My Recollections of Lord Byron
publisher on a par with himself. Moore marvelled at this; but Moore
forgets that Murray was no ordinary publisher, and that, generous by
nature, he made to Byron on one occasion, in 1815, when the noble poet
was in great difficulties, the handsomest offers. Lord Byron refused
them; but the act was so noble, that its impression was never effaced
from Byron's mind, and modified the nature of their relations.
When he had recovered his fortune, he wrote to Murray from Ravenna:--"I
only know of three men who would have raised a finger on my behalf; and
one of those is yourself. It was in 1815, when I was not even sure of a
five-pound note. I refused your offer, but have preserved the
recollection of it, though you may have lost it."
To calculate the degree of gratitude due to a service rendered, would
have seemed ingratitude in his eyes. He could create beings who were
capable of doling it out in that way, but to apply it to himself was an
impossibility.
His predilection for the inhabitants of Epirus, of Albania, and for the
Suliotes, is known. This predilection originated in the gratitude which
he felt for the care taken of him by two Albanian servants who doted on
him, during an illness which he had at Patras at the time when he
visited that place for the first time. It was also on the Albanian coast
that he was wrecked on one occasion, and where he received that
hospitality which he has immortalized in Don Juan.
Byron's predilection for this people even overcame the effects which
their ingratitude might have produced, for it is matter of history, how
badly the barbarous Suliotes behaved to him at Missolonghi a short time
before his death; they who had been so benefited by his kindness to
them.
The memory of services done to him was not susceptible of change, and
neither time nor distance could in the least affect it. The moment he
had contracted a debt of gratitude, he believed himself obliged to pay
interest upon it all his life, even had he discharged his debt. One
single anecdote will serve to illustrate the truth of these remarks. On
the eve of his last departure from London in 1816, when the cruelty of
his enemies, powerfully seconded by the spite of Lady Byron, had
succeeded in so perverting facts as to give their calumnies the color of
truth, and to throw upon his conduct as a husband so false a light as to
hold him up to universal execration, it required great courage to
venture on his defense. Lady Jersey did it. She--who was then quite the
mistress of fashion by her beauty, her youth, her rank, her fortune,
and her irreproachable conduct--organized a fete in honor of Byron, and
invited all that was most distinguished in London to come and wish Byron
farewell.
Among those who responded to the noble courage of Lady Jersey was one
equally deserving of praise, Miss Mercer, now Lady K----. This conduct
of Miss Mercer was all the more creditable that there had been a
question of her marriage with Lord Byron, and that Miss Milbank had been
preferred to her.
This party gave Byron a great insight into the human heart, and showed
him all its beauty and all its baseness. The reflections which it caused
him to make, and the frank account he gave of it in his memoirs--(the
loss of which can never be too much regretted)--would not have pleased
his survivors. This was unquestionably a powerful reason why the memoirs
were destroyed. But Byron cared not so much for the painful portion of
this recollection, as he loved to remember the noble conduct of these
two ladies.
"How often he spoke to me of Lady Jersey, of her beauty and her
goodness," says Madame G----. "As to Miss M----," he said, "she was a
woman of elevated ideas, who had shown him more friendship than he
deserved."
One of the noblest tributes of gratitude and admiration which can be
rendered to a woman was paid by Lord Byron to Miss Mercer. As he was
embarking at Dover, Byron turned round to Mr. Scroope Davies, who was
with him, and giving him a little parcel which he had forgotten to give
her when in London, he added: "Tell her that had I been fortunate enough
to marry a woman like her, I should not now be obliged to exile myself
from my country."
"If," pursues Arthur Dudley (evidently a name adopted by a very
distinguished woman biographer), "the rare instances of devotion which
he met in life reconciled him to humanity, with what touching glory used
he not to repay it. The last accents of the illustrious fugitive will
not be forgotten, and history will preserve through centuries the name
of her to whom Byron at such a time could send so flattering a message."
But, as if all this were not enough, he actually consecrated in verse, a
short time before his death, the memory of his gratitude to the noble
women who had done so much honor to their sex:--
"I've also seen some female _friends_ ('tis odd,
But true--as, if expedient, I could prove),
That faithful were through thick and thin abroad,
At home, far more than ever yet was Love--
Who did not quit me when Oppression trod
Upon me; whom no scandal could remove;
Who fought, and fight, in absence, too, my battles,
Despite the snake Society's loud rattles."
It was on that occasion that Hobhouse said to Lady Jersey, "Who would
not consent to be attacked in this way, to boast such a defense?" To
which Lady Jersey might have replied, "But who would not be sufficiently
rewarded by such gratitude, preserved in such a heart and immortalized
in such verses?"
IMPULSES OF LORD BYRON.
