Chapter 10

‘I stayed a week with the Websters, and behaved very well, though the lady of the house is young, religious, and pretty, and the master is my particular friend. I felt no wish for anything but a poodle dog, which they kindly gave me.’

So little does Byron seem to have been attracted by Lady Frances, that he only once more visited the Websters, and then only for a few days, on his way to Newstead, between October 3 and 10, 1813.

On June 3 of that year Byron wrote to Mr. John Hanson, his solicitor, a letter which shows the state of his mind at that time. He tells Hanson that he is about to visit Salt Hill, near Maidenhead, and that he will be absent for one week. He is determined to go abroad. The prospective lawsuit with Mr. Claughton (about the sale of Newstead) is to be dropped, if it cannot be carried on in Byron’s absence. At all hazards, at all losses, he is determined that nothing shall prevent him from leaving the country.

‘If utter ruinwereorisbefore me on the one hand, and wealth at home on the other, I have made my choice, and go I will.’

The pictures, and every movable that could be converted into cash, were, by Byron’s orders, to be sold. ‘All I want is a few thousand pounds, and then, Adieu. You shan’t be troubled with me these ten years, if ever.’ Clearly, there must have been something more than a passing fancy which could haveinduced Byron to sacrifice his chances of selling Newstead, for the sake of a few thousand pounds of ready-money. Ithad beenhis intention to accompany Lord and Lady Oxford on their travels, but this project was abandoned. After three weeks—spent in running backwards and forwards between Salt Hill and London—Byron confided his troubles to Augusta. She was always his rock of refuge in all his deeper troubles. Augusta Leigh thought that absence might mend matters, and tried hard to keep her brother up to his resolve of going abroad; she even volunteered to accompany him. But Lady Melbourne—who must have had a prurient mind—persuaded Byron that the gossips about town would not consider it ‘proper’ for him and his sister to travel alone! As Byron was at that time under the influence of an irresistible infatuation, Lady Melbourne’s warning turned the scale, and the project fell through. Meanwhile the plot thickened. Something—he told Moore—had ruined all his prospects of matrimony. His financial circumstances, he said, were mending; ‘and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife.’

In July he still wishes to get out of England. ‘They had better let me go,’ he says; ‘one can die anywhere.’

On August 22, after another visit to Salt Hill, Byron writes to Moore:

‘I have said nothing of the brilliant sex; but the fact is, I am at this moment in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape, than any of the last twelve months, and that is saying a good deal. It is unlucky we can neither live with nor without these women.’

A week later he wrote again to Moore:

‘I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow—that is, I would a month ago, but at present....’

Moore suggested that Byron’s case was similar to that of the youth apostrophized by Horace in his twenty-seventh ode, and invited his confidence:

‘Come, whisper it—the tender truth—To safe and friendly ears!What! Her? O miserable youth!Oh! doomed to grief and tears!In what a whirlpool are you tost,Your rudder broke, your pilot lost!’

Recent research has convinced the present writer that the incident which affected Byron so profoundly at this time—about eighteen months before his marriage—indirectly brought about the separation between Lord and Lady Byron in 1816. A careful student of Byron’s character could not fail to notice, among all the contradictions and inconsistencies of his life, one point upon which he was resolute—namely, a consistent reticence on the subject of the intimacy which sprang up between himself and Mary Chaworth in the summer of 1813. The strongest impulse of his life—even to the last—was a steadfast, unwavering, hopeless attachment to that lady. Throughout his turbulent youth, in his early as in his later days, the same theme floats through the chords of his melodious verse, a deathless love and a deep remorse. Even at the last, when the shadow of Death was creeping slowly over the flats at Missolonghi, the same wild, despairing note found involuntary expression, and the last words that Byron ever wrote tell the sad story with a distinctness which might well open the eyes even of the blind.

When he first met his fate, he was a schoolboy of sixteen—precocious, pugnacious, probably a prig, and by no means handsome. He must have appeared to Mary much as we see him in his portrait by Sanders. Mary was two years older, and already in love witha fox-hunting squire of good family. ‘Love dwells not in our will,’ and a nature like Byron’s, once under its spell, was sure to feel its force acutely. There was romance, too, in the situation; and the poetic temperament—always precocious—responded to an impulse on the gossamer chance of achieving the impossible. Mary was probably half amused and half flattered by the adoration of a boy of whose destiny she divined nothing.

