“Mrs. Drury was once heard to say of him: ‘There goes Byron’ (Birron she called him) ‘straggling up the hill, like a ship in a storm without rudder or compass.’”
Byron’s influence at Harrow, in short, was exercised over his juniors rather than his contemporaries. It pleased him, when he was big enough, to protect small boys from school tyrants. One catches his feudal spirit again in his appeal to a bully not to lick Lord Delawarr “because he is a fellow peer”; but he was also ready to intervene in other cases in which that plea could not be urged; and he had the reward that might be expected. He once offered to take a licking for one of the Peels; and he became a hero with hero-worshippers—titled hero-worshippers for the most part—sitting at his feet. Lord Delawarr, Lord Clare, the Duke of Dorset, the Honorable John Wingfield, were the most conspicuous among them. It was from their adulation that he got his first taste of the incense which was, in later years, to be burnt to him so lavishly.
He described his school friendships, when he looked back on them, as “passions”; and there is no denying that the language of the letters which he wrote to his friends was inordinately passionate for a schoolboy addressing schoolfellows. “Dearest” is a more frequent introduction to them than “dear,” and the word “sweet” also occurs. It is not the happiest of signs to find a schoolboy writing such letters; and it is not altogether impossible that unfounded apprehensions caused by them account for the suggestion made by Drury—though the fact is not mentioned in the biographies—that Byron should be quietly removed from the school on the ground that his conduct was causing “much trouble and uneasiness.”
That, however, is uncertain, and one must not insist. All that the so-called “passions”—occasionally detrimental though they may have been to school discipline—demonstrate is Byron’s enjoyment of flattery, and his proneness to sentiment and gush. He liked, as he grew older, to accept flattery, while professing to be superior to it; to enjoy sentiment, and then to laugh at it; to gush with the most gushing, and then suddenly to turn round and “say ‘damn’ instead.” But the cynicism which was afterwards to alternate with the sentimentalism had not developed yet. He did not yet say “damn”—at all events in that connection.
One must think of him as a boy with a great capacity for passionate affection, and a precocious tendency to gush, deprived of the most natural outlets for his emotions. He could not love his mother because she was a virago; he hardly ever saw his sister; his guardian kept him coldly at a distance. Consequently his feelings, dammed in one direction, broke out with almost ludicrous intensity in another; and his friendships were sentimental to a degree unusual, though not, of course, unknown or unprecedented, among schoolboys. He wrote sentimental verses to his friends.
But not to them alone. “Hours of Idleness,” first published when he was a Cambridge undergraduate, is the idealised record of his school friendships; but it is also the idealised record of other, and very different, excursions into sentiment. It introduces us to Mary Duff, to Margaret Parker, to Mary Chaworth,—and also to some other Maries of less importance; and we will turn back and glance, in quick succession at their stories before following Byron to Cambridge.
CHAPTER III
A SCHOOLBOY’S LOVE AFFAIRS—MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER, AND MARY CHAWORTH