will say. We could not have imagined the words, but we can imagine the sense. Did he ever fail to say it? Not once. "My pang shall find a voice "-and it was always the same voice. The songs, with growing powers, became more complex ; even as a De Reszke advances from singing scales to singing Tristan, so Byron advanced from the vibrant monotony of the early narratives to the vibrant variety of his World-poem. What is Lara, after all, but an inarticulate Juan? And in Juan, again, we find further proof of his invariability-for how persistently, in Juan, the imperishable boy that Byron was flames forth! Men are not so intoxicated with knowing. Goethe perceived this puerile strain in him: "As soon as he reflects, he is a child" (Sobald er reflectirt, ist er ein Kind). Thus, in the continual portrayal of himself, he was in reality portraying a recurrent aspect of young manhood. The mode, to be sure, is for the hour altered: young men nowadays are morbidly cheerful, amused as never children were by children's toys-and does not the much-paraded bloom seem often to be only painted on the peach? Byron's pallor, Byron's wild-eyed woe, histrionic though they be, convince us of some profound unseizable sincerity. The sunt lacrime rerum is somewhere therein affirmed with all the crudeness of half-comprehension, it is true, yet with a quality in the utterance which persuades the soul. And if ever the child was father of the man, Byron's youth was father of the wildfire Byron whose stone is not, and never will be, in Westminster Abbey; yet whose memory tingles so keenly through the veins of England that, forgotten as he is often said to be, there is rarely a day even now on which in one connection or another we do not find, as they found when he was alive, his name in the newspaper. "But there is that within me that shall tire Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire." II HOLLAND Road, KENSINGTON BYRON CHAPTER I CHILDHOOD-1788-1798 Byron's forebears-Foulweather Jack-The Wicked Lord-Byron's father and mother-A miserable marriage-The heiress despoiled-Birth of Byron-His only childism-The twisted foot-Life in AberdeenDeath of Captain Byron-Childish traits-First lessons-The Highlands— Mary Duff-Precocity in love-He succeeds to the title W ILDFIRE leaped about his cradle, as it were. Of a "dark and ominous type", says his German biographer, Karl Elze, were his immediate forebears. "Unbridled passions, defiant self-will, arrogant contempt for the accepted order of things, together with high endowments of energy-these made an inauspicious heritage"; and his grandfather, by marrying a Cornish woman,1 had added to the cup an infusion of the Celtic melancholy-as notorious in our own days as was the Byronic variety in those of which I am to write. The grandfather was that Admiral John Byron who was known to his companions in service by the nickname of Foulweather Jack, because he never could make a voyage without encountering a hurricane. From a word let fall by Mrs. Piozzi, who was an intimate friend of his wife, we gather that the Admiral made his hurricanes for himself when he was at home. His first cousin, Sophia Trevanion, whom he married in 1748, gave him two sons and four daughters. From the list of these, Juliana 1 She was his first cousin as well. William, fourth Baron Byron, married Frances, second daughter of the fourth Baron Berkeley of Stratton, and had by her the two sons known as the Wicked Lord (William, fifth Baron) and Foulweather Jack. Her sister married John Trevanion of Caerhayes, Cornwall, and had by her that daughter, Sophia, who, marrying Foulweather Jack, became the mother of John Byron ("Mad Jack ") and grandmother of the poet. To the Berkeley strain John Cordy Jeaffreson attributes "the impulsiveness and vehemence of Jack Byron and his (The Real Lord Byron, i. 28). son ⚫ Mrs. Piozzi wrote of Mrs. Byron, "She is wife to the Admiral, pour ses péchés" (Life and Writings of Mrs. Piozzi, ii. 456). They were: (1) John, eldest son; father of the poet. (2) George, and John stand forth as the stormy petrels. Juliana qualified for the typical Byronic part by marriage with her first cousin, William Byron. This was violently opposed by his father, the legendary Wicked Lord-otherwise William, fifth Baron Byron, hero of the Chaworth Duel tragedy. His dislike to the union brought about the devastation of the family property from which it never, in the Byron days, wholly recovered; for this fifth lord was so infuriated by the marriage of his son with one thus near in blood that—very nearly insane as he was, and to that extent justified of his wrath against the Byronic tendency to in-breeding -he resolved to hand that heir a ruined heritage. The heritage was ruined, but the son never received it. He died before the father in 1788; and his son, too, died in 1794,1 when our Byron was six years old-leaving the child heir to the barony. John, father of the poet, and elder son of Foulweather Jack, was the other stormy petrel. At twenty-two, a dazzlingly handsome and very dissipated Guardsman, he ran away with, and in a year married, the Marchioness of Carmarthen 2-born Amelia d'Arcy, only child and heiress of the last Earl of Holderness, and, moreover, Baroness Conyers in her own right. They lived in France and had three children, of whom only the last-born, Augusta, survived. This was the girl who in 1807 married her first cousin, George Leigh, and thus became the Augusta Leigh whose name runs through the whole Byron story. 3 In 1784, the year after Augusta's birth, Lady Conyers died, and Captain Byron returned to England, head over ears in debt, and avowedly on the look-out for what his son, in after years, was to describe as a " Golden Dolly". He found her quickly in who married Henrietta Dallas. Their son, George (R.N.), succeeded the poet in 1824 as seventh lord. (3) Frances, who married Colonel Charles Leigh. Their son, George, married his first cousin, Augusta Byron (Hon. Augusta Leigh), daughter of John Byron by his first marriage. (4) Juliana-Elizabeth, who married her first cousin, the Hon. William Byron, only son and heir of William, fifth lord, whom the poet (his grand-nephew) succeeded in 1798—the son having died before his father. (5) SophiaMary, who died unmarried. (6) Charlotte-Augusta, who married ViceAdmiral Parker. 