My Recollections of Lord Byron
'Anti-Byron'--coming out, to prove that I have formed a conspiracy to
overthrow by rhyme all religion and government, and have already made
great progress! It is not very scurrilous, but serious and ethereal. I
never felt myself important till I saw and heard of my being such a
little Voltaire as to induce such a production."
He therefore laughed at these accusations as too absurd. As for
skepticism, he did not defend himself from a touch of it; for not only
did he feel that the suspicious stanza could partly justify the belief,
but also because there did exist in him a kind of religious skepticism
which proceeded far more from meditation and observation than from a
passion for it. Such a skepticism is in truth a sigh for conviction. A
painful vision which appears to most reflective minds in a more or less
indistinct and vague manner, but which appeared more forcibly to him,
inasmuch as it sought to be expressed in words.
"He," says Montaigne, "who analyzes all the circumstances which have
brought about matters, and all the consequences which have been derived
from them, debars himself from having any choice, and remains
skeptical."
This skepticism of Lord Byron, however, did not overstep the boundaries
of permissible doubt, as prescribed by an intelligence desirous of
improvement. This privilege he exercised; and one might say that he
remained, as it were, suspended between heaven and earth, ever looking
up toward heaven, from whence he felt that light must come in the
end,--a light ever on the increase, which would daily steady him in the
great principles which form the fundamental basis of truth,--one God the
creator, the real immortality of our soul, our liberty and our
responsibility before God.
Tired, however, of ever being the butt of the invectives of his enemies,
and of the clergy, whom he had roughly handled in his writings, Lord
Byron preferred remaining silent; and until his arrival in Switzerland
he ceased making any allusions in his writings to any philosophical
doubts which he may have entertained. The heroes which he selected for
his Oriental poems were, moreover, too passionate to allow the
mysterious voices from heaven to silence the cries from their heart.
These celestial warnings, however, Byron never ceased to hear, although
absorbed himself by various passions of a different kind; he was at that
time almost surrounded by an idolizing public, and rocked in the cradle
of success and popularity. This is but too visible whenever he ceases to
talk the language of his heroes, and expresses merely his own ideas and
his own personal feelings. It was at this time that he wrote those
delicious "Hebrew Melodies," in which a belief in spirituality and
immortality is everywhere manifest, and in which is to be found the
moral indication, if not the metaphysical proof, of the working of his
mind in a religious point of view, as he matured in years. Two of these
Melodies especially, the third and the fifteenth, contain so positive a
profession of faith in the spiritualist doctrines, and carry with them
the mark of so elevated a Christian sentiment, that I can not forbear
quoting them _in extenso_.
IF THAT HIGH WORLD.
I.
If that high world, which lies beyond
Our own, surviving Love endears;
If there the cherish'd heart be fond,
The eye the same, except in tears--
How welcome those untrodden spheres!
How sweet this very hour to die!
To soar from earth and find all fears
Lost in thy light--Eternity!
II.
It must be so: 'tis not for self
That we so tremble on the brink;
And striving to o'erleap the gulf,
Yet cling to Being's severing link.
Oh! in that future let us think
To hold each heart the heart that shares;
With them the immortal waters drink,
And soul in soul grow deathless theirs!
* * * * *
WHEN COLDNESS WRAPS THIS SUFFERING CLAY.
I.
When coldness wraps this suffering clay,
Ah! whither strays the immortal mind?
It can not die, it can not stay,
But leaves its darken'd dust behind.
Then, unembodied, doth it trace
By steps each planet's heavenly way?
Or fill at once the realms of space,
A thing of eyes, that all survey?
II.
Eternal, boundless, undecay'd,
A thought unseen, but seeing all,
All, all in earth or skies display'd,
Shall it survey, shall it recall:
Each fainter trace that memory holds
So darkly of departed years,
In one broad glance the soul beholds,
And all, that was, at once appears
III.
Before Creation peopled earth,
Its eyes shall roll through chaos back;
And where the furthest heaven had birth,
The spirit trace its rising track.
And where the future mars or makes,
Its glance dilate o'er all to be,
While sun is quench'd or system breaks,
Fix'd in his own eternity.
IV.
Above our Love, Hope, Hate, or Fear,
It lives all passionless and pure:
An age shall fleet like earthly year;
Its years as moments shall endure.
Away, away, without a wing,
O'er all, through all, its thought shall fly,
A nameless and eternal thing,
Forgetting what it was to die.
There is no passage in Plato, or in St. Augustin, or in Pascal, which
can equal the sublimity of these stanzas.
It was in this painful state of mind that he spent the unfortunate year
of his marriage. Having separated from his wife, he came to Geneva.
Here, at the same hotel--Hotel de Secheron--Shelley had also arrived,
who some years previously had offered Byron a copy of his poem entitled
"Queen Mab." Here they became acquainted. Although only twenty-three
years of age, Shelley had already experienced much sorrow during his
short existence. Born of rich and aristocratic parents, and who
professed very religious and Tory principles, Shelley had been sent to
Eton at thirteen. His character was most peculiar. He had none of the
tastes of the young, could not stand scholastic discipline, despised
every rule and regulation, and spent his time in writing novels. He
published two when fifteen years old only, which appeared to be far
above what could be expected from a boy of his age, but which deserved
censure from their immoral tone. Owing to the nature of his mind, and
especially at a time when reading has much influence, Shelley had
conceived a great taste for the books which were disapproved of at
college. Consequently the doctrines of the materialist school, which
were the most in fashion then both in France and in England, so poisoned
his mind as to cause him to become an atheist, and to argue as such
against several theologians. He even published a pamphlet, so
exaggerated in tone that he entitled it, "On the Necessity of Atheism."
To crown this folly, Shelley sent round to all the bishops a copy of
this work, and signed it with his own name.
Brought before the authorities to answer the charge of this audacious
act, he persisted in his doctrines, and was actually preparing an answer
to the judges in the same sense, when he was expelled from the
university.
For people who know England a little, it is easy to conceive what an
impression such conduct must have produced on the part of the eldest son
of a family like his, of Tory principles, belonging to the aristocracy,
intimate with the prince regent, and stanch, orthodox and severe in
their religious tenets. Expelled from college, he was likewise sent away
from home; and when his indignant father consented to see him again,
Shelley was treated with such coldness that he was enraged at being
received as a stranger in the bosom of a family of which he was the
eldest son. This was not all: even the young lady for whom Shelley had
already conceived an affection, deemed it right to cast him off.
Overwhelmed by all these but too well merited misfortunes, he took
refuge in an inn, where he tried to poison himself.
As he was struggling between life and death, a young girl of fifteen,
Miss Westbrook, took care of him. Believing himself to be past recovery,
and having no other means of rewarding her attention except by marrying
her, he did so, in the hope that after his death his family would
provide for her. But it is not always so easy to die, and he did not
die. His health, however, was completely broken, and all that remained
to him besides was an ill-assorted marriage. After the Gretna Green
ceremony, Shelley went to reside in Edinburgh. His marriage so
exasperated his father, that from that time he ceased to have any
intercourse with him.
From Scotland Shelley went to Ireland, which was then in a very
disturbed state. His metaphysics led him to conceive the most dangerous
social theories. Conquered by a very real love of humanity, which he
hoped to serve by the realization of his chimerical views, he even
believed it to be his duty to make proselytes. While recommending the
observance of peace, and of a spirit of moderation on the one hand, he,
on the other, published pamphlets and spoke at meetings with a degree of
talent which earned for him a certain amount of reputation, if not of
fame. Then he was seized with a violent admiration for the English
school called "Lockists," and devoted himself to poetry by way of giving
a literary expression to his metaphysical reveries, and to his social
theories. Thus he wrote "Queen Mab," a poem full of talent and
imagination, but which is only the frame which encircles his most
deplorable fancies. He sent a copy of it to all the noted literary men
of England, and among them to Lord Byron, whose star had risen since the
publication of "Childe Harold." Lord Byron declared, as may be seen in a
note to the "Due Foscari," that the metaphysical portion of the poem was
quite in opposition with his own opinions; but, with his usual
impartiality and justice, he admired the poetry which is noticeable in
this work, agreeing in this "with all those who are not blinded by
bigotry and baseness of mind."
Shelley's marriage, contracted as it was under such strange auspices,
was, of course, very unfortunate. By his acquaintance with Godwin, one
of the greatest literary characters of his day, Shelley came to know
Mary, his daughter, by his marriage with the celebrated Mrs.
Woolstonecraft. Each fell in love with the other, but Shelley was not
yet free to marry Miss Godwin. He separated from the wife he had chosen
only from grateful motives, although he had two children by her, and he
left England for the first time, where he had become the object of
persecutions of all kinds, and of a hatred which at a later period
culminated in taking away his right to the guardianship of his children.
Such was his position when Lord Byron arrived in Switzerland, and
alighted at the Hotel Secheron. To make acquaintance, therefore, with
the author of "Queen Mab," and with the daughter of Godwin, for whom he
entertained great regard, was a natural consequence on the part of the
author of "Childe Harold."
Notwithstanding their difference of character, their diversity of taste,
and their different habits, owing to the very opposite mode of living
which they had followed, the two poets felt drawn to one another by that
irresistible sympathy which springs up in the souls of two persecuted
beings, however just that persecution may have been, as regards Shelley,
but which was wholly unjust as regards Byron. Here we must allow Moore
to speak:--
"The conversation of Shelley, from the extent of his poetic reading, and
the strange, mystic speculations into which his systems of philosophy
led him, was of a nature strongly to interest the attention of Lord
Byron, and to turn him away from worldly associations and topics into
more abstract and untrodden ways of thought. As far as contrast indeed