A Publisher and His Friends Part 24

I saw Mr. Shadwell to-day on "Don Juan." He has gone through the book with more attention than Mr. Bell had time to do. He desires me to say that he does not think the Chancellor would refuse an injunction, or would overturn it if obtained....

Yours most faithfully,

SHARON TURNER.

In the event the injunction to restrain the publication of "Don Juan" by piratical publishers was granted.

Towards the end of 1819 Byron thought of returning to England. On November 8 he wrote to Mr. Murray:

"If she [the Countess Guiccioli] and her husband make it up, you will perhaps see me in England sooner than you expect. If not, I will retire with her to France or America, change my name, and lead a quiet provincial life. If she gets over this, and I get over my Tertian ague, I will perhaps look in at Albemarle Street _en pa.s.sant_ to Bolivar."

When Mr. Hobhouse, then living at Ramsbury, heard of Byron's intention to go to South America, he wrote to Mr. Murray as follows:

" ... To be sure it is impossible that Lord B. should seriously contemplate, or, if he does, he must not expect us to encourage, this mad scheme. I do not know what in the world to say, but presume some one has been talking nonsense to him. Let Jim Perry go to Venezuela if he will--he may edit his 'Independent Gazette' amongst the Independents themselves, and reproduce his stale puns and politics without let or hindrance. But our poet is too good for a planter--too good to sit down before a fire made of mare's legs, to a dinner of beef without salt and bread. It is the wildest of all his meditations--pray tell him. The plague and Yellow Jack, and famine and free quarter, besides a thousand other ills, will stare him in the face. No tooth-brushes, no corn-rubbers, no _Quarterly Reviews_. In short, plenty of all he abominates and nothing of all he loves. I shall write, but you can tell facts, which will be better than my arguments."

Byron's half-formed intention was soon abandoned, and the Countess Guiccioli's serious illness recalled him to Ravenna, where he remained for the next year and a half.

Hobhouse's next letter to Murray (January 1820), in which he reported "Bad news from Ravenna--a great pity indeed," is dated _Newgate_, where he had been lodged in consequence of his pamphlet ent.i.tled "A Trifling Mistake in Thomas Lord Erskine's Recent Pamphlet," containing several very strong reflections on the House of Commons as then const.i.tuted.

During his imprisonment, Mr. Hobhouse was visited by Mr. Murray and Ugo Foscolo, as well as by many of his political friends.

Lady Caroline Lamb also wrote to Mr. Murray from Brockett Hall, asking for information about Byron and Hobhouse.

_Lady Caroline Lamb to John Murray_.

You have never written to tell me about him. Now, did you know the pain and agony this has given me, you had not been so remiss. If you could come here on Wednesday for one night, I have a few people and a supper.

You could come by the Mail in two hours, much swifter than even in your swift carriage; and I have one million of things to say and ask also. Do tell me how that dear Radical Hob is, and pray remember me to him. I really hope you will be here at dinner or supper on Wednesday. Your bedroom shall be ready, and you can be back in Town before most people are up, though I rise here at seven.

Yours quite disturbed my mind, for want of your telling me how he [Byron] looks, what he says, if he is grown fat, if he is no uglier than he used to be, if he is good-humoured or cross-grained, putting his brows down--if his hair curls or is straight as somebody said, if he has seen Hobhouse, if he is going to stay long, if you went to Dover as you intended, and a great deal more, which, if you had the smallest tact or aught else, you would have written long ago; for as to me, I shall certainly not see him, neither do I care he should know that I ever asked after him. It is from mere curiosity I should like to hear all you can tell me about him. Pray come here immediately.

Yours,

C.L.

Notwithstanding the remarkable sale of "Don Juan," Murray hesitated about publishing any more of the cantos. After the fifth canto was published, Lord Byron informed Murray that it was "hardly the beginning of the work," that he intended to take Don Juan through the tour of Europe, put him through the Divorce Court, and make him finish as Anacharsis Clootz in the French Revolution. Besides being influenced by his own feelings, it is possible that the following letter of Mr. Croker may have induced Mr. Murray to have nothing further to do with the work:

_Mr. Croker to John Murray_.

MUNSTER HOUSE, _March_ 26, 1820.

_A rainy Sunday_.

