CHAPTERVIIIBYRON AND HUCKNALL-TORKARD CHURCH

January 22, 1888.—On a night in 1785, when Mrs. Siddons was acting at Edinburgh, the play beingThe Fatal Marriageand the character Isabella, a young lady of Aberdeenshire, Miss Catherine Gordon, of Gight, was among the audience. There is a point in that tragedy at which Isabella recognises her first husband, whom she had supposed to be dead, and in whose absence she had been married to another, and her consternation, grief, and rapture are sudden and excessive. Mrs. Siddons, at that point, always made a great effect. The words are, "O my Biron, my Biron!" On this night, at the moment when the wonderful actress sent forth her wailing, heart-piercing cry, as she uttered those words, Miss Gordon gave a frantic scream, fell into violent hysterics, and was borne out of the theatre, repeating "O my Biron, my Biron!" At the time of that incident she had not met the man by whom she was afterward wedded,—the Hon. John Byron, whose wife she became, about a year later. Their first-bornand only child was George Gordon, afterward Lord Byron, the poet; and among the many aspects of his life which impress the thoughtful reader of its strange and melancholy story none is more striking than the dramatic aspect of it,—so strangely prefigured in this event.

Lord Byron.

Censure of Byron, whether as a man or as a writer, may be considered to have spent its force. It is a hundred years since he was born, and almost as many since he died.[24]Everybody who wished to say a word against him has had ample opportunity for saying it, and there is evidence that this opportunity has not been neglected. The record was long ago made up. Everybody knows that Byron's conduct was sometimes deformed with frenzy and stained with vice. Everybody knows that Byron's writings are occasionally marred with profanity and licentiousness, and that they containa quantity of crude verse. If he had never been married, or if, being married, his domestic life had not ended in disaster and scandal, his personal reputation would stand higher than it does at present, in the esteem of virtuous society. If about one-third of what he wrote had never been published, his reputation as a man of letters would stand higher than it now does in the esteem of stern judges of literary art. After an exhaustive discussion of the subject in every aspect of it, after every variety of hostile assault, and after praise sounded in every key of enthusiasm and in every language of the world, these truths remain. It is a pity that Byron was not a virtuous man and a good husband. It is a pity that he was not invariably a scrupulous literary artist, that he wrote so much, and that almost everything he wrote was published. But, when all this has been said, it remains a solid and immovable truth that Byron was a great poet and that he continues to be a great power in the literature and life of the world. Nobody who pretends to read anything omits to readChilde Harold.

To touch this complex and delicate subject in only a superficial manner it may not be amiss to say that the world is under obligation to Byron, if for nothing else, for the spectacle of a romantic, impressive, and instructive life. His agency in that spectacle no doubt was involuntary, but all the same he presented it. He was a great poet; a man of genius; his faculty of expression was colossal, and his conduct was absolutely genuine. No man in literature ever lived who lived himself more fully. His assumptions of disguise only made him more obvious and transparent. He kept nothing back. His heart was laid absolutely bare. Weknow even more about him than we know about Dr. Johnson,—and still his personality endures the test of our knowledge and remains unique, romantic, fascinating, prolific of moral admonition, and infinitely pathetic. Byron in poetry, like Edmund Kean in acting, is a figure that completely fills the imagination, profoundly stirs the heart, and never ceases to impress and charm, even while it afflicts, the sensitive mind. This consideration alone, viewed apart from the obligation that the world owes to the better part of his writings, is vastly significant of the great personal force that is inherent in the name and memory of Byron.

