by Will Durant
The same doctor quotes him as saying, “Let not my body be sent to England. Here let my bones molder. Lay me in the first corner without pomp or nonsense.”155
On April 15, after another convulsion, he allowed the doctors to bleed him again. They took two pounds of blood, and, two hours later, another. He died on April 19, 1824. The unusually incompetent autopsy showed uremia—the poisonous accumulation, in the blood, of elements that should have been eliminated in the urine. There was no sign of syphilis, but much evidence that repeated bleedings and strong cathartics had been the final causes of death. The brain was one of the largest ever recorded—710 grams above the top range for normal men.156 Perhaps years of sexual excess, and alternate periods of heavy eating and reckless fasts, had weakened the body’s resources against strain, anxiety, and miasmic air.
News of the death did not reach London till May 14. Hobhouse brought it to Augusta Leigh; the two broke down together. Hobhouse then turned to the problem of Byron’s secret memoirs. Moore had sold these for two thousand guineas to Murray, who was tempted to send them to the press despite warning from his chief adviser, William Gifford, that (in Hobhouse’s words) they were “fit only for the brothel, and would doom Lord Byron to everlasting infamy if published.”157 Murray and Hobhouse proposed to destroy the manuscript; Moore protested, but agreed to let Mrs. Leigh decide; she asked that it be burned; it was done. Moore returned two thousand guineas to Murray.
Byron’s old servant, Fletcher, insisted that his master, shortly before death, had expressed a wish to be buried in England. The Greek authorities and populace protested, but they had to be content with parts of the viscera removed before embalming. The body, preserved in 180 gallons of spirits, reached London on June 29. A request was made to the authorities of Westminster Abbey to let the corpse be buried in the Poets’ Corner there; permission was refused. On July 9–10 the public was allowed to view the coffined remains; many people came, very few of note; but some dignitaries allowed their empty carriages to take part in the procession that carried the corpse from London, July 12–15, to Nottingham. From a window Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley saw the funeral move by. Farther along it passed an open carriage bearing Caroline Lamb; her husband, riding ahead, learned the name of the dead, but did not, till days later, reveal it to his wife. On July 16 the poet was buried in the vault of his ancestors, beside his mother, in the parish church of Hucknall Torkard, a village near Newstead Abbey.
XVII. SURVIVORS
Of those who had played a part in Byron’s drama, most survived far into the next epoch of history. Soonest to pass was Pietro Gamba; after escorting his hero’s body to London he returned to Greece, remained faithful to the revolution, and died there of fever in 1827. —Lady Caroline Lamb became “very ill” when her husband told her that Byron’s corpse had passed her; she had satirized him in a novel, Glenarvon (1816), but now she said, “I am very sorry I ever said one unkind word against him.”158 She survived him by less than four years. —Augusta Leigh inherited, by Byron’s will, nearly all (some one hundred thousand pounds) that remained of his fortune; spent most of it paying the gambling debts of her husband and her sons, and died in poverty in 1852.159 —Lady Byron kept to the end some tenderness for the man whose inherited devils had cursed her marriage; “As long as I live,” she wrote, “my chief difficulty will probably be not to remember him too kindly.”160 “Can I not be believed when, after all which I have disclosed, I say there was a higher better being in that breast throughout, … one which he was always defying, but never could destroy?”161 Their daughter Ada, on whose development Byron had set such hopes, married the second Earl of Lovelace, lost a fortune gambling on horses, was saved from financial disaster by her mother, lost hope and health, and died, like her father, at the age of thirty-six (1852); Lady Byron, trying to fill her lonely life with social services, died in 1860.
