"October 22. 1814.
"My dear Cowell,
"Many and sincere thanks for your kind letter--the bet, or rather
forfeit, was one hundred to Hawke, and fifty to Hay (nothing to
Kelly), for a guinea received from each of the two former.[50] I
shall feel much obliged by your setting me right if I am incorrect
in this statement in any way, and have reasons for wishing you to
recollect as much as possible of what passed, and state it to
Hodgson. My reason is this: some time ago Mr. * * * required a bet
of me which I never made, and of course refused to pay, and have
heard no more of it; to prevent similar mistakes is my object in
wishing you to remember well what passed, and to put Hodgson in
possession of your memory on the subject.
"I hope to see you soon in my way through Cambridge. Remember me to
H., and believe me ever and truly," &c.
[Footnote 50: He had agreed to forfeit these sums to the persons
mentioned, should he ever marry.]
* * * * *
Soon after the date of this letter, Lord Byron had to pay a visit to
Cambridge for the purpose of voting for Mr. Clarke, who had been
started by Trinity College as one of the candidates for Sir Busick
Harwood's Professorship. On this occasion, a circumstance occurred which
could not but be gratifying to him. As he was delivering in his vote to
the Vice-Chancellor, in the Senate House, the under-graduates in the
gallery ventured to testify their admiration of him by a general murmur
of applause and stamping of the feet. For this breach of order, the
gallery was immediately cleared by order of the Vice-Chancellor.
At the beginning of the month of December, being called up to town by
business, I had opportunities, from being a good deal in my noble
friend's society, of observing the state of his mind and feelings, under
the prospect of the important change he was now about to undergo; and it
was with pain I found that those sanguine hopes[51] with which I had
sometimes looked forward to the happy influence of marriage, in winning
him over to the brighter and better side of life, were, by a view of all
the circumstances of his present destiny, considerably diminished;
while, at the same time, not a few doubts and misgivings, which had
never before so strongly occurred to me, with regard to his own fitness,
under any circumstances, for the matrimonial tie, filled me altogether
with a degree of foreboding anxiety as to his fate, which the
unfortunate events that followed but too fully justified.
The truth is, I fear, that rarely, if ever, have men of the higher order
of genius shown themselves fitted for the calm affections and comforts
that form the cement of domestic life. "One misfortune (says Pope) of
extraordinary geniuses is, that their very friends are more apt to
admire than love them." To this remark there have, no doubt, been
exceptions,--and I should pronounce Lord Byron, from my own experience,
to be one of them,--but it would not be difficult, perhaps, to show,
from the very nature and pursuits of genius, that such must generally be
the lot of all pre-eminently gifted with it; and that the same qualities
which enable them to command admiration are also those that too often
incapacitate them from conciliating love.
The very habits, indeed, of abstraction and self-study to which the
occupations of men of genius lead, are, in themselves, necessarily, of
an unsocial and detaching tendency, and require a large portion of
indulgence from others not to be set down as unamiable. One of the chief
sources, too, of sympathy and society between ordinary mortals being
their dependence on each other's intellectual resources, the operation
of this social principle must naturally be weakest in those whose own
mental stores are most abundant and self-sufficing, and who, rich in
such materials for thinking within themselves, are rendered so far
independent of any aid from others. It was this solitary luxury (which
Plato called "banqueting his own thoughts") that led Pope, as well as
Lord Byron, to prefer the silence and seclusion of his library to the
most agreeable conversation.--And not only too, is the necessity of
commerce with other minds less felt by such persons, but, from that
fastidiousness which the opulence of their own resources generates, the
society of those less gifted than themselves becomes often a restraint
and burden, to which not all the charms of friendship, or even love, can
reconcile them. "Nothing is so tiresome (says the poet of Vaucluse, in
assigning a reason for not living with some of his dearest friends) as
to converse with persons who have not the same information as one's
self."
