Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 07

by Unknown

LORD GEORGE GORDON BYRON.

So he was, but not by consistent hypocritical premeditation; for his pose was not so much of set purpose as in obedience to a false education, an undisciplined temper, and a changing mind. He was guided by the impulse of the moment. I think it a supportable thesis that every age, every wide and popular movement, finds its supreme expression in a Poet. Byron was the mouthpiece of a certain phase of his time. He expressed it, and the expression remains and is important as a record, like the French Revolution and the battle of Waterloo. Whatever the judgment in history may be of the value to civilization of this eighteenth-century movement extending into the nineteenth, in politics, sociology, literature, with all its recklessness, morbidness, hopefulness, Byron represented it. He was the poet of Revolt. He sounded the note of intemperate, unconsidered defiance in the 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.' This satire was audacious; many of its judgments were unjust; but its wit and poetic vigor announced a new force in English literature, and the appearance of a man who was abundantly able to take care of himself and secure respectful treatment. In moments afterward he expressed regret for it, or for portions of it, and would have liked to soften its personalities. He was always susceptible to kindness, and easily won by the good opinion of even a declared enemy. He and Moore became lifelong friends, and between him and Walter Scott there sprang up a warm friendship, with sincere reciprocal admiration of each other's works. Only on politics and religion did they disagree, but Scott thought Byron's Liberalism not very deep: "It appeared to me," he said, "that the pleasure it afforded him as a vehicle of displaying his wit and satire against individuals in office was at the bottom of this habit of thinking. At heart I would have termed Byron a patrician on principle." Scott shared Goethe's opinion of Byron's genius:—"He wrote from impulse, never for effect, and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time, and of half a century before me. We have many men of high poetic talents, but none of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural waters." It has been a fashion of late years to say that both Byron and Scott have gone by; I fancy it is a case of "not lost, but gone before." Among the men satirized in the 'Bards' was Wordsworth. Years after, Byron met him at a dinner, and on his return told his wife that the "one feeling he had for him from the beginning to the end of the visit was reverence." Yet he never ceased to gird at him in his satires. The truth is, that consistency was never to be expected in Byron. Besides, he inherited none of the qualities needed for an orderly and noble life. He came of a wild and turbulent race.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, the sixth of the name, was born in London, January 22d, 1788, and died at Missolonghi, Greece, April 19th, 1824. His father, John Byron, a captain in the Guards, was a heartless profligate with no redeeming traits of character. He eloped with Amelia D'Arcy, wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen, and after her divorce from her husband married her and treated her like a brute. One daughter of this union was Augusta, Byron's half-sister, who married Colonel Leigh, and who was the good angel of the poet, and the friend of Lady Byron until there was a rupture of their relations in 1830 on a matter of business. A year after the death of his first wife, John Byron entrapped and married Catherine Gordon of Gicht,—a Scotch heiress, very proud of her descent from James I. of Scotland,—whose estate he speedily squandered. In less than two years after the birth of George, John Byron ran away from his wife and his creditors, and died in France.

Mrs. Byron was a wholly undisciplined and weak woman, proud of her descent, wayward and hysterical. She ruined the child, whom she alternately petted and abused. She interfered with his education and fixed him in all his bad tendencies. He never learned anything until he was sent away from her to Harrow. He was passionate, sullen, defiant of authority, but very amenable to kindness; and with a different mother his nobler qualities, generosity, sense of justice, hatred of hypocrisy, and craving for friendship would have been developed, and the story of his life would be very different from what it is. There is no doubt that the regrettable parts of the careers of both Byron and Shelley are due to lack of discipline and loving-kindness in their early years. Byron's irritability and bad temper were aggravated by a physical defect, which hindered him from excelling in athletic sports of which he was fond, and embittered all his life. Either at birth or by an accident one of his feet was malformed or twisted so as to affect his gait, and the evil was aggravated by surgical attempts to straighten the limb. His sensitiveness was increased by unfeeling references to it. His mother used to call him "a lame brat," and his pride received an incurable wound in the heartless remark of Mary Chaworth, "Do you think I could care for that lame boy?" Byron was two years her junior, but his love for her was the purest passion of his life, and it has the sincerest expression in the famous 'Dream.' Byron's lameness, and his morbid fear of growing obese, which led him all his life into reckless experiments in diet, were permanent causes of his discontent and eccentricity. In 1798, by the death of its incumbent, Byron became the heir of Newstead Abbey and the sixth Lord Byron. He had great pride in the possession of this crumbling and ruinous old pile. After its partial repair he occupied it with his mother, and from time to time in his stormy life; but in 1818 it was sold for £90,000, which mostly went to pay debts and mortgages. Almost all the influences about Byron's early youth were such as to foster his worst traits, and lead to those eccentricities of conduct and temper which came at times close to insanity. But there was one exception, his nurse Mary Gray, to whom he owed his intimate knowledge of the Bible, and for whom he always retained a sincere affection. It is worth noting also, as an indication of his nature, that he always had the love of his servants.

