Reflections on his domestic Verses—Consideration of his Works—“The Corsair”—Probabilities of the Character and Incidents of the Story—On the Difference between poetical Invention and moral Experience: illustrated by the Difference between the Genius of Shakespeare and that of Byron
The task just concluded may disappoint the expectations of some of my readers, but I would rather have said less than so much, could so little have been allowed; for I have never been able to reconcile to my notions of propriety, the exposure of domestic concerns which the world has no right claim to know, and can only urge the plea of curiosity for desiring to see explained. The scope of my undertaking comprehends only the public and intellectual character of Lord Byron; every word that I have found it necessary to say respecting his private affairs has been set down with reluctance; nor should I have touched so freely on his failings, but that the consequences have deeply influenced his poetical conceptions.
There is, however, one point connected with his conjugal differences which cannot be overlooked, nor noticed without animadversion. He was too active himself in bespeaking the public sympathy against his lady. It is true that but for that error the world might never have seen the verses written by him on the occasion; and perhaps it was the friends who were about him at the time who ought chiefly to be blamed for having given them circulation: but in saying this, I am departing from the rule I had prescribed to myself, while I ought only to have remarked that the compositions alluded to, both the Fare-thee-well and the Anathema on Mrs Charlemont, are splendid corroborations of the metaphysical fact which it is the main object of this work to illustrate, namely, that Byron was only original and truly great when he wrote from the dictates of his own breast, and described from the suggestions of things he had seen. When his imagination found not in his subject uses for the materials of his experience, and opportunities to embody them, it seemed to be no longer the same high and mysterious faculty that so ruled the tides of the feelings of others. He then appeared a more ordinary poet——a skilful verse-maker. The necromancy which held the reader spellbound became ineffectual; and the charm and the glory which interested so intensely, and shone so radiantly on his configurations from realities, all failed and faded; for his genius dealt not with airy fancies, but had its power and dominion amid the living and the local of the actual world.
I shall now return to the consideration of his works, and the first in order is The Corsair, published in 1814. He seems to have been perfectly sensible that this beautiful composition was in his best peculiar manner. It is indeed a pirate’s isle, peopled with his own creatures.
It has been alleged that Lord Byron was indebted to Sir Walter Scott’s poem of Rokeby for the leading incidents of The Corsair, but the resemblance is not to me very obvious: besides, the whole style of the poem is so strikingly in his own manner, that even had he borrowed the plan, it was only as a thread to string his own original conceptions upon; the beauty and brilliancy of them could not be borrowed, and are not imitations.
There were two islands in the Archipelago, when Lord Byron was in Greece, considered as the chief haunts of the pirates, Stampalia, and a long narrow island between Cape Colonna and Zea. Jura also was a little tainted in its reputation. I think, however, from the description, that the pirate’s isle of The Corsair is the island off Cape Colonna. It is a rude, rocky mass. I know not to what particular Coron, if there be more than one, the poet alludes; for the Coron of the Morea is neighbour to, if not in, the Mainote territory, a tract of country which never submitted to the Turks, and was exempted from the jurisdiction of Mussulman officers by the payment of an annual tribute. The Mainotes themselves are all pirates and robbers. If it be in that Coron that Byron has placed Seyd the pasha, it must be attributed to inadvertency. His Lordship was never there, nor in any part of Maina; nor does he describe the place, a circumstance which of itself goes far to prove the inadvertency. It is, however, only in making it the seat of a Turkish pasha that any error has been committed. In working out the incidents of the poem where descriptions of scenery are given, they relate chiefly to Athens and its neighbourhood. In themselves these descriptions are executed with an exquisite felicity; but they are brought in without any obvious reason wherefore. In fact, they appear to have been written independently of the poem, and are patched on “shreds of purple” which could have been spared.
The character of Conrad the Corsair may be described as a combination of the warrior of Albania and a naval officer—Childe Harold mingled with the hero of The Giaour.
A man of loneliness and mystery,
Scarce seen
to smile, and seldom heard to sigh;
Robust, but not Herculean,
to the sight,
No giant frame sets forth his common height;
Yet
in the whole, who paused to look again
Saw more than marks the
crowd of vulgar men:
They gaze and marvel how, and still confess
That
thus it is, but why they cannot guess.
