MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE days accumulate inexorably into weeks, and the months inexorably into years : one ends by becoming extremely middle- aged. There is no compensation for this outrage : the most that one can do is to devise substitutes for the pleasures which one can no longer enjoy. I realise, for instance, that—having lost my gambol faculties—it would arouse comment were I overtly to indulge in street-games. My street-games, therefore, have become clandestine. On those occasions when I am reluctantly obliged to move by omnibus or cab (in which conveyances I find it difficult to read), I entertain myself by playing private street-games in the recesses of my mind. Some of these games are very dignified: others are not. There is one street-game which is more interesting and less far-fetched than it may appear. I imagine that the ghost of Lord Byron, in one of his more companionable moods, comes to sit beside me. I should warn my readers that it is quite useless to play this street-game unless one is prepared to accept from the outset the assumption that Lord Byron, on finding himself on the top of an omnibus in Piccadilly, would not be too bewildered by changes in circumstance and locomotion to take a bright interest in what he observed. I do not allow myself to be diverted from my main purpose by having to explain to Lord Byron the intricacies of the internal-combustion engine. I do not encourage him to waste our limited time by foolish questions about Piccadilly Terrace, or the removal of the turnpike, or the significance of the monument to the Machine Gun Corps. My street-game is more concentrated and more specialised than that. All I do is to count the number of words and phrases which we encounter on our passage from Hyde Park Corner to the Circus which, although patent to me, must appear to Lord Byron as wholly inexplicable.
* * * *
As we sit upon the omnibus together, he addresses vivacious questions to me regarding the interpretation of the notices and advertisements which we pass. Such phrases as the following inspire him with perplexity :—" Bombed Site Parking Place," " Underground," " One Way Street," "Bus Stop, Request," " Snack Bar," " Gentlemen," " University Motors," " White City Stadium," and " Britain's Famous Aluminium House." It is a delight for me, as I interpret to his quick perceptions these improvements, to watch 'the glow of contemporary progress irradiating his handsome face. Yet sooner or later comes the question which we had both expected. "Tell me, Mr. Nicolson," he asks in his sly, slithering voice, "Tell me, am I entirely forgotten today in what I used to call England, and in what you now, it seems, call Britain ? " I have informaf ve answers to give to such an enquiry. I begin by telling him that Southey is entirely forgotten except by the intellectuals (a small and often persecuted minority in this island) and that Rogers is unread. His delight at receiving such information is ill-concealed. I go on to say that Shelley is regarded as the greatest of his contemporaries, second only to John Keats. That produces a start and a scowl. I think he was pleased on the whole when I went on to assure him that Don Yuan was regarded as his masterpiece and that the Corsair and the first two cantos of Childe Harold were dismissed as somewhat out of date. But when I told him, with such tact as I could command, that the memoirs to which he had devoted such gay industry were burnt by J. C. Hobhouse in the grate at Albemarle Street, and that his grandson had written a rude book entitled Astarte, he relapsed
into a sulk. * *
By the time that our omnibus was passing Burlington House I was able to revive him by striking that chord which always resounded —the chord of reputation. I told him that, owing mainly to Shelley, he was often referred to as " the Pilgrim of Eternity ": he snorted, quite rightly, at that senseless phrase. But I also told him that the House of Murray had continued year by year, generation by genera- tion, to publish and republish his poems, his journals and his corre- spondence. I told him that in this very week of May, 1948, as we were slowly descending the valley of Piccadilly, Mr. C. E. Vulliamy—surely the most assiduous of contemporary biographers—had published yet another book about his life, his licence and his loves. I assured him that Mr. Vulliamy's book was a sedative work, in which all his enemies were blackened, in which all his friends were smudged, and in which, as he would have preferred, his mysteries remained unsolved. I added that Professor Marchand had come all the way from America to Europe in order to investigate, in the pertinacious manner of all western scholars, the few scraps and straws which had not already been garnered. And I should have dared even, had he been in one of his soft moods, to add that, when I left him on the edge of the art nouveau fountain which adorns the hub of Piccadilly Circus, I should proceed to the Royal Society of Medicine in Wimpole Street to attend a lecture and a discussion upon the eternal
problem of the nature of his lameness and the causes of his death. Had he consented, as he might well haVe consented, to come with Professor Marchand and myself to that symposium, he would have been confirmed in his opinion that the medical profession never know their own minds. But at least it would have provided him with that pleasurable experience which he himself defined as "that posthumous feel."
* .* * *
The discussion in Wimpole Street was inconclusive. The lecturer was inaudible and the attendance sparse. Yet Byron would have enjoyed the epediascope and the pictures it displayed of feet not dissimilar to his own. He might have been enraged, had he been present, to find that so galling a problem should be discussed in public one hundred and twenty-four years after his death. But at the same time he would have been entranced at finding that the doctors of London in our age of enlightenment were really just as puzzled as were the Nottingham practitioners of 1804. It was obviously only a slight disability, since none of his contemporaries are agreed as to whether he was lame in the right or the left foot ; all that they agree upon is that he slithered and did not _limp. It cannot have been a club-foot, or even talipes equinus, since neither those who observed him when bathing, nor the shoes that he, wore, conform with any such diagnosis. I had always believed that the affliction from which he suffered was due to some lesion in the motor centres of the brain, and had—in my utter ignorance of all medical terminology—some connection with what (and again I may be wrong in definition) I imagine to be known as " Little's disease." But I was told in Wimpole Street that those who suffer from this affliction are inordinately clumsy ; they upset teapots and tumble out of bed. Yet Byron was a superb swimmer, delicate in his movements, and one of the finest pistol-shots in Europe. He was without doubt an epileptic. He had a bad fit in 1814 and a really terrible fit in February, 1824. Yet nobody (and Trelawny in his revised version is among the witnesses) ever noticed anything wrong with his legs.
* * * *
In the discussion which followed the lecture there arose a young surgeon who impressed us all by his technical knowledge of the anatomy of the human spine and leg. He made an astounding suggestion. He advanced the theory that Byron was one of those rare human beings who possess a tail. The strange thing is that there exists a drawing of extreme malevolence in which Lady Caroline Lamb depicts Byron with the tail of a faun. The young surgeon who advanced this theory added that people who possess tails are known to be extremely amorous. He may know a great deal about spinal deformations, but he does not know a great deal about Byron. That great man was not extremely amorous : he was merely adventurous and sentimental. But it would have been most irksome for me, while descending in our omnibus from Hyde Park Corner to Piccadilly Circus, to have said to him:—" Excuse me Lord Byron, but there is one question among many I wish to ask you. Have you got a tail ? "
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