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The Romantic poets offer us an extraordinary range of personality — they might all be characters in some vast Comédie Humaine. And the super-Balzac who possessed such a cast would find Byron the hardest to carry inside the compass of his art. He is really too empty for the most cunning or the most sublime kinds of fictional definition. He is invulnerable to caricature, because he is lacking in the density and helplessness which hold Wordsworth down in his relation to Nature, Shelley in his mad musical seriousness, and Keats in his sparrow, his globed peonies and autumn rose. Like most of us, Byron has no consuming interest in anything: he just wants something to be happening. But, unlike any of us, he is actually able to make his best poetry out of this supremely ordinary human condition.

     Mr Paul West’s book is a lively and original attempt to analyse just how Byron manages it. If he doesn’t quite satisfy us it is because the nature of the poetry makes it impossible to analyse satisfactorily in depth: to be honest, analysis must inevitably be as bitty — one might almost say as methodically sloppy — as the poetic performance. Elimination, says Mr West, is the key to Byron’s technique. The image that most fascinated him was that of the Turkish mistress consigned in a sack to the Bosphorus. ‘Reduce everything he ever wrote, and you will find an essential act of repulsion . . . he pushes away what is . . . he needs to feel unobliged to his subject-matter . . . and yet he seeks to eliminate even this lust for elimination.’ Surely these are very penetrating comments? We can never catch Byron lingering on the right word, admiring the right poet (he announced that future generations would much prefer Rogers and Campbell to himself or any of the other Romantics) and in fact doing anything but despise the artist’s secret (and in some sense comical) passion for making his product perfect. Never, that is, until Missolonghi, when death — with an irony Byron would have appreciated — shaped the true close he had always avoided.

     There is nothing in the poetry that could not have been better done by someone else, but how invariably compelling he is, even in his most workaday narrative melodrama. Even if the Poems fall open at ‘Parisina’ or ‘The Island’ we are caught by some telling stroke:

But she must lay her own conscious head
A husband’s trusting heart beside . . .

or

‘Hoist out the boat!’ was now the leader’s cry

     And who dare answer ‘No’ to mutiny? and we are gripped in spite of ourselves. Browning has lost the secret of this readability as completely as Lydgate lost it after Chaucer.

     Byron professed to admire Pope as his master; but even here he shows his disingenuousness for Pope was a craftsman of perfections — Byron would never have distilled the gold from fops and tea-tables. Don Juan — as Mr West brilliantly demonstrates — triumphs by its mastery of the throwaway method. Byron balances down the entertaining stanza form, usually falling off deliberately just when we think he is going to make it to the end of the verse. He makes use of the ingenious rhymes that carry us along — for at the Byronic cocktail party we must never be bored by anything like the blank verse of the ‘drowsy frowsy’ ‘Excursion’ — to achieve the contrived tumble.

She sits upon his knee, and drinks his sighs,
He hers, until they end in broken gasps;
And thus they form a group that’s quite antique,
Half naked, loving, natural, and Greek.

What happens if we compare this with an example of what Matthew Arnold called ‘genuine’ poetry? — say the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’? The distressing result is that Keats sounds like some good man at the party whose attempt to carry on a humane and serious conversation is made ridiculous, to the other guests in the milieu, by the flippant interruptions of an accomplished hostess. The point of his story is quite spoilt. Fortunately the spell does not last when the party is over. The tone of that ‘quite antique’ and ‘Greek’ is appallingly familiar, redolent of travel chatter and easily humorous enthusiasms. So is

High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture . . .

An Anthony Powell could catch to a nicety the tone of the lady who might say that, but Byron has already, as it were, left her to her fate. He is elsewhere, perhaps saying

He who has bent him o’er the dead . . .

or

. . . that seeming marble heart
Now mask’d in silence or withheld by pride,
Was not unskilful in the spoiler’s art,
And spread its snares licentious far and wide . . .

And yet he does not so much spoil everything as invent a way of failing to find it quite real (Mr West coins the excellent phrase ‘strict apathy’). The romantic multitude, toiling far behind, are left in possession of his discarded attitudes, Corsairs, Haidées, Childe Harolds — and Don Juans.

     Perhaps the one thing we can hold on to which Byron can never quite twitch out of our grasp is his sense of aristocracy, with all the complex social and spiritual factors that went with it then and probably still do. It is the clue to his jealously guarded Corinthian and amateur status. Like the candid friend who yields up everything but the pleasure he gets from being candid, Byron can never quite part from his Lordship. It does not help to compare him, as Mr West tries to do in the course of his study of ‘Manfred’ and ‘The Deformed Transformed’, with Baudelaire, Jarry, or Hemingway. The real and refreshing advantage of his obstinate status is that it liberates him not only from the inky tribe but from the professional exploiters of wounds.

     By a curious coincidence it is the Russian authors who learnt most from Byron who most pitilessly reveal the confines of his emptiness. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is a cousin of the Byronic hero who does his best to emulate his relation, but who fails because of his sense of the real things of Russia, the country houses, the aunts, the dogs, the smell of blackberry leaves. Byron’s progeny returns to the nourishing soil. And his lack of a true sense of contrast, the absence in his world of any object ‘from which the shadows fall with a difference’ is most clearly revealed in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. When after a long absence the old captain meets Pechorin, another of Byron’s children, he tries to embrace him; but Pechorin turns away with the cultivated indifference of the âme damnée and the old man bursts into tears. Such tears cannot be wept in the presence of Byron’s bad angels.