The Life of Lord Byron Part 27

Awake! not Greece--she is awake-- Awake my spirit! think through whom My life-blood tastes its parent lake, And then strike home!

I tread reviving pa.s.sions down, Unworthy manhood! Unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of beauty be.

If thou regrett'st thy youth, why live?

The land of honourable death Is here, up to the field and give Away thy breath.

Seek out--less often sought than found-- A soldier's grave--for thee the best Then look around, and choose thy ground, And take thy rest.

CHAPTER XLVIII

The funeral Preparations and final Obsequies

The death of Lord Byron was felt by all Greece as a national misfortune. From the moment it was known that fears were entertained for his life, the progress of the disease was watched with the deepest anxiety and sorrow. On Easter Sunday, the day on which he expired, thousands of the inhabitants of Missolonghi had a.s.sembled on the s.p.a.cious plain on the outside of the city, according to an ancient custom, to exchange the salutations of the morning; but on this occasion it was remarked, that instead of the wonted congratulations, "Christ is risen," they inquired first, "How is Lord Byron?"

On the event being made known, the Provisional Government a.s.sembled, and a proclamation, of which the following is a translation, was issued

"Provisional Government of Western Greece.

"The day of festivity and rejoicing is turned into one of sorrow and morning.

"The Lord Noel Byron departed this life at eleven {354} o'clock last night, after an illness of ten days. His death was caused by an inflammatory fever. Such was the effect of his Lordship's illness on the public mind, that all cla.s.ses had forgotten their usual recreations of Easter, even before the afflicting event was apprehended.

"The loss of this ill.u.s.trious individual is undoubtedly to be deplored by all Greece; but it must be more especially a subject of lamentation at Missolonghi, where his generosity has been so conspicuously displayed, and of which he had become a citizen, with the ulterior determination of partic.i.p.ating in all the dangers of the war.

"Everybody is acquainted with the beneficent acts of his Lordship, and none can cease to hail his name as that of a real benefactor.

"Until, therefore, the final determination of the national Government be known, and by virtue of the powers with which it has been pleased to invest me, I hereby decree:

"1st. To-morrow morning, at daylight, thirty-seven minute-guns shall be fired from the grand battery, being the number which corresponds with the age of the ill.u.s.trious deceased.

"2nd. All the public offices, even to the tribunals, are to remain closed for three successive days.

"3rd. All the shops, except those in which provisions or medicines are sold, will also be shut; and it is strictly enjoined that every species of public amus.e.m.e.nt and other demonstrations of festivity at Easter may be suspended.

"4th. A general mourning will be observed for twenty-one days.

"5th. Prayers and a funeral service are to be offered up in all the churches.

"A. MAVROCORDATOS.

"GEORGIS PRAIDIS, Secretary.

"Given at Missolonghi, this 19th of April, 1824."

The funeral oration was written and delivered on the occasion, by Spiridion Tricoupi, and ordered by the government to be published.

No token of respect that reverence could suggest, or custom and religion sanction, was omitted by the public authorities, nor by the people.

Lord Byron having omitted to give directions for the disposal of his body, some difficulty arose about fixing the place of interment. But after being embalmed it was sent, on the 2nd of May, to Zante, where it was met by Lord Sidney Osborne, a relation of Lord Byron, by marriage--the secretary of the senate at Corfu.

It was the wish of Lord Sidney Osborne, and others, that the interment should be in Zante; but the English opposed the proposition in the most decided manner. It was then suggested that it should be conveyed to Athens, and deposited in the temple of Theseus, or in the Parthenon--Ulysses Odysseus, the Governor of Athens, having sent an express to Missolonghi, to solicit the remains for that city; but, before it arrived, they were already in Zante, and a vessel engaged to carry them to London, in the expectation that they would be deposited in Westminster Abbey or St Paul's.

