RENEWAL AND INTERRUPTION OF RELATIONS WITH MARY CHAWORTH

The Journal is only a fragment, kept only for five months. It is a record rather of emotions than of events—the chronicle of the emotions of a man who feels the need of talking to himself of matters of which he cannot easily talk to others, but who, even in speaking to himself, speaks in riddles. It begins soon after the “mischief” of which Augusta has been told has happened, and while he is entangled in the “scrape” mentioned to Moore. The talk on the first page is of travel—“provided I neither marry myself, nor unmarry any one else in the interval”; and there immediately follows a reference to the writing of “The Bride of Abydos”:

“The Bride,” he insists, was written for himself, and not with any view to publication. “I am sure, had it not been for Murray, that would never have been published, though the circumstances which are the groundwork make it ... heigho!” “It was written,” he adds, “in four days to distract my thoughts from * * *”; and then we perceive that he is in correspondence with the lady thus enigmatically designated. He is expecting a letter from her which does not arrive. What, he asks himself, is the meaning of that?

The probability of a challenge from an injured husband is evidently contemplated here. No challenge came, the injured man remaining in ignorance of his injury; but peace of mind nevertheless remained unattainable. No connected narrative, indeed, can be pieced together. It is hardly ever possible to declare that such and such a thing happened on such and such a day. There is only the general impression that things are happening, and that, whether they happen or do not happen, a tragedy is always in progress. We come presently to a curiously significant note on the raison d’Être of Byron’s practice of fasting:

But a man does not write like that unless his heart has heralded the way, and he is following it. Byron’s trouble was not that he had failed to follow the road which his heart pointed, but that he had followed it into an impasse. He had reached a point at which the only way out was the way on; but he could not follow it alone, and his companion would not follow it with him. She had gone a little way with him, and then taken fright at his and her own temerity.

It is a question whether we should pity her for her lack of courage or praise her for remembering her principles after she had yielded to temptation; but we should need more knowledge of the facts than we have in order to answer it with confidence. Exceptional people may do exceptional things with impunity—it is sometimes for lack of the nerve to do them that they make shipwreck of their lives; but though Byron was an exceptional man, we have no proof that Mary Chaworth was an exceptional woman. She had neither the romantic audacity of George Sand, nor that audacity of the superior person which upheld George Eliot in her bold misappropriation of another woman’s name. Probably, if she had had it, Byron would have classed her with the “blues,” and either have tired of her at once or turned away from her very quickly. She had, no doubt, exceptional charm, but no exceptional strength of character. She was just a weak woman launched into a situation to which the old rules did not apply, but afraid to break them, ashamed of having broken them, obstinate in her refusal to go on breaking them.

Catastrophe, in those circumstances, was inevitable. The bold course might have led to it—for a weak woman, brought up in the fear of her neighbours, can only take a bold course at grave risks. The weak course—since the love of the heart and not merely the passion of the senses was at stake—was bound to lead to it, and did. The only question was whether the victims of the catastrophe would suffer in silence or would cry aloud; and the answer to that question, given the characters of the victims, could easily be predicted. Mary Chaworth would be silent, would make believe to the best of her ability, would wear a mask, and pose, and persuade the world that she was behaving naturally. Byron, disdaining to pretend, proclaiming the truth about his own heart even while respecting Mary’s secret—proclaiming it quite naturally though rather noisily—would appear to the world to be posing.He did so; but before we observe him doing so, we may turn back to the Journal, and study a few more of its enigmatic passages with the help of the clues at our disposal:

Mary Chaworth.

These entries, as everyone who has read them through will have remarked, are all variations on a single theme; and there are many more entries in the same key, which have been left unquoted. They succeed each other, week after week, and almost day after day, for a period of about five months. The story of the events to which they relate has been told, and need not be repeated. One may think of them as the cries attendant on the birth pangs of those aspects of Byron’s character and personality which the world knows specifically as Byronism. Other tragedies, indeed, were to come to pass—and were to be necessary—before the angry heart could dash itself with its full force against the desolations of the world; but the train was being laid for those tragedies too; and by the time Byron flung his unfinished Diary down, the thing called Byronism was born.

