The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 4

That Matthews speaks of tonsures as if they were articles of dress is neither here nor there; and there is no importance to be attached to his omission of all reference to the "buffooning." We know from Hobhouse that he played his part in it, and that one of the amus.e.m.e.nts of this brilliant young Fellow of Downing was to hide himself in a stone coffin in the Long Gallery and groan, by way of alarming his brother revellers. Evidently the Monks of Newstead, while taking some hints from the profane members of the Medmenham h.e.l.l Fire Club, carried out, to the best of their ability, the traditions of the Monks of Thelema. "Fays ce que voudras" might have been their motto; and the doing of what they wished appears to have involved and included the extension of invitations to the cook and the housemaid to partic.i.p.ate in their pleasures. Moore says so, not as one who makes a charge, but as one who makes an admission to rebut a graver charge, and is full of sympathy for the exuberance of l.u.s.ty youth. Moralists must make what they can of the story, and apportion censure and indulgence as they think just.

The excesses, at any rate, whatever their degree and nature, did not fill Byron's life. He was getting on with his poetry in spite of them, though it would be too much to say that he had yet proved his t.i.tle to be called a poet.

"Hours of Idleness" had appeared while he was at Cambridge. The interest of that volume, nowadays, is far more biographical than poetical. When one has inferred from it that Byron did not pa.s.s through the University with a heart bowed down by the loss of Mary Chaworth, but flirted with a long series of the belles of Southwell, one has said nearly all that there is to say. The poems themselves, as the quotations given amply demonstrate, are no better than the general run of undergraduate verse composition.

They are purely imitative; no new note rings in them. One is not surprised that Lord Carlisle, on receiving a presentation copy, was in a greater hurry to acknowledge than to read it, and merely remarked, in his acknowledgment that young men were better occupied in writing poetry than in devoting their valuable time to women and horses.

"Tolerably handsome," was Byron's first verdict on that letter; but he seems to have felt snubbed when he read it over a second time. Lord Carlisle's opinions, he wrote to Miss Pigot, were nothing to him, but his guardian must not be "insolent." If he were insolent, he should be gibbeted, just as Butler of Harrow had been gibbeted. In fact, and to sum up:

"Perhaps the Earl '_bears no brother near the throne_'--_if so_, I will make his _sceptre_ totter _in his hands_."

Which shows that Byron's back was up, and that he was already in a fighting mood when the famous review in the _Edinburgh_ introduced a jarring note into the chorus of approbation.

The author of the attack was not Jeffrey, as Byron thought, but Brougham.

He had the excuse, for what it may be worth, that the poems had indubitably been over-praised because they had appeared under the signature of a n.o.bleman. He, therefore, set out on the war path with the truculent air of a man whose conscience requires him to bludgeon a b.u.t.terfly. The punishment, we cannot doubt, was very painful to the poet whom Cambridge undergraduates and Southwell belles had flattered; and the instant question for him was: Would he take his punishment lying down, or would he take it fighting?

That question, however, was not long in doubt. The Byrons were a fighting race; and the poet had inherited their love of fighting. Just as he had fought Lord Calthorpe at Harrow for calling him an atheist, so now he would fight the _Edinburgh_ critic for calling him a fool. And he would fight him with his own weapons. Let him have three bottles of claret to prime him, and then he would strip for the fray, and would "take on," not the reviewer only, but every one whom the reviewer had praised, and every one whom he himself disliked, or thought he might dislike if he knew him better. So he emptied his three bottles, and set to work on "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," and having written twenty lines of it, "felt better."

It is the poem in which his genius first begins to be apparent. Most of the judgments expressed in it were unjust--most of them were afterwards retracted by their author; but that does not matter. One does not expect sound criticism from poets--least of all does one expect it from poets of one-and-twenty. The essence of the thing is that now, in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" a new personality spoke--and spoke loud enough to be heard.

The note of Byron--the note which gained him his large and attentive audience--was his reckless audacity. He was not afraid of saying things; he did not wrap them up, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, but said them in plain language which all the world could understand--said them, moreover, in a manner which made them appear true even to those who thought, or wished to think, them false. His readers never knew what he would be saying next. They only knew that, whatever it was, he would say it effectively, and, as has already been remarked, with the air of one who d.a.m.ned the consequences. That was the note which was, in later years, to ring through "Don Juan." We can already hear it ringing, as it were in antic.i.p.ation, through the couplets of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."

Many examples might be cited; for the Satire, after the way of Satires, is almost entirely composed of d.a.m.natory clauses. Any piece of gossip was good enough for Byron to lay hold of and use as a missile when running amok among literary reputations. The best instance, however, may be found in the pa.s.sage in which he turned and rent Carlisle.

His original intention was to make himself pleasant to his guardian. He had no particular reason for liking him, but he had no definite case against him. There was the letter, of course, in which Carlisle had patronised the poet instead of praising his poetry; but he had got over his irritation about that, and did not bear malice; and so he prepared for publication these lines of fulsome eulogy:

"_Ah, who would take their t.i.tles from their rhymes?

On one alone Apollo deigns to smile, And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle._"

But then, before the day of publication, occurred his quarrel with Carlisle. He thought that his guardian ought to have volunteered to introduce him when he took his seat in the House of Lords; he had the more reason for thinking so because his guardian was the only Peer of the Realm whom he knew. Carlisle, however, did not do so, contenting himself with instructing his ward as to the formalities to be fulfilled. The slight, whether intentional or not, was keenly felt--the more keenly because Byron was, at the moment, at war with all the world except Carlisle. _Et tu, Brute_, may very well have been his reflection.

So he had misjudged Carlisle. So Carlisle was as bad as other people--worse, indeed, because better things might reasonably have been expected from him. Very well. It was to be war between them, was it? Those who played at bowls must look out for rubbers. Carlisle should see what kind of an antagonist he had provoked. He had threatened to make his sceptre totter in his hands. Now he would show that he could do it. So he struck out the lines of eulogy, and subst.i.tuted:

"_Yet did or Taste or Reason sway the times, Ah! who would take their t.i.tles with their rhymes!

Roscommon! Sheffield! With your spirits fled, No future laurels deck a n.o.ble head; No Muse will cheer with renovating smile The paralytic puling of Carlisle._"

Such was the Parthian shaft; and Byron, having discharged it, shook the dust of England from off his feet, and departed on the grand tour.

CHAPTER VI

THE GRAND TOUR--FLIRTATIONS IN SPAIN

The glory has long since departed from the grand tour. We all take it nowadays, with less and less sense of adventure, and more and more expectation of home comforts. Sir Henry Lunn has pegged out the course, and stationed lecturers along it at intervals, to prevent us from confounding Scylla and Charybdis with Sodom and Gomorrah. They stir appropriate emotions in our b.r.e.a.s.t.s like stokers making up a fire. We play bridge in the evening on steamers "replete with every modern convenience"; and we are back again, in about six weeks, with a smattering of second-hand culture which goes the way of all smatterings in a very brief period of time. It is a shadowy, unreal, unsatisfactory business--a poor imitation of the grand tour as our forefathers knew it.

Some of them, no doubt, travelled frivolously and superficially. The Earl of Carlisle did so when he and Fox, as Samuel Rogers tells us, "travelled from Paris to Lyons for the express purpose of buying waistcoats and, during the whole journey, talked of nothing else." But there was plenty of emotion in travel for those who cared for it--a real impression of a widening horizon on which unusual figures might be expected to appear--a sense of escaping from the familiar crowd and plunging into an unknown world in which anything might happen. The temptation was strong for the traveller of temperament to strike an att.i.tude and say: "Behold me! The old moorings were impossible; the old lights gave no guidance. I prefer to be adrift on a strange sea, seeking I know not what. Travel is my escape from life. A woman tempted me, and tortured me, and so, unless a woman heals the wound a woman gave----"

Chateaubriand sought the Orient in that spirit. Disgust and disillusion, as he tells us, drove him forth. Pauline de Beaumont was dead, and Madame de Chateaubriand was a woman hard to live with. He needed the consolations of religion; he needed to meditate at the tomb of Christ. Above all he needed, when his meditations had fortified his mind, to meet Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy in the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra. He met her there, and travelled with her for three months in Spain, and presently found that he had only plucked yet another Dead Sea apple. And so he cried: "Behold me!" Similarly, in spite of the differences, with Byron.

It was a fixed article of faith with Chateaubriand that Byron had plagiarised his personality without acknowledgment. It was an act of envious vengeance, he said, for his own neglect to reply to a letter which Byron had written him while a schoolboy. That accusation, of course, is incredible and may be dismissed; but the resemblance between the two men was nevertheless as close as the differences of race allowed. Byron was as distinctly British, at intervals, as Chateaubriand was, at all times, distinctly French; and their points of view were to diverge widely as they grew older. Chateaubriand, an artistic Catholic, was to become one of the pillars of the Holy Alliance. Byron was to do more than any other man except Canning to pull the pillars of that temple down. But, in the meantime, the likeness was striking. There was about them both an equal air of cultivated gloom, an equal tendency to introspection, an equally intense interest in their personalities--that sense of the significance of the ego which was to be of the essence of the Romantic Movement--an equal readiness, as has been re-marked, to exclaim: Behold me!

The likeness is specially striking in the case of their journeys to the Orient. They sailed the same seas in the same spirit--with the one difference that Byron, who had a deadly hatred of certain kinds of hypocrisy, made no pretence in his quest for peace, of looking to and fro between love and religion. In both cases alike, disgust for life was understood to have given the impulsion to the journey. A leading incident in both journeys was, as Byron bluntly puts it, "a pa.s.sion for a married woman." Neither pa.s.sion gave the lover any lasting satisfaction. Both pa.s.sions were proclaimed in enigmatic paeans to the world.

The two cantos of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" which chronicle the journey are also the record of the beginning of the Byronic pose. The picture of the Childe is the picture of Rene, with a difference--the difference being that, whereas Chateaubriand could never, even in a work of art, depreciate himself, Byron rejoiced in doing so. For the rest, the Childe was "tameless and swift and proud," and worthless, and weary, and disillusioned, and disgusted. He had "spent his days in riot most uncouth": he had "felt the fulness of satiety." It was well that he had not won the woman whom he loved because his kiss "had been polution unto aught so chaste." His boon companions were only "flatterers of the festal hour," and "none did love him, not his lemans dear." Wherefore behold him, on the Lisbon packet, in flight from himself, and seeking his "escape from life."

That is the picture; that, as perhaps it would be better to put it, is the pose. It was to become a sincere and natural posture before the end; but it is impossible, at this early stage, to take it very seriously. Byron would himself have been the first to repudiate the suggestion that such men as Matthews, Hobhouse, and Hodgson were "heartless parasites of present cheer." He had more respect for Matthews than for any man of his acquaintance; Hodgson was to be his most regular correspondent, and Hobhouse the chosen companion of his journey. Moreover, he was only twenty-one--an age at which a young man is eager to see the world and needs no excuse for setting out to do so. His conception of himself as a forlorn exile impelled to wander because the world has betrayed and trifled with him is, in the main, a young man's literary affectation.

An affectation, no doubt, for which certain realities had furnished a hint. The fear of impending pecuniary embarra.s.sment may sometimes have given the sound of revelry a hollow ring. The sarcasm of the _Edinburgh_, though repaid in kind, had certainly left a thin skin sore. The icy politeness of Carlisle had chilled an expansive heart, and given Byron the impression that he was regarded as an intruder in his own domain.

Conjoined with his mother's nagging, it had made something of a three-cornered quarrel from which it was good to escape. He had also found himself more sentimental than he ought to be about Mary Chaworth. Here, at any rate, was something to exaggerate--a foundation of bad temper on which a superstructure of pessimism might be raised. Byron duly raised it, for literary purposes. But he had his high spirits as well as his low spirits; and the farewell lines which he sent from Falmouth to Hodgson suggest anything rather than a heart bowed down with woe.

"_Now at length we're off for Turkey, Lord knows when we shall come back!

Breezes foul and tempests murky May unship us in a crack.

But since life at most a jest is, As philosophers allow, Still to laugh by far the best is, Then laugh on--as I do now.

Laugh at all things, Great and small things, Sick or well, at sea or sh.o.r.e; While we're quaffing, Let's have laughing-- Who the devil asks for more?-- Some good wine! and who would lack it, Ev'n on board the Lisbon packet?_"

Those verses, quite as much as "'Tis done, and shivering in the gale"--and much more than anything in "Childe Harold,"--indicate the frame of mind in which Byron wished his native land good-night. He was travelling with all the paraphernalia of the grand tourist--with more servants than he could afford, and with the hearty, matter-of-fact John Cam Hobhouse for his companion to keep him out of mischief. Whatever he fled from, adventure was what he was looking for--not only the adventures which belong to the exploration of barbarous countries, but also those which are to be encountered in the boudoirs of garrison towns.

He landed at Lisbon and went to Cintra. He rode across Spain to Seville and Cadiz. He proceeded to Gibraltar, to Malta, to Albania, to Athens, and thence to Smyrna and the Dardanelles. He returned to Athens, and spent some time in exploring the interior of Greece. That, in outline, was the itinerary; and there were two adventures of which the letters to Hodgson show him to have been particularly proud. He swam the h.e.l.lespont, in imitation of Leander--a feat of which he boasts, over and over again, in every letter to every correspondent--and he indulged in "a pa.s.sion for a married woman at Malta."

Nor was that his only pa.s.sion. If it was the only pa.s.sion which he felt--which is doubtful--it certainly was not the only pa.s.sion which he inspired. "Lord Byron," says Hobhouse, in his matter-of-fact way, "is, of course, very popular with all the ladies, as he is very handsome, amusing, and generous; but his attentions to all and sundry generally end, as on this occasion, in _rixae femininae_." We shall come to that story in a moment. It is preceded by a story of which the hint is in the lines beginning:

"_Yet are Spain's maids no race of Amazons, But formed for all the witching arts of love_:"

a story of which the memory is in "Don Juan":

"_'Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongue By female lips and eyes--that is I mean, When both the teacher and the taught are young, As was the case, at least, where I have been._"

It happened at Seville, where the travellers, as Hobhouse writes, "made the acquaintance of Admiral Cordova, with whose daughter Byron contrived to fall in love at very short notice."

Admiral Cordova was the Admiral who put up the fight which gained Sir John Jervis the t.i.tle of Earl Saint Vincent. Byron had an introduction to the family, met Senorita Cordova at the theatre, and was invited to escort her home. It is not quite clear from the correspondence whether it was Senorita Cordova or some other lady who quarrelled with him because he would not give her the ring which he wore, as pledge of his affection; nor is it certain whether the ring was, or was not, a memento of Mary Chaworth. Whatever its origin, it was to be yielded up at the hour of the "pa.s.sion for a married woman"; and meanwhile there was another little incident of which Byron speaks, of all places in the world, in a letter to his mother:

"We lodged in the house of two Spanish unmarried ladies.... The eldest honoured your _unworthy_ son with very particular attention, embracing him with great tenderness at parting ... after cutting off a lock of his hair, and presenting him with one of her own, about three feet in length, which I send and beg you will retain till my return.... She offered me a share of her apartment, which my _virtue_ induced me to decline."

That is all, and it is of no importance. The next stage was Gibraltar, and it is there, and on the voyage thence to Malta, that we get our first glimpse of Byron from the pen of an observer who observed, not as a matter of course, but as a matter of curiosity, and had a turn for picturesque description.

John Galt, afterwards famous as a Scotch novelist, was at Gibraltar when Byron arrived there. He had been sent to the Levant by a firm of traders to ascertain how far British goods could be exploited in defiance of the Berlin and Milan Decrees. He was to try hard, though in vain, to introduce such goods into the Greek archipelago, and to smuggle them into Spain.

Half man of action and half dreamer, he went about denouncing priests and kings, and exhorting the British Government to seize all the islands everywhere for the supposed advantage of British commerce. Byron, condescendingly asking Hodgson to review one of his books favourably, describes him, with more or less of justice, as "a c.o.c.k-brained man," and, remembering him at a later date, told Lady Blessington that he "could not awe him into a respect sufficiently profound for my sublime self, either as a peer or an author."

This means, of course, that Galt, though he perceived the pose, did not abase himself in ecstasy before it. Seeing that he was a man of thirty, whereas Byron was only just of age, it was hardly to be expected that he would. Moreover, as a Scotsman, he would naturally take the side of the _Edinburgh_ and maintain that Byron had done nothing to be conceited about. So he observed Byron--and we may be grateful to him for doing so--in a spirit of criticism and detachment.

"His physiognomy," Galt writes, "was prepossessing and intelligent, but ever and anon his brows lowered and gathered; a habit, as I then thought, with a degree of affectation in it, probably first a.s.sumed for picturesque effect and energetic expression, but which I afterwards discovered was undoubtedly the occasional scowl of some unpleasant recollection: it was certainly disagreeable--forbidding--but still the general cast of his features was impressed with elegance and character."

That was the first impression, and the second impression was not more favourable:

"In the little bustle and process of embarking their luggage, his lordship affected, as it seemed to me, more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion; and I then thought of his singular scowl, and suspected him of pride and irascibility. The impression that evening was not agreeable, but it was interesting; and that forehead mark, the frown, was calculated to awaken curiosity and beget conjectures."

Galt, in short, contrasted Byron unfavourably with Hobhouse, whom he found "a cheerful companion" and "altogether an advantageous specimen of a well-educated English gentleman;" but it was Byron who intrigued him. He noticed what Byron ate--"no animal food, but only bread and vegetables"--and he reflected that "he had not acquired his knowledge of the world by always dining so sparingly." He even found his way "by cautious circ.u.mvallations into his intimacy"--though not very far into it, for "his uncertain temper made his favour precarious"; and finally we find him, as if in return for this precarious favour, drawing a picture of Byron which really can be called Byronic. The scene is the ship which conveys them both from Gibraltar to Malta: