THE FIRST LORD OF LETTERS
Fortunately not all the poets of England let themselves be frightened
into reaction by the French revolution.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born in 1788. His father was a rake and
blackguard. “Your mother is a fool,” said a schoolmate; and Byron
answered, “I know it.” This, you must admit, was a poor start in life
for a boy. He had a club foot, concerning which he was frightfully
sensitive; but in other ways he was divinely handsome, and much sought
after by the ladies; so he alternated between fits of solitude and
melancholy, and other fits of amorous excess. Being a lord, he was a
great person all his life. Being a man of genius, he enormously
increased his greatness. He lived always before the world, in one
sublime pose or another, and composed whole epics about himself and his
moods.
He traveled, and became a cosmopolitan figure, and wild tales were
spread concerning his adventures in Europe. Then he came back to
England, and published a poem, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which made
such a sensation as Britain had never known before. “I awoke one morning
and found myself famous,” he said. But he affected to despise this fame;
he, a noble lord, must not be confused with vulgar writing fellows. He
would toss a manuscript to his publishers with a careless
gesture--though the manuscript might be worth one or two thousand
pounds. I cannot recall any high-up aristocrat who achieved literary
greatness to compare with Byron; he was the first lord of letters of
that age and of all ages.
He composed a series of verse romances, tales of Eastern despots and
their crimes, in the fashion of the day. They were full of melody and
rhythm, and their heroes were always that melancholy, sublime, outlaw
figure which we known as “Byronic.” This autobiographic hero was eagerly
taken up by the fashionable world, especially the female part. One great
lady, already supplied with a husband, adored the poet wildly, then
despised him, threatened to kill him, attacked him in a novel, and
finally, when she met his funeral cortege in the street, fainted and
went insane.
He married an heiress, quite cynically for her money, spent the money,
and had everything he owned attached by his creditors. Then his wife
left him, with hints of mysterious wickedness. He was overwhelmed by a
storm of abuse, and went into exile for the rest of his life. The wife
never told her story, but many years later the American novelist,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, published what she claimed was the truth, that
Byron had been guilty of incest with his half-sister. His lordship had
by that time become a “standard author,” and the critics were outraged
by Mrs. Stowe’s indiscretion; even now they do not speak out loud about
the matter.
In Switzerland the poet met Shelley, the best influence that ever came
into his life. He recognized this new friend as the purest soul he knew,
and praised his character ardently in his letters, though he never paid
the public tribute to Shelley’s writings which they deserved. Shelley
turned Byron’s thoughts to politics, and he wrote “The Prisoner of
Chillon,” one of the noblest of his poems. But then he went off to
Venice, and amused himself with numerous intrigues, and got fat. He
began “Don Juan,” a new kind of epic poem, mocking itself, as well as
everything else. It is a hateful picture of a hateful world, but it has
almost infinite verve and energy, and we recognize in it a great spirit
trying to lift itself above an age of corruption by the instrument of
scorn.
It was the time of the “Holy Alliance,” and the few men who cared for
freedom were living in exile or hiding from the police. Byron associated
with these revolutionists, and gave them both money and his name. He
became a neighbor of Shelley’s, and again immersed himself in politics
and literature. He wrote his drama “Cain,” in which he deals with the
problems of human fate from the revolutionary point of view. To the
religionists of the time, this was most awful blasphemy; the poet
Southey frothed at the mouth, and wrote his “Vision of Judgment,”
portraying the damnation of Byron. His angry lordship came back with a
poem of the same name--so effective that the publisher was jailed for
six months! One stanza, describing the poet laureate, will serve for a
sample of Byron’s fighting mood:
He had written praises of a regicide;
He had written praises of all kings whatever;
He had written for republics far and wide,
And then against them bitterer than ever:
For pantisocracy he once had cried
Aloud, a scheme less moral than ’twas clever;
Then grew a hearty anti-jacobin--
Had turned his coat--and would have turned his skin.
Byron had now become the voice of liberty against reaction throughout
Europe. And this was a brand new thing, seeming a kind of insanity to
the Tories. There had been an abundance of dissipated lords, but never
before a lord of revolt! Byron joined the secret society of the
Carbonari, and took part in their attempt to free Italy. When they
failed, he was not discouraged, but wrote: “There will be blood shed
like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the
end.” In those words we know the voice of a thinker and a man.
He was now thirty-five years of age, restless, tormented by a sense of
futility. The Greek people were carrying on a war for liberation against
the Turks, and Byron went to help them, and thus set a crown upon his
life. He died of a fever, early in the campaign; and so today, when we
think of him, we think not merely of a nobleman and a poet, but of a man
who laid down wealth and fame and worldly position for the greatest of
all human ideals.
In the beginning he had written to amuse himself and his readers; he had
catered to their sentimentalism and their folly. But in the end he came
to despise his readers, and wrote only to shock them. They had made a
world of lies; and one man would tell them the truth. That is why today
we rank him as a world force in the history of letters. We are no longer
the least bit thrilled by his wickedness; we think of such things as
pathological and are moved only to pity. We do not see anything
picturesque about a great lord who travels over Europe with a train of
horses and carriages, dogs, fowls, monkeys, servants, and mistresses;
the Sunday supplements of our newspapers have over-supplied us with such
material. But we are interested in a poet who possessed a clear eye and
a clear brain, who saw the truth, and spoke it to all Europe, and helped
to set free the future of the race.