Beacon Lights of History, Volume 13: Great Writers

Thus far Byron was comparatively unknown. Not yet was he even a favorite in society, beautiful and brilliant as he was; for he had few friends, not much money, and many enemies, whom he made by his scorn and defiance,–a born aristocrat, without having penetrated those exclusive circles to which his birth entitled him. He was always quarrelling with his mother, and was treated with indifference by his guardian. He was shunned by those who adhered to the conventionalities of life, and was pursued by bailiffs and creditors,–since his ancestral estates, small for his rank, were encumbered and mortgaged, and Newstead Abbey itself was in a state of dilapidation.

Within a year from leaving Cambridge, in 1807, Byron published a volume of his juvenile poems; and although they were remarkable for a young man of twenty, they were not of sufficient merit to attract the attention of the public. At this time he was abstemious in eating, wishing to reduce a tendency to corpulence. He could practise self-denial if it were to make his person attractive, especially to ladies. Nor was he idle. His reading, if desultory, was vast; and from the list of books which his biographer has noted it would seem that Macaulay never read more than Byron in a given time,–all the noted historians of England, Germany, Rome, and Greece, with innumerable biographies, miscellanies, and even divinity, the raw material which he afterwards worked into his poems. How he found time to devour so many solid books is to me a mystery. These were not merely European works, but Asiatic also. He was not a critical scholar, but he certainly had a passing familiarity with almost everything in literature worth knowing, which he subsequently utilized, as seen in his "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." A college reputation was nothing to him, any more than it was to Swift, Goldsmith, Churchill, Gibbon, and many other famous men of letters, who left on record their dislike of the English system of education. Among these were even such men as Addison, Cowper, Milton, and Dryden, who were scholars, but who alike felt that college honors and native genius did not go hand in hand,–which might almost be regarded as the rule, but for a few remarkable exceptions, like Sir Robert Peel and Gladstone. And yet it would be unwise to decry college honors, since not one in a hundred of those who obtain them by their industry, aptness, and force of will can lay claim to what is called genius,–the rarest of all gifts. Moreover, how impossible it is for college professors to detect in students, with whom they are imperfectly acquainted, extraordinary faculties, more especially if the young men are apparently idle and negligent, and contemptuous of the college curriculum.

It was a bitter pill for Lord Byron when his juvenile poems, called "Hours of Idleness," were so severely attacked by the Edinburgh Review. They might have escaped the searching eyes of the critics had the author not been a lord. At that time the great Reviews had just been started; and it was the especial object of the Edinburgh Review to handle authors roughly,–to condemn and not to praise. Criticism was not then a science, as it became fifty years later, in the hands of Sainte-Beuve, who endeavored to review every production fairly and justly. There was nothing like justice entering into the head of Jeffrey or Sydney Smith or Brougham, or later on of Macaulay, whose articles were often written for political party effect. Critics, from the time of Swift down to the middle of the century, aimed to demolish enemies, and to make party capital; hence, as a general thing, their articles were not criticisms at all, but attacks. And as even an Achilles was vulnerable in his heel, so most intellectual giants have some weak point for the shafts of malice to penetrate. Yet it is the weaknesses of great men that people like to quote.

If Byron was humiliated, enraged, and embittered by the severity of the Edinburgh Review, he was not crushed. He rallied, collected his unsuspected strength, and shattered his opponents by one of the wittiest, most brilliant, and most unscrupulous satires in our literature, which he called "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." At the height of his fame he regretted and suppressed this youthful production of malice and bitterness. Yet it was the beginning of his great career, both as to a consciousness of his own powers and in attracting the public attention. It was doubtless unwise, since he attacked many who were afterwards his friends, and since he sowed the seeds of hatred among those who might otherwise have been his admirers or apologists. He had to learn the truth that "with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again." The creators of public opinion in reference to Byron have not been women of fashion, or men of the world, but literary lions themselves,–like Thackeray, who detested him, and the whole school of pharisaic ecclesiastical dignitaries, who abhorred in him sentiments which they condoned in Fielding, in Burns, in Rousseau, and in Voltaire.

