My Recollections of Lord Byron
gave his vindication and explanation with as much calm frankness as if
it had concerned another person."
And he declares his astonishment at seeing him submit to the lessons of
morality, and the censures on his opinions and principles which Kennedy,
in his extreme orthodoxy, made him undergo.[110]
I will also add, that Lord Byron was often heard to say that he had been
in a frightful rage with his servants; but, if they were questioned,
_they knew nothing at all about it_. It is known, moreover, that his
toleration and gentleness with them almost exceeded due bounds, and
that, even when he had serious cause for chiding them, his severest
reprimands were conveyed in jests and pleasantries.
Persons who will not change their convictions, go so far as to
say,--"Well, be it so. We admit that he may have been calumniated in his
private life, and that his strange fancy of speaking against himself may
have contributed toward it. But how do you explain the anger expressed
by his pen? Do you forget his misanthropical invectives, his personal
attacks, his 'Avatar,' his epigrams?"
And I answer them:--"Do you forget that there are different kinds of
anger? some that can never be vicious, and others that can never be
virtuous? The anger expressed by his pen--the sole kind that was real
with him--requires to be explained, not excused or forgotten."
"Let us beware," says a great contemporary philosopher, "of him who is
never irritated, and can not understand the existence of a noble
anger."[111]
Be so good as to examine, without preconceived opinions, and without
prejudice, the nature of every kind of anger he displayed; see if any
were personal, egotistical, or whether they did not rather spring from
some noble cause; whether they were not rather the generous explosions
of a soul burning with indignation at evil and injustice, because it
ever held in view the contrast afforded by an ideal of its own that was
only too perfect?
It is impossible, for instance, not to see that his pen was guided by
one of these generous impulses when he spoke of Lord Castlereagh. He
had no personal, malevolent, interested antipathy toward this gay and
fashionable nobleman. His pen was inspired simply by his conscience,
that revolted at sight of the evils which he attributed to Lord
Castlereagh's policy. It was not the colleague, but the minister, that
he wished to stigmatize together with his policy, which appeared to Lord
Byron inhuman, selfish, and unjust. It was this same policy that caused
Pitt to say:--
"If we were just for one hour, we should not live a day." And
again:--"Perish every principle rather than England!"
What other statesman did Lord Byron attack except Castlereagh? But him
he did detest with a noble hatred.
"By what right do you attack Lord C----?" he was asked.
"By the right," he replied, "that every honest man has to denounce the
minister who ruins his country, and treads under foot every sentiment of
equity and humanity."
A few days before setting out on his last journey to Greece, he said to
an English lady passing through Genoa:--
"With regard to Lord Castlereagh personally, whom you hear that I have
attacked, I can only say that a bad minister's memory is as much an
object of investigation as his conduct while alive. He is a matter of
history; and wherever I find a tyrant or a _villain_, I will mark him. I
attacked him no more than I had the right to do, and than was necessary.
"Do not defend me, you will only make yourself enemies--mine are neither
to be diminished nor softened."
When Lord Byron wrote about Lord Castlereagh, imagination beheld in him
the author of all the evils inflicted on Ireland, the man who through a
selfish feeling of nationality, dangerous even to England, had riveted
the chains of all Europe.
"If he spoke and wrote thus of Lord Castlereagh," says Kennedy himself,
"the reason was that he really thought him an enemy to the true
interests of his country; and this sentiment, carried perhaps to excess,
made him consider it just to condemn him to the execration of
humanity."[112]
What I have said with regard to his attacks on Lord Castlereagh, may
equally apply to all the satire hurled against other individuals,
against governments and nations. His benevolence was so great and
universal, that it rendered the idea of the sufferings endured by
humanity quite intolerable to him. His love of justice likewise was so
great, that he became thoroughly indignant at seeing what he worshiped
trampled under foot by individual or national selfishness, while deceit
and injustice were reigning triumphant. Lord Byron conceived a sort of
hatred and dislike for the wicked, and those who voluntarily prevented
the well-being of men. And when thus indignant at some injustice, if he
snatched up a pen, he could not help expressing himself with a certain
kind of violence, in order to chastise, if he could not change, the
guilty men who martyrized Ireland, crushed and degraded Italy, and
condemned England to the hatred of the whole world. The sparkling, witty
strain, mocking at all human things, which had served as a weapon for
his reason while asserting the interests of truth and injustice in
Italy, and protesting against folly and evil, no longer sufficed him
then. He required to brand with fire the limit where folly stops and
crime begins. Thus it was not mocking, joking satire he would inflict on
these great culprits; but burning words to mark the limits where this
should stop, and stigmatize them by condemning moral deformity. This is
what he did, and wished to do, with regard to Castlereagh, and also with
regard to the Austrians in Italy. Shall it be said that his language was
occasionally too violent; that the punishment went beyond the crime?
But, in the first place, condemnation was pronounced in the language of
poetry; and then, does not appreciation of the measure kept depend
solely on the point of view taken by reason and conscience when they sat
in judgment?
Shall it be said that the moral sense of these invectives was not always
brought forward with all the clearness desirable? But let them be
examined attentively, and then the fine sentiments to which they owe
their origin will be understood.
Let us read "Avatar," for instance,--"Avatar," teeming with noble
anger,--and say if any poetry exists emitting flame and light purer, and
more intense in its moral life, more efficacious for keeping within the
boundaries of that humane just policy from which Lord Byron never
swerved.
If, in the war he waged against evil and its perpetrators, he did not
outstep the limits of merited punishment, nevertheless he often did go
beyond the limits of a quality (he possessed not) which is raised to the
rank of a virtue, but which applied, despite conscience, to our personal
interests, is but selfishness and cowardice. And therein was he truly
sublime; for in attacking thus, not only the great men of the day, but
likewise the prejudices, idolatries, and passions belonging to such a
proud nation, he well knew the harm that would result to himself. But
Lord Byron was a real hero. So soon as his conscience spoke, he heard no
other voice, but kept his glance fixed on the light of justice and truth
beaming at the end of his career. Without looking to the right or to the
left, without taking into account the obstacles and dangers which
personal prudence counselled him to avoid, he held on his course;
exposed his noble breast to British vengeance pursuing him across the
Channel and the Alps, and then also to Genevan and Austrian shafts that
flew back again across the Alps and the Channel on the wings of dark,
fierce calumny.
Still I do not pretend to assert that, on some rare occasions, personal
suffering did not give rise to irritation and anger. He belonged to
humanity; and if, despite the harsh trials to which his sensibility was
exposed, he had escaped entirely from nature's laws, he would have been
not only heroic, but superhuman.
It is then very possible that, in the sad days preceding, accompanying,
and following on his separation from Lady Byron, he may have been
irritable. Such a host of evils overwhelmed him at once! He may have
allowed to escape his lips at that time some drops of the ocean of
bitterness with which his soul was overflowing. It is certain also that
when the Edinburgh critics made such cruel havoc with his heart and
mind, the over-excitement caused by this review had likewise for its
source the wounds inflicted on his self-love. Can we be astonished at
it, when we reflect that this senseless, wicked criticism succeeded to,
and contrasted strangely with, the praises awarded by such judges as
Mackenzie and Lord Woodhouse? They both had expressed their admiration
spontaneously, and without knowing the writer: one of them was the
celebrated author of the "Man of Feeling," and the other had brought out
many esteemed works, and was considered to be at the head of Scottish
literature. Besides, these cutting criticisms followed close on the
strong admiration expressed by his friends, by all the society in which
he was then moving, and by a mother who idolized him! These verses,
though not yet the highest expression of his genius, were certainly full
of charming tenderness, grace, and naive sensibility; moreover, they had
been given to the public in such a modest way by a man so young that he
might almost be called a child! If he were not conscious of his great
superiority, of which he must nevertheless have felt some prophetic
presentiment--restrained, doubtless, by modesty and timidity,--he must
at least have been conscious that he had not, in any way, merited the
brutality displayed in attacks which violated all the laws of just and
allowable criticism.
Lord Byron's soul revolted at it, and in his indignation repelling
assault by assault, he overstepped his aim; for he certainly went to
extremes. And yet, in the very paroxysm of such irritation, was a
personal sentiment his first incentive? No! it was a good, generous,
affectionate feeling that actuated him: fear lest his mother should be
grieved at what had occurred.
He had scarcely been told how biting the criticism was, and he had not
read it, when he hastened to write to his friend Beecher:--
"Tell Mrs. Byron not to be out of humor with them, and to prepare her
mind for the greatest hostility on their part. It will do no injury
whatever, and I trust her mind will not be ruffled. They defeat their
object by indiscriminate abuse, and they never praise, except the
partisans of Lord Holland and Co. It is nothing to be abused when
Southey and Moore share the same fate."
In assuming this philosophical calm, which he really did arrive at
later, but which he was very far from possessing at this time,--in
forcing this language on his just resentment to console his mother, when
his whole being was agitated, he certainly made one of those efforts
which betoken a soul as vigorous as it was beautiful. He used his pen as
soon as he had satisfied this first want of his heart; but the
intensity of passion destroyed his equilibrium.
When at Ravenna he wrote:--
"I recollect well the effect that criticism produced on me; it was rage,
and resistance, and redress, but not despondency nor despair. A savage
review is hemlock to a sucking author; the one on me knocked me
down--but I got up again. This criticism was a master-piece of low
jests, a tissue of coarse invectives. It contained many commonplace
expressions, lowlived insults; for instance, that one should be grateful
for what one got; that a gift horse ought not to be looked at in the
mouth, and other stable vocabulary; but that did not frighten me. I
resolved on giving the lie to their predictions, and on showing them,