My Recollections of Lord Byron Part 67

It was not that of Hamlet, for a single instant's dissimulation would have been impossible for Lord Byron. It was not that of Obermann, for his energetic nature could not partake the weakness and powerlessness of Oberon; his strength equalled his genius.

It was not, either, that of Childe Harold, for this hero of his first poem is, in the first and second canto, the personification of youthful exquisites, with senses dulled and satiated by excesses to which Lord Byron had never yielded when he composed this type, since he was then only twenty-one years of age, and had hardly quitted the university, where he lived surrounded by intellectual friends, who have all testified to his mode of life there, and then at Newstead Abbey, where he may have become a little dissipated, but still without any excess capable of engendering satiety. Nor was his melancholy that of the darker heroes he has described in "Lara" and "Manfred," for he never knew remorse; and we have already seen to what must be attributed all these identifications between himself and his heroes.[161]

In general, these kinds of melancholy have other causes, or else they arise from individual organization. With him, on the contrary, melancholy always originated from some moral external cause, which would tend to show, that without such cause, his melancholy would not have existed, or else might have been quite overcome. But, before arriving at a definition, we must a.n.a.lyze it, after taking a rapid glance at his whole life.

It has even been said, that our conduct in early years offers a sure indication of our future; that the man does but continue the child. Let us then begin by studying Byron during his childhood. We know from the testimony of his nurses and preceptors, both in Scotland and England, that goodness, sensibility, tenderness, and likewise gayety, with a tendency to jesting, formed the basis of his character. Nevertheless, a yearning after solitude led him into solitary distant walks, along the sea-sh.o.r.e when he was living at Aberdeen, or amid the wild poetic mountains of Scotland, near the romantic banks of the Dee, often putting his life in danger, and causing much alarm to his mother. But this sprang simply from his ardent nature, which, far from inclining him to melancholy, made earth seem like a paradise.

Has he not described these ecstasies of his childhood in "Ta.s.so's Lament:"--

"From my very birth my soul was drunk with love," etc.

This want of solitude became still more remarkable as reflection acquired further development. At Harrow, he would leave his favorite games and dear companions to go and sit alone on the stone which bears his name. But this want of living alone sometimes in the fairyland of his imagination, feeding on his own sentiments, and the bright illusions of his youthful soul, was that what is yclept melancholy? No, no; what he experienced was but the harbinger of genius, destined to dazzle the world; Disraeli, that great observer of the race of geniuses, so affirms:--

"Eagles fly alone," exclaims Sydney, "while sheep are ever to be found in flocks."

Almost all men of genius have experienced this precocious desire of solitude. But Lord Byron, who united so many contrasts, and, according to Moore, the faculties of several men, had also much of the child about him. And, while almost all children belonging to the race of great intellects, have neither taste nor apt.i.tude for bodily exercises and games of dexterity, he, by exception to the general rule, on coming out of his reveries, experienced equally the want of giving himself up pa.s.sionately to the play and stir of companions who were inferior to him in intelligence. Up to this, then, we can discover no symptom in him of that _fatal_ kind of melancholy--that which is _hereditary_ and _causeless_. But anon, his heart begins to beat high, and the boy already courts aspirations, ardent desires, illusions that may well be destined to agitate, afflict, or even overwhelm him. Meanwhile let us follow him from Harrow to the vacations pa.s.sed at Nottingham and Southwell. There we shall see him acting plays with enthusiasm, making himself the life of the social circle a.s.sembled round the amiable Pigott family, delighting in music, and writing his first effusions in verse.

Certainly it was not melancholy that predominated in his early poems, but rather generosity, kindness, sincerity, the ardor of a loving heart, the aspiration after all that is pa.s.sionate, n.o.ble, great, virtuous and heroic; but these verses also make us feel by a thousand delicate shades of sentiment portrayed, and by cherished illusions pertinaciously held, that melancholy may hereafter succeed in making new pa.s.sage for itself, and finding out the path to that loving, pa.s.sionate heart. And, in truth, it did more than once penetrate there. For death s.n.a.t.c.hed from him, first, two dear companions of his childhood, and then the young cousin, who beneath an angel's guise on earth, first awakened the fire of love. And afterward Lord Byron gave his heart, of fifteen, to another affection, was deceived, met with no return,[162] but, on the contrary, was sorely wounded. Yet all the melancholy thus engendered was accidental and fact.i.tious, springing from the excessive sensibility of his physical and moral being, as well as from circ.u.mstances; his griefs resembled the usual griefs of youth. It was in these dispositions that he quitted Harrow for Cambridge University. There, one of the greatest sorrows of his life overtook him. It was a complex sentiment, made up of regret at having left his beloved Harrow, of grief at the recent loss of a cherished affection, and, lastly, sadness caused by a very modest and very singular feeling for a youth of his age; he regretted no longer feeling himself a child, which regret can only be explained by a presentiment of therefore soon being called on to renounce other illusions. This is how he spoke of it still, when at Ravenna, in 1821:--

"It was one of the most fatal and crus.h.i.+ng sentiments of my life, to feel that I was no longer a child."

He fell ill from it. But all these sorts of melancholy, arising from _palpable avowed_ causes, having their origin in the heart, might equally find their cure in the heart. Already did imagination transport him toward his beloved Ida, and he consoled himself by saying, that if love has wings, friends.h.i.+p ought to have none. If this were an illusion, he completed it by writing that charming poem of his youth, "Friends.h.i.+p is Love without Wings."[163]

At Cambridge he met again one of his dearest friends from Harrow, Edward Long; he also made acquaintance with the amiable Eddlestone, and his melancholy disappeared in the genial atmosphere of friends.h.i.+p. As long as these dear friends remained near him he was happy, even at Cambridge.

But they were called to different careers, and destiny separated them.

Long, with whom he had pa.s.sed such happy days,[164] left the first to go into the guards. Eddlestone remained, but Lord Byron himself was already about to quit Cambridge. During the vacation, we see him modestly preparing his first poems intended as an offering to Friends.h.i.+p; then going to a watering-place with some respectable friends; devoting himself with ardor to dramatic representations at the amateur theatre at Southwell, where he was more than ever the life of society; and thus he remained a whole year away from Cambridge, often seeing his dear Long again in London, and visiting Harrow with him. When he returned, in 1807, to Cambridge, Long had already left, and Eddlestone was shortly to go; thus, he no longer heard the song of that amiable youth, nor the flute of his dear Long, and melancholy well-nigh seized hold on him.

Nevertheless, he consoled himself with projects for the future. Besides, he was already nineteen years of age, had made some progress in the journey of life, probably leaving some illusions behind him on the bushes that lined the roadside, and perhaps his soul had already lost somewhat of its early purity. He had certainly seen that many things in the moral world were far removed from the ideal forms with which he had invested them; that love, even friends.h.i.+p, virtue, patriotism, generosity, and goodness, by no means attained the height of his first convictions. A year before, he had said: "I have tasted the joy and the bitterness of love." Willingly again would he have given way to the emotions of the heart; but he too soon perceived that to do so were a useless, dangerous luxury,--a language scarcely understood in the world in which he moved; that the idols he had believed of precious metal, were, in reality, made of vile clay. Then he also resolved on taking his degrees in vice; but, unlike others, he did so _with disgust_, and he called satiety, not the _quant.i.ty_, but the _quality_ of the aliment. A year before he had also said: "_I have found that a friend may promise and yet deceive._"

Magnanimous as he was, he made advances to the guilty friend, and took half the blame on himself; but in vain was he generous, saying, with tears that flowed from his heart to his pen:--

"You knew that my soul, that my heart, my existence, If danger demanded, were wholly your own; You knew me unalter'd by years or by distance, Devoted to love and to friends.h.i.+p alone."

And then:--

"Repentance will cancel the vow you have made."

And again:

"With me no corroding resentment shall live: My bosom is calm'd by the simple reflection, That both may be wrong, and that both should forgive."

The friend did not return, and Lord Byron's generous, pure, delicate nature--fearful lest he might be in the wrong--could only find peace in trying to offer reparation. He wrote to Lord Clare:--

"I have, therefore, made all the reparation in my power, by apologizing for my mistake, though with very faint hopes of success. His answer has not arrived, and, most probably, never will. However, I have eased my own conscience by the atonement, which is humiliating enough to one of my disposition; yet I could not have slept satisfied with the reflection of having, even unintentionally, injured any individual. I have done all that could be done to repair the injury, and there the affair must rest.

Whether we renew our intimacy or not is of very trivial consequence."

But although he could no longer rely entirely upon his heart for defending his loved illusions so cruelly attacked by reality, yet it was not possible for him to put out of sight his ideal of all the beauties of soul whose presence was a condition of his being. And it was this presence that made material dissipated life, and also the intellectual routine existence at Granta, both appear so unattractive to him. He wrote a satire on them, and the blame inflicted shows his fine nature.

When evil was thus judged, thus condemned, alike by pen and heart, there could be no real danger; not even had it power to sadden him. A more formidable peril menaced him from another side. Sadness might now reach his heart through his mind. That deep intellect, so given to a.n.a.lyze, meditate, generalize, from childhood upward, according to the relative capacity of age, was ever busy with the great problems of life. It has been seen that he began to worry even his nurses with childish questions, and afterward much more to embarra.s.s his tutors, masters etc., and especially the excellent Dr. Glenny at Dulwich. A natural tendency fortified by early religious education evidently drew his heart to G.o.d; but, on the other hand, a logical mind, fond of investigating every thing, made him experience the necessity of examining his grounds of belief. The answers, all ready prepared, made to him on great questions could not satisfy him; he required to discuss their basis.

Already the increasing play of his faculties had been revealed in that beautiful Prayer to the Divinity which const.i.tutes his profession of faith and wors.h.i.+p, "every line of which," says Moore, "is instinct with fervent sadness, as of a heart that grieves at loss of its illusions."

On arriving this year at Cambridge, he found, amid a circle of intellectual companions which Moore calls "a brilliant pleiad," a young man of genius, an extraordinary thinker, a mind that had, perhaps, some affinity to his own, but which, devoid of his sensibility and logic, surpa.s.sed him in hardihood; a bold spirit, striving to scrutinize the inscrutable, and, not content with a.n.a.lysis, desirous to arrive at _conclusions_. Through the natural influence of example, and more especially the irresistible fascination exercised by a great intelligence, uniting also the spirit of fun, so amusing to Lord Byron because so like his own; from all these causes, Matthews exercised an immense influence over him. This young man loved to plunge his head into depths from whence he emerged all dizzy. Lord Byron was guided by too reasonable a mind to arrive at such results. He refused to follow where deformity and evil were to ensue, and persisted still in looking upward.

Still, however, he allowed his eyes to wander over the magic gla.s.s, where danced a few pretended certainties conjoined with a host of doubts. The first he rejected, as too antipathetic to his soul, but perhaps he did not sufficiently repel all the doubts. And, being no longer alarmed at sounding such depths, he imbibed seeds of doctrine capable of producing incredulity or, at least, skepticism. Happily these seeds required a dry soil to fructify, and his, being so rich, they _perished_, after a short period of wretched existence. All these influences, and this precocious experience, were for him at this time a sort of personification of Mephistopheles, although not entailing serious consequences; for in the main his belief was not deeply shaken.

It had no other effect than to throw him, for a time, into uncertainty on points necessary to him, "and to teach him," says Moore, "to feel less embarra.s.sed in a _sort_ of skepticism."

This disagreement between his reason and his aspirations becoming deeper and wider, his mind ceased always to follow his heart. But the latter following rather the former, though with sadness and fatigue, and all the problems of life becoming more and more enveloped in darkness, it is possible that he pa.s.sed through gloomy hours, wherein equivocal expressions escaped his pen. In a word, if he avoided dizziness, he was not equally fortunate with regard to ennui.

"Ennui," says the clever Viscomte D'Yzarn de Freissinet, in his deep and delightful book, "_Les Pensees grises_," "ennui is felt by ordinary minds because they can not understand earth, and by superior ones because they can not understand heaven."

Let us now observe Byron after he had taken his degrees at the university, and when about to enter into possession of his estates. On seeing this young n.o.bleman of twenty, almost an orphan, commence his career perfectly independent, call around him at Newstead Abbey his dear companions of Harrow and Cambridge, make up masquerades with them, don the costume of abbots and monks, pa.s.s the nights in running about his own parks and the heather of Sherwood Forest, and the days amid youthful eccentricities, amiable hospitality, and London dissipation, it would seem as if this odd, s.h.i.+fting, noisy kind of life, however efficient for developing knowledge of men and things, must inevitably obliterate all trace of melancholy.

But it was not so; the responsibilities of life began too soon for him, and the joyous horizon of his twentieth year was already dotted with black marks indicative of the approaching tempest. In the first place, the ca.s.sock of a real priest never reposed on a heart more sensitive, endowed with feelings deeper and less hostile to audacity of mind.

Moreover, the griefs of his boyhood had sown seeds of sadness in his heart, and the unjust cruel criticism lavished on his early poems had already inflicted a deep wound. Lord Byron, it is true, thought to heal this by writing a satire; still, despite the vein of pleasantry indulged, he continued to discipline his mind by serious study of the great masters of literature and of the deepest thinkers.

It must be acknowledged that the balm he sought in _satire_, was a dangerous caustic which, while closing one wound, might well cause others to open. At the same time, the money embarra.s.sments inherited from his predecessor in the estate went on acc.u.mulating, and the period was approaching when the ca.s.sock, donned in boyish fun, was to be exchanged for the grave ermine of a peer of the realm. Who should present him, then, to the n.o.ble a.s.sembly, if not his guardian, and near relative, the Earl of Carlisle? The young lord had always met his coldness with deference and respect, even dedicating his early poems to him. But the n.o.ble earl now still further aggravated his unkind conduct toward his ward by abandoning him at this solemn moment. Not only did he refuse to lend countenance himself, but he even hurt and wounded Lord Byron by interposing delays so as to prevent or put off his reception in the House of Peers, and that _solely because he did not like the young man's mother_! It would be impossible for the most loving heart, the one most susceptible of family affections, not to have felt cruelly, under such circ.u.mstances, the absence of near ties, and Lord Byron did not then know his sister. Suffer he did, of course; and, had it not been for a distant relative, despite his high birth and wondrous gifts, he must have entered the august a.s.sembly accompanied only by his t.i.tle.

However frivolous the young man might have appeared, he was not so in reality; and he hesitated at this time between a project of travelling for information, and the desire to take part immediately in the labors of the Senate. Some months before, attaining his majority, when the wish of travelling predominated, after having informed his mother of a thousand arrangements, all equally affectionate, wise, and generous, that he was about to take for her during his absence, he wrote that he proposed visiting Persia, India, and other countries.

"If I do not travel now," said he, "I never shall, and all men should, one day or other. I have, at present, no connections to keep me at home; no wife, or unprovided sisters, brothers, etc. I shall take care of you, and when I return I may possibly become a politician. A few years'

knowledge of other countries than our own will not incapacitate me for that part. If we see no nation but our own, we do not give mankind a fair chance: it is from experience, not books, we ought to judge of them. There is nothing like inspection and trusting to our senses."

But while cheris.h.i.+ng these ideas, his mind at the same time wavered between the two projects,--Parliament attracted him greatly. Despite his light words, the love of true and merited glory, of the beautiful and the good, ever inflamed his heart. What he wrote a year or two before, to his counsellor and friend, the Rev. Mr. Beecher, had not ceased to be his programme.[165] He said to his mother, a short time before his majority, that he thought it indispensable, "as a preparation for the future, to make a speech in the House, as soon as he was admitted." He wrote the same thing still more explicitly to Harness; for he then thought seriously of entering upon politics without delay, and his rights as a hereditary legislator paved the way for it. Nevertheless, being hurt, disappointed, and indignant at his guardian's conduct, and feeling himself isolated, he not only renounced taking any active part in the debates of his colleagues, but, according to Moore, appeared to consider the obligation of being among them painful and mortifying.

Thus, a few days after entering Parliament, he returned disgusted to the solitude of his abbey, there to meditate on the bitterness of precocious experience, or upon scenes that appeared more vast to his independent spirit, than those which his country presented.

The final decision soon came. He resolved on leaving England and taking a long journey with his friend Hobhouse, on seeking suns.h.i.+ne, experience, and forgetfulness for his wounded soul. It seemed really at that moment as if, through an acc.u.mulation of disappointment, injustice and grief, the result of lost illusions (he had already written the epitaph on "Boatswain"), as if, I say, some germs of misanthropy were beginning to appear. But his bitterness did not reach, or rather, did not change his heart: every thing proves this. One of his friends, Lord Faulkland, was killed in a duel about this time; and our misanthrope not only was inconsolable, but, despite the embarra.s.sment of his own affairs, generously a.s.sisted the family of the deceased, who had been left in distress. Dallas, who, through his prejudices, personal susceptibilities, and exaggerated opinions, shows so little indulgence to Lord Byron, thus describes however the impression made on him, and his conduct under the circ.u.mstances:--

"Nature had gifted Lord Byron with most benevolent sentiments, which I had frequent opportunities of perceiving; and I sometimes saw them give to his beautiful countenance an expression truly sublime. I paid him a visit the day after Lord Faulkland's death; he had just seen the lifeless body of one in whose society he had lately pa.s.sed a pleasant day. He was saying to himself aloud, from time to time--'Poor Faulkland!' His look was more expressive than his words. 'But,' he added, 'his wife! 'tis she that is to be pitied!' I read his soul full of the kindest intentions, nor were they sterile. If ever there were a pure action, it was the one he meditated then; and the man who conceived and accomplished it was at that moment advancing through thorns and briers toward the free but narrow path that leads to heaven."[166]

He was setting out then on a long journey. And at that period long journeys were serious things. His first desire was to have a farewell meeting at Newstead, of all his old school-fellows. And that not sufficing, he even wished to carry their image away with him, so as to enjoy a sensible means of recalling tender remembrances of the past. But his heart found an aliment for misanthropy in the selfish answer given by one of his comrades, who was alarmed at the expense of getting a portrait taken. We see the impression made by this ungenerous reply, in the letter he addressed to his friend Harness:--

"I am going abroad, if possible, in the spring, and before I depart I am collecting the pictures of my most intimate school-fellows. I want yours; I have commissioned one of the first miniature painters of the day to take them, of course, at my own expense, as I never allow any to incur the least expenditure to gratify a whim of mine. To mention this may seem indelicate; but when I tell you a friend of ours first refused to sit, under the idea that he was to _disburse_ on the occasion, you will see that it is _necessary_ to state these preliminaries, to prevent the recurrence of any similar mistake. It will be a tax on your patience for a week, but pray excuse it, as it is possible the resemblance may be the sole trace I shall be able to preserve of our past friends.h.i.+p. Just now it seems foolish enough, but in a few years, when some of us are dead, and others are separated by inevitable circ.u.mstances, it will be a kind of satisfaction to retain, in these images of the living, the idea of our former selves, and to contemplate, in the resemblances of the dead, all that remains of judgment, feeling, and a host of pa.s.sions."

