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Functional Python Programming
Second Edition

Discover the power of functional programming, generator

functions, lazy evaluation, the built-in itertools library, and
monads

Steven F. Lott
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Functional Python
Programming Second
Edition
Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing

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About the author
Steven F. Lott has been programming since the '70s, when
computers were large, expensive, and rare. He's been using
Python to solve business problems for over 10 years. His other
titles with Packt Publishing include Python Essentials,
Mastering Object-Oriented Python, Functional Python
Programming, and Python for Secret Agents. Steven is
currently a technomad who lives in city along the east coast of
the U.S. You can follow his technology blog (slott-
softwarearchitect).
About the reviewer
Yogendra Sharma is a developer with experience in
architecture, design, and development of scalable and
distributed applications. He was awarded a bachelor’s degree
from the Rajasthan Technical University in computer science.
With a core interest in microservices and Spring, he also has
hands-on experience in technologies such as AWS Cloud,
Python, J2EE, NodeJS, JavaScript, Angular, MongoDB, and
Docker.

Currently, he works as an IoT and Cloud Architect at Intelizign

Engineering Services Pune.
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Preface
Functional programming offers a variety of techniques for
creating succinct and expressive software. While Python is not
a purely functional programming language, we can do a great
deal of functional programming in Python.

Python has a core set of functional programming features. This

lets us borrow many design patterns and techniques from other
functional languages. These borrowed concepts can lead us to
create succinct and elegant programs. Python's generator
expressions, in particular, negate the need to create large in-
memory data structures, leading to programs that may execute
more quickly because they use fewer resources.

We can’t easily create purely functional programs in Python.

Python lacks a number of features that would be required for
this. We don’t have unlimited recursion, for example, we don’t
have lazy evaluation of all expressions, and we don’t have an
optimizing compiler.

There are several key features of functional programming

languages that are available in Python. One of the most
important ones is the idea of functions being first-class
objects. Python also offers a number of higher-order functions.
The built-in map(), filter(), and functools.reduce() functions are
widely used in this role, and less-obvious are functions such
as sorted(), min(), and max().

We’ll look at the core features of functional programming from

a Python point of view. Our objective is to borrow good ideas
from functional programming languages and use those ideas to
create expressive and succinct applications in Python.
Who this book is for
This book is for programmers who want to create succinct,
expressive Python programs by borrowing techniques and
design patterns from functional programming languages. Some
algorithms can be expressed elegantly in a functional style; we
can—and should—adapt this to make Python programs more
readable and maintainable.

In some cases, a functional approach to a problem will also lead

to extremely high-performance algorithms. Python makes it
too easy to create large intermediate data structures, tying up
memory (and processor time.) With functional programming
design patterns, we can often replace large lists with generator
expressions that are equally expressive but take up much less
memory and run much more quickly.
What this book covers
Chapter 1 , Understanding Functional Programming, introduces
some of the techniques that characterize functional
programming. We’ll identify some of the ways to map those
features to Python. Finally, we’ll also address some ways that
the benefits of functional programming accrue when we use
these design patterns to build Python applications.

Chapter 2 , Introducing Essential Functional Concepts, delves

into six central features of the functional programming
paradigm. We’ll look at each in some detail to see how they’re
implemented in Python. We’ll also point out some features of
functional languages that don’t apply well to Python. In
particular, many functional languages have complex type-
matching rules required to support compiling and optimizing.

Chapter 3 , Functions, Iterators, and Generators, will show how

to leverage immutable Python objects, and generator
expressions adapt functional programming concepts to the
Python language. We’ll look at some of the built-in Python
collections and how we can leverage them without departing
too far from functional programming concepts.
Chapter 4 , Working with Collections, shows how you can use a
number of built-in Python functions to operate on collections
of data. This chapter will focus on a number of relatively simple
functions, such as any() and all(), which will reduce a collection
of values to a single result.

Chapter 5 , Higher-Order Functions, examines the commonly-

used higher-order functions such as map() and filter(). It also
shows a number of other functions that are also higher-order
functions as well as how we can create our own higher-order
functions.

