Sketches of the Living Poets. Lord ByronThe Examiner[Leigh Hunt] Markup and editing by David Hill Radcliffe Completed December 2009 LeHunt.1821.Byron Center for Applied Technologies in the Humanities Virginia Tech
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Sketches of the Living Poets. No. 2.—Lord ByronThe ExaminerHunt, Leigh, 1784-1859London29 July 1821708472-74
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THE EXAMINER.No. 708. SUNDAY, July 29, 1821. SKETCHES OF THE LIVING POETS. No. 2.—Lord Byron
There have not been many noblemen who have written poetry, or indeed
any thing else much to the purpose. They have been brought up in too artificial a state, with
too many ready-made notions of superiority; and their lives have passed in a condition too
easy, conventional, and to say the truth, vulgar. France has produced the greatest number,
because the literature prevailing in that country has been more attainable by common means: but
the very best of them, with the exception of Montesquieu
who was a country gentleman, write somehow like lords. Buffon handles men and brutes equally with his gloves on; and Rochefoucault’s philosophy is the quintessence of
contempt. Even Montaigne, while he laughs at all classes
in the gross, shews himself not a little to be Montaigne of that ilk. In
England, the spirit of chivalry helped to fetch out the genius of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney, and Lord Herbert; but even they were of more or less hurt by their
ambition, and expected the Muses to visit them like gentlemen. There was something grand,
however, and peculiar in the solitary courage of Herbert’s
deism. Dorset and Rochester were men of wit, who might both have come nearer to Dryden, especially the latter. Bolingbroke defended liberty itself like an aristocrat, and for no purpose but
to get it into the power of its enemies. He wrote against religion too upon the principle of a
feudal baron, who laughed equally at his liege lord and his serfs. As to Horace Walpole, however, Lord
Byron may find his esprit du corps roused in his behalf,
he was an undoubted fop, who had the good luck to stumble upon the Castle of Otranto over his own escutcheon.
George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, whom the peerage ought to
value much more than he does or can value it, let him try as he may, is the grandson of the
celebrated Commodore Byron, whose outset in a disastrous
life has interested us all so much in our reading of voyages and shipwrecks. He was born in
Scotland in 1791. His father, the brother of the
late Lord, was an officer in the Guards; his mother a Gordon of Park, related to the Earls of Fife. The
poetry, that finally took its due aspect in his person, had given various intimations of itself
in his family, in the shape of verse-writing ladies and romantic adventures. The race, who were
great country proprie-tors in Yorkshire, were ennobled in the person of
Sir John Byron for his loyal efforts in the cause of
Charles the First; but the greatest Byron of old was
one recorded in Sir John Beaumont’s poem of
Bosworth-Field for his friendship with his
companion Clifton.
As it is part of the spirit of our Sketches to be as characteristic every way as
possible without violating any real delicacy, we shall touch upon some matters which must
always interest, and some which shall agreeably surprise the public. This is said to be
“an age of personalities:” and it is so; but if we can give the interest of
personality without any thing of the scandal of it, we shall perhaps help even to counteract
the latter, better than if we said nothing. Lord Byron is of
good stature, with a very handsome face and person. His hair is brown, with a tendency to run
in ringlets; his head and forehead finely cut; his eyes of a lamping blue, and might give his
face too haughty an expression, if it were not for his mouth and chin, which are eminently
bland and beautiful. The portrait after Philips in
Mr. Murray’s editions, from which our wood
outline is taken, is the best and indeed only likeness of him; the others being inefficient
attempts to catch his expression under various moods, real or imaginary. It is not new to the
public, that all this beauty of aspect, has one contradiction to it, in a lame foot, but the
lameness is hardly perceptible in a modern dress, as he seems little more than sweeping hither
and thither with a certain lordliness of indolence. It is a shrunken foot, not one raised upon
irons, or otherwise prominently defective. We are the less scrupulous in alluding to this
lameness, because it has been mentioned in the grossest manner by some poor creatures, who
thought to worry his Lordship’s feelings. Did these sorry beings contemplate, for an
instant, how pernicious their success might be? Too wretched for his revenge, they might yet
awake in him thoughts about human nature, for which a defect of this sort does not help to
sweeten the kindest. It is remarkable, that the two eminent living writers, whose portraits of
humanity are upon the whole mixed up with a greater degree of scorn than those of any of their
contemporaries, are both of them lame. The other we allude to is Sir
Walter Scott. Sir Walter with a feeling which we shall
certainly not call vanity, has been willing to let the public understand, that Shakspeare also was “but a halting fellow.” To our
minds, that indifferent sentence, coupled as it is in our recollections with another about
lameness, is the most touching in all his works. Nor need he, or his Lordship, disdain us such
an emotion. They can afford to let us have it. As to Shakspeare, we know
not upon what authority this lameness of his is ascertained; but we can imagine it probable,
were it for nothing but Iago’s
judgement of Desdemona,
“Tush, man, the wine she drinks is made of grapes.” The circumstance, if
proved, and not owing to accident, might lessen a little our astonishment at
Shakspeare’s insight into things equivocal; but it would add
what it took away to our love of his good nature.
With some other matters respecting Lord Byron,
that have come before the public, we shall not meddle so much, for various reasons; but none of
them discreditable to any party. They are not necessary to a consideration of his genius, and
are almost as little known in reality as they ought to remain. His Lordship is quite candid
enough about his own faults, sometimes perhaps a little ostentatious and even inventive; but if
this, and feelings very different in their origin from hostility, lead him sometimes into
strange vagaries about the faults of others, the public could not be more mistaken than when
they fancied him the fierce and gloomy person which some described him to be. At least, neither
his oldest nor his newest friends thought him so. The Don
Juan undeceived people a good deal in that respect. The fact is, that he is much
fonder of cracking jokes and walnuts, than heads. No man in private sooner hastens to shew
himself superior to his reply which he wishes his ancestor had not obtained at the
expense of his riches, and with all that he says about his temper (of which we have heard him
talk nobly) he is really so good-natured a man that if we were asked why he insinuates so much
about being otherwise, and puts on those strange distant airs, which he does about his
countrymen, in his last work, we should answer that although it may partly be because his
countrymen are really not so pleasant as they suppose themselves, yet the ground of it all is a
suspicion that he shall be found too easy and accommodating,—a man too facile to
influence, and so become jealous of it.
Lord Byron was bred at Harrow, where he cultivated his young
friendships and verses with equal ardour. He has told us, that his regard for another living
writer was first awakened by a youthful publication in which similar inclinations abounded. He
recollects his school-days with regard; and yet at Harrow the first seeds were probably sown of
that mistrust and disappointment at human nature which is so apparent in his writings.
School-boys in general understand little but one another’s defects; and when he left
Cambridge, he was destined to find that friends of whom he expected otherwise, could soon
forget him in the bustle of the world. He grew careless and riotous. The first productions of
his pen, (commonplace enough it is true, like those of all young writers who are brought up in
the midst of artificial models), were contemptuously treated by the critics; his hey-day life
met with equally injudicious rebuke; and being, as he says, angry with every body since every
body seemed angry with him, he “ran a muck” at them all in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,—a work which he has
lived to regret. As it was written however with feelings of his own, it gave a sample of what
he was likely to attain to; and on his return from his travels in Greece, a succession of
meditative and narrative poems made an unexpected delight of what his rank helped to make a
fashion.
But it will be all over with our Sketches if we go on
after this manner. Having said a good deal of what every body does not know, we must make short
work of what every body does. The great learning of Lord
Byron’s poetry, if not on the poetical side, is on that which is more
generally interesting, it is the poetry, not of imagination, but of passion and humour. We like
nevertheless the last canto of Childe Harold, and think it might have hindered him from getting into that
controversy the other day, in which the weaker vessel had the stronger side. For the most part,
we do not admire his narratives, written in that over-easy eight-syllable measure, of which
Dryden thought so poorly. They are like their
heroes, too melodramatic, hasty, and vague. But the passion is sometimes excellent. It is more
so in his Lara; and most of
all in his songs and other minor pieces. For the drama, whatever good passages such a writer
will always put forth, we hold that he has no more qualifications than we have; his tendency
being to spin every thing out of his own perceptions, and colour it with his own eye. His Don Juan is perhaps his best
work, and the one by which he will stand or fall with readers, who see beyond times and
toilets. It far surpasses, in our opinion, all the Italian models on which it is founded, not
excepting the Secchia
Rapita. Nor can we see in it the injury to morals and goodness, which makes
so many people shake their heads, both solid and shallow. Poems of this kind may not be the
best things to put abruptly into the hands of young ladies, but people are apt to beg many more
questions than they settle, about morality; and numbers of such Don
Juans as Lord Byron’s (not the unfeeling vagabond in
the Italian opera), would be very good and proper, if we would let them. A poet’s morals
have a natural tendency to recur to first principles, which is a proceeding that others are
perpetually making a maxim of, and never observing. If Don
Juan is pernicious in any thing, it is in that extreme mixture now and
then of the piteous and the ludicrous, which tends to put some of our best feelings out of
countenance. But if we may judge of its effect on others by ourselves,
this kind of despair is accompanied with too much bitterness, in spite of its drollery, and is
written in too obvious a spirit of extravagance, not to furnish its own counteraction.
But we call to mind the object of these Sketches; and to keep at all to their
title, must lay down our pen. That these poets are seductive fellows, is certain.