" Ye've married, ye've married wi' Johnny Byron, the doggerel must have jingled in Catherine Gordon's ears, but Johnny Byron was still enthroned in her heart. His foibles-they deserve no worse name ": thus she wrote, after his death, of the courses which had disinherited her house; and indeed this wife, who could storm the roof off for a whimsy, bore her financial ruin with dignity and composure. The purchase-money of Gight was thrown, after the rest, into the abyss of her husband's debts; but Catherine could live on her pittance of £150 a year without incurring any. At first it was in France, with him; then at the end of 1787, returning alone to England, she soon afterwards-on January 22, 1788-gave birth, at 16 Holles Street, London,1 to her first and only child, George Gordon Byron. He was born with a caul. The fabled talisman against drowning was sold by his nurse to one Captain Hanson, brother of Mrs. Byron's family lawyer, John Hanson; and two years after buying it, Captain Hanson was drowned. It is strange that Byron should never have commented on this little irony, and the more so because tragedies of drowning entered with unusual frequency into the story of his life. He had much to say, on the other hand, of the two remaining peculiarities of his birth his only childism, and his twisted foot. Of the former he made a subject for vanity. "I have been thinking", he says in his Detached Thoughts," of an odd circumstance. My daughter, wife, half-sister, mother, sister's mother, natural daughter, and myself, are or were all only children. . . . Such a complication of only children, all tending to one family, is singular enough, and looks like fatality almost. But the fiercest animals have the fewest numbers in their litters". Not many passages of his characteristic prose are more characteristic than this one, wherein his constant brooding over the family history is mingled with the special form to which his vanity tended. He would be exceptional at any cost, fierce at any cost: thus horses (the one-litter animal par excellence) are omitted from a list in which "lions, tigers, and even elephants, which are mild in comparison", are eagerly displayed. Horses, though spirited, are not fierce and horses are ignored. Of the other circumstance the twisted foot-vanity possessed 1 Since numbered 24, and now destroyed. 2 Prothero, Letters and Journals, v. 467. In this instance he thought erroneously. Augusta Leigh was not an only child, except in the sense that the two other children of Captain Byron's first marriage died before her birth. itself also, but this time with a morbid intensity which turned it into one of the keynotes of his life. It is as well one of the puzzles of his story. Inured as the student of biography must needs become to conflicting evidence, the discrepancies here afford a fresh amazement. Of all things, this a question of visible and tactual fact-would seem the easiest to establish; yet even in the Byron legend no point is more debated. I shall not summon the cloud of witnesses, for they witness only to the enigma; what this one positively affirms, that one as positively contradicts; what the lasts on which his shoes were made 1 would seem to prove that both feet were perfect-is powerless to convince when set against the observation of all who knew him, and the (perhaps less cogent) testimony of his own incessant mental suffering. . . . From the maze, one certainty alone emerges. The foot was not a club-foot. But he, in the histrionic heats of his imagination, fanned as they were by the continuous actual drama which his (in all other respects) surpassing personal beauty kept ablaze-he would be satisfied, so to speak, with nothing less than the worst, the ugliest aspect. He had a clubfoot only the big word would do, and it must be in the biggest letters, and the limelight must illume them. It is not difficult to understand. Dowered as he was with almost everything else that the fairies can bring to the christening, this was, as Macaulay said, the bad fairy's bundle. She flung it into his cradle, and she flung a curse with it: he was to attribute it to his mother. The allusion (made by himself) to that mother's " false modesty remains obscure, but we can conjecture its meaning; and his persuasion of its truth embittered hopelessly a relationship which nothing could have made an even tolerable one. We shall learn later what his life with her contained of mental torture -and we shall not forget, while learning it, that her offences against him dated, as he came to believe, from before his conscious existence. Once, in a fit of her unhappy fury, she called him a lame brat. He answered, "I was born so, mother "; and the boyish face was white with such anguish as permits no further analysis. . .. Words! No blows have ever shown men hell as words can show it. When the little boy was two years old, Mrs. Byron left London for Aberdeen, where her husband joined her. They lived 1 Preserved in Nottingham Museum. 2 A fine bronze statue has been erected (1923) in Aberdeen. Byron is shown at about 20, in a cloak of the period. The statue is the work of Dr. Pittendrigh Macgillivray, R.S.A., King's Sculptor, of Edinburgh. No other sculpture of Byron is comparable to this one in vitality and nobility. It is at a glance " Byronic". together for a short time in lodgings in Queen Street, but domesticity with this latter-day Catherine the Curst was out of the question. Jack Byron-then safely self-exiled in Valenciennes-wrote of her in 1791 to his sister, Mrs. Charles Leigh, with whom he corresponded: "She is very amiable at a distance; but I defy you and all the Apostles to live with her two months, for if anybody could live with her, it was me". Nor had he given it up without a fair trial. If they could by no means agree in the same house, perhaps they might contrive to do so if it were only in the same street. So the lady flitted to the farther end of Queen Street, bearing all expenses of the move herself; and they visited one another, drank tea with one another --but even this soon proved to be more than could be tranquilly got through, and they agreed to meet not at all. Captain Byron still lingered a while in Aberdeen-his wife occasionally possessed small sums of ready money which could be wrested from her by letter-and in his walks he often met the little son, out for an airing with his nurse. The father would stop and chat with his offspring, and at last he expressed a wish to have the child on a couple of days' visit. Mrs. Byron demurred, but the nurse declared that if his father kept the boy one night, he would certainly not keep him another. Her presage was fulfilled. When she went next morning to inquire about her charge, Captain Byron earnestly requested her to take him home at once. Moore pleads for his darling that since the nurse (Mrs. Byron having only that one servant) could not stay with him, the little boy was naturally upset, and hence naughty. No doubt of it; and a still more forcible defence should occur to any one who has ever beheld a man (and a fashionable and dissipated young man at that) helpless before the indomitable will of a child of two years old-to say nothing of its complicated toilet and feeding arrangements. After this exploit Jack Byron, probably feeling that he had done all that could be required of him, fled to France and lived at Valenciennes on his wife's money, until he died in the summer of the following year (1791), aged only thirty-six. Little though the visit to his father may prove concerning the character of the small Geordie (as our poet was called during his Scottish period), there can be no question that he inherited the passionate temper which came to him, as it were, from every side. He was once scolded for having soiled a new frock in which he had just been dressed. The tiny creature, in speechless resentment (" one of my silent rages"), seized the frock in both hands and tore it from top to bottom. He had many times seen his mother do the same with her gowns and caps; but we must hope that he had not seen her commit the further delin quency which a relic, treasured in Aberdeen, was still attesting when Moore published his biography in 1830. This was a china saucer, out of which, in another silent rage, the baby Byron had bitten a large piece. In such manner was the stage set for his existence with his mother. That rent gown and bitten saucer were sufficiently significant properties, and the drama proceeded in their sense. What was there not to intensify it! There was soon even aggravated poverty. While Jack Byron lived, his wife had been obliged to pay all his expenses; and now that he was dead -now that her characteristic shrieks of grief at that news (they had been heard all over the street) had sunk into silence-the woman who had been the victim of those foibles which deserved no worse name, found herself heavily involved in debt. For since he to the last had snatched all such ready money as she might have painfully saved out of her very hands, she was forced to procure on credit the furnishing for the flat to which she moved after his death. This was in Broad Street; her expenses in connection with it, joined to the continuous drain that had gone on in the past, now loaded her down with a debt of £300.1 She was a woman who worried herself vehemently over moneymatters; and the incessant strain of grinding penury exacerbated all her natural feelings. Catherine the Curst may claim, in the early days of her motherhood at any rate, some sympathy. An heretofore considerable heiress, totally despoiled, living in a scrubby flat in a depressing northern town, cuts a deplorable figure enough, though she be of docile temper; what the ordeal must have been to this one, fancy hesitates to grasp. She was only twenty-seven years old; she had been, besides a notable heiress, a vain capricious girl, "as proud as Lucifer": now here she was, a disclassed, unfriended widow, beggared to such a degree that she saw herself obliged to send her spirited and sensitive child to a cheap and nasty day-school in the Long Acre of Aberdeen! Day-schools, one gathers, were always nasty in those days, and this one was abnormally cheap-only five shillings a quarter. Learning, even of the simplest kind, can hardly have been looked for at the price, and Byron himself has told us how much the year of his attendance taught him: "not even my letters ". When his mother found this out, she first soundly boxed his ears, and then got a private tutor for him, " a very devout, clever little clergyman, named Ross". Under Ross the boy discovered 1 The payment of interest on this debt and of her grandmother's annuity reduced her annual income to £135. On such a sum, however, she contrived to live without increasing her obligations, and on the death of her grandmother she discharged them all. the passionate delight in historical reading which remained with him to the end. Next came Paterson, the "very serious, saturnine, but kind young man, the son of my shoemaker "— who was nevertheless a good scholar, and initiated him into Latin. From Paterson's hands he passed into the Aberdeen Grammar School, where he remained till he was ten years old. In 1796, after an attack of scarlet fever, Mrs. Byron took him to the Highlands, and either in that year or the following one they lived at a farmhouse near Ballater. "From this period", he wrote long afterwards, “I date my love of mountainous countries ". . . It is said that our earliest clear memory of anything in Nature is always connected with that aspect which in later life is to prove the nearest to our hearts. Byron's joy was tardy in arrival: he was eight years old before he ever saw a mountain; but the first vision was remembered as only the destined vision is—and, to account for its immanent vividity, we need no thin-spun theorising (such as Moore and Christopher North resort to) but merely the knowledge that these are something more than revocations, and shine for their possessors in the light that never was on sea or land. Such to me is my first outdoor memory-and each will find, on reflection, that the First-Remembered is, as well, the heart of all dreaming. In Byron's boyish volume there are two poems relating to the Highland sojourn.1 Of the first, the subject is the mountain of Loch-na-gar (or Lachin-y-gair) near Invercauld; one Mary— "sweet Mary" with "the long flowing ringlets of gold "-is the inspiration of the second. Byron ", says Mr. E. H. Coleridge," was in early youth' unco' wastefu' ' of Marys". Between the ages of eight and ten we find two-this evanescent Highland nymph, and the dark-haired, hazel-eyed little cousin and beauty, whose " very dress" he remembered sixteen years later when, in 1813, he wrote the famous passage in his journal for November 26: "I have been thinking a good deal lately of Mary Duff ". 2 Precocity in love is not uncommon among ordinary mortals, though Alfieri considered such youthful sensibility to be an unerring sign of the artistic soul. He himself fell in love at nine years old; Dante is so conspicuous an instance as hardly to permit of citation; Heine, at eleven, began his career of 1 See also the famous lines in The Island: "The infant rapture still survived the boy, (Poems, 1903, v. 609.) This is the Highland Mary of local tradition. She was the daughter of James Robertson, a farmer of Deeside, and was of gentle birth through her mother-tracing her descent, indeed, to Macdonald the Lord of the Isles. "She died at Aberdeen, in 1867, aged eighty-five" (Poems, i. 192). |