Lord Byron - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Byron

  Murray, the of publishers, the Anak of stationers, has a design upon you in the paper line. He wants you to become the staple and stipendiary editor of a periodical work. What say you? Will you be bound, like “Kit Smart, to write for ninety-nine years in the “Universal Visitor?”

  Seriously, he talks of hundreds a year, and — though I hate prating of the beggarly elements — his proposal may be to your honour and profit, and, I am very sure, will be to our pleasure.

  I don’t know what to say about “friendship.” I never was in friendship but once, in my nineteenth year, and then it gave me as much trouble as love. I am afraid, as Whitbread’s sire said to the king, when he wanted to knight him, that I am “too old; but nevertheless, no one wishes you more friends, fame, and felicity, than

  Yours, etc.

  “‘And ah! what verse can grace thy stately mien,

  Guide of the world, preferment’s golden queen,

  Neckar’s fair daughter, Staël the Epicene!

  Bright o’er whose flaming cheek and pumple nose

  The bloom of young desire unceasing glows!

  Fain would the Muse — but ah! she dares no more,

  A mournful voice from lone Guyana’s shore,

  Sad Quatremer, the bold presumption checks,

  Forbid to question thy ambiguous sex.’

  “These lines contain the Secret History of Quatremer’s deportation. He presumed, in the Council of Five Hundred, to arraign Madame de Staël’s conduct, and even to hint a doubt of her sex. He was sent to Guyana. The transaction naturally brings to one’s mind the dialogue between Falstaff and Hostess Quickly in Shakespeare’s Henry IV.”

  Canning’s New Morality, lines 293-301 (Edmonds’ edition of the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, pp. 282, 283).

  Anne Louise Germaine Necker (1766-1817), only child of the Minister Necker and his wife Suzanne Curchod, Gibbon’s early love, married, in 1786, the Swedish Ambassador Baron de Staël Holstein, who died in 1802. She married, as her second husband, in 1811, M. de Rocca, a young French officer, who had been severely wounded in Spain, but survived her by a year (Madame de Récamier, Souvenirs, vol. i. p. 272). Her book, De l’Allemagne, seized and destroyed by Napoleon, was brought out in June, 1813, by John Murray. Byron thought her

  “certainly the cleverest, though not the most agreeable woman he had ever known. ‘She declaimed to you instead of conversing with you,’ said he, ‘never pausing except to take breath; and if during that interval a rejoinder was put in, it was evident that she did not attend to it, as she resumed the thread of her discourse as though it had not been interrupted’“.

  (Lady Blessington’s Conversations, p. 26). Croker (Croker Papers, vol. i. p. 327) describes her as

  “ugly, and not of an intellectual ugliness. Her features were coarse, and the ordinary expression rather vulgar, she had an ugly mouth, and one or two irregularly prominent teeth, which perhaps gave her countenance an habitual gaiety. Her eye was full, dark, and expressive; and when she declaimed, which was almost whenever she spoke, she looked eloquent, and one forgot that she was plain.”

  Madame de Staël

  “did not affect to conceal her preference for the society of men to that of her own sex,”

  and was entirely above, or below, studying the feminine arts of pleasing. In 1802 Miss Berry called on her in Paris.

  “Found her in an excessively dirty cabinet — sofa singularly so; her own dress, a loose spencer with a bare neck,”

  (Journal, vol. ii. p. 145). A similar experience is mentioned by Crabb Robinson (Diary, 1804).

  “On the 28th of January,” he writes, “I first waited on Madame de Staël. I was shown into her bedroom, for which, not knowing Parisian customs, I was unprepared. She was sitting, most decorously, in her bed, and writing. She had her night-cap on, and her face was not made up for the day. It was by no means a captivating spectacle; but I had a very cordial reception, and two bright black eyes smiled benignantly on me.”

  Of her political opinions Sir John Bowring (Autobiographical Recollections, pp. 375, 376) has left a sketch.

  “Madame de Staël was a perfect aristocrat, and her sympathies were wholly with the great and prosperous. She saw nothing in England but the luxury, stupidity, and pride of the Tory aristocracy, and the intelligence and magnificence of the Whig aristocracy. These latter talked about truth, and liberty and herself, and she supposed it was all as it should be. As to the millions, the people, she never inquired into their situation. She had a horror of the canaille, but anything of sangre asul had a charm for her. When she was dying she said, ‘Let me die in peace; let my last moments be undisturbed.’ Yet she ordered the cards of every visitor to be brought to her. Among them was one from the Duc de Richelieu. ‘What!’ exclaimed she indignantly, ‘What! have you sent away the Duke? Hurry! Fly after him. Bring him back. Tell him that, though I die for all the world, I live for him.’“

  Napoleon’s hatred of her was intense. “Do not allow that jade, Madame de Staël,” he writes to Fouché, December 31, 1806 (New Letters of Napoleon I., p. 35), “to come near Paris.” Again, March 15, 1807 (ibid., p. 39), “You are not to allow Madame de Staël to come within forty leagues of Paris. That wicked schemer ought to make up her mind to behave herself at last.” In a third letter, April 19, 1807 (ibid., p. 40), he speaks of her as “paying court, one day to the great — a patriot, a democrat, the next!... a fright, ... a worthless woman” (Léon Lecestre’s Lettres inédites de Napoléon I’er, 2nd ed. vol. i. pp. 84, 88, 93).

  “Old Gardner the bookseller employed Rolt and Smart to write a monthly miscellany called the Universal Visitor. There was a formal written contract, which Allen the printer saw…. They were bound to write nothing else; they were to have, I think, a third of the profits of his sixpenny pamphlet; and the contract was for ninety-nine years”

  (Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson, ed. Birrell, vol. iii. p. 192).

  “But first the Monarch, so polite,

  Ask’d Mister Whitbread if he’d be a Knight.

  Unwilling in the list to be enroll’d,

  Whitbread contemplated the Knights of Peg,

  Then to his generous Sov’reign made a leg,

  And said, ‘He was afraid he was too old,’“ etc.

  Peter Pindar’s Instructions to a Laureat.

  306 — to the Hon. Augusta Leigh

  4, Bennet Street, June 26th, 1813.

  My Dearest Augusta, — Let me know when you arrive, and when, and where, and how, you would like to see me, — any where in short but at dinner. I have put off going into ye country on purpose to waylay you.

  Ever yours,

  Byron.

  307 — to the Hon. Augusta Leigh

  [June, 1813.]

  My Dearest Augusta, — And if you knew whom I had put off besides my journey — you would think me grown strangely fraternal. However I won’t overwhelm you with my own praises.

  Between one and two be it — I shall, in course, prefer seeing you all to myself without the incumbrance of third persons, even of your (for I won’t own the relationship) fair cousin of eleven page memory, who, by the bye, makes one of the finest busts I have seen in the Exhibition, or out of it. Good night!

  Ever yours, Byron.

  P. S. — Your writing is grown like my Attorney’s, and gave me a qualm, till I found the remedy in your signature.

  308 — to the Hon. Augusta Leigh

  [Sunday], June 27th, 1813.

  My Dearest Augusta, — If you like to go with me to ye Lady Davy’s to-night, I have an invitation for you.

  There you will see the Stael, some people whom you know, and me whom you do not know, — and you can talk to which you please, and I will watch over you as if you were unmarried and in danger of always being so. Now do as you like; but if you chuse to array yourself before or after half past ten, I will call for you. I think our being together before 3d people will be a new sensation to both.

  Ev
er yours,

  B.

  “He is now about thirty-three, but with all the freshness and bloom of five-and-twenty, and one of the handsomest men I have seen in England. He has a great deal of vivacity, talks rapidly, though with great precision, and is so much interested in conversation, that his excitement amounts to nervous impatience, and keeps him in constant motion.”

  Davy married, in 1812, a rich widow, Jane Aprecce, née Kerr (1780-1855). The marriage brought him wealth; but it also, it is said, impaired the simplicity of his character, and made him ambitious of social distinction. Miss Berry (Journal, vol. ii. p. 535) supped with Lady Davy in May, 1813, to meet the Princess of Wales, and notes that among the other guests was Byron. Lady Davy, who was so dark a brunette that Sydney Smith said she was as brown as a dry toast, was for many years a prominent figure in the society of London and Rome. It was of her that Madame de Staël said that she had “all Corinne’s talents without her faults or extravagances.” Ticknor, who called on her in June, 1815,

  “found her in her parlour, working on a dress, the contents of her basket strewed about the table, and looking more like home than anything since I left it. She is small, with black eyes and hair, a very pleasant face, an uncommonly sweet smile, and, when she speaks, has much spirit and expression in her countenance. Her conversation is agreeable, particularly in the choice and variety of her phraseology, and has more the air of eloquence than I have ever heard before from a lady.”

  (Life of George Ticknor, vol. i. P. 57).

  309 — to John Murray

  July 1st, 1813.

  Dear Sir, — There is an error in my dedication. The word “my” must be struck out — ”my” admiration, etc.; it is a false construction and disagrees with the signature. I hope this will arrive in time to prevent a cancel and serve for a proof; recollect it is only the “my” to be erased throughout.

  There is a critique in the Satirist, which I have read, — fairly written, and, though vituperative, very fair in judgment. One part belongs to you, viz., the 4s. and 6d charge; it is unconscionable, but you have no conscience.

  Yours truly,

  B.

  “To Samuel Rogers, Esq., as a slight but most sincere token of my admiration of his genius.”

  “A word in conclusion. The noble lord appears to have an aristocratical solicitude to be read only by the opulent. Four shillings and sixpence for forty-one octavo pages of poetry! and those pages verily happily answering to Mr. Sheridan’s image of a rivulet of text flowing through a meadow of margin. My good Lord Byron, while you are revelling in all the sensual and intellectual luxury which the successful sale of Newstead Abbey has procured for you, you little think of the privations to which you have subjected us unfortunate Reviewers, ... in order to enable us to purchase your lordship’s expensive publication.”

  310 — to Thomas Moore

  4, Benedictine Street, St. James’s, July 8, 1813.

  I presume by your silence that I have blundered into something noxious in my reply to your letter, for the which I beg leave to send beforehand a sweeping apology, which you may apply to any, or all, parts of that unfortunate epistle. If I err in my conjecture, I expect the like from you in putting our correspondence so long in quarantine. God he knows what I have said; but he also knows (if he is not as indifferent to mortals as the nonchalant deities of Lucretius), that you are the last person I want to offend. So, if I have, — why the devil don’t you say it at once, and expectorate your spleen?

  Rogers is out of town with Madame de Stael, who hath published an Essay against Suicide, which, I presume, will make somebody shoot himself; — as a sermon by Blenkinsop, in proof of Christianity, sent a hitherto most orthodox acquaintance of mine out of a chapel of ease a perfect atheist. Have you found or founded a residence yet? and have you begun or finished a poem? If you won’t tell me what I have done, pray say what you have done, or left undone, yourself. I am still in equipment for voyaging, and anxious to hear from, or of, you before I go, which anxiety you should remove more readily, as you think I sha’n’t cogitate about you afterwards. I shall give the lie to that calumny by fifty foreign letters, particularly from any place where the plague is rife, — without a drop of vinegar or a whiff of sulphur to save you from infection.

  The Oxfords have sailed almost a fortnight, and my sister is in town, which is a great comfort, — for, never having been much together, we are naturally more attached to each other. I presume the illuminations have conflagrated to Derby (or wherever you are) by this time. We are just recovering from tumult and train oil, and transparent fripperies, and all the noise and nonsense of victory. Drury Lane had a large M. W., which some thought was Marshal Wellington; others, that it might be translated into Manager Whitbread; while the ladies of the vicinity of the saloon conceived the last letter to be complimentary to themselves. I leave this to the commentators to illustrate. If you don’t answer this, I sha’n’t say what you deserve, but I think I deserve a reply. Do you conceive there is no Post-Bag but the Twopenny? Sunburn me, if you are not too bad.

  “Madame de Stael treats me as the person whom she most delights to honour; I am generally ordered with her to dinner, as one orders beans and bacon: she is one of the few persons who surpass expectation; she has every sort of talent, and would be universally popular, if, in society, she were to confine herself to her inferior talents — pleasantry, anecdote, and literature. I have reviewed her Essay on Suicide in the last Edinburgh Review: it is not one of her best, and I have accordingly said more of the author and the subject than of the work.”

