Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/679

Rh sincere affection. Circumstances that would have fallen lightly on a less sensitive man preyed upon his self-torturing spirit. In his dejection he had taken pleasure in the romantic notion of collecting the portraits of his friends, and one of; them refused to sit on the ground that ho could not afford it. Another friend, invited to say good-bye, excused himself on the ground that he had to go shopping with his mother. Another prop on which he leaned also precipitated him into the Slough of Despond. His ambition pointed to political distinction, and having given fair youthful proof of the power he felt to be in him, his pride taught him to look for a warm welcome from his party chiefs when he came of age, but on the contrary, there was a haggle over his admission. Lord Carlisle held coldly aloof, and he had to wait with savage indignation till the marriage certificate of his grandfather was fished up in Cornwall before he could take his seat. This cold but perfectly correct and formal indifference added another pang to the bitterness with which he took leave of his country. When after two years absence he returned, still dogged by impecuuiosity and the incivilities, real and imagined, that follow in its train, he "found fresh cause to roam." Nursed as he had been in superstitions, he could hardly keep from crying out that the stars had combined against him, when in the months following his return friend after friend went to the grave. Matthews was drowned in the Cam; Wingfield died of fever at Coimbra; and he heard of both deaths on the same day. His mother died in the same month, and in spite of all their quarrels, he felt the bereavement bitterly.

But the death which most deeply wounded him came later. Nothing ever racked him with sharper anguish than the death of her whom he mourned under the name of Thyrza. To know the bitterness of his struggle with this sorrow, we have only to look at what he wrote on the day that the news reached him (October 11, 1811); some of his wildest and most fiercely misanthropical verse, as well as some of his sweetest and saddest, belongs to that blackest of dates in his calendar. It is time that something were done to trace this attachment, which has been strangely overlooked by the essayists and biographers, because it furnishes an important clue to Byron's character, and is, indeed, of hardly less importance than his later attachment to the Countess Guiccioli. Mr John Morley, in an essay which ought to be read by everybody who wishes to form a clear idea of Byron's poetry as a revolutionary force in itself and an index to the movement of the time, remarks upon the respect which Byron, with all his raillery of; the married state in modern society, still shows for the domestic idea, It is against the artificial union, the marriage of convenience, that Byron's raillery ia directed; he always upholds singleness of attachment as an ideal, however cynically or mournfully he laments its infrequence, and points with laughter or with tears at the way in which it is crossed and cut short by circumstances when it does exist. Byron is not a railer against matrimony, except as a counterfeit of the natural union of hearts. His attachment to Thyrza shows that in this, as in other matters, he was transparently sincere. It is commonly taken for granted that his youth before, and, indeed, after his marriage with Miss Milbanke, was a featureless level of promiscuous debauchery; but those who look more narrowly into the facts cannot fail to see that, whatever may have been the number of his " light of loves," his fugitive passions were innumerable, and however often he may have lapsed into vulgar rakery in bitter despair or reckless wantonness, he was always pining for some constant love, and cursing the fate that had denied it to him. This purer sentiment was always enshrined in his heart of heart, from his boyhood to the end of his days. Who Thyrza was can probably never be known, but in trying to convey the impression that she was merely imaginary, probably with the intention of shielding his friend's memory, by declaring him innocent of a relationship unsanctioned by society, Moore really did Byron an injustice. The poor girl, whoever she was, and however much she was deified after her death by his imagination, would really seem to have been his grand passion. Her "dear sacred name" his hand, he says years afterwards, would have trembled to write; he wished it to "rest ever unrevealed; " and when he was questioned by the Countess Guiccioli, he was deeply agitated, and begged her not to recur to the subject. We find him in his Journal, with her in his memory, writing with contempt of the amours of some of his acquaintances, and scoffing at the idea of their applying the name of love to favours that could be purchased. She is the presiding genius of his series of Eastern Tales; he has recorded the fact that when he drew the portrait of Zuleika his whole soul was full of her memory, and her image was again before him when he described the relationship between Zara and the disguised Gulnare. Conrad, with all his conscious villany, had one redeeming passion " love unchangeable, un changed." The Giaour, too, loved but one; he learnt that lesson, he said, from the birds; he despised " the fool still prone to range," and " envied not his varied joys." All these portraitures of single-hearted devotion are tributes to the memory of Thyrza, the " more than friend," commemorated in the second canto of Childe Harold. Medora's song in the Corsair, "Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells," though not flawless as a lyric, is one of his most beautiful expressions of this mournful sentiment in a subdued key. When we realize how bitterly ho. lamented her death, and how he could not even bear to write her name, there seems some reason for believing that the mysterious object of Manfred's love and remorse is another of the forms that she took in his imagination. Whoever cares to look into the matter will find many little corroborative particulars. It is quite in keeping with the morbid self-accusing tendency, the exaggerated moral sensibility, which Byron showed all his life through, that he should have been consumed with remorse at a recollection which colder-hearted men of the world bear about with them every day without a pang.

For some months after his return to England, Byron lived at Newstead very unhappily. He wrote that he was growing nervous, "really, wretchedly, ridiculously, fineladically nervous." He could not arrange his thoughts; he feared his brain was giving way, and it would end in madness. He felt at times a strange tendency to mirth. Sometimes he thought of seeking relief in a warfare against society, and. he besought one of his friends, when he heard of his deepening crimes, to remember the cause. The inconsistency between this hunger for sympathy and the reckless ferocity of the resolution, shows how distempered his mind was by care and sorrow, "like sweet bells jangled, harsh, and out of tune." At other times he thought more soberly of parliament as a diversion. All his life through, however, "most of his convulsions ended in verse." He found occupation in correcting the proofsheets of Childe Harold. He went up to London, not to plunge into a lawless and pitiless course of crime, but to enter upon a political career. He spoke two or three times in the House of Lords on the House-Breaker's Bill, and a petition for Roman Catholic Emancipation, but the publication of Childe Harold put. an end at once to his parliamentary ambitions. "When Childe Harold was published," he says, "nobody thought of my prose after wards, nor indeed did I."

It has often been asked what was the cause of the instantaneous and wide-spread popularity of Childe Harold,