‘No, no, no!
My injuries came down on those who loved me —
On those whom I best loved: I never quelled
An enemy, save in my just defence —
But my embrace was fatal.’
In speaking of the ‘core of his heart’s grief,’ Manfred says:
‘Yet there was One —
She was like me in lineaments – her eyes —
Her hair – her features – all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But softened all, and tempered into beauty:
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,52
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the Universe: nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears – which I had not;
And tenderness – but that I had for her;
Humility – and that I never had.
Her faults were mine – her virtues were her own —
I loved her, and destroyed her!
Not with my hand, but heart, which broke her heart;
It gazed on mine, and withered.’
In order to appreciate the absurdity of connecting this description with Augusta, we will quote her noble accuser, Lord Lovelace:
‘The character of Augusta is seen in her letters and actions. She was a woman of that great family which is vague about facts, unconscious of duties, impulsive in conduct. The course of her life could not be otherwise explained, by those who had looked into it with close intimacy, than by a kind of moral idiotcy from birth. She was of a sanguine and buoyant disposition, childishly fond and playful, ready to laugh at anything, loving to talk nonsense.’
In fact,
‘She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the Universe.’
Lord Lovelace further tells us that Augusta Leigh ‘had a refined species of comic talent’; that she was ‘strangely insensible to the nature and magnitude of the offence in question [incest] even as an imputation;’ and that ‘there was apparently an absence of all deep feeling in her mind, of everything on which a strong impression could be made.’ We are also told that ‘Byron, after his marriage, generally spoke of Augusta as “a fool,” with equal contempt of her understanding and principles.’
In short, Byron’s description of the woman, whom he had ‘destroyed,’ resembles Augusta Leigh about as much as a mountain resembles a haystack. How closely Manfred’s description resembles Mary Chaworth will be seen presently. Augusta Leigh had told Byron that, in consequence of his conduct, Mary Chaworth was out of her mind.
Manfred says that if he had never lived, that which he loved had still been living:
‘… Had I never loved,
That which I love would still be beautiful,
Happy, and giving happiness. What is she?
What is she now? A sufferer for my sins—
A thing I dare not think upon– or nothing.’
When Nemesis asks Manfred whom he would ‘uncharnel,’ he replies:
‘One without a tomb —
Call up Astarte.’
The name, of course, suggests a star. As we have seen, Byron often employed that metaphor in allusion to Mary Chaworth.
When the phantom of Astarte rises, Manfred exclaims:
‘Can this be death? there’s bloom upon her cheek;
But now I see it is no living hue,
But a strange hectic.’
He is afraid to look upon her; he cannot speak to her, and implores Nemesis to intercede:
‘Bid her speak —
Forgive me, or condemn me.’
Nemesis tells him that she has no authority over Astarte:
‘She is not of our order, but belongs
To the other powers.’53
The fine appeal of Manfred cannot have been addressed by Byron to his sister:
‘Hear me, hear me —
Astarte! my belovéd! speak to me:
I have so much endured – so much endure —
Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more
Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovedst me
Too much, as I loved thee: we were not made
To torture thus each other – though it were
The deadliest sin to love as we have loved.
Say that thou loath’st me not – that I do bear
This punishment for both – that thou wilt be
One of the blesséd – and that I shall die.
*******
‘I cannot rest.
I know not what I ask, nor what I seek:
I feel but what thou art, and what I am;
And I would hear yet once before I perish
The voice which was my music54– speak to me!
*******
Speak to me! I have wandered o’er the earth,
And never found thy likeness.’
When Manfred implores Astarte to forgive him, she is silent. It is not a matter for forgiveness. He entreats her to speak to him, so that he may once more hear that sweet voice, even though it be for the last time. The silence is broken by the word ‘Farewell!’ Manfred, whose doom is sealed, cries in agony:
‘What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain (from others).
The Mind, which is immortal, makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts, —
Is its own origin of ill and end —
And its own place and time:
I was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter…
The hand of Death is on me…
All things swim around me, and the Earth
Heaves, as it were, beneath me. Fare thee well!’
