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Nothing is more convenient than a muse whose complete works are printed; one knows then what to expect, and you have not always the reading of Damocles hanging over your head. Dragged by a fatality that so often makes me the victim of women I do not admire, I became the Conrad, the Lara of this Byronic heroine. Every morning she sent me folio-sized epistles, dated three hours after midnight.
But we, in our "superior" condition, pooh-pooh the Byronic spirit of indifference to events and scorn of trifles, we say it is "melodramatic," completely forgetting that our attitude towards ourselves and things in general is one of most pitiable bathos.
Not all will be mentioned, but among them was the Knight of the Holston Athelstanic in build in black stockings, white negligee shirt, with Byronic collar, and a broad crimson sash tied with a bow at his right side.
"An illustrious poet, was he?" said I. "Beyond all criticism," said the dapper man; "all we of the rising generation are under incalculable obligation to Byron; I myself, in particular, have reason to say so; in all my correspondence my style is formed on the Byronic model."
In Lélia, however, which is strongly imbued with Byronic coloring, she had chosen to pose somewhat as the proud angel in rebellion; and the immediate effect of hostile criticism was to confirm her in the position taken up.
Tony Collasso was an Italian illustrator, who lodged and painted in studio-apartments in Washington Square, South. He had studied in the Julian School and the Beaux Arts, and wore a shock of dark curls, a Satanic black mustache, and an expression of Byronic melancholy. The melancholy, he explained to Samson, sprang from the necessity of commercializing his divine gift.
It was retouched, refined, and idealized in the highest style of that polite and diplomatic art. As Captain Poindexter looked upon the fringed hazel eyes, the drooping raven mustache, the clustering ringlets, and the Byronic full throat and turned-down collar of his friend, a smile of exhausted humorous tolerance and affectionate impatience curved his lips.
No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs," which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with breathless interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries, that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from their tombs, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite subject, the novelist's favorite scene, where the water first narrows by the steps of the Church of La Salute, the mighty Doges would not know in what spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave.
"The English aristocracy," said Lousteau, hastening to put a word in, for he foresaw a Byronic paragraph, "has the advantage over ours of assimilating every form of superiority; it lives in the midst of magnificent parks; it is in London for no more than two months. It lives in the country, flourishing there, and making it flourish."
No man who seriously cares for Byron will assent to this doctrine. We want to know the whole of him, his weakness as well as his strength; for the one is not intelligible without the other. A human being is an indivisible unity, and his weakness IS his strength, and his strength IS his weakness. It is not my object now, however, to justify what Mr. Arnold calls the Byronic "superstition."