A BOOK OF THE MOMENT.

A BYRON "CLOSE-UP."

Byron : The Last Journey, 1823-1824. By Harold Nicolson. (London: Constable. 12s. 6d. net.) Byron in England. By Samuel C. Chew. (John Murray. 21s. net.)

Byron, The Poet. Edited by Walter A. Briscoe. (Rout- ledge. 12s. 6d. net.)

Mn. NicoLsow has given us a most interesting and successful example of a literary "close-up "—a photographic portrait

on a big scale such as one sees at the cinema. It is not a

caricature, but a piece of realism in which certain features and aspects of the man or woman portrayed are magnified though not distorted. The result is not always beautiful—

generally the reverse. We get a certain Brobdingnagian effect even in the mouth and nose and lips of Beauty, personified and all-armed in the charming Mary Pickford. Venus herself must have blushed a little had she looked into a magnifying mirror.

Mr. Lytton Strachey, not merely in his Eminent Victorians, but still more in the account of Queen Victoria and in his inci- dental and occasional portraits of statesmen in the last-

named book, was the first modern practitioner in this art— in fact, was the inventor of the literary "close-up." Take his wonderful if slightly too highly coloured picture of Palmerston visiting Windsor after the death of the Prince Consort.

But though Mr. Nicolson has, consciously or unconsciously, been affected by Mr. Lytton Strachey's example, he is in no sense an imitator. He has a touch of his own, and a very delightful touch, which makes him not a scholar in the Lyttonian School of Painting, but rather a younger colleague in the same manner. In Mr. Nicolson the ironic note is stronger, the screen larger, and the light and shade more intense. That mood of aloofness, often pathetic though never fallacious, so constantly found in Mr. Lytton Strachey's portraiture, is usually absent from that of Mr. Nicolson. Mr. Nicolson has more dash, but also more hardness. His appeal tends to laughter rather than to the pensive smile. But though the stroke is freer, there is in both the faultless line and that true sense of sympathy without which the art of portraiture, whether on the canvas or the printed page, must flaunt and go down unregarded or despised.

• Mr. Nicolson has called his picture of Byron The Last Journey, 1823-1824, but if people think that the book is confined to this close corner of fact they will prove mis- taken. The book is a very true delineation of Byron's mind and character, a true general analysis. Though the back- ground of the picture is the Palaces and the port of Genoa, the Adriatic Sea, the Ionian Islands, and the mud flats of Missolonghi, the mind of the man is the thing. The first two chapters are wholly delightful, and a most successful effort to show Byron through the eyes of his last and, perhaps in many ways his most successful, contemporary female critic. Lady Blessington was a loud, harum-scarum Irish woman, with a lucky star, a pretty face, a rough and ready genial temper; she was lastly the first of a new type of social figure in London life. In her diary, written at Genoa where she met the poet for the first time, she managed as much by accident as by skill to put Byron exactly in his right place. She does in miniature what Mr. Nicolson does on a big scale. She begins by showing how very different was the real Byron from the man of the Byronic legend. She expected to see a laurel-crowned, implacable, beautiful tyrant, the en- chanter who first seared women's hearts with the fire of his passion, and then chilled them with the ice of his sneers ; the Lama of London ballrooms who leaned against the wall and watched the dancers with a halo of disdain ! What she saw, in fact, was a rather small, over-dressed, yet rather untidy man waddling down the drive of his Genoese villa, to apologize for keeping her waiting and doing it in a manner which was humble and ingratiating almost to the point of oiliness. The beautiful dark locks had become a kind of rusty auburn streaked with grey. Worse, they hung over the collar of his coat with greasy ambrosialness. His ill- fitting, loose, badly cut Venetian trousers were much too big for him, and his tartan coat, also of Venetian manufacture, hung about his shrunken form. Poor Lady Blessington was

almost too disillusioned to recover herself. And the thing grew horrider and horrider, for Byron was as much "out of it" in manner as in dress. He proved as little of an English gentleman as of a poetic and romantic "Spirit of Evil." He would explain how highly he was connected, what a swell was his mistress, the Countess Guiccioli, how fine were her father's coach and six horses. More dreadful still, for his Italian snobbery might have passed for a touch of the pictur- esque, he was always explaining how intimate were his relations with the English peerage. In a word, all the gilt is torn oft the Byron gingerbread by the first entries of the diary. And then gradually and surely—just as in Mr. Nicolson's book as a whole—the real Byron, the fascinating companion, the man of genius, the human soul below the coat of the vulgarian, and also below the blackguard woman-hunter, emerges and gradually does the work of reconciliation.

Though, as Mr. Nicolson points out, Lady Blessington ends her Genoa entries by talking about "poor Byron," her heart has been really touched, and touched in the right way, as indeed is Mr. Nicolson's, by the innate pathos of the subject on his easel. There was an intellectual grandeur in the man that could not be gainsaid. Though morally and intellectually he was equipped almost as badly as the Venetian tailor who dressed him, he was in the last resort a man of high distinction.