Chapter 6 , Recursions and Reductions, teaches how to design an

algorithm using recursion and then optimize it into a high-
performance for loop. We’ll also look at some other reductions
that are widely used, including collections.Counter().

Chapter 7 , Additional Tuple Techniques, showcases a number of

ways that we can use immutable tuples (and namedtuples)
instead of stateful objects. Immutable objects have a much
simpler interface—we never have to worry about abusing an
attribute and setting an object into some inconsistent or invalid
state.

Chapter 8 , The Itertools Module, examines a number of functions

in this standard library module. This collection of functions
simplifies writing programs that deal with collections or
generator functions.
Chapter 9 , More Itertools Techniques, covers the combinatoric
functions in the itertools module. These functions are
somewhat less useful. This chapter includes some examples
that illustrate ill-considered use of these functions and the
consequences of combinatoric explosion.

Chapter 10 , The Functools Module, focuses on how to use some of

the functions in this module for functional programming. A few
functions in this module are more appropriate for building
decorators, and they are left for Chapter 11, Decorator Design
Techniques. The other functions, however, provide several
more ways to design and implement function programs.

Chapter 11 , Decorator Design Techniques, looks at how you can

look at a decorator as a way to build a composite function.
While there is considerable flexibility here, there are also some
conceptual limitations: we’ll look at ways that overly-complex
decorators can become confusing rather than helpful.

Chapter 12 , The Multiprocessing and Threading Modules, points

out an important consequence of good functional design: we
can distribute the processing workload. Using immutable
objects means that we can’t corrupt an object because of
poorly-synchronized write operations.

Chapter 13 , Conditional Expressions and the Operator Module,

lists some ways to break out of Python’s strict order of
evaluation. There are limitations to what we can achieve here.
We’ll also look at the operator module and how this can lead to
slight clarification of some simple kinds of processing.

Chapter 14 , The PyMonad Library, examines some of the features

of the PyMonad library. This provides some additional
functional programming features. It also provides a way to
learn more about monads. In some functional languages,
monads are an important way to force a particular order for
operations that might get optimized into an undesirable order.
Since Python already has strict ordering of f expressions and
statements, the monad feature is more instructive than
practical.

Chapter 15 , A Functional Approach to Web Services, shows how

we can think of web services as a nested collection of functions
that transform a request into a reply. We’ll see ways to leverage
functional programming concepts for building responsive,
dynamic web content.

Chapter 16 , Optimizations and Improvements, includes some

additional tips on performance and optimization. We’ll
emphasize techniques such as memoization, because they’re
easy to implement and can—in the right context—yield
dramatic performance improvements.
To get the most out of this
book
This book presumes some familiarity with Python 3 and
general concepts of application development. We won’t look
deeply at subtle or complex features of Python; we’ll avoid
much consideration of the internals of the language.

We’ll presume some familiarity with functional programming.

Since Python is not a functional programming language, we
can’t dig deeply into functional concepts. We’ll pick and choose
the aspects of functional programming that fit well with Python
and leverage just those that seem useful.

Some of the examples use exploratory data analysis (EDA)

as a problem domain to show the value of functional
programming. Some familiarity with basic probability and
statistics will help with this. There are only a few examples that
move into more serious data science.

You’ll need to have Python 3.6 installed and running. For more
information on Python, visit http://www.python.org/. The examples
all make extensive use of type hints, which means that the
latest version of mypy must be installed as well.
Check out https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mypy for the latest version of
mypy.

Examples in Chapter 9, More Itertools Techniques, use PIL and

Beautiful Soup 4. The Pillow fork of the original PIL library
works nicely; refer to https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/2.7.0 and http
s://pypi.python.org/pypi/beautifulsoup4/4.6.0 .

Examples in Chapter 14 , The PyMonad Library, use PyMonad;

check out https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PyMonad/1.3.

All of these packages should be installed using the following:

$ pip install pillow beautifulsoup4 PyMonad

Download the example
code files
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your account at www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book
elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to
have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

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them out!
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this
book.

