"Twelve o'clock, Friday night.
"My dear Bankes,
"I have just received your note; believe me I regret most sincerely
that I was not fortunate enough to see it before, as I need not repeat
to you that your conversation for half an hour would have been much
more agreeable to me than gambling or drinking, or any other
fashionable mode of passing an evening abroad or at home.--I really am
very sorry that I went out previous to the arrival of your despatch:
in future pray let me hear from you before six, and whatever my
engagements may be, I will always postpone them.--Believe me, with
that deference which I have always from my childhood paid to your
_talents_, and with somewhat a better opinion of your heart than I
have hitherto entertained,
"Yours ever," &c.
Among the causes--if not rather among the results--of that disposition
to melancholy, which, after all, perhaps, naturally belonged to his
temperament, must not be forgotten those sceptical views of religion,
which clouded, as has been shown, his boyish thoughts, and, at the
time of which I am speaking, gathered still more darkly over his mind.
In general we find the young too ardently occupied with the
enjoyments which this life gives or promises to afford either leisure
or inclination for much enquiry into the mysteries of the next. But
with him it was unluckily otherwise; and to have, at once, anticipated
the worst experience both of the voluptuary and the reasoner,--to have
reached, as he supposed, the boundary of this world's pleasures, and
see nothing but "clouds and darkness" beyond, was the doom, the
anomalous doom, which a nature, premature in all its passions and
powers, inflicted on Lord Byron.
When Pope, at the age of five-and-twenty, complained of being weary of
the world, he was told by Swift that he "had not yet acted or suffered
enough in the world to have become weary of it."[111] But far
different was the youth of Pope and of Byron;--what the former but
anticipated in thought, the latter had drunk deep of in reality;--at
an age when the one was but looking forth on the sea of life, the
other had plunged in, and tried its depths. Swift himself, in whom
early disappointments and wrongs had opened a vein of bitterness that
never again closed, affords a far closer parallel to the fate of our
noble poet,[112] as well in the untimeliness of the trials he had
been doomed to encounter, as in the traces of their havoc which they
left in his character.
That the romantic fancy of youth, which courts melancholy as an
indulgence, and loves to assume a sadness it has not had time to earn,
may have had some share in, at least, fostering the gloom by which the
mind of the young poet was overcast, I am not disposed to deny. The
circumstance, indeed, of his having, at this time, among the ornaments
of his study, a number of skulls highly polished, and placed on light
stands round the room, would seem to indicate that he rather courted
than shunned such gloomy associations.[113] Being a sort of boyish
mimickry, too, of the use to which the poet Young is said to have
applied a skull, such a display might well induce some suspicion of
the sincerity of his gloom, did we not, through the whole course of
his subsequent life and writings, track visibly the deep vein of
melancholy which nature had imbedded in his character.
Such was the state of mind and heart,--as, from his own testimony and
that of others, I have collected it,--in which Lord Byron now set out
on his indefinite pilgrimage; and never was there a change wrought in
disposition and character to which Shakspeare's fancy of "sweet bells
jangled out of tune" more truly applied. The unwillingness of Lord
Carlisle to countenance him, and his humiliating position in
consequence, completed the full measure of that mortification towards
which so many other causes had concurred. Baffled, as he had been, in
his own ardent pursuit of affection and friendship, his sole revenge
and consolation lay in doubting that any such feelings really existed.
The various crosses he had met with, in themselves sufficiently
irritating and wounding, were rendered still more so by the high,
impatient temper with which he encountered them. What others would
have bowed to, as misfortunes, his proud spirit rose against, as
wrongs; and the vehemence of this re-action produced, at once, a
revolution throughout his whole character,[114] in which, as in
revolutions of the political world, all that was bad and irregular in
his nature burst forth with all that was most energetic and grand. The
very virtues and excellencies of his disposition ministered to the
violence of this change. The same ardour that had burned through his
friendships and loves now fed the fierce explosions of his
indignation and scorn. His natural vivacity and humour but lent a
fresher flow to his bitterness,[115] till he, at last, revelled in it
as an indulgence; and that hatred of hypocrisy, which had hitherto
only shown itself in a too shadowy colouring of his own youthful
frailties, now hurried him, from his horror of all false pretensions
to virtue, into the still more dangerous boast and ostentation of
vice.
The following letter to his mother, written a few days before he
sailed, gives some particulars respecting the persons who composed his
suit. Robert Rushton, whom he mentions so feelingly in the postscript,
was the boy introduced, as his page, in the first Canto of Childe
Harold.