Lord Byron's Novel

by John Crowley

  I have myself only recently returned from visiting the place, which I had never seen before, and to which my husband and I were most kindly invited by the present owner—Colonel Wildman, least wild of men—, a gracious host, a devotee of my father and his memory, who in restoring the house to something exceeding its glory in any former time, has also been most careful to preserve every relic of my father’s life there. I admit that at first I walked the fine halls and inspected the new-planted grounds with something approaching a depression of spirit—it seemed the Mausoleum of my race, where history lay entombed, not to be touched by living hand or mind. I felt that I myself was turning to stone. At the same time I could not shake the feeling that this should have been MINE: a feeling not of delight, far less of envy, but of a profound melancholy, as of a chance missed, or a duty overlooked, that now can never be performed.

  Yet the following day, leaving the house early, like the youth Ali I walked alone in the so-named ‘Devil’s Wood’, where the ‘Wicked’ Fifth Lord had liked to put up stone figures of fauns and satyrs, as though in bacchanal—now so mossy and overgrown as to give no offence. There Colonel Wildman found me—that gentleman having conceived that I was in some distress—and we talked long, of the Byrons, of his love for his old schoolmate, of myself—to which he listened with the greatest kindness and patience. What had clung to me—or what I in error clung to—seemed then and there to fall, or fly, away. I knew myself to be the child of a race that had left to me what is more than lands and stones—a nature, that I had lived within as within a mansion of many rooms, some timeworn and fallen, or refurbished by others for their use, but not all explored—no, not even yet.

  a linked series of lakes: Dark and deep and very cold the remaining lake is still, and the wild birds do still sleep upon it.

  Canalettos, &c.: It is of interest to compare Ld. B.’s picture of this devastated and abused Abbey with the picture he paints of ‘Norman Abbey’ in the last extant cantos of Don Juan. In that poem, his own Newstead is reimagined as he might have wished it to be—filled with comforts and fine things, including portraits of ancestors, and crowded with guests of rank and achievement—its ancient woods still uncut. That picture is as much better than his own house’s state, as this is worse. So are tales made from the facts of life.

  black Newfoundland dog: Lord Byron’s dog, beloved in his youth, was named Boatswain, though I cannot determine why. He expired in a fit of madness, and Ld. B. cared for him most solicitously in his last agony, wiping the slaver from the dog’s lips with his own hand.

  an Elm: This great tree still stands, grown only older, in the Park at Newstead. The names inscribed upon it are those of my father and his half-sister, the Hon. Augusta Leigh. I bear her name as part of my own, and that is not all. The lady is very recently deceased, and I never had that intercourse with her that would allow me to speak to her character. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

  ‘Old Jock’: Lord Byron was devoted to an elderly servant at Newstead called Joe Murray. In a portrait that hangs at Newstead today, he has the rosy cheek, the kind smile, and the long clay pipe here ascribed to a Scottish counterpart. Byron never knew his father, and perhaps in Old Joe Murray, and later in others, he found some part of the lack fulfilled.

  Ida: Lord Byron attended Harrow School from 1801 till 1805, and said that he hated it in his first years but came in his last year to love it. Dr Joseph Drury, the Headmaster against whom he would battle at first and come later to admire and love, recorded his impression that a ‘Wild mountain colt’ had been given into his care. The fact of his lameness was a source of troubles, not only in the sports and games from which it kept him taking part, but in the taunts and cruelties of other boys; he had always to prove himself as strong and as bold as any of them. His own sharp sense of amour-propre led him to contest with all, including Masters, whom he conceived to have offended him, and at times he had to be removed from amongst his fellows and given room in a Master’s house. It takes little effort to translate the young Lord Byron’s deformity of body into the alienated nature of his imagined creation. Harrow School, which I have visited upon one occasion, and now and then passed at a distance, remains a tall and plain place on a hill that has ever instilled in me a feeling of desolation and loneliness, I know not why.

  his favoured gravestone: There is in the church-yard of Harrow-on-the-Hill, by the church where once the young scholars attended divine service, a flat stone that commands a view over the valley. It is called ‘the Peachey stone’, no doubt for the one supposed to lie beneath it. It is now pointed out to visitors as the place where the young poet loved to retire, and where he first turned his thoughts to verse. In the common way of such sights, it has also come to be misunderstood, and is sometimes called ‘Byron’s grave’, which certainly it is not: that is in the parish church of Hucknall Torkard, in his own county of Nottinghamshire, with his ancestors—for the which, see below.

  Lord Corydon: This figure combines the characters of Lord Clare, with whom Byron became the closest of friends at Harrow, and John Edelston, a chorister at Cambridge, who was but fifteen when Byron developed a profound affection for him. Of Lord Clare, he said in a late letter to Moore that he ‘always loved him (since I was thirteen, at Harrow) better than any (male) thing in the world’. Edelston was poor, and thus in his picture Byron perhaps contrived to blend in one the two youths he most loved.

  some are dead: John Wingfield, who was with Byron at Harrow, later died in battle. He too, and Byron’s grief for him, must form part of the story he tells of Lord Corydon and his fate.

  • FOUR •

  A vision of Love, with its result, Marriage; and of Money, with the same

  THE HALL OF THE CORYDONS was not as that of the Sanes. Its oaks still stood, and spread their shade over a rose-red house and its towers, a jumble of them—and arches, and windows, and chimney-pots, and parterres, and colonnades, added and subtracted and added again since the days of Good Queen Bess. The late Lord, an optimist of the most ardent, not to say blindest, sort, had taken much of his birthright upon ’Change, and there had seen it inflate magnificently, till he was rich ‘beyond the dreams of avarice’—at least until the following week, when new news swept the market, and what had expanded so miraculously, just as miraculously went down (miraculous indeed it seemed, to those who were not among the select few puffing away at the empty bladder of it). It soon vanished utterly away, so that—most miraculous of all!—even the original investment, solid Pounds Sterling and golden Guineas though it had been, was nowhere to be found. The unhappy Lord bethought him of the suffering his ruin must bring upon his beloved wife and children, and considered putting a bullet through his breast—but his optimism had not entirely vanished with his Money, and he went home instead, where he was comforted, and all his kin agreed with him that something would surely turn up—and the next afternoon, following his hounds (they have since been sold), the optimistic gentleman was flung headlong from his horse, and knew no more of Chance, or Price, or Possibility.

  Still the bereft Hall smiled, or seemed to, upon visitors, or sons returning, who came down through the ‘chequered shade’ to the door. The Lady of the house, having been apprised, who knows how, of her son’s approach, had already come forth, and now nearly leapt from the steps to embrace him—her smile was as the Sun. Lord Corydon brought forward his friend—who had desired not to interrupt Corydon’s home-coming, but rather to observe it, as a thing new to him, and deserving of study. Lady C. then advanced upon him, her arms open as an Angel’s, and she made him welcome with all her heart. Behind her there came tumbling from the open doors the youngest children of the house, a boy with a hoop, and another with a bow-and-arrow—both fair, both golden—and then, after them, as though conjured by the armed and laughing Cupid who called to her, a Form clad in white and in all the radiance of sixteen years.

  ‘May I present my sister Susanna,’ said Corydon, as though he spoke of a matter of no particular importance, while knowing better.
‘Susanna, I am pleased to introduce Ali, my friend, the son of Lord Sane.’

  ‘Welcome,’ said she to Ali, in that low voice that is ‘an excellent thing in woman’. ‘I am very pleased to meet the friend I have often read about.’

  The gentle pressure of her hand upon his, the glance her sapphire eyes paid him, the commonplace greeting to which he found he could not return even a commonplace reply—what Ali felt need not be named, for even those who have not felt it can name it, its name is ever on the world’s tongue. But Ali’s confusion was due to more than the sweet common cause—for Susanna so resembled her brother that the eye was baffled to look upon them both. Her brother came and linked his arm in hers, and kissed her cheek, and they both smiled upon Ali. They were Eros and Anteros, or more simply the twinned boy & girl in a comedy—a very Viola and Sebastian, interchangeable. It was their sport—as Ali would come to realize—to pretend that they hardly understood their resemblance, and that there was nothing remarkable about them—and yet they delighted in Ali’s bemusement, even as they would not acknowledge it.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ cried Lady Corydon, ‘come in, and refresh yourselves!’ And that admirable Dame swept them all before like goslings before their goose-girl, and even before they had entered in, she had begun upon a gazette of the family’s doings since her beloved Son’s last return.

  That the house was much impoverished did not diminish its warmth, nor its cheer—for Lady Corydon, tho’ it shock’d her neighbours, would not remain in mourning, which she thought did not suit her—nor would she draw her drapes, and shut out the healing Sun—and no diminution of her Income would keep her from filling her house with fruits and sweetmeats in profusion—and lights, good waxen candles—and Music, by means of a Pianoforte, and her children’s voices. Susanna played, and her brother beside her sang, and Ali sat beside Susanna and turned the pages at her nod (for the marks upon them were all a mystery to him) and wished the piece endless—that he might remain always near, yet be under no obligation to speak—which he did not think he could creditably do. ‘If Music be the food of Love, play on,’ as saith that Comedy aforementioned; and if it be so, then they two, Corydon and Susanna, were the true purveyors, indeed the grocers in general—and if it be not so, then what sweets Love does feed upon need not be listed—no, they need not.

  True it was that the house provided little other amusement—but what to one alone might result in ennui and irritation, did not in company—for circumstances change cases—and in the days Ali spent with the inhabitants of Corydon Hall he found an intire and blissful satisfaction. They walked the hills and woods, hand in hand—they look’d out the window, as promised, but since they looked together, cheek by cheek, what they saw was of endless interest. They even enjoy’d Angling, that most witless of pastimes, and with rod and line and net sate by a stream to await, for an hour or two or three by the clock, the approach of some inedible being dull enough to be fooled by their gins—who often as not still escaped unharmed, to swim another day.

  Susanna wish’d to know—as there they waited—what Ali’s story might be, and how he had come among Englishmen, and the scholars of Ida; and she asked so gently, and without prejudice as to an answer, that he told all that he could—for the first time since coming to this Isle—of himself, and his life among the Albanian hills, and his becoming a soldier of the Pacha—leaving aside only tales of such horrid and bloody character as he supposed might cause so fine a being as this to draw away from him. Even so ‘she loved him for the dangers he had passed’, at which she marvelled, and grieved too; and ‘he loved her that she did pity him’. Her brother, of a heart not less tender but always willing to let present happiness annul—nay, to make sport of—distant sorrow, would not by his laughter permit the two to persist long in sentiment.

  ‘You are no Turk, nor Albanian,’ said Corydon, ‘and no foreigner neither, for I perceive you are, as a result of your adventures, nothing at all—neither good nor bad—fish nor fowl—but a blank slate upon which any name may be written—and once written, sponged off again. I would it were my own case!’

  Ali knew not if the gay young man’s thought were true, but a strange new hope dawned in his own heart, as homeward they wended. Thought he: ‘If I am nothing in myself—since all that I might naturally have been was taken from me—then let me be any thing. Let me be what I choose—and change what I choose when I choose to do so!’

  Well might he vow this, in the clear sight of Youthfulness—which indeed sees clearly, though chiefly its own self as it might someday be. Yet the rest of the world would still assign to him but one character—though permitting no outward sign of it, in dress or manner, and truly knowing nothing of it but the Name—and that name was Turk.

  THE SCHOLARS SOON returned to school, with their fellow-blackbirds. Lord Corydon was grateful to be again from home, but Ali cast backward his look, as one expelled from Eden, an Eden whose existence he had not suspected—whose Eve as well he left behind. Did he think not, then, of Iman far away, and was he not reminded, in the sharpness of his present feelings, of that child? No, indeed he was not—except in how he marvelled that he was not—for the knowledge had not yet dawned upon him, that even the most singular of hearts can possess two such fair beings within its compass (the more so, if one be near, & the other far). Moreover, he had for constant companion her Brother, Corydon—and it was as though Ali had two roll’d into One, so much could he see Susanna in her Brother, and hear her in his voice, and feel, in the pressure of his hand, her own.

