Whether a book is called “The Love Affairs of Lord Byron” or “The Life of Lord Byron” can make very little difference to the contents of its pages. Byron’s love affairs were the principal incidents of his life, and almost the only ones. Like Chateaubriand, he might have spoke of “a procession of women” as the great panoramic effect of his career. He differed from Chateaubriand, however, in the first place, in not professing to be very much concerned by the pageant, and, in the second place, in being, in reality, very deeply affected by it. Chateaubriand kept his emotions well in hand, exaggerating them in retrospect for the sake of literary effect, picturing the sensibility of his heart in polished phrases, but never giving the impression of a man who has suffered through his passions, or been swept off his feet by them, or diverted by them from the pursuit of ambition or the serene cult of the all-important ego. In all Chateaubriand’s love affairs, in short, red blood is lacking and self-consciousness prevails. He appears to be equally in love with all the women in the procession; the explanation being that he is more in love with himself than with any of them. In spite of the procession of women, which is admitted to have been magnificent, it may justly be said of Chateaubriand that love was “of his life a thing apart.”

Of Byron, who coined the phrase (though Madame de StaËl had coined it before him) it cannot be said. It may appear to be true of sundry of his incidental love affairs, but it cannot stand as a broad generalisation. His whole life was deflected from its course, and thrown out of gear: first, by his unhappy passion for Mary Chaworth; secondly, by the way in which women of all ranks, flattering his vanity for the gratification of their own, importuned him with the offer of their hearts. Lady Byron herself did so no less than Lady Caroline Lamb, and Jane Clairmont, and the Venetian light o’ loves, though, no doubt, with more delicacy and a better show of maidenly reserve. Fully persuaded in her own mind that he had pined for her for two years, she delicately hinted to him that he need pine no longer. He took the hint and married her, with the catastrophic consequences which we know. Then other women—a long series of other women—did what they could to break his fall and console him. He dallied with them for years, without ever engaging his heart very deeply, until at last he realised that this sort of dalliance was a very futile and enervating occupation, tore himself away from his last entanglement, and crossed the sea to strike a blow for freedom.

That is Byron’s life in a nutshell. His biographer, it is clear, has no way of escape from his love affairs; while the critic is under an obligation, almost equally compelling, to take note of them. It is not merely that he was continually writing about them, and that the meaning of his enigmatic sentences can, in many cases, only be unravelled by the help of the clue which a knowledge of his love affairs provides. The striking change which we see the tone of his work undergoing as he grows older is the reflection of the history of his heart. Many of his later poems might have been written in mockery of the earlier ones. He had his illusions in his youth. In his middle-age, if he can be said to have reached middle-age, he had none, but wrote, to the distress of the Countess Guiccioli, as a man who delighted to tear aside, with a rude hand, the striped veil of sentiment and hypocrisy which hid the ugly nakedness of truth. The secret of that transformation is written in the record of his love affairs, and can be read nowhere else. His life lacks all unity and all consistency unless the first place in it is given to that record.

Since the appearance of Moore’s Life, and even since the appearance of Cordy Jeaffreson’s “Real Lord Byron,” a good deal of new information has been made available. The biographer has to take cognisance of the various documents brought together in Mr. Murray’s latest edition of Byron’s Writings and Letters; of Hobhouse’s “Account of the Separation”; of the “Confessions,” for whatever they may be worth, elicited from Jane Clairmont and first printed in the Nineteenth Century; of Mr. Richard Edgcumbe’s “Byron: the Last Phase”; and of the late Lord Lovelace’s privately printed work, “Astarte.”

The importance of each of these authorities will appear when reference is made to it in the text. It will be seen, then, that some of the Murray MSS. give precision to the narrative of Byron’s relations with Lady Caroline Lamb, and that others effectually dispose of Cordy Jeaffreson’s theory that Lady Byron’s mysterious grievance—the grievance which caused her lawyer to declare reconciliation impossible—was her husband’s intimacy with Miss Clairmont. Others of them, again, as effectually confute Cordy Jeaffreson’s amazing doctrine that Byron only brought railing accusations against his wife because he loved her, and that at the time when he denounced her as “the moral Clytemnestra of thy lord,” he was in reality yearning to be recalled to the nuptial bed. Concerning “Astarte” some further remarks may be made.

It is a disgusting and calumnious compilation, designed, apparently, to show that Byron’s descendants accept the worst charges preferred against him by his enemies during his lifetime. Those charges are such that one would have expected a member of the family to hold his tongue about them, even if he were in possession of evidence conclusively demonstrating their truth. That a member of the family should have revived the charges on the strength of evidence which may justly be described as not good enough to hang a dog on almost surpasses belief. Still, the thing has been done, and the biographer’s obligations are affected accordingly. Unpleasant though the subject is, he must examine the so-called evidence for fear lest he should be supposed to feel himself unable to rebut it; and he is under the stronger compulsion to do so because the mud thrown by Lord Lovelace is not thrown at Byron only, but also at Augusta Leigh, a most worthy and womanly woman, and the best of sisters and wives. It is the hope and belief of the present writer that he has succeeded in definitely clearing her character, together with that of her brother, and demonstrated that the legend of the crime, so industriously inculated by Byron’s grandson, has no shadow of foundation in fact.

Francis Gribble