There is no reason to suppose that there was any meeting between Byron and Mary Chaworth after the spring of 1809, until the summer of 1813. Their separation seemed destined to be final. Although Byron, in after-years, wished it to be believed that they had not met since 1808, it is certain that a meeting took place in the summer of 1813. Although Byron took, as we shall see presently, great pains to conceal that fact from the public, he did not attempt to deceive either Moore, Hobhouse, or Hodgson. In his letter to Monsieur Coulmann, written in July, 1823, we have the version which Byron wished the public to believe.

‘I had not seen her [Mary Chaworth] for many years. When an occasion offered, I was upon the point, with her consent, of paying her a visit, when my sister, who has always had more influence over me than anyone else, persuaded me not to do it. “For,” said she, “if you go, you will fall in love again, and then there will be a scene; one step will lead to another,et cela fera un éclat,” etc. I was guided by these reasons, and shortly after I married.... Mrs. Chaworth some time after, being separated from her husband, became insane; but she has since recovered her reason, and is, I believe, reconciled to her husband.’

At about the same time Byron told Medwin that,afterMary’s separation from her husband, she proposed an interview with him—a suggestion whichByron, by the advice of Mrs. Leigh, declined. He also said to Medwin:

‘She [Mary Chaworth] was thebeau-idéalof all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful; and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfection my imagination created in her—I saycreated, for I found her,like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic.’

It is difficult to see how Byron could have arrived at so unflattering an estimate of a woman whom he had onlyonceseen since her marriage—at a dinner-party, when, as he has told us, he was overcome by shyness and a feeling of awkwardness! But let that pass. Byron wished the world to believe (1) that Mary Chaworth, after the separation from her husband in 1813, proposed a meeting with Byron; (2) that he declined to meet her; (3) that, after his unfortunate marriage, Mary became insane; and (4) that he found her, ‘like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic.’

It is quite possible, of course, that Byron may haveat firstrefused to meet the only woman on earth whom he sincerely loved, and more than likely that Mrs. Leigh did her utmost to dissuade him from so rash a proceeding. But it is on record that Byron incautiously admitted to Medwin that hedidmeet Mary Chaworthafter his return from Greece.[37]It will be remembered that he returned from Greece in 1811. Their intimacy had long before been broken off by Mr. John Musters; and, as we have seen, Mary, faithful to a promise which she had made to her husband, kept away from Annesley during the period (1811) when the ‘Thyrza’ poems were written. It is doubtful whether they would ever again have met if her husband had shown any consideration for her feelings. But heshowed her none. When, nearly forty years ago, the present writer visited Annesley, there were several people living who remembered both Mary Chaworth and her husband. These people stated that their married life, so full of grief and bitterness, was a constant source of comment both at Annesley and Newstead. The trouble was attributed to the harsh and capricious conduct, and the well-known infidelities, of one to whose kindness and affection Mary had a sacred claim. She seems to have been left for long periods at Annesley with only one companion, Miss Anne Radford, who had been brought up with her from childhood. This state of things eventually broke down, and when, in the early part of 1813, Mary could stand the strain no longer, a separation took place by mutual consent.

In the summer of that year Byron and this unhappy woman were thrown together by the merest accident, and, unfortunately for both, renewed their dangerous friendship.

Byron’s friend and biographer, Thomas Moore, took great pains to suppress every allusion to Mary Chaworth in Byron’s memoranda and letters. He faithfully kept the secret. There is nothing in Byron’s letters or journals, as revised by Moore, to show that they ever met after 1808, and yet they undoubtedly did meet in 1813,afterMary’s estrangement from her husband. That they were in constant correspondence in November of that year may be gathered from Byron’s journal, where Mary’s name is veiled by asterisks.

On November 24 he writes:

‘I am tremendously in arrear with my letters, except to * * * *, and to her my thoughts overpower me: my words never compass them.’‘I have been pondering,’ he writes on the 26th, ‘on the miseries of separation, that—oh! how seldom we see those we love! Yet we live ages in momentswhen met.’

‘I am tremendously in arrear with my letters, except to * * * *, and to her my thoughts overpower me: my words never compass them.’

‘I have been pondering,’ he writes on the 26th, ‘on the miseries of separation, that—oh! how seldom we see those we love! Yet we live ages in momentswhen met.’