DEAR MURRAY,

I have to thank you for letting me see your two new cantos [the 3rd and 4th], which I return. What sublimity! what levity! what boldness! what tenderness! what majesty! what trifling! what variety! what _tediousness_!--for tedious to a strange degree, it must be confessed that whole pa.s.sages are, particularly the earlier stanzas of the fourth canto. I know no man of such general powers of intellect as Brougham, yet I think _him_ insufferably tedious; and I fancy the reason to be that he has such _facility_ of expression that he is never recalled to a _selection_ of his thoughts. A more costive orator would be obliged to choose, and a man of his talents could not fail to choose the best; but the power of uttering all and everything which pa.s.ses across his mind, tempts him to say all. He goes on without thought--I should rather say, without pause. His speeches are poor from their richness, and dull from their infinite variety. An impediment in his speech would make him a perfect Demosthenes. Something of the same kind, and with something of the same effect, is Lord Byron's wonderful fertility of thought and facility of expression; and the Protean style of "Don Juan," instead of checking (as the fetters of rhythm generally do) his natural activity, not only gives him wider limits to range in, but even generates a more roving disposition. I dare swear, if the truth were known, that his digressions and repet.i.tions generate one another, and that the happy jingle of some of his comical rhymes has led him on to episodes of which he never originally thought; and thus it is that, with the most extraordinary merit, _merit of all kinds_, these two cantos have been to _me_, in several points, tedious and even obscure.

As to the PRINCIPLES, all the world, and you, Mr. Murray, _first of all_, have done this poem great injustice. There are levities here and there, more than good taste approves, but nothing to make such a terrible rout about--nothing so bad as "Tom Jones," nor within a hundred degrees of "Count Fathom."

The writer goes on to remark that the personalities in the poem are more to be deprecated than "its imputed looseness of principle":

I mean some expressions of political and personal feelings which, I believe, he, in fact, never felt, and threw in wantonly and _de gaiete de coeur_, and which he would have omitted, advisedly and _de bonte de coeur_, if he had not been goaded by indiscreet, contradictory, and urgent _criticisms_, which, in some cases, were dark enough to be called _calumnies_. But these are blowing over, if not blown over; and I cannot but think that if Mr. Gifford, or some friend in whose taste and disinterestedness Lord Byron could rely, were to point out to him the cruelty to individuals, the injury to the national character, the offence to public taste, and the injury to his own reputation, of such pa.s.sages as those about Southey and Waterloo and the British Government and the head of that Government, I cannot but hope and believe that these blemishes in the first cantos would be wiped away in the next edition; and that some that occur in the two cantos (which you sent me) would never see the light. What interest can Lord Byron have in being the poet of a party in politics?... In politics, he cannot be what he appears, or rather what Messrs. Hobhouse and Leigh Hunt wish to make him appear. A man of his birth, a man of his taste, a man of his talents, a man of his habits, can have nothing in common with such miserable creatures as we now call _Radicals_, of whom I know not that I can better express the illiterate and blind ignorance and vulgarity than by saying that the best informed of them have probably never heard of Lord Byron. No, no, Lord Byron may be indulgent to these jackal followers of his; he may connive at their use of his name--nay, it is not to be denied that he has given them too, too much countenance--but he never can, I should think, now that he sees not only the road but the rate they are going, continue to take a part so contrary to all his own interests and feelings, and to the feelings and interests of all the respectable part of his country.... But what is to be the end of all this rigmarole of mine? To conclude, this--to advise you, for your own sake as a tradesman, for Lord Byron's sake as a poet, for the sake of good literature and good principles, which ought to be united, to take such measures as you may be able to venture upon to get Lord Byron to revise these two cantos, and not to make another step in the odious path which Hobhouse beckons him to pursue....

Yours ever,

J.W. CROKER.

But Byron would alter nothing more in his "Don Juan." He accepted the corrections of Gifford in his "Tragedies," but "Don Juan" was never submitted to him. Hobhouse was occasionally applied to, because he knew Lord Byron's handwriting; but even his suggestions of alterations or corrections of "Don Juan" were in most cases declined, and moreover about this time a slight coolness had sprung up between him and Byron.

When Hobhouse was standing for Westminster with Sir Francis Burdett, Lord Byron sent a song about him in a letter to Mr. Murray. It ran to the tune of "My Boy Tammy? O!"

"Who are now the People's men?

My boy Hobby O!

Yourself and Burdett, Gentlemen, And Blackguard Hunt and Cobby O!

"When to the mob you make a speech, My boy Hobby O!

How do you keep without their reach The watch without your fobby O?"

[Footnote: The rest of the song is printed in _Murray's Magazine_, No. 3.]

Lord Byron asked Murray to show the song not only to some of his friends--who got it by heart and had it printed in the newspapers--but also to Hobhouse himself. "I know," said his Lordship, "that he will never forgive me, but I really have no patience with him for letting himself be put in quod by such a set of ragam.u.f.fins." Mr. Hobhouse, however, was angry with Byron for his lampoon and with Murray for showing it to his friends. He accordingly wrote the following letter, which contains some interesting particulars of the Whig Club at Cambridge in Byron's University days:

_Mr. Hobhouse to John Murray_.

