![]()
![]()
I reached Pisa for the second time in December. Lord Byron had already arrived, and was settled in the Casa Lanfranchi.
Shelley had taken up his abode on the opposite
side of the Lung’ Arno. His apartment, however, looked to the west, and it was
basking in the sun when I entered; and I may here add, that during almost all that winter,
such is the divine climate of Pisa, we dined with the windows open. At his house, I first
saw the Countess Guiccioli, then a strikingly
handsome woman. Those who saw her at that time, might have supposed that she had sat to
Georgione for a celebrated picture in the Dresden
gallery—a gentleman with two ladies; she bore such a striking resemblance to one of
these, that on the left of the groupe; possessing the same character of features, bright
auburn hair and eyes, that seem indigenal to, or hereditary in the fair Venetians. For many
weeks she passed her soirees at Shelley’s; a more perfectly
amiable, interesting, and feminine person I never met. Her at-![]()
![]()
tachment
to Byron, whose name she pronounced, laying a strong stress on the
y, (and her voice was the most musical I ever remember in an
Italian,) had been her first; she loved him with a devotion of which no women are so
capable as the Italians, and has remained constant to that love—unchanged and
unchangeable. I met her many years after, at the baths of Lucca, and at Florence, where at
a ball given by the Prince Borghese, singularly enough, I, at the
request of Mr. King, now
Lord
Lovelace, introduced her to him; little thinking that he would afterwards
have married the
Ada of Childe Harold. But to revert to Shelley.
I found him an altered man; his health had sensibly improved, and he had
shaken off much of that melancholy and depression, to which he had been subject during the
last year. He anticipated with delight the arrival of Leigh
Hunt—was surrounded by many friends. The
Williams’s were a never failing resource to him, and his
daily visit to Byron was a distraction, ![]()
![]()
and ever new excitement. Nor this alone,—he accompanied him in
his evening drives, assisted as wont in the pistol-practice, for which he formed an early
predilection at Oxford. A friend speaking of several contradictions in his appearance and
character at that time, says, “His ordinary preparations for a rural walk formed a
remarkable contrast with his mild aspect and pacific habits. He provided himself with a
pair of duelling pistols, and good store of powder and ball, and when he came to a
solitary spot, he pinned a card, or fixed some other mark upon a tree or a bank, and
amused himself by firing at it. He was a pretty good shot, and was much delighted at
his success. The same gentleman says of himself, that having accidentally shot the
target in the centre,
Shelley ran to the card,
examined it attentively several times, and more than once measured the distance on the
spot where I had stood.” How often have I seen him do the same! I imagine
that it was Shelley, who at Geneva, inoculated Lord
Byron (whose
![]()
![]()
lameness made his out-door amusements
very limited,) with the taste. These trials of skill were
Shelley’s favourite recreation, and even the preparations
for it occupied his thoughts agreeably, for he generally made and carried to the ground a
target to be used on the occasion, and habit enabled him to manufacture them with great
neatness. I have often been surprised to see the poet occupied in making circles and
bull’s eyes. Shelley used to wonder that
Byron shot so well, for his aim was long, and his hand trembled.
Shelley’s was all firmness. He was a very indifferent
horseman—had an awkward and unsafe seat—which is very singular, as he had very
early been used to ride, though it is probable that he had almost from boyhood discontinued
the habit. Byron’s seat was not the best in the world, nor his
stud very famous. The animal who carried him was loaded with fat, and resembled, if she
were not one, a Flanders mare. She was encumbered with a sliding martingale, a hussar
saddle, and holsters with
![]()
![]()
pistols; was remarkable for the lowness of
her action, and the amble, her usual pace, which, from its ease, made her a favourite with
her master.
Shelley and myself generally visited Byron at the same hour, between two and three; indeed, I
believe there never passed a day, for many months, without our meeting at the Lanfranchi,
and they had invented a sort of macaronic language that was very droll. They called firing,
tiring; hitting, colping; missing, mancating; riding, cavalling; walking, a-spassing, &c.
