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Updated: June 1, 2025
Tasso's lamentations as recorded in Byron's poem are undoubtedly eloquent, but for sheer force of truth they fall far short of the widow's cry from the depths. "Only three cups of coffee in the morning, Sylvie! Oh dear! to have your house emptied in this way is enough to break your heart. What is life, now my lodgers are gone? Nothing at all. Just think of it!
Yet the biographer dignifies this sorry rubbish with the name of "evidence." Nothing remotely resembling a distinct charge from a named person professing to know is offered among this precious "evidence." "Shelley believed" so and so. Byron's discarded mistress says that Shelley told Mary Godwin so and so, and Mary told her.
Opinions vary about both; but the general judgment seems to be that the earlier poems show too much of Byron's influence, and their crudeness suffers by comparison with the exquisitely finished work of Tennyson's middle life. Of dramatic works he wrote seven, his great ambition being to present a large part of the history of England in a series of dramas.
"You will tell her that what I wrote to her is not a millionth part of what I feel that she is my sun by day and my moon and stars by night, that I must marry her at once or die, that I think of nothing in the world but her, that I can do, write, plan, nothing without her, that once she smiles on me I will write her great love-poems, greater than Byron's, greater than Heine's the real Song of Songs, which is Pinchas's that I will make her immortal as Dante made Beatrice, as Petrarch made Laura, that I walk about wretched, bedewing the pavements with my tears, that I sleep not by night nor eat by day you will tell her this?"
This fact in Byron's case seems due not to mere carelessness, but to incapacity. Something seems to stand behind him, like the slave in the chariot, to check the current of his highest thought. The glow of his fancy fades with the suddenness of a southern sunset. His best inspirations are spoilt by the interruption of incongruous commonplace.
"Tut, tut!" replied the absent-minded physician; "can't you wait? The post-mortem will reveal all that." The critics did not wait for Byron's death it was vivisection. And after his death the dissection was zealously continued. Byron's life lies open to us in many books.
If we delay, they may escape.... Besides, our fleet being unmanned, it is in condition neither to sail nor to fight. What would happen if Admiral Byron's fleet should arrive? What would become of ships having neither crews nor admiral? Their defeat would cause the loss of the army and the colony.
Mary had been much interested in the account Trelawny had sent her of Byron's latest moments. She had been to see the poet's remains at the house where they lay in London.
But there is a still finer poem which belongs to this period of his history, though written, I believe, before he reached Venice The Lament of Tasso: and I am led to notice it the more particularly, as one of its noblest passages affords an illustration of the opinion which I have early maintained that Lord Byron's extraordinary pretensions to the influence of love was but a metaphysical conception of the passion.
The following stanza from Shelley's "Adonais" alludes to Byron's early quarrel with the reviewers: "The herded wolves, bold only to pursue; The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead; The vultures, to the conqueror's banner true, Who feed where Desolation first has fed, And whose wings rain contagion: how they fled, When like Apollo, from his golden bow, The Pythian of the age one arrow sped And smiled!
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