THE MAID OF ATHENS--MRS. WERRY--MRS. PEDLEY--THE SWIMMING OF THE
HELLESPONT
"_Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!_"
It would be superfluous to quote more of the poem than that; and it would
be absurd to attach importance to the episode which it commemorates.
Byron came to Athens after an expedition, with Hobhouse, into the heart of
Albania. He was, according to Hobhouse's Diary, "all this time engaged in
writing a long poem in the Spenserian stanzas," the poem being, of course,
the first canto of "Childe Harold." That the travellers roughed it a good
deal is evident from Hobhouse's description of a supper whereat "Byron,
with his sabre, cut off the head of a goose which shared our room with a
collection of pigs and cows, and so we got an excellent roast." He was
much pleased with his reception by Ali Pasha, who said "he was certain I
was a man of birth because I had small ears, curling hair, and little
white hands." He was also, at the same time, brooding on his "passion for
a married woman," and no doubt felt himself years older in consequence of
that passion; and then, arriving at Athens, he fell in love, or fancied
or pretended that he was in love, with his landlady's daughter.
That was the social status of the Maid of Athens. Her mother, Theodora
Macri, the widow of a former British Vice-Consul, had been reduced to
letting lodgings--a sitting-room and two bedrooms, looking on to a
courtyard, much patronised by English travellers, and highly recommended
by them. There were three daughters, and there are passages in Byron's
letters which might be read to mean that he was equally in love with all
of them. "An attachment to three Greek girls" is his summary of the
incident to Hodgson; but he distinguished one of them by the special
homage of a poem destined to be one of the most famous in the English
language, with the result that Theresa Macri, Maid of Athens, became an
institution, and that subsequent lodgers made much of her, looking for a
romance where there had, in fact, been little more than the formal salute
of the ships passing in the night. Hugh W. Williams, the artist, who was
at Athens in 1817, depicts them for us:
"On the crown of the head of each is a red Albanian skull-cap, with a
blue tassel spread out and fastened down like a star. Near the edge or
bottom of the skull-cap is a handkerchief of various colours bound
round their temples. The youngest wears her hair loose, falling on her
shoulders."
[Illustration: _The Maid of Athens._]
That, no doubt, was how Theresa wore her hair when Byron flattered her
with his attentions. She also, it seems, wore "white stockings and
yellow slippers," and had "teeth of pearly whiteness" and "manners such as
would be fascinating in any country." It was the usual thing, according to
Williams, for their mother's lodgers to flirt with one or other of them.
It would have been "remarkable," he thinks, if they had not done so.
Presumably he did so himself. At all events he admired them very much as
they sat "in the Eastern style, a little reclined, with their limbs
gathered under them on the divan, and without shoes"; but he insists with
no less emphasis upon their propriety than upon their graces. "Modesty and
delicacy of conduct," he comments, "will always command respect"; and
further:
"Though so poor, their virtues shine as conspicuous as their
beauty.... Not all the wealth of the East, or the complimentary lays
even of the first of England's poets could render them so truly worthy
of love and admiration."
Moore tells us that Byron, in Oriental style, gashed himself across the
breast with a dagger as a symbolic demonstration of his conquest by
Theresa's charms, and that Theresa "looked on very coolly during the
operation, considering it a fit tribute to her beauty, but in no degree
moved to gratitude." And that, of course, is what one would expect. The
game was being played according to the rules, and Theresa was child enough
to enjoy the fun. One can imagine that it was a game which the girls
often played with the lodgers, teaching them the rules when they did not
already know them. One would be churlish indeed to begrudge them their
enjoyment, or to protest that they were "forward" or suspect that they
were "designing." The landlady's daughter can often do much to make life
in a lodging-house agreeable; and youth must have its hour though time
flies and love, like a bird, is on the wing.
Our next glimpse of Theresa, taken from Walsh's "Narrative of a Residence
in Constantinople," shows us that time is, indeed, an "ever-rolling
stream," carrying its daughters, as well as its sons away upon the flood.
