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 George Gordon
Byron came of an ancient line who, in 1540, had received from
Henry VIII the rich Priory of Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire;
who traced descent from a long line of soldiers back to the Conquest;
and in 1643 had obtained a peerage for services in the civil
war. During the 18th century the Byrons were distinguished as
seamen, as spendthrifts, and debauchees. The poet was born in
London, January 1788; and at the age of ten succeeded to the
peerage and a ruined estate, on the death of his great-uncle,
the fifth "wicked Lord." The limits of space do not
permit us to repeat here the familiar story of the life of him
who was certainly the most interesting personality of the 19th
century. It has been probed and discussed with bitter exaggeration
and wearisome minuteness. Suffice to say that it is the story
of splendid genius and a truly noble nature, stained though not
ruined by vice, egoism, and some paltry desires. But a spirit
capable of such intense and enduring love, of such passion for
great causes and high endeavours, of so much courage, generosity,
and sympathy, and a life flung with such stormy energy into an
ideal world of mighty and passionate beings--wipe out the memory
of the sensualities which scandalise many and the meanness and
affectation which have exercised so many over-busy pens.
It is a story of a childhood cruelly maltreated and neglected;
of a boyhood wayward, desultory, passionate, and loving; of a
youth spent in folly, vice, day-dreams, intense study alternating
with masterful extravagance; of a manhood wrecked by fierce temptations,
domestic tragedies, an ill-assorted marriage, outrageous ill-usage,
and a curious combination of disastrous circumstances, but withall
ennobled by gigantic labour, much of beautiful affection, true
sympathies with all that was great in the past or promising for
the future, and a burning passion for social progress. Byron's
first poems were published at the age of 19; his travels began
at the age of 21; he left England forever at the age of 28; the
next eight years of his life were memorable for their prodigious
poetic activity, and within them almost all his main work was
done; he died during the war of Greek Independence at Missolonghi,
April 1824, aged 36. His ashes lie with his ancestors in Hucknall-Torkard
Church, Nottinghamshire.
This is not the place to renew the long debate as to the poetry
of Byron, of which the highest qualities have hardly yet been
understood, and of which the glaring defects are now pedantically
exaggerated. Keats, Shelley,
and Tennyson, their interpreters and their imitators, have made
our age exacting in the matter of musical cadence and subtle
mastery of phrase such as mark the highest level of poetry. And
it is but too plain that Byron does not even seek after the perfection
of form which we have in the Sonnets of Shakespeare,
Lycidas, or In Memoriam. He never seems to have
realised the art of poetry as a mysterious alembic of musical
language; but he poured out a torrent of impetuous thoughts in
verse with the same reckless profusion as did Scott in prose.
And both, we are now told, gave us rank commonplace, because
they spoke in hot haste, using the first phrase that rose to
the lip.
But artists must be judged in the light of their own inspiration;
and it is right to remember that Byron, in about ten years of
activity, produced some 60,000 to 70,000 lines--more than the
Iliad, the Odyssey, the Æneid, the
Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost all put together.
And in the single year 1821, he wrote upwards of 15,000 lines,
or as many as are in the Iliad. Quantity, of course, is
in poetry a poor equivalent for quality. But it shows that Byron
had his own methods, and elaborate form was plainly not amongst
them. He was a true improvisatore, boiling over with ideas,
aspirations, memories, and impressions, as to man and Nature,
as to the Past and as to the Future, as to the hopes of nations
and the dignity of manhood. He chose to pour these forth in verse,
without the care which all great verse demands; so that it may
be said that he was a great poet who did not understand what
poetry implied.
It would be an error to make too much of Byron's weakness
in form. The invocations to Athens, to Rome, to the Sea, and
some of the occasional lyrics show that he held the magic of
the lyre of the poet, thought it was of narrow compass and too
often rang out a false note. Even at his best, Byron can hardly
write twenty lines without stumbling, and is at all times perilously
near the prose of rhetoric. But his conceptions are neither prosaic,
diluted, nor commonplace. And conceptions, not form, are the
bone and sinew of all high poetry. Take Byron's work as a whole
and weigh its mass, its variety, its glow, its power of stirring
nations and of creating new modes of thought--its social, national,
and popular influence--its effective inspiration on men--and
we must place him, as did Scott and Goethe,
amongst the great poetic forces of modern ages.
To judge Byron truly, we must look on him with European and
not with insular eyesight. His power, his directness, his social
enthusiasm, fill the imagination of Europe, which is less troubled
than we are today about his metrical poverty and conventional
phrase. To Italians he is almost more an Italian than an English
poet; to Greeks he is the true author and prophet of their patriotic
sentiments; and in France and in Germany he is now more valued
and studied than by his countrymen in a generation, when subtle
involution of idea and artful cadence of metre are the sole qualifications
for the laurel crown. When this literary purism is over, Byron
will be seen as the poet of the revolutionary movement which
early in the 19th century awoke a new Renaissance. He filled
it with a sense of the inherent royalty of man and his mission
to subdue the earth and to make it his final and beautiful home.
The romances and stray verse of youth, the satires, and even
Don Juan will be set aside. But the picture of Humanity
in the Past and the visions of Man's power in the Future, in
the latter part of Childe Harold, in Manfred, Cain,
Heaven and Earth, will remain as permanent appeals to strengthen
the heart and inspire respect for inherent Manhood.
Purchase books
by Lord Byron
| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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