Entering the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, and turning to the
right, the first work that meets one's eye is the marble bust of a
noble-looking young man, with beautiful features and curly hair--the
bust of Lord Byron. In room No. 12 we find the same work in plaster,
and in No. 13 stands the statue executed (after Byron's death) from the
bust. Let us examine the plaster bust, which is without doubt the most
speaking likeness. Beauty and distinction are the first qualities that
strike us in this head and face; but the next moment we are attracted
by an expression of energy, which comes chiefly from a restless quiver
of the brow--indicating that clouds might gather on it and lightning
flash from the clouds--and from something imperiously compelling in the
glance. This brow betokens irresistibility.
When one remembers the dissimilarity of Thorvaldsen's and Byron's
natures, remembers that in all probability Thorvaldsen never read a
line of Byron's poetry, and also that the poet did not show his best
side to the sculptor, the result of the meeting of the two great men
must be regarded as extraordinarily satisfactory. The bust gives
what is necessarily a feeble and incomplete, but nevertheless a true
and beautiful representation of a main aspect of Byron's character
which one would hardly have expected Thorvaldsen to grasp. The idyll
is that sculptor's real province. When he sets himself to represent
Alexander's triumphal entry into Babylon, he is much more successful
with the shepherds, the sheep, the fishermen, the women, the children,
the procession in general, than with the hero himself; the heroic is
not to the same extent his affair; how much less, then, the combatant
nature in the complicated, modern form of it which has been dubbed
the dæmonic. And yet he understood Byron. In the bust (not in the
statue) he has given the world a monument of him, which, although it
satisfied neither the Countess Guiccioli nor Thomas Moore, is worthy
both of the poet and of the artist. If Thorvaldsen had really known
Byron, the work would probably have been still better; the face would
have had a touch of the frankness and attractiveness which impressed
all who knew him well. This is absent. But the Danish sculptor has
succeeded in penetrating into what lay beneath the gloomy expression
which he considered an assumed one, and showing us the suffering, the
restlessness, the genius, the noble and terrible power.
It was, undoubtedly, with the Byron of the Museum that the next
generation to his in Denmark grew up. But the image presented to
them there was invariably connected in their minds with the story
of the poet's visit to Thorvaldsen's studio, and with the latter's
observation: "It was his fancy to be unhappy;"[1] and they wondered
why such a great man should not have been perfectly natural. And so
the first attitude of the Danes to Byron was a wrong, or at any rate
an uncertain one. And an uncertain one it still remains. He is little
fitted to be the hero of the present age. The very things which were
much more effectual than his greatness as a poet in arousing the
admiration of our grandfathers and grandmothers, are the things that
repel the present generation--all those mythical traditions (which
really obscure his history to us) of Byron the stage hero, with the tie
which every one imitated; Byron, the hero of romance, whose pistols
were his constant companions, and whose amorous adventures were as
famous as his verse; Byron, the aristocrat, with the title which he
valued so highly, but which makes little impression on a generation
that recognises no aristocracy but that of the intellect. And our
practical age has, moreover, a distinct contempt for what Byron
sometimes imagined his honour required him to be, and sometimes really
was--the dilettante.
It was a matter of honour with him to practise his art in a
non-professional manner. His position and his pursuits (so he writes in
the preface to his first volume of poetry) make it highly improbable
that he will ever take up the pen again. In 1814, at the very summit of
the celebrity won for him by his first narrative poems, he determines
to write no more poetry, and to suppress all that he has written. A
month afterwards he writes _Lara_. Jeffrey criticised the character
of the hero as too elaborate. Byron asks (in a letter of 1822): "What
do they mean by '_elaborate?_' I wrote _Lara_ while undressing after
coming home from balls and masquerades, in the year of revelry 1814."
We feel that he lays stress on the careless manner of production and
the planlessness consequent thereon, from a desire to show that he
is not a professional poet, but, in the first instance, a man of the
world, in the second, that which his gifts forbade his being, namely, a
poetical dilettante.
Though he was incapable of being a dilettante in the calling in which
he was determined to play that part (a determination which nowadays
detracts from our respect for him), he was indisputably one in another
field of activity, where it was by no means his intention, namely, in
politics. Practical though he always showed himself to be when it came
to political action, his politics were in reality--whether he took part
in the conspiracies of the Carbonari at Ravenna or led the Suliotes at
Missolonghi--the politics of the emotionalist and the adventurer. His
first proceeding after he had resolved to go to Greece was to order
for himself and his friends gilded helmets with his crest and motto
engraved on them. The great politician of our days is the man who
lays plans, adheres to them and develops them year after year, and,
obstinate and regardless of side issues, carries them out in the end,
without the heroic apparatus, but with the hero's determination.
