CHAPTER VI

“Entre nous, I am cursedly dipped; my debts,everythinginclusive, will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps the Earl ‘bears no brother near the throne’—if so, I will make hissceptretotterin his hands.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE GRAND TOUR—FLIRTATIONS IN SPAIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yet are Spain’s maids no race of Amazons,But formed for all the witching arts of love:”

a story of which the memory is in “Don Juan”:

“’Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongueBy female lips and eyes—that is I mean,When both the teacher and the taught are young,As was the case, at least, where I have been.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sweet Florence! could another ever shareThis wayward, loveless heart, it would be thine.”

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

FLORENCE SPENCER SMITH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fair Florence found, in sooth, with some amaze,One who, ’twas said, still sighed to all he saw,Withstand, unmoved, the lustre of her gaze——”

The suggestion in the “Lines” is different:

“Oh, lady! When I left the shore,The distant shore which gave me birth,I hardly thought to grieve once more,To quit another spot on earth:“Yet, here amidst this barren isle,Where panting Nature droops the head,Where only thou art seen to smile,I view my parting hour with dread.”

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

“Though Fate forbids such things to be,Yet by thine eyes and ringlets curled!I cannotloseaworldfor thee,But would not losetheefor aWorld.”

And therefore again, just two months later:

“The spell is broke, the charm is flown!Thus is it with Life’s fitful fever:We madly smile when we should groan;Delirium is our best deceiver.Each lucid interval of thoughtRecalls the woes of Nature’s charter;AndHethat acts aswise men ought,Butlives—as Saints have died—a martyr.”

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

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

“Maid of Athens, ere we part,Give, oh give me back my heart!”

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

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

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

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