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Letters and Journals of Lord Byron; with Notices of his Life. By Thomas Moore,
Esq. 2 vols. 4to. London: 1830.
We have read this book with the greatest pleasure. Considered merely as a
composition, it deserves to be classed among the best specimens of English prose
which our age has produced. It contains, indeed, no single passage equal to two
or three which we could select from the Life of Sheridan. But, as a whole, it is
immeasurably superior to that work. The style is agreeable, clear, and manly,
and when it rises into eloquence, rises without effort or ostentation. Nor is
the matter inferior to the manner. It would be difficult to name a book which
exhibits more kindness, fairness, and modesty. It has evidently been written,
not for the purpose of showing, what, however, it often shows, how well its
author can write, but for the purpose of vindicating, as far as truth will
permit, the memory of a celebrated man who can no longer vindicate himself. Mr.
Moore never thrusts himself between Lord Byron and the public. With the
strongest temptations to egotism, he has said no more about himself than the
subject absolutely required.
A great part, indeed the greater part, of these volumes, consists of extracts
from the letters and journals of Lord Byron; and it is difficult to speak too
highly of the skill which has been shown in the selection and arrangement. We
will not say that we have not occasionally remarked in these two large quartos
an anecdote which should have been omitted, a letter which should have been
suppressed, a name which should have been concealed by asterisks, or asterisks
which do not answer the purpose of concealing the name. But it is impossible, on
a general survey, to deny that the task has been executed with great judgment
and great humanity. When we consider the life which Lord Byron had led, his
petulance, his irritability, and his communicativeness, we cannot but admire the
dexterity with which Mr. Moore has contrived to exhibit so much of the character
and opinions of his friend, with so little pain to the feelings of the living.
The extracts from the journals and correspondence of Lord Byron are in the
highest degree valuable, not merely on account of the information which they
contain respecting the distinguished man by whom they were written, but on
account also of their rare merit as compositions. The letters, at least those
which were sent from Italy, are among the best in our language. They are less
affected than those of Pope and Walpole; they have more matter in them than
those of Cowper. Knowing that many of them were not written merely for the
person to whom they were directed, but were general epistles, meant to be read
by a large circle, we expected to find them clever and spirited, but deficient
in ease. We looked with vigilance for instances of stiffness in the language and
awkwardness in the transitions. We have been agreeably disappointed; and we must
confess that, if the epistolary style of Lord Byron was artificial, it was a
rare and admirable instance of that highest art which cannot be distinguished
from nature.
Of the deep and painful interest which this book excites no abstract can give a
just notion. So sad and dark a story is scarcely to be found in any work of
fiction; and we are little disposed to envy the moralist who can read it without
being softened.
The pretty fable by which the Duchess of Orleans illustrated the character of
her son the Regent might, with little change, be applied to Byron. All the
fairies, save one, had been bidden to his cradle. All the gossips had been
profuse of their gifts. One had bestowed nobility, another genius, a third
beauty. The malignant elf who had been uninvited came last, and, unable to
reverse what her sisters had done for their favorite, had mixed up a curse with
every blessing. In the rank of Lord Byron, in his understanding, in his
character, in his very person, there was a strange union of opposite extremes.
He was born to all that men covet and admire. But in every one of those eminent
advantages which he possessed over others was mingled something of misery and
debasement. He was sprung from a house, ancient indeed and noble, but degraded
and impoverished by a series of crimes and follies which had attained a
scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded had died poor, and, but for
merciful judges, would have died upon the gallows. The young peer had great
intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound part in his mind. He had naturally
a generous and feeling heart: but his temper was wayward and irritable. He had a
head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the
beggars in the streets mimicked. Distinguished at once by the strength and by
the weakness of his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a
handsome cripple, he required, if ever man required, the firmest and the most
judicious training. But, capriciously as nature had dealt with him, the parent
to whom the office of forming his character was entrusted was more capricious
still. She passed from paroxysms of rage to paroxysms of tenderness. At one time
she stifled him with her caresses; at another time she insulted his deformity.
He came into the world; and the world treated him as his mother had treated him,
sometimes with fondness, sometimes with cruelty, never with justice. It indulged
him without discrimination, and punished him without discrimination. He was
truly a spoiled child, not merely the spoiled child of his parent, but the
spoiled child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child of
fame, the spoiled child of society. His first poems were received with a
contempt which, feeble as they were, they did not absolutely deserve. The poem
which he published on his return from his travels was, on the other hand,
extolled far above its merit. At twenty-four, he found himself on the highest
pinnacle of literary fame, with Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and a crowd of other
distinguished writers beneath his feet. There is scarcely an instance in history
of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence.
Everything that could stimulate, and everything that could gratify the strongest
propensities of our nature, the gaze of a hundred drawing-rooms, the
acclamations of the whole nation, the applause of applauded men, the love of
lovely women, all this world and all the glory of it were at once offered to a
youth to whom nature had given violent passions, and whom education had never
taught to control them. He lived as many men live who have no similar excuse to
plead for their faults. But his countrymen and his countrywomen would love him
and admire him. They were resolved to see in his excesses only the flash and
outbreak of that same fiery mind which glowed in his poetry. He attacked
religion; yet in religious circles his name was mentioned with fondness, and in
many religious publications his works were censured with singular tenderness. He
lampooned the Prince Regent; yet he could not alienate the Tories. Everything,
it seemed, was to be forgiven to youth, rank, and genius.
Then came the reaction. Society, capricious in its indignation as it had been
capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its forward and petted
darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry. He was persecuted
with an irrational fury. Much has been written about those unhappy domestic
occurrences which decided the fate of his life. Yet nothing is, nothing ever
was, positively known to the public, but this, that he quarreled with his lady,
and that she refused to live with him. There have been hints in abundance, and
shrugs and shakings of the head, and "Well, well, we know," and "We could an if
we would," and "If we list to speak," and "There be that might an they list."
But we are not aware that there is before the world substantiated by credible,
or even by tangible evidence, a single fact indicating that Lord Byron was more
to blame than any other man who is on bad terms with his wife. The professional
men whom Lady Byron consulted were undoubtedly of opinion that she ought not to
live with her husband. But it is to be remembered that they formed that opinion
without hearing both sides. We do not say, we do not mean to insinuate, that
Lady Byron was in any respect to blame. We think that those who condemn her on
the evidence which is now before the public are as rash as those who condemn her
husband. We will not pronounce any judgment, we cannot, even in our own minds,
form any judgment, on a transaction which is so imperfectly known to us. It
would have been well if, at the time of the separation, all those who knew as
little about the matter then as we know about it now, had shown that forbearance
which, under such circumstances, is but common justice.
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its
periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces, and family
quarrels, pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk about it for a day,
and forget it. But once in six or seven years our virtue becomes outrageous. We
cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated. We must make a
stand against vice. We must teach libertines that the English people appreciate
the importance of domestic ties. Accordingly some unfortunate man, in no respect
more depraved than hundreds whose offences have been treated with lenity, is
singled out as an expiatory sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken
from him. If he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by the
higher orders, and hissed by the lower. He is, in truth, a sort of whipping-boy,
by whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of the same class are, it
is supposed, sufficiently chastised. We reflect very complacently on our own
severity, and compare with great pride the high standard of morals established
in England with the Parisian laxity. At length our anger is satiated. Our victim
is ruined and heart-broken. And our virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years
more.
