***One evening in the autumn of 1816, I entered M. de
Breme's box after an excursion on Lake Como; and I discovered something solemn
and subdued about the company there. Everyone was silent, and I was
listening to the music, when M. de Breme said to me, indicating the man beside
me:
"Monsieur Beyle, this is Lord Byron."
He then introduced Lord Byron to me in the same
way. I saw a young man whose eyes reflected pride, with an added quality
of generosity; he was not at all large. Then I remembered
Lara. And on second glance I no longer saw Lord Byron as he
actually was, but as I imaged the author of Lara ought to be. As the
conversation was flagging, M. de Breme sought to get me to speak; but it was
impossible: I was filled with timidity and tenderness. Had I dared, I
would have wept and kissed Lord Byron's hand. Egged on by M. de Breme's
interpolations I attempted to speak, and uttered only commonplaces that did
nothing to break the silence reigning over the company that evening.
Finally Lord Byron asked me - as the only one there who spoke English - what
roads he should take walking back to his inn; it was at the other end of the
city, near the fortress. I though that he was wrong to try walking: at
that end of Milan, at midnight, all the shops are closed; he would be wandering
along solitary, poorly-lit streets, and without knowing a word of the
language. So out of solicitude I was foolish enough to advise him to hire
a coach. Instantly, an expression of haughtiness appeared on his face; he
gave to understand, with all politeness, that he had asked me for the route, and
not for advice on how to travel it. He then left the box, and I understood
why he had imposed such silence upon it.
The haughty but
perfectly gentlemanly character of the box's owner had met its match. In
Lord Byron's presence, no one wished to run the risk to which that man is
exposed who, in the midst of seven or eight silent people, proposes a subject of
conversation.
Like a child, Lord Byron exposed himself to
the attacks of English high society, that aristocracy all-powerful, inexorable,
terrible in its vengeance, which makes of so many wealthy sots very
respectable men, but which cannot, without utter loss of self-control, bear
the mockery of its children. The fear generated, throughout Europe, by the
great nation led by Danton and Carnot has made the English aristocracy what we
see today, this body so strong, so morose, so riddled with hypocrisy.
Lord Byron's mockery is bitter in Childe Harold;
it is the anger of youth; his mockery is only ironic in Beppo and in
Don Juan. But we must not examine this irony too closely; for
instead of gaiety and carelessness, hatred and unhappiness are at its
heart. Lord Byron knew how to paint only one man: himself. Moreover
he was, and knew himself to be, a nobleman; he wanted to appear as such to the
world, and yet he was also a great poet and wished to be admired: two
incompatible desires, and an immense source of unhappiness for him.
Never, in any country, has the body of wealthy and
well-brought-up persons - those people who pride themselves on titles inherited
from their ancestors or on patents of nobility earned by themselves - been able
to bear the spectacle of a man surrounded by public admiration and enjoying the
general favor of society only because he has written a few hundred fine lines of
verse. The aristocracy revenges itself upon other poets by complaining,
"Such a personality! Such manners!" But these two petty complaints could
not be used against Lord Byron. Rather, they weighed upon the heart and
turned to hatred. This hatred surfaced in a long poem by a M. Southey who,
till that time, was known only for the odes which he regularly addressed to the
King of England (the paragon of kings, naturally) on the royal birthday.
This M. Southey, sponsored by the Quarterly Review, addressed atrocious
slanders to Lord Byron, who at one time was on the point of honoring Southey
with a pistol shot.
In his ordinary moments, every day of
his life, Lord Byron thought of himself as a nobleman; that was the armor which
his delicate spirit, deeply vulnerable to insult, put on against the infinite
vulgarity of the herd. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo (Horace: I hate the
vulgar herd and reject it.) And it must be admitted that the herd, in England,
since it also possesses spleen by right of birth, is more atrocious than
anywhere else.
On those days when Lord Byron felt braver
against vulgarity of word and deed, that is, when he was less sensitive, his
affectations of beauty and stylishness were called into play. And finally,
two or three times, perhaps, per week, there were moments (lasting five or six
hours) when he was a wise man and, often, a great poet.***