REVELRY AT NEWSTEAD--"ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS"
One watches the swelling of Byron's indebtedness with morbid interest. It
is like the rapid rising of a Spring tide which threatens to submerge a
city. Already, in his second term at Cambridge, as we have seen, he
besought his sister to pledge her credit for his loans. At the beginning
of his third year, we find him making a confession to his solicitor:
"My debts amount to three thousand, three hundred to Jews, eight
hundred to Mrs. B. of Nottingham, to coachmaker and other tradesmen a
thousand more, and these must be much increased before they are
lessened."
They were increased before they were lessened--unless the explanation be
that Byron only told the truth about them in instalments. Three months
later this is his confession to the Reverend John Becher:
"_Entre nous_, I am cursedly dipped; my debts, _everything_ inclusive,
will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one."
But, even so, the high-water mark is not yet reached. Towards the end of
the same year, when Byron is contemplating his "grand tour," he once more
calls his solicitor into council:
"You honour my debts; they amount to perhaps twelve thousand pounds,
and I shall require perhaps three or four thousand at setting out,
with credit on a Bengal agent. This you must manage for me."
A pleasant commission, which seems to have led to a reference to Mrs.
Byron, who made a luminous suggestion:
"I wish to God he would exert himself and retrieve his affairs. He
must marry a woman of _fortune_ this Spring; love matches is all
nonsense. Let him make use of the Talents God has given him. He is an
English Peer, and has all the privileges of that situation."
It was a matter-of-fact proposal, worthy of the canny Scotswoman who made
it--a proof that, even when she threw the tongs at her son, she still had
his interests at heart; but nothing came of it. Very likely Byron, at this
date knew no heiresses; and even his mother was not matter-of-fact enough
to expect him to advertise for one, even for the purpose of avoiding the
necessity of selling Newstead. There was still the resource of borrowing a
little more, and of making the loans go as far as possible by retaining
the money for personal expenses, instead of applying it to the payment of
debt; and something of that sort seems to have been done. Scrope Davies
lent Byron £4800; and yet Mrs. Byron had occasion to write:
"There is some Trades People at Nottingham that will be completely
ruined if he does not pay them, which I would not have happen for a
whole world."
Moreover, though Byron himself talked vaguely to Hanson of the possibility
of his marriage with "a golden Dolly," he was at an age at which a young
man does not readily marry any woman with whom he is not in love. Whether
he was or was not, at that time, in love with Mrs. Chaworth,[5] he
certainly was not in love with any one else; and he was enjoying himself
and "having his fling," after the manner of gilded youth. His "domestic
female companion," to use Gibbon's charming phrase, was a professional
daughter of joy who travelled about with him in male attire. He even
brought her to Newstead, when he took possession of the Abbey on the
expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthen's tenancy. That may have been one
reason--though it need not necessarily have been the only one--for his
refusal to let his mother join him there. It would certainly have been a
valid reason for postponing matrimony.
Around those Newstead revels a good deal of fantastic legend circles; and
the facts concerning them are hardly to be disentangled from the myths.
"Childe Harold" starts with them:--
_Ah! me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;
Few earthly things found favour in his sight
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree._
"Childe Harold," however, in spite of the fact that it was first called
"Childe Buron," is a poem, not a deposition. The picture, with its
"Paphian girls" and the rest of it--
_Where superstition once had made her den,
Now Paphian girls were wont to sing and smile,
And monks might deem their time was come agen,
If ancient tales say true, nor wrong these holy men_,
is not necessarily faithful because the note of contrast which it sounds
is of the essence of the poem. But, on the other hand, the excuses and
explanations by means of which Moore and Cordy Jeaffreson attempt to
palliate and minimise the supposed assertions of the poem are somewhat
less than convincing.
The revels, say these apologists, cannot have been so very dreadful
because the Newstead guests sometimes included some of the local clergy,
and because some of the young men who engaged in them afterwards took
orders. The obvious answer to that is that the revellers may very well
have moderated their revelry on the occasions on which clergymen were
present--and that those of them who afterwards became pillars of the
Church may not, at that date, have got the old Adam into complete
subjection. Nor is a great deal gained by the contention that the part of
the supposed "Paphian girls" was, in fact, sustained by Byron's "domestic
female companion," and by the Newstead cook and the Newstead housemaid. To
say this is merely to protest that the alleged Paphians did not really
come from Paphos, but from some other island in the same neighbourhood.
A letter written by Charles Skinner Matthews to his sister is the only
contemporary chronicle of the proceedings. There is a confirmation of his
account, together with some supplementary details, in a letter written,
long afterwards, by Byron to John Murray. Remembering the ages and
circumstances of the revellers--and remembering also that Moore's
information was derived from some of them--we will try to get as near to
the truth as the procurable evidence allows.
Byron, one must always bear in mind, had not yet conquered his place in
county society, or in what is now called "smart" society. His mother's
eccentricities and his guardian's chilly attitude had, as we have seen,
kept him out of it. He actually knew no peer who could or would introduce
him when he took his seat in the House of Lords. The people whom he knew
at home were chiefly provincial people of the professional classes. At
Cambridge he had got into a fast, though not an unintellectual, set. He
was very young, and he had plenty of credit, if not much ready money; and
here was the "venerable pile" of Newstead--not the less venerable because
it was dilapidated--at his disposal as a playground, and a place in which
to dispense hospitality.
Naturally he wanted to show Newstead to his friends, whom he had never
been able to entertain at home before. Naturally, having credit, he used
it to fit up and furnish as much of Newstead as was necessary for their
comfortable accommodation, not troubling to foresee the day--though he
would not have had to look very far ahead in order to foresee it--when the
bailiffs would be put in to seize the goods in default of payment.
Naturally, as Mrs. Byron was so addicted to rattling the tongs and
throwing the fire-irons at him, he did not want her there. Naturally, his
college friends having fast tastes and habits, and no ladies of their own
station being of the party, the method of their life did not follow the
conventional round of the ordinary house-party. The pet bear, and the pet
wolf, which guarded the entrances, were only symbols of the unusual and
extravagant state of things within.
Breakfast, in theory, could be served at any hour. The hour actually
preferred by the majority of the party was one P.M. Matthews, who
generally came down between eleven and twelve, "was esteemed a prodigy of
early rising." Any one, he says, who had wanted to breakfast as early as
ten "would have been rather lucky to find any of the servants up." Not
until two P.M., as a rule, was the breakfast cleared away. The amusements
of the afternoon--which Matthews euphemistically calls the morning--were
"reading, fencing, single-stick, or shuttle-cock, in the great room,
practising with pistols in the hall, walking, riding, cricket, sailing on
the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf." Dinner was between
seven and eight, and then--another euphemism most proper in a letter to a
sister--"the evening diversions may be easily conceived."
Those evening diversions consisted, in the first instance of dressing up
and drinking. The beverages, according to Byron himself, were "burgundy,
claret, champagne, and what not," quaffed not only out of ordinary
glasses, but also out of a loving-cup fashioned from a skull which had
been dug up in the Newstead grounds. As for the dressing-up; "A set of
monkish dresses," says Matthews, "which had been provided, with all the
proper apparatus of crosses, beads, tonsures, &c., often gave a variety to
our appearance and to our pursuits," which pursuits consisted, in Byron's
words, of "buffooning all round the house in our conventual garments."
That Matthews speaks of tonsures as if they were articles of dress is
neither here nor there; and there is no importance to be attached to his
omission of all reference to the "buffooning." We know from Hobhouse that
he played his part in it, and that one of the amusements of this brilliant
young Fellow of Downing was to hide himself in a stone coffin in the Long
Gallery and groan, by way of alarming his brother revellers. Evidently the
Monks of Newstead, while taking some hints from the profane members of the
Medmenham Hell Fire Club, carried out, to the best of their ability, the
traditions of the Monks of Thelema. "Fays ce que voudras" might have been
their motto; and the doing of what they wished appears to have involved
and included the extension of invitations to the cook and the housemaid to
participate in their pleasures. Moore says so, not as one who makes a
charge, but as one who makes an admission to rebut a graver charge, and is
full of sympathy for the exuberance of lusty youth. Moralists must make
what they can of the story, and apportion censure and indulgence as they
think just.
The excesses, at any rate, whatever their degree and nature, did not fill
Byron's life. He was getting on with his poetry in spite of them, though
it would be too much to say that he had yet proved his title to be called
a poet.
"Hours of Idleness" had appeared while he was at Cambridge. The interest
of that volume, nowadays, is far more biographical than poetical. When one
has inferred from it that Byron did not pass through the University with a
heart bowed down by the loss of Mary Chaworth, but flirted with a long
series of the belles of Southwell, one has said nearly all that there is
to say. The poems themselves, as the quotations given amply demonstrate,
are no better than the general run of undergraduate verse composition.
They are purely imitative; no new note rings in them. One is not surprised
that Lord Carlisle, on receiving a presentation copy, was in a greater
hurry to acknowledge than to read it, and merely remarked, in his
acknowledgment that young men were better occupied in writing poetry than
in devoting their valuable time to women and horses.
