LIFE AT GENEVA--THE AFFAIR WITH JANE CLAIRMONT
"From Brussels," as Moore magniloquently puts it, "the noble traveller
pursued his course along the Rhine." At Geneva he joined Shelley and his
party who had taken the shorter route across France; and it would seem
that he felt the need of all the moral support which their companionship
could give him.
Concerning the nature of his reception in Switzerland, indeed, there is a
good deal of conflicting testimony; but the balance of the evidence points
to its having been unfavourable. His own statement is that he "retired
entirely from society," with the exception of "some occasional intercourse
with Coppet at the wish of Madame de Staël"; but there are indications
that the retirement was not voluntary, and that, even at Coppet, his
welcome was something less than enthusiastic. On the former point we may
quote the letters of Lady Westmorland, just published by Lady Rose
Weigall:
"Lord Byron has been very coldly received here both by the natives and
by the English. No one visited him, though there is much curiosity
about him. He has been twice to Coppet."
Only twice, be it observed; and on one of the two occasions, one of Madame
de Staël's guests, Mrs. Hervey the novelist--a mature woman novelist of
sixty-five virtuous summers--fainted, according to one account, and
"nearly fainted," according to another, at the sudden appearance of the
Man of Sin, though, when she came to, she was ashamed of herself, and
conversed with him. Probably he called again; and not all the Coppet
house-party shared Mrs. Hervey's consternation at his visits. Lady
Westmorland did not for one, but commented on his "sweetness and sadness,
melancholy and depression," adding: "If he was all that he tries to seem
now he would really be very fascinating." On the other hand, however,
Madame de Staël's son-in-law, the Duc de Broglie, summed him up unkindly
and almost scornfully, declaring him "a boastful pretender in the matter
of vice," protesting that "his talk was heavy and tiresome," and that "he
did not manoeuvre his lame legs with the same ease and nonchalance as M.
de Talleyrand," and concluding:
"Madame de Staël, who helped all her friends to make the best of
themselves, did what she could to make him cut a dignified figure
without success; and when the first moment of curiosity had passed,
his society ceased to attract, and no one was glad to see him."
Which clearly indicates, in spite of the offensive priggishness of the
witness, that the tide of hostile opinion was, indeed, flowing too
strongly for even Madame de Staël to stem it.
She did her best, however; for she was no prude, but a woman with a great
heart, who had herself sought happiness in marriage, and failed to find it
there, and had openly done things for which, if she had been an
Englishwoman, Mrs. Grundy, instead of lionising, would have turned and
rent her. She went further, and proposed to write to Lady Byron and try to
arrange terms of peace; and Byron thanked her, and let her do so.
Not, of course, that he had the least desire to return to Lady Byron's
society. He was presently to thunder at her as his "moral Clytemnestra";
and Cordy Jeaffreson's suggestion that his irrepressible rhetoric was
"only the superficial ferment covering the depths of his affection for
her," and that "the woman at whom he railed so insanely was the woman who
shared with his child the last tender emotions of his unruly heart" is as
absurd a suggestion as ever a biographer put forth. Hobhouse has told us
that Byron never was in love with Lady Byron; and, after what we have seen
of Lady Byron's conduct and correspondence, it is hard to believe that any
man would have been in love with her after living with her for a
twelvemonth. Moreover, we know from "The Dream" where Byron's heart was at
this time, as always, and we know from his own, as well as from Miss
Clairmont's confessions, with how little regard for Lady Byron's feelings
he was just then diverting himself in the Genevan suburbs; and we may
fairly conclude that what he desired was not to return to her, but merely
to be set right with the world by a nominal reconciliation, which would
still leave him free to live apart from her.
He did not get what he wanted, and Lady Byron was quite within her rights
in withholding it. He had allowed himself to be manoeuvred into a false
position, and had no claim upon her to help him to manoeuvre himself out
of it; while she, on her part, was much too high principled to strain a
point in favour of a returning prodigal--especially if, as is probable,
information had reached her as to his proceedings in his exile. So she
rejected his overtures in that cold, judicial, high-minded way of hers;
and Byron did not repeat them, but made it clear that he had meant nothing
by them, seeing that--
His reason is in "The Dream" which he wrote in July 1816. It was another
of his bursts of candour, telling the world (and Lady Byron) yet again how
he loved Mary Chaworth, and always had loved her, and always would, and
how, even on his wedding day, the memory of her had come between him and
his bride:
"_A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was returned--I saw him stand
Before an Altar--with a gentle bride;
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The Starlight of his boyhood:--as he stood
Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came
The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock
That in the antique Oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude: and then--
As in that hour--a moment o'er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced,--and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reeled around him; he could see
Not that which was, nor that which should have been--
But the old mansion and the accustomed hall,
And the remembered chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour
And her who was his destiny, came back
And thrust themselves between him and the light._"
That was his Parthian shaft; and Cordy Jeaffreson's view of "The Dream" as
"a lovely and elaborate falsehood, written to persuade all mankind that he
never loved the woman whose heart he was yearning to recover" is much too
preposterous to be admitted. Mary Chaworth's husband knew that it was no
figment. He recognised the reference to a certain "peculiar diadem of
trees" on his estate, and gave orders that those trees should be cut down.
