The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 17

Macaulay has described, in that picturesque style of his, how, just as Byron "woke up one morning and found himself famous," so the British public woke up one morning and found itself virtuous, with the result that Byron was hooted and hounded out of England. The picture, like all Macaulay's pictures, was overdrawn and over-coloured. The life of the country, and even of the capital, went on pretty much as usual in spite of Byron's dissensions with his wife; and Byron himself kept up appearances fairly well, going to the theatre, entertaining Leigh Hunt, Kinnaird, and other friends at dinner, and corresponding with Murray about the publication of his poems. But, nevertheless, many circ.u.mstances combined to make him feel uncomfortable.

Invitations ceased to be showered upon him; and "gross charges" continued to be whispered in spite of Lady Byron's disavowal. The grounds of the separation not being known, every one was free to conjecture his own solution of the mystery. There seemed little doubt, at any rate, that Byron had forsaken his lawful wife's society for that of the nymphs of Drury Lane; and it was quite certain that he had failed to pay the d.u.c.h.ess of Devons.h.i.+re her rent. The only possible reply to these allegations was that they were no part of the business of the people who made such a fuss about them. The fuss being made, the most reasonable course was to go abroad until the hubbub ceased.

It was no case, as Byron's enemies have said, of running away to avoid an investigation into his conduct--investigation had been challenged, and all the grave charges had been withdrawn. They had, indeed, by a breach of faith, been secretly kept alive; but they had not reappeared in such shape and circ.u.mstances that action could be taken on them; and Byron could not be expected to formulate them himself, merely for the purpose of denying them. His threat, a little later, to appeal to the Courts for an injunction to restrain Lady Byron from taking his daughter out of England as he had heard that she proposed to do, amply showed that he had no fear of any shameful disclosures; but he had Mrs. Leigh's reputation as well as his own to think of; and it was better for her sake as well as his that he should desist from bandying words with her calumniators. Moreover it was not only his calumniators who were making things unpleasant for him. His creditors were also joining in the hue and cry and multiplying his motives for retiring; so he resolved to go, attended by three servants and the Italian physician, Polidori.

Rogers paid him a farewell visit on April 22; and Mr. and Mrs. Kinnaird called the same evening, bringing, as Hobhouse tells us, "a cake and two bottles of champagne." On the following morning the party were up at six and off at half-past nine for Dover; Hobhouse riding with Polidori in Scrope Davies' carriage, and Byron, with Scrope Davies, in his own new travelling coach, modelled on that of Napoleon, containing a bed, a library, and a dinner-service, specially built for him at a cost of 500.

A crowd gathered to watch the departure--a crowd which Hobhouse feared might prove dangerous, but which, in fact, was only inquisitive. The bailiffs arrived ten minutes afterwards and "seized everything," with expressions of regret that they had not been in time to seize the coach as well. Even cage-birds and a squirrel were taken away by them.

This news having been brought by Fletcher, the valet, who followed the party, the coach was hustled on board the packet to be safe--a most wise precaution seeing that there was a day's delay before it started; and Hobhouse continues:

"April 25. Up at eight, breakfasted; all on board except the company.

The captain said he could not wait, and Byron would not get up a moment sooner. Even the serenity of Scrope was disturbed.... The bustle kept Byron in spirits, but he looked affected when the packet glided off.... The dear fellow pulled off his cap and waved it to me.

I gazed until I could not distinguish him any longer. G.o.d bless him for a gallant spirit and a kind one!"

And then:

"Went to London.... Told there was a row expected at the theatre, Douglas K. having received fifteen anonymous letters stating that Mrs.

Mardyn would be hissed on Byron's account."

This gives us, of course, the point of view of the populace--or perhaps one should say of the middle cla.s.ses. They, it is evident, knew nothing of any specially gross or unspeakable charges against Byron, but were satisfied to turn the hose of virtuous indignation on him because, instead of managing Drury Lane in the sole interest of dramatic art, he had availed himself of opportunities and yielded to temptations. And so no doubt he had, though not exactly in such circ.u.mstances as the populace supposed or in connection with the particular lady whose guilt the populace had hastily a.s.sumed.

The popular indictment, indeed, included at least three glaring errors of fact. In the first place the partner of Byron's latest pa.s.sion (if pa.s.sion be the word) was not Mrs. Mardyn, but Miss Jane Clairmont. In the second place his relations with Miss Clairmont had nothing whatever to do with his separation from Lady Byron, because he did not make Miss Clairmont's acquaintance until after Lady Byron had left him. In the third place it was not Byron who pursued Miss Clairmont with his attentions, but Miss Clairmont who threw herself at Byron's head.

