Lord Byron Was Pitiless!

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 124, 28 May 1938, Page 9 (Supplement)

Lord Byron Was Pitiless!

GEORGE GORDON, Lord Byron, was not only a great poet, he was a great breaker of women's hearts. His amorous adventures were as many and discreditable as those of the legendary Don Juan, whom he immortalised. He had no pity on women. He dazzled them with his wit and ardour, made passionate love to them . . . and threw them aside with as little remorse as ordinary men would feel in removing' a wilting flower from a button-hole. What made him at once so great a pursuer and so preat an enemy of women? The chance remark of one girl. At the age of 15, already a peer, although his early years had been darkened by poverty, he fell madly in love with a girl two years his senior. She was Mary Ann Chaworth, who lived near his family seat, Newstead Abbey. Every year throughout the summer of 1803 he palloped over to see her at Annesley. Eveiy day they sat on a hillside, and the girl smiled coquettishly while the boy poured out his heart. But there came a morning when young Byron overheard his divinity talking to her maid, and in an instant his dream was shattered. "You don't think I eould really care anything for that lame boy?" said Mary Ann Chaworth. That reference to the crippled foot with which he had been cursed from birth pierced him to his soul. He had seen Mary as a goddess. She had seen him merely as a limping adolescent, amusing as a swain only until a real man came along. From that date he became even more cynical about women than his dissolute father, John Byron, had been. He refused to regard them as the equals of men. "They are pretty, but inferior creatures ... grown-up children," he wrote. ••' • • At Cambridge he plunged into social life. He took up boxing and swimming . . . but the sport he loved best was the pursuit and conquest of women. Now that he was a man, with a title, an arrogant look on his handsome face, and a pretty taste in words, his crippled foot went unnoticed. It even added to his dark charm. His reputation as a rake grew, and as the flame burned brighter more and more .pretty moths fluttered around it and presently fell with singed wings. The success of his poetry made him a social lion. Every hostess in London begged him to grace her parties. One night at Lady Westmorland's house he met Coraline Lamb, wife of the man who was to become Lord Melbourne. She thought he looked like a Greek status, but in her diary she wrote: "Mad, bad and dangerous to know."

Nevertheless, she threw everything at his feet, offering him even her jewels. They spent the greater part of that year together. . .' . She Tras hypnotised, enslaved. She arranged parties for him, worshipped him openly —and finally bored him with too much devotion. When ho told her in his cold way that it was over, she tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide. She could not believe it. She pestered him, grovelled before him, and he shook his head. He had no pity on women. Fate punished him for his cruelty with equal cruelty. He fell in love with his half-sister, Augusta, wife of a rake named Colonel Leigh. Augusta fell in love with him, too. They were affinities. A child was born. . . . And then the strange pair reached a strange decision. Byron must marry! He proposed to Annabelia, daughter of Sir Ralph and Lady Milbanke, and she, dazzled luce all other women by his dark personality and poetic genius—• now in full flower—accepted him and counted herself the luckiest woman in the world to have won such a husband.

They were married in 1815 and spent what Byron called their "treacle-moon" at Halnaby, near Darlington. That "romance" lasted just over a year, and then Annabella left him because of his angry moods and his affairs with other women. Society sided with her. From all sides came accusations against Byron, true and false. He was a traitor, a renegade, a libertine addicted to every repulsive vice. He was driven abroad into exile . . . driven away to write the poetry that was to make him immortal. Over Europe he limped. Gibraltar— Malta — Constantinople — Athens. He wore flamboyant clothes, behaved outrageously. "If they say I am a mad, vile reprobate, I will be one," seemed to have been his attitude. There was Ma °..nna Segati, wife of a Venice draper. She lasted a year in his palace on the Grand Canal. There was Margarita Cogni, a baker's wife, whose violence frightened off all possible rivals until Byron finally turned her out.

There were many others, including women of the most depraved type as well as haughty patricians. Almost last of all came Teresa. Teresa, Countess of Guiccioli, already had a husband, but a little thing like that never worried Byron. Although he was growing podgy and bloated, he fascinated her a* he had fascinated scores of other women. She did not keep the liaison a secret. She told everybody, blasted of it. She even brought Byron to stay with her and her husband at Ravenna. At length, however, the complaisant husband rebelled. He offered Teresa the choice between husband and lover. She chose the lover. Byron resumed his wanderings with Teresa at his side. He was prematurely old, the fierce flame was burning out, and he no longer philandered with his old ardour. They were together for five years, and for most of that time Byron was heartily bored with her. Yet for once he iiad compassion and did not cast her aside. He even indulged her whims. When she begged him to discontinue his "Don Juan" because it was licentious, he agreed to end it respectably.

When, as often happened, they quarrelled, he sought to pacify her instead of forgetting her with another woman. It was, of course, too much to expect that he would be entirely faithful to her for five years. There were minor peccadilloes. But he was reforming. He was developing a conscience, and supporting lost causes. He became a passionate supporter of Greece against the Turks. He loved Greece with the ardour which he had formerly reserved for women. He went to Athens to help in the war against Turkish domination, and it vas in Greece a little later that he died of a chill. "England has lost her brightest genius —Greece her noblest friend," hope. And womankind had lost its most din- ; gcrons enemy, Venus her most ardent devotee ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