A SCHOOLBOY'S LOVE AFFAIRS--MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER, AND MARY CHAWORTH
First on the list of early loves comes little Mary Duff of Aberdeen. She
was one of Byron's Scotch cousins, though a very distant one; and there is
hardly anything else to be said, except that he was a child and she was a
child in their kingdom by the sea. Only no wind blew out of a cloud
chilling her. Her mother made a second marriage--described by Byron as a
"faux pas" because it was socially disadvantageous--and left the city; and
the two children never met again.
It was of no importance, of course. They were only a little more than
seven when they were separated. But Byron was proud of his precocity, and
liked to recall it, and to wonder if any other lover had ever been equally
precocious. "I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff," he
wrote in a fragment of a diary at the age of twenty-five; and he reminded
himself how he used to lie awake, picturing her, and how he urged his
nurse to write her a love letter on his behalf, and how they sat
together--"gravely making love in our way"--while Mary expressed pity for
her younger sister Helen, for not having an admirer too. Above all, he
reminded himself of the shock which he felt, years afterwards, when the
sudden communication of a piece of news revived the recollection of the
idyll.
"My mother," he proceeded, "used always to rally me about this
childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen,
she told me, one day, 'Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh,
from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to
a Mr. C----.' And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or
account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into
convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much that, after I grew better,
she generally avoided the subject--to _me_--and contented herself with
telling it to all her acquaintance."
And then again:
"My misery, my love for that girl were so violent that I sometimes
doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that as it may,
hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder
stroke--it nearly choked me--to the horror of my mother and the
astonishment and almost incredulity of nearly everybody."
It is a well-known story, and one can add nothing to it beyond the fact
that Mary Duff's husband was Mr. Cockburn, the wine merchant, and that she
lived quite happily with him, and that we are entitled to think of her
whenever we drink a glass of Cockburn's port. But we may also doubt,
perhaps, whether Byron is, in this case, quite a faithful reporter of his
own emotions, and whether his grief was not artistically blended with
other and later regrets, and other and later perceptions of the fickleness
of the female heart and the mutability of human things. For when we come
to look at the dates, we find that the date of Mary Duff's marriage was
also the date of Byron's desperate passion for Mary Chaworth.
Between Mary Duff and Mary Chaworth, however, Margaret Parker had
intervened. She was another cousin, descended from Admiral Byron's
daughter Augusta. The first letter that Byron ever wrote was addressed to
her mother. "Dear Madam," it began, "My Mamma being unable to write
herself desires I will let you know that the potatoes are now ready and
you are welcome to them whenever you please." For the rest, one can only
quote Byron's brief reminiscence:
"My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition
of a passion for my first cousin Margaret Parker, one of the most
beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but
it would be difficult for me to forget her--her dark eyes--her long
eyelashes--her completely Greek cast of face and figure! I was then
about twelve--she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year
or two afterwards in consequence of a fall which injured her spine
and induced consumption.... My sister told me that, when she went to
see her, shortly before her death, upon accidentally mentioning my
name, Margaret coloured through the paleness of mortality to the
eyes.... I knew nothing of her illness, being at Harrow and in the
country, till she was gone. Some years after I made an attempt at an
elegy--a very dull one."
And then Byron speaks of his cousin's "transparent" beauty--"she looked as
if she had been made out of a rainbow"--and concludes:
"My passion had its usual effect upon me--I could not eat--I could not
sleep--I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she
loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time that must
elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of
separation! But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now."
The elegy is included in the collected works. Special indulgence is asked
for it on the ground that it was "composed at the age of fourteen." It is
very youthful in tone--quite on the conventional lines--as one would
expect. A single quatrain may be given--not to be criticised, but merely
to show that Byron, as a boy, was still looking at life pretty much as his
pastors and masters told him to look at it:
"_And shall presumptuous mortals Heaven arraign!
And, madly, Godlike Providence accuse!
Ah! no, far fly from me attempts so vain;--
I'll ne'er submission to my God refuse._"
We are still a long way here from the intense, the cynical, the defiant,
or even the posturing Byron of later years. The gift of personal
expression has not yet come to him; and he is still in literary fetters,
weeping, on paper, according to the rules. Intensity and the personal note
only begin with his sudden love for Mary Chaworth; cynicism and defiance
only begin after that love affair has ended in failure.
