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The English may think of Byron as they please; but this is certain, that they can show no poet who is to be compared with him. He is different from all the others, and for the most part greater. Mazzini, many years later, concluded his famous essay on Byron and Goethe with this vindication of the English poet's claim:
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The day will come when Democracy will remember all that it owes to Byron. England too, will, I hope, one day remember the mission--so entirely English, yet hitherto overlooked by her--which Byron fulfilled on the Continent; the European cast given by him to English literature, and the appreciation and sympathy for England which he awakened among us. Shelley, who knew Byron intimately, has given perhaps the best expression to the English view of him. He said of him in 1822:
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The coarse music which he produced touched a chord to which a million hearts responded.... Space wondered less at the swift and fair creations of God when he grew weary of vacancy, than I at this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body. To most Englishmen of his day, Byron, like Shelley, appeared as a monster of impious wickedness. Unlike Shelley, he attained thereby the vogue of the forbidden. His earliest poems achieved what the French call a _succès de scandal_. His satire,
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English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, brought to the youthful poet a notoriety amounting to fame. After the publication of the first two cantos of
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Childe Harold, in 1812, according to his own phrase, he awoke to find himself famous, and became a spoiled child of society. Trelawney has recorded that Byron was what London in the days of the Prince Regent made him. One of Byron's ablest critics, Symonds, has put this even more strongly:
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His judgment of the world was prematurely warped, while his naturally earnest feelings were overlaid with affectations and prejudices which he never succeeded in shaking off.... It was his misfortune to be well born, but ill bred, combining the pride of a peer with the self-consciousness of a parvenu. Byron's life in London between 1812 and 1816 certainly increased his tendency to cynicism, as did his divorce from his wife. While these experiences distorted his personal character, they supplied him, however, with much of the irony wrought into his masterpiece,
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Don Juan. His poetic genius derived its strongest stimulus from his imbittered domestic life and from his travels in Spain, Italy and Greece. This twofold character of the poet it is that is revealed in his best poems,
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Childe Harold and
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Don Juan. He used both works as receptacles for the most incongruous ideas.
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If things are farcical, he once said to Trelawney,
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This means of disposing of his poetic ideas accounts for the great volume of Byron's verse as well as for its inequality. That
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Don Juan
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You were complaining that I never write any poetry now. This is my birthday, and I have just finished something which, I think, is better than what I usually write. They were the famous lines,
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On this Day I complete my Thirty-sixth Year