The Byronic Mystery

Byron : The Years of Fame. By Peter Quennoll. (Faber and Faber.. les.)

Ma. QUENNELL has written a book which is worthy to be set beside Mr. Harold Nieolson's Byron, the Last Journey, and the

excellent volumes of Miss Ethel Colburn Mayne. All of them are examples of what historical writing which aims at a popular audience should be : learned, yet alive—not through an artificial infusion of feeling, or through meretricious references to external details, but because their authors have studied the times and the people about which they write, and have studied them with a sympathetic, yet disciplined, imagination.

Mr. Quennell takes for his subject the four years of Byron's fame, between his return from foreign travel in the summer of 1811 and his departure from England after the collapse of his marriage in the spring of 1810. The background—Regency London, with Holland House and Melbourne House in their glory—and the attendant figures—Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady

Bessborough, Madame de Stall, Rogers, Torn Moore, Sheridan, and the rest of the Whig leaders in politics and literature—

offer an attractive subject for a writer who wishes merely to be Popular. Mr. Quennell has resisted the temptation. He tells 'ery straightforwardly in simple, but beautifully written, English the strange story of Byron's rise to fame, of the furore that he provoked in London, of his perverse marriage and its disastrous results. Both his presentment of the per- sonalities involved and his descriptions of their various back- grounds—Newstead, Halnaby, Ey wood, and London itself— are excellent : yet never lacking or false in character.

Against one other temptation Mr. Quennell has been Proof : his book is free from that attempt to shock, to excite by disgusting or delight by horrifying, for which the life of Byron offers such an ample opportunity. Lord Byron was a very bad man, and his badness is the great mystery of his character and his career, and any writer who is studying that character and career must diligently enquire into the causes, the nature, the effects of his wickedness. But his wickedness does not consist in the tale of his extraordinary amours, and the lifting of the curtain that has so long concealed part of Byron's sexual life reveals little or nothing that gives us cause to increase the severity of our judgement upon him. Mr. Quennell has had the advantage of access to some most inte- resting notes made by Hobhouse in the margins of his copy of Moore's Life of Byron. Among other things, they throw further light on those attachments to persons of his own sex, of which hints occur elsewhere in the literature concerning Byron. Here, no doubt, is a " find " for the merely sensational biographer, another scandal to add to the story of Byron's incestuous relations with Augusta Leigh. Mr. Quennell, however, quite rightly lays small emphasis on these matters : the depths of Byron's " vice " have very little to do with the abysses of his personality ; indeed, his feeling for Augusta was Perhaps the tenderest and least unsatisfactory of his passions, While the attachments of his boyish and his undergraduate days have at least something fresher and happier about them than the jaded encounters of his London life, in which in order to gratify his vanity (or, to put it in other words, in an attempt to find that other self which he for ever sought in vain), he broke impartially the hearts of actresses, peeresses and housemaids.

Mr. Quennell eschews scandal, and keeps our attention fixed upon the central mystery : what was it that made

133'ron act so perversely in everything where his happiness

Was concerned ? His relations with Lady Caroline Lamb, With Lady Oxford, with Augusta, during the fatal years

1812-1815 pass under review ; each makes the problem more

difficult to understand. Lady Caroline's is an easy case to diagnose : the strength, the singularity, of her infatuation

interested and then irritated him ; in Lady Oxford he found

someone who could be at once a mother to him and a mistress ; With Augusta he could " forget the Byronic doom " : " As maternal, as comfortably a pagan, as Lady Oxford, she had the romantic charm of being united to him by ties of blood." But his relations with Annabelle, their engagement, and their Marriage, will remain for ever as mysterious as the much- disputed circumstances of their separation.

Indeed, if there is one question which Mr. Quennell does not solve, does not even, perhaps, fully face, it is the quest Why Byron married Annabelle. " He married," says

Hobhouse, in what is intended to be an exculpatory passage; " because he thought he should marry, and because he thought Miss Milbanke, on the whole, a suitable person, and one with whom the experiment might be made with the best chance of success. . . He married . . not for love, certainly, nor for money." Reeding Ilobhouse's account, one almost wishes it had been for money. For it does seem that the marriage was nothing but one more in the long series of experiments which made up Byron's emotional life. He had passion, says Mr. Quennell, but not passions. And this surely is true, if it is taken to mean that Byron's " love-affairs" were a series of attempts to concentrate, to individualise, to communicate the force of undetermined 'emotion accumulated within him the other person was merely a party to the experiment. The failure of each experiment was a fresh proof that strength of emotion, even a genuine tenderness, cannot take the place of a heart ; and his lack of a heart (it was all he lacked to qualify him for a lover) Lad for him this happy consequence—that it was the other person, and not he, who suffered. For him; another experiment had proved unsuccessful, and he was left with his wonted load of Byronic melancholy. Sometimes he grew desperate : " I have tried everything—I will try virtue, I think," he said to Annabelle. But his marriage is not to be accounted for as easily as that. It was, indeed, a new kind of experiment : to play off, under the same roof, within six weeks of marriage, the bride against the sister and the sister against the bride, so as to inflict the maximum of suffering upon each, was an experience which only marriage could have made possible. Yet one feels that Byron only imagined, and never realised; the suffering that he inflicted.

This is only one element in the mystery of Byron's character, a mystery which Mr. Quennell's book is in large measure devoted to explaining. In other relationships, as much as in his marriage, he seems to have been acting—forgetful only that the other actors were human beings and their sufferings were real. Among his friends, in ordinary social converse, he threw off his melancholy and was humorous and charming —" a gallant spirit and a kind one." So, while the real Byron charmed the clubs and drawing rooms of London, the actor whose proper stage was Halnaby and Newstead caught the imagination of Europe and became a symbolic figure for a whole European movement of thought and art. To appreciate fully the double nature of Byron's being we must read the memoirs, the letters and the contemporary records on which such a study as Mr. Quennell's is founded (regretting as we do so the loss of that journal of Byron's which would have told us so much that we should like to know). And it is a proof of the merit of Mr. Quennell's book that we put it down with a desire to probe further into the facts that he brilliantly analyses, and to do so with his book by our side to be perpetually used as a commentary on them. Jonisr SPARROW.