Byron - John Nichol
At Harrow, Byron proved himself capable of violent fits of work, but of
"few continuous drudgeries." He would turn out an unusual number of
hexameters, and again lapse into as much idleness as the teachers would
tolerate. His forte was in declamation: his attitude and delivery, and
power of extemporizing, surprised even critical listeners into unguarded
praise. "My qualities," he says, "were much more oratorical and martial
than poetical; no one had the least notion that I should subside into
poesy." Unpopular at first, he began to like school when he had fought his
way to be a champion, and from his energy in sports more than from the
impression produced by his talents had come to be recognized as a leader
among his fellows. Unfortunately, towards the close of his course, in
1805, the headship of Harrow changed hands. Dr. Drury retired, and was
succeeded by Dr. Butler. This event suggested the lines beginning,--
Where are those honours, Ida, once your own,
When Probus fill'd your magisterial throne?
The appointment was generally unpopular among the boys, whose sympathies
were enlisted in favour of Mark Drury, brother of their former master, and
Dr. Butler seems for a time to have had considerable difficulty in
maintaining discipline. Byron, always "famous for rowing," was a
ringleader of the rebellious party, and compared himself to Tyrlaeus. On
one occasion he tore down the window gratings in a room of the
school-house, with the remark that they darkened the hall; on another he
is reported to have refused a dinner invitation from the master, with the
impertinent remark that he would never think of asking him in return to
dine at Newstead. On the other hand, he seems to have set limits to the
mutiny, and prevented some of the boys from setting their desks on fire by
pointing to their fathers' names carved on them. Byron afterwards
expressed regret for his rudeness; but Butler remains in his verse as
Pomposus "of narrow brain, yet of a narrower soul."
Of the poet's free hours, during the last years of his residence which he
refers to as among the happiest of his life, many were spent in solitary
musing by an elm-tree, near a tomb to which his name has been given--a
spot commanding a far view of London, of Windsor "bosomed high in tufted
trees," and of the green fields that stretch between, covered in spring
with the white and red snow of apple blossom. The others were devoted to
the society of his chosen comrades. Byron, if not one of the safest, was
one of the warmest of friends; and he plucked the more eagerly at the
choicest fruit of English public school and college life, from the feeling
he so pathetically expresses,--
Is there no cause beyond the common claim,
Endear'd to all in childhood's very name?
Ah, sure some stronger impulse vibrates here,
Which whispers Friendship will be doubly dear
To one who thus for kindred hearts must roam,
And seek abroad the love denied at home.
Those hearts, dear Ida, have I found in thee--
A home, a world, a paradise to me.
Of his Harrow intimates, the most prominent were the Duke of Dorset, the
poet's favoured fag; Lord Clare (the Lycus of the _Childish
Recollections_); Lord Delawarr (the Euryalus); John Wingfield (Alonzo),
who died at Coimbra, 1811; Cecil Tattersall (Davus); Edward Noel Long
(Cleon); Wildman, afterwards proprietor of Newstead; and Sir Robert Peel.
Of the last, his form-fellow and most famous of his mates, the story is
told of his being unmercifully beaten for offering resistance to his fag
master, and Byron rushing up to intercede with an offer to take half the
blows. Peel was an exact contemporary, having been born in the same year,
1788. It has been remarked that most of the poet's associates were his
juniors, and, less fairly, that he liked to regard them as his satellites.
But even at Dulwich his ostentation of rank had provoked for him the
nickname of "the old English baron." To Wildman, who, as a senior, had a
right of inflicting chastisement for offences, he said, "I find you have
got Delawarr on your list; pray don't lick him." "Why not?" was the reply.
"Why, I don't know, except that he is a brother peer." Again, he
interfered with the more effectual arm of physical force to rescue a
junior protege--lame like himself, and otherwise much weaker--from the
ill-treatment of some hulking tyrant. "Harness," he said, "if any one
bullies you, tell me, and I'll thrash him if I can;" and he kept his word.
