The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Dear Adorable Lord Byron, don't make a more coarse old libertine of yourself . . . When you don't feel quite up to a spirit of benevolence . . . throw away your pen, my love, and take a little calomel. (Hariette Wilson, who shordy afterwards offered to come and pimp for him.)

I ■would rather have the fame of Childe Harold for THREE YEARS than an IMMORTALITY of Don Juan.

(Teresa Guiccoli.)

Some of his friends, among them Hobhouse, admired parts of Don Juan, but the only person who seems to have realized how utterly different in kind it was from all Byron's previous work was John Lockhart:

Stick to Don Juan; it is the only sincere thing you have ever written . . . out of all sight the best of your works; it is by far the most spirited, the most straightforward, the most interesting, and the most poetical . . . the great charm of its style, is that it is not much like the style of any other poem in the world.

Byron was not normally given to praising his own work, but of Don Juan he was openly proud:

Of the fate of the "pome" I am quite uncertain, and do not anticipate much brilliancy from your silence. But I do not care. I am as sure as the Archbishop of Granada that I never wrote better, and I wish you all better taste.

As to "Don Juan," confess, confess—you dog be candid— that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing—it may be bawdy but is it not good English? It may be profli­gate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world?— and tooled in a post-chaise?—in a hackney coach?—in a gondola?—against a wall?—in a court carriage?—in a vis­a-vis?—on a table?—and under it?

There is an element of swank in this description, for the poem is far less bawdy than he makes it sound. Only a small part of the experience upon which Byron drew in writing it was amorous.

What Byron means by life—which explains why he could never appreciate Wordsworth or Keats—is the motion of life, the passage of events and thoughts. His visual descriptions of scenery or architecture are not particularly vivid, nor are his portrayal of states of mind particularly profound, but at the description of things in motion or the way in which the mind wanders from one thought to another he is a great master.

Unlike most poets, he must be read very rapidly as if the words were single frames in a movie film; stop on a word or a line and the poetry vanishes—the feeling seems superficial, the rhyme forced, the grammar all over the place—but read at the proper pace, it gives a conviction of watching the real thing which many profounder writers fail to inspire for, though motion is not the only characteristic of life, it is an es­sential one.

If Byron was sometimes slipshod in his handling of the language, he was a stickler for factual accuracy; "I don't care one lump of sugar," he once wrote, "for my poetry; but for my costume, and my correctness

... I will combat lustily," and, on another occasion, "I hate things all -fiction . . . There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a liar." He was furious when the poem "Pilgrimage to Jerusalem" was attributed to him: "How the devil should I write about Jerusalem, never having been yet there?" And he pounced, with justice, on Wordsworth's lines about Greece:

Rivers, fertile plains, and sounding shores, Under a cope of variegated sky.

The rivers are dry half the year, the plains are barren, and the shores as "still" and "tideless" as the Mediter­ranean can make them; the sky is anything but varie­gated, being for months and months "darkly, deeply, beautifuly blue."

The material of his poems is always drawn from events that actually happened, either to himself or to people he knew, and he took great trouble to get his technical facts, such as sea terms, correct.