Curiously enough, indeed, even the political Byronism can be seen coming to birth at the time of the writing of the Journal. The Byron who was presently, while in exile, to harbour revolutionists, and make his house their arsenal, deride the Tsar of All the Russias as a “Billy bald-coot,” and shake his fist in the faces of the “holy three,” already begins to reveal himself in its pages with scoffing remarks about legitimate kings and the hereditary principle. Perhaps it is only a case of instinct asserting itself and the imperious need to find something to scoff at following the line of least resistance; but that does not matter. What does matter is that here was a crisis and a turning point in Byron’s development, brought about because Mary Chaworth had come back into his life, had passed through it, and had passed out of it again.

Mr. Richard Edgcumbe reads, and has written, still more details into the story, startling students of Byron’s biography with the suggestion that a child was born as the result of the intimacy—that Mrs. Leigh adopted the child and pretended that it was her own—that the child thus secretly born and falsely acknowledged was no other than Medora Leigh, who turned out so badly, and whose alleged autobiography was published by Charles Mackay. Passages can be quoted from the poems—and perhaps also from the letters—which might conceivably contain veiled allusions to such a transaction. None, however, can be quoted which require that explanation as an alternative to remaining unintelligible; and, in the absence of positive evidence, all the probabilities are against Mr. Edgcumbe’s theory.Such a secret as he hints at—and indeed almost affirms—would have been very difficult to keep; and it is hard to believe that Mrs. Leigh’s sense of duty to her husband, with whom she was on the best of terms, would have allowed her to be a party to the alleged conspiracy. Those are a few of the most obvious objections; and they must be given the greater weight because Byron’s bitter cries and altered attitude towards life are more easily explicable without Mr. Edgcumbe’s hypothesis than with it. Loving the real mother so passionately, and having such a faithful friend in the supposed mother, he would assuredly not have been content to live out his life in exile without ever making an attempt to see his daughter, and without constant and particular inquiries after her. So why strain credulity so far when, without straining it, everything can be made plain and clear?

There was a renewal of intimacy, and then a suspension of intimacy; a fear of a public scandal which proved to be groundless; a risk of a duel which was, after all, avoided. That is all that is certain; but that suffices to explain the references to “scrapes” and “mischief” and the rest of it; and that also, on the assumption that Byron was passionately sincere, explains the depth and disgusted vehemence of his emotions. He had dreamed of Mary Chaworth before as the one woman in the world with whom he could live out the whole of his life in a continuous ecstasy of intense emotion; but he had from time to time awakened from his dream. Now the dream had become a reality—and the reality had not lasted. She had been too high principled—or too much afraid. He had not been strong enough to give her courage—or to shake her principles. And therefore....

Therefore he wrote poem after poem, all on the same theme, all in the same key—poems of farewell, of everlasting sorrow and despair, and of that sense of guilt, not defiant as yet, of which Mr. Edgcumbe makes so much, but which are perhaps best read as the reflection of Mary Chaworth’s own horror—the horror of a mind perilously near insanity—at the thing which she had done, but was resolved to do no more. He wrote this, for instance:

“There is no more for me to hope,
There is no more for thee to fear;
And, if I give my sorrow scope,
That sorrow thou shalt never hear.
Why did I hold thy love so dear?
Why shed for such a heart one tear?
Let deep and dreary silence be
My only memory of thee!”

He wrote the well-known lines, beginning:

“I speak not—I trace not—I breathe not thy name—
There is love in the sound—there is Guilt in the fame—
But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart
The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart.”

He wrote, again, these lines, which are taken from “Lara”:

“The tempest of his heart in scorn had gazed
On that the feebler Elements had raised.
The Rapture of his Heart had looked on high,
And asked if greater dwell beyond the sky:
Chained to excess, the slave of each extreme,
How woke he from the wildness of that dream!
Alas! he told not—but he did awake
To curse the withered heart that would not break.”

And then, once more:

“These lips are mute, these eyes are dry;
But in my breast and in my brain,
Awake the pangs that pass not by,
The thought that ne’er shall sleep again.
My soul nor deigns nor dares complain,
Though Grief and Passion there rebel:
I only know we loved in vain—
I only feel—Farewell! Farewell!”

There is no need to quote more. Enough has been given to show how the passionate heart found passionate utterance, and what a wound the wrench had left. Afterwards, of course, when it was all over—or as much over as it ever would be—Byron realised that a man of twenty-six could not well consecrate all the rest of his years to lamentation. He had to live out his life somehow, with the help of incident of some sort; and incident in such a case must mean either a fresh love affair or marriage.

In Byron’s case it meant marriage—the very marriage which Lady Melbourne had designed as a distraction for him from the too-pointed attentions of Lady Caroline Lamb.