Mr. Nicolson, with a delightful art, makes us go through exactly Lady Blessington's processes, first by disillusionment and then by recovery. Byron is stripped bare of all his external pretensions to greatness, and to our sympathy, and then we see him re-edificed as a figure demanding our admira- tion. The emergent Byron leaves one with as little bad taste in one's mouth as is possible in the case of a man liable to such brain-storms of malignity and cruelty as were his. Remember, there were always these elements in Byron at his worst. There have been few men of genius with less of the essential milk of human kindness in them than Byron. Goethe, of course, had none of it. He was the least good-natured man in the world, as Benjamin Constant sadly noted, when he dined with him at Weimar, "Le mains bonhomme du monde." But Goethe wore his want of human kindness with a differ- ence. It was a dry brand, reticent and calculated, and properly dressed—Cuvee Reservie. Byron was always exposing his bad qualities by his ill-temper, and then again by his sudden and almost comic dives into his "three r's " of remorse, repentance and religion.

I confess to be hugely delighted by the way in which, when proper occasion offers, Mr. Nicolson carries his method of ironic sympathy to the verge of farce. Byron, setting off to Greece in his Snark-like tub the Hercules,' his relations with the various cranks and impostors who were helping to run the Greek War of Independence, is one of the most delightful pantomimes in literature. And it is all true. Byron was a laughter-loving satirist, but he was by no means able to avoid occasion for laughter in others. His projected uniforms, his classical helmets like that worn by Hector in the trenches, to be donned by himself as soon as they got into contact with the Turks, are veritable "screams." They ended, alas ! for himself, in a kind of Scotch bonnet, and a misfit of 'rrelawny's in the shape of a green frogged semi- military coat of the sort which prevailed at the end of the war and in the early years of the Regency. Alas, poor Pilgrim I Equally attractive from the comic point of view is the story not only of the girl (the voracious, unveracious Countess Guiccioli), but also of the geese he left behind him.

The geese deserve an epic. He did not want them, but helpful friends were always trying to press the wretched birds upon him, after they had missed the boat at Genoa. The

'Hercules' itself was an entirely farcical craft. It was commanded by -one of the greatest sea captains in literature.

In this whole Pantaloon, Harlequin and Columbine outfit

there is nobody greater than" Captain Scott of the Hercules" —not, alas 1 a lugger, or even a rakish or piratical schooners

but a horrible old tub as Trelawny insisted. Captain Scott

had no taste for running a Turkish blockade, and when asked to do so he grasped wildly for an excuse. Byron had sug-

gested starting on the Sunday. Scott pounced on the religious issue as if it were a life-belt. "No, may Lord, you must not play these tricks with me ; there shall be no heathenish and outlandish doings on board my ship on a Sunday." When it was suggested that the Monday would just do as well for the start, Captain Scott had to shift his ground. He found be

could only sail, be it Sunday or Monday, if Byron would guarantee him the full value of his vessel in the event of capture.. But that meant "nothing doing," and so the

Hercules ' - was paid off, and the brave but pious skipper returned to England.

There were plenty of other star characters in the "panto." For example, Colonel Stanhope—one of the many intellectual, liberty-loving, semi-virtuous adventurers to whom Byron was so "greatly exposed" in the last two years of his life. Stanhope had not merely cranky political views, but was an amateur journalist and editor. He was convinced that all Greece wanted to revive her soul was a free press. He had not noticed, as Mr. Nicolson points out, that the Greek nation was almost totally illiterate, and that half those who could read, would not read the vernacular on a patriotic punctilio. The other half could not read the classical artificial Greek even if they would. Nobody, of course, could read English. All the same, the free press was a panacea, and Stanhope toiled on with his types in a halo of virtuous glory. But there was something worse behind the printer's ink and the only presses in the only sitting-room. Stanhope was a devoted admirer of Bentham. Byron made cruel fun of Bentham. In their fierce debates on the merits of the phil- osopher of Birdcage Walk, the Holy Greek cause, even the printing presses, were forgotten. Stanhope, in true washer- woman fashion, accused Byron of personal attacks on Bentham. Byron replied, as people always do in such cases, that he did not attack him personally, but only his public principles. Stanhope when gravely reporting the squabble to the Greek Committee in London said that Lord Byron "never reasoned on any of Mr. Bentham's writings, taut merely made sport of them." When asked by him, Stanhope, to explain himself, "Lord Byron mentioned his Panopticon as visionary. I said that experience in Pennsylvania, at Millbank, &c., had proved it otherwise." So they went on hammer and tongs Stanhope concluded by saying that Bentham had "a truly British heart," while Byron only professed Liberal principles, and that when called upon to act he "proved himself a Turk." Byron, like the schoolboy he was, yelled "Prove it." Then out came the old printing press grievance and the combatants reached reality at last. Stanhope threw it in Byron's face. "Your conduct in endeavouring to crush the press, by declaiming against it to Mavrocordato, and your general abuse of liberal principles." Next, "the Hunts and Cart- wright" and the Reform Bill, and Leigh Hunt, and heaven knows what, went hurtling through the air." Stanhope ended by riding the high horse and declaring that though he was a mere soldier, he would never "abandon his prin- ciples." Stanhope finishes his Report with a touch of irony : "When he wished me good-night, I took up the light to conduct him to the passage ; but he said, What I hold up a light to a Turk !' " Another of the pantomime characters was Mr. William Parry, a clerk in a Government office who became "Major Parry of Lord Byron's Brigade, Commanding Officer of Artillery and Engineer in the service of the Greeks." Parry had many Snark analogies. He was sent out to manufacture Congrevc rockets to be used against the Turkish fleet, also Greek fire, and other military fireworks. Unfortunately, however, when he landed, he had to confess that the Congreve rocket happened to be the only kind of rocket he did not know how to make ! The English artificers, who accompanied him, were very much like the Beaver in the Snark. They had with them minature forges for making weapons of war, but these could only be used 'with coal. And there was not an ounce of coal in all Greece! Also they were not of a military character, and when they heard of Turkish methods, and saw the awful scallywags and bandits who formed the• Greek Army, they were as frightened as the Beaver when he saw the butcher sharpening his knife on deck. They went home. But Parry somehow quite won the heart of Byron.

Another delightful character is Dr. Kennedy, a worthy evangelical Chaplain attached to the British garrison of the Ionian Islands. He attempted by means of long expositions and copious tracts to convert Byron. Byron seems to have enjoyed the process, and would argue with him for hours, while the British Infantry subalterns stood by and listened awe-inspired. Probably they preferred to hear Byron describe the seamy side of his life, which he was very fond of doing, but when that rich treat was not obtainable it was almost as good to hear him " down " the Padre on the Scriptures. Another wOnderful character Was Colonel Napier, the man destined -to be the general who- conquered Saide, and be the cause of the best pun in history, " Peccavi- I have Scintle."

But I must not write as if the book was all pantomime. . .

With great skill Mr: Nicolson shows us behind the rough and tumble of the Hellenic harlequinade the great practical ability shown by Byron, and the extreme good sense of his political views. The memorable thing here is that Byron, though in one sense quite disillusioned about the Greeks, was in no sense disillusioned as to the Greek cause. One would have expected him to fly off in a rage and abandon the whole business. In fact he was the only man who stuck it out. When others deserted in a pet and went home, or wandered off, as did Trelawny, Byron kept to his post till he died. His death-bed was indeed the last net of the harlequinade, for the doctors fought over him and with him as in a new edition of Moliere.

The death-story is told somewhat abruptly but with great good taste by Mr. Nicolson. He would have put his book out of tone if he had ended up with a highly coloured, highly drawn picture of the tragedy—for so it was ! With a true sense of proportion, he does not indulge in anything approach- ing a dirge, but relies upon the artless narrative of Byron's valet. The last chapter closes with an account of how the news was received in England and elsewhere. I have the good fortune here to be able to add a personal comment as to the impact of that news upon the generation which looked upon Byron as its greatest poet. I heard the late Lady Stanley of Alderley describe how she, as a girl, travelling with her parents in Italy, received the news. She and her party were in the Customs House at Genoa, along with a number of other English travelling families. During the examination of the luggage an Englishman suddenly came into the room and called out "Byron is dead." The effect, said Lady Stanley's account, was electric. Not only did the women but the men burst into tears. In a word there was "an intense emotional moment" such as is common in the case of the Latin races, but from which as a rule Englishmen seek safety in silence. Even at the age of 85 or so Lady Stanley of Alderley showed a touch of personal emotion in recalling the scene ; though emotion was not usually the mood of one of the best and most interesting talkers of the Victorian Age. It will be remembered that Tennyson when as a boy he heard of Byron's death felt as if the world had come to an end.

Mr. Chew gives us a most interesting and valuable account of Byron in England, and his fame both before and after his death. It is a book full of information, and is certain to be used by the writer upon whom shall fall the fate of compiling the complete life of Byron. Byron, the Poet, is a series of essays—none of them very memorable. The best part of the book is the pictures. Byron at the age of 17, by Raeburn, is very striking, as also is the charming portrait by Lawrence

of a still younger boy. Very attractive also is the picture of Mrs. Musters, ("Mary ") by Phillips. Exceedingly amusing is the Italian miniature of "Byron and the Countess Guiccioli." It is, in truth, a terrible piece of unconscious satire, and shows us Byron's "blowsy Cleopatra" at her worst. By the way, why does not someone give us a Byron Albumwith reproductions of all the Byron pictures, miniatures, sketches and busts? To these might be added pictures of all his friends and flames.

J. Sr. LOE STRACHEY.