THE SECRET ORCHARD

The invisible force which was beginning to influence Byron’s life, and was presently to deflect it, was a revival of his recollections of Mary Chaworth. He nowhere tells us so, nor do his biographers on his behalf, but the fact is none the less quite certain. The proofs abound, though the name is never mentioned in them; and Mr. Richard Edgecumbe has marshalled them[6] with conclusive force. The course which Byron’s life followed—the things which he willed and did, as well as the things he said—can only be explained if Mary Chaworth is once more brought into the story.

She is, it must be admitted, one of the most shadowy and elusive of all heroines of romance. We have hardly a scrap of her handwriting—hardly a definite report about her from any contemporary witness. She is said to have been disposed to flirt before her marriage, but to have been serious and well-conducted afterwards. It is known that her husband was unkind to her and that she was unhappy with him; there are statements that she was “religious”; but most of the other evidence is negative, leaving the impression that she was commonplace. The secret of her charm, that is to say, is lost; and we can only guess at it—each of us guessing differently because something of ourselves has to go to the framing of the guesses.

Assuredly there is no inference unfavourable to her charm to be drawn from the fact that she passed through the world without cutting a figure in it. The women who dazzle the world are rarely the women for whose love men count the world well lost. It has been written that a man could no more fall in love with Mrs. Siddons than with the Pyramid of Cheops. Men have also refrained, as a rule, from falling in love with the brilliant women of the salons—with Madame du Deffand, for instance, and Madame Necker, and Lady Blessington, and Lady Holland. The qualities of a hostess, they have felt, are different from those of a mistress. Such women can dominate the crowd, wearing their tiaras like queens, in the garish light of fashionable assemblies; but, in the twilight of the secret orchard, their empire crumbles to the dust. It is not given to them to make any man feel that the limitations of time and space have ceased and that the whole of life is concentrated in the life lived here and now. The women who possess that power are the women who seem insignificant to the men to whom they have not revealed themselves.

Mary Chaworth possessed that power, and so left no mark anywhere in life except on Byron’s heart. She was quite undistinguished, and seemingly conventional—the last woman in the world to be likely to throw her bonnet over the windmill; but she had this subtle, indefinable, and inexplicable secret. She had had it even in the irresponsible days when she flirted with the fat boy, but failed to divine his genius, and preferred the hard-riding and hard-drinking squire. She retained it when the fox-hunting squire had shown the coarseness of his fibre, and the fat boy was a man whose genius had proved itself. Every meeting, therefore, was bound to bring a renewal of the spell, even though, in the intervals between the meetings, Byron could forget.

We have it, on Byron’s authority, that there were certain “stolen meetings.” It has been assumed that these were prior to Mary Chaworth’s marriage; but that is hardly credible. There was no need for stolen meetings then; for everything was frank and open. They must have taken place, if at all—and there is no reason to doubt that they did take place—subsequently to the marriage: subsequently to that dinner-party at which Byron and Mary met, and were embarrassed, and did not know what to say to each other. Perhaps, since Mary was a woman whose instinct it was to walk in the straight path, there was no conscious and deliberate secrecy. The more likely assumption, indeed, is that they contrived to meet by accident, and then thought it better, without any definite exchange of promises, not to mention that they had met. However that may be, the spell continued, and Mary kept the key of the secret orchard. Her spirit was certain to revisit it, even if she herself did not.

Then came the long Eastern pilgrimage. The feeling that this sort of thing could not go on indefinitely may very well have been one of the motives for it; and Byron, of course, was quite young enough to forget, and a great deal too young to let past memories divert his mind from present pleasures. He did forget—or very nearly so; he did divert himself as opportunity occurred. He enjoyed his battle with the police for a woman of the town; he enjoyed his passion for a married woman. There is no reason whatever to suppose that he was really thinking of Mary Chaworth when he wrote verses to the Maid of Athens, or when he gave the most precious of his rings to Mrs. Spencer Smith. But the secret orchard always remained; the spirit of the old tenant might at any time return to it. Such spirits always do return whenever life suddenly, for whatever reason, seems a blank.

It was, in this instance, death—a rapid series of deaths—that brought it back. Byron’s mother died, in circumstances for which, as we have seen, he had some reason to reproach himself. His choirboy friend Eddleston pined away from consumption. Charles Skinner Matthews was drowned in the Cam—entangled in the river weeds and sucked under. Wingfield was drowned on his way to the war in Spain. The news of these four deaths came almost simultaneously, and the shock broke down Byron’s high spirits. His letters are very heartbroken and eloquent.

“Some curse,” he wrote to Scrope Davies, the gamester, “hangs over me and mine.... Come to me, Scrope; I am almost desolate—left almost alone in the world.” “At three-and-twenty,” he wrote to Dallas, “I am left alone, and what more can we be at seventy? It is true I am young enough to begin again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of my life?” To Dallas, too, he wrote a certain morbid letter about the four skulls which lay on his study table, and in another letter to Hodgson he says:

The consolations which Hodgson offered him in his distress were those of religion. He wrote him long letters concerning the immortality of the soul; letters which caused Byron, years afterwards, to remark, when his friend had taken orders, that Hodgson was always pious, “even when he was kept by a washerwoman”—and was shocked by his blasphemous reply that he did not believe in immortality and did not desire it. He appealed to Byron—“for God’s sake”—to pull himself together and read Paley’s “Evidences of Christianity.” He had a great respect for Paley as a Senior Wrangler and entertained no doubt that his conclusions followed from his premisses. A little later, he and Harness,[7] one of Byron’s Harrow protÉgÉs, who was then at Cambridge, reading for his degree, went down to Newstead to stay with Byron.

There were no orgies there this time. No “Paphian girls” were introduced; no practical jokes were played; the cook and the housemaid remained in the servants’ quarters. “Nothing,” says Harness, “could have been more orderly than the course of our days”—which was right and proper seeing that both he and Hodgson were shortly going to be ordained. If the trio sat up late, it was only to talk about literature and religion. Hodgson pressed orthodox views on Byron with “judicious zeal and affectionate earnestness.” Harness supported him with the diffidence appropriate to his tender years. Byron maintained his own point of view, while thinking of other things.

Chiefly he thought of the ghost which now revisited his secret orchard, telling himself that it was not the ghost but the real woman which should have been there. With Mary Chaworth alone he had known the sensation that nothing else mattered while he and she were together. Now that so many deaths had made a solitude in his heart he sorely needed the renewal of that feeling. She could have vouchsafed it to him; she both could and should. Why then, was she not at Annesley, waiting for him, granting more stolen interviews, proving that she still cared, affording him that escape from life to ecstasy?

That was the drift of Byron’s thoughts at the time when Hodgson was trying to direct his attention to Paley’s “Evidences.” He saw, as youth is apt to do, more possibilities of comfort in love than in theology—a fact which is the less to be wondered at seeing that the theology in which he had been brought up was of the uncomfortable Calvinistic kind; and though he was the victim of a mood rather than of a passion—for passion needed the stimulus of sight and touch—the mood had to be expressed, and perhaps worked off, in verse. It burst into “Childe Harold”:

“Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!
Whom Youth and Youth’s affections bound to me;
Who did for me what none beside have done,
Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee.
What is my Being! thou has ceased to be!
Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,
Who mourns o’er hours which we no more shall see—
Would they had never been, or were to come!
Would he had ne’er returned to find fresh cause to roam.
“Oh, ever loving, lovely, and beloved!
How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past.
And clings to thoughts now better far removed!
But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last.
All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death, thou hast;
The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend,
Ne’er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,
And grief with grief continuing still to blend,
Hath snatched the little joy that Life hath yet to lend.”

These stanzas, with three others, were sent to Dallas after “Childe Harold” was in the press, together with a letter which must have mystified him though, as a “poor relation,” he would not well ask impertinent questions; a letter to the effect that Byron has “supped full of horrors” and “become callous” and “has not a tear left.” The “Thyrza” sequence of poems belongs to the same period—almost to the same day. They have puzzled many generations of editors and commentators because “Thyrza” is addressed in them as one who is dead, and because, though Byron spoke of Thyrza to his friends as a real person and showed a lock of her hair, no trace of any woman answering to her description can be discovered in any chronicle of his life.

The explanation is that Thyrza was not really dead, though Byron chose so to write of her. Thyrza was Mary Chaworth who was dead to Byron in the sense that she had passed out of his life, as he had every reason to think (though he thought wrongly) for ever. The poems expressed, according to Moore, “the essence, the abstract spirit, as it were, of many griefs,” with which was mingled the memory of her who “though living was for him as much lost as” any of the dead friends for whom he mourned. They expressed, in fact, his despair at finding the secret orchard tenanted only by a ghost; and if we read the poems by the light of that clue, we can get a clear meaning out of every line.

They are too long to be quoted. Readers must refer to them and judge. The note is the note of bitter despair, working up, at the end, into the note of recklessness. The contrast is there—that contrast as old as the world—between the things that are and the things that might, and should, have been; and then there follows the declaration that, as things are what they are, and as their consequences will be what they will be, there is nothing for it but to plunge into pleasure, albeit with the full knowledge that pleasure cannot please:

“One struggle more, and I am free
From pangs that rend my heart in twain;
One last long sigh to Love and thee,
Then back to busy life again.
It suits me well to mingle now
With things that never pleased before:
Though every joy is fled below,
What future grief can touch me more?
“Then bring me wine, the banquet bring;
Man was not formed to live alone:
I’ll be that light unmeaning thing
That smiles with all, and weeps with none.
It was not thus in days more dear,
It never would have been, but thou
Hast fled, and left me lonely here;
Thou’rt nothing,—all are nothing now.”

The so-called Byronic pose challenges us in that passage; but it is by no means as a pose that it must be dismissed. The men who seem to pose are very often just the men who have the courage—or the bravado, if any one prefers the word—to be sincere; and Byron, if he is to be rightly understood, must be thought of as the most sincere man who ever struck an attitude. That was the secret of his strength. Pose was for him just what Aristotle, as interpreted by Professor Bywater, says that the spectacle of tragedy is to the mass of the spectators. It purged him, for the time being, of his emotions by indulging them. The pose, having done its work, ceased until the emotions recurred, and then he posed again. Hence the many differences of opinion among his friends as to whether he posed or not.

Just now he was posing, in all sincerity, not only to himself but to Hodgson. At one time he told Hodgson that, as soon as he had set his affairs in order, he should “leave England for ever.” At another he sent him an “Epistle to a Friend in Answer to some Lines exhorting the Author to be cheerful and to ‘banish Care.’” Hodgson sent them to Moore for publication in his Life, requesting that the concluding lines should not be printed; but Moore disregarded the request. The Epistle ended thus:

“But let this pass—I’ll whine no more.
Nor seek again an Eastern shore;
The world befits a busy brain,—
I’ll hie me to its haunts again.
But if, in some succeeding year,
When Britain’s “May is in the sere,”
Thou hear’st of one, whose deepening crimes
Suit with the sablest of the times,
Of one, whom love nor pity sways,
Nor hope of fame, nor good men’s praise;
One, who in stern Ambition’s pride,
Perchance not blood shall turn aside:
One ranked in some recording page
With the worst anarchs of the age,
Him wilt thou know,—and knowing pause,
Nor with the effect forget the cause.”

The allusion here, as Hodgson’s biographer discerns, is to “his early disappointment in love as the source of all his subsequent sorrow.” Hodgson’s own comment, scrawled in the margin of the manuscript is: “N.B.—The poor dear soul meant nothing of all this.”

He meant it—and yet he did not mean it. It was the emphasised and exaggerated expression of what he meant—momentarily emphasised for the purpose, whether conscious or unconscious, of relieving himself from the black mood which had descended on him. The relief was gained—though it was not to be permanent. He did not “leave England for ever”—not yet—but hied him to the haunts of the world as he had promised. He plunged into pleasure—and found pleasure more pleasant than he had imagined that it could be.

That was inevitable. He was only twenty-four, and he was famous; and “to be famous when one is young—that is the dream of the gods.” Moreover, he was achieving just that sort of fame which is attended by the most intoxicating joy. The fame of the man of science is nothing—the world interests itself in his discovery but not in him. The fame of a statesman is hardly sweeter—it is only won by fighting and working hard and making jealous enemies. The fame of a poet—a poet who is also the poet—brings instantaneously the applause of men and the wonder and homage of women. They do not separate the man from his work, but insist on associating him with it. Beautiful women as well as blue-stockings—and with less critical discrimination than blue-stockings—prostrate and abase themselves before him, competing for the sunshine of his smiles, believing, or affecting to believe, that his and theirs are kindred souls.

So it befell Byron. Born in exile, he had at last returned from exile in a blaze of triumph. All the doors of all the best houses were thrown open to him with a blare of trumpets. He entered them, not as a parvenu, like Moore the Irish grocer’s son, but as the one man without whose presence the festival would have been incomplete. No man, if one might judge by externals, had ever a better chance of making a splendid and noble pageant of his life. So far as an observer could judge—so far probably as he himself knew—the ghosts of the past were laid, and its memories in a fair way of being effaced. If the past had not come back to him, he might have forgotten it. The tragedy of his life was that it did come back—that he did meet Mary Chaworth again and rediscover the secret orchard which, while she was absent from it, was a howling wilderness, overgrown with weeds.

But not quite immediately. There were certain other things which had to happen first.