Then follows, on the 27th, a clue:

‘I believe, with Clym o’ the Clow, or Robin Hood,‘“By our Mary (dear name!) thou art both Mother and May,I think it never was a man’s lot to die before his day.”’

‘I believe, with Clym o’ the Clow, or Robin Hood,

‘“By our Mary (dear name!) thou art both Mother and May,I think it never was a man’s lot to die before his day.”’

It is attested, by all those who were acquainted with Mary Chaworth, that she always bore an exemplary character. It was well known that her marriage was an unhappy one, and that she had been for some time deserted by her husband. In June, 1813, when she fell under the fatal spell of Byron, then the most fascinating man in society,[38]she was living in deep dejection, parted from her lawful protector, with whom she had a serious disagreement. He had neglected her, and she well knew that she had a rival in his affections at that time.

It was in these distressing circumstances that Byron, with the world at his feet, came to worship her in great humility. As he looked back upon the past, he realized that this neglected woman had always been the light of his life, the lodestar of his destiny. And now that he beheld his ‘Morning Star of Annesley’ shedding ineffectual rays upon the dead embers of a lost love, the old feeling returned to him with resistless force.

‘We met—we gazed—I saw, and sighed;She did not speak, and yet replied;There are ten thousand tones and signsWe hear and see, but none defines—Involuntary sparks of thought,Which strike from out the heart o’erwrought,And form a strange intelligence,Alike mysterious and intense,Which link the burning chain that binds,Without their will, young hearts and minds.I saw, and sighed—in silence wept,And still reluctant distance kept,Until I was made known to her,And we might then and there conferWithout suspicion—then, even then,I longed, and was resolved to speak;But on my lips they died again,The accents tremulous and weak,Until one hour...******‘I would have givenMy life but to have called her mineIn the full view of Earth and Heaven;For I did oft and long repineThat we could only meet by stealth.’

In the remorseful words of Manfred,

‘Her faults were mine—her virtues were her own—I loved her, and destroyed her!...Not with my hand, but heart—which brokeherheart—It gazed on mine and withered.’

Without attempting to excuse Byron’s conduct—indeed, that were useless—it must be remembered that he was only twenty-five years of age, and Mary was very unhappy. After all hope of meeting her again had been abandoned, the force of destiny, so to speak, had unexpectedly restored his lost Thyrza—theTheresaof ‘Mazeppa.’

‘I loved her then, I love her still;And such as I am, love indeedIn fierce extremes—in good and ill—But still we love...Haunted to our very ageWith the vain shadow of the past.’

Byron’s punishment was in this world. The remorse which followed endured throughout the remaining portion of his life. It wrecked what might have proved a happy marriage, and drove him, from stone to stone, along life’s causeway, to that ‘Sea Sodom’ where, for many months, he tried to destroy the memory of his crime by reckless profligacy.

Mary Chaworth no sooner realized her awful danger—the madness of an impulse which not even love could excuse—than she recoiled from the precipice which yawned before her. She had been momentarily blinded by the irresistible fascination of one who, after all, really and truly loved her. But she was a good woman in spite of this one episode, and to the last hour of her existence she never swerved from that narrow path which led to an honoured grave.

Although it was too late for happiness, too late to evade the consequences of her weakness, there was still time for repentance. The secret was kept inviolate by the very few to whom it was confided, and the present writer deeply regrets that circumstances have compelled him to break the seal.

If ‘Astarte’ had not been written, there would have been no need to lift the veil. Lord Lovelace has besmirched the good name of Mrs. Leigh, and it is but an act of simple justice to defend her.

When Mary Chaworth escaped from Byron’s fatal influence, he reproached her for leaving him, and tried to shake her resolution with heart-rending appeals. Happily for both, they fell upon deaf ears.

‘Astarte! my beloved! speak to me;Say that thou loath’st me not—that I do bearThis punishment for both.’

The depth and sincerity of Byron’s love for MaryChaworth cannot be questioned. Moore, who knew him well, says:

‘The all-absorbing and unsuccessful (unsatisfied) love for Mary Chaworth was the agony, without being the death, of an unsated desire which lived on through life, filled his poetry with the very soul of tenderness, lent the colouring of its light to even those unworthy ties which vanity or passion led him afterwards to form, and was the last aspiration of his fervid spirit, in those stanzas written but a few months before his death.’

It was, in fact, a love of such unreasonableness and persistence as might be termed, without exaggeration, a madness of the heart.

Although Mary escaped for ever from that baneful infatuation, which in an unguarded moment had destroyed her peace of mind, her separation from Byron was not complete until he married. Not only did they correspond frequently, but they also met occasionally. In the following January (1814) Byron introduced Mary to Augusta Leigh. From that eventful meeting,when probable contingencies were provided for, until Mary’s death in 1832, these two women, who had suffered so much through Byron, continued in the closest intimacy; and in November, 1819, Augusta stood sponsor for Mary’s youngest daughter.

In a poem which must have been written in 1813, an apostrophe ‘To Time,’ Byron refers to Mary’s resolutions.

‘In Joy I’ve sighed to think thy flightWould soon subside from swift to slow;Thy cloud could overcast the light,But could not add a night to Woe;For then, however drear and dark,My soul was suited to thy sky;One star aloneshot forth a sparkTo prove thee—not Eternity.That beam hath sunk.’

It is of course true that matters were not, and could never again be, on the same footing as in July of that year; but Mary Chaworth was constancy itself, in a higher and a nobler sense than Byron attached to it, when he reproached her for broken vows.

‘Thy vows are all broken,And light is thy fame:I hear thy name spoken,And share in its shame.’

During the remainder of Byron’s life, Mary took a deep interest in everything that affected him. In 1814, believing that marriage would be his salvation, she used her influence in that direction. We know that she did not approve of the choice which Byron so recklessly made, and she certainly had ample cause to deplore its results. Through her close intimacy with Augusta Leigh—an intimacy which has not hitherto been suspected—she became acquainted with every phase in Byron’s subsequent career. She could read ‘between the lines,’ and solve the mysteries to be found in such poems as ‘Lara,’ ‘Mazeppa,’ ‘Manfred,’ and ‘Don Juan.’

We believe that Byron’s love for Mary was the main cause of the indifference he felt towards his wife. In order to shield Mary from the possible consequences of a public investigation into conduct prior to his marriage, Byron, in 1816, consented to a separation from his wife.

After Byron had left England Mary broke down under the strain she had borne so bravely, and her mind gave way. When at last, in April, 1817, a reconciliation took place between Mary and her husband, it was apparent to everyone that she had, during those four anxious years, become a changed woman. Shenever entirely regained either health or spirits. Her mind ‘had acquired a tinge of religious melancholy, which never afterwards left it.’ Sorrow and disappointment had subdued a naturally buoyant nature, and ‘melancholy marked her for its own.’ Shortly before her death, in 1832, she destroyed every letter she had received from Byron since those distant fateful years when, as boy and girl, they had wandered on the Hills of Annesley. For eight sad years Mary Chaworth survived the lover of her youth. Shortly before her death, in a letter to one of her daughters, she drew her own character which might fitly form her epitaph: ‘Soon led, easily pleased, very hasty, and very relenting, with a heart moulded in a warm and affectionate fashion.’

Such was the woman who, though parted by fate, maintained through sunshine and storm an ascendancy over the heart of Byron which neither time nor absence could impair, and which endured to the end of his earthly existence. We may well believe that those inarticulate words which the dying poet murmured to the bewildered Fletcher—those broken sentences which ended with, ‘Tell her everything; you are friends with her’—may have referred, not to Lady Byron, as policy suggested, but to Mary Chaworth, with whom Fletcher had been acquainted since his youth.

We have incontestable proof that, only two months before he died, Byron’s thoughts were occupied with one whom he had named ‘the starlight of his boyhood.’ How deeply Byron thought about Mary Chaworth at the last is proved by the poem which was found among his papers at Missolonghi. In six stanzas the poet revealed the story that he would fainhave hidden. A note in his handwriting states that they were addressed ‘to no one in particular,’ and that they were merely ‘a poetical scherzo.’ There is, however, no room for doubt that the poem bears a deep significance.

I.‘I watched thee when the foe was at our side,Ready to strike at him—or thee and meWere safety hopeless—rather than divideAught with one loved, save love and liberty.’

We have here a glimpse of that turbulent scene when Mary’s husband, in a fit of jealousy, put an end to their dangerous intimacy.

II.‘I watched thee on the breakers, when the rockReceived our prow, and all was storm and fear,And bade thee cling to me through every shock;This arm would be thy bark, or breast thy bier.’