Harness became an accomplished clergyman and minor poet, and has left some
pleasing reminiscences of his former patron. The prodigy of the school,
George Sinclair, was in the habit of writing the poet's exercises, and
getting his battles fought for him in return. His bosom friend was Lord
Clare. To him his confidences were most freely given, and his most
affectionate verses addressed. In the characteristic stanzas entitled
"L'amitie est l'amour sans ailes," we feel as if between them the
qualifying phrase might have been omitted: for their letters, carefully
preserved on either side, are a record of the jealous complaints and the
reconciliations of lovers. In 1821 Byron writes, "I never hear the name
Clare without a beating of the heart even now; and I write it with the
feelings of 1803-4-5, ad infinitum." At the same date he says of an
accidental meeting: "It annihilated for a moment all the years between the
present time and the days of Harrow. It was a new and inexplicable
feeling, like a rising from the grave to me. Clare too was much
agitated--more in appearance than I was myself--for I could feel his heart
beat to his fingers' ends, unless, indeed, it was the pulse of my own
which made me think so. We were but five minutes together on the public
road, but I hardly recollect an hour of my existence that could be weighed
against them." They were "all that brothers should be but the name;" and
it is interesting to trace this relationship between the greatest genius
of the new time and the son of the statesman who, in the preceding age,
stands out serene and strong amid the swarm of turbulent rioters and
ranting orators by whom he was surrounded and reviled.
Before leaving Harrow the poet had passed through the experience of a
passion of another kind, with a result that unhappily coloured his life.
Accounts differ as to his first meeting with Mary Ann Chaworth, the
heiress of the family whose estates adjoined his own, and daughter of the
race that had held with his such varied relations. In one of his letters
ho dates the introduction previous to his trip to Cheltenham, but it seems
not to have ripened into intimacy till a later period. Byron, who had, in
the autumn of 1802, visited his mother at Bath, joined in a masquerade
there and attracted attention by the liveliness of his manners. In the
following year Mrs. Byron again settled at Nottingham, and in the course
of a second and longer visit to her he frequently passed the night at the
Abbey, of which Lord Grey de Ruthyn was then a temporary tenant. This was
the occasion of his renewing his acquaintance with the Chaworths, who
invited him to their seat at Annesley. He used at first to return every
evening to Newstead, giving the excuse that the family pictures would come
down and take revenge on him for his grand-uncle's deed, a fancy repeated
in the _Siege of Corinth_. Latterly he consented to stay at Annesley,
which thus became his headquarters during the remainder of the holidays of
1803. The rest of the six weeks were mainly consumed in an excursion to
Matlock and Castleton, in the same companionship. This short period, with
the exception of prologue and epilogue, embraced the whole story of his
first real love. Byron was on this occasion in earnest; he wished to marry
Miss Chaworth, an event which, he says, would have "joined broad lands,
healed an old feud, and satisfied at least one heart."
The intensity of his passion is suggestively brought before us in an
account of his crossing the Styx of the Peak cavern, alone with the lady
and the Charon of the boat. In the same passage he informs us that he had
never told his love; but that she had discovered--it is obvious that she
never returned--it. We have another vivid picture of his irritation when
she was waltzing in his presence at Matlock; then an account of their
riding together in the country on their return to the family residence;
again, of his bending over the piano as she was playing the Welsh air of
"Mary Anne;" and lastly, of his overhearing her heartless speech to her
maid, which first opened his eyes to the real state of affairs--"Do you
think I could care for that lame boy?"--upon which he rushed out of the
house, and ran, like a hunted creature, to Newstead. Thence he shortly
returned from the rougher school of life to his haunts and tasks at
Harrow. A year later the pair again met to take farewell, on the hill of
Annesley--an incident he has commemorated in two short stanzas, that have
the sound of a wind moaning over a moor. "I suppose," he said, "the next
time I see you, you will be Mrs. Chaworth?" "I hope so," she replied (her
betrothed, Mr. Musters, had agreed to assume her family name). The
announcement of her marriage, which took place in August, 1805, was made
to him by his mother, with the remark, "I have some news for you. Take out
your handkerchief; you will require it." On hearing what she had to say,
with forced calm he turned the conversation to other subjects; but he was
long haunted by a loss which he has made the theme of many of his verses.
In 1807 he sent to the lady herself the lines beginning,--
O had my fate been join'd with thine.
In the following year he accepted an invitation to dine at Annesley, and
was visibly affected by the sight of the infant daughter of Mrs. Chaworth,
to whom he addressed a touching congratulation. Shortly afterwards, when
about to leave England for the first time, he finally addressed her in the
stanzas,--
'Tis done, and shivering in the gale,
The bark unfurls her snowy sail.
