CHAPTER XII

“The general reason against marriage is that two minds, however congenial they may be, or however submissive the one may be to the other, can never act like one. It is the nature of human beings that no man can be free or independent....”“... By marriage you place yourself on the defensive instead of the offensive in society....”“Every man will find his own private affairs more difficult to control than any public affairs on which he may be engaged....”

“... By marriage you place yourself on the defensive instead of the offensive in society....”

“Every man will find his own private affairs more difficult to control than any public affairs on which he may be engaged....”

William Lamb’s experience of married life was to be, as it were, an object lesson on those texts. At one moment Lady Caroline was to overwhelm him with doting affection; at the next to make him ridiculous. Sometimes the two moods followed each other as quickly as the thunder follows the lightning, as in the case of a scene of which the Kembles were involuntary witnesses when staying in the same hotel with the Lambs in Paris.

Husband and wife had quarrelled in their presence, and had then withdrawn to their apartment which faced the rooms which the Kembles occupied. The lamps were lighted, and the blinds were not drawn, so that the Kembles looked across the courtyard and saw what happened. William Lamb was in his arm-chair. Lady Caroline first sat on his knee, and then slid to his feet, looking up into his face with great humility. This for a few moments. Then something that William Lamb said once more disturbed Lady Caroline’s equanimity. In an instant she was on her feet, running round the room, pursued by her husband, sweeping mirrors, candlesticks, and crockery on to the floor, in a veritable whirlwind of passion; whereupon William Lamb drew the blind and the Kembles saw no more.

That story may serve as a symbolic epitome of William Lamb’s married life. We shall come to many stories of the same kind as we proceed. Lady Caroline was a creature of impulse, and there was nearly always a man in the case. She easily persuaded herself that any man who was polite to her was in love with her—both Moore and Rogers were among the victims of whom she boasted—and she would not allow the contrary to be suggested. Moreover, besides being self-willed in matters of the heart, she liked toafficherherself with every man for whom she felt a preference, and to declare the state of her affections to the world with the insistent emphasis with which the sensational virtues of soaps and sauces are set forth on the hoardings.

Whether she deliberately sought notoriety, or merely did what she chose to do without fear of it, remains, to this hour, an open question. All that is certain is that she did, in fact, make herself very notorious indeed, and that there was more scandal than subtlety in her attempts to monopolise Byron, to whose heart she laid siege, with all the audacity of a stage adventuress, in the presence of a large, amused, and interested audience.

It was Lady Westmorland who introduced them. She did not introduce Byron to Lady Caroline, but Lady Caroline to Byron. Already, only a few days after the appearance of “Childe Harold,” he was on his pedestal, and was not expected to descend from it, even to show deference to ladies.“He has a club-foot and bites his nails,” Rogers had told her. “If he is as ugly as Æsop I must know him,” she had answered. But now that she was brought to him, she shrank from him, whether because she was afraid, or because she wished to provoke and pique him. “I looked earnestly at him,” she told Lady Morgan, “and turned on my heel”; and she went home and wrote in her diary the impression that Byron was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

That was the first scene in the comedy. The second took place at Holland House, and the third at Melbourne House. Lady Caroline’s recollections of them were recorded in Lady Morgan’s reminiscences:

“I was sitting with Lord and Lady Holland when he was announced. Lady Holland said, ‘I must present Lord Byron to you.’ Lord Byron said, ‘That offer was made to you before; may I ask why you rejected it?’ He begged permission to come and see me. He did so the next day. Rogers and Moore were standing by me: I had just come in from riding. I was filthy and heated. When Lord Byron was announced, I flew out of the room to wash myself. When I returned, Rogers said, ‘Lord Byron, you are a happy man. Lady Caroline has been sitting here in all her dirt with us, but when you were announced, she flew to beautify herself.’ Lord Byron wished to come and see me at eight o’clock, when I was alone. I said he might.”

He did; and “from that moment for more than nine months he almost lived at Melbourne House.” The rest, in Lady Caroline’s opinion—at all events in one of her opinions, expressed in an angry letter—was all William Lamb’s fault.

“He cared nothing for my morals,” she remarks. “I might flirt and go about with what men I pleased. He was privy to my affair with Lord Byron and laughed at it. His indolence renders him insensible to everything. When I ride, play, and amuse him, he loves me. In sickness and suffering he deserts me.”

That protest, however, is wholly unjust, and only partly true. A married woman who has no sooner met a man than she arranges to dinetête-à-têtewith him is hardly entitled to ascribe her flirtation to her husband’s contributory negligence. Lady Caroline not only did that, but also, in her wilful way, plunged at once into a compromising correspondence. Her very first letter to Byron, according to Rogers, “assured him that, if he was in any want of money, all her jewels were at his disposal.” In another letter of approximately the same date we find her writing: “The rose Lord Byron gave Lady Caroline Lamb died in despite of every effort made to save it; probably from regret at its fallen fortunes.”

Evidently Lady Caroline had thrown herself at Byron’s head before William Lamb guessed what was happening. Afterwards, no doubt, he knewwhat the rest of the world knew. But he also knew—what the rest of the world did not know, and what Lady Caroline herself only imperfectly realised—how froward and changeable were his wife’s moods, how great was the risk of hysterical explosions if those moods were crossed, what a “handful” she was, in short, and how very difficult it was to handle her, and so he left things alone.

Leaving things alone, indeed, was William Lamb’s regular formula for the solution of the problems alike of public and of private life. He believed that problems left alone tended to solve themselves, just as letters left unanswered tend to answer themselves. On the whole the principle had worked, if not ideally, yet well enough for the practical purposes of domestic life. Things had happened before, and, being left alone, had ceased to happen. In his desk lay a letter relating to some previous ebullition the particulars of which are wrapped in mystery. “I think lately, my dearest William,” Lady Caroline had written, three years before, “we have been very troublesome to each other.” It was true, and it had not mattered. The fire, if there had been a fire, had burnt itself out. The hysterics—it is not to be doubted that there were hysterics—had subsided with the passing of the occasion which had called them forth. The clouds had been dispersed, and the sun had shone again. Why should not this chapter in his domestic history repeat itself? He was very fond of his wife; he hated rows; he wished to take no risks.The best way of avoiding risks was to humour her.

So he humoured her, remembering how she had railed at the bishop on her wedding day, knowing, no doubt, how little a thing might upset her mental balance, and making every possible allowance; and the only attempt at intervention came from Lady Melbourne, who remonstrated, not with Lady Caroline, but with Byron. He struck an attitude, and waived the matter on one side.

“You need not fear me,” was his reply. “I do not pursue pleasure like other men; I labour under an incurable disease and a blighted heart. Believe me she is safe with me.”

No one knows whether she was, in the narrow sense of the word, “safe” with him or not. Rogers thought that she was, but admitted that he did not really know. In any case she was not safe from herself, or from the tongue of scandal. She was really in love—her devotion was no passing fancy—and she did not care who knew it. Indeed she behaved as if she thought that the more people who knew it, the better. The woman who, at a ball, called upon Byron’s friend Harness—that very serious young Cantab just about to take orders—to bear witness that she was wearing no fewer than six pairs of stockings, was not likely to hide the light of a grand passion under a bushel. She did not so hide it, but proceeded, as has been said, toafficherherself as if she were inviting the attentionof the world to a great spectacular entertainment. She had not known Byron a couple of months before people were beginning to talk.

“Your little friend Caro William,” wrote the Duchess of Devonshire on May 4, 1812, “as usual is doing all sorts of imprudent things with him.... The ladies, I hear spoil him, and the gentlemen are jealous of him. He is going back to Naxos, and then the husbands may sleep in peace. I should not be surprised if Caro William were to go with him, she is so wild and imprudent.”

Rogers, in his “Table Talk,” is still more picturesque. He tells us how, when Byron and Lady Caroline quarrelled, she used to plant herself in his (Rogers’) garden, waiting to catch him on his return home and beg him to effect a reconciliation; and he continues:

“When she met Byron at a party, she would always, if possible, return home from it inhiscarriage, and accompanied byhim: I recollect particularly their returning to town together from Holland House. But such was the insanity of her passion for Byron that sometimes, when not invited to a party where he was to be, she would wait for him in the street till it was over! One night, after a great party at Devonshire House, to which Lady Caroline had not been invited, I saw her—yes, saw her—talking to Byron, with half of her body thrust into the carriage which he had just entered.”

In the midst of, and in consequence of, these spectacles, Lady Melbourne decided to take Lady Caroline to Ireland. She cherished, it seems, the double design of getting her daughter-in-law out of Byron’s way and marrying Byron to her niece. Of the success of the latter scheme there will be a good deal to be said in subsequent chapters. Much was to happen, however, both to Byron and to Lady Caroline before it succeeded. They continued to correspond during Lady Caroline’s absence; and the correspondence soon reached an acute phase which resulted in a series of violent scenes.

THE QUARREL WITH LADY CAROLINE—HER CHARACTER AND SUBSEQUENT CAREER

“While in Ireland,” Lady Caroline Lamb told Lady Morgan, “I received letters constantly—the most tender and the most amusing.”

She received one letter in which Byron, after speaking of “a sense of duty to your husband and mother” declared that “no other in word or deed shall ever hold the place in my affections which is, and shall be, most sacred to you,” and concluded: “I was and am yours freely and most entirely, to obey, to honour, love—and fly with you when, where, and how you yourselfmightandmaydetermine.” What did he mean?

Apparently he meant to let Lady Caroline down gently—to give her the right of boasting of his undying regard—and to obtain his liberty in exchange. We need not stop to consider whether the bargain would have been a fair one, for Lady Caroline did not agree to it. There were no bounds to her infatuation, and she could not bear the thought that there should be any bounds to his. But there were. “Even during our intimacy,” he told Medwin, “I was not at all constant to this fair one, and she suspected as much.” It looks as though her suspicions decided her to return toEngland. At all events she started, and at Dublin, received another letter to which the epithets “tender” and “amusing” were equally inapplicable.

“It was,” she told Lady Morgan, “that cruel letter I have published in ‘Glenarvon’”—the novel in which, some five years later, she gave the world her version of the liaison. The text of it, as given in ‘Glenarvon,’ is as follows:

“I am no longer your lover; and since you oblige me to confess it by this truly unfeminine persecution, learn that I am attached to another, whose name it would, of course, be dishonest to mention. I shall ever remember with gratitude the many instances I have received of the predilection you have shown in my favour. I shall ever continue your friend, if your ladyship will permit me so to style myself. And as a first proof of my regard, I offer you this advice: correct your vanity, which is ridiculous: exert your absurd caprices on others; and leave me in peace.”

Byron appears to have admitted to Medwin that “a part” of the letter was genuine. The rest of it—the gratuitously offensive part of it—was doubtless doctored, if not actually fabricated, by the novelist for the purposes of her art. In any case, however, quite enough was written to send Lady Caroline into a fit, from which she only recovered to renew her eccentricities. “I lost my brain,” she confesses. “I was bled, leeched; kept for a monthin the filthy Dolphin Inn at Rock. On my return I was in great prostration of mind and spirit.” And then scenes followed—scene on the heels of scene. It is impossible to be quite sure of arranging them in their proper order; but that matters little.

There was a scene in Brocket Park, where Lady Caroline burnt Byron in effigy. Together with his effigy she burnt copies of his letters, keeping the originals for reference. A number of girls, attired in white, danced round the pyre, chanting a dirge which she had composed for the occasion:

“Is this Guy Faux you burn in effigy?Why bring the Traitor here? What is Guy Faux to me?Guy Faux betrayed his country, and his laws.England revenged the wrong; his was a public cause.But I have private cause to raise this flame.Burn also those, and be their fate the same.”

And also:

“Burn, fire, burn, while wondering Boys exclaim,And gold and trinkets glitter in the flame.Ah! look not thus on me, so grave, so sad;Shake not your heads, nor say the Lady’s mad.”

Et cetera.

Then there was a scene in Byron’s chambers, whither Lady Caroline pursued him in order to obtain confirmation of certain suspicions, thus described by Byron to Medwin:

“In order to detect my intrigues she watched me, and earthed a lady into my lodgings—and came herself, terrier-like, in the disguise of a carman. My valet, who did not see through the masquerade, let her in: when to the despair of Fletcher, she put off the man and put on the woman. Imagine the scene! It was worthy of Faublas!”

After that, according to Medwin, it was agreed that, if they met, they were to meet as strangers; but Lady Caroline did not carry out her part of the agreement. “We were at a ball,” the reporter represents Byron as saying. “She came up and asked me if she might waltz. I thought it perfectly indifferent whether she waltzed or not, or with whom, and told her so, in different terms, but with much coolness. After she had finished, a scene occurred, which was in the mouths of everyone.” Fanny Kemble, however, gives a more sensational version of the story.

“Lady Caroline,” she says, “with impertinent disregard of Byron’s infirmity, asked him to waltz. He contemptuously replied, ‘I cannot, and you nor any other woman ought not.’” Whereupon, the narrator continues, Lady Caroline rushed into the dressing-room, threw up the window, and tried to throw herself out of it, exclaiming with Saint-Preux: “La roche est escarpée; l’eau est profonde!” Then, saved by someone who saw her intention and caught hold of her skirts, she asked for water, bit a piece out of the glass which was handed to her, and tried to stab herself with it,but was ultimately persuaded to return home and go to bed.

Fact and fancy, no doubt, are inextricably woven together in that narrative. All that is quite certain is that Lady Caroline did go home, and that her temper became so ungovernable that William Lamb, who also, in spite of his easy-going ways, had a temper, proposed a separation. The proposal was agreed to, and the family lawyer was instructed to draw up the deed. He drew it up; but when he brought it to the house to be signed, sealed, and delivered, he found Lady Caroline sitting on her husband’s knee, “feeding him,” says his biographer, “with tiny scraps of transparent bread and butter.” His professional tact bade him retire before this unexpected tableau; and the separation was postponed for twelve years.

That is practically the whole of the story, so far as Byron is concerned with it. Lady Caroline was to write him other letters to which it will be necessary to refer as we proceed; but she had now passed out of his life, even if he had not passed out of hers. Other urgent interests were springing up to occupy him; and he had once more heard theleit motiffor which we always have to listen when we find his actions, his letters, and his poems perplexing us.

Society—that is to say, the women of society—blamed him for his conduct; but the blame, if it is to have any sting in it, seems to require the assumption that every woman has a right to everyman’s heart if she demands it with sufficient emphasis, and that any man who refuses to honour the demand is,ipso facto, “behaving badly.” Women, perhaps, are a little more ready to make that assumption than are philosophers to allow its validity. Granting the assumption, we shall be bound to admit that Byron did treat Lady Caroline shamefully; but suppose we do not grant it—then, perhaps, our chief task will be to search for excuses for Lady Caroline herself.

The excuses to which she is entitled are those which were very obviously made for her by her husband and his mother. They did not quarrel with her, though they sometimes lost their temper with her; and—what is more to the purpose—they did not quarrel with Byron. Evidently, therefore, they held the view that Lady Caroline was responsible for Byron’s conduct—but could not be held responsible for her own. They had the doctor’s word for it that, though she was not mad, she might easily become so. If she was to be kept sane, she must be humoured. In humouring her up to a point, Byron had acted for the best. Neither a husband nor a mother-in-law could blame him for his unwillingness to go beyond that point. His proposal to fly with her may strike one as excessive; but it may perhaps be classed with the promises sometimes made to passionate children in the hope of keeping them quiet till the passion passes. There is really no reason to think that either William Lamb or Lady Melbourne regarded it in any other light.

It was “really from the best motives,” Byron assured Hodgson, that “I withdrew my homage.” The best motives, as we shall perceive, were mixed with other motives; but they were doubtless there. Byron could justly speak of himself as “restoring a woman to her family, who are treating her with the greatest kindness, and with whom I am on good terms.” It was only to be expected that he would be flattered by her attentions when he was twenty-four and new to society. It was equally to be expected that he should execute a retreat when he realised that he had to do with adétraquéewhose pursuit at once threatened a scandal and made him as well as her husband look ridiculous.

The proofs that her mind was unhinged are ample. “She appears to me,” wrote Lady H. Leveson Gower to Lady G. Morpeth, “in a state very little short of insanity, and my aunt describes it as at times having been very decidedly so.” That is an example of the direct evidence; and the circumstantial evidence is even more abundant. The scene at the ball, of which Lady Caroline herself gave a spluttering account in a rambling and incoherent letter to Medwin, is only a part of it. An attempt which she made to forge Byron’s signature in order to obtain his portrait from John Murray points to the same conclusion. The inconsistent and inconsequential picture which she draws of herself in her letters and her writings affords the most conclusive testimony of all.

From the correspondence and other documents one could not possibly gather whether shepreferred her husband to her lover or her lover to her husband; whether she “worshipped” Byron for three years only or throughout her life; whether her attachment to him ceased, or did not cease, after her visit, in men’s clothes, to his chambers; whether she did or did not rejoice in the unhappiness of his married life. On all these points she repeatedly contradicted herself with the excessive emphasis of the hysterical. To say that Byron’s treatment of her drove her mad would be to talk nonsense. At the most it only gave an illusion of method to her madness, and supplied the monomania for which her unbalanced mind was waiting.

William Lamb humoured her long after Byron had ceased to do so. She knew it, and, in her comparatively lucid intervals, appreciated both his forbearance and his character. “Remember,” she wrote to Lady Morgan, “the only noble fellow I ever met with is William Lamb; he is to me what Shore was to Jane Shore.” She also placed “William Lamb first” in the order of the objects of her affection; but, in the very letter in which she did so, she spoke of “Lord Byron, that dear, that angel, that misguided and misguiding Byron, whom I adore.” We must make what we can of it; but, in truth, there is nothing to be made of it except that Lady Caroline was mad. Presently she became so obviously mad that she smashed her doctor’s watch in a fit of rage and had to be placed in the charge of two female keepers.

There came a day when, riding near Brocket,she met a funeral procession, and was told that it was Byron’s. Then she fainted; and it was after that incident that her uncontrollable violence caused the long-postponed separation to be carried into effect. Some verses which she wrote on the occasion are printed among Lord Melbourne’s papers:

“Loved One! No tear is in mine eye,Though pangs my bosom thrill,For I have learned, when others sigh,To suffer and be still.Passion, and pride, and flattery strove,They made a wreck of me;But oh, I never ceased to love,I never loved but thee.”

There are two other—very similar—stanzas. The inadequacy of the expression is, perhaps, the most pathetic thing about them. A child seems to be struggling to utter the emotions of a grown-up person—a clouded mind, to be striving to clear itself under the influence of a sudden shock. And the mind in truth was, at that date, very far from clear. The drinking of laudanum mixed with brandy often helped in the clouding of it; and the end was not very far removed.

The last illness began towards the end of 1827. William Lamb, when he heard of it, hurried to his wife’s side; devoted to her, and eager to humour her, in spite of everything, to the last. She was “able to converse with him and enjoy his society,” and he found her “calm, patient, and affectionate.”She died of dropsy on January 28, 1828; and William Lamb published an article consecrated to her memory in theLiterary Gazettein the course of the following month. One gathers from it, reading between the lines, not only that he forgave, but that he understood. Hopes, he admitted, had been drawn from her early years which “her maturity was not destined to realise”; but he concluded: “Her manners, though somewhat eccentric, and apparently, not really, affected, had a fascination which it is difficult for any who never encountered their effect to conceive.”

All this, however, though not irrelevant, is taking us a long way from Byron, to whom it is now time to return.

LADY OXFORD—BYRON’S INTENTION OF GOING ABROAD WITH HER

Byron’s separation from Lady Caroline Lamb, though suggested by Lady Melbourne, appears to have been negotiated by Hobhouse at the instance of Lady Bessborough. “Received a note from Lady Bessborough. Went to Byron, who agrees to go out of town,” is the entry in his Diary which reveals the part he played. A further entry relating that Lady Caroline found him and Lady Bessborough together, and charged them with looking like conspirators, adds all the confirmation needed. Byron went out of town as he had promised, stayed at Cheltenham, and presently wrote the letter in which he told Lady Caroline that he had ceased to love her. He added insult to injury, as Lady Caroline felt, by writing on notepaper bearing the arms of the Countess of Oxford.

