George Gordon Byron (born 1788) who succeeded in boyhood to the title of Lord Byron, was the son of a wild father, John Byron, and of a mother as much wilder as the blood of the Gordons of Gight, in Aberdeenshire, could make her. Of all "the gay Gordons" her family carried to the most extreme point the least estimable and more ferocious qualities of their glorious fighting clan. It is impossible to judge by a common measure the child of John Byron and Catherine Gordon. Byron was a man of all-conquering personal beauty, and great strength, marred by a painful and disfiguring blemish of lameness; and possessed by rather than possessing an intellectual fire that burned lawlessly where it listed.
At Harrow, Byron was, as always, inordinately conscious of his title; he was passionately affectionate, sullen, capricious, and, despite his lameness, played for the school against Eton.[1] When at Harrow, Byron, who from the age of 8 was often in love, lost his heart to a girl older than himself, Miss Mary Chaworth, who married Mr. Musters in 1805. On this affection, among others, he never ceased to brood and write verses: now protesting that he had been "jilted," and now denying the charge.
At Cambridge, Byron was most noted for insubordination, and contempt of the dons. His earliest volume of verse, "Hours of Idleness" (1807-1808, first privately printed in various forms), which showed, some promise, in places, was attacked in the "Edinburgh Review"; the trifle was noticed because the author had a title, and Jeffrey, in the words of Thackeray's bargee, "liked wopping a lord". This lord countered heavily, in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809).
For a satirist of 21 this is a fine exhibition of hard hitting in every direction. On looking through a number of his works later, Byron pronounced his satire to be the best of them. Byron's feud extended to the whole of his mother's country, and he did not spare Scott, who merely remarked to a friend that the satirist was "a young whelp". Sir Walter was not the man to be dragged into a quarrel of words, and, in his own phrase, would rather meet an opponent "where the muircock was Bailie".
Between 1809 and 1811 Byron voyaged about the borders of the Grecian sea, doing and suffering what adventures and misfortunes nobody precisely knows. In 1812 appeared the two first cantos of his "Childe Harold," in Spenserian verse, and Byron, in his own phrase, "awoke one day to find himself famous". Here was a poetical satirical picture of Spain and the Levant, here was living romance with a living young lord for the hero; a peer of a reckless and defiant character; as beautiful as a fallen angel. This was more thrilling than lays of the moss-troopers and Scottish kingly adventurers of the remote past, and Scott frankly owned that he "was bet" by the brilliant young rival with whom he was, henceforth, on the best of terms. Sir Walter produced but one more romance in rhyme, while Byron was the most enthusiastic admirer of Sir Walter's novels. Indeed it is to Scott's descriptions, with their serene tolerance, sympathy, and charity, that we must look for the best portrait of Byron, at his best. Of Byron at his worst we have enough in some of his own letters, in a very few of Shelley's, and in the "revelations" published in an evil hour by Leigh Hunt.
While a "lion," as the term was then used, in society, a conqueror of hearts, a dandy, and a student of the noble art of self-defence under "Gentleman Jackson," Byron wrote and published his Oriental tales in imitation of Scott's measures. The history of these poems (1813-1816) is certainly a veiled revelation of Byron's life during these strange years. In 1818, two years after their separation, his wife wrote to another lady that "egotism is the vital principle of his imagination, which it is difficult for him to kindle on any subject with which his own character and interests are not identified"; but that he veiled "his poetical disclosures" by "introducing fictitious incidents, and changes of scene and time".
"The Giaour" (1813) grew, in successive editions (5 June-27 November), from 800 to more than 1300 lines, and the additions contained, like "The Bride of Abydos", cryptic references to Byron's own loves and attendant remorses during that period. To these affairs many dark references occur in his Letters and Journal, from August, 1813, to March, or later, in 1814. Byron always rushed into print at the earliest moment, in the new editions of "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos" (written in a week of passion, November, 1814), "The Corsair," "Lara" (1814), and the separate lyrics published with each of these. It is not very difficult, but it is neither pleasant nor profitable, to disentangle history from fiction in these "poetical disclosures". The "Siege of Corinth," and "Parisina" were written in Byron's year of married life. The famous passage in "The Giaour"—
He who hath bent him o'er the dead.
is compared, by Byron's latest Editor, with a passage in Mrs. Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho," and Mrs. Radcliffe appears to have been a common source of Byron's inspiration. Between "He who hath bent" and the poet's return to "He" and to the structure of the sentence, twenty lines interfere; so hurried is the composition. The magnificent rhetoric of "Clime of the unforgotten brave," the waking chant of Greek freedom, was an addition to the second edition.
None of these poems of 1813-1816 can perhaps now be read with the enthusiasm which greeted their first appearance. Of "The Corsair" 10,000 copies were sold on the first day of publication. The extreme rapidity of the composition, "the fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse," as Byron says, adding that Scott alone "had triumphed over it," and something theatrical in the Giaours and Turks, Zuleikas and Leilas, no longer command intense interest. Byron himself saw the objections to the facile measures in narrative poetry; in blank verse he feared to find "a rough and barren rock," and in "The Corsair" he tried "the good old and now neglected heroic couplet". He always maintained that the age of the heroic couplet was the great age of English poetry, that Pope was its chief, and that the new "romantic" movement was a blunder. He was conscious that his strength lay in satire but his passionate nature, and the fashion set by Scott, combined to lead him into romantic narrative verse.