Byron: The Last Phase

The ninth stanza has puzzled commentators exceedingly. It has been pointed out that the River Po does not sweep beneath the walls of Ravenna. That is, of course, indisputable. But Byron, in all probability, did not then know the exact course of that river, and blindly followed Dante’s geographical description, and almost used his very words:

‘Siede la terra, dove nata fui,Su la marina dove il Po discende,Per aver pace co’ seguaci sui.’

It is, of course, well known that the Po branches off into two streams to the north-west of Ferrara, and flows both northward and southward of that city. The southern portion – the Po di Primaro – is fed by four affluents – the Rheno, the Savena, the Santerno, and the Lamone – and flows into the Adriatic south of Comachio, about midway between that place and Ravenna. It was obviously to the Po di Primaro that Dante referred when he wrote seguaci sui.

Unless Francesca was born close to the mouth of the Po, which is not impossible, Byron erred in good company. In any case, we may fairly plead poetic licence. That Byron crossed the Po di Primaro as well as the main river admits of no doubt.

In the eleventh stanza Byron is wondering what will be the result of his journey? Will the Guiccioli return to him? Will all be well with the lovers, or will he return to Venice alone? In his fancy they are both wandering on the banks of that river. He is near its source, where the Po di Primaro branches off near Pontelagascuro, while she was on the shore of the Adriatic.

The twelfth stanza would perhaps have been clearer if the first and second lines had been,

‘A stranger, born far beyond the mountains,Loves the Lady of the land,’

which was Byron’s meaning. The poet excuses himself for his fickleness on the plea that ‘his blood is all meridian’ – in short, that he cannot help loving someone. But we plainly see that his love for Mary Chaworth was still paramount. ‘In spite of tortures ne’er to be forgot’ – tortures of which we had a glimpse in ‘Manfred’ – he was still her slave. Finally, Byron tells us that it was useless to struggle against the misery his heart endured, and that all his hopes were centred on an early death.

The episode of Francesca and Paolo had made a deep impression on Byron. He likened it to his unfortunate adventure with Mary Chaworth in June and July, 1813. In ‘The Corsair’ – written after their intimacy had been broken off – Byron prefixes to each canto a motto from ‘The Inferno’ which seemed to be appropriate to his own case. In the first canto we find:

‘Nessun maggior dolore,Che ricordarsi del tempo feliceNella miseria.’

In the second canto:

‘Conoscesti i dubbiosi desire?’

In the third canto:

‘Come vedi – ancor non m’ abbandona.’

That Byron had Francesca in his mind when he wrote the stanzas to the Po seems likely; and in the letter which he wrote to Mary from Venice, in the previous month, he compares their misfortunes with those of Paolo and Francesca in plain words.57

‘Don Juan’ was begun in the autumn of 1818. That poem, Byron tells us, was inspired almost entirely by his own personal experience. Perhaps he drew a portrait of Mary Chaworth when he described Julia:

‘And sheWas married, charming, chaste, and twenty-three.’

When they parted in 1809, that was exactly Mary’s age.

‘Her eye was large and dark, suppressing half its fire until she spoke. Her glossy hair was clustered over a brow bright with intelligence. Her cheek was purple with the beam of youth, mounting at times to a transparent glow; and she had an uncommon grace of manner. She was tall of stature. Her husband was a good-looking man, neither much loved nor disliked. He was of a jealous nature, though he did not show it. They lived together, as most people do, suffering each other’s foibles.’

On a summer’s eve in the month of June, Juan and Julia met:

‘How beautiful she looked! her conscious heartGlowed in her cheek, and yet she felt no wrong.’

For her husband she had honour, virtue, truth, and love. The sun had set, and the yellow moon arose high in the heavens:

‘There is a dangerous silence in that hour,A stillness which leaves room for the full soul.’

Several weeks had passed away:

‘Julia, in fact, had tolerable grounds, —Alfonso’s loves with Inez were well known.’

Then came the parting note:

‘They tell me ’tis decided you depart:’Tis wise – ’tis well, but not the less a pain;I have no further claim on your young heart,Mine is the victim, and would be again:To love too much has been the only artI used.’

Julia tells Juan that she loved him, and still loves him tenderly:

‘I loved, I love you, for this love have lostState, station, Heaven, mankind’s, my own esteem,And yet cannot regret what it hath cost,So dear is still the memory of that dream.’‘All is o’erFor me on earth, except some years to hideMy shame and sorrow deep in my heart’s core.’

