Francis Henry Gribble

THE MAID OF ATHENS—MRS. WERRY—MRS. PEDLEY—THE SWIMMING OF THE HELLESPONT

“Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!”

It would be superfluous to quote more of the poem than that; and it would be absurd to attach importance to the episode which it commemorates.

Byron came to Athens after an expedition, with Hobhouse, into the heart of Albania. He was, according to Hobhouse’s Diary, “all this time engaged in writing a long poem in the Spenserian stanzas,” the poem being, of course, the first canto of “Childe Harold.” That the travellers roughed it a good deal is evident from Hobhouse’s description of a supper whereat “Byron, with his sabre, cut off the head of a goose which shared our room with a collection of pigs and cows, and so we got an excellent roast.” He was much pleased with his reception by Ali Pasha, who said “he was certain I was a man of birth because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands.” He was also, at the same time, brooding on his “passion for a married woman,” and no doubt felt himself years older in consequence of that passion; and then, arriving at Athens, he fell in love, or fancied or pretended that he was in love, with his landlady’s daughter.

That was the social status of the Maid of Athens. Her mother, Theodora Macri, the widow of a former British Vice-Consul, had been reduced to letting lodgings—a sitting-room and two bedrooms, looking on to a courtyard, much patronised by English travellers, and highly recommended by them. There were three daughters, and there are passages in Byron’s letters which might be read to mean that he was equally in love with all of them. “An attachment to three Greek girls” is his summary of the incident to Hodgson; but he distinguished one of them by the special homage of a poem destined to be one of the most famous in the English language, with the result that Theresa Macri, Maid of Athens, became an institution, and that subsequent lodgers made much of her, looking for a romance where there had, in fact, been little more than the formal salute of the ships passing in the night. Hugh W. Williams, the artist, who was at Athens in 1817, depicts them for us:

“On the crown of the head of each is a red Albanian skull-cap, with a blue tassel spread out and fastened down like a star. Near the edge or bottom of the skull-cap is a handkerchief of various colours bound round their temples. The youngest wears her hair loose, falling on her shoulders.”

The Maid of Athens.

That, no doubt, was how Theresa wore her hair when Byron flattered her with his attentions. She also, it seems, wore “white stockings and yellow slippers,” and had “teeth of pearly whiteness” and “manners such as would be fascinating in any country.” It was the usual thing, according to Williams, for their mother’s lodgers to flirt with one or other of them. It would have been “remarkable,” he thinks, if they had not done so. Presumably he did so himself. At all events he admired them very much as they sat “in the Eastern style, a little reclined, with their limbs gathered under them on the divan, and without shoes”; but he insists with no less emphasis upon their propriety than upon their graces. “Modesty and delicacy of conduct,” he comments, “will always command respect”; and further:

Moore tells us that Byron, in Oriental style, gashed himself across the breast with a dagger as a symbolic demonstration of his conquest by Theresa’s charms, and that Theresa “looked on very coolly during the operation, considering it a fit tribute to her beauty, but in no degree moved to gratitude.” And that, of course, is what one would expect. The game was being played according to the rules, and Theresa was child enough to enjoy the fun. One can imagine that it was a game which the girls often played with the lodgers, teaching them the rules when they did not already know them. One would be churlish indeed to begrudge them their enjoyment, or to protest that they were “forward” or suspect that they were “designing.” The landlady’s daughter can often do much to make life in a lodging-house agreeable; and youth must have its hour though time flies and love, like a bird, is on the wing.

Our next glimpse of Theresa, taken from Walsh’s “Narrative of a Residence in Constantinople,” shows us that time is, indeed, an “ever-rolling stream,” carrying its daughters, as well as its sons away upon the flood. “Lord Byron’s poem,” writes Walsh in 1817, “has rendered the poor lady no temporal service though it has ensured her immortality”; and he continues:

That, no doubt, is the exaggeration of a sentimentalist. Theresa’s hopes can hardly have been serious. Landladies’ daughters, have too many hopes deferred and disappointed to allow the disappointment of any hope in particular to blight their lives. Theresa, in due course, became Mrs. Black, the wife, like her mother, of a vice-consul; and she lived to the great age of eighty, “a tall old lady,” writes the United States Consular Agent at Athens, “with features inspiring reverence, and showing that at a time past she was a beautiful woman.” Her countrymen, however, did not forget that she had been the Maid of Athens; and, Byron’s services to the Greek cause being also remembered, a public subscription provided for the necessities of her last years. That is all that there is to say about her unless it be to repeat that she played but a very minor part in the pageant of Byron’s life, and cannot even be spoken of as Mrs. Spencer Smith’s only rival.

For there were others; and though the other stories are clouded with a good deal of doubt, they cannot fail to leave a certain collective impression of Byron as a man whom all women found attractive and many women found susceptible.

At Smyrna, for instance, there was a Mrs. Werry, whose name and effusive proceedings are mentioned by Hobhouse:

At Athens, too, there was a second affair of which there is a full and circumstantial account in Medwin’s “Conversations of Lord Byron.” The heroine was a Turkish girl of whom Byron was “fond as I have been of few women.” All went well, he told Medwin, until the Fast of Ramadan, when Law and Religion prohibit love-making for forty days, and the women are not allowed to quit their apartments. An attempt to arrange an assignation at this season was detected. The penalty was to be death, and Byron was to be kept in ignorance of everything until it was too late to interfere:

“Perhaps of love” is the typical finishing touch of the “fatal man;” but Medwin may have added it. To Byron, at any rate, the incident counted for no more than any of the other incidents; but it was followed, or is said to have been followed, by an incident which counted for even less—the incident of the beautiful Mrs. Pedley, related in a curious anonymous work entitled: “The life, Writings, Opinions, and Times of the Right Hon. G. G. Noel Byron,” published in 1825.

Byron met Mrs. Pedley at Malta on his way home. She was the wife of a Dr. Pedley, beautiful and frivolous—addicted, it may be, to levity, as a relief from the dulness of garrison life. Her husband, for reasons which we are left to conjecture, turned her out of his house. She came to Byron’s house, sat down on the door-step, and refused to go. Perhaps she argued that, as Byron had loved one married woman, he was prepared to love all married women; but if so, she argued wrongly. Byron begged her to return to her home, and when she declined to do so, he sent a note to Dr. Pedley to ask what he had better do with her. The Dr.’s answer was to pack up the lady’s clothes and other belongings and send them to Byron’s rooms, with a message to the effect that he wished him joy of the adventure. The upshot of it all was that Byron consented to take Mrs. Pedley to England, but gave her very little of his society, and parted with her immediately on landing.

Such, at all events, is the story as the anonymous biographer relates it, though it is impossible to say on what authority it reposes. Even if it rests upon gossip, and is untrue, it helps to fill in the picture by reflecting the reputation which Byron was making for himself during his Oriental travels: a reputation, on the one hand, of a man who made love with cynical recklessness, and on the other hand of a man who swaggered round the Levant with unwarrantable arrogance and pride.

We have already seen him swaggering about his swimming of the Hellespont. He continued to swagger about it to the very end of his life. Even in “Don Juan” there is a well-known reference to the exploit:

“A better swimmer you could scarce see ever;
He could, perhaps, have passed the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did.”

It was a considerable feat, no doubt, though he was only an hour and ten minutes in the water; but the anonymous biographer already quoted adds some details which make it, if not more glorious, at least more dramatic. Byron, according to this version of the story, was helped out of the water in a state of extreme exhaustion, and lay three days in a fisherman’s hut, nursed and tended by the fisherman’s wife. The fisherman did not in the least know whom he was entertaining, but believed his guest, whose language he could not speak, to be a needy shipwrecked sailor. On his departure, therefore, he pressed on him not only bread and cheese and wine, but also a few copper coins. Byron accepted the gift, without attempting to explain, and a few days afterwards sent his servant with a return gift: a brace of pistols, a fowling piece, a fishing net, and some silk to make a gown for the fisherman’s wife. The fisherman was so overwhelmed that he set out at once in his boat to thank the generous donor, and was caught in a sudden squall and drowned.

