Or rather one begins so to picture her—and is even justified in so picturing her at the beginning—though presently, when one sees how unfairly she fought in the great fight which ensued, one changes one’s mind about her, withdraws such sympathy as one has allowed to go out to her, and thinks of her husband when one comes to the final couplet of the poem:
“And I, dear passionate Teucer, dare
Go through the homeless world with you.”
Yet Lady Byron had her grievances, and though they were quite different from those which Harness has reported, they were not light ones. Two grievances in particular must have been very trying to the temper of a young bride who had been an only and spoiled child. In the first place, and almost at once, there was trouble about money. In the second place, and very soon, there was trouble about “the women of the theatre.”
Byron, at the time of his marriage, was heavily in debt. His one idea of economy had always been to obtain credit instead of paying cash; and such cash as he had the handling of quickly slipped through his fingers. He never denied himself a luxury, and seldom refused a request for a loan. He had helped Augusta; he had helped Hodgson; he had helped Coleridge. Now he found his expenses increased out of all proportion to the increase of his income; while his creditors, assuming that his wife had a fortune, proceeded to press for the settlement of their accounts. Hence that “snubbing on money matters” to which we have seen Hobhouse referring; and the word “snubbing” may well have been a euphemism for more severe remonstrance when executions began to be levied. There were no fewer than ten executions in the house in the course of a few months; and one can understand that the experience was unfavourable to the temper of a young wife coming from a well-ordered home in which precise middle-class notions on such subjects had prevailed.
The simultaneous trouble about women, of course, made matters worse. Whether there was trouble about Mary Chaworth or not is uncertain; but, at any rate, Lady Byron met her and appears to have felt the pangs of jealousy. “Such a wicked looking cat I never saw. Somebody else looked quite virtuous by the side of her,” was her commentary to Augusta; and, if she spoke of Mary Chaworth as a cat, we need not suppose her to have been any more complimentary in her references to those actresses whose acquaintance she knew her husband to be making.
He had become, at this time, together with Lord Essex, George Lamb, Douglas Kinnaird, and Peter Moore, a member of the Sub-Committee of Management of Drury Lane Theatre. It does not appear that the Sub-Committee did a great deal except waste the time of the actual managers; but it is not to be supposed that they were altogether neglectful of the amenities of their position. They had “influence”; and upon the men who have “influence” actresses never fail to smile. Some actresses smiled upon Byron for that reason, and others smiled upon him for his own sake. Some of them, it may be, drew the line at smiling; but others, as certainly, did more than smile. Miss Jane Clairmont, in particular—but we shall come to Miss Jane Clairmont presently.
How much Lady Byron knew, at the time, about these matters is doubtful. She must have known a good deal, for actresses sometimes called at the house; and any defects in her knowledge may be presumed to have been eked out by conjecture. Knowledge, conjecture, and gossip, operating in concert, cannot have failed to make her feel uncomfortable. In this respect, as in others, things were not falling out as she had expected. The fondly cherished belief that her love was the one thing needful to Byron’s happiness, and that he had moped for two years because she had withheld it from him, was receiving every day a ruder shock.
The shocks were the more violent because Byron, in the midst of his pecuniary embarrassments and theatrical philanderings, was attacked by a disorder of the liver. No man is at his best when his liver is sluggish; and Byron probably was at his worst—gloomy, contentious, and prone to uncontrollable outbursts of passion. So there were scenes—the sort of scenes that one would expect: Lady Byron, on the one hand, coldly and reasonably reproachful—“always in the right,” and most careful not to lose her temper; Byron, on the other hand, talking to provoke her, boasting of abandoned wickedness, falling into fits of rage, much as his own mother had been wont to do when she rattled the fire-irons—throwing his watch on the ground and smashing it to pieces with the poker.
Very likely he was angry with Lady Byron because he did not love her—irritated beyond measure at every fresh revelation that she could never be to him what Mary Chaworth might have been. The beginning of unhappiness in marriage must often come like that. It is not unnatural, though it is unreasonable, and not to be combated by reason. Lady Byron, unhappily, had no other weapon than reason with which to combat it; and it is quite likely that her very reasonableness made the trouble worse. It did, at any rate, pass from bad to worse—and then from worse to worst—during the critical days of her confinement, at the end of 1815.
Those were the circumstances which paved the way for open war and the demand for judicial separation. Or, at all events, those were some of the circumstances; for the story is long, and intricate, and involved, and darkened with the clouds of controversy. Byron’s version of it, it is needless to say, is quite different from Lady Byron’s. According to him the causes of the separation were “too simple to be easily found out.” According to her, they included an enormity of which he dared not speak; and the clash of these conflicting allegations constitutes what has been called “the Byron mystery.”