Francis Henry Gribble

LIFE AT GENEVA—THE AFFAIR WITH JANE CLAIRMONT

“From Brussels,” as Moore magniloquently puts it, “the noble traveller pursued his course along the Rhine.” At Geneva he joined Shelley and his party who had taken the shorter route across France; and it would seem that he felt the need of all the moral support which their companionship could give him.

Concerning the nature of his reception in Switzerland, indeed, there is a good deal of conflicting testimony; but the balance of the evidence points to its having been unfavourable. His own statement is that he “retired entirely from society,” with the exception of “some occasional intercourse with Coppet at the wish of Madame de StaËl”; but there are indications that the retirement was not voluntary, and that, even at Coppet, his welcome was something less than enthusiastic. On the former point we may quote the letters of Lady Westmorland, just published by Lady Rose Weigall:

“Lord Byron has been very coldly received here both by the natives and by the English. No one visited him, though there is much curiosity about him. He has been twice to Coppet.”

Only twice, be it observed; and on one of the two occasions, one of Madame de StaËl’s guests, Mrs. Hervey the novelist—a mature woman novelist of sixty-five virtuous summers—fainted, according to one account, and “nearly fainted,” according to another, at the sudden appearance of the Man of Sin, though, when she came to, she was ashamed of herself, and conversed with him. Probably he called again; and not all the Coppet house-party shared Mrs. Hervey’s consternation at his visits. Lady Westmorland did not for one, but commented on his “sweetness and sadness, melancholy and depression,” adding: “If he was all that he tries to seem now he would really be very fascinating.” On the other hand, however, Madame de StaËl’s son-in-law, the Duc de Broglie, summed him up unkindly and almost scornfully, declaring him “a boastful pretender in the matter of vice,” protesting that “his talk was heavy and tiresome,” and that “he did not manoeuvre his lame legs with the same ease and nonchalance as M. de Talleyrand,” and concluding:

“Madame de StaËl, who helped all her friends to make the best of themselves, did what she could to make him cut a dignified figure without success; and when the first moment of curiosity had passed, his society ceased to attract, and no one was glad to see him.”

Which clearly indicates, in spite of the offensive priggishness of the witness, that the tide of hostile opinion was, indeed, flowing too strongly for even Madame de StaËl to stem it.

She did her best, however; for she was no prude, but a woman with a great heart, who had herself sought happiness in marriage, and failed to find it there, and had openly done things for which, if she had been an Englishwoman, Mrs. Grundy, instead of lionising, would have turned and rent her. She went further, and proposed to write to Lady Byron and try to arrange terms of peace; and Byron thanked her, and let her do so.

Not, of course, that he had the least desire to return to Lady Byron’s society. He was presently to thunder at her as his “moral Clytemnestra”; and Cordy Jeaffreson’s suggestion that his irrepressible rhetoric was “only the superficial ferment covering the depths of his affection for her,” and that “the woman at whom he railed so insanely was the woman who shared with his child the last tender emotions of his unruly heart” is as absurd a suggestion as ever a biographer put forth. Hobhouse has told us that Byron never was in love with Lady Byron; and, after what we have seen of Lady Byron’s conduct and correspondence, it is hard to believe that any man would have been in love with her after living with her for a twelvemonth. Moreover, we know from “The Dream” where Byron’s heart was at this time, as always, and we know from his own, as well as from Miss Clairmont’s confessions, with how little regard for Lady Byron’s feelings he was just then diverting himself in the Genevan suburbs; and we may fairly conclude that what he desired was not to return to her, but merely to be set right with the world by a nominal reconciliation, which would still leave him free to live apart from her.

He did not get what he wanted, and Lady Byron was quite within her rights in withholding it. He had allowed himself to be manoeuvred into a false position, and had no claim upon her to help him to manoeuvre himself out of it; while she, on her part, was much too high principled to strain a point in favour of a returning prodigal—especially if, as is probable, information had reached her as to his proceedings in his exile. So she rejected his overtures in that cold, judicial, high-minded way of hers; and Byron did not repeat them, but made it clear that he had meant nothing by them, seeing that—

His reason is in “The Dream” which he wrote in July 1816. It was another of his bursts of candour, telling the world (and Lady Byron) yet again how he loved Mary Chaworth, and always had loved her, and always would, and how, even on his wedding day, the memory of her had come between him and his bride:

“A change came o’er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was returned—I saw him stand
Before an Altar—with a gentle bride;
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The Starlight of his boyhood:—as he stood
Even at the altar, o’er his brow there came
The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock
That in the antique Oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude: and then—
As in that hour—a moment o’er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced,—and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reeled around him; he could see
Not that which was, nor that which should have been—
But the old mansion and the accustomed hall,
And the remembered chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour
And her who was his destiny, came back
And thrust themselves between him and the light.”

That was his Parthian shaft; and Cordy Jeaffreson’s view of “The Dream” as “a lovely and elaborate falsehood, written to persuade all mankind that he never loved the woman whose heart he was yearning to recover” is much too preposterous to be admitted. Mary Chaworth’s husband knew that it was no figment. He recognised the reference to a certain “peculiar diadem of trees” on his estate, and gave orders that those trees should be cut down. Lady Byron had no such remedy open to her; but she knew what was meant and wrapped herself up in her virtue; while Byron, on his part, turned to the diversions which were to help him to live in the face of the world’s contumely.

Alike for him and for Shelley and the two ladies who attended him there was a good deal of that contumely as long as they remained in the Hotel d’Angleterre; and it may almost be said that they invited it by making themselves conspicuous. In Shelley’s relations with Miss Godwin and Miss Clairmont there was at least the appearance of promiscuity—an appearance on which it did not take gossip long to base positive asseveration.[11] Byron, already an object of curiosity on account of his supposed misdeeds, had made himself conspicuous by his coach, and his retinue, and his manner of travelling en seigneur. So that the other boarders stared when he arrived, and stared still more when they saw him fraternising with his brother poet and the ladies, not only wondering what the eccentric party would be up to next, but keeping close watch on their comings and goings, following them to the lake-side when they went out boating, awaiting them on the lake-side when they landed on their return, lining up to inspect them as often as carriages were brought to the door to take them for a drive.

They did not like it, and moved into villas on the other side of the Rhone, only to discover that the Hotel d’Angleterre overlooked them, and that its obliging landlord had set up a large telescope so that his visitors might survey their proceedings the more commodiously. This obliged them to move again—Byron to the Villa Diodati, and Shelley to the Maison Chapuis or Campagne Mont AllÈgre—and there at last they were able, as the party of the Libertins in the Geneva of the Reformation put it, to “live as they chose without reference to the preachers.”

To much that they did there the preachers, even those of Calvin’s time, could have taken no exception. They talked—the sort of talk that would have been high over the heads of their censors of the d’Angleterre; they rowed on the lake, and sang in their boat in the moonlight; they read poetry, and wrote it. Shelley pressed Byron to read Wordsworth; and he did so, with results which are apparent in the Third Canto of “Childe Harold,” where we find the Wordsworthian conception of the unity of man with Nature reproduced and spoiled, as Wordsworth most emphatically insisted, in the reproduction. There was a week of rain during which the friends decided to fleet the time by writing ghost stories, and Mary Godwin wrote “Frankenstein.” There was also a circular tour of the lake, undertaken without the ladies, in the course of which Shelley had a narrow escape from drowning near Saint Gingolph. These things were a part, and not the least important part, of the diversions which helped Byron to defy the slanderers whom he could not answer. So was his short trip to the Oberland with Hobhouse. And, finally, meaning so little to him that one naturally keeps it to the end and adds it as a detail, there was the “affair” with Miss Jane Clairmont.

On this branch of the subject he wrote to Mrs. Leigh, who had heard exaggerated rumours:

The love had been pressed, as we have seen, and as Miss Clairmont, in her age, admitted, very particularly indeed. She had dreamt, she admits—and she would have us think that Shelley and Mary Godwin expected—that her alliance with “the great Lord Byron” was to be permanent; and this though she declares, elsewhere in her confessions, that she did not really love him, but was only dazzled by him, and that her heart, in truth, was Shelley’s.It was an ambitious dream; and it would be easy to make a list of reasons why it was impossible that it should come true. The mood in which she found Byron was only one of them. The defects and limitations of her own qualities furnish others. She was a tradesman’s daughter, and, though well-educated, not without vulgarity; pretentious, but superficial; stage-struck, a romp, and a mimic. If she ever mimicked Byron—if, in particular, she ever mimicked his lameness—a good deal would be explained.

