“On every morrow are we wreathingA flowery band to bind us to the earthSpite of despondence, of the inhuman dearthOf noble natures, of the gloomy days,Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened waysMade for our searching; yes, in spite of all,Some shape of beauty moves away the pallFrom our dark spirits. Such—the sun, the moon,Trees—old and young, sprouting a shady boonFor simple sheep; and such are daffodilsWith the green world they live in; and clear rillsThat for themselves a cooling covert make’Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brakeRich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;And such, too, is the grandeur of the doomsWe have imagined for the mighty dead;All lovely tales that we have heard or read.”
“On every morrow are we wreathingA flowery band to bind us to the earthSpite of despondence, of the inhuman dearthOf noble natures, of the gloomy days,Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened waysMade for our searching; yes, in spite of all,Some shape of beauty moves away the pallFrom our dark spirits. Such—the sun, the moon,Trees—old and young, sprouting a shady boonFor simple sheep; and such are daffodilsWith the green world they live in; and clear rillsThat for themselves a cooling covert make’Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brakeRich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;And such, too, is the grandeur of the doomsWe have imagined for the mighty dead;All lovely tales that we have heard or read.”
“On every morrow are we wreathingA flowery band to bind us to the earthSpite of despondence, of the inhuman dearthOf noble natures, of the gloomy days,Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened waysMade for our searching; yes, in spite of all,Some shape of beauty moves away the pallFrom our dark spirits. Such—the sun, the moon,Trees—old and young, sprouting a shady boonFor simple sheep; and such are daffodilsWith the green world they live in; and clear rillsThat for themselves a cooling covert make’Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brakeRich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;And such, too, is the grandeur of the doomsWe have imagined for the mighty dead;All lovely tales that we have heard or read.”
“On every morrow are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching; yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such—the sun, the moon,
Trees—old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such, too, is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read.”
I might cite page on page from Keats, and yet hold your attention; there is something so beguiling in his witching words; and his pictures are finished—with only one or two or three dashes of his pencil. Thus we come upon—
“Swelling downs, where sweet air stirsBlue harebells lightly, and where prickly furzeBuds lavish gold.”
“Swelling downs, where sweet air stirsBlue harebells lightly, and where prickly furzeBuds lavish gold.”
“Swelling downs, where sweet air stirsBlue harebells lightly, and where prickly furzeBuds lavish gold.”
“Swelling downs, where sweet air stirs
Blue harebells lightly, and where prickly furze
Buds lavish gold.”
And again our ear is caught with—
“Rustle of the reapéd corn,And sweet birds antheming the morn.”
“Rustle of the reapéd corn,And sweet birds antheming the morn.”
“Rustle of the reapéd corn,And sweet birds antheming the morn.”
“Rustle of the reapéd corn,
And sweet birds antheming the morn.”
Well, this young master of song goes to Italy, too—not driven, like Byron, by hue and cry, or like Shelley, restless for change (from Chancellor’s courts) and for wider horizons—but running from the disease which has firm grip upon him, andwhich some three years after Shelley’s going kills the poet of theEndymionat Rome. His ashes lie in the Protestant burial-ground there—under the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius. Every literary traveller goes to see the grave, and to spell out the words he wanted inscribed there:
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Upon that death, Shelley, then living in Pisa, blazed out in theAdonais—the poem making, with theLycidasof Milton, and theIn Memoriamof Tennyson, a triplet of laurel garlands, whose leaves will never fade. Yet those of Shelley have a cold rustle in them—shine as they may:—
“Oh, weep for Adonais—he is dead!Wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep!Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bedThy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keepLike his—a mute and uncomplaining sleep.For he is gone where all things wise and fairDescend. Oh, dream not that the amorous deepWill yet restore him to the vital air;Death feeds on his mute voice and laughs at our despair.“Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick dreams,The passion-winged ministers of thoughtWho were his flocks, whom near the living streamsOf his young spirit he fed, and whom he taughtThe Love which was its music, wander not—Wander no more from kindling brain to brain,But droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lotRound the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,They ne’er will gather strength, or find a home again.”
“Oh, weep for Adonais—he is dead!Wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep!Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bedThy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keepLike his—a mute and uncomplaining sleep.For he is gone where all things wise and fairDescend. Oh, dream not that the amorous deepWill yet restore him to the vital air;Death feeds on his mute voice and laughs at our despair.“Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick dreams,The passion-winged ministers of thoughtWho were his flocks, whom near the living streamsOf his young spirit he fed, and whom he taughtThe Love which was its music, wander not—Wander no more from kindling brain to brain,But droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lotRound the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,They ne’er will gather strength, or find a home again.”
“Oh, weep for Adonais—he is dead!Wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep!Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bedThy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keepLike his—a mute and uncomplaining sleep.For he is gone where all things wise and fairDescend. Oh, dream not that the amorous deepWill yet restore him to the vital air;Death feeds on his mute voice and laughs at our despair.
“Oh, weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep!
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
Like his—a mute and uncomplaining sleep.
For he is gone where all things wise and fair
Descend. Oh, dream not that the amorous deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice and laughs at our despair.
“Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick dreams,The passion-winged ministers of thoughtWho were his flocks, whom near the living streamsOf his young spirit he fed, and whom he taughtThe Love which was its music, wander not—Wander no more from kindling brain to brain,But droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lotRound the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,They ne’er will gather strength, or find a home again.”
“Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick dreams,
The passion-winged ministers of thought
Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
The Love which was its music, wander not—
Wander no more from kindling brain to brain,
But droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne’er will gather strength, or find a home again.”
The weak place in this impassioned commemorative poem lies in its waste of fire upon the heads of those British critics, who—as flimsy, pathetic legends used to run—slew the poet by their savagery. Keats did not range among giants; but he was far too strong a man to die of the gibes of theQuarterly, or the jeers ofBlackwood. Not this; but all along, throughout his weary life—even amid the high airs of Hampstead, where nightingales sang—he sang, too,—
“I have been half in love with easeful Death,Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,To take into the air my quiet breath.”[76]
“I have been half in love with easeful Death,Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,To take into the air my quiet breath.”[76]
“I have been half in love with easeful Death,Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,To take into the air my quiet breath.”[76]
“I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath.”[76]
Keats died in 1821. In that year Shelley was living between Lirici, on the gulf of Spezia, and Pisa. While in this latter city, he was planted fora time at the old Lanfranchi palace, where in the following season very much at the instance and urgence of Shelley, Leigh Hunt came with his six riotous young children, and sometimes made a din—that was new to Byron and most worrisome—in the court of the Lanfranchi house. Out of this Hunt fraternizing and co-working (forecast by the kindly Shelley) was to be built up the success of that famous “Liberal” Journal, dear to the hearts of Shelley and Hunt, of which I have already spoken, and which had disastrous failure; out of this aggregation of disorderly poetic elements grew also the squabbles that gave such harsh color to theReminiscencesof Leigh Hunt.[77]
But other and graver disaster was impending. Shelley loved the sea, and carried with him to the water the same reckless daring which he put into his verse. Upon a summer day of July, 1822, he went with a friend and one boatman for a sail upon the bay of Spezia, not heeding some cautionsthat had been dropped by old seamen, who had seen portents of a storm; and his boat sailed away into the covert of the clouds. Next day there were no tidings, nor the next, nor the next. Finally wreck and bodies came to the shore.
Trelawney, Byron’s friend, tells a grim story of it all—how the dismal truth was carried to the widowed wife, how the body of the drowned poet was burned upon the shore, with heathen libations of oil and wine; how Byron and Hunt both were present at the weird funeral—the blue Mediterranean lapping peacefully upon the beach and the black smoke lifting in great clouds from the pyre and throwing lurid shadows over the silent company. The burial—such as there was of it—took place in that same Protestant graveyard at Rome—just out of the Porta San Paolo—where we were just now witnesses at the burial of Keats.
Shelley made many friendships, and lasting ones. He was wonderfully generous; he visited the sick; he helped the needy; putting himself often into grievous straits for means to give quickly. As he was fine of figure and of feature, so his voice was fine, delicate, penetrative, yet inmoments of great excitement rising to a shrillness that spoiled melody and rasped the ear; so his finer generosities and kindnesses sometimes passed into a rasping indifference or even cruelty toward those nearest him, he feeling that first Westbrookmesalliance, on occasions, like a torture—specially when the presence of the tyrannic, coarse, aggravating sister-in-law was like a poisonous irritant; he—under the teachings of a conscientious father, in his young days—was scarce more than half responsible for his wry life; running to badnesses—on occasions—under good impulses; perhaps marrying that first wife because she wanted to marry him; and quitting her—well—because “she didn’t care.” Intellectually, as well as morally, he was pagan; seeing things in their simplest aspects, and so dealing with them; intense, passionate, borne away in tempests of quick decision, whose grounds he cannot fathom; always beating his wings against the cagements that hem us in; eager to look into those depths where light is blinding and will not let us look; seeming at times to measure by some sudden reach of soul what is immeasurable; butunder the vain uplifts, always reverent, with a dim hope shining fitfully; contemptuous of harassing creeds or any jugglery of forms—of whatever splendid fashionings of mere material, whether robes or rites—and yearning to solve by some strong, swift flight of imagination what is insoluble. There are many reverent steps that go to that little Protestant cemetery—an English greenery upon the borders of the Roman Campagna—where the ashes of Shelley rest and where myrtles grow. And from its neighborhood, between Mount Aventine and the Janiculan heights, one may see reaches of the gleaming Tiber, and the great dome of St. Peter’s lifting against the northern sky, like another tomb, its cross almost hidden in the gray distance.
No such friendship as that whose gleams have shot athwart these latter pages could have been kindled by Byron. No “Adonais” could have been writ for him; he could have melted into no “Adonais” for another; old pirate blood, seething in him, forbade. No wonder he chafed at Hunt’ssqualling children in the Lanfranchi palace;thatliterary partnership finds quick dissolution. He sees on rare occasions an old English friend—he, who has so few! Yet he is in no mood to make new friends. The lambent flames of the Guiccioli romance hover and play about him, making the only counterfeit of a real home which he has ever known. The proud, independent, audacious, lawless living that has been his so long, whether the early charms lie in it or no—he still clings by. His pen has its old force, and the words spin from it in fiery lines; but to pluck the flowers worth the seeking, which he plants in them now, one must go over quaking bogs, and through ways of foulness.
TheChilde Haroldhas been brought to its conclusion long before; its cantos, here and there splendidly ablaze with Nature—its storms, its shadows, its serenities; and the sentiment—now morbid, now jubilant—is always his own, though it beguiles with honeyed sounds, or stabs like a knife.
There have been a multitude of lesser poems, and of dramas which have had their inceptionand their finish on that wild Continental holiday—beginning onLac Lemanand ending at Pisa and Genoa; but his real selfhood—whether of mind or passion—seems to me to come out plainer and sharper in theDon Juanthan elsewhere. There may not be lifts in it, which rise to the romantic levels of the “Pilgrimage;” there may be lack of those interpolated bits of passion, of gloom, of melancholy, which break into the earlier poem. But there is the blaze and crackle of his own mad march of flame; the soot, the cinders, the heat, the wide-spread ashes, and unrest of those fires which burned in him from the beginning were there, and devastated all the virginal purities of his youth (if indeed there were any!) and welded his satanic and his poetic qualities into that seamy, shining, wonderful residue of dirty scoriæ, and of brilliant phosphorescence, which we callDon Juan. From a mere literary point of view there are trails of doggerel in it, which the poet was too indolent to mend, and too proud to exclude. Nor can it ever be done; a revised Byron would be not only a Byron emasculated, but decapitated and devastated. ’Twould lack thelinks that tie it to the humanities which coil and writhe tortuously all up and down his pages. His faults of prosody, or of ethics, or of facts—his welter, at intervals, through a barren splendor of words—are all typical of that fierce, proud, ungovernable, unconventional nature. This leopard will and should carry all his spots. We cannot shrive the man; no chanters or churches can do this; he disdains to be shriven at human hands, or, it would seem, any other hands. The impact of that strong, vigorous nature—through his poems—brings, to the average reader, a sense of force, of brilliancy, of personality, of humanity (if gone astray), which exhilarates, which dashes away a thousand wordy memories of wordy verses, and puts in their place palpitating phrases that throb with life. An infinite capability for eloquent verse; an infinite capability for badnesses! We cannot root out the satanry from the man, or his books, any more than we can root out Lucifer from Milton’s Eden. But we can lament both, and, if need be, fight them.
Whether closer British influence (which usually smote upon him, like sleet on glass)—even ofthat “Ancient Oratory” of Annesley—would have served to whiten his tracks, who shall say? Long ago he had gone out from them, and from parish church and sermon; his hymns were theRanz des Vacheson the heights of theDent de Jaman, and the preachments he heard were the mellowed tones of convent bells—filtering through forest boughs—maybe upon the ear of some hapless Allegra, scathed by birth-marks of a sin that is not her own—conning her beads, and listening and praying!
It was in 1823, when he was living in Genoa—whither he had gone from Pisa (and before this, Ravenna)—that his sympathies were awakened in behalf of the Greeks, who since 1820 had been in revolt against their Turkish taskmasters. He had been already enrolled with those Carbonari—the forerunners of the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis—who had labored in vain for the independence and unity of Italy; and in many a burst of his impassioned song he had showered welcoming praisesupon a Greece that should be free, and with equal passion attuned his verse to the lament—that
“Freedom found no champion and no childSuch as Columbia saw arise when sheSprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled.”
“Freedom found no champion and no childSuch as Columbia saw arise when sheSprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled.”
“Freedom found no champion and no childSuch as Columbia saw arise when sheSprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled.”
“Freedom found no champion and no child
Such as Columbia saw arise when she
Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled.”
How much all this was real and how much only the romanticism of the poet, was now to be proven. And it was certainly with a business-like air that he cut short his littleagacerieswith the Lady Blessington, and pleasant dalliance with the Guiccioli, for a rallying of all his forces—moneyed or other—in the service of that cause for which the brave Marco Bozzaris had fallen, fighting, only three months before. It was in July that he embarked at Genoa for Greece—in a brig which he had chartered, and which took guns and ammunition and $40,000 of his own procurement, with a retinue of attendants—including his trusty Fletcher—besides his friends Trelawney and the Count Gamba. They skirted the west coast of Italy, catching sight of Elba—then famous for its Napoleonic associations—and of Stromboli, whose lurid blaze, reflected upon the sea, startled the admiring poet to a hinted promise—thatthose fires should upon some near day reek on the pages of a Fifth Canto ofChilde Harold.