Before his bitter satire was published, however, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords, not knowing any peer sufficiently to be introduced by him. His guardian, Lord Carlisle, treated him very shabbily, refusing to furnish to the Lord Chancellor some important information, of a technical kind, which refusal delayed the ceremony for several weeks, until the necessary papers could be procured from Cornwall relating to the marriage of one of his ancestors. Unfriended and alone, Byron sat on the scarlet benches of the House of Lords until he was formally admitted as a peer. But when the Lord Chancellor left the woolsack to congratulate him, and with a smiling face extended his hand, the embittered young peer bowed coldly and stiffly, and simply held out two or three of his fingers,–an act of impudence for which there was no excuse.

It is difficult to understand why Lord Byron should have had so few friends or even acquaintances at that time among people of his rank. At twenty-one, he was a lonely and solitary man, mortified by the attack of the Edinburgh Review, exasperated by injustice, morose even to misanthropy, and decidedly sceptical in his religious opinions. Newstead Abbey was a burden to him, since he could not keep it up. He owed £10,000. He had no domestic ties, except to a mother with whom he could not live. His poetry had not brought him fame, for which of all things he most ardently thirsted. His love affairs were unfortunate, and tinged his soul with sadness and melancholy. Nor had fashion as yet marked him for her own. He craved excitement, and society to him was dull and conventional.

It is not surprising that under these circumstances Byron made up his mind to travel: he did not much care whither, provided he had new experiences. "The grand tour" which educated young men of leisure and fortune took in that day had no charm for him, since he wished to avoid rather than to seek society in those cities which the English frequented. He did not care to see the literary lions of France or Germany or Italy, for though a nobleman, he was too young and unimportant to be much noticed, and he was too shy and too proud to make advances which might be rebuffed, wounding his amour propre.

He set out on his pilgrimage the latter part of June, 1809, in a ship bound for Lisbon, with a small suite of servants. Going to a land where Nature was most enchanting, he was sufficiently enthusiastic over the hills and vales and villages of Portugal. As for comfort, he expected little, and found less; but to this he was indifferent so long as he could swim in the Tagus, and ride on a mule, and procure eggs and wine. He was delighted with Cadiz, to him a Cythera, with its beautiful but uneducated women, where the wives of peasants were on a par with the wives of dukes in cultivation, and where the minds of both had but one idea,–that of intrigue. He hastily travelled through Spain on horseback, in August, reaching Gibraltar, from which he embarked for Malta and the East.

It was Greece and Turkey that Byron most wished to see and know; and, favored by introductions, he was cordially received by governors and pashas. At Athens, and other classical spots, he lingered enchanted, yet suppressing his enthusiasm in the contempt he had for the affected raptures of ordinary travellers. It was not the country alone, with its classical associations, which interested him, but also its maidens, with their dark hair and eyes, whom he idealized almost into goddesses. Everything he saw was picturesque, unique, and fascinating. The days and weeks flew rapidly away in dreamy enchantment.

After nearly three months at Athens, Byron embarked for Smyrna, and explored the ruins of the old Ionian cities, thence proceeding to Constantinople, with a view of visiting Persia and the farther East. In a letter to Mr. Henry Drury, he says:–

"I have left my home, and seen part of Africa and Asia, and a tolerable portion of Europe. I have been with generals and admirals, princes and pashas, governors and ungovernables. Albania, indeed, I have seen more than any Englishman, except Mr. Leake,–a country rarely visited, from the savage character of the natives, but abounding more in natural beauties than the classical regions of Greece."

A glimpse of Byron's inner life at this time is caught in the following extract from a letter to another friend:

"I have now been nearly a year abroad, and hope you will find me an altered personage,–I do not mean in body, but in manners; for I begin to find out that nothing but virtue will do in this d–d world. I am tolerably sick of vice, which I have tried in its agreeable varieties, and mean on my return to cut all my dissolute acquaintance, leave off wine and carnal company, and betake myself to politics and decorum."