2, HANOVER SQUARE, _November_, 1820.

I have received your letter, and return to you Lord Byron's. I shall tell you very frankly, because I think it much better to speak a little of a man to his face than to say a great deal about him behind his back, that I think you have not treated me as I deserved, nor as might have been expected from that friendly intercourse which has subsisted between us for so many years. Had Lord Byron transmitted to me a lampoon on you, I should, if I know myself at all, either have put it into the fire without delivery, or should have sent it at once to you. I should not have given it a circulation for the gratification of all the small wits at the great and little houses, where no treat is so agreeable as to find a man laughing at his friend. In this case, the whole coterie of the very shabbiest party that ever disgraced and divided a nation--I mean the Whigs--are, I know, chuckling over that silly charge made by Mr. Lamb on the hustings, and now confirmed by Lord Byron, of my having belonged to a Whig club at Cambridge. Such a Whig as I then was, I am now. I had no notion that the name implied selfishness and subserviency, and desertion of the most important principles for the sake of the least important interest. I had no notion that it implied anything more than an attachment to the principles the ascendency of which expelled the Stuarts from the Throne. Lord Byron belonged to this Cambridge club, and desired me to scratch out his name, on account of the criticism in the _Edinburgh Review_ on his early poems; but, exercising my discretion on the subject, I did not erase his name, but reconciled him to the said Whigs.

The members of the club were but few, and with those who have any marked politics amongst them, I continue to agree at this day. They were but ten, and you must know most of them--Mr.

W. Ponsonby, Mr. George O'Callaghan, the Duke of Devonshire, Mr. Dominick Browne, Mr. Henry Pearce, Mr. Kinnaird, Lord Tavistock, Lord Ellenborough, Lord Byron, and myself. I was not, as Lord Byron says in the song, the founder of this Club; [Footnote:

"But when we at Cambridge were My boy Hobbie O!

If my memory do not err, You founded a Whig Clubbie O!"

on the contrary, thinking myself of mighty importance in those days, I recollect very well that some difficulty attended my consenting to belong to the club, and I have by me a letter from Lord Tavistock, in which the distinction between being a Whig _party_ man and a Revolution Whig is strongly insisted upon.

I have troubled you with this detail in consequence of Lord Byron's charge, which he, who despises and defies, and has lampooned the Whigs all round, only invented out of wantonness, and for the sake of annoying me--and he has certainly succeeded, thanks to your circulating this filthy ballad. As for his Lordship's vulgar notions about the _mob_, they are very fit for the Poet of the _Morning Post_, and for n.o.body else. Nothing in the ballad annoyed me but the charge about the Cambridge club, because nothing else had the semblance of truth; and I own it has hurt me very much to find Lord Byron playing into the hands of the Holland House sycophants, for whom he has himself the most sovereign contempt, and whom in other days I myself have tried to induce him to tolerate.

I shall say no more on this unpleasant subject except that, by a letter which I have just received from Lord Byron, I think he is ashamed of his song. I shall certainly speak as plainly to him as I have taken the liberty to do to you on this matter. He was very wanton and you very indiscreet; but I trust neither one nor the other meant mischief, and there's an end of it. Do not aggravate matters by telling how much I have been annoyed. Lord Byron has sent me a list of his new poems and some prose, all of which he requests me to prepare for the press for him. The monied arrangement is to be made by Mr. Kinnaird. When you are ready for me, the materials may be sent to me at this place, where I have taken up my abode for the season.

I remain, very truly yours, JOHN CAM HOBHOUSE.

Towards the end of 1820 Lord Byron wrote a long letter to Mr. Murray on Mr. Bowles's strictures on the "Life and Writings of Pope." It was a subject perhaps unworthy of his pen, but being an ardent admirer of Pope, he thought it his duty to "bowl him [Bowles] down." "I mean to lay about me," said Byron, "like a dragon, till I make manure of Bowles for the top of Parna.s.sus."

After some revision, the first and second letters to Bowles were published, and were well received.

The tragedy of "Sardanapalus," the last three acts of which had been written in a fortnight, was despatched to Murray on May 30, 1821, and was within a few weeks followed by "The Two Foscari: an Historical Tragedy"--which had been composed within a month--and on September 10 by "Cain, a Mystery." The three dramas, "Sardanapalus," "The Two Foscari," and "Cain, a Mystery," were published together in December 1821, and Mr. Murray paid Lord Byron for them the sum of 2,710.

"Cain" was dedicated, by his consent, to Sir Walter Scott, who, in writing to Mr. Murray, described it as "a very grand and tremendous drama." On its first appearance it was reprinted in a cheap form by two booksellers, under the impression that the Court of Chancery would not protect it, and it therefore became necessary to take out an injunction to restrain these piratical publishers.