Like Scott, Byron was a prolific poet; and he owes to Scott the general suggestion and much of the success of his tales in verse. His powers of description were original and great: he adopted the new romantic tone, while in his more studied works he was an imitator and a champion of a former age, and a contemner of his own.
Early Life of Byron.—The Honorable George Gordon Byron, afterwards Lord Byron, was born in London on the 22d of January, 1788. While he was yet an infant, his father—Captain Byron—a dissipated man, deserted his mother; and she went with her child to live upon a slender pittance at Aberdeen. She was a woman of peculiar disposition, and was unfortunate in the training of her son. She alternately petted and quarrelled with him, and taught him to emulate her irregularities of temper. On account of an accident at his birth, he had a malformation in one of his feet, which, producing a slight limp in his gait through life, rendered his sensitive nature quite unhappy, the signs of which are to be discerned in his drama, The Deformed Transformed. From the age of five years he went to school at Aberdeen, and very early began to exhibit traits of generosity, manliness, and an imperious nature: he also displayed great quickness in those studies which pleased his fancy.
In 1798, when he was eleven years old, his grand-uncle, William, the fifth Lord Byron, died, and was succeeded in the title and estates by the young Gordon Byron, who was at once removed with his mother to Newstead Abbey. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he was well esteemed by his comrades, but was not considered forward in his studies.
He seems to have been of a susceptible nature, for, while still a boy, he fell in love several times. His third experience in this way was undoubtedly the strongest of his whole life. The lady was Miss Mary Chaworth, who did not return his affection. His last interview with her he has powerfully described in his poem called The Dream. From Harrow he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he lived an idle and self-indulgent life, reading discursively, but not studying the prescribed course. As early as November, 1806, before he was nineteen, he published his first volume, Poems on Various Occasions, for private distribution, which was soon after enlarged and altered, and presented to the public as Hours of Idleness, a Series of Poems Original and Translated, by George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Minor. These productions, although by no means equal to his later poems, are not without merit, and did not deserve the exceedingly severe criticism they met with from the Edinburgh Review. The critics soon found that they had bearded a young lion: in his rage, he sprang out upon the whole literary craft in a satire, imitated from Juvenal, called The English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he ridicules and denounces the very best poets of the day furiously but most uncritically. That his conduct was absurd and unjust, he himself allowed afterwards; and he attempted to call in and destroy all the copies of this work.
Childe Harold and Eastern Tales.—In March, 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords, where he did not accomplish much. He took up his residence at Newstead Abbey, his ancestral seat, most of which was in a ruinous condition; and after a somewhat disorderly life there, he set out on his continental tour, spending some time at Lisbon, Cadiz, Gibraltar, Malta, and in Greece. On his return, after two years' absence, he brought a summary of his travels in poetical form,—the first part of Childe Harold; and also a more elaborated poem entitled Hints from Horace. Upon the former he set little value; but he thought the latter a noble work. The world at once reversed his decision. The satire in the Latin vein is scarcely read; while to the first cantos of Childe Harold it was due that, in his own words, "he woke up one morning and found himself famous." As fruits of the eastern portion of his travels, we have the romantic tale, The Giaour, published in 1811, and The Bride of Abydos, which appeared in 1813. The popularity of these oriental stories was mainly due to their having been conceived on the spots they describe. In 1814 he issued The Corsair, perhaps the best of these sensational stories; and with singular versatility, in the same year, inspired by the beauty of the Jewish history, he produced The Hebrew Melodies, some of which are fervent, touching, and melodious. Late in the same year Lara was published, in the same volume with Mr. Rogers's Jacqueline, which it threw completely into the shade. Thus closed one distinct period of his life and of his authorship. A change came over the spirit of his dream.
Unhappy Marriage.—In 1815, urged by his friends, and thinking it due to his position, he married Miss Milbanke; but the union was without affection on either side, and both were unhappy. One child, a daughter, was born to them; and a year had hardly passed when they were separated, by mutual consent and for reasons never truly divulged; and which, in spite of modern investigations, must remain mysterious. He was licentious, extravagant, of a violent temper: his wife was of severe morals, cold, and unsympathetic. We need not advance farther into the horrors recently suggested to the world. The blame has rested on Byron; and, at the time, the popular feeling was so strong, that it may be said to have driven him from England. It awoke in him a dark misanthropy which returned English scorn with an unnatural hatred. He sojourned at various places on the continent. At Geneva he wrote a third canto of Childe Harold, and the touching story of Bonnivard, entitled The Prisoner of Chillon, and other short poems.
In 1817 he was at Venice, where he formed a connection with the Countess Guiccioli, to the disgrace of both. In Venice he wrote a fourth canto of Childe Harold, the story of Mazeppa, the first two cantos of Don Juan, and two dramas, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari.
For two years he lived at Ravenna, where he wrote some of his other dramas, and several cantos of Don Juan. In 1821 he removed to Pisa; thence, after a short stay, to Genoa, still writing dramas and working at Don Juan.
Philhellenism: His Death.—The end of his misanthropy and his debaucheries was near; but his story was to have a ray of sunset glory—his death was to be connected with a noble effort and an exhibition of philanthropic spirit which seem in some degree to palliate his faults. Unlike some writers who find in his conduct only a selfish whim, we think that it casts a beautiful radiance upon the early evening of a stormy life. The Greeks were struggling for independence from Turkish tyranny: Byron threw himself heart and soul into the movement, received a commission from the Greek government, recruited a band of Suliotes, and set forth gallantly to do or die in the cause of Grecian freedom: he died, but not in battle. He caught a fever of a virulent type, from his exposure, and after very few days expired, on the 19th of April, 1824, amid the mourning of the nation. Of this event, Macaulay—no mean or uncertain critic—could say, in his epigrammatical style: "Two men have died within our recollection, who, at a time of life at which few people have completed their education, had raised themselves, each in his own department, to the height of glory. One of them died at Longwood; the other at Missolonghi."
Estimate of His Poetry.—In giving a brief estimate of his character and of his works, we may begin by saying that he represents, in clear lineaments, the nobleman, the traveller, the poet, and the debauchee, of the beginning of the nineteenth century. In all his works he unconsciously depicts himself. He is in turn Childe Harold, Lara, the Corsair, and Don Juan. He affected to despise the world's opinion so completely that he has made himself appear worse than he really was—more profane, more intemperate, more licentious. It is equally true that this tendency, added to the fact that he was a handsome peer, had much to do with the immediate popularity of his poems. There was also a paradoxical vanity, which does not seem easily reconcilable with his misanthropy, that thus led him to reproduce himself in a new dress in his dramas and tales. He paraded himself as if, after all, he did value the world's opinion.