MOORE'S LIFE OF LORD BYRON.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1831.]

WE have read this book with the greatest pleasure. Considered merely as a composition, it deserves to be classed among the best specimens of English prose which our age has produced. It contains, indeed, no single passage equal to two or three which we could select from the Life of Sheridan. But, as a whole, it is immeasurably superior to that work. The style is agreeable, clear, and manly; and when it rises into eloquence, rises without effort or ostentation. Nor is the matter inferior to the manner.

general epistles, meant to be read by a large circle, we expected to find them clever and spirited, but deficient in ease. We looked with vigilance for instances of stiffness in the language, and awkwardness in the transitions. We have been agreeably disappointed; and we must confess, that if the epistolary style of Lord Byron was artificial, it was a rare and admirable instance of that highest art, which cannot be distinguished from nature.

Of the deep and painful interest which this book excites, no abstract can give a just no tion. So sad and dark a story is scarcely to be found in any work of fiction; and we are littl disposed to envy the moralist who can read i without being softened.

It would be difficult to name a book which exhibits more kindness, fairness, and modesty. It has evidently been written, not for the purpose of showing, what, however, it often shows, how well its author can write; but for the pur- The pretty fable by which the Duchess of pose of vindicating, as far as truth will per- Orleans illustrates the character of her son the mit, the memory of a celebrated man who can regent, might, with little change, be applied to no longer vindicate himself. Mr. Moore never Byron. All the fairies, save one, had been bidthrusts himself between Lord Byron and the den to his cradle. All the gossips had been public. With the strongest temptations to profuse of their gifts. One had bestowed noegotism, he has said no more about himself bility, another genius, a third beauty. The than the subject absolutely required. A great malignant elf who had been uninvited came part, indeed the greater part of these volumes, last, and, unable to reverse what her sisters had consists of extracts from the Letters and Jour-done for their favourite, had mixed up a curse nals of Lord Byron; and it is difficult to speak too highly of the skill which has been shown in the selection and arrangement. We will not say that we have not occasionally remarked in these two large quartos an anecdote which should have been omitted, a letter which should have been suppressed, a name which should have been concealed by asterisks; or asterisks which do not answer the purpose of concealing the name. But it is impossible, on a general survey, to deny that the task has been executed with great judgment and great humanity. When we consider the life which Lord Byron had led, his petulance, his irritability, and his communicativeness, we cannot but admire the dexterity with which Mr. Moore has contrived to exhibit so much of the character and opinions of his friend, with so little pain to the feelings of the living.

with every blessing. In the rank of Lerd Byron, in his understanding, in his character, in his very person, there was a strange union of opposite extremes. He was born to all that men covet and admire. But in every one of those eminent advantages which he possessed over others, there was mingled something of misery and debasement. He was sprung from a house, ancient indeed and noble, but degraded and impoverished by a series of crimes and follies, which had attained a scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded had died poor, and, but for merciful judges, would have died upon the gallows. The young peer had great intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound part in his mind. He had naturally a generous and tender heart; but his temper was wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the The extracts from the journals and corres- streets mimicked. Distinguished at once by the pondence of Lord Byron are in the highest de- strength and by the weakness of his intellect, gree valuable--not merely on account of the affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a information which they contain respecting the handsome cripple, he required, if ever man re distinguished man by whom they were written, quired, the firmest and the most judicious trainbut on account, also, of their rare merit as coming. But, capriciously as nature had dealt positions. The Letters, at least those which were sent from Italy, are among the best in our language. They are less affected than those of Pope and Walpole; they have more matter in them than those of Cowper. Knowing that many of them were not written merely for the person to whom they were directed, but were

* Letters and Journals of Lord Byron ; with Notices of Is Life. BY THOMAS MOORE, Esq. 2 vols. 4to. London: 1830.

with him, the relative to whom the office of forming his character was intrusted was more capricious still. She passed from paroxysms of rage to paroxysms of fondness. At one time she stifled him with her caresses, at another time she insulted his deformity. He came into the world, and the world treated him as his mother treated him-sometimes with kindness, sometimes with severity, never with justice. It indulged him without discrimina

tion, and punished him without discrimination. | form any judgment on a transaction which is He was truly a spoiled child; not merely the so imperfectly known to us. It would have spoiled child of his parents, but the spoiled been well if, at the time of the separation, ali child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the those who knew as little about the matter then spoiled child of fame, the spoiled child of so- as we know about it now, had shown that forciety. His first poems were received with a bearance, which, under such circumstances, is contempt which, feeble as they were, they did but common justice. not absolutely deserve. The poem which he published on his return from his travels, was, on the other hand, extolled far above its merits. At twenty-four he found himself on the highest pinnacle of literary fame, with Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and a crowd of other distinguished writers, beneath his feet. There is scarcely an instance in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence.

