On the 29th of February the first and second cantos of Childe Harold appeared. An early copy was sent to Mrs. Leigh, with the inscription: "To Augusta, my dearest sister and my best friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved, this volume is presented by her father's son and most affectionate brother, B." The book ran through seven editions in four weeks. The effect of the first edition of Burns, and the sale of Scott's Lays, are the only parallels in modern poetic literature to this success. All eyes were suddenly fastened on the author, who let his satire sleep, and threw politics aside, to be the romancer of his day and for two years the darling of society. Previous to the publition, Mr. Moore confesses to have gratified his lordship with the expression of the fear that Childe Harold was too good for the age. Its success was due to the reverse being the truth. It was just on the level of its age. Its flowing verse, defaced by rhymical faults perceptible only to finer ears, its prevailing sentiment, occasional boldness relieved by pleasing platitudes, its half affected rakishness, here and there elevated by a rush as of morning air, and its frequent richness—not yet, as afterwards, splendour—of description, were all appreciated by the fashionable London of the Regency; while the comparatively mild satire, not keen enough to scarify, only gave a more piquant flavour to the whole. Byron's genius, yet in the green leaf, was not too far above the clever masses of pleasure-loving manhood by which it was surrounded. It was natural that the address on the reopening of Drury Lane theatre should be written by "the world's new joy"—the first great English poet-peer; as natural as that in his only published satire of the period he should inveigh against almost the only amusement in which he could not share. The address was written at the request of Lord Holland, when of some hundred competitive pieces none had been found exactly suitable—a circumstance which gave rise to the famous parodies entitled The Rejected Addresses—and it was thought that the ultimate choice would conciliate all rivalry. The care which Byron bestowed on the correction of the first draft of this piece, is characteristic of his habit of writing off his poems at a gush, and afterwards carefully elaborating them.
The Waltz was published anonymously in April, 1813. It was followed in May by the Giaour, the first of the flood of verse romances which, during the three succeeding years, he poured forth with impetuous fluency, and which were received with almost unrestrained applause. The plots and sentiments and imagery are similar in them all. The Giaour steals the mistress of Hassan, who revenges his honour by drowning her. The Giaour escapes; returns, kills Hassan, and then goes to a monastery. In the Bride of Abydos, published in the December of the same year, Giaffir wants to marry his daughter Zuleika to Carasman Pasha. She runs off with Selim, her reputed brother—in reality her cousin, and so at last her legitimate lover. They are caught; he is slain in fight; she dies, to slow music. In the Corsair, published January, 1814, Conrad, a pirate, "linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes!" is beloved by Medora, who on his predatory expeditions, sits waiting for him (like Hassan's and Sisera's mother) in a tower. On one of these he attacks Seyd Pasha, and is overborne by superior force; but Gulnare, a female slave of Seyd, kills her master, and runs off with Conrad, who finds Medora dead and vanishes. In Lara, the sequel to this—written in May and June, published in August—a man of mystery appears in the Morea, with a page, Kaled. After adventures worthy of Mrs. Radcliffe—from whose Schledoni the Giaour is said to have been drawn—Lara falls in battle with his deadly foe, Ezzelin, and turns out to be Conrad, while Kaled is of course Gulnare. The Hebrew Melodies, written in December, 1814, are interesting, in connexion with the author's early familiarity with the Old Testament, and from the force and music that mark the best of them; but they can hardly be considered an important contribution to the devotional verse of England. The Siege of Corinth and Parisina, composed after his marriage in the summer and autumn of 1815, appeared in the following year. The former is founded on the siege of the city, when the Turks took it from Menotti; but our attention is concentrated on Alp the renegade, another sketch from the same protoplastic ruffian, who leads on the Turks, is in love with the daughter of the governor of the city, tries to save her, but dies. The poem is frequently vigorous, but it ends badly. Parisina, though unequal, is on the whole a poem of a higher order than the others of the period. The trial scene exhibits some dramatic power, and the shriek of the lady mingling with Ugo's funeral dirge lingers in our ears, along with the convent bells—
In the grey square turret swinging,
With a deep sound, to and fro,
Heavily to the heart they go.
