In reality, however, the long drawn-out drama was near its close. Unknown alike to William and to Caroline, the fates had decided to cut the coil which for so many years had bound them, one to another, in wretched conjunction. The ordeal of the separation marked an epoch in Caroline’s life. For the agitations it involved had put a fatal final strain on her already worn-out constitution. At last her amazing vitality began to ebb. From this time on, in a dying fall, a strange muted tranquillity, her storm-tossed career declined swiftly to its period. Once, during the first few months after her return to Brocket, a glimpse of the old Caroline showed itself. Bulwer had become engaged to a Miss Wheeler. And Caroline, partly from pique at his fickleness, partly because she saw the theatrical possibilities inherent in the situation, invited Miss Wheeler to Brocket, where she staged a little scene: Caroline, an experienced woman of the world, with kindly wisdom warns Miss Wheeler, an innocent girl, against the perfidy of men. “Don’t let Edward Bulwer let you down,” she adjured her ominously, “they are a bad set.” This piece of sentimental comedy, however, was a faint echo indeed of the thundering melodramas of Caroline’s prime. And it was the last echo. After this her days passed in eventless rural monotony. “How can I write,” she tells a friend, “even imagination must have some material on which to work. I have none. Passion might produce sentiment of some sort. But mine are all calmed or extinct . . . Memory—a waste with nothing in it worth recording! Happy, healthy, contented, quiet, I get up at half past four, ride about with Hazard, see harvesters at work in the pretty green confined country; read a few old books, see no one, hear from no one.” No longer did her spirit leap out at the call of fame; no longer did she combat hostile fate in baffled rage, or seek to forget it in the brandy bottle. Instead, profoundly weary, she lay back clinging to the comfort of safe homely innocent things, conscious only of a numbed longing to be at peace. So great a change in the direction of her desires brought with it an equal change in her character. The fury of her egotism dwindled with the vitality of which it was the expression. A child always, she was now a tired child, gentle and submissive, pathetically terrified of annoying people, stretching out her arms to be soothed and cherished. Frederic and Emily, driving over from Panshanger to pay her a visit, found all their age-old hostility towards her melting away: Caroline appeared so sincerely, so touchingly anxious to behave as they wanted. Still more did she want to behave as William wanted. For, as the fever of her maturity left her, so also did the memory of its preoccupations. Bulwer, Webster, Byron himself were as though they had never been: and the old first love, fresh and single as in honeymoon days, brimmed back into her heart. By this time William’s life had begun to change; in April, 1827, he was given an official appointment in Ireland. While he was there she wrote to him continually, naïve careful letters, asking him assiduously about his life, detailing the little facts of hers, and without a word about her own feelings. Alas, he had suffered too deeply at her hands to be able to respond with the same ardour. She had broken something in him that could never be mended. But when he saw the change in her, a generous tenderness welled up in his spirit that washed away any trace of bitterness that might lurk there. He answered her letters with affectionate kindness, saved up such scraps of news as he thought might entertain her, encouraged any plan of hers that seemed likely to give her pleasure.
“My dear Caroline,” runs a typical letter, “I am very much obliged to you for your letters—and much pleased with them—I never knew you more rational or quiet, and you say nothing which doesn’t give me great pleasure—Matters are a little uncertain in the political world, but at any rate I think a tour to Paris would do you good, provided you can avoid making scamps of acquaintance, which is your great fault and danger—I went down to dine at Bellevue; where I saw Mr. Peter La Touche, 94 years old past—he dined with us. Mrs. La Touche had tried to persuade him not, but he was determined upon it. They keep him on a strict regimen of sherry and water, but if he can get at a bottle of wine now he drinks it off in a crack—there is a fine old cod for you.” . . .
It is significant of the strength of the bond that bound him to her, that now Caroline was no longer provoking him, he began at once to try and excuse her to himself on the old plea. Other people, not she, were responsible for her errors: Let her avoid making friends with scamps, and he was only too anxious for her to go herself to Paris or anywhere else if she fancied it might make her happy. But there was to be no more travelling for her in this world. As the year advanced, her health began to exhibit alarming symptoms. In October, 1827, the doctors reported her to be dangerously ill of dropsy. From the first Caroline was sure her case was hopeless. But the conviction did not disperse her calm. On the contrary, her spirit rose to meet its stern ordeal; and, face to face with death, that streak of genuine nobility, which a lifetime of folly had not succeeded in wholly eradicating from her nature, showed itself as never before. She did not, indeed, give up dramatizing herself; she would not have been Caroline if she had. Appreciating to the full the pathos of her situation, she rallied all her strength in the effort to stage a death scene which should do her credit. Still, there is something heroic in a sense of the stage that is unquelled by the presence of death itself; and moreover the role, in which Caroline chose to make her last appearance before the world, was for once worthy of the heroine she had so long aspired to be. She showed no fear; she sought refuge neither in self-deception nor self-pity. Though racked with suffering, she lay hour by hour through the darkening autumn days, quiet and unmurmuring; her chief concern to convince others, in the short time that remained to her, how sorry she was for the needless suffering she had brought on them. “Dearest Maria,” she writes to Lady Duncannon, her eldest brother’s wife, “as I cannot sit up, I am obliged to use a pencil . . . I consider my painful illness as a great blessing—I feel returned to my God and duty and my dearest husband: and my heart which was so proud and insensible is quite overcome with the great kindness I receive—I have brought myself to be quite another person and broke that hard spell which prevented me saying my prayers; so that if I were better, I would go with you and your dear children to church. I say all this, dearest Maria, lest you should think I flew to Religion because I was in danger—it is no such thing, my heart is softened, I see how good and kind others are, and I am quite resigned to die. I do not myself think there is a chance for me.” And to Lady Morgan, with a flash of her old bewitching whimsicality, she says, “I am on my death-bed: say I might have died by a diamond, I die now by a brickbat: but remember the only noble fellow I ever met with is William Lamb. He is to me what Shore was to Jane Shore.” For, now at this final crisis of her troubled history, it was William who more than ever filled her thoughts. His name was always on her lips; she still wrote to him regularly and with no word of complaint—she who was used to complain so often and so groundlessly—and she besought the doctors not to tell him of her condition lest it might be a worry to him. There was no concealing it however. Lady Morgan, visiting Ireland, saw him one evening sunk in black depression at the news. A day or two later, he sent her the doctor’s report with a covering note. “It is with great pain I send you the enclosed. It is some consolation that she is now relieved from pain: but illness is a terrible thing.” To Caroline herself, when she rallied a little, he wrote with an emotion all the more poignant for the reserve with which it is expressed. “My dear C, I received your little line yesterday; and later received with great pleasure Dr. Goddard’s account that you were a little better. My heart is almost broken that I cannot come over directly: but your brother, to whom I have written, will explain to you the difficult situation in which I am placed. How unfortunate and melancholy that you should be so ill now, and that it should be at a time when I, who have had so many years of idleness, am so fixed and held down by circumstances.”
His ordeal was not to be protracted. In December Caroline, now removed by medical advice to London, was visibly sinking. It was noticed that she spoke with difficul
ty and that she seemed unable to take in what was going on round her. By the middle of January, it became clear that the end was near. Then only “Send for William,” she whispered with a last effort of her spent forces, “he is the only person who has never failed me.” He did not fail her now. Within a few days he had arrived at Melbourne House. And alone behind closed doors, they spoke to one another for the last time. It was for this only she had waited. A day or two later, her sister-in-law, Mrs. George Lamb, watching by her still form, heard a little sigh. She looked more closely: Caroline was dead.
William was out of the room at the time. When he was told the news he was sunk for a day or two in grief. Then, to all appearance his usual self, he went back to work. But this was no sign of insensibility. Sad experience had taught him that no purpose is served by unavailing lamentation: “solitude and retirement cherish grief,” he once wrote to a bereaved friend, “employment and exertion are the only means of dissipating it.” In reality Caroline’s death affected him profoundly. Detached from her as he had learnt to make himself, painful and frustrated as his feeling towards her had grown to be, it yet remained different in kind from what he felt towards anyone else. “In spite of all,” he was to say in later days, “she was more to me than anyone ever was, or ever will be.” For years afterward the mere mention of her name brought tears into his eyes; and plunged him into melancholy reverie. “Shall we meet?” he would be heard murmuring to himself, “shall we meet in another world?”
* * *
5 The agent at Brocket.
Chapter Nine
The Finished Product
But this is to anticipate. In 1826 William’s life was still at a standstill. So far as outward circumstances were concerned, it was unchanged since 1816. All the same these ten years had not been unimportant in his history. Frustrated of active outlet, his energies concentrated themselves on the development of his inner man. It was high time. For though he had been a precocious youth, at about twenty-six he had begun to mark time. The perturbations of his marriage, the preoccupations of his social and political life, required so much of his vitality as to leave little over for the maturing of mind and personality. Besides he was the sort of character that, in any circumstances, does not come of age till middle life. His nature was composed of such diverse elements that it took a long time to fuse them into a stable whole. Certainly he needed some slow blank period in which to digest his experience. These ten years were a bit of luck for him, whether he realized it or not.
In the first place they gave his intelligence space to develop. During this period he read omnivorously. No more than at Cambridge was it an orderly sort of reading. From Pindar to Shakespeare, from Thucydides to St. Augustine, from French to Latin, from philosophy to novels, he turned as the fancy took him. But the very diversity of his fancy meant that he covered a great deal of ground. And if his reading was unsystematic, it was the very opposite of superficial. He pondered, he compared, he memorized; the Elizabethan drama, for instance, he knew so well that he could repeat by heart whole scenes not only of Shakespeare but of Massinger; the margins of his books were black with the markings of his flowing illegible hand. He educated himself outside the library as well. When he was shooting—he loved the sport and was often out six hours a day—he took the opportunity to observe the habits of the wild creatures and note them down. On a landlord’s ride round his father’s property he would pick up information about agriculture, committing it to his memory for future reference. And he thought as much as he observed. More, in fact; for, to William, information was only interesting in so far as it illustrated a universal law. It was the nature of his mind to argue from the particular to the general; and he kept a commonplace book, in which he noted down the generalizations that were always springing to his mind. Sometimes they were the fruit of his reading:
“Never disregard a book because the author of it is a foolish fellow.”
“A curious book might be made of the great actions performed by actors whose names had not been preserved, the glories of the anonymous.”
We find him speculating as to why it is, that the spirit of a past period, so vivid in an original document, evaporates completely in the process of translation; or comparing the attitude of the Greeks to Alcibiades, with that of the English to Fox. He made it a rule, if a passage in a book started a train of thought in his mind, to pursue it to its conclusion, and then jot this down before he forgot it: At other times his reflections are the product of his personal experience. He had seen a great deal of human nature in his time. Now he began to meditate on it. Why did people get married? How did they manage their incomes? What was the secret of their success or failure? What fundamentally are the prevailing forces in public and private life? The pages of his book are littered with questionings and generalizations on these subjects. As time passed the different aspects of his thought began to connect themselves one with another; the wisdom he had acquired from books, to relate itself to the wisdom he had acquired from life. Gradually his scattered reflections composed themselves into a philosophy, his unconsciously acquired point of view built up for itself a conscious intellectual basis and justification.
Along with this mental development, went a development of character. The lessons of experience sank in and began to modify his native disposition; insensibly he began to control such impulses in himself as were inconsistent with what he believed, to give rein to those that his intelligence approved. Time, too, did its work on him; stripping his nature of such characteristics as were merely youthful and superficial, sharpening and stabilizing those that were of its essence. Slowly, the difficult process of maturity accomplished itself; bit by bit William’s temperament and his intelligence, the influence of his heredity and his education, of his married life, his social life, and his public life, integrated themselves into a completed personality. At forty-seven he was at last, the William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, of later days. As it is in this character that he cuts a figure in English history, it may be permitted to us to pause for a moment, and examine it in greater detail.
