The Life of Lord Byron
Introduction
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THE
LIFE OF LORD BYRON.
INTRODUCTION.
My present task is one of considerable difficulty; but I have long
had a notion that some time or another it would fall to my lot to perform it. I approach it,
therefore, without apprehension, entirely in consequence of having determined, to my own
satisfaction, the manner in which the biography of so singular and so richly endowed a
character as that of the late Lord Byron should be treated,
but still with no small degree of diffidence; for there is a wide difference between
determining a rule for oneself, and producing, according to that rule, a work which shall
please the public.
It has happened, both with regard to the man and the poet, that from the first
time his name came before the public, there has been a vehement and continual controversy
concerning him; and the chief difficulties of the task arise out of the heat with which the
adverse parties have maintained their respective opinions. The circumstances in which he was
placed, until his accession to the title and estates of his ![]()
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ancestors, were
not such as to prepare a boy that would be father to a prudent or judicious man. Nor, according
to the history of his family, was his blood without a taint of sullenness, which disqualified
him from conciliating the good opinion of those whom his innate superiority must have often
prompted him to desire for friends. He was branded, moreover, with a personal deformity; and
the grudge against Nature for inflicting this defect not only deeply disturbed his happiness,
but so generally affected his feelings as to embitter them with a vindictive sentiment, so
strong as, at times, to exhibit the disagreeable energy of misanthropy. This was not all. He
enjoyed high rank, and was conscious of possessing great talents; but his fortune was
inadequate to his desires, and his talents were not of an order to redeem the deficiencies of
fortune. It likewise so happened that while indulged by his only friend, his mother, to an
excess that impaired the manliness of his character, her conduct was such as in no degree to
merit the affection which her wayward fondness inspired.
It is impossible to reflect on the boyhood of Byron without regret. There is not one point in it all which could, otherwise
than with pain, have affected a young mind of sensibility. His works bear testimony, that while
his memory retained the impressions of early youth, fresh and unfaded, there was a gloom and
shadow upon them, which proved how little they had been really joyous.
The riper years of one so truly the nursling of pride, poverty, and pain,
could only be inconsistent, wild, and impassioned, even had his temperament been moderate and
well disciplined. But when it is considered that in addition to all the awful influences of
these fatalities, for they can receive no lighter name, he possessed an imagination of
unbounded capacity—was inflamed with those indescribable feelings which constitute, in
the opinion of many, the ![]()
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very elements of genius—fearfully quick in
the discernment of the darker qualities of character—and surrounded by
temptation—his career ceases to surprise. It would have been more wonderful had he proved
an amiable and well-conducted man, than the questionable and extraordinary being who has alike
provoked the malice and interested the admiration of the world.
Posterity, while acknowledging the eminence of his endowments, and lamenting
the habits which his unhappy circumstances induced, will regard it as a curious phenomenon in
the fortunes of the individual, that the progress of his fame as a poet should have been so
similar to his history as a man.
His first attempts, though displaying both originality and power, were
received with a contemptuous disdain, as cold and repulsive as the penury and neglect which
blighted the budding of his youth. The unjust ridicule in the review of his first poems,
excited in his spirit a discontent as inveterate as the feeling which sprung from his
deformity: it affected, more or less, all his conceptions to such a degree that he may be said
to have hated the age which had joined in the derision, as he cherished an antipathy against
those persons who looked curiously at his foot. Childe
Harold, the most triumphant of his works, was produced when the world was kindliest
disposed to set a just value on his talents; and his latter productions, in which the faults of
his taste appear the broadest, were written when his errors as a man were harshest in the
public voice.
These allusions to the incidents of a life full of contrarieties, and to a
character so strange as to be almost mysterious, sufficiently show the difficulties of the task
I have undertaken. But the course I intend to pursue will relieve me from the necessity of
entering, in any particular manner, upon those debatable points of his personal conduct which
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been so much discussed. I shall consider him, if I can, as his
character will be estimated when contemporary surmises are forgotten, and when the monument he
has raised to himself is contemplated for its beauty and magnificence, without suggesting
recollections of the eccentricities of the builder.
Leigh Hunt,
Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (London: Henry Colburn, 1828)
An article was
written in “The Westminster
Review” (Medwin says
by Mr. Hobhouse) to show that the Conversations were altogether unworthy of
credit. There are doubtless many inaccuracies in the latter; but the spirit remains
undoubted; and the author of the criticism was only vexed, that such was the fact. He
assumes, that Lord Byron could not have made this or that statement to
Captain Medwin, because the statement was erroneous or untrue; but
an anonymous author has no right to be believed in preference to one who speaks in his own
name: there is nothing to show that Mr. Hobhouse might not have been
as mistaken about a date or an epigram as Mr. Medwin; and when we find
him giving us his own version of a fact, and Mr. Medwin asserting that
Lord Byron gave him another, the only impression left upon the
mind of any body who knew his Lordship is, that the fault most probably lay in the loose
corners of the noble Poet’s vivacity. Such is the impression made upon the author of
an unpublished Letter to Mr.
