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beauty of the expression of his features, the magnificent height of his forehead, or the singularity of his dress, could ever pass him in the street without feeling that he was passing no common person. Lord Byron has been frequently recollected when his portraits have been shown-Ah! (the spectator has exclaimed, on either picture or engraving being seen,) I met that person in such or such a place, at such or such a time.

His lameness, a slight mal-formation of the foot, did not in the least impede his activity; it may perhaps account in some measure for his passion for riding, sailing, and swimming. He nearly divided his time between these three exercises: he rode from four to eight hours every day when he was not engaged in boating or swimming. And in these exercises, so careful was he of his hands (one of these little vanities which sometimes beset men) that he wore gloves even in swimming.

He indulged in another practice which is not considered in England genteel, that is to say, it is not just now a fashion with the upper classes in this country-he chewed tobacco to

some extent.

At times, too, he was excessively given to drinking; but this is not so uncommon. In his passage from Genoa to Cephalonia, he spent the principal part of the time in drinking with the Captain of the vessel. He could bear an immense quantity of liquor without intoxication, and was by no means particular either in the nature or in the order of the fluids he imbibed. He was by no means a drinker constantly, or, in other words, a drunkard, and could indeed be as abstemious as any body; but when his passion blew that way he drank, as he did every thing else, to excess.

This was indeed the spirit of his life-a round of passion, indulgence, and satiety. He had tried, as most men do who have the power, every species of gratification, however sensual. Let no rich young man here who is not living under the surveillance of his relations or in the fear of the public, let no such person turn up

his nose. No men are more given to ring the changes upon gratification of all the sensual kinds than the English, especially the English on the continent,-the English, who in speech are the most modest people of the universe, and who, if you might trust their shy and reserved manner, think of nothing but decorum. Lord Byron did no more in this respect than almost every other Lord or Esquire of degree has done, and is doing, if he dare, at this moment, whether in London, Paris, Naples, Vienna, or elsewhere, with this difference-Lord Byron was a man of strong powers of intellect and active imagination; he drew conclusions and took lessons from what he saw. Lord Byron too was a man capable of intense passion, which every one who pursues the gra. tification of his appetite is not; consequently he went to work with a headlong, reckless spirit, probably derived exquisite enjoyment, quickly exhausted himself, and was then left stranded in satiety.

There was scarcely a passion which he had not tried, even that of avarice. Before he left Italy he alarmed all his friends by becoming penurious-absolutely miserly, after the fashion of the Elwes and other great misers on record. The pleasures of avarice are dwelt on with evident satisfaction in one of the late cantos of Don Juanpleasures which were no fictions of the poet's brain, but which he had enjoyed and was revelling in at that moment; of course he indulged to excess, grew tired, and turned to something else.

The passion which last animated him was that which is said to be the last infirmity of noble minds-ambition. There can be little doubt that he had grown weary of being known only as a writer; he determined to distinguish himself by action. Many other motives, however, went to make up the bundle which took him to the succour of the Greeks. Italy was waning in favour, he was beginning to grow weary of the society of the lady, to whom, after the manners of Italy he had been attached, and unfortunately her passion outlived his even

in Greece she would gladly have broadest and lowest description, like,

joined him; but his Lordship had changed. Then, again, Greece was a land of adventure, bustle, struggle, sensation, and excitement, where the inhabitants have beautiful forms, and dress in romantic habits, and dwell in the most picturesque country of the world; and Lord Byron, as he said himself, had "an oriental twist in his imagination." He knew that the Greeks looked up to him as, what he really was, one of their greatest regenerators; he was aware that his money and rank, would give him unlimited power, influence, and respect; all of which he dearly loved. Then again, if any man ever sympathized deeply with bravery suffering in a generous cause, it was Lord Byron; and when he was roused, in moments of excitement, this sympathy was a violently propelling and a very virtuous motive. These and other secondary considerations led him to Greece, to sacrifice much of his personal comforts, much of his property, his health, and his life.

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No two men were ever more unlike than Lord Byron excited and Lord Byron in the ordinary state of calm. His friends about him used to call it inspiration; and when men of their stamp talk about inspiration, there must no common change take place. When excited, his sentiments were noble, his ideas grand or beautiful, his language rich and enthusiastic, his views elevated, and all his feelings of that disinterested and martyr-like cast which marks the great mind. When in the usual dull mood in which almost every body wearies their friends nine hours out of the ten, his ideas were gross, his language coarse, his sentiments not mean certainly, but of a low and sensual kind; his mood sneering and satirical, unless in a very good humour, which indeed, he often, I may say generally, was. This is, however, the wrong side of the picture in Lord Byron-he may be said here to be taken at the worst. Without being what I have called excited, his conversation was often very delightful, though almost always polluted by grossness-grossness of the very

I cannot help saying again like almost all his class-all of them that do not live in the fear of God, or of the public. His grossness had the advantage of a fertile fancy, and such subjects were the ready source of a petty kind of excitement; the forbidden words, the forbidden topics, the concealed actions of our nature, and the secret vices of society, stimulated his imagination, and stimulants he loved, and may be said at times to have wanted. He certainly did permit his fancy to feed on this dunghill garbage; now and then, indeed, even here he scratched up a pearl, but so dirty a pearl, few would be at the pains of washing it for all its price.

His letters are charming; he never wrote them with the idea of "The Letters of the Right Hon. Lord Byron, in 6 vols. 12mo." before his eyes, as unfortunately our great men must now almost necessarily do. The public are so fond of this kind of reading, and so justly too, that there is great reason to fear that it will consume what it feeds on. Few things are so charming as to see a great man without all the paraphernalia of his greatness, without his being armed cap-apie for public contest, when every point is guarded, and every motion studied: when a man of reputation presents himself to the notice of the world, he must pretend to know every thing, or he will have credit for nothing-he must assume the air of infallibility, or the meanest creature that can read will discover that he is full of error; he must be supposed to have examined the subject in all its bearings, he must have consulted every authority, he must know what every body has said or thought previously on the mat. ter, and he must anticipate what they can possibly say or think in future, or he will be voted a shallow writer, without information, who has produced a work of no value. Then as to style, it must be the abstract of language-it must be impersonal-unindividual-and just such as a literary machine which had the power of grinding thoughts might be supposed to utter. In short, the writer is every

moment afraid of either committing himself or his friends; he is on his good behaviour; and natural freedom, grace, and truth, are out of the question. The writer for the public is as much unlike the real man as the traveller in a stage coach or as the guest at a public ball or dinner is like the lively, careless, rattling, witty, good-natured, fanciful, pleasant creature, at his or her fire-side, among old friends, who know too much of the whole life and character to be alarmed at any little sally, and who are satisfied with such knowledge as their friend possesses, without requiring that he should know every thing. Lord Byron's letters are the models of a species of composition which should be written without an eye to any models. His fancy kindled on paper; he touches no subject in a common every-day way; the reader smiles all through, and loves the writer at the end; longs for his society, and admires his happy genius and his amiable disposition. Lord Byron's letters are like what his conversation was-but better-he had more undisturbed leisure to let his fancy ripen in; he could point his wit with more security, and his irritable temper met with no opposition on

paper.

Lord Byron was not ill-tempered nor quarrelsome, but still he was very difficult to live with; he was capricious, full of humours, apt to be of fended, and wilful. When Mr. Hobhouse and he travelled in Greece together, they were generally a mile asunder, and though some of his friends lived with him off and on a long time, (Trelawney, for instance,) it was not without serious trials of temper, patience, and affection. He could make a great point often about the least and most trifling thing imaginable, and adhere to his purpose with a pertinacity truly remarkable, and almost unaccountable. A love of victory might sometimes account for little disputes and petty triumphs, otherwise inexplicable, and always unworthy of his great genius; but, as I have said, he was only a great genius now and then, when excited; when not so, he was sometimes little in his conduct,

and in his writings dull, or totally destitute of all powers of production. He was very good-natured; and when asked to write a song, or a copy of verses in an album, or an inscription, for so poets are plagued, he would generally attempt to comply, but he seldom succeeded in doing any thing; and when he did, he generally gave birth to such Grub-street doggerel as his friends were ashamed of, and, it is to be hoped, charitably put into the fire. When, on the contrary, in a state of enthusiasm, he wrote with great facility, and corrected very little. He used to boast of an indifference about his writings which he did not feel, and would remark with pleasure that he never saw them in print, and never met with any body that did not know more about them than himself.

