equable) but wholly lacking the authentic "Byronism", without which Byron sinks to the level of Scott in poetry. The two poems passed (for works of his) comparatively unnoticed. They appeared at a time when public curiosity was more delightfully engaged with his private affairs, and were soon forgotten in the turmoil over Fare Thee Well and A Sketch. When this had died away, the new canto of Childe Harold and The Prisoner of Chillon, "with its brilliant and noticeable companion poems", arrived to eclipse decisively The Siege of Corinth and Parisina. CHAPTER XVIII THE OUTLAW-1816 The Childe goes forth again-The Low Countries-Pictures-Waterloo-Arrival at Geneva-Claire Clairmont-Friendship with Shelley-The Rousseau, Gibbon, and Voltaire Regions-Frankenstein-Departure of the Shelley Party-Visitors from England-The Bernese Alps-SoutheyThe Vision of Judgment-Dismissal of Polidori-Madame de StaëlAttempt at Reconciliation with Lady Byron-Failure "O NCE more upon the waters! yet once more! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam, to sail Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail. In my youth's summer I did sing of One The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind; ... So, frankly at last identified with his creator, did the Childe go forth again, 1 "With_nought of Hope left-but with less of gloom "; while, in a travesty of the old dualism, it was neither Harold nor Byron, but Polidori, who watched the stars during the sixteen-houred passage "with the wind completely in our teeth ". From Ostend they passed through Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and Mechlin to Brussels. The Low Countries made little impression : 2 not a rise from Ostend to Antwerp-a molehill 1 Compare with this : It is odd, but agitation or contest of any kind gives a rebound to my spirit and sets me up for the time " (Letter to Moore, March 8, 1816); and the "rage and resistance and redress" in 1809, which produced English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. " 2 Polidori has an apt phrase or two for their ennui: "The country is tiresomely beautiful. Fine avenues which make us yawn with admiration ... sometimes terminated by a church or a house-the church very ugly, and both very tiresome, as they always prove much farther off than is at first expected" (The Diary of Polidori, pp. 44-45). would make the inhabitants think that the Alps had come on a visit". Churches and pictures he had stared at till his brains were like a guide-book (as he told Augusta in a letter of May 1, from Brussels) and he was far from enthusiastic. The pictures in especial left him cold-or rather, hot. "The Flemish School, such as I saw it in Flanders, I utterly detested, despised, and abhorred ". And a year later, to Murray from Venice: “I never was so disgusted in my life as with Rubens and his eternal wives and infernal glare of colour 1. . . . You must recollect however that I know nothing of painting and that I detest it ". This was one of his favourite attitudes, and was, like most of them, entirely sincere. Byron was too violent and too selfabsorbed to care for the arts. Only in his rare moods of tranquillity could he suffer these abiding methods of expression. We shall see that in Florence and Rome, where he was almost really at rest, he for the first and last time wrote eagerly and passionately in praise of painting and sculpture. In the life which to him was normal-the hours of great distresses or greater dejections-his imagination, fiercely self-disdainful, fastened upon the men of action as the only beings worth consideration. The impulse towards poetry (in dark hours always at its most urgent) added what for him was a kind of infamy to the other tortures. Hamlet, unpacking his heart with words which by their vehemence lash the fury in him for his impotence in other things, is like Byron when the goad first pricked him. Once submissive to it, he found relief, and only so could find it; but that was the core of the humiliation. [Poetry] is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake. .. I prefer the talents of action". So he wrote of his own art. "The lava of the imagination... is precisely", says Mr. Arthur Symons, "what poetry was to Byron; and it is characteristic of him that he cannot look beyond himself even for the sake of a generalisation ". In this mood of rage and resistance and redress he visited the field of Waterloo, having come out of his way to the Rhine on purpose.2 " 'Stop -for thy tread is on an Empire's dust! But his deep intellectual sincerity quickly triumphed over the rhapsodical vein, and he became one of the obstinate questioners of the Day. 1 Polidori's description of one passage in Rubens's Crucifixion at Antwerp is worth quoting: A woman rising from the dead-surely a woman large as Guy Warwick's giant's wife . . . most hellish egregious breasts, which a child refuses with horror in its face" (p. 52). It was not yet, I may remind my readers, a year since the battle. "Oh, bloody and most bootless Waterloo ! Won half by blunder, half by treachery ".1 That terse summary was not attained till 1822. Wearied in 1816 by the effort to dupe himself into flamboyance, Byron's imagination fastened on the hours before the battle, apt theme for the poet "for whom, unlike all other poets, society exists as well as human nature ". Polidori's Diary tells us that they rode over the field, "myself silent, my companion singing a Turkish riding-tune"; and in a letter to Murray, written from Ouchy in June, Byron says: "I shall be glad to hear you have received certain helms and swords, sent from Waterloo, which I rode over with pain and pleasure". A further entry in Polidori's Diary on that day, states: "My friend has written twenty-six stanzas-some on Waterloo". This, if it refers to the first twenty-six stanzas of the third canto, would leave Byron on that evening with one of his most famous lines in his brain : "Or whispering with white lips-The foe! They come ! they come ! '' From Brussels they reached the Rhine through Liège and Aix-la-Chapelle. On May 11, leaving Bonn, they passed the Drachenfels; and that day were written, on the Rhine bank, the lines addressed to Augusta which were among those she wished in the Red Sea. " "The castled crag of Drachenfels Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine" He sent her with them (for they were at once sent to her) a bunch of lilies which a girl on the road had offered him. At Morat, in Switzerland, he brought away from the pyramid of bones on the battle-field "as much as may have made a quarter of a hero"; and thus, and in such moods, he came to Sécheron, a suburb of Geneva. They arrived on May 25-just a month after leaving England; and alighted at Dejean's Hôtel d'Angleterre, where Byron put his age down as 100. There they found, installed ten days before, Shelley and his wife-to-be, Mary Godwin, with their travelling companion and relative, variously called Jane, Claire, and Clara Clairmont. It was Byron's first meeting with his brother-poet; it may have been his first meeting with Mary 1 The Age of Bronze, v. 223. Poems, v. 535. He wrote on May 5 or 6, in Mrs. Pryse Gordon's album, stanzas 17 and 18 (Pryse Lockhart Gordon, Personal Memoirs, ii. 325). • Mr. Murray has still in his possession the parcel of bones which Byron sent home. Godwin; it was not his first meeting with Miss Clairmont, for she was already the expectant mother of his child. Jane Clairmont was William Godwin's step-daughter through his second wife, Mrs. Clairmont, of whom Charles Lamb reported that she was a truly disgusting woman, and wore green spectacles. Jane (for in her schooldays she was contented with the homelyname) was about the same age as her sister-by-affinity, Mary Godwin, whose birth had cost the life of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin's first wife. Mary Wollstonecraft had left two daughters, this Mary, and the offspring of an earlier illicit union, Fanny Imlay. The three girls, thus brought up together, were all to have unusual destinies. Fanny, melancholy and sentimental, was later in 1816 to put an end to her existence; Mary was living with Shelley in the bonds of love, for Harriet Westbrook was still alive; and Miss Clairmont was at present the mistress, quickly to be discarded, of Byron. It was in July 1814 that Shelley had eloped with Mary Godwin, a girl of sixteen. Harriet's day as queen of his heart was over; and, in his view, the fact that she was his legal wife must exercise no restraining influence on his love for another woman. This is not the place to discuss Shelley's relations with Harriet and Mary; I am glad to restrict myself to recording facts. . . . When in 1814 Mary and he fled to the Continent, they took Jane Clairmont with them-on the pretext, somewhat ambiguously reported by her, of her better acquaintance with French. She was nothing loth to go, for in the girlish trio at Skinner Street 1 she represented the adventurous type. Fanny was the Sentimentalist; Mary, the Practical-Romantic; Jane, the Dare-devil and Dreamer. Tall, with a lovely lissom figure, with masses of rich black hair, dark eyes that flashed or brooded, a fine sensitive mouth, and a singing voice which her master, Corri, likened to a string of pearls, she was one of those women who "if not pretty, are worse "; and her character and temperament were expressed in her brilliant and eager externality. She was all for love and liberty and emancipation; disdainful of those who bowed down in the Temple of Rimmon, disdainful above all of marriage— "I can never resist the temptation of throwing a pebble at it as I pass by"; disdainful too of masculine usurpation, yet with moments of stormy and ecstatic submission to it. The very girl, in short, to fall in love with the ardent visitor to Skinner Street, who for his part had fallen in love with quiet, piquante Mary. The affection of Claire (I shall henceforth call her by the name which most belongs to her) for Shelley has been, like most things Shelleyan, the subject of keen debate. She, in her old 1 The abode of William Godwin. |