No engagement at Drury Lane was procurable. Indeed, Miss Clairmont soon ceased to desire one. Her infatuation for Lord Byron drove all other thoughts and hopes and ambitions from her heart. She wrote to him repeatedly,—clever, foolish, half-mad, and cruelly long letters. She praised the “wild originality of his countenance.” She sent him her manuscripts to read. There is something pathetic in Byron’s unheeded entreaty that she should “write short.” There is something immeasurably painful in his unconcealed indifference, in his undisguised contempt. The glamour of his fame as a poet gave a compelling power to that fatal beauty which was his undoing. When we read what men have written about Byron’s head; when we recall the rhapsodies of Moore, the reluctant praise of Trelawney, the eloquence of Coleridge; when we remember that Scott—the sanest man in Great Britain—confessed ruefully that Byron’s face was a thing to dream of, we are the less surprised that women should have flung themselves at his feet in a frenzy of self-surrender, which a cold legacy of busts and portraits does little to explain. Miss Clairmont—to use one of Professor Dowden’s flowers of speech—“was lightly whirled out of her regular orbit.” In the spring she travelled with Shelley and Mary Godwin to Switzerland, and at Sécheron, a little suburb of Geneva, they met Lord Byron, who was then writing the splendid third canto of “Childe Harold.” His letter to his sister, the Hon. Augusta Leigh, bears witness to his annoyance at the encounter; but the two poets became for a season daily companions, and, in some sort, friends. Shelley thought Byron “as mad as the winds” (an opinion which was returned with interest), and deeply regretted his slavery “to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices;”—among them a prejudice in favour of Christianity, for which ancient institution Byron always entertained a profound though unfruitful reverence. Indeed, despite the revolutionary impetus of his verse, and despite the fact that he died for revolting Greece, the settled order of things appealed with force to his eminently practical nature. “Sanity and balance,” says Mr. Morley, “mark the foundations of his character. An angel of reasonableness seems to watch over him, even when he comes most dangerously near to an extravagance.”
Miss Clairmont did not confide to her guardians the secret of her intimacy with Lord Byron until after the meeting at Geneva. When her relations with him were understood, neither Shelley nor Mary Godwin saw at first any occasion for distress. They cared nothing for the broken marriage bond, and they believed, or hoped, that some true affection had been—as in their own case—the impelling and upholding power. It was the swift withering of this hope which filled their hearts with apprehension. They carried Miss Clairmont back to England in the autumn (“I have had all the plague possible to persuade her to go back,” wrote Byron to his sister); and in Bath, the following January, her little daughter was born.
It was a blue-eyed baby of exceptional loveliness. Mrs. Shelley (Mary Godwin had been married to the poet on the death of his wife, two months earlier) fills her letters with praises of its beauty. Miss Clairmont wrote to Byron in 1820 that her health had been injured by her “attentions” to her child during its first year; but she found time to study Italian, and to write a book, for which Shelley tried in vain to find a publisher, and the very title of which is now forgotten. The little household at Great Marlow was not a tranquil one. Mrs. Shelley had grown weary of her step-sister’s society. Her diary—all these young people kept diaries with uncommendable industry—abounds in notes, illustrative of Claire’s ill-temper, and of her own chronic irritation. “Clara imagines that I treat her unkindly.” “Clara in an ill-humour.” “Jane[1] gloomy.” “Jane for some reason refuses to walk.” “Jane is not well, and does not speak the whole day.”
[1] Clara Mary Jane Clairmont was “Claire’s” full name.
This was bad enough, but there were other moods more trying than mere sulkiness. Miss Clairmont possessed nerves. She had “the horrors” when “King Lear” was read aloud. She was, or professed to be, afraid of ghosts. She would come downstairs in the middle of the night to tell Shelley that an invisible hand had lifted her pillow from her bed, and dumped it on a chair. To such thrilling recitals the poet lent serious attention. “Her manner,” he wrote in his journal, “convinced me that she was not deceived. We continued to sit by the fire, at intervals engaged in awful conversation, relative to the nature of these mysteries;”—that is, to the migrations of the pillow. As a result of sympathetic treatment, Claire would wind up the night with hysterics, writhing in convulsions on the floor, and shrieking dismally, until poor Mrs. Shelley would be summoned from a sick-bed to soothe her to slumber. “Give me a garden, and absentia Claire, and I will thank my love for many favours,” is the weary comment of the wife, after months of inextinguishable agitation.
