"But in a higher niche, alone, but crowned, The Virgin-Mother of the G.o.d-born Child, With her Son in her blessed arms, looked round ...
But even the faintest relics of a shrine Of any worship wake some thoughts divine."]
[qm]
/ _chequered_ ----_beneath the_ { } _stone_.--[MS. G. erased.]
_inlaid_ /
[qn] _But now half-blotted_----.--[MS. G. erased.]
[qo] _But War must make the most of means_.--[MS. G. erased.]
[400] {492} ["Oh, but it made a glorious show!!!" Gifford erases the line, and adds these marks of exclamation.]
[qp] ----_the sacrament wine_.--[MS. G. erased.]
[qq] _Which the Christians partook at the break of the day_.--[MS. G.
Copy.]
[401] {493} [Compare _Sardanapalus_, act v. sc. 1 (s.f.)--
"_Myr._ Art thou ready?
_Sard._ As the torch in thy grasp.
(_Myrrha fires the pile._) _Myr._ "Tis fired! I come."]
[402] [A critic in the _Eclectic Review_ (vol. v. N.S., 1816, p. 273), commenting on the "obvious carelessness" of these lines, remarks, "We know not how "all that of dead remained" could _expire_ in that wild roar." To apply the word "expire" to inanimate objects is, no doubt, an archaism, but Byron might have quoted Dryden as an authority, "The ponderous ball expires."]
[qr] _The hills as by an earthquake bent_.--[MS. G. erased.]
[403] {494} [Strike out from "Up to the sky," etc., to "All blackened there and reeking lay." Despicable stuff.--Gifford.]
[qs] _Who can see or who shall say?_--[MS. G. erased.]
[404] [Lines 1043-1047 are not in the Copy or MS. G., but were included in the text of the First Edition.]
[405] [Compare _Don Juan_, Canto II. stanza cii. line 1, _seq._--
"Famine, despair, cold, thirst, and heat, had done Their work on them by turns, and thinned them to Such things a mother had not known her son Amidst the skeletons of that gaunt crew."
Compare, too, _The Island_, Canto I. section ix. lines 13, 14.]
[qt] {495} _And crashed each ma.s.s of stone_.--[MS. G. erased.]
[qu]
_And left their food the unburied dead_.--[Copy.]
_And left their food the untasted dead_.--[MS. G.]
_And howling left_----.--[MS. G. erased.]
[406] [Omit the next six lines.--Gifford.]
[407] ["I have heard hyaenas and jackalls in the ruins of Asia; and bull-frogs in the marshes; besides wolves and angry Mussulmans."--_Journal_, November 23, 1813, _Letters_, 1898, ii. 340.]
[qv] _Where Echo rolled in horror still_.--[MS. G.]
[qw] _The frightened jackal"s shrill sharp cry_.--[MS. G. erased.]
[408] I believe I have taken a poetical licence to transplant the jackal from Asia. In Greece I never saw nor heard these animals; but among the ruins of Ephesus I have heard them by hundreds. They haunt ruins, and follow armies. [Compare _Childe Harold_, Canto IV. stanza cliii. line 6; and _Don Juan_, Canto IX. stanza xxvii. line 2.]
[qx] _Mixed and mournful as the sound_.--[MS. G.]
[409] [Leave out this couplet.--Gifford.]
[410] [With lines 1058-1079, compare Southey"s _Roderick_ (Canto XVIII., ed. 1838, ix. 169)--
"Far and wide the thundering shout, Rolling among reduplicating rocks, Pealed o"er the hills, and up the mountain vales.
The wild a.s.s starting in the forest glade Ran to the covert; the affrighted wolf Skulked through the thicket to a closer brake; The sluggish bear, awakened in his den, Roused up and answered with a sullen growl, Low-breathed and long; and at the uproar scared, The brooding eagle from her nest took wing."
A sentence in a letter to Moore, dated January 10, 1815 (_Letters_, 1899, iii. 168), "_I_ have tried the rascals (i.e. the public) with my Harrys and Larrys, Pilgrims and Pirates. n.o.body but S....y has done any thing worth a slice of bookseller"s pudding, and _he_ has not luck enough to be found out in doing a good thing," implies that Byron had read and admired Southey"s _Roderick_--an inference which is curiously confirmed by a memorandum in Murray"s handwriting: "When Southey"s poem, _Don Roderick_ (_sic_), was published, Lord Byron sent in the middle of the night to ask John Murray if he had heard any opinion of it, for he thought it one of the finest poems he had ever read." The resemblance between the two pa.s.sages, which is pointed out by Professor Kolbing, is too close to be wholly unconscious, but Byron"s expansion of Southey"s lines hardly amounts to a plagiarism.]
PARISINA.
INTRODUCTION TO _PARISINA_.
_Parisina_, which had been begun before the _Siege of Corinth_, was transcribed by Lady Byron, and sent to the publisher at the beginning of December, 1815. Murray confessed that he had been alarmed by some hints which Byron had dropped as to the plot of the narrative, but was rea.s.sured when he traced "the delicate hand that transcribed it." He could not say enough of this "Pearl" of great price. "It is very interesting, pathetic, beautiful--do you know I would almost say moral"
(_Memoir of John Murray_, 1891, i. 353). Ward, to whom the MS. of _Parisina_ was shown, and Isaac D"Israeli, who heard it read aloud by Murray, were enthusiastic as to its merits; and Gifford, who had mingled censure with praise in his critical appreciation of the _Siege_, declared that the author "had never surpa.s.sed _Parisina_."
The last and shortest of the six narrative poems composed and published in the four years (the first years of manhood and of fame, the only years of manhood pa.s.sed at home in England) which elapsed between the appearance of the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_ and the third, _Parisina_ has, perhaps, never yet received its due. At the time of its appearance it shared the odium which was provoked by the publication of _Fare Thee Well_ and _A Sketch_, and before there was time to reconsider the new volume on its own merits, the new canto of _Childe Harold_, followed almost immediately by the _Prisoner of Chillon_ and its brilliant and noticeable companion poems, usurped the attention of friend and foe. Contemporary critics (with the exception of the _Monthly_ and _Critical_ Reviews) fell foul of the subject-matter of the poem--the guilty pa.s.sion of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d son for his father"s wife. "It was too disgusting to be rendered pleasing by any display of genius"
(_European Magazine_); "The story of _Parisina_ includes adultery not to be named" (_Literary Panorama_); while the _Eclectic_, on grounds of taste rather than of morals, gave judgment that "the subject of the tale was purely unpleasing"--"the impression left simply painful."
Byron, no doubt, for better or worse, was in advance of his age, in the pursuit of art for art"s sake, and in his indifference, not to morality--the _denouement_ of the story is severely moral--but to the moral edification of his readers. The tale was chosen because it is a tale of love and guilt and woe, and the poet, unconcerned with any other issue, sets the tale to an enchanting melody. It does not occur to him to condone or to reprobate the loves of Hugo and Parisina, and in detailing the issue leaves the actors to their fate. It was this aloofness from ethical considerations which perturbed and irritated the "canters," as Byron called them--the children and champions of the anti-revolution. The modern reader, without being attracted or repelled by the _motif_ of the story, will take pleasure in the sustained energy and sure beauty of the poetic strain. Byron may have gone to the "nakedness of history" for his facts, but he clothed them in singing robes of a delicate and shining texture.
to
SCROPE BERDMORE DAVIES, ESQ.
the following poem
Is Inscribed,
by one who has long admired his talents
and valued his friendship.