quotations from said W. W. to give a zest to said lectures. S. T. C. is
lecturing with success. I have not heard either of him or H., but dined
with S. T. C. at Gillman's a Sunday or two since, and he was well and in
good spirits. I mean to hear some of the course but lectures are not
much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If _read_, they are
dismal flat, and you can't think why you are brought together to hear a
man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure
yourself. If delivered extempore I am always in pain lest the gift of
utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at
the dinner given in honour of me at the London tavern.[117] "Gentlemen,"
said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the
necessity of supplying. Mrs. Wordsworth _will_ go on, kindly haunting us
with visions of seeing the lakes once more, which never can be realised.
Between us there is a great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies
and distances, I hope, as there seemed to be between me and that
gentleman concerned in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled
from at Haydon's. I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an
office. I hate all such people--accountants' deputy-accountants. The
dear abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is
unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by
the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet
what-do-you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all
our red-letter days, they had done their worst; but I was deceived in
the length to which heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go.
They are the tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this
week they have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going
at one o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us.
Dear W. W., be thankful for liberty.
FOOTNOTES:
[117] Lamb would have enjoyed a recent newspaper paragraph which,
stating that an inquest had been held on some one who, after lecturing
somewhere was taken ill and expired, concluded thus: "Verdict: death
from natural causes."
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)
It is one of the commonest of commonplaces that there are
certain subjects and persons who and which always cause
difference of opinion: and something like a full century has
established the fact that Byron is one of them. As far as
his poetry is concerned we have nothing to do with this
difference or these differences. They affect his letters
less, inasmuch as almost everybody admits them to be
remarkably good of their kind. But when the further
questions are raised, "What _is_ that kind?" and "Is it the
best, or even a very good kind?" the old division manifests
itself again. That they are extraordinarily _clever_ is
again more or less matter of agreement. That they make some
people dislike him more than they otherwise might is perhaps
not a fatal objection: for the people may be wrong. Besides,
as a matter of fact, they sometimes make other people _like_
him more than they would have done without these letters: so
the two things at least cancel each other. The chief
objection to them, which is hardly removable, is their too
frequent artificiality. Byron did not play the tricks that
Pope played: for, he was not, like Pope, an invalid with an
invalid's weaknesses and excuses. But almost more than in
his poems, where the "dramatic" excuse is available, (_i.e._
that the writer is speaking not for himself but for the
character) the letters provoke the question, "Is this what
the man thought, felt, did, or what he wished to seem to
feel, think, do?" In other words, "Is this _persona_ or
_res_?" The following shows Byron in perhaps as favourable a
light as any that could be chosen, and with as little of the
artificiality as is anywhere to be found. It is true that
even here Moore, his biographer and letter-giver, at first
included, though he afterwards cut out, some attacks on Sir
Samuel Romilly, whom Byron thought guilty of causing or
abetting dissension between Lady Byron and himself. But the
letter loses nothing by the omission and does not even gain
unfairly by it. There is nothing _false_ in the contrast of
comedy and sentiment concerning the cemetery. His impression
by the epitaphs Byron gave in more letters than one. Nor is
there any affectation in his remarks about his own burial,
about his children, or any other subject. They did "pickle
him and bring him home" (a quotation, not quite literal,
from Sheridan's _Rivals_), and his funeral procession
through London is the theme of a memorable passage in
Borrow's _Lavengro_. "Juan" is of course _Don Juan_.
"Allegra," his daughter by Jane (or as she re-christened
herself, Claire) Clairmont--step-daughter of Godwin, through
his second wife, and so a connection though no relation of
Mrs. Shelley--died at five years old. "Ada," his and Lady
Byron's only child, lived to marry Lord Lovelace, and
continued his blood to the present day. "Electra" works out
no further than the fact of her being the daughter of his
"_moral_ Clytemnestra," as he called Lady Byron, from her
having been almost as fatal to his reputation as the actual
Clytemnestra to her husband's life.
35. TO MR. MURRAY
Bologna, June 7. 1817.
Tell Mr. Hobhouse that I wrote to him a few days ago from Ferrara. It
will therefore be idle in him or you to wait for any further answers or
returns of proofs from Venice, as I have directed that no English
letters be sent after me. The publication can be proceeded in without,
and I am already sick of your remarks, to which I think not the least
attention ought to be paid.
Tell Mr. Hobhouse that since I wrote to him I had availed myself of my
Ferrara letters, and found the society much younger and better than that
at Venice. I am very much pleased with the little the shortness of my
stay permitted me to see of the Gonfaloniere Count Mosti, and his family
and friends in general.
I have been picture-gazing this morning at the famous Domenichino and
Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the beautiful
cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls and found, besides the superb
burial ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me of the
gravedigger in _Hamlet_.
He has a collection of capuchins' skulls, labelled on the forehead, and
taking down one of them said "This is Brother Desiderio Birro, who died
at forty--one of my best friends. I begged his head of his brethren
after his decease, and they gave it me. I put it in lime and then boiled
it. Here it is, teeth and all, in excellent preservation. He was the
merriest, cleverest fellow I ever knew. Wherever he went he brought joy,
and whenever anyone was melancholy, the sight of him was enough to make
him cheerful again. He walked so actively, you might have taken him for
a dancer--he joked--he laughed--oh! he was such a Frate as I never saw
before, nor ever shall again!"
He told me that he had himself planted all the cypresses in the
cemetery; that he had the greatest attachment to them and to his dead
people; that since 1801 they had buried fifty-three thousand persons. In
showing some older monuments, there was that of a Roman girl of twenty,
with a bust by Bernini. She was a princess Bartorini, dead two centuries
ago: he said that, on opening her grave, they had found her hair
complete, and "as yellow as gold."[118] Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara
pleased me more than the more splendid monuments at Bologna; for
instance:--
"MARTINI LUIGI
IMPLORA PACE."
"LUCREZIA PICINI
IMPLORA ETERNA QUIETE."
Can anything be more full of pathos? Those few words say all that can be
said or sought, the dead had had enough of life; all they wanted was
rest, and this they _implore_!
There is all the helplessness and humble hope, and deathlike prayer,
that can arise from the grave--'implora pace.' I hope, whoever may
survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigners' burying-ground at
the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see those two words,
and no more, put over me. I trust they won't think of "pickling, and
bringing me home to clod or Blunderbuss Hall." I am sure my bones would
not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that
country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my death-bed, could
I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my
carcass back to your soil. I would not even feed your worms if I could
help it.
So, as Shakespeare says of Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk, who
died at Venice (see _Richard II._), that he, after fighting
"Against black Pagans, Turks and Saracens,
And toiled with works of war, retired himself
To Italy, and there, at _Venice_, gave
His body to that _pleasant_ country's earth.
And his pure soul unto his captain, Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long!"
Before I left Venice, I had returned to you your late, and Mr.
Hobhouse's sheets of Juan. Don't wait for further answers from me, but
address yours to Venice as usual. I know nothing of my own movements; I
may return there in a few days, or not for some time. All this depends
on circumstances. I left Mr. Hoppner very well, as well as his son and
Mrs. Hoppner. My daughter Allegra was well too, and is growing pretty;
her hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her
ways, Mrs. H. says, are like mine, as well as her features: she will
make, in that case, a manageable young lady.
I have never heard anything of Ada, the little Electra of my Mycenae.
But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should not live to see
it. What a long letter I have scribbled.
Yours &c.
P.S. Here, as in Greece, they strew flowers on the tombs. I saw a
quantity of rose-leaves, and entire roses, scattered over the graves at
Ferrara. It has the most pleasing effect you can imagine.
FOOTNOTES:
[118] No one who has seen the Roman girl's hair at York, nearer two
thousand than two hundred years old, will doubt this, though _her_
tresses are not "yellow."
