“My circumstances are mending, and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife, and that should be the woman had I a chance.... The Staël last night said that I had no feeling, was totallyinsensible tola belle passion, andhadbeen all my life. I am very glad to hear it, but did not know it before.”
“My circumstances are mending, and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife, and that should be the woman had I a chance.... The Staël last night said that I had no feeling, was totallyinsensible tola belle passion, andhadbeen all my life. I am very glad to hear it, but did not know it before.”
Then in August he writes:
“After all, we must end in marriage; and I can conceive nothing more delightful than such a state in the country, reading the county newspaper, &c., and kissing one’s wife’s maid. Seriously, I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanourto-morrow—that is, I would a month ago, but at present——.”
“After all, we must end in marriage; and I can conceive nothing more delightful than such a state in the country, reading the county newspaper, &c., and kissing one’s wife’s maid. Seriously, I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanourto-morrow—that is, I would a month ago, but at present——.”
The word “seriously” there is evidently afaçon de parler. The writer’s mood may be serious, but his intentions evidently are not. It may be doubted whether the thoughts of travel were any more serious, though they lasted longer. In letter after letter we find Byron making inquiries about a passage in a ship of war bound for the Levant. When such a passage is offered to him, however, he declines it on the ground that he is unable to obtain accommodation for as many servants as he desires to take with him; and that explanation inevitably strikes one as a pretext rather than a reason—the pretext of a man who, while he knows that it would be better to go, is looking for an excuse to stay.
Projects of travel with his sister and with various friends fell through at about the same time, for reasons which are nowhere stated, but can very easily be guessed. We cannot read the letters, dark though the allusions are, without being conscious of a thickening plot. It thickens very perceptibly when we discover Byron at Newstead at a time when Mary Chaworth, forsaken by her husband, is at Annesley. There is nearly a month’s gap in the published letters at this point; but conjecture can easily fill the gap in the light of the letter from Byron to Mrs. Leigh, already quoted, which is dated November 8:
“It is not Lady Caroline nor Lady Oxford; but perhaps you may guess, and if youdo, do not tell.“You do not know what mischief your being near me might have prevented. You shall hear from me to-morrow; in the meantime, don’t be alarmed. I am inno immediateperil.”
“It is not Lady Caroline nor Lady Oxford; but perhaps you may guess, and if youdo, do not tell.
“You do not know what mischief your being near me might have prevented. You shall hear from me to-morrow; in the meantime, don’t be alarmed. I am inno immediateperil.”
One is further helped to understand by a letter to Moore written, after a longer silence than usual, on November 30:
“Since I last wrote to you, much has occurred, good, bad, and indifferent,—not to make me forget you, but to prevent me of reminding you of one who, nevertheless, has often thought of you....“Your French quotation was very confoundedly to the purpose,—though veryunexpectedlypertinent, as you may imagine by what Isaidbefore, and my silence since. However, ‘Richard’s himself again,’ and except all night, and some part of the morning, I don’t think very much about the matter.”
“Since I last wrote to you, much has occurred, good, bad, and indifferent,—not to make me forget you, but to prevent me of reminding you of one who, nevertheless, has often thought of you....
“Your French quotation was very confoundedly to the purpose,—though veryunexpectedlypertinent, as you may imagine by what Isaidbefore, and my silence since. However, ‘Richard’s himself again,’ and except all night, and some part of the morning, I don’t think very much about the matter.”
The French quotation referred to is Fontenelle’s: “Si je recommençais ma carrière je ferais tout ce que j’ai fait.” The inference from the allusion to it, and from the two letters given, is quite clear. Something has happened—at Newstead or in the neighbourhood, as the dates demonstrate—something which Byron cannot bring himself to regret, even though he feels that it is going to make trouble for him. Hints at the possibility of a duel which follow in later letters make it not less clear that the trouble—or a part of it—may come from the indignation of an angry husband. “Ishall not return his fire,” Byron writes—an indication, we may take it, that a sense of guilt, and some remorse, is mingled with his passion.
That is what we gather, and cannot help gathering, from the letters, in spite of their vagueness and intentional obscurity. We will take up the thread of the story from them again in a moment. In the meanwhile we will turn to the Journal and see how Byron presents the story to himself.
RENEWAL AND INTERRUPTION OF RELATIONS WITH MARY CHAWORTH
The Journal is only a fragment, kept only for five months. It is a record rather of emotions than of events—the chronicle of the emotions of a man who feels the need of talking to himself of matters of which he cannot easily talk to others, but who, even in speaking to himself, speaks in riddles. It begins soon after the “mischief” of which Augusta has been told has happened, and while he is entangled in the “scrape” mentioned to Moore. The talk on the first page is of travel—“provided I neither marry myself, nor unmarry any one else in the interval”; and there immediately follows a reference to the writing of “The Bride of Abydos”:
“I believe the composition of it kept me alive—for it was written to drive my thoughts from the recollection of—“Dear sacred name, rest ever unreveal’d.”“At least, even here, my hand would tremble to write it.”
“I believe the composition of it kept me alive—for it was written to drive my thoughts from the recollection of—
“Dear sacred name, rest ever unreveal’d.”
“At least, even here, my hand would tremble to write it.”
“The Bride,” he insists, was written for himself, and not with any view to publication. “I amsure, had it not been for Murray,thatwould never have been published, though the circumstances which are the groundwork make it ... heigho!” “It was written,” he adds, “in four days to distract my thoughts from * * *”; and then we perceive that he is in correspondence with the lady thus enigmatically designated. He is expecting a letter from her which does not arrive. What, he asks himself, is the meaning of that?
“Not a word from * * * Have they set out from * * *? or has my last precious epistle fallen into the lion’s jaws? If so—and this silence looks suspicious—I must clap on my ‘musty morion’ and ‘hold out my iron.’ I am out of practice—but I won’t begin again at Manton’s now. Besides, I would not return his shot. I was once a famous wafer-splitter; but then the bullies of society made it necessary. Ever since I began to feel that I had a bad cause to support, I have left off the exercise.”
“Not a word from * * * Have they set out from * * *? or has my last precious epistle fallen into the lion’s jaws? If so—and this silence looks suspicious—I must clap on my ‘musty morion’ and ‘hold out my iron.’ I am out of practice—but I won’t begin again at Manton’s now. Besides, I would not return his shot. I was once a famous wafer-splitter; but then the bullies of society made it necessary. Ever since I began to feel that I had a bad cause to support, I have left off the exercise.”
The probability of a challenge from an injured husband is evidently contemplated here. No challenge came, the injured man remaining in ignorance of his injury; but peace of mind nevertheless remained unattainable. No connected narrative, indeed, can be pieced together. It is hardly ever possible to declare that such and such a thing happened on such and such a day. There is only the general impression that things are happening, and that, whether they happen or do not happen, a tragedyis always in progress. We come presently to a curiously significant note on theraison d’êtreof Byron’s practice of fasting:
“I should not so much mind a little accession of flesh—my bones can well bear it. But the worst is, the devil always came with it,—till I starved him out,—and I willnotbe the slave ofanyappetite. If I do err, it shall be my heart, at least, that heralds the way.”
“I should not so much mind a little accession of flesh—my bones can well bear it. But the worst is, the devil always came with it,—till I starved him out,—and I willnotbe the slave ofanyappetite. If I do err, it shall be my heart, at least, that heralds the way.”
But a man does not write like that unless his heart has heralded the way, and he is following it. Byron’s trouble was not that he had failed to follow the road which his heart pointed, but that he had followed it into animpasse. He had reached a point at which the only way out was the way on; but he could not follow it alone, and his companion would not follow it with him. She had gone a little way with him, and then taken fright at his and her own temerity.
It is a question whether we should pity her for her lack of courage or praise her for remembering her principles after she had yielded to temptation; but we should need more knowledge of the facts than we have in order to answer it with confidence. Exceptional people may do exceptional things with impunity—it is sometimes for lack of the nerve to do them that they make shipwreck of their lives; but though Byron was an exceptional man, we have no proof that Mary Chaworth was an exceptional woman. She had neither theromantic audacity of George Sand, nor that audacity of the superior person which upheld George Eliot in her bold misappropriation of another woman’s name. Probably, if she had had it, Byron would have classed her with the “blues,” and either have tired of her at once or turned away from her very quickly. She had, no doubt, exceptional charm, but no exceptional strength of character. She was just a weak woman launched into a situation to which the old rules did not apply, but afraid to break them, ashamed of having broken them, obstinate in her refusal to go on breaking them.
Catastrophe, in those circumstances, was inevitable. The bold course might have led to it—for a weak woman, brought up in the fear of her neighbours, can only take a bold course at grave risks. The weak course—since the love of the heart and not merely the passion of the senses was at stake—was bound to lead to it, and did. The only question was whether the victims of the catastrophe would suffer in silence or would cry aloud; and the answer to that question, given the characters of the victims, could easily be predicted. Mary Chaworth would be silent, would make believe to the best of her ability, would wear a mask, and pose, and persuade the world that she was behaving naturally. Byron, disdaining to pretend, proclaiming the truth about his own heart even while respecting Mary’s secret—proclaiming it quite naturally though rather noisily—would appear to the world to be posing.
He did so; but before we observe him doing so, we may turn back to the Journal, and study a few more of its enigmatic passages with the help of the clues at our disposal:
“I awoke from a dream! well! and have not others dreamed? but she did not overtake me.... Ugh! how my blood chilled,—and I could not wake—and—heigho!... I do not like this dream,—I hate its ‘foregone conclusions.’”“No letters to-day;—so much the better,—there are no answers. I must not dream again;—it spoils even reality. I will go out of doors and see what the fog will do for me.”“Ward talks of going to Holland, and we have partly discussed anensembleexpedition.... And why not? —— is distant, and will be at ——, still more distant, till spring. No one else except Augusta cares for me; no ties—no trammels.”“No dreams last night of the dead, nor the living; so—I am ‘firm as the marble, founded on the rock,’ till the next earthquake....“... I am tremendously in arrear with my letters—except to ——, and to her my thoughts overpower me;—my words never compass them.”“I believe with Clym o’ the Clow, or Robin Hood, ‘By our Mary (dear name!) thou art both mother and May, I think it never was a man’s lot to die before his day.’”
