FAULTS OF LORD BYRON.
After having shown the virtues Lord Byron possessed, it might seem useless to inquire whether he had not the faults whose absence they prove. Still, however, it is well to look at the subject from another point of view, and to offer, so to say, counter-proof. For, in judging him, all rules have been disregarded, not only those of justice and equity, but likewise those of logic. And, as it has been variously asserted of him, that he was constant and inconstant, firm and fickle, guided by principle, yet giving way to every impulse; that he was both chaste and profligate, a sensual man and an anchorite; calumny alone can not be accused of all these contradictions. We must then seek out conscientiously whether there were not other causes for this inconsistency, so as to return back within due bounds, and bring contradiction in accord with truth. It is, of course, beyond dispute that the first cause of the unjust verdicts passed upon him lay in the bad passions stirred up by his success, by the independent language he used, and his contempt for a thousand national prejudices. Nevertheless, as the degree of injustice dealt out toward him was quite extraordinary, it may be asked whether some real defects did not lend specious reason to his enemies, and thus we are forced to confess that he had one great fault, which did powerfully aid their wickedness; it consisted in a species of cruelty toward himself, a positive necessity of calumniating himself.
Although the origin of this fault or defect must have been principally in the greatness of his soul, it certainly had other secondary and lesser causes, and, in common with many other qualities, it was fatal to his happiness; for men accustomed to exaggerate their own virtues only too readily believed him. This mode of doing harm to and persecuting himself, of casting shadows over his brilliant destiny, was so strange and so real, that it is necessary to show to what extent he did it, by collecting some of the numerous testimonies given among those who knew him, before we bring out the real cause of his fault, as well as the effect it had on his happiness and his reputation.
In no hands could his character have been less safe than his own, nor any greater wrong offered to his memory than the substitution of what he affected to be, for what he was.
While yet a student at Cambridge, he wrote a letter to Miss Pigott, full of gayety and fun, giving as an excuse for his silence the dissipated life he was leading, and which he calls a wretched chaos of noise and drunkenness, doing nothing but hunt, drink Burgundy, play, intrigue, libertinize. Then he exclaims:—
"What misery to have nothing else to do but make love and verses, and create enemies for one's self."
But while avowing this misery, he adds that he has just written 214 pages of prose and 1200 verses.
And Moore remarks, in a note annexed to this curious letter:—
"We observe here, as in other parts of his early letters, that sort of display and boast of rakishness which is but too common a folly at this period of life, when the young aspirant to manhood persuades himself that to be profligate is to be manly. Unluckily, this boyish desire to be thought worse than he really was remained with Lord Byron, as did some other failings and foibles, long after the period when, with others, they are past and forgotten; and his mind, indeed, was but beginning to outgrow them when he was snatched away."
When Moore speaks of the letter in which Lord Byron, replying to the praise given by Mr. Dallas, says he did not merit it, and depreciates himself morally in every possible way, Moore adds:—
"Here again, however, we should recollect there must be a considerable share of allowance for the usual tendency to make the most and the worst of his own obliquities. There occurs, indeed, in his first letter to Mr. Dallas, an account of this strange ambition, the very reverse, it must be allowed, of hypocrisy—which led him to court rather than avoid the reputation of profligacy, and to put, at all times, the worst face on his own character and conduct."
Mr. Dallas, writing for the first time to Lord Byron after having read his early poems, paid him some compliments on the moral beauties and charitable sentiments contained in his verses, remarking that they recalled another noble author, who was not only a poet, an orator, and a distinguished historian, but one of the most vigorous reasoners in England on the truths of that religion of which forgiveness forms the ruling principle, viz., the good and great Lord Lyttelton. Lord Byron answered, depreciating himself in a literary sense, and calumniating himself morally, by the assertion that he resembled Lord Lyttelton's son—a bad, though talented man—rather than the great author.
Dallas had the good sense to take this appreciation for what it was worth, and asked permission to pay the young nobleman a visit. Lord Byron answered politely that he should be happy to make his acquaintance, but continued to paint himself, especially as regarded his opinions, in the most unfavorable colors. Moore gives the whole of this letter, and then adds:—
"It must be recollected, before we attach any particular importance to the details of his creed, that in addition to the temptation—never easily resisted by him—of displaying his wit, at the expense of his character, he was here addressing a person who, though, no doubt, well meaning, was evidently one of those officious self-satisfied advisers whom it was the delight of Lord Byron, at all times, to astonish and mystify.
"The tricks which, when a boy, he played upon the Nottingham quack, Lavander, were but the first of a long series, with which, through life, he amused himself, at the expense of all the numerous quacks whom his celebrity and sociability drew around him."
In the first satire he gave to the world, and which attracted sympathy for his talent as well as for the justice of his cause, the horror he entertained of hypocrisy already made him speak against himself:—
"E'en I—least thinking of a thoughtless throng,
Just skill'd to know the right and choose the wrong."
After having quoted an early poem of Lord Byron, written in an hour of great depression, and which would seem, inspired by momentary madness, Moore makes the following declaration:—
"These concluding lines are of a nature, it must be owned, to awaken more of horror than of interest, were we not prepared, by so many instances of his exaggeration in this respect, not to be startled at any lengths to which the spirit of self-libelling would carry him. It seemed as if, with the power of painting fierce and gloomy personages, he had also the ambition to be himself the dark 'sublime he drew,' and that, in his fondness for the delineation of heroic crime, he endeavored to fancy, where he could not find in his own character, fit subjects for his pencil."
Moore, mentioning another article in his memoranda, where Lord Byron accuses himself of irritability of temperament in his early youth, follows up with this reflection:—
"In all his portraits of himself, the pencil he uses is so dark that the picture of his temperament and his self-attempts, covering as they do with a dark shadow the shade itself, must be taken with large allowance for exaggeration."
In another passage of his work, Moore further says:—
"To the perverse fancy he had for falsifying his own character, and even imputing to himself faults the most alien to his nature, I have already frequently adverted. I had another striking instance of it one day at La Mira."
Moore then relates that, on leaving Venice, he went to La Mira to bid Lord Byron farewell. Passing through the hall, he saw the little Allegra, who had just returned from a walk. Moore made some remark on the beauty of the child, and Byron answered, "Have you any notion—but I suppose you have—of what they call the parental feeling? For myself, I have not the least." And yet, when that child died, in a year or two afterward, he who had uttered this artificial speech was so overwhelmed by the event, that those who were about him at the time actually trembled for his reason.[98]
Colonel Stanhope, afterward Lord Harrington, who knew Lord Byron in Greece, shortly before his death, says:—
"Most men affect a virtuous character; Lord Byron's ambition, on the contrary, seemed to be to make the world believe that he was a sort of Satan, though impelled by high sentiments to accomplish great actions. Happily for his reputation, he possessed another quality that unmasked him completely: he was the most open and most sincere of men, and his nature, inclined to good, ever swayed all his actions."[99]
Mr. Finlay, who knew Lord Byron about the same time, says that not only he calumniated himself, but that he hid his best sentiments.
Speaking of the simplicity of his manners, and his repugnance for all emphasis:—
"I have always observed," continues Mr. Finlay, "that he adopted a very simple and even monotonous tone, when he had to say any thing not quite in the ordinary style of conversation. Whenever he had begun a sentence which showed that the subject interested him, and which contained sublime thought, he would check himself suddenly, and come to an end without concluding, either with a smile of indifference or in a careless tone. I thought he had adopted this mode to hide his real sentiments when he feared lest his tongue should be carried away by his heart; and often he did so evidently to hide the author or rather the poet. But in satire or clever conversation his genius took full flight."[100]
And Stanhope further adds:—
"I also have observed that Lord Byron acted in this way. He often liked to hide the noble sentiments that filled his soul, and even tried to turn them into ridicule."[101]
This was only too true. The spirit of repartee and fun often made him display his intellectual faculties at the expense of his moral nature and his truest sentiments.
Moore says that when Lord Byron went to Ravenna to see Countess G—— again, he wrote to Hoppner, who looked after his affairs, in such a light vein of pleasantry, that it would have been difficult for any one not knowing him thoroughly to conceive the possibility of his expressing himself thus, while under the influence of a passion so sincere:—
"But such is ever the wantonness of the mocking spirit, from which nothing—not even love—remains sacred; and which at last, for want of other food, turns upon self. The same horror, too, of hypocrisy that led Lord Byron to exaggerate his own errors led him also to disguise, under a seemingly heartless ridicule, all those natural and kindly qualities by which they were redeemed."
And by way of contrast with the strange lightness of his letter to Hoppner, as well as to do justice to the reality of his passion, Moore then quotes the whole of those beautiful stanzas, called "The Po," which Lord Byron wrote while crossing that river on his way from Venice to Ravenna.[102]
We might multiply quotations, in order to prove that all those who knew him have more or less remarked this phenomenon. But no one has well determined its principal cause; or else it has been too much confounded with the strange caprices he showed, especially in early youth; for subsequently, says Moore, "when he saw that the world gravely believed the opinion he had given of himself, he refused any longer to echo it."
There is certainly truth in the judgment passed by Moore and others. It can not be denied that, when as a boy, he boasted of his dissipated life at the University, the chief reason of it lay in the folly common to that period of life, which impels human beings while yet children to seek to appear like men by aping the vices of riper years. It can not be denied, either, that the pleasure of mystifying suggested his answer to Dallas; that an exaggerated horror of hypocrisy taught his pen a thousand censures of himself beginning with his first satire; that a sort of over-excitement and reaction of imagination gave him, at times, the strange ambition of appearing to be one of those dark, proud heroes he loved to paint for the sake of effect. Moreover, we must not forget that witty turn of mind which his extraordinary perception of the ridiculous, and his facility for seeing the two sides of things, often made him to display at the expense of his better nature, by seeming to mock his truest sentiments, as when he wrote to Hoppner: a psychological phenomenon, of which the cause has been more particularly sought elsewhere. Finally, we may also add that he might have believed he was disarming envy and malice by speaking against himself; and that he was to a certain extent escaping from the effects of those evil passions by throwing them something whereon to feed. Who knows whether he also did not—a little through goodness of heart, and greatly through the tactics that make good politicians complain of the unpleasantnesses attached to their greatness—ascribe to himself imaginary defects, so as to let some compassion, under the form of blame, mix with the malice that hemmed him in on all sides; and whether he did not think it well to make use of this means, as of a shield, to ward off their blows? This sort of generous artifice, which I more than once suspected in him, may serve as long as public favor lasts; but when persecution gets the upper hand,—which is the case sooner or later with all greatness and all virtues—when Envy triumphs by means of calumny, she converts into poison, benefits, virtues, gratitude. Thus, if our hypothesis be correct, Lord Byron would have been cruelly punished for his weakness in allowing that to be believed of him which was not true. Still, all we have observed can only furnish, at best, the secondary and evanescent causes of the moral phenomenon described, and those who would fain penetrate the recesses of Lord Byron's soul must search deeper for explanation. Our idea is, the first cause will be found to lie in some sentiment that reigned all powerful in his breast. I mean that he placed his ideal standard too high, and the influence it exercised over him was manifest even to his last moments.
In the severe judgments which he has pronounced upon himself in the first place, on mankind in general, and on some particular individuals, the ideal model of all the intellectual, moral, and physical beauty which he found in the depth of his own mind, shone with divine lustre before his imagination, by the union of faculties imbued with extraordinary energy.
We see, by a thousand traits, that his ideal was formed much earlier than is common with ordinary children. In his first youthful poems it already displayed itself much developed. Ever attracted toward truth, his first desire was to seek after that; and the better to do so, he searched into himself, analyzed what was passing within and without, and finally proclaimed it without any consideration for himself or others.
At Harrow we see him leaving off play to go and sit down alone and meditate on the stone now called Byron's tomb.
At Cambridge afterward, despite the dissipation he shared equally with his comrades, amid games and exercises in which he greatly excelled, we still find him courting meditation under shady trees. On returning to his home, the Abbey, when surrounded with the noise and frolic of boisterous companions, we see him devote himself to study and solitary reflection; finally, during his travels, and after his return, when all England was at his feet, we behold him still and ever experiencing that imperious want of scanning himself, of descending into the depths of his own heart, interrogating his conscience, and very often of writing down in his memorandum-books the severe sentences pronounced by that inflexible judge. And, as he could not put away from sight his divine model, he came out from these examinations humbled, dissatisfied, reproaching and punishing himself for having strayed from it. For he discovered too many terrestrial elements in all human virtues. For instance, in friendships, though so generous on his side, he found the satisfaction of a personal want, consequently, an egotistical element; the same, and much more strongly, with regard to love. He found something personal in the best instincts, in the passion for glory, in patriotism, even in the sentiment of veneration, since that is an echo of our tastes and personal sympathies. That the high standard of his ideal was the first cause of injustice toward himself, a thousand proofs might be offered. I will choose some only. We read in his memoranda:—
"It has lately been in my power to make two men happy. I am delighted at it, especially as regards the last, for he is excellent. But I wish there had been a little more sacrifice on my part, and less satisfaction for my self-love in doing that, because then there would have been more merit."
Such was this great culprit. He actually felt pleasure in doing good! Another time he was asked to present a petition to Parliament. "I am not in a humor for this business," writes he in the evening journal, where he examined his conscience. He was suffering then from grief, caused by the absence of a person he loved, and he apostrophizes himself in these terms:—"Had —— been here she would have made me do it. There is a woman who, amid all her fascination, always urged a man to usefulness or glory. Had she remained, she had been my tutelar genius.
"Baldwin is very unfortunate; but, poor fellow, 'I can't get out; I can't get out,' said the starling. Ah! I am as bad as that dog Sterne, who preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother. Villain! hypocrite! slave! sycophant! But I am no better. Here I can not stimulate myself to a speech for the sake of these unfortunates, and three words and half a smile of——, had she been here to urge it (and urge it she infallibly would; at least, she always pressed me on in senatorial duties, and particularly in the cause of weakness), would have made me an advocate, if not an orator. Curse on Rochefoucault for being always right!"
Another time he also accused himself of selfishness, because he wrote only for amusement! He was then but twenty-three years of age:—
"To withdraw myself from myself (oh, that cursed selfishness!) has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all; and publishing is also the continuance of the same object, by the action it affords to the mind, which else recoils upon itself."
This hard opinion of man's virtue, formed by many moralists, and especially by those who see virtue only in pure disinterested benevolence, was an impulse with Lord Byron rather than the result of reason; and I much doubt whether this craving for equity and truth were ever practically combined and harmonized with the faculty of benevolence in any one else as it was with Lord Byron, for this combination evidently formed the most striking part of his character. Montaigne himself,—who, if he did not possess as much innate benevolence, had nevertheless the faculty, and even felt the want of entering into his conscience, and examining it, so as to draw forth general notions,—says, "When I examine myself conscientiously, I find that my best sort of goodness has a vicious tint."
And he fears that even Plato, in his brightest virtue, had he analyzed it well, would have found some human admixture. And then he sums up by saying, "Man is made up of bits and oddities."[103]
But these sincere philosophers are few in number, and their maxims can never be popular. For men in general experience rather the want of magnifying than of depreciating themselves, and, instead of taking their best models from an ideal, they choose them from reality, judge characters, compare themselves to other men, and, living like other people, see no guilt in themselves; while Lord Byron, living as they did, discovered in himself weaknesses, reasons for modesty, regret, repentance. If he could have done as they did, he would have been satisfied, and he would either have escaped or vanquished calumny. But he could not and would not, though conscious of the harm thence resulting to himself.
"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 has 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!"
One of his biographers pretends that he rendered himself justice another time, and represents him as saying, speaking of M——:
"See how well he has got on in the world! He is just as little inclined to commit a bad action as incapable of doing a good one; fear keeps him from the former, and wickedness from the latter. The difference between him and me is that I attack a great many people, and truly, with one or two exceptions (and note that they are persons of my own sex), I do not hate one; while he says no harm of any one, but hates a great many, if not every body. Fancy, then, how amusing it would be to see him in the palace of Truth, when he would be thinking he was making the sweetest compliments, while all the time he would be giving vent to the accumulated spite and rancor of years, and then to see the person he had flattered so long listen to his real sentiments for the first time. Oh! that would truly be a comic sight. As to me, I should appear to great advantage in the palace of Truth, for while I should be thinking to vex friends and enemies with harsh speeches, I should be saying pretty things on the contrary; for at bottom, I have no malice or ill-nature,—at least, not of that kind which lasts more than a moment."
"Never," adds the biographer, "was a truer observation made. Lord Byron's nature is very fine, despite all the bad weeds that might have attempted to spring up in it; and I am convinced that it is the excellence of the poet, or rather the effect of such excellence, which has caused the faults of the man.
"The severity of censure lavished on the man has increased in proportion to the admiration excited by the poet, and often with the greatest injustice. The world offered up incense to the poet, while heaping ashes on the head of the man. He was indignant at such usage, and wounded pride avenged itself by painting himself in the darkest colors, as if to give a deeper hue than even his enemies had done; all the time forcing them to admiration for his genius, as boundless as was their disapprobation of his supposed character."[104]
Is this conversation real or imaginary? Doubt is allowable; but, however it may be, the reflections of the biographer in this case are too sensible and too true for us not to quote them with pleasure.
In concluding these remarks, which prove how high was the ideal type that impelled Lord Byron to be unjust to himself, I will further observe, that it was the exaggeration of his great characteristic faculties which made him fail in some little virtue (such as prudence, when it has its source solely in our personal interest). For it was only to this degree, and from this point of view, that Lord Byron lacked it. And it appears singular that his great mind should not have made him see, in this very craving after self-examination, caused by his inclination for truth; and in that extraordinary susceptibility of conscience which lead to self-reproach for egotism, only because he felt pleasure in exercising beneficence and that it did not contain enough sacrifice; it is singular, I say, that this same spirit of equity did not make him see how he shone in the only two faculties that can have no alloy of egotism, and which were very evidently the most striking qualities of his character. But he was, with regard to himself, like the torch which, lighting up distant objects, leaves those near it in obscurity. Lord Byron did not know himself; he had by no means overcome that difficulty which the oracles of Greece pronounced the greatest. Only he was sometimes conscious of it. In his memoranda, written at Ravenna, in 1821, after having said that he does not think the world judges him well, he adds:—
"I have seen myself compared, personally or poetically, in English, French, German as (interpreted to me), Italian and Portuguese, within these nine years, to Rousseau, Goethe, Young, Aretin, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, an Alabaster Vase lighted up within, Satan, Shakspeare, Bonaparte, Tiberius, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin the clown, Sternhold and Hopkins, to the Phantasmagoria, to Henry the Eighth, to Chenier, to Mirabeau, to Young, R. Dallas (the schoolboy), to Michael Angelo, to Raphael, to a petit maître, to Diogenes, to Childe Harold, to Lara, to the Count in 'Beppo,' to Milton, to Pope, to Dryden, to Burns, to Savage, to Chatterton, to 'oft have I heard of thee, my Lord Byron,' in Shakspeare, to Churchill the poet, to Kean the actor, to Alfieri, etc., etc. The object of so many contradictory comparisons must probably be like something different from them all; but what that is is more than I know, or any body else."
But had he known himself, he would have found that he realized one of the finest types of character that humanity can offer; for his two characteristic faculties were, his attraction toward truth and benevolence. And in ceasing to calumniate himself, he would have snatched from the hands of the envious and the enemies of truth, the principal weapon they made use of to defame him.
When one reflects on all this, one questions with astonishment how it is that all his biographers should have remained outside of truth. But it is useless insisting thereupon, for we have given sufficient answer.[105]
I will, then, confine myself to remarking here that one characteristic peculiar to the biographers of great men in general, is the extreme repugnance they feel toward praising their own subjects. What is the cause? Do they fear being told they have made a panegyric, passing for flatterers, appearing to get through a task? Do they believe that, in order to show cleverness, perspicacity, and deep knowledge of the human heart, it is necessary to put in place of simple truth a sort of malice, not very intelligible, and often contradictory? All that may well be, but I believe that what they especially feel is, that if their books were only written for noble minds, possessing such qualities as only belong to the minority of the human race, they might run the risk of being less sought after and less bought. Thus they search for faults with ardor, just as miners do for diamonds; and when they think they have discovered a vice in their hero, they look upon it as the "Mogul" of their book. They make it shine, polish it up, show it in a thousand lights, bring it out as the striking part of their work,—the chief quality of their hero, who, unable to defend himself, is handed down, disfigured, to posterity. Such are the strange perils incurred, as regards truth and justice, and the wrong done toward the great departed; and this is why their surviving friends are called on to protest against the false assertions of biographers. Those who have written on Lord Byron, unable to find this great "Mogul" (for Lord Byron had no vices), have all, more or less, sought at least to draw the attention of their readers to a thousand little weaknesses, mostly devoid of reality. Upon what basis, indeed, do they rest?—Almost always on Lord Byron's words. Now we know what account should be made of his testimony when he speaks against himself. For instance, he has called himself irritable and prone to anger, and biographers have found it very convenient to paint him with his own brush. Men never fail to treat those who depreciate themselves with equal injustice. Nor is this surprising. If it be true that we are always judged on our faulty side, even though we endeavor to show the best, what must be the case if our efforts tend only to display our worst? And besides, why should others give themselves the trouble of exonerating a man from blame who depreciated himself? As it requires great discernment, great generosity, and very rare qualities, not to go beyond truth in self-esteem, biographers have not hesitated to declare Lord Byron, on his own testimony, very irritable, and even very passionate; but was he really so? This is a question to be examined.