James Beattie.
Beattie had announced the new era of the lyre. The Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius is the picture of the first effects of the muse upon a young bard who is as yet unaware of the inspiration with which he is tossed. Now the future poet goes and sits by the sea-shore during a tempest; again he leaves the village sports to listen in some lonely spot to the distant sound of the pipes. Beattie has run through the entire series of reveries and melancholy ideas of which a hundred other poets have believed themselves the discoverers. Beattie proposed to continue his poem; he did, in fact, write the second canto: Edwin one evening hears a grave voice ascend from the bottom of the valley; it is the voice of a solitary who, after tasting the illusions of the world, has buried himself in that retreat, there to collect his soul and to sing the marvels of the Creator. This hermit instructs the young minstrel and reveals to him the secret of his genius. Beattie was destined to shed tears; the death of his son broke his paternal heart: like Ossian, after the loss of his son Oscar, he hung his harp on the branches of an oak. Perhaps Beattie's son was the young minstrel whom a father had sung and whose footsteps he no longer saw on the mountain.
*
Lord Byron's verses contain striking imitations of the Minstrel. At the time of my exile in England, Lord Byron was living at Harrow School, in a village ten miles from London. He was a child, I was young and as unknown as he; he had been brought up on the heaths of Scotland, by the sea-side, as I in the marshes of Brittany, by the sea-side; he first loved the Bible and Ossian, as I loved them; he sang the memories of his childhood in Newstead Abbey, as I sang mine in Combourg Castle:
When I roved a young Highlander o'er the dark heath.
And climb'd thy steep summit, O Morven of snow!
To gaze on the torrent that thunder'd beneath,
Or the mist of the tempest that gather'd below[305].
In my wanderings in the neighbourhood of London, when I was so unhappy, I passed through the village of Harrow a score of times, without suspecting the genius it contained. I have sat in the churchyard at the foot of the elm beneath which, in 1807, Lord Byron wrote these verses, at the time when I was returning from Palestine:
Spot of my youth! whose hoary branches sigh,
Swept by the breeze that fans thy cloudless sky;
Where now alone I muse, who oft have trod,
With those I loved, thy soft and verdant sod.
. . . . . . . .
When fate shall chill, at length, this fever'd breast,
And calm its cares and passions into rest,
. . . . . . . .
. . . . here my heart might lie;
Here might I sleep where all my hopes arose,
. . . . . . . .
Mix'd with the earth o'er which my footsteps moved;
. . . . . . . .
Deplored by those in early days allied,
And unremembered by the world beside[306].
And I shall say: Hail, ancient elm, at whose foot the child Byron indulged in the fancies of his age, while I was dreaming of René beneath thy shade, the same shade beneath which later, in his turn, the poet came to dream of Childe Harold! Byron asked of the churchyard, which witnessed the first sports of his life, an unknown grave: a useless prayer, which fame will not grant. Nevertheless, Byron is no longer what he has been; I had come across him in all directions living at Venice: at the end of a few years, in the same town where I had met with his name on every hand, I found him everywhere eclipsed and unknown. The echoes of the Lido no longer repeat his name and, if you ask after him of the Venetians, they no longer know of whom you speak. Lord Byron is entirely dead for them; they no longer hear the neighing of his horse: it is the same thing in London, where his memory is fading. That is what we become.
If I have passed by Harrow without knowing that the child Byron was drawing breath there, Englishmen have passed by Combourg without suspecting that a little vagabond, brought up in those woods, would leave any trace. Arthur Young[307], the traveller, when passing through Combourg, wrote:
"To Combourg [from Pontorson] the country has a savage aspect; husbandry has not much further advanced, at least in skill, than among the Hurons, which appears incredible amidst inclosures; the people almost as wild as their country, and their town of Combourg one of the most brutal filthy places that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so broken as to impede all passengers, but ease none-yet here is a chateau, and inhabited; who is this Mons. de Chateaubriand, the owner, that has nerves strung for a residence amidst such filth and poverty? Below this hideous heap of wretchedness is a fine lake, surrounded by well-wooded inclosures[308]."