My Recollections of Lord Byron
meditative and poetic nature like his? Indeed, what does Galt say?--
"When night arrived and there were lights in the vessel, he held himself
aloof, took his station on the rail, between the pegs on which the
sheets are belayed and the shrouds, and there, for hours, sat in
silence, enamored, as people say, of the moon. He was often strangely
absent--it may have been from his genius; and, had its sombre grandeur
been then known, this conduct might have been explained; but, at the
time, it threw as it were, around him the sackcloth of penitence.
Sitting amid the shrouds and rattlings, in the tranquillity of the
moonlight, composing melodies scarcely formed in his mind, he seemed
almost an apparition, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the
albatross. He was as a mystery in a winding-sheet crowned with a halo.
"The influence of the incomprehensible phantasma which hovered about
Lord Byron has been more or less felt by all who ever approached him.
That he sometimes descended from the clouds, and was familiar and
earthly, is true; but his dwelling was amid the murk and the mist, and
the home of his spirit in the abyss of the storm and the hiding-places
of guilt. He was at the time of which I am speaking scarcely
two-and-twenty, and could claim no higher praise than having written a
clever satire; and yet it was impossible, even then, to reflect on the
bias of his mind, as it was revealed by the casualties of conversation,
without experiencing a presentiment, that he was destined to execute
extraordinary things. The description he has given of "Manfred" in his
youth, was of himself:--
'My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men,
Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers,
Made me a stranger.'"
All that is very well, but the only astonishing part is Mr. Galt's
astonishment. The incomprehensible phantom of melancholy and caprice
then hanging over Lord Byron, was especially his genius seeking an
outlet; it was the melancholy that lays hold of so many great minds,
because, having a vision of beauty and fame before their eyes, they fear
not attaining to it. That it was which one day led Petrarch, all
tearful, to his consoler John of Florence. If almost all great geniuses,
ere carving out their path, have experienced this fever of the soul,
falling into certain kinds of melancholy, that put on all sorts of
forms,--sometimes noisy, sometimes capricious, sometimes misanthropical,
was there not greater reason for Lord Byron to undergo such a crisis--at
a period when energy of heart and mind was not yet balanced by
confidence in his own genius? For he had not met with a John of
Florence; he had been so much hurt at the cruel reception given to his
first attempts, that it appeared to him he ought to seek another
direction for the employment of his energetic faculties, and turn to
active life, as many of his tastes invited. But his genius, unknown to
the world as to himself, was, however, fermenting within his brain,
feeding on dreams; now pacing a deck, now beneath a starry sky, anon by
moonlight, and causing him to absorb from every thing all homogeneous to
his nature; and thus "Childe Harold" came to light. When Lord Byron took
his pen, the mechanical part of the work alone remained to be done. The
elaboration and meditation of it had taken place almost unknown to
himself, so that his conceptions remained latent, and took their shape
by degrees in his brain, before being fixed in his writings. He penned
"Childe Harold" at Janina and Athens; but it was on the vessel's deck,
in that dreamy attitude just seen by Mr. Galt, that he had moulded the
clay of his first statue, and given it an immortal form. Could he have
done so, if he had always remained in society on deck, laughing, joking,
giving way to all his charming, witty bursts of gayety, as he did while
coasting the shores of Sicily, when, from time to time, his playful
nature enabled him not only to forget the wounds of his heart, and the
disagreeable remembrances left behind, but also to impose silence on the
severe requirements of his genius?
The same causes must have produced the same opinions from the British
ambassador at Constantinople. Without even speaking of the irksomeness
of etiquette, always so distasteful to Lord Byron, that Moore looks upon
it as one of the causes of the apparent sadness remarked by Adair, we
ought to remember that he left Constantinople on board the same frigate
as the ambassador, making a sea-voyage of four days with him. During
these four days, it is likely that Lord Byron did not deny himself
solitude, and that he also courted the secret influences exercised by
starry nights on the Bosphorus as he had done under similar
circumstances on the AEgean Sea. But he had yet another motive for
sadness during this passage, since he was then about to separate from
his friend and fellow-traveller, Hobhouse, who was obliged to go back to
England. Thus, for the first time, Lord Byron would soon find himself
alone in a foreign land. The effect produced by this situation must have
shown itself in his countenance; for he was experiencing beforehand
quite a new sensation, wherein any satisfaction at perfect independence
and solitude must have been more than counterbalanced in his feeling,
grateful, and in reality most sociable nature, by real grief at such a
separation. And I doubt not that when setting foot on the barren isle of
Chios, with its jutting rocks and tall rugged-looking mountains, just
after having bade Hobhouse adieu, I doubt not that his heart experienced
one of those burning suffocating feelings that belong equally to intense
sorrow and joy. When, then, a few days later, he wrote to his mother for
the evident purpose of calming the uneasiness she must have felt at
knowing him to be alone, and when he mentioned with indifference the
departure of his friend, he was exaggerating, except in what he said of
loving solitude. That he did not even sufficiently express, for he might
have boldly declared that it was positively requisite to him; and,
indeed, his resignation at loss of a friend so thoroughly appreciated is
the best proof we could have of it.
