They are too long to be quoted. Readers must refer to them and judge. The note is the note of bitter despair, working up, at the end, into the note of recklessness. The contrast is there--that contrast as old as the world--between the things that are and the things that might, and should, have been; and then there follows the declaration that, as things are what they are, and as their consequences will be what they will be, there is nothing for it but to plunge into pleasure, albeit with the full knowledge that pleasure cannot please:
"_One struggle more, and I am free From pangs that rend my heart in twain; One last long sigh to Love and thee, Then back to busy life again. It suits me well to mingle now With things that never pleased before: Though every joy is fled below, What future grief can touch me more?_
"_Then bring me wine, the banquet bring; Man was not formed to live alone: I'll be that light unmeaning thing That smiles with all, and weeps with none. It was not thus in days more dear, It never would have been, but thou Hast fled, and left me lonely here; Thou'rt nothing,--all are nothing now._"
The so-called Byronic pose challenges us in that passage; but it is by no means as a pose that it must be dismissed. The men who seem to pose are very often just the men who have the courage--or the bravado, if any one prefers the word--to be sincere; and Byron, if he is to be rightly understood, must be thought of as the most sincere man who ever struck an attitude. That was the secret of his strength. Pose was for him just what Aristotle, as interpreted by Professor Bywater, says that the spectacle of tragedy is to the mass of the spectators. It purged him, for the time being, of his emotions by indulging them. The pose, having done its work, ceased until the emotions recurred, and then he posed again. Hence the many differences of opinion among his friends as to whether he posed or not.
Just now he was posing, in all sincerity, not only to himself but to Hodgson. At one time he told Hodgson that, as soon as he had set his affairs in order, he should "leave England for ever." At another he sent him an "Epistle to a Friend in Answer to some Lines exhorting the Author to be cheerful and to 'banish Care.'" Hodgson sent them to Moore for publication in his Life, requesting that the concluding lines should not be printed; but Moore disregarded the request. The Epistle ended thus: