Chapter 29

"December 11. 1811.

"My dear Moore,

"If you please, we will drop our former monosyllables, and adhere to the appellations sanctioned by our godfathers and godmothers. If you make it a point, I will withdraw your name; at the same time there is no occasion, as I have this day postponed your election 'sine die,' till it shall suit your wishes to be amongst us. I do not say this from any awkwardness the erasure of your proposal would occasion to _me_, but simply such is the state of the case; and, indeed, the longer your name is up, the stronger will become the probability of success, and your voters more numerous. Of course you will decide--your wish shall be my law. If my zeal has already outrun discretion, pardon me, and attribute my officiousness to an excusable motive.

"I wish you would go down with me to Newstead. Hodgson will be there, and a young friend, named Harness, the earliest and dearest I ever had from the third form at Harrow to this hour. I can promise you good wine, and, if you like shooting, a manor of 4000 acres, fires, books, your own free will, and my own very indifferent company. 'Balnea, vina * *.'

"Hodgson will plague you, I fear, with verse;--for my own part I will conclude, with Martial, 'nil recitabo tibi;' and surely the last inducement is not the least. Ponder on my proposition, and believe me, my dear Moore, yours ever,

"BYRON."

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Among those acts of generosity and friendship by which every year of Lord Byron's life was signalised, there is none, perhaps, that, for its own peculiar seasonableness and delicacy, as well as for the perfect worthiness of the person who was the object of it, deserves more honourable mention than that which I am now about to record, and which took place nearly at the period of which I am speaking. The friend, whose good fortune it was to inspire the feeling thus testified, was Mr. Hodgson, the gentleman to whom so many of the preceding letters are addressed; and as it would be unjust to rob him of the grace and honour of being, himself, the testimony of obligations so signal, I shall here lay before my readers an extract from the letter with which, in reference to a passage in one of his noble friend's Journals, he has favoured me.

"I feel it incumbent upon me to explain the circumstances to which this passage alludes, however private their nature. They are, indeed, calculated to do honour to the memory of my lamented friend. Having become involved, unfortunately, in difficulties and embarrassments, I received from Lord Byron (besides former pecuniary obligations) assistance, at the time in question, to the amount of a thousand pounds. Aid of such magnitude was equally unsolicited and unexpected on my part; but it was a long-cherished, though secret, purpose of my friend to afford that aid; and he only waited for the period when he thought it would be of most service. His own words were, on the occasion of conferring this overwhelming favour, '_I always intended to do it_.'"

During all this time, and through the months of January and February, his poem of "Childe Harold" was in its progress through the press; and to the changes and additions which he made in the course of printing, some of the most beautiful passages of the work owe their existence. On comparing, indeed, his rough draft of the two Cantos with the finished form in which they exist at present, we are made sensible of the power which the man of genius possesses, not only of surpassing others, but of improving on himself. Originally, the "little Page" and "Yeoman" of the Childe were introduced to the reader's notice in the following tame stanzas, by expanding the substance of which into their present light, lyric shape, it is almost needless to remark how much the poet has gained in variety and dramatic effect:--

"And of his train there was a henchman page, A peasant boy, who serv'd his master well; And often would his pranksome prate engage Childe Burun's[40] ear, when his proud heart did swell With sullen thoughts that he disdain'd to tell. Then would he smile on him, and Alwin[41] smiled, When aught that from his young lips archly fell, The gloomy film from Harold's eye beguiled....

"Him and one yeoman only did he take To travel eastward to a far countrie; And, though the boy was grieved to leave the lake, On whose fair banks he grew from infancy, Eftsoons his little heart beat merrily, With hope of foreign nations to behold, And many things right marvellous to see, Of which our vaunting travellers oft have told, From Mandeville....[42]"

In place of that mournful song "To Ines," in the first Canto, which contains some of the dreariest touches of sadness that even his pen ever let fall, he had, in the original construction of the poem, been so little fastidious as to content himself with such ordinary sing-song as the following:--

"Oh never tell again to me Of Northern climes and British ladies, It has not been your lot to see, Like me, the lovely girl of Cadiz, Although her eye be not of blue, Nor fair her locks, like English lasses," &c. &c.

There were also, originally, several stanzas full of direct personality, and some that degenerated into a style still more familiar and ludicrous than that of the description of a London Sunday, which still disfigures the poem. In thus mixing up the light with the solemn, it was the intention of the poet to imitate Ariosto. But it is far easier to rise, with grace, from the level of a strain generally familiar, into an occasional short burst of pathos or splendour, than to interrupt thus a prolonged tone of solemnity by any descent into the ludicrous or burlesque.[43] In the former case, the transition may have the effect of softening or elevating, while, in the latter, it almost invariably shocks;--for the same reason, perhaps, that a trait of pathos or high feeling, in comedy, has a peculiar charm; while the intrusion of comic scenes into tragedy, however sanctioned among us by habit and authority, rarely fails to offend. The noble poet was, himself, convinced of the failure of the experiment, and in none of the succeeding Cantos of Childe Harold repeated it.

Of the satiric parts, some verses on the well-known traveller, Sir John Carr, may supply us with, at least, a harmless specimen:--

"Ye, who would more of Spain and Spaniards know, Sights, saints, antiques, arts, anecdotes, and war, Go, hie ye hence to Paternoster Row,-- Are they not written in the boke of Carr? Green Erin's Knight, and Europe's wandering star. Then listen, readers, to the Man of Ink, Hear what he did, and sought, and wrote afar: All these are coop'd within one Quarto's brink, This borrow, steal (don't buy), and tell us what you think."

Among those passages which, in the course of revisal, he introduced, like pieces of "rich inlay," into the poem, was that fine stanza--

"Yet if, as holiest men have deem'd, there be A land of souls beyond that sable shore," &c.

through which lines, though, it must be confessed, a tone of scepticism breathes, (as well as in those tender verses--

"Yes,--I will dream that we may meet again,")

it is a scepticism whose sadness calls far more for pity than blame; there being discoverable, even through its very doubts, an innate warmth of piety, which they had been able to obscure, but not to chill. To use the words of the poet himself, in a note which it was once his intention to affix to these stanzas, "Let it be remembered that the spirit they breathe is desponding, not sneering, scepticism,"--a distinction never to be lost sight of; as, however hopeless may be the conversion of the scoffing infidel, he who feels pain in doubting has still alive within him the seeds of belief.

At the same time with Childe Harold, he had three other works in the press,--his "Hints from Horace," "The Curse of Minerva," and a fifth edition of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." The note upon the latter poem, which had been the lucky origin of our acquaintance, was withdrawn in this edition, and a few words of explanation, which he had the kindness to submit to my perusal, substituted in its place.

In the month of January, the whole of the two Cantos being printed off, some of the poet's friends, and, among others, Mr. Rogers and myself, were so far favoured as to be indulged with a perusal of the sheets. In adverting to this period in his "Memoranda," Lord Byron, I remember, mentioned,--as one of the ill omens which preceded the publication of the poem,--that some of the literary friends to whom it was shown expressed doubts of its success, and that one among them had told him "it was too good for the age." Whoever may have pronounced this opinion,--and I have some suspicion that I am myself the guilty person,--the age has, it must be owned, most triumphantly refuted the calumny upon its taste which the remark implied.

It was in the hands of Mr. Rogers I first saw the sheets of the poem, and glanced hastily over a few of the stanzas which he pointed out to me as beautiful. Having occasion, the same morning, to write a note to Lord Byron, I expressed strongly the admiration which this foretaste of his work had excited in me; and the following is--as far as relates to literary matters--the answer I received from him.

[Footnote 40: If there could be any doubt as to his intention of delineating himself in his hero, this adoption of the old Norman name of his family, which he seems to have at first contemplated, would be sufficient to remove it.]

[Footnote 41: In the MS. the names "Robin" and "Rupert" had been successively inserted here and scratched out again.]

[Footnote 42: Here the manuscript is illegible.]

[Footnote 43: Among the acknowledged blemishes of Milton's great poem, is his abrupt transition, in this manner, into an imitation of Ariosto's style, in the "Paradise of Fools."]

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