John Cam Hobhouse entered Parliament as a radical, rose to be secretary at war (1832–33), became a baron, and died in 1869 at the age of eightythree. Teresa Guiccioli, after Byron’s death, returned to her husband, but soon applied for, and received, a second separation. She had brief affairs with Byron’s lame friend Henry Fox, and with Byron’s admirer the French poet Lamartine. Falling with light grace from suitor to suitor, she married, at forty-seven, the wealthy and amiable Marquis de Boissy, who (according to a slightly prejudiced English view) proudly introduced her as “my wife, the former mistress of Byron.” When the Marquis died she took up spiritualism, talked with the spirits of Byron and her late husband, and reported that “they are together now, and are the best of friends.”162 She died in 1873, aged seventy-two, after writing several books portraying Byron as an almost flawless genius and gentleman. —Claire Clairmont died in 1879, aged eighty-one, carrying to the end a view of Byron as “the merest compound of vanity, folly, and every miserable weakness that ever met together in one human being.”163
Mary Shelley, despite some hurts, kept a more favorable view of “Albé” (as his circle had nicknamed Byron); when she learned of his death she wrote: “Albé—the dear, capricious, fascinating Albé—has left this desert world! God grant that I may die young!”164 She spent much of her remaining twenty-seven years editing her husband’s works with love and care, and a quiet eloquence of her own.
Leigh Hunt, who had dared to praise Shelley’s poetry when nearly all critics condemned it as the vagaries of an unfinished adolescence, remained faithful to his youthful radicalism, wrote hostile memories of Byron, and lasted till 1859. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, after outliving various infatuations, married Williams’ widow Jane, and lived with her the last thirty-five years of his life. The most remarkable of these epigoni was Edward John Trelawny, who came into Shelley’s life at Pisa, when both were entering their thirtieth year. Shelley was nearing his end, Trelawny had still fiftynine years to live. But already this “knight-errant, … dark, handsome, and mustachioed” (as Hunt described him), had had so many adventures, in so many countries, that his reminiscences never bored his new friends. Though Byron made him master of the horse and of Bolivar, it was Shelley, this “mild-mannered, beardless boy,” whom this man of action learned most to love. After seeing Byron safely arrived but immobilized at Missolonghi, he went off to seek his own fate, expecting to die in the cause of Greece. He saw Greece liberated, resumed his wandering, lived till 1881, and was buried in the grave that he had bought in 1822, next to Shelley’s ashes in the English cemetery at Rome.
CHAPTER XXIII
England’s Neighbors
1789–1815
I. THE SCOTS
THEY had been under British rule since the Union of 1707, enjoying freedom of movement and trade within the island, but never reconciled to government by a distant Parliament in whose House of Commons Scotland’s 1,800,000 souls were represented by forty-five delegates against the 513 representing the 10,164,000 population of England and Wales. Of the Scottish members, fifteen were appointed by self-perpetuating and corrupt town councils whose members were chosen by a total of 1,220 electors in all the boroughs. The remaining thirty were elected by the rural counties on a franchise limited to influential landholders; so the county of Bute, with 14,000 inhabitants, had twenty-one voters, and all the counties together had 2,405.1 Most of the successful candidates had been selected by the great nobles of the old and spacious estates. Feudalism had been abolished throughout Scotland in 1748, but poverty remained, since greed and inequality are in the structure of man. By and large, Scotland, like England, accepted this form of representative government as the best that could be established among a people fondly tied to tradition, and too harassed by daily needs to acquire the knowledge and experience needed for voting intelligently on national issues.
Religion was stronger than the state. The Sabbath was a day of somber worship and remembrance of sin; the clergy preached Adam’s fall, a personal Devil, and a vengeful God; and the congregations were more hardened in doctrine and morals than their pastors. David Deans, in The Heart o
f Midlothian, is sure that a girl who goes to a dance will go to hell.2
Nevertheless Scotland was in many ways ahead of England. She had a national system of really public schools: every parish was required to maintain a school where boys and girls together were taught reading and arithmetic. For this instruction the parents paid two shillings per quarter-year per student; and for two shillings more the student would get a touch of Latin. The children of paupers were paid for by the parish, and when the parish was too widespread to gather its children together, an itinerant schoolmaster brought some schooling to each section in turn. The teachers were strictly subject to the parish clergy, and were expected to help in transmitting a terrifying theology; for the elders had found that Calvinism was an economical way of installing a sheriff in every soul. A goodly number of undaunted spirits survived to produce the Scottish Enlightenment in the generation before the French Revolution, and to continue it, somewhat subdued, in the age of Napoleon.