"Lord Byron's poem," writes Walsh in 1817, "has rendered the poor lady no
temporal service though it has ensured her immortality"; and he continues:
"She was once very lovely, I was informed by those who knew her, and
realised all the descriptive part of the poem; but time and, I
suppose, disappointed hopes preyed upon her, and though still very
elegant in her person, and gentle and lady-like in her manners, she
has lost all pretensions to beauty, and has a countenance singularly
marked by hopeless sadness."
That, no doubt, is the exaggeration of a sentimentalist. Theresa's hopes
can hardly have been serious. Landladies' daughters, have too many hopes
deferred and disappointed to allow the disappointment of any hope in
particular to blight their lives. Theresa, in due course, became Mrs.
Black, the wife, like her mother, of a vice-consul; and she lived to the
great age of eighty, "a tall old lady," writes the United States Consular
Agent at Athens, "with features inspiring reverence, and showing that at a
time past she was a beautiful woman." Her countrymen, however, did not
forget that she had been the Maid of Athens; and, Byron's services to the
Greek cause being also remembered, a public subscription provided for the
necessities of her last years. That is all that there is to say about her
unless it be to repeat that she played but a very minor part in the
pageant of Byron's life, and cannot even be spoken of as Mrs. Spencer
Smith's only rival.
For there were others; and though the other stories are clouded with a
good deal of doubt, they cannot fail to leave a certain collective
impression of Byron as a man whom all women found attractive and many
women found susceptible.
At Smyrna, for instance, there was a Mrs. Werry, whose name and effusive
proceedings are mentioned by Hobhouse:
"Mrs. Werry actually cut off a lock of Byron's hair on parting from
him to-day, and shed a good many tears. Pretty well for fifty-six
years at least!"
At Athens, too, there was a second affair of which there is a full and
circumstantial account in Medwin's "Conversations of Lord Byron." The
heroine was a Turkish girl of whom Byron was "fond as I have been of few
women." All went well, he told Medwin, until the Fast of Ramadan, when Law
and Religion prohibit love-making for forty days, and the women are not
allowed to quit their apartments. An attempt to arrange an assignation at
this season was detected. The penalty was to be death, and Byron was to be
kept in ignorance of everything until it was too late to interfere:
"A mere accident only enabled me to prevent the completion of the
sentence. I was taking one of my usual evening rides by the sea-side,
when I observed a crowd of people moving down to the shore, and the
arms of the soldiers glittering among them. They were not so far off
but that I thought I could now and then distinguish a faint and
stifled shriek. My curiosity was forcibly excited, and I despatched
one of my followers to inquire the cause of the procession. What was
my horror to learn that they were carrying an unfortunate girl, sewn
up in a sack, to be thrown into the sea! I did not hesitate as to what
was to be done. I knew I could depend on my faithful Albanians, and
rode up to the officer commanding the party, threatening in case of
his refusal to give up his prisoner, that I would adopt means to
compel him. He did not like the business he was on, or perhaps the
determined look of my bodyguard, and consented to accompany me back to
the city with the girl, whom I discovered to be my Turkish favourite.
Suffice it to say that my interference with the chief magistrate,
backed by a heavy bribe, saved her; but it was only on condition that
I should break off all intercourse with her, and that she should
immediately quit Athens, and be sent to her friends in Thebes. There
she died, a few days after her arrival, of a fever, perhaps of love."
"Perhaps of love" is the typical finishing touch of the "fatal man;" but
Medwin may have added it. To Byron, at any rate, the incident counted for
no more than any of the other incidents; but it was followed, or is said
to have been followed, by an incident which counted for even less--the
incident of the beautiful Mrs. Pedley, related in a curious anonymous work
entitled: "The life, Writings, Opinions, and Times of the Right Hon. G. G.
Noel Byron," published in 1825.
Byron met Mrs. Pedley at Malta on his way home. She was the wife of a Dr.
Pedley, beautiful and frivolous--addicted, it may be, to levity, as a
relief from the dulness of garrison life. Her husband, for reasons which
we are left to conjecture, turned her out of his house. She came to
Byron's house, sat down on the door-step, and refused to go. Perhaps she
argued that, as Byron had loved one married woman, he was prepared to love
all married women; but if so, she argued wrongly. Byron begged her to
return to her home, and when she declined to do so, he sent a note to Dr.
