Part 12

About this time we find Hydra, as Byron pleasantly called his mother, rushing to the village apothecary and warning that worthy not to sell poison to the poet; and a few moments after her leaving, the astonished apothecary was visited by the poet, who begged that no poison should be sold to his mother. Each thought the other was going to turn Lucretia Borgia, or play the last act of Romeo and Juliet, at least.

There were wild bursts of rage on the mother's part, stubborn mockery on the other, followed up once by a poker flung with almost fatal precision at the poet's curly head.

Upon this he took flight to London and Hydra followed, repentant and lacrimose. A truce was patched up; they agreed to disagree, and coldly shaking hands withdrew in opposite directions.

After this, when the poet wrote he addressed his mother as "Dear Madam," and confined himself to business matters. Only rarely was there any flash in his letters, as when he said, "Dear Mother--you know you are a vixen, but save me some champagne." If Byron's mother had been of the stuff of which most mothers are made, we would have found these two safely settled at Newstead, making the best of their battered fortune, with the son in time marrying some neighbor lass, and slipping into the place of a respectable English gentleman, a worthy member of the House of Lords.

But the boy, now grown twenty, had no home, and either was supplied too much money or else too little. He wasted his substance in London, economized in Southwell, sponged on friends, and borrowed of Scrope Davis at Cambridge. When a remittance again came, he explored the greenrooms, took lessons from Professor Johnson, the pugilist (referred to as "my corporeal pastor"), drank whole companies under the table, bought a tame bear and a wolf to guard the entrance of Newstead, and roamed the country as a gipsy, in company with a girl dressed in boy's clothes, thus supplying Richard Le Gallienne an interesting chapter in his "Quest of the Golden Girl."

But all this time his brain was active, and another book of poetry had been printed, entitled "Hours of Idleness." This book was gotten out, at his own expense, by the same country printer as the first.

Surely the verse must have had merit, or why should Lord Brougham, in the great "Edinburgh Review," go after it with a slashing, crashing, damning criticism?

When Byron read the review, a bystander has told us he turned red, then livid green. He straightway ordered and drank two bottles of claret, said nothing, but looked like a man who had sent a challenge.

A challenge! that was exactly what Byron proposed. He would fight Jeffrey first, and then take up in turn every man who had ever contributed to the magazine--he would kill them all. And to that end he called for his pistols and went out to practise firing at ten paces. Wiser counsel prevailed, and he decided to attack the enemy in their own citadel, and with their own weapons. He ordered ink, and began "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."

It took time to get this enormous siege-gun into position and find the range. Finally, it was loaded with more kinds of missiles, in the way of what Augustine Birrell has called literary stinkpots, than were ever before rammed home in a single charge.

It was an audacious move--to reverse the initiative and go after a whole race of critics, scribblers and reviewers, who had been badgering honest folks, and blow 'em into kingdom come.

But at the last moment Byron's heart failed him, his wrath gave way to caution, and "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" appeared anonymously.

The edition was soon exhausted--the shot had at least raised a mighty dust.

The author got his nerve back, fathered the book, made corrections; and this edition, too, sold with a rush. Byron returned to Newstead, invited a score of his Cambridge cronies, who came down, entering the mansion between the bear and the wolf, and were received with salvos of pistol-shots. Here they played games over the spacious grounds, wrestled, boxed, swam, and at night feasted and drank deep damnation out of a skull to all Scotch reviewers.

Probably the acme of this depravity was reached when the young gentlemen began shooting the pendants off the chandelier; then the servants hastily decamped and left the rogues to do their own cooking.

This brought them to their senses, sanity came back, and the company disbanded. Then the servants, who had watched the orgies from afar, returned and found a week's pile of dishes unwashed and a horse stabled in the library.

* * * * *

Then Byron had reached the mature age of twenty-one, he was formally admitted to the House of Lords as a Peer of the realm. His titles and pedigree were so closely scanned on this occasion that he grew quite out of conceit with the noble company, and was seriously thinking of launching a dunciad in their direction. His good nature was especially ruffled by Lord Carlisle, his guardian, who refused to stand as his legal sponsor. The chief cause of the old Lord's prejudice against the young one lay in the fact that the young 'un had ridiculed the old 'un's literary pretensions.

They were rivals in letters, with a very beautiful, natural and mutual disdain for each other.

Lord Byron was not welcomed into the House of Lords: he simply pushed in the door because he had a right to. He thirsted for approbation, for distinction, for notoriety. His sensitive soul hung upon newspaper clippings with feverish expectations; and about all the attention he received was in the line of being damned by faint praise, or smothered with silence. Patriotism, as far as England was concerned, was not a part of Byron's composition.

When all Great Britain was execrating Napoleon, picturing him as a devil with horns and hoofs, Byron looked upon him as the world's hero.

In this frame of mind he went forth and borrowed a goodly sum, and started cut to view the world. He was accompanied by his friend Hobhouse, and his valet, Fletcher.

It was a two years' trip, this jolly trio made--down along the coast of France, Spain, through the Straits of Gibraltar, lingering in queer old cities, mousing over historic spots, alternately living like princes or vagabonds. They frolicked, drank, made love to married women, courted maidens, fought, feasted and did all the foolish things that sophomores usually do when they have money and opportunity.

These months of travel supplied Byron enough in way of suggestion to keep him writing many moons. His active imagination seized upon everything picturesque, peculiar, romantic, sentimental or tragic, and stored it up in those wondrous brain-cells, to be used when the time was ripe.

The disciples of Munchausen, who delight in showing Byron's verse to be only biography, have found a rich field in that two years' travel. One man really did a brilliant thing--in three volumes--recounting the conquering march of the poet, whom he depicts as a combination of Don Juan and Rob Roy.

The probabilities are that the real facts, not illumined by fancy, would be a tale with which to conjure sleep. Foreign travel is hard work. It constitutes the final test of friendship, and to make the tour of Europe with a man and not hate him marks one or both of the parties as seraphic in quality. The best of travel is in looking back upon it from the dreamy quiet and rest of home--laughing at the things that once rasped your nerves, and enjoying, through recollection, the scenes you only glanced at wearily.

Two instances of that trip--when Hobhouse threatened to desert the party and was dared to do so, and Byron slapped Fletcher's face and got himself well kicked in return--will suffice to show how Byron had the faculty of seizing trivial incidents, and by lifting them up and separating them from the mass, made them live as Art.

At Athens the trio made a sudden resolve to be respectable, and practise economy. To this end they hired rooms of a worthy widow, who accommodated travelers with a transient home for a moderate stipend. This widow had three daughters: the eldest, Theresa by name, lives in letters as the Maid of Athens, and the glory that came to her was achieved without any special danger to either her heart or the poet's. The young woman, we know, assisted in the household affairs; and probably often dusted the mantel in the poet's room while he sat smoking with one foot on the table, making irrelevant remarks to her about this or that.

Suddenly he wrote a poem, "Maid of Athens, ere we part, give, O give me back my heart." * * *

With the genuine literary thrift that marked all of Byron's career, he preserved a copy of the lines, and some years after recast them, touched them up a bit, included the stuff in a book--and there you are.

The other incident is that of Hobhouse recording in his journal the bare and barren fact that outside the city wall in Persia they once saw two dogs gnawing a human body. Byron saw the sight, but made no mention of it at the time. He waited, the scene sealed up in his brain-cells. Years after he wrote thus:

"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall, Hold o'er the dead their carnival; Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb, They were too busy to bark at him. From a Tartar's skull they stripped the flesh, As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh; And their white tusks crunched on the whiter skull, As it slipped through their jaws when the edge grew dull."

And this only proves that Hobhouse was not a poet and Byron was. The poet is never content to state the mere facts--facts are only valuable as suggestions for poetry.

Travel often excites the spirit to the point of expression. Good travelers carry pads and pencils. Byron reached England with fragments of marbles, skulls, pictures, shells, spears, guns, curios beyond count, and many manuscripts in process.

Upon arriving on the English coast the first news that reached him was that his mother had just died. He hastened to Newstead and reached there in time to attend the funeral, but refrained from following the cortege to the grave because he could not master his emotions. Their quarrels were at last ended.

A diversion to his feelings came soon after, in the way of a blunt letter from Tom Moore demanding if Lord Byron was the author of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."

Byron replied very stiffly that he was, but he really had intended no insult to Mr. Moore, with whom he had not the honor of being acquainted. Furthermore, if Mr. Moore felt himself aggrieved, why, the author of "English Bards" was at his service to supply him such satisfaction as he required.

The irate Irishman accepted "the apology," a genial reply followed, and soon the poets met at the house of a friend, and there began that lifelong friendship, with the result that Moore wrote Byron's "Life" and used much needless whitewash.

While abroad Byron had gotten into shape for publication one piece of manuscript. This was "Hints From Horace," and the matter was placed in the hands of Mr. Dallas, his businessman, very soon after his arrival. Dallas read the poem and did not like it.

"Haven't you anything else?" asked Dallas.

"Oh, nothing but a few stanzas of Spenserian stuff," was the answer.

Dallas asked to see it, and there were placed in his hands rough drafts of the first and second cantos of "Childe Harold." This time Dallas was better suited, and to corroborate his judgment the matter was submitted to Murray, the publisher.

Murray thought the matter had more or less merit, and arrangements were at once made for its publication. And so it came out, hammered into shape while in the printer's hands.

"Childe Harold" was an instantaneous, brilliant success--a success beyond the publisher's or author's expectations. The book ran through seven editions in four weeks, and Lord Byron "became famous in a night."

London society became Byron-mad. The poet was feted, courted, petted.

He indulged in much innocent and costly dissipation, and some not so innocent.

Finally all this began to pall upon him. When twenty-six we find him making a bold stand for reform: he would get married and live a staid, sober, respectable life. His finances were reduced--all the money he had made out of his books had been given away, prompted by a foolish whim that no man should take pay for the product of his mind.

Now he would marry and "settle down"; and to marry a woman with an income would be no special disadvantage. To sell one's thoughts was abhorrent to the young man, but to marry for money was quite another thing. Morality depends upon your point of view.

The paradox of things found expression when Byron the impressionable, Byron the irresistible, sat himself down and after chewing the end of his penholder, wrote a letter to Miss Milbanke, with whom he was only slightly acquainted, proposing marriage. The lady very properly declined. To be courted with a fresh-nibbed pen, and paper cut sonnet-size, instead of by a live man, deserves rebuke. Men who propose by mail to a woman in the next town are either insincere, self-deceived, or else are of the sort whose pulse never goes above sixty-five, and therefore should be avoided.

Byron was both insincere and self-deceived. He had grown to distrust the emotions of his heart, and so selected a wife with his head. He chose a woman with income, one who was strong, cool-headed, safe and sensible. Miss Milbanke was the antithesis of his mother.

The lady declined--but that is nothing.

They were married within a year.

In another year the wife left her husband and went back to her mother, carrying in her arms a girl baby, only a few weeks old.

She never returned to her husband.

What the trouble was no one ever knew, although the gossips named a hundred and one reasons--running from drunkenness to homicide. But Byron, the world now knows, was no drunkard--he was at times convivial, but he had no fixed taste for strong drink. He was, however, peevish, impulsive, impetuous and often very unreasonable.

Byron, be it said to his credit, brought no recriminating charges against his wife. He only said their differences were inexplicable and unexplainable.

The simple facts were that they breathed a different atmosphere--their heads were in a different stratum. His normal pulse was eighty; hers, sixty-five.

What do you think of a spiritual companionship where the wife demands, "How much longer are you going to follow this foolish habit of writing verses?"

They did not understand each other. Byron uttered words that no man should voice to a woman, and his outbursts were met with a forced calmness that was exasperating. The lady sat down, yawned wearily, and when there came a lull in the gentleman's verbal pyrotechnics, she would ask him if he had anything more to say.

One day she varied the program by packing up her effects and leaving him.

Of course, it is easy to say that had this woman been wise she would have stood the childish outbursts and endured the peevish tantrums, for the sake of the hours of tenderness and love that were sure to follow. By right treatment he would have been on his knees, begging forgiveness and crying it out with his head in her lap very shortly. But all this implies a woman of unusual power--extraordinary patience. And this woman was simply human. She left, and then in order to justify her action she gave reasons. Our actions are usually right, but our reasons for them seldom are.

Mrs. Byron made no concealment of her troubles. Society had occasion for gossip and the occasion was improved. Stories of Byron's cruelty and inhumanity filled the coffeehouses and drawing-rooms; and the hints at crimes so grave they could not even be mentioned gave the gossips their cue.

The press took it up, and the poet was warned by his friends not to appear at the theater or upon the street for fear of the indignation of the mob. The spoilt child of London was paying the penalty of popularity. The pendulum had swung too far and was now coming back.

Byron, hunted by creditors, hooted by enemies, broken in health, crushed in spirit, left the country--left England, never to return alive.

When Byron trod the deck of the good ship bound for Ostend, and saw a strip of tossing, blue water separating him from England, his spirits rose. He was twenty-eight years old, and the thought that he would yet do something and be somebody was strong in his heart. All the old pride came back.

The idea that he would not sell the product of his brain for hire was abandoned, and soon after arriving in Holland he began to write letters home, making sharp bargains with publishers.

Further than this, his attorneys, on his order, made demand for a share of his wife's estate. And erelong we find Byron, the wasteful, cultivating the good old gentlemanly habit of penuriousness. He was making money, and had he lived to be sixty it is probable he would have evolved into a conservative and written a book on "Getting on in the World, or Success as I Have Found It."

