That I am perfectly capable of criticising myself, here are
a few suggestions of gaps at that admirable V and A show. I may be wrong or have overlooked it, but I didn't notice a portrait of Walter Scott, whom Byron admired above all the writers of his time, Then, too, the relationship with Shelley was a very significant one — missed a portrait. Hobhouse was there, but I should have immensely liked to see a portrait of that other Cambridge friend, William Bankes, Oriental traveller and connoisseur, who recreated beautiful Kingson Lacy in Dorset, and whose career had such a fascinating upshot.
And then there was nothing about the Trevanions, simply Nothing. Half the Byrons were half Cornish Trevanions, as I have brought out. Byron, his half-sister Augusta, and her husband, Col. Leigh, were all grandchildren of the blue-stocking Sophia Trevanion — what a triangle! I should much like to see a portrait of her — where is one? We might also have had one of Byron's daughter by Augusta, Medora — not much doubt of that — who went off with her double-cousin, Henry Trevanion, husband of her sister Georgey. I possess Georgey's copy of Henry Trevanion's Poems, who represented the family at Byron's funeral at Hucknall Torkard, The V and A could have had that for the show — evidently totally unaware of the TrevanionByron connection.
Not much evidence of the naughty side of Byron that so much amuses me! (I share his temper about the conventional and bien pensant.)
To Newstead Abbey
With all this in mind I decided to go on to see Newstead Abbey, which I had never done. From Nottingham I drove out to Hucknall, where Byron was being celebrated with a charming little exhibition in the church, filled with flowers, a play by someone from the University of Nottingham, solemn choral evensong in his memory (how he would have appreciated that!).
There in the family vault beneath the chancel are no less than 27 Byrons, the last of them his (legitimate) daughter Ada. Looking down upon the scene was Augusta's mural monument to his memory, elsewhere a bronze profile of him — the whole place a Byron temple, the good people of Hucknall pattering in and out to admire the flowers. Outside in the market-place it was market day, the place crammed with stalls, fruit, vegetables, household goods, hardware, kitchen utensils, clothes, everything — hoi polloi chaffering and all the money in the world to spend out of the bottomless pocket of the Welfare State. Not one of them interested in Byron. 1 sallied ott to Newstead, surprised to find how splendid it all was. A long drive through purple rhododendrons into a great park — remains of Sherwood Forest — then down to the lake that appears in several of the poems, and around to that magnificent front. Actually the west front of the church is one of the most regular and perfect Early English faca'cles in England—thirteenth century I should say, with the statue of the Virgin and Child high up in the topmost gable still, as Byron describes it in Don Juan. He also tells us that the images in the empty niches below were destroyed not at the Reformation but during the Civil War — in which the Byrons played a foremost part in Nottinghamshire. There was the gaping arch of the great west window; he tells us that when the wind is at a certain point
There moans a strange unearthly sound, which then Is musical — a dying accent driven Though the huge arch, which soars and sinks again.
Within, too, all was on a grander scale than I expected; the great hall which had been the monks' guest-chamber, the saloon upstairs the former refectory. One felt closest to him in his bedroom, still with his original furniture, the round table on which he wrote, the large coroneted bed of so many memories — Augusta, while they were snowed up there one winter, the stone staircase up which came the pretty housemaid who disillusioned him by sharing her 'favours' with others.
Altogether, one appreciated what a wrench it must have been to have to sell the splendid place — six generations of Byrons lived there since the Reformation. On the other hand, if he had not, that spectacular career abroad — without which he would not, have written his poems with their themes from all over Europe — would not have been possible. And there was some consolation in avoiding the English summer, which, he said, began on July 31 and ended on August!. How right he was, I thought, as I looked down on the dripping, shivering scene:
Where now the grass exhales a murky dew, The humid pall of life-extinguished clay. • ..
No doubt the brilliant colours of the Mediterranean were more propitious to his muse — perhaps Byron was, after all, more of a Trevanion than either a Byron or a Gordon?
More graffiti
I have been asked, any more amusing graffiti to mitigate the horrors of student literacy? Well, here at Oxford, at any rate, they do have some sense of humour. At the time of all the scrawls, 'No arms for South Africa,' No Arms for Rhodesia,' No Arms for Vietnam' etc, I saw one gay notice confronting the Ashmolean Museum; 'No Arms for the Venus de Milo'.
Rather good for all those armless (and harmless) marble Venuses within,
A.L. Rowse
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