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 theFare-thee-welland theAnathema 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 isThe 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 ofRokebyfor the leading incidents ofThe 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 ofThe Corsairis 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 ofThe 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 againSaw more than marks the crowd of vulgar men:They gaze and marvel how, and still confessThat 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 revealsThe 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 hueAt times attracted, yet perplex’d the view,As if within that murkiness of mindWork’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 defyThe full encounter of his searching eye;He had the skill, when cunning gaze to seekTo 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 betraySome secret thought, than drag that chief’s to day.
There was a laughing devil in his sneerThat raised emotions both of rage and fear;And where his frown of hatred darkly fellHope 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 inThe Giaour.
There is a war, a chaos of the mindWhen 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 inChilde Harold, and fiery inThe Giaour. To the safe and shop-resorting inhabitants of Christendom,The Corsairseems 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 ofThe 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 asThe 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 inThe Corsairthan inChilde 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 afterThe Corsair, is an evident supplement to it; the description of the hero corresponds in person and character with Conrad; so that the remarks made onThe Corsairapply, in all respects, toLara. 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 streamThe 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 highThe 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 makeIn 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 delightTo 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 browUnfelt, 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 vaultsThat 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 suppliesAnd lies like truth, and still most truly lies;He wand’ring mused, and as the moonbeam shoneThrough the dim lattice o’er the floor of stone,And the high-fretted roof and saints that thereO’er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer;Reflected in fantastic figures grewLike life, but not like mortal life to view;His bristling locks of sable, brow of gloom,And the wide waving of his shaken plumeGlanced like a spectre’s attributes, and gaveHis 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 ofChilde 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 forbidHonour to Marceau, o’er whose early tombTears, 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 rearsA 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 gazeOf 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 ofManfred:
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 mindDeep in its fountain, lest it overboilIn the hot throng, where we become the spoilOf our infection, till too late and longWe 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 yearsIn fatal penitence, and in the blightOf 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 flightTo 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 becomePortion of that around me; and to me,High mountains are a feeling, but the humOf human cities tortures: I can seeNothing to loathe in nature, save to beA link reluctant in a fleshly chain,Class’d among creatures, where the soul can flee,And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plainOf 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’dTo its idolatries a patient knee—Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles—nor cried aloudIn worship of an echo;—in the crowdThey could not deem me one of such; I stoodAmong them, but not of them; in a shroudOf 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.
ThatManfredis the greatest of Byron’s works will probably not be disputed. It has more than the fatal mysticism ofMacbeth, with the satanic grandeur of theParadise 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 heartThere is a vigil, and these eyes but closeTo look within—and yet I live and bearThe 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’dAn 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 orderOf mortals on the earth, who do becomeOld 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 slaysMore than are number’d in the lists of Fate;Taking all shapes, and bearing many names.Look upon me! for even of all these thingsHave I partaken—and of all these thingsOne were enough; then wonder not that IAm 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 ofChilde Harold,Manfred, andThe Prisoner of Chillonare 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
“September22, 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
“September23.—Ascent of the Wingren, thedent d’argentshining 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 ofManfred, 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 mostMust mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,The tree of knowledge is not that of life.Philosophy and science and the springsOf wonder, and the wisdom of the worldI 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 powerO’er earth, the whole or portion, or a signWhich shall control the elements, whereofWe are the dominators. Each and all—These shall be thine.
MANFRED
Oblivion, self oblivion—Can ye not wring from out the hidden realmsYe 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 pastIs as the future, present. Art thou answer’d?
MANFRED
Ye mock me, but the power which brought ye hereHath 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 replyIs 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 thingMortals 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 toneEven 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 mindTo comprehend the universe; nor theseAlone, 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 shedBlood, 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 yearsHe hath pursued long vigils in this towerWithout a witness.—I have been within it—So have we all been ofttimes; but from it,Or its contents, it were impossibleTo draw conclusions absolute of aughtHis studies tend to.—To be sure there isOne 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 wanderingsAnd watchings—her—whom of all earthly thingsThat 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 ofChilde 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’sCitizen 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: