LORD BYRON'S RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
"When the triumph of a cause of such importance to humanity is in question, there never can be too many advocates.... But it is not enough to count up the votes; their value must, above all, be weighed."—Sherer.
The struggles between heart and reason, in religious matters, began almost with Lord Byron's infancy. His desire of reconciling them was such, that, if unsuccessful, his mind was perplexed and restless. He was not, as it were, out of the cradle, when, in the midst of his childish play, the great problems of life already filled his youthful thoughts; and his good nurse May, who was wont to sing psalms to him when rocking him to sleep, had also to answer questions which showed the dangerous curiosity of his mind.
"Among the traits," says Moore, "which should be recorded of his earlier years, I should mention, that, according to the character given of him by his first nurse's husband, he was, when a mere child, 'particularly inquisitive and puzzling about religion.'"
At ten years of age, he was sent to school, at Dulwich, under the care of the Rev. Dr. Glennie, who, in the account given by him to Moore, and after speaking of the amiable qualities of Byron, adds: that "At that age he already possessed an intimate acquaintance with the historical facts in the Scriptures, and was particularly delighted when he could speak of them to him, especially on Sunday evenings after worship." He was wont then to reason upon all the facts contained in the Bible, with every appearance of faith in the doctrine which it teaches.
But while his heart was thus drawn toward its Creator, the power of his reason began imperiously to assert its rights. As long as he remained sheltered under his father's roof, under the eyes of his mother, and of young ecclesiastics who were his first teachers, and whose practice agreed with their teaching,—as long as his reason had not reached a certain degree of development,—he remained orthodox and pious. But when he went to college, and particularly when he was received at Cambridge, a vast field of contradictions opened before his observing and thinking mind. His reflections, together with the study of the great psychological questions, soon clouded his mind, and threw a shade over his orthodoxy. If Lord Byron, therefore, had really the misfortune to lose at an earlier age than ordinary children, the simple faith of his childhood, the fact is not to be wondered at. By the universality of his genius he added to the faculties which form the poet, those of an eminently logical and practical mind; and being precocious in all things, he was likewise so in his powers of reflection and reasoning. "Never," says Moore, "did Lord Byron lose sight of reality and of common practical sense; his genius, however high it soared, ever preserved upon earth a support of some kind."
His intellectual inquisitiveness was likewise, with him, a precocious passion, and circumstances stood so well in the way to serve this craving, that when fifteen years of age (incredible as it seems), he had already perused two thousand volumes, among which his powerful and vivid intellect had been able to weigh the contradictions of all the principal modern and ancient systems of philosophy. This thirst for knowledge (anomalous according to the rules of both school and college) was the more extraordinary that it existed in him together with a passionate love for boyish play, and the indulgence in all the bodily exercises, in which he excelled, and on which he prided himself. But as he stored his mind after the usual college hours, and apart from the influences of that routine discipline, which, with Milton, Pope, and almost all the great minds, he so cordially hated, the real progress of his intellect remained unobserved by his masters, and even by his fellow-students. This mistake, on the part of men little gifted with quickness of perception, was not shared by Disraeli, who could so justly appreciate genius; and of Byron he spoke as of a studious boy, who loved to hide this quality from his comrades, thinking it more amiable on his part to appear idle in their eyes.
While the young man thus strengthened his intellect by hard though irregular study, his meditative and impassioned nature, feeling in the highest degree the necessity of confirming its impressions, experienced more imperatively than a youth of fifteen generally does, the want of examining the traditional teachings which had been transmitted to him. Byron felt the necessity of inquiring on what irrevocable proofs the dogmas which he was called upon to believe were based. Holy writ, aided by the infallibility of the teachings of the Church, etc., were adduced as the proofs he required.
He was wont, therefore, to read with avidity a number of books treating on religious matters; and he perused them, both with artless ingenuity and in the hope of their strengthening his faith. But, could he truly find faith in their pages? Are not such books rather dangerous than otherwise for some minds?
"The truth is," says the author of the "Essays," "that a mind which has never entertained a doubt in revelation, may conceive some doubts by reading books written in its defense." And he adds elsewhere, in speaking of the writers of such controversial works, that "impatient of the least hesitation, they deny with anger the value of their adversary's arguments, and betray, in their way of getting over difficulties, a humor which injures the effects of their reasoning, and of the proofs they make use of to help their arguments." After reading several of these books, he must have found, as did the great Pitt, "that such readings provoke many more doubts than they dispel;" and, in fact, they rather disquieted and shook, than strengthened his faith. At the same time, he was alive to another striking contradiction. He noticed that the men who taught the doctrines, too often forgot to make these and their practice agree; and in losing his respect for his masters, he still further doubted the sincerity of their teaching. Thus, while remaining religiously inclined, he must have felt his faith becoming more and more shaken, and in the memorandum of his early days, after enumerating the books treating upon religious subjects which he had read, he says: "All very tedious. I hate books treating of religious subjects; although I adore and love God, freed from all absurd and blasphemous notions."
In this state of mind, of which one especially finds a proof in his earlier poems, the philosophy of Locke, which is that professed at Cambridge, and which he had already skimmed, as it were, together with other philosophical systems, became his study. It only added an enormous weight in the way of contradictions to the already heavy weight of doubt.
Could it be otherwise? Does not Locke teach that all ideas being the creation of the senses, the notion of God, unless aided by tradition, has no other basis but our senses and the sight of the external world? If this be not the doctrine professed by Locke, it is the reading which a logical mind may give to it.
He believes in God; yet the notion of God, as it appears from his philosophical teaching, is not that which is taught by Christian doctrine. According to him, God is not even proclaimed to be the Creator of the Universe. But even were He proclaimed such, what would be the result of this philosophical condescension, unless it be that God is distinct from the world? Would God possess then all those attributes which reason, independently of all philosophy, points to in the Divinity? Would power, goodness, infinite perfection be God's? Certainly not: as we are unable to know Him except through a world of imperfections, where good and evil, order and confusion, are mixed together, and not by the conception of the infinite, which alone can give us a true and perfect idea of God, it follows that God would be much superior to the world, but would not be absolute perfection.
After this depreciation of the Omnipotent, what says this philosophy of our soul? It does away altogether with one of the essential proofs of its spiritual nature, and thereby compromises the soul itself, declaring as it does, that "it is not unlikely that matter is capable of thought." But then of what necessity would the soul be, if the body can think? How hope for immortality, if that which thinks is subject to dissolution and to death?
As for our liberty, it would be annihilated as a consequence of such doctrines; for it is not supposed to derive its essence from the interior activity of the soul, but would seem to be limited to our power of moving. Yet we are hourly experiencing what our weakness is in comparison with the power of the laws of nature, which rule us in every sense and way. In making, therefore, all things derivable from sensations, Locke fell from one error into another, and nearly arrived at that point when duty and all principles of justice and morality might be altogether denied. Being himself, however, both good, honest, liberal, and Christian-minded, he could only save himself from the social wreck to which he exposed others, by stopping on the brink of the abyss which he had himself created, and by becoming in practice inconsistent with his speculative notions. His successors, such as Condillac and Cabanis, fell by following his system and by carrying it too far.
A doctrine which denies the right of discovering, or of explaining the religious truths which are the grounds of all moral teaching, and which allows tradition the privilege only of bestowing faith; a system of metaphysics, which can not avoid the dangers in which morality must perish, owing to its contradictions and its inconsistencies, must be perilous for all but those happily constituted minds for whom simple faith and submission are a part of their essence, who believe on hearsay and seek not to understand, but merely glance at the surface of the difficult and venturesome questions which are discussed before them, either because they feel their weakness, or because the light of revelation shines upon them so strongly as to make that of reason pale. For more logical minds, however, for such who are inquisitive, whose reason is both anxious and exacting, who want to understand before they believe, for whom the ties which linked them to tradition have been loosened, owing to their having reflected on a number of contradictions (the least of which, in the case of Lord Byron, was decidedly not that of seeing such a philosophy professed and adopted in a clerical university); for minds like these such doctrines must necessarily lead to atheism. Though Lord Byron's mind was one of these, he escaped the fearful results by a still greater effort of his reason, which made him reject the precepts of the sensualists, and comprehend their inconsistencies.
His protest against the doctrines of the sensualists is entered in his memorandum, where, after naming all the authors of the philosophical systems which he had read, and, coming to the head of that school, he exclaims from the bottom of his heart:
"Hobbes! I detest him!"
And notwithstanding the respect with which the good and great Locke must individually have inspired him, he evidently must have repudiated his precepts, inasmuch as they were not strong enough to uproot from his mind the religious truths which reason proclaims, nor prevent either his coming out of his philosophical struggle a firm believer in all the dogmas which are imperiously upheld to the human reason, or his proclaiming his belief in one God and Creator, in our free will, and in the immortality of the soul.
This glorious and noble victory of his mind and true religious tendencies at that time, is evinced in his "Prayer to Nature," written when he had not yet reached his eighteenth year. In this beautiful prayer, which his so-called orthodox friends succeeded in having cut out of the volume containing his earliest poems, we find both great power of contemplation and humility and confidence in prayer—a soul too near the Creator to doubt of His Omnipotence, but also too far from Him for his faith and confidence in the divine mercy not to be mixed up with a little fear; in fact, all the essential elements of a noble prayer which is not orthodox. Though written on the threshold of life, he might, with few modifications, have signed it on the eve of his death; when, still young, fate had spared him nothing, from the sweetest to the bitterest feelings, from every deserved pleasure to every undeserved pain.
THE PRAYER OF NATURE.
Father of Light! great God of Heaven!
Hear'st thou the accents of despair?
Can guilt like man's be e'er forgiven?
Can vice atone for crimes by prayer?
Father of Light, on thee I call!
Thou seest my soul is dark within;
Thou who canst mark the sparrow's fall,
Avert from me the death of sin.
No shrine I seek, to sects unknown;
Oh, point to me the path of truth!
Thy dread omnipotence I own;
Spare, yet amend, the faults of youth.
Let bigots rear a gloomy fane,
Let superstition hail the pile,
Let priests, to spread their sable reign,
With tales of mystic rites beguile.
Shall man confine his Maker's sway
To Gothic domes of mouldering stone?
Thy temple is the face of day;
Earth, ocean, heaven, thy boundless throne.
Shall man condemn his race to hell,
Unless they bend in pompous form?
Tell us that all, for one who fell,
Must perish in the mingling storm?
Shall each pretend to reach the skies,
Yet doom his brother to expire,
Whose soul a different hope supplies,
Or doctrines less severe inspire?
Shall these, by creeds they can't expound,
Prepare a fancied bliss or woe?
Shall reptiles, grovelling on the ground,
Their great Creator's purpose know?
Shall those who live for self alone,
Whose years float on in daily crime—
Shall they by faith for guilt atone,
And live beyond the bounds of Time?
Father! no prophet's laws I seek,—
Thy laws in Nature's works appear;—
I own myself corrupt and weak,
Yet will I pray, for thou wilt hear!
Thou, who canst guide the wandering star
Through trackless realms of æther's space;
Who calm'st the elemental war,
Whose hand from pole to pole I trace:
Thou, who in wisdom placed me here,
Who, when thou wilt, canst take me hence,
Ah! while I tread this earthly sphere,
Extend to me thy wide defence.
To Thee, my God, to thee I call!
Whatever weal or woe betide,
By thy command I rise or fall,
In thy protection I confide.
If, when this dust to dust's restored,
My soul shall float on airy wing,
How shall thy glorious name adored
Inspire her feeble voice to sing!
But, if this fleeting spirit share
With clay the grave's eternal bed,
While life yet throbs I raise my prayer,
Though doom'd no more to quit the dead.
To Thee I breathe my humble strain,
Grateful for all thy mercies past,
And hope, my God, to thee again
This erring life may fly at last.
December 29, 1806. [First published, 1830.]
As much may be said of another poem which he likewise wrote in his youth; when, very dangerously ill, and believing his last end to be near, he turned all his thoughts to the other world, and conceived the touching poem which ended in the lines:—
"Forget this world, my restless sprite;
Turn, turn thy thoughts to Heaven;
There must thou soon direct thy flight
If errors are forgiven."
But if Lord Byron did not adopt Locke's philosophy he at least paid the greatest tribute of regard to his goodness by following ever more closely his best precept, which is to the effect that to love truth for the sake of truth is an essential part of human perfection in this world, and the fertile soil on which is sown the seed of every virtue.
While his mind thus wavered between a thousand contradictory opinions, and, finding part of the truth only in every philosophical system which he examined, but not the whole truth—which was what his soul thirsted for; calling himself at times skeptic, because he hesitated in adhering to one school, in consequence of the numerous errors and inconsistencies common to all (the great school which has, to the honor of France, harmonized them all, was not yet open); but not losing sight of the great eternal truths of which he felt inwardly the proofs, he made the acquaintance of a young man who had just completed his university education with great success. This young man, who exercised a great influence over all his fellow-students, owing to his superior intellect, influenced Byron in a similar manner. Bold, logical, inflexible, he was not swayed by the dangers which the sensualistic teaching presented to all logical minds; dangers which had frightened the chief of that school himself, and who, in wishing to oppose them, had not been able to do so except by contradictions. This young man, by a noble inconsistency, drew back in presence of the moral conclusions of that metaphysical doctrine, but not without culling from the master's thoughts conclusions, such that they leave all that is spiritual and immortal without defense, together with all the legitimate inferences to be derived from the principles he taught, however impious or absurd.
Among the Germans he had likewise met with several bold doctrines; but, merely to speak here of the conclusions to which the school he belonged necessarily brought him, he arrived at those conclusions by a series of deductions from the study of those great questions, which experience always ends by referring either to reason or to revelation. Compelled by the tenets of that school, to solve all these problems by means of the sensations only, he was naturally led to the conclusion that no such thing existed as the spirituality of the soul, and hence, that it had neither the gift of immortality nor that of liberty, nor any principles of morality. Finally, obliged to seek in tradition the conviction that a God existed, and that He can only be perceived through a maze of imperfections, and not as reason conceives Him clearly and simply with all His necessary attributes of perfection, he was even led to the necessity of losing sight of a Creator altogether.
