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LORD BYRON

HIS MORAL OFFENCES.

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And whether that be good or ill I know not,

Not being omnipotent, nor fit to judge
Omnipotence: but merely to endure

Its mandate—which thus far I have endured."-p. 424, 425.

The catastrophe follows soon after, and is brought about with great dramatic skill and effect. The murderer is sorrowful and confounded his parents reprobate and renounce him- his wife clings to him with eager and unhesitating affection; and they wander forth together into the vast solitude of the universe.

We have now gone through the poetical part of this volume, and ought here, perhaps, to close our account of it. But there are a few pages in prose that are more talked of than all the rest; and which lead irresistibly to topics, upon which it seems at last necessary that we should express an opinion. We allude to the concluding part of the Appendix to "The Two Foscari," in which Lord Byron resumes his habitual complaint of the hostility which he has experienced from the writers of his own country-makes reprisals on those who have assailed his reputation and inflicts, in particular, a memorable chastisement upon the unhappy Laureate, interspersed with some political reflections of great weight and authority.

It is not however with these, or the merits of the treatment which Mr. Southey has either given or received, that we have now any concern. But we have a word or two to say on the griefs of Lord Byron himself. He complains bitterly of the detraction by which he has been assailed — and intimates that his works have been received by the public with far less cordiality and favour than he was entitled to expect. We are constrained to say that this appears to us a very extraordinary mistake. In the whole course of our experience, we cannot recollect a single author who has had so little reason to complain of his reception -to whose genius the public has been so early and so constantly just-to whose faults they have been so long and so signally indulgent. From the very first, he must have been aware that he offended the principles and shocked the prejudices of

120 LORD BYRON-UNHAPPY TENDENCY OF HIS WRITINGS.

the majority, by his sentiments, as much as he delighted them by his talents. Yet there never was an author so universally and warmly applauded, so gently admonished - so kindly entreated to look more heedfully to his opinions. He took the praise, as usual, and rejected the advice. As he grew in fame and authority, he aggravated all his offences- clung more fondly to all he had been reproached with- and only took leave of Childe Harold to ally himself to Don Juan! That he has since been talked of, in public and in private, with less unmingled admiration that his name is now mentioned as often for censure as for praise — and that the exultation with which his countrymen once hailed the greatest of our living poets, is now alloyed by the recollection of the tendency of his writings-is matter of notoriety to all the world; but matter of surprise, we should imagine, to nobody but Lord Byron himself.

He would fain persuade himself, indeed, that for this decline of his popularity -or rather this stain upon its lustre for he is still popular beyond all other example -and it is only because he is so that we feel any interest in this discussion;-he is indebted, not to any actual demerits of his own, but to the jealousy of those he has supplanted, the envy of those he has outshone, or the party rancour of those against whose corruptions he has testified; - while, at other times, he seems inclined to insinuate, that it is chiefly because he is a Gentleman and a Nobleman that plebeian censors have conspired to bear him down! We scarcely think, however, that these theories will pass with Lord Byron himself we are sure they will pass with no other person. They are so manifestly inconsistent, as mutually to destroy each other and so weak, as to be quite insufficient to account for the fact, even if they could be effectually combined for that purpose. The party that Lord Byron has chiefly offended, bears no malice to Lords and Gentlemen. Against its rancour, on the contrary, these qualities have undoubtedly been his best protection; and had it not been for them, he may be assured that he would, long ere now, have been

PECULIARITY OF THEIR CORRUPTING INFLUENCE. 121

shown up in the pages of the Quarterly, with the same candour and liberality that has there been exercised towards his friend Lady Morgan. That the base and 1. the bigotted—those whom he has darkened by his glory, spited by his talent, or mortified by his neglect—have taken advantage of the prevailing disaffection, to vent their puny malice in silly nicknames and vulgar scurrility, is natural and true. But Lord Byron may depend upon it that the dissatisfaction is not confined to them and, indeed, that they would never have had the courage to assail one so immeasurably their superior, if he had not at once made himself vulnerable by his errors, and alienated his natural defenders by his obstinate adherence to them. We are not bigots or rival poets. We have not been detractors from Lord Byron's fame, nor the friends of his detractors; and we tell him -far more in sorrow than in anger-that we verily believe the great body of the English nation-the religious, the moral, and the candid part of it-consider the tendency of his writings to be immoral and pernicious and look upon his perseverance in that strain of composition with regret and reprehension.

He has no priestlike cant or priestlike reviling to apprehend from us. We do not charge him with being either a disciple or an apostle of Satan; nor do we describe his poetry as a mere compound of blasphemy and obscenity. On the contrary, we are inclined to believe that he wishes well to the happiness of mankind — and are glad to testify, that his poems abound with sentiments of great dignity and tenderness, as well as passages of infinite sublimity and beauty. But their general tendency we believe to be in the highest degree pernicious; and we even think that it is chiefly by means of the fine and lofty sentiments they contain, that they acquire their most fatal power of corruption. This may

sound at first, perhaps, like a paradox; but we are mistaken if we shall not make it intelligible enough in the

end.

We think there are indecencies and indelicacies, seductive descriptions and profligate representations, which

122 LORD BYRON- -WOULD DESTROY BELIEF IN VIRTUE

are extremely reprehensible; and also audacious speculations, and erroneous and uncharitable assertions, equally indefensible. But if these had stood alone, and if the whole body of his works had been made up of gaudy ribaldry and flashy scepticism, the mischief, we think, would have been much less than it is. He is not more obscene, perhaps, than Dryden or Prior, and other classical and pardoned writers; nor is there any passage in the history even of Don Juan, so offensively degrading as Tom Jones's affair with Lady Bellaston. It is no doubt a wretched apology for the indecencies of a man of genius, that equal indecencies have been forgiven to his predecessors: But the precedent of lenity might have been followed; and we might have passed both the levity and the voluptuousness—the dangerous warmth of his romantic situations, and the scandal of his cold-blooded dissipation. It might not have been so easy to get over his dogmatic scepticism. - his hardhearted maxims of misanthropy - his cold-blooded and eager expositions of the non-existence of virtue and honour. Even this, however, might have been comparatively harmless, if it had not been accompanied by that which may look, at first sight, as a palliation - the frequent presentment of the most touching pictures of tenderness, generosity, and faith.

The charge we bring against Lord Byron, in short, is, that his writings have a tendency to destroy all belief in the reality of virtue-and to make all enthusiasm and constancy of affection ridiculous; and this, not so much by direct maxims and examples, of an imposing or se ducing kind, as by the constant exhibition of the most profligate heartlessness in the persons who had been transiently represented as actuated by the purest and most exalted emotions and in the lessons of that very teacher who had been, but a moment before, so beautifully pathetic in the expression of the loftiest conceptions. When a gay voluptuary descants, somewhat too freely, on the intoxications of love and wine, we ascribe his excesses to the effervescence of youthful spirits, and do not consider him as seriously impeaching either the

BY THE EXCELLENCE OF HIS COUNTERFEITS.

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value or the reality of the severer virtues; and in the same way, when the satirist deals out his sarcasms against the sincerity of human professions, and unmasks the secret infirmities of our bosoms, we consider this as aimed at hypocrisy, and not at mankind: or, at all events, and in either case, we consider the Sensualist and the Misanthrope as wandering, each in his own delusion and are contented to pity those who have never known the charms of a tender or generous affection. The true antidote to such seductive or revolting views of human nature, is to turn to the scenes of its nobleness and attraction; and to reconcile ourselves again to our kind, by listening to the accents of pure affection and incorruptible honour. But if those accents have flowed in all their sweetness, from the very lips that instantly open again to mock and blaspheme them, the antidote is mingled with the poison, and the draught is the more deadly for the mixture!

The reveller may pursue his orgies, and the wanton display her enchantments, with comparative safety to those around them, as long as they know or believe that there are purer and higher enjoyments, and teachers and followers of a happier way. But if the Priest pass from the altar, with persuasive exhortations to peace and purity still trembling on his tongue, to join familiarly in the grossest and most profane debauchery - if the Matron, who has charmed all hearts by the lovely sanctimonies of her conjugal and maternal endearments, glides out from the circle of her children, and gives bold and shameless way to the most abandoned and degrading vices our notions of right and wrong are at once confounded our confidence in virtue shaken to the foundation and our reliance on truth and fidelity at an end for ever.

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This is the charge which we bring against Lord Byron. We say that, under some strange misapprehension as to the truth, and the duty of proclaiming it, he has exerted all the powers of his powerful mind to convince his readers, both directly and indirectly, that all ennobling pursuits, and disinterested virtues, are mere deceits or

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