Mosses from an old manse
religious point of view. He now combines the most rigid tenets of
Methodism with the ultra doctrines of the Puseyites; the former being
perhaps due to the convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble
consort, while the latter are the embroidery and picturesque
illumination demanded by his imaginative character. Much of whatever
expenditure his increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him is
bestowed in the reparation or beautifying of places of worship; and
this nobleman, whose name was once considered a synonyme of the foul
fiend, is now all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits of the
metropolis and elsewhere. In politics, Lord Byron is an uncompromising
conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether in the House of Lords
or in private circles, of denouncing and repudiating the mischievous
and anarchical notions of his earlier day. Nor does he fail to visit
similar sins in other people with the sincerest vengeance which his
somewhat blunted pen is capable of inflicting. Southey and he are on
the most intimate terms. You are aware that, some little time before
the death of Moore, Byron caused that brilliant but reprehensible man
to be evicted from his house. Moore took the insult so much to heart
that, it is said to have been one great cause of the fit of illness
which brought him to the grave. Others pretend that the lyrist died in
a very happy state of mind, singing one of his own sacred melodies, and
expressing his belief that it would be heard within the gate of
paradise, and gain him instant and honorable admittance. I wish he may
have found it so.
I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation with
Lord Byron, to pay the weed of homage due to a mighty poet, by
allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan,
which have made so large a portion of the music of my life. My words,
whether apt or otherwise, were at least warm with the enthusiasm of one
worthy to discourse of immortal poesy. It was evident, however, that
they did not go precisely to the right spot. I could perceive that
there was some mistake or other, and was not a little angry with
myself, and ashamed of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my own
heart to the gifted author’s ear, the echo of those strains that have
resounded throughout the world. But by and by the secret peeped quietly
out. Byron,—I have the information from his own lips, so that you need
not hesitate to repeat it in literary circles,—Byron is preparing a new
edition of his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and
amended, in accordance with his present creed of taste, morals,
politics, and religion. It so happened that the very passages of
highest inspiration to which I had alluded were among the condemned and
rejected rubbish which it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of
oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his passions
having burned out, the extinction of their vivid and riotous flame has
deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which he not merely wrote,
but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he had written. Positively
he no longer understands his own poetry.
This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few
specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is licentious,
whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith, whatever
morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive, whatever assails
settled constitutions of government or systems of society, whatever
could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except a pagan, a
republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly blotted out, and its
place supplied by unexceptionable verses in his lordship’s later style.
You may judge how much of the poem remains as hitherto published. The
result is not so good as might be wished; in plain terms, it is a very
sad affair indeed; for, though the torches kindled in Tophet have been
extinguished, they leave an abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by
no glimpses of hallowed fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that
this attempt on Lord Byron’s part to atone for his youthful errors will
at length induce the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is
concerned, to allow Thorwaldsen’s statue of the poet its due niche in
the grand old Abbey. His bones, you know, when brought from Greece,
were denied sepulture among those of his tuneful brethren there.
What a vile slip of the pen was that! How absurd in me to talk about
burying the bones of Byron, who, I have just seen alive, and incased in
a big, round bulk of flesh! But, to say the truth, a prodigiously fat
man always impresses me as a kind of hobgoblin; in the very
extravagance of his mortal system I find something akin to the
immateriality of a ghost. And then that ridiculous old story darted
into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Missolonghi, above twenty
years ago. More and more I recognize that we dwell in a world of
shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to
attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of
it. If there be any difference, the former are rather the more
substantial.
Only think of my good fortune! The venerable Robert Burns—now, if I
mistake not, in his eighty-seventh year—happens to be making a visit to
London, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of grasping him by
the hand. For upwards of twenty years past he has hardly left his quiet
cottage in Ayrshire for a single night, and has only been drawn hither
now by the irresistible persuasions of all the distinguished men in
England. They wish to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday by a festival.
