Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/680

608 which Byron himself so well expressed in the saying, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." Chief among the secondary causes was the warm sympathy between the poet and his readers, the direct interest of his theme for the time. In the spring of 1812 England was in the very crisis of a struggle for existence. It was just before Napoleon set out for Moscow. An English army was standing on the defensive in Portugal, with difficulty holding its own; the nation was trembling for its safety. The dreaded Bonaparte's next movement was uncertain: it was feared that it might be against our own shores. Humour was busy with alarms. All through the country men were arming and drilling for self-defence. The heart of England was beating high with patriotic resolution.

What were our poets doing in the midst of all this? Scott, then at the head of the tuneful brotherhood in popular favour, was celebrating the exploits of William of Deloraine and Marmion. Coleridge's Christabel Avas lying in manuscript. His poetic power was, as he said himself, "in a state of suspended animation." Southey was floundering in the dim sea of Hindu mythology. Rogers was content with his Pleasures of Memory. Wordsworth took a certain meditative interest in public affairs, but his poems, "dedicated to liberty," though fine as compositions, have not the fire and sinew, the ardent directness of popular verse. In the earlier stages of the war Campbell had electrified the country with his heart-stirring songs; but by 1812 he had retired from the post of Tyrtteus to become the poet of Gertrude of Wyoming. Moore confined himself to political squibs and wanton little lays for the boudoir. It was no wonder that, when at last a poet did appear whose impulses were not merely literary, who felt in what century he was living, whose artistic creations were throbbing with the life of his own age, a crowd at once gathered to hear the new singer. There was not a parish of Great Britain in which there was not some household that had a direct personal interest in the scene of the pilgrim's travels "some friend, some brother there." The effect was not confined to England; Byron at once had all Europe as his audience, because he spoke to them on a theme in which they were all deeply concerned. He spoke to them, too, in language which was not merely a naked expression of their most intense feelings; the spell by which he held them was all the stronger that he lifted them with the irresistible power of his song above the passing anxieties of the moment. Loose and rambling as Childe Harold is, it yet had for the time an unconscious art; it entered the absorbing tumult of a hot and feverish struggle, and opened a way in the dark clouds gathering over the combatants through which they could see the blue vault and the shining stars. If the young poet had only thrown himself forward to ridicule the vanity of their struggles, he would most certainly have been spurned aside in the heat of the fight with anger and contempt; but he was far from being a heartless cynic; his sympathy with the Spanish peasant, his worship of the scenic wonders of the country, his admiration of the heroism of the women, his ardent battle-cry of freedom, burst through his thin pretence of cynicism. The pulse of heroism—heroism conscious of the worst that could happen, and undismayed by the prospect beat beneath the garb of the cynic. It may have been by unconscious art, but it was not without dramatic propriety, that Byron turned in his second canto from the battlefields of Spain and the tremendous figure of war—

to "August Athena," "ancient of days," and the "vanished hero's lofty mound." In that terrible time of change, when every state in Europe was shaken to its foundation, there was a profound meaning in placing before men's eyes the departed greatness of Greece; it rounded off the troubled scene with dramatic propriety. Even the mournful scepticism of Childe Harold was not resented at a time when it lay at the root of every heart to ask, Is there a God in heaven to see such desolation, and withhold His hand?

The attention of the public once caught by his sympathy with them, it was rivetted by the theatrical fascination of the character of the pilgrim, whom they persisted in identifying with himself. Young, a man of genius, a lord, and unhappy unhappy with a sorrow that could not be repressed, here was a mystery over which speculation could never tire. On Byron himself the first effect of his fame was almost to endanger his poetic gift. He became acquainted with Moore, and went into the fashionable world as a "lion." He had never been in "society" before, and he took to gay life with all the impressionable facility of his character. He was even caught one evening by Mr Dallas in full court dress, and though he repented and did not go, this contemplated breach of his democratic principles, in gratitude for some kind words from the regent, shows how ductile his character was, and how easily he might have been lost to serious poetry if circumstances had not in his youth excluded him from the society of his rank. His docility under new influences was shown in the frank way in which he retracted hard saying after hard saying of his English Bards, and in the fact that though he was sufficiently scornful of the gay world to write the Waltz (1813), he strenously denied the authorship. Yet he soon began to tire of fashionable gaieties and to long for solitude.

Byron's poetic power did not advance in strength during the four years of his connection with high life. As he had been led to employ the Spenserian stanza by Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming, which reached his hands just as he was setting out on his travels, be began now to try the metres in which Scott had made his fanfe. He produced in rapid succession the Giaour (May 1813), the Bride of Abydos (December 1813), Corsair (January 1814), Lara (August 1814), Siege of Corinth (January 1816), Parisina (February 181 G). The best of these is the first; but they were received with an enthusiasm which rose higher and higher with each successive publication. It is quite clear that it was against his intention that he had been identified with Childe Harold, but it is equally clear that though the self-restrained, stern, dark-browed heroes are personifications of only one side of his character, one series of moods, and are as unlike as possible to the complete Byron, he was not unwilling that they should be accepted as types of himself. There was another reason for this than a morbid desire to represent himself as worse than he really was. All Byron's friends from his boyhood upwards declare him to have been of a very shy disposition. Never having been in the fashionable world before the spring of 1812, he was far from being at his ease in it; and he masked his shyness under a haughty and reserved manner. How severe a restraint this was on his natural manner may be inferred from the delight with which he escaped from it in the society of his boon companions. It galled his vanity to be thus constrained by people for whom he had no great respect, and it is impossible to help conjecturing that lie courted identification with his silent heroes, with their "vital scorn of all," and "chilling mystery of mien," in order to supply a romantic explanation of a reserve which was really due to unconquerable shyness. The influence of personal vanity on Lord Byron's actions, counterbalanced as it was and concealed by an equal warmth of generous feeling, is all but incredible. It was part of that amazing