Note 380 — THE SYRIAN AND THE THREE WOMEN OF CAIRO.[377]
Richard Francis Burton translation · Edition 2
In text “Kabút,” plur. Kabábít:
Oh! who is more brave than a dark Suliote,
In his snowy camise and his shaggy capote? “Childe Harold,” Canto II.
And here I cannot but notice the pitiful contrast (on the centenary of the poet’s nativity, Jan. 22nd, ’88) between the land of his birth and that of his death. The gallant Greeks honoured his memory with wreaths and panegyrics and laudatory articles, declaring that they will never forget the anniversaries of his nativity and his decease. The British Pharisee and Philistine, true to his miserable creed, ignored all the “real Lord Byron”—his generosity, his devotion to his friends, his boundless charity, and his enthusiasm for humanity. They exhaled their venom by carping at Byron’s poetry (which was and is to Europe a greater boon than Shakspeare’s), by condemning his morality (in its dirty sexual sense) and in prophesying for him speedy oblivion. Have these men no shame in presence of the noble panegyric dedicated by the Prince of German poets, Goethe, to his brother bard whom he welcomed as a prophet? Can they not blush before Heine (the great German of the future), before Flaubert, Alfred de Musset, Lamartine, Leopardi and a host of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese notables? Whilst England will not forgive Byron for having separated from his unsympathetic wife, the Literary society of Moscow celebrated his centenary with all honour; and Prof. Nicholas Storojenko delivered a speech which has found an echo
further west
That his sires’ “Islands of the Blest.”
He rightly remarked that Byron’s deadly sin in the eyes of the Georgian-English people was his Cosmopolitanism: he was the poetical representative of the Sturm und Drang period of the xixth century. He reflected, in his life and works, the wrath of noble minds at the collapse of the cause of freedom and the reactionary tendency of the century. Even in the distant regions of Monte Video Byron’s hundredth birthday was not forgotten, and Don Luis Desteffanio’s lecture was welcomed by literary society.