English Lands Letters and Kings 19
When the boy was ten, the wicked lord who had killed the Chaworth died;
and the Newstead inheritance fell to the young poet. We can imagine with
what touch of the pride that shivers through so many of his poems, this
lad--just lame enough to make him curse that unlucky fate--paced first
down the hall at Newstead--thenceforth master there--a Peer of England.
But the estate was left in sorry condition; the mother could not hold it
as a residence; so they went to Nottingham--whereabout the boy seems to
have had his first schooling. Not long afterward we find him at Harrow,
not far out of London, where he makes one or two of the few friendships
which abide; there, too, he gives first evidence of his power over
language.
It is at about this epoch, also, that on his visits to Nottingham--which
is not far from the Chaworth home of Annesley--comes about the spinning of
those little webs of romance which are twisted afterward into the
beautiful Chaworth “Dream.” It is an old story to tell, yet how
everlastingly fresh it keeps!
“The maid was on the eve of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him; he had looked
Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, nor being, but in hers,
She was his voice … upon a tone,
A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously--his heart
Unknowing of its cause of agony.”
As a matter of fact, Miss Chaworth was two years older, and far more
mature than he; she was gentle too, and possessed of a lady-like calm,
which tortured him--since he could not break it down. Indeed, through all
the time when he was sighing, she was looking over his head at Mr.
Musters--who was bluff and hearty, and who rode to the hounds, and was an
excellent type of the rollicking, self-satisfied, and beef-eating English
squire--whom she married.
_Early Verse and Marriage._
After this episode came Cambridge, and those _Hours of Idleness_ which
broke out into verse, and caught the scathing lash of Henry Brougham--then
a young, but well-known, advocate, who was conspiring with Sydney Smith
and Jeffrey (as I have told you) to renovate the world through the pages
of the _Edinburgh Review_.
But this lashing brought a stinging reply; and the clever, shrewd, witty
couplets of Byron’s satire upon the Scottish Reviewers (1809), convinced
all scholarly readers that a new and very piquant pen had come to the
making of English verse. Nor were Byron’s sentimentalisms of that day all
so crude and ill-shapen as Brougham would have led the public to suppose.
I quote a fragment from a little poem under date of 1808--he just twenty:
“The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now,
Thy vows are all broken
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
“They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me--
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well;
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.”
Naturally enough, our poet is beaming with the success of his satire,
which is widely read, and which has made him foes of the first rank; but
what cares he for this? He goes down with a company of fellow roisterers,
and makes the old walls of Newstead ring with the noisy celebration of his
twenty-first birthday; and on the trail of that country revel, and with
the sharp, ringing couplets of his “English Bards” crackling on the public
ear, he breaks away for his first joyous experience of Continental travel.
This takes him through Spain and to the Hellespont and among the isles of
Greece--seeing visions there and dreaming dreams, all which are braided
into that tissue of golden verse we know as the first two cantos of
_Childe Harold_.
On his return, and while as yet this poem of travel is on the eve of
publication, he prepares himself for a new _coup_ in Parliament--being not
without his oratorical ambitions. It was in February of 1812 that he made
his maiden speech in the House of Lords--carefully worded, calm, not
without quiet elegancies of diction--but not meeting such reception as his
extravagant expectation demanded; whatever he does, he wishes met with a
tempest of approval; a dignified welcome, to his fiery nature, seems cold.
But the publication of _Childe Harold_, only a short time later, brings
compensating torrents of praise. His satire had piqued attention without
altogether satisfying it; there was little academic merit in it--none of
the art which made _Absalom and Achitophel_ glow, or which gleamed upon
the sword-thrusts of the _Dunciad_; but its stabs were business-like; its
couplets terse, slashing, and full of truculent, scorching _vires iræ_.
