THE SECRET ORCHARD
The invisible force which was beginning to influence Byron's life, and was
presently to deflect it, was a revival of his recollections of Mary
Chaworth. He nowhere tells us so, nor do his biographers on his behalf,
but the fact is none the less quite certain. The proofs abound, though the
name is never mentioned in them; and Mr. Richard Edgecumbe has marshalled
them[6] with conclusive force. The course which Byron's life followed--the
things which he willed and did, as well as the things he said--can only be
explained if Mary Chaworth is once more brought into the story.
She is, it must be admitted, one of the most shadowy and elusive of all
heroines of romance. We have hardly a scrap of her handwriting--hardly a
definite report about her from any contemporary witness. She is said to
have been disposed to flirt before her marriage, but to have been serious
and well-conducted afterwards. It is known that her husband was unkind to
her and that she was unhappy with him; there are statements that she was
"religious"; but most of the other evidence is negative, leaving the
impression that she was commonplace. The secret of her charm, that is to
say, is lost; and we can only guess at it--each of us guessing differently
because something of ourselves has to go to the framing of the guesses.
Assuredly there is no inference unfavourable to her charm to be drawn from
the fact that she passed through the world without cutting a figure in it.
The women who dazzle the world are rarely the women for whose love men
count the world well lost. It has been written that a man could no more
fall in love with Mrs. Siddons than with the Pyramid of Cheops. Men have
also refrained, as a rule, from falling in love with the brilliant women
of the _salons_--with Madame du Deffand, for instance, and Madame Necker,
and Lady Blessington, and Lady Holland. The qualities of a hostess, they
have felt, are different from those of a mistress. Such women can dominate
the crowd, wearing their tiaras like queens, in the garish light of
fashionable assemblies; but, in the twilight of the secret orchard, their
empire crumbles to the dust. It is not given to them to make any man feel
that the limitations of time and space have ceased and that the whole of
life is concentrated in the life lived here and now. The women who possess
that power are the women who seem insignificant to the men to whom they
have not revealed themselves.
Mary Chaworth possessed that power, and so left no mark anywhere in life
except on Byron's heart. She was quite undistinguished, and seemingly
conventional--the last woman in the world to be likely to throw her bonnet
over the windmill; but she had this subtle, indefinable, and inexplicable
secret. She had had it even in the irresponsible days when she flirted
with the fat boy, but failed to divine his genius, and preferred the
hard-riding and hard-drinking squire. She retained it when the fox-hunting
squire had shown the coarseness of his fibre, and the fat boy was a man
whose genius had proved itself. Every meeting, therefore, was bound to
bring a renewal of the spell, even though, in the intervals between the
meetings, Byron could forget.
We have it, on Byron's authority, that there were certain "stolen
meetings." It has been assumed that these were prior to Mary Chaworth's
marriage; but that is hardly credible. There was no need for stolen
meetings then; for everything was frank and open. They must have taken
place, if at all--and there is no reason to doubt that they did take
place--subsequently to the marriage: subsequently to that dinner-party at
which Byron and Mary met, and were embarrassed, and did not know what to
say to each other. Perhaps, since Mary was a woman whose instinct it was
to walk in the straight path, there was no conscious and deliberate
secrecy. The more likely assumption, indeed, is that they contrived to
meet by accident, and then thought it better, without any definite
exchange of promises, not to mention that they had met. However that may
be, the spell continued, and Mary kept the key of the secret orchard. Her
spirit was certain to revisit it, even if she herself did not.
Then came the long Eastern pilgrimage. The feeling that this sort of thing
could not go on indefinitely may very well have been one of the motives
for it; and Byron, of course, was quite young enough to forget, and a
great deal too young to let past memories divert his mind from present
pleasures. He did forget--or very nearly so; he did divert himself as
opportunity occurred. He enjoyed his battle with the police for a woman of
the town; he enjoyed his passion for a married woman. There is no reason
whatever to suppose that he was really thinking of Mary Chaworth when he
wrote verses to the Maid of Athens, or when he gave the most precious of
his rings to Mrs. Spencer Smith. But the secret orchard always remained;
the spirit of the old tenant might at any time return to it. Such spirits
always do return whenever life suddenly, for whatever reason, seems a
blank.
It was, in this instance, death--a rapid series of deaths--that brought it
back. Byron's mother died, in circumstances for which, as we have seen, he
had some reason to reproach himself. His choirboy friend Eddleston pined
away from consumption. Charles Skinner Matthews was drowned in the
Cam--entangled in the river weeds and sucked under. Wingfield was drowned
on his way to the war in Spain. The news of these four deaths came almost
simultaneously, and the shock broke down Byron's high spirits. His
letters are very heartbroken and eloquent.
"Some curse," he wrote to Scrope Davies, the gamester, "hangs over me and
mine.... Come to me, Scrope; I am almost desolate--left almost alone in
the world." "At three-and-twenty," he wrote to Dallas, "I am left alone,
and what more can we be at seventy? It is true I am young enough to begin
again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of my life?" To
Dallas, too, he wrote a certain morbid letter about the four skulls which
lay on his study table, and in another letter to Hodgson he says:
"The blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from
the shock; and though I do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at
times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every
morning convince me mournfully to the contrary. I shall now waive the
subject, the dead are at rest, and none but the dead can be so.... I
am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before."
The consolations which Hodgson offered him in his distress were those of
religion. He wrote him long letters concerning the immortality of the
soul; letters which caused Byron, years afterwards, to remark, when his
friend had taken orders, that Hodgson was always pious, "even when he was
kept by a washerwoman"--and was shocked by his blasphemous reply that he
did not believe in immortality and did not desire it. He appealed to
Byron--"for God's sake"--to pull himself together and read Paley's
"Evidences of Christianity." He had a great respect for Paley as a Senior
Wrangler and entertained no doubt that his conclusions followed from his
premisses. A little later, he and Harness,[7] one of Byron's Harrow
protégés, who was then at Cambridge, reading for his degree, went down to
Newstead to stay with Byron.
There were no orgies there this time. No "Paphian girls" were introduced;
no practical jokes were played; the cook and the housemaid remained in the
servants' quarters. "Nothing," says Harness, "could have been more orderly
than the course of our days"--which was right and proper seeing that both
he and Hodgson were shortly going to be ordained. If the trio sat up late,
it was only to talk about literature and religion. Hodgson pressed
orthodox views on Byron with "judicious zeal and affectionate
earnestness." Harness supported him with the diffidence appropriate to his
tender years. Byron maintained his own point of view, while thinking of
other things.
Chiefly he thought of the ghost which now revisited his secret orchard,
telling himself that it was not the ghost but the real woman which should
have been there. With Mary Chaworth alone he had known the sensation that
nothing else mattered while he and she were together. Now that so many
deaths had made a solitude in his heart he sorely needed the renewal of
that feeling. She could have vouchsafed it to him; she both could and
should. Why then, was she not at Annesley, waiting for him, granting more
stolen interviews, proving that she still cared, affording him that escape
from life to ecstasy?
That was the drift of Byron's thoughts at the time when Hodgson was trying
to direct his attention to Paley's "Evidences." He saw, as youth is apt to
do, more possibilities of comfort in love than in theology--a fact which
is the less to be wondered at seeing that the theology in which he had
been brought up was of the uncomfortable Calvinistic kind; and though he
was the victim of a mood rather than of a passion--for passion needed the
stimulus of sight and touch--the mood had to be expressed, and perhaps
worked off, in verse. It burst into "Childe Harold":
"_Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!
Whom Youth and Youth's affections bound to me;
Who did for me what none beside have done,
Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee.
What is my Being! thou has ceased to be!
Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,
Who mourns o'er hours which we no more shall see--
Would they had never been, or were to come!
Would he had ne'er returned to find fresh cause to roam._
"_Oh, ever loving, lovely, and beloved!
How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past.
And clings to thoughts now better far removed!
But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last.
All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death, thou hast;
The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend,
Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,
And grief with grief continuing still to blend,
Hath snatched the little joy that Life hath yet to lend._"
These stanzas, with three others, were sent to Dallas after "Childe
Harold" was in the press, together with a letter which must have mystified
him though, as a "poor relation," he would not well ask impertinent
questions; a letter to the effect that Byron has "supped full of horrors"
and "become callous" and "has not a tear left." The "Thyrza" sequence of
poems belongs to the same period--almost to the same day. They have
puzzled many generations of editors and commentators because "Thyrza" is
addressed in them as one who is dead, and because, though Byron spoke of
Thyrza to his friends as a real person and showed a lock of her hair, no
trace of any woman answering to her description can be discovered in any
chronicle of his life.
The explanation is that Thyrza was not really dead, though Byron chose so
to write of her. Thyrza was Mary Chaworth who was dead to Byron in the
sense that she had passed out of his life, as he had every reason to think
(though he thought wrongly) for ever. The poems expressed, according to
Moore, "the essence, the abstract spirit, as it were, of many griefs,"
with which was mingled the memory of her who "though living was for him as
much lost as" any of the dead friends for whom he mourned. They expressed,
in fact, his despair at finding the secret orchard tenanted only by a
ghost; and if we read the poems by the light of that clue, we can get a
clear meaning out of every line.
They are too long to be quoted. Readers must refer to them and judge. The
note is the note of bitter despair, working up, at the end, into the note
of recklessness. The contrast is there--that contrast as old as the
world--between the things that are and the things that might, and should,
have been; and then there follows the declaration that, as things are what
they are, and as their consequences will be what they will be, there is
nothing for it but to plunge into pleasure, albeit with the full knowledge
that pleasure cannot please:
"_One struggle more, and I am free
From pangs that rend my heart in twain;
One last long sigh to Love and thee,
Then back to busy life again.
It suits me well to mingle now
With things that never pleased before:
Though every joy is fled below,
What future grief can touch me more?_
"_Then bring me wine, the banquet bring;
Man was not formed to live alone:
I'll be that light unmeaning thing
That smiles with all, and weeps with none.
It was not thus in days more dear,
It never would have been, but thou
Hast fled, and left me lonely here;
Thou'rt nothing,--all are nothing now._"
The so-called Byronic pose challenges us in that passage; but it is by no
means as a pose that it must be dismissed. The men who seem to pose are
very often just the men who have the courage--or the bravado, if any one
prefers the word--to be sincere; and Byron, if he is to be rightly
understood, must be thought of as the most sincere man who ever struck an
attitude. That was the secret of his strength. Pose was for him just what
Aristotle, as interpreted by Professor Bywater, says that the spectacle of
tragedy is to the mass of the spectators. It purged him, for the time
being, of his emotions by indulging them. The pose, having done its work,
ceased until the emotions recurred, and then he posed again. Hence the
many differences of opinion among his friends as to whether he posed or
not.
Just now he was posing, in all sincerity, not only to himself but to
Hodgson. At one time he told Hodgson that, as soon as he had set his
affairs in order, he should "leave England for ever." At another he sent
him an "Epistle to a Friend in Answer to some Lines exhorting the Author
to be cheerful and to 'banish Care.'" Hodgson sent them to Moore for
publication in his Life, requesting that the concluding lines should not
be printed; but Moore disregarded the request. The Epistle ended thus:
"_But let this pass--I'll whine no more.
Nor seek again an Eastern shore;
The world befits a busy brain,--
I'll hie me to its haunts again.
But if, in some succeeding year,
When Britain's "May is in the sere,"
Thou hear'st of one, whose deepening crimes
Suit with the sablest of the times,
Of one, whom love nor pity sways,
Nor hope of fame, nor good men's praise;
One, who in stern Ambition's pride,
Perchance not blood shall turn aside:
One ranked in some recording page
With the worst anarchs of the age,
Him wilt thou_ know,--_and_ knowing _pause,
Nor with the effect forget the cause._"
The allusion here, as Hodgson's biographer discerns, is to "his early
disappointment in love as the source of all his subsequent sorrow."
Hodgson's own comment, scrawled in the margin of the manuscript is:
"N.B.--The poor dear soul meant nothing of all this."
He meant it--and yet he did not mean it. It was the emphasised and
exaggerated expression of what he meant--momentarily emphasised for the
purpose, whether conscious or unconscious, of relieving himself from the
black mood which had descended on him. The relief was gained--though it
was not to be permanent. He did not "leave England for ever"--not
yet--but hied him to the haunts of the world as he had promised. He
plunged into pleasure--and found pleasure more pleasant than he had
imagined that it could be.
That was inevitable. He was only twenty-four, and he was famous; and "to
be famous when one is young--that is the dream of the gods." Moreover, he
was achieving just that sort of fame which is attended by the most
intoxicating joy. The fame of the man of science is nothing--the world
interests itself in his discovery but not in him. The fame of a statesman
is hardly sweeter--it is only won by fighting and working hard and making
jealous enemies. The fame of a poet--a poet who is also _the_ poet--brings
instantaneously the applause of men and the wonder and homage of women.
They do not separate the man from his work, but insist on associating him
with it. Beautiful women as well as blue-stockings--and with less critical
discrimination than blue-stockings--prostrate and abase themselves before
him, competing for the sunshine of his smiles, believing, or affecting to
believe, that his and theirs are kindred souls.
So it befell Byron. Born in exile, he had at last returned from exile in a
blaze of triumph. All the doors of all the best houses were thrown open to
him with a blare of trumpets. He entered them, not as a parvenu, like
Moore the Irish grocer's son, but as the one man without whose presence
the festival would have been incomplete. No man, if one might judge by
externals, had ever a better chance of making a splendid and noble pageant
of his life. So far as an observer could judge--so far probably as he
himself knew--the ghosts of the past were laid, and its memories in a fair
way of being effaced. If the past had not come back to him, he might have
forgotten it. The tragedy of his life was that it did come back--that he
did meet Mary Chaworth again and rediscover the secret orchard which,
while she was absent from it, was a howling wilderness, overgrown with
weeds.
But not quite immediately. There were certain other things which had to
happen first.