Some years later, having an opportunity of revisiting the family of his
successful rival, Mrs. Leigh dissuaded him. "Don't go," she said, "for if
you do you will certainly fall in love again, and there will be a scene."
The romance of the story culminates in the famous _Dream_, a poem of
unequal merit, but containing passages of real pathos, written in the year
1816 at Diodati, as we are told, amid a flood of tears.
Miss Chaworth's attractions, beyond those of personal beauty, seem to have
been mainly due--a common occurrence--to the poet's imagination. A young
lady, two years his senior, of a lively and volatile temper, she enjoyed
the stolen interviews at the gate between the grounds, and laughed at the
ardent letters, passed through a confidant, of the still awkward youth
whom she regarded as a boy. She had no intuition to divine the presence,
or appreciate the worship, of one of the future master-minds of England,
nor any ambition to ally herself with the wild race of Newstead, and
preferred her hale, commonplace, fox-hunting squire. "She was the beau
ideal," says Byron, in his first accurate prose account of the affair,
written 1823, a few days before his departure for Greece, "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 the sex,
anything but angelic."
Mrs. Musters (her husband re-asserted his right to his own name) had in
the long-run reason to regret her choice. The ill-assorted pair after some
unhappy years resolved on separation; and falling into bad health and
worse spirits, the "bright morning star of Annesley" passed under a cloud
of mental darkness. She died, in 1832, of fright caused by a Nottingham
riot. On the decease of Musters, in 1850, every relic of her ancient
family was sold by auction and scattered to the winds.
CHAPTER III.
CAMBRIDGE, AND FIRST PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP.
In October, 1805, on the advice of Dr. Drury, Byron was removed to Trinity
College, Cambridge, and kept up a connexion with the University for less
than three years of very irregular attendance, during which we hear
nothing of his studies, except the contempt for them expressed in some of
the least effective passages of his early satires. He came into residence
in bad temper and low spirits. His attachment to Harrow characteristically
redoubled as the time drew near to leave it, and his rest was broken "for
the last quarter, with counting the hours that remained." He was about to
start by himself, with the heavy feeling that he was no longer a boy, and
yet, against his choice, for he wished to go to Oxford. The _Hours of
Idleness_, the product of this period, are fairly named. He was so idle as
regards "problems mathematic," and "barbarous Latin," that it is matter of
surprise to learn that he was able to take his degree, as he did in March,
1808.
A good German critic, dwelling on the comparatively narrow range of
studies to which the energies of Cambridge were then mainly directed, adds
somewhat rashly, that English national literature stands for the most part
beyond the range of the academic circle, This statement is often
reiterated with persistent inaccuracy; but the most casual reference to
biography informs us that at least four-fifths of the leading statesmen,
reformers, and philosophers of England, have been nurtured within the
walls of her universities, and cherished a portion of their spirit. From
them have sprung the intellectual fires that have, at every crisis of our
history, kindled the nation into a new life; from the age of Wycliffe,
through those of Latimer, Locke, Gibbon, Macaulay, to the present reign of
the Physicists, comparatively few of the motors of their age have been
wholly "without the academic circle." Analysing with the same view the
lives of the British poets of real note from Barbour to Tennyson, we find
the proportion of University men increases. "Poeta nascitur et fit;" and
if the demands of technical routine have sometimes tended to stifle, the
comparative repose of a seclusion "unravaged" by the fierce activities
around it, the habit of dwelling on the old wisdom and harping on the
ancient strings, is calculated to foster the poetic temper and enrich its
resources. The discouraging effect of a sometimes supercilious and
conservative criticism is not an unmixed evil. The verse-writer who can be
snuffed out by the cavils of a tutorial drone, is a poetaster silenced for
his country's good. It is true, however, that to original minds, bubbling
with spontaneity, or arrogant with the consciousness of power, the
discipline is hard, and the restraint excessive; and that the men whom
their colleges are most proud to remember, have handled them severely.
Bacon inveighs against the scholastic trifling of his day; Milton talks of
the waste of time on litigious brawling; Locke mocks at the logic of the
schools; Cowley complains of being taught words, not things; Gibbon
rejoices over his escape from the port and prejudice of Magdalen;
Wordsworth contemns the "trade in classic niceties," and roves "in
magisterial liberty" by the Cam, as afterwards among the hills.
But all those hostile critics owe much to the object of their
animadversion. Any schoolboy can refer the preference of Light to Fruit in
the _Novum Organum_, half of _Comus_ and _Lycidas_, the stately periods of
the _Decline and Fall_, and the severe beauties of _Laodamia_, to the
better influences of academic training on the minds of their authors.
Similarly, the richest pages of Byron's work--from the date of _The Curse
of Minerva_ to that of the "Isles of Greece"--are brightened by lights and
adorned by allusions due to his training, imperfect as it was, on the
slopes of Harrow, and the associations fostered during his truant years by
the sluggish stream of his "Injusta noverca." At her, however, he
continued to rail as late as the publication of _Beppo_, in the 75th and
76th stanzas of which we find another cause of complaint,--
One hates an author that's all author, fellows
In foolscap uniforms turn'd up with ink--
So very anxious, clever, fine, and jealous,
One don't know what to say to them, or think.
Then, after commending Scott, Bogers, and Moore for being men of the
world, he proceeds:--
But for the children of the "mighty mother's,"
The would-be wits and can't-be gentlemen,
I leave them to the daily "Tea is ready,"
Snug coterie, and literary lady.
This attack, which called forth a counter invective of unusual ferocity
from some unknown scribbler, is the expression of a sentiment which, sound
enough within limits, Byron pushed to an extreme. He had a rooted dislike,
of professional _litterateurs_, and was always haunted by a dread that
they would claim equality with him on the common ground of authorship. He
aspired through life to the superiority of a double distinction, that of a
"lord among wits, and among wits a lord." In this same spirit lie resented
the comparison frequently made between him and Rousseau, and insisted on
points of contrast. "He had a bad memory, I a good one. He was of the
people; I of the aristocracy." Byron was capable, of unbending, where the
difference of rank was so great that it could not be ignored. On this
principle we may explain his enthusiastic regard for the chorister
Eddlestone, from whom he received the cornelian that is the theme of some
of his verses, and whose untimely death in 1811 he sincerely mourned.
Of his Harrow friends, Harness and Long in due course followed him to
Cambridge, where their common pursuits were renewed. With the latter, who
was drowned in 1809, on a passage to Lisbon with his regiment, he spent a
considerable portion of his time on the Cam, swimming and diving, in which
art they were so expert as to pick up eggs, plates, thimbles, and coins
from a depth of fourteen feet--incidents recalled to the poet's mind by
reading Milton's invocation to Sabrina. During the, same period he
distinguished himself at cricket, as in boxing, riding, and shooting. Of
his skill as a rider there are various accounts. He was an undoubted
marksman, and his habit of carrying about pistols, and use of them
wherever he went, was often a source of annoyance and alarm. He professed
a theoretical objection to duelling, but was as ready to take a challenge
as Scott, and more ready to send one.
Regarding the masters and professors of Cambridge, Byron has little to
say. His own tutor, Tavell, appears pleasantly enough in his verse, and he
commends the head of his college, Dr. Lort Mansel, for dignified demeanour
in his office, and a past reputation for convivial wit. His attentions to
Professor Hailstones at Harrowgate were graciously offered and received;
but in a letter to Murray he gives a graphically abusive account of
Porson, "hiccuping Greek like a Helot" in his cups. The poet was first
introduced at Cambridge to a brilliant circle of contemporaries, whose
talents or attainments soon made them more or less conspicuous, and most
of whom are interesting on their own account as well as from their
connection with the subsequent phases of his career. By common consent
Charles Skinner Matthews, son of the member for Herefordshire, 1802-6, was
the most remarkable of the group. Distinguished alike for scholarship,
physical and mental courage, subtlety of thought, humour of fancy, and
fascinations of character, this young man seems to have made an impression
on the undergraduates of his own, similar to that left by Charles Austin
on those of a later generation. The loss of this friend Byron always
regarded as an incalculable calamity. In a note to _Childe Harold_ he
writes, "I should have ventured on a verse to the memory of Matthews, were
he not too much above all praise of mine. His powers of mind shown in the
attainment of greater honours against the ablest candidates, than those of
any graduate on record at Cambridge, have sufficiently established his
fame on the spot where it was acquired; while his softer qualities live in
the recollection of friends, who loved him too well to envy his
superiority." He was drowned when bathing alone among the reeds of the
Cam, in the summer of 1811.