It has been considered necessary to account for the sadness and gloom of Byron's poetry by representing him to have been a criminal afflicted with remorse for his many and hideous crimes. His widow, apparently a monomaniac, after long brooding over the remembrance of a calamitous married life,—brief, unhappy, and terminated in separation,—whispered against him, and against his half-sister, a vile and hideous charge; and this, to the disgrace of American literature, was subsequently brought forward by a distinguished female writer of America, much noted for her works of fiction and especially memorable for that one. The explanation of the mental distress exhibited in the poet's writings was thought to be effectually provided in that disclosure. But, as this revolting and inhuman story,—desecrating graves, insulting a wonderful genius, and casting infamy upon the name of an affectionate, faithful, virtuous woman,—fell to pieces the moment it was examined, the student of Byron's grief-stricken nature remained no wiser than before this figment of a diseased imaginationhad been divulged. Surely, however, it ought not to be considered mysterious that Byron's poetry is often sad. The best poetry of the best poets is touched with sadness.Hamlethas never been mistaken for a merry production.MacbethandKing Leardo not commonly produce laughter. Shelley and Keats sing as near to heaven's gate as anybody, and both of them are essentially sad. Scott was as brave, hopeful, and cheerful as any poet that ever lived, and Scott's poetry is at its best in his dirges and in his ballads of love and loss. TheElegyandThe Ancient Marinercertainly are great poems, but neither of them is festive. Byron often wrote sadly because he was a man of melancholy temperament, and because he deeply felt the pathos of mortal life, the awful mystery with which it is surrounded, the pain with which it is usually attended, the tragedy with which it commonly is accompanied, the frail tenure with which its loves and hopes are held, and the inexorable death with which it is continually environed and at last extinguished. And Byron was an unhappy man for the reason that, possessing every elemental natural quality in excess, his goodness was constantly tortured by his evil. The tempest, the clangour, and the agony of his writings are denotements of the struggle between good and evil that was perpetually afflicting his soul. Had he been the wicked man depicted by his detractors, he would have lived a life of comfortable depravity and never would have written at all. Monsters do not suffer.

The true appreciation of Byron is not that of youth but that of manhood. Youth is captured by his pictorial and sentimental attributes. Youth beholds him asa nautical Adonis, standing lonely upon a barren cliff and gazing at a stormy sunset over the Ægean sea. Everybody knows that familiar picture,—with the wide and open collar, the great eyes, the wild hair, and the ample neckcloth flowing in the breeze. It is pretty but it is not like the real man. If ever at any time he was that sentimental image he speedily outgrew that condition, just as those observers of him who truly understand Byron have long outgrown their juvenile sympathy with that frail and puny ideal of a great poet. Manhood perceives a different individual and is captured by a different attraction. It is only when the first extravagant and effusive enthusiasm has run its course, and perhaps ended in revulsion, that we come to know Byron for what he actually is, and to feel the tremendous power of his genius. Sentimental folly has commemorated him, in the margin of Hyde Park, as in the fancy of many a callow youth and green girl, with the statue of a sailor-lad waiting for a spark from heaven, while a Newfoundland dog dozes at his feet. It is a caricature. Byron was a man, and terribly in earnest; and it is only by earnest persons that his mind and works are understood. At this distance of time the scandals of a corrupt age, equally with the frailties of its most brilliant and most illustrious poetical genius, may well be left to rest in the oblivion of the grave. The generation that is living at the close of the nineteenth century will remember of Byron only that he was the uncompromising friend of liberty; that he did much to emancipate the human mind from every form of bigotry and tyranny; that he augmented, as no man had done since Dryden, the power and flexibility of the noble English tongue;and that he enriched literature with passages of poetry which, for sublimity, beauty, tenderness, and eloquence, have seldom been equalled and have never been excelled.

HUCKNALL-TORKARD CHURCH

It was near the close of a fragrant, golden summer day [August 8, 1884], when, having driven out from Nottingham, I alighted in the market-place of the little town of Hucknall-Torkard, on a pilgrimage to the grave of Byron. The town is modern and commonplace in appearance,—a straggling collection of low brick dwellings, mostly occupied by colliers. On that day it appeared at its worst; for the widest part of its main street was filled with stalls, benches, wagons, and canvas-covered structures for the display of vegetables and other commodities, which were thus offered for sale; and it was thronged with rough, noisy, and dirty persons, intent on barter and traffic, and not indisposed to boisterous pranks and mirth, as they pushed and jostled each other, among the crowded booths. This main street ends at the wall of the graveyard in which stands the little gray church where Byron was buried. There is an iron gate in the centre of the wall, and in order to reach this it was necessary to thread the mazes of the market-place, and to push aside the canvas flaps of a peddler's stall which had been placed close against it. Next to the churchyard wall is a little cottage,[25]with its bit of garden, devoted in this instance to potatoes; and there, while waiting for the sexton, I talked with an aged man, who said that he remembered, as an eye-witness,the funeral of Byron. "The oldest man he seemed that ever wore gray hairs." He stated that he was eighty-two and that his name was William Callandyne. Pointing to the church, he indicated the place of the Byron vault. "I was the last man," he said, "that went down into it, before he was buried there. I was a young fellow then, and curious to see what was going on. The place was full of skulls and bones. I wish you could see my son; he's a clever lad, only he ought to have more of thesuaviter in modo." Thus, with the garrulity of wandering age, he prattled on; but his mind was clear and his memory tenacious and positive. There is a good prospect from the region of Hucknall-Torkard church, and pointing into the distance, when his mind had been brought back to the subject of Byron, my venerable acquaintance now described, with minute specification of road and lane,—seeming to assume that the names and the turnings were familiar to his auditor,—the course of the funeral train from Nottingham to the church. "There were eleven carriages," he said. "They didn't go to the Abbey" (meaning Newstead), "but came directly here. There were many people to look at them. I remember all about it, and I'm an old man—eighty-two. You're an Italian, I should say," he added. By this time the sexton had come and unlocked the gate, and parting from Mr. Callandyne we presently made our way into the church of St. James, locking the churchyard gate behind us, to exclude rough and possibly mischievous followers. A strange and sad contrast, I thought, between this coarse and turbulent place, by a malign destiny ordained for the grave of Byron, and that peaceful, lovely, majestic church andprecinct, at Stratford-upon-Avon, which enshrine the dust of Shakespeare!

Hucknall-Torkard Church.

The sexton of the church of St. James and the parish clerk of Hucknall-Torkard was Mr. John Brown, and a man of sympathetic intelligence, kind heart, and interesting character I found him to be,—large, dark, stalwart, but gentle alike in manner and feeling, and considerate of his visitor. The pilgrim to the literary shrines of England does not always find the neighbouring inhabitants either sympathetic with his reverence or conscious of especial sanctity or interest appertaining to the relics which they possess; but honest and manly John Brown of Hucknall-Torkard understood both the hallowing charm of the place and the sentiment, not to say the profound emotion, of the traveller who now beheld for the first time the tomb of Byron. This church has been restored and altered since Byron was buried in it, in 1824, yet it retains its fundamental structure and its ancient peculiarities. The tower, a fine specimen of Norman architecture, strongly built, dark and grim, gives indication of great age. It is of a kind often met with in ancient English towns: you may see its brothers at York, Shrewsbury, Canterbury, Worcester, Warwick, and in many places sprinkled over the northern heights of London: but amid its tame surroundings in this little colliery settlement it looms with a peculiar frowning majesty, a certain bleak loneliness, both unique and impressive. The church is of the customary crucial form,—a low stone structure, peak-roofed outside, but arched within, the roof being supported by four great pillars on either side of the centre aisle, and the ceiling being fashioned of heavy timbers[131]forming almost a true arch above the nave. There are four large windows on each side of the church, and two on each side of the chancel, which is beneath a roof somewhat lower than that of the main building. Under the pavement of the chancel and back of the altar rail,—at which it was my privilege to kneel, while gazing upon this sacred spot,—is the grave of Byron.[26]Nothing is written on the stone that covers his sepulchre except the name of BYRON, with the dates of his birth and death, in brass letters, surrounded by a wreath of leaves, in brass, the gift of the King of Greece; and never did a name seem more stately or a place more hallowed. The dust of the poet reposes between that of his mother, on his right hand, and that of his Ada,—"sole daughter of my house and heart,"—on his left. The mother died on August 1, 1811; the daughter, who had by marriage become the Countess of Lovelace, in 1852. "I buried her with my own hands," said the sexton, John Brown, when, after a little time, he rejoined me at the altar rail. "I told them exactly where he was laid, when they wanted to put that brass on the stone; I remembered it well, for I lowered the coffin of the Countess of Lovelace into this vault, and laid her by her father's side." And when presently we went into a little vestry he produced the Register of Burials and displayed the record of that interment, in the following words: "1852. Died at 69 Cumberland Place, London. Buried December 3. Agedthirty-six.—Curtis Jackson." The Byrons were a short-lived race. The poet himself had just turned thirty-six; his mother was only forty-six when she passed away. This name of Curtis Jackson in the register was that of the rector or curate then incumbent but now departed. The register is a long narrow book made of parchment and full of various crabbéd handwritings,—a record similar to those which are so carefully treasured at the church of the Holy Trinity at Stratford; but it is more dilapidated.

Another relic shown by John Brown was a bit of embroidery, presenting the arms of the Byron family. It had been used at Byron's funeral, and thereafter was long kept in the church, though latterly with but little care. When theRev.Curtis Jackson came there he beheld this frail memorial with pious disapprobation. "He told me," said the sexton, "to take it home and burn it. I did take it home, but I didn't burn it; and when the new rector came he heard of it and asked me to bring it back, and a lady gave the frame to put it in." Framed it is, and likely now to be always preserved in this interesting church; and earnestly do I wish that I could remember, in order that I might speak it with honour, the name of the clergyman who could thus rebuke bigotry, and welcome and treasure in his church that shred of silk which once rested on the coffin of Byron. Still another relic preserved by John Brown is a large piece of cardboard bearing the inscription which is upon the coffin of the poet's mother, and which bore some part in the obsequies of that singular woman,—a creature full of faults, but the parent of a mighty genius, and capable of inspiring deep love. On thenight after Byron arrived at Newstead, whither he repaired from London, on receiving news of her illness, only to find her dead, he was found sitting in the dark and sobbing beside the corse. "I had but one friend in the world," he said, "and she is gone." He was soon to publishChilde Harold, and to gain hosts of friends and have the world at his feet; but he spoke what he felt, and he spoke the truth, in that dark room on that desolate night. Thoughts of these things, and of many other strange passages and incidents in his brief, checkered, glorious, lamentable life, thronged into my mind as I stood there, in presence of those relics and so near his dust, while the church grew dark and the silence seemed to deepen in the dusk of the gathering night.

Hucknall-Torkard Church—Interior.

They have for many years kept a book at the church of Hucknall-Torkard [the first one, an album given by Sir John Bowring, containing the record of visitations from 1825 to 1834, disappeared[27]in the latter year, or soon after], in which the visitors write their names; but the catalogue of pilgrims during the last fifty years is not a long one. The votaries of Byron are far less numerous than those of Shakespeare. Custom has made the visit to Stratford "a property of easiness," and Shakespeare is a safe no less than a rightful object of worship. The visit to Hucknall-Torkard is neither so easy nor so agreeable, and it requires some courage to be a votary of Byron,—and to own it. No day passes without bringing its visitor to the Shakespearecottage and the Shakespeare tomb; many days pass without bringing a stranger to the church of St. James. On the capital of a column near Byron's tomb I saw two mouldering wreaths of laurel, which had hung there for several years; one brought by the Bishop of Norwich, the other by the American poet Joaquin Miller. It was good to see them, and especially to see them close by the tablet of white marble which was placed on that church wall to commemorate the poet, and to be her witness in death, by his loving and beloved sister Augusta Mary Leigh,—a name that is the synonym of noble fidelity, a name that in our day cruel detraction and hideous calumny have done their worst to tarnish.That tablet names him "The Author of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"; and if the conviction of thoughtful men and women throughout the world can be accepted as an authority, no name in the long annals of English literature is more certain of immortality than the name of Byron. People mention the poetry of Spenser and Cowley and Dryden and Cowper, but the poetry of Byron they read. His reputation can afford the absence of all memorial to him in Westminster Abbey, and it can endure the neglect and censure of the precinct of Nottingham. That city rejoices in a stately castle throned upon a rock, and persons who admire the Stuarts may exult in the recollection that there the standard of Charles the First was unfurled, in his fatal war with the Parliament of England; but all that really hallows it for the stranger of to-day and for posterity is its association with the name of Byron. The stranger will look in vain, however, for any adequate sign of his former association with that place. It is difficult even to find prints or photographs of the Byron shrines, in the shops of Nottingham. One dealer, from whom I bought all the Byron pictures that he possessed, was kind enough to explain the situation, in one expressive sentence: "Much more ought to be done here as to Lord Byron's memory, that is the truth; but the fact is, the first families of the county don't approve of him."

When we came again into the churchyard, with its many scattered graves and its quaint stones and crosses leaning every way, and huddled in a strange kind of orderly confusion, the great dark tower stood out bold and solitary in the gloaming, and a chill wind of evening had begun to moan around its pinnacles, and through its mysteriousbelfry windows, and in the few trees near by, which gave forth a mournful whisper. It was hard to leave the place, and for a long time I stood near the chapel, just above the outer wall of the Byron vault. And there the sexton told me the story of the White Lady,—pointing, as he spoke, to a cottage abutting on the churchyard, one window in which commands a clear view of the place of Byron's grave. [That house has since been removed.] "There she lived," he said, "and there she died, and there," pointing to an unmarked grave near the pathway, about thirty feet from the Byron vault, "I buried her." It is impossible to give his words or to indicate his earnest manner. In brief, this lady, whose past no one knew, had taken up her residence in this cottage long subsequent to the burial of Byron, and had remained there until she died. She was pale, thin, handsome, and she wore white garments. Her face was often to be seen at that window, whether by night or day, and she seemed to be watching the tomb. Once, when masons were repairing the church wall, she was enabled to descend into that vault, and therefrom she obtained a skull, which she declared to be Byron's, and which she scraped, polished, and made perfectly white, and kept always beneath her pillow. It was her request, often made to the sexton, that she might be buried in the churchyard, close to the wall of the poet's tomb. "When at last she died," said John Brown, "they brought that skull to me, and I buried it there in the ground. It was one of the loose skulls from the old vault. She thought it was Byron's, and it pleased her to think so. I might have laid her close to this wall. I don't know why I didn't."

In those words the sexton's story ended. It was only one more of the myriad hints of that romance which the life and poetry of Byron have so widely created and diffused. I glanced around for some relic of the place that might properly be taken away: there was neither an ivy leaf shining upon the wall nor a flower growing in all that ground; but into a crevice of the rock, just above his tomb, the wind had at some time blown a little earth, and in this a few blades of grass were thinly rooted. These I gathered, and still possess, as a memento of an evening at Byron's grave.

The Album that was given to Hucknall-Torkard church, in 1825, by Sir John Bowring, to be used as a register of the names of visitors to Byron's tomb, disappeared from that church in the year 1834, or soon after, and it is supposed to have been stolen. In 1834 its contents were printed,—from a manuscript copy of it, which had been obtained from the sexton,—in a book of selections from Byron's prose, edited by "J. M. L." Those initials stand for the name of Joseph Munt Langford, who died in 1884. The dedication of the register is in the following words: "To the immortal and illustrious fame ofLord Byron, the first poet of the age in which he lived, these tributes, weak and unworthy of him, but in themselves sincere, are inscribed with the deepest reverence.—July 1825." At that time no memorial of any kind had been placed in the church to mark the poet's sepulchre: a fact which prompted Sir John Bowring to begin his Album with twenty-eight lines of verse, of which these are the best:

"A still, resistless influence,Unseen but felt, binds up the sense ...And though the master hand is cold,And though the lyre it once controlledRests mute in death, yet from the gloomWhich dwells about this holy tombSilence breathes out more eloquentThan epitaph or monument."

"A still, resistless influence,

Unseen but felt, binds up the sense ...

And though the master hand is cold,

And though the lyre it once controlled

Rests mute in death, yet from the gloom

Which dwells about this holy tomb

Silence breathes out more eloquent

Than epitaph or monument."

This register was used from 1825 till 1834. It contains eight hundred and fifteen names, with which are intertwined twenty-eight inscriptions in verse and thirty-six in prose. The first name is that of Count Pietro Gamba, who visited his friend's grave on January 31, 1825: but this must have been a reminiscent memorandum, as the book was not opened till the following July. The next entry was made by Byron's old servant, the date being September 23, 1825: "William Fletcher visited his ever-to-be-lamented lord and master's tomb." On September 21, 1828, the following singular record was written: "Joseph Carr, engraver, Hound's Gate, Nottingham, visited this place for the first time to witness the funeral of Lady Byron [mother of the much lamented late Lord Byron], August 9th, 1811, whose coffin-plate I engraved, and now I once more revisit the spot to drop a tear as a tribute of unfeigned respect to the mortal remains of that noble British bard. 'Tho' lost to sight, to memory dear.'" The next notable entry is that of September 3, 1829: "Lord Byron's sister, the Honourable Augusta Mary Leigh, visited this church." Under the date of January 8, 1832, are found the names of "M. Van Buren, Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States; Washington Irving; John Van Buren, New York, U.S.A., and J. Wildman."The latter was Colonel Wildman, the proprietor of Newstead Abbey, Byron's old home, now owned by Colonel Webb. On August 5, 1832, "Mr. Bunn, manager of Drury Lane theatre, honoured by the acquaintance of the illustrious poet, visited Lord Byron's tomb, with a party." Edward F. Flower and Selina Flower, of Stratford-upon-Avon, record their presence, on September 15, 1832,—the parents of Charles Edward Flower and Edgar Flower, of Stratford, the former being the founder of the Shakespeare Memorial. There are several eccentric tributes in the register, but the most of them are feeble. One of the better kind is this:

"Not in that palace where the dead reposeIn splendid holiness, where Time has spreadHis sombre shadows, and a halo glowsAround the ashes of the mighty dead,Life's weary pilgrim rests his aching head.This is his resting-place, and save his ownNo light, no glory round his grave is shed:But memory journeys to his shrine aloneTo mark how sound he sleeps, beneath yon simple stone."Ah, say, art thou ambitious? thy young breast—Oh, does it pant for honours? dost thou chaseThe phantom Fame, in fairy colours drest,Expecting all the while to win the race?Oh, does the flush of youth adorn thy faceAnd dost thou deem it lasting? dost thou craveThe hero's wreath, the poet's meed of praise?Learn that of this, these, all, not one can saveFrom the chill hand of death. Behold Childe Harold's grave!"

"Not in that palace where the dead repose

In splendid holiness, where Time has spread

His sombre shadows, and a halo glows

Around the ashes of the mighty dead,

Life's weary pilgrim rests his aching head.

This is his resting-place, and save his own

No light, no glory round his grave is shed:

But memory journeys to his shrine alone

To mark how sound he sleeps, beneath yon simple stone.

"Ah, say, art thou ambitious? thy young breast—Oh, does it pant for honours? dost thou chaseThe phantom Fame, in fairy colours drest,Expecting all the while to win the race?Oh, does the flush of youth adorn thy faceAnd dost thou deem it lasting? dost thou craveThe hero's wreath, the poet's meed of praise?Learn that of this, these, all, not one can saveFrom the chill hand of death. Behold Childe Harold's grave!"

"Ah, say, art thou ambitious? thy young breast—

Oh, does it pant for honours? dost thou chase

The phantom Fame, in fairy colours drest,

Expecting all the while to win the race?

Oh, does the flush of youth adorn thy face

And dost thou deem it lasting? dost thou crave

The hero's wreath, the poet's meed of praise?

Learn that of this, these, all, not one can save

From the chill hand of death. Behold Childe Harold's grave!"

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