Ragged Lion

by Allan Massie

  The poem, which I myself consider the most satisfying of my longer essays in verse, found favour with the public, but Jeffrey would have none of it. The Romance of Chivalry, he declared, was a blind alley, a false fashion which could not last. Well, I never thought of it lasting, but was glad enough to have the money it earned me, and to know – what is dear to an author’s heart – that it had given pleasure to thousands with whom it was unlikely I should ever have any personal connection.

  The next year – it would have been 1809, I suppose – I made a tour of the Highlands, for I had it in mind to produce a northern companion to the Lay and Marmion. I took some trouble with the details of this poem, which was to be called The Lady of the Lake, to the extent even of riding from Loch Vennachar to Stirling Castle to make certain that my hero could do the journey in three hours. I was rewarded by the favour of the public, and even of the critics. Over 20,000 copies were sold in a few months, and Jeffrey himself abstained from adverse comment. Its success was such as to induce me for a moment to conclude that at last I had fixed a nail in the proverbially inconstant wheel of Fortune, even though in sober solitude I knew that an author’s vogue is like to be of brief duration, and that public taste is fickle: ‘unstable as water, thou shalt not prevail’. I was fortunate to be able to take this balanced view, for assuredly authors are children of the moon, their reputation now waxing, now waning, their light now obscured by clouds, and only sometimes shining forth in what seems to them their proper splendour. I was fortunate also to have decided not to rely utterly on literature, though in this decision I can give credit to my good sense as well as my luck. I suppose I have written as much in my lifetime as any man in Scotland, perhaps in Britain, but I have always regarded literature as subordinate and auxiliary to the main purposes of life, and in conversation have preferred talk of men and events rather than of books and criticism; and I believe this has been to the advantage of my literary work, for I trust that, despite my antiquarian interests, my books do not reek of the study. It will be a sad day for literature if the time comes when novelists can conceive only of characters who would themselves find their chief pleasure in reading.

  Thinking back over that period in my life has calmed me. The terrors of Hastie’s Close have receded, and I can view my experience with a certain detachment. I suppose I was in a more nervous state of mind than I had understood, and so exposed myself to imaginings which presented themselves to me in exaggerated form. Yet there is a certain despondency in this new mood of calm, for whether these sensations came from without, or were produced by some projection of myself upon the outer world, the conclusion must be disquieting. Either I was assailed by demons, whose reality my intelligence rejects, or I admitted elements in myself which habitually lie too deep for thoughts to force themselves into my consciousness. There was evil there; and yet I do not believe I am a bad man, though in my present perplexities, ‘the channering worm doth chide’.

  10

  Memories of Byron, 1814–24

  I was surprised by my success as a poet, though I did not think it entirely undeserved. There was novelty and spirit in my verses, which pleased a public unaccustomed to such fare. One curious result was that they established a vogue for the picturesque scenery of my native land. This was especially true of The Lady of the Lake. Painters flocked to the Trossachs to transfer my verbal descriptions of landscape to canvas; and a host of travellers followed, not only ladies and gentlemen, but merchants and tradesmen taking their bit holiday. (It is to be remembered that the continuing war with Napoleon made foreign travel all but impossible; nevertheless the charms of Caledonia do not yield to those of Switzerland or even Italy, and it pleased me to think that by making verses for my own pleasure I had contrived also to stimulate the economy of my country.)

  I knew that my vogue would not last, for the public, when it feeds greedily on an author, is usually soon satisfied; but I was unprepared for the swiftness of my fall from favour; it was some comfort, however, that my supplanter was a true eagle.

  I confess that my first impression of Lord Byron had been unfavourable. As a very young man he published a volume of verses entitled Hours of Idleness. Their value was slight, though a tender critic might have reflected that they were the work of a mere youth. Yet something presumptuous in the publication irritated Jeffrey, and the little book was greeted with an icy blast from the Edinburgh Review. His young lordship responded with a sharp satire in the manner of Pope, though some way behind the master in felicity of expression. For some reason he chose to lay a cudgel upon my back, which at the time appeared unjust to me, even ungentlemanly. I summoned up my fortitude – no difficult task in the circumstances, for I found it funny enough to see a young whelp sprung from the nobility abusing me, of whose circumstances he was perfectly ignorant, for endeavouring to scratch out a living with my pen. ‘God help the bear,’ I said to a friend, ‘if, having little else to eat he must not suck even his own paws. I could assure that noble imp of fame that it is not my fault that I was not born to a park and £5,000 a year, as it is not his lordship’s merit, although it may be his great good fortune, that he was not born to live by his literary talents or success.’

  This was certainly an unpromising beginning. Soon afterwards the young Byron went abroad – his travels taking him to the Levant, to Greece, Constantinople, and the ringing plains of wind-swept Troy; and indeed he all but dropped from my memory, and had any asked me, I should have been ready to wager that we should not find him again re-entering the poetic lists. I would, as the world knows, have been utterly wrong, and made to appear a fool, for he returned with two Cantos of a Romantic poem describing the travels of a noble but unhappy youth in that part of the world. Childe Harold took the town by storm, nay, not only the town, but the whole country. He followed it with a succession of eastern tales – somewhat, I confess or even boast, in my own manner – and, mellowed perhaps by fame, softened sufficiently towards me to send me the copy of one of these poems with an extravagantly flattering inscription, which modesty forbids me to repeat.

  It was at this time that I brought out the Lord of the Isles, a poem at which I had wrought with rather more care than was my custom. One evening, a few days after publication, I invited James Ballantyne to call on me.

  ‘Well, James,’ I said. ‘I have given you a week. What do folk say of the poem?’

  James, usually so brisk, hesitated.

  ‘Come,’ I said, ‘speak your mind. I am not a green girl to be laid low by adverse criticism. But I see from your look how the matter stands: in one word, disappointment. Byron has beat me, eh? So be it, so be it, but we canna hang our heads, James, we canna afford tae droop. Since one line has failed, we maun just tack our sails and try the ither yin,’ and I held up a sheaf of the manuscript that was to be Guy Mannering.

  James hummed and hawed a bit more, but did not deny my analysis, though he hastened to assure me that the novel would ‘set a’ to richts again. And when you’re in London town, Scott, will you meet wi’ Lord Byron?’

  ‘I hope I may,’ I said.

  ‘Man, that’ll be a rare encounter.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you though, James, what Byron should say when we accost each other:

  Art thou the man whom men famed Grizzle call?

  And I should germanely answer:

  Art thou the still more famed Tom Thumb the small?’

  But it was not, of course, with such compliments that we met.

  Our first encounter was in the drawing-room of his publisher Mr Murray, in Albemarle Street. It was my first visit to the capital in six years, and I approached my meeting with Byron with interest rather than in anticipation of pleasure. I greatly admired the vigour and efflorescence of Childe Harold, while finding the hero somewhat given to self-pity (one cause perhaps of its vast success, for the public loves to be invited to share in a melancholy mood); but report had prepared me for a man of peculiar and affected habits, and of quick temper, and I had some
doubts as to whether we were likely to suit each other in society. I was most agreeably and immediately disappointed in this respect, for I found the young man – some seventeen years my junior – to be in the highest degree courteous, and even kind, modest, and strangely gentle. He was full of wit and a gay humour that had to date found no place in his poetry, though it was, of course, subsequently to do so. We met frequently during my visit, talking almost daily for an hour or two in Murray’s drawing-room. Our sentiments agreed pretty well, except on the matter of politics and religion, about which subjects I fancied he then had no very fixed opinions. I remember once, taking advantage of my seniority, remarking to him that if he lived a few years longer, he would in all probability alter his opinions.

  ‘I suppose you are one of those who prophesy I shall turn Methodist,’ he said, with a certain asperity.