She and Lady Oxford knew each other rather well, and had been friends. “Lady Oxford and Caroline William Lamb,” we read in one of the letters of Harriet Lady Granville, “have been engaged in a correspondence, the subject whether learning Greek purifies or inflames the passions.” The right answer to the conundrum is, perhaps, that it depends upon the learner—or else thatit depends upon the teacher. Lady Oxford’s passions, at any rate, were, like Lady Caroline’s, inflammable. She was forty—the romantic age in the view of the philosophers; and she was unhappily married. Byron spoke of her to Medwin as “sacrificed, almost before she was a woman, to one whose mind and body were equally contemptible.” A less prejudiced witness, Uvedale Price, wrote to Rogers, at the time of her death: “There could not, in all respects, be a more ill-matched pair than herself and Lord Oxford, or a stronger instance of the cruel sports of Venus or, rather, of Hymen.”

Byron was in love with her, or thought so—he was not quite clear which when he poured his confidences on the subject into Medwin’s ear. Lady Caroline’s suspicions, to that extent, were justified. The “autumnal charms”—it is he who calls them so—fascinated him for about eight months. “The autumn of a beauty like hers,” he said, “is preferable to the spring in others.” He added that he “had great difficulty in breaking with her,” and “once was on the point of going abroad with her, and narrowly escaped this folly.” How he escaped it—or why he avoided it—he does not say; but perhaps we may find a reason.

Of his intentions, at any rate, there is no room for doubt. We have no need to depend on Medwin’s evidence for the full proof is in Byron’s own letters. It is mixed up with a good deal of extraneous matter, but it is there;and a series of very brief citations will present the romance, such as it was, in outline:

To William Bankes on September 12, 1812: “The only persons I know are the Rawdons and Oxfords, with some later acquaintances of less brilliant descent. But I do not trouble them much.”To Hanson on October 22, 1812: “I am going to Lord Oxford’s, Eywood, Presteigne, Hereford.”

To William Bankes on September 12, 1812: “The only persons I know are the Rawdons and Oxfords, with some later acquaintances of less brilliant descent. But I do not trouble them much.”

To Hanson on October 22, 1812: “I am going to Lord Oxford’s, Eywood, Presteigne, Hereford.”

Letters are dated from Presteigne on October 31, November 8, and November 16. A letter of November 22 begins, “On my return here (Cheltenham) from Lord Oxford’s.” A January letter shows Byron once again at Lord Oxford’s; and then the references to the contemplated foreign tour—letters of which there is no mistaking the significance—begin:

To Hanson on February, 27, 1813: “It is my determination, on account of a malady to which I am subject, and for other weighty reasons, to go abroad again almost immediately. To this you will object; but, as my intention cannot be altered, I have only to request that you will assist me as far as in your power to make the necessary arrangements.”To Hanson on March 1, 1813: “Your objections I anticipated and can only repeat that I cannot act otherwise; so pray hasten some arrangement—for with, or without, I must go.”To Hanson on March 6, 1813: “I must be ready in April at whatever risk—at whatever loss.”To Charles Hanson on March 24, 1813: “Pray tell your father to get the money on Rochdale, or I must sell it directly. I must be ready by the last week inMay, and am consequently pressed for time. I go first to Cagliari in Sardinia, and then on to the Levant.”To Mrs. Leigh on March 26, 1813: “I am going abroad again in June, but should wish to see you before my departure.... On Sunday, I set off for a fortnight for Eywood, near Presteigne, in Herefordshire—with theOxfords. I see you put on ademurelook at the name, which is very becoming and matronly in you; but you won’t be sorry to hear that I am quite out of a more serious scrape with another singular personage, which threatened me last year.”To Hanson on April 15, 1813: “I shall only be able to see you a few days in town, as I shall sail before the 20th of May.”To Hanson on April 17, 1813: “I wish, if possible, the arrangement with Hoare to be made immediately, as I must set off forthwith.”To John Murray on April 21, 1813: “Send in my account to Bennet Street, as I wish to settle it before sailing.”To Hanson on June 3, 1813; “I am as determined as I have been for the last six months.... Everything is ordered and ready now. Do not trifle with me, for I am in very solid serious earnest.... I have made my choice, and go I will.”To Hodgson on June 8, 1813: “I shall manage to see you somewhere before I sail, which will be next month.”To John Murray on June 12, 1813: “Recollect that my lacquey returns in the Evening, and that I set out for Portsmouth to-morrow.”To William Gifford on June 18, 1813: “As I do not sail quite so soon as Murray may have led you to expect (not till July), I trust I may have some chance of taking you by the hand before my departure.”To Mrs. Leigh, in the same month: “If you knewwhomI had put off besides my journey, you would think me grown strangely fraternal.”To Moore on July 8, 1813: “The Oxfords have sailed almost a fortnight, and my sister is in town, which is a great comfort.”

To Hanson on March 1, 1813: “Your objections I anticipated and can only repeat that I cannot act otherwise; so pray hasten some arrangement—for with, or without, I must go.”

To Hanson on March 6, 1813: “I must be ready in April at whatever risk—at whatever loss.”

To Charles Hanson on March 24, 1813: “Pray tell your father to get the money on Rochdale, or I must sell it directly. I must be ready by the last week inMay, and am consequently pressed for time. I go first to Cagliari in Sardinia, and then on to the Levant.”

To Mrs. Leigh on March 26, 1813: “I am going abroad again in June, but should wish to see you before my departure.... On Sunday, I set off for a fortnight for Eywood, near Presteigne, in Herefordshire—with theOxfords. I see you put on ademurelook at the name, which is very becoming and matronly in you; but you won’t be sorry to hear that I am quite out of a more serious scrape with another singular personage, which threatened me last year.”

To Hanson on April 15, 1813: “I shall only be able to see you a few days in town, as I shall sail before the 20th of May.”

To Hanson on April 17, 1813: “I wish, if possible, the arrangement with Hoare to be made immediately, as I must set off forthwith.”

To John Murray on April 21, 1813: “Send in my account to Bennet Street, as I wish to settle it before sailing.”

To Hanson on June 3, 1813; “I am as determined as I have been for the last six months.... Everything is ordered and ready now. Do not trifle with me, for I am in very solid serious earnest.... I have made my choice, and go I will.”

To Hodgson on June 8, 1813: “I shall manage to see you somewhere before I sail, which will be next month.”

To John Murray on June 12, 1813: “Recollect that my lacquey returns in the Evening, and that I set out for Portsmouth to-morrow.”

To William Gifford on June 18, 1813: “As I do not sail quite so soon as Murray may have led you to expect (not till July), I trust I may have some chance of taking you by the hand before my departure.”

To Mrs. Leigh, in the same month: “If you knewwhomI had put off besides my journey, you would think me grown strangely fraternal.”

To Moore on July 8, 1813: “The Oxfords have sailed almost a fortnight, and my sister is in town, which is a great comfort.”

That is the skeleton of the romance. Such clothes as it is felt to need the imagination must provide. Byron’s position seems to have been perilously near that of a “tame cat,” though hemight have preferred to call himself, then, as on a later occasion, acavaliere servente. His excuse is that he was only twenty-five, and that a fascinating woman of forty can be very fascinating indeed, and very clever at getting her own way. Her attempt to annex Byron, though she was fifteen years his senior, may be viewed as her gambler’s throw for happiness. She threw and lost—but she lost quietly. She resembled Lady Caroline in being romantic, but she differed from her in not being “obstreperous.” There was no scandal for society to take note of, and the welkin never rang with her complaints, though she did walk about Rome displaying Byron’s portrait at her girdle.

Nor did it ring with Byron’s, who, indeed, had nothing to complain of. The few allusions to the affair which Hobhouse contributes throw very little light upon it. He notes, in one place, that Lady Oxford was “most uncommon in her talk and licentious.” He adds, on another page, the memorandum: “Got a picture of Lady Oxford from Mrs. Mee. Lord B.’s money for it.” That is all; and there are no hints to be derived from “occasional” verses. However much Lady Oxford may have pleased Byron, she did not inspire him. The period of his intimacy with her was, from the literary point of view, a singularly barren period; and the allusions cited from the letters—they are all the allusions that can be cited—are chiefly instructive because of the difference between their tone and the tone of certain other letters written very soon afterwards.

There is no suggestion in them of deep sentiment. What they do suggest is—first, a young man desperately determined to go through with a desperate adventure, and very much afraid of being warned of the consequences of his folly—then a young man who, having a haunting doubt of his own sincerity, shouts to keep up his courage—finally a young man who is grateful to the circumstances, whatever they may have been, which have deflected him from a rash course, and saved him from himself. One turns a few pages, and finds Byron writing in a very different strain:

“I have said nothing of the brilliant sex; but the fact is, I am at this moment in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape, than any of the last twelve months, and that is saying a good deal. It is unlucky we can neither live with nor without these women.”“I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow—that is, I would a month ago, but at present....”“Some day or other, when we areveterans, I may tell you a tale of present and past times; and it is not from want of confidence that I do not tell you now.... All this would be very well if I had no heart; but, unluckily, I have found that there is such a thing still about me, though in no very good repair, and also that it hasa habit of attaching itself toone, whether I will or no.”

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

“Some day or other, when we areveterans, I may tell you a tale of present and past times; and it is not from want of confidence that I do not tell you now.... All this would be very well if I had no heart; but, unluckily, I have found that there is such a thing still about me, though in no very good repair, and also that it hasa habit of attaching itself toone, whether I will or no.”

These passages are from letters to Moore. A few days before writing the last of them Byron had written to Miss Milbanke, whom he was shortly to marry:

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

No names are mentioned here; but certain inferences not only can, but inevitably must, be drawn. At some time towards the end of the summer of 1813, there was a crisis of Byron’s life. It did not come to a head until after Lady Oxford’s departure, and Lady Oxford had nothing whatever to do with it. The latter point not only follows from the sudden disappearance of Lady Oxford from Byron’s sphere of interest, but is specifically made in a letter (dated November 8, 1813) from Byron to his sister:

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

“My dearest Augusta,

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

Those are the most significant of the letters, though there are others. Even if they stood alone, one would feel sure that there was a story behind them; but they do not stand alone. We have the poems to set beside them, and we have also the journal which Byron kept from November 14, 1813 till April 19, 1814. Letters, poems, and journal, read in conjunction, furnish a clue which it is impossible to mistrust. The distinction of having first so read them with sufficient care to find the clue belongs to Mr. Richard Edgcumbe.

Possibly Mr. Edgcumbe has proved just a little too much—that question will have to be faced when we come to it; but our immediate task must be to track the story along the lines which he has indicated, and see how all the mysteries connected with Byron can be solved, and all the emotional inconsistencies of his life unified, by the recollection that, of all the many passions of his life, there was only one which really mattered to him.

Many women were welcome to love him if they liked—he was a man very ready to let himself be loved; but only one woman had the power to make him suffer—and that woman was Mary Chaworth. The motto “Cherchez la femme” may, in short, in his case, be particularised.Whenever his conduct and his utterances seem, on the face of it, inexplicable, we have to look for Mary Chaworth and see her re-asserting a power which has been allowed to lapse; and we will turn to look for her now.

AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS—THOUGHTS OF MARRIAGE, OF FOREIGN TRAVEL, AND OF MARY CHAWORTH

The poems written during the dark period of Byron’s life which we have now to consider are “The Giaour,” “The Bride of Abydos,” “The Corsair,” and “Lara.” Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, in his introduction to “The Bride of Abydos,” attributed the gloom to the fact that Byron “had been staying at Aston Hall, Rotherham, with his friend James Wedderburn Webster, and had fallen in love with his friend’s wife, Lady Frances.” It will be time enough to treat that suggestion seriously when more evidence is offered in support of it. The one important reference to Lady Frances in the Letters certainly does not bear it out:

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

That is all; and it is not in tune with those allusions, veiled by asterisks, to a consuming anddestroying passion, with which the Journal is thickly sprinkled. On the other hand the open references to Mary Chaworth scattered throughout Byron’s autobiographical utterances are perfectly in tune with these enigmatical invocations of an Unknown Lady. Even if it could not be shown that she and Byron met during this period of mental anguish, we should still be tempted to conjecture that she and the Unknown Lady were one; and, as a matter of fact, we know that they did meet, and also know enough of the terms on which they met to be able to clear up the situation beyond much possibility of doubt. The key to it, indeed, is the letter written by Byron to Mary Chaworth five years after their final separation:

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

That letter by itself proves practically the whole case. It does not matter whether it is his own marriage or Mary Chaworth’s that Byron speaks of as “cursed”—the epithet may well have seemed to him equally applicable to either union. The essential point is that Byron could not conceivablyhave written in this tone to Mary Chaworth in 1818 if he had had no relations, or only formal relations, with her since 1809. The mere fact—the only openly acknowledged fact—that she had jilted him when he was a schoolboy would certainly not have warranted him in reproaching her with “refusing to continue to love” at a date thirteen years subsequent to his rejection. The letter obviously, and undeniably, implies an intimacy of later date in which his passion was reciprocated.

Later acquaintance, indeed, apart from intimacy, can easily be demonstrated, in spite of the suppressions of the biographers. “I remember meeting her,” Byron himself said to Medwin, “after my return from Greece”; and the statement is confirmed, as Medwin’s statements generally need to be, from other sources. It appears from Byron’s own letters that Mary Chaworth, or some member of her family, took charge of his robes after one of his attendances at the House of Lords; and a letter from Mary Chaworth to Byron, in the possession of Mr. Murray, is printed by Mr. Edgcumbe. It speaks of a seal which Byron was having made for her. The seal is still in existence, and is in the possession of the Musters family. The approximate date of its presentation is fixed by an entry in Byron’s journal:

“Mem. I must get a toy to-morrow for Eliza, and send the device for the seals of myself and ——.”

Here, at any rate, we get one clear case in which the asterisks in the Journal not only appear to indicate Mary Chaworth, but cannot possibly indicate anybody else. It does not follow, of course, that we are entitled to insert her name wherever we encounter asterisks—for Byron and his editors have, from time to time, had various reasons for thus concealing various names; but the cases in which the asterisks do refer to her are, when once this clue is provided, tolerably easy to distinguish. Furnished with the clue, we can at once unravel the skein of events and construct a consistent picture of these critical months in Byron’s career; and we may begin with the picture which he drew of himself to Medwin:

“I was at this time,” he says, “a mere Bond Street lounger—a great man at lobbies, coffee and gambling houses: my afternoons were passed in visits, luncheons, lounging, and boxing—not to mention drinking.”

This is true, and yet, at the same time, it is not true. The picture is, at once, confirmed by the Letters and the Journal and contradicted by them. It is a picture in which, so to say, all the lights are glaring, and all the shadows are left out. The truest thing in it is the after-thought, added a few sentences lower down; “Don’t suppose, however, that I took any pleasure in all these excesses.” In that moody claim we get, of course, the reflection, or recollection, of the Byronic pose; and at thisperiod, if not at all periods, there was grim reality behind the pose, and Byron fully justifies the description of him as the most sincere man who ever struck an attitude.

