The Works of Lord Byron Volume V Part 134

[203] [Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley inscribed the following note on the fly-leaf of her copy of _The Deformed Transformed_:--

"This had long been a favourite subject with Lord Byron. I think that he mentioned it also in Switzerland. I copied it--he sending a portion of it at a time, as it was finished, to me. At this time he had a great horror of its being said that he plagiarised, or that he studied for ideas, and wrote with difficulty. Thus he gave Sh.e.l.ley Aikins' edition of the British poets, that it might not be found in his house by some English lounger, and reported home; thus, too, he always dated when he began and when he ended a poem, to prove hereafter how quickly it was done. I do not think that he altered a line in this drama after he had once written it down. He composed and corrected in his mind. I do not know how he meant to finish it; but he said himself that the whole conduct of the story was already conceived. It was at this time that a brutal paragraph[*] alluding to his lameness appeared, which he repeated to me lest I should hear it from some one else. No action of Lord Byron's life--scarce a line he has written--but was influenced by his personal defect."

[*] It is possible that Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley alludes to a sentence in the _Memoirs, etc., of Lord Byron_. (by Dr. John Watkin), 1822, p. 46: "A malformation of one of his feet, and other indications of a rickety const.i.tution, served as a plea for suffering him to range the hills and to wander about at his pleasure on the seash.o.r.e, that his frame might be invigorated by air and exercise."]

[cv] {477} _The Deformed--a drama.--B. Pisa, 1822_.

[204] [Moore (_Life_, p. 13) quotes these lines in connection with a pa.s.sage in Byron's "Memoranda," where, in speaking of his own sensitiveness on the subject of his deformed foot, he described the feeling of horror and humiliation that came over him, when his mother, in one of her fits of pa.s.sion, called him "_a lame brat!_"... "It may be questioned," he adds, "whether that whole drama [_The Deformed Transformed_] was not indebted for its origin to that single recollection."

Byron's early letters (_e.g._ November 2, 11, 17, 1804, _Letters_, 1898, i. 41, 45, 48) are full of complaints of his mother's "eccentric behaviour," her "fits of phrenzy," her "caprices," "pa.s.sions," and so forth; and there is convincing proof--see _Life_, pp. 28, 306; _Letters_, 1898, ii. 122 (incident at Bellingham's execution); _Letters_, 1901, vi. 179 (_Le Diable Boiteux_)--that he regarded the contraction of the muscles of his legs as a more or less repulsive deformity. And yet, to quote one of a hundred testimonies,--"with regard to Lord Byron's features, Mr. Mathews observed, that he was the only man he ever contemplated, to whom he felt disposed to apply the word _beautiful_" (_Memoirs of Charles Matthews_, 1838, ii. 380). The looker-on or the consoler computes the magnitude and the liberality of the compensation. The sufferer thinks only of his sufferings.]

[205] {478}[So, too, Prospero to Caliban, _Tempest_, act i. sc. 2, line 309, etc.]

[206] {479}[Compare--"Have not partook oppression." _Marino Faliero_, act i. sc. 2, line 468, _Poetical Works_, 1901, iv. 362, note 1.]

[207] {480}[Compare the story of the philosopher Jamblichus and the raising of Eros and Anteros from their "fountain-dwellings."--_Manfred_, act ii. sc. 2, line 93, _Poetical Works_, 1901, iv. 105, note 2.]

[cw] {481} _Give me the strength of the buffalo's foot_ (_which marks me_).--[MS.]

[cx] _The sailless dromedary_----.--[MS.]

[cy] {482} _Now I can gibe the mightiest_.--[MS.]

[208] {483}[So, too, in _The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus_ (Marlowe's _Works_, 1858, p. 112), Faustus stabs his arm, "and with his proper blood a.s.sures his soul to be great Lucifer's."]

[cz]

_Walk lively and pliant_.

_You shall rise up as pliant_.--[MS, erased.]

[209] This is a well-known German superst.i.tion--a gigantic shadow produced by reflection on the Brocken. [See Brewster's _Letters on Natural Magic_, 1831, p. 128.]

[da] _And such my command_.--[MS.]

[210] {484}["Nigris vegetisque oculis."--Suetonius, _Vitae C. Julius Caesar_, cap. xiv., _Opera Omnia_, 1826, i. 105.]

[211] [_Vide post_, p. 501, note 1.]

[212] ["Sed ante alias [Julius Caesar] dilexit M. Bruti matrem Serviliam ... dilexit et reginas ... sed maxime Cleopatram" (_ibid._, i. 113, 115). Cleopatra, born B.C. 69, was twenty-one years old when she met Caesar, B.C. 48.]

[db]

_And can_ _It be? the man who shook the earth is gone_.--[MS.]

[213] {485}["Upon the whole, it may be doubted whether there be a name of Antiquity which comes down with such a general charm as that of _Alcibiades_. _Why?_ I cannot answer: who can?"--_Detached Thoughts_ (1821), No. 108, _Letters_, 1901, v. 461. For Sir Walter Scott's note on this pa.s.sage, see _Letters_, 1900, iv. 77, 78, note 2.]

[214] [The outside of Socrates was that of a satyr and buffoon, but his soul was all virtue, and from within him came such divine and pathetic things, as pierced the heart, and drew tears from the hearers.--Plato, _Symp_., p. 216, D.]

[215] {486}["Anthony had a n.o.ble dignity of countenance, a graceful length of beard, a large forehead, an aquiline nose: and, upon the whole, the same manly aspect that we see in the pictures and statues of Hercules."--Plutarch's _Lives_, Langhorne's Translation, 1838, p. 634.]

[216] [As in the "Farnese" Hercules.]

[217] [The beauty and mien [of Demetrius Poliorcetes] were so inimitable that no statuary or painter could hit off a likeness. His countenance had a mixture of grace and dignity; and was at once amiable and awful; and the unsubdued and eager air of youth was blended with the majesty of the hero and the king.--Plutarch's _Lives_, Langhorne's Translation, 1838, p. 616.

Demetrius the Besieger rescued Greece from the sway of Ptolemy and Ca.s.sander, B.C. 307. He pa.s.sed the following winter at Athens, where divine honours were paid to him under the t.i.tle of "the Preserver" (?

S?t?? [o(Sote/r]). He was "the shame of Greece in peace," by reason of his profligacy--"the citadel was so polluted with his debaucheries, that it appeared to be kept sacred in some degree when he indulged himself only with such _Hetaerae_ as Chrysis, Lamia, Demo, and Anticyra." He was the unspiritual ancestor of Charles the Second. Once when his father, Antigonus, had been told that he was indisposed, "he went to see him; and when he came to the door, he met one of his favourites going out. He went in, however, and, sitting down by him, took hold of his hand. 'My fever,' said Demetrius, 'has left me.' 'I knew it,' said Antigonus, 'for I met it this moment at the door.'"--Plutarch's _Lives_, _ibid._, pp.

621-623.]

[218] {488}[Spercheus was a river-G.o.d, the husband of Polydora, the daughter of Peleus. Peleus casts into the river the hair of his son Achilles, in the pious hope that his son-in-law would accept the votive offering, and grant the youth a safe return from the Trojan war. See _Iliad_, xxiii. 140, _sqq._]

[219] {489}["Whosoever," says Bacon, "hath anything fixed in his person that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn; therefore, all deformed persons are extreme bold; first, as in their own defence, as being exposed to scorn, but in process of time by a general habit; also it stirreth in them industry, and especially of this kind, to watch and observe the weakness of others, that they may have somewhat to repay." (Essay xliv.). Byron's "chief incentive, when a boy, to distinction was that mark of deformity on his person, by an acute sense of which he was first stung into the ambition of being great."--_Life_, p. 306.]

[220] [Timur Bey, or Timur Lang, _i.e._ "the lame Timur" (A.D.

1336-1405), was the founder of the Mogul dynasty. He was the Tamerlane of history and of legend. Byron had certainly read the selections from Marlowe's _Tamburlaine the Great_, in Lamb's _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_.]

[221] {491}["I am black, but comely."--_Song of Solomon_ i. 5.]

[222] Adam means "_red earth_," from which the first man was formed.

[The word _adam_ is said to be a.n.a.logous to the a.s.syrian _admu_, "child"--_i.e._ "one made" by G.o.d.--_Encycl. Bibl._, art. "Adam."]

[dc] {492} _This shape into Life_.--[_MS_.]

[223] {493}[The reference is to the _homunculi_ of the alchymists. See Retzsch's ill.u.s.trations to Goethe's _Faust_, 1834, plates 3, 4, 5.

Compare, too, _The Second Part of Faust_, act ii.--

"The gla.s.s rings low, the charming power that lives Within it makes the music that it gives.

It dims! it brightens! it will shape itself.

And see! a graceful dazzling little elf.

He lives! he moves! spruce mannikin of fire, What more can we? what more can earth desire?"

Anster's Translation, 1886, p. 91.]

[dd] _Your Interloper_----.--[MS.]

[224] {494}[Compare _Prisoner of Chillon_, stanza ii. line 35, _Poetical Works_, 1091, iv. 15, note i. Compare, too, the dialogue between Mephistopheles and the Will-o'-the Wisp, in the scene on the Hartz Mountains, in _Faust_, Part I. (see Anster's Translation, 1886, p.

271).]

[225] {495}[The immediate reference is to the composite forces, German, French, and Spanish, of the Imperial Army under the command of Charles de Bourbon: but there is in lines 498-507 a manifest allusion to the revolutionary movements in South America, Italy, and Spain, which were at their height in 1822. (See the _Age of Bronze_, section vi. lines 260, _sq._, _post_, pp. 555-557.)]

[226] {496}[See Euripides, _Hippolytus_, line 733.]

[de] _Kochlani_----.--[MS.]

[227] [Kochlani horses were bred in a central province of Arabia.]

[228] [Byron's knowledge of Huon of Bordeaux was, most probably, derived from Sotheby's _Oberon; or, Huon de Bourdeux: A Mask_, published in 1802. For _The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux_, done into English by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, see the reprint issued by the Early English Text Society (E.S., No. xliii. 1884); and for _a.n.a.lyse de Huon de Bordeaux, etc._, see _Les Epopees Francaises_, by Leon Gautier, 1880, ii. 719-773.]

[229] {497}[The so-called statue of Memnon, the beautiful son of t.i.thonus and Eos (Dawn), is now known to be that of Amenhotep III., who reigned in the eighteenth dynasty, about 1430 B.C. Strabo, ed. 1807. p.

1155, was the first to record the musical note which sounded from the statue when it was touched by the rays of the rising sun. It used to be argued (see Gifford's note to _Don Juan_, Canto XIII. stanza lxiv. line 3, ed. 1837, p. 731) that the sounds were produced by a trick, but of late years it has been maintained that the Memnon's wail was due to natural causes, the pressure of suddenly-warmed currents of air through the pores and crevices of the stone. After the statue was restored, the phenomenon ceased. (See _La statue vocale de Memnon_, par J. A. Letronne, Paris, 1833, pp. 55, 56.)]