BYRON LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS . Frontispiece From the engraving by T. LUPTON, after the painting by THOMAS NEWSTEAD ABBEY From a photograph by J. VALENTINE & SONS MRS. BYRON FACING PAGE From the painting by THOMAS STEWARDSON, in the possession of Mr. 146 From the engraving by W. FINDEN, after the painting by G. SANDERS 190 JOHN MURRAY, 1778-1843 From the painting by H. W. Pickersgill, R.A., in the possession of THOMAS MOORE . From the painting by Sir THOMAS Lawrence, P.R.A., in the possession From the painting by JOHN HOPPNER, R.A., in the possession of From the painting by JOHN HOPPNER, R.A., in the National Gallery BYRON, 1813-1814 From the engraving by C. TURNER, after the painting by R. WESTALL, R.A. T INTRODUCTORY HERE is only one full-length Life and Letters of Byron in English, and that was published in 1830. I imagine that this statement will astonish a good many people, for most of us have had -I certainly had a vague impression that Lives of Byron were too numerous. Writings about Byron have been at times too numerous, it is true. In 1869-70, for example, periodical literature was infested by his name; but those writings were only in a very restricted sense biographical. Pathological would be their juster description, for they were concerned with what was called "the Beecher Stowe revelation", and the whirlwind of controversy to which they contributed raged round one point only. I hope it will be as pleasant a surprise to my readers as it was to myself to find how very little else we knew about Byron, and how enthrallingly interesting, from its beginning to its end, his story is. The first act of a drama is sometimes seen, as the action develops, to have been too powerful. It has tuned the mind for events which, in the actual happening, fail to fulfil such radiant or such sinister promise. We who watch the play called "Byron " need fear no like deception. The first act seizes us, but when we rouse ourselves to attention for the next, we find no element of excitement wanting, and the third and fourth keep us not less enthralled. There is hardly another life-drama of which the same can be said. That one to which we turn as instinctively as he turned himself for a parallel-the lifedrama of Napoleon-falls below Byron's by reason of the hero's sterility in defeat. The sick eagle of St. Helena, the sick eagle of Italy and Greece-which had the unconquerable mind? If we measure men by their reaction to misfortune, there can be little doubt of the answer. Thus, like many another writer of many another nation, I (the countrywoman of Thomas Moore, his first biographer) "felt the call "-I longed to write a book about Byron. The coveted opportunity was afforded, and then for the first time realising the task which lay before me, I realised also for the first time the delight. If any degree of the joy I have felt in the work be transmitted to my readers, I shall count myself a fortunate woman. But perhaps I ought to apologise, as Byron's biographer, for being a woman at all. Assuredly he would have thought so. "You should recollect", he wrote of some critical severity on Lady Morgan, "that she is a woman; though, to be sure, they are now and then very provoking, still, as authoresses, they can do no great harm". The indulgence, scathing as it is, would not have been extended to her who dared to ply her pen on the subject of himself. Much water has run, since Byron's day, under the bridge between authors and "authoresses"; it seemed high time that a woman should write of this "victim of her sex", as he loved to call himself. There might appear, were I to cite all the arguments in such a biographer's favour, something too much of that sex-vanity which many of us feel to be nowadays losing in subtlety of effect what it has gained in candour; and indeed I think that the extremely articulate method is here, as elsewhere, superfluous. Those who have not already "the arguments" at their fingers' ends, will, I humbly hope, discover them as they read. A word about the books on Byron. Moore's Life, published in 1830, is the foundationstone for all; and if we often wish that it had been more soundly laid, we nevertheless must recognise that it has enabled two structures of supreme value to be erected. I allude to the editions of the Letters and Journals, and of the Poetry, by Mr. Rowland E. Prothero and Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, respectively. Both are published by Mr. John Murray. Praise of such works from me would be an absurdity: I offer my sincerest gratitude and admiration. John Cordy Jeaffreson's book, The Real Lord Byron (1883), which is by way of being a "full-dress " biography, is, rather, a full-dress debate. All through it the author argues interminably against now an actual, now an imagined, opponent, and we rise from our perusal with brain battered and image shattered. Neither a "real" nor an unreal Byron emerges from these wordy pages, wherein there is an occasional shrewdness, an intermittent flash of insight, a love of truth that pulses, however, chiefly for the sake of defeating some one else's. Further, the book was written at a time when guesswork had to supply the place of knowledge, and Jeaffreson, like many another, guessed badly. Of the late Lord Lovelace's Astarte (1905), the text of this book says enough. Astarte gives us vivid evocations of Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, and it has, besides, the supreme merit of unassailable documentsto a degree which makes the sole attempt at refutation a mere monument of absurdity. (See Appendix III.: Medora Leigh.) These are the chief sources. Of the rest, I may |