There was no loophole of escape, however, from a burden so rashly shouldered. Miss Clairmont made one or two ineffectual efforts at self-support; but found them little to her liking. She could not, and she would not, live with her mother, Mrs. Godwin;—“a very disgusting woman, and wears green spectacles,” is Charles Lamb’s description of this lady, whom, in common with most of her acquaintances, he cordially disliked. When Byron wrote, offering to receive and provide for his little daughter, Shelley vehemently opposed the plan, thinking it best that so young an infant should remain under its mother’s care. But his wife, who was at heart a singularly sagacious woman, never ceased to urge the advisability of the step. Claire, though reluctant to part from her baby, yielded to these persuasions; and the journey to Italy in the spring of 1818 was undertaken mainly as a sure though expensive method of conveying Allegra to her father.
That Byron wanted the child, there is no doubt, nor that he had been from the first deeply concerned for her uncertain future. Three months after her birth, he wrote to his sister that he had resolved to send for her, and place her in a convent, “to become a good Catholic, and (it may be) a nun,—being a character somewhat needed in our family.” “They tell me,” he adds, “that she is very pretty, with blue eyes and dark hair; and although I never was attached, nor pretended attachment to the mother, still, in case of the eternal war and alienation which I foresee about my legitimate daughter, Ada, it may be as well to have something to repose a hope upon. I must love something in my old age; and circumstances may render this poor little creature a great, and perhaps my only, comfort.”
It is not often that Byron’s letters reveal this grace of sentiment. Never, after Allegra’s arrival, does he allude to any affection he bears her, and he once assured Moore that he did not bear any;—a statement which that partial biographer thought fit to disregard. On the other hand, he dwells over and over again, both in his correspondence and in his journal, upon plans for her education and future settlement. He was at all times sternly practical, and pitilessly clear-sighted. He never regarded his daughter as a “lovely toy,” but as a very serious and troublesome responsibility. The poetic view of childhood failed to appeal to him. “Any other father,” wrote Claire bitterly, “would have made of her infancy a sweet idyl of flowers and innocent joy.” Byron was not idyllic. He dosed Allegra with quinine when she had a fever. He abandoned a meditated journey because she was ill. He dismissed a servant who had let her fall. He added a codicil to his will, bequeathing her five thousand pounds. These things do not indicate any stress of emotion, but they have their place in the ordinary calendar of parental cares.
A delicate baby, not yet sixteen months old, was a formidable and inharmonious addition to the poet’s Venetian household. The Swiss nurse, Elise, who had been sent by the Shelleys from Milan, proved to be a most incapable and unworthy woman, who later on made infinite mischief by telling the foulest of lies. Byron was sorely perplexed by the situation; and when Mrs. Hoppner, the Genevan wife of the English consul-general, offered to take temporary charge of the child, he gladly and gratefully consented. One difficulty in his path he had not failed to foresee;—that Claire, having relinquished Allegra of her own free will, would quickly want her back again. In fact, before the end of the summer, Miss Clairmont insisted upon going to Venice, and poor Shelley very ruefully and reluctantly accompanied her. Byron received him with genuine delight, and, in an access of good humour, proposed lending the party his villa at Este. There Mrs. Shelley, who had lost her infant daughter, might recover from sorrow and fatigue, and there Allegra might spend some weeks under her mother’s care. The offer was frankly accepted, and the two men came once more to an amicable understanding. They were not fitted to be friends,—the gods had ruled a severance wide and deep;—but when unpricked by the contentiousness of other people, they passed pleasant and profitable hours together.
Meanwhile, the poor little apple of discord was ripening every day into a fairer bloom. “Allegra has been with me these three months,” writes Byron to his sister in August. “She is very pretty, remarkably intelligent, and a great favourite with everybody.... She has very blue eyes, a singular forehead, fair curly hair, and a devil of a Spirit,—but that is Papa’s.” “I have here my natural daughter, by name Allegra,” he tells Moore six weeks later. “She is a pretty little girl enough, and reckoned like Papa.” To Murray he writes in the same paternal strain. “My daughter Allegra is well, and growing pretty; her hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her ways, Mr. Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features. She will make, in that case, a manageable young lady.”