Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/682

610 a villa in the neighbourhood of Geneva. He spent the summer there, making two excursions to Switzerland, one with Hobhouse, a shorter one with Shelley, who also was living at Geneva at the time. His travels through Flanders past the field of Waterloo appear in the third canto of Childe Harold (May to July 1816); the idea of writing Manfred on his way to Geneva (begun September 1816, finished February 1817) occurred to him on the Jungfrau. where the scene is laid. In November 1816 he removed to Venice, and lived there, with the exception of short visits to Ferrara and Rome, till December 1819, writing fourth canto of Childe Harold (June 1817), Beppo (October 1817), Ode to Venice (July 1818), first canto of Don Juan (September 1818), Mazeppa (October 1818), second canto of Don Juan (December 1818), third and fourth cantos (finished November 1819). The bare catalogue of his literary work shows that the reports of the debauchery in which he lived at Venice, and from which he is said to have been rescued by the Countess Guiccioli, must be taken with a qualification. His acquaintance with this lady began in April 1819, and a mutual attachment sprang up at once. In December 1819 he removed to Ravenna. In the following month the Countess Guiccioli, having separated from her husband, occupied, under her father Count Gauiba's presence and sanction, a suite of rooms in the same house with Byron at Ravenna; and though the families were formally separate, the union was not broken till Byron's departure for Greece. When, two years later, in 1821, the Gambas, in consequence of their connection with revolutionary movements, were ordered to quit Ravenna, Byron removed to Pisa and lived with them under the same roof as before. Leigh Hunt, who also was received into Byron's house with his wife and children, has given us a somewhat ill-natured but sufficiently faithful picture of his life here, which was simply that of a busy domesticated literary man, with a taste for riding, swimming, and marksmanship. During Byron's residence here Shelley was drowned in the Gulf of Spezzia. In September 1822, the Gambas were ordered by the Tuscan Government to quit Pisa, and Byron removed with them to Genoa. His life at Genoa has been described with traces of airy malice, but with much vivacity and abundance of detail, by Lady Blessington.

While he lived with the Countess Guiccioli Byron's literary industry was prodigious. The following is the list: Translation of the first canto of Morgante Maggiore, February 1820; the Prophecy of Dante, March 1820; translation of Francesca de Rimini, March 1820; Marino Faliero, April to July, 1820; fifth canto of Don Juan, October to November 1820; The Blues, November 1820; Sardanapalus, January to May 1821; Letters on Bowles, February and March 1821; The Two Foscari, June to July 1821; Cain, July to September 1821; Vision of Judgment, September 1821; Heaven and Earth, October 1821; Werner, November 1821 to January 1822; De formed Transformed, begun November 1821, finished August 1822; Don Juan, sixth, seventh, and eighth cantos, February 1822; ninth, tenth, and eleventh cantos, August 1822; The Age of Bronze, January 1823; The Island, February 1823; Don Juan, twelfth and thirteenth cantos, February 1823.

This quiet industrious life, however, did not cure him of his constitutional melancholy and restlessness. The curse of his nature was that he exhausted his pleasures too quickly. He too soon became dissatisfied with past triumphs. Much as he enjoyed the success of the works which poured with such rapidity from his pen, he began to harp on what he might have done; began to think that the tide was turning against him in England, and to hunger for new distinction. In this spirit, towards the end of 1821 he commenced those negotiations for the publication of a journal in England in conjunction with Shelley and Leigh Hunt, which ended in the abortive Liberal. The Vision of Judgment, the greatest of modern satires, appeared in the first number of the Liberal, in the summer of 1822; only three more numbers were published. According to Moore, the sign of an intention to take an active part in alliance with English Radicalism did more to make Byron unpopular in England than the most shocking of his poems. It was fortunate for his popularity that a more glorious enterprise offered itself to him in the Greek struggle for independence. He was brought into connection with this through the London Greek committee, of which he was appointed a member in May 1823. He at once decided to take action, raised 50,000 crowns, bought an English brig of 120 tons, and sailed from Genoa with arms and ammunition in July. The high hopes with which he set out were soon broken down; the Greeks had no plans, and he was compelled to spend five months of inglorious delay at Cephalonia. Reaching Missolonghi in December, after a chase by Turkish cruisers, he found dissension among the Greek chiefs and insubordination among their followers. He was appointed commander-in-chief of an expedition against Lepanto; but before anything could be done he was seized with fever, and died on the 19th April 1824.

It is yet, perhaps, too soon to hazard a speculation as to the permanence of Byron's fame. That he holds a lower place in the opinion of the present generation than of his own, so far at least as concerns his own country, is undeniable, and is probably due to the fact that poets now are tried by more strictly artistic standards; verses are judged, proportions measured, rare and precious excellences appreciated with the jealous scrutiny and skilled recognition of professional workmen. Tried by such standards, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley must be pronounced Byron's superiors. The greatest modern authority on verse, Mr Swinburne, comments justly on Byron's imperfect mastery of his materials: "One native and incurable defect grew up and strengthened side by side with his noblest qualities a feeble and faulty sense of metre. No poet of equal or. inferior rank ever had so bad an ear. His smoother cadences are often vulgar and facile; his fresher notes are often incomplete and inharmonious. His verse stumbles and jingles, stammers and halts, where is most need for a swift and even pace of musical sound. The rough sonorous changes of the songs in The Deformed Transformed rise far higher in harmony, and strike far deeper into the memory than the lax, easy lines in which he at first indulged; -but they slip too readily into notes as rude and weak as the rhymeless, tuneless verse in which they are so loosely set, as in a cheap and casual frame. The magnificent lyric measures of Heaven and Earth are defaced by the coarse obtrusion of short lines with jagged edges no small offence in a writer of verse." In point of metre, too, Byron showed none of the originality which we should expect in a poet who delighted in his materials for their own sake. The god of his idolatry was Pope, towards whom his sympathies were drawn chiefly by the elder poet's -modern and practical point of view, and quick interest in passing affairs, and he began by imitating with very indifferent success Pope's satiric couplet. But his successes were achieved in more popular measures. He was the least possible of an antiquarian poet, whether in matter or in form. His way was to take up any measure that struck him as effective, and try his hand on it. Campbell's example suggested the Spenserian stanza; Scott and Coleridge the rapid octosyllables of his Eastern Tales; and he would never have thought of the ottava rima of Beppo and Don Juan but for Frere's ''Whistlecraft. Whistlecraft'' appeared in 1817, and the moment it fell into his hands Byron