He had written to Moore some months previously: "If anything in the way of fever, fatigue, famine, or otherwise, should cut short the middle age of a brother warbler, I pray you to remember me in 'your smiles and wine.' I have hopes that the cause will triumph; but whether it does or no, still 'honour must be minded as strictly as milk diet.' I trust to observe both." On the 12th of April he had again to take to bed, and from this date the fever never abated. The 18th was Easter Day, a holiday which the Greeks were accustomed to celebrate by firing off muskets and salvos of artillery; but out of consideration for their benefactor, the townspeople kept perfectly quiet. The 19th was the last day of Byron's life. During part of it he was delirious; he imagined himself to be commanding troops, and shouted: "Forwards—forwards—courage!" When he came to himself again, he began to give his last orders to his servant, Fletcher. "Go to my sister," he said; "tell her—go to Lady Byron—you will see her, and say——." Here his voice became indistinct, and only names could be made out—"Augusta—Ada—Hobhouse." He then said: "Now, I have told you all." "My lord," replied Fletcher, "I have not understood a word your lordship has been saying." "Not understood me?" exclaimed Lord Byron, with a look of the utmost distress. "What a pity! Then it is too late; all is over." He still continued to utter a few disconnected words: "Poor Greece!—poor town!—my poor servants!" Then his thoughts must have turned to Countess Guiccioli, for he murmured: "Io lascio qualche cosa di caro nel mondo." Towards evening he said: "Now I shall go to sleep," and, turning round, fell into that slumber from which he never awoke.
The announcement of Byron's death fell like a thunderbolt upon Greece. It affected the nation in the manner of a terrible natural catastrophe, the consequences of which were incalculable. On the day he died the following proclamation was issued:—
PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF WESTERN GREECE.
The present day of festivity and rejoicing has become one of sorrow and of mourning. The Lord Noel Byron departed this life at six o'clock in the afternoon, after an illness of ten days ... I hereby decree:—
1st, To-morrow morning at daylight, thirty-seven minute guns will be fired from the grand battery, being the number which corresponds with the age of the illustrious deceased.
2nd, All the public offices, even the tribunals, are to remain closed for three successive days.
3d, All the shops, except those in which provisions or medicines are sold, will also be shut; and it is strictly enjoined that every species of public amusement, and other demonstrations of festivity at Easter, shall be suspended.
4th, A general mourning will be observed for twenty-one days.
5th, Prayers and a funeral service are to be offered up in all the churches.
A. MAVROCORDATO.
Given at Missolonghi
this 19th day of April 1824.
No other evidence is required of the impression which the news of Byron's death made upon all who were intimately connected with him. At Missolonghi people ran through the streets crying: "He is dead! The great man is gone!" The corpse was conveyed to England. The clergy refused it a place in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. But, dependent neither on the blame of England nor the praise of Greece, his renown established itself throughout the earth.
In the intellectual life of Russia and Poland, of Spain and Italy, of France and Germany, the seeds which he had strewn broadcast with such a lavish hand fructified—from the dragon's teeth sprang armed men. The Slavonic nations, who were groaning under tyrannical rule, who were by nature inclined to be melancholy, and in whom their history had developed rebellious instincts, seized on his poetry with avidity; and Pushkin's Onjœgin, Lermontoff's A Hero of Our Own Days, Malczewski's Marja, Mickiewicz's Conrad and Wallenrod, Slowacki's Lambro and Beniowski witness to the powerful impression made upon their authors. The Romance races, whose fair sinners his verses had celebrated, and who were now in the act of revolt, eagerly translated and studied his works. The Spanish and Italian exile-poets took up his war-cry; in Spain the "Myrtle" Society was formed; in Italy his influence was most plainly manifest in the writings of Giovanni Berchet, but hardly less so in those of Leopardi and Giusti. His death made an extraordinary impression in France. A week or two after it happened, Chateaubriand went over to the Opposition, and his first action after his fall was to become a member of the Greek Committee. Hugo's Les Orientales was not a flight straight to the East, like the Oriental poetry of Germany; his way lay through Greece, and he had much to say of the heroes of the war of liberation. Delavigne devoted a beautiful poem to Byron; Lamartine added a last canto to Childe Harold; Mérimée allowed himself to be influenced by Byron's occasional spirit of savagery; Alfred de Musset attempted to take up the mantle which had fallen from the shoulders of the great poet; and even Lamennais began to employ a style in which many of the words and expressions recalled the language of Byron's sallies. Germany was still politically too far behind the other nations to have exiles and emigrants among its poets; but its philologists had, with quiet rejoicing, beheld in the rising of Greece the resurrection of ancient Hellas; poets like Wilhelm Müller and Alfred Meissner wrote beautiful verse in honour of Byron; and there were other writers who were still more deeply moved by Byron's poetry—men of Jewish extraction, whose feelings were those of the exiled and excommunicated—chief among them Börne and Heine. Heine's best poetry (notably Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen) is a continuation of Byron's work. French Romanticism and German Liberalism are both direct descendants of Byron's Naturalism.
[XXIV]
CONCLUSION
Naturalism as an intellectual tendency in England, makes its appearance in Wordsworth in the form of love of all the external phenomena of nature, a habit of storing up natural impressions, and piety towards animals, children, country people, and the "poor in spirit." With him as its representative, it strays for a moment into a blind alley, that of uninspired imitation of nature. In Coleridge, and even more in Southey, it approaches the German Romanticism of the day, follows it into the world of legend and superstition, but avoids its worst excesses by treating Romantic themes in a Naturalistic manner and keeping an open eye on land and sea and all the elements of reality. In Scott, Naturalism occupies itself with the character and history of a whole nation, and in vivid colours paints man as the son of a race and a period; in Keats, it takes possession of the whole world of the senses, and reposes for a moment on the neutral ground between tranquil contemplation of nature and the proclamation of a gospel of nature and of natural rights. In Moore it becomes erotic, and espouses Liberalism in politics; the sight of the sufferings of his native island drives this poet into the ranks of the lovers of liberty, intellectual and political. In Campbell, it becomes eulogy of England as Queen of the Sea and expression of English liberal views. In Landor, it takes the shape of pagan Humanism, of too repellent and proud a character to win the suffrage of Europe. It is transformed in Shelley into a soulful love of nature and a poetic Radicalism, which have at their command poetic gifts of the very highest order; but the incorporeal universality of Shelley's Naturalism, in combination with the circumstance that he is much too far ahead of his age, and with his early death, causes his song to die away unheard, Europe never learning what a poet she possesses and loses.
Then, like Achilles arising in his wrath after he has burned the body of Patroclus, Byron, after Shelley's death, arises and lifts up his mighty voice. European poetry was flowing on like a sluggish, smooth river; those who walked along its banks found little for the eye to rest on. All at once, as a continuation of the stream, appeared this poetry, under which the ground so often gave way that it precipitated itself in cataracts from one level to another—and the eyes of all inevitably turn to that part of a river where its stream becomes a waterfall. In Byron's poetry the river boiled and foamed, and the roar of its waters made music that mounted up to heaven. In its seething fury it formed whirlpools, tore itself and whatever came in its way, and in the end undermined the very rocks. But, "in the midst of the infernal surge," sat such an Iris as the poet himself has described in Childe Harold—a glorious rainbow, the emblem of freedom and peace—invisible to many, but clearly seen by all who, with the sun above them in the sky, place themselves in the right position.