Two more citations, and I shall have done with this extraordinary record. In March, 1815 (the marriage having occurred in January), he writes to Moore from the house of his father-in-law, Sir Ralph Milbanke—a little northward of the Tees, in County Durham:
“I am in such a state of sameness and stagnation, and so totally occupied in consuming the fruits, and sauntering, and playing dull games at cards, and yawning, and trying to read old Annual Registers and the daily papers, and gathering shells on the shore, and watching the growth of stunted gooseberries in the garden, that I have neither time nor sense to say more than yours ever—B.”
A Stay in London.
On leaving the country for a new residence in London, his growing cheer and spirits are very manifest:
“I have been very comfortable here. Bell is in health, and unvaried good humor. But we are all in the agonies of packing.… I suppose by this hour to-morrow I shall be stuck in the chariot with my chin upon a band-box. I have prepared, however, another carriage for the abigail, and all the trumpery which our wives drag along with them.”
Well, there follows a year or more of this coupled life—with what clashings we can imagine. Old Ralph Milbanke is not there to drawl through his after-dinner stories, and to intrude his restraining presence. The poet finds things to watch about the clubs and the theatres—quite other than the stunted gooseberries that grew in his father-in-law’s garden. Nothing is more sure than that the wilful audacities, and selfishness, and temper of the poet, put my lady’s repose and dignities and perfection to an awful strain. Nor is it to be wondered at, if the mad and wild indiscretions of the husband should have provoked some quiet and galling counter indiscretions on the part of her ladyship.
It is alleged, for instance, that on an early occasion—and at the suggestion of a lady companion of the august mistress—there was an inspection of my lord’s private papers, and a sending home to their writers of certain highly perfumed notelets found therein; and we can readily believe that when this instance of wifely zeal came to his lordship’s knowledge he broke into a strain of remark which was not precisely that of the “Hebrew Melodies.” Doubtless he carries away from such encounter a great reserve of bottled wrath—not so much against her ladyship personally, as against the stolid proprieties, the unbending scruples, the lady-like austerities, and the cool, elegant dowager-dignities she represents. Fancy a man who has put such soul as he has, and such strength and hope and pride as he has, into those swift poems, which have taken his heart’s blood to their making—fancy him, asked by the woman who has set out to widen his hopes and life by all the helps of wifehood, “When—pray—he means to give up those versifying habits of his?” No, I do not believe he resented this in language. I don’t believe he argued the point; I don’t believe he made defence of versifying habits; but I imagine that he regarded her with a dazed look, and an eye that saw more than it seemed to see—an eye that discerned broad shallows in her, where he had hoped for pellucid depths. I think he felt then—if never before—a premonition that their roads would not lie long together. And yet it gave him a shock—not altogether a pleasant one, we may be sure—when Sir Ralph, the father-in-law, to whose house she had gone on a visit, wrote him politely to the effect that—“she would never come back.” Such things cannot be pleasant; at least, I should judge not.
And so, she thinks something more of marriage than as some highly reckoned conventionality—under whose cover bickerings may go on and spend their force, and the decent twin masks be always worn. And in him, we can imagine lingering traces of a love for the feminine features in her—for the grace, the dignity, the sweet face, the modesties—but all closed over and buckled up, and stanched by the everlasting and all encompassing buckram that laces her in, and that has so little of the compensating instinctive softness and yieldingness which might hold him in leash and win him back. The woman who cannot—on occasions—put a weakness into her forgiveness, can never put a vital strength into her persuasion.
But they part, and part forever; the only wonder is they had not parted before; and still another wonder is, that there should have been zealous hunt for outside causes when so many are staringly apparent within the walls of home. I do not believe that Byron would have lived at peace with one woman in a thousand; I do not believe that Lady Byron would have lived at peace with one man in a hundred. The computation is largely in her favor; although it does not imply necessity for his condemnation as an utter brute. Even as he sails away from England—from which he is hunted with hue and cry, and to whose shores he is never again to return—he drops a farewell to her with such touches of feeling in it, that one wonders—and future readers always will wonder—with what emotions the mother and his child may have read it: