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CHAPTER 6.
SOUTHWELL AND CAMBRIDGE.
1804—1808.
The Easter holidays of 1804 were spent at Southwell. His mother had taken Burgage Manor, by the side of the green. Nearby was the home of the Pigots, with whom he was soon on friendly terms. He contrived to see a good deal of Elizabeth and John. On one occasion the latter accompanied him on a visit to Harrogate.
John Pigot put a high value upon his friendship. He was convinced that the majority of people failed to understand him, and bore testimony to his having a kind and feeling' heart with not a single spark of malice in his composition.
His home life at Southwell was far from happy. Frequent outbreaks of temper on the part of his mother made his life unbearable. On occasions in her fury she would hurl crockery and firearms at him. His contempt for his mother was growing, and little wonder!
He found some relief in the company of Elizabeth Pigot. She took a kindly interest in him, and it was due to her encouragement that he first gave himself seriously to the writing of poetry.
His first little volume of poems, under the title of Fugitive Pieces, was printed by S. & J. Ridge, of Newark. Was this little book going to bring him fame?
Elizabeth Pigot kindled his hopes, but his hopes were soon dashed to the ground. The Rev. John Becher, whom he met at Southwell, and to whom he sent a presentation copy, was so shocked by the poem “To Mary,” included in the little volume, that he wrote and begged the author to withdraw its publication. It was a hard thing to ask, but Byron generously complied with the wishes of his friend, and with his own hands committed the whole edition, with the exception of the presentation copies sent to the Rev. John Becher and John Pigot, to the flames. He was disappointed, but not discouraged.
In January, 1807, Poems on Various Occasions was ready for publication.
In the same year he published under his own name, Hours of Idleness. This was intended for the larger public. He left Southwell immediately to undertake in London the distribution to the booksellers.
He hoped by this publication to make his name as a poet. The first sales were encouraging. The booksellers were asking for more copies. He was highly elated because the Critical Review “praised him to the skies.”
Robert Charles Dallas, the novelist, who claimed relationship with Byron, wrote after reading Hours of Idleness: “I have read your poems with more pleasure than I can express, and I feel myself irresistibly impelled to pay you a tribute on the effusions of a noble mind in strains so truly poetic.”
Had he at last found his vocation? He was encouraged to think he had, and he was already making plans of work for the future.
Byron went up to Cambridge in the October term of 1805. The Court of Chancery made him a generous allowance of £500 a year out of his revenues. The satisfaction that this brought to him was that it enabled him to be entirely independent of his mother, “It is my serious determination,” he wrote, “never again to visit or be upon any friendly terms with her.”
The rooms assigned to him in College were in Nevile’s Court, which had a cloister running right round it. These he set about furnishing with an extravagance which he thought would be befitting his rank.
He soon found his own set, and fell into extravagant ways. It was not the fashion to work. Why should he not do as others did, and have a good time? Drinking and gambling were the order of the day, or rather the order of the night; why should he not indulge? He hated gambling—he hated drinking—but he found satisfaction in posing as a drinker when he was not a wine-bibber— in posing as a gambler when he was not a card-player. It all helped him to forget the pain of disappointment.
How different everything might have been, if only Fate had not denied him the desire of his heart! What did it matter—this life of dissipation? What would it lead to? He did not, care. “I had no coolness, nor judgment, nor calculation,” he said. How could it be otherwise, when the inspiration of his life was gone. If at first his evenings were spent in revelry, his mornings were spent in riding, and his afternoons in swimming. The companion of his sport was his friend of Harrow days, Edward Noel Long, who was a great swimmer. It was his delight to accompany his friend to a deep pool in the River Cam, dive into fourteen feet of water, and bring up from the river bed a plate or a coin.
In one direction Long’s influence over him was for good, and as their friendship became more intimate, Byron gradually withdrew from the society of his other associates. Long was a musician—he played the flute and cello well, and Byron derived considerable pleasure from listening to him. He would sit in silent reverie—the rhythms of music suggested to him, perhaps, the rhythms of verse, and it may have been here that the spirit of the Muse seized upon him, and that he became first conscious of his vocation.
