The Life of Lord Byron

I shall now return to the consideration of his works, and the first in order is The Corsair, published in 1814. He seems to have been perfectly sensible that this beautiful composition was in his best peculiar manner. It is indeed a pirate’s isle, peopled with his own creatures.

It has been alleged that Lord Byron was indebted to Sir Walter Scott’s poem of Rokeby for the leading incidents of The Corsair, but the resemblance is not to me very obvious: besides, the whole style of the poem is so strikingly in his own manner, that even had he borrowed the plan, it was only as a thread to string his own original conceptions upon; the beauty and brilliancy of them could not be borrowed, and are not imitations.

There were two islands in the Archipelago, when Lord Byron was in Greece, considered as the chief haunts of the pirates, Stampalia, and a long narrow island between Cape Colonna and Zea. Jura also was a little tainted in its reputation. I think, however, from the description, that the pirate’s isle of The Corsair is the island off Cape Colonna. It is a rude, rocky mass. I know not to what particular Coron, if there be more than one, the poet alludes; for the Coron of the Morea is neighbour to, if not in, the Mainote territory, a tract of country which never submitted to the Turks, and was exempted from the jurisdiction of Mussulman officers by the payment of an annual tribute. The Mainotes themselves are all pirates and robbers. If it be in that Coron that Byron has placed Seyd the pasha, it must be attributed to inadvertency. His Lordship was never there, nor in any part of Maina; nor does he describe the place, a circumstance which of itself goes far to prove the inadvertency. It is, however, only in making it the seat of a Turkish pasha that any error has been committed. In working out the incidents of the poem where descriptions of scenery are given, they relate chiefly to Athens and its neighbourhood. In themselves these descriptions are executed with an exquisite felicity; but they are brought in without any obvious reason wherefore. In fact, they appear to have been written independently of the poem, and are patched on “shreds of purple” which could have been spared.

The character of Conrad the Corsair may be described as a combination of the warrior of Albania and a naval officer – Childe Harold mingled with the hero of The Giaour.

A man of loneliness and mystery,Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh;Robust, but not Herculean, to the sight,No giant frame sets forth his common height;Yet in the whole, who paused to look againSaw more than marks the crowd of vulgar men:They gaze and marvel how, and still confessThat thus it is, but why they cannot guess.Sun-burnt his cheek, his forehead high and pale,The sable curls in wild profusion veil.And oft perforce his rising lip revealsThe haughtier thought it curbs, but scarce conceals:Though smooth his voice, and calm his general mien,Still seems there something he would not have seen.His features’ deepening lines and varying hueAt times attracted, yet perplex’d the view,As if within that murkiness of mindWork’d feelings fearful, and yet undefined:Such might he be that none could truly tell,Too close inquiry his stern glance could quell.There breathed but few whose aspect could defyThe full encounter of his searching eye;He had the skill, when cunning gaze to seekTo probe his heart and watch his changing cheek,At once the observer’s purpose to espy,And on himself roll back his scrutiny,Lest he to Conrad rather should betraySome secret thought, than drag that chief’s to day.There was a laughing devil in his sneerThat raised emotions both of rage and fear;And where his frown of hatred darkly fellHope withering fled, and mercy sigh’d, farewell.

It will be allowed that, in this portrait, some of the darker features and harsher lineaments of Byron himself are very evident, but with a more fixed sternness than belonged to him; for it was only by fits that he could put on such severity. Conrad is, however, a higher creation than any which he had previously described. Instead of the listlessness of Childe Harold, he is active and enterprising; such as the noble pilgrim would have been, but for the satiety which had relaxed his energies. There is also about him a solemnity different from the animation of the Giaour – a penitential despair arising from a cause undisclosed. The Giaour, though wounded and fettered, and laid in a dungeon, would not have felt as Conrad is supposed to feel in that situation. The following bold and terrific verses, descriptive of the maelstrom agitations of remorse, could not have been appropriately applied to the despair of grief, the predominant source of emotion in The Giaour.

