Famous it is, and famous it deserved to become, though not because of
its wit and humour, for it has neither the one nor the other--nor yet
because of its effectiveness, for it is satire which for the most part
hacks and hews blindly, here, there, and everywhere--but because of the
power, the self-consciousness, the unexampled audacity, which underlie
and which found expression in the whole. The attacks of the reviewers
had produced in Byron for the first time the feeling which was soon to
become constant and dominant in his breast, the feeling which first
made him completely conscious of himself, and which may be expressed
in the words: "Alone against you all!" To him, as to the other great
combative characters of history, this feeling was the elixir of life.
"Jeer at _me_ with impunity! Crush _me_, who am stronger than all of
them together!" was the refrain that rang in his ears whilst he wrote.
The Edinburgh Reviewers were accustomed, when they crushed a trumpery
little poet and flung him on the ground like a fly, or by mischance
shot a poor little song-bird, to no resistance on the part of the
victim. He either rebelled against the verdict in silence, or humbly
laid the blame on his own want of ability. In either case what followed
was profound silence. But now they had lighted upon the man whose
prodigious strength and weakness lay exactly in the peculiarity that he
never blamed himself for a misfortune, but furiously turned upon others
as its authors. In this case, too, a silence of a year and a half
followed upon the review. But then happened what we read of in Victor
Hugo's poem (_Les Châtiments_. "La Caravane"):
"Tout à coup, au milieu de ce silence morne
Qui monte et qui s'accroît de moment en moment,
S'élève un formidable et long rugissement!
C'est le lion."
And the image is the correct one. For this satire, with its deficiency
in beauty, grace, and wit, is more a roar than a song. The poet
who has the throat of the nightingale, rejoices when he for the
first time hears that his own voice is melodious; the ugly duckling
becomes happily conscious of its swan-nature when it is cast into
its own element; but the roar which tells him that now he is grown
up, that now he is a lion, startles the young lion himself. It is in
vain, therefore, to look in _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ for
sword-thrusts, given with a steady hand and sure aim; these wounds are
not the work of a hand; they are torn with a claw--but the claw is the
claw of a lion. It is in vain to search for criticism, moderation,
reason; does the wounded beast of prey display discernment and tact
when a bullet, intended to kill it, has only slightly wounded it? No;
its own blood, which it sees flowing, dims its eyes, and it desires
nothing but to shed blood in revenge. It does not even seek the firer
of the shot alone; if one of the troop has wounded the young lion,
then woe to the troop! All the literary celebrities of England,
even the greatest and most popular--all who were in favour with the
_Edinburgh Review_ and all who wrote in it--are in this satire treated
like schoolboys by a youth of twenty, scarcely more than a schoolboy
himself. They run the gauntlet one after the other, English poets and
Scotch reviewers. There is many a hard hit that does not miss its mark.
The empty fantasticalness of Southey's _Thalaba_, and its author's
abnormal productivity; the proofs afforded by Wordsworth's own poems of
the truth of his doctrine that verse is the same as prose; Coleridge's
childish naïveté; Moore's licentiousness--all these receive their
due share of attention. An attack is made on Scott's _Marmion_ which
reminds us of the jeers of Aristophanes at the heroes of Euripides.
But by far the greater proportion of the attacks made, are so rash and
graceless that they became the occasion of much more annoyance to their
author than to the persons attacked. Byron's guardian, Lord Carlisle,
to whom he had but lately dedicated _Hours of Idleness_, but who had
declined to introduce him to the House of Lords; and men like Scott,
Moore, and Lord Holland, who at a later period were among the poet's
best friends, were here abused on perfectly incorrect premises, and
with a want of judgment which is paralleled only by the astonishing
alacrity with which Byron, as soon as he was convinced that he had
been in the wrong, apologised and strove to efface the impression of
his errors. Some years later he tried in vain to put an end to the
existence of the satire by destroying the whole fifth edition.
In the meantime it created a great sensation, and produced the desired
effect, the rehabilitation of its author.
In the beginning of 1809 Byron had gone to live in London, partly to
superintend the publication of his satire, partly for the purpose
of taking his seat in the House of Lords. As he had no friend among
the peers to introduce him, he was obliged, contrary to custom, to
present himself alone. His friend, Mr. Dallas, has described the scene.
When Byron entered the House he was even paler than usual, and his
countenance betrayed mortification and indignation. The Chancellor,
Lord Eldon, put out his hand warmly to welcome him, and paid him some
compliment. But this was thrown away upon Lord Byron, who made a stiff
bow, and put the tips of his fingers into the Chancellor's hands.
The Chancellor did not press a welcome so received, but resumed his
seat. Byron carelessly seated himself on one of the empty Opposition
benches, remained there for a few minutes to indicate to which party
he belonged, and then left. "I have taken my seat," he said to Dallas,
"and now I will go abroad."
He left England in June 1809. He had, as he wrote to his mother in
1808, long felt, that "if we see no nation but our own, we do not give
mankind a fair chance--it is from _experience_, not books, we ought
to judge of them. There is nothing like inspection, and trusting to
our own senses." He now went first to Lisbon (see the poem _Huzza!
Hodgson!_) The description of Cintra in the First Canto of _Childe
Harold_ is a recollection of the impressions received during his short
stay in Portugal. From Lisbon he and his friend Hobhouse travelled on
horseback to Seville and Cadiz, and thence to Gibraltar by sea.
None of the magnificent historical monuments of Seville made any
impression on Byron, but both there and at Cadiz he was deeply
interested in the women. The advances made by various beautiful Spanish
ladies flattered the young man, who took with him as a remembrance from
Seville a lock of hair about three feet in length. Gibraltar, being an
English town, is, of course, a "cursed place."
But, though little impressed by the historical memories of the
countries he is visiting, he is already beginning to interest himself
in their political relations. Those of Spain with England occupy him
first. The first two cantos of _Childe Harold_ show that he felt
nothing but contempt for the foreign policy of England. He jeers at
what the English called their victory of Talavera, where they lost 5000
men without doing the French much harm; and he is audacious enough to
call Napoleon his hero.
From Spain Byron went to Malta. Its memories of the days of yore, which
so delighted old Sir Walter Scott, made no more impression on the young
nobleman than those of Seville had done. He was as entirely devoid of
the romantic historical sense as of romantic national feeling. What he
thought of, and longed for, were not the green pastures of England, or
the misty hills of Scotland, but the Lake of Geneva in all its glory
of colour, and the bright Ægean Sea. His mind did not dwell on the
historical exploits of his countrymen, on wars like the War of the
Roses; it was occupied with the politics of the day; and in the past
nothing interested him but the great struggles for liberty. To him
the old statues were only stone; the living women were more beautiful
in his eyes than the ancient goddesses ("than all the nonsense of
their stone ideal," as he puts it in _Don Juan_); but on the field of
Marathon he fell into a deep reverie, and he celebrates its memories in
both his long narrative poems. When, during the last year of his life,
he visited Ithaca, he rejected all offers to show him the remains of
antiquity on the island, remarking to Trelawny: "I detest antiquarian
twaddle. Do people think I have no lucid intervals, that I came to
Greece to scribble more nonsense?" The poetic enthusiasm for liberty
was in the end swallowed up by the practical. With Byron Romantic
sentimentality comes to an end; with him the modern spirit in poetry
originates; therefore it was that he influenced not only his own
country but Europe.
At Malta he was greatly captivated by a beautiful young lady, a Mrs.
Spencer Smith, who for political reasons was subjected to persecution
by Napoleon. An enthusiastic friendship sprang up between the two,
which is commemorated in several of Byron's poems. (_Childe Harold_,
ii. 30. _To Florence. Lines Written in an Album, Stanzas composed
during a Thunderstorm. Stanzas Written in Passing the Ambracian Gulf_.)
From Malta the travellers went by way of Western Greece to Albania, the
"rugged nurse of savage men," as Byron in _Childe Harold_ calls the
country,
"(Where) roams the wolf, the eagle whets his beak,
Birds, beasts of prey, and wilder men appear."
It is characteristic of him, that in his first travels he visited
regions which lay practically without the pale of civilisation,
countries where the personality of the inhabitant was almost entirely
untrammelled by convention. Natural affinity attracted him to these
scenes and these beings. Like the young man in Wordsworth's _Ruth_,
"Whatever in those climes he found
Irregular in sight or sound
Did to his mind impart
A kindred impulse, seem'd allied
To his own powers, and justified
The workings of his heart."
A direct descendant of Rousseau, he had a strong sympathy for all the
races still living in "the state of nature."[1] The Albanians were at
that time almost as savage as their Pelasgian ancestors. Their law was
the law of the sword, the vendetta their idea of justice. The people
of the country, as Byron first beheld them assembled, the setting sun
illuminating their magnificent dresses and the rich trappings of their
horses, whilst drums beat and the muezzins called the hour from the
minaret of the mosque, presented such a spectacle as we read of in the
_Thousand and One Nights_.
Janina proved to be a more important town than Athens. It was on their
journey to or from Janina that the travellers were deserted by their
guide. In their perilous condition among these wild mountains, with the
prospect before them of dying of hunger, Byron was the member of the
party who kept up the spirits of all the others by that dauntlessness
which distinguished him in all dangerous situations.
The day after their arrival in the capital, Byron was introduced to Ali
Pacha, "the Turkish Bonaparte," whom he had always admired in spite of
his savage cruelty. Ali received his visitor standing, was extremely
friendly, desired his respects to Byron's mother, and flattered Byron
himself very agreeably by telling him that he knew him at once to be a
man of noble birth by his small ears, curling hair, and little white
hands. The visit to Ali provided matter for some of the principal
scenes in the _Fourth Canto_ of Don Juan. Lambro and several other
Byronic figures are drawn from him. (He is also described by Victor
Hugo in _Les Orientales_.) Ali treated Byron like a spoiled child,
sending him almonds and sugared sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats, twenty
times a day.
Protected by a guard of fifty men given him by Ali from the numerous
troops of brigands which infested the country, Byron now travelled all
through Albania. His wild followers became so attached to him that,
when he had an attack of fever, they threatened to kill the doctor
if the patient were not cured. The doctor ran away--and the patient
recovered. It was in the course of this tour, before retiring to rest
for the night in a cave by the shore of the Gulf of Arta, that Byron
saw the scene (the Pyrrhic war-dance to the accompaniment of song)
which he afterwards described in _Childe Harold_, ii. 71, 72, and which
inspired the beautiful song, "Tambourgi, Tambourgi!"
During his stay in Athens, the indignation he felt at the plundering
of the Parthenon by England, in the person of Lord Elgin, inspired him
with the poem, _The Curse of Minerva_; and a transient attachment to
one of the daughters of the English consul produced the song, _Maid of
Athens_, the heroine of which, even after she had become a little pale
old lady, continued to be tormented with visits from English tourists.
On the 3rd of May, Byron performed his famous feat of swimming across
the Dardanelles, from Sestos to Abydos, in an hour and ten minutes; he
writes of it in _Don Juan_, and was proud of it all his life.
All that he saw and did on this tour was, a few years later, to provide
him with poetic material. In Constantinople he one day saw the street
dogs devouring the flesh of a corpse; on this real scene are based the
descriptions of horrors in _The Siege of Corinth_ and in the Eighth
Canto of _Don Juan_ (assault of Ismail). After his return to Athens
from a tour in the Morea, he would seem himself to have been concerned
in the love affair on which _The Giaour_ is based. (See the Marquis of
Sligo's letter to Byron.) What we know for certain is, that one day,
as he was returning from bathing at the Piræus, he met a detachment of
Turkish soldiers carrying, sewn up in a sack, a young girl, who was
to be thrown into the sea because she had accepted a Christian as her
lover. Pistol in hand, Byron compelled the savage troop to turn back,
and partly by bribery, partly by threats, procured the girl's release.
This life of travel and adventure did not produce the mental
equilibrium which Byron lacked. His last letters from abroad reveal
settled melancholy. The disgust with life which is the result of
aimlessness seems to weigh him to the earth. And he feels that he is
coming home deep in debt, "with a body shaken by one or two smart
fevers," and to a country where he has no friends. He expects to be
met only by creditors. What did meet him was the news of his mother's
dangerous illness. He hastened to Newstead to see her once more, but
she had died the day before he arrived. Her maid found him in the
evening sitting beside the corpse. She had heard his sobs through
the closed door. On her begging him to try to control his grief, he
burst into tears, and exclaimed: "Oh, Mrs. By, I had but one friend
in the world, and she is gone!" Nevertheless, his excessive dislike
to his grief being witnessed by others, was sufficient to prevent his
following his mother's remains to the grave. He stood at the Abbey
door till the funeral procession had moved off; then, turning to his
attendant, young Rushton, desired him to fetch the sparring-gloves, and
proceeded to his usual exercise with the boy. At last, the struggle
to keep up seeming too much for him, he flung away the gloves and
retired to his room. During the protracted fit of melancholy into which
he sank, he made a will, in which he again ordered that he should be
buried beside his dog.
Byron had hardly landed before his friend Dallas asked him if he had
brought any poetry back with him from his travels. The young poet, who
was tolerably destitute of the critical sense, produced, not without
pride, _Hints from Horace_, a new satire in Pope's style. With this
work Mr. Dallas was very justifiably disappointed. On returning it next
morning he asked if his friend had written nothing else, on which Byron
handed him some short poems, and what he called "a number of stanzas in
Spenser's measure" chiefly descriptive of the countries he had visited.
These last were the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_; and at the
urgent request of Dallas they were at once given to the printer.
In the mind of the reader of to-day, the impression produced by these
two cantos is apt to be mixed up with that produced by the last two
(written six or seven years later); but whoever desires to understand
Byron's development must be careful to keep the two impressions
perfectly distinct from each other. The gap between the first and the
second half of _Childe Harold_ is as wide as the gap between this same
second half and _Don Juan_.
The stanzas which Byron showed Dallas are melodious, sincere in
feeling, and occasionally grand; they were the first of the full,
harmonious strains which were henceforward to issue from the lips of
this poet as long as he breathed the breath of life. But they only
faintly forecast what the man was to be, with whose fame, ten years
later, the continent of Europe rang. As yet, powerful descriptions of
nature form the main ingredient in his poetry; the lyric outbursts are
few and far between; to the casual reader these stanzas would seem
simply to convey a world-weary young English aristocrat's impressions
of travel, ennobled by the stateliness of the style--for the tone of
_Childe Harold_ is as idealistic and serious as that of _Don Juan_ is
realistic and humorous.
The mood is one of monotonous melancholy. Byron is not yet the poet who
bounds from one feeling to another, by preference its exact opposite,
in order to make each as strong as possible, and then hacks and hews
at them--the harder, the extremer the tension he has produced. But
though we as yet only catch the outline of this poet's countenance,
though we perceive nothing of its keenly satirical expression or of
its now impudent, now merry smile, we nevertheless divine from the
fervent youthful pathos that we are in the presence of the strongest
personality in the literature of the day. There is an Ego in this poem
which dominates every detail, an Ego which does not lose itself in any
feeling, does not forget itself in any cause.
The other literary personalities of the day could metamorphose--could
etherealise, liquefy, crystallise--themselves; they could become
invisible behind another personality, or transform themselves into
cosmic beings, or merge themselves entirely in sensations received from
without; but here we have an Ego which, whatever happens, is always
conscious of itself, and always comes back to itself; and it is an
agitated, passionate Ego, of whose emotions the movement of even the
most unimportant lines reminds us, as the whisper of the shell reminds
us of the roar of the ocean.
Childe Harold (in the first draft Childe Burun) leaves his country
after an ill-spent youth, in a mood of splenetic melancholy, leaving
behind no friends and no loved one. His is the youthful weariness
of life induced by a constitution and state of health inclining to
melancholy, and by an all too early satiety of pleasure. There is not
a trace in him of the confident gaiety of youth or of its desire for
amusement and fame; he believes, little as he has seen of life, that he
has done with everything; and the poet is so completely one with his
hero that not for one moment does he ever soar above him on the wings
of irony.
All this, which made such a powerful impression on the public of
Byron's day, is tolerably unattractive to a critical modern reader;
the aim at effect is plainly discernible, and the time when vague
world-weariness was interesting is past. But no one with a practised
eye can fail to see that in this case the mask--for mask it is--covers
an earnest and a suffering countenance. The mask is that of a hermit;
pluck it off, and there still remains a man of a solitary nature! The
mask is grandiose melancholy; throw it away; beneath it there is real
sadness! Harold's shell-bedecked pilgrim's cloak may be nothing but a
kind of ball domino; but it covers a youth of ardent feelings, with a
keen understanding, gloomy impressions of life, and an unusually strong
love of freedom. In Childe Harold's better Ego there is no insincerity;
Byron himself will be answerable for all his hero thinks and feels. And
to those who remember what Byron's own conduct, immediately after he
wrote _Childe Harold_, was, and who see a direct contradiction between
the fictitious personage's elderly melancholy and the real personage's
youthfully ardent pursuit of sensual pleasures, we reply, that the
reason of the apparent contradiction is simply this--that Byron, who
in his poetry was still an idealist, was unable to reveal his _whole_
nature in the earlier cantos of _Childe Harold_. All that is there is
certainly Byron, but there was in him, along with this, another and
perfectly different man; and it was not until he wrote _Don Juan_ that
he succeeded in introducing this other Byron, as he lived and thought
and spoke, into his poetry. The incompleteness of the self-description
must not be mistaken for simulation or affectation.
In February 1812 Byron made his maiden speech in Parliament. He spoke
in behalf of the poor weavers of Nottingham, whom it was proposed
to punish most severely for having destroyed the machinery that was
depriving them of their bread. It is a youthful and rather elaborate
speech, but full of life and warmth. Byron was quite in his element
in pleading the cause of the starving and desperate crowd. He very
sensibly pointed out to his countrymen that a tenth part of the sum
which they had willingly voted to enable the Portuguese to carry on
war, would be sufficient to relieve the misery which it was proposed to
reduce to silence by imprisonment and the gallows. Byron's vigorous and
obstinate hatred of war is one of the grains of sound commonsense which
are to be found in solution in his poetry; it lends animation to the
earlier cantos of _Childe Harold_.
His second Parliamentary speech was on the subject of Catholic
Emancipation. Though it did not please, it is an excellent one; in it
Byron acknowledges, and with correct logic disposes of, one of the
arguments against giving religious liberty to the Catholics, namely,
that it might equally well be given to the Jews. In reference to this
same emancipation question, we find the following youthfully facetious
entry in his notebook: "On one of the debates on the Catholic question,
when we were either equal or within one (I forget which), I had been
sent for in great haste to a ball, which I quitted, I confess, somewhat
reluctantly, to emancipate five millions of people." Playful utterances
of this kind (as another example of which take his saying: "After all
we must end in marriage; and I can conceive nothing more delightful
than such a state in the country, reading the county newspaper, &c, and
kissing one's wife's maid") have, because they are so little in keeping
with Childe Harold's melancholy, amply proved to stupid people that
nothing was sacred to him. The truth was that, being very young and
somewhat of a coxcomb, he considered it derogatory to his dignity to
express himself with any feeling; he unconsciously adopted as his motto
the saying of St. Bernard: _Plus labora celare virtutes quam vitia!_
The maiden speech was a great success, and helped to draw the
attention of the public to the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_,
which came out only two days after the speech had been made. The
impression produced by _Childe Harold_ was astounding; Byron
instantaneously became a celebrity--London's new lion, the lawful
sovereign of society for the year 1812. The metropolis, as represented
by its most beautiful, most distinguished, most brilliant, and most
cultivated inhabitants, prostrated itself at the feet of this youth
of twenty-three. If these earlier cantos of _Childe Harold_ had
been distinguished by the qualities of the later, namely, profound
originality and vigorous honesty, they would not have made the noise
in the world they did. Great honesty and great originality never find
favour at once with the general public. It was the veiledness, the
vague weariness of the world and its pleasures, which impressed the
crowd; the power of which they caught a glimpse, produced all the more
effect by revealing itself in a somewhat theatrical manner.
This was the heyday of dandyism. The upper class of London society,
with Beau Brummell as its master of ceremonies, gave itself up to a
luxuriousness and licentiousness which had not had their parallel since
the days of Charles II. Dinner-parties and balls, the play-house, the
gaming-table, pecuniary entanglements, amorous intrigues, seductions
and the duels consequent thereon, occupied the days and nights of the
aristocracy. And Byron was the hero of the day--nay, of the year. Could
there have been a more suitable object for the admiration and worship
of a society which was bored and burdened by its own inanity? So young,
so handsome, and so wicked! For no one doubted but that he was as
dangerous a roué as his hero. Byron had not Scott's coldbloodedness and
mental equilibrium to oppose to temptations and flattery. He allowed
himself to glide with the stream which supported him on its surface.
The artist in him craved for an experience of every mood, and rejected
none. He maintained his fame as a poet with ease; there followed on
one another with short intervals his narrative poems, _The Giaour_
(May 1813), _The Bride of Abydos_ (December of the same year), and
_The Corsair_ (completed on New Year's Day 1814). Of this last work
13,000 copies were sold in one day. The bitter _Ode to Napoleon_, on
the occasion of his abdication, showed that Byron, in his pursuit of
poetry, was not entirely oblivious of the political events of the day.
In 1815 he wrote _Parisina_ and _The Siege of Corinth_. The novelty,
the foreignness, and the passion of these works, entranced the blasé
aristocratic society of London. Their author was the prodigy on whom
all eyes were turned. In the drawing-rooms young ladies trembled with
the delightful hope that he might take them in to dinner, and at the
dinner-table hardly dared to partake of what was set before them,
because it was known that he did not like to see women eating. Owners
of albums in which he had deigned to write a few lines were objects of
envy. A specimen of his handwriting was in itself a treasure. People
talked of all the Greek and Turkish women to whom his love must have
meant death, and wondered how many husbands he had killed. His brow and
his glancing eye suggested wickedness. He wore his hair unpowdered, and
it was as wild as his passions. Different in everything from ordinary
mortals, he was as abstemious as his Corsair; the other day at Lord
-----'s had he not let eleven courses go by untasted and asked for
biscuits and soda-water? What an uncomfortable position for the lady
of the house, who was so proud of her cook! And what an extraordinary
piece of eccentricity in a country where a hearty appetite is one of
the national virtues!
We see Childe Harold transformed into Don Juan. The solitary pilgrim
becomes the drawing-room lion. On the ladies, Byron's rank, youth,
and remarkable beauty naturally made almost more impression than his
poetry. In the Life of Sir Walter Scott we find the following opinion
given by him on the subject of his fellow-author's personal appearance:
"As for poets, I have seen, I believe, all the best of our own time
and country--and, though Burns had the most glorious eyes imaginable,
I never thought any of them would come up to an artist's notion of
the character except Byron.... And the prints give one no impression
of him--the lustre is there, but it is not lighted up. Byron's
countenance is a thing to dream of." One of the beauties of the day
said to herself the first time she saw him: "That pale face is my fate."
Women had, undoubtedly, always occupied a large share of Byron's time
and thoughts; but expressions in _Childe Harold_ gave rise to the
report that he had maintained a regular harem at Newstead--the harem
appearing as a matter of fact to have consisted of one odalisque.
Absurdly exaggerated stories were in circulation of the amorous
adventures in which he had played the part of hero during his travels.
The consequence of all this was that he was positively besieged by
women; his table was covered every day with letters from ladies, known
and unknown to him. One came to his house (probably in imitation of
Kaled in _Lara_) disguised as a page; many came undisguised. He told
Medwin that one day very soon after his wedding he found three married
ladies in his wife's drawing-room, whom he at once recognised as "all
birds of the same feather."
This life, crowded with empty pleasures and with triumphs for his
vanity, at any rate suited Byron better than quiet; for, as he says in
_Childe Harold_, "quiet to quick bosoms is a hell." But, in all this
whirl of excitement, did his heart ever really come into play? It would
seem not. The love-affair which engrossed him much at this time and
also influenced his future, was, as we know from his own letters, only
a whirlpool within the whirlpool, and as such attracted him; but it
left his heart quite cold.
Lady Caroline Lamb, a young lady of good family, and wife of the
statesman afterwards known as Lord Melbourne, had long cherished
an ardent desire to make the acquaintance of the author of _Childe
Harold_. Hers was a wild, fantastic, restless nature, which rebelled
against every kind of control and promptly followed the inspiration of
the moment; therefore she was in so far a kindred spirit of the poet.
She was three years older than Byron, fair-haired, with a slender,
beautiful figure, and a soft voice; her manner, though affected, was
exceedingly attractive. She played in Byron's life the part which Frau
von Kalb played in Schiller's.[2] Her connection with him made the
lady so much talked of, that her mother did everything in her power to
break it off. Lady Caroline was at last persuaded to go to Ireland on
a visit. Byron wrote a farewell letter to her, of which she allowed
Lady Morgan to make a copy--a letter which is typical of his style
in his immature years, and in which no one with any knowledge of the
human heart will find the language of love. It reminds us of Hamlet's
ambiguous letter to Ophelia.
"If tears which you saw, and know I am not apt to shed,--if the
agitation in which I parted from you,--agitation which you must have
perceived through the whole of this most nervous affair, did not
commence until the moment of leaving you approached,--if all I have
said and done, and am still but too ready to say and do, have not
sufficiently proved what my real feelings are, and must ever be towards
you, my love, I have no other proof to offer.... Is there anything
in earth or heaven that would have made me so happy as to have made
you mine long ago? You know I would with pleasure give up all here and
beyond the grave for you, and in refraining from this, must my motives
be misunderstood? I care not who knows this, what use is made of
it,--it is to you and to you only that they are, _yourself_, I was and
am yours freely and entirely to obey, to honour, love, and fly with you
when, where, and how yourself _might_ and _may_ determine."
It will surprise no one to learn that a few months later Byron himself
put an end to the _liaison_; his love had never been anything but the
kind of reflected love which imitates in a mirror all the motions
of the flame, without fire of its own. Meeting Byron at a ball soon
afterwards, Lady Caroline, maddened by his indifference, seized the
first sharp thing that she could lay hold of--some say a pair of
scissors, others a broken glass--and tried to cut her throat with it.
After the ineffectual attempt at suicide, she (according to Countess
Guiccioli) made "the most incredible promises" to a young nobleman
on condition that he would challenge and kill the faithless one;
nevertheless she herself soon called at her quondam lover's apartments,
"by no means with the intention of cutting either her own throat or
his." He was not at home. The words which she wrote on a title-page of
a book she found on his table, inspired the epigram: "Remember thee!"
which is to be found amongst Byron's poems.
Pining for revenge, Lady Caroline now seized her pen and wrote the
novel, _Glenarvon_, which came out at the most unfortunate moment
possible for Byron, namely, just after his wife had left him, and
was one of the most active ingredients in the ferment of public
disapproval. The book, which has as its motto two lines from _The
Corsair_:--
"He left a name to all succeeding times,
Link'd with one virtue and a thousand crimes,"
pictures Byron as a perfect demon of dissimulation and wickedness,
endowed with all his hero's worst characteristics. But, possibly by
way of excuse for her own conduct, the authoress has not been able to
resist giving him some admirable and attractive qualities. One passage
runs: "Had he betrayed in his manner that freedom, that familiarity
so offensive in men, but yet so frequent amongst them, she would
have shuddered; but from what was she to fly? Not from the gross
adulation, or the easy, flippant protestations to which all women
are, soon or late, accustomed; but from a respect at once refined and
flattering, an attention devoted even to her least wishes, yet without
appearing subservient a gentleness and sweetness as rare as they were
fascinating; and these combined with all the powers of imagination,
vigour of intellect, and brilliancy of wit which none ever before
possessed in so eminent a degree."
