THE PRESENT VALUE OF BYRON[1]
By Oliver Elton
I have taken some care, for a reason that I hope is not arrogant or depreciatory, to read little or nothing of what has been printed on the occasion of the centenary. For this omission my commercially sounding title must be the excuse. What can be meant, at any time, by the “present value” of a poet? It is not to be measured by sales and editions, or by the rightful if passing glow of enthusiasm that prompts these celebrations. After all, it comes down to each one of us asking, What is Byron to me? To “me and many other mes,” according to the old Oxford rhyme; but, in the long run, to this “me.” And that we shall find out best by reading Byron through again, rather than by reading what better judges than ourselves have said about him. Never mind if he was cursed when alive for his bad morals, and after his death for his bad prosody. Let us try to get our own impressions pure. Above all, let us forget all that we ourselves may have written concerning him. Let us go over him once more and ask how far our confused young enthusiasms and dislikes are wearing. Criticism, possibly, is partly the attempt to recover these first inarticulate feelings, and to understand them; the result may be worth more than the mature official judgment which has been overlaid by much reading or teaching. This, no doubt, is not exactly a Wordsworthian view of the “intimations” of our early years. The starting-point is that old, unpurged, Galignani Byron which somehow had got on to the school shelves. What about it now? I will not inflict the process on your patience, but will simply offer the results of a review, in the form of an answer, which will not be at all startling, to a few simple questions; trying to deal very little either in literary history or in eulogy. A mere
- ↑ The Byron Lecture, delivered at University College, Nottingham, March 7, 1924 (slightly revised).
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