CHAPTER VI.
MARRIAGE, AND FAREWELL TO ENGLAND.
"As for poets," says Scott, "I have seen all the best of my time and country, and, though Burns had the most glorious eye imaginable, I never thought any of them would come up to an artist's notion of the character, except Byron. His countenance is a thing to dream of." Coleridge writes to the same effect, in language even stronger. We have from all sides similar testimony to the personal beauty which led the unhappiest of his devotees to exclaim, "That pale face is my fate!"
Southern critics, as Chasles, Castelar, even Mazzini, have dealt leniently with the poet's relations to the other sex; and Elze extends to him in this regard the same excessive stretch of charity. "Dear Childe Harold," exclaims the German professor, "was positively besieged by women. They have, in truth, no right to complain of him: from his childhood he had seen them on their worst side." It is the casuistry of hero-worship to deny that Byron was unjust to women, not merely in isolated instances, but in his prevailing views of their character and claims. "I regard them," he says, in a passage only distinguished from others by more extravagant petulance, "as very pretty but inferior creatures, who are as little in their place at our tables as they would be in our council chambers. The whole of the present system with regard to the female sex is a remnant of the barbarism of the chivalry of our forefathers. I look on them as grown-up children; but, like a foolish mamma, I am constantly the slave of one of them. The Turks shut up their women, and are much happier; give a woman a looking-glass and burnt almonds, and she will be content."
In contrast with this, we have the moods in which he drew his pictures of Angiolina, and Haidee, and Aurora Raby, and wrote the invocations to the shade of Astarte, and his letters in prose and verse to Augusta; but the above passage could never have been written by Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Shelley. The class whom he was reviling seemed, however, during "the day of his destiny," bent on confirming his judgment by the blindness of their worship. His rank and fame, the glittering splendour of his verse, the romance of his travels, his picturesque melancholy and affectation of mysterious secrets, combined with the magic of his presence to bewitch and bewilder them. The dissenting malcontents, condemned as prudes and blues, had their revenge. Generally, we may say that women who had not written books adored Byron; women who had written or were writing books distrusted, disliked, and made him a moral to adorn their tales, often to point their fables with. He was by the one set caressed and spoilt, and "beguiled too long;" by the other, "betrayed too late." The recent memoirs of Frances Ann Kemble present a curious record of the process of passing from one extreme to the other. She dwells on the fascination exerted over her mind by the first reading of his poetry, and tells how she "fastened on the book with a grip like steel," and carried it off and hid it under her pillow; how it affected her "like an evil potion," and stirred her whole being with a tempest of excitement, till finally she, with equal weakness, flung it aside, "resolved to read that grand poetry no more, and broke through the thraldom of that powerful spell." The confession brings before us a type of the transitions of the century, on its way from the Byronic to the anti-Byronic fever, of which later state Mrs. Norton and Miss Martineau are among the most pronounced representatives.
Byron's garrulity with regard to those delicate matters on which men of more prudence or chivalry are wont to set the seal of silence, has often the same practical effect as reticence; for he talks so much at large—every page of his Journal being, by his own admission, apt to "confute and abjure its predecessor"—that we are often none the wiser. Amid a mass of conjecture, it is manifest that during the years between his return from Greece and final expatriation (1811-1816), including the whole period of his social glory—though not yet of his solid fame—he was lured into liaisons of all sorts and shades. Some, now acknowledged as innocent, were blared abroad by tongues less skilled in pure invention than in distorting truth. On others, as commonplaces of a temperament "all meridian," it were waste of time to dwell. Byron rarely put aside a pleasure in his path; but his passions were seldom unaccompanied by affectionate emotions, genuine while they lasted. The verses to the memory of a lost love veiled as "Thyrza," of moderate artistic merit, were not, as Moore alleges, mere plays of imagination, but records of a sincere grief.[1] Another intimacy exerted so much influence on this phase of the poet's career, that to pass it over would be like omitting Vanessa's name from the record of Swift. Lady Caroline Lamb, granddaughter of the first Earl Spencer, was one of those few women of our climate who, by their romantic impetuosity, recall the "children of the sun." She read Burns in her ninth year, and in her thirteenth idealized William Lamb (afterwards Lord Melbourne) as a statue of Liberty. In her nineteenth (1805) she married him, and lived for some years, during which she was a reigning belle and toast, a domestic life only marred by occasional eccentricities. Rogers, whom in a letter to Lady Morgan she numbers among her lovers, said she ought to know the new poet, who was three years her junior, and the introduction took place in March, 1812. After the meeting, she wrote in her journal, "Mad—bad—and dangerous to know;" but, when the fashionable Apollo called at Melbourne House, she "flew to beautify herself." Flushed by his conquest, he spent a great part of the following year in her company, during which time the apathy or self-confidence of the husband laughed at the worship of the hero. "Conrad" detailed his travels and adventures, interested her, by his woes, dictated her amusements, invited her guests, and seems to have set rules to the establishment. "Medora," on the other hand, made no secret of her devotion, declared that they were affinities, and offered him her jewels. But after the first excitement, he began to grow weary of her talk about herself, and could not praise her indifferent verses: "he grew moody, and she fretful, when their mutual egotisms jarred." Byron at length concurred in her being removed for a season to her father's house in Ireland, on which occasion he wrote one of his glowing farewell letters. When she came back, matters were little better. The would-be Juliet beset the poet with renewed advances, on one occasion penetrating to his rooms in the disguise of a page, on another threatening to stab herself with a pair of scissors, and again, developing into a Medea, offering her gratitude to any one who would kill him. "The 'Agnus' is furious," he writes to Hodgson, in February, 1813, in one of the somewhat ungenerous bursts to which he was too easily provoked. "You can have no idea of the horrible and absurd things she has said and done since (really from the best motives) I withdrew my homage…. The business of last summer I broke off, and now the amusement of the gentle fair is writing letters literally threatening my life." With one member of the family, Lady Melbourne, Mr. Lamb's mother, and sister of Sir Ralph Milbanke, he remained throughout on terms of pleasant intimacy. He appreciated the talent and sense, and was ready to profit by the experience and tact of "the cleverest of women." But her well-meant advice had unfortunate results, for it was on her suggestion that he became a suitor for the hand of her niece, Miss Milbanke. Byron first proposed to this lady in 1813; his offer was refused, but so graciously that they continued to correspond on friendly, which gradually grew into intimate terms, and his second offer, towards the close of the following year, was accepted.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Trelawny says that Thyrza was a cousin, but that on this subject Byron was always reticent. Mr. Minto, as we have seen, associates her with the disguised girl of 1807-8.]