“I awoke from a dream! well! and have not others dreamed? but she did not overtake me.... Ugh! how my blood chilled,—and I could not wake—and—heigho!... I do not like this dream,—I hate its ‘foregone conclusions.’”
“No letters to-day;—so much the better,—there are no answers. I must not dream again;—it spoils even reality. I will go out of doors and see what the fog will do for me.”
“Ward talks of going to Holland, and we have partly discussed anensembleexpedition.... And why not? —— is distant, and will be at ——, still more distant, till spring. No one else except Augusta cares for me; no ties—no trammels.”
“No dreams last night of the dead, nor the living; so—I am ‘firm as the marble, founded on the rock,’ till the next earthquake....
“... I am tremendously in arrear with my letters—except to ——, and to her my thoughts overpower me;—my words never compass them.”
“I believe with Clym o’ the Clow, or Robin Hood, ‘By our Mary (dear name!) thou art both mother and May, I think it never was a man’s lot to die before his day.’”
Mary Chaworth.
“—— has received the portrait safe; and, in answer the only remark she makes upon it is, ‘indeed it is like’—and again ‘indeed it is like.’ With her the likeness ‘covered a multitude of sins,’ for I happen to know this portrait was not a flatterer, but dark and stern,—even black as the mood in which my mind was scorching last July when I sat for it.”“I amennuyébeyond my usual tense of that yawning verb, which I am always conjugating; and I don’t find that society much mends the matter. I am too lazy to shoot myself—and it would annoy Augusta, and perhaps ——.”“Much done, but nothing to record. It is quite enough to set down my thoughts,—my actions will rarely bear retrospection.”“The more I see of men the less I like them. If I could say so of women too, all would be well. Why can’t I? I am now six-and-twenty; my passions have had enough to cool them; my affections more than enough to wither them,—and yet, and yet, alwaysyetandbut.”“I must set about some employment soon; my heart begins to eatitselfagain.”“I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of, that I never am long in the society even ofherI love (God knows too well, and the devil probably too) without a yearningfor the company of my lamp, and my utterly confused and tumbled-down library.“I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch-light; and to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume. To be sure, I have long despised myself and man, but I never spat in the face of my species before, ‘O fool! I shall go mad!’”
“—— has received the portrait safe; and, in answer the only remark she makes upon it is, ‘indeed it is like’—and again ‘indeed it is like.’ With her the likeness ‘covered a multitude of sins,’ for I happen to know this portrait was not a flatterer, but dark and stern,—even black as the mood in which my mind was scorching last July when I sat for it.”
“I amennuyébeyond my usual tense of that yawning verb, which I am always conjugating; and I don’t find that society much mends the matter. I am too lazy to shoot myself—and it would annoy Augusta, and perhaps ——.”
“Much done, but nothing to record. It is quite enough to set down my thoughts,—my actions will rarely bear retrospection.”
“The more I see of men the less I like them. If I could say so of women too, all would be well. Why can’t I? I am now six-and-twenty; my passions have had enough to cool them; my affections more than enough to wither them,—and yet, and yet, alwaysyetandbut.”
“I must set about some employment soon; my heart begins to eatitselfagain.”
“I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of, that I never am long in the society even ofherI love (God knows too well, and the devil probably too) without a yearningfor the company of my lamp, and my utterly confused and tumbled-down library.
“I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch-light; and to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume. To be sure, I have long despised myself and man, but I never spat in the face of my species before, ‘O fool! I shall go mad!’”
These entries, as everyone who has read them through will have remarked, are all variations on a single theme; and there are many more entries in the same key, which have been left unquoted. They succeed each other, week after week, and almost day after day, for a period of about five months. The story of the events to which they relate has been told, and need not be repeated. One may think of them as the cries attendant on the birth pangs of those aspects of Byron’s character and personality which the world knows specifically as Byronism. Other tragedies, indeed, were to come to pass—and were to be necessary—before the angry heart could dash itself with its full force against the desolations of the world; but the train was being laid for those tragedies too; and by the time Byron flung his unfinished Diary down, the thing called Byronism was born.
Curiously enough, indeed, even the political Byronism can be seen coming to birth at the time of the writing of the Journal. The Byron who was presently, while in exile, to harbour revolutionists,and make his house their arsenal, deride the Tsar of All the Russias as a “Billy bald-coot,” and shake his fist in the faces of the “holy three,” already begins to reveal himself in its pages with scoffing remarks about legitimate kings and the hereditary principle. Perhaps it is only a case of instinct asserting itself and the imperious need to find something to scoff at following the line of least resistance; but that does not matter. What does matter is that here was a crisis and a turning point in Byron’s development, brought about because Mary Chaworth had come back into his life, had passed through it, and had passed out of it again.
Mr. Richard Edgcumbe reads, and has written, still more details into the story, startling students of Byron’s biography with the suggestion that a child was born as the result of the intimacy—that Mrs. Leigh adopted the child and pretended that it was her own—that the child thus secretly born and falsely acknowledged was no other than Medora Leigh, who turned out so badly, and whose alleged autobiography was published by Charles Mackay. Passages can be quoted from the poems—and perhaps also from the letters—which might conceivably contain veiled allusions to such a transaction. None, however, can be quoted which require that explanation as an alternative to remaining unintelligible; and, in the absence of positive evidence, all the probabilities are against Mr. Edgcumbe’s theory.
