BYI^ON 3 BY * HON. I^ODEN NOEL She 3. ' Beppo " : " One hates an author that's all author, fellows In foolscap uniforms turned up with ink, So very anxious, clever, fine, and jealous, One don't know what to say to them, or think." And he went to Greece partly to show the world that he could, as he expressed it, "do something better than write verses." He died dreaming in his fever heats that he was leading the Greeks to assault Lepanto. He cared as much for his fourteen-feet dives with Matthews into the Cam, to pick up coins and trinkets ; for his amorous adventures with the ladies in England, and darker orgies at Venice; his sea-rovings in the Bolivar, and long swims with Trelawny or Ekenhead ; his travels with Hobhouse, and solitary communings with nature; for his pleasant hours with young Eddlestone, the sweet chorister of Cambridge ; and the home-life with Augusta ; for Ada, and Allegra cared as much for these as for the composition of " Childe Harold " or "Don Juan." There was the rather vulgar ostentation of rank to set off against these keen interests in life, the whim, or affectation, of wishing rather to be treated as 62 LIFE OF a lord than as a poet, which may have made him too careless, or less conscientious than it behoves every true artist to be in the technical finish of his art, which ought to be sacred with him, the ideal wife, the queen of all mistresses. Still it was, I think, pure gain for Byron to be no mere bookman, hide-bound in calf, instead of human skin, and treating the universe as so much docile material for such as he to make pretty little things out of. He was a Berserker, whose wild spirit found vent in song, and his was a bleeding human heart, even though he made of it " a pageant." What he does has the salt breath of impetuously moving sea, the thrill of warm-blooded life ; his fervid voice has the living accent. It was not in order to write poems that he conversed much with sea and mountain, or humanity ; though these inspired him with the irresistible impulse to write. He mixed with men and women, helped them or marred, eat, drank, and caroused with them. But nature and men were as much to him as the creations they inspired, which, having taken their own resplendent shapes in the high and solitary places of reflection and imagination, issued therefrom, transformed and immortal. It is mainly this rare and memorable combination of in- terest alike in action and contemplation which gives Byron the eminent personality attributed to him by Goethe. But, at the same time, it must be added that he lived under a "plague of microscopes." Every lesser person who could gain a little reflected lustre by describing him, noted down every least significant word, mood, look, whim, gesture ; passing it, moreover, through the some- times distorting medium of his own understanding, and LORD BYRON. 53 too often also through that of his own rancour or preju- dice, heightening this trait, diminishing or ignoring the other ; so that we are left with a series of indifferent photographs, which hardly enable us to do the man justice. Who could come scathless out of such an ordeal ? And then, as Miss Blind says, in her excellent introduction to his " Letters," he was all things to all men, reflected chameonlike the character of his com- panions, or correspondents ; he was many characters in turn. So while all the sketches have a one-sided truth, they need to be combined and modified into a portrait. CHAPTER II. IN October, 1805, the youth left Harrow and went to Trinity College, Cambridge, remaining there during three years of irregular attendance, taking his (honorary nobleman's) M.A. degree in March, 1808. He was never anything but a poor scholar, however, bestowing little care on the studies of the place. He formed there several strong friendships, and, as I have already told, a very warm attachment to young Eddlestone, a sweet- voiced chorister in the college choir, a pretty and amiable boy of seventeen, who gave him a cornelian heart, which was the occasion of some verses. He writes to Miss Pigot : " I certainly love him more than any human being"; and, in 1811, when he died, his sorrow was deep. The most extraordinary suggestion made by one biographer after another is that this attachment is accounted for by the fact that Byron wanted some one of an inferior social position to patronize!! Whatever Byron's failings, he was not quite such a snob as the lord-and-lady-loving Tom Moore would suggest when he remarks that the poet's alterations in the epitaph he wrote on the boy, and the omission of another poem about him from the " Hours of Idleness," were probably caused by his wish to sink the recollection of his friend- ship for one of the people (! !) LIFE OF LORD BYRON. 65 Edward Noel Long, who had come up from Harrow, continued to be his friend ; they swam and dived to- gether in the Cam. Harness also had come from Har- row. In a letter to Murray Byron gives an amusing account of Porson, " hiccoughing Greek like a Helot in his cups.'' One of the most distinguished of his Cam- bridge chums was Charles Skinner Matthews, son of the member for Herefordshire. He seems to have been a youth of rare promise. He was drowned while bathing alone among the reeds of the Cam in the summer of 1811. Byron told a good story of Matthews who had occupied his rooms at Trinity during his year's absence. Jones, the gyp, in his odd way had said in putting him in, ' Mr. Matthews, I recommend to your attention not to damage any of the movables, for Lord Byron, sir, is a young man of tumultuous passions? Matthews was delighted with this, and whenever anybody came to visit him, begged them to handle the very door with caution, repeating Jones' admonition in his tone and manner. Scrope Davies was another man of whom the poet was very fond. After the break-up of his home he wrote to him, " Come to me, Scrope ; I am almost desolate left alone in the world. I had but you, and H., and M., and let me enjoy the survivors while I can." " Matthews, Davies, Hobhouse, and myself," says Byron, " formed a coterie of our own. Davies has always beaten us all in the war of words, and by colloquial powers at once delighted and kept us in order; even M. yielded to the dashing vivacity of S. D." He once lent Byron ^4,800 in some strait repaid one night when the pair sat up over champagne and claret from six till midnight, after which " Scrope could not be 56 LIFE OF got into the carriage on the way home, but remained tipsy and pious on his knees." Then there was John Cam Hobhouse (afterwards Lord Broughton), a very close and faithful friend, companion of the poet in his travels, the witness of his marriage, executor of his will, and lastly the veritable destroyer of the famous " Memoirs " a destruction which has been generally ascribed to others an able man, as his literary and political career alike prove, of mature and excellent judgment also in practical matters, and the vindicator of Byron's good name. Hob- house admitted his faults, but loved him notwithstanding, as I, who, when a boy, heard him speak of his illustrious friend, can testify. He told me that the portrait of him as a young man standing by the boat, with flowing tie, neckerchief, and open collar, by Sanders (engraved in Moore's " Life "), was the likest thing ever done of him. Hobhouse was the poet's confidant all through his domestic troubles, and at every period of his life. " Part of his fascination," said Lord Broughton, " may doubtless be ascribed to the entire self-abandonment, the incautious, it may be said the dangerous, sincerity of his private conversation ; but his weaknesses were amiable, and, as has been said of a portion of his virtues, were of a feminine character so that the affection felt for him was as that for a favourite and sometimes froward sister." He admitted that his selfishness was a serious blot on an otherwise noble and generous nature. But he adds, in reference to the charges against his friend, " Lord Byron had failings, many failings certainly, but he was untainted with any of the baser vices ; and his virtues, his good qualities, were all of a high order." On the other hand, LORD BYRON. 57 Byron said to Trelawny, in the course of one of their rides, " Travelling in Greece, Hobhouse and I wrangled every day. His guide was Mitford's fabulous history. He had a greed for legendary lore, topography, inscrip- tions ; gabbled in lingua franca to the Ephori of the villages, goatherds, and our dragoman. He would potter with map and compass at the foot of Pindus, Parnes, and Parnassus to ascertain the site of some ancient temple or city. I rode rny mule up them. They had haunted my dreams from boyhood ; the pines, eagles, vultures, and owls, were descended from those Themis- tocles and Alexander had seen, and were not degenerated like the humans ; the rocks and torrents the same. John Cam's dogged perseverance in pursuit of his hobby is to be envied ; I have no hobby and no perseverance. I gazed at the stars and ruminated, took no notes, asked no questions. He said nature had intended him for a poet, but chance made him take to politics, and that I wrote prose better than poetry." Anyhow, Byron always spoke of Hobhouse as his best surviving friend, and Madame Guiccioli tells us that when he unexpectedly walked up the stairs of the Lanfranchi Palace at Pisa, Byron was seized with so violent an excess of joy that it seemed to take away his strength, and he was forced to sit down in tears. The Rev. F. Hodgson was another friend, whose correspondence, edited by his son, contains interesting details about the poet. He recognized in the early Satire, and the first cantos of " Childe Harold," the promise of a great poet. The good advice he gave his turbulent and unorthodox companion seems to have been judicious and kindly, and 58 LIFE OF taken in good part. Even thus early Byron defined his attitude towards religion, in a letter to Hodgson, " In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything." He was a sceptic, what would now be termed an agnostic. But to Gifford he says that he never denied the existence of God only doubted our immortality. Even this he scarcely doubted later. On the other hand, he used to say to Lady Byron, " The worst of it is, I do believe." And she in vain tried to reason him out of the Calvinism of his Scotch teaching herself a Unitarian, and holding the doctrine of Universal Restoration. Against that gloomy creed of Calvin his reason and conscience revolted, yet he could never entirely shake it off. He told his wife that he had sinned too deeply for repentance, and the possibility of salvation. " Calvinism was the rock against which I was broken," she said. And this explains the fierce hostility of his attitude toward orthodoxy (as he knew it) in " Cain," and elsewhere. But " Cain " is steeped in the idea of Predestination, Fate, Destiny, against the injustice of which Cain rebels ; sin, suffering, and death being involved. The wrath and vengeance of Deity are deprecated in that poem, and in " Heaven and Earth," where the angel lovers will not leave the doomed mortals, even when summoned to their own blissful seats in heaven. So Japhet will hot leave Anah. This is a revolt against the revengeful, tyrannical God, made in the image of kings and priests ; but orthodoxy was equally shocked with the later revolt of a great theo- logian, F. D. Maurice, against the very same conception not certainly that of our Lord, who came to reveal the Absolute Love as Father of all, Cain objects even to LORD BYRON. 59 the bloody sacrifice of innocent animals upon the altar of Jehovah; he is a humane man. In conversation Byron set himself against the dogma of everlasting punishment (see Kennedy's " Conversations," &c.) though he may never have been able completely to throw off the idea, not having speculative grasp sufficient to conceive in his own way, and mould anew the eternal truths revealed through Christianity. And while believing in Destiny (thus Maddalo i.e., Byron takes the Neces- sarian side in arguing with Julian Shelley in Shelley's fine poem), yet one who asserted individuality so strongly could not but admit likewise the modifying and directing energy of a man's own initiative, which is Free-will. It is possible that his wife's more liberal religious opinions may have exercised a favourable influence on Byron's convic- tions after all, without his being distinctly aware of it. He is indeed very much akin to Burns, whose supreme song " survives," " deep in the general heart." Burns has the same wild irregular passion, the same humour, and intermingling of grave and gay, the same character full of contradictions. But, as in Burns there is an element of coarse commonplace, in Byron there is a certain gaudy charlatanry, blare of brass, and big bow- wowishness of the life, as of the poetry that imposes on the vulgar, for ever insensible to the delicate, subtle warble of bird or brook, to the soullike tones of a master's violin. So Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge waited, while Moore and Byron had their loud day. But Byron wrote up to them at last, giving the world his own distinctive song though purely as a lyrical poet he is hardly equal to Burns. The writers of CO LIFE OF " Tarn O'Shanter," and " Don Juan," however, poured their own lives into song. To no one did the poet more freely unbosom himself than to Hodgson, more freely abuse himself, betray his little weaknesses ; to him were addressed those humorous and rollicking verses, " On board the Lisbon Packet," commencing " Huzzah ! Hodgson." To him Byron, with his accustomed generosity, gave ^1,000 to pay off some debts with. In a letter to his uncle Hodgson says, " Oh, if you knew the exaltation of heart, ay, and of head, too, I feel at being free from those depressing embarrassments, you would, as I do, bless my dearest friend and brother, Byron ; " and he speaks of the exquisite delicacy with which the kindness was done. Then there was Henry Drury, Hodgson's brother-in-law, and Robert Charles Dallas, a connection by marriage of the poet. In the letter Byron wrote to him before they met, flippancy, bounce, brag, and the habit of posing as wicked to make people stare, are very pronounced ; nor are they, one must unfortunately admit, uncharacter- istic of the author though now of course boyish in their crudity. He makes Dallas stare by telling him he is like the wicked Lord Lyttleton, Dallas having complimented him by comparing him to the good one ! There was the taint of worldliness, of too much " Empeiria " about Byron, as Goethe affirmed ; and Shelley spoke of the "canker of aristocracy," of "perverse ideas," that needed cutting out. It was partly a defect of nature, partly what the artificial and corrupt society of the Regency had made him. His conversations with Tre- lawny not seldom show hjm in his least amiable mood. LORD BYRON. 61 The constant affectation, or obtrusion of cynicism, is un- pleasant. Though Trelawny was a fine fellow, he was a man of the world, and drew out the least elevated elements of conversational ability in this spoilt child spoilt by too much petting, rendered bitter and cynical, moreover, by cruel injustice though in the affairs of life Trelawny's influence over the poet was healthy and bracing. Byron hated Cambridge. Their Alma Mater has often proved but a harsh and crabbed foster-mother to the children of genius, whom she has starved upon thin, sour milk from her all too ancient and venerable bosom. 1 Milton so hated the same university that he detested even the fields that environ it, and Gray spoke slightingly of it. Dryden has recorded his scant affec- tion for this same Alma Mater; nor, as Moore says, must the names of Swift, Goldsmith, and Churchill be forgotten, to every one of whom some mark of incom- petency was affixed by the universities whose annals they adorn ; while Shelley was dismissed from Oxford with contumely. Of Cambridge, Byron sings, " Her Helicon is duller than her Cam." In November, 1806, Byron first printed for private circulation his juvenile poems. They were printed by Ridge of Newark; and in March, 1807, he published the " Hours of Idleness " at the same press. In June we find him congratulating himself on his reduction in weight and girth. He had been very fat, and weighed over fourteen stone ! This caused positive pain to his 1 But one gladly admits recent improvements in the system of University education. 62 LIFE OF lame foot, Trelawny says ; so he determined to keep himself down to eleven stone; which, by vapour baths, medicine, diet, and such exercise as he could take, he generally did. Sometimes he managed to weigh even less. In October he writes to Miss Pigot : " I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear. When I brought him here they asked me what I meant to do with him, and my reply was, ' He should sit for a fellow- ship ; ' this answer delighted them not." The greater part of the spring and summer of 1808 he was at Dorant's Hotel, Albemarle Street, London. Here he went in for the dissipations so many young men indulge in, saying as little as possible about them. But Byron, more suo, trumpeted them abroad. The fact is, his imagination played about, magnified, and decked out for artistic purposes everything in his own experience, good and bad, as did that of Rousseau. This was all real, and strongly felt, only that in these men it grew into imagi- native forms also. Byron was subject, from his volcanic and sensuous temperament, social position, and personal beauty, to great temptations, and he had no good or influential adviser. " My blood is all meridian," he said. He possessed, moreover, ample means wherewith to gratify his whims, and all encouragement from a loose- living society to do so. His habitual sombre melancholy, relieved by occasional outbursts of semi-hysterical, wild spirits, would favour the same result. Debauching women was then deemed stylish, and " manly " more- over ; while Byron was half a slave, not only to his own passions, but to the opinion of that modish little world, self-styled " good society," imposed on by its airs of LORD BYRON. C3 self-complacent superiority to the rest of the race as- sumptions common to it indeed with the nation whose " smile is childlike and bland," with swashbucklers, bullies, and roughs of the New World, with literary aesthetes of modern London, and unwashed satis- culottes of Paris slums. Alas ! so much the less poet he ! The remarks of Beyle (Stendhal), who lived with him for several weeks, are to the point here. " In presence of beautiful things he -became sublime. But on certain days he was mad " (so Lady Byron thought, till the doctor decided otherwise). " Petty English passions,'' says the continental writer, "pride of rank, a vain dandyism unhinged him ; he spoke of Brummel with a shudder of jealousy and admiration." " But small or great " (this is very acute and significant), " the present passion swept down upon his mind like a tempest, roused him, transported him, either into im- prudence, or genius." Yet Byron always averred that he had never seduced a girl, which is more than some of his loudest, and most jealously malicious, accusers could say. And seeing that he always made the worst of himself, we may well believe him. He gambled heavily, and keeping a carriage up at Cambridge with saddle-horses and servants, he soon became heavily embarrassed. In the summer of 1807, Leigh Hunt noticed a re- spectable, manly-looking person watching something bobbing up and down in the Thames. This was Jack- son the pugilist, with whom Byron was very intimate, looking on with keen interest while his patron swam for a wager from Lambeth to Blackfriars, a distance, including tacks and turns, of about three miles. By the way, the 04 LIFE OF intimates of Byron through life were persons distinguished for their talents and wit, or else for their charm and goodness; or again, otherwise interesting people like Lord Clare, the sweet