Home Life of Great Authors Part 6

Can we wonder that those who crowded the table where he sat, lingered on till the daylight drove them from the board? or that no man who had had him for a boon companion could ever be satisfied with another? Can we wonder that the students who crowded his lecture-room after he became a professor thought every other lecturer commonplace and dull? Not that he gave them more information than others--perhaps he did not give them as much; but he excited and inspired them. He quickened their minds, and wakened their dormant faculties. Some of the white heat of his own enthusiasm he communicated to their colder natures, and they enjoyed the unusual warmth. Those who listened to those wonderful discourses can never be persuaded that eloquence did not die with Christopher North.

They were all addressed to the hearts of his listeners, and thrills, and tears, and laughter that was not loud but deep, accompanied his speech from the beginning to the very end. Let one who thus listened to him speak:--

"We have heard him in the a.s.sembly-rooms, speaking on the genius of Scott, a little after the death of the Wizard, and in the tremble of his deep voice could read his sorrow for the personal loss, as well as his enthusiasm for the universal genius. We have heard him in his cla.s.s-room, in those wild and wailing cadences, which no description can adequately re-echo, in those long, deep-drawn, slowly expiring sounds, which now resembled the moanings of a forsaken cataract, and now seemed to come hoa.r.s.e and hollow from the chambers of the thunder, advocating the immortality of the soul, describing Caesar weeping at the grave of Alexander, repeating, with an energy which might have raised the dead, Scott's lines on the landing of the British in Portugal, and discovering the secret springs of laughter, beauty, sublimity, and terror, to audiences whom he melted, electrified, subdued, solemnized, exploded into mirth, or awed into silence, at his pleasure."

His eloquence gained little from his personal appearance, about which there was something savage, leonine, ma.s.sive, but little that was refined or attractive in the usual sense of that word. Still his face is described by some as magnificent, and his gray, flas.h.i.+ng eyes, as being remarkably expressive. In his dress he was exceedingly slovenly except upon state occasions. His professor's gown, as he stalked along the college-terraces, flew in tattered stripes behind him, his s.h.i.+rts were usually b.u.t.tonless, and his hat like a reminiscence of a pre-historic age. His yellow hair always floated over his shoulders, in confusion worse confounded, and he wore immense unkempt whiskers hanging upon his breast. d.i.c.kens thus describes him:--

"At his heels followed a wiry, sharp-eyed s.h.a.ggy devil of a terrier, d.o.g.g.i.ng his steps as he went slas.h.i.+ng up and down, now with one man beside him, now with another, and now quite alone, but always at a fast rolling pace, with his head in the air, and his eyes as wide open as he could get them. A bright, clear-complexioned, mountain-looking fellow, he looks as if he had just come down from the Highlands, and had never taken a pen in hand."

His carelessness of appearances extended to his rooms, which looked like small sections from the primeval chaos. The book-shelves were of unpainted wood, knocked together in the rudest fas.h.i.+on, and the books were many of them tattered and without backs. A case containing foreign birds was used also as a wardrobe, and all of his rare possessions in natural history were mixed up with a most motley collection of books and papers,--these latter consisting of all sorts of sc.r.a.ps, of which no one else could have made anything. He always seemed to be able to find them when wanted, even in the worst confusion; but how he did it was a mystery to his friends. "Here and there, in the interstices between books, were stuffed what appeared to be dingy, crumpled bits of paper, but they were in reality bank-notes, his cla.s.s fees; which he never carried in a purse, but stuffed away wherever it seemed most convenient at the moment." He never, even in the coldest weather, had a fire in his room.

No account of Kit North would be complete that left out entirely the convivialities of the table, though we should make a great mistake if we took the humorous caricatures of the "Noctes Ambrosianae" for accounts of literal feats in that line. This has sometimes been done, and he is frequently represented as a glutton and a drunkard. He was neither, although he did perform some remarkable feats both of eating and drinking in his day. His life of constant out-of-door exercise gave him a keen appet.i.te, and a perfect digestion, and he loved the hilarity of the table as well as any man of his day. But in his later life he became a _teetotaller_. Even in his earlier days it was often the excitement of company which quickened all of his powers to their utmost tension, when the effect was attributed to wine. So fond was he of all sorts and kinds of out-of-the-way company, that he was at one time in the habit of going at midnight to the Angel Inn, where many of the up and down London coaches met, and there to preside at the pa.s.sengers' supper, carving for them, inquiring all about their respective journeys, and astonis.h.i.+ng them with his wit and pleasantry. He would also linger about with coachmen and guards, and was present at, and took a hand in, many a street row, unknown by those with whom he mingled.

He is said to have remained for three months in the back room of a Highland blacksmith, strolling daily about the hills, and performing some of his prodigious pedestrian feats, to the great surprise of the rustics. He is also said to have followed the lady who became his wife all over the lake country of Scotland in the disguise of a waiter, serving her at table wherever the party happened to be, until the suspicions of her father were aroused by seeing the same waiter at every inn. Wilson then made himself known, declared his admiration for the lady, and finally became her accepted suitor. After their marriage he took her with him all over the Highlands on foot, a.s.suring her that only so could she become really acquainted with their beauties. No man perhaps ever loved the Highlands as Christopher North loved them,--with the possible exception of Walter Scott.--and we can truly envy his young bride to be thus escorted through their deepest labyrinths, and introduced to their most delicate and hidden beauties. Here he introduced his beloved also to the cottages of the peasants, and made her acquainted with the poetry of that life which has inspired some of the finest of modern literature. He knew as well as Hogg, or Scott, or Lockhart, that the characteristic romance of a people like the Scotch is to be sought chiefly in the cottages of the poor, and that the finest poetry of such a people has for the most part a like inspiration. And these same peasants showed to their best advantage always when Christopher was around. They loved him instinctively, although they knew him only as a sportsman, or in some cases, perhaps, as a naturalist. But his large heart always shone forth in his intercourse with the poor, and he seemed conscious of no superiority to them, meeting them always on the common ground of humanity, and sympathizing, in his hearty and genial way, in all their joys and sorrows. They _took to him_ just as dogs and children did.

And his descriptions of their cramped and narrow lives, enlivened by his characteristic humor, are among the best pictures the world has cherished of Scottish rural life. He did not spare their vices, but gave many dramatic pictures of the darker sides of peasant life, with which he gained a close acquaintance during those long foot-journeys which he was so fond of making, living really what we would call the life of a tramp, for long periods. Sometimes he camped with gypsies for weeks, and at all times was intimate with all of the so-called lower cla.s.ses.

Tinkers, cairds, poachers, were his familiar roadside acquaintances, and he extracted great amus.e.m.e.nt from their peculiarities. Sometimes he had to win the respect of these worthies by knocking them down in the beginning of the acquaintance, but after that they usually stood by him to the end. He usually figured as the champion of the weak in these games at fisticuffs, but sometimes he managed things on his own account.

Although he loved to wander in the Highlands, he made his home among the lakes at Elleray. This home was a rambling, mossy-roofed cottage, of very picturesque appearance, overhung by a giant sycamore.

"Never," he says, "in this well-wooded world, not even in the days of the Druids, could there have been such another tree. It would be easier to suppose two Shakspeares. Oh, sweetest and shadiest of sycamores, we love thee beyond all other trees."

And he thus discourses of the lakes amid which he lived,--and about whose borders he wandered so continually:--

"Each lake hath its promontories, that every step you walk, every stroke you row, undergo miraculous metamorphoses, accordant to the change that comes o'er the spirit of your dream, as your imagination glances again over the transfigured mountains. Each lake hath its bays of bliss, where might ride at her moorings, made of the stalks of water-lilies, the fairy bark of a spiritual life.

Each lake hath its hanging terraces of immortal green, that along her sh.o.r.es run glimmering far down beneath the superficial suns.h.i.+ne, where the poet in his becalmed canoe, among the l.u.s.tre, could fondly swear by all that is most beautiful on earth, and air, and water, that these three are one, blended as they are by the interfusing spirit of heavenly peace."

Lover of beauty as he was, yet he was well content with what he could find in Scotland; he cared little for England, and nothing for the Continent. There was enough to exhaust the seeing possibilities of a lifetime in his own little land, with its rocks and lakes and heathery hills. This was because he really had the poet's eye and heart. Such do not need to traverse the whole wide world to find enough of beauty; it is only the mediocre and the commonplace who care to gaze superficially at the landscapes of two continents. But Wilson knew his land not only with the eye of a poet, but also with that of a naturalist. His favorite pastime was ornithology, and he made fine collections of specimens in this line.

