Byron
by John Nichol · English · Gutenberg #10100 · 400,579 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Byron
Author: John Nichol
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10100]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10100
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BYRON ***
BYRON
BY
JOHN NICHOL
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
ANCESTRY AND FAMILY
CHAPTER II.
EARLY YEARS AND SCHOOL-LIFE. 1788-1808.
CHAPTER III.
CAMBRIDGE, AND FIRST PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP--HOURS OF IDLENESS--BARDS AND
REVIEWERS. 1808-1809.
CHAPTER IV.
TWO YEARS OF TRAVEL. 1809-1811.
CHAPTER V.
LIFE IN LONDON--CORRESPONDENCE WITH SCOTT AND MOORE--SECOND PERIOD OF
AUTHORSHIP--HAROLD (I., II.). AND THE ROMANCES. 1811-1815.
CHAPTER VI.
MARRIAGE AND SEPARATION--FAREWELL TO ENGLAND. 1815-1816.
CHAPTER VII.
SWITZERLAND--VENICE--THIRD PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP--HAROLD (III., IV.)
--MANFRED. 1816-1820.
CHAPTER VIII.
RAVENNA--COUNTESS GUICCIOLI--THE DRAMAS--CAIN--VISION OF JUDGMENT.
1820-1821.
CHAPTER IX.
PISA--GENOA--THE LIBERAL--DON JUAN. 1821-1823.
CHAPTER. X.
POLITICS--THE CARBONARI--EXPEDITION TO GREECE--DEATH. 1821-1824.
CHAPTER XI.
CHARACTERISTICS, AND PLACE IN LITERATURE
INDEX
BOOKS CONSULTED.
1. The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron, Commodore, in a late
Expedition Round the World, &c. (Baker and Leigh) 1768
2. Voyage of H.M.S. _Blonde_ to the Sandwich Islands in the years
1824-1825, the Right Hon. Lord Byron, Commander (John Murray) 1826
3. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Hon. Lord Byron (H.
Colburn) 1822
4. The Life, Writings, Opinions, and Times of G.G. Noel Byron, with
courtiers of tho present polished and enlightened age, &c., &c.,
3 vols. (M. Hey) 1825
5. Narrative of Lord Byron's last Journey to Greece, from Journal of
Count Peter Gamba 1825
6. Medwin's Conversations with Lord Byron at Pisa, 2 vols. (H. Colburn)
1825
7. Leigh Hunt's Byron and His Contemporaries (H. Colburn)
1828
8. The Works of Lord Byron, with Life by Thomas Moore, 17
vols. (Murray) 1832
9. Galt's Life of Lord Byron (Colburn and Buntley) 1830
10. Kennedy's Conversations on Religion (Murray) 1830
11. Countess of Blessington's Conversations (Colburn) 1834
12. Lady Morgan's Memoirs, 2 vols. (W.H. Allen) 1842
13. Recollections of the Countess Guiccioli (Bentley) 1869
14. Castelar's Genius and Character of Byron (Tinsley) 1870
15. Elze's Life of Lord Byron (Murray) 1872
16. Trelawny's Reminiscences of Byron and Shelley 1858
17. Torrens' Memoirs of Viscount Melbourne (Macmillan) 1878
18. Rev. F. Hodgson's Memoirs, 2 vols. (Macimillan) 1879
19. Essays and Articles, or Recorded Criticisms, by Macaulay, Scott,
Shelley, Goethe, G. Brandes, Mazzini, Sainte Beuve, Chasles, H.
Taine, &c.
20. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage 1879
GENEALOGY OF THE BYRON FAMILY.
THE BYRON FAMILY, FROM THE CONQUEST
Ralph de Burun (estates in Nottingham and Derby).
|
Hugh de Burun (Lord of Horestan).
|
Hugh de Buron (became a monk).
|
Sir Roger de Buron (gave lands to monks of Swinstead).
|
| Sir Richard Clayton.
| |
Robert de Byron. = Cecelia
|
Robert de Byron
|
Sir John Byron (Governor of York under Edward I.).
|
--------------------------------
| |
Sir Richard Byron. Sir John (knighted at siege of Calais)
|
Sir John (knighted in 3rd year of Henry V.).
|
| Sir John Butler.
| |
Sir Nicholas. = Alice.
|
-----------------------------------
| |
Sir Nicholas (made K.B. at Sir John (knighted by Richmond
marriage of Prince Arthur, at Milford; fought at Bosworth;
died 1503). died 1488).
|
Sir John Byron = 2nd wife, widow of George Halgh.
(received grant of Newstead from Henry VIII., May 26,1540).
|
Bar // Sinister
| Sir Nicholas Strelleye
| |
John Byron, of Clayton = Alice
(inherited by gift, knighted by Elizabeth, 1579).
|
-------------------------------------
| |
| Sir Nicholas
| Sir Richard Molyneux
| |
Sir John = Anne
(K.B. at coronation of James I; Governor of Tower).
|
--------------------------------------
| |
RICHARD, 2nd Lord (1605-1679) Sir JOHN 1st Lord (created
(Buried at Hucknal Torkard) Baron Byron of Rochdale,
| Oct. 24, 1643; at Newbury,
| Edgehill, Chester, &c.
| Viscount Chaworth Governor of Duke of York; died
| | at Paris, 1652).
WILLIAM, 3rd Lord = Elizabeth.
(died 1695)
| Lord Berkeley.
| |
WILLIAM, 4th Lord = Frances (3rd wife)
(1669-1736)
|
---------------------------
| |
Admiral John (1723-1786) |- WILLIAM, 5th Lord (1722-1798) (killed Mr.
| "Foul-weather Jack"). | Chaworth; survived his sons
| | and a grandson, who died 1794;
| | called "The wicked Lord").
| |
| | - Isabella = Lord Carlisle
| |
| Lord Carlisle (the poet's
| guardian).
---------------------------
| |
| |- A daughter
| | |
| | Colonel Leigh
| |
| |- George Anson (1758-1793).
| |
| Admiral GEORGE ANSON, 7th Lord
| (1789-1868)
| |
| ----
| |- Frederick
| | |
| | GEORGE F. WILLIAM, 9th and present
| | Lord Byron.
| |
| |- GEORGE, 8th Lord (1818-1870)
|
-------------------
|
1. Marchioness = John Byron (1751-1791) = 2. Miss Gordon of Gight
of Carmarthen | |
| |
Colonel Leigh = Augusta GEORGE GORDON, 6th Lord
| | (1788-1824). Married
Several daughters | Anna Isabella (1792-1860),
| daughter of Sir Ralph
| Milbanke and Judith,
| daughter of Sir Edward
| Noel (Viscount Wentworth),
| and by her had
-------------------------
|
Earl Lovelace = Augusta-Ada (1815-1852).
|
--------------------------------------
| | |
Mr. Blunt = Lady Anne. Byron Noel Ralph Gordon,
(died 1862) now Lord Wentworth
CHAPTER I.
ANCESTRY AND FAMILY.
Byron's life was passed under the fierce light that beats upon an
intellectual throne. He succeeded in making himself--what he wished to
be--the most notorious personality in the world of letters of our century.
Almost every one who came in contact with him has left on record various
impressions of intimacy or interview. Those whom he excluded or
patronized, maligned; those to whom he was genial, loved him. Mr. Southey,
in all sincerity, regarded him as the principle of Evil incarnate; an
American writer of tracts in the form of stories is of the same opinion:
to the Countess Guiccioli he is an archangel. Mr. Carlyle considers him to
have been a mere "sulky dandy." Goethe ranks him as the first English
poet after Shakespeare, and is followed by the leading critics of France,
Italy, and Spain. All concur in the admission that Byron was as proud of
his race as of his verse, and that in unexampled measure the good and evil
of his nature were inherited and inborn. His genealogy is, therefore, a
matter of no idle antiquarianism.
There are legends of old Norse Buruns migrating from their home in
Scandinavia, and settling, one branch in Normandy, another in Livonia. To
the latter belonged a distant Marshal de Burun, famous for the almost
absolute power he wielded in the then infant realm of Russia. Two members
of the family came over with the Conqueror, and settled in England. Of
Erneis de Burun, who had lands in York and Lincoln, we hear little more.
Ralph, the poet's ancestor, is mentioned in Doomsday Book--our first
authentic record--as having estates in Nottinghamshire and Derby. His son
Hugh was lord of Horestan Castle in the latter county, and with his son of
the same name, under King Stephen, presented the church of Ossington to
the monks of Lenton. Tim latter Hugh joined their order; but the race was
continued by his son Sir Roger, who gave lands to the monastery of
Swinstead. This brings us to the reign of Henry II. (1155-1189), when
Robert de Byron adopted the spelling of his name afterwards retained, and
by his marriage with Cecilia, heir of Sir Richard Clayton, added to the
family possessions an estate; in Lancashire, where, till the time of Henry
VIII., they fixed their seat. The poet, relying on old wood-carvings at
Newstead, claims for some of his ancestors a part in the crusades, and
mentions a name not apparently belonging to that age--
Near Ascalon's towers, John of Horestan slumbers--
a romance, like many of his, possibly founded on fact, but incapable of
verification.
Two grandsons of Sir Robert have a more substantial fame, having served
with distinction in the wars of Edward I. The elder of these was governor
of the city of York. Some members of his family fought at Cressy, and one
of his sons, Sir John, was knighted by Edward III. at the siege of Calais.
Descending through the other, Sir Richard, we come to another Sir John,
knighted by Richmond, afterwards Henry VII., on his landing at Milford. He
fought, with his kin, on the field of Bosworth, and dying without issue,
left the estates to his brother, Sir Nicholas, knighted in 1502, at the
marriage of Prince Arthur. The son of Sir Nicholas, known as "little Sir
John of the great beard," appears to have been a favourite of Henry VIII.,
who made him Steward of Manchester and Lieutenant of Sherwood, and on the
dissolution of the monasteries presented him with the Priory of Newstead,
the rents of which were equivalent to about 4000l. of our money. Sir John,
who stepped into the Abbey in 1540, married twice, and the premature
appearance of a son by the second wife--widow of Sir George Halgh--brought
the bar sinister of which so much has been made. No indication of this
fact, however, appears in the family arms, and it is doubtful if the poet
was aware of a reproach which in any case does not touch his descent. The
"filius naturalis," John Byron of Clayton, inherited by deed of gift, and
was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1579. His descendants were prominent as
staunch Royalists during the whole period of the Civil Wars. At Edgehill
there were seven Byrons on the field.
On Marston, with Rupert 'gainst traitors contending,
Four brothers enrich'd with their blood the bleak field.
Sir Nicholas, one of the seven, is extolled as "a person of great
affability and dexterity, as well as martial knowledge, which gave great
life to the designs of the well affected." He was taken prisoner by the
Parliament while acting as governor of Chester. Under his nephew, Sir
John, Newstead is said to have been besieged and taken; but the knight
escaped, in the words of the poet--never a Radical at heart--a "protecting
genius,
For nobler combats here reserved his life,
To lead the band where godlike Falkland foil."
Clarendon, indeed, informs us, that on the morning before the battle,
Falkland, "very cheerful, as always upon action, put himself into the
first rank of the Lord Byron's regiment." This slightly antedates his
title. The first battle of Newbury was fought on September, 1643. For his
services there, and at a previous royal victory, over Waller in July, Sir
John was, on October 24th of the same year, created Baron of Rochdale, and
so became the first Peer of the family.
This first lord was succeeded by his brother Richard (1605-1079), famous
in the war for his government and gallant defence of Newark. He rests in
the vault that now contains the dust of the greatest of his race, Hucknall
Torkard Church, where his epitaph records the fact that the family lost
all their present fortunes by their loyalty, adding, "yet it pleased God
so to bless the humble endeavours of the said Richard, Lord Byron, that he
repurchased part of their ancient inheritance, which he left to his
posterity, with a laudable memory for his great piety and charity." His
eldest son, William, the third Lord (died 1695), is worth remembering on
two accounts. He married Elizabeth, the daughter of Viscount Chaworth, and
so wove the first link in a strange association of tragedy and romance: he
was a patron of one of those poets who, approved by neither gods nor
columns, are remembered by the accident of an accident, and was himself a
poetaster, capable of the couplet,--
My whole ambition only does extend
To gain the name of Shipman's faithful friend,--
an ambition which, considering its moderate scope, may be granted to have
attained its desire.
His successor, the fourth lord (1669-1736), gentleman of the bedchamber to
Prince George of Denmark, himself living a quiet life, became, by his
third wife, Frances, daughter of Lord Berkeley, the progenitor of a
strange group of eccentric, adventurous, and passionate spirits. The
eldest son, the fifth lord, and immediate predecessor in the peerage of
the poet, was born in 1722, entered the naval service, left his ship, the
"Victory," just before she was lost on the rocks of Alderney, and
subsequently became master of the stag-hounds. In 1765, the year of the
passing of the American Stamp Act, an event occurred which coloured the
whole of his after-life, and is curiously illustrative of the manners of
the time. On January 26th or 29th (accounts vary) ten members of an
aristocratic social club sat down to dinner in Pall-mall. Lord Byron and
Mr. Chaworth, his neighbour and kinsman, were of the party. In the course
of the evening, when the wine was going round, a dispute arose between
them about the management of game, so frivolous that one conjectures the
quarrel to have been picked to cloak some other cause of offence. Bets
were offered, and high words passed, but the company thought the matter
had blown over. On going out, however, the disputants met on the stairs,
and one of the two, it is uncertain which, cried out to the waiter to show
them an empty room. This was done, and a single tallow candle being placed
on the table, the door was shut. A few minutes later a bell was rung, and
the hotel master rushing in, Mr. Chaworth was found mortally wounded.
There had been a struggle in the dim light, and Byron, having received the
first lunge harmlessly in his waistcoat, had shortened his sword and run
his adversary through the body, with the boast, not uncharacteristic of
his grand nephew, "By G-d, I have as much courage as any man in England."
A coroner's inquest was held, and he was committed to the Tower on a
charge of murder. The interest in the trial which subsequently took place
in Westminster Hall, was so great that tickets of admission were sold for
six guineas. The peers, after two days' discussion, unanimously returned a
verdict of manslaughter. Byron, pleading his privileges, and paying his
fees, was set at liberty; but he appears henceforth as a spectre-haunted
man, roaming about under false names, or shut up in the Abbey like a
baited savage, shunned by his fellows high and low, and the centre of the
wildest stories. That he shot a coachman, and flung the body into the
carriage beside his wife, who very sensibly left him; that he tried to
drown her; that he had devils to attend him--were among the many weird
legends of "the wicked lord." The poet himself says that his ancestor's
only companions were the crickets that used to crawl over him, receive
stripes with straws when they misbehaved, and on his death made an exodus
in procession from the house. When at home he spent his time in
pistol-shooting, making sham fights with wooden ships about the rockeries
of the lake, and building ugly turrets on the battlements. He hated his
heir presumptive, sold the estate of Rochdale,--a proceeding afterwards
challenged--and cut down the trees of Newstead, to spite him; but he
survived his three sons, his brother, and his only grandson, who was
killed in Corsica in 1794.
On his own death in 1798, the estates and title passed to George Gordon,
then a child of ten, whom he used to talk of, without a shadow of
interest, as "the little boy who lives at Aberdeen." His sister Isabella
married Lord Carlisle, and became the mother of the fifth Earl, the poet's
nominal guardian. She was a lady distinguished for eccentricity of
manners, and (like her son satirized in the _Bards and Reviewers_) for the
perpetration of indifferent verses. The career of the fourth lord's second
son, John, the poet's grandfather, recalls that of the sea-kings from whom
the family claim to have sprung. Born in 1723, he at an early age entered
the naval service, and till his death in 1786 was tossed from storm to
storm. "He had no rest on sea, nor I on shore," writes his illustrious
descendant. In 1740 a fleet of five ships was sent out under Commodore
Anson to annoy the Spaniards, with whom we were then at war, in the South
Seas. Byron took service as a midshipman in one of those ships--all more
or less unfortunate--called "The Wager." Being a bad sailor, and heavily
laden, she was blown from her company, and wrecked in the Straits of
Magellan. The majority of the crew were cast on a bleak rock, which they
christened Mount Misery. After encountering all the horrors of mutiny and
famine, and being in various ways deserted, five of the survivors, among
them Captain Cheap and Mr. Byron, were taken by some Patagonians to the
Island of Chiloe, and thence, after some months, to Valparaiso. They were
kept for nearly two years as prisoners at St. Iago, the capital of Chili,
and in December, 1744, put on board a French frigate, which reached Brest
in October, 1745. Early in 1746 they arrived at Dover in a Dutch vessel.
This voyage is the subject of a well-known apostrophe in _The Pleasures of
Hope_, beginning--
And such thy strength-inspiring aid that bore The hardy Byron from his
native shore. In torrid climes, where Chiloe's tempests sweep
Tumultuous murmurs o'er the troubled deep, 'Twas his to mourn
misfortune's rudest shock, Scourged by the winds and cradled by the
rock.
Byron's own account of his adventures, published in 1768, is remarkable
for freshness of scenery like that of our first literary traveller, Sir
John Mandeville, and a force of description which recalls Defoe. It
interests us more especially from the use that has been made of it in that
marvellous mosaic of voyages, the shipwreck, in _Don Juan_, the hardships
of his hero being, according to the poet--
Comparative
To those related in my grand-dad's narrative.
In June, 1764, Byron sailed with two ships, the "Dolphin" and the "Tamar,"
on a voyage of discovery arranged by Lord Egmont, to seek a southern
continent, in the course of which he took possession of the largest of the
Falkland Islands, again passed through the Magellanic Straits, and sailing
home by the Pacific, circumnavigated the globe. The planets so conspired
that, though his affable manners and considerate treatment made him always
popular with his men, sailors became afraid to serve under "foul-weather
Jack." In 1748 he married the daughter of a Cornish squire, John
Trevanion. They had two sons and three daughters. One of the latter
married her cousin (the fifth lord's eldest son), who died in 1776,
leaving as his sole heir the youth who fell in the Mediterranean in 1794.
The eldest son of the veteran, John Byron, father of the poet, was born in
1751, educated at Westminster, and, having received a commission, became a
captain in the guards; but his character, fundamentally unprincipled, soon
developed itself in such a manner as to alienate him from his family. In
1778, under circumstances of peculiar effrontery, he seduced Amelia
D'Arcy, the daughter of the Earl of Holdernesse, in her own right Countess
Conyers, then wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen, afterwards Duke of Leeds.
"Mad Jack," as he was called, seems to have boasted of his conquest; but
the marquis, to whom his wife had hitherto been devoted, refused to
believe the rumours that were afloat, till an intercepted letter,
containing a remittance of money, for which Byron, in reverse of the usual
relations, was always clamouring, brought matters to a crisis. The pair
decamped to the continent; and in 1779, after the marquis had obtained a
divorce, they were regularly married. Byron seems to have been not only
profligate but heartless, and he made life wretched to the woman he was
even more than most husbands bound to cherish. She died in 1784, having
given birth to two daughters. One died in infancy; the other was Augusta,
the half sister and good genius of the poet, whose memory remains like a
star on the fringe of a thunder-cloud, only brighter by the passing of the
smoke of calumny. In 1807 she married Colonel Leigh, and had a numerous
family, most of whom died young. Her eldest daughter, Georgiana, married
Mr. Henry Trevanion. The fourth, Medora, had an unfortunate history, the
nucleus of an impertinent and happily ephemeral romance.
The year after the death of his first wife, John Byron, who seems to have
had the fascinations of a Barry Lyndon, succeeded in entrapping a second.
This was Miss Catherine Gordon of Gight, a lady with considerable estates
in Aberdeenshire--which attracted the adventurer--and an overweening
Highland pride in her descent from James I., the greatest of the Stuarts,
through his daughter Annabella, and the second Earl of Huntly. This union
suggested the ballad of an old rhymer, beginning--
O whare are ye gaen, bonny Miss Gordon,
O whare are ye gaen, sae bonny and braw?
Ye've married, ye've married wi' Johnny Byron,
To squander the lands o' Gight awa'.
The prophecy was soon fulfilled. The property of the Scotch heiress was
squandered with impetuous rapidity by the English rake. In 1780 she left
Scotland for France, and returned to England toward the close of the
following year. On the 22nd of January, 1788, in Holles Street, London,
Mrs. Byron gave birth to her only child, George Gordon, sixth Lord.
Shortly after, being pressed by his creditors, the father abandoned both,
and leaving them with a pittance of 150 _l_ a year, fled to Valenciennes,
where he died, in August, 1791.
CHAPTER II.
EARLY YEARS AND SCHOOL LIFE.
Soon after the birth of her son, Mrs. Byron took him to Scotland. After
spending some time with a relation, she, early in 1790, settled in a small
house at Aberdeen. Ere long her husband, who had in the interval
dissipated away his remaining means, rejoined her; and they lived together
in humble lodgings, until their tempers, alike fiery and irritable,
compelled a definite separation. They occupied apartments, for some time,
at the opposite ends of the same street, and interchanged visits. Being
accustomed to meet the boy and his nurse, the father expressed a wish that
the former should be sent to live with him, at least for some days. "To
this request," Moore informs us, "Mrs. Byron was at first not very willing
to accede; but, on the representation of the nurse that if he kept him
over one night he would not do so another, she consented. On inquiring
next morning after the child, she was told by Captain Byron that he had
had quite enough of his young visitor." After a short stay in the north,
the Captain, extorting enough money from his wife to enable him to fly
from his creditors, escaped to France. His absence must have been a
relief; but his death is said to have so affected the unhappy lady, that
her shrieks disturbed the neighbourhood. The circumstance recalls an
anecdote of a similar outburst--attested by Sir W. Scott, who was present
on the occasion--before her marriage. Being present at a representation,
in Edinburgh, of the _Fatal Marriage_, when Mrs. Siddons was personating
Isabella, Miss Gordon was seized with a fit, and carried out of the
theatre, screaming out "O my Biron, my Biron." All we know of her
character shows it to have been not only proud, impulsive, and wayward,
but hysterical. She constantly boasted of her descent, and clung to the
courtesy title of "honourable," to which she had no claim. Her affection
and anger were alike demonstrative, her temper never for an hour secure.
She half worshipped, half hated, the blackguard to whom she was married,
and took no steps to protect her property; her son she alternately petted
and abused. "Your mother's a fool!" said a school companion to him years
after. "I know it," was his unique and tragic reply. Never was poet born
to so much illustrious, and to so much bad blood. The records of his
infancy betray the temper which he preserved through life--passionate,
sullen, defiant of authority, but singularly amenable to kindness. On
being scolded by his first nurse for having soiled a dress, without
uttering a word he tore it from top to seam, as he had seen his mother
tear her caps and gowns; but her sister and successor in office, May Gray,
acquired and retained a hold over his affections, to which he has borne
grateful testimony. To her training is attributed the early and remarkable
knowledge of the Scriptures, especially of the Psalms, which he possessed:
he was, according to her later testimony, peculiarly inquisitive and
puzzling about religion. Of the sense of solitude, induced by his earliest
impressions, he characteristically makes a boast. "My daughter, my wife,
my half-sister, my mother, my sister's mother, my natural daughter, and
myself, are or were all only children. But the fiercest animals have the
fewest numbers in their litters, as lions, tigers, &c."
To this practical orphanhood, and inheritance of feverish passion, there
was added another, and to him a heavy and life-long burden. A physical
defect in a healthy nature may either pass without notice or be turned to
a high purpose. No line of his work reveals the fact that Sir Walter Scott
was lame. The infirmity failed to cast even a passing shade over that
serene power. Milton's blindness is the occasion of the noblest prose and
verse of resignation in the language. But to understand Pope, we must
remember that he was a cripple: and Byron never allows us to forget,
because he himself never forgot it. Accounts differ as to the extent and
origin of his deformity; and the doubts on the matter are not removed by
the inconsistent accounts of the indelicate post-mortem examination made
by Mr. Trelawny at Mesolonghi. It is certain that one of the poet's feet
was, either at birth or at a very early period, so seriously clubbed or
twisted as to affect his gait, and to a considerable extent his habits. It
also appears that the surgical means--boots, bandages, &c.--adopted to
straighten the limb, only aggravated the evil. His sensitiveness on the
subject was early awakened by careless or unfeeling references. "What a
pretty boy Byron is," said a friend of his nurse. "What a pity he has such
a leg." On which the child, with flashing eyes, cutting at her with a
baby's whip, cried out, "Dinna speak of it." His mother herself, in her
violent fits, when the boy ran round the room laughing at her attempts to
catch him, used to say he was a little dog, as bad as his father, and to
call him "a lame brat"--an incident, which, notoriously suggested the
opening scene of the _Deformed Transformed_. In the height of his
popularity he fancied that the beggars and street-sweepers in London were
mocking him. He satirized and discouraged dancing; he preferred riding and
swimming to other exercises, because they concealed his weakness; and on
his death-bed asked to be blistered in such a way that he might not be
called on to expose it. The Countess Guiccioli, Lady Blessington, and
others, assure us that in society few would have observed the defect if he
had not referred to it; but it was never far from the mind, and therefore
never far from the mouth, of the least reticent of men.
In 1792 he was sent to a rudimentary day school of girls and boys, taught
by a Mr. Bowers, where he seems to have learnt nothing save to repeat
monosyllables by rote. He next passed through the hands of a devout and
clever clergyman, named Ross, under whom according to his own account he
made astonishing progress, being initiated into the study of Roman
history, and taking special delight in the battle of Regillus. Long
afterwards, when standing on the heights of Tusculum and looking down on
the little round lake, he remembered his young enthusiasm and his old
instructor. He next came under the charge of a tutor called Paterson, whom
he describes as "a very serious, saturnine, but kind young man. He was the
son of my shoemaker, but a good scholar. With him I began Latin, and
continued till I went to the grammar school, where I threaded all the
classes to the fourth, when I was recalled to England by the demise of my
uncle."
Of Byron's early school days there is little further record. We learn from
scattered hints that he was backward in technical scholarship, and low in
his class, in which he seems to have had no ambition to stand high; but
that he eagerly took to history and romance, especially luxuriating in the
_Arabian Nights_. He was an indifferent penman, and always disliked
mathematics; but was noted by masters and mates as of quick temper, eager
for adventures, prone to sports, always more ready to give a blow than to
take one, affectionate, though resentful.
When his cousin was killed at Corsica, in 1794, he became the next heir to
the title. In 1797, a friend, meaning to compliment the boy, said, "We
shall have the pleasure some day of reading your speeches in the House of
Commons," he, with precocious consciousness, replied, "I hope not. If you
read any speeches of mine, it will be in the House of Lords." Similarly,
when, in the course of the following year, the fierce old man at Newstead
died, and the young lord's name was called at school with "Dominus"
prefixed to it, his emotion was so great that he was unable to answer, and
burst into tears.
Belonging to this period is the somewhat shadowy record of a childish
passion for a distant cousin slightly his senior, Mary Duff, with whom he
claims to have fallen in love in his ninth year. We have a quaint picture
of the pair sitting on the grass together, the girl's younger sister
beside them playing with a doll. A German critic gravely remarks, "This
strange phenomenon places him beside Dante." Byron himself, dilating on
the strength of his attachment, tells us that he used to coax a maid to
write letters for him, and that when he was sixteen, on being informed, by
his mother, of Mary's marriage, he nearly fell into convulsions. But in
the history of the calf-loves of poets it is difficult to distinguish
between the imaginative afterthought and the reality. This equally applies
to other recollections of later years. Moore remarks--"that the charm of
scenery, which derives its chief power from fancy and association, should
be felt at an age when fancy is yet hardly awake and associations are but
few, can with difficulty he conceived." But between the ages of eight and
ten, an appreciation of external beauty is sufficiently common. No one
doubts the accuracy of Wordsworth's account, in the _Prelude_ of his early
half-sensuous delight in mountain glory. It is impossible to define the
influence of Nature, either on nations or individuals, or to say
beforehand what selection from his varied surroundings a poet will for
artistic purposes elect to make. Shakespeare rests in meadows and glades,
and leaves to Milton "Teneriffe and Atlas." Burns, who lived for a
considerable part of his life in daily view of the hills of Arran, never
alludes to them. But, in this respect like Shelley, Byron was inspired by
a passion for the high-places of the earth. Their shadow is on half his
verse. "The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow" perpetually
remind him of one of his constantly recurring refrains,--
He who surpasses or subdues mankind,
Must look down on the hate of those below.
In the course of 1790, after an attack of scarlet fever at Aberdeen he was
taken by his mother to Ballater, and on his recovery spent much of his
time in rambling about the country. "From this period," he says, "I date
my love of mountainous countries. I can never forget the effect, years
afterwards, in England, of the only thing I had long seen, even in
miniature, of a mountain, in the Malvern Hills. After I returned to
Cheltenham I used to watch them every afternoon, at sunset, with a
sensation which I cannot describe." Elsewhere, in _The Island_ he returns,
amid allusions to the Alps and Apennines, to the friends of his youth:--
The infant rapture still survived the boy,
And Lach-na-gair with Ida look'd o'er Troy,
Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount,
And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount.
The poet, owing to his physical defect, was not a great climber, and we
are informed, on the authority of his nurse, that he never even scaled the
easily attainable summit of the "steep frowning" hill of which he has made
such effective use. But the impression of it from a distance was none the
less genuine. In the midst of a generous address, in _Don Juan_, to
Jeffrey, he again refers to the same associations with the country of his
early training:--
But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred
A whole one; and my heart flies to my head
As "Auld Lang Syne" brings Scotland, one and all--
Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills and clear streams,
The Dee, the Don, Balgounie's brig's black wall--
All my boy feelings, all my gentler dreams
Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall,
Like Banquo's offspring...
Byron's allusions to Scotland are variable and inconsistent. His satire on
her reviewers was sharpened by the show of national as well as personal
antipathy; and when, about the time of its production, a young lady
remarked that he had a little of the northern manner of speech, he burst
out "Good God! I hope not. I would rather the whole d----d country was
sunk in the sea. I the Scotch accent!" But, in the passage from which we
have quoted, the swirl of feeling on the other side continues,--
I rail'd at Scots to show my wrath and wit,
Which must be own'd was sensitive and surly.
Yet 'tis in vain such sallies to permit;
They cannot quench young feelings, fresh and early.
I scotch'd, not kill'd, the Scotchman in my blood,
And love the land of mountain and of flood.
This suggests a few words on a question of more than local interest.
Byron's most careful biographer has said of him: "Although on his first
expedition to Greece he was dressed in the tartan of the Gordon clan, yet
the whole bent of his mind, and the character of his poetry, are anything
but Scottish. Scottish nationality is tainted with narrow and provincial
elements. Byron's poetic character, on the other hand, is universal and
cosmopolitan. He had no attachment to localities, and never devoted
himself to the study of the history of Scotland and its romantic legends."
Somewhat similarly Thomas Campbell remarks of Burns, "he was the most
un-Scotsmanlike of Scotchmen, having no caution." Rough national verdicts
are apt to be superficial. Mr. Leslie Stephen, in a review of Hawthorne,
has commented on the extent to which the nobler qualities and conquering
energy of the English character are hidden, not only from foreigners, but
from ourselves, by the "detestable lay figure" of John Bull. In like
manner, the obtrusive type of the "canny Scot" is apt to make critics
forget the hot heart that has marked the early annals of the country, from
the Hebrides to the Borders, with so much violence, and at the same time
has been the source of so much strong feeling and persistent purpose. Of
late years, the struggle for existence, the temptations of a too ambitious
and over active people in the race for wealth, and the benumbing effect of
the constant profession of beliefs that have ceased to be sincere, have
for the most part stifled the fervid fire in calculating prudence. These
qualities have been adequately combined in Scott alone, the one massive
and complete literary type of his race. Burns, to his ruin, had only the
fire: the same is true of Byron, whose genius, in some respects less
genuine, was indefinitely and inevitably wider. His intensely susceptible
nature took a dye from every scene, city, and society through which he
passed; but to the last he bore with him the marks of a descendant of the
Sea-Kings, and of the mad Gordons in whose domains he had first learned to
listen to the sound of the "two mighty voices" that haunted and inspired
him through life.
In the autumn of 1798 the family, i.e. his mother--who had sold the whole
of her household furniture for 75 _l_--with himself, and a maid, set
south. The poet's only recorded impression of the journey is a gleam of
Loch Leven, to which he refers in one of his latest letters. He never
revisited the land of his childhood. Our next glimpse of him is on his
passing the toll-bar of Newstead. Mrs. Byron asked the old woman who kept
it, "Who is the next heir?" and on her answer "They say it is a little boy
who lives at Aberdeen," "This is he, bless him!" exclaimed the nurse.
Returned to the ancestral Abbey, and finding it half ruined and desolate,
they migrated for a time to the neighbouring Nottingham. Here the child's
first experience was another course of surgical torture. He was placed
under the charge of a quack named Lavender, who rubbed his foot in oil,
and screwed it about in wooden machines. This useless treatment is
associated with two characteristic anecdotes. One relates to the endurance
which Byron, on every occasion of mere physical trial, was capable of
displaying. Mr. Rogers, a private tutor, with whom he was reading passages
of Virgil and Cicero, remarked, "It makes me uncomfortable, my lord, to
see you sitting them in such pain as I know you must be suffering." "Never
mind, Mr. Rogers." said the child, "you shall not see any signs of it in
me." The other illustrates his precocious delight in detecting imposture.
Having scribbled on a piece of paper several lines of mere gibberish, he
brought them to Lavender, and gravely asked what language it was; and on
receiving the answer "It is Italian," he broke into an exultant laugh at
the expense of his tormentor. Another story survives, of his vindictive
spirit giving birth to his first rhymes. A meddling old lady, who used to
visit his mother and was possessed of a curious belief in a future
transmigration to our satellite--the bleakness of whose scenery she had
not realized--having given him some cause of offence, he stormed out to
his nurse that he "could not bear the sight of the witch," and vented his
wrath in the quatrain.--
In Nottingham county there lives, at Swan Green,
As curst an old lady as ever was seen;
And when she does die, which I hope will be soon,
She firmly believes she will go to the moon.
The poet himself dates his "first dash into poetry" a year later (1800),
from his juvenile passion for his cousin Margaret Parker, whose subsequent
death from an injury caused by a fall he afterwards deplored in a
forgotten elegy. "I do not recollect," he writes through the transfiguring
mists of memory, "anything equal to the _transparent_ beauty of my cousin,
or to the sweetness of her temper, during the short period of our
intimacy. She looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow--all beauty
and peace. My passion had the usual effects upon me--I could not sleep; I
could not eat; I could not rest. It was the texture of my life to think of
the time that must elapse before we could meet again. But I was a fool
then, and not much wiser now." _Sic transit secunda_.
The departure at a somewhat earlier date of May Gray for her native
country, gave rise to evidence of another kind of affection. On her
leaving he presented her with his first watch, and a miniature by Kay of
Edinburgh, representing him with a bow and arrow in his hand and a
profusion of hair over his shoulders. He continued to correspond with her
at intervals. Byron was always beloved by his servants. This nurse
afterwards married well, and during her last illness, in 1827,
communicated to her attendant, Dr. Ewing of Aberdeen, recollections of the
poet, from which his biographers have drawn.
In the summer of 1799 he was sent to London, entrusted to the medical care
of Dr. Baillie (brother of Joanna, the dramatist), and placed in a
boarding school at Dulwich, under the charge of Dr. Glennie. The physician
advised a moderation in athletic sports, which the patient in his hours of
liberty was constantly apt to exceed. The teacher--who continued to
cherish an affectionate remembrance of his pupil, even when he was told,
on a visit to Geneva in 1817, that, he ought to have "made a better boy of
him"--testifies to the alacrity with which he entered on his tasks, his
playful good-humour with his comrades, his reading in history beyond his
age, and his intimate acquaintance with the Scriptures. "In my study," he
states, "he found many books open to him; among others, a set of our poets
from Chaucer to Churchill, which I am almost tempted to say he had more
than once perused from beginning to end." One of the books referred to was
the _Narrative of the Shipwreck of the "Juno,"_ which contains, almost
word for word, the account of the "two fathers," in _Don Juan_. Meanwhile
Mrs. Byron,--whose reduced income had been opportunely augmented by a
grant of a 300_l_. annuity from the Civil List,--after revisiting Newstead
followed her son to London, and took up her residence in a house in
Sloane-terrace. She was in the habit of having him with her there from
Saturday to Monday, kept him from school for weeks, introduced him to idle
company, and in other ways was continually hampering his progress.
Byron on his accession to the peerage having become a ward in Chancery,
was handed over by the Court to the guardianship of Lord Carlisle, nephew
of the admiral, and son of the grand aunt of the poet. Like his mother
this Earl aspired to be a poet, and his tragedy, _The Father's Revenge_,
received some commendation from Dr. Johnson; but his relations with his
illustrious kinsman were from the first unsatisfactory. In answer to Dr.
Glennie's appeal, he exerted his authority against the interruptions to
his ward's education; but the attempt to mend matters led to such
outrageous exhibitions of temper that he said to the master, "I can have
nothing more to do with Mrs. Byron; you must now manage her as you can."
Finally, after two years of work, which she had done her best to mar, she
herself requested his guardian to have her son removed to a public school,
and accordingly he went to Harrow, where he remained till the autumn of
1805. The first vacation, in the summer of 1801, is marked by his visit to
Cheltenham, where his mother, from whom he inherited a fair amount of
Scotch superstition, consulted a fortune-teller, who said he would be
twice married, the second time to a foreigner.
Harrow was then under the management of Dr. Joseph Drury, one of the most
estimable of its distinguished head-masters. His account of the first
impressions produced by his pupil, and his judicious manner of handling a
sensitive nature, cannot with advantage be condensed. "Mr. Hanson," he
writes, "Lord Byron's solicitor, consigned him to my care at the age of
thirteen and a half, with remarks that his education had been neglected;
that he was ill prepared for a public school; but that he thought there
was a cleverness about him. After his departure I took my young disciple
into my study, and endeavoured to bring him forward by inquiries as to his
former amusements, employments, and associates, but with little or no
effect, and I soon found that a wild mountain colt had been submitted to
my management. But there was mind in his eye. In the first place, it was
necessary to attach him to an elder boy; but the information he received
gave him no pleasure when he heard of the advances of some much younger
than himself. This I discovered, and assured him that he should not be
placed till by diligence he might rank with those of his own age. His
manner and temper soon convinced me that he might be led by a silken
string to a point, rather than a cable: on that principle I acted."
After a time, Dr. Drury tells us that he waited on Lord Carlisle, who
wished to give some information about his ward's property and to inquire
respecting his abilities, and continues: "On the former circumstance I
made no remark; as to the latter I replied, 'He has talents, my lord,
which will add lustre to his rank.' 'Indeed!' said his lordship, with a
degree of surprise that, according to my feeling, did not express in it
all the satisfaction I expected." With, perhaps, unconscious humour on the
part of the writer, we are left in doubt as to whether the indifference
proceeded from the jealousy that clings to poetasters, from incredulity,
or a feeling that no talent could add lustre to rank.
In 1804 Byron refers to the antipathy his mother had to his guardian.
Later he expresses gratitude for some unknown service, in recognition of
which the second edition of the _Hours of Idleness_ was dedicated "by his
obliged ward and affectionate kinsman," to Lord Carlisle. The tribute
being coldly received, led to fresh estrangement, and when Byron, on his
coming of age, wrote to remind the Earl of the fact, in expectation of
being introduced to the House of Peers, he had for answer a mere formal
statement of its rules. This rebuff affected him as Addison's praise of
Tickell affected Pope, and the following lines, were published in the
March of the same year:--
Lords too are bards! such things at times befall,
And 'tis some praise in peers to write at all.
Yet did or taste or reason sway the times,
Ah! who would take their titles with their rhymes.
Roscommon! Sheffield! with your spirits fled,
No future laurels deck a noble head;
No muse will cheer, with renovating smile
The paralytic puling of Carlisle.
In prose he adds, "If, before I escaped from my teens, I said anything in
favour of his lordship's paper-books, it was in the way of dutiful
dedication, and more from the advice of others than my own judgment; and I
seize the first opportunity of pronouncing my sincere recantation." As was
frequently the case with him, he recanted again. In a letter of 1814 he
expressed to Rogers his regret for his sarcasms; and in his reference to
the death of the Hon. Frederick Howard, in the third canto of _Childe
Harold_, he tried to make amends in the lines--
Yet one I would select from that proud throng,
Partly because they blend me with his line,
And partly that I did his sire some wrong.
This is all of any interest we know regarding the fitful connection of the
guardian and ward.
Towards Dr. Drury the poet continued through life to cherish sentiments of
gratitude, and always spoke of him with veneration. "He was," he says,
"the best, the kindest (and yet strict too) friend I ever had; and I look
on him still as a father, whose warnings I have remembered but too well,
though too late, when I have erred, and whose counsel I have but followed
when I have done well or wisely."
Great educational institutions must consult the greatest good of the
greatest number of common-place minds, by regulations against which genius
is apt to kick; and Byron, who was by nature and lack of discipline
peculiarly ill fitted to conform to routine, confesses that till the last
year and a half he hated Harrow. He never took kindly to the studies of
the place, and was at no time an accurate scholar. In the _Bards and
Reviewers_, and elsewhere, he evinces considerable familiarity with the
leading authors of antiquity, but it is doubtful whether he was able to
read any of the more difficult of them in the original. His translations
are generally commonplace, and from the marks on his books he must have
often failed to trust his memory for the meanings of the most ordinary
Greek words. To the well-known passage in _Childe Harold_ on Soracte and
the "Latian echoes" he appends a prose comment, which preserves its
interest as hearing on recent educational controversies:--"I wish to
express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the
beauty; that we learn by rote, before we get by heart; that the freshness
is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and
destroyed, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of
composition, which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin
and Greek, to relish or to reason upon.... In some parts of the continent
young persons are taught from common authors, and do not read the best
classics till their maturity."
Comparatively slight stress was then laid on modern languages. Byron
learnt to read French with fluency, as he certainly made himself familiar
with the great works of the eighteenth century; but he spoke it with so
little ease or accuracy that the fact was always a stumbling-block to his
meeting Frenchmen abroad. Of German he had a mere smattering. Italian was
the only language, besides his own, of which he was ever a master. But the
extent and variety of his general reading was remarkable. His list of
books, drawn up in 1807, includes more history and biography than most men
of education read during a long life; a fair load of philosophy; the poets
en masse; among orators, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Parliamentary debates
from the Revolution to the year 1742; pretty copious divinity, including
Blair, Tillotson, Hooker, with the characteristic addition--"all very
tiresome. I abhor books of religion, though I reverence and love my God
without the blasphemous notions of sectaries." Lastly, under the head of
"Miscellanies" we have _Spectator, Rambler, World, &c., &c_; among novels,
the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie, Sterne,
Rabelais, and Rousseau. He recommends Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ as
the best storehouse for second-hand quotations, as Sterne and others have
found it, and tells us that the great part of the books named were perused
before the age of fifteen. Making allowance for the fact that most of the
poet's autobiographic sketches are emphatically _"Dichtang und Wahrheit,"_
we can believe that he was an omnivorous reader--"I read eating, read in
bed, read when no one else reads"--and, having a memory only less
retentive than Macaulay's, acquired so much general information as to be
suspected of picking it up from Reviews. He himself declares that he never
read a Review till he was eighteen years old--when, he himself wrote one,
utterly worthless, on Wordsworth.
At Harrow, Byron proved himself capable of violent fits of work, but of
"few continuous drudgeries." He would turn out an unusual number of
hexameters, and again lapse into as much idleness as the teachers would
tolerate. His forte was in declamation: his attitude and delivery, and
power of extemporizing, surprised even critical listeners into unguarded
praise. "My qualities," he says, "were much more oratorical and martial
than poetical; no one had the least notion that I should subside into
poesy." Unpopular at first, he began to like school when he had fought his
way to be a champion, and from his energy in sports more than from the
impression produced by his talents had come to be recognized as a leader
among his fellows. Unfortunately, towards the close of his course, in
1805, the headship of Harrow changed hands. Dr. Drury retired, and was
succeeded by Dr. Butler. This event suggested the lines beginning,--
Where are those honours, Ida, once your own,
When Probus fill'd your magisterial throne?
The appointment was generally unpopular among the boys, whose sympathies
were enlisted in favour of Mark Drury, brother of their former master, and
Dr. Butler seems for a time to have had considerable difficulty in
maintaining discipline. Byron, always "famous for rowing," was a
ringleader of the rebellious party, and compared himself to Tyrlaeus. On
one occasion he tore down the window gratings in a room of the
school-house, with the remark that they darkened the hall; on another he
is reported to have refused a dinner invitation from the master, with the
impertinent remark that he would never think of asking him in return to
dine at Newstead. On the other hand, he seems to have set limits to the
mutiny, and prevented some of the boys from setting their desks on fire by
pointing to their fathers' names carved on them. Byron afterwards
expressed regret for his rudeness; but Butler remains in his verse as
Pomposus "of narrow brain, yet of a narrower soul."
Of the poet's free hours, during the last years of his residence which he
refers to as among the happiest of his life, many were spent in solitary
musing by an elm-tree, near a tomb to which his name has been given--a
spot commanding a far view of London, of Windsor "bosomed high in tufted
trees," and of the green fields that stretch between, covered in spring
with the white and red snow of apple blossom. The others were devoted to
the society of his chosen comrades. Byron, if not one of the safest, was
one of the warmest of friends; and he plucked the more eagerly at the
choicest fruit of English public school and college life, from the feeling
he so pathetically expresses,--
Is there no cause beyond the common claim,
Endear'd to all in childhood's very name?
Ah, sure some stronger impulse vibrates here,
Which whispers Friendship will be doubly dear
To one who thus for kindred hearts must roam,
And seek abroad the love denied at home.
Those hearts, dear Ida, have I found in thee--
A home, a world, a paradise to me.
Of his Harrow intimates, the most prominent were the Duke of Dorset, the
poet's favoured fag; Lord Clare (the Lycus of the _Childish
Recollections_); Lord Delawarr (the Euryalus); John Wingfield (Alonzo),
who died at Coimbra, 1811; Cecil Tattersall (Davus); Edward Noel Long
(Cleon); Wildman, afterwards proprietor of Newstead; and Sir Robert Peel.
Of the last, his form-fellow and most famous of his mates, the story is
told of his being unmercifully beaten for offering resistance to his fag
master, and Byron rushing up to intercede with an offer to take half the
blows. Peel was an exact contemporary, having been born in the same year,
1788. It has been remarked that most of the poet's associates were his
juniors, and, less fairly, that he liked to regard them as his satellites.
But even at Dulwich his ostentation of rank had provoked for him the
nickname of "the old English baron." To Wildman, who, as a senior, had a
right of inflicting chastisement for offences, he said, "I find you have
got Delawarr on your list; pray don't lick him." "Why not?" was the reply.
"Why, I don't know, except that he is a brother peer." Again, he
interfered with the more effectual arm of physical force to rescue a
junior protégé--lame like himself, and otherwise much weaker--from the
ill-treatment of some hulking tyrant. "Harness," he said, "if any one
bullies you, tell me, and I'll thrash him if I can;" and he kept his word.
Harness became an accomplished clergyman and minor poet, and has left some
pleasing reminiscences of his former patron. The prodigy of the school,
George Sinclair, was in the habit of writing the poet's exercises, and
getting his battles fought for him in return. His bosom friend was Lord
Clare. To him his confidences were most freely given, and his most
affectionate verses addressed. In the characteristic stanzas entitled
"L'amitié est l'amour sans ailes," we feel as if between them the
qualifying phrase might have been omitted: for their letters, carefully
preserved on either side, are a record of the jealous complaints and the
reconciliations of lovers. In 1821 Byron writes, "I never hear the name
Clare without a beating of the heart even now; and I write it with the
feelings of 1803-4-5, ad infinitum." At the same date he says of an
accidental meeting: "It annihilated for a moment all the years between the
present time and the days of Harrow. It was a new and inexplicable
feeling, like a rising from the grave to me. Clare too was much
agitated--more in appearance than I was myself--for I could feel his heart
beat to his fingers' ends, unless, indeed, it was the pulse of my own
which made me think so. We were but five minutes together on the public
road, but I hardly recollect an hour of my existence that could be weighed
against them." They were "all that brothers should be but the name;" and
it is interesting to trace this relationship between the greatest genius
of the new time and the son of the statesman who, in the preceding age,
stands out serene and strong amid the swarm of turbulent rioters and
ranting orators by whom he was surrounded and reviled.
Before leaving Harrow the poet had passed through the experience of a
passion of another kind, with a result that unhappily coloured his life.
Accounts differ as to his first meeting with Mary Ann Chaworth, the
heiress of the family whose estates adjoined his own, and daughter of the
race that had held with his such varied relations. In one of his letters
ho dates the introduction previous to his trip to Cheltenham, but it seems
not to have ripened into intimacy till a later period. Byron, who had, in
the autumn of 1802, visited his mother at Bath, joined in a masquerade
there and attracted attention by the liveliness of his manners. In the
following year Mrs. Byron again settled at Nottingham, and in the course
of a second and longer visit to her he frequently passed the night at the
Abbey, of which Lord Grey de Ruthyn was then a temporary tenant. This was
the occasion of his renewing his acquaintance with the Chaworths, who
invited him to their seat at Annesley. He used at first to return every
evening to Newstead, giving the excuse that the family pictures would come
down and take revenge on him for his grand-uncle's deed, a fancy repeated
in the _Siege of Corinth_. Latterly he consented to stay at Annesley,
which thus became his headquarters during the remainder of the holidays of
1803. The rest of the six weeks were mainly consumed in an excursion to
Matlock and Castleton, in the same companionship. This short period, with
the exception of prologue and epilogue, embraced the whole story of his
first real love. Byron was on this occasion in earnest; he wished to marry
Miss Chaworth, an event which, he says, would have "joined broad lands,
healed an old feud, and satisfied at least one heart."
The intensity of his passion is suggestively brought before us in an
account of his crossing the Styx of the Peak cavern, alone with the lady
and the Charon of the boat. In the same passage he informs us that he had
never told his love; but that she had discovered--it is obvious that she
never returned--it. We have another vivid picture of his irritation when
she was waltzing in his presence at Matlock; then an account of their
riding together in the country on their return to the family residence;
again, of his bending over the piano as she was playing the Welsh air of
"Mary Anne;" and lastly, of his overhearing her heartless speech to her
maid, which first opened his eyes to the real state of affairs--"Do you
think I could care for that lame boy?"--upon which he rushed out of the
house, and ran, like a hunted creature, to Newstead. Thence he shortly
returned from the rougher school of life to his haunts and tasks at
Harrow. A year later the pair again met to take farewell, on the hill of
Annesley--an incident he has commemorated in two short stanzas, that have
the sound of a wind moaning over a moor. "I suppose," he said, "the next
time I see you, you will be Mrs. Chaworth?" "I hope so," she replied (her
betrothed, Mr. Musters, had agreed to assume her family name). The
announcement of her marriage, which took place in August, 1805, was made
to him by his mother, with the remark, "I have some news for you. Take out
your handkerchief; you will require it." On hearing what she had to say,
with forced calm he turned the conversation to other subjects; but he was
long haunted by a loss which he has made the theme of many of his verses.
In 1807 he sent to the lady herself the lines beginning,--
O had my fate been join'd with thine.
In the following year he accepted an invitation to dine at Annesley, and
was visibly affected by the sight of the infant daughter of Mrs. Chaworth,
to whom he addressed a touching congratulation. Shortly afterwards, when
about to leave England for the first time, he finally addressed her in the
stanzas,--
'Tis done, and shivering in the gale,
The bark unfurls her snowy sail.
Some years later, having an opportunity of revisiting the family of his
successful rival, Mrs. Leigh dissuaded him. "Don't go," she said, "for if
you do you will certainly fall in love again, and there will be a scene."
The romance of the story culminates in the famous _Dream_, a poem of
unequal merit, but containing passages of real pathos, written in the year
1816 at Diodati, as we are told, amid a flood of tears.
Miss Chaworth's attractions, beyond those of personal beauty, seem to have
been mainly due--a common occurrence--to the poet's imagination. A young
lady, two years his senior, of a lively and volatile temper, she enjoyed
the stolen interviews at the gate between the grounds, and laughed at the
ardent letters, passed through a confidant, of the still awkward youth
whom she regarded as a boy. She had no intuition to divine the presence,
or appreciate the worship, of one of the future master-minds of England,
nor any ambition to ally herself with the wild race of Newstead, and
preferred her hale, commonplace, fox-hunting squire. "She was the beau
ideal," says Byron, in his first accurate prose account of the affair,
written 1823, a few days before his departure for Greece, "of all that my
youthful fancy could paint of beautiful. And I have taken all my fables
about the celestial nature of women from the perfection my imagination
created in her. I say created; for I found her, like the rest of the sex,
anything but angelic."
Mrs. Musters (her husband re-asserted his right to his own name) had in
the long-run reason to regret her choice. The ill-assorted pair after some
unhappy years resolved on separation; and falling into bad health and
worse spirits, the "bright morning star of Annesley" passed under a cloud
of mental darkness. She died, in 1832, of fright caused by a Nottingham
riot. On the decease of Musters, in 1850, every relic of her ancient
family was sold by auction and scattered to the winds.
CHAPTER III.
CAMBRIDGE, AND FIRST PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP.
In October, 1805, on the advice of Dr. Drury, Byron was removed to Trinity
College, Cambridge, and kept up a connexion with the University for less
than three years of very irregular attendance, during which we hear
nothing of his studies, except the contempt for them expressed in some of
the least effective passages of his early satires. He came into residence
in bad temper and low spirits. His attachment to Harrow characteristically
redoubled as the time drew near to leave it, and his rest was broken "for
the last quarter, with counting the hours that remained." He was about to
start by himself, with the heavy feeling that he was no longer a boy, and
yet, against his choice, for he wished to go to Oxford. The _Hours of
Idleness_, the product of this period, are fairly named. He was so idle as
regards "problems mathematic," and "barbarous Latin," that it is matter of
surprise to learn that he was able to take his degree, as he did in March,
1808.
A good German critic, dwelling on the comparatively narrow range of
studies to which the energies of Cambridge were then mainly directed, adds
somewhat rashly, that English national literature stands for the most part
beyond the range of the academic circle, This statement is often
reiterated with persistent inaccuracy; but the most casual reference to
biography informs us that at least four-fifths of the leading statesmen,
reformers, and philosophers of England, have been nurtured within the
walls of her universities, and cherished a portion of their spirit. From
them have sprung the intellectual fires that have, at every crisis of our
history, kindled the nation into a new life; from the age of Wycliffe,
through those of Latimer, Locke, Gibbon, Macaulay, to the present reign of
the Physicists, comparatively few of the motors of their age have been
wholly "without the academic circle." Analysing with the same view the
lives of the British poets of real note from Barbour to Tennyson, we find
the proportion of University men increases. "Poeta nascitur et fit;" and
if the demands of technical routine have sometimes tended to stifle, the
comparative repose of a seclusion "unravaged" by the fierce activities
around it, the habit of dwelling on the old wisdom and harping on the
ancient strings, is calculated to foster the poetic temper and enrich its
resources. The discouraging effect of a sometimes supercilious and
conservative criticism is not an unmixed evil. The verse-writer who can be
snuffed out by the cavils of a tutorial drone, is a poetaster silenced for
his country's good. It is true, however, that to original minds, bubbling
with spontaneity, or arrogant with the consciousness of power, the
discipline is hard, and the restraint excessive; and that the men whom
their colleges are most proud to remember, have handled them severely.
Bacon inveighs against the scholastic trifling of his day; Milton talks of
the waste of time on litigious brawling; Locke mocks at the logic of the
schools; Cowley complains of being taught words, not things; Gibbon
rejoices over his escape from the port and prejudice of Magdalen;
Wordsworth contemns the "trade in classic niceties," and roves "in
magisterial liberty" by the Cam, as afterwards among the hills.
But all those hostile critics owe much to the object of their
animadversion. Any schoolboy can refer the preference of Light to Fruit in
the _Novum Organum_, half of _Comus_ and _Lycidas_, the stately periods of
the _Decline and Fall_, and the severe beauties of _Laodamia_, to the
better influences of academic training on the minds of their authors.
Similarly, the richest pages of Byron's work--from the date of _The Curse
of Minerva_ to that of the "Isles of Greece"--are brightened by lights and
adorned by allusions due to his training, imperfect as it was, on the
slopes of Harrow, and the associations fostered during his truant years by
the sluggish stream of his "Injusta noverca." At her, however, he
continued to rail as late as the publication of _Beppo_, in the 75th and
76th stanzas of which we find another cause of complaint,--
One hates an author that's all author, fellows
In foolscap uniforms turn'd up with ink--
So very anxious, clever, fine, and jealous,
One don't know what to say to them, or think.
Then, after commending Scott, Bogers, and Moore for being men of the
world, he proceeds:--
But for the children of the "mighty mother's,"
The would-be wits and can't-be gentlemen,
I leave them to the daily "Tea is ready,"
Snug coterie, and literary lady.
This attack, which called forth a counter invective of unusual ferocity
from some unknown scribbler, is the expression of a sentiment which, sound
enough within limits, Byron pushed to an extreme. He had a rooted dislike,
of professional _littérateurs_, and was always haunted by a dread that
they would claim equality with him on the common ground of authorship. He
aspired through life to the superiority of a double distinction, that of a
"lord among wits, and among wits a lord." In this same spirit lie resented
the comparison frequently made between him and Rousseau, and insisted on
points of contrast. "He had a bad memory, I a good one. He was of the
people; I of the aristocracy." Byron was capable, of unbending, where the
difference of rank was so great that it could not be ignored. On this
principle we may explain his enthusiastic regard for the chorister
Eddlestone, from whom he received the cornelian that is the theme of some
of his verses, and whose untimely death in 1811 he sincerely mourned.
Of his Harrow friends, Harness and Long in due course followed him to
Cambridge, where their common pursuits were renewed. With the latter, who
was drowned in 1809, on a passage to Lisbon with his regiment, he spent a
considerable portion of his time on the Cam, swimming and diving, in which
art they were so expert as to pick up eggs, plates, thimbles, and coins
from a depth of fourteen feet--incidents recalled to the poet's mind by
reading Milton's invocation to Sabrina. During the, same period he
distinguished himself at cricket, as in boxing, riding, and shooting. Of
his skill as a rider there are various accounts. He was an undoubted
marksman, and his habit of carrying about pistols, and use of them
wherever he went, was often a source of annoyance and alarm. He professed
a theoretical objection to duelling, but was as ready to take a challenge
as Scott, and more ready to send one.
Regarding the masters and professors of Cambridge, Byron has little to
say. His own tutor, Tavell, appears pleasantly enough in his verse, and he
commends the head of his college, Dr. Lort Mansel, for dignified demeanour
in his office, and a past reputation for convivial wit. His attentions to
Professor Hailstones at Harrowgate were graciously offered and received;
but in a letter to Murray he gives a graphically abusive account of
Porson, "hiccuping Greek like a Helot" in his cups. The poet was first
introduced at Cambridge to a brilliant circle of contemporaries, whose
talents or attainments soon made them more or less conspicuous, and most
of whom are interesting on their own account as well as from their
connection with the subsequent phases of his career. By common consent
Charles Skinner Matthews, son of the member for Herefordshire, 1802-6, was
the most remarkable of the group. Distinguished alike for scholarship,
physical and mental courage, subtlety of thought, humour of fancy, and
fascinations of character, this young man seems to have made an impression
on the undergraduates of his own, similar to that left by Charles Austin
on those of a later generation. The loss of this friend Byron always
regarded as an incalculable calamity. In a note to _Childe Harold_ he
writes, "I should have ventured on a verse to the memory of Matthews, were
he not too much above all praise of mine. His powers of mind shown in the
attainment of greater honours against the ablest candidates, than those of
any graduate on record at Cambridge, have sufficiently established his
fame on the spot where it was acquired; while his softer qualities live in
the recollection of friends, who loved him too well to envy his
superiority." He was drowned when bathing alone among the reeds of the
Cam, in the summer of 1811.
In a letter written from Ravenna in 1820, Byron, in answer to a request
for contributions to a proposed memoir, introduces into his notes much
autobiographical matter. In reference to a joint visit to Newstead, he
writes: "Matthews and myself had travelled down from London together,
talking all the way incessantly upon one single topic. When we got to
Loughborough, I know not what chasm had made us diverge for a moment to
some other subject, at which he was indignant. 'Come,' said he, 'don't let
us break through; let us go on as we began, to our journey's end;' and so
he continued, and was as entertaining as ever to the very end. He had
previously occupied, during my year's absence from Cambridge, my rooms in
Trinity, with the furniture; and Jones (his tutor), in his odd way had
said, in putting him in, 'Mr. Matthews, I recommend to your attention not
to damage any of the movables, for Lord Byron, sir, is a young man of
_tumultuous passions_.' Matthews was delighted with this, and whenever
anybody came, to visit him, begged them to handle the very door with
caution, and used to repeat Jones's admonition in his tone and manner....
He had the same droll sardonic way about everything. A wild Irishman,
named F., one evening beginning to say something at a large supper,
Matthews roared 'Silence!' and then pointing to F., cried out, in the
words of the oracle, 'Orson is endowed with reason.' When Sir Henry Smith
was expelled from Cambridge for a row with a tradesman named 'Hiron,'
Matthews solaced himself with shouting under Hiron's windows every
evening--
Ah me! what perils do environ
The man who meddles with hot Hiron!
He was also of that band of scoffers who used to rouse Lort Mansel from
his slumbers in the lodge of Trinity; and when he appeared at the window,
foaming with wrath, and crying out, "I know you, gentlemen; I know you!"
were wont to reply, "We beseech thee to hear us, good Lort. Good Lort,
deliver us!"
The whole letter, written in the poet's mature and natural style, gives a
vivid picture of the social life and surroundings of his Cambridge days:
how much of the set and sententious moralizing of some of his formal
biographers might we not have spared, for a report of the conversation on
the road from London to Newstead. Of the others gathered round the same
centre, Scrope Davies enlisted the largest share of Byron's affections. To
him he wrote after the catastrophe:--"Come to me, Scrope; I am almost
desolate--left alone in the world. I had but you, and H., and M., and let
me enjoy the survivors while I can." Later he says, "Matthews, Davies,
Hobhouse, and myself formed a coterie of our own. Davies has always beaten
us all in the war of words, and by colloquial powers at once delighted and
kept us in order; even M. yielded to the dashing vivacity of S.D." The
last is everywhere commended for the brilliancy of his wit and repartee:
he was never afraid to speak the truth. Once when the poet in one of his
fits of petulance exclaimed, intending to produce a terrible impression,
"I shall go mad!" Davies calmly and cuttingly observed, "It is much more
like silliness than madness!" He was the only man who ever laid Byron
under any serious pecuniary obligation, having lent him 4800_l_. in some
time of strait. This was repaid on March 27, 1814, when the pair sat up
over champagne and claret from six till midnight, after which "Scrope
could not be got into the carriage on the way home, but remained tipsy and
pious on his knees." Davies was much disconcerted at the influence which
the sceptical opinions of Matthews threatened to exercise over Byron's
mind. The fourth of this quadrangle of amity was John Cam Hobhouse,
afterwards Lord Broughton, the steadfast friend of the poet's whole life,
the companion of his travels, the witness of his marriage, the executor of
his will, the zealous guardian and vindicator of his fame. His ability is
abundantly attested by the impression he left on his contemporaries, his
published description of the Pilgrimage, and subsequent literary and
political career. Byron bears witness to the warmth of his affections, and
the charms of his conversation, and to the candour which, as he confessed
to Lady Blessington, sometimes tried his patience. There is little doubt
that they had some misunderstanding when travelling together, but it was a
passing cloud. Eighteen months after his return the poet admits that
Hobhouse was his best friend; and when he unexpectedly walked up the
stairs of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, at Pisa, Madame Guiccioli informs us
that Byron was seized with such violent emotion, and so extreme an excess
of joy, that it seemed to take away his strength, and he was forced to sit
down in tears.
On the edge of this inner circle, and in many respects associated with it,
was the Rev. Francis Hodgson, a ripe scholar, good translator, a sound
critic, a fluent writer of graceful verse, and a large-hearted divine,
whoso correspondence, recently edited with a connecting narrative by his
son, has thrown light on disputed passages of Lord Byron's life. The views
entertained by the friends on literary matters were almost identical; they
both fought under the standards of the classic school; they resented the
same criticisms, they applauded the same successes, and were bound
together by the strong tie of mutual admiration. Byron commends Hodgson's
verses, and encourages him to write; Hodgson recognizes in the _Bards and
Reviewers_ and the early cantos of _Childe Harold_ the promise of
_Manfred_ and _Cain_. Among the associates who strove to bring the poet
back to the anchorage of fixed belief, and to wean him from the error of
his thoughts, Francis Hodgson was the most charitable, and therefore the
most judicious. That his cautions and exhortations were never stultified
by pedantry or excessive dogmatism, is apparent from the frank and
unguarded answers which they called forth. In several, which are
preserved, and some for the first time reproduced in the
recently-published Memoir, we are struck by the mixture of audacity and
superficial dogmatism, sometimes amounting to effrontery, that is apt to
characterize the negations of a youthful sceptic. In September, 1811,
Byron writes from Newstead:--"I will have nothing to do with your
immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity
of speculating upon another. Christ came to save men, but a good Pagan
will go to heaven, and a bad Nazarene to hell. I am no Platonist, I am
nothing at all; but I would sooner be a Paulician, Manichean, Spinozist,
Gentile, Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, than one of the seventy-two villainous
sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and
hatred of each other. I will bring ten Mussulman, shall shame you all in
good will towards men and prayer to God." On a similar outburst in verse,
the Rev. F. Hodgson comments with a sweet humanity, "The poor dear soul
meant nothing of this." Elsewhere the poet writes, "I have read Watson to
Gibbon. He proves nothing; so I am where I was, verging towards Spinoza;
and yet it is a gloomy creed; and I want a better; but there is something
pagan in me that I cannot shake off. _In short, I deny nothing, but I
doubt everything_." But his early attitude on matters of religion is best
set forth in a letter to Gilford, of 1813, in which he says, "I am no
bigot to infidelity, and did not expect that because I doubted the
immortality of man I should be charged with denying the existence of a
God. It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world,
when placed in comparison of the mighty whole of which man is an atom,
that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be
overrated. This, and being early disgusted with a Calvinistic Scotch
school, where I was cudgelled to church for the first ten years of my
life, afflicted me with this malady; for, after all, it is, I believe, a
disease of the mind, as much as other kinds of hypochondria."
Hodgson was a type of friendly forbearance and loyal attachment, which
had for their return a perfect open-heartedness in his correspondent. To
no one did the poet more freely abuse himself; to no one did he indulge in
more reckless sallies of humour; to no one did he more readily betray his
little conceits. From him Byron sought and received advice, and he owed to
him the prevention of what might have been a most foolish and disastrous
encounter. On the other hand, the clergyman was the recipient of one of
the poet's many single-hearted acts of munificence--a gift of 1000_l_., to
pay off debts to which he had been left heir. In a letter to his uncle,
the former gratefully alludes to this generosity: "Oh, if you knew the
exultation of heart, aye, and of head to, I feel at being free from those
depressing embarrassments, you would, as I do, bless my dearest friend and
brother, Byron." The whole transaction is a pleasing record of a benefit
that was neither sooner nor later resented by the receiver.
Among other associates of the same group should be mentioned Henry
Drury--long Hodgson's intimate friend, and ultimately his brother-in-law,
to whom many of Byron's first series of letters from abroad are
addressed--and Robert Charles Dallas, a name surrounded with various
associations, who played a not insignificant part in Byron's history, and,
after his death, helped to swell the throng of his annotators. This
gentleman, a connexion by marriage, and author of some now forgotten
novels, first made acquaintance with the poet in London early in 1808,
when we have two letters from Byron, in answer to some compliment on his
early volume, in which, though addressing his correspondent merely as
'Sir,' his flippancy and habit of boasting of excessive badness reach an
absurd climax.
Meanwhile, during the intervals of his attendance at college, Byron had
made other friends. His vacations were divided between London and
Southwell, a small town on the road from Mansfield and Newark, once a
refuge of Charles I., and still adorned by an old Norman Minster. Here
Mrs. Byron for several summer seasons took up her abode, and was
frequently joined by her son. He was introduced to John Pigot, a medical
student of Edinburgh, and his sister Elizabeth, both endowed with talents
above the average, and keenly interested in literary pursuits, to whom a
number of his letters are addressed; also to the Rev. J.T. Becher, author
of a treatise on the state of the poor, to whom he was indebted for
encouragement and counsel. The poet often rails at the place, which he
found dull in comparison with Cambridge and London; writing from the
latter, in 1807: "O Southwell, how I rejoice to have left thee! and how I
curse the heavy hours I dragged along for so many months among the Mohawks
who inhabit your kraals!" and adding, that his sole satisfaction during
his residence there was having pared off some pounds of flush.
Notwithstanding, in the small but select society of this inland
watering-place he passed on the whole a pleasant time--listening to the
music of the simple ballads in which he delighted, taking part in the
performances of the local theatre, making excursions, and writing verses.
This otherwise quiet time was disturbed by exhibitions of violence on the
part of Mrs. Byron, which suggest the idea of insanity. After one more
outrageous than usual, both mother and son are said to have gone to the
neighbouring apothecary, each to request him not to supply the other with
poison. On a later occasion, when he had been meeting her bursts of rage
with stubborn mockery, she flung a poker at his head, and narrowly missed
her aim. Upon this he took flight to London, and his Hydra or Alecto, as
ho calls her, followed: on their meeting a truce was patched, and they
withdrew in opposite directions, she back to Southwell, he to refresh
himself on the Sussex coast, till in the August of the same year (1806) he
again rejoined her. Shortly afterwards we have from Pigot a description of
a trip to Harrogate, when his lordship's favourite Newfoundland,
Boatswain, whose relation to his master recalls that of Bounce to Pope, or
Maida to Scott, sat on the box.
In November Byron printed for private circulation the first issue of his
juvenile poems. Mr. Becher having called his attention to one which he
thought objectionable, the impression was destroyed; and the author set to
work upon another, which, at once weeded and amplified, saw the light in
January, 1807. He sent copies, under the title of _Juvenilia_, to several
of his friends, and among others to Henry Mackenzie (the Man of Feeling),
and to Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee. Encouraged by their favourable
notices, he determined in appeal to a wider audience, and in March, 1807,
the _Hours of Idleness_, still proceeding from the local press at Newark,
were given to the world. In June we find the poet again writing from his
college rooms, dwelling with boyish detail on his growth in height and
reduction in girth, his late hours and heavy potations, his comrades, and
the prospects of his book. From July to September he dates from London,
excited by the praises of some now obscure magazine, and planning a
journey to the Hebrides. In October he is again settled at Cambridge, and
in a letter to Miss Pigot, makes a humorous reference to one of his
fantastic freaks: "I have got a new friend, the finest in the world--a
_tame bear_. When I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do
with him, and my reply was, 'He should sit for a fellowship.' This answer
delighted them not." The greater part of the spring and summer of 1808 was
spent at Dorant's Hotel, Albemarle Street. Left to himself, he seems
during this period for the first time to have freely indulged in
dissipations, which are in most lives more or less carefully concealed.
But Byron, with almost unparalleled folly, was perpetually taking the
public into his confidence, and all his "sins of blood," with the strange
additions of an imaginative effrontery, have been thrust before us in a
manner in which Rochester or Rousseau might have thought indelicate.
Nature and circumstances conspired the result. With passions which he is
fond of comparing to the fires of Vesuvius and Hecla, he was, on his
entrance into a social life which his rank helped to surround with
temptations, unconscious of any sufficient motive for resisting them; he
had no one to restrain him from the whim of the moment, or with sufficient
authority to give him effective advice. A temperament of general
despondency, relieved by reckless outbursts of animal spirits, is the
least favourable to habitual self-control. The melancholy of Byron was not
of the pensive and innocent kind attributed to Cowley, rather that of the,
[Greek: melancholikoi] of whom Aristotle asserts, with profound
psychological or physiological intuition, that they are [Greek: aei en
sphodra orexei]. The absurdity of Moore's frequent declaration, that all
great poets are inly wrapt in perpetual gloom, is only to be excused by
the modesty which, in the saying so obviously excludes himself from the
list. But it is true that anomalous energies are sources of incessant
irritation to their possessor, until they have found their proper vent in
the free exercise of his highest faculties. Byron had not yet done, this,
when he was rushing about between London, Brighton, Cambridge, and
Newstead--shooting, gambling, swimming, alternately drinking deep and
trying to starve himself into elegance, green-room hunting, travelling
with disguised companions,[1] patronizing D'Egville the dancing-master,
Grimaldi the clown, and taking lessons from Mr. Jackson, the distinguished
professor of pugilism, to whom he afterwards affectionately refers as his
"old friend and corporeal pastor and master." There is no inducement to
dwell on amours devoid of romance, further than to remember that they
never trenched on what the common code of the fashionable world terms
dishonour. We may believe the poet's later assertion, backed by want of
evidence to the contrary, that he had never been the first means of
leading any one astray--a fact perhaps worthy the attention of those moral
worshippers of Goethe and Burns who hiss at Lord Byron's name.
[Footnote 1: In reference to one of these, see an interesting letter
from Mr. Minto to the _Athenaeum_ (Sept. 2nd, 1876), in which with
considerable though not conclusive ingenuity, he endeavours to
identify the girl with "Thyrza," and with "Astarté," whom he regards
as the same person.]
Though much of this year of his life was passed unprofitably, from it
dates the impulse that provoked him to put forth his powers. The
_Edinburgh_, with the attack on the _Hours of Idleness_, appeared in
March, 1808. This production, by Lord Brougham, is a specimen of the
tomahawk style of criticism prevalent in the early years of the century,
in which the main motive of the critic was, not to deal fairly with his
author, but to acquire for himself an easy reputation for cleverness, by a
series of smart contemptuous sentences. Taken apart, most of the
strictures of the _Edinburgh_ are sufficiently just, and the passages
quoted for censure are all bad. Byron's genius as a poet was not
remarkably precocious. The _Hours of Idleness_ seldom rise, either in
thought or expression, very far above the average level of juvenile verse;
many of the pieces in the collection are weak imitations, or commonplace
descriptions; others suggested by circumstances of local or temporary
interest, had served their turn before coming into print. Their prevailing
sentiment is an affectation of misanthropy, conveyed in such lines as
these:--
Weary of love, of life, devour'd with spleen,
I rest, a perfect Timon, not nineteen.
This mawkish element unfortunately survives in much of the author's later
verse. But even in this volume there are indications of force, and
command. The _Prayer of Nature_, indeed, though previously written, was
not included in the edition before the notice of the critic; but the sound
of _Loch-na-Gair_ and some of the stanzas on _Newstead_ ought to have
saved him from the mistake of his impudent advice. The poet, who through
life waited with feverish anxiety for every verdict on his work, is
reported after reading the review to have looked like a man about to send
a challenge. In the midst of a transparent show of indifference, he
confesses to have drunk three bottles of claret on the evening of its
appearance. But the wound did not mortify into torpor; the Sea-Kings'
blood stood him in good stead, and he was not long in collecting his
strength for the panther-like spring, which, gaining strength by its
delay, twelve months later made it impossible for him to be contemned.
The last months of the year he spent at Newstead, vacated by the tenant,
who had left the building in the tumble-down condition in which he found
it. Byron was, by his own acknowledgment, at this time, "heavily dipped,"
generosities having combined with selfish extravagances to the result; he
had no funds to subject the place to anything like a thorough repair, but
he busied himself in arranging a few of the rooms for his own present and
his mother's after use. About this date he writes to her, beginning in his
usual style, "Dear Madam," saying he has as yet no rooms ready for her
reception, but that on his departure she shall be tenant till his return.
During this interval he was studying Pope, and carefully maturing his own
Satire. In November the dog Boatswain died in a fit of madness. The event
called forth the famous burst of misanthropic verse, ending with the
couplet,--
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but _one_, and _here_ he lies;--
and the inscription on the monument that still remains in the gardens of
Newstead,--
Near this spot,
Are deposited the remains of one
Who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the virtues of Man without his Vices.
This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
If inscribed over human ashes,
Is but a just tribute to the Memory of
Boatswain, a Dog,
Who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803,
And died at Newstead Abbey, November 18, 1808.
On January 22, 1809, his lordship's coming of age was celebrated with
festivities, curtailed of their proportions by his limited means. Early in
spring he paid a visit to London, bringing the proof of his satire to the
publisher, Cawthorne. From St. James's Street he writes to Mrs. Byron, on
the death of Lord Falkland, who had been killed in a duel, and expresses a
sympathy for his family, left in destitute circumstances, whom he
proceeded to relieve with a generosity only equalled by the delicacy of
the manner in which it was shown. Referring to his own embarrassment, he
proceeds in the expression of a resolve, often repeated, "Come what may,
Newstead and I stand or fall together. I have now lived on the spot--I
have fixed my heart on it; and no pressure, present or future, shall
induce me to barter the last vestige of our inheritance." He was building
false hopes on the result of the suit for the Rochdale property, which,
being dragged from court to court, involved him in heavy expenses, with no
satisfactory result. He took his seat in the House of Lords on the 13th of
March, and Mr. Dallas, who accompanied him to the bar of the House, has
left an account of his somewhat unfortunate demeanour.
"His countenance, paler than usual, showed that his mind was agitated, and
that he was thinking of the nobleman to whom he had once looked for a hand
and countenance in his introduction. There were very few persons in the
House. Lord Eldon was going through some ordinary business. When Lord
Byron had taken the oaths, the Chancellor quitted his seat, and went
towards him with a smile, putting out his hand warmly to welcome him; and,
though I did not catch the words, I saw that he paid him some compliment.
This was all thrown away upon Lord Byron, who made a stiff bow, and put
the tips of his fingers into the Chancellor's hand. The Chancellor did not
press a welcome so received, but resumed his seat; while Lord Byron
carelessly seated himself for a few minutes on one of the empty benches to
the left of the throne, usually occupied by the lords in Opposition. When,
on his joining me, I expressed what I had felt, he said 'If I had shaken
hands heartily, he would have set me down for one of his party; but I will
have nothing to do with them on either side. I have taken my seat, and now
I will go abroad.'"
A few days later the _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ appeared before
the public. The first anonymous edition was exhausted in a month; a
second, to which the author gave his name, quickly followed. He was wont
at a later date to disparage this production, and frequently recanted many
of his verdicts in marginal notes. Several, indeed, seem to have been
dictated by feelings so transitory, that in the course of the correction
of proof blame was turned into praise, and praise into blame; i.e. he
wrote in MS. before he met the agreeable author,--
I leave topography to coxcomb Gell;
we have his second thought in the first edition, before he saw the
Troad,--
I leave topography to classic Gell;
and his third, half way in censure, in the fifth,--
I leave topography to rapid Gell.
Of such materials are literary judgments made!
The success of Byron's satire was due to the fact of its being the only
good thing of its kind since Churchill,--for in the _Baviad_ and _Maeviad_
only butterflies were broken upon the wheel--and to its being the first
promise of a now power. The _Bards and Reviewers_ also enlisted sympathy,
from its vigorous attack upon the critics who had hitherto assumed the
prerogative of attack. Jeffrey and Brougham were seethed in their own
milk; and outsiders, whose credentials were still being examined, as Moore
and Campbell, came in for their share of vigorous vituperation. The Lakers
fared worst of all. It was the beginning of the author's life-long war,
only once relaxed, with Southey. Wordsworth--though against this passage
is written "unjust," a concession not much sooner made than withdrawn,--is
dubbed an idiot, who--
Both by precept and example shows,
That prose is verse and verse is only prose;
and Coleridge, a baby,--
To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear.
The lines ridiculing the encounter between Jeffrey and Moore, are a fair
specimen of the accuracy with which the author had caught the ring of
Pope's antithesis:--
The surly Tolbooth scarcely kept her place.
The Tolbooth felt--for marble sometimes can,
On such occasions, feel as much as man--
The Tolbooth felt defrauded of her charms,
If Jeffrey died, except within her arms.
Meanwhile Byron had again retired to Newstead, where he invited some
choice spirits to hold a few weeks of farewell revel. Matthews, one of
these, gives an account of the place, and the time they spent
there--entering the mansion between a bear and a wolf, amid a salvo of
pistol-shots; sitting up to all hours, talking politics, philosophy,
poetry; hearing stories of the dead lords, and the ghost of the Black
Brother; drinking their wine out of the skull cup which the owner had made
out of the cranium of some old monk dug up in the garden; breakfasting at
two, then reading, fencing, riding, cricketing, sailing on the lake, and
playing with the bear or teasing the wolf. The party broke up without
having made themselves responsible for any of the orgies of which Childe
Harold raves, and which Dallas in good earnest accepts as veracious, when
the poet and his friend Hobhouse started for Falmouth, on their way
"_outre mer_."
CHAPTER IV.
TWO YEARS OF TRAVEL.
There is no romance of Munchausen or Dumas more marvellous than the
adventures attributed to Lord Byron abroad. Attached to his first
expedition are a series of narratives, by professing eye-witnesses, of his
intrigues, encounters, acts of diablerie and of munificence, in particular
of his roaming about the isles of Greece and taking possession of one of
them, which have all the same relation to reality as the _Arabian Nights_
to the actual reign of Haroun Al Raschid.[1]
[Footnote 1: Those who wish to read them are referred to the three
large volumes--published in 1825, by Mr. Iley, Portman Street--of
anonymous authorship.]
Byron had far more than an average share of the _émigré_ spirit, the
counterpoise in the English race of their otherwise arrogant isolation. He
held with Wilhelm Meister--
To give space for wandering is it,
That the earth was made so wide.
and wrote to his mother from Athens: "I am so convinced of the advantages
of looking at mankind, instead of reading about them, and the bitter
effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an islander,
that I think there should be a law amongst us to send our young men abroad
for a term, among the few allies our wars have left us."
On June 11th, having borrowed money at heavy interest, and stored his mind
with information about Persia and India, the contemplated but unattained
goal of his travels, he left London, accompanied by his friend Hobhouse,
Fletcher his valet, Joe Murray his old butler, and Robert Rushton the son
of one of his tenants, supposed to be represented by the Page in _Childe
Harold_. The two latter, the one on account of his age, the other from his
health breaking down, he sent back to England from Gibraltar.
Becalmed for some days at Falmouth, a town which he describes as "full of
Quakers and salt fish," he despatched letters to his mother, Drury, and
Hodgson, exhibiting the changing moods of his mind. Smarting under a
slight he had received at parting from a school-companion, who had excused
himself from a farewell meeting on the plea that he had to go shopping, he
at one moment talks of his desolation, and says that, "leaving England
without regret," he has thought of entering the Turkish service; in the
next, especially in the stanzas to Hodgson, he runs off into a strain of
boisterous buffoonery. On the 2nd of July, the packet, by which he was
bound, sailed for Lisbon and arrived there about the middle of the month,
when the English fleet was anchored in the Tagus. The poet in some of his
stanzas has described the fine view of the port and the disconsolate
dirtiness of the city itself, the streets of which were at that time
rendered dangerous by the frequency of religious and political
assassinations. Nothing else remains of his sojourn to interest us, save
the statement of Mr. Hobhouse, that his friend made a more perilous,
though less celebrated, achievement by water than his crossing the
Hellespont, in swimming from old Lisbon to Belem Castle, Byron praises the
neighbouring Cintra, as "the most beautiful village in the world," though
he joins with Wordsworth in heaping anathemas on the Convention, and
extols the grandeur of Mafra, the Escurial of Portugal, in the convent of
which a monk, showing the traveller a large library, asked if the English
had any books in their country. Despatching his baggage and servants by
sea to Gibraltar, he and his friend started on horseback through the
south-west of Spain. Their first resting-place, after a ride of 400 miles,
performed at an average rate of seventy in the twenty-four hours, was
Seville, where they lodged for three days in the house of two ladies, to
whose attractions, as well as the fascination he seems to have exerted
over them, the poet somewhat garrulously refers. Here, too, he saw,
parading on the Prado, the famous _Maid of Saragossa_, whom he celebrates
in his equally famous stanzas (_Childe Harold_, I., 54-58). Of Cadiz, the
next stage, he writes with enthusiasm as a modern Cythera, describing the
bull fights in his verse, and the beauties in glowing prose. The belles of
this city, he says, are the Lancashire witches of Spain; and by reason of
them, rather than the sea-shore or the Sierra Morena, "sweet Cadiz is the
first spot in the creation." Hence, by an English frigate, they sailed to
Gibraltar, for which place he has nothing but curses. Byron had no
sympathy with the ordinary forms of British patriotism, and in our great
struggle with the tyranny of the First Empire, he may almost be said to
have sympathized with Napoleon.
The ship stopped at Cagliari in Sardinia, and again at Girgenti on the
Sicilian coast. Arriving at Malta, they halted there for three weeks--time
enough to establish a sentimental, though Platonic, flirtation with Mrs.
Spencer Smith, wife of our minister at Constantinople, sister-in-law of
the famous admiral, and the heroine of some exciting adventures. She is
the "Florence" of _Childe Harold_, and is afterwards addressed in some of
the most graceful verses of his cavalier minstrelsy--
Do thou, amidst the fair white walls,
If Cadiz yet be free,
At times from out her latticed halls
Look o'er the dark blue sea--
Then think upon Calypso's isles,
Endear'd by days gone by,--
To others give a thousand smiles,
To me a single sigh.
The only other adventure of the visit is Byron's quarrel with an officer,
on some unrecorded ground, which Hobhouse tells us nearly resulted in a
duel. The friends left Malta on September 29th, in the war-ship "Spider,"
and after anchoring off Patras, and spending a few hours on shore, they
skirted the coast of Acarnania, in view of localities--as Ithaca, the
Leucadian rock, and Actium--whose classic memories filtered through the
poet's mind and found a place in his masterpieces. Landing at Previsa,
they started on a tour through Albania,--
O'er many a mount sublime,
Through lands scarce noticed in historic tales.
Byron was deeply impressed by the beauty of the scenery, and the
half-savage independence of the people, described as "always strutting
about with slow dignity, though in rags." In October we find him with his
companions at Janina, hospitably entertained by order of Ali Pasha, the
famous Albanian Turk, bandit, and despot, then besieging Ibrahim at Berat
in Illyria. They proceeded on their way by "bleak Pindus," Acherusia's
lake, and Zitza, with its monastery door battered by robbers. Before
reaching the latter place, they encountered a terrific thunderstorm, in
the midst of which they separated, and Byron's detachment lost its way for
nine hours, during which he composed the verses to Florence, quoted above.
Some days later they together arrived at Tepaleni, and were there received
by Ali Pasha in person. The scene on entering the town is described as
recalling Scott's Branksome Castle and the feudal system; and the
introduction to Ali, who sat for some of the traits of the poet's
corsairs,--is graphically reproduced in a letter to Mrs. Byron. "His first
question was, why at so early an age I left my country, and without a
'lala,' or nurse? He then said the English minister had told him I was of
a great family, and desired his respects to my mother, which I now present
to you (date, November 12th). He said he was certain I was a man of birth,
because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands. He told me
to consider him as a father whilst I was in Turkey, and said he looked on
me as his son. Indeed he treated me like a child, sending me almonds,
fruit, and sweetmeats, twenty times a day." Byron shortly afterwards
discovered his host to be, a poisoner and an assassin. "Two days ago," he
proceeds in a passage which illustrates his character and a common
experience, "I was nearly lost in a Turkish ship-of-war, owing to the
ignorance of the captain and crew. Fletcher yelled after his wife; the
Greeks called on all the saints, the Mussulmen on Alla; the captain burst
into tears and ran below deck, telling us to call on God. The sails were
split, the mainyard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting
in; and all our chance was to make for Corfu--or, as F. pathetically
called it, 'a watery grave.' I did what I could to console him, but
finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself in my Albanian capote, and lay
down on the deck to wait the worst." Unable from his lameness, says
Hobhouse, to be of any assistance, he in a short time was found amid the
trembling sailors, fast asleep. They got back to the coast of Suli, and
shortly afterwards started through Acarnania and AEtolia for the Morea,
again rejoicing in the wild scenery and the apparently kindred spirits of
the wild men among whom they passed. Byron was especially fascinated by
the firelight dance and song of the robber band, which he describes and
reproduces in _Childe Harold_. On the 21st of November he reached
Mesolonghi, whore, fifteen years later, he died. Here he dismissed most of
his escort, proceeded to Patras, and on to Vostizza, caught sight of
Parnassus, and accepted a flight of eagles near Delphi as a favouring sign
of Apollo. "The last bird," he writes, "I ever fired at was an eaglet on
the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto. It was only wounded and I tried to save
it--the eye was so bright. But it pined and died in a few days: and I
never did since, and never will, attempt the life of another bird." From
Livadia the travellers proceeded to Thebes, visited the cave of
Trophonius, Diana's fountain, the so-called ruins of Pindar's house, and
the field of Cheronea, crossed Cithaeron, and on Christmas, 1809, arrived
before the defile, near the ruins of Phyle, where, he had his first
glimpse of Athens, which evoked the famous lines:--
Ancient of days, august Athena! where,
Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were.
First in the race that led to glory's goal,
They won, and pass'd away: is this the whole--
A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour?
After which he reverts to his perpetually recurring moral, "Men come and
go; but the hills, and waves, and skies, and stars, endure"--
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds;
Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare;
Art, glory, freedom fail--but nature still is fair.
The duration of Lord Byron's first visit to Athens was about three months,
and it was varied by excursions to different parts of Attica; Eleusis,
Hymettus, Cape Colonna, (Sunium, the scene of Falconer's shipwreck), the
Colonus of OEdipus, and Marathon, the plain of which is said to have been
placed at his disposal for about the same sum that, thirty years later, an
American offered to give for the bark with the poet's name on the tree at
Newstead. Byron had a poor opinion of the modern Athenians, who seem to
have at this period done their best to justify the Roman satirist. He
found them superficial, cunning, and false; but, with generous historic
insight, he says that no nation in like circumstances would have been much
better; that they had the vices of ages of slavery, from which it would
require ages of freedom to emancipate them.
In the Greek capital he lodged at the house of a respectable lady, widow
of an English vice-consul, who had three daughters, the eldest of whom,
Theresa, acquired an innocent and enviable fame as the Maid of Athens,
without the dangerous glory of having taken any very firm hold of the
heart that she was asked to return. A more solid passion was the poet's
genuine indignation on the "lifting," in Border phrase, of the marbles
from the Parthenon, and their being taken to England by order of Lord
Elgin. Byron never wrote anything more sincere than the _Curse of
Minerva_; and he has recorded few incidents more pathetic than that of the
old Greek who, when the last stone was removed for exportation, shed
tears, and said "[Greek: telos]!" The question is still an open one of
ethics. There are few Englishmen of the higher rank who do not hold London
in the right hand as barely balanced by the rest of the world in the left;
a judgment in which we can hardly expect Romans, Parisians, and Athenians
to concur. On the other hand, the marbles were mouldering at Athens, and
they are preserved, like ginger, in the British Museum.
Among the adventures of this period are an expedition across the Ilissus
to some caves near Kharyati, in which the travellers were by accident
nearly entombed; another to Pentelicus, where they tried to carve their
names on the marble rock; and a third to the environs of the Piraeus in
the evening light. Early in March the convenient departure of an English
sloop-of-war induced them to make an excursion to Smyrna. There, on the
28th of March, the second canto of _Childe Harold_, begun in the previous
autumn at Janina, was completed. They remained in the neighbourhood,
visiting Ephesus, without poetical result further than a reference to the
jackals, in the _Siege of Corinth_; and on April 11th left by the
"Salsette," a frigate on its way to Constantinople. The vessel touched at
the Troad, and Byron spent some time on land, snipe-shooting, and rambling
among the reputed ruins of Ilium. The poet characteristically, in _Don
Juan_ and elsewhere, attacks the sceptics, and then half ridicules the
belief.
I've stood upon Achilles' tomb,
And heard Troy doubted! Time will doubt of Rome!
* * * * *
There, on the green and village-cotted hill, is,
Flank'd by the Hellespont, and by the sea,
Entomb'd the bravest of the brave Achilles.--
They say so: Bryant says the contrary.
Being again detained in the Dardanelles, waiting for a fair wind, Byron
landed on the European side, and swam, in company with Lieutenant
Ekenhead, from Sestos to Abydos--a performance of which he boasts some
twenty times. The strength of the current is the main difficulty of a
feat, since so surpassed as to have passed from notice; but it was a
tempting theme for classical allusions. At length, on May 14, he reached
Constantinople, exalted the Golden Horn above all the sights he had seen,
and now first abandoned his design of travelling to Persia. Galt, and
other more or less gossiping travellers, have accumulated a number of
incidents of the poet's life at this period, of his fanciful dress,
blazing in scarlet and gold, and of his sometimes absurd contentions for
the privileges of rank--as when he demanded precedence of the English
ambassador in an interview with the Sultan, and, on its refusal, could
only be pacified by the assurances of the Austrian internuncio. In
converse with indifferent persons he displayed a curious alternation of
frankness and hauteur, and indulged a habit of letting people up and down,
by which he frequently gave offence. More interesting are narratives of
the suggestion of some of his verses, as the slave-market in _Don Juan_,
and the spectacle of the dead criminal tossed on the waves, revived in the
_Bride of Abydos_. One example is, if we except Dante's _Ugolino_, the
most remarkable instance in literature of the expansion, without the
weakening, of the horrible. Take first Mr. Hobhouse's plain prose: "The
sensations produced by the state of the weather"--it was wretched and
stormy when they left the "Salsette" for the city--"and leaving a
comfortable cabin, were in unison with the impressions which we felt when,
passing under the palace of the Sultans, and gazing at the gloomy cypress
which rises above the walls, we saw two dogs gnawing a dead body." After
this we may measure the almost fiendish force of a morbid imagination
brooding over the incident,--
And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival:
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunch'd on the whiter skull,
As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grow dull.
No one ever more persistently converted the incidents of travel into
poetic material; but sometimes in doing so he borrowed more largely from
his imagination than his memory, as in the description of the seraglio, of
which there is reason to doubt his having seen more than the entrance.
Byron and Hobhouse set sail from Constantinople on the 14th July,
1810--the latter to return direct to England, a determination which, from
no apparent fault on either side, the former did not regret. One incident
of the passage derives interest from its possible consequence. Taking up,
and unsheathing, a yataghan which he found on the quarter deck, ho
remarked, "I should like to know how a person feels after committing a
murder." This harmless piece of melodrama--the idea of which is expanded
in Mr. Dobell's _Balder_, and parodied in _Firmilian_--may have been the
basis of a report afterwards circulated, and accepted among others by
Goethe, that his lordship had committed a murder; hence, obviously, the
character of _Lara_, and the mystery of _Manfred!_ The poet parted from
his friend at Zea, (Ceos): after spending some time in solitude on the
little island, he returned to Athens, and there renewed acquaintance with
his school friend, the Marquis of Sligo, who after a few days accompanied
him to Corinth. They then separated, and Byron went on to Patras in the
Morea, where he had business with the Consul. He dates from there at the
close of July. It is impossible to give a consecutive account of his life
during the next ten months, a period consequently filled up with the
contradictory and absurd mass of legends before referred to. A few facts
only of any interest are extricable. During at least half of the time his
head-quarters were at Athens, where he again met his friend the Marquis,
associated with the English Consul and Lady Hester Stanhope, studied
Romaic in a Franciscan monastery--where he saw and conversed with a motley
crew of French, Italians, Danes, Greeks, Turks, and Americans,--wrote to
his mother and others, saying he had swum from Sestos to Abydos, was sick
of Fletcher bawling for beef and beer, had done with authorship, and hoped
on his return to lead a quiet recluse life. He nevertheless made notes to
_Harold_, composed the _Hints from Horace_ and the _Curse of Minerva_, and
presumably brooded over, and outlined in his mind, many of his verse
romances. We hear no more of the, _Maid of Athens_, but there is no fair
ground to doubt that the _Giaour_ was suggested by his rescue of a young
woman whom, for the fault of an amour with some Frank, a party of
Janissaries were about to throw, sewn up in a sack, into the sea. Mr. Galt
gives no authority for his statement, that the girl's deliverer was the
original cause of her sentence. We may rest assured that if it had been
so, Byron himself would have told us of it.
A note to the _Siege of Corinth_ is suggestive of his unequalled
restlessness. "I visited all three--Tripolitza, Napoli, and Argos--in
1810-11; and in the course of journeying through the country, from my
first arrival in 1809, crossed the Isthmus eight times on my way from
Attica to the Morea." In the latter locality we find him during the autumn
the honoured guest of the Vizier Valhi (a son of Ali Pasha), who presented
him with a fine horse. During a second visit to Patras, in September, he
was attacked by the same sort of marsh fever from which, fourteen years
afterwards, in the near neighbourhood, he died. On his recovery, in
October, he complains of having been nearly killed by the heroic measures
of the native doctors: "One of them trusts to his genius, never having
studied; the other, to a campaign of eighteen months against the sick of
Otranto, which he made in his youth with great effect. When I was seized
with my disorder, I protested against both these assassins, but in vain."
He was saved by the zeal of his servants, who asseverated that if his
lordship died they would take good care the doctors should also; on which
the learned men discontinued their visits, and the patient revived. On his
final return to Athens, the restoration of his health was retarded by one
of his long courses of reducing diet; he lived mainly on rice, and vinegar
and water. From that city he writes in the early spring, intimating his
intention of proceeding to Egypt; but Mr. Hanson, his man of business,
ceasing to send him remittances, the scheme was abandoned. Beset by
letters about his debts, he again declares his determination to hold fast
by Newstead, adding that if the place which is his only tie to England is
sold, he won't come back at all. Life on the shores of the Archipelago is
far cheaper and happier, and "Ubi bene ibi patria," for such a citizen of
the world as he has become. Later he went to Malta, and was detained
there by another bad attack of tertian fever. The next record of
consequence is from the "Volage" frigate, at sea, June 29, 1811, when he
writes in a despondent strain to Hodgson, that he is returning home
"without a hope, and almost without a desire," to wrangle with creditors
and lawyers about executions and coal pits. "In short, I am sick and
sorry; and when I have a little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I
shall march, either to campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where
I can at least have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence. I
am sick of fops, and poesy, and prate, and shall leave the whole Castalian
state to Bufo, or anybody else. Howbeit, I have written some 4000 lines,
of one kind or another, on my travels." With these, and a collection of
marbles, and skulls, and hemlock, and tortoises, and servants, he reached
London about the middle of July, and remained there, making some
arrangements about business and publication. On the 23rd we have a short
but kind letter to his mother, promising to pay her a visit on his way to
Rochdale. "You know you are a vixen, but keep some champagne for me," he
had written from abroad. On receipt of the letter she remarked, "If I
should be dead before he comes down, what a strange thing it, would be."
Towards the close of the month she had an attack so alarming that he was
summoned; but before, he had time to arrive she had expired, on the 1st of
August, in a fit of rage brought on by reading an upholsterer's bill. On
the way Byron heard the intelligence, and wrote to Dr. Pigot: "I now feel
the truth of Gray's observation, that we can only have _one_ mother. Peace
be with her!" On arriving at Newstead, all their storms forgotten, the son
was so affected that he did not trust himself to go to the funeral, but
stood dreamily gazing at the cortège from the gate of the Abbey. Five days
later, Charles S. Matthews was drowned.
CHAPTER V.
SECOND PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP--IN LONDON--CORRESPONDENCE WITH SCOTT
The deaths of Long, Wingfield, Eddlestone, Matthews, and of his mother,
had narrowed the circle of the poet's early companions; and, though he
talks of each loss in succession as if it had been that of an only friend,
we can credit a degree of loneliness, and excuse a certain amount of
bitterness in the feelings with which he returned to London. He had at
this time seen very little of the only relative whom he over deeply loved.
He and his half-sister met casually in 1804, and again in the following
year. After her marriage (1807), Byron writes from abroad (1810),
regretting having distressed her by his quarrel with Lord Carlisle. In
1811 she is mentioned as reversionary heiress of his estate. Towards the
close of 1813, there are two allusions which testify to their mutual
affection. Next wo come to the interesting series of letters of 1815-16,
published with the Memoir of Mr. Hodgson, to whom, along with Hobhouse and
Scrope Davies, his lordship in a will and codicil leaves the management of
his property. Harness appears frequently at this period among his
surviving intimates: to this list there was shortly added another. In
speaking of his _Bards and Reviewers_, the author makes occasional
reference to the possibility of his being called to account for some of
his attacks. His expectation was realized by a letter from the poet Moore,
dated Dublin, Jan. 1, 1810, couched in peremptory terms, demanding to know
if his lordship avowed the authorship of the insults contained in the
poem. This letter, being entrusted to Mr. Hodgson, was not forwarded to
Byron abroad; but shortly after his return, he received another in more
conciliatory terms, renewing the complaint. To this he replied, in a stiff
but manly letter, that he had never meant to insult Mr. Moore; but that he
was, if necessary, ready to give him satisfaction. Moore accepting the
explanation, somewhat querulously complained of his advances to friendship
not being received. Byron again replied that much as he would feel
honoured by Mr. Moore's acquaintance, he being practically threatened by
the irate Irishman could hardly make the first advances. This called forth
a sort of apology; the correspondents met at the house of Mr. Rogers, and
out of the somewhat awkward circumstances, owing to the frankness of the
"noble author," as the other ever after delights to call him, arose the
life-long intimacy which had such various and lasting results. Moore has
been called a false friend to Byron, and a traitor to his memory. The
judgment is somewhat harsh, but the association between them was
unfortunate. Thomas Moore had some sterling qualities. His best satirical
pieces are inspired by a real indignation, and lit up by a genuine humour.
