Kitabı oku: «The Life of Lord Byron», sayfa 14

CHAPTER XXXI

Byron determines to reside abroad—Visits the Plain of Waterloo—State of his Feelings

From different incidental expressions in his correspondence it is sufficiently evident that Byron, before his marriage, intended to reside abroad. In his letter to me of the 11th December, 1813, he distinctly states this intention, and intimates that he then thought of establishing his home in Greece. It is not therefore surprising that, after his separation from Lady Byron, he should have determined to carry this intention into effect; for at that period, besides the calumny heaped upon him from all quarters, the embarrassment of his affairs, and the retaliatory satire, all tended to force him into exile; he had no longer any particular tie to bind him to England.

On the 25th of April, 1816, he sailed for Ostend, and resumed the composition of Childe Harold, it may be said, from the moment of his embarkation. In it, however, there is no longer the fiction of an imaginary character stalking like a shadow amid his descriptions and reflections – he comes more decidedly forwards as the hero in his own person.

In passing to Brussels he visited the field of Waterloo, and the slight sketch which he has given in the poem of that eventful conflict is still the finest which has yet been written on the subject.

But the note of his visit to the field is of more importance to my present purpose, inasmuch as it tends to illustrate the querulous state of his own mind at the time.

“I went on horseback twice over the field, comparing it with my recollection of similar scenes. As a plain, Waterloo seems marked out for the scene of some great action, though this may be mere imagination. I have viewed with attention those of Platea, Troy, Mantinea, Leuctra, Chævronæ, and Marathon, and the field round Mont St Jean and Hugoumont appears to want little but a better cause and that indefinable but impressive halo which the lapse of ages throws around a celebrated spot, to vie in interest with any or all of these, except perhaps the last-mentioned.”

The expression “a better cause,” could only have been engendered in mere waywardness; but throughout his reflections at this period a peevish ill-will towards England is often manifested, as if he sought to attract attention by exasperating the national pride; that pride which he secretly flattered himself was to be augmented by his own fame.

I cannot, in tracing his travels through the third canto, test the accuracy of his descriptions as in the former two; but as they are all drawn from actual views they have the same vivid individuality impressed upon them. Nothing can be more simple and affecting than the following picture, nor less likely to be an imaginary scene:

 
By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground,
There is a small and simple pyramid,
Crowning the summit of the verdant mound;
Beneath its base are heroes’ ashes hid,
Our enemies. And let not that forbid
Honour to Marceau, o’er whose early tomb
Tears, big tears, rush’d from the rough soldier’s lid,
Lamenting and yet envying such a doom,
Falling for France, whose rights he battled to resume.
 

Perhaps few passages of descriptive poetry excel that in which reference is made to the column of Avenches, the ancient Aventicum. It combines with an image distinct and picturesque, poetical associations full of the grave and moral breathings of olden forms and hoary antiquity.

 
By a lone wall, a lonelier column rears
A gray and grief-worn aspect of old days:
’Tis the last remnant of the wreck of years,
And looks as with the wild-bewilder’d gaze
Of one to stone converted by amaze,
Yet still with consciousness; and there it stands,
Making a marvel that it not decays,
When the coeval pride of human hands,
Levell’d Aventicum, hath strew’d her subject lands.
 

But the most remarkable quality in the third canto is the deep, low bass of thought which runs through several passages, and which gives to it, when considered with reference to the circumstances under which it was written, the serious character of documentary evidence as to the remorseful condition of the poet’s mind. It would be, after what has already been pointed out in brighter incidents, affectation not to say, that these sad bursts of feeling and wild paroxysms, bear strong indications of having been suggested by the wreck of his domestic happiness, and dictated by contrition for the part he had himself taken in the ruin. The following reflections on the unguarded hour, are full of pathos and solemnity, amounting almost to the deep and dreadful harmony of Manfred:

 
To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind;
All are not fit with them to stir and toil,
Nor is it discontent to keep the mind
Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil
In the hot throng, where we become the spoil
Of our infection, till too late and long
We may deplore and struggle with the coil,
In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong
’Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong.
 
 
There, in a moment, we may plunge our years
In fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears,
And colour things to come with hues of night;
The race of life becomes a hopeless flight
To those who walk in darkness: on the sea,
The boldest steer but where their ports invite;
But there are wanderers o’er eternity,
Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor’d ne’er shall be.
 

These sentiments are conceived in the mood of an awed spirit; they breathe of sorrow and penitence. Of the weariness of satiety the pilgrim no more complains; he is no longer despondent from exhaustion, and the lost appetite of passion, but from the weight of a burden which he cannot lay down; and he clings to visible objects, as if from their nature he could extract a moral strength.

 
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me,
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities tortures: I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Class’d among creatures, where the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.
 

These dim revelations of black and lowering thought are overshadowed with a darker hue than sorrow alone could have cast. A consciousness of sinful blame is evident amid them; and though the fantasies that loom through the mystery, are not so hideous as the guilty reveries in the weird caldron of Manfred’s conscience, still they have an awful resemblance to them. They are phantoms of the same murky element, and, being more akin to fortitude than despair, prophesy not of hereafter, but oracularly confess suffering.

Manfred himself hath given vent to no finer horror than the oracle that speaks in this magnificent stanza:

 
I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d
To its idolatries a patient knee —
Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles – nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; – in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not of their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.
 

There are times in life when all men feel their sympathies extinct, and Lord Byron was evidently in that condition, when he penned these remarkable lines; but independently of their striking beauty, the scenery in which they were conceived deserves to be considered with reference to the sentiment that pervades them. For it was amid the same obscure ravines, pine-tufted precipices and falling waters of the Alps, that he afterward placed the outcast Manfred – an additional corroboration of the justness of the remarks which I ventured to offer, in adverting to his ruminations in contemplating, while yet a boy, the Malvern hills, as if they were the scenes of his impassioned childhood. In “the palaces of nature,” he first felt the consciousness of having done some wrong, and when he would infuse into another, albeit in a wilder degree, the feelings he had himself felt, he recalled the images which had ministered to the cogitations of his own contrition. But I shall have occasion to speak more of this, when I come to consider the nature of the guilt and misery of Manfred.

That Manfred is the greatest of Byron’s works will probably not be disputed. It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character. How then, it may be asked, does this moral phantom, that has never been, bear any resemblance to the poet himself? Must not, in this instance, the hypothesis which assigns to Byron’s heroes his own sentiments and feelings be abandoned? I think not. In noticing the deep and solemn reflections with which he was affected in ascending the Rhine, and which he has embodied in the third canto of Childe Harold, I have already pointed out a similarity in the tenour of the thoughts to those of Manfred, as well as the striking acknowledgment of the “filed” mind. There is, moreover, in the drama, the same distaste of the world which Byron himself expressed when cogitating on the desolation of his hearth, and the same contempt of the insufficiency of his genius and renown to mitigate contrition – all in strange harmony with the same magnificent objects of sight. Is not the opening soliloquy of Manfred the very echo of the reflections on the Rhine?

 
My slumbers – if I slumber – are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not; in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within – and yet I live and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing man.
 

But the following is more impressive: it is the very phrase he would himself have employed to have spoken of the consequences of his fatal marriage:

 
My in juries came down on those who lov’d me,
On those whom I best lov’d; I never quell’d
An enemy, save in my just defence —
But my embrace was fatal.
 

He had not, indeed, been engaged in any duel of which the issue was mortal; but he had been so far engaged with more than one, that he could easily conceive what it would have been to have quelled an enemy in just defence. But unless the reader can himself discern, by his sympathies, that there is the resemblance I contend for, it is of no use to multiply instances. I shall, therefore, give but one other extract, which breathes the predominant spirit of all Byron ‘s works – that sad translation of the preacher’s “vanity of vanities; all is vanity!”

 
Look on me! there is an order
Of mortals on the earth, who do become
Old in their youth and die ere middle age,
Without the violence of warlike death;
Some perishing of pleasure – some of study —
Some worn with toil – some of mere weariness —
Some of disease – and some insanity —
And some of wither’d or of broken hearts;
For this last is a malady which slays
More than are number’d in the lists of Fate;
Taking all shapes, and bearing many names.
Look upon me! for even of all these things
Have I partaken – and of all these things
One were enough; then wonder not that I
Am what I am, but that I ever was,
Or, having been, that I am still on earth.
 

CHAPTER XXXII

Byron’s Residence in Switzerland—Excursion to the Glaciers—“Manfred” founded on a magical Sacrifice, not on Guilt—Similarity between Sentiments given to Manfred and those expressed by Lord Byron in his own Person

The account given by Captain Medwin of the manner in which Lord Byron spent his time in Switzerland, has the raciness of his Lordship’s own quaintness, somewhat diluted. The reality of the conversations I have heard questioned, but they relate in some instances to matters not generally known, to the truth of several of which I can myself bear witness; moreover they have much of the poet’s peculiar modes of thinking about them, though weakened in effect by the reporter. No man can give a just representation of another who is not capable of putting himself into the character of his original, and of thinking with his power and intelligence. Still there are occasional touches of merit in the feeble outlines of Captain Medwin, and with this conviction it would be negligence not to avail myself of them.

