by Thomas Moore
“You do not say a word to me of your poem. I wish I could see or hear it. I neither could, nor would, do it or its author any harm. I believe I told you of Larry and Jacquy. A friend of mine was reading — at least a friend of his was reading — said Larry and Jacquy in a Brighton coach. A passenger took up the book and queried as to the author. The proprietor said ‘there were two’ — to which the answer of the unknown was, ‘Ay, ay — a joint concern, I suppose, summot like Sternhold and Hopkins.’
“Is not this excellent? I would not have missed the ‘vile comparison’ to have ‘scaped being one of the ‘Arcades ambo et cantare pares.’ Good night. Again yours.”
LETTER 201. TO MR. MOORE.
“Newstead Abbey, Sept. 20. 1814.
“Here’s to her who long Hath waked the poet’s sigh! The girl who gave to song What gold could never buy.
— My dear Moore, I am going to be married — that is, I am accepted, and one usually hopes the rest will follow. My mother of the Gracchi (that are to be) you think too strait-laced for me, although the paragon of only children, and invested with ‘golden opinions of all sorts of men,’ and full of ‘most blest conditions’ as Desdemona herself. Miss Milbanke is the lady, and I have her father’s invitation to proceed there in my elect capacity, — which, however, I cannot do till I have settled some business in London and got a blue coat.
“She is said to be an heiress, but of that I really know nothing certainly, and shall not enquire. But I do know, that she has talents and excellent qualities; and you will not deny her judgment, after having refused six suitors and taken me.
“Now, if you have any thing to say against this, pray do; my mind’s made up, positively fixed, determined, and therefore I will listen to reason, because now it can do no harm. Things may occur to break it off, but I will hope not. In the mean time, I tell you (a secret, by the by, — at least, till I know she wishes it to be public,) that I have proposed and am accepted. You need not be in a hurry to wish me joy, for one mayn’t be married for months. I am going to town to-morrow; but expect to be here, on my way there, within a fortnight.
“If this had not happened, I should have gone to Italy. In my way down, perhaps, you will meet me at Nottingham, and come over with me here. I need not say that nothing will give me greater pleasure. I must, of course, reform thoroughly; and, seriously, if I can contribute to her happiness, I shall secure my own. She is so good a person, that — that — in short, I wish I was a better. Ever,” &c.
LETTER 202. TO THE COUNTESS OF * * *.
“Albany, October 5. 1814.
“Dear Lady * *,
“Your recollection and invitation do me great honour; but I am going to be ‘married, and can’t come.’ My intended is two hundred miles off, and the moment my business here is arranged, I must set out in a great hurry to be happy. Miss Milbanke is the good-natured person who has undertaken me, and, of course, I am very much in love, and as silly as all single gentlemen must be in that sentimental situation. I have been accepted these three weeks; but when the event will take place, I don’t exactly know. It depends partly upon lawyers, who are never in a hurry. One can be sure of nothing; but, at present, there appears no other interruption to this intention, which seems as mutual as possible, and now no secret, though I did not tell first, — and all our relatives are congratulating away to right and left in the most fatiguing manner.
“You perhaps know the lady. She is niece to Lady Melbourne, and cousin to Lady Cowper and others of your acquaintance, and has no fault, except being a great deal too good for me, and that I must pardon, if nobody else should. It might have been two years ago, and, if it had, would have saved me a world of trouble. She has employed the interval in refusing about half a dozen of my particular friends, (as she did me once, by the way,) and has taken me at last, for which I am very much obliged to her. I wish it was well over, for I do hate bustle, and there is no marrying without some; — and then, I must not marry in a black coat, they tell me, and I can’t bear a blue one.
“Pray forgive me for scribbling all this nonsense. You know I must be serious all the rest of my life, and this is a parting piece of buffoonery, which I write with tears in my eyes, expecting to be agitated. Believe me most seriously and sincerely your obliged servant, BYRON.
“P.S. My best rems. to Lord * * on his return.”
LETTER 203. TO MR. MOORE.
“October 7. 1814.
“Notwithstanding the contradictory paragraph in the Morning Chronicle, which must have been sent by * *, or perhaps — I know not why I should suspect Claughton of such a thing, and yet I partly do, because it might interrupt his renewal of purchase, if so disposed; in short it matters not, but we are all in the road to matrimony — lawyers settling, relations congratulating, my intended as kind as heart could wish, and every one, whose opinion I value, very glad of it. All her relatives, and all mine too, seem equally pleased.
“Perry was very sorry, and has re-contradicted, as you will perceive by this day’s paper. It was, to be sure, a devil of an insertion, since the first paragraph came from Sir Ralph’s own County Journal, and this in the teeth of it would appear to him and his as my denial. But I have written to do away that, enclosing Perry’s letter, which was very polite and kind.
“Nobody hates bustle so much as I do; but there seems a fatality over every scene of my drama, always a row of some sort or other. No matter — Fortune is my best friend; and as I acknowledge my obligations to her, I hope she will treat me better than she treated the Athenian, who took some merit to himself on some occasion, but (after that) took no more towns. In fact, she, that exquisite goddess, has hitherto carried me through every thing, and will I hope, now; since I own it will be all her doing.
