The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

There have been poets—Keats is the most striking example —whose letters and poems are so different from each other that they might have been written by two different people, and yet both seem equally authentic. But, with Byron, this is not the case. From the beginning, his letters seem authentic but, before Beppo, very litde of his poetry; and the more closely his poetic persona comes to resemble the epistolary persona of his letters to his male friends—his love letters are another matter—the more authentic his poetry seems.

So Scrope is gone—down diddled—as Doug K writes it, the said Doug being like the man who, when he lost a

friend, went down to St. James Coffee House and took a new one; 'the best of men'. Gone to Bruges where he will get tipsy with Dutch beer and shoot himself the first foggy morning.

Reading this letter to Hobhouse, one immediately recognizes its likeness to Don Juan and its unlikeness to Manfred

and one feels that, while the letter and Don Juan have been written by someone-in-particular, Manfred must have been written, as it were, by a committee.

If one can say that the authentic poet in Byron is Byron the Friend, it is worth asking what are the typical characteristics of friendship. (I am thinking, of course, of friendship between men. To me, as to all men, the nature of friendship between women remains a mystery, which is probably a wise provision of nature. If we ever discovered what women say to each other when we are not there, our male vanity might receive such a shock that the human race would die out.)

The basis of friendship is similarity: it is only possible be­tween persons who regard each other as equals and who have some interests and tastes in common, so that they can share each other's experiences. We can speak of a false friendship but not of an unreciprocated one. In this, friendship differs from sexual love which is based on difference and is all too often unreciprocated. Further, friendship is a nonexclusive, nonpossessive relationship; we can speak of having friends in common, while we cannot speak of having lovers, husbands or wives in common. Between two friends, therefore, there is an indifference towards, even an impatience with, those areas of human experience which they cannot share with each other, religious experiences, for example, which are unsharable with anybody, and feelings of passionate devotion which can be shared, if at all, only with the person for whom they are felt. Andre Gide was being unduly cynical, perhaps, when he de­fined a friend as someone with whom one does something dis­graceful; it is true, however, that a vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or woman­izers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

The experiences which friends can share range from the grossest to the most subtle and refined, but nearly all of them belong to the category of the Amusing. No lover worries about boring his beloved; if she loves him, she cannot be bored and if she doesn't love him, he is too unhappy to care if she is. But between two friends, their first concern is not to bore each other. If they are persons of heart and imagination, they will take it for granted that the other has beliefs and feelings which he takes seriously and problems of his own which cause him suffering and sorrow, but in conversation they will avoid discussing them or, if they do discuss them, they will avoid the earnest note. One laughs with a friend; one does not weep with him (though one may weep for him).

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and ir­reverent, if less important, are no less human. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

An authentic and original work nearly always shocks its first readers and Byron's "new manner" was no exception.

Beppo is just imported but not perused. The greater the levity of Lord Byron's Compositions, the more I imagine him to suffer from the turbid state of his mind.

(Lady Byron.)

Frere particularly observed that the world had now given up the foolish notion that you were to be identified with your sombre heroes, and had acknowledged with what great success and good keeping you had por­trayed a grand imaginary being. But the same admiration cannot be bestowed upon, and will not be due to the Rake Juan. . . . All the idle stories about your Venetian life will be more than confirmed. (Hobhouse.)