Allegra

IN these Wordsworthian lines Shelley describes Lord Byron’s little daughter Allegra, then under two years of age ; and the word “ toy ” —so keenly suggestive of both the poetic and the masculine point of view — has in this case an unconscious and bitter significance. Allegra was a toy at which rude hands plucked violently, until death lifted her from their clutches, and hid her away in the safety and dignity of the tomb. “She is more fortunate than we are,” said her father, with a noble and rare lapse into simplicity, and the words were the truest spoken. Never did a little child make a happier escape from the troublesome burden of life.

In the winter of 1816 a handsome, vivacious, dark-eyed girl called on Lord Byron in London, and begged him to use his influence in obtaining for her an engagement at Drury Lane. She was precisely the type of young woman who seeks a career on the stage, or in any other field, without regard to qualification and without the burden of study. She gave her name as Claire Clairmont, — which was prettier than the unromantic “Jane ” by which she had been known from infancy, — and she added that her stepfather was William Godwin, whose daughter Mary had fled to Europe eighteen months before with the poet Shelley. As a fact, she had been their companion in flight ; and their inexplicable folly in taking her with them was punished — as folly always is —with a relentless severity seldom accorded to crime. To the end of Shelley’s life Miss Clairmont continued to be a source of irritation and anxiety.

No engagement at Drury Lane was procurable ; but the acquaintance between Lord Byron and the infatuated girl ripened all too quickly into passion. The glamour of the poet’s fame gave a compelling power to that fatal beauty which was his undoing. When we read what men have written about Byron’s head ; when we recall the rhapsodies of Moore, the reluctant praise of Trelawny, the eloquence of Coleridge ; when we remember that Scott — the sanest man in Great Britain — confessed ruefully that Byron’s face was a thing to dream of, we are the less surprised that women should have flung themselves at his feet in a frenzy of self-surrender which a cold legacy of busts and portraits does little to explain. Miss Clairmont, to use Professor Dowden’s poetic phraseology, “was lightly whirled out of her regular orbit. ” When Byron left England she met him at Geneva, — still under the care of Shelley and Mary Godwin, — and the following winter her little daughter was born.

It was a blue-eyed baby of exceptional loveliness. Mrs. Shelley (Mary Godwin had been married to the poet on the death of his wife, two months earlier) fills her letters with praises of its beauty, though by this time she was sadly weary of her stepsister’s companionship. Her diary — all these young people kept diaries with uncommendable industry — abounds in notes illustrative of Claire’s ill temper and of her own chronic irritation : “Clara imagines that I treat her unkindly.” “Clara in an ill humor. ” “Jane¹ gloomy. ” “Jane for some reason refuses to walk. ” “Jane is not well, and does not speak the whole day.”

This was bad enough, but there were other moods more trying than mere sulkiness. Miss Clairmont possessed nerves. She had “the horrors” when King Lear was read aloud. She was, or professed to be, in fear of ghosts. She would come downstairs in the middle of the night to tell Shelley that an invisible hand had lifted her pillow from her bed and dumped it on a chair. To such thrilling recitals the poet lent much serious attention. “Her manner,” he wrote in his journal, “convinced me that she was not deceived. We continued to sit by the fire, at intervals engaged in awful conversation relative to the nature of these mysteries ; ” that is, the migrations of the pillow. As a result of sympathetic treatment, Claire would wind up the night with hysterics, writhing in convulsions on the floor and shrieking dismally, until poor Mrs. Shelley was summoned from a sick-bed to soothe her to slumber. “ Give me a garden, and absentia Claire, and I will thank my love for many favors, ” is the weary comment of the wife, after months of inextinguishable agitation.

There was no loophole of escape, however, from a burden so rashly shouldered. Miss Clairmont could not and would not live with her mother, Mrs. Godwin, — “a very disgusting woman, and wears green spectacles, ” is Charles Lamb’s description of this lady, whom, in common with most of her acquaintances, he cordially hated. But when Byron wrote, offering to receive and provide for his daughter, Mrs. Shelley determined that the child should be sent to him. Claire consented, and the journey to Italy in the spring of 1818 was undertaken mainly as a sure though expensive means of conveying the infant to its father.

A delicate baby, not yet sixteen months old, proved a formidable and inharmonious addition to the poet’s Venetian household. Byron was sorely perplexed by the situation, and when Mrs. Hoppner, the Swiss wife of the English consul-general, offered to take temporary charge of the child, he gladly and gratefully consented. That he wanted Allegra there is no doubt, nor that he was already deeply concerned for her most uncertain future. Over and over again in his letters he dwells upon his plans for her education and settlement. He was at all times sternly practical and pitilessly clear-sighted. He never regarded his daughter as a “lovely toy,” but as a very serious and troublesome responsibility. The poetic view of childhood failed to commend itself to him. “ Any other father, ” wrote Claire bitterly, “would have made of her infancy a sweet idyl of flowers and innocent joy.” Byron was not idyllic. He dosed Allegra with quinine when she had a fever. He abandoned a meditated journey because she was ill. He dismissed a servant who had let her fall. He added a codicil to his will, bequeathing her five thousand pounds. These things do not indicate any stress of emotion, but they have their place in the ordinary calendar of parental cares.