That is a story of which it is impossible to say whether it is true or only well invented. We are on safer ground in taking the testimony of the well-known people who met Byron in the course of his journey; and our principal witnesses are Lady Hester Stanhope, who passed him at Athens on her way to Lebanon, Sir Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the “great Eltchi,” then Secretary of Embassy at Constantinople, and John Galt, who was still going his rounds as a high-class commercial traveller. No one of the three is extravagantly eulogistic, and all three bear witness to the pose, the swagger, and the arrogance.

“A sort of Don Quixote fighting with the police for a woman of the town,” is Lady Hester’s verdict, suggested, no doubt, by the adventure on which Byron put such a different colour when he related it to Medwin. “He wanted,” she continues, “to make himself something great,” but she will not allow that he succeeded. “He had a great deal of vice in his looks,” she says, “his eyes set close together and a contracted brow”; and, as for his poetry, Lady Hester shakes her head even over that:

That reflection, perhaps, always supposing that Dr. Merryon has reported it correctly, throws a brighter flood of light upon the critic’s mind than upon the poet’s genius; but the criticism offered by Sir Stratford Canning was a criticism of matters which he understood. He “cannot,” he says, “forbear to record” what happened when Byron obtained permission to be present at an audience granted by the Sultan to the corps diplomatique. There is a reference to the story in Moore’s “Journal”; but the authorised version must be sought in Lord Stratford de Redcliffe’s Papers:

“As Canning refused to walk behind him, Byron went home,” is Hobhouse’s laconic report of the incident; but when a letter from the Ambassador followed him, he apologised. His fancy dress, it had seemed to him, was quite as becoming as other people’s uniforms; he had honestly supposed himself to be standing out for the legitimate rights of a peer of the realm. As this was not so—as the Austrian Internuncio had been consulted and had said that it was not so—then he would be glad to join the procession as a simple individual, and humbly to follow his Excellency and “his ox or his ass or anything that was his.” Whether that was a subtle way of calling Stratford Canning an ass does not appear; but the transaction was a characteristic exhibition of the neck-or-nothing audacity of Byron’s undisciplined youth. He figures, at this date, as a Lord among adventurers and an adventurer among Lords.

Stratford Canning saw him in the latter and John Galt in the former light. At a dinner-party at which they were both present, “he seemed inclined,” says Galt, “to exact a deference to his dogmas that was more lordly than philosophical”; and he continues:

The fair inference seems to be that Byron had let Galt perceive the great gulf fixed between peers of the realm and commercial travellers. It was the sort of thing that he would do when in a bad temper, though not when in a good one. Galt, however, not only submitted to the snub, but accounted for it like a philosopher. Byron, he says, was in trouble at this time, not about his soul, but about his remittances; and “the false dignity he assumed” was really “the apprehension of a person of his rank being exposed to require assistance among strangers.” One can certainly find support for the supposition in his urgent letters home.In due course, however, the remittances turned up, and Byron recovered his affability and resumed his journey. Hobhouse left him and returned alone. “Took leave,” he notes in his Diary, “non sine lacrymis, of this singular young person, on a little stone terrace at the end of the bay, dividing with him a little nosegay of flowers.” There had been some coolness between them, and this was the sentimental renewal of their friendship. A return visit to Athens was the next stage, but there does not appear to have been any resumption of the old relations with the Maid of Athens. On the contrary, it was on this second visit to Athens that Lady Hester Stanhope discovered the poet “fighting the police for a woman of the town.”

At Athens, too, Byron met his old Cambridge acquaintance, Lord Sligo, from whom we obtain, through Moore, some further glimpses at his manner of life and characteristic affectations. He was once more, it seems, constrained to combat the flesh by means of self-denying ordinances, and, to that end, took three Turkish baths a week, and confined himself to a diet of rice and vinegar and water. This system, and a fever contracted at Patras, made him very pale; and he felt that to be pale was to be interesting.

But that is another of the stories which throw at least as much light on the reporter as on the reported. Lord Sligo, no doubt, was the sort of healthy, wooden-headed young Philistine on whom it is a joy to test the effect of such remarks. Byron, in thus posing for him, was, so to say, “trying it on the dog.” There is no such foolishness in his correspondence with those whom he regarded as his intellectual equals, and one cannot conclude the account of his travels better than by quoting his summary of their moral effect contained in a letter to Hodgson:

To what extent, and within what limits, he carried out these good resolutions, we shall observe as we proceed.