THE NEW ROMANTIC POETRY: BYRON AND MOORE.
Early Life of Byron. Childe Harold and Eastern Tales. Unhappy Marriage.
Philhellenism and Death. Estimate of his Poetry. Thomas Moore.
Anacreon. Later Fortunes. Lalla Rookh. His Diary. His Rank as Poet.
In immediate succession after Scott comes the name of Byron. They were
both great lights of their age; but the former may be compared to a planet
revolving in regulated and beneficent beauty through an unclouded sky;
while the latter is more like a comet whose lurid light came flashing upon
the sight in wild and threatening career.
Like Scott, Byron was a prolific poet; and he owes to Scott the general
suggestion and much of the success of his tales in verse. His powers of
description were original and great: he adopted the new romantic tone,
while in his more studied works he was an imitator and a champion of a
former age, and a contemner of his own.
EARLY LIFE OF BYRON.--The Honorable George Gordon Byron, afterwards Lord
Byron, was born in London on the 22d of January, 1788. While he was yet an
infant, his father--Captain Byron--a dissipated man, deserted his mother;
and she went with her child to live upon a slender pittance at Aberdeen.
She was a woman of peculiar disposition, and was unfortunate in the
training of her son. She alternately petted and quarrelled with him, and
taught him to emulate her irregularities of temper. On account of an
accident at his birth, he had a malformation in one of his feet, which,
producing a slight limp in his gait through life, rendered his sensitive
nature quite unhappy, the signs of which are to be discerned in his drama,
_The Deformed Transformed_. From the age of five years he went to school
at Aberdeen, and very early began to exhibit traits of generosity,
manliness, and an imperious nature: he also displayed great quickness in
those studies which pleased his fancy.
In 1798, when he was eleven years old, his grand-uncle, William, the fifth
Lord Byron, died, and was succeeded in the title and estates by the young
Gordon Byron, who was at once removed with his mother to Newstead Abbey.
In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he was well esteemed by his comrades,
but was not considered forward in his studies.
He seems to have been of a susceptible nature, for, while still a boy, he
fell in love several times. His third experience in this way was
undoubtedly the strongest of his whole life. The lady was Miss Mary
Chaworth, who did not return his affection. His last interview with her he
has powerfully described in his poem called _The Dream_. From Harrow he
went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he lived an idle and
self-indulgent life, reading discursively, but not studying the prescribed
course. As early as November, 1806, before he was nineteen, he published
his first volume, _Poems on Various Occasions_, for private distribution,
which was soon after enlarged and altered, and presented to the public as
_Hours of Idleness, a Series of Poems Original and Translated, by George
Gordon, Lord Byron, A Minor_. These productions, although by no means
equal to his later poems, are not without merit, and did not deserve the
exceedingly severe criticism they met with from the _Edinburgh Review_.
The critics soon found that they had bearded a young lion: in his rage, he
sprang out upon the whole literary craft in a satire, imitated from
Juvenal, called _The English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, in which he
ridicules and denounces the very best poets of the day furiously but most
uncritically. That his conduct was absurd and unjust, he himself allowed
afterwards; and he attempted to call in and destroy all the copies of this
work.
CHILDE HAROLD AND EASTERN TALES.--In March, 1809, he took his seat in the
House of Lords, where he did not accomplish much. He took up his residence
at Newstead Abbey, his ancestral seat, most of which was in a ruinous
condition; and after a somewhat disorderly life there, he set out on his
continental tour, spending some time at Lisbon, Cadiz, Gibraltar, Malta,
and in Greece. On his return, after two years' absence, he brought a
summary of his travels in poetical form,--the first part of _Childe
Harold_; and also a more elaborated poem entitled _Hints from Horace_.
