Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to John Murray, 25 December 1822
“I had sent you back the Quarterly without perusal, having resolved to read no more
reviews, good, bad, or indifferent: but ‘who can control ![]()
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his fate?’ Galignani, to whom
my English studies are confined, has forwarded a copy of at least one half of it in his
indefatigable catch-penny weekly compilation; and as, ‘like honour, it came
unlooked for,’ I have looked through it. I must say that, upon the whole, that is, the whole of the half which
I have read (for the other half is to be the segment of
Galignani’s next week’s circular), it is extremely
handsome, and any thing but unkind or unfair. As I take the good in good part, I must
not, nor will not, quarrel with the bad. What the writer says of Don Juan is harsh, but it is inevitable. He must follow, or
at least not directly oppose, the opinion of a prevailing and yet not very firmly seated
party. A Review may and will direct and ‘turn awry’ the currents of opinion,
but it must not directly oppose them. Don Juan will be known,
by and by, for what it is intended, a Satire on abuses of the present states of society, and not an
eulogy of vice. It may be now and then voluptuous:—I can’t help that. Ariosto is worse; Smollett (see Lord Strutwell in vol.
2d of Roderick Random) ten times
worse; and Fielding no better. No girl will ever
be seduced by reading Don Juan:—no, no; she will go to Little’s poems and Rousseau’s Romans for that, or even to the immaculate De Staël. They will encourage her, and not the Don, who laughs at that, and—and—most other things. But
never mind—ça ira!
* * * * * *
“Now, do you see what you and your friends do by your
injudicious rudeness?—actually cement a sort of connexion which you strove to prevent,
and which, had the Hunts prospered, would not in all probability
have continued. As it is, I will not quit them in their adversity, though it should cost
me character, fame, money, and the usual et cetera.
“My original motives I already explained (in the letter
which you thought proper to show): they are the true ones, and I abide by them, as I
tell you, and I told Leigh Hunt when he questioned me
on the subject of that letter. He was violently hurt, and never will forgive me at
bottom; but I can’t help that. I never meant to make a parade of it; but if he
chose to question me, I could only answer the plain truth: and I confess I did not see
any thing in the letter to hurt him, unless I said ![]()
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he was
‘a bore,’ which I don’t remember. Had their
Journal gone on well, and I could have
aided to make it better for them, I should then have left them, after my safe pilotage
off a lee shore, to make a prosperous voyage by themselves. As it is, I can’t, and
would not, if I could, leave them among the breakers.
“As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinion,
between Leigh Hunt and me, there is little or none. We
meet rarely, hardly ever; but I think him a good-principled and able man, and must do as
I would be done by. I do not know what world he has lived in, but I have lived in three
or four; but none of them like his Keats and
kangaroo terra incognita. Alas! poor Shelley! how we would have laughed had he lived, and how we used to laugh
now and then, at various things which are grave in the suburbs!
“You are all mistaken about Shelley. You do not know how mild, how tolerant, how good he was in
society; and as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room, when he liked, and
where liked.
“I have some thoughts of taking a run down to Naples
(solus, or, at most, cum solâ) this spring, and writing, when I have
studied the country, a Fifth and Sixth Canto of Childe Harold: but this is merely an idea for the present, and I have other
excursions and voyages in my mind. The busts* are finished: are you worthy of them?
“Yours, &c.
“N. B.
“P.S. Mrs. Shelley
is residing with the Hunts at some distance from me. I see them very seldom, and
generally on account of their business. Mrs. Shelley, I believe,
will go to England in the spring.
“Count
Gamba’s family, the father and mother and daughter, are residing
with me by Mr. Hill (the minister’s)
recommendation, as a safer asylum from the political persecutions than they could
have in another
* Of the bust of himself by Bartollini he says, in one of the omitted letters to Mr. Murray:—“The bust does not turn
out a good one,—though it may be like for aught I know, as it exactly
resembles a superannuated Jesuit.” Again, “I assure you
Bartollini’s is dreadful, though my mind
misgives me that it is hideously like. If it is, I cannot be long for this
world, for it overlooks seventy.” |
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residence; but they occupy one part of a large house,
and I the other, and our establishments are quite separate.