"Tolerably handsome," was Byron's first verdict on that letter; but he
seems to have felt snubbed when he read it over a second time. Lord
Carlisle's opinions, he wrote to Miss Pigot, were nothing to him, but his
guardian must not be "insolent." If he were insolent, he should be
gibbeted, just as Butler of Harrow had been gibbeted. In fact, and to sum
up:
"Perhaps the Earl '_bears no brother near the throne_'--_if so_, I
will make his _sceptre_ totter _in his hands_."
Which shows that Byron's back was up, and that he was already in a
fighting mood when the famous review in the _Edinburgh_ introduced a
jarring note into the chorus of approbation.
The author of the attack was not Jeffrey, as Byron thought, but Brougham.
He had the excuse, for what it may be worth, that the poems had
indubitably been over-praised because they had appeared under the
signature of a nobleman. He, therefore, set out on the war path with the
truculent air of a man whose conscience requires him to bludgeon a
butterfly. The punishment, we cannot doubt, was very painful to the poet
whom Cambridge undergraduates and Southwell belles had flattered; and the
instant question for him was: Would he take his punishment lying down, or
would he take it fighting?
That question, however, was not long in doubt. The Byrons were a fighting
race; and the poet had inherited their love of fighting. Just as he had
fought Lord Calthorpe at Harrow for calling him an atheist, so now he
would fight the _Edinburgh_ critic for calling him a fool. And he would
fight him with his own weapons. Let him have three bottles of claret to
prime him, and then he would strip for the fray, and would "take on," not
the reviewer only, but every one whom the reviewer had praised, and every
one whom he himself disliked, or thought he might dislike if he knew him
better. So he emptied his three bottles, and set to work on "English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers," and having written twenty lines of it, "felt
better."
It is the poem in which his genius first begins to be apparent. Most of
the judgments expressed in it were unjust--most of them were afterwards
retracted by their author; but that does not matter. One does not expect
sound criticism from poets--least of all does one expect it from poets of
one-and-twenty. The essence of the thing is that now, in "English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers" a new personality spoke--and spoke loud enough to
be heard.
The note of Byron--the note which gained him his large and attentive
audience--was his reckless audacity. He was not afraid of saying things;
he did not wrap them up, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, but said them in
plain language which all the world could understand--said them, moreover,
in a manner which made them appear true even to those who thought, or
wished to think, them false. His readers never knew what he would be
saying next. They only knew that, whatever it was, he would say it
effectively, and, as has already been remarked, with the air of one who
damned the consequences. That was the note which was, in later years, to
ring through "Don Juan." We can already hear it ringing, as it were in
anticipation, through the couplets of "English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers."
Many examples might be cited; for the Satire, after the way of Satires, is
almost entirely composed of damnatory clauses. Any piece of gossip was
good enough for Byron to lay hold of and use as a missile when running
amok among literary reputations. The best instance, however, may be found
in the passage in which he turned and rent Carlisle.
His original intention was to make himself pleasant to his guardian. He
had no particular reason for liking him, but he had no definite case
against him. There was the letter, of course, in which Carlisle had
patronised the poet instead of praising his poetry; but he had got over
his irritation about that, and did not bear malice; and so he prepared for
publication these lines of fulsome eulogy:
"_Ah, who would take their titles from their rhymes?
On one alone Apollo deigns to smile,
And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle._"
But then, before the day of publication, occurred his quarrel with
Carlisle. He thought that his guardian ought to have volunteered to
introduce him when he took his seat in the House of Lords; he had the more
reason for thinking so because his guardian was the only Peer of the Realm
whom he knew. Carlisle, however, did not do so, contenting himself with
instructing his ward as to the formalities to be fulfilled. The slight,
whether intentional or not, was keenly felt--the more keenly because Byron
was, at the moment, at war with all the world except Carlisle. _Et tu,
Brute_, may very well have been his reflection.
So he had misjudged Carlisle. So Carlisle was as bad as other
people--worse, indeed, because better things might reasonably have been
expected from him. Very well. It was to be war between them, was it? Those
who played at bowls must look out for rubbers. Carlisle should see what
kind of an antagonist he had provoked. He had threatened to make his
sceptre totter in his hands. Now he would show that he could do it. So he
struck out the lines of eulogy, and substituted:
"_Yet did or Taste or Reason sway the times,
Ah! who would take their titles with their rhymes!
Roscommon! Sheffield! With your spirits fled,
No future laurels deck a noble head;
No Muse will cheer with renovating smile
The paralytic puling of Carlisle._"
Such was the Parthian shaft; and Byron, having discharged it, shook the
dust of England from off his feet, and departed on the grand tour.