by Thomas Moore
“Now, I am willing to do what I can for this unfortunate person; but her situation and her wishes (not unreasonable, however,) require more than can be advanced by one individual like myself; for I have many claims of the same kind just at present, and also some remnants of debt to pay in England — God, he knows, the latter how reluctantly! Can the Literary Fund do nothing for her? By your interest, which is great among the pious, I dare say that something might be collected. Can you get any of her books published? Suppose you took her as author in my place, now vacant among your ragamuffins; she is a moral and pious person, and will shine upon your shelves. But seriously, do what you can for her.”
LETTER 505. TO MR. MURRAY.
“Genoa, 9bre 23. 1822.
“I have to thank you for a parcel of books, which are very welcome, especially Sir Walter’s gift of ‘Halidon Hill.’ You have sent me a copy of ‘Werner,’ but without the preface. If you have published it without, you will have plunged me into a very disagreeable dilemma, because I shall be accused of plagiarism from Miss Lee’s German’s Tale, whereas I have fully and freely acknowledged that the drama is entirely taken from the story.
“I return you the Quarterly Review, uncut and unopened, not from disrespect or disregard or pique, but it is a kind of reading which I have some time disused, as I think the periodical style of writing hurtful to the habits of the mind, by presenting the superfices of too many things at once. I do not know that it contains any thing disagreeable to me — it may or it may not; nor do I return it on account that there may be an article which you hinted at in one of your late letters, but because I have left off reading these kind of works, and should equally have returned you any other number.
“I am obliged to take in one or two abroad, because solicited to do so. The Edinburgh came before me by mere chance in Galignani’s picnic sort of gazette, where he had inserted a part of it.
“You will have received various letters from me lately, in a style which I used with reluctance; but you left me no other choice by your absolute refusal to communicate with a man you did not like upon the mere simple matter of transfer of a few papers of little consequence (except to their author), and which could be of no moment to yourself.
“I hope that Mr. Kinnaird is better. It is strange that you never alluded to his accident, if it be true, as stated in the papers. I am yours, &c. &c.
“I hope that you have a milder winter than we have had here. We have had inundations worthy of the Trent or Po, and the conductor (Franklin’s) of my house was struck (or supposed to be stricken) by a thunderbolt. I was so near the window that I was dazzled and my eyes hurt for several minutes, and everybody in the house felt an electric shock at the moment. Madame Guiccioli was frightened, as you may suppose.
“I have thought since that your bigots would have ‘saddled me with a judgment’ (as Thwackum did Square when he bit his tongue in talking metaphysics), if any thing had happened of consequence. These fellows always forget Christ in their Christianity, and what he said when ‘the tower of Siloam fell.’
“To-day is the 9th, and the 10th is my surviving daughter’s birth-day. I have ordered, as a regale, a mutton chop and a bottle of ale. She is seven years old, I believe. Did I ever tell you that the day I came of age I dined on eggs and bacon and a bottle of ale? For once in a way they are my favourite dish and drinkable, but as neither of them agree with me, I never use them but on great jubilees — once in four or five years or so.
“I see somebody represents the Hunts and Mrs. Shelley as living in my house: it is a falsehood. They reside at some distance, and I do not see them twice in a month. I have not met Mr. Hunt a dozen times since I came to Genoa, or near it.
“Yours ever,” &c.
LETTER 506. TO MR. MURRAY.
“Genoa, 10bre 25°. 1822.