Lady Byron had no such remedy open to her; but she knew what was meant and
wrapped herself up in her virtue; while Byron, on his part, turned to the
diversions which were to help him to live in the face of the world's
contumely.
Alike for him and for Shelley and the two ladies who attended him there
was a good deal of that contumely as long as they remained in the Hotel
d'Angleterre; and it may almost be said that they invited it by making
themselves conspicuous. In Shelley's relations with Miss Godwin and Miss
Clairmont there was at least the appearance of promiscuity--an appearance
on which it did not take gossip long to base positive asseveration.[11]
Byron, already an object of curiosity on account of his supposed misdeeds,
had made himself conspicuous by his coach, and his retinue, and his manner
of travelling _en seigneur_. So that the other boarders stared when he
arrived, and stared still more when they saw him fraternising with his
brother poet and the ladies, not only wondering what the eccentric party
would be up to next, but keeping close watch on their comings and goings,
following them to the lake-side when they went out boating, awaiting them
on the lake-side when they landed on their return, lining up to inspect
them as often as carriages were brought to the door to take them for a
drive.
They did not like it, and moved into villas on the other side of the
Rhone, only to discover that the Hotel d'Angleterre overlooked them, and
that its obliging landlord had set up a large telescope so that his
visitors might survey their proceedings the more commodiously. This
obliged them to move again--Byron to the Villa Diodati, and Shelley to
the Maison Chapuis or Campagne Mont Allègre--and there at last they were
able, as the party of the Libertins in the Geneva of the Reformation put
it, to "live as they chose without reference to the preachers."
To much that they did there the preachers, even those of Calvin's time,
could have taken no exception. They talked--the sort of talk that would
have been high over the heads of their censors of the d'Angleterre; they
rowed on the lake, and sang in their boat in the moonlight; they read
poetry, and wrote it. Shelley pressed Byron to read Wordsworth; and he did
so, with results which are apparent in the Third Canto of "Childe Harold,"
where we find the Wordsworthian conception of the unity of man with Nature
reproduced and spoiled, as Wordsworth most emphatically insisted, in the
reproduction. There was a week of rain during which the friends decided to
fleet the time by writing ghost stories, and Mary Godwin wrote
"Frankenstein." There was also a circular tour of the lake, undertaken
without the ladies, in the course of which Shelley had a narrow escape
from drowning near Saint Gingolph. These things were a part, and not the
least important part, of the diversions which helped Byron to defy the
slanderers whom he could not answer. So was his short trip to the Oberland
with Hobhouse. And, finally, meaning so little to him that one naturally
keeps it to the end and adds it as a detail, there was the "affair" with
Miss Jane Clairmont.
On this branch of the subject he wrote to Mrs. Leigh, who had heard
exaggerated rumours:
"As to all these 'mistresses,' Lord help me--I have had but one. Now
don't scold; but what could I do?--a foolish girl, in spite of all I
could say or do, would come after me, or rather went before--for I
found her here--and I have had all the plague possible to persuade her
to go back again; but at last she went. Now, dearest, I do most truly
tell thee that I could not help this, that I did all I could to
prevent it, and have at last put an end to it. I was not in love, nor
have any love left for any; but I could not exactly play the Stoic
with a woman who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophise
me. Besides, I had been regaled of late with so many 'two courses and
a _desert_' (Alas!) of aversion, that I was fain to take a little love
(if pressed particularly) by way of novelty."
The love had been pressed, as we have seen, and as Miss Clairmont, in her
age, admitted, very particularly indeed. She had dreamt, she admits--and
she would have us think that Shelley and Mary Godwin expected--that her
alliance with "the great Lord Byron" was to be permanent; and this though
she declares, elsewhere in her confessions, that she did not really love
him, but was only dazzled by him, and that her heart, in truth, was
Shelley's.
It was an ambitious dream; and it would be easy to make a list of reasons
why it was impossible that it should come true. The mood in which she
found Byron was only one of them. The defects and limitations of her own
qualities furnish others. She was a tradesman's daughter, and, though
well-educated, not without vulgarity; pretentious, but superficial;
stage-struck, a romp, and a mimic. If she ever mimicked Byron--if, in
particular, she ever mimicked his lameness--a good deal would be
explained.
One does not know whether she did or not. What one does know is that he
shook her off rather roughly, and, never having loved her, presently
conceived a dislike for her; and that though she bore him a child--the
little Allegra, so named after her birthplace, who only lived to be five
years of age, and now lies buried at Harrow. To Allegra, indeed, Byron was
good and kind--he looked forward, he told Moore and others, to the time
when she would be a support to the loneliness of his old age; but to
Allegra's mother he would have nothing more to say. How she hunted him
down, and how she and the Countess Guiccioli made each other
jealous--these are matters into which it is unnecessary to enter here. The
conclusions which Miss Clairmont drew, as she told Mr. Graham, was that
Byron's attitude towards women was that of a Sultan towards the ladies of
his harem. No doubt it was so in her case--and through her fault; for her
plight was very much like that of the worshipper of Juggernaut who should
prostrate himself before the oncoming car and then complain because the
wheels pass over him.
Probably, if she had been less pressing, or less clinging, he would have
been more grateful; for there assuredly was cause for gratitude even
though there was no room for love. Vulgar, feather-headed, stage-struck
little thing that she was, Jane Clairmont, by throwing herself at Byron's
head, and telling him, without waiting to be asked, that she, at least,
would count the world well lost for him--and still more perhaps by
bringing him into relation with the Shelleys--had rendered him real help
in the second desperate crisis of his life. One may repeat, indeed, that
she helped him to live through that dark period; and if she knew that, or
guessed it, she may well have felt aggrieved that his return for her
passion was so inadequate.
But he could not help it. His heart was out of his keeping, and he could
not give what he did not possess. A "passade" was all that he was capable
of just then; but that this "passade" did really help him to feel his feet
again in stormy waters, and bring him back once more to cheerfulness and
self-respect, is amply proved, first by the change of tone which appears
in his more intimate writings, and then by the new, and worse, way of life
into which we see him falling after the curtain has been rung down on the
episode.
Shelley departed, taking Miss Clairmont and her sister with him, sorely,
as there is reason to believe, against the former's wish, towards the end
of August; the honeymoon, such as it was, having lasted about three
months. Towards the end of the time, visitors began to arrive--"Monk"
Lewis, and "Conversation" Sharp, and Scrope Davies, and Hobhouse--but most
particularly Hobhouse who wrote Mrs. Leigh a reassuring letter to the
effect that her brother was "living with the strictest attention to
decorum, and free from all offence, either to God or man or woman," having
given up brandy and late hours and "quarts of magnesia" and "deluges of
soda-water," and appearing to be "as happy as it is consistent for a man
of honour and common feeling to be after the occurrence of a calamity
involving a charge, whether just or unjust, against his honour and his
feeling."
That was written on September 9; and it approximated to the truth. Having
despatched his report, Hobhouse took Byron for the tour already referred
to--over the Col de Jaman, down the Simmenthal to Thun, up the Lake of
Thun to Interlaken, and thence to Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, Brienz, and
back by way of Berne, Fribourg, and Yverdon. Byron kept a journal of the
journey for his sister to peruse. In the main it is merely a record,
admirably written, of things seen; but now and again the diarist speaks
out and shows how exactly his companion had read and interpreted his mind.
"It would be a great injustice," Hobhouse had continued to Mrs. Leigh, in
reference to the "calamity" and the "charge," "to suppose that he has
dismissed the subject from his thoughts, or indeed from his conversation,
upon any other motive than that which the most bitter of his enemies would
commend. The uniformly guarded and tranquil manner shows the effort which
it is meant to hide." And there are just two passages in the Diary in
which we see the tranquil manner breaking down. In the first place at
Grindelwald:
"Starlight, beautiful, but a devil of a path. Never mind, got safe in;
a little lightning; but the whole of the day as fine in point of
weather as the day on which Paradise was made. Passed _whole woods of
withered pines, all withered_; trunks stripped and barkless, branches
lifeless; done by a single winter--their appearance reminded me of me
and my family."
In the second place, at the very end of the tour:
"I ... have seen some of the noblest views in the world. But in all
this--the recollections of bitterness, and more especially of recent
and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have
preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the Shepherd, the
crashing of the Avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the Glacier,
the Forest, nor the Cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight
upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my old wretched identity in the
majesty, and the power and the glory, around, above, and beneath me."
A striking admission truly of the unreality and insincerity of the Byronic
presentation of Wordsworth's Pantheism, and concluding with an exclamation
which shows clearly how distinct a thing Byron's individuality was to him,
and how far he was from picturing himself, in sober prose, as "a portion
of the tempest" or anything but his passionate and suffering self:
"I am past reproaches; and there is a time for all things. I am past
the wish of vengeance, and I know of none like for what I have
suffered; but the hour will come when what I feel must be felt, and
the--but enough."
And so up the Rhone valley and over the Simplon to Italy, where his life
was to enter upon yet another phase.