Mediterranean ships were slow sailers in those days, and it was not until August that they arrived and disembarked at Cephalonia—an island near to the outlet of the Gulf of Corinth, and lying due east from the Straits of Messina. There was a boisterous welcome to the generous and eloquent peer of England; but it was a welcome that showed factional discords. Only across a mile or two of water lay the Isle of Ithaca, full of vague, Homeric traditions, which under other conditions he would have been delighted to follow up; but the torturing perplexities about the distribution of moneys or ammunition, the jealousies of quarrelsome chieftains, the ugly watch over drafts and bills of exchange, and the griping exactions of local money-changers, made all Homeric fancies or memories drift away with the scuds of wind that blew athwart the Ionian seas.
He battled bravely with the cumulating difficulties—sometimes maddened to regret—other times lifted to enthusiasm by the cordial greeting of such a chieftain as Mavrocordatos, or the streetcheers of a band of Suliotes. So months passed, until he embarked again, in equipage of his own, with his own fittings, for Missolonghi, where final measures were to be taken. Meantime he is paying for his ships, paying for his Suliotes, paying for delays, and beset by rival chieftains for his interest, or his stimulating presence, or his more stimulating moneys. On this new but short sea venture he barely escapes capture by a Turkish frigate—is badly piloted among the rocky islets which stud the shores; suffers grievous exposure—coming at last, wearied and weakened, to a new harborage, where welcomes are vociferous, but still wofully discordant. He labors wearily to smooth the troubled waters, his old, splendid allegiance to a free and united Greece suffering grievous quakes, and doubts; and when after months of alternating turbulence and rest there seems promise of positive action, he is smitten by the fever of those low coasts—aggravated by his always wanton exposures. The attack is as sudden as a shot from a gun—under which he staggers and falls, writhing with pain, and I know not what convulsional agonies.
There is undertaken an Italian regimen of cupping and leeching about the brow and temples, from which the bleeding is obstinate, and again and again renewed. But he rallies; attendants are assiduous in their care. Within a day or two he has recovered much of the oldvires vitæ, when on a sudden there is an alarm; a band of mutinous Suliotes, arms in hand, break into his lordship’s apartments, madly urging some trumpery claim for back-pay. Whereupon Byron—showing the old savagery of his ancestors—leaps from his bed, seizes whatever weapon is at hand, and gory—with his bandaged head still trickling blood—he confronts the mutineers; his strength for the moment is all his own again, and they are cowered into submission, their yataghans clinking as they drop to the tiled flooring of his room.
’Twas a scene for Benjamin West to have painted in the spirit of Death on the Pale Horse, or for some later artist—loving bloody “impressions.” However, peace is established. Quiet reigns once more (we count by days only, now). There is a goodly scheme for attack upon the fortress which guards the Gulf of Lepanto (Corinth);the time is set; the guards are ready; the Suliotes are under bidding; the chieftains are (for once) agreed, when, on the 18th, he falters, sinks, murmurs some last words—“Ada—daughter—love—Augusta—” barely caught; doubtfully caught; but it is all—and the poet ofChilde Haroldis gone, and that turbulent, brilliant career hushed in night.
It was on April 19, 1824, that he died. His body was taken home for burial. I saidhome; ’twere better to have said to England, to the family vault, in which his mother had been laid; and at a later day, his daughter, Ada, was buried there beside him, in the old Hucknall-Torkard church. The building is heavy and bald, without the winning picturesqueness that belongs to so many old country churches of Yorkshire. The beatitudes that are intoned under its timbered arch are not born of any rural beatitudes in the surroundings. The town is small, straggly, bricky,[78]and neither church nor hamlet nor neighbors’houses are suffused with those softened tints which verdure, and nice keeping, and mellow sunshine give to so many villages of southern England. Hucknall-Torkard is half way between Nottingham and Newstead, and lies upon that northern road which pushes past Annesley into the region of woods and parks where Sherwood forest once flung its shadows along the aisles in which the bugle notes of master Robin Hood woke the echoes.
But Hucknall-Torkard church is bald and tame. Mr. Winter, in his pleasant descriptive sketch,[79]does indeed give a certain glow to the “grim” tower, and many a delightful touch to the gray surroundings; but even he would inhibit the pressure of the noisy market-folk against the church-yard walls, and their rollicking guffaw. And yet, somehow, the memory of Byron does not seem to me to mate well with either home or church quietudes, and their serenities. Is it not proper and fitting after all that the clangor of a rebellious and fitful world should voice itself near such a grave? Old mossy and ivied towers inwhich church bells are a-chime, and near trees where rooks are cawing with home-sounds, do not marry happily with our memories of Byron.
Best of all if he had been given burial where his heart lies, in that Ætolian country, upon some shaggy fore-land from which could have been seen—one way, Ithaca and the Ionian seas, and to the southward, across the Straits of Lepanto, the woody depths of the Morea, far as Arcadia.
But there is no mending the matter now; he lies beside his harsh Gordon mother in the middle of the flat country of stockings, lace curtains, and collieries.
Another poet, William Lisle Bowles, in a quaint sonnet has versed this Gordon mother’s imaginary welcome to her dead son:—
“Could that mother speak,In thrilling, but with hollow accent weak,She thus might give the welcome of the dead:‘Here rest, my son, with me; the dream is fled;The motley mask, and the great stir is o’er.Welcome to me, and to this silent bed,Where deep forgetfulness succeeds the roarOf life, and fretting passions waste the heart no more!’”
“Could that mother speak,In thrilling, but with hollow accent weak,She thus might give the welcome of the dead:‘Here rest, my son, with me; the dream is fled;The motley mask, and the great stir is o’er.Welcome to me, and to this silent bed,Where deep forgetfulness succeeds the roarOf life, and fretting passions waste the heart no more!’”
“Could that mother speak,In thrilling, but with hollow accent weak,She thus might give the welcome of the dead:‘Here rest, my son, with me; the dream is fled;The motley mask, and the great stir is o’er.Welcome to me, and to this silent bed,Where deep forgetfulness succeeds the roarOf life, and fretting passions waste the heart no more!’”
“Could that mother speak,
In thrilling, but with hollow accent weak,
She thus might give the welcome of the dead:
‘Here rest, my son, with me; the dream is fled;
The motley mask, and the great stir is o’er.
Welcome to me, and to this silent bed,
Where deep forgetfulness succeeds the roar
Of life, and fretting passions waste the heart no more!’”
For many a page now we have spoken intermittently of that extraordinary man and poet—full of power and full of passion, both uncontrolled—whose surroundings we found in that pleasantly undulating Nottingham country where Newstead Abbey piled above its lawn and its silent tarns—half a ruin, and half a home.[80]Nor did Byron ever know a home which showed no ruin—nor ever know a ruin, into which his verse did not nestle as into a home.
We traced him from the keeping of that passionate mother—who smote him through and throughwith her own wrathful spirit—to the days when he uttered the “Idle” songs—coined in the courts of Cambridge—and to those quick succeeding days, when his mad verse maddened English bards and Scotch reviewers. Then came the passages of love—with Mary Chaworth, which was real and vain; with a Milbanke, which was a mockery and ended in worse than mockery; all these experiences whetting the edge of that sword of song with which he carved a road of romance for thousands of after journeymen to travel, through the old Iberian Peninsula, and the vales of Thessaly. Then there was the turning away, in rage, from the shores of England, the episode with the Shelley household on the borders of Lake Leman, with its record of “crag-splitting” storms and sunny siestas; and such enduring memorials as the ghastlyFrankensteinof Mrs. Shelley, the Third Canto ofChilde Harold, and the child-name of—Allegra.
Next came Venice, where the waves lapped murmurously upon the door-steps of the palaces which “Mi-lord” made noisy with his audacious revelry. To this succeeded the long stay at Ravenna,with its pacifying and lingering, reposeful reach of an attachment, which was beautiful in its sincerity, but as lawless as his life. After Ravenna came Pisa with its Hunt-Lanfranchi coruscations of spleen, and its weird interlude of the burning of the body of his poor friend Shelley upon the Mediterranean shores. Song, and drama, and tender verselets, and bagnio-tainted pictures of Don Juan, gleamed with fervid intensity through the interstices of this Italian life; but they all came to a sudden stay when he sailed for Greece, and with a generosity as strong as his wilder passions, flung away his fortune and his life in that vortex of Suliote strifes and deadly miasmas, which was centred amid the swamplands of Missolonghi.
The Cretans of to-day (1897), and the men of Thessaly, and of the Morea, and Albanians all, may find a lift of their ambitions and a spur to their courage in Byron’s sacrifice to their old struggle for liberty, and in his magnificent outburst of patriotic song. So, too, those who love real poetry will never cease to admire his subtle turns of thought, and his superb command of all theresources of language. But the households are few in which his name will be revered as an apostle of those cheering altitudes of thought which encourage high endeavor, or of those tenderer humanities which spur to kindly deeds, and give their glow to the atmosphere of homes.
The last figure that we dealt with among England’s kings was that bluff, vulgar-toned sailor, William IV., whom even the street-folk criticise, because he spat from his carriage window when driving on some State ceremonial.[81]Nor was this the worst of his coarsenesses; he swore—with great ease and pungency. He forgot his dignity; he insulted his ministers; he gave to Queen Adelaide, who survived him many years as dowager, many most uncomfortable half-hours; and if he read the new sea-stories of Captain Marryat—though he read very little—I suspect he lovedmore the spicier condiments ofPeregrine Pickleand ofTom Jones.
