| No. 149 | LONDON, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1830. | Price 1s. |
National Library, No. 1.—The Life of Lord Byron. By John Galt. London, 1830. Colburn & Bentley.
Mr. John Galt—a Scotch writer of considerable practice, the author of some Tragedies which were never read, of some Travels which are never read, and of small Novels which are, in bad weather, occasionally read—has, perhaps, on the strength of the commendation bestowed on these latter trifles by ourselves and others, considered himself the proper person to become the biographer of Lord Byron. We have for months been undergoing newspaper assurances that a more fitting person than Mr. Galt could not have undertaken the work—and that a piece of more interesting biography would be found never to have issued from the press. The usual announcements of “immediate publication,”—of publication “early in the ensuing month,”—of publication “on Friday next,” with the customary “sweet, reluctant, amorous delays” on the part of the publishers,—have been uttered to provoke the appetite of the expectant reader, and at length Mr. Galt’s long-promised Life of Byron is produced. We expected to find in the work something to justify the multifarious puffing announcements—some original anecdotes—some particulars not to be found in Dallas, Parry, Hunt, or Moore—some unpublished letters or poems of Byron (the announcements hinted at “original correspondence”)—some lineaments of character drawn from a familiar intercourse with, and knowledge of, the mighty poet:—But no; Mr. Galt, who in his introduction says, “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,” is nearly the last person that ought to have ventured upon writing the Life of Lord Byron. He knew little of his lordship personally—he was an acquaintance, not a friend:—he has not the mind to enter into and allow for the capricious wanderings and fine prejudices of the poet:—he sits down, the Sir Fretful Plagiary of biographers, with all the “excoriated sensibility” which he charges upon his victim, and with splenetic candour, does the kind-savage upon Lord Byron’s petty-larcenies; enumerating and forgiving—lacerating and plastering almost at the same moment.
Lord Byron has had to suffer the posthumous animosities which great men are invariably doomed to receive from friends. He has had his full share of “bad biography” from those who sat at his table, used his purse, purloined his conversation, mimicked his eccentricities, boasted of his friendship, and did not know him. A jury of matrons has sat upon his fame. The Mrs. Candours, Mrs. Slipslops, Mrs. Sneerwells, Mrs. Prues, and Mrs. Fretfuls have done their worst—and now, “Malice domestic—foreign levy,—nothing can touch him futher!” What right had Captain Medwin to be the Lilliputian Boswell to that Brobdignag Johnson, Byron!—we are not quite sure that Dr. Kennedy was justified in publishing Lord Byron’s “Conversations on Religion” without his sanction—and what quality in Mr. Galt—a steam-boat acquaintance, kindly and condescendingly recognized by Lord Byron on two or three subsequent occasions—could mark him as the biographer of the greatest poet that has risen for years! Mr. Hobhouse, when the fumes of a Westminster patriotism are out of his head, and years have subdued his prejudices, and tempered his recollections, is the person who alone ought to write, because he can write, the life of his friend, and the world’s friend, Lord Byron.
Our readers will expect to see something of the book which Mr. Galt has taken the liberty of writing, and of which we have taken the liberty of candidly speaking. We will give them, as well as our limits will permit, a few of the very many bad passages which are written either in confused English or in bad spirit. Mr. Galt is ambitious of writing in the “Ercles vein,” and of course the glooms and hurricanes of Byron carry him into some very magnanimous figures, and truly original groupings of words. Some the sentences remind us of the cage exhibited on Waterloo Bridge, which contains a cat, a bird, a mouse, a rat, a dog, and a monkey—all living harmoniously together; or of old Sambo’s selections of “violent contrarities,” chosen as a present for his daughter, and right pleasantly enumerated in the third canto of Don Juan.
We shall commence our extracts, by presenting to our readers the 28th chapter of the volume before us; because we think it is a key to the feeling in which the whole work is written. The first sentence in the following passage, marked by us in italic, would seem to have aroused all the biographer in the soul of Mr. Galt, and to have coloured—nay stained the whole biography. What an abuse of wealth is the present volume! The Israelites of old, with fine gold as a material, cast their idol in the molten image of a calf; not that Lord Byron,—the late Lord Byron, is now an object of idolatry with the present Mr. Galt, whatever he may have been formerly. The living commoner, among the rest, flings his heels at the dead. But there is little to boast of in kicking this lifeless lion!
“There is a curious note in the memoranda which Byron kept in the year 1813, that I should not pass unnoticed, because it refers to myself, and moreover is characteristic of the excoriated sensibility with which his Lordship felt everything that touched or affected him or his.
“When I had read the Bride of Abydos, I wrote to him my opinion of it, and mentioned that there was a remarkable coincidence in the story, with a matter in which I had been interested. I have no copy of the letter, and I forget the expressions employed, but Lord Byron seemed to think they implied that he had taken the story from something of mine.
The note is:
“‘Galt says there is a coincidence between the first part of ‘The Bride’ and some story of his, whether published or not, I know not, never having seen it. He is almost the last person on whom any one would commit literary larceny, and I am not conscious of any witting thefts on any of the genus. As to originality, all pretensions are ludicrous; there is nothing new under the sun.’
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“It is sufficiently clear that he was offended with what I had said, and was somewhat excited. I have not been able at present to find his answer to my letter, but it would appear by the subjoined that he had written to me something which led me to imagine he was offended at my observations, and that I had in consequence deprecated his wrath.
“‘There was no offence—there could be none. I thought it by no means impossible that we might have hit on something similar, particularly as you are a dramatist, and was anxious to assure you of the truth, viz. that I had not wittingly seized upon plot, sentiment, or incident; and I am very glad that I have not in any respect trenched upon your subjects. Something still more singular is, that the first part, where you have found a coincidence in some events within your observations on life, was drawn from observation of mine also, and I meant to have gone on with the story, but on second thoughts, I thought myself two centuries at least too late for the subject; which, though admitting of very powerful feeling and description, yet is not adapted for this age, at least this country. Though the finest works of the Greeks, one of Schiller’s and Alfieri’s, in modern times, besides several of our old (and best) dramatists, have been grounded on incidents of a similar cast, I therefore altered it as you perceive, and in so doing have weakened the whole, by interrupting the train of thought; and in composition I do not think second thoughts are the best, though second expressions may improve the first ideas.
“‘I do not know how other men feel towards those they have met abroad, but to me there seems a kind of tie established between all who have met together in a foreign country, as if we had met in a state of pre-existence, and were talking over a life that has ceased; but I always look forward to renewing my travels; and though you, I think, are now stationary, if I can at all forward your pursuits there as well as here, I shall be truly glad in the opportunity.
“‘P.S. I believe I leave town for a day or two on Monday, but after that I am always at home, and happy to see you till half-past two.’
“This letter was dated on Saturday, the 11th of September, 1813. On Sunday, the 12th, he made the following other note in his memorandum book:
“‘By Galt’s answer, I find it is some story in real life, and not any work with which my late composition coincides. It is still more singular, for mine is drawn from existence also.’
“The most amusing part of this little fracas is the denial of his Lordship, as to pilfering the thoughts and fancies of others; for it so happens, that the first passage of The Bride of Abydos, the poem in question, is almost a literal and unacknowledged translation from Goethe, which was pointed out in some of the periodicals soon after the work was published.
“Then, as to his not thieving from me or mine, I believe the fact to be as he has stated; but there are singular circumstances connected with some of his other productions, of which the account is at least curious.
“On leaving England I began to write a poem in the Spenserian measure. It was called The Unknown, and was intended to describe, in narrating the voyages and adventures of a pilgrim, who had embarked for the Holy Land, the scenes I expected to visit. I was occasionally engaged in this composition during the passage with Lord Byron from Gibraltar to Malta, and he knew what I was about. In stating this, I beg to be distinctly understood, as in no way whatever intending to insinuate that this work had any influence on the composition of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which Lord Byron began to write in Albania; but it must be considered as something extraordinary, that the two works should have been so similar in plan, and in the structure of the verse. His Lordship never saw my attempt that I know of, nor did I his poem until it was printed. It is needless to add, that beyond the plan and verse there was no other similarity between the two works; I wish there had been.