In the workings of Lord Byron's intellect, observation, reflection, and
solitary meditation were brought into play much more than
imagination.[174] Every thing with him took its source from facts; and
the vital flame that circulates in every phase of his writings is the
very essence of this reality, first elaborated in his brain and then
stamped on his verse. As long as this first kind of work of observation
was going on, as long as he was only occupied in imbibing truths of the
visible world that were sure to strike him, and storing them in his
memory, society, and especially intellectual society, suited him. But
when he began to shape his observations into form, by dint of reflection
and meditation, generalizing and making deductions, then constant
society forced upon him fatigued him, and solitude became indispensable.
Now it was more particularly at the period of which we are speaking that
his mind was in the situation described. He had just visited Albania,
whose inhabitants were a violent, turbulent race, animated with a
passionate love of independence, who were ever rising in rebellion
against authority, and whose every sentiment, passion, and principle,
formed a perfect contrast with all existing in his own country. He had
become familiar with their usages, and recognized in them the possession
of virtues which he loved, though mixed up with vices which he abhorred.
He had gone through strange emotions and adventures among them; his life
had often been in danger from the elements, from pirates and brigands;
on the throne sat a prince who united monstrous vices to a few virtues,
who, wearing gentleness on his countenance, was yet so ferocious in
soul, that Byron, despite the favors lavished on himself, felt
constrained to paint the tyrant in his real colors. He found in these
contrasts, in this moral phenomenon, that which made him shudder, and
precisely because it did cause shuddering, the source of soul-stirring,
most original poetry, the type of his Eastern verses--of "Conrad," "The
Giaour," and "Lara"--which, having been admitted into the fertile soil
of his brain, were one day to come forth in all their terrible truth,
though softened down by some of his own personal qualities; and having
gone through, unknown to him, a long process of warm fertilization,
while nursed in _solitary_ reflection. Thus solitude was necessary to
him; and this want, I again repeat, was an intellectual one, and had
nothing to do with melancholy. From Chios Lord Byron went to Athens, a
residence so sad and monotonous at this period, that it was well
calculated to give rather than cure the spleen. But as he had no malady
of this kind, after an excursion into the Morea with Lord Sligo,--a
college friend and companion to whom nothing could be refused,--he
returned to Athens; and here, in order to enjoy his cherished
independence, would not even give himself the distraction of seeing
those lovely young faces he used to admire behind the geraniums at their
windows, and which had charmed him some months before he took up his
abode at the Franciscan convent. There, amid the silence of the
cloister, he could commune freely with his own mind, allow it full
expansion, and revert, at will, from solitary contemplation to the most
varied studies, especially to that he always so much appreciated--the
study of mankind in general.
"Here," he wrote to his mother, "I see and have conversed with French,
Italians, Germans, Danes, Greeks, Turks, Americans, etc.; and, without
losing sight of my own, I can judge of the countries and manners of
others. When I see the superiority of England (which, by-the-by, we are
a great deal mistaken about in many things) I am pleased, and where I
find her inferior, I am at least enlightened. Now, I might have staid,
smoked in your towns, or fogged in your country a century without being
sure of this, and without acquiring any thing more useful or amusing at
home."
And then he adds:--
"I hope, on my return, to lead a quiet, recluse life; but God knows and
does best for us all; at least so they say, and I have nothing to
object, as, on the whole, I have no reason to complain of my lot. I
trust this will find you well, and as happy as one can be; you will, at
least, be pleased to hear I am so."
It was in this admirable frame of mind that he often went from Athens to
Cape Colonna. And amid these ruins, washed by the blue waves of the
AEgean Sea, immortalized by Plato, who here taught his half-Christian
philosophy, Lord Byron took his seat at the celestial banquet spread by
the great master, and entered into full possession of his genius. For,
although he ignored its great power and extent, it is impossible that he
should not have had in hours like these, some vision of the future, some
presentiment of coming glory, which, piercing through the veils that
yet shrouded his genius, gave moments of ineffable delight. When he
bathed in some solitary spot, he tells us in his memoranda that one of
his greatest delights was to sit on a rock overlooking the waves, and to
remain there whole hours lost in admiration of sky and sea, "absorbed,"
says Moore, "in that sort of vague reverie, which, however formless and
indistinct at the moment, settled afterward on his pages into those
clear, bright pictures which will endure forever."
One day, while he was swimming under the rocks of Cape Colonna, a vessel
from the coast of Attica drew near. On board, going from London to