Part 11

Yet certainly the daring caution of Macaulay's mind, his dignity and luring presence, his patience, self-command, good temper, and all those manifold graces of his heart, would have made him an almost ideal Premier, one who might rank with Palmerston, Peel, Disraeli or Gladstone.

But the highest office was not for him.

We die by heart-beats; and Macaulay at fifty-nine had lived as much as most strong men do if they exist a hundred years.

It is easy to show where Lord Macaulay could have been greater. His life lies open to us as the ether. We complain because he did not read less and meditate more; we sigh at his lack of religion and mention the fact that he never loved a woman, seemingly waiving tautology and the fact that men who do not love are never religious.

We forget that it takes a good many men to make the Ideal Man.

If Macaulay had been different he would have been some one else. He was a brave, tender-hearted man who lived one day at a time, packing the moments with good-cheer, good work and an earnest wish to do better tomorrow than he had done today. That Nature occasionally produces such a man should be a cause for gratitude in the hearts of all the rest of us little folk who jig, mince, mouth, amble, run, peek about and criticize our betters.

LORD BYRON

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years, their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles! --_Childe Harold_

[Illustration: LORD BYRON]

Man! I wonder what a man really is! Starting from a single cell, this seized upon by another, and out of the Eternal comes a particle of the Divine Energy that makes these cells its home. Growth follows, cell is added to cell, and there develops a man--a man whose body, two-thirds water, can be emptied by a single dagger-thrust and the spirit given back to its Maker.

This being, which we call man, does not last long.

Fifty-seven generations have come and gone since Cæsar trod the Roman Forum. The pillars against which he often leaned still stand, the thresholds over which he passed are there, the pavements ring beneath your tread as they once rang beneath his. Three generations and more have come and gone since Napoleon trod the streets of Toulon contemplating suicide.

Babes in arms were carried by fond mothers to see Lincoln, the candidate for President. These babes have grown into men, are grandfathers possibly, with whitened hair, furrowed faces, looking calmly forward to the end, having tasted all that life holds in store for them.

And yet Lincoln lived but yesterday! You can reach back into the past and grasp his hand, and look into his sad and weary eyes.

A man! weighted with the sins of his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, who fade off into dim spectral shapes in the dark and dreamlike past; no word of choice has he in the selection of his father and mother, no voice in the choosing of environment--brought into life without his consent and thrust out of it against his will--battling, striving, hoping, cursing, waiting, loving, praying; burned by fever, torn by passion, checked by fear, reaching for friendship, longing for sympathy, clutching--nothing.

* * * * *

Doctors and priests attend us at both ends of the route. We can not be born, neither can we die, without consulting the tax-collector, and interviewing those who look after us for a consideration.

The doctor who sought to assist George Gordon Byron into the world dislocated the bones of his left foot in the operation. Forsooth, this baby would not be born as others---he selected a way of his own and paid the penalty. "It is a malformation--take these powders--I'll be back tomorrow," quoth the busy doctor.

The autopsy proved it was not a malformation, but a displacement.

"Doctor, now please tell me just what is the matter with me," once asked an anxious patient.

"Tut, tut!" replied the absent-minded physician; "can't you wait? The post-mortem will reveal all that."

The critics did not wait for Byron's death--it was vivisection. And after his death the dissection was zealously continued. Byron's life lies open to us in many books. Scarcely a month in the entire life of the man is unaccounted for, and if a hiatus of a few weeks is found, the men of imagination fill in and make him a pirate on the Mediterranean coast, or give him a seraglio in some gloomy old Moorish palace in Venice.

In his lifetime Byron was overpraised and overcensured, and since his death the dust has been allowed to gather over his matchless books. Between the two extremes lies the truth; and the true Byron is just now being discovered. Byron in literature will not die. He is the brightest comet that has darted into our ken since Shakespeare's time; and as comets have no orbit, but are vagrants of the heavens, so was he. Tragedy was in his train, and his destiny was disgrace and death.

And yet as we review the life of this man, "the lame brat" of his mother, as this mother called him, and behold the whirlwind of passion that swept him on, the fulsome praise, the shrill outcry of hypocritical prudes and pedants, the torrent of abuse, and the piling up of sins that he never committed (and God knows he committed enough!); and yet behold his craving for tenderness, the reaching out for truth, and hear his earnest and unquenchable prayer to be understood and loved, we blot out the record of his sins with our tears. To know the life of Byron and not be moved to profoundest pity marks one as alien to his kind.

"God is on the side of the most sensitive," said Thoreau. And did there ever tread the earth a man more sensitive than Byron?--such capacity for suffering, such exaltation, such heights, such depths! Music made him tremble and weep, and in the presence of kindness he was powerless. He lived life to its fullest, and paid the penalty with shortened years. He expressed himself without reserve--being emancipated from superstition and precedent. And the man who is not dominated by the fetish of custom is marked for contumely by the many. Custom makes law, and the one who violates custom is "bad." Yet all respectable people are not good; and all good people are not respectable. If you do not know this you are ignorant of life.

So imagine this handsome, headstrong, restless young man, in whose lexicon there was no such word as prudence, with time and money at his command, defying the state, society and religion, and listen to the anathemas that fill the air at mention of his name.

That a world full of such men would not be at all desirable is stern truth; but that one such man lived is a cause for congratulation. His life holds for us both warning and example.

Beneath the strain of the stuff and the onward swirl of his verse we see that this man stood for truth and justice as against hypocrisy and oppression. Folly and freedom are better far than smugness and persecution. Byron stood for the rights of the individual, for the right of free speech and free thought: and he stood for political and physical freedom, long before abolition societies became popular. He sided with the people; his heart went out to the oppressed; and all of his fruitless gropings and stumblings were a reaching out for tenderness and truth, for life and love--for the Ideal.

* * * * *

The father of Byron, the poet, was a captain in the army--a man of small mental ability, whose recklessness won him the sobriquet of "Mad Jack Byron." When twenty-three years of age he eloped to France with the Baroness Conyers, wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen. Happiness, in a foreign country, for a woman who has exchanged one love for another is outside the pale of possibilities. Love is much--but love is not all. Life is too short to break family-ties and adjust one's self to a new language and a new country. The change means death.

Two years and the woman died, leaving a daughter, Augusta by name, afterward Mrs. Augusta Leigh.

Back to England went Mad Jack Byron, broken-hearted, bearing in his arms the baby girl. Kind kinsmen, ready to forgive, cared for the child. Mad Jack didn't remain broken-hearted long--what would you expect from a man? He sought sympathy among several discreet dames, and in two years we find him safely and legally married to Catherine Gordon. Scotch, and heiress to twenty-five thousand pounds. On the occasion of the wedding, Jack informed a friend that the fact of the lady's being Scotch was forgiven in view of the dowry. Most of this fortune went into a rat-hole to help pay the debts of the Mad Jack.

One child was born to this ill-assorted pair--a boy who was destined to write his name large on history's page. But such a pedigree! No wonder the youth once wrote to Augusta, his half-sister, expressing a covetous appreciation of her parentage, even with its bar sinister. In passing, it is well to note the sunshine of this love of brother and sister, which continued during life--confidential, earnest, tender, frank. In their best moods they were both lofty souls, and their mutuality was cemented in a contempt for the man who was their sire. This fine brotherly and sisterly affection comes close to us when we remember that it was our own Harriet Beecher Stowe, with sympathies worn to the quick through much brooding over the wrongs of a race in bondage, who rushed into print with a scandalous accusation concerning this same sweet affection of brother for sister. The charge was brought on no better foundation than some old-woman gossip held over the hyson when it was red, and moved itself aright--all vouchsafed to Mrs. Stowe by the widow of Byron in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six. If a woman as good at heart as Harriet Beecher Stowe was deceived, why should we blame humanity for biting at a hook that is not baited?

No sane dentist will administer an anesthetic to a woman, without a witness: not that women as a class are dangerous, but because some women can not be trusted to distinguish between their dreams and the facts. Every practising lawyer of insight also knows that a wronged woman's reasons are plentiful as blackberries, and must always be taken with large pinches of the Syracuse product.

Mad Jack followed his regiment here and there, dodging his creditors, and finally in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one induced his wife to borrow a hundred pounds for him, with which he started to Paris intent on retrieving fortune with pasteboard.

He died on the way, and the money was used to bury him. The lame boy was then three years old, but a few dark memories, no doubt retouched by hearsay, were retained by him of Mad Jack, who in his most sober moments never guessed that he would be known to the ages as the father of the greatest poet of his time.

Mad Jack was neither literary nor psychic.

The widowed mother remained at Aberdeen with her boy, living on the hundred and fifty pounds a year that had been settled on her in a way that she could not squander the principal--all the rest had gone.

The child was shy, sensitive, proud and headstrong.

The mother used to reprove him by throwing things at him, and by chasing him with the tongs. At other times she diverted herself by imitating his limp. And yet again she would smother him with caresses, beseech his pardon for abusing him, and praise the beauty of his matchless eyes.

