Life of Lord Byron.

Vol. II.

by Thomas Moore.

NOTICES OF THE LIFE OF LORD BYRON.

Having landed the young pilgrim once more in England, it may be worth while, before we accompany him into the scenes that awaited him at home, to consider how far the general character of his mind and disposition may have been affected by the course of travel and adventure, in which he had been, for the last two years, engaged. A life less savouring of poetry and romance than that which he had pursued previously to his departure on his travels, it would be difficult to imagine. In his childhood, it is true, he had been a dweller and wanderer among scenes well calculated, according to the ordinary notion, to implant the first rudiments of poetic feeling. But, though the poet may afterwards feed on the recollection of such scenes, it is more than questionable, as has been already observed, whether he ever has been formed by them. If a childhood, indeed, pa.s.sed among mountainous scenery were so favourable to the awakening of the imaginative power, both the Welsh, among ourselves, and the Swiss, abroad, ought to rank much higher on the scale of poetic excellence than they do at present. But, even allowing the picturesqueness of his early haunts to have had some share in giving a direction to the fancy of Byron, the actual operation of this influence, whatever it may have been, ceased with his childhood; and the life which he led afterwards during his school-days at Harrow, was,--as naturally the life of so idle and daring a schoolboy must be,--the very reverse of poetical. For a soldier or an adventurer, the course of training through which he then pa.s.sed would have been perfect;--his athletic sports, his battles, his love of dangerous enterprise, gave every promise of a spirit fit for the most stormy career. But to the meditative pursuits of poesy, these dispositions seemed, of all others, the least friendly; and, however they might promise to render him, at some future time, a subject for bards, gave, a.s.suredly, but little hope of his shining first among bards himself.

The habits of his life at the university were even still less intellectual and literary. While a schoolboy, he had read abundantly and eagerly, though desultorily; but even this discipline of his mind, irregular and undirected as it was, he had, in a great measure, given up, after leaving Harrow; and among the pursuits that occupied his academic hours, those of playing at hazard, sparring, and keeping a bear and bull-dogs, were, if not the most favourite, at least, perhaps, the most innocent. His time in London pa.s.sed equally unmarked either by mental cultivation or refined amus.e.m.e.nt. Having no resources in private society, from his total want of friends and connections, he was left to live loosely about town among the loungers in coffee-houses; and to those who remember what his two favourite haunts, Limmer's and Stevens's, were at that period, it is needless to say that, whatever else may have been the merits of these establishments, they were anything but fit schools for the formation of poetic character.

But however incompatible such a life must have been with those habits of contemplation, by which, and which only, the faculties he had already displayed could be ripened, or those that were still latent could be unfolded, yet, in another point of view, the time now apparently squandered by him, was, in after-days, turned most invaluably to account. By thus initiating him into a knowledge of the varieties of human character,--by giving him an insight into the details of society, in their least artificial form,--in short, by mixing him up, thus early, with the world, its business and its pleasures, his London life but contributed its share in forming that wonderful combination which his mind afterwards exhibited, of the imaginative and the practical--the heroic and the humorous--of the keenest and most dissecting views of real life, with the grandest and most spiritualised conceptions of ideal grandeur.

To the same period, perhaps, another predominant characteristic of his maturer mind and writings may be traced. In this antic.i.p.ated experience of the world which his early mixture with its crowd gave him, it is but little probable that many of the more favourable specimens of human kind should have fallen under his notice. On the contrary, it is but too likely that some of the lightest and least estimable of both s.e.xes may have been among the models, on which, at an age when impressions sink deepest, his earliest judgments of human nature were formed. Hence, probably, those contemptuous and debasing views of humanity with which he was so often led to alloy his n.o.blest tributes to the loveliness and majesty of general nature. Hence the contrast that appeared between the fruits of his imagination and of his experience,--between those dreams, full of beauty and kindliness, with which the one teemed at his bidding, and the dark, desolating bitterness that overflowed when he drew from the other.

Unpromising, however, as was his youth of the high destiny that awaited him, there was one unfailing characteristic of the imaginative order of minds--his love of solitude--which very early gave signs of those habits of self-study and introspection by which alone the "diamond quarries" of genius are worked and brought to light. When but a boy, at Harrow, he had shown this disposition strongly,--being often known, as I have already mentioned, to withdraw himself from his playmates, and sitting alone upon a tomb in the churchyard, give himself up, for hours, to thought. As his mind began to disclose its resources, this feeling grew upon him; and, had his foreign travel done no more than, by detaching him from the distractions of society, to enable him, solitarily and freely, to commune with his own spirit, it would have been an all-important step gained towards the full expansion of his faculties.

