The elegy is included in the collected works. Special indulgence is asked for it on the ground that it was “composed at the age of fourteen.” It is very youthful in tone—quite on the conventional lines—as one would expect. A single quatrain may be given—not to be criticised, but merely to show that Byron, as a boy, was still looking at life pretty much as his pastors and masters told him to look at it:
“And shall presumptuous mortals Heaven arraign!
And, madly, Godlike Providence accuse!
Ah! no, far fly from me attempts so vain;—
I’ll ne’er submission to my God refuse.”
We are still a long way here from the intense, the cynical, the defiant, or even the posturing Byron of later years. The gift of personal expression has not yet come to him; and he is still in literary fetters, weeping, on paper, according to the rules. Intensity and the personal note only begin with his sudden love for Mary Chaworth; cynicism and defiance only begin after that love affair has ended in failure.
Mary Chaworth was the heir of the Annesley property, adjoining Newstead, and she was the grand-niece of the Chaworth whom the wicked Lord Byron ran through the body in the upper chamber of the Pall Mall tavern; so that their marriage, if they could have been married, would, as Byron says, “have healed feuds in which blood had been shed by our fathers.” But Byron was not yet the Byron who had only to come, and to be seen, in order to conquer. He was a schoolboy of fifteen, which is an awkward age. He had achieved no triumphs in any field which could give him self-assurance. He was not yet a leader, even among his schoolfellows; and he was not only lame, but also fat. How shall a fat boy hope, whatever fires of genius burn within him, to enter the lists against his elders and bear away the belle from county balls? Byron, at any rate, failed signally in the attempt to do so.
Newstead having been let to Lord Grey de Ruthen, Mrs. Byron was, at the time, lodging at Nottingham; and Byron had various reasons for preferring to see as little of her as possible. She was never sympathetic; she was often quarrelsome; it was her pleasant habit, when annoyed, to rattle the fire-irons and throw the tongs at him. So he often availed himself of his tenant’s invitation to visit Newstead, whenever he liked; and from Newstead it was the most natural thing in the world that he should go over to Annesley, where Miss Chaworth, with whom he already had a slight acquaintance, was living with her mother, Mrs. Clarke.
He was always welcome there. There was as little desire on his cousin’s side as on his to revive the recollection of the feud. When he came to call, he was pressed to stay and sleep. At first he refused, most probably from shyness, though he professed a superstitious fear of the family portraits. They had “taken a grudge to him,” he said, on account of the duel; they would “come down from their frames at night to haunt him.” But presently his fears, or his shyness, were conquered. He had seen a ghost, he said, in the park; and if he must see ghosts he might just as well see them in the house; so, if it was all the same to his hosts, he would like to stay.
He stayed, and was entranced with Mary Chaworth’s singing. He rode with her, and practiced pistol shooting on the terrace—more than a little pleased, one conjectures, to show off his marksmanship. He went with her—and with others, including a chaperon—on an excursion to Matlock and Castleton. A note, written long afterwards, preserves a memory of the trip:
“It happened that, in a cavern in Derbyshire, I had to cross in a boat (in which two people only could lie down) a stream which flows under a rock, with the rock so close upon the water as to admit the boat only to be pushed on by a ferryman (a sort of Charon) who wades at the stern, stooping all the time. The companion of my transit was M.A.C., with whom I had long been in love, and never told it, though she had discovered it without. I recollect my sensations, but cannot describe them, and it is as well.”
And no doubt Mary Chaworth encouraged the boy, amused at his raptures, enjoying the visible proof of her power, prepared to snub him, in the end, if necessary, but scarcely expecting that there would be any need for her to do so. She was seventeen, and a girl of seventeen always feels capable of reminding a boy of fifteen that the prayer book forbids him to marry his grandmother. Moreover, she was engaged, though the engagement had not yet been announced, to Mr. John Musters—a grown man and a Philistine—a handsome, rather dissipated, hard-riding and hard-drinking country squire. The dreamy, limping, fat boy from Harrow had no shadow of a chance against his athletic rival. It was impossible for Mary Chaworth to divine the genius that lurked beneath the fat. One has no right to expect such powers of divination from girls of seventeen.
No doubt she thought the fat boy, as she would have said, “good fun.” No doubt she was amused when, as a demonstration that he was not too young to be loved, he showed her the locket which Margaret Parker had given him, three years before, when he was twelve. Unquestionably she flirted with him—or, at least, let him flirt with her. She even gave him a ring, and the gift must have raised high hopes, though it was the cause of the discovery which brought the flirtation to an end.