A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits Read Free Book Online Page A

are to be acted upon, there are others, and forbearance among them, that proceed only from quiet spirits, which he has never known himself two days in succession. I have begged him to study tranquillity. There is nothing his noble intellect might not master if he applied himself to it, but he lacks direction. Alas, that none of his acquaintance seems inclined to give it! His conversation is very pleasing, but he wants that calm benevolence which could only touch my heart.’ And then she repeated her assurance to Mary Montgomery: ‘He is not a dangerous person to me.’
    The passing of the summer tended to justify this conviction. She met him again and again, at suppers and dances, but he was too much the object of a general attention for one who prided herself on an indifference to fashions to make much way with him. And he seemed to continue shy of her. Once, at a dinner given by Samuel Rogers, the conversation turned again to a question of poetical sincerity. Their host, himself a poet, who was rather admired than read, gave his opinion that there could be no good poetry without true feeling; Annabella was greatly surprised to find Lord Byron take up the argument against him. He invited any of his readers to determine from any particular passage what his real feelings on the subject were; often, he had no notion himself of what he believed or did not believe when the estro took him. Besides, he could never answer for his own feelings for more than one hour together.
    Dinner was finished, and the gentlemen had rejoined the ladies in the drawing room. There was something in the bleak elegance of Rogers’s apartments to encourage ‘philosophy’, as Sir Walter Scott pleasantly declared. Annabella had read his novels, and Scott’s open, manly countenance greatly impressed her. It was hard to imagine him lost in the business of fancy. He looked like a family lawyer, and his manners had the excellence of that profession: he was particularly kind to young ladies. He nodded at Annabella as he said the word. Her reputation as a blooming intellectual was sufficiently established to provoke the gentlemen into little tributes to it. She had found, however, that her opinions were more frequently honoured than asked for. And she began to summon within herself the courage to do justice to them.
    Their host himself, a small, narrow, sour-faced man, who looked as if he suffered equally from hunger and indigestion, was perpetually engaged in straightening a picture, or resettling a cushion, or aligning a gem on the mantelpiece. It was quite a game with Lord Byron to shift one of these little ornaments in his progress through the room: to observe Rogers, like a restless ant, busily re-establishing order. The lamplight tended to exaggerate his shadowy fretfulness against the wall. Byron teased Rogers for being ‘the ghost of small adjustments’—a quip that, not unkindly meant, served only to irritate the feeling it was intended to relieve. The older poet, Annabella guessed, resented the fact that Byron continued to hold the floor over a question of inspiration. But nothing could divert the flow of inquiry.
    It was suggested to his lordship that what mattered was his sincerity at the time of composition. Something of the force of his true sentiments, however changeable, could not be kept from the language. These would declare themselves in the gross power of the eloquence, if nowhere else. There could be no poetry without passion; and passion, whatever its moral tone, was little susceptible of being doubted if felt. Lord Byron smiled at this ruefully and said, ‘I hold my tongue, I hold my tongue, I should not like the ladies present to suspect how much the gentlemen put up for show.’ Annabella did not understand the tittering that greeted this remark and responded, lifting her voice to drown her nerves, that ‘perhaps it was the business of a discerning reader to decide for himself the truth