“Well, now, for thee. Your article on * * is perfection itself. You must not leave off reviewing. By Jove, I believe you can do any thing. There is wit, and taste, and learning, and good humour (though not a whit less severe for that), in every line of that critique.
“Next to your being an E. Reviewer, my being of the same kidney, and Jeffrey’s being such a friend to both, are amongst the events which I conceive were not calculated upon in Mr. — what’s his name?’s— ‘Essay on Probabilities.’
“But, Tom, I say — Oons! Scott menaces the ‘Lord of the Isles.” Do you mean to compete? or lay by, till this wave has broke upon the shelves? (of booksellers, not rocks — a broken metaphor, by the way.) You ought to be afraid of nobody; but your modesty is really as provoking and unnecessary as a * *’s. I am very merry, and have just been writing some elegiac stanzas on the death of Sir P. Parker. He was my first cousin, but never met since boyhood. Our relations desired me, and I have scribbled and given it to Perry, who will chronicle it to-morrow. I am as sorry for him as one could be for one I never saw since I was a child; but should not have wept melodiously, except ‘at the request of friends.’
“I hope to get out of town and be married, but I shall take Newstead in my way; and you must meet me at Nottingham and accompany me to mine Abbey. I will tell you the day when I know it.
“Ever,” &c.
“P.S. By the way my wife elect is perfection, and I hear of nothing but her merits and her wonders, and that she is ‘very pretty.’ Her expectations, I am told, are great; but what, I have not asked. I have not seen her these ten months.”
LETTER 204. TO MR. MOORE.
“October 14. 1814.
“An’ there were any thing in marriage that would make a difference between my friends and me, particularly in your case, I would ‘none on’t.’ My agent sets off for Durham next week, and I shall follow him, taking Newstead and you in my way. I certainly did not address Miss Milbanke with these views, but it is likely she may prove a considerable parti. All her father can give, or leave her, he will; and from her childless uncle, Lord Wentworth, whose barony, it is supposed, will devolve on Ly. Milbanke (her sister), she has expectations. But these will depend upon his own disposition, which seems very partial towards her.
She is an only child, and Sir R.’s estates, though dipped by electioneering, are considerable. Part of them are settled on her; but whether that will be dowered now, I do not know, — though, from what has been intimated to me, it probably will. The lawyers are to settle this among them, and I am getting my property into matrimonial array, and myself ready for the journey to Seaham, which I must make in a week or ten days.
“I certainly did not dream that she was attached to me, which it seems she has been for some time. I also thought her of a very cold disposition, in which I was also mistaken — it is a long story, and I won’t trouble you with it. As to her virtues, &c. &c. you will hear enough of them (for she is a kind of pattern in the north), without my running into a display on the subject. It is well that one of us is of such fame, since there is sad deficit in the morale of that article upon my part, — all owing to my ‘bitch of a star,’ as Captain Tranchemont says of his planet.
“Don’t think you have not said enough of me in your article on T * *; what more could or need be said?
“Your long-delayed and expected work — I suppose you will take fright at ‘The Lord of the Isles’ and Scott now. You must do as you like, — I have said my say. You ought to fear comparison with none, and any one would stare, who heard you were so tremulous, — though, after all, I believe it is the surest sign of talent. Good morning. I hope we shall meet soon, but I will write again, and perhaps you will meet me at Nottingham. Pray say so.
“P.S. If this union is productive, you shall name the first fruits.”
LETTER 205. TO MR. HENRY DRURY.
“October 18. 1814.
“My dear Drury,
“Many thanks for your hitherto unacknowledged ‘Anecdotes.’ Now for one of mine — I am going to be married, and have been engaged this month. It is a long story, and, therefore, I won’t tell it, — an old and (though I did not know it till lately) a mutual attachment. The very sad life I have led since I was your pupil must partly account for the offs and ons in this now to be arranged business. We are only waiting for the lawyers and settlements, &c.; and next week, or the week after, I shall go down to Seaham in the new character of a regular suitor for a wife of mine own.
“I hope Hodgson is in a fair way on the same voyage — I saw him and his idol at Hastings. I wish he would be married at the same time, — I should like to make a party, — like people electrified in a row, by (or rather through) the same chain, holding one another’s hands, and all feeling the shock at once. I have not yet apprised him of this. He makes such a serious matter of all these things, and is so ‘melancholy and gentlemanlike,’ that it is quite overcoming to us choice spirits.
“They say one shouldn’t be married in a black coat. I won’t have a blue one, — that’s flat. I hate it.
“Yours,” &c.
LETTER 206. TO MR. COWELL.
“October 22. 1814.
“My dear Cowell,
“Many and sincere thanks for your kind letter — the bet, or rather forfeit, was one hundred to Hawke, and fifty to Hay (nothing to Kelly), for a guinea received from each of the two former. I shall feel much obliged by your setting me right if I am incorrect in this statement in any way, and have reasons for wishing you to recollect as much as possible of what passed, and state it to Hodgson. My reason is this: some time ago Mr. * * * required a bet of me which I never made, and of course refused to pay, and have heard no more of it; to prevent similar mistakes is my object in wishing you to remember well what passed, and to put Hodgson in possession of your memory on the subject.
