Byron in Love (21 page)

Mary Shelley, who had written in her diary that her ‘dear capricious Albe' had quitted the desert world, and had gone to Great George Street to pay her respects, watched now from an upstairs window in Kentish Town, along with Jane Williams, as from all the windows people craned to see the bier of the man they knew only by hearsay. The poet John Clare, bordering on madness, seeing a beautiful young girl sigh with sorrow, thought it and the homage of the common people, the surest testament for Byron the Poet.

At St Pancras Church, where the cobblestones ran out, the empty carriages turned back. The procession took four days to reach Nottingham, mourners thronged the roadside and then at the Blackamoor's Head in Nottingham, where the remains lay in a little parlour, the crush of people was so great that a large body of constabulary had to keep order; squires, squireens and farmers come to pay their respects and according to one account, a youth bashfully recited from ‘Waterloo':

At the very same time, the memoirs of Dallas, aided by his son the Reverend Alexander, were being hurried through the printing press as an epidemic of Byron mania struck the world. The literary deification, bludgeoning and misrepresenting was now afoot. Books of gossip, smut, malice, lies and ‘intrinsic nothings', as Thomas Love Peacock called them, were soon to proliferate. Peacock himself parodied Byron, giving him the name of Mr Cypress in
Nightmare Abbey
.

Fascination, envy and literary malfeasance on Byron were unceasing. Before the end of that year Southey, the Poet Laureate, in
The Quarterly Review
, accused Byron of committing ‘high crime, misdemeanours against society, work in which mockery was mingled with horror, filth and impiety, profligacy with sedition and slander'. A Mr Dugdale was even more extreme, justifying his pirating of
Cain
and
Don Juan
as quite reasonable, since the works were ‘so shocking and flagitious' as to be unworthy to be dignified by the word ‘copyright'.

 

Hobhouse was wrong. They did bury him like a poet, but he resurrected as a legend. Why? we may ask. Why him above the legion of poets down the years? He was the embodiment of Everyman, human, ambitious, erratic, generous, destructive, dazzling, dark and dissonant, but yet there is the unfathomable that eludes us, and perhaps even eluded him. It is not simply that he was a poet whose poetry burst upon the world or that he was a letter-writer of consummate greatness, he reincarnates for each age as an icon with a divine spark and all-too-human flaws.