Moral Effects of local Scenery; a Peculiarity in Taste--Early Love--
Impressions and Traditions
Before I proceed to the regular narrative of the character and
adventures of Lord Byron, it seems necessary to consider the probable
effects of his residence, during his boyhood, in Scotland. It is
generally agreed, that while a schoolboy in Aberdeen, he evinced a
lively spirit, and sharpness enough to have equalled any of his
schoolfellows, had he given sufficient application. In the few
reminiscences preserved of his childhood, it is remarkable that he
appears in this period, commonly of innocence and playfulness, rarely
to have evinced any symptom of generous feeling. Silent rages, moody
sullenness, and revenge are the general characteristics of his
conduct as a boy.
He was, undoubtedly, delicately susceptible of impressions from the
beauties of nature, for he retained recollections of the scenes which
interested his childish wonder, fresh and glowing, to his latest
days; nor have there been wanting plausible theories to ascribe the
formation of his poetical character to the contemplation of those
romantic scenes. But, whoever has attended to the influential causes
of character will reject such theories as shallow, and betraying
great ignorance of human nature. Genius of every kind belongs to
some innate temperament; it does not necessarily imply a particular
bent, because that may possibly be the effect of circumstances: but,
without question, the peculiar quality is inborn, and particular to
the individual. All hear and see much alike; but there is an
undefinable though wide difference between the ear of the musician,
or the eye of the painter, compared with the hearing and seeing
organs of ordinary men; and it is in something like that difference
in which genius consists. Genius is, however, an ingredient of mind
more easily described by its effects than by its qualities. It is as
the fragrance, independent of the freshness and complexion of the
rose; as the light on the cloud; as the bloom on the cheek of beauty,
of which the possessor is unconscious until the charm has been seen
by its influence on others; it is the internal golden flame of the
opal; a something which may be abstracted from the thing in which it
appears, without changing the quality of its substance, its form, or
its affinities. I am not, therefore, disposed to consider the idle
and reckless childhood of Byron as unfavourable to the development of
his genius; but, on the contrary, inclined to think, that the
indulgence of his mother, leaving him so much to the accidents of
undisciplined impression, was calculated to cherish associations
which rendered them, in the maturity of his powers, ingredients of
spell that ruled his memory.
It is singular, and I am not aware it has been before noticed, that
with all his tender and impassioned apostrophes to beauty and love,
Byron has in no instance, not even in the freest passages of Don
Juan, associated either the one or the other with sensual images.
The extravagance of Shakespeare's Juliet, when she speaks of Romeo
being cut after his death into stars, that all the world may be in
love with night, is flame and ecstasy compared to the icy
metaphysical glitter of Byron's amorous allusions. The verses
beginning with
She walks in beauty like the light
Of eastern climes and starry skies,
are a perfect example of what I have conceived of his bodiless
admiration of beauty, and objectless enthusiasm of love. The
sentiment itself is unquestionably in the highest mood of the
intellectual sense of beauty; the simile is, however, anything but
such an image as the beauty of woman would suggest. It is only the
remembrance of some impression or imagination of the loveliness of a
twilight applied to an object that awakened the same abstract general
idea of beauty. The fancy which could conceive in its passion the
charms of a female to be like the glow of the evening, or the general
effect of the midnight stars, must have been enamoured of some
beautiful abstraction, rather than aught of flesh and blood. Poets
and lovers have compared the complexion of their mistresses to the
hues of the morning or of the evening, and their eyes to the dewdrops
and the stars; but it has no place in the feelings of man to think of
female charms in the sense of admiration which the beauties of the
morning or the evening awaken. It is to make the simile the
principal. Perhaps, however, it may be as well to defer the
criticism to which this peculiar characteristic of Byron's amatory
effusions gives rise, until we shall come to estimate his general
powers as a poet. There is upon the subject of love, no doubt, much
beautiful composition. throughout his works; but not one line in all
the thousands which shows a sexual feeling of female attraction--all
is vague and passionless, save in the delicious rhythm of the verse.
But these remarks, though premature as criticisms, are not uncalled
for here, even while we are speaking of a child not more than ten
years old. Before Byron had attained that age, he describes himself
as having felt the passion. Dante is said as early as nine years old
to have fallen in love with Beatrice; Alfieri, who was himself
precocious in the passion, considered such early sensibility to be an
unerring sign of a soul formed for the fine arts; and Canova used to
say that he was in love when but five years old. But these
instances, however, prove nothing. Calf-love, as it is called in the
country, is common; and in Italy it may arise earlier than in the
bleak and barren regions of Lochynagar. This movement of juvenile
sentiment is not, however, love--that strong masculine avidity,
which, in its highest excitement, is unrestrained, by the laws alike
of God and man. In truth, the feeling of this kind of love is the
very reverse of the irrepressible passion it is a mean shrinking,
stealthy awe, and in no one of its symptoms, at least in none of
those which Byron describes, has it the slightest resemblance to that
bold energy which has prompted men to undertake the most improbable
adventures.
He was not quite eight years old, when, according to his own account,
he formed an impassioned attachment to Mary Duff; and he gives the
following account of his recollection of her, nineteen years
afterwards.
"I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff. How very odd
that I should have been so devotedly fond of that girl, at an age
when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word
and the effect! My mother used always to rally me about this
childish amour, and at last, many years after, when I was sixteen,
she told me one day, 'O Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh,
and your old sweetheart, Mary Duff, is married to Mr C***.' And what
was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at
that moment, but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed
my mother so much, that after I grew better she generally avoided the
subject--to ME--and contented herself with telling it to all her
acquaintance." But was this agitation the effect of natural feeling,
or of something in the manner in which his mother may have told the
news? He proceeds to inquire. "Now what could this be? I had never
seen her since her mother's faux pas at Aberdeen had been the cause
of her removal to her grandmother's at Banff. We were both the
merest children. I had, and have been, attached fifty times since
that period; yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our
caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting
my mother's maid to write for me to her, which she at last did to
quiet me. Poor Nancy thought I was wild, and, as I could not write
for myself, became my secretary. I remember too our walks, and the
happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children's apartment, at their
house, not far from the Plainstones, at Aberdeen, while her lesser
sister, Helen, played with the doll, and we sat gravely making love
in our own way.
"How the deuce did all this occur so early? Where could it
originate? I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterward, and
yet my misery, my love for that girl, were so violent, that I
sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that
as it may, hearing of her marriage, several years afterward, was as a
thunderstroke. It nearly choked me, to the horror of my mother, and
the astonishment and almost incredulity of everybody; and it is a
phenomenon in my existence, for I was not eight years old, which has
puzzled and will puzzle me to the latest hour of it. And, lately, I
know not why, the RECOLLECTION (NOT the attachment) has recurred as
forcibly as ever: I wonder if she can have the least remembrance of
it or me, or remember pitying her sister Helen, for not having an
admirer too. How very pretty is the perfect image of her in my
memory. Her dark brown hair and hazel eyes, her very dress--I should
be quite grieved to see her now. The reality, however beautiful,
would destroy, or at least confuse, the features of the lovely Peri,
which then existed in her, and still lives in my imagination, at the
distance of more than sixteen years."
Such precocious and sympathetic affections are, as I have already
mentioned, common among children, and is something very different
from the love of riper years; but the extract is curious, and shows
how truly little and vague Byron's experience of the passion must
have been. In his recollection of the girl, be it observed, there is
no circumstance noticed which shows, however strong the mutual
sympathy, the slightest influence of particular attraction. He
recollects the colour of her hair, the hue of her eyes, her very
dress, and he remembers her as a Peri, a spirit; nor does it appear
that his sleepless restlessness, in which the thought of her was ever
uppermost, was produced by jealousy, or doubt, or fear, or any other
concomitant of the passion.
There is another most important circumstance in what may be called
the Aberdonian epoch of Lord Byron's life.
That Byron, in his boyhood, was possessed of lively sensibilities, is
sufficiently clear; that he enjoyed the advantage of indulging his
humour and temper without restraint, is not disputable; and that his
natural temperament made him sensible, in no ordinary degree, to the
beauties of nature, is also abundantly manifest in all his
productions; but it is surprising that this admiration of the
beauties of Nature is but an ingredient in Byron's poetry, and not
its most remarkable characteristic. Deep feelings of dissatisfaction
and disappointment are far more obvious; they constitute, indeed, the
very spirit of his works, and a spirit of such qualities is the least
of all likely to have arisen from the contemplation of magnificent
Nature, or to have been inspired by studying her storms or serenity;
for dissatisfaction and disappointment are the offspring of moral
experience, and have no natural association with the forms of
external things. The habit of associating morose sentiments with any
particular kind of scenery only shows that the sources of the
sullenness arose in similar visible circumstances. It is from these
premises I would infer, that the seeds of Byron's misanthropic
tendencies were implanted during the "silent rages" of his childhood,
and that the effect of mountain scenery, which continued so strong
upon him after he left Scotland, producing the sentiments with which
he has imbued his heroes in the wild circumstances in which he places
them, was mere reminiscence and association. For although the sullen
tone of his mind was not fully brought out until he wrote Childe
Harold, it is yet evident from his Hours of Idleness that he was
tuned to that key before he went abroad. The dark colouring of his
mind was plainly imbibed in a mountainous region, from sombre heaths,
and in the midst of rudeness and grandeur. He had no taste for more
cheerful images, and there are neither rural objects nor villagery in
the scenes he describes, but only loneness and the solemnity of
mountains.
To those who are acquainted with the Scottish character, it is
unnecessary to suggest how very probable it is that Mrs Byron and her
associates were addicted to the oral legends of the district and of
her ancestors, and that the early fancy of the poet was nourished
with the shadowy descriptions in the tales o' the olden time;--at
last this is manifest, that although Byron shows little of the
melancholy and mourning of Ossian, he was yet evidently influenced by
some strong bias and congeniality of taste to brood and cogitate on
topics of the same character as those of that bard. Moreover,
besides the probability of his imagination having been early tinged
with the sullen hue of the local traditions, it is remarkable, that
the longest of his juvenile poems is an imitation of the manner of
the Homer of Morven.
In addition to a natural temperament, kept in a state of continual
excitement, by unhappy domestic incidents, and the lurid legends of
the past, there were other causes in operation around the young poet
that could not but greatly affect the formation of his character.
Descended of a distinguished family, counting among its ancestors the
fated line of the Scottish kings, and reduced almost to extreme
poverty, it is highly probable, both from the violence of her temper,
and the pride of blood, that Mrs Byron would complain of the almost
mendicant condition to which she was reduced, especially so long as
there was reason to fear that her son was not likely to succeed to
the family estates and dignity. Of his father's lineage few
traditions were perhaps preserved, compared with those of his
mother's family; but still enough was known to impress the
imagination. Mr Moore, struck with this circumstance, has remarked,
that "in reviewing the ancestors, both near and remote, of Lord
Byron, it cannot fail to be remarked how strikingly he combined in
his own nature some of the best, and perhaps worst qualities that lie
scattered through the various characters of his predecessors." But
still it is to his mother's traditions of her ancestors that I would
ascribe the conception of the dark and guilty beings which he
delighted to describe. And though it may be contended that there was
little in her conduct to exalt poetical sentiment, still there was a
great deal in her condition calculated to affect and impel an
impassioned disposition. I can imagine few situations more likely to
produce lasting recollections of interest and affection, than that in
which Mrs Byron, with her only child, was placed in Aberdeen.
Whatever might have been the violence of her temper, or the
improprieties of her after-life, the fond and mournful caresses with
which she used to hang over her lame and helpless orphan, must have
greatly contributed to the formation of that morbid sensibility which
became the chief characteristic of his life. At the same time, if it
did contribute to fill his days with anguish and anxieties, it also
undoubtedly assisted the development of his powers; and I am
therefore disposed to conclude, that although, with respect to the
character of the man, the time he spent in Aberdeen can only be
contemplated with pity, mingled with sorrow, still it must have been
richly fraught with incidents of inconceivable value to the genius of
the poet.