LORD  BYRON  and  his  TIMES
Byron
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Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron
Chapter VI
INTRODUCTION & INDEXES
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Table of Contents
Preliminary Statement
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
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RECOLLECTIONS

OF THE

LIFE OF LORD BYRON,


FROM THE YEAR

1808 TO THE END OF 1814;


EXHIBITING


HIS EARLY CHARACTER AND OPINIONS, DETAILING THE PROGRESS OF HIS
LITERARY CAREER, AND INCLUDING VARIOUS UNPUBLISHED
PASSAGES OF HIS WORKS.


TAKEN FROM AUTHENTIC DOCUMENTS.
IN THE POSSESSION OF THE AUTHOR.


BY THE LATE
R. C. DALLAS, Esq.


TO WHICH IS PREFIXED


AN ACCOUNT OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES LEADING TO THE SUPPRESSION
OF LORD BYRON’S CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE AUTHOR,
AND HIS LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER, LATELY
ANNOUNCED FOR PUBLICATION.




LONDON:

PRINTED FOR CHARLES KNIGHT, PALL-MALL-EAST.

MDCCCXXIV.
LIFE OF LORD BYRON 127

CHAPTER VI.

OPINIONS AND FEELINGS OF LORD BYRON
AFTER THE DEATH OF HIS MOTHER.

At every step which I take in my task of submitting to the public my Recollections of Lord Byron, I feel a deeper regret at the unfortunate necessity which deprives them of his Correspondence. The letters, which I received from him while he was at Newstead, give a complete picture of his mind, under circumstances peculiarly calculated to call forth its most interesting features. Our correspondence was kept up without interruption. Upon arriving at Newstead he found that his mother had breathed her last. He suffered much from this loss, and the disappointment of not seeing her before her death; and
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while his feelings were still very acute, within a few days of his arrival at the Abbey, he received the intelligence that Mr. M * * *, a very intimate friend of his friend Mr. Hobhouse, and one whom he highly estimated himself, had been drowned in the Cam. He had not long before heard of the death of his schoolfellow, Wingfield, at Coimbra, to whom he was much attached. He wrote me an account of these events in a short but affecting letter. They had all died within a month, he having just heard from all three, but seen none. The letter from Mr. M * * * had been written the day previous to his death. He could not restore them by regret, and therefore, with a sigh to the departed, he struggled to return to the heavy routine of life, in the sure expectation that all would one day have their repose. He felt that his grief was selfish. He wished to think upon any subject except death—he was satiated with that. Having always four skulls
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in his library, he could look on them without emotion; but he could not allow his imagination to take off the fleshy covering from those of his friends, without a horrible sensation; and he thought that the Romans were right in burning their deceased friends. I wrote to him, and said:

“On my return home last night, I received your letter, which renewed in my mind some of the most painful ideas which for many years accompanied me, or took place of all others; which, in spite of Philosophy, and, yes, my lord, in spite of Religion, rendered my life wretched; and which time, in bringing me nearer to eternity, has softened to such a degree, that they are now far from being painful. But you deprecate the subject, and I will not enlarge upon it, though one I take some delight in. You have, indeed, had enough within a very short time, to make you prefer any other: yet I
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must not lose the opportunity of saying once more, what I imagine may have been said a thousand times before, that is, how cruel a present is a reflecting mind, if all existence terminates with life! I feel much for your friend Hobhouse. I supposed him embarked for Ireland, en militaire, at the time that I saw the account of Mr. M * * *’s fate in the papers. Resignation, I must own, is a difficult virtue when the heart is deeply affected—at the same time, it is the part of every man of sense to cultivate it, and to be indebted for it rather to his reason, or his religion, than to the influence of time. I condemn myself, perhaps; but the argument may be of service to strong and active minds. With respect to your friend Wingfield, it must be some consolation to you to have consecrated his memory in the stanzas you have since inserted in your Poem; and if there should be a meeting hereafter, as alluded to by the half-hoping stanza which
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you have added, let me flatter myself to please me, the pleasure with him will not be a little heightened by that memorial.

The funeral pile, the ashes preserved by the asbestos, and inurned, are circumstances more pleasing to the imagination than a box, a hole, and worms; but when the vivifying principle has ceased to act, let me say, when the soul is separated from the chemical elements which constitute body, Reason says it is of little importance what becomes of them. Even in burning, we cannot save all the body from mixing with other natures: by the flames much is carried off into the atmosphere, and falls again to the earth to fertilize it, and sustain worms. Nay, in the entombed box, perhaps, the dust is at last more purely preserved; for though, in the course of decomposition, it gives a temporary existence to a loathsome creature, yet, in time, the rioted worm dies too, and gives back to the mass
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of dust the share of substance which it borrowed for its own form. I am afraid this language borders on the subject I meant to avoid.”

