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The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

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Title: The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

Author: Francis Henry Gribble


        
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THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF LORD BYRON

       *       *       *       *       *

_Works by the Same Author_


MADAME DE STAËL AND HER LOVERS

GEORGE SAND AND HER LOVERS

ROSSEAU AND THE WOMEN HE LOVED

CHATEAUBRIAND AND HIS COURT OF WOMEN

THE PASSIONS OF THE FRENCH ROMANTICS

       *       *       *       *       *


[Illustration: _Lord Byron._]


THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF LORD BYRON

by

FRANCIS GRIBBLE

Author of "George Sand and Her Lovers" etc.







London
Eveleigh Nash
Fawside House
1910




PREFACE


Whether a book is called "The Love Affairs of Lord Byron" or "The Life of
Lord Byron" can make very little difference to the contents of its pages.
Byron's love affairs were the principal incidents of his life, and almost
the only ones. Like Chateaubriand, he might have spoke of "a procession of
women" as the great panoramic effect of his career. He differed from
Chateaubriand, however, in the first place, in not professing to be very
much concerned by the pageant, and, in the second place, in being, in
reality, very deeply affected by it. Chateaubriand kept his emotions well
in hand, exaggerating them in retrospect for the sake of literary effect,
picturing the sensibility of his heart in polished phrases, but never
giving the impression of a man who has suffered through his passions, or
been swept off his feet by them, or diverted by them from the pursuit of
ambition or the serene cult of the all-important ego. In all
Chateaubriand's love affairs, in short, red blood is lacking and
self-consciousness prevails. He appears to be equally in love with all the
women in the procession; the explanation being that he is more in love
with himself than with any of them. In spite of the procession of women,
which is admitted to have been magnificent, it may justly be said of
Chateaubriand that love was "of his life a thing apart."

Of Byron, who coined the phrase (though Madame de Staël had coined it
before him) it cannot be said. It may appear to be true of sundry of his
incidental love affairs, but it cannot stand as a broad generalisation.
His whole life was deflected from its course, and thrown out of gear:
first, by his unhappy passion for Mary Chaworth; secondly, by the way in
which women of all ranks, flattering his vanity for the gratification of
their own, importuned him with the offer of their hearts. Lady Byron
herself did so no less than Lady Caroline Lamb, and Jane Clairmont, and
the Venetian light o' loves, though, no doubt, with more delicacy and a
better show of maidenly reserve. Fully persuaded in her own mind that he
had pined for her for two years, she delicately hinted to him that he need
pine no longer. He took the hint and married her, with the catastrophic
consequences which we know. Then other women--a long series of other
women--did what they could to break his fall and console him. He dallied
with them for years, without ever engaging his heart very deeply, until at
last he realised that this sort of dalliance was a very futile and
enervating occupation, tore himself away from his last entanglement, and
crossed the sea to strike a blow for freedom.

That is Byron's life in a nutshell. His biographer, it is clear, has no
way of escape from his love affairs; while the critic is under an
obligation, almost equally compelling, to take note of them. It is not
merely that he was continually writing about them, and that the meaning of
his enigmatic sentences can, in many cases, only be unravelled by the help
of the clue which a knowledge of his love affairs provides. The striking
change which we see the tone of his work undergoing as he grows older is
the reflection of the history of his heart. Many of his later poems might
have been written in mockery of the earlier ones. He had his illusions in
his youth. In his middle-age, if he can be said to have reached
middle-age, he had none, but wrote, to the distress of the Countess
Guiccioli, as a man who delighted to tear aside, with a rude hand, the
striped veil of sentiment and hypocrisy which hid the ugly nakedness of
truth. The secret of that transformation is written in the record of his
love affairs, and can be read nowhere else. His life lacks all unity and
all consistency unless the first place in it is given to that record.

Since the appearance of Moore's Life, and even since the appearance of
Cordy Jeaffreson's "Real Lord Byron," a good deal of new information has
been made available. The biographer has to take cognisance of the various
documents brought together in Mr. Murray's latest edition of Byron's
Writings and Letters; of Hobhouse's "Account of the Separation"; of the
"Confessions," for whatever they may be worth, elicited from Jane
Clairmont and first printed in the _Nineteenth Century_; of Mr. Richard
Edgcumbe's "Byron: the Last Phase"; and of the late Lord Lovelace's
privately printed work, "Astarte."

The importance of each of these authorities will appear when reference is
made to it in the text. It will be seen, then, that some of the Murray
MSS. give precision to the narrative of Byron's relations with Lady
Caroline Lamb, and that others effectually dispose of Cordy Jeaffreson's
theory that Lady Byron's mysterious grievance--the grievance which caused
her lawyer to declare reconciliation impossible--was her husband's
intimacy with Miss Clairmont. Others of them, again, as effectually
confute Cordy Jeaffreson's amazing doctrine that Byron only brought
railing accusations against his wife because he loved her, and that at the
time when he denounced her as "the moral Clytemnestra of thy lord," he was
in reality yearning to be recalled to the nuptial bed. Concerning
"Astarte" some further remarks may be made.

It is a disgusting and calumnious compilation, designed, apparently, to
show that Byron's descendants accept the worst charges preferred against
him by his enemies during his lifetime. Those charges are such that one
would have expected a member of the family to hold his tongue about them,
even if he were in possession of evidence conclusively demonstrating their
truth. That a member of the family should have revived the charges on the
strength of evidence which may justly be described as not good enough to
hang a dog on almost surpasses belief. Still, the thing has been done, and
the biographer's obligations are affected accordingly. Unpleasant though
the subject is, he must examine the so-called evidence for fear lest he
should be supposed to feel himself unable to rebut it; and he is under the
stronger compulsion to do so because the mud thrown by Lord Lovelace is
not thrown at Byron only, but also at Augusta Leigh, a most worthy and
womanly woman, and the best of sisters and wives. It is the hope and
belief of the present writer that he has succeeded in definitely clearing
her character, together with that of her brother, and demonstrated that
the legend of the crime, so industriously inculated by Byron's grandson,
has no shadow of foundation in fact.

FRANCIS GRIBBLE




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                                             PAGE

  I. ANCESTORS, PARENTS, AND HEREDITARY INFLUENCES                       1

  II. CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS AT ABERDEEN, DULWICH, AND HARROW         10

  III. A SCHOOLBOY'S LOVE AFFAIRS--MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER,
  AND MARY CHAWORTH                                                     23

  IV. LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE AND FLIRTATIONS AT SOUTHWELL                    35

  V. REVELRY AT NEWSTEAD--"ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS"          50

  VI. THE GRAND TOUR--FLIRTATIONS IN SPAIN                              63

  VII. FLORENCE SPENCER SMITH                                           75

  VIII. THE MAID OF ATHENS--MRS. WERRY--MRS. PEDLEY--THE SWIMMING
  OF THE HELLESPONT                                                     87

  IX. RETURN TO ENGLAND--PUBLICATION OF "CHILDE HAROLD"                101

  X. THE SECRET ORCHARD                                                114

  XI. LADY CAROLINE LAMB                                               127

  XII. THE QUARREL WITH LADY CAROLINE--HER CHARACTER AND
  SUBSEQUENT CAREER                                                    138

  XIII. LADY OXFORD--BYRON'S INTENTION OF GOING ABROAD WITH HER        148

  XIV. AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS--THOUGHTS OF MARRIAGE, OF FOREIGN
  TRAVEL, AND OF MARY CHAWORTH                                         158

  XV. RENEWAL AND INTERRUPTION OF RELATIONS WITH MARY CHAWORTH         170

  XVI. MARRIAGE                                                        182

  XVII. INCOMPATIBILITY OF TEMPER                                      194

  XVIII. LADY BYRON'S DEMAND FOR A SEPARATION--RUMOURS THAT
  "GROSS CHARGES" MIGHT BE BROUGHT, INVOLVING MRS. LEIGH               208

  XIX. "GROSS CHARGES" DISAVOWED BY LADY BYRON--SEPARATION
  AGREED TO                                                            221

  XX. REVIVAL OF THE BYRON SCANDAL BY MRS. BEECHER STOWE AND
  THE LATE LORD LOVELACE                                               231

  XXI. INHERENT IMPROBABILITY OF THE CHARGES AGAINST AUGUSTA
  LEIGH--THE ALLEGATION THAT SHE "CONFESSED"--THE PROOF THAT SHE
  DID NOTHING OF THE KIND                                              240

  XXII. BYRON'S DEPARTURE FOR THE CONTINENT--HIS ACQUAINTANCE
  WITH JANE CLAIRMONT                                                  253

  XXIII. LIFE AT GENEVA--THE AFFAIR WITH JANE CLAIRMONT                264

  XXIV. FROM GENEVA TO VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE DRAPER'S WIFE       277

  XXV. AT VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE BAKER'S WIFE--DISSOLUTE
  PROCEEDINGS IN THE MOCENIGO PALACE--ILLNESS, RECOVERY AND
  REFORMATION                                                          287

  XXVI. IN THE VENETIAN SALONS--INTRODUCTION TO COUNTESS GUICCIOLI     300

  XXVII. BYRON'S RELATIONS WITH THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI AND HER
  HUSBAND AT RAVENNA                                                   312

  XXVIII. REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES--REMOVAL FROM RAVENNA TO PISA       324

  XXIX. THE TRIVIAL ROUND AT PISA                                      336

  XXX. FROM PISA TO GENOA                                              345

  XXXI. DEPARTURE FOR GREECE                                           356

  XXXII. DEATH IN A GREAT CAUSE                                        369

  APPENDIX                                                             375

  INDEX                                                                377




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  LORD BYRON                    _Frontispiece_

  THE MAID OF ATHENS        _To face page_  88

  LADY CAROLINE LAMB              "        128

  MARY CHAWORTH                   "        174

  LADY BYRON                      "        222

  COUNTESS GUICCIOLI              "        302




CHAPTER I

ANCESTORS, PARENTS, AND HEREDITARY INFLUENCES


The Byrons came over with the Conqueror, helped him to conquer, and were
rewarded with a grant of landed estates in Lancashire. Hundreds of years
elapsed before they distinguished themselves either for good or evil, or
emerged from the ruck of the landed gentry. There were Byrons at Crecy,
and at the siege of Calais; and there probably were Byrons among the
Crusaders. There is even a legend of a Byron Crusader rescuing a Christian
maiden from the Saracens; but neither the maiden nor the Crusader can be
identified. The authentic history of the family only begins with the grant
of Newstead Abbey, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, to
Sir John Byron of Clayton, in Lancashire--a reward, apparently, for
services rendered by his father at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Even so, however, the Byrons remained comparatively inconspicuous[1]; and
their records only begin to be full and interesting at the time of the war
between Charles I. and his Parliament. Seven Byrons, all brothers, then
fought on the King's side; and the most distinguished of the seven was the
eldest, another Sir John Byron of Clayton--a loyal, valiant, and impetuous
soldier, with more zeal than discretion. It was his charge that broke
Haslerig's cuirassiers at Roundway Down. It was in his regiment that
Falkland was fighting when he fell at Newbury. On the other hand he helped
to lose the battle of Marston Moor by charging without orders. "By Lord
Byron's improper charge," Prince Rupert reported, "much harm hath been
done."

He had been given his peerage--with limitations in default of issue male
to his six surviving brothers and the issue male of their bodies--in the
midst of the war. After Naseby, he went to Paris, and spent the rest of
his life in exile. His first wife being dead, he married a second--a lady
concerning whom there is a piquant note in Pepys' Diary. She was, Pepys
tells us, one of Charles II.'s mistresses--his "seventeenth mistress
aboard," who, as the diarist proceeds, "did not leave him till she got him
to give her an order for £4000 worth of plate; but, by delays, thanks be
to God! she died before she got it."

This first Lord Byron died childless, and the title passed to his brother
Richard, who had also distinguished himself in the war on the King's side.
He was one of the colonels whose gallantry at Edgehill the University of
Oxford rewarded with honorary degrees; and he was Governor, successively,
of Appleby and Newark. He tried to seduce his kinsman, Colonel
Hutchinson, from his allegiance to the Parliament, but without avail.
"Except," Colonel Hutchinson told him, "he found his own heart prone to
such treachery, he might consider that there was, if nothing else, so much
of a Byron's blood in him that he should very much scorn to betray or quit
a trust he had undertaken."

The third Lord, Richard's son William, succeeded to the title in 1679. His
marriage with Elizabeth, daughter of Viscount Chaworth, brings the name of
the heroine of the poet's first and last love into the story; and he is
also notable as the first Byron who had a taste, if not actually a turn,
for literature. Thomas Shipman, the royalist singer whose songs indicate,
according to Mr. Thomas Seccombe's criticism in the "Dictionary of
National Biography," that "the severe morals of the Roundheads were even
less to his taste than their politics," was his intimate friend; and
Shipman's "Carolina" contains a set of verses from his pen:

  "_My whole ambition only does extend
  To gain the name of Shipman's faithful friend;
  And though I cannot amply speak your praise,
  I'll wear the myrtle, tho' you wear the bays._"

That is a fair specimen of the third Lord Byron's poetical style; and it
is clear that his descendant did not need to be a great poet in order to
improve upon it. Of his son, the fourth Lord, who died in 1736, there is
nothing to be said; but his grandson, the fifth Lord, lives in history
and tradition as "the wicked Lord Byron." The report of his arraignment
before his fellow peers on the charge of murdering his relative, Mr.
William Chaworth, in 1765, may be read in the Nineteenth Volume of State
Trials, though the most careful reading is likely to leave the rights of
the case obscure.

The tragedy, whatever the rights of it, occurred after one of the weekly
dinners of the Nottinghamshire County Club, at the Star and Garter Tavern
in Pall Mall. The quarrel arose out of a heated discussion on the subject
of preserving game--a topic which country gentlemen are particularly
liable to discuss with heat. Lord Byron is said to have advocated
leniency, and Mr. Chaworth severity, towards poachers. The argument led to
a wager; and the two men went upstairs together--apparently for the
purpose of arranging the terms of the wager--and entered a room lighted
only by a dull fire and a single candle. As soon as the door was closed,
they drew their swords and fought, and Lord Byron ran Mr. Chaworth through
the body.

Those are the only points on which all the depositions agree. Lord Byron
said that Chaworth, who was the better swordsman of the two, challenged
him to fight, and that the fight was conducted fairly. The case for the
prosecution was that Chaworth did not mean to fight, and that Lord Byron
attacked him unawares. Chaworth, though he lingered for some hours, and
was questioned on the subject, said nothing to exonerate his assailant.
That, broadly speaking, was the evidence on which the peers had to come to
their decision; and they found Lord Byron not guilty of murder but guilty
of manslaughter. Pleading his privilege as a peer, he was released on
payment of the fees.

Society, however, inclined to the view that he had not fought fairly. Two
years before he had been Master of the Stag-hounds. Now he was cut by the
county, and relapsed into misanthropic debauchery. He quarrelled with his
son, the Honorable William Byron, sometime M.P. for Morpeth, for
contracting a marriage of which he disapproved. He drove his wife away
from Newstead by his brutality, and consorted with a low-born "Lady
Betty." The stories of his shooting his coachman and trying to drown his
wife were untrue, but his neighbours believed them, and behaved
accordingly; and an unpleasant picture of his retirement may be found in
Horace Walpole's Letters.

    "The present Lord," Horace Walpole writes, "hath lost large sums, and
    paid part in old oaks; five thousand pounds worth have been cut down
    near the house. _En revanche_, he has built two baby forts to pay his
    country in castles for the damage done to the Navy, and planted a
    handful of Scotch firs that look like plough-boys dressed in old
    family liveries for a public day."

Playing at naval battles and bombardments, with toy ships, on the little
lakes in his park, was, indeed, the favourite, if not the only,
recreation of the wicked lord's old age. It is said that his chief purpose
in cutting down the timber was to spite and embarrass his heirs; and he
did, at any rate, involve his heir in a law suit almost as long as the
famous case of Jarndyce _versus_ Jarndyce by means of an improper sale of
the Byron property at Rochdale.

His heir, however, was not to be either his son or his grandson. They both
predeceased him--the latter dying in Corsica in 1794--and the title and
estates passed to the issue of his brother John, known to the Navy List as
Admiral Byron, and to the navy as "foul weather Jack."

The Admiral had been round the world with Anson, had been wrecked on the
coast of Chili, and had published a narrative--"my granddad's
narrative"--of his hardships and adventures. He had later been sent round
the world on a voyage of discovery on his own account, but had discovered
nothing in particular. Finally he had fought, not too successfully,
against d'Estaing in the West Indies, and had withdrawn to misanthropic
isolation. His son, Captain Byron, of the Guards, known to his
contemporaries as "Mad Jack Byron," was a handsome youth of worthless
character, but very fascinating to women. His elopement, while still a
minor, with the Marchioness of Carmarthen, was one of the sensational
events of a London season.

Lady Carmarthen's husband having divorced her, Mad Jack married her in
1778. They lived together in Paris and at Chantilly--prosperously, for
the bride had £4000 a year in her own right. A child was born--Augusta,
who subsequently married Colonel Leigh; but, in 1784, his wife died, and
Captain Byron, heavily in debt, was once more thrown on his own resources.
He returned to England to look for an heiress, and he found one in the
person of Miss Gordon of Gight, whom he met and married at Bath in 1786.

The fortune, when the landed estates had been realised, amounted to about
£23,000; and Captain Byron's clamorous creditors took most of it. A
considerable portion of what was left was quickly squandered in riotous
living on the Continent. The ultimate income consisted of the interest
(subject to an annuity to Mrs. Byron's grandmother) on the sum of £4200;
and that lamentable financial position had already been reached when
Captain and Mrs. Byron came back to England and took a furnished house in
Holles Street, where George Noel Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, was born on
January 22, 1788.

There we have, in brief outline, all that is essential of the little that
is known of Byron's heredity. If it is not precisely common-place, it is
at least undistinguished. No one can ever have generalised from it and
said that the Byrons were brilliant, or even--in spite of the third Lord's
conscientious attempts at versification--that they were "literary." A far
more likely generalisation would have been that the Byrons were mad.

They were not quite that, of course, though some of them were eccentric;
and those who were eccentric had the courage of their eccentricity. But
they were, at least so far as we know them, impetuous and reckless
men--men who went through life in the spirit of a bull charging a gate,
doing what they chose to do because they chose to do it, with a defiant
air of "damn the consequences." We find that note alike in the first
Lord's "improper charge" on Marston Moor, and the fifth Lord's improvised
duel in the dark room of the Pall Mall tavern, and in Captain Byron's
dashing elopement with a noble neighbour's wife. We shall catch it again,
and more than once, in our survey of the career of the one Byron who has
been famous; and we shall see how much his fame owed to his pride, his
determined indifference, in spite of his prickly sensitiveness, to public
opinion, and his clear-cut, haughty character.

Legh Richmond, the popular evangelical preacher, once said that, if Byron
had been as bad a poet as he was a man, his poetry would have done but
little harm, but that criticism is almost an inversion of the truth.
Byron, in fact, imposed himself far less because his poetry was good than
because his personality was strong. He never saw as far into the heart of
things as Wordsworth. When he tried to do so, at Shelley's instigation, he
only saw what Wordsworth had already shown; and there are many passages in
his work which might fairly be described as being "like Wordsworth only
less so." None of his shorter pieces are fit to stand beside "The world is
too much with us," and he never wrote a line so wonderfully inspired as
Wordsworth's "still, sad music of humanity."

But he had one advantage over Wordsworth. He spoke out; he was not afraid
of saying things. His genius had all the hard riding, neck-or-nothing
temper of the earlier, undistinguished Byrons behind it. He was "dowered
with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,"--and he damned the
consequences with the haphazard blasphemy of an aristocrat who feels sure
of himself, and has no need to pick his words. He was quite ready to damn
them in the presence of ladies, and in the face of kings; and he damned
them as one having authority, and not as the democratic upstarts; so that
the world listened attentively, wondering what he would say next, and even
Shelley, observing how easily he compelled a hearing, was fully persuaded
that Byron was a greater poet than himself.

That, in the main, it would seem, was how heredity affected him. The
hereditary influences, however, were, in their turn modified by the
strange circumstances of his upbringing; and it is time to glance at them,
and see how far they help to account for the loneliness and aloofness of
Byron's temperament, for the sensitiveness already referred to, and for
the ultimate attitude known as the Byronic pose.




CHAPTER II

CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS AT ABERDEEN, DULWICH, AND HARROW


Captain and Mrs. Byron, finding themselves impoverished, left Holles
Street, and retired to Aberdeen, to live on an income of £150 a year.
Augusta having been taken off their hands by her grandmother, Lady
Holderness, they were alone together, with the baby and the nurse, in
cheap and gloomy lodgings; and they soon began to wrangle. It was the old
story, no doubt, of poverty coming in at the door and love flying out of
the window, leaving only incompatibility of temper behind.

The husband, though inclined to be amiable as long as things went well,
was, in modern phrase, a "waster." The wife, though shrewd and possessed
of some domestic virtues, was, in the language of all time, a scold. He
wanted to run into debt in order to keep up appearances; she to disregard
appearances in order to live within her income. Dinners of many courses
and wines of approved vintages seemed to her the superfluities but to him
the necessaries of life. He probably did not mince words in expressing his
view of the matter; she certainly minced none in expressing hers. There is
a strong presumption, too, that she complained of him to her neighbours;
for it is well attested in her son's letters to his sister that she was
that sort of woman. So the day came when Captain Byron walked out of the
house, vowing that he would live with his wife no longer.

For a time he lived in a separate lodging in the same street. Presently,
scraping some money together--borrowing it, that is to say, without any
intention of repaying it--he went to France to amuse himself; and in
January 1791, at the age of thirty-five, he died at Valenciennes. It has
been suggested that he committed suicide, but nothing is known for
certain. One of Byron's earliest recollections was of his mother's weeping
at the news of her husband's death, and of his own astonishment at her
tears. She had continually nagged at him, and heaped abuse on him, while
he lived; yet now her distracted shrieks filled the house and disturbed
the neighbourhood. That was the child's earliest lesson in the
unaccountable ways of women. He was only three at the time--yet old enough
to wonder, though not to understand.

His stay at Aberdeen was to last for seven more years. He was to go to
school there, and to be accounted a dunce, though not a fool. He was to
learn religion there from his nurse, who taught him the dark, alarming
Calvinistic doctrine; and he was to develop some of the traits and
characteristics which were afterwards to be pronounced. On the whole,
indeed, in spite of alleviations, he had a gloomy childhood, by a sense,
however imperfectly comprehended, of the contrast between life as it was
and life as it ought to have been.

He had been born proud, inheriting quite as much pride from his mother's
as from his father's family. He soon came to know that there were such
things as old families, and that the Byron family was one of the oldest of
them. It was borne in upon him by what he saw and heard that the proper
place for a baron was a baronial hall; and he could see that the apartment
in which he was growing up was neither a hall nor baronial. The first
apartment occupied by his mother was, in fact, as has already been said, a
lodging, and the second was an "upper part," the furniture of which, when
it ultimately came to be sold, fetched exactly £74 17s. 7d.

The boy must have felt--we may depend upon it that his mother told
him--that there was something wrong about that; that his school companions
were make-shift associates, not really worthy of him; that he was, as it
were, a child born in exile, and unjustly kept out of his rights. The
feeling must have grown stronger--we may be quite sure that his mother
stimulated it--when the unexpected death of his cousin made him the direct
heir to the title and estates; and, indeed, it was a feeling to some
extent justified by the facts. His great-uncle, the wicked Lord Byron,
ought then, as everybody said, to have shown signs of recognition, and to
have offered an allowance.

He made no sign, however, and he offered no allowance. Instead of doing
so, he went on felling timber, and effected the illegal sale of the
Rochdale property already referred too; and for four more years--from the
age of six, roughly speaking, to the age of ten--the heir apparent to the
barony was living poorly in an Aberdeen "upper part," while the actual
baron was living in luxury and state at Newstead. There were good grounds
for bitterness and resentment there; and Mrs. Byron, with her unruly
tongue, was the woman to make the most of them. Family pride grew apace
under her influence; and there was no other influence to check or
counteract it. The boy learnt to be as proud of his birth as a _parvenu_
would like to be--a characteristic of which we shall presently note some
examples.

If he was proud, however, he was also sensitive: and it may well have been
that his pride was, to some extent, a shield of protection which his
sensitiveness threw up. He was sensitive, not only because he was poor
when he ought to be rich and insignificant when he ought to be important,
but also because he was lame. An injury done at birth to his Achilles
tendons prevented him from planting his heels firmly on the ground. He had
to trot on the ball of his foot instead of walking; he could not even trot
for more than a mile or so at a time. A physical defect of that sort is
always a haunting grief to a child--especially so, perhaps, to a child
with a dawning consciousness of great mental gifts. It appears to such a
child as an irreparable wrong done--a wrong which can never be either
righted or avenged--an irremovable mark of inferiority, inviting taunts
and gibes.

Byron was sensitive on the subject, fearing that it made him ridiculous,
throughout his life, alike when he was the darling and when he was the
outcast of society; and various stories show how the deformity embittered
his childhood.

"What a pretty boy Byron is! What a pity he has such a leg!" he, one day,
heard a lady say to his nurse.

"Dinna speak of it," he screamed, stamping his foot, and slashing at her
with his toy whip.

And then there is the story of his mother who, in one of her fits of
passion, called him "a lame brat."

He drew himself up, and, with a restraint and a concentrated scorn beyond
his years, replied in the word which he afterwards put into "The
Hunchback":

"I was born so, mother."

That was one of the passionate scenes that passed between them--but only
one among many; and it was only in the case of this one affront which cut
him to the quick, that the child displayed such precocious self-control.
More often he answered rage with rage and violence with violence. In one
fit of fury he tore his new frock to shreds; in another he tried to stab
himself, at table, with a dinner knife. Exactly why he did it, or what he
resented, he probably did not know either at the time, or afterwards; but
he vaguely felt, no doubt, that something was wrong with the world, and
instinct impelled him to kick against the pricks and damn the whole nature
of things.

Then, in 1798, came the sudden change of fortune. The wicked Lord Byron
was dead at last; and the child of ten was a peer of the realm and the
heir to great, though heavily mortgaged estates. He could not take
possession of them yet--the embarrassed property needed to be delicately
nursed--but still, subject to the charges, they were his. He was taken to
look at them, and then, a tenant having been found for Newstead, Mrs.
Byron settled, first at Nottingham, and then in London, and her son was
sent to school--first to a preparatory school at Dulwich, and then to
Harrow.

Even so, however, there remained something strange, abnormal, and
uncomfortable about his position. On the one hand, Mrs. Byron, not
understanding, or trying to understand, him, nagged and scolded until he
lost almost all his natural affection for her. On the other hand, his
father's relatives, whether because they felt that "Mad Jack" had
disgraced the family, or because they objected to Mrs. Byron--who, in
truth, in spite of her good birth, was extremely provincial in her style,
and of loquacious, mischief-making propensities--were very far from
cordial. They had not even troubled to communicate with her when the death
of her son's cousin made him the direct heir, but had left her to learn
the news accidentally from strangers. Lord Carlisle, the son of his
grandfather's sister, Isabella Byron, consented to act as his guardian,
but abstained from making friendly overtures.

The fault in that case, however, was almost entirely Mrs. Byron's. There
was some dispute between her and Dr. Glennie, her son's Dulwich
headmaster--a dispute which culminated in a fit of hysterics in Dr.
Glennie's study. Lord Carlisle was appealed to, and the result of his
attempt at mediation was that Mrs. Byron practically ordered him out of
the house. Byron, of course, could not help that; but, equally of course,
he suffered from it. He was neglected, and he was sensible of the neglect.
He had come into a world in which he had every right to move, only to be
made to feel that he was not wanted there. Born in exile, and having
returned from exile, he was cold-shouldered by kinsmen who seemed to think
that he would have done better to remain in exile.

Very likely he was, at that age, somewhat of a lout, shy, ill at ease, and
unprepossessing. Genius does not necessarily reflect itself in polished
behaviour. Aberdeen is not as good a school of manners as Eton, and Mrs.
Byron was but an indifferent teacher of deportment. But his pride, it
seems clear, was not the less but the greater because of his inability to
express it in strict accordance with the rules of the best society. He was
a Byron--a peer of the realm--the senior representative of an ancient
house. He knew that respect, and even homage, were due to him; and he felt
that he must assert himself--if not in one way, then in another. So, when
the Earl of Portsmouth--a peer of comparatively recent creation--presumed
to give his ear a friendly pinch, he asserted himself by picking up a
sea-shell and throwing it at the Earl of Portsmouth's head. That would
teach the Earl, he said, not to take liberties with other members of the
aristocracy.

At this date, too, when writing to his mother, he addressed her as "the
Honorable Mrs. Byron," a designation to which, of course, she had no
shadow of a right; and he earned the nickname of "the old English Baron"
by his habit of boasting to his schoolfellows of the amazing antiquity of
his lineage. Lord Carlisle may well have thought that it was high time for
his ward to go to Harrow to be licked or kicked into shape. He went there
in 1803, at the age of thirteen and a half.

Dr. Drury, of Harrow, was the first man who saw in Byron the promise of
future distinction. "He has talents, my lord," he soon assured his
guardian, "which will add lustre to his rank." Whereat Lord Carlisle
merely shrugged his shoulders and said, "Indeed!"--whether because his
ward's talents were a matter of indifference to him, or because he
considered that rank could dispense with the lustre which talents bestow.

According to his own recollections, Byron was quick but indolent. He could
run level in the class-room with Sir Robert Peel, who afterwards took a
sensational double-first at Oxford, when he chose; but, as a rule, he did
not choose. He absorbed a good deal of scholarship, without ever becoming
a good scholar in the technical sense, and his declamations on the
speech-days were much applauded. There are records to the effect that he
was bullied. A specially offensive insult directed at him in later life
drew from him the retort that he had not passed through a public school
without learning that he was deformed; and Leigh Hunt has related that
sometimes "he would wake and find his leg in a tub of water." But he was
not an easy boy to bully, for he was ready to fight on small provocation;
and he won all his fights except one. He did credit to his religious
training by punching Lord Calthorpe's head for calling him an atheist,
though it is possible that his objections to the obnoxious epithet were as
much social as theological, for an atheist, among schoolboys is, by
implication, an "outsider."

"I was a most unpopular boy," he told Moore, "but _led_ latterly." The
latter statement has been generally accepted by his biographers; but not
all the stories told in support of it stand the test of inquiry. There is
the story, for instance, accepted even by Cordy Jeaffreson, that he led
the revolt against Butler's appointment to the headmastership, but
prevented his followers from burning down one of the class-rooms by
reminding them that the names of their ancestors were carved upon the
desks. "I can certify," wrote the late Dean Merivale of Ely, "that just
such a story was told in my early days of Sir John Richardson;" so that
Byron seems here to have got the credit for another hero's exploits.

There are the stories, too, of his connection with the first Eton and
Harrow cricket match. Cordy Jeaffreson goes so far as to express doubt
whether he took part in the match at all; but that is exaggerated
scepticism, which research would have confuted. The score is printed in
Lillywhite's "Cricket Scores and Biographies of celebrated Cricketers;"
and it appears therefrom that Byron scored seven runs in the first innings
and two in the second, and also bowled one wicket; but even on that
subject the Dean of Ely, who went to Harrow in 1818, has something to say.

    "It is clear," the Dean writes, "that he was never a leader.... On the
    contrary, awkward, sentimental, and addicted to dreaming and
    tombstones, he seems to have been held in little estimation among our
    spirited athletes. The remark was once made to me by Mr. John Arthur
    Lloyd (of Salop), a well-known Harrovian, who had been captain of the
    school in the year of the first match with Eton (1805): 'Yes,' he
    said, 'Byron played in the match, and very badly too. He should never
    have been in the eleven if my counsel had been taken.'"

And the Dean goes on, picturing Byron's awkwardness:

    "Mrs. Drury was once heard to say of him: 'There goes Byron' (Birron
    she called him) 'straggling up the hill, like a ship in a storm
    without rudder or compass.'"

Byron's influence at Harrow, in short, was exercised over his juniors
rather than his contemporaries. It pleased him, when he was big enough, to
protect small boys from school tyrants. One catches his feudal spirit
again in his appeal to a bully not to lick Lord Delawarr "because he is a
fellow peer"; but he was also ready to intervene in other cases in which
that plea could not be urged; and he had the reward that might be
expected. He once offered to take a licking for one of the Peels; and he
became a hero with hero-worshippers--titled hero-worshippers for the most
part--sitting at his feet. Lord Delawarr, Lord Clare, the Duke of Dorset,
the Honorable John Wingfield, were the most conspicuous among them. It was
from their adulation that he got his first taste of the incense which was,
in later years, to be burnt to him so lavishly.

He described his school friendships, when he looked back on them, as
"passions"; and there is no denying that the language of the letters which
he wrote to his friends was inordinately passionate for a schoolboy
addressing schoolfellows. "Dearest" is a more frequent introduction to
them than "dear," and the word "sweet" also occurs. It is not the happiest
of signs to find a schoolboy writing such letters; and it is not
altogether impossible that unfounded apprehensions caused by them account
for the suggestion made by Drury--though the fact is not mentioned in the
biographies--that Byron should be quietly removed from the school on the
ground that his conduct was causing "much trouble and uneasiness."

That, however, is uncertain, and one must not insist. All that the
so-called "passions"--occasionally detrimental though they may have been
to school discipline--demonstrate is Byron's enjoyment of flattery, and
his proneness to sentiment and gush. He liked, as he grew older, to accept
flattery, while professing to be superior to it; to enjoy sentiment, and
then to laugh at it; to gush with the most gushing, and then suddenly to
turn round and "say 'damn' instead." But the cynicism which was afterwards
to alternate with the sentimentalism had not developed yet. He did not yet
say "damn"--at all events in that connection.

One must think of him as a boy with a great capacity for passionate
affection, and a precocious tendency to gush, deprived of the most natural
outlets for his emotions. He could not love his mother because she was a
virago; he hardly ever saw his sister; his guardian kept him coldly at a
distance. Consequently his feelings, dammed in one direction, broke out
with almost ludicrous intensity in another; and his friendships were
sentimental to a degree unusual, though not, of course, unknown or
unprecedented, among schoolboys. He wrote sentimental verses to his
friends.

But not to them alone. "Hours of Idleness," first published when he was a
Cambridge undergraduate, is the idealised record of his school
friendships; but it is also the idealised record of other, and very
different, excursions into sentiment. It introduces us to Mary Duff, to
Margaret Parker, to Mary Chaworth,--and also to some other Maries of less
importance; and we will turn back and glance, in quick succession at their
stories before following Byron to Cambridge.




CHAPTER III

A SCHOOLBOY'S LOVE AFFAIRS--MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER, AND MARY CHAWORTH


First on the list of early loves comes little Mary Duff of Aberdeen. She
was one of Byron's Scotch cousins, though a very distant one; and there is
hardly anything else to be said, except that he was a child and she was a
child in their kingdom by the sea. Only no wind blew out of a cloud
chilling her. Her mother made a second marriage--described by Byron as a
"faux pas" because it was socially disadvantageous--and left the city; and
the two children never met again.

It was of no importance, of course. They were only a little more than
seven when they were separated. But Byron was proud of his precocity, and
liked to recall it, and to wonder if any other lover had ever been equally
precocious. "I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff," he
wrote in a fragment of a diary at the age of twenty-five; and he reminded
himself how he used to lie awake, picturing her, and how he urged his
nurse to write her a love letter on his behalf, and how they sat
together--"gravely making love in our way"--while Mary expressed pity for
her younger sister Helen, for not having an admirer too. Above all, he
reminded himself of the shock which he felt, years afterwards, when the
sudden communication of a piece of news revived the recollection of the
idyll.

    "My mother," he proceeded, "used always to rally me about this
    childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen,
    she told me, one day, 'Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh,
    from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to
    a Mr. C----.' And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or
    account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into
    convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much that, after I grew better,
    she generally avoided the subject--to _me_--and contented herself with
    telling it to all her acquaintance."

And then again:

    "My misery, my love for that girl were so violent that I sometimes
    doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that as it may,
    hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder
    stroke--it nearly choked me--to the horror of my mother and the
    astonishment and almost incredulity of nearly everybody."

It is a well-known story, and one can add nothing to it beyond the fact
that Mary Duff's husband was Mr. Cockburn, the wine merchant, and that she
lived quite happily with him, and that we are entitled to think of her
whenever we drink a glass of Cockburn's port. But we may also doubt,
perhaps, whether Byron is, in this case, quite a faithful reporter of his
own emotions, and whether his grief was not artistically blended with
other and later regrets, and other and later perceptions of the fickleness
of the female heart and the mutability of human things. For when we come
to look at the dates, we find that the date of Mary Duff's marriage was
also the date of Byron's desperate passion for Mary Chaworth.

Between Mary Duff and Mary Chaworth, however, Margaret Parker had
intervened. She was another cousin, descended from Admiral Byron's
daughter Augusta. The first letter that Byron ever wrote was addressed to
her mother. "Dear Madam," it began, "My Mamma being unable to write
herself desires I will let you know that the potatoes are now ready and
you are welcome to them whenever you please." For the rest, one can only
quote Byron's brief reminiscence:

    "My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition
    of a passion for my first cousin Margaret Parker, one of the most
    beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but
    it would be difficult for me to forget her--her dark eyes--her long
    eyelashes--her completely Greek cast of face and figure! I was then
    about twelve--she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year
    or two afterwards in consequence of a fall which injured her spine
    and induced consumption.... My sister told me that, when she went to
    see her, shortly before her death, upon accidentally mentioning my
    name, Margaret coloured through the paleness of mortality to the
    eyes.... I knew nothing of her illness, being at Harrow and in the
    country, till she was gone. Some years after I made an attempt at an
    elegy--a very dull one."

And then Byron speaks of his cousin's "transparent" beauty--"she looked as
if she had been made out of a rainbow"--and concludes:

    "My passion had its usual effect upon me--I could not eat--I could not
    sleep--I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she
    loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time that must
    elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of
    separation! But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now."

The elegy is included in the collected works. Special indulgence is asked
for it on the ground that it was "composed at the age of fourteen." It is
very youthful in tone--quite on the conventional lines--as one would
expect. A single quatrain may be given--not to be criticised, but merely
to show that Byron, as a boy, was still looking at life pretty much as his
pastors and masters told him to look at it:

  "_And shall presumptuous mortals Heaven arraign!
    And, madly, Godlike Providence accuse!
  Ah! no, far fly from me attempts so vain;--
    I'll ne'er submission to my God refuse._"

We are still a long way here from the intense, the cynical, the defiant,
or even the posturing Byron of later years. The gift of personal
expression has not yet come to him; and he is still in literary fetters,
weeping, on paper, according to the rules. Intensity and the personal note
only begin with his sudden love for Mary Chaworth; cynicism and defiance
only begin after that love affair has ended in failure.

Mary Chaworth was the heir of the Annesley property, adjoining Newstead,
and she was the grand-niece of the Chaworth whom the wicked Lord Byron ran
through the body in the upper chamber of the Pall Mall tavern; so that
their marriage, if they could have been married, would, as Byron says,
"have healed feuds in which blood had been shed by our fathers." But Byron
was not yet the Byron who had only to come, and to be seen, in order to
conquer. He was a schoolboy of fifteen, which is an awkward age. He had
achieved no triumphs in any field which could give him self-assurance. He
was not yet a leader, even among his schoolfellows; and he was not only
lame, but also fat. How shall a fat boy hope, whatever fires of genius
burn within him, to enter the lists against his elders and bear away the
belle from county balls? Byron, at any rate, failed signally in the
attempt to do so.

Newstead having been let to Lord Grey de Ruthen, Mrs. Byron was, at the
time, lodging at Nottingham; and Byron had various reasons for preferring
to see as little of her as possible. She was never sympathetic; she was
often quarrelsome; it was her pleasant habit, when annoyed, to rattle the
fire-irons and throw the tongs at him. So he often availed himself of his
tenant's invitation to visit Newstead, whenever he liked; and from
Newstead it was the most natural thing in the world that he should go over
to Annesley, where Miss Chaworth, with whom he already had a slight
acquaintance, was living with her mother, Mrs. Clarke.

He was always welcome there. There was as little desire on his cousin's
side as on his to revive the recollection of the feud. When he came to
call, he was pressed to stay and sleep. At first he refused, most probably
from shyness, though he professed a superstitious fear of the family
portraits. They had "taken a grudge to him," he said, on account of the
duel; they would "come down from their frames at night to haunt him." But
presently his fears, or his shyness, were conquered. He had seen a ghost,
he said, in the park; and if he must see ghosts he might just as well see
them in the house; so, if it was all the same to his hosts, he would like
to stay.

He stayed, and was entranced with Mary Chaworth's singing. He rode with
her, and practiced pistol shooting on the terrace--more than a little
pleased, one conjectures, to show off his marksmanship. He went with
her--and with others, including a chaperon--on an excursion to Matlock and
Castleton. A note, written long afterwards, preserves a memory of the
trip:

    "It happened that, in a cavern in Derbyshire, I had to cross in a boat
    (in which two people only could lie down) a stream which flows under a
    rock, with the rock so close upon the water as to admit the boat only
    to be pushed on by a ferryman (a sort of Charon) who wades at the
    stern, stooping all the time. The companion of my transit was M.A.C.,
    with whom I had long been in love, and never _told_ it, though _she_
    had discovered it without. I recollect my sensations, but cannot
    describe them, and it is as well."

And no doubt Mary Chaworth encouraged the boy, amused at his raptures,
enjoying the visible proof of her power, prepared to snub him, in the end,
if necessary, but scarcely expecting that there would be any need for her
to do so. She was seventeen, and a girl of seventeen always feels capable
of reminding a boy of fifteen that the prayer book forbids him to marry
his grandmother. Moreover, she was engaged, though the engagement had not
yet been announced, to Mr. John Musters--a grown man and a Philistine--a
handsome, rather dissipated, hard-riding and hard-drinking country squire.
The dreamy, limping, fat boy from Harrow had no shadow of a chance against
his athletic rival. It was impossible for Mary Chaworth to divine the
genius that lurked beneath the fat. One has no right to expect such powers
of divination from girls of seventeen.

No doubt she thought the fat boy, as she would have said, "good fun." No
doubt she was amused when, as a demonstration that he was not too young to
be loved, he showed her the locket which Margaret Parker had given him,
three years before, when he was twelve. Unquestionably she flirted with
him--or, at least, let him flirt with her. She even gave him a ring, and
the gift must have raised high hopes, though it was the cause of the
discovery which brought the flirtation to an end.

Squire Musters discovered the ring among Byron's clothes one day when he
and the boy were bathing together in the Trent. He recognised it, picked
it up, and put it in his pocket. Byron claimed it, and Musters declined to
give it up; and then, to quote the Countess Guiccioli, who is the
authority for the story:

    "High words were exchanged. On returning to the house, Musters jumped
    on a horse and galloped off to ask an explanation from Miss Chaworth,
    who, being forced to confess that Lord Byron wore the ring with her
    consent, felt obliged to make amends to Musters by promising to
    declare immediately her engagement with him."

Such is the story, as one gets it, through the Countess and through Moore,
from Byron himself; but we also get a side glimpse at it in a letter,
recently published,[2] from Mrs. Byron to Hanson, the family solicitor.
From this we gather that Byron, in order to make love, had absented
himself from school; that Drury had inquired the reason of his absence;
and that his mother was making strenuous, but unavailing, efforts to
induce him to return. Nothing was the matter with him but love--"desperate
love, the _worst_ of all _maladies_ in my opinion." He had hardly been to
see his mother at all, but had been spending all his time at Annesley. "It
is the last of all connexions," she added, "that I should wish to take
place"; and she begged Mr. Hanson to make arrangements for her son to
spend his next holidays elsewhere. Expense was no object; and it would
suit her very well if Dr. Drury could be induced to detain him at Harrow.

And Byron himself, meanwhile, was writing to his mother, alternately using
lofty language about his right to choose his own friends, and pleading for
one more day in order that he might take leave.

He took it; but there is more than one version of the story.

"Do you think," he overheard Mary Chaworth say to her maid, "that I could
care anything for that lame boy?" And, having heard that, "he instantly
darted out of the house, and, scarcely knowing whither he ran, never
stopped till he found himself at Newstead." That is what Moore tells us;
but the picture drawn in "The Dream,"--the most obviously and
deliberately autobiographical of Byron's poems--is different.

"She loved," he writes:

  "_Another: even now she loved another,
  And on the summit of that hill she stood
  Looking afar as if her lover's steed
  Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew._"

She was waiting, that is to say, for Squire Musters to ride up the lane,
while listening to Byron's declaration. That is the first picture; and
then there follows the picture of the boy who "within an antique oratory
stood," and to whom, presently, "the lady of his love re-entered":

  "_She was serene and smiling then, and yet
  She knew she was by him beloved--she knew,
  For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart
  Was darkened with her shadow, and she saw
  That he was wretched, but she saw not all.
  He rose, and with a cold and gentle grasp
  He took her hand; a moment o'er his face
  A tablet of unutterable thoughts
  Was traced, and then it faded, as it came;
  He dropped the hand he held, and with slow steps
  Retired, but not as bidding her adieu,
  For they did part with mutual smiles; he passed
  From out the massy gate of that old Hall,
  And mounting on his steed he went his way;
  And ne'er repassed that hoary threshold more._"

There we have the Mary Chaworth legend as it has been handed down from one
generation of biographers to another. Byron, according to that legend, saw
Mary once after her marriage, but once only. He was on the point of
visiting her at a later date, but was dissuaded by his sister. "If you
go," Augusta said, "you will fall in love again, and then there will be a
scene; one step will lead to another, _et cela fera un éclat_." He agreed
that the reasoning was sound, and did as he was advised. He tells that
story himself, and adds: "Shortly after, I married."

And yet--the legend continues--this hopeless love, which touched his heart
at the age of fifteen, was the dominating influence of his life. Mary
Chaworth, though always absent, was yet always present. He never loved any
other woman, though he tried to love, and indeed seemed to love, several.
The vision of her face always came between him and them. His later love
affairs were only concessions, or attempts to escape from himself and his
memories--unavailing attempts, for this memory continued to haunt him
until the end.

It sounds incredible. The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts;
but the memories of youth are short, and the dreams of youth are dreams
from which we never fail to wake. And yet Byron insists, quite as much as
biographers have insisted. He insists in "The Dream," which was written
more than a decade after the parting. He insists in later poems, the inner
meaning of which is hardly to be questioned. So that speculation is
challenged, and, when pursued, leads us inevitably to a dilemma.

For of two things, one: Either Byron was posing--posing not only to the
world but to himself; or else the story, as all the biographers from Moore
to Cordy Jeaffreson have told it, is incomplete, and after an interlude,
had a sequel.

To search for such a sequel will be our task presently. Unless we can find
one, the development of the personal note in Byron's work will have to be
left unexplained. The impression which we get, if we read the more
personal poems in quick succession, is of a man who first awakes from the
dream of love--and remains very wide awake for a season--and then relapses
and dreams it all over again. Unless the story which first set him
dreaming had had a sequel, that would hardly be. So we will seek for the
sequel in due course, though we must first gather up the incidents of the
interlude.




CHAPTER IV

LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE AND FLIRTATIONS AT SOUTHWELL


Baffled in love, Byron returned to Harrow, after a term's absence, in
January 1804, and remained there for another eighteen months. This
eighteen months is the period during which he describes himself as having
been happy at school. It is also the period during which he haunted the
Harrow churchyard, indulging his day dreams as he looked down from the
hillside on the wide, green valley of the Thames. Those dreams, it is
hardly to be doubted, were chiefly of Mary Chaworth; and we may picture
the poet's secret sorrow as giving him, fat though he was, a sense of
superiority over other boys who had no secret sorrows. Apparently, too,
casting about for an explanation of his failure, he realised that, in the
rivalries of love, the victory is far less likely to rest with the fat
than with the lame; and so, presently,--though not until after an interval
of reflection--he set himself the task of compelling his too solid flesh
to melt.

He has been laughed at, and charged with vanity for doing so; but he was
right. He would also have been ridiculed, and with more justice, if he had
resigned himself to be overwhelmed by the rising tide of superabundant
tissue. Fatness is not merely a grotesque condition. It is a condition
incompatible with fitness; and it is far nobler to resist it with
systematic heroism than to cultivate it and call heaven and earth to
witness that one is the fattest person going; and the fact that Byron, by
dint of exercises which made him perspire, a careful diet, and a
persistent use of Epsom salts, reduced his weight from fourteen stone six
to twelve stone seven, is no small achievement to be passed over lightly.
It is, on the contrary, one of the most memorable incidents in his
development--the greatest of all the feats performed by him at Trinity
College, Cambridge,[3] where he began to reside in October 1805.

He did not read for honours. At Oxford he might have done so, and might
have figured in the same class list as his Harrow friend, Sir Robert Peel,
who took a double-first, and Archbishop Whately, who took a double-second.
At Cambridge, however, the pernicious rule prevailed that honours were
only for mathematicians. The Classical Tripos was not originated until a
good many years afterwards, and Byron had neither talent nor taste for
figures. The most notable, though not the highest, wranglers of his year
were Adam Sedgwick, the geologist, and Blomfield, Bishop of London. Byron
would have had to work very hard to make any show against them. He did
not enter the competition, but let his mind exercise itself on more
congenial themes, cherishing the belief--so erroneous and yet so
common--that Senior Wranglers never come to any good in after life.

His allowance was £500 a year; and he kept a servant and a horse. His
general proceedings, except when he was writing verses were pretty similar
to those of the average young nobleman who attends a University, not to
instruct but to amuse himself. He rode, and fenced, and boxed, and swam,
and dived; he gambled and backed horses; he was alternately guest and host
at rather uproarious wine-parties, and was spoken of as a young man "of
very tumultuous passions." The statement has been made--he has made it
himself and his biographers have repeated it--that he lived quietly at
first, and only latterly got into a dissipated set; but as we find him, in
his second term, entreating his sister to back a bill for £800, the
statement probably needs to be modified in order to square with the facts.

Apparently Augusta did not comply with his request; but the proofs that he
lived beyond his means are ample. Mrs. Byron was as loud in her wail on
the subject as the widows of Asher. She complains--this also in the second
term--of bills "coming in thick upon me to double the amount I expected";
and she protests, in Byron's first Easter vacation, against his wanton
extravagance in subscribing thirty guineas to Pitt's statue; while, in the
course of the next Easter vacation we find her consulting the family
solicitor as to the propriety of borrowing £1000 to get her son out of the
hands of the Jews, and declaring that, during the whole of his Cambridge
career he has done "nothing but drink, gamble, and spend money."

Very similar is the testimony of his own and his sister's letters. "I was
much surprised," Augusta writes, in the second term, to the solicitor, "to
see my brother a week ago at the Play, as I think he ought to be employing
his time more profitably at Cambridge." Byron himself, writing to his
intimates, confesses to several departures from sobriety. The first was in
celebration of the Eton and Harrow match, which was followed by a
convivial scene, foreshadowing those at the Empire on boat-race night, at
some place of public entertainment. "How I got home after the play," Byron
says, "God knows. I hardly recollect, as my brain was so much confused by
the heat, the row, and the wine I drank, that I could not remember in the
morning how I found my way to bed." Later, in a letter to Miss Elizabeth
Bridget Pigot of Southwell, he speaks of his life as "one continual
routine of dissipation," talks of "a bottle of claret in my head," and
concludes with the specific admission: "Sorry to say been drunk every day,
and not quite sober yet."

Possibly he exaggerates a little; but those who know the Universities best
will be least likely to suspect him of exaggerating very much. There is
always a set which lives in that style at any college frequented by young
men of ample means. Their ways, _mutatis mutandis_, are faithfully
described in the pages of "Verdant Green." Byron's career, once more
_mutatis mutandis_, was not unlike the career of Charles Larkyns and
Little Mr. Bouncer in Cuthbert Bede's picture of life at the sister
University. He had, at any rate, one foot in such a set as that, though he
was in a better set as well, and formed serious friendships with such men
as Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, Charles Skinner Matthews,
afterwards Fellow of Downing, Scrope Davies, afterwards Fellow of King's,
and Francis Hodgson, ultimately Provost of Eton. It is not quite clear
whether he was, or was not, one of the rowdy spirits who "ragged" Lort
Mansell, the Master of Trinity.[4] He certainly annoyed the dons by
keeping a bear as a pet, and asserting that he intended the animal to "sit
for a fellowship." But the most characteristic picture, after all, is that
which he draws (selecting his solicitor, of all persons in the world, for
his confidant) of his mode of reducing his flesh.

    "I wear _seven_ waistcoats, and a great Coat, run and play cricket in
    this Dress, till quite exhausted by excessive perspiration, use the
    bath daily, eat only a quarter of a pound of Butcher's Meat in 24
    hours.... By these means my ribs display Skin of no great Thickness,
    and my clothes have been taken in nearly _half a yard_."

That is the closing passage of a letter which begins with the confession
that "_Wine_ and _women_ have _dished_ your _humble servant_." The two
statements, taken in conjunction, furnish two-thirds of the picture. The
remaining third of it may be deduced and constructed from the verses which
Byron had then written or was then writing.

It might be tempting to see in the period of dissipation a disappointed
lover's desperate attempt to escape from an ineffaceable recollection; and
the view might be supported by Byron's own subsequent declaration that "a
violent, though _pure_, love and passion," was "the then romance of the
most romantic period of my life." Undergraduate excesses, however, rarely
require such recondite explanations; and Byron's reminiscences had, as we
shall see, been coloured by intervening events. All the contemporary
evidence that one can gather goes to show that they were inexact; that,
though he had been hard hit by Mary Chaworth's disdainful reception of his
suit, he did not mope, but, holding up his head, was in a fair way to live
his trouble down; and that his theory of himself, put forward in the
well-known lines in "Childe Harold":

  "_And I must from this land begone
  Because I cannot love but one_"

is an after thought entirely inconsistent with his practices as a
Cambridge undergraduate.

One would be constrained to suspect that, even if the early poems
addressed to Mary Chaworth stood alone. There are not many of them, and
they lack the intensity of passion--the impression of all possible hopes
irremediably blighted--which "The Dream" reveals. They strike one as a
little stiff and artificial, as though the poet had tried to express, not
so much what he actually felt, as what he considered that a man in his
position ought to feel. That is particularly the case with the poems of
the first period. There are boasts in them which we know to have been
quite unwarranted by the circumstances of the case. The poet pictures
himself as one who might disturb domestic peace if he chose, but refrains,
being merciful as he is strong:

  "_Perhaps his peace I could destroy,
    And spoil the blisses that await him;
  Yet let my rival smile in joy,
    For thy dear sake, I cannot hate him._"

The boasts there, we see, are the prelude of resignation; and, a line or
two further on, resignation is followed by the resolution to forget:

  "_Then, fare thee well, deceitful Maid,
    'Twere vain and fruitless to regret thee;
  Nor Hope nor Memory yield their aid,
    But Pride may teach me to forget thee._"

That is very conventional--hardly less conventional than the Elegy on
Margaret Parker--a sentimental "prelude to life," one would judge, of
quite an ordinary kind. And, as has been said, the sentimental utterance
does not stand alone. Other verses, hardly less sentimental, addressed to
several other ladies, were, at the same time, pouring from Byron's pen.

Burgage Manor, a house which his mother had taken at Southwell, near
Nottingham, was his vacation home. He fled from his home, from time to
time, because of Mrs. Byron's incurable habit of rattling the fire-irons
in order to draw attention to his faults; but he returned at intervals,
and stayed long enough to form a considerable circle of friends--friends,
be it noted, who belonged not to "the county" but to the professional
society of the town.

The county did not "call" to any appreciable extent. A few of the men
called on Byron himself; but none of the women called on Mrs.
Byron--whether because her reputation for rattling the fire-irons and
hurling the tongs had reached them, or because, on general principles,
they did not think her good enough to mix with them. Byron, as was
natural, resented their attitude and refused to return visits which
implied a slight upon his mother. Whatever his own disputes with her, he
would not have her snubbed by the local magnates, or himself enter their
doors on sufferance while she was excluded from them. He mixed instead
with the clergy, the doctors, the lawyers, the retired colonels, and
flirted with their sisters and daughters. In that set he moved as a triton
among the minnows, fluttering the dovecotes of Southwell pretty much as,
at a later date, Praed, fresh from Eton, fluttered the dovecotes of
Teignmouth. He could not dance, of course, owing to his lameness; but he
could distinguish himself in amateur theatricals, and he could write
verses.

His success in the Southwell drawing-rooms and boudoirs was the first
reward of his success in resisting and repelling the encroachments of the
flesh. The struggle was one which he had to renew at intervals throughout
his life; but his "crowning mercy" was the victory of this date. He
emerged from it slim, elegant, and strikingly handsome. He rejoiced, and
the girls of Southwell rejoiced with him. They understood, as well as he
did, that it is difficult for a man to be fat and sentimental at one and
the same time; that there is something ludicrously incongruous in the
picture of a fat boy writing sentimental verses and professing to pine
away for love. And they liked him to write sentimental verses to them, and
he was quite willing to do so. He was, at this time, the sort of young man
who will write verses to any girl who will give him a keepsake--the sort
of young man to whom almost every girl will give a keepsake on condition
that he will write verses to her.

He wrote lines, for instance, "to a lady who presented to the author a
lock of hair braided with his own and appointed a night in December to
meet him in the garden." Nothing is known of her except that her name was
Mary, and that she was neither Mary Duff nor Mary Chaworth, but a third
Mary "of humble station." Southwell, when it saw those verses, was
shocked. It seemed highly improper to Southwell that maidens of humble
station should be encouraged to presume by such attentions on the part of
noblemen. Probably it was on this occasion that the Reverend John Becher,
Vicar of Rumpton, Notts, expostulated with the poet for

  "_Deigning to varnish scenes that shun the day
  With guilty lustre and with amorous lay._"

But Byron kept Mary's lock of hair, and showed it, together with her
portrait, to his friends and wrote:

  "_Thro' hours, thro' years, thro' time 'twill cheer--
    My hope in gloomy moments raise;
  In life's last conflict 'twill appear,
    And meet my fond, expiring gaze._"

To Mary Chaworth herself Byron could hardly have said more, but he was, in
fact, at this time, saying the same sort of thing to all and sundry. Just
the same sentiment recurs in the lines addressed "To a lady who presented
the author with the velvet band which bound her tresses":

  "_Oh! I will wear it next my heart;
    'Twill bind my soul in bonds to thee:
  From me again 'twill ne'er depart,
    But mingle in the grave with me._"

Yet if Byron proposes to be faithful for ever to this un-named lady, he
proposes, at the same time, to be equally faithful to a lady who can be
identified as Miss Anne Houson:

  "_With beauty like yours, oh, how vain the contention!
    Thus lowly I sue for forgiveness before you;--
  At once to conclude such a fruitless dissension,
    Be false, my sweet Anne, when I cease to adore you!_"

And then there are other lines--innumerable other lines which would also
have to be quoted if the treatment of the subject were to be
encyclopædic--lines to Marion, lines to Caroline, lines to a beautiful
Quaker, lines to Miss Julia Leacroft, whose brother, the fire-eating
Captain John Leacroft remonstrated with Byron, and, according to Moore,
even went so far as to challenge him, on account of his pointed attentions
to his sister: lines, finally, to M.S.G. who would appear, if verse could
be accepted as autobiography, to have offered to yield to Byron, but to
have been spared because of his tender regard for her fair fame:

  "_I will not ease my tortured heart,
    By driving dove-ey'd peace from thine;
  Rather than such a sting impart,
    Each thought presumptuous I resign._

  "_At least from guilt shalt thou be free,
    No matron shall thy shame reprove;
  Though cureless pangs may prey on me,
    No martyr shalt thou be to love._"

With that citation we may quit the subject. Not one of the sets of
verses--with the single exception of the set addressed to Miss
Leacroft--has any discoverable story attached to it. All of them--or
nearly all of them--have the air of celebrating some profound attachment
from which no escape is to be looked for on this side of the grave.
Byron's later conception of himself as a man who had loved but one had not
crept into his poetry yet. He had not even begun to strike the pose of the
Childe impelled to "visit scorching climes beyond the sea" because the one
he loved "could ne'er be his."

The idea, indeed, of a man fleeing the country in 1809 because he had
loved in vain in 1804 would not, in any case, carry conviction. Even to a
poet the idea could hardly have presented itself without some definite
renewal of the memories. They were revived, in fact, at a dinner party, in
1808, of which we find an account in one of Byron's letters to Hodgson:

    "I was seated near a woman to whom, when a boy, I was as much attached
    as boys generally are, and more than a man should be. I knew this
    before I went, and was determined to be valiant and converse with
    _sang froid_; but instead I forgot my valour and my nonchalance, and
    never opened my lips even to laugh, far less to speak, and the lady
    was almost as absurd as myself, which made both the object of more
    observation than if we had conducted ourselves with easy indifference.
    You will think all this great nonsense; if you had seen it, you would
    have thought it still more ridiculous. What fools we are! We cry for a
    plaything which, like children, we are never satisfied with till we
    break open, though, like them, we cannot get rid of it by putting it
    on the fire."

That is the prose record of the meeting, and there is also a record in
verse. There are lines "to a lady on being asked my reason for quitting
England in the Spring"; there is the piece beginning, "Well! thou art
happy":

  "_Mary, adieu! I must away:
    While thou art blest I'll not repine;
  But near thee I can never stay;
    My heart would soon again be thine._"

And also:

  "_In flight I shall be surely wise,
    Escaping from temptation's snare;
  I cannot view my Paradise
    Without the wish of dwelling there._"

Poor stuff, as poetry, it will be agreed. Any one who wrote poetry at all
might have written it. The sentiment rendered in it is just the sentiment
which any sentimental youth would have felt to be proper to the occasion.
We can find in it, at most, only the faint fore-running shadow of the
Byronic pose. It rings very insincerely if we set it beside the lines in
which Walter Savage Landor, at about the same period, commemorated a
similar moment of emotion:

  "_Rose Aylmer, whom these waking eyes
    May weep but never see;
  A night of memories and of sighs
    I consecrate to thee._"

In that comparison, most decidedly, all the advantage is with
Landor--inevitably, because his were the feelings of a man, whereas
Byron's were the feelings of a boy. He was only twenty, and his age is the
explanation of a good deal. It explains his startled timidity, described
in the letter to Hodgson, in a novel, romantic situation. It explains his
hugging his grief as a precious possession on no account to be let go. It
also explains the zest with which, when grief had had its sacred hour, he
could turn from it and throw himself into other activities.

He rejoiced in the pose, only outlined as yet, which was presently to make
him the most interesting man (to women at all events) in Europe; but he
also rejoiced in his youth. He flirted, as we have seen; he took part in
amateur theatrical performances; he engaged energetically in most of the
sports of the day, fencing with Angelo, boxing with Gentleman Jackson,
swimming the Thames from Lambeth to the Tower; he accumulated debts with
the fine air of a man heaping Pelion on Ossa; he flung down his defiant
challenge to the literary bigwigs in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";
he drew his plans for the grand tour. The world, in short, was just then
"so full of a number of things" that Mary Chaworth's importance in it can
easily be, as it has often been, exaggerated.

Presently we shall see Byron exaggerating it; and we shall also see how he
came to do so--how the boy's occasional pose became the determining
reality of the man's life. But before we come to that, we must turn back.




CHAPTER V

REVELRY AT NEWSTEAD--"ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS"


One watches the swelling of Byron's indebtedness with morbid interest. It
is like the rapid rising of a Spring tide which threatens to submerge a
city. Already, in his second term at Cambridge, as we have seen, he
besought his sister to pledge her credit for his loans. At the beginning
of his third year, we find him making a confession to his solicitor:

    "My debts amount to three thousand, three hundred to Jews, eight
    hundred to Mrs. B. of Nottingham, to coachmaker and other tradesmen a
    thousand more, and these must be much increased before they are
    lessened."

They were increased before they were lessened--unless the explanation be
that Byron only told the truth about them in instalments. Three months
later this is his confession to the Reverend John Becher:

    "_Entre nous_, I am cursedly dipped; my debts, _everything_ inclusive,
    will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one."

But, even so, the high-water mark is not yet reached. Towards the end of
the same year, when Byron is contemplating his "grand tour," he once more
calls his solicitor into council:

    "You honour my debts; they amount to perhaps twelve thousand pounds,
    and I shall require perhaps three or four thousand at setting out,
    with credit on a Bengal agent. This you must manage for me."

A pleasant commission, which seems to have led to a reference to Mrs.
Byron, who made a luminous suggestion:

    "I wish to God he would exert himself and retrieve his affairs. He
    must marry a woman of _fortune_ this Spring; love matches is all
    nonsense. Let him make use of the Talents God has given him. He is an
    English Peer, and has all the privileges of that situation."

It was a matter-of-fact proposal, worthy of the canny Scotswoman who made
it--a proof that, even when she threw the tongs at her son, she still had
his interests at heart; but nothing came of it. Very likely Byron, at this
date knew no heiresses; and even his mother was not matter-of-fact enough
to expect him to advertise for one, even for the purpose of avoiding the
necessity of selling Newstead. There was still the resource of borrowing a
little more, and of making the loans go as far as possible by retaining
the money for personal expenses, instead of applying it to the payment of
debt; and something of that sort seems to have been done. Scrope Davies
lent Byron £4800; and yet Mrs. Byron had occasion to write:

    "There is some Trades People at Nottingham that will be completely
    ruined if he does not pay them, which I would not have happen for a
    whole world."

Moreover, though Byron himself talked vaguely to Hanson of the possibility
of his marriage with "a golden Dolly," he was at an age at which a young
man does not readily marry any woman with whom he is not in love. Whether
he was or was not, at that time, in love with Mrs. Chaworth,[5] he
certainly was not in love with any one else; and he was enjoying himself
and "having his fling," after the manner of gilded youth. His "domestic
female companion," to use Gibbon's charming phrase, was a professional
daughter of joy who travelled about with him in male attire. He even
brought her to Newstead, when he took possession of the Abbey on the
expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthen's tenancy. That may have been one
reason--though it need not necessarily have been the only one--for his
refusal to let his mother join him there. It would certainly have been a
valid reason for postponing matrimony.

Around those Newstead revels a good deal of fantastic legend circles; and
the facts concerning them are hardly to be disentangled from the myths.
"Childe Harold" starts with them:--

    _Ah! me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,
      Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;
    Few earthly things found favour in his sight
      Save concubines and carnal companie,
  And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree._

"Childe Harold," however, in spite of the fact that it was first called
"Childe Buron," is a poem, not a deposition. The picture, with its
"Paphian girls" and the rest of it--

    _Where superstition once had made her den,
    Now Paphian girls were wont to sing and smile,
    And monks might deem their time was come agen,
  If ancient tales say true, nor wrong these holy men_,

is not necessarily faithful because the note of contrast which it sounds
is of the essence of the poem. But, on the other hand, the excuses and
explanations by means of which Moore and Cordy Jeaffreson attempt to
palliate and minimise the supposed assertions of the poem are somewhat
less than convincing.

The revels, say these apologists, cannot have been so very dreadful
because the Newstead guests sometimes included some of the local clergy,
and because some of the young men who engaged in them afterwards took
orders. The obvious answer to that is that the revellers may very well
have moderated their revelry on the occasions on which clergymen were
present--and that those of them who afterwards became pillars of the
Church may not, at that date, have got the old Adam into complete
subjection. Nor is a great deal gained by the contention that the part of
the supposed "Paphian girls" was, in fact, sustained by Byron's "domestic
female companion," and by the Newstead cook and the Newstead housemaid. To
say this is merely to protest that the alleged Paphians did not really
come from Paphos, but from some other island in the same neighbourhood.

A letter written by Charles Skinner Matthews to his sister is the only
contemporary chronicle of the proceedings. There is a confirmation of his
account, together with some supplementary details, in a letter written,
long afterwards, by Byron to John Murray. Remembering the ages and
circumstances of the revellers--and remembering also that Moore's
information was derived from some of them--we will try to get as near to
the truth as the procurable evidence allows.

Byron, one must always bear in mind, had not yet conquered his place in
county society, or in what is now called "smart" society. His mother's
eccentricities and his guardian's chilly attitude had, as we have seen,
kept him out of it. He actually knew no peer who could or would introduce
him when he took his seat in the House of Lords. The people whom he knew
at home were chiefly provincial people of the professional classes. At
Cambridge he had got into a fast, though not an unintellectual, set. He
was very young, and he had plenty of credit, if not much ready money; and
here was the "venerable pile" of Newstead--not the less venerable because
it was dilapidated--at his disposal as a playground, and a place in which
to dispense hospitality.

Naturally he wanted to show Newstead to his friends, whom he had never
been able to entertain at home before. Naturally, having credit, he used
it to fit up and furnish as much of Newstead as was necessary for their
comfortable accommodation, not troubling to foresee the day--though he
would not have had to look very far ahead in order to foresee it--when the
bailiffs would be put in to seize the goods in default of payment.
Naturally, as Mrs. Byron was so addicted to rattling the tongs and
throwing the fire-irons at him, he did not want her there. Naturally, his
college friends having fast tastes and habits, and no ladies of their own
station being of the party, the method of their life did not follow the
conventional round of the ordinary house-party. The pet bear, and the pet
wolf, which guarded the entrances, were only symbols of the unusual and
extravagant state of things within.

Breakfast, in theory, could be served at any hour. The hour actually
preferred by the majority of the party was one P.M. Matthews, who
generally came down between eleven and twelve, "was esteemed a prodigy of
early rising." Any one, he says, who had wanted to breakfast as early as
ten "would have been rather lucky to find any of the servants up." Not
until two P.M., as a rule, was the breakfast cleared away. The amusements
of the afternoon--which Matthews euphemistically calls the morning--were
"reading, fencing, single-stick, or shuttle-cock, in the great room,
practising with pistols in the hall, walking, riding, cricket, sailing on
the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf." Dinner was between
seven and eight, and then--another euphemism most proper in a letter to a
sister--"the evening diversions may be easily conceived."

Those evening diversions consisted, in the first instance of dressing up
and drinking. The beverages, according to Byron himself, were "burgundy,
claret, champagne, and what not," quaffed not only out of ordinary
glasses, but also out of a loving-cup fashioned from a skull which had
been dug up in the Newstead grounds. As for the dressing-up; "A set of
monkish dresses," says Matthews, "which had been provided, with all the
proper apparatus of crosses, beads, tonsures, &c., often gave a variety to
our appearance and to our pursuits," which pursuits consisted, in Byron's
words, of "buffooning all round the house in our conventual garments."

That Matthews speaks of tonsures as if they were articles of dress is
neither here nor there; and there is no importance to be attached to his
omission of all reference to the "buffooning." We know from Hobhouse that
he played his part in it, and that one of the amusements of this brilliant
young Fellow of Downing was to hide himself in a stone coffin in the Long
Gallery and groan, by way of alarming his brother revellers. Evidently the
Monks of Newstead, while taking some hints from the profane members of the
Medmenham Hell Fire Club, carried out, to the best of their ability, the
traditions of the Monks of Thelema. "Fays ce que voudras" might have been
their motto; and the doing of what they wished appears to have involved
and included the extension of invitations to the cook and the housemaid to
participate in their pleasures. Moore says so, not as one who makes a
charge, but as one who makes an admission to rebut a graver charge, and is
full of sympathy for the exuberance of lusty youth. Moralists must make
what they can of the story, and apportion censure and indulgence as they
think just.

The excesses, at any rate, whatever their degree and nature, did not fill
Byron's life. He was getting on with his poetry in spite of them, though
it would be too much to say that he had yet proved his title to be called
a poet.

"Hours of Idleness" had appeared while he was at Cambridge. The interest
of that volume, nowadays, is far more biographical than poetical. When one
has inferred from it that Byron did not pass through the University with a
heart bowed down by the loss of Mary Chaworth, but flirted with a long
series of the belles of Southwell, one has said nearly all that there is
to say. The poems themselves, as the quotations given amply demonstrate,
are no better than the general run of undergraduate verse composition.
They are purely imitative; no new note rings in them. One is not surprised
that Lord Carlisle, on receiving a presentation copy, was in a greater
hurry to acknowledge than to read it, and merely remarked, in his
acknowledgment that young men were better occupied in writing poetry than
in devoting their valuable time to women and horses.

"Tolerably handsome," was Byron's first verdict on that letter; but he
seems to have felt snubbed when he read it over a second time. Lord
Carlisle's opinions, he wrote to Miss Pigot, were nothing to him, but his
guardian must not be "insolent." If he were insolent, he should be
gibbeted, just as Butler of Harrow had been gibbeted. In fact, and to sum
up:

    "Perhaps the Earl '_bears no brother near the throne_'--_if so_, I
    will make his _sceptre_ totter _in his hands_."

Which shows that Byron's back was up, and that he was already in a
fighting mood when the famous review in the _Edinburgh_ introduced a
jarring note into the chorus of approbation.

The author of the attack was not Jeffrey, as Byron thought, but Brougham.
He had the excuse, for what it may be worth, that the poems had
indubitably been over-praised because they had appeared under the
signature of a nobleman. He, therefore, set out on the war path with the
truculent air of a man whose conscience requires him to bludgeon a
butterfly. The punishment, we cannot doubt, was very painful to the poet
whom Cambridge undergraduates and Southwell belles had flattered; and the
instant question for him was: Would he take his punishment lying down, or
would he take it fighting?

That question, however, was not long in doubt. The Byrons were a fighting
race; and the poet had inherited their love of fighting. Just as he had
fought Lord Calthorpe at Harrow for calling him an atheist, so now he
would fight the _Edinburgh_ critic for calling him a fool. And he would
fight him with his own weapons. Let him have three bottles of claret to
prime him, and then he would strip for the fray, and would "take on," not
the reviewer only, but every one whom the reviewer had praised, and every
one whom he himself disliked, or thought he might dislike if he knew him
better. So he emptied his three bottles, and set to work on "English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers," and having written twenty lines of it, "felt
better."

It is the poem in which his genius first begins to be apparent. Most of
the judgments expressed in it were unjust--most of them were afterwards
retracted by their author; but that does not matter. One does not expect
sound criticism from poets--least of all does one expect it from poets of
one-and-twenty. The essence of the thing is that now, in "English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers" a new personality spoke--and spoke loud enough to
be heard.

The note of Byron--the note which gained him his large and attentive
audience--was his reckless audacity. He was not afraid of saying things;
he did not wrap them up, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, but said them in
plain language which all the world could understand--said them, moreover,
in a manner which made them appear true even to those who thought, or
wished to think, them false. His readers never knew what he would be
saying next. They only knew that, whatever it was, he would say it
effectively, and, as has already been remarked, with the air of one who
damned the consequences. That was the note which was, in later years, to
ring through "Don Juan." We can already hear it ringing, as it were in
anticipation, through the couplets of "English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers."

Many examples might be cited; for the Satire, after the way of Satires, is
almost entirely composed of damnatory clauses. Any piece of gossip was
good enough for Byron to lay hold of and use as a missile when running
amok among literary reputations. The best instance, however, may be found
in the passage in which he turned and rent Carlisle.

His original intention was to make himself pleasant to his guardian. He
had no particular reason for liking him, but he had no definite case
against him. There was the letter, of course, in which Carlisle had
patronised the poet instead of praising his poetry; but he had got over
his irritation about that, and did not bear malice; and so he prepared for
publication these lines of fulsome eulogy:

  "_Ah, who would take their titles from their rhymes?
  On one alone Apollo deigns to smile,
  And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle._"

But then, before the day of publication, occurred his quarrel with
Carlisle. He thought that his guardian ought to have volunteered to
introduce him when he took his seat in the House of Lords; he had the more
reason for thinking so because his guardian was the only Peer of the Realm
whom he knew. Carlisle, however, did not do so, contenting himself with
instructing his ward as to the formalities to be fulfilled. The slight,
whether intentional or not, was keenly felt--the more keenly because Byron
was, at the moment, at war with all the world except Carlisle. _Et tu,
Brute_, may very well have been his reflection.

So he had misjudged Carlisle. So Carlisle was as bad as other
people--worse, indeed, because better things might reasonably have been
expected from him. Very well. It was to be war between them, was it? Those
who played at bowls must look out for rubbers. Carlisle should see what
kind of an antagonist he had provoked. He had threatened to make his
sceptre totter in his hands. Now he would show that he could do it. So he
struck out the lines of eulogy, and substituted:

  "_Yet did or Taste or Reason sway the times,
  Ah! who would take their titles with their rhymes!
  Roscommon! Sheffield! With your spirits fled,
  No future laurels deck a noble head;
  No Muse will cheer with renovating smile
  The paralytic puling of Carlisle._"

Such was the Parthian shaft; and Byron, having discharged it, shook the
dust of England from off his feet, and departed on the grand tour.




CHAPTER VI

THE GRAND TOUR--FLIRTATIONS IN SPAIN


The glory has long since departed from the grand tour. We all take it
nowadays, with less and less sense of adventure, and more and more
expectation of home comforts. Sir Henry Lunn has pegged out the course,
and stationed lecturers along it at intervals, to prevent us from
confounding Scylla and Charybdis with Sodom and Gomorrah. They stir
appropriate emotions in our breasts like stokers making up a fire. We play
bridge in the evening on steamers "replete with every modern convenience";
and we are back again, in about six weeks, with a smattering of
second-hand culture which goes the way of all smatterings in a very brief
period of time. It is a shadowy, unreal, unsatisfactory business--a poor
imitation of the grand tour as our forefathers knew it.

Some of them, no doubt, travelled frivolously and superficially. The Earl
of Carlisle did so when he and Fox, as Samuel Rogers tells us, "travelled
from Paris to Lyons for the express purpose of buying waistcoats and,
during the whole journey, talked of nothing else." But there was plenty of
emotion in travel for those who cared for it--a real impression of a
widening horizon on which unusual figures might be expected to appear--a
sense of escaping from the familiar crowd and plunging into an unknown
world in which anything might happen. The temptation was strong for the
traveller of temperament to strike an attitude and say: "Behold me! The
old moorings were impossible; the old lights gave no guidance. I prefer to
be adrift on a strange sea, seeking I know not what. Travel is my escape
from life. A woman tempted me, and tortured me, and so, unless a woman
heals the wound a woman gave----"

Chateaubriand sought the Orient in that spirit. Disgust and disillusion,
as he tells us, drove him forth. Pauline de Beaumont was dead, and Madame
de Chateaubriand was a woman hard to live with. He needed the consolations
of religion; he needed to meditate at the tomb of Christ. Above all he
needed, when his meditations had fortified his mind, to meet Natalie de
Noailles-Mouchy in the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra. He met her
there, and travelled with her for three months in Spain, and presently
found that he had only plucked yet another Dead Sea apple. And so he
cried: "Behold me!" Similarly, in spite of the differences, with Byron.

It was a fixed article of faith with Chateaubriand that Byron had
plagiarised his personality without acknowledgment. It was an act of
envious vengeance, he said, for his own neglect to reply to a letter which
Byron had written him while a schoolboy. That accusation, of course, is
incredible and may be dismissed; but the resemblance between the two men
was nevertheless as close as the differences of race allowed. Byron was as
distinctly British, at intervals, as Chateaubriand was, at all times,
distinctly French; and their points of view were to diverge widely as they
grew older. Chateaubriand, an artistic Catholic, was to become one of the
pillars of the Holy Alliance. Byron was to do more than any other man
except Canning to pull the pillars of that temple down. But, in the
meantime, the likeness was striking. There was about them both an equal
air of cultivated gloom, an equal tendency to introspection, an equally
intense interest in their personalities--that sense of the significance of
the ego which was to be of the essence of the Romantic Movement--an equal
readiness, as has been re-marked, to exclaim: Behold me!

The likeness is specially striking in the case of their journeys to the
Orient. They sailed the same seas in the same spirit--with the one
difference that Byron, who had a deadly hatred of certain kinds of
hypocrisy, made no pretence in his quest for peace, of looking to and fro
between love and religion. In both cases alike, disgust for life was
understood to have given the impulsion to the journey. A leading incident
in both journeys was, as Byron bluntly puts it, "a passion for a married
woman." Neither passion gave the lover any lasting satisfaction. Both
passions were proclaimed in enigmatic pæans to the world.

The two cantos of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" which chronicle the
journey are also the record of the beginning of the Byronic pose. The
picture of the Childe is the picture of René, with a difference--the
difference being that, whereas Chateaubriand could never, even in a work
of art, depreciate himself, Byron rejoiced in doing so. For the rest, the
Childe was "tameless and swift and proud," and worthless, and weary, and
disillusioned, and disgusted. He had "spent his days in riot most
uncouth": he had "felt the fulness of satiety." It was well that he had
not won the woman whom he loved because his kiss "had been polution unto
aught so chaste." His boon companions were only "flatterers of the festal
hour," and "none did love him, not his lemans dear." Wherefore behold him,
on the Lisbon packet, in flight from himself, and seeking his "escape from
life."

That is the picture; that, as perhaps it would be better to put it, is the
pose. It was to become a sincere and natural posture before the end; but
it is impossible, at this early stage, to take it very seriously. Byron
would himself have been the first to repudiate the suggestion that such
men as Matthews, Hobhouse, and Hodgson were "heartless parasites of
present cheer." He had more respect for Matthews than for any man of his
acquaintance; Hodgson was to be his most regular correspondent, and
Hobhouse the chosen companion of his journey. Moreover, he was only
twenty-one--an age at which a young man is eager to see the world and
needs no excuse for setting out to do so. His conception of himself as a
forlorn exile impelled to wander because the world has betrayed and
trifled with him is, in the main, a young man's literary affectation.

An affectation, no doubt, for which certain realities had furnished a
hint. The fear of impending pecuniary embarrassment may sometimes have
given the sound of revelry a hollow ring. The sarcasm of the _Edinburgh_,
though repaid in kind, had certainly left a thin skin sore. The icy
politeness of Carlisle had chilled an expansive heart, and given Byron the
impression that he was regarded as an intruder in his own domain.
Conjoined with his mother's nagging, it had made something of a
three-cornered quarrel from which it was good to escape. He had also found
himself more sentimental than he ought to be about Mary Chaworth. Here, at
any rate, was something to exaggerate--a foundation of bad temper on which
a superstructure of pessimism might be raised. Byron duly raised it, for
literary purposes. But he had his high spirits as well as his low spirits;
and the farewell lines which he sent from Falmouth to Hodgson suggest
anything rather than a heart bowed down with woe.

  "_Now at length we're off for Turkey,
    Lord knows when we shall come back!
  Breezes foul and tempests murky
    May unship us in a crack.
  But since life at most a jest is,
    As philosophers allow,
  Still to laugh by far the best is,
    Then laugh on--as I do now.
      Laugh at all things,
      Great and small things,
    Sick or well, at sea or shore;
      While we're quaffing,
      Let's have laughing--
    Who the devil asks for more?--
  Some good wine! and who would lack it,
    Ev'n on board the Lisbon packet?_"

Those verses, quite as much as "'Tis done, and shivering in the gale"--and
much more than anything in "Childe Harold,"--indicate the frame of mind in
which Byron wished his native land good-night. He was travelling with all
the paraphernalia of the grand tourist--with more servants than he could
afford, and with the hearty, matter-of-fact John Cam Hobhouse for his
companion to keep him out of mischief. Whatever he fled from, adventure
was what he was looking for--not only the adventures which belong to the
exploration of barbarous countries, but also those which are to be
encountered in the boudoirs of garrison towns.

He landed at Lisbon and went to Cintra. He rode across Spain to Seville
and Cadiz. He proceeded to Gibraltar, to Malta, to Albania, to Athens, and
thence to Smyrna and the Dardanelles. He returned to Athens, and spent
some time in exploring the interior of Greece. That, in outline, was the
itinerary; and there were two adventures of which the letters to Hodgson
show him to have been particularly proud. He swam the Hellespont, in
imitation of Leander--a feat of which he boasts, over and over again, in
every letter to every correspondent--and he indulged in "a passion for a
married woman at Malta."

Nor was that his only passion. If it was the only passion which he
felt--which is doubtful--it certainly was not the only passion which he
inspired. "Lord Byron," says Hobhouse, in his matter-of-fact way, "is, of
course, very popular with all the ladies, as he is very handsome, amusing,
and generous; but his attentions to all and sundry generally end, as on
this occasion, in _rixæ femininæ_." We shall come to that story in a
moment. It is preceded by a story of which the hint is in the lines
beginning:

  "_Yet are Spain's maids no race of Amazons,
    But formed for all the witching arts of love_:"

a story of which the memory is in "Don Juan":

  "_'Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongue
    By female lips and eyes--that is I mean,
  When both the teacher and the taught are young,
    As was the case, at least, where I have been._"

It happened at Seville, where the travellers, as Hobhouse writes, "made
the acquaintance of Admiral Cordova, with whose daughter Byron contrived
to fall in love at very short notice."

Admiral Cordova was the Admiral who put up the fight which gained Sir John
Jervis the title of Earl Saint Vincent. Byron had an introduction to the
family, met Señorita Cordova at the theatre, and was invited to escort her
home. It is not quite clear from the correspondence whether it was
Señorita Cordova or some other lady who quarrelled with him because he
would not give her the ring which he wore, as pledge of his affection; nor
is it certain whether the ring was, or was not, a memento of Mary
Chaworth. Whatever its origin, it was to be yielded up at the hour of the
"passion for a married woman"; and meanwhile there was another little
incident of which Byron speaks, of all places in the world, in a letter to
his mother:

    "We lodged in the house of two Spanish unmarried ladies.... The eldest
    honoured your _unworthy_ son with very particular attention, embracing
    him with great tenderness at parting ... after cutting off a lock of
    his hair, and presenting him with one of her own, about three feet in
    length, which I send and beg you will retain till my return.... She
    offered me a share of her apartment, which my _virtue_ induced me to
    decline."

That is all, and it is of no importance. The next stage was Gibraltar, and
it is there, and on the voyage thence to Malta, that we get our first
glimpse of Byron from the pen of an observer who observed, not as a matter
of course, but as a matter of curiosity, and had a turn for picturesque
description.

John Galt, afterwards famous as a Scotch novelist, was at Gibraltar when
Byron arrived there. He had been sent to the Levant by a firm of traders
to ascertain how far British goods could be exploited in defiance of the
Berlin and Milan Decrees. He was to try hard, though in vain, to introduce
such goods into the Greek archipelago, and to smuggle them into Spain.
Half man of action and half dreamer, he went about denouncing priests and
kings, and exhorting the British Government to seize all the islands
everywhere for the supposed advantage of British commerce. Byron,
condescendingly asking Hodgson to review one of his books favourably,
describes him, with more or less of justice, as "a cock-brained man," and,
remembering him at a later date, told Lady Blessington that he "could not
awe him into a respect sufficiently profound for my sublime self, either
as a peer or an author."

This means, of course, that Galt, though he perceived the pose, did not
abase himself in ecstasy before it. Seeing that he was a man of thirty,
whereas Byron was only just of age, it was hardly to be expected that he
would. Moreover, as a Scotsman, he would naturally take the side of the
_Edinburgh_ and maintain that Byron had done nothing to be conceited
about. So he observed Byron--and we may be grateful to him for doing
so--in a spirit of criticism and detachment.

    "His physiognomy," Galt writes, "was prepossessing and intelligent,
    but ever and anon his brows lowered and gathered; a habit, as I then
    thought, with a degree of affectation in it, probably first assumed
    for picturesque effect and energetic expression, but which I
    afterwards discovered was undoubtedly the occasional scowl of some
    unpleasant recollection: it was certainly
    disagreeable--forbidding--but still the general cast of his features
    was impressed with elegance and character."

That was the first impression, and the second impression was not more
favourable:

    "In the little bustle and process of embarking their luggage, his
    lordship affected, as it seemed to me, more aristocracy than befitted
    his years or the occasion; and I then thought of his singular scowl,
    and suspected him of pride and irascibility. The impression that
    evening was not agreeable, but it was interesting; and that forehead
    mark, the frown, was calculated to awaken curiosity and beget
    conjectures."

Galt, in short, contrasted Byron unfavourably with Hobhouse, whom he found
"a cheerful companion" and "altogether an advantageous specimen of a
well-educated English gentleman;" but it was Byron who intrigued him. He
noticed what Byron ate--"no animal food, but only bread and
vegetables"--and he reflected that "he had not acquired his knowledge of
the world by always dining so sparingly." He even found his way "by
cautious circumvallations into his intimacy"--though not very far into it,
for "his uncertain temper made his favour precarious"; and finally we find
him, as if in return for this precarious favour, drawing a picture of
Byron which really can be called Byronic. The scene is the ship which
conveys them both from Gibraltar to Malta:

    "When the lights were placed, he made himself a man forbid, took his
    station on the railing between the pegs on which the sheets are
    belayed and the shrouds, and there, for hours, sat in silence,
    enamoured, it may be, of the moon. All these peculiarities, with his
    caprices, and something inexplicable in the cast of his metaphysics,
    while they served to awaken interest, contributed little to conciliate
    esteem. He was often strangely rapt--it may have been from his genius;
    and, had its grandeur and darkness been then divulged, susceptible of
    explanation; but, at the time, it threw, as it were, round him the
    sackcloth of penitence. Sitting amidst the shrouds and rattlings,
    churming an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional,
    suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross. He was as
    a mystery in a winding sheet, crowned with a halo."

One quotes the passage in full because it is the earliest coloured picture
of the theatrical Byron--the fatal man of gloom and splendour on whom so
much limelight was presently to be thrown. Whether Byron was posing for
Galt--or whether Galt magnified the pose in the light of subsequent
events--it is, of course, at this date, impossible to say. Perhaps both
things happened, and the picture owes a little to each of them. At all
events the beginning of Byronism--of the outward, visible Byronism, that
is to say--is there. It is just the picture which we feel we have a right
to look for of the fatal man divining the doom which he is unable to
resist--alone in the midst of the crowd--his own personality creating a
void around him--proceeding to his first "passion for a married woman."

That passion awaited him as soon as he landed at Malta. The woman who
inspired it was Mrs. Spencer Smith--the "Florence" of "Childe Harold:"

  "_Sweet Florence! could another ever share
  This wayward, loveless heart, it would be thine._"

But Mrs. Spencer Smith has a story of her own which it is worth while to
turn aside and tell.




CHAPTER VII

FLORENCE SPENCER SMITH


Mrs. Spencer Smith was the daughter of an Austrian Ambassador and the wife
of an English Minister Plenipotentiary. "Married unhappily, yet has never
been impeached in point of character," says Byron in a letter to his
mother. There are no details forthcoming about that, however. All that one
can affirm is that her husband only appears as a shadowy figure in the
background of her adventures, leaving the leading _rôle_ to other men,
while he serves his country at the other end of Europe.

He was a younger brother of Sir Sidney Smith, who had checked Napoleon's
victorious career at Acre. Napoleon, it is said by some French writers,
loathed the very name of Smith after that calamity, held all the Smiths
jointly and severally responsible for it, and swore to wreak his vengeance
on the first Smith who fell into his hands. Consequently, the same writers
add, when he heard that a Mrs. Smith was staying at Venice--a city then in
his power--he felt that his long-delayed hour of triumph had come, and
gave his orders accordingly.

That version of the story, however, is too good to be true. Mrs. Spencer
Smith, in fact, was suspected, whether rightly or wrongly, of having
played some part, as a secret agent, in some conspiracy against Napoleon.
She had been betrayed, or denounced; she was being watched; and she
walked, unaware of her danger, into the snare that had been set. Venice,
it had seemed to her, would be a safe place of refuge when the
over-running of northern Italy by the French armies made it awkward for
her to remain at the Baths of Valdagno, where she had been staying for the
benefit of her health. Her sister, Countess Attems, lived at Venice, and
she went to visit her.

She was young, accomplished, beautiful--"like one of those apparitions,"
says the Duchesse d'Abrantès, "which come to us in our happiest dreams."
She spoke seven languages, and looked down demurely--"a habit," the
Duchesse d'Abrantès continues, "which only added to her charms." A
Sicilian boy of twenty, the Marquis de Salvo, begged for an introduction,
was presented, and fell in love. He had hardly done so--he had not even
declared himself--when he lighted upon his chance of proving his devotion
by rendering help in time of trouble.

General Lauriston, Napoleon's aide-de-camp, arrived at Venice with a
commission to act as Military Governor in his pocket; and then the trouble
began. Mrs. Spencer Smith was sent for by the Chief of Police and
requested to leave the town and take a residence in the country. She had
hardly begun to look for one when there arrived four gendarmes, with the
intimation that she was to remain in her apartment, and that they were to
see that she did so. The Marquis de Salvo then volunteered to call on the
Chief of Police and inquire the meaning of this rigorous measure. The
Chief of Police first talked vaguely to him about Napoleon's prejudice
against the name of Smith, and then hinted that there might be more
specific reasons for his severity. He added that his orders were to
conduct Mrs. Smith under an escort to Milan; "and I rather fancy," he
concluded, "that she is to be detained in the fortress of Valenciennes."

That was the boy's chance. He was a boy in years, but a man in courage and
resource. He ran to Mrs. Spencer Smith, repeated what he had been told,
and promised that he would save her.

At first she hesitated. He would be taking a risk, she said, which he had
no right to take. He probably expected a reward which her "principles"
would not permit her to grant. But the boy, as it happened, was as
chivalrous as he was brave. Perhaps he loved noble actions for their own
sake. At all events he loved adventure; and here was the prospect of an
adventure such as rarely comes the way of a youth fresh from school. As
for the risks, he said, he did not fear them. As for reward, he would not
ask for any. If Mrs. Spencer Smith would let him save her she should be
saved. He had thought the matter out, and made his plans. All that was
necessary was that she should take a maid with her whom she could trust.
Everything else might be left to him.

Then Florence Spencer Smith thanked Salvo, and promised to accept his aid.
She too was of the age at which one is grateful to life for adventures;
and, if she must choose between the two evils, well then she would rather
be compromised than locked up. So she made sure of her maid, and got into
the carriage which the gendarmes provided. There were five of them,
including the brigadier; and Salvo sought, and obtained, leave to ride
with them in the vague character of "friend of the family." The gendarmes,
he found, were excellent fellows, quite unsuspicious, and very
sympathetic. The brigadier was specially sympathetic because he was lost
in admiration of Mrs. Smith's faithful maid; and Salvo, having carefully
thought out his coup, watched all the chances.

It had been agreed that Mrs. Smith should plead ill health, and ask to be
allowed to journey by short stages. No objections were raised--probably
because of the pleasure which the brigadier took in the society of the
maid--and the party halted, first at Verona, and then at Brescia. At
Verona nothing could be done. An Italian friend, whom Salvo implored to
meet and help him, failed to keep the appointment, guessing why he was
wanted, and fearing Napoleon's long arm. He must, therefore, act alone;
and the question was whether he could find a means of getting Mrs. Smith
on board a boat and across the Lake of Garda. Probably he could if he
could first see her alone and concert a scheme with her. So he galloped
off to the lake side, hired two boats, and bought a post chaise, in which
he proposed to drive Mrs. Smith up into the mountains, and over the
frontier into Austria. Then he galloped back, told the brigadier that he
was obliged to return to Venice, and begged to be allowed to say good-bye
to Mrs. Smith without witnesses.

The brigadier, who liked to be alone with the maid, could quite understand
that the marquis liked to be alone with the mistress. He winked a wicked
eye, called the marquis "a sad dog," and gave permission. Salvo winked
back at him, as if admitting the impeachment of sad doggedness, and, in
the brief interview which the brigadier supposed to be consecrated to
sentiment, told Mrs. Smith what he had plotted, and how she herself must
act.

He would return, after night-fall, with a rope ladder. In order to avoid
the suspicions of the inquisitive, he would make that rope ladder with his
own hands. He would pack it up into a parcel, and Mrs. Smith must lower a
piece of string with which to draw it up. The parcel would also contain a
boy's costume, as a disguise for her, and a dose of laudanum with which to
drug the maid's evening drink in case she were not a party to the
conspiracy. He would come again at eleven, wearing a cocked hat, and
enveloped in a military cloak. Mrs. Smith, understanding who was there,
must then make the ladder fast and climb down to him.

He came; and things happened more or less as he had planned them. The
maid, in particular, was magnificently loyal. She offered to attend her
mistress in her flight; and, when told that that could not be, she handed
out her mistress' jewels, helped in securing the ladder to the verandah,
promised to remove it after it had served its purpose, and then tossed off
the soporific of her own accord, so that it might be physically impossible
for her to answer questions for some hours to come--incidentally also, no
doubt, in order to give the brigadier the excuse which he would naturally
desire for acquitting her of all complicity in the escape.

Mrs. Smith descended the ladder half way, and then fell off it; but Salvo
had expected that. He caught her in his arms, and they got into their
carriage and were off. The gates of the town were closed; but Salvo
bluffed his way through them in an instant, with the help of his military
cloak and head-gear.

"What in thunder do you mean by keeping me waiting? I'm the colonel of the
twenty-fifth. You were warned to look out for me. You'll hear of this
again, my man. Open the gate at once, and let me through."

Thus the boy swore in the full-blooded military style of the period. The
gate was thrown open for him with profound apologies. He whipped up the
horses, and galloped to Salona, where the boats were ready. They embarked,
taking their carriage with them, and crossed to Riva. There they got into
the carriage again, and galloped on to Trent, where a sleepy official,
much in wrath at this disturbance of his slumbers, proceeded to make
trouble about their passports, which were only approximately in order. The
only course, since time pressed, and pursuers were on their track, was to
leave the chaise behind and slip away surreptitiously in a country cart
which an inn-keeper offered to sell them.

The pursuers, indeed, were hard upon their heels; but happily the morning
sun was in their eyes. The fugitives saw them before they were seen, and
drove their cart down from the mountain road through the forest to the
torrent, so that the horsemen missed them and rode past them. After that,
they abandoned their cart, and travelled by cross country roads and
mountain paths, continually in peril of arrest, but always escaping as if
by a miracle. A peasant, to whom they appealed for food and shelter,
proposed to conduct them to the nearest police station, but was melted to
tenderness by Mrs. Smith's tears and pitiful entreaties. They read the
offer of a reward for their capture posted on the walls. They hid
themselves for two days in a mountain chapel. They were stopped, and
questioned, and mistaken for other more romantic fugitives--an Italian
Princess who was said to have eloped with an Italian bookseller's
assistant. They disguised themselves as peasants, and travelled in the
midst of the real peasants' flocks of sheep. Not until after many days'
wanderings did they reach Austrian territory, declare their true
identity, and claim the protection of the law; and even so their troubles
were not over.

Austria, at that date, had not yet recovered either morally or materially
from the shock of Austerlitz, and dared not stand openly between Napoleon
and his prey. The fugitives had to be arrested before they could be saved.
Salvo was, for a while, locked up, like a criminal, in the deepest dungeon
of a Styrian Castle; and Mrs. Smith was smuggled out of the country, under
the name of Frau Müller--first to Riga, and thence to England, where Salvo
ultimately joined her. Queen Charlotte thanked him publicly for the
service so gallantly rendered to a British subject; and he made his best
bow and withdrew, remembering his promise to expect no other recompense.

Such is the story of Mrs. Smith's adventure as told, first by Salvo
himself, who wrote a book about it, and then by the Duchesse d'Abrantès,
who devoted a long section of her Memoirs to it. One repeats it, partly
for its own sake and partly because the romance of it explains how the
heroine of it appealed to Byron's imagination.

She was the first really interesting--or, at all events, the first really
remarkable--woman whom he had met. The women whom he had previously known
had been very conventional young persons of the upper middle classes. Even
Mary Chaworth had been _bourgeoise_, or must have seemed so in comparison
with Mrs. Spencer Smith. To meet her was to encounter, for the first time,
the amazing realities of life, and to find more romance in them than even
a poet dared to dream of without reality to prompt him. And she was
married, and it made no difference--or none except that, being married,
she had more liberty, and could be more audacious than a spinster. "Since
my arrival here," Byron writes--still to his mother--"I have had scarcely
any other companion." There is an unmistakable note of self-complacency in
the confession. Byron's "passion for a married woman" was evidently
signalling to him, as such a passion has signalled to many a young man
before and after him, that, now at last, he was grown up.

Galt says that the attachment was merely "Platonic." Possibly Galt was
right, though his evidence goes for nothing, seeing that Byron looked down
upon him from far too Olympian a height to be in the least likely to
confide in him. The impression which Mrs. Spencer Smith, from the little
that we know about her, gives is that of the type of the favourite heroine
of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones' more serious plays--a woman, that is to say,
who shows herself of a very "coming-on" disposition until a certain point
is reached, but then stops suddenly short, being frightened and abashed by
her own temerity. She asked Byron for his ring--the ring which the Spanish
lady had asked him for in vain--and he gave it to her. "Soon after this I
sailed for Malta, and there parted with both heart and ring," is his own
way of putting it; and as Galt knew that she had got the ring, there seem
to be grounds for the conjecture that she showed it and boasted of it.

Anything else, however, it would be idle to conjecture, even though we
have "Childe Harold" and sundry "Lines" to help us in the quest.

