"Dorant's Hotel, Feb. 26. 1803.
"My dear Becher,
"Now for Apollo. I am happy that you still retain your predilection,
and that the public allow me some share of praise. I am of so much
importance, that a most violent attack is preparing for me in the next
number of the Edinburgh Review. This I had from the authority of a
friend who has seen the proof and manuscript of the critique. You know
the system of the Edinburgh gentlemen is universal attack. They praise
none; and neither the public nor the author expects praise from them.
It is, however, something to be noticed, as they profess to pass
judgment only on works requiring the public attention. You will see
this when it comes out;--it is, I understand, of the most unmerciful
description; but I am aware of it, and hope you will not be hurt by
its severity.
"Tell Mrs. Byron not to be out of humour with them, and to prepare her
mind for the greatest hostility on their part. It will do no injury
whatever, and I trust her mind will not be ruffled. They defeat their
object by indiscriminate abuse, and they never praise except the
partisans of Lord Holland and Co. It is nothing to be abused when
Southey, Moore, Lauderdale, Strangford, and Payne Knight, share the
same fate.
"I am sorry--but 'Childish Recollections' must be suppressed during
this edition. I have altered, at your suggestion, the _obnoxious
allusions_ in the sixth stanza of my last ode.
"And now, my dear Becher, I must return my best acknowledgments for
the interest you have taken in me and my poetical bantlings, and I
shall ever be proud to show how much I esteem the _advice_ and the
_adviser_.
Believe me, most truly," &c.
Soon after this letter appeared the dreaded article,--an article
which, if not "witty in itself," deserved eminently the credit of
causing "wit in others." Seldom, indeed, has it fallen to the lot of
the justest criticism to attain celebrity such as injustice has
procured for this; nor as long as the short, but glorious race of
Byron's genius is remembered, can the critic, whoever he may be, that
so unintentionally ministered to its first start, be forgotten.
It is but justice, however, to remark,--without at the same time
intending any excuse for the contemptuous tone of criticism assumed by
the reviewer,--that the early verses of Lord Byron, however
distinguished by tenderness and grace, give but little promise of
those dazzling miracles of poesy with which he afterwards astonished
and enchanted the world; and that, if his youthful verses now have a
peculiar charm in our eyes, it is because we read them, as it were, by
the light of his subsequent glory.
There is, indeed, one point of view, in which these productions are
deeply and intrinsically interesting. As faithful reflections of his
character at that period of life, they enable us to judge of what he
was in his yet unadulterated state,--before disappointment had begun
to embitter his ardent spirit, or the stirring up of the energies of
his nature had brought into activity also its defects. Tracing him
thus through these natural effusions of his young genius, we find him
pictured exactly such, in all the features of his character, as every
anecdote of his boyish days proves him really to have been, proud,
daring, and passionate,--resentful of slight or injustice, but still
more so in the cause of others than in his own; and yet, with all this
vehemence, docile and placable, at the least touch of a hand
authorised by love to guide him. The affectionateness, indeed, of his
disposition, traceable as it is through every page of this volume, is
yet but faintly done justice to, even by himself;--his whole youth
being, from earliest childhood, a series of the most passionate
attachments,--of those overflowings of the soul, both in friendship
and love, which are still more rarely responded to than felt, and
which, when checked or sent back upon the heart, are sure to turn into
bitterness. We have seen also, in some of his early unpublished poems,
how apparent, even through the doubts that already clouded them, are
those feelings of piety which a soul like his could not but possess,
and which, when afterwards diverted out of their legitimate channel,
found a vent in the poetical worship of nature, and in that shadowy
substitute for religion which superstition offers. When, in addition,
too, to these traits of early character, we find scattered through
his youthful poems such anticipations of the glory that awaited
him,--such, alternately, proud and saddened glimpses into the future,
as if he already felt the elements of something great within him, but
doubted whether his destiny would allow him to bring it forth,--it is
not wonderful that, with the whole of his career present to our
imaginations, we should see a lustre round these first puerile
attempts not really their own, but shed back upon them from the bright
eminence which he afterwards attained; and that, in our indignation
against the fastidious blindness of the critic, we should forget that
he had not then the aid of this reflected charm, with which the
subsequent achievements of the poet now irradiate all that bears his
name.
The effect this criticism produced upon him can only be conceived by
those who, besides having an adequate notion of what most poets would
feel under such an attack, can understand all that there was in the
temper and disposition of Lord Byron to make him feel it with tenfold
more acuteness than others. We have seen with what feverish anxiety he
awaited the verdicts of all the minor Reviews, and, from his
sensibility to the praise of the meanest of these censors, may guess
how painfully he must have writhed under the sneers of the highest. A
friend, who found him in the first moments of excitement after reading
the article, enquired anxiously whether he had just received a
challenge?--not knowing how else to account for the fierce defiance of
his looks. It would, indeed, be difficult for sculptor or painter to
imagine a subject of more fearful beauty than the fine countenance of
the young poet must have exhibited in the collected energy of that
crisis. His pride had been wounded to the quick, and his ambition
humbled;--but this feeling of humiliation lasted but for a moment. The
very re-action of his spirit against aggression roused him to a full
consciousness of his own powers;[90] and the pain and the shame of the
injury were forgotten in the proud certainty of revenge.
Among the less sentimental effects of this review upon his mind, he
used to mention that, on the day he read it, he drank three bottles of
claret to his own share after dinner;--that nothing, however, relieved
him till he had given vent to his indignation in rhyme, and that
"after the first twenty lines, he felt himself considerably better."
His chief care, indeed, afterwards, was amiably devoted,--as we have
seen it was, in like manner, _before_ the criticism,--to allaying,
as far as he could, the sensitiveness of his mother; who, not having
the same motive or power to summon up a spirit of resistance, was, of
course, more helplessly alive to this attack upon his fame, and felt
it far more than, after the first burst of indignation, he did
himself. But the state of his mind upon the subject will be best
understood from the following letter.