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)
It may sometimes seem as if there were only two things that
Shelley lacked--humour and common sense. As a matter of fact
he possessed both, but allowed them to be perpetually
stifled by other elements--not in themselves necessarily
bad--of his character. If either--still better both--had
been able to constitute themselves monarchs of his
Brentford, Duumvirs of the rest, his political and religious
extravagances would have been curbed; his less admirable
actions would probably--for he would not have married and
therefore would not have deserted poor Harriet--have been
obviated; and it is by no means necessary that his poetry,
though it could not have been much improved, should have
been in any degree worsened. Shakespeare, one thinks, had
plenty of both. Nor is this consideration irrelevant to the
study of his letters. There are glimmerings of the humour
which shines in _Peter Bell the Third_, and more of the
common sense which is not needed, but by no means negatived,
in the sublimer poems. But in the case suggested we should
certainly have had more of them in a department than which
they could have found no better home. Shelley wrote
everything (after his intellectual infancy) that he did
write, so excellently that he must have excelled here also.
As it is, we must take him as we find him and be thankful.
Since he wrote the following, English readers have perhaps
been satiated with writings about Art. But rather more than
100 years ago there had been comparatively little of it and
hardly anything, if anything at all, of this quality. And it
may not be absurd to draw attention to the differences
between these descriptions and those in ornate prose that
we have had since from Mr. Ruskin and others. Most of the
latter are essentially prose though often very beautiful
prose: Shelley's, though pure prose in form, are as it were
scenarios for poetry. Indeed by this time poetry had taken
almost entire possession of him, and he of her.
36. TO THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
BOLOGNA,
Monday, Nov[ember] 9, 1818.
My dear Peacock,
I have seen a quantity of things here--churches, palaces, statues,
fountains, and pictures; and my brain is at this moment like a portfolio
of an architect, or a print-shop, or a commonplace-book, I will try to
recollect something of what I have seen; for, indeed, it requires, if it
will obey, an act of volition. First, we went to the cathedral, which
contains nothing remarkable, except a kind of shrine, or rather a marble
canopy, loaded with sculptures, and supported on four marble columns. We
went then to a palace--I am sure I forget the name of it--where we saw a
large gallery of pictures. Of course, in a picture gallery you see three
hundred pictures you forget, for one you remember. I remember, however,
an interesting picture by Guido, of the Rape of Proserpine, in which
Proserpine casts back her languid and half-unwilling eyes, as it were,
to the flowers she had left ungathered in the fields of Enna. There was
an exquisitely executed piece of Correggio, about four saints, one of
whom seemed to have a pet dragon in a leash. I was told that it was the
devil who was bound in that style--but who can make anything of four
saints? For what can they be supposed to be about? There was one
painting, indeed, by this master, Christ beatified, inexpressibly fine.
It is a half figure, seated on a mass of clouds, tinged with an
ethereal, rose-like lustre; the arms are expanded; the whole frame seems
dilated with expression; the countenance is heavy, as it were, with the
weight of the rapture of the spirit; the lips parted, but scarcely
parted, with the breath of intense but regulated passion; the eyes are
calm and benignant; the whole features harmonised in majesty and
sweetness. The hair is parted on the forehead, and falls in heavy locks
on each side. It is motionless, but seems as if the faintest breath
would move it. The colouring, I suppose, must be very good, if I could
remark and understand it. The sky is of pale aerial orange, like the
tints of latest sunset; it does not seem painted around and beyond the
figure, but everything seems to have absorbed, and to have been
penetrated by its hues. I do not think we saw any other of Correggio,
but this specimen gives me a very exalted idea of his powers.
