The Silent Isle, Arthur Christopher Benson [best book reader txt] 📗

be thrown into the opposite scale before Byron can be rehabilitated or made worthy of the least admiration and respect.

Byron had invited Leigh Hunt out to Italy, with the design of producing, with his assistance, a monthly Review of a literary type. Leigh Hunt came out with his wife and family, and accepted quarters under Byron's roof. Byron had already tired of the scheme and repented of his generosity. Leigh Hunt avers that Byron was an innately avaricious man, and that, though he occasionally lavished money on some favourite scheme, it was only because, though he loved money much, he loved notoriety more. The good angel of the situation was Shelley, who really made all the arrangements for Hunt's sojourn and presented him with the necessary furniture for his rooms. Shelley was certainly entirely indifferent to money, and profusely generous. He had begun by admiring Byron, with all the enthusiasm of hero-worship, but a closer acquaintance had revealed much that was distasteful and even repugnant to him, and it may safely be said that if he had lived he would soon have withdrawn from Byron's society. Shelley's ideas of morality were not conventional; his affection and enthusiasm for people burnt fiercely and waned, yet when he sinned, he sinned through a genuine passion. But Byron, according to Leigh Hunt, was a cold-blooded libertine, and had no conception of what love meant, except as a merely animal desire, which he abundantly gratified.

The awkward menage was established. Byron was at the Casa Lanfranchi at Pisa, and gave Leigh Hunt the ground floor. Leigh Hunt describes him as lounging about half the day in a nankeen jacket and white duck trousers, singing in a swaggering fashion, in a voice at once "thin and veiled," a boisterous air of Rossini's, riding out with pistols accompanied by his dogs, and sitting up half the night to write Don Juan over gin and water. He was living at the time with the Countess Guiccioli, who had married a man four times her age, had obtained a separation, and now lived as Byron's mistress, with her father and brother in the same house.

That Hunt should have been willing to bring his wife and a growing family under the same roof does not reflect much credit on him, especially when he found that Byron was not averse to saying cynical and even corrupting things to Hunt's boys, when Hunt himself was absent. Mrs. Leigh Hunt took a stronger line; she cordially disliked Byron from the first. On one occasion when Byron said to her that Trelawny had been finding fault with his morals, Mrs. Leigh Hunt said trenchantly that it was the first time she had ever heard of them.

Leigh Hunt soon perceived that he and Byron had very little in common. Byron disliked his familiarity and his airs of equality; while he himself was not long in discovering Byron to be egotistical to the verge of insanity, childishly vain of his rank, ill-natured, jealous, coarse, inconsiderate, disloyal, a blabber of secrets, mean, deceitful. But the glamour of Byron's fame, the romance that surrounded him, his rank, which Leigh Hunt valued almost pathetically, kept the amiable invalid--for such Leigh Hunt was at this time--hanging on to Byron's skirts and claiming his protection. The Review began with a flourish of trumpets, but soon broke down; and finally the very uncongenial partnership was dissolved.

One cannot pardon Leigh Hunt at any stage. He ought never to have accepted the original invitation; he ought never to have retained the undignified position of a sort of literary parasite. He endeavoured to protect his own self-respect by adopting a tone of easy familiarity with Byron, which only resulted in galling his host; and he ought not to have written his very damaging reminiscences of the period, though it is quite clear that he felt under no obligation whatever to Byron.

Still it is a deeply interesting piece of portraiture, and probably substantially accurate. The painful fact is that Byron was a very ill-bred person. He had drawn a prize in the lottery of life, and had obtained, so to speak, by accident of birth, a position that gave him fortuitously the consequence which numbers of ambitious men spend their lives in trying to obtain. And then, too, we must not lose sight of Byron's genius, though it is abundantly clear that all there was of noble and beautiful in Byron's nature was entirely given to his art, and that outside of his art there remained nothing but a temperament burdened with all the ugliest faults of the artistic nature, artificially forced and developed by untoward circumstance. There remains the perennial mystery of genius, which can put into glowing words and exquisite phrases emotions which it can conceive but cannot feel. Leigh Hunt's deliberate view of Byron is that he did everything for effect, that his vanity was boundless and insatiable, and that even his raptures were stage raptures. There is little reason to doubt it. Byron's tumultuous agonies of soul were little more than the rage of the spoilt child, who cannot bear that things should go contrary to its desires. Byron, by concealing the causes of his melancholy, and attaching to it a nobler motive, made himself into a Hamlet when he was in reality only a Timon. What view are we to take of Byron's intervention in the affairs of Greece? To fling oneself into a revolutionary movement, to sacrifice money and health, to suffer, to die, is surely an evidence of enthusiasm and sincerity? Leigh Hunt would have us believe that this, too, was nothing but a pose. He tells us how the gift of ten thousand pounds to the Greek Revolutionaries, which was publicly announced by Byron's action, was reduced to a loan of four thousand. He tells the story of the three gilded helmets, bearing the family motto, "Crede Byron," which the poet offered to show him, that he had had made for himself and Trelawny and Count Pietro Gamba. The conclusion is irresistible that there was a large infusion of vanity in the whole scheme, and that Byron had his eye upon the world, here as elsewhere. The Greek expedition would exhibit him in a chivalrous and romantic light; it might provide him with some excitement, though Leigh Hunt maintains that Byron was physically and morally a coward; and indeed, judging from what one knows of Byron, it is hard to believe that his enthusiasm was an unselfish one, or that he was deeply stirred with patriotic emotions, though he was perhaps swayed by a certain artistic sympathy.

