New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1922-07-02
The New Byron Letters
BY Edmund Wilson Jr.

coT oI INC Ncd!rn, 10 TAKE nrSt place IN
Turkish official reception.
To read Byron is to watch brilliant
moving picture of the Europe of the
early nineteenth century---the morrow
of the French Revolution and Of tho
triumph Of Napoleon seen through tho
eyes of a sophisticated man who Ia as
much alive to how people arc feeling
and to what sort Of struggles they are
waging as to how they are drinking
and making love, How amusing no
makes Milan and Geneva and Venice!
that Venice Of which Stendhal wrote
that it constituted "a distinct world, of
which the gloomy society of the rest of
Europe can form no conceptions; care
Is there n subject of mockery" Here
as yet was neither Burbank with his
Baedeker nor Bleistein with his cigar
but romantic black eyes on balconies
pecping out from behind long blinds;
dark covered gondolas at night in dark
streets Of wavering water; the dancing
the fantastic wine and the masqued
fiirtations of the Carnival; the revolu-
tionary young countess with her aged
complacent husband and her English
cavalier scrucnte, the scanda!ous, witty
Lord Byron.
Yet the final effect these letters leave
is one Of almost into!erable depression.
For enc thing, life had played poor
Byron not the least annoying Of it's
tricks: by the time he had acquired
enough judgment not to make any more
disastrous mistakes and to be sure in
what manner Of life his hope for hap
piness lay he had already hurt others
and himself SO gricvously in the proc
css CT learning that both his TRANQUIL
lily ard his pleasures we're forever de-
stroyed by the wounds. Among the
motley baggage of his soul there was
sort of Calvinistic conscience (sup-
posed to have been implanted by his
early education at Edinburgh which
gnawed its mills ard gnashed it's teeth
amid the very laughter of Venice
ut must be admitted" says Stend-
hal, writing of BYRON at this period,
that during nearly third of the time
we passed in the poets society he ap-
peared to us like one laboring under
an access of folly, often approaching
to madness. One evening,
among others, the conversation turned
upon handsome Mlanese female who
had eagerly desired to venture her
person in single combat with a lover
by whom she had been abandoned; the
discussion afterward changed to the
story Of prince who in cold blood
had murdered his mistress for an act
of infidelity. Byron was instantly
silent, endeavored to restrain his feel
lngs, but, unequal to the effort, soon
efterward Indignantly quilted the box"
A ND by this time he had another sin
to stave off with champagne. Jane
Claremont, a connection of the Shell
legs and romantic foolish young girl.
mad TO give herself to poet, had laid
violent siege to Byron and finally
nagged him into gratifying her. They
parted in Switzerland, Byron refusing
ever to see her again, and when Jane
had returned to England with the Shell
leys she bore him daughter. The
new documents here published in il
Elimination of this affair steal much
CLAM our from both Byron and Shelley.
Eo
thrilling lyric revolt. One is chilled
to find the price they paid-and that
other people paid-not only in pain
and grief, but in sordidness and raw
distress. How much good life was
plowed under in the triumph of that
roble defancc And how messy the
triumph itself appears when looked at
in the process Of making.
Well, art has it's origin in the neces-
sity to pretend that life is something
other than it is and, in a sense, bv pre-
tending so, it actually succeeds in
transforming it: what we see when we
turn back our eyes to the age OF Shell
ley and Byron is not the igominy of
mute, broken hearts and hurriedly muf-
fed up births, but a blaze of divine
WHITE light and the smoky torches of
rebellion. But poor Jane Caremont, to
nave set her heart on a love affair with
a poet! Poor Miss Milbanke, to have
been so luckless as to marry an in
Splred rake! Poor Shelley and poor
Byron, to have carried in their hearts
SCch crnelties as no wine could ever
consume and no songs could ever wash
clean! Poor male and female human
beings, who, understanding life in diff
ferent fashions and united to live to-
getherr, yet cannot leave each other
alone! For NJ moment, as we read these
letters. the very splendors Of Chi!de
Harold and Prometheus seem dwindled
and insubstantia!, like witch fires above
bog.
News Notes
Sherlock Holmes is pass6 and will
soon have successor. Sir Arthur
h(.,, 10 4