It was only then, indeed, that he began to feel himself capable of the abstraction which self-study requires, or to enjoy that freedom from the intrusion of others' thoughts, which alone leaves the contemplative mind master of its own. In the solitude of his nights at sea, in his lone wanderings through Greece, he had sufficient leisure and seclusion to look within himself, and there catch the first "glimpses of his glorious mind." One of his chief delights, as he mentioned in his "Memoranda,"

was, when bathing in some retired spot, to seat himself on a high rock above the sea, and there remain for hours, gazing upon the sky and the waters[1], and lost in that sort of vague reverie, which, however formless and indistinct at the moment, settled afterwards on his pages, into those clear, bright pictures which will endure for ever.

Were it not for the doubt and diffidence that hang round the first steps of genius, this growing consciousness of his own power, these openings into a new domain of intellect, where he was to reign supreme, must have made the solitary hours of the young traveller one dream of happiness.

But it will be seen that, even yet, he distrusted his own strength, nor was at all aware of the height to which the spirit he was now calling up would grow. So enamoured, nevertheless, had he become of these lonely musings, that even the society of his fellow-traveller, though with pursuits so congenial to his own, grew at last to be a chain and a burden on him; and it was not till he stood, companionless, on the sh.o.r.e of the little island in the Aegean, that he found his spirit breathe freely. If any stronger proof were wanting of his deep pa.s.sion for solitude, we shall find it, not many years after, in his own written avowal, that, even when in the company of the woman he most loved, he not unfrequently found himself sighing to be alone.

It was not only, however, by affording him the concentration necessary for this silent drawing out of his feelings and powers, that travel conduced so essentially to the formation of his poetical character. To the East he had looked, with the eyes of romance, from his very childhood. Before he was ten years of age, the perusal of Rycaut's History of the Turks had taken a strong hold of his imagination, and he read eagerly, in consequence, every book concerning the East he could find.[2] In visiting, therefore, those countries, he was but realising the dreams of his childhood; and this return of his thoughts to that innocent time, gave a freshness and purity to their current which they had long wanted. Under the spell of such recollections, the attraction of novelty was among the least that the scenes, through which he wandered, presented. Fond traces of the past--and few have ever retained them so vividly--mingled themselves with the impressions of the objects before him; and as, among the Highlands, he had often traversed, in fancy, the land of the Moslem, so memory, from the wild hills of Albania, now "carried him back to Morven."

While such sources of poetic feeling were stirred at every step, there was also in his quick change of place and scene--in the diversity of men and manners surveyed by him--in the perpetual hope of adventure and thirst of enterprise, such a succession and variety of ever fresh excitement as not only brought into play, but invigorated, all the energies of his character: as he, himself, describes his mode of living, it was "To-day in a palace, to-morrow in a cow-house--this day with the Pacha, the next with a shepherd." Thus were his powers of observation quickened, and the impressions on his imagination multiplied. Thus schooled, too, in some of the roughnesses and privations of life, and, so far, made acquainted with the flavour of adversity, he learned to enlarge, more than is common in his high station, the circle of his sympathies, and became inured to that manly and vigorous cast of thought which is so impressed on all his writings. Nor must we forget, among these strengthening and animating effects of travel, the enn.o.bling excitement of danger, which he more than once experienced,--having been placed in situations, both on land and sea, well calculated to call forth that pleasurable sense of energy, which perils, calmly confronted, never fail to inspire.

The strong interest which--in spite of his a.s.sumed philosophy on this subject in Childe Harold--he took in every thing connected with a life of warfare, found frequent opportunities of gratification, not only on board the English ships of war in which he sailed, but in his occasional intercourse with the soldiers of the country. At Salora, a solitary place on the Gulf of Arta, he once pa.s.sed two or three days, lodged in a small miserable barrack. Here, he lived the whole time, familiarly, among the soldiers; and a picture of the singular scene which their evenings presented--of those wild, half-bandit warriors, seated round the young poet, and examining with savage admiration his fine Manton gun[3] and English sword--might be contrasted, but too touchingly, with another and a later picture of the same poet, dying, as a chieftain, on the same land, with Suliotes for his guards, and all Greece for his mourners.

