Our last chapter brought us into the presence of that vivacious specimen
of royalty, George IV., who “shuffled off this mortal coil” in the year
1830, and was succeeded by that rough-edged, seafaring brother of his,
William IV. This admiral-king was not brilliant; but we found
brilliancy--of a sort--in the acute and disputatious essayist, William
Hazlitt; yet he was far less companionable than acute, and contrasted most
unfavorably with that serene and most worthy gentleman, Hallam, the
historian. We next encountered the accomplished and showy Lady
Blessington--the type of many a one who throve in those days, and who had
caught somewhat of the glitter that radiated from the royal trappings of
George the Fourth. We saw Bulwer, among others, in her salon; and we
lingered longer over the wonderful career of that Disraeli, who died as
Lord Beaconsfield--the most widely known man in Great Britain.
We then passed to a consideration of that other wonderful adventurer--yet
the inheritor of an English peerage--who had made his futile beginning in
politics, and a larger beginning in poetry. To his career, which was left
half-finished, we now recur.
_Lord Byron a Husband._
As we left him--you will remember--there was a jangle of marriage-bells;
and a wearisome jangle it proved. Indeed Byron’s marriage-bells were so
preposterously out of tune, and lent their discord in such disturbing
manner to the whole current of his life, that it may be worth our while to
examine briefly the conditions under which the discord began. It is
certain that all the gossips of London had been making prey of this match
of the poetic hero of the hour for much time before its consummation.
Was he seeking a fortune? Not the least in the world; for though the
burden of debt upon his estates was pressing him sorely, and his
extravagances were reckless, yet large sums accruing from his
swift-written tales of the “Corsair,” “Lara,” and “Bride of Abydos” were
left untouched, or lavishly bestowed upon old or new friends; his
liberality in those days was most exceptional; nor does it appear that he
had any very definite notion of the pecuniary aid which his bride might
bring to him. She had, indeed, in her own right, what was a small sum
measured by their standards of living; and her expectancies, that might
have justified the title of heiress (which he sometimes gives to her in
his journal), were then quite remote.
As for social position, there could be by such marriage no gain to him,
for whom already the doors of England were flung wide open. Did he
seek the reposeful dignity of a home? There may have been such fancies
drifting by starts through his mind; but what crude fancies they must
have been with a man who had scarcely lived at peace with his own
mother, and whose only notion of enjoyment in the house of his ancestors
was in the transport to Newstead of a roistering company of boon
companions--followed by such boisterous revels there, and such unearthly
din and ghostly frolics, as astounded the neighborhood!
The truth is, he marched into that noose of matrimony as he would have
ordered a new suit from his tailor. When this whim had first seized him,
he had written off formal proposals to Miss Milbanke--whom he knew at that
time only slightly; and she, with very proper prudence, was non-committal
in her reply--though suggesting friendly correspondence. In his journal of
a little later date we have this entry:
“November 30, 1813 [some fourteen months before the marriage].
Yesterday a very pretty letter from Annabella [the full name was
Anna Isabella], which I answered. What an odd situation and
friendship is ours! Without one spark of love on either side. She is
a very superior woman, and very little spoiled … a girl of twenty,
an only child and a _savante_, who has always had her own way.”
This evidently does not promise a very ardent correspondence. Nay, it is
quite possible that the quiet reserve he encounters here, does offer a
refreshing contrast to the heated gush of which he is the subject in that
Babel of London; maybe, too, there is something in the reserve and the
assured dignity which reminds him of that earlier idol of his
worship--Miss Chaworth of Annesley.
However, three months after this last allusion to Miss Milbanke, we have
another entry in his journal, running thus:
“January 16, 1814. A wife would be my salvation. I am getting rather
into an admiration for C----, youngest sister of F----. [This is not
Miss Milbanke--observe.] That she won’t love me is very probable,
nor shall I love her. The business would probably be arranged
between the papa and me.”
Perhaps it was in allusion to this new caprice that he writes to Moore, a
few months later:
“Had Lady ---- appeared to wish it, or even not to oppose it, I
would have gone on, and very possibly married, with the same
indifference which has frozen over the Black Sea of almost all my
passions.… Obstacles the slightest even, stop me.” (_Moore’s Byron_,
p. 255.)
And it is in face of some such obstacle, lifting suddenly, that he flashes
up, and over, into new proposals to Miss Milbanke; these are quietly
accepted--very likely to his wonderment; for he says, in a quick ensuing
letter to Moore:
“I certainly did not dream that she was attached to me, which it
seems she has been for some time. I also thought her of a very cold
disposition, in which I was also mistaken; it is a long story, and I
won’t trouble you with it. As to her virtues, and so on, you will
hear enough of them (for she is a kind of _pattern_ in the north)
without my running into a display on the subject.”
A little over two months after the date of this they were married, and he
writes to Murray in the same week:
“The marriage took place on the 2d inst., so pray make haste and
congratulate away.” [And to Moore, a few days later.] “I was married
this day week. The parson has pronounced it; Perry has announced it,
and the _Morning Post_, also, under head of ‘Lord Byron’s
marriage’--as if it were a fabrication and the puff direct of a new
stay-maker.”
A month and a half later, in another Moore letter, alluding to the death
of the Duke of Dorset (an old friend of his), he says:
“There was a time in my life when this event would have broken my
heart; and all I can say for it now is--that it isn’t worth
breaking.”
Two more citations, and I shall have done with this extraordinary record.
