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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.
(Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave)And feeling, in a poet, is the source
Of others' feeling; but they are such liars,
And take all colours—like the hands of dyers.
(Don Juan, iii, st. 87)I saw, that is, I dream'd myself
Here—here—even where we are, guests as we were,
Myself a host that deem'd himself but guest,
Willing to equal all in social freedom.
(Sardanapalus, iv, i, 78–81)We think of Byron as the most personal of poets, recklessly candid, self-revealing to a fault. Like most long-standing literary judgments, this one still strikes home. Nevertheless, its truth involves a paradox best defined by a later English writer who is in many ways Byron's avatar. “Man is least himself,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” Perhaps no English writer, not even Wilde himself, executed this theory of the mask so completely as Byron. “Before Oscar Wilde was, I am.”
Many of Byron's masks are famous, Childe Harold being, I suppose, the most famous of them all – and the prototype of those subsequent masked men we call Byronic Heroes.
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