It must not be forgotten that a whole succession of Byron's admirers
and imitators have forced themselves in between him and us, obscuring
the figure, and confusing our impression, of the great departed.
Their qualities have been imputed to him, and he has been blamed for
their faults. When the literary reaction set in against those who
had understood him half and wrongly--against the brokenhearted, the
_blasés_, the enigmatical, writers--his great name suffered along with
theirs; it was swept aside along with the lesser ones. It had deserved
better of fate.
George Gordon Byron, born on the 22nd of January 1788, was the son of
a passionate and unhappy mother, who a short time before his birth
left her dissipated, brutal husband. This man, Captain Byron, who had
served for a time in America as an officer in the Guards, was known in
his youth as "mad Jack Byron." He eloped to the Continent with the wife
of the Marquis of Carmarthen, married her when her husband obtained
a divorce from her, spent all her money, and treated her so badly
that she died of grief a few years after her marriage. Captain Byron
returned to England with his little daughter, Augusta, and, solely with
the view of improving his circumstances, married a wealthy Scottish
heiress, Miss Catherine Gordon of Gight, who became the mother of the
man who still enjoys a world-wide fame. Immediately after the wedding
Captain Byron began to make away with the fortune of his second wife.
In the course of a year he had reduced it from £24,000 to £3000. She
left him in France and, coming to London, gave birth there to her only
child. By an accident, said to have occurred at the time of his birth,
one of the child's feet was malformed.
Two years later the mother went with her boy to Scotland, and took
up her residence at Aberdeen. Captain Byron, during a pause in his
dissipations, followed them there, in the hope of extracting more money
from his wife. She generously gave him the shelter of her roof for a
time, and afterwards they still continued to visit each other, until
Captain Byron, to evade his creditors, was obliged to return to France,
where he died in 1791. When the news of his death reached his wife, who
had never ceased to love him, her grief bordered on distraction, and
her shrieks were so loud as to be heard in the street.
Uncontrollable passionateness, differing only in its manifestations
and its force, was thus a characteristic of both Byron's parents. And
farther back in the families of both, we find the same temperament,
revealing itself in the mother's family in attempts at suicide
and poisoning, and in the father's, now in heroic daring, now in
reckless excess. Byron's paternal grandfather, Admiral John Byron,
generally known as "hardy Byron," took part in the naval warfare
against Spain and France, made voyages of discovery in the South Sea,
circumnavigated the globe, and went through perils and adventures
without number; the peculiarity that he could never take a voyage
without encountering terrible storms gained him the nickname among the
sailors of "foul-weather Jack." Byron compares his own fate with his
grandfather's. The family temperament shows itself in its worst form
in the poet's grand-uncle, William, Lord Byron, a dissolute brawler,
who achieved notoriety by killing his neighbour, Mr. Chaworth (after a
quarrel), in a duel fought without seconds. It was only in his quality
of peer of England that he escaped sentence for murder; ever after his
trial he lived on his estate of Newstead, shunned like a leper. He was
hated by all around him; his wife procured a separation from him; among
the superstitious country people extravagantly horrible stories of his
doings circulated and were believed.
Thus the poet had wild blood in his veins. But it was also very
aristocratic blood. On the mother's side he claimed descent from the
Stuarts, from King James the First of Scotland; on his father's he was
the descendant (though with a bar-sinister in the arms, a circumstance
Byron himself never alludes to) of the Norman noble Ralph de Burun,
who accompanied William the Conqueror into England. And when the
grand-uncle just named lost, first his only son, and then, in 1794, his
only grandson, it became probable that "the little lame boy who lives
at Aberdeen," as his uncle called him, would inherit both Newstead and
the family title.
