China and the West

[Koizumi, Yakumo = Hearn, Lafcadio]. Ping Bailun. Chen Bao yi. [ID D26398].
Lafcadio Hearn schreibt : "Byron has a double personality : on one hand he is imprudent, selfish and sensual ; on the other generous, chivalrous, and noble... That Byron's influence spread all over Europe is not because he promoted any thought, but because his works revealed a truth to the world. Ne was neither a philosopher nor a logical thinker. Byron temporarily confused the European literary wordls with his satanism. But we should keep in mind that Byron himself did not intend to do so, nor did he fully understand the thought himself, but he made it all the rage for a time. He liked to write about the violent, brutal characters, making people aware, perhaps he was not aware himself, of the force of nature : no one could be absolutely free from the control of the force of the nature. His heroes' lives were a symbol of this contradiction. Later, with the emergence of people greater than Byron, who revealed the same truth through sound and accurate thinking, Byron began to be forgotten."

Chu Chih-yu : Hearn believed that Byron's distorted character was influenced by his perverse parents and his clubfoot, the causes of his unhappy childhood. His assessment of Byron's achievements in poetry was from a purely academic point of view. He attempted to answer the question why Byron's work had been so popular in England and Europe during his own lifetime and why suddenly he had lost most of his readers in recent years. Byron incorporated a satanic quality in his heroes, who were not real daemons but 'noble and gloomy, mysterious and beautiful'.