My Recollections of Lord Byron Part 32

"I hear that the E.R. has cut up Coleridge's 'Christabel,' and declared against me for praising it. I praised it, firstly, because I thought well of it; secondly, because Coleridge was in great distress, and after doing what little I could for him in essentials, I thought that the public avowal of my good opinion might help him further, at least with the booksellers. I am very sorry that J---- has attacked him, because, poor fellow, it will hurt him in mind and pocket. As for me, he's welcome--I shall never think less of Jeffrey for any thing he may say against me or mine in future."

At Genoa he declared, in a memorandum, that Crabbe and Coleridge were pre-eminent in point of power and talent.

At Pisa he blamed those who refused to see in "Christabel" a work of rare merit, notwithstanding the knowledge which he had of Coleridge's ingrat.i.tude to him; and refused to believe that W. Scott did not admire the poem, "for we all owe Coleridge a great deal," said he, "and even Scott himself."

And Medwin adds: "Lord Byron thinks Coleridge's poem very fine. He paraphrased and imitated one pa.s.sage. He considers the idea excellent, and enters into it."

And speaking of Coleridge's psychological poem, he said: "What perfect harmony! 'Kubla Khan' delights me."

Sh.e.l.lEY.

If Sh.e.l.ley did not find a place in the triangle, it is only because he was not yet known, except by the eccentricities of his conduct as a boy.

But so soon as Byron was able to appreciate his genius, he lavished praises upon the poet and the man, while he blamed his metaphysics.

In all his letters we find proofs of his affectionate regard for Sh.e.l.ley; and during his last days in Greece, he said to Finlay,--"Sh.e.l.ley was really a most extraordinary genius; but those who know him only from his works, know but half his merits: it was from his thoughts and his conversation poor Sh.e.l.ley ought to be judged. He was romance itself in his manners and his style of thinking."

"You were all mistaken," he wrote from Pisa to Murray, "about Sh.e.l.ley, who was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew."

And when he learned his death, he wrote to Moore:--"There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it."

Such were Byron's expressions in behalf of poets of whose school he disapproved, before the calumnies spread about, and the perfidious provocations of some, joined to the ingrat.i.tude and jealousy of others, obliged him to turn his generosity into bitter retaliation. We will speak elsewhere of this epoch in their mutual relations, and we hope to show, if jealousy caused the change, that it sprang from them and not from him.

To praise was almost a besetting sin in Lord Byron. So amiable a fault was not only committed in favor of his rivals, but also by way of encouragement to young authors. What did he not do to promote the success of M.N. N----, the author of Bertram's dramas, whom Walter Scott had recommended to him?

After reading a tragedy which a young man had submitted to him, Byron wrote in his memoranda:----

"This young man has talent; he has, no doubt, stolen his ideas from another, but I shall not betray him. His critics will be but too p.r.o.ne to proclaim it. I hate to discourage a beginner."

Indulgent to mediocrity, compa.s.sionate with the weakness and defects of all, incapable of causing the slightest pain to those who were dest.i.tute of talent, even when art required that he should condemn them, his goodness was such, that he almost felt remorse whenever he had been led to criticise a work too severely. He deplored his having dealt too harshly with poor Blackett, as soon as the latter's position became known to him; and also with Keats, whose talent, though great, was raw in many respects, and who had become a follower of the Lakist school, which Byron abhorred.

To praise the humble, however, in order to humble the great, was an action incompatible with his n.o.ble character. Great minds const.i.tuted his great attractions, and on these he bestowed such praise as could not be deemed too partial or unjust.

Happy in the unqualified praise of Pope, of the cla.s.sical poets, of the great German and Italian poets, he sometimes made exceptions, and Shakspeare was one. This is not to be wondered at. Lord Byron's mind was as well regulated as it was powerful. His admiration of Pope proves it.

"As to Pope," he writes to Moore from Ravenna, in 1821, "I have always regarded him as the greatest name in our Poetry. Depend upon it, the rest are barbarians. He is a Greek temple, with a Gothic cathedral on one hand, and a Turkish mosque and all sorts of fantastic paG.o.das and conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, if you please; but I prefer the Temple of Theseus, or the Parthenon, to a mountain of burnt brick-work."[33]

Order and proportion were necessities of his nature, so much so that he condemned his writings whenever they departed from his ideal of the beautiful, the essential const.i.tuents of which were order and power.

His admiration, therefore, was entirely centred in cla.s.sical works. But has not Shakspeare a little disregarded the eternal laws of the beautiful observed by Homer, Pindar, and a host of other poets, ancient and modern?

If Byron, then, did not see in Shakspeare all that perfection which an aesthetical school just sprung from the North attributed to him, was he to be blamed? Has he, on this account, disregarded the great merits of that glorious mind? Even had Byron seen in Shakspeare the founder of a dramatic school, rather than a genius more powerful than orderly, who acted against his will upon certain principles, and who scrutinized the human heart to an almost supernatural depth, was he interdicted from finding fault with that school?

Does Shakspeare so economize both time and mind, as to make the action of his dramas continuous, without fatiguing the mind or weakening the dramatic effect? Are not the unities and the proportions disregarded in his plays? What necessity is there at times to put one piece into another? Are not his discussions and monologues too long? Does not his own exuberant genius become a fatigue to himself and to his readers? Are not, perhaps, his characters too real? and do they not often degenerate, without motive, from the sublime into the ridiculous? Would Hamlet have appeared less interesting or less mad had he not spoken indelicate and cruel words to Ophelia? Would Laertes have seemed less grieved on hearing of the death of his sister had he not made so unnecessary a play on the words?

Was not Byron, therefore, right when he said, with Pope, that Shakspeare was "the worst of models?" And could he possibly be called jealous, because he added that, "notwithstanding his defects, Shakspeare was still the most extraordinary of men of genius?"

This opinion of Byron was decidedly serious, though his opinions did not always partake of that character. His humor was rather French: he liked to laugh, to joke, to mystify, and astonish people who wished to understand him. He used, then, to employ a particular measure in his praise and his condemnation.

"On one occasion at Missolonghi, and shortly before his death," says Colonel Stanhope, "the drama was mentioned in conversation, and Byron at once attacked Shakspeare by defending the unities. A gentleman present, on hearing his anti-Shakspearean opinions rushed out of the room, and afterward entered his protest most earnestly against such doctrines.

Lord Byron was quite delighted with this, and redoubled the severity of his criticism.

"He said once, when we were alone,--'I like to astonish Englishmen; they come abroad full of Shakspeare, and contempt for the dramatic literature of other nations. They think it blasphemy to find a fault in his writings, which are full of them. People talk of my writings, and yet read the sonnets to Master Hughes.'

"And yet," continues Finlay, "he continually had the most melodious lines of Shakspeare in his mouth, as examples of blank verse."

The jealousy of Shakspeare attributed to Byron is, however, nothing when compared to the ridiculous a.s.sertion, that he was jealous of Keats, simply because he had repeated in joke what the papers and Sh.e.l.ley himself, a friend of Keats, had said, namely, "that the young poet had been killed by a criticism of the 'Quarterly.'"

But since a French critic, M. Philarete Chasles, has made the same accusation, we must pause and consider it.

At the time when Byron was more than ever penetrated with the perfection of Pope, and opposed to the romantic school,--at the time when he himself wrote his dramas according to all cla.s.sical rules,--he received at Ravenna the poems of a young disciple of the Lakists, who united in himself all their exaggerated faults. This young man had the audacity--(which was almost unpardonable in the eyes of Byron)--to despise Pope, and to const.i.tute himself at nineteen a lawgiver of poetical rules in England.

Such ridiculous pride, added to the contempt shown to his idol, incensed Byron and prevented his showing Keats the same indulgence he had shown Maturin and Blackett. He spoke severely of Keats in his famous reply to "Blackwood's Magazine," and to his Cambridge friends--followers of the good old traditions. He quoted some lines of Keats, and remarked that "they were taken from the book of a young man who was learning how to write in verse, but who began by teaching others the art of poetry."

Then, after a long quotation, he adds--"What precedes will show the ideas and principles professed by the regenerators of the English lyre in regard to the man who most of any contributed to its harmony, and the progress visible in their innovation."

Let us not forget to add that he styled Keats "the tadpole of the Lakists."

But the following year, when he heard that Keats had died at Rome, the victim of his inordinate self-love, and unable to be consoled for the criticism directed against his poetry, he wrote the following heartfelt, and, as it were, repentant words to Sh.e.l.ley:--

"I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats--is it _actually_ true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. Though I differ from you essentially in your estimate of his performances, I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been seated on the highest peak of Parna.s.sus than have perished in such a manner. Poor fellow!

though, with such inordinate self-love, he would probably have not been very happy.... Had I known that Keats was dead, or that he was 'alive,'

and so 'sensitive,' I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry, to which I was provoked by his attack upon Pope, and my disapprobation of his own style of writing."

To Murray he wrote the same day:--

"Is it true what Sh.e.l.ley writes me, that poor John Keats died at Rome of the 'Quarterly Review?' I am very sorry for it; though I think he took the wrong line as a poet, and was spoilt by c.o.c.kneyfying and suburbing, and versifying Tooke's 'Pantheon' and Lempriere's 'Dictionary.' I know by experience, that a savage review is hemlock to a sucking author; and the one on me (which produced the 'English Bards,' etc.) knocked me down; but I got up again. Instead of bursting a bloodvessel, I drank three bottles of claret, and began an answer, finding that there was nothing in the article for which I could lawfully knock Jeffrey on the head, in an honorable way. However, I would not be the person who wrote the homicidal article for all the honor and glory in the world, though I by no means approve of that school of scribbling which it treats upon."

Some time after he wrote again to Murray, saying,--"You know very well that I did not approve of Keats's poetry, nor of his poetical principles, nor of his abuse of Pope. But he is dead. I beg that you will therefore omit all I have said of him either in my ma.n.u.scripts or in my publications. His 'Hyperion' is a fine monument, and will cause his name to last. I do not envy the man who wrote the article against Keats."

Several months later he made complete amends. He added to his severe article in answer to Blackwood, a note in the following terms:

"I have read the article before and since; and although it is bitter, I do not think that a man should permit himself to be killed by it. But a young man little dreams what he must inevitably encounter in the course of a life ambitious of public notice. My indignation at Mr. Keats's depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me do justice to his own genius, which, _malgre_ all the fantastic fopperies of his style, was undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of 'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the t.i.tans, and is as sublime as aeschylus. He is a loss to our literature; and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was reforming his style upon the more cla.s.sical models of the language."

Were we wrong in saying that the accusations against Byron, with respect to Keats, did not deserve a notice? If we have noticed them, it has been merely to show, that the French critic should have judged matters in this instance with greater conscientiousness and reflection.

Influenced as Byron always was by his own ideas of beauty, he required in the authors themselves certain moral qualities which would demand for their works the bestowal of his praise. It was not only their talent, but their loyalty, their independence of character, their political consistency, and their perfect honesty, which endeared Walter Scott, Moore, and others, to him.

Byron, on the other hand, had never found these qualities in the Lakists, and especially in the head of their school, whose whole life, on the contrary, bore the marks of quite opposite characteristics. Since Southey's dream of a life of intimacy with other poets of his school, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, in some blissful remote spot from which they would publish their works in common, and where they would live with their wives and children in community of interests, some change had taken place; for Southey had so far deviated from his purpose as to become Laureate, to write for himself, and to profess ultra-Tory principles, the ultimate objects of which could not but be palpable.

All this called for Byron's contempt. To this contempt, however, he gave no expression, for fear of wounding without reason, until that reason did arise by the Laureate's unforgiving spirit. "The Laureate," says Byron, "is not one of those who can forgive." Incapable of forgetting that Byron's genius had obscured his own reputation, Southey hated Byron with an intensity, such as to make him look out for opportunities of doing him an injury. This opportunity Southey found in Byron's departure for the Continent, subsequently to the unfortunate result of his marriage; and not only did he join in all the calumnies which were set forth against him in England, but actually followed him to Switzerland, there to invent new ones, in the hope of crushing his reputation and ruining the fame of the poet by the depreciation of the man.

Lord Byron for some time was ignorant of the Laureate's baseness, for oftentimes friends deem it prudent to hide the truth which it would perhaps be better to make known. But when he came to know of them, his whole soul revolted, as naturally must be the case with a man of honor, and in "Don Juan" he came down upon Southey with a double-edged sword, throwing ridicule upon the author's writings, and odium upon his conduct as a calumniator.

This revenge was well deserved. It was not only natural but just, and even necessary, for it was requisite to show up the man, to judge of the value to be attached to his calumnies; and later, when he called him out, he did what honor required of him.

We have seen elsewhere how far the Laureate's conduct justified Byron's retaliation. It is enough, therefore, that I should have shown here that Byron's anger was rather the result of Southey's envy than his own, and that his sarcasms were due entirely to the disgust which he felt for such dishonorable proceedings.

From that time his language, when speaking of Wordsworth and Coleridge, always reflected the same disgust. Both had made themselves the echoes of Southey, and both had been inconstant from interested motives, and had solicited favors from the party in power, which they had abused in their writings. "They have each a price," said Byron at Pisa.