In March, 1815 (the marriage having occurred in January), he writes to
Moore from the house of his father-in-law, Sir Ralph Milbanke--a little
northward of the Tees, in County Durham:
“I am in such a state of sameness and stagnation, and so 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 gooseberries in the garden, that
I have neither time nor sense to say more than yours ever--B.”
_A Stay in London._
On leaving the country for a new residence in London, his growing cheer
and spirits are very manifest:
“I have been very comfortable here. Bell is in health, and unvaried
good humor. But we are all in the agonies of packing.… I suppose by
this hour to-morrow I shall be stuck in the chariot with my chin
upon a band-box. I have prepared, however, another carriage for the
abigail, and all the trumpery which our wives drag along with them.”
Well, there follows a year or more of this coupled life--with what
clashings we can imagine. Old Ralph Milbanke is not there to drawl through
his after-dinner stories, and to intrude his restraining presence. The
poet finds things to watch about the clubs and the theatres--quite other
than the stunted gooseberries that grew in his father-in-law’s garden.
Nothing is more sure than that the wilful audacities, and selfishness, and
temper of the poet, put my lady’s repose and dignities and perfection to
an awful strain. Nor is it to be wondered at, if the mad and wild
indiscretions of the husband should have provoked some quiet and galling
counter indiscretions on the part of her ladyship.
It is alleged, for instance, that on an early occasion--and at the
suggestion of a lady companion of the august mistress--there was an
inspection of my lord’s private papers, and a sending home to their
writers of certain highly perfumed notelets found therein; and we can
readily believe that when this instance of wifely zeal came to his
lordship’s knowledge he broke into a strain of remark which was _not_
precisely that of the “Hebrew Melodies.” Doubtless he carries away from
such encounter a great reserve of bottled wrath--not so much against her
ladyship personally, as against the stolid proprieties, the unbending
scruples, the lady-like austerities, and the cool, elegant
dowager-dignities she represents. Fancy a man who has put such soul as he
has, and such strength and hope and pride as he has, into those swift
poems, which have taken his heart’s blood to their making--fancy him,
asked by the woman who has set out to widen his hopes and life by all the
helps of wifehood, “_When--pray--he means to give up those versifying
habits of his?_” No, I do not believe he resented this in language. I
don’t believe he argued the point; I don’t believe he made defence of
versifying habits; but I imagine that he regarded her with a dazed look,
and an eye that saw more than it seemed to see--an eye that discerned
broad shallows in her, where he had hoped for pellucid depths. I think he
felt then--if never before--a premonition that their roads would not lie
long together. And yet it gave him a shock--not altogether a pleasant one,
we may be sure--when Sir Ralph, the father-in-law, to whose house she had
gone on a visit, wrote him politely to the effect that--“she would never
come back.” Such things cannot be pleasant; at least, I should judge not.
And so, she thinks something more of marriage than as some highly reckoned
conventionality--under whose cover bickerings may go on and spend their
force, and the decent twin masks be always worn. And in him, we can
imagine lingering traces of a love for the feminine features in her--for
the grace, the dignity, the sweet face, the modesties--but all closed over
and buckled up, and stanched by the everlasting and all encompassing
buckram that laces her in, and that has so little of the compensating
instinctive softness and yieldingness which might hold him in leash and
win him back. The woman who cannot--on occasions--put a weakness into her
forgiveness, can never put a vital strength into her persuasion.
But they part, and part forever; the only wonder is they had not parted
before; and still another wonder is, that there should have been zealous
hunt for outside causes when so many are staringly apparent within the
walls of home. I do not believe that Byron would have lived at peace with
one woman in a thousand; I do not believe that Lady Byron would have lived
at peace with one man in a hundred. The computation is largely in her
favor; although it does not imply necessity for his condemnation as an
utter brute. Even as he sails away from England--from which he is hunted
with hue and cry, and to whose shores he is never again to return--he
drops a farewell to her with such touches of feeling in it, that one
wonders--and future readers always will wonder--with what emotions the
mother and his child may have read it:
“Fare thee well and if for ever,[66]
Still for ever--fare thee well!
Even tho’ unforgiving--never
’Gainst thee shall my heart rebel.
…
Love may sink by slow decay
But, by sudden wrench, believe not
Hearts can thus be torn away.
And when thou would’st solace gather,
When our child’s first accents flow,
Wilt thou teach her to say ‘Father’
Though his care she must forego?
When her little hands shall press thee,
When her lip to thine is prest,
Think of him whose prayer shall bless thee;
Think of him thy love has blessed.
Should her lineaments resemble
Those thou never more may’st see,
Then thy heart will softly tremble
With a pulse yet true to me;
All my faults perchance thou knowest,
All my madness none can know,
All my hopes where’er thou goest
Wither--yet, with thee they go.
Every feeling hath been shaken;
Pride which not a world could bow,
Bows to thee--by thee forsaken,
Even my soul forsakes me now.
But ’tis done, all words are idle;
Words from _me_ are vainer still;
But the thoughts we cannot bridle
Force their way, without the will.
Fare thee well! thus disunited,
Torn from every nearer tie,
Seared in heart and lone, and blighted--
More than this, I scarce can die.”
I should have felt warranted in giving some intelligible account of the
poet’s infelicities at home were it only to lead up to this exhibit of
his wondrous literary skill; but I find still stronger reasons in the fact
that the hue and cry which followed upon his separation from his wife
seemed to exalt the man to an insolent bravado, and a challenge of all
restraint--under which his genius flamed up with new power, and with a
blighting splendor.
