CONVERSATIONS.

Conversation the First.

66

CALLED on Mr. Northcote; had, as usual, an interesting conversation. Spoke of some account of Lord Byron in a newspaper, which he thought must be like. "The writer says he did not wish to be thought merely a great poet. My sister asked, 'What then did he wish to be thought? Why, I'll tell you; he wished to be something different from everybody else. As to nobility, there were many others before him, so that he could not rely upon that; and then as to poetry, there are so many wretched creatures that pretend to the name, that he looked at it with disgust; he thought himself as distinct from them as the stars in the firmament. It comes to what Sir Joshua used to say, that a man who is at the head of his profession is above it. I remember being at Cosway's, where they were recommending some charitable institution for the relief of decayed artists, and I said I would not be of it, for it was holding out a temptation to idleness, and bringing those into the profession who were not fit for it. Some one who wanted to flatter me observed, 'I wonder you should talk in this manner, who are under such obligations to the art!' I answered immediately,‘If I am to take your compliment as I believe it is meant, I

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might answer, that it is the art that is under obligation to me, not I to it. Do you suppose that Rubens, Titian, and others were under obligations to the art—they who raised it from obscurity, and made it all that it is? What would the art be without these?' The world in general, as Miss Reynolds used to say with reference to her brother, think no more of a painter than they do of a fiddler, or a dancing-master, or a pianoforte-maker. And so of a poet. I have always said of that dispute about burying Lord Byron in Poets' Corner, that he would have resisted it violently if he could have known of it. Not but there were many very eminent names there with whom he would like to be associated, but then there were others that he would look down upon. If they had laid him there, he would have got up again. No; I'll tell you where they should have laid him. If they had buried him with the Kings in Henry the Seventh's Chapel he would have had no objection to that. One cannot alter the names of things, or the prejudices of the world respecting them, to suit one's convenience. I once went with Hoppner to the hustings to vote for Horne Tooke; and when they asked me what I was, I said, 'A painter.' At this Hoppner was very mad all the way home, and said I should have called myself a portraitpainter. I replied, the world had no time to trouble. their heads about such distinctions. I afterwards asked Kemble, who agreed I was right, that he always called himself a player," &c.

I then observed I had been to the play with Godwin and his daughter, from the last of whom I had learnt something about Lord Byron's conversation. "What!" he said, "the beauty-daughter?" I said, "Do you think her a beauty, then?” "Why no, she rather thinks herself one; and yet there is something about her that would pass for such. Girls generally find out where to place themselves. She's clever, too, isn't she?"

"Oh, yes." "What did she tell you about Lord Byron? Because I am curious to know all about him." "I asked her if it was true that Lord Byron was so poor a creature as Hunt represented him. She at first misunderstood me, and said nothing could be meaner than he was, and gave some instances of it. I said, that was not what I meant; that I could believe anything of that kind of him; that whatever he took in his head he would carry to extremes, regardless of everything but the feeling of the moment; but that I could not conceive him to be in conversation, or in any other way, a flat and commonplace person.1 Oh, no,' she said, 'he was not. Hunt was hardly a fair judge. The other had not behaved well to him, and whenever they met, Hunt always began some kind of argument, and as Lord Byron could not argue they made but a bad piece of business of it, and it ended unsatisfactorily for all parties.' I said, Hunt was too apt to put people to their trumps, or to force them upon doing, not what they could do, but what he thought he could do. He, however, not only gave his own opinion, but said Mr. Shelley could only just endure Lord Byron's company. This seemed to me odd; for though he might be neither orator nor philosopher, yet anything he might say, or only stammer out in broken sentences, must be interesting; a glance, a gesture, would be full of meaning; or he would make one look about one like the tree in Virgil, that expressed itself by groans. To this she assented, and observed: ' At least Shelley and myself found it so; for we generally sat with him till morning. He was perhaps a little moody and reserved at first; but by touching on certain strings he began to unbend, and gave the most extraordinary accounts of his own feelings and adventures that could be imagined. Besides, he was

1 Mr. Moore has just written a book to prove the truth of the contrary opinion.

very handsome, and it was some satisfaction to look at a head at once so beautiful and expressive!' I repeated what Hunt told me, that when he and Lord Byron met in Italy they did not know one another-he himself from having grown so thin, and Byron from having grown so fat, like a great chubby schoolboy—a circumstance which shocked his lordship so much that he took to drinking vinegar at a great rate, that he might recover the figure of the stripling god. I mentioned some things that Hunt had reported of Lord Byron; such as his saying, 'He never cared for anything above a day,' -which might be merely in a fit of spleen, or from the spirit of contradiction, or to avoid an imputation of sentimentality.”—“ Oh!" said Northcote, "that will never do, to take things literally that are uttered in a moment of irritation. You do not express your own opinion, but one as opposite as possible to that of the person that has provoked you. You get as far from a person you have taken a pique against as you can, just as you turn off the pavement to get out of the way of a chimneysweeper; but it is not to be supposed you prefer walking in the mud, for all that. I have often been ashamed myself of speeches I have made in that way, which have been repeated to me as good things, when all I meant was that I would say anything sooner than agree to the nonsense or affectation I heard. You then set yourself against what you think a wrong bias in another, and are not like a wall, but a buttress-as far from the right line as your antagonist; and the more absurd he is the more so do you become. Before you attend to what any one says you should ask, Was he talking to a fool or a wise man? No; Hunt would make Lord Byron tributary to him, or would make him out to be nothing. I wonder you admire him as you do; and compare him to the wits of Charles II. It isn't writing verses or painting a picture-that, as Sir Joshua

used to say, is what everybody can do; but it is the doing something more than anybody else can do that entitles the poet or the artist to distinction, or makes the work live. But these people shut themselves up in a little circle of their own, and fancy all the world are looking at them." I said Hunt had been spoiled by flattery when he was young. "Oh, no!" he said, "it was not that. Sir Joshua was not spoiled by flattery, and yet he had as much of it as anybody need have; but he was looking out to see what the world said of him, or thinking what figure he should make by the side of Correggio or Vandyke-not pluming himself on being a better painter than some one in the next street, or being surprised that the people at his own table spoke in praise of his pictures. It is a little mind that is taken up with the nearest object, or puffed up with immediate notice: to do anything great, we must look out of ourselves and see things upon a broader scale.”

I told Northcote I had promised Hunt I would bring him to see him; and then, said I, you would think as favourably of him as I do, and everybody else that knows him. "But you didn't say anything in my praise to induce him to come?" 66 Oh, yes, I exerted all my eloquence." “That wasn't the way. You should have said I was a poor creature, perhaps amusing for an hour or so, or curious to see, like a little dried mummy in a museum; but he would not hear of your having two idols. Depend upon it he'll not come. Such characters only want to be surrounded with satellites or echoes; and that is one reason they never improve. True genius, as well as wisdom, is ever docile, humble, vigilant, and ready to acknowledge the merit it seeks to appropriate from every quarter. That was Fuseli's mistake. Nothing was good enough for him that was not a repetition of himself. So once, when I told him of a very fine Vandyke, he made answer, ' And what is it? A little bit of