A NEW LIFE OF BYRON.
Byron in Perspective. By J. D. Symon. (Seeker. 12s. 6d. net.)
Ma. SYMON has added another block to the pyramid of Byron literature, but we may feel his is a corner stone. His book is the result of much scholarship and untiring research, and it cannot fail to impress every reader by its qualities of fairness, and enthusiastic yet balanced criticism. The author is evidently a Scot, and his defence of Byron's Scottish mother is a dignified and manly piece of work. It is also convincing ; for to an ounce of speculation he brings a grain of evidence, and that is nice enough a proportion to satisfy the greatest sceptic. When Byron's Scottish affinities are in question, it is no matter if the author indulges in a little special pleading, for he does it so candidly and engagingly that we sympathise with his national, and particularly his Aberdonian, pride. He apologizes for dealing at length with the eight years of Byron's childhood spent in Aberdeen, but no apology is needed, for, by his local research, he is specially qualified to interest us on that mattcT. He does more than that. His survey of Byron's ancestry, especially the maternal, is very moving, and has a cumulative effect that broods over the rest of the book.
On both sides Byron's progenitors belonged to that feudal caste whose descendants, the aristocracy of the eighteenth century, were the poison of the social fabric of the whole of Europe, with the possible exception of Spain. Vicious, licensed by their own undisciplined lives of pillage and rent-• gathering, they sucked the wealth of the peoples like a cancer within the womb of a mother. Byron's parents both were creatures of such a parasitic society. What wonder that he entered this world endowed with the invalid nervous system of a tyrant and a voluptuary ? It is a miracle that his arduous imagination, capable of surveying European life in all its activities, survived such a debilitating birth-wrong.
We sense these ancestors hovering over the poet like Erinyes over Orestes, dropping their poison moment by moment into his brain and heart, so that his thoughts and emotions were but half reflections of his experience. He could not escape that virus in the centre of his being. In moments of emotional crisis, or what the moralists call temptation, it would treacher- ously react in his system, betraying him to perversity when he needed candour. No sooner would he make a resolution for temperance and sedate action, than it would galvanize him into some recoil of excess, or tortured fury, such as in lesser people is prompted in a minor degree by wounded vanity. He was cursed with the Achilles heel not only in body, but also in mind ; and the fecund beauty of idea, which none can deny he possessed, would suddenly be twisted and scorched by the laughter of this devil within him. It was like the mobs of Paris breaking into the Tuileries ; only in his mental palace the despoilers were his aristocratic, forebears, those sardonic, sneering, raping, and rioting blackguards who, for four hundred years, had been working up this cyclone of unspiritual fury in which to drown their own genius, centred in this crippled lad.
It is more than likely, as Mr. Symon predicts, that Byron will revive to be read by this generation, when it is surfeited with its own artistry and care for craft inherited from the Pre-Raphaelites. But it will not now appreciate the false glamour of his Romanticism—the tower, the beetling cliff, and the cavern of secret sin within the mind. It will go to him for the expression of its own satiation and disillusionment ; for he can tell of a world war-weary.; of a people's religious inheritance squandered by a materialistic priestcraft ; and of superstitious creeds that once co-ordinated society on a basis of moral slavery, now shattered by the anarchic hands of the popular educator.
The prophecy of the shallowest fool must, some time or other, be vindicated by the cycle of events. Still more, then, may we be assured in Mr. Symon's prophecy that sooner or later Byron will be replaced upon a pedestal of fame ; but it will not be that of his earlier fame, which is irreparably broken.
RICILCRD CHURCH.
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