London,February 25, 1845.
My dear friend:
Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing tenacity. Daily custom grows up about us like a stone-wall, and consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind’s strongest architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with me, whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed with all the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do, at this moment, in my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a print of Queen Victoria—listening to the muffled roar of the world’s metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which, whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London—with all this positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you think, is just now perplexing my brain? Why—would you believe it?—that, all this time, I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little chamber,— that whitewashed little chamber,—that little chamber with its one small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars— that same little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so often brought you to visit me! Will no length of time, or breadth of space, enfranchise me from that unlovely abode? I travel, but it seems to be like the snail, with my house upon my head. Ah, well! I am verging, I suppose, on that period of life when present scenes and events make but feeble impressions, in comparison with those of yore; so that I must reconcile myself to be more and more the prisoner of memory, who merely lets me hop about a little, with her chain around my leg.
My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling me to make the acquaintance of several distinguished characters, who, until now, have seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal intercourse as the wits of Queen Anne’s time, or Ben Jonson’s compotators at the Mermaid. One of the first of which I availed myself, was the letter to Lord Byron. I found his lordship looking much older than I had anticipated; although—considering his former irregularities of life, and the various wear and tear of his constitution—not older than a man on the verge of sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested his earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet’s spiritual immortality. He wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and extending down over his forehead. The expression of his eyes is concealed by spectacles. His early tendency to obesity having increased, Lord Byron is now enormously fat; so fat as to give the impression of a person quite overladen with his own flesh, and without sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life through the great mass of corporeal substance, which weighs upon him so cruelly. You gaze at the mortal heap; and, while it fills your eye with what purports to be Byron, you murmur within yourself —“For Heaven’s sake, where is he?” Were I disposed to be cautic, I might consider this mass of earthly matter as the symbol, in a material shape, of those evil habits and carnal vices which unspiritualize man’s nature, and clog up his avenues of communication with the better life. But this would be too harsh; and besides, Lord Byron’s morals have been improving, while his outward man has swollen to such unconscionable circumference. Would that he were leaner; for, though he did me the honor to present his hand, yet it was so puffed out with alien substance, that I could not feel as if I had touched the hand that wrote Childe Harold.
On my entrance, his lordship had apologised for not rising to receive me, on the sufficient plea that the gout, for several years past, had taken up its constant residence in his right foot; which, accordingly, was swathed in many rolls of flannel, and deposited upon a cushion. The other foot was hidden in the drapery of his chair. Do you recollect whether Byron’s right or left foot was the deformed one?
The noble poet’s reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as you are aware, of ten years’ standing; nor does it exhibit, I am assured, any symptom of breach or fracture. They are said to be, if not a happy, at least a contented, or, at all events, a quiet couple, descending the slope of life with that tolerable degree of mutual support, which will enable them to come easily and comfortably to the bottom. It is pleasant to reflect how entirely the poet has redeemed his youthful errors, in this particular. Her ladyship’s influence, it rejoices me to add, has been productive of the happiest results upon Lord Byron in a religious point of view. He now combines the most rigid tenets of methodism with the ultra doctrines of the Puseyites: the former being perhaps due to the convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble consort; while the latter are the embroidery and picturesque illumination, demanded by his imaginative character. Much of whatever expenditure his increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him, is bestowed in the reparation or beautifying of places of worship; and this nobleman, whose name was once considered a synonym of the foul fiend, is now all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits of the metropolis and elsewhere. In politics, Lord Byron is an uncompromising conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether in the House of Lords or in private circles, of denouncing and repudiating the mischievous and anarchical notions of his earlier day. Nor does he fail to visit similar sins, in other people, with the sincerest vengeance which his somewhat blunted pen is capable of inflicting. Southey and he are on the most intimate terms. You are aware that some little time before the death of Moore, Byron caused that brilliant but reprehensible man to be ejected from his house. Moore took the insult so much to heart, that it is said to have been one great cause of the fit of illness which brought him to the grave. Others pretend that the Lyrist died in a very happy state of mind, singing one of his own sacred melodies, and expressing his belief that it would be heard within the gate of paradise, and gain him instant and honorable admittance. I wish he may have found it so.
I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation with Lord Byron, to pay the meed of homage due to a mighty poet, by allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan, which have made so large a portion of the music of my life. My words, whether apt or otherwise, were at least warm with the enthusiasm of one worthy to discourse of immortal poesy. It was evident, however, that they did not go precisely to the right spot. I could perceive that there was some mistake or other, and was not a little angry with myself, and ashamed of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my own heart to the gifted author’s ear, the echo of those strains that have resounded throughout the world. But, by and by, the secret peeped quietly out. Byron—I have the information from his own lips, so that you need not hesitate to repeat it in literary circles—Byron is preparing a new edition of his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated and amended, in accordance with his present creed of taste, morals, politics and religion. It so happened, that the very passages of highest inspiration, to which I had alluded, were among the condemned and rejected rubbish, which it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his passions having burnt out, the extinction of their vivid and riotous flame has deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which he not merely wrote, but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he had written. Positively, he no longer understands his own poetry.
This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is licentious—whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith—whatever morbidly melancholic, or splenetically sportive—whatever assails settled constitutions of government, or systems of society—whatever could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter—has been unrelentingly blotted out, and its place supplied by unexceptionable verses, in his lordship’s later style. You may judge how much of the poem remains as hitherto published. The result is not so good as might be wished; in plain terms, it is a very sad affair indeed; for though the torches kindled in Tophet have been extinguished, they leave an abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by no glimpses of hallowed fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that this attempt, on Lord Byron’s part, to atone for his youthful errors, will at length induce the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is
concerned, to allow Thorwaldsen’s statue of the poet its due niche in the grand old Abbey. His bones, you know, when brought from Greece, were denied sepulture among those of his tuneful brethren there.
What a vile slip of the pen was that! How absurd in me to talk about burying the bones of Byron, whom I have just seen alive, and encased in a big, round bulk of flesh! But, to say the truth, a prodigiously fat man always impresses me as a kind of hobgoblin; in the very extravagance of his mortal system, I find something akin to the immateriality of a ghost. And then that ridiculous old story darted into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Missolonghi, above twenty years ago. More and more I recognize that we dwell in a world of shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of it. If there be any difference, the former are rather the more substantial.
Only think of my good fortune! The venerable Robert Burns—now, if I mistake not, in his eighty-seventh-year—happens to be making a visit to London, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of grasping him by the hand. For upwards of twenty years past he has hardly left his quiet cottage in Ayrshire for a single night, and has only been drawn hither now by the irresistible persuasions of all the distinguished men in England. They wish to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday by a festival. It will be the greatest literary triumph on record. Pray Heaven the little spirit of life within the aged bard’s bosom may not be extinguished in the lustre of that hour! I have already had the honor of an introduction to him, at the British Museum, where he was examining a collection of his own unpublished letters, interspersed with songs, which have escaped the notice of all his biographers.
Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of! How should Burns have been embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty old man!
The figure of the bard is tall, and in the highest degree reverend; nor the less so, that it is much bent by the burthen of time. His white hair floats like a snow-drift around his face, in which are seen the furrows of intellect and passion, like the channels of headlong torrents that have foamed themselves away. The old gentleman is in excellent preservation, considering his time of life. He has that cricketty sort of liveliness—I mean the cricket’s humor of chirping for any cause or none—which is perhaps the most favorable mood that can befall extreme old age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although we perceive it to be a beneficence of nature in the case of others. I was surprised to find it in Burns. It seems as if his ardent heart and brilliant imagination had both burnt down to the last embers, leaving only a little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing upward and laughing all by itself. He is no longer capable of pathos. At the request of Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song to Mary in Heaven; but it was evident that the feeling of those verses, so profoundly true, and so simply expressed, was entirely beyond the scope of his present sensibilities; and when a touch of it did partially awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his eyes, and his voice broke into a tremulous cackle. And yet he but indistinctly knew wherefore he was weeping. Ah! he must not think again of Mary in Heaven, until he shake off the dull impediment of time, and ascend to meet her there.
Burns then began to repeat Tam O’Shanter, but was so tickled with its wit and humor—of which, however, I did suspect he had but a traditionary sense—that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter, succeeded by a cough, which brought this not very agreeable exhibition to a close. On the whole, I would rather not have witnessed it. It is a satisfactory idea, however, that the last forty years of the peasant-poet’s life have been passed in competence and perfect comfort. Having been cured of his bardic improvidence for many a day past, and grown as attentive to the main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now considered to be quite well off, as to pecuniary circumstances. This, I suppose, is worth having lived so long for.
I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in regard to the health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am sorry to say, remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of a hopeless paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler attributes of which the body is the instrument. And thus he vegetates from day to day, and from year to year, at that splendid fantasy of Abbotsford, which grew out of his brain, and became a symbol of the great romancer’s tastes, feelings, studies, prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although that one in infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in his library, and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating tales to an amanuensis. To an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not deemed worth any one’s trouble, now, to take down what flows from that once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold, and capable of being coined. Yet, Cunningham, who has lately seen him, assures me that there is now and then a touch of the genius; a striking combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of character, such as no other man alive could have hit off; a glimmer from that ruined mind, as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted helmet in the gloom of an ancient hall. But the plots of these romances become inextricably confused; the characters melt into one another; and the tale loses itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy and marshy ground.
For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his consciousness of outward things, before his works went out of vogue. It was good that he should forget his fame, rather than that fame should first have forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like the same position in literature. The world, now-a-days, requires a more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth, than he was qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be, to the present generation, even what Scott has been to the past? Bulwer nauseates me; he is the very pimple of the age’s humbug. There is no hope of the public, so long as he retains an admirer, a reader, or a publisher. I had expectations from a young man—one Dickens—who published a few magazine articles, very rich in humor, and not without symptoms of genuine pathos; but the poor fellow died, shortly after commencing an odd series of sketches, entitled, I think, the Pickwick Papers. Not impossibly, the world has lost more than it dreams of, by the untimely death of this Mr. Dickens.
Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall, the other day? You would not hit it in ten guesses. Why, no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte!—or all that is now left of him—that is to say, the skin, bones, and corporeal substance, little cocked hat, green coat, white breeches and small sword, which are still known by his redoubtable name. He was attended only by two policemen, who walked quietly behind the phantasm of the old ex-Emperor, appearing to have no duty in regard to him, except to see that none of the light-fingered gentry should possess themselves of the star of the Legion of Honor. Nobody, save myself, so much as turned to look after him; nor, it grieves me to confess, could even I contrive to muster up any tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike spirit, formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape, had wrought upon our globe. There is no surer method of annihilating the magic influence of a great renown, than by exhibiting the possessor of it in the decline, the overthrow, the utter degradation of his powers—buried beneath his own mortality— and lacking even the qualities of sense, that enable the most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the eye of the world. This is the state to which disease, aggravated by long endurance of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age—for he is now above seventy—has reduced Bonaparte. The British government has acted shrewdly, in re-transporting him from St. Helena to England. They should now restore him to Paris, and there let him once again review the relics of his armies. His eye is dull and rheumy; his nether lip hung down upon his chin. While I was observing him, there chanced to be a little extra bustle in the street; and he, the brother of Cæsar and Hannibal—the Great Captain, who had veiled the world in battle smoke, and tracked it round with bloody footsteps—was seized with
a nervous trembling, and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked and dolorous cry. The fellows winked at one another, laughed aside, and patting Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and led him away.
Death and fury! Ha, villain, how came you hither? Avaunt! —or I fling my inkstand at your head. Tush, tush; it is all a mistake. Pray, my dear friend, pardon this little outbreak. The fact is, the mention of those two policemen, and their custody of Bonaparte, had called up the idea of that odious wretch—you remember him well—who was pleased to take such gratuitous and impertinent care of my person, before I quitted New England. Forthwith, uprose before my mind’s eye that same little whitewashed room, with the iron-grated window—strange, that it should have been iron-grated—where, in too easy compliance with the absurd wishes of my relatives, I have wasted several good years of my life. Positively, it seemed to me that I was still sitting there, and that the keeper—not that he ever was my keeper neither, but only a kind of intrusive devil of a body-servant—had just peeped in at the door. The rascal! I owe him an old grudge, and will find a time to pay it yet! Fie, fie! The mere thought of him has exceedingly discomposed me. Even now, that hateful chamber—that iron-grated window, which blasted the blessed sunshine as it fell through the dusty panes, and made it poison to my soul—looks more distinct to my view than does this, my comfortable apartment in the heart of London. The reality—that which I know to be such—hangs like remnants of tattered scenery over the intolerably prominent illusion. Let us think of it no more.
Mosses from an Old Manse, Volume 2 Page 12