Yet during the period of his short reign—scarce seven years—events happened—some through his slow helpfulness, and none suffering grievously from his obstructiveness—which gave new and brighter color to the political development and to the literary growth of England. There was, for instance, the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832 (of which I have already spoken, in connection with Sydney Smith)—not indeed accomplishing all its friends had hoped; not inaugurating a political millennium; not doing away with the harsh frictions of state-craft; no reforms ever do or can; but broadening the outlook and range of all publicists, and stirring quiet thinkers into aggressive and kindling and hopeful speech. Very shortly after this followed the establishment of that old society for the “Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” which came soon to the out-put—under the editorship of Charles Knight—of thePenny Cyclopædiaand thePenny Magazine.[82]
I recall distinctly the delight with which—as boys—we lingered over the pictured pages of that magazine—the great forerunner of all of our illustrated monthlies.
To the same period belong thoseTracts for the Times, in which John Keble, the honored author of theChristian Year, came to new notice, while his associates, Dr. Pusey and Cardinal Newman, gave utterance to speech which is not without reverberating echoes, even now. Nor was it long after this date that British journalism received a great lift, and a great broadening of its forces, by a reduction of the stamp-tax—largely due to the efforts of Bulwer Lytton—whereby British newspapers increased their circulation, within two years, by 20,000,000 annually.[83]
All these things had come about in the reign of William IV.; but to none of them had he given any enthusiastic approval, or any such urgence of attention as would have dislocated a single one of his royal dinners.
In 1837 he died—not very largely sighed over;least of all by that sister-in-law, the Duchess of Kent, whom he had hated for her starched proprieties, whom he had insulted again and again, and who now, in her palace of Kensington, prepared her daughter Victoria for her entrance upon the sovereignty.
The girl was only eighteen—well taught, discreet, and modest. Greville tells us that she was consumed with blushes when her uncles of Sussex and of Cumberland came, with the royal council, to kneel before her, and to kiss her hand in token of the new allegiance.
The old king had died at two o’clock of the morning; and by eleven o’clock on the same day the duties of royalty had begun for the young queen, in receiving the great officers of state. Among the others she meets on that first regal day in Kensington Palace, are Lansdowne, the fidgety Lord Brougham, the courtly Sir Robert Peel, and the spare, trim-looking old Duke of Wellington, who is charmed by her gracious manner, and by her self-control and dignity. He said he couldnot have been more proud of her if she had been his own daughter.
Nearer to the young queen than all these—by old ties of friendship, that always remained unshaken—was the suave and accomplished Lord Melbourne—First Minister—who has prepared the queen’s little speech for her, which she reads with charming self-possession; to him, too, she looks for approval and instruction in all her progress through the new ceremonials of Court, and the ordering of a royal household. And Melbourne is admirably suited to that task; he was not a great statesman; was never an orator, but possessed of all the arts of conciliation—adroit and full of tact, yet kindly, sympathetic, and winning. Not by any means a man beyond reproach in his private life, but bringing to those new offices of political guardianship to the young queen only the soundest good-sense and the wisest of advice—thus inspiring in her a trust that was never forfeited.
Indeed, it was under Melbourne’s encouragements, and his stimulative commendation (if stimulus were needed), that the young princess formedshortly after that marriage relation which proved altogether a happy one—giving to England and to the world shining proof that righteous domesticities were not altogether clean gone from royal houses. And if the good motherly rulings have not had their best issues with some of the male members of the family, can we not match these wry tendencies with those fastening upon the boys of well-ordered households all around us? It is not in royal circles only that his satanic majesty makes friends of nice boys, when the girls escape him—or seem to!
Well, I have gone back to that old palace of Kensington, which still, with its mossy brick walls, in the west of London, baffles the years, and the fogs—the same palace where we went to find William III. dying, and the gracious Queen Anne too; and where now the Marquis of Lorne and the Princess Louise have their home. I have taken you again there to see how the young Victoria bore herself at the news of her accession—with the great councillors of the kingdom about her—not alone because those whom we shall bring to the front, in this closing chapter, have wroughtduring her reign; but because, furthermore, she with her household have been encouragers and patrons of both letters and of art in many most helpful ways; and yet, again, because this queen, who has within this twelve-month (1897) made her new speech to Parliament—sixty years after that first little speech at Kensington—is herself, in virtue of certain modest book-making, to be enrolled with all courtesy in the Guild of Letters. And though the high-stepping critics may be inclined to question the literary judgment or the scrupulous finish of her book-work, we cannot, I think, deny to it a thoroughly humane tone, and a tender realism. We greet her not only by reason of her queenship proper, but for that larger sovereignty of womanhood and of motherhood which she has always dignified and adorned.
I once caught such glimpse of her—as strangers may—in the flush of her early wedded life; not beautiful surely, but comely, kindly, and radiant, in the enjoyment of—what is so rare with sovereigns—a happy home-life; and again I came upon other sight of her eight years later, when the prince was a rollicking boy, and the princess ablooming maiden; these and lesser rosy-cheeked ones were taking the air on the terrace at Windsor, almost in the shadow of the great keep, which has frowned there since the days of Edward III.
In the early days of Queen Victoria’s reign—when Sir Robert Peel was winning his way to the proud position he later held—when American and English politicians were getting into the toils of the “Maine Boundary” dispute (afterward settled by Ashburton and Webster), and when the Countess of Blessington was making “Gore House” lively with her little suppers, and the banker Rogers entertaining allbeaux espritsat his home near the Green Park, there may have been found as guest at one of the banker’s famous breakfasts—somewhere we will say in the year 1838—a man, well-preserved, still under forty—with a shaggy brow, with clothes very likely ill-adjusted and ill-fitting, and with gloves which are never buttoned—who has just come back from India, where he has held lucrative official position. He is cogitating, it is said, a history of England, andhis talk has a fulness and richness that seem inexhaustible.
You know to whom I must refer—Thomas Babington Macaulay[84]—not a new man at Rogers’s table, not a new man to bookish people; for he had won his honors in literature, especially by a first paper on Milton, published in the year 1825 in theEdinburgh Review. This bore a new stamp and had qualities that could not be overlooked. There are scores of us who read that paper for the first time in the impressionable days of youth, who are carried back now by the mere mention of it to the times of the old Puritan poet.
“We can almost fancy that we are visiting him in his small lodging; that we see him sitting at the old organ beneath the faded green hangings; that we can catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to find the day; that we are reading in the lines of his noble countenance the proud and mournful history of his glory and his affliction!”
“We can almost fancy that we are visiting him in his small lodging; that we see him sitting at the old organ beneath the faded green hangings; that we can catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to find the day; that we are reading in the lines of his noble countenance the proud and mournful history of his glory and his affliction!”
Macaulay came of good old Scotch stock—his forefathers counting up patriarchal families inColl and Inverary; but his father, Zachary Macaulay, well known for his anti-slavery action and influence, and for his association with Wilberforce, married an English Quaker girl from Bristol—said to have been aprotégéeof our old friend, Mistress Hannah More. Of this marriage was born, in 1800, at the charming country house of an aunt, named Babington, in the pleasant county of Leicestershire, the future historian.
The father’s first London home was near by Lombard Street, where he managed an African agency under the firm name of Macaulay & Babington; and the baby Macaulay used to be wheeled into an open square near by, for the enjoyment of such winter’s sunshine as fell there at far-away intervals. His boyish memories, however, belonged to a later home at Clapham, then a suburban village. There, was his first schooling, and there he budded out—to the wonderment of all his father’s guests—into young poems and the drollest of precocious talk. His pleasant biographer (Trevelyan) tells of a visit the bright boy made at Strawberry Hill—Walpole’s old showplace. There was a spilling of hot drink of somesort, during the visitation, which came near to scalding the lad; and when the sympathizing hostess asked after his suffering: “Thank you, madam,” said he, “the agony is abated!” The story is delightfully credible; and so are other pleasant ones of his reciting some of his doggerel verses to Hannah More and getting a gracious and approving nod of her gray curls and of her mob-cap.
At Cambridge, where he went at the usual student age, he studied what he would, and discarded what he would—as he did all through his life. For mathematics he had a distinguished repugnance, then and always; and if brought to task by them in those student days—trying hard to twist their certainties into probabilities, and so make them subject to that world of “ifs and buts” which he loved to start buzzing about the ears of those who loved the exact sciences better than he. He missed thus some of the University honors, it is true; yet, up and down in those Cambridge coteries he was a man looked for, and listened to, eagerly and bravely applauded. Certain scholastic honors, too, he did reap, in spite of hislunges outside the traces; there was a medal for his poem ofPompeii; and a Fellowship, at last, which gave him a needed, though small income—his father’s Afric business having proved a failure, and no home moneys coming to him thereafter.
The first writings of Macaulay which had public issue were printed inKnight’s Quarterly Magazine—among them were criticisms on Italian writers, a remarkable imaginary conversation between “Cowley and Milton,” and the glittering, jingling battle verses about the War of the League and stout “Henry of Navarre”—full to the brim of that rush and martial splendor which he loved all his life, and which he brought in later years to his famous re-heralding of theLays of Ancient Rome. A few lines are cited:—
“The King is come to marshal us, in all his armor drest;And he has bound a snow-white plume upon his gallant crest.He looked upon his people, and a tear was in his eye;He looked upon the traitors, and his glance was stern and high.Right graciously he smiled on us, as rolled from wing to wingDown all our line a deafening shout, ‘God save our Lord the King!’And if my standard bearer fall, as fall full well he may,For never saw I promise yet of such a bloody fray;Press where ye see my white plume shine, amidst the ranks of war,And be your oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre!”
“The King is come to marshal us, in all his armor drest;And he has bound a snow-white plume upon his gallant crest.He looked upon his people, and a tear was in his eye;He looked upon the traitors, and his glance was stern and high.Right graciously he smiled on us, as rolled from wing to wingDown all our line a deafening shout, ‘God save our Lord the King!’And if my standard bearer fall, as fall full well he may,For never saw I promise yet of such a bloody fray;Press where ye see my white plume shine, amidst the ranks of war,And be your oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre!”
