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Title: The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 3
Author: Baron George Gordon Byron Byron
Editor: Ernest Hartley Coleridge
Release date: June 12, 2007 [eBook #21811]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21811
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Produced by Jonathan Ingram, David Cortesi and the Online
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
This etext contains only characters from the Latin-1 set. The original
work contained a few phrases of Greek text. These are represented here
as Beta-code transliterations in brackets, e.g. [Greek: miseto\n].
The original text used a few other characters not found in the Latin-1
set. These have been represented using bracket notation, as follows:
[=a], [=i] for letters with a macron, and ['c] for c with accent. In a
few places superscript letters are shown by carets, as in Oct^r. 11.
An important feature of this edition is its copious footnotes. Footnotes
indexed with letters (e.g. [c], [bf]) show variant forms of Byron's text
from manuscripts and other sources. Footnotes indexed with arabic
numbers (e.g. [17], [221]) are informational. Text in notes and
elsewhere in square brackets is the work of Editor E. H. Coleridge. Note
text not in brackets is by Byron himself.
In the original, footnotes are printed at the foot of the page on which
they are referenced, and their indices start over on each page. In this
etext, footnotes have been collected at the end of each section, and
have been numbered consecutively throughout the book. Within each block
of footnotes are numbers in braces, e.g. {321}. These represent the page
number on which the following notes originally appeared. To find a note
that was originally printed on page 27, search for {27}.
In note [ci] to _The Giaour_ and in the section headed "NOTE TO _THE
BRIDE OF ABYDOS_" the editor showed deleted text struck through with
lines. The struck-through words are noted here with braces and dashes,
as in {-deleted words-}.
The Works
of
LORD BYRON.
A NEW, REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION,
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.
Poetry. Vol. III.
EDITED BY
ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE, M.A., HON. F.R.S.L.
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
1900.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD VOLUME.
The present volume contains the six metrical tales which were composed
within the years 1812 and 1815, the _Hebrew Melodies_, and the minor
poems of 1809-1816. With the exception of the first fifteen poems
(1809-1811)--_Chansons de Voyage_, as they might be called--the volume
as a whole was produced on English soil. Beginning with the _Giaour_;
which followed in the wake of _Childe Harold_ and shared its triumph,
and ending with the ill-omened _Domestic Pieces_, or _Poems of the
Separation_, the poems which Byron wrote in his own country synchronize
with his popularity as a poet by the acclaim and suffrages of his own
countrymen. His greatest work, by which his lasting fame has been
established, and by which his relative merits as a great poet will be
judged in the future, was yet to come; but the work which made his name,
which is stamped with his sign-manual, and which has come to be regarded
as distinctively and characteristically Byronic, preceded maturity and
achievement.
No poet of his own or other times, not Walter Scott, not Tennyson, not
Mr. Kipling, was ever in his own lifetime 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 month in and month out. Everywhere men talked about the "noble
author"--in the capitals of Europe, in literary circles in the United
States, in the East Indies. He was "the glass of fashion ... the
observ'd of all observers," the swayer of sentiment, the master and
creator of popular emotion. No other English poet before or since has
divided men's attention with generals and sea-captains and statesmen,
has attracted and fascinated and overcome the world so entirely and
potently as Lord Byron.
It was _Childe Harold_, the unfinished, immature _Childe Harold_, and
the Turkish and other "Tales," which raised this sudden and deafening
storm of applause when the century was young, and now, at its close (I
refer, of course, to the Tales, not to Byron's poetry as a whole, which,
in spite of the critics, has held and still holds its own), are ignored
if not forgotten, passed over if not despised--which but few know
thoroughly, and "very few" are found to admire or to love. _Ubi lapsus,
quid feci?_ might the questioning spirit of the author exclaim with
regard to his "Harrys and Larrys, Pilgrims and Pirates," who once held
the field, and now seem to have gone under in the struggle for poetical
existence!
To what, then, may we attribute the passing away of interest and
enthusiasm? To the caprice of fashion, to an insistence on a more
faultless _technique_, to a nicer taste in ethical sentiment, to a
preference for a subtler treatment of loftier themes? More certainly,
and more particularly, I think, to the blurring of outline and the
blotting out of detail due to lapse of time and the shifting of the
intellectual standpoint.
However much the charm of novelty and the contagion of enthusiasm may
have contributed to the success of the Turkish and other Tales, it is in
the last degree improbable that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers
were enamoured, not of a reality, but of an illusion born of ignorance
or of vulgar bewilderment. They were carried away because they breathed
the same atmosphere as the singer; and being undistracted by ethical, or
grammatical, or metrical offences, they not only read these poems with
avidity, but understood enough of what they read to be touched by their
vitality, to realize their verisimilitude.
_Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner._ Nay, more, the knowledge, the
comprehension of essential greatness in art, in nature, or in man is not
to know that there is aught to forgive. But that sufficing knowledge
which the reader of average intelligence brings with him for the
comprehension and appreciation of contemporary literature has to be
bought at the price of close attention and patient study when the
subject-matter of a poem and the modes and movements of the poet'Next |