The fatal precipice, which this young student himself avoided by the practical conclusions by which he abided, Byron likewise escaped both by his conclusions and his theoretical notions. He even hated the name of atheist to that degree, that at Harrow he wished to fight his companion Lord Althorpe, because he had written the word atheist under Byron's name. This is so true that Sir Robert Dallas, of whose judgment no interpretation can ever be given without making allowances for the intolerant spirit and the exaggeration required by his notions of orthodoxy and by his party prejudices, after regretting that Lord Byron should not have had a shield during his minority to protect him against his comrades, "proud, free-thinking, and acute sophists," as he calls them, adds that, if surprise must be expressed, it is not that Byron should have erred, but that he should have pierced the clouds which surrounded him, and have dispersed them by the sole rays of his genius.
So many struggles, however, so many contradictions, so many strains upon the mind, while leaving his heart untouched, could not but multiply the doubts which he conceived, and more or less modify his mind, and even give to it a tinge of skepticism.
When he left England for the first time, his mind was in this transitory, suffering state. The various countries which he visited, the various creeds with which he became acquainted the intolerance of the one, the laxity in others in direct opposition to their superstitious and irrational practices; the truly touching piety which he found in the Greek monasteries (at Zytza and at Athens), in the midst of which and in the silence of whose cloisters, he loved to share the peace and even the austerities of a monkish life; his transition from the Western countries, where reason is placed above imagination, to the East, where the opposite is aimed at—all contributed to prevent what was vacillating in his mind from becoming settled. Meanwhile endless disappointments, bitter sorrows, and broken illusions contributed their share to the pain which his mind experienced at every stage of its philosophical inquiry, and contributed to give him, in the loneliness of his life, a tinge of misanthropy opposed to his natural character, which suggested the rather philosophical and generous than prudent conception of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," where he depicts his hero as intellectually imbued with philosophical doctrines which lead practical minds to skepticism and materialism! These doctrines resulted in causing "Childe Harold" to lose that traditional faith which gives peace to the soul by insuring conviction to the mind. The poet shows the impossibility of withdrawing himself from their disastrous results when arrived at the age when passions assert their rule, and when in a certain social position, they must be carried into practice. Nature not having gifted him with a sufficiently generous heart to check the disease of his mind, Childe Harold, disgusted with the sins of his youth, no longer seeks the road to virtue, but begins to experience with Solomon the vanity of human things, becomes a prey to satiety, ennui, and to insensibility to both physical and moral worth.
Byron, who made the intellectual education of his day responsible for Childe Harold's faults, had conceived this character in his earliest days at Harrow. It was in any case, he said, a characteristic of the youth of those days, although idealized and drawn from his own imagination. His enemies and his rivals have endeavored to prove that he wished to describe in this poem the state of his own mind. They made capital out of a few historical and local circumstances, to give to their falsehood some appearance of truth. But only those who did not know him personally could be ignorant how improbable it was that any resemblance between the poet and his hero could be maintained.
Let us confine ourselves to the remark that Lord Byron, instead of personifying his hero, personifies no one but simply the poet. Let us add, besides, that in no case could Lord Byron be made responsible for the consequences of the doctrines of the materialists, as held by his hero. Not only because of his nature, which was totally opposed to them, but also and especially because of his tendencies, which were eminently and persistently those of a spiritualist, and which clung to him throughout his life even at the time when he was accused of skepticism. This was at the time when he wrote the second canto of "Childe Harold." Thoughts, little in unison with, if not entirely opposed to his intimate convictions, sprang from his sick heart to his head: his soul became dejected, and his copious tears so obscured his eyes as to veil from them for a time the existence of the Almighty, which he seemed to question; and he appeared to think that if the Cambridge philosophy was right in doubting the soul's spirituality, its immortality might be equally questioned. These doubts having been expressed in his own, and not in his hero's name, at the outset of the second canto of "Childe Harold," led to his being also accused of skepticism.
But if pain actually paralyzed for a time the elasticity of his mind, the latter very soon recovered its natural vigor and showed itself in all its glowing energy in the eighth and ninth stanzas, which are most delicate emanations from a beautiful soul. The first stanzas alone, however, continued to occupy the attention of some orthodox and over-scrupulous minds: poetry not necessarily being a mode of teaching philosophy. We must besides remark that the meaning of the lines is purely hypothetical. In saying that the soul might not be immortal, is it not saying much the same as was said by Locke in the words the soul is perhaps spiritual? Is not that perishable which is capable of dissolution according to the laws of the world? Lord Byron, though a stanch spiritualist at heart, derived his doubts from other much less exalted authorities. Believing implicitly in the omnipotence of the Creator, could he not modestly fear that God, who had made his soul out of nothing, might cause it to return to nothing? Might he not imagine that the contrary belief was rather the result of our wishes, of our pride, and of the importance which we love to attach to ourselves? Can the conviction of the existence of immortality, unless founded upon revelation, be any thing else but a hope or a sentiment? Pantheists alone find immortality to be the fatal consequence of their presumptuous doctrine. But what an immortality! One to be laughed at, as a philosopher of our days so well expresses it.
Accused of skepticism, Byron replied by explaining the meaning of his lines in a note which, at the instance of Mr. Dallas, he also consented to suppress with his habitual good-nature, and in which he endeavored to show that the spirit which pervaded the whole of the poem was rather one of discouragement and despair, than raillery at religion, and that, after all, the effect of religion upon the world had been less to make men love their equals than to excite the various sects to a hatred against one another, and thus give rise to those fanatical wars which have caused so much bloodshed and injured so deeply the cause which they were intended to defend.
In reading this note again, one can with difficulty make out what Dallas's objections were, and why he tried so hard to have it suppressed; for it savors much more of a spirit of toleration and charity than of skepticism. Lord Byron nevertheless withdrew it.
But this was not enough to satisfy the British straight-lacedness. As the accusations against his skepticism were on the increase daily, Mr. Gifford, for whose enlightened opinion Byron ever had great respect, advised him to be more prudent, whereupon Byron replied:—
"I will do as you advise in regard to religious matters. The best would perhaps be to avoid them altogether. Certainly the passages already published are rather too rigorously interpreted. I am no bigot of incredulity, and I did not expect that I should be accused of denying the existence of God, because I had expressed some doubts as to the immortality of the soul.... After all, I believe my doubts to be but the effects of some mental illness."
It is clear from this letter, the tone of which is so honest and sincere, that if in the stanzas which his rivals blamed there was really more skepticism than can be gathered from the consideration of man's littleness and God's greatness, yet it was not his real conviction. Perhaps it was only a kind of cloud overhanging the mind, produced by the great grief which weighed on his heart. These sentiments, however, must have been really his own for some time longer. In his journal of 1813 he expresses himself thus:—
"My restlessness tells me I have something within that 'passeth show.' It is for him who made it to prolong that spark of celestial fire which illuminates yet burns this frail tenement.... In the mean time I am grateful for some good, and tolerably patient under certain evils, grace à Dieu et à mon bon tempérament."
But all this, as we have said, amounted to the opinion that an omnipotent God is the author of our soul, which is of a totally different nature to that of our body, and that the soul being spiritual and not subjected to the laws which rule the body, the soul must be immortal. That he who made it out of nothing can cause it to return to nothing. The orthodox doctrine does not teach, as pantheism does, that our soul can not perish. It gives it only an individual immortality.
Notwithstanding this, and indeed on account of it, he was accused of being an atheist, in a poem entitled "Anti-Byron." This poem was the work of a clever rival, who made himself the echo of a party. Murray hesitated to publish it, but Byron, who was always just, praised the poem, and advised its publication.
"If the author thinks that I have written poetry with such tendencies, he is quite right to contradict it."
But having done so much for others, this time, at least, he fulfilled a duty toward himself by adding:—
"The author is however wrong on one point; I am not in the least an atheist;" and ends by saying, "It is very odd; eight lines may have produced eight thousand, if we calculate what has been and may still be said on the subject."
He speaks of the same work to Moore, in the same tone of pleasantry:—
"Oh, by-the-by, I had nearly forgot. There is a long poem—an 'Anti-Byron'—coming out, to prove that I have formed a conspiracy to overthrow by rhyme all religion and government, and have already made great progress! It is not very scurrilous, but serious and ethereal. I never felt myself important till I saw and heard of my being such a little Voltaire as to induce such a production."
He therefore laughed at these accusations as too absurd. As for skepticism, he did not defend himself from a touch of it; for not only did he feel that the suspicious stanza could partly justify the belief, but also because there did exist in him a kind of religious skepticism which proceeded far more from meditation and observation than from a passion for it. Such a skepticism is in truth a sigh for conviction. A painful vision which appears to most reflective minds in a more or less indistinct and vague manner, but which appeared more forcibly to him, inasmuch as it sought to be expressed in words.
"He," says Montaigne, "who analyzes all the circumstances which have brought about matters, and all the consequences which have been derived from them, debars himself from having any choice, and remains skeptical."
This skepticism of Lord Byron, however, did not overstep the boundaries of permissible doubt, as prescribed by an intelligence desirous of improvement. This privilege he exercised; and one might say that he remained, as it were, suspended between heaven and earth, ever looking up toward heaven, from whence he felt that light must come in the end,—a light ever on the increase, which would daily steady him in the great principles which form the fundamental basis of truth,—one God the creator, the real immortality of our soul, our liberty and our responsibility before God.
Tired, however, of ever being the butt of the invectives of his enemies, and of the clergy, whom he had roughly handled in his writings, Lord Byron preferred remaining silent; and until his arrival in Switzerland he ceased making any allusions in his writings to any philosophical doubts which he may have entertained. The heroes which he selected for his Oriental poems were, moreover, too passionate to allow the mysterious voices from heaven to silence the cries from their heart. These celestial warnings, however, Byron never ceased to hear, although absorbed himself by various passions of a different kind; he was at that time almost surrounded by an idolizing public, and rocked in the cradle of success and popularity. This is but too visible whenever he ceases to talk the language of his heroes, and expresses merely his own ideas and his own personal feelings. It was at this time that he wrote those delicious "Hebrew Melodies," in which a belief in spirituality and immortality is everywhere manifest, and in which is to be found the moral indication, if not the metaphysical proof, of the working of his mind in a religious point of view, as he matured in years. Two of these Melodies especially, the third and the fifteenth, contain so positive a profession of faith in the spiritualist doctrines, and carry with them the mark of so elevated a Christian sentiment, that I can not forbear quoting them in extenso.
IF THAT HIGH WORLD.
I.
If that high world, which lies beyond
Our own, surviving Love endears;
If there the cherish'd heart be fond,
The eye the same, except in tears—
How welcome those untrodden spheres!
How sweet this very hour to die!
To soar from earth and find all fears
Lost in thy light—Eternity!
II.
It must be so: 'tis not for self
That we so tremble on the brink;
And striving to o'erleap the gulf,
Yet cling to Being's severing link.
Oh! in that future let us think
To hold each heart the heart that shares;
With them the immortal waters drink,
And soul in soul grow deathless theirs!
WHEN COLDNESS WRAPS THIS SUFFERING CLAY.
I.
When coldness wraps this suffering clay,
Ah! whither strays the immortal mind?
It can not die, it can not stay,
But leaves its darken'd dust behind.
Then, unembodied, doth it trace
By steps each planet's heavenly way?
Or fill at once the realms of space,
A thing of eyes, that all survey?
II.
Eternal, boundless, undecay'd,
A thought unseen, but seeing all,
All, all in earth or skies display'd,
Shall it survey, shall it recall:
Each fainter trace that memory holds
So darkly of departed years,
In one broad glance the soul beholds,
And all, that was, at once appears
III.
Before Creation peopled earth,
Its eyes shall roll through chaos back;
And where the furthest heaven had birth,
The spirit trace its rising track.
And where the future mars or makes,
Its glance dilate o'er all to be,
While sun is quench'd or system breaks,
Fix'd in his own eternity.
IV.
Above our Love, Hope, Hate, or Fear,
It lives all passionless and pure:
An age shall fleet like earthly year;
Its years as moments shall endure.
Away, away, without a wing,
O'er all, through all, its thought shall fly,
A nameless and eternal thing,
Forgetting what it was to die.
There is no passage in Plato, or in St. Augustin, or in Pascal, which can equal the sublimity of these stanzas.
It was in this painful state of mind that he spent the unfortunate year of his marriage. Having separated from his wife, he came to Geneva. Here, at the same hotel—Hôtel de Secheron—Shelley had also arrived, who some years previously had offered Byron a copy of his poem entitled "Queen Mab." Here they became acquainted. Although only twenty-three years of age, Shelley had already experienced much sorrow during his short existence. Born of rich and aristocratic parents, and who professed very religious and Tory principles, Shelley had been sent to Eton at thirteen. His character was most peculiar. He had none of the tastes of the young, could not stand scholastic discipline, despised every rule and regulation, and spent his time in writing novels. He published two when fifteen years old only, which appeared to be far above what could be expected from a boy of his age, but which deserved censure from their immoral tone. Owing to the nature of his mind, and especially at a time when reading has much influence, Shelley had conceived a great taste for the books which were disapproved of at college. Consequently the doctrines of the materialist school, which were the most in fashion then both in France and in England, so poisoned his mind as to cause him to become an atheist, and to argue as such against several theologians. He even published a pamphlet, so exaggerated in tone that he entitled it, "On the Necessity of Atheism." To crown this folly, Shelley sent round to all the bishops a copy of this work, and signed it with his own name.
Brought before the authorities to answer the charge of this audacious act, he persisted in his doctrines, and was actually preparing an answer to the judges in the same sense, when he was expelled from the university.
For people who know England a little, it is easy to conceive what an impression such conduct must have produced on the part of the eldest son of a family like his, of Tory principles, belonging to the aristocracy, intimate with the prince regent, and stanch, orthodox and severe in their religious tenets. Expelled from college, he was likewise sent away from home; and when his indignant father consented to see him again, Shelley was treated with such coldness that he was enraged at being received as a stranger in the bosom of a family of which he was the eldest son. This was not all: even the young lady for whom Shelley had already conceived an affection, deemed it right to cast him off. Overwhelmed by all these but too well merited misfortunes, he took refuge in an inn, where he tried to poison himself.
As he was struggling between life and death, a young girl of fifteen, Miss Westbrook, took care of him. Believing himself to be past recovery, and having no other means of rewarding her attention except by marrying her, he did so, in the hope that after his death his family would provide for her. But it is not always so easy to die, and he did not die. His health, however, was completely broken, and all that remained to him besides was an ill-assorted marriage. After the Gretna Green ceremony, Shelley went to reside in Edinburgh. His marriage so exasperated his father, that from that time he ceased to have any intercourse with him.
