Thomas Moore - Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II

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"To-day is the Sabbath,--a day I never pass pleasantly, but at
Cambridge; and, even there, the organ is a sad remembrancer. Things
are stagnant enough in town,--as long as they don't retrograde,
'tis all very well. H * * writes and writes and writes, and is an
author. I do nothing but eschew tobacco. I wish parliament were
assembled, that I may hear, and perhaps some day be heard;--but on
this point I am not very sanguine. I have many plans;--sometimes I
think of the East again, and dearly beloved Greece. I am well, but
weakly.--Yesterday Kinnaird told me I looked very ill, and sent me
home happy.

* * * * * "Is Scrope still interesting and invalid? And how does
Hinde with his cursed chemistry? To Harness I have written, and he
has written, and we have all written, and have nothing now to do
but write again, till death splits up the pen and the scribbler.

"The Alfred has three hundred and fifty-four candidates for six
vacancies. The cook has run away and left us liable, which makes
our committee very plaintive. Master Brook, our head serving-man,
has the gout, and our new cook is none of the best. I speak from
report,--for what is cookery to a leguminous-eating ascetic? So now
you know as much of the matter as I do. Books and quiet are still
there, and they may dress their dishes in their own way for me. Let
me know your determination as to Newstead, and believe me,

"Yours ever, [Greek: Mpairon]."

[Footnote 37: This poem is now printed in Lord Byron's Works.]

* * * * *

LETTER 80. TO MR. HODGSON.

"8. St. James's Street, Dec. 12. 1811.

"Why, Hodgson! I fear you have left off wine and me at the same
time,--I have written and written and written, and no answer! My
dear Sir Edgar, water disagrees with you,--drink sack and write.
Bland did not come to his appointment, being unwell, but M * * e
supplied all other vacancies most delectably. I have hopes of his
joining us at Newstead. I am sure you would like him more and more
as he developes,--at least I do.

"How Miller and Bland go on, I don't know. Cawthorne talks of being
in treaty for a novel of Me. D'Arblay's, and if he obtains it (at
1500 gs.!!) wishes me to see the MS. This I should read with
pleasure,--not that I should ever dare to venture a criticism on
her whose writings Dr. Johnson once revised, but for the pleasure
of the thing. If my worthy publisher wanted a sound opinion, I
should send the MS. to Rogers and M * * e, as men most alive to true
taste. I have had frequent letters from Wm. Harness, and _you_ are
silent; certes, you are not a schoolboy. However, I have the
consolation of knowing that you are better employed, viz.
reviewing. You don't deserve that I should add another syllable,
and I won't. Yours, &c.

"P.S.--I only wait for your answer to fix our meeting."

* * * * *

LETTER 81. TO MR. HARNESS.

"8. St. James's Street, Dec. 15. 1811.

"I wrote you an answer to your last, which, on reflection, pleases
me as little as it probably has pleased yourself. I will not wait
for your rejoinder; but proceed to tell you, that I had just then
been greeted with an epistle of * *'s, full of his petty
grievances, and this at the moment when (from circumstances it is
not necessary to enter upon) I was bearing up against recollections
to which _his_ imaginary sufferings are as a scratch to a cancer.
These things combined, put me out of humour with him and all
mankind. The latter part of my life has been a perpetual struggle
against affections which embittered the earliest portion; and
though I flatter myself I have in a great measure conquered them,
yet there are moments (and this was one) when I am as foolish as
formerly. I never said so much before, nor had I said this now, if
I did not suspect myself of having been rather savage in my letter,
and wish to inform you thus much of the cause. You know I am not
one of your dolorous gentlemen: so now let us laugh again.

"Yesterday I went with Moore to Sydenham to visit Campbell.[38] He
was not visible, so we jogged homeward, merrily enough. To-morrow I
dine with Rogers, and am to hear Coleridge, who is a kind of rage
at present. Last night I saw Kemble in Coriolanus;--he _was
glorious_, and exerted himself wonderfully. By good luck I got an
excellent place in the best part of the house, which was more than
overflowing. Clare and Delawarre, who were there on the same
speculation, were less fortunate. I saw them by accident,--we were
not together. I wished for you, to gratify your love of Shakspeare
and of fine acting to its fullest extent. Last week I saw an
exhibition of a different kind in a Mr. Coates, at the Haymarket,
who performed Lothario in a _damned_ and damnable manner.

