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How much of this morbid feeling sprang from an original disease of the mind, how much from real misfortune, how much from the nervousness of dissipation, how much was fanciful, how much was merely affected, it is impossible for us, and would probably have been impossible for the most intimate friends of Lord Byron, to decide. Whether there ever existed, or can ever exist, a person answering to the description which he gave of himself may be doubted; but that he was not such a person is beyond all doubt. It is ridiculous to imagine that a man whose mind was really imbued with scorn of his fellow-creatures would have published three or four books every year in order to tell them so; or that a man who could say with truth that he neither sought sympathy nor needed it would have admitted all Europe to hear his farewell to his wife, and his blessings on his child. In the second canto of Childe Harold, he tells us that he is insensible to fame and obloquy :

"Ill may such contest now the spirit move,

Which heeds nor keen reproof nor partial praise."

Yet we know on the best evidence that, a day or two before he published these lines, he was greatly, indeed childishly, elated by the compliments paid to his maiden speech in the House of Lords.

We are far, however, from thinking that his sadness was altogether feigned. He was naturally a man of great sensibility; he had been ill educated; his feelings had been early exposed to sharp trials; he had been crossed in his boyish love; he had been mortified by the failure of his first literary efforts; he was straitened in pecuniary circumstances; he was unfortunate in his domestic relations; the public treated him with cruel injustice; his health and spirits suffered from his dissipated habits of life; he was, on the whole, an unhappy man. He early discovered that, by parading his unhappiness before the multitude, he produced an immense sensation. The world gave him every encouragement to talk about his mental sufferings. The interest which his first confessions excited induced him to affect much that he did not feel; and the affectation probably reacted on his feelings. How far the character in which he exhibited himself was genuine, and how far theatrical, it would probably have puzzled himself to say.

There can be no doubt that this remarkable man owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at

1 By the first literary efforts Macaulay refers to the Hours of Idleness published in 1807 and roughly criticised in the Edinburgh Review. Byron's first love was Mary Chaworth, 1786-1832, who afterwards became Mrs. Musters.

least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry. We never could very clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing; or how it is that men who affect in their compositions qualities and feelings which they have not, impose so much more easily on their contemporaries than on posterity. The interest which the loves of Petrarch excited in his own time, and the pitying fondness with which half Europe looked upon Rousseau, are well known. To readers of our age, the love of Petrarch seems to have been love of that kind which breaks no hearts, and the sufferings of Rousseau to have deserved laughter rather than pity, to have been partly counterfeited, and partly the consequences of his own perverseness and vanity.

"2

What our grandchildren may think of the character of Lord Byron, as exhibited in his poetry, we will not pretend to guess. It is certain, that the interest which he excited during his life is without a parallel in literary history. The feeling with which young readers of poetry regarded him can be conceived only by those who have experienced it. To people who are unacquainted with real calamity, "nothing is so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy." This faint image of sorrow has in all ages been considered by young gentlemen as an agreeable excitement. Old gentlemen and middle-aged gentlemen have so many real causes of sadness that they are rarely inclined "to be as sad as night only for wantonness.” 3 Indeed they want the power almost as much as the inclination. We know very few persons engaged in active life who, even if they were to procure stools to be melancholy upon, and were to sit down with all the premeditation of Master Stephen, would be able to enjoy much of what somebody calls the "ecstasy of woe." 5

1This is surely a very simple remark. The living egotist encroaches upon us, demands a large share of the sympathy which is exclusively due to our own sorrows and awakens all that is combative in our fierce, all-absorbing nature. The egotist in prose or verse is the mere impersonal exponent of the pain that gnaws at every heart, of the incurable will to live, of the hopeless frustration of that will by the iron order of the universe. The living egotist is the last aggravation of our sorrows; the literary egotist relieves us by giving them expression.

2" Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley.
Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."

-FLETCHER, "The Nice Valour," act iii., scene 3.

Shakspeare, "King John," act iv., scene 1.

4 MASTER STEPHEN. "I thank you, sir, I shall be bold, I warrant you; have you a stool there, to be melancholy upon?" (Ben Jonson, "Every Man in His Humour," act iii., scene 1.)

511

Where is Cupid's crimson motion?

Billowy ecstasy of woe,

Bear me straight, meandering ocean,
Where the stagnant torrents flow."

-Laura Matilda in Rejected Addresses.

Among that large class of young persons whose reading is almost entirely confined to works of imagination, the popularity of Lord Byron was unbounded. They bought pictures of him; they treasured up the smallest relics of him; they learned his poems by heart, and did their best to write like him, and to look like him. Many of them practised at the glass in the hope of catching the curl of the upper lip, and the scowl of the brow, which appear in some of his portraits. A few discarded their neckcloths in imitation of their great leader. For some years the Minerva press sent forth no novel without a mysterious, unhappy, Lara-like peer.1 The number of hopeful under-graduates and medical students who became things of dark imaginings, on whom the freshness of the heart ceased to fall like dew, whose passions had consumed themselves to dust, and to whom the relief of tears was denied, passes all calculation. This was not the worst. There was created in the minds of many of these enthusiasts a pernicious and absurd association between intellectual power and moral depravity. From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbour, and to love your neighbour's wife.

This affectation has passed away; and a few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron. To us he is still a man, young, noble, and unhappy. To our children he will be merely a writer; and their impartial judgment will appoint his place among writers; without regard to his rank or to his private history. That his poetry will undergo a severe sifting, that much of what has been admired by his contemporaries will be rejected as worthless, we have little doubt. But we have as little doubt that, after the closest scrutiny, there will still remain much that can only perish with the English language.

1 From the Minerva press in Leadenhall Street romances poured forth in shoals during the years before the appearance of Waverley" (Raleigh, The English Novel, p. 270).

SAMUEL JOHNSON

SEPTEMBER, 1831

NOTE ON THE ESSAY

HE review of Croker's Boswell is one of the best known and most

TH characteristic of Macaulay's Essays. Nowhere else are the

resources of his extraordinary memory, his wide range of allusion, his keen eye for the outward circumstances of a period or of an individual, his effective but fatiguing impetuosity of attack upon persons whom he disliked, and his weakness now for rhetorical commonplace, and now for rhetorical paradox, more strikingly displayed. In plan the essay is a threefold criticism of Croker, of Boswell and of Johnson himself. Macaulay found it easy to think ill of a Tory; but his detestation of Croker must have had some other ground beside difference of political opinion. It was shared indeed by Disraeli and by Thackeray who in politics were more adverse to Macaulay than to Croker. No hint as to its origin can be derived from Croker's Correspondence and Diaries which were published not many years since. An unwritten character of every well-known man circulates among his contemporaries and usually vanishes when they die. Partly derived from special knowledge, partly from loose or spiteful gossip, it takes a new colour from the sympathies or antipathies of each mind through which it passes. Believing Croker to be a very bad man Macaulay was glad to prove him a very bad editor. To what extent his scornful exhibition of Croker's ignorance and want of literary tact was justified we may judge by the words of the distinguished scholar who in our own time has made the age of Boswell and Johnson his own peculiar patrimony.

"I should be wanting in justice were I not to acknowledge that I owe much to the labours of Mr. Croker. No one can know better than I do his great failings as an editor. His remarks and criticisms far too often deserve the contempt that Macaulay so liberally poured on them. Without being deeply versed in books he was shallow in himself. Johnson's strong character was never known to him. Its breadth and depth and length and height were far beyond his measure. With his writings even he shows few signs of being familiar. Boswell's genius, a genius which even to Lord Macaulay was foolishness, was altogether

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