CodeInText : Indicates code words in text, database table names,

folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy
URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example:
"Python has other statements, such as global or nonlocal, which
modify the rules for variables in a particular namespace."

A block of code is set as follows:

s = 0
for n in range(1, 10):
if n % 3 == 0 or n % 5 == 0:
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print(s)

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a

code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

s = 0
for n in range(1, 10):
if n % 3 == 0 or n % 5 == 0:
s += n
print(s)
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$ pip install pillow beautifulsoup4 PyMonad

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that

you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes
appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "For our
purposes, we will distinguish between only two of the many
paradigms: functional programming and imperative pro
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Get in touch
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General feedback: Email [email protected] and mention the

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Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
“Much done, but nothing to record. It is quite enough to set down
my thoughts,—my actions will rarely bear retrospection.”
“The more I see of men the less I like them. If I could say so of
women too, all would be well. Why can’t I? I am now six-and-
twenty; my passions have had enough to cool them; my affections
more than enough to wither them,—and yet, and yet, always yet
and but.”
“I must set about some employment soon; my heart begins to eat
itself again.”
“I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of,
that I never am long in the society even of her I love (God knows
too well, and the devil probably too) without a yearning for the
company of my lamp, and my utterly confused and tumbled-down
library.
“I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch-light; and
to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I
tear out the remaining leaves of this volume. To be sure, I have long
despised myself and man, but I never spat in the face of my species
before, ‘O fool! I shall go mad!’”
These entries, as everyone who has read them through will have
remarked, are all variations on a single theme; and there are many
more entries in the same key, which have been left unquoted. They
succeed each other, week after week, and almost day after day, for a
period of about five months. The story of the events to which they
relate has been told, and need not be repeated. One may think of
them as the cries attendant on the birth pangs of those aspects of
Byron’s character and personality which the world knows specifically
as Byronism. Other tragedies, indeed, were to come to pass—and
were to be necessary—before the angry heart could dash itself with
its full force against the desolations of the world; but the train was
being laid for those tragedies too; and by the time Byron flung his
unfinished Diary down, the thing called Byronism was born.
Curiously enough, indeed, even the political Byronism can be seen
coming to birth at the time of the writing of the Journal. The Byron
who was presently, while in exile, to harbour revolutionists, and
make his house their arsenal, deride the Tsar of All the Russias as a
“Billy bald-coot,” and shake his fist in the faces of the “holy three,”
already begins to reveal himself in its pages with scoffing remarks
about legitimate kings and the hereditary principle. Perhaps it is only
a case of instinct asserting itself and the imperious need to find
something to scoff at following the line of least resistance; but that
does not matter. What does matter is that here was a crisis and a
turning point in Byron’s development, brought about because Mary
Chaworth had come back into his life, had passed through it, and
had passed out of it again.
Mr. Richard Edgcumbe reads, and has written, still more details into
the story, startling students of Byron’s biography with the suggestion
that a child was born as the result of the intimacy—that Mrs. Leigh
adopted the child and pretended that it was her own—that the child
thus secretly born and falsely acknowledged was no other than
Medora Leigh, who turned out so badly, and whose alleged
autobiography was published by Charles Mackay. Passages can be
quoted from the poems—and perhaps also from the letters—which
might conceivably contain veiled allusions to such a transaction.
None, however, can be quoted which require that explanation as an
alternative to remaining unintelligible; and, in the absence of
positive evidence, all the probabilities are against Mr. Edgcumbe’s
theory.
Such a secret as he hints at—and indeed almost affirms—would have
