The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 13

It was on the last day of September, 1814, that Hobhouse heard of the engagement. On the first day of October he wrote his congratulations, and on October 19, he was invited to act as groomsman. Some time in the same month Byron paid his first visit to the Milbankes at Seaham. Thence he went to Cambridge to vote in favour of the candidature of his friend Dr.

Clarke's candidature for the Professors.h.i.+p of Anatomy, and was applauded by the undergraduates in the Senate House. "This distinction," Hobhouse says, "to a literary character had never before been paid except in the instance of Archdeacon Paley"--a curious partner in the poet's glory. A month later Byron and Hobhouse set out together again for Seaham on what Hobhouse calls "his matrimonial scheme."

This was the occasion on which Byron confided to Hobhouse that he was not in love. A note in Hobhouse's Diary to the effect that "never was lover in less haste" affords contemporary corroboration of the fact; and the Diary continues to be picturesque, giving us Hobhouse's critical, but not altogether unfavourable, impression of Miss Milbanke and her family:

"Miss Milbanke is rather dowdy-looking, and wears a long and high dress, though she has excellent feet and ankles.... The lower part of her face is bad, the upper, expressive but not handsome, yet she gains by inspection.

"She heard Byron coming out of his room, ran to meet him, threw her arms round his neck, and burst into tears. She did this _not before us_.... Lady Milbanke was so much agitated that she had gone to her room ... our delay the cause.... Indeed I looked foolish in finding out an excuse for our want of expedition....

"Miss Milbanke, before us, was silent and modest, but very sensible and quiet, and inspiring an interest which it is easy to mistake for love. With me she was frank and open, without little airs and affectations....

"Of my friend she seemed dotingly fond, gazing with delight on his bold and animated face ... this regulated, however, by the most entire decorum.

"Old Sir Ralph Milbanke is an honest, red-faced spirit, a little prosy, but by no means devoid of humour.... My lady, who has been a dasher in her day, and has ridden the grey mare, is pettish and tiresome, but clever."

There is more; but that is the essence. The impression which disengages itself is one of a well-bred but rather narrow provincialism. The Milbankes are not exactly great people, but the country cousins of great people--very decidedly their country cousins. The men are not quite men of the world; the women are very far from being women of the world--which is pretty much what one would expect in an age in which the country was so much more remote from the town than it is at present. Miss Milbanke, in particular, seems to strike the exact note of provincial correct.i.tude alike in her display of the emotion proper to the occasion and in her concealment of it. Her correct.i.tude was, no doubt, made still more correct by an unemotional disposition.

During the ceremony, which took place in her mother's drawing-room, she was very self-possessed--"firm as a rock," is Hobhouse's description of her demeanour. Things were happening as she had meant them to happen--one may almost say as she had contrived that they should happen. "I felt,"

says Hobhouse, "as if I had buried a friend"; but he nevertheless paid the compliments which were due, and Miss Milbanke, now Lady Byron, said just the right thing in reply to them:

"At a little before twelve," Hobhouse notes, "I handed Lady Byron downstairs and into her carriage. When I wished her many years of happiness, she said, 'If I am not happy it will be my own fault.'"

Nothing could have been more proper than that; for that is just how things happen when the dreams come true. Such a saying sometimes is, and always should be, the prelude to "they lived happily together ever afterwards"; and one can picture Lady Byron telling herself that things were happening, and would continue to happen, just as in a story-book.

Only there are two kinds of story-books. There are the story-books which are written for girls--and the others. This story was to be one of the others. The husband's past and the wife's illusions were almost bound to make it so--the more certainly because both husband and wife suffered from the defects of their qualities; and the defects of Lady Byron's qualities in particular were such as not only to make her helpless in the _role_ which developments were to a.s.sign to her, but also to compel her to comport herself with something worse than a lack of dignity.

CHAPTER XVII

INCOMPATIBILITY OF TEMPER

A thick accretion of legend has gathered round Byron's life alike as an engaged and as a married man. Every biographer, whether friendly or hostile, has added fresh anecdotes to the heap. Almost all the stories are coloured by prejudice. Even when they seem to be derived from the same source, they are often mutually contradictory; so that it is, as a rule, a hopeless task to try to distinguish between fact and fiction, or do more than disengage a general impression of discordant temperaments progressing from incompatibility to open war.

