They did not like it, and moved into villas on the other side of the Rhone, only to discover that the Hotel d’Angleterre overlooked them, and that its obliging landlord had set up a large telescope so that his visitors might survey their proceedings the more commodiously. This obliged them to move again—Byron to the Villa Diodati, and Shelley to the Maison Chapuis or Campagne Mont Allègre—and there at last they were able, as the party of the Libertins in the Geneva of the Reformation put it, to “live as they chose without reference to the preachers.”
To much that they did there the preachers, even those of Calvin’s time, could have taken no exception. They talked—the sort of talk that would have been high over the heads of their censors of the d’Angleterre; they rowed on the lake, and sang in their boat in the moonlight; they read poetry, and wrote it. Shelley pressed Byron to read Wordsworth; and he did so, with results which are apparent in the Third Canto of “Childe Harold,” where we find the Wordsworthian conception of the unity of man with Nature reproduced and spoiled, as Wordsworth most emphatically insisted, in the reproduction. There was a week of rain during which the friends decided to fleet the time by writing ghost stories, and Mary Godwin wrote “Frankenstein.” There was also a circular tour of the lake, undertaken without the ladies, in the course of which Shelley had a narrow escape from drowning near Saint Gingolph. These things were a part, and not the least important part, of the diversions which helped Byron to defy the slanderers whom he could not answer. So was his short trip to the Oberland with Hobhouse. And, finally, meaning so little to him that one naturally keeps it to the end and adds it as a detail, there was the “affair” with Miss Jane Clairmont.
On this branch of the subject he wrote to Mrs. Leigh, who had heard exaggerated rumours:
“As to all these ‘mistresses,’ Lord help me—I have had but one. Now don’t scold; but what could I do?—a foolish girl, in spite of all I could say or do, would come after me, or rather went before—for I found her here—and I have had all the plague possible to persuade her to go back again; but at last she went. Now, dearest, I do most truly tell thee that I could not help this, that I did all I could to prevent it, and have at last put an end to it. I was not in love, nor have any love left for any; but I could not exactly play the Stoic with a woman who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophise me. Besides, I had been regaled of late with so many ‘two courses and a desert’ (Alas!) of aversion, that I was fain to take a little love (if pressed particularly) by way of novelty.”
The love had been pressed, as we have seen, and as Miss Clairmont, in her age, admitted, very particularly indeed. She had dreamt, she admits—and she would have us think that Shelley and Mary Godwin expected—that her alliance with “the great Lord Byron” was to be permanent; and this though she declares, elsewhere in her confessions, that she did not really love him, but was only dazzled by him, and that her heart, in truth, was Shelley’s.
It was an ambitious dream; and it would be easy to make a list of reasons why it was impossible that it should come true. The mood in which she found Byron was only one of them. The defects and limitations of her own qualities furnish others. She was a tradesman’s daughter, and, though well-educated, not without vulgarity; pretentious, but superficial; stage-struck, a romp, and a mimic. If she ever mimicked Byron—if, in particular, she ever mimicked his lameness—a good deal would be explained.
One does not know whether she did or not. What one does know is that he shook her off rather roughly, and, never having loved her, presently conceived a dislike for her; and that though she bore him a child—the little Allegra, so named after her birthplace, who only lived to be five years of age, and now lies buried at Harrow. To Allegra, indeed, Byron was good and kind—he looked forward, he told Moore and others, to the time when she would be a support to the loneliness of his old age; but to Allegra’s mother he would have nothing more to say. How she hunted him down, and how she and the Countess Guiccioli made each other jealous—these are matters into which it is unnecessary to enter here. The conclusions which Miss Clairmont drew, as she told Mr. Graham, was that Byron’s attitude towards women was that of a Sultan towards the ladies of his harem. No doubt it was so in her case—and through her fault; for her plight was very much like that of the worshipper of Juggernaut who should prostrate himself before the oncoming car and then complain because the wheels pass over him.
Probably, if she had been less pressing, or less clinging, he would have been more grateful; for there assuredly was cause for gratitude even though there was no room for love. Vulgar, feather-headed, stage-struck little thing that she was, Jane Clairmont, by throwing herself at Byron’s head, and telling him, without waiting to be asked, that she, at least, would count the world well lost for him—and still more perhaps by bringing him into relation with the Shelleys—had rendered him real help in the second desperate crisis of his life. One may repeat, indeed, that she helped him to live through that dark period; and if she knew that, or guessed it, she may well have felt aggrieved that his return for her passion was so inadequate.
But he could not help it. His heart was out of his keeping, and he could not give what he did not possess. A “passade” was all that he was capable of just then; but that this “passade” did really help him to feel his feet again in stormy waters, and bring him back once more to cheerfulness and self-respect, is amply proved, first by the change of tone which appears in his more intimate writings, and then by the new, and worse, way of life into which we see him falling after the curtain has been rung down on the episode.
Shelley departed, taking Miss Clairmont and her sister with him, sorely, as there is reason to believe, against the former’s wish, towards the end of August; the honeymoon, such as it was, having lasted about three months. Towards the end of the time, visitors began to arrive—“Monk” Lewis, and “Conversation” Sharp, and Scrope Davies, and Hobhouse—but most particularly Hobhouse who wrote Mrs. Leigh a reassuring letter to the effect that her brother was “living with the strictest attention to decorum, and free from all offence, either to God or man or woman,” having given up brandy and late hours and “quarts of magnesia” and “deluges of soda-water,” and appearing to be “as happy as it is consistent for a man of honour and common feeling to be after the occurrence of a calamity involving a charge, whether just or unjust, against his honour and his feeling.”