Life of Lord Byron Volume IV Part 31

"The separation business still continues, and all the world are implicated, including priests and cardinals. The public opinion is furious against _him_, because he ought to have cut the matter short _at first_, and not waited twelve months to begin. He has been trying at evidence, but can get none _sufficient_; for what would make fifty divorces in England won't do here--there must be the _most decided_ proofs.

"It is the first cause of the kind attempted in Ravenna for these two hundred years; for, though they often separate, they a.s.sign a different motive. You know that the continental incontinent are more delicate than the English, and don't like proclaiming their coronation in a court, even when n.o.body doubts it.

"All her relations are furious against him. The father has challenged him--a superfluous valour, for he don't fight, though suspected of two a.s.sa.s.sinations--one of the famous Monzoni of Forli. Warning was given me not to take such long rides in the Pine Forest without being on my guard; so I take my stiletto and a pair of pistols in my pocket during my daily rides.

"I won't stir from this place till the matter is settled one way or the other. She is as femininely firm as possible; and the opinion is so much against him, that the _advocates_ decline to undertake his cause, because they say that he is either a fool or a rogue--fool, if he did not discover the liaison till now; and rogue, if he did know it, and waited, for some bad end, to divulge it. In short, there has been nothing like it since the days of Guido di Polenta's family, in these parts.

"If the man has me taken off, like Polonius 'say, he made a good end,'--for a melodrama. The princ.i.p.al security is, that he has not the courage to spend twenty scudi--the average price of a clean-handed bravo--otherwise there is no want of opportunity, for I ride about the woods every evening, with one servant, and sometimes an acquaintance, who latterly looks a little queer in solitary bits of bushes.

"Good bye.--Write to yours ever," &c.

[Footnote 74: M. Lamartine.]

LETTER 377. TO MR. MURRAY.

"Ravenna, June 7. 1820.

"Enclosed is something which will interest you, to wit, the opinion of _the_ greatest man of Germany--perhaps of Europe--upon one of the great men of your advertis.e.m.e.nts, (all 'famous hands,' as Jacob Tonson used to say of his ragam.u.f.fins,)--in short, a critique of _Goethe's_ upon _Manfred_. There is the original, an English translation, and an Italian one; keep them all in your archives,--for the opinions of such a man as Goethe, whether favourable or not, are always interesting--and this is more so, as favourable. His _Faust_ I never read, for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me _viva voce_, and I was naturally much struck with it; but it was the _Steinbach_ and the _Jungfrau_, and something else, much more than Faustus, that made me write Manfred. The first scene, however, and that of Faustus are very similar. Acknowledge this letter.

"Yours ever.

"P.S. I have received _Ivanhoe_;--_good_. Pray send me some tooth-powder and tincture of myrrh, by _Waite_, &c. Ricciardetto should have been _translated literally, or not at all_. As to puffing _Whistlecraft_, it _won't_ do. I'll tell you why some day or other. Cornwall's a poet, but spoilt by the detestable schools of the day. Mrs. Hemans is a poet also, but too stiltified and apostrophic,--and quite wrong. Men died calmly before the Christian era, and since, without Christianity: witness the Romans, and, lately, Thistlewood, Sandt, and Lovel--_men who ought to have been weighed down with their crimes, even had they believed_. A deathbed is a matter of nerves and const.i.tution, and not of religion.

Voltaire was frightened, Frederick of Prussia not: Christians the same, according to their strength rather than their creed. What does H * * H * * mean by his stanza? which is octave got drunk or gone mad. He ought to have his ears boxed with Thor's hammer for rhyming so fantastically."

The following is the article from Goethe's "Kunst und Alterthum,"

enclosed in this letter. The grave confidence with which the venerable critic traces the fancies of his brother poet to real persons and events, making no difficulty even of a double murder at Florence to furnish grounds for his theory, affords an amusing instance of the disposition so prevalent throughout Europe, to picture Byron as a man of marvels and mysteries, as well in his life as his poetry. To these exaggerated, or wholly false notions of him, the numerous fictions palmed upon the world of his romantic tours and wonderful adventures in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed[75], have, no doubt, considerably contributed; and the consequence is, so utterly out of truth and nature are the representations of his life and character long current upon the Continent, that it may be questioned whether the real "flesh and blood" hero of these pages,--the social, practical-minded, and, with all his faults and eccentricities, _English_ Lord Byron,--may not, to the over-exalted imaginations of most of his foreign admirers, appear but an ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic personage.

[Footnote 75: Of this kind are the accounts, filled with all sorts of circ.u.mstantial wonders, of his residence in the island of Mytilene;--his voyages to Sicily,--to Ithaca, with the Countess Guiccioli, &c. &c. But the most absurd, perhaps, of all these fabrications, are the stories told by Pouqueville, of the poet's religious conferences in the cell of Father Paul, at Athens; and the still more unconscionable fiction in which Rizo has indulged, in giving the details of a pretended theatrical scene, got up (according to this poetical historian) between Lord Byron and the Archbishop of Arta, at the tomb of Botzaris, in Missolonghi.]