He was also an exquisite musician in words, and must have been
occasionally a fascinating companion. But he was essentially a worldling,
and, as such, a superficial critic. He encouraged the shallow affectations
of his great friend's weaker work, and recoiled in alarm before the daring
defiance of his stronger. His criticisms on all Byron wrote and felt
seriously on religion are almost worthy of a conventicle. His letters to
others on _Manfred_, and _Cain_, and _Don Juan_, are the expression of
sentiments which he had never the courage to state explicitly to the
author. On the other hand, Byron was attracted beyond reasonable measure
by his gracefully deferential manners, paid too much regard to his
opinions, and overestimated his genius. For the subsequent destruction of
the memoirs, urged by Mr. Hobhouse and Mrs. Leigh, he was not wholly
responsible; though a braver man, having accepted the position of his
lordship's literary legatee, with the express understanding that he would
seue to the fulfilment of the wishes of his dead friend, would have to the
utmost resisted their total frustration.
Meanwhile, on landing in England, the poet had placed in the hands of Mr.
Dallas the _Hints from Horace_, which he intended to have brought out by
the publisher Cawthorne. Of this performance--an inferior edition,
relieved by a few strong touches, of the _Bards and Reviewers_--Dallas
ventured to express his disapproval. "Have you no other result of your
travels?" he asked; and got for answer, "A few short pieces; and a lot of
Spenserian stanzas; not worth troubling you with, but you are welcome to
them." Dallas took the remark literally, saw they were a safe success, and
assumed to himself the merit of the discovery, the risks, and the profits.
It is the converse of the story of Gabriel Harvey and the _Faery Queene_.
Tho first two cantos of _Childe Harold_ bear no comparison with the legend
of _Una and the Red Cross Knight_; but there was no mistake about their
proof of power, their novelty, and adaptation to a public taste as yet
unjaded by eloquent and imaginative descriptions of foreign scenery,
manners, and climates.
The poem--after being submitted to Gifford, in defiance of the
protestations of the author, who feared that the reference might seem to
seek the favour of the august _Quarterly_--was accepted by Mr. Murray, and
proceeded through the press, subject to change and additions, during the
next five months. The _Hints from Horace_, fortunately postponed and then
suspended, appeared posthumously in 1831. Byron remained at Newstead till
the close of October, negotiating with creditors and lawyers, and engaged
in a correspondence about his publications, in the course of which he
deprecates any identification of himself and his hero, though he had at
first called him Childe Byron. "Instruct Mr. Murray," he entreats, "not to
allow his shopman to call the work 'Child of Harrow's Pilgrimage,' as he
has done to some of my astonished friends, who wrote to inquire after my
_sanity_ on the occasion, as well they might." At the end of the month we
find him in London, again indulging in a voyage in "the ship of fools," in
which Moore claims to have accompanied him; but at the same time
exhibiting remarkable shrewdness in reference to the affairs of his
household. In February, 1812, he again declares to Hodgson his resolve to
leave England for ever, and fix himself in "one of the fairest islands of
the East." On the 27th he made in the House of Lords his speech on a Bill
to introduce special penalties against the frame-breakers of Nottingham.
This effort, on which he received many compliments, led among other
results to a friendly correspondence with Lord Holland. On April 21st of
the same year, he again addressed the House on behalf of Roman Catholic
Emancipation; and in June, 1813, in favour of Major Cartwright's petition.
On all these occasions, as afterwards on the continent, Byron espoused the
Liberal side of politics. But his role was that of Manlius or Caesar, and
he never fails to remind us that he himself was _for_ the people, not _of_
them. His latter speeches, owing partly to his delivery, blamed as too
Asiatic, were less successful. To a reader the three seem much on the same
level. They are clever, but evidently set performances, and leave us no
ground to suppose that the poet's abandonment of a parliamentary career
was a serious loss to the nation.
On the 29th of February the first and second cantos of _Childe Harold_
appeared. An early copy was sent to Mrs. Leigh, with the inscription: "To
Augusta, my dearest sister and my best friend, who has ever loved me much
better than I deserved, this volume is presented by her father's son and
most affectionate brother, B." The book ran through seven editions in four
weeks. The effect of the first edition of Burns, and the sale of Scott's
_Lays_, are the only parallels in modern poetic literature to this
success. All eyes were suddenly fastened on the author, who let his satire
sleep, and threw politics aside, to be the romancer of his day and for two
years the darling of society. Previous to the publition, Mr. Moore
confesses to have gratified his lordship with the expression of the fear
that _Childe Harold_ was too good for the age. Its success was due to the
reverse being the truth. It was just on the level of its age. Its flowing
verse, defaced by rhymical faults perceptible only to finer ears, its
prevailing sentiment, occasional boldness relieved by pleasing platitudes,
its half affected rakishness, here and there elevated by a rush as of
morning air, and its frequent richness--not yet, as afterwards,
splendour--of description, were all appreciated by the fashionable London
of the Regency; while the comparatively mild satire, not keen enough to
scarify, only gave a more piquant flavour to the whole. Byron's genius,
yet in the green leaf, was not too far above the clever masses of
pleasure-loving manhood by which it was surrounded. It was natural that
the address on the reopening of Drury Lane theatre should be written by
"the world's new joy"--the first great English poet-peer; as natural as
that in his only published satire of the period he should inveigh against
almost the only amusement in which he could not share. The address was
written at the request of Lord Holland, when of some hundred competitive
pieces none had been found exactly suitable--a circumstance which gave
rise to the famous parodies entitled _The Rejected Addresses_--and it was
thought that the ultimate choice would conciliate all rivalry. The care
which Byron bestowed on the correction of the first draft of this piece,
is characteristic of his habit of writing off his poems at a gush, and
afterwards carefully elaborating them.
_The Waltz_ was published anonymously in April, 1813. It was followed in
May by the _Giaour_, the first of the flood of verse romances which,
during the three succeeding years, he poured forth with impetuous fluency,
and which were received with almost unrestrained applause. The plots and
sentiments and imagery are similar in them all. The Giaour steals the
mistress of Hassan, who revenges his honour by drowning her. The Giaour
escapes; returns, kills Hassan, and then goes to a monastery. In the
_Bride of Abydos_, published in the December of the same year, Giaffir
wants to marry his daughter Zuleika to Carasman Pasha. She runs off with
Selim, her reputed brother--in reality her cousin, and so at last her
legitimate lover. They are caught; he is slain in fight; she dies, to slow
music. In the _Corsair_, published January, 1814, Conrad, a pirate,
"linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes!" is beloved by Medora, who
on his predatory expeditions, sits waiting for him (like Hassan's and
Sisera's mother) in a tower. On one of these he attacks Seyd Pasha, and is
overborne by superior force; but Gulnare, a female slave of Seyd, kills
her master, and runs off with Conrad, who finds Medora dead and vanishes.
In _Lara_, the sequel to this--written in May and June, published in
August--a man of mystery appears in the Morea, with a page, Kaled. After
adventures worthy of Mrs. Radcliffe--from whose Schledoni the Giaour is
said to have been drawn--Lara falls in battle with his deadly foe,
Ezzelin, and turns out to be Conrad, while Kaled is of course Gulnare. The
_Hebrew Melodies_, written in December, 1814, are interesting, in
connexion with the author's early familiarity with the Old Testament, and
from the force and music that mark the best of them; but they can hardly
be considered an important contribution to the devotional verse of
England. The _Siege of Corinth_ and _Parisina_, composed after his
marriage in the summer and autumn of 1815, appeared in the following year.
The former is founded on the siege of the city, when the Turks took it
from Menotti; but our attention is concentrated on Alp the renegade,
another sketch from the same protoplastic ruffian, who leads on the Turks,
is in love with the daughter of the governor of the city, tries to save
her, but dies. The poem is frequently vigorous, but it ends badly.
_Parisina_, though unequal, is on the whole a poem of a higher order than
the others of the period. The trial scene exhibits some dramatic power,
and the shriek of the lady mingling with Ugo's funeral dirge lingers in
our ears, along with the convent bells--
In the grey square turret swinging,
With a deep sound, to and fro,
Heavily to the heart they go.
These romances belong to the same period of the author's poetic career as
the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_. They followed one another like
brilliant fireworks. They all exhibit a command of words, a sense of
melody, and a flow of rhythm and rhyme, which mastered Moore and even
Scott on their own ground. None of them are wanting in passages, as "He
who hath bent him o'er the dead," and the description of Alp leaning
against a column, which strike deeper than any verse of either of those
writers. But there is an air of melodrama in them all. Harmonious delights
of novel readers, they will not stand against the winnowing wind of
deliberate criticism. They harp on the same string, without the variations
of a Paganini. They are potentially endless reproductions of one phase of
an ill-regulated mind--the picture of the same quasi-melancholy vengeful
man, who knows no friend but a dog, and reads on the tombs of the great
only "the glory and the nothing of a name," the exile who cannot flee from
himself, "the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind," who has not loved
the world nor the world him,--
Whose heart was form'd for softness, warp'd by wrong,
Betray'd too early, and beguiled too long--
all this, _decies repetita_, grows into a weariness and vexation. Mr.
Carlyle harshly compares it to the screaming of a meat-jack. The reviewers
and the public of the time thought differently. Jeffrey, penitent for the
early _faux pas_ of his _Review_, as Byron remained penitent for his
answering assault, writes of _Lara_, "Passages of it may be put into
competition with anything that poetry has produced in point either of
pathos or energy." Moore--who afterwards wrote, not to Byron, that seven
devils had entered into _Manfred_--professes himself "enraptured with it."
Fourteen thousand copies of the _Corsair_ wore sold in a day. But hear the
author's own half-boast, half-apology: "_Lara_ I wrote while undressing
after coming home from balls and masquerades, in the year of revelry 1814.
The _Bride_ was written in four, the _Corsair_ in ten days. This I take to
he a humiliating confession, as it proves my own want of judgment in
publishing, and the public's in reading, things which cannot have stamina
for permanence."
The pecuniary profits accruing to Byron from his works began with _Lara_,
for which he received 700_l_. He had made over to Mr. Dallas, besides
other gifts to the same ungrateful recipient, the profits of _Harold_,
amounting to 600_l_, and of the _Corsair_, which brought 525_l_. The
proceeds of the _Giaour_ and the _Bride_ were also surrendered.
During this period, 1813-1816, he had become familiar with all the phases
of London society, "tasted their pleasures," and, towards the close, "felt
their decay." His associates in those years were of two classes--men of
the world, and authors. Fêted and courted in all quarters, he patronized
the theatres, became in 1815 a member of the Drury Lane Committee, "liked
the dandies," including Beau Brummell, and was introduced to the Regent.
Their interview, in June 1812, in the course of which the latter paid
unrestrained compliments to _Harold_ and the poetry of Scott, is naively
referred to by Mr. Moore "as reflecting even still more honour on the
Sovereign himself than on the two poets." Byron, in a different spirit,
writes to Lord Holland: "I have now great hope, in the event of Mr. Pye's
decease, of warbling truth at Court, like Mr. Mallet of indifferent
memory. Consider, one hundred marks a year! besides the wine and the
disgrace." We can hardly conceive the future author of the _Vision of
Judgment_ writing odes to dictation. He does not seem to have been much
fascinated with the first gentleman of Europe, whom at no distant date he
assailed in the terrible "Avatar," and left the laureateship to Mr.
Southey.
Among leaders in art and letters he was brought into more or less intimate
contact with Sir Humphry Davy, the Edgeworths, Sir James Mackintosh,
Colman the dramatic author, the older Kean, Monk Lewis, Grattan, Curran,
and Madame de Staël. Of a meeting of the last two he remarks, "It was like
the confluence of the Rhone and the Sâone, and they were both so ugly that
I could not help wondering how the best intellects of France and Ireland
could have taken up respectively such residences."
About this time a communication from Mr Murray in reference to the meeting
with the Regent led to a letter from Sir Walter Scott to Lord Byron, the
beginning of a life-long friendship, and one of the most pleasing pages of
biography. These two great men were for a season perpetually pitted
against one another, as the foremost competitors for literary favour. When
_Rokeby_ came out, contemporaneously with the _Giaour_, the undergraduates
of Oxford and Cambridge ran races to catch the first copies, and laid bets
as to which of the rivals would win. During the anti-Byronic fever of
1840-1860 they were perpetually contrasted as the representatives of the
manly and the morbid schools. A later sentimentalism has affected to
despise the work of both. The fact therefore that from an early period the
men themselves knew each other as they were, is worth illustrating.
Scott's letter, in which a generous recognition of the pleasure he had
derived from tho work of the English poet, was followed by a manly
remonstrance on the subject of the attack in the _Bards and Reviewers_,
drew from Byron in the following month (July 1812) an answer in the same
strain, descanting on the Prince's praises of the _Lay_ and _Marmion_, and
candidly apologizing for the "evil works of his nonage." "The satire," he
remarks, "was written when I was very young and very angry, and fully bent
on displaying my wrath and my wit; and now I am haunted by the ghosts of
my wholesale assertions." This, in turn, called forth another letter to
Byron eager for more of his verses, with a cordial invitation to
Abbotsford on the ground of Scotland's maternal claim on him, and asking
for information about Pegasus and Parnassus. After this the correspondence
continues with greater freedom, and the same display on either side of
mutual respect. When Scott says "the _Giaour_ is praised among our
mountains," and Byron returns "_Waverley_ is the best novel I have read,"
there is no suspicion of flattery--it is the interchange of compliments
between men,
Et cantare pares et respondere parati.
They talk in just the same manner to third parties. "I gave over writing
romances," says the elder, in the spirit of a great-hearted gentleman,"
because Byron beat me. He hits the mark, where I don't even pretend to
fledge my arrow. He has access to a stream of sentiment unknown to me."
The younger, on the other hand, deprecates the comparisons that were being
invidiously drawn between them. He presents his copy of the _Giaour_ to
Scott, with the phrase "To the monarch of Parnassus," and compares the
feeling of those who cavilled at his fame to that of the Athenians towards
Aristides. From those sentiments, he never swerves, recognizing to the
last the breadth of character of the most generous of his critics, and
referring to him, during his later years in Italy, as the Wizard and the
Ariosto of the North. A meeting was at length arranged between them. Scott
looked forward to it with anxious interest, humorously remarking that
Byron should say,--
Art thou the man whom men famed Grissell call?
And he reply--
Art thou the still more famed Tom Thumb the small?
They met in London during the spring of 1815. The following sentences are
from Sir Walter's account of it:--"Report had prepared me to meet a man
of peculiar habits and quick temper, and I had some doubts whether we were
likely to suit each other in society. I was most agreeably disappointed in
this respect. I found Lord Byron in the highest degree courteous, and even
kind. We met for an hour or two almost daily in Mr. Murray's drawing-room,
and found a great deal to say to each other. Our sentiments agreed a good
deal, except upon the subjects of religion and politics, upon neither of
which I was inclined to believe that Lord Byron entertained very fixed
opinions. On politics he used sometimes to express a high strain of what
is now called Liberalism; but it appeared to me that the pleasure it
afforded him as a vehicle of displaying his wit and satire against
individuals in office was at the bottom of this habit of thinking. At
heart, I would have termed Byron a patrician on principle. His reading did
not seem to me to have been very extensive. I remember repeating to him
the fine poem of Hardyknute, and some one asked me what I could possibly
have been telling Byron by which he was so much agitated. I saw him for
the last time in (September) 1815, after I returned from France; he dined
or lunched with me at Long's in Bond Street. I never saw him so full of
gaiety and good humour. The day of this interview was the most interesting
I ever spent. Several letters passed between us--one perhaps every half
year. Like the old heroes in Homer we exchanged gifts; I gave Byron a
beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the
redoubted Elfi Bey. But I was to play the part of Diomed in the _Iliad_,
for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral vase of silver,
full of dead men's bones, found within the land walls of Athens. He was
often melancholy, almost gloomy. When I observed him in this humour I used
either to wait till it went off of its own accord, or till some natural
and easy mode occurred of leading him into conversation, when the shadows
almost always left his countenance, like the mist arising from a
landscape. I think I also remarked in his temper starts of suspicion, when
he seemed to pause and consider whether there had not been a secret and
perhaps offensive meaning in something that was said to him. In this case
I also judged it best to let his mind, like a troubled spring, work itself
clear, which it did in a minute or two. A downright steadiness of manner
was the way to his good opinion. Will Rose, looking by accident at his
feet, saw him scowling furiously; but on his showing no consciousness, his
lordship resumed his easy manner. What I liked about him, besides his
boundless genius, was his generosity of spirit as well as of purse, and
his utter contempt of all the affectations of literature. He liked Moore
and me because, with all our other differences, we were both good-natured
fellows, not caring to maintain our dignity, enjoying the _mot-pour-rire_.
He wrote from impulse never from effort, and therefore I have always
reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time, and
of half a century before me. We have many men of high poetic talents, but
none of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural waters."
Scott, like all hale men of sound sense, regretted the almost fatal
incontinence which, in the year of his greatest private troubles, led his
friend to make a parade of them before the public. He speaks more than
once of his unhappy tendency to exhibit himself as the dying gladiator,
and even compares him to his peacock, screeching before his window because
he chooses to bivouack apart from his mate; but he read a copy of the
Ravenna diary without altering his view that his lordship was his own
worst maligner. Scott, says Lockhart, considered Byron the only poet of
transcendent talents we had had since Dryden. There is preserved a curious
record of his meeting with a greater poet than Dryden, but one whose
greatness neither he nor Scott suspected. Mr. Crabb Robinson reports
Wordsworth to have said, in Charles Lamb's chambers, about the year 1808,
"These reviewers put me out of patience. Here is a young man who has
written a volume of poetry; and these fellows, just because he is a lord,
set upon him. The young man will do something, if he goes on as he has
begun. But these reviewers seem to think that nobody may write poetry
unless he lives in a garret." Years after, Lady Byron, on being told this,
exclaimed, "Ah, if Byron had known that, he would never have attacked
Wordsworth. He went one day to meet him at dinner, and I said, 'Well, how
did the young poet get on with the old one?' 'Why, to tell the truth,'
said he, 'I had but one feeling from the beginning of the visit to the
end, and that was _reverence_.'" Similarly, he began by being on good
terms with Southey, and after a meeting at Holland House, wrote
enthusiastically of his prepossessing appearance.
Byron and the leaders of the so-called Lake School were, at starting,
common heirs of the revolutionary spirit; they were, either in their
social views or personal feelings, to a large extent influenced by the
most morbid, though in some respects the most magnetic, genius of modern
France, J.J. Rousseau; but their temperaments were in many respects
fundamentally diverse; and the pre-established discord between them ere
long began to make itself manifest in their following out widely divergent
paths. Wordsworth's return to nature had been preluded by Cowper; that of
Byron by Burns. The revival of the one ripened into a restoration of
simpler manners and old beliefs; the other was the spirit of the storm.
When they had both become recognized powers, neither appreciated the work
of the other. A few years after this date Byron wrote of Wordsworth, to a
common admirer of both: "I take leave to differ from you as freely as I
once agreed with you. His performances, since the _Lyrical Ballads_, are
miserably inadequate to the ability that lurks within him. There is,
undoubtedly, much natural talent spilt over the _Excursion_; but it is
rain upon rocks, where it stands and stagnates; or rain upon sand, where
it falls without fertilizing." This criticism with others in like strain,
was addressed to Mr. Leigh Hunt, to whom, in 1812, when enduring for
radicalism's sake a very comfortable incarceration, Byron had, in company
with Moore, paid a courteous visit.
Of the correspondence of this period--flippant, trenchant, or
sparkling--few portions are more calculated to excite a smile than the
record of his frequent resolutions made, reasseverated, and broken, to
have done with literature; even going the length on some occasions of
threatening to suppress his works, and, if possible, recall the existing
copies. He affected being a man of the world unmercifully, and had a real
delight in clever companions who assumed the same rôle. Frequent allusion
is made to his intercourse with Erskine and Sheridan: the latter he is
never tired of praising, as "the author of the best modern comedy (_School
for Scandal_), the best farce (_The Critic_), and the best oration (the
famous Begum speech) ever heard in this country." They spent many an
evening together, and probably cracked many a bottle. It is Byron who
tells the story of Sheridan being found in a gutter in a sadly incapable
state; and, on some one asking "Who is this?" stammering out
"Wilberforce." On one occasion he speaks of coming out of a tavern with
the dramatist, when they both found the staircase in a very cork-screw
condition: and elsewhere, of encountering a Mr. C----, who "had no notion
of meeting with a bon-vivant in a scribbler," and summed the poet's eulogy
with the phrase, "he drinks like a man." Hunt, the tattler, who observed
his lordship's habits in Italy, with the microscope of malice ensconced
within the same walls, makes it a charge against his host that he would
not drink like a man. Once for all it may be noted, that although there
was no kind of excess in which Byron, whether from bravado or inclination,
failed occasionally to indulge, he was never for any stretch of time given
over, like Burns, to what is technically termed intemperance. His head
does not seem to have been strong, and under the influence of stimulants
he may have been led to talk a great deal of his dangerous nonsense. But
though he could not say, with Wordsworth, that only once, at Cambridge,
had his brain been "excited by the fumes of wine," his prevailing sins
were in other directions.
CHAPTER VI.
MARRIAGE, AND FAREWELL TO ENGLAND.
"As for poets," says Scott, "I have seen all the best of my time and
country, and, though Burns had the most glorious eye imaginable, I never
thought any of them would come up to an artist's notion of the character,
except Byron. His countenance is a thing to dream of." Coleridge writes to
the same effect, in language even stronger. We have from all sides similar
testimony to the personal beauty which led the unhappiest of his devotees
to exclaim, "That pale face is my fate!"
Southern critics, as Chasles, Castelar, even Mazzini, have dealt leniently
with the poet's relations to the other sex; and Elze extends to him in
this regard the same excessive stretch of charity. "Dear Childe Harold,"
exclaims the German professor, "was positively besieged by women. They
have, in truth, no right to complain of him: from his childhood he had
seen them on their worst side." It is the casuistry of hero-worship to
deny that Byron was unjust to women, not merely in isolated instances, but
in his prevailing views of their character and claims. "I regard them," he
says, in a passage only distinguished from others by more extravagant
petulance, "as very pretty but inferior creatures, who are as little in
their place at our tables as they would be in our council chambers. The
whole of the present system with regard to the female sex is a remnant of
the barbarism of the chivalry of our forefathers. I look on them as
grown-up children; but, like a foolish mamma, I am constantly the slave of
one of them. The Turks shut up their women, and are much happier; give a
woman a looking-glass and burnt almonds, and she will be content."
In contrast with this, we have the moods in which he drew his pictures of
Angiolina, and Haidee, and Aurora Raby, and wrote the invocations to the
shade of Astarte, and his letters in prose and verse to Augusta; but the
above passage could never have been written by Chaucer, or Spenser, or
Shakespeare, or Shelley. The class whom he was reviling seemed, however,
during "the day of his destiny," bent on confirming his judgment by the
blindness of their worship. His rank and fame, the glittering splendour of
his verse, the romance of his travels, his picturesque melancholy and
affectation of mysterious secrets, combined with the magic of his presence
to bewitch and bewilder them. The dissenting malcontents, condemned as
prudes and blues, had their revenge. Generally, we may say that women who
had not written books adored Byron; women who had written or were writing
books distrusted, disliked, and made him a moral to adorn their tales,
often to point their fables with. He was by the one set caressed and
spoilt, and "beguiled too long;" by the other, "betrayed too late." The
recent memoirs of Frances Ann Kemble present a curious record of the
process of passing from one extreme to the other. She dwells on the
fascination exerted over her mind by the first reading of his poetry, and
tells how she "fastened on the book with a grip like steel," and carried
it off and hid it under her pillow; how it affected her "like an evil
potion," and stirred her whole being with a tempest of excitement, till
finally she, with equal weakness, flung it aside, "resolved to read that
grand poetry no more, and broke through the thraldom of that powerful
spell." The confession brings before us a type of the transitions of the
century, on its way from the Byronic to the anti-Byronic fever, of which
later state Mrs. Norton and Miss Martineau are among the most pronounced
representatives.
Byron's garrulity with regard to those delicate matters on which men of
more prudence or chivalry are wont to set the seal of silence, has often
the same practical effect as reticence; for he talks so much at
large--every page of his Journal being, by his own admission, apt to
"confute and abjure its predecessor"--that we are often none the wiser.
Amid a mass of conjecture, it is manifest that during the years between
his return from Greece and final expatriation (1811-1816), including the
whole period of his social glory--though not yet of his solid fame--he was
lured into liaisons of all sorts and shades. Some, now acknowledged as
innocent, were blared abroad by tongues less skilled in pure invention
than in distorting truth. On others, as commonplaces of a temperament "all
meridian," it were waste of time to dwell. Byron rarely put aside a
pleasure in his path; but his passions were seldom unaccompanied by
affectionate emotions, genuine while they lasted. The verses to the memory
of a lost love veiled as "Thyrza," of moderate artistic merit, were not,
as Moore alleges, mere plays of imagination, but records of a sincere
grief.[1] Another intimacy exerted so much influence on this phase of the
poet's career, that to pass it over would be like omitting Vanessa's name
from the record of Swift. Lady Caroline Lamb, granddaughter of the first
Earl Spencer, was one of those few women of our climate who, by their
romantic impetuosity, recall the "children of the sun." She read Burns in
her ninth year, and in her thirteenth idealized William Lamb (afterwards
Lord Melbourne) as a statue of Liberty. In her nineteenth (1805) she
married him, and lived for some years, during which she was a reigning
belle and toast, a domestic life only marred by occasional eccentricities.
Rogers, whom in a letter to Lady Morgan she numbers among her lovers, said
she ought to know the new poet, who was three years her junior, and the
introduction took place in March, 1812. After the meeting, she wrote in
her journal, "Mad--bad--and dangerous to know;" but, when the fashionable
Apollo called at Melbourne House, she "flew to beautify herself." Flushed
by his conquest, he spent a great part of the following year in her
company, during which time the apathy or self-confidence of the husband
laughed at the worship of the hero. "Conrad" detailed his travels and
adventures, interested her, by his woes, dictated her amusements, invited
her guests, and seems to have set rules to the establishment. "Medora," on
the other hand, made no secret of her devotion, declared that they were
affinities, and offered him her jewels. But after the first excitement, he
began to grow weary of her talk about herself, and could not praise her
indifferent verses: "he grew moody, and she fretful, when their mutual
egotisms jarred." Byron at length concurred in her being removed for a
season to her father's house in Ireland, on which occasion he wrote one of
his glowing farewell letters. When she came back, matters were little
better. The would-be Juliet beset the poet with renewed advances, on one
occasion penetrating to his rooms in the disguise of a page, on another
threatening to stab herself with a pair of scissors, and again, developing
into a Medea, offering her gratitude to any one who would kill him. "The
'Agnus' is furious," he writes to Hodgson, in February, 1813, in one of
the somewhat ungenerous bursts to which he was too easily provoked. "You
can have no idea of the horrible and absurd things she has said and done
since (really from the best motives) I withdrew my homage.... The
business of last summer I broke off, and now the amusement of the gentle
fair is writing letters literally threatening my life." With one member of
the family, Lady Melbourne, Mr. Lamb's mother, and sister of Sir Ralph
Milbanke, he remained throughout on terms of pleasant intimacy. He
appreciated the talent and sense, and was ready to profit by the
experience and tact of "the cleverest of women." But her well-meant advice
had unfortunate results, for it was on her suggestion that he became a
suitor for the hand of her niece, Miss Milbanke. Byron first proposed to
this lady in 1813; his offer was refused, but so graciously that they
continued to correspond on friendly, which gradually grew into intimate
terms, and his second offer, towards the close of the following year, was
accepted.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Trelawny says that Thyrza was a cousin, but that on
this subject Byron was always reticent. Mr. Minto, as we have seen,
associates her with the disguised girl of 1807-8.]
After a series of vain protests, and petulant warnings against her cousin
by marriage, who she said was punctual at church, and learned, and knew
statistics, but was "not for Conrad, no, no, no!" Lady Caroline lapsed
into an attitude of fixed hostility; and shortly after the crash came, and
her predictions were realized, vented her wrath in the now almost
forgotten novel of _Glenarvon_, in which some of Byron's real features
were represented in conjunction with many fantastic additions. Madame de
Staël was kind enough to bring a copy of the book before his notice when
they met on the Lake of Geneva, but he seems to have been less moved by it
than by most attacks. We must however, bear in mind his own admission in a
parallel case. "I say I am perfectly calm; I am, nevertheless, in a fury."
Over the sad vista of the remaining years of the unhappy lady's life we
need not linger. During a considerable part of it she appears hovering
about the thin line that separates some kinds of wit and passion from
madness; writing more novels, burning her hero's effigy and letters, and
then clamouring for a lock of his hair, or a sight of his portrait;
separated from, and again reconciled to, a husband to whose magnanimous
forbearance and compassion she bears testimony to the last, comparing
herself to Jane Shore; attempting Byronic verses, loudly denouncing and
yet never ceasing inwardly to idolize, the man whom she regarded as her
betrayer, perhaps only with justice in that he had unwittingly helped to
overthrow her mental balance. After eight years of this life, lit up here
and there by gleams of social brilliancy, we find her carriage, on the
12th of July, 1824, suddenly confronted by a funeral. On hearing that the
remains of Byron were being carried to the tomb, she shrieked, and
fainted. Her health finally sank, and her mind gave way under this shock;
but she lingered till January, 1828, when she died, after writing a calm
letter to her husband, and bequeathing the poet's miniature to her friend,
Lady Morgan.
"I have paid some of my debts, and contracted others," Byron writes to
Moore, on September 15th, 1814; "but I have a few thousand pounds which I
can't spend after my heart in this climate, and so I shall go back to the
south. I want to see Venice and the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses, and look
at the coast of Greece from Italy. All this however depends upon an event
which may or may not happen. Whether it will I shall probably know
tomorrow, and if it does I can't well go abroad at present." "A wife," he
had written, in the January of the same year, "would be my salvation;" but
a marriage entered upon in such a flippant frame of mind could, scarcely
have been other than disastrous. In the autumn of the year we are told
that a friend,[2] observing how cheerless was the state both of his mind
and prospects, advised him to marry, and after much discussion he
consented, naming to his correspondent Miss Milbanke. To this his adviser
objected, remarking that she had, at present, no fortune, and that his
embarrassed affairs would not allow him to marry without one, etc.
Accordingly, he agreed that his friend should write a proposal to another
lady, which was done. A refusal arrived as they were one morning sitting
together. "'You see,' said Lord Byron, 'that after all Miss Milbanke is to
be the person,' and wrote on the moment. His friend, still remonstrating
against his choice, took up the letter; but, on reading it, observed,
'Well, really, this is a very pretty letter; it is a pity it should not
go.' 'Then it _shall_ go,' said Lord Byron, and, in so saying, sealed and
sent off this fiat of his fate." The incident seems cut from a French
novel; but so does the whole strange story--one apparently insoluble
enigma in an otherwise only too transparent life. On the arrival of the
lady's answer he was seated at dinner, when his gardener came in, and
presented him with his mother's wedding-ring, lost many years before, and
which had just been found, buried in the mould beneath her window. Almost
at the same moment the letter arrived; and Byron exclaimed, "If it
contains a consent (which it did), I will be married with this very ring."
He had the highest anticipations of his bride, appreciating her "talents,
and excellent qualities;" and saying, "she is so good a person that I wish
I was a better." About the same date he writes to various friends in the
good spirits raised by his enthusiastic reception from the Cambridge
undergraduates, when in the course of the same month he went to the Senate
House to give his vote for a Professor of Anatomy.
[Footnote 2: Doubtless Moore himself, who tells the story.]
The most constant and best of those friends was his sister, Augusta Leigh,
whom, from the death of Miss Chaworth to his own, Byron, in the highest
and purest sense of the word, loved more than any other human being.
Tolerant of errors, which she lamented, and violences in which she had no
share, she had a touch of their common family pride, most conspicuous in
an almost cat-like clinging to their ancestral home. Her early published
letters are full of regrets about the threatened sale of Newstead, on the
adjournment of which, when the first purchaser had to pay 25,000_l_. for
breaking his bargain, she rejoices, and over the consummation of which she
mourns, in the manner of Milton's Eve--
Must I then leave thee, Paradise?
In all her references to the approaching marriage there are blended notes
of hope and fear. In thanking Hodgson for his kind congratulations, she
trusts it will secure her brother's happiness. Later she adds her
testimony to that of all outsiders at this time, as to the graces and
genuine worth of the object of his choice. After the usual preliminaries,
the ill-fated pair were united, at Seaham House, on the 2nd of January,
1815. Byron was married like one walking in his sleep. He trembled like a
leaf, made the wrong responses, and almost from the first seems to have
been conscious of his irrevocable mistake.
I saw him stand
Before an altar with a gentle bride:
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The starlight of his boyhood. He could see
Not that which was--but that which should have been--
But the old mansion, the accustom'd hall.
And she who was his destiny came back,
And thrust herself between him and the light.
Here we have faint visions of Miss Chaworth, mingling with later memories.
In handing the bride into the carriage he said, "Miss Milbanke, are you
ready?"--a mistake said to be of evil omen. Byron never really loved his
wife; and though he has been absurdly accused of marrying for revenge, we
must suspect that he married in part for a settlement. On the other hand,
it is not unfair to say that she was fascinated by a name, and inspired by
the philanthropic zeal of reforming a literary Corsair. Both were
disappointed. Miss Milbanke's fortune was mainly settled on herself; and
Byron, in spite of plentiful resolutions gave little sign of reformation.
For a considerable time their life, which, after the "treacle moon," as
the bridegroom called it, spent at Halnaby, near Darlington, was divided
between residence at Seaham and visits to London, seemed to move smoothly.
In a letter, evidently mis-dated the 15th December, Mrs. Leigh writes to
Hodgson: "I have every reason to think that my beloved B. is very happy
and comfortable. I hear constantly from him and _his rib_. It appears to
me that Lady B. sets about making him happy in the right way. I had many
fears. Thank God that they do not appear likely to be realized. In short,
there seems to me to be but one drawback to all our felicity, and that,
alas, is the disposal of dear Newstead. I never shall feel reconciled to
the loss of that sacred revered Abbey. The thought makes me more
melancholy than perhaps the loss of an inanimate object ought to do. Did
you ever hear that _landed property_, the GIFT OF THE CROWN, could not be
sold? Lady B. writes me word that she never saw her father and mother so
happy; that she believes the latter would go to the bottom of the sea
herself to find fish for B.'s dinner, &c." Augusta Ada was born in London
on the 10th of December, 1815. During the next months a few cynical
mutterings are the only interruptions to an ominous silence; but these
could be easily explained by the increasing embarrassment of the poet's
affairs, and the importunity of creditors, who in the course of the last
half-year had served seven or eight executions on his house and furniture.
Their expectations were raised by exaggerated reports of his having
married money; and by a curious pertinacity of pride he still declined,
even when he had to sell his books, to accept advances from his publisher.
In January the storm which had been secretly gathering suddenly broke. On
the 15th, i.e. five weeks after her daughter's birth, Lady Byron left home
with the infant to pay a visit, as had been agreed, to her own family at
Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire. On the way she despatched to her husband
a tenderly playful letter, which has been often quoted. Shortly afterwards
he was informed--first by her father, and then by herself--that she did
not intend ever to return to him. The accounts of their last interview, as
in the whole evidence bearing on the affair, not only differ but flatly
contradict one another. On behalf of Lord Byron it is asserted, that his
wife, infuriated by his offering some innocent hospitality on occasion of
bad weather to a respectable actress, Mrs. Mardyn, who had called on him
about Drury Lane business, rushed into the room exclaiming, "I leave you
for ever"--and did so. According to another story, Lady Byron, finding him
with a friend, and observing him to be annoyed at her entrance, said, "Am
I in your way, Byron?" whereupon he answered, "Damnably." Mrs. Leigh,
Hodgson, Moore, and others, did everything that mutual friends could do to
bring about the reconciliation for which Byron himself professed to be
eager, but in vain; and in vain the effort was renewed in later years. The
wife was inveterately bent on a separation, of the causes of which the
husband alleged he was never informed, and with regard to which as long as
he lived she preserved a rigid silence.
For some time after the event Byron spoke of his wife with at least
apparent generosity. Rightly or wrongly, he blamed her parents, and her
maid--Mrs. Clermont, the theme of his scathing but not always dignified
"Sketch;" but of herself he wrote (March 8, 1816), "I do not believe that
there ever was a brighter, and a kinder, or a more amiable or agreeable
being than Lady Byron. I never had nor can have any reproach to make to
her, when with me." Elsewhere he adds, that he would willingly, if he had
the chance, "renew his marriage on a lease of twenty years." But as time
passed and his overtures were rejected, his patience gave way, and in some
of his later satires he even broke the bounds of courtesy. Lady Byron's
letters at the time of the separation, especially those first published in
the _Academy_ of July 19, 1879, are to Mrs. Leigh always affectionate and
confidential, often pathetic, asking her advice "in this critical moment,"
and protesting that, "independent of malady, she does not think of the
past with any spirit of resentment, and scarcely with the sense of
injury." In her communications to Mr. Hodgson, on the other hand--the
first of almost the same date, the second a few weeks later--she writes
with intense bitterness, stating that her action was due to offences which
she could only condone on the supposition of her husband's insanity, and
distinctly implying that she was in danger of her life. This supposition
having been by her medical advisers pronounced erroneous, she felt, in the
words only too pungently recalled in _Don Juan_, that her duty both to man
and God prescribed her course of action. Her playful letter on leaving she
seems to defend on the ground of the fear of personal violence. Till Lord
Byron's death the intimacy between his wife and sister remained unbroken;
through the latter he continued to send numerous messages to the former,
and to his child, who became a ward in Chancery; but at a later date it
began to cool. On the appearance of Lady Byron's letter, in answer to
Moore's first volume, Augusta speaks of it as "a despicable tirade," feels
"disgusted at such unfeeling conduct," and thinks "nothing can justify any
one in defaming the dead." Soon after 1830 they had an open rupture on a
matter of business, which was never really healed, though the then
Puritanic precisian sent a message of relenting to Mrs. Leigh on her
death-bed (1851).
The charge or charges which, during her husband's life, Lady Byron from
magnanimity or other motive reserved, she is ascertained after his death
to have delivered with important modifications to various persons, with
little regard to their capacity for reading evidence or to their
discretion. On one occasion her choice of a confidante was singularly
unfortunate. "These," wrote Lord Byron in his youth, "these are the first
tidings that have ever sounded like fame in my ears--to be redde on the
banks of the Ohio." Strangely enough, it is from the country of
Washington, whom the poet was wont to reverence as the purest patriot of
the modern world, that in 1869 there emanated the hideous story which
scandalized both continents, and ultimately recoiled on the retailer of
the scandal. The grounds of the reckless charge have been weighed by those
who have wished it to prove false, and by those who have wished it to
prove true, and found wanting. The chaff has been beaten in every way and
on all sides, without yielding an ounce of grain; and it were ill-advised
to rake up the noxious dust that alone remains. From nothing left on
record by either of the two persons most intimately concerned can we
derive any reliable information. It is plain that Lady Byron was during
the later years of her life the victim of hallucinations, and that if
Byron knew the secret, which he denies, he did not choose to tell it,
putting off Captain Medwin and others with absurdities, as that "He did
not like to see women eat," or with commonplaces, as "The causes, my dear
sir, were too simple to be found out."
Thomas Moore, who had the Memoirs[3] supposed to have thrown light on the
mystery, in the full knowledge of Dr. Lushington's judgment and all the
gossip of the day, professes to believe that "the causes of disunion did
not differ from those that loosen the links of most such marriages," and
writes several pages on the trite theme that great genius is incompatible
with domestic happiness. Negative instances abound to modify this sweeping
generalization; but there is a kind of genius, closely associated with
intense irritability, which it is difficult to subject to the most
reasonable yoke; and of this sort was Byron's. His valet, Fletcher, is
reported to have said that "Any woman could manage my lord, except my
lady;" and Madame De Staël, on reading the _Farewell_, that "She would
have been glad to have been in Lady Byron's place." But it may be doubted
if Byron would have made a good husband to any woman; his wife and he were
even more than usually ill-assorted. A model of the proprieties, and a
pattern of the learned philanthropy of which in her sex he was wont to
make a constant butt, she was no fit consort for that "mens insana in
corpore insano." What could her stolid temperament conjecture of a man
whom she saw, in one of his fits of passion, throwing a favourite watch
under the fire, and grinding it to pieces with a poker? Or how could her
conscious virtue tolerate the recurring irregularities which he was
accustomed, not only to permit himself, but to parade? The harassment of
his affairs stimulated his violence, till she was inclined to suspect him
to be mad. Some of her recently printed letters--as that to Lady Anne
Barnard, and the reports of later observers of her character--as William
Howitt, tend to detract from the earlier tributes to her consistent
amiability, and confirm our ideas of the incompatibility of the pair. It
must have been trying to a poet to be asked by his wife, impatient of his
late hours, when he was going to leave off writing verses; to be told he
had no real enthusiasm; or to have his desk broken open, and its
compromising contents sent to the persons for whom they were least
intended. The smouldering elements of discontent may have been fanned by
the gossip of dependants, or the officious zeal of relatives, and kindled
into a jealous flame by the ostentation of regard for others beyond the
circle of his home. Lady Byron doubtless believed some story which, when
communicated to her legal advisers, led them to the conclusion that the
mere fact of her believing it made reconciliation impossible; and the
inveterate obstinacy which lurked beneath her gracious exterior, made her
cling through life to the substance--not always to the form, whatever that
may have been--of her first impressions. Her later letters to Mrs. Leigh,
as that called forth by Moore's _Life_, are certainly as open to the
charge of self-righteousness, as those of her husband's are to
self-disparagement.
[Footnote 3: Captain Trelawney, however, doubts if he ever read them.]
Byron himself somewhere says, "Strength of endurance is worth all the
talent in the world." "I love the virtues that I cannot share." His own
courage was all active; he had no power of sustained endurance. At a time
when his proper refuge was silence, and his prevailing sentiment--for he
admits he was somehow to blame--should have been remorse, he foolishly
vented his anger and his grief in verses, most of them either peevish or
vindictive, and some of which he certainly permitted to be published. "Woe
to him," exclaims Voltaire, "who says all he could on any subject!" Woe to
him, he might have added, who says anything at all on the subject of his
domestic troubles! The poet's want of reticence at this crisis started a
host of conjectures, accusations, and calumnies, the outcome, in some
degree at least, of the rancorous jealousy of men of whose adulation he
was weary. Then began that burst of British virtue on which Macaulay has
expatiated, and at which the social critics of the continent have laughed.
Cottle, Cato, Oxoniensis, Delia, and Styles, were let loose, and they
anticipated the _Saturday_ and the _Spectator_ of 1869, so that the latter
might well have exclaimed, "Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt." Byron
was accused of every possible and impossible vice, he was compared to
Sardanapalus, Nero, Tiberius, the Duke of Orleans, Heliogabalus, and
Satan--all the most disreputable persons mentioned in sacred and profane
history; his benevolences were maligned, his most disinterested actions
perverted. Mrs. Mardyn, the actress, was on his account, on one occasion,
driven off the public stage. He was advised not to go to the theatres,
lest he should be hissed; nor to Parliament, lest he should be insulted.
On the very day of his departure a friend told him that he feared violence
from mobs assembling at the door of his carriage. "Upon what grounds," the
poet writes, in a trenchant survey of the circumstances, in August, 1819,
"the public formed their opinion, I am not aware; but it was general, and
it was decisive. Of me and of mine they knew little, except that I had
written poetry, was a nobleman, bad married, became a father, and was
involved in differences with my wife and her relatives--no one knew why,
because the persons complaining refused to state their grievances.
"The press was active and scurrilous;.. my name--which had been a
knightly or a noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for
William the Norman--was tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered and
muttered and murmured was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England
was unfit for me. I withdrew; but this was not enough. In other
countries--in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue
depth of the lakes--I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I
crossed the mountains, but it was the same; so I went a little farther,
and settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who
betakes himself to the waters."
On the 16th of April, 1816, shortly before his departure, he wrote to Mr.
Rogers: "My sister is now with me, and leaves town to-morrow. We shall not
meet again for some time, at all events, if ever (it was their final
meeting), and under these circumstances I trust to stand excused to you
and Mr. Sheridan for being unable to wait upon him this evening." In all
this storm and stress, Byron's one refuge was in the affection which rises
like a well of purity amid the passions of his turbid life.
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wild waste there still is a tree;
And a bird in the solitude singing,
That speaks to my spirit of thee.
The fashionable world was tired of its spoilt child, and he of it. Hunted
out of the country, bankrupt in purse and heart, he left it, never to
return; but he left it to find fresh inspiration by the "rushing of the
arrowy Rhone," and under Italian skies to write the works which have
immortalized his name.
DESCENT OF LADY BYRON AND LADY C. LAMB
Earl Spencer. Sir Ralph Milbanke. Viscount Wentworth
| _________________|_______________ |
| | | |
Henrietta Elizabeth (Lady Melbourne) Sir Ralph + Judith Noel
Frances. | m. Viscount Melbourne. |
+ | |
F. Ponsonby | Lord Byron + Anna Isabella.
(Earl of | |
Bessborough). | Augusta Ada.
| |
| |
Lady Caroline + William Lamb.
DESCENT OF ALLEGRA
William Godwin.
Married 1st + Mary Woolstonecraft. 2nd Mrs. Clairmont.
| She had by previous |
| alliance |
| | Claire Claremont + Byron.
P. B. Shelley + Mary Godwin Fanny Imlay. |
Allegra.
CHAPTER VII
LIFE ABROAD--SWITZERLAND TO VENICE--THIRD PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP.--CHILDE
HAROLD, III., IV.--MANFRED.
On the 25th of April, 1816, Byron embarked for Ostend. From the "burning
marl" of the staring streets he planted his foot again on the dock with a
genuine exultation.
Once more upon the waters, yet once more,
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows her rider. Welcome to the roar!
But he brought with him a relic of English extravagance, sotting out on
his land travels in a huge coach, copied from that of Napoleon taken at
Genappe, and being accompanied by Fletcher, Rushton, Berger, a Swiss, and
Polidori, a physician of Italian descent, son of Alfieri's secretary, a
man of some talent but indiscreet. A question arises as to the source from
which he obtained the means for these and subsequent luxuries, in striking
contrast with Goldsmith's walking-stick, knapsack, and flute. Byron's
financial affairs are almost inextricably confused. We can, for instance,
nowhere find a clear statement of the result of the suit regarding the
Rochdale Estates, save that he lost it before the Court of Exchequer, and
that his appeal to the House of Lords was still unsettled in 1822. The
sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman in 1818, for 90,000 _l_., went mostly
to pay off mortgages and debts. In April, 1819, Mrs. Leigh writes, after a
last sigh over this event:--"Sixty thousand pounds was secured by his
(Byron's) marriage settlement, the interest of which he receives for life,
and which ought to make him very comfortable." This is unfortunately
decisive of the fact that he did not in spirit adhere to the resolution
expressed to Moore never to touch a farthing of his wife's money, though
we may accept his statement to Medwin, that he twice repaid the dowry of
10,000 _l_. brought to him at the marriage, as in so far diminishing the
obligation. None of the capital of Lady Byron's family came under his
control till 1822, when, on the death of her mother, Lady Noel, Byron
arranged the appointment of referees, Sir Francis Burdett on his behalf,
Lord Dacre on his wife's. The result was an equal division of a property
worth about 7000 _l_ a year. While in Italy the poet received besides
about 10,000 _l_ for his writings--4000 _l_. being given for _Childe
Harold_ (iii., iv.), and _Manfred_. "Ne pas être dupe" was one of his
determinations, and, though he began by caring little for making money, he
was always fond of spending it. "I tell you it is too much," he said to
Murray, in returning a thousand guineas for the _Corinth_ and _Partsina_.
Hodgson, Moore, Bland, Thomas Ashe, the family of Lord Falkland, the
British Consul at Venice, and a host of others, were ready to testify to
his superb munificence. On the other hand, he would stint his pleasures,
or his benevolences, which were among them, for no one; and when he found
that to spend money he had to make it, he saw neither rhyme nor reason in
accepting less than his due. In 1817 he begins to dun Murray, declaring,
with a frankness in which we can find no fault, "You offer 1500 guineas
for the new canto (_C. H_., iv.). I won't take it. I ask 2500 guineas for
it, which you will either give or not, as you think proper." During the
remaining years of his life he grew more and more exact, driving hard
bargains for his houses, horses, and boats, and fitting himself, had he
lived, to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in the newly-liberated State,
from which he took a bond securing a fair interest for his loan. He made
out an account in _£. s. d_. against the ungrateful Dallas, and when Leigh
Hunt threatened to sponge upon him he got a harsh reception; but there is
nothing to countenance the view that Byron was ever really possessed by
the "good old gentlemanly vice" of which lie wrote. The Skimpoles and
Chadbands of the world are always inclined to talk of filthy lucre: it is
equally a fashion of really lavish people to boast that they are good men
of business.
We have only a few glimpses of Byron's progress. At Brussels the
Napoleonic coach was set aside for a more serviceable caleche. During his
stay in the Belgian capital lie paid a visit to the scene of Waterloo,
wrote the famous stanzas beginning, "Stop, for thy tread is on an empire's
dust!" and in unpatriotic prose, recorded his impressions of a plain which
appeared to him to "want little but a better cause" to make it vie in
interest with those of Platea and Marathon.
The rest of his journey lay up the Rhine to Basle, thence to Berne,
Lausanne, and Geneva, where he settled for a time at the Hôtel Secheron,
on the western shore of the lake. Here began the most interesting literary
relationship of his life, for here he first came in contact with the
impassioned Ariel of English verse, Percy Bysshe Shelley. They lived in
proximity after they left the hotel, Shelley's headquarters being at Mont
Alégre, and Byron's for the remainder of the summer at the Villa Diodati;
and their acquaintance rapidly ripened into an intimacy which, with some
interruptions, extended over the six remaining years of their joint lives.
The place for an estimate of their mutual influence belongs to the time of
their Italian partnership. Meanwhile, we hear of them mainly as
fellow-excursionists about the lake, which on one occasion departing from
its placid poetical character, all but swallowed them both, along with
Hobhouse, off Meillerie. "The boat," says Byron, "was nearly wrecked near
the very spot where St. Preux and Julia were in danger of being drowned.
It would have been classical to have been lost there, but not agreeable. I
ran no risk, being so near the rocks and a good swimmer; but our party
wore wet and incommoded." The only anxiety of Shelley, who could not swim,
was, that no one else should risk a life for his. Two such revolutionary
or such brave poets were, in all probability, never before nor since in a
storm in a boat together. During this period Byron complains of being
still persecuted. "I was in a wretched state of health and worse spirits
when I was in Geneva; but quiet and the lake--better physicians than
Polidori--soon set me up. I never led so moral a life as during my
residence in that country, but I gained no credit by it. On the contrary,
there is no story so absurd that they did not invent at my cost. I was
watched by glasses on the opposite side of the lake, and by glasses, too,
that must have had very distorted optics. I was waylaid in my evening
drives. I believe they looked upon me as a man-monster." Shortly after his
arrival in Switzerland he contracted an intimacy with Miss Clairmont, a
daughter of Godwin's second wife, and consequently a connexion by marriage
of the Shelleys, with whom she was living, which resulted in the birth of
a daughter, Allegra, at Great Marlow, in February, 1817. The noticeable
events of the following two months are a joint excursion to Chamouni, and
a visit in July to Madame de Staël at Coppet, in the course of which he
met Frederick Schlegel. During a wet week, when the families were reading
together some German ghost stories, an idea occurred of imitating them,
the main result of which was Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_. Byron
contributed to the scheme a fragment of _The Vampire_, afterwards
completed and published in the name of his patron by Polidori. The
eccentricities of this otherwise amiable physician now began to give
serious annoyance; his jealousy of Shelley grew to such a pitch that it
resulted in the doctor's giving a challenge to the poet, at which the
latter only laughed; but Byron, to stop further outbreaks of the kind,
remarked, "Recollect that, though Shelley has scruples about duelling, I
have none, and shall be at all times ready to take his place." Polidori
had ultimately to be dismissed, and, after some years of vicissitude,
committed suicide.
The Shelleys left for England in September, and Byron made an excursion
with Hobhouse through the Bernese Oberland. They went by the Col de Jaman
and the Simmenthal to Thun; then up the valley to the Staubbach, which he
compares to the tail of the pale horse in the Apocalypse--not a very
happy, though a striking comparison. Thence they proceeded over the
Wengern to Grindelwald and the Rosenlau glacier; then back by Berne,
Friburg, and Yverdun to Diodati. The following passage in reference to
this tour may be selected as a specimen of his prose description, and of
the ideas of mountaineering before the days of the Alpine Club:--
"Before ascending the mountain, went to the torrent again, the sun upon it
forming a rainbow of the lower part, of all colours but principally purple
and gold, the bow moving as you move. I never saw anything like this; it
is only in the sunshine.... Left the horses, took off my coat, and went to
the summit, 7000 English feet above the level of the sea, and 5000 feet
above the valley we left in the morning. On one side our view comprised
the Jungfrau, with all her glaciers; then the Dent d'Argent, shining like
truth; then the Eighers and the Wetterhorn. Heard the avalanches falling
every five minutes. From where we stood on the Wengern Alp we had all
these in view on one side; on the other, the clouds rose up from the
opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices, like the foam of the
ocean of hell during a spring tide; it was white and sulphury, and
immeasurably deep in appearance.... Arrived at the Grindelwald; dined;
mounted again, and rode to the higher glacier--like a frozen hurricane;
starlight beautiful, but a devil of a path. Passed whole woods of withered
pines, all withered; trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless; done
by a single winter. Their appearance reminded me of me and my family."
Students of _Manfred_ will recognize whole sentences, only slightly
modified in its verse. Though Byron talks with contempt of authorship,
there is scarce a fine phrase in his letters or journal which is not
pressed into the author's service. He turns his deepest griefs to artistic
gain, and uses five or six times for literary purposes the expression
which seems to have dropped from him naturally about his household gods
being shivered on his hearth. His account of this excursion concludes with
a passage equally characteristic of his melancholy and incessant
self-consciousness:--
"In the weather for this tour, I have been very fortunate.... I was
disposed to be pleased. I am a lover of nature, &c.... But in all this the
recollection of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home
desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me
here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the
avalanche, the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the
cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled
me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the
glory around, above, and beneath me."
Such egotism in an idle man would only provoke impatience; but Byron was,
during the whole of this period, almost preternaturally active. Detained
by bad weather at Ouchy for two days (Juno 26, 27), he wrote the _Prisoner
of Chillon_, which, with its noble introductory sonnet on Bonnivard, in
some respects surpasses any of his early romances. The opening lines,--
Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls;
A thousand feet in depth below,
Its massy waters meet and flow,--
bring before us in a few words the conditions of a hopeless bondage. The
account of the prisoner himself, and of the lingering deaths of the
brothers; the first frenzy of the survivor, and the desolation which
succeeds it--
I only loved: I only drew
The accursed breath of dungeon dew,--
the bird's song breaking on the night of his solitude; his growing
enamoured of despair, and regaining his freedom with a sigh, are all
strokes from a master hand. From the same place, at the same date, he
announces to Murray the completion of the third canto of _Childe Harold_.
The productiveness of July is portentous. During that month he wrote the
_Monody on Sheridan, The Dream, Churchill's Grave_, the _Sonnet to Lake
Leman, Could I remount the River of my Years_, part of _Manfred,
Prometheus_, the _Stanzas to Augusta_, beginning,
My sister! My sweet sister! If a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine;
and the terrible dream of _Darkness_, which at least in the ghastly power
of the close, where the survivors meet by the lurid light of a dim altar
fire, and die of each other's hideousness, surpasses Campbell's _Last
Man_[1]. At Lausanne the poet made a pilgrimage to the haunts of Gibbon,
broke a sprig from his acacia-tree, and carried off some rose leaves from
his garden. Though entertaining friends, among them Mr. M.G. Lewis and
Scrope Davies, he systematically shunned "the locust swarm of English
tourists," remarking on their obtrusive platitudes; as when he heard one
of them at Chamouni inquire, "Did you ever see anything more truly rural?"
Ultimately he got tired of the Calvinistic Genevese--one of whom is said
to have swooned as he entered the room--and early in October set out with
Hobhouse for Italy. They crossed the Simplon, and proceeded by the Lago
Maggiore to Milan, admiring the pass, but slighting the somewhat hothouse
beauties of the Borromean Islands. From Milan he writes, pronouncing its
cathedral to be only a little inferior to that of Seville, and delighted
with "a correspondence, all original and amatory, between Lucretia Borgia
and Cardinal Bembo." He secured a lock of the golden hair of the Pope's
daughter, and wished himself a cardinal.
[Footnote 1: This only appeared in 1831, but Campbell claims to have
given Byron in conversation the suggestion of the subject.]
At Verona, Byron dilates on the amphitheatre, as surpassing anything he
had seen even in Greece, and on the faith of the people in the story of
Juliet, from whose reputed tomb he sent some pieces of granite to Ada and
his nieces. In November we find him settled in Venice, "the greenest isle
of his imagination." There he began to form those questionable alliances
which are so marked a feature of his life, and so frequent a theme in his
letters, that it is impossible to pass them without notice. The first of
his temporary idols was Mariana Segati, "the wife of a merchant of
Venice," for some time his landlord. With this woman, whom he describes as
an antelope with oriental eyes, wavy hair, voice like the cooing of a
dove, and the spirit of a Bacchante, he remained on terms of intimacy
for about eighteen months, during which their mutual devotion was only
disturbed by some outbursts of jealousy. In December the poet took lessons
in Armenian, glad to find in the study something craggy to break his mind
upon. Ho translated into that language a portion of St. Paul's Epistle to
the Corinthians. Notes on the carnival, praises of _Christabel_,
instructions about the printing of _Childe Harold_ (iii.), protests
against the publication under his name of some spurious "domestic poems,"
and constant references, doubtfully domestic, to his Adriatic lady, fill
up the records of 1816. On February 15, 1817, he announces to Murray the
completion of the first sketch of _Manfred_, and alludes to it in a
bantering manner as "a kind of poem in dialogue, of a wild metaphysical
and inexplicable kind;" concluding, "I have at least rendered it _quite
impossible_ for the stage, for which my intercourse with Drury Lane has
given me the greatest contempt."
About this time Byron seems to have entertained the idea of returning to
England in the spring, i.e. after a year's absence. This design, however,
was soon set aside, partly in consequence of a slow malarian fever, by
which he was prostrated for several weeks. On his partial recovery,
attributed to his having had neither medicine nor doctor, and a
determination to live till he had "put one or two people out of the
world," he started on an expedition to Rome.
His first stage was Arqua; then Ferrara, where he was inspired, by a sight
of the Italian poet's prison, with the _Lament of Tasso_; the next,
Florence, where he describes himself as drunk with the beauty of the
galleries. Among the pictures, he was most impressed with the mistresses
of Raphael and Titian, to whom, along with Giorgione, he is always
reverential; and he recognized in Santa Croce the Westminster Abbey of
Italy. Passing through Foligno, he reached his destination early in May,
and met his old friends, Lord Lansdowne and Hobhouse. The poet employed
his short time at Rome in visiting on horseback the most famous sites in
the city and neighbourhood--as the Alban Mount, Tivoli, Frascati, the
Falls of Terni, and the Clitumnus--re-casting the crude first draft of the
third act of _Manfred_, and sitting for his bust to Thorwaldsen. Of this
sitting the sculptor afterwards gave some account to his compatriot, Hans
Andersen: "Byron placed himself opposite to me, but at once began to put
on a quite different expression from that usual to him. 'Will you not sit
still?' said I. 'You need not assume that look.' 'That is my expression,'
said Byron. 'Indeed,' said I; and I then represented him as I wished. When
the bust was finished he said, 'It is not at all like me; my expression is
more unhappy.'" West, the American, who five years later painted his
lordship at Leghorn, substantiates the above half-satirical anecdote, by
the remark, "He was a bad sitter; he assumed a countenance that did not
belong to him, as though he were thinking of a frontispiece for _Chlde
Harold_." Thorwaldsen's bust, the first cast of which was sent to
Hobhouse, and pronounced by Mrs. Leigh to be the best of the numerous
likenesses of her brother, was often repeated. Professor Brandes, of
Copenhagen, introduces his striking sketch of the poet by a reference to
the model, that has its natural place in the museum named from the great
sculptor whose genius had flung into the clay the features of a character
so unlike his own. The bust, says the Danish critic, at first sight
impresses one with an undefinable classic grace; on closer examination the
restlessness of a life is reflected in a brow over which clouds seem to
hover, but clouds from which we look for lightnings. The dominant
impression of the whole is that of some irresistible power
(Unwiderstehlichkeit). Thorwaldsen, at a much later date (1829-1833)
executed the marble statue, first intended for the Abbey, which is now to
be seen in the library of Trinity College, in evidence that Cambridge is
still proud of her most brilliant son.
Towards the close of the month--after almost fainting at the execution by
guillotine of three bandits--he professes impatience to get back to
Mariana, and early in the next we find him established with her near
Venice, at the villa of La Mira, where for some time he continued to
reside. His letters of June refer to the sale of Newstead, the mistake of
Mrs. Leigh and others in attributing to him the _Tales of a Landlord_, the
appearance of _Lalla Rookh_, preparations for _Marino Faliero_, and the
progress of _Childe Harold_ iv. This poem, completed in September, and
published early in 1818 (with a dedication to Hobhouse, who had supplied
most of the illustrative notes), first made manifest the range of the
poet's power. Only another slope of ascent lay between him and the
pinnacle, over which shines the red star of _Cain_. Had Lord Byron's
public career closed when he left England, he would have be
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