an it did in England. In truth Byron's poetry was
more appreciated by the world at large than by his countrymen--a literary
anomaly that has prevailed even to the end of the Nineteenth Century.
Goethe said of Byron after his death: "The English may think of Byron as
they please; but this is certain, that they can show no poet who is to be
compared with him. He is different from all the others, and for the most
part greater." Mazzini, many years later, concluded his famous essay on
Byron and Goethe with this vindication of the English poet's claim: "The
day will come when Democracy will remember all that it owes to Byron.
England too, will, I hope, one day remember the mission--so entirely
English, yet hitherto overlooked by her--which Byron fulfilled on the
Continent; the European cast given by him to English literature, and the
appreciation and sympathy for England which he awakened among us." Shelley,
who knew Byron intimately, has given perhaps the best expression to the
English view of him. He said of him in 1822: "The coarse music which he
produced touched a chord to which a million hearts responded.... Space
wondered less at the swift and fair creations of God when he grew weary of
vacancy, than I at this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a
decaying body." To most Englishmen of his day, Byron, like Shelley,
appeared as a monster of impious wickedness. Unlike Shelley, he attained
thereby the vogue of the forbidden. His earliest poems achieved what the
French call a _succes de scandal_. His satire, "English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers," brought to the youthful poet a notoriety amounting to fame.
After the publication of the first two cantos of "Childe Harold," in 1812,
according to his own phrase, he awoke to find himself famous, and became a
spoiled child of society. Trelawney has recorded that Byron was what London
in the days of the Prince Regent made him. One of Byron's ablest critics,
Symonds, has put this even more strongly: "His judgment of the world was
prematurely warped, while his naturally earnest feelings were overlaid with
affectations and prejudices which he never succeeded in shaking off.... It
was his misfortune to be well born, but ill bred, combining the pride of a
peer with the self-consciousness of a parvenu." Byron's life in London
between 1812 and 1816 certainly increased his tendency to cynicism, as did
his divorce from his wife. While these experiences distorted his personal
character,