We went to see heaven knows how many more palaces--Ranuzzi,
Marriscalchi, Aldobrandi. If you want Italian names for any purpose,
here they are; I should be glad of them if I was writing a novel. I saw
many more of Guido. One, a Samson drinking water out of an ass's
jaw-bone, in the midst of the slaughtered Philistines. Why he is
supposed to do this, God, who gave him this jaw-bone, alone knows--but
certain it is, that the painting is a very fine one. The figure of
Samson stands in strong relief in the foreground, coloured, as it were,
in the hues of human life, and full of strength and elegance. Round him
lie the Philistines in all the attitudes of death. One prone, with the
slight convulsion of pain just passing from his forehead, whilst on his
lips and chin death lies as heavy as sleep. Another leaning on his arm,
with his hand, white and motionless, hanging out beyond. In the
distance, more dead bodies; and, still further beyond, the blue sea and
the blue mountains, and one white and tranquil sail.
There is a Murder of the Innocents, also, by Guido, finely coloured,
with much fine expression--but the subject is very horrible, and it
seemed deficient in strength--at least, you require the highest ideal
energy, the most poetical and exalted conception of the subject, to
reconcile you to such a contemplation. There was a Jesus Christ
crucified, by the same, very fine. One gets tired, indeed, whatever may
be the conception and execution of it, of seeing that monotonous and
agonised form for ever exhibited in one prescriptive attitude of
torture. But the Magdalen, clinging to the cross with the look of
passive and gentle despair beaming from beneath her bright flaxen hair,
and the figure of St. John, with his looks uplifted in passionate
compassion; his hands clasped, and his fingers twisting themselves
together, as it were, with involuntary anguish; his feet almost writhing
up from the ground with the same sympathy; and the whole of this arrayed
in colours of diviner nature, yet most like nature's self. Of the
contemplation of this one would never weary.
There was a "Fortune," too, of Guido; a piece of mere beauty. There was
the figure of Fortune on a globe, eagerly proceeding onwards, and Love
was trying to catch her back by the hair, and her face was half turned
towards him; her long chestnut hair was floating in the stream of the
wind, and threw its shadow over her fair forehead. Her hazel eyes were
fixed on her pursuer, with a meaning look of playfulness, and a light
smile was hovering on her lips. The colours which arrayed her delicate
limbs were ethereal and warm.
But, perhaps, the most interesting of all the pictures of Guido which I
saw was a Madonna Lattante. She is leaning over her child, and the
maternal feelings with which she is pervaded are shadowed forth on her
soft and gentle countenance, and in her simple and affectionate
gestures--there is what an unfeeling observer would call a dulness in
the expression of her face; her eyes are almost closed; her lip
depressed; there is a serious, and even a heavy relaxation, as it were,
of all the muscles which are called into action by ordinary emotions:
but it is only as if the spirit of love, almost insupportable from its
intensity, were brooding over and weighing down the soul, or whatever it
is, without which the material frame is inanimate and inexpressive.
There is another painter here, called Franceschini, a Bolognese, who,
though certainly very inferior to Guido, is yet a person of excellent
powers. One entire church, that of Santa Catarina, is covered by his
works. I do not know whether any of his pictures have ever been seen in
England. His colouring is less warm than that of Guido, but nothing can
be more clear and delicate; it is as if he could have dipped his pencil
in the hues of some serenest and star-shining twilight. His forms have
the same delicacy and aerial loveliness; their eyes are all bright with
innocence and love; their lips scarce divided by some gentle and sweet
emotion. His winged children are the loveliest ideal beings ever created
by the human mind. These are generally, whether in the capacity of
Cherubim or Cupid, accessories to the rest of the picture; and the
underplot of their lovely and infantine play is something almost
pathetic from the excess of its unpretending beauty. One of the best of
his pieces is an Annunciation of the Virgin:--the Angel is beaming in
beauty; the Virgin, soft, retiring, and simple.
We saw, besides, one picture of Raphael--St. Cecilia: this is in another
and higher style; you forget that it is a picture as you look at it; and
yet it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality. It is
of the inspired and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived and
executed in a similar state of feeling to that which produced among the
ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are the
baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a
perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St.
Cecilia, seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the
painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up; her chestnut
hair flung back from her forehead--she holds an organ in her hands--her
countenance, as it were, calmed by the depth of its passion and rapture,
and penetrated throughout with the warm and radiant light of life. She
is listening to the music of heaven, and, as I imagine, has just ceased
to sing, for the four figures that surround her evidently point, by
their attitudes, towards her; particularly St. John, who, with a tender
yet impassioned gesture, bends his countenance towards her, languid with
the depth of his emotion. At her feet lie various instruments of music,
broken and unstrung. Of the colouring I do not speak; it eclipses
nature, yet it has all her truth and softness.
JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)
A good deal has already been said of Keats in the
Introduction; but a little more may be pardoned on that most
remarkable correspondence with his brother and sister-in-law
which is there mentioned, and which it is hoped may be
fairly sampled here. There is nothing quite like it: and one
can only be thankful to the Atlantic (which here at least
can have "disappointed" nobody worth mentioning) for causing
the separation that brought it about. The inspirations which
it shows were happily double. We do not know very much about
George Keats, but John's family affection was of the
keenest, and this was the only member of the family who was,
in all the circumstances, likely to sympathise thoroughly
with the poet in his poetry as in other things. Georgiana is
said to have been personally attractive and mentally gifted
beyond the common: and there is no doubt that this excited
something more than mere family devotion in such an
impressionable person as Keats. The combined reagency of
these relatives has given us what we have from no other
English poet--for the simple reason that no other English
poet has had such a chance of giving it to us. The only
thing to regret is that it could not continue longer: and
that is only a necessary operation of Fate. The particular
passage chosen here is one of the best known perhaps, but it
is also one of the most illuminating: for it gives at once
Keats's natural and simple interest in ordinary things, with
no mere trivialities: his _real_ attitude (so different from
that long attributed to him!) as regards the attacks of
critics, and his passion for beauty apart from mere
hedonism. The "Charmian" was at one time supposed to be
Miss Brawne: but this was an error. She was a Miss Jane Cox,
and nothing is heard of her afterwards.
37. TO GEORGE AND GEORGIANA KEATS
[October 14 or 15, 1818]
I came by ship from Inverness, and was nine days at Sea without being
sick. A little qualm now and then put me in mind of you; however, as
soon as you touch the shore, all the horrors of sickness are soon
forgotten, as was the case with a lady on board, who could not hold her
head up all the way. We had not been in the Thames an hour before her
tongue began to some tune--paying off, as it was fit she should, all old
scores. I was the only Englishman on board. There was a downright
Scotchman, who, hearing that there had been a bad crop of potatoes in
England, had brought some triumphant specimens from Scotland. These he
exhibited with national pride to all the ignorant lightermen and
watermen from the Nore to the Bridge. I fed upon beef all the way; not
being able to eat the thick porridge which the Ladies managed to manage,
with large, awkward, horn spoons into the bargain. Reynolds has returned
from a six-weeks' enjoyment in Devonshire; he is well, and persuades me
to publish my "Pot of Basil" as an answer to the attacks made on me in
"Blackwood's Magazine" and the "Quarterly Review." There have been two
Letters in my defence in the Chronicle and one in the Examiner, copied
from the Exeter Paper, and written by Reynolds. I do not know who wrote
those in the Chronicle. This is a mere matter of the moment--I think I
shall be among the English Poets after my death. Even as a Matter of
present interest the attempt to crush me in the "Quarterly" has only
brought me more into notice, and it is a common expression among
book-men, "I wonder the Quarterly should cut its own throat." It does me
not the least harm in Society to make me appear little and ridiculous: I
know when a man is superior to me and give him all due respect; he will
be the last to laugh at me; and as for the rest I feel that I make an
impression upon them which insures me personal respect while I am in
sight, whatever they may say when my back is turned.