To look at he was extremely prepossessing, “handsome, verging to portly,” said an observer, “with a sweet countenance and an expression of refined, easy, careless good humour. He was too well-bred to seem unpleasantly sensual; but his whole person, expression and manner showed a pleasure-loving nature, indulgent to himself and to others.” Indeed, age, while abating little of the sparkle of his youthful good looks, had enriched them with a new mellowness. His well-cut countenance radiated the comfortable glow that comes from years of good living; beneath his thick greying brows the eyes gleamed out, brilliant as ever, but with an added softness of geniality. His demeanour was of a piece with his appearance. There is no more talk of his arrogance or self-consciousness. Natural talent had united with long experience to make him the perfect man of the world, whose manners, at once unobtrusive and accomplished, could handle the most delicate situation with light-handed mastery, and shed round every conversation an atmosphere of delightful ease. Yet there was nothing studied about him. On the contrary, the first thing that struck most people meeting him was that he was surprisingly, eccentrically natural. Abrupt and casual, he seemed to saunter through life, swearing when he pleased, laughing when he pleased—with an odd infectious explosive “ha, ha!”—sprawling about in chairs, taking his meals with unashamed relish, and jerking out anything apparently that came into his head. It was his frankness that, above all, astonished. On the most dignified occasions, solemn political councils, stiff social gatherings, when everybody else was guarded or stilted, William Lamb talked exactly as if he were at home; came out, in lazy, flippant, colloquial tones, with some candid comment that made the whole pompous pretence immediately ridiculous.
His habits were equally unconventional. He was full of queer idiosyncrasies of behaviour: gleeful rubbings together of his hands if he were amused, odd ejaculations, “eh, eh!,” before he made a remark; and, a curious gestur
e, passing a finger to the back of his head while he was talking. His letters were folded and sealed anyhow; the pockets of his beautifully-cut coats bulged with a confusion of papers and bank notes; he never could be bothered with a watch, but would just shout to a passing servant to tell him the time; he went to sleep when and wherever the mood took him; in a fit of absent-mindedness he would start talking to himself in the midst of a company of strangers. Indeed, though they liked him, people found him perplexing in more ways than one. Here we come to his third salient characteristic. He was mysterious. It was partly that, for all his apparent frankness, he was discreet. Persons coming away from an interview with him, in which he had seemed to talk with complete candour, would suddenly realize that he had not given himself away on any point that really mattered. On the contrary they wondered nervously if they had not given themselves away to him. His air of idle nonchalance lulled them at first into thinking he noticed little. But then, looking up at him by chance, they would perceive, darting out beneath the half-closed lids, a keen glance that seemed to penetrate to their very hearts.
But most of all his point of view baffled them. His conversation was fascinating; the fine flower of Whig agreeability, at once light and learned, civilized and spontaneous, but made individual by the play of his whimsical fancy and the gusto of his good spirits—“There was a glee in his mirth,” it was remarked, “indescribably charming.” But the spirit, the intention behind the discourse—ah, that was elusive. Was William Lamb serious? Certainly he sometimes seemed to be. He would talk ardently on the most solemn subjects, political principle, the doctrines of Christianity. Yet within a few minutes he was conversing with equal animation in a different and less edifying strain. He had the typical eighteenth-century enjoyment of animal humour; “Now,” he would say with zest as the dining-room doors shut on the ladies, leaving the gentlemen to their wine, “now we can talk broad.” And even on serious subjects his tone was ambiguous. Its salient characteristic was irony, a mischievous, enigmatic irony, that played audaciously over the most sacred topics, leaving its hearer very much in doubt whether William Lamb thought them sacred at all. Paradox, too, was of the fibre of his talk. He loved to defend the indefensible. “What I like about the Order of the Garter,” he once remarked, “is that there is no damned merit about it.” Much as he appreciated poetry, he professed to welcome the news of a poet’s death. “It is a good thing when these authors die,” he confided, “for then one gets their works, and is done with them.” His paradoxes grew bolder the more astonishment they created. If he was talking to anyone who struck him as a prig or a humbug, they would pile themselves wickedly one on the other, till his bewildered interlocutor relapsed into shocked silence. Indeed, William’s whole personality was a paradox. Racy and refined, sensible and eccentric, cynical and full of sentiment, direct and secretive, each successive impression he made seemed to contradict the last.
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