Life of Lord Byron Volume VI Part 17

"Oh turn not coldly from the poet's bier, Nor check the sacred drops by Pity given; For though in sin his body slumbereth here, His soul, absolved, already wings to heaven."

These lines, says the legend, were looked upon as a divine decree; the religionists no longer enforced their objections, and the remains of the bard were left to take their quiet sleep by that "sweet bower of Mosellay" which he had so often celebrated in his verses.

Were our Byron's right of sepulture to be decided in the same manner, how few are there of his pages, thus taken at hazard, that would not, by some genial touch of sympathy with virtue, some glowing tribute to the bright works of G.o.d, or some gush of natural devotion more affecting than any homily, give him a t.i.tle to admission into the purest temple of which Christian Charity ever held the guardians.h.i.+p.

Let the decision, however, of these Reverend authorities have been, finally, what it might, it was the wish, as is understood, of Lord Byron's dearest relative to have his remains laid in the family vault at Hucknall, near Newstead. On being landed from the Florida, the body had, under the direction of his Lords.h.i.+p's executors, Mr.

Hobhouse and Mr. Hanson, been removed to the house of Sir Edward Knatchbull in Great George Street, Westminster, where it lay in state during Friday and Sat.u.r.day, the 9th and 10th of July, and on the following Monday the funeral procession took place. Leaving Westminster at eleven o'clock in the morning, attended by most of his Lords.h.i.+p's personal friends and by the carriages of several persons of rank, it proceeded through various streets of the metropolis towards the North Road. At Pancras Church, the ceremonial of the procession being at an end, the carriages returned; and the hea.r.s.e continued its way, by slow stages, to Nottingham.

It was on Friday the 16th of July that, in the small village church of Hucknall, the last duties were paid to the remains of Byron, by depositing them, close to those of his mother, in the family vault.

Exactly on the same day of the same month in the preceding year, he had said, it will be recollected, despondingly, to Count Gamba, "Where shall we be in another year?" The gentleman to whom this foreboding speech was addressed paid a visit, some months after the interment, to Hucknall, and was much struck, as I have heard, on approaching the village, by the strong likeness it seemed to him to bear to his lost friend's melancholy deathplace, Missolonghi.

On a tablet of white marble in the chancel of the Church of Hucknall is the following inscription:--

IN THE VAULT BENEATH, WHERE MANY OF HIS ANCESTORS AND HIS MOTHER ARE BURIED, LIE THE REMAINS OF GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON, LORD BYRON, OF ROCHDALE, IN THE COUNTY OF LANCASTER, THE AUTHOR OF "CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE."

HE WAS BORN IN LONDON ON THE 22D OF JANUARY, 1788.

HE DIED AT MISSOLONGHI, IN WESTERN GREECE, ON THE 19TH OF APRIL, 1824, ENGAGED IN THE GLORIOUS ATTEMPT TO RESTORE THAT COUNTRY TO HER ANCIENT FREEDOM AND RENOWN.

HIS SISTER, THE HONOURABLE AUGUSTA MARIA LEIGH, PLACED THIS TABLET TO HIS MEMORY.

From among the tributes that have been offered, in prose and verse, and in almost every language of Europe, to his memory, I shall select two which appear to me worthy of peculiar notice, as being, one of them,--so far as my limited scholars.h.i.+p will allow me to judge,--a simple and happy imitation of those laudatory inscriptions with which the Greece of other times honoured the tombs of her heroes; and the other as being the production of a pen, once engaged controversially against Byron, but not the less ready, as these affecting verses prove, to offer the homage of a manly sorrow and admiration at his grave.

[Greek:

Eis Ton en te h.e.l.ladi teleutesanta Poieten

Ou to zen tanaon biou euklees oud' enarithmein Arxaiax progonon eunxneon aretas Ton d' eudaimonias moir' amphepei, hosper apanton Aien aristeuon gignetai athanatos.-- Eudeis oun su, teknon, xariton ear? ouk eti thallei Akmaios meleon hedupnoon stephanos?-- Alla teon, tripophete, moron penphousin Aphene, Mousai, patris, Ares, Ellas, eleupheria.[1]]

[Footnote 1: By John Williams, Esq.--The following translation of this inscription will not be unacceptable to my readers:--

"Not length of life--not an ill.u.s.trious birth, Rich with the n.o.blest blood of all the earth;-- Nought can avail, save deeds of high emprize, Our mortal being to immortalise.

"Sweet child of song, thou deepest!--ne'er again Shall swell the notes of thy melodious strain: Yet, with thy country wailing o'er thy urn, Pallas, the Muse, Mars, Greece, and Freedom mourn."

H.H. JOY.]

"CHILDE HAROLD'S LAST PILGRIMAGE.

"BY THE REV. W.L. BOWLES.

"SO ENDS CHILDE HAROLD HIS LAST PILGRIMAGE!-- Upon the sh.o.r.es of Greece he stood, and cried 'LIBERTY!' and those sh.o.r.es, from age to age Renown'd, and Sparta's woods and rocks replied 'Liberty!' But a Spectre, at his side, Stood mocking;--and its dart, uplifting high, Smote him;--he sank to earth in life's fair pride: SPARTA! thy rocks then heard another cry, And old Ilissus sigh'd--'Die, generous exile, die!'

"I will not ask sad Pity to deplore His wayward errors, who thus early died; Still less, CHILDE HAROLD, now thou art no more, Will I say aught of genius misapplied; Of the past shadows of thy spleen or pride:-- But I will bid th' Arcadian cypress wave, Pluck the green laurel from Peneus' side, And pray thy spirit may such quiet have, That not one thought unkind be murmur'd o'er thy grave.

"SO HAROLD ENDS, IN GREECE, HIS PILGRIMAGE!-- There fitly ending,--in that land renown'd, Whose mighty genius lives in Glory's page,-- He, on the Muses' consecrated ground, Sinking to rest, while his young brows are bound With their unfading wreath!--To bands of mirth, No more in TEMPE let the pipe resound!

HAROLD, I follow to thy place of birth The slow hea.r.s.e--and thy LAST sad PILGRIMAGE on earth.

"Slow moves the plumed hea.r.s.e, the mourning train,-- I mark the sad procession with a sigh, Silently pa.s.sing to that village fane, Where, HAROLD, thy forefathers mouldering lie;-- There sleeps THAT MOTHER, who with tearful eye, Pondering the fortunes of thy early road, Hung o'er the slumbers of thine infancy; Her son, released from mortal labour's load, Now comes to rest, with her, in the same still abode.

"Bursting Death's silence--could that mother speak-- (Speak when the earth was heap'd upon his head)-- In thrilling, but with hollow accent weak, She thus might give the welcome of the dead:-- 'Here rest, my son, with me;--the dream is fled;-- The motley mask and the great stir is o'er: Welcome to me, and to this silent bed, Where deep forgetfulness succeeds the roar Of life, and fretting pa.s.sions waste the heart no more.'"

By his Lords.h.i.+p's Will, a copy of which will be found in the Appendix, he bequeathed to his executors in trust for the benefit of his sister, Mrs. Leigh, the monies arising from the sale of all his real estates at Rochdale and elsewhere, together with such part of his other property as was not settled upon Lady Byron and his daughter Ada, to be by Mrs. Leigh enjoyed, free from her husband's control, during her life, and, after her decease, to be inherited by her children.

We have now followed to its close a life which, brief as was its span, may be said, perhaps, to have comprised within itself a greater variety of those excitements and interest which spring out of the deep workings of pa.s.sion and of intellect than any that the pen of biography has ever before commemorated. As there still remain among the papers of my friend some curious gleanings which, though in the abundance of our materials I have not hitherto found a place for them, are too valuable towards the ill.u.s.tration of his character to be lost, I shall here, in selecting them for the reader, avail myself of the opportunity of trespa.s.sing, for the last time, on his patience with a few general remarks.

It must have been observed, throughout these pages, and by some, perhaps, with disappointment, that into the character of Lord Byron, as a poet, there has been little, if any, critical examination; but that, content with expressing generally the delight which, in common with all, I derive from his poetry, I have left the task of a.n.a.lysing the sources from which this delight springs to others.[1] In thus evading, if it must be so considered, one of my duties as a biographer, I have been influenced no less by a sense of my own inapt.i.tude for the office of critic than by recollecting with what a.s.siduity, throughout the whole of the poet's career, every new rising of his genius was watched from the great observatories of Criticism, and the ever changing varieties of its course and splendour tracked out and recorded with a degree of skill and minuteness which has left but little for succeeding observers to discover. It is, moreover, into the character and conduct of Lord Byron, as a man, not distinct from, but forming, on the contrary, the best ill.u.s.tration of his character, as a writer, that it has been the more immediate purpose of these volumes to enquire; and if, in the course of them, any satisfactory clue has been afforded to those anomalies, moral and intellectual, which his life exhibited,--still more, should it have been the effect of my humble labours to clear away some of those mists that hung round my friend, and show him, in most respects, as worthy of love as he was, in all, of admiration, then will the chief and sole aim of this work have been accomplished.

[Footnote 1: It may be making too light of criticism to say with Gray that "even a bad verse is as good a thing or better than the best observation that ever was made upon it;" but there are surely few tasks that appear more thankless and superfluous than that of following, as Criticism sometimes does, in the rear of victorious genius (like the commentators on a field of Blenheim or of Waterloo), and either labouring to point out to us _why_ it has triumphed, or still more unprofitably contending that it _ought_ to have failed.

The well-known pa.s.sage of La Bruyere, which even Voltaire's adulatory application of it to some work of the King of Prussia has not spoiled for use, puts, perhaps, in its true point of view the very subordinate rank which Criticism must be content to occupy in the train of successful Genius:--"Quand une lecture vous eleve l'esprit et qu'elle vous inspire des sentimens n.o.bles, ne cherehez pas une autre regle pour juger de l'ouvrage; il est bon et fait de main de l'ouvrier: La Critique, apres ca, peut s'exercer sur les pet.i.tes choses, relever quelques expressions, corriger des phrases, parler de syntaxe," &c. &c.]

Having devoted to this object so large a portion of my own share of these pages, and, yet more fairly, enabled the world to form a judgment for itself, by placing the man, in his own person, and without disguise, before all eyes, there would seem to remain now but an easy duty in summing up the various points of his character, and, out of the features, already separately described, combining one complete portrait. The task, however, is by no means so easy as it may appear. There are few characters in which a near acquaintance does not enable us to discover some one leading principle or pa.s.sion consistent enough in its operations to be taken confidently into account in any estimate of the disposition in which they are found.

Like those points in the human face, or figure, to which all its other proportions are referable, there is in most minds some one governing influence, from which chiefly,--though, of course, bia.s.sed on some occasions by others,--all its various impulses and tendencies will be found to radiate. In Lord Byron, however, this sort of pivot of character was almost wholly wanting. Governed as he was at different moments by totally different pa.s.sions, and impelled sometimes, as during his short access of parsimony in Italy, by springs of action never before developed in his nature, in him this simple mode of tracing character to its sources must be often wholly at fault; and if, as is not impossible, in trying to solve the strange variances of his mind, I should myself be found to have fallen into contradictions and inconsistencies, the extreme difficulty of a.n.a.lysing, without dazzle or bewilderment, such an unexampled complication of qualities must be admitted as my excuse.

So various, indeed, and contradictory, were his attributes, both moral and intellectual, that he may be p.r.o.nounced to have been not one, but many: nor would it be any great exaggeration of the truth to say, that out of the mere part.i.tion of the properties of his single mind a plurality of characters, all different and all vigorous, might have been furnished. It was this multiform aspect exhibited by him that led the world, during his short wondrous career, to compare him with that medley host of personages, almost all differing from each other, which he thus playfully enumerates in one of his Journals:--

"I have been thinking over, the other day, on the various comparisons, good or evil, which I have seen published of myself in different journals, English and foreign. This was suggested to me by accidentally turning over a foreign one lately,--for I have made it a rule latterly never to _search_ for any thing of the kind, but not to avoid the perusal, if presented by chance.

"To begin, then: I have seen myself compared, personally or poetically, in English, French, _German_ (_as_ interpreted to me), Italian, and Portuguese, within these nine years, to Rousseau, Goethe, Young, Aretine, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, 'an alabaster vase, lighted up within,' Satan, Shakspeare, Buonaparte, Tiberius, aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin, the Clown, Sternhold and Hopkins, to the phantasmagoria, to Henry the Eighth, to Chenier, to Mirabeau, to young R. Dallas (the schoolboy), to Michael Angelo, to Raphael, to a pet.i.t-maitre, to Diogenes, to Childe Harold, to Lara, to the Count in Beppo, to Milton, to Pope, to Dryden, to Burns, to Savage, to Chatterton, to 'oft have I heard of thee, my Lord Biron,' in Shakspeare, to Churchill the poet, to Kean the actor, to Alfieri, &c. &c. &c.

"The likeness to Alfieri was a.s.serted very seriously by an Italian who had known him in his younger days. It of course related merely to our apparent personal dispositions. He did not a.s.sert it to _me_ (for we were not then good friends), but in society.

"The object of so many contradictory comparisons must probably be like something different from them all; but what _that_ is, is more than _I_ know, or any body else."

It would not be uninteresting, were there either s.p.a.ce or time for such a task, to take a review of the names of note in the preceding list, and show in how many points, though differing so materially among themselves, it might be found that each presented a striking resemblance to Lord Byron. We have seen, for instance, that wrongs and sufferings were, through life, the main sources of Byron's inspiration. Where the hoof of the critic struck, the fountain was first disclosed; and all the tramplings of the world afterwards but forced out the stream stronger and brighter. The same obligations to misfortune, the same debt to the "oppressor's wrong," for having wrung out from bitter thoughts the pure essence of his genius, was due no less deeply by Dante!--"quum illam sub amara cogitatione excitatam, occulti divinique ingenii vim exacuerit et inflammarit."[1]

[Footnote 1: Paulus Jovius.--Bayle, too, says of him, "Il fit entrer plus de feu et plus de force dans ses livres qu'il n'y en eut mis s'il avoit joui d'une condition plus tranquille."]

In that contempt for the world's opinion, which led Dante to exclaim, "Lascia dir le genti," Lord Byron also bore a strong resemblance to that poet,--though far more, it must be confessed, in profession than reality. For, while scorn for the public voice was on his lips, the keenest sensitiveness to its every breath was in his heart; and, as if every feeling of his nature was to have some painful mixture in it, together with the pride of Dante which led him to disdain public opinion, he combined the susceptibility of Petrarch which placed him shrinkingly at its mercy.

His agreement, in some other features of character, with Petrarch, I have already had occasion to remark[1]; and if it be true, as is often surmised, that Byron's want of a due reverence for Shakspeare arose from some latent and hardly conscious jealousy of that poet's fame, a similar feeling is known to have existed in Petrarch towards Dante; and the same reason a.s.signed for it,--that from the living he had nothing to fear, while before the shade of Dante he might have reason to feel humbled,--is also not a little applicable[2] in the case of Lord Byron.

[Footnote 1: Some pa.s.sages in Foscolo's Essay on Petrarch may be applied, with equal truth, to Lord Byron.--For instance, "It was hardly possible with Petrarch to write a sentence without portraying himself"--"Petrarch, allured by the idea that his celebrity would magnify into importance all the ordinary occurrences of his life, satisfied the curiosity of the world," &c. &c.--and again, with still more striking applicability,--"In Petrarch's letters, as well as in his Poems and Treatises, we always identify the author with the man, who felt himself irresistibly impelled to develope his own intense feelings. Being endowed with almost all the n.o.ble, and with some of the paltry pa.s.sions of our nature, and having never attempted to conceal them, he awakens us to reflection upon ourselves while we contemplate in him a being of our own species, yet different from any other, and whose originality excites even more sympathy than admiration."]

[Footnote 2: "II Petrarca poteva credere candidamente ch'ei non pativa d'invidia solamente, perche fra tutti i viventi non v'era chi non s'arretra.s.se per cedergli il pa.s.so alla prima gloria, ch'ei non poteva sentirsi umiliato, fuorche dall' ombra di Dante."]

Between the dispositions and habits of Alfieri and those of the n.o.ble poet of England, no less remarkable coincidences might be traced; and the sonnet in which the Italian dramatist professes to paint his own character contains, in one comprehensive line, a portrait of the versatile author of Don Juan,--

"Or stimandome Achille ed or Tersite."

By the extract just given from his Journal, it will be perceived that, in Byron's own opinion, a character which, like his, admitted of so many contradictory comparisons, could not be otherwise than wholly undefinable itself. It will be found, however, on reflection, that this very versatility, which renders it so difficult to fix, "ere it change," the fairy fabric of his character, is, in itself, the true clue through all that fabric's mazes,--is in itself the solution of whatever was most dazzling in his might or startling in his levity, of all that most attracted and repelled, whether in his life or his genius. A variety of powers almost boundless, and a pride no less vast in displaying them,--a susceptibility of new impressions and impulses, even beyond the usual allotment of genius, and an uncontrolled impetuosity, as well from habit as temperament, in yielding to them,--such were the two great and leading sources of all that varied spectacle which his life exhibited; of that succession of victories achieved by his genius, in almost every field of mind that genius ever trod, and of all those sallies of character in every shape and direction that unchecked feeling and dominant self-will could dictate.

It must be perceived by all endowed with quick powers of a.s.sociation how constantly, when any particular thought or sentiment presents itself to their minds, its very opposite, at the same moment, springs up there also:--if any thing sublime occurs, its neighbour, the ridiculous, is by its side;--across a bright view of the present or the future, a dark one throws its shadow;--and, even in questions respecting morals and conduct, all the reasonings and consequences that may suggest themselves on the side of one of two opposite courses will, in such minds, be instantly confronted by an array just as cogent on the other. A mind of this structure,--and such, more or less, are all those in which the reasoning is made subservient to the imaginative faculty,--though enabled, by such rapid powers of a.s.sociation, to multiply its resources without end, has need of the constant exercise of a controlling judgment to keep its perceptions pure and undisturbed between the contrasts it thus simultaneously calls up; the obvious danger being that, where matters of taste are concerned, the habit of forming such incongruous juxtapositions--as that, for example, between the burlesque and sublime--should at last vitiate the mind's relish for the n.o.bler and higher quality; and that, on the yet more important subject of morals, a facility in finding reasons for every side of a question may end, if not in the choice of the worst, at least in a sceptical indifference to all.