“There was something awful to me in the intensity of repressed emotion which she showed as she proceeded. The great fact upon which all turned was stated in words that were unmistakable:“‘He was guilty of incest with his sister.’”
“There was something awful to me in the intensity of repressed emotion which she showed as she proceeded. The great fact upon which all turned was stated in words that were unmistakable:
“‘He was guilty of incest with his sister.’”
There is the charge. Turning over the pages in quest of the evidence in support of it, we find this:
“She said that one night, in her presence, he treated his sister with a liberty which both shocked and astonished her. Seeing her amazement and alarm he came up to her, and said, in a sneering tone, ‘I suppose you perceiveyouare not wanted here. Go to your own room, and leave us alone. We can amuse ourselves better without you.’“She said, ‘I went to my room trembling. I went down on my knees and prayed to my heavenly Father to have mercy on them. I thought: What shall I do?’“I remember, after this, a pause in the conversation, during which she seemed struggling with thoughts and emotions; and, for my part, I was unable to utter a word or ask a question.”
“She said that one night, in her presence, he treated his sister with a liberty which both shocked and astonished her. Seeing her amazement and alarm he came up to her, and said, in a sneering tone, ‘I suppose you perceiveyouare not wanted here. Go to your own room, and leave us alone. We can amuse ourselves better without you.’
“She said, ‘I went to my room trembling. I went down on my knees and prayed to my heavenly Father to have mercy on them. I thought: What shall I do?’
“I remember, after this, a pause in the conversation, during which she seemed struggling with thoughts and emotions; and, for my part, I was unable to utter a word or ask a question.”
No more than that. Thisex parteinterpretation of a foolish conjugal quarrel of forty years before,admittedly untested by any demand for particulars, was absolutely the sole piece of testimony which Mrs. Stowe adduced when she set out to blast Byron’s reputation. The rest of the book consists of pious and sentimental out-pourings, vulgar abuse of Byron, and equally vulgar eulogy of his wife; the two passages cited being the only passages material to the issue. There was nothing in writing for her to quote—no case which a respectable lawyer would have taken into Court—no case that would not have been laughed out of Court within five minutes if it had ever got so far.
The tribunal of public opinion did, in fact, laugh the case out of Court at the time. It was “snowed under,” partly by laughter, and partly by indignation and the British feeling in favour of fair play; and it remained so buried for nearly forty years. Biographers could afford to scout it as “monstrous” without troubling to confute it. Sir Leslie Stephen, in the “Dictionary of National Biography,” treated it as an hallucination to which Lady Byron had fallen a victim through brooding over her grievances in solitude.
One would be glad if one could still take that tone towards it; but Lord Lovelace has made it impossible to do so. Mrs. Stowe, as a mischief-making meddler, interfering with matters which did not concern her, and about which she was obviously very ill informed, had not even aprimâ facietitle to be taken seriously. The case of Lord Lovelace was different. He was Byron’s grandson and the custodian of Lady Byron’s strong-box.He affected not merely to assert but to argue. He produced from the strong-box documents which he was pleased to call proofs. A good many people, not having seen them, probably still believe that they are proofs. They cannot be waived on one side like Mrs. Stowe’s unsupported allegations, but must be dealt with; and the whole question of the charge which they are alleged to substantiate must, of course, be dealt with simultaneously.
And first, as the documents laid before us are miscellaneous, we must distinguish between those of them which count and those which do not count. Some of the contents of the strong-box, it seems, are merely “statements” in Lady Byron’s handwriting. These are only referred to by Lord Lovelace, but not printed. Not having been produced, they cannot be criticised; but there are, nevertheless, two comments which it is legitimate to make. In the first place, anex partestatement, though admissible in evidence for what it may be worth, is not the same thing as proof. In the second place, if the statements had been of a nature to strengthen the case which Lord Lovelace was trying to make out, instead of merely embellishing it, they would not have been held back. Their absence from thedossierneed not, therefore, embarrass us; and we need, in fact, be the less embarrassed by it because it was already perfectly well known that Lady Byron was in the habit of writing out statements, and had shown them to impartial persons who had taken the measure of their value. That fact is set forth in theRev. Frederick Arnold’s Life of Robertson of Brighton, who, as is well known, was, for a considerable time, Lady Byron’s religious adviser.
“A remarkable incident,” writes Mr. Arnold, “may be mentioned in illustration of the relations with Lord Byron. Lady Byron had accumulated a great mass of documentary evidence, papers and letters, which were supposed to constitute a case completely exculpatory of herself and condemnatory of Byron. She placed all this printed matter in the hands of a well-known individual, who was then resident at Brighton, and afterwards removed into the country. This gentleman went carefully through the papers, and was utterly astonished at the utter want of criminatory matter against Byron. He was not indifferent to theéclator emolument of editing such memoirs. But he felt that this was a brief which he was unable to hold, and accordingly returned all the papers to Lady Byron.”