On the 25th of May, the Florida left Zante with the body, which Colonel Stanhope accompanied; and on the 29th of June it reached the Downs. After the ship was cleared from quarantine, Mr Hobhouse, with his Lordship's solicitor, received it from Colonel Stanhope, and, by their directions it was removed to the house of Sir E. Knatchbull, in Westminster, where it lay in state several days.

The dignitaries of the Abbey and of St Paul's having, as it was said, refused permission to deposit the remains in either of these great national receptacles of the ill.u.s.trious dead, it was determined that they should be laid in the ancestral vault of the Byrons. The funeral, instead of being public, was in consequence private, and attended by only a few select friends to Hucknell, a small village about two miles from Newstead Abbey, in the church of which the vault is situated; there the coffin was deposited, in conformity to a wish early expressed by the poet, that his dust might be mingled with his mother's. Yet, unmeet and plain as the solemnity was in its circ.u.mstances, a remarkable incident gave it interest and distinction: as it pa.s.sed along the streets of London, a sailor was observed walking uncovered near the hea.r.s.e, and on being asked what he was doing there, replied that he had served Lord Byron in the Levant, and had come to pay his last respects to his remains; a simple but emphatic testimony to the sincerity of that regard which his Lordship often inspired, and which with more steadiness might always have commanded.

The coffin bears the following inscription:

LORD BYRON, OF ROCHDALE, BORN IN LONDON, JANUARY 22, 1788; DIED AT MISSOLONGHI, IN WESTERN GREECE, APRIL 19, 1824.

Beside the coffin the urn is placed, the inscription on which is,

Within this urn are deposited the heart, brains, etc. of the deceased Lord Byron.

CHAPTER XLIX

The Character of Lord Byron

My endeavour, in the foregoing pages, has been to give a general view of the intellectual character of Lord Byron. It did not accord with the plan to enter minutely into the details of his private life, which I suspect was not greatly different from that of any other person of his rank, not distinguished for particular severity of manners. In some respects his Lordship was, no doubt, peculiar. He possessed a vivacity of sensibility not common, and talents of a very extraordinary kind. He was also distinguished for superior personal elegance, particularly in his bust. The style and character of his head were universally admired; but perhaps the beauty of his physiognomy has been more highly spoken of than it really merited.

Its chief grace consisted, when he was in a gay humour, of a liveliness which gave a joyous meaning to every articulation of the muscles and features: when he was less agreeably disposed, the expression was morose to a very repulsive degree. It is, however, unnecessary to describe his personal character here. I have already said enough incidentally, to explain my full opinion of it. In the ma.s.s, I do not think it was calculated to attract much permanent affection or esteem. In the detail it was the reverse: few men possessed more companionable qualities than Lord Byron did occasionally; and seen at intervals in those felicitous moments, I imagine it would have been difficult to have said, that a more interesting companion had been previously met with. But he was not always in that fascinating state of pleasantry: he was as often otherwise; and no two individuals could be more distinct from each other than Byron in his gaiety and in his misanthropy. This ant.i.thesis was the great cause of that diversity of opinion concerning him, which has so much divided his friends and adversaries. Of his character as a poet there can be no difference of opinion, but only a difference in the degree of admiration.

Excellence in talent, as in every other thing, is comparative; but the universal republic of letters will acknowledge, that in energy of expression and liveliness of imagery Byron had no equal in his own time. Doubts, indeed, may be entertained, if in these high qualities even Shakspeare himself was his superior.

I am not disposed to think with many of those who rank the genius of Byron almost as supreme, that he has shown less skill in the construction of his plots, and the development of his tales, than might have been expected from one so splendidly endowed; for it has ever appeared to me that he has accomplished in them everything he proposed to attain, and that in this consists one of his great merits. His mind, fervid and impa.s.sioned, was in all his compositions, except Don Juan, eagerly fixed on the catastrophe. He ever held the goal full in view, and drove to it in the most immediate manner. By this straightforward simplicity all the interest which intricacy excites was of necessity disregarded. He is therefore not treated justly when it is supposed that he might have done better had he shown more art: the wonder is, that he should have produced such magnificent effects with so little. He could not have made the satiated and meditative Harold so darkling and excursive, so lone, "aweary," and misanthropical, had he treated him as the hero of a scholastic epic. The might of the poet in such creations lay in the riches of his diction and in the felicity with which he described feelings in relation to the aspect of scenes amid the reminiscences with which the scenes themselves were a.s.sociated.

If in language and plan he be so excellent, it may be asked why should he not be honoured with that pre-eminent niche in the temple which so many in the world have by suffrage a.s.signed to him? Simply because, with all the life and beauty of his style, the vigour and truth of his descriptions, the boldness of his conceptions, and the reach of his vision in the dark abysses of pa.s.sion, Lord Byron was but imperfectly acquainted with human nature. He looked but on the outside of man. No characteristic action distinguishes one of his heroes from another, nor is there much dissimilarity in their sentiments; they have no individuality; they stalk and pa.s.s in mist and gloom, grim, ghastly, and portentous, mysterious shadows, ent.i.ties of the twilight, weird things like the sceptred effigies of the unborn issue of Banquo.

Combined with vast power, Lord Byron possessed, beyond all question, the greatest degree of originality of any poet of this age. In this rare quality he has no parallel in any age. All other poets and inventive authors are measured in their excellence by the accuracy with which they fit sentiments appropriate not only to the characters they create, but to the situations in which they place them: the works of Lord Byron display the opposite to this, and with the most extraordinary splendour. He endows his creations with his own qualities; he finds in the situations in which he places them only opportunities to express what he has himself felt or suffered; and yet he mixes so much probability in the circ.u.mstances, that they are always eloquently proper. He does everything, as it were, the reverse of other poets; in the air and sea, which have been in all times the emblems of change and the similitudes of inconstancy, he has discovered the very principles of permanency. The ocean in his view, not by its vastness, its unfathomable depths, and its limitless extent, becomes an image of deity, by its unchangeable character!

The variety of his productions present a prodigious display of power.

In his short career he has ent.i.tled himself to be ranked in the first cla.s.s of the British poets for quant.i.ty alone. By Childe Harold, and his other poems of the same mood, he has extended the scope of feeling, made us acquainted with new trains of a.s.sociation, awakened sympathies which few suspected themselves of possessing; and he has laid open darker recesses in the bosom than were previously supposed to exist. The deep and dreadful caverns of remorse had long been explored but he was the first to visit the bottomless pit of satiety.

The delineation of that Promethean fort.i.tude which defied conscience, as he has shown it in Manfred, is his greatest achievement. The terrific fables of Marlowe and of Goethe, in their respective versions of the legend of Faustus, had disclosed the utmost writhings which remorse in the fiercest of its torments can express; but what are those Laoc.o.o.n agonies to the sublime serenity of Manfred. In the power, the originality, and the genius combined, of that unexampled performance, Lord Byron has placed himself on an equality with Milton. The Satan of the Paradise Lost is animated by motives, and dignified by an eternal enterprise. He hath purposes of infinite prospect to perform, and an immeasurable ambition to satisfy.

Manfred hath neither purpose nor ambition, nor any desire that seeks gratification. He hath done a deed which severs him from hope, as everlastingly as the apostacy with the angels has done Satan. He acknowledges no contrition to bespeak commiseration, he complains of no wrong to justify revenge, for he feels none; he despises sympathy, and almost glories in his perdition.

The creation of such a character is in the sublimest degree of originality; to give it appropriate thoughts and feelings required powers worthy of the conception; and to make it susceptible of being contemplated as within the scope and range of human sympathy, places Byron above all his contemporaries and antecedents. Milton has described in Satan the greatest of human pa.s.sions, supernatural attributes, directed to immortal intents, and stung with inextinguishable revenge; but Satan is only a dilatation of man.

Manfred is loftier, and worse than Satan; he has conquered punishment, having within himself a greater than h.e.l.l can inflict.