The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

by Francis Henry Gribble

THE SECRET ORCHARD

The invisible force which was beginning to influence Byron’s life, and was presently to deflect it, was a revival of his recollections of Mary Chaworth. He nowhere tells us so, nor do his biographers on his behalf, but the fact is none the less quite certain. The proofs abound, though the name is never mentioned in them; and Mr. Richard Edgecumbe has marshalled them[6] with conclusive force. The course which Byron’s life followed—the things which he willed and did, as well as the things he said—can only be explained if Mary Chaworth is once more brought into the story.

She is, it must be admitted, one of the most shadowy and elusive of all heroines of romance. We have hardly a scrap of her handwriting—hardly a definite report about her from any contemporary witness. She is said to have been disposed to flirt before her marriage, but to have been serious and well-conducted afterwards. It is known that her husband was unkind to her and that she was unhappy with him; there are statements that she was “religious”; but most of the other evidence is negative, leaving the impression that she was commonplace. The secret of her charm, that is to say, is lost; and we can only guess at it—each of us guessing differently because something of ourselves has to go to the framing of the guesses.

Assuredly there is no inference unfavourable to her charm to be drawn from the fact that she passed through the world without cutting a figure in it. The women who dazzle the world are rarely the women for whose love men count the world well lost. It has been written that a man could no more fall in love with Mrs. Siddons than with the Pyramid of Cheops. Men have also refrained, as a rule, from falling in love with the brilliant women of the salons—with Madame du Deffand, for instance, and Madame Necker, and Lady Blessington, and Lady Holland. The qualities of a hostess, they have felt, are different from those of a mistress. Such women can dominate the crowd, wearing their tiaras like queens, in the garish light of fashionable assemblies; but, in the twilight of the secret orchard, their empire crumbles to the dust. It is not given to them to make any man feel that the limitations of time and space have ceased and that the whole of life is concentrated in the life lived here and now. The women who possess that power are the women who seem insignificant to the men to whom they have not revealed themselves.

Mary Chaworth possessed that power, and so left no mark anywhere in life except on Byron’s heart. She was quite undistinguished, and seemingly conventional—the last woman in the world to be likely to throw her bonnet over the windmill; but she had this subtle, indefinable, and inexplicable secret. She had had it even in the irresponsible days when she flirted with the fat boy, but failed to divine his genius, and preferred the hard-riding and hard-drinking squire. She retained it when the fox-hunting squire had shown the coarseness of his fibre, and the fat boy was a man whose genius had proved itself. Every meeting, therefore, was bound to bring a renewal of the spell, even though, in the intervals between the meetings, Byron could forget.

We have it, on Byron’s authority, that there were certain “stolen meetings.” It has been assumed that these were prior to Mary Chaworth’s marriage; but that is hardly credible. There was no need for stolen meetings then; for everything was frank and open. They must have taken place, if at all—and there is no reason to doubt that they did take place—subsequently to the marriage: subsequently to that dinner-party at which Byron and Mary met, and were embarrassed, and did not know what to say to each other. Perhaps, since Mary was a woman whose instinct it was to walk in the straight path, there was no conscious and deliberate secrecy. The more likely assumption, indeed, is that they contrived to meet by accident, and then thought it better, without any definite exchange of promises, not to mention that they had met. However that may be, the spell continued, and Mary kept the key of the secret orchard. Her spirit was certain to revisit it, even if she herself did not.

Then came the long Eastern pilgrimage. The feeling that this sort of thing could not go on indefinitely may very well have been one of the motives for it; and Byron, of course, was quite young enough to forget, and a great deal too young to let past memories divert his mind from present pleasures. He did forget—or very nearly so; he did divert himself as opportunity occurred. He enjoyed his battle with the police for a woman of the town; he enjoyed his passion for a married woman. There is no reason whatever to suppose that he was really thinking of Mary Chaworth when he wrote verses to the Maid of Athens, or when he gave the most precious of his rings to Mrs. Spencer Smith. But the secret orchard always remained; the spirit of the old tenant might at any time return to it. Such spirits always do return whenever life suddenly, for whatever reason, seems a blank.

It was, in this instance, death—a rapid series of deaths—that brought it back. Byron’s mother died, in circumstances for which, as we have seen, he had some reason to reproach himself. His choirboy friend Eddleston pined away from consumption. Charles Skinner Matthews was drowned in the Cam—entangled in the river weeds and sucked under. Wingfield was drowned on his way to the war in Spain. The news of these four deaths came almost simultaneously, and the shock broke down Byron’s high spirits. His letters are very heartbroken and eloquent.

“Some curse,” he wrote to Scrope Davies, the gamester, “hangs over me and mine.... Come to me, Scrope; I am almost desolate—left almost alone in the world.” “At three-and-twenty,” he wrote to Dallas, “I am left alone, and what more can we be at seventy? It is true I am young enough to begin again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of my life?” To Dallas, too, he wrote a certain morbid letter about the four skulls which lay on his study table, and in another letter to Hodgson he says:

“The blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from the shock; and though I do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every morning convince me mournfully to the contrary. I shall now waive the subject, the dead are at rest, and none but the dead can be so.... I am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before.”