The Young Melbourne & Lord M

by The Young Melbourne

  For this was the most distressing feature of her predicament. She realized her failures even though she refused to accept them. Her natural acuteness was always at war with her power of self-deception. Though she could persuade herself of anything, it was never for long. In consequence, the logic of facts forced her gradually, reluctantly, agonizingly, to relinquish her illusions; step by step she found herself compelled to recognize that her literary powers were small, that the intelligentsia bored her, that her lovers were a poor lot. At last she actually admitted that her misfortunes were mainly her own fault. Even then it was impossible for her to regard herself in an unsympathetic light. And she fell back on a last desperate pose of pitiful victim; a fragile butterfly, worthless and shallow perhaps, but punished far beyond her deserts by the harsh decrees of destiny. “I am like the wreck of a little boat,” she wrote to Godwin, “for I never come up to the sublime and beautiful—merely a little gay merry boat which perhaps stranded itself at Vauxhall or London Bridge; or wounded without killing itself, as a butterfly does in a tallow candle. There is nothing marked sentimental or interesting in my career; all I know is that I was happy, well, rich, surrounded by friends. I have now one faithful friend in William Lamb, two more in my father, brother, but health, spirits and all else is gone—gone how? O assuredly not by the visitation of God but slowly gradually by my own fault.” And again, “It were all very well one died at the end of a tragic scene, after playing a desperate part, but if one lives and instead of growing wiser remains the same victim of every folly and passion, without the excuse of youth and inexperience what then? There is no particular reason I should exist, it conduces to no one’s happiness and on the contrary I stand in the way of many. Besides I seem to have lived a thousand years and feel I am neither wiser, better nor worse than when I began . . . this is probably the case of millions but that does not mend the matter; and while a fly exists, it seeks to save itself.” The appropriate end of such a character was clearly to die. And, in order to squeeze the last tear of pity from her audience, Caroline now took every few weeks or so to announcing her speedily approaching death.

  In 1821 the spectre of her tumultuous past rose, in a succession of dramatic events, to trouble her distracted spirit still further. “I was taken ill in March,” she told a friend, “in the middle of the night, I fancied I saw Lord Byron—I screamed, jumped out of bed . . . he looked horrible, and ground his teeth at me, he did not speak; his hair was straight; he was fatter than when I knew him and not near so handsome . . . I am glad to think that it occurred before his death, as I never did and hope I never shall see a ghost. I even avoided enquiring about the exact day for fear I should believe it—it made enough impression as it was . . . Judge what my horror was as well as grief when long after, the news came of his death; it was conveyed to me in two or three words—‘Caroline behave properly, I know it will shock you, Lord Byron is dead.’ This letter I received, when laughing at Brocket Hall.”

  As a consequence she took to her bed with a serious attack of hysterical fever. Three months later when she was just beginning to recover, she went out driving. As her carriage emerged through the park gates it was met by a funeral cortege, grim with all the murky pageantry of plumes and mourning coaches, wending its way through the serene summer landscape. William, who was riding beside her, trotted on to ask whose it was. “Lord Byron’s,” was the answer. Fearful of the effect of the sudden shock on Caroline, he did not tell her at the time: but when she heard it that night, once more she collapsed.

  Such a collapse was only the intensification of what was now a chronic condition. Caroline was not the woman to rise superior to misfortune. Her self-respect was broken, and under the repeated batterings of fate her character gradually went to pieces. She began to exhibit all the painful, pitiable traits of the déclassée person; thrusting herself defiantly forward when she was not wanted, yet on edge, all the time, to take offence at insults real or imagined. Blinding herself to her present situation, she talked continually of the famous people she had known, with an embarrassing and unsuccessful pretence that she was as intimate with them as ever. Meanwhile her nerves were now permanently at the same pitch of irritability as at the height of the Byron episode. Not a week passed without some dreadful scene when she sobbed and kicked and screamed insane abuse at anyone who came near her. As for breaking things, it had become a habit: it was computed on one occasion that she had destroyed £200 worth of china in a morning. Rather than face the torture of her solitary thoughts, she took to galloping frantically round the park all day, and sitting up all night, holding forth to anyone who could be persuaded to listen. When all else failed she sought oblivion in laudanum and brandy. Loss of self-respect also showed itself in the ordering of her life. Unequal to the discipline of regular meals, she had food placed about the house that she might snatch a bite when and where she felt inclined: she grew squalid and careless in her person; while her bedroom presented a curious image of moral and mental disintegration. It was decked out with every fantastic caprice of the romantic fancy. An altar cloth, a portrait of Byron, and “an elegant crucifix” hung conspicuous on the walls. But the curtains were in holes: the furniture was scattered with half-finished plates of cake and pickles. While on the dressing table, flanked by a prayer-book on one side and on the other by a flask of lavender water, stood shamelessly the brandy bottle.

