Francis Henry Gribble

REVELRY AT NEWSTEAD—“ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS”

One watches the swelling of Byron’s indebtedness with morbid interest. It is like the rapid rising of a Spring tide which threatens to submerge a city. Already, in his second term at Cambridge, as we have seen, he besought his sister to pledge her credit for his loans. At the beginning of his third year, we find him making a confession to his solicitor:

“My debts amount to three thousand, three hundred to Jews, eight hundred to Mrs. B. of Nottingham, to coachmaker and other tradesmen a thousand more, and these must be much increased before they are lessened.”

They were increased before they were lessened—unless the explanation be that Byron only told the truth about them in instalments. Three months later this is his confession to the Reverend John Becher:

“Entre nous, I am cursedly dipped; my debts, everything inclusive, will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one.”

But, even so, the high-water mark is not yet reached. Towards the end of the same year, when Byron is contemplating his “grand tour,” he once more calls his solicitor into council:

“You honour my debts; they amount to perhaps twelve thousand pounds, and I shall require perhaps three or four thousand at setting out, with credit on a Bengal agent. This you must manage for me.”

A pleasant commission, which seems to have led to a reference to Mrs. Byron, who made a luminous suggestion:

“I wish to God he would exert himself and retrieve his affairs. He must marry a woman of fortune this Spring; love matches is all nonsense. Let him make use of the Talents God has given him. He is an English Peer, and has all the privileges of that situation.”

It was a matter-of-fact proposal, worthy of the canny Scotswoman who made it—a proof that, even when she threw the tongs at her son, she still had his interests at heart; but nothing came of it. Very likely Byron, at this date knew no heiresses; and even his mother was not matter-of-fact enough to expect him to advertise for one, even for the purpose of avoiding the necessity of selling Newstead. There was still the resource of borrowing a little more, and of making the loans go as far as possible by retaining the money for personal expenses, instead of applying it to the payment of debt; and something of that sort seems to have been done. Scrope Davies lent Byron £4800; and yet Mrs. Byron had occasion to write:

Moreover, though Byron himself talked vaguely to Hanson of the possibility of his marriage with “a golden Dolly,” he was at an age at which a young man does not readily marry any woman with whom he is not in love. Whether he was or was not, at that time, in love with Mrs. Chaworth,[5] he certainly was not in love with any one else; and he was enjoying himself and “having his fling,” after the manner of gilded youth. His “domestic female companion,” to use Gibbon’s charming phrase, was a professional daughter of joy who travelled about with him in male attire. He even brought her to Newstead, when he took possession of the Abbey on the expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthen’s tenancy. That may have been one reason—though it need not necessarily have been the only one—for his refusal to let his mother join him there. It would certainly have been a valid reason for postponing matrimony.Around those Newstead revels a good deal of fantastic legend circles; and the facts concerning them are hardly to be disentangled from the myths. “Childe Harold” starts with them:—

Ah! me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;
Few earthly things found favour in his sight
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.

“Childe Harold,” however, in spite of the fact that it was first called “Childe Buron,” is a poem, not a deposition. The picture, with its “Paphian girls” and the rest of it—

Where superstition once had made her den,
Now Paphian girls were wont to sing and smile,
And monks might deem their time was come agen,
If ancient tales say true, nor wrong these holy men,

is not necessarily faithful because the note of contrast which it sounds is of the essence of the poem. But, on the other hand, the excuses and explanations by means of which Moore and Cordy Jeaffreson attempt to palliate and minimise the supposed assertions of the poem are somewhat less than convincing.

The revels, say these apologists, cannot have been so very dreadful because the Newstead guests sometimes included some of the local clergy, and because some of the young men who engaged in them afterwards took orders. The obvious answer to that is that the revellers may very well have moderated their revelry on the occasions on which clergymen were present—and that those of them who afterwards became pillars of the Church may not, at that date, have got the old Adam into complete subjection. Nor is a great deal gained by the contention that the part of the supposed “Paphian girls” was, in fact, sustained by Byron’s “domestic female companion,” and by the Newstead cook and the Newstead housemaid. To say this is merely to protest that the alleged Paphians did not really come from Paphos, but from some other island in the same neighbourhood.

A letter written by Charles Skinner Matthews to his sister is the only contemporary chronicle of the proceedings. There is a confirmation of his account, together with some supplementary details, in a letter written, long afterwards, by Byron to John Murray. Remembering the ages and circumstances of the revellers—and remembering also that Moore’s information was derived from some of them—we will try to get as near to the truth as the procurable evidence allows.

Byron, one must always bear in mind, had not yet conquered his place in county society, or in what is now called “smart” society. His mother’s eccentricities and his guardian’s chilly attitude had, as we have seen, kept him out of it. He actually knew no peer who could or would introduce him when he took his seat in the House of Lords. The people whom he knew at home were chiefly provincial people of the professional classes. At Cambridge he had got into a fast, though not an unintellectual, set. He was very young, and he had plenty of credit, if not much ready money; and here was the “venerable pile” of Newstead—not the less venerable because it was dilapidated—at his disposal as a playground, and a place in which to dispense hospitality.

Naturally he wanted to show Newstead to his friends, whom he had never been able to entertain at home before. Naturally, having credit, he used it to fit up and furnish as much of Newstead as was necessary for their comfortable accommodation, not troubling to foresee the day—though he would not have had to look very far ahead in order to foresee it—when the bailiffs would be put in to seize the goods in default of payment. Naturally, as Mrs. Byron was so addicted to rattling the tongs and throwing the fire-irons at him, he did not want her there. Naturally, his college friends having fast tastes and habits, and no ladies of their own station being of the party, the method of their life did not follow the conventional round of the ordinary house-party. The pet bear, and the pet wolf, which guarded the entrances, were only symbols of the unusual and extravagant state of things within.

Breakfast, in theory, could be served at any hour. The hour actually preferred by the majority of the party was one P.M. Matthews, who generally came down between eleven and twelve, “was esteemed a prodigy of early rising.” Any one, he says, who had wanted to breakfast as early as ten “would have been rather lucky to find any of the servants up.” Not until two P.M., as a rule, was the breakfast cleared away. The amusements of the afternoon—which Matthews euphemistically calls the morning—were “reading, fencing, single-stick, or shuttle-cock, in the great room, practising with pistols in the hall, walking, riding, cricket, sailing on the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf.” Dinner was between seven and eight, and then—another euphemism most proper in a letter to a sister—“the evening diversions may be easily conceived.”

Those evening diversions consisted, in the first instance of dressing up and drinking. The beverages, according to Byron himself, were “burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not,” quaffed not only out of ordinary glasses, but also out of a loving-cup fashioned from a skull which had been dug up in the Newstead grounds. As for the dressing-up; “A set of monkish dresses,” says Matthews, “which had been provided, with all the proper apparatus of crosses, beads, tonsures, &c., often gave a variety to our appearance and to our pursuits,” which pursuits consisted, in Byron’s words, of “buffooning all round the house in our conventual garments.”

That Matthews speaks of tonsures as if they were articles of dress is neither here nor there; and there is no importance to be attached to his omission of all reference to the “buffooning.” We know from Hobhouse that he played his part in it, and that one of the amusements of this brilliant young Fellow of Downing was to hide himself in a stone coffin in the Long Gallery and groan, by way of alarming his brother revellers. Evidently the Monks of Newstead, while taking some hints from the profane members of the Medmenham Hell Fire Club, carried out, to the best of their ability, the traditions of the Monks of Thelema. “Fays ce que voudras” might have been their motto; and the doing of what they wished appears to have involved and included the extension of invitations to the cook and the housemaid to participate in their pleasures. Moore says so, not as one who makes a charge, but as one who makes an admission to rebut a graver charge, and is full of sympathy for the exuberance of lusty youth. Moralists must make what they can of the story, and apportion censure and indulgence as they think just.

The excesses, at any rate, whatever their degree and nature, did not fill Byron’s life. He was getting on with his poetry in spite of them, though it would be too much to say that he had yet proved his title to be called a poet.

“Hours of Idleness” had appeared while he was at Cambridge. The interest of that volume, nowadays, is far more biographical than poetical. When one has inferred from it that Byron did not pass through the University with a heart bowed down by the loss of Mary Chaworth, but flirted with a long series of the belles of Southwell, one has said nearly all that there is to say. The poems themselves, as the quotations given amply demonstrate, are no better than the general run of undergraduate verse composition. They are purely imitative; no new note rings in them. One is not surprised that Lord Carlisle, on receiving a presentation copy, was in a greater hurry to acknowledge than to read it, and merely remarked, in his acknowledgment that young men were better occupied in writing poetry than in devoting their valuable time to women and horses.

“Tolerably handsome,” was Byron’s first verdict on that letter; but he seems to have felt snubbed when he read it over a second time. Lord Carlisle’s opinions, he wrote to Miss Pigot, were nothing to him, but his guardian must not be “insolent.” If he were insolent, he should be gibbeted, just as Butler of Harrow had been gibbeted. In fact, and to sum up:

Which shows that Byron’s back was up, and that he was already in a fighting mood when the famous review in the Edinburgh introduced a jarring note into the chorus of approbation.

The author of the attack was not Jeffrey, as Byron thought, but Brougham. He had the excuse, for what it may be worth, that the poems had indubitably been over-praised because they had appeared under the signature of a nobleman. He, therefore, set out on the war path with the truculent air of a man whose conscience requires him to bludgeon a butterfly. The punishment, we cannot doubt, was very painful to the poet whom Cambridge undergraduates and Southwell belles had flattered; and the instant question for him was: Would he take his punishment lying down, or would he take it fighting?

That question, however, was not long in doubt. The Byrons were a fighting race; and the poet had inherited their love of fighting. Just as he had fought Lord Calthorpe at Harrow for calling him an atheist, so now he would fight the Edinburgh critic for calling him a fool. And he would fight him with his own weapons. Let him have three bottles of claret to prime him, and then he would strip for the fray, and would “take on,” not the reviewer only, but every one whom the reviewer had praised, and every one whom he himself disliked, or thought he might dislike if he knew him better. So he emptied his three bottles, and set to work on “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” and having written twenty lines of it, “felt better.”

It is the poem in which his genius first begins to be apparent. Most of the judgments expressed in it were unjust—most of them were afterwards retracted by their author; but that does not matter. One does not expect sound criticism from poets—least of all does one expect it from poets of one-and-twenty. The essence of the thing is that now, in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” a new personality spoke—and spoke loud enough to be heard.

The note of Byron—the note which gained him his large and attentive audience—was his reckless audacity. He was not afraid of saying things; he did not wrap them up, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, but said them in plain language which all the world could understand—said them, moreover, in a manner which made them appear true even to those who thought, or wished to think, them false. His readers never knew what he would be saying next. They only knew that, whatever it was, he would say it effectively, and, as has already been remarked, with the air of one who damned the consequences. That was the note which was, in later years, to ring through “Don Juan.” We can already hear it ringing, as it were in anticipation, through the couplets of “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.”

Many examples might be cited; for the Satire, after the way of Satires, is almost entirely composed of damnatory clauses. Any piece of gossip was good enough for Byron to lay hold of and use as a missile when running amok among literary reputations. The best instance, however, may be found in the passage in which he turned and rent Carlisle.

His original intention was to make himself pleasant to his guardian. He had no particular reason for liking him, but he had no definite case against him. There was the letter, of course, in which Carlisle had patronised the poet instead of praising his poetry; but he had got over his irritation about that, and did not bear malice; and so he prepared for publication these lines of fulsome eulogy:

“Ah, who would take their titles from their rhymes?
On one alone Apollo deigns to smile,
And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle.”

But then, before the day of publication, occurred his quarrel with Carlisle. He thought that his guardian ought to have volunteered to introduce him when he took his seat in the House of Lords; he had the more reason for thinking so because his guardian was the only Peer of the Realm whom he knew. Carlisle, however, did not do so, contenting himself with instructing his ward as to the formalities to be fulfilled. The slight, whether intentional or not, was keenly felt—the more keenly because Byron was, at the moment, at war with all the world except Carlisle. Et tu, Brute, may very well have been his reflection.

So he had misjudged Carlisle. So Carlisle was as bad as other people—worse, indeed, because better things might reasonably have been expected from him. Very well. It was to be war between them, was it? Those who played at bowls must look out for rubbers. Carlisle should see what kind of an antagonist he had provoked. He had threatened to make his sceptre totter in his hands. Now he would show that he could do it. So he struck out the lines of eulogy, and substituted:

“Yet did or Taste or Reason sway the times,
Ah! who would take their titles with their rhymes!
Roscommon! Sheffield! With your spirits fled,
No future laurels deck a noble head;
No Muse will cheer with renovating smile
The paralytic puling of Carlisle.”

Such was the Parthian shaft; and Byron, having discharged it, shook the dust of England from off his feet, and departed on the grand tour.