RETURN TO ENGLAND—PUBLICATION OF “CHILDE HAROLD”

July 1811 saw Byron back in England after two years’ absence, but in no hurry, for various reasons, to return to Newstead. The “venerable pile” had been desecrated by the invasion of bailiffs in connection with an unpaid upholsterer’s bill; and Mrs. Byron was living there, and was, as usual, quarrelling with her neighbours. Byron, in one of his letters from the Levant, tells her that she cannot deny that she is a “vixen,” and suggests that she is in the habit of drinking more champagne than is good for her. It was only to be expected that she would rattle the fire-irons, and throw the tongs, as furiously as ever—even if a little less accurately—under the stimulating influence. He lingered, therefore, at Reddish’s Hotel, Saint James’s Street; and it was there that the news of her sudden illness—the result, it is said, of shock caused by the magnitude of the afore-mentioned upholsterer’s bill—surprised him. He hurried to her, but the news of her death met him on his way.

He had not loved her. We have passed many proofs of that, and many others could be given. She had taunted him with his deformity, and he believed—so he told Lord Sligo—that he owed it to her “false delicacy” at his birth. She had not understood him, and he had fled before her violence. Unable to love her, he had missed a precious emotion to which he felt himself entitled—that may be one of the secrets of his persistent view of himself as a lonely man, without a friend in a lonely world. If he was shaken by the sudden sundering of the tie, it would have been too much to expect him to be prostrated by his grief, or to do more than pay his brief tribute to the solemnity of death, remembering that there had been signs of tenderness in the midst of, or in the intervals between, the storms of passion.

“Oh, Mrs. By,” he exclaimed to his mother’s maid. “I had but one friend in the world, and she is gone”; but he always said that of every friend who died—of Skinner Matthews who was drowned in the Cam; of John Wingfield who was drowned off Coimbra; and of Eddleston, the choir boy, whom he had admitted to his intimacy at Cambridge. He said it quite sincerely, giving emotion its hour, and then let his thoughts flow in other directions. On the day of Mrs. Byron’s funeral he told his servant to fetch the gloves and spar with him; and the boy thought that he hit harder than usual. Then he threw down the gloves and left the room without a word, with the air of a man disgusted with himself for trying to kill devils like that; and presently he was in the thick of his preparations for the production of “Childe Harold.”He had brought the manuscript of “Childe Harold” home with him, together with the manuscript of “Hints from Horace.” He believed “Hints from Horace” to be much the greater work of the two; and his reasons for thinking so are easy to understand. “Hints from Horace” was a satire based on the best models, and composed on conventional lines. It could be compared with the models, and judged and “marked,” like a schoolboy’s theme. “Childe Harold” was an experiment. It expressed a personality—the personality of a very young man who was not yet quite sure of himself and, except when his temper was up, was afraid of being laughed at. Hobhouse—that candid, trusty, matter-of-fact friend—had seen it, and had criticised it pretty much in the spirit in which Mark Twain’s jumping frog was criticised. He had failed to see any points in that poem different from any other poem. Byron, consequently, was sensitive and timorous about it. “Childe Harold,” he felt, like “Hours of Idleness,” would put him on his defence, whereas in “Hints from Horace,” as in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” he would have the advantage of attacking. He needed the encouragement of flattery.

One Dallas, a distant relative who now introduced himself and, for a season, doubled the parts, as it were, of literary mentor and literary valet, supplied the flattery, recognising that, whereas “Hints from Horace” was just a satire like another, “Childe Harold” was the expression of a new sentiment, hitherto unheard in English literature. “Hints from Horace,” he thought, might be published, if the author wished it—it did not much matter one way or the other; but “Childe Harold” must be published. It was interesting; it was romantic; it would please. It was not merely a narrative, but a manifesto. It ignored conventions, lifted a mask, and revealed a man—a new and unsuspected type of man—beneath it.

So Dallas spoke and wrote; and Byron let himself be persuaded. He yielded, at first, with reluctance—or perhaps it was only with a pretence of reluctance; but, after he had yielded, he entered into the spirit of the situation. He would not only publish, but he would publish with Éclat. If he could not command success, he would deserve it, and would be careful not to throw away a chance. He would not be contented with a publisher who merely printed a few copies of the poem, pushed them outside the back-door, and waited to see what would happen. The minds of men—and women—should be duly prepared for the sensation in store for them. Whatever the mountain might be destined to bring forth, at least it should be visibly in labour. Publication should be preluded by a noise as of the rolling of logs.

The money did not matter. The “magnificent man”—and there was a good deal of Aristotle’s “magnificent man” about Byron at this period—could not soil his hands by taking money for a poem even for the purpose of discharging his debt to the upholsterers whose bills were frightening his mother out of her life. Perish the mean thought! If there was money in the poem, Dallas might have it for himself. All that the author wanted was glory—a “boom,” as we vulgar moderns say—and that arresting noise already referred to, as of the rolling of logs. Dallas must see to that to the best of his ability, and he himself would lend a hand. Above all, there must be no hole-and-corner publishing. Cawthorne must on no account have the book—his status was not good enough. Miller was the man, and, failing Miller, Murray. On the whole it was to Murray that it would be best to go. Murray was the coming man—one could divine him as the publisher of the future, and he had, on his side divined Byron as the poet of the future, and expressed a wish to “handle” some of his work.

So Dallas went to Murray, and got five hundred guineas for the copyright; and then the sound of the rolling of the logs began. Galt heard it. Galt, being himself a man of letters as well as a commercial traveller, knew what it was that he heard. Galt, who was now back in London, tells us that “various surmises to stimulate curiosity were circulated,” and he continues:

That is quite modern—one often reads similar paragraphs nowadays concerning the visits of novelists to the Engadine, or to Khartoum; and if Byron did not go quite so far as to speak publicly of his forthcoming work as “a colossal undertaking,” he managed, without saying so, to convey the impression that that was what it was. He also contrived to have the proofs shown, as a great privilege, to the right people, and was careful to let the critics have advance copies with a view to notice on the day of publication. Dallas himself reviewed it before the day of publication, and was excused on the ground that his indiscretion had proved “a good advertisement.” The privileged women—Lady Caroline Lamb was among them—enchanted by the sentiment of the poem, boasted to the women who were not so privileged, and besought an introduction to the poet. “I must see him. I am dying to see him,” was Lady Caroline’s exclamation to Rogers. “He bites his nails,” Rogers maliciously warned her; but she persisted as vehemently as ever.

She was to see him presently, in circumstances and with consequences which we shall have to note. In the meantime many striking stories concerning him were floating about for her to hear. She heard, for instance—or one may suppose her to have heard—of that dinner-party at Rogers’ house at which Byron distinguished himself by his abstemiousness, refused soup, and fish, and mutton, and wine, asked for hard biscuits and soda-water, and, when Rogers confessed himself unable to provide these delicacies, “dined upon potatoes bruised down upon his plate and drenched with vinegar.” Let us hope that she never heard the end of the story which proceeds, in “Table Talk of Samuel Rogers”: “I did not then know, what I now know to be a fact, that Byron, after leaving my house, had gone to a Club in Saint James’s Street and eaten a hearty meat-supper.” And, of course, her interest, like the interest of the rest of the world, was stimulated by Byron’s maiden speech in the House of Lords.

Galt says quite bluntly that “there was a degree of worldly management in making his first appearance in the House of Lords so immediately preceding the publication of his poem.” Most probably there was. When so many logs were rolling, this particular log was hardly likely to be left unrolled; and there is no denying that the note of self-advertisement does sound in the speech quite as loudly as the note of sympathy with the common people—those Nottingham rioters and frame-breakers for whose suppression it was proposed to legislate.

Viewed as a contribution to the debate, the speech does more credit to the speaker’s heart than to his head. The appeal for pity for misguided, labouring men is mixed up with a denunciation of labour-saving appliances as devices for the further impoverishment of the poor. An economist might say a good deal about that if this were the place for saying it. Byron, such a one would point out, was a Radical by instinct, but a Radical who had as yet but an imperfect comprehension of the natural laws most favourable to the production, distribution, and exchange of wealth. But let that pass. The most resounding note of the speech is, after all, the note of the new man presenting himself, and explaining who he is, and what he has done:

That, in the days in which travel was really travel, involving adventure and bestowing unique experience, was the sort of utterance to draw attention. Byron had actually been to the places which other people only talked and read about; and he was no bronzed, maimed, or wrinkled veteran, but a youth with curling hair, a marble brow, a pallid face, a godlike aspect. What havoc must he not have wrought in harems, and in the hearts of odalisques! He was so young, so handsome, so clever—and, according to his own account, so wicked. And he had written a poem, it appeared—a poem as wicked and beautiful as himself, explaining, with all kinds of delightful details, the shocking courses into which he had been driven by disappointed love. However much poetry one left unread, one must read that poem, and read it at once, in order to show that one was “in the movement.”

So the women argued. It did not matter to them that Byron lacked the graces of the natural orator, and declaimed his sentiments in a monotonous sing-song tone, like a public schoolboy on a speech-day. It mattered still less to them whether his economics were sound or shaky. Sympathy, not argument, was what they wanted, and the sympathy was there. Byron would be some one to lionise—some one, it might be, to love—some one, at any rate, whom every woman must try to understand. And the first step towards understanding him must be to read his book.