There is a war, a chaos of the mindWhen all its elements convulsed combined,Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force,And gnashing with impenitent remorse.That juggling fiend who never spake before,But cries, “I warn’d thee,” when the deed is o’er;Vain voice, the spirit burning, but unbent,May writhe, rebel – the weak alone repent.

The character of Conrad is undoubtedly finely imagined; as the painters would say, it is in the highest style of art, and brought out with sublime effect; but still it is only another phase of the same portentous meteor, that was nebulous in Childe Harold, and fiery in The Giaour. To the safe and shop-resorting inhabitants of Christendom, The Corsair seems to present many improbabilities; nevertheless, it is true to nature, and in every part of the Levant the traveller meets with individuals whose air and physiognomy remind him of Conrad. The incidents of the story, also, so wild and extravagant to the snug and legal notions of England, are not more in keeping with the character, than they are in accordance with fact and reality. The poet suffers immeasurable injustice, when it is attempted to determine the probability of the wild scenes and wilder adventurers of his tales, by the circumstances and characters of the law-regulated system of our diurnal affairs. Probability is a standard formed by experience, and it is not surprising that the anchorets of libraries should object to the improbability of The Corsair, and yet acknowledge the poetical power displayed in the composition; for it is a work which could only have been written by one who had himself seen or heard on the spot of transactions similar to those he has described. No course of reading could have supplied materials for a narration so faithfully descriptive of the accidents to which an Ægean pirate is exposed as The Corsair. Had Lord Byron never been out of England, the production of a work so appropriate in reflection, so wild in spirit, and so bold in invention, as in that case it would have been, would have entitled him to the highest honours of original conception, or been rejected as extravagant; considered as the result of things seen, and of probabilities suggested, by transactions not uncommon in the region where his genius gathered the ingredients of its sorceries, more than the half of its merits disappear, while the other half brighten with the lustre of truth.

The manners, the actions, and the incidents were new to the English mind; but to the inhabitant of the Levant they have long been familiar, and the traveller who visits that region will hesitate to admit that Lord Byron possessed those creative powers, and that discernment of dark bosoms for which he is so much celebrated; because he will see there how little of invention was necessary to form such heroes as Conrad, and how much the actual traffic of life and trade is constantly stimulating enterprise and bravery. But let it not, therefore, be supposed, that I would undervalue either the genius of the poet, or the merits of the poem, in saying so, for I do think a higher faculty has been exerted in The Corsair than in Childe Harold. In the latter, only actual things are described, freshly and vigorously as they were seen, and feelings expressed eloquently as they were felt; but in the former, the talent of combination has been splendidly employed. The one is a view from nature, the other is a composition both from nature and from history.

Lara, which appeared soon after The Corsair, is an evident supplement to it; the description of the hero corresponds in person and character with Conrad; so that the remarks made on The Corsair apply, in all respects, to Lara. The poem itself is perhaps, in elegance, superior; but the descriptions are not so vivid, simply because they are more indebted to imagination. There is one of them, however, in which the lake and abbey of Newstead are dimly shadowed, equal in sweetness and solemnity to anything the poet has ever written.

It was the night, and Lara’s glassy streamThe stars are studding each with imaged beam:So calm, the waters scarcely seem to stray,And yet they glide, like happiness, away;Reflecting far and fairy-like from highThe immortal lights that live along the sky;Its banks are fringed with many a goodly tree,And flowers the fairest that may feast the bee:Such in her chaplet infant Dian wove,And innocence would offer to her love;These deck the shore, the waves their channel makeIn windings bright and mazy, like the snake.All was so still, so soft in earth and air,You scarce would start to meet a spirit there,Secure that naught of evil could delightTo walk in such a scene, in such a night!It was a moment only for the good:So Lara deemed: nor longer there he stood;But turn’d in silence to his castle-gate:Such scene his soul no more could contemplate:Such scene reminded him of other days,Of skies more cloudless, moons of purer blaze;Of nights more soft and frequent, hearts that now —No, no! the storm may beat upon his browUnfelt, unsparing; but a night like this,A night of beauty, mock’d such breast as his.He turn’d within his solitary hall,And his high shadow shot along the wall:There were the painted forms of other times —’Twas all they left of virtues or of crimes,Save vague tradition; and the gloomy vaultsThat hid their dust, their foibles, and their faults,And half a column of the pompous page,That speeds the spacious tale from age to age;Where history’s pen its praise or blame suppliesAnd lies like truth, and still most truly lies;He wand’ring mused, and as the moonbeam shoneThrough the dim lattice o’er the floor of stone,And the high-fretted roof and saints that thereO’er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer;Reflected in fantastic figures grewLike life, but not like mortal life to view;His bristling locks of sable, brow of gloom,And the wide waving of his shaken plumeGlanced like a spectre’s attributes, and gaveHis aspect all that terror gives the grave.

That Byron wrote best when he wrote of himself and of his own, has probably been already made sufficiently apparent. In this respect he stands alone and apart from all other poets, and there will be occasion to show, that this peculiarity extended much farther over all his works, than merely to those which may be said to have required him to be thus personal. The great distinction, indeed, of his merit consists in that singularity. Shakspeare, in drawing the materials of his dramas from tales and history has, with wonderful art, given from his own invention and imagination the fittest and most appropriate sentiments and language; and admiration at the perfection with which he has accomplished this, can never be exhausted. The difference between Byron and Shakspeare consists in the curious accident, if it may be so called, by which the former was placed in circumstances which taught him to feel in himself the very sentiments that he has ascribed to his characters. Shakspeare created the feelings of his, and with such excellence, that they are not only probable to the situations, but give to the personifications the individuality of living persons. Byron’s are scarcely less so; but with him there was no invention, only experience, and when he attempts to express more than he has himself known, he is always comparatively feeble.

CHAPTER XXXI

Byron determines to reside abroad—Visits the Plain of Waterloo—State of his Feelings

From different incidental expressions in his correspondence it is sufficiently evident that Byron, before his marriage, intended to reside abroad. In his letter to me of the 11th December, 1813, he distinctly states this intention, and intimates that he then thought of establishing his home in Greece. It is not therefore surprising that, after his separation from Lady Byron, he should have determined to carry this intention into effect; for at that period, besides the calumny heaped upon him from all quarters, the embarrassment of his affairs, and the retaliatory satire, all tended to force him into exile; he had no longer any particular tie to bind him to England.

On the 25th of April, 1816, he sailed for Ostend, and resumed the composition of Childe Harold, it may be said, from the moment of his embarkation. In it, however, there is no longer the fiction of an imaginary character stalking like a shadow amid his descriptions and reflections – he comes more decidedly forwards as the hero in his own person.

In passing to Brussels he visited the field of Waterloo, and the slight sketch which he has given in the poem of that eventful conflict is still the finest which has yet been written on the subject.

But the note of his visit to the field is of more importance to my present purpose, inasmuch as it tends to illustrate the querulous state of his own mind at the time.

“I went on horseback twice over the field, comparing it with my recollection of similar scenes. As a plain, Waterloo seems marked out for the scene of some great action, though this may be mere imagination. I have viewed with attention those of Platea, Troy, Mantinea, Leuctra, Chævronæ, and Marathon, and the field round Mont St Jean and Hugoumont appears to want little but a better cause and that indefinable but impressive halo which the lapse of ages throws around a celebrated spot, to vie in interest with any or all of these, except perhaps the last-mentioned.”

The expression “a better cause,” could only have been engendered in mere waywardness; but throughout his reflections at this period a peevish ill-will towards England is often manifested, as if he sought to attract attention by exasperating the national pride; that pride which he secretly flattered himself was to be augmented by his own fame.

I cannot, in tracing his travels through the third canto, test the accuracy of his descriptions as in the former two; but as they are all drawn from actual views they have the same vivid individuality impressed upon them. Nothing can be more simple and affecting than the following picture, nor less likely to be an imaginary scene:

By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground,There is a small and simple pyramid,Crowning the summit of the verdant mound;Beneath its base are heroes’ ashes hid,Our enemies. And let not that forbidHonour to Marceau, o’er whose early tombTears, big tears, rush’d from the rough soldier’s lid,Lamenting and yet envying such a doom,Falling for France, whose rights he battled to resume.

