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Mr. Moore’s Life of Lord ByronThe TimesLondon30 January 183014,157
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The Times.
No 14,157.LONDON, SATURDAY, January 30, 1830.Price 7d.
MR. MOORE’S LIFE OF LORD BYRON.
The life of Lord Byron was somewhat more marked
by variety of adventure than that of most of the literary men of these later days. Although it
was, for this reason, a more interesting subject for biography than is usually presented by
such lives, it might have been but little distinguished from the common lot, but for the
accident which has placed the task of recording it in the hands of one, who is, of all men, the
best qualified to perform it. Mr. Moore’s personal
knowledge of the author,—his familiar acquaintance with those who knew him better, and had
known him longer, than any others,—the access which these circumstances and his own reputation
have given him, to almost every authority and document in existence respecting his noble
friend,—have been advantages which perhaps no person besides could have commanded; and all
these advantages have been brought to bear in the work before us. Its fidelity and accuracy, as far as facts are related, admit of no
dispute; but that which confers on it at once its greatest charm and power,—that which will
make it interesting to all classes of readers now, and will keep up that interest as long as
the history of letters and of human character shall engage the attention of mankind, is derived
from the author. All that in common hands would have been common enough, acquires a new shape
under the influence of genius such as his, and the kindred feeling which they possessed in some
points has enabled the living poet to shed a lustre on the fame and character of the dead one
which could have been produced by scarcely any other means.
This leads us to remark that Mr. Moore has
not been able wholly to guard himself against the besetting temptation of all biography. The
interest which it is quite natural to feel in the performance of such a duty, combining in this
instance with the author’s strong regard for Lord
Byron, has engendered such a partiality as induces him often to extenuate faults
which, if even justice were done, ought not to escape whipping; and sometimes to ascribe to
Lord Byron’s actions motives more exalted than those which
really influence him. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to avoid this fault: a
thousand things may be said in its favour; and when they are all said and admitted, it is a
fault still.
All the early particulars of the life of the poet are collected by Mr. Moore with great care, and the premature death of
Lord Byron has left many persons living who are able to
verify the facts that are related of him. At school in Scotland, at Harrow, and at college,
Lord Byron appears to have been rather under than beyond the mark at
which most of his competitors of promise had arrived,—a circumstance which may be accounted for
by the early defects of his education, and by that proud intractability of temper which marked
his whole life and marred all his happiness. In the part of the book the great (we had nearly
said the only) charm is in the writer. The skilful manner in which he has brought together
facts trivial in themselves, and has imbued them with an interest and power which the reader
involuntarily acknowledges,—the kind solicitude with which he dwells on the development of the
better and more amiable traits of Lord Byron’s youthful days, and
seeks to refer to circumstances and accident the springs of his future actions, and the acute
and judicious observations which accompany the narration, render the work at once the most
satisfactory and interesting that has, perhaps, been produced in that class of literature to
which it belongs.
It is Lord Byron’s literary character
that deserves and has engaged Mr. Moore’s best
attention. He has preserved a paper in which his friend had written a list of the authors whose
works he had read before he was 20 years old, (a very considerable number, by the way), and the
greater part of which were in English. To this list Mr. Moore subjoins the
following observation:—
“To this early and extensive study of English writers may be
attributed that mastery over the resources of his own language, with which Lord Byron came furnished into the field of literature, and
which enabled him, as fast as his youthful fancies sprung up, to clothe them with a diction
worthy of their beauty. In general, the difficulty of young writers, at their commencement,
lies far less in any lack of thoughts or images, than in that want of a fitting organ to
give these conceptions vent, to which their unacquaintance with the great instrument of the
man of genius, his native language, dooms them. It will be found, indeed, that the three
most remarkable examples of early authorship, which, in their respective lines, the history
of literature affords—Pope, Congreve, and Chatterton—were all of them persons self-educated*, according to their own
intellectual wants and tastes, and left, undistracted by the worse than useless pedantries
of the schools, to seek, in the pure ‘well of English undefiled,’ those
treasures of which they accordingly so very early and intimately possessed
themselves†. To these three instances may now be added, virtually, that of
Lord Byron, who, though a disciple of the schools, was,
intellectually speaking, in them, not of them, and who, while his comrades were prying
curiously into the graves of dead languages, betook himself to the fresh, living sources of
his own‡, and from thence drew those rich, varied stores of diction, which have
placed his works, from the age of two-and-twenty upwards, among the most precious
depositories of the strength and sweetness of the English language that our whole
literature supplies.”