chorister of Cambridge, and the muscular professor of pugilism. Of course he liked to mix with his own set now and again. But he did not choose his friends among the mere supercilious inanities of rank and fashion " tenth transmitters of a foolish face." His care for that kind of thing has been mali- ciously exaggerated by people whose susceptibilities he had offended, or who were unable to understand the feelings of well-born men and women. The Rev. Mr. Becher, of Southwell, induced Byron to destroy the whole first issue of his " Juvenilia," because of an amatory poem in it he thought too warm. And now we come to the Edinburgh Review's smart, yet stupid critique upon the " Hours of Idleness," in which the author is sneered at for being a young lord, and advised forthwith to abandon poetry, for which he has evidently no vocation. The creature who spoke only spoke after its kind, and the thing would not be vvonh notice except for its effect. But as the irritating grit in the shell of the oyster excites the fish to fill the wound with pearl, so did the wound made by this poor thing rouse the fury of Byron to the satire of "English Bards." Whoever it was hid his ugly face ever after ; and we do not knoiv that it was Brougham, though Byron thought so. Mr. Jeaffreson's suggestion that it was a Trinity don, uncom- fortable under the really rather promisingly amusing invective of the juvenile verses against Cambridge Don- seems to me a happy one. At the same time, had LORD BYRON. 65 the writer made the faintest attempt at truth and justice (an attempt obviously impossible to persons of his calibre), there was much in the book which he might have worried, not only with the congenial delight proper to his species, but even with a good conscience. For never did a great poet produce an early volume that gave so little promise and contained so much doggrel, or weak, conventional, and bumptiously affected verse. Still " Loch-na-gair," "the Prayer of Nature," and some satirical things should have received kindly recog- nition. Byron is reported, just after reading this review, to have looked like a man who was about to send a challenge he confesses to have drunk three bottles of claret the same evening and he did not let himself be " snuffed out by an article." " What I feel is an immense rage for twenty-four hours," he said on a similar occasion, " I cannot understand the submissive yielding spirit." A Viking scald this, no Christian. Yet submission and eelf-control must be learned; he was learning; but "Cain" could not teach them. Byron never taught them. He is good to begin with, not to end with. The book was dedicated to Lord Carlisle, who acknowledged its receipt before reading it, and never wrote again. On coming to London from Newstead, moreover, in March, 1809, to take his seat in the House of Lords, he had to take it, contrary to his wish, without being introduced by any member of the Upper House; for he had written to his guardian announcing that he should be of age at the opening of the next parliamentary session ; but instead of responding with a cordial offer to introduce him, the Earl only wrote a cold note, telling him what formalities 5 66 LIFE OF were necessary upon the occasion. And again when he found that evidence must be produced as to the marriage of his grandfather, Admiral Byron, which was difficult to procure, the excitable youth became much alarmed lest he should be unable to prove his father's legitimacy; for Lord Carlisle, when appealed to for information that might be of use, either could not or would not give it. All this together made the poet furious ; so that whereas, on coming to town with his satire, the lines about his guardian had been complimentary, he now substituted an angry diatribe. But, well advised as ever by his beloved sister, in " Childe Harold " he afterwards made amends; in the glorious passage on Waterloo, where he laments the " young, gallant Howard," Lord Carlisle's son, introducing the line, v And partly that I did his sire some wrong" My grandfather told me that Byron wrote to him also, asking if he could accompany him on this occasion, but Lord Roden's absence from London made it impossible. The young peer seems to have been under a miscon- ception as to what the prevailing etiquette required. Mr. Dallas, however, happening to call just as he was going, accompanied him, and has described what ensued. "There were very few persons in the house. Lord Eldon was going through some ordinary business. When Lord Byron had taken the oaths, the Chancellor quitted his seat, and went towards him with a. smile, and though I did not catch the words, I saw that he paid him some compliment. This was all thrown away on Lord Byron, who made a stiff bow, and put the tips of his fingers LORD BYRON. 67 into the Chancellor's hand. The Chancellor did not press a welcome so received, but resumed his seat; while Lord Byron carelessly seated himself for a few minutes on one of the empty benches to the left of the throne, usually occupied by the lords in opposition. When on his joining me I expressed what I had felt, he said, ' If I had shaken hands heartily, he would have set me down for one of his party ; but I will have nothing to do with them on either side. I have taken my seat, ;md now I will go abroad.' " A few days later " English Bards and Scotch Re- viewers" came out. The first anonymous edition was exhausted in a month the poet had studied his favourite Pope to some purpose. The work showed considerable vigour and point. But it was only a work of promise, pointing to the great satire of the " Vision of Judgment " and " Don Juan " ; moreover, it was full of injustice and indiscriminate abuse. The writer re- gretted many of the allusions in after years. The last months of 1808 had been spent at Newstead, where he was busy in arranging a few rooms for himself and for his mother, who was to go there after his departure, not before. He had at this time two beautiful dogs one a savage bulldog, Nelson, the other a Newfound- land, Boatswain, who died in a fit of madness at Newstead, his master wiping the slaver from the poor beast's lips, not knowing he was mad. On this dog he wrote : " To mark a friend's remains these stones arise ; I never knew but one, and here he lies." On the monument, in the garden at Newstead, I have G8 LIFE OF myself read the warm and well-written tribute to the virtues of the noble animal which lies buried there. In the earlier months of 1808 the poet had lived in lodgings at Brompton with a girl, who used to ride about with him dressed as a boy, and she accompanied him to Brighton in the same attire, he introducing her to his acquaintances