"It is clear," the Dean writes, "that he was never a leader.... On the contrary, awkward, sentimental, and addicted to dreaming and tombstones, he seems to have been held in little estimation among our spirited athletes. The remark was once made to me by Mr. John Arthur Lloyd (of Salop), a well-known Harrovian, who had been captain of the school in the year of the first match with Eton (1805): 'Yes,' he said, 'Byron played in the match, and very badly too. He should never have been in the eleven if my counsel had been taken.'"
And the Dean goes on, picturing Byron's awkwardness:
"Mrs. Drury was once heard to say of him: 'There goes Byron' (Birron she called him) 'straggling up the hill, like a ship in a storm without rudder or compass.'"
Byron's influence at Harrow, in short, was exercised over his juniors rather than his contemporaries. It pleased him, when he was big enough, to protect small boys from school tyrants. One catches his feudal spirit again in his appeal to a bully not to lick Lord Delawarr "because he is a fellow peer"; but he was also ready to intervene in other cases in which that plea could not be urged; and he had the reward that might be expected. He once offered to take a licking for one of the Peels; and he became a hero with hero-worshippers-titled hero-worshippers for the most part-sitting at his feet. Lord Delawarr, Lord Clare, the Duke of Dorset, the Honorable John Wingfield, were the most conspicuous among them. It was from their adulation that he got his first taste of the incense which was, in later years, to be burnt to him so lavishly.
He described his school friendships, when he looked back on them, as "passions"; and there is no denying that the language of the letters which he wrote to his friends was inordinately passionate for a schoolboy addressing schoolfellows. "Dearest" is a more frequent introduction to them than "dear," and the word "sweet" also occurs. It is not the happiest of signs to find a schoolboy writing such letters; and it is not altogether impossible that unfounded apprehensions caused by them account for the suggestion made by Drury-though the fact is not mentioned in the biographies-that Byron should be quietly removed from the school on the ground that his conduct was causing "much trouble and uneasiness."
That, however, is uncertain, and one must not insist. All that the so-called "passions"-occasionally detrimental though they may have been to school discipline-demonstrate is Byron's enjoyment of flattery, and his proneness to sentiment and gush. He liked, as he grew older, to accept flattery, while professing to be superior to it; to enjoy sentiment, and then to laugh at it; to gush with the most gushing, and then suddenly to turn round and "say 'damn' instead." But the cynicism which was afterwards to alternate with the sentimentalism had not developed yet. He did not yet say "damn"-at all events in that connection.
One must think of him as a boy with a great capacity for passionate affection, and a precocious tendency to gush, deprived of the most natural outlets for his emotions. He could not love his mother because she was a virago; he hardly ever saw his sister; his guardian kept him coldly at a distance. Consequently his feelings, dammed in one direction, broke out with almost ludicrous intensity in another; and his friendships were sentimental to a degree unusual, though not, of course, unknown or unprecedented, among schoolboys. He wrote sentimental verses to his friends.
But not to them alone. "Hours of Idleness," first published when he was a Cambridge undergraduate, is the idealised record of his school friendships; but it is also the idealised record of other, and very different, excursions into sentiment. It introduces us to Mary Duff, to Margaret Parker, to Mary Chaworth,-and also to some other Maries of less importance; and we will turn back and glance, in quick succession at their stories before following Byron to Cambridge.
CHAPTER III
Table of Contents A SCHOOLBOY'S LOVE AFFAIRS-MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER, AND MARY CHAWORTH
First on the list of early loves comes little Mary Duff of Aberdeen. She was one of Byron's Scotch cousins, though a very distant one; and there is hardly anything else to be said, except that he was a child and she was a child in their kingdom by the sea. Only no wind blew out of a cloud chilling her. Her mother made a second marriage-described by Byron as a "faux pas" because it was socially disadvantageous-and left the city; and the two children never met again.
It was of no importance, of course. They were only a little more than seven when they were separated. But Byron was proud of his precocity, and liked to recall it, and to wonder if any other lover had ever been equally precocious. "I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff," he wrote in a fragment of a diary at the age of twenty-five; and he reminded himself how he used to lie awake, picturing her, and how he urged his nurse to write her a love letter on his behalf, and how they sat together-"gravely making love in our way"-while Mary expressed pity for her younger sister Helen, for not having an admirer too. Above all, he reminded himself of the shock which he felt, years afterwards, when the sudden communication of a piece of news revived the recollection of the idyll.
"My mother," he proceeded, "used always to rally me about this childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me, one day, 'Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to a Mr. C--.' And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much that, after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject-to me-and contented herself with telling it to all her acquaintance."
And then again:
"My misery, my love for that girl were so violent that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder stroke-it nearly choked me-to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of nearly everybody."
It is a well-known story, and one can add nothing to it beyond the fact that Mary Duff's husband was Mr. Cockburn, the wine merchant, and that she lived quite happily with him, and that we are entitled to think of her whenever we drink a glass of Cockburn's port. But we may also doubt, perhaps, whether Byron is, in this case, quite a faithful reporter of his own emotions, and whether his grief was not artistically blended with other and later regrets, and other and later perceptions of the fickleness of the female heart and the mutability of human things. For when we come to look at the dates, we find that the date of Mary Duff's marriage was also the date of Byron's desperate passion for Mary Chaworth.
Between Mary Duff and Mary Chaworth, however, Margaret Parker had intervened. She was another cousin, descended from Admiral Byron's daughter Augusta. The first letter that Byron ever wrote was addressed to her mother. "Dear Madam," it began, "My Mamma being unable to write herself desires I will let you know that the potatoes are now ready and you are welcome to them whenever you please." For the rest, one can only quote Byron's brief reminiscence:
"My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin Margaret Parker, one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but it would be difficult for me to forget her-her dark eyes-her long eyelashes-her completely Greek cast of face and figure! I was then about twelve-she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year or two afterwards in consequence of a fall which injured her spine and induced consumption.... My sister told me that, when she went to see her, shortly before her death, upon accidentally mentioning my name, Margaret coloured through the paleness of mortality to the eyes.... I knew nothing of her illness, being at Harrow and in the country, till she was gone. Some years after I made an attempt at an elegy-a very dull one."
And then Byron speaks of his cousin's "transparent" beauty-"she looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow"-and concludes:
"My passion had its usual effect upon me-I could not eat-I could not sleep-I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time that must elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of separation! But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now."
The elegy is included in the collected works. Special indulgence is asked for it on the ground that it was "composed at the age of fourteen." It is very youthful in tone-quite on the conventional lines-as one would expect. A single quatrain may be given-not to be criticised, but merely to show that Byron, as a boy, was still looking at life pretty much as his pastors and masters told him to look at it:
"And shall presumptuous mortals Heaven arraign!
And, madly, Godlike Providence accuse!
Ah! no, far fly from me attempts so vain;-
I'll ne'er submission to my God refuse."
We are still a long way here from the intense, the cynical, the defiant, or even the posturing Byron of later...