Byron's pilgrimage down through Germany, along the Rhine to Switzerland, was one of rest and recreation. At Berne, Basle, Lausanne and Geneva he found food for literary thought, and many instances in his writings show the reflected scenes he saw. No visitor at Lausanne fails to visit the Castle of Chillon, and all the guides will recite you these sweeping lines, so surcharged with feeling, beginning:

"Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls; A thousand feet in depth below, Its many waters meet and flow."

At Geneva began the most interesting friendship between Byron and that other young man, so like and yet so unlike him.

Only a few years and Byron was to search the shores of the Mediterranean for Shelley's dead body, and finding it, be one of the friends who reduced it to ashes.

Tiring of Geneva and the tourists who pointed him out as a curiosity, we find Byron and his little party making their way across the Simplon, to cross which is an epoch in the life of any man, and then down by the Lago Maggiore to Milan.

"The Last Supper" of Leonardo da Vinci did not impress Byron--the art of painting never did--this was his most marked limitation. From Milan they wandered down through Italy to Verona and Venice.

The third Canto of "Childe Harold," "Manfred," and dozens of shorter poems had been sent to Murray. England read and paid for all that Byron wrote, and accepted it all as autobiography. Possibly Byron's defiant manner lent an excuse for this, but by applying similar rules we could convict Sophocles, Schiller and Shelley of basest crimes, put Shakespeare in the dock for murder, Milton for blasphemy, Scott for forgery, and Goethe for questionable financial deals with the devil. Byron's sins were as scarlet and the number not a few, but the moths that came just to flit about the flame were all of mature age. Byron set no snares for the innocent, and in all of the man's misdoings, he himself it was who suffered most.

The Countess Guiccioli, it seems, was the only woman who comprehended his nature sufficiently to lead him in the direction of peace and poise. With her, for the first time, he began to systematize his life on a basis of sanity. They lived together for five years, and from the time he met her until his death no other love came to separate them.

Throughout his life Byron was a man in revolt; and it was only a variation of the old passion for freedom that led him to Greece and to his grave. The personal bravery of the man was proven more than once in his life, and on the approach of death he was undismayed. When he passed away, April Nineteenth, Eighteen Hundred Twenty-four, Stanhope wrote, "England has lost her brightest genius--Greece her best friend."

His body was returned to England, denied burial in Westminster, and now rests in the old church at Hucknall, near Newstead.

JOSEPH ADDISON

Thus am I doubly armed: my death and life, My bane and antidote, are both before me. This in a moment brings me to an end; But this informs me I shall never die. The soul, secured in her existence, smiles At the drawn dagger, and defies its point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years; But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amid the war of elements, The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds! --_Cato's Soliloquy_

[Illustration: JOSEPH ADDISON]

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.

Expression is necessary to life. The spirit grows through exercise of its faculties, just as a muscle grows strong through use. Life is expression and repression is stagnation--death.

Yet there is right expression and wrong expression. If a man allows his life to run riot, and only the animal side of his nature is allowed to express itself, he is repressing his highest and best, and therefore those qualities, not used, atrophy and die.

Sensuality, gluttony and the life of license repress the life of the spirit, and the soul never blossoms; and this is what it is to lose one's soul. All adown the centuries thinking men have noted these truths, and again and again we find individuals forsaking, in horror, the life of the senses and devoting themselves to the life of the spirit.

The question of expression through the spirit or through the senses--through the soul or the body--has been the pivotal point of all philosophies and the inspiration of all religions. Asceticism in our day finds an interesting manifestation in the Trappists, who live on a mountain, nearly inaccessible, and deprive themselves of almost every vestige of bodily comfort; going without food for days, wearing uncomfortable garments, suffering severe cold. So here we find the extreme instance of men repressing the faculties of the body in order that the spirit may find ample time and opportunity for exercise.

Between this extreme repression and the license of the sensualist lies the truth. But just where, is the great question; and the desire of one person, who thinks he has discovered the norm, to compel all other men to stop there, has led to war and strife untold. All law centers around this point--what shall men be allowed to do? And so we find statutes to punish "strolling play-actors," "players on fiddles," "disturbers of the public conscience," "persons who dance wantonly," "blasphemers," etc. In England there were, in the year Eighteen Hundred, sixty-seven offenses punishable with death.

What expression is right and what is not is largely a matter of opinion. Instrumental music has been to some a rock of offense, exciting the spirit, through the sense of hearing, to wrong thoughts--through "the lascivious pleasing of a lute." Others think dancing wicked, while a few allow square dances, but condemn the waltz. Some sects allow pipe-organ music, but draw the line at the violin; while others, still, employ a whole orchestra in their religious service. Some there may be who regard pictures as implements of idolatry, while the Hook-and-Eye Baptists look upon buttons as immoral.