Early Verse and Marriage.
After this episode came Cambridge, and those Hours of Idleness which broke out into verse, and caught the scathing lash of Henry Brougham—then a young, but well-known, advocate, who was conspiring with Sydney Smith and Jeffrey (as I have told you) to renovate the world through the pages of the Edinburgh Review.
But this lashing brought a stinging reply; and the clever, shrewd, witty couplets of Byron’s satire upon the Scottish Reviewers (1809), convinced all scholarly readers that a new and very piquant pen had come to the making of English verse. Nor were Byron’s sentimentalisms of that day all so crude and ill-shapen as Brougham would have led the public to suppose. I quote a fragment from a little poem under date of 1808—he just twenty:
“The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now,
Thy vows are all broken
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
“They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me—
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well;
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.”
Naturally enough, our poet is beaming with the success of his satire, which is widely read, and which has made him foes of the first rank; but what cares he for this? He goes down with a company of fellow roisterers, and makes the old walls of Newstead ring with the noisy celebration of his twenty-first birthday; and on the trail of that country revel, and with the sharp, ringing couplets of his “English Bards” crackling on the public ear, he breaks away for his first joyous experience of Continental travel. This takes him through Spain and to the Hellespont and among the isles of Greece—seeing visions there and dreaming dreams, all which are braided into that tissue of golden verse we know as the first two cantos of Childe Harold.
On his return, and while as yet this poem of travel is on the eve of publication, he prepares himself for a new coup in Parliament—being not without his oratorical ambitions. It was in February of 1812 that he made his maiden speech in the House of Lords—carefully worded, calm, not without quiet elegancies of diction—but not meeting such reception as his extravagant expectation demanded; whatever he does, he wishes met with a tempest of approval; a dignified welcome, to his fiery nature, seems cold.
But the publication of Childe Harold, only a short time later, brings compensating torrents of praise. His satire had piqued attention without altogether satisfying it; there was little academic merit in it—none of the art which made Absalom and Achitophel glow, or which gleamed upon the sword-thrusts of the Dunciad; but its stabs were business-like; its couplets terse, slashing, and full of truculent, scorching vires iræ. This other verse, however, of Childe Harold—which took one upon the dance of waves and under the swoop of towering canvass to the groves of “Cintra’s glorious Eden,” and among those Spanish vales where Dark Guadiana “rolls his power along;” and thence on, by proud Seville, and fair Cadiz, to those shores of the Egean, where
“Still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields,—”[64]
was of quite another order. There is in it, moreover, the haunting personality of the proud, broken-spirited wanderer, who tells the tale and wraps himself in the veil of mysterious and piquant sorrows: Withal there is such dash and spirit, such mastery of language, such marvellous descriptive power, such subtle pauses and breaks, carrying echoes beyond the letter—as laid hold on men and women—specially on women—in a way that was new and strange. And this bright meteor had flashed athwart a sky where such stars as Southey, and Scott, and Rogers, and the almost forgotten Crabbe, and Coleridge, and Wordsworth had been beaming for many a day. Was it strange that the doors of London should be flung wide open to this fresh, brilliant singer who had blazed such a path through Spain and Greece, and who wore a coronet upon his forehead?
He was young, too, and handsome as the morning; and must be mated—as all the old dowagers declared. So said his friends—his sister chiefest among them; and the good Lady Melbourne (mother-in-law of Lady Caroline Lamb)—not without discreet family reasons of her own—fixed upon her charming niece, Miss Milbanke, as the one with whom the new poet should be coupled, to make his way through the wildernesses before him. And there were other approvals; even Tom Moore—who, of all men, knew his habits best—saying a reluctant “Yes”—after much hesitation. And so, through a process of coy propositions and counter-propositions, the marriage was arranged at last, and came about down at Seaham House (near Stockton-on-Tees), the country home of the father, Sir Ralph Milbanke.
“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.”[65]
Yet the service went on to its conclusion; and the music pealed, and the welcoming shouts broke upon the air, and the adieux were spoken; and together, they two drove away—into the darkness.