The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 3

"_Thro' hours, thro' years, thro' time 'twill cheer-- My hope in gloomy moments raise; In life's last conflict 'twill appear, And meet my fond, expiring gaze._"

To Mary Chaworth herself Byron could hardly have said more, but he was, in fact, at this time, saying the same sort of thing to all and sundry. Just the same sentiment recurs in the lines addressed "To a lady who presented the author with the velvet band which bound her tresses":

"_Oh! I will wear it next my heart; 'Twill bind my soul in bonds to thee: From me again 'twill ne'er depart, But mingle in the grave with me._"

Yet if Byron proposes to be faithful for ever to this un-named lady, he proposes, at the same time, to be equally faithful to a lady who can be identified as Miss Anne Houson:

"_With beauty like yours, oh, how vain the contention!

Thus lowly I sue for forgiveness before you;-- At once to conclude such a fruitless dissension, Be false, my sweet Anne, when I cease to adore you!_"

And then there are other lines--innumerable other lines which would also have to be quoted if the treatment of the subject were to be encyclopaedic--lines to Marion, lines to Caroline, lines to a beautiful Quaker, lines to Miss Julia Leacroft, whose brother, the fire-eating Captain John Leacroft remonstrated with Byron, and, according to Moore, even went so far as to challenge him, on account of his pointed attentions to his sister: lines, finally, to M.S.G. who would appear, if verse could be accepted as autobiography, to have offered to yield to Byron, but to have been spared because of his tender regard for her fair fame:

"_I will not ease my tortured heart, By driving dove-ey'd peace from thine; Rather than such a sting impart, Each thought presumptuous I resign._

"_At least from guilt shalt thou be free, No matron shall thy shame reprove; Though cureless pangs may prey on me, No martyr shalt thou be to love._"

With that citation we may quit the subject. Not one of the sets of verses--with the single exception of the set addressed to Miss Leacroft--has any discoverable story attached to it. All of them--or nearly all of them--have the air of celebrating some profound attachment from which no escape is to be looked for on this side of the grave.

Byron's later conception of himself as a man who had loved but one had not crept into his poetry yet. He had not even begun to strike the pose of the Childe impelled to "visit scorching climes beyond the sea" because the one he loved "could ne'er be his."

The idea, indeed, of a man fleeing the country in 1809 because he had loved in vain in 1804 would not, in any case, carry conviction. Even to a poet the idea could hardly have presented itself without some definite renewal of the memories. They were revived, in fact, at a dinner party, in 1808, of which we find an account in one of Byron's letters to Hodgson:

"I was seated near a woman to whom, when a boy, I was as much attached as boys generally are, and more than a man should be. I knew this before I went, and was determined to be valiant and converse with _sang froid_; but instead I forgot my valour and my nonchalance, and never opened my lips even to laugh, far less to speak, and the lady was almost as absurd as myself, which made both the object of more observation than if we had conducted ourselves with easy indifference.

You will think all this great nonsense; if you had seen it, you would have thought it still more ridiculous. What fools we are! We cry for a plaything which, like children, we are never satisfied with till we break open, though, like them, we cannot get rid of it by putting it on the fire."

That is the prose record of the meeting, and there is also a record in verse. There are lines "to a lady on being asked my reason for quitting England in the Spring"; there is the piece beginning, "Well! thou art happy":

"_Mary, adieu! I must away: While thou art blest I'll not repine; But near thee I can never stay; My heart would soon again be thine._"

And also:

"_In flight I shall be surely wise, Escaping from temptation's snare; I cannot view my Paradise Without the wish of dwelling there._"

Poor stuff, as poetry, it will be agreed. Any one who wrote poetry at all might have written it. The sentiment rendered in it is just the sentiment which any sentimental youth would have felt to be proper to the occasion.

We can find in it, at most, only the faint fore-running shadow of the Byronic pose. It rings very insincerely if we set it beside the lines in which Walter Savage Landor, at about the same period, commemorated a similar moment of emotion:

"_Rose Aylmer, whom these waking eyes May weep but never see; A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee._"

In that comparison, most decidedly, all the advantage is with Landor--inevitably, because his were the feelings of a man, whereas Byron's were the feelings of a boy. He was only twenty, and his age is the explanation of a good deal. It explains his startled timidity, described in the letter to Hodgson, in a novel, romantic situation. It explains his hugging his grief as a precious possession on no account to be let go. It also explains the zest with which, when grief had had its sacred hour, he could turn from it and throw himself into other activities.

