Byron, GEORGE GORDON, sixth LORD, was born in Holles Street, Cavendish Square, on the 22d of January 1788. His mother was Catherine Gordon, heiress of the Gordons of Gight; his father was John Byron, nephew of the fifth or 'wicked' Lord Byron, and son of Admiral John Byron (1723–86), who sailed round the world with Anson, or rather who did not sail round, being wrecked in the Wager, and subjected to various hardships, of which he wrote a classical account. The admiral was then only a midshipman, and though, in a day when officers were habitually tyrannical, he was mild-mannered as well as gallant, his continual bad luck with the elements made him shunned by sailors much later as 'Foul-weather Jack.' The poet's maternal ancestry hardly belongs directly to this article; it is sufficient to say that it is indissolubly connected with the whole of Scottish history from James I. downward. On the father's side, though there was a blot in the middle of the pedigree (John Byron in the middle of the 16th century being described as filius naturalis, and inheriting by deed of gift, not in the ordinary course), the family was hardly less distinguished, and, as far as certain history goes, older. The Buruns, or Byrons, appear immediately after the Conquest as holding lands in most of the northern counties of England, especially Lancashire, Nottingham, and Derby. The chief family estates in the first-named county were acquired by marriage as early as the 12th century; the still more celebrated estate of Newstead was abbey land, and was given to Sir John Byron by Henry VIII. at the dissolution. Although the Byrons appear often in earlier history, it was not till the 17th century that they gained their principal distinction. They were strong royalists, and the Sir John Byron of the day was created Lord Byron of Rochdale, where the Lancashire estates lay, in October 1643, with special reference to services at Newbury. The next noteworthy holder of the title was the already mentioned wicked lord, who, like his brother, was in the navy, who escaped almost by accident the wreck of the ill-fated Victory on the Caskets, and who fought under very questionable circumstances, in a private room of a tavern in Pall Mall, a duel with his Nottinghamshire neighbour, Mr Chaworth. Chaworth was killed, and Lord Byron was tried (1765) for murder, but was found guilty only of manslaughter, and escaped with a nominal penalty. He was generally unpopular, and seems to have been decidedly mad; but his madness was very inconvenient for the Byron family, inasmuch as he sold, on a doubtful title, the Lancashire estates, which were much the most profitable part of the property. He did not die till ten years after the poet's birth, and the dilapidation of the property was partly excused by the fact that Captain John Byron, his heir, was at least as great a rascal as himself, without any apparent excuse of madness or ill-luck. This Captain Byron, the poet's father, seduced, borrowed money from, eloped with, married, and ill-treated the Marchioness of Carmarthen; the only offspring of this marriage who lived being Augusta, afterwards Mrs Leigh. Then John Byron, after his first wife's death, married Catherine Gordon, whose fortune he spent, and whom he would probably have ill-treated if she had not been at least as great a vixen as he was a rascal. The memorable picture of Mrs Cadurcis in Lord Beaconsfield's Venetia seems to be hardly too harsh for Mrs Byron, who on all occasions seems to have been absolutely incapable of what is commonly called ladylike demeanour. In very early youth the poet (who was born with a club-foot, the source of constant moral torture to him, though it is said that but for his own morbid consciousness it would have passed almost unnoticed) saw something of his father's and mother's quarrels.