Perhaps few passages of descriptive poetry excel that in which reference is made to the column of Avenches, the ancient Aventicum. It combines with an image distinct and picturesque, poetical associations full of the grave and moral breathings of olden forms and hoary antiquity.

By a lone wall, a lonelier column rearsA gray and grief-worn aspect of old days:’Tis the last remnant of the wreck of years,And looks as with the wild-bewilder’d gazeOf one to stone converted by amaze,Yet still with consciousness; and there it stands,Making a marvel that it not decays,When the coeval pride of human hands,Levell’d Aventicum, hath strew’d her subject lands.

But the most remarkable quality in the third canto is the deep, low bass of thought which runs through several passages, and which gives to it, when considered with reference to the circumstances under which it was written, the serious character of documentary evidence as to the remorseful condition of the poet’s mind. It would be, after what has already been pointed out in brighter incidents, affectation not to say, that these sad bursts of feeling and wild paroxysms, bear strong indications of having been suggested by the wreck of his domestic happiness, and dictated by contrition for the part he had himself taken in the ruin. The following reflections on the unguarded hour, are full of pathos and solemnity, amounting almost to the deep and dreadful harmony of Manfred:

To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind;All are not fit with them to stir and toil,Nor is it discontent to keep the mindDeep in its fountain, lest it overboilIn the hot throng, where we become the spoilOf our infection, till too late and longWe may deplore and struggle with the coil,In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong’Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong.There, in a moment, we may plunge our yearsIn fatal penitence, and in the blightOf our own soul, turn all our blood to tears,And colour things to come with hues of night;The race of life becomes a hopeless flightTo those who walk in darkness: on the sea,The boldest steer but where their ports invite;But there are wanderers o’er eternity,Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor’d ne’er shall be.

These sentiments are conceived in the mood of an awed spirit; they breathe of sorrow and penitence. Of the weariness of satiety the pilgrim no more complains; he is no longer despondent from exhaustion, and the lost appetite of passion, but from the weight of a burden which he cannot lay down; and he clings to visible objects, as if from their nature he could extract a moral strength.

I live not in myself, but I becomePortion of that around me; and to me,High mountains are a feeling, but the humOf human cities tortures: I can seeNothing to loathe in nature, save to beA link reluctant in a fleshly chain,Class’d among creatures, where the soul can flee,And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plainOf ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.

These dim revelations of black and lowering thought are overshadowed with a darker hue than sorrow alone could have cast. A consciousness of sinful blame is evident amid them; and though the fantasies that loom through the mystery, are not so hideous as the guilty reveries in the weird caldron of Manfred’s conscience, still they have an awful resemblance to them. They are phantoms of the same murky element, and, being more akin to fortitude than despair, prophesy not of hereafter, but oracularly confess suffering.

Manfred himself hath given vent to no finer horror than the oracle that speaks in this magnificent stanza:

I have not loved the world, nor the world me;I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’dTo its idolatries a patient knee —Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles – nor cried aloudIn worship of an echo; – in the crowdThey could not deem me one of such; I stoodAmong them, but not of them; in a shroudOf thoughts which were not of their thoughts, and still could,Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.

There are times in life when all men feel their sympathies extinct, and Lord Byron was evidently in that condition, when he penned these remarkable lines; but independently of their striking beauty, the scenery in which they were conceived deserves to be considered with reference to the sentiment that pervades them. For it was amid the same obscure ravines, pine-tufted precipices and falling waters of the Alps, that he afterward placed the outcast Manfred – an additional corroboration of the justness of the remarks which I ventured to offer, in adverting to his ruminations in contemplating, while yet a boy, the Malvern hills, as if they were the scenes of his impassioned childhood. In “the palaces of nature,” he first felt the consciousness of having done some wrong, and when he would infuse into another, albeit in a wilder degree, the feelings he had himself felt, he recalled the images which had ministered to the cogitations of his own contrition. But I shall have occasion to speak more of this, when I come to consider the nature of the guilt and misery of Manfred.

That Manfred is the greatest of Byron’s works will probably not be disputed. It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character. How then, it may be asked, does this moral phantom, that has never been, bear any resemblance to the poet himself? Must not, in this instance, the hypothesis which assigns to Byron’s heroes his own sentiments and feelings be abandoned? I think not. In noticing the deep and solemn reflections with which he was affected in ascending the Rhine, and which he has embodied in the third canto of Childe Harold, I have already pointed out a similarity in the tenour of the thoughts to those of Manfred, as well as the striking acknowledgment of the “filed” mind. There is, moreover, in the drama, the same distaste of the world which Byron himself expressed when cogitating on the desolation of his hearth, and the same contempt of the insufficiency of his genius and renown to mitigate contrition – all in strange harmony with the same magnificent objects of sight. Is not the opening soliloquy of Manfred the very echo of the reflections on the Rhine?

My slumbers – if I slumber – are not sleep,But a continuance of enduring thought,Which then I can resist not; in my heartThere is a vigil, and these eyes but closeTo look within – and yet I live and bearThe aspect and the form of breathing man.

But the following is more impressive: it is the very phrase he would himself have employed to have spoken of the consequences of his fatal marriage:

My in juries came down on those who lov’d me,On those whom I best lov’d; I never quell’dAn enemy, save in my just defence —But my embrace was fatal.

He had not, indeed, been engaged in any duel of which the issue was mortal; but he had been so far engaged with more than one, that he could easily conceive what it would have been to have quelled an enemy in just defence. But unless the reader can himself discern, by his sympathies, that there is the resemblance I contend for, it is of no use to multiply instances. I shall, therefore, give but one other extract, which breathes the predominant spirit of all Byron ‘s works – that sad translation of the preacher’s “vanity of vanities; all is vanity!”

Look on me! there is an orderOf mortals on the earth, who do becomeOld in their youth and die ere middle age,Without the violence of warlike death;Some perishing of pleasure – some of study —Some worn with toil – some of mere weariness —Some of disease – and some insanity —And some of wither’d or of broken hearts;For this last is a malady which slaysMore than are number’d in the lists of Fate;Taking all shapes, and bearing many names.Look upon me! for even of all these thingsHave I partaken – and of all these thingsOne were enough; then wonder not that IAm what I am, but that I ever was,Or, having been, that I am still on earth.

CHAPTER XXXII

Byron’s Residence in Switzerland—Excursion to the Glaciers—“Manfred” founded on a magical Sacrifice, not on Guilt—Similarity between Sentiments given to Manfred and those expressed by Lord Byron in his own Person

The account given by Captain Medwin of the manner in which Lord Byron spent his time in Switzerland, has the raciness of his Lordship’s own quaintness, somewhat diluted. The reality of the conversations I have heard questioned, but they relate in some instances to matters not generally known, to the truth of several of which I can myself bear witness; moreover they have much of the poet’s peculiar modes of thinking about them, though weakened in effect by the reporter. No man can give a just representation of another who is not capable of putting himself into the character of his original, and of thinking with his power and intelligence. Still there are occasional touches of merit in the feeble outlines of Captain Medwin, and with this conviction it would be negligence not to avail myself of them.

“Switzerland,” said his Lordship, “is a country I have been satisfied with seeing once; Turkey I could live in for ever. I never forget my predilections: I was in a wretched state of health and worse spirits when I was at Geneva; but quiet and the lake, better physicians than Polidori, soon set me up. I never led so moral a life as during my residence in that country; but I gained no credit by it. Where there is mortification there ought to be reward. On the contrary, there is no story so absurd that they did not invent at my cost. I was watched by glasses on the opposite side of the lake, and by glasses, too, that must have had very distorted optics; I was waylaid in my evening drives. I believe they looked upon me as a man-monster.