Memoir of John Murray
John Wilson Croker to John Murray, 26 March 1820
Munster House, March 26th, 1820.
A rainy Sunday.
I have to thank you for letting me see your two new cantos
[the 3rd and 4th], which I return. What sublimity! what levity! what boldness!
what tenderness! what majesty! what trifling! what variety! what tediousness!—for tedious to a strange degree, it
must be confessed that whole passages are, particularly the earlier stanzas of
the fourth canto. I know no man of such general powers of intellect as
Brougham, yet I think him insufferably tedious; and I fancy the
reason to be that he has such facility of expression
that he is never recalled to a selection of his
thoughts. A more costive orator would be obliged to choose, and a man of his
talents could not fail to choose the best; but the power of uttering all and
everything which passes across his mind, tempts him to say all. He goes on
without thought—I should rather say, without pause. ![]()
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His speeches are poor from their richness, and dull from their infinite
variety. An impediment in his speech would make him a perfect Demosthenes. Something of the same kind, and with
something of the same effect, is Lord
Byron’s wonderful fertility of thought and facility of
expression; and the Protean style of ‘Don Juan,’ instead of checking (as the
fetters of rhythm generally do) his natural activity, not only gives him wider
limits to range in, but even generates a more roving disposition. I dare swear,
if the truth were known, that his digressions and repetitions generate one
another, and that the happy jingle of some of his comical rhymes has led him on
to episodes of which he never originally thought; and thus it is that, with the
most extraordinary merit, merit of all kinds, these two
cantos have been to me, in several points, tedious and
even obscure.
As to the principles, all the
world, and you, Mr. Murray, first of
all, have done this poem great injustice. There are levities here and there,
more than good taste approves, but nothing to make such a terrible rout
about—nothing so bad as ‘Tom Jones,’ nor within a hundred
degrees of ‘Count
Fathom.’ I know that it is no justification of one fault to
produce a greater, neither am I justifying Lord
Byron. I have acquaintance none, or next to none, with him, and
of course no interest beyond what we must all take in a poet who, on the whole,
is one of the first, if not the very first, of our age; but I direct my
observations against you and those whom you deferred to. If you print and sell
‘Tom Jones’ and ‘Peregrine Pickle,’
why did you start at ‘Don
Juan’? Why smuggle it into the world and, as it were,
pronounce it illegitimate in its birth, and induce so many of the learned
rabble, when they could find so little specific offence in it, to refer to its
supposed original state as one of original sin? If instead of this you had
touched the right string and in the right place, Lord
Byron’s own good taste and good nature would have revised
and corrected some phrases in his poem which in reality disparage it more than
its imputed looseness of principle; I mean some expressions of political and
personal feelings which, I believe, he, in fact, never felt, and threw in
wantonly and de gaieté de cœur, and which he would
have omitted, advisedly and de bonté de cœur, if he had not been
goaded by indiscreet, contradictory, and urgent criticisms,
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which, in some cases,
were dark enough to be called calumnies. But these are
blowing over, if not blown over; and I cannot but think that if Mr. Gifford, or some friend in whose taste and
disinterestedness Lord Byron could rely, were to point out
to him the cruelty to individuals, the injury to the national character, the
offence to public taste, and the injury to his own reputation, of such passages
as those about Southey and Waterloo and
the British Government and the head of that Government, I cannot but hope and
believe that these blemishes in the first cantos would be wiped away in the
next edition; and that some that occur in the two cantos (which you sent me)
would never see the light. What interest can Lord Byron
have in being the poet of a party in politics, or of a party in morals, or of a
party in religion? Why should he wish to throw away the suffrages (you see the
times infect my dialect) of more than half the nation? He has no interest in
that direction, and, I believe, has no feeling of that kind. In politics, he
cannot be what he appears, or rather what Messrs.
Hobhouse and Leigh Hunt wish
to make him appear. A man of his birth, a man of his taste, a man of his
talents, a man of his habits, can have nothing in common with such miserable
creatures as we now call Radicals, of whom I know not that I can better express
the illiterate and blind ignorance and vulgarity than by saying that the best
informed of them have probably never heard of Lord Byron.
