My Recollections of Lord Byron
circumstances--which were a fatality of his destiny--he has shown
himself melancholy in his writings and very often in his dispositions,
it is no less certain that by temperament and taste, by the activity,
penetration, and complex character of his mind, he very often showed
himself to be extremely gay. No one better than he seized upon the
absurd and ridiculous side of things or more easily found cause for
laughter. His gayety--the result of a frank, open, volatile nature, full
of varying moods--was easily excited by any absurdities, ridiculous
pretensions, or witty sallies; and then he became so expansive and
charming, body and soul with him both seemed to laugh in such unison,
that it was impossible not to catch the contagion; but his laughter was
ever devoid of malice. Slight defects of harmony in things, or
proportion, or mutual relation, easily gave rise to mirthful sensations
in him. Being full of admiration for the beautiful, and having,
moreover, a great sense of mutual fitness, and much activity of mind, it
was with extraordinary and instinctive promptitude that he seized upon
the contradictory relations existing between objects, and indeed on all
showing a voluntary absence of order and beauty in the conduct of free
reasonable beings. His laughter was then quite as aesthetical as it was
innocent. And even if it were not admitted, as it is by all
philosophical moralists, that no sort of personal calculation enters
into this entirely spontaneous emotion, no sentiment of superiority over
the being we are laughing at--for _selfishness and laughter never
coexist_--if it were possible, I say, to doubt all this, even then to
see Lord Byron laugh would have sufficed to give the right conviction.
For truly his mirth was a charming thing; the very air surrounding him
appeared to laugh.
Then would his soul, that often required to emerge from its deep
reflections, unbend itself, and alternately disport or repose in utter
self-abandonment. It dismissed thought, as it were, in order to become a
child again; to deliver itself over to all the caprices of those myriad
changeful fugitive impressions that course through the brain at moments
of excitement.
Moore often recurs to Byron's liveliness. "Nothing, indeed, could be
more amusing and delightful.... It was like the bursting gayety of a boy
let loose from school, and seemed as if there was no extent of fun or
tricks of which he was not capable." When Moore visited him at Mira, in
the autumn of 1812, and accompanied him to Venice, the former expressed
himself as follows in his memorandum of that occasion:--
"As we proceeded across the lagoon in his gondola the sun was just
setting, and it was an evening such as Romance would have chosen for a
first sight of Venice, rising 'with her tiara of bright towers' above
the wave; while to complete, as might be imagined, the solemn interest
of the scene, I behold it in company with him who had lately given a new
life to its glories, and sung of that fair City of the Sea thus
grandly:--
'I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles,
Where Venice sat in state, throned on her hundred isles!'
"But whatever emotions the first sight of such a scene might, under
other circumstances, have inspired me with, the mood of mind in which I
now viewed it was altogether the reverse of what might have been
expected. The exuberant gayety of my companion, and the
recollections--any thing but romantic--into which our conversation
wandered, put at once completely to flight all poetical and historical
associations; and our course was, I am almost ashamed to say, one of
uninterrupted merriment and laughter till we found ourselves at the
steps of my friend's palazzo on the Grand Canal. All that ever happened,
of gay or ridiculous, during our London life together; his scrapes and
my lecturings; our joint adventures with the Bores and Blues, the two
great enemies, as he always called them, of London happiness; our joyous
nights together at Walter's, Kinnaird's, etc.; and that 'd--d supper of
Rancliffe's, which ought to have been a dinner;' all was passed rapidly
in review between us, and with a flow of humor and hilarity on his side
of which it would have been difficult for persons even far graver than
even I can pretend to be, not to have caught the contagion."
Lord Byron was especially prone to mirth and fun in the society of those
he liked; to jest and laugh with any one was a great proof of his
sympathy for them. When he wrote to absent dear ones, he would
constantly say, "I have many things to tell you for us to laugh over
together." In several letters addressed from Greece to Madame G----, he
informs her of these treasures of mirth, held in reserve for the day of
meeting, that they might laugh together. Lord Byron rarely used
flattering language to those he loved. It was rather by looks than by
words that he expressed his feelings and his approbation. His delight
with intimates was to bring out strongly their defects, as well as their
qualities and merits, by dint of jests, clever innuendo, and charming
sallies of humor. The promptitude with which he discovered the slightest
weakness, the faintest symptom of exaggeration or affectation, can
hardly be credited. It might almost be said that the persons on whom he
bestowed affection became _transparent_ for him, that he dived into
their thoughts and feelings.
It was this state of mind especially that gave rise to those sallies of
wit which formed such a striking feature of his intelligence. Then his
conversation really became quite dazzling. In his glowing language all
objects assumed unforeseen and picturesque aspects. New and striking
thoughts followed from him in rapid succession, and the flame of his
genius lighted up as if winged with wildfire. Those who have not known
him at these moments can form no idea of what it was from his works.