This brings us to that period of suspense and fear, in 1814, which preceded the birth of Medora. In a letter which Byron at that time wrote to Miss Milbanke, we find these words:

‘I am at present a little feverish—I mean mentally—and, as usual,on the brink of something or other, which will probably crush me at last, and cut our correspondence short, with everything else.’

Twelve days later (March 3, 1814), Byron tells Moore that he is ‘uncomfortable,’ and that he has ‘no lack of argument to ponder upon of the most gloomy description.’

‘Some day or other,’ he writes, ‘when we areveterans, I may tell you a tale of present and past times; and it is not from want of confidence that I do not now....All this would be very well if I had no heart; but, unluckily, I have found that there is such a thingstill about me, though in no very good repair, and also that it has a habit of attaching itself toone, whether I will or no.Divide et impera, I begin to think, will only do for politics.’

When Moore, who was puzzled, asked Byron to explain himself more clearly, he replied: ‘Guess darkly, and you will seldom err.’

Thirty-four days later Medora was born, April 15, 1814.

III.‘I watched thee when the fever glazed thine eyes,Yielding my couch, and stretched me on the ground,When overworn with watching, ne’er to riseFrom thence if thou an early grave had found.’

Here we see Byron’s agony of remorse. Like Herod, he lamented for Mariamne:

‘And mine’s the guilt, and mine the hell,This bosom’s desolation dooming;And I have earned those tortures wellWhich unconsumed are still consuming!’

In ‘Manfred’ we find a note of remembrance in the deprecating words:

‘Oh! no, no, no!My injuries came down on those who loved me—On those whom I best loved: I never quelledAn enemy, save in my just defence—But my embrace was fatal.’IV.‘The earthquake came, and rocked the quivering wall,And men and Nature reeled as if with wine:Whom did I seek around the tottering hall?For thee. Whose safety first provide for? Thine.’

We now see Byron, at the supreme crisis of his life, standing in solitude on his hearth, with all his household gods shivered around him. We perceive that not least among his troubles at that time was the ever-haunting fear lest the secret of Medora’s birth shouldbe disclosed. His greatest anxiety was for Mary’s safety, and this could only be secured by keeping his matrimonial squabbles out of a court of law. It was, in fact, by agreeing to sign the deed of separation that the whole situation was saved. The loyalty of Augusta Leigh on this occasion was never forgotten:

‘There was soft Remembrance and sweet TrustIn one fond breast.’‘Thatlove was pure—and, far above disguise,Had stood the test of mortal enmitiesStill undivided, and cemented moreBy peril, dreaded most in female eyes,But this was firm.’

In the fifth stanza we see Byron, eight years later, at Missolonghi, struck down by that attack of epilepsy which preceded his death by only two months:

V.‘And when convulsive throes denied my breathThe faintest utterance to my fading thought,To thee—to thee—e’en in the gasp of deathMy spirit turned, oh! oftener than it ought.’

In the sixth and final stanza, probably the last lines that Byron ever wrote, we find him reiterating, with all a lover’s persistency, a belief that Mary could never have loved him, otherwise she would not have left him.

VI.‘Thus much and more; and yet thou lov’st me not,And never will! Love dwells not in our will.Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lotTo strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.’

The reproaches of lovers are often unjust. Byron either could not, or perhapswould not, see that in abandoning him Mary had been actuated by the highest, the purest motives, and that the renunciation must have afforded her deep pain—a sacrifice, notlightly made, for Byron’s sake quite as much as for her own. That Byron for a time resented her conduct in this respect is evident from a remark made in a letter to Miss Milbanke, dated November 29, 1813. After saying that he once thought that Mary Chaworth could have made him happy, he added, ‘butsubsequent events have provedthat my expectations might not have been fulfilled had I ever proposed to and received my idol.’[39]

What those ‘subsequent events’ were may be guessed from reproaches which at this period appear among his poems:

‘The wholly false theheartdespises,And spurns deceiver and deceit;But she who not a thought disguises,Whose love is as sincere as sweet—Whenshecan change, who loved so truly,Itfeelswhat mine hasfeltso newly.’

In the letter written five years after their final separation, Byron again reproaches Mary Chaworth, but this time without a tinge of bitterness:

‘My own, we may have been very wrong, but I repent of nothing except that cursed marriage, and your refusing to continue to love me as you had loved me. I can neither forget norquite forgiveyou for that precious piece of reformation. But I can never be other than I have been, and whenever I love anything, it is because it reminds me in some way or other of yourself.’

