PART II WHAT THE POEMS REVEAL

‘Intesi, che a cosi fatto tormento Enno dannati i peccator carnali Che la ragion sommettono al talento.’ Inferno, Canto V., 37-39.

WHAT THE POEMS REVEAL

‘Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even be it against his will.’—Goethe.

Lady Byron has expressed her opinion that almost every incident in Byron’s poems was drawn from his personal experience. In a letter to Lady Anne Barnard, written two years after the separation, she says:

‘In regard to [Byron’s] poetry, egotism is the vital principle of his imagination, which it is difficult for him to kindle on any subject with which his own character and interests are not identified; but by the introduction of fictitious incidents, by change of scene or time, he has enveloped his poetical disclosures in a system impenetrable except to a very few.’

Byron himself has told us in ‘Don Juan’ that his music ‘has some mystic diapasons, with much which could not be appreciated in any manner by the uninitiated.’ In a letter to John Murray (August 23, 1821), he says: ‘Almost all “Don Juan” is real life, either my own or from people I knew.’

It is no exaggeration to say that in Byron’s poems some of the mysterious incidents in his life are plainly revealed. For example, ‘Childe Harold,’ ‘The Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ ‘The Corsair,’ ‘Lara,’ ‘The Dream,’ ‘Manfred,’ ‘Don Juan,’ and several of the smaller pieces, all disclose episodes connected with his own personal experience. In the so-called ‘Fugitive Pieces’ we get a glimpse of his school life and friendships; his pursuits during the time that he resided with his mother at Southwell; and his introduction to Cambridge. In the ‘Hours of Idleness’ we are introduced to Mary Chaworth, after her marriage and the ruin of his hopes.

In the verse ‘Remembrance’ we realize that the dawn of his life is overcast. We see, from some verses written in 1808, how, three years after that marriage, he was still the victim of a fatal infatuation:

After lingering for three months in the neighbourhood of the woman whom he so unwisely loved, he finally resolved to break the chain:

When about to leave England, in vain pursuit of the happiness he had lost, he addresses passionate verses to Mary Chaworth:

He tells her that he has had love passages with another woman, in the vain hope of destroying the love of his life:

He wished to say farewell, but dared not trust himself. In the cantos of ‘Childe Harold,’ written during his absence, he recurs to the subject nearest to his heart. He says that before leaving Newstead—

He mentions his mother, from whom he dreaded to part, and his sister Augusta, whom he loved, but had not seen for some time. After his return to England in 1811, he wrote the ‘Thyrza’ poems, and added some stanzas to ‘Childe Harold,’ wherein he expresses a hope that the separation between himself and Mary Chaworth may not be eternal. He then pours out the sorrows of his heart to Francis Hodgson. We cannot doubt that the ‘Lines written beneath a Picture,’ composed at Athens in January, 1811,

referred to Mary Chaworth, for he mentions the deathblow of his hope. In the ‘Epistle to a Friend,’ Byron mentions the effect which a chance meeting with Mary had upon him, causing him to realize that ‘Time had not made him love the less.’

The poems that have puzzled the commentator most were those which Byron addressed to ‘Thyrza’—a mysterious personage, whose identity has not hitherto been discovered. The present writer proposes to enter fully, and, he hopes, impartially, into the subject, trusting that the conclusions at which he has arrived may ultimately be endorsed by others who have given their serious attention to the question at issue.

In any attempt to unravel the mystery of the ‘Thyrza’ poems, it will be necessary to consider, not only the circumstances in which they were written, but also those associations of Byron’s youth which inspired a love that endured throughout his life.

Byron’s attachment to his distant cousin, Mary Anne Chaworth, is well known. We know that his boyish love was not returned, and that the young heiress of Annesley married, in 1805, Mr. John Musters, of Colwick, in the neighbourhood of Nottingham. In order to account for these love-poems, it has been suggested that, subsequent to this marriage, Byron fell in love with some incognita, whose identity has never been established, and who died soon after his return to England in 1811.

We are unable to concur with so simple a solution of the mystery, for the following reasons: It will be remembered that shortly after Mary Chaworth’s marriage Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he formed a romantic attachment to a young chorister, named Edleston, whose life he had saved from drowning. Writing to Miss Elizabeth Pigot on June 30, 1807, Byron says:

‘I quit Cambridge with very little regret, because our set are vanished, and my musical protégé (Edleston), before mentioned, has left the choir, and is stationed in a mercantile house of considerable eminence in the Metropolis. You may have heard me observe he is, exactly to an hour, two years younger than myself. I found him grown considerably, and, as you may suppose, very glad to see his former Patron.[30] He is nearly my height, very thin, very fair complexion, dark eyes, and light locks.

‘My opinion of his mind you already know; I hope I shall never have occasion to change it.’

On July 5, 1807, Byron again wrote to Miss Pigot:

‘At this moment I write with a bottle of claret in my head and tears in my eyes; for I have just parted with my “Cornelian,”[31] who spent the evening with me. As it was our last interview, I postponed my engagement to devote the hours of the Sabbath to friendship: Edleston and I have separated for the present, and my mind is a chaos of hope and sorrow.... I rejoice to hear you are interested in my protégé; he has been my almost constant associate since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manner attached me to him for ever. He departs for a mercantile house in Town in October, and we shall probably not meet till the expiration of my minority, when I shall leave to his decision, either entering as a partner through my interest, or residing with me altogether. Of course he would, in his present frame of mind, prefer the latter, but he may alter his opinion previous to that period; however, he shall have his choice. I certainly love him more than any human being, and neither time nor distance have had the least effect on my (in general) changeable disposition. In short, we shall put Lady E. Butler and Miss Ponsonby (the “Ladies of Llangollen,” as they were called) to the blush, Pylades and Orestes out of countenance, and want nothing but a catastrophe like Nisus and Euryalus, to give Jonathan and David the “go by.” He certainly is perhaps more attached to me than even I am in return. During the whole of my residence at Cambridge we met every day, summer and winter, without passing one tiresome moment, and separated each time with increasing reluctance. I hope you will one day see us together. He is the only being I esteem, though I like many.’

This letter shows the depth of the boyish affection that had sprung up between two lads with little experience of life. The attachment on both sides was sincere, but not more so than many similar boy friendships, which, alas! fade away under the chilling influences of time and circumstance. In this case the ‘Cornelian Heart’ that had sparkled with the tears of Edleston, and which, in the fervour of his feelings, Byron had suspended round his neck, was, not long afterwards, transferred to Miss Elizabeth Pigot.

A vague notion seems to prevail that the inspiration of these ‘Thyrza’ poems is in some way connected with Edleston. This idea seems to have arisen from Byron’s allusion to a pledge of affection given in better days:

We cannot accept this theory, being of opinion, not lightly formed, that the ‘bitter pledge’ referred to had a far deeper and a more lasting significance than ever could have belonged to ‘the Cornelian heart that was broken.’