The seal to this letter was a sunflower —Elle vous suit partout. It may be mentioned here that Byron had a seal bearing this motto.

When Juan realized that the parting was final, he exclaims:

‘No more – no more – oh! never more, my heart,Canst thou be my sole world, my universe!Once all in all, but now a thing apart,Thou canst not be my blessing or my curse:The illusion’s gone for ever.’

In the third canto we have a hint of Byron’s feelings after his wife had left him:

‘He entered in the house no more his home,A thing to human feelings the most trying,And harder for the heart to overcome,Perhaps, than even the mental pangs of dying;To find our hearthstone turned into a tomb,And round its once warm precincts palely lyingThe ashes of our hopes.’‘But whatsoe’er he had of love reposedOn that beloved daughter; she had beenThe only thing which kept his heart unclosedAmidst the savage deeds he had done and seen,A lonely pure affection unopposed:There wanted but the loss of this to weanHis feelings from all milk of human kindness,And turn him like the Cyclops mad with blindness.’

In the fourth canto we are introduced to Haidée, who resembled Lambro in features and stature, even to the delicacy of their hands. We are told that owing to the violence of emotion and the agitation of her mind she broke a bloodvessel, and lay unconscious on her couch for days. Like Astarte in ‘Manfred,’ ‘her blood was shed: I saw, but could not stanch it’:

‘She looked on many a face with vacant eye,On many a token without knowing what:She saw them watch her without asking why,And recked not who around her pillow sat.*******‘Anon her thin wan fingers beat the wallIn time to the harper’s tune: he changed the themeAnd sang of Love; the fierce name struck through allHer recollection; on her flashed the dreamOf what she was, and is, if ye could callTo be so being; in a gushing streamThe tears rushed forth from her o’erclouded brain,Like mountain mists at length dissolved in rain.’‘Short solace, vain relief! Thought came too quick,And whirled her brain to madness.’‘She died, but not alone; she held within,A second principle of Life, which mightHave dawned a fair and sinless child of sin;But closed its little being without light.’‘Thus lived – thus died she; never more on herShall Sorrow light, or Shame.’

In the fifth canto, written in 1820, after the ‘Stanzas to the Po,’ we find Byron once more in a confidential mood:

‘I have a passion for the name of “Mary,”For once it was a magic sound to me;And still it half calls up the realms of Fairy,Where I beheld what never was to be;All feelings changed, but this was last to varyA spell from which even yet I am not quite free.’

And there is a sigh for Mary Chaworth in the following lines:

‘To pay my court, IGave what I had – a heart; as the world went, IGave what was worth a world; for worlds could neverRestore me those pure feelings, gone for ever.’Twas the boy’s mite, and like the widow’s mayPerhaps be weighed hereafter, if not now;But whether such things do or do not weigh,All who have loved, or love, will still allowLife has naught like it.’

Early in 1823, little more than a year before his death, Byron refers to ‘the fair most fatal Juan ever met.’ Under the name of the Lady Adeline, this most fatal fair one is introduced to the reader:

‘Although she was not evil nor meant ill,Both Destiny and Passion spread the netAnd caught them.’‘Chaste she was, to Detraction’s desperation,And wedded unto one she had loved well.’‘The World could tellNought against either, and both seemed secure —She in her virtue, he in his hauteur.’

Here we have a minute description of Newstead Abbey, the home of the ‘noble pair,’ where Juan came as a visitor:

‘What I throw off is ideal —Lowered, leavened, like a history of Freemasons,Which bears the same relation to the realAs Captain Parry’s Voyage may do to Jason’s.The grand Arcanum’s not for men to see all;My music has some mystic diapasons;And there is much which could not be appreciatedIn any manner by the uninitiated.’

Adeline, we are told, came out at sixteen:

‘At eighteen, though below her feet still pantedA Hecatomb of suitors with devotion,She had consented to create againThat Adam called “The happiest of Men.”’

It will be remembered that when Mary Chaworth married she was exactly eighteen. Her husband was:

‘Tall, stately, formed to lead the courtly vanOn birthdays. The model of a chamberlain.’‘But there was something wanting on the whole —don’t know what, and therefore cannot tell —Which pretty women – the sweet souls! – call Soul.Certes it was not body; he was wellProportioned, as a poplar or a pole,A handsome man.’