One thing we notice in most of the familiar letters of Byron,–that he makes frequent use of a vulgar expletive. But when I remember that the Prince of Wales, the Lord Chancellor, the judges, the lawyers, the ministers of the Crown, and many other distinguished people were accustomed to use the same expression, I would fain hope that it was not meant for profanity, but was a sort of fashionable slang intended only to be emphatic. Fifty years have seen a great improvement in the use of language, and the vulgarism which then appeared to be of slight importance is now regarded, almost universally with gentlemen, to be at least in very bad taste. How far Byron transgressed beyond the frequent use of this expletive, does not appear either in his letters or in his biography; yet from his irreverent nature, and the society with which he was associated, it is more than probable that in him profanity was added to the other vices of his times.

Especially did he indulge in drinking to excess in all convivial gatherings. It was seldom that gentlemen sat down to a banquet without each despatching two or three bottles of wine in the course of an evening. No wonder that gout was the pervading disease among county squires, and even among authors and statesman. Morality was not one of the features of English society one hundred years ago, except as it consisted in a scrupulous regard for domesticity, truth, and honor, and abhorrence of meanness and hypocrisy.

It would be difficult to point out any defects and excesses of which Byron was guilty at this period beyond what were common to other fashionable young men of rank and leisure, except a spirit of religious scepticism and impiety, and a wanton and inexcusable recklessness in regard to women, which made him a slave to his passions. The first alienated him, so far as he was known, from the higher respectable classes, who generally were punctilious in the outward observances of religion; and the second made him abhorred by the virtuous middle class, who never condoned his transgressions in this respect. But at this time his character was not generally known. It was not until he was seated on the pinnacle of fame that public curiosity penetrated the scandals of his private life. He was known only as a young nobleman in quest of the excitements of foreign travel, and his letters of introduction procured him all the society he craved. Not yet had he expressed bitterness and wrath against the country which gave him birth; he simply found England dull, and craved adventures in foreign lands as unlike England as he could find. The East stimulated his imagination, and revived his classical associations. He saw the Orient only as an enthusiastic poet would see it, and as Lamartine saw Jerusalem. But Byron was more curious about the pagan cities of antiquity than concerning the places consecrated by the sufferings of our Lord. He cared more to swim across the Hellespont with Leander than to wander over the sacred hills of Judaea; to idealize a beautiful peasant girl among the ruins of Greece, than converse with the monks of Palestine in their gloomy retreats.

The result of Byron's travels was seen in the first two cantos of "Childe Harold," showing alike the fertility of his mind and the aspirations of a lofty genius. These were published in 1812, soon after his return to England, at the age of twenty-four. They took England by storm, creating both surprise and admiration. Public curiosity and enthusiasm for the young poet, who had mounted to the front ranks of literature at a single leap, was unbounded and universal. As he himself wrote: "I awoke one morning and found myself famous."

Young Byron was now sought, courted, and adored, especially by ladies of the highest rank. Everybody was desirous to catch even a glimpse of the greatest poet that had appeared since Pope and Dryden; any palace or drawing-room he desired to enter was open to him. He was surfeited with roses and praises and incense. He alone took precedence over Scott and Coleridge and Moore and Campbell. For a time his pre-eminence in literature was generally conceded. He was the foremost man of letters of his day, and the greatest popular idol. His rank added to his éclat, since not many noblemen were distinguished for genius or literary excellence. His singular beauty of face and person, despite his slight lameness, attracted the admiring gaze of women. What Abélard was in the schools of philosophy, Byron was in the drawing-rooms of London. People forgot his antecedents, so far as they were known, in the intoxication of universal admiration and unbounded worship of genius. No poet in English history was ever seated on a prouder throne, and no heathen deity was ever more indifferent than he to the incense of idolaters.

Far be it from me to attempt an analysis of the merits of the poem with which the fame of Byron will be forever identified. Its great merits are universally conceded; and while it has defects,–great inequalities in both style and matter; some stanzas supernal in beauty, and others only mediocre,–on the whole, the poem is extraordinary. Byron adopted the Spenserian measure,–perhaps the most difficult of all measures, hard even to read aloud,–in which blank verse seems to blend with rhyme. It might be either to the ear, though to the eye it is elaborate rhyme,–such as would severely task a made poet, but which this born poet seems to have thrown off without labor. The leading peculiarity of the poem is description,–of men and places; of the sea, the mountain, and the river; of Nature in her loveliness and mysteries; of cities and battle-fields consecrated by the heroism of brave and gifted men, in Greece, in Rome, in mediaeval Europe,–with swift passing glances at salient points in history, showing extensive reading and deep meditation.

