"TheMost Amiable Monster"

His VERY SELF AND VOICE (676 pp.)--Edited by Ernest J. Lovell Jr.--Mocmillan ($7.50).

"For a man of genius, in the 19th century," wrote Stendhal, "there is no alternative: he is either a fool or a monster." The great French novelist made this remark after meeting the one great romantic genius of Europe whose monstrous capacities were never in doubt: George Gordon, Lord Byron.

No other poet evoked in his contemporaries the burning curiosity, the passionate enthusiasm and revulsion, that Byron aroused wherever he went. It is an understatement to say that people were mad about Byron; people still are--still consumed with the desire to find out what he stood for and why he had such an overpowering influence on everyone who met him. His Very Self and Voice, instead of reaching one conclusion about him, offers the readers dozens from which to choose.

One hundred and fifty men and women who met Byron and wrote about him enter the witness box to testify to his character--and leave the judge owl-eyed and the jury hung. The outlines of the story will be familiar to readers of Byron biographies, but not most of the details, which have been culled from widely scattered sources--diaries, letters, magazines, rare 19th century books.

"What a Pretty Boy." The very first entry (about 1793) warns of storms-to-come. The little peer with the deformed foot is about five years old; he is out walking with his nurse in Aberdeen. Up comes another nursemaid and pipes: "What a pretty boy Byron is! What a pity he has such a leg!" The little boy's eyes blaze. Striking at her with a little whip, he cries furiously: "Dinna speak of it!" But when he meets another small boy with a deformed foot, the little monster's rage turns to laughter: "Come and see the twa laddies with the twa clubfeet going up the Broadstreet!" This boyish portrait soon gives way to a stranger, far more puzzling picture. The teachings of Calvin and John Knox add another dimension to Byron's thoughts, another torment to his emotions. "He seemed delighted to converse with me," writes a schoolmaster, "with every appearance of belief in the divine truths." "He was so shy," reports a visitor, "that [his mother] was forced to send for him three times before she could persuade him to come into the drawing room." "He was loud, even coarse . . . a rough, curly-headed boy . . . nothing more," says a Harrow schoolmate.

Once people became aware of his unpredictable nature, they were filled with morbid curiosity to find out what emotion he would bring to the surface in response to a loaded question. Like a born actor, Byron guessed what they were after, rarely disappointed their expectations.

While washing his hands and singing a gay Neapolitan air, he stopped and remarked casually: "My father cut his throat," then went back to singing. Byron was word-perfect in his monster role before he was out of his teens. Henceforth, the clubfoot and the sensitive heart hid themselves in the disguise of a cold, cloven-hoofed devil. On his brow, at a moment's notice, would appear "that singular scowl" which caused one acquaintance to exclaim that he "had never seen a man with such a Cain-like mark on the forehead." A Pair of Stays. A Miss Elizabeth Pigot had the honor of discovering that Byron was addicted to poetry. When she read him some poems of Burns, he astonished her by saying that "he, too, was a poet sometimes." After he published his first signed volume of poems, Hours of Idleness, he began to lead the life "of a gay young man of rank," and was so fearful of "doing anything of a nature to lower his character as a gentleman" that he pooh-poohed both his Hours of Idleness and his hours of boxing lessons with "Mr.

Jackson, the well-known pugilist." But when Hours was pooh-poohed by the Edinburgh Review, his lordship flew into an ungentlemanly frenzy, swore "to punish them for it." He did so, in the satirical poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers --the first intimation to Britons that there had risen among them a satirist with a skinning knife sharper than any since Alexander Pope's.

After he took his seat in the House of Lords and, at 24, published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (poetic impressions of a Continental journey), Byron became overnight Britain's most talked-of poet.

But the adulation, the lionizing, came precisely at a moment when he had determined "to present himself . . . in moral masquerade" and to invent fantastic stories about the viciousness of his nature. "His voice," said a Mrs. Opie with gushing horror, "was such a voice as the devil tempted Eve with; you feared its fascination the moment you heard it." "His head," noted a Miss Berry, "begins to be turned by all the adoration . . . especially [that of] the women." Byron himself summed it up succinctly, triumphantly. "I have made them afraid of me," he said.