Sun-burnt his cheek, his
forehead high and pale,
The sable curls in wild profusion veil.
And
oft perforce his rising lip reveals
The haughtier thought it curbs,
but scarce conceals:
Though smooth his voice, and calm his general
mien,
Still seems there something he would not have seen.
His
features’ deepening lines and varying hue
At times attracted,
yet perplex’d the view,
As if within that murkiness of mind
Work’d
feelings fearful, and yet undefined:
Such might he be that none
could truly tell,
Too close inquiry his stern glance could quell.
There
breathed but few whose aspect could defy
The full encounter of
his searching eye;
He had the skill, when cunning gaze to seek
To
probe his heart and watch his changing cheek,
At once the observer’s
purpose to espy,
And on himself roll back his scrutiny,
Lest
he to Conrad rather should betray
Some secret thought, than drag
that chief’s to day.
There was a laughing devil in his sneer
That raised emotions
both of rage and fear;
And where his frown of hatred darkly fell
Hope
withering fled, and mercy sigh’d, farewell.
It will be allowed that, in this portrait, some of the darker features and harsher lineaments of Byron himself are very evident, but with a more fixed sternness than belonged to him; for it was only by fits that he could put on such severity. Conrad is, however, a higher creation than any which he had previously described. Instead of the listlessness of Childe Harold, he is active and enterprising; such as the noble pilgrim would have been, but for the satiety which had relaxed his energies. There is also about him a solemnity different from the animation of the Giaour—a penitential despair arising from a cause undisclosed. The Giaour, though wounded and fettered, and laid in a dungeon, would not have felt as Conrad is supposed to feel in that situation. The following bold and terrific verses, descriptive of the maelstrom agitations of remorse, could not have been appropriately applied to the despair of grief, the predominant source of emotion in The Giaour.
There is a war, a chaos of the mind
When all its elements convulsed
combined,
Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force,
And gnashing
with impenitent remorse.
That juggling fiend who never spake before,
But
cries, “I warn’d thee,” when the deed is o’er;
Vain
voice, the spirit burning, but unbent,
May writhe, rebel—the
weak alone repent.
The character of Conrad is undoubtedly finely imagined; as the painters would say, it is in the highest style of art, and brought out with sublime effect; but still it is only another phase of the same portentous meteor, that was nebulous in Childe Harold, and fiery in The Giaour. To the safe and shop-resorting inhabitants of Christendom, The Corsair seems to present many improbabilities; nevertheless, it is true to nature, and in every part of the Levant the traveller meets with individuals whose air and physiognomy remind him of Conrad. The incidents of the story, also, so wild and extravagant to the snug and legal notions of England, are not more in keeping with the character, than they are in accordance with fact and reality. The poet suffers immeasurable injustice, when it is attempted to determine the probability of the wild scenes and wilder adventurers of his tales, by the circumstances and characters of the law-regulated system of our diurnal affairs. Probability is a standard formed by experience, and it is not surprising that the anchorets of libraries should object to the improbability of The Corsair, and yet acknowledge the poetical power displayed in the composition; for it is a work which could only have been written by one who had himself seen or heard on the spot of transactions similar to those he has described. No course of reading could have supplied materials for a narration so faithfully descriptive of the accidents to which an Ægean pirate is exposed as The Corsair. Had Lord Byron never been out of England, the production of a work so appropriate in reflection, so wild in spirit, and so bold in invention, as in that case it would have been, would have entitled him to the highest honours of original conception, or been rejected as extravagant; considered as the result of things seen, and of probabilities suggested, by transactions not uncommon in the region where his genius gathered the ingredients of its sorceries, more than the half of its merits disappear, while the other half brighten with the lustre of truth.
The manners, the actions, and the incidents were new to the English mind; but to the inhabitant of the Levant they have long been familiar, and the traveller who visits that region will hesitate to admit that Lord Byron possessed those creative powers, and that discernment of dark bosoms for which he is so much celebrated; because he will see there how little of invention was necessary to form such heroes as Conrad, and how much the actual traffic of life and trade is constantly stimulating enterprise and bravery. But let it not, therefore, be supposed, that I would undervalue either the genius of the poet, or the merits of the poem, in saying so, for I do think a higher faculty has been exerted in The Corsair than in Childe Harold. In the latter, only actual things are described, freshly and vigorously as they were seen, and feelings expressed eloquently as they were felt; but in the former, the talent of combination has been splendidly employed. The one is a view from nature, the other is a composition both from nature and from history.
Lara, which appeared soon after The Corsair, is an evident supplement to it; the description of the hero corresponds in person and character with Conrad; so that the remarks made on The Corsair apply, in all respects, to Lara. The poem itself is perhaps, in elegance, superior; but the descriptions are not so vivid, simply because they are more indebted to imagination. There is one of them, however, in which the lake and abbey of Newstead are dimly shadowed, equal in sweetness and solemnity to anything the poet has ever written.
It was the night, and Lara’s glassy stream
The stars are
studding each with imaged beam:
So calm, the waters scarcely seem
to stray,
And yet they glide, like happiness, away;
Reflecting
far and fairy-like from high
The immortal lights that live along
the sky;
Its banks are fringed with many a goodly tree,
And
flowers the fairest that may feast the bee:
Such in her chaplet
infant Dian wove,
And innocence would offer to her love;
These
deck the shore, the waves their channel make
In windings bright
and mazy, like the snake.
All was so still, so soft in earth and
air,
You scarce would start to meet a spirit there,
Secure
that naught of evil could delight
To walk in such a scene, in such
a night!
It was a moment only for the good:
So Lara deemed:
nor longer there he stood;
But turn’d in silence to his castle-gate:
Such
scene his soul no more could contemplate:
Such scene reminded him
of other days,
Of skies more cloudless, moons of purer blaze;
Of
nights more soft and frequent, hearts that now—
No, no! the
storm may beat upon his brow
Unfelt, unsparing; but a night like
this,
A night of beauty, mock’d such breast as his.
He turn’d within his solitary hall,
And his high shadow
shot along the wall:
There were the painted forms of other times—
’Twas
all they left of virtues or of crimes,
Save vague tradition; and
the gloomy vaults
That hid their dust, their foibles, and their
faults,
And half a column of the pompous page,
That speeds
the spacious tale from age to age;
Where history’s pen its
praise or blame supplies
And lies like truth, and still most truly
lies;
He wand’ring mused, and as the moonbeam shone
Through
the dim lattice o’er the floor of stone,
And the high-fretted
roof and saints that there
O’er Gothic windows knelt in pictured
prayer;
Reflected in fantastic figures grew
Like life, but
not like mortal life to view;
His bristling locks of sable, brow
of gloom,
And the wide waving of his shaken plume
Glanced
like a spectre’s attributes, and gave
His aspect all that
terror gives the grave.
That Byron wrote best when he wrote of himself and of his own, has probably been already made sufficiently apparent. In this respect he stands alone and apart from all other poets, and there will be occasion to show, that this peculiarity extended much farther over all his works, than merely to those which may be said to have required him to be thus personal. The great distinction, indeed, of his merit consists in that singularity. Shakspeare, in drawing the materials of his dramas from tales and history has, with wonderful art, given from his own invention and imagination the fittest and most appropriate sentiments and language; and admiration at the perfection with which he has accomplished this, can never be exhausted. The difference between Byron and Shakspeare consists in the curious accident, if it may be so called, by which the former was placed in circumstances which taught him to feel in himself the very sentiments that he has ascribed to his characters. Shakspeare created the feelings of his, and with such excellence, that they are not only probable to the situations, but give to the personifications the individuality of living persons. Byron’s are scarcely less so; but with him there was no invention, only experience, and when he attempts to express more than he has himself known, he is always comparatively feeble.
Byron determines to reside abroad—Visits the Plain of Waterloo—State of his Feelings
From different incidental expressions in his correspondence it is sufficiently evident that Byron, before his marriage, intended to reside abroad. In his letter to me of the 11th December, 1813, he distinctly states this intention, and intimates that he then thought of establishing his home in Greece. It is not therefore surprising that, after his separation from Lady Byron, he should have determined to carry this intention into effect; for at that period, besides the calumny heaped upon him from all quarters, the embarrassment of his affairs, and the retaliatory satire, all tended to force him into exile; he had no longer any particular tie to bind him to England.
