My Recollections of Lord Byron
Athens, were two celebrated personages--Lady Hester Stanhope and Mr.
Bruce. The first object that greeted their eyes, on nearing Sanium, was
Lord Byron, playing all alone with his favorite element. Some days
after, his friend Lord Sligo wished him to make their acquaintance, and
he saw a great deal of them at Athens. In his memoranda the following
words are applied to them:--"It was the commencement (their meeting at
Cape Colonna) of the most delightful acquaintance I have made in
Greece." And he wished to assure Mr. Bruce, in case these lines should
ever fall under his notice, of the pleasure he experienced in recalling
the time they had passed together at Athens. Now I do not see any
symptom of melancholy in all this, nor in all preceding, and yet Bruce
thought there was. Did he, then, also consider the joy Lord Byron felt
in solitude, and his indifference for the false conventional enthusiasm
his countrymen affected to display at sight of the ruins of Greece, as
so many other tokens of melancholy? In reality Lord Byron was averse to
all kinds of affectation, made no exception in favor of the artistic
pretensions which constitute the hypocrisy of taste, and only gave the
sincere, ardent homage of his soul to those things of antiquity that
recall great names or great actions, and to sublime scenes in nature.
Notwithstanding his fine intelligence, it is not impossible that Mr.
Bruce also may have shared the errors of superficial minds; and it is
likewise possible that Lord Byron may really, during the last period of
his sojourn at Athens, have sometimes been melancholy, for causes of
grief were certainly not wanting. His man of business wished Lord Byron
at this time to sell Newstead, so as to get his affairs into some
definite order. Perhaps it would have been wise, but such a
determination was extremely repugnant to him, for he was very fond of
Newstead, and had even written to his mother, before leaving, that she
might be quite easy on this head, as he would never part with it.
However, his agent, wishing to get him back to England, then affected
negligence, would not write, and made him wait for money. Lord Byron
grew uneasy and alarmed, was out of humor, and often seemed capricious,
because these circumstances obliged him to change his travelling plans,
and finally left him no other alternative but to return to England,
where, as he wrote to a friend, his first interview would be with a
lawyer, the second with a creditor; and then would come discussions with
miners, farmers, stewards and all the disagreeables consequent on a
ruined property and disputed mines.
After having resisted all these fears for some time, he was obliged to
decide on returning. Behold him, then, on the road to England.
At Malta he had attacks of fever to which his state of mind was
certainly not wholly foreign. "We have seen," says Moore, "from the
letters written by him on his passage homeward (on board the 'Volage'
frigate) how far from cheerful or happy was the state of mind in which
he returned. In truth, even for a disposition of the most sanguine cast,
there was quite enough in the discomfort that now awaited him in England
to sadden its hopes and check its buoyancy."
And yet in these letters, melancholy at bottom, which he addressed to
his mother and friends during this tiresome voyage of more than six
weeks, we still perceive, overriding all, his kind, sensitive, playful
nature. He told them that if one can not be happy, one must at least try
to be a little gay; that if England had ceased to smile on him, there
were other skies more serene; that he was coming back shaken by fever
morally and physically, but with a firm, intrepid spirit. And, in short,
pleasantry never failed him.
Always admirable toward his mother, he spoke of his apathy, but
re-assured her directly, adding:--
"Dear mother" (he wrote to her on the 'Volage' frigate), "within that
apathy I certainly do not comprise yourself, as I will prove by every
means in my power.
"P.S.--You will consider Newstead as your house, not mine, and me only
as a visitor."[175]
He had hardly arrived in London when Mr. Dallas hastened to greet him,
and instead of finding him changed, thought he was in excellent health,
with a countenance that betrayed neither melancholy nor any trace of
discontent at his return. The truth is, that those sorrows which did not
reach his heart were never very deep with Lord Byron. But already a most
formidable tempest was gathering on the horizon of his fate, for it was
one that would cruelly wound his heart. Perhaps it was some vague,
inexplicable presentiment of what was threatening him that saddened his
return to his native country. The storm burst as soon as he set foot in
London; for he was summoned in haste to Newstead, his mother's life
being declared in danger. He set out instantaneously, but on arriving
found only a corpse! This spectacle was still before his eyes; he had
hardly quitted the chamber of death, where, in the obscurity of night
and alone, believing himself free from all observation, he had given way
in silence and darkness to the real sentiments of his heart, weeping
bitterly the loss of a mother who had idolized him, when in rapid
succession news arrived of the deaths of his dearest friends. Matthews,
his mind's idol, had just been drowned in the river Cam, at Cambridge;
Wingfield, one of his heart-idols, was dying of fever at Coimbra; his
dear Eddlestone was in the last stage of consumption; and, finally, he
learned the death of another loved, mysterious being. Six deaths within
a few short weeks!