He used every trick in the book to keep them afraid, keep them horrified. His craziest fan, Lady Caroline Lamb (TIME, Oct. 11), fell dramatically in love with him. When she cooed, "Should you like to see me waltz with any man but yourself?", he replied that "he should have no objection whatever, upon which with no more ado the fair Lady whips a knife into her own side." Fortunately, observes a cynical onlooker: "Venus . . . interposed in the shape of a pair of stays, so that the blow was by no means fatal."

Actress Fanny Kelly was another lady who got a sharp comeuppance when she crossed swords with the monster. "Being offended" with him, she said: "You know, my Lord, I can act men's parts. I have a great mind to put on breeches and demand satisfaction [i.e., fight a duel with you]." To which his lordship replied coarsely: "Then, Miss Kelly, I should be very happy to pull off mine and give you satisfaction."

"I Am Surely in Hell!". In 1812 he proposed to Anne Isabella Milbanke, a pretty heiress. She turned him down. Two years later he tried again, and she accepted him. "They had not been an hour in the carriage which conveyed them from the church, when breaking into a malignant sneer, [Byron said]: 'Oh! what a dupe you have been . . .! Many are the tears you will have to shed . . . It is enough for me that you are my wife for me to hate you. If you were the wife of any other man, I own you might have charms.' " He told her he had "plotted to avenge her [first] refusal of him." He asked her, "with every appearance of aversion," if "she meant to sleep in the same bed with him": and during their wedding night, observing a candle "casting a ruddy glare through the crimson curtains of the bed," he cried in a loud voice: "Good God, I am surely in hell!"

He liked to hint to her that he had once committed murder, that his life was already ruined by a secret, mysterious depravity. He said roundly that he had married only to beget an heir to his title. "I mean to live, like a worm of the earth, to propagate my kind, and then I shall put an end to my existence." After one year of this satanic bliss, Lady Byron extricated herself from the monster's clutches. Byron sailed away to Europe; he never saw England again.

Were this the sum total of Byron's character, it would present no puzzle: any zoo attendant could tumble to it. In fact the monster was a mere segment of it. Women rarely saw the better side of Byron, but to his men friends, the devilish Byron seemed an absurd joke, a mere poetic fantasy. They sat at his feet, bowed to his charm, reveled in the humor and radiance he shed. Their descriptions of him are mostly levelheaded and carry a ring of conviction. Wrote Sir Walter Scott: "I found Lord Byron in the highest degree courteous, and even kind . . . He was devoid of selfishness . . . generous, humane and noble-minded when passion did not blind him." Wrote Stendhal: "The profile of an angel, the gentlest of manners . . . the most amiable monster that I have ever seen . . . There was much petty vanity, a continual and puerile fear of appearing ridiculous . . . But his genius once awakened, his faults were shaken off as a garment that would have incommoded the flight of his imagination . . ."

"Speedey Deselution." Byron made Italy his home for seven years before proceeding to Greece with the little army of men whom he paid out of his own pocket to fight against the Turks for Greek independence. There, at swampy Missolonghi, he died of fever at the age of 36, attended to the last by his devoted valet, William Fletcher. All others when they wrote of Byron rose to the occasion with polished words and well-turned phrases, but it was the blunt, semiliterate Fletcher who had the privilege of recording what he called that "fatal day which deprived England of its greatest ornament and me of the best of Masters."

The death scene has often been described, but never as arrestingly as by Valet Fletcher. "My Lord . . . began to make sure of his speedey Deselution . . . He said T have a great deal to tell you which I hope you will see done, for I feel I am going.' 'My Lord,' I Replyed, T will with my Life My Lord do everything to the utmost in my Power.' T know you will Fletcher,' he Replyed ... 'Be sure mind all I say,' and at this moment his voice began to falter and I was not able to Distinguish one word from another . . . I answered, 'My Lord I am verry sorry but I have not understood one word which I hope you will now tell me over again.' My Lord in Great agitation said then, 'if you have not understood me it is now too Late . . .' and in a minutes time all was over . . ."

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