Five days later Byron again writes to Augusta Leigh:
‘On Sunday or Monday next, with leave of your lord and president, you will be well and ready to accompany me to Newstead, which you should see, and I will endeavour to render as comfortable as I can, for both our sakes.... Claughton is, I believe, inclined to settle.... More news from Mrs. [Chaworth], all friendship; you shall see her.’
Medora was born on or about April 15, 1814. ‘Lara’ was written between May 4 and 14. The opening lines, which would have set every tongue wagging, were withheld from publication until January, 1887. They were written in London early in May, and were addressed to the mother of Medora:
‘When thou art gone—the loved, the lost—the one
Whose smile hath gladdened, though perchance undone—
Whose name too dearly cherished to impart
Dies on the lip, but trembles in the heart;
Whose sudden mention can almost convulse,
And lightens through the ungovernable pulse—
Till the heart leaps so keenly to the word
We fear that throb can hardly beat unheard—[48]
Then sinks at once beneath that sickly chill
That follows when we find her absent still.
When thou art gone—too far again to bless—
Oh! God—how slowly comes Forgetfulness!
Let none complain how faithless and how brief
The brain’s remembrance, or the bosom’s grief,
Or ere they thus forbid us to forget
Let Mercy strip the memory of regret;
Yet—selfish still—we would not be forgot,
What lip dare say—“My Love—remember not”?
Oh! best—and dearest! Thou whose thrilling name
My heart adores too deeply to proclaim—
My memory, almost ceasing to repine,
Would mount to Hope if once secure of thine.
Meantime the tale I weave must mournful be—
As absence to the heart that lives on thee!’
Lord Lovelace has told us that ‘nothing is too stupid for belief.’ We are disposed to agree with him, especially as he produces these lines in support of his accusation against Augusta Leigh. The absurdity of supposing that they were addressed to Byron’s sister appears to us to be so evident that it seems unnecessary to waste words in disputation. There is abundant proof that during this period Mrs. Leigh and Byron were in constant correspondence, and that he visited her almost daily during her simulated confinement and convalescence. When Murray sent her some books to while away the time, Byron wrote (April 9) on her behalf to thank him. And finally, as Augusta Leigh had no intention whatever of leaving London, she could in no sense have been ‘the lost one’ whose prospective departure filled Byron with despair. The poet and his sister—whom he was accustomed to address as ‘Goose’[49]—were then, and always, on most familiar terms. The ‘mention of her name’ (which was often on his lips) would certainly not have convulsed him, nor have caused his heart to beat so loudly that he feared lest others should hear it! The woman to whom those lines were addressed was Mary Chaworth, whose condition induced him, on April 18, to begin a fragment entitled ‘Magdalen’—she of whom he wrote on May 4:
‘I speak not—I trace not—I breathe not thy name—
There is Love in the sound—there is Guilt in the fame.’
Lord Lovelace, in his impetuosity, and with very imperfect knowledge of Byron’s life-story, ties every doubtful scrap of his grandfather’s poetry into his bundle of proofs against Augusta Leigh, without perceiving any discrepancy in the nature of his evidence. A moment’s reflection might have convinced him that the lines we have quoted could not, by any possibility, have applied to one whom he subsequently addressed as:
‘My sister! my sweet sister! if a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine;
*******
Had I but sooner learnt the crowd to shun,
I had been better than I now can be;
The passions which have torn me would have slept;
I had not suffered, and thou hadst not wept.’
It must be admitted that Byron, through indiscreet confidences and reckless mystifications, was partly the cause of the suspicions which afterwards fell upon his sister. Lady Byron has left it on record that Byron early in 1814—before the birth of Medora—told Lady Caroline Lamb that a woman he passionately loved was with child by him, and that if a daughter was born it should be called Medora.[50] At about the same time ‘he advanced, at Holland House, the most extraordinary theories about the relations of brother and sister, which originated the reports about Mrs. Leigh.’
That, after ninety years, such nonsense should be regarded as evidence against a woman so well known in the society of her day as was Mrs. Leigh, justifies our concurrence with Lord Lovelace’s opinion that ‘nothing is too stupid for belief.’