The Poet of Newstead.
The reminiscences and conversations of Lord Byron, which we have at the hands of Lady Blessington, belong to a time, of course, much earlier than her series of London triumphs, and date with her journeys in Italy. A score of years at least before ever the chandeliers of her Irish ladyship were lighted in Gore House, Byron[62] had gone sailing away from England under a storm of wrath; and he never came back again. Indeed it is not a little extraordinary that one of the most typical of English poets, should—like Landor, with whom he had many traits in common—have passed so little of his active life on English ground. Like Landor, he loved England most when England was most behind him. Like Landor, he was gifted with such rare powers as belonged to few Englishmen of that generation. In Landor these powers, so far as they expressed themselves in literary form, were kept in check by the iron rulings of a scrupulous and exacting craftsmanship; while in Byron they broke all trammels, whether of craftsmanship or reason, and glowed and blazed the more by reason of their audacities. Both were prone to great tempests of wrath which gave to both furious joys, and, I think, as furious regrets.
Byron came by his wrathfulness in good hereditary fashion—as we shall find if we look back only a little way into the records of that Newstead family. Newstead Abbey (more properly Priory, the archæologists tell us) is the name of that great English home—half a ruin—associated with the early years of the poet, but never for much time or in any true sense a home of his own. It is some ten miles north of Nottingham, in an interesting country, where lay the old Sherwood Forest, with its traditions of Robin Hood; there is a lichened Gothic front which explains the Abbey name; there are great rambling corridors and halls; there is a velvety lawn, with the monument to “Boatswain,” the poet’s dog; but one who goes there—with however much of Byronic reading in his or her mind—will not, I think, warm toward the locality; and the curious foot-traveller will incline to trudge away in a hunt for Annesley, and the “Antique Oratory.”
Well, in that ancient home, toward the end of the last century, there lived, very much by himself, an old Lord Byron, who some thirty years before, in a fit of wild rage, had killed a neighbor and kinsman of the name of Chaworth; there was indeed a little show of a duel about the murder—which was done in a London tavern, and by candle-light. His peerage, however, only saved this “wicked lord,” as he was called, from prison; and at Newstead his life smouldered out in 1798, under clouds of hate, and of distrust. His son was dead before him; so was his grandson, the last heir in direct line; but he had a younger brother, John, who was a great seaman—who published accounts of his voyages,[63] which seem always to have been stormy, and which lend, maybe, some realistic touches to the shipwreck scenes in “Don Juan.” A son of this voyager was the father of the poet, and was reputed to be as full of wrath and turbulence as his uncle who killed the Chaworth; and his life was as thick with disaster as that of the unlucky voyager. His first marriage was a runaway one with a titled lady, whose heart he broke, and who died leaving that lone daughter who became the most worthy Lady Augusta Leigh. For second wife he married Miss Gordon, a Scotch heiress, the mother of the poet, whose fortune he squandered, and whose heart also he would have broken—if it had been of a breaking quality. With such foregoers of his own name, one might look for bad blood in the boy; nor was his mother saint-like; she had her storms of wrath; and from the beginning, I think, gave her boy only cruel milk to drink.
His extreme boyhood was passed near to Aberdeen, with the Highlands not far off. How much those scenes impressed him, we do not know; but that some trace was left may be found in verses written near his death:—
“He who first met the Highland’s swelling blue
Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue;
Hail in each crag a friend’s familiar face
And clasp the mountain in his mind’s embrace.”
When the boy was ten, the wicked lord who had killed the Chaworth died; and the Newstead inheritance fell to the young poet. We can imagine with what touch of the pride that shivers through so many of his poems, this lad—just lame enough to make him curse that unlucky fate—paced first down the hall at Newstead—thenceforth master there—a Peer of England.
But the estate was left in sorry condition; the mother could not hold it as a residence; so they went to Nottingham—whereabout the boy seems to have had his first schooling. Not long afterward we find him at Harrow, not far out of London, where he makes one or two of the few friendships which abide; there, too, he gives first evidence of his power over language.
It is at about this epoch, also, that on his visits to Nottingham—which is not far from the Chaworth home of Annesley—comes about the spinning of those little webs of romance which are twisted afterward into the beautiful Chaworth “Dream.” It is an old story to tell, yet how everlastingly fresh it keeps!
“The maid was on the eve of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him; he had looked
Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, nor being, but in hers,
She was his voice … upon a tone,
A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously—his heart
Unknowing of its cause of agony.”
As a matter of fact, Miss Chaworth was two years older, and far more mature than he; she was gentle too, and possessed of a lady-like calm, which tortured him—since he could not break it down. Indeed, through all the time when he was sighing, she was looking over his head at Mr. Musters—who was bluff and hearty, and who rode to the hounds, and was an excellent type of the rollicking, self-satisfied, and beef-eating English squire—whom she married.