II
Byron is a good example of hysteria in literature. He loved Mary Chaworth, and for nineteen years, from 1805, the date of her marriage, to his death in 1824, she figured in nearly all his shorter love poems. She was Astarte in Manfred. She is Lady Adeline in Don Juan, she is, no doubt, "Thyrza"; she figured as the heroines of his eastern tales.
In the poem, "The Dream," he refers to the irony of fate that married each of them unhappily, and he describes his grief because he never wed her. When the poem was published her husband was annoyed and cut down some trees to which reference was made in the poem,—"the diadem of trees" arranged in a circle.
There are nearly fifty lyrics in which she appears beyond doubt, not mentioning the bigger poems where she often is present.
The last lines that Byron wrote in 1824, "I watched thee when the foe was at my side," refer to her:
"To thee—to thee—e'en in the grasp of death
My spirit turned, oh! oftener than it might.
Thus much and more; and yet thou lov'st me not
And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will
Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot
To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still."
The word "wrongly" shows that Mary was married.
She is referred to by him in his last letters.
The "Last Words to Greece," published posthumously, refer to Mary, and contain the same sentiment of his famous poem, "Oh talk to me not of a name great in story," written in 1821, and also posthumously published. He cares more about Mary's love than for the honours he would attain as hero in the Grecian War. He exclaims he is a fool of passion, and that the maddening fascination of Mary can depress him low if she frowns.
The celebrated poem to the Po River, sent May 8, 1820, to Murray, was inspired by "private feelings and passions"; he wrote Murray that it must not be published. The river Po in the poem really refers to the river Trent, in England, with memories of which Mary was bound to him.
There is no doubt about the fact that most of the early love poems of Byron relate to Mary. Critics have, however, failed to note her influence after the "The Dream," written in the summer of 1816, a half a year after his wife left him. But the reader of the later cantos of Childe Harold and Don Juan does not have to search too closely between the lines to detect Mary's presence.
I think we may dispense with the theory that Byron was a poseur and that his passion was unreal and rhetorical. Those lugubrious moods were unfortunately sincere. He suffered from hysteria, and this was connected with the lack of affection in infancy between him and his mother. He is the hero and Mary is the heroine of all his work. She made a neurotic out of him, and she is the cause of his moods when he wrote "I have not loved the world, nor the world me" in Childe Harold, or "From my youth upwards my spirit walked not with the souls of men," in Manfred. This seems strange to us who recognise that faithful love is often a pose, and that in real life men do not, as a rule, brood about lost sweethearts when these are married to others, and that they straightway marry themselves and smile over their past loves, in whom in many cases they could not again find interest.
Byron's wife inspired only two poems,—the bitter "Lines on Hearing Lady Byron Was Ill," and "Fare Thee Well"; she was also a model for two women in Don Juan, who are not amiably treated. His mistress, the Countess Guiccioli, may have been in part a model in Cain for Adah, along with Mary Chaworth, and she also inspired Sardanapalus.
For a long time the Thyrza poems of 1812 puzzled critics. They were held to be addressed to no one in general; there was a claim by some that they were addressed to a man, a friend he loved. But there can be no doubt that Mary furnished the chief inspiration. In Childe Harold, Canto II-9, he refers to Mary in the line "love and life together fled," and in a Thyrza poem he uses the words, "When love and life alike were new." Mary Chaworth was really responsible for Byronism.
Whether she ever committed adultery with him and had a child by him, as is claimed by the author of Byron, the Last Phase, one cannot say.
In his four early volumes of poetry, published before he was twenty-one, there are many poems inspired by Mary, and four poems, written in 1805, addressed to Caroline, who was undoubtedly Mary, are of especial excellence. The poems of his youth written to her included the "Fragment," written after her marriage, in 1805, and "Remembrance," written the year after. Both of these poems were published after Byron's death. A pathetic poem, In the Hours of Idleness (1807), is "To a Lady"; "Oh, had my fate been linked with thine." "When We Two Parted" was written the following year, and referred to Mary. In 1808 Byron wrote a series of sad love poems to Mary, and they were published in the next year, in 1809, in Hobhouse's Imitations and Translations. They include "Remind Me Not, Remind Me Not," "To a Lady," "When Man Expelled from Eden's Bowers," "Stanzas to a Lady on Leaving England," "Well! Thou Art Happy," "And Wilt Thou Weep When I Am Low," and "There Was a Time I Need Not Name." The six great poems written to Thyrza and published in 1812, with Childe Harold, were "To Thyrza" ("Without a stone to mark the spot"), "Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe," "One Struggle More and I Am Free," "Euthanasia," "And Thou Art Dead and Young and Fair," and "If Sometimes in the Haunts of Men." Mary was as if dead to him, and he wrote of her accordingly. About the time of the Thyrza poems, 1811 and 1812, he wrote other poems to her like the "Epistle to a Friend" "I have seen my bride another's bride" and "On Parting New." In 1813 appeared the two sonnets, "To Genevra" and "Remember Him Whom Passion's Power"; in 1814, "Thou Art Not False, But Thou Art Fickle," "Farewell! If Ever Fondest Prayer," "I Speak Not, I Trace Not, I Breathe Not Thy Name." In 1815 appeared "There's Not a Joy the World Can Give That It Takes Away," and 1816, "There Be None of Beauty's Daughters."
Byronism, then, was due chiefly to the poet's early quarrels with his mother, the separation from his wife, but above all his rejection by Mary Chaworth.