Home Life of Great Authors

by Hattie Tyng Griswold

LORD BYRON.

So many volumes have been written about the domestic life and the loves of Lord Byron, that it would be a hopeless undertaking to attempt to say anything new about them. But the story of Byron's life will never lose its fascination, and to every new generation of readers the romance will be fresh. Marvellously beautiful, wonderfully gifted, unfortunately constituted man; wronged by his birth, wronged by his education, wronged most of all by himself, the world will never cease to wonder and to weep when his tragic story is told. While the language remains his words will live. Immortal poetry for youth!—new generations will learn it by heart, when the older generations are forgetting; and long after all memory of his waywardness and folly has faded from the world, his deathless songs will still sing on.

In any attempt to understand Byron, his ancestry must be much considered. It will never do to compare him with cool-headed, calm-blooded, matter-of-fact people. He was the peculiar product of a peculiar race. Coming through generations of hot, turbulent blood, which was never once mastered or tamed by its possessors, he entered the world with a temperament and disposition which made it simply impossible that he should lead the ordinary life of the British Philistine of his day.

As far back as they have been traced, the family were violent, passionate, high-spirited, but unrestrained in the indulgence of their desires by any of the cardinal principles of morality. Byron's father, one of Byron's biographers tells us, had outraged in his previous family life not only the principles of religion, but also the laws of society; and when, in 1783, he married Catherine Gordon, the wealthy heiress of Gight, Aberdeenshire, it was chiefly for the purpose of paying off his debts with her fortune. Within two years after the marriage the heiress of Gight was reduced to a pittance of one hundred and fifty pounds a year. In 1790, for economy's sake, they removed from London to Aberdeen, but soon separated.

Even after this, Captain Byron was mean-spirited enough to solicit money from his wife, and she had not the heart to refuse him. With a small supply thus obtained he crossed the channel, and in 1791 died in Valenciennes, in the North of France. Of the violent temper of Byron's mother many stories are told, and of her heartless treatment of him in his early years; so that upon neither side can we find much upon which we could expect to build a very noble or well-balanced character, and the fact seems to be that the eccentricities of the Byron family were so great as to be dangerously near the point called insanity.

A youth inheriting such blood as this, and brought up without even a pretence of moral or religious training, could hardly be expected to develop many of the domestic virtues. Neither could high-mindedness or lofty principle be predicted of him. And in truth, Byron possessed neither of these things. With this fiery Norman blood flowing in his veins, restlessness was the habitual condition of his existence, such restlessness as drove him to seek excitement at whatever cost,—quiet, as he expressed it, to the quick bosom being hell. This restlessness led him into all sorts of folly and excess, in the pursuit of new excitements. Then he was cursed with an exaggerated sensibility, which, while it gave him many rare delights in life, inflicted upon him also the keenest tortures. His massive egotism was the cause, doubtless, of many of his most marked eccentricities. He was so anxious to have the world's gaze fixed upon him that he said and did things continually for the mere purpose of holding its attention. In this way he frequently made himself appear worse than he really was. Society was held willingly in the thrall of his personality. A dull world likes to have laid bare for its inspection the pulses of a vivid existence. Byron may have been no worse than many other men of his day, for it was a time of general immorality, but he never concealed even his worst vices. While hypocrisy is a national vice in England, Byron, though essentially English in most things, never possessed this marked characteristic of his countrymen. He flaunted his vices in the light of day; and the world took a speedy revenge upon him for his audacity. The little episode of his love for Mary Chaworth occurred at so early an age that it seems scarcely probable that it affected him as seriously as he claimed; yet he was a very precocious child, and his account of the strength of his passion, and its disappointment, may not be wholly an affectation. It is difficult, too, to arrive at his real feeling toward Miss Milbank, there was so much of contradiction both in his words and in his conduct. Miss Milbank probably loved him but feared to marry him, having heard of the irregularities of his life. And certainly the sort of life which Byron had led was a very poor preparation for happiness at the fireside, and if all other causes of unhappiness had been wanting would doubtless have wrecked his union with Miss Milbank. But there were not wanting numberless other sources of misery to this ill-mated couple, first among which was the complete incompatibility of their tastes, feelings, characters. That she was a noble, intelligent, and high-principled woman, none have ever denied. The wonder was, not that she would not live with such a man as Byron, but that she could ever have married him. In charity we must decide that she was ignorant of the unspeakable degradation of such an act. That he was a famous man of genius, the most wonderfully gifted poet of his time, might have been a temptation, but it was no excuse, if she entered into the contract with her eyes open. But aside from the question of vice or virtue, there was nothing in common between them. She felt that she had fallen from the unalterable serenity and dignity of her existence, into chaos. Her natural reserve and his natural frankness were the occasion of continual clashings. Her formality and his bluntness caused constant unrest. Accustomed to the regularity of a well-ordered English household, she was miserable at the utter demoralization of their home,—of which the bailiff had possession nine times during the short year they occupied it. Formed for a calm, domestic life, she would probably have been a most admirable wife to a man suited to her virtuous tastes, but her very virtues irritated Byron.

Lady Caroline Lamb, who had loved him so madly, and on whom he had expended a temporary passion, was in her ardent nature and erratic genius much better suited to his tastes; and yet it had not taken him long to tire of her, beautiful as she had been. And were ever such bitter and cruel words addressed to a wronged woman, even though she had herself been fearfully to blame in the matter, as those sent by Byron to this poor creature, who had sent him a last touching appeal to remember her? He wrote:—

"Remember you! remember you! Until the waters of Lethe have flowed over the burning torrent of your existence, shame and remorse will cry in your ears, and pursue you with the delirium of fever. Remember you! Do not doubt it, I will remember. And your husband will also remember you. Neither of us can ever forget you. To him you have been an unfaithful wife, and to me—a devil!"

Terrible words, which apparently changed her love to hate, for she was his relentless enemy for many years. But one day the great poet died, in Greece, the death of a hero. His body was taken back to England for burial, and Caroline Lamb stood at her window and saw the procession go by. The coffin was followed by a dog, howling piteously. Caroline uttered a heartrending cry, and sunk to the floor insensible. They raised her and placed her in her bed, from which she never rose; she was borne from it to her grave.