  I replied: ‘You do me wrong, for I do not suppose that your conversion is like to be of so ordinary a kind. I would rather look to see you retreat upon the Catholic faith, and distinguish yourself by the austerity of your penances.’

  The idea pleased him; he gave me that sudden ingenuous smile that lit up his countenance, removing all trace of the melancholy which he thought proper to assume in society; and conceded that I might well be in the right.

  On politics we could not agree, for he affected a high strain of what is now called Liberalism. At the time I thought it arose principally from the pleasure it afforded him, as a vehicle for displaying his wit and satire against individuals in office, rather than from any firm adherence to the principles which he professed. I have since moderated that judgement, though I do not think he had any inclination to democracy, for he was certainly proud of his rank and ancient lineage. But his subsequent career, ending in the noble enterprise in Greece, attested to the sincerity of his sympathy with the oppressed, a sympathy which he also displayed in his maiden speech in the House of Lords, wherein he expressed his abhorrence of the industrial system which was depriving so many poor artisans of their accustomed employment, and driving them in desperation to acts of ineffectual violence. I could not approve the threat to the stability of the body politic which the rioters offered; yet I could admire the generosity of Byron’s response. He was, I soon realized, a noble, generous, yet perturbed spirit, over-sensitive to the opinions of others, and at that time of youth, deficient in that robustness which allows a man to shake off criticism like a spaniel ridding itself of water after immersion in a river or pond.

  He could scarcely be blamed. His countenance was a thing to wonder at, and so his beauty drew every eye upon him whenever he entered a room; his fame joined with his beauty to make him the cynosure of every eye, and exposed him to envy, jealousy, and even insult. Like me he was lame, in his case the result of a congenital disorder; or so I believe. I, not being blessed with beauty, thought little of my affliction; but Byron, thin-skinned and self-conscious, could not forget his, and had adopted a manner of walking which he believed to disguise his infirmity.

  Withal, he was essentially manly, and we had the same view of the place of literature in a man’s life. When he caught himself saying to me ‘we authors’ or ‘we poets’, he dissolved in giggles like a schoolboy. Tom Moore has told me of how once, in Venice with Byron, they stood overlooking the Grand Canal by night, and Tom launched into rapturous praise of the beauty of the scene. ‘Hang it, Tom,’ Byron said – as I trust I should have said myself – ‘don’t be so damned poetical.’

  When he found the company unsympathetic, Byron could lapse into affectation. He never did so with me; I found him sincere; and I believe he was at his best with me. If so, it is a matter in which I take no little pride.

  I was always conscious of his genius, though in conversation he would run on, lightly, even frivolously; but always ready to turn to grave matters about which he discoursed with feeling and good sense. He has written that he was ‘born half a Scot and bred a whole one’, and indeed his consciousness of his Gordon blood, and the pride he took in it, was a bond between us. In many ways he was an aristocratic Burns. There was the same tenderness, allied to the same contempt for cant. There was even a certain similarity of countenance, not surprising perhaps when one considers that they not only shared a genius of the same order, but that, though Burns is associated with Ayrshire and the south-west of Scotland, his family hailed from the Mearns, not so very far from the Gordon stronghold of the north-east. I have even played with the fancy that some Gordon laird may have got one of Burns’s female ancestors with child, and that there might therefore have been a remote kinship linking the two poets. Certainly Byron’s genius – I mean the nature of it and the forms of expression it took in its maturity – appears to me more characteristically Scotch than English. Even his sympathy for Greece ‘rightly struggling to be free’ may sound an echo ringing back to our own Wars of Independence.