“His Lordship has published a poem, called The Curse of Minerva, the subject of which is the vengeance of the goddess on Lord Elgin for the rape of the Parthenon. It has so happened that I wrote at Athens a burlesque poem on nearly the same subject (mine relates to the vengeance of all the gods) which I called The Atheniad; the manuscript was sent to his Lordship in Asia Minor, and returned to me through Mr. Hobhouse. His Curse of Minerva, I saw for the first time in 1828, in Galignani’s edition of his works.
“In The Giaour, which he published a short time before The Bride of Abydos, he has this passage, descriptive of the anxiety with which the mother of Hassan looks out for the arrival of her son:
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The browsing camels’ bells are tinkling—
His mother look’d from her lattice high;
She saw the dews of eve besprinkling
The parterre green beneath her eye:
She saw the planets faintly twinkling—
’Tis twilight—sure his train is nigh.
She could not rest in the garden bower,
But gazed through the grate of his steepest tower:
Why comes he not—and his steeds are fleet—
Nor shrink they from the summer heat?
Why sends not the bridegroom his promised gift;
Is his heart more cold or his barb less swift?
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“His Lordship was well read in the Bible, and the book of Judges, chap. 5, and verse 28, has the following passage:—
“‘The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming; why tarry the wheels of his chariot?’
“It was, indeed, an early trick of his Lordship to filch good things. In the lamentation for Kirke White, in which he compares him to an eagle wounded by an arrow feathered from his own wing, he says,
So the struck eagle, stretch’d upon the plain, No more through rolling clouds to soar again, View’d his own feather on the fatal dart And winged the shaft that quivered in his heart. |
“The ancients have certainly stolen the best ideas of the moderns; this very thought may be found in the works of that ancient-modern, Waller:
That eagle’s fate and mine are one, Which on the shaft that made him die, Espied a feather of his own Wherewith he wont to soar on high. |
“His Lordship disdained to commit any larceny on me; and no doubt the following passage from The Giaour is perfectly original:
It is as if the dead could feel The icy worm around them steal; And shudder as the reptiles creep To revel o’er their rotting sleep, Without the power to scare away The cold consumers of their clay. |
“I do not claim any paternity in these lines: but not the most judicious action of all my youth was to publish certain dramatic sketches, and his Lordship had the printed book in his possession long before The Giaour was published, and may have read the following passage in a dream, which was intended to be very hideous:
———Then did I hear around The churme and chirruping of busy reptiles At hideous banquet on the royal dead:— Full soon methought the loathsome epicures Came thick on me, and underneath my shroud I felt the many-foot and beetle creep, And on my breast the cold worm coil and crawl. |
“However, I have said quite enough on this subject, both as respects myself and his seeming plagiarisms, which might be multiplied to legions. Such occasional accidental imitations are not things of much importance. All poets, and authors in general, avail themselves of their reading and knowledge to enhance the interest of their works. It can only be considered as one of Lord Byron’s spurts of spleen, that he felt so much about a “coincidence,” which ought not to have disturbed him; but it may be thought by the notice taken of it, that it disturbs myself more than it really does; and that it would have been enough to have merely said—Perhaps, when some friend is hereafter doing as indulgently for me, the same kind of task that I have undertaken for Byron, there may be found among my memoranda notes as little flattering to his Lordship, as those in his concerning me. I hope, however, that friend will have more respect for my memory than to imitate the taste of Mr. Moore.” p. 180—5.
A miff indeed!—There is something more than natural in all this, if philosophy could but find it out. Mr. Galt would infer that his poems suggested the “Childe Harold” and the “Curse of Minerva,” if he mean anything by particularizing these “remarkable coincidences.” One could almost have been induced to wish that Mr. Galt had written more verse, if his bellows-ing really originated such mighty music from so lofty an instrument! Mr. Moore had better take care how he die, because his wicked publication of Lord Byron’s remark on Mr. Galt’s unfitness for being robbed, will, certes, irritate the latter to write a life.
The eighth chapter of the volume announces the first acquaintance of Mr. Galt with Lord Byron. The concluding sentences of the extract are curiously inlaid, and we most especially recommend them to the notice of our readers.
“It was at Gibraltar that I first fell in with Lord Byron. I had arrived there in the packet from England, in indifferent health, on my way to Sicily. I had then no intention of travelling. I only went a trip, intending to return home after spending a few weeks in Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia; having, before my departure, entered into the Society of Lincoln’s Inn, with the design of studying the law.
“At this time, my friend, the late Colonel Wright, of the artillery, was secretary to the Governor; and during the short stay of the packet at the Rock, he invited me to the hospitalities of his house, and among other civilities gave me admission to the garrison library.
“The day, I well remember, was exceedingly sultry. The air was sickly; and if the wind was not a sirocco, it was a withering levanter—oppressive to the functions of life, and to an invalid denying all exercise. Instead of rambling over the fortifications, I was, in consequence, constrained to spend the hottest part of the day in the library; and, while sitting there, a young man came in and seated himself opposite to me at the table where I was reading. Something in his appearance attracted my attention. His dress indicated a Londoner of some fashion, partly by its neatness and simplicity, with just so much of a peculiarity of style as served to show, that although he belonged to the order of metropolitan beaux, he was not altogether a common one.
“I thought his face not unknown to me; I began to conjecture where I could have seen him; and, after an unobserved scrutiny, to speculate both as to his character and vocation. His physiognomy was prepossessing and intelligent, but ever and anon his brows lowered and gathered; a habit, as I then thought, with a degree of affectation in it, probably first assumed for picturesque effect and energetic expression; but which I afterwards discovered was undoubtedly the occasional scowl of some unpleasant reminiscence: it was certainly disagreeable—forbidding—but still the general cast of his features was impressed with elegance and character.
“At dinner, a large party assembled at Colonel Wright’s; among others the Countess of
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“Hobhouse had, a short time before I left London, published certain translations and poems rather respectable in their way, and I had seen the work, so that his name was not altogether strange to me. Byron’s was familiar—the Edinburgh Review had made it so, and still more the satire of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, but I was not conscious of having seen the persons of either.
“On the following evening I embarked early, and soon after the two travellers came on board; in one of whom I recognised the visitor to the library, and he proved to be Lord Byron. In the little bustle and process of embarking their luggage, his Lordship affected, as it seemed to me, more aristocracy than befitted his years, or the occasion; and I then thought of his singular scowl, and suspected him of pride and irascibility. The impression that evening was not agreeable, but it was interesting; and that forehead mark, the frown, was calculated to awaken curiosity, and beget conjectures.
“Hobhouse, with more of the commoner, made himself one of the passengers at once; but Byron held himself aloof, and sat on the rail, leaning on the mizzen shrouds, inhaling, as it were, poetical sympathy, from the gloomy Rock, then dark and stern in the twilight. There was in all about him that evening much waywardness; he spoke petulantly to Fletcher, his valet; and was evidently ill at ease with himself, and fretful towards others. I thought he would turn out an unsatisfactory shipmate; yet there was something redeeming in the tones of his voice, when, some time after he had indulged his sullen meditation, he again addressed Fletcher; so that, instead of finding him ill-natured, I was soon convinced he was only capricious.
“Our passage to Sardinia was tardy, owing to calms; but, in other respects, pleasant. About the third day Byron relented from his rapt mood, as if he felt it was out of place, and became playful, and disposed to contribute his fair proportion to the general endeavour to wile away the tediousness of the dull voyage. Among other expedients for that purpose, we had recourse to shooting at bottles. Byron, I think, supplied the pistols, and was the best shot, but not very pre-eminently so. In the calms, the jolly-boat was several times lowered; and, on one of those occasions, his Lordship, with the captain, caught a turtle—I rather think two—we likewise hooked a shark, part of which was dressed for breakfast, and tasted, without relish; your shark is but a cannibal dainty.
