The Legendary Poet
Allegra. By Armitstead C. Gordon. (Methuen. 10s. ed.)
IN early childhood it was my fortune to pass enchanted periods in the wild and lovely countryside where George Gordon, Lord
Byron, had caught his first unforgettable impressions of beauty and power. There, an enchanting grandmother conversed with me on subjects like corpse-candles, dragonflies, weasels, fairy women, adders, kelpies, and poets. She explained that Lord Byron had worn his hair curled high in front to conceal two little horns, which, with his mysterious hidden feet, admitted his identity with the Prince of Evil. Though I courteously dissembled a certain scepticism, I was already aware that the great poet would not have been displeased at the notion that he had left a track of cloven flames even in the Deeside Highlands.
For early indeed did Byron, begotten by a hazardous conjunction of furious races, with those poor cloven feet strangely distorted before his birth, predestined to give and to receive intolerable suffering, kingly in his essence, yet in his blind, baffled rages betraying his nobler self to deeds of ultimate discourtesy, in character as in body beautiful and deformed, a sensualist from mere vanity and ennui, an angry idealist who broke his dark plumes against the bars of an alien society, a poet who sang the pride of his own soul and found it suffi- cient to great verse like Marlowe and Milton before him, a lord of lost legions, and "the Pilgrim of Eternity," begin to make his biography a matter for myth and legend.
We wonder sometimes why Byron, of all our poets, did so seize and keep the admiration of Europe, even while he scorn- fully stamped his indelible image on a shrinking insular consciousness. It may be partly because his poetic effect depends not so much on verbal felicities and echoing cadences as on wild cataracts and surging waves and rushing fires of utterance, communicating an elemental energy that sweeps without great diminution into another language. Partly the very fact that he was an exile, international in his modes of feeling, drinking France and Italy and the Orient like his forebears, excited the sympathy of Mediterranean nations. But chiefly he avenges himself on his homeland and continues to,conquer the stranger by sheer flame of personality, because all his gestures, base, princely, perverse, gracious, were so charged with bitter passion that he seemed made of mythic stuff. The human imagination will always prefer those that do poetic things to those that write them. Byron did both, and became a legend. His dark-red star survives even his beatification by the bourgeois and the solemn rituals of centenary celebrations.
That being so, Mr. Armitstead C. Gordon's entertaining volume seems needlessly apologetic in tone. Sometimes his style is distinctly too frivolous, sometimes his story is disjointed, and he records much trivial gossip which is not new, and which obseures the greatness of his hero more than diabolic charges could. But he evidently has two intentions, one of which is of high value and interest. He desires to prove, first, that Byron's Scottish descent wrought strongly in the paradoxes of his character ; second, that Clare Clairmont and the birth of Allegra counted considerably in the frenzied disagreement that culminated in the poet's separation from his wife. Clare and Allegra occupy but a small space in Mr. Gordon's book ; he does not seem deeply convinced himself of the importance of the most volatile member of the strange Godwin family, and she remains for us something of an hysteric type, and a good deal of a nuisance—especially to the Shelleys. For Byron she seems but a passing episode, though the spirit of the child Allegra seems to flit through his melancholy moods sometimes like a wild white moth. She died, a charming,
spoilt thing, before she could realize she was embarrassing ; and Shelley has given her an immortal moment in Julian and Maddalo.
No! Clare Clairmont was vain and neurotic, and not even seductive enough to charm for long so sophisticated a lover.
Yet, for all his fascination, Byron was not fortunate in his experience of women. In that gross Georgian society a lord was expected to be a libertine, and, since Byron unfortunately was vain as well as proud, he could not refuse even the easy fame of the fatal conqueror of hearts. Each fair face was for a little a festival for his eyes, then changed to a pestering mask of folly. He sometimes shows the dreadful brutalitT of a true neurasthenic crisis, for he could not really love these
detraquee Society women. But the memory of these childish loves of his, folded up like pure waterlilies in the dark mystery. of his suffering, seems to betray a secret longing for something remote, exquisite, and ineffably pure in the world of sentiment. Perhaps he faintly imagined he would find it in_that disastrous marriage, when, like many another rake, he mistook prudish- ness for chastity and found a spear. of ice in his feverish heart. Not Clare, certainly not Augusta, was necessary to disunite a pair so completely incompatible. At the end of his life, when his masculine spirit .had found a man's work, and his Protean genius had beaten an Italian metre into a stanza flexible enough for all his transitions . of wit, melancholy, satire, terror, and passion, it seems as if his powers were. liberated for the first time. Then indeed he created enchanting women out of his fantasy, from lyric Haidee to "her frolic Grace."
Mr. Gordon's other theme is an absorbing one, and deserves, more analysis than he has given it. Undoubtedly. Byron's descent from violent and romantic Scots nobles worked more burningly in his veins than that from the sordidly wicked. family that stole its Abbey from the monks. But though the author of this book claims kinship with the Gight Gordons, he is superficial, both in his sense of Scotland, and of the Gordon psychology. Too few people remember the passionate history of Scotland. Mr. Gordon makes the usual allusions to Scottish caution and Scottish thrift. When have the Scots been cautious in love or war ? When have they been less than extravagant in hospitality ? Byron's spendthrift ways were Gordon_ ways. True, the Gight branch acquired a some- what sinister renown. The Huntly Gordons, however, long maintained a tradition of gaiety, beauty, splendour, and kingly blood that was a danger to reigning dynasties. Heredity may be almost cancelled out by environment : in Byron's, case pride of ancestry was at least an illusion so strong as to be a determining factor in his fate, encouraging him in wild excesses, yet strengthening in him that inexplicable authority which made young poets feel at his death as if some great planet had forsaken the skies, some vital principle disowned the chilling airs of Earth.
RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
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