But it is the cultivation and exercise of the imaginative faculty that,
more than any thing, tends to wean the man of genius from actual life,
and, by substituting the sensibilities of the imagination for those of
the heart, to render, at last, the medium through which he feels no less
unreal than that through which he thinks. Those images of ideal good and
beauty that surround him in his musings soon accustom him to consider
all that is beneath this high standard unworthy of his care; till, at
length, the heart becoming chilled as the fancy warms, it too often
happens that, in proportion as he has refined and elevated his theory of
all the social affections, he has unfitted himself for the practice of
them.[52] Hence so frequently it arises that, in persons of this
temperament, we see some bright but artificial idol of the brain usurp
the place of all real and natural objects of tenderness. The poet Dante,
a wanderer away from wife and children, passed the whole of a restless
and detached life in nursing his immortal dream of Beatrice; while
Petrarch, who would not suffer his only daughter to reside beneath his
roof, expended thirty-two years of poetry and passion on an idealised
love.
It is, indeed, in the very nature and essence of genius to be for ever
occupied intensely with Self, as the great centre and source of its
strength. Like the sister Rachel, in Dante, sitting all day before her
mirror,
"mai non si smaga
Del suo ammiraglio, e siede tutto giorno."
To this power of self-concentration, by which alone all the other powers
of genius are made available, there is, of course, no such disturbing
and fatal enemy as those sympathies and affections that draw the mind
out actively towards others[53]; and, accordingly, it will be found
that, among those who have felt within themselves a call to immortality,
the greater number have, by a sort of instinct, kept aloof from such
ties, and, instead of the softer duties and rewards of being amiable,
reserved themselves for the high, hazardous chances of being great. In
looking back through the lives of the most illustrious poets,--the class
of intellect in which the characteristic features of genius are,
perhaps, most strongly marked,--we shall find that, with scarcely one
exception, from Homer down to Lord Byron, they have been, in their
several degrees, restless and solitary spirits, with minds wrapped up,
like silk-worms, in their own tasks, either strangers, or rebels to
domestic ties, and bearing about with them a deposit for posterity in
their souls, to the jealous watching and enriching of which almost all
other thoughts and considerations have been sacrificed.
"To follow poetry as one ought (says the authority[54] I have already
quoted), one must forget father and mother and cleave to it alone." In
these few words is pointed out the sole path that leads genius to
greatness. On such terms alone are the high places of fame to be
won;--nothing less than the sacrifice of the entire man can achieve
them. However delightful, therefore, may be the spectacle of a man of
genius tamed and domesticated in society, taking docilely upon him the
yoke of the social ties, and enlightening without disturbing the sphere
in which he moves, we must nevertheless, in the midst of our admiration,
bear in mind that it is not thus smoothly or amiably immortality has
been ever struggled for, or won. The poet thus circumstanced may be
popular, may be loved; for the happiness of himself and those linked
with him he is in the right road,--but not for greatness. The marks by
which Fame has always separated her great martyrs from the rest of
mankind are not upon him, and the crown cannot be his. He may dazzle,
may captivate the circle, and even the times in which he lives, but he
is not for hereafter.
To the general description here given of that high class of human
intelligences to which he belonged, the character of Lord Byron was, in
many respects, a signal exception. Born with strong affections and
ardent passions, the world had, from first to last, too firm a hold on
his sympathies to let imagination altogether usurp the place of reality,
either in his feelings, or in the objects of them. His life, indeed, was
one continued struggle between that instinct of genius, which was for
ever drawing him back into the lonely laboratory of Self, and those
impulses of passion, ambition, and vanity, which again hurried him off
into the crowd, and entangled him in its interests; and though it may be
granted that he would have been more purely and abstractedly the
_poet_, had he been less thoroughly, in all his pursuits and
propensities, the _man_, yet from this very mixture and alloy has it
arisen that his pages bear so deeply the stamp of real life, and that in
the works of no poet, with the exception of Shakspeare, can every
various mood of the mind--whether solemn or gay, whether inclined to the
ludicrous or the sublime, whether seeking to divert itself with the
follies of society or panting after the grandeur of solitary
nature--find so readily a strain of sentiment in accordance with its
every passing tone.
But while the naturally warm cast of his affections and temperament gave
thus a substance and truth to his social feelings which those of too
many of his fellow votaries of Genius have wanted, it was not to be
expected that an imagination of such range and power should have been so
early developed and unrestrainedly indulged without producing, at last,
some of those effects upon the heart which have invariably been found
attendant on such a predominance of this faculty. It must have been
observed, indeed, that the period when his natural affections flourished
most healthily was before he had yet arrived at the full consciousness
of his genius,--before Imagination had yet accustomed him to those
glowing pictures, after gazing upon which all else appeared cold and
colourless. From the moment of this initiation into the wonders of his
own mind, a distaste for the realities of life began to grow upon him.
Not even that intense craving after affection, which nature had
implanted in him, could keep his ardour still alive in a pursuit whose
results fell so short of his "imaginings;" and though, from time to
time, the combined warmth of his fancy and temperament was able to call
up a feeling which to his eyes wore the semblance of love, it may be
questioned whether his heart had ever much share in such passions, or
whether, after his first launch into the boundless sea of imagination,
he could ever have been brought back and fixed by any lasting
attachment. Actual objects there were, in but too great number, who, as
long as the illusion continued, kindled up his thoughts and were the
themes of his song. But they were, after all, little more than mere
dreams of the hour;--the qualities with which he invested them were
almost all ideal, nor could have stood the test of a month's, or even
week's, cohabitation. It was but the reflection of his own bright
conceptions that he saw in each new object; and while persuading himself
that they furnished the models of his heroines, he was, on the contrary,
but fancying that he beheld his heroines in them.
There needs no stronger proof of the predominance of imagination in
these attachments than his own serious avowal, in the Journal already
given, that often, when in the company of the woman he most loved, he
found himself secretly wishing for the solitude of his own study. It was
_there_, indeed,--in the silence and abstraction of that study,--that
the chief scene of his mistress's empire and glory lay. It was there
that, unchecked by reality, and without any fear of the disenchantments
of truth, he could view her through the medium of his own fervid fancy,
enamour himself of an idol of his own creating, and out of a brief
delirium of a few days or weeks, send forth a dream of beauty and
passion through all ages.
While such appears to have been the imaginative character of his loves,
(of all, except the one that lived unquenched through all,) his
friendships, though, of course, far less subject to the influence of
fancy, could not fail to exhibit also some features characteristic of
the peculiar mind in which they sprung. It was a usual saying of his
own, and will be found repeated in some of his letters, that he had "no
genius for friendship," and that whatever capacity he might once have
possessed for that sentiment had vanished with his youth. If in saying
thus he shaped his notions of friendship according to the romantic
standard of his boyhood, the fact must be admitted: but as far as the
assertion was meant to imply that he had become incapable of a warm,
manly, and lasting friendship, such a charge against himself was unjust,
and I am not the only living testimony of its injustice.
To a certain degree, however, even in his friendships, the effects of a
too vivid imagination, in disqualifying the mind for the cold contact of
reality, were visible. We are told that Petrarch (who, in this respect,
as in most others, may be regarded as a genuine representative of the
poetic character,) abstained purposely from a too frequent intercourse
with his nearest friends, lest, from the sensitiveness he was so aware
of in himself, there should occur any thing that might chill his regard
for them [55]; and though Lord Byron was of a nature too full of social
and kindly impulses ever to think of such a precaution, it is a fact
confirmatory, at least, of the principle on which his brother poet,
Petrarch, acted, that the friends, whether of his youth or manhood, of
whom he had seen least, through life, were those of whom he always
thought and spoke with the most warmth and fondness. Being brought less
often to the touchstone of familiar intercourse, they stood naturally a
better chance of being adopted as the favourites of his imagination, and
of sharing, in consequence, a portion of that bright colouring reserved
for all that gave it interest and pleasure. Next to the dead, therefore,
whose hold upon his fancy had been placed beyond all risk of severance,
those friends whom he but saw occasionally, and by such favourable
glimpses as only renewed the first kindly impression they had made, were
the surest to live unchangingly, and without shadow, in his memory.
To this same cause, there is little doubt, his love for his sister owed
much of its devotedness and fervour. In a mind sensitive and versatile
as his, long habits of family intercourse might have estranged, or at
least dulled, his natural affection for her;--but their separation,
during youth, left this feeling fresh and untried.[56] His very
inexperience in such ties made the smile of a sister no less a novelty
than a charm to him; and before the first gloss of this newly awakened
sentiment had time to wear off, they were again separated, and for ever.
If the portrait which I have here attempted of the general character of
those gifted with high genius be allowed to bear, in any of its
features, a resemblance to the originals, it can no longer, I think, be
matter of question whether a class so set apart from the track of
ordinary life, so removed, by their very elevation, out of the
influences of our common atmosphere, are at all likely to furnish
tractable subjects for that most trying of all social experiments,
matrimony. In reviewing the great names of philosophy and science, we
shall find that all who have most distinguished themselves in those
walks have, at least, virtually admitted their own unfitness for the
marriage tie by remaining in celibacy;--Newton, Gassendi, Galileo,
Descartes, Bayle, Locke, Leibnitz, Boyle, Hume, and a long list of other
illustrious sages, having all led single lives.[57]
The poetic race, it is true, from the greater susceptibility of their
imaginations, have more frequently fallen into the ever ready snare. But
the fate of the poets in matrimony has but justified the caution of the
philosophers. While the latter have given warning to genius by keeping
free of the yoke, the others have still more effectually done so by
their misery under it;--the annals of this sensitive race having, at all
times, abounded with proofs, that genius ranks but low among the
elements of social happiness,--that, in general, the brighter the gift,
the more disturbing its influence, and that in married life
particularly, its effects have been too often like that of the "Wormwood
Star," whose light filled the waters on which it fell with bitterness.
Besides the causes already enumerated as leading naturally to such a
result, from the peculiarities by which, in most instances, these great
labourers in the field of thought are characterised, there is also much,
no doubt, to be attributed to an unluckiness in the choice of
helpmates,--dictated, as that choice frequently must be, by an
imagination accustomed to deceive itself. But from whatever causes it
may have arisen, the coincidence is no less striking than saddening,
that, on the list of married poets who have been unhappy in their homes,
there should already be found four such illustrious names as Dante,
Milton[58], Shakspeare[59], and Dryden; and that we should now have to
add, as a partner in their destiny, a name worthy of being placed beside
the greatest of them,--Lord Byron.
I have already mentioned my having been called up to town in the
December of this year. The opportunities I had of seeing Lord Byron
during my stay were frequent; and, among them, not the least memorable
or agreeable were those evenings we passed together at the house of his
banker, Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, where music,--followed by its accustomed
sequel of supper, brandy and water, and not a little laughter,--kept us
together, usually, till rather a late hour. Besides those songs of mine
which he has himself somewhere recorded as his favourites, there was
also one to a Portuguese air, "The song of war shall echo through our
mountains," which seemed especially to please him;--the national
character of the music, and the recurrence of the words "sunny
mountains," bringing back freshly to his memory the impressions of all
he had seen in Portugal. I have, indeed, known few persons more alive to
the charms of simple music; and not unfrequently have seen the tears in
his eyes while listening to the Irish Melodies. Among those that thus
affected him was one beginning "When first I met thee warm and young,"
the words of which, besides the obvious feeling which they express, were
intended also to admit of a political application. He, however,
discarded the latter sense wholly from his mind, and gave himself up to
the more natural sentiment of the song with evident emotion.
On one or two of these evenings, his favourite actor, Mr. Kean, was of
the party; and on another occasion, we had at dinner his early
instructor in pugilism, Mr. Jackson, in conversing with whom, all his
boyish tastes seemed to revive;--and it was not a little amusing to
observe how perfectly familiar with the annals of "The Ring[60]," and
with all the most recondite phraseology of "the Fancy," was the sublime
poet of Childe Harold.
The following note is the only one, of those I received from him at this
time, worth transcribing:--
"December 14. 1814.
"My dearest Tom,
"I will send the pattern to-morrow, and since you don't go to our
friend ('of the _keeping_ part of the town') this evening, I shall
e'en sulk at home over a solitary potation. My self-opinion rises
much by your eulogy of my social qualities. As my friend Scrope is
pleased to say, I believe I am very well for a 'holiday drinker.'
Where the devil are you? With Woolridge[61], I conjecture--for
which you deserve another abscess. Hoping that the American war
will last for many years, and that all the prizes may be registered
at Bermoothes, believe me, &c.
"P.S. I have just been composing an epistle to the Archbishop for
an especial licence. Oons! it looks serious. Murray is impatient to
see you, and would call, if you will give him audience. Your new
coat!--I wonder you like the colour, and don't go about, like
Dives, in purple."
[Footnote 51: I had frequently, both in earnest and in jest, expressed
these hopes to him; and, in one of my letters, after touching upon some
matters relative to my own little domestic circle, I added, "This will
all be unintelligible to you; though I sometimes cannot help thinking it
within the range of possibility, that even _you_, volcano as you are,
may, one day, cool down into something of the same _habitable_ state.
Indeed, when one thinks of lava having been converted into buttons for
Isaac Hawkins Browne, there is no saying what such fiery things may be
brought to at last."]
[Footnote 52: Of the lamentable contrast between sentiments and conduct,
which this transfer of the seat of sensibility from the heart to the
fancy produces, the annals of literary men afford unluckily too many
examples. Alfieri, though he could write a sonnet full of tenderness to
his mother, never saw her (says Mr. W. Rose) but once after their early
separation, though he frequently passed within a few miles of her
residence. The poet Young, with all his parade of domestic sorrows, was,
it appears, a neglectful husband and harsh father; and Sterne (to use
the words employed by Lord Byron) preferred "whining over a dead ass to
relieving a living mother."]
[Footnote 53: It is the opinion of Diderot, in his Treatise on Acting,
that not only in the art of which he treats, but in all those which are
called imitative, the possession of real sensibility is a bar to
eminence;--sensibility being, according to his view, "le caractere de la
bonté de l'ame et de la médiocrité du génie."]
[Footnote 54: Pope.]
[Footnote 55: See Foscolo's Essay on Petrarch. On the same principle,
Orrery says, in speaking of Swift, "I am persuaded that his distance
from his English friends proved a strong incitement to their mutual
affection."]
[Footnote 56: That he was himself fully aware of this appears from a
passage in one of his letters already given:--"My sister is in town,
which is a great comfort; for, never having been much together, we are
naturally more attached to each other."]
[Footnote 57: Wife and children, Bacon tells us in one of his Essays,
are "impediments to great enterprises;" and adds, "Certainly, the best
works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the
unmarried or childless men." See, with reference to this subject,
chapter xviii. of Mr. D'Israeli's work on "The Literary Character."]
[Footnote 58: Milton's first wife, it is well known, ran away from him,
within a month after their marriage, disgusted, says Phillips, "with his
spare diet and hard study;" and it is difficult to conceive a more
melancholy picture of domestic life than is disclosed in his nuncupative
will, one of the witnesses to which deposes to having heard the great
poet himself complain, that his children "were careless of him, being
blind, and made nothing of deserting him."]
[Footnote 59: By whatever austerity of temper or habits the poets Dante
and Milton may have drawn upon themselves such a fate, it might be
expected that, at least, the "gentle Shakspeare" would have stood exempt
from the common calamity of his brethren. But, among the very few facts
of his life that have been transmitted to us, there is none more clearly
proved than the unhappiness of his marriage. The dates of the birth of
his children, compared with that of his removal from Stratford,--the
total omission of his wife's name in the first draft of his will, and
the bitter sarcasm of the bequest by which he remembers her
afterwards,--all prove beyond a doubt both his separation from the lady
early in life, and his unfriendly feeling towards her at the close of
it.
In endeavouring to argue against the conclusion naturally to be deduced
from this will, Boswell, with a strange ignorance of human nature,
remarks:--"If he had taken offence at any part of his wife's conduct, I
cannot believe that he would have taken this petty mode of expressing
it."]
[Footnote 60: In a small book which I have in my possession, containing
a sort of chronological History of the Ring, I find the name of Lord
Byron, more than once, recorded among the "backers."]
[Footnote 61: Dr. Woolriche, an old and valued friend of mine, to whose
skill, on the occasion here alluded to, I was indebted for my life.]
* * * * *