Possibly Mr. Edgcumbe has proved just a little too much—that question will have to be faced when we come to it; but our immediate task must be to track the story along the lines which he has indicated, and see how all the mysteries connected with Byron can be solved, and all the emotional inconsistencies of his life unified, by the recollection that, of all the many passions of his life, there was only one which really mattered to him.
Many women were welcome to love him if they liked—he was a man very ready to let himself be loved; but only one woman had the power to make him suffer—and that woman was Mary Chaworth. The motto “Cherchez la femme” may, in short, in his case, be particularised. Whenever his conduct and his utterances seem, on the face of it, inexplicable, we have to look for Mary Chaworth and see her re-asserting a power which has been allowed to lapse; and we will turn to look for her now.
CHAPTER XIV
AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS—THOUGHTS OF MARRIAGE, OF FOREIGN TRAVEL, AND OF MARY CHAWORTH
The poems written during the dark period of Byron’s life which we have now to consider are “The Giaour,” “The Bride of Abydos,” “The Corsair,” and “Lara.” Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, in his introduction to “The Bride of Abydos,” attributed the gloom to the fact that Byron “had been staying at Aston Hall, Rotherham, with his friend James Wedderburn Webster, and had fallen in love with his friend’s wife, Lady Frances.” It will be time enough to treat that suggestion seriously when more evidence is offered in support of it. The one important reference to Lady Frances in the Letters certainly does not bear it out:
“I stayed a week with the Websters, and behaved very well, though the lady of the house is young, religious, and pretty, and the master is my particular friend. I felt no wish for anything but a poodle dog, which they kindly gave me.”
That is all; and it is not in tune with those allusions, veiled by asterisks, to a consuming and destroying passion, with which the Journal is thickly sprinkled. On the other hand the open references to Mary Chaworth scattered throughout Byron’s autobiographical utterances are perfectly in tune with these enigmatical invocations of an Unknown Lady. Even if it could not be shown that she and Byron met during this period of mental anguish, we should still be tempted to conjecture that she and the Unknown Lady were one; and, as a matter of fact, we know that they did meet, and also know enough of the terms on which they met to be able to clear up the situation beyond much possibility of doubt. The key to it, indeed, is the letter written by Byron to Mary Chaworth five years after their final separation:
“My own, we may have been very wrong, but I repent of nothing except that cursed marriage, and your refusing to continue to love me as you had loved me. I can neither forget nor quite forgive you for that precious piece of reformation. But I can never be other than I have been, and whenever I love anything, it is because it reminds me in some way or other of yourself.”