Francis Henry Gribble

“ We have to picture Francis Joseph, mounted on a snow-white horse, ascending the ancient hill, and brandishing his sword to the four points of Heaven as a sign that he would confound his subjects’ enemies, whether they came from north, south, east, or west; a very different experience truly from that of the days when Milan had received him and the Empress, with their heads covered, in stony silence, and the people of Venice had shunned the Archduke Maximilian and the Archduchess Charlotte as if they were lepers who had escaped from quarantine. ”

“ As long as Hobhouse remained with Byron nothing memorable happened. There was a good deal of the schoolmaster about Hobhouse, though he could sometimes unbend in a non-committal way; and in the presence of schoolmasters life is seldom a drama and never an extravaganza. The change, therefore, in the manner of Byron’s life did not occur until, tiring of his friend’s supervision, he declined to accompany him to Rome. In the meantime, first at Milan and then at Verona, he held up his head, and passed like a pageant through the salons of the best continental society. ”

“ The qualities of a hostess, they have felt, are different from those of a mistress. Such women can dominate the crowd, wearing their tiaras like queens, in the garish light of fashionable assemblies; but, in the twilight of the secret orchard, their empire crumbles to the dust. It is not given to them to make any man feel that the limitations of time and space have ceased and that the whole of life is concentrated in the life lived here and now. The women who possess that power are the women who seem insignificant to the men to whom they have not revealed themselves. ”

“ So great has been the evolution accomplished within the reign of a single ruler: a ruler who, at the beginning of his reign, did not dare to set his foot in his own capital, and, long before the end of it, had come to be regarded as the one indispensable man in the Empire—the one man whose life must be preserved and prolonged at all hazards, for fear lest his death should entail the collapse of the edifice [8] which he had reared—the one man who sometimes appeared to command the affection of all his subjects. ”

“ It transpired in the course of time—in the course of a very short time, in fact—that the tastes, manners, and customs of Fräulein Adamovics deviated from the healthy norm no less than those of the more eccentric of the Habsburgs, albeit in a different direction. Her passion for the simple life and the return to nature lured her on to proceedings hardly compatible with sanity. The goal of self-realisation, it seemed to her, could only be attained if men and women divested themselves of their clothing, and climbed trees in order to crack nuts. ”

“ Mary Chaworth had lived unhappily with the handsome squire whom she had, so naturally, preferred to the fat boy from Harrow. He had been, as these red-faced, full-blooded Philistines are so apt to be, at once jealous, unfaithful, and brutal, wanting to “have it both ways,”—to push rivals brusquely out of his path, and to pursue his own coarse pleasures where he chose. He had forbidden his wife to see Byron. He had insisted upon her absence from Annesley at the time of Byron’s return from Greece ”

“ She surpassed his hopes by her proficiency in the sciences and languages; and in her short visits to some relations at Lausanne, the wit, the beauty, and erudition of Mademoiselle Curchod were the theme of universal applause. The report of such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. I found her learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners; and the first sudden emotion was fortified by the habits and knowledge of a more familiar acquaintance. ”

“ But Byron was not yet the Byron who had only to come, and to be seen, in order to conquer. He was a schoolboy of fifteen, which is an awkward age. He had achieved no triumphs in any field which could give him self-assurance. He was not yet a leader, even among his schoolfellows; and he was not only lame, but also fat. How shall a fat boy hope, whatever fires of genius burn within him, to enter the lists against his elders and bear away the belle from county balls? Byron, at any rate, failed signally in the attempt to do so. ”

“ In her restlessness, if in nothing else, she reminds one a little of the Empress Elizabeth. One sees her, as one sees the Empress, driven continually from place to place, seeking she knows not exactly what, but always failing to find it; but one does not see her, as one sees the Empress, guarding her secret like a delicate flame which must at all costs be sheltered from the wind. Her disposition is, rather, to expose the flame to all the winds which blow, in the hope that one or other of them may fan it to a blaze. For she is, after all, a Habsburg ”

“ It is, no doubt, a very necessary reform, though one may think that it is being executed in too utilitarian a spirit. The old Geneva was malodorous, and its death-rate was high. They had more than one Great Plague there, and their Great Fires have always left some of the worst of their slums untouched. These could not be allowed to stand in an age which studies the science and practises the art of hygiene. Yet the traveller who wants to know what the old Geneva was really like must spend a morning or two rambling among them before they are pulled down. ”

“ He may or may not like, and therefore nurse, the idea that he has tied his life up into such a knot that nothing but death—his own death or another’s—can untie it; but he is quite ready, as a rule, to accept the tangle, if not to welcome it, as an excuse for a sensational plunge into the abysms of debauchery. And this is especially so if his passions are strong, and if his private affairs have been a public pageant, watched, whether for praise or censure, by innumerable eyes.
Both those conditions were fulfilled in Byron’s case. ”

“ If the laws of romance had governed the business of the world, it would have set the seal on the happiness of a marriage which had begun so happily; but it seems that, as a matter of fact, the happiness had taken wings and fled long before Elizabeth’s charm had conciliated her husband’s enemies to this good purpose—long, also, before the occurrence of those specially tragic events which were to make their reign memorable for tragedy. ”

“ Francis Joseph is the Head of the House as well as the Sovereign Ruler of the Empire; his judgment seat is, in all family matters, the ultimate tribunal. He can grant dispensations, like the Pope; and he sits without assessors—to decide whether hallowed principles or personal inclinations constitute the Higher Law. There are times when he feels that he would like to yield but must not; times when he yields, against his will, to a pressure which wears down his resistance; times when, though there is no particular reason why he should not yield, he simply does not choose to. ”

“ So he humoured her, remembering how she had railed at the bishop on her wedding day, knowing, no doubt, how little a thing might upset her mental balance, and making every possible allowance; and the only attempt at intervention came from Lady Melbourne, who remonstrated, not with Lady Caroline, but with Byron. He struck an attitude, and waived the matter on one side.
“You need not fear me,” was his reply. “I do not pursue pleasure like other men; I labour under an incurable disease and a blighted heart. Believe me she is safe with me.” ”

“ At Lausanne they can economize without feeling the pinch of poverty, and without feeling envious—or perceiving that their wives feel envious—of more prosperous neighbours. The sunshine costs nothing, and the amusements cost very little; they can go about in knickerbockers and wear out their old clothes without fearing that their solvency will be suspected. There is no need for them to learn a foreign tongue, since they form their own society, and mix very little with the Swiss who accept them, but do not pretend to like them. They live lazily, but healthily, and, on the whole, contentedly. ”

“ His wife is a clever woman who knows how to bide her time, and does not go out of her way to make unnecessary enemies. He himself has his party, which looks likely to be the party of the future. The blow which he has struck at the Habsburg system is the hardest blow which that system has yet sustained, because he has struck it with dignity and self-restraint, gratifying the instinctive Habsburg craving for the infusion of fresh blood without provoking any of those scandals which give the enemy occasion to blaspheme. ”

“ Those are the appreciations; and one quotes them, not for Shelley’s sake, but for Byron’s, and because the power to appreciate Shelley’s worth in spite of his eccentricities is a test of character. His shining spirituality cannot be perceived by the gross who are in bondage to the conventions of ethics, politics, or religion, or by those, not less gross, who are the slaves of their lusts. To love him was impossible except for one who looked beyond the material to the ideal. ”

“ It must be repeated that the common view of the Empress Charlotte as a valiant woman who took matters into her own hands when the Emperor Maximilian was timorous and hesitating cannot stand. She was, in the first place, a vain woman who took purely frivolous views of Imperial responsibilities; in the second place, a woman who lost her mental balance when she discovered that the position for which she had longed had its duties as well as its pleasures, and its perils as well as its privileges. ”

“ He began “Don Juan,” the poem in which the sincere cynic, who has come to cynicism by way of sentiment, passes with a light step from the pathetic to the ribald, and, attacking all hypocrisies, from those of Mrs. Grundy to those of the Holy Alliance, brushes them impatiently away like cobwebs.
Byron, in short, remained a fighter even in the midst of his self-indulgences; and for the fighter there is always hope. Self-indulgence brings satiety, but fighting does not, when it can be seen that the blows are telling; and there could be no question of the effect of Byron’s blows. ”

“ About the Empress, on the other hand, it is impossible to read a page from any pen—whether that page be written by an intimate or by a stranger—without feeling oneself in the presence of a mystery which the most favourably placed chroniclers have failed to penetrate. A novelist of genius might perhaps have invented her—Mr. Maurice Barrès, for one, is a little prone to write as if he had invented her; but she was not to be understood by courtiers, secretaries, and ladies-in-waiting. They recite her traits at great length, but almost in vain ”

“ The rest, in Lady Caroline’s opinion—at all events in one of her opinions, expressed in an angry letter—was all William Lamb’s fault.
“He cared nothing for my morals,” she remarks. “I might flirt and go about with what men I pleased. He was privy to my affair with Lord Byron and laughed at it. His indolence renders him insensible to everything. When I ride, play, and amuse him, he loves me. In sickness and suffering he deserts me.” ”

“ If the strong hand was a bloody hand, the bloody hand was a strong hand; and Austria did not “muddle through” her difficulties, but carved her way through them. She had nothing as yet to fear from Prussia; she strode with jack-boots through Hungary and northern Italy; and the House of Habsburg—bankrupt, but with the most effective army in Europe—could once more afford to be arrogant. So that we find Francis Joseph, as soon as his position was secure, manifesting his family pride by a proposal that Napoleon III. should be insulted. ”

“ Byron, on the other hand, talking to provoke her, boasting of abandoned wickedness, falling into fits of rage, much as his own mother had been wont to do when she rattled the fire-irons—throwing his watch on the ground and smashing it to pieces with the poker.
Very likely he was angry with Lady Byron because he did not love her—irritated beyond measure at every fresh revelation that she could never be to him what Mary Chaworth might have been. The beginning of unhappiness in marriage must often come like that. It is not unnatural, though it is unreasonable, and not to be combated by reason. ”

“ Some speeches attributed to her at other times would seem to indicate that she cried sometimes for lost illusions, like a child for a broken toy:—
“The happiness which men seek in sincerity and ask from it is controlled by tragic laws. We all live on the edge of an abysm of grief and pain, dug for us by the falsehood of social morality. That is the abysm which separates our actual condition from the condition in which we ought to find ourselves. An abysm is always an abysm. The moment we try to cross it, we fall and break our limbs.” ”

“ CHAPTER XVII INCOMPATIBILITY OF TEMPER
A thick accretion of legend has gathered round Byron’s life alike as an engaged and as a married man. Every biographer, whether friendly or hostile, has added fresh anecdotes to the heap. Almost all the stories are coloured by prejudice. Even when they seem to be derived from the same source, they are often mutually contradictory; so that it is, as a rule, a hopeless task to try to distinguish between fact and fiction, or do more than disengage a general impression of discordant temperaments progressing from incompatibility to open war. ”

“ According to the treaties, Lombardy belongs to me. My arms having been unfortunate, I am quite willing to cede the territory to the Emperor Napoleon; but I cannot recognise the wishes of the population, for that is only another phrase for the right of revolution. Use the phrase if you must in your treaty with the King of Sardinia, and in your proclamations to the Italian people—that is no business of mine; but you must clearly understand that I, the Emperor of Austria, emphatically refuse to put my signature to such a form of words. ”