Mary Baldwin College - Bluestocking Yearbook (Staunton, VA)

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The Mary Baldwin Seminary. 5 mates. He formed many warm friendships and much to his credit these friendships were never forgotten. He was consid- ered a very brave boy, always more ready to give a IjIow than to take one, and he never failed to take the part of tlie weak- er boy in the various controversies of school life. As he grew older his mother ' s influence still continued to affect him, and was developing in him a bitterness, a rebellious- ness, and a misanthropy which found outlet in moody fits. However, this was not his only trouble; he had other difficulties to contend with, and chief among them was his poverty. His income was very small, and the estate which he had inherited was seriously encumbered. Thus he was constantly being placed in some embarrassing position the circumstances of which he could not control. Perhaps much of the moodiness and gloominess which characterizes him at this period can be attrib- uted to this poverty. It was a great blow to his pride that he could not live as he thought the dignity of his position demand- ed. He had vers- rigid ideas of birth and though all through his life his views were liberal, he proudly held himself distinct from the people. The next year after he had domiciled himself at Xewstead he made his first trip upon the Continent. The account of his departure from his native land is very pathetic. He was feeling very desolate and depressed; in his literary attempts, in his love affairs and in many other ways, he had met bitter disap- pointments. The preparations for his journey were looked upon with indifference by most of those whom he thought his friends. He says that on the day of his departure he chanced to meet one of his old school fellows to whom he had been very much attached during his school days. Upon being asked to come and sit awhile with him to indulge in a farewell chat, the friend excused himself on the plea of an engagement to go shopping with some ladies. One can imagine the bitterness and indigna- tion with which he records this, adding that, with one or two exceptions, he believed his mother to be the only person who cared a whit as to his fate. After two years he returned to England bringing with him the first two Cantos of his Childe Harold. The stor - of its success is known to all. Byron himself tells us that he awoke one morning to find himself fa-

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4 The Annual of brave men. Later on we have records of seven Byron brothers all on the field at one time fighting for their country. However. Byron ' s immediate inheritance was far from being honorable, The grand-uncle, from whom he had received his title, was an erratic, misanthropic old man with a blackened record, hav- ing been brought up before the House of Lords for the murder of a cousin. His father was a drunken, reckless, scape-grace, who squandered his wife ' s fortune and then left her. His moth- er, a woman of small intellect, had a violent temper and was subject to frequent outbreaks which amounted almost to insani- t} ' . Though Byron had ancestors from whom he inherited the best of traits, he was compelled to feel the effe ct of his bad blood. His m.other ' s influence over him was indeed harmful; her treatment was capricious and contradictory. At one moment she would lavish upon him passionate caresses and praise the beauty of his eyes, and at the next moment she would cast him from her as a lame brat. It was she who could arouse most frequently and to the highest degree, all that was bad in him. His temper in childhood was sullen, stubborn and revolt- ing. He would fall into silent rages, and upon one occasion when his nurse reproved him for soiling his frock, he seized the frock, tore it from top to bottom and then stood defiant. This was due to the example of his mother who, it is said, would often give vent to her rage by tearing up pocket-handker- chiefs. ■ However, we have proof of how susceptible he was to kind and gentle treatment. His nurse, who was a very good woman and to whom he was devoted, tell us that Byron when kindly treated exhibited sweetness and docility of spirit, his manners, she adds, were winning and attractive. From the earliest period he had shown an intense and passionately affec- tionate nature, his heart responding readily to any display of affection, and he tells us that he was really desperately in love when eight years old. When he grew older he felt his moth- er ' s short comings very severely, and upon one occasion, when a quarrel between them had been unusually violent, some one said to him. Byron, j-our mother is a fool. He replied bit- terly, I know it. Though he led a very wild and dissipated life while at school, he was a great favorite among his school-

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6 The A7tn7ial of moiis. Byronism became the rage, the new idol was petted, spoiled and humored. Even the wild and dissipated life into which he plunged at this time was considered interesting, and all the world admired and endeavored to imitate the haughty and reserved bearing which characterized him. That much of this reserve and haughtiness was affected we learn from Mr. Moore, who tells us that Byron was intensely shy by nature and that he jealously concealed this timidity by assuming a haughty and distant manner; for his pride could not tolerate that he .should exhibit timidity before these fashionable people whom he neither cared for nor respected. Three years after his return to England he married, and the real trouble of his life began. After one short year came the separation from his wife, and the world turned upon him and ca.st him aside with a violence and a suddenness almost incredi- ble; he was lampooned, ridiculed and hissed. His pride had received a deadly blow, and filled with mingled feelings of in- dignation, bitterness and remorse, after a month he fled from his country never to return. Though we know that much of his life abroad was reckless and uncreditably spent, in the last few months of his life he displayed a brave and self-sacrificing spirit in entering into the struggles of the Greeks. This is a brief outline of Byron ' s life, one of the saddest and most interesting in history. Strongly impulsive, unhappy and consumed with a desire for affection and sympathy, his feelings must have an outlet, and as he was a poet he found ex- pression in his poetry. It seems to have been the dark side of his life that characterizes his poetry much more than the lighter side. Hence he revels in painting the grand and gloomy side of nature, the lofty mountains, the .storms, the ruin, all of these form the theme for his grandest descriptions, as the moonlight scene of the Coliseum so gloriously described in his Manfred, the shipwreck in Don Juan, the description of the storms and mountains in Childe Harold. In all of his heroes we recognize the same predominant traits, they are all the same grand, gloomy characters, men of intense passions with a won- derous capacity for love, yet separated from the world and hu- man companionship by trouble which has embittered them. Such men are Manfred, Conrad, Lara, and Childe Harold, dif-