Such a secret as he hints at—and indeed almost affirms—would have been very difficult to keep; and it is hard to believe that Mrs. Leigh’s sense of duty to her husband, with whom she was on the best of terms, would have allowed her to be a party to the alleged conspiracy. Those are a few of the most obvious objections; and they must be given the greater weight because Byron’s bitter cries and altered attitude towards life are more easily explicable without Mr. Edgcumbe’s hypothesis than with it. Loving the real mother so passionately, and having such a faithful friend in the supposed mother, he would assuredly not have been content to live out his life in exile without ever making an attempt to see his daughter, and without constant and particular inquiries after her. So why strain credulity so far when, without straining it, everything can be made plain and clear?
There was a renewal of intimacy, and then a suspension of intimacy; a fear of a public scandal which proved to be groundless; a risk of a duel which was, after all, avoided. That is all that is certain; but that suffices to explain the references to “scrapes” and “mischief” and the rest of it; and that also, on the assumption that Byron was passionately sincere, explains the depth and disgusted vehemence of his emotions. He had dreamed of Mary Chaworth before as the one woman in the world with whom he could live out the whole of his life in a continuous ecstasy of intense emotion; but he had from time to timeawakened from his dream. Now the dream had become a reality—and the reality had not lasted. She had been too high principled—or too much afraid. He had not been strong enough to give her courage—or to shake her principles. And therefore....
Therefore he wrote poem after poem, all on the same theme, all in the same key—poems of farewell, of everlasting sorrow and despair, and of that sense of guilt, not defiant as yet, of which Mr. Edgcumbe makes so much, but which are perhaps best read as the reflection of Mary Chaworth’s own horror—the horror of a mind perilously near insanity—at the thing which she had done, but was resolved to do no more. He wrote this, for instance:
“There is no more for me to hope,There is no more for thee to fear;And, if I give my sorrow scope,That sorrow thou shalt never hear.Why did I hold thy love so dear?Why shed for such a heart one tear?Let deep and dreary silence beMy only memory of thee!”
He wrote the well-known lines, beginning:
“I speak not—I trace not—I breathe not thy name—There is love in the sound—there is Guilt in the fame—But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impartThe deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart.”
He wrote, again, these lines, which are taken from “Lara”:
“The tempest of his heart in scorn had gazedOn that the feebler Elements had raised.The Rapture of his Heart had looked on high,And asked if greater dwell beyond the sky:Chained to excess, the slave of each extreme,How woke he from the wildness of that dream!Alas! he told not—but he did awakeTo curse the withered heart that would not break.”
And then, once more:
“These lips are mute, these eyes are dry;But in my breast and in my brain,Awake the pangs that pass not by,The thought that ne’er shall sleep again.My soul nor deigns nor dares complain,Though Grief and Passion there rebel:I only know we loved in vain—I only feel—Farewell! Farewell!”
There is no need to quote more. Enough has been given to show how the passionate heart found passionate utterance, and what a wound the wrench had left. Afterwards, of course, when it was all over—or as much over as it ever would be—Byron realised that a man of twenty-six couldnot well consecrate all the rest of his years to lamentation. He had to live out his life somehow, with the help of incident of some sort; and incident in such a case must mean either a fresh love affair or marriage.
In Byron’s case it meant marriage—the very marriage which Lady Melbourne had designed as a distraction for him from the too-pointed attentions of Lady Caroline Lamb.
MARRIAGE
Whatever doubts and mysteries environ the circumstances of Byron’s separation from his wife, there is, at any rate, nothing to perplex us in the train of events which brought about his marriage, though the two common and conflicting theories have to be set aside. He did not marry Miss Milbanke for money; he did not marry her for love; he married her, partly because he had persuaded himself that he wanted a wife, and partly because she had made up her mind that he should do so.
He cannot have married her for money because, at that date, her fortune was inconsiderable and her expectations were vague. She had only £10,000; and “good lives” stood between her and the prospect of any substantial inheritance. Seeing that Newstead, when put up to auction, was bought in for £90,000, a dowry of £10,000 was of no particular consequence to Byron, and if he had been fortune-hunting, he would have hunted bigger game. The fortune which he did capture was not enough to save him from almost instant financial embarrassments; and he faced that prospect as one who viewed it with indifference. “Sheis said,” he wrote to Moore, “to be an heiress, but of that I really know nothing certainly, and shall not inquire. But I do know that she has talents and excellent qualities.”
But if it is clear that Byron was not an interested, it is equally clear that he was not a passionate, suitor. He hardly could be so soon after the emotional stress through which we have seen him passing; and the proofs that he was not are conclusive. The most conclusive proof of all is that at the time when he proposed, by letter, to Miss Milbanke, he had not seen her, or made any attempt to see her, for ten months, and that, though he had, during those ten months, been corresponding with her, he had also, during those ten months, been pursuing sentimental adventures with which she had nothing to do. It was, as we have already seen, during those ten months that the renewed relations with Mary Chaworth were broken off; and when, after the close of those renewed relations, Byron’s thoughts turned to marriage, it was not Miss Milbanke whom he first thought of marrying.
The desire to marry, in short, had only been a particular emotion with Byron when there was a possibility of marrying Mary Chaworth. Thereafter it was only a general emotion—a desire for an “escape from life,” and a domestic refuge from the storms which threatened shipwreck. He was tired of the struggle, and here was a prospect of rest. A little more than three months before his proposal to Miss Milbanke he was thinkingof proposing to Lady Adelaide Forbes—ready to marry her, as he wrote to Moore, “with the same indifference which has frozen over the ‘Black Sea’ of all my passions.” A fortnight later—almost to a day three months before the proposal—he writes again to Moore:
“Icouldbe very sentimental now, but I won’t. The truth is, that I have been all my life trying to harden my heart, and have not yet quite succeeded—though there are great hopes—and you do not know how it has sunk with your departure.”
“Icouldbe very sentimental now, but I won’t. The truth is, that I have been all my life trying to harden my heart, and have not yet quite succeeded—though there are great hopes—and you do not know how it has sunk with your departure.”
Byron assuredly was not in love with Miss Milbanke when he wrote that; and he had no opportunity of falling in love with her in the course of the next three months, for he did not even see her. None the less he made up his mind to ask her to marry him—as an alternative to departing on a long foreign tour; and it is from Hobhouse’s lately published narrative that we can best see how he was led, or lured, to that decision.
Byron had first met Miss Milbanke at the time when Lady Caroline Lamb was throwing herself at his head. Lady Caroline had shown him some verses which Miss Milbanke had written, and he had said that he considered them rather good—possibly because he thought so, but more probably because he wished to be polite. Soon afterwards, he had been presented to her, and had made her a first proposal of marriage, which she had declined.
The reasons alike for his offer and for her refusal of it remain obscure. He must, at any rate, have liked her; he was almost certainly getting tired of Lady Caroline’s determination to monopolise and exploit him; perhaps he was also anxious to do anything in reason to oblige Lady Melbourne, who had the motives which we know of for desiring to bring about the match. Whether Miss Milbanke, on her part, preferred some other admirer or resented Lady Melbourne’s attempt to make a convenience of her is doubtful. Both motives may have operated simultaneously; and Byron, at any rate, accepted his refusal in a philosophic spirit. It had not, Hobhouse says, “sunk very deep into his heart or preyed upon his spirits.” He “did not pretend to regret Miss Milbanke’s refusal deeply.” Indeed “it might be said that he did not pretend to regret it at all.” And Hobhouse describes a “ludicrous scene” when some common friend related that he had been rejected by Miss Milbanke, and burst into tears over the catastrophe.
“Is that all?” said Lord Byron. “Perhaps then it will be some consolation for you to know that I also have been refused by Miss Milbanke.”
“Is that all?” said Lord Byron. “Perhaps then it will be some consolation for you to know that I also have been refused by Miss Milbanke.”
Perhaps it was—some unsuccessful suitors are quite capable of taking comfort from such reflections; but that need not concern us. What we have to note is that Byron’s rejection by Miss Milbanke resulted in his engaging in a longcorrespondence with her; and that the commencement of that correspondence was negotiated by Lady Melbourne. One infers that Lady Melbourne was a very clever woman, by no means innocent of “ulterior motives,” far less ready than Byron to take “no” for an answer from Miss Milbanke, and intuitively conscious that correspondences of this character are apt to weave entanglements for those who engage in them.
Some extracts from the correspondence are printed in Mr. Murray’s Collected Edition of Byron’s Works. There are references to it both in Byron’s Journal and in Hobhouse’s Account of the Separation. There is nothing in the text which it seems imperative to quote—nothing, that is to say, which perceptibly helps the story along. Byron’s own letters are rather high-flown and artificial. The impression which one gathers from them is that of a man elaborately keeping alive the double pretence that he is unworthy and that he is disappointed—but only keeping it alive out of politeness. The nature of Miss Milbanke’s letters can only be inferred from the one or two allusions which we find to them.
“Yesterday, a very pretty letter from Annabella, which I answered. What an odd situation and friendship is ours!—without one spark of love on either side, and produced by circumstances which in general lead to coldness on one side and aversion on the other. She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled.... She is a poetess—amathematician—a metaphysician, and yet withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head would be turned with half her acquisitions, and a tenth of her advantages.”
“Yesterday, a very pretty letter from Annabella, which I answered. What an odd situation and friendship is ours!—without one spark of love on either side, and produced by circumstances which in general lead to coldness on one side and aversion on the other. She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled.... She is a poetess—amathematician—a metaphysician, and yet withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head would be turned with half her acquisitions, and a tenth of her advantages.”
That is what Byron says; but Hobhouse adds a little more. He says that Byron at first “believed that a certain eccentricity of education had produced this communication from a young woman otherwise notorious for the strictest propriety of conduct and demeanour.” He also says that the tone of the communications grew in warmth as the correspondence proceeded, and that Byron did not make up his mind to propose marriage a second time until “after certain expressions had been dropped by Miss Milbanke in her letters which might easily have encouraged a bolder man than his lordship.” He says finally, and this he says, in italics, that when Byron did propose for the second time, Miss Milbankeaccepted him by return of post. To which piece of information Moore adds the statement that in order to make assurance doubly sure, she sent her acceptance in duplicate to his town and his country addresses.
It reached him at Hastings; and Miss Milbanke proceeded to impart her news to her friends. A passage from one of the letters—that to Miss Milner—shows not only that she was very happy in the prospect of her marriage, but also that she had woefully deceived herself as to the circumstances which had preceded and led up to the proposal:
“You only know me truly in thinking that without the highest moral esteem I could never have yielded to, if I had been weak enough to form, an attachment. It is not in the great world that Lord Byron’s true character must be sought; but ask of those nearest to him—of the unhappy whom he has consoled, of the poor whom he has blessed, of the dependants to whom he is the best of masters. For his despondency I fear I am but too answerable for the last two years.”
“You only know me truly in thinking that without the highest moral esteem I could never have yielded to, if I had been weak enough to form, an attachment. It is not in the great world that Lord Byron’s true character must be sought; but ask of those nearest to him—of the unhappy whom he has consoled, of the poor whom he has blessed, of the dependants to whom he is the best of masters. For his despondency I fear I am but too answerable for the last two years.”
“The last two years” included, as we have seen, the period during which Byron was bombarding Hanson with perpetual and imperious demands for the ready money without which he could not go abroad with Lady Oxford—the period at which he told Moore that he was ready to “incorporate with any decent woman”—and the period at which he wrote “The Bride of Abydos” in order to “distract my thoughts from * * *” Miss Milbanke, that is to say, exaggerated both her importance to Byron and her influence over him, flattering herself that there would have been no “Byronism” but for her coldness, and that the warmth of her affection, so long withheld, was the one thing wanting to make glorious summer of the winter of Byron’s discontent.
It was not an unnatural hallucination. Young women of romantic disposition are easily flattered into such beliefs, especially if the gates are thronged with suitors. Having read of such situations in many novels, and dreamed of themin many dreams, they live in expectation of the day when life will be true to fiction and their dreams will be fulfilled. And sometimes, of course, the dreams are fulfilled—sometimes, but not very often, and hardly ever in the case of heroines who are, as Miss Milbanke was, commonplace in spite of their intelligence, cold, obstinate, unyielding, critical, vain, and inexperienced, quick to perceive slights, and slow to forgive them.
At all events they were not, in her case, destined to be fulfilled; and the initial improbability of their fulfilment may be inferred from a confession which Hobhouse reports.
“Lord Byron,” Hobhouse writes, “frankly confessed to his companion that he was not in love with his intended bride; but at the same time he said that he felt for her that regard which he believed was the surest guarantee of matrimonial felicity.”
“Lord Byron,” Hobhouse writes, “frankly confessed to his companion that he was not in love with his intended bride; but at the same time he said that he felt for her that regard which he believed was the surest guarantee of matrimonial felicity.”
No more than that. Byron was only marrying, Hobhouse assures us, from “a love of change, and curiosity and a feeling of a sort of necessity of doing such a thing once.” So that the engagement may be said to have been entered upon with a clash of conflicting expectations; and though tact might have saved the adventurers from shipwreck, tact was precisely the quality in which they were both most conspicuously deficient.
It was on the last day of September, 1814, that Hobhouse heard of the engagement. On the first day of October he wrote his congratulations, and on October 19, he was invited to act as groomsman.Some time in the same month Byron paid his first visit to the Milbankes at Seaham. Thence he went to Cambridge to vote in favour of the candidature of his friend Dr. Clarke’s candidature for the Professorship of Anatomy, and was applauded by the undergraduates in the Senate House. “This distinction,” Hobhouse says, “to a literary character had never before been paid except in the instance of Archdeacon Paley”—a curious partner in the poet’s glory. A month later Byron and Hobhouse set out together again for Seaham on what Hobhouse calls “his matrimonial scheme.”
This was the occasion on which Byron confided to Hobhouse that he was not in love. A note in Hobhouse’s Diary to the effect that “never was lover in less haste” affords contemporary corroboration of the fact; and the Diary continues to be picturesque, giving us Hobhouse’s critical, but not altogether unfavourable, impression of Miss Milbanke and her family:
“Miss Milbanke is rather dowdy-looking, and wears a long and high dress, though she has excellent feet and ankles.... The lower part of her face is bad, the upper, expressive but not handsome, yet she gains by inspection.“She heard Byron coming out of his room, ran to meet him, threw her arms round his neck, and burst into tears. She did thisnot before us.... Lady Milbanke was so much agitated that she had gone to her room ... our delay the cause....Indeed I looked foolish in finding out an excuse for our want of expedition....“Miss Milbanke, before us, was silent and modest, but very sensible and quiet, and inspiring an interest which it is easy to mistake for love. With me she was frank and open, without little airs and affectations....“Of my friend she seemed dotingly fond, gazing with delight on his bold and animated face ... this regulated, however, by the most entire decorum.“Old Sir Ralph Milbanke is an honest, red-faced spirit, a little prosy, but by no means devoid of humour.... My lady, who has been a dasher in her day, and has ridden the grey mare, is pettish and tiresome, but clever.”
“Miss Milbanke is rather dowdy-looking, and wears a long and high dress, though she has excellent feet and ankles.... The lower part of her face is bad, the upper, expressive but not handsome, yet she gains by inspection.