“Switzerland,” said his Lordship, “is a country I have been satisfied with seeing once; Turkey I could live in for ever. I never forget my predilections: I was in a wretched state of health and worse spirits when I was at Geneva; but quiet and the lake, better physicians than Polidori, soon set me up. I never led so moral a life as during my residence in that country; but I gained no credit by it. Where there is mortification there ought to be reward. On the contrary, there is no story so absurd that they did not invent at my cost. I was watched by glasses on the opposite side of the lake, and by glasses, too, that must have had very distorted optics; I was waylaid in my evening drives. I believe they looked upon me as a man-monster.

“I knew very few of the Genevese. Hentsh was very civil to me, and I have a great respect for Sismondi. I was forced to return the civilities of one of their professors by asking him and an old gentleman, a friend of Gray’s, to dine with me I had gone out to sail early in the morning, and the wind prevented me from returning in time for dinner. I understand that I offended them mortally.

“Among our countrymen I made no new acquaintances; Shelley, Monk Lewis, and Hobhouse were almost the only English people I saw. No wonder; I showed a distaste for society at that time, and went little among the Genevese; besides, I could not speak French. When I went the tour of the lake with Shelley and Hobhouse, the boat was nearly wrecked near the very spot where St Preux and Julia were in danger of being drowned. It would have been classical to have been lost there, but not agreeable.”

The third canto of Childe Harold, Manfred, and The Prisoner of Chillon are the fruits of his travels up the Rhine and of his sojourn in Switzerland. Of the first it is unnecessary to say more; but the following extract from the poet’s travelling memorandum-book, has been supposed to contain the germ of the tragedy

“September 22, 18 16. – Left Thun in a boat, which carried us the length of the lake in three hours. The lake small, but the banks fine; rocks down to the water’s edge: landed at Newhouse; passed Interlachen; entered upon a range of scenes beyond all description or previous conception; passed a rock bearing an inscription; two brothers, one murdered the other; just the place for it. After a variety of windings, came to an enormous rock; arrived at the foot of the mountain (the Jungfrau) glaciers; torrents, one of these nine hundred feet, visible descent; lodge at the curate’s; set out to see the valley; heard an avalanche fall like thunder; glaciers; enormous storm comes on thunder and lightning and hail, all in perfection and beautiful. The torrent is in shape, curving over the rock, like the tail of the white horse streaming in the wind, just as might be conceived would be that of the pale horse on which Death is mounted in the Apocalypse: it is neither mist nor water, but a something between both; its immense height gives a wave, a curve, a spreading here, a condensation there, wonderful, indescribable

“September 23. – Ascent of the Wingren, the dent d’argent shining like truth on one side, on the other the clouds rose from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring-tide. It was white and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance; the side we ascended was of course not of so precipitous a nature; but on arriving at the summit, we looked down on the other side upon a boiling sea of cloud dashing against the crag on which we stood. Arrived at the Greenderwold, mounted and rode to the higher glacier, twilight, but distinct, very fine; glacier like a frozen hurricane; starlight beautiful; the whole of the day was fine, and, in point of weather, as the day in which Paradise was made. Passed whole woods of withered pines, all withered, trunks stripped and lifeless, done by a single winter.”

Undoubtedly in these brief and abrupt but masterly touches, hints for the scenery of Manfred may be discerned, but I can perceive nothing in them which bears the least likelihood to their having influenced the conception of that sublime work.

There has always been from the first publication of Manfred, a strange misapprehension with respect to it in the public mind. The whole poem has been misunderstood, and the odious supposition that ascribes the fearful mystery and remorse of a hero to a foul passion for his sister, is probably one of those coarse imaginations which have grown out of the calumnies and accusations heaped upon the author. How can it have happened that none of the critics have noticed that the story is derived from the human sacrifices supposed to have been in use among the students of the black art?

Manfred is represented as being actuated by an insatiable curiosity – a passion to know the forbidden secrets of the world. The scene opens with him at his midnight studies – his lamp is almost burned out – and he has been searching for knowledge and has not found it, but only that

 
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The tree of knowledge is not that of life.
Philosophy and science and the springs
Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world
I have essayed, and in my mind there is,
A power to make these subject to itself.
 

