Towards the close of 1811 he made friends with Moore. Some lines
in English Bards, &c. taunting Moore with fighting a
duel with Jeffrey with "leadless pistol" had led to a challenge, and it
was not till Byron returned to England that explanations ensued, and
that the challenge was withdrawn. As a poet Byron outgrew Moore, giving
back more than he had received, but the friendship which sprang up
between them still serves Byron in good stead. Moore’s Life of Byron
(1830) is no doubt a picture of the man at his best, but it is a genuine
likeness. At the end of October Byron moved to London and took up his
quarters at 8 St James’s Street. On the 27th of February 1812 he made
his first speech in the House of Lords on a bill which made the willful destruction of certain newly invented
stocking frames a capital offence,
speaking in defense of the riotous "hands" who feared that their numbers
would be diminished by improved machinery.
It was a brilliant speech and
won the praise of Burdett and Lord Holland. He made two other speeches
during the same session, but thenceforth pride or laziness kept him
silent. Childe Harold was published on Tuesday, the 10th of March
1812. "The effect," says Moore, "was . . . electric, his fame . . .
seemed to spring, like the palace of a fairy king, in a night." A fifth
edition was issued on the 5th of December 1812. Just turned
twenty-four he "found himself famous," a great poet, a rising statesman.
Society which had neglected him, was now at his
feet. But he could not keep what he had won. It was not only "villainous
company," as he put it, which was to prove his "spoil," but the
opportunity for intrigue. The excitement and absorption of one reigning
passion after another destroyed his peace of mind and put him out of
conceit with himself. His first affair of any moment was with Lady
Caroline Lamb, the wife of William Lamb, better known as Lord Melbourne.
a delicate, golden-haired sprite, who threw herself in his way, and
afterwards, when she was shaken off, involved him in her own disgrace.
To her succeeded Lady Oxford, who was double his own age, and Lady
Frances Wedderburn Webster, the Ginevra of his sonnets, the Medora
of The Corsair.
In the summer of 1813 a new and potent influence came into his life.
Mrs. Leigh, whose home was at Newmarket, came up to London on a visit.
After a long interval the brother and sister met, and whether there is
or is not any foundation for the dark story obscurely hinted at in
Byron’s lifetime, and afterwards made public property by Mrs. Beecher
Stowe (Macmillan’s Magazine, 1869, pp. 377-396), there is no question as
to the depth and sincerity of his love for his one relative-that her
well-being was more to him than his own. Byron passed the "seasons" of
1813, 1814 in London. His manner of life we know from his journals.
Socially he was on the crest of the wave. He was a welcome guest at the
great Whig houses, at Lady Melbourne’s, at Lady Jersey’s, at Holland
House. Sheridan and Moore, Rogers and Campbell, were his intimates and
companions. He was a member of the Alfred, of Watier’s, of the Cocoa
Tree, and half a dozen clubs besides. After the publication of The
Corsair he had promised an interval of silence, but the abdication of
Napoleon evoked An Ode, in his dishonor (April 16); Lara, a
Tale, an informal sequel to The Corsair, was published anonymously on
August 6, 1814.
Newstead had been put up for sale, but pending the completion of the
contract was still in his possession. During his last visit but one,
whilst his sister was his guest, he became engaged to Miss Anna Isabella
Milbanke (b. May 17, 1792; d. May 16, 1860), the only daughter of Sir
Ralph Milbanke, Bart., and the Hon. Judith (born Noel), daughter of Lord
Wentworth. She was an heiress, and in succession to a peerage in her
own right (becoming Baroness Wentworth in 1856). She was a pretty girl
of "a perfect figure," highly educated, a mathematician, and, by
courtesy, a poetess. She had rejected Byron’s first offer, but,
believing that her cruelty had broken his heart and that he was an
altered man, she was now determined on marriage. High principled, but
self-willed and opinionated, she believed that she held her future in
her own hands. On her side there was ambition touched with fancy, on his,
a wish to be married and some hope perhaps of finding an escape from
himself. The marriage took place at Seaham in Durham on the 2nd of
January 1815. Bride and bridegroom spent three months in paying visits,
and at the end of March settled at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, London.
