Lord Byron in Greece

 

 

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CHAPTER XXX

Reflections on his domestic Verses—Consideration of his Works—“The Corsair”—Probabilities of the Character and Incidents of the Story—On the Difference between poetical Invention and moral Experience: illustrated by the Difference between the Genius of Shakespeare and that of Byron

The task just concluded may disappoint the expectations of some of my readers, but I would rather have said less than so much, could so little have been allowed; for I have never been able to reconcile to my notions of propriety, the exposure of domestic concerns which the world has no right claim to know, and can only urge the plea of curiosity for desiring to see explained.  The scope of my undertaking comprehends only the public and intellectual character of Lord Byron; every word that I have found it necessary to say respecting his private affairs has been set down with reluctance; nor should I have touched so freely on his failings, but that the consequences have deeply influenced his poetical conceptions.

There is, however, one point connected with his conjugal differences which cannot be overlooked, nor noticed without animadversion.  He was too active himself in bespeaking the public sympathy against his lady.  It is true that but for that error the world might never have seen the verses written by him on the occasion; and perhaps it was the friends who were about him at the time who ought chiefly to be blamed for having given them circulation: but in saying this, I am departing from the rule I had prescribed to myself, while I ought only to have remarked that the compositions alluded to, both the Fare-thee-well and the Anathema on Mrs Charlemont, are splendid corroborations of the metaphysical fact which it is the main object of this work to illustrate, namely, that Byron was only original and truly great when he wrote from the dictates of his own breast, and described from the suggestions of things he had seen.  When his imagination found not in his subject uses for the materials of his experience, and opportunities to embody them, it seemed to be no longer the same high and mysterious faculty that so ruled the tides of the feelings of others.  He then appeared a more ordinary poet——a skilful verse-maker.  The necromancy which held the reader spellbound became ineffectual; and the charm and the glory which interested so intensely, and shone so radiantly on his configurations from realities, all failed and faded; for his genius dealt not with airy fancies, but had its power and dominion amid the living and the local of the actual world.

I shall now return to the consideration of his works, and the first in order is The Corsair, published in 1814.  He seems to have been perfectly sensible that this beautiful composition was in his best peculiar manner.  It is indeed a pirate’s isle, peopled with his own creatures.

It has been alleged that Lord Byron was indebted to Sir Walter Scott’s poem of Rokeby for the leading incidents of The Corsair, but the resemblance is not to me very obvious: besides, the whole style of the poem is so strikingly in his own manner, that even had he borrowed the plan, it was only as a thread to string his own original conceptions upon; the beauty and brilliancy of them could not be borrowed, and are not imitations.

There were two islands in the Archipelago, when Lord Byron was in Greece, considered as the chief haunts of the pirates, Stampalia, and a long narrow island between Cape Colonna and Zea.  Jura also was a little tainted in its reputation.  I think, however, from the description, that the pirate’s isle of The Corsair is the island off Cape Colonna.  It is a rude, rocky mass.  I know not to what particular Coron, if there be more than one, the poet alludes; for the Coron of the Morea is neighbour to, if not in, the Mainote territory, a tract of country which never submitted to the Turks, and was exempted from the jurisdiction of Mussulman officers by the payment of an annual tribute.  The Mainotes themselves are all pirates and robbers.  If it be in that Coron that Byron has placed Seyd the pasha, it must be attributed to inadvertency.  His Lordship was never there, nor in any part of Maina; nor does he describe the place, a circumstance which of itself goes far to prove the inadvertency.  It is, however, only in making it the seat of a Turkish pasha that any error has been committed.  In working out the incidents of the poem where descriptions of scenery are given, they relate chiefly to Athens and its neighbourhood.  In themselves these descriptions are executed with an exquisite felicity; but they are brought in without any obvious reason wherefore.  In fact, they appear to have been written independently of the poem, and are patched on “shreds of purple” which could have been spared.

The character of Conrad the Corsair may be described as a combination of the warrior of Albania and a naval officer—Childe Harold mingled with the hero of The Giaour.

   A man of loneliness and mystery,
Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh;
Robust, but not Herculean, to the sight,
No giant frame sets forth his common height;
Yet in the whole, who paused to look again
Saw more than marks the crowd of vulgar men:
They gaze and marvel how, and still confess
That thus it is, but why they cannot guess.
Sun-burnt his cheek, his forehead high and pale,
The sable curls in wild profusion veil.
And oft perforce his rising lip reveals
The haughtier thought it curbs, but scarce conceals:
Though smooth his voice, and calm his general mien,
Still seems there something he would not have seen.
His features’ deepening lines and varying hue
At times attracted, yet perplex’d the view,
As if within that murkiness of mind
Work’d feelings fearful, and yet undefined:
Such might he be that none could truly tell,
Too close inquiry his stern glance could quell.
There breathed but few whose aspect could defy
The full encounter of his searching eye;
He had the skill, when cunning gaze to seek
To probe his heart and watch his changing cheek,
At once the observer’s purpose to espy,
And on himself roll back his scrutiny,
Lest he to Conrad rather should betray
Some secret thought, than drag that chief’s to day.

There was a laughing devil in his sneer
That raised emotions both of rage and fear;
And where his frown of hatred darkly fell
Hope withering fled, and mercy sigh’d, farewell.

It will be allowed that, in this portrait, some of the darker features and harsher lineaments of Byron himself are very evident, but with a more fixed sternness than belonged to him; for it was only by fits that he could put on such severity.  Conrad is, however, a higher creation than any which he had previously described.  Instead of the listlessness of Childe Harold, he is active and enterprising; such as the noble pilgrim would have been, but for the satiety which had relaxed his energies.  There is also about him a solemnity different from the animation of the Giaour—a penitential despair arising from a cause undisclosed.  The Giaour, though wounded and fettered, and laid in a dungeon, would not have felt as Conrad is supposed to feel in that situation.  The following bold and terrific verses, descriptive of the maelstrom agitations of remorse, could not have been appropriately applied to the despair of grief, the predominant source of emotion in The Giaour.

There is a war, a chaos of the mind
When all its elements convulsed combined,
Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force,
And gnashing with impenitent remorse.
That juggling fiend who never spake before,
But cries, “I warn’d thee,” when the deed is o’er;
Vain voice, the spirit burning, but unbent,
May writhe, rebel—the weak alone repent.

The character of Conrad is undoubtedly finely imagined; as the painters would say, it is in the highest style of art, and brought out with sublime effect; but still it is only another phase of the same portentous meteor, that was nebulous in Childe Harold, and fiery in The Giaour.  To the safe and shop-resorting inhabitants of Christendom, The Corsair seems to present many improbabilities; nevertheless, it is true to nature, and in every part of the Levant the traveller meets with individuals whose air and physiognomy remind him of Conrad.  The incidents of the story, also, so wild and extravagant to the snug and legal notions of England, are not more in keeping with the character, than they are in accordance with fact and reality.  The poet suffers immeasurable injustice, when it is attempted to determine the probability of the wild scenes and wilder adventurers of his tales, by the circumstances and characters of the law-regulated system of our diurnal affairs.  Probability is a standard formed by experience, and it is not surprising that the anchorets of libraries should object to the improbability of The Corsair, and yet acknowledge the poetical power displayed in the composition; for it is a work which could only have been written by one who had himself seen or heard on the spot of transactions similar to those he has described.  No course of reading could have supplied materials for a narration so faithfully descriptive of the accidents to which an Ægean pirate is exposed as The Corsair.  Had Lord Byron never been out of England, the production of a work so appropriate in reflection, so wild in spirit, and so bold in invention, as in that case it would have been, would have entitled him to the highest honours of original conception, or been rejected as extravagant; considered as the result of things seen, and of probabilities suggested, by transactions not uncommon in the region where his genius gathered the ingredients of its sorceries, more than the half of its merits disappear, while the other half brighten with the lustre of truth.

The manners, the actions, and the incidents were new to the English mind; but to the inhabitant of the Levant they have long been familiar, and the traveller who visits that region will hesitate to admit that Lord Byron possessed those creative powers, and that discernment of dark bosoms for which he is so much celebrated; because he will see there how little of invention was necessary to form such heroes as Conrad, and how much the actual traffic of life and trade is constantly stimulating enterprise and bravery.  But let it not, therefore, be supposed, that I would undervalue either the genius of the poet, or the merits of the poem, in saying so, for I do think a higher faculty has been exerted in The Corsair than in Childe Harold.  In the latter, only actual things are described, freshly and vigorously as they were seen, and feelings expressed eloquently as they were felt; but in the former, the talent of combination has been splendidly employed.  The one is a view from nature, the other is a composition both from nature and from history.

Lara, which appeared soon after The Corsair, is an evident supplement to it; the description of the hero corresponds in person and character with Conrad; so that the remarks made on The Corsair apply, in all respects, to Lara.  The poem itself is perhaps, in elegance, superior; but the descriptions are not so vivid, simply because they are more indebted to imagination.  There is one of them, however, in which the lake and abbey of Newstead are dimly shadowed, equal in sweetness and solemnity to anything the poet has ever written.

It was the night, and Lara’s glassy stream
The stars are studding each with imaged beam:
So calm, the waters scarcely seem to stray,
And yet they glide, like happiness, away;
Reflecting far and fairy-like from high
The immortal lights that live along the sky;
Its banks are fringed with many a goodly tree,
And flowers the fairest that may feast the bee:
Such in her chaplet infant Dian wove,
And innocence would offer to her love;
These deck the shore, the waves their channel make
In windings bright and mazy, like the snake.
All was so still, so soft in earth and air,
You scarce would start to meet a spirit there,
Secure that naught of evil could delight
To walk in such a scene, in such a night!
It was a moment only for the good:
So Lara deemed: nor longer there he stood;
But turn’d in silence to his castle-gate:
Such scene his soul no more could contemplate:
Such scene reminded him of other days,
Of skies more cloudless, moons of purer blaze;
Of nights more soft and frequent, hearts that now—
No, no! the storm may beat upon his brow
Unfelt, unsparing; but a night like this,
A night of beauty, mock’d such breast as his.

He turn’d within his solitary hall,
And his high shadow shot along the wall:
There were the painted forms of other times—
’Twas all they left of virtues or of crimes,
Save vague tradition; and the gloomy vaults
That hid their dust, their foibles, and their faults,
And half a column of the pompous page,
That speeds the spacious tale from age to age;
Where history’s pen its praise or blame supplies
And lies like truth, and still most truly lies;
He wand’ring mused, and as the moonbeam shone
Through the dim lattice o’er the floor of stone,
And the high-fretted roof and saints that there
O’er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer;
Reflected in fantastic figures grew
Like life, but not like mortal life to view;
His bristling locks of sable, brow of gloom,
And the wide waving of his shaken plume
Glanced like a spectre’s attributes, and gave
His aspect all that terror gives the grave.

