Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) by Thomas Moore

T >> Thomas Moore >> Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6)

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30

To the moral sense so dangerous are the effects of this quality, that
it would hardly, perhaps, be generalising too widely to assert that
wheresoever great versatility of power exists, there will also be
found a tendency to versatility of principle. The poet Chatterton, in
whose soul the seeds of all that is good and bad in genius so
prematurely ripened, said, in the consciousness of this multiple
faculty, that he "held that man in contempt who could not write on
both sides of a question;" and it was by acting in accordance with
this principle himself that he brought one of the few stains upon his
name which a life so short afforded time to incur. Mirabeau, too,
when, in the legal warfare between his father and mother, he helped
to draw up for each the pleadings against the other, was influenced
less, no doubt, by the pleasure of mischief than by this pride of
talent, and lost sight of the unnatural perfidy of the task in the
adroitness with which he executed it.

The quality which I have here denominated versatility, as applied to
_power_, Lord Byron has himself designated by the French word
"mobility," as applied to _feeling_ and _conduct_; and, in one of the
Cantos of Don Juan, has described happily some of its lighter
features. After telling us that his hero had begun to doubt, from the
great predominance of this quality in her, "how much of Adeline was
_real_," he says,--

"So well she acted, all and every part,
By turns,--with that vivacious versatility,
Which many people take for want of heart.
They err--'tis merely what is called mobility,
A thing of temperament and not of art,
Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;
And false--though true; for surely they're sincerest,
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest."

That he was fully aware not only of the abundance of this quality in
his own nature, but of the danger in which it placed consistency and
singleness of character, did not require the note on this passage,
where he calls it "an unhappy attribute," to assure us. The
consciousness, indeed, of his own natural tendency to yield thus to
every chance impression, and change with every passing impulse, was
not only for ever present in his mind, but,--aware as he was of the
suspicion of weakness attached by the world to any retractation or
abandonment of long professed opinions,--had the effect of keeping
him in that general line of consistency, on certain great subjects,
which, notwithstanding occasional fluctuations and contradictions as
to the details of these very subjects, he continued to preserve
throughout life. A passage from one of his manuscripts will show how
sagaciously he saw the necessity of guarding himself against his own
instability in this respect. "The world visits change of politics or
change of religion with a more severe censure than a mere difference
of opinion would appear to me to deserve. But there must be some
reason for this feeling;--and I think it is that these departures
from the earliest instilled ideas of our childhood, and from the line
of conduct chosen by us when we first enter into public life, have
been seen to have more mischievous results for society, and to prove
more weakness of mind than other actions, in themselves, more
immoral."

The same distrust in his own steadiness, thus keeping alive in him a
conscientious self-watchfulness, concurred not a little, I have no
doubt, with the innate kindness of his nature, to preserve so
constant and unbroken the greater number of his attachments through
life;--some of them, as in the instance of his mother, owing
evidently more to a sense of duty than to real affection, the
consistency with which, so creditably to the strength of his
character, they were maintained.

But while in these respects, as well as in the sort of task-like
perseverance with which the habits and amusements of his youth were
held fast by him, he succeeded in conquering the variableness and
love of novelty so natural to him, in all else that could engage his
mind, in all the excursions, whether of his reason or his fancy, he
gave way to this versatile humour without scruple or check,--taking
every shape in which genius could manifest its power, and
transferring himself to every region of thought where new conquests
were to be achieved.

It was impossible but that such a range of will and power should be
abused. It was impossible that, among the spirits he invoked from all
quarters, those of darkness should not appear, at his bidding, with
those of light. And here the dangers of an energy so multifold, and
thus luxuriating in its own transformations, show themselves. To this
one great object of displaying power,--various, splendid, and
all-adorning power,--every other consideration and duty were but too
likely to be sacrificed. Let the advocate but display his eloquence
and art, no matter what the cause;--let the stamp of energy be but
left behind, no matter with what seal. _Could_ it have been expected
that from such a career no mischief would ensue, or that among these
cross-lights of imagination the moral vision could remain
undisturbed? _Is_ it to be at all wondered at that in the works of
one thus gifted and carried away, we should find,--wholly, too,
without any prepense design of corrupting on his side,--a false
splendour given to Vice to make it look like Virtue, and Evil too
often invested with a grandeur which belongs intrinsically but to
Good?

Among the less serious ills flowing from this abuse of his great
versatile powers,--more especially as exhibited in his most
characteristic work, Don Juan,--it will be found that even the
strength and impressiveness of his poetry is sometimes not a little
injured by the capricious and desultory flights into which this
pliancy of wing allures him. It must be felt, indeed, by all readers
of that work, and particularly by those who, being gifted with but a
small portion of such ductility themselves, are unable to keep pace
with his changes, that the suddenness with which he passes from one
strain of sentiment to another,--from the frolic to the sad, from the
cynical to the tender,--begets a distrust in the sincerity of one or
both moods of mind which interferes with, if not chills, the sympathy
that a more natural transition would inspire. In general such a
suspicion would do him injustice; as, among the singular combinations
which his mind presented, that of uniting at once versatility and
depth of feeling was not the least remarkable. But, on the whole,
favourable as was all this quickness and variety of association to
the extension of the range and resources of his poetry, it may be
questioned whether a more select concentration of his powers would
not have afforded a still more grand and precious result. Had the
minds of Milton and Tasso been thus thrown open to the incursions of
light, ludicrous fancies, who can doubt that those solemn sanctuaries
of genius would have been as much injured as profaned by the
intrusion?--and it is at least a question whether, if Lord Byron had
not been so actively versatile, so totally under the dominion of

"A fancy, like the air, most free,
And full of mutability,"

he would not have been less wonderful, perhaps, but more great.

Nor was it only in his poetical creations that this love and power of
variety showed itself:--one of the most pervading weaknesses of his
life may be traced to the same fertile source. The pride of
personating every description of character, evil as well as good,
influenced but too much, as we have seen, his ambition, and, not a
little, his conduct; and as, in poetry, his own experience of the ill
effects of passion was made to minister materials to the workings of
his imagination, so, in return, his imagination supplied that dark
colouring under which he so often disguised his true aspect from the
world. To such a perverse length, indeed, did he carry this fancy for
self-defamation, that if (as sometimes, in his moments of gloom, he
persuaded himself,) there was any tendency to derangement in his
mental conformation[1], on this point alone could it be pronounced to
have manifested itself.[2] In the early part of my acquaintance with
him, when he most gave way to this humour,--for it was observable
afterwards, when the world joined in his own opinion of himself, he
rather shrunk from the echo,--I have known him more than once, as we
have sat together after dinner, and he was, at the time, perhaps, a
little under the influence of wine, to fall seriously into this sort
of dark and self-accusing mood, and throw out hints of his past life
with an air of gloom and mystery designed evidently to awaken
curiosity and interest. He was, however, too promptly alive to the
least approaches of ridicule not to perceive, on these occasions,
that the gravity of his hearer was only prevented from being
disturbed by an effort of politeness, and he accordingly never again
tried this romantic mystification upon me. From what I have known,
however, of his experiments upon more impressible listeners, I have
little doubt that, to produce effect at the moment, there is hardly
any crime so dark or desperate of which, in the excitement of thus
acting upon the imaginations of others, he would not have hinted that
he had been guilty; and it has sometimes occurred to me that the
occult cause of his lady's separation from him, round which herself
and her legal adviser have thrown such formidable mystery, may have
been nothing more, after all, than some imposture of this kind, some
dimly hinted confession of undefined horrors, which, though intended
by the relater but to mystify and surprise, the hearer so little
understood him as to take in sober seriousness.

[Footnote 1: We have seen how often, in his Journals and Letters,
this suspicion of his own mental soundness is intimated. A similar
notion, with respect to himself, seems to have taken hold also of the
strong mind of Johnson, who, like Byron, too, was disposed to
attribute to an hereditary tinge that melancholy which, as he said,
"made him mad all his life, at least not sober." This peculiar
feature of Johnson's mind has, in the late new edition of Boswell's
Life of him, given rise to some remarks, pregnant with all the
editor's well known acuteness, which, as bearing on a point so
important in the history of the human intellect, will be found worthy
of all attention.

In one of the many letters of Lord Byron to myself, which I have
thought right to omit, I find him tracing this supposed disturbance
of his own faculties to the marriage of Miss Chaworth;--"a marriage,"
he says, "for which she sacrificed the prospects of two very ancient
families, and a heart which was hers from ten years old, and a head
which has never been quite right since."]

[Footnote 2: In his Diary of 1814 there is a passage (vol. ii. page
270.) which I had preserved solely for the purpose of illustrating
this obliquity of his mind, intending, at the same time, to accompany
it with an explanatory note. From some inadvertence, however, the
note was omitted; and, thus left to itself, this piece of
mystification has, with the French readers of the work, I see,
succeeded most perfectly; there being no imaginable variety of murder
which the votaries of the new romantic school have not been busily
extracting out of the mystery of that passage.]

This strange propensity with which the man was, as it were,
inoculated by the poet, re-acted back again upon his poetry, so as to
produce, in some of his delineations of character, that inconsistency
which has not unfrequently been noticed by his critics,--namely, the
junction of one or two lofty and shining virtues with "a thousand
crimes" altogether incompatible with them; this anomaly being, in
fact, accounted for by the two different sorts of ambition that
actuated him,--the natural one, of infusing into his personages those
high and kindly qualities he felt conscious of within himself, and
the artificial one, of investing them with those crimes which he so
boyishly wished imputed to him by the world.

Independently, however, of any such efforts towards blackening his
own name, and even after he had learned from bitter experience the
rash folly of such a system, there was still, in the openness and
over-frankness of his nature, and that indulgence of impulse with
which he gave utterance to, if not acted upon, every chance
impression of the moment, more than sufficient to bring his
character, in all its least favourable lights, before the world. Who
is there, indeed, that could bear to be judged by even the best of
those unnumbered thoughts that course each other, like waves of the
sea, through our minds, passing away unuttered, and, for the most
part, even unowned by ourselves?--Yet to such a test was Byron's
character throughout his whole life exposed. As well from the
precipitance with which he gave way to every impulse as from the
passion he had for recording his own impressions, all those
heterogeneous thoughts, fantasies, and desires that, in other men's
minds, "come like shadows, so depart," were by him fixed and embodied
as they presented themselves, and, at once, taking a shape cognizable
by public opinion, either in his actions or his words, either in the
hasty letter of the moment, or the poem for all time, laid open such
a range of vulnerable points before his judges, as no one individual
perhaps ever before, of himself, presented.

With such abundance and variety of materials for portraiture, it may
easily be conceived how two professed delineators of his character,
the one over partial and the other malicious, might,--the former, by
selecting only the fairer, and the latter only the darker,
features,--produce two portraits of Lord Byron, as much differing
from each other as they would both be, on the whole, unlike the
original.

Of the utter powerlessness of retention with which he promulgated his
every thought and feeling,--more especially if at all connected with
the subject of self,--without allowing even a pause for the almost
instinctive consideration whether by such disclosures he might not be
conveying a calumnious impression of himself, a stronger instance
could hardly be given than is to be found in a conversation held by
him with Mr. Trelawney, as reported by this latter gentleman, when
they were on their way together to Greece. After some remarks on the
state of his own health[1], mental and bodily, he said, "I don't know
how it is, but I am so cowardly at times, that if, this morning, you
had come down and horsewhipped me, I should have submitted without
opposition. Why is this? If one of these fits come over me when we
are in Greece, what shall I do?"--"I told him (continues Mr.
Trelawney) that it was the excessive debility of his nerves. He said,
'Yes, and of my head, too. I was very heroic when I left Genoa, but,
like Acres, I feel my courage oozing out at my palms.'"

[Footnote 1: "He often mentioned," says Mr. Trelawney, "that he
thought he should not live many years, and said that he would die in
Greece." This he told me at Cephalonia. He always seemed unmoved on
these occasions, perfectly indifferent as to when he died, only
saying that he could not bear pain. On our voyage we had been reading
with great attention the life and letters of Swift, edited by Scott,
and we almost daily, or rather nightly, talked them over; and he more
than once expressed his horror of existing in that state, and
expressed some fears that it would be his fate.]

It will hardly, by those who know any thing of human nature, be
denied that such misgivings and heart-sinkings as are here described
may, under a similar depression of spirits, have found their way into
the thoughts of some of the gallantest hearts that ever
breathed;--but then, untold and unremembered, even by the sufferer
himself, they passed off with the passing infirmity that produced
them, leaving neither to truth to record them as proofs of want of
health, nor to calumny to fasten upon them a suspicion of want of
bravery. The assertion of some one that all men are by nature
cowardly would seem to be countenanced by the readiness with which
most men believe others so. "I have lived," says the Prince de Ligne,
"to hear Voltaire called a fool, and the great Frederick a coward."
The Duke of Marlborough in his own times, and Napoleon in ours, have
found persons not only to assert but believe the same charge against
them. After such glaring instances of the tendency of some minds to
view greatness only through an inverting medium, it need little
surprise us that Lord Byron's conduct in Greece should, on the same
principle, have engendered a similar insinuation against him; nor
should I have at all noticed the weak slander, but for the
opportunity which it affords me of endeavouring to point out what
appears to me the peculiar nature of the courage by which, on all
occasions that called for it, he so strikingly distinguished himself.

Whatever virtue may be allowed to belong to personal courage, it is,
most assuredly, they who are endowed by nature with the liveliest
imaginations, and who have therefore most vividly and simultaneously
before their eyes all the remote and possible consequences of danger,
that are most deserving of whatever praise attends the exercise of
that virtue. A bravery of this kind, which springs more out of mind
than temperament,--or rather, perhaps, out of the conquest of the
former over the latter,--will naturally proportion its exertion to
the importance of the occasion; and the same person who is seen to
shrink with an almost feminine fear from ignoble and every-day
perils, may be found foremost in the very jaws of danger where honour
is to be either maintained or won. Nor does this remark apply only to
the imaginative class, of whom I am chiefly treating. By the same
calculating principle, it will be found that most men whose bravery
is the result not of temperament but reflection, are regulated in
their daring. The wise De Wit, though negligent of his life on great
occasions, was not ashamed, we are told, of dreading and avoiding
whatever endangered it on others.

Of the apprehensiveness that attends quick imaginations, Lord Byron
had, of course, a considerable share, and in all situations of
ordinary peril gave way to it without reserve. I have seldom seen any
person, male or female, more timid in a carriage; and, in riding, his
preparation against accidents showed the same nervous and imaginative
fearfulness. "His bridle," says the late Lord B----, who rode
frequently with him at Genoa, "had, besides cavesson and martingale,
various reins; and whenever he came near a place where his horse was
likely to shy, he gathered up these said reins and fixed himself as
if he was going at a five-barred gate." None surely but the most
superficial or most prejudiced observers could ever seriously found
upon such indications of nervousness any conclusion against the real
courage of him who was subject to them. The poet Ariosto, who was, it
seems, a victim to the same fair-weather alarms,--who, when on
horseback, would alight at the least appearance of danger, and on the
water was particularly timorous,--could yet, in the action between
the Pope's vessels and the Duke of Ferrara's, fight like a lion; and
in the same manner the courage of Lord Byron, as all his companions
in peril testify, was of that noblest kind which rises with the
greatness of the occasion, and becomes but the more self-collected
and resisting, the more imminent the danger.

In proposing to show that the distinctive properties of Lord Byron's
character, as well moral as literary, arose mainly from those two
great sources, the unexampled versatility of his powers and feelings,
and the facility with which he gave way to the impulses of both, it
had been my intention to pursue the subject still further in detail,
and to endeavour to trace throughout the various excellences and
defects, both of his poetry and his life, the operation of these two
dominant attributes of his nature. "No men," says Cowper, in speaking
of persons of a versatile turn of mind, "are better qualified for
companions in such a world as this than men of such temperament.
Every scene of life has two sides, a dark and a bright one; and the
mind that has an equal mixture of melancholy and vivacity is best of
all qualified for the contemplation of either." It would not be
difficult to show that to this readiness in reflecting all hues,
whether of the shadows or the lights of our variegated existence,
Lord Byron owed not only the great range of his influence as a poet,
but those powers of fascination which he possessed as a man. This
susceptibility, indeed, of immediate impressions, which in him was so
active, lent a charm, of all others the most attractive, to his
social intercourse, by giving to those who were, at the moment,
present, such ascendant influence, that they alone for the time
occupied all his thoughts and feelings, and brought whatever was most
agreeable in his nature into play.[1]

[Footnote 1: In reference to his power of adapting himself to all
sorts of society, and taking upon himself all varieties of character,
I find a passage in one of my early letters to him (from Ireland)
which, though it might be expressed, perhaps, in better taste, is
worth citing for its truth:--"Though I have not written, I have
seldom ceased to think of you; for you are that sort of being whom
every thing, high or low, brings into one's mind. Whether I am with
the wise or the waggish, among poets or among pugilists, over the
book or over the bottle, you are sure to connect yourself
transcendently with all, and come 'armed for _every_ field' into my
memory."]

So much did this extreme mobility,--this readiness to be "strongly
acted on by what was nearest,"--abound in his disposition, that, even
with the casual acquaintances of the hour, his heart was upon his
lips[1], and it depended wholly upon themselves whether they might
not become at once the depositories of every secret, if it might be
so called, of his whole life. That in this convergence of all the
powers of pleasing towards present objects, those absent should be
sometimes forgotten, or, what is worse, sacrificed to the reigning
desire of the moment, is unluckily one of the alloys attendant upon
persons of this temperament, which renders their fidelity, either as
lovers or confidants, not a little precarious. But of the charm which
such a disposition diffuses through the manner there can be but
little doubt,--and least of all among those who have ever felt its
influence in Lord Byron. Neither are the instances in which he has
been known to make imprudent disclosures of what had been said or
written by others of the persons with whom he was conversing to be
all set down to this rash overflow of the social hour. In his own
frankness of spirit, and hatred of all disguise, this practice,
pregnant as it was with inconvenience, and sometimes danger, in a
great degree originated. To confront the accused with the accuser
was, in such cases, his delight,--not only as a revenge for having
been made the medium of what men durst not say openly to each other,
but as a gratification of that love of small mischief which he had
retained from boyhood, and which the confusion that followed such
exposures was always sure to amuse. This habit, too, being, as I have
before remarked, well known to his friends, their sense of prudence,
if not their fairness, was put fully on its guard, and he himself was
spared the pain of hearing what he could not, without inflicting
still worse, repeat.

[Footnote 1: It is curious to observe how, in all times, and all
countries, what is called the poetical temperament has, in the great
possessors, and victims, of that gift, produced similar effects. In
the following passage, the biographer of Tasso has, in painting that
poet, described Byron also:--"There are some persons of a sensibility
so powerful, that whoever happens to be with them is, at that moment,
to them the world: their hearts involuntarily open; they are prompted
by a strong desire to please; and they thus make confidants of their
sentiments people whom they in reality regard with indifference."]

A most apt illustration of this point of his character is to be found
in an anecdote told of him by Parry, who, though himself the victim,
had the sense and good temper to perceive the source to which Byron's
conduct was to be traced. While the Turkish fleet was blockading
Missolonghi, his Lordship, one day, attended by Parry, proceeded in a
small punt, rowed by a boy, to the mouth of the harbour, while in a
large boat accompanying them were Prince Mavrocordato and his
attendants. In this situation, an indignant feeling of contempt and
impatience at the supineness of their Greek friends seized the
engineer, and he proceeded to vent this feeling to Lord Byron in no
very measured terms, pronouncing Prince Mavrocordato to be "an old
gentlewoman," and concluding, according to his own statement, with
the following words:--"If I were in their place, I should be in a
fever at the thought of my own incapacity and ignorance, and should
burn with impatience to attempt the destruction of those rascal
Turks. But the Greeks and the Turks are opponents worthy, by their
imbecility, of each other."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30