“The King is come to marshal us, in all his armor drest;And he has bound a snow-white plume upon his gallant crest.He looked upon his people, and a tear was in his eye;He looked upon the traitors, and his glance was stern and high.Right graciously he smiled on us, as rolled from wing to wingDown all our line a deafening shout, ‘God save our Lord the King!’And if my standard bearer fall, as fall full well he may,For never saw I promise yet of such a bloody fray;Press where ye see my white plume shine, amidst the ranks of war,And be your oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre!”
“The King is come to marshal us, in all his armor drest;
And he has bound a snow-white plume upon his gallant crest.
He looked upon his people, and a tear was in his eye;
He looked upon the traitors, and his glance was stern and high.
Right graciously he smiled on us, as rolled from wing to wing
Down all our line a deafening shout, ‘God save our Lord the King!’
And if my standard bearer fall, as fall full well he may,
For never saw I promise yet of such a bloody fray;
Press where ye see my white plume shine, amidst the ranks of war,
And be your oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre!”
On the year after this “Battle of Ivry” had sparkled into print appeared the paper on Milton, to which I have alluded, and which straightway set London doors open to the freshly fledged student-at-law. Crabb Robinson, in his diary of those days, speaks patronizingly of a “young gentleman of six or seven and twenty, who has emerged upon the dinner-giving public,” and is astounding old habitués by his fulness and brilliancy of talk. He had not, to be sure, those lighter and sportive graces of conversation which floated shortly thereafter out from the open windows of Gore House, and had burgeoned under the beaming smiles of Lady Blessington. But he came to be a table match for Sydney Smith, and was honored by the invitations of Lady Holland,[85]who allowed no new find of so brilliant feather to escape her.
Macaulay’s alliance with the Scottish Reviewers, and his known liberalism, make him a pet of the great Whigs; and through Lansdowne, with a helping hand from Melbourne, he found his way into Parliament: there were those who prophesied his failure in that field; I think Brougham in those days, with not a little of jealousy in his make up, was disposed to count him a mere essayist. But his speeches in favor of the Reform bill belied all such auguries. Sir Robert Peel declared them to be wonderful in their grasp and eloquence; they certainly had great weight in furthering reform; and his parliamentary work won presently for him the offer from Government of a place in India. No Oriental glamour allured him, but the new position was worth £10,000 per annum. He countedupon saving the half of this, and returning after five years with a moderate fortune. He did better, however—shortening his period of exile by nearly a twelve-month, and bringing back £30,000.
His sister (who later became Lady Trevelyan) went with him as the mistress of his Calcutta household; and his affectionate and most tender relations with this, as well as with his younger sister, are beautifully set forth in the charming biography by his nephew, Otto Trevelyan. It is a biography that everybody should read; and none can read it, I am sure, without coming to a kindlier estimate of its subject. The home-letters with which it abounds run over with affectionate playfulness. We are brought to no uglypost mortemin the book, and no opening of old sores. It is modest, courteous, discreet, and full.
Macaulay did monumental work in India upon the Penal Code. He also kept up there his voracious habits of reading and study. Listen for a moment to his story of this:
“During the last thirteen months I have read Eschylus, twice; Sophocles, twice; Euripides, once; Pindar, twice; Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, Theocritus, twice; Herodotus,Thucydides, almost all of Xenophon’s works, almost all of Plato, Aristotle’sPolitics, and a good deal of hisOrganon; the whole of Plutarch’s Lives; half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenæus; Plautus, twice; Terence, twice; Lucretius, twice; Catullus, Propertius, Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Sallust, Cæsar, and lastly, Cicero.”
“During the last thirteen months I have read Eschylus, twice; Sophocles, twice; Euripides, once; Pindar, twice; Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, Theocritus, twice; Herodotus,Thucydides, almost all of Xenophon’s works, almost all of Plato, Aristotle’sPolitics, and a good deal of hisOrganon; the whole of Plutarch’s Lives; half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenæus; Plautus, twice; Terence, twice; Lucretius, twice; Catullus, Propertius, Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Sallust, Cæsar, and lastly, Cicero.”
This is his classical list. Of his modern reading he does not tell; yet he was plotting theHistory of England, and the bouncing balladry of theLays of Romewas even then taking shape in the intervals of his study.
His father died while Macaulay was upon his voyage home from India—a father wholly unlike the son, in his rigidities and his Calvinistic asperities; but always venerated by him, and in the latter years of the old gentleman’s life treated with a noble and beautiful generosity.
A short visit to Italy was made after the return from India; and it was in Rome itself that he put some of the last touches to the Lays—staying the work until he could confirm by personal observation the relative sites of the bridge across the Tiber and the home of Horatius upon the Palatine.
You remember the words perhaps; if not, ’twere well you should,—