It was with this prospect before him that the lame boy grew up. He was
proud and uncontrollable by nature. When he was still in petticoats,
his nurse reprimanding him angrily one day for having soiled a new
frock, he got into one of his "silent rages" (as he himself called
them), turned as pale as a sheet, seized his frock with both hands, and
tore it from top to bottom. His mother's treatment of him was little
calculated to correct these tendencies. She alternately overwhelmed
him with reproaches and with passionate caresses; when she was in a
rage she vented on him the anger which his father's treatment of her
aroused; she sometimes even reproached him with his lameness. The fault
lies partly with her that this physical infirmity cast such a dark
shadow over little George's mind; he heard his own mother call him "a
lame brat." Bandaging and various kinds of surgical treatment only
increased the evil; the foot gave him much pain, and the proud little
boy exercised all the strength of his will in concealing his suffering,
and, as much as possible, his limp. Sometimes he was unable to bear any
allusion to his deformity; at other times he would speak with a mocking
bitterness of his "club-foot."
Though Byron was not diligent at school, he developed a passion, the
moment he could read, for history and books of travel; the seeds of
his longing for the East were sown in his earliest youth. He himself
tells that before he was ten he had read six long works on Turkey,
besides other books of travel and adventure, and Arabian tales. As a
little boy his favourite story was _Zeluco_, by John Moore, the hero of
which is a youth whose mother's bad education of him after his father's
death has led to his giving way to all his own caprices; he becomes
"as inflammable as gunpowder." In this hero of romance, who reminds us
of William Lovell, the boy saw himself reflected. One of the qualities
which were to play a decisive part in the poet's life revealed itself
very early, namely, his passionate attraction towards the other sex.
At the age of five he was so deeply in love with a little girl, Mary
Duff, that when, eleven years afterwards, he heard of her marriage, his
feelings nearly threw him into convulsions.
With pride, passionateness, melancholy, and a fantastic longing
for travel, there was combined, as the determining quality of his
character, an ardent love of truth. Naïve sincerity distinguished the
child who was destined as a man to be the great antagonist of the
hypocrisies of European society. His defiant spirit was only one of the
forms of his truthfulness. His nurse took him one night to the theatre
to see _The Taming of the Shrew_. In the scene between Catherine and
Petruchio, where Petruchio insists that what Catherine knows to be the
moon is the sun, little Geordie (as they called the child) started from
his seat and cried out boldly: "But I say it is the moon, sir."
When George was ten, his grand-uncle, Lord Byron, died. One of the
child's first actions after being told what had happened, was to run
to his mother and ask if she noticed any difference in him since he
had become a lord. On the morning when his name was first called out
in school with the title of "Dominus" prefixed to it, he was so much
agitated that he was unable to give utterance to the usual answer,
"Adsum"; after standing silent for a moment he burst into tears.
Byron's intensest pleasures were at first, and for long, those of
gratified vanity. But to understand his agitation properly in this
case, one must remember what the title of "lord" implied, and still
implies, in England. The nobility proper of that country consists of
not more than about four hundred titled persons--about the number of
princes in Germany. On their own estates these noblemen exercise an
almost unlimited political and social influence; their position is not
much inferior to that of reigning princes, and, as a rule, their wealth
corresponds to their rank. Such, however, was not the case in this
instance; Byron had no private fortune, and the property of Newstead
Abbey was in a neglected condition, and heavily mortgaged.
In the autumn of 1798 Mrs. Byron took her little son to Newstead.
When they came to Newstead toll-bar, affecting to be ignorant of the
neighbourhood, she asked the woman of the toll-house, to whom the park
and mansion they saw before them belonged. She was told that the owner
of it had been some months dead. "And who is the next heir?" asked the
proud and happy mother. "They say," answered the woman, "it is a little
boy who lives in Aberdeen." "And this is he, bless him!" exclaimed the
nurse, no longer able to contain herself, and turning to kiss with
delight the young lord, who was seated on her lap.
In 1801 the boy was sent to Harrow, one of the great English public
schools which is much in favour with the aristocracy. The system of
instruction (strictly classical) was uninteresting and pedantic,
and did not produce much effect on Byron, whose relations with his
masters were as strained as his friendships with his comrades were
enthusiastic. "My school friendships," he writes in his diary in 1821,
"were with _me passions_ (for I was always violent)." As a friend he
was generous, and loved to play the part of protector. When Peel, the
future Prime Minister, was one day being unmercifully thrashed by the
elder boy whose fag he was, Byron interrupted, and, knowing he was not
strong enough to fight the tyrant, humbly begged to be allowed to take
half the stripes the latter meant to inflict. When little Lord Gort,
after having had his hand burned with a piece of red-hot iron by one
of the monitors, as a punishment for making bad toast, refused, when
the matter was investigated into, to tell the name of the culprit,
Byron offered to take him as his fag, promising that he should not be
ill-used. "I became his fag," said Lord Gort (see Countess Guiccioli's
_Reminiscences_), "and was perfectly delighted when I found what a
good, kind master I had, one who was always giving me cakes and sweets,
and was most lenient with my faults." To his favourite fag, the Duke
of Dorset, Byron, in his _Hours of Idleness_, addressed some charming
lines in memory of their school days.
When the boy was at home in the holidays, his mothers behaviour towards
him was as erratic, her temper as uncontrollable, as ever; but now,
instead of being afraid of her, he could not resist laughing at the fat
little woman's outbreaks. Not content with smashing cups and plates,
she sometimes employed poker and tongs as missiles.[2]
Let us imagine, after such a scene as that described in the note,
a smiling, golden-haired girl entering the room and softening the
defiant boy's mood with a look, and we have a situation such as cannot
have been at all uncommon at Annesley, the residence of the Chaworth
family (relations of the man whom Byron's grand-uncle killed in the
notorious duel), when Mrs. Byron and her son were visiting there. The
golden-haired girl, Mary Anne Chaworth, was seventeen when Byron was
fifteen. He loved her passionately and jealously. At balls, where she
was in great request as a partner, and his lameness prevented his
dancing, it occasioned him agonies to see her in the arms of other men.
The climax was put to his sufferings when he overheard her one evening
saying to her maid: "Do you think I could care anything for that lame
boy?" He darted out of the house, late though it was, and, scarcely
knowing where he was running, never stopped till he came to Newstead.
Thirteen years later, in the Villa Deodati, by the Lake of Geneva, he
wrote, with the tears streaming from his eyes, a poem, _The Dream_,
which treats of this attachment, and shows the deep impression made by
the early disappointment.[3]
The cleverer Byron became in preserving a sarcastically calm attitude
during his mother's fits of rage, the more unnatural became the
relations between mother and son. The scenes were sometimes terrible.
It is told as a curious example of their idea of each other's violence,
that, after parting one evening, each went privately later in the night
to the apothecary's to inquire whether the other had been to purchase
poison, and to caution the man not to attend to such an application,
if made. In his letters young Byron writes with melancholy humour of
the manner in which he is every now and then driven to take flight,
to escape from scenes at home. He gives not the slightest hint to any
one of the intended excursions, for fear, he says, of rousing "the
accustomed maternal war whoop."
In 1805 Byron went to Cambridge, where he spent his time less in
study than in the practice of all the varieties of athletic exercise
to which from his childhood he had eagerly devoted himself, in the
hope of atoning by his proficiency in them for his bodily infirmity.
Riding, swimming, driving, shooting, boxing, cricket-playing, and
drinking, were accomplishments in which he was determined to excel. He
began to develop the signs of a dandy; and it satisfied his youthful
love of bravado to take excursions in company with a pretty young
girl, who went about with him in male attire, and played the part of
his valet, or sometimes of his younger brother--in which character he
was impertinent enough to introduce her to a lady at Brighton who was
unacquainted with his family.
Newstead Abbey had been let for a term of years. As soon as it was
vacant, Byron went to live there. It is a real old Gothic abbey,
with refectory and cells, the earliest parts of it dating from 1170.
The house and gardens are surrounded by a battlemented wall. In the
courtyard is a Gothic well. In front is a park, with a large lake. At
Newstead, Byron and his friends, in their youthful, defiant antipathy
to all rules, led a life of dissipation which showed traces of the
mania for originality to which, as history shows, men of genius have
not unfrequently been subject before becoming conscious of their proper
tasks and aims. These young men got up at 2 P.M. and fenced, played
shuttlecock, or practised with pistols in the hall; after dinner, to
the scandal of the pious inhabitants of the neighbourhood, a human
skull filled with Burgundy went round. It was the skull of some old
monk, which the gardener had unearthed when digging; Byron, in a
capricious mood, had had it mounted in silver as a drinking-cup, and
he and his companions took a childish pleasure in using it as such,
themselves dressed up as monks, with all the proper apparatus of
crosses, beads, tonsures, &C.[4] It is a mistake, however, to regard
the action simply as an evidence of that want of feeling which so
often--among medical students, for instance--accompanies joviality; to
a man like Byron the sight of this _memento mori_ in the midst of his
carousals probably acted as a kind of bitter stimulant. In the lines
which he addressed to it he writes that, to the dead man, the touch of
human lips must be preferable to the bite of the worm.
Byron's excesses did not proceed from too high spirits. He was
oppressed, not only by the melancholy which attacks most youths of
remarkable ability when they find themselves, with their untried
powers, face to face with nothing but questions, but, in addition to
this, by the melancholy which was a result of his passionate character
and his upbringing. Two stories, which to most of his biographers
seem very pathetic, are told of him at this period of his life. The
first is in connection with his dog, Boatswain. In 1808, he composed
an excessively misanthropic inscription for this favourite's grave,
in which he lauds him at the expense of the whole human race; and
at the same time he made a will (afterwards cancelled), in which he
desired that he should be buried beside his dog, his only friend.
The other proof of his forlorn mood is the manner in which he spent
his twenty-first birthday, the day of his coming of age, an occasion
which is celebrated among the English nobility with all manner of
festivities--illuminations, fireworks, a ball, and the entertainment of
all the tenants. Byron was so poor that he was obliged to have recourse
to the money-lenders for the wherewithal to give his tenants a ball
and roast the customary ox for them. But no long train of carriages
bringing visitors of high degree drew up at the doors of Newstead Abbey
on the 22nd of January 1809; neither mother, sister, guardians, nor
relations, near or distant, were there. Byron himself spent the day
at a hotel in London. In a letter of the year 1822 he writes: "Did I
ever tell you that the day I came of age I dined on eggs and bacon
and a bottle of ale? For once in a way they are my favourite dish and
drinkable; but as neither of them agree with me, I never use them but
on great jubilees--once in four or five years or so."
It is, naturally, pleasanter to be rich than to be poor, and more
flattering to one's self-esteem to receive the congratulations of
relatives and friends than to feel one's self homeless and solitary;
but in comparison with the difficulties and privations and humiliations
which every young modern plebeian has to encounter at the outset of his
career, the adversities of this young patrician dwindle into nothing.
What gave them their importance was that they early drove Byron, who,
as a young aristocrat, might otherwise have been absorbed by the
pursuits and ideas of his class and kin, exclusively to those resources
which he possessed as the single, isolated individual.
It was not one of the great political events of the day, no transport
of joy or anger occasioned by the great political revolutions in which
the period was so fertile, that tore Byron away from the disorderly,
aimless life at Newstead. Such events as the death of Fox, or that
proceeding which redounded so little to the honour of England--the
bombardment of Copenhagen, made no impression whatever on the youth
who, as a man, was to be so strongly affected by every historical
occurrence, every political deed or misdeed. It was a private literary
contrariety which made the first turning-point in his life. Whilst
living (from the summer of 1806 till the summer of 1807) in the little
town of Southwell, Byron had produced his first attempts at poetry,
which had met with much appreciation from the younger members of a
family named Pigot, who were his intimates at the time. In March 1807
a collection of these poems was published under the title, _Hours of
Idleness_. The volume contained nothing very remarkable; the poems
which really testify to strength of feeling are swamped by quantities
of school-boy verses, some of them translations and imitations of the
school classics and _Ossian_, the rest, sentimental poems of love
and friendship, immature in conception and style. In one or two, we
readers of the present day, wise after the event, can plainly detect
Byron's future personality and style. In the poem _To a Lady_, which is
addressed to Mary Chaworth, occur two genuinely Byronic verses:--
"If thou wert mine, had all been hush'd:--
This cheek now pale from early riot,
With passion's hectic ne'er had flush'd,
But bloomed in calm domestic quiet.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But now I seek for other joys:
To think would drive my soul to madness;
In thoughtless throngs and empty noise,
I conquer half my bosom's sadness."
The poems were really of little value, and the ample provision of
childish, foolish notes, the pretentious preface, and the appendage
of the words "A Minor" to the author's name on the title-page, lent
themselves to ridicule.
In January 1808, the _Edinburgh Review_, at that time the highest
literary court of appeal, contained an extremely sarcastic review of
the volume, probably written by Lord Brougham. "The noble author,"
writes the reviewer, "is peculiarly forward in pleading minority; we
have it in the title-page, and on the very back of the volume....
If any suit could be brought against Lord Byron, for the purpose of
compelling him to put into court a certain quantity of poetry, and
if judgment were given against him, it is highly probable that an
exception would be taken, were he to deliver _for poetry_ the contents
of this volume. To this he might plead _minority_; but, &c. &c....
Perhaps however, in reality all that he tells us about his youth is
rather with a view to increase our wonder than to soften our censures.
He possibly means to say, 'See how a minor can write! This poem was
actually composed by a young man of eighteen, and this by one of only
sixteen!' ... So far from hearing, with any degree of surprise, that
very poor verses were written by a youth from his leaving school to his
leaving college, inclusive, we really believe that it happens in the
life of nine men in ten who are educated in England, and that the tenth
man writes better verse than Lord Byron.... We must beg leave seriously
to assure him that the mere rhyming of the final syllable, even when
accompanied by the presence of a certain number of feet--nay, although
(which does not always happen) those feet should scan regularly, and
have been all counted accurately upon the fingers--is not the whole
art of poetry. A certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is
necessary to constitute a poem ... &c. &c."
The reviewer's advice to Byron is to give up poetry and employ his
gifts and his leisure hours better. As an exhortation addressed to the
epoch-making English poet of the age by one whose profession it was to
assay and value the works of literary aspirants, the article, in spite
of its partial justification, was undeniably a gross blunder. But as
far as Byron himself was concerned, nothing better could have happened
to him. It affected him like a challenge; it was a terrible blow to
his vanity, and roused that which was to survive him--his pride. A
friend who saw him in the first moments of excitement after reading the
article, has described the fierce defiance of his looks, and added that
it would be difficult for sculptor or painter to imagine a subject of
more fearful beauty than the young poet in his wrath.
Byron concealed his feelings from every one. In a letter written about
this time he expresses regret that his mother has taken the affair
so much to heart, and assures his correspondent that his own repose
and appetite have not been discomposed--that these "paper bullets
of the brain" have only taught him to stand fire. But a dozen years
afterwards he writes: "I well recollect the effect which the critique
of the Edinburgh Reviewers on my first poem had upon me--it was
rage and resistance, and redress; but not despondency nor despair.
A savage review is hemlock to a sucking author, and the one on me
knocked me down--but I got up again ... bent on falsifying their raven
predictions, and determined to show them, croak as they would, that
it was not the last time they should hear from me." Thus came the
stimulus from the outside world which for the first time drove all the
young man's passionate, scattered emotions into one channel, and made
of them one feeling, one aim. With obstinate determination he set to
work; he slept during the day, rising after sunset in order to be less
disturbed, and for several months worked every night and all night long
at his first famous satire.
[1] Thiele: _Thorvaldsen i Rom_. i. 342.
[2] The relation between mother and son has been so accurately
and vividly described by Disraeli in his novel _Venetia_, that I
append a scene from the book in question,--merely condensing it, and
substituting the real names for the fictitious (Cadurcis, Plantagenet,
Morpeth, &c). The scene takes place one morning at Annesley, a country
house in the neighbourhood of Newstead. A post-chaise drives up to
the hall, and from it issues a short, stout woman with a rubicund
countenance, dressed in a style which remarkably blends the shabby with
the tawdry. She is accompanied by a boy between eleven and twelve years
of age, whose appearance is in strong contrast with his mother's, for
he is pale and slender, with long curling black hair and black eyes,
which occasionally, by their transient flashes, agreeably relieve a
face, the general expression of which might be esteemed somewhat shy
and sullen. It is a first visit. The visitors enter tired and hot.
"'A terrible journey,' exclaimed Mrs. Byron, fanning herself as she
took her seat, 'and so very hot! George, my love, make your bow! Have
not I always told you to make a bow when you enter the room, especially
where there are strangers? Make your bow to Mrs. Chaworth.'
The boy gave a sort of sulky nod, but Mrs. Chaworth received it so
graciously and expressed herself so kindly to him that his features
relaxed a little, though he was quite silent and sat on the edge of his
chair, the picture of dogged indifference.
'Charming country, Mrs. Chaworth,' said Mrs. Byron.... 'Annesley is a
delightful place, very unlike the Abbey. Dreadfully lonesome, I assure
you, I find it there. Great change for us from a little town and all
our kind neighbours. Very different from Dulwich; is it not, George?'
'I hate Dulwich,' said the boy.
'Hate Dulwich!' exclaimed Mrs. Byron; 'well, I am sure, that is very
ungrateful, with so many kind friends as we always found. Besides,
George, have I not always told you that you are to hate nothing? It is
very wicked.--The trouble it costs me, Mrs. Chaworth, to educate this
dear child!' continued Mrs. Byron turning to her hostess. 'But when he
likes, he can be as good as any one. Can't you, George?'
Lord Byron gave a grim smile, seated himself at the very back of the
deep chair and swung his feet, which no longer reached the ground, to
and fro. 'I am sure that Lord Byron always behaves well,' said Mrs.
Chaworth.
'There, George,' continued Mrs. Byron, 'only listen to that. Hear
what Mrs. Chaworth says. Now mind, never give her cause to change her
opinion.
George curled his lip, and half turned his back on his companions....
'George, my dear, speak. Have not I always told you, when you pay a
visit, that you should open your mouth now and then. I don't like
chattering children, but I like them to answer when they are spoken to.'
'Nobody has spoken to me,' said Lord Byron in a sullen tone.
'George, my love,' said his mother in a solemn voice, 'you know you
promised me to be good.'
'Well! what have I done?'
'Lord Byron,' said Mrs. Chaworth, interfering, 'do you like to look at
pictures?'
'Thank you,' replied the little lord in a more courteous tone; 'I like
to be left alone.'
'Did you ever know such an odd child!' said Mrs. Byron; 'and yet, I
assure you, Mrs. Chaworth, he can behave, when he likes, as pretty as
possible.'
'Pretty!' muttered the little lord between his teeth.
'If you had only seen him at Dulwich sometimes at a little tea-party,'
said Mrs. Byron, 'he really was quite the ornament of the company.'
'No, I wasn't,' said Lord Byron.
'George!' said his mother again in a solemn tone, 'have I not always
told you that you are never to contradict any one?'
The little lord indulged in a suppressed growl.
'There was a little play last Christmas,' continued Mrs. Byron, 'and he
acted quite delightfully. Now you would not think that, from the way he
sits upon that chair. George, my dear, I do insist upon your behaving
yourself. Sit like a man.'
'I am not a man,' said Lord Byron, very quietly; 'I wish I were.'
'George!' said the mother, 'have I not always told you that you are
never to answer me? It is not proper for children to answer.... Do
you hear me?' she cried, with a face reddening to scarlet, and almost
menacing a move from her seat.
'Yes, everybody hears you, Mrs. Byron,' said the little lord.
'Don't call me Mrs. Byron; that is not the way to speak to your mother;
I will not be called Mrs. Byron by you.... I have half a mind to get up
and give you a good shake, that I have. O Mrs. Chaworth,' sighed Mrs.
Byron, while a tear trickled down her cheek, 'if you only knew the life
I lead, and what trouble it costs me to educate that child!'
'My dear madam,' said Mrs. Chaworth, 'I am sure that Lord Byron has no
other wish but to please you. Indeed you have misunderstood him.'
'Yes! she always misunderstands me,' said Lord Byron in a softer tone,
but with pouting lips and suffused eyes.
'Now he is going on,' said his mother, beginning herself to cry
dreadfully ... and, irritated by the remembrance of all his
naughtiness, she rushed forward to give him what she had threatened,
and what she in general ultimately had recourse to, a good shake.
Her agile son, experienced in these storms, escaped in time, and pushed
his chair before his infuriated mother; Mrs. Byron, however, rallied,
and chased him round the room; in her despair she took up a book and
threw it at his head; he laughed a fiendish laugh, as, ducking his
head, the book flew on and dashed through a pane of glass. Mrs. Byron
made a desperate charge, and her son, a little frightened at her almost
maniacal passion, saved himself by suddenly seizing Mrs. Chaworth's
work-table and whisking it before her. She fell over the leg of the
table, and went into hysterics, while Lord Byron, pale and dogged,
stood in a corner."
[3] Very characteristic of Mrs. Byron is the manner in which she
communicated to her son (two years after he had been obliged to give
up all hope) the news of Mary Chaworth's marriage. A visitor who was
present tells the story:--"'Byron,' she said, 'I have some news for
you.' Well, what is it?' 'Take out your handkerchief first, for you
will want it.' He did so, to humour her. 'Miss Chaworth is married.'
An expression very peculiar, impossible to describe, passed over his
pale face, and he hurried his handkerchief into his pocket, saying,
with an affected air of coldness and nonchalance, 'Is that all?' 'Why,
I expected you would have been plunged in grief!' He made no reply, and
soon began to talk about something else." The less he could confide
in his mother, the more impelled he felt to express his feelings and
sorrows on paper.
[4] The present owner of Newstead has, from religious reasons, had it
buried.