My Recollections of Lord Byron Part 24

HIS LATER FRIENDS.

When he had reached his nineteenth year, which was the second of his stay at Cambridge, Byron (having lost sight of most of his Harrow friends to whom he dedicated his verses, and having lost both Long and Eddleston) suddenly found himself launched into the vortex of a university life, for which he had no liking. Happily, however, he was thrown among young men of great distinction, whom fate had then gathered at Cambridge.

"It was so brilliant a constellation," says Moore, "that perhaps such a one will never be seen again." Among these he selected his friends from their literary merit. Those he most distinguished were Hobhouse, Matthews, Banks, and Scroope Davies. They formed a coterie at Cambridge, and spent most of their holidays at Newstead.

HOBHOUSE.

Sir John Cam Hobhouse, Bart., since created a peer, under the name of Lord Broughton, is one of the statesmen and writers the memory of whom England most reveres. It is he whom Byron addresses as Moschus in the "Hints from Horace." After being Byron's friend at college, he became his faithful companion likewise in his travels, and throughout his short-lived but brilliant career. It was he who accompanied Byron in the fatal journey to Seaham, where Byron wedded Miss Milbank. It was he who stood best man on that occasion, and it was he whom Byron selected as his executor.

As soon as Byron became of age in 1809, the two friends left England together to visit Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey. The results of these travels were, Byron's first two cantos of "Childe Harold," and Hobhouse's "Journey across Albania, and other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and in Asia."

On their return to England, their intimacy did not cease. "Hobhouse,"

Byron was wont to say, "ever gets me out of difficulty;" and in his journal of 1814 he says, "Hobhouse has returned. He is my best friend, the most animated and most amusing, and one whose knowledge is very deep and extensive. Hobhouse told me ten thousand anecdotes of Napoleon, which must be true. Hobhouse is the most interesting of travelling companions, and really excellent."

Lord Byron wished him to be his best man when he married Miss Milbank at Seaham, and after his separation from her Hobhouse joined him in Switzerland. They travelled together through the Oberland, and visited all the scenes which inspired that magnificent poem ent.i.tled "Manfred."

Thence they left for Italy, and visited it from North to South; from the Alps to Rome. The result of this journey was the fourth canto of "Childe Harold" from Byron, and from Hobhouse a volume of notes, which const.i.tutes a work of very great merit. If such a companion was agreeable to Byron, Byron was not less so to Hobhouse, who deplores a journey he had made without the company of that friend, whose perspicacity of observation and ingenious remarks united in producing that liveliness and good-humor, which take away half the sting of fatigue, and soften the aspect of danger and of difficulties.

During his absence from England Byron always insisted that all matters relating to the settlement of his affairs should pa.s.s through the hands of Hobhouse, his "alter ego" when near or when absent. His highest testimony of regard and friendship for Hobhouse, however, is to be found in the dedication of the fourth canto of "Childe Harold," which was written in Italy in 1815, and which is as follows:--

CANTO THE FOURTH.

_To John Hobhouse, Esq., A.M., F.R.S., etc._

Venice, January 2, 1818.

MY DEAR HOBHOUSE,--After an interval of eight years between the composition of the first and last cantos of Childe Harold, the conclusion of the poem is about to be submitted to the public. In parting with so old a friend, it is not extraordinary that I should recur to one still older and better,--to one who has beheld the birth and death of the other, and to whom I am far more indebted for the social advantages of an enlightened friendship, than--though not ungrateful--I can, or could be, to Childe Harold, for any public favor reflected through the poem on the poet,--to one whom I have known long and accompanied far, whom I have found wakeful over my sickness and kind in my sorrow, glad in my prosperity and firm in my adversity, true in counsel and trusty in peril,--to a friend often tried and never found wanting;--to yourself.

In so doing, I recur from fiction to truth; and in dedicating to you, in its complete or at least concluded state, a poetical work which is the longest, the most thoughtful and comprehensive of my compositions, I wish to do honor to myself by the record of many years' intimacy with a man of learning, of talent, of steadiness, and of honor. It is not for minds like ours to give or to receive flattery; yet the praises of sincerity have ever been permitted to the voice of friendship; and it is not for you, nor even for others, but to relieve a heart which has not elsewhere, or lately, been so much accustomed to the encounter of good-will as to withstand the shock firmly, that I thus attempt to commemorate your good qualities, or rather the advantages which I have derived from their exertion. Even the recurrence of the date of this letter, the anniversary of the most unfortunate day of my past existence,[25]

but which can not poison my future while I retain the resource of your friendship, and of my own faculties, will henceforth have a more agreeable recollection for both, inasmuch as it will remind us of this my attempt to thank you for an indefatigable regard, such as few men have experienced, and no one could experience without thinking better of his species and of himself.

It has been our fortune to traverse together, at various periods, the countries of chivalry, history, and fable--Spain, Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy; and what Athens and Constantinople were to us a few years ago, Venice and Rome have been more recently. The poem also, or the pilgrim, or both, have accompanied me from first to last; and perhaps it may be a pardonable vanity which induces me to reflect with complacency on a composition which in some degree connects me with the spot where it was produced, and the objects it would fain describe; and however unworthy it may be deemed of those magical and memorable abodes, however short it may fall of our distant conceptions and immediate impressions, yet as a mark of respect for what is venerable, and of feeling for what is glorious, it has been to me a source of pleasure in the production, and I part with it with a kind of regret, which I hardly suspected that events could have left me for imaginary objects.

With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive: like the Chinese in Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World," whom n.o.body would believe to be a Chinese, it was in vain that I a.s.serted, and imagined that I had drawn, a distinction between the author and the pilgrim; and the very anxiety to preserve this difference, and disappointment at finding it unavailing, so far crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to abandon it altogether--and have done so. The opinions which have been, or may be, formed on that subject, are _now_ a matter of indifference: the work is to depend on itself and not on the writer; and the author, who has no resources in his own mind beyond the reputation, transient or permanent, which is to arise from his literary efforts, deserves the fate of authors.

In the course of the following canto it was my intention, either in the text or in the notes, to have touched upon the present state of Italian literature, and perhaps of manners. But the text, within the limits I proposed, I soon found hardly sufficient for the labyrinth of external objects, and the consequent reflections; and for the whole of the notes, excepting a few of the shortest, I am indebted to yourself, and these were necessarily limited to the elucidation of the text.

It is also a delicate, and no very grateful task, to dissert upon the literature and manners of a nation so dissimilar; and requires an attention and impartiality which would induce us--though perhaps no inattentive observers, nor ignorant of the language or customs of the people among whom we have recently abode--to distrust, or at least defer our judgment, and more narrowly examine our information. The state of literary as well as political party appears to run, or to _have_ run, so high, that for a stranger to steer impartially between them is next to impossible. It may be enough then, at least for my purpose, to quote from their own beautiful language--"Mi pare che in un paese tutto poetico, che vanta la lingua la piu n.o.bile ed insieme la piu dolce, tutte tutte le vie diverse si possouo tentare, e che sinche la patria di Alfieri e di Monti non ha perduto l'antico valore, in tutte essa dovrebbe essere la prima." Italy has great names still: Canova, Monti, Ugo Foscolo, Pindemonte, Visconti, Morelli, Cicognara, Albrizzi, Mezzophanti, Mai, Mustoxidi, Aglietti, and Vacca, will secure to the present generation an honorable place in most of the departments of art, sciences, and belles-lettres; and in some the very highest. Europe--the World--has but one Canova.

It has been somewhere said by Alfieri, that "La pianta uomo nasce piu robusta in Italia che in qualunque altra terra--e che gli stessi atroci delitti che vi si commettono ne sono una prova."

Without subscribing to the latter part of his proposition--a dangerous doctrine, the truth of which may be disputed on better grounds, namely, that the Italians are in no respect more ferocious than their neighbors--that man must be willfully blind, or ignorantly heedless, who is not struck with the extraordinary capacity of this people, or, if such a word be admissible, their _capabilities_, the facility of their acquisitions, the rapidity of their conceptions, the fire of their genius, their sense of beauty, and amid all the disadvantages of repeated revolutions, the desolation of battles, and the despair of ages, their still unquenched "longing after immortality"--the immortality of independence. And when we ourselves, in riding round the walls of Rome, heard the simple lament of the laborers' chorus, "Roma! Roma!

Roma! Roma non e piu come era prima," it was difficult not to contrast this melancholy dirge with the baccha.n.a.l roar of the songs of exultation still yelled from the London taverns, over the carnage of Mont St. Jean, and the betrayal of Genoa, of Italy of France, and of the world, by men whose conduct you yourself have exposed in a work worthy of the better days of our history. For me,--

"Non movero mai corda Ove la turba di sue ciance a.s.sorda."

What Italy has gained by the late transfer of nations, it were useless for Englishmen to inquire, till it becomes ascertained that England has acquired something more than a permanent array and a suspended Habeas Corpus; it is enough for them to look at home. For what they have done abroad, and especially in the south "verily they _will have_ their reward," and at no very distant period.

Wishing you, my dear Hobhouse, a safe and agreeable return to that country whose real welfare can be dearer to none than to yourself, I dedicate to you this poem in its completed state; and repeat once more how truly I am ever, your obliged and affectionate friend,

BYRON.

MATTHEWS.

"Of this remarkable young man, Charles Skinner Matthews," says Moore, "I have already had occasion to speak; but the high station which he held in Lord Byron's affection and admiration may justify a somewhat ampler tribute to his memory.