Children are usually better judges of grown-ups than grown-ups are of children. This boy at five years of age had estimated his mother's character correctly. He knew that she was not his steadfast friend, and that she was unworthy of his confidence and whole heart's love. He grew moody, secretive, wilful. Once, being wrongly accused and punished, he seized a knife from the table and was about to apply it to his throat when he was disarmed. The child longed for tenderness and love, and being denied these, was already taking on that proud and haughty temper which was to serve as a mask to hide the tenderness of his nature.

We are told that seven brothers Byron fought at Edgehill, but when we get down to the time of Mad Jack there was danger of the name being snuffed out entirely. Nature is not anxious to perpetuate the idle and dissipated.

When little George Gordon was ten years old, his mother one day ran to him, seized him in her arms, wept and laughed, then laughed and wept, kissing him violently, addressing him as "My Lord!"

His great-uncle, William, Lord Byron of Rochdale and Newstead Abbey, had died, and the big-eyed, lame boy was the nearest heir--in fact, the only living male who bore the family-name. The next day at school, when the master called the roll and mentioned his name with the prefix "Dominus," the lad did not reply "Adsum"--he only stood up, gazed helplessly at the teacher, and burst into tears.

Even at this time he had given promise of the quality of his nature, by his firm affection for Mary Duff, his cousin. All the intensity of his childish nature was centered in this young woman, several years his senior. To call it a passion would be too much, but this child, denied of love at home, clung to Mary Duff, to whom he went in confession with all his childish tales of woe. When his mother proposed to leave Aberdeen, now that fortune had smiled, the anguish of the boy at thought of leaving his "first love" nearly caused him a fit of sickness.

And all this wealth of love was met with jeers and loud laughter, save by Mary Duff. The vibrating sensitiveness of such a child, with such a mother, must have caused a misery we can only guess.

"Your mother is a fool," said a boy to Byron at college some years later.

"I know it," was the melancholy answer, as the brown eyes filled with tears.

When money came, Mrs. Byron's first move was to take the lad to Nottingham and place him in charge of a surgical quack, who proposed, for a price, to make the lame foot just as good as the other, if not better. To this effect wooden clamps were placed on the foot and screwed down by thumbscrews, causing a torture that would have been unbearable to many.

No benefit was experienced from the treatment, although it was continued by another physician at London soon after. A schoolfellow of Byron's visited him in his room when his foot was encased in a wooden compress. The visitor noted the white face, and the beads of anguish on the boy's forehead, and at last said, "I know you are suffering awfully!"

"You will never hear me say so," was the grim reply.

The emphasis placed on Byron's lameness has been altogether overdone. In fact, as he grew to manhood, it was nothing more than a stiffness that would never have been noticed in a drawing-room. We have this on the testimony of the Countess Guiccioli, Lady Blessington and others. Byron himself made the mistake of referring to it several times in his verse, and doubtless all the torture he had suffered through ill-considered medical counsel, and his mother's taunts, caused the matter to take a place in his sensitive mind quite out of its due proportion. Sir Walter Scott was lame, too, but whoever heard of his discussing it, either by word of mouth or in print?

Of Byron's life at Harrow we have many tales as to his defending his juniors, volunteering to take punishment for them--and of lessons unlearned. He could not be driven nor forced, and pedagogics a hundred years ago, it seemed, was largely a science of coercion. Mary Gray, a nurse and early teacher of Byron's, has told us that kindness was the unfailing touchstone with this boy; no other plan would work. But Harrow knew nothing of Froebel methods, and does not yet.

* * * * *

Byron's first genuine love-affair occurred when he was sixteen. The object of this affection, as all the world knows, was Miss Chaworth, whose estate adjoined Newstead. The lady was two years older than Byron, and being of a lively nature found a pleasant diversion in leading the youth a merry chase. So severe was his attack that he was alternately oppressed by chills of fear and fevers of ecstasy. He lost appetite, and the family began to fear for his sanity. Such a love must find expression some way, and so the daily stealthy notes to the young woman took the form of rhyme. The lovesick youth was revealing considerable facility in this way. It pleased him, and did the buxom young woman no harm.

Beyond the mere prettiness and pinky whiteness of a healthy country lass, Miss Chaworth evidently had no beauties of character, save those conjured forth from the inner consciousness of the poet--a not wholly original condition.

Byron loved the Ideal. And this love-affair with Miss Chaworth is only valuable as showing the evolution of imagination in the poet. The woman hadn't the slightest idea that she was giving wings to a soul--to her the affair was simply funny.

The fact that Byron's great-uncle, from whom he had inherited his title, had killed the grandfather of Miss Chaworth in a duel, lent a romantic tinge to the matter--the boy was doing a sort of penance, and in one of his poems hints at the undoing of the sin of his kinsman by the lifelong devotion that he will bestow. This calling up the past, and incautious revealing of the fact that the ancestor Chaworth could not hold his own with a Byron, but allowed himself to be run through the body by the Byron cold steel, was not pleasing to Miss Chaworth.

"Don't imagine I am such a fool as to love that lame boy," cried Miss Chaworth to her maid one day.

Unluckily, "the lame boy" was in the next room and heard the remark.

He rushed from the house with a something gripping at his heart. Straightway he would go back to Harrow, which he had left in wrath only a few months before.

So he went to Harrow.

When he next returned home, his mother met him with the remark, "I have news for you; get out your handkerchief--Miss Chaworth is married."

In just another year Byron was home again, and was invited to dine with the Chaworths. He accepted the invitation, and when he was introduced to a baby girl, a month old, the child of his old sweetheart, his emotions got the better of him and he had to leave the room. And to ease his woe he indited a poem to the baby.

Miss Chaworth was not happy with her fox-hunting squire. Her mind became clouded, and after some years she passed out, in poverty and alone. And if there ever came to her mind any appreciation of the greatness of the man who had given her name immortality, we do not know it.

The years from Eighteen Hundred Five to Eighteen Hundred Eight Byron spent at Cambridge. The arts in which he perfected himself there were shooting, swimming, fencing, drinking and gambling.

During vacations, and off and on, he lived at Southwell, a village halfway between Mansfield and Newark. Southwell was sleepy, gossipy, dull--and exerted a wholesome restraint on our restless youth. It was simply a question of economy that took Byron and his mother to Southwell. The run-down estate of Newstead was yielding a meager income, but at Southwell one could be shabby and yet respectable.

At Southwell Byron met John Pigot and his sister--cultured people of a refined and quiet sort. Byron took to them at once, and they liked him.

In a country town the person who thinks, instinctively hunts out the other man who thinks--granting the somewhat daring hypothesis that there are two of them. So Byron and the Pigots often met for walks and talks, and on such occasions the poet would read to his friends the scraps of verse he had written. He had gotten into the habit--he wrote whenever his pulse ran up above eighty--he wrote because he could not help it; and he read his productions to his friends for the same reason. Every one who writes longs to read his work to some sympathetic soul. A thought is not ours until we repeat it to another, and this crying need of expression marks every poetic soul. All art is born of feeling, high, intense, holy feeling, and the creative faculty is largely a matter of temperature. We feel, and not to impart our feelings is stagnation--death. People who do not feel deeply never have anything to impart, either to individuals or to the world. They have no message.

The young man, fresh from the dusty, musty lectures of Cambridge, and out of the reach of his boisterous and carousing companions, grasped at the gentle, refined and sympathetic friendship of this brother and sister. The trinity would walk off across the fields and recline on the soft turf under a great spreading tree, reading aloud by turn from some good book. Such meetings always ended by Byron's reading to his friends any chance rhymes he had written since they last met.

John Morley dates the birth of Byron's poetic genius from his meeting with Miss Chaworth, while Taine names Southwell as the pivotal point. Probably both are right.

But this we know, that it was the Pigots who induced Byron to collect his rhymes and have them printed. This was done at the neighboring town of Newark, when Byron was nineteen years old. Possibly you have a few of these thin, poorly printed, crudely bound little books entitled "Juvenilia" around in the garret somewhere, and, if so, it might be well enough to take care of them. Quaritch says they are worth a hundred pounds apiece, although in the poet's lifetime they were dear at sixpence.

Byron sent copies to all the leading literary men whom he knew, including Mackenzie, the man of feeling. Mackenzie replied, praising the work, and so did several others. All writers of note are favored with many such juvenilia, and usually there is a gracious electrotype reply. A doubt exists as to whether Mackenzie ever read Byron's book, but we know that his letter of stock platitude fired Byron to do still better. It is said that no flattery is too fulsome for a pretty woman--she inwardly congratulates the man on his subtle insight in discovering excellences that she hardly knew existed. This may be so and may not, but the logic holds when applied to fledgling authors. When it comes to praise he is quite willing to take your word for it.

Byron's spirits arose to an ecstacy--he would be a poet.