Byron the man and Byron the poet
were as different as mind and matter. He possessed two natures—the human and the
divine. I have often heard Shelley, almost in the
language of a gifted German lady-writer, say,—“The poet is a different being
from the rest of the world. Imagination steals over him—he knows not whence.
Images float before him—he knows not their home. Struggling and contending powers
are engendered within him, which no outward ![]()
![]()
impulse, no inward
passion awakened. He utters sentiments he never meditated. He creates persons whose
original he had never seen; but he cannot command the power that called them out of
nothing. He must wait till the God or dæmon genius breathes it into him. He has higher
powers than the generality of men, and the most distinguished abilities; but he is
possessed by a still higher power. He prescribes laws, he overturns customs and
opinions, he begins and ends an epoch, like a God; but he is a blind, obedient,
officiating priest in the temple of God.” Byron also was
fully indued with this persuasion, for he says,—“Poetry is a distinct
faculty of the soul, and has no more to do with the every-day individual, than the
inspirations of the Pythianess when removed from the tripod.” In his
Essay on Poetry,
Shelley more fully developes this sentiment, and
says,—“Poets are the hyerophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the
mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts on the present; the words which
express what they understand not; the
![]()
![]()
trumpet that sounds to
battle, and feels not what it inspires; the influence which is moved, but moves not.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world!” And
again,—”They measure the circumference, and sound the depth of human
nature with a comprehensive, all-penetrating spirit, at the manifestations of which
they are themselves, perhaps, the most sincerely astonished,—for it is less
their spirit than the spirit of the age.”
But speaking of Byron in his human
capacity. The Byron of England and Geneva, and the
Byron of Italy, or at least Pisa, were widely different persons.
His talk was, at that time, a dilution of his letters, full of persiflage and calembourg. Shelley used to compare him to Voltaire, to whom he would have thought it the greatest compliment to be
compared; for if there was any one writer whom he admired more than another, it was the
author of Candide, Like
Voltaire, he looked upon converse as a relaxation, not an exercise
of mind. Both professed the same speculative—I might say, sceptical turn of mind; the
![]()
![]()
same power of changing the subject from the grave to the gay; the
same mastery over the sublime, the pathetic, the comic. No, he differed from the
philosopher of Ferney in one respect,—he never scoffed at religion. His boss of
veneration was strongly developed, and had he returned to England, he would, I have little
doubt, have died, as
Rochester did, and as
Tommy Moore lives, in the odour of sanctity.
Shelley frequently lamented that it was almost
impossible to keep Byron to any one given point. He flew
about from subject to subject like a will-o’-the-wisp, touching them with a false
fire, without throwing any real or steady light on any. There was something enchanting in
his manner, his voice, his smile—a fascination in them; but on leaving him, I have
often marvelled that I gained so little from him worth carrying away; whilst every word of
Shelley’s was almost oracular; his reasoning subtle and
profound; his opinions, whatever they were, sincere and undisguised; whilst with
Byron, such was his love of mystification, it was impossible to
know ![]()
![]()
when he was in earnest. As in the writings of the Greek
philosophers, there was always an undercurrent. He dealt, too, in the gross and indelicate,
of which Shelley had an utter abhorrence, and often left him with
ill-disguised disgust. At times, however, but they only, like angels’ visits, few and
far between, he, as was said of
Raphael, could pass
from the greatest jesting to the greatest seriousness with the most charming grace. To get
him into an argument was a very difficult matter.
Mr.
Hogg, speaking of Shelley, says,—“Never
was there a more unexceptionable disputant. He was the only arguer I ever knew, who
drew every argument from the nature of the thing, and who could never be provoked to
descend to personal contentions. He was free from the weaknesses of our
nature—conceit, irritability, vanity, and impatience of contradiction.”
“The Eternal Child!” this beautiful expression, so true
in its application to Shelley! I borrow from
Mr. Gilfillan, and I am tempted to add the rest
of his eloquent parallel between
Shelley
![]()
![]()
and
Lord Byron, as far as it
relates to their external appearance. In the forehead and head of
Byron there was a more massive power and breadth:
Shelley’s had a smooth, arched, spiritual expression;
wrinkles there seemed none on his brow; it was as if perpetual youth had there dropped its
freshness. Byron’s eye seemed the focus of pride and lust;
Shelley’s was mild, pensive, fixed on you, but seeing
through the mist of its own idealism. Defiance curled Byron’s
nostril, and sensuality steeped his full, large lips; the lower portions of
Shelley’s face were frail, feminine, and flexible.
Byron’s head was turned upwards; as if, having proudly risen
above his contemporaries, he were daring to claim kindred, or to demand a contest with a
superior order of beings; Shelley’s was half bent in reverence
and humility before some vast vision seen by his eye alone. In the portrait of
Byron, taken at the age of nineteen, you see the unnatural age of
premature passion. His hair is grey, his dress is youthful, but his face is old.
![]()
![]()
In Shelley you see the eternal child, none the
less because the hair is grey, and that “sorrow seems half his
immortality.”
No one had a higher opinion of Shelley—of his heart and his head, than Byron; to both these he has done ample credit. I have often been present
when the noble poet handed to his friend what he had written during the morning,
particularly Heaven and Earth, which
Shelley read to us when it was copying by Mrs. Shelley, who was occasionally
Byron’s amanuensis. Shelley was much
struck by the choral parts, and repeated twice or three times over as a specimen of great
lyrical harmony.
Anah. Sister, sister! I view them winging Their bright way through the parted night! |
![]()
Aholibamak. The clouds from off their pinions flinging, As though they bore to-morrow’s light. |
![]()
Anah. But should our father see the sight? |
![]()
![]()
![]()
Aholibamah. He would but deem it was the moon, Rising unto some sorcerer’s tune, An hour too soon. |
![]()
Nor did Shelley admire alone the
lyrics of this Mystery, and had he lived to see “The Loves of the Angels,” of which it was the
type, would have thought that in its sublimity, its simplicity, and its pathos, it bore the
same relation to that meretricious poem, which the figurante of the Pitti does to the Venus of the Tribune.
Cain also had arrived, which Shelley had seen begun at Ravenna; of which, speaking in
one of his letters, he says,—“In my opinion it contains finer poetry than
has appeared in England since the publication of The Paradise Regained;
Cain is apocalyptic.” It was a frequent subject
of conversation between the two poets. Byron read us Hobhouse’s opinion,—“that it was
worse than the worst bombast of Dryden (sage
critic!) and that it was not a work to which he would have ventured to put his name in
the days of ![]()
![]()
Pope,
Churchill, and
Johnson” (a strange trinity.) I shall reserve what I have to say of
this gentleman, an inveterate enemy of Shelley’s, to another
place.
Shelley was supposed to have greatly influenced
Byron in the design of the drama; at least, he was
so accused by Hobhouse and Moore; an accusation to which Shelley
remarks,—“How happy should I not be to attribute to myself, however
indirectly, any participation in that immortal work!” Though he might have
had nothing to do with the origination, or the general treatment of the drama,—and
indeed, the tone of Cain’s language was
emphatically Byronic,—I have reason to think that Byron owes to
Shelley the platonic idea of the Hades,—the preadamite
worlds, and their phantasmal shapes, perhaps suggested by Lucian’s Icaro Menippus. Lord
Byron had certainly a profound respect for
Shelley’s judgment. I have mentioned being present when the
MS. of “The Deformed
Transformed” was placed in his ![]()
![]()
hands,—and
Shelley’s remarks after perusing it,—“that he
liked it the least of all his works; that it smelt too strongly of
Faust; and besides, that there were two lines in it,
word for word from
Southey.” On which
occasion Byron turned deadly pale, seized the MS., and committed it to
the flames, seeming to take a savage delight in seeing it consume. But it was destined to
rise again from its ashes. Poets, like mothers, have a strange fondness for their ricketty
offspring. Byron thought that all his writings were equally good, and
always vindicated strenuously those which were the least popular, particularly in the case
of the
Version from Pulci, which
Mr. Moore says “must be fated to be unread;”
not that the version itself was bad,—on the contrary, it was most faithful; but the
poem was not worth translating, and is totally at variance with the taste of the English
public. My notion is, that Lord Byron’s object was to shew the
inferiority of the original, considered the best of the productions of the Italian
![]()
![]()
weavers of merry octava rima, to
Don Juan, and intended to blind the world to a belief that it
was derived from any source but the right one. None of the forty commentators or critics
(the number is ominous, certainly a most formidable array of living cavaliers, that have
entered the lists against a dead man) being at all aware that the
Novelle of
Casti were the prototypes of Don Juan,—much
less that it was framed and modelled after the
Diavolessa, and which Byron
first read at Brussels in 1816.
Leigh Hunt says,
“that he is so jealous of being indebted to any one for a hint, that he was
disconcerted at the mention I made in
the
Liberal, of
Whistlecraft’s specimen, the precursor of
Beppo and Don Juan; and I believe that the praise
he bestows on the pseudonimous author, when he asks, ‘who the
devil can have done this
diabolically
well-written letter?’ is in consequence of the sentiments therein
contained, being in accordance with the mystification he wished to keep up.”
Leigh Hunt goes on to say,—“that it is utter
![]()
![]()
humbug to say that it is borrowed from the style of the Italian
weavers of merry octava rima.” Shelley seems to have
been of the same opinion, and during his visits to Ravenna, speaking of Don Juan, says,—“Byron has read to me one
of his unpublished cantos of Don Juan, which is astonishingly
fine. It sets him not only above, but far above all the poets of the age. Every word is
stamped with immortality. I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, and
well I may; and there is no other with whom it is worth contending. The canto is in the
style, but totally, and sustained with considerable ease and power, like the end of the
second canto. There is not a word which the most rigid assertor of the dignity of human
nature would desire to be cancelled; it fulfils in a certain measure what I have long
preached of producing, something wholly new, and relative to the age, and yet
surpassingly beautiful; it may be vanity, but I think I see the traces of my earnest
exhortations to him to create something new!”
![]()
![]()
I now proceed to investigate “the humbug of Byron’s having borrowed from the weavers of the
octava rima,” and to show whether it was “something new.”
In the Diavolessa
of Casti, two Spanish scapegraces scour their native
country, dividing its cities among them in search of love adventures; the one is called
Don Ignazio, the other Don
Juan, but as dramatists and their kind have disposed of the latter
personage, to the quieting of all consciences that might dread his prowess,
Casti took for his hero Don Ignazio; Byron has taken Don Juan.
Casti says of Don
Ignazio,—
Naque, e l’infanzia sua passó in Seviglia; |
![]()
Byron of Don Juan,—
In Seville he was born, a pleasant city. |
![]()
Casti says of the parentage of Don
Ignazio,—
La nobil sua famialia Direttamente scendea fin dei ré Goti; |
![]()
Byron of Don Juan’s,—
![]()
![]()
He traced his source Through the most gothic gentlemen of Spain. |
![]()
The Juan and Ignazio of Casti were both precocious, so was the hero
of Lord Byron, and the age of twelve was marked as an epoch by both
poets.
Entrambo guinti a dodici anni appena. |
![]()
At twelve he was a fine but quiet boy. |
![]()
Casti takes his hero out to sea, he is shipwrecked, and considering
how little of a sailor an Italian abbé can be, the description of it, though partly drawn
from classical authors, will be found most powerful. We certainly do marvel that this
probable cause of Byron’s Shipwreck has never been suggested,
and it is a striking ignorance of the best critics. The sources whence he drew the
technicalities of terms have been noticed often enough, but it was never once hinted, that
Casti could possibly have suggested the idea. Moreover, in the
Shipwreck of the Italian, there is an expression that Byron has
evidently copied,
![]()
![]()
—the
si
spezzò, the going down of the ship, in either case told in two
lines; by the Italian,—
Il quarto di contro uno scoglio urtò, D’Africa sulle coste, e si spezzò; |
![]()
while Byron does it thus:
She gave a heel, and then a lurch to port, And going down headforemost—sunk in short. |
![]()
But further, Casti’s hero, of
all the crew, is the only one saved; so it is with Byron’s; and more singular still, a dove, or something like one,
appears to each in their moments of need.
It was a beautiful white bird, Web-footed, and not unlike a dove in size And plumage. |
![]()
that appeared to
Juan and the most
beautiful part of the stanza,—
It came and went and fluttered round, &c. |
![]()
which is, “e giva e fea ritorno svolazzando,” evidently
is a plagiarism from Casti. According to the Italian tale, Don Juan and Don Ignazio
![]()
![]()
meet in Hell.
Byron meant his hero
to finish there.
A panoramic view of Hell’s in training, &c. |
![]()
As a general specimen of Casti’s style, I subjoin in a note, the Shipwreck;* to which I
* At eventide, nor once the ship they wore, They made the mouth of Gibraltar’s straits, The bound of either continent, where the hoar And swoln sea, fettered, ever roars and beats. That ocean seems indignant of a shore, And oft makes ravage there of all it meets. And thus to menace this frail craft with wreck, A sudden squall and heavy drove them back. |
![]() In haste the mariners, with terror pale, In with the deadlights, each a separate door To man’s destruction,—close-reef every sail. Boils the swoln surge, winds rave, and billows roar. Fear reigns supreme. There’s nothing like a gale For taming tiger man. On either shore They wildly gaze, and scarce can draw their breath, In thinking how they shall escape from death. |
![]() Comes mounting on the deck,† like a wild horse, With shock that skill and seamanship defies, A giant breaker, with the united force Of lesser breakers foaming. The spray flies, |
![]()
† And the waves bound beneath me like a steed That knows its rider. |
![]() |
![]()
![]()
![]()
refer those who are curious about this matter,—to my mind set
at rest, as well as the stanza beginning,—
Ma la grazia di ciel che a lui d’intorno,* &c. |
![]()
|
And refluent sweeps the helmsman—and still more
The helm. Ermenigilda! in
thine eyes,
For bridal joys strange terrors then we see.
Poor thing! the sight of death’s but left to thee!
|
![]()
|
The main-mast gone, and with it the bowsprit,
She wounded lies in a most crazy state,
With water in her hold at least six feet.
To give them hopes, she should at any rate
Have had a helm and binnacle. I repeat,
That none who saw that craft could doubt her fate.
Four days she drove towards Africa, and hit
At last upon a sunken rock, and split.
|
![]()
|
Then all was wreck, and as she thumped the ground,
All were washed overboard, and then a few
Struck by the spars went down; with bubbling sound,
Others gave up the ghost, till all the crew
Were in the eddying whirlpool sucked, and drowned.
And must the merciless wave thee swallow too,
Ermenigild?—to save thee was there
none?—
Sole author of these ills, escaped our Don.
|
![]()
|
* But grace divine, or Heaven’s exceeding love,
That oft repulsed, desiring still to stay,
Went and came, like the olive-bearing dove,
Flew round and round, nor would be driven away;
|
![]()
|
![]()
![]()
![]()
Werner was also a play written during this
winter, and of which Byron produced to myself and
Shelley an Act, (the longest, I think the
fourth,) the fruit of one mighty morning’s labour. The MS. had scarcely an
emendation; unlike that of Heaven and Earth,
which was so interlined as scarcely to be legible. “Werner would be a better acting play,” said
Shelley, “than a closet one.” His words have
been confirmed. “It is,” says the editor of
Byron’s works, “the only one of his dramas that has been
successful in representation. It is still in possession of the stage.”
Shelley used to say, that the magnetism of Byron—“the Byronic Energy,” as he
called Byron—was hostile to his powers; that, like the reading
of Dante, the outpouring of his works,
Did easy access to his bosom prove, (For trials melt the hardest hearts) that day. She folds on Don Ignazio, as to rest Her wings, and seems to light upon his breast. |
![]() |
![]()
![]()
![]()
vast and fair As perfect worlds at the Creator’s will, |
![]()
produced in him a despair.
In a letter to Horace Smith he
says, “I have lived too long near Lord Byron, and the sun has extinguished my
glowworm; for I cannot hope with St. John, that the light came
into the world and the world knew it not.” Certain it is, that when he was
with Byron at Geneva, he wrote but little.