On the 25th of April, 1816, he sailed for Ostend, and resumed the composition of Childe Harold, it may be said, from the moment of his embarkation. In it, however, there is no longer the fiction of an imaginary character stalking like a shadow amid his descriptions and reflections——he comes more decidedly forwards as the hero in his own person.
In passing to Brussels he visited the field of Waterloo, and the slight sketch which he has given in the poem of that eventful conflict is still the finest which has yet been written on the subject.
But the note of his visit to the field is of more importance to my present purpose, inasmuch as it tends to illustrate the querulous state of his own mind at the time.
“I went on horseback twice over the field, comparing it with my recollection of similar scenes. As a plain, Waterloo seems marked out for the scene of some great action, though this may be mere imagination. I have viewed with attention those of Platea, Troy, Mantinea, Leuctra, Chævronæ, and Marathon, and the field round Mont St Jean and Hugoumont appears to want little but a better cause and that indefinable but impressive halo which the lapse of ages throws around a celebrated spot, to vie in interest with any or all of these, except perhaps the last-mentioned.”
The expression “a better cause,” could only have been engendered in mere waywardness; but throughout his reflections at this period a peevish ill-will towards England is often manifested, as if he sought to attract attention by exasperating the national pride; that pride which he secretly flattered himself was to be augmented by his own fame.
I cannot, in tracing his travels through the third canto, test the accuracy of his descriptions as in the former two; but as they are all drawn from actual views they have the same vivid individuality impressed upon them. Nothing can be more simple and affecting than the following picture, nor less likely to be an imaginary scene:
By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground,
There
is a small and simple pyramid,
Crowning the summit
of the verdant mound;
Beneath its base are heroes’
ashes hid,
Our enemies. And let not that
forbid
Honour to Marceau, o’er whose early
tomb
Tears, big tears, rush’d from the
rough soldier’s lid,
Lamenting and yet
envying such a doom,
Falling for France, whose rights he battled
to resume.
Perhaps few passages of descriptive poetry excel that in which reference is made to the column of Avenches, the ancient Aventicum. It combines with an image distinct and picturesque, poetical associations full of the grave and moral breathings of olden forms and hoary antiquity.
By a lone wall, a lonelier column rears
A
gray and grief-worn aspect of old days:
’Tis
the last remnant of the wreck of years,
And looks
as with the wild-bewilder’d gaze
Of one
to stone converted by amaze,
Yet still with consciousness;
and there it stands,
Making a marvel that it
not decays,
When the coeval pride of human hands,
Levell’d
Aventicum, hath strew’d her subject lands.
But the most remarkable quality in the third canto is the deep, low bass of thought which runs through several passages, and which gives to it, when considered with reference to the circumstances under which it was written, the serious character of documentary evidence as to the remorseful condition of the poet’s mind. It would be, after what has already been pointed out in brighter incidents, affectation not to say, that these sad bursts of feeling and wild paroxysms, bear strong indications of having been suggested by the wreck of his domestic happiness, and dictated by contrition for the part he had himself taken in the ruin. The following reflections on the unguarded hour, are full of pathos and solemnity, amounting almost to the deep and dreadful harmony of Manfred:
To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind;
All
are not fit with them to stir and toil,
Nor is
it discontent to keep the mind
Deep in its fountain,
lest it overboil
In the hot throng, where we
become the spoil
Of our infection, till too late
and long
We may deplore and struggle with the
coil,
In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong
’Midst
a contentious world, striving where none are strong.
There, in a moment, we may plunge our years
In
fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own
soul, turn all our blood to tears,
And colour
things to come with hues of night;
The race of
life becomes a hopeless flight
To those who walk
in darkness: on the sea,
The boldest steer but
where their ports invite;
But there are wanderers
o’er eternity,
Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor’d
ne’er shall be.
These sentiments are conceived in the mood of an awed spirit; they breathe of sorrow and penitence. Of the weariness of satiety the pilgrim no more complains; he is no longer despondent from exhaustion, and the lost appetite of passion, but from the weight of a burden which he cannot lay down; and he clings to visible objects, as if from their nature he could extract a moral strength.
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion
of that around me; and to me,
High mountains
are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities tortures:
I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to
be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Class’d
among creatures, where the soul can flee,
And
with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars,
mingle, and not in vain.
These dim revelations of black and lowering thought are overshadowed with a darker hue than sorrow alone could have cast. A consciousness of sinful blame is evident amid them; and though the fantasies that loom through the mystery, are not so hideous as the guilty reveries in the weird caldron of Manfred’s conscience, still they have an awful resemblance to them. They are phantoms of the same murky element, and, being more akin to fortitude than despair, prophesy not of hereafter, but oracularly confess suffering.
Manfred himself hath given vent to no finer horror than the oracle that speaks in this magnificent stanza:
I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I
have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d
To
its idolatries a patient knee—
Nor coin’d
my cheek to smiles—nor cried aloud
In worship
of an echo;—in the crowd
They could not
deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but
not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were
not of their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind,
which thus itself subdued.
There are times in life when all men feel their sympathies extinct, and Lord Byron was evidently in that condition, when he penned these remarkable lines; but independently of their striking beauty, the scenery in which they were conceived deserves to be considered with reference to the sentiment that pervades them. For it was amid the same obscure ravines, pine-tufted precipices and falling waters of the Alps, that he afterward placed the outcast Manfred—an additional corroboration of the justness of the remarks which I ventured to offer, in adverting to his ruminations in contemplating, while yet a boy, the Malvern hills, as if they were the scenes of his impassioned childhood. In “the palaces of nature,” he first felt the consciousness of having done some wrong, and when he would infuse into another, albeit in a wilder degree, the feelings he had himself felt, he recalled the images which had ministered to the cogitations of his own contrition. But I shall have occasion to speak more of this, when I come to consider the nature of the guilt and misery of Manfred.
That Manfred is the greatest of Byron’s works will probably not be disputed. It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character. How then, it may be asked, does this moral phantom, that has never been, bear any resemblance to the poet himself? Must not, in this instance, the hypothesis which assigns to Byron’s heroes his own sentiments and feelings be abandoned? I think not. In noticing the deep and solemn reflections with which he was affected in ascending the Rhine, and which he has embodied in the third canto of Childe Harold, I have already pointed out a similarity in the tenour of the thoughts to those of Manfred, as well as the striking acknowledgment of the “filed” mind. There is, moreover, in the drama, the same distaste of the world which Byron himself expressed when cogitating on the desolation of his hearth, and the same contempt of the insufficiency of his genius and renown to mitigate contrition—all in strange harmony with the same magnificent objects of sight. Is not the opening soliloquy of Manfred the very echo of the reflections on the Rhine?
My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep,
But a continuance
of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not; in my heart
There
is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within—and yet
I live and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing man.
But the following is more impressive: it is the very phrase he would himself have employed to have spoken of the consequences of his fatal marriage:
My in juries came down on those who lov’d me,
On those
whom I best lov’d; I never quell’d
An enemy, save in
my just defence—
But my embrace was fatal.
He had not, indeed, been engaged in any duel of which the issue was mortal; but he had been so far engaged with more than one, that he could easily conceive what it would have been to have quelled an enemy in just defence. But unless the reader can himself discern, by his sympathies, that there is the resemblance I contend for, it is of no use to multiply instances. I shall, therefore, give but one other extract, which breathes the predominant spirit of all Byron ‘s works—that sad translation of the preacher’s “vanity of vanities; all is vanity!”
Look on me! there is an order
Of mortals on
the earth, who do become
Old in their youth and die ere middle
age,
Without the violence of warlike death;
Some perishing
of pleasure—some of study—
Some worn with toil—some
of mere weariness—
Some of disease—and some insanity—
And
some of wither’d or of broken hearts;
For this last is a
malady which slays
More than are number’d in the lists of
Fate;
Taking all shapes, and bearing many names.
Look upon
me! for even of all these things
Have I partaken—and of all
these things
One were enough; then wonder not that I
Am what
I am, but that I ever was,
Or, having been, that I am still on
earth.
Byron’s Residence in Switzerland—Excursion to the Glaciers—“Manfred” founded on a magical Sacrifice, not on Guilt—Similarity between Sentiments given to Manfred and those expressed by Lord Byron in his own Person
The account given by Captain Medwin of the manner in which Lord Byron spent his time in Switzerland, has the raciness of his Lordship’s own quaintness, somewhat diluted. The reality of the conversations I have heard questioned, but they relate in some instances to matters not generally known, to the truth of several of which I can myself bear witness; moreover they have much of the poet’s peculiar modes of thinking about them, though weakened in effect by the reporter. No man can give a just representation of another who is not capable of putting himself into the character of his original, and of thinking with his power and intelligence. Still there are occasional touches of merit in the feeble outlines of Captain Medwin, and with this conviction it would be negligence not to avail myself of them.
“Switzerland,” said his Lordship, “is a country I have been satisfied with seeing once; Turkey I could live in for ever. I never forget my predilections: I was in a wretched state of health and worse spirits when I was at Geneva; but quiet and the lake, better physicians than Polidori, soon set me up. I never led so moral a life as during my residence in that country; but I gained no credit by it. Where there is mortification there ought to be reward. On the contrary, there is no story so absurd that they did not invent at my cost. I was watched by glasses on the opposite side of the lake, and by glasses, too, that must have had very distorted optics; I was waylaid in my evening drives. I believe they looked upon me as a man-monster.
“I knew very few of the Genevese. Hentsh was very civil to me, and I have a great respect for Sismondi. I was forced to return the civilities of one of their professors by asking him and an old gentleman, a friend of Gray’s, to dine with me I had gone out to sail early in the morning, and the wind prevented me from returning in time for dinner. I understand that I offended them mortally.
“Among our countrymen I made no new acquaintances; Shelley, Monk Lewis, and Hobhouse were almost the only English people I saw. No wonder; I showed a distaste for society at that time, and went little among the Genevese; besides, I could not speak French. When I went the tour of the lake with Shelley and Hobhouse, the boat was nearly wrecked near the very spot where St Preux and Julia were in danger of being drowned. It would have been classical to have been lost there, but not agreeable.”
The third canto of Childe Harold, Manfred, and The Prisoner of Chillon are the fruits of his travels up the Rhine and of his sojourn in Switzerland. Of the first it is unnecessary to say more; but the following extract from the poet’s travelling memorandum-book, has been supposed to contain the germ of the tragedy
“September 22, 18 16.—Left Thun in a boat, which carried us the length of the lake in three hours. The lake small, but the banks fine; rocks down to the water’s edge: landed at Newhouse; passed Interlachen; entered upon a range of scenes beyond all description or previous conception; passed a rock bearing an inscription; two brothers, one murdered the other; just the place for it. After a variety of windings, came to an enormous rock; arrived at the foot of the mountain (the Jungfrau) glaciers; torrents, one of these nine hundred feet, visible descent; lodge at the curate’s; set out to see the valley; heard an avalanche fall like thunder; glaciers; enormous storm comes on thunder and lightning and hail, all in perfection and beautiful. The torrent is in shape, curving over the rock, like the tail of the white horse streaming in the wind, just as might be conceived would be that of the pale horse on which Death is mounted in the Apocalypse: it is neither mist nor water, but a something between both; its immense height gives a wave, a curve, a spreading here, a condensation there, wonderful, indescribable
“September 23.—Ascent of the Wingren, the dent d’argent shining like truth on one side, on the other the clouds rose from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring-tide. It was white and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance; the side we ascended was of course not of so precipitous a nature; but on arriving at the summit, we looked down on the other side upon a boiling sea of cloud dashing against the crag on which we stood. Arrived at the Greenderwold, mounted and rode to the higher glacier, twilight, but distinct, very fine; glacier like a frozen hurricane; starlight beautiful; the whole of the day was fine, and, in point of weather, as the day in which Paradise was made. Passed whole woods of withered pines, all withered, trunks stripped and lifeless, done by a single winter.”
Undoubtedly in these brief and abrupt but masterly touches, hints for the scenery of Manfred may be discerned, but I can perceive nothing in them which bears the least likelihood to their having influenced the conception of that sublime work.
