Mr. HENRI DE REGNIER
of the French Academy

Byron is not only a great Poet, he is a whole Poetry. He is Romanticism and the Romantic. He is the first of the “Cursed Poets. and dominates them all with the fires of his glorious and evil star.

Mr. GEORGES GOYAU
of the French Academy

“In my youth,” says Byron in Don Juan, “I wrote because my soul was full, and I write now because I feel that boredom is taking hold of it.”
He writes to escape himself, to amuse for a moment what his Giaour calls “the desire of an unoccupied heart”. Being, like Harold, "the most unfit of men to live in the company of humans", it seems to him that he populates his solitude by exhibiting himself, alone, before England, before Europe who admire him . “The lion is alone, so am I,” said Manfred.

But behind the poet who believes that by composing an attitude he will free himself from suffering, look for the man, look for him in his Letters, in his Journal from time to time, he refutes the poet. This one pushes doubt to the point of blasphemy, and this one declares: “It seems to me that if we think for a moment about the action of the spirit, we can have no doubt about the immortality of the 'soul. I tried to doubt. But reflection has proven my error... I am very eager to believe, because I am not happy with my uncertainties.

This one flatters himself, like Harold, of "finding a life within himself and breathing outside of humanity"; this one exclaims as he dies: "My daughter! my sister!" and thus enters humanity And perhaps on his lips a more august name would then have appeared, if his dying Manfred had not responded in advance to the suggestions of the Abbot of Saint-Maurice: “He is. too late! >>
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Mr. EDMOND HARAUCOURT

Without doubt, the supreme glory of a poet is to embody some moment of human pathology. Byron possesses this glory. The almost seismic tremors which shook the old moral and social edifice at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century gave Europe a vibrant soul which found its formula in this English poet. The entire ancient continent contemplated, admired, loved this morbid anxiety which resembled its own; she looked at herself there as in a mirror; she recognized her exuberance and her weariness at the same time.

The sentimentalism of those times finds only a very weak echo in the temporary drought of our post-war period; but humanity which revolves incessantly and without end will return to states of soul that are now outdated. Byron's glory is one which can without peril undergo an interlude; history holds it in reserve for the days to come which will resemble them.

Mr. PAUL SOUDAY

I believe that Byron is the greatest of English poets, after Shakespeare, without even excluding Shelley or Keats. He is one of my favorites in all literature. I love him for the splendor of his imagination and his style, for his artistic sense (he was the first to see Venice, the Anadyomene city), for his liberated and biting spirit like that of Voltaire, for his sublime and Promethean, finally for the hatred pursued by the Pharisees, who have not yet all disarmed.

Mr. GEORGES LECOMTE

We can never celebrate the genius of Lord Byron enough. This great nostalgic, always in love with new horizons, always hungry for beauty and new sensations, will have truly transfused not only into the literature of his country but into the universal spirit a truly new blood.

He is a great lord. All his work has retained its sovereign height. “Born into the aristocracy,” he said, “I am naturally an aristocrat by character.” The rank assigned to him by his birth and his fortune allowed this poet, enamored of magnificent actions, to dare them, to carry them out. So he made his own existence the first and most moving of his works.

How can we remain indifferent to the great spectacle that our life composes? Either that, against these backdrops, Byron appears to us on horseback, a romantic centaur delivering his hair into the hands of the aerial muses, or that he appears on the Italian and Greek seas, under the flickering flame of his wandering yacht, or finally that he makes his lameness ring on the paving stones of his palaces where, always like a siren, dwells a formidable favorite whom he is, depending on his mood, adored or hated!...

What contradictions in this same stormy genius, going from his writing desk to his billiard table, from his billiard table to his stables, from his stables to his yacht, and making his Muse drink a pint of gin every evening. Water is the source of all my inspirations. If you drank as much as I do, you would write verses as good as mine: be sure that this is the real Hippocrene.”

How was he able to construct his immense work while he composed his life like an astonishing series of images in rare colors? Madame de Staël was asked one day: “When do you find the time to write? You don't count me on my sedan chair? she replied. Thus Byron, a marvelous improviser, could always pick up his subject where he left off and continue it as if he had not been interrupted. His manuscripts fill with admiration. There are entire pages where there is not a single erasure.

Much has been written about him, often getting it wrong. He did not always have the true glory that his genius deserved. For a long time, in England, he was considered a sort of bad archangel dragging his club foot like a thunderbolt; his school was called the satanic school of poetry. But even his detractors have come back from their errors. He remains forever as one of the greatest poets there is, and who, invested with the prestige of an incontestable genius, knew how to crown his dream with all the poetry with which great actions are capable of adorning him.

Mr. EDOUARD SCHURE

The recent publication of Mr. Boutet de Monvel's book on The Life of Lord Byron shows the author of Childe Harold in an unfavorable light. He appears there with all his defects and all his contradictions. We see him as whimsical, proud, insolent and cynical, seductive and charming, a perfect dandy and great lord to the tips of his nails, but of unbearable vanity, having all the pretensions of aristocracy by birth with the exaggerated emphasis of boldest revolutionaries. The poet's great imagination never fades, but he always knew how to distinguish the ideal from reality. He contemplated both with an eagle's eye, never being fooled by anything or anyone.

Bad husband, mediocre lover, reliable but cold friend. His whims and furies were interspersed with superb outbursts of generosity. In his disorderly life and his numerous adventures with women, it seems that he has only ever loved once. It was his first unhappy teenage love for Mary Chaworth. Because his affair with Guiccioli, this charming and sentimental Lombard, was neither a fatal passion nor a great love, but the last sensual fantasy of a jaded man and already almost detached from life. He left her without regret, to offer himself as a holocaust to the resurrected Greece, in the marshes of Missolonghi, (Like a swan at its song seeking someone to die for.)

This glorious death was the greatest act of his life and forever crowned the author of Childe Harold with the halo of martyrdom. Thus the poet's pride forced man to find a death worthy of his genius.

In short, Lord Byron is one of those men in whom genius is infinitely superior to character, and for this very reason he remains the most accomplished type of the romantic poet.

Mr. CAMILLE MAUCLAIR

Whether we consider him similar to a Berlioz or a Delacroix, who were inspired by him, Byron was perhaps more musician and painter than poet. He believed he based all his poetry on the expression of his interior life, which was almost entirely made up of boredom exasperated by the feeling of a terrible emptiness. This is why Byron's works are paintings and hymns of brilliant exteriority, splendid draperies over a mystery which was only spleen, over a soul which searched for itself everywhere and never knew itself. Byron was an orator and an actor. Goethe judged him better than anyone in the insincerity of his immoralism. He has spoiled many of our romantics and created some very unfortunate clichés. But what a figure all the same, and how many beautiful things there are in Childe Harold and Don Juan! Genius and unreason collide with splendid sparks!

Mr. HENRI DUVERNOIS

Only those who can understand his life of storm and dandyism, of exaltation and cold disdain can understand Byron's work. “This man,” wrote Taine, “is not an arranger of effects or a maker of sentences. He lived among the spectacles he describes; he experienced the emotions he describes. Great poet in clouds lit by lightning.

(See the continuation on the second page.)

Mr. CLAUDE FARRERE

I don't think I've ever read three verses of Lord Byron. I hear in the English text. All the same, I think Lord Byron's verses must be those great verses that Alfred de Musset loved so passionately, when he was a toddler, sulky and lazy. Hasn’t that been his whole life?

1830. Alfred de Musset was only twenty years old. By the way, it is Lord Byron that I should talk about and I am talking about Alfred de Musset, because, I beg England's forgiveness, Alfred de Musset appears to me to be considerably greater than Lord Byron . And mainly because Alfred de Musset was able to escape Romanticism and Lord Byron plunged into it so definitively that he met his end. This great poet was, all things considered, a fairly poor man who did not have, in all, only one life, and being able to choose a thousand magnificent causes on which to lavish it, Lord Byron offered it as a holocaust to the modern ancestors of the roulette dealers. He had only lived for falsehood. He died for falsehood. Antique dealers should build a stucco mausoleum for him.

BARON ERNEST SEILLIERE

I recently devoted quite a bit of time to the study of Byron in one of my works (The Stages of Passionate Mysticism). I believe more than ever in the exceptional passion which seems to have given a decisive direction to his short life, leading him to this attitude of mind which has been called Byronism. You know how contagious it proved to be in the troubled atmosphere of the time.

French romanticism comes from the naturism installed by Rousseau in the thoughts of his readers. But we first saw a reaction against the philosophy of the 18th century because Chateaubriand had cast a Catholic and monarchist veneer on the ideas of Jean-Jacques, advocated the Middle Ages and the classical 17th century.

Byron came to prove that romanticism could be something entirely different. Hence its immense influence which still lasts through a few brand intermediaries. Let us remember Lamartine's apostrophe, torn between admiration and concern in the face of this powerful work:
You whose real name the world still does not know,
Mysterious spirit, mortal, angel or demon,
Whoever you are, Byron, good or fatal genius,
I love the wild harmony of your concerts!

After a century has passed, the mystery persists, but also the genius, and we cannot do better than to repeat, in front of the work of the great Scot, these beautiful verses.
Please accept, my dear colleague, the expression of my very cordial and devoted feelings.

Mr. DE LANZAC DE LABORIE

Allow me to recuse myself... I believe I can discern that the influence of Byron contributed more than any other to directing French romanticism, which had to a certain point begun in the "cenacle", towards ostentation dandyism, skepticism and libertinism. But that is not the question, or at least it is only one side of the question. Unfortunately, I don't know English, and I consider the pretension of judging literary and especially poetic merit based on translations to be ridiculously presumptuous.

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Mr. JACQUES BOULENGER

Only English people can judge whether Byron is a great poet or whether he only had a certain genius (like Quinet, for example). He had a great and magnificent inspiration; but the poetry is not only in the feeling, it is also in the arrangement of the words and one cannot really feel finely the music of a foreign language. Nothing is more untranslatable than poetry and it is not enough to “know” English to judge Byron’s verses.

I see there, moreover, a lot of eloquence, but eloquence is not lyricism, although our romantics have often confused them. And whether or not Byron was a great musician in his own language is not what the French can afford to say.

I wonder if his favorite work was not his life, which my friend Roger Boutet de Monvel has just told. Byron lived his life with the greatest care. In words, he constantly sowed paradoxes that were more showy than brilliant, and his conversation seemed "heavy" to well-trained French people like those in Madame de Staël's circle: so, when he arrived at Coppet, the women got up to leave. But he thought: “Such is my satanic reputation: these poor creatures are afraid of me!”, and he was happy. “I think he has just enough sensitivity to damage a woman’s happiness,” Madame de Staël, who admired him, once said. If he had known that word, his dandyism would have been satisfied.

Mr. TANCREDE MARTEL

Lord Byron has always been one of my great literary admirations. At school, I read it with so much delight that my rhetoric teacher, Father Houlié, (God rest his soul!) confiscated a superb copy from me one day.

At twenty, I read and reread Byron with passion; and middle age has in no way diminished my enthusiasm for this immense poet, the most brilliant that England has had since Shakespeare. Don Juan, this extraordinary epic unfortunately unfinished, Childe-Harold, Manfred, this other Faust, the Corsair and Sardanapalus are the five golden pillars on which the glory of Lord Byron rests. On this glory, cant, hypocrites and pedants cannot bite.

Where can we find so much art, emotion, fantasy, united with more exquisite sensitivity? What despair in the face of the enigma of destiny was ever expressed in such harmonious verse? And then, without mentioning the Norman blood which flows in his veins and makes him one of our relatives, Lord Byron desperately loved the countries from which our civilization came. Athens and Venice, not London, were the capitals of his mind and his heart; and it was to the Greece of Homer and Phidias that he offered his life as a holocaust. Glory then to this luminous poet, only English by birth, but profoundly Celtic-Latin in his gestures and the expression of his genius!
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Mr. SAINT-GEORGES DE BOUHÉLIER

There never lived under heaven a greater poet than Byron. Never did a heart beat more painful, more disenchanted, more proud. I look at this romantic figure, I see the expression of a Satan in exile, under hair of light. René Puaux described his death which resembles, in its solitude, that of the eagle. And I think of this extraordinary destiny, more filled with flames than lightning, and more quickly extinguished. Who will give us such a great poet? Which young man will bring back for us, from the depths, songs so full of lava and so beautiful? When will we hear such harsh words again? It seems that the times of these great eloquences are over on this poor and desolate land, where smallness reigns alone...

Mr. OCTAVE UZANNE

Around 1821, in Ravenna, Byron, three years before his death, wrote: One of the most overwhelming and deadly feelings of my life is to perceive that I am no longer a child. What a mistake his was! Childe-Harold never ceased to be an enfant terrible, a spoiled child, rebellious, cruel to all those who loved him and tried to appease his irritability, his angry passion and his evil instincts which led him to be, if not to appear, a brilliant Nero, in his madness in search of the martyrdom of fame. He envied all the glories which seemed to overshadow his own.

During a life quickly withered in the paroxysm of his excesses, which brought him, before his thirties, wrinkles, these damned democrats, as he said, the author of Giaour and Manfred, this great lyricist always excessive in his affectations and the sumptuousness of its rhythms, painfully dragged away the defects of a morbid heredity heavy with vices and delusions of grandeur. Like a capricious, despotic child, ferociously selfish, dissatisfied with himself and others, he broke all his toys, discouraged all devotion, made suffer all women who, as maternal as lovers, attached themselves to his wavering steps. His books are hardly read anymore. An extravagant poet, he cannot be easily interpreted by the intellectuals of our time. However, his Don Juan must be considered one of the master works of humanity.

Mr. GÉRARD BAUER

You ask me to write a few lines about Byron. I have been around him too much, I am too blinded by his life and his work not to be clumsy in expressing my admiration to you in a few words. To tell you my concise thoughts, I believe that it is with Goethe the highest lyrical peak of the emerging nineteenth century. English Pharisaism, implacable to all true poets, has not diminished its size, any more than our ironic intelligence could diminish it today. (Because we must be wary of a false good taste which will become as petty as Puritan hypocrisy.) Byron, moreover, continues to shine and disconcerts irony. This is because he sowed his poems with great beauty, cries torn from the depths of being. Rebellion, enthusiasm, love, all the feelings that enhance our human condition, he kneaded them magnificently. And then again he lived: it is by a generous consumption of his days that we often keep, beyond the grave, this warm influence on souls. He knew how to shine and disappear like his heroes: “Old man, it is not so difficult to die.” This is the last word of Manfred to whom Byron gave his heroic demonstration a hundred years ago.

This union of action and poetry is a success, a fascinating example. I think that we will follow this knightly poet for a long time, through the centuries. For a long time to come, Byron will pass over the horizon of ardent men.