A SCHOOLBOY’S LOVE AFFAIRS—MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER, AND MARY CHAWORTH

First on the list of early loves comes little Mary Duff of Aberdeen. She was one of Byron’s Scotch cousins, though a very distant one; and there is hardly anything else to be said, except that he was a child and she was a child in their kingdom by the sea. Only no wind blew out of a cloud chilling her. Her mother made a second marriage—described by Byron as a “faux pas” because it was socially disadvantageous—and left the city; and the two children never met again.

It was of no importance, of course. They were only a little more than seven when they were separated. But Byron was proud of his precocity, and liked to recall it, and to wonder if any other lover had ever been equally precocious. “I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff,” he wrote in a fragment of a diary at the age of twenty-five; and he reminded himself how he used to lie awake, picturing her, and how he urged his nurse to write her a love letter on his behalf, and how they sat together—“gravely making love in our way”—while Mary expressed pity for her younger sister Helen, for not having an admirer too. Above all, he reminded himself of the shock which he felt, years afterwards, when the sudden communication of a piece of news revived the recollection of the idyll.

And then again:

It is a well-known story, and one can add nothing to it beyond the fact that Mary Duff’s husband was Mr. Cockburn, the wine merchant, and that she lived quite happily with him, and that we are entitled to think of her whenever we drink a glass of Cockburn’s port. But we may also doubt, perhaps, whether Byron is, in this case, quite a faithful reporter of his own emotions, and whether his grief was not artistically blended with other and later regrets, and other and later perceptions of the fickleness of the female heart and the mutability of human things. For when we come to look at the dates, we find that the date of Mary Duff’s marriage was also the date of Byron’s desperate passion for Mary Chaworth.

Between Mary Duff and Mary Chaworth, however, Margaret Parker had intervened. She was another cousin, descended from Admiral Byron’s daughter Augusta. The first letter that Byron ever wrote was addressed to her mother. “Dear Madam,” it began, “My Mamma being unable to write herself desires I will let you know that the potatoes are now ready and you are welcome to them whenever you please.” For the rest, one can only quote Byron’s brief reminiscence:

And then Byron speaks of his cousin’s “transparent” beauty—“she looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow”—and concludes:

The elegy is included in the collected works. Special indulgence is asked for it on the ground that it was “composed at the age of fourteen.” It is very youthful in tone—quite on the conventional lines—as one would expect. A single quatrain may be given—not to be criticised, but merely to show that Byron, as a boy, was still looking at life pretty much as his pastors and masters told him to look at it:

“And shall presumptuous mortals Heaven arraign!
And, madly, Godlike Providence accuse!
Ah! no, far fly from me attempts so vain;—
I’ll ne’er submission to my God refuse.”

We are still a long way here from the intense, the cynical, the defiant, or even the posturing Byron of later years. The gift of personal expression has not yet come to him; and he is still in literary fetters, weeping, on paper, according to the rules. Intensity and the personal note only begin with his sudden love for Mary Chaworth; cynicism and defiance only begin after that love affair has ended in failure.

Mary Chaworth was the heir of the Annesley property, adjoining Newstead, and she was the grand-niece of the Chaworth whom the wicked Lord Byron ran through the body in the upper chamber of the Pall Mall tavern; so that their marriage, if they could have been married, would, as Byron says, “have healed feuds in which blood had been shed by our fathers.” But Byron was not yet the Byron who had only to come, and to be seen, in order to conquer. He was a schoolboy of fifteen, which is an awkward age. He had achieved no triumphs in any field which could give him self-assurance. He was not yet a leader, even among his schoolfellows; and he was not only lame, but also fat. How shall a fat boy hope, whatever fires of genius burn within him, to enter the lists against his elders and bear away the belle from county balls? Byron, at any rate, failed signally in the attempt to do so.Newstead having been let to Lord Grey de Ruthen, Mrs. Byron was, at the time, lodging at Nottingham; and Byron had various reasons for preferring to see as little of her as possible. She was never sympathetic; she was often quarrelsome; it was her pleasant habit, when annoyed, to rattle the fire-irons and throw the tongs at him. So he often availed himself of his tenant’s invitation to visit Newstead, whenever he liked; and from Newstead it was the most natural thing in the world that he should go over to Annesley, where Miss Chaworth, with whom he already had a slight acquaintance, was living with her mother, Mrs. Clarke.

He was always welcome there. There was as little desire on his cousin’s side as on his to revive the recollection of the feud. When he came to call, he was pressed to stay and sleep. At first he refused, most probably from shyness, though he professed a superstitious fear of the family portraits. They had “taken a grudge to him,” he said, on account of the duel; they would “come down from their frames at night to haunt him.” But presently his fears, or his shyness, were conquered. He had seen a ghost, he said, in the park; and if he must see ghosts he might just as well see them in the house; so, if it was all the same to his hosts, he would like to stay.