These romances belong to the same period of the author's poetic career as the first two cantos of Childe Harold. They followed one another like brilliant fireworks. They all exhibit a command of words, a sense of melody, and a flow of rhythm and rhyme, which mastered Moore and even Scott on their own ground. None of them are wanting in passages, as "He who hath bent him o'er the dead," and the description of Alp leaning against a column, which strike deeper than any verse of either of those writers. But there is an air of melodrama in them all. Harmonious delights of novel readers, they will not stand against the winnowing wind of deliberate criticism. They harp on the same string, without the variations of a Paganini. They are potentially endless reproductions of one phase of an ill-regulated mind—the picture of the same quasi-melancholy vengeful man, who knows no friend but a dog, and reads on the tombs of the great only "the glory and the nothing of a name," the exile who cannot flee from himself, "the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind," who has not loved the world nor the world him,—
Whose heart was form'd for softness, warp'd by wrong,
Betray'd too early, and beguiled too long—
all this, decies repetita, grows into a weariness and vexation. Mr. Carlyle harshly compares it to the screaming of a meat-jack. The reviewers and the public of the time thought differently. Jeffrey, penitent for the early faux pas of his Review, as Byron remained penitent for his answering assault, writes of Lara, "Passages of it may be put into competition with anything that poetry has produced in point either of pathos or energy." Moore—who afterwards wrote, not to Byron, that seven devils had entered into Manfred—professes himself "enraptured with it." Fourteen thousand copies of the Corsair wore sold in a day. But hear the author's own half-boast, half-apology: "Lara I wrote while undressing after coming home from balls and masquerades, in the year of revelry 1814. The Bride was written in four, the Corsair in ten days. This I take to he a humiliating confession, as it proves my own want of judgment in publishing, and the public's in reading, things which cannot have stamina for permanence."
The pecuniary profits accruing to Byron from his works began with Lara, for which he received 700_l_. He had made over to Mr. Dallas, besides other gifts to the same ungrateful recipient, the profits of Harold, amounting to 600_l_, and of the Corsair, which brought 525_l_. The proceeds of the Giaour and the Bride were also surrendered.
During this period, 1813-1816, he had become familiar with all the phases of London society, "tasted their pleasures," and, towards the close, "felt their decay." His associates in those years were of two classes—men of the world, and authors. Fêted and courted in all quarters, he patronized the theatres, became in 1815 a member of the Drury Lane Committee, "liked the dandies," including Beau Brummell, and was introduced to the Regent. Their interview, in June 1812, in the course of which the latter paid unrestrained compliments to Harold and the poetry of Scott, is naively referred to by Mr. Moore "as reflecting even still more honour on the Sovereign himself than on the two poets." Byron, in a different spirit, writes to Lord Holland: "I have now great hope, in the event of Mr. Pye's decease, of warbling truth at Court, like Mr. Mallet of indifferent memory. Consider, one hundred marks a year! besides the wine and the disgrace." We can hardly conceive the future author of the Vision of Judgment writing odes to dictation. He does not seem to have been much fascinated with the first gentleman of Europe, whom at no distant date he assailed in the terrible "Avatar," and left the laureateship to Mr. Southey.
Among leaders in art and letters he was brought into more or less intimate contact with Sir Humphry Davy, the Edgeworths, Sir James Mackintosh, Colman the dramatic author, the older Kean, Monk Lewis, Grattan, Curran, and Madame de Staël. Of a meeting of the last two he remarks, "It was like the confluence of the Rhone and the Sâone, and they were both so ugly that I could not help wondering how the best intellects of France and Ireland could have taken up respectively such residences."
About this time a communication from Mr Murray in reference to the meeting with the Regent led to a letter from Sir Walter Scott to Lord Byron, the beginning of a life-long friendship, and one of the most pleasing pages of biography. These two great men were for a season perpetually pitted against one another, as the foremost competitors for literary favour. When Rokeby came out, contemporaneously with the Giaour, the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge ran races to catch the first copies, and laid bets as to which of the rivals would win. During the anti-Byronic fever of 1840-1860 they were perpetually contrasted as the representatives of the manly and the morbid schools. A later sentimentalism has affected to despise the work of both. The fact therefore that from an early period the men themselves knew each other as they were, is worth illustrating.