All those who have studied human nature agree that impulses show the
natural qualities of the soul. "Beware of your first impulses, they are
always true," said a diplomatist, the same who insisted that speech was
given us to conceal our thoughts. If such be the case, Lord Byron's
goodness of heart is palpable, for all who knew him agree in bearing
testimony to the extraordinary goodness of all his impulses. "His
lordship," says Parry, "was keenly sensitive at the recital of any case
of distress, in the first instance; and advantage being taken of this
feeling immediately, he would always relieve it when in his power. If
this passion, however, was allowed to cool, he was no longer to be
excited. This was a fault of Lord Byron's, as he frequently offered,
upon the impulse of a moment, assistance which he would not afterward
give, and therefore occasionally compromise his friends."
To multiply quotations would only be to repeat the same proof. I shall
therefore merely add that it was often the necessity of modifying the
nobility of his first impulses which made him appear inconstant and
changeable.
EFFECTS OF HAPPINESS AND MISFORTUNE UPON BYRON.
"The effect of a great success," writes some one, "is ever bad in bad
natures, but does good only to such as are really good in themselves."
As the rays of the sun soften the honey and harden the mud, so the rays
of happiness soften a good and tender heart, while they harden a base
and egotistical nature. This proof has not been wanting in Byron. His
wonderful successes, which laid at his feet the homage of nations, and
which might easily have made him vain and proud, only rendered him
better, more amiable, and brighter.
"I am happy," said Dallas, on the occasion of the great success which
greeted the publication of the first canto of "Childe Harold," "to think
that his triumph, and the attention which he has attracted, have already
produced upon him the soothing effect I had hoped. He was very lively to
day."
Moore says the same; and Galt is obliged to grant that, as Byron became
the object of public curiosity, his desire to oblige others increased.
After giving a personal proof of Byron's goodness to him, he ends by
saying:--
"His conversation was then so lively, that gayety seemed to have passed
into habit with him." It was also at that time that he wrote in his
memoranda:--"I love Ward, I love A----, I love B----," and then, as if
afraid of those numerous sympathies, he adds: "oh! shall I begin to love
the whole world?" This universal love was only the expression of the
want of his soul which had mollified under the rays of that mild sun
which is called happiness.
EFFECTS OF MISFORTUNE AND INJUSTICE UPON BYRON.
If his natural goodness had so large a field to develop itself in
happiness, it reached a degree of sublimity in misfortune.
That Byron's short life was full of real sorrows, I have shown in
another chapter, when I had to prove their reality against those
imputations of their being imaginary made by some of his biographers. He
required a strength of mind equal to his genius and to his sensibility,
to be able to resist the numerous ills with which he was assailed,
throughout his life:--
"Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?
Have I not suffered things to be forgiven?
Have I not had my brain sear'd, my heart riven,
Hopes sapp'd, name blighted, Life's life lied away?"
Such beautiful lines speak loudly enough of the intensity of his
sufferings. Great as they were, they did not, however, produce in him
any feeling of hatred. To forgive was his only revenge; and not only did
he forgive, but, the paroxysm of passion over, there was only room in
his soul for those nobler feelings of patience, of toleration, of
resignation, and of abnegation, of which no one in London can have
formed a notion. The storms to which his soul was at times a prey only
purified it, and discovered a host of qualities which are kept back
often by the more powerful passions of youth. If he never attained that
calmness of spirit which is the gift of those who can not feel, or
perhaps of the saints, he at any rate, at the age of thirty-two, began
to feel a contempt of all worldly and frivolous matters, and came to the
resolution of forgiving most generously all offenses against him.
Shelley, who went to see him at Ravenna, wrote to his wife "that if he
had mischievous passions he seemed to have subdued them; and that he was
becoming, what he should be,--a _virtuous man_."
Mme. de Bury, in her excellent essay upon Byron, expresses herself thus:
"Had his natural goodness not been great, the events which compelled him
to leave his country, and which followed upon his departure, must have
exercised over his mind the effect of drying it up; and, in lessening
its power, would have forced him to give full vent to his passions."
Instead of producing such a result, they on the contrary purified it,
and developed in him the germs of a host of virtues. I shall not tarry
any longer, however, on this subject, as in another chapter I intend to
consider Byron's kindness of disposition from a far higher point of
view. I shall only add his own words, which prove his goodness of
character. "I can not," said he, "bear malice to any one, nor can I go
to sleep with an ill thought against any body."
ABSENCE OF ALL JEALOUS FEELINGS IN LORD BYRON.
Among the infirmities of human nature, one of the most general, serious,
and incurable, is certainly that of jealousy. Being the essence of a
disordered self-love, it presents several aspects, according to the
different social positions of those whom it afflicts, and the degree of
goodness of the people. It might, in my mind, almost be called the
thermometer of the heart. But of all the jealousies, that which has done
most harm on earth has been the jealousy of artists and of literary men.
This kind of fever has at times risen to a degree inconceivable. It has
raged so high as to call poison to its aid, to invoke the help of
daggers and create assassins.
But even putting aside these excesses, proper to Southern countries, it
is certain that everywhere and at all times jealousy has caused
numberless cases of ingratitude, and has set brothers against brothers,