So many volumes have been written about the domestic life and the loves
of Lord Byron, that it would be a hopeless undertaking to attempt to say
anything new about them. But the story of Byron's life will never lose
its fascination, and to every new generation of readers the romance will
be fresh. Marvellously beautiful, wonderfully gifted, unfortunately
constituted man; wronged by his birth, wronged by his education, wronged
most of all by himself, the world will never cease to wonder and to weep
when his tragic story is told. While the language remains his words will
live. Immortal poetry for youth!--new generations will learn it by
heart, when the older generations are forgetting; and long after all
memory of his waywardness and folly has faded from the world, his
deathless songs will still sing on.
In any attempt to understand Byron, his ancestry must be much
considered. It will never do to compare him with cool-headed,
calm-blooded, matter-of-fact people. He was the peculiar product of a
peculiar race. Coming through generations of hot, turbulent blood, which
was never once mastered or tamed by its possessors, he entered the world
with a temperament and disposition which made it simply impossible that
he should lead the ordinary life of the British Philistine of his day.
As far back as they have been traced, the family were violent,
passionate, high-spirited, but unrestrained in the indulgence of their
desires by any of the cardinal principles of morality. Byron's father,
one of Byron's biographers tells us, had outraged in his previous family
life not only the principles of religion, but also the laws of society;
and when, in 1783, he married Catherine Gordon, the wealthy heiress of
Gight, Aberdeenshire, it was chiefly for the purpose of paying off his
debts with her fortune. Within two years after the marriage the heiress
of Gight was reduced to a pittance of one hundred and fifty pounds a
year. In 1790, for economy's sake, they removed from London to Aberdeen,
but soon separated.
Even after this, Captain Byron was mean-spirited enough to solicit money
from his wife, and she had not the heart to refuse him. With a small
supply thus obtained he crossed the channel, and in 1791 died in
Valenciennes, in the North of France. Of the violent temper of Byron's
mother many stories are told, and of her heartless treatment of him in
his early years; so that upon neither side can we find much upon which
we could expect to build a very noble or well-balanced character, and
the fact seems to be that the eccentricities of the Byron family were so
great as to be dangerously near the point called insanity.
A youth inheriting such blood as this, and brought up without even a
pretence of moral or religious training, could hardly be expected to
develop many of the domestic virtues. Neither could high-mindedness or
lofty principle be predicted of him. And in truth, Byron possessed
neither of these things. With this fiery Norman blood flowing in his
veins, restlessness was the habitual condition of his existence, such
restlessness as drove him to seek excitement at whatever cost,--quiet,
as he expressed it, to the quick bosom being hell. This restlessness led
him into all sorts of folly and excess, in the pursuit of new
excitements. Then he was cursed with an exaggerated sensibility, which,
while it gave him many rare delights in life, inflicted upon him also
the keenest tortures. His massive egotism was the cause, doubtless, of
many of his most marked eccentricities. He was so anxious to have the
world's gaze fixed upon him that he said and did things continually for
the mere purpose of holding its attention. In this way he frequently
made himself appear worse than he really was. Society was held willingly
in the thrall of his personality. A dull world likes to have laid bare
for its inspection the pulses of a vivid existence. Byron may have been
no worse than many other men of his day, for it was a time of general
immorality, but he never concealed even his worst vices. While hypocrisy
is a national vice in England, Byron, though essentially English in most
things, never possessed this marked characteristic of his countrymen. He
flaunted his vices in the light of day; and the world took a speedy
revenge upon him for his audacity. The little episode of his love for
Mary Chaworth occurred at so early an age that it seems scarcely
probable that it affected him as seriously as he claimed; yet he was a
very precocious child, and his account of the strength of his passion,
and its disappointment, may not be wholly an affectation. It is
difficult, too, to arrive at his real feeling toward Miss Milbank, there
was so much of contradiction both in his words and in his conduct. Miss
Milbank probably loved him but feared to marry him, having heard of the
irregularities of his life. And certainly the sort of life which Byron
had led was a very poor preparation for happiness at the fireside, and
if all other causes of unhappiness had been wanting would doubtless have
wrecked his union with Miss Milbank. But there were not wanting
numberless other sources of misery to this ill-mated couple, first among
which was the complete incompatibility of their tastes, feelings,
characters. That she was a noble, intelligent, and high-principled
woman, none have ever denied. The wonder was, not that she would not
live with such a man as Byron, but that she could ever have married him.
In charity we must decide that she was ignorant of the unspeakable
degradation of such an act. That he was a famous man of genius, the
most wonderfully gifted poet of his time, might have been a temptation,
but it was no excuse, if she entered into the contract with her eyes
open. But aside from the question of vice or virtue, there was nothing
in common between them. She felt that she had fallen from the
unalterable serenity and dignity of her existence, into chaos. Her
natural reserve and his natural frankness were the occasion of continual
clashings. Her formality and his bluntness caused constant unrest.
Accustomed to the regularity of a well-ordered English household, she
was miserable at the utter demoralization of their home,--of which the
bailiff had possession nine times during the short year they occupied
it. Formed for a calm, domestic life, she would probably have been a
most admirable wife to a man suited to her virtuous tastes, but her very
virtues irritated Byron.
Lady Caroline Lamb, who had loved him so madly, and on whom he had
expended a temporary passion, was in her ardent nature and erratic
genius much better suited to his tastes; and yet it had not taken him
long to tire of her, beautiful as she had been. And were ever such
bitter and cruel words addressed to a wronged woman, even though she had
herself been fearfully to blame in the matter, as those sent by Byron to
this poor creature, who had sent him a last touching appeal to remember
her? He wrote:--
"Remember you! remember you! Until the waters of Lethe have flowed
over the burning torrent of your existence, shame and remorse will
cry in your ears, and pursue you with the delirium of fever.
Remember you! Do not doubt it, I will remember. And your husband
will also remember you. Neither of us can ever forget you. To him
you have been an unfaithful wife, and to me--a devil!"
Terrible words, which apparently changed her love to hate, for she was
his relentless enemy for many years. But one day the great poet died, in
Greece, the death of a hero. His body was taken back to England for
burial, and Caroline Lamb stood at her window and saw the procession go
by. The coffin was followed by a dog, howling piteously. Caroline
uttered a heartrending cry, and sunk to the floor insensible. They
raised her and placed her in her bed, from which she never rose; she was
borne from it to her grave.
Such was the devotion which his fatal beauty and fascination won from
women, from many women, in his brief life. It is not probable that his
wife ever loved him in this way, but had she done so it seems very
unlikely that they could have lived a happy life together.
For one reason, he had no faith in women. "False as a woman or an
epitaph" expressed his deliberate opinion of the sex; and it must be
confessed that the sort of women with whom he had best acquaintance were
not calculated to give him high ideas upon the subject. This low
estimate of women would have stood in the way of domestic happiness
under any circumstances.
He was not ignorant of this, and in "Childe Harold" states the case
thus:--
"For he through sin's long labyrinth had run,
Nor made atonement when he did amiss;
Had sighed to many, though he loved but one,
And that loved one, alas! could ne'er be his.
Ah, happy she! to 'scape from him whose kiss
Had been pollution unto aught so chaste!
Who soon had left her charms for vulgar bliss,
And spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste,
Nor calm domestic bliss had ever deigned to taste."
It has been thought by some that had Byron had the good fortune to meet
his latest love, the Countess Guiccioli, in his youth, all his stormy
life might have been changed and redeemed. However this may be, she
seems, so far as we can judge of her, to have been more likely to be a
poet's one great love than any of the others who for a time held his
wandering fancy. Beautiful as a poet's wildest dream, young, ardent,
gifted, and passionately devoted to him, what more could even his
exacting nature demand?--
"Educated in the gloom of the convent, the notes of the organ, the
clouds of incense, the waxen tapers burning at the feet of the
Virgin, the litanies of the nuns,--all this had filled her mind
with the poetry of the cloister, and with that mystic and
indefinable love which at the first contact with the world was
ready to change into a violent passion when it should meet with an
object upon which to fix itself."
Married as soon as she left the convent to a man selected by her
parents, whom she had barely seen, and who was old enough to be her
father, she was at the time Byron first saw her a melancholy and unhappy
woman, much given to the reading of poetry and of the immoral novels of
that time and place.
That she should love Byron at first sight was inevitable, and that which
followed was almost as inevitable. She herself thus describes her first
acquaintance with him:--
"His noble and exquisitely beautiful countenance, the tone of his
voice, his manners, the thousand enchantments that surrounded him,
rendered him so different and so superior a being to any by whom I
was surrounded or had hitherto seen that it was impossible he
should not have left the most profound impression upon me. From
that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay at Venice, we
met every day."
Almost the only glimpses of quiet happiness which Byron ever enjoyed
came from this association. The lovers seemed to be admirably adapted to
each other, and their love knew no diminution during the short remainder
of his life. And she cherished his memory with the utmost fondness
throughout a long life, writing of him with unbounded enthusiasm, in her
own account of her acquaintance with him, many years after his death.
Byron has probably exaggerated his own unhappiness, yet there can be no
doubt that much of what he describes was very real. The nobler elements
of his character were constantly at war with the lower, and although he
did not have sufficient strength of character to lead the noble life of
which he had frequent visions, he had enough innate nobility to despise
himself for the life he did lead. Doubtless there was much of truth in
what he wrote in his journal in Switzerland:--
"But in all, the recollections of bitterness, and more especially
of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany one
through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of
the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, or the torrent, the
mountain, the glacier, the forest, or the cloud, have for one
moment lightened the weight upon my heart, or enabled me to lose my
own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory
around, above, and beneath me."
The close of Byron's life, in Greece, seems to have been one of peculiar
desolation. There is something really tragic in the utter loneliness of
such a death-bed. Years before, he had written concerning his death:--
"When time or soon or late shall bring
The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead,
Oblivion! may thy languid wing
Wave gently o'er my dying bed.
"No band of friends or heirs be there
To weep, or wish the coming blow;
No maiden with dishevelled hair
To feel, or feign, decorous woe.
"But silent let me sink to earth,
With no officious mourners near;
I would not mar one hour of rest
Or startle friendship with a tear."
Never was wish more literally fulfilled than this. There were none but
servants about him in his last hours:--
"In all these attendants," says Parry, "there was an
over-officiousness of zeal; but as they could not understand each
other's language their zeal only added to the confusion. This
circumstance, and the want of common necessaries, made Byron's
apartment such a picture at distress and even anguish during the
last two or three days of his life as never before beheld, and have
no wish to witness again."
His remains were taken to England and interred in the family vault in
the Church of Hucknall. His poems are his imperishable monument.
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