CHAPTER II

BYRON

GEORGE GORDON, sixth Lord Byron, and descendant of an ancient Norman family that accompanied William the Conqueror to England, was the only son of 'Mad Jack' Byron by his second marriage with the Scottish heiress, Catherine Gordon of Gight. He was born in London, on 22 January 1788; but, shortly after his birth, owing to his father's withdrawal to France in order to escape from his creditors, the future poet was brought by his mother to Aberdeen. Here, his first boyhood was spent, and the impressions which he received of Deeside, Lochnagar and the Grampians remained with him throughout his life and have left their mark upon his poetry. By the death of his great-uncle, William, fifth Lord Byron, in 1798, the boy succeeded to the title and to the Byron estates of Newstead priory and Rochdale; in the year 1801, he entered Harrow school. Up to this time, his life had been that of 'a wild mountain colt'; his education, both intellectual and moral, had been neglected, and his mother petted and abused him in turn; his father had died when he was a child of three. Sensitive and proud by nature, his sensitiveness was aggravated by his lameness and his poverty, while his pride was nurtured by his succession, at the age of ten, to a peerage. At Harrow, he made many friends, read widely and promiscuously in history and biography, but never became an exact scholar. To these schoolboy years also belongs the story of his romantic, unrequited love for Mary Ann Chaworth. From Harrow, Byron proceeded, in October 1805, to Trinity college, Cambridge; but the university, though it widened his circle of friends, never won his affections in the way that Harrow had. While at Harrow, he had written a number of short poems, and, in January 1807, he printed for private circulation a slender volume of verse, Fugitive Pieces, the favourable reception of which led to the publication, in the following March, of Hours of Idleness. The contemptuous,

but not wholly unjust, criticism of this volume in The Edinburgh Review, which is generally supposed to have been the work of Lord Brougham, while it stung the sensitive poet to the quick, also spurred him to retaliation, and, early in 1809, appeared the famous satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which swiftly ran through several editions and made its author famous. Shortly before it appeared, Byron came of age and took his seat in the House of Lords.

In the following June, accompanied by his friend, John Cam Hobhouse, Byron left England for a tour in the Mediterranean and the east. He was away for little more than a year; but the impressions which he received of the life and scenery of Spain, Portugal and the Balkan peninsula profoundly affected his mind and left an indelible imprint upon his subsequent work as a poet. The letters which he wrote at this time furnish a singularly vivid record of the gay life of Spanish cities, the oriental feudalism of Ali pasha's Albanian court, and of the memories of, and aspirations for, political freedom which were quickened within him during his sojourn at Athens. The first two books of Childe Harold and the oriental tales-The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair and The Siege of Corinth-were the immediate outcome of this year of travel, but the memory of the scenes which he had witnessed remained freshly in his mind when, years afterwards, he composed Don Juan, and, at the close of his life, played his heroic part in the liberation of Greece.

The publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold in 1812, shortly after his return to England, placed Byron on the summit of the pinnacle of fame, and, from this time onwards to his death, he remained, through good report and evil report, the poet most prominently before the minds of Englishmen. The story of the three years which he spent as the lion of London society under the regency, and of his marriage with Miss Milbanke in 1815, is too familiar to need detailed record here; nor is this the place to dwell upon the causes which led to the separation of husband and wife shortly after the birth of their only child, Ada, in 1816. Rightly or wrongly, the sympathies of English society at this crisis in Byron's life were overwhelmingly on the side of Lady Byron, and the poet was subjected to the grossest insults. At first bewildered, and then lacerated in his deepest feelings, by the hue and cry against him, he perceived that 'if what was whispered and muttered and murmured was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me.' He accordingly left England

for the continent in May 1816, and never returned. He proceeded leisurely up the Rhine to Switzerland, where he made the acquaintance of Shelley and his wife, and spent much time in their society. Thence, he passed to Italy, and established himself before the end of the year at Venice, 'like the stag at bay, who betakes himself to the waters.'

The events of the year 1816 mark a crisis both in Byron's domestic life and in his poetic career. The outrage which he believed, not unreasonably, that he had suffered at the hands of English society embittered a mind naturally prone to melancholy, and equally prone to hide that melancholy beneath a mask of cynicism. Knowing only too well the hollowness of the world of English fashion under the regency, he looked upon the fit of virtuous indignation which made him its victim and drove him from the land as an outburst of envenomed hypocrisy. And, just as the contemptuous criticism of Hours of Idleness by the Edinburgh reviewer had roused him to a satiric onslaught upon the whole contemporary world of letters, so, now, in his new home, he prepared himself for the task of levelling against social hypocrisy the keenest weapons which a piercing wit and versatile genius had placed at his command. But, bitter as Byron's feelings towards England were, it is obvious that the new life which now opened up to him on the shores of the Adriatic proved congenial to his tastes and fostered the growth of his poetic genius. If the loose code of morals accepted by Venetian society plunged him, for a time, into libertinism, the beauty of the 'sea Cybele' and the splendour of her historic past fired his imagination.

More or less indifferent to the triumphs of Italian plastic and pictorial art, he was in full accord with what was best in Italian poetry. His Lament of Tasso, Prophecy of Dante and Francesca of Rimini are an imperishable witness to the sympathy which he felt with the works and tragic destinies of two of Italy's greatest poets; his Venetian tragedies and Sardanapalus show the influence upon him of Alfieri, while his indebtedness to the great Italian mock-heroic school, from Berni to Casti, is everywhere manifest in Beppo and in his great masterpiece, Don Juan. Finally, his liaison with the countess Guiccioli, which began in 1819 and remained unbroken till his death, brought him into direct touch with the Carbonari movement and made him the champion of the cause of national freedom.

An exile from England, and deeply resentful of the wrongs which he had suffered there, Byron, nevertheless, continued to

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follow with keen interest the course of English political, literary and domestic affairs. He kept up an active correspondence with the friends whom he had made there-Moore, Scott and his publisher, John Murray, among others-studiously read the English reviews, and remained almost morbidly sensitive to the reception of his works by the British public. He was, moreover, ever ready to offer hospitality to English friends in his Venetian home: Hobhouse was with him in the summer of 1818, and was followed, soon afterwards, by Shelley, whose intercourse with Byron is ideally commemorated in Julian and Maddalo; in the next year, he entertained Moore, who has left a vivid picture of his friend's domestic life at this time. At no period of his career, moreover, was Byron's literary activity so great as during the years which immediately followed his departure from England. His tour through Germany and Switzerland inspired the third canto of Childe Harold, The Prisoner of Chillon and his witch-drama, Manfred, while the concluding canto of Childe Harold was the outcome of an Italian tour entered upon in the spring of 1817, before he established himself definitely at Venice. To the year 1818 belong, among other things, Mazeppa, Beppo and the first canto of Don Juan; about the same time, he began his famous Memoirs, which he put into the hands of Moore, when his future biographer and editor visited him at Venice, and which, in accordance with the wishes of the poet's friend Hobhouse and his halfsister, Augusta Leigh, was committed to the flames after Byron's death. The publication of his poems-especially the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold and Manfred-greatly increased Byron's reputation as a poet, and his fame spread from England to the continent. The resemblance of Manfred to Faust stimulated the interest of the most famous of Byron's literary contemporaries, Goethe, who, henceforth, showed a lively regard for the younger poet's genius and character. A correspondence sprang up between them; Byron dedicated to Goethe, in language of sincere homage, his tragedy Sardanapalus (1821), and, after Byron's death, Goethe honoured his memory by introducing him as Euphorion, child of Helen and Faust, of Hellenism and the renascence, in the second part of Faust.

In the spring of 1819 began Byron's connection with Theresa, countess Guiccioli, the young wife of the sexagenarian count Guiccioli, whose home was at Ravenna. On either side the attachment was one of passionate devotion: the lady was prepared to make supreme sacrifices for the man she loved, and her influence

upon him was ennobling. She lifted him out of the mire of Venetian libertinism and aroused his interest in the cause of Italian freedom; she inspired one of his sublimest poems, The Prophecy of Dante, while such was her power over him that, for her sake, he desisted, for a time, from the continuation of Don Juan after the completion of the fifth canto. In December 1819, Byron broke up his home at Venice and moved to Ravenna, in order to be nearer to the countess. Here, he was visited by Shelley, who, in a letter to Mrs Shelley, dated 8 August 1821, speaks as follows of the change which had come over his friend:

Lord Byron is greatly improved in every respect. In genius, in temper, in moral views, in health, in happiness. The connection with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him.......... He has had mischievous passions, but these he seems to have subdued, and he is becoming, what he should be, a virtuous man. The interest which he took in the politics of Italy, and the actions he performed in consequence of it, are subjects not fit to be written, but are such as will delight and surprise you1.

In the preceding year, the countess had obtained a papal decree of separation from her husband, and was now living in a villa belonging to her brother, count Gamba, about fifteen miles from Ravenna.

Byron's literary activity remained unabated in his new home. To the Ravenna period belong, in addition to his Prophecy of Dante, Francesca of Rimini and his translation of the first canto of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, most of his dramatic writings. Drama had always interested him keenly, and, while living in London, after his return from the east, he had been elected a member of the Drury lane theatre committee, and had thus gained some firsthand knowledge of the stage. His earliest play, Manfred, had been begun in Switzerland and completed at Venice in the spring of 1817; after his removal to Ravenna, he turned his attention to historical tragedy, and, in little more than a year, produced his two tragedies of Venetian history, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari, together with his oriental Sardanapalus. Following upon these came the two 'mysteries,' Cain and Heaven and Earth, both written currente calamo between the July and October of 1821. These plays were not intended for the stage, and the only one acted during the author's lifetime was Marino Faliero, which was performed at Drury lane, against Byron's express wish, in April 1821. To the Ravenna period also belongs Byron's Letter to John Murray, Esq. on the Rev. W. L. Bowles's Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, in which the poet came forward as the 1 Shelley's Prose Works, ed. Shepherd, R. H., vol. 11, p. 337.