Having landed the young pilgrim once more in England, it may be worth
while, before we accompany him into the scenes that awaited him at home,
to consider how far the general character of his mind and disposition
may have been affected by the course of travel and adventure, in which
he had been, for the last two years, engaged. A life less savouring of
poetry and romance than that which he had pursued previously to his
departure on his travels, it would be difficult to imagine. In his
childhood, it is true, he had been a dweller and wanderer among scenes
well calculated, according to the ordinary notion, to implant the first
rudiments of poetic feeling. But, though the poet may afterwards feed on
the recollection of such scenes, it is more than questionable, as has
been already observed, whether he ever has been formed by them. If a
childhood, indeed, passed among mountainous scenery were so favourable
to the awakening of the imaginative power, both the Welsh, among
ourselves, and the Swiss, abroad, ought to rank much higher on the
scale of poetic excellence than they do at present. But, even allowing
the picturesqueness of his early haunts to have had some share in giving
a direction to the fancy of Byron, the actual operation of this
influence, whatever it may have been, ceased with his childhood; and the
life which he led afterwards during his school-days at Harrow, was,--as
naturally the life of so idle and daring a schoolboy must be,--the very
reverse of poetical. For a soldier or an adventurer, the course of
training through which he then passed would have been perfect;--his
athletic sports, his battles, his love of dangerous enterprise, gave
every promise of a spirit fit for the most stormy career. But to the
meditative pursuits of poesy, these dispositions seemed, of all others,
the least friendly; and, however they might promise to render him, at
some future time, a subject for bards, gave, assuredly, but little hope
of his shining first among bards himself.
The habits of his life at the university were even still less
intellectual and literary. While a schoolboy, he had read abundantly and
eagerly, though desultorily; but even this discipline of his mind,
irregular and undirected as it was, he had, in a great measure, given
up, after leaving Harrow; and among the pursuits that occupied his
academic hours, those of playing at hazard, sparring, and keeping a bear
and bull-dogs, were, if not the most favourite, at least, perhaps, the
most innocent. His time in London passed equally unmarked either by
mental cultivation or refined amusement. Having no resources in private
society, from his total want of friends and connections, he was left to
live loosely about town among the loungers in coffee-houses; and to
those who remember what his two favourite haunts, Limmer's and
Stevens's, were at that period, it is needless to say that, whatever
else may have been the merits of these establishments, they were
anything but fit schools for the formation of poetic character.
But however incompatible such a life must have been with those habits of
contemplation, by which, and which only, the faculties he had already
displayed could be ripened, or those that were still latent could be
unfolded, yet, in another point of view, the time now apparently
squandered by him, was, in after-days, turned most invaluably to
account. By thus initiating him into a knowledge of the varieties of
human character,--by giving him an insight into the details of society,
in their least artificial form,--in short, by mixing him up, thus early,
with the world, its business and its pleasures, his London life but
contributed its share in forming that wonderful combination which his
mind afterwards exhibited, of the imaginative and the practical--the
heroic and the humorous--of the keenest and most dissecting views of
real life, with the grandest and most spiritualised conceptions of ideal
grandeur.
To the same period, perhaps, another predominant characteristic of his
maturer mind and writings may be traced. In this anticipated experience
of the world which his early mixture with its crowd gave him, it is but
little probable that many of the more favourable specimens of human
kind should have fallen under his notice. On the contrary, it is but too
likely that some of the lightest and least estimable of both sexes may
have been among the models, on which, at an age when impressions sink
deepest, his earliest judgments of human nature were formed. Hence,
probably, those contemptuous and debasing views of humanity with which
he was so often led to alloy his noblest tributes to the loveliness and
majesty of general nature. Hence the contrast that appeared between the
fruits of his imagination and of his experience,--between those dreams,
full of beauty and kindliness, with which the one teemed at his bidding,
and the dark, desolating bitterness that overflowed when he drew from
the other.
Unpromising, however, as was his youth of the high destiny that awaited
him, there was one unfailing characteristic of the imaginative order of
minds--his love of solitude--which very early gave signs of those habits
of self-study and introspection by which alone the "diamond quarries" of
genius are worked and brought to light. When but a boy, at Harrow, he
had shown this disposition strongly,--being often known, as I have
already mentioned, to withdraw himself from his playmates, and sitting
alone upon a tomb in the churchyard, give himself up, for hours, to
thought. As his mind began to disclose its resources, this feeling grew
upon him; and, had his foreign travel done no more than, by detaching
him from the distractions of society, to enable him, solitarily and
freely, to commune with his own spirit, it would have been an
all-important step gained towards the full expansion of his faculties.
It was only then, indeed, that he began to feel himself capable of the
abstraction which self-study requires, or to enjoy that freedom from the
intrusion of others' thoughts, which alone leaves the contemplative mind
master of its own. In the solitude of his nights at sea, in his lone
wanderings through Greece, he had sufficient leisure and seclusion to
look within himself, and there catch the first "glimpses of his glorious
mind." One of his chief delights, as he mentioned in his "Memoranda,"
was, when bathing in some retired spot, to seat himself on a high rock
above the sea, and there remain for hours, gazing upon the sky and the
waters[1], and lost in that sort of vague reverie, which, however
formless and indistinct at the moment, settled afterwards on his pages,
into those clear, bright pictures which will endure for ever.
Were it not for the doubt and diffidence that hang round the first steps
of genius, this growing consciousness of his own power, these openings
into a new domain of intellect, where he was to reign supreme, must have
made the solitary hours of the young traveller one dream of happiness.
But it will be seen that, even yet, he distrusted his own strength, nor
was at all aware of the height to which the spirit he was now calling up
would grow. So enamoured, nevertheless, had he become of these lonely
musings, that even the society of his fellow-traveller, though with
pursuits so congenial to his own, grew at last to be a chain and a
burden on him; and it was not till he stood, companionless, on the shore
of the little island in the Aegean, that he found his spirit breathe
freely. If any stronger proof were wanting of his deep passion for
solitude, we shall find it, not many years after, in his own written
avowal, that, even when in the company of the woman he most loved, he
not unfrequently found himself sighing to be alone.
It was not only, however, by affording him the concentration necessary
for this silent drawing out of his feelings and powers, that travel
conduced so essentially to the formation of his poetical character. To
the East he had looked, with the eyes of romance, from his very
childhood. Before he was ten years of age, the perusal of Rycaut's
History of the Turks had taken a strong hold of his imagination, and he
read eagerly, in consequence, every book concerning the East he could
find.[2] In visiting, therefore, those countries, he was but realising
the dreams of his childhood; and this return of his thoughts to that
innocent time, gave a freshness and purity to their current which they
had long wanted. Under the spell of such recollections, the attraction
of novelty was among the least that the scenes, through which he
wandered, presented. Fond traces of the past--and few have ever retained
them so vividly--mingled themselves with the impressions of the objects
before him; and as, among the Highlands, he had often traversed, in
fancy, the land of the Moslem, so memory, from the wild hills of
Albania, now "carried him back to Morven."
While such sources of poetic feeling were stirred at every step, there
was also in his quick change of place and scene--in the diversity of men
and manners surveyed by him--in the perpetual hope of adventure and
thirst of enterprise, such a succession and variety of ever fresh
excitement as not only brought into play, but invigorated, all the
energies of his character: as he, himself, describes his mode of living,
it was "To-day in a palace, to-morrow in a cow-house--this day with the
Pacha, the next with a shepherd." Thus were his powers of observation
quickened, and the impressions on his imagination multiplied. Thus
schooled, too, in some of the roughnesses and privations of life, and,
so far, made acquainted with the flavour of adversity, he learned to
enlarge, more than is common in his high station, the circle of his
sympathies, and became inured to that manly and vigorous cast of thought
which is so impressed on all his writings. Nor must we forget, among
these strengthening and animating effects of travel, the ennobling
excitement of danger, which he more than once experienced,--having been
placed in situations, both on land and sea, well calculated to call
forth that pleasurable sense of energy, which perils, calmly confronted,
never fail to inspire.
The strong interest which--in spite of his assumed philosophy on this
subject in Childe Harold--he took in every thing connected with a life
of warfare, found frequent opportunities of gratification, not only on
board the English ships of war in which he sailed, but in his occasional
intercourse with the soldiers of the country. At Salora, a solitary
place on the Gulf of Arta, he once passed two or three days, lodged in a
small miserable barrack. Here, he lived the whole time, familiarly,
among the soldiers; and a picture of the singular scene which their
evenings presented--of those wild, half-bandit warriors, seated round
the young poet, and examining with savage admiration his fine Manton
gun[3] and English sword--might be contrasted, but too touchingly, with
another and a later picture of the same poet, dying, as a chieftain, on
the same land, with Suliotes for his guards, and all Greece for his
mourners.
It is true, amidst all this stimulating variety of objects, the
melancholy which he had brought from home still lingered around his
mind. To Mr. Adair and Mr. Bruce, as I have before mentioned, he gave
the idea of a person labouring under deep dejection; and Colonel Leake,
who was, at that time, resident at Ioannina, conceived very much the
same impression of the state of his mind.[4] But, assuredly, even this
melancholy, habitually as it still clung to him, must, under the
stirring and healthful influences of his roving life, have become a far
more elevated and abstract feeling than it ever could have expanded to
within reach of those annoyances, whose tendency was to keep it wholly
concentrated round self. Had he remained idly at home, he would have
sunk, perhaps, into a querulous satirist. But, as his views opened on a
freer and wider horizon, every feeling of his nature kept pace with
their enlargement; and this inborn sadness, mingling itself with the
effusions of his genius, became one of the chief constituent charms not
only of their pathos, but their grandeur. For, when did ever a sublime
thought spring up in the soul, that melancholy was not to be found,
however latent, in its neighbourhood?
We have seen, from the letters written by him on his passage homeward,
how far from cheerful or happy was the state of mind in which he
returned. In truth, even for a disposition of the most sanguine cast,
there was quite enough in the discomforts that now awaited him in
England, to sadden its hopes, and check its buoyancy. "To be happy at
home," says Johnson, "is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to
which every enterprise and labour tends." But Lord Byron had no
home,--at least none that deserved this endearing name. A fond family
circle, to accompany him with its prayers, while away, and draw round
him, with listening eagerness, on his return, was what, unluckily, he
never knew, though with a heart, as we have seen, by nature formed for
it. In the absence, too, of all that might cheer and sustain, he had
every thing to encounter that could distress and humiliate. To the
dreariness of a home without affection, was added the burden of an
establishment without means; and he had thus all the embarrassments of
domestic life, without its charms. His affairs had, during his absence,
been suffered to fall into confusion, even greater than their inherent
tendency to such a state warranted. There had been, the preceding year,
an execution on Newstead, for a debt of 1500_l._ owing to the Messrs.
Brothers, upholsterers; and a circumstance told of the veteran, Joe
Murray, on this occasion, well deserves to be mentioned. To this
faithful old servant, jealous of the ancient honour of the Byrons, the
sight of the notice of sale, pasted up on the abbey-door, could not be
otherwise than an unsightly and intolerable nuisance. Having enough,
however, of the fear of the law before his eyes, not to tear the writing
down, he was at last forced, as his only consolatory expedient, to paste
a large piece of brown paper over it.
Notwithstanding the resolution, so recently expressed by Lord Byron, to
abandon for ever the vocation of authorship, and leave "the whole
Castalian state" to others, he was hardly landed in England when we find
him busily engaged in preparations for the publication of some of the
poems which he had produced abroad. So eager was he, indeed, to print,
that he had already, in a letter written at sea, announced himself to
Mr. Dallas, as ready for the press. Of this letter, which, from its
date, ought to have preceded some of the others that have been given, I
shall here lay before the reader the most material parts.
[Footnote 1: To this he alludes in those beautiful stanzas,
"To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell," &c.
Alfieri, before his dramatic genius had yet unfolded itself, used to
pass hours, as he tells us, in this sort of dreaming state, gazing upon
the ocean:--"Après le spectacle un de mes amusemens, à Marseille, était
de me baigner presque tous les soirs dans la mer. J'avais trouvé un
petit endroit fort agréable, sur une langue de terre placée à droite
hors du port, où, en m'asseyant sur le sable, le dos appuyé contre un
petit rocher qui empêchait qu'on ne pût me voir du côté de la terre, je
n'avais plus devant moi que le ciel et la mer. Entre ces deux immensités
qu'embellissaient les rayons d'un soleil couchant, je passai en rêvant
des heures délicieuses; et là, je serais devenu poëte, si j'avais su
écrire dans une langue quelconque."]
[Footnote 2: But a few months before he died, in a conversation with
Maurocordato at Missolonghi, Lord Byron said--"The Turkish History was
one of the first books that gave me pleasure when a child; and I believe
it had much influence on my subsequent wishes to visit the Levant, and
gave perhaps the oriental colouring which is observed in my
poetry."--COUNT GAMBA's _Narrative_.
In the last edition of Mr. D'Israeli's work on "the Literary Character,"
that gentleman has given some curious marginal notes, which he found
written by Lord Byron in a copy of this work that belonged to him. Among
them is the following enumeration of the writers that, besides Rycaut,
had drawn his attention so early to the East:--
"Knolles, Cantemir, De Tott, Lady M.W. Montague, Hawkins's Translation
from Mignot's History of the Turks, the Arabian Nights, all travels, or
histories, or books upon the East I could meet with, I had read, as well
as Rycaut, before I was _ten years old_. I think the Arabian Nights
first. After these, I preferred the history of naval actions, Don
Quixote, and Smollett's novels, particularly Roderick Random, and I was
passionate for the Roman History. When a boy, I could never bear to read
any Poetry whatever without disgust and reluctance."]
[Footnote 3: "It rained hard the next day, and we spent another evening
with our soldiers. The captain, Elmas, tried a fine Manton gun belonging
to my Friend, and hitting his mark every time was highly
delighted."--HOBHOUSE'_s_ _Journey_, &c.]
[Footnote 4: It must be recollected that by two of these gentlemen he
was seen chiefly under the restraints of presentation and etiquette,
when whatever gloom there was on his spirits would, in a shy nature like
his, most show itself. The account which his fellow-traveller gives of
him is altogether different. In introducing the narration of a short
tour to Negroponte, in which his noble friend was unable to accompany
him, Mr. Hobhouse expresses strongly the deficiency of which he is
sensible, from the absence, on this occasion, of "a companion, who, to
quickness of observation and ingenuity of remark, united that gay
good-humour which keeps alive the attention under the pressure of
fatigue, and softens the aspect of every difficulty and danger." In some
lines, too, of the "Hints from Horace," addressed evidently to Mr.
Hobhouse, Lord Byron not only renders the same justice to his own social
cheerfulness, but gives a somewhat more distinct idea of the frame of
mind out of which it rose;--
"Moschus! with whom I hope once more to sit,
And smile at folly, if we can't at wit;
Yes, friend, for thee I'll quit my Cynic cell,
And bear Swift's motto, "Vive la bagatelle!"
Which charm'd our days in each Ægean clime,
And oft at home with revelry and rhyme."
]
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