It is clear that those vices which destroy domestic happiness ought to be as
much as possible repressed. It is equally clear that they cannot be repressed by
penal legislation. It is therefore right and desirable that public opinion
should be directed against them. But it should be directed against them
uniformly, steadily, and temperately, not by sudden fits and starts. There
should be one weight and one measure. Decimation is always an objectionable mode
of punishment. It is the resource of judges too indolent and hasty to
investigate facts and to discriminate nicely between shades of guilt. It is an
irrational practice, even when adopted by military tribunals. When adopted by
the tribunal of public opinion, it is infinitely more irrational. It is good
that a certain portion of disgrace should constantly attend on certain bad
actions. But it is not good that the offenders should merely have to stand the
risks of a lottery of infamy, that ninety-nine out of every hundred should
escape, and that the hundredth, perhaps the most innocent of the hundred, should
pay for all. We remember to have seen a mob assembled in Lincoln's Inn to hoot a
gentleman against whom the most oppressive proceeding known to the English law
was then in progress. He was hooted because he had been an unfaithful husband,
as if some of the most popular men of the age, Lord Nelson for example, had not
been unfaithful husbands. We remember a still stronger case. Will posterity
believe that, in an age in which men whose gallantries were universally known,
and had been legally proved, filled some of the highest offices in the State and
in the army, presided at the meetings of religions and benevolent institutions,
were the delight of every society, and the favorites of the multitude, a crowd
of moralists went to the theatre, in order to pelt a poor actor for disturbing
the conjugal felicity of an alderman? What there was in the circumstances either
of the offender or of the sufferer to vindicate the zeal of the audience, we
could never conceive. It has never been supposed that the situation of an actor
is peculiarly favorable to the rigid virtues, or that an alderman enjoys any
special immunity from injuries such as that which on this occasion roused the
anger of the public. But such is the justice of mankind.
In these cases the punishment was excessive; but the offence was known and
proved. The case of Lord Byron was harder. True Jedwood justice was dealt out to
him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or
rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without knowing anything whatever
about the transactions in his family, flew into a violent passion with him, and
proceeded to invent stories which might justify its anger. Ten or twenty
different accounts of the separation, inconsistent with each other, with
themselves, and with common sense, circulated at the same time. What evidence
there might be for any one of these, the virtuous people who repeated them
neither knew nor cared. For in fact these stories were not the causes, but the
effects of the public indignation. They resembled those loathsome slanders which
Lewis Goldsmith, and other abject libelers of the same class, were in the habit
of publishing about Bonaparte; such as that he poisoned a girl with arsenic when
he was at the military school, that he hired a grenadier to shoot Dessaix at
Marengo, that he filled St. Cloud with all the pollutions of Capreae. There was
a time when anecdotes like these obtained some credence from persons who, hating
the French emperor without knowing why, were eager to believe anything which
might justify their hatred. Lord Byron fared in the same way. His countrymen
were in a bad humor with him. His writings and his character had lost the charm
of novelty. He had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is
punished most severely; he had been over-praised; he had excited too warm an
interest; and the public, with its usual justice, chastised him for its own
folly. The attachments of the multitude bear no small resemblance to those of
the wanton enchantress in the Arabian Tales, who, when the forty days of her
fondness were over, was not content with dismissing her lovers, but condemned
them to expiate, in loathsome shapes, and under cruel penances, the crime of
having once pleased her too well.
The obloquy which Byron had to endure was such as might well have shaken a more
constant mind. The newspapers were filled with lampoons. The theatres shook with
execrations. He was excluded from circles where he had lately been the observed
of all observers. All those creeping things that riot in the decay of nobler
natures hastened to their repast; and they were right; they did after their
kind. It is not every day that the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified
by the agonies of such a spirit, and the degradation of such a name.
The unhappy man left his country for ever. The howl of contumely followed him
across the sea, up the Rhine, over the Alps; it gradually waxed fainter; it died
away; those who had raised it began to ask each other, what, after all, was the
matter about which they had been so clamorous, and wished to invite back the
criminal whom they had just chased from them. His poetry became more popular
than it had ever been; and his complaints were read with tears by thousands and
tens of thousands who had never seen his face.
He had fixed his home on the shores of the Adriatic, in the most picturesque and
interesting of cities, beneath the brightest of skies, and by the brightest of
seas. Censoriousness was not the vice of the neighbors whom he had chosen. They
were a race corrupted by a bad government and a bad religion, long renowned for
skill in the arts of voluptuousness, and tolerant of all the caprices of
sensuality. From the public opinion of the country of his adoption, he had
nothing to dread. With the public opinion of the country of his birth, he was at
open war. He plunged into wild and desperate excesses, ennobled by no generous
or tender sentiment. From his Venetian harem, he sent forth volume after volume,
full of eloquence, of wit, of pathos, of ribaldry, and of bitter disdain. His
health sank under the effects of his intemperance. His hair turned grey. His
food ceased to nourish him. A hectic fever withered him up. It seemed that his
body and mind were about to perish together.
From this wretched degradation he was in some measure rescued by a connection,
culpable indeed, yet such as, if it were judged by the standard of morality
established in the country where he lived, might be called virtuous. But an
imagination polluted by vice, a temper embittered by misfortune, and a frame
habituated to the fatal excitement of intoxication, prevented him from fully
enjoying the happiness which he might have derived from the purest and most
tranquil of his many attachments. Midnight draughts of ardent spirits and
Rhenish wines had begun to work the ruin of his fine intellect. His verse lost
much of the energy and condensation which had distinguished it. But he would not
resign, without a struggle, the empire which he had exercised over the men of
his generation. A new dream of ambition arose before him; to be the chief of a
literary party; to be the great mover of an intellectual revolution; to guide
the public mind of England from his Italian retreat, as Voltaire had guided the
public mind of France from the villa of Ferney. With this hope, as it should
seem, he established The Liberal. But, powerfully as he had affected the
imaginations of his contemporaries, he mistook his own powers if he hoped to
direct their opinions; and he still more grossly mistook his own disposition, if
he thought that he could long act in concert with other men of letters. The plan
failed, and failed ignominiously. Angry with himself, angry with his coadjutors,
he relinquished it, and turned to another project, the last and noblest of his
life.
A nation, once the first among the nations, pre-eminent in knowledge,
pre-eminent in military glory, the cradle of philosophy, of eloquence, and of
the fine arts, had been for ages bowed down under a cruel yoke. All the vices
which oppression generates, the abject vices which it generates in those who
submit to it, the ferocious vices which it generates in those who struggle
against it, had deformed the character of that miserable race. The valor which
had won the great battle of human civilization, which had saved Europe, which
had subjugated Asia, lingered only among pirates and robbers. The ingenuity,
once so conspicuously displayed in every department of physical and moral
science, had been depraved into a timid and servile cunning. On a sudden this
degraded people had risen on their oppressors. Discountenanced or betrayed by
the surrounding potentates, they had found in themselves something of that which
might well supply the place of all foreign assistance, something of the energy
of their fathers.
As a man of letters, Lord Byron could not but be interested in the event of this
contest. His political opinions, though, like all his opinions, unsettled,
leaned strongly towards the side of liberty. He had assisted the Italian
insurgents with his purse, and, if their struggle against the Austrian
Government had been prolonged, would probably have assisted them with his sword.
But to Greece he was attached by peculiar ties. He had when young resided in
that country. Much of his most splendid and popular poetry had been inspired by
its scenery and by its history. Sick of inaction, degraded in his own eyes by
his private vices and by his literary failures, pining for untried excitement
and honorable distinction, he carried his exhausted body and his wounded spirit
to the Grecian camp.
His conduct in his new situation showed so much vigor and good sense as to
justify us in believing that, if his life had been prolonged, he might have
distinguished himself as a soldier and a politician. But pleasure and sorrow had
done the work of seventy years upon his delicate frame. The hand of death was
upon him: he knew it; and the only wish which he uttered was that he might die
sword in hand.
