The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 2

He was always welcome there. There was as little desire on his cousin's side as on his to revive the recollection of the feud. When he came to call, he was pressed to stay and sleep. At first he refused, most probably from shyness, though he professed a superst.i.tious fear of the family portraits. They had "taken a grudge to him," he said, on account of the duel; they would "come down from their frames at night to haunt him." But presently his fears, or his shyness, were conquered. He had seen a ghost, he said, in the park; and if he must see ghosts he might just as well see them in the house; so, if it was all the same to his hosts, he would like to stay.

He stayed, and was entranced with Mary Chaworth's singing. He rode with her, and practiced pistol shooting on the terrace--more than a little pleased, one conjectures, to show off his marksmanship. He went with her--and with others, including a chaperon--on an excursion to Matlock and Castleton. A note, written long afterwards, preserves a memory of the trip:

"It happened that, in a cavern in Derbyshire, I had to cross in a boat (in which two people only could lie down) a stream which flows under a rock, with the rock so close upon the water as to admit the boat only to be pushed on by a ferryman (a sort of Charon) who wades at the stern, stooping all the time. The companion of my transit was M.A.C., with whom I had long been in love, and never _told_ it, though _she_ had discovered it without. I recollect my sensations, but cannot describe them, and it is as well."

And no doubt Mary Chaworth encouraged the boy, amused at his raptures, enjoying the visible proof of her power, prepared to snub him, in the end, if necessary, but scarcely expecting that there would be any need for her to do so. She was seventeen, and a girl of seventeen always feels capable of reminding a boy of fifteen that the prayer book forbids him to marry his grandmother. Moreover, she was engaged, though the engagement had not yet been announced, to Mr. John Musters--a grown man and a Philistine--a handsome, rather dissipated, hard-riding and hard-drinking country squire.

The dreamy, limping, fat boy from Harrow had no shadow of a chance against his athletic rival. It was impossible for Mary Chaworth to divine the genius that lurked beneath the fat. One has no right to expect such powers of divination from girls of seventeen.

No doubt she thought the fat boy, as she would have said, "good fun." No doubt she was amused when, as a demonstration that he was not too young to be loved, he showed her the locket which Margaret Parker had given him, three years before, when he was twelve. Unquestionably she flirted with him--or, at least, let him flirt with her. She even gave him a ring, and the gift must have raised high hopes, though it was the cause of the discovery which brought the flirtation to an end.

Squire Musters discovered the ring among Byron's clothes one day when he and the boy were bathing together in the Trent. He recognised it, picked it up, and put it in his pocket. Byron claimed it, and Musters declined to give it up; and then, to quote the Countess Guiccioli, who is the authority for the story:

"High words were exchanged. On returning to the house, Musters jumped on a horse and galloped off to ask an explanation from Miss Chaworth, who, being forced to confess that Lord Byron wore the ring with her consent, felt obliged to make amends to Musters by promising to declare immediately her engagement with him."

Such is the story, as one gets it, through the Countess and through Moore, from Byron himself; but we also get a side glimpse at it in a letter, recently published,[2] from Mrs. Byron to Hanson, the family solicitor.

From this we gather that Byron, in order to make love, had absented himself from school; that Drury had inquired the reason of his absence; and that his mother was making strenuous, but unavailing, efforts to induce him to return. Nothing was the matter with him but love--"desperate love, the _worst_ of all _maladies_ in my opinion." He had hardly been to see his mother at all, but had been spending all his time at Annesley. "It is the last of all connexions," she added, "that I should wish to take place"; and she begged Mr. Hanson to make arrangements for her son to spend his next holidays elsewhere. Expense was no object; and it would suit her very well if Dr. Drury could be induced to detain him at Harrow.

And Byron himself, meanwhile, was writing to his mother, alternately using lofty language about his right to choose his own friends, and pleading for one more day in order that he might take leave.

He took it; but there is more than one version of the story.

"Do you think," he overheard Mary Chaworth say to her maid, "that I could care anything for that lame boy?" And, having heard that, "he instantly darted out of the house, and, scarcely knowing whither he ran, never stopped till he found himself at Newstead." That is what Moore tells us; but the picture drawn in "The Dream,"--the most obviously and deliberately autobiographical of Byron's poems--is different.

"She loved," he writes:

"_Another: even now she loved another, And on the summit of that hill she stood Looking afar as if her lover's steed Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew._"

She was waiting, that is to say, for Squire Musters to ride up the lane, while listening to Byron's declaration. That is the first picture; and then there follows the picture of the boy who "within an antique oratory stood," and to whom, presently, "the lady of his love re-entered":

"_She was serene and smiling then, and yet She knew she was by him beloved--she knew, For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart Was darkened with her shadow, and she saw That he was wretched, but she saw not all.

He rose, and with a cold and gentle grasp He took her hand; a moment o'er his face A tablet of unutterable thoughts Was traced, and then it faded, as it came; He dropped the hand he held, and with slow steps Retired, but not as bidding her adieu, For they did part with mutual smiles; he pa.s.sed From out the ma.s.sy gate of that old Hall, And mounting on his steed he went his way; And ne'er repa.s.sed that h.o.a.ry threshold more._"

There we have the Mary Chaworth legend as it has been handed down from one generation of biographers to another. Byron, according to that legend, saw Mary once after her marriage, but once only. He was on the point of visiting her at a later date, but was dissuaded by his sister. "If you go," Augusta said, "you will fall in love again, and then there will be a scene; one step will lead to another, _et cela fera un eclat_." He agreed that the reasoning was sound, and did as he was advised. He tells that story himself, and adds: "Shortly after, I married."

And yet--the legend continues--this hopeless love, which touched his heart at the age of fifteen, was the dominating influence of his life. Mary Chaworth, though always absent, was yet always present. He never loved any other woman, though he tried to love, and indeed seemed to love, several.

The vision of her face always came between him and them. His later love affairs were only concessions, or attempts to escape from himself and his memories--unavailing attempts, for this memory continued to haunt him until the end.

It sounds incredible. The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts; but the memories of youth are short, and the dreams of youth are dreams from which we never fail to wake. And yet Byron insists, quite as much as biographers have insisted. He insists in "The Dream," which was written more than a decade after the parting. He insists in later poems, the inner meaning of which is hardly to be questioned. So that speculation is challenged, and, when pursued, leads us inevitably to a dilemma.

For of two things, one: Either Byron was posing--posing not only to the world but to himself; or else the story, as all the biographers from Moore to Cordy Jeaffreson have told it, is incomplete, and after an interlude, had a sequel.

To search for such a sequel will be our task presently. Unless we can find one, the development of the personal note in Byron's work will have to be left unexplained. The impression which we get, if we read the more personal poems in quick succession, is of a man who first awakes from the dream of love--and remains very wide awake for a season--and then relapses and dreams it all over again. Unless the story which first set him dreaming had had a sequel, that would hardly be. So we will seek for the sequel in due course, though we must first gather up the incidents of the interlude.

CHAPTER IV

LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE AND FLIRTATIONS AT SOUTHWELL

Baffled in love, Byron returned to Harrow, after a term's absence, in January 1804, and remained there for another eighteen months. This eighteen months is the period during which he describes himself as having been happy at school. It is also the period during which he haunted the Harrow churchyard, indulging his day dreams as he looked down from the hillside on the wide, green valley of the Thames. Those dreams, it is hardly to be doubted, were chiefly of Mary Chaworth; and we may picture the poet's secret sorrow as giving him, fat though he was, a sense of superiority over other boys who had no secret sorrows. Apparently, too, casting about for an explanation of his failure, he realised that, in the rivalries of love, the victory is far less likely to rest with the fat than with the lame; and so, presently,--though not until after an interval of reflection--he set himself the task of compelling his too solid flesh to melt.

He has been laughed at, and charged with vanity for doing so; but he was right. He would also have been ridiculed, and with more justice, if he had resigned himself to be overwhelmed by the rising tide of superabundant tissue. Fatness is not merely a grotesque condition. It is a condition incompatible with fitness; and it is far n.o.bler to resist it with systematic heroism than to cultivate it and call heaven and earth to witness that one is the fattest person going; and the fact that Byron, by dint of exercises which made him perspire, a careful diet, and a persistent use of Epsom salts, reduced his weight from fourteen stone six to twelve stone seven, is no small achievement to be pa.s.sed over lightly.

It is, on the contrary, one of the most memorable incidents in his development--the greatest of all the feats performed by him at Trinity College, Cambridge,[3] where he began to reside in October 1805.

He did not read for honours. At Oxford he might have done so, and might have figured in the same cla.s.s list as his Harrow friend, Sir Robert Peel, who took a double-first, and Archbishop Whately, who took a double-second.

