by Thomas Moore
His agreement, in some other features of character, with Petrarch, I have already had occasion to remark; and if it be true, as is often surmised, that Byron’s want of a due reverence for Shakspeare arose from some latent and hardly conscious jealousy of that poet’s fame, a similar feeling is known to have existed in Petrarch towards Dante; and the same reason assigned for it, — that from the living he had nothing to fear, while before the shade of Dante he might have reason to feel humbled, — is also not a little applicable in the case of Lord Byron.
[Footnote 1: Some passages in Foscolo’s Essay on Petrarch may be applied, with equal truth, to Lord Byron. — For instance, “It was hardly possible with Petrarch to write a sentence without portraying himself”— “Petrarch, allured by the idea that his celebrity would magnify into importance all the ordinary occurrences of his life, satisfied the curiosity of the world,” &c. &c. — and again, with still more striking applicability,— “In Petrarch’s letters, as well as in his Poems and Treatises, we always identify the author with the man, who felt himself irresistibly impelled to develope his own intense feelings. Being endowed with almost all the noble, and with some of the paltry passions of our nature, and having never attempted to conceal them, he awakens us to reflection upon ourselves while we contemplate in him a being of our own species, yet different from any other, and whose originality excites even more sympathy than admiration.”]
[Footnote 2: “II Petrarca poteva credere candidamente ch’ei non pativa d’invidia solamente, perché fra tutti i viventi non v’era chi non s’arretrasse per cedergli il passo alla prima gloria, ch’ei non poteva sentirsi umiliato, fuorchè dall’ ombra di Dante.”]
Between the dispositions and habits of Alfieri and those of the noble poet of England, no less remarkable coincidences might be traced; and the sonnet in which the Italian dramatist professes to paint his own character contains, in one comprehensive line, a portrait of the versatile author of Don Juan, —
“Or stimandome Achille ed or Tersite.”
By the extract just given from his Journal, it will be perceived that, in Byron’s own opinion, a character which, like his, admitted of so many contradictory comparisons, could not be otherwise than wholly undefinable itself. It will be found, however, on reflection, that this very versatility, which renders it so difficult to fix, “ere it change,” the fairy fabric of his character, is, in itself, the true clue through all that fabric’s mazes, — is in itself the solution of whatever was most dazzling in his might or startling in his levity, of all that most attracted and repelled, whether in his life or his genius. A variety of powers almost boundless, and a pride no less vast in displaying them, — a susceptibility of new impressions and impulses, even beyond the usual allotment of genius, and an uncontrolled impetuosity, as well from habit as temperament, in yielding to them, — such were the two great and leading sources of all that varied spectacle which his life exhibited; of that succession of victories achieved by his genius, in almost every field of mind that genius ever trod, and of all those sallies of character in every shape and direction that unchecked feeling and dominant self-will could dictate.
It must be perceived by all endowed with quick powers of association how constantly, when any particular thought or sentiment presents itself to their minds, its very opposite, at the same moment, springs up there also: — if any thing sublime occurs, its neighbour, the ridiculous, is by its side; — across a bright view of the present or the future, a dark one throws its shadow; — and, even in questions respecting morals and conduct, all the reasonings and consequences that may suggest themselves on the side of one of two opposite courses will, in such minds, be instantly confronted by an array just as cogent on the other. A mind of this structure, — and such, more or less, are all those in which the reasoning is made subservient to the imaginative faculty, — though enabled, by such rapid powers of association, to multiply its resources without end, has need of the constant exercise of a controlling judgment to keep its perceptions pure and undisturbed between the contrasts it thus simultaneously calls up; the obvious danger being that, where matters of taste are concerned, the habit of forming such incongruous juxtapositions — as that, for example, between the burlesque and sublime — should at last vitiate the mind’s relish for the nobler and higher quality; and that, on the yet more important subject of morals, a facility in finding reasons for every side of a question may end, if not in the choice of the worst, at least in a sceptical indifference to all.
In picturing to oneself so awful an event as a shipwreck, its many horrors and perils are what alone offer themselves to ordinary fancies. But the keen, versatile imagination of Byron could detect in it far other details, and, at the same moment with all that is fearful and appalling in such a scene, could bring together all that is most ludicrous and low. That in this painful mixture he was but too true to human nature, the testimony of De Retz (himself an eye-witness of such an event) attests:— “Vous ne pouvez vous imaginer (says the Cardinal) l’horreur d’une grande tempête; — vous en pouvez imaginer aussi pen le ridicule.” But, assuredly, a poet less wantoning in the variety of his power, and less proud of displaying it, would have paused ere he mixed up, thus mockingly, the degradation of humanity with its sufferings, and, content to probe us to the core with the miseries of our fellow-men, would have forborne to wring from us, the next moment, a bitter smile at their baseness.