  It was not an auspicious setting for domestic happiness. William’s married life after 1816 was even more disagreeable than before. In a sense he was better equipped to bear it. For he entered on it with open eyes. He recognized himself as the lunatic’s guardian, which in fact he was; and strove to approach his task with the firm but kindly detachment suitable to it. There was no question of his pretending, either to Caroline or to anyone else, that he thought marriage a pleasant state. One day when the family were gathered round the Brocket dinner table the conversation turned on matrimony. Caroline opined that husband and wife should live in separate houses; while William, though admitting that people had better marry, said that only the very rich could expect to be happier by so doing. “People who are forced to live together,” he declared, “and are confined to the same rooms and the same bed are like two pigeons under a basket, who must fight.” He was also completely hardened by now, to Caroline’s making a public exhibition of herself. Emily was outraged when, at the height of the Mr. Walker scandal, she saw William at a concert in company with Caroline and her reputed lover. “William looked such a fool arriving with them,” she said, “and looking as pleased as Punch, and she looking so disgusting with her white cross and dirty gown as if she had been rolled in a kennel.” As a matter of fact, so far from her lovers annoying him, he looked on them as fellow victims for whose sufferings he could feel nothing but sympathy. “William Lamb was particularly kind to me,” said Bulwer Lytton after describing an appalling series of scenes with Caroline, while staying at Brocket. “I think he saw my feelings. He is a singularly fine character for a man of the world.”

  At the same time William still felt a responsibility towards her: and did all he could to alleviate her unhappiness. Such of her activities as seemed comparatively harmless had all his encouragement. He was always pressing Emily to try and get her asked about in London society; at Caroline’s request he assisted Godwin in his career. And he took an immense amount of trouble to help her in her novels; going over every sentence with her, and himself sending the finished manuscript to the publisher with a covering letter. Consistent with his new attitude to her, he made no attempt to recommend them above their merits.

  “The incongruity of, and objection to, the story of ‘Ada Reis’ can only be got over by power of writing, beauty of sentiment, striking and effective situation, etc. If Mr. Gifford thinks there is in the first two volumes anything of excellence sufficient to over-balance their manifest faults, I still hope that he will press upon Lady Caroline the absolute necessity of carefully reconsidering and revising the third volume, and parti
cularly the conclusion of the novel . . . I think, if it were thought that anything could be done with the novel, and that the fault of its design and structure can be got over, that I could put her in the way of writing up this part a little, and giving it something of strength, spirit, and novelty, and of making it at once more moral and more interesting. I wish you would communicate these my hasty suggestions to Mr. Gifford, and he will see the propriety of pressing Lady Caroline to take a little more time to this part of the novel. She will be guided by his authority, and her fault at present is to be too hasty and too impatient of the trouble of correcting and recasting what is faulty.”

  He also did his best to soothe her nerves. It was to William that everyone turned, if Caroline became more than usually unmanageable. One day she was making arrangements for a dinner party at Brocket. Exasperated at what she considered the stupidity of the butler in failing to grasp her ideas of decoration, she suddenly leapt on to the dinner table, and fixed herself in a fantastic attitude which she requested him to take as the model from which to arrange the centrepiece. The poor man, terrified by her extraordinary appearance, ran to William for help. He came immediately. “Caroline, Caroline,” he said in tranquillizing tones, and gently lifting her from the table carried her from the room.

  Caroline was not his only care at Brocket. He also concerned himself with his son. Augustus was now in his teens; but mentally he remained a child of seven. A strong well-grown boy, he caused dismay by romping half-dressed into the drawing-room when the housekeeper was setting it to rights, tumbling her over and sitting on her. But William never faced the fact that his deficiency was incurable. Despairing of his wife, he clung all the more desperately to the hope that something might be made of his child. No stone was left unturned; he consulted every kind of doctor and psychological expert, and procured a special tutor, for whom he had prepared an elaborate scheme of education, including lessons in logic, moral philosophy and metaphysics. All of course in vain; it was as much as the tutor could do to teach Augustus to read and write. But William obstinately, pathetically, refused to despair.

  About Caroline he showed less fortitude. In spite of all his resolution he was unable to make even a modified success of his relationship with her. For he was in a false position. It was all very well to try and behave as the guardian of a lunatic. But William had neither the taste nor the talent for such a part. He had embarked on it mainly from weakness; because he could not face the unpleasantness of breaking with her. In consequence he was not supported in his ordeal by any conviction that he was doing right. And he could not stand the strain. As the years went by his patience progressively crumbled. He went away from Brocket as often as he could. During the time he spent there, he lived in a state of nervous tension, morbidly apprehensive of an outburst; when it came, he flew out into a violent passion; and then in the end gave way to her completely for the sake of peace. Such a situation could not last. By 1825 William at last admitted he had made a mistake in trying to settle down with her again. Once more he decided on a separation.

  The process of its accomplishment was a caricature of all the least admirable features in their relationship. Never had he been weaker or she more intolerable. He was still too frightened to face breaking the news to her in person; so in March he went off to Brighton, where he wrote to her saying he was never coming back. This provoked the storm that might have been expected. However, by May her letters had grown so much calmer that he decided to go down to Brocket to discuss the necessary arrangements. It was a mad risk to take. To begin with Caroline was all right; quiet, sensible, and at moments so entertaining that she kept William in fits of laughter. But, when he began to talk business, the other Caroline appeared. She wanted an allowance of £3,000 a year: he, though his family offered to help him, could not see his way to giving her more than the £2,000 on which they had lived up till then. In the twinkling of an eye she had become a fury, “relapsed,” he said bitterly, “into her usual course of abuse, invective and the most unrestrained violence.” She wrote round to her relations alleging that he beat her; and accusing him in the same breath of ruining her character by over-indulgence and driving her to desperation by his cruelty. She was the more unbridled, because for once she had a supporter. Her brother, William Ponsonby, “reckoned an ass and a jackanapes by everybody” said Emily tartly, was sufficiently convinced by Caroline’s reports to write off to William in the strain of Lady Catherine de Bourgh; saying that he could not allow his sister to be trampled on by William, who owed her a great deal for deigning to marry someone of such inferior social position. Not trusting himself to answer such a communication with discretion, William went away and left the affair in Emily’s hands. She, to use her own words, “bullied the bully” by telling Caroline that rather than give way William would take the whole thing into court. Caroline was always ready for publicity, even of an undesirable kind: but her relations were more reasonable. In the end the matter was referred to the arbitration of her cousins Lord Althorp and the Duke of Devonshire, who proposed a compromise of £2,500 a year. Both parties accepted the settlement; neither was pleased with it. William thought he would never be able to afford so large a sum; Caroline, on the other hand, informed her friends that she was going to be so poor, as to be in danger of dying of starvation. Indeed the version of this particular passage in her history, which she published to the world, had even less relation to the truth than usual. At the same time that she was squabbling with William over money and accusing him of every vice under heaven, she told Lady Morgan that she loved him more than anyone in the world, and that he was being forced away from her against his will by the machinations of his family. Her letter ended with the usual announcement of her imminent demise. “If I would but sign a paper,” she said, with bitter sarcasm, “all my rich relations will protect me, and I shall no doubt go with an Almack’s ticket to heaven.”

  Trouble was not yet at an end. It was one thing to persuade Caroline to sign; it was another to get her out of the house. She refused to move till she had decided what to do. “Shall I go abroad?” she asks Lady Morgan. “Shall I throw myself upon those who no longer want me, or shall I live a good sort of half kind of life in some cheap street a little way off, the City Road, Shoreditch, Camberwell or upon the top of a shop—or shall I give lectures to little children, and keep a seminary and thus earn my bread? Or shall I write a kind of quiet everyday sort of novel full of wholesome truths, or shall I attempt to be poetical, and failing beg my friends for a guinea a-piece, and their name, to sell my work upon the best foolscap paper; or shall I fret, fret and die; or shall I be dignified and fancy myself as Richard the Second did when he picked the nettle up—upon a thorn?”

  Faced with such variety of sensational alternatives to choose from, there seemed no reason she should ever make up her mind. And William, exhausted by the unnatural energy of purpose he had exerted during the first part of the year, now reacted into a listless indolence, in which he refused to put any pressure on her. On the contrary, to his family’s irritation, he was always paying her visits in order to keep her in a good humour. At last in August Caroline decided that she wanted to go to Paris. A tremendous farewell scene was staged at Brocket, in which Caroline played her part so affectingly that even the butler—so she noted with satisfaction—was bathed in tears. By the 14th she was over the Channel. It was a very bad crossing: “She will, I trust,” writes Emily, “have been so sick as to feel little anxiety to cross the water again directly.”

  This pious hope proved vain. Within two months her relations-in-law were dismayed to learn that Caroline had reappeared at an inn in Dover; whence she wrote to all and sundry giving a heart-rending picture of the poverty-stricken state to which she was reduced; “in a little dreary apartment,” made drearier by the peals of heartless laughter that rose from the neighbouring smoking-room, destitute, she complained, of such necessities of life as pages, carriages, horses and fine rooms; and accusing the Lambs, with a wild disreg
ard for truth, of conspiring with her doctor to say that she was mad, in order that they might withhold from her her meagre allowance. “William,” she asserted, “is enchanted at the prospect of giving me nothing.” The plain fact was that she was far too unbalanced to be able to manage life on her own. And there was no knowing the trouble in which she would involve herself and everyone else, unless she was looked after. Since no one else offered, the Lambs reluctantly took on the task again. Just three months after taking a last farewell of Brocket, she was settled there once more. William, clinging to the outward form of separation, still had his official home in London. But since he felt himself obliged to pay her frequent visits in order to see how she was getting on, his situation, with regard to her, was not essentially altered. It seemed as if, in personal life as in public, all his efforts to free himself ended equally in frustration.