The suggestion in "Childe Harold" is that Mrs. Spencer Smith made love to
Byron in vain:

  "_Fair Florence found, in sooth, with some amaze,
  One who, 'twas said, still sighed to all he saw,
  Withstand, unmoved, the lustre of her gaze----_"

The suggestion in the "Lines" is different:

  "_Oh, lady! When I left the shore,
    The distant shore which gave me birth,
  I hardly thought to grieve once more,
    To quit another spot on earth:_

  "_Yet, here amidst this barren isle,
    Where panting Nature droops the head,
  Where only thou art seen to smile,
    I view my parting hour with dread._"

We must make what we can of that; and it really matters very little what
we make of it. This "passion for a married woman" was an inevitable stage
of the sentimental pilgrimage. Byron was bound to halt there for a little
while, if not for long; and it was not to be expected that he would, like
Ulysses, stuff his ears with wool while passing the Siren's Isle. That is
not the way of poets, and that is not the way of youth. He was bound, too,
to fancy, for a moment, that the passion meant a great deal to him, even
though, in fact, it meant but little; for that also is the way of youth
and poets. And hardly less inevitable, though both of them knew that no
hearts were being broken was the idea that Fate was cruel to decree their
parting, and that, while they acted wisely, they must also suffer for
their wisdom. And therefore:

  "_Though Fate forbids such things to be,
    Yet by thine eyes and ringlets curled!
  I cannot_ lose _a_ world _for thee,
    But would not lose_ thee _for a_ World."

And therefore again, just two months later:

  "_The spell is broke, the charm is flown!
    Thus is it with Life's fitful fever:
  We madly smile when we should groan;
    Delirium is our best deceiver.
  Each lucid interval of thought
    Recalls the woes of Nature's charter;
  And_ He _that acts as_ wise men ought,
    _But_ lives--_as Saints have died--a martyr._"

That is all; and the story which the lines half cover up and half disclose
is clearly of very little consequence. Mrs. Smith had enjoyed her
flirtation, and had had verses written to her--much better verses than had
been addressed to any of the belles of Southwell. Byron had posed, not
knowing for certain whether he posed or not, had undergone a necessary
experience, and had passed through the fire unhurt. The experiences which
were really to matter to him were yet to come--though not immediately; and
he had hardly finished writing verses to Mrs. Spencer Smith when he began
writing verses to the Maid of Athens.




CHAPTER VIII

THE MAID OF ATHENS--MRS. WERRY--MRS. PEDLEY--THE SWIMMING OF THE
HELLESPONT


  "_Maid of Athens, ere we part,
  Give, oh give me back my heart!_"

It would be superfluous to quote more of the poem than that; and it would
be absurd to attach importance to the episode which it commemorates.

Byron came to Athens after an expedition, with Hobhouse, into the heart of
Albania. He was, according to Hobhouse's Diary, "all this time engaged in
writing a long poem in the Spenserian stanzas," the poem being, of course,
the first canto of "Childe Harold." That the travellers roughed it a good
deal is evident from Hobhouse's description of a supper whereat "Byron,
with his sabre, cut off the head of a goose which shared our room with a
collection of pigs and cows, and so we got an excellent roast." He was
much pleased with his reception by Ali Pasha, who said "he was certain I
was a man of birth because I had small ears, curling hair, and little
white hands." He was also, at the same time, brooding on his "passion for
a married woman," and no doubt felt himself years older in consequence of
that passion; and then, arriving at Athens, he fell in love, or fancied
or pretended that he was in love, with his landlady's daughter.

That was the social status of the Maid of Athens. Her mother, Theodora
Macri, the widow of a former British Vice-Consul, had been reduced to
letting lodgings--a sitting-room and two bedrooms, looking on to a
courtyard, much patronised by English travellers, and highly recommended
by them. There were three daughters, and there are passages in Byron's
letters which might be read to mean that he was equally in love with all
of them. "An attachment to three Greek girls" is his summary of the
incident to Hodgson; but he distinguished one of them by the special
homage of a poem destined to be one of the most famous in the English
language, with the result that Theresa Macri, Maid of Athens, became an
institution, and that subsequent lodgers made much of her, looking for a
romance where there had, in fact, been little more than the formal salute
of the ships passing in the night. Hugh W. Williams, the artist, who was
at Athens in 1817, depicts them for us:

    "On the crown of the head of each is a red Albanian skull-cap, with a
    blue tassel spread out and fastened down like a star. Near the edge or
    bottom of the skull-cap is a handkerchief of various colours bound
    round their temples. The youngest wears her hair loose, falling on her
    shoulders."

[Illustration: _The Maid of Athens._]

That, no doubt, was how Theresa wore her hair when Byron flattered her
with his attentions. She also, it seems, wore "white stockings and
yellow slippers," and had "teeth of pearly whiteness" and "manners such as
would be fascinating in any country." It was the usual thing, according to
Williams, for their mother's lodgers to flirt with one or other of them.
It would have been "remarkable," he thinks, if they had not done so.
Presumably he did so himself. At all events he admired them very much as
they sat "in the Eastern style, a little reclined, with their limbs
gathered under them on the divan, and without shoes"; but he insists with
no less emphasis upon their propriety than upon their graces. "Modesty and
delicacy of conduct," he comments, "will always command respect"; and
further:

    "Though so poor, their virtues shine as conspicuous as their
    beauty.... Not all the wealth of the East, or the complimentary lays
    even of the first of England's poets could render them so truly worthy
    of love and admiration."

Moore tells us that Byron, in Oriental style, gashed himself across the
breast with a dagger as a symbolic demonstration of his conquest by
Theresa's charms, and that Theresa "looked on very coolly during the
operation, considering it a fit tribute to her beauty, but in no degree
moved to gratitude." And that, of course, is what one would expect. The
game was being played according to the rules, and Theresa was child enough
to enjoy the fun. One can imagine that it was a game which the girls
often played with the lodgers, teaching them the rules when they did not
already know them. One would be churlish indeed to begrudge them their
enjoyment, or to protest that they were "forward" or suspect that they
were "designing." The landlady's daughter can often do much to make life
in a lodging-house agreeable; and youth must have its hour though time
flies and love, like a bird, is on the wing.

Our next glimpse of Theresa, taken from Walsh's "Narrative of a Residence
in Constantinople," shows us that time is, indeed, an "ever-rolling
stream," carrying its daughters, as well as its sons away upon the flood.
"Lord Byron's poem," writes Walsh in 1817, "has rendered the poor lady no
temporal service though it has ensured her immortality"; and he continues:

    "She was once very lovely, I was informed by those who knew her, and
    realised all the descriptive part of the poem; but time and, I
    suppose, disappointed hopes preyed upon her, and though still very
    elegant in her person, and gentle and lady-like in her manners, she
    has lost all pretensions to beauty, and has a countenance singularly
    marked by hopeless sadness."

That, no doubt, is the exaggeration of a sentimentalist. Theresa's hopes
can hardly have been serious. Landladies' daughters, have too many hopes
deferred and disappointed to allow the disappointment of any hope in
particular to blight their lives. Theresa, in due course, became Mrs.
Black, the wife, like her mother, of a vice-consul; and she lived to the
great age of eighty, "a tall old lady," writes the United States Consular
Agent at Athens, "with features inspiring reverence, and showing that at a
time past she was a beautiful woman." Her countrymen, however, did not
forget that she had been the Maid of Athens; and, Byron's services to the
Greek cause being also remembered, a public subscription provided for the
necessities of her last years. That is all that there is to say about her
unless it be to repeat that she played but a very minor part in the
pageant of Byron's life, and cannot even be spoken of as Mrs. Spencer
Smith's only rival.

For there were others; and though the other stories are clouded with a
good deal of doubt, they cannot fail to leave a certain collective
impression of Byron as a man whom all women found attractive and many
women found susceptible.

At Smyrna, for instance, there was a Mrs. Werry, whose name and effusive
proceedings are mentioned by Hobhouse:

    "Mrs. Werry actually cut off a lock of Byron's hair on parting from
    him to-day, and shed a good many tears. Pretty well for fifty-six
    years at least!"

At Athens, too, there was a second affair of which there is a full and
circumstantial account in Medwin's "Conversations of Lord Byron." The
heroine was a Turkish girl of whom Byron was "fond as I have been of few
women." All went well, he told Medwin, until the Fast of Ramadan, when Law
and Religion prohibit love-making for forty days, and the women are not
allowed to quit their apartments. An attempt to arrange an assignation at
this season was detected. The penalty was to be death, and Byron was to be
kept in ignorance of everything until it was too late to interfere:

    "A mere accident only enabled me to prevent the completion of the
    sentence. I was taking one of my usual evening rides by the sea-side,
    when I observed a crowd of people moving down to the shore, and the
    arms of the soldiers glittering among them. They were not so far off
    but that I thought I could now and then distinguish a faint and
    stifled shriek. My curiosity was forcibly excited, and I despatched
    one of my followers to inquire the cause of the procession. What was
    my horror to learn that they were carrying an unfortunate girl, sewn
    up in a sack, to be thrown into the sea! I did not hesitate as to what
    was to be done. I knew I could depend on my faithful Albanians, and
    rode up to the officer commanding the party, threatening in case of
    his refusal to give up his prisoner, that I would adopt means to
    compel him. He did not like the business he was on, or perhaps the
    determined look of my bodyguard, and consented to accompany me back to
    the city with the girl, whom I discovered to be my Turkish favourite.
    Suffice it to say that my interference with the chief magistrate,
    backed by a heavy bribe, saved her; but it was only on condition that
    I should break off all intercourse with her, and that she should
    immediately quit Athens, and be sent to her friends in Thebes. There
    she died, a few days after her arrival, of a fever, perhaps of love."

"Perhaps of love" is the typical finishing touch of the "fatal man;" but
Medwin may have added it. To Byron, at any rate, the incident counted for
no more than any of the other incidents; but it was followed, or is said
to have been followed, by an incident which counted for even less--the
incident of the beautiful Mrs. Pedley, related in a curious anonymous work
entitled: "The life, Writings, Opinions, and Times of the Right Hon. G. G.
Noel Byron," published in 1825.

Byron met Mrs. Pedley at Malta on his way home. She was the wife of a Dr.
Pedley, beautiful and frivolous--addicted, it may be, to levity, as a
relief from the dulness of garrison life. Her husband, for reasons which
we are left to conjecture, turned her out of his house. She came to
Byron's house, sat down on the door-step, and refused to go. Perhaps she
argued that, as Byron had loved one married woman, he was prepared to love
all married women; but if so, she argued wrongly. Byron begged her to
return to her home, and when she declined to do so, he sent a note to Dr.
Pedley to ask what he had better do with her. The Dr.'s answer was to pack
up the lady's clothes and other belongings and send them to Byron's
rooms, with a message to the effect that he wished him joy of the
adventure. The upshot of it all was that Byron consented to take Mrs.
Pedley to England, but gave her very little of his society, and parted
with her immediately on landing.

Such, at all events, is the story as the anonymous biographer relates it,
though it is impossible to say on what authority it reposes. Even if it
rests upon gossip, and is untrue, it helps to fill in the picture by
reflecting the reputation which Byron was making for himself during his
Oriental travels: a reputation, on the one hand, of a man who made love
with cynical recklessness, and on the other hand of a man who swaggered
round the Levant with unwarrantable arrogance and pride.

We have already seen him swaggering about his swimming of the Hellespont.
He continued to swagger about it to the very end of his life. Even in "Don
Juan" there is a well-known reference to the exploit:

  "_A better swimmer you could scarce see ever;
  He could, perhaps, have passed the Hellespont,
  As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
  Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did._"

It was a considerable feat, no doubt, though he was only an hour and ten
minutes in the water; but the anonymous biographer already quoted adds
some details which make it, if not more glorious, at least more dramatic.
Byron, according to this version of the story, was helped out of the
water in a state of extreme exhaustion, and lay three days in a
fisherman's hut, nursed and tended by the fisherman's wife. The fisherman
did not in the least know whom he was entertaining, but believed his
guest, whose language he could not speak, to be a needy shipwrecked
sailor. On his departure, therefore, he pressed on him not only bread and
cheese and wine, but also a few copper coins. Byron accepted the gift,
without attempting to explain, and a few days afterwards sent his servant
with a return gift: a brace of pistols, a fowling piece, a fishing net,
and some silk to make a gown for the fisherman's wife. The fisherman was
so overwhelmed that he set out at once in his boat to thank the generous
donor, and was caught in a sudden squall and drowned.

That is a story of which it is impossible to say whether it is true or
only well invented. We are on safer ground in taking the testimony of the
well-known people who met Byron in the course of his journey; and our
principal witnesses are Lady Hester Stanhope, who passed him at Athens on
her way to Lebanon, Sir Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de
Redcliffe, the "great Eltchi," then Secretary of Embassy at
Constantinople, and John Galt, who was still going his rounds as a
high-class commercial traveller. No one of the three is extravagantly
eulogistic, and all three bear witness to the pose, the swagger, and the
arrogance.

"A sort of Don Quixote fighting with the police for a woman of the town,"
is Lady Hester's verdict, suggested, no doubt, by the adventure on which
Byron put such a different colour when he related it to Medwin. "He
wanted," she continues, "to make himself something great," but she will
not allow that he succeeded. "He had a great deal of vice in his looks,"
she says, "his eyes set close together and a contracted brow"; and, as for
his poetry, Lady Hester shakes her head even over that:

    "At Athens, I saw nothing in him but a well-bred man, like many
    others; for, as for poetry, it is easy enough to write verses; and as
    for the thoughts, who knows where he got them? Many a one picks up
    some old book that nobody knows anything about, and gets his ideas out
    of it."

That reflection, perhaps, always supposing that Dr. Merryon has reported
it correctly, throws a brighter flood of light upon the critic's mind than
upon the poet's genius; but the criticism offered by Sir Stratford Canning
was a criticism of matters which he understood. He "cannot," he says,
"forbear to record" what happened when Byron obtained permission to be
present at an audience granted by the Sultan to the _corps diplomatique_.
There is a reference to the story in Moore's "Journal"; but the authorised
version must be sought in Lord Stratford de Redcliffe's Papers:

    "We had assembled," he writes, "in the hall of our so-called palace
    when Lord Byron arrived in scarlet regimentals topped by a profusely
    feathered cocked hat, and, coming up to me, asked what his place as a
    peer of the realm was to be in the procession. I referred him to Mr.
    Adair, who had not yet left his room, and the upshot of their private
    interview was that, as the Turks ignored all but officials, any
    amateur, though a peer, must be content to follow in the wake of the
    Embassy. His lordship thereupon walked away with that look of scornful
    indignation which so well became his fine, imperious features."

"As Canning refused to walk behind him, Byron went home," is Hobhouse's
laconic report of the incident; but when a letter from the Ambassador
followed him, he apologised. His fancy dress, it had seemed to him, was
quite as becoming as other people's uniforms; he had honestly supposed
himself to be standing out for the legitimate rights of a peer of the
realm. As this was not so--as the Austrian Internuncio had been consulted
and had said that it was not so--then he would be glad to join the
procession as a simple individual, and humbly to follow his Excellency and
"his ox or his ass or anything that was his." Whether that was a subtle
way of calling Stratford Canning an ass does not appear; but the
transaction was a characteristic exhibition of the neck-or-nothing
audacity of Byron's undisciplined youth. He figures, at this date, as a
Lord among adventurers and an adventurer among Lords.

Stratford Canning saw him in the latter and John Galt in the former light.
At a dinner-party at which they were both present, "he seemed inclined,"
says Galt, "to exact a deference to his dogmas that was more lordly than
philosophical"; and he continues:

    "It was too evident ... that without intending wrong, or any offence,
    the unchecked humour of his temper was, by its caprices, calculated to
    prevent him from ever gaining that regard to which his talents and
    freer moods, independently of his rank, ought to have entitled him.
    Such men become objects of solicitude, but never of esteem."

The fair inference seems to be that Byron had let Galt perceive the great
gulf fixed between peers of the realm and commercial travellers. It was
the sort of thing that he would do when in a bad temper, though not when
in a good one. Galt, however, not only submitted to the snub, but
accounted for it like a philosopher. Byron, he says, was in trouble at
this time, not about his soul, but about his remittances; and "the false
dignity he assumed" was really "the apprehension of a person of his rank
being exposed to require assistance among strangers." One can certainly
find support for the supposition in his urgent letters home.

In due course, however, the remittances turned up, and Byron recovered his
affability and resumed his journey. Hobhouse left him and returned alone.
"Took leave," he notes in his Diary, "_non sine lacrymis_, of this
singular young person, on a little stone terrace at the end of the bay,
dividing with him a little nosegay of flowers." There had been some
coolness between them, and this was the sentimental renewal of their
friendship. A return visit to Athens was the next stage, but there does
not appear to have been any resumption of the old relations with the Maid
of Athens. On the contrary, it was on this second visit to Athens that
Lady Hester Stanhope discovered the poet "fighting the police for a woman
of the town."

At Athens, too, Byron met his old Cambridge acquaintance, Lord Sligo, from
whom we obtain, through Moore, some further glimpses at his manner of life
and characteristic affectations. He was once more, it seems, constrained
to combat the flesh by means of self-denying ordinances, and, to that end,
took three Turkish baths a week, and confined himself to a diet of rice
and vinegar and water. This system, and a fever contracted at Patras, made
him very pale; and he felt that to be pale was to be interesting.

    "Standing one day before a looking glass," Moore tells us, "he said to
    Lord Sligo:

    "'How pale I look! I should like, I think, to die of a consumption!'

    "'Why of a consumption?' asked his friend.

    "'Because then,' he answered, 'all the women would say, "See that poor
    Byron--how interesting he looks in dying!"'"

But that is another of the stories which throw at least as much light on
the reporter as on the reported. Lord Sligo, no doubt, was the sort of
healthy, wooden-headed young Philistine on whom it is a joy to test the
effect of such remarks. Byron, in thus posing for him, was, so to say,
"trying it on the dog." There is no such foolishness in his correspondence
with those whom he regarded as his intellectual equals, and one cannot
conclude the account of his travels better than by quoting his summary of
their moral effect contained in a letter to Hodgson:

    "I hope you will find me an altered personage--I do not mean in body
    but in manner, for I begin to find out that nothing but virtue will do
    in this damned world. I am tolerably sick of vice, which I have tried
    in its agreeable varieties, and mean, on my return, to cut all my
    dissolute acquaintance, leave off wine and carnal company, and betake
    myself to politics and decorum."

To what extent, and within what limits, he carried out these good
resolutions, we shall observe as we proceed.




CHAPTER IX

RETURN TO ENGLAND--PUBLICATION OF "CHILDE HAROLD"


July 1811 saw Byron back in England after two years' absence, but in no
hurry, for various reasons, to return to Newstead. The "venerable pile"
had been desecrated by the invasion of bailiffs in connection with an
unpaid upholsterer's bill; and Mrs. Byron was living there, and was, as
usual, quarrelling with her neighbours. Byron, in one of his letters from
the Levant, tells her that she cannot deny that she is a "vixen," and
suggests that she is in the habit of drinking more champagne than is good
for her. It was only to be expected that she would rattle the fire-irons,
and throw the tongs, as furiously as ever--even if a little less
accurately--under the stimulating influence. He lingered, therefore, at
Reddish's Hotel, Saint James's Street; and it was there that the news of
her sudden illness--the result, it is said, of shock caused by the
magnitude of the afore-mentioned upholsterer's bill--surprised him. He
hurried to her, but the news of her death met him on his way.

He had not loved her. We have passed many proofs of that, and many others
could be given. She had taunted him with his deformity, and he
believed--so he told Lord Sligo--that he owed it to her "false delicacy"
at his birth. She had not understood him, and he had fled before her
violence. Unable to love her, he had missed a precious emotion to which he
felt himself entitled--that may be one of the secrets of his persistent
view of himself as a lonely man, without a friend in a lonely world. If he
was shaken by the sudden sundering of the tie, it would have been too much
to expect him to be prostrated by his grief, or to do more than pay his
brief tribute to the solemnity of death, remembering that there had been
signs of tenderness in the midst of, or in the intervals between, the
storms of passion.

"Oh, Mrs. By," he exclaimed to his mother's maid. "I had but one friend in
the world, and she is gone"; but he always said that of every friend who
died--of Skinner Matthews who was drowned in the Cam; of John Wingfield
who was drowned off Coimbra; and of Eddleston, the choir boy, whom he had
admitted to his intimacy at Cambridge. He said it quite sincerely, giving
emotion its hour, and then let his thoughts flow in other directions. On
the day of Mrs. Byron's funeral he told his servant to fetch the gloves
and spar with him; and the boy thought that he hit harder than usual. Then
he threw down the gloves and left the room without a word, with the air of
a man disgusted with himself for trying to kill devils like that; and
presently he was in the thick of his preparations for the production of
"Childe Harold."

He had brought the manuscript of "Childe Harold" home with him, together
with the manuscript of "Hints from Horace." He believed "Hints from
Horace" to be much the greater work of the two; and his reasons for
thinking so are easy to understand. "Hints from Horace" was a satire based
on the best models, and composed on conventional lines. It could be
compared with the models, and judged and "marked," like a schoolboy's
theme. "Childe Harold" was an experiment. It expressed a personality--the
personality of a very young man who was not yet quite sure of himself and,
except when his temper was up, was afraid of being laughed at.
Hobhouse--that candid, trusty, matter-of-fact friend--had seen it, and had
criticised it pretty much in the spirit in which Mark Twain's jumping frog
was criticised. He had failed to see any points in that poem different
from any other poem. Byron, consequently, was sensitive and timorous about
it. "Childe Harold," he felt, like "Hours of Idleness," would put him on
his defence, whereas in "Hints from Horace," as in "English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers," he would have the advantage of attacking. He needed the
encouragement of flattery.

One Dallas, a distant relative who now introduced himself and, for a
season, doubled the parts, as it were, of literary mentor and literary
valet, supplied the flattery, recognising that, whereas "Hints from
Horace" was just a satire like another, "Childe Harold" was the expression
of a new sentiment, hitherto unheard in English literature. "Hints from
Horace," he thought, might be published, if the author wished it--it did
not much matter one way or the other; but "Childe Harold" must be
published. It was interesting; it was romantic; it would please. It was
not merely a narrative, but a manifesto. It ignored conventions, lifted a
mask, and revealed a man--a new and unsuspected type of man--beneath it.

So Dallas spoke and wrote; and Byron let himself be persuaded. He yielded,
at first, with reluctance--or perhaps it was only with a pretence of
reluctance; but, after he had yielded, he entered into the spirit of the
situation. He would not only publish, but he would publish with _éclat_.
If he could not command success, he would deserve it, and would be careful
not to throw away a chance. He would not be contented with a publisher who
merely printed a few copies of the poem, pushed them outside the
back-door, and waited to see what would happen. The minds of men--and
women--should be duly prepared for the sensation in store for them.
Whatever the mountain might be destined to bring forth, at least it should
be visibly in labour. Publication should be preluded by a noise as of the
rolling of logs.

The money did not matter. The "magnificent man"--and there was a good deal
of Aristotle's "magnificent man" about Byron at this period--could not
soil his hands by taking money for a poem even for the purpose of
discharging his debt to the upholsterers whose bills were frightening
his mother out of her life. Perish the mean thought! If there was money in
the poem, Dallas might have it for himself. All that the author wanted was
glory--a "boom," as we vulgar moderns say--and that arresting noise
already referred to, as of the rolling of logs. Dallas must see to that to
the best of his ability, and he himself would lend a hand. Above all,
there must be no hole-and-corner publishing. Cawthorne must on no account
have the book--his status was not good enough. Miller was the man, and,
failing Miller, Murray. On the whole it was to Murray that it would be
best to go. Murray was the coming man--one could divine him as the
publisher of the future, and he had, on his side divined Byron as the poet
of the future, and expressed a wish to "handle" some of his work.

So Dallas went to Murray, and got five hundred guineas for the copyright;
and then the sound of the rolling of the logs began. Galt heard it. Galt,
being himself a man of letters as well as a commercial traveller, knew
what it was that he heard. Galt, who was now back in London, tells us that
"various surmises to stimulate curiosity were circulated," and he
continues:

    "I do not say that these were by his orders or under his directions,
    but on one occasion I did fancy that I could discern a touch of his
    own hand in a paragraph in the _Morning Post_, in which he was
    mentioned as having returned from an excursion into the interior of
    Africa; and when I alluded to it, my suspicion was confirmed by his
    embarrassment."

That is quite modern--one often reads similar paragraphs nowadays
concerning the visits of novelists to the Engadine, or to Khartoum; and if
Byron did not go quite so far as to speak publicly of his forthcoming work
as "a colossal undertaking," he managed, without saying so, to convey the
impression that that was what it was. He also contrived to have the proofs
shown, as a great privilege, to the right people, and was careful to let
the critics have advance copies with a view to notice on the day of
publication. Dallas himself reviewed it before the day of publication, and
was excused on the ground that his indiscretion had proved "a good
advertisement." The privileged women--Lady Caroline Lamb was among
them--enchanted by the sentiment of the poem, boasted to the women who
were not so privileged, and besought an introduction to the poet. "I must
see him. I am dying to see him," was Lady Caroline's exclamation to
Rogers. "He bites his nails," Rogers maliciously warned her; but she
persisted as vehemently as ever.

She was to see him presently, in circumstances and with consequences which
we shall have to note. In the meantime many striking stories concerning
him were floating about for her to hear. She heard, for instance--or one
may suppose her to have heard--of that dinner-party at Rogers' house at
which Byron distinguished himself by his abstemiousness, refused soup, and
fish, and mutton, and wine, asked for hard biscuits and soda-water, and,
when Rogers confessed himself unable to provide these delicacies, "dined
upon potatoes bruised down upon his plate and drenched with vinegar." Let
us hope that she never heard the end of the story which proceeds, in
"Table Talk of Samuel Rogers": "I did not then know, what I now know to be
a fact, that Byron, after leaving my house, had gone to a Club in Saint
James's Street and eaten a hearty meat-supper." And, of course, her
interest, like the interest of the rest of the world, was stimulated by
Byron's maiden speech in the House of Lords.

Galt says quite bluntly that "there was a degree of worldly management in
making his first appearance in the House of Lords so immediately preceding
the publication of his poem." Most probably there was. When so many logs
were rolling, this particular log was hardly likely to be left unrolled;
and there is no denying that the note of self-advertisement does sound in
the speech quite as loudly as the note of sympathy with the common
people--those Nottingham rioters and frame-breakers for whose suppression
it was proposed to legislate.

Viewed as a contribution to the debate, the speech does more credit to the
speaker's heart than to his head. The appeal for pity for misguided,
labouring men is mixed up with a denunciation of labour-saving appliances
as devices for the further impoverishment of the poor. An economist might
say a good deal about that if this were the place for saying it. Byron,
such a one would point out, was a Radical by instinct, but a Radical who
had as yet but an imperfect comprehension of the natural laws most
favourable to the production, distribution, and exchange of wealth. But
let that pass. The most resounding note of the speech is, after all, the
note of the new man presenting himself, and explaining who he is, and what
he has done:

    "I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsular, I have been in
    some of the most oppressed provinces in Turkey; but never under the
    most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid
    wretchedness," &c. &c. &c.

That, in the days in which travel was really travel, involving adventure
and bestowing unique experience, was the sort of utterance to draw
attention. Byron had actually been to the places which other people only
talked and read about; and he was no bronzed, maimed, or wrinkled veteran,
but a youth with curling hair, a marble brow, a pallid face, a godlike
aspect. What havoc must he not have wrought in harems, and in the hearts
of odalisques! He was so young, so handsome, so clever--and, according to
his own account, so wicked. And he had written a poem, it appeared--a poem
as wicked and beautiful as himself, explaining, with all kinds of
delightful details, the shocking courses into which he had been driven by
disappointed love. However much poetry one left unread, one must read that
poem, and read it at once, in order to show that one was "in the
movement."

So the women argued. It did not matter to them that Byron lacked the
graces of the natural orator, and declaimed his sentiments in a monotonous
sing-song tone, like a public schoolboy on a speech-day. It mattered still
less to them whether his economics were sound or shaky. Sympathy, not
argument, was what they wanted, and the sympathy was there. Byron would be
some one to lionise--some one, it might be, to love--some one, at any
rate, whom every woman must try to understand. And the first step towards
understanding him must be to read his book.

They read it, and made the men read it too. It was recognised, as such
things come to be recognised, that any one who had not read it would be
liable to feel foolish wherever the "best" people were gathered together.
The first edition, issued on March 10, 1812, was sold out in three days.
There was a second edition in April, a third in June, a fourth in
September, a fifth in December, a sixth in August 1813, a seventh in
February 1814. By 1819, an eleventh edition had been reached; and the
subsequent editions would require a professional statistician to count
them. Byron, in short, had not only, as he said, "woke up one morning and
found himself famous"; his fame had proved to have enduring qualities.

The suddenness of the fame, as we have seen, was not solely the result
either of accident or of merit. Author, publisher, and literary agent--for
Dallas may fairly be ranked with the pioneers of the last-named
profession--had planned and plotted for it. It may even be questioned
whether such supreme success was quite deserved; and it would be easy to
cite examples of much greater work--some of Wordsworth's, for
example--which was far less successful. But that the enthusiasm was
natural--and indeed almost inevitable--cannot be disputed.

The title helped, as Byron himself recognised with cheerful cynicism.
Lords, of course, had tried their hands at poetry before, but never with
much success, whether they were good lords or wicked. Their compositions
had amounted to little more than ingenious exercises in rhyme. Either they
had failed to put their personalities into their poems or they had had no
personalities worth speaking of to put into them. One could say that, with
varying degrees of truth, of Rochester, Roscommon, Sheffield, and
Carlisle. To find a lord whose poems could be taken seriously one had to
go back to the Elizabethan ages; and modern readers--especially the women
among them--were not very fond of going back so far. To get real poetry,
with a real personality behind it, from a lord was "phenomenal," like
getting figs from thistles--a thing to stand still and take note of.

Note, therefore, was taken--the more carefully, perhaps, because Byron
was, as it were, an unknown lord, born and brought up in exile, coming
into society with something of the air of one who had to break down
barriers in order to claim his birthright. His poem was, in a manner, his
weapon of assault; and, whatever else might be said about it, it was, in
no case mere exercise in metrical composition. It was the manifesto of a
new personality.

An immature personality, no doubt--in these two cantos of "Childe Harold"
the essential Byron is not yet revealed. A personality, too, it might be,
with a good deal of paste board theatricality about it--sincerity and
clarity of insight were later Byronic developments. But that did not
matter--least of all did it matter to the women. Melodrama is often more
instantaneously effective than drama; and "twopence coloured" has obvious
immediate advantages over "penny plain." The pose might be apparent, but
it was not ridiculous--or, at all events, it did not strike people as
being so; and the power of posing without making himself ridiculous is one
of the tests of a man's value. Moreover no pose which makes an impression
is ever entirely insincere. The great posturer must put a good deal of
himself into his postures, just as the great painter puts a good deal of
himself into his pictures. Matter-of-fact persons like Hobhouse might not
think so; but women, with their surer instinct, know better. Hobhouse,
glancing at the manuscript of "Childe Harold," might say, with perfect
candour, that he saw no points in that poem different from any other poem;
but to the women it was, and was bound to be, a revelation.

A revelation, too, of just such a personality as the women liked to think
that they understood--and with just such gaps in the revelation as they
liked to be puzzled by! One may almost say that the hearts of Englishwomen
went out with a rush to Byron for the same reason for which the
hearts of the Frenchwomen, two generations earlier, had gone out to
Rousseau--because he gave them sentiment in place of gallantry. He had, in
fact, given them both; but the note of sentiment predominated; and it was
easy to believe that the sentiment was sincere, and the gallantry merely
the consoling pastime of the stricken heart.

The women took that view, as they were bound to, agreeing that Byron was
the most interesting man of their age and generation. He certainly was
infinitely more interesting, from their point of view, than Rousseau. He
was younger, better born, and better looking, with more distinguished
manners--one of themselves and not, like Jean-Jacques, a promoted lackey.
So, in a day and a night, they made him famous, and ensured that, whatever
else his career might be, it should be spectacular. The world, in short,
was placed, in a sudden instant, at his feet. It was open to him to stand
with his foot on its neck, striking attitudes--to step at a stride into a
notable position in public life, or to ride, in his own way, with his own
haste, to the devil.

Or, at all events, it seemed open to him to make this choice, though the
actual course of his life in the presence of the apparent choice, might
well be cited as an object lesson in the distinction which the
philosophers have drawn between the freedom to do as we will, and the
freedom to will as we will. Which is to say that the spectacular life, in
his case as in so many others, was to be at the mercy of the inner life,
and the things seen in it were largely to be the effect of causes which
were out of sight.

It is to that inner life, and to those invisible causes of visible effects
that we must now turn back.




CHAPTER X

THE SECRET ORCHARD


The invisible force which was beginning to influence Byron's life, and was
presently to deflect it, was a revival of his recollections of Mary
Chaworth. He nowhere tells us so, nor do his biographers on his behalf,
but the fact is none the less quite certain. The proofs abound, though the
name is never mentioned in them; and Mr. Richard Edgecumbe has marshalled
them[6] with conclusive force. The course which Byron's life followed--the
things which he willed and did, as well as the things he said--can only be
explained if Mary Chaworth is once more brought into the story.

She is, it must be admitted, one of the most shadowy and elusive of all
heroines of romance. We have hardly a scrap of her handwriting--hardly a
definite report about her from any contemporary witness. She is said to
have been disposed to flirt before her marriage, but to have been serious
and well-conducted afterwards. It is known that her husband was unkind to
her and that she was unhappy with him; there are statements that she was
"religious"; but most of the other evidence is negative, leaving the
impression that she was commonplace. The secret of her charm, that is to
say, is lost; and we can only guess at it--each of us guessing differently
because something of ourselves has to go to the framing of the guesses.

Assuredly there is no inference unfavourable to her charm to be drawn from
the fact that she passed through the world without cutting a figure in it.
The women who dazzle the world are rarely the women for whose love men
count the world well lost. It has been written that a man could no more
fall in love with Mrs. Siddons than with the Pyramid of Cheops. Men have
also refrained, as a rule, from falling in love with the brilliant women
of the _salons_--with Madame du Deffand, for instance, and Madame Necker,
and Lady Blessington, and Lady Holland. The qualities of a hostess, they
have felt, are different from those of a mistress. Such women can dominate
the crowd, wearing their tiaras like queens, in the garish light of
fashionable assemblies; but, in the twilight of the secret orchard, their
empire crumbles to the dust. It is not given to them to make any man feel
that the limitations of time and space have ceased and that the whole of
life is concentrated in the life lived here and now. The women who possess
that power are the women who seem insignificant to the men to whom they
have not revealed themselves.

Mary Chaworth possessed that power, and so left no mark anywhere in life
except on Byron's heart. She was quite undistinguished, and seemingly
conventional--the last woman in the world to be likely to throw her bonnet
over the windmill; but she had this subtle, indefinable, and inexplicable
secret. She had had it even in the irresponsible days when she flirted
with the fat boy, but failed to divine his genius, and preferred the
hard-riding and hard-drinking squire. She retained it when the fox-hunting
squire had shown the coarseness of his fibre, and the fat boy was a man
whose genius had proved itself. Every meeting, therefore, was bound to
bring a renewal of the spell, even though, in the intervals between the
meetings, Byron could forget.

We have it, on Byron's authority, that there were certain "stolen
meetings." It has been assumed that these were prior to Mary Chaworth's
marriage; but that is hardly credible. There was no need for stolen
meetings then; for everything was frank and open. They must have taken
place, if at all--and there is no reason to doubt that they did take
place--subsequently to the marriage: subsequently to that dinner-party at
which Byron and Mary met, and were embarrassed, and did not know what to
say to each other. Perhaps, since Mary was a woman whose instinct it was
to walk in the straight path, there was no conscious and deliberate
secrecy. The more likely assumption, indeed, is that they contrived to
meet by accident, and then thought it better, without any definite
exchange of promises, not to mention that they had met. However that may
be, the spell continued, and Mary kept the key of the secret orchard. Her
spirit was certain to revisit it, even if she herself did not.

Then came the long Eastern pilgrimage. The feeling that this sort of thing
could not go on indefinitely may very well have been one of the motives
for it; and Byron, of course, was quite young enough to forget, and a
great deal too young to let past memories divert his mind from present
pleasures. He did forget--or very nearly so; he did divert himself as
opportunity occurred. He enjoyed his battle with the police for a woman of
the town; he enjoyed his passion for a married woman. There is no reason
whatever to suppose that he was really thinking of Mary Chaworth when he
wrote verses to the Maid of Athens, or when he gave the most precious of
his rings to Mrs. Spencer Smith. But the secret orchard always remained;
the spirit of the old tenant might at any time return to it. Such spirits
always do return whenever life suddenly, for whatever reason, seems a
blank.

It was, in this instance, death--a rapid series of deaths--that brought it
back. Byron's mother died, in circumstances for which, as we have seen, he
had some reason to reproach himself. His choirboy friend Eddleston pined
away from consumption. Charles Skinner Matthews was drowned in the
Cam--entangled in the river weeds and sucked under. Wingfield was drowned
on his way to the war in Spain. The news of these four deaths came almost
simultaneously, and the shock broke down Byron's high spirits. His
letters are very heartbroken and eloquent.

"Some curse," he wrote to Scrope Davies, the gamester, "hangs over me and
mine.... Come to me, Scrope; I am almost desolate--left almost alone in
the world." "At three-and-twenty," he wrote to Dallas, "I am left alone,
and what more can we be at seventy? It is true I am young enough to begin
again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of my life?" To
Dallas, too, he wrote a certain morbid letter about the four skulls which
lay on his study table, and in another letter to Hodgson he says:

    "The blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from
    the shock; and though I do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at
    times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every
    morning convince me mournfully to the contrary. I shall now waive the
    subject, the dead are at rest, and none but the dead can be so.... I
    am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before."

The consolations which Hodgson offered him in his distress were those of
religion. He wrote him long letters concerning the immortality of the
soul; letters which caused Byron, years afterwards, to remark, when his
friend had taken orders, that Hodgson was always pious, "even when he was
kept by a washerwoman"--and was shocked by his blasphemous reply that he
did not believe in immortality and did not desire it. He appealed to
Byron--"for God's sake"--to pull himself together and read Paley's
"Evidences of Christianity." He had a great respect for Paley as a Senior
Wrangler and entertained no doubt that his conclusions followed from his
premisses. A little later, he and Harness,[7] one of Byron's Harrow
protégés, who was then at Cambridge, reading for his degree, went down to
Newstead to stay with Byron.

There were no orgies there this time. No "Paphian girls" were introduced;
no practical jokes were played; the cook and the housemaid remained in the
servants' quarters. "Nothing," says Harness, "could have been more orderly
than the course of our days"--which was right and proper seeing that both
he and Hodgson were shortly going to be ordained. If the trio sat up late,
it was only to talk about literature and religion. Hodgson pressed
orthodox views on Byron with "judicious zeal and affectionate
earnestness." Harness supported him with the diffidence appropriate to his
tender years. Byron maintained his own point of view, while thinking of
other things.

Chiefly he thought of the ghost which now revisited his secret orchard,
telling himself that it was not the ghost but the real woman which should
have been there. With Mary Chaworth alone he had known the sensation that
nothing else mattered while he and she were together. Now that so many
deaths had made a solitude in his heart he sorely needed the renewal of
that feeling. She could have vouchsafed it to him; she both could and
should. Why then, was she not at Annesley, waiting for him, granting more
stolen interviews, proving that she still cared, affording him that escape
from life to ecstasy?

That was the drift of Byron's thoughts at the time when Hodgson was trying
to direct his attention to Paley's "Evidences." He saw, as youth is apt to
do, more possibilities of comfort in love than in theology--a fact which
is the less to be wondered at seeing that the theology in which he had
been brought up was of the uncomfortable Calvinistic kind; and though he
was the victim of a mood rather than of a passion--for passion needed the
stimulus of sight and touch--the mood had to be expressed, and perhaps
worked off, in verse. It burst into "Childe Harold":

    "_Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!
    Whom Youth and Youth's affections bound to me;
    Who did for me what none beside have done,
    Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee.
    What is my Being! thou has ceased to be!
    Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,
    Who mourns o'er hours which we no more shall see--
    Would they had never been, or were to come!
  Would he had ne'er returned to find fresh cause to roam._

    "_Oh, ever loving, lovely, and beloved!
    How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past.
    And clings to thoughts now better far removed!
    But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last.
    All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death, thou hast;
    The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend,
    Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,
    And grief with grief continuing still to blend,
  Hath snatched the little joy that Life hath yet to lend._"

These stanzas, with three others, were sent to Dallas after "Childe
Harold" was in the press, together with a letter which must have mystified
him though, as a "poor relation," he would not well ask impertinent
questions; a letter to the effect that Byron has "supped full of horrors"
and "become callous" and "has not a tear left." The "Thyrza" sequence of
poems belongs to the same period--almost to the same day. They have
puzzled many generations of editors and commentators because "Thyrza" is
addressed in them as one who is dead, and because, though Byron spoke of
Thyrza to his friends as a real person and showed a lock of her hair, no
trace of any woman answering to her description can be discovered in any
chronicle of his life.

The explanation is that Thyrza was not really dead, though Byron chose so
to write of her. Thyrza was Mary Chaworth who was dead to Byron in the
sense that she had passed out of his life, as he had every reason to think
(though he thought wrongly) for ever. The poems expressed, according to
Moore, "the essence, the abstract spirit, as it were, of many griefs,"
with which was mingled the memory of her who "though living was for him as
much lost as" any of the dead friends for whom he mourned. They expressed,
in fact, his despair at finding the secret orchard tenanted only by a
ghost; and if we read the poems by the light of that clue, we can get a
clear meaning out of every line.

They are too long to be quoted. Readers must refer to them and judge. The
note is the note of bitter despair, working up, at the end, into the note
of recklessness. The contrast is there--that contrast as old as the
world--between the things that are and the things that might, and should,
have been; and then there follows the declaration that, as things are what
they are, and as their consequences will be what they will be, there is
nothing for it but to plunge into pleasure, albeit with the full knowledge
that pleasure cannot please:

  "_One struggle more, and I am free
    From pangs that rend my heart in twain;
  One last long sigh to Love and thee,
    Then back to busy life again.
  It suits me well to mingle now
    With things that never pleased before:
  Though every joy is fled below,
    What future grief can touch me more?_

  "_Then bring me wine, the banquet bring;
    Man was not formed to live alone:
  I'll be that light unmeaning thing
    That smiles with all, and weeps with none.
  It was not thus in days more dear,
    It never would have been, but thou
  Hast fled, and left me lonely here;
    Thou'rt nothing,--all are nothing now._"

The so-called Byronic pose challenges us in that passage; but it is by no
means as a pose that it must be dismissed. The men who seem to pose are
very often just the men who have the courage--or the bravado, if any one
prefers the word--to be sincere; and Byron, if he is to be rightly
understood, must be thought of as the most sincere man who ever struck an
attitude. That was the secret of his strength. Pose was for him just what
Aristotle, as interpreted by Professor Bywater, says that the spectacle of
tragedy is to the mass of the spectators. It purged him, for the time
being, of his emotions by indulging them. The pose, having done its work,
ceased until the emotions recurred, and then he posed again. Hence the
many differences of opinion among his friends as to whether he posed or
not.

Just now he was posing, in all sincerity, not only to himself but to
Hodgson. At one time he told Hodgson that, as soon as he had set his
affairs in order, he should "leave England for ever." At another he sent
him an "Epistle to a Friend in Answer to some Lines exhorting the Author
to be cheerful and to 'banish Care.'" Hodgson sent them to Moore for
publication in his Life, requesting that the concluding lines should not
be printed; but Moore disregarded the request. The Epistle ended thus:

  "_But let this pass--I'll whine no more.
  Nor seek again an Eastern shore;
  The world befits a busy brain,--
  I'll hie me to its haunts again.
  But if, in some succeeding year,
  When Britain's "May is in the sere,"
  Thou hear'st of one, whose deepening crimes
  Suit with the sablest of the times,
  Of one, whom love nor pity sways,
  Nor hope of fame, nor good men's praise;
  One, who in stern Ambition's pride,
  Perchance not blood shall turn aside:
  One ranked in some recording page
  With the worst anarchs of the age,
  Him wilt thou_ know,--_and_ knowing _pause,
  Nor with the effect forget the cause._"

The allusion here, as Hodgson's biographer discerns, is to "his early
disappointment in love as the source of all his subsequent sorrow."
Hodgson's own comment, scrawled in the margin of the manuscript is:
"N.B.--The poor dear soul meant nothing of all this."

He meant it--and yet he did not mean it. It was the emphasised and
exaggerated expression of what he meant--momentarily emphasised for the
purpose, whether conscious or unconscious, of relieving himself from the
black mood which had descended on him. The relief was gained--though it
was not to be permanent. He did not "leave England for ever"--not
yet--but hied him to the haunts of the world as he had promised. He
plunged into pleasure--and found pleasure more pleasant than he had
imagined that it could be.

That was inevitable. He was only twenty-four, and he was famous; and "to
be famous when one is young--that is the dream of the gods." Moreover, he
was achieving just that sort of fame which is attended by the most
intoxicating joy. The fame of the man of science is nothing--the world
interests itself in his discovery but not in him. The fame of a statesman
is hardly sweeter--it is only won by fighting and working hard and making
jealous enemies. The fame of a poet--a poet who is also _the_ poet--brings
instantaneously the applause of men and the wonder and homage of women.
They do not separate the man from his work, but insist on associating him
with it. Beautiful women as well as blue-stockings--and with less critical
discrimination than blue-stockings--prostrate and abase themselves before
him, competing for the sunshine of his smiles, believing, or affecting to
believe, that his and theirs are kindred souls.

So it befell Byron. Born in exile, he had at last returned from exile in a
blaze of triumph. All the doors of all the best houses were thrown open to
him with a blare of trumpets. He entered them, not as a parvenu, like
Moore the Irish grocer's son, but as the one man without whose presence
the festival would have been incomplete. No man, if one might judge by
externals, had ever a better chance of making a splendid and noble pageant
of his life. So far as an observer could judge--so far probably as he
himself knew--the ghosts of the past were laid, and its memories in a fair
way of being effaced. If the past had not come back to him, he might have
forgotten it. The tragedy of his life was that it did come back--that he
did meet Mary Chaworth again and rediscover the secret orchard which,
while she was absent from it, was a howling wilderness, overgrown with
weeds.

But not quite immediately. There were certain other things which had to
happen first.




CHAPTER XI

LADY CAROLINE LAMB


The record of Byron's social triumphs may be outlined in a few sentences.

Without quite losing sight of such old friends as Hodgson and Harness, he
moved, with the air of a social conqueror in three new sets, which may be
regarded as distinct, though there were points at which they touched each
other. Among men of letters his chief friends were Samuel Rogers, the
banker poet, then a man verging on fifty, whose superlative dinner we have
seen him refusing to eat, and Thomas Moore, who had made his acquaintance
by demanding satisfaction for an alleged affront in "English Bards," which
Byron had explained away. At the same time he "got on very well," as he
tells us, with Beau Brummell and the other dandies, being one of the three
men of letters who were admitted to Watiers, and was lionised in the
society which we should nowadays describe as "smart."

It has been written that the roadway opposite to his apartments was
blocked by liveried footmen conveying perfumed notes. That, we may take
it, is a picturesque exaggeration; but, no doubt, he received more
invitations than the laws of time and space allowed him to accept--most
of them, though by no means all of them, to the great Whig houses. Lady
Westmorland, Lady Jersey, Lady Holland, and Lady Melbourne were the most
fashionable of the hostesses who competed for the privilege of his
company; and Lady Melbourne had a daughter-in-law--Lady Caroline Lamb. She
also had a niece--Miss Anna Isabella Milbanke; but it is of Lady Caroline
Lamb that we must speak first.

Lady Caroline was three years older than Byron. She was the daughter of
the third Earl of Bessborough, and the wife of William Lamb, who, as Lord
Melbourne, afterwards became Prime Minister of England. It was a matter of
opinion whether she was beautiful; it was also a matter of opinion whether
she was sane--doctors consulted on that branch of the subject had returned
doubtful, non-committal answers. She was not exactly mad, they said, but
she was of a temperament allied to madness. She must not be pressed to
study, but must be allowed to run wild and do as she liked.

She had run wild, for years, reading the works of Burns, which are not
written for the young, and galloping about parks on bare-backed steeds,
imagining the world about her instead of realising it, and, of course,
imagining it wrong. It is on record that she believed that
bread-and-butter was a natural product and that horses were fed on beef;
also that she divided the community into two classes--dukes and
beggars--and supposed that the former would always, by some law of
nature, remain wealthy, whatever they did with their money. Her charm--and
she could be very charming when she liked--was that of a high-spirited,
irresponsible, wilful, wayward child. She was, in short, the kind of girl
whom those who loved her best would describe, in the vernacular, as "a
handful."

[Illustration: _Lady Caroline Lamb._]

"Of all the Devonshire House girls," William Lamb had said, "that is the
one for me." That was when she was thirteen; and six years later he was
still of the same opinion. He was confirmed in it when she refused his
offer of marriage, proposing instead to run away with him in boy's clothes
and act as his secretary. He accepted neither his dismissal nor her
alternative suggestion, but persevered in his suit until he was accepted.
The next thing that happened was that Lady Caroline broke into railing
accusations against the bishop who performed the marriage rites, tore her
wedding dress to tatters, and had to be carried to her carriage in a
fainting fit. It was not a very auspicious commencement of married life,
but one which prepares us for the general reflections on marriage found in
her husband's common-place book, recently edited by Mr. Lloyd Sanders:

    "The general reason against marriage is that two minds, however
    congenial they may be, or however submissive the one may be to the
    other, can never act like one. It is the nature of human beings that
    no man can be free or independent...."

    "... By marriage you place yourself on the defensive instead of the
    offensive in society...."

    "Every man will find his own private affairs more difficult to control
    than any public affairs on which he may be engaged...."

William Lamb's experience of married life was to be, as it were, an object
lesson on those texts. At one moment Lady Caroline was to overwhelm him
with doting affection; at the next to make him ridiculous. Sometimes the
two moods followed each other as quickly as the thunder follows the
lightning, as in the case of a scene of which the Kembles were involuntary
witnesses when staying in the same hotel with the Lambs in Paris.

Husband and wife had quarrelled in their presence, and had then withdrawn
to their apartment which faced the rooms which the Kembles occupied. The
lamps were lighted, and the blinds were not drawn, so that the Kembles
looked across the courtyard and saw what happened. William Lamb was in his
arm-chair. Lady Caroline first sat on his knee, and then slid to his feet,
looking up into his face with great humility. This for a few moments. Then
something that William Lamb said once more disturbed Lady Caroline's
equanimity. In an instant she was on her feet, running round the room,
pursued by her husband, sweeping mirrors, candlesticks, and crockery on to
the floor, in a veritable whirlwind of passion; whereupon William Lamb
drew the blind and the Kembles saw no more.

That story may serve as a symbolic epitome of William Lamb's married life.
We shall come to many stories of the same kind as we proceed. Lady
Caroline was a creature of impulse, and there was nearly always a man in
the case. She easily persuaded herself that any man who was polite to her
was in love with her--both Moore and Rogers were among the victims of whom
she boasted--and she would not allow the contrary to be suggested.
Moreover, besides being self-willed in matters of the heart, she liked to
_afficher_ herself with every man for whom she felt a preference, and to
declare the state of her affections to the world with the insistent
emphasis with which the sensational virtues of soaps and sauces are set
forth on the hoardings.

Whether she deliberately sought notoriety, or merely did what she chose to
do without fear of it, remains, to this hour, an open question. All that
is certain is that she did, in fact, make herself very notorious indeed,
and that there was more scandal than subtlety in her attempts to
monopolise Byron, to whose heart she laid siege, with all the audacity of
a stage adventuress, in the presence of a large, amused, and interested
audience.

It was Lady Westmorland who introduced them. She did not introduce Byron
to Lady Caroline, but Lady Caroline to Byron. Already, only a few days
after the appearance of "Childe Harold," he was on his pedestal, and was
not expected to descend from it, even to show deference to ladies. "He
has a club-foot and bites his nails," Rogers had told her. "If he is as
ugly as Æsop I must know him," she had answered. But now that she was
brought to him, she shrank from him, whether because she was afraid, or
because she wished to provoke and pique him. "I looked earnestly at him,"
she told Lady Morgan, "and turned on my heel"; and she went home and wrote
in her diary the impression that Byron was "mad, bad, and dangerous to
know."

That was the first scene in the comedy. The second took place at Holland
House, and the third at Melbourne House. Lady Caroline's recollections of
them were recorded in Lady Morgan's reminiscences:

    "I was sitting with Lord and Lady Holland when he was announced. Lady
    Holland said, 'I must present Lord Byron to you.' Lord Byron said,
    'That offer was made to you before; may I ask why you rejected it?' He
    begged permission to come and see me. He did so the next day. Rogers
    and Moore were standing by me: I had just come in from riding. I was
    filthy and heated. When Lord Byron was announced, I flew out of the
    room to wash myself. When I returned, Rogers said, 'Lord Byron, you
    are a happy man. Lady Caroline has been sitting here in all her dirt
    with us, but when you were announced, she flew to beautify herself.'
    Lord Byron wished to come and see me at eight o'clock, when I was
    alone. I said he might."

He did; and "from that moment for more than nine months he almost lived at
Melbourne House." The rest, in Lady Caroline's opinion--at all events in
one of her opinions, expressed in an angry letter--was all William Lamb's
fault.

    "He cared nothing for my morals," she remarks. "I might flirt and go
    about with what men I pleased. He was privy to my affair with Lord
    Byron and laughed at it. His indolence renders him insensible to
    everything. When I ride, play, and amuse him, he loves me. In sickness
    and suffering he deserts me."

That protest, however, is wholly unjust, and only partly true. A married
woman who has no sooner met a man than she arranges to dine _tête-à-tête_
with him is hardly entitled to ascribe her flirtation to her husband's
contributory negligence. Lady Caroline not only did that, but also, in her
wilful way, plunged at once into a compromising correspondence. Her very
first letter to Byron, according to Rogers, "assured him that, if he was
in any want of money, all her jewels were at his disposal." In another
letter of approximately the same date we find her writing: "The rose Lord
Byron gave Lady Caroline Lamb died in despite of every effort made to save
it; probably from regret at its fallen fortunes."

Evidently Lady Caroline had thrown herself at Byron's head before William
Lamb guessed what was happening. Afterwards, no doubt, he knew what the
rest of the world knew. But he also knew--what the rest of the world did
not know, and what Lady Caroline herself only imperfectly realised--how
froward and changeable were his wife's moods, how great was the risk of
hysterical explosions if those moods were crossed, what a "handful" she
was, in short, and how very difficult it was to handle her, and so he left
things alone.

Leaving things alone, indeed, was William Lamb's regular formula for the
solution of the problems alike of public and of private life. He believed
that problems left alone tended to solve themselves, just as letters left
unanswered tend to answer themselves. On the whole the principle had
worked, if not ideally, yet well enough for the practical purposes of
domestic life. Things had happened before, and, being left alone, had
ceased to happen. In his desk lay a letter relating to some previous
ebullition the particulars of which are wrapped in mystery. "I think
lately, my dearest William," Lady Caroline had written, three years
before, "we have been very troublesome to each other." It was true, and it
had not mattered. The fire, if there had been a fire, had burnt itself
out. The hysterics--it is not to be doubted that there were hysterics--had
subsided with the passing of the occasion which had called them forth. The
clouds had been dispersed, and the sun had shone again. Why should not
this chapter in his domestic history repeat itself? He was very fond of
his wife; he hated rows; he wished to take no risks. The best way of
avoiding risks was to humour her.

So he humoured her, remembering how she had railed at the bishop on her
wedding day, knowing, no doubt, how little a thing might upset her mental
balance, and making every possible allowance; and the only attempt at
intervention came from Lady Melbourne, who remonstrated, not with Lady
Caroline, but with Byron. He struck an attitude, and waived the matter on
one side.

    "You need not fear me," was his reply. "I do not pursue pleasure like
    other men; I labour under an incurable disease and a blighted heart.
    Believe me she is safe with me."

No one knows whether she was, in the narrow sense of the word, "safe" with
him or not. Rogers thought that she was, but admitted that he did not
really know. In any case she was not safe from herself, or from the tongue
of scandal. She was really in love--her devotion was no passing fancy--and
she did not care who knew it. Indeed she behaved as if she thought that
the more people who knew it, the better. The woman who, at a ball, called
upon Byron's friend Harness--that very serious young Cantab just about to
take orders--to bear witness that she was wearing no fewer than six pairs
of stockings, was not likely to hide the light of a grand passion under a
bushel. She did not so hide it, but proceeded, as has been said, to
_afficher_ herself as if she were inviting the attention of the world to
a great spectacular entertainment. She had not known Byron a couple of
months before people were beginning to talk.

    "Your little friend Caro William," wrote the Duchess of Devonshire on
    May 4, 1812, "as usual is doing all sorts of imprudent things with
    him.... The ladies, I hear spoil him, and the gentlemen are jealous of
    him. He is going back to Naxos, and then the husbands may sleep in
    peace. I should not be surprised if Caro William were to go with him,
    she is so wild and imprudent."

Rogers, in his "Table Talk," is still more picturesque. He tells us how,
when Byron and Lady Caroline quarrelled, she used to plant herself in his
(Rogers') garden, waiting to catch him on his return home and beg him to
effect a reconciliation; and he continues:

    "When she met Byron at a party, she would always, if possible, return
    home from it in _his_ carriage, and accompanied by _him_: I recollect
    particularly their returning to town together from Holland House. But
    such was the insanity of her passion for Byron that sometimes, when
    not invited to a party where he was to be, she would wait for him in
    the street till it was over! One night, after a great party at
    Devonshire House, to which Lady Caroline had not been invited, I saw
    her--yes, saw her--talking to Byron, with half of her body thrust into
    the carriage which he had just entered."

In the midst of, and in consequence of, these spectacles, Lady Melbourne
decided to take Lady Caroline to Ireland. She cherished, it seems, the
double design of getting her daughter-in-law out of Byron's way and
marrying Byron to her niece. Of the success of the latter scheme there
will be a good deal to be said in subsequent chapters. Much was to happen,
however, both to Byron and to Lady Caroline before it succeeded. They
continued to correspond during Lady Caroline's absence; and the
correspondence soon reached an acute phase which resulted in a series of
violent scenes.




CHAPTER XII

THE QUARREL WITH LADY CAROLINE--HER CHARACTER AND SUBSEQUENT CAREER


"While in Ireland," Lady Caroline Lamb told Lady Morgan, "I received
letters constantly--the most tender and the most amusing."

She received one letter in which Byron, after speaking of "a sense of duty
to your husband and mother" declared that "no other in word or deed shall
ever hold the place in my affections which is, and shall be, most sacred
to you," and concluded: "I was and am yours freely and most entirely, to
obey, to honour, love--and fly with you when, where, and how you yourself
_might_ and _may_ determine." What did he mean?

Apparently he meant to let Lady Caroline down gently--to give her the
right of boasting of his undying regard--and to obtain his liberty in
exchange. We need not stop to consider whether the bargain would have been
a fair one, for Lady Caroline did not agree to it. There were no bounds to
her infatuation, and she could not bear the thought that there should be
any bounds to his. But there were. "Even during our intimacy," he told
Medwin, "I was not at all constant to this fair one, and she suspected as
much." It looks as though her suspicions decided her to return to
England. At all events she started, and at Dublin, received another letter
to which the epithets "tender" and "amusing" were equally inapplicable.

"It was," she told Lady Morgan, "that cruel letter I have published in
'Glenarvon'"--the novel in which, some five years later, she gave the
world her version of the liaison. The text of it, as given in 'Glenarvon,'
is as follows:

    "I am no longer your lover; and since you oblige me to confess it by
    this truly unfeminine persecution, learn that I am attached to
    another, whose name it would, of course, be dishonest to mention. I
    shall ever remember with gratitude the many instances I have received
    of the predilection you have shown in my favour. I shall ever continue
    your friend, if your ladyship will permit me so to style myself. And
    as a first proof of my regard, I offer you this advice: correct your
    vanity, which is ridiculous: exert your absurd caprices on others; and
    leave me in peace."

Byron appears to have admitted to Medwin that "a part" of the letter was
genuine. The rest of it--the gratuitously offensive part of it--was
doubtless doctored, if not actually fabricated, by the novelist for the
purposes of her art. In any case, however, quite enough was written to
send Lady Caroline into a fit, from which she only recovered to renew her
eccentricities. "I lost my brain," she confesses. "I was bled, leeched;
kept for a month in the filthy Dolphin Inn at Rock. On my return I was in
great prostration of mind and spirit." And then scenes followed--scene on
the heels of scene. It is impossible to be quite sure of arranging them in
their proper order; but that matters little.

There was a scene in Brocket Park, w

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