As the letters of great men are not, as a rule, intentionally written for publication, they are among the most valuable sources whence an authentic knowledge of their life and its surroundings may be derived. This is eminently so in the case of Lord Byron, whose correspondence is a faithful reflex of his singularly varied, brilliant, and dramatic career. Born on the 22nd of January 1788, George Gordon Byron, the inheritor of an old historic name, had the good fortune, as a letter-writer, of coming to maturity at a period precisely the most favourable to a fine epistolary style. Letters had never played so important a part in literature as in the century or two preceding his own times; so much was this the case, that the most memorable novels of the eighteenth century, Clarissa Harlowe, La Nouvelle Hèloise, and Werther, had been cast in that favourite mould; while some of the most exquisite literary workmanship is to be found in the Letters of Madame de Sevigné, of Pope, of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, etc., etc. But it was inevitable that, from having been cultivated too much as a fine art, there should be a corresponding loss of spontaneity and freshness of expression. Now, in comparing Byron's epistolary style with that of his literary predecessors on the one hand, and of his successors on the other, he seems to us to hit a happy medium between the choice diction and jewel-like periods of the Queen Anne period, and the easy, dressing-gown and slipper style which has come into fashion with the penny post. Byron's letters are always unmistakably letters, never prose poems or finished essays with a superscription, and of them he might no doubt have said, more truly than he did of Don Juan, "I rattle on exactly as I'd talk The prose style of Byron is invariably clear, terse, and racy; it is swift and limpid in its flow, like a full river that rolls undeviatingly to its goal, never lured aside into those exquisite little nooks and corners where flower the forget-me-nots of fancy. His is the pungent phrase, the perspicuous narrative, the piercing sarcasm; in his descriptions he seizes salient points, broad and typical effects, massing them together with a master hand. Though an indefatigable student of Rochefoucault, he does not seem to have acted on his favourite's axiom, that language was given us to hide our thoughts; at least, he is always at the pains to express his ideas luminously, never involving his meaning in a verbal labyrinth, in which what thought there may be struggles hopelessly entangled, with as little possibility of being extricated as an unhappy fly caught in the dexterously woven meshes of a spider's web. Words always stood as signs for things to Byron, his object being to get hold of the one that most adequately expressed the image in his mind: a manner of writing which differs entirely from the æsthetic method, where the luxuriant beauty of expression becomes of such supreme importance that it weakens, undermines, and finally destroys the sap and marrow of thought, as the enlacing ivy the tree that is its stay. A fine specimen of Byron's prose may be adduced from his "Letter on Bowles's Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope," which, although a most perverse piece of literary criticism, is a splendid piece of writing : "The aspect of a storm in the Archipelago is as poetical as need be, the sea being particularly short, dashing, and dangerous, and the navigation intricate and broken by the isles and currents. Cape Sigeum, the tumuli of the Troad, Lemnos, Tenedos, all added to the associations of the time. But what seemed the most 'poetical' of all at the moment, were the numbers (about two hundred) of Greek and Turkish craft, which were obliged to 'cut and run' before the wind, from their unsafe anchorage, some for Tenedos, some for other isles, some for the main, and some it might be for eternity. The sight of these little scudding vessels, darting over the foam in the twilight, now appearing and now disappearing between the waves in the cloud of night, with their peculiarly white sails (the Levant sails not bein of 'coarse canvas,' vas, but of white cotton), skimming along as quickly, but less safely, than the sea-mews which hovered over them; their evident distress, their reduction to fluttering specks in the distance, their crowded succession, their littleness, as contending with the giant element, which made our stout being forty-four's teak timbers (she was built in India) creak again; their aspect and their motion, all struck me as something far more 'poetical' than the mere broad, brawling, shipless sea, and the sullen winds, could possibly have been without them." A curious feature of Byron's letters is that not only do they reflect their writer's singularly iridescent nature, but also, to a considerable degree, the character of the person he happens to be addressing at the moment. The poet, chameleon-like, seems involuntarily to catch something of his correspondent's tone of mind, and so impressionable is his temperament, that it would be easy, as a rule, to assign his epistles to the right quarter, supposing the name of the persons they were intended for had been suppressed. Thus his manner when writing to Walter Scott is a happy blending of genuine admiration, affectionate regard, and delicate homage, as when, on addressing him after having allowed a long interval of silence to elapse, he says"Since I left England I have scribbled to five hundred blockheads on business, etc., without difficulty, though with no great pleasure; and yet, with a notion of addressing you a hundred times in my heart, I have not done what I ought to have done. I can only account for it on the same principle of tremulous anxiety with which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of our own degree, with whom one is enamoured in good earnest," etc., etc. With Moore he is now brother in Apollo, now wit and buffoon, and sometimes, though rarely, the world-weary misanthrope. We find this Protean being entering sympathetically into the pious anxieties of a certain Mr. Sheppard, whose deceased wife, so the husband had told him, besought God for the salvation of the poet's soul; whereupon the author of the Vision of Judgment writes as follows:-" I can assure you that all the fame which ever cheated humanity into higher notions of its own importance would never weigh in my mind against the pure and pious interest which a virtuous being may be pleased to take in my welfare. In this point of view, I would not exchange the prayer of the deceased in my behalf for the united glory of Homer, Cæsar, and Napoleon, could such be accumulated on a living head." Thus, in turn, Byron is a man of the world, satirist, scoffing profligate, poet, and hero: "whom everything becomes, to chide, to laugh, to weep." And this infinite variety of humour makes his letters the most amusing and delightful in the language. Apart, too, from their literary charm, they teem with biographical interest; reflecting, as they do, the writer's varying fortunes through good report and evil; his fickle loves and restless longings; his lofty aspirations and low excesses; his reckless selfishness in sexual relations, that yet went hand in hand with a generous devotion to great causes and lofty aims. With the deduction of seventeen years of Lord Byron's life, of which the first ten were spent with his mother in Aberdeen, and of his school-life up to the time of leaving Harrow in the autumn of 1805, we can trace in the poet's letters all the vicissitudes of his chequered and romantic career, from the time when the Cambridge undergraduate is described with bated breath by his tutor as a young man of "tumultuous passions." Glimpses may be caught of the young master of Newstead Abbey gathering congenial companions about him in that halfruined building, "where," he writes, "I had got a famous cellar, and monks' dresses from a masquerade warehouse. We were a company of some seven or eight, with an occasional neighbour or so for visitors, and used to sit up late, in our friars' dresses, drinking burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not, out of the skull-cup and all sorts of glasses, and buffooning all round the house in our conventual garments." But just as the poet's imaginative faculties were at once vigorously stimulated by his wanderings through Spain and Greece, so his letters gained in vivid colouring and varied interest from the moment he touched foreign soil. And it is noteworthy that although his descriptions of nature are frequently remarkable for their power and beauty, it is the actual world of men and women, their ways and vagaries, their foibles, fashions, and passions, that take hold of him. It was only much later, "when in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," that he rushed into the arms of nature, somewhat in the mood of "a curled darling," overmuch praised and petted by a society that suddenly turned from him with loathing and abomination; and strove to find an outlet for the fever and discord of his soul in Alpine storm and ocean solitude. When, on his return to England in 1811, after the publication of "Childe Harold," he, in his own phrase, awoke one morning and found himself famous; his brilliant, witty, vivacious letters dashed off to Moore and other friends are a faithful record of the whirl of fashionable dissipation in which he was swept along, as well as of the simultaneous flow of his astonishing poetic productivity. While his "Giaours" and "Corsairs" were going through the press, he would fire off as many as three notes a day, like so many bullets, at his publisher, Murray, wherein, with sublime inconsequence, having previously assured the latter that he does "not care a lump of sugar for his poetry," he writes immediately afterwards, fuming with rage, concerning some misprint,-"You have looked at it. To much purpose, to allow so stupid a blunder to stand; it is not 'courage' but 'carnage'; and if you don't want me to cut my throat, see it altered." The letters of this period naturally contain many passages about Miss Milbanke, his future wife, both before and after their ill-starred marriage, which took place on the 2nd of January 1815. In an epistle to Moore, a month after the above event, Byron says, "Since I wrote last I have been transferred to my fatherin-law's, with my lady and lady's maid, etc., etc., and the treacle-moon is over, and I am awake and find myself married. My spouse and I agree to and in-admiration. Swift says, 'No wise man ever married, but for a fool I think it the most ambrosial of all possible future states. I still think one ought to marry on lease; but I am very sure I should renew mine at the expiration, though next term were for ninety and nine years. My papa, Sir Ralph, hath recently made a speech at a Durham tax-meeting; and not only at Durham, but here several times after dinner. He is now, I believe, speaking it to himself (I left him in the middle) over various decanters, which can neither interrupt him nor fall asleep, as might possibly have been the case with his audience." Very shortly after this remarkable ... |