BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Mature Byron
Byron in Italy. By Peter Quennell. (Collins. ras. 6d.)
PERHAPS the heading of this article is misleading, for it is possible to argue that Byron was never mature, that he never outgrew the stage of being the sulky boy, fired with romantic ideas he was unable to realise completely. The answer to that is Don Juan, and it is a little to be regretted that in this book Mr. Quennell did not give us a stronger dose than he does of literary analysis, relating the work to the man. How was it that out of the pre- posterous life that he led, with his menageries of mistresses and animals, his self-conscious flauntings, his domestic cruelties, he was able to produce so solid, wise, and amusing a work? Mr. Quennell does, indeed, suggest the answer, but he does not develop it It was Byron's virtue, in the face of mystery, to remain un- usually clear-headed. Self-deception he might indulge in with regard to his private problems: but, confronted with the large enigma of human destiny, his intellect was clear and honest, if his view was limited. To attempt to force an explanation, or to wring the confirmation of a theory from the facts of experience, was antipathetic to the nature of his instinctive genius.
In the long watches of the night, when Byron did most of his work, the instinctive genius, the mature man, the ardent student of poetry, got the upper hand of the Byronic figure.
Apart from this (which is, no doubt, a matter of choice—and you cannot put everything into one book) there is little to grumble at in Mr. Quennell's study, and a great deal to praise. He has handled his material with extraordinary skill, and he contrives to be continuously sensible without being for a moment dull, a result due to his prose as much as to his selection. Even the period in Venice, where Byron's besoin d'aimer became so easily confused with a nostalgie de in bone, and when in comparison with Byron's affairs Casanova's lowest seem exalted adventures of the mind, even this is alive and sparkling because Mr. Quennell never lets his mind become bogged in the mass of material. He naturally does not refuse the help of Byron's letters, those brilliant essays in common sense and self-deception. Nor does he fail to make use of the picturesque elements, Venice in decay, the life of perpetual masquerade combined with a flavour of risorgitnento; and he succeeds in making a fascinating por- trait, though Byron in this phase and through the whole Allegra episode was at his worst, most fleshly, most petulant, most cruel about his wife. This in itself is an achievement.
We begin with the flight from England after the social down- fall, in company with Polidori the doctor, Fletcher the valet, Rushton the sparring partner, and the Swiss, and we soon get to Switzerland, where Byron met the best man he had ever met, Shelley, with Mary and Claire Clairemont. Then to Venice, with occasional expostulatory visits from Shelley, and from other English people, till Byron relapsed into the comparative respecta- bility of a cavaliere servante—" by the holy! it is a strange sensa- tion." But it was one that was to last some years, right through to the more permanent linking up with the Shelleys, with Trelawney, and, of course, the Hunt ménage, to which the book takes us, ending with the last gloriously sentimental two months with Lady Blessington, about which Mr. Harold Nicolson has written so well. But just before this ending, Mr. Quennell gives us some brilliant pages on what he calls "The Romantic Catastrophe," where he sets Byron in perspective with Shelle}, Keats and Coleridge. This section is extremely well placed; we needed some solid thinking, some putting into proportion, after the long picaresque novel into which Byron's life resolved itself. It is full of good and profoundly apperceptive things, from which one dare not begin to quote, since one would not know where
to stop. Not that everybody will agree with Mr. Quennell throughout; an independent mind is always provocative and invites resistance. One might, for instance, challenge the remark that " Byron represents the intrusion of the brilliant amateur." The remark is a little misleading, for though it is true to say that he was not a professional poet in his person, as the others were, with an austere notion of the function of poetry, he was a first- rate craftsman, as W. P. Ker once pointed out. But there would be no fun in a book so lacking in liveliness that one could never disagree.
Anyone who possesses Mr. Quennell's earlier volume, Byron: the Years of Fame, will certainly wish to put this one beside it on his shelf. Most biographies are either journalism, or unin-
spired scholarship: this one is a book. But on the score of scholarship, there is one complaint to be made against Mr. Quennell : not that there should be (so my learned friends tell me) a few minor slips in detail, but that there are no references, and no bibliography. The serious reader, such as this book deserves in addition to the reader in search of agreeable distrac- tion, wants to know where facts come from, how he can easily turn up a letter, or continue a quotation. He also wants to know where he can look up more on the subject, either by previous writers on Byron, and especially those who have contributed to our knowledge such as Lord Lovelace, and Ethel Colborn Mayne, or by writers who have written on the other figures in the drama, as, for instance, Mr. Edmund Blunden on ,Hunt. One must not, however, blame Mr. Quennell entirely for this, until we know what part Mr. Collins played in the omission. Publishers have, or tend to have, a mistaken objection to footnotes, on the plea that they spoil the page, and are inclined to regard bibliographies as a bore. Could not some means be taken to persuade them that
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