“The spell is broke, the charm is flown!
Thus is it with Life’s fitful fever:
We madly smile when we should groan;
Delirium is our best deceiver.
Each lucid interval of thought
Recalls the woes of Nature’s charter;
And He that acts as wise men ought,
But lives—as Saints have died—a martyr.”
That is all; and the story which the lines half cover up and half disclose is clearly of very little consequence. Mrs. Smith had enjoyed her flirtation, and had had verses written to her—much better verses than had been addressed to any of the belles of Southwell. Byron had posed, not knowing for certain whether he posed or not, had undergone a necessary experience, and had passed through the fire unhurt. The experiences which were really to matter to him were yet to come—though not immediately; and he had hardly finished writing verses to Mrs. Spencer Smith when he began writing verses to the Maid of Athens.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MAID OF ATHENS—MRS. WERRY—MRS. PEDLEY—THE SWIMMING OF THE HELLESPONT
“Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!”
It would be superfluous to quote more of the poem than that; and it would be absurd to attach importance to the episode which it commemorates.
Byron came to Athens after an expedition, with Hobhouse, into the heart of Albania. He was, according to Hobhouse’s Diary, “all this time engaged in writing a long poem in the Spenserian stanzas,” the poem being, of course, the first canto of “Childe Harold.” That the travellers roughed it a good deal is evident from Hobhouse’s description of a supper whereat “Byron, with his sabre, cut off the head of a goose which shared our room with a collection of pigs and cows, and so we got an excellent roast.” He was much pleased with his reception by Ali Pasha, who said “he was certain I was a man of birth because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands.” He was also, at the same time, brooding on his “passion for a married woman,” and no doubt felt himself years older in consequence of that passion; and then, arriving at Athens, he fell in love, or fancied or pretended that he was in love, with his landlady’s daughter.
That was the social status of the Maid of Athens. Her mother, Theodora Macri, the widow of a former British Vice-Consul, had been reduced to letting lodgings—a sitting-room and two bedrooms, looking on to a courtyard, much patronised by English travellers, and highly recommended by them. There were three daughters, and there are passages in Byron’s letters which might be read to mean that he was equally in love with all of them. “An attachment to three Greek girls” is his summary of the incident to Hodgson; but he distinguished one of them by the special homage of a poem destined to be one of the most famous in the English language, with the result that Theresa Macri, Maid of Athens, became an institution, and that subsequent lodgers made much of her, looking for a romance where there had, in fact, been little more than the formal salute of the ships passing in the night. Hugh W. Williams, the artist, who was at Athens in 1817, depicts them for us: