The present day of festivity and rejoicing has become one
of sorrow and of mourning. The Lord Noel Byron departed
this life at six o'clock in the afternoon, after an
illness of ten days ... I hereby decree:--
1st, To-morrow morning at daylight, thirty-seven minute
guns will be fired from the grand battery, being the
number which corresponds with the age of the illustrious
deceased.
2nd, All the public offices, even the tribunals, are to
remain closed for three successive days.
3d, All the shops, except those in which provisions or
medicines are sold, will also be shut; and it is strictly
enjoined that every species of public amusement, and other
demonstrations of festivity at Easter, shall be suspended.
4th, A general mourning will be observed for twenty-one
days.
5th, Prayers and a funeral service are to be offered up in
all the churches.
A. MAVROCORDATO.
_Given at Missolonghi_
_this 19th day of April_ 1824.
No other evidence is required of the impression which the news of
Byron's death made upon all who were intimately connected with him. At
Missolonghi people ran through the streets crying: "He is dead! The
great man is gone!" The corpse was conveyed to England. The clergy
refused it a place in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. But,
dependent neither on the blame of England nor the praise of Greece, his
renown established itself throughout the earth.
In the intellectual life of Russia and Poland, of Spain and Italy,
of France and Germany, the seeds which he had strewn broadcast with
such a lavish hand fructified--from the dragon's teeth sprang armed
men. The Slavonic nations, who were groaning under tyrannical rule,
who were by nature inclined to be melancholy, and in whom their
history had developed rebellious instincts, seized on his poetry with
avidity; and Pushkin's Onjœgin, Lermontoff's _A Hero of Our Own
Days_, Malczewski's _Marja_, Mickiewicz's _Conrad_ and _Wallenrod_,
Slowacki's _Lambro_ and _Beniowski_ witness to the powerful impression
made upon their authors. The Romance races, whose fair sinners his
verses had celebrated, and who were now in the act of revolt, eagerly
translated and studied his works. The Spanish and Italian exile-poets
took up his war-cry; in Spain the "Myrtle" Society was formed; in Italy
his influence was most plainly manifest in the writings of Giovanni
Berchet, but hardly less so in those of Leopardi and Giusti. His death
made an extraordinary impression in France. A week or two after it
happened, Chateaubriand went over to the Opposition, and his first
action after his fall was to become a member of the Greek Committee.
Hugo's _Les Orientales_ was not a flight straight to the East, like
the Oriental poetry of Germany; his way lay through Greece, and he
had much to say of the heroes of the war of liberation. Delavigne
devoted a beautiful poem to Byron; Lamartine added a last canto to
_Childe Harold_; Mérimée allowed himself to be influenced by Byron's
occasional spirit of savagery; Alfred de Musset attempted to take up
the mantle which had fallen from the shoulders of the great poet; and
even Lamennais began to employ a style in which many of the words and
expressions recalled the language of Byron's sallies. Germany was
still politically too far behind the other nations to have exiles
and emigrants among its poets; but its philologists had, with quiet
rejoicing, beheld in the rising of Greece the resurrection of ancient
Hellas; poets like Wilhelm Müller and Alfred Meissner wrote beautiful
verse in honour of Byron; and there were other writers who were still
more deeply moved by Byron's poetry--men of Jewish extraction, whose
feelings were those of the exiled and excommunicated--chief among
them Börne and Heine. Heine's best poetry (notably _Deutschland, ein
Wintermärchen_) is a continuation of Byron's work. French Romanticism
and German Liberalism are both direct descendants of Byron's Naturalism.