In 1817, when Byron was living in Venice, an Italian translation of
_Glenarvon_ was sent to press there. The censor refused to sanction its
publication until he had ascertained if Lord Byron had any objections.
Byron assured him that he had none. Only once again in the biography
of Lord Byron is mention made of Lady Caroline Lamb. As the funeral
procession following his corpse (which had been brought home from
Greece) was slowly making its way from London to Newstead, it was met
by a lady and gentleman on horseback. The lady inquired who it was that
was to be buried. When she heard, she fell fainting from her horse. She
was the authoress of _Glenarvon_.
Byron's giddy, wild London career was arrested by the most fateful
event of his life--his marriage. Life, as he had lived it, had not
inspired him with much respect for woman; but the kind of woman he
loved was the devoted, self-sacrificing creature whom he delighted in
portraying in his poems. The woman whom chance made his wife had a
strong, obstinate English character. Miss Anne Isabella Milbanke was
the only child of a rich baronet. Byron was attracted by her simplicity
and modesty, and tempted by the prospect of restoring Newstead with
the help of her fortune. She annoyed him by refusing his hand when he
first offered it to her, but fascinated him again by soon afterwards
beginning a friendly correspondence with him of her own accord. In
course of time she returned a favourable answer to a letter of proposal
which he had written in an unwarrantably frivolous mood, and sent
because a friend who read it thought it a pity that such "a pretty
letter" should not go.
From motives which were, one and all, bad--motives of vanity, motives
of vulgar aggrandisement--Byron rushed into a marriage which did not
end worse than might have been expected. His mood during his engagement
was a comparatively cheerful one. "Of course I am very much in love,"
he writes to a lady friend, "and as silly as all single gentlemen must
be in that sentimental situation." And to another friend he writes:
"I am now the happiest of mortals, for I became engaged a week ago.
Yesterday I met young F., also the happiest of mortals, for he too is
engaged." So childish are all the letters written at this time that, if
we believe them, we must suppose Byron's only serious trouble to have
been the necessity of being married in a blue coat. However, as the
wedding-day approached, he became ever more ill at ease; the relations
between his parents had early inoculated him with a dread of marriage.
His feelings during the wedding ceremony he has described in _The
Dream_. He told Medwin that he trembled and gave wrong answers.
"The treacle-moon," as Byron calls it, did not run its course
unshadowed by clouds. Two months after his marriage he writes to Moore
from the country, where he and his wife were staying with her parents:
"I am in a state of sameness and stagnation, totally occupied in
consuming the fruits, and sauntering, and playing dull games at cards,
and yawning, and trying to read old Annual Registers and the daily
papers, and gathering shells on the shore, and watching the growth of
stunted gooseberry bushes in the garden." A few days later he writes:
"I have been very comfortable here--listening to that d--d monologue
which elderly gentlemen call conversation, and in which my pious
father-in-law repeats himself every evening--save one, when he played
upon the fiddle. However, they have been very kind and hospitable....
Bell is in health and unvaried good-humour and behaviour."
Pegasus was beginning to feel the yoke gall. However, the young couple
presently went to London, where they lived in great style, keeping
carriages and horses, and entertaining sumptuously, until Byron's
creditors began to push their claims. Lady Byron's dowry of £10,000
disappeared like dew in sunshine, quickly followed by £8000, to which
Byron had lately fallen heir. Things became so bad that he had to sell
his library. In order to prevent this sale, Murray, his publisher,
offered him £1500 as remuneration for his writings; but Byron's false
pride led him to return the draft torn in pieces. Eight executions
followed on each other in as many months; the very beds were seized at
last.
Such was the position of affairs when, in December 1815, Lady Byron
gave birth to her daughter Ada.
The spoiled young heiress had, of course, never dreamt that such
experiences awaited her. The married life of the couple was at first
by no means unhappy. They drove out together, and the young wife
waited patiently in the carriage while her husband paid calls. She
wrote letters for him and copied out poems, among others _The Bride of
Corinth_. But there had very soon been small misunderstandings. Lady
Byron seems to have been in the habit of constantly interrupting her
husband with questions and remarks when he was writing, thereby giving
occasion to outbursts of temper which she considered most unseemly.
She had had no experience of such passionate violence and eccentric
behaviour as she was soon to witness. On one occasion she saw Byron,
when in a passion, throw his watch into the fire and break it to
pieces with the poker; on another, in fun or by accident, he fired
off a pistol in her room. Ere long, too, she was suffering the pangs
of jealousy. She knew of his notoriety as the hero of many amours,
and knew more particularly about his connection with Lady Caroline
Lamb, who was her own near relative. Byron had, unfortunately for his
domestic peace, become a member of the Committee of Management of
Drury Lane Theatre, and his correct lady was much perturbed by the
business relations with actresses, singers, and ballet-dancers which
this entailed. A person in her service (described by Lord Byron in _A
Sketch_) began to act the spy, ransacking Byron's drawers and reading
his letters. And there is yet another disagreeable matter, which we
shall notice later.
With her husband's consent, the young wife, about a month after the
child's birth, left the unsettled and unhappy home, and went on a visit
to her parents. But hardly had she arrived before her father intimated
to Byron that she would not return to him. While on the journey she
had written a letter to him (now in print) which begins: "Dear Duck,"
and ends quite as affectionately. Byron's surprise may be imagined.
He replied to his father-in-law that in this matter he could not
acknowledge paternal authority, and must hear from his wife herself.
Her communication was to the same effect. In 1830 Lady Byron publicly
affirmed that she had written to her husband as affectionately as she
did, in the belief that he was insane; and that if this idea of hers
had proved to be the correct one, she would have borne everything as
his faithful wife, but that in no other case could she have continued
to live with him.
In a fragment of a novel, written by Byron in 1817, we have a
corroboration of this assertion:--"A few days after, she set out for
Aragon, with my son, on a visit to her father and mother. I did not
accompany her immediately, having been in Aragon before.... During
her journey I received a very affectionate letter from Donna Josepha,
apprising me of the welfare of herself and my son. On her arrival at
the château, I received another, still more affectionate, pressing
me, in very fond and rather foolish terms, to join her immediately.
As I was preparing to set out from Seville, I received a third--this
was from her father, Don José di Cardozo, who requested me, in the
politest manner, to dissolve our marriage. I answered him, with equal
politeness, that I would do no such thing. A fourth letter arrived--it
was from Donna Josepha, in which she informed me that her father's
letter was written by her particular desire. I requested the reason by
return of post: she replied, by express, that as reason had nothing to
do with the matter, it was unnecessary to give any--but that she was
an injured and excellent woman. I then inquired why she had written
to me the two preceding affectionate letters, requesting me to come
to Aragon. She answered, that was because she believed me out of my
senses--that, being unfit to take care of myself, I had only to set out
on this journey alone, and, making my way without difficulty to Don
José di Cardozo's, I should there have found the tenderest of wives
and--a strait-waistcoat."
When it became known that Byron's wife had left him, a sudden and
complete change in the attitude of the public towards him took place.
He had awakened one morning after the publication of _Childe Harold_ to
find himself famous; now came a morning when he awoke to find himself
infamous, regarded by society as an outlaw.
Chief among the causes of this revulsion was envy--not that envy in
the hearts of the gods which the ancients regarded as the cause of
the downfall of the great--but foul, base envy in the breasts of his
fellow-men. He stood so high; he was so great; with all his faults
he had never sunk to the level of vulgar, mechanical respectability;
confident in his powers and the favour of fortune, he had never deigned
to seek friends who could protect him, or heeded how many enemies he
made. These latter had long been innumerable. Chief among the envious
were his literary rivals; and amongst all the many species of envy, the
envy of authors is one of the most venomous. He had derided them, had
called them the writers of a decadent period, had taken from some the
name they had won, and made it impossible for others to win a name--why
should he be admired and idolised whilst they were in vain arranging
their locks for the reception of a wreath which never came? What joy
to be able to tear him from the golden throne of fame and besmirch him
with the mud in which they themselves stood!
He had long been suspected and secretly hated by the orthodox in
religion and politics. The couple of stanzas in _Childe Harold_ which
venture in the most cautious terms to express a doubt that we shall
meet our friends again after death, had been greeted with a cry
of--heresy! and a whole book, _Anti-Byron_, had been written against
them. The two verses to the Princess Charlotte, which, under the title,
_Lines to a Lady Weeping_, were appended to the first edition of _The
Corsair_, and in which the poet condoles with the daughter on the
occasion of her father, the Prince Regent's, desertion of the Liberal
side in politics, had set the whole Tory party violently against him.
But hitherto he had been protected by his magic influence over men's
minds as by an invisible coat of mail. This unfortunate episode in his
private life offered a weak point, against which his enemies diverted
the full force of public opinion.
The life led by Lady Byron and her family was the life on which English
public opinion has set the seal of its peculiar approbation; and it
was easy to convince the public that the man whom such a wife felt
obliged to leave must indeed be a monster. Rumours began to spread; the
slanders once conceived and brought forth, developed feet to walk on,
wings to fly with, and swelled as they flew. Their voices rose from a
whisper to a cry, from a cry to a deafening roar. Who does not know
that concerted piece in the production of which baseness and stupidity
collaborate, and during the performance of which ignorance sings in
chorus with conscious villainy, whilst spite heightens the effect by
the contribution of its most piercing trills!
Envy in this case entered the service of hypocrisy, and took its wages.
Refined hypocrisy was, far on into the nineteenth century--as long,
namely, as the period of religious reaction lasted--a social power, the
authority of which differed from that of the Inquisitional tribunals of
the sixteenth century only in the means it employed, not in the reach
and efficacy of these means. It wrought through public opinion, and
public opinion had become what Byron calls it in _Childe Harold_,
"an omnipotence,--whose veil
Mantles the earth with darkness, until right
And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale
Lest their own judgments should become too bright,
And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have too much light."
As for hypocrisy, he felt incapable of doing justice to it unaided. "Oh
for a forty-parson power!" he cries in _Don Juan_:--
"Oh for a _forty-parson power_ to chant
Thy praise, Hypocrisy! Oh for a hymn
Loud as the virtues thou dost loudly vaunt,
Not practise! Oh for trump of cherubim!"
Such a state of matters was inevitable at a period which has so much
in common with the age when the ancient religions and theories of
life were in process of dissolution; a period when an old theological
theory of the universe and of life, everywhere undermined and riddled
by science, and unable to support itself by its own inherent truth, was
obliged to cling to the conventional morality of the upper classes,
which it made as rigid as possible in order to have a support in
it; a period when ecclesiastical authority and narrow-minded social
conservatism, both in a tottering condition, were endeavouring to
uphold each other. Taking a bird's-eye view of the psychological
history of Europe during the first two decades of the century, it
actually seems to us as if the whole edifice of hypocrisy, the
foundations of which were laid in the writings of the French _émigrés_,
which rose steadily in those of the German Romanticists, and towered
to a giddy height during the French Reaction, now suddenly fell on the
head of one man.
Macaulay, in his essay on Moore's _Life of Byron_, writing on this
subject, says:--"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British
public in one of its periodical fits of morality. In general,
elopements, divorces, and family quarrels, pass with little notice.