In a memorandum annexed to another list, Lord
Byron expresses a very slighting opinion, which perhaps he lived to change, of
some of the distinguished English poets. Of Chaucer, he
says, “notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think him obscene and
contemptible:” the only conclusion to be drawn from which saying is, that he could not
read the father of our poetry,—a case by no means uncommon with his countrymen.
Up to the period at which he published his satire, his life appears to have been
passed in mere frivolity, to the recital of which neither his own egotism (a more plentiful
share of which never fell to any other mortal, as his letters every where testify), nor the
efforts of his friend can give importance, however the latter may have contrived to clothe them
with a considerable portion of interest. His letters of this period are sad productions, more
like the effusions of a sprightly haberdasher, than of the poet that was to be. They are filled
with that sort of pert impertinence that cockneys (to adopt a phrase which belongs to a
particular class of professors of modern literature) have been so justly ridiculed for: it
would be difficult to point out any recent production in which there is more unworthy variety,
more mawkishness and sauciness, than in the letters addressed to a young lady at Southwell. She must be (whoever she is) a model of good temper,
to have endured such a correspondent. The publication of his satire, and the consequences which ensued, developed a new
feature in his character, and convinced him that he possessed powers which, however he had
coveted them, he had never before thought were his own. Mr.
Moore’s observations on this event are singularly happy and judicious.
“Great as was the advance which his powers had made, under
the influence of that resentment from which he now drew his inspiration, they were yet,
even in his Satire, at an immeasurable
distance from the point to which they afterwards so triumphantly rose. It is, indeed,
remarkable that, essentially as his genius seemed connected with, and, as it were,
springing out of his character, the development of the one should so long have preceded the
full maturity of the resources of the other. By her very early and rapid expansion of his
sensibilities, Nature had given him notice of what she destined him for, long before he
understood the call; and those materials of poetry with which his own fervid temperament
abounded were but by slow degrees, and after much self-meditation, revealed to him. In his
Satire, though vigorous, there is but little foretaste of the wonders that followed it. His
spirit was stirred, but he had not yet looked down into its depths, nor does even his
bitterness taste of the bottom of the heart, like those sarcasms which he afterwards flung
in the face of mankind. Still less had the other countless feelings and passions, with
which his soul had been long labouring, found an organ worthy of them;—the gloom, the
grandeur, the tenderness of his nature, all were left without a voice, till his mighty
genius, at last, awakened in its strength.
“In stooping, as he did, to write after established models,
as well in the Satire as in his still earlier
poems, he showed how little he had yet explored his own original resources, or found out
those distinctive marks by which he was to be known through all time. But, bold and
energetic as was his general character, he was, in a remarkable degree, diffident in his
intellectual powers. The consciousness of what he could achieve was but by degrees forced
upon him, and the discovery of so rich a mine of genius in his soul came with no less
surprise on himself than on the world. It was from the same slowness of self-appreciation
that, afterwards, in the full flow of his fame, he long doubted, as we shall see, his own
aptitude for works of wit and humour,—till the happy experiment of ‘Beppo’ at once dissipated this distrust,
and opened a new region of triumph to his versatile and boundless powers.
“But, however far short of himself his first writings must
be considered, there is in his Satire a
liveliness of thought, and, still more, a vigour and courage, which, concurring with the
justice of his cause and the sympathies of the public on his side, could not fail to attach
instant celebrity to his name. Notwithstanding, too, the general boldness and recklessness
of his tone, there were occasionally mingled with this defiance some allusions to his own
fate and character, whose affecting earnestness seemed to answer for their truth, and which
were of a nature strongly to awaken curiosity as well as interest.”
The history of his early, and always hopeless, attachment to Miss Chaworth, is very delightfully written. We cannot,
however, believe that it was this event which cast a colour over his future life, and
occasioned that melancholy and misanthropy of which he afterwards made so abundant a
display. What Madame de Stael told him, and what he
never forgave her for telling him,—that he had never been in love, and was incapable of feeling
that passion,—was perfectly true. The pettiness of his spirit,—which all his pride could not
conceal,—and that unjust malignant temper, of which he gave so many proofs, shows itself most
disgustingly in every passage of his letters in which he mentions Madame de
Stael. In one place he vents coarse, unmanly, inhuman sarcasms against her on an
occasion which might have induced his forbearance—the death of her son; and in another his wit
helps his spite so feebly that he calls her Madame Stale. It may be said
these are passages in private letters, and that therefore they are entitled to indulgence. The
folks they concern have been long in their graves, so that indulgence is not worth having; but
being the unchecked expression of the writer’s private thoughts, they show pretty
satisfactorily the stuff his temper was made of.
Mr. Moore has collected many of Lord Byron’s letters written during his travels in the East; and these
are not only interesting and amusing, but they place the writer of them in a better light than
he often appears in elsewhere. There is Mr.
Hobhouse’s testimony that he was an agreeable companion; he wrote very
sprightly amusing letters, with no superabundance of gall, saw a great deal, described it very
well, and produced his Childe Harold.
That is a very eloquent and beautiful passage of the work in which Mr.
Moore, having landed the pilgrim once more in England, considers the effect
which his travel must have had upon his mind in maturing and developing the powers that lay
within it. We have not room to extract the whole, and to give a part of it would be unjust.
Lord Byron, with a remarkable, but not, in authors, an
uncommon mistake in judgment, preferred a satirical poem he had written, called Hints from Horace, to his
Childe Harold.
Mr. Moore has preserved some of this poem, of which
the specimens we have, leave us no room to doubt the suppression of the whole.
It was impossible for the author to avoid a topic which occurs in the life of
Lord Byron, and in which he is himself personally
concerned; and the manner in which he has treated it entitles him to great credit for frankness
and good feeling. We shall be understood to speak of that which has long been sufficiently
notorious, but never before fully explained,—Mr.
Moore’s quarrel with Lord Byron, occasioned by an
unjustifiable allusion which he had made to him in his Satire. It is not possible for a man, the hero of his
own tale, and that so delicate a one, to tell it with more perfectly unaffected modesty and
manliness. Mr. Moore had required Lord Byron, by
letter, to give him satisfaction for the wrong he had done him. By an accident this letter was
never delivered according to its address. Soon after it was written Lord
Byron went abroad, where he remained some time. Mr. Moore
adds—
“During the interval of a year and a half which elapsed
before Lord Byron’s return, I had taken upon
myself obligations, both as husband and father, which make most men,—and especially those
who have nothing to bequeath,—less willing to expose themselves unnecessarily to danger. On
hearing, therefore, of the arrival of the noble traveller from Greece, though still
thinking it due to myself to follow up my first request of an explanation. I resolved, in
prosecuting that object, to adopt such a tone of conciliation as should not only prove my
sincere desire of a pacific result, but show the entire freedom from any angry or resentful
feeling with which I took the step. The death of Mrs.
Byron, for some time, delayed my purpose. But as soon after that event as
was consistent with decorum, I addressed a letter to Lord Byron, in
which, referring to my former communication and expressing some doubts as to its having
ever reached him, I re-stated, in pretty nearly the same words, the nature of the insult,
which, as it appeared to me, the passage in his note was calculated to convey.”
Lord Byron replied to this note, and after some coldness
(which was perhaps justifiable enough under the circumstances) a satisfactory explanation was
arrived at, and that friendship ensued between the poets, which existed without interruption
during Lord Byron’s life.
Lord Byron’s fame as a poet, and his rank, carried him now much into
society, the best and most brilliant that London contained. Mr.
Moore’s account of him here is curious, but it leads us to a conclusion
very different from that at which he has arrived. We take the merriment to have been the
natural character of the man,—the melancholy mere affectation, and that love of being
distinguished, no matter how, which “sicklied o’er” all his existence, and
hastened its termination.
“During all this time, the impression which he had produced
in society, both as a poet and a man, went on daily increasing; and the facility with which
he gave himself up to the current of fashionable life, and mingled in all the gay scenes
through which it led, showed that the novelty, at least, of this mode of existence had
charms for him, however he might estimate its pleasures. That sort of vanity which is
almost inseparable from genius, and which consists in an extreme sensitiveness on the
subject of self, Lord Byron, I need not say, possessed
in no ordinary decree; and never was there a career in which this sensibility to the
opinions of others was exposed to more constant and various excitement than that on which
he was now entered. I find in a note of my own to him, written at this period, some jesting
allusions to the ‘circle of star-gazers’ whom I had left around him at some
party on the preceding night;—and such, in fact, was the flattering ordeal he had to
undergo wherever he went. On these occasions,—particularly before the range of his
acquaintance had become sufficiently extended to set him wholly at his ease,—his air and
port were those of one whose better thoughts were elsewhere, and who looked with melancholy
abstraction on the gay crowd around him. This deportment, so rare in such scenes, and so
accordant with the romantic notions entertained of him, was the result partly of shyness,
and partly, perhaps, of that love of effect and impression to which the poetical character
of his mind naturally led. Nothing, indeed, could be more amusing and delightful than the
contrast which his manner afterwards, when we were alone, presented to his proud reserve in
the brilliant circle we had just left. It was like the bursting gaiety of a boy let loose
from school, and seemed as if there was no extent of fun or tricks of which he was not
capable. Finding him invariably thus lively when we were together, I often rallied him on
the gloomy tone of his poetry, as assumed; but his constant answer was (and I soon ceased
to doubt of its truth), that, though thus merry and full of laughter with those he liked,
he was, at heart, one of the most melancholy wretches in existence.”
Lord Byron’s marriage was certainly one of the most
disastrous events in his life. It was, however, be it remembered, only in consequence of his
own imprudence and selfish injustice. Mr. Moore has
taken some pains to account for, and by a side-wind to excuse, his conduct; but ingenious as
this part of the work is, it has wholly failed to convince us that there is any thing in the
temperament of a poet which unfits him for discharging the social duties of a husband and a
father. Mr. Moore says—
“‘To follow poetry as one ought (says the
authority‖ I have already quoted), one must forget father and mother and cleave to it
alone.’ In these few words is pointed out the sole path that leads genius to
greatness. On such terms alone are the high places of fame to be won;—nothing less than the
sacrifice of the entire man can achieve them. However delightful, therefore, may be the
spectacle of a man of genius tamed and domesticated in society, taking docilely upon him
the yoke of the social ties, and enlightening without disturbing the sphere in which he
moves, we must nevertheless, in the midst of our admiration, bear in mind that it is not
thus smoothly or amiably immortality has been ever struggled for, or won. The poet thus
circumstanced may be popular, may be loved; for the happiness of himself and those linked
with him he is in the right road,—but not for greatness. The marks by which Fame has always
separated her great martyrs from the rest of mankind are not upon him, and the crown cannot
be his. He may dazzle, may captivate the circle, and even the times in which he lives, but
he is not for hereafter.”
It is impossible not to understand the allusion, but we think the writer proves
the opposite side of the question. It is mischievous, too, for a person whose opinion is
entitled to have such weight as Mr. Moore’s, to
express it as he has done; for although he has so qualified and guarded it, that to people of
sane minds and honest intentions it contains no harm, there are as abundance of weak folks in
the world who will fancy that he means to justify his friend. All that can be said in excuse of
Lord Byron’s treatment of his wife is, that he had
made a choice by no means calculated to realize the happiness he fancied he should find in
wedlock, and that the discovery of his error brought with it bitterness and exasperation on
either side, which if left alone, would probably have subsided; but which being inflamed by the
malevolent or injudicious persons by whom the parties were surrounded, ended in a lamentable
wreck of their mutual comfort and tranquility. To excuse or to account for an event which began
only in an erroneous calculation and ill temper, on the score of Lord
Byron’s extraordinary mental powers, seems to be incorrect, and may be the
means (which Heaven avert!) of many a future coxcomb who scribbles verse, fancying he has found
an authority for leaving his wife and children to the parental care of the parish officers, by
virtue of his being a genius.
The account which Mr. Moore gives of the
Memoirs that were burnt, will be read with
interest.
“In those Memoirs (or, more properly, Memoranda) of the noble poet, which it was thought
expedient, for various reasons, to sacrifice, he gave a detailed account of all the
circumstances connected with his marriage, from the first proposal to the lady till his own
departure, after the breach, from England. In truth, though the title of
“Memoirs,” which he himself sometimes gave to that manuscript, conveys the idea
of a complete and regular piece of biography, it was to this particular portion of his life
that the work was principally devoted; while the anecdotes, having reference to other parts
of his career, not only occupied a very disproportionate space in its pages, but were most
of them such as are found repeated in the various Journals and other MSS. he left behind.
The chief charm, indeed, of that narrative was the melancholy playfulness—melancholy, from
the wounded feeling so visible through its pleasantry—with which events unimportant and
persons uninteresting, in almost every respect but their connexion with such a man’s
destiny, were detailed and described in it. Frank, as usual, throughout, in his avowal of
his own errors, and generously just towards her who was his fellow-sufferer in the strife,
the impression his recital left on the minds of all who perused it was, to say the least,
favourable to him;—though, upon the whole, leading to a persuasion, which I have already
intimated to be my own, that, neither in kind or degree, did the causes of disunion between
the parties much differ from those that loosen the links of most such marriages.
“With respect to the details themselves, though all
important in his own eyes at the time, as being connected with the subject that superseded
most others in his thoughts, the interest they would possess for others, now that their
first zest as a subject of scandal is gone by, and the greater number of the persons to
whom they relate forgotten, would be too slight to justify me in entering upon them more
particularly, or running the risk of any offence that might be inflicted by their
disclosure.”
In 1816 Lord Byron went once more abroad—never
to return; and here Mr. Moore’s memoir for the
present closes.
* “I took to reading by myself,” says Pope, “for which I had a very great eagerness and
enthusiasm; . . . . . I followed every where, as my fancy led me, and was like a boy
gathering flowers in the fields and woods, just as they fell in his way. These five or
six years I still look upon as the happiest part of my life.” It appears,
too, that he was himself aware of the advantages which this free course of study brought
with it:—“Mr. Pope,” says Spence, “thought himself the better, in some
respects, for not having had a regular education. He (as he observed in particular)
read originally for the sense, whereas we are taught, for many years, to read only for
words.”
† Before Chatterton was 12 years
old he wrote a catalogue, in the same manner as Lord
Byron, of the books he had already read, to the number of 70. Of these the
chief subjects were history and divinity.
‡ The perfect purity with which the Greeks wrote their own language
was, with justice perhaps, attributed by themselves to their entire abstinence from the
study of any other. “If they became learned,” says Ferguson, “it was only by studying what they themselves had
produced.”