It is true, amidst all this stimulating variety of objects, the melancholy which he had brought from home still lingered around his mind. To Mr. Adair and Mr. Bruce, as I have before mentioned, he gave the idea of a person labouring under deep dejection; and Colonel Leake, who was, at that time, resident at Ioannina, conceived very much the same impression of the state of his mind.[4] But, a.s.suredly, even this melancholy, habitually as it still clung to him, must, under the stirring and healthful influences of his roving life, have become a far more elevated and abstract feeling than it ever could have expanded to within reach of those annoyances, whose tendency was to keep it wholly concentrated round self. Had he remained idly at home, he would have sunk, perhaps, into a querulous satirist. But, as his views opened on a freer and wider horizon, every feeling of his nature kept pace with their enlargement; and this inborn sadness, mingling itself with the effusions of his genius, became one of the chief const.i.tuent charms not only of their pathos, but their grandeur. For, when did ever a sublime thought spring up in the soul, that melancholy was not to be found, however latent, in its neighbourhood?

We have seen, from the letters written by him on his pa.s.sage homeward, how far from cheerful or happy was the state of mind in which he returned. In truth, even for a disposition of the most sanguine cast, there was quite enough in the discomforts that now awaited him in England, to sadden its hopes, and check its buoyancy. "To be happy at home," says Johnson, "is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends." But Lord Byron had no home,--at least none that deserved this endearing name. A fond family circle, to accompany him with its prayers, while away, and draw round him, with listening eagerness, on his return, was what, unluckily, he never knew, though with a heart, as we have seen, by nature formed for it. In the absence, too, of all that might cheer and sustain, he had every thing to encounter that could distress and humiliate. To the dreariness of a home without affection, was added the burden of an establishment without means; and he had thus all the embarra.s.sments of domestic life, without its charms. His affairs had, during his absence, been suffered to fall into confusion, even greater than their inherent tendency to such a state warranted. There had been, the preceding year, an execution on Newstead, for a debt of 1500_l._ owing to the Messrs.

Brothers, upholsterers; and a circ.u.mstance told of the veteran, Joe Murray, on this occasion, well deserves to be mentioned. To this faithful old servant, jealous of the ancient honour of the Byrons, the sight of the notice of sale, pasted up on the abbey-door, could not be otherwise than an unsightly and intolerable nuisance. Having enough, however, of the fear of the law before his eyes, not to tear the writing down, he was at last forced, as his only consolatory expedient, to paste a large piece of brown paper over it.

Notwithstanding the resolution, so recently expressed by Lord Byron, to abandon for ever the vocation of authorship, and leave "the whole Castalian state" to others, he was hardly landed in England when we find him busily engaged in preparations for the publication of some of the poems which he had produced abroad. So eager was he, indeed, to print, that he had already, in a letter written at sea, announced himself to Mr. Dallas, as ready for the press. Of this letter, which, from its date, ought to have preceded some of the others that have been given, I shall here lay before the reader the most material parts.

[Footnote 1: To this he alludes in those beautiful stanzas,

"To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell," &c.

Alfieri, before his dramatic genius had yet unfolded itself, used to pa.s.s hours, as he tells us, in this sort of dreaming state, gazing upon the ocean:--"Apres le spectacle un de mes amus.e.m.e.ns, a Ma.r.s.eille, etait de me baigner presque tous les soirs dans la mer. J'avais trouve un pet.i.t endroit fort agreable, sur une langue de terre placee a droite hors du port, ou, en m'a.s.seyant sur le sable, le dos appuye contre un pet.i.t rocher qui empechait qu'on ne put me voir du cote de la terre, je n'avais plus devant moi que le ciel et la mer. Entre ces deux immensites qu'embellissaient les rayons d'un soleil couchant, je pa.s.sai en revant des heures delicieuses; et la, je serais devenu poete, si j'avais su ecrire dans une langue quelconque."]

[Footnote 2: But a few months before he died, in a conversation with Maurocordato at Missolonghi, Lord Byron said--"The Turkish History was one of the first books that gave me pleasure when a child; and I believe it had much influence on my subsequent wishes to visit the Levant, and gave perhaps the oriental colouring which is observed in my poetry."--COUNT GAMBA's _Narrative_.

In the last edition of Mr. D'Israeli's work on "the Literary Character,"

that gentleman has given some curious marginal notes, which he found written by Lord Byron in a copy of this work that belonged to him. Among them is the following enumeration of the writers that, besides Rycaut, had drawn his attention so early to the East:--

"Knolles, Cantemir, De Tott, Lady M.W. Montague, Hawkins's Translation from Mignot's History of the Turks, the Arabian Nights, all travels, or histories, or books upon the East I could meet with, I had read, as well as Rycaut, before I was _ten years old_. I think the Arabian Nights first. After these, I preferred the history of naval actions, Don Quixote, and Smollett's novels, particularly Roderick Random, and I was pa.s.sionate for the Roman History. When a boy, I could never bear to read any Poetry whatever without disgust and reluctance."]

