AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS—THOUGHTS OF MARRIAGE, OF FOREIGN TRAVEL, AND OF MARY CHAWORTH

The poems written during the dark period of Byron’s life which we have now to consider are “The Giaour,” “The Bride of Abydos,” “The Corsair,” and “Lara.” Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, in his introduction to “The Bride of Abydos,” attributed the gloom to the fact that Byron “had been staying at Aston Hall, Rotherham, with his friend James Wedderburn Webster, and had fallen in love with his friend’s wife, Lady Frances.” It will be time enough to treat that suggestion seriously when more evidence is offered in support of it. The one important reference to Lady Frances in the Letters certainly does not bear it out:

That is all; and it is not in tune with those allusions, veiled by asterisks, to a consuming and destroying passion, with which the Journal is thickly sprinkled. On the other hand the open references to Mary Chaworth scattered throughout Byron’s autobiographical utterances are perfectly in tune with these enigmatical invocations of an Unknown Lady. Even if it could not be shown that she and Byron met during this period of mental anguish, we should still be tempted to conjecture that she and the Unknown Lady were one; and, as a matter of fact, we know that they did meet, and also know enough of the terms on which they met to be able to clear up the situation beyond much possibility of doubt. The key to it, indeed, is the letter written by Byron to Mary Chaworth five years after their final separation:

That letter by itself proves practically the whole case. It does not matter whether it is his own marriage or Mary Chaworth’s that Byron speaks of as “cursed”—the epithet may well have seemed to him equally applicable to either union. The essential point is that Byron could not conceivably have written in this tone to Mary Chaworth in 1818 if he had had no relations, or only formal relations, with her since 1809. The mere fact—the only openly acknowledged fact—that she had jilted him when he was a schoolboy would certainly not have warranted him in reproaching her with “refusing to continue to love” at a date thirteen years subsequent to his rejection. The letter obviously, and undeniably, implies an intimacy of later date in which his passion was reciprocated.

Later acquaintance, indeed, apart from intimacy, can easily be demonstrated, in spite of the suppressions of the biographers. “I remember meeting her,” Byron himself said to Medwin, “after my return from Greece”; and the statement is confirmed, as Medwin’s statements generally need to be, from other sources. It appears from Byron’s own letters that Mary Chaworth, or some member of her family, took charge of his robes after one of his attendances at the House of Lords; and a letter from Mary Chaworth to Byron, in the possession of Mr. Murray, is printed by Mr. Edgcumbe. It speaks of a seal which Byron was having made for her. The seal is still in existence, and is in the possession of the Musters family. The approximate date of its presentation is fixed by an entry in Byron’s journal:

Here, at any rate, we get one clear case in which the asterisks in the Journal not only appear to indicate Mary Chaworth, but cannot possibly indicate anybody else. It does not follow, of course, that we are entitled to insert her name wherever we encounter asterisks—for Byron and his editors have, from time to time, had various reasons for thus concealing various names; but the cases in which the asterisks do refer to her are, when once this clue is provided, tolerably easy to distinguish. Furnished with the clue, we can at once unravel the skein of events and construct a consistent picture of these critical months in Byron’s career; and we may begin with the picture which he drew of himself to Medwin:

This is true, and yet, at the same time, it is not true. The picture is, at once, confirmed by the Letters and the Journal and contradicted by them. It is a picture in which, so to say, all the lights are glaring, and all the shadows are left out. The truest thing in it is the after-thought, added a few sentences lower down; “Don’t suppose, however, that I took any pleasure in all these excesses.” In that moody claim we get, of course, the reflection, or recollection, of the Byronic pose; and at this period, if not at all periods, there was grim reality behind the pose, and Byron fully justifies the description of him as the most sincere man who ever struck an attitude.

It would be easy to depict him, whether from his letters or from contemporary memoirs, as the dissipated darling of society. The year 1813 was the year in which he and Madame de StaËl were the rival lions of the season, roaring against each other, not entirely without jealousy. The list of his social engagements, if one troubled to draw it out, would have a very formidable appearance. It would show him going everywhere, meeting everybody, doing everything. We should see him at the great houses, such as Lady Melbourne’s, Lady Holland’s, Lady Jersey’s. We should discover him at the opera and the theatre, now in their boxes, now in his own, and at men’s dinners, with Sheridan, and Rogers, “Conversation Sharp,” and other brilliant talkers. We should also find him patronising “the fancy,” and losing his money at hazard, and drinking several bottles of claret at a sitting—retiring to bed in a sublime state of exaltation, and rising from it with a shocking headache.

That, however, would only be one half the picture. Many contemporary observers remarked that Byron passed through the haunts of pleasure with a scowl, and that his face wore a frown whenever his features were in repose. One would infer from that, not that Byron, while really enjoying himself, posed, for the sake of effect, as a man who was secretly eating his heart out, but rather that some secret trouble was actually gnawing at his heart while he made the gestures of a man of pleasure; and the Letters and the Journal—more particularly the Journal—give us many glimpses at this darker side of his life. If he often accepted the invitations which continued to be showered on him, he also frequently declined them, locking himself up alone in his chambers to read, and write, and think things out—persuading himself, after some months had lapsed, that he had really been very little into society, and that it was a matter of indifference to him whether he went into it again or not.

And this, it will be observed, is a new note which only begins to be sounded in his intimate writings towards the end of the summer of 1813, after he has allowed Lady Oxford to go abroad alone. There is nothing like it in the days of his dalliance with her. Still less is there anything like it in the writings of the days of his dalliance with Lady Caroline Lamb. Those episodes and adventures, it is quite clear, only touched the surface of his nature. He first pursued them, and then ceased to pursue them, with laughter on his lips, and self-satisfaction—one might even say jollity—in his heart. There was not even anything in them to cradle him into song. The interval between the “Thyrza” poems and the passionate allegorical tales of which “The Giaour” was the first—an interval of some eighteen months—was poetically uneventful. A period of feverish activity succeeded; and it coincided with a renewal of relations with Mary Chaworth.

Mary Chaworth had lived unhappily with the handsome squire whom she had, so naturally, preferred to the fat boy from Harrow. He had been, as these red-faced, full-blooded Philistines are so apt to be, at once jealous, unfaithful, and brutal, wanting to “have it both ways,”—to push rivals brusquely out of his path, and to pursue his own coarse pleasures where he chose. He had forbidden his wife to see Byron. He had insisted upon her absence from Annesley at the time of Byron’s return from Greece; and he had found her, whether willingly or unwillingly, compliant. But he had also, by his own conduct, caused scandals which had set the tongues of the neighbours wagging; and, in doing that, he had presumed too far. There had been a separation by mutual consent; and it was after the separation that the meeting with Byron took place.

There was little about him now to remind Mary of the fat boy whom she had laughed at. The Turkish baths, the Epsom salts, and the regimen of biscuits and soda-water had done their work. He came to her as a man of ethereal beauty, fascinating manners, and undisputed genius; and he left other women—women of higher rank, greater importance, and more widely acknowledged charm—in order to come to her. Nor did he come with the triumphant air of a man who was resolved to dazzle her in order to avenge a slight. He came, as it were, because he could not help himself—because he felt cords drawing him—because this was his destiny and he must fulfil it, though he forfeited the whole world in doing so.

Her case was hard. She was not one of the women who readily do desperate things in scorn of consequence. The traditions of her class, the claims of her family—the precepts, also, one imagines, of her religion—had too strong a hold on her for that. These very hesitations, no doubt,—so different from the “on coming” ways of Lady Caroline, and Lady Oxford’s “terrible love,” as Balzac phrases it, “of the woman of forty”—were a part of her charm for Byron. But she was very unhappy, and Byron was offering her a little happiness; and it was very, very difficult for her to refuse the gift. So the history of the matter seems, in a sentence or two, to have been this: that she was slow to yield, but yielded; that she had no sooner yielded than she repented; that her repentance left Byron a desperate, heart-broken man, profoundly cynical about women—so cynical about them that he could speak even of her, while he still loved her, to Medwin, as “like the rest of her sex, far from angelic”—ready to marry out of pique, or from any other motive equally unworthy.

The details must remain obscure. They passed in the secret orchard; and Byron was not, like Victor Hugo, a man who treated his secret orchard as a park to be thrown open to excursionists. He knew that there was a time to keep silence as well as a time to speak; and though there were some episodes in his life of which he spoke too much, of this particular episode he only spoke to Moore and Mrs. Leigh, whom he could trust. Yet, given the clues, the story constructs itself; and we must either believe the story which arises out of those clues, or else believe that the most passionate poems which Byron ever wrote were the outcome of a spiritual crisis about nothing in particular. And that, of course, is absurd.

We find him, at the beginning of the crisis, pondering two escapes from it—the escape by way of marriage, and the escape by way of foreign travel. He talks, in the middle of July, of proposing to Lady Adelaide Forbes; he talks, at the end of August, of proposing to anyone who is likely to accept him; but in neither instance does he talk like a man who really means what he says. This is the July announcement:

“My circumstances are mending, and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife, and that should be the woman had I a chance.... The StaËl last night said that I had no feeling, was totally insensible to la belle passion, and had been all my life. I am very glad to hear it, but did not know it before.”