He is engaged in calling spirits; and, as the incantation proceeds, they obey his bidding, and ask him what he wants; he replies, “forgetfulness.”

FIRST SPIRIT

Of what – of whom – and why?

MANFRED

 
Of that which is within me; read it there —
Ye know it, and I cannot utter it.
 

SPIRIT

 
We can but give thee that which we possess; —
Ask of us subjects, sovereignty, the power
O’er earth, the whole or portion, or a sign
Which shall control the elements, whereof
We are the dominators. Each and all —
These shall be thine.
 

MANFRED

 
Oblivion, self oblivion —
Can ye not wring from out the hidden realms
Ye offer so profusely, what I ask?
 

SPIRIT

 
It is not in our essence, in our skill,
But – thou may’st die.
 

MANFRED

Will death bestow it on me?

SPIRIT

 
We are immortal, and do not forget;
We are eternal, and to us the past
Is as the future, present. Art thou answer’d?
 

MANFRED

 
Ye mock me, but the power which brought ye here
Hath made you mine. Slaves! scoff not at my will;
The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark,
The lightning of my being is as bright,
Pervading and far darting as your own,
And shall not yield to yours though coop’d in clay.
Answer, or I will teach you what I am.
 

SPIRIT

 
We answer as we answer’d. Our reply
Is even in thine own words.
 

MANFRED

Why say ye so?

SPIRIT

 
If, as thou say’st, thine essence be as ours,
We have replied in telling thee the thing
Mortals call death hath naught to do with us.
 

MANFRED

I then have call’d you from your realms in vain.

This impressive and original scene prepares the reader to wonder why it is that Manfred is so desirous to drink of Lethe. He has acquired dominion over spirits, and he finds, in the possession of the power, that knowledge has only brought him sorrow. They tell him he is immortal, and what he suffers is as inextinguishable as his own being: why should he desire forgetfulness? – Has he not committed a great secret sin? What is it? – He alludes to his sister, and in his subsequent interview with the witch we gather a dreadful meaning concerning her fate. Her blood has been shed, not by his hand nor in punishment, but in the shadow and occultations of some unutterable crime and mystery.

 
She was like me in lineaments; her eyes,
Her hair, her features, all to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine,
But soften’d all and temper’d into beauty.
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe; nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears, which I had not;
And tenderness – but that I had for her;
Humility, and that I never had:
Her faults were mine – her virtues were her own;
I lov’d her and – destroy’d her —
 

WITCH

With thy hand?

MANFRED

 
Not with my hand, but heart, which broke her heart.
It gaz’d on mine, and withered. I have shed
Blood, but not hers, and yet her blood was shed; —
I saw, and could not stanch it.
 

There is in this little scene, perhaps, the deepest pathos ever expressed; but it is not of its beauty that I am treating; my object in noticing it here is, that it may be considered in connection with that where Manfred appears with his insatiate thirst of knowledge, and manacled with guilt. It indicates that his sister, Astarte, had been self-sacrificed in the pursuit of their magical knowledge. Human sacrifices were supposed to be among the initiate propitiations of the demons that have their purposes in magic – as well as compacts signed with the blood of the self-sold. There was also a dark Egyptian art, of which the knowledge and the efficacy could only be obtained by the novitiate’s procuring a voluntary victim – the dearest object to himself and to whom he also was the dearest; ² and the primary spring of Byron’s tragedy lies, I conceive, in a sacrifice of that kind having been performed, without obtaining that happiness which the votary expected would be found in the knowledge and power purchased at such a price. His sister was sacrificed in vain. The manner of the sacrifice is not divulged, but it is darkly intimated to have been done amid the perturbations of something horrible.

 
Night after night for years
He hath pursued long vigils in this tower
Without a witness. – I have been within it —
So have we all been ofttimes; but from it,
Or its contents, it were impossible
To draw conclusions absolute of aught
His studies tend to. – To be sure there is
One chamber where none enter – ..
Count Manfred was, as now, within his tower:
How occupied – we know not – but with him,
The sole companion of his wanderings
And watchings – her – whom of all earthly things
That liv’d, the only thing he seem’d to love.
 

With admirable taste, and its thrilling augmentation of the horror, the poet leaves the deed which was done in that unapproachable chamber undivulged, while we are darkly taught, that within it lie the relics or the ashes of the “one without a tomb.”