This description would answer equally well for ‘handsome Jack Musters,’ who married Mary Chaworth. Adeline, we are told, took Juan in hand when she was about seven-and-twenty. That was Mary’s age in 1813. But this may have been a mere coincidence.

‘She had one defect,’ says Byron, in speaking of Adeline: ‘her heart was vacant. Her conduct had been perfectly correct. She loved her lord, or thought so; but that love cost her an effort. She had nothing to complain of – no bickerings, no connubial turmoil. Their union was a model to behold – serene and noble, conjugal, but cold. There was no great disparity in years, though much in temper. But they never clashed. They moved, so to speak, apart.’

Now, when once Adeline had taken an interest in anything, her impressions grew, and gathered as they ran, like growing water, upon her mind. The more so, perhaps, because she was not at first too readily impressed. She did not know her own heart:

‘I think not she was then in love with Juan:If so, she would have had the strength to flyThe wild sensation, unto her a new one:She merely felt a common sympathyIn him.’‘She was, or thought she was, his friend – and thisWithout the farce of Friendship, or romanceOf Platonism.’

‘Few of the soft sex,’ says Byron, ‘are very stable in their resolves.’ She had heard some parts of Juan’s history; ‘but women hear with more good humour such aberrations than we men of rigour’:

‘Adeline, in all her growing senseOf Juan’s merits and his situation,Felt on the whole an interest intense —Partly perhaps because a fresh sensation,Or that he had an air of innocence,Which is for Innocence a sad temptation —As Women hate half-measures, on the whole,She ’gan to ponder how to save his soul.’

After a deal of thought, ‘she seriously advised him to get married.’

‘There was Miss Millpond, smooth as summer’s sea,That usual paragon, an only daughter,Who seemed the cream of Equanimity,Till skimmed – and then there was some milk and water,With a slight shade of blue too, it might beBeneath the surface.’

The mention of Aurora Raby, to whom Juan in the first instance proposed, and by whom he was refused, suggests an incident in his life which is well known. Aurora was very young, and knew but little of the world’s ways. In her indifference she confounded him with the crowd of flatterers by whom she was surrounded. Her mind appears to have been of a serious caste; with poetic vision she ‘saw worlds beyond this world’s perplexing waste,’ and

‘those worldsHad more of her existence; for in herThere was a depth of feeling to embraceThoughts, boundless, deep, but silent too as Space.’

She had ‘a pure and placid mien’; her colour was ‘never high,’

‘Though sometimes faintly flushed – and always clearAs deep seas in a sunny atmosphere.’

We cannot be positive, but perhaps Byron had Aurora Raby in his mind when he wrote:

‘I’ve seen some balls and revels in my time,And stayed them over for some silly reason,And then I looked (I hope it was no crime)To see what lady best stood out the season;And though I’ve seen some thousands in their primeLovely and pleasing, and who still may please on,I never saw but one (the stars withdrawn)Whose bloom could after dancing dare the Dawn.’58

Perhaps Aurora Raby may have been drawn from his recollection of Miss Mercer Elphinstone, who afterwards married Auguste Charles Joseph, Comte de Flahaut de la Billarderie, one of Napoleon’s Aides-de-Camp, then an exile in England. This young lady was particularly gracious to Byron at Lady Jersey’s party, when others gave him a cold reception. We wonder how matters would have shaped themselves if she had accepted the proposal of marriage which Byron made to her in 1814! But it was not to be. That charming woman passed out of his orbit, and as he waited upon the shore, gazing at the dim outline of the coast of France, the curtain fell upon the first phase of Byron’s existence. The Pilgrim of Eternity stood on the threshold of a new life:

‘Between two worlds life hovers like a star,’Twixt Night and Morn, upon the horizon’s verge.How little do we know that which we are!How less what we may be! The eternal surgeOf Time and Tide rolls on and bears afarOur bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,Lashed from the foam of Ages.’