“I had sent you back the Quarterly, without perusal, having resolved to read no more reviews, good, bad, or indifferent; but ‘who can control his fate?’ Galignani, to whom my English studies are confined, has forwarded a copy of at least one half of it in his indefatigable catch-penny weekly compilation; and as, ‘like honour, it came unlooked for,’ I have looked through it. I must say that, upon the whole, that is, the whole of the half which I have read (for the other half is to be the segment of Galignani’s next week’s circular), it is extremely handsome, and any thing but unkind or unfair. As I take the good in good part, I must not, nor will not, quarrel with the bad. What the writer says of Don Juan is harsh, but it is inevitable. He must follow, or at least not directly oppose, the opinion of a prevailing, and yet not very firmly seated, party. A Review may and will direct and ‘turn awry’ the currents of opinion, but it must not directly oppose them. Don Juan will be known by and by, for what it is intended, — a Satire on abuses of the present states of society, and not an eulogy of vice. It may be now and then voluptuous: I can’t help that. Ariosto is worse; Smollett (see Lord Strutwell in vol. 2d of Roderick Random) ten times worse; and Fielding no better. No girl will ever be seduced by reading Don Juan: — no, no; she will go to Little’s poems and Rousseau’s romans for that, or even to the immaculate De Staël. They will encourage her, and not the Don, who laughs at that, and — and — most other things. But never mind — ça irà!
“Now, do you see what you and your friends do by your injudicious rudeness? — actually cement a sort of connection which you strove to prevent, and which, had the Hunts prospered, would not in all probability have continued. As it is, I will not quit them in their adversity, though it should cost me character, fame, money, and the usual et cetera.
“My original motives I already explained (in the letter which you thought proper to show): they are the true ones, and I abide by them, as I tell you, and I told Leigh Hunt when he questioned me on the subject of that letter. He was violently hurt, and never will forgive me at bottom; but I can’t help that. I never meant to make a parade of it; but if he chose to question me, I could only answer the plain truth: and I confess I did not see any thing in the letter to hurt him, unless I said he was ‘a bore,’ which I don’t remember. Had their Journal gone on well, and I could have aided to make it better for them, I should then have left them, after my safe pilotage off a lee shore, to make a prosperous voyage by themselves. As it is, I can’t, and would not, if I could, leave them among the breakers.
“As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinion, between Leigh Hunt and me, there is little or none. We meet rarely, hardly ever; but I think him a good-principled and able man, and must do as I would be done by. I do not know what world he has lived in, but I have lived in three or four; but none of them like his Keats and kangaroo terra incognita. Alas! poor Shelley! how we would have laughed had he lived, and how we used to laugh now and then, at various things which are grave in the suburbs!
“You are all mistaken about Shelley. You do not know how mild, how tolerant, how good he was in society; and as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room, when he liked, and where liked.
“I have some thoughts of taking a run down to Naples (solus, or, at most, cum sola) this spring, and writing, when I have studied the country, a Fifth and Sixth Canto of Childe Harold: but this is merely an idea for the present, and I have other excursions and voyages in my mind. The busts are finished: are you worthy of them?
“Yours, &c. N.B.
“P.S. Mrs. Shelley is residing with the Hunts at some distance from me. I see them very seldom, and generally on account of their business. Mrs. Shelley, I believe, will go to England in the spring.
“Count Gamba’s family, the father and mother and daughter, are residing with me by Mr. Hill (the minister’s) recommendation, as a safer asylum from the political persecutions than they could have in another residence; but they occupy one part of a large house, and I the other, and our establishments are quite separate.
“Since I have read the Quarterly, I shall erase two or three passages in the latter six or seven cantos, in which I had lightly stroked over two or three of yo
ur authors; but I will not return evil for good. I liked what I read of the article much.
“Mr. J. Hunt is most likely the publisher of the new Cantos; with what prospects of success I know not, nor does it very much matter, as far as I am concerned; but I hope that it may be of use to him; he is a stiff, sturdy, conscientious man, and I like him; he is such a one as Prynne or Pym might be. I bear you no ill-will for declining the Don Juans.
“Have you aided Madame de Yossy, as I requested? I sent her three hundred francs. Recommend her, will you, to the Literary Fund, or to some benevolence within your circles.”
LETTER 507. TO LADY —— .
“Albaro, November 10. 1822.
“The Chevalier persisted in declaring himself an ill-used gentleman, and describing you as a kind of cold Calypso, who lead astray people of an amatory disposition without giving them any sort of compensation, contenting yourself, it seems, with only making one fool instead of two, which is the more approved method of proceeding on such occasions. For my part, I think you are quite right; and be assured from me that a woman (as society is constituted in England) who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover, but will sooner or later find a tyrant; and this is not the man’s fault either, perhaps, but is the necessary and natural result of the circumstances of society, which, in fact, tyrannise over the man equally with the woman; that is to say, if either of them have any feeling or honour.
“You can write to me at your leisure and inclination. I have always laid it down as a maxim, and found it justified by experience, that a man and a woman make far better friendships than can exist between two of the same sex; but these with this condition, that they never have made, or are to make, love with each other. Lovers may, and, indeed, generally are enemies, but they never can be friends; because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of self in all their speculations.
“Indeed, I rather look upon love altogether as a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to make or to break matches, and keep the world going, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned.
“Now, as my love perils are, I believe, pretty well over, and yours, by all accounts, are never to begin, we shall be the best friends imaginable, as far as both are concerned, and with this advantage, that we may both fall to loving right and left through all our acquaintance, without either sullenness or sorrow from that amiable passion which are its inseparable attendants.
“Believe me,” &c.
VOLUME VI.
LETTER 508. TO MR. MOORE.
“Genoa, February 20. 1823.
“My Dear Tom,
“I must again refer you to those two letters addressed to you at Passy before I read your speech in Galignani, &c., and which you do not seem to have received.
[Footnote 1: I was never lucky enough to recover these two letters, though frequent enquiries were made about them at the French post-office.]
“Of Hunt I see little — once a month or so, and then on his own business, generally. You may easily suppose that I know too little of Hampstead and his satellites to have much communion or community with him. My whole present relation to him arose from Shelley’s unexpected wreck. You would not have had me leave him in the street with his family, would you? and as to the other plan you mention, you forget how it would humiliate him — that his writings should be supposed to be dead weight! Think a moment — he is perhaps the vainest man on earth, at least his own friends say so pretty loudly; and if he were in other circumstances, I might be tempted to take him down a peg; but not now, — it would be cruel. It is a cursed business; but neither the motive nor the means rest upon my conscience, and it happens that he and his brother have been so far benefited by the publication in a pecuniary point of view. His brother is a steady, bold fellow, such as Prynne, for example, and full of moral, and, I hear, physical courage.
[Footnote 1: The passage in one of my letters to which he here refers shall be given presently.]
“And you are really recanting, or softening to the clergy! It will do little good for you — it is you, not the poem, they are at. They will say they frightened you — forbid it, Ireland!
“Yours ever,
“N.B.”
Lord Byron had now, for some time, as may be collected from his letters, begun to fancy that his reputation in England was on the wane. The same thirst after fame, with the same sensitiveness to every passing change of popular favour, which led Tasso at last to look upon himself as the most despised of writers, had more than once disposed Lord Byron, in the midst of all his triumphs, if not to doubt their reality, at least to distrust their continuance; and sometimes even, with that painful skill which sensibility supplies, to extract out of the brightest tributes of success some omen of future failure, or symptom of decline. New successes, however, still came to dissipate these bodings of diffidence; nor was it till after his unlucky coalition with Mr. Hunt in the Liberal, that any grounds for such a suspicion of his having declined in public favour showed themselves.
[Footnote 1: In one of his letters this poet says:— “Non posso negare che io mi doglio oltramisura di esser stato tanto disprezzato dal mondo quanto non e altro scrittore di questo secolo.” In another letter, however, after complaining of being “perseguitato da molti più che non era convenevole,” he adds, with a proud prescience of his future fame, “Laondé stimo di poter mene ragionevolmente richiamare alla posterità.”]
The chief inducements, on the part of Lord Byron, to this unworthy alliance were, in the first place, a wish to second the kind views of his friend Shelley in inviting Mr. Hunt to join him in Italy; and, in the next, a desire to avail himself of the aid of one so experienced, as an editor, in the favourite project he had now so long contemplated, of a periodical work, in which all the various offspring of his genius might be received fast as they sprung to light. With such opinions, however, as he had long entertained of Mr. Hunt’s character and talents, the facility with which he now admitted him — not certainly to any degree of confidence or intimacy, but to a declared fellowship of fame and interest in the eyes of the world, is, I own, an inconsistency not easily to be accounted for, and argued, at all events, a strong confidence in the antidotal power of his own name to resist the ridicule of such an association.
[Footnote 1: See Letter 317. .]
As long as Shelley lived, the regard which Lord Byron entertained for him extended its influence also over his relations with his friend; the suavity and good-breeding of Shelley interposing a sort of softening medium in the way of those unpleasant collisions which afterwards took place, and which, from what is known of both parties, may be easily conceived to have been alike trying to the patience of the patron and the vanity of the dependent. That even, however, during the lifetime of their common friend, there had occurred some of those humiliating misunderstandings which money engenders, — humiliating on both sides, as if from the very nature of the dross that gives rise to them, — will appear from the following letter of Shelley’s which I find among the papers in my hands.
TO LORD BYRON.
“February 15. 1823.
“My dear Lord Byron.
“I enclose you a letter from Hunt, which annoys me on more than one account. You will observe the postscript, and you know me well enough to feel how painful a task is set me in commenting upon it. Hunt had urged me more than once to ask you to lend him this money. My answer consisted in sending him all I could spare, which I have now literally done. Your kindness in fitting up a part of your own house for his accommodation I sensibly felt, and willingly accepted from you on his part, but, believe me, without the slightest intention of imposing, or, if I could help it, allowing to be imposed, any heavier task on your purse. As it has come to this in spite of my exertions, I will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in the present moment, — that is, my absolute incapacity of assisting Hunt farther.
“I do not think poor Hunt’s promise to pay in a given time is worth very much; but mine is les
s subject to uncertainty, and I should be happy to be responsible for any engagement he may have proposed to you. I am so much annoyed by this subject that I hardly know what to write, and much less what to say; and I have need of all your indulgence in judging both my feelings and expressions.
“I shall see you by and by. Believe me
“Yours most faithfully and sincerely,
“P.B. SHELLEY.”
Of the book in which Mr. Hunt has thought it decent to revenge upon the dead the pain of those obligations he had, in his hour of need, accepted from the living, I am luckily saved from the distaste of speaking at any length, by the utter and most deserved oblivion into which his volume has fallen. Never, indeed, was the right feeling of the world upon such subjects more creditably displayed than in the reception given universally to that ungenerous book; — even those the least disposed to think approvingly of Lord Byron having shrunk back from such a corroboration of their own opinion as could be afforded by one who did not blush to derive his authority, as an accuser, from those facilities of observation which he had enjoyed by having been sheltered and fed under the very roof of the man whom he maligned.
With respect to the hostile feeling manifested in Mr. Hunt’s work towards myself, the sole revenge I shall take is, to lay before my readers the passage in one of my letters which provoked it; and which may claim, at least, the merit of not being a covert attack, as throughout the whole of my remonstrances to Lord Byron on the subject of his new literary allies, not a line did I ever write respecting either Mr. Shelley or Mr. Hunt which I was not fully prepared, from long knowledge of my correspondent, to find that he had instantly, and as a matter of course, communicated to them. That this want of retention was a fault in my noble friend, I am not inclined to deny; but, being undisguised, it was easily guarded against, and, when guarded against, harmless. Besides, such is the penalty generally to be paid for frankness of character; and they who could have flattered themselves that one so open about his own affairs as Lord Byron would be much more discreet where the confidences of others were concerned, would have had their own imprudence, not his, to blame for any injury that their dependence upon his secrecy had brought on them.