"GOETHE ON MANFRED.

[1820.]

"Byron's tragedy, Manfred, was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one that closely touched me. This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius. The whole is in this way so completely formed anew, that it would be an interesting task for the critic to point out not only the alterations he has made, but their degree of resemblance with, or dissimilarity to, the original: in the course of which I cannot deny that the gloomy heat of an unbounded and exuberant despair becomes at last oppressive to us. Yet is the dissatisfaction we feel always connected with esteem and admiration.

"We find thus in this tragedy the quintessence of the most astonis.h.i.+ng talent born to be its own tormentor. The character of Lord Byron's life and poetry hardly permits a just and equitable appreciation. He has often enough confessed what it is that torments him. He has repeatedly pourtrayed it; and scarcely any one feels compa.s.sion for this intolerable suffering, over which he is ever laboriously ruminating.

There are, properly speaking, two females whose phantoms for ever haunt him, and which, in this piece also, perform princ.i.p.al parts--one under the name of Astarte, the other without form or actual presence, and merely a voice. Of the horrid occurrence which took place with the former, the following is related:--When a bold and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one on whom any suspicion could be attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, and these spirits haunted him all his life after.

"This romantic incident is rendered highly probable by innumerable allusions to it in his poems. As, for instance, when turning his sad contemplations inwards, he applies to himself the fatal history of the king of Sparta. It is as follows:--Pausanias, a Lacedemonian general, acquires glory by the important victory at Plataea, but afterwards forfeits the confidence of his countrymen through his arrogance, obstinacy, and secret intrigues with the enemies of his country. This man draws upon himself the heavy guilt of innocent blood, which attends him to his end; for, while commanding the fleet of the allied Greeks, in the Black Sea, he is inflamed with a violent pa.s.sion for a Byzantine maiden. After long resistance, he at length obtains her from her parents, and she is to be delivered up to him at night. She modestly desires the servant to put out the lamp, and, while groping her way in the dark, she overturns it. Pausanias is awakened from his sleep--apprehensive of an attack from murderers, he seizes his sword, and destroys his mistress. The horrid sight never leaves him. Her shade pursues him unceasingly, and he implores for aid in vain from the G.o.ds and the exorcising priests.

"That poet must have a lacerated heart who selects such a scene from antiquity, appropriates it to himself, and burdens his tragic image with it. The following soliloquy, which is overladen with gloom and a weariness of life, is, by this remark, rendered intelligible. We recommend it as an exercise to all friends of declamation. Hamlet's soliloquy appears improved upon here."[76]

[Footnote 76: The critic here subjoins the soliloquy from Manfred, beginning "We are the fools of time and terror," in which the allusion to Pausanias occurs.]

LETTER 378. TO MR. MOORE.

"Ravenna, June 9. 1820.

"Galignani has just sent me the Paris edition of your works (which I wrote to order), and I am glad to see my old friends with a French face. I have been skimming and dipping, in and over them, like a swallow, and as pleased as one. It is the first time that I had seen the Melodies without music; and, I don't know how, but I can't read in a music-book--the crotchets confound the words in my head, though I recollect them perfectly when _sung_. Music a.s.sists my memory through the ear, not through the eye; I mean, that her quavers perplex me upon paper, but they are a help when heard. And thus I was glad to see the words without their borrowed robes;--to my mind they look none the worse for their nudity.

"The biographer has made a botch of your life--calling your father 'a _venerable old_ gentleman,' and prattling of 'Addison,' and 'dowager countesses.' If that d.a.m.ned fellow was to _write my_ life, I would certainly _take his_. And then, at the Dublin dinner, you have 'made a speech' (do you recollect, at Douglas K.'s, 'Sir, he made me a speech?') too complimentary to the 'living poets,' and somewhat redolent of universal praise. _I_ am but too well off in it, but * * *.

"You have not sent me any poetical or personal news of yourself.

Why don't you complete an Italian Tour of the Fudges? I have just been turning over Little, which I knew by heart in 1803, being then in my fifteenth summer. Heigho! I believe all the mischief I have ever done, or sung, has been owing to that confounded book of yours.

"In my last I told you of a cargo of 'Poes.h.i.+e,' which I had sent to M. at his own impatient desire;--and, now he has got it, he don't like it, and demurs. Perhaps he is right. I have no great opinion of any of my last s.h.i.+pment, except a translation from Pulci, which is word for word, and verse for verse.

"I am in the third Act of a Tragedy; but whether it will be finished or not, I know not: I have, at this present, too many pa.s.sions of my own on hand to do justice to those of the dead.

Besides the vexations mentioned in my last, I have incurred a quarrel with the Pope's carabiniers, or gens d'armerie, who have pet.i.tioned the Cardinal against my liveries, as resembling too nearly their own lousy uniform. They particularly object to the epaulettes, which all the world with us have on upon gala days. My liveries are of the colours conforming to my arms, and have been the family hue since the year 1066.

"I have sent a tranchant reply, as you may suppose; and have given to understand that, if any soldados of that respectable corps insult my servants, I will do likewise by their gallant commanders; and I have directed my ragam.u.f.fins, six in number, who are tolerably savage, to defend themselves, in case of aggression; and, on holidays and gaudy days, I shall arm the whole set, including myself, in case of accidents or treachery. I used to play pretty well at the broad-sword, once upon a time, at Angelo's; but I should like the pistol, our national buccaneer weapon, better, though I am out of practice at present. However, I can 'wink and hold out mine iron.' It makes me think (the whole thing does) of Romeo and Juliet--'now, Gregory, remember thy _swas.h.i.+ng_ blow.'

"All these feuds, however, with the Cavalier for his wife, and the troopers for my liveries, are very tiresome to a quiet man, who does his best to please all the world, and longs for fellows.h.i.+p and good will. Pray write. I am yours," &c.

LETTER 379. TO MR. MOORE.

"Ravenna, July 13. 1820.

"To remove or increase your Irish anxiety about my being 'in a wisp[77],' I answer your letter forth-with; premising that, as I am a '_Will_ of the wisp,' I may chance to flit out of it. But, first, a word on the Memoir;--I have no objection, nay, I would rather that _one_ correct copy was taken and deposited in honourable hands, in case of accidents happening to the original; for you know that I have none, and have never even _re_-read, nor, indeed, _read_ at all what is there written; I only know that I wrote it with the fullest intention to be 'faithful and true' in my narrative, but _not_ impartial--no, by the Lord! I can't pretend to be that, while I feel. But I wish to give every body concerned the opportunity to contradict or correct me.

"I have no objection to any proper person seeing what is there written,--seeing it was written, like every thing else, for the purpose of being read, however much many writings may fail in arriving at that object.

"With regard to 'the wisp,' the Pope has p.r.o.nounced _their separation_. The decree came yesterday from Babylon,--it was _she_ and _her friends_ who demanded it, on the grounds of her husband's (the n.o.ble Count Cavalier's) extraordinary usage. _He_ opposed it with all his might because of the alimony, which has been a.s.signed, with all her goods, chattels, carriage, &c. to be restored by him.

In Italy they can't divorce. He insisted on her giving me up, and he would forgive every thing,--* * * * *

* * * * * * * But, in this country, the very courts hold such proofs in abhorrence, the Italians being as much more delicate in public than the English, as they are more pa.s.sionate in private.

"The friends and relatives, who are numerous and powerful, reply to him--'_You_, yourself, are either fool or knave,--fool, if you did not see the consequences of the approximation of these two young persons,--knave, if you connive at it. Take your choice,--but don't break out (after twelve months of the closest intimacy, under your own eyes and positive sanction) with a scandal, which can only make you ridiculous and her unhappy.'

"He swore that he thought our intercourse was purely amicable, and that _I_ was more partial to him than to her, till melancholy testimony proved the contrary. To this they answer, that 'Will of _this_ wisp' was not an unknown person, and that 'clamosa Fama' had not proclaimed the purity of my morals;--that _her_ brother, a year ago, wrote from Rome to warn him that his wife would infallibly be led astray by this ignis fatuus, unless he took proper measures, all of which he neglected to take, &c. &c.

"Now he says that he encouraged my return to Ravenna, to see '_in quanti piedi di acqua siamo_,' and he has found enough to drown him in. In short,

"'Ce ne fut pas le tout; sa femme se plaignit-- Proces--La parente se joint en excuse et dit Que du _Docteur_ venoit tout le mauvais menage; Que cet homme etoit fou, que sa femme etoit sage.

On fit ca.s.ser le mariage.'

It is but to let the women alone, in the way of conflict, for they are sure to win against the field. She returns to her father's house, and I can only see her under great restrictions--such is the custom of the country. The relations behave very well:--I offered any settlement, but they refused to accept it, and swear she _shan't_ live with G. (as he has tried to prove her faithless), but that he shall maintain her; and, in fact, a judgment to this effect came yesterday. I am, of course, in an awkward situation enough.

"I have heard no more of the carabiniers who protested against my liveries. They are not popular, those same soldiers, and, in a small row, the other night, one was slain, another wounded, and divers put to flight, by some of the Romagnuole youth, who are dexterous, and somewhat liberal of the knife. The perpetrators are not discovered, but I hope and believe that none of my ragam.u.f.fins were in it, though they are somewhat savage, and secretly armed, like most of the inhabitants. It is their way, and saves sometimes a good deal of litigation.