Mary Chaworth was the heir of the Annesley property, adjoining Newstead,
and she was the grand-niece of the Chaworth whom the wicked Lord Byron ran
through the body in the upper chamber of the Pall Mall tavern; so that
their marriage, if they could have been married, would, as Byron says,
"have healed feuds in which blood had been shed by our fathers." But Byron
was not yet the Byron who had only to come, and to be seen, in order to
conquer. He was a schoolboy of fifteen, which is an awkward age. He had
achieved no triumphs in any field which could give him self-assurance. He
was not yet a leader, even among his schoolfellows; and he was not only
lame, but also fat. How shall a fat boy hope, whatever fires of genius
burn within him, to enter the lists against his elders and bear away the
belle from county balls? Byron, at any rate, failed signally in the
attempt to do so.
Newstead having been let to Lord Grey de Ruthen, Mrs. Byron was, at the
time, lodging at Nottingham; and Byron had various reasons for preferring
to see as little of her as possible. She was never sympathetic; she was
often quarrelsome; it was her pleasant habit, when annoyed, to rattle the
fire-irons and throw the tongs at him. So he often availed himself of his
tenant's invitation to visit Newstead, whenever he liked; and from
Newstead it was the most natural thing in the world that he should go over
to Annesley, where Miss Chaworth, with whom he already had a slight
acquaintance, was living with her mother, Mrs. Clarke.
He was always welcome there. There was as little desire on his cousin's
side as on his to revive the recollection of the feud. When he came to
call, he was pressed to stay and sleep. At first he refused, most probably
from shyness, though he professed a superstitious fear of the family
portraits. They had "taken a grudge to him," he said, on account of the
duel; they would "come down from their frames at night to haunt him." But
presently his fears, or his shyness, were conquered. He had seen a ghost,
he said, in the park; and if he must see ghosts he might just as well see
them in the house; so, if it was all the same to his hosts, he would like
to stay.
He stayed, and was entranced with Mary Chaworth's singing. He rode with
her, and practiced pistol shooting on the terrace--more than a little
pleased, one conjectures, to show off his marksmanship. He went with
her--and with others, including a chaperon--on an excursion to Matlock and
Castleton. A note, written long afterwards, preserves a memory of the
trip:
"It happened that, in a cavern in Derbyshire, I had to cross in a boat
(in which two people only could lie down) a stream which flows under a
rock, with the rock so close upon the water as to admit the boat only
to be pushed on by a ferryman (a sort of Charon) who wades at the
stern, stooping all the time. The companion of my transit was M.A.C.,
with whom I had long been in love, and never _told_ it, though _she_
had discovered it without. I recollect my sensations, but cannot
describe them, and it is as well."
And no doubt Mary Chaworth encouraged the boy, amused at his raptures,
enjoying the visible proof of her power, prepared to snub him, in the end,
if necessary, but scarcely expecting that there would be any need for her
to do so. She was seventeen, and a girl of seventeen always feels capable
of reminding a boy of fifteen that the prayer book forbids him to marry
his grandmother. Moreover, she was engaged, though the engagement had not
yet been announced, to Mr. John Musters--a grown man and a Philistine--a
handsome, rather dissipated, hard-riding and hard-drinking country squire.
The dreamy, limping, fat boy from Harrow had no shadow of a chance against
his athletic rival. It was impossible for Mary Chaworth to divine the
genius that lurked beneath the fat. One has no right to expect such powers
of divination from girls of seventeen.
No doubt she thought the fat boy, as she would have said, "good fun." No
doubt she was amused when, as a demonstration that he was not too young to
be loved, he showed her the locket which Margaret Parker had given him,
three years before, when he was twelve. Unquestionably she flirted with
him--or, at least, let him flirt with her. She even gave him a ring, and
the gift must have raised high hopes, though it was the cause of the
discovery which brought the flirtation to an end.
Squire Musters discovered the ring among Byron's clothes one day when he
and the boy were bathing together in the Trent. He recognised it, picked
it up, and put it in his pocket. Byron claimed it, and Musters declined to
give it up; and then, to quote the Countess Guiccioli, who is the
authority for the story:
"High words were exchanged. On returning to the house, Musters jumped
on a horse and galloped off to ask an explanation from Miss Chaworth,
who, being forced to confess that Lord Byron wore the ring with her
consent, felt obliged to make amends to Musters by promising to
declare immediately her engagement with him."
Such is the story, as one gets it, through the Countess and through Moore,
from Byron himself; but we also get a side glimpse at it in a letter,
recently published,[2] from Mrs. Byron to Hanson, the family solicitor.
From this we gather that Byron, in order to make love, had absented
himself from school; that Drury had inquired the reason of his absence;
and that his mother was making strenuous, but unavailing, efforts to
induce him to return. Nothing was the matter with him but love--"desperate
love, the _worst_ of all _maladies_ in my opinion." He had hardly been to
see his mother at all, but had been spending all his time at Annesley. "It
is the last of all connexions," she added, "that I should wish to take
place"; and she begged Mr. Hanson to make arrangements for her son to
spend his next holidays elsewhere. Expense was no object; and it would
suit her very well if Dr. Drury could be induced to detain him at Harrow.
And Byron himself, meanwhile, was writing to his mother, alternately using
lofty language about his right to choose his own friends, and pleading for
one more day in order that he might take leave.
He took it; but there is more than one version of the story.
"Do you think," he overheard Mary Chaworth say to her maid, "that I could
care anything for that lame boy?" And, having heard that, "he instantly
darted out of the house, and, scarcely knowing whither he ran, never
stopped till he found himself at Newstead." That is what Moore tells us;
but the picture drawn in "The Dream,"--the most obviously and
deliberately autobiographical of Byron's poems--is different.
"She loved," he writes:
"_Another: even now she loved another,
And on the summit of that hill she stood
Looking afar as if her lover's steed
Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew._"
She was waiting, that is to say, for Squire Musters to ride up the lane,
while listening to Byron's declaration. That is the first picture; and
then there follows the picture of the boy who "within an antique oratory
stood," and to whom, presently, "the lady of his love re-entered":
"_She was serene and smiling then, and yet
She knew she was by him beloved--she knew,
For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart
Was darkened with her shadow, and she saw
That he was wretched, but she saw not all.
He rose, and with a cold and gentle grasp
He took her hand; a moment o'er his face
A tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced, and then it faded, as it came;
He dropped the hand he held, and with slow steps
Retired, but not as bidding her adieu,
For they did part with mutual smiles; he passed
From out the massy gate of that old Hall,
And mounting on his steed he went his way;
And ne'er repassed that hoary threshold more._"
There we have the Mary Chaworth legend as it has been handed down from one
generation of biographers to another. Byron, according to that legend, saw
Mary once after her marriage, but once only. He was on the point of
visiting her at a later date, but was dissuaded by his sister. "If you
go," Augusta said, "you will fall in love again, and then there will be a
scene; one step will lead to another, _et cela fera un éclat_." He agreed
that the reasoning was sound, and did as he was advised. He tells that
story himself, and adds: "Shortly after, I married."
And yet--the legend continues--this hopeless love, which touched his heart
at the age of fifteen, was the dominating influence of his life. Mary
Chaworth, though always absent, was yet always present. He never loved any
other woman, though he tried to love, and indeed seemed to love, several.
The vision of her face always came between him and them. His later love
affairs were only concessions, or attempts to escape from himself and his
memories--unavailing attempts, for this memory continued to haunt him
until the end.
It sounds incredible. The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts;
but the memories of youth are short, and the dreams of youth are dreams
from which we never fail to wake. And yet Byron insists, quite as much as
biographers have insisted. He insists in "The Dream," which was written
more than a decade after the parting. He insists in later poems, the inner
meaning of which is hardly to be questioned. So that speculation is
challenged, and, when pursued, leads us inevitably to a dilemma.
For of two things, one: Either Byron was posing--posing not only to the
world but to himself; or else the story, as all the biographers from Moore
to Cordy Jeaffreson have told it, is incomplete, and after an interlude,
had a sequel.
To search for such a sequel will be our task presently. Unless we can find
one, the development of the personal note in Byron's work will have to be
left unexplained. The impression which we get, if we read the more
personal poems in quick succession, is of a man who first awakes from the
dream of love--and remains very wide awake for a season--and then relapses
and dreams it all over again. Unless the story which first set him
dreaming had had a sequel, that would hardly be. So we will seek for the
sequel in due course, though we must first gather up the incidents of the
interlude.