No, no, Lord Byron may be indulgent to these jackal
followers of his; he may connive at their use of his name—nay, it is not
to be denied that he has given them too, too much countenance—but he
never can, I should think, now that he sees not only the road but the rate they
are going, continue to take a part so contrary to all his own interests and
feelings, and to the feelings and interests of all the respectable part of his
country. And yet it was only yesterday at dinner that somebody said that he had
read or seen a letter of Lord Byron’s to somebody,
saying that if the Radicals only made a little progress and showed some real
force, he would hasten over and get on horseback to head them. This is
evidently either a gross lie altogether, or a grosser misconstruction of some
epistolary pleasantry; because if the proposition were serious, the letter
never would have been shown. Yet see how a bad name is given. We were twelve at
dinner, all (except myself) people of ![]()
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note, and yet
(except Walter Scott and myself again) every
human being will repeat the story to twelve others—and so on. But what is
to be the end of all this rigmarole of mine? To conclude, this—to advise
you, for your own sake as a tradesman, for Lord
Byron’s sake as a poet, for the sake of good literature
and good principles, which ought to be united, to take such measures as you may
be able to venture upon to get Lord Byron to revise these
two cantos, and not to make another step in the odious path which
Hobhouse beckons him to pursue. There is little, very
little, of this offensive nature in these cantos; the omission, I think, of
five stanzas out of 215, would do all I should ask on this point; but I confess
that I think it would be much better for his fame and your profit if the two
cantos were thrown into one, and brought to a proper length by the retrenchment
of the many careless, obscure, and idle passages which incuria fudit. I think Tacitus says that the Germans formed their plans when drunk and
matured them when sober. I know not how this might answer in public affairs,
but in poetry I should think it an excellent plan—to pour out, as
Lord Byron says, his whole mind in the intoxication of
the moment, but to revise and condense in the sobriety of the morrow. One word
more: experience shows that the Pulcian
style is very easily written. Frere,
Blackwood’s Magaziners,
Rose, Cornwall, all write it with ease and success; it therefore
behoves Lord Byron to distinguish his use of this measure
by superior and peculiar beauties. He should refine and polish; and by the limæ labor et mora, attain the perfection of ease. A vulgar epigram says that “easy writing is damned hard reading;” and
it is one of the eternal and general rules by which heaven warns us, at every
step and at every look, that this is a mere transitory life; that what costs no
trouble soon perishes; that what grows freely dies early; and that nothing
endures but in some degree of proportion with the time and labour it has cost
to create. Use these hints if you can, but not my name.
Yours ever,
Henry Peter Brougham, first baron Brougham and Vaux (1778-1868)
Educated at Edinburgh University, he was a founder of the
Edinburgh
Review in which he chastised Byron's
Hours of Idleness; he
defended Queen Caroline in her trial for adultery (1820), established the London University
(1828), and was appointed lord chancellor (1830).
John Wilson Croker (1780-1857)
Secretary of the Admiralty (1810) and writer for the
Quarterly
Review; he edited an elaborate edition of Boswell's
Life of
Johnson (1831).
Demosthenes (384 BC-322 BC)
Athenian orator, author of the
Philippics.
John Hookham Frere (1769-1846)
English diplomat and poet; educated at Eton and Cambridge, he was envoy to Lisbon
(1800-02) and Madrid (1802-04, 1808-09); with Canning conducted the
The
Anti-Jacobin (1797-98); author of
Prospectus and Specimen of an
intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft (1817, 1818).
William Gifford (1756-1826)
Poet, scholar, and editor who began as a shoemaker's apprentice; after Oxford he
published
The Baviad (1794),
The Maeviad
(1795), and
The Satires of Juvenal translated (1802) before becoming
the founding editor of the
Quarterly Review (1809-24).
John Cam Hobhouse, baron Broughton (1786-1869)
Founder of the Cambridge Whig Club; traveled with Byron in the orient, radical MP for
Westminster (1820); Byron's executor; after a long career in politics published
Some Account of a Long Life (1865) later augmented as
Recollections of a Long Life, 6 vols (1909-1911).
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)
English poet, journalist, and man of letters; editor of
The
Examiner and
The Liberal; friend of Byron, Keats, and
Shelley.
John Murray II (1778-1843)
The second John Murray began the
Quarterly Review in 1809 and
published works by Scott, Byron, Austen, Crabbe, and other literary notables.
Bryan Waller Procter [Barry Cornwall] (1787-1874)
English poet; a contemporary of Byron at Harrow, and friend of Leigh Hunt and Charles
Lamb. He was the author of several volumes of poem and
Mirandola, a
tragedy (1821).
Luigi Pulci (1432-1484)
Italian poet patronized by the Medici family; author of the
Il
Morgante (1483).
William Stewart Rose (1775-1843)
Second son of George Rose, treasurer of the navy (1744-1818); he introduced Byron to
Frere's
Whistlecraft poems and translated Casti's
Animale parlante (1819).
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose
works, among them the
Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813),
History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and
The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. (1817-1980). Begun as the
Edinburgh Monthly Magazine,
Blackwood's assumed the name of its proprietor, William Blackwood after the sixth
number. Blackwood was the nominal editor until 1834.
George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Don Juan. (London: 1819-1824). A burlesque poem in ottava rima published in installments: Cantos I and II published in
1819, III, IV and V in 1821, VI, VII, and VIII in 1823, IX, X, and XI in 1823, XII, XIII,
and XIV in 1823, and XV and XVI in 1824.