"I told you the fate of B. and H. in my last. So much for these
sentimentalists, who console themselves in their stews for the
loss--the never to be recovered loss--the despair of the refined
attachment of a couple of drabs! You censure _my_ life,
Harness,--when I compare myself with these men, my elders and my
betters, I really begin to conceive myself a monument of
prudence--a walking statue--without feeling or failing; and yet the
world in general hath given me a proud pre-eminence over them in
profligacy. Yet I like the men, and, God knows, ought not to
condemn their aberrations. But I own I feel provoked when they
dignify all this by the name of _love_--romantic attachments for
things marketable for a dollar!

"Dec. 16th.--I have just received your letter;--I feel your
kindness very deeply. The foregoing part of my letter, written
yesterday, will, I hope, account for the tone of the former, though
it cannot excuse it. I do _like_ to hear from you--more than
_like_. Next to seeing you, I have no greater satisfaction. But you
have other duties, and greater pleasures, and I should regret to
take a moment from either. H * * was to call to-day, but I have not
seen him. The circumstances you mention at the close of your letter
is another proof in favour of my opinion of mankind. Such you will
always find them--selfish and distrustful. I except none. The
cause of this is the state of society. In the world, every one is
to stir for himself--it is useless, perhaps selfish, to expect any
thing from his neighbour. But I do not think we are born of this
disposition; for you find _friendship_ as a schoolboy, and _love_
enough before twenty.

"I went to see * *; he keeps me in town, where I don't wish to be
at present. He is a good man, but totally without conduct. And now,
my dearest William, I must wish you good morrow, and remain ever,
most sincerely and affectionately yours," &c.

[Footnote 38: On this occasion, another of the noble poet's
peculiarities was, somewhat startlingly, introduced to my notice. When
we were on the point of setting out from his lodgings in St. James's
Street, it being then about mid-day, he said to the servant, who was
shutting the door of the vis-a-vis, "Have you put in the pistols?" and
was answered in the affirmative. It was difficult,--more especially,
taking into account the circumstances under which we had just become
acquainted,--to keep from smiling at this singular noon-day precaution.]

* * * * *

From the time of our first meeting, there seldom elapsed a day that Lord
Byron and I did not see each other; and our acquaintance ripened into
intimacy and friendship with a rapidity of which I have seldom known an
example. I was, indeed, lucky in all the circumstances that attended my
first introduction to him. In a generous nature like his, the pleasure
of repairing an injustice would naturally give a zest to any partiality
I might have inspired in his mind; while the manner in which I had
sought this reparation, free as it was from resentment or defiance, left
nothing painful to remember in the transaction between us,--no
compromise or concession that could wound self-love, or take away from
the grace of that frank friendship to which he at once, so cordially and
so unhesitatingly, admitted me. I was also not a little fortunate in
forming my acquaintance with him, before his success had yet reached its
meridian burst,--before the triumphs that were in store for him had
brought the world all in homage at his feet, and, among the splendid
crowds that courted his society, even claims less humble than mine had
but a feeble chance of fixing his regard. As it was, the new scene of
life that opened upon him with his success, instead of detaching us from
each other, only multiplied our opportunities of meeting, and increased
our intimacy. In that society where his birth entitled him to move,
circumstances had already placed me, notwithstanding mine; and when,
after the appearance of "Childe Harold," he began to mingle with the
world, the same persons, who had long been _my_ intimates and friends,
became his; our visits were mostly to the same places, and, in the gay
and giddy round of a London spring, we were generally (as in one of his
own letters he expresses it) "embarked in the same Ship of Fools
together."

But, at the time when we first met, his position in the world was most
solitary. Even those coffee-house companions who, before his departure
from England, had served him as a sort of substitute for more worthy
society, were either relinquished or had dispersed; and, with the
exception of three or four associates of his college days (to whom he
appeared strongly attached), Mr. Dallas and his solicitor seemed to be
the only persons whom, even in their very questionable degree, he could
boast of as friends. Though too proud to complain of this loneliness, it
was evident that he felt it; and that the state of cheerless isolation,
"unguided and unfriended," to which, on entering into manhood, he had
found himself abandoned, was one of the chief sources of that resentful
disdain of mankind, which even their subsequent worship of him came too
late to remove. The effect, indeed, which his subsequent commerce with
society had, for the short period it lasted, in softening and
exhilarating his temper, showed how fit a soil his heart would have been
for the growth of all the kindlier feelings, had but a portion of this
sunshine of the world's smiles shone on him earlier.

At the same time, in all such speculations and conjectures as to what
_might_ have been, under more favourable circumstances, his character,
it is invariably to be borne in mind, that his very defects were among
the elements of his greatness, and that it was out of the struggle
between the good and evil principles of his nature that his mighty
genius drew its strength. A more genial and fostering introduction into
life, while it would doubtless have softened and disciplined his mind,
might have impaired its vigour; and the same influences that would have
diffused smoothness and happiness over his life might have been fatal to
its glory. In a short poem of his[39], which appears to have been
produced at Athens, (as I find it written on a leaf of the original MS.
of Childe Harold, and dated "Athens, 1811,") there are two lines which,
though hardly intelligible as connected with the rest of the poem, may,
taken separately, be interpreted as implying a sort of prophetic
consciousness that it was out of the wreck and ruin of all his hopes the
immortality of his name was to arise.

"Dear object of defeated care,
Though now of love and thee bereft,
To reconcile me with despair,
Thine image and my tears are left.
'Tis said with sorrow Time can cope,
But this, I feel, can ne'er be true;
For, _by the death-blow of my hope,
My Memory immortal grew!_"

We frequently, during the first months of our acquaintance, dined
together alone; and as we had no club, in common, to resort to,--the
Alfred being the only one to which he, at that period, belonged, and I
being then a member of none but Watier's,--our dinners used to be either
at the St. Alban's, or at his old haunt, Stevens's. Though at times he
would drink freely enough of claret, he still adhered to his system of
abstinence in food. He appeared, indeed, to have conceived a notion that
animal food has some peculiar influence on the character; and I
remember, one day, as I sat opposite to him, employed, I suppose, rather
earnestly over a beef-steak, after watching me for a few seconds, he
said, in a grave tone of enquiry,--"Moore, don't you find eating
beef-steak makes you ferocious?"

Understanding me to have expressed a wish to become a member of the
Alfred, he very good-naturedly lost no time in proposing me as a
candidate; but as the resolution which I had then nearly formed of
betaking myself to a country life rendered an additional club in London
superfluous, I wrote to beg that he would, for the present, at least,
withdraw my name: and his answer, though containing little, being the
first familiar note he ever honoured me with, I may be excused for
feeling a peculiar pleasure in inserting it.

[Footnote 39: "Written beneath the picture of ----"]

* * * * *

LETTER 82. TO MR. MOORE.

"December 11. 1811.

"My dear Moore,

"If you please, we will drop our former monosyllables, and adhere
to the appellations sanctioned by our godfathers and godmothers. If
you make it a point, I will withdraw your name; at the same time
there is no occasion, as I have this day postponed your election
'sine die,' till it shall suit your wishes to be amongst us. I do
not say this from any awkwardness the erasure of your proposal
would occasion to _me_, but simply such is the state of the case;
and, indeed, the longer your name is up, the stronger will become
the probability of success, and your voters more numerous. Of
course you will decide--your wish shall be my law. If my zeal has
already outrun discretion, pardon me, and attribute my
officiousness to an excusable motive.

"I wish you would go down with me to Newstead. Hodgson will be
there, and a young friend, named Harness, the earliest and dearest
I ever had from the third form at Harrow to this hour. I can
promise you good wine, and, if you like shooting, a manor of 4000
acres, fires, books, your own free will, and my own very
indifferent company. 'Balnea, vina * *.'

"Hodgson will plague you, I fear, with verse;--for my own part I
will conclude, with Martial, 'nil recitabo tibi;' and surely the
last inducement is not the least. Ponder on my proposition, and
believe me, my dear Moore, yours ever,

"BYRON."

* * * * *

Among those acts of generosity and friendship by which every year of
Lord Byron's life was signalised, there is none, perhaps, that, for its
own peculiar seasonableness and delicacy, as well as for the perfect
worthiness of the person who was the object of it, deserves more
honourable mention than that which I am now about to record, and which
took place nearly at the period of which I am speaking. The friend,
whose good fortune it was to inspire the feeling thus testified, was Mr.
Hodgson, the gentleman to whom so many of the preceding letters are
addressed; and as it would be unjust to rob him of the grace and honour
of being, himself, the testimony of obligations so signal, I shall here
lay before my readers an extract from the letter with which, in
reference to a passage in one of his noble friend's Journals, he has
favoured me.

"I feel it incumbent upon me to explain the circumstances to which this
passage alludes, however private their nature. They are, indeed,
calculated to do honour to the memory of my lamented friend. Having
become involved, unfortunately, in difficulties and embarrassments, I
received from Lord Byron (besides former pecuniary obligations)
assistance, at the time in question, to the amount of a thousand pounds.
Aid of such magnitude was equally unsolicited and unexpected on my part;
but it was a long-cherished, though secret, purpose of my friend to
afford that aid; and he only waited for the period when he thought it
would be of most service. His own words were, on the occasion of
conferring this overwhelming favour, '_I always intended to do it_.'"

During all this time, and through the months of January and February,
his poem of "Childe Harold" was in its progress through the press; and
to the changes and additions which he made in the course of printing,
some of the most beautiful passages of the work owe their existence. On
comparing, indeed, his rough draft of the two Cantos with the finished
form in which they exist at present, we are made sensible of the power
which the man of genius possesses, not only of surpassing others, but of
improving on himself. Originally, the "little Page" and "Yeoman" of the
Childe were introduced to the reader's notice in the following tame
stanzas, by expanding the substance of which into their present light,
lyric shape, it is almost needless to remark how much the poet has
gained in variety and dramatic effect:--

"And of his train there was a henchman page,
A peasant boy, who serv'd his master well;
And often would his pranksome prate engage
Childe Burun's[40] ear, when his proud heart did swell
With sullen thoughts that he disdain'd to tell.
Then would he smile on him, and Alwin[41] smiled,
When aught that from his young lips archly fell,
The gloomy film from Harold's eye beguiled....

"Him and one yeoman only did he take
To travel eastward to a far countrie;
And, though the boy was grieved to leave the lake,
On whose fair banks he grew from infancy,
Eftsoons his little heart beat merrily,
With hope of foreign nations to behold,
And many things right marvellous to see,
Of which our vaunting travellers oft have told,
From Mandeville....[42]"

In place of that mournful song "To Ines," in the first Canto, which
contains some of the dreariest touches of sadness that even his pen ever
let fall, he had, in the original construction of the poem, been so
little fastidious as to content himself with such ordinary sing-song as
the following:--

"Oh never tell again to me
Of Northern climes and British ladies,
It has not been your lot to see,
Like me, the lovely girl of Cadiz,
Although her eye be not of blue,
Nor fair her locks, like English lasses," &c. &c.

There were also, originally, several stanzas full of direct personality,
and some that degenerated into a style still more familiar and ludicrous
than that of the description of a London Sunday, which still disfigures
the poem. In thus mixing up the light with the solemn, it was the
intention of the poet to imitate Ariosto. But it is far easier to rise,
with grace, from the level of a strain generally familiar, into an
occasional short burst of pathos or splendour, than to interrupt thus a
prolonged tone of solemnity by any descent into the ludicrous or
burlesque.[43] In the former case, the transition may have the effect of
softening or elevating, while, in the latter, it almost invariably
shocks;--for the same reason, perhaps, that a trait of pathos or high
feeling, in comedy, has a peculiar charm; while the intrusion of comic
scenes into tragedy, however sanctioned among us by habit and authority,
rarely fails to offend. The noble poet was, himself, convinced of the
failure of the experiment, and in none of the succeeding Cantos of
Childe Harold repeated it.

Of the satiric parts, some verses on the well-known traveller, Sir John
Carr, may supply us with, at least, a harmless specimen:--

"Ye, who would more of Spain and Spaniards know,
Sights, saints, antiques, arts, anecdotes, and war,
Go, hie ye hence to Paternoster Row,--
Are they not written in the boke of Carr?
Green Erin's Knight, and Europe's wandering star.
Then listen, readers, to the Man of Ink,
Hear what he did, and sought, and wrote afar:
All these are coop'd within one Quarto's brink,
This borrow, steal (don't buy), and tell us what you think."

Among those passages which, in the course of revisal, he introduced,
like pieces of "rich inlay," into the poem, was that fine stanza--

"Yet if, as holiest men have deem'd, there be
A land of souls beyond that sable shore," &c.

through which lines, though, it must be confessed, a tone of scepticism
breathes, (as well as in those tender verses--

"Yes,--I will dream that we may meet again,")

it is a scepticism whose sadness calls far more for pity than blame;
there being discoverable, even through its very doubts, an innate warmth
of piety, which they had been able to obscure, but not to chill. To use
the words of the poet himself, in a note which it was once his intention
to affix to these stanzas, "Let it be remembered that the spirit they
breathe is desponding, not sneering, scepticism,"--a distinction never
to be lost sight of; as, however hopeless may be the conversion of the
scoffing infidel, he who feels pain in doubting has still alive within
him the seeds of belief.

At the same time with Childe Harold, he had three other works in the
press,--his "Hints from Horace," "The Curse of Minerva," and a fifth
edition of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." The note upon the
latter poem, which had been the lucky origin of our acquaintance, was
withdrawn in this edition, and a few words of explanation, which he had
the kindness to submit to my perusal, substituted in its place.

In the month of January, the whole of the two Cantos being printed off,
some of the poet's friends, and, among others, Mr. Rogers and myself,
were so far favoured as to be indulged with a perusal of the sheets. In
adverting to this period in his "Memoranda," Lord Byron, I remember,
mentioned,--as one of the ill omens which preceded the publication of
the poem,--that some of the literary friends to whom it was shown
expressed doubts of its success, and that one among them had told him
"it was too good for the age." Whoever may have pronounced this
opinion,--and I have some suspicion that I am myself the guilty
person,--the age has, it must be owned, most triumphantly refuted the
calumny upon its taste which the remark implied.

It was in the hands of Mr. Rogers I first saw the sheets of the poem,
and glanced hastily over a few of the stanzas which he pointed out to me
as beautiful. Having occasion, the same morning, to write a note to Lord
Byron, I expressed strongly the admiration which this foretaste of his
work had excited in me; and the following is--as far as relates to
literary matters--the answer I received from him.

[Footnote 40: If there could be any doubt as to his intention of
delineating himself in his hero, this adoption of the old Norman name of
his family, which he seems to have at first contemplated, would be
sufficient to remove it.]

[Footnote 41: In the MS. the names "Robin" and "Rupert" had been
successively inserted here and scratched out again.]

[Footnote 42: Here the manuscript is illegible.]

[Footnote 43: Among the acknowledged blemishes of Milton's great poem,
is his abrupt transition, in this manner, into an imitation of Ariosto's
style, in the "Paradise of Fools."]

* * * * *

LETTER 83. TO MR. MOORE.

"January 29. 1812.

"My dear Moore,

"I wish very much I could have seen you; I am in a state of
ludicrous tribulation. * * *

"Why do you say that I dislike your poesy? I have expressed no such
opinion, either in _print_ or elsewhere. In scribbling myself, it
was necessary for me to find fault, and I fixed upon the trite
charge of immorality, because I could discover no other, and was so
perfectly qualified in the innocence of my heart, to 'pluck that
mote from my neighbour's eye.'

"I feel very, very much obliged by your approbation; but, at _this
moment_, praise, even _your_ praise, passes by me like 'the idle
wind.' I meant and mean to send you a copy the moment of
publication; but now I can think of nothing but damned,
deceitful,--delightful woman, as Mr. Liston says in the Knight of
Snowdon. Believe me, my dear Moore,

"Ever yours, most affectionately,

"BYRON."

* * * * *

The passages here omitted contain rather _too_ amusing an account of a
disturbance that had just occurred in the establishment at Newstead, in
consequence of the detected misconduct of one of the maid-servants, who
had been supposed to stand rather too high in the favour of her master,
and, by the airs of authority which she thereupon assumed, had disposed
all the rest of the household to regard her with no very charitable
eyes. The chief actors in the strife were this sultana and young
Rushton; and the first point in dispute that came to Lord Byron's
knowledge (though circumstances, far from creditable to the damsel,
afterwards transpired) was, whether Rushton was bound to carry letters
to "the Hut" at the bidding of this female. To an episode of such a
nature I should not have thought of alluding, were it not for the two
rather curious letters that follow, which show how gravely and coolly
the young lord could arbitrate on such an occasion, and with what
considerate leaning towards the servant whose fidelity he had proved, in
preference to any new liking or fancy by which it might be suspected he
was actuated towards the other.

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