It may be asked, is it not better to put the most generous construction upon Byron's acts, to believe that his was a nature of high enthusiasms as well as of violent passions, and that the needle fluctuated between the two?

All depends upon the mood in which one approaches a character. I confess myself that the one thing which seems to me important and interesting is to get at the truth about a man. In the investigation of character there is nothing to be said for being a partisan and for indulging in special pleading, so as to minimise faults and magnify virtues. My own belief is that Byron was an essentially worthless character, the prey of impulse, the slave of desire, thirsting for distinction above everything. There is nothing in his letters or in his recorded speech that would make one think otherwise; his life was devoted to the pursuit of pleasurable excitement, and he cared little what price he paid for it He never seems to me to have admired gentleness or self-restraint or modesty, or to have desired to attain them. Indeed, I think he gives the lie to all the theories that assert that genius and influence must be based on some essential worthiness and greatness of soul.


XLVIII


It is often said that poets have no biographies but their own works, but that is only a half-truth. It is to me one of the most delightful things in the world to follow the footsteps of a poet about, in scenes perhaps familiar to myself; to see how the simple sights of earth and sky struck fire from his mind, to realise what he thought about under commonplace conditions. I have often stayed, for instance, at Tan-yr-allt in North Wales, where Shelley spent some months, and where the strange adventure of the night-attack by the assassin occurred--a story never satisfactorily unravelled; it was a constant pleasure there to feel that one was looking at the fine crags which Shelley loved, so nobly weather-stained and ivy-hung, that one was threading the same woodland paths, and rambling on the open moorland where he so often paced. The interest, the inspiration of the process comes from the fact that one sees how genius transmutes the dull elements of life, those elements which are in reach of all of us, into thoughts rich and strange. I often think of the plum-tree in the tiny garden of Wentworth Place, where Keats, one languid spring day, sate to hear the nightingale sing, and scribbled the Ode on loose half-sheets of paper, careless if they were preserved or no. It makes one discern the quality of genius to realise how there is food for it everywhere, and how little right one has to blame one's surroundings for not being more suggestive. Indeed, I cannot help feeling that the very vulgarity of Keats' circle, with its ill-flavoured jokes, its provincial taint, is even more impressive than the romance in which Shelley lived, because it marks his genius more impressively. Shelley was at least in contact with interesting personalities, while Keats' circle was on the whole a depressing one.

But the point which has been deeply borne in upon me, and which we are apt, in reflecting on the posthumous glories of men of genius, to forget, is the reflection how extraordinarily scanty was the recognition which both Keats and Shelley met with in their lifetime. Keats was nothing more than an obscure poetaster; he had a few friends who believed in him, but which of them would have dared to predict the volume and magnitude of his subsequent fame? Shelley was in even worse case, for he was regarded by ordinary people as a monster of irreligion and immorality, the custody of whose children had been denied him by the most respectable of Lord Chancellors, on account of his detestable opinions and the infamy of his mode of life. There are, I will venture to say, a hundred living English writers who have more, far more, of the comfortable sense of renown, and its tangible rewards, than either of these great poets enjoyed in their lifetime. Byron himself, who by the side of Shelley cuts so deplorable a figure, had at least the consciousness of being an intensely romantic and mysterious figure, quickening the emotional temperature of the world and making its pulse beat faster. But Keats and Shelley worked on in discouragement and obscurity. It is true that they judged their own work justly, and knew within themselves that there was a fiery quality in what they wrote. But how many poets have fed themselves in vain on the same hopes, have thought themselves unduly contemned and slighted! There is hardly a scribbler of verse who has not the same delusion, and who has not in chilly and comfortless moments to face the fact that he does not probably count for very much, after all, in the scheme of things. How hard it is in the case of Keats and Shelley to feel that they had not some inkling of all the desirous worship, the generous praise, that has surrounded their memory after their death! How hard it is to enter into the bitterness of spirit which fell upon Shelley, not once nor twice,