The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 8

Chiefly he thought of the ghost which now revisited his secret orchard, telling himself that it was not the ghost but the real woman which should have been there. With Mary Chaworth alone he had known the sensation that nothing else mattered while he and she were together. Now that so many deaths had made a solitude in his heart he sorely needed the renewal of that feeling. She could have vouchsafed it to him; she both could and should. Why then, was she not at Annesley, waiting for him, granting more stolen interviews, proving that she still cared, affording him that escape from life to ecstasy?

That was the drift of Byron's thoughts at the time when Hodgson was trying to direct his attention to Paley's "Evidences." He saw, as youth is apt to do, more possibilities of comfort in love than in theology--a fact which is the less to be wondered at seeing that the theology in which he had been brought up was of the uncomfortable Calvinistic kind; and though he was the victim of a mood rather than of a pa.s.sion--for pa.s.sion needed the stimulus of sight and touch--the mood had to be expressed, and perhaps worked off, in verse. It burst into "Childe Harold":

"_Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!

Whom Youth and Youth's affections bound to me; Who did for me what none beside have done, Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee.

What is my Being! thou has ceased to be!

Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home, Who mourns o'er hours which we no more shall see-- Would they had never been, or were to come!

Would he had ne'er returned to find fresh cause to roam._

"_Oh, ever loving, lovely, and beloved!

How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past.

And clings to thoughts now better far removed!

But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last.

All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death, thou hast; The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend, Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast, And grief with grief continuing still to blend, Hath s.n.a.t.c.hed the little joy that Life hath yet to lend._"

These stanzas, with three others, were sent to Dallas after "Childe Harold" was in the press, together with a letter which must have mystified him though, as a "poor relation," he would not well ask impertinent questions; a letter to the effect that Byron has "supped full of horrors"

and "become callous" and "has not a tear left." The "Thyrza" sequence of poems belongs to the same period--almost to the same day. They have puzzled many generations of editors and commentators because "Thyrza" is addressed in them as one who is dead, and because, though Byron spoke of Thyrza to his friends as a real person and showed a lock of her hair, no trace of any woman answering to her description can be discovered in any chronicle of his life.

The explanation is that Thyrza was not really dead, though Byron chose so to write of her. Thyrza was Mary Chaworth who was dead to Byron in the sense that she had pa.s.sed out of his life, as he had every reason to think (though he thought wrongly) for ever. The poems expressed, according to Moore, "the essence, the abstract spirit, as it were, of many griefs,"

with which was mingled the memory of her who "though living was for him as much lost as" any of the dead friends for whom he mourned. They expressed, in fact, his despair at finding the secret orchard tenanted only by a ghost; and if we read the poems by the light of that clue, we can get a clear meaning out of every line.

They are too long to be quoted. Readers must refer to them and judge. The note is the note of bitter despair, working up, at the end, into the note of recklessness. The contrast is there--that contrast as old as the world--between the things that are and the things that might, and should, have been; and then there follows the declaration that, as things are what they are, and as their consequences will be what they will be, there is nothing for it but to plunge into pleasure, albeit with the full knowledge that pleasure cannot please:

"_One struggle more, and I am free From pangs that rend my heart in twain; One last long sigh to Love and thee, Then back to busy life again.

It suits me well to mingle now With things that never pleased before: Though every joy is fled below, What future grief can touch me more?_

"_Then bring me wine, the banquet bring; Man was not formed to live alone: I'll be that light unmeaning thing That smiles with all, and weeps with none.

It was not thus in days more dear, It never would have been, but thou Hast fled, and left me lonely here; Thou'rt nothing,--all are nothing now._"

The so-called Byronic pose challenges us in that pa.s.sage; but it is by no means as a pose that it must be dismissed. The men who seem to pose are very often just the men who have the courage--or the bravado, if any one prefers the word--to be sincere; and Byron, if he is to be rightly understood, must be thought of as the most sincere man who ever struck an att.i.tude. That was the secret of his strength. Pose was for him just what Aristotle, as interpreted by Professor Bywater, says that the spectacle of tragedy is to the ma.s.s of the spectators. It purged him, for the time being, of his emotions by indulging them. The pose, having done its work, ceased until the emotions recurred, and then he posed again. Hence the many differences of opinion among his friends as to whether he posed or not.

Just now he was posing, in all sincerity, not only to himself but to Hodgson. At one time he told Hodgson that, as soon as he had set his affairs in order, he should "leave England for ever." At another he sent him an "Epistle to a Friend in Answer to some Lines exhorting the Author to be cheerful and to 'banish Care.'" Hodgson sent them to Moore for publication in his Life, requesting that the concluding lines should not be printed; but Moore disregarded the request. The Epistle ended thus:

"_But let this pa.s.s--I'll whine no more.

Nor seek again an Eastern sh.o.r.e; The world befits a busy brain,-- I'll hie me to its haunts again.

But if, in some succeeding year, When Britain's "May is in the sere,"

Thou hear'st of one, whose deepening crimes Suit with the sablest of the times, Of one, whom love nor pity sways, Nor hope of fame, nor good men's praise; One, who in stern Ambition's pride, Perchance not blood shall turn aside: One ranked in some recording page With the worst anarchs of the age, Him wilt thou_ know,--_and_ knowing _pause, Nor with the effect forget the cause._"

The allusion here, as Hodgson's biographer discerns, is to "his early disappointment in love as the source of all his subsequent sorrow."

Hodgson's own comment, scrawled in the margin of the ma.n.u.script is: "N.B.--The poor dear soul meant nothing of all this."

He meant it--and yet he did not mean it. It was the emphasised and exaggerated expression of what he meant--momentarily emphasised for the purpose, whether conscious or unconscious, of relieving himself from the black mood which had descended on him. The relief was gained--though it was not to be permanent. He did not "leave England for ever"--not yet--but hied him to the haunts of the world as he had promised. He plunged into pleasure--and found pleasure more pleasant than he had imagined that it could be.

That was inevitable. He was only twenty-four, and he was famous; and "to be famous when one is young--that is the dream of the G.o.ds." Moreover, he was achieving just that sort of fame which is attended by the most intoxicating joy. The fame of the man of science is nothing--the world interests itself in his discovery but not in him. The fame of a statesman is hardly sweeter--it is only won by fighting and working hard and making jealous enemies. The fame of a poet--a poet who is also _the_ poet--brings instantaneously the applause of men and the wonder and homage of women.

They do not separate the man from his work, but insist on a.s.sociating him with it. Beautiful women as well as blue-stockings--and with less critical discrimination than blue-stockings--prostrate and abase themselves before him, competing for the suns.h.i.+ne of his smiles, believing, or affecting to believe, that his and theirs are kindred souls.

So it befell Byron. Born in exile, he had at last returned from exile in a blaze of triumph. All the doors of all the best houses were thrown open to him with a blare of trumpets. He entered them, not as a parvenu, like Moore the Irish grocer's son, but as the one man without whose presence the festival would have been incomplete. No man, if one might judge by externals, had ever a better chance of making a splendid and n.o.ble pageant of his life. So far as an observer could judge--so far probably as he himself knew--the ghosts of the past were laid, and its memories in a fair way of being effaced. If the past had not come back to him, he might have forgotten it. The tragedy of his life was that it did come back--that he did meet Mary Chaworth again and rediscover the secret orchard which, while she was absent from it, was a howling wilderness, overgrown with weeds.

But not quite immediately. There were certain other things which had to happen first.

CHAPTER XI

LADY CAROLINE LAMB

The record of Byron's social triumphs may be outlined in a few sentences.

Without quite losing sight of such old friends as Hodgson and Harness, he moved, with the air of a social conqueror in three new sets, which may be regarded as distinct, though there were points at which they touched each other. Among men of letters his chief friends were Samuel Rogers, the banker poet, then a man verging on fifty, whose superlative dinner we have seen him refusing to eat, and Thomas Moore, who had made his acquaintance by demanding satisfaction for an alleged affront in "English Bards," which Byron had explained away. At the same time he "got on very well," as he tells us, with Beau Brummell and the other dandies, being one of the three men of letters who were admitted to Watiers, and was lionised in the society which we should nowadays describe as "smart."

It has been written that the roadway opposite to his apartments was blocked by liveried footmen conveying perfumed notes. That, we may take it, is a picturesque exaggeration; but, no doubt, he received more invitations than the laws of time and s.p.a.ce allowed him to accept--most of them, though by no means all of them, to the great Whig houses. Lady Westmorland, Lady Jersey, Lady Holland, and Lady Melbourne were the most fas.h.i.+onable of the hostesses who competed for the privilege of his company; and Lady Melbourne had a daughter-in-law--Lady Caroline Lamb. She also had a niece--Miss Anna Isabella Milbanke; but it is of Lady Caroline Lamb that we must speak first.

Lady Caroline was three years older than Byron. She was the daughter of the third Earl of Bessborough, and the wife of William Lamb, who, as Lord Melbourne, afterwards became Prime Minister of England. It was a matter of opinion whether she was beautiful; it was also a matter of opinion whether she was sane--doctors consulted on that branch of the subject had returned doubtful, non-committal answers. She was not exactly mad, they said, but she was of a temperament allied to madness. She must not be pressed to study, but must be allowed to run wild and do as she liked.

She had run wild, for years, reading the works of Burns, which are not written for the young, and galloping about parks on bare-backed steeds, imagining the world about her instead of realising it, and, of course, imagining it wrong. It is on record that she believed that bread-and-b.u.t.ter was a natural product and that horses were fed on beef; also that she divided the community into two cla.s.ses--dukes and beggars--and supposed that the former would always, by some law of nature, remain wealthy, whatever they did with their money. Her charm--and she could be very charming when she liked--was that of a high-spirited, irresponsible, wilful, wayward child. She was, in short, the kind of girl whom those who loved her best would describe, in the vernacular, as "a handful."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Lady Caroline Lamb._]

"Of all the Devons.h.i.+re House girls," William Lamb had said, "that is the one for me." That was when she was thirteen; and six years later he was still of the same opinion. He was confirmed in it when she refused his offer of marriage, proposing instead to run away with him in boy's clothes and act as his secretary. He accepted neither his dismissal nor her alternative suggestion, but persevered in his suit until he was accepted.

The next thing that happened was that Lady Caroline broke into railing accusations against the bishop who performed the marriage rites, tore her wedding dress to tatters, and had to be carried to her carriage in a fainting fit. It was not a very auspicious commencement of married life, but one which prepares us for the general reflections on marriage found in her husband's common-place book, recently edited by Mr. Lloyd Sanders:

"The general reason against marriage is that two minds, however congenial they may be, or however submissive the one may be to the other, can never act like one. It is the nature of human beings that no man can be free or independent...."

"... By marriage you place yourself on the defensive instead of the offensive in society...."

"Every man will find his own private affairs more difficult to control than any public affairs on which he may be engaged...."

William Lamb's experience of married life was to be, as it were, an object lesson on those texts. At one moment Lady Caroline was to overwhelm him with doting affection; at the next to make him ridiculous. Sometimes the two moods followed each other as quickly as the thunder follows the lightning, as in the case of a scene of which the Kembles were involuntary witnesses when staying in the same hotel with the Lambs in Paris.

Husband and wife had quarrelled in their presence, and had then withdrawn to their apartment which faced the rooms which the Kembles occupied. The lamps were lighted, and the blinds were not drawn, so that the Kembles looked across the courtyard and saw what happened. William Lamb was in his arm-chair. Lady Caroline first sat on his knee, and then slid to his feet, looking up into his face with great humility. This for a few moments. Then something that William Lamb said once more disturbed Lady Caroline's equanimity. In an instant she was on her feet, running round the room, pursued by her husband, sweeping mirrors, candlesticks, and crockery on to the floor, in a veritable whirlwind of pa.s.sion; whereupon William Lamb drew the blind and the Kembles saw no more.

That story may serve as a symbolic epitome of William Lamb's married life.

We shall come to many stories of the same kind as we proceed. Lady Caroline was a creature of impulse, and there was nearly always a man in the case. She easily persuaded herself that any man who was polite to her was in love with her--both Moore and Rogers were among the victims of whom she boasted--and she would not allow the contrary to be suggested.

Moreover, besides being self-willed in matters of the heart, she liked to _afficher_ herself with every man for whom she felt a preference, and to declare the state of her affections to the world with the insistent emphasis with which the sensational virtues of soaps and sauces are set forth on the h.o.a.rdings.

Whether she deliberately sought notoriety, or merely did what she chose to do without fear of it, remains, to this hour, an open question. All that is certain is that she did, in fact, make herself very notorious indeed, and that there was more scandal than subtlety in her attempts to monopolise Byron, to whose heart she laid siege, with all the audacity of a stage adventuress, in the presence of a large, amused, and interested audience.

It was Lady Westmorland who introduced them. She did not introduce Byron to Lady Caroline, but Lady Caroline to Byron. Already, only a few days after the appearance of "Childe Harold," he was on his pedestal, and was not expected to descend from it, even to show deference to ladies. "He has a club-foot and bites his nails," Rogers had told her. "If he is as ugly as aesop I must know him," she had answered. But now that she was brought to him, she shrank from him, whether because she was afraid, or because she wished to provoke and pique him. "I looked earnestly at him,"

she told Lady Morgan, "and turned on my heel"; and she went home and wrote in her diary the impression that Byron was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

That was the first scene in the comedy. The second took place at Holland House, and the third at Melbourne House. Lady Caroline's recollections of them were recorded in Lady Morgan's reminiscences:

"I was sitting with Lord and Lady Holland when he was announced. Lady Holland said, 'I must present Lord Byron to you.' Lord Byron said, 'That offer was made to you before; may I ask why you rejected it?' He begged permission to come and see me. He did so the next day. Rogers and Moore were standing by me: I had just come in from riding. I was filthy and heated. When Lord Byron was announced, I flew out of the room to wash myself. When I returned, Rogers said, 'Lord Byron, you are a happy man. Lady Caroline has been sitting here in all her dirt with us, but when you were announced, she flew to beautify herself.'

Lord Byron wished to come and see me at eight o'clock, when I was alone. I said he might."

He did; and "from that moment for more than nine months he almost lived at Melbourne House." The rest, in Lady Caroline's opinion--at all events in one of her opinions, expressed in an angry letter--was all William Lamb's fault.