This was denied to him. Anxiety, exertion, exposure, and those fatal stimulants
which had become indispensable to him, soon stretched him on a sick-bed, in a
strange land, amidst strange faces, without one human being that he loved near
him. There, at thirty-six, the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth
century closed his brilliant and miserable career.
We cannot even now retrace those events without feeling something of what was
felt by the nation, when it was first known that the grave had closed over so
much sorrow and so much glory; something of what was felt by those who saw the
hearse, with its long train of coaches, turn slowly northward, leaving behind it
that cemetery which had been consecrated by the dust of so many great poets, but
of which the doors were closed against all that remained of Byron. We well
remember that on that day, rigid moralists could not refrain from weeping for
one so young, so illustrious, so unhappy, gifted with such rare gifts, and tried
by such strong temptations. It is unnecessary to make any reflections. The
history carries its moral with it. Our age has indeed been fruitful of warnings
to the eminent and of consolations to the obscure. Two men have died within our
recollection, who, at the time of life at which many people have hardly
completed their education, had raised themselves, each in his own department, to
the height of glory. One of them died at Longwood; the other at Missolonghi.
It is always difficult to separate the literary character of a man who lives in
our own time from his personal character. It is peculiarly difficult to make
this separation in the case of Lord Byron. For it is scarcely too much to say,
that Lord Byron never wrote without some reference, direct or indirect, to
himself The interest excited by the events of his life mingles itself in our
minds, and probably in the minds of almost all our readers, with the interest
which properly belongs to his works. A generation must pass away before it will
be possible to form a fair judgment of his books, considered merely as books. At
present they are not only books but relics. We will however venture, though with
unfeigned diffidence, to offer some desultory remarks on his poetry.
His lot was cast in the time of a great literary revolution. That poetical
dynasty which had dethroned the successors of Shakespeare and Spenser was, in
its turn, dethroned by a race who represented themselves as heirs of the ancient
line, so long dispossessed by usurpers. The real nature of this revolution has
not, we think, been comprehended by the great majority of those who concurred in
it.
Wherein especially does the poetry of our times differ from that of the last
century? Ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would answer that the poetry of
the last century was correct, but cold and mechanical, and that the poetry of
our time, though wild and irregular, presented far more vivid images, and
excited the passions far more strongly than that of Parnell, of Addison, or of
Pope. In the same manner we constantly hear it said, that the poets of the age
of Elizabeth had far more genius, but far less correctness, than those of the
age of Anne. It seems to be taken for granted, that there is some
incompatibility, some antithesis between correctness and creative power. We
rather suspect that this notion arises merely from an abuse of words, and that
it has been the parent of many of the fallacies which perplex the science of
criticism.
What is meant by correctness in poetry? If by correctness he meant the
conforming to rules which have their foundation in truth and in the principles
of human nature, then correctness is only another name for excellence. If by
correctness be meant the conforming to rules purely arbitrary, correctness may
be another name for dullness and absurdity.
A writer who describes visible objects falsely and violates the propriety of
character, a writer who makes the mountains "nod their drowsy heads" at night,
or a dying man take leave of the world with a rant like that of Maximin, may be
said, in the high and just sense of the phrase, to write incorrectly. He
violates the first great law of his art. His imitation is altogether unlike the
thing imitated. The four poets who are most eminently free from incorrectness of
this description are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. They are, therefore,
in one sense, and that the best sense, the most correct of poets.
When it is said that Virgil, though he had less genius than Homer, was a more
correct writer, what sense is attached to the word correctness? Is it meant that
the story of the Aeneid is developed more skillfully than that of the Odyssey?
that the Roman describes the face of the external world, or the emotions of the
mind, more accurately than the Greek? that the characters of Achates and
Mnestheus are more nicely discriminated, and more consistently supported, than
those of Achilles, of Nestor, and of Ulysses? The fact incontestably is that,
for every violation of the fundamental laws of poetry which can be found in
Homer, it would be easy to find twenty in Virgil.
