Art. 12.-THE NEW LETTERS OF BYRON.

Lord Byron's Correspondence chiefly with Lady Melbourne, Mr Hobhouse, the Hon. Douglas Kinnaird, and P. B. Shelley. Two vols. Murray, 1922.

An important series of unpublished letters of Byron has long been known to exist. The collection was inherited by Lady Dorchester from her father, John Cam Hobhouse, Byron's most intimate friend. At her death, in 1914, she bequeathed them to Mr Murray, who is the editor as well as the publisher of the correspondence. True to the traditions of his house, he is concerned with Byron on his literary side as the poet of acknowledged genius, and not with his moral delinquencies, proved or unproved. It would have been easy to give seasoning to the volumes by emphasising the bearing of this or that passage on the controversies which still rage round Byron's name. Mr Murray has not attempted anything of the kind. He has underlined nothing. He has also, as he tells us, omitted nothing. It was the wisest, and indeed the only, course to adopt. One copy, if not two copies, of the correspondence is known to exist in manuscript. It might have been deposited in the British Museum, and so made available to the public in the misleading form of extracts. Instead of selected passages, Mr Murray prints the actual text of the originals. With admirable self-restraint, he has avoided all superfluous comment. He has been content to give, in the briefest space, the biographical links which connect the letters as an intelligible whole. He has supplied those notes, and only those, which are indispensable for the identification of the persons, the events, and the allusions that pass across the pages.

On the whole, it may be said that the new collection adds more to the bulk than to the quality of Byron's letters. It contains no single letter which is better than many of those previously printed. Except in its revelation of the important part played by Lady Caroline Lamb in the tragedy of Byron's life, its biographical value is slight. Taken by itself, the first volume is unfair to the man from the tiresome monotony of the subjectmatter. The levity, the egotism, the licentiousness of

Byron are forced into excessive prominence. They stand out without the relief of his genius for friendship, his generosities, his love of children, his hatred of war, his pity for human suffering, or the touches of wistfulness and pathos, all of which, in the collection as a whole, soften the depths of the shadows. Interspersed with the three hundred other letters and fragments of his journal, which belong to the same period, the letters to Lady Melbourne would produce a less exaggerated effect. The number of the published letters now considerably exceeds sixteen hundred. This abundance of material for his life-history is not to Byron's advantage. Shakespeare is trebly blessed in that so little is known about his human relationships. An age more addicted to letter-writing, and more curious about its greatest men, might have preserved the correspondence relating to Ann Hathaway, the Dark Lady, and perhaps other loves, with the result that to-day we might be discussing his morals instead of reading his works and thrilling with pride that he was of our race. Byron is triply accursed, because we already know too much about his private affairs, and want to know more. Instead of enjoying Don Juan' as a priceless gift to our literature, we are still wrangling over an unproved scandal of his domestic life.

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Byron is in this respect himself mainly to blame. He was his own worst enemy with the pen as well as with the tongue. Through his letters he has given to the world an intimate autobiography of a peculiar kind. It was not prepared for publication by a man who, at the close of his life, chooses what to omit and what to relate. It was not even revised or corrected for the press. contains no studied attitudes, no carefully considered phrases. Many an artist, with brush or pen, has painted his own portrait. But hardly any one except Byron has left behind him so complete a series of 'snap-shots' of himself in every sort of position and temper. They represent the man in many moods, his sulks, his merriments-often saddest when they were gayest-his passing whims and fugitive fancies set down as they came and went with characteristic vivacity. Few men could be subjected to such a test and retain their reputations. In the piquant candour of their self-revelations, the letters resemble the delectable 'Diary of Samuel Pepys.' In a

large, sprawling, unpunctuated hand-writing, circulated among all and sundry of his contemporaries, Byron is as intimate in his confidences as was Pepys in the confessions which he entrusted to the imagined secrecy of his cipher. The resemblance ends with the candour. When two men admit of no comparison in character, intellectual power, and circumstances, the impressions created by their books necessarily differ. No ordinary man can help liking Pepys. It requires some study to like Byron. The simple, natural vanities of the one are as amusing as the sexual and aristocratic vanities of the other are repellent. The confidences of Pepys are quiet and carry conviction; those of Byron are noisy and sometimes seem to ring false. In another respect the Letters are at a disadvantage. They describe the life which Byron lived openly and without disguise. Their humour is occasional and, so to speak, imported. But throughout the Diary runs the slyness of unexpected asides; it is steeped in a natural atmosphere of unconscious humour derived from the double life revealed, and the contrast between the public duties and the private pleasures of the precise Government official.

Samuel Pepys made his confidences in conditions that are never likely to recur. It is unreasonable to expect that confessions in long-hand can match the peculiar qualities of candour in a secret cipher. But, open though Byron is in his confidences, there is one side of his life and personality on which his letters are reserved. He locks the door of his poetic workshop and jealously guards the key. Into this region even Lady Melbourne is only partially admitted. He tells her that he writes to get away from himself and to soothe his irritated feelings. That is all. She was allowed to see too much of the flippant, flashy side of the man of society. She saw nothing of the tender, passionate, remorseful, melancholy, and solitary nature of the poet. Byron consults her over the choice of a wife or a mistress, never on the subject of a poem. Even when he seems to turn his heart inside out for her inspection, he keeps hidden the corner of his poetical life. He maintains a similar reserve in most of his letters to other intimate friends. They are bare of revelations about the composition of his poetry.

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The reticence may have been partly an affectation. Byron did, in fact, work at lightning speed. But he was also not superior to the vanity of encouraging the impression that his poetry was struck off in a white heat of inspiration. Literary labour was inconsistent with his birth and position. It would have outraged the tone of a fashionable society, which agreed with the Duke of Devonshire's estimate of his illustrious cousin, Henry Cavendish-' he is not a gentleman; he works.' But, in the main, Byron's reserve on these high subjects was not a pose. Weak and irresolute as he was in the ordinary affairs of life, he was self-reliant in literary matters. He had a true perception of his own powers. In the choice of themes and method of treatment he had the independence and isolation of genius. He knew where his strength lay better than his friends. Hobhouse was, on points of literature, a poor critic and a depressing influence. Kinnaird advised him to write for the stage. His sister and Countess Guiccioli persuaded him to discontinue 'Don Juan.' Even Shelley, his only associate of his own intellectual calibre, went as wrong as the others when he urged him to write an epic of the age in the style of the Iliad.' He did indeed submit his completed manuscripts to the criticism of friends, accepted their suggestions with docility, acquiesced in omissions with good-tempered ferocity. But in the conception and shaping of work which ranks him with the immortals, he consulted no one, and went his own way. The result is a loss of balance which is particularly apparent in this collection of his letters. They illustrate his amazing cleverness; they are a full record of his follies; they hardly give a hint of his poetic achievements, or of the sources from which they sprang. He was a greater man than he at all allowed himself to appear to be in the letters alone.

Had Byron never written a line of poetry, his letters would give him a place in literature. What his exact rank may be among those who have excelled in the 'gentle art' of letter-writing is certain to be disputed. Comparisons are barren of definite results. Walpole resembles the play of the fountains of Versailles; Cowper suggests the placid course of the Ouse through the flat meadows which encircle Olney; Byron is like a Highland

river in spate. All that can be said is that his letters satisfy the most reliable test of excellence. Easy and natural, they approach as nearly as written words can do to good conversation. They are intensely alive. In vivacity and versatility, in zest, in mental power, at once brilliant and varied, in range of entertainment, in fullness of self-revelation, they are unsurpassed. But their violence is apt to give that impression of falsity which in letters is an unpardonable sin. It suggests the stage rather than the real man. Yet, in the ordinary sense of the word, the impression of insincerity is not wholly justified. It is an insincerity to himself rather than to the reader. It is a confession of his profound self-distrust. When he is at his noisiest, he is trying to convince himself that he is stronger than he really knows himself to be. Almost pathetically conscious of his irresolution, he bolsters up his weakness by the loudness of his exclamations. Any one who reads his letters by the side of one of those from Shelley, which are printed in these volumes, must be struck by the contrast. The nature of the modest, retiring, ethereal Shelley is by far the strongest. He had ideals of life ; Byron had none. His letters, therefore, are true to nature. They represent one side of the real man. They do not fail in the test of being sincere tell-tales to character.

To add another to the many imperfect portraits of Byron would be superfluous. The letters are an unsparing record of his short and crowded life. Different readers will draw from them different impressions. Some may with justice dismiss him with the verdict 'serve him right.' Others, struck by the pathos of his death, may be tempted to seek in his character reasons for the shipwreck of his life. To say that a man gifted with genius, with rare personal beauty, with high social position and a sufficiency of worldly means, was handicapped at the start, sounds absurd. None the less it is, in a sense, true. No defence can be legitimately urged for the moral delinquencies of the men or women of literary genius. They cannot claim exceptional treatment. There is, however, this to be said. The creative genius of imaginative poets does not depend on the gift of some peculiar quality denied to ordinary men. It