In later years, it will be remembered, Byron told Medwin that, shortly after his arrival at Cambridge, he fell into habits of dissipation, in order to drown the remembrance of a hopeless passion for Mary Chaworth. That Mary Chaworth held his affections at that time is beyond question. She also had given Byron ‘a token,’ which was still in his possession when the ‘Thyrza’ poems were written; whereas Edleston’s gift had passed to other hands. The following anecdote, related by the Countess Guiccioli, may be accepted on Byron’s authority:

‘One day (while Byron and Musters were bathing in the Trent—a river that runs through the grounds of Colwick) Mr. Musters perceived a ring among Lord Byron’s clothes, left on the bank. To see and take possession of it was the affair of a moment. Musters had recognized it as having belonged to Miss Chaworth. Lord Byron claimed it, but Musters would not restore the ring. High words were exchanged. On returning to the house, Musters jumped on a horse, and galloped off to ask an explanation from Miss Chaworth, who, being forced to confess that Lord Byron wore the ring with her consent, felt obliged to make amends to Musters, by promising to declare immediately her engagement with him.’

It is therefore probable that the ‘dear simple gift,’ of the first draft, was the ring which Mary Chaworth had given to her boy lover in 1804, and that the words we have quoted had no connection whatever with young Edleston.

Assuming that the ‘Thyrza’ poems were addressed to a woman—and there is abundant proof of this—it is remarkable that, neither in the whole course of his correspondence with his friends, nor from any source whatever, can any traces be found of any other serious attachment which would account for the poems in question. Between the date of the marriage, in 1805, and the autumn of 1808, Byron and Mary Chaworth had not met. It will be remembered that in the autumn—only eight months before he left England with Hobhouse—Byron met Mary Chaworth at dinner in her own home. The effect of that meeting, which he has himself described, shows the depth of his feelings, and precludes the idea that he could at that time have been deeply interested in anyone else. After that meeting Byron remained three months in the neighbourhood of Annesley; and it may be inferred that an intimacy sprang up between them, which was broken off somewhat abruptly by Mary’s husband. There are traces of this in ‘Lara.’

At the end of November, 1808, Byron writes from Newstead to his sister:

‘I am living here alone, which suits my inclination better than society of any kind.... I am a very unlucky fellow, for I think I had naturally not a bad heart; but it has been so bent, twisted, and trampled on, that it has now become as hard as a Highlander’s heelpiece.’

A fortnight later he writes to Hanson, his agent, and talks of either marrying for money or blowing his brains out. It was then that he wrote those verses addressed to Mary Chaworth:

On January 25, 1809, Byron returned to London. It is hard to believe that during those three months Byron did not often meet the lady of his love. It is more than probable that the old friendship between them had been renewed, since there is evidence to prove that, after Byron had taken his seat in the House of Lords on March 13, 1809, he confided his Parliamentary robes to Mary Chaworth’s safe-keeping, a circumstance which suggests a certain amount of neighbourly friendship.

In May, Byron again visited Newstead, where he entertained Matthews and some of his college friends. That sérénade indiscrète,

which was addressed to Mary Chaworth from Falmouth on, or about, June 22, shows the state of his feelings towards her; but she does not seem to have given him any encouragement, and there was no correspondence between them during Byron’s absence from England. Between July 2, 1809, and July 15, 1811, Byron’s thoughts were fully occupied in other directions. His distractions, which may be traced in his writings, were, however, not sufficient to crush out the remembrance of that fatal infatuation. When, in 1811, he returned to England, it was without pleasure, and without the faintest hope of any renewal of an intimacy which Mary Chaworth had broken off for both their sakes. He was in no hurry to visit Newstead, where his mother anxiously awaited him, and dawdled about town, under various pretexts, until the first week in August, when he heard of his mother’s serious illness. Before Byron reached Newstead his mother had died. He seems to have heard of her illness one day, and of her death on the day following. Although there had long been a certain estrangement between them, all was now forgotten, and Byron felt his mother’s death acutely.

It was at this time that he wrote to his friend Scrope Davies:

‘Some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends (Charles Skinner Matthews) is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? I received a letter from him the day before yesterday.... Come to me, Scrope; I am almost desolate—left almost alone in the world.’

In that gloomy frame of mind, in the solitude of a ruin—for Newstead at that time was but little better than a ruin—Byron, on August 12, drew up some directions for his will, in which he desired to be buried in the garden at Newstead, by the side of his favourite dog Boatswain.

On the same day he wrote to Dallas, who was superintending the printing of the first and second cantos of ‘Childe Harold’:

‘Peace be with the dead! Regret cannot wake them. With a sigh to the departed, let us resume the dull business of life, in the certainty that we also shall have our repose. Besides her who gave me being, I have lost more than one who made that being tolerable. Matthews, a man of the first talents, and also not the worst of my narrow circle, has perished miserably in the muddy waves of the Cam, always fatal to genius; my poor schoolfellow, Wingfield, at Coimbra—within a month; and whilst I had heard from all three, but not seen one.... But let this pass; we shall all one day pass along with the rest. The world is too full of such things, and our very sorrow is selfish.... I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy covering, even in idea, without a hideous sensation; but the worms are less ceremonious. Surely, the Romans did well when they burned the dead.’

The writer of this letter was in his twenty-fourth year!

Ten days later Byron writes to Hodgson:

‘Indeed the blows followed each other so rapidly that I am yet stupid from the shock; and though I do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake, did not every morning convince me mournfully to the contrary. I shall now waive the subject, the dead are at rest, and none but the dead can be so.... I am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before.’

At about the same date, in a letter to Dallas, Byron writes:

‘At three-and-twenty I am left alone, and what more can we be at seventy? It is true I am young enough to begin again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of my life? It is odd how few of my friends have died a quiet death—I mean, in their beds!

‘I cannot settle to anything, and my days pass, with the exception of bodily exercise to some extent, with uniform indolence and idle insipidity.’

The verses, ‘Oh! banish care,’ etc., were written at this time.

In the following lines we see that his grief at the losses he had sustained was deepened by the haunting memory of Mary Chaworth:

Moore, who knew more of the inner workings of Byron’s mind in later years than anyone else, has told us that the poems addressed to ‘Thyrza’ were merely ‘the abstract spirit of many griefs,’ and that the pseudonym was given to an ‘object of affection’ to whom he poured out the sorrows of his heart.

‘All these recollections,’ says Moore, ‘of the young and dead now came to mingle themselves in his mind with the image of her who, though living, was for him as much lost as they, and diffused that general feeling of sadness and fondness through his soul, which found a vent in these poems. No friendship, however warm, could have inspired sorrow so passionate; as no love, however pure, could have kept passion so chastened.

‘It was the blending of the two affections in his memory and imagination that thus gave birth to an ideal object combining the best features of both, and drew from him these saddest and tenderest of love-poems, in which we find all the depth and intensity of real feeling, touched over with such a light as no reality ever wore.’

Moore here expresses himself guardedly. He was one of the very few who knew the whole story of Mary Chaworth’s associations with Byron. He could not, of course, betray his full knowledge; but he has made it sufficiently clear that Byron, in writing the ‘Thyrza’ group of poems, was merely strewing the flowers of poetry on the grave of his love for Mary Chaworth.

The first of these poems was written on the day on which he heard of the death of Edleston. In a letter to Dallas he says:

‘I have been again shocked by a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times. I have become callous, nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered. Other men can always take refuge in their families; I have no resource but my own reflections, and they present no prospect here or hereafter, except the selfish satisfaction of surviving my betters. I am indeed very wretched, and you will excuse my saying so, as you know I am not apt to cant of sensibility.’[32]

Shortly after this letter was written Byron visited Cambridge, where, among the many memories which that place awakened, a remembrance of the young chorister and their ardent friendship was most vivid. Byron recollected the Cornelian that Edleston gave him as a token of friendship, and, now that the giver had passed away for ever, he regretted that he had parted with it. The following letter to Mrs. Pigot explains itself:

‘Cambridge, ‘October 28, 1811.

‘Dear Madam,

‘I am about to write to you on a silly subject, and yet I cannot well do otherwise. You may remember a cornelian which some years ago I consigned to Miss Pigot—indeed I gave to her—and now I am going to make the most selfish and rude of requests. The person who gave it to me, when I was very young, is dead, and though a long time has elapsed since we met, as it was the only memorial I possessed of that person (in whom I was very much interested), it has acquired a value by this event I could have wished it never to have borne in my eyes. If, therefore, Miss Pigot should have preserved it, I must, under these circumstances, beg her to excuse my requesting it to be transmitted to me at No. 8, St. James’ Street, London, and I will replace it by something she may remember me by equally well. As she was always so kind as to feel interested in the fate of him that formed the subject of our conversation, you may tell her that the giver of that cornelian died in May last of a consumption at the age of twenty-one, making the sixth, within four months, of friends and relatives that I have lost between May and the end of August.

‘Believe me, dear madam, ‘Yours very sincerely, ‘Byron.’

The cornelian when found, was returned to Byron, but apparently in a broken condition.

It was through the depressing influence of solitude that the idea entered Byron’s mind to depict his (possibly eternal) separation from Mary Chaworth in terms synonymous with death. With a deep feeling of desolation he recalled every incident of his boyish love. We have seen how the image of his lost Mary, now the wife of his rival, deepened the gloom caused by the sudden death of his mother, and of some of his college friends. It was to Mary, whom he dared not name, that he cried in his agony:

Her absence from Annesley, where he had hoped to find her on his return home, was a great disappointment to him.

These stanzas were attached to the second canto of ‘Childe Harold,’ after that poem was in the press. Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, who so ably edited the latest edition of the poetry of Byron, states that they were sent to Dallas on the same day that Byron composed the poem ‘To Thyrza.’ This is significant, as also his attempt to mystify Dallas by telling him that he had again (October 11, 1811) been shocked by a death. This was true enough, for he had on that day heard of the death of Edleston; but it was not true that the stanzas we have quoted had any connection with that event. Mr. Coleridge in a note says:

‘In connection with this subject, it may be noted that the lines 6 and 7 of Stanza XCV.,

do not bear out Byron’s contention to Dallas (Letters, October 14 and 31, 1811) that in these three in memoriam stanzas (IX., XCV., XCVI.) he is bewailing an event which took place after he returned to Newstead.[33] The “more than friend” had “ceased to be” before the “wanderer” returned. It is evident that Byron did not take Dallas into his confidence.’

Assuredly he did not. The ‘more than friend’ was not dead; she had merely absented herself, and did not stay to welcome the ‘wanderer’ on his return from his travels. She was, however, dead to him in a sense far deeper than mere absence at such a time.

Mary Chaworth’s presence would have consoled him at a time when he felt alone in the world. He feared that she was lost to him for ever. He knew her too well to suppose that she could ever be more to him than a friend; and yet it was just that female sympathy and friendship for which he so ardently yearned. In his unreasonableness, he was both hurt and disappointed that this companion of his earlier days should have kept away from her home at that particular time, and of course misconstrued the cause. With the feeling that this parting must be eternal, he wished that they could have met once more.

In the bitterness of his desolation he recalled the days when they were at Newstead together—probably stolen interviews, which find no place in history—when

Six days after these lines were written Byron left Newstead. Writing to Hodgson from his lodgings in St. James’s Street, he enclosed some stanzas which he had written a day or two before, ‘on hearing a song of former days.’ The lady, whose singing now so deeply impressed Byron, was the Hon. Mrs. George Lamb, whom he had met at Melbourne House.

In this, the second of the ‘Thyrza’ poems, the allusions to Mary Chaworth are even more marked. Byron says the songs of Mrs. George Lamb ‘speak to him of brighter days,’ and that he hopes to hear those strains no more:

In Byron’s imagination Mary Chaworth was always hovering over him like a star. She was the ‘starlight of his boyhood,’ the ‘star of his destiny,’ and three years later the poet, in his unpublished fragment ‘Harmodia,’ speaks of Mary as his

The third and last of the ‘Thyrza’ poems must have been written at about the same time as the other two. It appeared with ‘Childe Harold’ in 1812. Byron, weary of the gloom of solitude, and tortured by ‘pangs that rent his heart in twain,’ now determined to break away and seek inspiration for that mental energy which formed part of his nature. Man, he says, was not made to live alone.

Byron’s thoughts went back to the days when he was sailing over the bright waters of the blue Ægean, in the Salsette frigate, commanded by ‘good old Bathurst’[35]—those halcyon days when he was weaving his visions into stanzas for ‘Childe Harold.’

Byron here suggests that the pledge in question was given with the giver’s heart. Lovers are apt to interpret such gifts as ‘love-tokens,’ without suspicion that they may possibly have been due to a feeling far less flattering to their hopes.

These three pieces comprise the so-called ‘Thyrza’ poems, and, in the absence of proof to the contrary, we may reasonably suppose that their subject was Mary Chaworth. This is the more likely because the original manuscripts were the property of Byron’s sister, to whom they were probably given by Mary Chaworth, when, in later years, she destroyed or parted with all the letters and documents which she had received from Byron since the days of their childhood.

Byron did not give up the hope of winning Mary Chaworth’s love until her marriage in 1805. Two months later he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and from that time, until his departure with Hobhouse on his first foreign tour, those who were in constant intercourse with him never mentioned any other object of adoration who might fit in with the Thyrza of the poems. If such a person had really existed, Byron would certainly, either in conversation or in writing, have disclosed her identity. Moore makes it clear that the one passion of Byron’s life was Mary Chaworth. He tells us that there were many fleeting love-episodes, but only one passion strong enough to have inspired the poems in question. If Byron’s heart, during the two years that he passed abroad, had been overflowing with love for some incognita, it was not in his nature to have kept silence. From his well-known effusiveness, reticence under such circumstances is inconceivable.

Finally, as there were no poems, no letters, and no allusion to any such person in the first draft of ‘Childe Harold,’ we may confidently assume that the poet, in the loneliness of his heart, appealed to the only woman whom he ever really loved, and that the legendary Thyrza was a myth.

It will be remembered that the ninth stanza in the second canto of ‘Childe Harold’ was interpolated long after the manuscript had been given to Dallas. It was forwarded for that purpose, three days after the date of the poem ‘To Thyrza,’ and essentially belongs to that period of desolation which inspired those poems:

It is difficult to believe that this stanza was inspired by a memory of the dead. Are we not told that ‘Love and Life together fled’—in other words, when Mary withdrew her love, she was dead to him?

He tells her that in abandoning him she has left him to love and live in vain. And yet he will not give up the hope of meeting her again some day; this is now his sole consolation. Memory of the past (possibly those meetings which took place by stealth, shortly before his departure from England in 1809) feeds the hope that now sustains him. But he will leave everything to chance, and if fate decides that they shall be parted for ever, then will he sink to sullen apathy.

We may remind the reader that at this period (1811) Byron had no belief in any existence after death.

‘I will have nothing to do with your immortality,’ he writes to Hodgson in September; ‘we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another. If men are to live, why die at all? and if they die, why disturb the sweet and sound sleep that “knows no waking”?

‘“Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque Mors nihil ... quæris quo jaceas post obitum loco? Quo non Nata jacent.”’

Even when, in later years, Byron somewhat modified the views of his youth, he expressed an opinion that

‘A material resurrection seems strange, and even absurd, except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong.’

It is therefore tolerably certain that, on the day when he expressed a hope that he might meet his lady-love again, the meeting was to have been in this world, and not in that ‘land of souls beyond the sable shore.’ It must also be remembered that the eighth stanza in the second canto of ‘Childe Harold’ was substituted for one in which Byron deliberately stated that he did not look for Life, where life may never be. The revise was written to please Dallas, and does not pretend to be a confession of belief in immortality, but merely an admission that, on a subject where ‘nothing can be known,’ no final decision is possible.

In the summer of 1813 Byron underwent grave vicissitudes, mental, moral, and financial. His letters and journals teem with allusions to some catastrophe. It seemed as though he were threatened with impending ruin. In his depressed state of mind he found relief only, as he tells us, in the composition of poetry. It was at this time that he wrote in swift succession ‘The Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ and ‘The Corsair.’ It is clear that Byron’s dejection was the result of a hopeless attachment. Mr. Hartley Coleridge assumes that Byron’s innamorata was Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. But that bright star did not long shine in Byron’s orbit—certainly not after October, 1813—and it is doubtful whether they were ever on terms of close intimacy. Her husband had long been Byron’s friend. Byron had lent him money, and had given him advice, which he seems to have sorely needed. It is difficult to understand why Lady Frances Webster should have been especially regarded as Byron’s Calypso. There is nothing to show that she ever seriously occupied his thoughts. Writing to Moore on September 27, 1813, Byron says:

‘I stayed a week with the Websters, and behaved very well, though the lady of the house is young, religious, and pretty, and the master is my particular friend. I felt no wish for anything but a poodle dog, which they kindly gave me.’

So little does Byron seem to have been attracted by Lady Frances, that he only once more visited the Websters, and then only for a few days, on his way to Newstead, between October 3 and 10, 1813.

On June 3 of that year Byron wrote to Mr. John Hanson, his solicitor, a letter which shows the state of his mind at that time. He tells Hanson that he is about to visit Salt Hill, near Maidenhead, and that he will be absent for one week. He is determined to go abroad. The prospective lawsuit with Mr. Claughton (about the sale of Newstead) is to be dropped, if it cannot be carried on in Byron’s absence. At all hazards, at all losses, he is determined that nothing shall prevent him from leaving the country.

‘If utter ruin were or is before me on the one hand, and wealth at home on the other, I have made my choice, and go I will.’

The pictures, and every movable that could be converted into cash, were, by Byron’s orders, to be sold. ‘All I want is a few thousand pounds, and then, Adieu. You shan’t be troubled with me these ten years, if ever.’ Clearly, there must have been something more than a passing fancy which could have induced Byron to sacrifice his chances of selling Newstead, for the sake of a few thousand pounds of ready-money. It had been his intention to accompany Lord and Lady Oxford on their travels, but this project was abandoned. After three weeks—spent in running backwards and forwards between Salt Hill and London—Byron confided his troubles to Augusta. She was always his rock of refuge in all his deeper troubles. Augusta Leigh thought that absence might mend matters, and tried hard to keep her brother up to his resolve of going abroad; she even volunteered to accompany him. But Lady Melbourne—who must have had a prurient mind—persuaded Byron that the gossips about town would not consider it ‘proper’ for him and his sister to travel alone! As Byron was at that time under the influence of an irresistible infatuation, Lady Melbourne’s warning turned the scale, and the project fell through. Meanwhile the plot thickened. Something—he told Moore—had ruined all his prospects of matrimony. His financial circumstances, he said, were mending; ‘and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife.’

In July he still wishes to get out of England. ‘They had better let me go,’ he says; ‘one can die anywhere.’

On August 22, after another visit to Salt Hill, Byron writes to Moore:

‘I have said nothing of the brilliant sex; but the fact is, I am at this moment in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape, than any of the last twelve months, and that is saying a good deal. It is unlucky we can neither live with nor without these women.’

A week later he wrote again to Moore:

‘I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow—that is, I would a month ago, but at present....’

Moore suggested that Byron’s case was similar to that of the youth apostrophized by Horace in his twenty-seventh ode, and invited his confidence:

Recent research has convinced the present writer that the incident which affected Byron so profoundly at this time—about eighteen months before his marriage—indirectly brought about the separation between Lord and Lady Byron in 1816. A careful student of Byron’s character could not fail to notice, among all the contradictions and inconsistencies of his life, one point upon which he was resolute—namely, a consistent reticence on the subject of the intimacy which sprang up between himself and Mary Chaworth in the summer of 1813. The strongest impulse of his life—even to the last—was a steadfast, unwavering, hopeless attachment to that lady. Throughout his turbulent youth, in his early as in his later days, the same theme floats through the chords of his melodious verse, a deathless love and a deep remorse. Even at the last, when the shadow of Death was creeping slowly over the flats at Missolonghi, the same wild, despairing note found involuntary expression, and the last words that Byron ever wrote tell the sad story with a distinctness which might well open the eyes even of the blind.

When he first met his fate, he was a schoolboy of sixteen—precocious, pugnacious, probably a prig, and by no means handsome. He must have appeared to Mary much as we see him in his portrait by Sanders. Mary was two years older, and already in love with a fox-hunting squire of good family. ‘Love dwells not in our will,’ and a nature like Byron’s, once under its spell, was sure to feel its force acutely. There was romance, too, in the situation; and the poetic temperament—always precocious—responded to an impulse on the gossamer chance of achieving the impossible. Mary was probably half amused and half flattered by the adoration of a boy of whose destiny she divined nothing.

There is no reason to suppose that there was any meeting between Byron and Mary Chaworth after the spring of 1809, until the summer of 1813. Their separation seemed destined to be final. Although Byron, in after-years, wished it to be believed that they had not met since 1808, it is certain that a meeting took place in the summer of 1813. Although Byron took, as we shall see presently, great pains to conceal that fact from the public, he did not attempt to deceive either Moore, Hobhouse, or Hodgson. In his letter to Monsieur Coulmann, written in July, 1823, we have the version which Byron wished the public to believe.

‘I had not seen her [Mary Chaworth] for many years. When an occasion offered, I was upon the point, with her consent, of paying her a visit, when my sister, who has always had more influence over me than anyone else, persuaded me not to do it. “For,” said she, “if you go, you will fall in love again, and then there will be a scene; one step will lead to another, et cela fera un éclat,” etc. I was guided by these reasons, and shortly after I married.... Mrs. Chaworth some time after, being separated from her husband, became insane; but she has since recovered her reason, and is, I believe, reconciled to her husband.’

At about the same time Byron told Medwin that, after Mary’s separation from her husband, she proposed an interview with him—a suggestion which Byron, by the advice of Mrs. Leigh, declined. He also said to Medwin:

‘She [Mary Chaworth] was the beau-idéal of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful; and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfection my imagination created in her—I say created, for I found her, like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic.’

It is difficult to see how Byron could have arrived at so unflattering an estimate of a woman whom he had only once seen since her marriage—at a dinner-party, when, as he has told us, he was overcome by shyness and a feeling of awkwardness! But let that pass. Byron wished the world to believe (1) that Mary Chaworth, after the separation from her husband in 1813, proposed a meeting with Byron; (2) that he declined to meet her; (3) that, after his unfortunate marriage, Mary became insane; and (4) that he found her, ‘like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic.’

It is quite possible, of course, that Byron may have at first refused to meet the only woman on earth whom he sincerely loved, and more than likely that Mrs. Leigh did her utmost to dissuade him from so rash a proceeding. But it is on record that Byron incautiously admitted to Medwin that he did meet Mary Chaworth after his return from Greece.[37] It will be remembered that he returned from Greece in 1811. Their intimacy had long before been broken off by Mr. John Musters; and, as we have seen, Mary, faithful to a promise which she had made to her husband, kept away from Annesley during the period (1811) when the ‘Thyrza’ poems were written. It is doubtful whether they would ever again have met if her husband had shown any consideration for her feelings. But he showed her none. When, nearly forty years ago, the present writer visited Annesley, there were several people living who remembered both Mary Chaworth and her husband. These people stated that their married life, so full of grief and bitterness, was a constant source of comment both at Annesley and Newstead. The trouble was attributed to the harsh and capricious conduct, and the well-known infidelities, of one to whose kindness and affection Mary had a sacred claim. She seems to have been left for long periods at Annesley with only one companion, Miss Anne Radford, who had been brought up with her from childhood. This state of things eventually broke down, and when, in the early part of 1813, Mary could stand the strain no longer, a separation took place by mutual consent.

In the summer of that year Byron and this unhappy woman were thrown together by the merest accident, and, unfortunately for both, renewed their dangerous friendship.

Byron’s friend and biographer, Thomas Moore, took great pains to suppress every allusion to Mary Chaworth in Byron’s memoranda and letters. He faithfully kept the secret. There is nothing in Byron’s letters or journals, as revised by Moore, to show that they ever met after 1808, and yet they undoubtedly did meet in 1813, after Mary’s estrangement from her husband. That they were in constant correspondence in November of that year may be gathered from Byron’s journal, where Mary’s name is veiled by asterisks.

On November 24 he writes:

‘I am tremendously in arrear with my letters, except to * * * *, and to her my thoughts overpower me: my words never compass them.’

‘I have been pondering,’ he writes on the 26th, ‘on the miseries of separation, that—oh! how seldom we see those we love! Yet we live ages in moments when met.’

Then follows, on the 27th, a clue:

‘I believe, with Clym o’ the Clow, or Robin Hood,

It is attested, by all those who were acquainted with Mary Chaworth, that she always bore an exemplary character. It was well known that her marriage was an unhappy one, and that she had been for some time deserted by her husband. In June, 1813, when she fell under the fatal spell of Byron, then the most fascinating man in society,[38] she was living in deep dejection, parted from her lawful protector, with whom she had a serious disagreement. He had neglected her, and she well knew that she had a rival in his affections at that time.

It was in these distressing circumstances that Byron, with the world at his feet, came to worship her in great humility. As he looked back upon the past, he realized that this neglected woman had always been the light of his life, the lodestar of his destiny. And now that he beheld his ‘Morning Star of Annesley’ shedding ineffectual rays upon the dead embers of a lost love, the old feeling returned to him with resistless force.

In the remorseful words of Manfred,

Without attempting to excuse Byron’s conduct—indeed, that were useless—it must be remembered that he was only twenty-five years of age, and Mary was very unhappy. After all hope of meeting her again had been abandoned, the force of destiny, so to speak, had unexpectedly restored his lost Thyrza—the Theresa of ‘Mazeppa.’

Byron’s punishment was in this world. The remorse which followed endured throughout the remaining portion of his life. It wrecked what might have proved a happy marriage, and drove him, from stone to stone, along life’s causeway, to that ‘Sea Sodom’ where, for many months, he tried to destroy the memory of his crime by reckless profligacy.

Mary Chaworth no sooner realized her awful danger—the madness of an impulse which not even love could excuse—than she recoiled from the precipice which yawned before her. She had been momentarily blinded by the irresistible fascination of one who, after all, really and truly loved her. But she was a good woman in spite of this one episode, and to the last hour of her existence she never swerved from that narrow path which led to an honoured grave.

Although it was too late for happiness, too late to evade the consequences of her weakness, there was still time for repentance. The secret was kept inviolate by the very few to whom it was confided, and the present writer deeply regrets that circumstances have compelled him to break the seal.

If ‘Astarte’ had not been written, there would have been no need to lift the veil. Lord Lovelace has besmirched the good name of Mrs. Leigh, and it is but an act of simple justice to defend her.

When Mary Chaworth escaped from Byron’s fatal influence, he reproached her for leaving him, and tried to shake her resolution with heart-rending appeals. Happily for both, they fell upon deaf ears.

The depth and sincerity of Byron’s love for Mary Chaworth cannot be questioned. Moore, who knew him well, says:

‘The all-absorbing and unsuccessful (unsatisfied) love for Mary Chaworth was the agony, without being the death, of an unsated desire which lived on through life, filled his poetry with the very soul of tenderness, lent the colouring of its light to even those unworthy ties which vanity or passion led him afterwards to form, and was the last aspiration of his fervid spirit, in those stanzas written but a few months before his death.’

It was, in fact, a love of such unreasonableness and persistence as might be termed, without exaggeration, a madness of the heart.

Although Mary escaped for ever from that baneful infatuation, which in an unguarded moment had destroyed her peace of mind, her separation from Byron was not complete until he married. Not only did they correspond frequently, but they also met occasionally. In the following January (1814) Byron introduced Mary to Augusta Leigh. From that eventful meeting, when probable contingencies were provided for, until Mary’s death in 1832, these two women, who had suffered so much through Byron, continued in the closest intimacy; and in November, 1819, Augusta stood sponsor for Mary’s youngest daughter.

In a poem which must have been written in 1813, an apostrophe ‘To Time,’ Byron refers to Mary’s resolutions.

It is of course true that matters were not, and could never again be, on the same footing as in July of that year; but Mary Chaworth was constancy itself, in a higher and a nobler sense than Byron attached to it, when he reproached her for broken vows.

During the remainder of Byron’s life, Mary took a deep interest in everything that affected him. In 1814, believing that marriage would be his salvation, she used her influence in that direction. We know that she did not approve of the choice which Byron so recklessly made, and she certainly had ample cause to deplore its results. Through her close intimacy with Augusta Leigh—an intimacy which has not hitherto been suspected—she became acquainted with every phase in Byron’s subsequent career. She could read ‘between the lines,’ and solve the mysteries to be found in such poems as ‘Lara,’ ‘Mazeppa,’ ‘Manfred,’ and ‘Don Juan.’

We believe that Byron’s love for Mary was the main cause of the indifference he felt towards his wife. In order to shield Mary from the possible consequences of a public investigation into conduct prior to his marriage, Byron, in 1816, consented to a separation from his wife.

After Byron had left England Mary broke down under the strain she had borne so bravely, and her mind gave way. When at last, in April, 1817, a reconciliation took place between Mary and her husband, it was apparent to everyone that she had, during those four anxious years, become a changed woman. She never entirely regained either health or spirits. Her mind ‘had acquired a tinge of religious melancholy, which never afterwards left it.’ Sorrow and disappointment had subdued a naturally buoyant nature, and ‘melancholy marked her for its own.’ Shortly before her death, in 1832, she destroyed every letter she had received from Byron since those distant fateful years when, as boy and girl, they had wandered on the Hills of Annesley. For eight sad years Mary Chaworth survived the lover of her youth. Shortly before her death, in a letter to one of her daughters, she drew her own character which might fitly form her epitaph: ‘Soon led, easily pleased, very hasty, and very relenting, with a heart moulded in a warm and affectionate fashion.’