_Exile._
It was on the 25th of April, 1816 (he being then in his twenty-eighth
year), that he bade England adieu forever, and among the tenderest of his
leave-takings was that from his sister, who had vainly sought to make
smooth the difficulties in his home, and who (until Lady Byron had fallen
into the blindness of dotage) retained her utmost respect. I cannot
forbear quoting two verses from a poem addressed to this devoted sister:
“Though the rock of my last hope is shivered
And its fragments are sunk in the wave,
Though I feel that my soul is delivered
To pain--it shall _not_ be its slave;
There is many a pang to pursue me;
They may crush--but they shall not contemn,
They may torture, but shall not subdue me,
’Tis of _thee_ that I think--not of them.
“From the wreck of the past, which hath perished,
Thus much I at least may recall,
It hath taught me that what I most cherished
Deserved to be dearest of all;
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste, there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing
Which speaks to my spirit of _thee_.”
Never was a man pelted away from his native shores with more anathemas;
never one in whose favor so few appealing voices were heard. It was not so
much a memory of his satirical thrusts, as a jealousy begotten by his late
extraordinary successes, which had alienated nearly the whole literary
fraternity. Only Rogers, Moore, and Scott were among the better known ones
who had forgiven his petulant verse, and were openly apologetic and
friendly; while such kind wishers as Lady Holland and Lady Jersey were
half afraid to make a show of their sympathies. Creditors, too, of that
burdened estate of his, had pushed their executions one upon another--in
those days when his torments were most galling--into what was yet called
with poor significance his home; only his title of peer, Moore tells us,
at one date saved him from prison.
Yet when he lands in Belgium, he travels--true to his old
recklessness--like a prince; with body servants and physician, and a
lumbering family coach, with its showy trappings. Waterloo was fresh then,
and the wreck and the blood, and the glory of it were all scored upon his
brain, and shortly afterward by his fiery hand upon the poem we know so
well, and which will carry that streaming war pennon in the face of other
generations than ours. Then came the Rhine, with its castles and
traditions, glittering afresh in the fresh stories that he wove; and after
these his settlement for a while upon the borders of Lake Geneva--where,
in some one of these talks of ours we found the studious Gibbon, under his
acacia-trees, and where Rousseau left his footprints--never to be
effaced--at Clarens and Meillerie. One would suppose that literature could
do no more with such outlooks on lake and mountain, as seem to mock at
language.
And yet the wonderful touch of Byron has kindled new interest in scenes on
which the glowing periods of Rousseau had been lavished. Even the
guide-books can none of them complete their record of the region without
stealing descriptive gems from his verse; and his story of the _Prisoner
of Chillon_ will always--for you and for me--lurk in the shadows that lie
under those white castle walls, and in the murmur of the waters that ebb
and flow--gently as the poem--all round about their foundations. I may
mention that at the date of the Swiss visit, and under the influences and
active co-operation of Madame de Staël--then a middle-aged and invalid
lady residing at her country seat of Coppet, on the borders of Geneva
Lake--Byron did make overtures for a reconciliation with his wife. They
proved utterly without avail, even if they were not treated with scorn.
And it is worthy of special note that while up to this date all mention of
Lady Byron by the poet had been respectful, if not relenting and
conciliatory--thereafter the vials of his wrath were opened, and his
despairing scorn knew no bounds. Thus, in the “Incantation”--thrust into
that uncanny work of _Manfred_--with which he was then at labor--he says:
“Though thou seest me not pass by,
Thou shalt feel me with thine eye,
As a thing that, though unseen,
Must be near thee, and hath been;
And when, in that secret dread,
Thou hast turned around thy head,
Thou shalt marvel I am not
As thy shadow on the spot;
And the power which thou dost feel
Shall be what thou must conceal.”
_Shelley and Godwin._
Another episode of Byron’s Swiss life was his encounter there, for the
first time, with the poet Shelley.[67] He, too, was under ban, for reasons
that I must briefly make known. Like his brother poet, Shelley was born to
a prospective inheritance of title and of wealth. His father was a
baronet, shrewd and calculating, and living by the harshest and baldest
of old conventionalisms; this father had given a warm, brooding care to
the estate left him by Sir Bysshe Shelley (the grandfather of the poet),
who had an American bringing up--if not an American birth--in the town of
Newark,[68] N. J. The boy poet had the advantages of a place at
Eton[69]--not altogether a favorite there, it would seem; “passionate in
his resistance to an injury, passionate in his love.” He carried thence to
Oxford a figure and a beauty of countenance that were almost effeminate;
and yet he had a capacity for doubts and negations that was wondrously
masculine. His scholarship was keen, but not tractable; he takes a wide
range outside the established order of studies; he is a great and
unstinted admirer of the French philosophers, and makes such audacious
free-thinking challenge to the church dignitaries of Oxford that he is
expelled--like something venomous. His father, too, gives him the cold
shoulder at this crisis, and he drifts to London. There he contrives
interviews with his sisters, who are in school at Clapham; and is decoyed
into a marriage--before he is twenty--with a somewhat pretty and over-bold
daughter of a coffee-house keeper, who has acted as a go-between in
communications with his sisters. The prudent, conventional father is now
down upon him with a vengeance.