One does not know whether she did or not. What one does know is that he shook her off rather roughly, and, never having loved her, presently conceived a dislike for her; and that though she bore him a child—the little Allegra, so named after her birthplace, who only lived to be five years of age, and now lies buried at Harrow. To Allegra, indeed, Byron was good and kind—he looked forward, he told Moore and others, to the time when she would be a support to the loneliness of his old age; but to Allegra’s mother he would have nothing more to say. How she hunted him down, and how she and the Countess Guiccioli made each other jealous—these are matters into which it is unnecessary to enter here. The conclusions which Miss Clairmont drew, as she told Mr. Graham, was that Byron’s attitude towards women was that of a Sultan towards the ladies of his harem. No doubt it was so in her case—and through her fault; for her plight was very much like that of the worshipper of Juggernaut who should prostrate himself before the oncoming car and then complain because the wheels pass over him.

Probably, if she had been less pressing, or less clinging, he would have been more grateful; for there assuredly was cause for gratitude even though there was no room for love. Vulgar, feather-headed, stage-struck little thing that she was, Jane Clairmont, by throwing herself at Byron’s head, and telling him, without waiting to be asked, that she, at least, would count the world well lost for him—and still more perhaps by bringing him into relation with the Shelleys—had rendered him real help in the second desperate crisis of his life. One may repeat, indeed, that she helped him to live through that dark period; and if she knew that, or guessed it, she may well have felt aggrieved that his return for her passion was so inadequate.

But he could not help it. His heart was out of his keeping, and he could not give what he did not possess. A “passade” was all that he was capable of just then; but that this “passade” did really help him to feel his feet again in stormy waters, and bring him back once more to cheerfulness and self-respect, is amply proved, first by the change of tone which appears in his more intimate writings, and then by the new, and worse, way of life into which we see him falling after the curtain has been rung down on the episode.

Shelley departed, taking Miss Clairmont and her sister with him, sorely, as there is reason to believe, against the former’s wish, towards the end of August; the honeymoon, such as it was, having lasted about three months. Towards the end of the time, visitors began to arrive—“Monk” Lewis, and “Conversation” Sharp, and Scrope Davies, and Hobhouse—but most particularly Hobhouse who wrote Mrs. Leigh a reassuring letter to the effect that her brother was “living with the strictest attention to decorum, and free from all offence, either to God or man or woman,” having given up brandy and late hours and “quarts of magnesia” and “deluges of soda-water,” and appearing to be “as happy as it is consistent for a man of honour and common feeling to be after the occurrence of a calamity involving a charge, whether just or unjust, against his honour and his feeling.”

That was written on September 9; and it approximated to the truth. Having despatched his report, Hobhouse took Byron for the tour already referred to—over the Col de Jaman, down the Simmenthal to Thun, up the Lake of Thun to Interlaken, and thence to Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, Brienz, and back by way of Berne, Fribourg, and Yverdon. Byron kept a journal of the journey for his sister to peruse. In the main it is merely a record, admirably written, of things seen; but now and again the diarist speaks out and shows how exactly his companion had read and interpreted his mind.

“It would be a great injustice,” Hobhouse had continued to Mrs. Leigh, in reference to the “calamity” and the “charge,” “to suppose that he has dismissed the subject from his thoughts, or indeed from his conversation, upon any other motive than that which the most bitter of his enemies would commend. The uniformly guarded and tranquil manner shows the effort which it is meant to hide.” And there are just two passages in the Diary in which we see the tranquil manner breaking down. In the first place at Grindelwald:

In the second place, at the very end of the tour:

A striking admission truly of the unreality and insincerity of the Byronic presentation of Wordsworth’s Pantheism, and concluding with an exclamation which shows clearly how distinct a thing Byron’s individuality was to him, and how far he was from picturing himself, in sober prose, as “a portion of the tempest” or anything but his passionate and suffering self:

And so up the Rhone valley and over the Simplon to Italy, where his life was to enter upon yet another phase.