“A remarkable incident,” writes Mr. Arnold, “may be mentioned in illustration of the relations with Lord Byron. Lady Byron had accumulated a great mass of documentary evidence, papers and letters, which were supposed to constitute a case completely exculpatory of herself and condemnatory of Byron. She placed all this printed matter in the hands of a well-known individual, who was then resident at Brighton, and afterwards removed into the country. This gentleman went carefully through the papers, and was utterly astonished at the utter want of criminatory matter against Byron. He was not indifferent to theéclator emolument of editing such memoirs. But he felt that this was a brief which he was unable to hold, and accordingly returned all the papers to Lady Byron.”
That comment on the “statements,” significant in itself, is doubly significant when taken in conjunction with Lord Lovelace’s suppression of them; and we may fairly consider the case without further reference to them, and without an apprehension that a surprise will be sprung from that source to upset the conclusions at which we arrive. Lord Lovelace did not rest his case on them, but on quite other documents, which we will proceed to examine after first saying the few words which need to be said in order to clear the air.
One point, indeed, Lord Lovelace has made successfully. He has proved that the gross and mysterious charge which Lady Byron preferred (or rather hinted at while refusing to prefer it) at the time of the separation was, in fact, identical with the charge formulated in Mrs. Stowe’s book. A contemporary memorandum to that effect, in Lushington’s handwriting, signed by Lady Byron, and witnessed by Lushington, Wilmot Horton, and Colonel Doyle, is printed in “Astarte.” To that extent the so-called Byron mystery is now solved, once and for all. The statement set forth in that memorandum, and afterwards repeated to Mrs. Stowe, was the statement on the strength of which Lushington declared, as has already been mentioned, that he could not be a party to any attempt to effect a reconciliation.
So far so good. The probability of these facts could have been inferred from Hobhouse’s narrative; their certainty is now established. We now know of what Byron was accused—behind his back; we also know of what Mrs. Leigh was accused—behind her back. But—and the “but” is most important—the memorandum contains this remarkable sentence:
“It will be observed that this Paper does not contain nor pretend to contain any of the grounds which gave rise to the suspicion which has existed and still continues to exist in Lady B.’s mind.”
“It will be observed that this Paper does not contain nor pretend to contain any of the grounds which gave rise to the suspicion which has existed and still continues to exist in Lady B.’s mind.”
Which is to say that Lady Byron, on her ownshowing, and that of her legal advisers, was acting not on evidence but on “suspicion.” In this document there is not even so much evidence as was set before Mrs. Stowe, or any suggestion that any evidence worthy of the name exists. The quest for proof must be pursued elsewhere.
But where?
Lord Lovelace has not shown us. The document in which it is expressly set forth that none of the statements contained in it are of the nature of proofs is the only contemporary document which he cites; for the scrap of a letter which he quotes from Mrs. George Lamb only proves, if indeed it proves anything, that Mrs. Lamb had heard what Lady Byron said. Further on in his book, indeed, Lord Lovelace represents that Mrs. Leigh subsequently, under pressure, confessed her guilt to Lady Byron; but concerning that representation two things shall be demonstrated in the next chapter.
In the first place Mrs. Leigh did not confess—the alleged confession having no bearing whatsoever on the matter which we are now considering. In the second place the inherent probabilities of the case and the circumstantial evidence which illuminates it are such that, even if Mrs. Leigh had confessed, it would be impossible to believe her on her oath.
INHERENT IMPROBABILITY OF THE CHARGES AGAINST AUGUSTA LEIGH—THE ALLEGATION THAT SHE “CONFESSED”—THE PROOF THAT SHE DID NOTHING OF THE KIND
First as to the inherent probabilities:
The accusation, as elaborated by Lord Lovelace, is, it must be observed, that Byron had yielded to an unnatural passion for his sister at a period anterior to his marriage—the period covered by the Journal from which we have quoted, and by those mysteriously morbid and gloomy poems of which “The Bride of Abydos” and “Lara” are the most remarkable. This passion, according to Lord Lovelace, was the cause of the spiritual “crisis” through which poems and Journal alike prove him to have passed. When Byron writes that “The Bride” was “written to drive my thoughts from the recollection of * * *,” Lord Lovelace interprets him to mean that it was written to drive his thoughts from the recollection of Mrs. Leigh. Hers, he invites us to believe, was the “dear sacred name” which was to “rest ever unrevealed.”
That theory is not only nonsense, but arrant nonsense—obviously so to readers who are familiar with Byron’s letters, and demonstrably so to those who are not. All that can be said in favour ofthe view is that some of the passages in some of the poems are so obscure that they can be tortured into accord with the most preposterous hypothesis. On the other hand, while there is no direct evidence on the subject at all, there is conclusive circumstantial evidence which effectually disposes of Lord Lovelace’s calumnious assertion—evidence, happily, so simple that one almost can sum it up in a sentence.
Throughout the whole of the “crisis” in question Byron was in correspondence with Mrs. Leigh; and a great deal of the correspondence has been published. The letters are letters in which Byron takes his sister into his confidence. We find him writing to her, first about his “affairs” with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, and then about his desolating passion for another lady whom we have seen reason to identify with Mary Chaworth. Nor does it matter, for the purposes of the present argument, whether that identification is correct or not. The solid fact, in any case, remains that, at the very time when Lord Lovelace represents Byron as engaged in an intrigue with Augusta Leigh, he was, in fact, writing to her to apologise for his “long silence,” and attributing that silence to trouble in connection with another lady: “It is not Lady Caroline, nor Lady Oxford;but perhaps you may guess, and, if you do, do not tell.”
There are other letters to the same effect, but that letter should suffice. No sane man will believe Byron to have been devoured by a guilty passion for the woman to whom he confided secretsof that sort; and, if there were any disposition to entertain the belief were still harboured, it could hardly fail to be expelled by an examination of the letters which passed between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, and between Mrs. Leigh and Francis Hodgson.
Mrs. Leigh had been with Lady Byron during her confinement. There had been no quarrel between them, and no suspicion or suggestion of a quarrel. When Lady Byron left Piccadilly Terrace for Kirkby Mallory, Mrs. Leigh continued, with her knowledge, and without any hint of an objection, to stay in her brother’s house. Even when Lady Byron communicated her decision not to return to her husband, she expressed neither surprise at Mrs. Leigh’s remaining there, nor desire for her departure. On the contrary, at the very time when she was insisting upon separation, and hinting at charges too awful to be preferred unless the particulars were dragged from her, she was corresponding with Mrs. Leigh, not merely on terms of ordinary politeness, but on terms of confidential intimacy and cordial affection—addressing her as “My dearest A.,” “My dearest Sis,” “My dearest Gus,” &c., &c.
A long series of these letters is printed in Mr. Murray’s latest edition of Byron’s Works. Readers who desire full particulars must be referred to them. A few sentences only need be given here, as an indication of their tone:
“If all the world had told me you were doing me an injury, Iought notto have believed it. My chief feeling, therefore, in relation to you and myself must be that Ihavewronged you, and that you have never wronged me!”“I know you feel for me as I do for you—and perhaps I am better understood than I think. You have been ever since I knew you my best comforter, and will so remain, unless you grow tired of the office, which may well be.”“The present sufferings of allmayyet be repaid in blessings. Don’t despair absolutely, dearest; and leave me but enough of your interest to afford you any consolation by partaking that sorrow which I am most unhappy to cause you thus unintentionally.... Heaven knows you have considered me more than one in a thousand would have done.”“I am anxious to acquit you of all misrepresentation, and myself of having supposed that you had misrepresented.... I cannot give you pain without feeling yet more myself.”“My dearest A., it is my great comfort that you are in Piccadilly.”
“If all the world had told me you were doing me an injury, Iought notto have believed it. My chief feeling, therefore, in relation to you and myself must be that Ihavewronged you, and that you have never wronged me!”
“I know you feel for me as I do for you—and perhaps I am better understood than I think. You have been ever since I knew you my best comforter, and will so remain, unless you grow tired of the office, which may well be.”
“The present sufferings of allmayyet be repaid in blessings. Don’t despair absolutely, dearest; and leave me but enough of your interest to afford you any consolation by partaking that sorrow which I am most unhappy to cause you thus unintentionally.... Heaven knows you have considered me more than one in a thousand would have done.”
“I am anxious to acquit you of all misrepresentation, and myself of having supposed that you had misrepresented.... I cannot give you pain without feeling yet more myself.”
“My dearest A., it is my great comfort that you are in Piccadilly.”
Some of these letters were written at a time when Lady Byron believed her husband to be mad. All of them were written at a time when she was accusing him of improper relations with her correspondent—as is established beyond dispute by her signed statement, published in “Astarte.”The excerpt printed last was written at the time when she professed to entertain both beliefs. It amounts, when analysed, to an expression of gratification that her sister-in-law, to whom she claims to be deeply attached, is in a position to continue incestuous and adulterous intercourse with a raving maniac. It is incredible, of course, that she can either have felt, or intended to express, any such gratification at any such state of things. The letter is explicable on one hypothesis, and one only: that Lady Byron herself did not really believe the story which she had told to her advisers.
We have already seen—from the wording of Lady Byron’s statement and from her correspondence with Colonel Doyle—that she had no proofs of her story. We have also seen that, when Byron’s friends tried to pin her to the story, she disavowed it. The conclusion that she did not even believe it at the time when she told it comes as a fitting climax; and it needs but little conjecture or imagination to divine her motives and give coherence to the narrative of her proceedings.
She had come to hate her husband, and had resolved to separate from him at all costs. Such hatreds are sometimes conceived by women without adequate cause, just before and just after pregnancy. One suspects that pathological explanation, though one does not know enough of the facts to insist upon it. The hatred, at any rate, was there, impelling Lady Byron to seek a separation, and she proceeded to take advice. Probably she was advised that her case was tooweak to be taken into Court with confidence; and she certainly was advised that reconciliation was preferable to separation. The only way of securing the firm support of her own friends was to lay fresh facts before them.
That is the stage of the proceedings at which we are told that fresh facts came to her knowledge. But the alleged facts were only treated as facts for the purposes of argument. They were scandals—the scandals implicating Mrs. Leigh, and launched, as is believed, by Lady Caroline Lamb, who subsequently disavowed them as explicitly as Lady Byron herself. In order to make sure of her separation Lady Byron adopted those scandals and laid them before Lushington. Lushington may or may not have believed them. So long, however, as he remained in charge of the case he was bound to behave as if he did; and the nature of the charges was such that, even if he only believed them in the sense in which a barrister is required to believe the contents of his brief, he was obviously bound to take the line that they precluded all idea of a reconciliation.
