RENEWAL AND INTERRUPTION OF RELATIONS WITH MARY CHAWORTH
The Journal is only a fragment, kept only for five months. It is a record
rather of emotions than of events--the chronicle of the emotions of a man
who feels the need of talking to himself of matters of which he cannot
easily talk to others, but who, even in speaking to himself, speaks in
riddles. It begins soon after the "mischief" of which Augusta has been
told has happened, and while he is entangled in the "scrape" mentioned to
Moore. The talk on the first page is of travel--"provided I neither marry
myself, nor unmarry any one else in the interval"; and there immediately
follows a reference to the writing of "The Bride of Abydos":
"I believe the composition of it kept me alive--for it was written to
drive my thoughts from the recollection of--
"_Dear sacred name, rest ever unreveal'd._"
"At least, even here, my hand would tremble to write it."
"The Bride," he insists, was written for himself, and not with any view to
publication. "I am sure, had it not been for Murray, _that_ would never
have been published, though the circumstances which are the groundwork
make it ... heigho!" "It was written," he adds, "in four days to distract
my thoughts from * * *"; and then we perceive that he is in correspondence
with the lady thus enigmatically designated. He is expecting a letter from
her which does not arrive. What, he asks himself, is the meaning of that?
"Not a word from * * * Have they set out from * * *? or has my last
precious epistle fallen into the lion's jaws? If so--and this silence
looks suspicious--I must clap on my 'musty morion' and 'hold out my
iron.' I am out of practice--but I won't begin again at Manton's now.
Besides, I would not return his shot. I was once a famous
wafer-splitter; but then the bullies of society made it necessary.
Ever since I began to feel that I had a bad cause to support, I have
left off the exercise."
The probability of a challenge from an injured husband is evidently
contemplated here. No challenge came, the injured man remaining in
ignorance of his injury; but peace of mind nevertheless remained
unattainable. No connected narrative, indeed, can be pieced together. It
is hardly ever possible to declare that such and such a thing happened on
such and such a day. There is only the general impression that things are
happening, and that, whether they happen or do not happen, a tragedy is
always in progress. We come presently to a curiously significant note on
the _raison d'être_ of Byron's practice of fasting:
"I should not so much mind a little accession of flesh--my bones can
well bear it. But the worst is, the devil always came with it,--till I
starved him out,--and I will _not_ be the slave of _any_ appetite. If
I do err, it shall be my heart, at least, that heralds the way."
But a man does not write like that unless his heart has heralded the way,
and he is following it. Byron's trouble was not that he had failed to
follow the road which his heart pointed, but that he had followed it into
an _impasse_. He had reached a point at which the only way out was the way
on; but he could not follow it alone, and his companion would not follow
it with him. She had gone a little way with him, and then taken fright at
his and her own temerity.
It is a question whether we should pity her for her lack of courage or
praise her for remembering her principles after she had yielded to
temptation; but we should need more knowledge of the facts than we have in
order to answer it with confidence. Exceptional people may do exceptional
things with impunity--it is sometimes for lack of the nerve to do them
that they make shipwreck of their lives; but though Byron was an
exceptional man, we have no proof that Mary Chaworth was an exceptional
woman. She had neither the romantic audacity of George Sand, nor that
audacity of the superior person which upheld George Eliot in her bold
misappropriation of another woman's name. Probably, if she had had it,
Byron would have classed her with the "blues," and either have tired of
her at once or turned away from her very quickly. She had, no doubt,
exceptional charm, but no exceptional strength of character. She was just
a weak woman launched into a situation to which the old rules did not
apply, but afraid to break them, ashamed of having broken them, obstinate
in her refusal to go on breaking them.
Catastrophe, in those circumstances, was inevitable. The bold course might
have led to it--for a weak woman, brought up in the fear of her
neighbours, can only take a bold course at grave risks. The weak
course--since the love of the heart and not merely the passion of the
senses was at stake--was bound to lead to it, and did. The only question
was whether the victims of the catastrophe would suffer in silence or
would cry aloud; and the answer to that question, given the characters of
the victims, could easily be predicted. Mary Chaworth would be silent,
would make believe to the best of her ability, would wear a mask, and
pose, and persuade the world that she was behaving naturally. Byron,
disdaining to pretend, proclaiming the truth about his own heart even
while respecting Mary's secret--proclaiming it quite naturally though
rather noisily--would appear to the world to be posing.
He did so; but before we observe him doing so, we may turn back to the
Journal, and study a few more of its enigmatic passages with the help of
the clues at our disposal:
"I awoke from a dream! well! and have not others dreamed? but she did
not overtake me.... Ugh! how my blood chilled,--and I could not
wake--and--heigho!... I do not like this dream,--I hate its 'foregone
conclusions.'"
"No letters to-day;--so much the better,--there are no answers. I must
not dream again;--it spoils even reality. I will go out of doors and
see what the fog will do for me."
"Ward talks of going to Holland, and we have partly discussed an
_ensemble_ expedition.... And why not? ---- is distant, and will be at
----, still more distant, till spring. No one else except Augusta
cares for me; no ties--no trammels."
"No dreams last night of the dead, nor the living; so--I am 'firm as
the marble, founded on the rock,' till the next earthquake....
"... I am tremendously in arrear with my letters--except to ----, and
to her my thoughts overpower me;--my words never compass them."
"I believe with Clym o' the Clow, or Robin Hood, 'By our Mary (dear
name!) thou art both mother and May, I think it never was a man's lot
to die before his day.'"
[Illustration: _Mary Chaworth._]
"---- has received the portrait safe; and, in answer the only remark
she makes upon it is, 'indeed it is like'--and again 'indeed it is
like.' With her the likeness 'covered a multitude of sins,' for I
happen to know this portrait was not a flatterer, but dark and
stern,--even black as the mood in which my mind was scorching last
July when I sat for it."
"I am _ennuyé_ beyond my usual tense of that yawning verb, which I am
always conjugating; and I don't find that society much mends the
matter. I am too lazy to shoot myself--and it would annoy Augusta, and
perhaps ----."
"Much done, but nothing to record. It is quite enough to set down my
thoughts,--my actions will rarely bear retrospection."
"The more I see of men the less I like them. If I could say so of
women too, all would be well. Why can't I? I am now six-and-twenty; my
passions have had enough to cool them; my affections more than enough
to wither them,--and yet, and yet, always _yet_ and _but_."
"I must set about some employment soon; my heart begins to eat
_itself_ again."
"I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of,
that I never am long in the society even of _her_ I love (God knows
too well, and the devil probably too) without a yearning for the
company of my lamp, and my utterly confused and tumbled-down library.
"I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch-light;
and to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory,
I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume. To be sure, I have
long despised myself and man, but I never spat in the face of my
species before, 'O fool! I shall go mad!'"
These entries, as everyone who has read them through will have remarked,
are all variations on a single theme; and there are many more entries in
the same key, which have been left unquoted. They succeed each other, week
after week, and almost day after day, for a period of about five months.
The story of the events to which they relate has been told, and need not
be repeated. One may think of them as the cries attendant on the birth
pangs of those aspects of Byron's character and personality which the
world knows specifically as Byronism. Other tragedies, indeed, were to
come to pass--and were to be necessary--before the angry heart could dash
itself with its full force against the desolations of the world; but the
train was being laid for those tragedies too; and by the time Byron flung
his unfinished Diary down, the thing called Byronism was born.
Curiously enough, indeed, even the political Byronism can be seen coming
to birth at the time of the writing of the Journal. The Byron who was
presently, while in exile, to harbour revolutionists, and make his house
their arsenal, deride the Tsar of All the Russias as a "Billy bald-coot,"
and shake his fist in the faces of the "holy three," already begins to
reveal himself in its pages with scoffing remarks about legitimate kings
and the hereditary principle. Perhaps it is only a case of instinct
asserting itself and the imperious need to find something to scoff at
following the line of least resistance; but that does not matter. What
does matter is that here was a crisis and a turning point in Byron's
development, brought about because Mary Chaworth had come back into his
life, had passed through it, and had passed out of it again.
Mr. Richard Edgcumbe reads, and has written, still more details into the
story, startling students of Byron's biography with the suggestion that a
child was born as the result of the intimacy--that Mrs. Leigh adopted the
child and pretended that it was her own--that the child thus secretly born
and falsely acknowledged was no other than Medora Leigh, who turned out so
badly, and whose alleged autobiography was published by Charles Mackay.
Passages can be quoted from the poems--and perhaps also from the
letters--which might conceivably contain veiled allusions to such a
transaction. None, however, can be quoted which require that explanation
as an alternative to remaining unintelligible; and, in the absence of
positive evidence, all the probabilities are against Mr. Edgcumbe's
theory.
Such a secret as he hints at--and indeed almost affirms--would have been
very difficult to keep; and it is hard to believe that Mrs. Leigh's sense
of duty to her husband, with whom she was on the best of terms, would have
allowed her to be a party to the alleged conspiracy. Those are a few of
the most obvious objections; and they must be given the greater weight
because Byron's bitter cries and altered attitude towards life are more
easily explicable without Mr. Edgcumbe's hypothesis than with it. Loving
the real mother so passionately, and having such a faithful friend in the
supposed mother, he would assuredly not have been content to live out his
life in exile without ever making an attempt to see his daughter, and
without constant and particular inquiries after her. So why strain
credulity so far when, without straining it, everything can be made plain
and clear?
There was a renewal of intimacy, and then a suspension of intimacy; a fear
of a public scandal which proved to be groundless; a risk of a duel which
was, after all, avoided. That is all that is certain; but that suffices to
explain the references to "scrapes" and "mischief" and the rest of it; and
that also, on the assumption that Byron was passionately sincere, explains
the depth and disgusted vehemence of his emotions. He had dreamed of Mary
Chaworth before as the one woman in the world with whom he could live out
the whole of his life in a continuous ecstasy of intense emotion; but he
had from time to time awakened from his dream. Now the dream had become a
reality--and the reality had not lasted. She had been too high
principled--or too much afraid. He had not been strong enough to give her
courage--or to shake her principles. And therefore....
Therefore he wrote poem after poem, all on the same theme, all in the same
key--poems of farewell, of everlasting sorrow and despair, and of that
sense of guilt, not defiant as yet, of which Mr. Edgcumbe makes so much,
but which are perhaps best read as the reflection of Mary Chaworth's own
horror--the horror of a mind perilously near insanity--at the thing which
she had done, but was resolved to do no more. He wrote this, for instance:
"_There is no more for me to hope,
There is no more for thee to fear;
And, if I give my sorrow scope,
That sorrow thou shalt never hear.
Why did I hold thy love so dear?
Why shed for such a heart one tear?
Let deep and dreary silence be
My only memory of thee!_"
He wrote the well-known lines, beginning:
"_I speak not--I trace not--I breathe not thy name--
There is love in the sound--there is Guilt in the fame--
But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart
The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart._"
He wrote, again, these lines, which are taken from "Lara":
"_The tempest of his heart in scorn had gazed
On that the feebler Elements had raised.
The Rapture of his Heart had looked on high,
And asked if greater dwell beyond the sky:
Chained to excess, the slave of each extreme,
How woke he from the wildness of that dream!
Alas! he told not--but he did awake
To curse the withered heart that would not break._"
And then, once more:
"_These lips are mute, these eyes are dry;
But in my breast and in my brain,
Awake the pangs that pass not by,
The thought that ne'er shall sleep again.
My soul nor deigns nor dares complain,
Though Grief and Passion there rebel:
I only know we loved in vain--
I only feel--Farewell! Farewell!_"
There is no need to quote more. Enough has been given to show how the
passionate heart found passionate utterance, and what a wound the wrench
had left. Afterwards, of course, when it was all over--or as much over as
it ever would be--Byron realised that a man of twenty-six could not well
consecrate all the rest of his years to lamentation. He had to live out
his life somehow, with the help of incident of some sort; and incident in
such a case must mean either a fresh love affair or marriage.
In Byron's case it meant marriage--the very marriage which Lady Melbourne
had designed as a distraction for him from the too-pointed attentions of
Lady Caroline Lamb.