BYRON THE CAD
TO LORD BYRON. By George Paston and Peter Quennell. Murray. 275 pp. and 12 illustrations. This is a selection of letters from Byron’s "sentimental archives" hitherto unpublished. Why they ‘were’ preserved it is difficult to say-until we.remember in how many personal ways’ Byron was a cad-but as they were’ all written between 1807 and 1824 there is no longer a reason why they should not be released. Altogether they represent the outpourings of thirteen women-some of them worthy, some mercenary, all in some degree pathetic. .In three cases nothing is. revealed that was not already known, but most of the others are lovesick creatures who loiter for a moment in the light of his presence and then vanish in tears. It has been ‘said already that Byron was a cad.‘ Most-people who know. anything. at.all about..him are agreed about that. But it is a shock to realise how contemptibly he could behave to women and. girls .who,. however tiresome they must sometimes have been, owed most of their absurdities to his own example and teaching. Even when we remember the customs and beliefs of the age, recall his. temptations, and allow for his abnormalities, it is hard, more than a hundred years afterwards, to forgive a man who could behave so badly as he behaved, not once or twice, but over and over again. The mere preservation of so many letters which the writers had. begged him to return or destroy makes a hound of him and something of a hog, since he not only retained these things but boasted about ‘them and showed some of them round.
His nobility and generosity are fortunately as well established as his ugliest lapses, so that this book is an appeal, in thirteen tongues, to the charity that rejoiceth only in the truth.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 10, 1 September 1939, Page 37
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303BYRON THE CAD New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 10, 1 September 1939, Page 37
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