The Henson Journals

[167]

Saturday, February 16th, 1924.

No poet of his own or other times, not Walter Scott, not Tennyson, nor Mr Kipling, was ever in his own life–time so widely, so amazingly popular. Thousands of copies of the "Tales" – of the Bride of Abydos, of the Corsair, of Lara – were sold in a day, and edition followed edition in and month out…. No other English poet before or since has divided men's attention with generals & sea–captains & statesmen, has attracted & fascinated & overcome the world so entirely & potently as Lord Byron.

Preface to Works. Vol. iii

A collection of Essays edited by W. A. Briscoe, "Byron the Poet", published in connexion with the centenary of the poet's death, arrived: and I wasted much of the day in reading it. The best thing in the whole volume is the photographs of Byron as Boy, Youth of 17, and man, which were new to me. Of the painful but critically important question of his relations with his half–sister the book speaks with two voices. In one essay, his guilt is taken as demonstrated: in another, the author exerts himself to disprove it. On the assumption of his guilt much in his behaviour and his poetry is explicable: apart from that assumption, much in his wife's conduct is quite unintelligible. The horrid ambiguity is itself eminently Byronic!

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