[Footnote 3: "It rained hard the next day, and we spent another evening with our soldiers. The captain, Elmas, tried a fine Manton gun belonging to my Friend, and hitting his mark every time was highly delighted."--HOBHOUSE'_s_ _Journey_, &c.]

[Footnote 4: It must be recollected that by two of these gentlemen he was seen chiefly under the restraints of presentation and etiquette, when whatever gloom there was on his spirits would, in a shy nature like his, most show itself. The account which his fellow-traveller gives of him is altogether different. In introducing the narration of a short tour to Negroponte, in which his n.o.ble friend was unable to accompany him, Mr. Hobhouse expresses strongly the deficiency of which he is sensible, from the absence, on this occasion, of "a companion, who, to quickness of observation and ingenuity of remark, united that gay good-humour which keeps alive the attention under the pressure of fatigue, and softens the aspect of every difficulty and danger." In some lines, too, of the "Hints from Horace," addressed evidently to Mr.

Hobhouse, Lord Byron not only renders the same justice to his own social cheerfulness, but gives a somewhat more distinct idea of the frame of mind out of which it rose;--

"Moschus! with whom I hope once more to sit, And smile at folly, if we can't at wit; Yes, friend, for thee I'll quit my Cynic cell, And bear Swift's motto, "Vive la bagatelle!"

Which charm'd our days in each aegean clime, And oft at home with revelry and rhyme."

LETTER 54. TO MR. DALLAS.

_"Volage Frigate, at sea, June 28. 1811_.

"After two years' absence, (to a day, on the 2d of July, before which we shall not arrive at Portsmouth,) I am retracing my way to England.

"I am coming back with little prospect of pleasure at home, and with a body a little shaken by one or two smart fevers, but a spirit I hope yet unbroken. My affairs, it seems, are considerably involved, and much business must be done with lawyers, colliers, farmers, and creditors. Now this, to a man who hates bustle as he hates a bishop, is a serious concern. But enough of my home department.

"My Satire, it seems, is in a fourth edition, a success rather above the middling run, but not much for a production which, from its topics, must be temporary, and of course be successful at first, or not at all. At this period, when I can think and act more coolly, I regret that I have written it, though I shall probably find it forgotten by all except those whom it has offended.

"Yours and Pratt's _protege_, Blackett, the cobbler, is dead, in spite of his rhymes, and is probably one of the instances where death has saved a man from d.a.m.nation. You were the ruin of that poor fellow amongst you: had it not been for his patrons, he might now have been in very good plight, shoe-(not verse-) making: but you have made him immortal with a vengeance. I write this, supposing poetry, patronage, and strong waters, to have been the death of him. If you are in town in or about the beginning of July, you will find me at Dorant's, in Albemarle Street, glad to see you.

I have an imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry ready for Cawthorn, but don't let that deter you, for I sha'n't inflict it upon you.

You know I never read my rhymes to visitors. I shall quit town in a few days for Notts., and thence to Rochdale.

"Yours, &c."

Immediately, on Lord Byron's arrival in London, Mr. Dallas called upon him. "On the 15th of July," says this gentleman, "I had the pleasure of shaking hands with him at Reddish's Hotel in St. James's Street. I thought his looks belied the report he had given me of his bodily health, and his countenance did not betoken melancholy, or displeasure at his return. He was very animated in the account of his travels, but a.s.sured me he had never had the least idea of writing them. He said he believed satire to be his _forte_, and to that he had adhered, having written, during his stay at different places abroad, a Paraphrase of Horace's Art of Poetry, which would be a good finish to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. He seemed to promise himself additional fame from it, and I undertook to superintend its publication, as I had done that of the Satire. I had chosen the time ill for my visit, and we had hardly any time to converse uninterruptedly, he therefore engaged me to breakfast with him next morning."

In the interval Mr. Dallas looked over this Paraphrase, which he had been permitted by Lord Byron to take home with him for the purpose, and his disappointment was, as he himself describes it, "grievous," on finding, that a pilgrimage of two years to the inspiring lands of the East had been attended with no richer poetical result. On their meeting again next morning, though unwilling to speak disparagingly of the work, he could not refrain, as he informs us, from expressing some surprise that his n.o.ble friend should have produced nothing else during his absence.--"Upon this," he continues, "Lord Byron told me that he had occasionally written short poems, besides a great many stanzas in Spenser's measure, relative to the countries he had visited. 'They are not worth troubling you with, but you shall have them all with you if you like.' So came I by Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. He took it from a small trunk, with a number of verses. He said they had been read but by one person, who had found very little to commend and much to condemn: that he himself was of that opinion, and he was sure I should be so too.