He was a great sportsman, and a story is told by his daughter, Mrs.

Gordon, of his travelling seventy miles in one day, to fish in a certain favorite loch among the braes of Glenarchy, called Loch Toila. He was also a good shot, and very enthusiastic in sport even to old age.

Boating was another favorite pastime; and engaged in one or another of these out-of-door pursuits, he pa.s.sed a very large portion of his whole life. When he did write, he did it with great rapidity, composing one of the "Noctes" at a sitting. His love for the animal creation was very deep, and he would never submit to seeing any creature abused. He one day saw a man cruelly beating his horse, which was overloaded with coals, and could not move. He remonstrated with the driver, who, exasperated at the interference, took up the whip in a threatening way, as if with intent to strike the professor. In one instant the well-nerved hand of Wilson, not new to these encounters, twisted the whip from the coa.r.s.e fist of the driver, and walking up to the cart, he unfastened the _trams_ and hurled the whole weight of the coals into the street. He then took the horse and led it away, depositing it in the hands of the authorities, with injunctions to see that the beast was better treated in future.

He made great pets of game-birds, the aristocracy of the species, with their delicate heads and exquisite plumage, and kept at one time no less than sixty-two in the back yard of his house. The noise was simply unendurable to all but Wilson, who was never annoyed by it in the least.

He kept one lame sparrow for eleven years, caring for it with the tenderest solicitude.

He was always well known in the houses of the poor, and he never gave up one of his humble friends. He was tender and gentle always to these, as to the members of his own household, where it was said the very strength of his hand was softened, that he might caress the infant, or play with the little ones at his feet. With all children he was a prime favorite, and in his declining years his grandchildren were his daily playmates.

Noah's ark, trumpets, drums, pencils, puzzles, dolls, were all supposed by them to possess interest in his eyes equal to their own.

He was thrown much upon these children for his pleasures near the close of his life. That frame of gigantic build and of gigantic strength became almost helpless from paralysis, and he was cared for till death by his daughter, the mother of these favored little ones. Oh, it is sad to think of it! Poor Christopher,--the active, the alert, the keen-sighted, the fleet-footed, the gay and rollicking sportsman, the famous angler, the champion boxer, too, upon occasions,--laid low, and propped helpless upon pillows within walls, which he had always hated so sincerely. He writes:--

"Our spirit burns within us, but our limbs are palsied, and our feet must brush the heather no more. Lo, how beautifully those fast-travelling pointers do their work on that black mountain's breast; intersecting it into parallelograms and squares and circles, and now all a-stoop on a sudden, as if frozen to death.

Higher up among the rocks and cliffs and stones, we see a stripling whose ambition it is to strike the sky with his forehead, and wet his hair in the misty cloud, pursuing the ptarmigan. . . . Never shall eld deaden our sympathies with the pastimes of our fellow-men, any more than with their highest raptures, their profoundest griefs."

It is safe to say that he kept his word, and was to the last, the same genial, warm-hearted, impulsive, wayward man who had by these and other engaging qualities made for himself so large a place in the heart of his countrymen, during the long years he had wandered over her moors and hills, seeing all her beauties, and describing them as no other had done.

He was almost the last of that band of strong men who cast such l.u.s.tre over the beginning of this century. Coleridge had gone before, and Wordsworth, Byron, and Campbell, Sh.e.l.ley, and Canning, and Peel, and Jeffrey, and Moore, and he lingered on in a solitude made greater by that last stroke of calamity which deprived him of motion for a time that was weary and heart-breaking to him, and over which the world yet sheds its sympathizing tears. He died at the age of sixty-eight.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

LORD BYRON.

So many volumes have been written about the domestic life and the loves of Lord Byron, that it would be a hopeless undertaking to attempt to say anything new about them. But the story of Byron's life will never lose its fascination, and to every new generation of readers the romance will be fresh. Marvellously beautiful, wonderfully gifted, unfortunately const.i.tuted man; wronged by his birth, wronged by his education, wronged most of all by himself, the world will never cease to wonder and to weep when his tragic story is told. While the language remains his words will live. Immortal poetry for youth!--new generations will learn it by heart, when the older generations are forgetting; and long after all memory of his waywardness and folly has faded from the world, his deathless songs will still sing on.

In any attempt to understand Byron, his ancestry must be much considered. It will never do to compare him with cool-headed, calm-blooded, matter-of-fact people. He was the peculiar product of a peculiar race. Coming through generations of hot, turbulent blood, which was never once mastered or tamed by its possessors, he entered the world with a temperament and disposition which made it simply impossible that he should lead the ordinary life of the British Philistine of his day.

As far back as they have been traced, the family were violent, pa.s.sionate, high-spirited, but unrestrained in the indulgence of their desires by any of the cardinal principles of morality. Byron's father, one of Byron's biographers tells us, had outraged in his previous family life not only the principles of religion, but also the laws of society; and when, in 1783, he married Catherine Gordon, the wealthy heiress of Gight, Aberdeens.h.i.+re, it was chiefly for the purpose of paying off his debts with her fortune. Within two years after the marriage the heiress of Gight was reduced to a pittance of one hundred and fifty pounds a year. In 1790, for economy's sake, they removed from London to Aberdeen, but soon separated.

Even after this, Captain Byron was mean-spirited enough to solicit money from his wife, and she had not the heart to refuse him. With a small supply thus obtained he crossed the channel, and in 1791 died in Valenciennes, in the North of France. Of the violent temper of Byron's mother many stories are told, and of her heartless treatment of him in his early years; so that upon neither side can we find much upon which we could expect to build a very n.o.ble or well-balanced character, and the fact seems to be that the eccentricities of the Byron family were so great as to be dangerously near the point called insanity.

A youth inheriting such blood as this, and brought up without even a pretence of moral or religious training, could hardly be expected to develop many of the domestic virtues. Neither could high-mindedness or lofty principle be predicted of him. And in truth, Byron possessed neither of these things. With this fiery Norman blood flowing in his veins, restlessness was the habitual condition of his existence, such restlessness as drove him to seek excitement at whatever cost,--quiet, as he expressed it, to the quick bosom being h.e.l.l. This restlessness led him into all sorts of folly and excess, in the pursuit of new excitements. Then he was cursed with an exaggerated sensibility, which, while it gave him many rare delights in life, inflicted upon him also the keenest tortures. His ma.s.sive egotism was the cause, doubtless, of many of his most marked eccentricities. He was so anxious to have the world's gaze fixed upon him that he said and did things continually for the mere purpose of holding its attention. In this way he frequently made himself appear worse than he really was. Society was held willingly in the thrall of his personality. A dull world likes to have laid bare for its inspection the pulses of a vivid existence. Byron may have been no worse than many other men of his day, for it was a time of general immorality, but he never concealed even his worst vices. While hypocrisy is a national vice in England, Byron, though essentially English in most things, never possessed this marked characteristic of his countrymen. He flaunted his vices in the light of day; and the world took a speedy revenge upon him for his audacity. The little episode of his love for Mary Chaworth occurred at so early an age that it seems scarcely probable that it affected him as seriously as he claimed; yet he was a very precocious child, and his account of the strength of his pa.s.sion, and its disappointment, may not be wholly an affectation. It is difficult, too, to arrive at his real feeling toward Miss Milbank, there was so much of contradiction both in his words and in his conduct. Miss Milbank probably loved him but feared to marry him, having heard of the irregularities of his life. And certainly the sort of life which Byron had led was a very poor preparation for happiness at the fireside, and if all other causes of unhappiness had been wanting would doubtless have wrecked his union with Miss Milbank. But there were not wanting numberless other sources of misery to this ill-mated couple, first among which was the complete incompatibility of their tastes, feelings, characters. That she was a n.o.ble, intelligent, and high-principled woman, none have ever denied. The wonder was, not that she would not live with such a man as Byron, but that she could ever have married him.

In charity we must decide that she was ignorant of the unspeakable degradation of such an act. That he was a famous man of genius, the most wonderfully gifted poet of his time, might have been a temptation, but it was no excuse, if she entered into the contract with her eyes open. But aside from the question of vice or virtue, there was nothing in common between them. She felt that she had fallen from the unalterable serenity and dignity of her existence, into chaos. Her natural reserve and his natural frankness were the occasion of continual clas.h.i.+ngs. Her formality and his bluntness caused constant unrest.

Accustomed to the regularity of a well-ordered English household, she was miserable at the utter demoralization of their home,--of which the bailiff had possession nine times during the short year they occupied it. Formed for a calm, domestic life, she would probably have been a most admirable wife to a man suited to her virtuous tastes, but her very virtues irritated Byron.

Lady Caroline Lamb, who had loved him so madly, and on whom he had expended a temporary pa.s.sion, was in her ardent nature and erratic genius much better suited to his tastes; and yet it had not taken him long to tire of her, beautiful as she had been. And were ever such bitter and cruel words addressed to a wronged woman, even though she had herself been fearfully to blame in the matter, as those sent by Byron to this poor creature, who had sent him a last touching appeal to remember her? He wrote:--

"Remember you! remember you! Until the waters of Lethe have flowed over the burning torrent of your existence, shame and remorse will cry in your ears, and pursue you with the delirium of fever.

Remember you! Do not doubt it, I will remember. And your husband will also remember you. Neither of us can ever forget you. To him you have been an unfaithful wife, and to me--a devil!"

Terrible words, which apparently changed her love to hate, for she was his relentless enemy for many years. But one day the great poet died, in Greece, the death of a hero. His body was taken back to England for burial, and Caroline Lamb stood at her window and saw the procession go by. The coffin was followed by a dog, howling piteously. Caroline uttered a heartrending cry, and sunk to the floor insensible. They raised her and placed her in her bed, from which she never rose; she was borne from it to her grave.

Such was the devotion which his fatal beauty and fascination won from women, from many women, in his brief life. It is not probable that his wife ever loved him in this way, but had she done so it seems very unlikely that they could have lived a happy life together.

For one reason, he had no faith in women. "False as a woman or an epitaph" expressed his deliberate opinion of the s.e.x; and it must be confessed that the sort of women with whom he had best acquaintance were not calculated to give him high ideas upon the subject. This low estimate of women would have stood in the way of domestic happiness under any circ.u.mstances.

He was not ignorant of this, and in "Childe Harold" states the case thus:--

"For he through sin's long labyrinth had run, Nor made atonement when he did amiss; Had sighed to many, though he loved but one, And that loved one, alas! could ne'er be his.

Ah, happy she! to 'scape from him whose kiss Had been pollution unto aught so chaste!

Who soon had left her charms for vulgar bliss, And spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste, Nor calm domestic bliss had ever deigned to taste."

It has been thought by some that had Byron had the good fortune to meet his latest love, the Countess Guiccioli, in his youth, all his stormy life might have been changed and redeemed. However this may be, she seems, so far as we can judge of her, to have been more likely to be a poet's one great love than any of the others who for a time held his wandering fancy. Beautiful as a poet's wildest dream, young, ardent, gifted, and pa.s.sionately devoted to him, what more could even his exacting nature demand?--

"Educated in the gloom of the convent, the notes of the organ, the clouds of incense, the waxen tapers burning at the feet of the Virgin, the litanies of the nuns,--all this had filled her mind with the poetry of the cloister, and with that mystic and indefinable love which at the first contact with the world was ready to change into a violent pa.s.sion when it should meet with an object upon which to fix itself."

Married as soon as she left the convent to a man selected by her parents, whom she had barely seen, and who was old enough to be her father, she was at the time Byron first saw her a melancholy and unhappy woman, much given to the reading of poetry and of the immoral novels of that time and place.

That she should love Byron at first sight was inevitable, and that which followed was almost as inevitable. She herself thus describes her first acquaintance with him:--

"His n.o.ble and exquisitely beautiful countenance, the tone of his voice, his manners, the thousand enchantments that surrounded him, rendered him so different and so superior a being to any by whom I was surrounded or had hitherto seen that it was impossible he should not have left the most profound impression upon me. From that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay at Venice, we met every day."

Almost the only glimpses of quiet happiness which Byron ever enjoyed came from this a.s.sociation. The lovers seemed to be admirably adapted to each other, and their love knew no diminution during the short remainder of his life. And she cherished his memory with the utmost fondness throughout a long life, writing of him with unbounded enthusiasm, in her own account of her acquaintance with him, many years after his death.

Byron has probably exaggerated his own unhappiness, yet there can be no doubt that much of what he describes was very real. The n.o.bler elements of his character were constantly at war with the lower, and although he did not have sufficient strength of character to lead the n.o.ble life of which he had frequent visions, he had enough innate n.o.bility to despise himself for the life he did lead. Doubtless there was much of truth in what he wrote in his journal in Switzerland:--