1 This son was killed fighting at the siege of Calvi, in Corsica. • Wife of Francis, Marquis of Carmarthen, afterwards fifth Duke of Leeds. • Lord Lovelace, in Astarte, says that she died in giving birth to Augusta, in 1784. Her death deprived her husband of £4000 a year. She is said to have died of grief caused by his vices and brutalities. This was strenuously denied by the poet in a letter written to a Swiss admirer in 1823. "So far from [my father's] being' brutal,' he was of an extremely amiable and joyous character, though careless and dissipated. . . . It is not by brutality that a young officer in the Guards seduces and carries off a Marchioness, and marries two heiresses". Elze pours contempt on this letter: "it is either self-delusion, or deliberate falsehood." Miss Catherine Gordon of Gight,1 a direct descendant of the Royal House of Scotland-for Annabella Stewart, daughter of James I of Scotland, had married the second Earl of Huntley, and their third son became Sir William Gordon of Gight. The lairds of Gight were a "hot-headed, hasty-handed race, sufficiently notable to be commemorated by Thomas the Rhymer"; and Catherine's father, George Gordon, was the fifth who bore the two names which his grandson was to make immortal. He married one Catherine Innes of Rosieburn; the daughter was born in 1765, and was their only child. Both her parents died early, and she was brought up by her grandmother-a Duff of the Fife family-who lived at Banff, and was commonly called Lady Gight. This was a very parsimonious great lady, and an illiterate one as well; but, aware of the disadvantages of illiteracy, she was solicitous that the little girl should be better educated than herself. Her solicitude bore fruit. Catherine Gordondestined to be the mother of a great poet-was all her life particularly fond of reading, and read good literature; she wrote vivid though inelegant letters; and she could criticise shrewdly, in after years, not only her son's poems (those which she saw, for she died before his notable works were published), but the discrepant reviews of them. On the other hand, she never lost the provinciality, the uncouthness even, of the atmosphere wherein she had grown up; and to this defect was added the far more distressing one of a violent temper which had never known control, and which expressed itself not only in speech, but in all too appropriate action. China as well as "words" flew at her victims' heads; with fire-irons no less than with opprobrium were they pursued. . . . In this undisciplined personality an evident and overweening pride of birth, justified though it was by facts, made a ludicrous impression. She seemed of the soil -nay, of the slums (had the word then been in vogue); yet in her the observer was enjoined to honour a "gentlewoman". It was in Catherine Gordon's twentieth year that, for her sins, she met and married John Byron. Bath was the scene of both events-Bath where, some years earlier, her father had 1 She had a fortune of £23,000, "doubled by rumour (Dict. Nat. Biog.). In 1784, the year of Lady Conyers' death, before Miss Gordon met Jack Byron, she saw at Edinburgh Mrs. Siddons act the character of Isabella in Southerne's Fatal Marriage, and was so overcome that she fell into convulsions and had to be carried out, uttering with a loud cry-an exclamation belonging to the character acted by Mrs. Siddons—“ Oh, my Biron, my Biron "! (Moore; 1838, p. 3). With the exception of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. There is said to be in existence a book in which she collected all the criticisms of his early poems, and inserted on blank pages interleaved her own comments, which were written with wit and ability. The whereabouts of the volume is unknown (Notes and Queries, 4th series, December 1869, p. 495). drowned himself. In a girl so superstitious as was the heiress of Gight, it seems a reckless ruffling of destiny to have fixed her wedding-day, in Bath, for the thirteenth of May. But that was what she did, that was how she "defied augury "—and all the world knows whether augury or she prevailed. The union was unimaginably wretched. She had been married for her money-as an anonymous Scottish rhymer had warned her on her wedding-day, in a ballad openly addressed to Miss Gordon of Gight; and her money was instantly snatched from her. In two years (1784-86) the heiress was landless and almost penniless; she had nothing of her own in the world but a pittance of £150 a year. "When the heron leaves the tree The laird of Gight shall landless be." So ran an old saw of the Gordons; and legend affirms that on that sinister Thirteenth of May the heronry of Gight flew over to Haddo, the property of the Earl of Aberdeen. Lord Haddo, the eldest son, on hearing it said calmly: "The land will soon follow". . . . For a few months the Byron-Gordons (her husband assumed the name) lived at beautiful Gight. But quickly the truth came out. Captain Byron was assailed on every side by clamorous creditors; all available cash was engulfed, the timber on the estate was cut down, the farms, the salmonfishery rights, were sold, £8000 was borrowed on mortgage. It was in vain. The debts were still but half paid. In 1786 the Byrons left Gight; in 1787 (almost unbelievable, were it not that such things seem constantly to happen) Lord Haddo bought the estate. The land had followed. 1 "You know, or you do not know, that my maternal grandfather* (a very clever man, and amiable, I am told) was strongly suspected of suicide . . . and that another very near relative of the same branch took poison, and was merely saved by antidotes. For the first of these events there was no apparent cause, as he was rich, respected, and of considerable intellectual resources, hardly forty years of age, and not at all addicted to any unhinging vice. It was, however, but a strong suspicion, owing to his melancholy temper. The second had a cause, but it does not become me to touch upon it; it happened when I was far too young to be aware of it, and I never heard of it till after the death of that relative, many years afterwards. I think, then, that I may call this dejection constitutional. I had always been told that in temper I more resembled my maternal grandfather than any of my father's family—that is, in the gloomier part of his temper, for he was what you call a good-natured man, and I am not" (Letter to John Murray; Moore, ed. 1838, p. 531). * Byron's grandfather, George Gordon, was found drowned in the canal at Bath in 1779. His great-grandfather, Alexander Davidson Gordon, was drowned in the Ythan, a river of Aberdeenshire, in 1760. In both cases there was suspicion of suicide. |