Upon the former he set little value; but he thought the latter a noble
work. The world at once reversed his decision. The satire in the Latin
vein is scarcely read; while to the first cantos of _Childe Harold_ it was
due that, in his own words, "he woke up one morning and found himself
famous." As fruits of the eastern portion of his travels, we have the
romantic tale, _The Giaour_, published in 1811, and _The Bride of Abydos_,
which appeared in 1813. The popularity of these oriental stories was
mainly due to their having been conceived on the spots they describe. In
1814 he issued _The Corsair_, perhaps the best of these sensational
stories; and with singular versatility, in the same year, inspired by the
beauty of the Jewish history, he produced _The Hebrew Melodies_, some of
which are fervent, touching, and melodious. Late in the same year _Lara_
was published, in the same volume with Mr. Rogers's _Jacqueline_, which it
threw completely into the shade. Thus closed one distinct period of his
life and of his authorship. A change came over the spirit of his dream.
UNHAPPY MARRIAGE.--In 1815, urged by his friends, and thinking it due to
his position, he married Miss Milbanke; but the union was without
affection on either side, and both were unhappy. One child, a daughter,
was born to them; and a year had hardly passed when they were separated,
by mutual consent and for reasons never truly divulged; and which, in
spite of modern investigations, must remain mysterious. He was licentious,
extravagant, of a violent temper: his wife was of severe morals, cold, and
unsympathetic. We need not advance farther into the horrors recently
suggested to the world. The blame has rested on Byron; and, at the time,
the popular feeling was so strong, that it may be said to have driven him
from England. It awoke in him a dark misanthropy which returned English
scorn with an unnatural hatred. He sojourned at various places on the
continent. At Geneva he wrote a third canto of _Childe Harold_, and the
touching story of Bonnivard, entitled _The Prisoner of Chillon_, and other
short poems.
In 1817 he was at Venice, where he formed a connection with the Countess
Guiccioli, to the disgrace of both. In Venice he wrote a fourth canto of
_Childe Harold_, the story of _Mazeppa_, the first two cantos of _Don
Juan_, and two dramas, _Marino Faliero_ and _The Two Foscari_.
For two years he lived at Ravenna, where he wrote some of his other
dramas, and several cantos of _Don Juan_. In 1821 he removed to Pisa;
thence, after a short stay, to Genoa, still writing dramas and working at
_Don Juan_.
PHILHELLENISM: HIS DEATH.--The end of his misanthropy and his debaucheries
was near; but his story was to have a ray of sunset glory--his death was
to be connected with a noble effort and an exhibition of philanthropic
spirit which seem in some degree to palliate his faults. Unlike some
writers who find in his conduct only a selfish whim, we think that it
casts a beautiful radiance upon the early evening of a stormy life. The
Greeks were struggling for independence from Turkish tyranny: Byron threw
himself heart and soul into the movement, received a commission from the
Greek government, recruited a band of Suliotes, and set forth gallantly to
do or die in the cause of Grecian freedom: he died, but not in battle. He
caught a fever of a virulent type, from his exposure, and after very few
days expired, on the 19th of April, 1824, amid the mourning of the nation.
Of this event, Macaulay--no mean or uncertain critic--could say, in his
epigrammatical style: "Two men have died within our recollection, who, at
a time of life at which few people have completed their education, had
raised themselves, each in his own department, to the height of glory. One
of them died at Longwood; the other at Missolonghi."
ESTIMATE OF HIS POETRY.--In giving a brief estimate of his character and
of his works, we may begin by saying that he represents, in clear
lineaments, the nobleman, the traveller, the poet, and the debauchee, of
the beginning of the nineteenth century. In all his works he unconsciously
depicts himself. He is in turn Childe Harold, Lara, the Corsair, and Don
Juan. He affected to despise the world's opinion so completely that he has
made himself appear worse than he really was--more profane, more
intemperate, more licentious. It is equally true that this tendency, added
to the fact that he was a handsome peer, had much to do with the immediate
popularity of his poems. There was also a paradoxical vanity, which does
not seem easily reconcilable with his misanthropy, that thus led him to
reproduce himself in a new dress in his dramas and tales. He paraded
himself as if, after all, he did value the world's opinion.
That he was one of the new romantic poets, with, however, a considerable
tincture of the transition school, may be readily discerned in his works:
his earlier poems are full of the conceits of the artificial age. His
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ reminds one of the _MacFlecknoe_ of
Dryden and _The Dunciad_ of Pope, without being as good as either. When
he began that original and splendid portrait of himself, and transcript
of his travels, _Childe Harold_, he imitated Spenser in form and in
archaism. But he was possessed by the muse: the man wrote as the spirit
within dictated, as the Pythian priestess is fabled to have uttered her
oracles. _Childe Harold_ is a stream of intuitive, irrepressible poetry;
not art, but overflowing nature: the sentiments good and bad came welling
forth from his heart. His descriptive powers are great but peculiar.
Travellers find in _Childe Harold_ lightning glimpses of European scenery,
art, and nature, needing no illustrations, almost defying them. National
conditions, manners, customs, and costumes, are photographed in his
verses:--the rapid rush to Waterloo; a bull-fight in Spain; the women of
Cadiz or Saragossa; the Lion of St. Mark; the eloquent statue of the Dying
Gladiator; "Fair Greece, sad relic of departed worth;" the address to the
ocean; touches of love and hate; pictures of sorrow, of torture, of death.
Everywhere thought and glance are powerfully concentrated, and we find the
poem to be journal, history, epic, and autobiography. His felicity of
expression is so great, that, as we come upon the happy conceptions
exquisitely rendered, we are inclined to say of each, as he has said of
the Egeria of Muna:
... whatsoe'er thy birth,
Thou wert a beautiful thought and softly bodied forth.
Of his dramas which are founded upon history, we cannot say so much; they
are dramatic only in form: some of them are spectacular, like
_Sardanapalus_, which is still presented upon the stage on account of its
scenic effects. In _Manfred_ we have a rare insight into his nature, and
_Cain_ is the vehicle for his peculiar, dark sentiments on the subject of
religion.
_Don Juan_ is illustrative not only of the poet, but of the age; there was
a generation of such men and women. But quite apart from its moral, or
rather immoral, character, the poem is one of the finest in our
literature: it is full of wonderful descriptions, and exhibits a splendid
mastery of language, rhythm, and rhyme: a glorious epic with an inglorious
hero, and that hero Byron himself.
As a man he was an enigma to the world, and doubtless to himself: he was
bad, but he was bold. If he was vindictive, he was generous; if he was
misanthropic and sceptical, it was partly because he despised shams: in
all his actions, we see that implicit working out of his own nature, which
not only conceals nothing, but even exaggerates his own faults. His
antecedents were bad;--his father was a villain; his grand-uncle a
murderer; his mother a woman of violent temper; and himself, with all this
legacy, a man of powerful passions. If evil is in any degree to be
palliated because it is hereditary, those who most condemn it in the
abstract, may still look with compassionate leniency upon the career of
Lord Byron.
THOMAS MOORE.--Emphatically the creature of his age, Moore wrote
sentimental songs in melodious language to the old airs of Ireland, and
used them as an instrument to excite the Irish people in the struggle they
were engaged in against English misgovernment. But his songs were true
neither to tradition nor to nature; they placed before the ardent Celtic
fancy an Irish glory and grandeur entirely different from the reality. Nor
had he in any degree caught the bardic spirit. His lyre was attuned to
reach the ear rather than the heart; his scenes are in enchanted lands;
his _dramatis personæ_ tread theatrical boards; his thunder is a
melo-dramatic roll; his lightning is pyrotechny; his tears are either
hypocritical or maudlin; and his laughter is the perfection of genteel
comedy.
Thomas Moore was born in Dublin, on the 28th of May, 1779: he was a
diminutive but precocious child, and was paraded by his father and mother,
who were people in humble life, as a reciter of verse; and as an early
rhymer also. His first poem was printed in a Dublin magazine, when he was
fourteen years old. In 1794 he entered Trinity College, Dublin; and,
although never considered a good scholar, he was graduated in 1798, when
he was nineteen years old.
ANACREON.--The first work which brought him into notice, and which
manifests at once the precocity of his powers and the peculiarity of his
taste, was his translation of the _Odes of Anacreon_. He had begun this
work while at college, but it was finished and published in London,
whither he had gone after leaving college, to enter the Middle Temple, in
order to study law. With equal acuteness and adaptation to character, he
dedicated the poems to the Prince of Wales, an anacreontic hero. As might
be expected, with such a patron, the volume was a success. In 1801 he
published another series of erotic poems, under the title _The Poetical
Works of the late Thomas Little_. This gained for him, in Byron's line,
the name of "the young Catullus of his day"; and, at the instance of Lord
Moira, he was appointed poet-laureate, a post he filled only long enough
to write one birthday ode. What seemed a better fortune came in the shape
of an appointment as Registrar of the Admiralty Court of Bermuda. He went
to the island; remained but a short time; and turned over the uncongenial
duties of the post to a deputy, who subsequently became a defaulter, and
involved Moore to a large amount. Returning from Bermuda, he travelled in
the United States and Canada; not without some poetical record of his
movements. In 1806 he published his _Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems_,
which called down the righteous wrath of the Edinburgh Review: Jeffrey
denounced the book as "a public nuisance," and "a corrupter of public
morals." For this harsh judgment, Moore challenged him; but the duel was
stopped by the police. This hostile meeting was turned to ridicule by
Byron in the lines:
When Little's leadless pistols met his eye,
And Bow-street myrmidons stood laughing by.
LATER FORTUNES.--Moore was now the favorite--the poet and the dependent of
the nobility; and his versatile pen was principally employed to amuse and
to please. He soon began that series of _Irish Melodies_ which he
continued to augment with new pieces for nearly thirty years.
Always of a theatrical turn, he acted well in private drama, in which the
gentlemen were amateurs, and the female parts were personated by
professional actresses. Thus playing in a cast with Miss Dyke, the
daughter of an Irish actor, Moore fell in love with her, and married her
on the 25th of March, 1811.
With a foolish lack of judgment, he lost his hopes of preferment, by
writing satires against the regent; but as a means of livelihood, he
engaged to write songs for Powers, at a salary of £500 per annum, for
seven years.
LALLA ROOKH.--The most acceptable offering to fame, and the most
successful pecuniary venture, was his _Lalla Rookh_. The East was becoming
known to the English; and the fancy of the poet could convert the glimpses
of oriental things into charming pictures. Long possessed with the purpose
to write an Eastern story in verse, Moore set to work with laudable
industry to read books of travels and history, in order to form a strong
and sensible basis for his poetical superstructure. The work is a
collection of beautiful poems, in a delicate setting of beautiful prose.
The princess Lalla Rookh journeys, with great pomp, to become the bride of
the youthful king of Bokkara, and finds among her attendants a handsome
young poet, who beguiles the journey by singing to her these tales in
verse. The dangers of the process became manifest--the king of Bokkara is
forgotten, and the heart of the unfortunate princess is won by the beauty
and the minstrelsy of the youthful poet. What is her relief and her joy to
find on her arrival the unknown poet seated upon the throne as the king,
who had won her heart as an humble bard!
This beautiful and popular work was published in 1817; and for it Moore
received from his publishers, the Longmans, £3000.
In the same year Moore took a small cottage at Sloperton on the estate of
the Marquis of Lansdowne, which, with some interruptions of travel, and a
short residence in Paris, continued to be his residence during his life.
Improvident in money matters, he was greatly troubled by his affairs in
Bermuda;--the amount for which he became responsible by the defalcation of
his deputy was £6000; which, however, by legal cleverness, was compromised
for a thousand guineas.
HIS DIARY.--It is very fortunate, for a proper understanding of Moore's
life, that we have from this time a diary which is invaluable to the
biographer. In 1820 he went to Paris, where he wasted his time and money
in fashionable dissipation, and produced nothing of enduring value. Here
he sketched an Egyptian story, versified in _Alciphron_, but enlarged in
the prose romance called _The Epicurean_.
On a short tour he visited Venice, where he received, as a gift from Lord
Byron, his autobiographical memoirs, which contained so much that was
compromising to others, that they were never published--at least in that
form. They were withdrawn from the Murrays, in whose hands he had placed
them, upon the death of Byron in 1824, and destroyed. A short visit to
Ireland led to his writing the _Memoirs of Captain Rock_, a work which
attained an unprecedented popularity in Ireland.
In 1825 he published his _Life of Sheridan_, which is rather a friendly
panegyric than a truthful biography.
During three years--from 1827 to 1830--he was engaged upon the _Life of
Byron_, which concealed more truth than it divulged. But in all these
years, his chief dependence for daily bread was upon his songs and glees,
squibs for newspapers and magazines, and review articles.
In 1831 he made another successful hit in his _Life of Lord Edward
Fitzgerald_, a rebel of '98, which was followed in 1833 by _The Travels of
an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion_.
In 1835, through the agency of Lord John Russel, the improvident poet
received a pension of £300. It came in a time of need; for he was getting
old, and his mind moved more sluggishly. His infirmities made him more
domestic; but his greater trials were still before him. His sons were
frivolous spendthrifts; one for whom he had secured a commission in the
army behaved ill, and drew upon his impoverished father again and again
for money: both died young. This cumulation of troubles broke him down; he
had a cerebral attack in December, 1849, and lived helpless and broken
until the 26th of February, 1852, when he expired without suffering.
HIS POETRY.--In most cases, the concurrence of what an author has written
will present to us the mental and moral features of the man. It is
particularly true in the case of Moore. He appears to us in Protean
shapes, indeed, but not without an affinity between them. Small in
stature, of jovial appearance; devoted to the gayest society; not very
earnest in politics; a Roman Catholic in name, with but little practical
religion, he pandered at first to a frivolous public taste, and was even
more corrupt than the public morals.
Not so apparently as Pope an artificial poet, he had few touches of
nature. Of lyric sentiment he has but little; but we must differ from
those who deny to him rare lyrical expression, and happy musical
adaptations. His songs one can hardly _read_; we feel that they must be
sung. He has been accused, too violently, by Maginn of plagiarism: this,
of course, means of phrases and ideas. In our estimate of Moore, it counts
but little; his rare rhythm and exquisite cadences are not plagiarized;
they are his own, and his chief merit.
He abounds in imagery of oriental gorgeousness; and if, in personality,
he may be compared to his own Peri, or one of "the beautiful blue damsel
flies" of that poem, he has given to his unfriendly critics a judgment of
his own style, in a criticism made by Fadladeen of the young poet's story
to Lalla Rookh;--"it resembles one of those Maldivian boats--a slight,
gilded thing, sent adrift without rudder or ballast, and with nothing but
vapid sweets and faded flowers on board." "The effect of the whole," says
one of his biographers, speaking of Lalla Rookh, "is much the same as that
of a magnificent ballet, on which all the resources of the theatre have
been lavished, and no expense spared in golden clouds, ethereal light,
gauze-clad sylphs, and splendid tableaux."
Moore has been felicitously called "the poet of all circles," a phrase
which shows that he reflected the general features of his age. At no time
could the license of _Anacreon_, or the poems of Little, have been so well
received as when "the first gentleman in Europe" set the example of
systematic impurity. At no time could _Irish Melodies_ have had such a
_furore_ of adoption and applause, as when _Repeal_ was the cry, and the
Irish were firing their minds by remembering "the glories of Brian the
Brave;" that Brian Boroimhe who died in the eleventh century, after
defeating the Danes in twenty-five battles.
Moore's _Biographies_, with all their faults, are important social
histories. _Lalla Rookh_ has a double historical significance: it is a
reflection--like _Anastasius_ and _Vathek_, like _Thalaba_ and _The Curse
of Kehama_, like _The Giaour_ and _The Bride of Abydos_--of English
conquest, travel, and adventure in the East. It is so true to nature in
oriental descriptions and allusions, that one traveller declared that to
read it was like riding on a camel; but it is far more important to
observe that the relative conditions of England and the Irish Roman
Catholics are symbolized in the Moslem rule over the Ghebers, as
delineated in _The Fire Worshippers_. In his preface to that poem, Moore
himself says: "The cause of tolerance was again my inspiring theme; and
the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of Ireland soon found itself at
home in the East."
In an historic view of English Literature, the works of Moore, touching
almost every subject, must always be of great value to the student of his
period: there he will always have his prominent place. But he is already
losing his niche in public favor as a poet proper; better taste, purer
morals, truer heart-songs, and more practical views will steadily supplant
him, until, with no power to influence the present, he shall stand only as
a charming relic of the past.