We opened our budget in the last chapter with the _Quarterly Review_,
which was just getting upon its legs through the smart, keen, and hard
writing of Mr. William Gifford. It throve afterward under the coddling of
the most literary of the Tory gentlemen in London, and its title has
always been associated with the names of John Wilson Croker, of Dr.
Southey, and of Mr. Lockhart. It is a journal, too, which has always been
tied by golden bonds to the worship of tradition and of vested privilege,
and which has always been ready with its petulant, impatient bark of
detraction at reform or reformers, or at any books which may have had a
scent of Liberalism. Leigh Hunt, of course, came in for periodic
scathings--some of them deserved; some not deserved. Indeed, I am
half-disposed to repent what may have seemed a too flippant mention of
this very graceful poet and essayist. Of a surety, there is an abounding
affluence of easy language--gushing and disporting over his pages--which
lures one into reading and into dreamy acquiescence; but read as much as
we may, and as long as we will, we shall go away from the reading with a
certain annoyance that there is so little to keep out of it all--so little
that sticks to the ribs and helps.
As for the poet Moore, of whom also we may have spoken in terms which may
seem of too great disparagement to those who have loved to linger in his
“Vale of Cashmere
With its roses, the brightest that earth ever gave.
Its temples, and grottos, and fountains as clear
As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave,”
no matter what may become of these brilliant orientalisms, or of his life
of Byron, or of his diaries, and his “Two-penny Post Bag,” it is certain
that his name will be gratefully kept alive by his sparkling, patriotic,
and most musical Irish melodies; and under that sufficient monument we
leave him.
As for Landor--surely the pages in which we dealt with him were not too
long: a strange, strong bit of manhood--as of one fed on collops of bear’s
meat; a big animal nature, yet wonderfully transfused by a vivid
intellectuality--fine and high--that pierced weighty subjects to their
core; and yet--and yet, singing such heart-shivering tributes as that to
Rose Aylmer: coarse as the bumpkins on the sheep wolds of Lincoln, and yet
with as fine subtleties in him as belonged to the young Greeks who
clustered about the writer of the _Œdipus Tyrannus_.
_The “First Gentleman.”_
King George IV. was an older man than any of those we have commented on;
indeed, he was a prematurely old man at sixty-five--feeling the shivers
and the stings of his wild life: I suppose no one ever felt the approaches
of age more mortifyingly. He had counted so much on being the fine
gentleman to the last--such a height, such a carriage, such a grace! It
was a dark day for him when his mirror showed wrinkles that his cosmetics
would not cover, and a stoop in the shoulders which his tailors could not
bolster out of sight. Indeed, in his later years he shrunk from exposure
of his infirmities, and kept his gouty step out of reach of the curious,
down at Windsor, where he built a cottage in a wood; and arranged his
drives through the Park so that those who had admired this Apollo at his
best should never know of his shakiness. Thither went his conclave of
political advisers--sometimes Canning, the wonderful orator--sometimes the
Duke of Wellington, with the honors of Waterloo upon him--sometimes young
Sir Robert Peel, just beginning to make his influence felt; oftener yet,
Charles Greville, whose memoirs are full of piquant details about the
royal household--not forgetting that army of tailors and hair-dressers who
did their best to assuage the misery and gratify the vanities of the gouty
king. And when he died--which he hated exceedingly to do--in 1830, there
came to light such a multitude of waistcoats, breeches, canes,
snuff-boxes, knee-buckles, whips, and wigs, as I suppose were never
heaped before around any man’s remains. The first gentleman in Europe
could not, after all, carry these things with him. His brother, William
IV., who succeeded him, was a bluff old Admiral--with not so high a sense
of the proprieties of life as George; but honester even in his badnesses
(which were very many) and, with all his coarseness and vulgarity,
carrying a brusque, sailor-like frankness that half redeemed his
peccadilloes. In those stormy times which belonged to the passage of the
Reform Bill of 1832, he showed nerve and pluck, and if he split the air
pretty often with his oaths, he never offended by a wearying
dilettanteism, or by foppery. In the year 1837 he died; and then and there
began--within the memory of a good many of us old stagers--that reign of
his young niece Victoria, daughter of his brother, the Duke of Kent (who
had died seventeen years before)--which reign still continues, and is
still resplendent with the virtues of the Sovereign and the well-being of
her people.
