It will always be easy to take an interest in Byron because he was not only a scamp but a hero—or, alternatively, because he was not only a hero but a scamp. As a hero he can be taken seriously: as a villain he can be taken comically. His letters, like Don Juan, reveal him at their best chiefly on the comic side. He was not only a wit, but an audacious wit, and there is a kind of audacity that amuses us, whether in a guttersnipe or in a peer. Byron was a guttersnipe in scarlet and ermine. He enjoyed all the more playing the part of a guttersnipe, because he could play it in a peer’s robe. He was obviously the sort of person who, if brought up in the gutter, would be sent to a reformatory. Imagine a reformatory boy, unreformed and possessed of genius, loosed on respectable society, and you will have a picture of Byron. Not that Byron did not share the point of view of respectable society on the most important matters. He had no sympathy with the heresies of Shelley, whom he thought “crazy against religion and morality.” He did not want a new morality, as Shelley did: he was quite content with the old morality and the old immorality. He never could have run away with a woman on principle. Love with him was not a principle, but an appetite. He was a glutton who did not know where to stop. He himself never pretended that it was the desire of the moth for the star that was the cause of his troubles. He was an orthodox materialist, as we may gather from one of his unusually frank letters to Lady Melbourne, a lady in her sixties, to whom he ran with the tale of every fresh amour, like a newsboy with the stop-press edition of an evening paper. We find him at the age of twenty-five or so writing to explain that he was sure to die fairly young. “I began very early and very violently,” he wrote, “and alternate extremes of excess and abstinence have utterly destroyed—oh, unsentimental word!—my stomach, and, as Lady Oxford used seriously to say, a broken heart means nothing but a bad digestion.” Byron, no doubt, enjoyed posturing, whether he exposed a broken heart or a weak stomach. But, for a poet, he undoubtedly lived and thought on the material plane out of all proportion to his life and thought on the spiritual plane. He felt much the same dread of a respectable woman as did the wicked young æsthete of the ’nineties. When he was thinking of getting married, and had his eye on Miss Milbanke, he wrote doubtingly to Lady Melbourne: “I admired your niece, but she is engaged to Eden; besides, she deserves a better heart than mine. What shall I do—shall I advertise?” About the same time he was writing concerning women in general:
I am sadly out of practice lately; except a few sighs to a gentlewoman at supper, who was too much occupied with ye fourth wing of her second chicken to mind anything that was not material.
If the wing of a chicken was not at least as immaterial as Byron’s sighs, there must have been something amiss with the cooking. Byron’s sighs to women were material enough, one fancies, to have been visible, like a drayman’s breath on a frosty day.
The letters to Lady Melbourne reveal him in an extraordinary light, even for an amorist. While attempting to arrange a match with Lady Melbourne’s niece he fills the greater part of his letter to her with the backwash of his intrigue with her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb, and with stories of intrigues with various other ladies. Byron, like many amorists, seems never to have realised that adventures are to the adventurous in love as in other matters, but to have looked on himself as a man pestered by women when he was only a man pestered by ordinary greed and extraordinary opportunity. If he could not shift the blame for his sins on to the woman, he would even shift it on to her husband. “He literally provoked and goaded me into it,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne, about the husband of Lady Frances Webster, at a time when he seemed to be falling almost seriously in love with Lady Frances. No one who cares for scandalous literature should miss these letters in which Byron writes off to Lady Melbourne rapturous accounts of every step in the wooing of the wife of his host. “I am glad they amaze you,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne concerning the Websters; “anything that confirms and extends one’s observations on life and character delights me.” It does not appear to have occurred to him that, amazing though the Websters were, they were but as copper to gold compared to his own amazing self. Lady Frances, at least, would have been considerably amazed if she had known that, every time she sighed, the fat young poet who adored her heliographed the fact from Yorkshire to London. In one of his letters he tells of a game of billiards with his hostess, in the course of which he slipped a love-letter to her. Just at that moment, “who should enter the room but the person who ought at the moment to have been in the Red Sea, if Satan had any civility”—in other words, Webster, his host and her husband. Even as he is writing the description of the incident to Lady Melbourne, Byron makes a parenthesis to tell her that Webster has again come into the room (“I am this moment interrupted by the Marito, and write this before him. He has brought me a political pamphlet in MS. to decipher and applaud; I shall content myself with the last; oh, he is gone again”). Ultimately, however, Byron spared Lady Frances—at least, that is how he put it. He protested to Lady Melbourne that he loved the lady and would have sacrificed everything for her, and that Lady Melbourne wronged him to think otherwise. “I hate sentiment,” he told her, “and, in consequence, my epistolary levity makes you believe me as hollow and heartless as my letters are light.” The truth is, Byron was, in many of his relations, heartless. He kissed and told, and he enjoyed telling, at least, as much as he enjoyed kissing. He tells Lady Melbourne, for instance, about the “exquisite oddity” of Lady Frances’s letters—“the simplicity of her cunning and her exquisite reasons”:
She vindicates her treachery to [Webster] thus: after condemning deceit in general, and hers in particular, she says: “But then remember it is to deceive un marito, and to prevent all the unpleasant consequences, etc., etc.”
It is clear that Lady Frances, though pure, shocked Byron, just as Byron, though impure, shocks the average reader. She even besought him to go on writing to her husband:
Again, she desires me to write to him kindly, for she believes he cares for nobody but me!
Byron could never understand unconventional behaviour. “Is not all this a comedy?” he asks Lady Melbourne.
Byron, as we read his letters and poems together, seems to lead the double life of an actor. There is the Byron who stands in the middle of the stage in the fierce light that beats upon a poet, and who declaims—how gloriously!—:
The mountains look on Marathon—