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Show THE POET BYRON. THE WITCHERY OF THE POET EXER CISED WHILE LIVING. A l'llfrrlmege to Ills Crave A Mass of Affectation Af-fectation and Coutradlntlon How Kegarded Today as Author Au-thor and Man. New York. Nov. 10. It is more than twenty years since, being in England, I was anxious to viait the grave of Byron. I was romantically interested in him and his poetry then the romantic iut st belonged, be-longed, I suppose, to my youth .I I felt j that I could not quit the kingdom without i making a sentimental pilgrimage to the ; . spot which contained his ashes. I was full j ' of the subject: I talked much of it to vari- j ous acquaintances, true Britons, that I had made in London. To my surprise, they did not know, though educated and ' of the upper class, where Byron was buried. I had not then got accustomed to the extraordinary ignorance of the English ; about topics on which they should be plen tifully informed. "His remains have not been removed," I inquired, "from Hucknall, have they?" They had never heard of Hucknall. "It is a small town," I explained, "near Kewstead Ahley." They had never heard of Newstoad Abbey Ab-bey either, was astounded. "You know who Byron was?" I questioned ques-tioned with some Irritation. They believed that they did. I Ono of them remembered reading some of his "queer stuff" at college. Another pronounced him an awfully funny fellow, expressing the opinion thai his burlesques were really jolly. He referred to Henry J. V, Byron, author of "Babes in the Wood," "Jack the Giant Killer" and "Dundreary Married and Done For." ' i. The poet, you recollect, illustrated mili tary glory by a soldier killed in battle and i having his name misspelled in The Army Gazette. What could have been more satirical sa-tirical than the confounding of his great Jl.-. uaino with that of a writer of extrava-4 extrava-4 gauzas for the British stjigo! He would H have enjoyed or have pretended to enjoy ; that cruel stab at his self love. I went to Hucknall and saw the family - vault iu the little church of tho little town in which Bvron was interred forty years before, after the ridiculous ecclesiastic eccle-siastic philistinb, the dean of Westminster, had pompously refused to admit the body to the abbey. The vault was not much to sec, but it awoke many emotions in my breast, and the contrast between the tranquil, tran-quil, decaying village and the passion and the tumult of tho poefs life impressed me deeply. I had at that time great admiration admira-tion for the man. Wider experience, added ' years and better acquaintance with his life have materially modified that admiration. When I was born Byron had beeT years In the grave, and the reaction against tho sentimental worship of him and his works had been completely established. He had ceased to be iueulized; his literary reputation reputa-tion was much bolow his merit, when, in my early teens, I began to read him. "Childe Harold," "Lara," "The Corsair," "Manfred," "Cain," "The Deformed Transformed," Trans-formed," appealed to mo like the echoes of my own heart. His thoughts, his feelings, feel-ings, his sKeptlcism, his melancholy, his I egotism were mine, or at least I fancied them to be. Having nothing to trouble me, my days passing serenely, smoothly, my future unclouded and promising, I Imagined myself wretched and bearing a peculiar destiny. It all seems very absurd and ludicrous now; but then my condition appeared positively serious to my own morbid mind. I was extremely foolish, no doubt; but I had not the slightest conception concep-tion of the fact. I There can be no such a blas5, blasted soul I as that of fcxonccited romantic hoy, who, ." thinking binSHT clover, delights In con juring up shadows wherever the sunlight falls. I must have lieen afflicted with the peculiar ailment named Wertherism, derived de-rived from Goetho's "Sorrows of Werther," to which introspective, over susceptible juvenility is still subject. I should stylo Jit Byronism, were not Byronism a couta- gion caught from reading the poet, and I ? x had suffered from the distemucr before He did not deserve sympathy. lie may have valued it in his heart, but he outwardly out-wardly scoffed at it and invariably ridiculed ridi-culed those who expressed it. So iucrusted was be with affectation that nature might have been suffocated in him forwantof air. Many of his apologists have declared that it would have been far better if he had married Mary Chaworth he conveyed the same impression in his writings instead of Anne Milbanke. But it I not the least likely. He was totally disqualified for domesticity. do-mesticity. No woman of any pride or spirit could or would have lived with him as wife any length of time. Teresa Guiccioli was his mistress four or Ave years without serious quarrels; but she was an easy going go-ing Italian of abnormal character. He treated poor Jane Clormont, the mother of his daughter Allegra, shamefully; ho had neither understanding nor appreciation of pure minded women. The incarnation of disloyalty, his liaisons generally were as offensive to good tasle as to morality, and ho boasted of them, as he boasted of everything, every-thing, whether creditable or shameful. So inveterate a humbug was Je that it has been gravely doubted if bis dejection and despondence were not part of his masquerading. In a men-snre they were; but when he put them into his verse, as he continually did, ho doubtless felt them they represented his mood of the moment. Otherwise he could not have so affected his readers. Nature stubbornly declines to be tricked. Surely he had more than enough to render hiin melancholy. His heredity was execrable; his father being an army officer he was dubbed Mad Jack Byron a gambler, a debauchee, a spendthrift; spend-thrift; his mother an ill favored, narrow, vulgar vixen. One moment she would deride de-ride him for his lameness; the next praise him to the skies, and smother him with kisses. After abusing each other violently, violent-ly, while he was still a boy, they would each, after expending their fury, slip round to the nearest drug store to inquire if the other hud been there to buy poison. On his return from the east he did not visit her, though he had btjen absent two years, and she cursed him just before she died, wishing that he might be as deformed mentally as he was physically. His solo deformity was his defective right foot, with which she derided him when angry, knowing how sensitive ho was about it. What could be expected of a man with such a mother, and with a father of mad Jack's antecedents? Much should be forgiven for-given him in consequence. His blood was tainted at his birth. Byron's good and bad qualities have I both been exaggerated by ids contempo- rai'ies. He was not nearly bo handsome as his portraits commonly represent him. They idealize him; they show him to be almost boyish in appearance. Years before his death he was out of health and looked older than his age, though he died at 30. I have seen drawing und sketches of him in England, declared to have been taken from life, and there is no reason for doubt. They were cot remarkable in any way; they were fairly comely, but without trace of beauty. Trelawney, who died recently at an advanced ad-vanced age, kuew him intimately, and often spoke of him orally, I have been told, in a manner very diverse from what he printed in his memoirs. Byron's end was noble. He earnestly endeavored to aid tho Greeks against their Turkish oppressors, and thereby evinced considerable talent for military organization. organiza-tion. His sacrilice for the struggling nation na-tion cancelled most of his grievous faults and consecrated his memory. Schopenhauer Schopen-hauer published his now famous work, "The World as Will and Idea," the first systematic expression of pessimism, five years before Byron's death, but it attracted no attention until long afterward. The poet considered as sufficient motive for "Childe Harold" his wish to inform civilization that he was unhappy; and ho informed it of the fact in dulcet numbers , for the next twelve years. In the last hnlf century we have grown .$o accustomed to regard life as very serious, with a large admixture ad-mixture of sadness, that Byron's tuneful plaints appear redundant. They contain much beside, however, that is grand and beautiful; and remembering how weighted he was with ancestral evil, we pity him as nu heir of our common humanity; we admire ad-mire him as a lover of liberty andprogress, and as incoutestably a great poet. ..JUNIUS IlENItr BROWKff. opening a volume of his works. His writ- i ; lugs certainly had, and may have yet, a : w strange capacity to reproduce, in very I , f young persons, the morose, dismal, de- , f spairing moods which they so eloquently r ) describe. In Italy and Germany, particu- larly in Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and f Kussia, their strong influence has never Cbeen modified. But the people of those countries are very different from the English Eng-lish and Americans, who are, above all, conspicuous f .r practicality and common sense. It is hard to comprehend at this late day what a glamor Byron contrived during his life to throw over his verse, investing his personality with exaggerated and romantic roman-tic qualities that did not belong to him. On young women of our blood he wrought asortof spell. They sympathized with him intensely, all the more because he was by hi own account so very wicked. They were in the habit of kneeling down every night and praying for his conversion, for the repose re-pose of his soul. Precious lit t le simpletons, how the author of "Childo Harold" would have gibed at them had he seen their folly! I remember an aunt who told me that she perplexed her brain for months in her girlhood with trying to think how she might mitigate his misery. He becamt the fashion among Anglo-Saxon youths, who, by quoting his stanzas and imitating his vices, imagined that they had genius. Others cultivated pallor, wore broad, lovr collars and scowled like Alp or the Giaour. They labored hard to believe themselvei (leep dyed villains; and certain freshmen at Cambridge and Oxford were want to stalk over the quadrangle with moody brow, intimating that they had committed a dreadful crime without a name. Tho , ' feminine heart in two hemispheres leaped 1 to the refrain. "So young, so handsome, o gifted, so unhappy." No man before or Incehas so imposed himself upon the cultured cult-ured world, so stolen tha unmerited sympathies sym-pathies of hearts charged with excess of aensibility. The strain did not and could Cot last; but it was sincere and severe while it continued. Byron was underrated as A poet, long after the reaction had set in, and it is only within the last twenty odd years that he ; has regniued the place ha is entitled to. j He is now adopted, with all deductious, as . one of the greatest of poets, as one of the I musters ,01 the Knglish tongue. Not a lit-! tic of his work is set to ono key; but the key is magnificent and most melodiously t variable, As a man, notwithstanding his Constantly expressed hatred of cant and ahnui, he hud a deal of both In his verse, aad his daily assumptions. Strong, gifted and courageous, often chivalrous, he undeniably unde-niably was: but he was also superlatively 5 vain, egotistic, sensual, affected and in the i main deeply selfish. It is dillicult to do- j ) eide what he was or what he was not, so j inconsistent, so euntradlctory was hl I Whole nature. Ho complained acridl7 of i private slander and public calumny, yet 1 or years he did his utmost to make tho world believe him ten times worse than he was a task altogether superfluous, j His disposition was salieutly dual. His : j avery virtue had ita attendant vice; he was j generous and niggardly, magnanimous and B paltry, exulted and base, delicate and 1 coarse, true and false, lovablo and. odious in the same hour. Never wns he quite sincere. sin-cere. He was always playing a part, acting act-ing for effect, tryi ni to mystify everybody. Quizzing was his i. jjtual offense. He was a creature of impulse seldom impelled by principle and absolutely incajiable of for- i , getting himself. On no other mortal, per- j fcapa. has so much sympathy been wasted. |