From Scotland Shelley went to Ireland, which was then in a very disturbed state. His metaphysics led him to conceive the most dangerous social theories. Conquered by a very real love of humanity, which he hoped to serve by the realization of his chimerical views, he even believed it to be his duty to make proselytes. While recommending the observance of peace, and of a spirit of moderation on the one hand, he, on the other, published pamphlets and spoke at meetings with a degree of talent which earned for him a certain amount of reputation, if not of fame. Then he was seized with a violent admiration for the English school called "Lockists," and devoted himself to poetry by way of giving a literary expression to his metaphysical reveries, and to his social theories. Thus he wrote "Queen Mab," a poem full of talent and imagination, but which is only the frame which encircles his most deplorable fancies. He sent a copy of it to all the noted literary men of England, and among them to Lord Byron, whose star had risen since the publication of "Childe Harold." Lord Byron declared, as may be seen in a note to the "Due Foscari," that the metaphysical portion of the poem was quite in opposition with his own opinions; but, with his usual impartiality and justice, he admired the poetry which is noticeable in this work, agreeing in this "with all those who are not blinded by bigotry and baseness of mind."
Shelley's marriage, contracted as it was under such strange auspices, was, of course, very unfortunate. By his acquaintance with Godwin, one of the greatest literary characters of his day, Shelley came to know Mary, his daughter, by his marriage with the celebrated Mrs. Woolstonecraft. Each fell in love with the other, but Shelley was not yet free to marry Miss Godwin. He separated from the wife he had chosen only from grateful motives, although he had two children by her, and he left England for the first time, where he had become the object of persecutions of all kinds, and of a hatred which at a later period culminated in taking away his right to the guardianship of his children.
Such was his position when Lord Byron arrived in Switzerland, and alighted at the Hôtel Secheron. To make acquaintance, therefore, with the author of "Queen Mab," and with the daughter of Godwin, for whom he entertained great regard, was a natural consequence on the part of the author of "Childe Harold."
Notwithstanding their difference of character, their diversity of taste, and their different habits, owing to the very opposite mode of living which they had followed, the two poets felt drawn to one another by that irresistible sympathy which springs up in the souls of two persecuted beings, however just that persecution may have been, as regards Shelley, but which was wholly unjust as regards Byron. Here we must allow Moore to speak:—
"The conversation of Shelley, from the extent of his poetic reading, and the strange, mystic speculations into which his systems of philosophy led him, was of a nature strongly to interest the attention of Lord Byron, and to turn him away from worldly associations and topics into more abstract and untrodden ways of thought. As far as contrast indeed is an enlivening ingredient of such intercourse, it would be difficult to find two persons more formed to whet each other's faculties by discussion, as on few points of common interest between them did their opinions agree: and that this difference had its root deep in the conformation of their respective minds, needs but a glance through the rich, glittering labyrinth of Shelley's pages to assure us.
"In Lord Byron, the real was never forgotten in the fanciful. However Imagination had placed her whole realm at his disposal, he was no less a man of this world than a ruler of hers: and, accordingly, through the airiest and most subtle creations of his brain, still the life-blood of truth and reality circulates. With Shelley it was far otherwise: his fancy was the medium through which he saw all things, his facts as well as his theories; and not only the greater part of his poetry, but the political and philosophical speculations in which he indulged, were all distilled through the same over-refining and unrealizing alembic. Having started as a teacher and reformer of the world, at an age when he could know nothing of the world but from fancy, the persecution he met with on the threshold of this boyish enterprise only confirmed him in his first paradoxical views of human ills, and their remedies. Instead of waiting to take lessons from those of greater experience, he with a courage, admirable, had it been but wisely directed, made war upon both.... With a mind, by nature, fervidly pious, he yet refused to acknowledge a Supreme Providence, and substituted some airy abstraction of 'Universal Love' in its place. An aristocrat by birth, and, as I understand, also in appearance and manners, he was yet a leveller in politics, and to such an utopian extent as to be the serious advocate of a community of goods. Though benevolent and generous to an extent that seemed to exclude all idea of selfishness, he yet scrupled not, in the pride of system, to disturb wantonly the faith of his fellow-men, and, without substituting any equivalent good in its place, to rob the wretched of a hope, which, even if false, would be better than all this world's best truths.
"Upon no point were the opposite tendencies of the two friends more observable than in their notions on philosophical subjects: Lord Byron being, with the great bulk of mankind, a believer in the existence of matter and evil, while Shelley so far refined upon the theory of Berkeley, as not only to resolve the whole of creation into spirit, but to add also to this immaterial system, some pervading principle, some abstract nonentity of love and beauty—of which, as a substitute at least for Deity—the philosophic bishop had never dreamed."
The difference existing between their philosophical doctrines was that which existed between the two most opposed systems of spiritualism and pantheism.
I said that Shelley, notwithstanding his originality of mind, was destined, through the mobility of his impressions, to be easily influenced by what he read. The study of Plato and of Spinoza had already given to his metaphysical views a different bent. But before his transition from atheism to a mystical pantheism, before finding God in all things, after having sought him in vain everywhere, before considering himself to be a fragment of a chosen existence, and before shutting himself up in a kind of mysticism which did actually absorb him at a later period, he confined himself to a positive worship of nature, which appeared to him then in the glorious shape of the mountains and lakes of Helvetia. Wordsworth was his oracle, and thus cultivating a poetry which deified nature, Shelley, in reality, remained at heart an atheist, and doubtless tried to imbue Byron with his enthusiasm and with his opinions.
Himself greatly delighted with the beauties of the scenery in the midst of which they lived, and, as he was wont to say in laughter, having received many large doses of Wordsworth from Shelley, Lord Byron wrote several stanzas in which the same enthusiasm may be met with, recorded in terms almost of adoration.
It was only a poetical form, however, a poetical illusion, which was succeeded by stanzas in which God himself as our creator, was loudly proclaimed. If in the seventy-second and following stanzas of the third canto, opinions were expressed which savored of pantheistic tendencies, they were at once followed by some such as these:—
"All heaven and earth are still—though not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thought too deep:—
All heaven and earth are still: from the high host
Of stars to the lull'd lake and mountain-coast,
All is concentred in a life intense,
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all Creator and Defense."
And again, on viewing the Alps, he writes the poem of "Manfred," in which his belief in a One God, and Creator, is expressed in sublime lines. His repugnance to atheism and to materialism is testified not only in his poetry, but also by his own actions.
On reaching Montauvert with his friend Hobhouse, and on the point of ascending Mont Blanc with him, he found Shelley's name in the register of the travellers, and under it the qualification of "atheist" written in Shelley's own hand. Lord Byron at once scratched it out. But on reading, a little below, a remark by another traveller, who had justly rebuked Shelley's folly, Byron added the words, "The appellation is well deserved."
He soon after left the Alps, and came to Italy, without his views, either philosophical or religious, being in the least altered by the seductions of "that serpent," as he jokingly denominated Shelley.
We shall now follow him, step by step, until the end of his life, and we shall see whether he will not show himself stanch in his adherence to great principles. Lord Byron had enough of systems, and was disgusted with their absurdity, their proud dogmatical views, and their intolerant spirit. Whenever the great questions of life and the dictates of the soul occupy his thoughts, either in the silence of the night or in the absence of passion, we shall see him set himself resolutely to the examination of his own conscience, for the purpose of arriving at truth and justice. The answers which his powerful reasoning suggested to him served to determine and confirm his faith in God.
On leaving Geneva, Lord Byron proceeded to Milan. "One day," says Mr. Stendhall, who knew Lord Byron at Milan, in 1817, and saw a great deal of him there, "some people alluded to a couplet from the 'Aminta' of Tasso, in which the poet appears to take credit to himself for being an unbeliever, and expresses it in the lines which may thus be translated:—
'Listen, oh my son, to the thunder as it rolls.
But what is it to us what Jupiter does up there?
Let us rejoice down here if betroubled above;
Let the common herd of mortals dread his blows:
And let the world go to ruin, I will only think
Of what pleases me; and if I become dust again,
I shall only be what I have already been.'
Lord Byron says that these lines were written under the influence of spleen. A belief in the existence of a superior Being was a necessity for the fiery and tender nature of Tasso. He was, besides, far too Platonic to try to reconcile such contrary opinions. When he wrote those lines, he probably was in want of a piece of bread and a mistress."
Lord Byron reached Venice, and there his most agreeable hours and days were spent with Padre Pasquale, in the convent of the Armenian priests.
He also wrote, at this time, the sublimely moral poem entitled "Manfred," in which he renders justice to the existence of God, to the free will of man, the abuse of which has resulted in the loss of "Manfred," and retraces, in splendid lines, all the duties incumbent upon man, together with the limits which he is not allowed to pass. The apparition of his lovely and young victim, the uncertainty of her happiness, which causes Manfred's greatest grief, and finally his supplication to her that he may know whether she is enjoying eternal bliss,
... "That I do bear
This punishment for both—that thou wilt be
One of the blessed—...."
the whole bears the impress of a truly religious spirit.
He shortly afterward visited Rome, and finding himself in presence of St. Peter's, he again gave expression to his religious sentiments, in the admirable fourth canto of "Childe Harold," which Englishmen do not hesitate to acknowledge as the finest poem which ever came from mortal hands.
TO ST. PETER.
Stanza 153.
* * * * *
"Christ's mighty shrine above his martyr's tomb!"
Stanza 154.
"But thou, of temples old, or altars new,
Standest alone, with nothing like to thee.
* * * * *
Power, glory, strength, and beauty all are aisled
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled."
From Venice he went on to Ravenna. The persecution to which he was subjected, on the ground of religion and morality, on account of the publication of the two first cantos of "Don Juan," was then at its height, and he was tormented in every possible way. It was useless for him to protest, in verse, in prose, by letter, or by words, against the accusation of his being an atheist and a skeptic. It was asserted that "Manfred" was the expression of his doubts upon the dispensation of Providence, and that his other poems, all more or less imbued with passion, had tendencies of an irreverent nature in respect to the Divinity. His two famous stanzas in "Childe Harold" were always held up to him by the innumerable army of hypocrites and wicked people who assailed him.
All were not hypocrites, however; some were his enemies in good faith, but were blinded by sectarian prejudices. Among these was an Irishman of the name of Mulock, author of a work entitled "Atheism Answered." Lord Byron one day at Ravenna received a paper from the editor of the "Bologna Telegraph," with extracts from this work, in which "there is a long eulogium of" his "poetry, and a great compatimento for" his "misery" on account of his being a skeptic and an unbeliever in Christ; "although," says Mr. Mulock, "his bold skepticism is far preferable to the pharisaical parodists of the religion of the Gospel, who preach and persecute with an equally intolerant spirit."
Lord Byron, writing that day to Murray, says:—
"I never could understand what they mean by accusing me of irreligion. They may, however, have it their own way. This gentleman seems to be my great admirer, so I take what he says in good part, as he evidently intends kindness, to which I can't accuse myself of being insensible."
In the evening he talked to and laughed a good deal with the Countess Guiccioli about this great compatimento,[17] treating it as a great oddity. A few months later, Moore having written to him about this same Mr. Mulock, and told him that that gentleman was giving lectures upon religion, Lord Byron, while riding with the young Count G—— in the forest of Ravenna, made his profession of faith, and finding his youthful companion not quite orthodox, said to him: "The nature of classical and philosophical studies generally paralyzes all logical minds, and that is why many young heads leave college unbelievers: you are even still more so, because you mix up your religious views with your political antipathies. As for me, in my early youth, when I left college, where I had to bow to very superior and stronger minds who themselves were under various evil influences of college and of youth, I was more than heterodox. Time and reflection have changed my mind upon these subjects, and I consider Atheism as a folly. As for Catholicism, so little is it objectionable to me, that I wish my daughter to be brought up in that religion, and some day to marry a Catholic. If Catholicism, after all, suggests difficulties of a nature which it is difficult for reason to get over, are these less great than those which Protestantism creates? Are not all the mysteries common to both creeds? Catholicism at least offers the consolation of Purgatory, of the Sacraments, of absolution and forgiveness; whereas Protestantism is barren of consolation for the soul."
This open profession of faith, expressed by such a man as Lord Byron, in a calm and dispassionate tone, produced a great impression upon the young count. It had been so much the fashion to consider him as irreligious, that one would say that even his friends were of the same opinion. Some time had elapsed since Byron had sent a translation from the Armenian of one of the Epistles of St. Paul, which Murray delayed in publishing. Rather annoyed by this delay, Byron wrote to him on the 9th of October, 1821, from Ravenna:—
"The Epistle of St. Paul, which I translated from the Armenian, for what reason have you kept it back, though you published that stuff which gave rise to the 'Vampire?' Is it because you are afraid to print any thing in opposition to the cant of the 'Quarterly' about Manicheism? Let me have a proof of that Epistle directly. I am a better Christian than those parsons of yours, though not paid for being so."
If Byron hated fanatical and persecuting clergymen, he, on the other hand, entertained great regard for priests of every denomination, when he knew that they exercised their functions without fanaticism and in a tolerant spirit. Among his dearest and earliest friends he placed two young clergymen,[18] both distinguished in their profession by their piety and their attainments. At Ravenna, his alms in favor of churches and monasteries were very liberal. If the organ were not in order, if the steeple wanted repairs, Lord Byron's pecuniary assistance was asked for, and he ever gave liberally though it was for the benefit of the Catholic community. He was always indignant at his writings, especially if connected with religion, being sent back to him by Murray with alterations to which he was no party. On one occasion he reproached him in the following terms:—
"In referring to the mistake in stanza 132, I take the opportunity to desire that in future, in all parts of my writings referring to religion, you will be more careful, and not forget that it is possible that in addressing the Deity a blunder may become a blasphemy: and I do not choose to suffer such infamous perversions of my words or of my intentions. I saw the canto by accident."
His dearest paternal care was the religious education to be given to his natural daughter, Allegra, who was with him at Ravenna. In writing to Mr. and Mrs. Hoppner, to give them tidings of his dear Allegra, whom he had sent to a convent in Romagna to be educated there, he declares that in presence of the political disquietude which reigned in the Romagna, he thought he could not do better than send his child to that convent. Here "she would receive a little instruction, and some notions of morality and the principles of religion."
Moore adds to this letter a note, which runs thus:—
"With such anxiety did he look to this essential part of his daughter's education, that notwithstanding the many advantages she was sure to derive from the kind and feminine superintendence of Mrs. Shelley, his apprehensions lest her feelings upon religious subjects might be disturbed by the conversation of Shelley himself prevented him from allowing her to remain under his friend's roof."
