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

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СКАЧАТЬ for all the swagger of Cain or Heaven and Earth, Byron’s sense of sin and exclusion was ultimately bound by this world rather than the next, his instinct for rebellion against man and not against God.

      And this is perhaps the key to his behaviour with Augusta, because the fear he had of what they had done was less to do with a theological sense of sin than the growing recognition that he was prepared to push his defiance of convention to any limits. In his affair with Caroline Lamb the previous year, the courage or recklessness had seemed almost exclusively hers, but as he paraded Augusta in London and followed her to Newmarket and talked of exile together, as he trailed the affair in his letters and flaunted their incest in his poetry – as he pitted the Byrons against the world in the most public and symbolic way he could find – he discovered in Augusta not just his ideal refuge but his perfect weapon.

      It would take the imaginative sympathy of a novelist to do justice to the complex and contradictory rhythms of Byron’s life as it slid towards open rupture with the society that had embraced him only eighteen months earlier. If one simply believed the evidence of his journal for the winter of 1813–14, the frustrations of the previous year were as acute as ever, but as one turns from that to his verse, the contrasting boldness of the poetry suggests rather an artist and man growing into a defiant sense of his own power and vocation.

      In the space of a few days in November 1813 he wrote The Bride of Abydos, and the following month, in another spasm of creative energy, threw off the third of his Eastern tales, The Corsair. In his letters and journals he was as dismissive as one would expect of these achievements, and yet no amount of Byronic self-mockery or defensive irony could deflect the central importance these poems had for him.

      The Bride of Abydos, written with Augusta and the theme of incest constantly in mind, had been, in his own words, his first ‘complete’ poem but in its own harsher way The Corsair was every bit as subversive. He had written the Bride in the first place to keep himself sane, but with its violent and antisocial rage The Corsair was in itself a kind of deliberate public madness, brilliantly conceived simultaneously to alienate and seduce his public. ‘Fear’d, shunn’d, belied, ere youth had lost her force,’ Byron described his hero whom he must have known by now his readers would associate with himself.

      He hated man too much to feel remorse,

      And thought the voice of wrath a sacred call,

      To pay the injuries of some on all.

      He knew himself a villain – but he deem’d

      The rest no better than the thing he seem’d;

      And scorn’d the best as hypocrites who hid

      Those deeds the bolder spirits plainly did.

      He knew himself detested, but he knew

      The hearts that loath’d him, crouch’d and dreaded too.

      Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt

      From all affection and from all contempt:

      His name could sadden, and his acts surprise;

      But they that fear’d him dared not to despise:

      Man spurns the worm, but pauses ere he wake

      The slumbering venom of the folded snake:

      The first may turn, but not avenge the blow;

      The last expires, but leaves no living foe;

      Fast to the doom’d offender’s form it clings,

      And he may crush – not conquer – still it stings!⁷⁰

      ‘I have just finished the Corsair – am in the greatest admiration’, Annabella Milbanke, wilting forgotten in the wings since her rejection of Byron’s proposal, wrote to Lady Melbourne,

      In knowledge of the human heart & its most secret workings surely he may without exaggeration be compared to Shakespeare. He gives such wonderful life & individuality to character that from that cause, as well as from unjust prepossessions of his own disposition, the idea that he represents himself in his heroes may be partly accounted for. It is difficult to believe that he could have known these beings so thoroughly but from introspection … I am afraid the compliment to his poetry will not repay him for the injury to his character.⁷¹

      For a brief period in the autumn of 1813 – probably to placate Lady Melbourne – Byron did his best to draw back from the edge with his pursuit of the young, newly married Lady Frances Webster, but by the end of the year Augusta was pregnant with a child which the dates suggested might well be his. In the middle of the following January, with a crisis mounting, brother and sister drove north to Newstead, ‘through more snows than ever opposed the Emperor’s retreat.’ Once arrived, there was no possibility of leaving. The roads beyond the Abbey were impassable, but their coals were excellent, he told his publisher, John Murray, the fireplaces large, the cellar full, his head empty, his only desire ‘to shut my doors & let my beard grow.’⁷²

      For the moment, defiance and refuge were in perfect equilibrium. ‘Never was such weather’, Byron wrote contentedly after ten days, ‘one would imagine Heaven wanted to raise a Powder-tax & had sent the snow to lay it on.’⁷³ Never had his ancestral home seemed so all-sufficient as with Augusta. ‘And what unto them is the world beside,’ Byron later demanded in Parisina, his drama of incest and family doom that echoes the mood of these weeks,

      With all its change of time and tide

      Its living things, its earth and sky,

      Are nothing to their mind and eye.

      And heedless as the dead are they

      Of aught around, above, beneath;

      As if all else had pass’d away

      They only for each other breathe …

      Of guilt, of peril, do they deem

      In that tumultuous dream?⁷⁴

      There is something, in fact, of the magic of Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago about Byron’s and Augusta’s illicit exile at Newstead, isolated from criticism and responsibilities by the impenetrable winter landscape, as safe among the ruins of the abbey as Yuri and Lara in the frozen wastes of Varykino. At the edge of Newstead’s cloistered world lurked the wolves, but like Zhivago watching their shadows in the half-light of dusk, Byron could pretend for the moment that they were merely dogs. To be alive, and to live in the present, was enough. All his restless search after sensation was sunk in ‘sluggish’ content. Even the desire or need to write – for Byron the ‘lava of the imagination’⁷⁵ – was gone. Happy, he had neither need nor urge to create. He felt, he told Murray in a revealing metaphor for his poetic life, as he did when recovering from fever in Patras – ‘weak but in health and only afraid of a relapse.’ ‘I shall keep this resolution’, he wrote of his determination to give up scribbling, ‘for since I left London – though shut up – snowbound – thawbound – & tempted with all kinds of paper – the dirtiest of ink – and the bluntest of СКАЧАТЬ