For many a page now we have spoken intermittently of that extraordinary man and poet—full of power and full of passion, both uncontrolled—whose surroundings we found in that pleasantly undulating Nottingham country where Newstead Abbey piled above its lawn and its silent tarns—half a ruin, and half a home.[80] Nor did Byron ever know a home which showed no ruin—nor ever know a ruin, into which his verse did not nestle as into a home.
We traced him from the keeping of that passionate mother—who smote him through and through with her own wrathful spirit—to the days when he uttered the “Idle” songs—coined in the courts of Cambridge—and to those quick succeeding days, when his mad verse maddened English bards and Scotch reviewers. Then came the passages of love—with Mary Chaworth, which was real and vain; with a Milbanke, which was a mockery and ended in worse than mockery; all these experiences whetting the edge of that sword of song with which he carved a road of romance for thousands of after journeymen to travel, through the old Iberian Peninsula, and the vales of Thessaly. Then there was the turning away, in rage, from the shores of England, the episode with the Shelley household on the borders of Lake Leman, with its record of “crag-splitting” storms and sunny siestas; and such enduring memorials as the ghastly Frankenstein of Mrs. Shelley, the Third Canto of Childe Harold, and the child-name of—Allegra.
Next came Venice, where the waves lapped murmurously upon the door-steps of the palaces which “Mi-lord” made noisy with his audacious revelry. To this succeeded the long stay at Ravenna, with its pacifying and lingering, reposeful reach of an attachment, which was beautiful in its sincerity, but as lawless as his life. After Ravenna came Pisa with its Hunt-Lanfranchi coruscations of spleen, and its weird interlude of the burning of the body of his poor friend Shelley upon the Mediterranean shores. Song, and drama, and tender verselets, and bagnio-tainted pictures of Don Juan, gleamed with fervid intensity through the interstices of this Italian life; but they all came to a sudden stay when he sailed for Greece, and with a generosity as strong as his wilder passions, flung away his fortune and his life in that vortex of Suliote strifes and deadly miasmas, which was centred amid the swamplands of Missolonghi.
The Cretans of to-day (1897), and the men of Thessaly, and of the Morea, and Albanians all, may find a lift of their ambitions and a spur to their courage in Byron’s sacrifice to their old struggle for liberty, and in his magnificent outburst of patriotic song. So, too, those who love real poetry will never cease to admire his subtle turns of thought, and his superb command of all the resources of language. But the households are few in which his name will be revered as an apostle of those cheering altitudes of thought which encourage high endeavor, or of those tenderer humanities which spur to kindly deeds, and give their glow to the atmosphere of homes.
King William’s Time.
The last figure that we dealt with among England’s kings was that bluff, vulgar-toned sailor, William IV., whom even the street-folk criticise, because he spat from his carriage window when driving on some State ceremonial.[81] Nor was this the worst of his coarsenesses; he swore—with great ease and pungency. He forgot his dignity; he insulted his ministers; he gave to Queen Adelaide, who survived him many years as dowager, many most uncomfortable half-hours; and if he read the new sea-stories of Captain Marryat—though he read very little—I suspect he loved more the spicier condiments of Peregrine Pickle and of Tom Jones.
Yet during the period of his short reign—scarce seven years—events happened—some through his slow helpfulness, and none suffering grievously from his obstructiveness—which gave new and brighter color to the political development and to the literary growth of England. There was, for instance, the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832 (of which I have already spoken, in connection with Sydney Smith)—not indeed accomplishing all its friends had hoped; not inaugurating a political millennium; not doing away with the harsh frictions of state-craft; no reforms ever do or can; but broadening the outlook and range of all publicists, and stirring quiet thinkers into aggressive and kindling and hopeful speech. Very shortly after this followed the establishment of that old society for the “Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” which came soon to the out-put—under the editorship of Charles Knight—of the Penny Cyclopædia and the Penny Magazine.[82]
I recall distinctly the delight with which—as boys—we lingered over the pictured pages of that magazine—the great forerunner of all of our illustrated monthlies.
To the same period belong those Tracts for the Times, in which John Keble, the honored author of the Christian Year, came to new notice, while his associates, Dr. Pusey and Cardinal Newman, gave utterance to speech which is not without reverberating echoes, even now. Nor was it long after this date that British journalism received a great lift, and a great broadening of its forces, by a reduction of the stamp-tax—largely due to the efforts of Bulwer Lytton—whereby British newspapers increased their circulation, within two years, by 20,000,000 annually.[83]