The Bible, as is well known, constituted his favorite reading. Often did he find in the magnificent poetry of the Bible matter for inspiration. His "Hebrew Melodies" prove it, and as for the Book of Job, he used to say that it was far too sublime for him even to attempt to translate it, as he would have wished. Toward the end of his stay at Ravenna, when his genius was most fertile and almost superhuman—(he wrote five dramas and many other admirable poems in fifteen months, that is to say, in less time than it requires to copy them)—two biblical subjects inspired his muse: "Cain," and "Heaven and Earth." Both were admirably suited to his pen. He naturally treated them as a philosopher, but without any preconceived notion of making any religious converts. His enemies nevertheless seized hold of these pieces, to incriminate him and impugn his religious belief. I have spoken elsewhere[19] of that truly scandalous persecution. I will only add here that Moore, timid as he usually was when he had to face an unpopularity which came from high quarters, and alarmed by all the cries proceeding from party spirit, wrote to approve the beauty of the poem in enthusiastic terms, but disapproved of the harm which some doubts expressed therein might produce. Byron replied:—
"There is nothing against the immortality of the soul in 'Cain,' that I recollect. I hold no such opinions; but in a drama the first rebel and the first murderer must be made to talk according to his character."
And in another letter he says, with regard to the same subject:—
"With respect to religion, can I never convince you that I have no such opinions as the characters in that drama, which seem to have frightened every body? Yet they are nothing to the expressions in Goethe's 'Faust' (which are ten times hardier), and not a whit more bold than those of Milton's 'Satan.' My ideas of character may run away with me: like all imaginative men, I, of course, embody myself with the character while I draw it, but not a moment after the pen is from off the paper.
"I am no enemy to religion, but the contrary. As a proof, I am educating my natural daughter a strict Catholic in a convent of Romagna, for I think people can never have enough of religion, if they are to have any. I incline myself very much to the Catholic doctrines; but if I am to write a drama, I must make my characters speak as I conceive them likely to argue."
The sympathy of persons sincerely religious was extremely agreeable to him. A short time after he had left Ravenna for Pisa, a Mr. John Sheppard sent him a prayer he had found among the papers belonging to his young wife, whom he had lost some two years before. Lord Byron thanked him in a beautiful letter, in which he consoled the distressed husband by assuring him of his belief in immortality, and of his confidence that he would again see the worthy person whom himself he could not but admire, for her virtues and her pure and simple piety.
"I am obliged to you," he added, "for your good wishes, and more than obliged by the extract from the papers of the beloved object whose qualities you have so well described in a few words. I can assure you that all the fame which ever cheated humanity into higher notions of its own importance, would never weigh in my mind against the pure and pious interest which a virtuous being may be pleased to take in my welfare. In this point of view I would not exchange the prayers of the deceased in my behalf for the united glory of Homer, Cæsar, and Napoleon, could such be accumulated upon a living head. Do me at least the justice to suppose that
'Video meliora proboque,'
however the deteriora sequor may have been applied to my conduct.
Byron."
Not only did Lord Byron prevent his reason being influenced by the arguments of others, but even by the dictates of his own heart. Both his mind and his heart were perfectly independent of one another, nay, often took different directions. It was to him unquestionably painful to see such a division, but it was the fatal result of the excessive development of the powers of each. In the same letter to Mr. Sheppard which we have quoted, and which is full of gratitude for the prayers which the young wife had addressed to heaven to obtain his conversion, Byron adds:—
"A man's creed does not depend upon himself: who can say, 'I will believe this, that, or the other?' and, least of all, that which he least can comprehend."
Walter Scott once told him in London that he was convinced he would daily become more and more religious.
"What!" vehemently replied Lord Byron, "do you believe that I could become bigoted?"
"No," said Walter Scott, "I only think that the influence of some great mind might modify your religious views."
Galt says the same thing:—
"A mind like Byron's," says he, "was little susceptible of being impressed by the reasonings of ordinary men. Truth, in visiting him, must come accompanied by every kind of solemnity, and preceded by respect and reverence. A marked superiority, a recognized celebrity, were indispensable to command his sincere attention."
Without taking implicitly for granted the rather exaggerated opinion of Galt with respect to Lord Byron, we must allow that the great poet's attention could not be captivated by reasonings of a superficial kind, but could be influenced only by great learning, and powerful arguments which had conviction for their basis.
But he might have found at Pisa the great intellectual influence spoken of, for he found Shelley there. Seeing him every day, in the quiet intimacy which the delightful sojourn in Tuscany procured for them, it was easy for both to forget all the troubles of an agitated and political existence, and only to think about the world of spirits. Shelley had every opportunity for inculcating his doctrines, having, or rather being able to exercise, the most exclusive influence upon Byron's mind. Did he exercise that influence, and if he did not, for what reason?
We have said that Shelley, notwithstanding his original views, his extreme readiness to be impressed by every thing he heard and saw, was often the victim of his reading. He had read a great deal, and though since he had written the "Apology for Atheism" he had not changed his mind as to his metaphysical tenets, nevertheless the study of the German philosophy, and especially of Spinoza's, had produced on him a revolution of ideas. From a materialistic atheism, which denies the existence of God in every thing, he had gone over to a kind of mystic pantheism, which supposes God to be everywhere and in every thing. This species of pantheism is in reality but a disguised atheism, but which, in such a man as Shelley, appeared more in the actions of his life as a pervading devotion than an impious belief. Shelley ever adored all that is beautiful, true, and holy. From this it followed that his doctrines, far from appearing to be the result of pride, seemed, on the contrary, to be founded upon humility, sacrifice, and devotion to humanity. If the mystic pantheism of Spinoza could have found a living justification of its silly principles, and an excuse for its want of power, Shelley would have supplied both. The individuality, always more or less egotistical, which is prominent in the word ego, seemed positively to have ceased to exist with him: one would have said that he almost already felt himself absorbed in that universal and divine substance, which is the God of Spinoza. If in a century like ours such a philosophy as Eclecticism could return and become again a doctrinal institution, Shelley might have personified it. He had so sacrificed his individuality to chimeras of all kinds, that he appeared to consider himself a mere phenomenon, and to look upon the external world as mere fiction, in order that the impossible and never-to-be-found divinity of his dreams might occupy all the space.
He was perhaps the meekest, most generous, and the most modest of the creatures of the true God, whom he yet persistently refused to recognize as his Creator.
If, however, there was no impiety in his irreligion, no real pride, in his pride, there existed that weakness, if I may use the word, peculiar to a brain which can not grasp at reality, but adheres to a chimera as a basis for its arguments.
"His works," says Galt, "are soiled by the false judgments proceeding from a mind which made him look at every thing in a false light, and it must be allowed that that mind was either troubled or defective by nature."
If this opinion is too severe, it is, however, certain that Shelley had so exalted an imagination that his judgment suffered by it. As he is in his works, so was he in all the commonest actions of his life. A few anecdotes will serve to make him still better known.
Once, at Pisa, he went to see Count Gamba, who expected him, for some charitable purpose which they were to agree upon together. A violent storm burst forth suddenly, and the wind tore a tile from a roof, and caused it to fall on Shelley's head. The blow was very great, and his forehead was covered with blood. This, however, did not in the least prevent his proceeding on his way. When Count Gamba saw him in this state he was much alarmed, and asked him how it had occurred. Shelley replied quite calmly, passing his hand over his head, just as if he had forgotten all about it, that it was true that the wind had blown down a tile which had fallen on his head, but that he would be taken care of later upon his return home. Shelley was not rich, but whenever he went to his banker's it was necessary that no one should require his assistance, in order that the money which he had gone to fetch should come home untouched. As, on one occasion, he was returning from a visit to his banker's, some one at the door of his house asked for assistance. Shelley hastily got up the stairs, and throwing down his gold and notes on the floor, rushed suddenly away, crying out to Mrs. Shelley, "There, pick it all up." This the lady did as well as she could, for she was a woman of order, and as much attached to the reality of things as her husband was wanting in that particular.
I shall not multiply these characteristic instances of the man, but will only add that such incidents were by no means uncommon, nay, that they were matters of daily occurrence.
There was almost a kind of analogy in his life between him and Spinoza. Notwithstanding their great qualities and merits, both were hated and persecuted for sufficiently just motives,—society having the right of repudiating doctrines which tend to its destruction; but both were persecuted in undue and unfair proportions. Both had weak and sickly constitutions. Both had great and generous souls. Both endeavored to understand the laws which govern the destiny of the world, without ever being subject to their moral consequences, and both devoted themselves to be practically useful to their fellow-creatures—a contradiction which was the effect of their too generous minds.
In Shelley's heart the dominant wish was to see society entirely reorganized. The sight of human miseries and infirmities distressed him to the greatest degree; but, too modest himself to believe that he was called upon to take the initiative, and inaugurate a new era of good government and fresh laws for the benefit of humanity, he would have been pleased to see such a genius as Byron take the initiative in this undertaking. "He can be the regenerator of his country," wrote Shelley, speaking of Byron, in 1818, at Venice.
Shelley therefore did his best to influence Lord Byron. But the latter hated discussions: he could not bear entering into philosophical speculation at times when his soul craved the consolations of friendship and his mind a little rest. He was quite insensible to reasonings, which often appear sublime because they are clothed in words incomprehensible to those who have not sought to understand their meaning. But he made an exception in favor of Shelley. He knew that he could not shake his faith in a doctrine founded upon illusions, by his incredulity: but he listened to him with pleasure, not only on account of Shelley's good faith and sincerity of meaning, but also because he argued upon false data with such talent and originality that he was both interested and amused. But with all his great and noble qualities was it to be expected that Lord Byron would fall into the doctrines proffered by pantheists? Doctrines rejected by reason, which wound the heart, are opposed to the most imperative necessities of our nature, and only bring desolation to our minds.
Lord Byron had examined every kind and species of philosophy by the light of common sense, and by the instinct of his genius: the result had been to make him compassionate toward the vain weaknesses of the human understanding, and to convince him that all systems which have hypothesis as groundwork are illusions, and consequently likely to perish with their authors.
Pantheism in particular was odious to him, and he esteemed it to be the greatest of absurdities. He made no difference between the Pantheism "absolute," which mixes up that which is infinite with that which is finite, and that which struggles in vain to keep clear of Atheism.
In an age like ours, when the common tendency is of a materialistic character, such as almost to defy the power of man, mysticism has little or no locus standi. Shelley's opinions, on account of their appearance of spiritualism, were most likely of any to interest Byron; but, founded as they are upon fancy, could they please him? Could he possibly consent to lose his individuality, deny his own freedom of will, all responsibility of action, and hence all his privileges, his future existence, and all principles of morality? Could he possibly admit that the doctrine which prescribed these sacrifices was better than any other? Even with the best intentions, could any of the essential, moral, and holy principles of nature be introduced into such a system? Byron could not but condemn it, and he attributed all Shelley's views to the aberrations of a mind which is happier when it dreams than when it denies.
Here, then, was the cause of his being inaccessible to Shelley's arguments. He used sometimes to exclaim, "Why Shelley appears to me to be mad with his metaphysics." This he one day repeated to Count Gamba at Pisa, as Shelley walked out and he came in. "We have been discussing metaphysics," said he: "what trash in all these systems! Say what they will, mystery for mystery, I still find that of the Creation the most reasonable of any."
He made no disguise of the difficulties which he found in admitting the doctrine of a God, Creator of the world, and entirely distinct from it; but he added, "I prefer even that mystery to the contradictions by which other systems endeavor to replace it." He certainly found that in the mystery of Creation there existed the proof of the weakness of our minds, but he declared that pantheism had to explain absurdities far too evident for a logical mind to adopt its tenets. "They find," said he, "that reason is more easily satisfied with a system of unity like theirs, in which all is derived from one principle only: may be, but what do we ask of truth? why all our never-ceasing efforts in its pursuit? Is it merely that we may exercise the mind, and make truth the toy of our imagination? Impossible. At any rate it would be a secret to which, as yet, God has not given us any clue. But in doing this, in constantly placing the phenomena of creation before us without their causes or without ever explaining them, and at the same time instilling into our souls an insatiable thirst for truth, the Almighty has placed within us a voice which at times reminds us that He is preparing some surprise for us; and we trust that that surprise may be a happy one."
Poor Shelley lost his time with Byron. But, however much Byron objected to his doctrines, he had no similar objection to Shelley himself, for whom he professed a great respect and admiration. He grieved to find so noble an intellect the victim of hallucination which entirely blinded him to the perception of truth. Shelley, however, did not despair of succeeding in making Byron some day give up what he termed his philosophical errors, and his persistency earned for him the appellation of "serpent" which Byron gave him in jest. This persistency, which at the same time indicates the merit of Byron's resistance, has often been mentioned by Shelley himself. Writing from Pisa to a friend in England, a very few days before his death, and alluding to a letter from Moore which Byron had shown him, and wherein "Cain" was attributed to the influence which he (Shelley) had evidently exercised over Byron, he said, "Pray assure Moore that in a philosophical point of view I have not the slightest influence over Byron; if I had, be sure I should use it for the purpose of uprooting his delusions and his errors. He had conceived 'Cain' many years ago, and he had already commenced writing it when I saw him last year at Ravenna. How happy I should be could I attribute to myself, even indirectly, a part in that immortal work!"
Moore wrote to Byron on the same subject a little later, and received the following reply:—"As for poor Shelley, who also frightens you and the world, he is, to my knowledge, the least egotistical and kindest of men. I know no one who has so sacrificed both fortune and sentiments for the good of others; as for his speculative opinions, we have none in common, nor do I wish to have any."
All the poems which he wrote at this time, and which admitted of his introducing the religious element either purposely or accidentally into them, prove one and all that his mind, as regards religion, was as we have shown it to be. This is particularly noticeable in his mystery called "Heaven and Earth;" but the same remark is applicable to others, such as the "Island," and even to some passages in "Don Juan." "Heaven and Earth"—a poem which appeared about this time, and which he styled "A Mystery"—is a biblical poem in which all the thoughts agree with the Book of Genesis, and "which was inspired," says Galt, "by a mind both serious and patriarchal, and is an echo of the oracles of Adam and of Melchisedec." In this work he exhibits as much veneration for scriptural theology as Milton himself. In the "Island," which he wrote at Genoa, there are passages which penetrate the soul with so religious a feeling, that Benjamin Constant, in reading it, and indignant at hearing Byron called an unbeliever, exclaimed in his work on religion, "I am assured that there are men who accuse Lord Byron of atheism and impiety. There is more religion in the twelve lines which I have quoted than in the past, present, and future writings of all his detractors put together."
Even in "Don Juan," in that admirable satire which, not being rightly understood, has given rise to so many calumnies, he says, after having spoken in the fifteenth canto of the moral greatness of various men, and among others of Socrates:—
"And thou, Diviner still,
Whose lot it is by man to be mistaken,
And thy pure creed made sanction of all ill?
Redeeming worlds to be by bigots shaken,
How was thy toil rewarded?"
At the end of this stanza he wrote the following note:——
"As it is necessary in these times to avoid ambiguity, I say that I mean by 'Diviner still,' Christ. If ever God was man—or man God—he was both. I never arraigned his creed, but the use or abuse made of it. Mr. Canning one day quoted Christianity to sanction negro slavery, and Mr. Wilberforce had little to say in reply. And was Christ crucified that black men might be scourged? If so, he had better been born a mulatto, to give both colors an equal chance of freedom, or at least salvation."
Notwithstanding these beautiful lines, which were equally professions of faith, England, instead of doing Byron justice, continued more than ever to persecute him.
Shortly afterward he embarked at Genoa for Greece, and halted at Cephalonia. He there made the acquaintance of a young Scotchman, named Kennedy, who was attached as doctor to the Greek army. Before taking to medicine this young man had studied law, with the intention of going to the Edinburgh bar. He was so deeply convinced of the truths of Christianity, and so familiar with its teaching, that he would fain have imparted his belief to every one he met. From his position he found himself among a host of young officers, mostly Scotch, and all more or less lax in their religious practices. Among these, however, he met with four who consented to listen to his explanation of the doctrines of Christianity. As their principal challenge was to show proofs that the Bible was of divine origin, he accepted the challenge in the hope of making some conversions.
One of these officers informed Lord Byron of this projected meeting, and Byron, from the interest which he always took in the subject which was to be their ground of discussion, expressed a wish to be present. "You know," said he, "that I am looked upon as a black sheep, and yet I am not as black as the world makes me out, nor worse than others,"—words, which, from the fact of his rarely doing himself justice, were noteworthy in his mouth.
Under such auspices, then, was Kennedy fortunate enough to open his discussion, and Lord Byron was present in company of the young Count Gamba and Dr. Bruno.
Mr. Kennedy has given a detailed account of this meeting, as also of his subsequent conversations with Lord Byron. We will mention some of them here, because they show Lord Byron's religious opinions in the latter portion of his life. Mr. Kennedy had made a condition that he should be allowed to speak, without being interrupted, but at various intervals, for twelve hours. This condition, was soon set aside, and then Lord Byron joined the conversation. After exciting admiration by his patient silence, he astounded every one as an interlocutor. If Kennedy was well versed in the Scriptures, Lord Byron was not less so, and even able to correct a misquotation from Holy Writ. The direct object of the meeting was to prove that the Scriptures contained the genuine and direct revelation of God's will. Mr. Kennedy, however, becoming a little entangled in a series of quotations, which had not the force that was required to prove his statements, and, seeing that a little impatience betrayed itself among the audience, could not resist showing some temper, and accusing his hearers of ignorance. "Strange accusation, when applied to Lord Byron," says Galt. Lord Byron, who had come there to be interested, and to learn, did not notice the taunt of Mr. Kennedy, but merely remarked, "that all that can be desired is to be convinced of the truth of the Bible, as containing really the word of God; for if this is sincerely believed, it must follow, as a necessary consequence, that one must believe all the doctrines contained in it."
He then added, that in his youth he had been brought up by his mother in very strict religious principles; had read a large number of theological works, and that Barrow's writings had most pleased him; that he regularly went to church, that he was by no means an unbeliever who denied the Scriptures, and wished to grope in atheism; but, on the contrary, that all his wish was to increase his belief, as half-convictions made him wretched. He declared, however, that he could not thoroughly understand the Scriptures. He also added, that he entertained the highest respect for, and confidence in, those who believed conscientiously; but that he had met with many whose conduct differed from the principles they professed simply from interested motives, and esteemed the number of those who really believed in the Scriptures to be very small. He asked him about his opinion as to various writers against religion, and among others of Sir W. Hamilton, Bellamy, and Warburton, who pretend that the Jews had no notion of a future existence. He confessed that the sight of so much evil was a difficulty to him, which he could not explain, and which made him question the perfect goodness of the Creator. He dwelt upon this argument a long time, exhibiting as much tenderness of heart as force of reasoning. Kennedy's answers were weak, as must be those of one who denies the measure of evil, in order that he may not be compassionate toward it, and who promises a reward in after life to escape the necessity of its being bestowed in the present. In reply Lord Byron pointed to moral and physical evil which exists among savages, to whom Scripture is unknown, and who are bereft of all the means of becoming civilized people. Why are they deprived of these gifts of God? and what is to be the ultimate fate of Pagans? He quoted several objections made to our Lord by the apostles; mentioned prophecies which had never been fulfilled, and spoke of the consequences of religious wars. Kennedy replied with much ability, and even with a certain degree of eloquence, and prudently made use of the ordinary theological arguments. But to influence such a mind as Byron's more was required. In the search after truth, he looked for hard logic, and eloquence was not required by him. Fénélon could not have persuaded him; but Descartes might have influenced him. He preferred, in fact, in such arguments, the method of the geometrician to that of the artist; the one uses truth to arrive at truth, the other makes use of the beautiful only, to arrive at the same end.
The meeting lasted four hours, and created much sensation in the island, and every one agreed in praising Lord Byron's great knowledge of the Scriptures, joined to his moderation and modesty. Kennedy, however, a little irritated by the superiority granted to his adversary, did his best to dissipate the impression produced by it. He went so far as to reproach his friends for having allowed themselves to be blinded by the rank, the celebrity, and the prestige of Lord Byron. "His theological knowledge being," said he, "in reality quite ordinary and superficial." This meeting was the only one in which Lord Byron took a part, for he left Argostoli for Metaxata.
The meetings continued, however, for some time longer, and Kennedy showed a zeal which deserved to meet with better success. He brought before his audience with talent every possible reasoning in favor of orthodoxy; but his audience, composed of young men, were far too engrossed with worldly occupations to be caught by the ardor of their master's zeal. Disappointed at not seeing Lord Byron again among them, they all deserted Kennedy's lectures just at the time when he was going to speak of miracles and prophecies, the subject of all others upon which he had built his greatest hopes. Not only did they desert the hall, but actually overwhelmed the speaker with mockery. Some declared they would put off their conversion to a more advanced age; others actually maintained that they had less faith than before.
Meanwhile Kennedy, though disappointed in his religious enthusiasm on the one hand, received some consolation on the other, at the hands of Lord Byron, who had not forgotten him, and who often inquired after him though he had not been convinced by his arguments. Kennedy also had conceived a great liking for Byron. He admired in the poet all his graceful qualities and his unequalled talents. He wished, but dared not yet, visit Lord Byron. Meeting, however, Count Gamba at Argostoli on one occasion, and hearing from him that Byron was on the point of departure for Continental Greece, he resolved to pay him a visit, "as much," said he, "to show the respect which is due to such a man, as to satisfy one's own curiosity in seeing and hearing so distinguished a person."
Byron received him with his natural cordiality. He made him stay to dinner with him, and thus gave him the opportunity of entering into a long conversation. Kennedy, who never lost sight of his mission of proselytism, brought the conversation round to the object of his wishes, and prefaced his arguments by saying that he was prepared to talk upon the matter; but that he had no doubt lost his time, since it was not likely that his lordship would consider these subjects urgent at that moment. Byron smiled and replied, "It is true that at the present time I have not given that important subject all my attention, but I should nevertheless be curious to know the motives which not only have convinced you, as a man of sense and reflection, as you undoubtedly are, of the truth of religion, but also have induced you to profess Christianity with such zeal."
"If there had been men," said Kennedy, "who had rejected Christianity, there were greater men still who had accepted it; but to adopt a system merely because others have adopted it is not to act rationally, unless it is proved that the great minds which adopted it were mistaken."
"But I have not the slightest desire," answered Byron, "to reject a doctrine without having investigated it. Quite the contrary; I wish to believe, because I feel extremely unhappy in a state of uncertainty as to what I am to believe."
Kennedy having told him then that to obtain the grace of faith, he should pray humbly for it, Byron replied, that prayer does not consist in the act of kneeling or of repeating certain words in a solemn manner: "Devotion is the affection of the heart, and that I possess, for when I look at the marvels of creation I bow before the Majesty of Heaven, and when I experience the delights of life, health, and happiness, then my heart dilates in gratitude toward God for all His blessings."
"That is not sufficient," continued the doctor. "I should wish your lordship to read the Bible with the greatest attention, having prayed earnestly before that the Almighty may grant you the grace to understand it. For, however great your talents, the book will be a sealed letter to you unless the Holy Spirit inspires you."
"I read the Bible more than you think," said Byron. "I have a Bible which my sister, who is goodness itself, gave me, and I often peruse it."
He then went into his bedroom, and brought out a handsomely-bound pocket Bible which he showed the doctor. The latter advised his continuing to read it, but expressed his surprise that Byron should not have better understood it. He looked out several passages in which it is enjoined that we should pray with humility if we wish to understand the truth of the Gospel; and where it is expressly said that no human wisdom can fathom these truths; but that God alone can reveal them to us, and enlighten our understanding; that we must not scrutinize His acts, but be submissive as children to His will; and that, as obedience through the sin of our first parents, and our own evil inclinations, has become for us a positive difficulty, we must change our hearts before we can obey or take pleasure in obeying the commandments of our Lord God; and, finally, that all, whatever the rank of each, are subject to the necessity of obedience.
Byron's occupations and ideas at that time were not quite in accordance with the nature of these holy words, but he received them with his usual kind and modest manner, because they came from one who was sincere. He only replied, that, as to the wickedness of the world, he was quite of his opinion, as he had found it in every class of society; but that the doctrines which he had put forth would oblige him to plunge into all the problems respecting the Old Testament and original sin, which many learned persons, as good Christians as Dr. Kennedy, did not hesitate to reject. He then showed the doctor, in answer to the latter's rather intolerant assertion of the omnipotence of the Bible, how conversant he was with the subject by quoting several Christian authors who thought differently. He quoted Bishop Watson, who, while professing Christianity, did not attribute such authority to the contents of the Bible. He also mentioned the Waldenses, who were such good Christians that they were called "the true Church of Christ," but who, nevertheless, looked upon the Bible as merely the history of the Jews. He then showed that the Book of Genesis was considered by many doctors of divinity as a mere symbol or allegory. He took up the defense of Gibbon against Kennedy's insinuation that the great historian had maliciously and intentionally kept back the truth; he quoted Warburton as a man whose ingenious theories have found much favor with many learned persons; finally, he proved to the doctor that, in any case, he could not himself be accused of ignorance of the subject.
This conversation afforded him the opportunity also of refuting the accusation brought against him by some of his numerous enemies; namely, that of having a tendency to the doctrines of Manicheism. Kennedy having said that the spirit of evil, as well as the angels, is subject to the will of God, Lord Byron replied,——
"If received in a literal sense, I find that it gives one a far higher notion of God's majesty, power, and wisdom, if we believe that the spirit of evil is really subject to the will of the Almighty, and is as easily controlled by Him as the elements follow the respective laws which He has made for them."
Byron could not bear any thing which took away from the greatness of the Divinity, and his words all tended to replace the Divinity in that incomprehensible space where He must be silently acknowledged and adored. Their conversation extended to other points of religious belief. While the doctor, taking the Bible to be the salvation of mankind, indulged in exaggerated and intolerant condemnation of the Catholic Church, which he called an abominable hierarchy not less to be regretted than Deism and Socinianism, Byron again displayed a spirit of toleration and moderation. Though he disapproved of the doctor's language, he did not contradict him, believing him to be sincere in his recriminations, but brought back the conversation to that point from which common sense should never depart. He deplored with him existing hypocrisies and superstitions, which he looked upon as the cause of the unbelief of many in the existence of God; but he added, that it was not confined to the Continent only, but likewise existed in England. Instead of resting his hopes upon the Bible, he said that he knew the Scriptures well enough "to be sure that if the spirit of meekness and goodness which the religion of the Gospel contains were put into practice by men, there would certainly be a marvellous change in this wicked world;" and he finished by saying, that as for himself he had, as a rule, ever respected those who believed conscientiously, whatever that belief might be; in the same manner as he detested from his heart hypocrites of all kinds, and especially hypocrites in religion.
He then changed the topic of conversation, and turned it to literature. All he said on that subject is so interesting that I reserve the record of it to another chapter. The doctor, however, soon resumed the former subject of their conversation, and, more in the spirit of a missionary than a philosopher, he went on to recommend the study of Christianity, which he said was summed up entirely in the Scriptures.
"But what will you have me do?" said Byron. "I do not reject the doctrines of Christianity, I only ask a few more proofs to profess them sincerely. I do not believe myself to be the vile Christian which many—to whom I have never done any harm, and many of whom do not even know me—strenuously assert that I am, and attack me violently in consequence."
The doctor insisted.
"But," said Byron, "you go too fast. There are many points still to be cleared up, and when these shall have been explained, I shall then examine what you tell me."
"What are those difficulties?" replied the doctor. "If the subject is important, why delay its explanation? You have time; reason upon it; reflect. You have the means of disposing of the difficulty at your command."
"True," answered Byron, "but I am the slave of circumstances, and the sphere in which I live is not likely to make me consider the subject."
As the doctor became more urgent, Byron said——
"How will you have me begin?"
"Begin this very night to pray God that he may forgive you your sins, and may grant you grace to know the truth. If you pray, and read your Bible with purity of intention, the result must be that which we so ardently wish for."
"Well, yes," replied Byron, "I will certainly study these matters with attention."
"But your lordship must bear in mind, that you should not be discouraged, even were your doubts and difficulties to increase; for nothing can be understood without sufficient time and pains. You must weigh conscientiously each argument, and continue to pray to God, in whom at least you believe, to give you the necessary understanding."
"Why then," asked Byron, "increase the difficulties, when they are already so great?"
The doctor then took the mystery of the Trinity as an example, and spoke of it as a man who has faith and accepts the mystery as a revealed dogma.
"It is not the province of man," said he, "to comprehend or analyze the nature of an existence which is entirely spiritual, such as that of the Divinity; but we must accept it, and believe in it, because it has been revealed to us, being fully convinced that man in his present state will never be able to fathom such mysteries."
He not only blamed those who wish to explain all things, but likewise the presumption of certain theologians in mixing up their own arguments with the revelations of Scripture in order to prove the unity in the Trinity, and who speculate upon the attributes of the Deity to ascertain the relative mode of existence of each of the three persons who compose the Trinity. "They must fall," he added, "or lead others to a similar end." Hence he concluded that mysteries should be believed in implicitly, as children believe fully what their parents tell them.
"I therefore advise your lordship," said he, "to put aside all difficult subjects,—such as the origin of sin, the fall of man, the nature of the Trinity, the mystery of predestination, etc.,—and to study Christianity not in books of theology, which, even the best, are all more or less imperfect, but in the careful examination of the Scriptures. By comparing each part of it, you will at last find a harmony so great in all its constituent parts, and so much wisdom in its entire whole, that you will no longer be able to doubt its divine origin, and hence that it contains the only means of salvation."
To so firm and enviable a faith, Byron replied as follows:—
"You recommend what is very difficult; for how is it possible for one who is acquainted with ecclesiastical history, as well as with the writings of the most renowned theologians, with all the difficult questions which have agitated the minds of the most learned, and who sees the divisions and sects which abound in Christianity, and the bitter language which is often used by the one against the other; how is it possible, I ask, for such a one not to inquire into the nature of the doctrines which have given rise to so much discussion? One Council has pronounced against another; Popes have belied their predecessors, books have been written against other books, and sects have risen to replace other sects; the Pope has opposed the Protestants and the Protestants the Pope. We have heard of Arianism, Socinianism, Methodism, Quakerism, and numberless other sects. Why have these existed? It is a puzzle for the brain; and does it not, after all, seem safer to say 'Let us be neutral; let those fight who will, and when they have settled which is the best religion, then shall we also begin to study it?'
"I, however, like," he continued, "your way of thinking, in many respects; you make short work of decrees and councils, you reject all which is not in harmony with the Scriptures, you do not admit of theological works filled with Latin and Greek of both high and low church, you would even suppress many abuses which have crept into the Church, and you are right; but I question whether the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Scotch Presbyterians would consider you their ally.
"As for predestination, I do not believe as S—— and M—— do on that subject, but as you do; for it appears to me that I am influenced in a manner which I can not understand, and am led to do things which my will does not direct. If, as we all admit, there is a supreme Ruler of the universe, and if, as you say, He rules, over both good and bad spirits, then those actions which we perform against our will are likewise under His direction. I have never tried to sift this subject, but satisfied myself by believing that there is, in certain events, a predestination which depends upon the will of God."
The doctor replied, "that he had founded his belief upon his own grounds."
The doctor then touched upon the differences which existed in religious opinions, and expressed his regret at this, while showing, nevertheless, some indulgence for those Christian sects which do not attack the actual fundamental doctrines of Christianity. But he was intolerant as regards other sects, such as Arianism, Socinianism, and Swedenborgianism, of which he spoke almost with passion.
"You seem to hate the Socinians greatly," remarked Byron, "but is this charitable? Why exclude a Socinian, who believes honestly, from any hope of salvation? Does he not also found his belief upon the Bible? It is a religion which gains ground daily. Lady Byron is much in favor with its followers. We were wont to discuss religious matters together, and many of our misunderstandings have arisen from that. Yet, on the whole, I think her religion and mine were much alike."
Of course the doctor deplored the existence of such bold doctrines.
Lord Byron then spoke of Shelley:—
"I wish," he said, "you had known him, and that I might have got you both together. You remind me of him, not only in looks, but by your manner of speaking."
Besides physical appearance, it is easy to understand that there existed a great likeness between the two minds, different though their moral tendencies might have been. In both could be traced that degree of mysticism and expansiveness, which make the poet and the missionary. Byron praised the virtues of Shelley, and styled them Christian, and spoke mainly of his great benevolence of character, and of his generosity above his means.
"Certainly," replied the doctor, "such rare virtues are esteemed among Christians, but they can not be called Christian virtues, unless they spring from Christian principles: and in Shelley they were not so. His virtues might deserve human praise, they were no doubt pagan virtues; but they were nothing in the eyes of God, since God has declared that nothing pleases Him but that which springs from a good motive, especially the love of and belief in Christ, which was wanting in Shelley."
When Kennedy had characterized Shelley in even stronger terms, Byron said to him: "I see it is impossible to move your soul to any sympathy, or even to obtain from you in common justice a little indulgence for an unfortunate young man, gifted with a lofty mind and a fine imagination."
These remarks reveal the tolerant spirit of Lord Byron, but they also show how the best natures are spoiled by dogmatism.
The conversation had lasted several hours. Night was coming on, and the doctor, carried away by his zeal, had forgotten the hour. His host, however, did nothing to remind him of it, and when Kennedy got up to take his leave, he said to Byron, after making excuses for remaining so long, "God having gifted you, my lord, with a mind which can grasp every subject, I am convinced that if your lordship would devote yourself to the study of religion, you would become one of its lights, the pride of your country, and the consolation of every honest person."
Lord Byron replied:—
"I certainly intend to study the matter, but you must give me a little time. You see that I have begun well: I listen to all you say. Don't you find that my arguments are more like your own than you would have thought?"
"Yes," answered the doctor, "and it gives me great pleasure. I have far better hopes of your lordship's conversion than of that of the young officers who listened to me without understanding the meaning of my words. You have shown greater patience and candor than I could have imagined you to be capable of; whereas they, on the contrary, exhibited so hardened a spirit that they appeared to look upon the subject as one which lent itself admirably to ridicule and laughter."
"You must allow," said Byron, "that in the times in which we are now living it is difficult to bestow attention to any serious religious matter. I think, however, I can promise to reflect even more on the subject than I have done hitherto, without, however, promising to adopt your orthodox views."
The doctor then asked him leave to present him with the work of B——, which he commended in high terms. Lord Byron said he would have great pleasure in reading it, and told the doctor that he should always be happy to see him, and at any time that he liked to come. "Should I be out when you come," he added, "take my books and read until my return."
On leaving Byron the doctor reflected over all that had taken place, and feared that his zeal had carried him too far—that his long conversation might have tired rather than interested Byron; but on the whole, he concluded by saying to himself, "It appears to me, that Byron never exhibited the least symptom of fatigue, but, on the contrary, continually showed great attention from beginning to end."
We have, perhaps, dwelt too much in our report of this conversation, but we wished to do so for several reasons. First, because it shows, better than a public debate, the real thoughts and feelings of Byron on religious matters, next, the real nature of his religious opinions, and finally we find, in Byron's conversation, virtues such as amiability, goodness, patience, delicacy, and toleration, which have not been sufficiently noticed.
The sympathy which Kennedy had conceived for Byron after the public meeting greatly increased after this first conversation. The candor and simplicity depicted on his handsome countenance, showed that his lofty intelligence could, better than any one else, grasp the theories of the doctor; and the latter felt that if he could not prevail in making Byron a believer in his own orthodox views, at least he could prepare the way for the acquirement of every virtue, and he resolved, therefore, to profit by the permission given him of often visiting Byron.
Meanwhile, the young officers continued their jokes, and pretended that Byron was laughing at the doctor, and making use of him in order to study Methodism, which he wished to introduce into his poem of "Don Juan." There is, however, a community of feeling between two frank natures, and Byron felt that the doctor's sincerity commanded respect, while the doctor, on the other hand, knew that Lord Byron was too earnest to condescend to a mockery of him.
"There was," says Kennedy, "nothing flighty in his manner with me, and nothing which showed any desire to laugh at religion."
When he returned to see Lord Byron, he found him more than ever preoccupied with his approaching departure for Continental Greece, and engrossed with a multitude of various occupations and visits. Byron, nevertheless, received him most graciously, and maintained that jovial humor which was one of his characteristics in conversation. Byron had reflected a good deal since his last interview with the doctor, but the direction which his thoughts had taken was not precisely that which the doctor had advised him to pursue. They did not agree with the tenets of the doctor's religion. The latter had not advised an unlimited use of one's reason, but, on the contrary, had recommended reliance on the traditional and orthodox teachings of the Church. To reason, however, constituted in Byron a positive necessity. He could not admit that God had given us the power of thought not to make use of it, and obliged us to believe that which in religion, as in other things, appears ridiculous to our reason and shocks our sense of justice. "It is useless to tell me," he said, somewhere in his memoranda, "that I am to believe and not to reason: you might just as well tell a man, 'Wake not, but sleep.' Then to be threatened with eternal sufferings and torments!—I can not help thinking that as many devils are created by the threat of eternal punishment, as numberless criminals are made by the severity of the penal laws."
Mysteries and dogmas, however, were not objectionable to Byron. This was shown in his conversation with Kennedy on the subject of the Trinity and of predestination. However little disposed he may have been to believe in mysteries, he nevertheless bowed in submission before their existence, and respected the faith which they inspire in minds more happily constituted than his own. His partial skepticism, or rather that in him which has been so denominated, was humble and modest in comparison to Montaigne's skepticism. Byron admitted that these were mysteries because the littleness of man and the greatness of God were ever present to him. He would have agreed with Newton in saying that "he was like a child playing on the beach with the waves which bathed the sands. The water with which he played was what he knew; what he ignored was the widespread ocean before him." Surrounded as we are by mysteries on all sides, he would have esteemed it presumption on his part to reject, in the name of science, all the mysteries of religion, when science itself has only to deal with phenomena. All is necessarily a mystery in its origin, and not to understand was no sufficient reason in the eyes of Byron to deny altogether the existence of matters relating to the Divinity. Could he reject religious dogmas under the pretext of not being able to understand them, when he admitted others equally difficult of comprehension, although supported by logical proofs?
Among the mysteries of religion founded entirely upon revelation, there was one, however, which not only weighed upon his mind, but actually gave him positive pain. This was the dogma of eternal punishment, which he could not reconcile with the idea of an omnipotent Creator, as omnipotence implies perfect goodness and justice, of which the ideal has been implanted in our hearts. Here again his objections sprang from kindness of disposition.
After speaking a while on the subject of prayer, Byron said to Kennedy:—
"There is a book which I must show you," and, having chosen from a number of books on the table an octavo volume, entitled "Illustrations of the Moral Government of God, by E. Smith, M.D., London," he showed it to Kennedy, and asked him whether he knew of it. On Kennedy replying in the negative, Byron said that the author of the book proved that hell was not a place of eternal punishment.
"This is no new doctrine," replied Kennedy, "and I presume the author to be a Socinian, who, if consistent at all with his opinions, will sooner or later reject the Bible entirely, and avow himself to be what he really is already, namely, a Deist. Where did your lordship find the book?"
"It was sent to me from England," replied Byron, "to convert me, I suppose. The author's arguments are very powerful. They are taken from the Bible, and, while proving that the day will come when every intellectual being will enjoy the bliss of eternal happiness, he shows how impossible is the doctrine which pretends that sin and misery can exist eternally under the government of a God whose principle attributes are goodness and love."
"But," said Kennedy, "how does he then explain the existence of sin in the world for upward of 6000 years? That is equally inconsistent with the notion of perfect love and goodness as united in God."
"I can not admit the soundness of your argument," replied Byron; "for God may allow sin and misery to co-exist for a time, but His goodness must prevail in the end, and cause their existence to cease. At any rate it is better to believe that the infinite goodness of God, while allowing evil to exist as a means of our arriving at perfection, will show itself still greater some day when every intellectual being shall be purified and freed from the bondage of sin and misery."
As Kennedy persisted in arguing against the author's opinions, Lord Byron asked him "Why he was so desirous of proving the eternity of hell, since such a doctrine was most decidedly against the gentle and kind character of the teaching of Christ?" To other arguments on the same subject, Byron replied, that he could not determine as to the justice of their conclusions, but that he could not help thinking it would be very desirable to show that in the end all created beings must be happy, and therefore rather agreed with Mr. Smith than with the doctor.
As Lord Byron, however, had always allowed that man was free in thought and action, and therefore a responsible being made to justify the ends of Providence, he believed that Providence did give some sanction to the laws implanted in our natures. Sinners must be punished, but a merciful God must proportion punishments to the weakness of our natures, and Byron therefore inclined toward the Catholic belief in Purgatory, which agreed better with his own appreciation of the goodness and mercy of God.
Lord Byron's preference for Catholicism is well known. His first successes of oratory in the House of Lords were due to the cause of Catholicism in Ireland, which he defended; and when he wished his little daughter Allegra to be brought up in the Catholic faith, he wrote to Mr. Hoppner, British consul at Venice, who had always taken a lively interest in the child, to say that:—
"In the convent of Bagna-Cavallo she will at least have her education advanced, and her morals and religion cared for.... It is, besides, my wish that she should be a Roman Catholic, which I look upon as the best religion, as it is assuredly the oldest of the various branches of Christianity."
This predilection for Catholicism was not the result of the poetry of that religion, or of the effect which its pomps and gorgeous ceremonies produced upon the imagination. They, no doubt, were not indifferent to a mind so easily impressed as his, but not sufficient to justify his preference; for Byron, although a poet, never allowed his reason to be swayed by his imagination. He reasoned upon every subject. His objections proceeded as much from his mind as his heart. "Catholicism," he was wont say, "is the most ancient of worships; and as for our own heresy, it unquestionably had its origin in vice. With regard to those difficulties which baffle our understanding, are they more easily explained by Protestants than by Catholics?
"Catholicism, at least, is a consoling religion, and its belief in Purgatory conciliates the justice of the Almighty with His goodness. Why has Protestantism given up so human a belief? To intercede for and do good to beings whom we have loved here below, is to be not altogether separated from them."
"I often regretted," he said on one occasion at Pisa, "that I was not born a Catholic. Purgatory is a consoling doctrine. I am surprised that the Reformers gave it up, or that they did not at least substitute for it something equally consoling." "It is," he remarked to Shelley, "a refinement of the doctrine of transmigration taught by your stupid philosophers."