‘The Giaour’ was begun in May and finished in November, 1813. Those parts which relate to Mary Chaworth were added to that poem in July and August:

‘She was a form of Life and Light,That, seen, became a part of sight;And rose, where’er I turned mine eye,The Morning-Star of Memory!’

Byron says that, like the bird that sings within the brake, like the swan that swims upon the waters, he can only have one mate. He despises those who sneer at constancy. He does not envy them their fickleness, and regards such heartless men as lower in the scale of creation than the solitary swan.

‘Such shame at least was never mine—Leila! each thought was only thine!My good,my guilt, my weal, my woe,My hope on high—my all below.Earth holds no other like to thee,Or, if it doth, in vain for me:... Thou wert, thou art,The cherished madness of my heart!’‘Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;A spark of that immortal fireWith angels shared, by Alla given,To lift from earth our low desire.I grantmylove imperfect, allThat mortals by the name miscall;Then deem it evil, what thou wilt;But say, oh say,herswas not Guilt!And she was lost—and yet I breathed,But not the breath of human life:A serpent round my heart was wreathed,And stung my every thought to strife.’

Who can doubt that the friend ‘of earlier days,’ whose memory the Giaour wishes to bless before he dies, but whom he dares not bless lest Heaven should ‘mark the vain attempt’ of guilt praying for the guiltless, was Mary Chaworth. He bids the friar tell that friend

‘What thou didst behold:The withered frame—the ruined mind,The wreck that Passion leaves behind—The shrivelled and discoloured leaf,Seared by the Autumn blast of Grief.’

He wonders whether that friend is still his friend, as in those earlier days, when hearts were blended inthat sweet land where bloom his native valley’s bowers. To that friend he sends a ring, which was the memorial of a youthful vow:

‘Tell him—unheeding as I was,Through many a busy bitter sceneOf all our golden youth hath been,In pain, my faltering tongue had triedTo bless his memory—ere I died;I do not ask him not to blame,Too gentle he to wound my name;I do not ask him not to mourn,Such cold request might sound like scorn.But bear this ring, his own of old,And tell him what thou dost behold!’

The motto chosen by Byron for ‘The Giaour’ is in itself suggestive:

‘One fatal remembrance—one sorrow that throwsIts bleak shade alike o’er our Joys and our Woes—To which Life nothing darker nor brighter can bring,For which Joy hath no balm—and affliction no sting.’

On October 10, 1813, Byron arrived at Newstead, where he stayed for a month. Mary Chaworth was at Annesley during that time. On his return to town he wrote (November 8) to his sister:

‘My dearest Augusta,‘I have only time to say that my long silence has been occasioned by a thousand things (with whichyouare not concerned). It is not Lady Caroline, nor Lady Oxford;but perhaps you may guess, and if you do, do not tell. You do not know what mischief your being with me might have prevented. You shall hear from me to-morrow; in the meantime don’t be alarmed. I am inno immediateperil.‘Believe me, ever yours,‘B.’

‘My dearest Augusta,

‘I have only time to say that my long silence has been occasioned by a thousand things (with whichyouare not concerned). It is not Lady Caroline, nor Lady Oxford;but perhaps you may guess, and if you do, do not tell. You do not know what mischief your being with me might have prevented. You shall hear from me to-morrow; in the meantime don’t be alarmed. I am inno immediateperil.

‘Believe me, ever yours,‘B.’

On November 30 Byron wrote to Moore:

‘We were once very near neighbours this autumn;[40]and a good and bad neighbourhood it has proved to me. Suffice it to say that your French quotation (Si je récommençais ma carrière, je ferais tout ce que j’ai fait) was confoundedly to the purpose,—though veryunexpectedlypertinent, as you may imagine by what Isaidbefore, and my silence since. However, “Richard’s himself again,” and, except all night and some part of the morning, I don’t think very much about the matter. All convulsions end with me in rhyme; and to solace my midnights I have scribbled another Turkish story [‘The Bride of Abydos’] which you will receive soon after this.... I have written this, and published it, for the sake ofemployment—to wring my thoughts from reality, and take refuge in “imaginings,” however “horrible.”... This is the work of a week....’