At the end of 1806 Byron found himself hopelessly in debt. The allowance which the Court of Chancery made to him of £500 a year, and which he himself at first thought generous, proved to be quite inadequate. He had lived at the height of extravagance, and when he found himself in financial difficulties, he wrote to his lawyer, Hanson, demanding an additional sum from the Court of Chancery. The Attorney would not yield, and wrote rebuking him for his extravagance. Whereupon Byron replied that, if he were not given money to liquidate his debts, he would resort to money-lenders. He carried out his threat, and with the help of his half-sister, Augusta, whom since 1804 he had made his confidante, and with whom he had affectionately corresponded, he had no difficulty in negotiating a loan. He was still a minor, and the moneylenders required the signature of a relative of full age to cover their risk. It was for this reason that Byron sought the assistance of Augusta, and she gave him her signature.
He was able to borrow several hundreds of pounds, went down from Cambridge, and lived at 16 Piccadilly, London, until the Spring, when he returned to the University.
At this time he made the acquaintance of Jackson, the pugilist, and Angelo, the fencer. He spent a great part of his time with them, enjoying the violent exercise with which they provided him, and by which he was able, to his great satisfaction, to reduce his weight. He took Jackson and Angelo back to Cambridge with him in the Spring, and continued his lessons in boxing and fencing.
It must not be thought that his time at Cambridge was entirely wasted. A superficial observation of his Cambridge years reveals a young nobleman, living a life of extravagance and, at times, of dissipation, the prey of irresponsible fancies, without ambition, and with little sense of obligation either to himself or anyone else. This was his pose, an apparent negligence of his opportunities. In actual fact he was working hard. He indulged his appetite for reading, which was prodigious, upon every possible occasion, and he was all the time preparing himself to be a poet. His soul was being stirred within him, but the real Byron was hidden from the eyes of men.
The first reception of Hours of Idleness, as we have said, was encouraging, and Byron was cultivating an inflated opinion of himself and his poems. It was, therefore, a very wholesome thing for him that he had to face up to the smashing criticism of the Edinburgh Review. He had been warned that it was coming, and he prepared himself for the onslaught. We can well imagine, however, what it must have meant to Byron, with his peculiar temperament and sensitiveness, to take up the February, 1808, number of the Review and read:
The criticism continues in the bitterest terms, and concludes with some railing at the tone of Byron’s preface:
This criticism was cruel and undignified, and altogether unworthy of a publication of standing.
It is not known who was responsible for this “abominable article.” Byron believed it to be Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, but in all probability it was Lord Brougham, who was famed for his malicious criticisms.
Byron was stunned when he first read this criticism of his poem, but he soon recovered himself. Years after
wards he wrote to Shelley—“I recollect its effect on me— it was rage and resistance and redress; but not despondency or despair.” He tells Murray that it knocked him down, but he got up again.
Byron was a fighter. It was altogether against his nature to allow such an attack to pass. He would enter the lists with his enemies and wield with deadly effect that weapon in the use of which he was a pastmaster—the weapon of scathing satire. He set to work to prepare his first work of real note, the fierce diatribe English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. It underwent several revisions, and was at last published in March, 1809. Its success was immediate. The first edition of a thousand copies was sold out in a very short time. It was published anonymously, but the author’s name was generally known. The work itself showed real genius. It revealed the fire and the spirit of the author, and by the time the fourth edition had been sold, Byron repented of his attack on living authors, with some of whom he had become friendly, and refused to allow a republication. His weapon of satire had been used too ruthlessly, and he came himself to look upon English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as “a miserable record of misplaced anger and indiscriminate acrimony.”
Most of it had been written at Newstead, and the table upon which he wrote it is still at the Priory, and is, shown in the illustration of the Poet’s bedroom.