At Cambridge, however, the pernicious rule prevailed that honours were only for mathematicians. The Cla.s.sical Tripos was not originated until a good many years afterwards, and Byron had neither talent nor taste for figures. The most notable, though not the highest, wranglers of his year were Adam Sedgwick, the geologist, and Blomfield, Bishop of London. Byron would have had to work very hard to make any show against them. He did not enter the compet.i.tion, but let his mind exercise itself on more congenial themes, cherishing the belief--so erroneous and yet so common--that Senior Wranglers never come to any good in after life.

His allowance was 500 a year; and he kept a servant and a horse. His general proceedings, except when he was writing verses were pretty similar to those of the average young n.o.bleman who attends a University, not to instruct but to amuse himself. He rode, and fenced, and boxed, and swam, and dived; he gambled and backed horses; he was alternately guest and host at rather uproarious wine-parties, and was spoken of as a young man "of very tumultuous pa.s.sions." The statement has been made--he has made it himself and his biographers have repeated it--that he lived quietly at first, and only latterly got into a dissipated set; but as we find him, in his second term, entreating his sister to back a bill for 800, the statement probably needs to be modified in order to square with the facts.

Apparently Augusta did not comply with his request; but the proofs that he lived beyond his means are ample. Mrs. Byron was as loud in her wail on the subject as the widows of Asher. She complains--this also in the second term--of bills "coming in thick upon me to double the amount I expected"; and she protests, in Byron's first Easter vacation, against his wanton extravagance in subscribing thirty guineas to Pitt's statue; while, in the course of the next Easter vacation we find her consulting the family solicitor as to the propriety of borrowing 1000 to get her son out of the hands of the Jews, and declaring that, during the whole of his Cambridge career he has done "nothing but drink, gamble, and spend money."

Very similar is the testimony of his own and his sister's letters. "I was much surprised," Augusta writes, in the second term, to the solicitor, "to see my brother a week ago at the Play, as I think he ought to be employing his time more profitably at Cambridge." Byron himself, writing to his intimates, confesses to several departures from sobriety. The first was in celebration of the Eton and Harrow match, which was followed by a convivial scene, foreshadowing those at the Empire on boat-race night, at some place of public entertainment. "How I got home after the play," Byron says, "G.o.d knows. I hardly recollect, as my brain was so much confused by the heat, the row, and the wine I drank, that I could not remember in the morning how I found my way to bed." Later, in a letter to Miss Elizabeth Bridget Pigot of Southwell, he speaks of his life as "one continual routine of dissipation," talks of "a bottle of claret in my head," and concludes with the specific admission: "Sorry to say been drunk every day, and not quite sober yet."

Possibly he exaggerates a little; but those who know the Universities best will be least likely to suspect him of exaggerating very much. There is always a set which lives in that style at any college frequented by young men of ample means. Their ways, _mutatis mutandis_, are faithfully described in the pages of "Verdant Green." Byron's career, once more _mutatis mutandis_, was not unlike the career of Charles Larkyns and Little Mr. Bouncer in Cuthbert Bede's picture of life at the sister University. He had, at any rate, one foot in such a set as that, though he was in a better set as well, and formed serious friendships with such men as Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, Charles Skinner Matthews, afterwards Fellow of Downing, Scrope Davies, afterwards Fellow of King's, and Francis Hodgson, ultimately Provost of Eton. It is not quite clear whether he was, or was not, one of the rowdy spirits who "ragged" Lort Mansell, the Master of Trinity.[4] He certainly annoyed the dons by keeping a bear as a pet, and a.s.serting that he intended the animal to "sit for a fellowship." But the most characteristic picture, after all, is that which he draws (selecting his solicitor, of all persons in the world, for his confidant) of his mode of reducing his flesh.

"I wear _seven_ waistcoats, and a great Coat, run and play cricket in this Dress, till quite exhausted by excessive perspiration, use the bath daily, eat only a quarter of a pound of Butcher's Meat in 24 hours.... By these means my ribs display Skin of no great Thickness, and my clothes have been taken in nearly _half a yard_."

That is the closing pa.s.sage of a letter which begins with the confession that "_Wine_ and _women_ have _dished_ your _humble servant_." The two statements, taken in conjunction, furnish two-thirds of the picture. The remaining third of it may be deduced and constructed from the verses which Byron had then written or was then writing.

It might be tempting to see in the period of dissipation a disappointed lover's desperate attempt to escape from an ineffaceable recollection; and the view might be supported by Byron's own subsequent declaration that "a violent, though _pure_, love and pa.s.sion," was "the then romance of the most romantic period of my life." Undergraduate excesses, however, rarely require such recondite explanations; and Byron's reminiscences had, as we shall see, been coloured by intervening events. All the contemporary evidence that one can gather goes to show that they were inexact; that, though he had been hard hit by Mary Chaworth's disdainful reception of his suit, he did not mope, but, holding up his head, was in a fair way to live his trouble down; and that his theory of himself, put forward in the well-known lines in "Childe Harold":

"_And I must from this land begone Because I cannot love but one_"

is an after thought entirely inconsistent with his practices as a Cambridge undergraduate.

One would be constrained to suspect that, even if the early poems addressed to Mary Chaworth stood alone. There are not many of them, and they lack the intensity of pa.s.sion--the impression of all possible hopes irremediably blighted--which "The Dream" reveals. They strike one as a little stiff and artificial, as though the poet had tried to express, not so much what he actually felt, as what he considered that a man in his position ought to feel. That is particularly the case with the poems of the first period. There are boasts in them which we know to have been quite unwarranted by the circ.u.mstances of the case. The poet pictures himself as one who might disturb domestic peace if he chose, but refrains, being merciful as he is strong:

"_Perhaps his peace I could destroy, And spoil the blisses that await him; Yet let my rival smile in joy, For thy dear sake, I cannot hate him._"

The boasts there, we see, are the prelude of resignation; and, a line or two further on, resignation is followed by the resolution to forget:

"_Then, fare thee well, deceitful Maid, 'Twere vain and fruitless to regret thee; Nor Hope nor Memory yield their aid, But Pride may teach me to forget thee._"

That is very conventional--hardly less conventional than the Elegy on Margaret Parker--a sentimental "prelude to life," one would judge, of quite an ordinary kind. And, as has been said, the sentimental utterance does not stand alone. Other verses, hardly less sentimental, addressed to several other ladies, were, at the same time, pouring from Byron's pen.

Burgage Manor, a house which his mother had taken at Southwell, near Nottingham, was his vacation home. He fled from his home, from time to time, because of Mrs. Byron's incurable habit of rattling the fire-irons in order to draw attention to his faults; but he returned at intervals, and stayed long enough to form a considerable circle of friends--friends, be it noted, who belonged not to "the county" but to the professional society of the town.

The county did not "call" to any appreciable extent. A few of the men called on Byron himself; but none of the women called on Mrs.

Byron--whether because her reputation for rattling the fire-irons and hurling the tongs had reached them, or because, on general principles, they did not think her good enough to mix with them. Byron, as was natural, resented their att.i.tude and refused to return visits which implied a slight upon his mother. Whatever his own disputes with her, he would not have her snubbed by the local magnates, or himself enter their doors on sufferance while she was excluded from them. He mixed instead with the clergy, the doctors, the lawyers, the retired colonels, and flirted with their sisters and daughters. In that set he moved as a triton among the minnows, fluttering the dovecotes of Southwell pretty much as, at a later date, Praed, fresh from Eton, fluttered the dovecotes of Teignmouth. He could not dance, of course, owing to his lameness; but he could distinguish himself in amateur theatricals, and he could write verses.

His success in the Southwell drawing-rooms and boudoirs was the first reward of his success in resisting and repelling the encroachments of the flesh. The struggle was one which he had to renew at intervals throughout his life; but his "crowning mercy" was the victory of this date. He emerged from it slim, elegant, and strikingly handsome. He rejoiced, and the girls of Southwell rejoiced with him. They understood, as well as he did, that it is difficult for a man to be fat and sentimental at one and the same time; that there is something ludicrously incongruous in the picture of a fat boy writing sentimental verses and professing to pine away for love. And they liked him to write sentimental verses to them, and he was quite willing to do so. He was, at this time, the sort of young man who will write verses to any girl who will give him a keepsake--the sort of young man to whom almost every girl will give a keepsake on condition that he will write verses to her.

He wrote lines, for instance, "to a lady who presented to the author a lock of hair braided with his own and appointed a night in December to meet him in the garden." Nothing is known of her except that her name was Mary, and that she was neither Mary Duff nor Mary Chaworth, but a third Mary "of humble station." Southwell, when it saw those verses, was shocked. It seemed highly improper to Southwell that maidens of humble station should be encouraged to presume by such attentions on the part of n.o.blemen. Probably it was on this occasion that the Reverend John Becher, Vicar of Rumpton, Notts, expostulated with the poet for

"_Deigning to varnish scenes that shun the day With guilty l.u.s.tre and with amorous lay._"

But Byron kept Mary's lock of hair, and showed it, together with her portrait, to his friends and wrote: