Francis Henry Gribble

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The men who seem to pose are very often just the men who have the courage—or the bravado, if any one prefers the word—to be sincere; and Byron, if he is to be rightly understood, must be thought of as the most sincere man who ever struck an attitude. That was the secret of his strength. Pose was for him just what Aristotle, as interpreted by Professor Bywater, says that the spectacle of tragedy is to the mass of the spectators. It purged him, for the time being, of his emotions by indulging them. The pose, having done its work, ceased until the emotions recurred, and then he posed again. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ So it befell Byron. Born in exile, he had at last returned from exile in a blaze of triumph. All the doors of all the best houses were thrown open to him with a blare of trumpets. He entered them, not as a parvenu, like Moore the Irish grocer’s son, but as the one man without whose presence the festival would have been incomplete. No man, if one might judge by externals, had ever a better chance of making a splendid and noble pageant of [Pg 126] his life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Assuredly there is no inference unfavourable to her charm to be drawn from the fact that she passed through the world without cutting a figure in it. The women who dazzle the world are rarely the women for whose love men count the world well lost. It has been written that a man could no more fall in love with Mrs. Siddons than with the Pyramid of Cheops. Men have also refrained, as a rule, from falling in love with the brilliant women of the salons—with Madame du Deffand, for instance, and Madame Necker, and Lady Blessington, and Lady Holland. ”

“ She easily persuaded herself that any man who was polite to her was in love with her—both Moore and Rogers were among the victims of whom she boasted—and she would not allow the contrary to be suggested. Moreover, besides being self-willed in matters of the heart, she liked to afficher herself with every man for whom she felt a preference, and to declare the state of her affections to the world with the insistent emphasis with which the sensational virtues of soaps and sauces are set forth on the hoardings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But when the Countess Guiccioli wrote a book about Byron in which Lady Byron was disparaged, she could restrain herself no longer. In support of Lady Byron’s story she had no evidence except Lady Byron’s word. She did not know—and she did not trouble to inquire—what evidence against it might exist. She did not pause to ask herself whether her own recollection might not be at fault concerning a story which she had heard thirteen years before. It was enough for her, apparently, that Lady Byron was a religious woman, and that Byron, on his own showing, had lived “a man’s life.” ”

“ Living for himself he had made a mess of his life; and his relations with Madame Guiccioli did not conceal the fact from him. His love for her was a pastime, and no more an end in itself than his attachment to the draper’s wife at Venice. ”

“ John Galt, afterwards famous as a Scotch novelist, was at Gibraltar when Byron arrived there. He had been sent to the Levant by a firm of traders to ascertain how far British goods could be exploited in defiance of the Berlin and Milan Decrees. He was to try hard, though in vain, to introduce such goods into the Greek archipelago, and to smuggle them into Spain. Half man of action and half dreamer, he went about denouncing priests and kings, and exhorting the British Government to seize all the islands everywhere for the supposed advantage of British commerce. ”

“ Every line in them demonstrates, not merely that the writer is conscious of rectitude, but also that the writer is ignorant that she herself is, or can be, the object of sinister suspicion. They are just the flurried letters of a simple body who feels that circumstances have laid upon her shoulders a heavier load of responsibility than they can bear, but would rather be helped to bear the burden than run away from it; and it is a fair summary of them to say that they exonerate Byron by exonerating the alleged accomplice in his crime. ”

“ The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts; but the memories of youth are short, and the dreams of youth are dreams from which we never fail to wake. And yet Byron insists, quite as much as biographers have insisted. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is no reason whatever to suppose that he was really thinking of Mary Chaworth when he wrote verses to the Maid of Athens, or when he gave the most precious of his rings to Mrs. Spencer Smith. But the secret orchard always remained; the spirit of the old tenant might at any time return to it. Such spirits always do return whenever life suddenly, for whatever reason, seems a blank.
It was, in this instance, death—a rapid series of deaths—that brought it back. Byron’s mother died, in circumstances for which, as we have seen, he had some reason to reproach himself. ”

“ All of which seems to show Byron defiant, but not yet reckless, preferring, if not actually enjoying, the society of his equals, and still paying a very proper regard to appearances. The change occurred when he got to Venice and Hobhouse left him there. Then there was a moral collapse, just as if a moral support had been withdrawn—a collapse of which the first outward sign was a new kind of intrigue.
Hitherto his amours had been with his social equals; and the daughters of the people had, since his celebrity, had very little attraction for him. ”

“ What matters is that here is an instance, almost unique in history, of a poet transforming himself into a man of action, and proving himself a very competent man of action, very sober and sensible, and quite free from the characteristic vices of the poetical and artistic temperaments.
So far, though he had succeeded as a poet, Byron had failed as a man. The one deep and sincere passion of his life had only made trouble for him; and still more trouble had been made by his own violence, and vanity, and faults of temper. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She had gone a little way with him, and then taken fright at his and her own temerity.
It is a question whether we should pity her for her lack of courage or praise her for remembering her principles after she had yielded to temptation; but we should need more knowledge of the facts than we have in order to answer it with confidence. Exceptional people may do exceptional things with impunity—it is sometimes for lack of the nerve to do them that they make shipwreck of their lives; but though Byron was an exceptional man, we have no proof that Mary Chaworth was an exceptional woman. ”

“ They sailed the same seas in the same spirit—with the one difference that Byron, who had a deadly hatred of certain kinds of hypocrisy, made no pretence in his quest for peace, of looking to and fro between love and religion. In both cases alike, disgust for life was understood to have given the impulsion to the journey. A leading incident in both journeys was, as Byron bluntly puts it, “a passion for a married woman.” Neither passion gave the lover any lasting satisfaction. ”

“ There was a renewal of intimacy, and then a suspension of intimacy; a fear of a public scandal which proved to be groundless; a risk of a duel which was, after all, avoided. That is all that is certain; but that suffices to explain the references to “scrapes” and “mischief” and the rest of it; and that also, on the assumption that Byron was passionately sincere, explains the depth and disgusted vehemence of his emotions. He had dreamed of Mary Chaworth before as the one woman in the world with whom he could live out the whole of his life in a continuous ecstasy of intense emotion ”

“ Even if it rests upon gossip, and is untrue, it helps to fill in the picture by reflecting the reputation which Byron was making for himself during his Oriental travels: a reputation, on the one hand, of a man who made love with cynical recklessness, and on the other hand of a man who swaggered round the Levant with unwarrantable arrogance and pride.
We have already seen him swaggering about his swimming of the Hellespont. He continued to swagger about it to the very end of his life. ”

“ It was the old story, no doubt, of poverty coming in at the door and love flying out of the window, leaving only incompatibility of temper behind.
The husband, though inclined to be amiable as long as things went well, was, in modern phrase, a “waster.” The wife, though shrewd and possessed of some domestic virtues, was, in the language of all time, a scold. He wanted to run into debt in order to keep up appearances; she to disregard appearances in order to live within her income. ”