been very difficult to keep; and it is hard to believe that Mrs. Leigh’s
sense of duty to her husband, with whom she was on the best of
terms, would have allowed her to be a party to the alleged
conspiracy. Those are a few of the most obvious objections; and
they must be given the greater weight because Byron’s bitter cries
and altered attitude towards life are more easily explicable without
Mr. Edgcumbe’s hypothesis than with it. Loving the real mother so
passionately, and having such a faithful friend in the supposed
mother, he would assuredly not have been content to live out his life
in exile without ever making an attempt to see his daughter, and
without constant and particular inquiries after her. So why strain
credulity so far when, without straining it, everything can be made
plain and clear?
There was a renewal of intimacy, and then a suspension of intimacy;
a fear of a public scandal which proved to be groundless; a risk of a
duel which was, after all, avoided. That is all that is certain; but that
suffices to explain the references to “scrapes” and “mischief” and the
rest of it; and that also, on the assumption that Byron was
passionately sincere, explains the depth and disgusted vehemence of
his emotions. He had dreamed of Mary Chaworth before as the one
woman in the world with whom he could live out the whole of his life
in a continuous ecstasy of intense emotion; but he had from time to
time awakened from his dream. Now the dream had become a
reality—and the reality had not lasted. She had been too high
principled—or too much afraid. He had not been strong enough to
give her courage—or to shake her principles. And therefore....
Therefore he wrote poem after poem, all on the same theme, all in
the same key—poems of farewell, of everlasting sorrow and despair,
and of that sense of guilt, not defiant as yet, of which Mr. Edgcumbe
makes so much, but which are perhaps best read as the reflection of
Mary Chaworth’s own horror—the horror of a mind perilously near
insanity—at the thing which she had done, but was resolved to do
no more. He wrote this, for instance:
“There is no more for me to hope,
There is no more for thee to fear;
And, if I give my sorrow scope,
That sorrow thou shalt never hear.
Why did I hold thy love so dear?
Why shed for such a heart one tear?
Let deep and dreary silence be
My only memory of thee!”
He wrote the well-known lines, beginning:
“I speak not—I trace not—I breathe not thy name—
There is love in the sound—there is Guilt in the fame—
But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart
The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart.”
He wrote, again, these lines, which are taken from “Lara”:
“The tempest of his heart in scorn had gazed
On that the feebler Elements had raised.
The Rapture of his Heart had looked on high,
And asked if greater dwell beyond the sky:
Chained to excess, the slave of each extreme,
How woke he from the wildness of that dream!
Alas! he told not—but he did awake
To curse the withered heart that would not break.”
And then, once more:
“These lips are mute, these eyes are dry;
But in my breast and in my brain,
Awake the pangs that pass not by,
The thought that ne’er shall sleep again.
My soul nor deigns nor dares complain,
Though Grief and Passion there rebel:
I only know we loved in vain—
I only feel—Farewell! Farewell!”
There is no need to quote more. Enough has been given to show
how the passionate heart found passionate utterance, and what a
wound the wrench had left. Afterwards, of course, when it was all
over—or as much over as it ever would be—Byron realised that a
man of twenty-six could not well consecrate all the rest of his years
to lamentation. He had to live out his life somehow, with the help of
incident of some sort; and incident in such a case must mean either
a fresh love affair or marriage.
In Byron’s case it meant marriage—the very marriage which Lady
Melbourne had designed as a distraction for him from the too-
pointed attentions of Lady Caroline Lamb.
 CHAPTER XVI
MARRIAGE
Whatever doubts and mysteries environ the circumstances of Byron’s
separation from his wife, there is, at any rate, nothing to perplex us
in the train of events which brought about his marriage, though the
two common and conflicting theories have to be set aside. He did
not marry Miss Milbanke for money; he did not marry her for love;
he married her, partly because he had persuaded himself that he
wanted a wife, and partly because she had made up her mind that
he should do so.
He cannot have married her for money because, at that date, her
fortune was inconsiderable and her expectations were vague. She
had only £10,000; and “good lives” stood between her and the
prospect of any substantial inheritance. Seeing that Newstead, when
put up to auction, was bought in for £90,000, a dowry of £10,000
was of no particular consequence to Byron, and if he had been
