My Recollections of Lord Byron
certainly a prepossessing person to look on, and a man of talent, and
all that--and--there is his eulogy."
"Southey I have not seen much of. His appearance is epic; and he is the
only existing entire man of letters. His manners are mild, but not those
of a man of the world, and his talents of the first order. His prose is
perfect. Of his poetry there are various opinions: there is, perhaps,
too much of it for the present generation--posterity will probably
select. He has passages equal to any thing. At present he has a party,
but no public--except for his prose writings. The 'Life of Nelson' is
beautiful."
WORDSWORTH.
Underneath some lines of his satire upon Wordsworth, Byron in 1816 wrote
in Switzerland the word "unjust!"
He often praised Wordsworth, even at times when the latter had, for
reasons which I will mention hereafter, lost all claims to Byron's
indulgence. Even in his poem of the "Island," written shortly before his
departure for Greece, where he was to die, Byron found means of
inserting a passage from Wordsworth's poem, which he considered
exquisite.
COLERIDGE.
Among the three Lakers, Coleridge was the one to whom he showed the most
generous feeling. He was poor, and lived by his pen. Lord Byron, putting
this consideration above all others, wished to assist at his readings,
and praised them warmly. Coleridge having asked him on one occasion to
interest himself with the director of Drury-lane Theatre (on the
committee of which Byron then stood) the latter did his best to gratify
the wishes of Coleridge, and wrote him the most flattering letter,
blaming the satire which had been the effect of a youthful ebullition of
feeling:--
"P.S.--You mention my 'satire,' lampoon, or whatever you or others
please to call it. I can only say that it was written when I was very
young and very angry, and has been a thorn in my side ever since; more
particularly as almost all the persons animadverted upon became
subsequently my acquaintances, and some of them my friends, which is
'heaping fire upon an enemy's head,' and forgiving me too readily to
permit me to forgive myself. The part applied to you is pert, and
petulant, and shallow enough; but, although I have long done every thing
in my power to suppress the circulation of the whole thing, I shall
always regret the wantonness or generality of many of its attacks. If
Coleridge writes his promised tragedy, Drury Lane will be set up."
Though harassed with pecuniary difficulties of all kinds, Byron
contrived to help Coleridge, who he had heard was in the greatest
distress.
He wrote to Moore:--"By the way, if poor Coleridge--who is a man of
wonderful talent, and in distress, and about to publish two volumes of
poesy and biography, and who has been worse used by the critics than
ever we were--will you, if he comes out, promise me to review him
favorably in the E.R.? Praise him I think you must; but will you also
praise him well,--of all things the most difficult? It will be the
making of him.
"This must be a secret between you and me, as Jeffrey might not like
such a project: nor, indeed, might he himself like it. But I do think he
only wants a pioneer and a spark or two to explode most gloriously."
He sent Murray a MS. tragedy of Coleridge, begging him to read it and to
publish it:----
"When you have been enabled to form an opinion on Mr. Coleridge's MS.,
you will oblige me by returning it, as, in fact, I have no authority to
let it out of my hands. I think most highly of it, and feel anxious that
you should be the publisher; but if you are not, I do not despair of
finding those who will."
As the reader knows, Byron, while in England, always gave away the
produce of his poems. To Coleridge he destined part of the sum offered
to him by Murray for "Parisina" and the "Siege of Corinth." Some
difficulty, however, having arisen, because Murray refused to pay the
100 guineas to any other than Byron himself, he borrowed it himself to
give it to Coleridge.
At the same time Byron paid so noble a tribute to Coleridge's talent,
and to his poem of "Christabel," by inserting a note on the subject in
his preface to the "Siege of Corinth," that Coleridge's editor took this
note as the epigraph.
"Christabel!--I won't have any one," he said, "sneer at 'Christabel;' it
is a fine wild poem."
In 1816 he wrote from Venice to Moore:--
"I hear that the E.R. has cut up Coleridge's 'Christabel,' and declared
against me for praising it. I praised it, firstly, because I thought
well of it; secondly, because Coleridge was in great distress, and after
doing what little I could for him in essentials, I thought that the
public avowal of my good opinion might help him further, at least with
the booksellers. I am very sorry that J---- has attacked him, because,
poor fellow, it will hurt him in mind and pocket. As for me, he's
welcome--I shall never think less of Jeffrey for any thing he may say
against me or mine in future."
At Genoa he declared, in a memorandum, that Crabbe and Coleridge were
pre-eminent in point of power and talent.
At Pisa he blamed those who refused to see in "Christabel" a work of
rare merit, notwithstanding the knowledge which he had of Coleridge's
ingratitude to him; and refused to believe that W. Scott did not admire
the poem, "for we all owe Coleridge a great deal," said he, "and even
Scott himself."
And Medwin adds: "Lord Byron thinks Coleridge's poem very fine. He
paraphrased and imitated one passage. He considers the idea excellent,
and enters into it."
And speaking of Coleridge's psychological poem, he said: "What perfect
harmony! 'Kubla Khan' delights me."
SHELLEY.
If Shelley did not find a place in the triangle, it is only because he
was not yet known, except by the eccentricities of his conduct as a boy.
But so soon as Byron was able to appreciate his genius, he lavished
praises upon the poet and the man, while he blamed his metaphysics.
In all his letters we find proofs of his affectionate regard for
Shelley; and during his last days in Greece, he said to
Finlay,--"Shelley was really a most extraordinary genius; but those who
know him only from his works, know but half his merits: it was from his
thoughts and his conversation poor Shelley ought to be judged. He was
romance itself in his manners and his style of thinking."
"You were all mistaken," he wrote from Pisa to Murray, "about Shelley,
who was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew."
And when he learned his death, he wrote to Moore:--"There is thus
another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and
ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now,
when he can be no better for it."
Such were Byron's expressions in behalf of poets of whose school he
disapproved, before the calumnies spread about, and the perfidious
provocations of some, joined to the ingratitude and jealousy of others,
obliged him to turn his generosity into bitter retaliation. We will
speak elsewhere of this epoch in their mutual relations, and we hope to
show, if jealousy caused the change, that it sprang from them and not
from him.
To praise was almost a besetting sin in Lord Byron. So amiable a fault
was not only committed in favor of his rivals, but also by way of
encouragement to young authors. What did he not do to promote the
success of M.N. N----, the author of Bertram's dramas, whom Walter Scott
had recommended to him?
After reading a tragedy which a young man had submitted to him, Byron
wrote in his memoranda:----
"This young man has talent; he has, no doubt, stolen his ideas from
another, but I shall not betray him. His critics will be but too prone
to proclaim it. I hate to discourage a beginner."
Indulgent to mediocrity, compassionate with the weakness and defects of
all, incapable of causing the slightest pain to those who were destitute
of talent, even when art required that he should condemn them, his
goodness was such, that he almost felt remorse whenever he had been led
to criticise a work too severely. He deplored his having dealt too
harshly with poor Blackett, as soon as the latter's position became
known to him; and also with Keats, whose talent, though great, was raw
in many respects, and who had become a follower of the Lakist school,
which Byron abhorred.
To praise the humble, however, in order to humble the great, was an
action incompatible with his noble character. Great minds constituted
his great attractions, and on these he bestowed such praise as could not
be deemed too partial or unjust.
Happy in the unqualified praise of Pope, of the classical poets, of the
great German and Italian poets, he sometimes made exceptions, and
Shakspeare was one. This is not to be wondered at. Lord Byron's mind was
as well regulated as it was powerful. His admiration of Pope proves it.
"As to Pope," he writes to Moore from Ravenna, in 1821, "I have always
regarded him as the greatest name in our Poetry. Depend upon it, the
rest are barbarians. He is a Greek temple, with a Gothic cathedral on
one hand, and a Turkish mosque and all sorts of fantastic pagodas and
conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, if
you please; but I prefer the Temple of Theseus, or the Parthenon, to a
mountain of burnt brick-work."[33]
Order and proportion were necessities of his nature, so much so that he
condemned his writings whenever they departed from his ideal of the
beautiful, the essential constituents of which were order and power.
His admiration, therefore, was entirely centred in classical works. But
has not Shakspeare a little disregarded the eternal laws of the
beautiful observed by Homer, Pindar, and a host of other poets, ancient
and modern?
If Byron, then, did not see in Shakspeare all that perfection which an
aesthetical school just sprung from the North attributed to him, was he
to be blamed? Has he, on this account, disregarded the great merits of
that glorious mind? Even had Byron seen in Shakspeare the founder of a
dramatic school, rather than a genius more powerful than orderly, who
acted against his will upon certain principles, and who scrutinized the
human heart to an almost supernatural depth, was he interdicted from
finding fault with that school?
Does Shakspeare so economize both time and mind, as to make the action
of his dramas continuous, without fatiguing the mind or weakening the
dramatic effect? Are not the unities and the proportions disregarded in
his plays? What necessity is there at times to put one piece into
another? Are not his discussions and monologues too long? Does not his
own exuberant genius become a fatigue to himself and to his readers? Are
not, perhaps, his characters too real? and do they not often degenerate,
without motive, from the sublime into the ridiculous? Would Hamlet have
appeared less interesting or less mad had he not spoken indelicate and
cruel words to Ophelia? Would Laertes have seemed less grieved on
hearing of the death of his sister had he not made so unnecessary a play
on the words?
Was not Byron, therefore, right when he said, with Pope, that Shakspeare
was "the worst of models?" And could he possibly be called jealous,
because he added that, "notwithstanding his defects, Shakspeare was
still the most extraordinary of men of genius?"
This opinion of Byron was decidedly serious, though his opinions did not
always partake of that character. His humor was rather French: he liked
to laugh, to joke, to mystify, and astonish people who wished to
understand him. He used, then, to employ a particular measure in his
praise and his condemnation.
"On one occasion at Missolonghi, and shortly before his death," says
Colonel Stanhope, "the drama was mentioned in conversation, and Byron at