CHAPTER IX

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

The Maid of Athens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Standing one day before a looking glass,” Moore tells us, “he said to Lord Sligo:“‘How pale I look! I should like, I think, to die of a consumption!’“‘Why of a consumption?’ asked his friend.“‘Because then,’ he answered, ‘all the women would say, “See that poor Byron—how interesting he looks in dying!”’”

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

“‘How pale I look! I should like, I think, to die of a consumption!’

“‘Why of a consumption?’ asked his friend.

“‘Because then,’ he answered, ‘all the women would say, “See that poor Byron—how interesting he looks in dying!”’”

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

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

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

RETURN TO ENGLAND—PUBLICATION OF “CHILDE HAROLD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SECRET ORCHARD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!Whom Youth and Youth’s affections bound to me;Who did for me what none beside have done,Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee.What is my Being! thou has ceased to be!Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,Who mourns o’er hours which we no more shall see—Would they had never been, or were to come!Would he had ne’er returned to find fresh cause to roam.“Oh, ever loving, lovely, and beloved!How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past.And clings to thoughts now better far removed!But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last.All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death, thou hast;The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend,Ne’er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,And grief with grief continuing still to blend,Hath snatched the little joy that Life hath yet to lend.”

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

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

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

“One struggle more, and I am freeFrom pangs that rend my heart in twain;One last long sigh to Love and thee,Then back to busy life again.It suits me well to mingle nowWith things that never pleased before:Though every joy is fled below,What future grief can touch me more?“Then bring me wine, the banquet bring;Man was not formed to live alone:I’ll be that light unmeaning thingThat smiles with all, and weeps with none.It was not thus in days more dear,It never would have been, but thouHast fled, and left me lonely here;Thou’rt nothing,—all are nothing now.”

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

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

“But let this pass—I’ll whine no more.Nor seek again an Eastern shore;The world befits a busy brain,—I’ll hie me to its haunts again.But if, in some succeeding year,When Britain’s “May is in the sere,”Thou hear’st of one, whose deepening crimesSuit with the sablest of the times,Of one, whom love nor pity sways,Nor hope of fame, nor good men’s praise;One, who in stern Ambition’s pride,Perchance not blood shall turn aside:One ranked in some recording pageWith the worst anarchs of the age,Him wilt thouknow,—andknowingpause,Nor with the effect forget the cause.”

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

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

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

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

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

LADY CAROLINE LAMB

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

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

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

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

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

Lady Caroline Lamb.

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

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