BOOKS
299
preparing the product of careful scholarship (there will be nine
volumes) for the general reader. The letters are good reading, lively and
civilizing, and it is interesting
to
remember Byron right now. A
number of modern ideas about identity, roles, consciousness, and
language are sharply and movingly reflected in his image.
The idea of Byron which stirred young Alfred Tennyson and the
Brontes, and people all across Europe who read no English, was both
easy to grasp and complex. In
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
the poem
which brought him instant celebrity, Byron created a prototypical
Romantic hero, sated and bored, seeking meaning with near hopeless–
ness, yearning to escape the boundaries of his being. But Harold's clear
outlines are illusory. Precisely because of all he is, the poem about him
focuses not so much on its hero as on the real things which absorb and
are absorbed by him as he travels; the membrane between the character
and his background, between fiction and historical reality, is alive.
Conspicuous in Harold's background is Lord Byron, with whom he is
essentiall y entangled. The theme of the poet creating his hero in order
to
create himself eventually takes over the poem:
'Tis
to
create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou ,
Sou l of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,
In visib le but gazing, as I glow
Mix 'd with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling sti ll with thee in my crush 'd feelings ' dearth.
Harold's graphic gloom, Byron's rank and youth and beauty, the
persuasiveness and the evident self-indulgence of their anguish, their
merging identities-all together make up the
event
that was Byron, not
quite extraliterary but not quite literary either. The idea of Byron is the
idea of dramatic, boldly expressive rhetoric that realizes the personal–
ity, and of profoundly ironic self-creation.
Byron moved in and out of himself as he moved in and out of
Harold; his own life seemed to him a play of varying reality, and he
commented on it as if he were entitled to do so. The early letters reveal
an original youth very good at expressing urgent "hot" feelings while
also acknowledging how those must look from the outside. Writing
