XIV. THE VIRTUES OF HIS SOUL…

XIV. THE VIRTUES OF HIS SOUL

HIS GENEROSITY A VIRTUE.

All that we have hitherto said, proves that Lord Byron's generosity has never been disputed; but the generosity usually attributed to him was an innate quality, the impulse of a good heart, naturally inclined to bestow benefits.

Certainly, to distribute among the poor our superfluities, and very often more than that, to borrow rather than suffer the unfortunate to wait for assistance; to subtract from our pleasures, and even to bear privations, the better to help all the afflicted, without distinction of opinion, age, or sex; to measure the kindness done rather by their wants, than our own resources, and to do all that, without ostentation, habitually, in secret and unknown, with God and our conscience for sole witnesses: certainly, all that is full of moral beauty; and we know on what a large scale Lord Byron practiced it all his life. We have seen him in childhood, of which we should vainly seek one more amiable and more admirable, wish to take upon himself the punishments destined for his comrades; rescue their hall from the senseless fury of his school-fellows, by showing them the dear names of their parents written on the walls; desire to expose himself to death, to save a comrade, who had two parents to regret his loss, while he himself had only one; and send his good nurse the first watch of which he became possessed,--and we know what a treasure the first watch is to a child. We have followed him later, a youth at college, at the university, and at Newstead, in his devoted passionate affections; a young man on his travels, and in the midst of the great world, and we have seen his compassion for every kind of misfortune, and his mode of assuaging them.

When we perceive, despite the ardor and mobility of his heart, where so many contrary elements combined, contradicted, jarred against, or succeeded each other, that there never was a single instant in his life when generosity did not reign supreme over every impulse and consideration, not only are we compelled to pronounce him generous, but we are likewise forced to acknowledge that generosity, with a passion for truth, divided the empire of his soul, and formed the two principal features of his character. But if his generosity had ended in only satisfying the fine tendencies of his nature, would it have acquired the right to be called virtuous? We do not think so. For generosity, to merit that sacred epithet, must express sentiments rarer and more elevated, arrive at the highest triumph of moral strength, at the greatest self-abnegation; it must succeed in overcoming appetite, in forgetting the most just resentments, in returning good for evil. Then, alone, can generosity attain that sublime degree which entitles it to be called a virtue.

Did Lord Byron's generosity reach this great moral height? Let us examine facts; they alone can answer.

If a young man lends assistance to a young and beautiful girl, without any interested motive, and with exquisite delicacy, he certainly gives proof that he possesses delicacy of soul. His merit becomes much greater if he acts thus solely to save her honor. But if the young girl, full of gratitude, falls deeply in love with her benefactor; if, unable to hide the impression produced on her heart by his presence and his generosity, she makes him understand that her gratitude would have no limits; and if he, at the age when passion is all awake, though touched by the sentiments this charming person has conceived, nevertheless shuts his senses against all temptations, does not the greatness of his soul then become admirable? Well, this was fully realized in Lord Byron. And not only in a single instance; but often during his life. For, if temptations were numerous, so were victories also. We will only quote one example, with sufficient details to make it justly appreciated.

Miss S----, who had been bred in ease, but who, with her family, had been reduced, through a series of misfortunes, to absolute want, found herself exposed to the greatest evil that can menace a portionless girl. Her mother, whose temper had been soured by reverses which had likewise quite overthrown her sense of morality, had become one of those women who consider poverty the worst of all evils. Unscrupulous as to the means of putting an end to it, she did not think it necessary to fortify her daughter's mind by good counsels. Happily the young girl had lofty sentiments and natural dignity. Secure from vulgar seduction, and guided by wholesome steady principles, she desired to depend only on her talents for gaining a livelihood, and for assisting her parents. Having written a small volume of poetry, she had already got subscriptions from persons of high position; but her great desire was to obtain Lord Byron's name.

An impulse, often recurring, induced her to apply to the young nobleman, who was then still unmarried. She only knew him through his works, and by report, which already associated with admiration for his talents a thousand calumnies concerning his moral character. The skeptical stanzas of "Childe Harold" still troubled orthodox repose; the lines on the tears of the Princess Royal irritated the Tories, and his last success with the "Corsair," added to those he had already gained, further embittered his jealous rivals. Thus calumnies made up from these different elements besieged the poet's house, so as to prevent truth concerning the man from being known. Even in her family, Miss S---- found hostility against him; for her mother, who called herself a Tory, only discovered moral delicacy when she wished to show her repugnance for the Whig party, to which Lord Byron belonged. Miss S----, in a moment of extreme anguish and pressing embarrassment, resolved upon applying to the young nobleman. He received her with respect and consideration, and soon perceived how intimidated she was by the rather bold step she had taken, and also by the cause that prompted it. Lord Byron reassured her, by treating her with peculiar kindness, as he questioned her respecting her circumstances. When she had related the sad reasons that determined her to ask him for a subscription, Lord Byron rang for his valet, and ordered a desk to be brought to him. Then, with that delicacy of heart which formed such a remarkable trait in his character, he wrote down, while still conversing, a few words, which he wrapped up in an envelope, and gave to the young lady. She soon after withdrew, thinking she had obtained the coveted subscription.

When fairly out, all she had seen and heard appeared to her like a dream. The door which had just closed behind her seemed the gate of Eden, opening on a land of exile. Nevertheless, she was to see him again. He had consented to receive her volume. Lord Byron was not for her the angel with the flaming sword, but rather an angel of gentleness, mercy, and love. Never had she seen or imagined such a combination of enchantments; never had she seen so much beauty, nor heard such a voice; never had such a sweet expressive glance met hers. "No;" she repeated to herself, "he is not a man, but some celestial being. Oh, mamma, Lord Byron is an angel!" were the first words that escaped her on returning home. The envelope was opened; and a new surprise awaited them. Together with his subscription, she found, wrapped up, fifty pounds. That sum was, indeed, a treasure for her. She fell on her knees with all her family; even her mother forgot for the moment that it was Whig money to which they owed their deliverance, and seemed almost to agree with her eldest daughter, whose enthusiasm communicated itself to the younger one, who never wearied in questioning her sister about Lord Byron's perfections, until the night was far spent.

But if the family was thus relieved, if the young girl's honor was safe, her peace of mind was gone. The contempt and dislike she already felt for several men who were hovering about her with alarming offers of protection, were now further increased by the comparison she was enabled to make between their vulgar and low, basely hypocritical or openly licentious natures, and that of the noble being she had just seen.

Thenceforth Byron's dazzling image never left her mind. It remained fixed there during the day, to reappear at night in her dreams and visions. Such a hold had it gained over her entire being, that Miss S---- seemed from that hour to live heart and soul only in the hope of seeing him again.

When she returned to take him her book, she found that she had to add to all the other charms of this superior being that respect which the wisdom of mature age seems only able to inspire. For he not only spoke to her of what might best suit her position, and disapproved some of her mother's projects, as dangerous for her honor, but even refused to go and see her as she requested; nor would he give her a letter of introduction to the Duke of Devonshire, simply, because a handsome girl could not be introduced by a young man without having her reputation compromised.

The more Miss S---- saw of Lord Byron, the more intense her passion for him became. It seemed to her that all to which heart could aspire, all of happiness that heaven could give here below, must be found in the love of such a pre-eminent being. Lord Byron soon perceived the danger of these visits. Miss S---- was beautiful, witty, and charming; Lord Byron was twenty-six years of age. How many young men, in a similar case, would not without a scruple have thought that he had only to cull this flower which seemed voluntarily to tempt him? Lord Byron never entertained such an idea. Innocent of all intentional seduction, unable to render her happy, even if he could have returned her sentiments, instead of being proud of having inspired them, he was distressed at having done so. He did not wish to prove the source of new misfortunes to this young girl, already so tried by fate, and without guide or counsellor. So he resolved to use all his efforts toward restoring her peace. It would be too long to tell the delicate mode he used to attain this end, the generous stratagems he employed to heal this poor wounded heart. He went so far as to try to appear less amiable. For the sake of destroying any hope, he assumed a cold, stern, troubled air; but on perceiving that he had only aggravated the evil, his kindliness of heart could resist no longer, and he hit on other expedients. Finally he succeeded in making her comprehend the necessity of putting an end to her visits. She left his house, having ever been treated with respect, the innocence of their mutual intercourse unstained; and the young man's sacrifice only permitted one kiss imprinted on the lovely brow of her whose strong feelings for himself he well knew.

What this victory, gained by his will and his sentiment as a man of honor over his senses and his heart, cost Lord Byron, has remained his own secret. But those who will imagine themselves in similar circumstances at the age of twenty-six, may conceive it. As to Miss S----, the excess of her emotions made her ill; and she long hung between life and death. Nevertheless, the strength of youth prevailed, and ended by giving her back physical health. But was her mind equally cured? The only light that had brightened her path had gone out, and, plunged in darkness, how did she pursue her course through life? Was her heart henceforth closed to every affection? Or did she chain it down to the fulfillment of some austere duty, that stood her in lieu of happiness? Or, as it sometimes happens to stricken hearts, did a color, a sound, a breeze, one feature in a face, call up hallucinations, give her vain longings, make her build fresh hopes and prepare for her new deceptions? Proof against all meannesses, but young and most unhappy, was she always able to resist the promptings of a warm, feeling, grateful heart? We are ignorant of all this. We only know of her, that never again in her long career did she meet united in one man that profusion of gifts, physical, intellectual, and moral, that made Lord Byron seem like a being above humanity. She tells it to us herself, in letters written at the distance that separates 1814 from 1864, lately published in French, preceding and accompanying a narrative composed in her own language, in which she has related her impressions of Lord Byron, and given the details of all that took place between her and him. It was a duty, she says, that remained for her to accomplish here below.

Her narrative and these letters are charming from their simplicity and naivete; what she says bears the stamp of plain truth, her admiration has nothing high-flown in it, and her style is never wanting in the sobriety which ought always to accompany truth, in order to make it penetrate into other minds.

We would fain transcribe these pages, that evidently flow from an elevated and sincerely grateful heart. For they reflect great honor on Lord Byron, since, in showing the strength of the impression made on the young girl, they bring out more fully all the self-denial he must have exercised in regard to her; likewise, because, in her letters, this lady, after so long an experience of life, never ceases proclaiming Lord Byron the handsomest, the most generous, and the best of men she ever knew. But though it is impossible for me to reproduce all she says, still I feel it necessary to quote some passages from her book. In the first letter addressed to Mrs. B----, she says:--

"At the moment of the separation between Lord Byron and that woman who caused the misery of his life, I was not in London; and I was so ill, that I could neither go to see him nor write as I wished. For he had shown me so much goodness and generosity that my heart was bursting with gratitude and sorrow; and never have I had any means of expressing either to him, except through my little offering.[87] Even now my heart is breaking at the thought of the injustice with which he has been treated.

"His friend Moore, to whom he had confided his memoirs, written with his own hand, had not the courage to fulfill faithfully the desire of his generous friend. Lady Blessington made a book upon him very profitable to herself, but in which she does not always paint Lord Byron en beau, and where she has related a thousand things that Lord Byron only meant in joke, and which ought not to have been either written or published. And when it is remembered that this lady (as I am assured) never saw or conversed with Lord Byron but out of doors, when she happened to meet him on horseback, and very rarely (two or three times) when he consented to dine at her house, in both of these cases, in too numerous a company for the conversation to be of an intimate nature; when it is known (as I am further assured) that Lord Byron was so much on his guard with this lady (aware of her being an authoress), that he never accepted an invitation to dine with her, unless when his friend Count Gamba did: truly, we may then conclude that these conversations were materially impossible, and must have been a clever mystification,--a composition got up on the biographies of Lord Byron that had already appeared, on Moore's works, Medwin's, Lord Byron's correspondence, and, above all, on "Don Juan." She must have made her choice, without any regard to truth or to Lord Byron's honor; rather selecting such facts, expressions, and observations as allowed her to assume the part of a moral, sensitive woman, to sermonize, by way of gaining favor with the strict set of people in high society, and to be able to bring out her own opinions on a number of things and persons, without fear of compromising herself, since she put them into Lord Byron's mouth.

"Verily these conversations can not be explained in any other way. At any rate, I confess this production of her ladyship so displeased me that I threw it aside, unable to read it without ill-humor and disgust. At that time (1814) he was not married; and I beheld in him a young man of the rarest beauty. Superior intellect shone in his countenance; his manners were at once full of simplicity and dignity; his voice was sweet, rich, and melodious. If Lord Byron had defects (and who has not?) he also possessed very great virtues, with a dignity and sincerity of character seldom to be found. The more I have known the world, the more have I rendered homage to Lord Byron's memory."

Miss S---- wrote thus to a person with whom she was not acquainted; but, encouraged by the answer she received, she dispatched a second letter, opening her heart still further, and sending some details of her intercourse with Lord Byron,--what she had seen and known of him.

"Ah! madam," she exclaims, "if you knew the happiness, the consolation I feel in writing to you, knowing that all I say of him will be well received, and that you believe all these details so creditable to him!"

In the same letter, she declares "that when he was exposed to the attacks of jealousy and a thousand calumnies spread against him, he always said, 'Do not defend me.'

"But, madam, how can we be silent when we hear such infamous things said against one so incapable of them? I have always said frankly what I thought of him, and defended him in such a way as to carry conviction into the minds of those who heard me. But a combat between one person and many is not equal, and I have several times been ill with vexation. Never mind; what I can do, I will."

She announced her intention of communicating the whole history of her acquaintance with Lord Byron.

"I am about to commence, madam, the account of my acquaintance with our great and noble poet. I shall write all concerning him in English, because I can thus make use of his own words, which are graven in my heart, as well as all the circumstances relating to him. I will give you these details, madam, in all their simplicity; but their value consists less in the words he made use of, than in the manner accompanying them, in the sweetness of his voice, his delicacy and politeness at the moment when he was granting a favor, rendering me such a great service. Oh! yes, he was really good and generous; never, in all my long years, have I seen a man worthy to be compared to him."

She wrote again on the 10th of November, 1864:--

"Here, madam, are the details I promised you about my first interview with Lord Byron. I give them to you in all their simplicity. I make no attempt at style; but simply tell unvarnished truth; for, with regard to Lord Byron, I consider truth the most important thing,--his name is the greatest ornament of the page whereon it is inscribed. I will also send you, madam, if you desire, my second and third interview with this noble, admirable man, who was so misjudged. To write this history is a great happiness for me; since I know that, in so doing, I render him that justice so often denied him by the envious and the wicked.

"His conduct toward me was always so beautiful and noble, that I would fain make it known to the whole world. I think they are beginning to render him the justice that is his due; everywhere now he is quoted--Byron said this, Byron thought that--that is what I hear continually, and many persons who formerly spoke against him, now testify in his favor.

"They say we ought not to speak evil of the dead; that is very well, but as this maxim was not observed toward Lord Byron, I also will repeat what I have heard said of his wife--I mean that the blame was hers--that her temper was so bad, her manners so harsh and disagreeable, that no one could endure her society; that she was avaricious, wicked, scolding; that people hated to wait upon her or live near her. How dared this lady to marry a man so distinguished, and then to treat him ill and tyrannically? Truly it is inconceivable. If she were charitable for the poor (as some one has pretended), she certainly wanted Christian charity. And I also am wanting in it perhaps; but, when I think of her, I lose all patience."

On announcing to Mrs. B---- the sequel of her narrative, she says:--

"It contains the history of the two days that passed after my first interview with him whom I ever found the noblest and most generous of men, whose memory lives in my heart like a brilliant star amid the dark and gloomy clouds that have often surrounded me in life; it is the single ray of sunshine illumining my remembrances of the past."

Miss S---- had not forgotten a look, a word, not even the material external part of things; and when Mrs. B---- expressed her astonishment at this lively recollection,--

"All that concerned Lord Byron," said she, "has been retained by my heart. I recall his words, gestures, looks, now, as if it had all taken place yesterday. I believe this is owing to his great and beautiful qualities, such a rare assemblage of which I never saw in any other human being.

"There was so much truth in all he said, so much simplicity in all he did, that every thing became indelibly engraven on heart and memory."

After having said that Lord Byron gave her the best counsels, and among others that of living with her mother ("not knowing," she adds, "to what it would expose me"), she continues:

"You say, madam, there is no cause for astonishment that I so admire and respect Lord Byron. In all he said, or advised, there was so much right reason, goodness and judgment far above his age, that one remained enthralled."

On sending the conclusion of her history to Mrs. B----, she says:--

"You who knew Lord Byron, will not be surprised that I loved him so much. But a woman does not pass through such a trial with impunity. On returning home, I threw myself on my knees and tried to pray, imploring Heaven for strength and patience. But the sound of his voice, his looks, pierced to my very heart, my soul felt torn asunder; I could not even weep. For two years and a half I was no longer myself. A man of high position offered me his hand. He would have placed me in the first society; but he wished for love, and I could only offer him friendship."

And, finally, when the reception of the concluding part of her narrative was acknowledged, she further added:--

"I am very glad that the history of my heart appears to you a precious document for proving the virtues of one whom I have ever looked upon as the first of men, as well for his qualities as for his genius."

Her last letter ends exactly as did her first:--"Ah! there never was but one Lord Byron!" In her narrative, which is quite as natural in style as her letters, no detail of her interviews with Lord Byron has escaped her memory.[88]

We have already seen how, in a moment of despair, the young girl, full of confidence in Lord Byron, whom she considered as one of the noblest characters that ever existed, thought she might go and ask his protection. A fashionable young man, and still unmarried, the reports current about him might well lead to the belief that his house was not quite the temple of order. She was surprised on knocking timidly at his door, on explaining to the valet-de-chambre who opened it, her great desire to speak to Lord Byron, to see Fletcher listen to her with a civil, compassionate air, that predisposed her in favor of his master.

He conducted her into a small room, where all Lord Byron's servants were assembled, and there also she was greatly surprised at the order and simplicity in the establishment of the young lord.

"I never saw servants more polite and respectful," says she. "Fletcher and the coachman remained standing, only the old house-keeper kept her seat."

Miss S---- had dried her tears when admitted into Lord Byron's presence.

"Surprise and admiration," says she, "were the first emotions I experienced on seeing him. He was only twenty-six years of age, but he looked still younger. I had been told that he was gloomy, severe, and often out of temper: I saw, on the contrary, a most attractive physiognomy, wearing a look of charming sweetness."

Miss S---- soon found cause to appreciate Lord Byron's delicacy. She began by excusing herself for having come to him, saying she had taken this step in consequence of family misfortunes. She remained standing. After some moments of silence, during which Lord Byron appeared to interrogate memory, he said:--

"Pray be seated; I will not hear another word until you are. You appear to have an independent spirit, and this step must have cost you much."

Having already partly seen the results of this interview, we refrain from giving further details here, although they are full of interest on account of the goodness, generosity, and delicacy they reveal.

Miss S---- endeavored to draw his portrait, but the pencil dropped from her hands:--

"I feel that unless I could portray his look, and repeat his words as pronounced by him, I could not even do justice to his actions."

She does it, however in a few bold touches which, on account of their truth, we have quoted in the chapter entitled Portrait of Lord Byron.

After having said that it was impossible to see finer eyes, a more beautiful expression of face, manners more graceful, hands more exquisite, or to hear such a tone of voice, she adds:--

"All that formed such an assemblage of seductive qualities, that never before or since have I remarked any man who could be compared to him. What particularly struck me was the serene, gentle dignity of his manner. Lady Blessington says, that she did not find in Lord Byron quite the dignity she had expected; but surely, then, she does not understand what dignity is? Indeed she did not understand Lord Byron at all. With me he was unaffected, amiable, and natural. The hours passed in his society I look upon as the brightest of my life, and even now I think of them with an effusion of gratitude and admiration, rather increased than diminished by time."

Lord Byron saw directly that Miss S---- had a noble nature. It must have been such; it must even have been, so to say, incorruptible, since she had been able to preserve her purity of soul and simplicity in the position to which she was, despite her surroundings and with such a mother. Lord Byron, seeing her so unprotected and ill-advised, took an interest in her, and instead of profiting by her isolation, resolved to save her. With virtue superior to his years, he opposed the best counsels to the more than imprudent projects of a mother who thought only of repairing her fortune by whatever means. Miss S----, attracted toward him with her whole heart and soul, begged her young and noble benefactor to come and see her, if it were only once a month. "I should be so happy, my lord, if you would sometimes grant me the favor of a visit, and guide my life," said she to him.

But Lord Byron had perceived the excited state of feeling in which the young girl was. Besides, he was betrothed, and did not wish to expose her and himself to the consequences. Honor and prudence alike counselled a refusal, and he refused.

"My dear child," answered he, "I can not. I will tell you my present position, and you will understand that I ought not: I am going to marry."

"At these words," said she, "my heart sunk within me, as if a piece of lead had fallen on my chest. At the same instant I experienced an acute pain in it. It seemed as if a chilly steel had pierced me. A horrible, indescribable sensation shook my whole frame. For some moments I could not possibly articulate a single word. Lord Byron looked at me with an expression full of interest, for indeed I must have changed countenance."

Lord Byron, already aware that his image was graven on this young heart, and might become dangerous to her, then understood still better the silent ravages that love must be making there. He pitied her more than ever, he felt the necessity of refusal and sacrifice, and, from that moment, all struggle between will and desire ceased.

He also refused, after some hesitation, to recommend her to the Duke of Devonshire.

"You are young and pretty," said he, "and that is sufficient to place any man, wishing to serve you, in a false position. You know how the world understands a young man's friendship and interest for a young woman. No; my name must not appear in a recommendation to the duke. Don't think me disobliging, therefore. On the contrary, I wish you to make an appeal to Devonshire, but without naming me; I have told you my reasons for refusing to be openly your advocate."

