Byron determines to reside abroad--Visits the Plain of Waterloo--
State of his Feelings
From different incidental expressions in his correspondence it is
sufficiently evident that Byron, before his marriage, intended to
reside abroad. In his letter to me of the 11th December, 1813, he
distinctly states this intention, and intimates that he then thought
of establishing his home in Greece. It is not therefore surprising
that, after his separation from Lady Byron, he should have determined
to carry this intention into effect; for at that period, besides the
calumny heaped upon him from all quarters, the embarrassment of his
affairs, and the retaliatory satire, all tended to force him into
exile; he had no longer any particular tie to bind him to England.
On the 25th of April, 1816, he sailed for Ostend, and resumed the
composition of Childe Harold, it may be said, from the moment of his
embarkation. In it, however, there is no longer the fiction of an
imaginary character stalking like a shadow amid his descriptions and
reflections----he comes more decidedly forwards as the hero in his
own person.
In passing to Brussels he visited the field of Waterloo, and the
slight sketch which he has given in the poem of that eventful
conflict is still the finest which has yet been written on the
subject.
But the note of his visit to the field is of more importance to my
present purpose, inasmuch as it tends to illustrate the querulous
state of his own mind at the time.
"I went on horseback twice over the field, comparing it with my
recollection of similar scenes. As a plain, Waterloo seems marked
out for the scene of some great action, though this may be mere
imagination. I have viewed with attention those of Platea, Troy,
Mantinea, Leuctra, Chaevronae, and Marathon, and the field round Mont
St Jean and Hugoumont appears to want little but a better cause and
that indefinable but impressive halo which the lapse of ages throws
around a celebrated spot, to vie in interest with any or all of
these, except perhaps the last-mentioned."
The expression "a better cause," could only have been engendered in
mere waywardness; but throughout his reflections at this period a
peevish ill-will towards England is often manifested, as if he sought
to attract attention by exasperating the national pride; that pride
which he secretly flattered himself was to be augmented by his own
fame.
I cannot, in tracing his travels through the third canto, test the
accuracy of his descriptions as in the former two; but as they are
all drawn from actual views they have the same vivid individuality
impressed upon them. Nothing can be more simple and affecting than
the following picture, nor less likely to be an imaginary scene:
By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground,
There is a small and simple pyramid,
Crowning the summit of the verdant mound;
Beneath its base are heroes' ashes hid,
Our enemies. And let not that forbid
Honour to Marceau, o'er whose early tomb
Tears, big tears, rush'd from the rough soldier's lid,
Lamenting and yet envying such a doom,
Falling for France, whose rights he battled to resume.
Perhaps few passages of descriptive poetry excel that in which
reference is made to the column of Avenches, the ancient Aventicum.
It combines with an image distinct and picturesque, poetical
associations full of the grave and moral breathings of olden forms
and hoary antiquity.
By a lone wall, a lonelier column rears
A gray and grief-worn aspect of old days:
'Tis the last remnant of the wreck of years,
And looks as with the wild-bewilder'd gaze
Of one to stone converted by amaze,
Yet still with consciousness; and there it stands,
Making a marvel that it not decays,
When the coeval pride of human hands,
Levell'd Aventicum, hath strew'd her subject lands.
But the most remarkable quality in the third canto is the deep, low
bass of thought which runs through several passages, and which gives
to it, when considered with reference to the circumstances under
which it was written, the serious character of documentary evidence
as to the remorseful condition of the poet's mind. It would be,
after what has already been pointed out in brighter incidents,
affectation not to say, that these sad bursts of feeling and wild
paroxysms, bear strong indications of having been suggested by the
wreck of his domestic happiness, and dictated by contrition for the
part he had himself taken in the ruin. The following reflections on
the unguarded hour, are full of pathos and solemnity, amounting
almost to the deep and dreadful harmony of Manfred:
To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind;
All are not fit with them to stir and toil,
Nor is it discontent to keep the mind
Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil
In the hot throng, where we become the spoil
Of our infection, till too late and long
We may deplore and struggle with the coil,
In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong
'Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong.
There, in a moment, we may plunge our years
In fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears,
And colour things to come with hues of night;
The race of life becomes a hopeless flight
To those who walk in darkness: on the sea,
The boldest steer but where their ports invite;
But there are wanderers o'er eternity,
Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor'd ne'er shall be.