universally known, and had been legally proved, filled some of the highest offices in the state, and in the army, presided at the meetings of religious and benevolent institutions, were the delight of every society, and the favourites of the multitude, a crowd of moralists went to the theatre, in order to pelt a poor actor for disturbing the conjugal felicity of an alderman? What there was in the circumstances, either of the offender or of the sufferer, to vindicate the zeal of the audience, we could never conceive. It has never been supposed that the situation of an actor is peculiarly favourable to the rigid virtues, or that an alderman enjoys any special immunity from injuries such as that which on this occasion roused the anger of the public. But such is the justice of mankind.

decay of nobler natures, hastened to their re past; and they were right; they did after their kind. It is not every day that the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified by the agonies of such a spirit and the degradation of such a name.

The unhappy man left his country forever. The howl of contumely followed him across the sea, up the Rhine, over the Alps; it gradually waxed fainter; it died away. Those who had raised it began to ask each other, what, after all, was the matter about which they had been so clamorous; and wished to invite back the criminal whom they had just chased from them. His poetry became more popular than it had ever been; and his complaints were read with tears by thousands and tens of thousands who had never seen his face.

He had fixed his home on the shores of the Adriatic, in the most picturesque and interesting of cities, beneath the brightest of skies, and by the brightest of seas. Censoriousness was not the vice of the neighbours whom he had chosen. They were a race corrupted by a bad government and a bad religion; long renowned for skill in the arts of voluptuousness, and tolerant of all the caprices of sensuality. From the public opinion of the country of his adoption he had nothing to dread. With the public opinion of the country of his birth he was at open war. He plunged into wild and desperate excesses, ennobled by no generous or tender sentiment. From his Venetian harem he sent forth volume after volume, full of eloquence, of wit, of pathos, of ribaldry, and of bitter disdain. His health sank under the effects of his intemperance. His hair turned gray. His food ceased to nourish him. A hectic fever withered him up. It seemed that his body and mind were about to perish to

In these cases, the punishment was excessive; but the offence was known and proved. The case of Lord Byron was harder. True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without knowing any thing whatever about the transactions in his family, flew into a violent passion with him, and proceeded to invent stories which might justify its anger. Ten or twenty different accounts of the separation, inconsistent with each other, with themselves, and with common sense, circulated at the same time. What evidence there might be for any one of these, the virtuous people who repeated them neither knew nor cared. For in fact these stories were not the causes, but the effects of the public indignation. They resembled those loathsome slanders which Goldsmith, and other abject libellers of the same class, were in the habit of publishing about Bonaparte-how he poisoned a girl with arsenic, when he was at the military school-gether. how he hired a grenadier to shoot Dessaix at Marengo-how he filled St. Cloud with all the pollutions of Capres. There was a time when anecdotes like these obtained some credence from persons, who, hating the French Emperor without knowing why, were eager to believe any thing which might justify their hatred. Lord Byron fared in the same way. His countrymen were in a bad humour with him. His writings and his character had lost the charm of novelty. He had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is punished more severely; he had been over-praised; he had excited too warm an interest; and the public, with its usual justice, chastised him for its own folly. The attachments of the multitude bear no small resemblance to those of the wanton enchantress in the Arabian Tales, who, when the forty days of her fondness were over, was not content with dismissing her lovers, out condemned them to expiate, in loathsome shapes, and under severe punishments, the crime of having once pleased her too well.

The obloquy which Byron had to endure was such as might well have shaken a more constant mind. The newspapers were filled with lampoons. The theatres shook with execrations. He was excluded from circles where ne had lately been the observed of all observAll those creeping things that riot in the

From this wretched degradation he was in some measure rescued by an attachment, culpable indeed, yet such as, judged by the standard of morality established in the country where he lived, might be called virtuous. But an imagination polluted by vice, a temper imbittered by misfortune, and a frame habituated to the fatal excitement of intoxication, prevented him from fully enjoying the happiness which he might have derived from the purest and most tranquil of his many attachments. Midnight draughts of ardent spirits and Rhenish wines had begun to work the ruin of his fine intellect. His verse lost much of the energy and condensation which had distinguished it. But he would not resign, without a struggle, the empire which he had exercised over the men of his generation. A new dream of ambition arose before him, to be the centre of a literary party; the great mover of an intellectual revolution; to guide the public mind of England from his Italian retreat, as Voltaire had guided the public mind of France from the villa of Ferney. With this hope, as it should seem, he established The Liberal. But powerfully as he had affected the imaginations of his contemporaries, he mistook his own powers, if he hoped to direct their opinions: and he still more grossly mistook his own disposition, if he thought that he could long act

in concert with other men of letters. The plan failed, and failed ignominiously. Angry with himself, angry with his coadjutors, he relinquished it: and turned to another project, the last and the noblest of his life.

of coaches, turn slowly northward, leaving be hind it that cemetery, which had been conse crated by the dust of so many great poets, but of which the doors were closed against all that remained of Byron. We well remember that, on that day, rigid moralists could not re

Two

trious, so unhappy, gifted with such rare gifts,
and tried by such strong temptations. It is
unnecessary to make any reflections. The
history carries its moral with it. Our age has
indeed been fruitful of warnings to the emi-
nent, and of consolations to the obscure.
men have died within our recollection, who at
a time of life at which few people have com-
pleted their education, had raised themselves,
each in his own department, to the height of
glory. One of them died at Longwood, the
other at Missolonghi.

A nation, once the first among the nations, pre-eminent in knowledge, pre-eminent in mi-frain from weeping for one so young, so illuslitary glory, the cradle of philosophy, of eloquence, and of the fine arts, had been for ages bowed down under a cruel yoke. All the vices which tyranny generates-the abject vices which it generates in those who submit to it, the ferocious vices which it generates in those who struggle against it-had deformed the character of that miserable race. The valour which had won the great battle of human civilization, which had saved Europe, and subjugated Asia, lingered only among pirates and robbers. The ingenuity, once so conspicuously displayed in every department of physical and moral science, had been depraved into a timid and servile cunning. On a sudden this degraded people had risen on their oppressors. Discountenanced or betrayed by the surrounding potentates, they had found in themselves something of that which might well supply the place of all foreign assistance -something of the energy of their fathers.

As a man of letters, Lord Byron could not but be interested in the event of this contest. His political opinions, though, like all his opinions, unsettled, leaned strongly towards the side of liberty. He had assisted the Italian insurgents with his purse; and if their struggle against the Austrian government had been prolonged, would probably have assisted them with his sword. But to Greece he was attached by peculiar ties. He had, when young, resided in that country. Much of his most splendid and popular poetry had been inspired by its scenery and by its history. Sick of inaction, degraded in his own eyes by his private vices and by his literary failures, pining for untried excitement and honourable distinction, he carried his exhausted body and his wounded spirit to the Grecian camp.

His conduct in his new situation showed so much vigour and good sense as to justify us in believing, that, if his life had been prolonged, he might have distinguished himself as a soldier and a politician. But pleasure and sorrow had done the work of seventy years upon his delicate frame. The hand of death was on him; he knew it; and the only wish which he uttered was that he might die sword in hand.

This was denied to him. Anxiety, exertion, exposure, and those fatal stimulants which had become indispensable to him, soon stretched him on a ck-bed, in a strange land, amidst strange faces, without one human being that he loved near him. There, at thirty-six, the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century closed his brilliant and miserable

career.

We cannot even now retrace those events without feeling something of what was felt by the nation, when it was first known that the grave had closed over so much sorrow and so much glory;-something of what was felt by those wh: saw the hearse, with its long train

It is always difficult to separate the literary character of a man who lives in our own time from his personal character. It is peculiarly difficult to make this separation in the case of Lord Byron. For it is scarcely too much to say, that Lord Byron never wrote without some reference, direct or indirect, to himself. The interest excited by the events of his life mingles itself in our minds, and probably in the minds of almost all our readers, with the interest which properly belongs to his works. A generation must pass away before it will be pos sible to form a fair judgment of his books, considered merely as books. At present they are not only books, but relics. We will, however, venture, though with unfeigned diffidence, to offer some desultory remarks on his poetry.

His lot was cast in the time of a great literary revolution. That poetical dynasty which had dethroned the successors of Shakspeare and Spenser was, in its turn, dethroned by a race who represented themselves as heirs of the ancient line, so long dispossessed by usurp ers. The real nature of this revolution has not, we think, been comprehended by the great majority of those who concurred in it.

If this question were proposed-wherein especially does the poetry of our times differ from that of the last century? ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would answer, that the poetry of the last century was correct, but cold and mechanical, and that the poetry of our time, though wild and irregular, presented far more vivid images, and excited the passions far more strongly, than that of Parnell, of Addison, or of Pope. In the same mann'r we constantly hear it said, that the poets of the age of Elizabeth had far more genius, but far less correctness, than those of the age of Anne. It seems to be taken for granted, that there is some necessary incompatibility, some antithesis, between correctness and creative power. We rather suspect that this notion arises mere. ly from an abuse of words; and that it has been the parent of many of the fallacies which perplex the science of criticism.

What is meant by correctness in poetry If by correctness be meant the conforming to rules which have their foundation in truth and in the principles of human nature, then correctness is only another name for excel lence. If by correctness be meant the con

forming to rules purely arbitrary, correctness may be another name for dulness and absurdity.

A writer who describes visible objects falsely, and violates the propriety of character-a writer who makes the mountains "nod their drowsy heads" at night, or a dying man take leave of the world with a rant like that of Maximin, may be said, in the high and just sense of the phrase, to write incorrectly. He violates the first great law of his art. His imitation is altogether unlike the thing imiated. The four poets who are most eminently free from incorrectness of this description are Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. They are, therefore, in one sense, and that the best sense, the most correct of poets.

ers. Watt Tinlinn and William of Deloraine are not, it is true, persons of so much dignity as Cato. But the dignity of the persons represented has as little to do with the correctness of poetry as with the correctness of painting. We prefer a gipsy by Reynolds to his majes ty's head on a signpost, and a borderer by Scott to a senator by Addison.

In what sense, then, is the word correctness used by those who say, with the author of the Pursuits of Literature, that Pope was the most correct of English poets, and, that next to Pope, came the late Mr. Gifford? What is the nature and value of that correctness, the praise of which is denied to Macbeth, to Lear, and to Othello, and given to Hoole's translations and to all the Seatonian prize-poems? We can When it is said that Virgil, though he had discover no eternal rule, no rule founded in less genius than Homer, was a more correct reason and in the nature of things, which writer, what sense is attached to the word cor- Shakspeare does not observe much more rectness? Is it meant that the story of the strictly than Pope. But if by correctness be Eneid is developed more skilfully than that meant the conforming to a narrow legislation, of the Odyssey? that the Ronan describes the which, while lenient to the mala in se, multiface of the external world, or he emotions of plies, without the shadow of a reason, the mala the mind, more accurately unan the Greek? prohibita; if by correctness be meant a strict that the characters of Achates and Mnestheus attention to certain ceremonious observances, are more nicely discriminated, and more con- which are no more essential to poetry than sistently supported, than those of Achilles, of etiquette to good government, or than the Nestor, and of Ulysses? The fact incontesta- washings of a Pharisee to devotion; then, asbly is, that for every violation of the funda-suredly, Pope may be a more correct poet than mental laws of poetry, which can be found in Homer, it would be easy to find twenty in Virgil.

Shakspeare; and, if the code were a little altered, Colley Cibber might be a more correct poet than Pope. But it may well be doubted whether this kind of correctness be a merit; nay, whether it be not an absolute fault.

Troilus and Cressida is perhaps of all the plays of Shakspeare that which is commonly considered as the most incorrect. Yet it seems It would be amusing to make a digest of the to us infinitely more correct, in the sound irrational laws which bad critics have framed sense of the term, than what are called the for the government of poets. First in celebrity most correct plays of the most correct drama- and in absurdity stand the dramatic unities of tists. Compare it, for example, with the Iphi- place and time. No human being has ever génie of Racine. We are sure that the Greeks been able to find any thing that could, even by of Shakspeare bear a far greater resemblance courtesy, be called an argument for these unithan the Greeks of Racine, to the real Greeks ties, except that they have been deduced from who besieged Troy; and for this reason, that the general practice of the Greeks. It requires the Greeks of Shakspeare are human beings, no very profound examination to discover that and the Greeks of Racine mere names;-mere the Greek dramas, often admirable as compowords printed in capitals at the head of para-sitions, are, as exhibitions of human characgraphs of declamation. Racine, it is true, would have shuddered at the thought of making Agamemnon quote Aristotle. But of what use is it to avoid a single anachronism, when the whole play is one anachronism-the topics and phrases of Versailles in the camp of Aubs!

ter and human life, far inferior to the English plays of the age of Elizabeth. Every scholar knows that the dramatic part of the Athenian tragedies was at first subordinate to the lyrical part. It would, therefore, have been little less than a miracle if the laws of the Athenian stage had been found to suit plays in which In the sense in which we are now using the there was no chorus. All the great masterword correctness, we think that Sir Walter pieces of the dramatic art have been comSco', Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge, are far posed in direct violation of the unities, and more correct writers than those who are com- could never have been composed if the unities mon.y extolled as the models of correctness-had not been violated. It is clear, for examPope for example, and Addison. The single ple, that such a character as that of Hamlet description of a moonlight night in Pope's could never have been developed within the Iliad contains more inaccuracies than can be limits to which Alfieri confined himself. found in all the Excursion. There is not a such was the reverence of literary men during single scene in Cato in which every thing that the last century for these unities, that Johnson, conduces to poetical illusion-the propriety of who, much to his honour, took the opposite character, of language, of situation, is not side, was, as he says, "frighted at his own te more grossly violated than in any part of the merity;" and "afraid to stand against the au Lay of the Last Minstrel. No man can possi-thorities which might be produced against bly think that the Romans of Addison resem- him."

Yet

b'e the real Romans so closely as the moss- There are other rules of the same kind treoners of Scott resemble the real moss-troop- without end. "Shakspeare," says Rymer.