"There have seldom, perhaps, started together in life so many youths of high promise and hope as were to be found among the society of which Lord Byron formed a part at Cambridge. Among all these young men of learning and talent, the superiority in almost every department of intellect seems to have been, by the ready consent of all, awarded to Matthews.... Young Matthews appears--in spite of some little asperities of temper and manner, which he was already beginning to soften down when s.n.a.t.c.hed away--to have been one of those rare individuals who, while they command deference, can at the same time win regard, and who, as it were, relieve the intense feeling of admiration which they excite by blending it with love."

Matthews died while bathing in the Cam.

On the 7th of September, 1811, Byron wrote to Dallas as follows:--"Matthews, Hobhouse, Davies, and myself, formed a coterie of our own at Cambridge and elsewhere.... Davies, who is not a scribbler, has always beaten us all in the war of words. H---- and myself always had the worst of it with the other two, and even M---- yielded to the dashing vivacity of S. D----."

And in another letter:--"You did not know M----: he was a man of the most astonishing powers."

And again, speaking of his death to Mr. Hodgson, he writes:--

"You will feel for poor Hobhouse; Matthews was the G.o.d of his idolatry: and if intellect could exalt a man above his fellows, no one would refuse him pre-eminence."

Matthews died at the time when he was offering himself to compete for a lucrative and honorable position in the University. As soon as his death was known, it was said that if the highest talents could be sure of success, if the strictest principles of honor, and the devotion to him of a mult.i.tude of friends could have a.s.sured it, his dream would have been realized.

Besides a great superiority of intellect, Matthews was gifted with a very amusing originality of thought, which, joined to a very keen sense of the ridiculous, exercised a kind of irresistible fascination. Lord Byron, who loved a joke better than any one, took great pleasure in all the amusing eccentricities of him who was styled the Dean of Newstead; while Byron had been christened by him the Abbot of that place.

Shortly before his death, in 1821, Byron wrote a very amusing letter from Ravenna to Murray, recalling a host of anecdotes relating to Matthews, and which well set forth the clever eccentricity of the man for whom Byron professed so much esteem and admiration.

SCROOPE DAVIES.

We have already seen what Byron thought of Davies. His cleverness, his great vivacity, and his gayety, were great resources to Byron in his moments of affliction. When, in 1811, Byron experienced the bitterest loss of his life--that of his mother--he wrote from Newstead to beg that Davies would come and console him.

Shortly after, he wrote to Hodgson to say, "Davies has been here. His gayety, which death itself can not change, has been of great service to me: but it must be allowed that our laughter was very false."

We must not forget to mention, among the friends of Byron, William Banks, Mr. Pigott, of Southwell, and Mr. Hodgson, a writer of great merit, who was one of his companions at Newstead, and with whom he corresponded even during his voyage in the East. For all these he maintained throughout life the kindest remembrance, as also for Mr.

Beecher, for whom he entertained a regard equal to his affection. Mr.

Beecher having disapproved of the moral tendency of his early poems, Lord Byron destroyed in one night the whole of the first edition of those poems, in order to prove his sense of esteem for Mr. Beecher's opinion. In the same category we should place Lord Byron's friendship for Dr. Drury, his tutor at Harrow; but this latter friendship is so marked with feelings of respect, veneration, and grat.i.tude, that I had rather speak of it later, when I shall treat of the last-named quality, as one of the most noticeable in Lord Byron's character.

GRIEF WHICH HE EXPERIENCED AT THE LOSS OF HIS FRIENDS.

The grief which the loss of his friends occasioned to him was proportioned to the degree of affection which he entertained for them.

By a curious fatality he had the misfortune to lose at an early age, almost all those he loved. This grief reached its climax on his return from his first travels.

"If," says Moore, "to be able to depict powerfully the painful emotions it is necessary first to have experienced them, or, in other words, if, for the poet to be great, the man must suffer, Lord Byron, it must be owned, paid early this dear price of mastery. In the short s.p.a.ce of one month," he says in a note on Childe Harold, "I have lost her who gave me being, and most of those who made that being tolerable." Of these young Wingfield, whom we have seen high on the list of his Harrow favorites, died of a fever at Coimbra; and Matthews, the idol of his admiration at Cambridge, was drowned while bathing in the Cam. The following letter, written shortly after, shows so powerful a feeling of regret, and displays such real grief, that it is almost painful to peruse it:

"MY DEAREST DAVIES,--Some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? My dear Scroope, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me; I want a friend. Matthews's last letter was written on Friday; on Sat.u.r.day he was not. In ability who was like Matthews?

Come to me; I am almost desolate; left almost alone in the world. I had but you and H---- and M----, and let me enjoy the survivors while I can."

Writing to Dallas on the first of August, he says:--