Yet we know on the best evidence that, a day or two before he
published these lines, he was greatly, indeed childishly, elated by the
compliments paid to his maiden speech In the House of Lords.
We are far, however, from thinking that his sadness was altogether
feigned. He was naturally a man of great sensibility; he had been ill
educated; his feelings had been early exposed to sharp trials; he had
been crossed in his boyish love; he had been mortified by the failure
of his first literary efforts; he was straitened in pecuniary
circumstances; he was unfortunate in his domestic relations; the public
treated him with cruel injustice: his health and spirits suffered from
his {365}dissipated habits of life; he was, on the whole, an unhappy
man. He early discovered that, by parading his unhappiness before the
multitude, he produced an immense sensation. The world gave him every
encouragement to talk about his mental sufferings. The interest which
his first confessions excited induced him to affect much that he did not
feel; and the affectation probably reacted on his feelings. How far
the character in which he exhibited himself was genuine, and how far
theatrical, it would probably have puzzled himself to say.
There can be no doubt that this remarkable man owed the vast influence
which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his
gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry. We never could very
clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation,
should be so popular in writing; or how it is that men who affect in
their compositions qualities and feelings which they have not, impose so
much more easily on their contemporaries than on posterity. The interest
which the loves of Petrarch excited in his own time, and the pitying
fondness with which half Europe looked upon Rousseau, are well known. To
readers of our age, the love of Petrarch seems to have been love of
that kind which breaks no hearts, and the sufferings of Rousseau to have
deserved laughter rather than pity, to have been partly counterfeited,
and partly the consequences of his own perverseness and vanity.
What our grandchildren may think of the character of Lord Byron, as
exhibited in his poetry, we will not pretend to guess. It is certain,
that the interest which he excited during his life is without a parallel
in literary history The feeling with which young readers of {366}poetry
regarded him can be conceived only by those who have experienced it. To
people who are unacquainted with real calamity, “nothing is so dainty
sweet as lovely melancholy.” This faint image of sorrow has in all
ages been considered by young gentlemen as an agreeable excitement. Old
gentlemen and middle-aged gentlemen have so many real causes of
sadness that they are rarely inclined “to be as sad as night only
for wantonness.” Indeed they want the power almost as much as the
inclination. We know very few persons engaged in active life who, even
if they were to procure stools to be melancholy upon, and were to sit
down with all the premeditation of Master Stephen, would be able to
enjoy much of what somebody calls the “ecstasy of woe.”
Among that large class of young persons whose reading is almost entirely
confined to works of imagination, the popularity of Lord Byron was
unbounded. They bought pictures of him; they treasured up the smallest
relics of him; they learned his poems by heart, and did their best to
write like him, and to look like him. Many of them practised at the
glass in the hope of catching the curl of the upper lip, and the scowl
of the brow, which appear in some of his portraits. A few discarded
their neckcloths in imitation of their great leader. For some years
the Minerva press sent forth no novel without a mysterious, unhappy,
Lara-like peer. The number of hopeful under-graduates and medical
students who became things of dark imaginings, on whom the freshness
of the heart ceased to fall like dew, whose passions had consumed
themselves to dust, and to whom the relief of tears was denied, passes
all calculation. This was not the worst. There was created in the minds
of {367}many of these enthusiasts a pernicious and absurd association
between intellectual power and moral depravity. From the poetry of
Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and
voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to
hate your neighbour, and to love your neighbour’s wife.
This affectation has passed away; and a few more years will destroy
whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the
name of Byron. To us he is still a man, young, noble, and unhappy. To
our children he will be merely a writer; and their impartial judgment
will appoint his place among writers, without regard to his rank or to
his private history. That his poetry will undergo a severe sifting, that
much of what has been admired by his contemporaries will be rejected
as worthless, we have little doubt. But we have as little doubt, that,
after the closest scrutiny, there will still remain much that can only
perish with the English language.