My Recollections of Lord Byron
the least hesitation, they deny with anger the value of their
adversary's arguments, and betray, in their way of getting over
difficulties, a humor which injures the effects of their reasoning, and
of the proofs they make use of to help their arguments." After reading
several of these books, he must have found, as did the great Pitt, "that
such readings provoke many more doubts than they dispel;" and, in fact,
they rather disquieted and shook, than strengthened his faith. At the
same time, he was alive to another striking contradiction. He noticed
that the men who taught the doctrines, too often forgot to make these
and their practice agree; and in losing his respect for his masters, he
still further doubted the sincerity of their teaching. Thus, while
remaining religiously inclined, he must have felt his faith becoming
more and more shaken, and in the memorandum of his early days, after
enumerating the books treating upon religious subjects which he had
read, he says: "All very tedious. I hate books treating of religious
subjects; although I adore and love God, freed from all absurd and
blasphemous notions."
In this state of mind, of which one especially finds a proof in his
earlier poems, the philosophy of Locke, which is that professed at
Cambridge, and which he had already skimmed, as it were, together with
other philosophical systems, became his study. It only added an enormous
weight in the way of contradictions to the already heavy weight of
doubt.
Could it be otherwise? Does not Locke teach that all ideas being the
creation of the senses, the notion of God, unless aided by tradition,
has no other basis but our senses and the sight of the external world?
If this be not the doctrine professed by Locke, it is the reading which
a logical mind may give to it.
He believes in God; yet the notion of God, as it appears from his
philosophical teaching, is not that which is taught by Christian
doctrine. According to him, God is not even proclaimed to be the Creator
of the Universe. But even were He proclaimed such, what would be the
result of this philosophical condescension, unless it be that God is
distinct from the world? Would God possess then all those attributes
which reason, independently of all philosophy, points to in the
Divinity? Would power, goodness, infinite perfection be God's? Certainly
not: as we are unable to know Him except through a world of
imperfections, where good and evil, order and confusion, are mixed
together, and not by the conception of the infinite, which alone can
give us a true and perfect idea of God, it follows that God would be
much superior to the world, but would not be absolute perfection.
After this depreciation of the Omnipotent, what says this philosophy of
our soul? It does away altogether with one of the essential proofs of
its spiritual nature, and thereby compromises the soul itself, declaring
as it does, that "it is not unlikely that matter is capable of thought."
But then of what necessity would the soul be, if the body can think? How
hope for immortality, if that which thinks is subject to dissolution and
to death?
As for our liberty, it would be annihilated as a consequence of such
doctrines; for it is not supposed to derive its essence from the
interior activity of the soul, but would seem to be limited to our power
of moving. Yet we are hourly experiencing what our weakness is in
comparison with the power of the laws of nature, which rule us in every
sense and way. In making, therefore, all things derivable from
sensations, Locke fell from one error into another, and nearly arrived
at that point when duty and all principles of justice and morality might
be altogether denied. Being himself, however, both good, honest,
liberal, and Christian-minded, he could only save himself from the
social wreck to which he exposed others, by stopping on the brink of the
abyss which he had himself created, and by becoming in practice
inconsistent with his speculative notions. His successors, such as
Condillac and Cabanis, fell by following his system and by carrying it
too far.
A doctrine which denies the right of discovering, or of explaining the
religious truths which are the grounds of all moral teaching, and which
allows tradition the privilege only of bestowing faith; a system of
metaphysics, which can not avoid the dangers in which morality must
perish, owing to its contradictions and its inconsistencies, must be
perilous for all but those happily constituted minds for whom simple
faith and submission are a part of their essence, who believe on hearsay
and seek not to understand, but merely glance at the surface of the
difficult and venturesome questions which are discussed before them,
either because they feel their weakness, or because the light of
revelation shines upon them so strongly as to make that of reason pale.
For more logical minds, however, for such who are inquisitive, whose
reason is both anxious and exacting, who want to understand before they
believe, for whom the ties which linked them to tradition have been
loosened, owing to their having reflected on a number of contradictions
(the least of which, in the case of Lord Byron, was decidedly not that
of seeing such a philosophy professed and adopted in a clerical
university); for minds like these such doctrines must necessarily lead
to atheism. Though Lord Byron's mind was one of these, he escaped the
fearful results by a still greater effort of his reason, which made him
reject the precepts of the sensualists, and comprehend their
inconsistencies.
His protest against the doctrines of the sensualists is entered in his
memorandum, where, after naming all the authors of the philosophical
systems which he had read, and, coming to the head of that school, he
exclaims from the bottom of his heart:
"Hobbes! I detest him!"
And notwithstanding the respect with which the good and great Locke must
individually have inspired him, he evidently must have repudiated his
precepts, inasmuch as they were not strong enough to uproot from his
mind the religious truths which reason proclaims, nor prevent either his
coming out of his philosophical struggle a firm believer in all the
dogmas which are imperiously upheld to the human reason, or his
proclaiming his belief in one God and Creator, in our free will, and in
the immortality of the soul.
This glorious and noble victory of his mind and true religious
tendencies at that time, is evinced in his "Prayer to Nature," written
when he had not yet reached his eighteenth year. In this beautiful
prayer, which his so-called orthodox friends succeeded in having cut out
of the volume containing his earliest poems, we find both great power of
contemplation and humility and confidence in prayer--a soul too near the
Creator to doubt of His Omnipotence, but also too far from Him for his
faith and confidence in the divine mercy not to be mixed up with a
little fear; in fact, all the essential elements of a noble prayer which
is not orthodox. Though written on the threshold of life, he might, with
few modifications, have signed it on the eve of his death; when, still
young, fate had spared him nothing, from the sweetest to the bitterest
feelings, from every deserved pleasure to every undeserved pain.
THE PRAYER OF NATURE.
Father of Light! great God of Heaven!
Hear'st thou the accents of despair?
Can guilt like man's be e'er forgiven?
Can vice atone for crimes by prayer?
Father of Light, on thee I call!
Thou seest my soul is dark within;
Thou who canst mark the sparrow's fall,
Avert from me the death of sin.
No shrine I seek, to sects unknown;
Oh, point to me the path of truth!
Thy dread omnipotence I own;
Spare, yet amend, the faults of youth.
Let bigots rear a gloomy fane,
Let superstition hail the pile,
Let priests, to spread their sable reign,
With tales of mystic rites beguile.
Shall man confine his Maker's sway
To Gothic domes of mouldering stone?
Thy temple is the face of day;
Earth, ocean, heaven, thy boundless throne.
Shall man condemn his race to hell,
Unless they bend in pompous form?
Tell us that all, for one who fell,
Must perish in the mingling storm?
Shall each pretend to reach the skies,
Yet doom his brother to expire,
Whose soul a different hope supplies,
Or doctrines less severe inspire?
Shall these, by creeds they can't expound,
Prepare a fancied bliss or woe?
Shall reptiles, grovelling on the ground,
Their great Creator's purpose know?
Shall those who live for self alone,
Whose years float on in daily crime--
Shall they by faith for guilt atone,
And live beyond the bounds of Time?
Father! no prophet's laws I seek,--
_Thy_ laws in Nature's works appear;--
I own myself corrupt and weak,
Yet will I pray, for thou wilt hear!
Thou, who canst guide the wandering star
Through trackless realms of aether's space;
Who calm'st the elemental war,
Whose hand from pole to pole I trace:
Thou, who in wisdom placed me here,
Who, when thou wilt, canst take me hence,
Ah! while I tread this earthly sphere,
Extend to me thy wide defence.
To Thee, my God, to thee I call!
Whatever weal or woe betide,
By thy command I rise or fall,
In thy protection I confide.
If, when this dust to dust's restored,
My soul shall float on airy wing,
How shall thy glorious name adored
Inspire her feeble voice to sing!
But, if this fleeting spirit share
With clay the grave's eternal bed,
While life yet throbs I raise my prayer,
Though doom'd no more to quit the dead.
To Thee I breathe my humble strain,
Grateful for all thy mercies past,
And hope, my God, to thee again
This erring life may fly at last.
_December 29, 1806._ [First published, 1830.]
As much may be said of another poem which he likewise wrote in his
youth; when, very dangerously ill, and believing his last end to be
near, he turned all his thoughts to the other world, and conceived the
touching poem which ended in the lines:--
"Forget this world, my restless sprite;
Turn, turn thy thoughts to Heaven;
There must thou soon direct thy flight
If errors are forgiven."
But if Lord Byron did not adopt Locke's philosophy he at least paid the
greatest tribute of regard to his goodness by following ever more
closely his best precept, which is to the effect that to love truth for
the sake of truth is an essential part of human perfection in this
world, and the fertile soil on which is sown the seed of every virtue.
While his mind thus wavered between a thousand contradictory opinions,
and, finding part of the truth only in every philosophical system which
he examined, but not the whole truth--which was what his soul thirsted
for; calling himself at times skeptic, because he hesitated in adhering
to one school, in consequence of the numerous errors and inconsistencies
common to all (the great school which has, to the honor of France,
harmonized them all, was not yet open); but not losing sight of the
great eternal truths of which he felt inwardly the proofs, he made the
acquaintance of a young man who had just completed his university
education with great success. This young man, who exercised a great
influence over all his fellow-students, owing to his superior intellect,
influenced Byron in a similar manner. Bold, logical, inflexible, he was
not swayed by the dangers which the sensualistic teaching presented to
all logical minds; dangers which had frightened the chief of that school
himself, and who, in wishing to oppose them, had not been able to do so
except by contradictions. This young man, by a noble inconsistency, drew