Under these several royal hands, the traditional helpfulness to men of
letters had declared itself in pensions and civil appointments; Southey
had come to his laureateship, and his additional pension; we found the
venerable Wordsworth making a London pilgrimage for a “kissing of hands,”
and the honor of a royal stipend; Walter Scott had received his baronetcy
at the hands of George IV., and that dilettante sovereign would have taken
Byron (whom we shall presently encounter) patronizingly by the hand,
except the fiery poet--scenting slights everywhere--had flamed up in that
spirit of proud defiance, which afterward declared itself with a fury of
denunciation in the _Irish Avatar_ (1821).
_Hazlitt and Hallam._
Another noticeable author of this period, whose cynicism kept him very
much by himself, was William Hazlitt;[53] he was the son of a clergyman
and very precocious--hearing Coleridge preach in his father’s pulpit at
Wem in Shropshire, and feeling his ambition stirred by the notice of that
poet, who was attracted by the shrewd speech and great forehead of the
boy. Young Hazlitt drifts away from such early influences to Paris and to
painting--he thinking to master that art. But in this he does nothing
satisfying; he next appears in London, to carve a way to fame with his
pen. He is an acute observer; he is proud; he is awkward; he is shy.
Charles Lamb and sister greatly befriend him and take to him; and he, with
his hate of conventionalisms, loves those Lamb chambers and the whist
parties, where he can go, in whatever slouch costume he may choose; poor
Mary Lamb, too, perceiving that he has a husband-ish hankering after a
certain female friend of hers--blows hot and cold upon it, in her quaint
little notelets, with a delighted and an undisguised sense of being a
party to their little game. It ended in a marriage at last; not without
its domestic infelicities; but these would be too long, and too dreary for
the telling. Mr. Hazlitt wrote upon a vast variety of topics--upon art,
and the drama, upon economic questions, upon politics--as wide in his
range as Leigh Hunt; and though he was far more trenchant, more shrewd,
more disputatious, more thoughtful, he did lack Hunt’s easy pliancy and
grace of touch. Though a wide reader and acute observer, Hazlitt does not
contend or criticise by conventional rules; his law of measurement is not
by old syntactic, grammatic, or dialectic practices; there’s no imposing
display of critical implements (by which some operators dazzle us), but he
cuts--quick and sharp--to the point at issue. We never forget his
strenuous, high-colored personality, and the seething of his
prejudices--whether his talk is of Napoleon (in which he is not reverent
of average British opinion), or of Sir Joshua Reynolds, or of Burke’s
brilliant oratorical apostrophes. But with fullest recognition of his
acuteness, and independence, there remains a disposition (bred by his
obstinacies and shortcomings) to take his conclusions _cum grano salis_.
He never quite disabuses our mind of the belief that he is a paid
advocate; he never conquers by calm; and, upon the whole, impresses one as
a man who found little worth the living for in this world, and counted
upon very little in any other.
The historian, Henry Hallam,[54] on the other hand, who was another
notable literary character of this epoch, was full of all serenities of
character--even under the weight of such private griefs as were appalling.
He was studious, honest, staid--with a great respect for decorum; he would
have gravitated socially--as he did--rather to Holland House than to the
chambers where Lamb presided over the punch-bowl. In describing the man
one describes his histories; slow, calm, steady even to prosiness, yet
full; not entertaining in a gossipy sense; not brilliant; scarce ever
eloquent. If he is in doubt upon a point he tells you so; if there has
been limitation to his research, there is no concealment of it; I think,
upon the whole, the honestest of all English historians. In his search for
truth, neither party, nor tradition, nor religious scruples make him
waver. None can make their historic journey through the Middle Ages
without taking into account the authorities he has brought to notice, and
the path that he has scored.
And yet there is no atmosphere along that path as he traces it. People and
towns and towers and monarchs pile along it, clearly defined, but in dead
shapes. He had not the art--perhaps he would have disdained the art--to
touch all these with picturesque color, and to make that page of the
world’s history glow and palpitate with life.
Among those great griefs which weighed upon the historian, and to which
allusion has been made, I name that one only with which you are perhaps
familiar--I mean the sudden death of his son Arthur, a youth of rare
accomplishments--counted by many of more brilliant promise than any young
Englishman of his time--yet snatched from life, upon a day of summer’s
travel, as by a thunderbolt. He lies buried in Clevedon Church, which
overhangs the waters of Bristol Channel; and his monument is Tennyson’s
wonderful memorial poem.
I will not quote from it; but cite only the lines “out of which” (says Dr.
John Brown), “as out of the well of the living waters of Love, flows
forth all _In Memoriam_.”
“Break--break--break
At the foot of thy crags, O sea:
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O, for the touch of a vanished hand
And the sound of a voice that is still.”
I have purposely set before you two strongly contrasted types of English
literary life in that day--in William Hazlitt and Henry Hallam--the first
representing very nearly what we would call the Bohemian element--ready
to-day for an article in the _Edinburgh Review_, and to-morrow for a gibe
in the _Examiner_, or a piece of diablerie in the _London Magazine_;
Hallam, on the other hand, representing the sober and orderly traditions,
colored by the life and work of such men as Hume, Roscoe, and Gibbon.
_Queen of a Salon._
Another group of literary people, of a very varied sort, we should have
found in the salons of my Lady Blessington,[55] who used to hold court on
the Thames--now by Piccadilly, and again at Gore House--in the early part
of this century. She was herself a writer; nor is her personal history
without its significance, as an outgrowth of times when George IV. was
setting the pace for those ambitious of social distinction.
She was the quick-witted daughter of an Irish country gentleman of the
Lucius O’Trigger sort--nicknamed Beau Power. He loved a whip and fast
horses--also dogs, powder, and blare. He wore white-topped boots, with
showy frills and ruffles; he drank hard, swore harder--wasted his fortune,
abused his wife, but was “very fine” to the end. He was as cruel as he was
fine; shot a peasant once, in cold blood, and dragged him home after his
saddle beast. He worried his daughter, Marguerite (Lady Blessington), into
marrying, at fifteen, a man whom she detested. It gave relief, however,
from paternal protection, until the husband proved worse than the father,
and separation ensued--made good (after some years of tumultuous, uneasy
life) by the violent and providential death of the recreant husband.
Shortly after, she married Lord Blessington, a rich Irish nobleman, very
much blasé, seven years her senior, but kind and always generous with her.
Then came travel in a princely way over the Continent, with long stays in
pleasant places, and such lavish spendings as put palaces at their
disposal--of all which a readable and gossipy record is given in her
_Idler in Italy_ and _Idler in France_--books well known, in their day, in
America. Of course she encountered in these ramblings Landor, Shelley,
Byron, and all notable Englishmen, and when she returned to London it was
to establish that brilliant little court already spoken of. She was
admirably fitted for sovereign of such a court; she was witty, ready,
well-instructed; was beautiful, too, and knew every art of the
toilet.[56]
More than this, she was mistress of all the pretty and delicate arts of
conciliation; had amazing aptitude for accommodating herself to different
visitors--flattering men without letting them know they were
flattered--softening difficulties, bringing enemies together, magnetizing
the most obstinate and uncivil into acquiescence with her rules of
procedure. Withal she had in large development those Irish traits of
generosity and cheer, with a natural, winning way, which she studied to
make more and more taking. One of those women who, with wit, prettiness,
and grace, count it the largest, as it is (to them) the most agreeable
duty of life, to be forever making social conquests, and forever reaping
the applause of drawing-rooms. And if we add to the smiles and the witty
banter and the persuasive tones of our lady, the silken hangings, the
velvet carpets, the mirrors multiplying inviting alcoves, with paintings
by Cattermole or Stothard, and marbles, maybe by Chantrey or Westmacott,
and music in its set time by the best of London masters, and cooking in
its season as fine as the music,--and we shall be at no loss to measure
the attractions of Gore House, and to judge of the literary and social
aspects which blazed there on the foggy banks of the Thames. No wonder
that old Samuel Rogers, prince of epicures, should love to carry his
pinched face and his shrunk shanks into such sunny latitudes. Moore, too,
taking his mincing steps into those regions, would find banquets to remind
him of the Bowers of Bendemeer. Possibly, too, the Rev. Sydney Smith,
without the fear of Lady Holland in his heart or eyes, may have pocketed
his dignity as Canon of St. Paul’s and gone thither to taste the delights
of the table or of the talk. Even Hallam, or Southey (on his rare visits
to town), may have gone there. Lady Blessington was always keenly awake
for such arrivals. Even Brougham used to take sometimes his clumsy
presence to her brilliant home; and so, on occasion, did that younger
politician, and accomplished gentleman, Sir Robert Peel. Procter--better
known as Barry Cornwall--the song-writer, was sure to know his way to
those doors and to be welcomed; and Leigh Hunt was always eager to play
off his fine speeches amid such surroundings of wine and music.
