“In the days when Byron was manager of Drury Lane Theatre I bethought myself that I would go on to the stage. Our means were very narrow, and it was necessary for me to do something, and this seemed to suit me better than anything else; in any case it was the only form of occupation congenial to my girlish love of glitter and excitement.... I called, then, on Byron in his capacity of manager, and he promised to do what he could to help me as regards the stage. The result you know. I am too old now to play with any mock repentance. I was young, and vain, and poor. He was famous beyond all precedent.... His beauty was as haunting as his fame, and he was all-powerful in the direction in which my ambition turned. It seems to me almost needless to say that the attentions of a man like this, with all London at his feet, very quickly completely turned the head of a girl in my position; and when you recollect that I was brought up to consider marriage not only as a useless but as an absolutely sinful custom, that only bigotry made necessary, you will scarcely wonder at the results, which you know.”
That is the story as Miss Clairmont remembered it, or as she wished posterity to believe it. She also seems to have been fully persuaded in her own mind that Shelley had recommended her to apply to Byron, and that it was about her that Byron and Lady Byron fell out; but the letters published by Mr. Murray show all this to be a tissue of absurd inexactitudes. What actually happened was that Miss Clairmont wrote to Byron under the pseudonym of “E Trefusis,” beginning “An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you,” and proceeding to say: “It may seem a strange assertion, but it is not the less true that I place my happiness in your hands.”
There is no reference there, it will be remarked, to any desire on Miss Clairmont’s part to adopt the theatrical profession. The few references to such a desire which do occur later in the correspondence are of such a nature as to show that Miss Clairmont did not entertain it seriously, consisting mainly of objections to Byron’s proposal that she should discuss the matter with Mr. Kinnaird instead of him. Miss Clairmont, in short, made it abundantly clear that she was in love, not with the theatre, but with Byron; and the more evasive Byron showed himself, the more ardently and impulsively did she advance. We gather from her letters, indeed, that most of those letters were left unanswered, that Byron very frequently was “not at home” to her, and that, when she was at last admitted, she did not find him alone.
Most women would have been discouraged by such a series of repulses; but Miss Clairmont was not. In response to a communication in which Byron had begged her to “write short,” she wrote: “I do not expect you to love me; I am not worthy of your love.” But she begged him, if he could not love, at least to let himself be loved—to suffer her to demonstrate that she, on her part, could “love gently and with affection”; and thus she paved the way to a practical proposal:
“Have you, then,” (she asked) “any objection to the following plan? On Thursday Evening we may go out of town together by some stage of mail about the distance of ten or twelve miles. There we shall be free and unknown; we can return early the following morning. I have arranged everything here so that the slightest suspicion may not be excited. Pray do so with your people.”
Even to that appeal Byron seems to have turned a deaf ear. One infers as much from the fact that other appeals followed it: “Do not delay our meeting after Saturday—I cannot endure the suspense,” &c. After that, however, and apparently quite soon after it, followed the capitulation; and for the sequel we will turn again to Mr. Graham’s report of Miss Clairmont’s confessions:
“He was making his final arrangements for leaving England, when I told him of the project the Shelleys and I had formed of the journey to Geneva. He at once suggested that we should all meet at Geneva, and delightedly fell in with my proposal to accompany me one day when I had arranged to visit the Shelleys at Marlow,[10] where they were then stopping, and arrange matters. We started early one morning, and we arrived at Marlow about the mid-day dinner-hour.... Byron refreshed himself with a huge mug of beer.... A few minutes afterwards in came Shelley and Mary. It was such a merry party that we made at lunch in the inn parlour: Byron, despite his misfortunes, was in the spirits of a boy at leaving England, and Shelley was overjoyed at meeting his idolised poet, who had actually come all the way from London to see him.”
Such are the facts, so far as they are ascertainable, concerning the origin of this curious liaison. It is a story which begins, and goes on for some time, though it does not conclude, like the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife; and Miss Clairmont recalls how exultantly she proclaimed her triumph. “Percy! Mary! What do you think? The great Lord Byron loves me!” she exclaimed, bursting in upon her friends; and she adds that Shelley regarded the attachment as right and natural and proper, and a proof that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
He may have done so, for he was a dreamer, cradled in illusions, unfettered by codes, always ready to look upon life as a fairy-tale that was turning out to be true. Whether he did so or not, it seems at any rate pretty clear that he was in Miss Clairmont’s confidence, knew for what reason Byron wished to meet him at Geneva, and acquiesced in the proposal. But it is equally certain that he was not in Byron’s confidence, and had no suspicion of the spirit in which Byron had entered into the intrigue.
For Byron was not in love with Miss Clairmont, and never had been in love with her, and never would be. In so far as he loved at all, he still loved Mary Chaworth, to whom his heart always returned at every crisis of unhappiness. There was no question of any renewal of the old passionate relations; but she consented to see him once more before he left England. “When we two parted in silence and tears” seems to belong to this moment of his life—the moment at which Miss Clairmont first persuaded herself, and then persuaded Shelley, that she was enthroned for ever in the author’s heart. That, still, was his one real sentimental hold on life. Nothing else mattered; and the coquetries and audacities of this child of seventeen mattered less than most things.