MARRIAGE

Whatever doubts and mysteries environ the circumstances of Byron’s separation from his wife, there is, at any rate, nothing to perplex us in the train of events which brought about his marriage, though the two common and conflicting theories have to be set aside. He did not marry Miss Milbanke for money; he did not marry her for love; he married her, partly because he had persuaded himself that he wanted a wife, and partly because she had made up her mind that he should do so.

He cannot have married her for money because, at that date, her fortune was inconsiderable and her expectations were vague. She had only £10,000; and “good lives” stood between her and the prospect of any substantial inheritance. Seeing that Newstead, when put up to auction, was bought in for £90,000, a dowry of £10,000 was of no particular consequence to Byron, and if he had been fortune-hunting, he would have hunted bigger game. The fortune which he did capture was not enough to save him from almost instant financial embarrassments; and he faced that prospect as one who viewed it with indifference. “She is said,” he wrote to Moore, “to be an heiress, but of that I really know nothing certainly, and shall not inquire. But I do know that she has talents and excellent qualities.”

But if it is clear that Byron was not an interested, it is equally clear that he was not a passionate, suitor. He hardly could be so soon after the emotional stress through which we have seen him passing; and the proofs that he was not are conclusive. The most conclusive proof of all is that at the time when he proposed, by letter, to Miss Milbanke, he had not seen her, or made any attempt to see her, for ten months, and that, though he had, during those ten months, been corresponding with her, he had also, during those ten months, been pursuing sentimental adventures with which she had nothing to do. It was, as we have already seen, during those ten months that the renewed relations with Mary Chaworth were broken off; and when, after the close of those renewed relations, Byron’s thoughts turned to marriage, it was not Miss Milbanke whom he first thought of marrying.

The desire to marry, in short, had only been a particular emotion with Byron when there was a possibility of marrying Mary Chaworth. Thereafter it was only a general emotion—a desire for an “escape from life,” and a domestic refuge from the storms which threatened shipwreck. He was tired of the struggle, and here was a prospect of rest. A little more than three months before his proposal to Miss Milbanke he was thinking of proposing to Lady Adelaide Forbes—ready to marry her, as he wrote to Moore, “with the same indifference which has frozen over the ‘Black Sea’ of all my passions.” A fortnight later—almost to a day three months before the proposal—he writes again to Moore:

Byron assuredly was not in love with Miss Milbanke when he wrote that; and he had no opportunity of falling in love with her in the course of the next three months, for he did not even see her. None the less he made up his mind to ask her to marry him—as an alternative to departing on a long foreign tour; and it is from Hobhouse’s lately published narrative that we can best see how he was led, or lured, to that decision.

Byron had first met Miss Milbanke at the time when Lady Caroline Lamb was throwing herself at his head. Lady Caroline had shown him some verses which Miss Milbanke had written, and he had said that he considered them rather good—possibly because he thought so, but more probably because he wished to be polite. Soon afterwards, he had been presented to her, and had made her a first proposal of marriage, which she had declined.The reasons alike for his offer and for her refusal of it remain obscure. He must, at any rate, have liked her; he was almost certainly getting tired of Lady Caroline’s determination to monopolise and exploit him; perhaps he was also anxious to do anything in reason to oblige Lady Melbourne, who had the motives which we know of for desiring to bring about the match. Whether Miss Milbanke, on her part, preferred some other admirer or resented Lady Melbourne’s attempt to make a convenience of her is doubtful. Both motives may have operated simultaneously; and Byron, at any rate, accepted his refusal in a philosophic spirit. It had not, Hobhouse says, “sunk very deep into his heart or preyed upon his spirits.” He “did not pretend to regret Miss Milbanke’s refusal deeply.” Indeed “it might be said that he did not pretend to regret it at all.” And Hobhouse describes a “ludicrous scene” when some common friend related that he had been rejected by Miss Milbanke, and burst into tears over the catastrophe.

Perhaps it was—some unsuccessful suitors are quite capable of taking comfort from such reflections; but that need not concern us. What we have to note is that Byron’s rejection by Miss Milbanke resulted in his engaging in a long correspondence with her; and that the commencement of that correspondence was negotiated by Lady Melbourne. One infers that Lady Melbourne was a very clever woman, by no means innocent of “ulterior motives,” far less ready than Byron to take “no” for an answer from Miss Milbanke, and intuitively conscious that correspondences of this character are apt to weave entanglements for those who engage in them.

Some extracts from the correspondence are printed in Mr. Murray’s Collected Edition of Byron’s Works. There are references to it both in Byron’s Journal and in Hobhouse’s Account of the Separation. There is nothing in the text which it seems imperative to quote—nothing, that is to say, which perceptibly helps the story along. Byron’s own letters are rather high-flown and artificial. The impression which one gathers from them is that of a man elaborately keeping alive the double pretence that he is unworthy and that he is disappointed—but only keeping it alive out of politeness. The nature of Miss Milbanke’s letters can only be inferred from the one or two allusions which we find to them.

That is what Byron says; but Hobhouse adds a little more. He says that Byron at first “believed that a certain eccentricity of education had produced this communication from a young woman otherwise notorious for the strictest propriety of conduct and demeanour.” He also says that the tone of the communications grew in warmth as the correspondence proceeded, and that Byron did not make up his mind to propose marriage a second time until “after certain expressions had been dropped by Miss Milbanke in her letters which might easily have encouraged a bolder man than his lordship.” He says finally, and this he says, in italics, that when Byron did propose for the second time, Miss Milbanke accepted him by return of post. To which piece of information Moore adds the statement that in order to make assurance doubly sure, she sent her acceptance in duplicate to his town and his country addresses.

It reached him at Hastings; and Miss Milbanke proceeded to impart her news to her friends. A passage from one of the letters—that to Miss Milner—shows not only that she was very happy in the prospect of her marriage, but also that she had woefully deceived herself as to the circumstances which had preceded and led up to the proposal:

“The last two years” included, as we have seen, the period during which Byron was bombarding Hanson with perpetual and imperious demands for the ready money without which he could not go abroad with Lady Oxford—the period at which he told Moore that he was ready to “incorporate with any decent woman”—and the period at which he wrote “The Bride of Abydos” in order to “distract my thoughts from * * *” Miss Milbanke, that is to say, exaggerated both her importance to Byron and her influence over him, flattering herself that there would have been no “Byronism” but for her coldness, and that the warmth of her affection, so long withheld, was the one thing wanting to make glorious summer of the winter of Byron’s discontent.

It was not an unnatural hallucination. Young women of romantic disposition are easily flattered into such beliefs, especially if the gates are thronged with suitors. Having read of such situations in many novels, and dreamed of them in many dreams, they live in expectation of the day when life will be true to fiction and their dreams will be fulfilled. And sometimes, of course, the dreams are fulfilled—sometimes, but not very often, and hardly ever in the case of heroines who are, as Miss Milbanke was, commonplace in spite of their intelligence, cold, obstinate, unyielding, critical, vain, and inexperienced, quick to perceive slights, and slow to forgive them.

At all events they were not, in her case, destined to be fulfilled; and the initial improbability of their fulfilment may be inferred from a confession which Hobhouse reports.

No more than that. Byron was only marrying, Hobhouse assures us, from “a love of change, and curiosity and a feeling of a sort of necessity of doing such a thing once.” So that the engagement may be said to have been entered upon with a clash of conflicting expectations; and though tact might have saved the adventurers from shipwreck, tact was precisely the quality in which they were both most conspicuously deficient.

It was on the last day of September, 1814, that Hobhouse heard of the engagement. On the first day of October he wrote his congratulations, and on October 19, he was invited to act as groomsman. Some time in the same month Byron paid his first visit to the Milbankes at Seaham. Thence he went to Cambridge to vote in favour of the candidature of his friend Dr. Clarke’s candidature for the Professorship of Anatomy, and was applauded by the undergraduates in the Senate House. “This distinction,” Hobhouse says, “to a literary character had never before been paid except in the instance of Archdeacon Paley”—a curious partner in the poet’s glory. A month later Byron and Hobhouse set out together again for Seaham on what Hobhouse calls “his matrimonial scheme.”

This was the occasion on which Byron confided to Hobhouse that he was not in love. A note in Hobhouse’s Diary to the effect that “never was lover in less haste” affords contemporary corroboration of the fact; and the Diary continues to be picturesque, giving us Hobhouse’s critical, but not altogether unfavourable, impression of Miss Milbanke and her family:

There is more; but that is the essence. The impression which disengages itself is one of a well-bred but rather narrow provincialism. The Milbankes are not exactly great people, but the country cousins of great people—very decidedly their country cousins. The men are not quite men of the world; the women are very far from being women of the world—which is pretty much what one would expect in an age in which the country was so much more remote from the town than it is at present. Miss Milbanke, in particular, seems to strike the exact note of provincial correctitude alike in her display of the emotion proper to the occasion and in her concealment of it. Her correctitude was, no doubt, made still more correct by an unemotional disposition.During the ceremony, which took place in her mother’s drawing-room, she was very self-possessed—“firm as a rock,” is Hobhouse’s description of her demeanour. Things were happening as she had meant them to happen—one may almost say as she had contrived that they should happen. “I felt,” says Hobhouse, “as if I had buried a friend”; but he nevertheless paid the compliments which were due, and Miss Milbanke, now Lady Byron, said just the right thing in reply to them:

Nothing could have been more proper than that; for that is just how things happen when the dreams come true. Such a saying sometimes is, and always should be, the prelude to “they lived happily together ever afterwards”; and one can picture Lady Byron telling herself that things were happening, and would continue to happen, just as in a story-book.

Only there are two kinds of story-books. There are the story-books which are written for girls—and the others. This story was to be one of the others. The husband’s past and the wife’s illusions were almost bound to make it so—the more certainly because both husband and wife suffered from the defects of their qualities; and the defects of Lady Byron’s qualities in particular were such as not only to make her helpless in the rÔle which developments were to assign to her, but also to compel her to comport herself with something worse than a lack of dignity.