“I hope to see you soon in my way through Cambridge. Remember me to H., and believe me ever and truly,” &c.
Soon after the date of this letter, Lord Byron had to pay a visit to Cambridge for the purpose of voting for Mr. Clarke, who had been started by Trinity College as one of the candidates for Sir Busick Harwood’s Professorship. On this occasion, a circumstance occurred which could not but be gratifying to him. As he was delivering in his vote to the Vice-Chancellor, in the Senate House, the under-graduates in the gallery ventured to testify their admiration of him by a general murmur of applause and stamping of the feet. For this breach of order, the gallery was immediately cleared by order of the Vice-Chancellor.
At the beginning of the month of December, being called up to town by business, I had opportunities, from being a good deal in my noble friend’s society, of observing the state of his mind and feelings, under the prospect of the important change he was now about to undergo; and it was with pain I found that those sanguine hopes with which I had sometimes looked forward to the happy influence of marriage, in winning him over to the brighter and better side of life, were, by a view of all the circumstances of his present destiny, considerably diminished; while, at the same time, not a few doubts and misgivings, which had never before so strongly occurred to me, with regard to his own fitness, under any circumstances, for the matrimonial tie, filled me altogether with a degree of foreboding anxiety as to his fate, which the unfortunate events that followed but too fully justified.
The truth is, I fear, that rarely, if ever, have men of the higher order of genius shown themselves fitted for the calm affections and comforts that form the cement of domestic life. “One misfortune (says Pope) of extraordinary geniuses is, that their very friends are more apt to admire than love them.” To this remark there have, no doubt, been exceptions, — and I should pronounce Lord Byron, from my own experience, to be one of them, — but it would not be difficult, perhaps, to show, from the very nature and pursuits of genius, that such must generally be the lot of all pre-eminently gifted with it; and that the same qualities which enable them to command admiration are also those that too often incapacitate them from conciliating love.
The very habits, indeed, of abstraction and self-study to which the occupations of men of genius lead, are, in themselves, necessarily, of an unsocial and detaching tendency, and require a large portion of indulgence from others not to be set down as unamiable. One of the chief sources, too, of sympathy and society between ordinary mortals being their dependence on each other’s intellectual resources, the operation of this social principle must naturally be weakest in those whose own mental stores are most abundant and self-sufficing, and who, rich in such materials for thinking within themselves, are rendered so far independent of any aid from others. It was this solitary luxury (which Plato called “banqueting his own thoughts”) that led Pope, as well as Lord Byron, to prefer the silence and seclusion of his library to the most agreeable conversation. — And not only too, is the necessity of commerce with other minds less felt by such persons, but, from that fastidiousness which the opulence of their own resources generates, the society of those less gifted than themselves becomes often a restraint and burden, to which not all the charms of friendship, or even love, can reconcile them. “Nothing is so tiresome (says the poet of Vaucluse, in assigning a reason for not living with some of his dearest friends) as to converse with persons who have not the same information as one’s self.”
But it is the cultivation and exercise of the imaginative faculty that, more than any thing, tends to wean the man of genius from actual life, and, by substituting the sensibilities of the imagination for those of the heart, to render, at last, the medium through which he feels no less unreal than that through which he thinks. Those images of ideal good and beauty that surround him in his musings soon accustom him to consider all that is beneath this high standard unworthy of his care; till, at length, the heart becoming chilled as the fancy warms, it too often happens that, in proportion as he has refined and elevated his theory of all the social affections, he has unfitted himself for the practice of them. Hence so frequently it arises that, in persons of this temperament, we see some bright but artificial idol of the brain usurp the place of all real and natural objects of tenderness. The poet Dante, a wanderer away from wife and children, passed the whole of a restless and detached life in nursing his immortal dream of Beatrice; while Petrarch, who would not suffer his
only daughter to reside beneath his roof, expended thirty-two years of poetry and passion on an idealised love.
It is, indeed, in the very nature and essence of genius to be for ever occupied intensely with Self, as the great centre and source of its strength. Like the sister Rachel, in Dante, sitting all day before her mirror,
“mai non si smaga Del suo ammiraglio, e siede tutto giorno.”
To this power of self-concentration, by which alone all the other powers of genius are made available, there is, of course, no such disturbing and fatal enemy as those sympathies and affections that draw the mind out actively towards others; and, accordingly, it will be found that, among those who have felt within themselves a call to immortality, the greater number have, by a sort of instinct, kept aloof from such ties, and, instead of the softer duties and rewards of being amiable, reserved themselves for the high, hazardous chances of being great. In looking back through the lives of the most illustrious poets, — the class of intellect in which the characteristic features of genius are, perhaps, most strongly marked, — we shall find that, with scarcely one exception, from Homer down to Lord Byron, they have been, in their several degrees, restless and solitary spirits, with minds wrapped up, like silk-worms, in their own tasks, either strangers, or rebels to domestic ties, and bearing about with them a deposit for posterity in their souls, to the jealous watching and enriching of which almost all other thoughts and considerations have been sacrificed.