BYRON’S DEPARTURE FOR THE CONTINENT—HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH JANE CLAIRMONT

Macaulay has described, in that picturesque style of his, how, just as Byron “woke up one morning and found himself famous,” so the British public woke up one morning and found itself virtuous, with the result that Byron was hooted and hounded out of England. The picture, like all Macaulay’s pictures, was overdrawn and over-coloured. The life of the country, and even of the capital, went on pretty much as usual in spite of Byron’s dissensions with his wife; and Byron himself kept up appearances fairly well, going to the theatre, entertaining Leigh Hunt, Kinnaird, and other friends at dinner, and corresponding with Murray about the publication of his poems. But, nevertheless, many circumstances combined to make him feel uncomfortable.

Invitations ceased to be showered upon him; and “gross charges” continued to be whispered in spite of Lady Byron’s disavowal. The grounds of the separation not being known, every one was free to conjecture his own solution of the mystery. There seemed little doubt, at any rate, that Byron had forsaken his lawful wife’s society for that of the nymphs of Drury Lane; and it was quite certain that he had failed to pay the Duchess of Devonshire her rent. The only possible reply to these allegations was that they were no part of the business of the people who made such a fuss about them. The fuss being made, the most reasonable course was to go abroad until the hubbub ceased.

It was no case, as Byron’s enemies have said, of running away to avoid an investigation into his conduct—investigation had been challenged, and all the grave charges had been withdrawn. They had, indeed, by a breach of faith, been secretly kept alive; but they had not reappeared in such shape and circumstances that action could be taken on them; and Byron could not be expected to formulate them himself, merely for the purpose of denying them. His threat, a little later, to appeal to the Courts for an injunction to restrain Lady Byron from taking his daughter out of England as he had heard that she proposed to do, amply showed that he had no fear of any shameful disclosures; but he had Mrs. Leigh’s reputation as well as his own to think of; and it was better for her sake as well as his that he should desist from bandying words with her calumniators. Moreover it was not only his calumniators who were making things unpleasant for him. His creditors were also joining in the hue and cry and multiplying his motives for retiring; so he resolved to go, attended by three servants and the Italian physician, Polidori.

Rogers paid him a farewell visit on April 22; and Mr. and Mrs. Kinnaird called the same evening, bringing, as Hobhouse tells us, “a cake and two bottles of champagne.” On the following morning the party were up at six and off at half-past nine for Dover; Hobhouse riding with Polidori in Scrope Davies’ carriage, and Byron, with Scrope Davies, in his own new travelling coach, modelled on that of Napoleon, containing a bed, a library, and a dinner-service, specially built for him at a cost of £500. A crowd gathered to watch the departure—a crowd which Hobhouse feared might prove dangerous, but which, in fact, was only inquisitive. The bailiffs arrived ten minutes afterwards and “seized everything,” with expressions of regret that they had not been in time to seize the coach as well. Even cage-birds and a squirrel were taken away by them.

This news having been brought by Fletcher, the valet, who followed the party, the coach was hustled on board the packet to be safe—a most wise precaution seeing that there was a day’s delay before it started; and Hobhouse continues:

And then:

This gives us, of course, the point of view of the populace—or perhaps one should say of the middle classes. They, it is evident, knew nothing of any specially gross or unspeakable charges against Byron, but were satisfied to turn the hose of virtuous indignation on him because, instead of managing Drury Lane in the sole interest of dramatic art, he had availed himself of opportunities and yielded to temptations. And so no doubt he had, though not exactly in such circumstances as the populace supposed or in connection with the particular lady whose guilt the populace had hastily assumed.

The popular indictment, indeed, included at least three glaring errors of fact. In the first place the partner of Byron’s latest passion (if passion be the word) was not Mrs. Mardyn, but Miss Jane Clairmont. In the second place his relations with Miss Clairmont had nothing whatever to do with his separation from Lady Byron, because he did not make Miss Clairmont’s acquaintance until after Lady Byron had left him. In the third place it was not Byron who pursued Miss Clairmont with his attentions, but Miss Clairmont who threw herself at Byron’s head.Jane Clairmont was, as is well known, sister by affinity to Mary Godwin who was then living with Shelley and was afterwards married to him. She had accompanied Shelley and Mary on their first trip to Switzerland in 1814, and had subsequently stayed with them in various lodgings. In the impending summer she was to go to Switzerland with them again, and Byron was to meet her there, whether accidentally or on purpose. In the early biographies, indeed, the meeting figures as accidental; but the later biographers knew better, and the complete story can be pieced together from a bundle of letters included in the Murray MSS., and the statement which Miss Clairmont herself made in her old age to Mr. William Graham, who travelled all the way to Florence to see her, and, after her death, reported her conversations in the Nineteenth Century.