Even the period of the engagement is reported not to have been of unclouded happiness. A son of Sir Ralph Milbanke's Steward at Seaham has furnished recollections to that effect. "While Byron was at Seaham," says this witness, "he spent most of his time pistol-shooting in the plantation"--a strangely moody occupation for an affianced man; and he adds that, on the wedding morning, when all was prepared for the ceremony, "Byron had to be sought for in the grounds where he was walking in his usual surly mood." Mrs. Beecher Stowe tells us that Miss Milbanke, observing that her lover did not rejoice sufficiently in his good fortune, offered to release him from his promise--whereupon he "fainted entirely away," and so convinced her, for the moment, of the sincerity of his affection.

Similar stories, equally well attested and equally unconvincing, cl.u.s.ter round the departure of the married couple for Halnaby where they spent their honeymoon. Lady Byron told Lady Anne Barnard that the carriage had no sooner driven away from the door of the mansion than her husband turned upon her with "a malignant sneer" and derided her for cheris.h.i.+ng the "wild hope" of "reforming him," saying: "Many are the tears you will have to shed ere that plan is accomplished. It is enough for me that you are my wife for me to hate you." The Steward's son, giving an alternative version of the story, declares that "insulting words" were spoken before leaving the park--"after which he appeared to sit in moody silence, reading a book for the rest of the journey." Byron's own account of the incident, as given to Medwin, was as follows:

"I was surprised at the arrangements for the journey, and somewhat out of humour to find a lady's maid stuck between me and my bride. It was rather too early to a.s.sume the husband; so I was forced to submit, but it was not with a very good grace. Put yourself in a similar situation, and tell me if I had not some reason to be in the sulks."

These three stories, it is clear, cannot all be true; and none of them can either be proved or disproved, though the last was contradicted by Hobhouse who said that he had inspected the carriage and found no maid in it. Similarly with the stories which follow. According to the Steward's son, Sir Ralph Milbanke's tenants a.s.sembled to cheer Byron on his arrival at Halnaby--but "of these he took not the slightest notice, but jumped out of the carriage and walked away, leaving his bride to alight by herself."

There is also a story told by another authority, who cannot, however, have been an eye-witness, to the effect that Byron, awaking from his slumbers on his nuptial night, exclaimed, in his surprise at his strange surroundings, that he supposed he was in h.e.l.l.

All these stories, of course, are exceedingly shocking, if true; but there are no means of ascertaining whether they are true. Nothing can be positively affirmed except that the beginnings were inauspicious, and must have seemed the more inauspicious to Lady Byron because of that fond belief of hers, that her rejection of Byron in 1812 had caused him two years' mental agony, now at last to be happily removed by her condescending tenderness. A vast amount of tact--a vast amount of give-and-take--would have been needed to make a success of a marriage concluded under that misapprehension; and Lord and Lady Byron were both of an age at which tact is, as a rule, a virtue only known by name.

Of Byron's tact we have an example in the famous dialogue: "Do I interrupt you, Byron?"... "d.a.m.nably." Of Lady Byron's tact we shall discover an instance at the crisis of her married life. In the meantime we must note that they made up their first quarrel--which may very well have been less serious at the time than it appeared to be in retrospect--and, at any rate, kept up appearances sufficiently well to deceive their closest friends. From Halnaby they returned to Seaham, where nothing happened except that Byron discovered his father-in-law to be a bore, addicted to dreary political monologuising over wine and walnuts. They next visited Mrs. Leigh at Six Mile Bottom, and then they proceeded to 13 Piccadilly Terrace--that unluckily numbered house, hired from the d.u.c.h.ess of Devons.h.i.+re, in which many catastrophes were to occur, and a distress was presently to be levied for non-payment of the rent.

Mrs. Leigh, it will be observed, was pleasantly surprised to observe that the marriage seemed to be turning out well. She had the more reason to be surprised because she shared none of Lady Byron's illusions as to the part which she had played, for the past two years, in Byron's emotional and imaginative life. She was in her brother's confidence, and knew all about Lady Caroline Lamb, all about Lady Oxford, and--more particularly--all about Mary Chaworth. Consequently she had had her apprehensions, which she confided to Byron's friend Hodgson. A few extracts from her letters to Hodgson will bring this point out, and show us how the marriage looked from her point of view. On February 15, 1815, she wrote:

"It appears to me that Lady Byron _sets about_ making him happy in quite the right way. It is true I judge at a distance, and we generally _hope_ as we _wish_; but I a.s.sure you I don't conclude hastily on this subject, and will own to you, what I would not scarcely to any other person, that I had _many fears_ and much anxiety _founded upon many causes and circ.u.mstances_ of which I cannot _write_. Thank G.o.d! that they do not appear likely to be realised."

