Byron: The Last Phase

‘There was soft Remembrance and sweet TrustIn one fond breast.’‘That love was pure – and, far above disguise,Had stood the test of mortal enmitiesStill undivided, and cemented moreBy peril, dreaded most in female eyes,But this was firm.’

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:

V‘And when convulsive throes denied my breathThe faintest utterance to my fading thought,To thee – to thee – e’en in the gasp of deathMy spirit turned, oh! oftener than it ought.’

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.

VI‘Thus much and more; and yet thou lov’st me not,And never will! Love dwells not in our will.Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lotTo strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.’

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:

‘The wholly false the heart despises,And spurns deceiver and deceit;But she who not a thought disguises,Whose love is as sincere as sweet —When she can change, who loved so truly,It feels what mine has felt so newly.’

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:

‘She was a form of Life and Light,That, seen, became a part of sight;And rose, where’er I turned mine eye,The Morning-Star of Memory!’

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.

‘Such shame at least was never mine —Leila! each thought was only thine!My good, my guilt, my weal, my woe,My hope on high – my all below.Earth holds no other like to thee,Or, if it doth, in vain for me:… Thou wert, thou art,The cherished madness of my heart!’‘Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;A spark of that immortal fireWith angels shared, by Alla given,To lift from earth our low desire.I grant my love imperfect, allThat mortals by the name miscall;Then deem it evil, what thou wilt;But say, oh say, hers was not Guilt!And she was lost – and yet I breathed,But not the breath of human life:A serpent round my heart was wreathed,And stung my every thought to strife.’

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

‘What thou didst behold:The withered frame – the ruined mind,The wreck that Passion leaves behind —The shrivelled and discoloured leaf,Seared by the Autumn blast of Grief.’

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:

‘Tell him – unheeding as I was,Through many a busy bitter sceneOf all our golden youth hath been,In pain, my faltering tongue had triedTo bless his memory – ere I died;I do not ask him not to blame,Too gentle he to wound my name;I do not ask him not to mourn,Such cold request might sound like scorn.But bear this ring, his own of old,And tell him what thou dost behold!’

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

‘One fatal remembrance – one sorrow that throwsIts bleak shade alike o’er our Joys and our Woes —To which Life nothing darker nor brighter can bring,For which Joy hath no balm – and affliction no sting.’

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

‘“… quæque ipse … vidi,Et quorum pars magna fui”?’

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 Nottinghamshire41, 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:

‘Had we never loved sae kindly,Had we never loved sae blindly,Never met – or never parted,We had ne’er been broken-hearted.’

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:

‘Think’st thou that I could bear to partWith thee, and learn to halve my heart?Ah! were I severed from thy side,Where were thy friend – and who my guide?Years have not seen, Time shall not see,The hour that tears my soul from thee:Ev’n Azrael, from his deadly quiverWhen flies that shaft, and fly it must,That parts all else, shall doom for everOur hearts to undivided dust!***** *What other can she seek to seeThan thee, companion of her bower,The partner of her infancy?These cherished thoughts with life begun,Say, why must I no more avow?’

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

‘But be the Star that guides the wanderer, Thou!Thou, my Zuleika, share and bless my bark;The Dove of peace and promise to mine ark!Or, since that hope denied in worlds of strife,Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life!The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray!*******Not blind to Fate, I see, where’er I rove,Unnumbered perils, – but one only love!Yet well my toils shall that fond breast repay,Though Fortune frown, or falser friends betray.’

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:

‘Yes, fear! the doubt, the dread of losing thee.That dread shall vanish with the favouring gale;Which Love to-night has promised to my sail.No danger daunts the pair his smile hath blest,Their steps still roving, but their hearts at rest.With thee all toils are sweet, each clime hath charms;Earth – Sea alike – our world within our arms!’

‘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

‘Knew himself a villain – but he deemedThe rest no better than the thing he seemed;And scorned the best as hypocrites who hidThose deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exemptFrom all affection and from all contempt.None are all evil – quickening round his heart,One softer feeling would not yet depart.Yet ’gainst that passion vainly still he strove,And even in him it asks the name of Love!Yes, it was Love – unchangeable – unchanged,Felt but for one from whom he never ranged.Yes – it was Love – if thoughts of tenderness,Tried in temptation, strengthened by distress,Unmoved by absence, firm in every clime,And yet – oh! more than all! untired by Time.If there be Love in mortals – this was Love!He was a villain – aye, reproaches showerOn him – but not the Passion, nor its power,Which only proved – all other virtues gone —Not Guilt itself could quench this earliest one!’

The following verses are full of meaning for the initiated:

I‘Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,Lonely and lost to light for evermore,Save when to thine my heart responsive swells,Then trembles into silence as before.II‘There, in its centre, a sepulchral lampBurns the slow flame, eternal – but unseen;Which not the darkness of Despair can damp,Though vain its ray as it had never been.III‘Remember me – oh! pass not thou my graveWithout one thought whose relics there recline:The only pang my bosom dare not braveMust be to find forgetfulness in thine.IV‘My fondest – faintest – latest accents hear —Grief for the dead not Virtue can reprove;Then give me all I ever asked – a tear,The first – last – sole reward of so much love!’

Conrad and Medora part, to meet no more in life

‘But she is nothing – wherefore is he here?..By the first glance on that still, marble brow —It was enough – she died – what recked it how?The love of youth, the hope of better years,The source of softest wishes, tenderest fears,The only living thing he could not hate,Was reft at once —and he deserved his fate,But did not feel it less.’

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,

‘Formed for softness – warped to wrong,Betrayed too early, and beguiled too long,’

was petrified at last!

‘Yet tempests wear, and lightning cleaves the rock;If such his heart, so shattered it the shock.There grew one flower beneath its rugged brow,Though dark the shade – it sheltered – saved till now.The thunder came – that bolt hath blasted both,The Granite’s firmness, and the Lily’s growth:The gentle plant hath left no leaf to tellIts tale, but shrunk and withered where it fell;And of its cold protector, blacken roundBut shivered fragments on the barren ground!’

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.

‘He asked no question – all were answered now!’

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

‘I suoi pensieri in lui dormir non ponno,’

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:

‘When thou art gone – the loved, the lost – the oneWhose smile hath gladdened, though perchance undone —Whose name too dearly cherished to impartDies on the lip, but trembles in the heart;Whose sudden mention can almost convulse,And lightens through the ungovernable pulse —Till the heart leaps so keenly to the wordWe fear that throb can hardly beat unheard —48Then sinks at once beneath that sickly chillThat follows when we find her absent still.When thou art gone – too far again to bless —Oh! God – how slowly comes Forgetfulness!Let none complain how faithless and how briefThe brain’s remembrance, or the bosom’s grief,Or ere they thus forbid us to forgetLet Mercy strip the memory of regret;Yet – selfish still – we would not be forgot,What lip dare say – “My Love – remember not”?Oh! best – and dearest! Thou whose thrilling nameMy heart adores too deeply to proclaim —My memory, almost ceasing to repine,Would mount to Hope if once secure of thine.Meantime the tale I weave must mournful be —As absence to the heart that lives on thee!’

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:

‘I speak not – I trace not – I breathe not thy name —There is Love in the sound – there is Guilt in the fame.’

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:

‘My sister! my sweet sister! if a nameDearer and purer were, it should be thine;*******Had I but sooner learnt the crowd to shun,I had been better than I now can be;The passions which have torn me would have slept;I had not suffered, and thou hadst not wept.’

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.’