As to the spirit of "Childe Harold," it is not satirical; it is more pensive than bitter, and reveals the loneliness and sorrows of an unsatisfied soul,–the unrest of a pilgrim in search for something new. It seeks to penetrate the secrets of struggling humanity, at war often with those certitudes which are the consolation of our inner life. It everywhere recognizes the soul as that which gives greatest dignity to man. It invokes love as the noblest joy of life. The poem is one of the most ideal of human productions, soaring beyond what is material and transient. It is not religious, not reverential, not Christian, like the "Divine Comedy" and the "Paradise Lost;" and yet it is lofty, aspiring, exulting in what is greatest in deed or song, destined to immortality of fame and admiration. It is a confession, indirectly, of the follies and shortcomings of the author, and of their retribution, but complains not of the Nemesis that avenges everything. It is sensitive of wrongs and injustices and misrepresentations, but does not hurl anathemas,–speaking in sorrow rather than in anger, except in regard to hypocrisies and shams and lies, when its scorn is intense and terrible.

The whole poem is brilliant and original, but does not flash like fire in a dark night. It was written with the heart's blood, and is as earnest as it is penetrating. It does not ascend to the higher mysteries forever veiled from mortal eye, nor descend to the deepest depths of hatred and despair, but confines itself to those passions which have marked gifted mortals, and those questionings in which all thoughtful minds have ever delighted. It does not make revelations like "Hamlet" or "Macbeth;" it does not explore secrets hidden forever from ordinary minds, like "Faust;" but it muses and meditates on what Fate and Time have brought to pass,–such events as have been revealed in history. It invokes the neglected but impressive monuments of antiquity to tell the tales of glory and of shame. In moral wisdom it is vastly inferior to Shakspeare, and it is not rich in those wise and striking lines which pass into the proverbs of the world; but it has the glow of a poetic soul, longing for fame, craving love, and not unmindful of immortality. Its most beautiful stanzas are full of tenderness and sadness for lost or unrequited affections; of reproachless sorrow for broken friendships, in which the soul would fain have lived but for inconsistencies and contradictions which made true and permanent love impossible. The poem paints a paradise lost, rather than a paradise regained. I wonder at its popularity, for it seems to me too deep and learned for popular appreciation, except in those stanzas where pathos or enthusiasm, expressed in matchless language, appeal to the heart and soul.

Of all modern poets, Byron is the most human and outspoken, daring to say what many would fear or blush to meditate upon. He fearlessly reveals the infirmities and audacities of a double and mysterious nature, made up of dust and deity, now grovelling in the mire, then borne aloft to the skies,–the football of the eternal powers of good and evil, enslaved and yet to be emancipated, as we may hope, in the last and final struggle, when the soul is rescued by Omnipotence.

I have alluded to the triumphs of Byron on the publication of "Childe Harold,"–but his joys were more than balanced by his sorrows. His mother died suddenly without seeing him. His dearest friend Mathews was drowned. He was hampered by creditors. He made no mark in the House of Lords, and was sick of what he called "parliamentary mummeries." His habits became more and more dissipated among the boon companions who courted his society. His reputation after a while began to wane, for people became ashamed of their enthusiasm. Some critics disparaged his poetry, and conventional circles were shocked by his morals. Three years of London life told on his constitution, and he was completely disenchanted. He sought retirement and solitude, for not even the most brilliant society satisfied him. He wearied of such a woman and admirer as Madame de Staël. He went to Holland House–that resort of all the eminent ones of the time–as seldom as he could. He buried himself with a few intimate friends, chiefly poets, among whom were Moore and Rogers. He saw and liked Sir Walter Scott, but did not push his acquaintance to intimacy. The larger part of his letters were written to Murray, the publisher, who treated him generously; but Byron gave away his literary gains to personal friends in need. He seemed to scorn copyrights for support. He would write only for fame.