It would be easy to depict him, whether from his letters or from contemporary memoirs, as the dissipated darling of society. The year 1813 was the year in which he and Madame de Staël were the rival lions of the season, roaring against each other, not entirely without jealousy. The list of his social engagements, if one troubled to draw it out, would have a very formidable appearance. It would show him going everywhere, meeting everybody, doing everything. We should see him at the great houses, such as Lady Melbourne’s, Lady Holland’s, Lady Jersey’s. We should discover him at the opera and the theatre, now in their boxes, now in his own, and at men’s dinners, with Sheridan, and Rogers, “Conversation Sharp,” and other brilliant talkers. We should also find him patronising “the fancy,” and losing his money at hazard, and drinking several bottles of claret at a sitting—retiring to bed in a sublime state of exaltation, and rising from it with a shocking headache.

That, however, would only be one half the picture. Many contemporary observers remarked that Byron passed through the haunts of pleasure with a scowl, and that his face wore a frown whenever his features were in repose. One would infer from that, not that Byron, while really enjoying himself, posed, for the sake of effect, as aman who was secretly eating his heart out, but rather that some secret trouble was actually gnawing at his heart while he made the gestures of a man of pleasure; and the Letters and the Journal—more particularly the Journal—give us many glimpses at this darker side of his life. If he often accepted the invitations which continued to be showered on him, he also frequently declined them, locking himself up alone in his chambers to read, and write, and think things out—persuading himself, after some months had lapsed, that he had really been very little into society, and that it was a matter of indifference to him whether he went into it again or not.

And this, it will be observed, is a new note which only begins to be sounded in his intimate writings towards the end of the summer of 1813, after he has allowed Lady Oxford to go abroad alone. There is nothing like it in the days of his dalliance with her. Still less is there anything like it in the writings of the days of his dalliance with Lady Caroline Lamb. Those episodes and adventures, it is quite clear, only touched the surface of his nature. He first pursued them, and then ceased to pursue them, with laughter on his lips, and self-satisfaction—one might even say jollity—in his heart. There was not even anything in them to cradle him into song. The interval between the “Thyrza” poems and the passionate allegorical tales of which “The Giaour” was the first—an interval of some eighteen months—was poetically uneventful. A period of feverish activitysucceeded; and it coincided with a renewal of relations with Mary Chaworth.

Mary Chaworth had lived unhappily with the handsome squire whom she had, so naturally, preferred to the fat boy from Harrow. He had been, as these red-faced, full-blooded Philistines are so apt to be, at once jealous, unfaithful, and brutal, wanting to “have it both ways,”—to push rivals brusquely out of his path, and to pursue his own coarse pleasures where he chose. He had forbidden his wife to see Byron. He had insisted upon her absence from Annesley at the time of Byron’s return from Greece; and he had found her, whether willingly or unwillingly, compliant. But he had also, by his own conduct, caused scandals which had set the tongues of the neighbours wagging; and, in doing that, he had presumed too far. There had been a separation by mutual consent; and it was after the separation that the meeting with Byron took place.

There was little about him now to remind Mary of the fat boy whom she had laughed at. The Turkish baths, the Epsom salts, and the regimen of biscuits and soda-water had done their work. He came to her as a man of ethereal beauty, fascinating manners, and undisputed genius; and he left other women—women of higher rank, greater importance, and more widely acknowledged charm—in order to come to her. Nor did he come with the triumphant air of a man who was resolved to dazzle her in order to avenge a slight. He came, as it were, because he could nothelp himself—because he felt cords drawing him—because this was his destiny and he must fulfil it, though he forfeited the whole world in doing so.

Her case was hard. She was not one of the women who readily do desperate things in scorn of consequence. The traditions of her class, the claims of her family—the precepts, also, one imagines, of her religion—had too strong a hold on her for that. These very hesitations, no doubt,—so different from the “on coming” ways of Lady Caroline, and Lady Oxford’s “terrible love,” as Balzac phrases it, “of the woman of forty”—were a part of her charm for Byron. But she was very unhappy, and Byron was offering her a little happiness; and it was very, very difficult for her to refuse the gift. So the history of the matter seems, in a sentence or two, to have been this: that she was slow to yield, but yielded; that she had no sooner yielded than she repented; that her repentance left Byron a desperate, heart-broken man, profoundly cynical about women—so cynical about them that he could speak even of her, while he still loved her, to Medwin, as “like the rest of her sex, far from angelic”—ready to marry out of pique, or from any other motive equally unworthy.

The details must remain obscure. They passed in the secret orchard; and Byron was not, like Victor Hugo, a man who treated his secret orchard as a park to be thrown open to excursionists. He knew that there was a time to keep silence as well as a time to speak; and though there were some episodes in his life of which he spoke too much, ofthis particular episode he only spoke to Moore and Mrs. Leigh, whom he could trust. Yet, given the clues, the story constructs itself; and we must either believe the story which arises out of those clues, or else believe that the most passionate poems which Byron ever wrote were the outcome of a spiritual crisis about nothing in particular. And that, of course, is absurd.

We find him, at the beginning of the crisis, pondering two escapes from it—the escape by way of marriage, and the escape by way of foreign travel. He talks, in the middle of July, of proposing to Lady Adelaide Forbes; he talks, at the end of August, of proposing to anyone who is likely to accept him; but in neither instance does he talk like a man who really means what he says. This is the July announcement:

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