That Byron wrote best when he wrote of himself and of his own, has probably been already made sufficiently apparent.  In this respect he stands alone and apart from all other poets, and there will be occasion to show, that this peculiarity extended much farther over all his works, than merely to those which may be said to have required him to be thus personal.  The great distinction, indeed, of his merit consists in that singularity.  Shakspeare, in drawing the materials of his dramas from tales and history has, with wonderful art, given from his own invention and imagination the fittest and most appropriate sentiments and language; and admiration at the perfection with which he has accomplished this, can never be exhausted.  The difference between Byron and Shakspeare consists in the curious accident, if it may be so called, by which the former was placed in circumstances which taught him to feel in himself the very sentiments that he has ascribed to his characters.  Shakspeare created the feelings of his, and with such excellence, that they are not only probable to the situations, but give to the personifications the individuality of living persons.  Byron’s are scarcely less so; but with him there was no invention, only experience, and when he attempts to express more than he has himself known, he is always comparatively feeble.

CHAPTER XXXI

Byron determines to reside abroad—Visits the Plain of Waterloo—State of his Feelings

From different incidental expressions in his correspondence it is sufficiently evident that Byron, before his marriage, intended to reside abroad.  In his letter to me of the 11th December, 1813, he distinctly states this intention, and intimates that he then thought of establishing his home in Greece.  It is not therefore surprising that, after his separation from Lady Byron, he should have determined to carry this intention into effect; for at that period, besides the calumny heaped upon him from all quarters, the embarrassment of his affairs, and the retaliatory satire, all tended to force him into exile; he had no longer any particular tie to bind him to England.

On the 25th of April, 1816, he sailed for Ostend, and resumed the composition of Childe Harold, it may be said, from the moment of his embarkation.  In it, however, there is no longer the fiction of an imaginary character stalking like a shadow amid his descriptions and reflections——he comes more decidedly forwards as the hero in his own person.

In passing to Brussels he visited the field of Waterloo, and the slight sketch which he has given in the poem of that eventful conflict is still the finest which has yet been written on the subject.

But the note of his visit to the field is of more importance to my present purpose, inasmuch as it tends to illustrate the querulous state of his own mind at the time.

“I went on horseback twice over the field, comparing it with my recollection of similar scenes.  As a plain, Waterloo seems marked out for the scene of some great action, though this may be mere imagination.  I have viewed with attention those of Platea, Troy, Mantinea, Leuctra, Chævronæ, and Marathon, and the field round Mont St Jean and Hugoumont appears to want little but a better cause and that indefinable but impressive halo which the lapse of ages throws around a celebrated spot, to vie in interest with any or all of these, except perhaps the last-mentioned.”

The expression “a better cause,” could only have been engendered in mere waywardness; but throughout his reflections at this period a peevish ill-will towards England is often manifested, as if he sought to attract attention by exasperating the national pride; that pride which he secretly flattered himself was to be augmented by his own fame.

I cannot, in tracing his travels through the third canto, test the accuracy of his descriptions as in the former two; but as they are all drawn from actual views they have the same vivid individuality impressed upon them.  Nothing can be more simple and affecting than the following picture, nor less likely to be an imaginary scene:

   By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground,
   There is a small and simple pyramid,
   Crowning the summit of the verdant mound;
   Beneath its base are heroes’ ashes hid,
   Our enemies.  And let not that forbid
   Honour to Marceau, o’er whose early tomb
   Tears, big tears, rush’d from the rough soldier’s lid,
   Lamenting and yet envying such a doom,
Falling for France, whose rights he battled to resume.

Perhaps few passages of descriptive poetry excel that in which reference is made to the column of Avenches, the ancient Aventicum.  It combines with an image distinct and picturesque, poetical associations full of the grave and moral breathings of olden forms and hoary antiquity.

   By a lone wall, a lonelier column rears
   A gray and grief-worn aspect of old days:
   ’Tis the last remnant of the wreck of years,
   And looks as with the wild-bewilder’d gaze
   Of one to stone converted by amaze,
   Yet still with consciousness; and there it stands,
   Making a marvel that it not decays,
   When the coeval pride of human hands,
Levell’d Aventicum, hath strew’d her subject lands.

But the most remarkable quality in the third canto is the deep, low bass of thought which runs through several passages, and which gives to it, when considered with reference to the circumstances under which it was written, the serious character of documentary evidence as to the remorseful condition of the poet’s mind.  It would be, after what has already been pointed out in brighter incidents, affectation not to say, that these sad bursts of feeling and wild paroxysms, bear strong indications of having been suggested by the wreck of his domestic happiness, and dictated by contrition for the part he had himself taken in the ruin.  The following reflections on the unguarded hour, are full of pathos and solemnity, amounting almost to the deep and dreadful harmony of Manfred:

   To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind;
   All are not fit with them to stir and toil,
   Nor is it discontent to keep the mind
   Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil
   In the hot throng, where we become the spoil
   Of our infection, till too late and long
   We may deplore and struggle with the coil,
   In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong
’Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong.

   There, in a moment, we may plunge our years
   In fatal penitence, and in the blight
   Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears,
   And colour things to come with hues of night;
   The race of life becomes a hopeless flight
   To those who walk in darkness: on the sea,
   The boldest steer but where their ports invite;
   But there are wanderers o’er eternity,
Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor’d ne’er shall be.

These sentiments are conceived in the mood of an awed spirit; they breathe of sorrow and penitence.  Of the weariness of satiety the pilgrim no more complains; he is no longer despondent from exhaustion, and the lost appetite of passion, but from the weight of a burden which he cannot lay down; and he clings to visible objects, as if from their nature he could extract a moral strength.

   I live not in myself, but I become
   Portion of that around me; and to me,
   High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
   Of human cities tortures: I can see
   Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
   A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
   Class’d among creatures, where the soul can flee,
   And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.

These dim revelations of black and lowering thought are overshadowed with a darker hue than sorrow alone could have cast.  A consciousness of sinful blame is evident amid them; and though the fantasies that loom through the mystery, are not so hideous as the guilty reveries in the weird caldron of Manfred’s conscience, still they have an awful resemblance to them.  They are phantoms of the same murky element, and, being more akin to fortitude than despair, prophesy not of hereafter, but oracularly confess suffering.

Manfred himself hath given vent to no finer horror than the oracle that speaks in this magnificent stanza:

   I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
   I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d
   To its idolatries a patient knee—
   Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles—nor cried aloud
   In worship of an echo;—in the crowd
   They could not deem me one of such; I stood
   Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
   Of thoughts which were not of their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.

There are times in life when all men feel their sympathies extinct, and Lord Byron was evidently in that condition, when he penned these remarkable lines; but independently of their striking beauty, the scenery in which they were conceived deserves to be considered with reference to the sentiment that pervades them.  For it was amid the same obscure ravines, pine-tufted precipices and falling waters of the Alps, that he afterward placed the outcast Manfred—an additional corroboration of the justness of the remarks which I ventured to offer, in adverting to his ruminations in contemplating, while yet a boy, the Malvern hills, as if they were the scenes of his impassioned childhood.  In “the palaces of nature,” he first felt the consciousness of having done some wrong, and when he would infuse into another, albeit in a wilder degree, the feelings he had himself felt, he recalled the images which had ministered to the cogitations of his own contrition.  But I shall have occasion to speak more of this, when I come to consider the nature of the guilt and misery of Manfred.

That Manfred is the greatest of Byron’s works will probably not be disputed.  It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character.  How then, it may be asked, does this moral phantom, that has never been, bear any resemblance to the poet himself?  Must not, in this instance, the hypothesis which assigns to Byron’s heroes his own sentiments and feelings be abandoned?  I think not.  In noticing the deep and solemn reflections with which he was affected in ascending the Rhine, and which he has embodied in the third canto of Childe Harold, I have already pointed out a similarity in the tenour of the thoughts to those of Manfred, as well as the striking acknowledgment of the “filed” mind.  There is, moreover, in the drama, the same distaste of the world which Byron himself expressed when cogitating on the desolation of his hearth, and the same contempt of the insufficiency of his genius and renown to mitigate contrition—all in strange harmony with the same magnificent objects of sight.  Is not the opening soliloquy of Manfred the very echo of the reflections on the Rhine?

My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not; in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within—and yet I live and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing man.

But the following is more impressive: it is the very phrase he would himself have employed to have spoken of the consequences of his fatal marriage:

My in juries came down on those who lov’d me,
On those whom I best lov’d; I never quell’d
An enemy, save in my just defence—
But my embrace was fatal.

He had not, indeed, been engaged in any duel of which the issue was mortal; but he had been so far engaged with more than one, that he could easily conceive what it would have been to have quelled an enemy in just defence.  But unless the reader can himself discern, by his sympathies, that there is the resemblance I contend for, it is of no use to multiply instances.  I shall, therefore, give but one other extract, which breathes the predominant spirit of all Byron ‘s works—that sad translation of the preacher’s “vanity of vanities; all is vanity!”

   Look on me! there is an order
Of mortals on the earth, who do become
Old in their youth and die ere middle age,
Without the violence of warlike death;
Some perishing of pleasure—some of study—
Some worn with toil—some of mere weariness—
Some of disease—and some insanity—
And some of wither’d or of broken hearts;
For this last is a malady which slays
More than are number’d in the lists of Fate;
Taking all shapes, and bearing many names.
Look upon me! for even of all these things
Have I partaken—and of all these things
One were enough; then wonder not that I
Am what I am, but that I ever was,
Or, having been, that I am still on earth.

CHAPTER XXXII

Byron’s Residence in Switzerland—Excursion to the Glaciers—“Manfred” founded on a magical Sacrifice, not on Guilt—Similarity between Sentiments given to Manfred and those expressed by Lord Byron in his own Person

The account given by Captain Medwin of the manner in which Lord Byron spent his time in Switzerland, has the raciness of his Lordship’s own quaintness, somewhat diluted.  The reality of the conversations I have heard questioned, but they relate in some instances to matters not generally known, to the truth of several of which I can myself bear witness; moreover they have much of the poet’s peculiar modes of thinking about them, though weakened in effect by the reporter.  No man can give a just representation of another who is not capable of putting himself into the character of his original, and of thinking with his power and intelligence.  Still there are occasional touches of merit in the feeble outlines of Captain Medwin, and with this conviction it would be negligence not to avail myself of them.