“When I was a very young girl,” Miss Clairmont told Mr. Graham, “Byron was the rage.” She spoke of the “troubling morbid obsession” which he exercised “over the youth of England of both sexes,” and insisted that the girls in particular “made simple idiots of themselves about him”; and then she went on to describe how one girl did so:

That is the story as Miss Clairmont remembered it, or as she wished posterity to believe it. She also seems to have been fully persuaded in her own mind that Shelley had recommended her to apply to Byron, and that it was about her that Byron and Lady Byron fell out; but the letters published by Mr. Murray show all this to be a tissue of absurd inexactitudes. What actually happened was that Miss Clairmont wrote to Byron under the pseudonym of “E Trefusis,” beginning “An utter stranger takes the liberty of addressing you,” and proceeding to say: “It may seem a strange assertion, but it is not the less true that I place my happiness in your hands.”

There is no reference there, it will be remarked, to any desire on Miss Clairmont’s part to adopt the theatrical profession. The few references to such a desire which do occur later in the correspondence are of such a nature as to show that Miss Clairmont did not entertain it seriously, consisting mainly of objections to Byron’s proposal that she should discuss the matter with Mr. Kinnaird instead of him. Miss Clairmont, in short, made it abundantly clear that she was in love, not with the theatre, but with Byron; and the more evasive Byron showed himself, the more ardently and impulsively did she advance. We gather from her letters, indeed, that most of those letters were left unanswered, that Byron very frequently was “not at home” to her, and that, when she was at last admitted, she did not find him alone.

Most women would have been discouraged by such a series of repulses; but Miss Clairmont was not. In response to a communication in which Byron had begged her to “write short,” she wrote: “I do not expect you to love me; I am not worthy of your love.” But she begged him, if he could not love, at least to let himself be loved—to suffer her to demonstrate that she, on her part, could “love gently and with affection”; and thus she paved the way to a practical proposal:

Even to that appeal Byron seems to have turned a deaf ear. One infers as much from the fact that other appeals followed it: “Do not delay our meeting after Saturday—I cannot endure the suspense,” &c. After that, however, and apparently quite soon after it, followed the capitulation; and for the sequel we will turn again to Mr. Graham’s report of Miss Clairmont’s confessions:

Such are the facts, so far as they are ascertainable, concerning the origin of this curious liaison. It is a story which begins, and goes on for some time, though it does not conclude, like the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife; and Miss Clairmont recalls how exultantly she proclaimed her triumph. “Percy! Mary! What do you think? The great Lord Byron loves me!” she exclaimed, bursting in upon her friends; and she adds that Shelley regarded the attachment as right and natural and proper, and a proof that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

He may have done so, for he was a dreamer, cradled in illusions, unfettered by codes, always ready to look upon life as a fairy-tale that was turning out to be true. Whether he did so or not, it seems at any rate pretty clear that he was in Miss Clairmont’s confidence, knew for what reason Byron wished to meet him at Geneva, and acquiesced in the proposal. But it is equally certain that he was not in Byron’s confidence, and had no suspicion of the spirit in which Byron had entered into the intrigue.

For Byron was not in love with Miss Clairmont, and never had been in love with her, and never would be. In so far as he loved at all, he still loved Mary Chaworth, to whom his heart always returned at every crisis of unhappiness. There was no question of any renewal of the old passionate relations; but she consented to see him once more before he left England. “When we two parted in silence and tears” seems to belong to this moment of his life—the moment at which Miss Clairmont first persuaded herself, and then persuaded Shelley, that she was enthroned for ever in the author’s heart. That, still, was his one real sentimental hold on life. Nothing else mattered; and the coquetries and audacities of this child of seventeen mattered less than most things.

But a man must live; a man must divert himself. Most especially must a man do so when, as Byron expressed it, his household gods lay shivered around him—when his home was broken up and his child was taken away—when rumours as intangible as abominable were afloat to his dishonour—when the society of which he had been the bright particular star was turning its back on him. Even the love, or what passed for such, of a stage-struck girl of seventeen, could be welcome in such a case, and it would not be difficult to give something which could pass for love in return for it.

That was what happened—and that was all that happened. Miss Clairmont told Mr. Graham, in so many words, that she never loved Byron, but was only “dazzled” by him. It is written in Byron’s letters—from which there shall be quotations in due course—and it is amply demonstrated by his conduct, that he never loved Miss Clairmont, but only accepted favours which she pressed upon him, and suffered her to help him to live at a time when life was difficult.

The credit of having done that for him, however, should be freely given to her. The appointment which she made with him at Geneva touched his flight from England with romance. His reception by the generality of English residents on the Continent was very, very doubtful. It would have been painful to him to travel across Europe, defying opinion in solitude; but he and Shelley and Mary Godwin and Jane Clairmont could defy it in company and laugh; and it was with this confident assurance in his mind that, as Hobhouse writes, “the dear fellow pulled off his cap and waved it” when the Ostend packet glided out of Dover harbour.