as his "brother Gordon." A lady of fashion, meeting them riding there one day, com- plimented her on the beauty of her horse ; her reply being, " Yes, it was gave me by my brother ! " This girl afterwards (May, 1809) formed one of the roystering party at Newstead, and (with the doubtful exception of a housemaid) was apparently the only representative of those " Paphian girls " who are said, in " Childe Harold," to have " sung and smiled " in the Childe's ancestral halls before he left his native land ! On this occasion Byron entertained at Newstead, Matthews, Scrope Davies, Hodgson, and Hobhouse ; few of the country gentry seem to have called, and none are named as having been present at the ball given in honour of his coming of age. But three or four of the neighbour- ing clergy came in now and then to join the young men. These were " the revellers from far and near " ! Yet the party passed the time merrily enough. Rising late, they breakfasted at noon, read, fenced, single-sticked, rode, walked, sailed on the lake, practised with pistols, and at dinner-time played the fool, as Byron always liked to do : for he was a mischievous, fun-loving boy (with a spice of the malicious imp in him) to the end. They dug up a monk's skull in the Abbey garden, and he had it polished into a wine-cup for Burgundy ; he LORD BYRON. 69 dressed himself as the Abbot, and put his friends into monks' robes (crosses, beads, tonsures and all), and they had a wild time of it after dinner, no doubt. But these friends did not remain with him for long together at the Abbey, and Byron studied a good deal in the intervals. A wolf and the bear were kept chained at the chief entrance. While he was in London, he wrote to Mrs. Byron from St. James's Street, about the death of Lord Falkland, killed in a duel, whose family were left very destitute. He felt keenly for them, and in the most delicate as well as generous manner (notwithstanding his own difficulties), after reminding the widow that he was to be godfather to her infant, put a five-hundred-pound note into a cup for her, when he attended at the christening, so secretly that it was not found till after he had left the room. At this time he declared that he would never part with Newstead, whatever his difficulties. But he was then relying on the suit that was proceeding for the recovery of Rochdale, a property which had been illegally sold by his predecessor. The suit, however, was dragged through one court after another, involving him in heavy expense, and with no satisfactory result. On the 2nd of July he sailed from Falmouth, with his friend Hobhouse, for Lisbon, and remained abroad for two years. He writes with his usual affectionate sensitiveness at the slight he had suffered on leaving England from an old friend, who excused himself from bidding him farewell because he had to go shopping. He arrived at Lisbon about the middle of the month. Hobhouse wrote a prose account of their journey, while he composed the 70 LIFE OF early cantos of " Childe Harold," and his friend furnished some notes for the same. The latter says that Byron made a more dangerous, though less celebrated, swim here than his passage of the Hellespont crossing from old Lisbon to Belem Castle. Byron thought Cintra the most beautiful village in the world, and praises the grandeur of Massa, the Escurial of Portugal. Sending baggage and servants by sea to Gibraltar, Hobhouse and he rode through the south-west of Spain, about seventy miles a day. At Seville, they lodged for three days in the house of two unmarried ladies, and he gives a pleasant picture of them, as of their rather free and easy relations with him. The eldest embraced him with great tenderness at parting, and cut off a lock of his hair, giving him one in return about three feet in length ; her last words were : " Adios, tu hermoso ! me gusto mucho ! " (" Adieu, you pretty fellow ! you please me much ! ") At Cadiz, he had also fallen half in love with a beautiful girl, whom he ac- companied to the opera. He speaks enthusiastically of the dark beauties of Spain, surely with good reason. For what can be more ideally lovely than a gazelle-eyed Spanish brunette? To the younger of his two Seville hostesses he made love by help of a dictionary, but she asked him for a ring, which he wore, as a pledge of affection ; and this he would not part with, which offended her. He arrayed himself in a superb scarlet uniform on state occasions. Having touched at Gibraltar, he sailed to Malta, where he engaged in a Platonic, but warm, flirtation with Mrs. Spencer Smith, whom he addressed as " Florence " in " Childe LORD BYRON. 71 Harold," and also in the lines written during a thunder- storm on the road to Zitza. She was wife of our minister at Constantinople. What he thought of Malta Aiay be read in the verses beginning "Adieu ye joys of La Valhtte /" Here he was on the point of fighting a duel with an English officer. On September the apth, the friends left Malta in a man-of-war, and skirted the coast of Acarnania, in view of Ithaca, the Leucadian rock, and Actium. Landing at Prevesa, they journeyed through Albania, visiting Ali Pacha, at Tepeleni, and halting on the way at Janina, where Byron was supplied, by order of the Pacha, with a house, horses, and all necessaries, gratis, Ali himself being absent, besieging Ibrahim, in Illyria. A few days after, they arrived at Tepeleni, and were received by Ali in person. The scene, on entering the town, recalled to his mind Scott s description of Branksome Castle in the " Lay," and the feudal times. Byron gives a lively account of his reception in a letter to his mother. Ali received him standing, and made him sit on his right hand, asking him why he had left home so early, telling him he had heard he was of "a great family, sending his respects to his mother, and adding that he " Was certain I was a man of high birth, because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands. He told me to consider him as a father whilst I was in Turkey. Indeed, he treated me like a child, sending me almonds, and sugared sherbet, fruit and sweet- meats twenty times a day. He begged me to visit him often, and especially at night, when he was at leisure. . . . Two days ago (proceeds Byron) I was nearly lost in a Turkish ship-of-war, owing to the ignorance of the captain and crew. Fletcher yelled after his wife; the Greeks called on all the saints; the Mussulmen on 78 LIFE OF Allah ; the captain burst into tears, and ran below deck, telling Us to call on God. The sails were split, the mainyard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting in, and all our chance was to make Corfu, or, as Fletcher pathetically called it, 'a watery grave.' I did what I could to console him, but, finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself in my Albanian capote and lay down on the deck to wait for the worst." " Unable," says Hobhouse, " from his lameness, to be of any assistance, he in a short time was found among the trembling sailors fast asleep." However, they landed on the coast of Suli. In November, he travelled, with a guard of fifty Albanians, through Acarnania and CEtolia, on his way to the Morea. The vivid description by Hob- house of a night scene round the camp fires, with back- ground of rugged rocks, in the Gulf of Arta, will be remembered by readers of " Childe Harold," among the notes to that poem, the wild Albanian soldiers dancing in the firelight, and singing fierce bandit songs, with the refrain icXf^rsic TTOTS Hapya (robbers all at Parga!} On reaching Mesolonghi (where later he died), he dismissed all the Albanians excepting one, and, after spending a fortnight at Patras, he arrived at Vostizza, where first the grand peaks of Parnassus on the farther side of the gulf rose to view ; riding along the mountain-side, he saw a flight of twelve eagles, which he took as a good omen. At Delphi, he wrote the lines about Parnassus for "Childe Harold." "The last bird I ever fired at," he says, " was an eaglet, on the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto, near Vostizza. It was only wounded, and I tried to save it, the eye was so bright, but it pined and died in a few days; and I never did since, and never will, attempt the death LORD BYRON. ?8 of another bird." From Livadia they went to Thebes ; crossed Cithseron; and on Christmas day, 1809, near the ruins of Phyle, he caught his first glimpse of Athens. His first visit there lasted three months, and he made excursions to different parts of Attica, Eleusis Hymet- tus, Cape Colonna (where he narrowly escaped capture by pirates), the plain of Marathon, and to some caves beyond the Ilissus, in which he and Hobhouse were, by accident, nearly entombed. At Athens he lodged in the house of a lady who was the widow of an Eng- lish vice-consul, and had three daughters. They were all, he says, good-looking, and the eldest of them was Theresa, " the Maid of Athens," whom he celebrated in those pretty verses with the Greek line at the end of each ; but the affection he felt for her was very innocent and Platonic. Early in March, an English sloop-of-war took the travellers to Smyrna. There he finished the second canto of "Childe Harold," which he had begun at Janina. After visiting the ruins of Ephesus, the travellers sailed in the frigate Sahette to Constantinople, touching at the Troad, and roaming about the reputed remains of Ilium. While waiting for a fair wind in the Dardanelles, Byron, landing on the European shore, swam with Lieutenant Ekenhead from Sestos to Abydos, not much above a mile, but the strength of the current made it three. He did it in an hour and ten minutes. Of this feat he talked a good deal, and it was indeed a good swim. Trelawny says he was subject to cramp ; but a boat, I think, accompanied the swimmers on this occasion. Later he took some fine aquatic exercise 74 LIFE OF with Trelawny, who admits his indomitable pluck, and even the excellence of his swimming, but still boasts (rather ungenerously) of how he himself could beat him, and avers that he gave in sometimes in their contests lest the poet might be mortified by defeat ; relating how the latter was sick in the water one day when trying con- clusions with him, swimming to and from the yacht Bolivar the fact being, of course, that Trelawny was a man of iron physique and constitution, a first-rate athlete, unexhausted by great drafts of nervous energy on the brain, and by the excesses of a furious, hyper- sensitive temperament. But it was the man of action this time who would " bear no brother near the throne." It should have been sufficient for the prowess of a poet to win laurels on ideal fields, like Shelley ! When the English minister, Mr. Adair, obtained an audience with the Sultan on taking leave, and Byron with other travellers was to be presented on the occasion, the poet is said to have insisted on his right to some precedence in the ceremony ; but the minister answered him that none could be allotted, since the Turks would only recognize official dignities. He, however, would not yield the point until the Austrian internuncio had been consulted, and confirmed the decision of Mr. Adair. It hardly seems to me extraordinary that he should have urged the claim till better informed though certainly, if the tale be true, about his not landing on his arrival at Malta for some time because he expected a salute from the forts, his pretensions on the score of rank must have been extravagant and absurd. It is related that, when he left Constantinople on LORD BYRON. 75 board the Salsette, walking the deck, he one day took up a yataghan, or Turkish dagger, and was overheard, while gazing on it unsheathed, muttering to himself, " I should like to know how a person feels after committing a murder ; " and some one has conjectured with plausi- bility that this little incident may have been the germ from which arose the absurd story about his having committed a murder; a story accepted among others by Goethe, who gravely surmised that "Manfred" had been suggested by some such horrible experience. At Stamboul he gathered much material for poetry from the slave market an episode for " Don Juan ;" while the spectacle of a dead criminal tossed on the waves he utilized for the " Bride of Abydos," and that of lean dogs gnawing a dead body outside the palace of the Sultans for "The Siege of Corinth." He and Hobhoase had now agreed to separate, and the latter returned to England, while Byron was landed on the island of Zea with the Albanians, a Tartar, and his valet, Fletcher, of whose squeamishness about the discomforts of foreign travel and timidity he much complains. Soon after he returned to Athens, where he renewed acquaintance with his schoolfellow, the Marquis of Sligo, and made friends with Lady Hester Stanhope, who saw him first bathing under the rocks of Cape Colonna. In July, 1810, we find him at Patras, staying with the Consul, Mr. Strand, having passed through Corinth. At Patras he had an attack of fever, not very unlike the last fatal illness, which carried him off, a little way from this, at Meso- longhi ; and he rails at the doctors who attended him now, as he was also to do in his last illness. " One of them," 70 LIFE OF he says, "trusts to his genius, having never studied; the other to a campaign of eighteen months against the sick of Otranto, which he made in his youth with great effect." Byron's recovery at Athens was greatly retarded by his course of thinning diet ; he took nothing but rice, vinegar, and water. He studied Romaic in a Franciscan monastery, where he conversed with a motley crew of many nationalities, and wrote notes for " Childe Harold," the " Hints from Horace," and " The Curse of Minerva," which fulminates against the removal of the Elgin marbles to the British Museum. Here occurred an incident, which suggested one in "The Giaour" he rescued a young woman about to be thrown into the sea by a party of Janissaries for some intrigue with a Frank. Gait seems mistaken in stating that the intrigue was with Byron himself. He had intended to visit Egypt, Persia, and India; but Hanson, his solicitor, failed to send remittances, and therefore he set sail, on the 3rd of June, 1811, in the Volage frigate, for England. 1 On board he writes in very low spirits to Hodgson, having suffered from a tertian fever at Malta, "I am returning home without a hope, and almost without a desire." Naturally he anticipates no pleasure from having to settle his much-embarrassed affairs. He also declares he will write no more though he had written about four thousand lines on his journey. On Byron's arrival in London, Mr. Dallas called on him at Reddish's Hotel in St. James' Street. He wished the latter to see through the press his "Hints from 1 Before leaving Athens, Byron had become much attached to a youth, named Nicolo Giraud, to whom he left in his will a sum of 7,000. LORD BYRON. 77 Horace," of which he himself thought highly. But they are in fact much tamer than the " English Bards," and Mr. Dallas was greatly disappointed, on reading them, to find that his Eastern travel had produced no more inspired result : this he frankly avowed to the poet next morning. " Then Lord Byron told me," says Dallas, " that he had occasionally written short poems, besides a great many stanzas in Spenser's measure relative to the countries he had visited. They are not worth troubling you with, but you shall have them all if you like. So came I by 'Childe Harold's Pilgrim- age.' He said a friend had condemned them, and he did not think much of them. Such as it was, however, it was at my service." That very evening Dallas wrote, "You have written one of the most delightful poems I ever read. I have been so fascinated with ' Childe Harold ' that I have not been able to lay it down." Dallas, though a little narrow-minded, was a shrewd man ; he saw that the poem was likely to succeed, took the risks of publication, put the MSS. into Murray's hands, and made a good profit out of it Byron being at that time unwilling as a peer to make money by his writings, which was considered infra dig. Murray sub- mitted the work to Gifford, the most feared critic of the day, contrary to Byron's wishes, who did not care to seem to curry favour with the literary set in the disposal of whose patronage too often merit might claim to have the casting vote, if only no other more influential suffrage should intervene. He would lick no man's boots nor be concerned in any of the backstairs intrigues, delusive dodges, and hidden wirepullings of literature. 78 LIFE OF It will have been noticed that Byron, though his relations with his mother were necessarily strained and painful, yet wrote to her dutifully and often, having also made sedulous arrangements for her comfort at New- stead. Here he was on the point of joining her, when he received the news of her sudden death, brought about, it is said, through excitement, caused by an extortionate tradesman's bill, telling on a natural weakness of heart. She had observed to her maid, when he announced his intended visit, " If I should be dead before Byron comes down, what a strange thing it would be ! " All the old natural affection for one who had, after all, nursed him tenderly in childhood, as well as little Augusta, his sister, seems to have returned, and he quotes Gray to a friend : " I now feel the truth of Gray's observation that we can only have one mother ! Peace be with her ! " He got down too late to find her alive. Her maid one night, hearing a sound of sighing in the room where the body lay at rest, found Byron by the bedside, who, when she spoke to him, burst out crying, and said, " O Mrs. By, I had but one friend in the world, and she is gone ! " I know few more arresting incidents than that of this young man watching the funeral move away from the Abbey door why he did not follow it who can say? and then calling to young Rushton, a favourite servant, to spar with him, as usual but silent and abstracted all the time. As if from an effort to get the better of his feelings, he threw more violence, Rushton thought, into his blows than was his wont, till at last, the struggle seeming too much for him, he flung away the gloves, and retired to his room. LORD BYRON. 79 She had taken, poor woman, much interest in her son's literary career, and he had tried to comfort her when the unfavourable review of his book appeared. Peace be with her ! She loved him in her way. But what a legacy of violence, sullen rage, and unrestraint had she left him ! He addressed her as " the Honourable," a title to which she had no claim, and in their moments of fun called her " Kitty Gordon," or " the Honourable Kitty." Young Eddlestone had died also before his return to England, and he now lost in succession two more of his friends, Charles S. Matthews (whose pro- nounced religious scepticism must, from his remark- able intellectual power, have strongly influenced that of Byron), and the Honourable John Wingfield. " Matthews," he says, " has perished miserably in the muddy waters of the Cam, always fatal to genius." He writes as none but a man of the warmest, most affectionate heart could write to his surviving friend, his "dearest Davies": "Some curse hangs on me and mine my mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. My dear Scrope, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me I want a friend. What will our poor Hobhouse feel ? " " The blows," he says to Hodgson, " followed each other so rapidly that I arn yet stupid from the shock, and though I do eat and drink and talk, and even laugh at times, yet. I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake." At this time he made a will, appointing Hobhouse and Davies his executors, and directing that he should be buried in the vault of the garden, at Newstead, without any religious ceremony whatever, and with his dog 80 LIFE OF Boatswain. Soon after, he became acquainted with Moore, whose letter, seeking an apology, or satisfaction fora passage in the " English Bards," had not been for- warded abroad to Byron by prudent Mr. Hodgson, who had undertaken to send it. Moore now wrote again, but more mildly ; and the correspondence ended in the two poets meeting and dining together, with Thomas Campbell, at the house of Samuel Rogers. From that time they became fast friends. Moore speaks of the beauty and pallor of his face, as also of his curling picturesque hair ; and Lady Caroline Lamb, when she first met him, exclaimed, " That pale face is my fate ! " Every variety and shade of feeling passed over his mobile features in turn. On the ayth of February, 1812, he made his first speech in the House of Lords, on the Nottingham Frame-breakers Bill, and received the congratulations of distinguished statesmen ; the speech was voted a success. "I have traversed," he said, "the seat of war in the Peninsula, I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most des- potic of infidel Governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the heart of a Christian country." Reprobating the severe mea- sures proposed against the poor starving mechanics who broke the looms that deprived them of food, he pro- ceeded, " Is there not blood enough upon your penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to heaven, and testify against you?" Thus ever was he on the side of the oppressed. Two other speeches he made in the House, one on Catholic Emancipation ; but these were thought somewha.t mouthing and theatrical. LORD BYRON. 81 Two days after, " Childe Harold " appeared. The pre- sentation copy to the Honourable Mrs. Leigh was in- scribed, "To Augusta, my dearest sister and my best friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved, this volume is presented by her father's son, and most affectionate brother, B." The result was electric, sudden, startling, dazzling. " I awoke one morning," he says, " and found myself famous." " Childe Harold " and " Lord Byron " became the theme of every tongue. " At his door," says Moore, " most of the leading men of the day presented them- selves some of them persons whom he had much wronged in his satire. From morning till night the most flattering testimonies of his success crowded his table from the grave tributes of the statesman and the philoso- pher down to what flattered him still more, the romantic billet of some incognita, or the pressing note of invitation from some fair leader of fashion ; and in place of the desert which London had been to him but a few weeks before, he now not only saw the whole splendid interior of high life thrown open to receive him, but found him- self among its crowds the most distinguished object ! " Byron had actually called his hero Childe Burun in the first draft of the poem, and yet he deprecated identifica- tion of that hero with himself; though it was quite obviously the story of himself, and of his travels, with a few embellishments thrown in, chiefly to make the chief personage look more "Satanic." Moore had told the author that he feared it was too good for the age. Yet, as Mr. Nichol observes, its success was due to the fact that it was just on a level with the age. If it had been 6 82 LIFE OF on the level of the poetry he wrote later, its success would probably have been less immediate. It was graceful, beautiful sometimes, new in subject and manner, faithful in description, the revelation of an interesting personality on the spot to confirm the impression, written by a peer, and a "curled darling" of society, fascinatingly sad, gently, not too boldly and vehemently sceptical or defiant ; it was also very intelligible, not in the least too thoughtful for the multitude. The same criticism may be made on the " tales " that followed ; they accorded with the taste of the fashionable and gentle world. But they were, one may say, a legitimate success, like that of Burns, Tennyson, Longfellow. Byron's early success was deserved, if exaggerated. There is really good art, as well as really bad art, which appeals to popular taste, and that immediately. Subject and treatment alike may appeal to the people ; the work may even be first-rate of its kind, as in the case of Burns, Beranger, Dickens, Thackeray, Scott. Byron's earlier works indeed were hardly first-rate, yet they were true poetry. The works he poured forth in abundant succession, written easily and with haste, had originality, individuality, the one essential element in literature. They opened up a new vein of genuine ore. It is the mere extravagance of reaction and fastidious caprice to deny their value, monotonous as they were, and imitated as they have been ad nauseam. But, while it met a want of the hour, this poetry, save in snatches and fragments was hardly powerful, or subtle and piercing enough for per- manence. There were indeed exquisite passages con- cerning Greek nationality and aspirations, concerning LORD BYRON. 83 death and passion, the beauty and frailty of women, their lovely fidelity, their devotion ; graphic pictures also of fierce wild life, and of external nature, in the " Corsair," "The Giaour," the "Bride of Abydos," " Parisina," "Lara," the "Siege of Corinth," which should not perish. All these, moreover, contain self-portraitures of a gloomy, unhappy, restless, remorseful, unbelieving, still unsatiated and insatiable soul. The misery of the lines "To Inez," in " Childe Harold/' is surely not affected; nor the sea delight of "O'er the glad waters," in "The Corsair"; the fervent sympathy with freedom of "Here- ditary Bondsmen ! " in " Childe Harold " ; the pathos of " He who hath bent him o'er the dead," in " The Giaour"; and that of the Dark Page watching dying " Lara." But still, the greater Byron is not here the volcanic force and fire ; the defiance, the immense dis- dain of all mortal things, including himself; those Thor- hammer strokes resounding in " Don Juan " and " The Vision of Judgment"; the haughty and headstrong rebel- lion of elect individualism, or genius in " Manfred," a dis- organizing, aggressive, anti-social individualism ; the more Promethean, though still selfish, ineffectual revolt of "Cain"; the highest ethical note of his lyre being struck in "Prometheus." But all this was in embryo here. It was the young Heracles strangling snakes, not the adult hero slaying Lernaean Hydras of orthodox and political tyranny, clearing Augean stables of English hypocrisy. The poetry is too much one of melodrama and pose, of "how interesting the women will think me"! Still, Walter Scott generously felt that Byron had gone beyond him in the lyrical rush and swing of these verse stories ; 81 LIFE OF while even the critics relented, wantin