Such was the woman who, though parted by fate, maintained through sunshine and storm an ascendancy over the heart of Byron which neither time nor absence could impair, and which endured to the end of his earthly existence. We may well believe that those inarticulate words which the dying poet murmured to the bewildered Fletcher—those broken sentences which ended with, ‘Tell her everything; you are friends with her’—may have referred, not to Lady Byron, as policy suggested, but to Mary Chaworth, with whom Fletcher had been acquainted since his youth.

We have incontestable proof that, only two months before he died, Byron’s thoughts were occupied with one whom he had named ‘the starlight of his boyhood.’ How deeply Byron thought about Mary Chaworth at the last is proved by the poem which was found among his papers at Missolonghi. In six stanzas the poet revealed the story that he would fain have hidden. A note in his handwriting states that they were addressed ‘to no one in particular,’ and that they were merely ‘a poetical scherzo.’ There is, however, no room for doubt that the poem bears a deep significance.

We have here a glimpse of that turbulent scene when Mary’s husband, in a fit of jealousy, put an end to their dangerous intimacy.

This brings us to that period of suspense and fear, in 1814, which preceded the birth of Medora. In a letter which Byron at that time wrote to Miss Milbanke, we find these words:

‘I am at present a little feverish—I mean mentally—and, as usual, on the brink of something or other, which will probably crush me at last, and cut our correspondence short, with everything else.’

Twelve days later (March 3, 1814), Byron tells Moore that he is ‘uncomfortable,’ and that he has ‘no lack of argument to ponder upon of the most gloomy description.’

‘Some day or other,’ he writes, ‘when we are veterans, I may tell you a tale of present and past times; and it is not from want of confidence that I do not now.... All this would be very well if I had no heart; but, unluckily, I have found that there is such a thing still about me, though in no very good repair, and also that it has a habit of attaching itself to one, whether I will or no. Divide et impera, I begin to think, will only do for politics.’

When Moore, who was puzzled, asked Byron to explain himself more clearly, he replied: ‘Guess darkly, and you will seldom err.’

Thirty-four days later Medora was born, April 15, 1814.

Here we see Byron’s agony of remorse. Like Herod, he lamented for Mariamne:

In ‘Manfred’ we find a note of remembrance in the deprecating words:

We now see Byron, at the supreme crisis of his life, standing in solitude on his hearth, with all his household gods shivered around him. We perceive that not least among his troubles at that time was the ever-haunting fear lest the secret of Medora’s birth should be disclosed. His greatest anxiety was for Mary’s safety, and this could only be secured by keeping his matrimonial squabbles out of a court of law. It was, in fact, by agreeing to sign the deed of separation that the whole situation was saved. The loyalty of Augusta Leigh on this occasion was never forgotten:

In the fifth stanza we see Byron, eight years later, at Missolonghi, struck down by that attack of epilepsy which preceded his death by only two months:

In the sixth and final stanza, probably the last lines that Byron ever wrote, we find him reiterating, with all a lover’s persistency, a belief that Mary could never have loved him, otherwise she would not have left him.

The reproaches of lovers are often unjust. Byron either could not, or perhaps would not, see that in abandoning him Mary had been actuated by the highest, the purest motives, and that the renunciation must have afforded her deep pain—a sacrifice, not lightly made, for Byron’s sake quite as much as for her own. That Byron for a time resented her conduct in this respect is evident from a remark made in a letter to Miss Milbanke, dated November 29, 1813. After saying that he once thought that Mary Chaworth could have made him happy, he added, ‘but subsequent events have proved that my expectations might not have been fulfilled had I ever proposed to and received my idol.’[39]

What those ‘subsequent events’ were may be guessed from reproaches which at this period appear among his poems:

In the letter written five years after their final separation, Byron again reproaches Mary Chaworth, but this time without a tinge of bitterness:

‘My own, we may have been very wrong, but I repent of nothing except that cursed marriage, and your refusing to continue to love me as you had loved me. I can neither forget nor quite forgive you for that precious piece of reformation. But I can never be other than I have been, and whenever I love anything, it is because it reminds me in some way or other of yourself.’

‘The Giaour’ was begun in May and finished in November, 1813. Those parts which relate to Mary Chaworth were added to that poem in July and August:

Byron says that, like the bird that sings within the brake, like the swan that swims upon the waters, he can only have one mate. He despises those who sneer at constancy. He does not envy them their fickleness, and regards such heartless men as lower in the scale of creation than the solitary swan.

Who can doubt that the friend ‘of earlier days,’ whose memory the Giaour wishes to bless before he dies, but whom he dares not bless lest Heaven should ‘mark the vain attempt’ of guilt praying for the guiltless, was Mary Chaworth. He bids the friar tell that friend

He wonders whether that friend is still his friend, as in those earlier days, when hearts were blended in that sweet land where bloom his native valley’s bowers. To that friend he sends a ring, which was the memorial of a youthful vow:

The motto chosen by Byron for ‘The Giaour’ is in itself suggestive:

On October 10, 1813, Byron arrived at Newstead, where he stayed for a month. Mary Chaworth was at Annesley during that time. On his return to town he wrote (November 8) to his sister:

‘My dearest Augusta,

‘I have only time to say that my long silence has been occasioned by a thousand things (with which you are not concerned). It is not Lady Caroline, nor Lady Oxford; but perhaps you may guess, and if you do, do not tell. You do not know what mischief your being with me might have prevented. You shall hear from me to-morrow; in the meantime don’t be alarmed. I am in no immediate peril.

‘Believe me, ever yours, ‘B.’

On November 30 Byron wrote to Moore:

‘We were once very near neighbours this autumn;[40] and a good and bad neighbourhood it has proved to me. Suffice it to say that your French quotation (Si je récommençais ma carrière, je ferais tout ce que j’ai fait) was confoundedly to the purpose,—though very unexpectedly pertinent, as you may imagine by what I said before, and my silence since. However, “Richard’s himself again,” and, except all night and some part of the morning, I don’t think very much about the matter. All convulsions end with me in rhyme; and to solace my midnights I have scribbled another Turkish story [‘The Bride of Abydos’] which you will receive soon after this.... I have written this, and published it, for the sake of employment—to wring my thoughts from reality, and take refuge in “imaginings,” however “horrible.”... This is the work of a week....’

In order the more effectually to dispose of the theory that Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster was the cause of Byron’s disquietude, we insert an extract from his journal, dated a fortnight earlier (November 14, 1813):

‘Last night I finished “Zuleika” [the name was afterwards changed to ‘The Bride of Abydos’], my second Turkish tale. I believe the composition of it kept me alive—for it was written to drive my thoughts from the recollection of * * * * “Dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed.” At least, even here, my hand would tremble to write it.... I have some idea of expectorating a romance, but what romance could equal the events

Surely the name that Byron dared not write, even in his own journal, was not that of Lady Frances Webster, whose name appears often in his correspondence. The ‘sacred name’ was that of one of whom he afterwards wrote, ‘Thou art both Mother and May.’