“She heard Byron coming out of his room, ran to meet him, threw her arms round his neck, and burst into tears. She did thisnot before us.... Lady Milbanke was so much agitated that she had gone to her room ... our delay the cause....Indeed I looked foolish in finding out an excuse for our want of expedition....
“Miss Milbanke, before us, was silent and modest, but very sensible and quiet, and inspiring an interest which it is easy to mistake for love. With me she was frank and open, without little airs and affectations....
“Of my friend she seemed dotingly fond, gazing with delight on his bold and animated face ... this regulated, however, by the most entire decorum.
“Old Sir Ralph Milbanke is an honest, red-faced spirit, a little prosy, but by no means devoid of humour.... My lady, who has been a dasher in her day, and has ridden the grey mare, is pettish and tiresome, but clever.”
There is more; but that is the essence. The impression which disengages itself is one of a well-bred but rather narrow provincialism. The Milbankes are not exactly great people, but the country cousins of great people—very decidedly their country cousins. The men are not quite men of the world; the women are very far from being women of the world—which is pretty much what one would expect in an age in which the country was so much more remote from the town than it is at present. Miss Milbanke, in particular, seems to strike the exact note of provincial correctitude alike in her display of the emotion proper to the occasion and in her concealment of it. Her correctitude was, no doubt, made still more correct by an unemotional disposition.
During the ceremony, which took place in her mother’s drawing-room, she was very self-possessed—“firm as a rock,” is Hobhouse’s description of her demeanour. Things were happening as she had meant them to happen—one may almost say as she had contrived that they should happen. “I felt,” says Hobhouse, “as if I had buried a friend”; but he nevertheless paid the compliments which were due, and Miss Milbanke, now Lady Byron, said just the right thing in reply to them:
“At a little before twelve,” Hobhouse notes, “I handed Lady Byron downstairs and into her carriage. When I wished her many years of happiness, she said, ‘If I am not happy it will be my own fault.’”
“At a little before twelve,” Hobhouse notes, “I handed Lady Byron downstairs and into her carriage. When I wished her many years of happiness, she said, ‘If I am not happy it will be my own fault.’”
Nothing could have been more proper than that; for that is just how things happen when the dreams come true. Such a saying sometimes is, and always should be, the prelude to “they lived happily together ever afterwards”; and one can picture Lady Byron telling herself that things were happening, and would continue to happen, just as in a story-book.
Only there are two kinds of story-books. There are the story-books which are written for girls—and the others. This story was to be one of the others. The husband’s past and the wife’s illusions were almost bound to make it so—the more certainly because both husband and wife suffered from the defects of their qualities; and the defectsof Lady Byron’s qualities in particular were such as not only to make her helpless in therôlewhich developments were to assign to her, but also to compel her to comport herself with something worse than a lack of dignity.
INCOMPATIBILITY OF TEMPER
A thick accretion of legend has gathered round Byron’s life alike as an engaged and as a married man. Every biographer, whether friendly or hostile, has added fresh anecdotes to the heap. Almost all the stories are coloured by prejudice. Even when they seem to be derived from the same source, they are often mutually contradictory; so that it is, as a rule, a hopeless task to try to distinguish between fact and fiction, or do more than disengage a general impression of discordant temperaments progressing from incompatibility to open war.
Even the period of the engagement is reported not to have been of unclouded happiness. A son of Sir Ralph Milbanke’s Steward at Seaham has furnished recollections to that effect. “While Byron was at Seaham,” says this witness, “he spent most of his time pistol-shooting in the plantation”—a strangely moody occupation for an affianced man; and he adds that, on the wedding morning, when all was prepared for the ceremony, “Byron had to be sought for in the grounds where he was walking in his usual surly mood.” Mrs. Beecher Stowe tells us that Miss Milbanke,observing that her lover did not rejoice sufficiently in his good fortune, offered to release him from his promise—whereupon he “fainted entirely away,” and so convinced her, for the moment, of the sincerity of his affection.
Similar stories, equally well attested and equally unconvincing, cluster round the departure of the married couple for Halnaby where they spent their honeymoon. Lady Byron told Lady Anne Barnard that the carriage had no sooner driven away from the door of the mansion than her husband turned upon her with “a malignant sneer” and derided her for cherishing the “wild hope” of “reforming him,” saying: “Many are the tears you will have to shed ere that plan is accomplished. It is enough for me that you are my wife for me to hate you.” The Steward’s son, giving an alternative version of the story, declares that “insulting words” were spoken before leaving the park—“after which he appeared to sit in moody silence, reading a book for the rest of the journey.” Byron’s own account of the incident, as given to Medwin, was as follows:
“I was surprised at the arrangements for the journey, and somewhat out of humour to find a lady’s maid stuck between me and my bride. It was rather too early to assume the husband; so I was forced to submit, but it was not with a very good grace. Put yourself in a similar situation, and tell me if I had not some reason to be in the sulks.”
“I was surprised at the arrangements for the journey, and somewhat out of humour to find a lady’s maid stuck between me and my bride. It was rather too early to assume the husband; so I was forced to submit, but it was not with a very good grace. Put yourself in a similar situation, and tell me if I had not some reason to be in the sulks.”