This other verse, however, of _Childe Harold_--which took one upon the
dance of waves and under the swoop of towering canvass to the groves of
“Cintra’s glorious Eden,” and among those Spanish vales where Dark
Guadiana “rolls his power along;” and thence on, by proud Seville, and
fair Cadiz, to those shores of the Egean, where
“Still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields,--”[64]
was of quite another order. There is in it, moreover, the haunting
personality of the proud, broken-spirited wanderer, who tells the tale and
wraps himself in the veil of mysterious and piquant sorrows: Withal there
is such dash and spirit, such mastery of language, such marvellous
descriptive power, such subtle pauses and breaks, carrying echoes beyond
the letter--as laid hold on men and women--specially on women--in a way
that was new and strange. And this bright meteor had flashed athwart a sky
where such stars as Southey, and Scott, and Rogers, and the almost
forgotten Crabbe, and Coleridge, and Wordsworth had been beaming for many
a day. Was it strange that the doors of London should be flung wide open
to this fresh, brilliant singer who had blazed such a path through Spain
and Greece, and who wore a coronet upon his forehead?
He was young, too, and handsome as the morning; and must be mated--as all
the old dowagers declared. So said his friends--his sister chiefest among
them; and the good Lady Melbourne (mother-in-law of Lady Caroline
Lamb)--not without discreet family reasons of her own--fixed upon her
charming niece, Miss Milbanke, as the one with whom the new poet should be
coupled, to make his way through the wildernesses before him. And there
were other approvals; even Tom Moore--who, of all men, knew his habits
best--saying a reluctant “Yes”--after much hesitation. And so, through a
process of coy propositions and counter-propositions, the marriage was
arranged at last, and came about down at Seaham House (near
Stockton-on-Tees), the country home of the father, Sir Ralph Milbanke.
“Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The starlight of his boyhood; as he stood
Even at the altar, o’er his brow there came
The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock
That in the Antique Oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude; and then--
As in that hour--a moment o’er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced; and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reeled around him.”[65]
Yet the service went on to its conclusion; and the music pealed, and the
welcoming shouts broke upon the air, and the adieux were spoken; and
together, they two drove away--into the darkness.
CHAPTER VI.
Our last chapter brought us into the presence of that vivacious specimen
of royalty, George IV., who “shuffled off this mortal coil” in the year
1830, and was succeeded by that rough-edged, seafaring brother of his,
William IV. This admiral-king was not brilliant; but we found
brilliancy--of a sort--in the acute and disputatious essayist, William
Hazlitt; yet he was far less companionable than acute, and contrasted most
unfavorably with that serene and most worthy gentleman, Hallam, the
historian. We next encountered the accomplished and showy Lady
Blessington--the type of many a one who throve in those days, and who had
caught somewhat of the glitter that radiated from the royal trappings of
George the Fourth. We saw Bulwer, among others, in her salon; and we
lingered longer over the wonderful career of that Disraeli, who died as
Lord Beaconsfield--the most widely known man in Great Britain.
We then passed to a consideration of that other wonderful adventurer--yet
the inheritor of an English peerage--who had made his futile beginning in
politics, and a larger beginning in poetry. To his career, which was left
half-finished, we now recur.
_Lord Byron a Husband._
As we left him--you will remember--there was a jangle of marriage-bells;
and a wearisome jangle it proved. Indeed Byron’s marriage-bells were so
preposterously out of tune, and lent their discord in such disturbing
manner to the whole current of his life, that it may be worth our while to
examine briefly the conditions under which the discord began. It is
certain that all the gossips of London had been making prey of this match
of the poetic hero of the hour for much time before its consummation.
Was he seeking a fortune? Not the least in the world; for though the
burden of debt upon his estates was pressing him sorely, and his
extravagances were reckless, yet large sums accruing from his
swift-written tales of the “Corsair,” “Lara,” and “Bride of Abydos” were
left untouched, or lavishly bestowed upon old or new friends; his
liberality in those days was most exceptional; nor does it appear that he
had any very definite notion of the pecuniary aid which his bride might
bring to him. She had, indeed, in her own right, what was a small sum
measured by their standards of living; and her expectancies, that might
have justified the title of heiress (which he sometimes gives to her in
his journal), were then quite remote.
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