;
No one is there to show, no tongue to say
What was; no dirge except the hollow seas
Mourns o’er the beauty of the Cyclades.
3. His Drama. Byron’s dramas are all blank-verse tragedies that were composed during the later stages of his career, when he was in Italy. The chief are Manfred (1817), Marino Faliero (1820), The Two Foscari and Cain (1821), and The Deformed Transformed (1824). In nearly all we have a hero of the Byronic type. In Cain, for example, we have the outcast who defies the censure of the world; in The Deformed Transformed there are thinly screened references to Byron’s own deformity. In this fashion he showed that he had little of the real dramatic faculty, for he could portray no character with any zeal unless it resembled himself. The blank verse has power and dignity, but it lacks the higher poetic inspiration.
4. Features of his Poetry. (a) For a man of his egotistical temper Byron’s lyrical gift is disappointingly meager. He wrote many tuneful and readable lyrics, such as She walks in Beauty and To Thyrza. His favorite theme draws on variations of the following mood:
Do thou, amid the fair white walls,
If Cadiz still be free,
At times, from out her latticed halls,
Look o’er the dark blue sea;
Then think upon Calypso’s isles,
Endeared by days gone by;
To others give a thousand smiles,
To me a single sigh.
In such lyrics he is merely sentimental, and the reader cannot avoid thinking that he is posturing before the world. When he attempts more elevated themes, as he does in The Isles of Greece, he is little better than a poetical tub-thumper. Of the genuine passionate lyric there is little trace in his poems.
(b) His satirical power is gigantic. In the expression of his scorn, a kind of sublime and reckless arrogance, he has the touch of the master. Yet in spite of his genius he has several defects. In the first place, his motive is to a very large extent personal, and so his scorn becomes one-sided. It is, however, a sign of the essential bigness of his mind that he hardly ever becomes mean and spiteful. Secondly, he lacks the deep vision of the supreme satirist, like Cervantes, who behind the shadows of the crimes and follies of men can see the pity of it all. In the third place, he is often deliberately outrageous. When he found how easily and deeply he could shock a certain class of people he went out of his way to shock them, and succeeded only too well. No doubt this satisfied Byron’s injured feelings, but it is a rather cheap and juvenile proceeding, and detracts from the solid value of his work.
(c) He treats nature in a rather lordly fashion, more as a humble helper in his poems than as a light and inspiration. In his later poems he agreeably modified this attitude; and his passion for the sea never paled.
(d) His style has been sufficiently revealed in the extracts we have given. He could modulate it with great skill to the purpose in hand. Dignified in his dramas, melodious in his songs, vigorous in his narratives, and stinging in his satires, he is hardly ever dull, seldom obscure, and always the master of his medium.
(e) A word is necessary regarding the fluctuations of his reputation. In his earlier manhood he was reckoned among the great poets; he lived to hear himself denounced, and his poetry belittled. After his death Victorian morality held up hands in horror over his iniquity, and his real merits were steadily decried. Since those days his reputation has been climbing back to take a stable position high above the second-rate poets. In some European countries he still ranks second to none among English poets. He broke down the labored insularity of the English, and he gave to non-English readers a clear and forcible example of what the English language can accomplish.