Byron's hero is always
represented as a man originally noble, whom some great wrong, by others,
or some mysterious crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and who
carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow. Harold--who
may stand as a type of all his heroes--has run "through sin's
labyrinth," and feeling the "fullness of satiety," is drawn abroad to
roam, "the wandering exile of his own dark mind." The loss of a
capacity for pure, unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron's
lament;
No more, no more, O never more on me
The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew:
and again,
O could I feel as I have felt--or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.
This mood was sincere in Byron; but by cultivating it, and posing too
long in one attitude, he became self-conscious and theatrical, and much
of his serious poetry has a false ring. His example infected the minor
poetry of the time, and it was quite natural that Thackeray--who
represented a generation that had a very different ideal of the
heroic--should be provoked into describing Byron as "a big sulky dandy.
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