BYRON- An Introduction

by A. S. B. GLOVER ( taken from Selected Poetry-The Penguin)

BYRON’S life and work is like a book which seems at first sight to be dominated by its highly coloured plates. First there is the standard portrait – a magnificently turbaned profile posed against a stormy sky – Byron dressed up as a Byronic Hero. Then comes a picture of Newstead Abbey, a suitably ‘Gothic’ retreat for Byron and his friends, sitting up late in `friars’ dresses, drinking burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not out of the skull-cup’. Byron is seen at Cambridge, sharing his college rooms with a bear; and on his entry into society – the pale /homme fatale of the drawing-rooms: `mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. Women come into the picture: Annabella Milbanke, whom he so unaccountably and un-fortunately married; Caroline Lamb, who made a public scandal of her love for him; Augusta Leigh, his half-sister, with whom he was more in love than with any other woman, and one of whose many children he considered to be his.

Byron is next seen leaving England on account of the moral indignation aroused by his private life. The scene shifts to the Mediterranean. The colours become brighter: Byron swimming the Hellespont; Byron travelling through Italy with the Countess Guiccioli, and a caravan of monkeys, dogs, and peacocks; finally, Byron dead in the cause of Greek liberation. ‘My God,’ .wrote Jane Welsh to Thomas Carlyle, `if they had said that the sun or the moon was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words, “Byron is dead!”‘

That was how Byron appeared to the majority of his contemporaries: as a luminary, a dynamic force. His works were translated into all the languages of Europe, the literary scene was thronged with `Byronic’ young poets, and the progeny of his Heroes multiplied yearly.

Today the flamboyant aspects of his personality have not only ceased to dazzle, they even tend to detract from our appreciation of Byron’s work, seeming to be simply the successful poses of a man playing to the gallery of his own day. They do not, however, represent the whole of Byron. He had many other facets. He was an aristocrat who rebelled against social injustice; a man who not only spoke about liberty but worked for it; an affectionate and loyal friend; an immensely lively correspondent; a trenchant satirist.

Byron was born in 1788. His early childhood was spent in Scotland in an atmosphere of disorder and poverty, dominated by an hysterical mother and a dissolute nurse. These years left by an hysterical mother and a dissolute nurse. These years left by an hysterical mother and a dissolute nurse. These years left their legacy of nervous insecurity, only partly concealed by the aristocratic facade provided by his title and his handsome patrician features. In 1800 he went to Harrow and in 1805 to Trinity College, Cambridge. Unlike Milton and Words- worth, Byron did not regard his studies at Cambridge as part of the discipline essential to becoming a great poet. He did not draft out plans for any new English epic or record the progress of a poet’s mind. He made friends, went to parties, and swam at Grantchester:

We have several parties here, and this evening a large assortment of jockeys, gamblers, boxers, authors, parsons, and poets, sup with me, -a precious mixture but they go on well together;and for me, I am a spice of everything…

But he goes on to say that he has 380 lines of a satire written and that his published verses have just been `praised to the skies’ in one review and `abused greatly’ in another.

In 1807, when this letter was written, Byron had brought out two volumes of poetry : Hours of Idleness and Poems on Various Occasions. The interest of these early poems is largely biographical. Though they showed that Byron wrote verse with great facility, they did not seem to hold out much promise for the future. Yet the very next year he wrote a lyric,

`When we two parted in silence and tears’ (p. 82), which had all the qualities of his best work in this kind. It is quite simple both in thought and expression, but beneath the quiet rhythm there is a strong current of feeling.

The satire also mentioned above was `English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’. It was Byron’s first long poem. Byron was a great admirer both of Dryden and of Pope, and saw himself as their successor, the satirist of the English literary scene. `I `he poetasters of Grub Street were replaced as the butts of satire by the `troubadours’ of the Lake District, Words-worth, Coleridge, and Southey. Byron’s attack has vitality and punch, though it has nothing of the polish and subtlety of Pope’s mature work. Today the part of the work which deals with the Scotch reviewers is of limited interest, as the subjects of the satire are little read, but what Byron writes of Wordsworth and Coleridge (p. 58) provides a refreshing antidote to a too solemn regard for these poets. Byron was not, however, a discriminating judge of literature; his pronouncements on it are often no more than sweeping generalizations of little value, and taken as a whole his criticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats was singularly lacking in
perception.

In 1817 Byron, now living in London, published the first two cantos of `Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’. His name was made: he awoke to find his book on every table and `to be made the greatest fuss of’. A contemporary commented; Language can hardly exaggerate the folly that prevailed in 1817, when waltzing and Lord Byron came into fashion.’ His readers identified him with his hero and watched for like

symptoms of melancholy.

Yet off-times in his maddest mirthful mood
Strange pangs would flash along Childe Harold’s brow
As if the memory of some deadly feud
Or disappointed passion lurked below,

To be continue in Next issue