In order the more effectually to dispose of the theory that Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster was the cause of Byron’s disquietude, we insert an extract from his journal, dated a fortnight earlier (November 14, 1813):

‘Last night I finished “Zuleika” [the name was afterwards changed to ‘The Bride of Abydos’], my second Turkish tale. I believe the composition of it kept me alive—for it was written to drive my thoughts from the recollection of * * * * “Dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed.” At least, even here, my hand would tremble to write it.... I have some idea of expectorating a romance, but what romance could equal the events‘“... quæque ipse ... vidi,Et quorum pars magna fui”?’

‘“... quæque ipse ... vidi,Et quorum pars magna fui”?’

Surely the name that Byron dared not write, even in his own journal, was not that of Lady Frances Webster, whose name appears often in his correspondence. The ‘sacred name’ was that of one of whom he afterwards wrote, ‘Thou art both Mother and May.’

During October, November, and December, 1813,Byron’s mind was in a perturbed condition. We gather, from a letter which he wrote to Moore on November 30, that his thoughts were centred on a lady living in Nottinghamshire[41], and that the scrape, which he mentions in his letter to Augusta on November 8, referred to that lady and the dreaded prospects of maternity.

Mr. Coleridge believes that the verses, ‘Remember him, whom Passion’s power,’ were addressed to Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. There is nothing, so far as the present writer knows, to support that opinion. There is no evidence to show the month in which they were written; and, in view of the statement that the lady in question had lived in comparative retirement, ‘Thy soul from long seclusion pure,’ and that she had, because of his presumption, banished the poet in 1813, it could not well have been Lady Frances Webster, who in September of that year had asked Byron to be godfather to her child, and in October had invited him to her house. It is noteworthy that Byron expressly forbade Murray to publish those verses with ‘The Corsair,’ where, it must be owned, they would have been sadly out of place. ‘Farewell, if ever fondest prayer,’ was decidedly more appropriate to the state of things existing at that time.

The motto chosen for his ‘Bride of Abydos’ is taken from Burns:

‘Had we never loved sae kindly,Had we never loved sae blindly,Never met—or never parted,We had ne’er been broken-hearted.’

The poem was written early in November, 1813.

Byron has told us that it was written to divert hismind,[42]‘to wring his thoughts from reality to imagination, from selfish regrets to vivid recollections’; to ‘distract his thoughts from the recollection of * * * * “Dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed,”’ and in a letter to John Galt (December 11, 1813) he says that parts of the poem were drawn ‘from existence.’ He had been staying at Newstead, in close proximity to Annesley, from October 10 to November 8, during which time, as he says, he regretted the absence of his sister Augusta, ‘who might have saved him much trouble.’ He says, ‘All convulsions end with me in rhyme,’ and that ‘The Bride of Abydos’ was ‘the work of a week.’ In speaking of a ‘dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed,’ he says: ‘At least even here my hand would tremble to write it’; and on November 30 he writes to Moore: ‘Since I last wrote’ (October 2), ‘much has happened to me.’ On November 27 he writes in his journal: ‘Mary—dear name—thou art both Mother and May.’[43]At the end of November, after he had returned to town, he writes in his journal:

‘* * * * is distant, and will be at * * * *, still more distant, till the spring. No one else, except Augusta, cares for me.... I am tremendously in arrears with my letters, except to * * * *, and to her my thoughts overpower me—my words never compass them.’

On November 14 Byron sends a device for the seals of himself and * * * *; the seal in question is at present in the possession of the Chaworth-Musters family. On December 10, we find from one of Byron’s letters thathe had thoughts of committing suicide, and was deterred by the idea that ‘it would annoy Augusta, and perhaps * * * *.’

Byron seems to have put into the mouth of Zuleika words which conveyed his own thoughts:

‘Think’st thou that I could bear to partWith thee, and learn to halve my heart?Ah! were I severed from thy side,Where were thy friend—and who my guide?Years have not seen, Time shall not see,The hour that tears my soul from thee:Ev’n Azrael, from his deadly quiverWhen flies that shaft, and fly it must,That parts all else, shall doom for everOur hearts to undivided dust!******What other can she seek to seeThan thee, companion of her bower,The partner of her infancy?These cherished thoughts with life begun,Say, why must I no more avow?’

Selim suggests that Zuleika should brave the world and fly with him:

‘But be the Star that guides the wanderer, Thou!Thou, my Zuleika, share and bless my bark;The Dove of peace and promise to mine ark!Or, since that hope denied in worlds of strife,Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life!The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray!*******Not blind to Fate, I see, where’er I rove,Unnumbered perils,—but one only love!Yet well my toils shall that fond breast repay,Though Fortune frown, or falser friends betray.’

Zuleika, we are told, was the ‘last of Giaffir’s race.’[44]Selim tells her that ‘life is hazard at the best,’ and there is much to fear:

‘Yes, fear! the doubt, the dread of losing thee.That dread shall vanish with the favouring gale;Which Love to-night has promised to my sail.No danger daunts the pair his smile hath blest,Their steps still roving, but their hearts at rest.With thee all toils are sweet, each clime hath charms;Earth—Sea alike—our world within our arms!’

‘The Corsair’ was written between December 18, 1813, and January 11, 1814. While it was passing through the press, Byron was at Newstead. He gives a little of his own spirit to Conrad, and all Mary’s virtues to Medora—a name which was afterwards given to his child. Conrad

‘Knew himself a villain—but he deemedThe rest no better than the thing he seemed;And scorned the best as hypocrites who hidThose deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exemptFrom all affection and from all contempt.None are all evil—quickening round his heart,One softer feeling would not yet depart.Yet ’gainst that passion vainly still he strove,And even in him it asks the name of Love!Yes, it was Love—unchangeable—unchanged,Felt but for one from whom he never ranged.Yes—it was Love—if thoughts of tenderness,Tried in temptation, strengthened by distress,Unmoved by absence, firm in every clime,And yet—oh! more than all! untired by Time.If there be Love in mortals—this was Love!He was a villain—aye, reproaches showerOn him—but not the Passion, nor its power,Which only proved—all other virtues gone—Not Guilt itself could quench thisearliestone!’

The following verses are full of meaning for the initiated:

I.‘Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,Lonely and lost to light for evermore,Save when to thine my heart responsive swells,Then trembles into silence as before.II.‘There, in its centre, a sepulchral lampBurns the slow flame, eternal—but unseen;Which not the darkness of Despair can damp,Though vain its ray as it had never been.III.‘Remember me—oh! pass not thou my graveWithout one thought whose relics there recline:The only pang my bosom dare not braveMust be to find forgetfulness in thine.IV.‘My fondest—faintest—latest accents hear—Grief for the dead not Virtue can reprove;Then give me all I ever asked—a tear,The first—last—sole reward of so much love!’

Conrad and Medora part, to meet no more in life

‘But she is nothing—wherefore is he here?...By the first glance on that still, marble brow—It was enough—she died—what recked it how?The love of youth, the hope of better years,The source of softest wishes, tenderest fears,The only living thing he could not hate,Was reft at once—and he deserved his fate,But did not feel it less.’

The blow he feared the most had fallen at last. The only woman whom he loved had withdrawn her society from him, and his heart,

‘Formed for softness—warped to wrong,Betrayed too early, and beguiled too long,’

was petrified at last!

‘Yet tempests wear, and lightning cleaves the rock;If such his heart, so shattered it the shock.There grew one flower beneath its rugged brow,Though dark the shade—it sheltered—saved till now.The thunder came—that bolt hath blasted both,The Granite’s firmness, and the Lily’s growth:The gentle plant hath left no leaf to tellIts tale, but shrunk and withered where it fell;And of its cold protector, blacken roundBut shivered fragments on the barren ground!’

In moments of deep emotion, even the most reticent of men may sometimes reveal themselves. ‘The Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ and ‘The Corsair,’ formed a trilogy, through which the tragedy of Byron’s life swept like a musical theme. Those poems acted like a recording instrument which, by registering his transient moods, was destined ultimately to betray a secret which he had been at so much pains to hide. In ‘The Giaour’ we see remorse for a crime, which he was at first willing to expiate in sorrow and repentance. In ‘The Bride of Abydos’ we find him, in an access of madness and passion, proposing to share the fate of his victim, if she will but consent to fly with him. Happily for both, Mary would never have consented to an act of social suicide. In ‘The Corsair’ we behold his dreams dispelled by the death of his Love and the hope of better years.

‘He asked no question—all were answered now!’

With the dramatic fate of Medora the curtain falls, and the poet, in whom

‘I suoi pensieri in lui dormir non ponno,’

crosses the threshold of a new life. He reappears later on the scene of all his woes, a broken, friendless stranger, in the person of Lara—that last phase, in which the poet discloses his identity with characteristicinsouciance, brings the tragedy abruptly to a close.[45]

On January 6, 1814, Byron wrote a remarkable letter to Moore, at that time in Nottinghamshire:

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