The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

by Francis Henry Gribble

That is a story of which it is impossible to say whether it is true or only well invented. We are on safer ground in taking the testimony of the well-known people who met Byron in the course of his journey; and our principal witnesses are Lady Hester Stanhope, who passed him at Athens on her way to Lebanon, Sir Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the “great Eltchi,” then Secretary of Embassy at Constantinople, and John Galt, who was still going his rounds as a high-class commercial traveller. No one of the three is extravagantly eulogistic, and all three bear witness to the pose, the swagger, and the arrogance.

“A sort of Don Quixote fighting with the police for a woman of the town,” is Lady Hester’s verdict, suggested, no doubt, by the adventure on which Byron put such a different colour when he related it to Medwin. “He wanted,” she continues, “to make himself something great,” but she will not allow that he succeeded. “He had a great deal of vice in his looks,” she says, “his eyes set close together and a contracted brow”; and, as for his poetry, Lady Hester shakes her head even over that:

“At Athens, I saw nothing in him but a well-bred man, like many others; for, as for poetry, it is easy enough to write verses; and as for the thoughts, who knows where he got them? Many a one picks up some old book that nobody knows anything about, and gets his ideas out of it.”

That reflection, perhaps, always supposing that Dr. Merryon has reported it correctly, throws a brighter flood of light upon the critic’s mind than upon the poet’s genius; but the criticism offered by Sir Stratford Canning was a criticism of matters which he understood. He “cannot,” he says, “forbear to record” what happened when Byron obtained permission to be present at an audience granted by the Sultan to the corps diplomatique. There is a reference to the story in Moore’s “Journal”; but the authorised version must be sought in Lord Stratford de Redcliffe’s Papers:

“We had assembled,” he writes, “in the hall of our so-called palace when Lord Byron arrived in scarlet regimentals topped by a profusely feathered cocked hat, and, coming up to me, asked what his place as a peer of the realm was to be in the procession. I referred him to Mr. Adair, who had not yet left his room, and the upshot of their private interview was that, as the Turks ignored all but officials, any amateur, though a peer, must be content to follow in the wake of the Embassy. His lordship thereupon walked away with that look of scornful indignation which so well became his fine, imperious features.”

“As Canning refused to walk behind him, Byron went home,” is Hobhouse’s laconic report of the incident; but when a letter from the Ambassador followed him, he apologised. His fancy dress, it had seemed to him, was quite as becoming as other people’s uniforms; he had honestly supposed himself to be standing out for the legitimate rights of a peer of the realm. As this was not so—as the Austrian Internuncio had been consulted and had said that it was not so—then he would be glad to join the procession as a simple individual, and humbly to follow his Excellency and “his ox or his ass or anything that was his.” Whether that was a subtle way of calling Stratford Canning an ass does not appear; but the transaction was a characteristic exhibition of the neck-or-nothing audacity of Byron’s undisciplined youth. He figures, at this date, as a Lord among adventurers and an adventurer among Lords.

Stratford Canning saw him in the latter and John Galt in the former light. At a dinner-party at which they were both present, “he seemed inclined,” says Galt, “to exact a deference to his dogmas that was more lordly than philosophical”; and he continues:

“It was too evident ... that without intending wrong, or any offence, the unchecked humour of his temper was, by its caprices, calculated to prevent him from ever gaining that regard to which his talents and freer moods, independently of his rank, ought to have entitled him. Such men become objects of solicitude, but never of esteem.”

The fair inference seems to be that Byron had let Galt perceive the great gulf fixed between peers of the realm and commercial travellers. It was the sort of thing that he would do when in a bad temper, though not when in a good one. Galt, however, not only submitted to the snub, but accounted for it like a philosopher. Byron, he says, was in trouble at this time, not about his soul, but about his remittances; and “the false dignity he assumed” was really “the apprehension of a person of his rank being exposed to require assistance among strangers.” One can certainly find support for the supposition in his urgent letters home.

In due course, however, the remittances turned up, and Byron recovered his affability and resumed his journey. Hobhouse left him and returned alone. “Took leave,” he notes in his Diary, “non sine lacrymis, of this singular young person, on a little stone terrace at the end of the bay, dividing with him a little nosegay of flowers.” There had been some coolness between them, and this was the sentimental renewal of their friendship. A return visit to Athens was the next stage, but there does not appear to have been any resumption of the old relations with the Maid of Athens. On the contrary, it was on this second visit to Athens that Lady Hester Stanhope discovered the poet “fighting the police for a woman of the town.”