The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 12

"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 pa.s.sions have had enough to cool them; my affections more than enough to wither them,--and yet, and yet, always _yet_ and _but_."

"I must set about some employment soon; my heart begins to eat _itself_ again."

"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 of _her_ I love (G.o.d knows too well, and the devil probably too) without a yearning for 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 pa.s.s--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 a.r.s.enal, 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 a.s.serting 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 pa.s.sed through it, and had pa.s.sed out of it again.

Mr. Richard Edgc.u.mbe 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.

Pa.s.sages 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. Edgc.u.mbe'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 att.i.tude towards life are more easily explicable without Mr. Edgc.u.mbe's hypothesis than with it. Loving the real mother so pa.s.sionately, and having such a faithful friend in the supposed mother, he would a.s.suredly 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 "sc.r.a.pes" and "mischief" and the rest of it; and that also, on the a.s.sumption that Byron was pa.s.sionately 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 time awakened 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. Edgc.u.mbe 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 be My 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 impart The 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 gazed On 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 awake To 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 pa.s.s not by, The thought that ne'er shall sleep again.

My soul nor deigns nor dares complain, Though Grief and Pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sionate heart found pa.s.sionate 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 could not 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.

CHAPTER XVI

MARRIAGE

Whatever doubts and mysteries environ the circ.u.mstances 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 embarra.s.sments; and he faced that prospect as one who viewed it with indifference. "She is 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 pa.s.sionate, suitor. He hardly could be so soon after the emotional stress through which we have seen him pa.s.sing; 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 thinking of 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 pa.s.sions." A fortnight later--almost to a day three months before the proposal--he writes again to Moore:

"I _could_ be 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 a.s.suredly 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."

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 long correspondence 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 circ.u.mstances 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--a mathematician--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 Milbanke _accepted him by return of post_. To which piece of information Moore adds the statement that in order to make a.s.surance 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 pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mstances 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."

"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 them in 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."

No more than that. Byron was only marrying, Hobhouse a.s.sures 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.