“Switzerland,” said his Lordship, “is a country I have been satisfied with seeing once; Turkey I could live in for ever.  I never forget my predilections: I was in a wretched state of health and worse spirits when I was at Geneva; but quiet and the lake, better physicians than Polidori, soon set me up.  I never led so moral a life as during my residence in that country; but I gained no credit by it.  Where there is mortification there ought to be reward.  On the contrary, there is no story so absurd that they did not invent at my cost.  I was watched by glasses on the opposite side of the lake, and by glasses, too, that must have had very distorted optics; I was waylaid in my evening drives.  I believe they looked upon me as a man-monster.

“I knew very few of the Genevese.  Hentsh was very civil to me, and I have a great respect for Sismondi.  I was forced to return the civilities of one of their professors by asking him and an old gentleman, a friend of Gray’s, to dine with me I had gone out to sail early in the morning, and the wind prevented me from returning in time for dinner.  I understand that I offended them mortally.

“Among our countrymen I made no new acquaintances; Shelley, Monk Lewis, and Hobhouse were almost the only English people I saw.  No wonder; I showed a distaste for society at that time, and went little among the Genevese; besides, I could not speak French.  When I went the tour of the lake with Shelley and Hobhouse, the boat was nearly wrecked near the very spot where St Preux and Julia were in danger of being drowned.  It would have been classical to have been lost there, but not agreeable.”

The third canto of Childe Harold, Manfred, and The Prisoner of Chillon are the fruits of his travels up the Rhine and of his sojourn in Switzerland.  Of the first it is unnecessary to say more; but the following extract from the poet’s travelling memorandum-book, has been supposed to contain the germ of the tragedy

“September 22, 18 16.—Left Thun in a boat, which carried us the length of the lake in three hours.  The lake small, but the banks fine; rocks down to the water’s edge: landed at Newhouse; passed Interlachen; entered upon a range of scenes beyond all description or previous conception; passed a rock bearing an inscription; two brothers, one murdered the other; just the place for it.  After a variety of windings, came to an enormous rock; arrived at the foot of the mountain (the Jungfrau) glaciers; torrents, one of these nine hundred feet, visible descent; lodge at the curate’s; set out to see the valley; heard an avalanche fall like thunder; glaciers; enormous storm comes on thunder and lightning and hail, all in perfection and beautiful.  The torrent is in shape, curving over the rock, like the tail of the white horse streaming in the wind, just as might be conceived would be that of the pale horse on which Death is mounted in the Apocalypse: it is neither mist nor water, but a something between both; its immense height gives a wave, a curve, a spreading here, a condensation there, wonderful, indescribable

“September 23.—Ascent of the Wingren, the dent d’argent shining like truth on one side, on the other the clouds rose from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring-tide.  It was white and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance; the side we ascended was of course not of so precipitous a nature; but on arriving at the summit, we looked down on the other side upon a boiling sea of cloud dashing against the crag on which we stood.  Arrived at the Greenderwold, mounted and rode to the higher glacier, twilight, but distinct, very fine; glacier like a frozen hurricane; starlight beautiful; the whole of the day was fine, and, in point of weather, as the day in which Paradise was made.  Passed whole woods of withered pines, all withered, trunks stripped and lifeless, done by a single winter.”

Undoubtedly in these brief and abrupt but masterly touches, hints for the scenery of Manfred may be discerned, but I can perceive nothing in them which bears the least likelihood to their having influenced the conception of that sublime work.

There has always been from the first publication of Manfred, a strange misapprehension with respect to it in the public mind.  The whole poem has been misunderstood, and the odious supposition that ascribes the fearful mystery and remorse of a hero to a foul passion for his sister, is probably one of those coarse imaginations which have grown out of the calumnies and accusations heaped upon the author.  How can it have happened that none of the critics have noticed that the story is derived from the human sacrifices supposed to have been in use among the students of the black art?

Manfred is represented as being actuated by an insatiable curiosity—a passion to know the forbidden secrets of the world.  The scene opens with him at his midnight studies—his lamp is almost burned out—and he has been searching for knowledge and has not found it, but only that

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The tree of knowledge is not that of life.
Philosophy and science and the springs
Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world
I have essayed, and in my mind there is,
A power to make these subject to itself.

He is engaged in calling spirits; and, as the incantation proceeds, they obey his bidding, and ask him what he wants; he replies, “forgetfulness.”

FIRST SPIRIT

Of what—of whom—and why?

MANFRED

Of that which is within me; read it there——
Ye know it, and I cannot utter it.

SPIRIT

We can but give thee that which we possess;—
Ask of us subjects, sovereignty, the power
O’er earth, the whole or portion, or a sign
Which shall control the elements, whereof
We are the dominators.  Each and all—
These shall be thine.

MANFRED

   Oblivion, self oblivion—
Can ye not wring from out the hidden realms
Ye offer so profusely, what I ask?

SPIRIT

It is not in our essence, in our skill,
But—thou may’st die.

MANFRED

   Will death bestow it on me?

SPIRIT

We are immortal, and do not forget;
We are eternal, and to us the past
Is as the future, present.  Art thou answer’d?

MANFRED

Ye mock me, but the power which brought ye here
Hath made you mine.  Slaves! scoff not at my will;
The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark,
The lightning of my being is as bright,
Pervading and far darting as your own,
And shall not yield to yours though coop’d in clay.
Answer, or I will teach you what I am.

SPIRIT

We answer as we answer’d.  Our reply
Is even in thine own words.

MANFRED

Why say ye so?

SPIRIT

If, as thou say’st, thine essence be as ours,
We have replied in telling thee the thing
Mortals call death hath naught to do with us.

MANFRED

I then have call’d you from your realms in vain.

This impressive and original scene prepares the reader to wonder why it is that Manfred is so desirous to drink of Lethe.  He has acquired dominion over spirits, and he finds, in the possession of the power, that knowledge has only brought him sorrow.  They tell him he is immortal, and what he suffers is as inextinguishable as his own being: why should he desire forgetfulness?—Has he not committed a great secret sin?  What is it?—He alludes to his sister, and in his subsequent interview with the witch we gather a dreadful meaning concerning her fate.  Her blood has been shed, not by his hand nor in punishment, but in the shadow and occultations of some unutterable crime and mystery.

She was like me in lineaments; her eyes,
Her hair, her features, all to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine,
But soften’d all and temper’d into beauty.
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe; nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears, which I had not;
And tenderness—but that I had for her;
Humility, and that I never had:
Her faults were mine—her virtues were her own;
I lov’d her and—destroy’d her—

WITCH

With thy hand?

MANFRED

Not with my hand, but heart, which broke her heart.
It gaz’d on mine, and withered.  I have shed
Blood, but not hers, and yet her blood was shed;—
I saw, and could not stanch it.

There is in this little scene, perhaps, the deepest pathos ever expressed; but it is not of its beauty that I am treating; my object in noticing it here is, that it may be considered in connection with that where Manfred appears with his insatiate thirst of knowledge, and manacled with guilt.  It indicates that his sister, Astarte, had been self-sacrificed in the pursuit of their magical knowledge.  Human sacrifices were supposed to be among the initiate propitiations of the demons that have their purposes in magic—as well as compacts signed with the blood of the self-sold.  There was also a dark Egyptian art, of which the knowledge and the efficacy could only be obtained by the novitiate’s procuring a voluntary victim—the dearest object to himself and to whom he also was the dearest; {241} and the primary spring of Byron’s tragedy lies, I conceive, in a sacrifice of that kind having been performed, without obtaining that happiness which the votary expected would be found in the knowledge and power purchased at such a price.  His sister was sacrificed in vain.  The manner of the sacrifice is not divulged, but it is darkly intimated to have been done amid the perturbations of something horrible.

   Night after night for years
He hath pursued long vigils in this tower
Without a witness.—I have been within it—
So have we all been ofttimes; but from it,
Or its contents, it were impossible
To draw conclusions absolute of aught
His studies tend to.—To be sure there is
One chamber where none enter—. . .
Count Manfred was, as now, within his tower:
How occupied—we know not—but with him,
The sole companion of his wanderings
And watchings—her—whom of all earthly things
That liv’d, the only thing he seem’d to love.

With admirable taste, and its thrilling augmentation of the horror, the poet leaves the deed which was done in that unapproachable chamber undivulged, while we are darkly taught, that within it lie the relics or the ashes of the “one without a tomb.”

CHAPTER XXXIII

State of Byron in Switzerland—He goes to Venice—The fourth Canto of “Childe Harold”—Rumination on his own Condition—Beppo—Lament of Tasso—Curious Example of Byron’s metaphysical Love

The situation of Lord Byron in Switzerland was comfortless.  He found that “the montain palaces of Nature” afforded no asylum to a haunted heart; he was ill at ease with himself, even dissatisfied that the world had not done him enough of wrong to justify his misanthropy.

Some expectation that his lady would repent of her part in the separation probably induced him to linger in the vicinity of Geneva, the thoroughfare of the travelling English, whom he affected to shun.  If it were so, he was disappointed, and, his hopes being frustrated, he broke up the establishment he had formed there and crossed the Alps.  After visiting some of the celebrated scenes and places in the north of Italy he passed on to Venice, where he domiciled himself for a time.

During his residence at Venice Lord Byron avoided as much as possible any intercourse with his countrymen.  This was perhaps in some degree necessary, and it was natural in the state of his mind.  He had become an object of great public interest by his talents; the stories connected with his domestic troubles had also increased his notoriety, and in such circumstances he could not but shrink from the inquisition of mere curiosity.  But there was an insolence in the tone with which he declares his “utter abhorrence of any contact with the travelling English,” that can neither be commended for its spirit, nor palliated by any treatment he had suffered.  Like Coriolanus he may have banished his country, but he had not, like the Roman, received provocation: on the contrary, he had been the aggressor in the feuds with his literary adversaries; and there was a serious accusation against his morals, or at least his manners, in the circumstances under which Lady Byron withdrew from his house.  It was, however, his misfortune throughout life to form a wrong estimate of himself in everything save in his poetical powers.

A life in Venice is more monotonous than in any other great city; but a man of genius carries with him everywhere a charm, which secures to him both variety and enjoyment.  Lord Byron had scarcely taken up his abode in Venice, when he began the fourth canto of Childe Harold, which he published early in the following year, and dedicated to his indefatigable friend Mr Hobhouse by an epistle dated on the anniversary of his marriage, “the most unfortunate day,” as he says, “of his past existence.”

In this canto he has indulged his excursive moralizing beyond even the wide licence he took in the three preceding parts; but it bears the impression of more reading and observation.  Though not superior in poetical energy, it is yet a higher work than any of them, and something of a more resolved and masculine spirit pervades the reflections, and endows, as it were, with thought and enthusiasm the aspect of the things described.  Of the merits of the descriptions, as of real things, I am not qualified to judge: the transcripts from the tablets of the author’s bosom he has himself assured us are faithful.

“With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person.  The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line, which every one seemed determined not to perceive: like the Chinese, in Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World, whom nobody would believe to be a Chinese, it was in vain that I asserted and imagined that I had drawn a distinction between the author and the pilgrim; and the very anxiety to preserve this difference, and the disappointment at finding it unavailing, so far crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to abandon it altogether—and have done so.”

This confession, though it may not have been wanted, gives a pathetic emphasis to those passages in which the poet speaks of his own feelings.  That his mind was jarred, and out of joint, there is too much reason to believe; but he had in some measure overcome the misery that clung to him during the dismal time of his sojourn in Switzerland, and the following passage, though breathing the sweet and melancholy spirit of dejection, possesses a more generous vein of nationality than is often met with in his works, even when the same proud sentiment might have been more fitly expressed:

   I’ve taught me other tongues—and in strange eyes
   Have made me not a stranger; to the mind
   Which is itself, no changes bring surprise,
   Nor is it harsh to make or hard to find
   A country with—aye, or without mankind.
   Yet was I born where men are proud to be,
   Not without cause; and should I leave behind
   Th’ inviolate island of the sage and free,
And seek me out a home by a remoter sea?

   Perhaps I lov’d it well, and should I lay
   My ashes in a soil which is not mine,
   My spirit shall resume it—if we may,
   Unbodied, choose a sanctuary.  I twine
   My hopes of being remember’d in my line,
   With my land’s language; if too fond and far
   These aspirations in their hope incline—
   If my fame should be as my fortunes are,
Of hasty growth and blight, and dull oblivion bar

   My name from out the temple where the dead
   Are honour’d by the nations—let it be,
   And light the laurels on a loftier head,
   And be the Spartan’s epitaph on me:
   “Sparta had many a worthier son than he”;
   Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need;
   The thorns which I have reap’d are of the tree
   I planted—they have torn me—and I bleed:
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

It will strike the reader as remarkable, that although the poet, in the course of this canto, takes occasion to allude to Dante and Tasso, in whose destinies there was a shadowy likeness of his own, the rumination is mingled with less of himself than might have been expected, especially when it is considered how much it was a habit with him, to make his own feelings the basis and substratum of the sentiments he ascribed to others.  It has also more than once surprised me that he has so seldom alluded to Alfieri, whom of all poets, both in character and conduct, he most resembled; with this difference, however, that Alfieri was possessed of affections equally intense and durable, whereas the caprice of Byron made him uncertain in his partialities, or what was the same in effect, made his friends set less value on them than perhaps they were entitled to.

Before Childe Harold was finished, an incident occurred which suggested to Byron a poem of a very different kind to any he had yet attempted:—without vouching for the exact truth of the anecdote, I have been told, that he one day received by the mail a copy of Whistlecraft’s prospectus and specimen of an intended national work; and, moved by its playfulness, immediately after reading it, began Beppo, which he finished at a sitting.  The facility with which he composed renders the story not improbable; but, singular as it may seem, the poem itself has the facetious flavour in it of his gaiety, stronger than even his grave works have of his frowardness, commonly believed to have been—I think, unjustly—the predominant mood of his character.

The Ode to Venice is also to be numbered among his compositions in that city; a spirited and indignant effusion, full of his peculiar lurid fire, and rich in a variety of impressive and original images.  But there is a still finer poem which belongs to this period of his history, though written, I believe, before he reached Venice—The Lament of Tasso: and I am led to notice it the more particularly, as one of its noblest passages affords an illustration of the opinion which I have early maintained—that Lord Byron’s extraordinary pretensions to the influence of love was but a metaphysical conception of the passion.

It is no marvel—from my very birth
My soul was drunk with love, which did pervade
And mingle with whate’er I saw on earth;
Of objects all inanimate I made
Idols, and out of wild and lovely 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.

It has been remarked by an anonymous author of Memoirs of Lord Byron, a work written with considerable talent and acumen, that “this is so far from being in character, that it is the very reverse; for whether Tasso was in his senses or not, if his love was sincere, he would have made the object of his affection the sole theme of his meditation, instead of generalising his passion, and talking about the original sympathies of his nature.”  In truth, no poet has better described love than Byron has his own peculiar passion.

   His love was passion’s essence—as a tree
   On fire by lightning; with ethereal flame
   Kindled he was, and blasted; for to be
   Thus enamour’d were in him the same.
   But his was not the love of living dame,
   Nor of the dead who rise upon our dreams,
   But of ideal beauty, which became
   In him existence, and o’erflowing teems
Along his burning page, distemper’d though it seems.

In tracing the course of Lord Byron’s career, I have not deemed it at all necessary to advert to the instances of his generosity, or to conduct less pleasant to record.  Enough has appeared to show that he was neither deficient in warmth of heart nor in less amiable feelings; but, upon the whole, it is not probable that either in his charities or his pleasures he was greatly different from other young men, though he undoubtedly had a wayward delight in magnifying his excesses, not in what was to his credit, like most men, but in what was calculated to do him no honour.  More notoriety has been given to an instance of lavish liberality at Venice, than the case deserved, though it was unquestionably prompted by a charitable impulse.  The house of a shoemaker, near his Lordship’s residence, in St Samuel, was burned to the ground, with all it contained, by which the proprietor was reduced to indigence.  Byron not only caused a new but a superior house to be erected, and also presented the sufferer with a sum of money equal in value to the whole of his stock in trade and furniture.  I should endanger my reputation for impartiality if I did not, as a fair set-off to this, also mention that it is said he bought for five hundred crowns a baker’s wife.  There might be charity in this, too.

CHAPTER XXXIV

Removes to Ravenna—The Countess Guiccioli

Although Lord Byron resided between two and three years at Venice, he was never much attached to it.  “To see a city die daily, as she does,” said he, “is a sad contemplation.  I sought to distract my mind from a sense of her desolation and my own solitude, by plunging into a vortex that was anything but pleasure.  When one gets into a mill-stream, it is difficult to swim against it, and keep out of the wheels.”  He became tired and disgusted with the life he led at Venice, and was glad to turn his back on it.  About the close of the year 1819 he accordingly removed to Ravenna; but before I proceed to speak of the works which he composed at Ravenna, it is necessary to explain some particulars respecting a personal affair, the influence of which on at least one of his productions is as striking as any of the many instances already described upon others.  I allude to the intimacy which he formed with the young Countess Guiccioli.

This lady, at the age of sixteen, was married to the Count, one of the richest noblemen in Romagna, but far advanced in life.  “From the first,” said Lord Byron, in his account of her, “they had separate apartments, and she always called him, Sir!  What could be expected from such a preposterous connection.  For some time she was an Angiolina and he a Marino Faliero, a good old man; but young Italian women are not satisfied with good old men, and the venerable Count did not object to her availing herself of the privileges of her country in selecting a cicisbeo; an Italian would have made it quite agreeable: indeed, for some time he winked at our intimacy, but at length made an exception against me, as a foreigner, a heretic, an Englishman, and, what was worse than all, a Liberal.

“He insisted—Teresa was as obstinate—her family took her part.  Catholics cannot get divorces; but to the scandal of all Romagna, the matter was at last referred to the Pope, who ordered her a separate maintenance on condition that she should reside under her father’s roof.  All this was not agreeable, and at length I was forced to smuggle her out of Ravenna, having discovered a plot laid with the sanction of the legate, for shutting her up in a convent for life.”

The Countess Guiccioli was at this time about twenty, but she appeared younger; her complexion was fair, with large, dark, languishing eyes; and her auburn hair fell in great profusion of natural ringlets over her shapely shoulders.  Her features were not so regular as in their expression pleasing, and there was an amiable gentleness in her voice which was peculiarly interesting.  Leigh Hunt’s account of her is not essentially dissimilar from any other that I have either heard of or met with.  He differs, however, in one respect, from every other, in saying that her hair was yellow; but considering the curiosity which this young lady has excited, perhaps it may be as well to transcribe his description at length, especially as he appears to have taken some pains on it, and more particularly as her destiny seems at present to promise that the interest for her is likely to be revived by another unhappy English connection.

“Her appearance,” says Mr Hunt, “might have reminded an English spectator of Chaucer’s heroine:

Yclothed was she, fresh for to devise,
Her yellow hair was braided in a tress
Behind her back, a yardé long I guess,
And in the garden (as the same uprist)
She walketh up and down, where as her list.

And then, as Dryden has it:

At every turn she made a little stand,
And thrust among the thorns her lily hand.

Madame Guiccioli, who was at that time about twenty, was handsome and lady-like, with an agreeable manner, and a voice not partaking too much of the Italian fervour to be gentle.  She had just enough of it to give her speaking a grace—none of her graces appeared entirely free from art; nor, on the other hand, did they betray enough of it to give you an ill opinion of her sincerity and good-humour . . . Her hair was what the poet has described, or rather blond, with an inclination to yellow; a very fair and delicate yellow, at all events, and within the limits of the poetical.  She had regular features of the order properly called handsome, in distinction to prettiness or piquancy; being well proportioned to one another, large, rather than otherwise, but without coarseness, and more harmonious than interesting.  Her nose was the handsomest of the kind I ever saw; and I have known her both smile very sweetly, and look intelligently, when Lord Byron has said something kind to her.  I should not say, however, that she was a very intelligent person.  Both her wisdom and her want of wisdom were on the side of her feelings, in which there was doubtless mingled a good deal of the self-love natural to a flattered beauty. . . .  In a word, Madame Guiccioli was a kind of buxom parlour-boarder, compressing herself artificially into dignity and elegance, and fancying she walked, in the eyes of the whole world, a heroine by the side of a poet.  When I saw her at Monte Nero, near Leghorn, she was in a state of excitement and exultation, and had really something of this look.  At that time, also, she looked no older than she was; in which respect, a rapid and very singular change took place, to the surprise of everybody.  In the course of a few months she seemed to have lived as many years.”

This is not very perspicuous portraiture, nor does it show that Mr Hunt was a very discerning observer of character.  Lord Byron himself is represented to have said, that extraordinary pains were taken with her education: “Her conversation is lively without being frivolous; without being learned, she has read all the best authors of her own and the French language.  She often conceals what she knows, from the fear of being thought to know too much; possibly because she knows I am not fond of blues.  To use an expression of Jeffrey’s, ‘If she has blue stockings, she contrives that her petticoats shall hide them.’”

Lord Byron was at one time much attached to her; nor could it be doubted that their affection was reciprocal; but in both, their union outlived their affection, for before his departure to Greece his attachment had perished, and he left her, as it is said, notwithstanding the rank and opulence she had forsaken on his account, without any provision.  He had promised, it was reported, to settle two thousand pounds on her, but he forgot the intention, or died before it was carried into effect. {255}  On her part, the estrangement was of a different and curious kind—she had not come to hate him, but she told a lady, the friend of a mutual acquaintance of Lord Byron and mine, that she feared more than loved him.

CHAPTER XXXV

Residence in Ravenna—The Carbonari—Byron’s Part in their Plot—The Murder of the military Commandant—The poetical Use of the Incident—“Marino Faliero”—Reflections—“The Prophecy of Dante”

Lord Byron has said himself, that except Greece, he was never so attached to any place in his life as to Ravenna.  The peasantry he thought the best people in the world, and their women the most beautiful.  “Those at Tivoli and Frescati,” said he, “are mere Sabines, coarse creatures, compared to the Romagnese.  You may talk of your English women; and it is true, that out of one hundred Italian and English you will find thirty of the latter handsome; but then there will be one Italian on the other side of the scale, who will more than balance the deficit in numbers—one who, like the Florence Venus, has no rival, and can have none in the North.  I found also at Ravenna much education and liberality of thinking among the higher classes.  The climate is delightful.  I was not broken in upon by society.  Ravenna lies out of the way of travellers.  I was never tired of my rides in the pine forest: it breathes of the Decameron; it is poetical ground.  Francesca lived and Dante was exiled and died at Ravenna.  There is something inspiring in such an air.

“The people liked me as much as they hated the government.  It is not a little to say, I was popular with all the leaders of the constitutional party.  They knew that I came from a land of liberty, and wished well to their cause.  I would have espoused it, too, and assisted them to shake off their fetters.  They knew my character, for I had been living two years at Venice, where many of the Ravennese have houses.  I did not, however, take part in their intrigues, nor join in their political coteries; but I had a magazine of one hundred stand of arms in the house, when everything was ripe for revolt——a curse on Carignan’s imbecility!  I could have pardoned him that, too, if he had not impeached his partisans.

“The proscription was immense in Romagna, and embraced many of the first nobles: almost all my friends, among the rest the Gambas (the father and brother of the Countess Guiccioli), who took no part in the affair, were included in it.  They were exiled, and their possessions confiscated.  They knew that this must eventually drive me out of the country.  I did not follow them immediately: I was not to be bullied—I had myself fallen under the eye of the government.  If they could have got sufficient proof they would have arrested me.”

The latter part of this declaration bears, in my opinion, indubitable marks of being genuine.  It has that magnifying mysticism about it which more than any other quality characterized Lord Byron’s intimations concerning himself and his own affairs; but it is a little clearer than I should have expected in the acknowledgment of the part he was preparing to take in the insurrection.  He does not seem here to be sensible, that in confessing so much, he has justified the jealousy with which he was regarded.

“Shortly after the plot was discovered,” he proceeds to say, “I received several anonymous letters, advising me to discontinue my forest rides; but I entertained no apprehensions of treachery, and was more on horseback than ever.  I never stir out without being well armed, nor sleep without pistols.  They knew that I never missed my aim; perhaps this saved me.”

An event occurred at this time at Ravenna that made a deep impression on Lord Byron.  The commandant of the place, who, though suspected of being secretly a Carbonaro, was too powerful a man to be arrested, was assassinated opposite to his residence.  The measures adopted to screen the murderer proved, in the opinion of his Lordship, that the assassination had taken place by order of the police, and that the spot where it was perpetrated had been selected by choice.  Byron at the moment had his foot in the stirrup, and his horse started at the report of the shot.  On looking round he saw a man throw down a carbine and run away, and another stretched on the pavement near him.  On hastening to the spot, he found it was the commandant; a crowd collected, but no one offered any assistance.  His Lordship directed his servant to lift the bleeding body into the palace—he assisted himself in the act, though it was represented to him that he might incur the displeasure of the government—and the gentleman was already dead.  His adjutant followed the body into the house.  “I remember,” says his Lordship, “his lamentation over him—‘Poor devil he would not have harmed a dog.’”

It was from the murder of this commandant that the poet sketched the scene of the assassination in the fifth canto of Don Juan.

   The other evening (’twas on Friday last),
      This is a fact, and no poetic fable—
   Just as my great coat was about me cast,
      My hat and gloves still lying on the table,
   I heard a shot—’twas eight o’clock scarce past,
      And running out as fast as I was able,
I found the military commandant
Stretch’d in the street, and able scarce to pant.

   Poor fellow! for some reason, surely bad,
      They had him slain with five slugs, and left him there
   To perish on the pavement: so I had
      Him borne into the house, and up the stair;
The man was gone: in some Italian quarrel
Kill’d by five bullets from an old gun-barrel.

   The scars of his old wounds were near his new,
      Those honourable scars which bought him fame,
   And horrid was the contrast to the view—
      But let me quit the theme, as such things claim
   Perhaps ev’n more attention than is due
      From me: I gazed (as oft I’ve gazed the same)
To try if I could wrench aught out of death
Which should confirm, or shake, or make a faith.

Whether Marino Faliero was written at Ravenna or completed there, I have not ascertained, but it was planned at Venice, and as far back as 1817.  I believe this is considered about the most ordinary performance of all Lord Byron’s works; but if it is considered with reference to the time in which it was written, it will probably be found to contain many great and impressive passages.  Has not the latter part of the second scene in the first act reference to the condition of Venice when his Lordship was there?  And is not the description which Israel Bertuccio gives of the conspirators applicable to, as it was probably derived from, the Carbonari, with whom there is reason to say Byron was himself disposed to take a part?

Know, then, that there are met and sworn in secret
A band of brethren, valiant hearts and true;
Men who have proved all fortunes, and have long
Grieved over that of Venice, and have right
To do so; having served her in all climes,
And having rescued her from foreign foes,
Would do the same for those within her walls.
They are not numerous, nor yet too few
For their great purpose; they have arms, and means,
And hearts, and hopes, and faith, and patient courage.

This drama, to be properly appreciated, both in its taste and feeling should be considered as addressed to the Italians of the epoch at which it was written.  Had it been written in the Italian instead of the English language, and could have come out in any city of Italy, the effect would have been prodigious.  It is, indeed, a work not to be estimated by the delineations of character nor the force of passion expressed in it, but altogether by the apt and searching sarcasm of the political allusions.  Viewed with reference to the time and place in which it was composed, it would probably deserve to be ranked as a high and bold effort: simply as a drama, it may not be entitled to rank above tragedies of the second or third class.  But I mean not to set my opinion of this work against that of the public, the English public; all I contend for is, that it possesses many passages of uncommon beauty, and that its chief tragic merit consists in its political indignation; but above all, that is another and a strong proof too, of what I have been endeavouring to show, that the power of the poet consisted in giving vent to his own feelings, and not, like his great brethren, or even his less, in the invention of situations or of appropriate sentiments.  It is, perhaps, as it stands, not fit to succeed in representation; but it is so rich in matter that it would not be a difficult task to make out of little more than the third part a tragedy which would not dishonour the English stage.

I have never been able to understand why it has been so often supposed that Lord Byron was actuated in the composition of his different works by any other motive than enjoyment: perhaps no poet had ever less of an ulterior purpose in his mind during the fits of inspiration (for the epithet may be applied correctly to him and to the moods in which he was accustomed to write) than this singular and impassioned man.  Those who imagine that he had any intention to impair the reverence due to religion, or to weaken the hinges of moral action, give him credit for far more design and prospective purpose than he possessed.  They could have known nothing of the man, the main defect of whose character, in relation to everything, was in having too little of the element or principle of purpose.  He was a thing of impulses, and to judge of what he either said or did, as the results of predetermination, was not only to do the harshest injustice, but to show a total ignorance of his character.  His whole fault, the darkest course of those flights and deviations from propriety which have drawn upon him the severest animadversion, lay in the unbridled state of his impulses.  He felt, but never reasoned.  I am led to make these observations by noticing the ungracious, or, more justly, the illiberal spirit in which The Prophecy of Dante, which was published with the Marino Faliero, has been treated by the anonymous author of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron.

Of The Prophecy of Dante I am no particular admirer.  It contains, unquestionably, stanzas of resounding energy, but the general verse of the poem is as harsh and abrupt as the clink and clang of the cymbal; moreover, even for a prophecy, it is too obscure, and though it possesses abstractedly too many fine thoughts, and too much of the combustion of heroic passion to be regarded as a failure, yet it will never be popular.  It is a quarry, however, of very precious poetical expression.

It was written at Ravenna, and at the suggestion of the Guiccioli, to whom it is dedicated in a sonnet, prettily but inharmoniously turned.  Like all his other best performances, this rugged but masterly composition draws its highest interest from himself and his own feelings, and can only be rightly appreciated by observing how fitly many of the bitter breathings of Dante apply to his own exiled and outcast condition.  For, however much he was himself the author of his own banishment, he felt when he wrote these haughty verses that he had been sometimes shunned.

CHAPTER XXXVI

The Tragedy of “Sardanapalus” considered, with Reference to Lord Byron’s own Circumstances—“Cain”

Among the mental enjoyments which endeared Ravenna to Lord Byron, the composition of Sardanapalus may be reckoned the chief.  It seems to have been conceived in a happier mood than any of all his other works; for, even while it inculcates the dangers of voluptuous indulgence, it breathes the very essence of benevolence and philosophy.  Pleasure takes so much of the character of virtue in it, that but for the moral taught by the consequences, enjoyment might be mistaken for duty.  I have never been able to satisfy myself in what the resemblance consists, but from the first reading it has always appeared to me that there was some elegant similarity between the characters of Sardanapalus and Hamlet, and my inclination has sometimes led me to imagine that the former was the nobler conception of the two.

The Assyrian monarch, like the Prince of Denmark, is highly endowed, capable of the greatest undertakings; he is yet softened by a philosophic indolence of nature that makes him undervalue the enterprises of ambition, and all those objects in the attainment of which so much of glory is supposed to consist.  They are both alike incapable of rousing themselves from the fond reveries of moral theory, even when the strongest motives are presented to them.  Hamlet hesitates to act, though his father’s spirit hath come from death to incite him; and Sardanapalus derides the achievements that had raised his ancestors to an equality with the gods.