Pedley to ask what he had better do with her. The Dr.'s answer was to pack
up the lady's clothes and other belongings and send them to Byron's
rooms, with a message to the effect that he wished him joy of the
adventure. The upshot of it all was that Byron consented to take Mrs.
Pedley to England, but gave her very little of his society, and parted
with her immediately on landing.
Such, at all events, is the story as the anonymous biographer relates it,
though it is impossible to say on what authority it reposes. Even if it
rests upon gossip, and is untrue, it helps to fill in the picture by
reflecting the reputation which Byron was making for himself during his
Oriental travels: a reputation, on the one hand, of a man who made love
with cynical recklessness, and on the other hand of a man who swaggered
round the Levant with unwarrantable arrogance and pride.
We have already seen him swaggering about his swimming of the Hellespont.
He continued to swagger about it to the very end of his life. Even in "Don
Juan" there is a well-known reference to the exploit:
"_A better swimmer you could scarce see ever;
He could, perhaps, have passed the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did._"
It was a considerable feat, no doubt, though he was only an hour and ten
minutes in the water; but the anonymous biographer already quoted adds
some details which make it, if not more glorious, at least more dramatic.
Byron, according to this version of the story, was helped out of the
water in a state of extreme exhaustion, and lay three days in a
fisherman's hut, nursed and tended by the fisherman's wife. The fisherman
did not in the least know whom he was entertaining, but believed his
guest, whose language he could not speak, to be a needy shipwrecked
sailor. On his departure, therefore, he pressed on him not only bread and
cheese and wine, but also a few copper coins. Byron accepted the gift,
without attempting to explain, and a few days afterwards sent his servant
with a return gift: a brace of pistols, a fowling piece, a fishing net,
and some silk to make a gown for the fisherman's wife. The fisherman was
so overwhelmed that he set out at once in his boat to thank the generous
donor, and was caught in a sudden squall and drowned.
That is a story of which it is impossible to say whether it is true or
only well invented. We are on safer ground in taking the testimony of the
well-known people who met Byron in the course of his journey; and our
principal witnesses are Lady Hester Stanhope, who passed him at Athens on
her way to Lebanon, Sir Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de
Redcliffe, the "great Eltchi," then Secretary of Embassy at
Constantinople, and John Galt, who was still going his rounds as a
high-class commercial traveller. No one of the three is extravagantly
eulogistic, and all three bear witness to the pose, the swagger, and the
arrogance.
"A sort of Don Quixote fighting with the police for a woman of the town,"
is Lady Hester's verdict, suggested, no doubt, by the adventure on which
Byron put such a different colour when he related it to Medwin. "He
wanted," she continues, "to make himself something great," but she will
not allow that he succeeded. "He had a great deal of vice in his looks,"
she says, "his eyes set close together and a contracted brow"; and, as for
his poetry, Lady Hester shakes her head even over that:
"At Athens, I saw nothing in him but a well-bred man, like many
others; for, as for poetry, it is easy enough to write verses; and as
for the thoughts, who knows where he got them? Many a one picks up
some old book that nobody knows anything about, and gets his ideas out
of it."
That reflection, perhaps, always supposing that Dr. Merryon has reported
it correctly, throws a brighter flood of light upon the critic's mind than
upon the poet's genius; but the criticism offered by Sir Stratford Canning
was a criticism of matters which he understood. He "cannot," he says,
"forbear to record" what happened when Byron obtained permission to be
present at an audience granted by the Sultan to the _corps diplomatique_.
There is a reference to the story in Moore's "Journal"; but the authorised
version must be sought in Lord Stratford de Redcliffe's Papers:
"We had assembled," he writes, "in the hall of our so-called palace
when Lord Byron arrived in scarlet regimentals topped by a profusely
feathered cocked hat, and, coming up to me, asked what his place as a
peer of the realm was to be in the procession. I referred him to Mr.
Adair, who had not yet left his room, and the upshot of their private
interview was that, as the Turks ignored all but officials, any
amateur, though a peer, must be content to follow in the wake of the
Embassy. His lordship thereupon walked away with that look of scornful
indignation which so well became his fine, imperious features."
"As Canning refused to walk behind him, Byron went home," is Hobhouse's
laconic report of the incident; but when a letter from the Ambassador
followed him, he apologised. His fancy dress, it had seemed to him, was
quite as becoming as other people's uniforms; he had honestly supposed
himself to be standing out for the legitimate rights of a peer of the
realm. As this was not so--as the Austrian Internuncio had been consulted
and had said that it was not so--then he would be glad to join the
procession as a simple individual, and humbly to follow his Excellency and
"his ox or his ass or anything that was his." Whether that was a subtle
way of calling Stratford Canning an ass does not appear; but the
transaction was a characteristic exhibition of the neck-or-nothing
audacity of Byron's undisciplined youth. He figures, at this date, as a
Lord among adventurers and an adventurer among Lords.
Stratford Canning saw him in the latter and John Galt in the former light.
At a dinner-party at which they were both present, "he seemed inclined,"
says Galt, "to exact a deference to his dogmas that was more lordly than
philosophical"; and he continues:
"It was too evident ... that without intending wrong, or any offence,
the unchecked humour of his temper was, by its caprices, calculated to
prevent him from ever gaining that regard to which his talents and
freer moods, independently of his rank, ought to have entitled him.
Such men become objects of solicitude, but never of esteem."
The fair inference seems to be that Byron had let Galt perceive the great
gulf fixed between peers of the realm and commercial travellers. It was
the sort of thing that he would do when in a bad temper, though not when
in a good one. Galt, however, not only submitted to the snub, but
accounted for it like a philosopher. Byron, he says, was in trouble at
this time, not about his soul, but about his remittances; and "the false
dignity he assumed" was really "the apprehension of a person of his rank
being exposed to require assistance among strangers." One can certainly
find support for the supposition in his urgent letters home.
In due course, however, the remittances turned up, and Byron recovered his
affability and resumed his journey. Hobhouse left him and returned alone.
"Took leave," he notes in his Diary, "_non sine lacrymis_, of this
singular young person, on a little stone terrace at the end of the bay,
dividing with him a little nosegay of flowers." There had been some
coolness between them, and this was the sentimental renewal of their
friendship. A return visit to Athens was the next stage, but there does
not appear to have been any resumption of the old relations with the Maid
of Athens. On the contrary, it was on this second visit to Athens that
Lady Hester Stanhope discovered the poet "fighting the police for a woman
of the town."
At Athens, too, Byron met his old Cambridge acquaintance, Lord Sligo, from
whom we obtain, through Moore, some further glimpses at his manner of life
and characteristic affectations. He was once more, it seems, constrained
to combat the flesh by means of self-denying ordinances, and, to that end,
took three Turkish baths a week, and confined himself to a diet of rice
and vinegar and water. This system, and a fever contracted at Patras, made
him very pale; and he felt that to be pale was to be interesting.
"Standing one day before a looking glass," Moore tells us, "he said to
Lord Sligo:
"'How pale I look! I should like, I think, to die of a consumption!'
"'Why of a consumption?' asked his friend.
"'Because then,' he answered, 'all the women would say, "See that poor
Byron--how interesting he looks in dying!"'"
But that is another of the stories which throw at least as much light on
the reporter as on the reported. Lord Sligo, no doubt, was the sort of
healthy, wooden-headed young Philistine on whom it is a joy to test the
effect of such remarks. Byron, in thus posing for him, was, so to say,
"trying it on the dog." There is no such foolishness in his correspondence
with those whom he regarded as his intellectual equals, and one cannot
conclude the account of his travels better than by quoting his summary of
their moral effect contained in a letter to Hodgson:
"I hope you will find me an altered personage--I do not mean in body
but in manner, for I begin to find out that nothing but virtue will do
in this damned world. I am tolerably sick of vice, which I have tried
in its agreeable varieties, and mean, on my return, to cut all my
dissolute acquaintance, leave off wine and carnal company, and betake
myself to politics and decorum."
To what extent, and within what limits, he carried out these good
resolutions, we shall observe as we proceed.