GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON

SCHERER says Byron "posed all his life long," and Matthew Arnold, catching Swinburne's phrase, speaks of Byron's "splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength." There is plenty of evidence to support both judgments. Byron himself, on looking in a mirror just after he had been sick, remarked to a friend, "How pale I look! I should like, I think, to die of a consumption; because then the women would all say, 'See that poor Byron, - how interesting he looks in dying!'" Almost whenever he got a chance he exposed his suffering heart to a compassionate humanity and talked of himself without modesty or reticence; hence what the Hon. Roden Noel has called his " gaudy charlatanry, blare of brass, and big bow-wowishness; - hence, too, when the suffering was real, what the Germans have aptly called Weltschmerz. There was, on the other hand, a dauntless Viking spirit in Byron's breast, a sincere opposition to tyranny and bigotry. This very characteristic, which was his deepest and most abiding, which made him hate the sham and falseness of himself as well as of others, is in both his life and his work the predominant note. It is on this, in fact, that his fame depends; and, by strange irony, it was by this vigorous, defiant spirit, which scorned and resented correction, that he wrought his own downfall.

No man in the whole history of English literature has become so suddenly famous as Byron did on the publication of Childe Harold, and no poet has had

heaped upon him such wrathful denunciation by the virtuous and the zealous misinformed. As a result, he has figured in exaggerated, superlative terms. Because he was a peer, because he wrote excellent verses, because he was beautiful, he has received absurd adulation. Because he made certain very serious moral and social slips, because he had the grim humor to pretend he was much worse than he really was, because scandal-mongers spread almost unimaginable lies about him, he was practically driven from England and has been, since his death, the victim of unjustified calumny.

A further consequence of the exaggerated attitude towards Byron has been the falsification of the mere facts of his life, as well as of the inferences in regard to his character. He has been pictured, for instance, as a beautiful, black-haired Adonis, albeit with a club-foot, reclining, as he wrote verses, on a tombstone at Harrow, while his fellow scholars formed an admiring circle about him. As a matter of fact, however, when Byron was at Harrow, as Mr. Jeaffreson has pointed out, he was fat and shy, his hair was auburn, and he did not have, literally, a club-foot. Further, biographers have spoken of his vigorous, manly appearance when they could have found all sorts of proof that he was robust only in his arms and shoulders, that his legs were weak, and that his face, far from having the rugged vigor they imagine, was beautiful rather than handsome, femininely delicate in outline and expressive of feminine sensibilities. In later life he was accused of the blackest crimes in the calendar. Unfortunately he could not have cleared himself wholly if he had tried, but it must be kept in mind that he did not do half the things, good or bad, attributed to him.

To call Byron a bad man is, after all, beside the point. He was a weak man. Intensely passionate, badly brought up, spoiled by the adulations of society, constitutionally reckless of authority, he literally followed his impulses. This and the fact that he could be wholly possessed by rapidly succeeding and widely differing moods account in a large measure for his abrupt, seemingly inconsistent changes: his "silent rages," his affection and hatred almost at the same moment, his recklessness and remorse, his sentimental melancholy, and his fundamental sincerity. It is futile, of course, to gloss over Byron's faults, but it must be remembered that his discreditable quarrel with his wife and his dissolute life in Venice, as well as the facts that he was a "noble lord" and had an adorable face, are no longer the only important features of his life or the cause of his great fame however they may have brought about a newspaper notoriety in his day. What is far more significant now, when all the little creatures who shared his scandals have disappeared, is the evidence of genius, the Titanic soul in him. It throws light on the story of his life to know that Lady Caroline Lamb lost her head over him, but it is much more illuminating to know that Scott and Goethe, two of his greatest contemporaries, considered him a very great genius.

George Gordon Byron, born January 22, 1788, in Holles Street, London, was the only son of Captain Jack Byron and Catharine Gordon of Aberdeen. His descent can be traced from the Norman Buruns, recorded in the Domesday Book. Sir John Byron-"Sir John the little with the great beard" was the first of the family to come by Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, granted him by Henry VIII, and the poet was the last owner.