Byron: The Last Phase Part 29

'But whatsoe'er he had of love reposed On that beloved daughter; she had been The only thing which kept his heart unclosed Amidst the savage deeds he had done and seen, A lonely pure affection unopposed: There wanted but the loss of this to wean His feelings from all milk of human kindness, And turn him like the Cyclops mad with blindness.'

In the fourth canto we are introduced to Haidee, who resembled Lambro in features and stature, even to the delicacy of their hands. We are told that owing to the violence of emotion and the agitation of her mind she broke a bloodvessel, and lay unconscious on her couch for days. Like Astarte in 'Manfred,' 'her blood was shed: I saw, but could not stanch it':

'She looked on many a face with vacant eye, On many a token without knowing what: She saw them watch her without asking why, And recked not who around her pillow sat.

'Anon her thin wan fingers beat the wall In time to the harper's tune: he changed the theme And sang of Love; the fierce name struck through all Her recollection; on her flashed the dream Of what she was, and is, if ye could call To be so being; in a gushing stream The tears rushed forth from her o'erclouded brain, Like mountain mists at length dissolved in rain.'

'Short solace, vain relief! Thought came too quick, And whirled her brain to madness.'

'She died, but not alone; she held within, A second principle of Life, which might Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin; But closed its little being without light.'

'Thus lived--thus died she; never more on her Shall Sorrow light, or Shame.'

In the fifth canto, written in 1820, after the 'Stanzas to the Po,' we find Byron once more in a confidential mood:

'I have a pa.s.sion for the name of "Mary,"

For once it was a magic sound to me; And still it half calls up the realms of Fairy, Where I beheld what never was to be; All feelings changed, but this was last to vary A spell from which even yet I am not quite free.'

And there is a sigh for Mary Chaworth in the following lines:

'To pay my court, I Gave what I had--a heart; as the world went, I Gave what was worth a world; for worlds could never Restore me those pure feelings, gone for ever.

'Twas the boy's mite, and like the widow's may Perhaps be weighed hereafter, if not now; But whether such things do or do not weigh, All who have loved, or love, will still allow Life has naught like it.'

Early in 1823, little more than a year before his death, Byron refers to 'the fair most fatal Juan ever met.' Under the name of the Lady Adeline, this most fatal fair one is introduced to the reader:

'Although she was not evil nor meant ill, Both Destiny and Pa.s.sion spread the net And caught them.'

'Chaste she was, to Detraction's desperation, And wedded unto one she had loved well.'

'The World could tell Nought against either, and both seemed secure-- She in her virtue, he in his hauteur.'

Here we have a minute description of Newstead Abbey, the home of the 'n.o.ble pair,' where Juan came as a visitor:

'What I throw off is ideal-- Lowered, leavened, like a history of Freemasons, Which bears the same relation to the real As Captain Parry's Voyage may do to Jason's.

The grand _Arcanum's_ not for men to see all; My music has some mystic diapasons; And there is much which could not be appreciated In any manner by the uninitiated.'

Adeline, we are told, came out at sixteen:

'At eighteen, though below her feet still panted A Hecatomb of suitors with devotion, She had consented to create again That Adam called "The happiest of Men."'

It will be remembered that when Mary Chaworth married she was exactly eighteen. Her husband was:

'Tall, stately, formed to lead the courtly van On birthdays. The model of a chamberlain.'

'But there was something wanting on the whole-- don't know what, and therefore cannot tell-- Which pretty women--the sweet souls!--call _Soul_.

_Certes_ it was not body; he was well Proportioned, as a poplar or a pole, A handsome man.'

This description would answer equally well for 'handsome Jack Musters,'

who married Mary Chaworth. Adeline, we are told, took Juan in hand when she was about seven-and-twenty. That was Mary's age in 1813. But this may have been a mere coincidence.

'She had one defect,' says Byron, in speaking of Adeline: 'her heart was vacant. Her conduct had been perfectly correct. She loved her lord, or thought so; but _that_ love cost her an effort. She had nothing to complain of--no bickerings, no connubial turmoil. Their union was a model to behold--serene and n.o.ble, conjugal, but cold.

There was no great disparity in years, though much in temper. But they never clashed. They moved, so to speak, apart.'

Now, when once Adeline had taken an interest in anything, her impressions grew, and gathered as they ran, like growing water, upon her mind. The more so, perhaps, because she was not at first too readily impressed. She did not know her own heart:

'I think not she was _then_ in love with Juan: If so, she would have had the strength to fly The wild sensation, unto her a new one: She merely felt a common sympathy In him.'

'She was, or thought she was, his friend--and this Without the farce of Friendship, or romance Of Platonism.'

'Few of the soft s.e.x,' says Byron, 'are very stable in their resolves.'

She had heard some parts of Juan's history; 'but women hear with more good humour such aberrations than we men of rigour':

'Adeline, in all her growing sense Of Juan's merits and his situation, Felt on the whole an interest intense-- Partly perhaps because a fresh sensation, Or that he had an air of innocence, Which is for Innocence a sad temptation-- As Women hate half-measures, on the whole, She 'gan to ponder how to save his soul.'

After a deal of thought, 'she seriously advised him to get married.'

'There was Miss Millpond, smooth as summer's sea, That usual paragon, an only daughter, Who seemed the cream of Equanimity, Till skimmed--and then there was some milk and water, With a slight shade of blue too, it might be Beneath the surface.'

The mention of Aurora Raby, to whom Juan in the first instance proposed, and by whom he was refused, suggests an incident in his life which is well known. Aurora was very young, and knew but little of the world's ways. In her indifference she confounded him with the crowd of flatterers by whom she was surrounded. Her mind appears to have been of a serious caste; with poetic vision she 'saw worlds beyond this world's perplexing waste,' and

'those worlds Had more of her existence; for in her There was a depth of feeling to embrace Thoughts, boundless, deep, but silent too as s.p.a.ce.'

She had 'a pure and placid mien'; her colour was 'never high,'

'Though sometimes faintly flushed--and always clear As deep seas in a sunny atmosphere.'

We cannot be positive, but perhaps Byron had Aurora Raby in his mind when he wrote:

'I've seen some b.a.l.l.s and revels in my time, And stayed them over for some silly reason, And then I looked (I hope it was no crime) To see what lady best stood out the season; And though I've seen some thousands in their prime Lovely and pleasing, and who still may please on, I never saw but one (the stars withdrawn) Whose bloom could after dancing dare the Dawn.'[58]

Perhaps Aurora Raby may have been drawn from his recollection of Miss Mercer Elphinstone, who afterwards married Auguste Charles Joseph, Comte de Flahaut de la Billarderie, one of Napoleon's Aides-de-Camp, then an exile in England. This young lady was particularly gracious to Byron at Lady Jersey's party, when others gave him a cold reception. We wonder how matters would have shaped themselves if she had accepted the proposal of marriage which Byron made to her in 1814! But it was not to be. That charming woman pa.s.sed out of his...o...b..t, and as he waited upon the sh.o.r.e, gazing at the dim outline of the coast of France, the curtain fell upon the first phase of Byron's existence. The Pilgrim of Eternity stood on the threshold of a new life:

'Between two worlds life hovers like a star, 'Twixt Night and Morn, upon the horizon's verge.

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of Time and Tide rolls on and bears afar Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge, Lashed from the foam of Ages.'

And after eight years of exile, in his 'Last Words on Greece,' written in those closing days at Missolonghi, with the shadow of Death upon him, his mind reverts to one whom, in 1816, he had called 'Soul of my thought':

'What are to me those honours or renown Past or to come, a new-born people's cry?

Albeit for such I could despise a crown Of aught save laurel, or for such could die.

I am a fool of pa.s.sion, and a frown Of thine to me is as an adder's eye-- To the poor bird whose pinion fluttering down Wafts unto death the breast it bore so high-- Such is this maddening fascination grown, So strong thy magic or so weak am I.'

'The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; the worm, The canker, and the grief, are mine alone!'