The Life of Lord Byron Part 16

There is a war, a chaos of the mind When 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 circ.u.mstances 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 anch.o.r.ets 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 AEgean 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 ent.i.tled 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 l.u.s.tre 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 gla.s.sy stream The 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 high The 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 sh.o.r.e, the waves their channel make In 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 delight To 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 brow Unfelt, 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 vaults That hid their dust, their foibles, and their faults, And half a column of the pompous page, That speeds the s.p.a.cious tale from age to age; Where history's pen its praise or blame supplies And lies like truth, and still most truly lies; He wand'ring mused, and as the moonbeam shone Through the dim lattice o'er the floor of stone, And the high-fretted roof and saints that there O'er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer; Reflected in fantastic figures grew Like life, but not like mortal life to view; His bristling locks of sable, brow of gloom, And the wide waving of his shaken plume Glanced like a spectre's attributes, and gave His 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 circ.u.mstances 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 x.x.xI

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 embarra.s.sment 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 pa.s.sing 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 ill.u.s.trate 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, Chaevronae, 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 forbid Honour to Marceau, o'er whose early tomb Tears, 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 pa.s.sages of descriptive poetry excel that in which reference is made to the column of Avenches, the ancient Aventic.u.m.

It combines with an image distinct and picturesque, poetical a.s.sociations full of the grave and moral breathings of olden forms and h.o.a.ry antiquity.

By a lone wall, a lonelier column rears A 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 gaze Of 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 Aventic.u.m, hath strew'd her subject lands.

But the most remarkable quality in the third canto is the deep, low ba.s.s of thought which runs through several pa.s.sages, and which gives to it, when considered with reference to the circ.u.mstances under which it was written, the serious character of doc.u.mentary 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 mind Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil In the hot throng, where we become the spoil Of our infection, till too late and long We 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 years In fatal penitence, and in the blight Of 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 flight To 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 appet.i.te of pa.s.sion, 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 become Portion of that around me; and to me, High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities tortures: I can see Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Cla.s.s'd among creatures, where the soul can flee, And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of 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 fort.i.tude 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'd To its idolatries a patient knee-- Nor coin'd my cheek to smiles--nor cried aloud In worship of an echo;--in the crowd They could not deem me one of such; I stood Among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of 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 impa.s.sioned 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 a.s.signs 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 heart There is a vigil, and these eyes but close To look within--and yet I live and bear The 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'd An 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 order Of mortals on the earth, who do become Old 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 slays More than are number'd in the lists of Fate; Taking all shapes, and bearing many names.

Look upon me! for even of all these things Have I partaken--and of all these things One were enough; then wonder not that I Am what I am, but that I ever was, Or, having been, that I am still on earth.

CHAPTER x.x.xII