A History of English Literature

and Tennyson were to be among his successors. Aspiring to be an athlete, he
made himself respected as a fighter, despite his deformity, by his strength
of arm, and he was always a powerful swimmer. Deliberately aiming also at
the reputation of a debauchee, he lived wildly, though now as later
probably not altogether so wickedly as he represented. After three years of
irregular attendance at the University his rank secured him the degree of
M. A., in 1808. He had already begun to publish verse, and when 'The
Edinburgh Review' ridiculed his very juvenile 'Hours of Idleness' he added
an attack on Jeffrey to a slashing criticism of contemporary poets which he
had already written in rimed couplets (he always professed the highest
admiration for Pope's poetry), and published the piece as 'English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers.'
He was now settled at his inherited estate of Newstead Abbey (one of the
religious foundations given to members of the nobility by Henry VIII when
he confiscated them from the Church), and had made his appearance in his
hereditary place in the House of Lords; but following his instinct for
excitement and for doing the expensively conspicuous thing he next spent
two years on a European tour, through Spain, Greece, and Turkey. In Greece
he traveled, as was necessary, with a large native guard, and he allowed
reports to become current that he passed through a succession of romantic
and reckless adventures. The first literary result of his journey was the
publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage.' This began as the record of the wanderings of Childe Harold, a
dissipated young noble who was clearly intended to represent the author
himself; but Byron soon dropped this figure as a useless impediment in the
series of descriptions of Spain and Greece of which the first two cantos
consist. He soon abandoned also the attempt to secure an archaic effect by
the occasional use of Spenserian words, but he wrote throughout in
Spenser's stanza, which he used with much power. The public received the
poem with the greatest enthusiasm; Byron summed up the case in his
well-known comment: 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous.' In fact,
'Childe Harold' is the best of all Byron's works, though the third and
fourth cantos, published some years later, and dealing with Belgium, the
battle of Waterloo, and central Europe, are superior to the first two. Its
excellence consists chiefly in the fact that while it is primarily a
descriptive poem, its pictures, dramatically and finely vivid in
themselves, are permeated with intense emotion and often serve only as
introductions to passionate rhapsodies, so that the effect is largely
lyrical.
Though Byron always remained awkward in company he now became the idol of
the world of fashion. He followed up his first literary success by
publishing during the next four years his brief and vigorous metrical
romances, most of them Eastern in setting, 'The Giaour' (pronounced by
Byron 'Jower'), 'The Bride of Abydos,' 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Siege of
Corinth,' and 'Parisina.' These were composed not only with remarkable
facility but in the utmost haste, sometimes a whole poem in only a few days
and sometimes in odds and ends of time snatched from social diversions. The
results are only too clearly apparent; the meter is often slovenly, the
narrative structure highly defective, and the characterization superficial
or flatly inconsistent. In other respects the poems are thoroughly
characteristic of their author. In each of them stands out one dominating
figure, the hero, a desperate and terrible adventurer, characterized by
Byron himself as possessing 'one virtue and a thousand crimes,' merciless
and vindictive to his enemies, tremblingly obeyed by his followers,
manifesting human tenderness only toward his mistress (a delicate romantic
creature to whom he is utterly devoted in the approved romantic-sentimental
fashion), and above all inscrutably enveloped in a cloud of pretentious