He did take that line; and Lady Byron got her separation. She was so eager to get it that she first made abominable charges against her husband in order to win the sympathy of her own friends, and then withdrew them in order to disarm Byron’s friends. All this without informing Mrs. Leigh that her name was being mixed up in the matter, and without withdrawing from Mrs. Leigh’s society. Ultimately, no doubt, she did come tobelieve the story which she had first circulated and then disavowed. It is hardly to be questioned that she believed it at the time when she told it to Mrs. Beecher Stowe. But she clearly did not believe it at the time when she made use of it; and one can only attribute her final belief in it to a kind of auto-suggestion, induced by dwelling on her grievances, and akin to the process by which George IV. persuaded himself that he had taken part in the Battle of Waterloo.
That is the most plausible supposition as to the motives inspiring Lady Byron’s conduct; and there is nothing except the motives themselves which stands in need of explanation. From Lushington’s action no inference whatever is to be drawn, for it was the only action which the rules of professional etiquette left open to him; and the Byron question is not: On what evidence did Lady Byron act as she did? It is merely: Why did Lady Byron act as she did without any evidence at all? It is so small a question that, having offered a tentative solution, we may fairly leave it and glance at Mrs. Leigh’s correspondence with Hodgson.
Hodgson, as has already been mentioned was brought in by Mrs. Leigh as a peacemaker. The letters which she wrote to him before, during, and after the quarrel appear in the Life of Hodgson by his son, published in 1878. They are too long to be given at length; but their bearing on the issue, which no one who takes the trouble to read them will dispute, must be briefly stated.
In the first place they, most obviously, are not the letters of a guilty woman, or of a woman who feels herself in any way personally implicated in the dispute which she seeks to compose. Every line in them demonstrates, not merely that the writer is conscious of rectitude, but also that the writer is ignorant that she herself is, or can be, the object of sinister suspicion. They are just the flurried letters of a simple body who feels that circumstances have laid upon her shoulders a heavier load of responsibility than they can bear, but would rather be helped to bear the burden than run away from it; and it is a fair summary of them to say that they exonerate Byron by exonerating the alleged accomplice in his crime.
In the second place the letters show Mrs. Leigh, ignorant, indeed, of the specific enormities with which Byron is charged, but well aware of certain circumstances which had made Byron’s marriage a dubious experiment. In the earlier letters, indeed those circumstances are only hinted at obscurely, but in the later letters the meaning of the hints is made quite clear. For instance:
“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 anxiety founded upon many causes and circumstances of which I cannotwrite. Thank God! that they do not appear likely to be realised.”
“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 anxiety founded upon many causes and circumstances of which I cannotwrite. Thank God! that they do not appear likely to be realised.”
That was written during the honeymoon. Inletters written shortly after the honeymoon there are similar vague expressions of anxiety. It is not until we come to the letters written after the separation that we begin to get sight of the particulars; but then we light upon this significant passage:
“I am afraid to open my lips, though all I say toyouI know is secure from misinterpretation. On the opinions expressed by Mr. M. I amnot surprised. I have seen letters writtento himwhich could not but give rise to such, or confirm them. If I may give youmine, it is thatin his own mindtherewereandarerecollections, fatal to his peace, and which would have prevented his being happy with any woman whose excellence equalled or approached that of Lady B., from the consciousness of being unworthy of it. Nothing could or can remedy this fatal cause but the consolations to be derived from religion, of which, alas! dear Mr. H., our beloved B. is, I fear, destitute.”
“I am afraid to open my lips, though all I say toyouI know is secure from misinterpretation. On the opinions expressed by Mr. M. I amnot surprised. I have seen letters writtento himwhich could not but give rise to such, or confirm them. If I may give youmine, it is thatin his own mindtherewereandarerecollections, fatal to his peace, and which would have prevented his being happy with any woman whose excellence equalled or approached that of Lady B., from the consciousness of being unworthy of it. Nothing could or can remedy this fatal cause but the consolations to be derived from religion, of which, alas! dear Mr. H., our beloved B. is, I fear, destitute.”
The idea that the fatal recollections here deplored are recollections of guilty acts in which the writer of the letter was a partner would be too preposterous to be treated with respect even if we did not know what the nature of those recollections was; but, as a matter of fact, a later passage in the same letter supplies the information:
“I am glad you were rather agreeably surprised in the poems.... Of courseyouknow to whom the ‘Dream’ alludes, Mrs. C——.”
“I am glad you were rather agreeably surprised in the poems.... Of courseyouknow to whom the ‘Dream’ alludes, Mrs. C——.”