Jane Clairmont was, as is well known, sister by affinity to Mary G.o.dwin who was then living with Sh.e.l.ley and was afterwards married to him. She had accompanied Sh.e.l.ley and Mary on their first trip to Switzerland in 1814, and had subsequently stayed with them in various lodgings. In the impending summer she was to go to Switzerland with them again, and Byron was to meet her there, whether accidentally or on purpose. In the early biographies, indeed, the meeting figures as accidental; but the later biographers knew better, and the complete story can be pieced together from a bundle of letters included in the Murray MSS., and the statement which Miss Clairmont herself made in her old age to Mr. William Graham, who travelled all the way to Florence to see her, and, after her death, reported her conversations in the _Nineteenth Century_.

"When I was a very young girl," Miss Clairmont told Mr. Graham, "Byron was the rage." She spoke of the "troubling morbid obsession" which he exercised "over the youth of England of both s.e.xes," and insisted that the girls in particular "made simple idiots of themselves about him"; and then she went on to describe how one girl did so:

"In the days when Byron was manager of Drury Lane Theatre I bethought myself that I would go on to the stage. Our means were very narrow, and it was necessary for me to do something, and this seemed to suit me better than anything else; in any case it was the only form of occupation congenial to my girlish love of glitter and excitement....

I called, then, on Byron in his capacity of manager, and he promised to do what he could to help me as regards the stage. The result you know. I am too old now to play with any mock repentance. I was young, and vain, and poor. He was famous beyond all precedent.... His beauty was as haunting as his fame, and he was all-powerful in the direction in which my ambition turned. It seems to me almost needless to say that the attentions of a man like this, with all London at his feet, very quickly completely turned the head of a girl in my position; and when you recollect that I was brought up to consider marriage not only as a useless but as an absolutely sinful custom, that only bigotry made necessary, you will scarcely wonder at the results, which you know."

That is the story as Miss Clairmont remembered it, or as she wished posterity to believe it. She also seems to have been fully persuaded in her own mind that Sh.e.l.ley had recommended her to apply to Byron, and that it was about her that Byron and Lady Byron fell out; but the letters published by Mr. Murray show all this to be a tissue of absurd inexact.i.tudes. What actually happened was that Miss Clairmont wrote to Byron under the pseudonym of "E Trefusis," beginning "An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you," and proceeding to say: "It may seem a strange a.s.sertion, but it is not the less true that I place my happiness in your hands."

There is no reference there, it will be remarked, to any desire on Miss Clairmont's part to adopt the theatrical profession. The few references to such a desire which do occur later in the correspondence are of such a nature as to show that Miss Clairmont did not entertain it seriously, consisting mainly of objections to Byron's proposal that she should discuss the matter with Mr. Kinnaird instead of him. Miss Clairmont, in short, made it abundantly clear that she was in love, not with the theatre, but with Byron; and the more evasive Byron showed himself, the more ardently and impulsively did she advance. We gather from her letters, indeed, that most of those letters were left unanswered, that Byron very frequently was "not at home" to her, and that, when she was at last admitted, she did not find him alone.

Most women would have been discouraged by such a series of repulses; but Miss Clairmont was not. In response to a communication in which Byron had begged her to "write short," she wrote: "I do not expect you to love me; I am not worthy of your love." But she begged him, if he could not love, at least to let himself be loved--to suffer her to demonstrate that she, on her part, could "love gently and with affection"; and thus she paved the way to a practical proposal:

"Have you, then," (she asked) "any objection to the following plan? On Thursday Evening we may go out of town together by some stage of mail about the distance of ten or twelve miles. There we shall be free and unknown; we can return early the following morning. I have arranged everything here so that the slightest suspicion may not be excited.

Pray do so with your people."

Even to that appeal Byron seems to have turned a deaf ear. One infers as much from the fact that other appeals followed it: "Do not delay our meeting after Sat.u.r.day--I cannot endure the suspense," &c. After that, however, and apparently quite soon after it, followed the capitulation; and for the sequel we will turn again to Mr. Graham's report of Miss Clairmont's confessions:

"He was making his final arrangements for leaving England, when I told him of the project the Sh.e.l.leys and I had formed of the journey to Geneva. He at once suggested that we should all meet at Geneva, and delightedly fell in with my proposal to accompany me one day when I had arranged to visit the Sh.e.l.leys at Marlow,[10] where they were then stopping, and arrange matters. We started early one morning, and we arrived at Marlow about the mid-day dinner-hour.... Byron refreshed himself with a huge mug of beer.... A few minutes afterwards in came Sh.e.l.ley and Mary. It was such a merry party that we made at lunch in the inn parlour: Byron, despite his misfortunes, was in the spirits of a boy at leaving England, and Sh.e.l.ley was overjoyed at meeting his idolised poet, who had actually come all the way from London to see him."

Such are the facts, so far as they are ascertainable, concerning the origin of this curious _liaison_. It is a story which begins, and goes on for some time, though it does not conclude, like the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife; and Miss Clairmont recalls how exultantly she proclaimed her triumph. "Percy! Mary! What do you think? The great Lord Byron loves me!" she exclaimed, bursting in upon her friends; and she adds that Sh.e.l.ley regarded the attachment as right and natural and proper, and a proof that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

He may have done so, for he was a dreamer, cradled in illusions, unfettered by codes, always ready to look upon life as a fairy-tale that was turning out to be true. Whether he did so or not, it seems at any rate pretty clear that he was in Miss Clairmont's confidence, knew for what reason Byron wished to meet him at Geneva, and acquiesced in the proposal.

But it is equally certain that he was not in Byron's confidence, and had no suspicion of the spirit in which Byron had entered into the intrigue.

For Byron was not in love with Miss Clairmont, and never had been in love with her, and never would be. In so far as he loved at all, he still loved Mary Chaworth, to whom his heart always returned at every crisis of unhappiness. There was no question of any renewal of the old pa.s.sionate relations; but she consented to see him once more before he left England.

"When we two parted in silence and tears" seems to belong to this moment of his life--the moment at which Miss Clairmont first persuaded herself, and then persuaded Sh.e.l.ley, that she was enthroned for ever in the author's heart. That, still, was his one real sentimental hold on life.

Nothing else mattered; and the coquetries and audacities of this child of seventeen mattered less than most things.

But a man must live; a man must divert himself. Most especially must a man do so when, as Byron expressed it, his household G.o.ds lay s.h.i.+vered around him--when his home was broken up and his child was taken away--when rumours as intangible as abominable were afloat to his dishonour--when the society of which he had been the bright particular star was turning its back on him. Even the love, or what pa.s.sed for such, of a stage-struck girl of seventeen, could be welcome in such a case, and it would not be difficult to give something which could pa.s.s for love in return for it.

That was what happened--and that was all that happened. Miss Clairmont told Mr. Graham, in so many words, that she never loved Byron, but was only "dazzled" by him. It is written in Byron's letters--from which there shall be quotations in due course--and it is amply demonstrated by his conduct, that he never loved Miss Clairmont, but only accepted favours which she pressed upon him, and suffered her to help him to live at a time when life was difficult.

The credit of having done that for him, however, should be freely given to her. The appointment which she made with him at Geneva touched his flight from England with romance. His reception by the generality of English residents on the Continent was very, very doubtful. It would have been painful to him to travel across Europe, defying opinion in solitude; but he and Sh.e.l.ley and Mary G.o.dwin and Jane Clairmont could defy it in company and laugh; and it was with this confident a.s.surance in his mind that, as Hobhouse writes, "the dear fellow pulled off his cap and waved it" when the Ostend packet glided out of Dover harbour.

CHAPTER XXIII

LIFE AT GENEVA--THE AFFAIR WITH JANE CLAIRMONT

"From Brussels," as Moore magniloquently puts it, "the n.o.ble traveller pursued his course along the Rhine." At Geneva he joined Sh.e.l.ley and his party who had taken the shorter route across France; and it would seem that he felt the need of all the moral support which their companions.h.i.+p could give him.

Concerning the nature of his reception in Switzerland, indeed, there is a good deal of conflicting testimony; but the balance of the evidence points to its having been unfavourable. His own statement is that he "retired entirely from society," with the exception of "some occasional intercourse with Coppet at the wish of Madame de Stael"; but there are indications that the retirement was not voluntary, and that, even at Coppet, his welcome was something less than enthusiastic. On the former point we may quote the letters of Lady Westmorland, just published by Lady Rose Weigall:

"Lord Byron has been very coldly received here both by the natives and by the English. No one visited him, though there is much curiosity about him. He has been twice to Coppet."

Only twice, be it observed; and on one of the two occasions, one of Madame de Stael's guests, Mrs. Hervey the novelist--a mature woman novelist of sixty-five virtuous summers--fainted, according to one account, and "nearly fainted," according to another, at the sudden appearance of the Man of Sin, though, when she came to, she was ashamed of herself, and conversed with him. Probably he called again; and not all the Coppet house-party shared Mrs. Hervey's consternation at his visits. Lady Westmorland did not for one, but commented on his "sweetness and sadness, melancholy and depression," adding: "If he was all that he tries to seem now he would really be very fascinating." On the other hand, however, Madame de Stael's son-in-law, the Duc de Broglie, summed him up unkindly and almost scornfully, declaring him "a boastful pretender in the matter of vice," protesting that "his talk was heavy and tiresome," and that "he did not manoeuvre his lame legs with the same ease and nonchalance as M.

de Talleyrand," and concluding:

"Madame de Stael, who helped all her friends to make the best of themselves, did what she could to make him cut a dignified figure without success; and when the first moment of curiosity had pa.s.sed, his society ceased to attract, and no one was glad to see him."

Which clearly indicates, in spite of the offensive priggishness of the witness, that the tide of hostile opinion was, indeed, flowing too strongly for even Madame de Stael to stem it.

She did her best, however; for she was no prude, but a woman with a great heart, who had herself sought happiness in marriage, and failed to find it there, and had openly done things for which, if she had been an Englishwoman, Mrs. Grundy, instead of lionising, would have turned and rent her. She went further, and proposed to write to Lady Byron and try to arrange terms of peace; and Byron thanked her, and let her do so.

Not, of course, that he had the least desire to return to Lady Byron's society. He was presently to thunder at her as his "moral Clytemnestra"; and Cordy Jeaffreson's suggestion that his irrepressible rhetoric was "only the superficial ferment covering the depths of his affection for her," and that "the woman at whom he railed so insanely was the woman who shared with his child the last tender emotions of his unruly heart" is as absurd a suggestion as ever a biographer put forth. Hobhouse has told us that Byron never was in love with Lady Byron; and, after what we have seen of Lady Byron's conduct and correspondence, it is hard to believe that any man would have been in love with her after living with her for a twelvemonth. Moreover, we know from "The Dream" where Byron's heart was at this time, as always, and we know from his own, as well as from Miss Clairmont's confessions, with how little regard for Lady Byron's feelings he was just then diverting himself in the Genevan suburbs; and we may fairly conclude that what he desired was not to return to her, but merely to be set right with the world by a nominal reconciliation, which would still leave him free to live apart from her.

He did not get what he wanted, and Lady Byron was quite within her rights in withholding it. He had allowed himself to be manoeuvred into a false position, and had no claim upon her to help him to manoeuvre himself out of it; while she, on her part, was much too high principled to strain a point in favour of a returning prodigal--especially if, as is probable, information had reached her as to his proceedings in his exile. So she rejected his overtures in that cold, judicial, high-minded way of hers; and Byron did not repeat them, but made it clear that he had meant nothing by them, seeing that--

His reason is in "The Dream" which he wrote in July 1816. It was another of his bursts of candour, telling the world (and Lady Byron) yet again how he loved Mary Chaworth, and always had loved her, and always would, and how, even on his wedding day, the memory of her had come between him and his bride:

"_A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.

The Wanderer was returned--I saw him stand Before an Altar--with a gentle bride; Her face was fair, but was not that which made The Starlight of his boyhood:--as he stood Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock That in the antique Oratory shook His bosom in its solitude: and then-- As in that hour--a moment o'er his face The tablet of unutterable thoughts Was traced,--and then it faded as it came, And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke The fitting vows, but heard not his own words, And all things reeled around him; he could see Not that which was, nor that which should have been-- But the old mansion and the accustomed hall, And the remembered chambers, and the place, The day, the hour, the suns.h.i.+ne, and the shade, All things pertaining to that place and hour And her who was his destiny, came back And thrust themselves between him and the light._"

That was his Parthian shaft; and Cordy Jeaffreson's view of "The Dream" as "a lovely and elaborate falsehood, written to persuade all mankind that he never loved the woman whose heart he was yearning to recover" is much too preposterous to be admitted. Mary Chaworth's husband knew that it was no figment. He recognised the reference to a certain "peculiar diadem of trees" on his estate, and gave orders that those trees should be cut down.

Lady Byron had no such remedy open to her; but she knew what was meant and wrapped herself up in her virtue; while Byron, on his part, turned to the diversions which were to help him to live in the face of the world's contumely.

Alike for him and for Sh.e.l.ley and the two ladies who attended him there was a good deal of that contumely as long as they remained in the Hotel d'Angleterre; and it may almost be said that they invited it by making themselves conspicuous. In Sh.e.l.ley's relations with Miss G.o.dwin and Miss Clairmont there was at least the appearance of promiscuity--an appearance on which it did not take gossip long to base positive a.s.severation.[11]

Byron, already an object of curiosity on account of his supposed misdeeds, had made himself conspicuous by his coach, and his retinue, and his manner of travelling _en seigneur_. So that the other boarders stared when he arrived, and stared still more when they saw him fraternising with his brother poet and the ladies, not only wondering what the eccentric party would be up to next, but keeping close watch on their comings and goings, following them to the lake-side when they went out boating, awaiting them on the lake-side when they landed on their return, lining up to inspect them as often as carriages were brought to the door to take them for a drive.

They did not like it, and moved into villas on the other side of the Rhone, only to discover that the Hotel d'Angleterre overlooked them, and that its obliging landlord had set up a large telescope so that his visitors might survey their proceedings the more commodiously. This obliged them to move again--Byron to the Villa Diodati, and Sh.e.l.ley to the Maison Chapuis or Campagne Mont Allegre--and there at last they were able, as the party of the Libertins in the Geneva of the Reformation put it, to "live as they chose without reference to the preachers."