One difficulty in his path he had not failed to foresee, — that Claire, having relinquished Allegra of her own free will, would quickly want her back again. In fact, before the end of the summer Miss Clairmont insisted upon going to Venice, and poor Shelley very ruefully and reluctantly accompanied her. Byron received him with genuine delight, and, in an access of good humor, proposed lending the party his villa at Este. There Mrs. Shelley might rest after the fatigues of prolonged travel, and there little Allegra might spend some weeks under her mother’s care. The offer was frankly accepted, and the two men came once more to an amicable understanding. They were not fitted to be friends, — the gods had ruled a severance wide and deep, — but when unpricked by the contentiousness of other people they passed pleasant and profitable hours together.

Meanwhile the poor little apple of discord was ripening every day into a fairer bloom. “Allegra is very pretty, remarkably intelligent, and a great favorite with everybody, ” writes Byron to his sister in August. “She has very blue eyes, a singular forehead, fair curly hair, and a devil of a spirit ; but that is papa’s.” “I have here my natural daughter, by name Allegra,” he tells Moore six weeks later. “She is a pretty little girl enough, and reckoned like papa. ” To Murray he writes in the same paternal strain : “ My daughter Allegra is well, and growing pretty ; her hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her ways, Mr. Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features. She will make, in that case, a manageable young lady.”

Other pens bear ready witness to Allegra’s temper. Mr. Jeaffreson, who has written a very offensive book about Lord Byron, takes pains to tell us that the poor child was “greedy, passionate, and, in her fifth year, precocious, vain, and saucy.” Mr. Hoppner, after the publication of the Countess Guiccioli’s Recollections, wrote an agitated letter to the Athenæum, assuring an indifferent public that he had no acquaintance with the lady, that he utterly disapproved of the poet’s life, and that he had seldom been his companion, save when they rode together, — on Byron’s horses. “Allegra was not by any means an amiable child,” he added sourly, “nor was Mrs. Hoppner nor I particularly fond of her.”

It could hardly have been expected that the daughter of Byron and Claire Clairmont would have been “ amiable ; ” nor can we wonder that Mr. Hoppner, who had a seven-months-old baby of his own, should have failed to wax enthusiastic over another infant. But his warm-hearted wife did love her little charge, and grieved sincerely when the child’s quick temper subsided into listlessness under the fierce Italian heat. “Mon petit brille, et il est toujours gai et sautillant, ” she wrote prettily to the Shelleys, after their departure from Venice ; “et Allegra, par contre, est devenue tranquille et sérieuse, comme une petite vieille, ce que nous peine beaucoup. ”

Byron was frankly grateful to Mrs. Hoppner for her kindness to his daughter ; and after he had carried the child to Ravenna, where the colder, purer air brought back her gayety and bloom, he wrote again and again to her former guardians, now thanking them for “a whole treasure of toys ” which they had sent, now assuring them that “ Allegrina is flourishing like a pomegranate blossom, ” and now pouring into their sympathetic ears the bitter resentment of his soul.

For Claire, clever about most things, was an adept in the art of provocation. She wrote him letters calculated to try the patience of a saint, and he retaliated by a cruel and contemptuous silence. In vain Shelley attempted to play the difficult part of peacemaker. “I wonder,” he pleaded, “at your being provoked by what Claire writes, though that she should write what is provoking is very probable. She is unhappy and in bad health, and she ought to be treated with as much indulgence as possible. The weak and the foolish are in this respect the kings, — they can do no wrong.”

But Byron was less generous. The weak and the foolish — especially when their weakness and folly took an hysterical form — irritated him beyond endurance, and he had no pity for the pain that Claire was suffering. On one point his mind was made up : Allegra should never again be sent to her mother nor to the Shelleys. He had views of his own on the education of little girls, which by no means corresponded with theirs.

“About Allegra,” he writes to Mr. Hoppner in 1820, “I can only say to Claire that I so totally disapprove of the mode of children’s treatment in their family that I should look upon the child as going into a hospital. Her health has hitherto been excellent, and her temper not bad. She is sometimes vain and obstinate, but always clean and cheerful ; and as, in a year or two, I shall either send her to England or put her in a convent for education, these defects will be remedied as far as they can in human nature. But the child shall not quit me again to perish of starvation and green fruit, or be taught to believe that there is no Deity. Whenever there is convenience of vicinity and access, her mother can always have her with her ; otherwise, no. It was so stipulated from the beginning.”

Five months later he reiterates these painfully prosaic views. He has taken a house in the country, because the air agrees better with Allegra. He has two maids to attend to her. He is doing his best, and he is very angry at Claire’s last batch of letters. “Were it not for the poor little child’s sake,” he writes, “I am almost tempted to send her back to her atheistical mother ; but that would be too bad. If Claire thinks that she shall ever interfere with the child’s morals or education, she mistakes ; she never shall. The girl shall be a Christian and a married woman, if possible.”

On these two points Byron had set his heart. The Countess Guiccioli — kindly creature — assures us that “ his dearest paternal care was the religious training to be given to his natural daughter, Allegra ; ” and while the words of this sweet advocate weigh little in the scale, they are in some degree confirmed by the poet’s letters and conduct. He placed the child at the convent school of Bagnacavallo, twelve miles from Ravenna, and he explained very clearly and concisely that he intended keeping her in Italy, because he could there find her a husband. “Abroad, with a fair foreign education and a portion of five or six thousand pounds, she might and may marry very respectably. In England such a dowry would be a pittance, while elsewhere it is a fortune.”

Miss Clairmont was spending her carnival merrily in Florence, when word came that Allegra had been sent to school. It was a blow, says Professor Dowden, “under which she staggered and reeled.” In vain Shelley and his wife represented to her the wisdom of the step. In vain Byron wrote that the air of the Romagna was exceptionally good, and that he paid double fees for his little daughter to insure her every care and attention. Claire, piteously unreasonable, answered only with frenzied reproaches and appeals. She taunted the poet with his unhappy married life, — which was applying caustic to a raw wound, — she inveighed against the “ ignorance and degradation ” of convent - reared women, she implored permission to carry her child to England. Her grief was so excessive that in August, 1821, the longsuffering Shelley made a pilgrimage to Bagnacavallo, to see how Allegra was placed, and to assure himself of her health and happiness. His charming letter — too long to be quoted in full — leaves no doubt upon this subject. The little girl was now in her fifth year, and lovelier than ever, with that strange mingling of melancholy and vivacity which she had inherited from her father. “Her hair, scarcely darker than it was, is beautifully profuse, and hangs in large curls on her neck. She was prettily dressed in white muslin, and an apron of black silk, with trousers. Her light and airy figure and her graceful motions were a striking contrast to the other children. She seemed a thing of a finer and higher order. . . . She showed me her little bed, and the chair where she sat at dinner, and the carrozzina in which she and her favorite companions drew each other along a walk in the garden. I had brought her a basket of sweetmeats, and before eating any of them she gave her friends and all the nuns a portion.

This is not much like the old Allegra. She knows certain orazioni by heart, and talks and dreams of paradise and angels and all sorts of things, and has a prodigious list of saints, and is always talking of the Bambino.”

Shelley’s content with Allegra’s situation (the poor little tempest-tossed thing had at last sailed into quiet waters) failed to bring comfort to Claire. The convent walls seemed a hopeless barrier between mother and child, and Miss Clairmont actually persuaded herself that Byron meant to leave his daughter at Bagnacavallo in the event of his own departure for England. Tormented by this fear, which the poet’s maddening silence did something to excuse, she determined to steal Allegra from school, and proposed wild schemes of abduction, in which she was ardently encouraged by Lady Mountcashel, Mr. Tighe, and Elizabeth Parker, all of whom seem to have worked themselves into a fever of excitement over what was certainly not their concern. Miss Parker, indeed, assured her friend that, were she the child’s mother, she would unhesitatingly stab Lord Byron to the heart, and free his unhappy offspring from tyranny.

In the midst of this melodramatic turmoil we hear Mrs. Shelley’s voice pleading for moderation and common sense, and stating distinctly that her husband has no money for the furtherance of such plots. Shelley himself is equally explicit on this score. “So far from being able to lend me three or four hundred pounds, ” he writes to Claire, “Horace Smith has lately declined to advance six or seven napoleons for a musical instrument which I wished to buy for Jane Williams in Paris.”

There was no need this time of money, or counsel, or heroics. Fever was even then sweeping the towns of the Romagna, so seldom scourged by infection, and the little English-born girl fell an early victim. Allegra died at her convent school in the spring of 1822. Byron, who loved her, admitted that death was kind. “Her position in the world would scarcely have allowed her to be happy,” he said, pitying remorsefully the “sinless child of sin, ” so harshly handicapped in life. A fortnight later he wrote to Scott : “ I have just lost my natural daughter, Allegra, by a fever. The only consolation, save time, is the reflection that she is either at rest or happy ; for her few years (only five) prevented her from having incurred any sin, except what we inherit from Adam.

Allegra’s body was sent to England, and buried, by her father’s wish, in Harrow church. Close to the door she lies, and visitors, searching sentimentally for “Byron’s tomb,” —by which they mean a stone that he was wont to sit on when a boy, — seldom observe the spot where his little daughter sleeps.

Agnes Repplier.