After a series of vain protests, and petulant warnings against her cousin by marriage, who she said was punctual at church, and learned, and knew statistics, but was "not for Conrad, no, no, no!" Lady Caroline lapsed into an attitude of fixed hostility; and shortly after the crash came, and her predictions were realized, vented her wrath in the now almost forgotten novel of Glenarvon, in which some of Byron's real features were represented in conjunction with many fantastic additions. Madame de Staël was kind enough to bring a copy of the book before his notice when they met on the Lake of Geneva, but he seems to have been less moved by it than by most attacks. We must however, bear in mind his own admission in a parallel case. "I say I am perfectly calm; I am, nevertheless, in a fury." Over the sad vista of the remaining years of the unhappy lady's life we need not linger. During a considerable part of it she appears hovering about the thin line that separates some kinds of wit and passion from madness; writing more novels, burning her hero's effigy and letters, and then clamouring for a lock of his hair, or a sight of his portrait; separated from, and again reconciled to, a husband to whose magnanimous forbearance and compassion she bears testimony to the last, comparing herself to Jane Shore; attempting Byronic verses, loudly denouncing and yet never ceasing inwardly to idolize, the man whom she regarded as her betrayer, perhaps only with justice in that he had unwittingly helped to overthrow her mental balance. After eight years of this life, lit up here and there by gleams of social brilliancy, we find her carriage, on the 12th of July, 1824, suddenly confronted by a funeral. On hearing that the remains of Byron were being carried to the tomb, she shrieked, and fainted. Her health finally sank, and her mind gave way under this shock; but she lingered till January, 1828, when she died, after writing a calm letter to her husband, and bequeathing the poet's miniature to her friend, Lady Morgan.
"I have paid some of my debts, and contracted others," Byron writes to Moore, on September 15th, 1814; "but I have a few thousand pounds which I can't spend after my heart in this climate, and so I shall go back to the south. I want to see Venice and the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses, and look at the coast of Greece from Italy. All this however depends upon an event which may or may not happen. Whether it will I shall probably know tomorrow, and if it does I can't well go abroad at present." "A wife," he had written, in the January of the same year, "would be my salvation;" but a marriage entered upon in such a flippant frame of mind could, scarcely have been other than disastrous. In the autumn of the year we are told that a friend,[2] observing how cheerless was the state both of his mind and prospects, advised him to marry, and after much discussion he consented, naming to his correspondent Miss Milbanke. To this his adviser objected, remarking that she had, at present, no fortune, and that his embarrassed affairs would not allow him to marry without one, etc. Accordingly, he agreed that his friend should write a proposal to another lady, which was done. A refusal arrived as they were one morning sitting together. "'You see,' said Lord Byron, 'that after all Miss Milbanke is to be the person,' and wrote on the moment. His friend, still remonstrating against his choice, took up the letter; but, on reading it, observed, 'Well, really, this is a very pretty letter; it is a pity it should not go.' 'Then it shall go,' said Lord Byron, and, in so saying, sealed and sent off this fiat of his fate." The incident seems cut from a French novel; but so does the whole strange story—one apparently insoluble enigma in an otherwise only too transparent life. On the arrival of the lady's answer he was seated at dinner, when his gardener came in, and presented him with his mother's wedding-ring, lost many years before, and which had just been found, buried in the mould beneath her window. Almost at the same moment the letter arrived; and Byron exclaimed, "If it contains a consent (which it did), I will be married with this very ring." He had the highest anticipations of his bride, appreciating her "talents, and excellent qualities;" and saying, "she is so good a person that I wish I was a better." About the same date he writes to various friends in the good spirits raised by his enthusiastic reception from the Cambridge undergraduates, when in the course of the same month he went to the Senate House to give his vote for a Professor of Anatomy.
[Footnote 2: Doubtless Moore himself, who tells the story.]