Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, was born in Dublin on May 28,
1779, was educated at Trinity College, and studied for the Bar
at the Middle Temple. At twenty-one years of age he published
a translation of Anacreon, and his reputation was further
established by his love-poems, under the pseudonym of Thomas
Little, in 1801. He received in 1803 an official post in
Bermuda, but entrusted his duties there to a substitute, by
whose defalcations he was later embarrassed. He was married at
thirty-one to a beautiful and amiable actress, Bessy Dyke, and
lived very happily for most of his life in Wiltshire, but with
an interval of a few years in Paris. In 1835 he received a
literary pension of £300, to which a Civil List pension of
£100 was added in 1850. He died on February 25, 1852.
Undoubtedly, Moore's most important contribution to prose
literature was his "Letters and Journals of Lord Byron,"
published in 1830, six years after the poet's death; as
payment he received £4,200. Although the work was frankly and
even severely criticised in many quarters, it did a great deal
to put Byron right with public opinion. Certainly no literary
contemporary was better fitted to write the biography of his
friend than Moore, who, moreover, had been marked for this
work by a free gift of Byron's own memoirs.
_I.--Ancestors and Early Days_
It has been said of Lord Byron that he was prouder of being a descendant
of those Byrons of Normandy, who accompanied William the Conqueror into
England, than of having been the author of "Childe Harold." The remark
is not altogether unfounded, for the pride of ancestry was a feature of
his character; and justly so, for his line was honourably known on the
fields of Cressy, Bosworth, and Marston Moor; and in the faithful
royalist, Sir John Biron, afterwards Lord Biron, throughout the Civil
Wars.
In 1784, the father of the poet, Captain John Byron, nephew of the fifth
Lord Byron, with the sole object of relieving his debts, married, as his
second wife, Miss Catherine Gordon, a wealthy lady of illustrious
Scottish ancestry. Her fortune was swallowed up, and she was reduced to
£150 a year, before she gave birth, on January 22, 1788, in Holles
Street, London, to her first and only child, George Gordon Byron. The
boy was somewhat deformed, one of his feet being twisted.
In 1790, we find the unhappy parents living in separate lodgings in
Aberdeen; and this estrangement was followed by complete separation, the
worthless Captain Byron proceeding to France, where he died in the
following year. The mother, a woman of the most passionate extremes,
sent the boy to day school and grammar school. His schoolmates remember
him as lively, warm-hearted, and more ready to give a blow than to take
one. To summer excursions with his mother in the Highlands the poet
traces his love of scenery and especially of mountainous countries; and
he refers many years after, still with keen feeling, to a little girl,
Mary Duff, for whom, in his eighth year, he cherished a consuming
attachment. So early were his sensibilities dominant.
On the death, in 1794, of the grandson of the old lord, little George
stood in immediate succession to the peerage; in May, 1798, the fifth
Lord Byron died at Newstead Abbey, and the boy's name was called in
school with the title "Dominus." The Earl of Carlisle was appointed his
guardian in chancery, and in the same summer, Lord Byron, in his
eleventh year, took possession, with his mother, of the seat of his
ancestors. The next year Mrs. Byron was placed on the Civil List for a
pension of £300 a year. Removing to London, she placed George at school
with Dr. Glennie at Dulwich, but thwarted the progress of his education
with her fondness and self-will, until Lord Carlisle gave up all hope of
ruling her. It was at this period that a boyish love for Margaret
Parker, his cousin, who died shortly after, led Byron into the practice
of verse.
From 1801 to 1805, from thirteen years of age to seventeen, George was
at Harrow, where he sat beside Peel, the future statesman. This period
of ardent friendship with his fellows includes also the romantic
affection, in 1803, for Miss Chaworth, heiress of Annesley, near
Newstead, who looked on her admirer as the mere schoolboy that he was.
