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MOORE'S LIFE OF LORD BYRON.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1831.]

We have read this book with the greatest pleasure. Considered merely as a composition, it deserves to be classed among the best specimens of English prose which our age has produced. It contains, indeed, no single passage equal to two or three which we could select from the Life of Sheridan. But, as a whole, it is immeasurably superior to that work. The style is agreeable, clear, and manly; and when it rises into eloquence, rises without effort or ostentation. Nor is the matter inferior to the manner.

general epistles, meant to be read by a large
circle, we expected to find them clever and
spirited, but deficient in ease. We looked
with vigilance for instances of stiffness in the
language, and awkwardness in the transitions.
We have been agreeably disappointed; and
we must confess, that if the epistolary style of
Lord Byron was artificial, it was a rare and
admirable instance of that highest art, which
cannot be distinguished from nature.

Of the deep and painful interest which this
book excites, no abstract can give a just no
tion. So sad and dark a story is scarcely to be
found in any work of fiction; and we are littl
disposed to envy the moralist who can read i
without being softened.

The

It would be difficult to name a book which exhibits more kindness, fairness, and modesty. It has evidently been written, not for the purpose of showing, what, however, it often shows, how well its author can write; but for the pur- The pretty fable by which the Duchess of pose of vindicating, as far as truth will per- Orleans illustrates the character of her son the mit, the memory of a celebrated man who can regent, might, with little change, be applied to no longer vindicate himself. Mr. Moore never Byron. All the fairies, save one, had been bidthrusts himself between Lord Byron and the den to his cradle. All the gossips had been public. With the strongest temptations to profuse of their gifts. One had bestowed noegotism, he has said no more about himselfbility, another genius, a third beauty. than the subject absolutely required. A great part, indeed the greater part of these volumes, consists of extracts from the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron; and it is difficult to speak too highly of the skill which has been shown in the selection and arrangement. We will not say that we have not occasionally remarked in these two large quartos an anecdote which should have been omitted, a letter which should have been suppressed, a name which should have been concealed by asterisks; or asterisks which do not answer the purpose of concealing the name. But it is impossible, on a general survey, to deny that the task has been executed with great judg-publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded ment and great humanity. When we consider the life which Lord Byron had led, his petulance, his irritability, and his communicativeness, we cannot but admire the dexterity with which Mr. Moore has contrived to exhibit so much of the character and opinions of his friend, with so little pain to the feelings of the living.

malignant elf who had been uninvited came
last, and, unable to reverse what her sisters had
done for their favourite, had mixed up a curse
with every blessing. In the rank of Lerd
Byron, in his understanding, in his character,
in his very person, there was a strange union
of opposite extremes. He was born to all that
men covet and admire. But in every one of
those eminent advantages which he possessed
over others, there was mingled something of
misery and debasement. He was sprung from
a house, ancient indeed and noble, but de-
graded and impoverished by a series of crimes
and follies, which had attained a scandalous

had died poor, and, but for merciful judges,
would have died upon the gallows. The young
peer had great intellectual powers; yet there
was an unsound part in his mind. He had na-
turally a generous and tender heart; but his
temper was wayward and irritable. He had
a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a
foot the deformity of which the beggars in the
streets mimicked. Distinguished at once by the
strength and by the weakness of his intellect,
affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a
handsome cripple, he required, if ever man re-
quired, the firmest and the most judicious train-
But, capriciously as nature had dealt
with him, the relative to whom the office of
forming his character was intrusted was more
capricious still. She passed from paroxysms
of rage to paroxysms of fondness. At one time
she stifled him with her caresses, at another
time she insulted his deformity. He came into
the world, and the world treated him as his
mother treated him-sometimes with kind-
ness, sometimes with severity, never with
justice. It indulged him without discrimina-

The extracts from the journals and correspondence of Lord Byron are in the highest degree valuable--not merely on account of the information which they contain respecting the distinguished man by whom they were written, but on account, also, of their rare merit as coming. positions. The Letters, at least those which were sent from Italy, are among the best in our language. They are less affected than those of Pope and Walpole; they have more matter in them than those of Cowper. Knowing that many of them were not written merely for the person to whom they were directed, but were

Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of Vis Life. By THOMAS MOORE, Esq. 2 vols. 4to. London: 1830.

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tion, and punished him without discrimination. | form any judgment on a transaction which is He was truly a spoiled child; not merely the so imperfectly known to us. It would have spoiled child of his parents, but the spoiled been well if, at the time of the separation, all child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the those who knew as little about the matter then spoiled child of fame, the spoiled child of so- as we know about it now, had shown that forciety. His first poems were received with a bearance, which, under such circumstances, is contempt which, feeble as they were, they did but common justice. not absolutely deserve. The poem which he published on his return from his travels, was, on the other hand, extolled far above its merits. At twenty-four he found himself on the highest pinnacle of literary fame, with Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and a crowd of other distinguished writers, beneath his feet. There is scarcely an instance in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence.

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces, and family quarrels pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years, our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated. We must make a stand against vice. Every thing that could stimulate, and every We must teach libertines, that the English thing that could gratify the strongest propensi- people appreciate the importance of domestic ties of our nature-the gaze of a hundred ties. Accordingly, some unfortunate man, in drawing-rooms, the acclamations of the whole no respect more depraved than hundreds whose nation, the applause of applauded men, the offences have been treated with lenity, is love of the loveliest women-all this world, singled out as an expiatory sacrifice. If he and all the glory of it, were at once offered to has children, they are to be taken from him. If a young man, to whom nature had given vio- he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. lent passions, and whom education had never He is cut by the higher orders, and hissed by taught to control them. He lived as many men the lower. He is, in truth, a sort of whippinglive who have no similar excuses to plead boy, by whose vicarious agonies all the other for their faults. But his countrymen and his transgressors of the same class are, it is supcountrywomen would love him and admire posed, sufficiently chastised. We reflect very him. They were resolved to see in his ex- complacently on our own severity, and comcesses only the flash and outbreak of that same pare with great pride the high standard of mofiery mind which glowed in his poetry. He rals established in England, with the Parisian attacked religion; yet in religious circles his laxity. At length our anger is satiated. Our name was mentioned with fondness, and in victim is ruined and heart-broken. And our many religious publications his works were virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years censured with singular tenderness. He lam- more. pooned the Prince Regent; yet he could not alienate the Tories. Every thing, it seemed, was to be forgiven to youth, rank, and genius. Then came the reaction. Society, capricious in its indignation as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and petted darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry. He was persecuted with an irrational fury. Much has been written about those unhappy domestic occurrences which decided the fate of his life. Yet nothing ever was positively known to the public, but this-that he quarrelled with his lady, and that she refused to live with him. There have been hints in abundance, and shrugs and shakings of the head, and "Well, well, we know," and "We could an if we would," and "If we list to speak," and "There be that might an they list." But we are not aware that there is before the world, substantiated by credible, or even by tangible evidence, a single fact indicating that Lord Byron was more to blame than any other man who is on pad terms with his wife. The professional men whom Lady Byron consulted were undoubtedly of opinion that she ought not to live with her husband. But it is to be remembered that they formed that opinion without hearing both sides. We do not say, we do not mean to insinuate that Lady Byron was in any respect to blame. We think that those who condemn her on the evidence which is now before the public, are as rash as those who condemn her husband. We will not pronounce any juagment; we cannot, even in our own minds,

It is clear that those vices which destroy domestic happiness ought to be as much as possible repressed. It is equally clear that they cannot be repressed by penal legislation. It is therefore right and desirable that public opinion should be directed against them. But it should be directed against them uniformly, steadily, and temperately, not by sudden fits and starts. There should be one weight and one measure. Decimation is always an ob jectionable mode of punishment. It is the resource of judges too indolent and hasty to investigate facts, and to discriminate nicely between shades of guilt. It is an irrational practice, even when adopted by military tribunals. When adopted by the tribunal of public opinion, it is infinitely more irrational. It is good that a certain portion of disgrace should constantly attend on certain bad actions. But it is not good that the offenders merely have to stand the risks of a lottery of infamy; that ninety-nine out of every hundred should escape; and that the hundredth, perhaps the most innocent of the hundred, should pay for all. We remember to have seen a mob assem bled in Lincoln's Inn to hoot a gentleman, against whom the most oppressive proceeding known to the English law was then in pro gress. He was hooted because he had been an indifferent and unfaithful husband, as if some of the most popular men of the age, Lord Nelson, for example, had not been indifferent and unfaithful husbands. We remember a still stronger case. Will posterity believe, tnat in an age in which men, whose gallantries were

kind. It is not every day that the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified by the agonies of such a spirit and the degradation of such a name.

universally known, and had been legally | decay of nobler natures, hastened to their re proved, filled some of the highest offices in the past; and they were right; they did after their state, and in the army, presided at the meetings of religious and benevolent institutions, were the delight of every society, and the favourites of the multitude, a crowd of moralists went to the theatre, in order to pelt a poor actor for disturbing the conjugal felicity of an alderman? What there was in the circumstances, either of the offender or of the sufferer, to vindicate the zeal of the audience, we could never conceive. It has never been supposed that the situation of an actor is peculiarly favourable to the rigid virtues, or that an alderman enjoys any special immunity from injuries such as that which on this occasion roused the anger of the public. But such is the justice of mankind.

