by Thomas Moore
“THE FAREWELL — TO A LADY.
“When man, expell’d from Eden’s bowers, A moment linger’d near the gate, Each scene recall’d the vanish’d hours, And bade him curse his future fate.
“But wandering on through distant climes, He learnt to bear his load of grief; Just gave a sigh to other times, And found in busier scenes relief.
“Thus, lady, must it be with me, And I must view thy charms no more! For, whilst I linger near to thee, I sigh for all I knew before,” &c. &c.
The other poem is, throughout, full of tenderness; but I shall give only what appear to me the most striking stanzas.
“STANZAS TO —— ON LEAVING ENGLAND.
“’Tis done — and shivering in the gale The bark unfurls her snowy sail; And whistling o’er the bending mast, Loud sings on high the fresh’ning blast; And I must from this land be gone, Because I cannot love but one.
“As some lone bird, without a mate, My weary heart is desolate; I look around, and cannot trace One friendly smile or welcome face, And ev’n in crowds am still alone, Because I cannot love but one.
“And I will cross the whitening foam, And I will seek a foreign home; Till I forget a false fair face, I ne’er shall find a resting-place; My own dark thoughts I cannot shun, But ever love, and love but one.
“I go — but wheresoe’er I flee There’s not an eye will weep for me; There’s not a kind congenial heart, Where I can claim the meanest part; Nor thou, who hast my hopes undone, Wilt sigh, although I love but one.
“To think of every early scene, Of what we are, and what we’ve been, Would whelm some softer hearts with woe — But mine, alas! has stood the blow; Yet still beats on as it begun, And never truly loves but one.
“And who that dear loved one may be Is not for vulgar eyes to see, And why that early love was crost, Thou know’st the best, I feel the most; But few that dwell beneath the sun Have loved so long, and loved but one.
“I’ve tried another’s fetters, too, With charms, perchance, as fair to view; And I would fain have loved as well, But some unconquerable spell Forbade my bleeding breast to own A kindred care for aught but one.
“’Twould soothe to take one lingering view, And bless thee in my last adieu; Yet wish I not those eyes to weep For him that wanders o’er the deep; His home, his hope, his youth, are gone, Yet still he loves, and loves but one.”
While thus, in all the relations of the heart, his thirst after affection was thwarted, in another instinct of his nature, not less strong — the desire of eminence and distinction — he was, in an equal degree, checked in his aspirings, and mortified. The inadequacy of his means to his station was early a source of embarrassment and humiliation to him; and those high, patrician notions of birth in which he indulged but made the disparity between his fortune and his rank the more galling. Ambition, however, soon whispered to him that there were other and nobler ways to distinction. The eminence which talent builds for itself might, one day, he proudly felt, be his own; nor was it too sanguine to hope that, under the favour accorded usually to youth, he might with impunity venture on his first steps to fame. But here, as in every other object of his heart, disappointment and mortification awaited him. Instead of experiencing the ordinary forbearance, if not indulgence, with which young aspirants for fame are received by their critics, he found himself instantly the victim of such unmeasured severity as is not often dealt out even to veteran offenders in literature; and, with a heart fresh from the trials of disappointed love, saw those resources and consolations which he had sought in the exercise of his intellectual strength also invaded.
While thus prematurely broken into the pains of life, a no less darkening effect was produced upon him by too early an initiation into its pleasures. That charm with which the fancy of youth invests an untried world was, in his case, soon dissipated. His passions had, at the very onset of their career, forestalled the future; and the blank void that followed was by himself considered as one of the causes of that melancholy, which now settled so deeply into his character.
“My passions” (he says, in his ‘Detached Thoughts’) “were developed very early — so early that few would believe me if I were to state the period and the facts which accompanied it. Perhaps this was one of the reasons which caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts, — having anticipated life. My earlier poems are the thoughts of one at least ten years older than the age at which they were written, — I don’t mean for their solidity, but their experience. The two first Cantos of Childe Harold were completed at twenty-two; and they are written as if by a man older than I shall probably ever be.”
Though the allusions in the first sentence of this extract have reference to a much earlier period, they afford an opportunity of remarking, that however dissipated may have been the life which he led during the two or three years previous to his departure on his travels, yet the notion caught up by many, from his own allusions, in Childe Harold, to irregularities and orgies of which Newstead had been the scene, is, like most other imputations against him, founded on his own testimony, greatly exaggerated. He describes, it is well known, the home of his poetical representative as a “monastic dome, condemned to uses vile,” and then adds, —
“Where Superstition once had made her den, Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile.”
Mr. Dallas, too, giving in to the same strain of exaggeration, says, in speaking of the poet’s preparations for his departure, “already satiated with pleasure, and disgusted with those companions who have no other resource, he had resolved on mastering his appetites; — he broke up his harams.” The truth, however, is, that the narrowness of Lord Byron’s means would alone have prevented such oriental luxuries. The mode of his life at Newstead was simple and unexpensive. His companions, though not averse to convivial indulgences, were of habits and tastes too intellectual for mere vulgar debauchery; and, with respect to the alleged “harams,” it appears certain that one or two suspected “subintroductæ” (as the ancient monks of the abbey would have styled them), and those, too, among the ordinary menials of the establishment, were all that even scandal itself could ever fix upon to warrant such an assumption.
That gaming was among his follies at this period he himself tells us in the journal I have just cited: —
“I have a notion (he says) that gamblers are as happy as many people, being always excited. Women, wine, fame, the table, — even ambition, sate now and then; but every turn of the card and cast of the dice keeps the gamester alive: besides, one can game ten times longer than one can do any thing else. I was very fond of it when young, that is to say, of hazard, for I hate all card games, — even faro. When macco (or whatever they spell it) was introduced, I gave up the whole thing, for I loved and missed the rattle and dash of the box and dice, and the glorious uncertainty, not only of good luck or bad luck, but of any luck at all, as one had sometimes to throw often to decide at all. I have thrown as many as fourteen mains running, and carried off all the cash upon the table occasionally; but I had no coolness, or judgment, or calculation. It was the delight of the thing that pleased me. Upon the whole, I left off in time, without being much a winner or loser. Since one-and-twenty years of age I played but little, and then never above a hundred, or two, or three.”
To this, and other follies of the same period, he alludes in the following note: —
TO MR. WILLIAM BANKES.
“Twelve o’clock, Friday night.
“My dear Bankes,
“I have just received your note; believe me I regret most sincerely that I was not fortunate enough to see it before, as I need not repeat to you that your conversation for half an hour would have been much more agreeable to me than gambling or drinking, or any other fashionable mode of passing an evening abroad or at home. — I really am very sorry that I went out previous to the arrival of your despatch: in future pray let me hear from you before six, and whatever my engagements may be, I will always postpone them. — Believe me, with that deference which I have alw
ays from my childhood paid to your talents, and with somewhat a better opinion of your heart than I have hitherto entertained,
“Yours ever,” &c.
Among the causes — if not rather among the results — of that disposition to melancholy, which, after all, perhaps, naturally belonged to his temperament, must not be forgotten those sceptical views of religion, which clouded, as has been shown, his boyish thoughts, and, at the time of which I am speaking, gathered still more darkly over his mind. In general we find the young too ardently occupied with the enjoyments which this life gives or promises to afford either leisure or inclination for much enquiry into the mysteries of the next. But with him it was unluckily otherwise; and to have, at once, anticipated the worst experience both of the voluptuary and the reasoner, — to have reached, as he supposed, the boundary of this world’s pleasures, and see nothing but “clouds and darkness” beyond, was the doom, the anomalous doom, which a nature, premature in all its passions and powers, inflicted on Lord Byron.
When Pope, at the age of five-and-twenty, complained of being weary of the world, he was told by Swift that he “had not yet acted or suffered enough in the world to have become weary of it.” But far different was the youth of Pope and of Byron; — what the former but anticipated in thought, the latter had drunk deep of in reality; — at an age when the one was but looking forth on the sea of life, the other had plunged in, and tried its depths. Swift himself, in whom early disappointments and wrongs had opened a vein of bitterness that never again closed, affords a far closer parallel to the fate of our noble poet, as well in the untimeliness of the trials he had been doomed to encounter, as in the traces of their havoc which they left in his character.
That the romantic fancy of youth, which courts melancholy as an indulgence, and loves to assume a sadness it has not had time to earn, may have had some share in, at least, fostering the gloom by which the mind of the young poet was overcast, I am not disposed to deny. The circumstance, indeed, of his having, at this time, among the ornaments of his study, a number of skulls highly polished, and placed on light stands round the room, would seem to indicate that he rather courted than shunned such gloomy associations. Being a sort of boyish mimickry, too, of the use to which the poet Young is said to have applied a skull, such a display might well induce some suspicion of the sincerity of his gloom, did we not, through the whole course of his subsequent life and writings, track visibly the deep vein of melancholy which nature had imbedded in his character.
Such was the state of mind and heart, — as, from his own testimony and that of others, I have collected it, — in which Lord Byron now set out on his indefinite pilgrimage; and never was there a change wrought in disposition and character to which Shakspeare’s fancy of “sweet bells jangled out of tune” more truly applied. The unwillingness of Lord Carlisle to countenance him, and his humiliating position in consequence, completed the full measure of that mortification towards which so many other causes had concurred. Baffled, as he had been, in his own ardent pursuit of affection and friendship, his sole revenge and consolation lay in doubting that any such feelings really existed. The various crosses he had met with, in themselves sufficiently irritating and wounding, were rendered still more so by the high, impatient temper with which he encountered them. What others would have bowed to, as misfortunes, his proud spirit rose against, as wrongs; and the vehemence of this re-action produced, at once, a revolution throughout his whole character, in which, as in revolutions of the political world, all that was bad and irregular in his nature burst forth with all that was most energetic and grand. The very virtues and excellencies of his disposition ministered to the violence of this change. The same ardour that had burned through his friendships and loves now fed the fierce explosions of his indignation and scorn. His natural vivacity and humour but lent a fresher flow to his bitterness, till he, at last, revelled in it as an indulgence; and that hatred of hypocrisy, which had hitherto only shown itself in a too shadowy colouring of his own youthful frailties, now hurried him, from his horror of all false pretensions to virtue, into the still more dangerous boast and ostentation of vice.
The following letter to his mother, written a few days before he sailed, gives some particulars respecting the persons who composed his suit. Robert Rushton, whom he mentions so feelingly in the postscript, was the boy introduced, as his page, in the first Canto of Childe Harold.
LETTER 34. TO MRS. BYRON.
“Falmouth, June 22. 1809.
“Dear Mother,
“I am about to sail in a few days; probably before this reaches you. Fletcher begged so hard, that I have continued him in my service. If he does not behave well abroad, I will send him back in a transport. I have a German servant, (who has been with Mr. Wilbraham in Persia before, and was strongly recommended to me by Dr. Butler, of Harrow,) Robert and William; they constitute my whole suite. I have letters in plenty: — you shall hear from me at the different ports I touch upon; but you must not be alarmed if my letters miscarry. The Continent is in a fine state — an insurrection has broken out at Paris, and the Austrians are beating Buonaparte — the Tyrolese have risen.
“There is a picture of me in oil, to be sent down to Newstead soon. — I wish the Miss P —— s had something better to do than carry my miniatures to Nottingham to copy. Now they have done it, you may ask them to copy the others, which are greater favourites than my own. As to money matters, I am ruined — at least till Rochdale is sold; and if that does not turn out well, I shall enter into the Austrian or Russian service — perhaps the Turkish, if I like their manners. The world is all before me, and I leave England without regret, and without a wish to revisit any thing it contains, except yourself, and your present residence.
“P.S — Pray tell Mr. Rushton his son is well and doing well; so is Murray, indeed better than I ever saw him; he will be back in about a month. I ought to add the leaving Murray to my few regrets, as his age perhaps will prevent my seeing him again. Robert I take with me; I like him, because, like myself, he seems a friendless animal.”
To those who have in their remembrance his poetical description of the state of mind in which he now took leave of England, the gaiety and levity of the letters I am about to give will appear, it is not improbable, strange and startling. But, in a temperament like that of Lord Byron, such bursts of vivacity on the surface are by no means incompatible with a wounded spirit underneath; and the light, laughing tone that pervades these letters but makes the feeling of solitariness that breaks out in them the more striking and affecting.
LETTER 35. TO MR. HENRY DRURY.
“Falmouth, June 25. 1809.
My dear Drury,
“We sail to-morrow in the Lisbon packet, having been detained till now by the lack of wind, and other necessaries. These being at last procured, by this time to-morrow evening we shall be embarked on the vide vorld of vaters, vor all the vorld like Robinson Crusoe. The Malta vessel not sailing for some weeks, we have determined to go by way of Lisbon, and, as my servants term it, to see ‘that there Portingale’ — thence to Cadiz and Gibraltar, and so on our old route to Malta and Constantinople, if so be that Captain Kidd, our gallant commander, understands plain sailing and Mercator, and takes us on our voyage all according to the chart.
“Will you tell Dr. Butler that I have taken the treasure of a servant, Friese, the native of Prussia Proper, into my service from his recommendation. He has been all among the Worshippers of Fire in Persia, and has seen Persepolis and all that.
“H —— has made woundy preparations for a book on his return; 100 pens, two gallons of japan ink, and several volumes of best blank, is no bad provision for a discerning public. I have laid down my pen, but have promised to contribute a chapter on the state of morals, &c. &c.
“The cock is crowing, I must be going, And can no more.”
Ghost of Gaffer Thumb.
“Adieu. — Believe me,” &c. &c.
LETTER 36. TO MR. HODGSON.
“Falmouth, June 25. 1
809.
“My dear Hodgson,
“Before this reaches you, Hobhouse, two officers’ wives, three children, two waiting-maids, ditto subalterns for the troops, three Portuguese esquires and domestics, in all nineteen souls, will have sailed in the Lisbon packet, with the noble Captain Kidd, a gallant commander as ever smuggled an anker of right Nantz.
“We are going to Lisbon first, because the Malta packet has sailed, d’ye see? — from Lisbon to Gibraltar, Malta, Constantinople, and ‘all that,’ as Orator Henley said, when he put the Church, and ‘all that,’ in danger.
“This town of Falmouth, as you will partly conjecture, is no great ways from the sea. It is defended on the sea-side by tway castles, St. Maws and Pendennis, extremely well calculated for annoying every body except an enemy. St. Maws is garrisoned by an able-bodied person of fourscore, a widower. He has the whole command and sole management of six most unmanageable pieces of ordnance, admirably adapted for the destruction of Pendennis, a like tower of strength on the opposite side of the Channel. We have seen St. Maws, but Pendennis they will not let us behold, save at a distance, because Hobhouse and I are suspected of having already taken St. Maws by a coup de main.
“The town contains many Quakers and salt fish — the oysters have a taste of copper, owing to the soil of a mining country — the women (blessed be the Corporation therefor!) are flogged at the cart’s tail when they pick and steal, as happened to one of the fair sex yesterday noon. She was pertinacious in her behaviour, and damned the mayor.
“I don’t know when I can write again, because it depends on that experienced navigator, Captain Kidd, and the ‘stormy winds that (don’t) blow’ at this season. I leave England without regret — I shall return to it without pleasure. I am like Adam, the first convict sentenced to transportation, but I have no Eve, and have eaten no apple but what was sour as a crab; — and thus ends my first, chapter. Adieu.