These three stories, it is clear, cannot all be true; and none of them can either be proved or disproved, though the last was contradicted by Hobhouse who said that he had inspected the carriage and found no maid in it. Similarly with the stories which follow. According to the Steward’s son, Sir Ralph Milbanke’s tenants assembled to cheer Byron on his arrival at Halnaby—but “of these he took not the slightest notice, but jumped out of the carriage and walked away, leaving his bride to alight by herself.” There is also a story told by another authority, who cannot, however, have been an eye-witness, to the effect that Byron, awaking from his slumbers on his nuptial night, exclaimed, in his surprise at his strange surroundings, that he supposed he was in Hell.
All these stories, of course, are exceedingly shocking, if true; but there are no means of ascertaining whether they are true. Nothing can be positively affirmed except that the beginnings were inauspicious, and must have seemed the more inauspicious to Lady Byron because of that fond belief of hers, that her rejection of Byron in 1812 had caused him two years’ mental agony, now at last to be happily removed by her condescending tenderness. A vast amount of tact—a vast amount of give-and-take—would have been needed to make a success of a marriage concluded under that misapprehension; and Lord and Lady Byron were both of an age at which tact is, as a rule, a virtue only known by name.
Of Byron’s tact we have an example in thefamous dialogue: “Do I interrupt you, Byron?”... “Damnably.” Of Lady Byron’s tact we shall discover an instance at the crisis of her married life. In the meantime we must note that they made up their first quarrel—which may very well have been less serious at the time than it appeared to be in retrospect—and, at any rate, kept up appearances sufficiently well to deceive their closest friends. From Halnaby they returned to Seaham, where nothing happened except that Byron discovered his father-in-law to be a bore, addicted to dreary political monologuising over wine and walnuts. They next visited Mrs. Leigh at Six Mile Bottom, and then they proceeded to 13 Piccadilly Terrace—that unluckily numbered house, hired from the Duchess of Devonshire, in which many catastrophes were to occur, and a distress was presently to be levied for non-payment of the rent.
Mrs. Leigh, it will be observed, was pleasantly surprised to observe that the marriage seemed to be turning out well. She had the more reason to be surprised because she shared none of Lady Byron’s illusions as to the part which she had played, for the past two years, in Byron’s emotional and imaginative life. She was in her brother’s confidence, and knew all about Lady Caroline Lamb, all about Lady Oxford, and—more particularly—all about Mary Chaworth. Consequently she had had her apprehensions, which she confided to Byron’s friend Hodgson. A few extracts from her letters to Hodgson will bring this pointout, and show us how the marriage looked from her point of view. On February 15, 1815, she wrote:
“It appears to me that Lady Byronsets aboutmaking him happy in quite the right way. It is true I judge at a distance, and we generallyhopeas wewish; but I assure you I don’t conclude hastily on this subject, and will own to you, what I would not scarcely to any other person, that I hadmany fearsand much anxietyfounded upon many causes and circumstancesof which I cannotwrite. Thank God! that they do not appear likely to be realised.”On March 18, 1815: “Byron is looking remarkably well, and of Lady B. I hardly know how to write, for I have a sad trick of being struck dumb when I am most happy and pleased. The expectations I had formed could not beexceeded, but at least they are fully answered.“I think I never saw or heard of a more perfect being in mortal mould than she appears to be, and scarcely dared flatter myself such a one would fall to the lot of my dear B. He seems quite sensible of her value.”On March 31, 1815: “Byron and Lady B. left me on Tuesday for London.... The more I see of her the more I love and esteem her, and feel how grateful I am, and ought to be, forthe blessing of such a wife for my dear, darling Byron.”On September 4, 1815: “My brother has just left me, having been here since last Wednesday, when he arrived very unexpectedly. I never saw himsowell, and he is in the best spirits.”
“It appears to me that Lady Byronsets aboutmaking him happy in quite the right way. It is true I judge at a distance, and we generallyhopeas wewish; but I assure you I don’t conclude hastily on this subject, and will own to you, what I would not scarcely to any other person, that I hadmany fearsand much anxietyfounded upon many causes and circumstancesof which I cannotwrite. Thank God! that they do not appear likely to be realised.”
On March 18, 1815: “Byron is looking remarkably well, and of Lady B. I hardly know how to write, for I have a sad trick of being struck dumb when I am most happy and pleased. The expectations I had formed could not beexceeded, but at least they are fully answered.
“I think I never saw or heard of a more perfect being in mortal mould than she appears to be, and scarcely dared flatter myself such a one would fall to the lot of my dear B. He seems quite sensible of her value.”
On March 31, 1815: “Byron and Lady B. left me on Tuesday for London.... The more I see of her the more I love and esteem her, and feel how grateful I am, and ought to be, forthe blessing of such a wife for my dear, darling Byron.”
On September 4, 1815: “My brother has just left me, having been here since last Wednesday, when he arrived very unexpectedly. I never saw himsowell, and he is in the best spirits.”
This is evidence not extorted by questions but spontaneously volunteered. If it proves nothing else, at least it proves that appearances were kept up, and that Augusta was deceived. But appearances, none the less, gave a false impression; and there were other friends, more keen sighted than Augusta, who saw through them. Hobhouse, in particular, did so. He too had had his anxieties, and had been watching; and the notes in his Diary—some of them contemporaneous with, but others subsequent to, Augusta’s letters—are not unlike the rumblings of a coming thunderstorm.