"Extreme in love or hate, in good or ill,
The worst of crimes had left her woman still!
This Conrad mark'd, and felt--ah! could he less?--
Hate of that deed, but grief for her distress."
_(The Corsair._)
But where, they ask, shall the original of _Gulnare_ be found,--Gulnare,
who stains her hand with the blood of her lord the Pasha, to save the
Corsair from a dreadful death? Byron refuses to reveal his source of
inspiration: but Shelley quotes with sincere approval the lines which
most emphatically delineate that lovely, desperate woman.
Embark'd, the sail unfurl'd, the light breeze blew--
How much had Conrad's memory to review!...
He thought on her afar, his lovely bride:
He turned and saw--Gulnare, the homicide!
She watch'd his features till she could not bear
Their freezing aspect and averted air;
And that strange fierceness, foreign to her eye,
Fell quench'd in tears, too late to shed or dry.
"But for that deed of darkness what wert thou?
Reproach me--but not yet--O! spare me _now_!
I am not what I seem--this fearful night
My brain bewilder'd--do not madden quite!
If I had never loved, though less my guilt,
Thou hadst not lived to--hate me--if thou wilt."
Extreme in love or hate, in good or ill,
The worst of crimes had left her woman still!
This Conrad mark'd, and felt--ah! could he less?
Hate of that deed, but grief for her distress;
What she has done no tears could wash away,
And Heaven must punish on its angry day:
But--it was done: he knew, whate'er her guilt,
For him that poniard smote, that blood was spilt;
And he was free! and she for him had given
Her all on earth, and more than all in heaven!
(_The Corsair._)
But--"Heavens, Shelley!" cries his host, "what infinite nonsense are you
quoting?" and he hastily turns the current of conversation towards more
impersonal subjects.
The evening wears on: the guests depart: the clear spring moonlight
streams upon the winding Arno. Byron stands dreaming at the open window,
the bridges and buildings of Pisa lie still and silver-lit before him: a
subtle influence of quietude steals down upon him from the stars. "What
nothings we are," he murmurs, "before the least of these stars!" One in
particular--is it Sirius?--entrances his attention with its cold
refulgence of pure light. His thoughts involuntarily shape themselves in
rhythm and rhyme;
Sun of the sleepless! melancholy star!
Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far,
That show'st the darkness thou canst not dispel,
How like art thou to joy remember'd well!
So gleams the past, the light of other days,
Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays;
A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to behold,
Distinct, but distant--clear--but oh! how cold!
It is the hour when Byron's brain becomes thronged with a glowing
phantasmagoria of ideas that cry aloud for visible expression. He
forgets, under the stress of creative impulse, the sources and causes of
his inherent melancholy,--the miserable days of his childhood, with a
Fury for a mother,--the wound, never to be healed, of his unrequited
love for Mary Chaworth,--the inimical wife from whom he is eternally
alienated,--the little daughter that he may never hold in his arms,--the
beloved sister separated from his side,--the ancestral home of his
forefathers now passed into a stranger's hold,--the meteoric glory and
total eclipse of his unparalleled popularity in England,--the follies,
and worse than follies, which have made him what he is, "consistent in
nothing but his passion and his pride." These memories, like poisonous
exhalations, are banished from his mind, and leave a clear horizon for a
while,--a fertile landscape peopled with great words and images.
Something akin to inspiration seizes upon him: and he throws himself to
work with all the zest and nerve of his impulsive nature.
This is a man who writes, in his own phrase, "with rapidity and rarely
with pains.... When I once take pen in hand, I _must_ say what comes
uppermost or fling it away." Not for him that careful polishing of
sentences, which other writers meticulously bestow. "I have always
written as fast as I could put pen to paper, and never revised but in
the proofs.... I can never recast anything. I am like the tiger; if I
miss the first spring, I go grumbling back to my jungle." And to this
impetuous directness of onslaught, his finest poems bear witness. Some
critic has remarked that Byron is too much of the earth earthy to be a
great lyrical writer: yet a Promethean fire, stolen from heaven, burns
immortally through some of his shorter lyrics. In Greek, it is said,
there are 1632 ways of expressing the simple fact _I love you_: yet who
has ever put it in a more convincing form than Byron does in _Maid of
Athens_?
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