fortune-hunting, he would have hunted bigger game. The fortune
which he did capture was not enough to save him from almost
instant financial embarrassments; and he faced that prospect as one
who viewed it with indifference. “She is said,” he wrote to Moore, “to
be an heiress, but of that I really know nothing certainly, and shall
not inquire. But I do know that she has talents and excellent
qualities.”
But if it is clear that Byron was not an interested, it is equally clear
that he was not a passionate, suitor. He hardly could be so soon
after the emotional stress through which we have seen him passing;
and the proofs that he was not are conclusive. The most conclusive
proof of all is that at the time when he proposed, by letter, to Miss
Milbanke, he had not seen her, or made any attempt to see her, for
ten months, and that, though he had, during those ten months,
been corresponding with her, he had also, during those ten months,
been pursuing sentimental adventures with which she had nothing
to do. It was, as we have already seen, during those ten months
that the renewed relations with Mary Chaworth were broken off; and
when, after the close of those renewed relations, Byron’s thoughts
turned to marriage, it was not Miss Milbanke whom he first thought
of marrying.
The desire to marry, in short, had only been a particular emotion
with Byron when there was a possibility of marrying Mary Chaworth.
Thereafter it was only a general emotion—a desire for an “escape
from life,” and a domestic refuge from the storms which threatened
shipwreck. He was tired of the struggle, and here was a prospect of
rest. A little more than three months before his proposal to Miss
Milbanke he was thinking of proposing to Lady Adelaide Forbes—
ready to marry her, as he wrote to Moore, “with the same
indifference which has frozen over the ‘Black Sea’ of all my
passions.” A fortnight later—almost to a day three months before the
proposal—he writes again to Moore:
“I could be very sentimental now, but I won’t. The truth is, that I
have been all my life trying to harden my heart, and have not yet
quite succeeded—though there are great hopes—and you do not
know how it has sunk with your departure.”
Byron assuredly was not in love with Miss Milbanke when he wrote
that; and he had no opportunity of falling in love with her in the
course of the next three months, for he did not even see her. None
the less he made up his mind to ask her to marry him—as an
alternative to departing on a long foreign tour; and it is from
Hobhouse’s lately published narrative that we can best see how he
was led, or lured, to that decision.
Byron had first met Miss Milbanke at the time when Lady Caroline
Lamb was throwing herself at his head. Lady Caroline had shown
him some verses which Miss Milbanke had written, and he had said
that he considered them rather good—possibly because he thought
so, but more probably because he wished to be polite. Soon
afterwards, he had been presented to her, and had made her a first
proposal of marriage, which she had declined.
The reasons alike for his offer and for her refusal of it remain
obscure. He must, at any rate, have liked her; he was almost
certainly getting tired of Lady Caroline’s determination to monopolise
and exploit him; perhaps he was also anxious to do anything in
reason to oblige Lady Melbourne, who had the motives which we
know of for desiring to bring about the match. Whether Miss
Milbanke, on her part, preferred some other admirer or resented
Lady Melbourne’s attempt to make a convenience of her is doubtful.
Both motives may have operated simultaneously; and Byron, at any
rate, accepted his refusal in a philosophic spirit. It had not,
Hobhouse says, “sunk very deep into his heart or preyed upon his
spirits.” He “did not pretend to regret Miss Milbanke’s refusal deeply.”
Indeed “it might be said that he did not pretend to regret it at all.”
And Hobhouse describes a “ludicrous scene” when some common
friend related that he had been rejected by Miss Milbanke, and burst
into tears over the catastrophe.
“Is that all?” said Lord Byron. “Perhaps then it will be some
consolation for you to know that I also have been refused by Miss
Milbanke.”
Perhaps it was—some unsuccessful suitors are quite capable of
taking comfort from such reflections; but that need not concern us.
What we have to note is that Byron’s rejection by Miss Milbanke
resulted in his engaging in a long correspondence with her; and that
the commencement of that correspondence was negotiated by Lady
Melbourne. One infers that Lady Melbourne was a very clever
woman, by no means innocent of “ulterior motives,” far less ready
than Byron to take “no” for an answer from Miss Milbanke, and
intuitively conscious that correspondences of this character are apt
to weave entanglements for those who engage in them.
Some extracts from the correspondence are printed in Mr. Murray’s
Collected Edition of Byron’s Works. There are references to it both in