They read it, and made the men read it too. It was recognised, as such things come to be recognised, that any one who had not read it would be liable to feel foolish wherever the “best” people were gathered together. The first edition, issued on March 10, 1812, was sold out in three days. There was a second edition in April, a third in June, a fourth in September, a fifth in December, a sixth in August 1813, a seventh in February 1814. By 1819, an eleventh edition had been reached; and the subsequent editions would require a professional statistician to count them. Byron, in short, had not only, as he said, “woke up one morning and found himself famous”; his fame had proved to have enduring qualities.The suddenness of the fame, as we have seen, was not solely the result either of accident or of merit. Author, publisher, and literary agent—for Dallas may fairly be ranked with the pioneers of the last-named profession—had planned and plotted for it. It may even be questioned whether such supreme success was quite deserved; and it would be easy to cite examples of much greater work—some of Wordsworth’s, for example—which was far less successful. But that the enthusiasm was natural—and indeed almost inevitable—cannot be disputed.

The title helped, as Byron himself recognised with cheerful cynicism. Lords, of course, had tried their hands at poetry before, but never with much success, whether they were good lords or wicked. Their compositions had amounted to little more than ingenious exercises in rhyme. Either they had failed to put their personalities into their poems or they had had no personalities worth speaking of to put into them. One could say that, with varying degrees of truth, of Rochester, Roscommon, Sheffield, and Carlisle. To find a lord whose poems could be taken seriously one had to go back to the Elizabethan ages; and modern readers—especially the women among them—were not very fond of going back so far. To get real poetry, with a real personality behind it, from a lord was “phenomenal,” like getting figs from thistles—a thing to stand still and take note of.

Note, therefore, was taken—the more carefully, perhaps, because Byron was, as it were, an unknown lord, born and brought up in exile, coming into society with something of the air of one who had to break down barriers in order to claim his birthright. His poem was, in a manner, his weapon of assault; and, whatever else might be said about it, it was, in no case mere exercise in metrical composition. It was the manifesto of a new personality.

An immature personality, no doubt—in these two cantos of “Childe Harold” the essential Byron is not yet revealed. A personality, too, it might be, with a good deal of paste board theatricality about it—sincerity and clarity of insight were later Byronic developments. But that did not matter—least of all did it matter to the women. Melodrama is often more instantaneously effective than drama; and “twopence coloured” has obvious immediate advantages over “penny plain.” The pose might be apparent, but it was not ridiculous—or, at all events, it did not strike people as being so; and the power of posing without making himself ridiculous is one of the tests of a man’s value. Moreover no pose which makes an impression is ever entirely insincere. The great posturer must put a good deal of himself into his postures, just as the great painter puts a good deal of himself into his pictures. Matter-of-fact persons like Hobhouse might not think so; but women, with their surer instinct, know better. Hobhouse, glancing at the manuscript of “Childe Harold,” might say, with perfect candour, that he saw no points in that poem different from any other poem; but to the women it was, and was bound to be, a revelation.

A revelation, too, of just such a personality as the women liked to think that they understood—and with just such gaps in the revelation as they liked to be puzzled by! One may almost say that the hearts of Englishwomen went out with a rush to Byron for the same reason for which the hearts of the Frenchwomen, two generations earlier, had gone out to Rousseau—because he gave them sentiment in place of gallantry. He had, in fact, given them both; but the note of sentiment predominated; and it was easy to believe that the sentiment was sincere, and the gallantry merely the consoling pastime of the stricken heart.

The women took that view, as they were bound to, agreeing that Byron was the most interesting man of their age and generation. He certainly was infinitely more interesting, from their point of view, than Rousseau. He was younger, better born, and better looking, with more distinguished manners—one of themselves and not, like Jean-Jacques, a promoted lackey. So, in a day and a night, they made him famous, and ensured that, whatever else his career might be, it should be spectacular. The world, in short, was placed, in a sudden instant, at his feet. It was open to him to stand with his foot on its neck, striking attitudes—to step at a stride into a notable position in public life, or to ride, in his own way, with his own haste, to the devil.

Or, at all events, it seemed open to him to make this choice, though the actual course of his life in the presence of the apparent choice, might well be cited as an object lesson in the distinction which the philosophers have drawn between the freedom to do as we will, and the freedom to will as we will. Which is to say that the spectacular life, in his case as in so many others, was to be at the mercy of the inner life, and the things seen in it were largely to be the effect of causes which were out of sight.

It is to that inner life, and to those invisible causes of visible effects that we must now turn back.