Lord Byron disclaimed the acuteness of feeling I attributed to him, because, though he certainly felt unhappy, he was nevertheless attacked by a kind of hysterical merriment, or rather a laughing without merriment, which he could neither understand nor overcome, and which gave him no relief, while a spectator would think him in good spirits. He frequently talked of M * * * as of a person of gigantic intellect—he could by no language do justice to his abilities—all other men were pigmies to him. He loved Wingfield indeed more—he was an earlier and a dearer friend, and one whom he could never regret loving—but in talent he knew no equal to M * * *. In him he had to mourn the loss of a guide, philo-
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sopher; and friend, while in Wingfield he lost a friend only, though one before whom he could have wished to have gone his long journey. Lord Byron’s language concerning Mr. M * * * was equally strong and remarkable. He affirmed that it was not in the mind of those who did not know him, to conceive such a man; that his superiority was too great to excite envy—that he was awed by him—that there was the mark of an immortal creature in whatever he did, and yet he was gone—that such a man should have been given over to death, so early in life, bewildered him. In referring to the honours M * * * acquired at the University, he declared that nevertheless he was a most confirmed atheist, indeed offensively so, for he did not scruple to avow his opinions in all companies.

Once only did Lord Byron ever express, in distinct terms to me, a direct attack upon the tenets of the Christian Reli-
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gion; I postponed my answer, saying upon this I had much to write to him. He afterwards reminded me of my having said so, but, at the same time, begged me not to enter upon metaphysics, upon which he never could agree with me. In answering him, I said, “If I have not written the much with which I have threatened you, it has been owing, not solely to my avocations, but partly to a consciousness of my subject being too weighty for me, and not adapted to a hasty discussion. A passage in your letter of the 7th of this month, beginning: ’Are you aware that your religion is impious?’ &c., incited me to a determination, in spite of the indolence I begin to feel on argumentative topics, to call you a purblind philosopher, and to break a lance with you in defence of a cause on which I rest so much hope. I still dread that my feebleness may be laid to the account, and esteemed the feebleness of the cause itself.

LIFE OF LORD BYRON 135

“By proposing to drop metaphysics you cut down the much I meditated. I will not pursue them at present, though I think them the prime subjects of intellectual enjoyment. But, though I drop my point, instead of couching my lance, I do not mean to say that I will not yet try my strength. Meanwhile, though neither Mr. H * *’s glow, nor my fervour, has wrought conviction hitherto; this I am sure of, that you will not shut your mind against it, whenever your understanding begins to feel ground to rest upon. I compare such philosophers as you, and Hume, and Gibbon, (—I have put you into company that you are not ashamed of—) to mariners wrecked at sea, buffeting the waves for life, and at last carried by a current towards land, where, meeting with rugged and perpendicular rocks, they decide that it is impossible to land, and, though some of their companions point out a firm
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beach, exclaim—‘Deluded things! there can be no beach, unless you melt down these tremendous rocks—no, our ship is wrecked, and to the bottom we must go—all we have to do is to swim on, till Fate overwhelms us.’—You do not deny the depravity of the human race—well, that is one step gained—it is allowing that we are cast away—it is, figuratively, our shipwreck. Behold us, then, all scattered upon the ocean, and all anxious to be saved—all, at least, willing to be on terra firma; the Humes, the Gibbons, the Voltaires, as well as the Newtons, the Lockes, the Johnsons, &c. The latter make for the beach; the former exhaust their strength about the rocks, and sink, declaring them insurmountable. The incarnation of a Deity! vicarious atonement! the innocent suffering for the guilty! the seeming inconsistencies of the Old Testament, and the dis-
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crepancies of the new! &c. &c.! are rocks which I am free to own are not easily melted down; but I am certain that they may be viewed from a point on the beach in less deterring forms, lifting their heads into the clouds indeed, yet adding sublimity to the prospect of the shores on which we have landed, and by no means impeding our progress upon it. In less metaphorical language, my lord, it appears to me, that freethinkers are generally more eager to strengthen their objections than solicitous for conviction; and prefer wandering into proud inferences, to pursuing the evidences of facts; so contrary to the example given to us in all judicial investigations, where testimony precedes reasoning, and is the ground of it. The corruption of human nature being self-evident, it is very natural to inquire the cause of that corruption, and as natural to hope that there may be a re-
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medy for it. The cause and the remedy have been stated.

“How are we to ascertain the truth of them? Not by arguing mathematically, but by first examining the proofs adduced; and if they are satisfactory, to use our reasoning powers, as far as they will go, to clear away the difficulties which may attend them. This is the only mode of investigating with any hope of conviction. It is, to return to my metaphor, the beach on which we may find a footing, and be able to look around us; on which breach, I trust, I shall one day or other see you taking your stand. I have done—and pray observe, that I have kept my word—I have not entered on metaphysics on the subject of Revelation. I have merely stated the erroneous proceeding of freethinking Philosophy; and, on the other hand, the natural and rational proceeding of the mind in the inquiry after truth:
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—the conviction must, and I am confident will, be the operation of your own mind.”

Lord Byron noticed, indeed, what I had written, but in a very discouraging manner. He would have nothing to do with the subject—we should all go down together, he said, “So,” quoting St. Paul, “let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die;”—he felt satisfied in his creed, for it was better to sleep than to wake.

Such were the opinions which occasionally manifested themselves in this unhappy young man, and which gave me a degree of pain proportioned to the affection I could not but feel for him; while my hopes of his ultimately breaking from the trammels of infidelity, which were never relinquished, received from time to time fresh excitement from some expressions that appeared to me to have an opposite tendency. He frequently recurred to his
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playful raillery upon the subject of my co-operation in the murder, as he called it, of poor Blackett. Upon one occasion, he mentioned him in opposition to Kirke White, whom, setting aside what he called his bigotry, he classed with Chatterton. He expressed wonder that White was so little known at Cambridge, where he said nobody knew any thing about him until his death. He added, that for himself, he should have taken pride in making his acquaintance, and that his very prejudices were calculated to render him respectable. Such occasional expressions as these, in spite of the inconsistency which they displayed, furnished food for my hope that I should one day see him sincerely embracing Christianity, and escaping from the vortex of the Atheistical society, in which, having entered at all, it was only wonderful to me that he was so moderate in his expressions as in general he had hitherto been. He
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told me that both his friend, Juvenal Hodgson, and myself, had beset him upon the subject of religion, and that my warmth was nothing, compared to his fire—his reward would surely be great in heaven, he said, if he were half as careful in the matter of his own salvation, as he was voluntarily anxious concerning his friends. Lord Byron added, that he gave honour to us both, but conviction to neither.

The mention of Kirke White brought to his mind an embryo epic poet who was at Cambridge, Mr. Townsend, who had published the plan and specimen of a work, to be called “Armageddon.” Lord Byron’s opinion of this is already given in his own note, to a line in his Hints from Horace (see page 111); but in referring to him, he thought that perhaps his anticipating the Day of Judgment was too presumptuous—it seemed something like instructing the Lord
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what he should do, and might put a captious person in mind of the line,
“And fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
This he said, without wishing to cavil himself, but other people would; he nevertheless hoped, that Mr. Townsend would complete his work, in spite of Milton.

Lord Byron’s moral feelings were sometimes evinced in a manner which the writings and opinions of his later life render remarkable. When he was abroad, he was informed that the son of one of his tenants had seduced a respectable young person in his own station in life. On this he expressed his opinion very strongly. Although he felt it impossible strictly to perform what he conceived our first duty, to abstain from doing harm, yet he thought our second duty was to exert all our power to repair the harm we may have done. In the particular case in question, the parties
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ought forthwith to marry, as they were in equal circumstances—if the girl had been the inferior of the seducer, money would be even then an insufficient compensation. He would not sanction in his tenants what he would not do himself. He had, indeed, as God knew, committed many excesses, but as he had determined to amend, and latterly kept to his determination, this young man must follow his example. He insisted that the seducer should restore the unfortunate girl to society.

The manner in which Lord Byron expressed his particular feelings respecting his own life, was melancholy to a painful degree. At one time, he said, that he was about to visit Cambridge, but that M * * * was gone, and Hobhouse was also absent; and except the person who had invited him, there was scarcely any to welcome him. From this his thoughts fell into a gloomy channel—he was alone in the world, and
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only three-and-twenty; he could be no more than alone, when he should have nearly finished his course; he had, it was true, youth to begin again with, but he had no one with whom to call back the laughing period of his existence. He was struck with the singular circumstance that few of his friends had had a quiet death; but a quiet life, he said, was more important. He afterwards acknowledged that he felt his life had been altogether opposed to propriety, and even decency; and that it was now become a dreary blank, with his friends gone, either by death or estrangement.

While he was still continuing at Newstead, he wrote me a letter, which affected me deeply, upon the occasion of another death with which he was shocked—he lost one whom he had dearly loved in the more smiling season of his earlier youth; but he quoted—“I have almost forgot the taste of grief, and supped full of horrors.” He
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could not then weep for an event which a few years before would have overwhelmed him. He appeared to be afflicted in youth, he thought, with the greatest unhappiness of old age, to see those he loved fall about him, and stand solitary before he was withered. He had not, like others, domestic resources; and his internal anticipations gave him no prospect in time or in eternity, except the selfish gratification of living longer than those who were better. At this period he expressed great wretchedness; but he turned from himself, and knowing that I was contemplating a retirement into the country, he proposed a plan for me, dictated by great kindness of heart, by which I was the more sensibly touched, as it occupied his mind at such a moment. He wished me to settle in the little town of Southwell, the particulars of which he explained to me. Upon these subjects I wrote to him as follows, on the 27th of October.

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“Your letter of the 11th made such an impression upon me, that I felt as if I had a volume to say upon it; yet, it is but too true, that the sensibility which vents itself in many words carries with it the appearance of affectation, and hardly ever pleases in real life. The few sentences of your letter relative to the death of friends, and to your feelings, excited in my mind no common degree of sympathy; but I must be content to express it in a common way, and briefly.

Death has, indeed, begun to draw your attention very early. I hardly knew what it was, or thought of it till I went at the age of five-and-twenty to reside in the West Indies, and there he began to show himself to me frequently. My friends, young and old, were carried to the grave with a rapidity that astonished me, and I was myself in a manner snatched out of his grasp. This, and the other sad concomitants of a West
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Indian existence, determined me to adopt, at whatever loss, any alternative by which I might plant my family in England. Here I have grown old without seeing much of him near me, though when he has approached me it has been in his most dreadful form. I am led to these recollections from comparing your experience at three-and-twenty with mine long after that age. Your losses, and in a country where health and life have more stable foundations than in torrid climates, have been extraordinary; and that too within the limit, I believe, of one or two years. I thank you for your confidential communication at the bottom of the stanza which so much delighted me. How truly do I wish that the being to whom that verse now belongs had lived, and lived yours! What your obligations to her would have been in that case is inconceivable; and, as it is, what a gratification would it be to me to believe, that in
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her death she has left you indebted to her; to believe that these lines
‘Well—I will dream that we may meet again,
And woo the vision to my vacant breast’—
are not merely the glow of a poetic imagination, nor the fleeting inspiration of sorrow; but a well-founded hope, leading to the persuasion that there is another and a better world.

Your reflections on the forlorn state of your existence are very painful, and very strongly expressed. I confess I am at a loss how to preach comfort. It would be very easy for me to resort to commonplaces, and refer you to study and the enjoyment of the intellect; but I know too well that happiness must find its abode in the heart, and not in the head. Voltaire, who you know is no apostle with me, expresses this pleasingly:
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Est-il done vrai, grands Dieux! il ne faut plus que j’aime!
La foule des beaux arts, dont je veux tour a tour
Remplir le vuide de moi-même,
N’est point encore assez pour remplacer l’amour.’
He evidently means love, emphatically so called; but kind affections of every nature are sources of happiness, and more lasting ones than that violent flame, which, like the pure air of the chemist, when separated from common air, intoxicates, and accelerates the term of its existence. Those affections are the only remedy I see for you. The more you lose, the more should you strive to repair your losses. At your age the door of friendship cannot be shut; but man, and woman too, is imperfect: you must make allowances, and though human nature is in a sad state, there are many worthy of your regard. I am certain you may yet go through life surrounded by friends,—real friends, not—
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‘—Flatterers of the festal hour,
The heartless parasites of present cheer.’
I am truly sorry for the wretchedness you are suffering, and the more, because I am certain of your not having any pathetic cant in your character. But while I think you have reason to be unhappy, I confide in the strength of your understanding, to get the better of the evils of life, and to enter upon a new pursuit of happiness. You see the volume will come, but believe me it comes from the heart.

I thank you most kindly for that part of your letter which relates to my purposed retirement into the country. You judge rightly that I should not wish to be entirely out of society, but my bent on this head is more on account of my family than myself; for I could live alone, that is alone with them. I often avoid company; but it has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life to see them coveted in society. Your
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account of Southwell delights me; and the being within reach of the metropolis would of itself outweigh the charm of the picturesque, though a charm, and a great one, it has. The being within a ride of you, however, is the decisive attraction. I will, then, from this time keep Southwell in view for my retreat, and at a future day we will take our flight. I am going to dine with the Ionian to-day. He and Mrs. Wright carried me off suddenly last night to the Haymarket to see Mathews, who performs no more in London this winter, for which I am sorry, as I am meditating another ordeal at the Lyceum, in which he might have been of use to me. Mr. Wright feels himself honoured in your desire of being personally acquainted with him, and I shall be proud of being the introducer of such friends. You think, no doubt, that I have communicated your poem to him, and you would not do me justice if you thought
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otherwise. He is the most intimate friend I have, though many years younger than myself. We accord very generally in our opinions, and we do not differ as to Childe Harold. I meant to say something about the progress of the Poem, but I must postpone it. May peace and happiness await you.”

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