The unhappy man left his country forever. The howl of contumely followed him across the sea, up the Rhine, over the Alps; it gradually waxed fainter; it died away. Those who had raised it began to ask each other, what, after all, was the matter about which they had been so clamorous; and wished to invite back the criminal whom they had just chased from them. His poetry became more popular than it had ever been; and his complaints were read with tears by thousands and tens of thousands who had never seen his face.

He had fixed his home on the shores of the Adriatic, in the most picturesque and interesting of cities, beneath the brightest of skies, and by the brightest of seas. Censoriousness was not the vice of the neighbours whom he had chosen. They were a race corrupted by a bad government and a bad religion; long renowned for skill in the arts of voluptuousness, and tolerant of all the caprices of sensuality. From the public opinion of the country of his adoption he had nothing to dread. With the public opinion of the country of his birth he was at open war. He plunged into wild and desperate excesses, ennobled by no generous or tender sentiment. From his Venetian harem he sent forth volume after volume, full of eloquence, of wit, of pathos, of ribaldry, and of bitter disdain. His health sank under the effects of his intemperance. His hair turned gray. His food ceased to nourish him. A hectic fever withered him up. It seemed that his body and mind were about to perish to

In these cases, the punishment was excessive; but the offence was known and proved. The case of Lord Byron was harder. True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without knowing any thing whatever about the transactions in his family, flew into a violent passion with him, and proceeded to invent stories which might justify its anger. Ten or twenty different accounts of the separation, inconsistent with each other, with themselves, and with common sense, circulated at the same time. What evidence there might be for any one of these, the virtuous people who repeated them neither knew nor cared. For in fact these stories were not the causes, but the effects of the public indignation. They resembled those loathsome slanders which Goldsmith, and other abject libellers of the same class, were in the habit of publishing about Bonaparte-how he poisoned a girl with arsenic, when he was at the military school-gether." how he hired a grenadier to shoot Dessaix at Marengo-how he filled St. Cloud with all the pollutions of Capres. There was a time when anecdotes like these obtained some credence from persons, who, hating the French Emperor without knowing why, were eager to believe any thing which might justify their hatred. Lord Byron fared in the same way. His countrymen were in a bad humour with him. His writings and his character had lost the charm of novelty. He had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is punished more severely; he had been over-praised; he had excited too warm an interest; and the public, with its usual justice, chastised him for its own folly. The attachments of the multitude bear no small resemblance to those of the wanton enchantress in the Arabian Tales, who, when the forty days of her fondness were over, was not content with dismissing her lovers, out condemned them to expiate, in loathsome shapes, and under severe punishments, the crime of having once pleased her too well.

The obloquy which Byron had to endure was such as might well have shaken a more constant mind. The newspapers were filled with lampoons. The theatres shook with execrations. He was excluded from circles where ne had lately been the observed of all observAll those creeping things that riot in the

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From this wretched degradation he was in some measure rescued by an attachment, culpable indeed, yet such as, judged by the standard of morality established in the country where he lived, might be called virtuous. But an imagination polluted by vice, a temper imbittered by misfortune, and a frame habituated to the fatal excitement of intoxication, prevented him from fully enjoying the happiness which he might have derived from the purest and most tranquil of his many attachments. Midnight draughts of ardent spirits and Rhenish wines had begun to work the ruin of his fine intellect. His verse lost much of the energy and condensation which had distinguished it. But he would not resign, without a struggle, the empire which he had exercised over the men of his generation. A new dream of ambition arose before him, to be the centre of a literary party; the great mover of an intellectual revolution; to guide the public mind of England from his Italian retreat, as Voltaire had guided the public mind of France from the villa of Ferney. With this hope, as it should seem, he established The Liberal. But powerfully as he had affected the imaginations of his contemporaries, he mistook his own powers, if he hoped to direct their opinions: and he still more grossly mistook his own disposition, if he thought that he could long act

MOORE'S LIFE OF LORD BYRON.

in concert with other men of letters. The plan failed, and failed ignominiously. Angry with himself, angry with his coadjutors, he relinquished it: and turned to another project, the last and the noblest of his life.

A nation, once the first among the nations, pre-eminent in knowledge, pre-eminent in military glory, the cradle of philosophy, of eloquence, and of the fine arts, had been for ages bowed down under a cruel yoke. All the vices which tyranny generates-the abject vices which it generates in those who submit to it, the ferocious vices which it generates in those who struggle against it-had deformed the character of that miserable race. The valour which had won the great battle of human civilization, which had saved Europe, and subjugated Asia, lingered only among pirates and robbers. The ingenuity, once so conspicuously displayed in every department of physical and moral science, had been depraved into a timid and servile cunning. On a sudden this degraded people had risen on their oppressors. Discountenanced or betrayed by the surrounding potentates, they had found in themselves something of that which might well supply the place of all foreign assistance -something of the energy of their fathers.

As a man of letters, Lord Byron could not but be interested in the event of this contest. His political opinions, though, like all his opinions, unsettled, leaned strongly towards the side of liberty. He had assisted the Italian insurgents with his purse; and if their struggle against the Austrian government had been prolonged, would probably have assisted them with his sword. But to Greece he was attached by peculiar ties. He had, when young, resided in that country. Much of his most splendid and popular poetry had been inspired by its scenery and by its history. Sick of inaction, degraded in his own eyes by his private vices and by his literary failures, pining for untried excitement and honourable distinction, he carried his exhausted body and his wounded spirit to the Grecian camp.

His conduct in his new situation showed so rauch vigour and good sense as to justify us in believing, that, if his life had been prolonged, he might have distinguished himself as a soldier and a politician. But pleasure and sorrow had done the work of seventy years upon his delicate frame. The hand of death was on him; he knew it; and the only wish which he uttered was that he might die sword in hand.

This was denied to him. Anxiety, exertion, exposure, and those fatal stimulants which had become indispensable to him, soon stretched him on a ck-bed, in a strange land, amidst strange faces, without one human being that he loved near him. There, at thirty-six, the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century closed his brilliant and miserable

of coaches, turn slowly northward, leaving be
hind it that cemetery, which had been conse
crated by the dust of so many great poets, but
that remained of Byron. We well remember
of which the doors were closed against all
that, on that day, rigid moralists could not re-
frain from weeping for one so young, so illus-
trious, so unhappy, gifted with such rare gifts,
and tried by such strong temptations. It is
unnecessary to make any reflections. The
history carries its moral with it. Our age has
indeed been fruitful of warnings to the emi-
nent, and of consolations to the obscure. Two
men have died within our recollection, who at
a time of life at which few people have com-
pleted their education, had raised themselves,
each in his own department, to the height of
glory. One of them died at Longwood, the
other at Missolonghi.

It is always difficult to separate the literary
character of a man who lives in our own time
from his personal character. It is peculiarly
difficult to make this separation in the case of
Lord Byron. For it is scarcely too much to
say, that Lord Byron never wrote without some
reference, direct or indirect, to himself. The
itself in our minds, and probably in the minds
interest excited by the events of his life mingles
of almost all our readers, with the interest
which properly belongs to his works. A ge-
neration must pass away before it will be pos-
sible to form a fair judgment of his books,
considered merely as books. At present they
are not only books, but relics. We will, how-
ever, venture, though with unfeigned diffidence,
His lot was cast in the time of a great lite-
to offer some desultory remarks on his poetry.
rary revolution. That poetical dynasty which
had dethroned the successors of Shakspeare
and Spenser was, in its turn, dethroned by a
race who represented themselves as heirs of
the ancient line, so long dispossessed by usurp-
ers. The real nature of this revolution has
not, we think, been comprehended by the great
If this question were proposed-wherein
majority of those who concurred in it.
especially does the poetry of our times differ
from that of the last century? ninety-nine
persons out of a hundred would answer, that
the poetry of the last century was correct, but
cold and mechanical, and that the poetry of our
time, though wild and irregular, presented far
more vivid images, and excited the passions
far more strongly, than that of Parnell, of Ad-
constantly hear it said, that the poets of the
dison, or of Pope. In the same manner we
age of Elizabeth had far more genius, but far
less correctness, than those of the age of Anne
It seems to be taken for granted, that there i
some necessary incompatibility, some antithe
sis, between correctness and creative powe
We rather suspect that this notion arises mer
ly from an abuse of words; and that it ha
perplex the science of criticism.
been the parent of many of the fallacies whic

What is meant by correctness in poetr If by correctness be meant the conforming rules which have their foundation in tri and in the principles of human nature, th correctness is only another name for exc lence. If by correctness be meant the c

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forming to rules purely arbitrary, correctness
may be another name for dulness and ab-
surdity.