"Another time," adds she, "I ventured to express the wish of being presented to the future Lady Byron. But he again answered by a refusal. 'Though amiable and unsuspicious,' said he, 'persons about Lady Byron might put jealous suspicions, devoid of foundation, into her head.'"

Thus equally by what he refused her and what he granted her, he proved his great generosity, the elevation of his character, his virtuous abnegation and self-control.

Although Miss S---- was then in an humble and humiliating position, she had received a fine classical and intellectual education from her uncle, who was a professor at Cambridge. Her natural wit, the naivete and sincerity of her ideas, uncontaminated by worldly knowledge, were appreciated by Lord Byron. He understood her worth, despite the difficulties that made virtue of greater merit in her, and notwithstanding appearances that were against her; and he showed interest in her conversation during the different interviews she obtained from him. He talked to her of literature, the news of the day; and even had the goodness to read with indulgence and approbation the verses she had composed. One day, among others, she had the happiness of remaining with him till a late hour, and when his carriage was announced, to take him to a soiree, he had her conducted home in the same carriage.

"Oh! how delightful that evening was to me," says she. "Lord Byron's abode at the Albany recalled some collegiate dwelling, so perfectly quiet was it, though situated at the West End, the noisiest quarter of the metropolis. His conversation so varied and delightful, the purity of his English, his refined pronunciation, all offered such a contrast even with the most distinguished men I had had the good fortune to meet, that I really learned what happiness was."

These conversations afforded her the opportunity of knowing and admiring him still more. In conversing on literature, she was able to appreciate his modesty by the praises he lavished on the talents of others, and by the slight importance he attached to his own; and also his love of truth when, a propos of some book of travels she was praising, he told her that he preferred a simple but true tale of voyages to all the pomp of lies. In speaking about an adventure in high life that was then making a great noise in England, she was able to appreciate his high sentiments of delicacy and honor. When the conversation fell on religion, she had the happiness of hearing him declare he abhorred atheism and unbelief; and when his childhood was touched upon, of hearing him say that it had been pleasant and happy. Finally, when she asked his advice with regard to her future conduct, he displayed, at twenty-six years of age, the wisdom that seldom comes before the advent of gray hairs. In short, by word and by action, he manifested that nobleness of soul which always unveiled itself to pure open natures, but which closed against artificial ones; and which makes Miss S---- say at the beginning as well as at the end of her account:--"There has been but one Byron on earth: how could I not love him?"

But it is especially on account of the great love she felt for him, on going over it, reflecting, comparing the depth of feelings she had been unable to hide from him, with the conduct of this young man of twenty-six, who drew from duty alone a degree of strength superior to his age and sex, that she expressed herself thus. She can still see his looks of tenderness; she can judge what the struggle was, the combat that was going on in him as soft and stern glances chased each other; at length she sees honor gain the victory, and remain triumphant.

It is this spectacle of such great moral beauty, still before her eyes, that can be so well appreciated after the lapse of long years, and which justifies the words that begin and close her recital by divesting it of all semblance of exaggeration:--"There has been but one Byron!"

When we have known such beings, admiration and love outlive all else. And while the causes that may have led to transient emotions in a long career--an error, a fault--pass away and are forgotten like some beautiful vision, these glorious remembrances, these more than human images, tower above, living and radiant, in memory, and even come to visit us in our dreams, sometimes to reproach us with our useless and imprudent doubts, ever to sustain us amid the sadnesses of life; and if the love has been reciprocal, then to console us with the prospect of another life, in that blessed abode where we shall meet again forever.

After this long narrative, it would be useless and perhaps wearisome for the reader if we quoted many other similar facts in Lord Byron's life. They might differ in circumstances, but would all wear the same moral character.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 87: She had dedicated to him a small collection of poems, which she sent to Pisa, in 1821, with a letter, to which she received no answer.]

[Footnote 88: "All that," says she, "lives in my heart and soul, as if these things had taken place a few weeks ago, instead of so many years" (1864).]

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XV. GENEROSITY A HEROISM

PARDON, MAGNANIMITY.

It remains for us to examine Lord Byron's generosity under another form. I mean that which, after having passed by different degrees of moral beauty, may reach the highest summit of virtue, and become the greatest triumph of moral strength, because it overcomes the most just resentments, forgives, returns good for evil, and constitutes the very heroism of Christian charity.

Did Lord Byron's generosity really attain such a high degree? To convince ourselves of it, we must again examine his life.

Clemency and forgiveness showed themselves in Lord Byron at all periods of his life. In childhood, in youth, though so passionate, and so sensitive at school and at college, so soon as the first explosion was over, he was ever ready to make peace.

In the poems composed during his boyhood and early youth, he was always the first to forgive. He even forgave his wicked guardian (Lord Carlisle). Although this latter only evinced indifference, or worse, with regard to his ward, Lord Byron dedicated his first poems to him. The noble earl having further aggravated his faults by behaving in an unjustifiable manner, Lord Byron was of course greatly irritated, since he hurled some satirical lines at him. But soon after, at the intercession of friends, and especially at that of his sister, he showed himself disposed to forget the faults of his bad guardian with all the clemency inherent to his generous nature. He writes to Rogers, 27th June, 1814:--"Are there any chances or possibility of ending this, and making our peace with Carlisle? I am disposed to do all that is reasonable (or unreasonable) to arrive at it. I would even have done so sooner; but the 'Courier' newspaper, and a thousand disagreeable interpretations, have prevented me."

Afterward, he further sealed this generous pardon by those fine verses in the third canto of "Childe Harold," where he laments the death of Major Howard, Lord Carlisle's son, killed at Waterloo.[89]

He forgave Miss Chaworth; and in this case also there was great generosity. The history of this boyish love is well known. Even if the name of love should be refused to the feeling entertained by a child of fifteen for a girl of eighteen, who only looked upon him, it is said, as a boy, and liked him as a brother, not only on account of the difference of age, but also because she was already attached to the young man whom she afterward married, still it can not be denied that these first awakenings of the heart, though full of illusion, cause great suffering. For if Lord Byron was a child in years, he was already a young man in intellect, soul, imagination, and sensibility. That Miss Chaworth should raise emotion in his heart is very comprehensible, for every girl has good chances of appearing an angel to youths, whose preference invariably falls on women older than themselves. Besides, Miss Chaworth was placed in quite exceptional circumstances with regard to Lord Byron, such as were well calculated to act powerfully on the imagination of a boy, and render the dispelling of his poetic dream a most painful reality.

Miss Chaworth was heiress of the noble family whose name she bore, and her uncle had been killed in a duel by the last Lord Byron, grand-uncle of the poet. She resided with her family at Annesley, a seat two miles distant from Newstead Abbey. Their two properties touched each other; but the slight barrier separating them was marked with blood. The two children then, despite their near vicinity, only saw each other by chance, or by secretly getting over the boundary of their respective grounds. The chief obstacle to the reconciliation of the two families was the young girl's father. But when Lord Byron reached his fourteenth year, and, according to custom, came from Harrow to pass his holidays at Newstead, Mr. Chaworth was dead, and the mother of the young heiress received him at Annesley with open arms, for she did not partake her husband's feelings, but, on the contrary, looked forward with pleasure to the possibility of a union with her daughter, despite the difference of age between them. The development of their mutual sympathy was equally encouraged by the professors, governesses, and all surrounding the young lady, for they liked young Byron extremely.

From that time he had his room at Annesley, and was looked upon as one of the family. As to the young lady, she made him the companion of her amusements. In the gardens, parks, on horseback, in all excursions, he was constantly by her side. For him she played, and sang to the piano. What was her love for him? Were there not moments in which she did not look upon him only as a brother, or a child? Did she ever contemplate the possibility of becoming his wife?

Moore does not think so.

"Neither is it, indeed, probable," says he, "had even her affections been disengaged, that Lord Byron would, at this time, have been selected as the object of them. A seniority of two years gives to a girl, 'on the eve of womanhood,' an advance into life with which the boy keeps no proportionate pace. Miss Chaworth looked upon Byron as a mere schoolboy. His manners, too, were not yet formed, and his great beauty was still in its promise and not developed."

Galt is still more explicit in the same sense. Washington Irving appears to think the contrary:--

"Was this love returned?" says he. "Byron sometimes speaks as if it had been; at other times he says, on the contrary, that she never gave him reason to believe so. It is, however, probable, that at the commencement her heart experienced at least fluctuations of feeling: she was at a dangerous age. Though a child in years, Lord Byron was already a man in intelligence, a poet in imagination, and possessed of great beauty."

This opinion is the most probable. We may add that every thing must have contributed to keep up his illusion. Miss Chaworth gave him her portrait, her hair, and a ring. Mrs. Chaworth, the governess, all the family of the young heiress liked him so much, that after his death, when Washington Irving visited Annesley, he found proofs of this affection in the welcome given to, and the emotion caused even by the presence of a dog that had belonged to Lord Byron. This beautiful waking dream lasted, however, only the space of a dream in sleep.

At the expiration of his six weeks' holidays, young Byron returned to Harrow.

While he was cherishing the sacred flame with his purest energies of soul, what did she? She had forgotten him! The impression made on her heart by the schoolboy's love could not withstand the test of absence. She gave her heart to another.

"I thought myself a man," says he; "I was in earnest, she was fickle."

It was natural, however. She had arrived at the age when girls become women, and leave their childish loves behind them.

While young Byron was pursuing his studies, Miss Chaworth mixed in society. She met with a young man, named Musters, remarkable for his handsome person, and whose property lay contiguous to her own.

She had perceived him one day from her terrace, galloping toward the park followed by his hounds, the horn sounding in front, and he leading a fox hunt; she had been struck with his manly beauty and graceful carriage. From that day his image seated itself in her remembrance, and probably in her heart. It was under these favorable auspices that he made her acquaintance in society. Soon he gained her love. And when young Byron at the next vacation saw her again, she was already the willing betrothed of another.

That was still, however, a secret locked up in her heart. Her parents would not have wished this union. She had not then declared her intentions, and Lord Byron could not of course guess them. He was still welcomed at Annesley, and treated as heretofore. The young lady herself, instead of repelling him, continued to accept his attentions. This lasted until one day when Musters was bathing with Byron in a river that ran through the park he perceived a ring which he recognized as having belonged to Miss Chaworth. This discovery, and the scenes it gave rise to, obliged the lady to declare her preference.

The grief this broken illusion caused Lord Byron is shown by some of his early verses, and by the "Dream," written at Geneva, while musing how different his fate might have been if he had married Miss Chaworth, instead of Miss Milbank. It might be objected that sorrows, the proof of which rests on poetry, are not very authentic, and that it is not quite certain they really did pass through his heart. One might consider with Galt that this childish sentiment was less a real feeling of love than the phantom of an enthusiastic attachment, quite intellectual in its nature, like others that possessed such power over Lord Byron, since Miss Chaworth was not the sole object of his attention, but divided it with study and passionate friendships. One might say, with Moore, that the poetic description given by Lord Byron of this childish love, ought to serve especially to show how genius and sentiment may raise the realities of life, and give an immense lustre to the most ordinary events and objects. In short, one might think that Lord Byron perceived all the poetic advantages accruing from the remembrance of a youthful passion, at once innocent, pure, and unhappy; how it would furnish him with a magic tint to enrich his palette with an inexhaustible fund of sweet, graceful, and pathetic fancies, with delicate, lofty, and noble sentiments, and therefore that he resolved to shut it up in his heart, so as to preserve its freshness amid the withering atmosphere of the world; and in order to draw thence those exquisite images that so often shed ineffable grace and tenderness over his poems. It may, then, be said that, by maintaining alive in his mind scenes passed at Annesley, which recall the chaste, unhappy loves of Romeo and Juliet, and Lucy, he thereby satisfied an intellectual want of the poet that was quite independent of his heart as a man.

But, nevertheless, all those who can feel the heart's beatings through the veil of poetic language will understand that Lord Byron's verses on Mary Chaworth owe their origin to real grief.

Could it be otherwise? The experience resulting from reflection and comparison, which made him afterward say, that the perfections of the girl were the creation of his imagination at fifteen, because he found her in reality quite other than angelic;[90] that she was fickle, and had deceived him. This experience, I say, was wanting to the child. Thus, then, Miss Chaworth was for him at that period the beau ideal of all his young fancy could paint as best and most charming.

At the same time, this love, notwithstanding the difference of age, was not, on his side, the giddy result of too much ardor. It was composed of a thousand circumstances and feelings,--of practical, wise, and generous thoughts. A far-off prospect of happiness heightened all the noble instincts of the boy, and all the ideas of order that belonged to his fine moral nature.

To reunite two noble families,--to efface the stain of blood and hatred through love,--to revive again the ancient splendor of his ancestral halls,--all these thoughts mingled with the idea of his union with Miss Chaworth, and made his heart beat with hope. If there were excess in such hope,--if there were illusion,--the fault lies with the relatives of the young lady and herself, rather than with him. Generosity was on his side alone, because he alone had a right to feel rancor.

"She jilted me," says he in prose, and in verse we read,--

"She knew she was by him beloved,--she knew, For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart Was darken'd with her shadow, and she saw That he was wretched."

If, then, it was natural for a girl to prefer a young man of more suitable age, handsome and fashionable, to a boy whose features were yet undeveloped, and whom she treated as a child and a brother; was it quite as natural to flatter him,--load him with caresses,--with those gifts likely to foster illusion and hope,--pledges considered as love tokens? Was it natural that in order to justify certain coquetries to her affianced, she should make use of insulting expressions with regard to young Byron? But, on the other hand, would it not have been very natural for him, having heard them, to feel a little rancor against her? Surely she was guilty if she had spoken in jest, and more guilty still if she were in earnest.

And yet what was his conduct? In his poem called the "Dream," where he sings this romance of his boyhood, he tells us how he quitted Annesley, after having learned that Miss Chaworth was engaged to Mr. Musters:--

"He rose, and with a cold and gentle grasp He took her hand; a moment o'er his face A tablet of unutterable thoughts Was traced, and then it faded, as it came; He dropped the hand he held, and with slow steps Retired, but not as bidding her adieu, For they did part with mutual smiles; he pass'd From out the massy gate of that old hall, And mounting on his steed he went his way; And ne'er repass'd that hoary threshold more."

Then he jumped upon his horse, intending to gallop over the distance separating Annesley from Newstead. But when he arrived at the last hill overlooking Annesley, he stopped his horse, and cast a glance of mingled sorrow and tenderness at what he left behind,--the groves, the old house, the lovely one inhabiting there. But then the thought that she could never be his dispelled his reverie, and putting spurs to his horse he set off anew, as if rapid motion could drown reflection. However, instead of the reflections he could not succeed in drowning, he cast away all rancor.

When he alludes to her in his early poems it is always with tenderness and respect.[91] He contents himself with calling her once, deceitful girl, and another time, a false fair face.

After an interval of some years, when the boy had become a fine young man, before setting out for the East, he accepted the proffered hospitality of Annesley.

He never ceased to welcome Musters at Newstead, and, lest he should disturb the peace of Mrs. Musters, he had even concealed his agitation on kissing his rival's child. Heretofore she had only seen the boy or youth, now she beheld the young man whose genius and personal attractions lent to each other light and charm.

It was about this time that the bright star of Annesley began to pale. On her brow, formerly so gay, a veil of sadness was overspread. It seemed as if the gardens had lost their charm for her; as if the spreading foliage of Annesley had become dark for her. What caused this change? On seeing again the companion of her childhood, did she contrast her now solitary walks with those of earlier days in his beautiful park, where beside her was the youth who would fain have kissed the ground on which she trod? The sound of that hunting horn, which anon made her thrill with joy, when it announced the approach of her handsome betrothed, and awakened all the illusions of love,--had it now become to her more discordant and painful by its contrast with the harmonious voice and sweet smile of him whom she had just seen again so changed to his advantage?

It was during his travels in the East that Lord Byron heard of this mysterious melancholy. Given the circumstances, such a report would not have displeased, even if it had not pleased, vulgar, rancorous souls. But it produced quite a contrary effect on him. The feeling of his own worth, doubtless, must and ought to have brought certain ideas to his mind; but they saddened his generous nature, and he experienced a desire to drive them away by saying, "Has she not the husband of her choice, and lovely children to caress her?"

"What could her grief be?--she had all she loved. * * * * * * * What could her grief be?--she had loved him not, * * * * * * * Nor could he be a part of that which prey'd Upon her mind--a spectre of the past."

Lord Byron returned from his travels, and by degrees, as he rose in the admiration of England, the melancholy observable in Mrs. Musters deepened.

One day she felt such a longing to see again the companion of her childhood, that she asked for an interview. Could he not desire the meeting? But ought he to grant it? He had had the courage to meet her again when he thought her happy, when sorrow for the past belonged to him alone, when she appeared neither to understand nor to share it. But would his heart be equally strong--would it not yield on seeing her unhappy?[92] And yet, what could he then do for her happiness? With the same generosity that induced him always to sacrifice his pleasure to the happiness of others, he listened to his reason, his heart, and the prudent counsels of his sister; he refrained from an interview which could only augment the troubles of that devastated soul, soon to become the "queen of a fantastic kingdom" in reason's night. But he ever preserved a tender remembrance of Miss Chaworth, only forgetting the wrong she had done him.[93]

Lord Byron's conduct had been no less generous toward Mr. Musters, his triumphant rival in the affections of Miss Chaworth. Mr. Musters, though several years older than Lord Byron, was, nevertheless, among his early companions. The parents of this young man resided at their country-seat, called Colwich, a few miles distant from Newstead, and Lord Byron often accepted their hospitality. One day the two youths were bathing in the Trent (a river which runs through the grounds of Colwich), when Mr. Musters perceived a ring among Lord Byron's clothes, left on the bank. To see and take possession of it was the affair of a moment. He had recognized it as having belonged to Miss Chaworth. Lord Byron claimed it, but Musters would not restore the ring. High words were exchanged. On returning to the house, Musters jumped on a horse and galloped off to ask an explanation from Miss Chaworth, who, being forced to confess that Lord Byron wore the ring with her consent, felt obliged to make amends to Musters by promising to declare immediately her engagement with him. Proud of his success, he returned home and acquainted Lord Byron with Miss Chaworth's determination. Dinner was announced. The family sat down, and soon perceived there was something amiss between the two friends, whose gloomy silence spoke more eloquently than words. Before the end of dinner Lord Byron left the table, unable to endure the provocations of his rival.

The parents of Musters, though completely ignorant of what had caused the quarrel, were uneasy for the consequences. After dinner bitter words were again exchanged between the two young men, and Musters used such coarse, insolent language that Lord Byron could ill restrain his indignation. Anger flashing from his eyes expressed itself as warmly in words. In this frame of mind he retired to his room, and remained long shut up there, while Musters believed he was preparing to leave Colwich that very night. But the magnanimous youth, on reflection, understood that at fifteen he ought not to pretend to carry off the fair prize of seventeen from a man nine years his senior; and that it was not generous to grieve his hosts and hurt the reputation of the lady he loved. Accordingly, he suppressed his sorrow, his pride, his anger. Instead of returning to Newstead, he made his appearance as usual in the drawing-room, and to the astonishment of his rival, excused himself for having shown anger, and thus failed in politeness to his hosts. Candidly, and with regret, he acknowledged that the excess of his feelings had caused the outburst. From that day forth he gave up all pretensions to Miss Chaworth's love, and, forgiving them both with equal magnanimity, he even continued inviting his rival to Newstead. "But," said he, "now my heart would hate him if he loved her not."

On declaring to Moore, in a letter written from Pisa, that he would still forgive fresh wrongs, Lord Byron made this avowal:--"The truth is, I can not keep up resentment, however violent may be its explosion."

At all periods of his life, he remained the young man of 1814, saying that he could not go to rest with anger at his heart. In Greece, a few weeks before his glorious death, he gave another proof of it by his conduct toward Colonel Stanhope (afterward Lord Harrington). They had persuaded Lord Byron that the colonel was very jealous of his influence, and of the enthusiasm manifested for him. True or not, Lord Byron could not but believe it. The colonel arrived in Greece (sent by the London committee), for the purpose, it was said, of uniting with Lord Byron, and acting jointly in favor of Greek independence; but in reality, it would have seemed as if he came only to counteract what Byron wished. Their ideas on matters of administration and on political economy, their principles with regard to institutions and means of government, were totally opposed. Bentham was the colonel's idol and model, while Lord Byron particularly disliked the moral and social consequences flowing from Bentham's doctrines. Ever straightforward and practical, Lord Byron thought the Greeks ought to begin by gaining their independence, and that they had better be taught to read before they were made to buy books, and the liberty of the press were given them. Good and honorable, but fond of systems, the colonel always wished to begin by the end. Thence resulted long discussions between them, which produced hours of ennui for Lord Byron, and many annoyances, most prejudicial to his health, which was then very delicate. One evening, among others, the colonel grew so excited, that he told him he believed him to be a friend of the Turks. Lord Byron only answered: "Judge me by my actions." Both appeared angry; the colonel got up to leave. Lord Byron, who was the offended party, instead of bearing rancor, rose also, and, going straight to the colonel, said: "Give me your honest hand, and good-night." The night would not have passed tranquilly for Lord Byron without this reconciliation.

Among numerous proofs of this generous spirit of forgiveness,--so numerous that choice is difficult--we shall select his behavior toward a certain Mr. Scott, who, at the time of his separation, had attacked him in a savage, cruel manner,--not only unjustly, but even without any provocation.

"I beg to call particular attention," says Moore, "to the extract about to follow.

