LORD BYRON.
So many volumes have been written about the domestic life and the loves of Lord Byron, that it would be a hopeless undertaking to attempt to say anything new about them. But the story of Byron's life will never lose its fascination, and to every new generation of readers the romance will be fresh. Marvellously beautiful, wonderfully gifted, unfortunately constituted man; wronged by his birth, wronged by his education, wronged most of all by himself, the world will never cease to wonder and to weep when his tragic story is told. While the language remains his words will live. Immortal poetry for youth!—new generations will learn it by heart, when the older generations are forgetting; and long after all memory of his waywardness and folly has faded from the world, his deathless songs will still sing on.
In any attempt to understand Byron, his ancestry must be much considered. It will never do to compare him with cool-headed, calm-blooded, matter-of-fact people. He was the peculiar product of a peculiar race. Coming through generations of hot, turbulent blood, which was never once mastered or tamed by its possessors, he entered the world with a temperament and disposition which made it simply impossible that he should lead the ordinary life of the British Philistine of his day.
As far back as they have been traced, the family were violent, passionate, high-spirited, but unrestrained in the indulgence of their desires by any of the cardinal principles of morality. Byron's father, one of Byron's biographers tells us, had outraged in his previous family life not only the principles of religion, but also the laws of society; and when, in 1783, he married Catherine Gordon, the wealthy heiress of Gight, Aberdeenshire, it was chiefly for the purpose of paying off his debts with her fortune. Within two years after the marriage the heiress of Gight was reduced to a pittance of one hundred and fifty pounds a year. In 1790, for economy's sake, they removed from London to Aberdeen, but soon separated.
Even after this, Captain Byron was mean-spirited enough to solicit money from his wife, and she had not the heart to refuse him. With a small supply thus obtained he crossed the channel, and in 1791 died in Valenciennes, in the North of France. Of the violent temper of Byron's mother many stories are told, and of her heartless treatment of him in his early years; so that upon neither side can we find much upon which we could expect to build a very noble or well-balanced character, and the fact seems to be that the eccentricities of the Byron family were so great as to be dangerously near the point called insanity.
A youth inheriting such blood as this, and brought up without even a pretence of moral or religious training, could hardly be expected to develop many of the domestic virtues. Neither could high-mindedness or lofty principle be predicted of him. And in truth, Byron possessed neither of these things. With this fiery Norman blood flowing in his veins, restlessness was the habitual condition of his existence, such restlessness as drove him to seek excitement at whatever cost,—quiet, as he expressed it, to the quick bosom being hell. This restlessness led him into all sorts of folly and excess, in the pursuit of new excitements. Then he was cursed with an exaggerated sensibility, which, while it gave him many rare delights in life, inflicted upon him also the keenest tortures. His massive egotism was the cause, doubtless, of many of his most marked eccentricities. He was so anxious to have the world's gaze fixed upon him that he said and did things continually for the mere purpose of holding its attention. In this way he frequently made himself appear worse than he really was. Society was held willingly in the thrall of his personality. A dull world likes to have laid bare for its inspection the pulses of a vivid existence. Byron may have been no worse than many other men of his day, for it was a time of general immorality, but he never concealed even his worst vices. While hypocrisy is a national vice in England, Byron, though essentially English in most things, never possessed this marked characteristic of his countrymen. He flaunted his vices in the light of day; and the world took a speedy revenge upon him for his audacity. The little episode of his love for Mary Chaworth occurred at so early an age that it seems scarcely probable that it affected him as seriously as he claimed; yet he was a very precocious child, and his account of the strength of his passion, and its disappointment, may not be wholly an affectation. It is difficult, too, to arrive at his real feeling toward Miss Milbank, there was so much of contradiction both in his words and in his conduct. Miss Milbank probably loved him but feared to marry him, having heard of the irregularities of his life. And certainly the sort of life which Byron had led was a very poor preparation for happiness at the fireside, and if all other causes of unhappiness had been wanting would doubtless have wrecked his union with Miss Milbank. But there were not wanting numberless other sources of misery to this ill-mated couple, first among which was the complete incompatibility of their tastes, feelings, characters. That she was a noble, intelligent, and high-principled woman, none have ever denied. The wonder was, not that she would not live with such a man as Byron, but that she could ever have married him. In charity we must decide that she was ignorant of the unspeakable degradation of such an act. That he was a famous man of genius, the most wonderfully gifted poet of his time, might have been a temptation, but it was no excuse, if she entered into the contract with her eyes open. But aside from the question of vice or virtue, there was nothing in common between them. She felt that she had fallen from the unalterable serenity and dignity of her existence, into chaos. Her natural reserve and his natural frankness were the occasion of continual clashings. Her formality and his bluntness caused constant unrest. Accustomed to the regularity of a well-ordered English household, she was miserable at the utter demoralization of their home,—of which the bailiff had possession nine times during the short year they occupied it. Formed for a calm, domestic life, she would probably have been a most admirable wife to a man suited to her virtuous tastes, but her very virtues irritated Byron.