Leaving Harrow with the reputation of an idler who would never learn,
Byron was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October, 1805. His
vacations were spent with his mother at Southwell, and her explosions of
temper, in which she would throw poker and tongs, alienated him
increasingly. In vacation and in term alike he read with extraordinary
avidity and variety, wrote a great deal of verse, and in November, 1806,
printed a small volume of poems for private circulation.
He was a frank and vivid correspondent; his letters to Miss Pigot, of
Southwell, and others, are full of the liveliest descriptions of the
Cambridge days. At this time Byron was painfully shy of new faces, and
perpetually mortified on account of his poverty. He rose, and retired to
rest, very late. He was very fond of the exercises of swimming, riding,
shooting, fencing, and sparring; greatly devoted to his dogs, delighted
in music, and was known as remarkably superstitious. Of his charity and
kindheartedness there was no end. Always conscious of his deformity, and
terribly afraid of becoming corpulent, he was sedulously careful of his
person and dress.
"Hours of Idleness," Byron's first published volume, came out while he
was at the university, and was received by the "Edinburgh Review" with a
contempt which stung him to the quick. With intervals of dissipation in
London and at Brighton, Byron threw himself, at Newstead, into the
preparation of a satirical revenge, training himself for it by a deep
study of the writings of Pope. After his coming of age, in 1809, he went
up to London with his satire, and on March 13 took his seat in the House
of Lords. A few days later "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" was the
talk of the town. Wild festivities at Newstead followed its publication,
and on July 2 Byron sailed from Falmouth in the Lisbon packet.
_II.--The Poet Finds Himself_
Lord Byron was absent from England for two years, and in the solitude of
his nights at sea and in his lone wanderings through Greece he had
leisure and seclusion to look within himself, and there catch the first
glimpses of his glorious mind. His deep passion for solitude grew to
full power; the varied excitement of his travels invigorated his
character and stored his imagination with impressions, and his inborn
sadness rose from a querulous bitterness to the grandeur of his later
melancholy.
His letters show him on Parnassus, where a flight of eagles seemed an
omen of his destiny; at Athens, where he lodged with the mother of the
"Maid of Athens"; standing among the ruins of Ephesus and the mounds of
Troy; swimming the Hellespont in honour of Leander; at Constantinople,
where the prospect of the Golden Horn seemed the fairest of all; at
Patras, in the woeful debility of fever; and again at Athens, making
acquaintance with Lady Hester Stanhope and "Abyssinian" Bruce. Through
all these varied scenes his mind was brooding on the verses of the
"Childe Harold."
On Byron's return to England, in July, 1811, that poem was placed in Mr.
Murray's hands, and thus was laid the foundation of a long connection
between author and publisher. Mrs. Byron died on August 1. With all her
faults she had loved her son deeply, and he could at least look back
upon dutiful and kindly behaviour to her. It was in November that I
first had the pleasure of meeting the poet at dinner, and what I chiefly
remarked was the nobleness of his air, his beauty, the gentleness of his
voice and manner, and his marked kindness. From our first meeting our
acquaintance quickly ripened into friendship.
On February 27, 1812, a day or two before the appearance of "Childe
Harold," Byron made the first trial of his eloquence in the House of
Lords, and it was on this occasion that he made the acquaintance of Lord
Holland. The subject of debate was the Nottingham Frame-breaking Bill.
Workmen were rioting and wrecking because their labour had been
displaced by the introduction of machinery, and Byron's view was that
"we must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in
mechanism"--"the maintenance of the industrious poor is of greater
consequence than the enrichment of monopolists"--"I have seen the state
of these miserable men, and it is a disgrace to a civilised country."
The speech was well received. The impression produced two days later by
Byron's "Childe Harold" was as instantaneous as it has proved deep and
lasting. Even the dashes of scepticism, with which he darkened his
strain, served only to heighten its success. The Prince Regent had the
poet presented to him, and the author of "Marmion" offered his praise.
In the following May appeared the wild and beautiful fragment, "The
Giaour." This new offspring of his genius was hailed with wonder and
delight, and on my rejoining him in town this spring, I found an intense
enthusiasm for Byron throughout the literary and social world. But his
mind was already turning to freedom and solitude, and his third and last
speech in the House of Lords was made in June.
_III.--Byron's Unfortunate Marriage_
Byron's restlessness is reflected throughout his "Journal," which he
began at this time. He had dreams of living in the Grecian Islands and
of adopting an Eastern manner of life; but in December, 1813, when "The
Bride of Abydos" was published, he was still feverishly dissipating
himself in England.
A significant entry in the "Journal" says: "A wife would be the
salvation of me," and Lord Byron became a suitor for the hand of Miss
Milbanke, a relative of Lady Melbourne. His proposal was not at first
accepted, but a correspondence ensued between them, and in September,
1814, after the appearance of "The Corsair" and "Lara," they became
formally affianced. I was much in his society at this time, and was
filled with foreboding anxieties, which the unfortunate events that
followed only too fully justified. At the end of December he set out for
Seaham, the seat of Sir Ralph Milbanke, the lady's father, and on
January 2, 1815, was married. On March 8, he wrote to me from Seaham:
"Bell is in health, and unvaried good-humour and behaviour."
Lord Byron's pecuniary embarrassments now accumulated upon him, and just
a year after his marriage, and shortly after the birth of their
daughter, I received a letter which breathed a profound melancholy, due
partly to his difficulties, but more, I thought, to a return of the
restless and roving spirit. I replied: "Do tell me you are happier than
that letter has led me to fear, and I shall be satisfied." It was only a
few weeks later that Lady Byron adopted the resolution of parting from
him. She had left London in January on a visit to her father, and Byron
was to follow her. They had parted in the utmost kindness; she wrote him
a letter, full of playfulness and affection, on the road; but
immediately on her arrival her father wrote to acquaint Lord Byron that
she would return to him no more. At the time when he had to stand this
unexpected shock, his financial troubles, which had led to eight or nine
executions in his house within the year, had arrived at their utmost;
and at a moment when, to use his own expression, he was "standing alone
on his hearth, with his household gods shivered around him," he was also
doomed to receive the startling intelligence that the wife who had just
parted with him in kindness, had parted with him for ever.
I must quote from a letter he wrote me in March: "The fault was not in
my choice, unless in choosing at all; for I do not believe--and I must
say it in the very dregs of all this bitter business--that there ever
was a better, or even a brighter, a kinder, or a more amiable and
agreeable being than Lady Byron. I never had any reproach to make her
while with me. Where there is blame, it belongs to myself, and if I
cannot redeem, I must bear it."
_IV.--Wanderings and Work_
On April 25, 1816, being now twenty-eight years of age, Byron took final
leave of England, and sailed with two servants for Ostend. His route, by
Flanders and the Rhine, may be traced in his matchless verses. He
settled in Geneva, where he met Shelley and Mrs. Shelley; they boated on
the lake and walked together, and Byron's susceptible mind was deeply
influenced by his mystical companion. We may discover traces of that
vague sublimity in the third canto of "Childe Harold," and traces also
of Mr. Wordsworth's mood which Byron absorbed from Shelley's favourite
author.
From November, 1816, his letters are dated from Venice. "This has always
been, next to the East, the greenest island of my imagination, and it
has not disappointed me." They are considerably taken up with love
affairs of an irregular kind, and contain also many vivid pictures of
Venetian society and manners. "Manfred" was completed in 1817, and was
followed by the fourth canto of "Childe Harold." Margarita Cogni was the
reigning favourite of Byron's unworthy harem at this time; and his poem
of "Don Juan," now begun, most faithfully and lamentably reflects every
whim and passion that, like the rack of autumn, swept across his mind.
But April, 1819, brought a revulsion against all this libertine way of
living, and brought also the dawn of the only real love of his whole
life. Lord Byron had first met the Countess Guiccioli in the autumn of
1818, when she made her appearance, three days after her marriage, at
the house of the Countess Albrizzi, in all the gaiety of bridal array,
and the first delight of exchanging a convent for the world. She has
given her impressions of their meeting: "His noble and exquisitely
beautiful countenance, the tone of his voice, his manners, the thousand
enchantments that surrounded him, rendered him so superior a being to
any whom I had hitherto seen, that it was impossible he should not have
left the most profound impression upon me."
In June, Byron joined her at Ravenna, and for the next three years
remained devotedly attached to her. She struck me, during our first
interview, when I visited them at La Mira, as a lady not only of a style
of beauty singular in an Italian, as being fair-complexioned and
delicate, but also as being highly intelligent and amiable.
A letter to me from Pisa, dated August 27, 1822, has a mournful
interest: "We have been burning the bodies of Shelley and Williams on
the seashore. You can have no idea what an extraordinary effect such a
funeral pile has, with mountains in the background and the sea before."
Another, of November 17, to Lady Byron, shows that if the author of it
had not right on his side, he had at least most of those good feelings
which generally accompany it. "I have to acknowledge the receipt of
Ada's [their daughter's] hair; this note will reach you about her
birthday.... We both made a bitter mistake; but now it is over, and
better so.... I assure you that I bear you now no resentment
whatever.... Whether the offence has been solely on my side, or
reciprocal, or on yours chiefly, I have ceased to reflect on any but two
things--that you are the mother of my child, and that we shall never
meet again."
Byron was thirty-five years old when from his exile at Genoa he turned
his eyes to Greece, where a spirit was now rising such as he had imaged
forth in dreams of song, but hardly could have dreamed that he should
have lived to see it realised. He longed to witness, and very probably
to share in, the present triumphs of liberty on those very fields where
he had gathered for immortality such memorials of the liberty of the
past. Lord Byron was in touch with the committee concerned with Grecian
liberty in May, 1823, and two months later sailed with his party on July
14.
Arriving at Cephalonia he made a journey to Ithaca for a few days. His
confidence in the Greek cause was soon clouded; the people were grossly
degenerate, and he saw that the work of regeneration must be slow. To
convince the government and the chiefs of the paralysing effect of their
dissensions, to inculcate the spirit of union, to endeavour to humanise
the feelings of the belligerents on both sides, so as to take from the
war the character of barbarism--these, with the generous aid of his
money, were the objects of his interference.
At length the time for action arrived, and, leaving Cephalonia, Byron
landed at Missolonghi on January 4, 1824. He was welcomed with all
honour, and at the end of the month received a formal commission from
the government as commander of the expedition against Lepanto, a
fortified town. This design was a failure, and Byron occupied himself
with the fortification of Missolonghi, and with the formation of a
brigade for the next campaign.
But his health had lately been giving way; he was living in little
better than a swamp; and one day, after exposure to a heavy shower, he
was seized with acute pains. On April 11, the illness, now recognised as
rheumatic fever, increased, and on the 19th he was no more. The funeral
took place in the Church of St. Nicholas, Missolonghi, on April 22, and
the remains were carried to England on the brig Florida, and buried,
close to those of his mother, in the village church of Hucknall.
_V.--A Bewildering Personality_
Can I clear away some of the mists that hang round my friend, and show
him as worthy of love as he was of admiration? The task is not an easy
one. In most minds some one influence governs, from which all secondary
impulses are found to radiate, but this pivot of character was wanting
to Lord Byron. Governed at different moments by totally different
passions, and impelled sometimes, as in his excess of parsimony in
Italy, by springs of action never before developed in his nature, he
presents the strangest contradictions and inconsistencies, a bewildering
complication of qualities.
So various, indeed, were his moral and intellectual attributes, that he
may be pronounced to have been not one, but many. It was this multiform
aspect that led the world to compare him with a medley host of
personages: "within nine years," as he playfully records, "to Rousseau,
Goethe, Young, Aretino, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, Satan,
Shakespeare, Buonaparte, Tiberius, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
Harlequin, Henry VIII., Mirabeau, Michael Angelo, Diogenes, Milton,
Alfieri, and many others."