And there, of course, the truth is out. Mrs.C—— is, and can be no one else than, Mary Chaworth. The “causes too simple to be found out” had to do with Byron’s imperishable passion for the lady whom we have seen his wife calling a “cat.” Byron could not live happily with Lady Byron because he could not forget Mary Chaworth—and Lady Byron knew it. Consequently she set her heart upon obtaining a separation, and, in order to make sure of that separation, “put up” the story, suggested by Lady Caroline Lamb’s poisonous tongue. The whole business is as simple as all that; and the subject might properly be dropped at that point if it were not for Lord Lovelace’s assertion that papers in his hands demonstrated that Mrs. Leigh had “confessed.”
But the so-called confession of Augusta Leigh is like the so-called confession of Captain Dreyfus. We are told that it exists; and when our curiosity has been thus aroused we are told that it is not worth while to produce it. Augusta, says Lord Lovelace, “admitted everything in her letters of June, July, and August, 1816”; and then he goes on to say: “It is unnecessary to produce them here, as their contents are confirmed and made clear by the correspondence of 1819 in another chapter.” But when we turn to the correspondence of 1819, we find that no confession is contained in them. The most that one can say is that, the language of the letters being sometimes enigmatic, and the subjects to which they relate being uncertain, one or two passages in them might conceivably be read as referring to a confession, ifone knew that a confession had been made. Even on that hypothesis, however, they might just as easily be read as referring to something else; and the real clue to their meaning may, almost certainly, be found in a letter which Lord Lovelace prints in the chapter entitled “Some Correspondence of Augusta Byron.”
The letter[9]in question is a love letter. It begins “My dearest Love” and ends “Ever Dearest.” Lord Lovelace prints it as addressed by Lord Byron to Mrs. Leigh in May 1819. It is a letter, however, in which both the signature and the address are erased; but though there is no great reason for doubting that Byron was the writer, there is no reason whatever for believing that Mrs. Leigh was the recipient. Indeed, one has only to place it side by side with the letters which we actually know Byron to have written to Mrs. Leigh a little before May 1819, and a little afterwards, in order to be positive that she was not; and one has only to remember that Byron still sometimes wrote to Mary Chaworth, and that his correspondence passed through his sister’s hands, in order to satisfy oneself whose letter it was that Lord Lovelace found among Lord Byron’s papers. So that our conclusion must be:
1. That Lord Lovelace’s most substantial piece of evidence against Mrs. Leigh is a letter[9]which though it passed through her hands, was really written to Mary Chaworth.2. That the alleged confession does not exist—for if it did exist, Lord Lovelace would have printed it.
1. That Lord Lovelace’s most substantial piece of evidence against Mrs. Leigh is a letter[9]which though it passed through her hands, was really written to Mary Chaworth.
2. That the alleged confession does not exist—for if it did exist, Lord Lovelace would have printed it.
And we may go further, and say, with confidence, not only that the alleged confession does not exist at the present time, but that it never did exist; for even that conclusion follows irresistibly from the known circumstances of the final meeting between Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, at Reigate, in the presence of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, in 1851.
They had remained friends until 1830, and had then quarrelled, not about Byron, but about the appointment of a new trustee under a settlement. After that, they had ceased to see each other; and the Reigate interview, of which Robertson drew up a memorandum, was avowedly and admittedly arranged because Lady Byron desired, and expected, to receive a confession before a witness of unimpeachable integrity. Nothing is more obvious than that Lady Byron would have had no need to solicit a verbal confession in 1851 if she had succeeded in extracting a written confession in 1816; and it is common ground that, in 1851, Mrs. Leigh not only confessed nothing, but denied that she had anything to confess.
The whole story of the confession, therefore, vanishes like smoke; and one is free, at last, to quit this painful part of the subject. It was necessary to dwell on it carefully and at length on account of the sophistical cobwebs spun round it by Lord Lovelace’s awkward hands and because,while justice injoined the vindication of Lord Byron, his biographer could not let any prudish scruples or false delicacy withhold him from the task of definitely clearing the memory of Byron’s sister from the shameful aspersions cast upon it, by Byron’s grandson. But one, nevertheless, gets away from it with relief, and returns with a sense of recovered freedom to the facts of Byron’s career at the time when the storm broke about his head and drove him from the country.
BYRON’S DEPARTURE FOR THE CONTINENT—HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH JANE CLAIRMONT
Macaulay has described, in that picturesque style of his, how, just as Byron “woke up one morning and found himself famous,” so the British public woke up one morning and found itself virtuous, with the result that Byron was hooted and hounded out of England. The picture, like all Macaulay’s pictures, was overdrawn and over-coloured. The life of the country, and even of the capital, went on pretty much as usual in spite of Byron’s dissensions with his wife; and Byron himself kept up appearances fairly well, going to the theatre, entertaining Leigh Hunt, Kinnaird, and other friends at dinner, and corresponding with Murray about the publication of his poems. But, nevertheless, many circumstances combined to make him feel uncomfortable.
Invitations ceased to be showered upon him; and “gross charges” continued to be whispered in spite of Lady Byron’s disavowal. The grounds of the separation not being known, every one was free to conjecture his own solution of the mystery. There seemed little doubt, at any rate, that Byron had forsaken his lawful wife’s society for that of the nymphs of Drury Lane; and it was quitecertain that he had failed to pay the Duchess of Devonshire her rent. The only possible reply to these allegations was that they were no part of the business of the people who made such a fuss about them. The fuss being made, the most reasonable course was to go abroad until the hubbub ceased.
It was no case, as Byron’s enemies have said, of running away to avoid an investigation into his conduct—investigation had been challenged, and all the grave charges had been withdrawn. They had, indeed, by a breach of faith, been secretly kept alive; but they had not reappeared in such shape and circumstances that action could be taken on them; and Byron could not be expected to formulate them himself, merely for the purpose of denying them. His threat, a little later, to appeal to the Courts for an injunction to restrain Lady Byron from taking his daughter out of England as he had heard that she proposed to do, amply showed that he had no fear of any shameful disclosures; but he had Mrs. Leigh’s reputation as well as his own to think of; and it was better for her sake as well as his that he should desist from bandying words with her calumniators. Moreover it was not only his calumniators who were making things unpleasant for him. His creditors were also joining in the hue and cry and multiplying his motives for retiring; so he resolved to go, attended by three servants and the Italian physician, Polidori.
Rogers paid him a farewell visit on April 22; and Mr. and Mrs. Kinnaird called the sameevening, bringing, as Hobhouse tells us, “a cake and two bottles of champagne.” On the following morning the party were up at six and off at half-past nine for Dover; Hobhouse riding with Polidori in Scrope Davies’ carriage, and Byron, with Scrope Davies, in his own new travelling coach, modelled on that of Napoleon, containing a bed, a library, and a dinner-service, specially built for him at a cost of £500. A crowd gathered to watch the departure—a crowd which Hobhouse feared might prove dangerous, but which, in fact, was only inquisitive. The bailiffs arrived ten minutes afterwards and “seized everything,” with expressions of regret that they had not been in time to seize the coach as well. Even cage-birds and a squirrel were taken away by them.
This news having been brought by Fletcher, the valet, who followed the party, the coach was hustled on board the packet to be safe—a most wise precaution seeing that there was a day’s delay before it started; and Hobhouse continues:
“April 25. Up at eight, breakfasted; all on board except the company. The captain said he could not wait, and Byron would not get up a moment sooner. Even the serenity of Scrope was disturbed.... The bustle kept Byron in spirits, but he looked affected when the packet glided off.... The dear fellow pulled off his cap and waved it to me. I gazed until I could not distinguish him any longer. God bless him for a gallant spirit and a kind one!”
“April 25. Up at eight, breakfasted; all on board except the company. The captain said he could not wait, and Byron would not get up a moment sooner. Even the serenity of Scrope was disturbed.... The bustle kept Byron in spirits, but he looked affected when the packet glided off.... The dear fellow pulled off his cap and waved it to me. I gazed until I could not distinguish him any longer. God bless him for a gallant spirit and a kind one!”
And then:
“Went to London.... Told there was a row expected at the theatre, Douglas K. having received fifteen anonymous letters stating that Mrs. Mardyn would be hissed on Byron’s account.”
“Went to London.... Told there was a row expected at the theatre, Douglas K. having received fifteen anonymous letters stating that Mrs. Mardyn would be hissed on Byron’s account.”
This gives us, of course, the point of view of the populace—or perhaps one should say of the middle classes. They, it is evident, knew nothing of any specially gross or unspeakable charges against Byron, but were satisfied to turn the hose of virtuous indignation on him because, instead of managing Drury Lane in the sole interest of dramatic art, he had availed himself of opportunities and yielded to temptations. And so no doubt he had, though not exactly in such circumstances as the populace supposed or in connection with the particular lady whose guilt the populace had hastily assumed.
The popular indictment, indeed, included at least three glaring errors of fact. In the first place the partner of Byron’s latest passion (if passion be the word) was not Mrs. Mardyn, but Miss Jane Clairmont. In the second place his relations with Miss Clairmont had nothing whatever to do with his separation from Lady Byron, because he did not make Miss Clairmont’s acquaintance until after Lady Byron had left him. In the third place it was not Byron who pursued Miss Clairmont with his attentions, but Miss Clairmont who threw herself at Byron’s head.
Jane Clairmont was, as is well known, sister by affinity to Mary Godwin who was then living with Shelley and was afterwards married to him. She had accompanied Shelley and Mary on their first trip to Switzerland in 1814, and had subsequently stayed with them in various lodgings. In the impending summer she was to go to Switzerland with them again, and Byron was to meet her there, whether accidentally or on purpose. In the early biographies, indeed, the meeting figures as accidental; but the later biographers knew better, and the complete story can be pieced together from a bundle of letters included in the Murray MSS., and the statement which Miss Clairmont herself made in her old age to Mr. William Graham, who travelled all the way to Florence to see her, and, after her death, reported her conversations in theNineteenth Century.
“When I was a very young girl,” Miss Clairmont told Mr. Graham, “Byron was the rage.” She spoke of the “troubling morbid obsession” which he exercised “over the youth of England of both sexes,” and insisted that the girls in particular “made simple idiots of themselves about him”; and then she went on to describe how one girl did so:
“In the days when Byron was manager of Drury Lane Theatre I bethought myself that I would go on to the stage. Our means were very narrow, and it was necessary for me to do something, and this seemed to suit me better than anything else;in any case it was the only form of occupation congenial to my girlish love of glitter and excitement.... I called, then, on Byron in his capacity of manager, and he promised to do what he could to help me as regards the stage. The result you know. I am too old now to play with any mock repentance. I was young, and vain, and poor. He was famous beyond all precedent.... His beauty was as haunting as his fame, and he was all-powerful in the direction in which my ambition turned. It seems to me almost needless to say that the attentions of a man like this, with all London at his feet, very quickly completely turned the head of a girl in my position; and when you recollect that I was brought up to consider marriage not only as a useless but as an absolutely sinful custom, that only bigotry made necessary, you will scarcely wonder at the results, which you know.”
“In the days when Byron was manager of Drury Lane Theatre I bethought myself that I would go on to the stage. Our means were very narrow, and it was necessary for me to do something, and this seemed to suit me better than anything else;in any case it was the only form of occupation congenial to my girlish love of glitter and excitement.... I called, then, on Byron in his capacity of manager, and he promised to do what he could to help me as regards the stage. The result you know. I am too old now to play with any mock repentance. I was young, and vain, and poor. He was famous beyond all precedent.... His beauty was as haunting as his fame, and he was all-powerful in the direction in which my ambition turned. It seems to me almost needless to say that the attentions of a man like this, with all London at his feet, very quickly completely turned the head of a girl in my position; and when you recollect that I was brought up to consider marriage not only as a useless but as an absolutely sinful custom, that only bigotry made necessary, you will scarcely wonder at the results, which you know.”
That is the story as Miss Clairmont remembered it, or as she wished posterity to believe it. She also seems to have been fully persuaded in her own mind that Shelley had recommended her to apply to Byron, and that it was about her that Byron and Lady Byron fell out; but the letters published by Mr. Murray show all this to be a tissue of absurd inexactitudes. What actually happened was that Miss Clairmont wrote to Byron under the pseudonym of “E Trefusis,” beginning “An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you,” and proceeding to say: “It may seem a strangeassertion, but it is not the less true that I place my happiness in your hands.”
There is no reference there, it will be remarked, to any desire on Miss Clairmont’s part to adopt the theatrical profession. The few references to such a desire which do occur later in the correspondence are of such a nature as to show that Miss Clairmont did not entertain it seriously, consisting mainly of objections to Byron’s proposal that she should discuss the matter with Mr. Kinnaird instead of him. Miss Clairmont, in short, made it abundantly clear that she was in love, not with the theatre, but with Byron; and the more evasive Byron showed himself, the more ardently and impulsively did she advance. We gather from her letters, indeed, that most of those letters were left unanswered, that Byron very frequently was “not at home” to her, and that, when she was at last admitted, she did not find him alone.
Most women would have been discouraged by such a series of repulses; but Miss Clairmont was not. In response to a communication in which Byron had begged her to “write short,” she wrote: “I do not expect you to love me; I am not worthy of your love.” But she begged him, if he could not love, at least to let himself be loved—to suffer her to demonstrate that she, on her part, could “love gently and with affection”; and thus she paved the way to a practical proposal:
“Have you, then,” (she asked) “any objection to the following plan? On Thursday Evening wemay go out of town together by some stage of mail about the distance of ten or twelve miles. There we shall be free and unknown; we can return early the following morning. I have arranged everything here so that the slightest suspicion may not be excited. Pray do so with your people.”
“Have you, then,” (she asked) “any objection to the following plan? On Thursday Evening wemay go out of town together by some stage of mail about the distance of ten or twelve miles. There we shall be free and unknown; we can return early the following morning. I have arranged everything here so that the slightest suspicion may not be excited. Pray do so with your people.”
Even to that appeal Byron seems to have turned a deaf ear. One infers as much from the fact that other appeals followed it: “Do not delay our meeting after Saturday—I cannot endure the suspense,” &c. After that, however, and apparently quite soon after it, followed the capitulation; and for the sequel we will turn again to Mr. Graham’s report of Miss Clairmont’s confessions:
“He was making his final arrangements for leaving England, when I told him of the project the Shelleys and I had formed of the journey to Geneva. He at once suggested that we should all meet at Geneva, and delightedly fell in with my proposal to accompany me one day when I had arranged to visit the Shelleys at Marlow,[10]where they were then stopping, and arrange matters. We started early one morning, and we arrived at Marlow about the mid-day dinner-hour.... Byron refreshed himself with a huge mug of beer.... A few minutes afterwards in came Shelley and Mary. It was such a merry party that we made at lunch in the inn parlour: Byron, despite hismisfortunes, was in the spirits of a boy at leaving England, and Shelley was overjoyed at meeting his idolised poet, who had actually come all the way from London to see him.”
“He was making his final arrangements for leaving England, when I told him of the project the Shelleys and I had formed of the journey to Geneva. He at once suggested that we should all meet at Geneva, and delightedly fell in with my proposal to accompany me one day when I had arranged to visit the Shelleys at Marlow,[10]where they were then stopping, and arrange matters. We started early one morning, and we arrived at Marlow about the mid-day dinner-hour.... Byron refreshed himself with a huge mug of beer.... A few minutes afterwards in came Shelley and Mary. It was such a merry party that we made at lunch in the inn parlour: Byron, despite hismisfortunes, was in the spirits of a boy at leaving England, and Shelley was overjoyed at meeting his idolised poet, who had actually come all the way from London to see him.”
Such are the facts, so far as they are ascertainable, concerning the origin of this curiousliaison. It is a story which begins, and goes on for some time, though it does not conclude, like the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife; and Miss Clairmont recalls how exultantly she proclaimed her triumph. “Percy! Mary! What do you think? The great Lord Byron loves me!” she exclaimed, bursting in upon her friends; and she adds that Shelley regarded the attachment as right and natural and proper, and a proof that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
He may have done so, for he was a dreamer, cradled in illusions, unfettered by codes, always ready to look upon life as a fairy-tale that was turning out to be true. Whether he did so or not, it seems at any rate pretty clear that he was in Miss Clairmont’s confidence, knew for what reason Byron wished to meet him at Geneva, and acquiesced in the proposal. But it is equally certain that he was not in Byron’s confidence, and had no suspicion of the spirit in which Byron had entered into the intrigue.
For Byron was not in love with Miss Clairmont, and never had been in love with her, and never would be. In so far as he loved at all, he still loved Mary Chaworth, to whom his heart alwaysreturned at every crisis of unhappiness. There was no question of any renewal of the old passionate relations; but she consented to see him once more before he left England. “When we two parted in silence and tears” seems to belong to this moment of his life—the moment at which Miss Clairmont first persuaded herself, and then persuaded Shelley, that she was enthroned for ever in the author’s heart. That, still, was his one real sentimental hold on life. Nothing else mattered; and the coquetries and audacities of this child of seventeen mattered less than most things.
But a man must live; a man must divert himself. Most especially must a man do so when, as Byron expressed it, his household gods lay shivered around him—when his home was broken up and his child was taken away—when rumours as intangible as abominable were afloat to his dishonour—when the society of which he had been the bright particular star was turning its back on him. Even the love, or what passed for such, of a stage-struck girl of seventeen, could be welcome in such a case, and it would not be difficult to give something which could pass for love in return for it.
That was what happened—and that was all that happened. Miss Clairmont told Mr. Graham, in so many words, that she never loved Byron, but was only “dazzled” by him. It is written in Byron’s letters—from which there shall be quotations in due course—and it is amply demonstrated by his conduct, that he never loved Miss Clairmont, but only accepted favours which she pressed upon him,and suffered her to help him to live at a time when life was difficult.
The credit of having done that for him, however, should be freely given to her. The appointment which she made with him at Geneva touched his flight from England with romance. His reception by the generality of English residents on the Continent was very, very doubtful. It would have been painful to him to travel across Europe, defying opinion in solitude; but he and Shelley and Mary Godwin and Jane Clairmont could defy it in company and laugh; and it was with this confident assurance in his mind that, as Hobhouse writes, “the dear fellow pulled off his cap and waved it” when the Ostend packet glided out of Dover harbour.
LIFE AT GENEVA—THE AFFAIR WITH JANE CLAIRMONT
“From Brussels,” as Moore magniloquently puts it, “the noble traveller pursued his course along the Rhine.” At Geneva he joined Shelley and his party who had taken the shorter route across France; and it would seem that he felt the need of all the moral support which their companionship could give him.
Concerning the nature of his reception in Switzerland, indeed, there is a good deal of conflicting testimony; but the balance of the evidence points to its having been unfavourable. His own statement is that he “retired entirely from society,” with the exception of “some occasional intercourse with Coppet at the wish of Madame de Staël”; but there are indications that the retirement was not voluntary, and that, even at Coppet, his welcome was something less than enthusiastic. On the former point we may quote the letters of Lady Westmorland, just published by Lady Rose Weigall:
“Lord Byron has been very coldly received here both by the natives and by the English. No onevisited him, though there is much curiosity about him. He has been twice to Coppet.”
“Lord Byron has been very coldly received here both by the natives and by the English. No onevisited him, though there is much curiosity about him. He has been twice to Coppet.”
Only twice, be it observed; and on one of the two occasions, one of Madame de Staël’s guests, Mrs. Hervey the novelist—a mature woman novelist of sixty-five virtuous summers—fainted, according to one account, and “nearly fainted,” according to another, at the sudden appearance of the Man of Sin, though, when she came to, she was ashamed of herself, and conversed with him. Probably he called again; and not all the Coppet house-party shared Mrs. Hervey’s consternation at his visits. Lady Westmorland did not for one, but commented on his “sweetness and sadness, melancholy and depression,” adding: “If he was all that he tries to seem now he would really be very fascinating.” On the other hand, however, Madame de Staël’s son-in-law, the Duc de Broglie, summed him up unkindly and almost scornfully, declaring him “a boastful pretender in the matter of vice,” protesting that “his talk was heavy and tiresome,” and that “he did not manœuvre his lame legs with the same ease and nonchalance as M. de Talleyrand,” and concluding: