It appears that one day Lady Byron was talking to her husband about ‘Lara,’ which seemed to her to be ‘like the darkness in which one fears to behold spectres.’ This bait was evidently too tempting for Byron to resist. He replied: ‘“Lara”—there’s more in that than in any of them.’ As he spoke he shuddered, and turned his eyes to the ground.
Before we examine that poem to see how much it may contain of illuminating matter, we will touch upon a remark Byron made to his wife, which Lord Lovelace quotes without perceiving its depth and meaning. We will quote ‘Astarte’:
‘He told Lady Byron that if she had married him when he first proposed, he should not have written any of the poems which followed [the first and second Cantos] “Childe Harold.”’
This is perfectly true. Byron proposed to Miss Milbanke in 1812. If she had married him then, he would not have renewed his intimacy with Mary Chaworth in June, 1813. There would have been no heart-hunger, no misery, no remorse, and, in short, no inspiration for ‘The Giaour,’ ‘The Bride,’ ‘The Corsair,’ and ‘Lara.’ Miss Milbanke’s refusal of his offer of marriage in 1812 rankled long in Byron’s mind, and provoked those ungenerous reproaches which have been, with more or less exaggeration, reported by persons in Lady Byron’s confidence. The mischief was done between the date of Miss Milbanke’s refusal and her acceptance of his offer, which occurred after the fury of his passion for Mary Chaworth had burnt itself out. No blame attaches to Lady Byron for this misfortune. When Byron first proposed, her affections were elsewhere engaged; she could not, therefore, dispose of her heart to him. When she at last accepted him, it was too late for happiness.
In a letter which Byron wrote to Miss Milbanke previous to his marriage,[51] he unconsciously prophesied the worst:
‘The truth is that could I have foreseen that your life was to be linked to mine—had I even possessed a distinct hope, however distant—I would have been a different and better being. As it is, I have sometimes doubts, even if I should not disappoint the future, nor act hereafter unworthily of you, whether the past ought not to make you still regret me—even that portion of it with which you are not unacquainted. I did not believe such a woman existed—at least for me—and I sometimes fear I ought to wish that she had not.’
When Byron said that he had doubts whether the past would not eventually reflect injuriously upon his future wife, he referred, not to Augusta Leigh, but to his fatal intercourse with Mary Chaworth. The following sentences taken from Mrs. Leigh’s letters to Francis Hodgson, who knew the truth, prove that the mystery only incidentally affected Augusta. The letters were written February, 1816.
‘From what passed [between Captain Byron and Mrs. Clermont] now, if they choose it, it must come into court! God alone knows the consequences.’
‘It strikes me that, if their pecuniary proposals are favourable, Byron will be too happy to escape the exposure. He must be anxious. It is impossible he should not in some degree.’
These are the expressions, not of a person connected with a tragedy, but rather of one who was a spectator of it. Every impartial person must see that. When, on another occasion, Byron told his wife that he wished he had gone abroad—as he had intended—in June, 1813, he undoubtedly implied that the fatal intimacy with Mary Chaworth would have been avoided. This seems so clear to us that we are surprised that Byron’s statement on the subject of his poems should have made no impression on the mind of Lord Lovelace, and should have elicited nothing from him in ‘Astarte,’ except the banale suggestion that Byron’s literary activity must have been accidental!