WHAT DID BYRON LOOK LIKE ?
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I observe from your last issue that we are both of us in a scrape over Byron. I fear, indeed, that your own plight, Sir, is even more serious than mine ; for whereas your correspon- dent, Miss Doris Langley Levy, has actually read the review for which she scolds you, yet she has omitted to read the book which has exposed me, for my part, to the lash of her dis- pleasure. If she were now to repair this omission, she would perhaps discover that I did not say the things, the ruthless things, for which she has assailed me. I did not, for instance, write that Byron " waddled " : it wouldn't have been true ; Byron never waddled, he slid. Having imposed the remark upon me, Miss Langley Levy dubs me " unkind and rather vulgar." Now vulgar I may well be—the idea has frequently occurred to me myself—but unkind, No ; as Miss Langley Levy says at the end of her letter, " No, that is too much to bear."
I should not venture, however, thus to waste your valuable space in replying to an attack which, I cordially admit, is unanswerable, did I not feel that Miss Langley Levy has, all unwittingly perhaps, raised by her spirited letter a quite interesting problem in the ethics of biography. She com- plains, I see, that my " sense of drollery " (or was it Byron's sense of drollery ?) has fouled what would otherwise have remained " a pleasant idea." She complains, more specifi- cally, that I have destroyed the legend of Byron's physical beauty—a legend which " during several years of unremitting interest " has been for her a persistent and quite laudable hobby. But, after all, I was writing of Byron at the age of thirty-six, and it might well have appeared misplaced to ex- ploit the. beaux Testes of a by then bilious and epicene Apollo. Moreover, there were many accurate and unpleasant things which I could, had I so desired, have remarked upon the personal appearance of Lord Byron in that year 1823. I could have said that his legs were short, his hair almost red, his face yellow, his teeth " gapped," and one eye larger than the other ; I could have said, even, that he had no lobes to his ears. I said none of these things. With admirable good taste and forethought I concluded that even in 1823 his appearance was
" highly prepossessing." But even this, I fear, would not have suited Miss Langley Levy.
The issue raised by your correspondent is not, however, without interest. It is this. Do the readers, the vivid realistic readers, of to-day prefer the truth to the " pleasant idea " ? I have always imagined that what was required was the former. But I may be wrong.—I am, Sir, &c.,
HAROLD NICOLSON.
Mr. Thomas Carr, 82 Earls Road, Southampton, writes :— "Your correspondent objects to ` waddling,' as an unkind and rather vulgar word to describe a lame man's walk. But Lady Blessington was not always vulgar in describing the poet's walk. In an earlier note she writes, ' There is some gaucherie in his walk, from his attempts to conceal his lame- ness.' His admirers will surely not object to the word gaucherie as applied to any act of Byron : it imputes an unsophisticated schoolgirlish air to one who has sometimes been blamed for his audacity. And in another place she writes, ' His head has a lurid look, as if it carried a higher temperature than that of most men.' Where will you find' a more delicate way of suggesting that a man was hot-headed ? Again Lady Blessington observes, ' A sweet smile often breaks through his melancholy . . . his mouth is splendid. . . . One of his eyes is larger than the other . . . his nose is rather thick ; he is best seen in profile.' After all, it does• not appear that Lady Blessington's authority always corrob- orates Mr. Harold Nicolson ; and now that the centenary. of Byron's passing is upon us, shall we not try to get at the real meaning of the immortal pilgrim who was—to use Macaulay's charitable summing-up--` gifted with such rare gifts, and tried by such strong temptations' ? "
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