So far as we know, there is nothing in the whole length of this poem to suggest anything abnormal; and it is hard to understand what resemblance Byron’s contemporaries could have discovered between the Astarte of ‘Manfred’ and Augusta Leigh! Enough has been quoted to show that Byron was not thinking of his sister when he wrote ‘Manfred,’ but of her whose life he had blasted, and whose ‘sacred name’ he trembled to reveal.
In April, 1817, Byron was informed by Mrs. Leigh that Mary Chaworth and her husband had made up their differences. The ‘Lament of Tasso’ was written in that month, and Byron’s thoughts were occupied, as usual, with the theme of all his misery.
‘That thou wert beautiful, and I not blind,
Hath been the sin that shuts me from mankind;
But let them go, or torture as they will,
My heart can multiply thine image still;
Successful Love may sate itself away;
The wretched are the faithful; ’tis their fate
To have all feeling, save the one, decay,
And every passion into one dilate,
As rapid rivers into Ocean pour;
But ours is fathomless, and hath no shore.’
In ‘Mazeppa’ Byron tells how he met ‘Theresa’ in that month of June, and how ‘through his brain the thought did pass that there was something in her air which would not doom him to despair.’ This incident is again referred to in ‘Don Juan.’ The Count Palatine is, probably, intended as a sketch of Mary’s husband.
‘The Duel,’ which was written in December, 1818, is addressed to Mary Chaworth:
‘I loved thee – I will not say how,
Since things like these are best forgot.’
Byron alludes to ‘the curse of blood,’ with, ‘many a bar and many a feud,’ which ‘rolled like a wide river between them’:
‘Alas! how many things have been
Since we were friends; for I alone
Feel more for thee than can be shown.’
In the so-called ‘Stanzas to the Po,’ we find the same prolonged note of suffering. Writing to Murray (May 8, 1820), Byron says:
‘I sent a copy of verses to Mr. Kinnaird (they were written last year on crossing the Po) which must not be published. Pray recollect this, as they were mere verses of society, and written from private feelings and passions.’
In view of the secrecy which Byron consistently observed, respecting his later intimacy with Mary Chaworth, the publication of these verses would have been highly indiscreet. They were written in June, 1819, after Mary had for some time been reconciled to her husband. She was then living with him at Colwick Hall, near Nottingham.
Ostensibly these stanzas form an apostrophe to the River Po, and the ‘lady of the land’ was, of course, the Guiccioli. Medwin, to whom Byron gave the poem, believed that the river apostrophized by the poet was the River Po, whose ‘deep and ample stream’ was ‘the mirror of his heart.’ But it seems perfectly clear that, if this poem referred only to the Countess Guiccioli, there could have been no objection to its publication in England. The reading public in those days knew nothing of Byron’s liaisons abroad, and his mystic allusion to foreign rivers and foreign ladies would have left the British public cold.
A scrutiny of these perplexing stanzas suggests that they were adapted, from a fragment written in early life, to meet the conditions of 1819. Evidently Mary Chaworth was once more ‘the ocean to the river of his thoughts,’ and the stream indicated in the opening stanza was not the Po, but the River Trent, which flows close to the ancient walls of Colwick, where ‘the lady of his love’ was then residing. To assist the reader, we insert the poem, having merely transposed three stanzas to make its purport clearer
I
‘River, that rollest by the ancient walls,
Where dwells the Lady of my love, when she
Walks by the brink, and there perchance recalls
A faint and fleeting memory of me:
II
‘She will look on thee – I have looked on thee,
Full of that thought: and from that moment ne’er
Thy waters could I dream of, name, or see
Without the inseparable sigh for her!
III
‘But that which keepeth us apart is not
Distance, nor depth of wave, nor space of earth,
But the distraction of a various lot,
As various the climates of our birth.
IV
‘What if thy deep and ample stream should be
A mirror of my heart, where she may read
The thousand thoughts I now betray to thee,
Wild as thy wave, and headlong as thy speed!
V
‘What do I say – a mirror of my heart?
Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong?
Such as my feelings were and are, thou art;
And such as thou art were my passions long.
VI
‘Time may have somewhat tamed them – not for ever;
Thou overflowest thy banks, and not for aye
Thy bosom overboils, congenial river!
Thy floods subside, and mine have sunk away:
VII
‘But left long wrecks behind, and now again,
Borne on our old unchanged career, we move:
Thou tendest wildly onwards to the main,
And I, – to loving one I should not love.
VIII
‘My blood is all meridian; were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be,
In spite of tortures, ne’er to be forgot,
A slave again to Love – at least of thee.
IX
‘The current I behold will sweep beneath
Her native walls,55 and murmur at her feet;
Her eyes will look on thee, when she shall breathe
The twilight air, unharmed by summer’s heat.
X
‘Her bright eyes will be imaged in thy stream.
Yes, they will meet the wave I gaze on now:
Mine cannot witness, even in a dream,
That happy wave repass me in its flow!
XI
‘The wave that bears my tears returns no more:
Will she return by whom that wave shall sweep?
Both tread thy banks, both wander on thy shore,
I near thy source, she by the dark-blue deep.56
XII
‘A stranger loves the Lady of the land,
Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood
Is all meridian, as if never fanned
By the bleak wind that chills the polar flood.
XIII
‘’Tis vain to struggle – let me perish young —
Live as I lived, and love as I have loved;
To dust if I return, from dust I sprung,
And then, at least, my heart can ne’er be moved.’
In the first stanza, Byron says that when his lady-love walks by the river’s brink ‘she may perchance recall a faint and fleeting memory’ of him. Those words, which might have been applicable to Mary Chaworth, whom he had not seen for at least three years, could not possibly refer to a woman from whom he had been parted but two short months, and with whom he had since been in constant correspondence. Only a few days before these verses were written, Countess Guiccioli had told him by letter that she had prepared all her relatives and friends to expect him at Ravenna. There must surely have been something more than ‘a faint and fleeting’ memory of Byron in the mind of the ardent Guiccioli. In the second stanza, Byron, in allusion to the river he had in his thoughts, says:
‘She will look on thee —I have looked on thee, full of that thought: and from that moment ne’er thy waters could I dream of, name, or see, without the inseparable sigh for her.’
Now, while there was nothing whatever to connect the River Po with tender recollections, there was Byron’s association in childhood with the River Trent, a memory inseparable from his boyish love for Mary Chaworth.
‘But in his native stream, the Guadalquivir,
Juan to lave his youthful limbs was wont;
And having learnt to swim in that sweet river
Had often turned the art to some account.’
In the fourth stanza we perceive that the poet, while thinking of the Trent, ‘betrays his thoughts’ to the Po, a river as wild and as swift as his native stream.
The ninth stanza has puzzled commentators exceedingly. It has been pointed out that the River Po does not sweep beneath the walls of Ravenna. That is, of course, indisputable. But Byron, in all probability, did not then know the exact course of that river, and blindly followed Dante’s geographical description, and almost used his very words:
‘Siede la terra, dove nata fui,
Su la marina dove il Po discende,
Per aver pace co’ seguaci sui.’
It is, of course, well known that the Po branches off into two streams to the north-west of Ferrara, and flows both northward and southward of that city. The southern portion – the Po di Primaro – is fed by four affluents – the Rheno, the Savena, the Santerno, and the Lamone – and flows into the Adriatic south of Comachio, about midway between that place and Ravenna. It was obviously to the Po di Primaro that Dante referred when he wrote seguaci sui.
Unless Francesca was born close to the mouth of the Po, which is not impossible, Byron erred in good company. In any case, we may fairly plead poetic licence. That Byron crossed the Po di Primaro as well as the main river admits of no doubt.
In the eleventh stanza Byron is wondering what will be the result of his journey? Will the Guiccioli return to him? Will all be well with the lovers, or will he return to Venice alone? In his fancy they are both wandering on the banks of that river. He is near its source, where the Po di Primaro branches off near Pontelagascuro, while she was on the shore of the Adriatic.
The twelfth stanza would perhaps have been clearer if the first and second lines had been,
‘A stranger, born far beyond the mountains,
Loves the Lady of the land,’
which was Byron’s meaning. The poet excuses himself for his fickleness on the plea that ‘his blood is all meridian’ – in short, that he cannot help loving someone. But we plainly see that his love for Mary Chaworth was still paramount. ‘In spite of tortures ne’er to be forgot’ – tortures of which we had a glimpse in ‘Manfred’ – he was still her slave. Finally, Byron tells us that it was useless to struggle against the misery his heart endured, and that all his hopes were centred on an early death.
The episode of Francesca and Paolo had made a deep impression on Byron. He likened it to his unfortunate adventure with Mary Chaworth in June and July, 1813. In ‘The Corsair’ – written after their intimacy had been broken off – Byron prefixes to each canto a motto from ‘The Inferno’ which seemed to be appropriate to his own case. In the first canto we find:
‘Nessun maggior dolore,
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria.’
In the second canto:
‘Conoscesti i dubbiosi desire?’
In the third canto:
‘Come vedi – ancor non m’ abbandona.’
That Byron had Francesca in his mind when he wrote the stanzas to the Po seems likely; and in the letter which he wrote to Mary from Venice, in the previous month, he compares their misfortunes with those of Paolo and Francesca in plain words.57
‘Don Juan’ was begun in the autumn of 1818. That poem, Byron tells us, was inspired almost entirely by his own personal experience. Perhaps he drew a portrait of Mary Chaworth when he described Julia:
‘And she
Was married, charming, chaste, and twenty-three.’
When they parted in 1809, that was exactly Mary’s age.
‘Her eye was large and dark, suppressing half its fire until she spoke. Her glossy hair was clustered over a brow bright with intelligence. Her cheek was purple with the beam of youth, mounting at times to a transparent glow; and she had an uncommon grace of manner. She was tall of stature. Her husband was a good-looking man, neither much loved nor disliked. He was of a jealous nature, though he did not show it. They lived together, as most people do, suffering each other’s foibles.’
On a summer’s eve in the month of June, Juan and Julia met:
‘How beautiful she looked! her conscious heart
Glowed in her cheek, and yet she felt no wrong.’
For her husband she had honour, virtue, truth, and love. The sun had set, and the yellow moon arose high in the heavens:
‘There is a dangerous silence in that hour,
A stillness which leaves room for the full soul.’
Several weeks had passed away:
‘Julia, in fact, had tolerable grounds, —
Alfonso’s loves with Inez were well known.’
Then came the parting note:
‘They tell me ’tis decided you depart:
’Tis wise – ’tis well, but not the less a pain;
I have no further claim on your young heart,
Mine is the victim, and would be again:
To love too much has been the only art
I used.’
Julia tells Juan that she loved him, and still loves him tenderly:
‘I loved, I love you, for this love have lost
State, station, Heaven, mankind’s, my own esteem,
And yet cannot regret what it hath cost,
So dear is still the memory of that dream.’
‘All is o’er
For me on earth, except some years to hide
My shame and sorrow deep in my heart’s core.’
The seal to this letter was a sunflower —Elle vous suit partout. It may be mentioned here that Byron had a seal bearing this motto.
When Juan realized that the parting was final, he exclaims:
‘No more – no more – oh! never more, my heart,
Canst thou be my sole world, my universe!
Once all in all, but now a thing apart,
Thou canst not be my blessing or my curse:
The illusion’s gone for ever.’
In the third canto we have a hint of Byron’s feelings after his wife had left him:
‘He entered in the house no more his home,
A thing to human feelings the most trying,
And harder for the heart to overcome,
Perhaps, than even the mental pangs of dying;
To find our hearthstone turned into a tomb,
And round its once warm precincts palely lying
The ashes of our hopes.’
‘But whatsoe’er he had of love reposed
On that beloved daughter; she had been
The only thing which kept his heart unclosed
Amidst the savage deeds he had done and seen,
A lonely pure affection unopposed:
There wanted but the loss of this to wean
His feelings from all milk of human kindness,
And turn him like the Cyclops mad with blindness.’
