CHAPTER III

“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.

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 heryounger 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—tome—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 areentitled 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 andinduced 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 hismarksmanship. 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 nevertoldit, thoughshehad 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 forMary 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, theworstof allmaladiesin 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,”—themost 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 stoodLooking afar as if her lover’s steedKept 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 yetShe knew she was by him beloved—she knew,For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heartWas darkened with her shadow, and she sawThat he was wretched, but she saw not all.He rose, and with a cold and gentle graspHe took her hand; a moment o’er his faceA tablet of unutterable thoughtsWas traced, and then it faded, as it came;He dropped the hand he held, and with slow stepsRetired, but not as bidding her adieu,For they did part with mutual smiles; he passedFrom 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 ofwhich 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.

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 therising 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 herconsulting 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. Theirways,mutatis mutandis, are faithfully described in the pages of “Verdant Green.” Byron’s career, once moremutatis 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 wearsevenwaistcoats, 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 nearlyhalf a yard.”

That is the closing passage of a letter whichbegins with the confession that “Wineandwomenhavedishedyourhumble 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, thoughpure, 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 begoneBecause 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 Chaworthstood 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. Otherverses, 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 ofTeignmouth. 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 highlyimproper 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 dayWith 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 sametime, 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 withsang 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. Youwill 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 ParadiseWithout 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 besidethe lines in which Walter Savage Landor, at about the same period, commemorated a similar moment of emotion:

“Rose Aylmer, whom these waking eyesMay weep but never see;A night of memories and of sighsI 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 hisdefiant 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.

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:

Back to Index Next