"Those who at all remember the peculiar bitterness and violence, with which Mr. Scott had assailed Lord Byron, at a crisis when both his heart and fame were most vulnerable, will, if I am not mistaken, feel a thrill of pleasurable admiration, in reading these sentences, such as they were penned by Lord Byron, for his own expressions can alone convey any adequate notion of the proud, generous pleasure that must have been felt in writing them:--

"'Poor Scott is no more! In the exercise of his vocation, he contrived, at last, to make himself the subject of a coroner's inquest. But he died like a brave man, and he lived an able one. I knew him personally, though slightly; although several years my senior, we had been school-fellows together, at the grammar-school of Aberdeen. He did not behave to me quite handsomely, in his capacity of editor, a few years ago, but he was under no obligation to behave otherwise. The moment was too tempting for many friends, and for all enemies. At a time when all my relations (save one) fell from me, like leaves from the tree in autumn winds, and my few friends became still fewer,--when the whole periodical press (I mean the daily and weekly, not the literary, press) was let loose against me, in every shape of reproach, with the two strange exceptions (from their usual opposition) of, "The Courier" and "The Examiner,"--the paper of which Scott had the direction was neither the last nor the least vituperative. Two years ago, I met him at Venice, when he was bowed in grief, by the loss of his son, and had known, by experience, the bitterness of domestic privation. He was then earnest with me to return to England, and on my telling him, with a smile, that he was once of a different opinion, he replied to me, "that he, and others, had been greatly misled; and that some pains, and rather extraordinary means, had been taken to excite them." Scott is no more, but there are more than one living who were present at this dialogue. He was a man of very considerable talents and of great acquirements. He had made his way, as a literary character, with high success, and in a few years. Poor fellow! I recollect his joy, at some appointment, which he had obtained, or was to obtain, through Sir James Mackintosh, and which prevented the further extension (unless by a rapid run to Rome) of his travels in Italy. I little thought to what it would conduct him. Peace be with him! and may all such other faults as are inevitable to humanity be as readily forgiven him as the little injury which he had done to one who respected his talents and regrets his loss.

BYRON.'"

Nor did his magnanimity stop here. After Scott's death, a subscription for his widow was got up, and Lord Byron was requested to contribute ten pounds.

"You may make my subscription for Mr. Scott's widow thirty pounds, instead of the proposed ten," answered he; "but do not put down my name. As I mentioned him in the pamphlet, it would look indelicate."

But this refined generosity was only one of the forms which Lord Byron's kindliness took. To act thus, was a necessity for this privileged nature, that could not endure to hate, and loved to pardon. Still, his generosity had not yet entered on the road of great sacrifices. It had not yet reached the highest degree of power over self. It did attain to that, when it led him to comprise in one general pardon the so-called friends who had abandoned him in his hour of sacrifice, and those bitter enemies who knew no reconciliation, when he forgave Lady Byron. Then his generosity merited the name of virtue.

Pusillanimity, which binds with an invisible chain the hearts and tongues of vulgar souls, in unreal exacting society, had carried away some; jealousy of his superiority had rendered others ferocious; and an absolute moral monstrosity--an anomaly in the history of types of female hideousness--had succeeded in showing itself in the light of magnanimity. But false as was this high quality in Lady Byron, so did it shine out in him true and admirable. The position in which Lady Byron had placed him, and where she continued to keep him by her harshness, silence, and strange refusals, was one of those which cause such suffering, that the highest degree of self-control seldom suffices to quiet the promptings of human weakness, and to cause persons of even slight sensibility to preserve moderation. Yet, with his sensibility and the knowledge of his worth, how did he act?--what did he say? I will not speak of his "Farewell," of the care he took to shield her from blame by throwing it on others, by taking much too large a share to himself, when in reality his sole fault lay in having married her; because it might be objected that, when he acted thus, he had not given up the wish of reunion.

But at Venice, and more especially at Ravenna and Pisa, this project certainly had ceased to exist; the measure of insult was filled up to overflowing. And yet, in one of those days of exasperation which letters from London never failed to produce, and precisely when he was writing pages on Lady Byron that could scarcely be complimentary, he learned that she had been taken ill. His anger and his pen both fell simultaneously, and he hastened to throw into the fire what he had written. Another time he was told that Lady Byron lived in constant dread of having Ada forcibly taken from her.

"Yes," he replied, "I might claim her in Chancery, without having recourse to any other means; but I would rather be unhappy myself than make Lady Byron so."

And he said this, well knowing how his name was kept from his daughter, like a forbidden thing; and that his picture was hidden from her sight by a curtain.

One day at Rome, while he was walking amid the ruins of the Forum, treading upon those mighty relics that, to him, breathed language and well-nigh sentiments, that seemed like some magic temple of the past, Lord Byron traced back, in thought, his own career. The meannesses of which he had been, and still was, the victim rose up to view. He allowed his thoughts to wander amid the saddest memories. All the wounds of his still bleeding heart opened afresh. The serenity of the starry sky, the silence of that solemn hour, the ideas of order, peace, and justice, which such a scene ever awakens, contrasted strangely with the material devastation around worked by time. The natural effect of a grand spectacle like this, is to render sadder still those moral ruins accumulated within by the wickedness of man.

Then did his past, so recent still, rise up before him in all its bitterness. And, taking earth and heaven to witness, he exclaimed:--

"Have I not had to wrestle with my lot? Have I not suffered things to be forgiven? Have I not had my brain sear'd, my heart riven, Hopes sapp'd, name blighted, Life's life lied away? And only not to desperation driven, Because not altogether of such clay As rots into the souls of those whom I survey.

"From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy, Have I not seen what human things could do? From the loud roar of foaming calumny To the small whisper of the as paltry few, And subtler venom of the reptile crew, The Janus glance of whose significant eye, Learning to lie with silence, would SEEM _true, And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh, Deal round to happy fools its speechless obloquy_."

His spirit stirred with excitement, he invoked the aid of the divinity whose shrine these Roman remains appeared to be:--

"O Time! the beautifier of the dead, Adorner of the ruin, comforter And only healer when the heart hath bled; Time! the corrector where our judgments err, The test of truth, love--sole philosopher, For all beside are sophists--from thy thrift, Which never loses though it doth defer-- Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift My hands, and eyes, and heart, and crave of thee a gift."

And what was this gift? Was it vengeance? No! It was the repentance of those who had done and were still doing him wrong; that was the prayer he sent up to heaven, so as not to have worn in vain this iron in his soul, and so that, when his earthly life should cease, his spirit,--

"_Like the remember'd tone of a mute lyre, Shall on their soften'd spirits sink, and move, In hearts all rocky now, the late remorse of love._"[94]

Arrived before the temple of Nemesis,--that dread divinity who has never left unpunished human injustice,--Lord Byron evokes her thus:--

"Dost thou not hear my heart?--Awake! thou shalt, and must."

He feels that the guilty will not escape the vengeance of the goddess, since it is inevitable; but, as to him, he will not wreak it. Nemesis shall watch; he will sleep. He reserves to himself, however, one revenge. Which? Ever the same:--Forgiveness!

"That curse shall be forgiveness."[95]

Now, we have seen that his generosity did not recoil from any sacrifice of fortune, repose, affection; we have seen it strong against all privations, all instincts, all interests; in short, we have looked at it under all the aspects that constitute great beauty of soul. There remains only one degree more for him to attain--heroism. But the constant exercise of generosity of soul, in inferior degrees, will give him power to reach that sublime height, and, summing up all in one, arrive at the crowning sacrifice of his life.

Already more than once, in Italy, and especially in Romagna, when that peninsula was preparing a grand struggle for independence, Lord Byron had shown himself ready to make any sacrifice, to aid in throwing off Austrian chains. But, owing to subsequent events, his extreme devotedness could not then go beyond the offer made. Two years later it was accepted; an enslaved nation, eager for redemption, asked Lord Byron's assistance toward regaining its liberty. In this sacrifice on his part, no single feature of greatness is wanting. Lord Byron would have been great, had he sacrificed himself for his country; but how much greater was he in sacrificing himself for a foreign nation, for the general cause of humanity? He would still have remained great, had he been led into this noble sacrifice by his own enthusiasm, by his illusions, by personal hopes. But no illusion, no enthusiasm, impelled him toward Greece; naught save the satisfaction caused in a noble mind by the performance of a great action. He did not even hope to escape ingratitude or to silence calumny; for, although so young, he had already acquired the experience of mature years. He knew Greece, and was well aware what he should find there, in exchange for his repose and for all dear to him in this world. We know what sadness overwhelmed his soul during the last period of his sojourn at Genoa. The struggles he had with his own heart may be imagined, when we reflect, that despite his self-control, he was more than once surprised with tears in his eyes.

When hardly out of port from Genoa, a tempest cast him back. He landed, and resolved on visiting the abode he had left with such anguish the day before. While climbing the hill of Albano, the darkest presentiments took possession of his soul. "Where shall we be this day next year?" said he to Count Gamba, who was walking by his side. Alas! we know that precisely that day next year, his mortal remains were carried through the streets of London, on their way to repose with his ancestors, near Newstead. His sorrow only increased on arriving at the palace. His friends were gone; all within that dwelling was silent, deserted, solitary. He asked to be left alone; and then shut himself up in his apartments, remaining there for several hours. What was his occupation? What were his thoughts? Through what strange agony did he pass? Who shall tell us (since he concealed it), of that last struggle between the Man and the Hero?

The sadnesses of great souls are unspeakable, almost superhuman. They are beyond the scales where we would weigh them. But we know that he understood and tasted the bitterness of this chalice,[96] without drawing back, without failing to drain it to the last.

Night came, and behold him once more on board the vessel. The tempest roared again, then ceased; but the storm within his soul did not cease. Only when a tear sometimes threatened betrayal, did he hasten to the privacy of his cabin.

We will not give here the narrative of this voyage. These pages, we again repeat, are not a biography, but the picture of a soul.

On arriving at the Ionian Islands, he soon understood that his sacrifice, though not beyond what circumstances demanded, certainly far transcended any hope that could exist of regenerating this fallen race, and constituting a nation worthy to bear the glorious name of Greece. But it mattered not: he had given his word, and he was resolved to remain in the country. He even quitted the asylum afforded by the Ionian Islands, and determined to encounter all dangers, the better to accomplish his mission.

Then he went to Missolonghi. The privations he underwent there, the moral and physical fatigue, the effluvia from the adjoining marshes, and the mode of life he was forced to lead, all combined to affect his naturally good health. He was entreated to leave this unhealthy place, and told that his life depended on it. He felt it and knew it. Already he perceived the spectre of the future, and, at the same time, the image of his beloved Italy floated before his eyes,--all that he had left, and would still find there; he represented to himself the existence he might lead there, quiet and happy, surrounded with love and respect. Still so young, handsome, rich, and almost adored, for whom could life have more value? But, if he left, what would become of Greece? His presence was worth an army to that unhappy country. So, then, he would not desert his post; he resolved to remain, come what might. "No, Tita; no, we will not return to Italy," said he sadly to his faithful Venetian follower a few days before he fell ill. He did remain, and he died.

By this action, in which he overcame himself, Lord Byron gave one of those rare examples of self-immolation, of virtue, and heroism, which, says a noble mind of our day,[97] "afford real consolation to the soul, and reflect the greatest honor on the human race."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 89:

"Their praise is hymn'd by loftier hearts than mine, Yet one I would select from that proud throng, Partly because they blend me with his line, And partly that I did his sire some wrong."]

[Footnote 90: See Medwin.]

[Footnote 91:

"In the shade of her bower, I remember the hour She rewarded those vows with a Tear.

By another possest, may she live ever blest! Her name still my heart must revere; With a sigh I resign what I once thought was mine, And forgive her deceit with a Tear."

"The Tear" (October, 1806).]

[Footnote 92: She had been obliged to separate from her husband, who returned her sacrifices by bad and even brutal treatment.]

[Footnote 93:

"Oh! she was changed As by the sickness of the soul; her mind Had wandered from its dwelling, and her eyes They had not their own lustre, but the look Which is not of the earth; she was become The queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts Were combinations of disjointed things; And forms impalpable and unperceived Of others' sight familiar were to hers. And this the world calls frenzy."]

[Footnote 94: "Childe Harold," canto iv.]

[Footnote 95: Ibid.]

[Footnote 96: See his "Life in Italy."]

[Footnote 97: M. Janet.]

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XVI. FAULTS OF LORD BYRON

After having shown the virtues Lord Byron possessed, it might seem useless to inquire whether he had not the faults whose absence they prove. Still, however, it is well to look at the subject from another point of view, and to offer, so to say, counter-proof. For, in judging him, all rules have been disregarded, not only those of justice and equity, but likewise those of logic. And, as it has been variously asserted of him, that he was constant and inconstant, firm and fickle, guided by principle, yet giving way to every impulse; that he was both chaste and profligate, a sensual man and an anchorite; calumny alone can not be accused of all these contradictions. We must then seek out conscientiously whether there were not other causes for this inconsistency, so as to return back within due bounds, and bring contradiction in accord with truth. It is, of course, beyond dispute that the first cause of the unjust verdicts passed upon him lay in the bad passions stirred up by his success, by the independent language he used, and his contempt for a thousand national prejudices. Nevertheless, as the degree of injustice dealt out toward him was quite extraordinary, it may be asked whether some real defects did not lend specious reason to his enemies, and thus we are forced to confess that he had one great fault, which did powerfully aid their wickedness; it consisted in a species of cruelty toward himself, a positive necessity of calumniating himself.

Although the origin of this fault or defect must have been principally in the greatness of his soul, it certainly had other secondary and lesser causes, and, in common with many other qualities, it was fatal to his happiness; for men accustomed to exaggerate their own virtues only too readily believed him. This mode of doing harm to and persecuting himself, of casting shadows over his brilliant destiny, was so strange and so real, that it is necessary to show to what extent he did it, by collecting some of the numerous testimonies given among those who knew him, before we bring out the real cause of his fault, as well as the effect it had on his happiness and his reputation.

In no hands could his character have been less safe than his own, nor any greater wrong offered to his memory than the substitution of what he affected to be, for what he was.

While yet a student at Cambridge, he wrote a letter to Miss Pigott, full of gayety and fun, giving as an excuse for his silence the dissipated life he was leading, and which he calls a wretched chaos of noise and drunkenness, doing nothing but hunt, drink Burgundy, play, intrigue, libertinize. Then he exclaims:--

"What misery to have nothing else to do but make love and verses, and create enemies for one's self."

But while avowing this misery, he adds that he has just written 214 pages of prose and 1200 verses.

And Moore remarks, in a note annexed to this curious letter:--

"We observe here, as in other parts of his early letters, that sort of display and boast of rakishness which is but too common a folly at this period of life, when the young aspirant to manhood persuades himself that to be profligate is to be manly. Unluckily, this boyish desire to be thought worse than he really was remained with Lord Byron, as did some other failings and foibles, long after the period when, with others, they are past and forgotten; and his mind, indeed, was but beginning to outgrow them when he was snatched away."

When Moore speaks of the letter in which Lord Byron, replying to the praise given by Mr. Dallas, says he did not merit it, and depreciates himself morally in every possible way, Moore adds:--

"Here again, however, we should recollect there must be a considerable share of allowance for the usual tendency to make the most and the worst of his own obliquities. There occurs, indeed, in his first letter to Mr. Dallas, an account of this strange ambition, the very reverse, it must be allowed, of hypocrisy--which led him to court rather than avoid the reputation of profligacy, and to put, at all times, the worst face on his own character and conduct."

Mr. Dallas, writing for the first time to Lord Byron after having read his early poems, paid him some compliments on the moral beauties and charitable sentiments contained in his verses, remarking that they recalled another noble author, who was not only a poet, an orator, and a distinguished historian, but one of the most vigorous reasoners in England on the truths of that religion of which forgiveness forms the ruling principle, viz., the good and great Lord Lyttelton. Lord Byron answered, depreciating himself in a literary sense, and calumniating himself morally, by the assertion that he resembled Lord Lyttelton's son--a bad, though talented man--rather than the great author.

Dallas had the good sense to take this appreciation for what it was worth, and asked permission to pay the young nobleman a visit. Lord Byron answered politely that he should be happy to make his acquaintance, but continued to paint himself, especially as regarded his opinions, in the most unfavorable colors. Moore gives the whole of this letter, and then adds:--

"It must be recollected, before we attach any particular importance to the details of his creed, that in addition to the temptation--never easily resisted by him--of displaying his wit, at the expense of his character, he was here addressing a person who, though, no doubt, well meaning, was evidently one of those officious self-satisfied advisers whom it was the delight of Lord Byron, at all times, to astonish and mystify.

"The tricks which, when a boy, he played upon the Nottingham quack, Lavander, were but the first of a long series, with which, through life, he amused himself, at the expense of all the numerous quacks whom his celebrity and sociability drew around him."

In the first satire he gave to the world, and which attracted sympathy for his talent as well as for the justice of his cause, the horror he entertained of hypocrisy already made him speak against himself:--

"E'en I--least thinking of a thoughtless throng, Just skill'd to know the right and choose the wrong."

After having quoted an early poem of Lord Byron, written in an hour of great depression, and which would seem, inspired by momentary madness, Moore makes the following declaration:--

"These concluding lines are of a nature, it must be owned, to awaken more of horror than of interest, were we not prepared, by so many instances of his exaggeration in this respect, not to be startled at any lengths to which the spirit of self-libelling would carry him. It seemed as if, with the power of painting fierce and gloomy personages, he had also the ambition to be himself the dark 'sublime he drew,' and that, in his fondness for the delineation of heroic crime, he endeavored to fancy, where he could not find in his own character, fit subjects for his pencil."

Moore, mentioning another article in his memoranda, where Lord Byron accuses himself of irritability of temperament in his early youth, follows up with this reflection:--

"In all his portraits of himself, the pencil he uses is so dark that the picture of his temperament and his self-attempts, covering as they do with a dark shadow the shade itself, must be taken with large allowance for exaggeration."

In another passage of his work, Moore further says:--

"To the perverse fancy he had for falsifying his own character, and even imputing to himself faults the most alien to his nature, I have already frequently adverted. I had another striking instance of it one day at La Mira."

Moore then relates that, on leaving Venice, he went to La Mira to bid Lord Byron farewell. Passing through the hall, he saw the little Allegra, who had just returned from a walk. Moore made some remark on the beauty of the child, and Byron answered, "Have you any notion--but I suppose you have--of what they call the parental feeling? For myself, I have not the least." And yet, when that child died, in a year or two afterward, he who had uttered this artificial speech was so overwhelmed by the event, that those who were about him at the time actually trembled for his reason.[98]

Colonel Stanhope, afterward Lord Harrington, who knew Lord Byron in Greece, shortly before his death, says:--

"Most men affect a virtuous character; Lord Byron's ambition, on the contrary, seemed to be to make the world believe that he was a sort of Satan, though impelled by high sentiments to accomplish great actions. Happily for his reputation, he possessed another quality that unmasked him completely: he was the most open and most sincere of men, and his nature, inclined to good, ever swayed all his actions."[99]

Mr. Finlay, who knew Lord Byron about the same time, says that not only he calumniated himself, but that he hid his best sentiments.

Speaking of the simplicity of his manners, and his repugnance for all emphasis:--

"I have always observed," continues Mr. Finlay, "that he adopted a very simple and even monotonous tone, when he had to say any thing not quite in the ordinary style of conversation. Whenever he had begun a sentence which showed that the subject interested him, and which contained sublime thought, he would check himself suddenly, and come to an end without concluding, either with a smile of indifference or in a careless tone. I thought he had adopted this mode to hide his real sentiments when he feared lest his tongue should be carried away by his heart; and often he did so evidently to hide the author or rather the poet. But in satire or clever conversation his genius took full flight."[100]

And Stanhope further adds:--

"I also have observed that Lord Byron acted in this way. He often liked to hide the noble sentiments that filled his soul, and even tried to turn them into ridicule."[101]

This was only too true. The spirit of repartee and fun often made him display his intellectual faculties at the expense of his moral nature and his truest sentiments.

Moore says that when Lord Byron went to Ravenna to see Countess G---- again, he wrote to Hoppner, who looked after his affairs, in such a light vein of pleasantry, that it would have been difficult for any one not knowing him thoroughly to conceive the possibility of his expressing himself thus, while under the influence of a passion so sincere:--

"But such is ever the wantonness of the mocking spirit, from which nothing--not even love--remains sacred; and which at last, for want of other food, turns upon self. The same horror, too, of hypocrisy that led Lord Byron to exaggerate his own errors led him also to disguise, under a seemingly heartless ridicule, all those natural and kindly qualities by which they were redeemed."

And by way of contrast with the strange lightness of his letter to Hoppner, as well as to do justice to the reality of his passion, Moore then quotes the whole of those beautiful stanzas, called "The Po," which Lord Byron wrote while crossing that river on his way from Venice to Ravenna.[102]

We might multiply quotations, in order to prove that all those who knew him have more or less remarked this phenomenon. But no one has well determined its principal cause; or else it has been too much confounded with the strange caprices he showed, especially in early youth; for subsequently, says Moore, "when he saw that the world gravely believed the opinion he had given of himself, he refused any longer to echo it."

There is certainly truth in the judgment passed by Moore and others. It can not be denied that, when as a boy, he boasted of his dissipated life at the University, the chief reason of it lay in the folly common to that period of life, which impels human beings while yet children to seek to appear like men by aping the vices of riper years. It can not be denied, either, that the pleasure of mystifying suggested his answer to Dallas; that an exaggerated horror of hypocrisy taught his pen a thousand censures of himself beginning with his first satire; that a sort of over-excitement and reaction of imagination gave him, at times, the strange ambition of appearing to be one of those dark, proud heroes he loved to paint for the sake of effect. Moreover, we must not forget that witty turn of mind which his extraordinary perception of the ridiculous, and his facility for seeing the two sides of things, often made him to display at the expense of his better nature, by seeming to mock his truest sentiments, as when he wrote to Hoppner: a psychological phenomenon, of which the cause has been more particularly sought elsewhere. Finally, we may also add that he might have believed he was disarming envy and malice by speaking against himself; and that he was to a certain extent escaping from the effects of those evil passions by throwing them something whereon to feed. Who knows whether he also did not--a little through goodness of heart, and greatly through the tactics that make good politicians complain of the unpleasantnesses attached to their greatness--ascribe to himself imaginary defects, so as to let some compassion, under the form of blame, mix with the malice that hemmed him in on all sides; and whether he did not think it well to make use of this means, as of a shield, to ward off their blows? This sort of generous artifice, which I more than once suspected in him, may serve as long as public favor lasts; but when persecution gets the upper hand,--which is the case sooner or later with all greatness and all virtues--when Envy triumphs by means of calumny, she converts into poison, benefits, virtues, gratitude. Thus, if our hypothesis be correct, Lord Byron would have been cruelly punished for his weakness in allowing that to be believed of him which was not true. Still, all we have observed can only furnish, at best, the secondary and evanescent causes of the moral phenomenon described, and those who would fain penetrate the recesses of Lord Byron's soul must search deeper for explanation. Our idea is, the first cause will be found to lie in some sentiment that reigned all powerful in his breast. I mean that he placed his ideal standard too high, and the influence it exercised over him was manifest even to his last moments.

In the severe judgments which he has pronounced upon himself in the first place, on mankind in general, and on some particular individuals, the ideal model of all the intellectual, moral, and physical beauty which he found in the depth of his own mind, shone with divine lustre before his imagination, by the union of faculties imbued with extraordinary energy.

We see, by a thousand traits, that his ideal was formed much earlier than is common with ordinary children. In his first youthful poems it already displayed itself much developed. Ever attracted toward truth, his first desire was to seek after that; and the better to do so, he searched into himself, analyzed what was passing within and without, and finally proclaimed it without any consideration for himself or others.

At Harrow we see him leaving off play to go and sit down alone and meditate on the stone now called Byron's tomb.

At Cambridge afterward, despite the dissipation he shared equally with his comrades, amid games and exercises in which he greatly excelled, we still find him courting meditation under shady trees. On returning to his home, the Abbey, when surrounded with the noise and frolic of boisterous companions, we see him devote himself to study and solitary reflection; finally, during his travels, and after his return, when all England was at his feet, we behold him still and ever experiencing that imperious want of scanning himself, of descending into the depths of his own heart, interrogating his conscience, and very often of writing down in his memorandum-books the severe sentences pronounced by that inflexible judge. And, as he could not put away from sight his divine model, he came out from these examinations humbled, dissatisfied, reproaching and punishing himself for having strayed from it. For he discovered too many terrestrial elements in all human virtues. For instance, in friendships, though so generous on his side, he found the satisfaction of a personal want, consequently, an egotistical element; the same, and much more strongly, with regard to love. He found something personal in the best instincts, in the passion for glory, in patriotism, even in the sentiment of veneration, since that is an echo of our tastes and personal sympathies. That the high standard of his ideal was the first cause of injustice toward himself, a thousand proofs might be offered. I will choose some only. We read in his memoranda:--

"It has lately been in my power to make two men happy. I am delighted at it, especially as regards the last, for he is excellent. But I wish there had been a little more sacrifice on my part, and less satisfaction for my self-love in doing that, because then there would have been more merit."

Such was this great culprit. He actually felt pleasure in doing good! Another time he was asked to present a petition to Parliament. "I am not in a humor for this business," writes he in the evening journal, where he examined his conscience. He was suffering then from grief, caused by the absence of a person he loved, and he apostrophizes himself in these terms:--"Had ---- been here she would have made me do it. There is a woman who, amid all her fascination, always urged a man to usefulness or glory. Had she remained, she had been my tutelar genius.

"Baldwin is very unfortunate; but, poor fellow, 'I can't get out; I can't get out,' said the starling. Ah! I am as bad as that dog Sterne, who preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother. Villain! hypocrite! slave! sycophant! But I am no better. Here I can not stimulate myself to a speech for the sake of these unfortunates, and three words and half a smile of----, had she been here to urge it (and urge it she infallibly would; at least, she always pressed me on in senatorial duties, and particularly in the cause of weakness), would have made me an advocate, if not an orator. Curse on Rochefoucault for being always right!"

Another time he also accused himself of selfishness, because he wrote only for amusement! He was then but twenty-three years of age:--

"To withdraw myself from myself (oh, that cursed selfishness!) has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all; and publishing is also the continuance of the same object, by the action it affords to the mind, which else recoils upon itself."

This hard opinion of man's virtue, formed by many moralists, and especially by those who see virtue only in pure disinterested benevolence, was an impulse with Lord Byron rather than the result of reason; and I much doubt whether this craving for equity and truth were ever practically combined and harmonized with the faculty of benevolence in any one else as it was with Lord Byron, for this combination evidently formed the most striking part of his character. Montaigne himself,--who, if he did not possess as much innate benevolence, had nevertheless the faculty, and even felt the want of entering into his conscience, and examining it, so as to draw forth general notions,--says, "When I examine myself conscientiously, I find that my best sort of goodness has a vicious tint."

And he fears that even Plato, in his brightest virtue, had he analyzed it well, would have found some human admixture. And then he sums up by saying, "Man is made up of bits and oddities."[103]

But these sincere philosophers are few in number, and their maxims can never be popular. For men in general experience rather the want of magnifying than of depreciating themselves, and, instead of taking their best models from an ideal, they choose them from reality, judge characters, compare themselves to other men, and, living like other people, see no guilt in themselves; while Lord Byron, living as they did, discovered in himself weaknesses, reasons for modesty, regret, repentance. If he could have done as they did, he would have been satisfied, and he would either have escaped or vanquished calumny. But he could not and would not, though conscious of the harm thence resulting to himself.

"You censure my life, Harness. When I compare myself with these men, my elders and my betters, I really begin to conceive myself a monument of prudence,--a walking statue, without feeling or failing; and yet the world in general has given me a proud pre-eminence over them in profligacy. Yet I like the men, and, God knows, ought not to condemn their aberrations; but I own I feel provoked when they dignify all this by the name of love. Romantic attachments for things marketable for a dollar!"

One of his biographers pretends that he rendered himself justice another time, and represents him as saying, speaking of M----:

"See how well he has got on in the world! He is just as little inclined to commit a bad action as incapable of doing a good one; fear keeps him from the former, and wickedness from the latter. The difference between him and me is that I attack a great many people, and truly, with one or two exceptions (and note that they are persons of my own sex), I do not hate one; while he says no harm of any one, but hates a great many, if not every body. Fancy, then, how amusing it would be to see him in the palace of Truth, when he would be thinking he was making the sweetest compliments, while all the time he would be giving vent to the accumulated spite and rancor of years, and then to see the person he had flattered so long listen to his real sentiments for the first time. Oh! that would truly be a comic sight. As to me, I should appear to great advantage in the palace of Truth, for while I should be thinking to vex friends and enemies with harsh speeches, I should be saying pretty things on the contrary; for at bottom, I have no malice or ill-nature,--at least, not of that kind which lasts more than a moment."

"Never," adds the biographer, "was a truer observation made. Lord Byron's nature is very fine, despite all the bad weeds that might have attempted to spring up in it; and I am convinced that it is the excellence of the poet, or rather the effect of such excellence, which has caused the faults of the man.

"The severity of censure lavished on the man has increased in proportion to the admiration excited by the poet, and often with the greatest injustice. The world offered up incense to the poet, while heaping ashes on the head of the man. He was indignant at such usage, and wounded pride avenged itself by painting himself in the darkest colors, as if to give a deeper hue than even his enemies had done; all the time forcing them to admiration for his genius, as boundless as was their disapprobation of his supposed character."[104]

Is this conversation real or imaginary? Doubt is allowable; but, however it may be, the reflections of the biographer in this case are too sensible and too true for us not to quote them with pleasure.

In concluding these remarks, which prove how high was the ideal type that impelled Lord Byron to be unjust to himself, I will further observe, that it was the exaggeration of his great characteristic faculties which made him fail in some little virtue (such as prudence, when it has its source solely in our personal interest). For it was only to this degree, and from this point of view, that Lord Byron lacked it. And it appears singular that his great mind should not have made him see, in this very craving after self-examination, caused by his inclination for truth; and in that extraordinary susceptibility of conscience which lead to self-reproach for egotism, only because he felt pleasure in exercising beneficence and that it did not contain enough sacrifice; it is singular, I say, that this same spirit of equity did not make him see how he shone in the only two faculties that can have no alloy of egotism, and which were very evidently the most striking qualities of his character. But he was, with regard to himself, like the torch which, lighting up distant objects, leaves those near it in obscurity. Lord Byron did not know himself; he had by no means overcome that difficulty which the oracles of Greece pronounced the greatest. Only he was sometimes conscious of it. In his memoranda, written at Ravenna, in 1821, after having said that he does not think the world judges him well, he adds:--

"I have seen myself compared, personally or poetically, in English, French, German as (interpreted to me), Italian and Portuguese, within these nine years, to Rousseau, Goethe, Young, Aretin, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, an Alabaster Vase lighted up within, Satan, Shakspeare, Bonaparte, Tiberius, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin the clown, Sternhold and Hopkins, to the Phantasmagoria, to Henry the Eighth, to Chenier, to Mirabeau, to Young, R. Dallas (the schoolboy), to Michael Angelo, to Raphael, to a petit maitre, to Diogenes, to Childe Harold, to Lara, to the Count in 'Beppo,' to Milton, to Pope, to Dryden, to Burns, to Savage, to Chatterton, to 'oft have I heard of thee, my Lord Byron,' in Shakspeare, to Churchill the poet, to Kean the actor, to Alfieri, etc., etc. The object of so many contradictory comparisons must probably be like something different from them all; but what that is is more than I know, or any body else."

But had he known himself, he would have found that he realized one of the finest types of character that humanity can offer; for his two characteristic faculties were, his attraction toward truth and benevolence. And in ceasing to calumniate himself, he would have snatched from the hands of the envious and the enemies of truth, the principal weapon they made use of to defame him.

When one reflects on all this, one questions with astonishment how it is that all his biographers should have remained outside of truth. But it is useless insisting thereupon, for we have given sufficient answer.[105]

I will, then, confine myself to remarking here that one characteristic peculiar to the biographers of great men in general, is the extreme repugnance they feel toward praising their own subjects. What is the cause? Do they fear being told they have made a panegyric, passing for flatterers, appearing to get through a task? Do they believe that, in order to show cleverness, perspicacity, and deep knowledge of the human heart, it is necessary to put in place of simple truth a sort of malice, not very intelligible, and often contradictory? All that may well be, but I believe that what they especially feel is, that if their books were only written for noble minds, possessing such qualities as only belong to the minority of the human race, they might run the risk of being less sought after and less bought. Thus they search for faults with ardor, just as miners do for diamonds; and when they think they have discovered a vice in their hero, they look upon it as the "Mogul" of their book. They make it shine, polish it up, show it in a thousand lights, bring it out as the striking part of their work,--the chief quality of their hero, who, unable to defend himself, is handed down, disfigured, to posterity. Such are the strange perils incurred, as regards truth and justice, and the wrong done toward the great departed; and this is why their surviving friends are called on to protest against the false assertions of biographers. Those who have written on Lord Byron, unable to find this great "Mogul" (for Lord Byron had no vices), have all, more or less, sought at least to draw the attention of their readers to a thousand little weaknesses, mostly devoid of reality. Upon what basis, indeed, do they rest?--Almost always on Lord Byron's words. Now we know what account should be made of his testimony when he speaks against himself. For instance, he has called himself irritable and prone to anger, and biographers have found it very convenient to paint him with his own brush. Men never fail to treat those who depreciate themselves with equal injustice. Nor is this surprising. If it be true that we are always judged on our faulty side, even though we endeavor to show the best, what must be the case if our efforts tend only to display our worst? And besides, why should others give themselves the trouble of exonerating a man from blame who depreciated himself? As it requires great discernment, great generosity, and very rare qualities, not to go beyond truth in self-esteem, biographers have not hesitated to declare Lord Byron, on his own testimony, very irritable, and even very passionate; but was he really so? This is a question to be examined.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 98: Moore's "Life," vol. iv. p. 241.]

[Footnote 99: Parry, 273.]

[Footnote 100: Letter from Finlay to Stanhope, Parry, 210.]

[Footnote 101: Parry, 210.]

[Footnote 102: Moore, 214, vol. ii. in 4to.]

[Footnote 103: Montaigne, vol. iii. p. 87.]

[Footnote 104: "Journal of Conversation," p. 195.]

[Footnote 105: See chapter on Lord Byron's biographers.]

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XVII. IRRITABILITY OF LORD BYRON

Was Lord Byron irritable? With his poetic temperament, his exquisite and almost morbid sensibility, so grievously tried by circumstances, it would be equally absurd and untrue to pretend that he was as impassible as a stoic, or phlegmatic as some good citizen who vegetates rather than lives. Did such qualities, or rather faults,--for they betoken a cold nature,--ever belong to Milton, Dante, Alfieri, and those master-spirits whose strength of passion, combined with force of intellect, have merited for them the rank of geniuses?

All more or less were, and could not fail to have been, susceptible of irritation and anger; for such susceptibility was indispensable in the peculiar constitution of their minds. But he who finds sufficient strength of will to control himself, when over-excitement is caused by some wounded feeling, does not that person approach to virtue? Did Lord Byron possess this power? Every thing, even to the testimony of his servants, his masters, his comrades, proves that he did. In childhood he showed that he knew how to conquer himself, and would use his power. He says, himself, that his anger was of a silent nature, and made him grow pale. Now, is not pale and silent anger of the kind that is overcome? We know that Lord Byron's mother, while still young, suffered so cruelly from the simultaneous loss of her fortune and a husband she adored, that her temper became changed and embittered. She gave way to violent bursts of passion, quite at variance with her excellent qualities of heart; thus she loved her son, but being very jealous of his affection, a trifle sufficed to make her launch out into reproaches and disagreeable scenes. This disposition on her part was not calculated to inspire the tenderness which her passionate fondness for him would otherwise have merited. But it was his disapprobation of such scenes that taught him to overcome in himself all outward tokens of anger, and to keep guard over his temper. Thus he opposed to the violence displayed by his poor mother a calm and silent demeanor that provoked her still more, it is true, but which proved great strength of will in him. After a violent scene that took place with her during one of his Cambridge vacations, he even determined on leaving home.

"It was very seldom," says Moore, "that he allowed himself to be so far provoked by her as to come out of his passivity."

And by what he himself declares in his memoranda, written at the age of twenty-two, we see that he did not permit any external demonstration of his temper, and that under this discipline it certainly had already improved. "It is especially when I wish to keep silence, and when I feel my cheeks and brow grow pale," says he, "that it becomes very difficult for me to control myself; but the presence of a woman, though not of all women, suffices to calm me."

To proceed with justice in any psychological study, we should never lose sight of the particular circumstances of the subject under treatment. Now, the circumstances amid which Lord Byron's moral and social life first began to unfold itself were very irritating.

While yet a boy we see his heart expand to love, to tenderness, excited by the way in which the young lady received his attentions, by the gift she made him of her portrait, by meetings, by the encouragement her parents afforded; for, notwithstanding the disproportion of age, they looked favorably on a union that was equal with regard to fortune and position. And while he was thus beguiled, this girl--whom he considered an angel--deemed the timid youth too childish, and entered into a union with a man of fashion.

On the eve of a long farewell to England, a friend whom he loved with all the devotedness that belonged to a heart like his, showed the utmost indifference at his departure. Having attained his majority, he ought to have taken his seat in the House of Peers; but his noble guardian, Lord Carlisle, whom he had always treated with respect, and to whom he had lately shown the attention of dedicating his early poems to him, behaved toward him in an unjustifiable manner. Not only did he refuse to present him to the House of Lords, but he even delayed sending the documents necessary for his admission, because forsooth the noble earl did not like his ward's mother! Lord Byron had published a charming collection of poems that won for him equal applause and sympathy; but an all-powerful Review sought to humiliate him and crush his talent in the bud by bringing out a brutal and stupid article against him. Nor was this all; he had likewise the annoyance of money embarrassments inherited from his predecessors in the estate. Leaving England under the sting of all these insults from men and fate, which a phlegmatic temper could alone have borne with patience, would it have been astonishing if his young heart had felt irritation? But could it have existed without being perceived by those who lived with him? Yet they say nothing about it. His fellow-traveller was a friend and comrade of old,--Lord Broughton, then the Hon. Mr. Hobhouse. If Lord Byron had been of an irritable, violent temper, who more than his daily companion would have perceived it, and suffered from it in that constant intercourse which tries the gentlest natures? Mr. Hobhouse had lived with Lord Byron at Cambridge, was one of his inseparable companions of Newstead, and was a member of the confraternity of the chapter. Thus he knew him well, and if Lord Byron's temper had been unamiable, would he have undertaken such a long journey with him? Lord Byron did not then possess even the prestige of celerity to render him desirable as a fellow-traveller. Well, on returning from this journey, Mr. Hobhouse was more attached than ever to Lord Byron, and, speaking of his qualities, expressed himself thus:--"To perspicacity of observation and ingenious remarks, Lord Byron united that gayety and good-humor which keeps attention alive under the pressure of fatigue, smoothing all difficulties and dangers."

Journeys taken together test tempers so much, that a good understanding which has withstood the trial of twenty years, is often compromised in a journey of twenty-four hours. Thus to choose again for our travelling companions those with whom we have already long journeyed, is the best testimony that can be rendered to their amiable disposition. Well, this testimony was given by Mr. Hobhouse; and while proving Lord Byron's excellent temper, it also proves the high character of Mr. Hobhouse. For we must not forget that malice and stupidity were inflicting a real persecution on Lord Byron at the very moment when Mr. Hobhouse hastened to rejoin him at Geneva, so as to travel again in company with his noble friend. They accomplished together an excursion into the Alps, and afterward crossed over them to visit Italy. On arriving at Venice, the two friends separated for several months; but in the spring they met again to visit together Rome and Florence. It was beside Mr. Hobhouse, while scaling the Alps, that the plan of "Manfred" was conceived; and it was on the road from Venice to Rome that the fourth canto of "Childe Harold" was written: it is dedicated to Mr. Hobhouse, and he it was who made the volume of notes, which forms, even independently of the text, a work so well appreciated in England.

Having gathered from Lord Byron's first journey proofs of his good natural disposition, and of the control he exercised over himself, I shall also draw others from his last: that journey from Cephalonia to Missolonghi which proved so fatal, and which alone, from all Lord Byron did, said, and wrote during the time it lasted, would suffice to reveal his fine character, and almost every one of his virtues.

It is well known, that during this journey he underwent still greater annoyances than in the one from Genoa to Cephalonia, which had already tried him so much. On seeing both destiny and the elements so pertinaciously combine against its success, one might really be tempted to embrace superstitious ideas, and see therein the efforts of his good genius raising up all sorts of obstacles in order to save him, and keep him from that fatal shore. I have already given the description of this journey so full of dramatic incidents; and I have related Lord Byron's admirable conduct throughout, in the passages where proofs are adduced of his courage in danger, of his extraordinary coolness and extreme generosity. But that is not enough; we must also examine him with regard to amiability of temper and the self-control he was able to exercise.

We have seen him, when pressed on all sides to quit the Ionian Islands for the continent of Greece, yield to these entreaties, although it was the most severe season of the year (28th December), and, notwithstanding a stormy sea, set out for Missolonghi.

He refused the honor of an escort of Greek vessels, hiring instead a Cephalonian Mistico, and a heavy Bombarda that waited for him at St. Euphemia. But on arriving near the harbor, he was driven back by contrary winds. Forced to remain on shore and wait, what sort of humor did he display under these annoyances? Mr. Kennedy, who went to wish him a pleasant journey, shall tell us.

"I found him," says he, "quietly reading 'Quentin Durward,' and, as usual, in high spirits."

Meanwhile, the sea grew calm. They set sail, and embarked; Lord Byron on the little Mistico, with his doctor, two or three servants, and his dogs; Count Gamba on the Bombarda, with the arms, horses, followers, baggage, papers, money, etc. On arriving at Zante, persons came to offer Lord Byron means of amusement, various comforts, etc. To accept might have been very pleasant for him; but he knew that he was wanted at Missolonghi; and not an hour would he lose after having transacted business with his bankers. He believed (for it had been announced) that Greek vessels were coming to meet him; nor did he doubt that the Turkish fleet was still anchored at Lepanto. Sea and wind were favorable, the sky serene, fortune for once seemed to smile; but it was only the better to deceive him. The Turks had been informed of his departure; and hoped to make an easy prey of him and his riches. They left the waters of Lepanto, and heading their course toward Patras, set off in pursuit of Lord Byron and his suite.

At the close of a few hours, the Mistico, which was a good sailer, lost sight of the Bombarda, of slower motion. They halted opposite the Scrophes (rocks in Roumelia), to wait for it; and meanwhile Lord Byron saw a large vessel bearing down upon him. Could it be the Greek vessel sent to meet him? The Mistico fired a pistol at its approach, but the vessel did not answer fire. Was it the enemy, then? On hearing the cries of the sailors on board, the captain could no longer doubt it: it was an Ottoman frigate, calling on them to surrender. Their sole hope of safety lay in the swiftness of their sails. Under cover of the darkness, which left the Turks in fear lest the Mistico should be a fire-ship, and aided by the almost miraculous silence that reigned,--for even the dogs, that had been barking all night, now held their peace,--the Mistico sped onward rapidly. At dawn of day it had arrived opposite the coast, but, owing to a contrary wind, was unable to get into port. At the same moment, another Turkish vessel, on the watch, closed the passage toward the Gulf. An Ionian boat perceived the danger, and made signals from the shore for the Mistico not to approach. They then succeeded, all sails set, in throwing themselves between the rocks of Roumelia, called Scrophes, where the Turkish vessel could not penetrate. It was amid these rocks, where he hardly remained an hour, that Lord Byron wrote Colonel Stanhope a letter, truly admirable for its generosity, patience, courage, coolness, and good temper; a letter which it would seem impossible to pen under such circumstances, and which makes Count Gamba say, when he quotes it in his work entitled "Last Voyage of Lord Byron in Greece:"--

"Such was Lord Byron's style in the midst of great dangers. There was always immense gayety in him, under circumstances that render other men serious and full of care. This disposition of mind gave him an air of frankness and sincerity, quite irresistible, even with persons previously less well disposed toward him."

Having hardly, and as if by a miracle, escaped from this danger, and being exposed every instant to assault from the Turks, having seen the Bombarda captured by the Ottoman frigate, did he complain of any thing personal to himself? No. His sole anxiety was for Count Gamba; his uneasiness was the danger to which the Greeks with him were exposed. As to his money losses--"Never mind," said he,"don't think about it, we have some left. But we have no arms, except two carbines and some pistols; and if our friends, the Turks, took a fancy to send their vessels to attack us, I greatly fear that we should only be four on board to defend ourselves."

Not being able to know that the unexpected apparition of the Turkish fleet had put out all their calculations, and prevented the Greek government from collecting the vessels sent from Missolonghi to meet him; not knowing that Missolonghi, in great consternation, on learning the danger to which he was exposed, was about to send other vessels in quest of him, other vessels that would no longer find him near the Scrophes rocks, he necessarily believed that nothing had been done to keep the promises made him. Under such a persuasion, would not some few harsh words have been most natural? And yet this is the language Lord Byron used:--

"But where has it gone to; the fleet that lets us advance without giving the least sign of any Moslems in these latitudes? Present my respects to Mavrocordato, and tell him I am here at his disposal. I am ill at ease here (among the rocks), not so much for myself, as for the Greek child with me; for you know what his destiny would be! We are all in good health."

The Mistico had hardly been an hour among these rocks, Lord Byron's letter to Colonel Stanhope was hardly finished, when the Turkish vessel on the lookout made toward them to give chase; and they were obliged to fly without delay. Issuing from the rocks, they directed their course, full sail, toward a little port of Acarnania, called Dragomestri, where they arrived before night.

Lord Byron wished to continue his route by land; but it was impossible. The mountains did not afford him better hospitality than the sea. It was the 1st of January; his sole resting-place was the damp deck of the Mistico. There he slept, there he eat the coarse sailors' food; and his fingers were so cramped with cold, that he could scarcely write. If he had complained a little of his hard fate, could one be much astonished? Yet these are the terms in which he wrote to his two correspondents at Cephalonia.--It was the month of January; he wished every one a happy new year; apparently forgetting only himself. He then entered into some details about his "Odyssey" with so much calmness, that nothing seemed to touch him personally; but his heart protested meanwhile, and he could not help showing uneasiness about the fate of his friend Count Gamba, although persuaded that his detention was only temporary:--

"I regret the detention of Gamba, etc., but the rest we can make up again, so tell Hancock to set my bills into cash as soon as possible, and Corgialegno to prepare the remainder of my credit with Messrs. Webb to be turned into money. We are here for the fifth day without taking our clothes off, and sleeping on deck in all weathers, but are all very well and in good spirits. I shall remain here, unless something extraordinary occurs, till Mavrocordato sends, and then go on, and act according to circumstances. My respects to the two colonels, and remembrances to all friends. Tell Ultima Analise[106] that his friend Raids did not make his appearance with the brig, though I think that he might as well have spoken with us in or off Zante, to give us a gentle hint of what we had to expect. Excuse my scrawl, on account of the pen and the frosty morning at daybreak.

BYRON."

He writes at the same time to Hancock:--

"Here we are--the Bombarda taken--or at least missing, with all the Committee stores, my friend Gamba, the horses, negro, bull-dog, steward, and domestics, with all our implements of peace and war--also 8000 dollars; but whether she will be a lawful prize or no, is for the decision of the governor of the Seven Islands. We are in good condition, considering wind and weather, being hunted by the Turks, and the difficulty of sleeping on deck; we are in tolerable seasoning for the country and circumstances. But I foresee that we shall have occasion for all the cash I can muster at Zante and elsewhere. Tell our friends to keep up their spirits--and we may yet do well. I hope that Gamba's detention will only be temporary. As for the effects and money, if we have them, well; if otherwise, patience! I disembarked the boy and another Greek, who were in most terrible alarm. As for me and mine, we must stick to our goods. I wish you a happy new year; and all our friends the same. Yours,

BYRON."

Would an impatient, irritable temper have acted thus, and preserved such serenity amid so many annoyances, privations, and sufferings, of which one alone might suffice to make a stoic bitter?

But this was not yet all. After six days of this life, hopeless of being able to continue by land, and getting no answer from Missolonghi (from whence, nevertheless, several gun-boats had been dispatched to meet him, and also the brig "Leonidas," which he only fell in with near the Scrophes), he resolved on setting out. But the wind, which had never ceased being contrary, soon changed into a furious tempest. Then Byron was truly sublime. His bark was thrown against enormous rocks; the affrighted sailors, seeing their lives in danger, and excited by fear, abandoned the vessel to seek refuge on the rocks. But he remained there, on board the vessel, which every one saw was sinking.[107]

Encouraged by such an example, the sailors let go their hold on the rocks to try and free the vessel, which they succeeded in setting afloat again; but it was only for it to be forced back a second time by the angry waves. Then despair seized on them all; they trembled for the general safety, and for the illustrious personage on board. He alone showed no emotion; but calmly said to his doctor, who, in great alarm, was about to swim for the shore: "Do not leave the vessel while we have sufficient strength to guide her; only when the water covers us entirely, then throw yourself into the sea, and I will undertake to save you."

And in the midst of those dangers he not only appeared calm, but his gay, playful humor, and his habit of observing the different aspects of every thing, did not abandon him. After having soothed and consoled those around him, he likewise found means of amusement in the strong traits of individuality which fear brought to light among his followers. The sailors who had remained on board, seeing the danger become so imminent, were about to betake themselves, like the rest, to the rocks; but encouraged by Lord Byron's words and example, they remained at their post, and succeeded in bringing the vessel between two little islands, where they cast anchor. Thus Lord Byron, by his courage, firmness, and his great experience in the art of navigation, overcame this great peril, saving several lives, together with the money and other means of assistance he was conveying to Greece! The sailors esteemed themselves happy to be able to cast anchor between these islands, or rather these rocks, in order to pass the night; but even what appeared fortunate, was destined to turn out the reverse in this fatal journey.

If Lord Byron did not complain of the privation and ennui he experienced, he did not, therefore, feel them less. After so many nights passed on the damp and dirty deck of his Mistico, he could not resist the desire of refreshing himself, and seeking amid the waves that cleanliness which was an imperative want for his refined nature. And so, without reflecting on the rigor of the season (it was the month of January), he plunged into the troubled sea, and swam there for half an hour. Imprudence no less fatal to him than to Alexander.[108] For it was then, undoubtedly, that he contracted the seeds of the malady which showed itself soon after, and under which he succumbed. At last he arrived at Missolonghi, without having ceased for one instant to be threatened by the sea. He was expected there as if he had been the Messiah, says Stanhope; and the consternation caused by the dangers he had gone through, gave place, on his arrival, to the most lively joy. Lord Byron met with a reception worthy of himself.[109] But this enthusiastic joy, which found expression in songs as well as tears, subjected his patience and good-nature to another sort of trial.

"After eight days of such fatigue," says Count Gamba, "he had scarcely time to refresh himself, and converse with Mavrocordato, and his friends and countrymen, before he was assailed by the tumultuous visits of the primates and chiefs. These latter, not content with coming all together, each had a suite of twenty or thirty, and not unfrequently, fifty soldiers! It was difficult to make them understand that he had fixed certain hours to receive them. Their visits began at seven in the morning, and the greater part of them were without any object." This is one of the most insupportable annoyances to which a man of influence and consideration is exposed in the East.

"I saw Lord Byron bear all this with the greatest patience."

Could an irritable temper have done so? For my part, I think that this journey alone, borne, as we have seen, by his letters and the unanimous testimony of his companions, with such perfect good-humor, that he could jest, be quite resigned to unavoidable evils, show indulgence to the faults of others, however great the sufferings entailed thereby on himself; and display great self-denial, strength of mind, and imperturbable serenity, amid frightful dangers; all these qualities, I say, paint the moral nature of the man better than all analyses and commentaries.

But alas! while displaying his virtues, this journey also brings out his faults: since, prudent in behalf of others, he was not at all so for himself; and his want of prudence planted in him the germs of the disease which was so soon to be fatally developed in that stifling atmosphere of Greece, then full of tumult and confusion. If the limits of this chapter allowed, we could multiply proofs of his naturally amiable disposition at all periods of his life; and we would show what he was in Switzerland, at Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, Genoa, and in Greece, up to his last hour, as he has been described by Shelley, Hoppner, M. de G----, Medwin, Lady B----, and so many others. But to those who have said he was irritable because, feeling himself susceptible of irritation and anger, he declared himself to be so, I will content myself with answering simply by a few lines borrowed from the truthful conversations of Mr. Kennedy:--

"Even during his last days on earth, he calumniated himself. For instance, he told me, that at a certain hour, every evening, he had intolerable fits of ill-humor. Well, Mr. Finlay and M---- always went to see him precisely at that fatal hour, and they invariably found him gay, pleasant, and amiable, as usual."

Mr. Finlay, a young English officer of merit and high intelligence, whom Lord Byron thought very like Shelley, which, perhaps, increased his sympathy for him, and who only knew him two months before his death, says, in a letter written on Lord Byron to Colonel Stanhope:--

"What astonished me most was the indifference with which Lord Byron spoke to us of all the lying reports his enemies spread against him. He gave his vindication and explanation with as much calm frankness as if it had concerned another person."

And he declares his astonishment at seeing him submit to the lessons of morality, and the censures on his opinions and principles which Kennedy, in his extreme orthodoxy, made him undergo.[110]

I will also add, that Lord Byron was often heard to say that he had been in a frightful rage with his servants; but, if they were questioned, they knew nothing at all about it. It is known, moreover, that his toleration and gentleness with them almost exceeded due bounds, and that, even when he had serious cause for chiding them, his severest reprimands were conveyed in jests and pleasantries.

Persons who will not change their convictions, go so far as to say,--"Well, be it so. We admit that he may have been calumniated in his private life, and that his strange fancy of speaking against himself may have contributed toward it. But how do you explain the anger expressed by his pen? Do you forget his misanthropical invectives, his personal attacks, his 'Avatar,' his epigrams?"

And I answer them:--"Do you forget that there are different kinds of anger? some that can never be vicious, and others that can never be virtuous? The anger expressed by his pen--the sole kind that was real with him--requires to be explained, not excused or forgotten."

"Let us beware," says a great contemporary philosopher, "of him who is never irritated, and can not understand the existence of a noble anger."[111]

Be so good as to examine, without preconceived opinions, and without prejudice, the nature of every kind of anger he displayed; see if any were personal, egotistical, or whether they did not rather spring from some noble cause; whether they were not rather the generous explosions of a soul burning with indignation at evil and injustice, because it ever held in view the contrast afforded by an ideal of its own that was only too perfect?

It is impossible, for instance, not to see that his pen was guided by one of these generous impulses when he spoke of Lord Castlereagh. He had no personal, malevolent, interested antipathy toward this gay and fashionable nobleman. His pen was inspired simply by his conscience, that revolted at sight of the evils which he attributed to Lord Castlereagh's policy. It was not the colleague, but the minister, that he wished to stigmatize together with his policy, which appeared to Lord Byron inhuman, selfish, and unjust. It was this same policy that caused Pitt to say:--

"If we were just for one hour, we should not live a day." And again:--"Perish every principle rather than England!"

What other statesman did Lord Byron attack except Castlereagh? But him he did detest with a noble hatred.

"By what right do you attack Lord C----?" he was asked.

"By the right," he replied, "that every honest man has to denounce the minister who ruins his country, and treads under foot every sentiment of equity and humanity."

A few days before setting out on his last journey to Greece, he said to an English lady passing through Genoa:--

"With regard to Lord Castlereagh personally, whom you hear that I have attacked, I can only say that a bad minister's memory is as much an object of investigation as his conduct while alive. He is a matter of history; and wherever I find a tyrant or a villain, I will mark him. I attacked him no more than I had the right to do, and than was necessary.

"Do not defend me, you will only make yourself enemies--mine are neither to be diminished nor softened."

When Lord Byron wrote about Lord Castlereagh, imagination beheld in him the author of all the evils inflicted on Ireland, the man who through a selfish feeling of nationality, dangerous even to England, had riveted the chains of all Europe.

"If he spoke and wrote thus of Lord Castlereagh," says Kennedy himself, "the reason was that he really thought him an enemy to the true interests of his country; and this sentiment, carried perhaps to excess, made him consider it just to condemn him to the execration of humanity."[112]

What I have said with regard to his attacks on Lord Castlereagh, may equally apply to all the satire hurled against other individuals, against governments and nations. His benevolence was so great and universal, that it rendered the idea of the sufferings endured by humanity quite intolerable to him. His love of justice likewise was so great, that he became thoroughly indignant at seeing what he worshiped trampled under foot by individual or national selfishness, while deceit and injustice were reigning triumphant. Lord Byron conceived a sort of hatred and dislike for the wicked, and those who voluntarily prevented the well-being of men. And when thus indignant at some injustice, if he snatched up a pen, he could not help expressing himself with a certain kind of violence, in order to chastise, if he could not change, the guilty men who martyrized Ireland, crushed and degraded Italy, and condemned England to the hatred of the whole world. The sparkling, witty strain, mocking at all human things, which had served as a weapon for his reason while asserting the interests of truth and injustice in Italy, and protesting against folly and evil, no longer sufficed him then. He required to brand with fire the limit where folly stops and crime begins. Thus it was not mocking, joking satire he would inflict on these great culprits; but burning words to mark the limits where this should stop, and stigmatize them by condemning moral deformity. This is what he did, and wished to do, with regard to Castlereagh, and also with regard to the Austrians in Italy. Shall it be said that his language was occasionally too violent; that the punishment went beyond the crime? But, in the first place, condemnation was pronounced in the language of poetry; and then, does not appreciation of the measure kept depend solely on the point of view taken by reason and conscience when they sat in judgment?

Shall it be said that the moral sense of these invectives was not always brought forward with all the clearness desirable? But let them be examined attentively, and then the fine sentiments to which they owe their origin will be understood.

Let us read "Avatar," for instance,--"Avatar," teeming with noble anger,--and say if any poetry exists emitting flame and light purer, and more intense in its moral life, more efficacious for keeping within the boundaries of that humane just policy from which Lord Byron never swerved.

If, in the war he waged against evil and its perpetrators, he did not outstep the limits of merited punishment, nevertheless he often did go beyond the limits of a quality (he possessed not) which is raised to the rank of a virtue, but which applied, despite conscience, to our personal interests, is but selfishness and cowardice. And therein was he truly sublime; for in attacking thus, not only the great men of the day, but likewise the prejudices, idolatries, and passions belonging to such a proud nation, he well knew the harm that would result to himself. But Lord Byron was a real hero. So soon as his conscience spoke, he heard no other voice, but kept his glance fixed on the light of justice and truth beaming at the end of his career. Without looking to the right or to the left, without taking into account the obstacles and dangers which personal prudence counselled him to avoid, he held on his course; exposed his noble breast to British vengeance pursuing him across the Channel and the Alps, and then also to Genevan and Austrian shafts that flew back again across the Alps and the Channel on the wings of dark, fierce calumny.

Still I do not pretend to assert that, on some rare occasions, personal suffering did not give rise to irritation and anger. He belonged to humanity; and if, despite the harsh trials to which his sensibility was exposed, he had escaped entirely from nature's laws, he would have been not only heroic, but superhuman.

It is then very possible that, in the sad days preceding, accompanying, and following on his separation from Lady Byron, he may have been irritable. Such a host of evils overwhelmed him at once! He may have allowed to escape his lips at that time some drops of the ocean of bitterness with which his soul was overflowing. It is certain also that when the Edinburgh critics made such cruel havoc with his heart and mind, the over-excitement caused by this review had likewise for its source the wounds inflicted on his self-love. Can we be astonished at it, when we reflect that this senseless, wicked criticism succeeded to, and contrasted strangely with, the praises awarded by such judges as Mackenzie and Lord Woodhouse? They both had expressed their admiration spontaneously, and without knowing the writer: one of them was the celebrated author of the "Man of Feeling," and the other had brought out many esteemed works, and was considered to be at the head of Scottish literature. Besides, these cutting criticisms followed close on the strong admiration expressed by his friends, by all the society in which he was then moving, and by a mother who idolized him! These verses, though not yet the highest expression of his genius, were certainly full of charming tenderness, grace, and naive sensibility; moreover, they had been given to the public in such a modest way by a man so young that he might almost be called a child! If he were not conscious of his great superiority, of which he must nevertheless have felt some prophetic presentiment--restrained, doubtless, by modesty and timidity,--he must at least have been conscious that he had not, in any way, merited the brutality displayed in attacks which violated all the laws of just and allowable criticism.

Lord Byron's soul revolted at it, and in his indignation repelling assault by assault, he overstepped his aim; for he certainly went to extremes. And yet, in the very paroxysm of such irritation, was a personal sentiment his first incentive? No! it was a good, generous, affectionate feeling that actuated him: fear lest his mother should be grieved at what had occurred.

He had scarcely been told how biting the criticism was, and he had not read it, when he hastened to write to his friend Beecher:--

"Tell Mrs. Byron not to be out of humor 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 and Moore share the same fate."

In assuming this philosophical calm, which he really did arrive at later, but which he was very far from possessing at this time,--in forcing this language on his just resentment to console his mother, when his whole being was agitated, he certainly made one of those efforts which betoken a soul as vigorous as it was beautiful. He used his pen as soon as he had satisfied this first want of his heart; but the intensity of passion destroyed his equilibrium.

When at Ravenna he wrote:--

"I recollect well the effect that criticism produced on me; it was rage, and resistance, and redress, but not despondency nor despair. A savage review is hemlock to a sucking author; the one on me knocked me down--but I got up again. This criticism was a master-piece of low jests, a tissue of coarse invectives. It contained many commonplace expressions, lowlived insults; for instance, that one should be grateful for what one got; that a gift horse ought not to be looked at in the mouth, and other stable vocabulary; but that did not frighten me. I resolved on giving the lie to their predictions, and on showing them, that, however discordant my voice, it was not the last time they were to hear it."

But when this heat had passed away, his innate passion for that justice so cruelly violated toward himself, made him quickly recover his self-possession. He repented having written this satire, which he designated as insensate, and wished to suppress it. He even judged it more severely than others.

He wrote to Coleridge in 1815:--

"You mention my satire, lampoon, or whatever you like to call it. I can only say, that it was written when I was very young and very angry, and has been a thorn in my side ever since: more particularly as almost all the persons animadverted upon became subsequently my acquaintances, and some of them my friends, which is heaping fire on an enemy's head, and forgiving me too readily to permit me to forgive myself. The part applied to you is pert, and petulant, and shallow enough; but, although I have long done every thing in my power to suppress the circulation of the whole thing, I shall always regret the wantonness or generality of its attempted attacks."[113]

On examining his conscience with regard to this satire, and passing judgment on himself, he adds, in a note to his own verses, after having given great praise to Jeffrey for his magnanimity, etc.:--

"I was really too ferocious--this is mere insanity.--B., 1816."

And farther on:--

"This is bad; because personal.--B., 1816."

With regard to his verses on his guardian, Lord Carlisle, so culpable toward himself, he generously remarks:

"Wrong also--the provocation was not sufficient to justify such acerbity.--B., 1816."

To what he said against Wordsworth he simply adds the word, "Unjust."

And again, with reference to Lord Carlisle:--

"Much too savage, whatever the foundation may be.--B., 1816."

And at Geneva, 14th of July, 1816, he writes:--

"The greater part of this satire I most sincerely wish had never been written: not only on account of the injustice of much of the critical and some of the personal part of it, but the tone and temper are such as I can not approve.--BYRON, Villa Diodati, 1816."

Lastly, from Venice he wrote to Murray, who wished to make a superior edition of his works:--

"With regard to a future large edition, you may print all, or any thing, except 'English Bards,' to the republication of which at no time will I consent. I would not reprint them on any consideration. I don't think them good for much, even in point of poetry; and, as to other things, you are to recollect that I gave up the publication on account of the Hollands, and I do not think that any time or circumstances should cancel the suppression. Add to which, that, after being on terms with almost all the bards and critics of the day, it would be savage at any time, but worst of all now,[114] to revive this foolish lampoon."

"Whatever may have been the faults or indiscretion of this satire," says Moore, "there are few who would now sit in judgment upon it so severely as did the author himself, on reading it over nine years after, when he had quitted England, never to return. The copy which he then perused is now in possession of Mr. Murray, and the remarks which he has scribbled over its pages are well worth transcribing. On the first leaf we find:--

"The binding of this volume is considerably too valuable for its contents. Nothing but the consideration of its being the property of another prevents me from consigning this miserable record of misplaced anger and indiscriminate acrimony to the flames.

BYRON."

To this ample reparation offered on account of his early satire we must add the following paragraph, from the first letter he addressed to Sir Walter Scott, in 1812:--

"I feel sorry that you should have thought it worth while to notice the 'evil works of my nonage,' as the thing is suppressed voluntarily; and your explanation is too kind not to give me pain. The satire was written when I was very young and very angry, and fully bent on displaying my wrath and my wit, and now I am haunted by the ghosts of my wholesale assertions. I can not sufficiently thank you for your praise."

Thus scrupulously did this conscientious man judge himself. And not only do we find him repeating the same fine sentiment a hundred times, but he caused the whole edition, then still in the hands of the publisher, to be destroyed, which of course entailed a great sacrifice of money. He became intimate with the principal personages whom he had attacked; and even, in order to testify that no resentment continued to exist in his mind against his guardian, Lord Carlisle, he seized the first opportunity that presented itself of writing in "Childe Harold" those pathetic generous lines on the death of his son, Major Howard. He acted just in the same way every time he thought he had any fault to repair. But could this same love of justice, that had guided him through life, have caused him equally to disavow what he said of Lord Castlereagh and of Ireland in "Avatar?" of Southey and the Austrians at Venice? or the greater part of the satirical traits contained in "Don Juan" and the "Age of Bronze?" I do not think so. I believe, even, that if on his death-bed, he had been asked to retract some of his writings, he would have answered as Pascal did. And this because the sentiment which under all circumstances guided his pen did not arise from any personal interest, but was only, to use the beautiful language of a great contemporary philosopher, "the indignation and revolt of the generous faculties of the soul, which, hurt by injustice, rose up proudly, to protest against human dignity, offended in one's own person or in that of others."

This sentiment not being capable of change, neither could its consequences bring any repentance. According to Lord Byron, Castlereagh was a scourge for mankind. Faithful to this opinion, as to all his great principles, he wrote to Moore in 1815:--

"I am sick at heart of politics and slaughters; and the luck which Providence is pleased to lavish on Lord Castlereagh, is only a proof of the little value the gods set upon prosperity, when they permit such rogues as he and that drunken corporal, old Bl----, to bully their betters. From this, however, Wellington should be excepted. He is a man, and the Scipio of our Hannibal."

Let people read the "Avatar," the eleventh octave and following of the dedication of "Don Juan," the forty-ninth and fiftieth stanzas of the ninth canto of "Don Juan," as well as the epigrams; and they will have a fair idea of the generous sentiments that provoked his indignation against the inhuman policy of this minister. They will understand why he wished to denounce him to the execration of posterity. As to his satirical verses and anger against the poet laureate, it has already been seen on whose side lay the fault, and how this jealous poet, through a combination of bad feelings, in which envy and revenge predominated, spared no means, no occasion, of doing him harm. Thus Lord Byron saw himself and his friends enveloped in one of those darksome conspiracies, forming a labyrinth of calumny, whence the purest innocence has no escape; and he felt that justice violated in the person of his friends, by a man unworthy of respect, required him, in justice, to brand the individual. And rightly did he so with his words of fire. When Ireland, that he would fain have seen heroic under misfortune, degraded herself by her conduct toward this minister and the king, on the occasion of their visit, he, touched with noble indignation, resolved to punish and warn her; and his "Avatar" expressed these fine sentiments. When the prince regent, after having shown himself a Liberal and a Whig, denied his part, betrayed his party, and leagued with the Tories, Lord Byron's noble indignation burst forth in his verses, and, whenever occasion offered, he stigmatized such unworthy conduct.

And a proof that it was the conduct of the individual, and not personal animosity, that guided his pen, may be found in the fact that a single ray of hope of seeing this moral deformity transformed into beauty, sufficed to make him change his tone immediately. When he learned the pardon that had just been granted by George the Fourth to the guilty Lord Edward Fitzgerald, he forgot all past offenses; his soul expanded to admiration and hope; and he composed that beautiful sonnet, which so well reveals the aspirations of his great heart:--

"To be the father of the fatherless, To stretch the hand from the throne's height, and raise His offspring, who expired in other days To make thy sire's sway by a kingdom less,-- This is to be a monarch, and repress Envy into unutterable praise. Dismiss thy guard, and trust thee to such traits, For who would lift a hand except to bless? Were it not easy, sir, and is't not sweet To make thyself beloved? and to be Omnipotent by mercy's means? for thus Thy sovereignty would grow but more complete: A despot thou, and yet thy people free, And by the heart, not hand, enslaving us."

Bologna, August 12, 1819.

And then, as if poetry did not suffice, he adds these lines in prose:--

"So the prince has annulled Lord E. Fitzgerald's condemnation. He deserves all praise, bad and good: it was truly a princely act."

All Lord Byron's expressions of indignation that have been attributed to anger, belong really to his disinterested, heroic, generous nature. We may convince ourselves of this by following him through life, beginning from childhood, at college, when he would plant himself in front of school tyrants, asking to share the punishments inflicted on his friend Peel, and always taking the part of his weak or oppressed companions; then, during his first youth, when an accumulation of unmerited griefs and injustice cast over him a shade of misanthropy, so contrary to his nature; and, lastly, up to the moment when that noble indignation burst forth which he experienced in Greece, and which hastened his end.[115]

This is the truth. Nevertheless, if, in early youth, he did sometimes go beyond the limits of what may be fairly conceded to extreme sensibility,--to a certain hypochondriacal tendency of race, and more especially of his intellectual life; if he really was sometimes wearied, fatigued, discouraged, inclined to irritation, and to view things darkly, can it, therefore, be said that he weakly gave way to a morbid disposition? By no means. He always wished to sift his conscience thoroughly,--never ceased analyzing causes and symptoms, proclaiming his state morbid, and blaming himself beyond measure, far beyond what justice warranted, for a single word that had escaped his lips under the pressure of intense suffering. And even in the few moments of impatience occasioned by his last illness, he said, "Do not take the language of a sick man for his real sentiments." Lastly, he never gave over struggling against himself; seeking to acquire dominion over his faculties and passions intellectually by hard study, and materially by the strictest regime. What could he do more? it may be said. But if it be true that he had been irritable in his youth, that would only show how much he achieved; for he must have conquered himself immensely, since at Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, Genoa, and in Greece, he certainly displayed no traces of temper, and all those causes which usually excite irritation and anger in others had quite ceased to produce any in him.

"A mild philosophy," says the Countess G----, "every day more and more took possession of his soul. Adversity and the companionship of great thoughts strengthened him so much, that he was able to cast off the yoke of even ordinary passions, only retaining those among the number which impel to good.[116]

"I have seen him sometimes at Ravenna, Pisa, Genoa, when receiving news of some stupid, savage attack, from those who, in violating justice, also did him considerable harm. No emotion of anger any longer mixed itself up with his generous indignation. He appeared rather to experience a mixture of contempt, almost of quiet austere pleasure, in the struggle his great soul sustained against fools."

When Shelley saw him again at Venice, in 1818, and painted him under the name of Count Maddalo, he said:--

"In social life there is not a human being gentler, more patient, more natural, and modest, than Lord Byron. He is gay, open, and witty; his graver conversations steep you in a kind of inebriation. He has travelled a great deal, and possesses ineffable charm when he relates his adventures in the different countries he has visited."

Mr. Hoppner, English consul at Venice, and Lord Byron's friend, who was living constantly with him at this time, sums up his own impressions in these remarkable terms:--

"Of one thing I am certain, that I never met with goodness more real than Lord Byron's."

And some years later, when Shelley saw Lord Byron again at Ravenna, he wrote to Mrs. Shelley:--

"Lord Byron has made great progress in all respects; in genius, temper, moral views, health, and happiness. His intimacy with the Countess G---- has been of inestimable benefit to him. A fourth part of his revenue is devoted to beneficence. He has conquered his passions, and become what nature meant him to be, a virtuous man."

In concluding these quotations, no longer requisite, I hope, I will only make one last observation, that all which infallibly changes in a bad nature never did change in him. Friendship, real love, all devoted feelings, lived on in him unchanged to his last hour. If he had had a bad disposition, been capricious, irritable, or given to anger, would this have been the case?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 106: Count Delladecima, to whom he gives this name in consequence of a habit which that gentleman had of using the phrase "in ultima analise" frequently in conversation.]

[Footnote 107: See the account given by Mr. Bruno, his physician.]

[Footnote 108: Alexander the Great imprudently bathed in the Cydnus, etc.]

[Footnote 109: "Life in Italy." See how he was received at Missolonghi.]

[Footnote 110: Parry, 215.]

[Footnote 111: Jules Simon.]

[Footnote 112: Kennedy, 330.]

[Footnote 113: Moore, vol. iii, p. 159.]

[Footnote 114: Now alludes to the ungenerous treatment received from many of these persons at the time of his separation.]

[Footnote 115: See his "Life in Italy."]

[Footnote 116: Ibid.]

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XVIII. LORD BYRON'S MOBILITY

So much has been said of Lord Byron's mobility that it is necessary to analyze it well, and examine it under different aspects, so as to define and bring it within due limits. In the first place, we may ask on what grounds his biographers rested their opinion of this extraordinary mobility, which, according to them, went beyond the scope of intellectual qualities rather into the category of faults of temper? Evidently it was again through accepting a testimony the small value of which we have already shown; namely, Lord Byron's own words at twenty-three years of age--that period when passion is hardly ever a regular wind, simply swelling sails, but rather a gusty tempest, tearing them to pieces; and then again they grounded their opinion on verses in "Don Juan," where he explains the meaning of these expressions,--versatility and mobility. Moore, from motives we shall examine hereafter, found it expedient to take Lord Byron at his word, and to make a great fuss about this quality. In summing up his character, he reasons very cleverly on the unexampled extent, as he calls it, of this faculty, and the consequences to which it led in Lord Byron. Following in Moore's wake, other biographers have proclaimed Lord Byron versatile. Moore exaggerates so far as to pretend that this faculty made it almost impossible to find a dominant characteristic in Lord Byron. As if mobility were not, in reality, a universal quality or defect,--as if men could so govern themselves throughout life as to resemble the hero of a drama, where the action is confined within classical rules.

"A man possessing the highest order of mind is, nevertheless, unequal," says La Bruyere. "He suffers from increase and diminution; he gets into a good train of thought, and falls out of it likewise.

"It is different with an automaton. Such a man is like a machine,--a spring. Weight carries him away, making him move and turn forever in the same direction, and with equal motion. He is uniform, and never changes. Once seen, he appears the same at all times and periods of life. At best, he is but the ox lowing, or the blackbird whistling; he is fixed and stamped by nature, and I may say by species. What shows least in him is his soul; that never acts,--is never brought into play,--perpetually reposes. Such a man will be a gainer by death."

La Bruyere also says, "There is a certain mediocrity that helps to make a man appear wise."

And what says Montaigne, that great connoisseur of the human heart?--

"Our usual custom is to go right or left, over mountains or valleys, just as we are drifted by the wind of opportunity. We change like that animal which assumes the color of the spots where it is placed. All is vacillation and inconstancy. We do not walk of ourselves; we are carried away like unto things that float now gently and now impetuously, according to the uncertain mood of the waters. Every day some new fancy arises, and our tempers vary with the weather. This fluctuation and contradiction ever succeeding in us, has caused it to be imagined by some that we possess two souls; by others, that two faculties are perpetually at work within us, one inclining us toward good, and the other toward evil."

Montaigne also says:--"I give my soul sometimes one appearance, and sometimes another, according to the side on which I look at it; if I speak variously of myself, it is because I look at myself variously: all contrarieties, in one degree or other, are found in me, according to the number of turns given. Thus I am shamefaced, insolent, chaste, sensual, talkative, taciturn, laborious, delicate, ingenious, stupid, sad, good-natured, deceitful, true, learned, ignorant, liberal, avaricious, and prodigal, just according to the way in which I look at myself; and whoever studies himself attentively, will find this variety and discordancy even in his judgment.

"We are all parts of a whole, and formed of such shapeless, mixed materials, that every part and every moment does its own work."

If, then, we all experience the varied influences of our passions a hundred times in a lifetime, not to say in every twenty-four hours; if we are sensible of a thousand physical and moral causes, perpetually modifying our dispositions, and our words, making us differ to-day from what we were yesterday; if even the coldest and most stoical temperaments do not wholly escape from these influences, how could Moore be surprised that Lord Byron, who was so sensitive and full of passion, so hardly used by men and Providence, that he should not prove invulnerable? Moore was not surprised at it in reality, it is true; he only made-believe to be so, and that because Lord Byron was wanting in some of those virtues called peculiarly English. Lord Byron had no superstitious patriotism; he did not love his country through sentiment or passion, but on duty and principle. He loved her, but justice also! and he loved justice best. And in order to do homage to truth, he had committed the fault of saying a host of irreverential truths concerning that country, and also many individuals belonging to it; consequently he had made many enemies for himself. Indeed, his enemies might be found in every camp: among the orthodox, in the literary world, and the world of fashion, among the fair sex, and in the political world. Moore, for his part, wished to live in peace with all these potentates,--the warm, comfortable, and brilliant atmosphere of their society had become a necessity for him; and wishing also, perhaps, to obtain pardon for his friend's boldness, he probably thought to conciliate all things by sparing the susceptibility of the great. Instead, then, of attributing Lord Byron's severe appreciations to observation, experience, and serious reflection, he preferred declaring them the result of capricious and inconsistent mobility. But more just in the depths of his soul than he was in words, Moore, it is easy to see, felt painfully conscious of the wrong done to his illustrious friend, and ardently wished to make his own weakness tally with truth. What was the result? The brilliant edifice he had raised was so unstable of basis, that it could not stand the logic of facts and conclusions. While appearing to consider the excess of this quality as a defect, and calling it dangerous, he was all the time showing that Lord Byron had strength to overcome any real danger it contained; he was giving it to be understood that this versatility of intellect might exist without the least mobility of principle; he made out that mobility was the ornament of his intelligence, just as he had shown constancy to be the ornament of his soul. Then, after having reasoned cleverly on this quality, yclept versatility when applied to the intelligence, and mobility when applied to conduct; after having shown how predominant it must have been in Lord Byron through his great impressionability; Moore says that Lord Byron did yield to his versatile humor, without scruple or resistance, in all things attracting his mind, in all the excursions of reason or fancy assuming all the forms in which his genius could manifest its power, transporting himself into all the regions of thought where there were any new conquests to make; and that thereby he gave to the world a grand spectacle, displayed a variety of unlimited and almost contradictory powers, and finally achieved a succession of unexampled triumphs in every intellectual field. Then, in order to characterize completely this quality of Lord Byron, Moore further adds:--

"It must be felt, indeed, by all readers of that work, and particularly by those who, being gifted with but a small portion of such ductility themselves, are unable to keep pace with his changes, that the suddenness with which he passes from one strain of sentiment to another, from the gay to the sad, from the cynical to the tender,--begets a distrust in the sincerity of one or both moods of mind which interferes with, if not chills, the sympathy that a more natural transition would inspire. In general, such a suspicion would do him injustice; as among the singular combinations which his mind presented, that of uniting at once versatility and depth of feeling was not the least remarkable."

But, throughout this analysis by Moore, do we see aught save an intellectual quality? Does it not stand out in relief, a pure, high attribute of genius? For this to be a defect, it would be necessary that, leaving the domain of intelligence, it should become mobility, by entering into the course of his daily life in extraordinary proportions. And how does it, in reality, enter there? Were his principles in politics, in religion, in all that constitutes the man of honor in the highest acceptation of the term, at all affected by it? Did his true affections, or even his simple tastes, suffer from the varied impresses of his versatile genius? In short, was Lord Byron inconstant? Moore has sufficiently answered, since all he remarked and said oblige us to rank constancy among Lord Byron's most shining virtues.[117] And as a human heart can not at the same time be governed by a virtue and its opposite vice, what must we say to those who should persist (for there are some, doubtless, who will), despite all axioms, in considering Lord Byron as a changeable, capricious, fickle man? I reply, that Lord Byron proved, once more, the truth of the observation made by that moralist, who said: "The most beautiful souls are those possessing the greatest variety and pliancy," and that he realized in himself, after a splendid fashion, the moral phenomenon remarked in Cato the Elder, who, according to Livy, possessed a mind at once so versatile and so comprehensive, that whatever he did it might be thought he was born solely for that.

I will acknowledge, then, the intellectual versatility and the mobility of Lord Byron, but on condition of their being reduced to their real proportions; of their being shown as they ever existed in him, that is to say, under subjection to duty, honor, and feeling. Through his extreme impressionability, and his power of combining, in the liveliest manner, the greatest contrasts, through the pleasure he took in exercising such extraordinary faculties, and in manifesting them to others, Lord Byron sometimes assumed such an appearance of skeptical indifference and caprice, that he might almost be said to show a certain intermission of faculties, and even of ideas. But if his words and writings are examined, it will be seen that this mobility was only skin-deep. It might affect his nerves and muscles, but did not penetrate into his system. It animated his writings occasionally, and oftener his words, but never his actions! for, if in some rare moments of life, he abandoned his will to the sway of light breezes, that was only for very evanescent fancies of youth, in which neither heart nor honor were at stake. And even then it was rather by word than by deed, as occurred at Newstead, when he was twenty years of age, and at Venice when he was twenty-eight. His energetic soul did not, like feebler natures, require inconstancy to awaken it. As to ideas, they were only changeable in him, when they were by nature open to discussion or accessory; and they remained floating, until having been elaborated by his great reason, he could admit them into the small number of such as he considered chosen and indisputable. Then they found a sort of sanctuary in his mind, remaining there sacred and unmoved, just like his true sentiments of heart.

His mobility, thus limited and circumscribed within due bounds by unswerving principles and the dictates of an excellent heart, was thus shorn of all danger, and had for its first result to contribute toward producing that amiability and that wonderful fascination which he exercised over all those who came near him. Moore quotes, on this head, the words of Cooper, who, speaking of persons with a changeful intellectual temperament, says, that their society "ought to be preferred in this world, for, all scenes in life having two sides, one dark and the other brilliant, the mind possessing an equal admixture of melancholy and vivacity, is the one best organised for contemplating both." Moore adds:--"It would not be difficult to show that to this readiness in reflecting all hues, whether of the shadows or the lights of our variegated existence, Lord Byron owed not only the great range of his influence as a poet, but those powers of fascination which he possessed as a man. This susceptibility, indeed, of immediate impressions, which in him were so active, lent a charm, of all others the most attractive, to his social intercourse, and brought whatever was most agreeable in his nature into play."

All those who knew him have said the same thing. This charm was the immediate consequence of his qualities; but they produced another result, that justice requires to be mentioned. Mobility being united in him with constancy and the most heroic firmness, added lustre to his soul through that great difficulty overcome which amounts to virtue. Moralists of all ages have generally found the virtue of constancy so rare, that they have said,--

"Wait for death to judge a man."

"In all antiquity," says Montaigne, "it would be difficult to find a dozen men who shaped their lives in a certain steady course which is the chief end of wisdom."

This is true as regards the generality of minds; but to overcome this difficulty, when one has a mind eager for emotion, variable, with width and depth capable of discerning simultaneously the for and against of every thing, and thus being necessarily exposed to perplexity of choice, it is surely marvellous if a mind so constituted be also constant. Now, Lord Byron personified this marvel. In him was seen the realization of that rare thing in nature, intellectual versatility combined with unswerving principle; mobility of mind united to a constant heart. In short, to sum up:--He possessed the amount of versatility requisite to manifest his genius under all its aspects; a degree of mobility most charming in social intercourse; and such constancy as is always estimable, always a virtue, and which, united to a temperament like his,[118] becomes positively wonderful.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 117: See the chapter on "Constancy."]

[Footnote 118: See the chapter on "Constancy."]

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XIX. LORD BYRON'S MISANTHROPY AND SOCIABILITY

Lord Byron has also been accused of misanthropy. But what is a misanthrope? Since Lucian, this name has been bestowed on the man who owns no friend but himself; who looks upon all others as so many rogues, for whom relatives, friends, country, are but empty names; who despises fame, and aims at no distinction except that conferred by his strange manners, savage anger, and inhumanity.

When those who have known Lord Byron, and studied his life, compare him to this type, it may well be asked whether such persons be in their right understanding. The famous tower of Babel, and all the confusion ensuing, rise up to view.

The excess of absurdity may give way, however, to some little moderation in judgment. It will be said, for instance, that there are different kinds of misanthropy. Lucian's "Timon" does not at all resemble Moliere's "Alceste:" Lord Byron's misanthropy was not like either of theirs; his was only of the kind that mars sociability, good temper, and other amiable qualities. In short, we shall be given to understand that Lord Byron is only accused of having liked solitude too much, of having shunned his fellow-creatures too much, and thought too ill of humanity.

But these modifications can not satisfy our conscience. Still too many reasons of astonishment may be offered to allow us to resist the desire of adding other facts and indisputable proofs to those already adduced in the chapter where we examined the nature and limits of his melancholy at all periods of life, and throughout all its phases.[119] This chapter might even suffice as a response to the above strange accusation.

A better answer still would be found in all the proofs we have given of his goodness, generosity, and humanity. Nevertheless, we think it right rather to appeal to the patience of our readers; so that they may consider with us, more especially, one of the peculiar aspects of Lord Byron's character; namely, his sociability.

That Lord Byron loved solitude, and that it was a want of his nature who can doubt? As a child, we know, his delight was to wander alone on the sea-shore, on the Scottish strand. At school, he was wont to withdraw from his beloved companions, and the games he liked so well, in order to pass whole hours seated on the solitary stone in the church-yard at Harrow, which has been fitly called Byron's Tomb. He himself describes these inclinations of his childhood in the "Lament of Tasso:"--

"Of objects all inanimate I made Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers, And rocks, whereby they grew, a paradise, Where I did lay me down within the shade Of waving trees, and dream'd uncounted hours, Though I was chid for wandering; and the wise Shook their white aged heads o'er me, and said, Of such materials wretched men were made."

Arrived at adolescence, he showed so little inclination to mix in society that his friends reproached him with his over-weening love for solitude. Amid the gay dissipation of university life, he was often a prey to vague disquietude. Like the majority of great spirits that had preceded him at Cambridge,--Milton, Gray, Locke, etc.,--he did not enjoy his stay there. He even made a satire upon it in his early poems. At a later period, when he had acquired fame, at the very height of his triumphs, when he was the observed of all observers, he often caught himself dreaming on the happiness of escaping from fashionable society, and getting home; for, like Pope, he greatly preferred quiet reading to the most agreeable conversation.

All his life there were hours and days wherein his mind absolutely required this repose.

It may, then, truly be said that he loved solitude, and felt a real attraction for it. But would it be equally just to attribute this taste to melancholy, and then to call his melancholy misanthropy? Those who have deeply studied the nature of a certain order of genius, and the phases of its development, will discover something very different in the impulse that attracted the child Byron to the sea-shore in Scotland, and to the sepulchral stone shaded over by the tall trees of Harrow? They will see therein, not the melancholy apparent to vulgar eyes, but the forecast of genius, to be revealed sooner or later, and with a further promise, in the antipathy shown for the routine of schools, and especially of the University of Cambridge,--a suffocating atmosphere for genius, equally uncongenial to Milton, Dryden, Gray, and Locke, who all, like Lord Byron, and more bitterly than he, exercised their satiric vein on it. As for the slight attraction he sometimes showed for the world in his youth--in his seventeenth year--and which the excellent Mr. Beecher reproached him with, his feelings are too well defined by the noble boy himself for us to dare to substitute any words of ours in lieu of those used by him, in justification to his friend.

Dear Beecher, you tell me to mix with mankind; I can not deny such a precept is wise; But retirement accords with the tone of my mind; I will not descend to a world I despise.

Did the senate or camp my exertions require, Ambition might prompt me at once to go forth; And, when infancy's years of probation expire, Perchance, I may strive to distinguish my birth.

The fire in the cavern of Etna concealed Still mantles unseen in its secret recess: At length in a volume terrific revealed, No torrent can quench it, no bounds can repress.

Oh! thus the desire in my bosom for fame Bids me live but to hope for posterity's praise. Could I soar with the phoenix on pinions of flame, With him I would wish to expire in the blaze.

For the life of a Fox, of a Chatham the death, What censure, what danger, what woe would I brave! Their lives did not end when they yielded their breath; Their glory illumines the gloom of their grave.

Yet why should I mingle in Fashion's full herd? Why crouch to her leaders, or cringe to her rules? Why bend to the proud, or applaud the absurd, Why search for delight in the friendship of fools?

I have tasted the sweets and the bitters of love; In friendship I early was taught to believe; My passion the matrons of prudence reprove; I have found that a friend may profess, yet deceive.

To me what is wealth?--it may pass in an hour, If tyrant's prevail, or if Fortune should frown: To me what is title? the phantom of power; To me what is fashion?--I seek but renown.

Deceit is a stranger as yet to my soul: I still am unpracticed to varnish the truth: Then why should I live in a hateful control? Why waste upon folly the days of my youth? 1806.

Thus it was the desire of fame that then engrossed his whole soul; the wish of adding some great action to illustrate a name already ennobled by his ancestors.

Subsequently, this ardent desire may have become weakened. Alas! he had been made to pay so dearly for satisfying it. But at the outset of his career this aspiration after glory, that belongs to the noblest souls, was the strongest impulse he had,--the one that often made him prefer the solitary exercise of intelligence to even the usual dissipation of youth, and when he did yield, like others, he punished himself by self-inflicted blame and contempt, often expressed in an imprudent, exaggerated manner.

Nevertheless, the paths that lead to glory are various, and trod by many; which should he choose? Then did he feel the further torment of uncertainty. His faculties were various, and he was to learn this to his cost. He was to feel, though vaguely, that he might just as well aspire to the civic as to the military crown; be an orator in the senate, or a hero on the field of battle.

Among all the careers presenting themselves before him, the one that flattered him least was to be an author or a literary man. But he was living in the midst of young men well versed in letters. Most of them amused themselves with making verses. To tranquillize his heart, and exercise his activity of mind, he also made some, but without attaching any great importance to them. These verses were charming; the first flower and perfume of a young, pure soul, devoted to friendship and other generous emotions. Nevertheless, a criticism that was at once malignant, unjust, and cruel, fell foul of these delightful, clever inspirations. The injustice committed was great. The modest, gentle, but no less sensitive mind of the youth was both indignant and overwhelmed at it. Other sorrows, other illusions dispelled, further increased his agitation, making a wound that might really have become misanthropy, had his heart been less excellent by nature. But it could not rankle thus in him, and his sufferings only resulted in making him quit England with less regret, and throw into his verses and letters misanthropical expressions, no sooner written than disavowed by the general tone of cordiality and good-humor that reigned throughout them; and, lastly, by suggesting the imprudent idea of choosing a misanthrope as the hero of the poem in which he was to sing his own pilgrimage.

This necessity of essaying and giving expression to his genius also made him desire solitude yet more. He found poetic loneliness beneath the bright skies of the East, where he pitched his tent, slowly to seek the road to that fame for which his soul thirsted. But when he arrived at it,--when he became transformed, so to say, into an idol,--did this necessity for solitude abandon him? By no means.

"April 10th.--I do not know that I am happiest when alone," he writes in his memoranda; "but this I am sure of, I never am long in the society even of her I love--and God knows how I love her--without a yearning for the company of my lamp and my library. Even in the day, I send away my carriage oftener than I use or abuse it."

This desire, this craving for his lamp and his library,--this absence of taste for certain realities of life,--show affinities between Lord Byron and another great spirit, Montaigne. One might fancy one hears Lord Byron saying, with the other:--

"The continual intercourse I hold with ancient thought, and the ideas caught from those wondrous spirits of by-gone times, disgust me with others and with myself."

He also felt ennui at living in an age that only produced very ordinary things.

But whether he felt happy or sad, it was always in silence, in retirement, and contemplation of the great visible nature, carrying his thought away to what does not the less exist though veiled from our feeble sight and intellect; it was there, I say, that his mind and heart sought strength, peace, and consolation.

His soul was bursting with mighty griefs when he arrived in Switzerland, on the borders of Lake Leman. He loved this beautiful spot, but did not deem himself sufficiently alone to enjoy it fully.

"There is too much of man here, to look through With a fit mind the might which I behold,"

said he; and he promised himself soon to arrive at that beloved solitude, so necessary to him for enjoying well the grand spectacle presented by Helvetian nature; but, he added:--

"To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind: * * * * * * * Nor is it discontent to keep the mind Deep in its fountain, lest it over boil In the hot throng."

And then he continues:--

"I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling."

Thus, even in the midst of the beloved solitude so necessary to him, there was no misanthropy in his thoughts or feelings, but simply the desire of not being disturbed in his studies and reveries. Lord Byron often said, that solitude made him better. He thought, on that head, like La Bruyere:--"All the evil in us," says that great moralist, "springs from the impossibility of our being alone. Thence we fall into gambling, luxury, dissipation, wine, women, ignorance, slandering, envy, forgetfulness of self, and of God." If the satisfaction of this noble want were to be called misanthropy, few of our great spirits, whether philosophers, poets, or orators, could escape the accusation. For, with almost all of them, the taste for retirement and solitude has been likewise a necessity: a condition without which we should have lost their greatest chefs-d'oeuvre. The biography of the noblest minds leaves no doubt on this head. But if Lord Byron did not use solitude like a misanthrope, if he loved it solely as a means, and not as an end, so that we may even say it was with him an antidote to misanthropy, can we equally give proof of his sociability? To clear up this point, we have only to glance at his whole life. For the sake of avoiding repetition, let us pass over his childhood, so full of tenderness, and ardor for youthful pastimes; his boyhood, all devoted to feelings affectionate and passionate; his university life, where sociability seemed to predominate over regular study; the vacations, when it was such pleasure to act plays, and he was the life of amateur theatres,--a time that has left behind it such an enthusiastic memory of him, that when Moore, some years after Lord Byron's death, went to obtain information about it from the amiable Pigott family, not one member could be found to admit that Lord Byron had the smallest defect. Let us also pass over his sojourn at Newstead, when his sociability and gayety appear even to have been too noisy; and let us arrive at that period of his life when he began to be called a misanthrope, because he gave himself that appellation, because real sorrows had cast a shade over his life, and because, wishing to devote himself to graver things, his object was to withdraw from the society of gay, noisy companions, and then to mature his mind in distant travel. He left his native land, but in company with his friend Hobhouse, a man distinguished for his intelligence, and who, instead of testifying to his fellow-traveller's misanthropy, bears witness, on the contrary, to his amiable, sociable disposition.

When this friend was obliged to take leave of him in Greece, and return to England, Lord Byron frequented the society of pleasant persons like Lord Sligo, Mr. Bruce, and Lady Hester Stanhope, whom he met at Athens, alleviating his studious solitude by intercourse with them.

When he also returned to England, after two years of absence, great misfortunes overwhelmed him. He lost successively his mother, dear friends, and other loved ones. Not to sink beneath these accumulated blows, and mistrusting his own strength, he called in to aid him the society of his friends.

"My dear Scroope," wrote he, "if you have an instant, come and join me, I entreat you. I want a friend; I am in utter desolation. Come and see me; let me enjoy as long as I can the company of those friends that yet remain."

Some time after, having attained the highest popularity, and his mind being soothed by friendship even more than by fame, he entered into the fashionable society in which his rank entitled him to move.

He frequented the world very much at this period, cultivating it assiduously. A moment even came when he seemed to be completely absorbed by gayety. Sometimes going to as many as fourteen assemblies, balls, etc., in one evening. "He acknowledged to me," says Dallas, "that it amused him." Did not his genius suffer then from the new infatuation? So courted, flattered, and surrounded by temptations, did not this worldly life prove too seductive, hurtful to his mind, heart, and independence of character? Did he draw from the world's votaries his rules of judgment, his ways of thought? Did he yield when brought in contact with that terrible English law of opinion? No; Lord Byron was safe from all such dangers. Amid the vortex in which he allowed himself to be whirled along, his mind was never idle. In the drawing-rooms he frequented, his intellectual curiosity found field for exercise. Though so young, he had already reflected much on human nature in general; but he still required to study individuals. It was in society that his extraordinary penetration could find out true character, discover the reality lurking under a borrowed mask. The great world formed an excellent school to discipline his mind. There he found subjects for observation that he afterward put in order, and brought to maturity in retirement.

"Wherever he went," says Moore, "Lord Byron found field for observation and study. To a mind with a glance so deep, lively, and varied, every place, and every occupation, presented some view of interest; and, whether he were at a ball, in the boxing-school, or the senate, a genius like his turned every thing to advantage."

And if salons in general were powerless to exercise any bad influence over him, this impossibility was still greater with regard to London salons. Without adopting as exact the picture drawn of them by a learned academician,[120] in a book more witty than true, wherein we read:--"that under pain of passing for eccentric, of giving scandal or exciting alarm, English people are forbidden to speak of others or themselves, of politics, religion, or intellectual things or matters of taste; but only of the environs, the roundabouts, a picnic, a visit to some ruin, a fashionable preacher, a fox-hunt, and the rain,--that never-ending theme kindly furnished by the inconstant climate;" without, I say, adopting this picture as true, for in England it must be considered a clever caricature, it is nevertheless certain, that the discipline of fashionable London salons requires independence of mind to be in a measure sacrificed. The tone reigning in these salons, which are only opened during the season, is quite different from that produced by the open-hearted hospitality which renders English country residences so very agreeable. Could Lord Byron long take pleasure in the salons of the metropolis, where every thing is on the surface and noisy, where one may say that people are content with simply showing themselves, intending concealment all the while; or where they show themselves what they are not; where set forms, or a vocabulary of their own, so far limits allowable subjects of conversation, that fools may easily have the advantage over clever men (for intellect is looked upon as suspicious, dangerous, bold, and called an eccentricity). Lord Byron, so frank, and open-hearted, loving fame, and having a sort of presentiment that Heaven would not accord him sufficient time to reap his full harvest of genius, consequently regretting the moments he was forced to lose; must he not, after seeking amusement in these assemblies, soon have found that they lasted too long, and were too fatiguing? Must he not often have well-nigh revolted against himself, felt something cold and heavy restraining his outburst of soul, something like a sort of slavery; must he not have understood that it was requisite for him to escape from such useless pastimes in order to re-invigorate himself by study, in the society of his own thoughts, and those of the master-spirits of ages? Yes, Lord Byron did experience all that. Ennui of the world called him back to solitude. We can not doubt it, he said so himself:--

"Last night, party at Lansdowne House; to-night, party at Lady Charlotte Greville's--deplorable waste of time, and loss of temper, nothing imparted, nothing acquired--talking without ideas--if any thing like thought were in my mind, it was not on the subjects on which we were gabbling. Heigho! and in this way half London pass what is called life. To-morrow, there is Lady Heathcote's--shall I go? Yes; to punish myself for not having a pursuit."

And, elsewhere:--

"Shall I go to Lansdowne's? to the Berry's? They are all pleasant; but I don't know, I don't think that soirees improve one."

He will not go into the world:--

"I don't believe this worldly life does any good; how could such a world ever be made? Of what use are dandies, for instance, and kings, and fellows at college, and women of a certain age, and many men of my age, myself foremost?"

Having changed his apartments, he had not yet got all his books; was reading without order, composing nothing; and he suffered in consequence. "I must set myself to do something directly; my heart already begins to feed on itself." He accuses himself of not profiting enough by time. "Twenty-six years of age! I might and ought to be a Pasha at that age. 'I 'gin to be weary of the sun.'" But let him be with a clever friend, like Moore, for instance, and, oh! then the ennui of salons becomes metamorphosed into pleasure for him, without taking away his clearsightedness as to the world's worth.

"Are you going this evening," writes he to Moore, "to Lady Cahir's? I will, if you do; and wherever we can unite in follies, let us embark on the same ship of fools. I went to bed at five, and got up at nine."

And elsewhere, after having expressed his disappointment at seeing Moore so little during the season, he calls London "a populous desert, where one should be able to keep one's thirst like the camel. The streams are so few, and for the most part so muddy."

And ten years later, in the fourteenth canto of "Don Juan," he said, speaking of fashionable London society:--

"Although it seems both prominent and pleasant, There is a sameness in its gems and ermine, A dull and family likeness through all ages, Of no great promise for poetic pages.

XVI.

"With much to excite, there's little to exalt; Nothing that speaks to all men and all times; A sort of varnish over every fault; A kind of commonplace, even in their crimes; Factitious passions, wit without much salt, A want of that true nature which sublimes Whate'er it shows with truth; a smooth monotony Of character, in those at least who have got any.

XVII.

"Sometimes, indeed, like soldiers off parade, They break their ranks and gladly leave the drill; But then the roll-call draws them back afraid, And they must be or seem what they were: still Doubtless it is a brilliant masquerade; But when of the first sight you have had your fill, It palls--at least it did so upon me, This paradise of pleasure and ennui."

It was thus that he judged what is called the great world, the fashionable crowd. Yet never having ceased to frequent it, he also might have said, with Plutarch:--"My taste leads me to fly the world; but the gentleness of my nature brings me back to it again."

The best proof, however, of his sociable disposition does not lie in this fact of his going much to great assemblies, since he submitted to, rather than sought after that: it consists in the pleasure he always took in the society of friends, and those whom he loved; in the want of intimacy which he ever experienced. In such quiet little circles he was truly himself, quite different to what he appeared in salons. Then only could he be really known. His wit, gayety, and simplicity were unveiled solely for friends and intimates. He, so light-hearted, became serious amid the forced laughter of drawing-rooms; he, so witty, waxed silent and gloomy amid unmeaning conventional talkativeness. Those who only saw him in salons, or on fashionable staircases, during the four years he passed in England, did not really know him; is it surprising that he should have been wrongly judged? Moore alone has tolerably well described the agreeable, sociable, gay, kind being Lord Byron was.

When he quitted England, his sociable disposition did not abandon him, though his soul was filled with bitterness. He had scarcely arrived at Geneva, when he became intimate with Shelley. He made him the companion of his walks, passed whole days and evenings in his society, and that of his amiable wife. Several London friends came to join him in Switzerland. In his excursions over the Alps, Lord Broughton (then Mr. Hobhouse) was always his faithful companion. He frequented and appreciated then, more than he had ever done before in England, the society of Madame de Stael at Coppet, because it was there and not in drawing-rooms that this noble-hearted woman showed herself what she was. Always attracted by high intellect, he became intimate with Count Rossi, entertaining so great a sympathy for him, that often when the count was about to leave him and return to Geneva, Lord Byron retained him by his entreaties. As to the natives of Geneva, as he detested Calvinism, and knew that they believed the calumnies wickedly spread abroad against him by some of his country-people, he did not see them often, for he did not like them. "What are you going to do in that den of honest men," said he one day to Count Rossi, who was preparing to leave. On arriving at Milan, he immediately adopted the style of life usual there. Every evening he went to the theatre, occupying M. de Breme's box, together with a group of young and clever men; among them I may name Silvio Pellico, Abbe de Breme, Monti, Porro, and Stendhal (Beyle), who have all unanimously testified to his amiability, social temper, and fascinating conversation. At Venice, he allowed himself to be presented in the most hospitable mansions of the nobility; particularly distinguishing those where Countess Albruzzi and Countess Benzoni presided, for he always went to one or other of these ladies after leaving the theatre. Nor did he disdain, during the early part of his stay at Venice, even the official salon of the Comtesse de Goetz. But his aversion for Austrian oppression and the perfidy of the official press soon obliged him to withdraw; for the oppressors of Venice, knowing him to be a formidable enemy, sought to discredit him by spreading all sorts of calumnious reports against him and his private character.[121]

It has been seen in his "Life in Italy" how he divided his time at Venice, and the impression he made wherever there had not been a preconceived purpose of judging him unfavorably. In the morning, his first walk was always directed toward the convent of the Armenian Fathers, in the island of San Lazzaro. He went there to study their language; and these good monks conceived an extreme affection for him. Afterward he would cross the Laguna going to the Lido, where his stables were. He was accustomed to ride on horseback with the different friends who chanced to arrive from England: such as Hobhouse, Monk Lewis, Rose, Kinnaird, Shelley, and more particularly still with Mr. Hoppner, Consul-general for England at Venice, a man of the noblest stamp, much beloved by Lord Byron, and who, in the account he has left of this intercourse, can not find words adequate for expressing all he wished to say of the charming social qualities Lord Byron displayed at Venice. "People have no idea," says he, "of Lord Byron's gayety, vivacity, and amiability." He followed Italian customs, went every evening to the theatre, where his box was always filled with friends and acquaintances; and after that, generally spent the remainder of the evening or night, according to the then custom of Venice, in the most distinguished circles of the town, principally at the houses of Countess Albruzzi and Countess Benzoni, where he was not only welcome, but so much liked, that these salons were voted dull when he did not appear. Lastly, his social qualities and amiability gave so much pleasure at Venice, and the inhabitants were so desirous of keeping him among them, that his departure for Ravenna actually stirred up malice, quite foreign to the usual simplicity characterizing Venetian society.[122]

The friends who came to see him there,--Hobhouse, Lewis, Kinnaird, Shelley, Rose, etc.,--succeeded each other at short intervals, and their arrivals were so many fetes for him. But while he was leading this sociable life, vulgar tourists, who had not been able to succeed in getting presented to him, took their revenge, by repeating in every direction fables they had gleaned from the gondoliers for a few pence--viz., that Lord Byron was a misanthrope and hated his countrymen. Mr. Hoppner, who was an ocular witness of the life which Lord Byron led at Venice, and whose testimony is so worthy of respect, told Moore how much annoyance Lord Byron endured from English travellers, bent on following him everywhere, eyeglass in hand, staring at him with impertinence or affectation during his walks, getting into his palace under some pretext, and even penetrating into his bedroom.

"Thence," says he, "his bitterness toward them. The sentiments he has expressed in a note termed cynical, as well as the misanthropical expressions to be found in his first poems, are not at all his natural sentiments."

And then he adds that he is very certain "never to have met with in his lifetime more real goodness than in Lord Byron."

Moore, also, is indignant at all these perfidious inventions:--

"Among those minor misrepresentations," says he, "of which it was Lord Byron's fate to be the victim, advantage was at this time taken of his professed distaste to the English, to accuse him of acts of inhospitality, and even rudeness, toward some of his fellow-countrymen. How far different was his treatment of all who ever visited him, many grateful testimonies might be collected to prove; but I shall here content myself with selecting a few extracts from an account given to me by Mr. Joy, of a visit which, in company with another English gentleman, he paid to the noble poet, during the summer of 1817, at his villa on the banks of the Brenta. After mentioning the various civilities they had experienced from Lord Byron; and, among others, his having requested them to name their own day for dining with him:--'We availed ourselves,' says Mr. Joy, 'of this considerate courtesy by naming the day fixed for our return to Padua, when our route would lead us to his door; and we were welcomed with all the cordiality which was to be expected from so friendly an invitation. Such traits of kindness in such a man deserve to be recorded on account of the numerous slanders heaped upon him by some of the tribes of tourists, who resented, as a personal affront, his resolution to avoid their impertinent inroads upon his retirement.

"'So far from any appearance of indiscriminate aversion to his countrymen, his inquiries about his friends in England were most anxious and particular.

"'After regaling us with an excellent dinner (in which, by-the-by, a very English joint of roast-beef showed that he did not extend his antipathies to all John Bullisms), he took us in his carriage some miles on our route toward Padua, after apologizing to my fellow-traveller for the separation, on the score of his anxiety to hear all he could of his friends in England: and I quitted him with a confirmed impression of the strong ardor and sincerity of his attachment to those by whom he did not fancy himself slighted or ill-treated!'"

It has been seen elsewhere[123] that Mr. Rose, speaking of Lord Byron's sociable temper at Venice, said his presence sufficed to diffuse joy and gayety in the salons he frequented."

When any worthy persons among his countrymen arrived, his house, his time, his purse were at their service.

For further proof, let people only read the details Captain Basil Hall gave Murray of his intercourse with Byron.

"His witty, clever conversation," says Shelley, who visited him at Venice in 1817, "enlivened our winter nights and taught me to know my own soul. Day dawned upon us, ere we perceived with surprise that we were still listening to him."

When he went from Venice to Romagna, he passed by Ferrara. But though eager to arrive where his heart summoned him, he did not fail delivering the letters of introduction given him by friends. At Ferrara he made the acquaintance of a noble family, and went into society there, speaking of it afterward in the most flattering manner.[124]

At Ravenna, he frequented all the salons where he was introduced; and at the request of Count G----, became the cavaliere servente of the young countess. According to the custom of the country, he accompanied her to assemblies or theatres, or spent his evenings in her family circle. At Pisa, he held aloof from the world, because his friends, the Gambas, who had taken refuge there in consequence of the troubles and political enmities existing in Romagna, did not wish to mix in society. But he passed all his evenings regularly with them, either at their house, or sometimes dispensing hospitality at home with the greatest affability and kindness.

"I believe I can not give a better proof of the sociability of Lord Byron's disposition," says Medwin, "than by speaking of the gayety that prevailed at his Wednesday dinner-parties at Pisa. His table, when alone, was more than frugal; but on these occasions, every sort of wine, and all the delicacies of the season, were served up in grand display, worthy of the best houses. I never knew any one who did the honors of his house with greater affability and hospitality than Lord Byron.

"The vivacity of his wit, the warmth of his eloquence, are things not to be expressed. Could we forget the tone of his voice, or his gesture, adding charm to all he said?"[125]

At Pisa he generally received in the morning all those who wished to see him, and among others several of his countrymen, mostly acquaintances or friends of Shelley, who also went to see him every day. In the afternoon he rode out on horseback, still followed by his countrymen, and by the young Count Gamba; amusing himself with them till evening came, in shooting exercises or in long excursions. We have already said how he employed his evenings. In fact, he was so seldom alone that people could not understand how he found time for writing. He did find it, however, and without subtracting from social intercourse. Nor was it solely because he composed so rapidly, but likewise because he gave to occupation the hours that young men are wont to pass in idle, not to say vicious, amusements. When he went from Pisa to a villa situated on the hills that overlook Leghorn and the Mediterranean, in order to pass the great heats of summer there, an American painter, Mr. West, who had been commissioned by an American society, requested him to sit for his picture. Lord Byron could not give him much time, and the portrait was not successful. But Mr. West, who, if not a good artist, possessed a just and cultivated mind, drew a picture of his moral character as true as it was flattering,--his pen doing him better service than his brush:--

"I returned to Leghorn," says he, "hardly able to persuade myself that this was the proud misanthrope whose character had ever appeared shrouded in gloom and mystery. For I never remember having met with gentler, more attractive manners in my life. When I told him the idea I had previously formed, what I had thought about him, he was extremely amused, laughed a great deal, and said, 'Don't you find that I am like every body else?'"

But Mr. Rogers thought him better than every body else, for he says:--

"From all I had observed, I left him under the impression that he possessed an excellent heart, which had been completely misunderstood, perhaps on account of his mobility and apparent likeness of manner. Indeed he took a capricious pleasure in bringing out this contrast between himself and others."

On quitting Pisa he went to Genoa, and there produced the same impression on all who saw him until he left for Greece.

At this last stage of his life, the testimonies as to his amiable, genial nature are so unanimous, from the time of his arrival to the day of his death, that we can not refrain from quoting the language used by some of those who saw him then.

"When I was presented to him," writes Mr. D---- to Colonel Stanhope, "I was particularly struck with his extremely graceful and affable manners, so opposite to what I had expected from the reputation given him, and which painted him as morose, gloomy, almost cynical."[126]

"I took leave of him," writes Mr. Finlay, who was presented to Lord Byron at Cephalonia, "quite enchanted, charmed to find a great man so agreeable."[127]

Colonel Stanhope, afterward Lord Harrington, who had been sent to Greece by the committee, and who only knew Lord Byron a few months before his death, notwithstanding great discrepancies of idea and character, says frankly, that with regard to social relations, no one could ever have been so agreeable; that there was no pedantry or affectation about him, but, on the contrary, that he was like a child for simplicity and joyousness.

"In the evening all the English, who had not, like Colonel Stanhope, turned Odyssean, assembled at his house, and till late at night enjoyed the charm of his conversation. His character so much differed from what I had been induced to imagine from the relations of travellers, that either their reports must have been inaccurate, or his character must have totally changed after his departure from Genoa. It would be difficult, indeed impossible, to convey an idea of the pleasure his conversation afforded. Among his works that which may perhaps be more particularly regarded as exhibiting the mirror of his conversation, and the spirit which animated it, is 'Don Juan.' The following lines from Shakspeare seem as if prophetically written for him:--

"'Biron they call him; but a merrier man, Within the limits of becoming mirth, I never spent an hour's talk withal: His eye begets occasion for his wit; For every object that the one doth catch, The other turns to a mirth-moving jest; While his fair tongue (conceit's expositor) Delivers in such apt and gracious words, That aged ears play truant at his tales, And younger, hearing, are quite ravished; So sweet and voluble is his discourse.'"

Millingen says:--

"His wonderful mnemonic faculties, the rich and varied store with which he had furnished his mind, his lively, brilliant, and ever-busy imagination, his deep acquaintance with the world, owing to his sagacious penetration, and the advantageous position in which, through his birth and other circumstances, he had been placed, conjoined to the highly mercurial powers of his wit, rendered his conversation peculiarly interesting; enhanced, too, as it was by the charm of his fascinating manners. Far from being the surly, taciturn misanthrope generally imagined, I always found him dwelling on the lightest and merriest subjects; carefully shunning discussions and whatever might give rise to unpleasing reflections. Almost every word with him was a jest; and he possessed the talent of passing from subject to subject with a lightness, an ease, and a grace, that could with difficulty be matched. Communicative to a degree that astonished us, and might not unfrequently be termed indiscretion, he related anecdotes of himself and his friends which he might as well have kept secret."

Several persons, influenced by the stories circulated against Lord Byron, asked Dr. Kennedy whether his manners and exterior did not give the idea of a demon incarnate. "Quite the contrary," replied Kennedy, "his appearance and manners give the idea of a man with an excellent heart, both benevolent and feeling, and he has an amiable, sympathetic physiognomy. The impression he made on me was that of a man of refined politeness and great affability, united to much gayety, vivacity, and benevolence. His cordial affability even went so far that one was often obliged to recall his rank and fame, in order not to be involuntarily led away by his manner into too great familiarity with him."[128]

A short time after Lord Byron's death, one of the first English reviews published an article on him entitled "Personal Character of Lord Byron." It was written by a personage who had had several occasions, during Lord Byron's last sojourn in Greece, of observing his habits, feelings and opinions. Though often jealous of Lord Byron's influence in the country, nevertheless when he could get rid of these bad feelings, he expressed himself with tolerable justice:--

"Lord Byron's demeanor," says he, "was perhaps the most affable and courteous I ever met with."

When he was in a good humor, and desirous to be on fair terms with any one, there was a great charm, an irresistible fascination in his manner. Though very gentle, it was always gay, with an air of great frankness and generosity, qualities most real in him. "Lord Byron," he adds, "was known for a sort of poetic misanthrope; but that existed much more in public imagination than in reality. He liked society, and was extremely kind and amiable, when calm. Instead of being gloomy, he was, on the contrary, of a very gay disposition, and was fond of jesting; it even amused him to witness comic scenes, such as quarrels between vulgar buffoons, to make them drink, or lead them on in any other way to show their drolleries. In his writings, certainly, he loved to paint a character more or less the work of his imagination, and which therefore was assigned to himself by public opinion: that is, a proud, haughty being, despising all men, and disgusted with the human species. His liking for bandits and pirates may have sprung from some tendencies of his nature, some circumstances in his life; but there was not the smallest resemblance between the poet and the corsair. Lord Byron's heart was full of kindness and generosity, he took pride in splendid acts of beneficence: to change the position of some among his fellow-men, and make them exchange misery for unexpected good fortune, was for him the dearest exercise of his faculties. No one ever sympathized more deeply with the joys he could create."

The same biographer remarks that one great error of Lord Byron's youth was to count upon gratitude and devotedness proportionate to his own, and that most of his accusations against human nature originated with this mistake. And then he adds:--

"But his sentiments, in accordance with his nature, far from obeying the false direction his prejudices and erroneous opinions would have given, always made him, on the contrary, love his fellow-men with a warmth that quite excluded misanthropy. Still this natural ardor rendered him extremely sensitive to neglect from those he loved, especially in early youth, when he was led by the fault of an individual to generalize blame against mankind. He relates somewhere, with merited contempt, that one of his friends would accompany a female relative to her milliner, instead of coming to take leave of him when he was about to leave England for a long time. The truth is that no one ever loved his neighbor as much as Lord Byron. Sympathy, respect, affection, attention, were perpetual wants with him. He was really disgusted and sad when they failed him. But then he did not reason much, he only felt like a poet. It was his business to feed all these discontents, for the public likes nothing so much in poetry as disdain, contempt, derision, indignation, and particularly a kind of proud mockery, which forms the line of transition from or distinguishes a disordered state of imagination from madness. Consequently, seeing that this sort of tone pleased the public, when he began to write again he encouraged that style, his first care being to collect, like Jupiter, the darkest clouds."

The same biographer also tries to insinuate that the romantic interest excited by a handsome young man, full of melancholy and mystery, may have influenced Lord Byron's choice of heroes in his early poems; for, says he, it is not every one who can be weary of the most exquisite enjoyments of society, and to be thus sated a man must have been greatly prized by beauty and wealth. These reflections and explanations are arbitrary, and not impartial. But even if Lord Byron, at twenty-one years of age, did borrow ideas and sentiments not really his, by way of producing poetic effect, we must nevertheless acknowledge that, even in this order of sentiments, part still were genuine and real. Like all young men, Lord Byron had entered the world armed with the notions preceptors deem it necessary to inculcate on their disciples regarding generosity, disinterestedness, liberty, honor, patriotism, etc. When he saw that almost all he had thus been taught was mere illusion, a theme for declamation, and that people in the world very rarely act on such principles; then, no doubt, with his exquisite sensibility, and elevated standard of ideal, he must have felt himself more disgusted than any one else, and must have believed he had a right to despise the human race. Especially would this have been the case after he had personally suffered from cruel satire, from the conduct of his relative and guardian, Lord Carlisle, from the lightness of a few women, and the lukewarmness of some few friends. But, while owing to this fault in education, many young men subjected to like trials become sensualists, and others, convinced of the falsities that have been inculcated on them, conclude there is no better system of morality than to seek after place, power, and profit, and become voluntary instruments in the hands of the world's oppressors, Lord Byron's soul revolted at it. Too noble by nature to stoop, and confiding also in his genius, he became a poet with a slight tinge of misanthropy in his mind, but that could never reach unto his heart, that never modified his amiability in society, and which at a later period, when experience of life made him reflect more on the nature of his own sentiments and the weakness of humanity, became transformed into a sweet philosophy, full of indulgence for every human defect. This generous disposition is to be found at the base of all his poems written in Italy.

Another reproach brought against Lord Byron is that he did not paint the good side of human nature. People showed as much indignation at this as if he had betrayed some secret, or calumniated some innocent person. A wondrous susceptibility, assuredly, with regard to the imperfections of our common nature, as tardy as strange. One would think, in reading the reproaches addressed to Lord Byron, that those who made them had quite forgotten how, from all time and in all languages, since man commented on man, our poor human nature has not generally been treated with much respect. Putting to one side moralists, and still more pessimists, have not the Holy Scriptures and all the Fathers of the Church, used the most mortifying language concerning the perversity and corruption of our species? As regards complaints and avowals humiliating for our nature, could there be any more eloquent than those of St. Augustine? Did not Pascal almost wish man to understand that he is an incomprehensible monster? Lord Byron would not have called man a monster; but shocked at his pride he would willingly have said with Pascal, "If he raises himself, I will lower him; if he abuses himself, I will raise him up." In his drama of "Cain," where Lucifer is conducting Cain through space and worlds, "Where is earth?" asks Cain. "'Tis now beyond thee, less in the universe than thou in it," answers Lucifer. Byron always wished to make man feel his littleness. It is true that, while saying the same thing, a notable difference exists between Lord Byron's thought and that of great Christian souls, who humble man in order to make him see that his sole hope is in supernatural power. Lord Byron follows the same road, but his starting-point and his goal are not the same. When Lord Byron humbles man, it proceeds from a soul-felt want of truth and justice. He sought truth by a natural law of his mind, expressed it unflinchingly, and thus yielded a pleasure to his heart and understanding. But if the impulse that sometimes provoked his severe or contemptuous words was not the sublime one of Christian orthodoxy, that sees no remedy for human depravity save in God alone, it was still farther off from belonging to the school of the pessimists, of La Rochefoucault in particular, who, content with asserting evil, neither saw nor sought for a remedy anywhere. Lord Byron never despaired of mankind. In early youth, especially, he thought,--not like a Utopist, or even a poet, but like a sensible, humane, generous man, who deems that many of the evils that afflict his species, morally and physically, might be alleviated by better laws, under whose influence more goodness, sincerity, and real virtue might be substituted for the hypocrisy and other vices that now deprave our nature. Lord Byron saw in many vices and littlenesses the work of man rather than of nature. It was man corrupted by society, rather than by nature, that he condemned.

If religious hopes did not furnish him with an escape from the cruel sentence, philosophical hopes saved him from being overwhelmed by it. Was that an error?--an illusion? In any case, it was a noble one; sufficient to raise up an insurmountable barrier between him and La Rochefoucault. For a time, it is true, in his first youth, he also seemed to be under the prestige La Rochefoucault exercised over so many minds, through his "Maxims." The elegant manner in which they were written, the clever tone of observation they displayed, boldly laying down the result in the shape of axioms, was well calculated to lead a youthful mind astray, and make a relative appear an absolute truth. For a while, Lord Byron also seemed to confound the self-love that merges into real hateful egotism, with that which constitutes the principle of life, and which, under the influence of heart and intelligence, claims the high name of virtue. He seemed to doubt of many things, and to be uneasy at the best impulses of his heart. We may remember that he accused himself of selfishness, because he took pleasure in the exercise of amiable virtues. But then that was only the passing error of a youthful mind, filled with an ideal of excellence too high for reality; and therefore coming into rude contact with deceptions and sorrows. In those days, recalling the fine pictures of life and mankind that had been presented to him as realities, especially at his first onset, and perceiving how different things actually were, seeing men pursue their fellow-men, and ascribe vices to the good and virtues to the bad, not even finding in his friends the qualities that distinguished his own heart, indignant at seeing so many persons sought after for their attractions, despite the vices that defaced them, his soul revolted at the sight--saddened too--and he exclaimed, sorrowfully, in his memoranda:--"Yes, La Rochefoucault is right."

An illusion might find place in Lord Byron's mind, but it could not last; and if people will read with attention what he has written, they will soon understand the great difference existing between him and the author of the "Maxims." Without even speaking of that which separates prose from poetry, an axiom from a hasty expression, grave from gay, maxims from satire, the difference is still enormous. Lord Byron had not received from nature, any more than the author of the "Maxims," the gift of seeing things in a roseate hue. On the contrary, from his habit of profound observation, he too often saw them enveloped in sombre colors. But, on the other hand, he had received such a great gift of perspicacity and exactness that things false and fictitious could no more resist his glance than fog can resist the rays of the sun. La Rochefoucault is certainly an admirable painter, but he never takes a likeness otherwise than by profile. Just as our satellite turns round our planet, only showing us its volcanoes and calcined summits, and leaving us in ignorance of the other side; just so did La Rochefoucault turn around human nature. It only showed him one side,--the most barren and most unhealthy, and that alone did he describe. Still, his description is made with such art and nicety, and has so much charm about it, that it appears correct at first sight, and, indeed, so it is relatively; but, nevertheless, by dint of omission and generalization, it is false, since it would fain impose a part upon us for the whole. In his voyage of exploration through the windings of the human heart the author of the "Maxims" stops midway, and comes back over the same ground. It would appear as if his mind lacked strength to go through more than half the circle of truth. But Lord Byron, through the vigor and elasticity of his faculties, after having penetrated into the dark regions where only evil is perceived, and gone through the whole circle, raised himself up into that pure, serene atmosphere where goodness and virtue inhabit, and he also could say, with Dante, coming out of the last infernal circle,--

"Alfin tornammo a riveder le stelle."

La Rochefoucault always rails against mankind, without ever finding out any good. Lord Byron, on the contrary, sees both good and evil. He points out the latter, often sadly, and sometimes with light jests; but he is always happy to acknowledge seriously the existence of good, and to proclaim that, despite all hinderances, beautiful souls do exist, practicing all kinds of virtue; thus proving that, however rare, virtue to him is still a reality, and no illusion. If, in his burlesque, satirical poems, wishing especially to stigmatize vice in high quarters, he has painted wicked women and queens (Catherine and Elizabeth), did he not likewise refresh our souls with the enchanting portraits of Angiolina (the wife of Faliero), and of Josephine (the wife of Werner). If he made merry at the expense of coquettish, weak, hypocritical women (like Adeline, for instance), has he not consoled us by painting, in far greater number, angels of loving devotedness, like Myrrha, Adah, Medora, Haidee, and in general all his delightful female creations? Are not all his heroes even, more or less, constant, devoted, ready to sacrifice every thing to the sincerity of their feelings--devoted love, continued even in the heart of Cain toward his Adah? In "Heaven and Earth" the angels gave up celestial happiness, and exposed themselves to every evil, in order not to abandon those who loved them. Don Juan himself loved unselfishly. Bitter remembrances, reflections arising from the conduct of friends, made him, it is true, doubt the existence of friendship, generalize, blame sometimes, and write those fine stanzas in the fourteenth canto of "Don Juan:"--

"Without a friend, what were humanity, To hunt our errors up with a good grace? Consoling us with--'Would you had thought twice! Ah! if you had but follow'd my advice!'

XLVIII.

"O Job! you had two friends: one's quite enough, Especially when we are ill at ease; They're but bad pilots when the weather's rough, Doctors less famous for their cures than fees. Let no man grumble when his friends fall off. As they will do like leaves at the first breeze: When your affairs come round, one way or 'tother, Go to the coffee-house, and take another.

XLIX.

"But this is not my maxim; had it been, Some heart-aches had been spared me: yet I care not-- I would not be a tortoise in his screen Of stubborn shell, which waves and weather wear not; 'Tis better on the whole to have felt and seen That which humanity may bear, or bear not; 'Twill teach discernment to the sensitive, And not to pour their ocean in a sieve.

L.

"Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe, Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast, Is that portentous phrase, 'I told you so,' Utter'd by friends, those prophets of the past, Who, 'stead of saying what you now should do, Own they foresaw that you would fall at last, And solace your slight lapse 'gainst 'bonos mores,' With a long memorandum of old stories."

On looking into his own heart, Lord Byron no longer doubted the existence of sincere friendships, devoid of all ironical selfishness, since he wrote that forty-ninth stanza, where he says that such is not his maxim, or his heart would have had less to suffer.

Did he not make love of country incarnate in that admirable type (the young Venetian Foscari); too fine a type, perhaps, though historical, to be understood by every one. And did he not, through other types, equally prove his belief in all the noblest, most virtuous sentiments of our soul? In fine, if he recognized littleness in man, he recognized greatness likewise. All his writings, as well as his conduct through life, belied continuously and broadly a few poetical expressions and mystifications which drew down upon him, in common with other calumnies, that of having unjustly accused humanity. As to the misanthropy of his early youth, it was of so slight a nature that it only passed through his mind, and occasionally rested on his pen; but it always evaporated in words, and especially in his verses. For his life and actions ever showed that such a sentiment was foreign to his nature.

And since its attacks[129] always took place under the pressure of some great injustice, some excess of suffering imposed by the strong on the weak and inoffensive, we must also add that there was in this pretended misanthropy more real goodness and humanity than in all the elegies, songs, meditations, Messenian odes, etc., of all those who blamed him.

Having studied Lord Byron at all periods of his life, in his relations with society, and in his love of solitude, we have seen him alternately placed in contact with others, and then more directly with himself; now correcting the inconveniences that flow from solitude, by seeking the amusements of youth and society, and then making solitary meditation follow on the useful field of observation sought in the world, and thus he drew profit from both, without ever suffering himself to be exclusively engrossed by one or the other. The enervating atmosphere of drawing-rooms remained innocuous for him; he came out from them with a mind as virile and independent as if he had never breathed it, keeping all his ideas strong and bold, just and humane, as they were before. But the consequences of this rare equilibrium, which he was enabled to maintain between a worldly and a solitary life, were very great, as regarded his fame, if not his happiness; for he gained thereby an experience and a knowledge of the human heart quite wonderful, at an age when the first pages of the Book of Life have in general scarcely been read, so that, in perusing his writings, one might imagine that he had already gone through a long career. Lastly, as afterward not the least trace of this pretended misanthropy remained, he might have repeated what Bernardin de Saint Pierre said of a certain melancholy that we are scarcely ever free from in youth, and which was compared, in his presence, to the small-pox:--"I also have had that malady, but it left no traces behind it."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 119: See chapter on "Melancholy and Gayety."]

[Footnote 120: M. Nisard.]

[Footnote 121: See his "Life in Italy."]

[Footnote 122: See his "Life in Italy."]

[Footnote 123: See chapter on "Gayety and Melancholy."]

[Footnote 124: See his "Life in Italy."]

[Footnote 125: Medwin, vol. ii. p. 138.]

[Footnote 126: Appendix to Parry's work.]

[Footnote 127: Ibid. p. 210.]

[Footnote 128: See Kennedy.]

[Footnote 129: See chapter on "Melancholy."]

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