In the fourth canto we are introduced to Haidée, who resembled Lambro in features and stature, even to the delicacy of their hands. We are told that owing to the violence of emotion and the agitation of her mind she broke a bloodvessel, and lay unconscious on her couch for days. Like Astarte in ‘Manfred,’ ‘her blood was shed: I saw, but could not stanch it’:
‘She looked on many a face with vacant eye,
On many a token without knowing what:
She saw them watch her without asking why,
And recked not who around her pillow sat.
*******
‘Anon her thin wan fingers beat the wall
In time to the harper’s tune: he changed the theme
And sang of Love; the fierce name struck through all
Her recollection; on her flashed the dream
Of what she was, and is, if ye could call
To be so being; in a gushing stream
The tears rushed forth from her o’erclouded brain,
Like mountain mists at length dissolved in rain.’
‘Short solace, vain relief! Thought came too quick,
And whirled her brain to madness.’
‘She died, but not alone; she held within,
A second principle of Life, which might
Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin;
But closed its little being without light.’
‘Thus lived – thus died she; never more on her
Shall Sorrow light, or Shame.’
In the fifth canto, written in 1820, after the ‘Stanzas to the Po,’ we find Byron once more in a confidential mood:
‘I have a passion for the name of “Mary,”
For once it was a magic sound to me;
And still it half calls up the realms of Fairy,
Where I beheld what never was to be;
All feelings changed, but this was last to vary
A spell from which even yet I am not quite free.’
And there is a sigh for Mary Chaworth in the following lines:
‘To pay my court, I
Gave what I had – a heart; as the world went, I
Gave what was worth a world; for worlds could never
Restore me those pure feelings, gone for ever.
’Twas the boy’s mite, and like the widow’s may
Perhaps be weighed hereafter, if not now;
But whether such things do or do not weigh,
All who have loved, or love, will still allow
Life has naught like it.’
Early in 1823, little more than a year before his death, Byron refers to ‘the fair most fatal Juan ever met.’ Under the name of the Lady Adeline, this most fatal fair one is introduced to the reader:
‘Although she was not evil nor meant ill,
Both Destiny and Passion spread the net
And caught them.’
‘Chaste she was, to Detraction’s desperation,
And wedded unto one she had loved well.’
‘The World could tell
Nought against either, and both seemed secure —
She in her virtue, he in his hauteur.’
Here we have a minute description of Newstead Abbey, the home of the ‘noble pair,’ where Juan came as a visitor:
‘What I throw off is ideal —
Lowered, leavened, like a history of Freemasons,
Which bears the same relation to the real
As Captain Parry’s Voyage may do to Jason’s.
The grand Arcanum’s not for men to see all;
My music has some mystic diapasons;
And there is much which could not be appreciated
In any manner by the uninitiated.’
Adeline, we are told, came out at sixteen:
‘At eighteen, though below her feet still panted
A Hecatomb of suitors with devotion,
She had consented to create again
That Adam called “The happiest of Men.”’
It will be remembered that when Mary Chaworth married she was exactly eighteen. Her husband was:
‘Tall, stately, formed to lead the courtly van
On birthdays. The model of a chamberlain.’
‘But there was something wanting on the whole —
don’t know what, and therefore cannot tell —
Which pretty women – the sweet souls! – call Soul.
Certes it was not body; he was well
Proportioned, as a poplar or a pole,
A handsome man.’
This description would answer equally well for ‘handsome Jack Musters,’ who married Mary Chaworth. Adeline, we are told, took Juan in hand when she was about seven-and-twenty. That was Mary’s age in 1813. But this may have been a mere coincidence.
‘She had one defect,’ says Byron, in speaking of Adeline: ‘her heart was vacant. Her conduct had been perfectly correct. She loved her lord, or thought so; but that love cost her an effort. She had nothing to complain of – no bickerings, no connubial turmoil. Their union was a model to behold – serene and noble, conjugal, but cold. There was no great disparity in years, though much in temper. But they never clashed. They moved, so to speak, apart.’
Now, when once Adeline had taken an interest in anything, her impressions grew, and gathered as they ran, like growing water, upon her mind. The more so, perhaps, because she was not at first too readily impressed. She did not know her own heart:
‘I think not she was then in love with Juan:
If so, she would have had the strength to fly
The wild sensation, unto her a new one:
She merely felt a common sympathy
In him.’
‘She was, or thought she was, his friend – and this
Without the farce of Friendship, or romance
Of Platonism.’
‘Few of the soft sex,’ says Byron, ‘are very stable in their resolves.’ She had heard some parts of Juan’s history; ‘but women hear with more good humour such aberrations than we men of rigour’:
‘Adeline, in all her growing sense
Of Juan’s merits and his situation,
Felt on the whole an interest intense —
Partly perhaps because a fresh sensation,
Or that he had an air of innocence,
Which is for Innocence a sad temptation —
As Women hate half-measures, on the whole,
She ’gan to ponder how to save his soul.’
After a deal of thought, ‘she seriously advised him to get married.’
‘There was Miss Millpond, smooth as summer’s sea,
That usual paragon, an only daughter,
Who seemed the cream of Equanimity,
Till skimmed – and then there was some milk and water,
With a slight shade of blue too, it might be
Beneath the surface.’
The mention of Aurora Raby, to whom Juan in the first instance proposed, and by whom he was refused, suggests an incident in his life which is well known. Aurora was very young, and knew but little of the world’s ways. In her indifference she confounded him with the crowd of flatterers by whom she was surrounded. Her mind appears to have been of a serious caste; with poetic vision she ‘saw worlds beyond this world’s perplexing waste,’ and
‘those worlds
Had more of her existence; for in her
There was a depth of feeling to embrace
Thoughts, boundless, deep, but silent too as Space.’
She had ‘a pure and placid mien’; her colour was ‘never high,’
‘Though sometimes faintly flushed – and always clear
As deep seas in a sunny atmosphere.’
We cannot be positive, but perhaps Byron had Aurora Raby in his mind when he wrote:
‘I’ve seen some balls and revels in my time,
And stayed them over for some silly reason,
And then I looked (I hope it was no crime)
To see what lady best stood out the season;
And though I’ve seen some thousands in their prime
Lovely and pleasing, and who still may please on,
I never saw but one (the stars withdrawn)
Whose bloom could after dancing dare the Dawn.’58
Perhaps Aurora Raby may have been drawn from his recollection of Miss Mercer Elphinstone, who afterwards married Auguste Charles Joseph, Comte de Flahaut de la Billarderie, one of Napoleon’s Aides-de-Camp, then an exile in England. This young lady was particularly gracious to Byron at Lady Jersey’s party, when others gave him a cold reception. We wonder how matters would have shaped themselves if she had accepted the proposal of marriage which Byron made to her in 1814! But it was not to be. That charming woman passed out of his orbit, and as he waited upon the shore, gazing at the dim outline of the coast of France, the curtain fell upon the first phase of Byron’s existence. The Pilgrim of Eternity stood on the threshold of a new life:
‘Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
’Twixt Night and Morn, upon the horizon’s verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge
Of Time and Tide rolls on and bears afar
Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,
Lashed from the foam of Ages.’
And after eight years of exile, in his ‘Last Words on Greece,’ written in those closing days at Missolonghi, with the shadow of Death upon him, his mind reverts to one whom, in 1816, he had called ‘Soul of my thought’:
‘What are to me those honours or renown
Past or to come, a new-born people’s cry?
Albeit for such I could despise a crown
Of aught save laurel, or for such could die.
I am a fool of passion, and a frown
Of thine to me is as an adder’s eye —
To the poor bird whose pinion fluttering down
Wafts unto death the breast it bore so high —
Such is this maddening fascination grown,
So strong thy magic or so weak am I.’
‘The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; the worm,
The canker, and the grief, are mine alone!’