Byron’s Journal and in Hobhouse’s Account of the Separation. There
is nothing in the text which it seems imperative to quote—nothing,
that is to say, which perceptibly helps the story along. Byron’s own
letters are rather high-flown and artificial. The impression which one
gathers from them is that of a man elaborately keeping alive the
double pretence that he is unworthy and that he is disappointed—
but only keeping it alive out of politeness. The nature of Miss
Milbanke’s letters can only be inferred from the one or two allusions
which we find to them.
“Yesterday, a very pretty letter from Annabella, which I answered.
What an odd situation and friendship is ours!—without one spark of
love on either side, and produced by circumstances which in general
lead to coldness on one side and aversion on the other. She is a very
superior woman, and very little spoiled.... She is a poetess—a
mathematician—a metaphysician, and yet withal, very kind,
generous, and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head
would be turned with half her acquisitions, and a tenth of her
advantages.”
That is what Byron says; but Hobhouse adds a little more. He says
that Byron at first “believed that a certain eccentricity of education
had produced this communication from a young woman otherwise
notorious for the strictest propriety of conduct and demeanour.” He
also says that the tone of the communications grew in warmth as
the correspondence proceeded, and that Byron did not make up his
mind to propose marriage a second time until “after certain
expressions had been dropped by Miss Milbanke in her letters which
might easily have encouraged a bolder man than his lordship.” He
says finally, and this he says, in italics, that when Byron did propose
for the second time, Miss Milbanke accepted him by return of post.
To which piece of information Moore adds the statement that in
order to make assurance doubly sure, she sent her acceptance in
duplicate to his town and his country addresses.
It reached him at Hastings; and Miss Milbanke proceeded to impart
her news to her friends. A passage from one of the letters—that to
Miss Milner—shows not only that she was very happy in the prospect
of her marriage, but also that she had woefully deceived herself as
to the circumstances which had preceded and led up to the
proposal:
“You only know me truly in thinking that without the highest moral
esteem I could never have yielded to, if I had been weak enough to
form, an attachment. It is not in the great world that Lord Byron’s
true character must be sought; but ask of those nearest to him—of
the unhappy whom he has consoled, of the poor whom he has
blessed, of the dependants to whom he is the best of masters. For
his despondency I fear I am but too answerable for the last two
years.”
“The last two years” included, as we have seen, the period during
which Byron was bombarding Hanson with perpetual and imperious
demands for the ready money without which he could not go abroad
with Lady Oxford—the period at which he told Moore that he was
ready to “incorporate with any decent woman”—and the period at
which he wrote “The Bride of Abydos” in order to “distract my
thoughts from * * *” Miss Milbanke, that is to say, exaggerated both
her importance to Byron and her influence over him, flattering
herself that there would have been no “Byronism” but for her
coldness, and that the warmth of her affection, so long withheld,
was the one thing wanting to make glorious summer of the winter of
Byron’s discontent.
It was not an unnatural hallucination. Young women of romantic
disposition are easily flattered into such beliefs, especially if the
gates are thronged with suitors. Having read of such situations in
many novels, and dreamed of them in many dreams, they live in
expectation of the day when life will be true to fiction and their
dreams will be fulfilled. And sometimes, of course, the dreams are
fulfilled—sometimes, but not very often, and hardly ever in the case
of heroines who are, as Miss Milbanke was, commonplace in spite of
their intelligence, cold, obstinate, unyielding, critical, vain, and
inexperienced, quick to perceive slights, and slow to forgive them.
At all events they were not, in her case, destined to be fulfilled; and
the initial improbability of their fulfilment may be inferred from a
confession which Hobhouse reports.
“Lord Byron,” Hobhouse writes, “frankly confessed to his companion
that he was not in love with his intended bride; but at the same time
he said that he felt for her that regard which he believed was the
surest guarantee of matrimonial felicity.”
No more than that. Byron was only marrying, Hobhouse assures us,
from “a love of change, and curiosity and a feeling of a sort of
necessity of doing such a thing once.” So that the engagement may
be said to have been entered upon with a clash of conflicting