For, in the silence of his study, when, pen in hand, he was working out
his grand conceptions, the lightning strokes lost much of their
brilliant intensity; and although we find, especially in "Don Juan" and
"Beppo," delightful pages of rich comic humor, only those who knew him
can judge how superior still his conversation was. But in this gay
exercise of his faculties, which was to him a real enjoyment in all his
sallies or even in his railleries, not one iota of malice could be
traced--unless we call by that name the amusement springing from mirth
and wit indulged. Even if his shafts were finely pointed, they were at
the same time so inoffensive that the most susceptible could not be
wounded.
The great pleasure he took in jesting appears to have belonged to his
organization, for it accompanied him throughout life. We have already
seen what his nurses, his preceptors, and the friends of his childhood
said on this subject. We have observed his sympathy for the old
cup-bearer of his family mansion; the pleasantries expended on the quack
Lavander, who was always promising to cure his foot, and never did; the
jesting tone of his boyish correspondence; afterward the masqueradings
that took place at Newstead Abbey; then again his gay doings with Moore
and Rogers in London; the jests pervading the correspondence of his
maturer years; then their concentration in "Beppo" and "Don Juan;" and
finally, how often, even in Greece, when he was already unwell at
Missolonghi, he could not help giving way to pleasantry and childish
play to such a degree that good Dr. Kennedy, when he wished to convert
him to his somewhat intolerant orthodoxy at Cephalonia, found one of the
obstacles to consist in the difficulty of keeping Lord Byron serious.
"He was fond," says the doctor, "of saying smart and witty things, and
never allowed an opportunity of punning to escape him.... He generally
showed high spirits and hilarity.... I have heard him say several witty
things; but as I was always anxious to keep him grave and present
important subjects for his consideration, after allowing the laugh to
pass I again endeavored to resume the seriousness of the conversation,
while his lordship constantly did the same."
And then Kennedy adds:--"My impression from them was, that they were
unworthy a man of his accomplishments: I mean the desire of
jesting."[150]
These words well characterize the honest Methodist, who, like many other
good and noble minds, yet could not understand fun. This incapability is
also sometimes the case with persons of a sour, ill-natured, or
susceptible disposition, whose excessive vanity is shocked at all
simple, innocent explosions of gayety and pleasantry.[151] Colonel
Stanhope, who knew Lord Byron at the same period, and who was not a
Methodist, but who from other causes could not appreciate the poet's
vivacious wit, said:--
"The mind of Lord Byron was like a volcano, full of fire and wrath,
sometimes calm, often dazzling and playful.... As a companion," he adds,
"no one could be more amusing than Lord Byron; he had neither pedantry
nor affectation about him, but was natural and playful as a boy. His
conversation resembled a stream; sometimes smooth, sometimes rapid, and
sometimes rushing down in cataracts. It was a mixture of philosophy and
slang, of every thing,--like his 'Don Juan.' He was a patient, and in
general a very attentive, listener. When, however, he did engage with
earnestness in conversation, his ideas succeeded each other with such
uncommon rapidity that he could not control them. They burst from him
impetuously; and although he both attended to and noticed the remarks of
others, yet he did not allow these to check his discourse for an
instant."
"There was usually," writes Count Gamba, his friend and companion in
Greece, in his interesting work, entitled "Last Travels of Lord Byron in
Greece," "a liveliness of spirit and a tendency to joke, even at times
of great danger, when other men would have become serious and
pre-occupied. This disposition of mind gave him a kind of air of
frankness and sincerity which was quite irresistible with those persons
even who were most prejudiced against him."
This allusion of Count Gamba refers to the letter which Byron wrote in
the midst of the Suliotes, among whom he had taken refuge during the
storm and to escape the Turks.
"If any thing," writes Lord Byron, on the point of embarking for
Missolonghi, and in his last letter to Moore, "if any thing in the way
of fever, fatigue, famine, or otherwise, should cut short the middle age
of a brother warbler, like Garcilasso de la Vega, I pray you remember me
in 'your smiles and wine.'
"I have hopes that the cause will triumph; but, whether it does or no,
still 'honor must be minded as strictly as a milk diet.' I trust to
observe both.
BYRON."
"It is matter of history," continues Count Gamba, "that Lord Byron, in
consequence of vexations to which he was ever a victim, added to the
rigorous diet which he followed (he only fed upon vegetables and green
tea, to show that he could live as frugally as a Greek soldier), and
from the impossibility which he found to take any exercise at
Missolonghi, had a nervous fit, which deprived him of the power of
speech and alarmed all his friends and acquaintances. When the crisis
had worn off, he merely laughed over it."
"Even at Missolonghi," says Parry, who knew him there only in the midst
of troubles and vexations of every description and quite at the close of
his life, "he loved to jest in words and actions. These pleasantries