At the age of twenty-seven, in January, 1815, Byron married Miss Milbanke,–a lady whom he did not love, but to whom he was attracted by her supposed wealth, which would patch up his own fortunes. He had great respect for this lady and some friendship; but with all her virtues and attainments she was cold, conventional, and exacting. A mystery shrouds this unfortunate affair, which has never been fully revealed. The upshot was that, to Byron's inexpressible humiliation, in less than a year she left him, never to return. No reasons were given. It was enough that both parties were unhappy, and had cause to be; and both kept silence.

But the voice of rumor and scandal was not silent. All the failings of Byron were now exaggerated and dwelt upon by those who envied him, and by those who hated him,–for his enemies were more numerous than his friends. Those whom he had snubbed or ridiculed or insulted now openly turned against him. The conventional public had a rare subject for their abuse or indignation. Proper people, religious people, and commonplace people, joined in the cry against a man with whom a virtuous woman could not live. Indeed, no woman could have lived happily with Byron; and very few were the women with whom he could have lived happily, by reason of that irritability and unrest which is so common with genius. The habits of abstraction and contemplation which absorbed much of his time at home were not easily understood by an ordinary woman, to whom social life is necessary.

Byron lived much in his library, which was his solitary luxury. In the revelry of the imagination his heart became cold. "To follow poetry," says Pope, "one must leave father and mother, and cleave to it alone,"–as Dante and Petrarch and Milton did. Not even Byron's intense craving for affection could be satisfied when he was dwelling on the ideals which his imagination created, and which scarcely friendship could satisfy. Even so good a man as Carlyle lived among his books rather than in the society of his wife, whom he really loved, and whose virtues and attainments he appreciated and admired. An affectionate woman runs a great risk in marrying an absorbed and preoccupied man of genius, even if his character be reproachless. Unfortunately, the character of Byron was anything but reproachless, and no one knew this better than his wife, which knowledge doubtless alienated what little affection she had for him. He seems to have sought low company even after his marriage, and Lady Byron has intimated that she did not think him altogether sane. Living with him as his wife was insupportable; but though she separated from him, she did not seek a divorce.

Byron would not have married at all if he had consulted his happiness, and still more his fame. "In reviewing the great names of philosophy and science, we shall find that those who have most distinguished themselves have virtually admitted their own unfitness for the marriage tie by remaining in celibacy,–Newton, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Locke, Leibnitz, Boyle, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, and a host of others."

The scandal which Byron's separation from his wife created, and his known and open profligacy, at last shut him out from the society of which he had been so bright an ornament. It is a peculiarity of the English people, which redounds to their honor, to exclude from public approbation any man, however gifted or famous, who has outraged the moral sense by open and ill-disguised violation of the laws of morality. The cases of Dilke and Parnell in our own day are illustrations known to all. What in France or Italy is condoned, is never pardoned or forgotten in England. Not even a Voltaire, a Rousseau, or a Mirabeau, had they lived in England, could have been accepted by English society,–much less a man who scorned and ridiculed it. Even Byron–for a few years the pet, the idol, and the glory of the country–was not too high to fall. To quote one of his own stanzas,–

     "He who ascends to mountain-tops shall find      The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;      He who surpasses or subdues mankind      Must look down on the hate of those below.      Though high above the sun of glory glow,      And far beneath the earth and ocean spread,      Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow      Contending tempests on his naked head."

Embarrassed in his circumstances; filled with disgust, mortification, and shame; excluded from the proudest circles,–Byron now resolved to leave England forever, and bury himself in such foreign lands as were most congenial to his tastes and habits. But for his immorality he might still have shined at an exalted height; for he had not yet written anything which shocked the practical English mind. The worst he had written was bitter satire, yet not more bitter than that of Swift or Pope. No defiance, no blasphemous sentiments, or what seemed to many to be such, had yet escaped him. His "Corsair" and his "Bride of Abydos" appeared soon after the "Childe Harold," and added to his fame by their exquisite melody of rhyme and sentimental admiration for Oriental life,–though even these were tinged with that abandon which afterwards made his latter poems a scandal and reproach. "The disappointment of youthful passion, the lassitude and remorse of premature excess, the lone friendlessness of his life," and, I may add, the reproaches of society, induced him to fly from the scene of his brilliant successes, filled with blended sentiments of scorn, hatred, defiance, and despair.