January 22, 1888.—On a night in 1785, when Mrs. Siddons was acting at Edinburgh, the play being The Fatal Marriage and the character Isabella, a young lady of Aberdeenshire, Miss Catherine Gordon, of Gight, was among the audience. There is a point in that tragedy at which Isabella recognises her first husband, whom she had supposed to be dead, and in whose absence she had been married to another, and her consternation, grief, and rapture are sudden and excessive. Mrs. Siddons, at that point, always made a great effect. The words are, "O my Biron, my Biron!" On this night, at the moment when the wonderful actress sent forth her wailing, heart-piercing cry, as she uttered those words, Miss Gordon gave a frantic scream, fell into violent hysterics, and was borne out of the theatre, repeating "O my Biron, my Biron!" At the time of that incident she had not met the man by whom she was afterward wedded,—the Hon. John Byron, whose wife she became, about a year later. Their first-born and only child was George Gordon, afterward Lord Byron, the poet; and among the many aspects of his life which impress the thoughtful reader of its strange and melancholy story none is more striking than the dramatic aspect of it,—so strangely prefigured in this event.
Lord Byron.
Censure of Byron, whether as a man or as a writer, may be considered to have spent its force. It is a hundred years since he was born, and almost as many since he died.[24] Everybody who wished to say a word against him has had ample opportunity for saying it, and there is evidence that this opportunity has not been neglected. The record was long ago made up. Everybody knows that Byron's conduct was sometimes deformed with frenzy and stained with vice. Everybody knows that Byron's writings are occasionally marred with profanity and licentiousness, and that they contain a quantity of crude verse. If he had never been married, or if, being married, his domestic life had not ended in disaster and scandal, his personal reputation would stand higher than it does at present, in the esteem of virtuous society. If about one-third of what he wrote had never been published, his reputation as a man of letters would stand higher than it now does in the esteem of stern judges of literary art. After an exhaustive discussion of the subject in every aspect of it, after every variety of hostile assault, and after praise sounded in every key of enthusiasm and in every language of the world, these truths remain. It is a pity that Byron was not a virtuous man and a good husband. It is a pity that he was not invariably a scrupulous literary artist, that he wrote so much, and that almost everything he wrote was published. But, when all this has been said, it remains a solid and immovable truth that Byron was a great poet and that he continues to be a great power in the literature and life of the world. Nobody who pretends to read anything omits to read Childe Harold.
To touch this complex and delicate subject in only a superficial manner it may not be amiss to say that the world is under obligation to Byron, if for nothing else, for the spectacle of a romantic, impressive, and instructive life. His agency in that spectacle no doubt was involuntary, but all the same he presented it. He was a great poet; a man of genius; his faculty of expression was colossal, and his conduct was absolutely genuine. No man in literature ever lived who lived himself more fully. His assumptions of disguise only made him more obvious and transparent. He kept nothing back. His heart was laid absolutely bare. We know even more about him than we know about Dr. Johnson,—and still his personality endures the test of our knowledge and remains unique, romantic, fascinating, prolific of moral admonition, and infinitely pathetic. Byron in poetry, like Edmund Kean in acting, is a figure that completely fills the imagination, profoundly stirs the heart, and never ceases to impress and charm, even while it afflicts, the sensitive mind. This consideration alone, viewed apart from the obligation that the world owes to the better part of his writings, is vastly significant of the great personal force that is inherent in the name and memory of Byron.
It has been considered necessary to account for the sadness and gloom of Byron's poetry by representing him to have been a criminal afflicted with remorse for his many and hideous crimes. His widow, apparently a monomaniac, after long brooding over the remembrance of a calamitous married life,—brief, unhappy, and terminated in separation,—whispered against him, and against his half-sister, a vile and hideous charge; and this, to the disgrace of American literature, was subsequently brought forward by a distinguished female writer of America, much noted for her works of fiction and especially memorable for that one. The explanation of the mental distress exhibited in the poet's writings was thought to be effectually provided in that disclosure. But, as this revolting and inhuman story,—desecrating graves, insulting a wonderful genius, and casting infamy upon the name of an affectionate, faithful, virtuous woman,—fell to pieces the moment it was examined, the student of Byron's grief-stricken nature remained no wiser than before this figment of a diseased imagination had been divulged. Surely, however, it ought not to be considered mysterious that Byron's poetry is often sad. The best poetry of the best poets is touched with sadness. Hamlet has never been mistaken for a merry production. Macbeth and King Lear do not commonly produce laughter. Shelley and Keats sing as near to heaven's gate as anybody, and both of them are essentially sad. Scott was as brave, hopeful, and cheerful as any poet that ever lived, and Scott's poetry is at its best in his dirges and in his ballads of love and loss. The Elegy and The Ancient Mariner certainly are great poems, but neither of them is festive. Byron often wrote sadly because he was a man of melancholy temperament, and because he deeply felt the pathos of mortal life, the awful mystery with which it is surrounded, the pain with which it is usually attended, the tragedy with which it commonly is accompanied, the frail tenure with which its loves and hopes are held, and the inexorable death with which it is continually environed and at last extinguished. And Byron was an unhappy man for the reason that, possessing every elemental natural quality in excess, his goodness was constantly tortured by his evil. The tempest, the clangour, and the agony of his writings are denotements of the struggle between good and evil that was perpetually afflicting his soul. Had he been the wicked man depicted by his detractors, he would have lived a life of comfortable depravity and never would have written at all. Monsters do not suffer.
The true appreciation of Byron is not that of youth but that of manhood. Youth is captured by his pictorial and sentimental attributes. Youth beholds him as a nautical Adonis, standing lonely upon a barren cliff and gazing at a stormy sunset over the Ægean sea. Everybody knows that familiar picture,—with the wide and open collar, the great eyes, the wild hair, and the ample neckcloth flowing in the breeze. It is pretty but it is not like the real man. If ever at any time he was that sentimental image he speedily outgrew that condition, just as those observers of him who truly understand Byron have long outgrown their juvenile sympathy with that frail and puny ideal of a great poet. Manhood perceives a different individual and is captured by a different attraction. It is only when the first extravagant and effusive enthusiasm has run its course, and perhaps ended in revulsion, that we come to know Byron for what he actually is, and to feel the tremendous power of his genius. Sentimental folly has commemorated him, in the margin of Hyde Park, as in the fancy of many a callow youth and green girl, with the statue of a sailor-lad waiting for a spark from heaven, while a Newfoundland dog dozes at his feet. It is a caricature. Byron was a man, and terribly in earnest; and it is only by earnest persons that his mind and works are understood. At this distance of time the scandals of a corrupt age, equally with the frailties of its most brilliant and most illustrious poetical genius, may well be left to rest in the oblivion of the grave. The generation that is living at the close of the nineteenth century will remember of Byron only that he was the uncompromising friend of liberty; that he did much to emancipate the human mind from every form of bigotry and tyranny; that he augmented, as no man had done since Dryden, the power and flexibility of the noble English tongue; and that he enriched literature with passages of poetry which, for sublimity, beauty, tenderness, and eloquence, have seldom been equalled and have never been excelled.
HUCKNALL-TORKARD CHURCH
It was near the close of a fragrant, golden summer day [August 8, 1884], when, having driven out from Nottingham, I alighted in the market-place of the little town of Hucknall-Torkard, on a pilgrimage to the grave of Byron. The town is modern and commonplace in appearance,—a straggling collection of low brick dwellings, mostly occupied by colliers. On that day it appeared at its worst; for the widest part of its main street was filled with stalls, benches, wagons, and canvas-covered structures for the display of vegetables and other commodities, which were thus offered for sale; and it was thronged with rough, noisy, and dirty persons, intent on barter and traffic, and not indisposed to boisterous pranks and mirth, as they pushed and jostled each other, among the crowded booths. This main street ends at the wall of the graveyard in which stands the little gray church where Byron was buried. There is an iron gate in the centre of the wall, and in order to reach this it was necessary to thread the mazes of the market-place, and to push aside the canvas flaps of a peddler's stall which had been placed close against it. Next to the churchyard wall is a little cottage,[25] with its bit of garden, devoted in this instance to potatoes; and there, while waiting for the sexton, I talked with an aged man, who said that he remembered, as an eye-witness, the funeral of Byron. "The oldest man he seemed that ever wore gray hairs." He stated that he was eighty-two and that his name was William Callandyne. Pointing to the church, he indicated the place of the Byron vault. "I was the last man," he said, "that went down into it, before he was buried there. I was a young fellow then, and curious to see what was going on. The place was full of skulls and bones. I wish you could see my son; he's a clever lad, only he ought to have more of the suaviter in modo." Thus, with the garrulity of wandering age, he prattled on; but his mind was clear and his memory tenacious and positive. There is a good prospect from the region of Hucknall-Torkard church, and pointing into the distance, when his mind had been brought back to the subject of Byron, my venerable acquaintance now described, with minute specification of road and lane,—seeming to assume that the names and the turnings were familiar to his auditor,—the course of the funeral train from Nottingham to the church. "There were eleven carriages," he said. "They didn't go to the Abbey" (meaning Newstead), "but came directly here. There were many people to look at them. I remember all about it, and I'm an old man—eighty-two. You're an Italian, I should say," he added. By this time the sexton had come and unlocked the gate, and parting from Mr. Callandyne we presently made our way into the church of St. James, locking the churchyard gate behind us, to exclude rough and possibly mischievous followers. A strange and sad contrast, I thought, between this coarse and turbulent place, by a malign destiny ordained for the grave of Byron, and that peaceful, lovely, majestic church and precinct, at Stratford-upon-Avon, which enshrine the dust of Shakespeare!