AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS--THOUGHTS OF MARRIAGE, OF FOREIGN TRAVEL, AND OF MARY
CHAWORTH
The poems written during the dark period of Byron's life which we have now
to consider are "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," and
"Lara." Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, in his introduction to "The Bride of
Abydos," attributed the gloom to the fact that Byron "had been staying at
Aston Hall, Rotherham, with his friend James Wedderburn Webster, and had
fallen in love with his friend's wife, Lady Frances." It will be time
enough to treat that suggestion seriously when more evidence is offered in
support of it. The one important reference to Lady Frances in the Letters
certainly does not bear it out:
"I stayed a week with the Websters, and behaved very well, though the
lady of the house is young, religious, and pretty, and the master is
my particular friend. I felt no wish for anything but a poodle dog,
which they kindly gave me."
That is all; and it is not in tune with those allusions, veiled by
asterisks, to a consuming and destroying passion, with which the Journal
is thickly sprinkled. On the other hand the open references to Mary
Chaworth scattered throughout Byron's autobiographical utterances are
perfectly in tune with these enigmatical invocations of an Unknown Lady.
Even if it could not be shown that she and Byron met during this period of
mental anguish, we should still be tempted to conjecture that she and the
Unknown Lady were one; and, as a matter of fact, we know that they did
meet, and also know enough of the terms on which they met to be able to
clear up the situation beyond much possibility of doubt. The key to it,
indeed, is the letter written by Byron to Mary Chaworth five years after
their final separation:
"My own, we may have been very wrong, but I repent of nothing except
that cursed marriage, and your refusing to continue to love me as you
had loved me. I can neither forget nor _quite forgive_ you for that
precious piece of reformation. But I can never be other than I have
been, and whenever I love anything, it is because it reminds me in
some way or other of yourself."
That letter by itself proves practically the whole case. It does not
matter whether it is his own marriage or Mary Chaworth's that Byron speaks
of as "cursed"--the epithet may well have seemed to him equally applicable
to either union. The essential point is that Byron could not conceivably
have written in this tone to Mary Chaworth in 1818 if he had had no
relations, or only formal relations, with her since 1809. The mere
fact--the only openly acknowledged fact--that she had jilted him when he
was a schoolboy would certainly not have warranted him in reproaching her
with "refusing to continue to love" at a date thirteen years subsequent to
his rejection. The letter obviously, and undeniably, implies an intimacy
of later date in which his passion was reciprocated.
Later acquaintance, indeed, apart from intimacy, can easily be
demonstrated, in spite of the suppressions of the biographers. "I remember
meeting her," Byron himself said to Medwin, "after my return from Greece";
and the statement is confirmed, as Medwin's statements generally need to
be, from other sources. It appears from Byron's own letters that Mary
Chaworth, or some member of her family, took charge of his robes after one
of his attendances at the House of Lords; and a letter from Mary Chaworth
to Byron, in the possession of Mr. Murray, is printed by Mr. Edgcumbe. It
speaks of a seal which Byron was having made for her. The seal is still in
existence, and is in the possession of the Musters family. The approximate
date of its presentation is fixed by an entry in Byron's journal:
"Mem. I must get a toy to-morrow for Eliza, and send the device for
the seals of myself and ----."
Here, at any rate, we get one clear case in which the asterisks in the
Journal not only appear to indicate Mary Chaworth, but cannot possibly
indicate anybody else. It does not follow, of course, that we are entitled
to insert her name wherever we encounter asterisks--for Byron and his
editors have, from time to time, had various reasons for thus concealing
various names; but the cases in which the asterisks do refer to her are,
when once this clue is provided, tolerably easy to distinguish. Furnished
with the clue, we can at once unravel the skein of events and construct a
consistent picture of these critical months in Byron's career; and we may
begin with the picture which he drew of himself to Medwin:
"I was at this time," he says, "a mere Bond Street lounger--a great
man at lobbies, coffee and gambling houses: my afternoons were passed
in visits, luncheons, lounging, and boxing--not to mention drinking."
This is true, and yet, at the same time, it is not true. The picture is,
at once, confirmed by the Letters and the Journal and contradicted by
them. It is a picture in which, so to say, all the lights are glaring, and
all the shadows are left out. The truest thing in it is the after-thought,
added a few sentences lower down; "Don't suppose, however, that I took any
pleasure in all these excesses." In that moody claim we get, of course,
the reflection, or recollection, of the Byronic pose; and at this period,
if not at all periods, there was grim reality behind the pose, and Byron
fully justifies the description of him as the most sincere man who ever
struck an attitude.
It would be easy to depict him, whether from his letters or from
contemporary memoirs, as the dissipated darling of society. The year 1813
was the year in which he and Madame de Staël were the rival lions of the
season, roaring against each other, not entirely without jealousy. The
list of his social engagements, if one troubled to draw it out, would have
a very formidable appearance. It would show him going everywhere, meeting
everybody, doing everything. We should see him at the great houses, such
as Lady Melbourne's, Lady Holland's, Lady Jersey's. We should discover him
at the opera and the theatre, now in their boxes, now in his own, and at
men's dinners, with Sheridan, and Rogers, "Conversation Sharp," and other
brilliant talkers. We should also find him patronising "the fancy," and
losing his money at hazard, and drinking several bottles of claret at a
sitting--retiring to bed in a sublime state of exaltation, and rising from
it with a shocking headache.
That, however, would only be one half the picture. Many contemporary
observers remarked that Byron passed through the haunts of pleasure with a
scowl, and that his face wore a frown whenever his features were in
repose. One would infer from that, not that Byron, while really enjoying
himself, posed, for the sake of effect, as a man who was secretly eating
his heart out, but rather that some secret trouble was actually gnawing at
his heart while he made the gestures of a man of pleasure; and the Letters
and the Journal--more particularly the Journal--give us many glimpses at
this darker side of his life. If he often accepted the invitations which
continued to be showered on him, he also frequently declined them, locking
himself up alone in his chambers to read, and write, and think things
out--persuading himself, after some months had lapsed, that he had really
been very little into society, and that it was a matter of indifference to
him whether he went into it again or not.
And this, it will be observed, is a new note which only begins to be
sounded in his intimate writings towards the end of the summer of 1813,
after he has allowed Lady Oxford to go abroad alone. There is nothing like
it in the days of his dalliance with her. Still less is there anything
like it in the writings of the days of his dalliance with Lady Caroline
Lamb. Those episodes and adventures, it is quite clear, only touched the
surface of his nature. He first pursued them, and then ceased to pursue
them, with laughter on his lips, and self-satisfaction--one might even say
jollity--in his heart. There was not even anything in them to cradle him
into song. The interval between the "Thyrza" poems and the passionate
allegorical tales of which "The Giaour" was the first--an interval of some
eighteen months--was poetically uneventful. A period of feverish activity
succeeded; and it coincided with a renewal of relations with Mary
Chaworth.
Mary Chaworth had lived unhappily with the handsome squire whom she had,
so naturally, preferred to the fat boy from Harrow. He had been, as these
red-faced, full-blooded Philistines are so apt to be, at once jealous,
unfaithful, and brutal, wanting to "have it both ways,"--to push rivals
brusquely out of his path, and to pursue his own coarse pleasures where he
chose. He had forbidden his wife to see Byron. He had insisted upon her
absence from Annesley at the time of Byron's return from Greece; and he
had found her, whether willingly or unwillingly, compliant. But he had
also, by his own conduct, caused scandals which had set the tongues of the
neighbours wagging; and, in doing that, he had presumed too far. There had
been a separation by mutual consent; and it was after the separation that
the meeting with Byron took place.
There was little about him now to remind Mary of the fat boy whom she had
laughed at. The Turkish baths, the Epsom salts, and the regimen of
biscuits and soda-water had done their work. He came to her as a man of
ethereal beauty, fascinating manners, and undisputed genius; and he left
other women--women of higher rank, greater importance, and more widely
acknowledged charm--in order to come to her. Nor did he come with the
triumphant air of a man who was resolved to dazzle her in order to avenge
a slight. He came, as it were, because he could not help himself--because
he felt cords drawing him--because this was his destiny and he must fulfil
it, though he forfeited the whole world in doing so.
Her case was hard. She was not one of the women who readily do desperate
things in scorn of consequence. The traditions of her class, the claims of
her family--the precepts, also, one imagines, of her religion--had too
strong a hold on her for that. These very hesitations, no doubt,--so
different from the "on coming" ways of Lady Caroline, and Lady Oxford's
"terrible love," as Balzac phrases it, "of the woman of forty"--were a
part of her charm for Byron. But she was very unhappy, and Byron was
offering her a little happiness; and it was very, very difficult for her
to refuse the gift. So the history of the matter seems, in a sentence or
two, to have been this: that she was slow to yield, but yielded; that she
had no sooner yielded than she repented; that her repentance left Byron a
desperate, heart-broken man, profoundly cynical about women--so cynical
about them that he could speak even of her, while he still loved her, to
Medwin, as "like the rest of her sex, far from angelic"--ready to marry
out of pique, or from any other motive equally unworthy.
The details must remain obscure. They passed in the secret orchard; and
Byron was not, like Victor Hugo, a man who treated his secret orchard as a
park to be thrown open to excursionists. He knew that there was a time to
keep silence as well as a time to speak; and though there were some
episodes in his life of which he spoke too much, of this particular
episode he only spoke to Moore and Mrs. Leigh, whom he could trust. Yet,
given the clues, the story constructs itself; and we must either believe
the story which arises out of those clues, or else believe that the most
passionate poems which Byron ever wrote were the outcome of a spiritual
crisis about nothing in particular. And that, of course, is absurd.
We find him, at the beginning of the crisis, pondering two escapes from
it--the escape by way of marriage, and the escape by way of foreign
travel. He talks, in the middle of July, of proposing to Lady Adelaide
Forbes; he talks, at the end of August, of proposing to anyone who is
likely to accept him; but in neither instance does he talk like a man who
really means what he says. This is the July announcement:
"My circumstances are mending, and were not my other prospects
blackening, I would take a wife, and that should be the woman had I a
chance.... The Staël last night said that I had no feeling, was
totally _in_sensible to _la belle passion_, and _had_ been all my
life. I am very glad to hear it, but did not know it before."
Then in August he writes:
"After all, we must end in marriage; and I can conceive nothing more
delightful than such a state in the country, reading the county
newspaper, &c., and kissing one's wife's maid. Seriously, I would
incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow--that is, I
would a month ago, but at present----."
The word "seriously" there is evidently a _façon de parler_. The writer's
mood may be serious, but his intentions evidently are not. It may be
doubted whether the thoughts of travel were any more serious, though they
lasted longer. In letter after letter we find Byron making inquiries about
a passage in a ship of war bound for the Levant. When such a passage is
offered to him, however, he declines it on the ground that he is unable to
obtain accommodation for as many servants as he desires to take with him;
and that explanation inevitably strikes one as a pretext rather than a
reason--the pretext of a man who, while he knows that it would be better
to go, is looking for an excuse to stay.
Projects of travel with his sister and with various friends fell through
at about the same time, for reasons which are nowhere stated, but can very
easily be guessed. We cannot read the letters, dark though the allusions
are, without being conscious of a thickening plot. It thickens very
perceptibly when we discover Byron at Newstead at a time when Mary
Chaworth, forsaken by her husband, is at Annesley. There is nearly a
month's gap in the published letters at this point; but conjecture can
easily fill the gap in the light of the letter from Byron to Mrs. Leigh,
already quoted, which is dated November 8:
"It is not Lady Caroline nor Lady Oxford; but perhaps you may guess,
and if you _do_, do not tell.
"You do not know what mischief your being near me might have
prevented. You shall hear from me to-morrow; in the meantime, don't be
alarmed. I am in _no immediate_ peril."
One is further helped to understand by a letter to Moore written, after a
longer silence than usual, on November 30:
"Since I last wrote to you, much has occurred, good, bad, and
indifferent,--not to make me forget you, but to prevent me of
reminding you of one who, nevertheless, has often thought of you....
"Your French quotation was very confoundedly to the purpose,--though
very _unexpectedly_ pertinent, as you may imagine by what I _said_
before, and my silence since. However, 'Richard's himself again,' and
except all night, and some part of the morning, I don't think very
much about the matter."
The French quotation referred to is Fontenelle's: "Si je recommençais ma
carrière je ferais tout ce que j'ai fait." The inference from the allusion
to it, and from the two letters given, is quite clear. Something has
happened--at Newstead or in the neighbourhood, as the dates
demonstrate--something which Byron cannot bring himself to regret, even
though he feels that it is going to make trouble for him. Hints at the
possibility of a duel which follow in later letters make it not less clear
that the trouble--or a part of it--may come from the indignation of an
angry husband. "I shall not return his fire," Byron writes--an
indication, we may take it, that a sense of guilt, and some remorse, is
mingled with his passion.
That is what we gather, and cannot help gathering, from the letters, in
spite of their vagueness and intentional obscurity. We will take up the
thread of the story from them again in a moment. In the meanwhile we will
turn to the Journal and see how Byron presents the story to himself.