The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

When he stopped work on Don Juan, he had by no means exhausted his experience. Reading through Professor Mar- chand's recent biography, one comes across story after story that seems a natural for the poem; Caroline Lamb, for ex­ample, surrounded by little girls in white, burning effigies of Byron's pictures and casting into the flames copies of his letters because she could not bear to part with the originals; Byron himself, at Shelley's cremation, getting acutely sun­burned, and Teresa preserving a piece of skin when he peeled; Teresa forbidding an amateur performance of Othello because she couldn't speak English and wasn't going to have anybody else play Desdemona. And, if Byron's shade is still interested in writing, there are plenty of posthumous incidents. The Greeks stole his lungs as a relic and then lost them; at his funeral, noble carriage after noble carriage lumbered by, all empty, because the aristocracy felt they must show some re­spect to a fellow-peer but did not dare seem to show approval of his politics or his private life; Fletcher, his valet, started a macaroni factory and failed; Teresa married a French marquis who used to introduce her as

"La Marquise de Boissy, ma femme, ancienne maitresse de Byron" and after his death maltresse devoted herself to spiritualism, talking with the spirits of both Byron and her first husband. What stanzas they could all provide! How suitable, too, for a that-there poet that the room in which his "Memoirs" were burned should now be called the Byron Room, how perfect the scene John Buchan describes of himself and Henry James setting down to examine the archives of Lady Lovelace:

.. . during a summer weekend, Henry James and I waded through masses of ancient indecency, and duly wrote an opinion . . . My colleague never turned a hair. His only words for some special vileness were "singular"—"most curious"—"nauseating, perhaps, but how quite inexpress­ibly significant."

DINGLEY DELL & THE FLEET

To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at flay.

F. W. NIETZSCHE

All characters who are products of the mythopeoic imagination are instantaneously recognizable by the fact that their exist­ence is not defined by their social and historial context; trans­fer them to another society or another age and their characters and behavior will remain unchanged. In consequence, once they have been created, they cease to be their author's char­acters and become the reader's; he can continue their story for himself.

Anna Karenina is not such a character for the reader can­not imagine her apart from the particular milieu in which Tolstoi places her or the particular history of her life which he records; Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, is: every reader, according to his fancy, can imagine adventures for him which Conan Doyle forgot, as it were, to tell us.

Tolstoi was a very great novelist, Conan Doyle a very minor one, yet it is the minor not the major writer who possesses the mythopoeic gift. The mythopoeic imagination is only accidentally related, it would seem, to the talent for literary expression; in Cervantes' Don Quixote they are found together, in Rider Haggard's She literary talent is largely absent. Indeed, few of the writers whom we call great have created mythical characters. In Shakespeare's plays we find five, Prospero, Ariel, Caliban, Falstaff and Hamlet, and Ham­let is a myth for actors only; the proof that, for actors, he is a myth is that all of them without exception, irrespective of age, build, or even sex, wish to play the part.