“As we approached the gulf, or bay, of Cagliari, in Sardinia, a strong north wind came from the shore, and we had a whole disagreeable day of tacking, but next morning, it was Sunday, we found ourselves at anchor near the mole, where we landed. Byron, with the captain, rode out some distance into the country, while I walked with Mr. Hobhouse about the town: we left our cards for the consul, and Mr. Hill, the ambassador, who invited us to dinner. In the evening we landed again, to avail ourselves of the invitation; and, on this occasion, Byron and his Pylades dressed themselves as aides-de-camp—a circumstance which, at the time, did not tend to improve my estimation of the solidity of the character of either. But such is the force of habit: it appeared a less exceptionable affectation in the young peer than in the commoner.
“Had we parted at Cagliari, it is probable that I should have retained a much more favourable recollection of Mr. Hobhouse than of Lord Byron; for he was a cheerful companion, full of odd and droll stories, which he told extremely well; he was also good-humoured and intelligent—altogether an advantageous specimen of a well-educated English gentleman. Moreover, I was at the time afflicted with a nervous dejection, which the occasional exhilaration produced by his anecdotes and college tales often materially dissipated, though, for the most part, they were more after the manner and matter of Swift than of Addison.
“Byron was, during the passage, in delicate health, and upon an abstemious regimen. He rarely tasted wine, nor more than half a glass, mingled with water, when he did. He ate little; no animal food, but only bread and vegetables. He reminded me of the ghoul that picked rice with a needle; for it was manifest, that he had not acquired his knowledge of the world by always dining so sparely. If my remembrance is not treacherous, he only spent one evening in the cabin with us—the evening before we came to anchor at Cagliari; for, when the lights were placed, he made himself a man forbid, took his station on the railing between the pegs on which the sheets are belayed and the shrouds, and there, for hours, sat in silence, enamoured, it may be, of the moon. All these peculiarities, with his caprices, and something inexplicable in the cast of his metaphysics, while they served to awaken interest, contributed little to conciliate esteem. He was often strangely rapt—it may have been from his genius; and, had its grandeur and darkness been then divulged, susceptible of explanation; but, at the time, it threw, as it were, around him the sackcloth of penitence. Sitting amid the shrouds and rattlins, in the tranquillity of the moonlight, churming an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross. He was as a mystery in a winding-sheet, crowned with a halo.”
Pheu!
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“Plague on’t—I ne’er was so beset with words
Since first I learnt to call my brother’s father, dad!”
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The greater part of the book is occupied with Mr. Galt’s travels in company with Childe Harold,—worked up in rough prose, studded with extracts from the poem. Those of our readers who have read the notes to the “Childe Harold,” and Mr. Hobhouse’s two great quartos, need not traverse the ground again. What an ingenious art is book-making!
The following passage is worth extracting; it is deeply characteristic of Lord Byron:—
“On the night after his arrival at the Abbey, the waiting-woman of Mrs. Byron, in passing the door of the room where the corpse lay, heard the sound of some one sighing heavily within, and on entering found his Lordship sitting in the dark beside the bed. She remonstrated with him for so giving way to grief, when he burst into tears, and exclaimed, “I had but one friend in the world, and she is gone.” Of the fervency of his sorrow I do therefore think there can be no doubt; the very endeavour which he made to conceal it by indifference, was a proof of its depth and anguish, though he hazarded the strictures of the world by the indecorum of his conduct on the occasion of the funeral. Having declined to follow the remains himself, he stood looking from the hall door at the procession, till the whole had moved away; and then, turning to one of the servants, the only person left, he desired him to fetch the sparring-gloves, and proceeded with him to his usual exercise. But the scene was impressive, and spoke eloquently of a grieved heart; he sparred in silence all the time, and the servant thought that he hit harder than was his habit: at last he suddenly flung away the gloves and retired to his own room.”
It is but justice to Mr. Galt to give the following; it is good, true, and sensible writing:—
“I have never been able to understand why it has been so often supposed that Lord Byron was actuated in the composition of his different works by any other motive than enjoyment: perhaps no poet had ever less of an ulterior purpose in his mind during the fits of inspiration (for the epithet may be applied correctly to him and to the moods in which he was accustomed to write) than this singular and impassioned man. Those who imagine that he had any intention to impair the reverence due to religion, or to weaken the hinges of moral action, give him credit for far more design and prospective purpose than he possessed. They could have known nothing of the man, the main defect of whose character, in relation to everything, was in having too little of the element or principle of purpose. He was a thing of impulses, and to judge of what he either said or did, as the results of predetermination, was not only to do the harshest injustice, but to show a total ignorance of his character. His whole fault, the darkest course of those flights and deviations from propriety which have drawn upon him the severest animadversion, lay in the unbridled state of his impulses. He felt, but never reasoned. I am led to make these observations by noticing the ungracious, or, more justly, the illiberal spirit in which “The Prophecy of Dante,” which was published with the “Marino Faliero,” has been treated by the anonymous author of ‘Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron.’”
The description of “The Guiccioli” is taken from Leigh Hunt’s Book; and our readers are familiar with the particulars of Lord Byron’s personal presence and exertions in Greece, and of his fever and death. Not an iota of information is added to that which has been already given to the world. The last moments of Byron, as detailed by Fletcher, his faithful servant, are as affecting as the good death of a great man can make them.
Mr. Galt’s friendship breaks out continually. What would Lord Byron have said to his biographer, if he could have read the following sketch of his mother—a mother whom he loved,—forced too heedlessly into a work professing to be the Life of Lord Byron:—
“However this may have been, it is certain that Byron came to an embarrassed inheritance, both as respected his property and the character of his race; and, perhaps, though his genius suffered nothing by the circumstance, it is to be regretted that he was still left under the charge of his mother; a woman without judgment or self-command, alternately spoiling her child by indulgence, irritating him by her self-willed obstinacy, and, what was still worse, amusing him by her violence, and disgusting him by fits of inebriety. Sympathy for her misfortunes would be no sufficient apology for concealing her defects; they undoubtedly had a material influence on her son, and her appearance was often the subject of his childish ridicule. She was a short and corpulent person. She rolled in her gait, and would, in her rage, sometimes endeavour to catch him for the purpose of inflicting punishment, while he would run round the room, mocking her menaces and mimicking her motions.” p. 23-4.
As a specimen of the Captain Grand in style, (as our author so broadly phrases it,) we must give the following delectable morceau. Will our readers have the kindness to endeavour to work the sentences in italics by the rules of common sense, and transmit to us the product.
“About three weeks or a month after he had left Athens, I went by a
circuitous route to Smyrna, where I found him waiting with Mr.
Hobhouse, to proceed with the Salsette frigate, then
ordered to Constantinople, to bring away Mr. Adair, the
ambassador. He had, in the meantime, visited Ephesus, and acquired some knowledge of the
environs of Smyrna; but he appeared to have been less interested by what he
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We are compelled here to close the volume. We had intended to give a few of Mr. Galt’s attempts at word-coining. He is nearly as eminent as Sir Charles Wetherell, not only in the originality of the coinage, but in the boldness of the uttering. We will endeavour to make a small collection by the time our next number appears.
The volume, as to quantity of printing and paper, is remarkably cheap and there are two copperplates—of Lord Byron and the Countess Guiccioli—which are extremely neat. We fear, however, that the publishers, whether they have a “miff” with Mr. Galt, will have to advertise the first number of the “National Library,” as Lady Morgan’s publications have been advertised by them, at half price, “on account of the great number of copies on hand.”