But this very versatility, which renders it so difficult to fix the
fairy fabric of his character, is itself the clue to whatever was most
dazzling in his might, or startling in his levity, or most attractive or
most repellent in his life and genius. A variety of powers almost
boundless, and a pride no less vast in displaying them; an unusual
susceptibility and an uncontrolled impetuosity--such were the two great
sources of all that varied spectacle of his life--unchecked feeling and
dominant self-will.
Great versatility of power will hardly be found without a tendency to
versatility of principle. Byron was fully aware, not only of this
characteristic quality of his nature, but also of its danger to
singleness of character; and this consciousness had the effect of
keeping him in a general line of consistency, throughout life, on
certain great subjects, and helped him to preserve unbroken the greater
number of his personal attachments. But, except in some few respects, he
gave way to his versatile humour without scruple or check; and it was
impossible but that such a range of will and power should be abused. Is
it to be wondered at that in the works of one thus gifted and carried
away we should find, without any design of corrupting on his side, evil
too often invested with a grandeur which belongs intrinsically but to
good?
Nay, it will be found that even the strength and impressiveness of
Byron's poetry is sometimes injured by a capricious and desultory
quality due to this very pliancy of mind. It may be questioned whether a
concentration of his powers would not have afforded a grander result. It
may be that, if Lord Byron had not been so actively versatile, he would
have been, not less wonderful, but more great.
Again, this love of variety was one of the most pervading weaknesses,
not only to his poetry, but of his life. The pride of personating every
kind of character, evil as well as good, influenced his ambition and his
conduct; and to such a perverse length did he carry this fancy for
self-defamation that, if there was any tendency to mental derangement,
it was in this point that it manifested itself. I have known him more
than once, as we have sat together, to throw out dark hints of his past
life with an air of gloom and mystery designed to awaken interest; and I
have little doubt that, to produce effect at the moment, there is hardly
any crime so dark or so desperate of which, in the excitement of acting
upon the imaginations of others, he would not have hinted that he had
been guilty. It has sometimes occurred to me that the occult cause of
his lady's separation from him may have been nothing more, after all,
than some imposture of this kind, some dim confession of undefined
horror.
But the over-frankness with which he uttered every chance impression of
the moment was by itself enough to bring his character unfavourably
before the world. Which of us could bear to be judged by the unnumbered
thoughts that course like waves of the sea through our minds and pass
away unuttered and even unowned by ourselves? To such a test was Byron's
character, throughout his life, exposed.
Yet, to this readiness in reflecting all hues, whether of the shadows or
lights of our variegated existence, Lord Byron owed his personal
fascination. His social intercourse was perfectly charming, because
whoever was with him occupied for the moment all his thoughts and
feelings. Even with the casual acquaintance of the hour his heart was on
his lips, ready to give away every secret of his life.
To my assertion that "at no time of his life was Lord Byron a confirmed
unbeliever" it has been objected that his writings prove the direct
contrary. But this is to confuse the words "unbeliever" and "sceptic,"
the former of which implies decision of opinion, and the latter only
doubt. Many passages in his "Journal" show doubt strongly inclined to
belief. "Of the immortality of the soul it appears to me there can be
little doubt." "I have often been inclined to materialism in philosophy,
but could never bear its introduction into Christianity, which appears
to me essentially founded upon the soul." Here are doubt and unrest, but
not unbelief.
And so I conclude my labours, undertaken at the wish of my friend, and
leave his character to the judgement of the world. Let it be remembered
that through life, with all his faults, he never lost a friend; that
those about him in his youth, whether as companions, teachers, or
servants, remained attached to him to the last; that the woman to whom
he gave the love of his maturer years idolises his name; and that, with
a single unhappy exception, those who were brought into relations of
amity with him have felt towards him a kind regard in life, and retain a
fondness for his memory.
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