We read the scandal, talk about it for a day, and forget it. But
once in six or seven years our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot
suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated. We must make
a stand against vice. We must teach libertines that the English
people appreciate the importance of domestic ties. Accordingly some
unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than hundreds whose
offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out as an expiatory
sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from him. If
he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by the
higher orders, and hissed by the lower. He is, in truth, a sort of
whipping-boy, by whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of
the same class are, it is supposed, sufficiently chastised. We reflect
very complacently on our own severity, and compare with great pride
the high standard of morals established in England with the Parisian
laxity. At length our anger is satiated. Our victim is ruined and
heart-broken. And our virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years
more."
If the causes of Byron's downfall were of a complex nature, the means
were simple enough. It was compassed by the Press, the only effective
instrument in such cases. Several of the papers and magazines had
taken the opportunity to spread slanders about him when criticising
his verses to the Princess Charlotte; and more than one of them
periodically calumniated him. Now they were all at liberty to discuss
and attack his private life freely, thanks to the anonymity which, in
spite of the want of naturalness and the corruption it entails, still
prevails in the English Press. What anonymity really means is simply
this, that the paltriest scribbler, who is hardly fit to hold the
pen with which he writes his lies, is enabled to put the trumpet of
moral public opinion to his lips, and let the voice of injured virtue
resound in thousands of homes. Nor is it enough that the one anonymous
writer should be able to constitute himself the voice of the public
in the thousands of copies of one newspaper; he can assume hundreds
of forms, can write with all kinds of fanciful signatures, and in a
dozen different newspapers and magazines. A single scribbler would have
sufficed to provide the whole Press with base attacks on a man outlawed
by public opinion; it is easy, then, to imagine the number that were
made on Byron, whose enemies were legion. Among the names given him by
the Press he himself remembered Nero, Apicius, Caligula, Heliogabalus,
and Henry VIII.--that is to say, he was accused of inhuman cruelty, of
insane brutality, of animal and unnatural lust; he was painted with all
the colours which vileness smears on its palette. The most terrible
of all the accusations was that which even then went the round of the
newspapers, and which sullied the fair name of the being dearest to
him--the accusation of incest. And to all this he could not answer a
word! He could not fight with the mire that bespattered him.
Slanders sped from mouth to mouth. When Mrs. Mardyn, the Drury Lane
actress, made her first appearance after the divorce, she was hissed
off the stage, because of the perfectly groundless report of a
_liaison_ between her and Byron, to whom, as a matter of fact, she had
only spoken twice. He himself could not appear on the streets without
danger. On his way to the House of Lords, where his presence was
ignored, he was insulted by a respectable crowd.
Defence or retort being impossible, no course was left him, proud as he
was, but to bow his head and go. "I felt," he writes, "that, if what
was whispered, and muttered, and murmured, was true, I was unfit for
England; if false, England was unfit for me." On the 25th of April,
1816, he set sail, never to return alive.
It is from this moment that Byron's true greatness dates. The blow
struck by the _Edinburgh Review_ had roused him, for the first time, to
intellectual activity. This new blow made of him a knight. There is no
comparison possible between what Byron wrote before, and what he wrote
after, the event which he himself regarded as his greatest misfortune.
It was a misfortune sent him by the genius of History, to snatch him
from the unmanning influence of idolisation, to sever the enfeebling
connection between him and that society and social spirit against which
it was his historic mission to arouse, with more fortune and more power
than any other individual, the hostility which was its undoing.
[1]
Byron has described Rousseau in a stanza which might have been written
about himself:--
"Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau,
The apostle of affliction, he who threw
Enchantment over passion, and from woe
Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first drew
The breath which made him wretched; yet he knew
How to make madness beautiful, and cast
O'er erring deeds and thoughts a heavenly hue
Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they pass'd
The eyes which o'er them shed tears feelingly and fast."
_Childe Harold_, iii 77.
[2] In Lady Morgan's _Memoirs_ we find the following lively account
by Lady Caroline Lamb herself of the beginning of her acquaintance
with Byron:--"Lady Westmoreland knew him in Italy. She took on her to
present him. The women suffocated him. I heard nothing of him, till one
day Rogers (for he, Moore, and Spencer, were all my lovers)--Rogers
said, 'You should know the new poet,' and he offered me the MS. of
_Childe Harold_ to read. I read it, and that was enough. Rogers said,
'He has a club-foot, and bites his nails.' I said, 'If he was as ugly
as Æsop I must know him.' I was one night at Lady Westmoreland's; the
women were all throwing their heads at him. Lady Westmoreland led me up
to him. I looked earnestly at him, and turned on my heel. My opinion in
my journal was, 'mad--bad--and dangerous to know.' A day or two passed;
I was sitting with Lord and Lady Holland, when he was announced. Lady
Holland said, 'I must present Lord Byron to you.' Lord Byron said,
'That offer was made to you before; may I ask why you rejected it?' He
begged permission to come and see me. He did so the next day. Rogers
and Moore were standing by me: I was on the sofa. I had just come in
from riding. I was filthy and heated. When Lord Byron was announced,
I flew out of the room to wash myself. When I returned, Rogers said,
'Lord Byron, you are a happy man. Lady Caroline has been sitting here
in all her dirt with us, but when you were announced, she flew to
beautify herself.... From that moment, for more than nine months, he
almost lived at Melbourne House. It was then the centre of all gaiety,
at least, in appearance.... All the _bon ton_ of London assembled here
every day. There was nothing so fashionable, Byron contrived to sweep
them all away." These utterances, reported with stenographic exactness,
give an excellent idea of the fashionable life of the day in London.