It will be the greatest literary triumph on record. Pray Heaven the
little spirit of life within the aged bard’s bosom may not be
extinguished in the lustre of that hour! I have already had the honor
of an introduction to him at the British Museum, where he was examining
a collection of his own unpublished letters, interspersed with songs,
which have escaped the notice of all his biographers.
Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of? How should Burns have been
embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty old man?
The figure of the bard is tall and in the highest degree reverend, nor
the less so that it is much bent by the burden of time. His white hair
floats like a snowdrift around his face, in which are seen the furrows
of intellect and passion, like the channels of headlong torrents that
have foamed themselves away. The old gentleman is in excellent
preservation, considering his time of life. He has that crickety sort
of liveliness,—I mean the cricket’s humor of chirping for any cause or
none,—which is perhaps the most favorable mood that can befall extreme
old age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although we
perceive it to be a beneficence of nature in the case of others. I was
surprised to find it in Burns. It seems as if his ardent heart and
brilliant imagination had both burned down to the last embers, leaving
only a little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing
upward and laughing all by itself. He is no longer capable of pathos.
At the request of Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song
to Mary in Heaven; but it was evident that the feeling of those verses,
so profoundly true and so simply expressed, was entirely beyond the
scope of his present sensibilities; and, when a touch of it did
partially awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his eyes and
his voice broke into a tremulous cackle. And yet he but indistinctly
knew wherefore he was weeping. Ah, he must not think again of Mary in
Heaven until he shake off the dull impediment of time and ascend to
meet her there.
Burns then began to repeat Tan O’Shanter; but was so tickled with its
wit and humor—of which, however, I suspect he had but a traditionary
sense—that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter, succeeded
by a cough, which brought this not very agreeable exhibition to a
close. On the whole, I would rather not have witnessed it. It is a
satisfactory idea, however, that the last forty years of the peasant
poet’s life have been passed in competence and perfect comfort. Having
been cured of his bardic improvidence for many a day past, and grown as
attentive to the main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now
considered to be quite well off as to pecuniary circumstances. This, I
suppose, is worth having lived so long for.
I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in regard
to the health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am sorry to say,
remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of a hopeless
paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler attributes of
which the body is the instrument. And thus he vegetates from day to day
and from year to year at that splendid fantasy of Abbotsford, which
grew out of his brain, and became a symbol of the great romancer’s
tastes, feelings, studies, prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether
in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing,
although that one in infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in
his library, and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating
tales to an amanuensis,—to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not
deemed worth any one’s trouble now to take down what flows from that
once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and
capable of being coined. Yet Cunningham, who has lately seen him,
assures me that there is now and then a touch of the genius,—a striking
combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of character, such as
no other man alive could have bit off,—a glimmer from that ruined mind,
as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted helmet in the gloom
of an ancient ball. But the plots of these romances become inextricably
confused; the characters melt into one another; and the tale loses
itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy and marshy
ground.
For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his
consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue. It
was good that he should forget his fame rather than that fame should
first have forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a
one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like the same
position in literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more earnest
purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he was
qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be to the present generation
even what Scott has been to the past? I had expectations from a young
man,—one Dickens,—who published a few magazine articles, very rich in
humor, and not without symptoms of genuine pathos; but the poor fellow
died shortly after commencing an odd series of sketches, entitled, I
think, the Pickwick Papers. Not impossibly the world has lost more than
it dreams of by the untimely death of this Mr. Dickens.
Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall the other day? You would not hit
it in ten guesses. Why, no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte, or all
that is now left of him,—that is to say, the skin, bones, and corporeal
substance, little cocked hat, green coat, white breeches, and small
sword, which are still known by his redoubtable name. He was attended
only by two policemen, who walked quietly behind the phantasm of the
old ex-emperor, appearing to have no duty in regard to him except to
see that none of the light-fingered gentry should possess themselves of
thee star of the Legion of Honor. Nobody save myself so much as turned
to look after him; nor, it grieves me to confess, could even I contrive
to muster up any tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike
spirit, formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape, had wrought