98 An Inquiry into the Moral Character of Lord Byron. By J. W. Simmons. New-York. Bliss & White. 1824. The writer of this Inquiry has come gallantly forward, in vindication of the principles, and in extenuation of the seemingly exceptionable conduct of the great poet, whose powers and eccentricities have so long excited wonder and speculation. He has presented himself boldly and fairly in the arena; employing philosophy, instead of cant, and truth in place of declamation, in his analysis of the poetical temperament. He has shown that he himself understands the nature and peculiarities of genius; but, from the existence of the original distinction, which he has taken, between those whose minds have created their own worlds, before the time has come for them to be initiated in the actual drama of life, and the plodding and practical majority of mankind, we doubt whether he can succeed in obtaining from the latter an acquittal for moral offences, on the ground of a mental organization which they cannot understand. When the grave has closed over a man of transcendant talents, the better and holier feelings of our nature induce us to speak reverentially of the follies and aberrations of the mighty dead. The pedantic wouldbe moralist and the senseless scribbler may perch like ravens on the cypress that shadows his ashes, and croak their obscene jargon for a time; but all who have not radically bad hearts, or who are not the victims of some unfortunate prejudice, will close their ears against such worthless ribaldry. Still, though mankind are willing to forget the frailties of those who have left them a rich intellectual legacy, it is vain to endeavour to make them excuse moral, on the ground of mental obliquity. And so it should be; for they have the rule of right plainly revealed to them; and to vindicate its transgression by metaphysical subtleties, would be to sap the foundation of their faith and practice. Yet may not the injunction of scripture, "judge not, that ye be not judged," be urged to the liberal Christian? May we not say that all men are to be judged according to their lights; not according to their opportunities, but to the capability they had of improving them? To use our author's reasoning, we will not put the case of an idiot or a lunatic, whom human laws would absolve from punishment, "but of a man whose passive impressions have been confirmed, previous to the development of his active principles; whose morals have been depraved ere his understanding had unfolded itself; with whom the moral approving and disapproving faculty was no guide, because the agent had become confirmed in those actions which constitute the object of this faculty, ere the faculty itself had been developed." It is a trite remark, that genius is perhaps as rare as idiocy. Of a hundred respectable writers, not one may have more than talent, fostered by education. Of a hundred who can write decent poetry, there may not be one "Whom Phoebus in his ire Has blasted with poetic fire." The reply to such an appeal would be, as we have said, that the world can understand no such singular constitution of the intellectual faculties; and that no human tribunal would allow of such a plea, even in mitigation of the penalty incurred. But surely God, the author of all intelligent souls, and to whom their mysterious operations are palpable, in requiring from each the talents intrusted to his charge, will exact less from him, whose moral perceptions were weaker, from the early development of a craving imagination, before reason could control, or experience test, the fallacy of its wanderings, than from him whose vision was unclouded by false creations, and whose perception of truth and error was distinct. The lives of men of genius, and their confessions, support our author in his examination of the poetical temperament. The different effects of education upon those possessed of it, and upon those who are not, are well pointed out by him. 'Tis education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.— But before the age when education can effectually adapt its instructions to the capability and disposition of the learner," the disposition, whatever it may be, has become so confirmed by nature herself, that it may be said to react. It assumes the reign, and directs, instead of being directed, by education." The destined victim of imagination has lived too much in a dreamy reverie. His creations of possible existences and circumstances are not merely the warm anticipations of youth, which are sure of disappointment, but which experience may correct, but are impossible and unprofitable chimeras-longings which are hugged the closer, the more wild and preposterous they grow, and which enfeeble the rational faculties of the mind, and render it unfit for practical labor. When the volume of knowledge and the lessons of morals are presented to the youthful subject of these delusions, his appetite, already become sickly, neglects or loaths too often the useful and the good; and the mind finds its aliment in what is accidentally congenial with its crude combinations and fantastic imaginings. The secret of genius, if not early discovered to itself, begins soon to develop its effects on the moral character. Bitter rebuke or correction, or ridicule, more tormenting than either, when applied to divert it from its favorite indulgences, rankle deeply and long in its remembrance, and awaken unsocial and malignant feelings. In the lament of Tasso, Byron exemplifies this- I was chid for wandering; and the wise The consciousness or discovery that the every day world has no sympathy with itself, is soon made by genius; and when, as is generally the case, it is spurned and trampled upon and wounded, by the coarse, the ignorant, the vulgar and the brutal, what wonder that it should recriminate? what wonder if, in the words of our author, it should sometimes "retaliate the injustice it conceives itself to have sustained-not in requiting society for the evil it has done, with good to that society-but with evil to the possessor himself?" Thus is the man of genius predisposed to be more easily seduced by the allurements of the world, in the first instance; and afterwards driven into irregularity by the misconception of his feelings, the rejection of his principles, and the envy of his powers, which consoles itself for his intellectual superiority, by blazoning his moral infirmities. Too often, perhaps, reposing on the consciousness of his own originality, and the certainty of his fame, he sets the opinions of the world at defiance, and is disposed to war on that which it holds most awful and sacred. But this is the perversion, not the natural tendency of genius.Its earlier aspirations are for better things, but connected with ideal forms and associations which never can be realized. There is a void which never can be filled; a yearning for intense emotion, which never can be reciprocated. The day dreams of youth pass away; its hopes are shattered, but its longings still remain, and are unsatisfied. There the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness, Thus the highest conceptions of abstract virtue may only lead to actions in themselves vicious. Jealousy, irritability. misanthropy and scepticism, find their way into the heart. The man whom fortune has not deserted, follows blindly the meteor light of the passions; but too often want, without the practical talent to provide for its necessities, has been superinduced upon the essential miseries of genius. Foresight, frugality and economy, have been words unknown in its vocabulary, since Hermes was sent a begging, and Apollo to tend sheep. Mr. Simmons, with great propriety, avoids any application of his theory to particular events in the private history of Lord Byron. These have been so variously, and always, no doubt, so erroneously narrated, that it would be impossible to speak of them with certainty, even if it were not in some measure sacrilegious to violate the charter of the illustrious dead. Having spoken of the noble author as the poet of passion, and cited some beautiful illustrations of his power in describing its effects, the writer proceeds "That the Being in whose soul dwelt such conceptions and such forms of beauty-such passionate desires, forever reaching after the unattainable and the definite, and seeking relief in disappointment by wreaking his whole being upon the expression of that disappointment-that such a Being should have been unhappy, and even incapacitated for the free exercise of the humbler duties and practical purposes of life, is only what might have been predicated of the peculiar constitution of his character. Whatever may have been the errors of Lord Byron's life, they were evidently those of a great and uncontroulable mind. His heart, we are persuaded, never conceived one ungenerous thought, or prompted to one ignoble action. It was the mind, the burning restless mind, that o'er informed his feelings. His heart appeared to weep over the frailties it never gave birth to, and could not controul. There was an eternal action and reaction going on between his feelings and his understanding. But, unhappily for his peace, the latter always maintained the ascendency they had early acquired over the former. Setting aside all consideration of the effects which are supposed to result from a neglected education, and early habits -those false links that bind At times the loftiest to the meanest mind -we are tempted to think that Lord Byron's genius was of that intense and peculiar temperament which admits of no other modification than that which the gradual confirmation of an original and powerful but unhappy bias, is calculated to effect And as there is nothing which acquires strength so much from indulgence as that morbid sensibility which is peculiar to genius, there is nothing so difficult to oppose-and yet so destructive of happiness for the want of disipline." The remarks on the poetry of Byron, in this pamphlet, evince in the writer a quick and full perception not only of the dazzling but of the more delicate and less obvious beauties of this Vol. II. No. VIII. 14 highly gifted minstrel. He has pointed out some exquisite passages, which we do not remember to have seen particularly noticed before. The speculation on the essential character of poetry, according to the definition of Lord Bacon, that "it adapts the shows of things to the desires of the mind," which precedes these quotations, is ingenious, but perhaps fruitless. That definition does indeed, as our author says, embrace all works of pure fiction. Without taking into account, as a necessary quality, the commonly received notion of a certain measure, necessarily leading to a certain inversion of phraseology, the use of certain words in a peculiar sense, and the coinage of others, by which every language soon comes to possess a distinct poetical dialect, it is impossible to mark, by any abstract character, the boundary line between prose and poetry. Not that we agree with Mr. Simmons, in his assertion, that, according to Bacon's definition, we must admit Robinson Crusoe to be the work of a poet. It is, indeed, true, as he observes, that the geometrician participates with the poet, in the faculty of invention; and the creations of Defoe were produced by a process of thought or reasoning, analogous to that of the mathematician in solving a problem. From given data, he supposed all the probable and natural results. His hero, in his lonely island, was troubled with no thick-coming fancies. A thunderstorm had some agency in producing his religious melancholy, which was increased by dreams and terrible visions; but the former was a plain matter of fact thunderstorm, directly calculated to frighten him, and convince him that he was in the power of superior and resistless agents; he began to think seriously about his own responsibilities, and removed his ammunition to a safer place. His dreams were such as every common seaman might have had, in his situation, without a particle of romance in their character. He did not conjure up aerial imagery in the distant and undefined objects around him; but adjusted his spy glass, and ascertained that it was the outline of a remote shore, or so many canoes, each containing a certain number of savages. When he saw the print of a footstep in the sand, and could not account for the impression, he supposed it had been made by the devil. All this is in good keeping; but certainly, it does not follow, necessarily, that the author was a poet. The desires of the mind which poetry seeks to satisfy, are for incidents where the immediate connexion of cause and effect is rather obscured, than obtruded upon the judgment for its sanction ;-for objects, on which the mind can itself work, |