During October, November, and December, 1813, Byron’s mind was in a perturbed condition. We gather, from a letter which he wrote to Moore on November 30, that his thoughts were centred on a lady living in Nottinghamshire[41], and that the scrape, which he mentions in his letter to Augusta on November 8, referred to that lady and the dreaded prospects of maternity.

Mr. Coleridge believes that the verses, ‘Remember him, whom Passion’s power,’ were addressed to Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. There is nothing, so far as the present writer knows, to support that opinion. There is no evidence to show the month in which they were written; and, in view of the statement that the lady in question had lived in comparative retirement, ‘Thy soul from long seclusion pure,’ and that she had, because of his presumption, banished the poet in 1813, it could not well have been Lady Frances Webster, who in September of that year had asked Byron to be godfather to her child, and in October had invited him to her house. It is noteworthy that Byron expressly forbade Murray to publish those verses with ‘The Corsair,’ where, it must be owned, they would have been sadly out of place. ‘Farewell, if ever fondest prayer,’ was decidedly more appropriate to the state of things existing at that time.

The motto chosen for his ‘Bride of Abydos’ is taken from Burns:

The poem was written early in November, 1813.

Byron has told us that it was written to divert his mind,[42] ‘to wring his thoughts from reality to imagination, from selfish regrets to vivid recollections’; to ‘distract his thoughts from the recollection of * * * * “Dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed,”’ and in a letter to John Galt (December 11, 1813) he says that parts of the poem were drawn ‘from existence.’ He had been staying at Newstead, in close proximity to Annesley, from October 10 to November 8, during which time, as he says, he regretted the absence of his sister Augusta, ‘who might have saved him much trouble.’ He says, ‘All convulsions end with me in rhyme,’ and that ‘The Bride of Abydos’ was ‘the work of a week.’ In speaking of a ‘dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed,’ he says: ‘At least even here my hand would tremble to write it’; and on November 30 he writes to Moore: ‘Since I last wrote’ (October 2), ‘much has happened to me.’ On November 27 he writes in his journal: ‘Mary—dear name—thou art both Mother and May.’[43] At the end of November, after he had returned to town, he writes in his journal:

‘* * * * is distant, and will be at * * * *, still more distant, till the spring. No one else, except Augusta, cares for me.... I am tremendously in arrears with my letters, except to * * * *, and to her my thoughts overpower me—my words never compass them.’

On November 14 Byron sends a device for the seals of himself and * * * *; the seal in question is at present in the possession of the Chaworth-Musters family. On December 10, we find from one of Byron’s letters that he had thoughts of committing suicide, and was deterred by the idea that ‘it would annoy Augusta, and perhaps * * * *.’

Byron seems to have put into the mouth of Zuleika words which conveyed his own thoughts:

Selim suggests that Zuleika should brave the world and fly with him:

Zuleika, we are told, was the ‘last of Giaffir’s race.’[44] Selim tells her that ‘life is hazard at the best,’ and there is much to fear:

‘The Corsair’ was written between December 18, 1813, and January 11, 1814. While it was passing through the press, Byron was at Newstead. He gives a little of his own spirit to Conrad, and all Mary’s virtues to Medora—a name which was afterwards given to his child. Conrad

The following verses are full of meaning for the initiated:

Conrad and Medora part, to meet no more in life

The blow he feared the most had fallen at last. The only woman whom he loved had withdrawn her society from him, and his heart,

was petrified at last!

In moments of deep emotion, even the most reticent of men may sometimes reveal themselves. ‘The Giaour,’ ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ and ‘The Corsair,’ formed a trilogy, through which the tragedy of Byron’s life swept like a musical theme. Those poems acted like a recording instrument which, by registering his transient moods, was destined ultimately to betray a secret which he had been at so much pains to hide. In ‘The Giaour’ we see remorse for a crime, which he was at first willing to expiate in sorrow and repentance. In ‘The Bride of Abydos’ we find him, in an access of madness and passion, proposing to share the fate of his victim, if she will but consent to fly with him. Happily for both, Mary would never have consented to an act of social suicide. In ‘The Corsair’ we behold his dreams dispelled by the death of his Love and the hope of better years.

With the dramatic fate of Medora the curtain falls, and the poet, in whom

crosses the threshold of a new life. He reappears later on the scene of all his woes, a broken, friendless stranger, in the person of Lara—that last phase, in which the poet discloses his identity with characteristic insouciance, brings the tragedy abruptly to a close.[45]

On January 6, 1814, Byron wrote a remarkable letter to Moore, at that time in Nottinghamshire:

‘... I have a confidence for you—a perplexing one to me, and just at present in a state of abeyance in itself.... [Here probably follows the disclosure.] However, we shall see. In the meantime you may amuse yourself with my suspense, and put all the justices of peace in requisition, in case I come into your county [Nottinghamshire] with hackbut bent.[46] Seriously, whether I am to hear from her or him, it is a pause, which I can fill up with as few thoughts of my own as I can borrow from other people. Anything is better than stagnation; and now, in the interregnum of my autumn and a strange summer adventure, which I don’t like to think of.... Of course you will keep my secret, and don’t even talk in your sleep of it. Happen what may, your dedication is ensured, being already written; and I shall copy it out fair to-night, in case business or amusement—Amant alterna Camœnæ.’

Byron here refers to ‘The Corsair,’ which he dedicated to Thomas Moore. In order to understand this letter, it may be inferred that one of the letters he had written to his lady-love had remained so long unanswered that Byron feared it might have fallen into her husband’s hands. Writing to Moore on the following day, Byron says:

‘My last epistle would probably put you in a fidget. But the devil, who ought to be civil on such occasions, proved so, and took my letter to the right place.... Is it not odd? the very fate I said she had escaped from * * * * she has now undergone from the worthy * * * *.’

An undated letter from Mary Chaworth, preserved among the Byron letters in Mr. Murray’s possession, seems to belong to this period:

‘Your kind letter, my dear friend, relieved me much, and came yesterday, when I was by no means well, and was a most agreeable remedy, for I fancied a thousand things.... I shall set great value by your seal, and, if you come down to Newstead before we leave Annesley, see no reason why you should not call on us and bring it....[47] I have lately suffered from a pain in my side, which has alarmed me; but I will not, in return for your charming epistle, fill mine with complaints.... I am surprised you have not seen Mr. Chaworth, as I hear of him going about a good deal. We [herself and Miss Radford] are now visiting very near Nottingham, but return to Annesley to-morrow, I trust, where I have left all my little dears except the eldest, whom you saw, and who is with me. We are very anxious to see you, and yet know not how we shall feel on the occasion—formal, I dare say, at the first; but our meeting must be confined to our trio, and then I think we shall be more at our ease. Do write me, and make a sacrifice to friendship, which I shall consider your visit. You may always address your letters to Annesley perfectly safe.

‘Your sincere friend, ‘Mary ——’

On or about January 7, 1814, Byron writes to his sister Augusta in reference to Mary Chaworth:

‘I shall write to-morrow, but did not go to Lady M.’s [Melbourne] twelfth cake banquet. M. [Mary] has written again—all friendship—and really very simple and pathetic—bad usage—paleness—ill-health—old friendship—once—good motive—virtue—and so forth.’

Five days later Byron again writes to Augusta Leigh:

‘On Sunday or Monday next, with leave of your lord and president, you will be well and ready to accompany me to Newstead, which you should see, and I will endeavour to render as comfortable as I can, for both our sakes.... Claughton is, I believe, inclined to settle.... More news from Mrs. [Chaworth], all friendship; you shall see her.’

Medora was born on or about April 15, 1814. ‘Lara’ was written between May 4 and 14. The opening lines, which would have set every tongue wagging, were withheld from publication until January, 1887. They were written in London early in May, and were addressed to the mother of Medora:

Lord Lovelace has told us that ‘nothing is too stupid for belief.’ We are disposed to agree with him, especially as he produces these lines in support of his accusation against Augusta Leigh. The absurdity of supposing that they were addressed to Byron’s sister appears to us to be so evident that it seems unnecessary to waste words in disputation. There is abundant proof that during this period Mrs. Leigh and Byron were in constant correspondence, and that he visited her almost daily during her simulated confinement and convalescence. When Murray sent her some books to while away the time, Byron wrote (April 9) on her behalf to thank him. And finally, as Augusta Leigh had no intention whatever of leaving London, she could in no sense have been ‘the lost one’ whose prospective departure filled Byron with despair. The poet and his sister—whom he was accustomed to address as ‘Goose’[49]—were then, and always, on most familiar terms. The ‘mention of her name’ (which was often on his lips) would certainly not have convulsed him, nor have caused his heart to beat so loudly that he feared lest others should hear it! The woman to whom those lines were addressed was Mary Chaworth, whose condition induced him, on April 18, to begin a fragment entitled ‘Magdalen’—she of whom he wrote on May 4:

Lord Lovelace, in his impetuosity, and with very imperfect knowledge of Byron’s life-story, ties every doubtful scrap of his grandfather’s poetry into his bundle of proofs against Augusta Leigh, without perceiving any discrepancy in the nature of his evidence. A moment’s reflection might have convinced him that the lines we have quoted could not, by any possibility, have applied to one whom he subsequently addressed as:

It must be admitted that Byron, through indiscreet confidences and reckless mystifications, was partly the cause of the suspicions which afterwards fell upon his sister. Lady Byron has left it on record that Byron early in 1814—before the birth of Medora—told Lady Caroline Lamb that a woman he passionately loved was with child by him, and that if a daughter was born it should be called Medora.[50] At about the same time ‘he advanced, at Holland House, the most extraordinary theories about the relations of brother and sister, which originated the reports about Mrs. Leigh.’

That, after ninety years, such nonsense should be regarded as evidence against a woman so well known in the society of her day as was Mrs. Leigh, justifies our concurrence with Lord Lovelace’s opinion that ‘nothing is too stupid for belief.’

It appears that one day Lady Byron was talking to her husband about ‘Lara,’ which seemed to her to be ‘like the darkness in which one fears to behold spectres.’ This bait was evidently too tempting for Byron to resist. He replied: ‘“Lara”—there’s more in that than in any of them.’ As he spoke he shuddered, and turned his eyes to the ground.

Before we examine that poem to see how much it may contain of illuminating matter, we will touch upon a remark Byron made to his wife, which Lord Lovelace quotes without perceiving its depth and meaning. We will quote ‘Astarte’:

‘He told Lady Byron that if she had married him when he first proposed, he should not have written any of the poems which followed [the first and second Cantos] “Childe Harold.”’

This is perfectly true. Byron proposed to Miss Milbanke in 1812. If she had married him then, he would not have renewed his intimacy with Mary Chaworth in June, 1813. There would have been no heart-hunger, no misery, no remorse, and, in short, no inspiration for ‘The Giaour,’ ‘The Bride,’ ‘The Corsair,’ and ‘Lara.’ Miss Milbanke’s refusal of his offer of marriage in 1812 rankled long in Byron’s mind, and provoked those ungenerous reproaches which have been, with more or less exaggeration, reported by persons in Lady Byron’s confidence. The mischief was done between the date of Miss Milbanke’s refusal and her acceptance of his offer, which occurred after the fury of his passion for Mary Chaworth had burnt itself out. No blame attaches to Lady Byron for this misfortune. When Byron first proposed, her affections were elsewhere engaged; she could not, therefore, dispose of her heart to him. When she at last accepted him, it was too late for happiness.

In a letter which Byron wrote to Miss Milbanke previous to his marriage,[51] he unconsciously prophesied the worst:

‘The truth is that could I have foreseen that your life was to be linked to mine—had I even possessed a distinct hope, however distant—I would have been a different and better being. As it is, I have sometimes doubts, even if I should not disappoint the future, nor act hereafter unworthily of you, whether the past ought not to make you still regret me—even that portion of it with which you are not unacquainted. I did not believe such a woman existed—at least for me—and I sometimes fear I ought to wish that she had not.’

When Byron said that he had doubts whether the past would not eventually reflect injuriously upon his future wife, he referred, not to Augusta Leigh, but to his fatal intercourse with Mary Chaworth. The following sentences taken from Mrs. Leigh’s letters to Francis Hodgson, who knew the truth, prove that the mystery only incidentally affected Augusta. The letters were written February, 1816.

‘From what passed [between Captain Byron and Mrs. Clermont] now, if they choose it, it must come into court! God alone knows the consequences.’

‘It strikes me that, if their pecuniary proposals are favourable, Byron will be too happy to escape the exposure. He must be anxious. It is impossible he should not in some degree.’

These are the expressions, not of a person connected with a tragedy, but rather of one who was a spectator of it. Every impartial person must see that. When, on another occasion, Byron told his wife that he wished he had gone abroad—as he had intended—in June, 1813, he undoubtedly implied that the fatal intimacy with Mary Chaworth would have been avoided. This seems so clear to us that we are surprised that Byron’s statement on the subject of his poems should have made no impression on the mind of Lord Lovelace, and should have elicited nothing from him in ‘Astarte,’ except the banale suggestion that Byron’s literary activity must have been accidental!

Lara, like Conrad, is a portion of Byron himself, and the poem opens with his return to Newstead after some bitter experiences, at which he darkly hints:

He tells us that ‘Another chief consoled his destined bride.’ ‘One is absent that most might decorate that gloomy pile.’

In stanzas 17, 18, and 19, Byron draws a picture of himself, so like that his sister remarked upon it in a letter to Hodgson. After telling us that ‘his heart was not by nature hard,’ he says that

The poet tells us that after Lara’s death he was mourned by one whose quiet grief endured for long.

On September 8, 1814, four months after Byron had finished ‘Lara,’ while he was at Newstead with his sister and her children—the little Medora among them—he wrote his fragment ‘Harmodia.’ The rough draft was given after his marriage to Lady Byron, who had no idea to what it could possibly refer. When the scandal about Augusta was at its height, this fragment was impounded among other incriminating documents, and eventually saw the light in ‘Astarte.’ Lord Lovelace was firmly convinced that it was addressed to Augusta Leigh!

Between September 7 and 15 Byron and Mary Chaworth were considering the desirability of marriage for Byron, and letters were passing between the distracted poet and two young ladies—Miss Milbanke and another—with that object in view. Although Byron was still in love with Mary Chaworth, he had come to understand that her determination to break the dangerous intimacy was irrevocable, so he resolved to follow her advice and marry. The tone of his letter to Moore, written on September 15, shows that he was not very keen about wedlock. He was making plans for a journey to Italy in the event of his proposal being rejected.

It is possible that, in a conversation between Mary and himself, the former may have spoken of the risks they had incurred in the past, and of her resolve never to transgress again. To which Byron replied: