My Recollections of Lord Byron Part 51

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

[Footnote 90: See Medwin.]

[Footnote 91:

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

By another possest, may she live ever blest!

Her name still my heart must revere; With a sigh I resign what I once thought was mine, And forgive her deceit with a Tear."

"_The Tear_" (October, 1806).]

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

[Footnote 93:

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

And this the world calls frenzy."]

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

[Footnote 95: Ibid.]

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

[Footnote 97: M. Janet.]

CHAPTER XVI.

FAULTS OF LORD BYRON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In another pa.s.sage of his work, Moore further says:--

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

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

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

"Most men affect a virtuous character; Lord Byron's ambition, on the contrary, seemed to be to make the world believe that he was a sort of _Satan_, though impelled by high sentiments to accomplish great actions.

_Happily for his reputation, he possessed another quality that unmasked him completely: he was the most open and most sincere of men, and his nature, inclined to good, ever swayed all his actions._"[99]

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

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

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

And Stanhope further adds:--

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

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