  Sir J. Mackintosh (Life, vol. ii. p. 269).

  311 — to Thomas Moore

  July 13, 1813.

  Your letter set me at ease; for I really thought (as I hear of your susceptibility) that I had said — I know not what — but something I should have been very sorry for, had it, or I, offended you; — though I don’t see how a man with a beautiful wife — his own children, — quiet — fame — competency and friends, (I will vouch for a thousand, which is more than I will for a unit in my own behalf,) can be offended with any thing.

  Do you know, Moore, I am amazingly inclined — remember I say but inclined — to be seriously enamoured with Lady A[delaide] F[orbes] — but this — — has ruined all my prospects. However, you know her; is she clever, or sensible, or good-tempered? either would do — I scratch out the will. I don’t ask as to her beauty — that I see; but my circumstances are mending, and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife, and that should be the woman, had I a chance. I do not yet know her much, but better than I did.

  I want to get away, but find difficulty in compassing a passage in a ship of war. They had better let me go; if I cannot, patriotism is the word — ”nay, an they’ll mouth, I’ll rant as well as they.”

  Now, what are you doing? — writing, we all hope, for our own sakes. Remember you must edit my posthumous works, with a Life of the Author, for which I will send you Confessions, dated “Lazaretto,” Smyrna, Malta, or Palermo — one can die any where.

  There is to be a thing on Tuesday ycleped a national fête. The Regent and — — are to be there, and every body else, who has shillings enough for what was once a guinea. Vauxhall is the scene — there are six tickets issued for the modest women, and it is supposed there will be three to spare. The passports for the lax are beyond my arithmetic.

  P. S. — The Staël last night attacked me most furiously — said that I had “no right to make love — that I had used — — barbarously — that I had no feeling, and was totally insensible to la belle passion, and had been all my life.” I am very glad to hear it, but did not know it before. Let me hear from you anon.

  “Lady A. F — — was also very handsome. It is melancholy to talk of women in the past tense. What a pity, that of all flowers, none fade so soon as beauty! Poor Lady A. F — has not got married. Do you know, I once had some thoughts of her as a wife; not that I was in love, as people call it, but I
had argued myself into a belief that I ought to marry, and, meeting her very often in society, the notion came into my head, not heart, that she would suit me. Moore, too, told me so much of her good qualities — all which was, I believe, quite true — that I felt tempted to propose to her, but did not, whether tant mieux or tant pis, God knows, supposing my proposal accepted.”

  (Lady Blessington’s Conversations, pp. 108, 109).

  Lady Adelaide Forbes, whom Byron in Rome compared to the “Belvedere Apollo,” was the daughter of George, sixth Earl of Granard, and his wife, Lady Selina Rawdon, daughter of the first Earl of Moira. Born in 1789, she died at Dresden, in 1858, unmarried. Lord Moira was Moore’s patron, and, through this connection and political sympathies, Moore was acquainted with Lord Granard and his family.

  “Nay, an thou’lt mouth,

  I’ll rant as well as thou.”

  But the letter is destroyed.

  312 — to John Hanson

  Sunday, July 18th, 1813.

  Dear Sir, — A Report is in general circulation (which has distressed my friends, and is not very pleasing to me), that the Purchaser of Newstead is a young man, who has been over-reached, ill-treated, and ruined, by me in this transaction of the sale, and that I take an unfair advantage of the law to enforce the contract. This must be contradicted by a true and open statement of the circumstances attending, and subsequent to, the sale, and that immediately and publicly. Surely, if anyone is ill treated it is myself. He bid his own price; he took time before he bid at all, and now, when I am actually granting him further time as a favour, I hear from all quarters that I have acted unfairly. Pray do not delay on this point; see him, and let a proper and true statement be drawn up of the sale, etc., and inserted in the papers.

  Ever yours,

  B.

  P.S. — Mr. C. himself, if he has either honour or feeling, will be the first to vindicate me from so unfounded an implication. It is surely not for his credit to be supposed ruined or over-reached.

  313 — to John Murray