(_Edinburgh Review_, June 1831.)
We {324}have read this book with the greatest pleasure. Considered
merely as a composition, it deserves to be classed among the best
specimens of English prose which our age has produced. It contains,
indeed, no single passage equal to two or three which we could select
from the Life of Sheridan. But, as a whole, it is immeasurably superior
to that work. The style is agreeable, clear, and manly, and when it
rises into eloquence, rises without effort or ostentation. Nor is the
matter inferior to the manner. It would be difficult to name a book
which exhibits more kindness, fairness, and modesty. It has evidently
been written, not for the purpose of showing, what, however, it
often shows, how well its author can write, but for the purpose of
vindicating, as far as truth will permit; the memory of a celebrated
man who can no longer vindicate himself. Mr. Moore never thrusts himself
between Lord Byron and the public. With the strongest temptations to
egotism, he has said no more about himself than the subject absolutely
required.
A great part, indeed the greater part, of these volumes, consists of
extracts from the Letters and Journals
(1) _Letters and Journals of Lord Byron; with Notices of his
Life_. By Thomas Mooke, Esq. 2 vols. 4to. London: 1830.
{325}of Lord Byron; and it is difficult to speak too highly of the skill
which has been shown in the selection and arrangement. We will not say
that we have not occasionally remarked in these two large quartos an
anecdote which should have been omitted, a letter which should have been
suppressed, a name which should have been concealed by asterisks, or
asterisks which do not answer the purpose of concealing the name. But
it is impossible, on a general survey, to deny that the task has been
executed with great judgment and great humanity. When we consider the
life which Lord Byron had led, his petulance, his irritability, and his
communicativeness, we cannot but admire the dexterity with which Mr.
Moore has contrived to exhibit so much of the character and opinions of
his friend, with so little pain to the feelings of the living.
The extracts from the journals and correspondence of Lord Byron are in
the highest degree valuable, not merely on account of the information
which they contain respecting the distinguished man by whom they were
written, but on account also of their rare merit as compositions. The
Letters, at least those which were sent from Italy, are among the best
in our language. They are less affected than those of Pope and Walpole;
they have more matter in them than those of Cowper. Knowing that many of
them were not written merely for the person to whom they were directed,
but were general epistles, meant to be read by a large circle, we
expected to find them clever and spirited, but deficient in ease. We
looked with vigilance for instances of stiffness in the language and
awkwardness in the transitions. We have been agreeably disappointed;
and we must confess that, if the epistolary style of Lord Byron was
artificial, it was a {326}rare and admirable instance of that highest
art which cannot be distinguished from nature.
Of the deep and painful interest which this book excites no abstract can
give a just notion. So sad and dark a story is scarcely to be found in
any work of fiction; and we are little disposed to envy the moralist who
can read it without being softened.
The pretty fable by which the Duchess of Orleans illustrated the
character of her son the Regent might, with little change, be applied to
Byron. All the fairies, save one, had been bidden to his cradle. All
the gossips had been profuse of their gifts. One had bestowed nobility,
another genius, a third beauty. The malignant elf who had been uninvited
came last, and, unable to reverse what her sisters had done for their
favourite, had mixed up a curse with every blessing. In the rank of Lord
Byron, in his understanding, in his character, in his very person, there
was a strange union of opposite extremes. He was born to all that men
covet and admire. But in every one of those eminent advantages which he
possessed over others was mingled something of misery and debasement.
He was sprung from a house, ancient indeed and noble, but degraded and
impoverished by a series of crimes and follies which had attained a
scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded had died poor, and,
but for merciful judges, would have died upon the gallows. The young
peer had great intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound part in his
mind. He had naturally a generous and feeling heart: but his temper was
wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy,
and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.
