will be upon us. peal through the The great imprecation of Harold shall Colosseum : "Dost thou not hear my heart?—Awake! thou shalt, and must Manfred's "pang shall find a voice"; in Tasso, Dante, the old Doge of Venice, Cain, he shall seek and find the likeness which alone inspires him—and all our knowledge of the truth shall vainly fight against the "magic voice and verse", for "There is that within me that shall tire Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire". CHAPTER II THE DEPARTURE Farewell messages-The ostracism-Byron's lack of reticence-The Farewell Verses-Turmoil in the Press-The Sketch-Stanzas to Augusta -Byron's state of mind-Dr. Polidori-Dover, and Churchill's GraveCuriosity about Byron-Review of Work since Lara: Hebrew Melodies and Lyrics of 1814-16; the Napoleon Poems; The Siege of Corinth, and Coleridge's influence; Parisina Ο N Wednesday, April 24, 1816, Byron left To his wife he had sent a farewell letter; the whole import of it was "Be kind to Augusta". He wrote it immediately after parting from Mrs. Leigh"almost the last being you have left me to part with ". and after showing, as we learnt from her confession, "the only signs of remorse she had ever seen in him". With it he sent for Ada a ring containing the hair of one of the Scottish kings from whom Mrs. Byron had claimed descent. His last word from England was for his sister. Only a portion of it remains, and that is entirely colourless. Moore, absent in Dorsetshire, was not forgottenthe opening stanza of "My boat is on the shore" written in April 1816. "My boat is on the shore VOL. II.-3 Here's a sigh to those who love me, "A smile to those who hate": there were many such! In London, he had not ventured to appear at the theatres; even in the streets he was insulted by the mob. In the second week of April, Lady Jersey, one of the great social "leaders", had given a party expressly for him. She hoped to reinstate him, to silence scandal: he and Augusta both appeared. It was a horrible fiasco. Mrs. George Lamb cut Augusta; every one, except Miss Mercer Elphinstone, cut Byron. "It was done by Countesses and ladies of fashion leaving each room in crowds as he entered it". 2 "We know no spectacle", wrote Macaulay in 1831, reviewing Moore's book," "so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. . . . Once in six or seven years our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated. Accordingly some unfortunate man . . . is singled out as an expiatory sacrifice. . . . He is cut by the higher orders, and hissed by the lower. . .. At length our anger is satiated. Our victim is ruined and heart-broken. And our virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years more. It is clear", he continues, “that those vices which destroy domestic happiness ought to be as much as possible repressed. . . . It is good that a certain portion of disgrace should constantly attend on certain bad actions. But it is not good that the 1 He sent the entire jeu d'esprit to Moore on July 10, 1817, from Venice, adding, "This should have been written fifteen months ago-the first stanza was" (Moore, p. 362). 2 He sent her a little parcel from Dover by Scrope Davies, saying: "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 ”. 3 Edinburgh Review, June 1831. offenders should merely have to stand the risks of a lottery of infamy. . . The obloquy which Byron had to endure was such as might well have shaken a more constant mind. . . . All those creeping things that rot in the decay of nobler natures hastened to their repast; and they were right; they did after their kind. It is not every day that the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified by the agonies of such a spirit, and the degradation of such a name. . . . The howl of contumely followed him across the sea, up the Rhine, over the Alps; it gradually waxed fainter; it died away. His poetry became more popular than it had ever been; and his complaints were read with tears by thousands and tens of thousands who had never seen his face". Macaulay said there the last word on the subject of Byron's ostracism. Let us remember that forbidden relationships were in the air of the French Revolution that upheaval of all accepted ideas. In 1789, Lord Bolingbroke had eloped with his half-sister; of Napoleon, such rumours had long been prevalent; to make a closer juxtaposition, Caroline Lamb's mother, Lady Bessborough, had been the victim of similar whisperings. In René, Châteaubriand had long anticipated Manfred.1 Byron, always in actual conduct the mere creature of his age, became in truth (to quote 1"In intimate circles, [Châteaubriand] often recurred to the similarity between his nature and Lord Byron's, and to the affinity between their Muses. This caused him to regret the more vividly that there was not a single mention of his name (even in a casual allusion in Don Juan, where so many others are inscribed) in the works of the British poet who had been so evidently inspired by René" (De Marcellus, Châteaubriand et son Temps, p. 117). M. Edmond Estève (Byron et le Romantisme français) says that Châteaubriand's amour-propre suffered sensibly from this neglect. He declared that, on the appearance of Atala, he had received a letter from Cambridge, signed "G. Gordon. Lord Byron" (sic) and had replied to it. M. Estève points out that Byron did twice mention his name: in a note to The Bride of Abydos, and in a stanza of The Age of Bronze (Byron et le Romantisme français, p. 22; and see Poems, vols. iii. and v.). Macaulay again) "a sort of whipping-boy, by whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of the same class are, it is supposed, sufficiently chastised". On October 25 of that year, Goethe, conversing with George Ticknor, said of the Separation-drama that "it was so poetical in its circumstances . . . that if Byron had invented it, he could hardly have had a more fortunate subject for his genius". In Marino Faliero, the Doge, speaking of himself, is made to say— 66 . . . There was that in my spirit ever Which shaped out for itself some great reverse"; and were it not for the cynicism implied in such a comment, we might say that with this calamity Byron for the first time found himself. All through his work, from the earliest days, this (as it were) longing for remorse declares itself. He was like a boy in that, as he was in so much else; he wanted to terrify mankind, and make them see, as in Manfred "... A dusk and awful figure rise Like an infernal god from out the earth". It is worth observing that not until remorse had entered his soul did he ever think of keeping a Journal. On November 14, 1813, he began one. Nobody can read it and escape the conviction that its dark hintings at some extreme error were (though veracious) "written for posterity"—or at any rate for his friends to see and marvel at. Almost directly after he ceased to keep it, he gave it to Moore; he had made to the same friend half-confidences by the score about the "strange summer adventure which I don't like to think of".1 "The 1 He ceased to keep this Journal on April 19, 1814; on June 14, wrote to Moore: "Keep the Journal . . . if it has amused you, I am glad that I kept it". For his half-confidences to Moore, see his letters in 1813, of August 22 and 28, November 30, December 8; and, in 1814, those of |