He left very little behind him. Of late he had been too much occupied with the Greeks to write, and, indeed, had turned his attention very much to action, as has been observed. Don Juan he certainly intended to continue; and, I believe, that the real reason for his holding so many conferences with Dr. Kennedy in Cephalonia was, that he might master the slang of a religious sect, in order to hit off the character with more veri-similitude.

His religious principles were by no means fixed; habitually, like most of his class, he was an unbeliever; at times, however, he relapsed into Christianity, and, in his interviews with Dr. Kennedy, maintained the part of a Unitarian. Like all men whose imaginations are much stronger than the reasoning power-the guiding and determining faculty-he was in danger of falling into fanaticism, and some of his friends who knew him well used to predict that he would die a Methodist; a consummation by no means impossible.

From the same cause, the preponderance of the imagination, there might have been some ground for the fear which beset his later moments that he should go mad. The immediate cause of this fear was, the deep impression which the fate of Swift had made upon him. He read the life of

Swift during the whole of his voyage to Greece, and the melancholy termination of the Dean's life haunted his imagination.

Strong, overruling, and irregular as was Lord Byron's imagination--a rich vice which inspired him with his poetry, and which is too surely but the disease of a great mind-strong as was this imagination-sensitive and susceptible as it was to all external influence, yet Lord Byron's reasoning faculties were by no means of a low order; but they had never been cultivated, and, without cultivation, whether by spontaneous exertion, or under the guidance of discipline, to expect a man to be a good reasoner, even on the common affairs of life, is to expect a crop where the seed has not been sown, or where the weeds have been suffered to choke the corn. Lord Byron was shrewd, formed frequently judicious conclusions, and, though he did not reason with any accuracy or certainty, very often hit upon the right. He had occasional glimpses, and deep ones too, into the nature of the institutions of society and the foundations of morals, and, by his experience of the passions of men, speculated ably upon human life; yet withal he was any-thing but logical or scientific.

Uncertain and wavering, he never knew himself whether he was right or wrong, and was always obliged to write and feel for the moment on the supposition that his opinion was the true one. He used to declare that he had no fixed principles; which means that he knew nothing scientifically: in politics, for instance, he was a lover of liberty, from prejudice, habit, or from some vague notion that it was generous to be so; but in what liberty really consists-how it operates for the advantages of mankind-how it is to be obtained, secured, regulated, he was as ignorant as a child.

While he was in Greece, almost every elementary question of government was necessarily to be discussed; such was the crisis of Greek affairsabout all of which he showed himself perfectly ignorant. In the case of the press, for instance, and in all ques

tions relating to publicity, he was completely wrong. He saw nothing but a few immediate effects, which appeared to him pernicious or the contrary, and he set himself against or in behalf of the press accordingly. Lord Byron complaining of the licentiousness of the press may sound rather singular, and yet such are necessarily the inconsistencies of men who suffer themselves to be guided by highsounding words and vague generalities, and who expect to understand the art of government and the important interests of society by instinct. In spite, however, of Lord Byron, the press was established in Greece, and maintained free and unshackled, by one of the greatest benefactors that country has as yet known from England, the Hon. Colonel Leicester Stanhope, who, by his activity, his energy, courage, but, above all, by his enlightened knowledge of the principles of legislation and civilization, succeeded in carrying into effect all his measures, as agent of the Greek committee, and who, by spreading useful information, and, above all, by the establishment of the press in all the principal points of reunion in Greece, has advanced that country in civilization many years, how many we dare not say. Before the establishment of the press, the Greeks were working out their regeneration in various parts of Greece, but not as a whole-without unity of design, or unity of interest,-each centre was ignorant of the operations of all the other centres, except by accidental communication; and communication, from the nature of the country and from the circumstances in which it was placed, was rare and hazardous. The press has greatly assisted to establish one feeling throughout the country; not merely is information passed from one quarter to another by its means, but an interchange of sentiments takes place, and a sympathy is created, advice and encouragement reciprocated, enthusiasm kept alive, and useful principles disseminated through the whole commonwealth. Not only will the press thus accelerate the liberation of Greece, but will also, when that libera

tion is effected, prevent the separation and dissolution of the country into petty kingdoms and governments, which was the bane of ancient Greece. It is becoming to the body politic what the nerves are to the body physical, and will bind a set of disjected members into one corresponding and sensitive frame. As a proof of Lord Byron's uncertainty and unfixedness, he at one moment gave a very handsome donation of (501.) to one paper, the Greek Chronicle, the most independent of them all, and promised to assist in its compilation. His friend and secretary, too, with his approbation, established a polyglot newspaper, the Greek Telegraph, with his countenance and support. The want of any fixed principles and opinions on these important subjects galled him excessively, and he could never discuss them without passion. About this same press, schools, societies for mutual instruction, and all other institutions for the purpose of educating and advancing the Greeks in civilization, he would express himself with scorn and disgust. He would put it on the ground that the present was not the time for these things; that the Greeks must conquer first, and then set about learning-an opinion which no one could seriously entertain who knew as he well did the real situation of the Greeks, who are only now and then visited by the Turks, descending at particular seasons in shoals, like herrings, and like them too to be netted, knocked on the head and left to die in heaps till the whole country-side is glutted with their carcases.-The aptitude of the Greeks is as great as their leisure; and if even the men were actively engaged for the most part of their time, which they are not, surely no exertion of benevolence could be attended with more advantage than instructing the children at home. This, to be sure, is a quaker kind of warfare, and little likely to please a poet; though it must be confessed, that in respect to the pomp and circumstance of war, and all the sad delusions of military glory, no man could have more sane notions than Lord Byron. Mercenary warfare and the life-and-death

struggle of oppressed men for freedom are very different things; and Lord Byron felt a military ardour in Greece which he was too wise a man ever to have felt under other circumstances. He was at one time, in Greece, absolutely soldier-mad; he had a helmet made, and other armour in which to lead the Suliotes to the storming of Lepanto, and thought of nothing but of guns and blunderbusses. It is very natural to suppose that a man of an enthusiastic turn, tired of every-day enjoyments, in succouring the Greeks, would look to the bustle, the adventure, the moving accidents by flood and field, as sources of great enjoyment: but allowing for the romantic character of guerilla warfare in Greece, for the excessively unromantic nature of projects for establishing schools and printing-presses in safe places, where the Turks never or very seldom reach; allowing for these, yet they were not the causes of his Lordship's hostility to these peaceful but important instruments in propagating happiness he was ignorant of the science of civilization, and he was jealous of those who both knew it and practised it, and consequently were doing more good than himself, and began to be more thought about too, in spite of his Lordship's money, which in Greece is certainly very little short of being all-powerful. The Greeks, it is true, had a kind of veneration for Lord Byron, on account of his having sung the praises of Greece; but the thing which caused his arrival to make so great a sensation there was the report that he was immensely rich, and had brought a ship full of sallars (as they call dollars) to pay off all their arrears. So that as soon at it was understood he had arrived, the Greek fleet was presently set in motion to the port where he was stationed; was very soon in a state of the most pressing distress, and nothing could relieve it but a loan of four thou sand pounds from his Lordship, which loan was eventually obtained (though with a small difficulty), and then the Greek fleet sailed away, and left his Lordship's person to be nearly taken by the Turks in crossing to Missolonghi, as another vessel which contained

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