Distinguished {327}at once by the strength and by the weakness of
his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a handsome
cripple, he required, if ever man required, the firmest and the most
judicious training. But, capriciously as nature had dealt with him, the
parent to whom the office of forming his character was intrusted was
more capricious still. She passed from paroxysms of rage to paroxysms
of tenderness. At one time she stifled him with her caresses: at another
time she insulted his deformity. He came into the world; and the world
treated him as his mother had treated him, sometimes with fondness,
sometimes with cruelty, never with justice. It indulged him without
discrimination, and punished him without discrimination. He was truly
a spoiled child, not merely the spoiled child of his parent, but the
spoiled child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child
of fame, the spoiled child of society. His first poems were received
with a contempt which, feeble as they were, they did not absolutely
deserve. The poem which he published on his return from his travels was,
on the other hand, extolled far above its merit. At twenty-four he
found himself on the highest pinnacle of literary fame, with Scott,
Wordsworth, Southey, and a crowd of other distinguished writers beneath
his feet. There is scarcely an instance in history of so sudden a rise
to so dizzy an eminence.
Every thing that could stimulate, and every thing that could gratify
the strongest propensities of our nature, the gaze of a hundred
drawing-rooms, the acclamations of the whole nation, the applause of
applauded men, the love of lovely women, all this world and all the
glory of it were at once offered to a youth to whom nature had given
violent passions, and to {328}whom education had never taught to control
them. He lived as many men live who have no similar excuse to plead for
their fruits. But his countrymen and his countrywomen would love him and
admire him. They were resolved to see in his excesses only the flash and
outbreak of that same fiery mind which glowed in his poetry. He attacked
religion; yet in religious circles his name was mentioned with
fondness, and in many religious publications his works were censured with
singular tenderness. He lampooned the Prince Regent; yet he could not
alienate the Tories. Every thing, it seemed, was to be forgiven to
youth, rank, and genius.
Then came the reaction. Society, capricious in its indignation as it had
been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and
petted darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry.
He was persecuted with an irrational fury. Much has been written about
those unhappy domestic occurrences which decided the fate of his life.
Yet nothing is, nothing ever was, positively known to the public, but
this, that he quarrelled with his lady, and that she refused to live
with him. There have been hints in abundance, and shrugs and shakings of
the head, and “Well, well, we know,” and “We could an if we would,” and
“If we list to speak,” and “There be that might an they list.” But we
are not aware that there is before the world substantiated by credible,
or even by tangible evidence, a single fact indicating that Lord Byron
was more to blame than any other man who is on bad terms with his wife.
The professional men whom Lady Byron consulted were undoubtedly of
opinion that she ought not to live with her husband. But it is to be
remembered {329}that they formed that opinion without hearing both
sides. We do not say, we do not mean to insinuate, that Lady Byron was
in any respect to blame. We think that those who condemn her on the
evidence which is now before the public are as rash as those who condemn
her husband. We will not pronounce any judgment, we cannot, even in our
own minds, form any judgment, on a transaction which is so imperfectly
known to us. It would have been well if, at the time of the separation,
all those who knew as little about the matter then as we know about it
now had shown that forbearance which, under such circumstances, is but
common justice.
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of
its periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces, and
family quarrels, pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk
about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years our
virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and
decency to be violated. We must make a stand against vice. We must teach
libertines that the English people appreciate the importance of domestic
ties. Accordingly some unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than
hundreds whose offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out
as an expiatory sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from
him. If he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by
the higher orders, and hissed by the lower. He is, in truth, a sort of
whipping-boy, by whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of
the same class are, it is supposed, sufficiently chastised. We reflect,
very complacently on our own severity, and compare with great pride the
high standard of morals established in England with {330}the Parisian
laxity. At length our anger is satiated. Our victim is ruined and
heart-broken. And our virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years more.
It is clear that those vices which destroy domestic happiness ought to
be as much as possible repressed. It is equally clear that they cannot
be repressed by penal legislation. It is therefore right and desirable
that public opinion should be directed against them. But it should
be directed against them uniformly, steadily, and temperately, not by
sudden fits and starts. There should be one weight and one measure.
Decimation is always an objectionable mode of punishment. It is the
resource of judges too indolent and hasty to investigate facts and
to discriminate nicely between shades of guilt. It is an irrational
practice, even when adopted by military tribunals. When adopted by the
tribunal of public opinion, it is infinitely more irrational. It is good
that a certain portion of disgrace should constantly attend on certain
bad actions. But it is not good that the offenders should merely have
to stand the risks of a lottery of infamy, that ninety-nine out of every
hundred should escape, and that the hundredth, perhaps the most innocent
of the hundred, should pay for all. We remember to have seen a mob
assembled in Lincoln’s Inn to hoot a gentleman against whom the most
oppressive proceeding known to the English law was then in progress. He
was hooted because he had been an unfaithful husband, as if some of
the most popular men of the age, Lord Nelson for example, had not been
unfaithful husbands. We remember a still stronger case. Will posterity
believe that, in an age in which men whose gallantries were universally
known, and had been legally proved, filled some of the highest offices
in the state and in the army, {331}presided at the meetings of religious
and benevolent institutions, were the delight of every society, and the
favourites of the multitude, a crowd of moralists went to the theatre,
in order to pelt a poor actor for disturbing the conjugal felicity of an
alderman? What there was in the circumstances either of the offender or
of the sufferer to vindicate the zeal of the audience, we could never
conceive. It has never been supposed that the situation of an actor is
peculiarly favourable to the rigid virtues, or that an alderman enjoys
any special immunity from injuries such as that which on this occasion
roused the anger of the public. But such is the justice of mankind.
In these cases the punishment was excessive; but the offence was known
and proved. The case of Lord Byron was harder. True Jedwood justice was
dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and
last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without
knowing any thing whatever about the transactions in his family, flew
into a violent passion with him, and proceeded to invent stories
which might justify its anger. Ten or twenty different accounts of the
separation, inconsistent with each other, with themselves, and with
common sense, circulated at the same time. What evidence there might be
for any one of these, the virtuous people who repeated them neither
knew nor cared. For in fact these stories were not the causes, but
the effects of the public indignation. They resembled those loathsome
slanders which Lewis Goldsmith, and other abject libellers of the same
class, were in the habit of publishing about Bonaparte; such as that he
poisoned a girl with arsenic when he was at the military school, that he
hired a grenadier to shoot Dessaix at Marengo, that {332}he filled St.
Cloud with all the pollutions of Capreæ. There was a time when anecdotes
like these obtained some credence from persons who, hating the French
emperor without knowing why, were eager to believe any thing which might
justify their hatred. Lord Byron fared in the same way. His countrymen
were in a bad humour with him. His writings and his character had lost
the charm of novelty. He had been guilty of the offence which, of all
offences, is punished most severely; he had been over-praised; he had
excited too warm an interest; and the public, with its usual justice,
chastised him for its own folly. The attachments of the multitude bear
no small resemblance to those of the wanton enchantress in the Arabian
Tales, who, when the forty days of her fondness were over, was not
content with dismissing her lovers, but condemned them to expiate, in
loathsome shapes, and under cruel penances, the crime of having once
pleased her too well.
The obloquy which Byron had to endure was such as might well have shaken
a more constant mind. The newspapers were filled with lampoons. The
theatres shook with execrations. He was excluded from circles where he
had lately been the observed of all observers. All those creeping things
that riot in the decay of nobler natures hastened to their repast; and
they were right; they did after their kind. It is not every day that
the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified by the agonies of such a
spirit, and the degradation of such a name.
The unhappy man left his country for ever. The howl of contumely
followed him across the sea, up the Rhine, over the Alps; it gradually
waxed fainter; it died away; those who had raised it began to ask each
{333}other, what, after all, was the matter about which they had been
so clamorous, and wished to invite back the criminal whom they had just
chased from them. His poetry became more popular than it had ever
been; and his complaints were read with tears by thousands and tens of
thousands who had never seen his face.
He had fixed his home on the shores of the Adriatic, in the most
picturesque and interesting of cities, beneath the brightest of skies,
and by the brightest of seas. Censoriousness was not the vice of the
neighbours whom he had chosen. They were a race corrupted by a bad
government and a bad religion, long renowned for skill in the arts of
voluptuousness, and tolerant of all the caprices of sensuality. From the
public opinion of the country of his adoption, he had nothing to dread.
With the public opinion of the country of his birth, he was at open war.