A satisfactory outline of Byron's life and work is found in Mr. John Nichol's 'Byron' in the 'English Men of Letters' series. Owing to his undisciplined home life, he was a backward boy in scholarship. In 1805 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he resided irregularly for three years, reading much in a desultory manner, but paying slight attention to the classics and mathematics; so that it was a surprise that he was able to take his degree. But he had keen powers of observation and a phenomenal memory. Notwithstanding his infirmity he was distinguished in many athletic sports, he was fond of animals and such uncomfortable pets as bears and monkeys, and led generally an irregular life. The only fruit of this period in literature was the 'Hours of Idleness,' which did not promise much, and would be of little importance notwithstanding many verses of great lyric skill, had it not been for the slashing criticism on it, imputed to Lord Brougham, in the Edinburgh Review, which provoked the 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.' This witty outburst had instant success with the public.

In 1809 Byron came of age, and went abroad on a two-years' pilgrimage to Spain, Malta, Greece, and Constantinople, giving free rein to his humor for intrigue and adventure in the "lands of the sun," and gathering the material for many of his romances and poems. He became at once the picturesque figure of his day,—a handsome, willful poet, sated with life, with no regret for leaving his native land; the conqueror of hearts and the sport of destiny. The world was speedily full of romances of his recklessness, his intrigues, his diablerie, and his munificence. These grew, upon his return in 1811 and the publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold.' All London was at his feet. He had already made his first speech in the House of Lords espousing the Liberal side. The second speech was in favor of Catholic emancipation. The fresh and novel poem, which Byron himself had not at first thought worth offering a publisher, fell in with the humor and moral state of the town. It was then that he made the oft-quoted remark, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." The poem gave new impetus to the stories of his romantic life, and London seemed to idolize him as much for his follies and his liaisons as for his genius. He plunged into all the dissipation of the city. But this period from 1811 to 1815 was also one of extraordinary intellectual fertility. In rapid succession he gave to the press poems and romances,—'The Giaour,' 'The Bride of Abydos,' 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' the 'Hebrew Melodies,' 'The Siege of Corinth,' and 'Parisina.' Some of the 'Hebrew Melodies' are unequaled in lyric fire. The romances are all taking narratives, full of Oriental passion, vivid descriptions of scenery, and portraitures of female loveliness and dark-browed heroes, often full of melody, but melodramatic; and in substance do not bear analysis. But they still impress with their flow of vitality, their directness and power of versification, and their frequent beauty.

Sated with varied dissipation, worn out with the flighty adoration of Lady Caroline Lamb, and urged by his friends to marry and settle down, Byron married (January 2d, 1815) Anne Isabella, daughter of Sir Ralph Milbanke. He liked but did not love her; and she was no doubt fascinated by the reputation of the most famous man in Europe, and perhaps indulged the philanthropic hope that she could reform the literary Corsair. On the 10th of December was born Augusta Ada, the daughter whom Byron celebrates in his verse and to whom he was always tenderly attached. On the 15th of January, five weeks after her daughter's birth, Lady Byron left home with the child to pay a visit to her family, dispatching to her husband a playfully tender letter. Shortly after, he was informed by her father and by herself that she did not intend ever to return to him. It is useless to enter into the controversy as to the cause of this separation. In the light of the latest revelations, the better opinion seems to be that it was a hopeless incongruity that might have been predicted from the characters of the two. It seems that Lady Byron was not quite so amiable as she was supposed to be, and in her later years she was subject to hallucinations. Byron, it must be admitted, was an impossible husband for any woman, most of all for any woman who cared for the social conventions. This affair brought down upon Byron a storm of public indignation which drove him from England. The society which had petted him and excused his vagaries and violations of all decency, now turned upon him with rage and made the idol responsible for the foolishness of his worshipers. To the end of his life, neither society nor the critics ever forgave him, and did not even do justice to his genius. His espousal of the popular cause in Europe embittered the conservative element, and the freedom of speculation in such masterly works as 'Cain' brought upon him the anathemas of orthodox England. Henceforth in England his poetry was judged by his liberal and unorthodox opinions. This vituperation rose to its height when Byron dared to satirize George III., and to expose mercilessly in 'Don Juan' the hypocrisy of English life.

On the 25th of April, 1816, Byron left England, never to return. And then opened the most brilliant period of his literary career. Instead of being crushed by the situation, Byron's warlike spirit responded to it with defiance, and his suffering and his anger invoked the highest qualities of his extraordinary genius. His career in Italy was as wild and dissipated as ever. Strange to say, the best influence in his irregular life was the Countess Guiccioli, who persuaded him at one time to lay aside the composition of 'Don Juan,' and in whose society he was drawn into ardent sympathy with the Italian liberals. For the cause of Italian unity he did much when it was in its darkest period, and his name is properly linked in this great achievement with those of Mazzini and Cavour. It was in Switzerland, before Byron settled in Venice, that he met Shelley, with whom he was thereafter to be on terms of closest intimacy. Each had a mutual regard for the genius of the other, but Shelley placed Byron far above himself. It was while sojourning near the Shelleys on the Lake of Geneva that Byron formed a union with Claire Clairmont, the daughter of Mrs. Clairmont, who became William Godwin's second wife. The result of this intimacy was a natural daughter, Allegra, for whose maintenance and education Byron provided, and whose early death was severely felt by him.