A writer who describes visible objects false-
ly, and violates the propriety of character-a
writer who makes the mountains "nod their
drowsy heads" at night, or a dying man take
leave of the world with a rant like that of
Maximin, may be said, in the high and just
sense of the phrase, to write incorrectly. He
violates the first great law of his art. His
imitation is altogether unlike the thing imi-
ated. The four poets who are most eminently
free from incorrectness of this description are
Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. They
are, therefore, in one sense, and that the best
sense, the most correct of poets.

ers.

are not, it is true, persons of so much dignity
Watt Tinlinn and William of Deloraine
sented has as little to do with the correctness
as Cato. But the dignity of the persons repre-
of poetry as with the correctness of painting.
We prefer a gipsy by Reynolds to his majes
ty's head on a signpost, and a borderer by
Scott to a senator by Addison.

used by those who say, with the author of the In what sense, then, is the word correctness Pursuits of Literature, that Pope was the most correct of English poets, and, that next to Pope, came the late Mr. Gifford? What is the nature and value of that correctness, the praise of which is denied to Macbeth, to Lear, and to Othello, and given to Hoole's translations and When it is said that Virgil, though he had discover no eternal rule, no rule founded in to all the Seatonian prize-poems? We can less genius than Homer, was a more correct reason and in the nature of things, which writer, what sense is attached to the word cor- Shakspeare does not observe much more rectness? Is it meant that the story of the strictly than Pope. Eneid is developed more skilfully than that meant the conforming to a narrow legislation, of the Odyssey? that the Ronan describes the which, while lenient to the mala in se, multiBut if by correctness be face of the external world, or he emotions of plies, without the shadow of a reason, the mala the mind, more accurately nan the Greek? prohibita; if by correctness be meant a strict that the characters of Achates and Mnestheus attention to certain ceremonious observances, are more nicely discriminated, and more con- which are no more essential to poetry than sistently supported, than those of Achilles, of etiquette to good government, or than the Nestor, and of Ulysses? The fact incontesta- washings of a Pharisee to devotion; then, asbly is, that for every violation of the funda-suredly, Pope may be a more correct poet than mental laws of poetry, which can be found in Homer, it would be easy to find twenty in Virgil.

Shakspeare; and, if the code were a little
altered, Colley Cibber might be a more correct
whether this kind of correctness be a merit;
poet than Pope. But it may well be doubted
nay, whether it be not an absolute fault.

Troilus and Cressida is perhaps of all the plays of Shakspeare that which is commonly considered as the most incorrect. Yet it seems to us infinitely more correct, in the sound irrational laws which bad critics have framed It would be amusing to make a digest of the sense of the term, than what are called the for the government of poets. First in celebrity most correct plays of the most correct drama- and in absurdity stand the dramatic unities of tists. Compare it, for example, with the Iphi- place and time. No human being has ever génie of Racine. We are sure that the Greeks been able to find any thing that could, even by of Shakspeare bear a far greater resemblance courtesy, be called an argument for these unithan the Greeks of Racine, to the real Greeks ties, except that they have been deduced from who besieged Troy; and for this reason, that the general practice of the Greeks. It requires the Greeks of Shakspeare are human beings, no very profound examination to discover that and the Greeks of Racine mere names;-mere the Greek dramas, often admirable as compowords printed in capitals at the head of para-sitions, are, as exhibitions of human characgraphs of declamation. Racine, it is true, would have shuddered at the thought of making Agamemnon quote Aristotle. But of what use is it to avoid a single anachronism, when the whole play is one anachronism-the topics and phrases of Versailles in the camp of Aubs?

ter and human life, far inferior to the English plays of the age of Elizabeth. Every scholar knows that the dramatic part of the Athenian tragedies was at first subordinate to the lyrical part. It would, therefore, have been little less than a miracle if the laws of the Athenian In the sense in which we are now using the there was no chorus. All the great masterstage had been found to suit plays in which word correctness, we think that Sir Walter pieces of the dramatic art have been comSco', Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge, are far posed in direct violation of the unities, and more correct writers than those who are com- could never have been composed if the unities mon.y extolled as the models of correctness-had not been violated. It is clear, for examPope for example, and Addison. The single ple, that such a character as that of Hamlet description of a moonlight night in Pope's could never have been developed within the Iliad contains more inaccuracies than can be limits to which Alfieri confined himself. found in all the Excursion. There is not a such was the reverence of literary men during single scene in Cato in which every thing that the last century for these unities, that Johnson, conduces to poetical illusion-the propriety of who, much to his honour, took the opposite character, of language, of situation, is not side, was, as he says, "frighted at his own te more grossly violated than in any part of the merity;" and "afraid to stand against the auLay of the Last Minstrel. No man can possi-thorities which might be produced against bly think that the Romans of Addison resem- him." b'e the real Romans so closely as the moss

Yet

treoners of Scott resemble the real moss-troop- without end. "Shakspeare," says Rymer. There are other rules of the same kind

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