If misanthropy had not been an element heterogeneous to his character, it might well have a.s.sumed larger proportions at this moment; for, on the very eve of his departure from England, his heart had yet to suffer one of those chilling shocks to which sensitive natures, removed far above the usual temperature of the world, says Moore, are only too much exposed. And this proof of coldness, which he complains of with indignation in a note to the second canto of "Childe Harold," was given precisely by one of the friends he most loved. Mr. Dallas, who witnessed the immediate effect produced by this mark of coldness, thus describes it:

"I found him bursting with indignation. '_Will you believe it?_' said he, 'I _have just_ met ---- and asked him to come and sit an hour with me; he excused himself; and what do you think was his excuse? He was engaged with his mother and some ladies to go shopping! And he knows I set out to-morrow to be absent for years, perhaps never to return?

Friends.h.i.+p! I do not believe I shall leave behind me, yourself and family excepted, and perhaps my mother, a single being who will care what becomes of me!'"[167]

The conduct of this friend gave him so much pain, that a year after he wrote again about it, from Constantinople, to Dallas:--

"The only person I counted would feel grieved at my departure took leave of me with such coldness, that if I had not known the heart of man I should have been surprised. I should have attributed it to some offenses on my part, had I ever been guilty of aught save _too much affection_ for him."

Dallas thought that some lady, from a spirit of vengeance, had excited this young man to slight Lord Byron.

I will not here seek to discover whether he was right or wrong. It suffices that he could believe it, for me to say, that this singular misanthropy, born of heart-deceptions, was in reality nothing else but grief, the causes of which might each be enumerated, but the intensity of which we do not really know, since that deep capacity is the sad privilege of beings highly endowed.

In any case, it is certain that when he left England the measure of disappointments capable of producing real melancholy in such a sensitive heart was quite filled up. Is it, then, surprising that he, like his hero, "Childe Harold," should see with indifference the sh.o.r.es of his native land recede? But if, unhappily, the gloomy ideas he welcomed for a moment brought about a regrettable habit, no more to be lost, of adopting, in his language spoken and written, expressions and mystifications that too often concealed his real feelings, only letting them be seen through the medium of his mind (a sure way of making him misunderstood), he could not long stand against the proofs of real attachment shown him by his fellow-traveller, and, indeed, by all who came near him. Even before setting sail, the influence of this sentiment, combined with his natural disposition to gayety, became visible; all annoyances seemed forgotten in the agreeable sensation of a first voyage that was to bear him away from the country where he had suffered so much, and which would probably show him, in other lands, more favorable specimens of the human race. Indeed, this is quite evident in the letters and gay verses sent off from Falmouth to his friends Drury and Hodgson, as well as in the more serious strain, though still gay and affectionate, in which he, at the same time, addressed his mother.[168]

Hardly had he landed at Lisbon, when his heart, yearning after the beautiful, expanded into admiration at sight of the Tagus and the beauties of Cintra; displaying alike his high moral sense of things, whether he expressed admiration or inflicted blame.[169]

We see his whole nature revolt at baseness, ingrat.i.tude, cowardice, ferocity, all kinds of moral deformity; just as much as it was attracted and delighted by patriotism, courage, devotion, sacrifice, love carried to heroism, grace, and beauty. We perceive, in the poet's soul, a freshness and a moral vigor, that s.h.i.+ne all the more brightly, contrasted with the misanthropical melancholy of the hero of his legend.

But this personage had been imprudently chosen to typify a state of mind into which youth often falls, and which, perhaps, Lord Byron himself went through during a few short hours of disenchantment. The impressions thus gathered, were treasured in his memory until they came to maturity some months later; then they issued from his pen in flowing numbers, whose magic power he then ignored: but a.s.suredly the fine sentiments expressed came from the soul of the minstrel, not from the satiated feelingless hero, who was incapable of experiencing them. Let people only make the distinction between the two personages whom malice has taken pleasure in confounding, an error willingly adopted by a certain set and imposed on credulous minds.[170]

The relation between the two is not one of family or race, but a purely accidental external resemblance; the result of some strange fancy and intellectual want in the poet, whose powerful imagination, while having recourse only to his own spontaneity for the creation of ideal beings and types, yet required to rest always on reality, for painting the material world and for embodying his metaphysical conceptions.