Troilus and Cressida is perhaps of all the plays of Shakespeare that which is
commonly considered as the most incorrect. Yet it seems to us infinitely more
correct, in the sound sense of the term, than what are called the most correct
plays of the most correct dramatists. Compare it, for example, with the
Iphigenie of Racine. We are sure that the Greeks of Shakespeare bear a far
greater resemblance than the Greeks of Racine to the real Greeks who besieged
Troy; and for this reason, that the Greeks of Shakespeare are human beings, and
the Greeks of Racine mere names, mere words printed in capitals at the head of
paragraphs of declamation. Racine, it is true, would have shuddered at the
thought of making a warrior at the siege of Troy quote Aristotle. But of what
use is it to avoid a single anachronism, when the whole play is one anachronism,
the sentiments and phrases of Versailles in the camp of Aulis?
In the sense in which we are now using the word correctness, we think that Sir
Walter Scott, Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge, are far more correct poets than
those who are commonly extolled as the models of correctness, Pope, for example,
and Addison. The single description of a moonlight night in Pope's Iliad
contains more inaccuracies than can be found in all the Excursion. There is not
a single scene in Cato, in which all that conduces to poetical illusion, all the
propriety of character, of language, of situation, is not more grossly violated
than in any part of the Lay of the Last Minstrel. No man can possibly think that
the Romans of Addison resemble the real Romans so closely as the moss-troopers
of Scott resemble the real moss-troopers. Wat Tinlinn and William of Deloraine
are not, it is true, persons of so much dignity as Cato. But the dignity of the
persons represented has as little to do with the correctness of poetry as with
the correctness of painting. We prefer a gipsy by Reynolds to his Majesty's head
on a signpost, and a Borderer by Scott to a Senator by Addison.
In what sense, then, is the word correctness used by those who say, with the
author of the Pursuits of Literature, that Pope was the most correct of English
Poets, and that next to Pope came the late Mr. Gifford? What is the nature and
value of that correctness, the praise of which is denied to Macbeth, to Lear,
and to Othello, and given to Hoole's translations and to all the Seatonian
prize-poems? We can discover no eternal rule, no rule founded in reason and in
the nature of things, which Shakespeare does not observe much more strictly than
Pope. But if by correctness be meant the conforming to a narrow legislation
which, while lenient to the mala in se, multiplies, without a shadow of a
reason, the mala prohibita, if by correctness be meant a strict attention to
certain ceremonious observances, which are no more essential to poetry than
etiquette to good government, or than the washings of a Pharisee to devotion,
then, assuredly, Pope may be a more correct poet than Shakespeare; and, if the
code were a little altered, Colley Cibber might be a more correct poet than
Pope. But it may well be doubted whether this kind of correctness be a merit,
nay, whether it be not an absolute fault.
It would be amusing to make a digest of the irrational laws which bad critics
have framed for the government of poets. First in celebrity and in absurdity
stand the dramatic unities of place and time. No human being has ever been able
to find anything that could, even by courtesy, be called an argument for these
unities, except that they have been deduced from the general practice of the
Greeks. It requires no very profound examination to discover that the Greek
dramas, often admirable as compositions, are, as exhibitions of human character
and human life, far inferior to the English plays of the age of Elizabeth. Every
scholar knows that the dramatic part of the Athenian tragedies was at first
subordinate to the lyrical part. It would, therefore, have been little less than
a miracle if the laws of the Athenian stage had been found to suit plays in
which there was no chorus. All the greatest masterpieces of the dramatic art
have been composed in direct violation of the unities, and could never have been
composed if the unities had not been violated. It is clear, for example, that
such a character as that of Hamlet could never have been developed within the
limits to which Alfieri confined himself. Yet such was the reverence of literary
men during the last century for these unities that Johnson who, much to his
honor, took the opposite side, was, as he says, "frightened at his own
temerity," and "afraid to stand against the authorities which might be produced
against him."
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