  Ida absorbed the young men again into its pleasures and its occupations—its strife and struggles too. When again term ended, Ali purposed to avoid his own house, whether his Father were in residence or not—there where he had only the gentle heap of his nominal Mother for a protector—and to walk instead upon the hills of his friends’ pleasant shire. It was during his preparations for this visit, while listening to Lord Corydon’s listing of the sports and feasts they would enjoy there (for it was Christmas, and a pudding and a Goose were not at all unlikely, even in their reduced circumstances, and skating, and a Yule fire), when a Master came for Ali, and took him away to his own study, there to tell him in private certain news—which to his credit, he did with all careful kindness: that his Mother after her long years’ illness had at last given up the ghost, and passed from this vale of tears. Ali found he could make no reply to the Master, who puzzled over what seemed a strange hardness of heart, and bethought him what it showed concerning Ali’s nature and temperament—tho’ he said nothing in words, but only offered all assistance he could, to see that the lad, as were his Father’s instructions, at once started for Scotland and the Abbey, where, as he said, ‘All love and comfort might be found in this his affliction and grief ’: and Ali, unable to respond still, departed.

  When the coach Lord Sane had sent brought him to the Abbey at length, it was not his father who greeted him but Old Jock, who with tears in his eyes conveyed to the lad the tale of Lady Sane’s last days—her prayers for Ali—her fears and sufferings, too, at the approach of Death, for such a one as Old Jock would see no use or good in disguising such mortal facts. Indeed, all that levels distinctions between Laird and Dependent, those common things that all men share, are freely admitted there: where in the South, a gentleman’s griefs, or his mortality, or his boils and his catarrhs for the matter of that, are of a different and superior kind, and not to be mourned or deplored in the same breath as his servant’s, or his sweep’s.

  Leaving Old Jock’s fire-side, Ali sought out his father, who was dressed for a Journey, and seemed to have little time to entertain his son’s questions concerning the woman who had so long been shut up in the upper rooms of the Abbey where now he reigned alone. ‘May I not,’ Ali asked of him, ‘visit the place where she is laid? I cannot think it is too much to ask. She was, after all, my Mother.’

  His father regarded him for a moment, as though he would discern if he were mocked or not. ‘I have pressing business far from h
ere,’ he then said, ‘and may not linger. But if you insist upon the point, I shall accompany you to the vault where she lies, comfortably enough, with her ancestors. Let us be quick, however; the dead, you know, do not resent a brief Obsequy—no, nor nothing else, as I perceive the matter. Ha! Quick, dead: I see I have the makings of an amusing quibble here.’

  He ordered mounts to be saddled, and soon was leading Ali across stubbled fields and over hedges at a dash, as if to cause him to lose heart, or seat—though Ali did neither—till at eve they came to a small and ancient church, so small and ancient as to seem at first but a pile of flints agglomerated by chance, though ’twas in truth the work of pious hands in ages past, and there was a Chancel, and an arched window, and a stair to the vault below. No sexton met them; alone the two went down into the dark, where—it was a trait passed from Father to Son, as few others had been—the acuity of their eyesight made out the forms of Lady Sane’s ancestors, and her own casket, newly squeezed in among the others. Not long indeed did they linger there—they did not pray—they did not speak—though to his eyes and throat Ali felt tears arise, that he had not expected—for her kindness to him, and also at the thought of her long seclusion, bereft of all she loved, and her dim Candle now blown out. Was life no more than this? Did it at death begin again elsewhere, in a sphere where all was light, and activity, and force, and love? She had thought so; he wished, for her, it might be so.

  When they stood once again in the frosty sunlight, Lord Sane regarded the fields before them, his gloved hands clasped behind him and the crop he held twitching like the tail he did not possess. ‘Do not suppose, by the bye,’ said he, ‘that you have gained materially in this Lady’s death. You are indeed the titular heir to her lands, unimproved as she has left them, but you no more than I, have the power to dispose of them. Indeed you may incur greater expense in preserving them to the next Generation, than you will profit by them.’