He rejoiced in the pose, only outlined as yet, which was presently to make him the most interesting man (to women at all events) in Europe; but he also rejoiced in his youth. He flirted, as we have seen; he took part in amateur theatrical performances; he engaged energetically in most of the sports of the day, fencing with Angelo, boxing with Gentleman Jackson, swimming the Thames from Lambeth to the Tower; he acc.u.mulated debts with the fine air of a man heaping Pelion on Ossa; he flung down his defiant challenge to the literary bigwigs in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"; he drew his plans for the grand tour. The world, in short, was just then "so full of a number of things" that Mary Chaworth's importance in it can easily be, as it has often been, exaggerated.

Presently we shall see Byron exaggerating it; and we shall also see how he came to do so--how the boy's occasional pose became the determining reality of the man's life. But before we come to that, we must turn back.

CHAPTER V

REVELRY AT NEWSTEAD--"ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS"

One watches the swelling of Byron's indebtedness with morbid interest. It is like the rapid rising of a Spring tide which threatens to submerge a city. Already, in his second term at Cambridge, as we have seen, he besought his sister to pledge her credit for his loans. At the beginning of his third year, we find him making a confession to his solicitor:

"My debts amount to three thousand, three hundred to Jews, eight hundred to Mrs. B. of Nottingham, to coachmaker and other tradesmen a thousand more, and these must be much increased before they are lessened."

They were increased before they were lessened--unless the explanation be that Byron only told the truth about them in instalments. Three months later this is his confession to the Reverend John Becher:

"_Entre nous_, I am cursedly dipped; my debts, _everything_ inclusive, will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one."

But, even so, the high-water mark is not yet reached. Towards the end of the same year, when Byron is contemplating his "grand tour," he once more calls his solicitor into council:

"You honour my debts; they amount to perhaps twelve thousand pounds, and I shall require perhaps three or four thousand at setting out, with credit on a Bengal agent. This you must manage for me."

A pleasant commission, which seems to have led to a reference to Mrs.

Byron, who made a luminous suggestion:

"I wish to G.o.d he would exert himself and retrieve his affairs. He must marry a woman of _fortune_ this Spring; love matches is all nonsense. Let him make use of the Talents G.o.d has given him. He is an English Peer, and has all the privileges of that situation."

It was a matter-of-fact proposal, worthy of the canny Scotswoman who made it--a proof that, even when she threw the tongs at her son, she still had his interests at heart; but nothing came of it. Very likely Byron, at this date knew no heiresses; and even his mother was not matter-of-fact enough to expect him to advertise for one, even for the purpose of avoiding the necessity of selling Newstead. There was still the resource of borrowing a little more, and of making the loans go as far as possible by retaining the money for personal expenses, instead of applying it to the payment of debt; and something of that sort seems to have been done. Scrope Davies lent Byron 4800; and yet Mrs. Byron had occasion to write:

"There is some Trades People at Nottingham that will be completely ruined if he does not pay them, which I would not have happen for a whole world."

Moreover, though Byron himself talked vaguely to Hanson of the possibility of his marriage with "a golden Dolly," he was at an age at which a young man does not readily marry any woman with whom he is not in love. Whether he was or was not, at that time, in love with Mrs. Chaworth,[5] he certainly was not in love with any one else; and he was enjoying himself and "having his fling," after the manner of gilded youth. His "domestic female companion," to use Gibbon's charming phrase, was a professional daughter of joy who travelled about with him in male attire. He even brought her to Newstead, when he took possession of the Abbey on the expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthen's tenancy. That may have been one reason--though it need not necessarily have been the only one--for his refusal to let his mother join him there. It would certainly have been a valid reason for postponing matrimony.

Around those Newstead revels a good deal of fantastic legend circles; and the facts concerning them are hardly to be disentangled from the myths.

"Childe Harold" starts with them:--

_Ah! me! in sooth he was a shameless wight, Sore given to revel and unG.o.dly glee; Few earthly things found favour in his sight Save concubines and carnal companie, And flaunting wa.s.sailers of high and low degree._

"Childe Harold," however, in spite of the fact that it was first called "Childe Buron," is a poem, not a deposition. The picture, with its "Paphian girls" and the rest of it--

_Where superst.i.tion once had made her den, Now Paphian girls were wont to sing and smile, And monks might deem their time was come agen, If ancient tales say true, nor wrong these holy men_,

is not necessarily faithful because the note of contrast which it sounds is of the essence of the poem. But, on the other hand, the excuses and explanations by means of which Moore and Cordy Jeaffreson attempt to palliate and minimise the supposed a.s.sertions of the poem are somewhat less than convincing.

The revels, say these apologists, cannot have been so very dreadful because the Newstead guests sometimes included some of the local clergy, and because some of the young men who engaged in them afterwards took orders. The obvious answer to that is that the revellers may very well have moderated their revelry on the occasions on which clergymen were present--and that those of them who afterwards became pillars of the Church may not, at that date, have got the old Adam into complete subjection. Nor is a great deal gained by the contention that the part of the supposed "Paphian girls" was, in fact, sustained by Byron's "domestic female companion," and by the Newstead cook and the Newstead housemaid. To say this is merely to protest that the alleged Paphians did not really come from Paphos, but from some other island in the same neighbourhood.

A letter written by Charles Skinner Matthews to his sister is the only contemporary chronicle of the proceedings. There is a confirmation of his account, together with some supplementary details, in a letter written, long afterwards, by Byron to John Murray. Remembering the ages and circ.u.mstances of the revellers--and remembering also that Moore's information was derived from some of them--we will try to get as near to the truth as the procurable evidence allows.

Byron, one must always bear in mind, had not yet conquered his place in county society, or in what is now called "smart" society. His mother's eccentricities and his guardian's chilly att.i.tude had, as we have seen, kept him out of it. He actually knew no peer who could or would introduce him when he took his seat in the House of Lords. The people whom he knew at home were chiefly provincial people of the professional cla.s.ses. At Cambridge he had got into a fast, though not an unintellectual, set. He was very young, and he had plenty of credit, if not much ready money; and here was the "venerable pile" of Newstead--not the less venerable because it was dilapidated--at his disposal as a playground, and a place in which to dispense hospitality.

Naturally he wanted to show Newstead to his friends, whom he had never been able to entertain at home before. Naturally, having credit, he used it to fit up and furnish as much of Newstead as was necessary for their comfortable accommodation, not troubling to foresee the day--though he would not have had to look very far ahead in order to foresee it--when the bailiffs would be put in to seize the goods in default of payment.

Naturally, as Mrs. Byron was so addicted to rattling the tongs and throwing the fire-irons at him, he did not want her there. Naturally, his college friends having fast tastes and habits, and no ladies of their own station being of the party, the method of their life did not follow the conventional round of the ordinary house-party. The pet bear, and the pet wolf, which guarded the entrances, were only symbols of the unusual and extravagant state of things within.

Breakfast, in theory, could be served at any hour. The hour actually preferred by the majority of the party was one P.M. Matthews, who generally came down between eleven and twelve, "was esteemed a prodigy of early rising." Any one, he says, who had wanted to breakfast as early as ten "would have been rather lucky to find any of the servants up." Not until two P.M., as a rule, was the breakfast cleared away. The amus.e.m.e.nts of the afternoon--which Matthews euphemistically calls the morning--were "reading, fencing, single-stick, or shuttle-c.o.c.k, in the great room, practising with pistols in the hall, walking, riding, cricket, sailing on the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf." Dinner was between seven and eight, and then--another euphemism most proper in a letter to a sister--"the evening diversions may be easily conceived."

Those evening diversions consisted, in the first instance of dressing up and drinking. The beverages, according to Byron himself, were "burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not," quaffed not only out of ordinary gla.s.ses, but also out of a loving-cup fashioned from a skull which had been dug up in the Newstead grounds. As for the dressing-up; "A set of monkish dresses," says Matthews, "which had been provided, with all the proper apparatus of crosses, beads, tonsures, &c., often gave a variety to our appearance and to our pursuits," which pursuits consisted, in Byron's words, of "buffooning all round the house in our conventual garments."