On March 18, 1815: "Byron is looking remarkably well, and of Lady B. I hardly know how to write, for I have a sad trick of being struck dumb when I am most happy and pleased. The expectations I had formed could not be _exceeded_, but at least they are fully answered.

"I think I never saw or heard of a more perfect being in mortal mould than she appears to be, and scarcely dared flatter myself such a one would fall to the lot of my dear B. He seems quite sensible of her value."

On March 31, 1815: "Byron and Lady B. left me on Tuesday for London.... The more I see of her the more I love and esteem her, and feel how grateful I am, and ought to be, for the blessing of such a wife for my dear, darling Byron."

On September 4, 1815: "My brother has just left me, having been here since last Wednesday, when he arrived very unexpectedly. I never saw him _so_ well, and he is in the best spirits."

This is evidence not extorted by questions but spontaneously volunteered.

If it proves nothing else, at least it proves that appearances were kept up, and that Augusta was deceived. But appearances, none the less, gave a false impression; and there were other friends, more keen sighted than Augusta, who saw through them. Hobhouse, in particular, did so. He too had had his anxieties, and had been watching; and the notes in his Diary--some of them contemporaneous with, but others subsequent to, Augusta's letters--are not unlike the rumblings of a coming thunderstorm.

On March 25, 1815: "I went to bed out of spirits from indeterminate but chiefly low apprehensions about Byron."

On April 1, 1815: "He advises me 'not to marry,' though he has the best of wives."

On April 2, 1815: "Lady Oxford walks about Naples with Byron's picture on her girdle in front."

On July 31, 1815: "Byron is not more happy than before marriage. D.

Kinnaird is also melancholy. This is the state of man."

On August 4, 1815: "Lord Byron tells me he and she have begun a little snubbing on money matters. 'Marry not,' says he."

On August 8, 1815: "Dined with Byron, &c. All grumbled at life."

On November 25, 1815: "Called on Byron. In that quarter things do not go well. Strong advice against marriage. Talking of going abroad."

There is nothing specific there; and when we set out to look for something specific, we only run up against gossip of doubtful authenticity. "Do I interrupt you?"... "d.a.m.nably," may be a.s.sumed to be authentic since Byron himself has admitted the repartee. It was rude and reprehensible, though it was probably provoked. The charges which young Harness, now in Holy Orders, heard preferred by some of Lady Byron's friends are rightly described by him as "nonsensical"; but we may as well have them before us in order to judge of the propriety of the epithet:

"The poor lady had never had a comfortable meal since their marriage.

Her husband had no fixed hour for breakfast, and was always too late for dinner.

"At his express desire she had invited two elderly ladies to meet them in her opera-box. Nothing could be more courteous than his manner to them while they remained; but no sooner had they gone than he began to annoy his wife by venting his ill-humour, in a strain of bitterest satire, against the dress and manners of her friends."

"Poor Lady Byron was afraid of her life. Her husband slept with loaded pistols by his bed-side, and a dagger under his pillow."

"Nonsensical" is decidedly the word for these allegations. The incidents, even if true, could only be symptoms, not causes, of the disagreement.

Harness, perceiving that, seeks the true explanation of the estrangement in the disposition of Lady Byron, whom he had known as a girl. She "gave one the idea of being self-willed and self-opinionated." She "carried no cheerfulness along with her." The majority of her acquaintances "looked upon her as a reserved and frigid sort of being whom one would rather cross the room to avoid than be brought into conversation with unnecessarily." A common acquaintance remarked to Harness: "If Lady Byron has a heart, it is deeper seated and harder to get at than anybody else's heart whom I have ever known."

Et cetera. So far as we can judge Lady Byron by the letters in which she subsequently announced, without formulating, her grievances, the verdict seems a just one. She might be pictured, in the words of the author of "Ionica" as one who

"_Smiles at all that's coa.r.s.e and rash, Yet wins the trophies of the fight, Unscathed in honour's wreck and crash, Heartless, yet always in the right._"

Or rather one begins so to picture her--and is even justified in so picturing her at the beginning--though presently, when one sees how unfairly she fought in the great fight which ensued, one changes one's mind about her, withdraws such sympathy as one has allowed to go out to her, and thinks of her husband when one comes to the final couplet of the poem:

"_And I, dear pa.s.sionate Teucer, dare Go through the homeless world with you._"

Yet Lady Byron had her grievances, and though they were quite different from those which Harness has reported, they were not light ones. Two grievances in particular must have been very trying to the temper of a young bride who had been an only and spoiled child. In the first place, and almost at once, there was trouble about money. In the second place, and very soon, there was trouble about "the women of the theatre."