It was, therefore, chiefly this doctrine, and his abhorrence of Calvin, which attracted Byron toward Catholicism. A comparison was made before him, on one occasion, between Catholicism and Protestantism. "What matters," said Byron, "that Protestantism has decreased the number of its obligations, and reduced its articles of faith? Both religions proceed from the same origin,—authority and examination. It matters little that the measures of either be different; but why does the Protestant deny to the Catholic the privilege, which he claims more than he uses, of free examination? Catholics also claim the right of proving the soundness of their belief, and, therefore, admit likewise the right of discussion and examination. As for authority, if the Catholic obeys the Church and considers it infallible, does not the Protestant do the same with the Bible? And while recognizing the authority of the Church on the one hand, on the other he claims a right to free examination, does he not incur the liability of being thought inconsistent? And, after all, is not the authority of the Church the better of the two? There seems to greater peace for the mind who confides in it, than in the belief in the authority of a book, where one must ever seek the way to salvation by becoming a theologian, as it were. And is it not fairer to have certain books, such, for instance, as the 'Apocalypse,' explained to us by the Church, than to have them expounded by people more or less well informed or prejudiced?"
Such were Byron's views, if not his very words. Before Byron left for Greece, Kennedy had several other conversations with him; but as the limits of this chapter do not allow of my entering into them, I will merely add that they all prove the great charm of Byron's mind, and the gentleness of his nature in dealing with persons of contrary opinions to his own, but who argued honestly and from conviction. So it came about that, although the most docile of the doctor's pupils, he refused to change his views concerning eternal punishment. During one of the last of Kennedy's visits to him, he found several young men with Lord Byron, and among these M. S——, and M. F——. The former, seated at one corner of the table, was explaining to Count Gamba certain views which were any thing but orthodox. Lord Byron turned to the doctor, and said:—
"Have you heard what S—— said? I assure you, he has not made one step toward conversion; he is worse than I am."
M. F—— having joined in the conversation, and said that there were many contradictions in the Scriptures, Byron replied:—
"This is saying too much: I am a sufficiently good believer not to discover any contradictions in the Scriptures which can not, upon reflection, be explained; what most troubles me is eternal punishment: I am not prepared to believe in so terrible a dogma, and this is my only difference with the doctor's views; but he will not allow that I am an orthodox Christian, unless I agree with him in that matter."
This was said half-seriously, half-jestingly, but in so amiable a manner, and in a tone which was so free from mockery, that even the austere doctor was fain to forgive him for entertaining such erroneous views.
When Byron left for Missolonghi, he carried away with him a real regard for Kennedy, notwithstanding their differences of opinion. Kennedy, on the other hand, had conceived for Byron the greatest liking, and, indeed, shows it in his book. His portrait of Lord Byron is so good, that we have thought it right to reproduce it, together with his general impressions in another chapter.
Byron's death plunged Kennedy into the deepest grief; and it was then that he gathered all his conversations which he had had with Lord Byron into one volume, which he published. But his friends, or so-called friends, showed themselves hostile to the publication. Some feared that he would exaggerate either Lord Byron's faith or want of it, and others, less disinterested, apprehended the revelation of some of their own views, which might fail to meet with the approval of the public at home. When, therefore, Kennedy applied to several of these who were at Missolonghi to know in what religious frame of mind Byron died, he met with rebukes of all kinds, and his credit was attacked by articles in newspapers, endeavoring to show that Byron had all along been laughing at the doctor. All these attacks might have influenced Kennedy's picture of Byron, but it will be seen that, with the exception of a few puritanical touches, the artist's picture is not unworthy of the original.
In the preface to his book, the doctor, not knowing whether he should make use of the conversation he had had with Byron to give a greater interest to his work, the object of which was to be of use to the public, answers his own objections in the following words:—
"If my doing so would injure his character or fame, there could not be a moment's hesitation in deciding on the baseness of the measure. But, as far as I can judge, a true statement of what occurred will place his lordship's character in a fairer light than he has himself done in many of his writings, or than can, perhaps, be done by a friendly biographer. The brightest parts of his life were those which he spent in Cephalonia and Missolonghi, and the fact of his wishing to hear Christianity explained by one, simply because he believed him to be sincere, confessing that he derived no happiness from his unsettled notions on religion, expressing a desire to be convinced, and his carrying with him religious books, and promising to give the subject a more attentive study than he had ever done, will throw a certain lustre over the darker side of his fame, ... and deprive deists of the right of quoting him as a cool, deliberate rejecter of Christianity."
To these very significant declarations, coming as they do from so conscientious a believer as Kennedy, I shall add the testimony of a few persons who have been conspicuous by their hostility to Byron. Mr. Galt is one of these, and yet he says:—
"I am persuaded, nevertheless, that to class him among absolute infidels were to do injustice to his memory, and that he has suffered uncharitably in the opinion of the 'rigidly righteous,' who, because he had not attached himself to any particular sect or congregation, assumed that he was an adversary to religion. To claim for him any credit as a pious man would be absurd; but, to suppose he had not as deep an interest as other men 'in his soul's health and welfare,' was to impute to him a nature which can not exist."
And elsewhere, after showing, first, what Byron did not believe in; secondly, what he would have liked to believe, but which had not sufficient grounds to satisfy his reason; thirdly, what he did actually believe, Mr. Galt adds:—
"Whatever was the degree of Lord Byron's dubiety as to points of faith and doctrine, he could not be accused of gross ignorance, nor described as animated by any hostile feeling against religion."
The same biographer says elsewhere:—
"That Byron was deeply imbued with the essence of natural piety; that he often felt the power and being of a God thrilling in all his frame, and glowing in his bosom, I declare my thorough persuasion; and that he believed in some of the tenets and in the philosophy of Christianity, as they influence the spirit and conduct of men, I am as little disposed to doubt; especially if those portions of his works which only trench upon the subject, and which bear the impression of fervor and earnestness, may be admitted as evidence. But he was not a member of any particular church."
Medwin, who might be considered to be an authority, before his vanity was wounded by the publication of writings wherein his good faith was questioned, and it was shown that Lord Byron had no great esteem for his talents, says,—
"It is difficult to judge, from the contradictory nature of his writings, what the religious opinions of Lord Byron were. But on the whole, if he were occasionally skeptical, yet his wavering never amounted to a disbelief in the divine Founder of Christianity. 'I always took great delight,' observed he, 'in the English Cathedral service. It can not fail to inspire every man who feels at all, with devotion. Notwithstanding which, Christianity is not the best source of inspiration for a poet. No poet should be tied down to a direct profession of faith. Metaphysics open a vast field. Nature and heterodoxy present to the poet's imagination fertile sources from which Christianity forbids him to draw;' and he exemplified his meaning by a review of the works of Tasso and Milton.
"'Here is a little book somebody has sent me about Christianity," he said to Shelley and me, 'that has made me very uncomfortable. The reasoning seems to me very strong, the proofs are very staggering. I don't think you can answer it, Shelley; at least, I am sure I can't, and, what is more, I don't wish to do so.'"
Speaking of Gibbon, he says,—"L—— B—— thought the question set at rest in the 'History of the Decline and Fall,' but I am not so easily convinced. It is not a matter of volition to unbelieve. Who likes to own that he has been a fool all his life,—to unlearn all that he has been taught in his youth? Or can think that some of the best men that ever lived have been fools?" And again,—
"You believe in Plato's three principles, why not in the Trinity? One is not more mystical than the other. I don't know why I am considered an enemy to religion, and an unbeliever. I disowned the other day that I was of Shelley's school in metaphysics, though I admired his poetry."
"Although," says Lord Harrington, "Byron was no Christian, he was a firm believer in the existence of a God. It is, therefore, equally remote from truth to represent him as either an atheist or a Christian. He was, as he has often told me, a confirmed Deist." Further on, the same writer adds:—
"Byron always maintained that he was a skeptic, but he was not so at all. During a ride at Cephalonia, which lasted two or three hours almost without a pause, he began to talk about 'Cain' and his religious opinions, and he condemned all atheists, and maintained the principles of Deism." Mr. Finlay, who used to see Lord Byron in Greece, says, in a letter to his friend Lord Harrington:—
"Lord Byron liked exceedingly to converse upon religious topics, but I never once heard him openly profess to be a Deist."
These quotations are sufficiently numerous, and all point to the same conclusion, but I must quote the words of Gamba before I conclude this subject. He was, as it is known, the great friend of Byron, and alas! sacrificed his noble self, at the age of twenty-four, to the cause of Greece. To Kennedy's inquiries respecting Lord Byron's religious tendencies at Missolonghi, P. Gamba replied as follows:—
"My belief is that his religious opinions were not fixed. I mean, that he was not more inclined toward one than toward another of the Christian sects; but that his feelings were thoroughly religious, and that he entertained the highest respect for the doctrines of Christ, which he considered to be the source of virtue and of goodness. As for the incomprehensible mysteries of religion, his mind floated in doubts which he wished most earnestly to dispel, as they oppressed him, and that is why he never avoided a conversation on the subject, as you are well aware.
"I have often had an opportunity of observing him at times when the soul involuntarily expresses its most sincere convictions; in the midst of dangers, both at sea and on land; in the quiet contemplation of a calm and beautiful night, in the deepest solitude, etc.; and I remarked that his thoughts always were imbued with a religious sentiment. The first time I ever had a conversation with him on that subject was at Ravenna, my native place, a little more than four years ago. We were riding together in a pine wood, on a beautiful spring day, and all was conducive to religious meditation. 'How,' said he 'raising our eyes to heaven, or directing them to the earth, can we doubt of the existence of God? Or how, turning them inward, can we doubt that there is something within us more noble and more durable than the clay of which we are formed? Those who do not hear, or are unwilling to listen to those feelings, must necessarily be of a vile nature.' I answered him with all those reasons which the superficial philosophy of Helvetius, his disciples and his masters, have taught. He replied with very strong arguments and profound eloquence, and I perceived that obstinate contradiction on this subject, forcing him to reason upon it, gave him pain. This discourse made a deep impression on me.
"Many times, and in various circumstances, I have heard him confirm the same sentiments, and he always seemed to me to be deeply convinced of their truth. Last year, at Genoa, when we were preparing for our journey to Greece, he used to converse with me alone for two or three hours every evening, seated on the terrace of his palace in Albano, in the fine evenings of spring, whence there opened a magnificent view of that superb city and the adjoining sea. Our conversation turned almost always on Greece, for which we were so soon to depart, or on religious subjects. In various ways I heard him confirm the sentiments which I have already mentioned to you. 'Why, then,' said I to him, 'have you earned for yourself the name of impious, and enemy of all religious belief, from your writings?' He answered, 'They are not understood, and are wrongly interpreted by the malevolent. My object is only to combat hypocrisy, which I abhor in every thing, and particularly in religion, and which now unfortunately appears to me to be prevalent, ... and for this alone do those to whom you allude wish to render me odious, and make me out to be an impious person, and a monster of incredulity.'
"For the Bible he had always a particular respect. It was his custom to have it always on his study table, particularly during these last months; and you well know how familiar it was to him, since he sometimes knew how to correct your inaccurate citations.
"Fletcher may have informed you about his happy state of mind in his last moments. He often repeated subjects from the Testament, and when, in his last moments, he had in vain attempted to make known his wishes with respect to his daughter, and others most dear to him in life, and when, on account of the wanderings of his mind, he could not succeed in making himself understood, Fletcher answered him, 'Nothing is nearer my heart than to execute your wishes; but, unfortunately, I have scarcely been able to comprehend half of them.' 'Is it possible?' he replied. 'Alas! it is too late. How unfortunate! Not my will, but the will of God be done.' There remained to him only a few intervals of reason and interruptions of delirium, the effect of determination of blood to the head.
"He often expressed to me the contempt which he felt for those called esprits forts (a set of ignorant egotists, incapable of any generous action, and hypocrites themselves), in their affected contempt of every faith.
"He professed a complete toleration, and a particular respect for every sincere conviction. He would have deemed it an unpardonable crime to detach any one persuaded of the truth from his belief, although it might be tinctured with absurdity, because he believed it could lead to no other end than to render him an infidel."
After so many proofs of Byron's religious tendencies, is it not right to ask, What was that skepticism of which so much has been said that it has been almost received as a fact by the world generally? Did he not believe in the necessity of religion? In a God, Creator of all things? In the spirituality, and therefore immortality, of the soul? In our liberty of action, and our moral responsibility? We have seen what others have said on each of these subjects; let us now see what he said himself upon the subject. But some will object, "Are you going to judge of his views from his poetry? Can one attach much importance to opinions expressed in verse? Do not poets often say that which they do not think, but which genius inspires them to write? Are such dictates to be considered as their own views?" Such objections may be valid, and we shall so far respect them, therefore, as to dismiss Lord Byron's poetry, and treat only of that which he has written in prose: we will not consider him when under the influence of inspiration and of genius, but when given up entirely to the silent examination of his conscience. What did his thorough good sense tell him about religion in general? The following note, in which he repels the stupid and wicked attacks of Southey, who called him a skeptic, will prove it:—
"One mode of worship yields to another, but there never will be a country without a worship of some sort. Some will instance France; but the Parisians alone, and a fanatical faction of them, maintained for a short time the absurd dogma of theophilanthropy. If the English Church is upset, it will be by the hands of its own sectaries, not by those of skeptics. People are too wise, too well informed, to submit to an impious unbelief. There may exist a few speculators without faith; but they are small in numbers, and their opinions, being without enthusiasm or appeal to the passions, can not make proselytes unless they are persecuted, that being the only means of augmenting any sects."
"'I am always,' he writes in his memorandum, 'most religious upon a sunshiny day, as if there were some association, some internal approach to greater light and purity and the kindler of this dark lantern of our existence.
"'The night had also a religious influence, and even more so when I viewed the moon and stars through Herschel's telescope, and saw that they were worlds.'"
And what thought Byron of the existence of God? "Supposing even," he says, "that man existed before God, even his higher pre-Adamite supposititious creation must have had an origin and a creator, for a creation is a more natural imagination than a fortuitous concourse of atoms; all things remount to a fountain, though they may flow to an ocean.
"If, according to some speculations, you could prove the world many thousand years older than the Mosaic chronology, or if you could get rid of Adam and Eve, and the apple, and serpent, still what is to be set up in their stead? or how is the difficulty removed? Things must have had a beginning, and what matters it when or how?"