"If to be able," says Moore, "to depict powerfully the painful emotions
it is necessary first to have experienced them, or, in other words, if,
for the poet to be great the man must suffer, Lord Byron, it must be
owned, paid early this dear price of mastery."
This was certainly a most painful crisis in his existence. What he felt
then can not be called melancholy; it was truly _desolation, agony of
heart_. Seeing himself alone in his venerable but gloomy abode, beside
the dead body of his mother, solitude was for the first time intolerable
to him, and, despite his strength of mind, he experienced moments of
weakness. In his agony he wrote a letter to his friend Scroope Davies
that is truly painful to read, so much does it bear the impress of
intense suffering.
"Some curse hangs over me and mine," says he. "My mother lies a corpse
in this house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I
say, or think, or do?
"My dear Davies, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me; I want a
friend. Come to me, Scroope, I am almost desolate, left almost alone in
the world. I must enjoy the survivors while I can. Write or come, but
come if you can, or one or both."
Hardly had he allowed himself this heartrending expression of grief,
most touching for those who knew his repugnance to showing any
sensibility of heart, when a new calamity overtook him. His dear friend,
Wingfield, died at Coimbra at the age of twenty-one. Thoughts of death
even took possession of Lord Byron's soul, influencing and directing all
his actions. Neither self-love, nor the hope of great success with
"Childe Harold," which had been announced to him as he passed through
London, any longer could charm; tears dimmed the lustre of fame; he
could only occupy himself with the fate of the surviving, and resolved
on making his will in case of his own death. We find him then at this
time solely engaged in making out this new deed. He destroyed the old
will, rendered useless by the death of his mother, and took care to
forget no one in the new one; all his servants were mentioned with
admirable solicitude; and, in short, his last testament fully displayed
the beautiful, generous soul that had dictated it.
Some weeks after, he wrote to Dallas:--
"At three-and-twenty I am left alone, and what more can we be at
seventy? It is true that I am young to begin again, but with whom can I
retrace the laughing part of life?"
"Indeed," writes he at the same time to Hodgson, "the blows followed
each other so rapidly, that I am yet stupid from the shock; and though I
do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at times, yet I can hardly
persuade myself that I am awake did not every morning convince me
mournfully to the contrary.
"Davies has been here; his gayety (death can not mar it) has done me
service; but, after all, ours was a hollow laughter! You will write to
me? I am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before."
His moral sufferings had never been so great; and what he said and
experienced under these circumstances, amply prove that solitude was
good for him, when not unhappy. "I can do nothing," writes he to Dallas,
"and my days pass, except for a few bodily exercises, in uniform
indolence and idle insipidity."
The task of publishing "Childe Harold" was left to Dallas, and the
certainty of its success found him pretty nearly indifferent. When his
heart was in pain, Lord Byron's self-love always lay dormant. But
destiny was still far from granting him any respite. Eddlestone, that
dear friend, on whose true affection he most relied, as well as another
beloved one, whose name ever remained locked within his breast, both
died about this time; so that, as he says in his preface, during the
short space of two months, he lost six persons most dear. In announcing
this new misfortune to Dallas, he expresses himself in the following
words:--
"I have almost forgot the taste of grief; _and supped full of horrors_,
till I have become callous; nor have I a tear left for an event which,
five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems to
me as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of
age. My friends fall round me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before
I am withered.
"Other men can always take refuge in their families; I have no resource
but my own reflections, and they present no prospect here or hereafter,
except the selfish satisfaction of surviving my betters. I am, indeed,
very wretched, and you will excuse my saying so, as you know I am not
apt to cant of sensibility."
But if tears no longer flowed from his eyes, they did from his pen; for
it was then he wrote his elegies to "Thyrza," whose pathetic sublimity
is so well characterized by Moore; and that he added those melancholy
stanzas in "Childe Harold" on the death of friends, which we find at the
end of the second canto.
"Indeed," he wrote again to Hodgson, "I am growing nervous, ridiculously
nervous, I can neither read, write, nor amuse myself, or any one else.
My days are listless, and my nights restless. I have very seldom any
society, and when I have, I run out of it. At this present writing,
there are in the next room three ladies, and I have stolen away to
write this grumbling letter. I don't know that I sha'n't end with
insanity, for I find a want of method in arranging my thoughts that
perplexes me strangely; but this looks more like silliness than madness,
as Scroope Davies would facetiously remark in his consoling manner. I
must try the hartshorn of your company; and a session of Parliament
would suit me well, any thing to cure me of conjugating the accursed
verb _ennuyer_."
Distractions did come to him, but of a kind to make him conjugate verbs
equally disagreeable; for they came caused by grief and irritation. In
an infamous, ignoble publication, called "The Scourge," an anonymous
author, probably making himself the organ of those who wished to avenge
Lord Byron's satires, attacked his birth, and the reputation of his
mother, who, despite her faults, was a very respectable, excellent
woman.
"During the first winters after Lord Byron had returned to England,"