The Comte d’Orsay, artist and man of letters, who married (1827) a
daughter of Lord Blessington (step-daughter of the Countess), was a
standing ornament of the house; and rivalling him in their cravats and
other millinery were two young men who had long careers before them. These
were Benjamin Disraeli and Edward Lytton Bulwer.
_Young Bulwer and Disraeli._
It was some years before the passage of the Reform bill, and before the
death of George IV., that Bulwer[57] blazed out in _Pelham_ (1828), _The
Disowned_, and _Devereux_, making conquest of the novel-reading town, at a
time when _Quentin Durward_ (1823) was not an old book, and _Woodstock_
(1826) still fresh. And if Pelhamism had its speedy subsidence, the same
writer put such captivating historic garniture and literary graces about
the Italian studies of _Rienzi_, and of the _Last Days of Pompeii_, as
carry them now into most libraries, and insure an interested
reading--notwithstanding a strong sensuous taint and sentimental
extravagances.
He had scholarship; he had indefatigable industry; he had abounding
literary ambitions and enthusiasms, but he had no humor; I am afraid he
had not a very sensitive conscience; and he had no such pervading
refinement of literary taste as to make his work serve as the exemplar for
other and honester workers.
Benjamin Disraeli[58] in those days overmatched him in cravats and in
waistcoats, and was the veriest fop of all fop-land. No more beautiful
accessory could be imagined to the drawing-room receptions over which Lady
Blessington presided, and of which the ineffable Comte d’Orsay was a
shining and a fixed light, than this young Hebraic scion of a great Judean
house--whose curls were of the color of a raven’s wing, and whose satin
trumpery was ravishing!
And yet--this young foppish Disraeli, within fifty years, held the
destinies of Great Britain in his hand, and had endowed the Queen with the
grandest title she had ever worn--that of Empress of India. Still further,
in virtue of his old friendship for his fellow fop Bulwer, he sends the
son of that novelist (in the person of the second Lord Lytton) to preside
over a nation numbering two hundred millions of souls. Whoever can
accomplish these ends with such a people as that of Great Britain must
needs have something in him beyond mere fitness for the pretty salons of
my Lady Blessington.
And what was it? Whatever you may count it, there is surely warrant for
telling you something of his history and his antecedents: Three or more
centuries ago--at the very least--a certain Jew of Cordova, in Spain,
driven out by the terrors of the Inquisition, went to Venice--established
himself there in merchandise, and his family throve there for two hundred
years. A century and a half ago,--when the fortunes of Venice were plainly
on the wane--the head of this Jewish family--Benjamin Disraeli
(grandfather of the one of whom we speak) migrated to England. This first
English Benjamin met with success on the Exchange of London, and owing to
the influences of his wife (who hated all Jewry) he discarded his
religious connection with Hebraism, went to the town of Enfield, a little
north of London--with a good fortune, and lived there the life of a
retired country gentleman. He had a son Isaac, who devoted himself to the
study of literature, and showed early strong bookish proclivities--very
much to the grief of his father, who had a shrewd contempt for all such
follies. Yet the son Isaac persisted, and did little else through a long
life, save to prosecute inquiries about the struggles of authors and the
lives of authors and the work of authors--all ending in that agglomeration
which we know as the _Curiosities of Literature_--a book which sixty years
since used to be reckoned a necessary part of all well-equipped
libraries; but which--to tell truth--has very little value; being without
any method, without fulness, and without much accuracy. It is very rare
that so poor a book gets so good a name, and wears it so long.
Oddly enough, this father, who had devoted a life to the mere gossip of
literature, as it were, warns his son Benjamin against literary pursuits
(he wrote three or four novels indeed,[59] but they are never heard of),
and the son studied mostly under private tutors; there is no full or
trustworthy private biography of him: but we know that in the years
1826-1827--only a short time before the Lady Blessington coterie was in
its best feather--he wrote a novel called _Vivian Grey_,--the author being
then under twenty-two--which for a time divided attention with _Pelham_.
In club circles it made even more talk. It is full of pictures of people
of the day; Brougham and Wilson Croker, and Southey, and George Canning,
and Mrs. Coutts and Lady Melbourne (Caroline Lamb), all figure in it. He
never gave over, indeed, putting portraits in his books--as Goldwin Smith
can tell us. The larger Reviews were coy of praise and coy of
condemnation: indeed ’twas hard to say which way it pointed--socially or
politically; but, for the scandal-mongers, there was in it very appetizing
meat. He became a lion of the salons; and he enjoyed the lionhood vastly.
Chalon[60] painted him in that day--a very Adonis--gorgeous in velvet coat
and in ruffled shirt.
But he grew tired of England and made his trip of travel; it followed by
nearly a score of years after that of Childe Harold, and was doubtless
largely stimulated by it; three years he was gone--wandering over all the
East, as well as Europe. He came back with an epic (published 1834),
believing that it was to fill men’s minds, and to conquer a place for him
among the great poets of the century. In this he was dismally mistaken; so
he broke his lyre, and that was virtually the last of his poesy. There
came, however, out of these journeyings, besides the poem, the stories of
_Contarini Fleming_, of _The Young Duke_, and _The Wondrous Tale of
Alroy_. These kept his fame alive, but seemed after all only the work of a
man playing with literature, rather than of one in earnest.
With ambition well sharpened now, by what he counted neglect, he turned to
politics; as the son of a country gentleman of easy fortune, it was not
difficult to make place for himself. Yet, with all the traditions of a
country gentleman about him, in his first moves he was not inclined to
Toryism; indeed, he startled friends by his radicalism--was inclined to
shake hands at the outset with the arch-agitator O’Connell; but not
identifying himself closely with either party; and so, to the last it
happened that his sympathies were halved in most extraordinary way; he had
the concurrence of the most staid, Toryish, and conservative of country
voters; and no man could, like himself, bring all the jingoes of England
howling at his back. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable in his career than
his shrewd adaptation of policy to meet existing, or approaching tides of
feeling; he does not avow great convictions of duty, and stand by them;
but he toys with convictions; studies the weakness, as he does the power,
of those with him or against him; shifts his ground accordingly; rarely
lacking poise, and the attitude of seeming steadfastness; whipping with
his scourge of a tongue the little lapses of his adversaries till they
shrill all over the kingdom; and putting his own triumphs--great or
small--into such scenic combination, with such beat of drum, and blare of
trumpet, as to make all England break out into bravos.[61] There was not
that literary quality in his books, either early or late, which will give
to them, I think, a very long life; but there was in the man a quality of
shrewdness and of power which will be long remembered--perhaps not always
to his honor.
I do not yield to any in admiration for the noble and philanthropic
qualities which belong to the venerable, retired statesman of Hawarden;
yet I cannot help thinking that if such a firm and audacious executive
hand as belonged to Lord Beaconsfield, had--in the season of General
Gordon’s stress at Khartoum--controlled the fleets and armies of Great
Britain, there would have been quite other outcome to the sad imbroglio in
the Soudan. When war is afoot, the apostles of peace are the poorest of
directors.
I go back for a moment to that Blessington Salon--in order to close her
story. There was a narrowed income--a failure of her jointure--a
shortening of her book sales; but, notwithstanding, there was a long
struggle to keep that brilliant little court alive. One grows to like so
much the music and the fêtes and the glitter of the chandeliers, and the
unction of flattering voices! But at last the ruin came; on a sudden the
sheriffs were there; and clerks with their inventories in place of the
“Tokens” and “annuals”--with their gorgeous engravings by Finden &
Heath--which the Mistress had exploited; and she hurried off--after the
elegant D’Orsay--to Paris, hoping to rehabilitate herself, on the Champs
Elysées, under the wing of Louis Napoleon, just elected President. I
chanced to see her in her coupé there, on a bright afternoon early in
1849--with elegant silken wraps about her and a shimmer of the old kindly
smile upon her shrunken face--dashing out to the Bois; but within three
months there was another sharp change; she--dead, and her pretty
_decolleté_ court at an end forever.
_The Poet of Newstead._
The reminiscences and conversations of Lord Byron, which we have at the
hands of Lady Blessington, belong to a time, of course, much earlier than
her series of London triumphs, and date with her journeys in Italy. A
score of years at least before ever the chandeliers of her Irish ladyship
were lighted in Gore House, Byron[62] had gone sailing away from England
under a storm of wrath; and he never came back again. Indeed it is not a
little extraordinary that one of the most typical of English poets,
should--like Landor, with whom he had many traits in common--have passed
so little of his active life on English ground. Like Landor, he loved
England most when England was most behind him. Like Landor, he was gifted
with such rare powers as belonged to few Englishmen of that generation. In
Landor these powers, so far as they expressed themselves in literary form,
were kept in check by the iron rulings of a scrupulous and exacting
craftsmanship; while in Byron they broke all trammels, whether of
craftsmanship or reason, and glowed and blazed the more by reason of their
audacities. Both were prone to great tempests of wrath which gave to both
furious joys, and, I think, as furious regrets.
Byron came by his wrathfulness in good hereditary fashion--as we shall
find if we look back only a little way into the records of that Newstead
family. Newstead Abbey (more properly Priory, the archæologists tell us)
is the name of that great English home--half a ruin--associated with the
early years of the poet, but never for much time or in any true sense a
home of his own. It is some ten miles north of Nottingham, in an
interesting country, where lay the old Sherwood Forest, with its
traditions of Robin Hood; there is a lichened Gothic front which explains
the Abbey name; there are great rambling corridors and halls; there is a
velvety lawn, with the monument to “Boatswain,” the poet’s dog; but one
who goes there--with however much of Byronic reading in his or her
mind--will not, I think, warm toward the locality; and the curious
foot-traveller will incline to trudge away in a hunt for Annesley, and the
“Antique Oratory.”
Well, in that ancient home, toward the end of the last century, there
lived, very much by himself, an old Lord Byron, who some thirty years
before, in a fit of wild rage, had killed a neighbor and kinsman of the
name of Chaworth; there was indeed a little show of a duel about the
murder--which was done in a London tavern, and by candle-light. His
peerage, however, only saved this “wicked lord,” as he was called, from
prison; and at Newstead his life smouldered out in 1798, under clouds of
hate, and of distrust. His son was dead before him; so was his grandson,
the last heir in direct line; but he had a younger brother, John, who was
a great seaman--who published accounts of his voyages,[63] which seem
always to have been stormy, and which lend, maybe, some realistic touches
to the shipwreck scenes in “Don Juan.” A son of this voyager was the
father of the poet, and was reputed to be as full of wrath and turbulence
as his uncle who killed the Chaworth; and his life was as thick with
disaster as that of the unlucky voyager. His first marriage was a runaway
one with a titled lady, whose heart he broke, and who died leaving that
lone daughter who became the most worthy Lady Augusta Leigh. For second
wife he married Miss Gordon, a Scotch heiress, the mother of the poet,
whose fortune he squandered, and whose heart also he would have broken--if
it had been of a breaking quality. With such foregoers of his own name,
one might look for bad blood in the boy; nor was his mother saint-like;
she had her storms of wrath; and from the beginning, I think, gave her boy
only cruel milk to drink.
His extreme boyhood was passed near to Aberdeen, with the Highlands not
far off. How much those scenes impressed him, we do not know; but that
some trace was left may be found in verses written near his death:--
“He who first met the Highland’s swelling blue
Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue;
Hail in each crag a friend’s familiar face
And clasp the mountain in his mind’s embrace.”
When the boy was ten, the wicked lord who had killed the Chaworth died;
and the Newstead inheritance fell to the young poet. We can imagine with
what touch of the pride that shivers through so many of his poems, this
lad--just lame enough to make him curse that unlucky fate--paced first
down the hall at Newstead--thenceforth master there--a Peer of England.
But the estate was left in sorry condition; the mother could not hold it
as a residence; so they went to Nottingham--whereabout the boy seems to
have had his first schooling. Not long afterward we find him at Harrow,
not far out of London, where he makes one or two of the few friendships
which abide; there, too, he gives first evidence of his power over
language.
It is at about this epoch, also, that on his visits to Nottingham--which
is not far from the Chaworth home of Annesley--comes about the spinning of
those little webs of romance which are twisted afterward into the
beautiful Chaworth “Dream.” It is an old story to tell, yet how
everlastingly fresh it keeps!
“The maid was on the eve of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him; he had looked
Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, nor being, but in hers,
She was his voice … upon a tone,
A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously--his heart
Unknowing of its cause of agony.”
As a matter of fact, Miss Chaworth was two years older, and far more
mature than he; she was gentle too, and possessed of a lady-like calm,
which tortured him--since he could not break it down. Indeed, through all
the time when he was sighing, she was looking over his head at Mr.
Musters--who was bluff and hearty, and who rode to the hounds, and was an
excellent type of the rollicking, self-satisfied, and beef-eating English
squire--whom she married.
_Early Verse and Marriage._
After this episode came Cambridge, and those _Hours of Idleness_ which
broke out into verse, and caught the scathing lash of Henry Brougham--then
a young, but well-known, advocate, who was conspiring with Sydney Smith
and Jeffrey (as I have told you) to renovate the world through the pages
of the _Edinburgh Review_.
But this lashing brought a stinging reply; and the clever, shrewd, witty
couplets of Byron’s satire upon the Scottish Reviewers (1809), convinced
all scholarly readers that a new and very piquant pen had come to the
making of English verse. Nor were Byron’s sentimentalisms of that day all
so crude and ill-shapen as Brougham would have led the public to suppose.
I quote a fragment from a little poem under date of 1808--he just twenty:
“The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now,
Thy vows are all broken
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
“They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me--
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well;
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.”
Naturally enough, our poet is beaming with the success of his satire,
which is widely read, and which has made him foes of the first rank; but
what cares he for this? He goes down with a company of fellow roisterers,
and makes the old walls of Newstead ring with the noisy celebration of his
twenty-first birthday; and on the trail of that country revel, and with
the sharp, ringing couplets of his “English Bards” crackling on the public
ear, he breaks away for his first joyous experience of Continental travel.
This takes him through Spain and to the Hellespont and among the isles of
Greece--seeing visions there and dreaming dreams, all which are braided
into that tissue of golden verse we know as the first two cantos of
_Childe Harold_.
On his return, and while as yet this poem of travel is on the eve of
publication, he prepares himself for a new _coup_ in Parliament--being not
without his oratorical ambitions. It was in February of 1812 that he made
his maiden speech in the House of Lords--carefully worded, calm, not
without quiet elegancies of diction--but not meeting such reception as his
extravagant expectation demanded; whatever he does, he wishes met with a
tempest of approval; a dignified welcome, to his fiery nature, seems cold.
But the publication of _Childe Harold_, only a short time later, brings
compensating torrents of praise. His satire had piqued attention without
altogether satisfying it; there was little academic merit in it--none of
the art which made _Absalom and Achitophel_ glow, or which gleamed upon
the sword-thrusts of the _Dunciad_; but its stabs were business-like; its
couplets terse, slashing, and full of truculent, scorching _vires iræ_.
This other verse, however, of _Childe Harold_--which took one upon the
dance of waves and under the swoop of towering canvass to the groves of
“Cintra’s glorious Eden,” and among those Spanish vales where Dark
Guadiana “rolls his power along;” and thence on, by proud Seville, and
fair Cadiz, to those shores of the Egean, where
“Still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields,--”[64]
was of quite another order. There is in it, moreover, the haunting
personality of the proud, broken-spirited wanderer, who tells the tale and
wraps himself in the veil of mysterious and piquant sorrows: Withal there
is such dash and spirit, such mastery of language, such marvellous
descriptive power, such subtle pauses and breaks, carrying echoes beyond
the letter--as laid hold on men and women--specially on women--in a way
that was new and strange. And this bright meteor had flashed athwart a sky
where such stars as Southey, and Scott, and Rogers, and the almost
forgotten Crabbe, and Coleridge, and Wordsworth had been beaming for many
a day. Was it strange that the doors of London should be flung wide open
to this fresh, brilliant singer who had blazed such a path through Spain
and Greece, and who wore a coronet upon his forehead?
He was young, too, and handsome as the morning; and must be mated--as all
the old dowagers declared. So said his friends--his sister chiefest among
them; and the good Lady Melbourne (mother-in-law of Lady Caroline
Lamb)--not without discreet family reasons of her own--fixed upon her
charming niece, Miss Milbanke, as the one with whom the new poet should be
coupled, to make his way through the wildernesses before him. And there
were other approvals; even Tom Moore--who, of all men, knew his habits
best--saying a reluctant “Yes”--after much hesitation. And so, through a
process of coy propositions and counter-propositions, the marriage was
arranged at last, and came about down at Seaham House (near
Stockton-on-Tees), the country home of the father, Sir Ralph Milbanke.
“Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The starlight of his boyhood; as he stood
Even at the altar, o’er his brow there came
The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock
That in the Antique Oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude; and then--
As in that hour--a moment o’er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced; and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reeled around him.”[65]
Yet the service went on to its conclusion; and the music pealed, and the
welcoming shouts broke upon the air, and the adieux were spoken; and
together, they two drove away--into the darkness.