There has always been from the first publication of Manfred, a strange misapprehension with respect to it in the public mind. The whole poem has been misunderstood, and the odious supposition that ascribes the fearful mystery and remorse of a hero to a foul passion for his sister, is probably one of those coarse imaginations which have grown out of the calumnies and accusations heaped upon the author. How can it have happened that none of the critics have noticed that the story is derived from the human sacrifices supposed to have been in use among the students of the black art?
Manfred is represented as being actuated by an insatiable curiosity—a passion to know the forbidden secrets of the world. The scene opens with him at his midnight studies—his lamp is almost burned out—and he has been searching for knowledge and has not found it, but only that
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest
o’er the fatal truth,
The tree of knowledge is not that of
life.
Philosophy and science and the springs
Of wonder, and
the wisdom of the world
I have essayed, and in my mind there is,
A
power to make these subject to itself.
He is engaged in calling spirits; and, as the incantation proceeds, they obey his bidding, and ask him what he wants; he replies, “forgetfulness.”
FIRST SPIRIT
Of what—of whom—and why?
MANFRED
Of that which is within me; read it there——
Ye know
it, and I cannot utter it.
SPIRIT
We can but give thee that which we possess;—
Ask of us
subjects, sovereignty, the power
O’er earth, the whole or
portion, or a sign
Which shall control the elements, whereof
We
are the dominators. Each and all—
These shall be thine.
MANFRED
Oblivion, self oblivion—
Can ye not
wring from out the hidden realms
Ye offer so profusely, what I
ask?
SPIRIT
It is not in our essence, in our skill,
But—thou may’st
die.
MANFRED
Will death bestow it on me?
SPIRIT
We are immortal, and do not forget;
We are eternal, and to us
the past
Is as the future, present. Art thou answer’d?
MANFRED
Ye mock me, but the power which brought ye here
Hath made you
mine. Slaves! scoff not at my will;
The mind, the spirit,
the Promethean spark,
The lightning of my being is as bright,
Pervading
and far darting as your own,
And shall not yield to yours though
coop’d in clay.
Answer, or I will teach you what I am.
SPIRIT
We answer as we answer’d. Our reply
Is even in thine
own words.
MANFRED
Why say ye so?
SPIRIT
If, as thou say’st, thine essence be as ours,
We have
replied in telling thee the thing
Mortals call death hath naught
to do with us.
MANFRED
I then have call’d you from your realms in vain.
This impressive and original scene prepares the reader to wonder why it is that Manfred is so desirous to drink of Lethe. He has acquired dominion over spirits, and he finds, in the possession of the power, that knowledge has only brought him sorrow. They tell him he is immortal, and what he suffers is as inextinguishable as his own being: why should he desire forgetfulness?—Has he not committed a great secret sin? What is it?—He alludes to his sister, and in his subsequent interview with the witch we gather a dreadful meaning concerning her fate. Her blood has been shed, not by his hand nor in punishment, but in the shadow and occultations of some unutterable crime and mystery.
She was like me in lineaments; her eyes,
Her hair, her features,
all to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to
mine,
But soften’d all and temper’d into beauty.
She
had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden
knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe; nor these
Alone,
but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears,
which I had not;
And tenderness—but that I had for her;
Humility,
and that I never had:
Her faults were mine—her virtues were
her own;
I lov’d her and—destroy’d her—
WITCH
With thy hand?
MANFRED
Not with my hand, but heart, which broke her heart.
It gaz’d
on mine, and withered. I have shed
Blood, but not hers, and
yet her blood was shed;—
I saw, and could not stanch it.
There is in this little scene, perhaps, the deepest pathos ever expressed; but it is not of its beauty that I am treating; my object in noticing it here is, that it may be considered in connection with that where Manfred appears with his insatiate thirst of knowledge, and manacled with guilt. It indicates that his sister, Astarte, had been self-sacrificed in the pursuit of their magical knowledge. Human sacrifices were supposed to be among the initiate propitiations of the demons that have their purposes in magic—as well as compacts signed with the blood of the self-sold. There was also a dark Egyptian art, of which the knowledge and the efficacy could only be obtained by the novitiate’s procuring a voluntary victim—the dearest object to himself and to whom he also was the dearest; {241} and the primary spring of Byron’s tragedy lies, I conceive, in a sacrifice of that kind having been performed, without obtaining that happiness which the votary expected would be found in the knowledge and power purchased at such a price. His sister was sacrificed in vain. The manner of the sacrifice is not divulged, but it is darkly intimated to have been done amid the perturbations of something horrible.
Night after night for years
He hath pursued
long vigils in this tower
Without a witness.—I have been
within it—
So have we all been ofttimes; but from it,
Or
its contents, it were impossible
To draw conclusions absolute of
aught
His studies tend to.—To be sure there is
One chamber
where none enter—. . .
Count Manfred was, as now, within
his tower:
How occupied—we know not—but with him,
The
sole companion of his wanderings
And watchings—her—whom
of all earthly things
That liv’d, the only thing he seem’d
to love.
With admirable taste, and its thrilling augmentation of the horror, the poet leaves the deed which was done in that unapproachable chamber undivulged, while we are darkly taught, that within it lie the relics or the ashes of the “one without a tomb.”
State of Byron in Switzerland—He goes to Venice—The fourth Canto of “Childe Harold”—Rumination on his own Condition—Beppo—Lament of Tasso—Curious Example of Byron’s metaphysical Love
The situation of Lord Byron in Switzerland was comfortless. He found that “the montain palaces of Nature” afforded no asylum to a haunted heart; he was ill at ease with himself, even dissatisfied that the world had not done him enough of wrong to justify his misanthropy.
Some expectation that his lady would repent of her part in the separation probably induced him to linger in the vicinity of Geneva, the thoroughfare of the travelling English, whom he affected to shun. If it were so, he was disappointed, and, his hopes being frustrated, he broke up the establishment he had formed there and crossed the Alps. After visiting some of the celebrated scenes and places in the north of Italy he passed on to Venice, where he domiciled himself for a time.
During his residence at Venice Lord Byron avoided as much as possible any intercourse with his countrymen. This was perhaps in some degree necessary, and it was natural in the state of his mind. He had become an object of great public interest by his talents; the stories connected with his domestic troubles had also increased his notoriety, and in such circumstances he could not but shrink from the inquisition of mere curiosity. But there was an insolence in the tone with which he declares his “utter abhorrence of any contact with the travelling English,” that can neither be commended for its spirit, nor palliated by any treatment he had suffered. Like Coriolanus he may have banished his country, but he had not, like the Roman, received provocation: on the contrary, he had been the aggressor in the feuds with his literary adversaries; and there was a serious accusation against his morals, or at least his manners, in the circumstances under which Lady Byron withdrew from his house. It was, however, his misfortune throughout life to form a wrong estimate of himself in everything save in his poetical powers.
A life in Venice is more monotonous than in any other great city; but a man of genius carries with him everywhere a charm, which secures to him both variety and enjoyment. Lord Byron had scarcely taken up his abode in Venice, when he began the fourth canto of Childe Harold, which he published early in the following year, and dedicated to his indefatigable friend Mr Hobhouse by an epistle dated on the anniversary of his marriage, “the most unfortunate day,” as he says, “of his past existence.”
In this canto he has indulged his excursive moralizing beyond even the wide licence he took in the three preceding parts; but it bears the impression of more reading and observation. Though not superior in poetical energy, it is yet a higher work than any of them, and something of a more resolved and masculine spirit pervades the reflections, and endows, as it were, with thought and enthusiasm the aspect of the things described. Of the merits of the descriptions, as of real things, I am not qualified to judge: the transcripts from the tablets of the author’s bosom he has himself assured us are faithful.
“With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line, which every one seemed determined not to perceive: like the Chinese, in Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World, whom nobody would believe to be a Chinese, it was in vain that I asserted and imagined that I had drawn a distinction between the author and the pilgrim; and the very anxiety to preserve this difference, and the disappointment at finding it unavailing, so far crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to abandon it altogether—and have done so.”
This confession, though it may not have been wanted, gives a pathetic emphasis to those passages in which the poet speaks of his own feelings. That his mind was jarred, and out of joint, there is too much reason to believe; but he had in some measure overcome the misery that clung to him during the dismal time of his sojourn in Switzerland, and the following passage, though breathing the sweet and melancholy spirit of dejection, possesses a more generous vein of nationality than is often met with in his works, even when the same proud sentiment might have been more fitly expressed: