Byron [antikvár]

LORD BYRON A Biographical and Critical Study by PETER QUENNELL - n an ideal state of society the modem literary biographer would doubtless lose his Hvelihood; for the human origins of a work of art would have ceased to arouse the reader's interest and the .work itself, being complete and unflawed, would provide its own artistic justification and answer every question that we Hked to put. But, then, no work of art is entirely perfect; and there is usually a close connection between its qualities and defects and the artist's private character. Fully to understand a book, we must know something of the mind and temperament that directed the pen; and some writers have been blessed or cursed with an irrepressible personaUty that overflowed on to every page they wrote and added a strong and distinctive colouring to their whole achievement. Such was Byron, the creator of a personal legend that enflamed the imagination of contemporary Europe, although in some respects it bore little relation to the tastes and sympathies of the real man. Byron's biographer has a difficult task; for not only must he foUow the growth of the legend and explain how it originated in the poet's circumstances, but he must show how, once the legend had developed, it helped to disguise his less romantic traits. Both Byron and Childe Harold, from whom spring all his later heroes, are represented in his collected poems and his almost equally brilliant prose-writings. We can only hope to distinguish them, and allow to each his proper value, if we trace the story back as far as his birth and the strange inheritance with which he had entered the world. It has often been assumed, particularly by foreign critics, that Byron was a headstrong aristocrat, brought up in an atmosphere of sower and privilege. Actually, many a prosperous tradesman's son las been more comfortably and extravagantly nurtured. His childhood was wretched and impoverished; his father, a broken-down mihtary spendthrift, his mother a Scotch heiress whom his father