Byron was a member of the committee of management of Drury Lane
theatre, and devoted much of his time to his professional duties. He
wrote but little poetry. Hebrew Melodies (published April 1815), begun
at Seaham in October 1814, were finished and given to the musical
composer, Isaac Nathan, for publication. The Siege of Corinth and
Parisina (published February 7, 1816) were got ready for the press. On
the 10th of December Lady Byron gave birth to a daughter christened
Augusta Ada. To judge from, his letters, for the first weeks or months
of his marriage things went smoothly. His wife’s impression was that
Byron "had avowedly begun his revenge from the first." It is certain
that before the child was born his conduct was so harsh, so violent, and
so eccentric, that she believed, or tried to persuade herself, that he
was mad.
On the 15th of January 1816 Lady Byron left London for her father’s
house, claimed his protection, and after some hesitation and
consultation with her legal advisers demanded a separation from her
husband. It is a matter of common knowledge that in 1869 Mrs. Beecher
Stowe affirmed that Lady Byron expressly told her that Byron was guilty
of incest with his half-sister, Mrs. Leigh; also that in 1905 the second
Lord Lovelace (Lord Byron’s grandson) printed a work entitled Astarte
which was designed to uphold and to prove the truth of this charge. It
is a fact that neither Lady Byron nor her advisers supported their demand by this or any other charge of misconduct, but
it is also a fact that Lord Byron yielded to the demand reluctantly,
under pressure and for large pecuniary considerations. It is a fact that
Lady Byron’s letters to Mrs Leigh before and after the separation are
inconsistent with a knowledge or suspicion of guilt on the part of her sister-in-law, but it is also a fact (see
Astarte, pp. 142-145) that
she signed a document (dated March 14, 1816) to the effect that any
renewal of intercourse did not involve and must not be construed as a
withdrawal of the charge. It cannot be doubted that Lady Byron’s
conviction that her husband’s relations with his half sister before his
marriage had been of an immoral character was a factor in her demand for
a separation, but whether there were other and what issues, and whether
Lady Byron’s conviction was founded on fact, are questions which have
not been finally answered. Lady Byron’s charge, as reported by Mrs. Beecher Stowe and upheld by the 2nd earl of Lovelace, is
"non-proven." Mr. Robert Edgcome, in Byron: the Last Phase (1909), insists that Mary
Chaworth was the real object of Byron’s passion, and that Mrs. Leigh was
only shielding her.
The separation of Lord and Lady Byron. was the talk of the town. Two
poems entitled Fare Thee Well and A Sketch which Byron had
written and printed for private circulation, were published by The
Champion on Sunday, April 14. The other London papers one by one
followed suit. The poems, more especially A Sketch, were provocative
of criticism. There was a balance of opinion, but politics turned the
scale. Byron had recently published some pro-Gallican stanzas, On the
Star of the Legion of Honour, in the Examiner (April 7), and it was
felt by many that private dishonor was the outcome of public
disloyalty. The Whigs defended Byron as best ,they could, but his own
world, with one or two exceptions, ostracized him. The "excommunicating
voice of society," as Moore put it, was loud and insistent. The articles
of separation were signed on or about the 18th of April, and on Sunday,
the 25th of April, Byron sailed from Dover for Ostend. The Lines on
Churchill’s Grave were written whilst he was waiting for a favorable
wind. His route lay through the Low Countries, and by the Rhine to
Switzerland. On his way he halted at Brussels and visited the field of
Waterloo.
He reached Geneva on the 25th of May, where he met by
appointment at Dejean’s Hotel d’An.gleterre, Shelley, Mary Godwin and
Clare (or Claire) Clairmont. The meeting was probably at the instance
of Claire, who had recently become, and aspired to remain, Byron’s
mistress. On the 10th of June Byron moved to the Villa Diodati on the
southern shore of the lake. Shelley and his party had already settled at
an adjoining villa, the Campagne Montalegre. The friends were constantly
together. On the 23rd of June Byron and Shelley started for a yachting
tour round the lake. They visited the castle of Chillon on the 26th of
June, and, being detained by weather at the Hotel de l’Ancre, Ouchy,
Byron finished (June 27-29) the third canto of Childe Harold (published
November 18), and began the Prisoner of Cijilion (published December 5,
1816). These and other poems of July-September 1816, e.g. The Dream
and the first two acts of Manfred (published June 16, 1817), betray the
influence of Shelley, and through him of Wordsworth, both in thought and
style. Byron knew that Wordsworth had power, but was against his
theories, and resented his criticism of Pope and Dryden. Shelley was a
believer and a disciple, and converted Byron to the Wordsworthian creed.