Scotland was proud of its universities, at St. Andrews (founded in 1410), Glasgow (1451), Aberdeen (1494), and Edinburgh (1583). These considered themselves superior in many respects to Oxford and Cambridge, and some modern scholars admit the claim;3 in medical instruction the University of Edinburgh was the acknowledged leader.4 The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, was by common consent the most brilliant periodical in Great Britain, and the brave liberal lawyer Thomas Erskine (1750–1823) outshone nearly all other advocates before the London bar. It must be acknowledged, however, that when it came to suppressing freedom of thought—especially when this favored revolutionary France—no English jurist could rival the Scotch. Otherwise the intellectual climate in Edinburgh and Glasgow continued to favor the freedom that had protected David Hume, William Robertson, James Boswell, Robert Burns, and Adam Smith. We are told that not only the students but the entire intelligentsia of Edinburgh were to be seen taking notes at Dugald Stewart’s lectures on philosophy.
Stewart is almost forgotten today outside Scotland; but one of the stateliest monuments in Edinburgh is a small classic temple erected to his memory. He followed Thomas Reid in subjecting the skeptical conclusions of Hume and the mechanistic psychology of David Hartley to the scrutiny of “common sense.”5 He rejected metaphysics as a vain attempt of the mind to fathom the nature of the mind. (Only Baron Munchausen could pull himself up by his bootstraps.) In place of metaphysics Stewart proposed inductive psychology, which would practice patient and precise observation of mental processes without pretending to explain mind itself. Stewart was a man of wit and style, who gave acute accounts of wit, fancy dreams, and the poetic faculty. (His country was still a fount of loving songs, and some of the tenderest tunes that warmed our youth came from the banks and braes of Scotland.)
James Mill—though he surfeited his son with education—was a man of good will and spacious intellect. Son of a shoemaker, he won honors in Greek at the University of Edinburgh. Having graduated, he moved to London, lived dangerously by journalism, married, and begot a son whom he named after his M.P. friend John Stuart. Between 1806 and 1818 he wrote a History of British India which contained so convincingly documented a critique of misrule that it advanced major reforms in the government of India.
Meanwhile (1808) he met Jeremy Bentham, and enthusiastically accepted the utilitarian proposal that ethical and political customs and concepts should be judged according to their ability to advance the happiness of mankind. Overflowing with energy and ideas, Mill made himself the apostle of Bentham to Britain. For the fourth (1810), fifth (1815), and sixth (1820) editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (itself a Scottish enterprise) he wrote articles—on government, jurisprudence, prison reform, education, and freedom of the press—which, republished, won wide circulation and influence. These essays, and his contributions to the Westminster Review, became a force in the movement that led to the Reform Act of 1832. Under such leadership the British radicals turned from total revolution to progressive reform through a government based on a widening franchise and a utilitarian philosophy. In Elements of Political Economy (1821) Mill warned against letting population grow faster than capital, and proposed taxation of the “unearned increment”—the laborless rise in the value of land. In an Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) he sought to explain all mental operations through the association of ideas. And in 1835, a year before his death, he published a Fragment on Mackintosh.
Sir James Mackintosh continued the Scottish education of England. After acquiring the tools of thought at the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh, he migrated to London (1788). Soon he thrilled to the news that a popular uprising had captured the Bastille; in 1790 he resented Edmund Burke’s hostile Reflections on the French Revolution; and in 1791 he answered that historic diatribe with Vindiciae Gallicae, a vindication of Gallic democracy. The twenty-six-year-old philosopher saw, in the early stages of the cataclysm, the noble voice and fruit of a humanitarian philosophy; whereas the threatened monarchies were not, as Burke supposed, the tested wisdom of tradition and experience but the chaotic residue of haphazard institutions, unforeseen events, and patchwork repairs.