These sentiments are conceived in the mood of an awed spirit; they
breathe of sorrow and penitence. Of the weariness of satiety the
pilgrim no more complains; he is no longer despondent from
exhaustion, and the lost appetite of passion, but from the weight of
a burden which he cannot lay down; and he clings to visible objects,
as if from their nature he could extract a moral strength.
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me,
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities tortures: I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Class'd among creatures, where the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.
These dim revelations of black and lowering thought are overshadowed
with a darker hue than sorrow alone could have cast. A consciousness
of sinful blame is evident amid them; and though the fantasies that
loom through the mystery, are not so hideous as the guilty reveries
in the weird caldron of Manfred's conscience, still they have an
awful resemblance to them. They are phantoms of the same murky
element, and, being more akin to fortitude than despair, prophesy not
of hereafter, but oracularly confess suffering.
Manfred himself hath given vent to no finer horror than the oracle
that speaks in this magnificent stanza:
I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bow'd
To its idolatries a patient knee--
Nor coin'd my cheek to smiles--nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo;--in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not of their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.
There are times in life when all men feel their sympathies extinct,
and Lord Byron was evidently in that condition, when he penned these
remarkable lines; but independently of their striking beauty, the
scenery in which they were conceived deserves to be considered with
reference to the sentiment that pervades them. For it was amid the
same obscure ravines, pine-tufted precipices and falling waters of
the Alps, that he afterward placed the outcast Manfred--an additional
corroboration of the justness of the remarks which I ventured to
offer, in adverting to his ruminations in contemplating, while yet a
boy, the Malvern hills, as if they were the scenes of his impassioned
childhood. In "the palaces of nature," he first felt the
consciousness of having done some wrong, and when he would infuse
into another, albeit in a wilder degree, the feelings he had himself
felt, he recalled the images which had ministered to the cogitations
of his own contrition. But I shall have occasion to speak more of
this, when I come to consider the nature of the guilt and misery of
Manfred.
That Manfred is the greatest of Byron's works will probably not be
disputed. It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the
satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in
circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous
features of his preternatural character. How then, it may be asked,
does this moral phantom, that has never been, bear any resemblance to
the poet himself? Must not, in this instance, the hypothesis which
assigns to Byron's heroes his own sentiments and feelings be
abandoned? I think not. In noticing the deep and solemn reflections
with which he was affected in ascending the Rhine, and which he has
embodied in the third canto of Childe Harold, I have already pointed
out a similarity in the tenour of the thoughts to those of Manfred,
as well as the striking acknowledgment of the "filed" mind. There
is, moreover, in the drama, the same distaste of the world which
Byron himself expressed when cogitating on the desolation of his
hearth, and the same contempt of the insufficiency of his genius and
renown to mitigate contrition--all in strange harmony with the same
magnificent objects of sight. Is not the opening soliloquy of
Manfred the very echo of the reflections on the Rhine?
My slumbers--if I slumber--are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not; in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within--and yet I live and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing man.
But the following is more impressive: it is the very phrase he would
himself have employed to have spoken of the consequences of his fatal
marriage:
My in juries came down on those who lov'd me,
On those whom I best lov'd; I never quell'd
An enemy, save in my just defence--
But my embrace was fatal.
He had not, indeed, been engaged in any duel of which the issue was
mortal; but he had been so far engaged with more than one, that he
could easily conceive what it would have been to have quelled an
enemy in just defence. But unless the reader can himself discern, by
his sympathies, that there is the resemblance I contend for, it is of
no use to multiply instances. I shall, therefore, give but one other
extract, which breathes the predominant spirit of all Byron 's works-
-that sad translation of the preacher's "vanity of vanities; all is
vanity!"
Look on me! there is an order
Of mortals on the earth, who do become
Old in their youth and die ere middle age,
Without the violence of warlike death;
Some perishing of pleasure--some of study--
Some worn with toil--some of mere weariness--
Some of disease--and some insanity--
And some of wither'd or of broken hearts;
For this last is a malady which slays
More than are number'd in the lists of Fate;
Taking all shapes, and bearing many names.
Look upon me! for even of all these things
Have I partaken--and of all these things
One were enough; then wonder not that I
Am what I am, but that I ever was,
Or, having been, that I am still on earth.