Such as it was, however, it was at my service; but he was urgent that 'The Hints from Horace' should be immediately put in train, which I promised to have done."

The value of the treasure thus presented to him, Mr. Dallas was not slow in discovering. That very evening he despatched a letter to his n.o.ble friend, saying--"You have written one of the most delightful poems I ever read. If I wrote this in flattery, I should deserve your contempt rather than your friendship. I have been so fascinated with Childe Harold that I have not been able to lay it down. I would almost pledge my life on its advancing the reputation of your poetical powers, and on its gaining you great honour and regard, if you will do me the credit and favour of attending to my suggestions respecting," &c.&c.&c.

Notwithstanding this just praise, and the secret echo it must have found in a heart so awake to the slightest whisper of fame, it was some time before Lord Byron's obstinate repugnance to the idea of publishing Childe Harold could be removed.

"Attentive," says Mr. Dallas, "as he had hitherto been to my opinions and suggestions, and natural as it was that he should be swayed by such decided praise, I was surprised to find that I could not at first obtain credit with him for my judgment on Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 'It was any thing but poetry--it had been condemned by a good critic--had I not myself seen the sentences on the margins of the ma.n.u.scripts?' He dwelt upon the Paraphrase of the Art of Poetry with pleasure, and the ma.n.u.script of that was given to Cawthorn, the publisher of the Satire, to be brought forth without delay. I did not, however, leave him so: before I quitted him I returned to the charge, and told him that I was so convinced of the merit of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, that, as he had given it to me, I should certainly publish it, if he would have the kindness to attend to some corrections and alterations."

Among the many instances, recorded in literary history, of the false judgments of authors respecting their own productions, the preference given by Lord Byron to a work so little worthy of his genius, over a poem of such rare and original beauty as the first Cantos of Childe Harold, may be accounted, perhaps, one of the most extraordinary and inexplicable.[5]

"It is in men as in soils," says Swift, "where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of." But Lord Byron had made the discovery of the vein, without, as it would seem, being aware of its value. I have already had occasion to observe that, even while occupied with the composition of Childe Harold, it is questionable whether he himself was yet fully conscious of the new powers, both of thought and feeling, that had been awakened in him; and the strange estimate we now find him forming of his own production appears to warrant the remark. It would seem, indeed, as if, while the imaginative powers of his mind had received such an impulse forward, the faculty of judgment, slower in its developement, was still immature, and that of _self_-judgment, the most difficult of all, still unattained.

On the other hand, from the deference which, particularly at this period of his life, he was inclined to pay to the opinions of those with whom he a.s.sociated, it would be fairer, perhaps, to conclude that this erroneous valuation arose rather from a diffidence in his own judgment than from any deficiency of it. To his college companions, almost all of whom were his superiors in scholarship, and some of them even, at this time, his compet.i.tors in poetry, he looked up with a degree of fond and admiring deference, for which his ignorance of his own intellectual strength alone could account; and the example, as well as tastes, of these young writers being mostly on the side of established models, their authority, as long as it influenced him, would, to a certain degree, interfere with his striking confidently into any new or original path. That some remains of this bias, with a little leaning, perhaps, towards school recollections[6], may have had a share in prompting his preference of the Horatian Paraphrase, is by no means improbable;--at least, that it was enough to lead him, untried as he had yet been in the new path, to content himself, for the present, with following up his success in the old. We have seen, indeed, that the ma.n.u.script of the two Cantos of Childe Harold had, previously to its being placed in the hands of Mr. Dallas, been submitted by the n.o.ble author to the perusal of some friend--the first and only one, it appears, who at that time had seen them. Who this fastidious critic was, Mr. Dallas has not mentioned; but the sweeping tone of censure in which he conveyed his remarks was such as, at any period of his career, would have disconcerted the judgment of one, who, years after, in all the plenitude of his fame, confessed, that "the depreciation of the lowest of mankind was more painful to him than the applause of the highest was pleasing."[7]

Though on every thing that, after his arrival at the age of manhood, he produced, some mark or other of the master-hand may be traced; yet, to print the whole of his Paraphrase of Horace, which extends to nearly 800 lines, would be, at the best, but a questionable compliment to his memory. That the reader, however, may be enabled to form some opinion of a performance, which--by an error or caprice of judgment, unexampled, perhaps, in the annals of literature--its author, for a time, preferred to the sublime musings of Childe Harold, I shall here select a few such pa.s.sages from the Paraphrase as may seem calculated to give an idea as well of its merits as its defects.

The opening of the poem is, with reference to the original, ingenious:--