And after eight years of exile, in his ‘Last Words on Greece,’ written in those closing days at Missolonghi, with the shadow of Death upon him, his mind reverts to one whom, in 1816, he had called ‘Soul of my thought’:

‘What are to me those honours or renownPast or to come, a new-born people’s cry?Albeit for such I could despise a crownOf aught save laurel, or for such could die.I am a fool of passion, and a frownOf thine to me is as an adder’s eye —To the poor bird whose pinion fluttering downWafts unto death the breast it bore so high —Such is this maddening fascination grown,So strong thy magic or so weak am I.’‘The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; the worm,The canker, and the grief, are mine alone!’

PART III

‘ASTARTE’

‘The evil that men do lives after them;The good is oft interred with their bones.’Shakespeare: Julius Cæsar.

CHAPTER I

From the moment when Lord Byron left England until the hour of his death, the question of his separation from his wife was never long out of his thoughts. He was remarkably communicative on the subject, and spoke of it constantly, not only to Madame de Staël, Hobhouse, Lady Blessington, and Trelawny, but, as we have seen, even in casual conversation with comparative strangers. There is no doubt that he felt himself aggrieved, and bitterly resented a verdict which he knew to be unjust. In a pamphlet which was subsequently suppressed, written while he was at Ravenna, Byron sums up his own case. In justice to one who can no longer plead his own cause, we feel bound to transcribe a portion of his reply to strictures on his matrimonial conduct, which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine:

‘The man who is exiled by a faction has the consolation of thinking that he is a martyr; he is upheld by hope and the dignity of his cause, real or imaginary: he who withdraws from the pressure of debt may indulge in the thought that time and prudence will retrieve his circumstances: he who is condemned by the law has a term to his banishment, or a dream of its abbreviation; or, it may be, the knowledge or the belief of some injustice of the law, or of its administration in his own particular: but he who is outlawed by general opinion, without the intervention of hostile politics, illegal judgment, or embarrassed circumstances, whether he be innocent or guilty, must undergo all the bitterness of exile, without hope, without pride, without alleviation. This case was mine. Upon what grounds the public founded their opinion, I am not aware; but it was general, and it was decisive. Of me or of mine they knew little, except that I had written what is called poetry, was a nobleman, had married, become a father, and was involved in differences with my wife and her relatives, no one knew why, because the persons complaining refused to state their grievances. The fashionable world was divided into parties, mine consisting of a very small minority: the reasonable world was naturally on the stronger side, which happened to be the lady’s, as was most proper and polite. The press was active and scurrilous; and such was the rage of the day, that the unfortunate publication of two copies of verses, rather complimentary than otherwise to the subjects of both, was tortured into a species of crime, or constructive petty treason. I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and private rancour; my name, which had been a knightly or a noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman, was tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered, and muttered, and murmured, was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew; but this was not enough. In other countries, in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depths of the lakes, I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed the mountains, but it was the same: so I went a little farther, and settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who betakes him to the waters… I have heard of, and believe, that there are human beings so constituted as to be insensible to injuries; but I believe that the best mode to avoid taking vengeance is to get out of the way of temptation. I do not in this allude to the party, who might be right or wrong; but to many who made her cause the pretext of their own bitterness. She, indeed, must have long avenged me in her own feelings, for whatever her reasons may have been (and she never adduced them, to me at least), she probably neither contemplated nor conceived to what she became the means of conducting the father of her child, and the husband of her choice.’

Byron knew of the charge that had been whispered against his sister and himself, and, knowing it to be false, it stung him to the heart. And yet he dared not speak, because a solution of the mystery that surrounded the separation from his wife would have involved the betrayal of one whom he designated as the soul of his thought:

‘Invisible but gazing, as I glowMixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,And feeling still with thee in my crush’d feelings dearth.’

Augusta Leigh, the selfless martyr, the most loyal friend that Byron ever possessed, his ‘tower of strength in the hour of need,’ assisted her brother, so to speak, to place the pack on a false scent, and the whole field blindly followed. There never was a nobler example of self-immolation than that of the sister who bravely endured the odium of a scandal in which she had no part. For Byron’s sake she was content to suffer intensely during her lifetime; and after she had ceased to feel, her name was branded by Lady Byron and her descendants with the mark of infamy.

A curious feature in the case is that, with few exceptions, those who knew Byron and Mrs. Leigh intimately came gradually to accept the story which Lady Caroline Lamb had insidiously whispered, a libel which flourished exceedingly in the noxious vapours of a scandal-loving age. As Nature is said to abhor a vacuum, so falsehood rushed in to fill the void which silence caused.

It is with a deep searching of heart and with great reluctance that we re-open this painful subject.

The entire responsibility must rest with the late Lord Lovelace, whose loud accusation against Byron’s devoted sister deprives us of any choice in the matter.

In order to understand the full absurdity of the accusation brought against Augusta Leigh, we have but to contrast the evidence brought against her in ‘Astarte’ with allusions to her in Byron’s poems, and with the esteem in which she was held by men and women well known in society at the time of the separation.

Lord Stanhope, the historian, in a private letter written at the time of the Beecher Stowe scandals, says:

‘I was very well acquainted with Mrs. Leigh about forty years ago, and used to call upon her at St. James’s Palace to hear her speak about Lord Byron, as she was very fond of doing. That fact itself is a presumption against what is alleged, since, on such a supposition, the subject would surely be felt as painful and avoided. She was extremely unprepossessing in her person and appearance – more like a nun than anything – and never can have had the least pretension to beauty. I thought her shy and sensitive to a fault in her mind and character, and, from what I saw and knew of her, I hold her to have been utterly incapable of such a crime as Mrs. Beecher Stowe is so unwarrantably seeking to cast upon her memory.’

Frances, Lady Shelley, a woman of large experience, penetration, and sagacity, whose husband was a personal friend of the Prince Regent, stated in a letter to the Times that Mrs. Leigh was like a mother to Byron, and when she knew her intimately – at the time of the separation – was ‘not at all an attractive person.’ Her husband was very fond of her, and had a high opinion of her.

These impressions are confirmed by all those friends and acquaintances of Mrs. Leigh who were still living in 1869.

In 1816 Augusta Leigh was a married woman of thirty-two years of age, and the mother of four children. She had long been attached to the Court, moved in good society, and was much liked by those who knew her intimately. Since her marriage in 1807 she had been more of a mother than a sister to Byron, and her affection for him was deep and sincere. She made allowances for his frailties, bore his uncertain temper with patience, and was never afraid of giving him good advice. In June, 1813, she tried to save him from the catastrophe which she foresaw; and having failed, she made the supreme sacrifice of her life, by adopting his natural child, thus saving the reputation of a woman whom her brother sincerely loved. Henceforward, under suspicions which must have been galling to her pride, she faced the world’s ‘speechless obloquy,’ heedless of consequences. In the after-years, when great trouble fell upon her through the misconduct of that adopted child, she bore her sorrows in silence. Among those who were connected with Byron’s life, Hobhouse, Hodgson, and Harness – three men of unimpeachable character – respected and admired her to the last.

Such, then, was the woman who was persecuted during her lifetime and slandered in her grave. Her traducers at first whispered, and afterwards openly stated, not only that she had committed incest with her brother, but that she had employed her influence over him to make a reconciliation with his wife impossible.

If that were so, it is simply inconceivable that Hobhouse should have remained her lifelong friend. His character is well known. Not only his public but much of his private life is an open book. As a gentleman and a man of honour he was above suspicion. From his long and close intimacy with Byron, there were but few secrets between them; and Hobhouse undoubtedly knew the whole truth of the matter between Byron and his sister. He was Byron’s most trusted friend during life, and executor at his death.

It has never been disputed that, at the time of the separation, Hobhouse demanded from Lady Byron’s representative a formal disavowal of that monstrous charge; otherwise the whole matter would be taken into a court of law. He would allow no equivocation. The charge must either be withdrawn, then and there, or substantiated in open court. When Lady Byron, through her representative, unreservedly disavowed the imputation, Byron was satisfied, and consented to sign the deed of separation.

Six months after Byron left England, Hobhouse visited him in Switzerland; and on September 9, 1816, he wrote as follows to Augusta Leigh:

‘It would be a great injustice to suppose that [Byron] has dismissed the subject from his thoughts, or indeed from his conversation, upon any other motive than that which the most bitter of his enemies would commend. The uniformly tranquil and guarded manner shows the effect which it is meant to hide… I trust the news from your Lowestoft correspondent [Lady Byron] will not be so bad as it was when I last saw you. Pardon me, dear Mrs. Leigh, if I venture to advise the strictest confinement to very common topics in all you say in that quarter. Repay kindness in any other way than by confidence. I say this, not in reference to the lady’s character, but as a maxim to serve for all cases.