Byron: The Last Phase Part 17

'I quit Cambridge with very little regret, because our _set_ are vanished, and my musical _protege_ (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 friends.h.i.+p: 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 _protege_; he has been my _almost constant_ a.s.sociate 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 pa.s.sing 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 friends.h.i.+ps, which, alas! fade away under the chilling influences of time and circ.u.mstance. 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:

'Thou bitter pledge! thou mournful token!'

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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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.

a.s.suming 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:

'When man, expell'd from Eden's bowers, A moment linger'd near the gate, Each scene recall'd the vanish'd hours, And bade him curse his future fate.

'In flight I shall be surely wise, Escaping from temptation's snare; I cannot view my Paradise Without the wish of dwelling there.'

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 friends.h.i.+p 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 circ.u.mstance which suggests a certain amount of neighbourly friends.h.i.+p.

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

"Tis done--and s.h.i.+vering in the gale,'

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 pa.s.s; we shall all one day pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s, 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:

'I've seen my bride another's bride-- Have seen her seated by his side-- Have seen the infant which she bore Wear the sweet smile the mother wore, When she and I in youth have smiled As fond and faultless as her child; Have seen her eyes, in cold disdain, Ask if I felt no secret pain.

And I have acted well my part, And made my cheek belie my heart, Returned the freezing glance she gave, Yet felt the while _that_ woman's slave; Have kissed, as if without design, The babe which ought to have been mine, And showed, alas! in each caress Time had not made me love the less.'

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 friends.h.i.+p, however warm, could have inspired sorrow so pa.s.sionate; as no love, however pure, could have kept pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sociations 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 friends.h.i.+p was most vivid. Byron recollected the Cornelian that Edleston gave him as a token of friends.h.i.+p, and, now that the giver had pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances, 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.'