  When we parted, at the end of my London visit, we exchanged gifts, like the heroes of Homer – a comparison which, in justice to myself, I must state was made by Lord Byron rather than me, though the fancy did not displease me. I gave him a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey. But Byron outmatched me, for his gift was a large sepulchral vase of silver. It was full of dead men’s bones, and had inscriptions on two sides. One ran thus: ‘The bones contained in this urn were found in certain ancient sepulchres within the long walls of Athens’ – raised to defend the city during the war with Sparta – ‘in the month of February, 1811’. The other bore the lines of Juvenal: ‘Expende – quot libras in duce summo invenies? Mors sola fatetur quantula sint hominum corpuscula’. There was a letter with this vase, which I prized even more highly than the gift itself, on account of the kindness with which Byron expressed himself towards me. I left it naturally in the urn with the bones; but it is now missing. As the theft was not of a nature to be practised by a domestic – and in any case I have never employed a domestic whom I would have thought capable of such a theft – I have to suspect the inhospitality of some individual of higher station. Well, since I have chosen to make this public in a letter to Moore, which he has my permission to print in his Life of Byron, the said individual must enjoy his theft in secret, for I cannot think that he will choose now to boast of this literary curiosity.

  Byron and I laughed a good deal about what the public might be supposed to think concerning the gloomy nature of our mutual gifts. Certainly they fitted the popular conception of Byron, and indeed he was given to moods of an almost morbid melancholy, in which his beautiful countenance darkened, so that one might suppose him one of Milton’s rebel angels, now sunk in deep despair. When this happened, I either waited for the mood to pass, or diverted it by introducing some more easy and natural topic of conversation, whereupon the shadows would slip from him like mist rising from a landscape. He was also given, as I have hinted, to sudden starts of suspicion, when he would check himself, apparently considering whether there had not been a secret and perhaps offensive meaning in something casually said to him. Then, I preferred to let his mind, like a troubled spring, work itself clear, which, in my company, it invariably did in a short time.

  I would rather say nothing of the misfortunes which drove him into exile, amidst a storm of calumny such as I believe few men have ever been compelled to endure. The failure of a marriage must always retain something mysterious to others, and also, I fancy, to the two people most intimately concerned. There is a certain impudence in speculating on such matters. I would refrain, but that so much has already been said and written that I believe that in justice it behoves me to give my own opinion.

  Let me commence by stating what I take to be a general truth: that it is rare for the failure of a marriage to be altogether the responsibility of one party.

  Lord and Lady Byron were ill-matched, and it is probable – though the union of opposites is often fruitful – that they should never have been joined together. I believe Lady Byron to be a good woman, and one possessed of a firm high-prin
cipled morality; but the evidence suggests that she is also a narrow and inflexible lady, whose passions are cold and steely while Byron’s were hot and tempestuous. That he believed himself to love her I do not doubt; and indeed, through all the rage, indignation and incomprehension which he later expressed, I detect a continuing and, to him equally incomprehensible, attachment to her. Lady Byron was capable of a fierce and possessive jealousy, and Lord Byron incapable – in his glorious youth – of the great virtue of constancy. She was fiercely critical, and though I knew him to be given to self-criticism, often even to the point of self-laceration, he resented any suggestion of criticism from others. The habit of her mind was mathematical and rigid; his, poetic and exploratory. Had they come together when he had attained a greater maturity, and had Lady Byron been some years younger than his lordship, then I fancy they might have agreed well enough. But it was not so; they were yoked together as equal, yet unequal, partners, and discovered that they were also rivals. Lord Byron’s temperament required a wife, or woman, who was sympathetic, tolerant, undemanding; he chose one in whom these qualities were altogether absent. Her jealousy of his close relationship with his half-sister, Mrs Leigh, in whom he had discovered these very attributes, was natural enough; it was equally natural that the storms of his married life should reanimate his love for his half-sister. Whether, as the world insists, there was anything criminal in that love, I do not know. It would not surprise me if there was such a connection, much as I might deplore it – for if it existed it must have occasioned sensations of guilt which all parties must have found distressing. If such a connection did indeed exist, it is sufficiently accounted for by the reflection that Byron and Mrs Leigh were not reared together, and that indeed, they were barely acquainted till Byron was adult – Mrs Leigh, I fancy, being some five years older than her half-brother.