Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron

She had cast aside the remainder of Byron’s packet with her shawl, and the pages were scattered on the floor. I bent to retrieve them.

“Lady Oxford,” I attempted. “There is more he has written here—a further communication—”

She glanced at the sheets I held, and her lips curled. “It is only the last of that wretched poem to his dead Leila,” she said. “I suppose he has been scribbling away at it, under the light of a single oil lamp, at Brighton Camp. Here—” she moved swiftly to the writing desk placed beneath her bedroom window, and gathered a sheaf of pages together. “Here is the entire work, fresh from the Genius’s pen. Keep it, if you like, Miss Austen—sell it, if the spirit moves you. I shall not look into The Giaour again.”

AND SO TONIGHT, AFTER A MOST RESTFUL DINNER WITH Henry, I curled up in bed to read Lord Byron’s epic poem, of a hareem maiden drowned alive in a canvas sack, for the crime of loving another than her master.

A revenge tale , Lady Oxford had called it, but the opening lines gave little hint of this. They were rather a paean to Greece as it must once have been, before the yoke of Turkish rule.

Fair clime! Where every season smiles

Benignant o’er those blessed isles ,

Which, seen from far Colonna’s height ,

Make glad the heart that hails the sight ,

And lend to loneliness delight .

I sighed.

There was a great deal more of such stuff, about the Tyrant’s bitter lash, and the Eden of the Eastern Waves that once was Greece, and so on. I had an idea of Byron looking about him during his travels in Attic climes, and seeing only what he could despise—a race of men far different from himself, that he might ennoble in his verse, and yet regard as undoubtedly inferior. My Naval brothers, Frank and Charles, had been sailing about the globe for most of their lives, and the excellent sense of their observations, in the letters each faithfully sent home, was greatly to be preferred to this . However—I could not imagine a roomful of young girls, only just embarked on their first London Season, swooning at the excitements of my brothers’ letters; while they should certainly suffer palpitations at:

Though like a Demon of the night

He passed, and vanished from my sight ,

His aspect and his air impressed

A troubled memory on my breast ,

And long upon my startled ear

Rung his dark courser’s hoofs of fear…

Yes, there would be countless young girls who should take the dark courser’s hoofs of fear to bed with them, and read long into the night by their flickering candles—if Byron lived to see The Giaour published.

I could not think it entirely certain that he would .

“You will hardly credit it, I know,” Henry had said over dinner, “but the Regent appeared at Miss Twining’s funeral, and so far condescended as to spend a half-hour over the cold collation in the Officers’ Mess.”

“As I understand it, His Royal Highness is the very last man to forgo a meal,” I retorted, “however melancholy the occasion. Did he have anything intelligent to say on the tragedy?”

“Only to assure the General that Justice should be served as soon as may be, and the scoundrel Byron punished for his sins.”

“—Lest he cast a shadow of murderous doubt over the sanctity of the Pavilion, and its unmentionable tunnels. So Lord Byron is to be assumed guilty until proven innocent, in the best English tradition. And General Twining?” I enquired keenly. “How did he appear?”

My brother hesitated. “I must suppose that grief takes each of us in different ways—and that it is impossible for any man to judge another’s heart—but he looked very oddly, Jane. Cold, and severe, and as tho’ he stood in judgement upon the remains of the poor creature going into the earth before him. One might have thought he blamed Catherine for having been murdered—that the manner of her death embarrassed , rather than destroyed him.”

“I should have expected little else.”

“He almost hurried the attendant company out of the churchyard when poor old Smalls had done—the man fairly sobbed his way through the service—and seemed impatient the full hour he was required to converse with the mourners at the collation.”

“How dreadful,” I mused, “to be the sort of man to take consolation solely in his pride . All else may be sacrificed—human warmth, love, compassion in the face of weakness. I begin to think we were very fortune in our father, Henry. However little of wealth or station George Austen may have possessed—he did not set himself up as God over others; and there must be a good deal of temptation in that way, for a clergyman.”

Later, as I read Byron’s verse by candle-light, I found The Giaour had much to say on the matter of Judgement, and playing at God; and as I had not yet come to Leila, and was growing sleepy, I determined to push on. It had been a shockingly wearisome day.

—And here was a description of the poet’s jaded heart. Had Lady Oxford read it? I wondered. And was it meant for her—or Caro Lamb—or Catherine Twining?

The lovely toy so fiercely sought

Hath lost its charm by being caught ,

For every touch that wooed its stay

Hath brushed its brightest hues away ,

Till charm and hue, and beauty gone ,

’ Tis left to fly or fall alone .

All that I had read thus far had been written long before the events of the past week—the description of Hassan’s court, and the scented gardens with their plashing fountains where Leila reposed; the flight of the brooding Giaour, whom Leila had loved at her peril—

For she was flown her master’s rage

In likeness of a Georgian page ,

And far beyond the Moslem’s power

Had wronged him with the faithless Giaour…

Yes, there would be innumerable mammas forbidding their daughters to read anything remotely penned by Byron in the coming winter, lest the rage for dressing up as a young boy should overcome an entire generation.…

And here was the murder.

Sullen it plunged, and slowly sank ,

The calm wave rippled to the bank;

__________

I gazed, till vanishing from view ,

Like lessening pebble it withdrew;

________

And all its hidden secrets sleep ,

Known but to Genii of the deep…

I shuddered, and closed my eyes. Byron had certainly written these lines before Catherine Twining was murdered. Unlike the scraps Lady Oxford had shown me a few days before, or the ones lately delivered to her boudoir, these pages were penned in fair copy, without correction, and thus must represent finished verse. He had written it, and then the drowned girl had been delivered, in her sack, like Leila to his bed.…

The conviction grew stronger within me that the revenge tragedy was not of Byron’s seeking; it had been visited upon him, by one who hated him profoundly—or, hated, perhaps, the victim….

I turned over the successive verses. There were more than a thousand lines, by my estimation, most penned in black ink. But here, at the bottom of the pile, were words less neatly scrawled—lines penned at random, in the discomfort of a gaol, with much crossing out and revision, written in blue ink … and on the very last page, the word emphatically placed:

FINIS

He had finished it, then, on the day of Leila’s funeral.

I worked through these final pages, struggling to pick the sense from the alterations—the true words from the discarded—the rhythm and flow of poetry from amidst the lumber-room of Byron’s mind. For a writer such as myself, accustomed to reading pages that were fitful starts at best, before the typesetter’s art gave a neater appearance to my prose, it did not prove too taxing; but my eyes were growing tired in the poor light of the single candle.