Moreover he was an inspiration in. himself. Intimacy with Shelley left
Byron a greater poet than he was before. Byron passed the summer at the
Villa Diodati, where he also wrote the Monody on the Death of
Sheridan,
published September 9, 1816. The second half of September was spent and
devoted to "an excursion in the mountains." His journal (September
18-29), which was written for and sent to Mrs. Leigh, is a great prose
poem, the source of the word pictures of Alpine scenery in Manfred. His
old friend Hobhouse was with him and he enjoyed himself, but at the
close he confesses that he could not lose his "own wretched identity"
in the "majesty and the power and the glory" of nature.
Remorse was
scotched, not killed. On the 6th of October Byron and Hobhouse started via Milan
and Verona for Venice, which was reached early in November. For the next
three years Byron lived in or near Venice, at first, 1816-1817, in
apartments in the Frezzeria, and after January 1818 in the central block
of the Mocenigo palace. Venice appealed both to his higher and his lower
nature. He set himself to study her history, to understand her
constitution, to learn her language. The sights and scenes with which
Shakespeare and Otway, Schiller’s Ghostseer, and Madame de
Stael’s
Corinne had made him familiar, were before his eyes, not dreams but
realities. He would "repeople" her with her own past, and
"stamp her
image" on the creations of his pen. But he had no one to live for but
himself, and that self he gave over to a reprobate mind. He planned and
pursued a life of deliberate profligacy. Of two of his amours we learn
enough or too much from his letters to Murray and to Moore-the first
with his landlord’s wife, Marianna Segati, the second with Margarita
Cogni (the "Fornarina"), a Venetian of the lower class, who amused him
with her savagery and her wit.
But, if Shelley may be trusted, there was
a limit to his candor. There is abundant humor, but there is an
economy of detail in his pornographic chronicle. He could not touch
pitch without being defiled. But to do him justice he was never idle. He
kept his brains at work, and for this reason, perhaps, he seems for a
time to have recovered his spirits and sinned with a good courage. His
song of carnival, "So we’ll go no more a-roving," is a hymn of triumph.
About the middle of April he set out for Rome. His first halt was at
Ferrara, which inspired the Lament of Tasso (published July 17).
A month later (June 26) when memory had selected and reduced to
order the first impressions of his tour, he began to work them up into a
fourth canto of Childe Harold. A first draft of 226 stanzas was finished
by the 29th of July; the 60 additional stanzas which made up the canto
as it stands were written up to material suggested by or supplied by
Hobhouse, "who put his researches" at Byron’s disposal and wrote the
learned and elaborate notes which are appended to the poem. Among the
books which Murray sent out to Venice was a copy of Hookham Frere’s
Whistlecraft. Byron took the hint and produced Beppo, a Venetian Story
(published anonymously on the 28th of February 1818). He attributes his
choice of the mock heroic ottava-rima to Frere’s example, but he was
certainly familiar with Casti’s Novelle, and, according to
Stendhal,
with the poetry of Buratti. The success of Beppo and a growing sense
that "the excellent manner of Whistlecraft" was the manner for him, led
him to study Frere’s masters and models, Berni and Pulci. An accident
had led to a great discovery.
The fourth canto of
Childe Harold was published on the 28th of April
1818. Nearly three months went by before Murray wrote to him, and he
began to think that his new poem was a failure. Meanwhile he completed
an “Ode on Venice,” in which he laments her apathy and decay, and
contrasts the tyranny of the Old World with the new birth of freedom in
America. In September he began Don Juan. His own account of the
inception of his last and greatest work is characteristic but
misleading. He says (September 9) that his new poem is to be in the
style of Beppo, and is "meant to be a little quietly facetious about
everything." A year later (August 12, 1819), he says that he neither has
nor had a plan-but that "he had or has materials." By materials he means
books, such as Dahzell’s Shipwrecks and Disasters by Sea, or de
Castelnau’s Histoire de la nouvelle Russie, &c., which might be
regarded as poetry in the rough. He too would write An Excursion.
He doubted that Don Juan might be "too free for these modest days."
It was too free for the public, for his publisher, even for his
mistress; and the "building up of the drama," as Shelley puts it, was a
slow and gradual process. Cantos 1., were published on the
15th of July 1819; Cantos 111., Iv., v., finished in November 1820, were
not published till the 8th of August 1821. Cantos vi.-xvi., written
between June 1822 and March 1823, were published at intervals between
the 15th of July 1823 and the 26th of March 1824. Canto xvii was begun
in May 1823, but was never finished. A fragment of fourteen stanzas,
found in his room at Missolonghi, was first published in 1903.
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