The Works of Lord Byron Volume II Part 48

[293] {234} [The Hon. Frederick Howard (1785-1815), third son of Frederick, fifth Earl of Carlisle, fell late in the evening of the 18th of June, in a final charge of the left square of the French Guard, in which Vivian brought up Howard's hussars against the French. Neither French infantry nor cavalry gave way, and as the Hanoverians fired but did not charge, a desperate combat ensued, in which Howard fell and many of the 10th were killed.--_Waterloo: The Downfall of the First Napoleon_, G. Hooper, 1861, p. 236.

Southey, who had visited the field of Waterloo, September, 1815, in his _Poet's Pilgrimage_ (iii. 49), dedicates a pedestrian stanza to his memory--

"Here from the heaps who strewed the fatal plain Was Howard's corse by faithful hands conveyed; And not to be confounded with the slain, Here in a grave apart with reverence laid, Till hence his honoured relics o'er the seas Were borne to England, where they rest in peace."]

[294] [Autumn had been beforehand with spring in the work of renovation.

"Yet Nature everywhere resumed her course; Low pansies to the sun their purple gave, And the soft poppy blossomed on the grave."

_Poet's Pilgrimage_, iii. 36.

But the contrast between the continuous action of nature and the doom of the unreturning dead, which does not greatly concern Southey, fills Byron with a fierce desire to sum the price of victory. He flings in the face of the vain-glorious mourners the bitter reality of their abiding loss. It was this prophetic note, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," which sounded in and through Byron's rhetoric to the men of his own generation.]

[hp] {235} _And dead within behold the Spring return_.--[MS. erased.]

[hq] {236} _It still is day though clouds keep out the Sun_.--[MS.]

[295] [So, too, Coleridge. "Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the rest sprained, and, though tough, unsustaining? Oh, many, many are the broken-hearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of the man is."--_Anima Poetae_, 1895, p. 303.]

[296] [According to Lady Blessington (_Conversations_, p. 176), Byron maintained that the image of the broken mirror had in some mysterious way been suggested by the following quatrain which Curran had once repeated to him:--

"While memory, with more than Egypt's art Embalming all the sorrows of the heart, Sits at the altar which she raised to woe, And finds the scene whence tears eternal flow."

But, as M. Darmesteter points out, the true source of inspiration was a pa.s.sage in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_--"the book," as Byron maintained, "in my opinion most useful to a man who wishes to acquire the reputation of being well-read with the least trouble" (_Life_, p.

48). Burton is discoursing on injury and long-suffering. "'Tis a Hydra's head contention; the more they strive, the more they may; and as Praxiteles did by his gla.s.s [see Cardan, _De Consolatione_, lib. iii.], when he saw a scurvy face in it, break it in pieces; but for the one he saw, he saw many more as bad in a moment; for one injury done, they provoke another _c.u.m fanore_, and twenty enemies for one."--_Anatomy of Melancholy_, 1893, ii. 228. Compare, too, Carew's poem, _The Spark_, lines 23-26--

"And as a looking-gla.s.s, from the aspect, Whilst it is whole doth but one face reflect, But being crack'd or broken, there are shewn Many half-faces, which at first were one.

Anderson's _British Poets_, 1793, iii. 703.]

[hr] {237} _But not his pleasure--such might be a task_.--[MS. erased.]

[297] [The "tale" or reckoning of the Psalmist, the span of threescore years and ten, is contrasted with the tale or reckoning of the age of those who fell at Waterloo. A "fleeting span" the Psalmist's; but, reckoning by Waterloo, "more than enough." Waterloo grudges even what the Psalmist allows.]

[hs] {238}

_Here where the sword united Europe drew_ _I had a kinsman warring on that day_.--[MS.]

[ht] _On little thoughts with equal firmness fixed._--[MS.]

[hu]

_For thou hast risen as fallen--even now thou seek'st_ _An hour_----.--[MS.]

[298] [Byron seems to have been unable to make up his mind about Napoleon. "It is impossible not to be dazzled and overwhelmed by his character and career," he wrote to Moore (March 17, 1815), when his Heros de Roman, as he called him, had broken open his "captive's cage"

and was making victorious progress to the capital. In the _Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte_, which was written in April, 1814, after the first abdication at Fontainebleau, the dominant note is astonishment mingled with contempt. It is the lamentation over a fallen idol. In these stanzas (x.x.xvi.-xlv.) he bears witness to the man's essential greatness, and, with manifest reference to his own personality and career, attributes his final downfall to the peculiar const.i.tution of his genius and temper. A year later (1817), in the Fourth Canto (stanzas lx.x.xix.-xcii.), he pa.s.ses a severe sentence. Napoleon's greatness is swallowed up in weakness. He is a "kind of b.a.s.t.a.r.d Caesar,"

self-vanquished, the creature and victim of vanity. Finally, in The Age of Bronze, sections iii.-vi., there is a reversion to the same theme, the tragic irony of the rise and fall of the "king of kings, and yet of slaves the slave."

As a schoolboy at Harrow, Byron fought for the preservation of Napoleon's bust, and he was ever ready, in defiance of national feeling and national prejudice, to celebrate him as "the glorious chief;" but when it came to the point, he did not "want him here," victorious over England, and he could not fail to see, with insight quickened by self-knowledge, that greatness and genius possess no charm against littleness and commonness, and that the "glory of the terrestrial" meets with its own reward. The moral is obvious, and as old as history; but herein lay the secret of Byron's potency, that he could remint and issue in fresh splendour the familiar coinage of the world's wit. Moreover, he lived in a great age, when great truths are born again, and appear in a new light.]

[299] [The stanza was written while Napoleon was still under the guardians.h.i.+p of Admiral Sir George c.o.c.kburn, and before Sir Hudson Lowe had landed at St. Helena; but complaints were made from the first that imperial honours which were paid to him by his own suite were not accorded by the British authorities.]

[hv] {239} ----_and thy dark name_ _Was ne'er more rife within men's mouths than now_.--[MS.]

[hw] _Who tossed thee to and fro till_----.--[MS. erased.]

[hx] _Which be it wisdom, weakness_----.--[MS.]

[hy]

_To watch thee shrinking calmly hadst thou smiled._--[MS.]

_With a sedate tho' not unfeeling eye._--[MS. erased.]

[hz] {241} _Greater than in thy fortunes; for in them_ _Ambition lured thee on too far to show_ _That true habitual scorn_----.--[MS.]

[ia] {242} _Feeds on itself and all things_----.--[MS.]

[ib]

_Which stir too deeply_----[MS.]

_Which stir the blood too boiling in its springs_.--[MS. erased.]

[ic] {243} ----_they rave overcast_.--[MS.]

[id] ----_the hate of all below_.--[MS.]

[ie] ----_on his single head_.--[MS.]

[if] ----_the wise man's World will be_.--[MS.]

[ig] ----_for what teems like thee_.--[MS.]

[ih] {244} _From gray and ghastly walls--where Ruin kindly dwells_.--[MS.]

[300] [For the archaic use of "battles" for "battalions," compare _Macbeth_, act v. sc. 4, line 4; and Scott's _Lord of the Isles_, vi. 10--

"In battles four beneath their eye, The forces of King Robert lie."]

[ii] ----_are shredless tatters now_.--[MS.]

[ij] {245} _What want these outlaws that a king should have_ _But History's vain page_----.--[MS.]

[ik] ----_their hearts were far more brave_.--[MS.]

[301] [The most usual device is a bleeding heart.]

[il]

_Nor mar it frequent with an impious show_ _Of arms or angry conflict_----.--[MS.]

[302] {246} [Compare Moore's lines, _The Meeting of the Waters_--

"There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the wide waters meet."]

[im]