To the moral sense so dangerous are the effects of this quality, that it would hardly, perhaps, be generalising too widely to assert that wheresoever great versatility of power exists, there will also be found a tendency to versatility of principle. The poet Chatterton, in whose soul the seeds of all that is good and bad in genius so prematurely ripened, said, in the consciousness of this multiple faculty, that he “held that man in contempt who could not write on both sides of a question;” and it was by acting in accordance with this principle himself that he brought one of the few stains upon his name which a life so short afforded time to incur. Mirabeau, too, when, in the legal warfare between his father and mother, he helped to draw up for each the pleadings against the other, was influenced less, no doubt, by the pleasure of mischief than by this pride of talent, and lost sight of the unnatural perfidy of the task in the adroitness with which he executed it.
The quality which I have here denominated versatility, as applied to power, Lord Byron has himself designated by the French word “mobility,” as applied to feeling and conduct; and, in one of the Cantos of Don Juan, has described happily some of its lighter features. After telling us that his hero had begun to doubt, from the great predominance of this quality in her, “how much of Adeline was real,” he says, —
“So well she acted, all and every part,
By turns, — with that vivacious versatility,
Which many people take for want of heart.
They err— ’tis merely what is called mobility,
A thing of temperament and not of art,
Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;
And false — though true; for surely they’re sincerest,
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.”
That he was fully aware not only of the abundance of this quality in his own nature, but of the danger in which it placed consistency and singleness of character, did not require the note on this passage, where he calls it “an unhappy attribute,” to assure us. The consciousness, indeed, of his own natural tendency to yield thus to every chance impression, and change with every passing impulse, was not only for ever present in his mind, but, — aware as he was of the suspicion of weakness attached by the world to any retractation or abandonment of long professed opinions, — had the effect of keeping him in that general line of consistency, on certain great subjects, which, notwithstanding occasional fluctuations and contradictions as to the details of these very subjects, he continued to preserve throughout life. A passage from one of his manuscripts will show how sagaciously he saw the necessity of guarding himself ag
ainst his own instability in this respect. “The world visits change of politics or change of religion with a more severe censure than a mere difference of opinion would appear to me to deserve. But there must be some reason for this feeling; — and I think it is that these departures from the earliest instilled ideas of our childhood, and from the line of conduct chosen by us when we first enter into public life, have been seen to have more mischievous results for society, and to prove more weakness of mind than other actions, in themselves, more immoral.”
The same distrust in his own steadiness, thus keeping alive in him a conscientious self-watchfulness, concurred not a little, I have no doubt, with the innate kindness of his nature, to preserve so constant and unbroken the greater number of his attachments through life; — some of them, as in the instance of his mother, owing evidently more to a sense of duty than to real affection, the consistency with which, so creditably to the strength of his character, they were maintained.
But while in these respects, as well as in the sort of task-like perseverance with which the habits and amusements of his youth were held fast by him, he succeeded in conquering the variableness and love of novelty so natural to him, in all else that could engage his mind, in all the excursions, whether of his reason or his fancy, he gave way to this versatile humour without scruple or check, — taking every shape in which genius could manifest its power, and transferring himself to every region of thought where new conquests were to be achieved.
It was impossible but that such a range of will and power should be abused. It was impossible that, among the spirits he invoked from all quarters, those of darkness should not appear, at his bidding, with those of light. And here the dangers of an energy so multifold, and thus luxuriating in its own transformations, show themselves. To this one great object of displaying power, — various, splendid, and all-adorning power, — every other consideration and duty were but too likely to be sacrificed. Let the advocate but display his eloquence and art, no matter what the cause; — let the stamp of energy be but left behind, no matter with what seal. Could it have been expected that from such a career no mischief would ensue, or that among these cross-lights of imagination the moral vision could remain undisturbed? Is it to be at all wondered at that in the works of one thus gifted and carried away, we should find, — wholly, too, without any prepense design of corrupting on his side, — a false splendour given to Vice to make it look like Virtue, and Evil too often invested with a grandeur which belongs intrinsically but to Good?
Among the less serious ills flowing from this abuse of his great versatile powers, — more especially as exhibited in his most characteristic work, Don Juan, — it will be found that even the strength and impressiveness of his poetry is sometimes not a little injured by the capricious and desultory flights into which this pliancy of wing allures him. It must be felt, indeed, by all readers of that work, and particularly by those who, being gifted with but a small portion of such ductility themselves, are unable to keep pace with his changes, that the suddenness with which he passes from one strain of sentiment to another, — from the frolic to the sad, from the cynical to the tender, — begets a distrust in the sincerity of one or both moods of mind which interferes with, if not chills, the sympathy that a more natural transition would inspire. In general such a suspicion would do him injustice; as, among the singular combinations which his mind presented, that of uniting at once versatility and depth of feeling was not the least remarkable. But, on the whole, favourable as was all this quickness and variety of association to the extension of the range and resources of his poetry, it may be questioned whether a more select concentration of his powers would not have afforded a still more grand and precious result. Had the minds of Milton and Tasso been thus thrown open to the incursions of light, ludicrous fancies, who can doubt that those solemn sanctuaries of genius would have been as much injured as profaned by the intrusion? — and it is at least a question whether, if Lord Byron had not been so actively versatile, so totally under the dominion of
“A fancy, like the air, most free,
And full of mutability,”
he would not have been less wonderful, perhaps, but more great.
Nor was it only in his poetical creations that this love and power of variety showed itself: — one of the most pervading weaknesses of his life may be traced to the same fertile source. The pride of personating every description of character, evil as well as good, influenced but too much, as we have seen, his ambition, and, not a little, his conduct; and as, in poetry, his own experience of the ill effects of passion was made to minister materials to the workings of his imagination, so, in return, his imagination supplied that dark colouring under which he so often disguised his true aspect from the world. To such a perverse length, indeed, did he carry this fancy for self-defamation, that if (as sometimes, in his moments of gloom, he persuaded himself,) there was any tendency to derangement in his mental conformation, on this point alone could it be pronounced to have manifested itself. In the early part of my acquaintance with him, when he most gave way to this humour, — for it was observable afterwards, when the world joined in his own opinion of himself, he rather shrunk from the echo, — I have known him more than once, as we have sat together after dinner, and he was, at the time, perhaps, a little under the influence of wine, to fall seriously into this sort of dark and self-accusing mood, and throw out hints of his past life with an air of gloom and mystery designed evidently to awaken curiosity and interest. He was, however, too promptly alive to the least approaches of ridicule not to perceive, on these occasions, that the gravity of his hearer was only prevented from being disturbed by an effort of politeness, and he accordingly never again tried this romantic mystification upon me. From what I have known, however, of his experiments upon more impressible listeners, I have little doubt that, to produce effect at the moment, there is hardly any crime so dark or desperate of which, in the excitement of thus acting upon the imaginations of others, he would not have hinted that he had been guilty; and it has sometimes occurred to me that the occult cause of his lady’s separation from him, round which herself and her legal adviser have thrown such formidable mystery, may have been nothing more, after all, than some imposture of this kind, some dimly hinted confession of undefined horrors, which, though intended by the relater but to mystify and surprise, the hearer so little understood him as to take in sober seriousness.
[Footnote 1: We have seen how often, in his Journals and Letters, this suspicion of his own mental soundness is intimated. A similar notion, with respect to himself, seems to have taken hold also of the strong mind of Johnson, who, like Byron, too, was disposed to attribute to an hereditary tinge that melancholy which, as he said, “made him mad all his life, at least not sober.” This peculiar feature of Johnson’s mind has, in the late new edition of Boswell’s Life of him, given rise to some remarks, pregnant with all the editor’s well known acuteness, which, as bearing on a point so important in the history of the human intellect, will be found worthy of all attention.
In one of the many letters of Lord Byron to myself, which I have thought right to omit, I find him tracing this supposed disturbance of his own faculties to the marriage of Miss Chaworth;— “a marriage,” he says, “for which she sacrificed the prospects of two very ancient families, and a heart which was hers from ten years old, and a head which has never been quite right since.”]
[Footnote 2: In his Diary of 1814 there is a passage (vol. ii. page .) which I had preserved solely for the purpose of illustrating this obliquity of his mind, intending, at the same time, to accompany it with an explanatory note. From some inadvertence, however, the note was omitted; and, thus left to itself, this piece of mystification has, with the French readers of the work, I see, succeeded most perfectly; there being no imaginable variety of murder which the votaries of the new romantic school have not been busily extracting out of the mystery of that passage.]
This strange propensity with which the man was, as it were, inoculate
d by the poet, re-acted back again upon his poetry, so as to produce, in some of his delineations of character, that inconsistency which has not unfrequently been noticed by his critics, — namely, the junction of one or two lofty and shining virtues with “a thousand crimes” altogether incompatible with them; this anomaly being, in fact, accounted for by the two different sorts of ambition that actuated him, — the natural one, of infusing into his personages those high and kindly qualities he felt conscious of within himself, and the artificial one, of investing them with those crimes which he so boyishly wished imputed to him by the world.
Independently, however, of any such efforts towards blackening his own name, and even after he had learned from bitter experience the rash folly of such a system, there was still, in the openness and over-frankness of his nature, and that indulgence of impulse with which he gave utterance to, if not acted upon, every chance impression of the moment, more than sufficient to bring his character, in all its least favourable lights, before the world. Who is there, indeed, that could bear to be judged by even the best of those unnumbered thoughts that course each other, like waves of the sea, through our minds, passing away unuttered, and, for the most part, even unowned by ourselves? — Yet to such a test was Byron’s character throughout his whole life exposed. As well from the precipitance with which he gave way to every impulse as from the passion he had for recording his own impressions, all those heterogeneous thoughts, fantasies, and desires that, in other men’s minds, “come like shadows, so depart,” were by him fixed and embodied as they presented themselves, and, at once, taking a shape cognizable by public opinion, either in his actions or his words, either in the hasty letter of the moment, or the poem for all time, laid open such a range of vulnerable points before his judges, as no one individual perhaps ever before, of himself, presented.
