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.