The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons. David Crane

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Cheltenham and then at Eywood, the Oxfords’ country house in Herefordshire, that their friendship developed into the infatuation that absorbed him for the next six months. ‘She resembled a landscape by Claude Lorraine’, Lady Blessington – no ingenue herself – recalled him saying,

      ‘with a setting sun, her beauties enhanced by the knowledge that they were shedding their last dying beams, which threw a radiance around. A woman (continued Byron) is only grateful for her first and last conquest. The first of poor dear Lady [Oxford’s] was achieved before I entered on this world of care, but the last I do flatter myself was reserved for me, and a bonne bouche it was.’⁴⁵

      It is impossible to imagine Byron speaking of Lady Melbourne in this tone, but if Lady Oxford never exerted the same dominance over him as the ‘spider’ had done, in the sensual and intellectual licence of the ‘bowers of Armida’⁴⁶, as he labelled Eywood, he found a retreat from any fleeting disappointment at Annabella’s rejection and the continuing assaults of Caroline Lamb. ‘I mean (entre nous my dear Machiavel)’, he had written to Lady Melbourne,

      to play off Ly. O against her, who would have no objection perchance but she dreads her scenes and has asked me not to mention that we have met to C or that I am going to E.⁴⁷

      ‘I am no longer your lover’, he wrote to Caroline herself, as good as his word, if the letter she reproduced in Glenarvon is the faithful copy of Byron’s that she claimed it to be,

      and since you oblige me to confess it, by this truly unfeminine persecution, – learn, that I am attached to another; whose name it would of course be dishonorable to mention. I shall ever remember with gratitude the predilection you have shewn in my favor. I shall ever continue as your friend, if your ladyship will permit me so to style myself; and as a first proof of my regard, I offer you this advice, correct your vanity, which is ridiculous; exert your absurd caprices upon others; and leave me in peace.⁴⁸

      In spite of the callousness of this letter – a cruelty that forms the counterpart to Byron’s generosity – his relationship with Caroline had stirred him in ways that Lady Oxford never did. There is no disguising the sense of almost bloated content that runs through many of Byron’s letters from Eywood, and yet at some level both he and Lady Oxford knew that the demons that drove him were not ones that could be contained within Armida’s bowers or the boundaries of Whig politics she had marked out for him.

      For all the sexual and intellectual freedom Byron enjoyed at Eywood, the affair with Lady Oxford was too tame ever fully to satisfy him. In all his most important relationships there had been an element of risk and social danger, but there was something almost institutional in the sexual abandon of Lady Oxford, a kind of licensed immorality that paradoxically took Byron closer to one branch of the Whig political establishment than he had ever been before.

      And there was never a time, either, when Byron was more dangerous than when made aware of how little he wanted what English society had to offer him. ‘I am going abroad again’, he announced in March 1813, in the middle of his affair with Lady Oxford,

      … my parliamentary schemes are not much to my taste – I spoke twice last Session – & was told it was well enough – but I hate the thing altogether – & have no intention to ‘strut another hour’ on that stage.⁴⁹

      Byron was being partly disingenuous – for all the kind words that greeted his debut speech it had only had a limited impact – but his suppressed unease of this period was more than a defensive reflex to disappointment. It is clear from his own comments that he knew that he would never make a parliamentary orator, and yet it is hard to believe that success could any more have reconciled the creator of Childe Harold – still less the ‘Titan battling with religion and virtue’⁵⁰ that Nietzsche admired in Byron – to the limitations of English public life and a career in politics.

      If it seems inevitable that the young Nietzsche should be drawn to Byron – and in particular to the creator of the defiant Manfred – the quality that he most admired in him was the courage to follow his instincts that Lawrence also saw as the defining characteristic of the ‘aristocrat’. In his Hardy essay Lawrence wrote that ‘the final aim of every living thing … is the full achievement of itself’⁵¹, but as Byron’s affair with Lady Oxford guttered towards its untidy end, it was precisely that goal of self-realisation – the supreme ambition of the Romantic imagination – that he recognised with an ever increasing clarity he could never achieve in England.

      In an age that is as ready to recognise the tyranny of sex as ours is, it is possibly enough to point out that for a man of Byron’s sexual ambivalence a country that still sent homosexuals to the gallows was no place to be. From the publication of the spurious ‘Don Leon’ poems in the mid-nineteenth century, Byron has always been an icon and spokesman for homosexual freedom, and yet the vital thing in this context is not so much the question of his sexual identity per se – who now cares? – but the wider issues of creative fulfilment or frustration with which it was inevitably and intimately bound.

      For Byron, as for Lawrence, the test of ‘being’ was ‘doing’, and as the year dragged on he was conscious of how little he had achieved as a poet. For all his aristocratic disdain for the business of versifying he was keenly aware that he had ‘something within that “passeth show”’⁵², and yet for a man whose lameness, childhood and sexual ambiguities all supremely equipped him to challenge political, moral, or physical injustice in every form he found it, he had precious little to show. The adolescent anger of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which he had long since repudiated? The stagey and harmless posturing of Childe Harold? A clutch of cautiously disguised tributes to the dead Cambridge chorister, Edleston? ‘At five-and-twenty, when the better part of life is over’, he wrote in his journal,

      one should be something; – and what am I? nothing but five-and-twenty – and the odd months.⁵³

      But if, in these early months of 1813, Byron still lacked what Lawrence called the ‘courage to let go the security, and to be⁵⁴’, this sense of self-dissatisfaction and estrangement was gradually pushing him towards a crisis. As early as May he was writing to Lady Melbourne of the need to escape a world that was stifling him, and at the end of June he returned with increased irritation to the same theme. ‘I am doing all I can to be ready to go with your Russian’ [Prince Koslovsky, a visiting Russian diplomat], he told her,

      depend upon it I shall be either out of the country or nothing – very soon – all I like is now gone – & all I abhor (with some few exceptions ) remains – viz – the R[egent] – his government – & most of his subjects – what a fool I was to come back – I shall be wiser next time.⁵⁵

      It is a curious, if somehow irrelevant, thought that Byron might have gone abroad in the summer of 1813, either with the Oxfords to Sicily as was planned at one time, or farther east to the Levant. Byron himself had such a strong sense of his own destiny that even with the benefit of hindsight it is hard to see his life in any other shape than that which it finally took, and if this ignores those elements of chance and sloth that right up to his death might have disposed of him in a dozen different ways, one only has to picture СКАЧАТЬ