   Thou wouldst have me go
Forth as a conqueror.—By all the stars
Which the Chaldeans read! the restless slaves
Deserve that I should curse them with their wishes
And lead them forth to glory.

Again:

The ungrateful and ungracious slaves! they murmur
Because I have not shed their blood, nor led them
To dry into the deserts’ dust by myriads,
Or whiten with their bones the banks of Ganges,
Nor decimated them with savage laws,
Nor sweated them to build up pyramids
Or Babylonian walls.

The nothingness of kingly greatness and national pride were never before so finely contemned as by the voluptuous Assyrian, and were the scorn not mitigated by the skilful intermixture of mercifulness and philanthropy, the character would not be endurable.  But when the same voice which pronounced contempt on the toils of honour says,

      Enough
For me if I can make my subjects feel
The weight of human misery less,

it is impossible to repress the liking which the humane spirit of that thought is calculated to inspire.  Nor is there any want of dignity in Sardanapalus, even when lolling softest in his luxury.

Must I consume my life—this little life—
In guarding against all may make it less!
It is not worth so much—It were to die
Before my hour to live in dread of death. . . .
Till now no drop of an Assyrian vein
Hath flow’d for me, nor hath the smallest coin
Of Nineveh’s vast treasure e’er been lavish’d
On objects which could cost her sons a tear.
If then they hate me ’tis because I hate not,
If they rebel ’tis because I oppress not.

This is imagined in the true tone of Epicurean virtue, and it rises to magnanimity when he adds in compassionate scorn,

Oh, men! ye must be ruled with scythes, not sceptres,
And mow’d down like the grass, else all we reap
Is rank abundance and a rotten harvest
Of discontents infecting the fair soil,
Making a desert of fertility.

But the graciousness in the conception of the character of Sardanapalus, is not to be found only in these sentiments of his meditations, but in all and every situation in which the character is placed.  When Salamenes bids him not sheath his sword—

’Tis the sole sceptre left you now with safety,

the king replies—

“A heavy one;” and subjoins, as if to conceal his distaste for war, by ascribing a dislike to the sword itself,

The hilt, too, hurts my hand.

It may be asked why I dwell so particularly on the character of Sardanapalus.  It is admitted that he is the most heroic of voluptuaries, the most philosophical of the licentious.  The first he is undoubtedly, but he is not licentious; and in omitting to make him so, the poet has prevented his readers from disliking his character upon principle.  It was a skilful stroke of art to do this; had it been otherwise, and had there been no affection shown for the Ionian slave, Sardanapalus would have engaged no sympathy.  It is not, however, with respect to the ability with which the character has been imagined, nor to the poetry with which it is invested, that I have so particularly made it a subject of criticism; it was to point out how much in it Lord Byron has interwoven of his own best nature.

At the time when he was occupied with this great work, he was confessedly in the enjoyment of the happiest portion of his life.  The Guiccioli was to him a Myrrha, but the Carbonari were around, and in the controversy, in which Sardanapalus is engaged, between the obligations of his royalty and his inclinations for pleasure, we have a vivid insight of the cogitation of the poet, whether to take a part in the hazardous activity which they were preparing, or to remain in the seclusion and festal repose of which he was then in possession.  The Assyrian is as much Lord Byron as Childe Harold was, and bears his lineaments in as clear a likeness, as a voluptuary unsated could do those of the emaciated victim of satiety.  Over the whole drama, and especially in some of the speeches of Sardanapalus, a great deal of fine but irrelevant poetry and moral reflection has been profusely spread; but were the piece adapted to the stage, these portions would of course be omitted, and the character denuded of them would then more fully justify the idea which I have formed of it, than it may perhaps to many readers do at present, hidden as it is, both in shape and contour, under an excess of ornament.

That the character of Myrrha was also drawn from life, and that the Guiccioli was the model, I have no doubt.  She had, when most enchanted by her passion for Byron—at the very time when the drama was written—many sources of regret; and he was too keen an observer, and of too jealous a nature, not to have marked every shade of change in her appearance, and her every moment of melancholy reminiscence; so that, even though she might never have given expression to her sentiments, still such was her situation, that it could not but furnish him with fit suggestions from which to fill up the moral being of the Ionian slave.  Were the character of Myrrha scanned with this reference, while nothing could be discovered to detract from the value of the composition, a great deal would be found to lessen the merit of the poet’s invention.  He had with him the very being in person whom he has depicted in the drama, of dispositions and endowments greatly similar, and in circumstances in which she could not but feel as Myrrha is supposed to have felt—and it must be admitted, that he has applied the good fortune of that incident to a beautiful purpose.

This, however, is not all that the tragedy possesses of the author.  The character of Zarina is, perhaps, even still more strikingly drawn from life.  There are many touches in the scene with her which he could not have imagined, without thinking of his own domestic disasters.  The first sentiment she utters is truly conceived in the very frame and temper in which Byron must have wished his lady to think of himself, and he could not embody it without feeling that—

   How many a year has pass’d,
Though we are still so young, since we have met
Which I have borne in widowhood of heart.

The following delicate expression has reference to his having left his daughter with her mother, and unfolds more of his secret feelings on the subject than anything he has expressed more ostentatiously elsewhere:

I wish’d to thank you, that you have not divided
My heart from all that’s left it now to love.

And what Sardanapalus says of his children is not less applicable to Byron, and is true:

      Deem not
I have not done you justice: rather make them
Resemble your own line, than their own sire;
I trust them with you—to you.

And when Zarina says,

      They ne’er
Shall know from me aught but what may honour
Their father’s memory,

he puts in her mouth only a sentiment which he knew, if his wife never expressed to him, she profoundly acknowledged in resolution to herself.  The whole of this scene is full of the most penetrating pathos; and did the drama not contain, in every page, indubitable evidence to me, that he has shadowed out in it himself his wife, and his mistress, this little interview would prove a vast deal in confirmation of the opinion so often expressed, that where his genius was most in its element, it was when it dealt with his own sensibilities and circumstances.  It is impossible to read the following speech, without a conviction that it was written at Lady Byron:

   My gentle, wrong’d Zarina!
I am the very slave of circumstance
And impulse—borne away with every breath!
Misplaced upon the throne—misplaced in life.
I know not what I could have been, but feel
I am not what I should be—let it end.
But take this with thee: if I was not form’d
To prize a love like thine—a mind like thine—
Nor dote even on thy beauty—as I’ve doted
On lesser charms, for no cause save that such
Devotion was a duty, and I hated
All that look’d like a chain for me or others
(This even rebellion must avouch); yet hear
These words, perhaps among my last—that none
E’er valued more thy virtues, though he knew not
To profit by them.

At Ravenna Cain was also written; a dramatic poem, in some degree, chiefly in its boldness, resembling the ancient mysteries of the monasteries before the secular stage was established.  This performance, in point of conception, is of a sublime order.  The object of the poem is to illustrate the energy and the art of Lucifer in accomplishing the ruin of the first-born.  By an unfair misconception, the arguments of Lucifer have been represented as the sentiments of the author upon some imaginary warranty derived from the exaggerated freedom of his life; and yet the moral tendency of the reflections are framed in a mood of reverence as awful towards Omnipotence as the austere divinity of Milton.  It would be presumption in me, however, to undertake the defence of any question in theology; but I have not been sensible to the imputed impiety, while I have felt in many passages influences that have their being amid the shadows and twilights of “old religion”;

   “Stupendous spirits
That mock the pride of man, and people space
With life and mystical predominance.”

The morning hymns and worship with which the mystery opens are grave, solemn, and scriptural, and the dialogue which follows with Cain is no less so: his opinion of the tree of life is, I believe, orthodox; but it is daringly expressed: indeed, all the sentiments ascribed to Cain are but the questions of the sceptics.  His description of the approach of Lucifer would have shone in the Paradise Lost.

   A shape like to the angels,
Yet of a sterner and a sadder aspect,
Of spiritual essence.  Why do I quake?
Why should I fear him more than other spirits
Whom I see daily wave their fiery swords
Before the gates round which I linger oft
In twilight’s hour, to catch a glimpse of those
Gardens which are my just inheritance,
Ere the night closes o’er the inhibited walls,
And the immortal trees which overtop
The cherubim-defended battlements?
I shrink not from these, the fire-arm’d angels;
Why should I quail from him who now approaches?
Yet he seems mightier far than them, nor less
Beauteous; and yet not all as beautiful
As he hath been, or might be: sorrow seems
Half of his immortality.

There is something spiritually fine in this conception of the terror or presentiment of coming evil.  The poet rises to the sublime in making Lucifer first inspire Cain with the knowledge of his immortality—a portion of truth which hath the efficacy of falsehood upon the victim; for Cain, feeling himself already unhappy, knowing that his being cannot be abridged, has the less scruple to desire to be as Lucifer, “mighty.”  The whole speech of Lucifer, beginning,

Souls who dare use their immortality,

is truly satanic; a daring and dreadful description given by everlasting despair of the Deity.

But, notwithstanding its manifold immeasurable imaginations, Cain is only a polemical controversy, the doctrines of which might have been better discussed in the pulpit of a college chapel.  As a poem it is greatly unequal; many passages consist of mere metaphysical disquisition, but there are others of wonderful scope and energy.  It is a thing of doubts and dreams and reveries—dim and beautiful, yet withal full of terrors.  The understanding finds nothing tangible; but amid dread and solemnity, sees only a shapen darkness with eloquent gestures.  It is an argument invested with the language of oracles and omens, conceived in some religious trance, and addressed to spirits.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Removal to Pisa—The Lanfranchi Palace—Affair with the Guard at Pisa—Removal to Monte Nero—Junction with Mr Hunt—Mr Shelley’s Letter

The unhappy distrusts and political jealousies of the times obliged Lord Byron, with the Gambas, the family of the Guiccioli, to remove from Ravenna to Pisa.  In this compulsion he had no cause to complain; a foreigner meddling with the politics of the country in which he was only accidentally resident, could expect no deferential consideration from the government.  It has nothing to do with the question whether his Lordship was right or wrong in his principles.  The government was in the possession of the power, and in self-defence he could expect no other course towards him than what he did experience.  He was admonished to retreat: he did so.  Could he have done otherwise, he would not.  He would have used the Austrian authority as ill as he was made to feel it did him.

In the autumn of 1821, Lord Byron removed from Ravenna to Pisa, where he hired the Lanfranchi palace for a year—one of those massy marble piles which appear

“So old, as if they had for ever stood—
So strong, as if they would for ever stand!”

Both in aspect and character it was interesting to the boding fancies of the noble tenant.  It is said to have been constructed from a design of Michael Angelo; and in the grandeur of its features exhibits a bold and colossal style not unworthy of his genius.

The Lanfranchi family, in the time of Dante, were distinguished in the factions of those days, and one of them has received his meed of immortality from the poet, as the persecutor of Ugolino.  They are now extinct, and their traditionary reputation is illustrated by the popular belief in the neighbourhood, that their ghosts are restless, and still haunt their former gloomy and gigantic habitation.

The building was too vast for the establishment of Lord Byron, and he occupied only the first floor.

The life he led at this period was dull and unvaried.  Billiards, conversations, reading, and occasionally writing, constituted the regular business of the day.  In the cool of the afternoon, he sometimes went out in his carriage, oftener on horseback, and generally amused himself with pistol practice at a five-paul piece.  He dined at half an hour after sunset, and then drove to Count Gamba’s, where he passed several hours with the Countess Guiccioli, who at that time still resided with her father.  On his return he read or wrote till the night was far spent, or rather till the morning was come again, sipping at intervals spirits diluted with water, as medicine to counteract some nephritic disorder to which he considered himself liable.

Notwithstanding the tranquillity of this course of life, he was accidentally engaged in a transaction which threatened unpleasant consequences, and had a material effect on his comfort.  On the 21st of March, 1822, as he was returning from his usual ride, in company with several of his friends, a hussar officer, at full speed, dashed through the party, and violently jostled one of them.  Lord Byron, with his characteristic impetuosity, instantly pushed forwards, and the rest followed, and overtook the hussar.  His Lordship inquired what he meant by the insult; but for answer, received the grossest abuse: on which he and one of his companions gave their cards, and passed on.  The officer followed, hallooing, and threatening with his hand on his sabre.  They were now near the Paggia gate.  During this altercation, a common artilleryman interfered, and called out to the hussar, “Why don’t you arrest them?—command us to arrest them.”  Upon which the officer gave the word to the guard at the gate.  His Lordship, hearing the order, spurred his horse, and one of his party doing the same, they succeeded in forcing their way through the soldiers, while the gate was closed on the rest of the party, with whom an outrageous scuffle ensued.

Lord Byron, on reaching his palace, gave directions to inform the police, and, not seeing his companions coming up, rode back towards the gate.  On his way the hussar met him, and said, “Are you satisfied?”—“No: tell me your name!”—“Serjeant-major Masi.”  One of his Lordship’s servants, who at this moment joined them, seized the hussar’s horse by the bridle, but his master commanded him to let it go.  The hussar then spurred his horse through the crowd, which by this time had collected in front of the Lanfranchi palace, and in the attempt was wounded by a pitchfork.  Several of the servants were arrested, and imprisoned: and, during the investigation of the affair before the police, Lord Byron’s house was surrounded by the dragoons belonging to Serjeant-major Masi’s troop, who threatened to force the doors.  The result upon these particulars was not just; all Lord Byron’s Italian servants were banished from Pisa; and with them the father and brother of the Guiccioli, who had no concern whatever in the affair.  Lord Byron himself was also advised to quit the town, and, as the Countess accompanied her father, he soon after joined them at Leghorn, and passed six weeks at Monte Nero, a country house in the vicinity of that city.

It was during his Lordship’s residence at Monte Nero, that an event took place—his junction with Mr Leigh Hunt—which had some effect both on his literary and his moral reputation.  Previous to his departure from England, there had been some intercourse between them—Byron had been introduced by Moore to Hunt, when the latter was suffering imprisonment for the indiscretion of his pen, and by his civility had encouraged him, perhaps, into some degree of forgetfulness as to their respective situations in society.—Mr Hunt at no period of their acquaintance appears to have been sufficiently sensible that a man of positive rank has it always in his power, without giving anything like such a degree of offence as may be resented otherwise than by estrangement, to inflict mortification, and, in consequence, presumed too much to an equality with his Lordship—at least this is the impression his conduct made upon me, from the familiarity of his dedicatory epistle prefixed to Rimini to their riding out at Pisa together dressed alike—“We had blue frock-coats, white waistcoats and trousers, and velvet caps, à la Raphael, and cut a gallant figure.”  I do not discover on the part of Lord Byron, that his Lordship ever forgot his rank; nor was he a personage likely to do so; in saying, therefore, that Mr Hunt presumed upon his condescension, I judge entirely by his own statement of facts.  I am not undertaking a defence of his lordship, for the manner in which he acted towards Mr Hunt, because it appears to me to have been, in many respects, mean; but I do think there was an original error, a misconception of himself on the part of Mr Hunt, that drew down about him a degree of humiliation that he might, by more self-respect, have avoided.  However, I shall endeavour to give as correct a summary of the whole affair as the materials before me will justify.

The occasion of Hunt’s removal to Italy will be best explained by quoting the letter from his friend Shelley, by which he was induced to take that obviously imprudent step.

“Pisa, Aug. 26, 1821.

“MY DEAREST FRIEND,—Since I last wrote to you, I have been on a visit to Lord Byron at Ravenna.  The result of this visit was a determination on his part to come and live at Pisa, and I have taken the finest palace on the Lung’ Arno for him.  But the material part of my visit consists in a message which he desires me to give you, and which I think ought to add to your determination—for such a one I hope you have formed—of restoring your shattered health and spirits by a migration to these ‘regions mild, of calm and serene air.’

“He proposes that you should come, and go shares with him and me in a periodical work to be conducted here, in which each of the contracting parties should publish all their original compositions, and share the profits.  He proposed it to Moore, but for some reason it was never brought to bear.  There can be no doubt that the profits of any scheme in which you and Lord Byron engage must, for various yet co-operating reasons, be very great.  As to myself, I am, for the present, only a sort of link between you and him, until you can know each other, and effectuate the arrangement; since (to intrust you with a secret, which for your sake I withhold from Lord Byron) nothing would induce me to share in the profits, and still less in the borrowed splendour of such a partnership.  You and he, in different manners, would be equal, and would bring in a different manner, but in the same proportion, equal stocks of reputation and success.  Do not let my frankness with you, nor my belief that you deserve it more than Lord Byron, have the effect of deterring you from assuming a station in modern literature, which the universal voice of my contemporaries forbids me either to stoop or aspire to.  I am, and I desire to be, nothing.

“I did not ask Lord Byron to assist me in sending a remittance for your journey; because there are men, however excellent, from whom we would never receive an obligation in the worldly sense of the word; and I am as jealous for my friend as for myself.  I, as you know, have it not; but I suppose that at last I shall make up an impudent face, and ask Horace Smith to add to the many obligations he has conferred on me.  I know I need only ask.” . . .

Now, before proceeding farther, it seems from this epistle, and there is no reason to question Shelley’s veracity, that Lord Byron was the projector of The Liberal; that Hunt’s political notoriety was mistaken for literary reputation, and that there was a sad lack of common sense in the whole scheme.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

Mr Hunt arrives in Italy—Meeting with Lord Byron—Tumults in the House—Arrangements for Mr Hunt’s Family—-Extent of his Obligations to Lord Byron—Their Copartnery—Meanness of the whole Business

On receiving Mr Shelley’s letter, Mr Hunt prepared to avail himself of the invitation which he was the more easily enabled to do, as his friend, notwithstanding what he had intimated, borrowed two hundred pounds from Lord Byron, and remitted to him.  He reached Leghorn soon after his Lordship had taken up his temporary residence at Monte Nero.

The meeting with his Lordship was in so many respects remarkable, that the details of it cannot well be omitted.  The day was very hot; and when Hunt reached the house he found the hottest-looking habitation he had ever seen.  Not content with having a red wash over it, the red was the most unseasonable of all reds—a salmon-colour; but the greatest of all heats was within.

Lord Byron was grown so fat that he scarcely knew him; and was dressed in a loose nankeen jacket and white trousers, his neckcloth open, and his hair in thin ringlets about his throat; altogether presenting a very different aspect from the compact, energetic, and curly-headed person whom Hunt had known in England.

His Lordship took the stranger into an inner room, and introduced him to a young lady who was in a state of great agitation.  This was the Guiccioli; presently her brother also, in great agitation, entered, having his arm in a sling.  This scene and confusion had arisen from a quarrel among the servants, in which the young Count, having interfered, had been stabbed.  He was very angry, the Countess was more so, and would not listen to the comments of Lord Byron, who was for making light of the matter.  Indeed, it looked somewhat serious, for though the stab was not much, the inflicter threatened more, and was at that time revengefully keeping watch, with knotted brows, under the portico, with the avowed intention of assaulting the first person who issued forth.  He was a sinister-looking, meager caitiff, with a red cap—gaunt, ugly, and unshaven; his appearance altogether more squalid and miserable than Englishmen would conceive it possible to find in such an establishment.  An end, however, was put to the tragedy by the fellow throwing himself on a bench, and bursting into tears—wailing and asking pardon for his offence, and perfecting his penitence by requesting Lord Byron to kiss him in token of forgiveness.  In the end, however, he was dismissed; and it being arranged that Mr Hunt should move his family to apartments in the Lanfranchi palace at Pisa, that gentleman returned to Leghorn.

The account which Mr Hunt has given, in his memoir of Lord Byron, is evidently written under offended feeling; and, in consequence, though he does not appear to have been much indebted to the munificence of his Lordship, the tendency is to make his readers sensible that he was, if not ill used, disappointed.  The Casa Lanfranchi was a huge and gaunt building, capable, without inconvenience or intermixture, of accommodating several families.  It was, therefore, not a great favour in his Lordship, considering that he had invited Mr Hunt from England, to become a partner with him in a speculation purely commercial, to permit him to occupy the ground-floor or flat, as it would be called in Scotland.  The apartments being empty, furniture was necessary, and the plainest was provided; good of its kind and respectable, it yet could not have cost a great deal.  It was chosen by Mr Shelley, who intended to make a present of it to Mr Hunt; but when the apartments were fitted up, Lord Byron insisted upon paying the account, and to that extent Mr Hunt incurred a pecuniary obligation to his Lordship.  The two hundred pounds already mentioned was a debt to Mr Shelley, who borrowed the money from Lord Byron.

Soon after Mr Hunt’s family were settled in their new lodgings, Shelley returned to Leghorn, with the intention of taking a sea excursion—in the course of which he was lost: Lord Byron knowing how much Hunt was dependent on that gentleman, immediately offered him the command of his purse, and requested to be considered as standing in the place of Shelley, his particular friend.  This was both gentlemanly and generous, and the offer was accepted, but with feelings neither just nor gracious: “Stern necessity and a large family compelled me,” says Mr Hunt, “and during our residence at Pisa I had from him, or rather from his steward, to whom he always sent me for the money, and who doled it out to me as if my disgraces were being counted, the sum of seventy pounds.”

“This sum,” he adds, “together with the payment of our expenses when we accompanied him from Pisa to Genoa, and thirty pounds with which he enabled us subsequently to go from Genoa to Florence, was all the money I ever received from Lord Byron, exclusive of the two hundred pounds, which, in the first instance, he made a debt of Mr Shelley, by taking his bond.”—The whole extent of the pecuniary obligation appears certainly not to have exceeded five hundred pounds; no great sum—but little or great, the manner in which it was recollected reflects no credit either on the head or heart of the debtor.

Mr Hunt, in extenuation of the bitterness with which he has spoken on the subject, says, that “Lord Byron made no scruple of talking very freely of me and mine.”  It may, therefore, be possible, that Mr Hunt had cause for his resentment, and to feel the humiliation of being under obligations to a mean man; at the same time Lord Byron, on his side, may upon experience have found equal reason to repent of his connection with Mr Hunt.  And it is certain that each has sought to justify, both to himself and to the world, the rupture of a copartnery which ought never to have been formed.  But his Lordship’s conduct is the least justifiable.  He had allured Hunt to Italy with flattering hopes; he had a perfect knowledge of his hampered circumstances, and he was thoroughly aware that, until their speculation became productive, he must support him.  To the extent of about five hundred pounds he did so: a trifle, considering the glittering anticipations of their scheme.

Viewing their copartnery, however, as a mere commercial speculation, his Lordship’s advance could not be regarded as liberal, and no modification of the term munificence or patronage could be applied to it.  But, unless he had harassed Hunt for the repayment of the money, which does not appear to have been the case, nor could he morally, perhaps even legally, have done so, that gentleman had no cause to complain.  The joint adventure was a failure, and except a little repining on the part of the one for the loss of his advance, and of grudging on that of the other for the waste of his time, no sharper feeling ought to have arisen between them.  But vanity was mingled with their golden dreams.  Lord Byron mistook Hunt’s political notoriety for literary reputation, and Mr Hunt thought it was a fine thing to be chum and partner with so renowned a lord.  After all, however, the worst which can be said of it is, that formed in weakness it could produce only vexation.

But the dissolution of the vapour with which both parties were so intoxicated, and which led to their quarrel, might have occasioned only amusement to the world, had it not left an ignoble stigma on the character of Lord Byron, and given cause to every admirer of his genius to deplore, that he should have so forgotten his dignity and fame.

There is no disputing the fact, that his Lordship, in conceiving the plan of The Liberal, was actuated by sordid motives, and of the basest kind, inasmuch as it was intended that the popularity of the work should rest upon satire; or, in other words, on the ability to be displayed by it in the art of detraction.  Being disappointed in his hopes of profit, he shuffled out of the concern as meanly as any higgler could have done who had found himself in a profitless business with a disreputable partner.  There is no disguising this unvarnished truth; and though his friends did well in getting the connection ended as quickly as possible, they could not eradicate the original sin of the transaction, nor extinguish the consequences which it of necessity entailed.  Let me not, however, be misunderstood: my objection to the conduct of Byron does not lie against the wish to turn his extraordinary talents to profitable account, but to the mode in which he proposed to, and did, employ them.  Whether Mr Hunt was or was not a fit copartner for one of his Lordship’s rank and celebrity, I do not undertake to judge; but any individual was good enough for that vile prostitution of his genius, to which, in an unguarded hour, he submitted for money.  Indeed, it would be doing injustice to compare the motives of Mr Hunt in the business with those by which Lord Byron was infatuated.  He put nothing to hazard; happen what might, he could not be otherwise than a gainer; for if profit failed, it could not be denied that the “foremost” poet of all the age had discerned in him either the promise or the existence of merit, which he was desirous of associating with his own.  This advantage Mr Hunt did gain by the connection; and it is his own fault that he cannot be recollected as the associate of Byron, but only as having attempted to deface his monument.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Mr Shelley—Sketch of his Life—His Death—The Burning of his Body, and the Return of the Mourners

It has been my study in writing these sketches to introduce as few names as the nature of the work would admit of; but Lord Byron connected himself with persons who had claims to public consideration on account of their talents; and, without affectation, it is not easy to avoid taking notice of his intimacy with some of them, especially, if in the course of it any circumstance came to pass which was in itself remarkable, or likely to have produced an impression on his Lordship’s mind.  His friendship with Mr Shelley, mentioned in the preceding chapter, was an instance of this kind.

That unfortunate gentleman was undoubtedly a man of genius—full of ideal beauty and enthusiasm.  And yet there was some defect in his understanding by which he subjected himself to the accusation of atheism.  In his dispositions he is represented to have been ever calm and amiable; and but for his metaphysical errors and reveries, and a singular incapability of conceiving the existing state of things as it practically affects the nature and condition of man, to have possessed many of the gentlest qualities of humanity.  He highly admired the endowments of Lord Byron, and in return was esteemed by his Lordship; but even had there been neither sympathy nor friendship between them, his premature fate could not but have saddened Byron with no common sorrow.

Mr Shelley was some years younger than his noble friend; he was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart., of Castle Goring, Sussex.  At the age of thirteen he was sent to Eton, where he rarely mixed in the common amusements of the other boys; but was of a shy, reserved disposition, fond of solitude, and made few friends.  He was not distinguished for his proficiency in the regular studies of the school; on the contrary, he neglected them for German and chemistry.  His abilities were superior, but deteriorated by eccentricity.  At the age of sixteen he was sent to the University of Oxford, where he soon distinguished himself by publishing a pamphlet, under the absurd and world-defying title of The Necessity of Atheism; for which he was expelled from the University.

The event proved fatal to his prospects in life; and the treatment he received from his family was too harsh to win him from error.  His father, however, in a short time relented, and he was received home; but he took so little trouble to conciliate the esteem of his friends, that he found the house uncomfortable, and left it.  He then went to London; where he eloped with a young lady to Gretna Green.  Their united ages amounted to thirty-two; and the match being deemed unsuitable to his rank and prospects, it so exasperated his father, that he broke off all communication with him.

After their marriage the young couple resided some time in Edinburgh.  They then passed over to Ireland, which being in a state of disturbance, Shelley took a part in politics, more reasonable than might have been expected.  He inculcated moderation.

About this tune he became devoted to the cultivation of his poetical talents; but his works were sullied with the erroneous inductions of an understanding which, inasmuch as he regarded all the existing world in the wrong, must be considered as having been either shattered or defective.

His rash marriage proved, of course, an unhappy one.  After the birth of two children, a separation, by mutual consent, took place, and Mrs Shelley committed suicide.

He then married a daughter of Mr Godwin, the author of Caleb Williams, and they resided for some time at Great Marlow, in Buckinghamshire, much respected for their charity.  In the meantime, his irreligious opinions had attracted public notice, and, in consequence of his unsatisfactory notions of the Deity, his children, probably at the instance of his father, were taken from him by a decree of the Lord Chancellor: an event which, with increasing pecuniary embarrassments, induced him to quit England, with the intention of never returning.

Being in Switzerland when Lord Byron, after his domestic tribulations, arrived at Geneva, they became acquainted.  He then crossed the Alps, and again at Venice renewed his friendship with his Lordship; he thence passed to Rome, where he resided some time; and after visiting Naples, fixed his permanent residence in Tuscany.  His acquirements were constantly augmenting, and he was without question an accomplished person.  He was, however, more of a metaphysician than a poet, though there are splendid specimens of poetical thought in his works.  As a man, he was objected to only on account of his speculative opinions; for he possessed many amiable qualities, was just in his intentions, and generous to excess.

When he had seen Mr Hunt established in the Casa Lanfranchi with Lord Byron at Pisa, Mr Shelley returned to Leghorn, for the purpose of taking a sea excursion; an amusement to which he was much attached.  During a violent storm the boat was swamped, and the party on board were all drowned.  Their bodies were, however, afterwards cast on shore; Mr Shelley’s was found near Via Reggio, and, being greatly decomposed, and unfit to be removed, it was determined to reduce the remains to ashes, that they might be carried to a place of sepulture.  Accordingly preparations were made for the burning.

Wood in abundance was found on the shore, consisting of old trees and the wreck of vessels: the spot itself was well suited for the ceremony.  The magnificent bay of Spezzia was on the right, and Leghorn on the left, at equal distances of about two-and-twenty miles.  The headlands project boldly far into the sea; in front lie several islands, and behind dark forests and the cliffy Apennines.  Nothing was omitted that could exalt and dignify the mournful rites with the associations of classic antiquity; frankincense and wine were not forgotten.  The weather was serene and beautiful, and the pacified ocean was silent, as the flame rose with extraordinary brightness.  Lord Byron was present; but he should himself have described the scene and what he felt.

These antique obsequies were undoubtedly affecting; but the return of the mourners from the burning is the most appalling orgia, without the horror of crime, of which I have ever heard.  When the duty was done, and the ashes collected, they dined and drank much together, and bursting from the calm mastery with which they had repressed their feelings during the solemnity, gave way to frantic exultation.  They were all drunk; they sang, they shouted, and their barouche was driven like a whirlwind through the forest.  I can conceive nothing descriptive of the demoniac revelry of that flight, but scraps of the dead man’s own song of Faust, Mephistophiles, and Ignis Fatuus, in alternate chorus.

The limits of the sphere of dream,
   The bounds of true and false are past;
Lead us on, thou wand’ring Gleam;
   Lead us onwards, far and fast,
To the wide, the desert waste.

But see how swift, advance and shift,
   Trees behind trees—row by row,
Now clift by clift, rocks bend and lift,
   Their frowning foreheads as we go;
The giant-snouted crags, ho! ho!
   How they snort, and how they blow.
Honour her to whom honour is due,
Old mother Baubo, honour to you.
An able sow with old Baubo upon her
Is worthy of glory and worthy of honour.

The way is wide, the way is long,
But what is that for a Bedlam throng?
Some on a ram, and some on a prong,
On poles and on broomsticks we flutter along.

Every trough will be boat enough,
With a rag for a sail, we can sweep through the sky.
Who flies not to-night, when means he to fly?

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