If Byron did not question the existence of God, did he doubt the spirituality and immortality of the soul? Here are some of his answers:—
"What is poetry?" he asked himself in his memorandum, and he replied—"The feeling of a former world and future." And further, in the same memorandum:—
"Of the immortality of the soul, it appears to me that there can be little doubt, if we attend to the action of the mind for a moment: it is in perpetual activity. I used to doubt it, but reflection has taught me better. The stoics Epictetus and Aurelius call the present state 'a soul which draws a carcass'—a heavy chain, to be sure, but all chains, being material, may be shaken off. How far our future life will be individual, or, rather, how far it will at all resemble our present existence, is another question; but that the mind is eternal, seems as probable as that the body is not so. Of course, I here venture upon the question without recurring to revelation, which, however, is at least as rational a solution of it as any other. A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd, except for purposes of punishment: and all punishment which is to revenge, rather than correct, must be morally wrong: and when the world is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer? Human passions have probably disfigured the Divine doctrines here; but the whole thing is inscrutable."
And again:—
"I have often been inclined to materialism in philosophy; but could never bear its introduction into Christianity, which appears to me essentially founded upon the soul. For this reason, Priestley's 'Christian Materialism' always struck me as deadly. Believe the resurrection of the body, if you will, but not without a soul. The deuce is in it, if after having had a soul (as, surely, the mind, or whatever you call it, is) in this world, we must part with it in the next, even for an immortal materiality; and I own my partiality for spirit."
It has already been seen that, in his early youth, he was intimately convinced of the immortality of his soul, by the fact of the existence of his conscience. But it is equally proved that, as his soul became more perfect, and rose more and more toward all that is great and virtuous, his conviction of the immortality of the soul became still more certain.
The beautiful words which he addressed to Mr. Parry, a few hours before his agony, confirm our assertions:—
"Eternity and space are before me; but on this subject, thank God, I am happy and at ease. The thought of living eternally, of again reviving, is a great pleasure. Christianity is the purest and most liberal religion in the world; but the numerous teachers who are continually worrying mankind with their denunciations and their doctrines, are the greatest enemies of religion. I have read, with more attention than half of them, the Book of Christianity, and I admire the liberal and truly charitable principles which Christ has laid down. There are questions connected with this subject, which none but Almighty God can solve. Time and space, who can conceive? None but God: on Him I rely."
If he neither questioned the existence of God nor the spirituality and immortality of the soul, did he question our liberty of thought, and hence our moral responsibility?
To put such a question, is to misunderstand Byron completely. Who, more than Byron, ever believed in our right of judgment, and proclaimed that right more strenuously than he has, in prose and in verse? Let any one who has read "Manfred," say whether a poet ever developed such Christian and philosophical views with greater energy and power.
Did Lord Byron really question, in his poems, the infinite goodness of God, as he has been accused of doing? Did his doubts and perplexities of mind, caused by the terrible knowledge of the existence of evil, ever go beyond the limits of the doubts which beset the minds of intellectual men, when the light of faith fails to aid them in their philosophical researches after truth?
When he published his drama, "Cain, a Mystery," he was attacked by enemies in the most violent manner. They selected the arguments put into the mouth of Lucifer, and their influence upon Cain, to prove that this biblical poem was a blasphemous composition, and that its author was consequently deserving of being outlawed, as having attempted to question the supreme wisdom of God. But most certainly Lucifer speaks in the poem as Lucifer should speak, unless, indeed, the Evil Spirit ought to speak as a theologian, and the first assassin as a meek orthodox Christian? Byron gave them each the language logically most suited to their respective characters, as Milton did, without, however, incurring the accusation of impiety. It was argued that Byron ought, at least, to have introduced some one charged with the defense of the right doctrines. But was not the drama entitled a Mystery, and was not the title to be justified, as it were? Could he have done otherwise, even if he had wished it ever so much? What could Adam, or even God's angel, do better than remain silent in presence of the mental agony of Cain, and only advise his bowing to the incomprehensibility of the mystery? Again, if discussion was fruitful of results with Abel, must it be the same with Cain? Was Lord Byron to turn both these personages into theologians, ready to discuss any and every metaphysical question, and to explain the origin and effects of evil? Had they done so, it is not very likely they would have succeeded in persuading Cain of the solidity of their argument, or in dispelling the clouds which obscured his mind, and both calm his despair and satisfy so inquisitive a nature, influenced and mastered, as it was, by evil passions. If Lord Byron thought he could explain the existence of evil, he would not have entitled his poem "a Mystery." But, above all, Lord Byron did not wish to outstep the limits of reason to prove still more how powerless is reason, alone and unaided, in its endeavors to conciliate contradictory attributes. The drama was called a Mystery, and Byron wished it to remain such.
Were some of his biographers right in asserting that he had adopted Cuvier's system? But Cuvier never denied the existence of the Creator, as Moore seems to believe. On the contrary, he endeavored to show, even more forcibly, the admirable work of the Creation, in order to bring out still more in relief the perfection of its Creator.
In the end, however, Byron ceased to think the existence of evil to be so great an injustice to the infinite goodness of God, and expressed in his memorandum the opinion "that history and experience show that good and evil are counterbalanced on earth."
"Were I to begin life again," he said, in the same memorandum, "I don't think I would change any thing in mine." A proof that, without understanding why or wherefore, he felt our life on earth to be but the beginning of one which is to be continued in another sphere, under the rule of Him whose gentle hand can be traced in all things created. For the same reason he was reconciled to the injustice of mankind, believing this life to be a trial, and bearing it with noble courage and fortitude. This mental resignation, however, did not prevent his suffering bitterly in a moral sense. All pleasure became a pain to him at the sight of the sufferings of others. He declared on one occasion, at Cephalonia, that if every body was to be damned, and he alone to be saved, he would prefer being damned with the rest. This excess of generosity may have appeared eccentric, but can scarcely seem too exaggerated to those who knew him. Certain it is, that to witness the sufferings of others with resignation, appeared to him to be egotism, and to evince a coldheartedness, which would have been unpardonable in his eyes. Sometimes even the energy of his writings, dictated, as they were, by his great generosity of heart, appeared as the revolt of a noble nature against the miseries of humanity.
In such a frame of mind was he when he wrote "Cain," at Ravenna, in the midst of people who were for the most part unjustly proscribed, and in the midst of sufferings which he always tried to alleviate.
Did he deserve the appellation of skeptic, because he despised that vain philosophy which believes it can explain all things, even God's nature itself, by the sole force of reason? or because, while respecting the dogmas proclaimed by our reason and our conscience, he preferred to follow the principles of a philosophy that argues with diffidence, and humbly owns its inability to explain all things, and which caused him to exclaim in "Don Juan"—
"For me, I know naught; nothing I deny,
Admit, reject, contemn: and what know you,
Except, perhaps, that you were born to die?"
But to whom were these lines addressed? To those metaphysicians, of course, whom he would also have denominated "men who know nothing, but who, among the truths which they ignore, ignore their own ignorance most,"—to those arrogant minds who wish to fathom even the ways which God has kept back from us, and who, in seeking to know the wherefore of all things in creation, are forced to give the name of explanation to mere comparisons.
Byron says, in "Don Juan,"—
"Explain me your explanation."
He addressed himself finally, to all hypocrites and intolerant men; Byron has been called a skeptic, notwithstanding.
That a sincere and orthodox Catholic, who holds that the negation of a dogma constitutes skepticism, should have called Byron a skeptic because he questioned the doctrine of eternal punishment, is not to be wondered at; but what is matter of astonishment is, that the reproach was addressed to him by the writer of "Faust," and by the writer of "Elvire," and the "Meditations." Yet it is so; and if this psychological problem is not yet solved, let others do it,—we can not.
To sum up, we may declare, from what we have said, that as regards Lord Byron there has been a confusion of words, and that his skepticism has merely been a natural and inevitable situation in which certain minds who, as it were, are the victims of their own contradictory thoughts, are placed, notwithstanding their wish to believe. Faith, being a part of poetical feeling, could not but form a part likewise of Byron's nature, but there existed also in him a great tendency to weigh the merits of the opinions of others, and consequently the desire not to arrive too hastily at conclusions.
This combination of instinctive faith and a philosophical mind could not produce in him the belief in those things which did not appear to him to have been first submitted to the test of argument, and proved to be just by the convictions resulting from the test of reasoning to which they had been subjected. It produced, on the contrary, a species of expectant doubt, a state of mind awaiting some decisive explanation, to reject error and embrace the truth. His skepticism, therefore, may be said to have been the result of thought, not of passion.
In religion, however, it must be allowed that his skepticism never went so far as to cause him to deny its fundamental doctrines. These he proclaimed from heartfelt convictions, and his modest, humble, and manly skepticism may be said to have been that of great minds, and his failings, also, theirs. Is a day said to be stormy because a few clouds have obscured the rays of the sun?
Is it necessary to say any thing about what he doubted? In showing what he believed, the exception will be found unnecessary. He believed in a Creator, in a spiritual and consequently immortal soul, but which God can reduce to nothing, as He created it out of nothing. He believed in liberty of thought, in our responsibility, our privileges, our duties, and especially in the obligation of practicing the great precept which constitutes Christianity; namely, that of charity and devotion toward our neighbor, even to the sacrifice of our existence for his sake. He believed in every virtue, but his experience forbade his according faith to appearances, and trusting in fine phrases. He often found it wise and prudent to scrutinize the idol he was called upon to worship, but when once that idol had borne the test of scrutiny no worship was so sincere.
"Was he orthodox?" will again be asked. To such a question it may be justly answered, that if he did not entertain for all the doctrines revealed by the Scriptures that faith which he was called upon to possess, it was not for want of desiring so powerful an auxiliary to his reason. He felt that, however strong reason might be, it always retains a little wavering and anxious character; and, though essentially religious at heart, he could not master that blind faith required in matters which baffle the efforts of reason to prove their truth logically and definitively. This is to be accounted for by the conflict of his conscience and his philosophical turn of mind. Conviction, for him, was a difficult thing to attain. Hence for him the difficulty of saying "I believe," and hence the accusation of skepticism to which he became liable. He wanted proofs of a decisive character, and his doubts belonged to that school which made Bacon confess that a philosopher who can doubt, knows more than all the wise men together. Byron would never have contested absolutely the truth of any mystery, but have merely stated that, as long as the testimonies of its truth were hidden in obscurity, such a mystery must be liable to be questioned. He was wont to add, however, that the mysteries of religion did not appear to him less comprehensible than those of science and of reason.
As for miracles, how could he think them absurd and impossible, since he admitted the omnipotence of God? His mind was far too just not to understand that miracles surround us, even from the first origin of our race. He often asked himself, whether the first man could ever have been created a child? "Reason," says a great Christian philosopher, "does not require the aid of the Book of Genesis to believe in that miracle."
One evening at Pisa, in the drawing-room of the Countess G——, where Byron was wont to spend all his evenings, a great discussion arose respecting a certain miracle which was said to have taken place at Lucca.
The miracle had been accompanied by several rather ludicrous circumstances, and of course laughter was not spared. Shelley, who never lost sight of his philosopher, treated miracles as deplorable superstitions. Lord Byron laughed at the absurdity of the history told, without any malice however. Madame G—— alone did not laugh. "Do you, then, believe in that miracle?" asked Byron. "I do not say I exactly believe in that miracle," she replied; "but I believe in miracles, since I believe in God and in His omnipotence; nor could I believe that God can be deprived of His liberty, when I feel that I have mine. Were I no longer to believe in miracles, it seems to me I should no longer believe in God, and that I should lose my faith."
Lord Byron stopped joking, and said—
"Well, after all, the philosophy of common sense is the truest and the best."
The conversation continued, in the jesting tone in which it had begun, and M. M——, an esprit fort, went so far as to condemn the supernatural in the name of the general and permanent laws which govern nature, and to look upon miracles as the legends of a by-gone age, and as errors which affect the ignorant. From what had gone before, he probably fancied that Byron was going to join issue with him. But there was often a wide gulf between the intimate thoughts of Byron and his expressions of them.
"We allow ourselves too often," he said, "to give way to a jocular mood, and to laugh at everything, probably because God has granted us this faculty to compensate for the difficulty which we find in believing, in the same manner as playthings are given to children. But I really do not see why God should be obliged to preserve in the universe the same order which He once established. To whom did He promise that He would never change it, either wholly or in part? Who knows whether some day He will not give the moon an oval or a square shape instead of a round one?"
This he said smiling, but added immediately after, in a serious tone:—
"Those who believe in a God, Creator of the universe, can not refuse their belief in the possibility of miracles, for they behold in God the first of all miracles."
Finally, Lord Byron determined himself the limits of what he deemed his necessary belief; and remained throughout life a stanch supporter of those opinions, but he never ceased to evince a tendency to steer clear of intolerance, which according to him only brought one back to total unbelief.
Let us not omit to add that, as he grew older, he saw better the arrogant weakness of those who screen themselves under the cover of science, and recognized more clearly each day the hand of the Creator in the works of nature.
"Did Lord Byron pray?" is another objection which will be made.
We have already seen what he thought of prayer; we have shown that his poems often took the form of a prayer, and we have read with admiration various passages containing some most sublime lines which completely answer those who accused him of want of religion, while they exhibit the expansion of his soul toward God.
We also know with what feelings of respect he approached places devoted to a religious life, and what charms he found in the ceremonies of the Church. All this is proof enough, it would seem; but, in any case, we must add that if his prayers were not those advised by Kennedy, they were at least the prayers of a great soul which soars upward to bow before its Creator. "Outward ceremonies," says Fénélon, "are only tokens of that essential point, the religion of the soul, and Byron's prayer was rather a thanksgiving than a request."—"In the eyes of God," says some one, "a good action is worth more than a prayer."
Such was his mode of communing with God even in his early youth, but especially in his last moments, which were so sublime. Can one doubt, that at that solemn moment his greatest desire was to be allowed to live? He had still to reap all the fruits of his sacrifices. His harvest was only just beginning to ripen. By dint of heroism, he was at last becoming known. He was young, scarcely thirty-six years of age, handsome, rich. Rank and genius were his. He was beloved by many, notwithstanding a host of jealous rivals; and yet, on the point of losing all these advantages, what was his prayer? Was it egotistical or presumptuous? was it to solicit a miracle in his favor? No, his last words were those of noble resignation. "Let Thy holy will, my God, be done, and not mine!" and then absorbed, as it were, in the infinity of God's goodness, and, confiding entirely in God's mercy, he begged that he might be left alone to sleep quietly and peacefully into eternity. On the very day which brought to us the hope of our immortality, he would awake in the bosom of God.