Lady Caroline Lamb, who had loved him so madly, and on whom he had expended a temporary passion, was in her ardent nature and erratic genius much better suited to his tastes; and yet it had not taken him long to tire of her, beautiful as she had been. And were ever such bitter and cruel words addressed to a wronged woman, even though she had herself been fearfully to blame in the matter, as those sent by Byron to this poor creature, who had sent him a last touching appeal to remember her? He wrote:—
"Remember you! remember you! Until the waters of Lethe have flowed over the burning torrent of your existence, shame and remorse will cry in your ears, and pursue you with the delirium of fever. Remember you! Do not doubt it, I will remember. And your husband will also remember you. Neither of us can ever forget you. To him you have been an unfaithful wife, and to me—a devil!"
Terrible words, which apparently changed her love to hate, for she was his relentless enemy for many years. But one day the great poet died, in Greece, the death of a hero. His body was taken back to England for burial, and Caroline Lamb stood at her window and saw the procession go by. The coffin was followed by a dog, howling piteously. Caroline uttered a heartrending cry, and sunk to the floor insensible. They raised her and placed her in her bed, from which she never rose; she was borne from it to her grave.
Such was the devotion which his fatal beauty and fascination won from women, from many women, in his brief life. It is not probable that his wife ever loved him in this way, but had she done so it seems very unlikely that they could have lived a happy life together.
For one reason, he had no faith in women. "False as a woman or an epitaph" expressed his deliberate opinion of the sex; and it must be confessed that the sort of women with whom he had best acquaintance were not calculated to give him high ideas upon the subject. This low estimate of women would have stood in the way of domestic happiness under any circumstances.
He was not ignorant of this, and in "Childe Harold" states the case thus:—
"For he through sin's long labyrinth had run,
Nor made atonement when he did amiss;
Had sighed to many, though he loved but one,
And that loved one, alas! could ne'er be his.
Ah, happy she! to 'scape from him whose kiss
Had been pollution unto aught so chaste!
Who soon had left her charms for vulgar bliss,
And spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste,
Nor calm domestic bliss had ever deigned to taste."
It has been thought by some that had Byron had the good fortune to meet his latest love, the Countess Guiccioli, in his youth, all his stormy life might have been changed and redeemed. However this may be, she seems, so far as we can judge of her, to have been more likely to be a poet's one great love than any of the others who for a time held his wandering fancy. Beautiful as a poet's wildest dream, young, ardent, gifted, and passionately devoted to him, what more could even his exacting nature demand?—
"Educated in the gloom of the convent, the notes of the organ, the clouds of incense, the waxen tapers burning at the feet of the Virgin, the litanies of the nuns,—all this had filled her mind with the poetry of the cloister, and with that mystic and indefinable love which at the first contact with the world was ready to change into a violent passion when it should meet with an object upon which to fix itself."
Married as soon as she left the convent to a man selected by her parents, whom she had barely seen, and who was old enough to be her father, she was at the time Byron first saw her a melancholy and unhappy woman, much given to the reading of poetry and of the immoral novels of that time and place.
That she should love Byron at first sight was inevitable, and that which followed was almost as inevitable. She herself thus describes her first acquaintance with him:—
"His noble and exquisitely beautiful countenance, the tone of his voice, his manners, the thousand enchantments that surrounded him, rendered him so different and so superior a being to any by whom I was surrounded or had hitherto seen that it was impossible he should not have left the most profound impression upon me. From that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay at Venice, we met every day."
Almost the only glimpses of quiet happiness which Byron ever enjoyed came from this association. The lovers seemed to be admirably adapted to each other, and their love knew no diminution during the short remainder of his life. And she cherished his memory with the utmost fondness throughout a long life, writing of him with unbounded enthusiasm, in her own account of her acquaintance with him, many years after his death. Byron has probably exaggerated his own unhappiness, yet there can be no doubt that much of what he describes was very real. The nobler elements of his character were constantly at war with the lower, and although he did not have sufficient strength of character to lead the noble life of which he had frequent visions, he had enough innate nobility to despise himself for the life he did lead. Doubtless there was much of truth in what he wrote in his journal in Switzerland:—
"But in all, the recollections of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany one through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, or the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, or the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, or enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory around, above, and beneath me."
The close of Byron's life, in Greece, seems to have been one of peculiar desolation. There is something really tragic in the utter loneliness of such a death-bed. Years before, he had written concerning his death:—
"When time or soon or late shall bring
The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead,
Oblivion! may thy languid wing
Wave gently o'er my dying bed.
"No band of friends or heirs be there
To weep, or wish the coming blow;
No maiden with dishevelled hair
To feel, or feign, decorous woe.
"But silent let me sink to earth,
With no officious mourners near;
I would not mar one hour of rest
Or startle friendship with a tear."
Never was wish more literally fulfilled than this. There were none but servants about him in his last hours:—
"In all these attendants," says Parry, "there was an over-officiousness of zeal; but as they could not understand each other's language their zeal only added to the confusion. This circumstance, and the want of common necessaries, made Byron's apartment such a picture at distress and even anguish during the last two or three days of his life as never before beheld, and have no wish to witness again."
His remains were taken to England and interred in the family vault in the Church of Hucknall. His poems are his imperishable monument.