He plunged into wild and desperate excesses, ennobled by no generous
or tender sentiment. From his Venetian harem he sent forth volume after
volume, full of eloquence, of wit, of pathos, of ribaldry, and of bitter
disdain. His health sank under the effects of his intemperance. His hair
turned grey. His food ceased to nourish him. A hectic fever withered him
up. It seemed that his body and mind were about to perish together.
From this wretched degradation he was in some measure rescued by a
connection, culpable indeed, yet such as, if it were judged by the
standard of morality established in the country where he lived, might
be called virtuous. But an imagination polluted by vice, a temper
embittered by misfortune, and a frame habituated to the fatal excitement
of intoxication, prevented him from fully enjoying the happiness which
he might have derived from the purest and most tranquil of his {334}many
attachments. Midnight draughts of ardent spirits and Rhenish wines had
begun to work the ruin of his fine intellect. His verse lost much of
the energy and condensation which had distinguished it. But he would not
resign, without a struggle, the empire which he had exercised over the
men of his generation. A new dream of ambition arose before him; to be
the chief of a literary party; to be the great mover of an intellectual
revolution; to guide the public mind of England from his Italian
retreat, as Voltaire had guided the public mind of France from the
villa of Ferney. With this hope, as it should seem, he established the
Liberal. But, powerfully as he had affected the imaginations of his
contemporaries, he mistook his own powers if he hoped to direct their
opinions; and he still more grossly mistook his own disposition, if he
thought that he could long act in concert with other men of letters. The
plan failed, and failed ignominiously. Angry with himself, angry with
his coadjutors, he relinquished it, and turned to another project, the
last and noblest of his life.
A nation, once the first among the nations, preeminent in knowledge,
preeminent in military glory, the cradle of philosophy, of eloquence,
and of the fine arts, had been for ages bowed down under a cruel yoke.
All the vices which oppression generates, the abject vices which it
generates in those who submit to it, the ferocious vices which it
generates in those who struggle against it, had deformed the character
of that miserable race. The valour which had won the great battle of
human civilisation, which had saved Europe, which had subjugated
Asia, lingered only among pirates and robbers. The ingenuity, once
so conspicuously displayed in every department of physical and moral
science, had {335}been depraved into a timid and servile cunning. On
a sudden this degraded people had risen on their oppressors.
Discountenanced or betrayed by the surrounding potentates, they had
found in themselves something of that which might well supply the place
of all foreign assistance, something of the energy of their fathers.
As a man of letters, Lord Byron conld not but be interested in the event
of this contest. His political opinions, though, like all his opinions,
unsettled, leaned strongly towards the side of liberty. He bad assisted
the Italian insurgents with his purse, and, if their struggle against
the Austrian government had been prolonged, would probably have assisted
them with his sword. But to Greece he was attached by peculiar ties. He
had when young resided in that country. Much of his most splendid and
popular poetry had been inspired by its scenery and by its history. Sick
of inaction, degraded in his own eyes by his private vices and by
his literary failures, pining for untried excitement and honourable
distinction, he carried his exhausted body and his wounded spirit to the
Grecian camp.
His conduct in his new situation showed so much vigour and good sense
as to justify us in believing that, if his life had been prolonged,
he might have distinguished himself as a soldier and a politician. But
pleasure and sorrow had done the work of seventy years upon his delicate
frame. The hand of death was upon him: he knew it; and the only wish
which he uttered was that he might die sword in hand.
This was denied to him. Anxiety, exertion, exposure, and those fatal
stimulants which had become indispensable to him, soon stretched him on
a sick bed, in a strange land, amidst strange faces, without one human
{336}being that he loved near him. There, at thirty-six, the most
celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century closed his brilliant and
miserable career.
We cannot even now retrace those events without feeling something of
what was felt by the nation, when it was first known that the grave had
closed over so much sorrow and so much glory; something of what was felt
by those who saw the hearse, with its long train of coaches, turn slowly
northward, leaving behind it that cemetery which had been consecrated
by the dust of so many great poets, but of which the doors were closed
against all that remained of Byron. We well remember that on that day,
rigid moralists could not refrain from weeping for one so young, so
illustrious, so unhappy, gifted with such rare gifts, and tried by
such strong temptations. It is unnecessary to make any reflections. The
history carries its moral with it. Our age has indeed been fruitful of
warnings to the eminent, and of consolations to the obscure. Two men
have died within our recollection, who, at a time of life at which many
people have hardly 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.
It is always difficult to separate the literary character of a man who
lives in our own time from his personal character. It is peculiarly
difficult to make this separation in the case of Lord Byron. For it
is scarcely too much to say, that Lord Byron never wrote without some
reference, direct or indirect, to himself. The interest excited by the
events of his life mingles itself in our minds, and probably in the
minds of almost all our readers, with the interest which properly
belongs to his works. A generation must pass away before it will be
{337}possible to form a fair judgment of his books, considered merely as
books. At present they are not only books, but relics. We will however
venture, though with unfeigned diffidence, to offer some desultory
remarks on his poetry.
His lot was cast in the time of a great literary revolution. That
poetical dynasty which had dethroned the successors of Shakspeare and
Spenser was, in its turn, dethroned by a race who represented themselves
as heirs of the ancient line, so long dispossessed by usurpers. The real
nature of this revolution has not, we think, been comprehended by the
great majority of those who concurred in it.
Wherein especially does the poetry of our times differ from that of the
last century? Ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would answer that
the poetry of the last century was correct, but cold and mechanical, and
that the poetry of our time, though wild and irregular, presented far
more vivid images, and excited the passions far more strongly than that
of Parnell, of Addison, or of Pope. In the same manner we constantly
hear it said, that the poets of the age of Elizabeth had far more
genius, but far less correctness, than those of the age of Anne. It
seems to be taken for granted, that there is some incompatibility, some
antithesis between correctness and creative power. We rather suspect
that this notion arises merely from an abuse of words, and that it has
been the parent of many of the fallacies which perplex the science of
criticism.
What is meant by correctness in poetry? If by correctness be meant the
conforming to rules which have their foundation in truth and in the
principles of human nature, then correctness is only another name
{339}for excellence. If by correctness be meant the conforming to
rules purely arbitrary, correctness may be another name for dulness and
absurdity.
A writer who describes visible objects falsely and violates the
propriety of character, a writer who makes the mountains “nod their
drowsy heads” at night, or a dying man take leave of the world with a
rant like that of Maximin, may be said in the high and just sense of
the phrase, to write incorrectly. He violates the first great law of
his art. His imitation is altogether unlike the thing imitated. The four
poets who are most eminently free from incorrectness of this description
are Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. They are, therefore, in one
sense, and that the best sense, the most correct of poets.
When it is said that Virgil, though he had less genius than Homer, was a
more correct writer, what sense is attached to the word correctness? Is
it meant that the story of the Æneid is developed more skilfully than
that of the Odyssey? that the Roman describes the face of the external
world, or the emotions of the mind, more accurately than the Greek? that
the characters of Achates and Mnestheus are more nicely discriminated,
and more consistently supported, than those of Achilles, of Nestor, and
of Ulysses? The fact incontestably is that, for every violation of the
fundamental laws of poetry which can be found in Homer, it would be easy
to find twenty in Virgil.
Troilus and Cressida is perhaps of all the plays of Shakspeare that
which is commonly considered as the most incorrect. Yet it seems to us
infinitely more correct, in the sound sense of the term, than what are
called the most correct plays of the most correct dramatists. Compare
it, for example, with the Iphigenie {339}of Racine. We are sure that the
Greeks of Shakspeare bear a for greater resemblance than the Greeks of
Racine to the real Greeks who besieged Troy; and for this reason, that
the Greeks ol Shakspeare are human beings, and the Greeks of Racine
mere names, mere words printed in capitals at the head of paragraphs of
declamation. Racine, it is true, would have shuddered at the thought of
making a warrior at the siege of Troy quote Aristotle. But of what
use is it to avoid a single anachronism, when the whole play is one
anachronism, the sentiments and phrases of Versailles in the camp of
Aulis?
In the sense in which we are now using the word correctness, we think
that Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge, are for more
correct poets than those who are commonly extolled as the models of
correctness, Pope, for example, and Addison. The single description of
a moonlight night in Pope’s Iliad contains more inaccuracies than can
be found in all the Excursion. There is not a single scene in Cato,
in which all that conduces to poetical illusion, all the propriety of
character, of language, of situation, is not more grossly violated than
in any part of the Lay of the last Minstrel. No man can possibly think
that the Romans of Addison resemble the real Romans so closely as the
moss-troopers of Scott resemble the real mosstroopers. Wat Tinlinn and
William of Deloraine are not, it is true, persons of so much dignity
as Cato. But the dignity of the persons represented has as little to do
with the correctness of poetry as with the correctness of painting. We
prefer a gipsy by Reynolds to his Majesty’s head on a sign-post, and a
Borderer by Scott to a Senator by Addison.
In what sense, then, is the word correctness used {340}by those who say,
with the author of the Pursuits of Literature, that Pope was the most
correct of English Poets, and that next to Pope came the late Mr.
Gifford? What is the nature and value of that correctness, the praise
of which is denied to Macbeth, to Lear, and to Othello, and given
to Hoole’s translations and to all the Seatonian prize-poems? We can
discover no eternal rule, no rule founded in reason and in the nature of
things, which Shakspeare does not observe much more strictly than Pope.
But if by correctness be meant the conforming to a narrow legislation
which, while lenient to the _mala in se_, multiplies, without the shadow
of a reason, the _mala prohibita_, if by correctness be meant a
strict attention to certain ceremonious observances, which are no more
essential to poetry than etiquette to good government, or than the
washings of a Pharisee to devotion, then, assuredly, Pope may be a more
correct poet than Shakspeare; and, if the code were a little altered,
Colley Cibber might be a more correct poet than Pope. But it may well be
doubted whether this kind of correctness be a merit, nay, whether it be
not an absolute fault.
It would be amusing to make a digest of the irrational laws which bad
critics have framed for the government of poets. First in celebrity
and in absurdity stand the dramatic unities of place and time. No human
being has ever been able to find any thing that could, even by courtesy,
be called an argument for these unities, except that they have been
deduced from the general practice of the Greeks. It requires no very
profound examination to discover that the Greek dramas, often admirable
as compositions, are, as exhibitions of human character and human life,
far inferior to the English plays of the age of Elizabeth. {341}Every
scholar knows that the dramatic part of the Athenian tragedies was at
first subordinate to the lyrical part. It would, therefore, have been
little less than a miracle if the laws of the Athenian stage had been
found to suit plays in which there was no chorus.
All the greatest masterpieces of the dramatic art have been composed in
direct violation of the unities, and could never have been composed if
the unities had not been violated. It is clear, for example, that such
a character as that of Hamlet could never have been developed within the
limits to which Alfieri confined himself. Yet such was the reverence of
literary men during the last century for these unities that Johnson who,
much to his honour, took the opposite side, was, as he says, “frightened
at his own temerity,” and “afraid to stand against the authorities which
might be produced against him.”
There are other rules of the same kind without end. “Shakspeare,” says
Rymer, “ought not to have made Othello black; for the hero of a tragedy
ought always to be white.”
“Milton,” says another critic, “ought not to have taken Adam for his
hero; for the hero of an epic poem ought always to be victorious.”
“Milton,” says another, “ought not to have put so many similes into his
first book; for the first book of an epic poem ought always to be the
most unadorned. There are no similes in the first book of the Iliad.”
“Milton,” says another, “ought not to have placed in an epic poem such
lines as these."
“'While thus I called, and strayed I knew not whither.’”
And why not? The critic is ready with a reason, a lady’s reason. “Such
lines,” says he, “are not, it must be allowed, unpleasing to the ear;
but the redundant {342}syllable ought to be confined to the drama, and
not admitted into epic poetry.” As to the redundant syllable in heroic
rhyme on serious subjects, it has been, from the time of Pope downward,
proscribed by the general consent of all the correct school. No magazine
would have admitted so incorrect a couplet as that of Drayton;
“As when we lived untouch’d with these disgraces,