He stayed, and was entranced with Mary Chaworth’s singing. He rode with her, and practiced pistol shooting on the terrace—more than a little pleased, one conjectures, to show off his marksmanship. He went with her—and with others, including a chaperon—on an excursion to Matlock and Castleton. A note, written long afterwards, preserves a memory of the trip:

And no doubt Mary Chaworth encouraged the boy, amused at his raptures, enjoying the visible proof of her power, prepared to snub him, in the end, if necessary, but scarcely expecting that there would be any need for her to do so. She was seventeen, and a girl of seventeen always feels capable of reminding a boy of fifteen that the prayer book forbids him to marry his grandmother. Moreover, she was engaged, though the engagement had not yet been announced, to Mr. John Musters—a grown man and a Philistine—a handsome, rather dissipated, hard-riding and hard-drinking country squire. The dreamy, limping, fat boy from Harrow had no shadow of a chance against his athletic rival. It was impossible for Mary Chaworth to divine the genius that lurked beneath the fat. One has no right to expect such powers of divination from girls of seventeen.

No doubt she thought the fat boy, as she would have said, “good fun.” No doubt she was amused when, as a demonstration that he was not too young to be loved, he showed her the locket which Margaret Parker had given him, three years before, when he was twelve. Unquestionably she flirted with him—or, at least, let him flirt with her. She even gave him a ring, and the gift must have raised high hopes, though it was the cause of the discovery which brought the flirtation to an end.

Squire Musters discovered the ring among Byron’s clothes one day when he and the boy were bathing together in the Trent. He recognised it, picked it up, and put it in his pocket. Byron claimed it, and Musters declined to give it up; and then, to quote the Countess Guiccioli, who is the authority for the story:

Such is the story, as one gets it, through the Countess and through Moore, from Byron himself; but we also get a side glimpse at it in a letter, recently published,[2] from Mrs. Byron to Hanson, the family solicitor. From this we gather that Byron, in order to make love, had absented himself from school; that Drury had inquired the reason of his absence; and that his mother was making strenuous, but unavailing, efforts to induce him to return. Nothing was the matter with him but love—“desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion.” He had hardly been to see his mother at all, but had been spending all his time at Annesley. “It is the last of all connexions,” she added, “that I should wish to take place”; and she begged Mr. Hanson to make arrangements for her son to spend his next holidays elsewhere. Expense was no object; and it would suit her very well if Dr. Drury could be induced to detain him at Harrow.

And Byron himself, meanwhile, was writing to his mother, alternately using lofty language about his right to choose his own friends, and pleading for one more day in order that he might take leave.

He took it; but there is more than one version of the story.

“Do you think,” he overheard Mary Chaworth say to her maid, “that I could care anything for that lame boy?” And, having heard that, “he instantly darted out of the house, and, scarcely knowing whither he ran, never stopped till he found himself at Newstead.” That is what Moore tells us; but the picture drawn in “The Dream,”—the most obviously and deliberately autobiographical of Byron’s poems—is different.

“She loved,” he writes:

“Another: even now she loved another,
And on the summit of that hill she stood
Looking afar as if her lover’s steed
Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew.”

She was waiting, that is to say, for Squire Musters to ride up the lane, while listening to Byron’s declaration. That is the first picture; and then there follows the picture of the boy who “within an antique oratory stood,” and to whom, presently, “the lady of his love re-entered”:

“She was serene and smiling then, and yet
She knew she was by him beloved—she knew,
For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart
Was darkened with her shadow, and she saw
That he was wretched, but she saw not all.
He rose, and with a cold and gentle grasp
He took her hand; a moment o’er his face
A tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced, and then it faded, as it came;
He dropped the hand he held, and with slow steps
Retired, but not as bidding her adieu,
For they did part with mutual smiles; he passed
From out the massy gate of that old Hall,
And mounting on his steed he went his way;
And ne’er repassed that hoary threshold more.”There we have the Mary Chaworth legend as it has been handed down from one generation of biographers to another. Byron, according to that legend, saw Mary once after her marriage, but once only. He was on the point of visiting her at a later date, but was dissuaded by his sister. “If you go,” Augusta said, “you will fall in love again, and then there will be a scene; one step will lead to another, et cela fera un Éclat.” He agreed that the reasoning was sound, and did as he was advised. He tells that story himself, and adds: “Shortly after, I married.”

And yet—the legend continues—this hopeless love, which touched his heart at the age of fifteen, was the dominating influence of his life. Mary Chaworth, though always absent, was yet always present. He never loved any other woman, though he tried to love, and indeed seemed to love, several. The vision of her face always came between him and them. His later love affairs were only concessions, or attempts to escape from himself and his memories—unavailing attempts, for this memory continued to haunt him until the end.

It sounds incredible. The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts; but the memories of youth are short, and the dreams of youth are dreams from which we never fail to wake. And yet Byron insists, quite as much as biographers have insisted. He insists in “The Dream,” which was written more than a decade after the parting. He insists in later poems, the inner meaning of which is hardly to be questioned. So that speculation is challenged, and, when pursued, leads us inevitably to a dilemma.

For of two things, one: Either Byron was posing—posing not only to the world but to himself; or else the story, as all the biographers from Moore to Cordy Jeaffreson have told it, is incomplete, and after an interlude, had a sequel.

To search for such a sequel will be our task presently. Unless we can find one, the development of the personal note in Byron’s work will have to be left unexplained. The impression which we get, if we read the more personal poems in quick succession, is of a man who first awakes from the dream of love—and remains very wide awake for a season—and then relapses and dreams it all over again. Unless the story which first set him dreaming had had a sequel, that would hardly be. So we will seek for the sequel in due course, though we must first gather up the incidents of the interlude.