Hobhouse, which has been shown me in print; and he had a right to it. The
reviewer, to my knowledge, is mistaken upon some points, as well as the person he reviews.
The assumption, that nobody can know any thing about Lord Byron but
two or three persons who were conversant with him for a certain space of time, and whom he
spoke of with as little ceremony, and would hardly treat with more confidence than he did a
hundred others, is ludicrous; and can only end, as the criticism has done, in doing no good
either to him or them. . . .
John Galt,
“Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine
Vol. 2
No. 11 (December 1830)
“Dear Sir;—Amongst the
agreeable things which you say of me in your life of Lord Byron, you conjecture that I
‘condemned’
Childe Harold
previously to its publication. There is not the slightest foundation for this
supposition—nor is it true as you state, ‘that I was the only person
who had seen the poem in manuscript, as I was with Lord
Byron whilst he was writing it.’ I had left
Lord Byron before he had finished the two cantos, and,
excepting a few fragments, I had never seen them until they were printed. My own
persuasion is, that the story told in Dallas’s Recollections of some
person, name unknown, having dissuaded Lord Byron from
publishing Childe Harold, is a
mere fabrication, for it is at complete variance with all Lord
Byron himself told me on the subject. At any rate, I was not that
person; if I had been, it is not very likely that the poem which I had endeavoured
to stifle in its birth, should, in its complete, or, as Lord
Byron says, in its ‘concluded state,’ be dedicated to
me. I must, therefore, request you will take the earliest opportunity of relieving
me from this imputation, which, so far as a man can be written down by any other
author than himself, cannot fail to produce a very prejudicial effect, and to give
me more uneasiness than I think it can be your wish to inflict on any man who has
never given you provocation or excuse for injustice. . . .
John Galt,
“Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine
Vol. 2
No. 11 (December 1830)
I am glad to find my college
stories administered relief to your nerves, when we were together in the Malta
packet some one and twenty years ago; and I am not sorry that my wearing a red
coat at Cagliari, and cutting my finger in the quarries of Pentelicus, should
have furnished materials for your present volume; but to repay me for having
supplied these timely episodes, as well as for your copious extracts from my
travels in Albania, and also for inserting my note about Madame Guiccioli without my leave, you must
positively cancel the passage respecting Childe Harold
in page 161 of your little volume. . . .
John Galt,
“Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine
Vol. 2
No. 11 (December 1830)
I wonder that even common policy did not induce you to be
more cautious in making statements which might be so easily disproved, and
which have, indeed, been already incontrovertibly refuted. The very
conversation, which you have judiciously selected from Medwin, as one of those parts of his trumpery book to the truth of which you
can speak, I know to be a lie; for I never went the tour of the lake of Geneva
with Lord Byron. . . .
John Galt,
“Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine
Vol. 2
No. 11 (December 1830)
You tell me that your wish has
been to give only an outline of his intellectual character. I am at a loss to
understand how your gossip about him and me, and the silly anecdotes you have
copied from very discreditable authorities, can be said to be fairly comprised
in such an outline. But your plan ought certainly to have compelled you to make
yourself thoroughly acquainted with his poetry, and to quote him just as he
wrote. Nevertheless, you have misrepresented him at least nine times in the ten
stanzas of that poem which you call the last, and which was not the last, he
ever wrote. Oh, for shame! stick to your acknowledged fictions—there you
are safe—you may deal with Leddy
Grippy and Laurie Todd as
you please, but not with those who have really lived, or who are still
alive. . . .
[John Wilson et. al.],
“Noctes Ambrosianae XVII” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
Vol. 16
No. 94 (November 1824)
And there was another funny thing o’ his, till a queer looking lad, one
Mr. Skeffington, that wrote a tragedy, that was called
“The Mysterious Bride,” the whilk
thing made the Times newspaper for once witty—for it
said no more o’t, than just “Last night a play called The Mysterious
Bride, by the Honorable Mr. Skeffington, was performed at Drury Lane.
The piece was damned.” Weel, ye see it happened that there was a masquerade some nights after,
and Mr. Cam Hobhouse gaed till’t in the disguise
o’ a Spanish nun, that had been ravished by the French army— . . .