But the boy has pluck under that handsome face of his. He sets out, with
his wife--after sundry wanderings--to redeem Ireland; but they who are
used to blunderbusses, undervalue Shelley’s fine periods, and his fine
face. He is some time in Wales, too (the mountains there fastening on his
thought and cropping out in after poems); he is in Edinboro’, in York, in
Keswick--making his obeisance to the great Southey (but coming to
over-hate of him in after years). Meantime he has children. Sometimes
money comes from the yielding father--sometimes none; he is abstemious;
bread and water mostly his diet; his home is without order or thrift or
invitingness--the lapses of the hoydenish girl-wife stinging him over and
over and through and through.
But Shelley has read Godwin’s _Political Justice_--one of those many fine
schemes for the world’s renovation, by tearing out and burning up most of
the old furniture, which make their appearance periodically--and in virtue
of his admiration of Godwin, Shelley counts him among the demi-gods of the
heaven which he has conjured up. In reality Godwin[70] was an oldish,
rather clumsy, but astute and clever dissenting minister, who had left
preaching, and had not only written _Political Justice_, but novels--among
them one called _Caleb Williams_; by which you will know him better--if
you know him at all. This gave him great reputation in its time. There
were critics who ranked him with, or above, Scott--even in fiction. This
may tempt you to read _Caleb Williams_;[71] and if you read it--you will
not forget it. It pinches the memory like a vice; much reading of it
might, I should think, engender, in one of vivid imagination, such
nightmare stories as “_Called Back_” or “_A Dark Day_.”
But Mr. Godwin had a daughter, Mary (whose mother was that Mary
Wollstonecraft, promoted now to a place amongst famous women), and our
Shelley going to see Godwin, saw also the daughter Mary--many times over;
and these two--having misty and mystic visions of a new order of
ethics--ran away together.
It must be said, however, to the credit of Shelley (if credit be the word
to use), that when this first wife killed herself--as she did some
eighteen months afterward[72] (whether from grief or other cause is
doubtful)--he married Miss Godwin; and it was during the summer preceding
this second marriage that Byron (1816) encountered Shelley on the shores
of Lake Leman. Shelley had already written that wild screed of _Queen Mab_
(privately printed, 1813), giving poetic emphasis to the scepticism of his
Oxford days. He had published that dreamy poem of _Alastor_--himself its
poet hero, as indeed he was in a large sense of every considerable poem he
wrote. I cite a fragment of it, that you may see what waking and beguiling
voice belonged to the young bard, who posed there on the Geneva lake
beside the more masculine Byron. He has taken us into forest depths:
“One vast mass
Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence
A narrow vale embosoms.
The pyramids
Of the tall cedar, overarching, frame
Most solemn domes within; and far below,
Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,
The ash and the acacia floating, hang
Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents clothed
In rainbow and in fire, the parasites
Starred with ten thousand blossoms flowed around
The gray trunks; and as gamesome infants’ eyes,
With gentle meanings and most innocent wiles
Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love,
These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs.
… the woven leaves
Make net-work of the dark blue lights of day
And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable
As shapes in the weird clouds.
One darkest glen
Sends from its woods of musk-rose twined with jasmine
A soul-dissolving odor, to invite
To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell
Silence and twilight here, twin sisters, keep
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades
Like vaporous shapes half seen.”
And such mysteries and vaporous shapes run through all his poetic world.
He wanders, with that rarely fine gift of rhythmic speech, as wide away
from the compact sordid world--upon which Byron always sets foot with a
ringing tread--as ever Spenser in his chase of rainbow creations. Yet
there were penetrative sinuous influences about that young poet--defiant
of law and wrapt in his pursuit of mysteries--which may well have given
foreign touches of color to Byron’s _Manfred_ or to his _Prometheus_. At
any rate, these two souls lay quietly for a time, warped together--like
two vessels windbound under mountain shelter.
_Byron in Italy._
Byron next goes southward, to riotous life in Venice; where--whether in
tradesmen’s houses or in palaces upon the Grand Canal, or in country
villas upon the Euganean hills--he defies priests and traditions, and
order, and law, and decency.
To this period belongs, probably, the conception, if not the execution, of
many of those dramas[73]--as non-playable as ever those of
Tennyson--unequal, too, but with passages scattered here and there of
great beauty; masterly aggregation of words smoking with passion, and full
of such bullet-like force of expression as only he could command; but
there is no adequate blending of parts to make either stately or
well-harmonized march of events toward large and definite issues.
Out of the Venetian welter came, too, the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_
and the opening parts of _Don Juan_. The mocking, rollicking, marvellous
_Vision of Judgment_, whose daring license staggered even Murray and
Moore, and which scarified poor Southey, belongs to a later phase of his
Italian career. It is angry and bitter--and has an impish laughter in
it--of a sort which our friend Robert Ingersoll might write, if his genius
ran to poetry. _Cain_ had been of a bolder tone--perhaps loftier; with
much of the argument that Milton puts into the mouth of Satan, amplified
and rounded, and the whole illuminated by passages of wonderful poetic
beauty.
His scepticism, if not so out-spoken and full of plump negatives as that
of Shelley, is far more mocking and bitter. If Shelley was rich in
negations--so far as relates to orthodox belief--he was also rich in dim,
shadowy conceptions of a mysterious eternal region, with faith and love
reigning in it--toward which in his highest range of poetic effusion he
makes approaches with an awed and a tremulous step. But with Byron--even
where his words carry full theistic beliefs--the awe and the tremulous
approaches are wanting.
_Shelley Again._
Shelley went back from Switzerland to a home for a year or more, beyond
Windsor, near to Bisham--amid some of the loveliest country that borders
upon the Thames. Here he wrote that strange poem of _Laon and Cythna_ (or
_Revolt of Islam_, as it was called on its re-issue), which, so far as one
can gather meaning from its redundant and cumulated billows of rich,
poetic language, tells how a nation was kindled to freedom by the
strenuous outcry of some young poet-prophet--how he seems to win, and his
enemies become like smoking flax--how the dreadful fates that beset us,
and crowd all worldly courses from their best outcome, did at last trample
him down; not him only, but the one dearest to him--who is a willing
victim--and bears him off into the shades of night. Throughout, Laon the
Victim is the poet’s very self; and the very self appears again--with what
seems to the cautious, world-wise reader a curious indiscretion--in the
pretty jumping metre of “Rosalind and Helen”:--
“Joyous he was; and hope and peace
On all who heard him did abide,
Raining like dew from his sweet talk,
As where the evening star may walk
Along the brink of the gloomy seas,
Liquid mists of splendid quiver.
His very gestures touched to tears
The unpersuaded tyrant, never
So moved before.…
Men wondered, and some sneered, to see
One sow what he could never reap;
For he is rich, they said, and young,
And might drink from the depths of luxury.
If he seeks Fame, Fame never crowned
The champion of a trampled creed;
If he seeks Power, Power is enthroned
’Mid ancient rights and wrongs, to feed
Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil,
Those who would sit near Power must toil.”
It was in 1818, four years before his death, that Shelley sailed away from
English shores forever. There was not much to hold him there; those
children of the Westbrook mother he cannot know or guide.[74] The
Chancellor of England has decided that question against him; and Law,
which he has defied, has wrought him this great pain; nay, he has wild,
imaginary fears, too, that some Lord Chancellor, weaving toils in that web
of orderly British custom, may put bonds on these other and younger
children of the Godwin blood. Nor is it strange that a world of more
reasonable motives should urge this subtle poet--whose head is carried of
purpose, and by love, among the clouds--to turn his back on that grimy,
matter-of-fact England, and set his face toward those southern regions
where Art makes daily food, and where he may trail his robes without the
chafings of law or custom. But do not let me convey the impression that
Shelley then or ever lived day by day wantonly lawless, or doing violence
to old-fashioned proprieties; drunkenness was always a stranger to him, to
that new household--into which he had been grafted by Godwinian ethics--he
is normally true; he would, if it were possible, bring into the lap of
his charities those other estrays from whom the law divides him; his
generosities are of the noblest and fullest; he even entertains at one
time the singular caprice of “taking orders,” as if the author of _Queen
Mab_ could hold a vicarage! It opens, he said, so many ways of doing
kindly things, of making hearts joyful; and--for doctrine, one can always
preach Charity! With rare exceptions, it is only in his mental attitudes
and forays that he oversteps the metes and bounds of the every-day
moralities around him. Few poets, even of that time, can or do so measure
him as to enjoy him or to give him joy. Leigh Hunt is gracious and kindly;
but there are no winged sandals on his feet which can carry him into
regions where Shelley walks. Southey is stark unbeliever in the mystic
fields where Shelley grazes. Wordsworth is conquered by the Art, but has
melancholy doubts of the soul that seems caught and hindered in the meshes
of its own craftsmanship. Landor, of a certainty, has detected with his
keen insight the high faculties that run rampant under the mazes of the
new poet’s language; but Landor, too, is in exile--driven hither and
thither by the same lack of steady home affinities which has overset and
embroiled the domesticities of the younger poet.
_John Keats._
Yet another singer of these days, in most earnest sympathy with the
singing moods of Shelley--for whom I can have only a word now, was John
Keats;[75] born within the limits of London smoke, and less than
three-quarters of a mile from London Bridge--knowing in his boy days only
the humblest, work-a-day ranges of life; getting some good Latinity and
other schooling out of a Mr. Clarke (of the Cowden Clarke family)--reading
Virgil with him, but no Greek. And yet the lad, who never read Homer save
in Chapman, when he comes to write, as he does in extreme youth, crowds
his wonderful lines with the delicate trills and warblings which might
have broken out straight from Helicon--with a susurrus from the Bees of
Hymettus. This makes a good argument--so far as it reaches--in disproof
of the averments of those who believe that, for conquest of Attic
felicities of expression, the Greek vocables must needs be torn forth root
by root, and stretched to dry upon our skulls.
He published _Endymion_ in the very year when Shelley set off on his final
voyagings--a gushing, wavy, wandering poem, intermeshed with flowers and
greenery (which he lavishes), and with fairy golden things in it and
careering butterflies; with some bony under-structure of Greek
fable--loose and vague--and serving only as the caulking pins to hold
together the rich, sensuous sway, and the temper and roll of his language.
I must snatch one little bit from that book of _Endymion_, were it only to
show you what music was breaking out in unexpected quarters from that
fact-ridden England, within sound of the murmurs of the Thames, when
Shelley was sailing away:--
“On every morrow are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching; yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such--the sun, the moon,
Trees--old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such, too, is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read.”
I might cite page on page from Keats, and yet hold your attention; there
is something so beguiling in his witching words; and his pictures are
finished--with only one or two or three dashes of his pencil. Thus we come
upon--
“Swelling downs, where sweet air stirs
Blue harebells lightly, and where prickly furze
Buds lavish gold.”
