***** Stendhal, from Oeuvres Completes v. 35 (Memories of Lord Byron) (1829)
...Like a child, Lord Byron exposed himself to the attacks of English high society, that aristocracy all-powerful, inexorable, terrible in its vengeance, which makes of so many wealthy sots very respectable men, but which cannot, without utter loss of self-control, bear the mockery of its children. The fear generated, throughout Europe, by the great nation led by Danton and Carnot has made the English aristocracy what we see today, this body so strong, so morose, so riddled with hypocrisy.
Lord Byron's mockery is bitter in Childe Harold; it is the anger of youth; his mockery is only ironic in Beppo and in Don Juan. But we must not examine this irony too closely; for instead of gaiety and carelessness, hatred and unhappiness are at its heart....
Never, in any country, has the body of wealthy and well-brought-up persons - those people who pride themselves on titles inherited from their ancestors or on patents of nobility earned by themselves - been able to bear the spectacle of a man surrounded by public admiration and enjoying the general favor of society only because he has written a few hundred fine lines of verse. The aristocracy revenges itself upon other poets by complaining, "Such a personality! Such manners!" But these two petty complaints could not be used against Lord Byron. Rather, they weighed upon the heart and turned to hatred....
In his ordinary moments, every day of his life, Lord Byron thought of himself as a nobleman; that was the armor which his delicate spirit, deeply vulnerable to insult, put on against the infinite vulgarity of the herd. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo (Horace: I hate the vulgar herd and reject it.) And it must be admitted that the herd, in England, since it also possesses spleen by right of birth, is more atrocious than anywhere else....
<http://www.englishhistory.net/byron/stendhal.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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