His early life was mostly passed at Aberdeen. At Lord Byron's death in 1798 (John Byron had fortunately died seven years before), Mrs Byron and her son removed to England, and in 1801 Byron was sent to Harrow, whence in 1805 he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. He had become at his great-uncle's death a ward of chancery, and Lord Carlisle, a second cousin and an amiable person of some literature, was appointed his guardian. But probably no guardian under heaven could have satisfied Byron's irritable vanity, and the two did not get on well together. The anecdotes of the Harrow and Cambridge career are sufficiently numerous, but there is no room for them here. They are more consonant than usual with the future character of the man, showing a strong individuality, great though as yet unformed and entirely undirected talent, combined with a curious pride of station most unusual in one of such descent on both sides, and rather suggesting the vanity of a parvenu. The most interesting by far of these early incidents is the poet's 'calf-love' (as cruel custom calls it) for Mary Chaworth, heiress of his great-uncle's victim, and a very beautiful girl two years his senior. It is impossible to say how much merely romantic and fanciful sentiment entered into this affection, which as a poet he afterwards commemorated or created in immortal verse. But if it really was love, Miss Chaworth seems not to have returned it, and before Byron went to Cambridge she married John Musters, a mighty hunter of the neighbourhood. The marriage was not happy; but it is doubtful whether she envied Lady Byron. At Cambridge Byron spent the greater part of three years, and made many friends (the most important of whom was the late Lord Broughton), besides keeping a bear, and perpetrating other follies excusable enough. His vacations were spent partly in London, more largely at Southwell, where his mother had taken a house. It was from this time that Byron's habit of accusing himself of all sorts of wickedness in letters began, a habit which has prejudiced against him not merely those who take his letters as true, and are shocked, but also those who know them to be exaggerated, and are disgusted. His first work, Hours of Idleness, to which he had privately given circulation under the title of Juvenilia, appeared in March 1807. This is probably the worst first book ever written by a considerable poet, and it was savagely 'cut up' in the Edinburgh Review exactly a year later. There is no doubt that this attack did Byron good; but his rejoinder was by no means so rapid and careless as he would have liked it to be thought. He took nearly as long to concoct English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as his reviewer had taken before the attack appeared; and meanwhile (in the earliest spring of 1809) he came of age, resolved to keep up Newstead (a very difficult thing with his dilapidated fortune, even if he had been a more careful man), and took his seat in the House of Lords. He published English Bards, an imitative but, in its way, capital Popian satire, and soon afterwards (in June 1809) started for a grand tour, which, owing to the continental war, had to be of a somewhat different character from the regular grand tour of the preceding century.
He first sailed from Falmouth to Lisbon, and then after brief visits to Spain and Malta, made his way to Greece, where (in the large sense of the Greek countries round the Ægean) he spent the greater part of two years. There is no doubt that this visit 'made' Byron. His powerful and original faculties were associated with a strange bent towards the conventional and the commonplace, and it required something absolutely new, something of which the average Englishmen knew nothing, to awake his spirit. At this time the remoter parts of Europe were much less familiar to Englishmen than the Niger or the Rio Negro are now, and the medicine exactly suited the patient. Almost immediately after his return, and before he had time to reach her deathbed, his mother died, and his most intimate friend Matthews was drowned at Cambridge within a week. It will always be one of the capital anecdotes illustrating the insensibility of authors to their own strength and weakness, that Byron, whose English Bards had been very successful, intended to bring out on his return certain Hints from Horace, which are only a little better than the Hours of Idleness; and when asked by his friend Dallas if he had nothing else, produced, as a 'lot of Spenserian stanzas' not worth troubling anybody with, the first two cantos of Childe Harold. Gifford and Murray, to whom Dallas showed these, at once saw their merit, but the poem was not issued rapidly; indeed, Byron was by no means the rapid writer or issuer that he would have seemed. He had much disagreeable business, for, as has been mentioned, his affairs were wretchedly involved, by no means owing to his own fault wholly. He renewed acquaintance and began affection with his sister Augusta, spoke sometimes in the House of Lords, and went much into society; but neither now nor at any time did he like England, where the life was too uniform to suit him, and where he was not nearly monarch enough of all he surveyed to please him. Even he, however, can hardly have been disappointed at the success of Childe Harold, which, appearing on the 20th of February 1812, had, before the end of March, run through seven whole editions. Byron's admirers had now no cause of complaint as to his slowness in publication. Besides smaller pieces, the Glaou and the Bride of Abydos appeared in the same year (1813), the Corsair, Lara, and the Hebrew Melodies in 1814, the Bride of Corinth and Parisina in 1815. He said he wrote the Corsair (of which the public bought 14,000 copies in a day) in ten days, and the Bride of Abydos in four; but remarks of Byron's of this kind are not to be taken too literally. During these years he was the darling of society, knew almost every one in London who was worth knowing, and was the object of the maddest devotion from many women, notably Lady Caroline Lamb. On 2d January 1815, to the surprise of all and the consternation of a few, he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, heiress in her own right of the barony of Wentworth and of a considerable fortune. His daughter Ada was born in December 1815, and in January 1816 Lady Byron left her husband's house for ever.
Hardly any recent event, not concerning politics or religion, has ever exercised pens and tongues like this. Neither party immediately concerned ever gave to the world an authoritative version of the circumstances which led to it, and though there are many contradictory assertions on the subject, it is doubtful whether there is even in unpublished documents any quite satisfactory evidence. Forty-five years after the poet's death, Mrs Beecher Stowe informed the world that Lady Byron (then dead) had informed her that the separation was due to her discovery of a more than sisterly affection between the poet and his sister Augusta. But proof on three points—that Lady Byron told Mrs Stowe this; that Lady Byron, if she told Mrs Stowe so, believed it; and most important of all, that Lady Byron, if she believed it, had any ground for believing—is wholly wanting; and the relations between Lady Byron and Mrs Leigh subsequent to the separation are hopelessly incompatible with the story. Much later, in a book entitled The Real Lord Byron (1883), Mr J. C. Jeaffreson undertook to solve the mystery, but without contributing any new information of real value. The judgment of the wisest has reverted to what the judgment of the wisest was at the time: That nothing further need be sought than the natural incompatibility of a spoiled dandy and author of loose habits, violent temper, and pecuniary circumstances likely to produce perpetual irritation, and a spoiled heiress of exceptionally cold temperament, and of orthodox and even prim manners and notions. The blame was in all probability equally divided, but it was not equally apportioned; and Byron, after being a popular favourite for three years, was held up to such obloquy in newspapers and by society, that he left England and never returned.
He first went up the Rhine to Switzerland, where he met the Shelleys, with whom he connected himself by friendship with the poet, and more questionably by a liaison with Jane or Claire Clairmont, daughter of the second Mrs Shelley's stepmother by her first husband. He went on in a leisurely manner to Venice, which he reached at the end of the year, and which was his headquarters for some two years. His life at this time and place has been represented as one of wild debauchery, principally on the always untrustworthy evidence of his own assertions and hints. It is certain, however, that at the end of 1818 he entered upon a comparatively regular existence by becoming the accepted lover in Italian fashion of the Countess Teresa Guiccioli. During 1819 and 1820 he was living for the most part in her society at Ravenna. In the summer of the latter year he removed to Pisa; in 1822 he was present at Shelley's funeral, and engaged (an engagement which showed neither to advantage) with Leigh Hunt in the Liberal. From Pisa a further move was made in 1822 to Genoa. It was here, in 1823, that he received the proposals which enabled him to crown his life with a death not unheroic. He had always been a nominal, though a very unclassified, Liberal, and had latterly engaged in some Carbonari plots in Italy. He was now applied to through his friends Kinnaird and Hobhouse to join the movement for recovering the independence of Greece, and he set out for Greece itself on the 14th July 1823. But many weary months, spent chiefly in the Ionian Islands, passed before he could get into active work; nor was the delay in any way his fault. At last he landed at Missolonghi on the 5th January 1824; laboured with more difficulty, if less showy, heroism than if he had been storming Turkish castles, against bad weather, disunion among the Greeks, lack of material, and all tiresome checks; caught rheumatic fever, and died on the 19th April. His body was brought to England, and buried in the church of Hucknall-Torkard, near Newstead. His literary activity since he left England had been very great. The stimulus of his wife's desertion produced almost immediately two short poems, The Dream and Darkness, which were, perhaps, his poetical high-water mark. In the course of the seven years he completed Childe Harold, wrote a series of dramas or dramatic poems (Manfred, Cain, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, and others), which contain much of his most characteristic work; and produced, besides the wonderful bravura of Mazeppa, the cleverness of Beppo, and other things, the vast satiric medley of Don Juan.
The character of Byron, his genius, and the history of his literary reputation, are all subjects of great interest. In his own day, and immediately afterwards, his 'morality,' in the limited sense in which that word is popularly used, was the principal subject of discussion, and was most harshly judged. Recently it has been admitted: (1) That his education and circumstances supply a large palliation for faults of this kind; (2) that his own habit of fanfaronade exaggerated his moral delinquencies; and (3) that all faults of such a kind (for Byron, though a libertine, is never accused of treachery or cruelty in his libertinism) concern posterity but little. If, however, this side of his character has been more leniently judged, another side has been judged with increasing unfriendliness, and the poet's pride and vanity of birth (displayed in a manner to which the term 'snobbishness' is almost applicable), his alterations of ostentatious prodigality and sharp business practice, his childish vanity of all kinds, have received perhaps not undue, but certainly severe treatment.
In regard to his literary genius, English critical opinion has steadily sunk ever since his death, and though some effort has recently been made to set him on a higher position, the attempt has not as yet received either critical or popular approval. Every competent critic admits Byron's power. At his best he could utter what he himself had actually seen and felt with an energy not surpassed by any writer of any period in any language. For passion of a certain kind, and for picturesqueness of a certain kind, he is almost unequalled. But this merit of personal utterance involves almost of necessity two defects—complete failure when he endeavoured to portray anything besides his own personal emotions and experiences, and not infrequent insincerity and theatricality when, in default of actual emotion and experience, he endeavoured to simulate such experience and emotion. For he was not a man of many-sided mind or even feeling. The monotony of the Byronic hero—the man of dark imaginings, universal disillusion, and general contempt of man—but especially of woman-kind—is freely granted; yet the poet can write of little or nothing else, and as soon as the type ceases to be impressive it becomes ridiculous. A second great objection to Byron is his extraordinary weakness as regards all the formal merits of poetry. Hardly a long passage, certainly no long poem, of his can be cited which, after brilliant images, forcible expressions, and melodious verse, does not break down into the most commonplace thought and phrase, the most inharmonious rhythm, even into sheer bellman's rhyme and kitchenmaid's grammar. Accordingly his most uniform strength is to be found in his satirical work, which of its nature suffers less from these defects than serious or romantic verse. Byron had no humour; but he had a most keen, abounding, and versatile wit of a somewhat Voltairian character, but richer and more poetical than Voltaire's in quality, so that Don Juan ranks far above the Pucelle. He attempted no serious prose; but his letters, though somewhat artificial, are of singular excellence; indeed they are perhaps of their kind the best in English.
His poetical influence in his own country for a time swept all before it, but it gradually abated its force, and is now almost non-existent. Abroad, on the contrary, it has maintained itself at the full, if it has not actually increased, and the dictum attributed to Mazzini, that Byron 'made English literature European,' has received ever-increasing confirmation in a certain sense. This phenomenon, though curious at first sight, is susceptible of easy explanation. Few foreigners are in a position to seize the subtle formal defects, which, for all but the most uncritical English readers, mar every page of Byron's work. All are able to appreciate the strong points noted above, points in which, as has been said, Byron has few, if any, rivals in his strength. It must be added that some at least of his weaknesses as they strike his own countrymen, appeal to continental opinion nearly as much as his strength. His irreverence, his contempt for propriety, his open-mouthed egotism, his language about women, his theatricality, may not now shock all Englishmen as they once did; but the very persons who find them least 'shocking,' despise them most as puerile and unreal. To Frenchmen and Italians, to some Germans even, though in a less degree, these things usually seem virtues. Political causes assisting, and a considerable literary movement breaking out in all European countries at the beginning of the second quarter of the century, Byron attained the surest of all positions of influence, that of influencing those who influence their own countrymen. The whole Romantic school in France, Heine to a certain extent in Germany, Pushkin and Lermontoff in Russia, Espronceda in Spain, Byronised ad libitum; while the poet was a main if not a sole inspiration to many Italian writers, and shared with the classics the credit of producing Leopardi. Perhaps also Byron's ostentatious affectation of being un-English (though at heart he was very much of a John Bull) has done not least to create and preserve his popularity with the world from which Englishmen are still so sharply divided.
The editions of Byron's works are innumerable, but all those which have any authority have proceeded from the publishing house of Murray, whose possession of the poet's manuscript has enabled it by fresh issues of a little new matter from time to time to preserve copyright of the works in their entirety. The final edition of his Works, Letters, and Journals by Rowland E. Prothero and Ernest Hartley Coleridge was begun by Mr Murray in 1898. The history of the Life by Moore (2 vols. 1830) is curious. Byron gave his own Memoirs to Moore, and that poet sold them in 1821 to Mr Murray for £2000. Objections on the part of Lady Byron and others were raised to their publication, and in 1824 the manuscript was burned, Moore refunding the purchase-money, but receiving a still larger sum for the Life, in which such of the matter of the Memoirs as was deemed prudent was worked up with letters and personal reminiscences. Writings on Byron are extremely numerous: a good account of his life and work is that of Professor Nichol in the 'English Men of Letters' series (1879); works also by Lady Blessington (1834), Medwin (1824), the Countess Guiccioli (1868), and J. C. Jeaffreson (1883) may also be noted; and among essays, an irregular three-handed discussion in various reviews between Mr Swinburne, Mr Matthew Arnold, and Mr Alfred Austin may be mentioned. Only two children of Byron are known. Allegra (1817-22), his illegitimate daughter by Claire Clairmont, died before him to his great grief. His daughter Ada (1815-52) married in 1835 Lord Lovelace, and left two children, Lord Wentworth and Lady Anne Blunt.