In a letter written from Ravenna in 1820, Byron, in answer to a request
for contributions to a proposed memoir, introduces into his notes much
autobiographical matter. In reference to a joint visit to Newstead, he
writes: "Matthews and myself had travelled down from London together,
talking all the way incessantly upon one single topic. When we got to
Loughborough, I know not what chasm had made us diverge for a moment to
some other subject, at which he was indignant. 'Come,' said he, 'don't let
us break through; let us go on as we began, to our journey's end;' and so
he continued, and was as entertaining as ever to the very end. He had
previously occupied, during my year's absence from Cambridge, my rooms in
Trinity, with the furniture; and Jones (his tutor), in his odd way had
said, in putting him in, 'Mr. Matthews, I recommend to your attention not
to damage any of the movables, for Lord Byron, sir, is a young man of
_tumultuous passions_.' Matthews was delighted with this, and whenever
anybody came, to visit him, begged them to handle the very door with
caution, and used to repeat Jones's admonition in his tone and manner....
He had the same droll sardonic way about everything. A wild Irishman,
named F., one evening beginning to say something at a large supper,
Matthews roared 'Silence!' and then pointing to F., cried out, in the
words of the oracle, 'Orson is endowed with reason.' When Sir Henry Smith
was expelled from Cambridge for a row with a tradesman named 'Hiron,'
Matthews solaced himself with shouting under Hiron's windows every
evening--
Ah me! what perils do environ
The man who meddles with hot Hiron!
He was also of that band of scoffers who used to rouse Lort Mansel from
his slumbers in the lodge of Trinity; and when he appeared at the window,
foaming with wrath, and crying out, "I know you, gentlemen; I know you!"
were wont to reply, "We beseech thee to hear us, good Lort. Good Lort,
deliver us!"
The whole letter, written in the poet's mature and natural style, gives a
vivid picture of the social life and surroundings of his Cambridge days:
how much of the set and sententious moralizing of some of his formal
biographers might we not have spared, for a report of the conversation on
the road from London to Newstead. Of the others gathered round the same
centre, Scrope Davies enlisted the largest share of Byron's affections. To
him he wrote after the catastrophe:--"Come to me, Scrope; I am almost
desolate--left alone in the world. I had but you, and H., and M., and let
me enjoy the survivors while I can." Later he says, "Matthews, Davies,
Hobhouse, and myself formed a coterie of our own. Davies has always beaten
us all in the war of words, and by colloquial powers at once delighted and
kept us in order; even M. yielded to the dashing vivacity of S.D." The
last is everywhere commended for the brilliancy of his wit and repartee:
he was never afraid to speak the truth. Once when the poet in one of his
fits of petulance exclaimed, intending to produce a terrible impression,
"I shall go mad!" Davies calmly and cuttingly observed, "It is much more
like silliness than madness!" He was the only man who ever laid Byron
under any serious pecuniary obligation, having lent him 4800_l_. in some
time of strait. This was repaid on March 27, 1814, when the pair sat up
over champagne and claret from six till midnight, after which "Scrope
could not be got into the carriage on the way home, but remained tipsy and
pious on his knees." Davies was much disconcerted at the influence which
the sceptical opinions of Matthews threatened to exercise over Byron's
mind. The fourth of this quadrangle of amity was John Cam Hobhouse,
afterwards Lord Broughton, the steadfast friend of the poet's whole life,
the companion of his travels, the witness of his marriage, the executor of
his will, the zealous guardian and vindicator of his fame. His ability is
abundantly attested by the impression he left on his contemporaries, his
published description of the Pilgrimage, and subsequent literary and
political career. Byron bears witness to the warmth of his affections, and
the charms of his conversation, and to the candour which, as he confessed
to Lady Blessington, sometimes tried his patience. There is little doubt
that they had some misunderstanding when travelling together, but it was a
passing cloud. Eighteen months after his return the poet admits that
Hobhouse was his best friend; and when he unexpectedly walked up the
stairs of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, at Pisa, Madame Guiccioli informs us
that Byron was seized with such violent emotion, and so extreme an excess
of joy, that it seemed to take away his strength, and he was forced to sit
down in tears.