The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

I am so little fastidious in the selection or rather want of selection of associates, that the most stupid men satisfy me as well, nay, perhaps, better than the most brilliant. The effort of letting myself down to them costs me noth­ing, though my pride is hurt that they do not seem more sensible of the condescension.

Juan, though by birth a Spaniard and a Catholic and there­fore an outsider from an Englishman's point of view, is the perfect embodiment of the very English ideal of succeeding at anything he does without appearing to be ambitious of suc­cess.

Characters which are daydream projections of their authors are seldom very interesting and, had Byron written Don Juan as a straightforward narrative poem in the style of The Corsair

or Lara, it would probably have been unreadable. Fortunately, he had discovered a genre of poetry which allows the author to enter the story he is telling. Juan is only a convenience: the real hero of the poem is Byron himself.

Byron's poetry is the most striking example I know in literary history of the creative role which poetic form can play. If William Stewart Rose had arrived in Venice in September 1817 with nothing for him but magnesia and red tooth powder, Byron would probably today be considered a very minor poet. He knew Italian well, he had read Casti's Novelle Galanti and loved them, but he did not realize the poetic possibilities of the mock-heroic ottava-rima until he read Frere's The Monks and the Giants.

Take away the poems he wrote in this style and meter, Beppo, The Vision of Judgment, Don Juan,

and what is left of lasting value? A few lyrics, though none of them is as good as the best of Moore's, two adequate satires though inferior to Dryden or Pope, "Darkness," a fine piece of blank verse marred by some false sentiment, a few charming occasional pieces, half a dozen stanzas from Childe Harold, half a dozen lines from Cain, and that is all. Given his production up till that date, he showed better judgment than his readers when he wrote to Moore in 1817:

If I live ten years longer, you will see, however, that all is not over with me—I don't mean in literature, for that is nothing: and it may seem odd enough to say I do not think it is my vocation.

Soon afterwards, he read Frere: as he had foretold, it was not all over with him but, as he had not foreseen, his vocation was to be literature. The authentic poet was at last released.

So long as Byron tried to write Poetry with a capital P, to express deep emotions and profound thoughts, his work de­served that epithet he most dreaded, una seccatura. As a thinker he was, as Goethe perceived, childish, and he possessed neither the imaginative vision—he could never invent anything, only remember—nor the verbal sensibility such poetry demands. Lady Byron, of all people, put her finger on his great defect as a serious poet.

He is the absolute monarch of words, and uses them as Bonaparte did lives, for conquest without regard to their intrinsic value.

The artistic failure of Childe Harold is due in large measure to Byron's disastrous choice of the Spenserian stanza. At the time, he had only read a few verses of The Faerie Queene

and when, later, Leigh Hunt tried to make him read the whole of it, one is not surprised to learn that he hated the poem. Nothing could be further removed from Byron's cast of mind than its slow, almost timeless, visionary quality.

His attempt to write satirical heroic couplets were less un­successful but, aside from the impossibility of equaling Dryden and Pope in their medium, Byron was really a comedian, not a satirist. Funny things can be said in heroic couplets, but the heroic couplet as a form is not comic, that is to say, it does not itself make what it says funny.

Before Beppo, the authentic Byron emerges only in light occasional verse such as "Lines to a Lady who appointed a night in December to meet him in the garden."

Why should you weep like Lydia Languish And fret with self-created anguish

Or doom the lover you have chosen On winter nights to sigh half-frozen; In leafless shades to sue for pardon, Only because the scene's a garden? For gardens seem, by one consent, Since Shakespeare set the precedent, Since Julia first declared her passion, To form the place of assignation, Oh, would some modern muse inspire And seat her by a sea-coal fire; Or had the bard at Christmas written And laid the scene of love in Britain, He, surely, in commiseration Had changed the place of declaration. In Italy I've no objection, Warm nights are proper for reflection: But here our climate is so rigid That love itself is rather frigid: Think on our chilly situation, And curb this rage for imitation.