And again our ear is caught with--
“Rustle of the reapéd corn,
And sweet birds antheming the morn.”
Well, this young master of song goes to Italy, too--not driven, like
Byron, by hue and cry, or like Shelley, restless for change (from
Chancellor’s courts) and for wider horizons--but running from the disease
which has firm grip upon him, and which some three years after Shelley’s
going kills the poet of the _Endymion_ at Rome. His ashes lie in the
Protestant burial-ground there--under the shadow of the pyramid of Caius
Cestius. Every literary traveller goes to see the grave, and to spell out
the words he wanted inscribed there:
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Upon that death, Shelley, then living in Pisa, blazed out in the
_Adonais_--the poem making, with the _Lycidas_ of Milton, and the _In
Memoriam_ of Tennyson, a triplet of laurel garlands, whose leaves will
never fade. Yet those of Shelley have a cold rustle in them--shine as they
may:--
“Oh, weep for Adonais--he is dead!
Wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep!
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
Like his--a mute and uncomplaining sleep.
For he is gone where all things wise and fair
Descend. Oh, dream not that the amorous deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice and laughs at our despair.
“Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick dreams,
The passion-winged ministers of thought
Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
The Love which was its music, wander not--
Wander no more from kindling brain to brain,
But droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne’er will gather strength, or find a home again.”
The weak place in this impassioned commemorative poem lies in its waste of
fire upon the heads of those British critics, who--as flimsy, pathetic
legends used to run--slew the poet by their savagery. Keats did not range
among giants; but he was far too strong a man to die of the gibes of the
_Quarterly_, or the jeers of _Blackwood_. Not this; but all along,
throughout his weary life--even amid the high airs of Hampstead, where
nightingales sang--he sang, too,--
“I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath.”[76]
_Buried in Rome._
Keats died in 1821. In that year Shelley was living between Lirici, on the
gulf of Spezia, and Pisa. While in this latter city, he was planted for a
time at the old Lanfranchi palace, where in the following season very much
at the instance and urgence of Shelley, Leigh Hunt came with his six
riotous young children, and sometimes made a din--that was new to Byron
and most worrisome--in the court of the Lanfranchi house. Out of this Hunt
fraternizing and co-working (forecast by the kindly Shelley) was to be
built up the success of that famous “Liberal” Journal, dear to the hearts
of Shelley and Hunt, of which I have already spoken, and which had
disastrous failure; out of this aggregation of disorderly poetic elements
grew also the squabbles that gave such harsh color to the _Reminiscences_
of Leigh Hunt.[77]
But other and graver disaster was impending. Shelley loved the sea, and
carried with him to the water the same reckless daring which he put into
his verse. Upon a summer day of July, 1822, he went with a friend and one
boatman for a sail upon the bay of Spezia, not heeding some cautions that
had been dropped by old seamen, who had seen portents of a storm; and his
boat sailed away into the covert of the clouds. Next day there were no
tidings, nor the next, nor the next. Finally wreck and bodies came to the
shore.
Trelawney, Byron’s friend, tells a grim story of it all--how the dismal
truth was carried to the widowed wife, how the body of the drowned poet
was burned upon the shore, with heathen libations of oil and wine; how
Byron and Hunt both were present at the weird funeral--the blue
Mediterranean lapping peacefully upon the beach and the black smoke
lifting in great clouds from the pyre and throwing lurid shadows over the
silent company. The burial--such as there was of it--took place in that
same Protestant graveyard at Rome--just out of the Porta San Paolo--where
we were just now witnesses at the burial of Keats.
Shelley made many friendships, and lasting ones. He was wonderfully
generous; he visited the sick; he helped the needy; putting himself often
into grievous straits for means to give quickly. As he was fine of figure
and of feature, so his voice was fine, delicate, penetrative, yet in
moments of great excitement rising to a shrillness that spoiled melody and
rasped the ear; so his finer generosities and kindnesses sometimes passed
into a rasping indifference or even cruelty toward those nearest him, he
feeling that first Westbrook _mesalliance_, on occasions, like a
torture--specially when the presence of the tyrannic, coarse, aggravating
sister-in-law was like a poisonous irritant; he--under the teachings of a
conscientious father, in his young days--was scarce more than half
responsible for his wry life; running to badnesses--on occasions--under
good impulses; perhaps marrying that first wife because she wanted to
marry him; and quitting her--well--because “she didn’t care.”
Intellectually, as well as morally, he was pagan; seeing things in their
simplest aspects, and so dealing with them; intense, passionate, borne
away in tempests of quick decision, whose grounds he cannot fathom; always
beating his wings against the cagements that hem us in; eager to look into
those depths where light is blinding and will not let us look; seeming at
times to measure by some sudden reach of soul what is immeasurable; but
under the vain uplifts, always reverent, with a dim hope shining fitfully;
contemptuous of harassing creeds or any jugglery of forms--of whatever
splendid fashionings of mere material, whether robes or rites--and
yearning to solve by some strong, swift flight of imagination what is
insoluble. There are many reverent steps that go to that little Protestant
cemetery--an English greenery upon the borders of the Roman
Campagna--where the ashes of Shelley rest and where myrtles grow. And from
its neighborhood, between Mount Aventine and the Janiculan heights, one
may see reaches of the gleaming Tiber, and the great dome of St. Peter’s
lifting against the northern sky, like another tomb, its cross almost
hidden in the gray distance.
