My springs of life were poisoned.”
Byron was subject to attacks of epilepsy; and perhaps this fact may account for much of the spleen and irritability which he manifested through life, and which made him so many enemies. It also teaches us an important lesson. We are too apt to form our estimate of character without taking into consideration all those circumstances which are known materially to influence human thought and actions. The state of the organization and the health ought to be maturely weighed before we pronounce authoritatively as to the motives of individuals, or denounce them for not acting or thinking according to what our preconceived opinions have taught us to consider as orthodox. Byron’s mind was morbidly alive to impressions. The most trifling circumstance would cause him to swoon. At Bologna, in 1819, he describes one of his convulsive attacks:—“Last night I went to the representation of Alfieri’s Myrrha, the last two acts of which threw me into convulsions; I don’t mean by that word lady’s hysterics, but an agony of reluctant tears, and the choking shudder which I do not often undergo for fiction.” He was seized in a similar manner at seeing Kean in Sir Giles Overreach; he was carried out of the theatre in convulsions. From early life, Byron exhibited this abnormal excitability. There can be no doubt that it was but the natural effect of a peculiar condition of nervous function; but, instead of endeavouring to subdue the feeling, he did his best to encourage it, and to fan the fire into a flame. He appears to have been tortured by horrid dreams. He says in his Journal—“I awoke from a dream: well, have not others dreamed? Such a dream! But she did not overtake me! I wish the dead would rest for ever. Ugh! how my blood is chilled! I do not like this dream; I hate its foregone conclusion.”
The “Bride of Abydos” was written to distract the poet’s mind from his dreams. He was in such a nervous state at this period, that he says if he had not done something, he must have gone mad, or have eat his own heart.
Stendhal, alluding to Byron’s apparent remorse, asks, “Is it not possible that Byron might have had some guilty stain on his conscience, similar to that which wrecked Othello’s fame? Can it be, have we sometimes exclaimed, that, in a frenzy of pride or jealousy, he had shortened the days of some fair Grecian slave, faithless to her vows?”[43]
It is not just to form our opinions of the character of men by their writings or actions. In the mass, we are ready to admit that we have no other criteria by which to be guided; but we may charitably consider that Byron was not himself the “dark original he drew.”
“O memory! torture me no more:
The present’s all o’ercast—
My hopes of future bliss are o’er;
In mercy, veil the past.”
Such were his feelings at the age of seventeen.