“Since I have read the Quarterly, I shall erase two or three passages in the
latter six or seven cantos, in which I had lightly stroked over two or three of your
authors; but I will not return evil for good. I liked what I read of the article
much.
“Mr. J. Hunt is
most likely the publisher of the new Cantos; with what prospects of success I know
not, nor does it very much matter, as far as I am concerned; but I hope that it may
be of use to him, for he is a stiff, sturdy, conscientious man, and I like him: he is
such a one as Prynne or Pym might be. I bear you no ill-will for declining the
Don Juans.
“Have you aided Madame de
Yossy, as I requested? I sent her three hundred francs. Recommend her,
will you, to the Literary Fund, or to some benevolence within your circles.”
Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533)
Italian poet, author of the epic romance
Orlando Furioso
(1532).
Lorenzo Bartolini (1777-1850)
Florentine sculptor patronized by Napoleon who made a bust of Byron in 1822.
Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
English dramatist, essayist, and novelist; author of
Joseph
Andrews (1742) and
The History of Tom Jones (1749).
John Anthony Galignani (1796-1873)
Bookseller with his brother William; in 1821 they succeeded their father as publishers of
the Parisian newspaper
Galignani's Messenger..
William Noel- Hill, third baron Berwick (1773-1842)
English diplomat and book-collector; he was envoy to Sardinia from 1807 to 1824 and
minister at Naples before he succeeded to the title in 1832.
John Hunt (1775-1848)
English printer and publisher, the elder brother of Leigh Hunt; he was the publisher of
The Examiner and
The Liberal, in
connection with which he was several times prosecuted for libel.
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)
English poet, journalist, and man of letters; editor of
The
Examiner and
The Liberal; friend of Byron, Keats, and
Shelley.
John Keats (1795-1821)
English poet, author of
Endymion, "The Eve of St. Agnes," and
other poems, who died of tuberculosis in Rome.
John Murray II (1778-1843)
The second John Murray began the
Quarterly Review in 1809 and
published works by Scott, Byron, Austen, Crabbe, and other literary notables.
William Prynne (1600-1669)
Puritan pamphleteer whose nose was slit for the offence of publishing his notorious
attack on stage-plays,
Histriomastix (1633).
John Pym (1584-1643)
English politician; a leader of the Puritan faction in the Short and Long
Parliaments.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Swiss-born man of letters; author of, among others,
Julie ou la
Nouvelle Heloïse (1761),
Émile (1762) and
Les Confessions (1782).
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [née Godwin] (1797-1851)
English novelist, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecaft, and the second wife
of Percy Bysshe Shelley. She is the author of
Frankenstein (1818)
and
The Last Man (1835) and the editor of Shelley's works
(1839-40).
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
English poet, with Byron in Switzerland in 1816; author of
Queen
Mab (1813),
The Revolt of Islam (1817),
The Cenci and
Prometheus Unbound (1820), and
Adonais (1821).
Tobias Smollett (1721-1771)
Scottish physician and man of letters; author of the novels
Roderick
Random (1747) and
Humphry Clinker (1771).
Germaine de Staël (1766-1817)
French woman of letters; author of the novel
Corinne, ou L'Italie
(1807) and
De l'Allemagne (1811); banned from Paris by Napoleon, she
spent her later years living in Germany, Britain, and Switzerland.
Ann Yosy (1833 fl.)
Novelist and miscellaneous writer married to a Swiss farmer; she was living in London
1825-33. She wrote
Constance and Leopold, a Novel (1820) and
Tales from Switzerland (1822-23).
The Quarterly Review. (1809-1967). Published by John Murray, the
Quarterly was instigated by Walter
Scott as a Tory rival to the
Edinburgh Review. It was edited by
William Gifford to 1824, and by John Gibson Lockhart from 1826 to 1853.
George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Don Juan. (London: 1819-1824). A burlesque poem in ottava rima published in installments: Cantos I and II published in
1819, III, IV and V in 1821, VI, VII, and VIII in 1823, IX, X, and XI in 1823, XII, XIII,
and XIV in 1823, and XV and XVI in 1824.