All the governments that now exist in the world (except the United States of America) have been fortuitously formed…. It was certainly not to be presumed that these fortuitous governments should have surpassed the works of intellect…. It was time that men should learn to tolerate nothing ancient that reason does not respect, and to shrink from no novelty to which reason may conduct. It was time that the human powers… should mark the commencement of a new era in history by giving birth to the art of improving government, and increasing the civil happiness of man.6
As the Revolution declined from the ideals of philosophers to the chaotic tyranny of terrified men, Mackintosh revised his theorems, and adjusted himself to the social forces impinging upon him. His lectures on “The Laws of Nature and of Nations” (1799) discoursed, in a way that would have pleased Burke, on how social organization can generate—in the individual’s development—habits of action and judgments of conscience which acquire all the appearance of being innate; so the adult, through civilization, is a product not of nature only but of nurture as well. —In his final years Mackintosh wrote, from original researches and documents, a History of the Revolution in England (1832).
We may judge from these instances that Scottish civilization was not resting on its past glories at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. Agriculture was prospering, especially in the Lowlands. There, too, the textile mills were busy, and Robert Owen was opening up new visions of human cooperation. Glasgow was proud of its scientists, and Edinburgh was throbbing with lawyers, doctors, and clergymen in the van of their time. In art Sir Henry Raeburn was painting portraits that made him the Reynolds of Scotland. In literature Boswell was publishing (1791) that inexhaustible fountain of delight, The Life of Samuel Johnson; and at Abbotsford on the Tweed, mediating between ancient enemies, singing melodious lays, and writing world-famous novels to pay debts only partly his own, was the finest Scot and gentleman of them all.
Walter Scott was by temperament well suited to be a leader in the Romantic flowering of British literature, for he liked to think of himself as descended from the Scottish border chieftains whose feuds and wars had provided stirring matter for the ballads that were fed him in his childhood. His immediate ancestors, however, were an Edinburgh solicitor and the daughter of a professor of medicine in the University of Edinburgh. He was born there in 1771, one of twelve children, six of whom, after the custom of that time, died in infancy. In his eighteenth month he was stricken with poliomyelitis, which left him permanently lame in his right leg. Byron’s kindred disability may have helped Scott to maintain an undiscourageable friendship with the younger poet through all divergences of morals and belief.
After attending Edinburgh’s Old College, Scott began a five-year apprenticeship in law under his father, and in 1792 he was admitted as an advocate to the Scottish bar. His marriage with Charlotte Charp
entier (1797) and a legacy from his father (1799) gave him a comfortable income. He was sociable and likable, and won many influential friends, through whom, in 1806, he was appointed clerk of session at Edinburgh. The emoluments of office, and some bequests from relatives, allowed him to neglect, and soon abandon, his law practice in order to indulge his taste for literature.
A chance meeting with Robert Burns, a fondness for Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and an acquaintance with the lyrics—especially Lenore—of Gottfried Bürger, refreshed his adolescent interest in old British ballads. In 1802–03 he brought out, in three volumes, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Stimulated by these lively tales, he tried his own hand at the form, and in 1805 he issued The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Its sale was a landmark in the annals of British poetry. When he went to London in 1807 he found himself the lord of the salons. He decided to make literature his profession and almost his business, and began a perilous investment of his time and money in composing, printing, and publishing.
In the rhymed octosyllabic couplets of Coleridge’s Christabel he found an easy medium for his swiftly moving, romantic narratives of love and war, of mystery and the supernatural, in Scottish legend and history. He exploited the new field with Marmion (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), Rokeby (1813), and The Lord of the Isles (1815). He did not claim to be a great poet; he wrote to entertain the public profitably, not to entertain the Muses, who, after all, were weary of epics and hexameters. His readers followed him breathlessly from knight to fair lady to heroic fray; and they sang with zest such interspersed songs as “O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west, / Through all the wide Border his steed was the best.”7 Then, in 1813, Byron issued The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos, and in 1814 The Corsair and Lara. Scott saw his audience leaving border for Oriental mysteries and desperate misanthropes; he recognized that the young lord of Newstead Abbey could outrhyme and outpace the laird of Abbotsford; and in 1814, with Waverley, he turned from poetry to prose, and struck new ore.