_Pisa and Don Juan._
No such friendship as that whose gleams have shot athwart these latter
pages could have been kindled by Byron. No “Adonais” could have been writ
for him; he could have melted into no “Adonais” for another; old pirate
blood, seething in him, forbade. No wonder he chafed at Hunt’s squalling
children in the Lanfranchi palace; _that_ literary partnership finds quick
dissolution. He sees on rare occasions an old English friend--he, who has
so few! Yet he is in no mood to make new friends. The lambent flames of
the Guiccioli romance hover and play about him, making the only
counterfeit of a real home which he has ever known. The proud,
independent, audacious, lawless living that has been his so long, whether
the early charms lie in it or no--he still clings by. His pen has its old
force, and the words spin from it in fiery lines; but to pluck the flowers
worth the seeking, which he plants in them now, one must go over quaking
bogs, and through ways of foulness.
The _Childe Harold_ has been brought to its conclusion long before; its
cantos, here and there splendidly ablaze with Nature--its storms, its
shadows, its serenities; and the sentiment--now morbid, now jubilant--is
always his own, though it beguiles with honeyed sounds, or stabs like a
knife.
There have been a multitude of lesser poems, and of dramas which have had
their inception and their finish on that wild Continental
holiday--beginning on _Lac Leman_ and ending at Pisa and Genoa; but his
real selfhood--whether of mind or passion--seems to me to come out plainer
and sharper in the _Don Juan_ than elsewhere. There may not be lifts in
it, which rise to the romantic levels of the “Pilgrimage;” there may be
lack of those interpolated bits of passion, of gloom, of melancholy, which
break into the earlier poem. But there is the blaze and crackle of his own
mad march of flame; the soot, the cinders, the heat, the wide-spread
ashes, and unrest of those fires which burned in him from the beginning
were there, and devastated all the virginal purities of his youth (if
indeed there were any!) and welded his satanic and his poetic qualities
into that seamy, shining, wonderful residue of dirty scoriæ, and of
brilliant phosphorescence, which we call _Don Juan_. From a mere literary
point of view there are trails of doggerel in it, which the poet was too
indolent to mend, and too proud to exclude. Nor can it ever be done; a
revised Byron would be not only a Byron emasculated, but decapitated and
devastated. ’Twould lack the links that tie it to the humanities which
coil and writhe tortuously all up and down his pages. His faults of
prosody, or of ethics, or of facts--his welter, at intervals, through a
barren splendor of words--are all typical of that fierce, proud,
ungovernable, unconventional nature. This leopard will and should carry
all his spots. We cannot shrive the man; no chanters or churches can do
this; he disdains to be shriven at human hands, or, it would seem, any
other hands. The impact of that strong, vigorous nature--through his
poems--brings, to the average reader, a sense of force, of brilliancy, of
personality, of humanity (if gone astray), which exhilarates, which dashes
away a thousand wordy memories of wordy verses, and puts in their place
palpitating phrases that throb with life. An infinite capability for
eloquent verse; an infinite capability for badnesses! We cannot root out
the satanry from the man, or his books, any more than we can root out
Lucifer from Milton’s Eden. But we can lament both, and, if need be, fight
them.
Whether closer British influence (which usually smote upon him, like sleet
on glass)--even of that “Ancient Oratory” of Annesley--would have served
to whiten his tracks, who shall say? Long ago he had gone out from them,
and from parish church and sermon; his hymns were the _Ranz des Vaches_ on
the heights of the _Dent de Jaman_, and the preachments he heard were the
mellowed tones of convent bells--filtering through forest boughs--maybe
upon the ear of some hapless Allegra, scathed by birth-marks of a sin that
is not her own--conning her beads, and listening and praying!
_Missolonghi._
It was in 1823, when he was living in Genoa--whither he had gone from Pisa
(and before this, Ravenna)--that his sympathies were awakened in behalf of
the Greeks, who since 1820 had been in revolt against their Turkish
taskmasters. He had been already enrolled with those Carbonari--the
forerunners of the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis--who had labored in vain
for the independence and unity of Italy; and in many a burst of his
impassioned song he had showered welcoming praises upon a Greece that
should be free, and with equal passion attuned his verse to the
lament--that
“Freedom found no champion and no child
Such as Columbia saw arise when she
Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled.”
How much all this was real and how much only the romanticism of the poet,
was now to be proven. And it was certainly with a business-like air that
he cut short his little _agaceries_ with the Lady Blessington, and
pleasant dalliance with the Guiccioli, for a rallying of all his
forces--moneyed or other--in the service of that cause for which the brave
Marco Bozzaris had fallen, fighting, only three months before. It was in
July that he embarked at Genoa for Greece--in a brig which he had
chartered, and which took guns and ammunition and $40,000 of his own
procurement, with a retinue of attendants--including his trusty
Fletcher--besides his friends Trelawney and the Count Gamba. They skirted
the west coast of Italy, catching sight of Elba--then famous for its
Napoleonic associations--and of Stromboli, whose lurid blaze, reflected
upon the sea, startled the admiring poet to a hinted promise--that those
fires should upon some near day reek on the pages of a Fifth Canto of
_Childe Harold_.
Mediterranean ships were slow sailers in those days, and it was not until
August that they arrived and disembarked at Cephalonia--an island near to
the outlet of the Gulf of Corinth, and lying due east from the Straits of
Messina. There was a boisterous welcome to the generous and eloquent peer
of England; but it was a welcome that showed factional discords. Only
across a mile or two of water lay the Isle of Ithaca, full of vague,
Homeric traditions, which under other conditions he would have been
delighted to follow up; but the torturing perplexities about the
distribution of moneys or ammunition, the jealousies of quarrelsome
chieftains, the ugly watch over drafts and bills of exchange, and the
griping exactions of local money-changers, made all Homeric fancies or
memories drift away with the scuds of wind that blew athwart the Ionian
seas.
He battled bravely with the cumulating difficulties--sometimes maddened to
regret--other times lifted to enthusiasm by the cordial greeting of such a
chieftain as Mavrocordatos, or the street cheers of a band of Suliotes.
So months passed, until he embarked again, in equipage of his own, with
his own fittings, for Missolonghi, where final measures were to be taken.
Meantime he is paying for his ships, paying for his Suliotes, paying for
delays, and beset by rival chieftains for his interest, or his stimulating
presence, or his more stimulating moneys. On this new but short sea
venture he barely escapes capture by a Turkish frigate--is badly piloted
among the rocky islets which stud the shores; suffers grievous
exposure--coming at last, wearied and weakened, to a new harborage, where
welcomes are vociferous, but still wofully discordant. He labors wearily
to smooth the troubled waters, his old, splendid allegiance to a free and
united Greece suffering grievous quakes, and doubts; and when after months
of alternating turbulence and rest there seems promise of positive action,
he is smitten by the fever of those low coasts--aggravated by his always
wanton exposures. The attack is as sudden as a shot from a gun--under
which he staggers and falls, writhing with pain, and I know not what
convulsional agonies.
There is undertaken an Italian regimen of cupping and leeching about the
brow and temples, from which the bleeding is obstinate, and again and
again renewed. But he rallies; attendants are assiduous in their care.
Within a day or two he has recovered much of the old _vires vitæ_, when on
a sudden there is an alarm; a band of mutinous Suliotes, arms in hand,
break into his lordship’s apartments, madly urging some trumpery claim for
back-pay. Whereupon Byron--showing the old savagery of his
ancestors--leaps from his bed, seizes whatever weapon is at hand, and
gory--with his bandaged head still trickling blood--he confronts the
mutineers; his strength for the moment is all his own again, and they are
cowered into submission, their yataghans clinking as they drop to the
tiled flooring of his room.
’Twas a scene for Benjamin West to have painted in the spirit of Death on
the Pale Horse, or for some later artist--loving bloody “impressions.”
However, peace is established. Quiet reigns once more (we count by days
only, now). There is a goodly scheme for attack upon the fortress which
guards the Gulf of Lepanto (Corinth); the time is set; the guards are
ready; the Suliotes are under bidding; the chieftains are (for once)
agreed, when, on the 18th, he falters, sinks, murmurs some last
words--“Ada--daughter--love--Augusta--” barely caught; doubtfully caught;
but it is all--and the poet of _Childe Harold_ is gone, and that
turbulent, brilliant career hushed in night.
It was on April 19, 1824, that he died. His body was taken home for
burial. I said _home_; ’twere better to have said to England, to the
family vault, in which his mother had been laid; and at a later day, his
daughter, Ada, was buried there beside him, in the old Hucknall-Torkard
church. The building is heavy and bald, without the winning
picturesqueness that belongs to so many old country churches of Yorkshire.
The beatitudes that are intoned under its timbered arch are not born of
any rural beatitudes in the surroundings. The town is small, straggly,
bricky,[78] and neither church nor hamlet nor neighbors’ houses are
suffused with those softened tints which verdure, and nice keeping, and
mellow sunshine give to so many villages of southern England.
Hucknall-Torkard is half way between Nottingham and Newstead, and lies
upon that northern road which pushes past Annesley into the region of
woods and parks where Sherwood forest once flung its shadows along the
aisles in which the bugle notes of master Robin Hood woke the echoes.
But Hucknall-Torkard church is bald and tame. Mr. Winter, in his pleasant
descriptive sketch,[79] does indeed give a certain glow to the “grim”
tower, and many a delightful touch to the gray surroundings; but even he
would inhibit the pressure of the noisy market-folk against the
church-yard walls, and their rollicking guffaw. And yet, somehow, the
memory of Byron does not seem to me to mate well with either home or
church quietudes, and their serenities. Is it not proper and fitting after
all that the clangor of a rebellious and fitful world should voice itself
near such a grave? Old mossy and ivied towers in which church bells are
a-chime, and near trees where rooks are cawing with home-sounds, do not
marry happily with our memories of Byron.
Best of all if he had been given burial where his heart lies, in that
Ætolian country, upon some shaggy fore-land from which could have been
seen--one way, Ithaca and the Ionian seas, and to the southward, across
the Straits of Lepanto, the woody depths of the Morea, far as Arcadia.
But there is no mending the matter now; he lies beside his harsh Gordon
mother in the middle of the flat country of stockings, lace curtains, and
collieries.
Another poet, William Lisle Bowles, in a quaint sonnet has versed this
Gordon mother’s imaginary welcome to her dead son:--
“Could that mother speak,
In thrilling, but with hollow accent weak,
She thus might give the welcome of the dead:
‘Here rest, my son, with me; the dream is fled;
The motley mask, and the great stir is o’er.
Welcome to me, and to this silent bed,
Where deep forgetfulness succeeds the roar
Of life, and fretting passions waste the heart no more!’”