expectations; and though tact might have saved the adventurers
from shipwreck, tact was precisely the quality in which they were
both most conspicuously deficient.
It was on the last day of September, 1814, that Hobhouse heard of
the engagement. On the first day of October he wrote his
congratulations, and on October 19, he was invited to act as
groomsman. Some time in the same month Byron paid his first visit
to the Milbankes at Seaham. Thence he went to Cambridge to vote
in favour of the candidature of his friend Dr. Clarke’s candidature for
the Professorship of Anatomy, and was applauded by the
undergraduates in the Senate House. “This distinction,” Hobhouse
says, “to a literary character had never before been paid except in
the instance of Archdeacon Paley”—a curious partner in the poet’s
glory. A month later Byron and Hobhouse set out together again for
Seaham on what Hobhouse calls “his matrimonial scheme.”
This was the occasion on which Byron confided to Hobhouse that he
was not in love. A note in Hobhouse’s Diary to the effect that “never
was lover in less haste” affords contemporary corroboration of the
fact; and the Diary continues to be picturesque, giving us
Hobhouse’s critical, but not altogether unfavourable, impression of
Miss Milbanke and her family:
“Miss Milbanke is rather dowdy-looking, and wears a long and high
dress, though she has excellent feet and ankles.... The lower part of
her face is bad, the upper, expressive but not handsome, yet she
gains by inspection.
“She heard Byron coming out of his room, ran to meet him, threw
her arms round his neck, and burst into tears. She did this not
before us.... Lady Milbanke was so much agitated that she had gone
to her room ... our delay the cause.... Indeed I looked foolish in
finding out an excuse for our want of expedition....
“Miss Milbanke, before us, was silent and modest, but very sensible
and quiet, and inspiring an interest which it is easy to mistake for
love. With me she was frank and open, without little airs and
affectations....
“Of my friend she seemed dotingly fond, gazing with delight on his
bold and animated face ... this regulated, however, by the most
entire decorum.
“Old Sir Ralph Milbanke is an honest, red-faced spirit, a little prosy,
but by no means devoid of humour.... My lady, who has been a
dasher in her day, and has ridden the grey mare, is pettish and
tiresome, but clever.”
There is more; but that is the essence. The impression which
disengages itself is one of a well-bred but rather narrow
provincialism. The Milbankes are not exactly great people, but the
country cousins of great people—very decidedly their country
cousins. The men are not quite men of the world; the women are
very far from being women of the world—which is pretty much what
one would expect in an age in which the country was so much more
remote from the town than it is at present. Miss Milbanke, in
particular, seems to strike the exact note of provincial correctitude
alike in her display of the emotion proper to the occasion and in her
concealment of it. Her correctitude was, no doubt, made still more
correct by an unemotional disposition.
During the ceremony, which took place in her mother’s drawing-
room, she was very self-possessed—“firm as a rock,” is Hobhouse’s
description of her demeanour. Things were happening as she had
meant them to happen—one may almost say as she had contrived
that they should happen. “I felt,” says Hobhouse, “as if I had buried
a friend”; but he nevertheless paid the compliments which were due,
and Miss Milbanke, now Lady Byron, said just the right thing in reply
to them:
“At a little before twelve,” Hobhouse notes, “I handed Lady Byron
downstairs and into her carriage. When I wished her many years of
happiness, she said, ‘If I am not happy it will be my own fault.’”
Nothing could have been more proper than that; for that is just how
things happen when the dreams come true. Such a saying
sometimes is, and always should be, the prelude to “they lived
happily together ever afterwards”; and one can picture Lady Byron
telling herself that things were happening, and would continue to
happen, just as in a story-book.
Only there are two kinds of story-books. There are the story-books
which are written for girls—and the others. This story was to be one
of the others. The husband’s past and the wife’s illusions were
almost bound to make it so—the more certainly because both
husband and wife suffered from the defects of their qualities; and
the defects of Lady Byron’s qualities in particular were such as not
only to make her helpless in the rôle which developments were to
assign to her, but also to compel her to comport herself with
something worse than a lack of dignity.
 CHAPTER XVII
INCOMPATIBILITY OF TEMPER
A thick accretion of legend has gathered round Byron’s life alike as
an engaged and as a married man. Every biographer, whether
friendly or hostile, has added fresh anecdotes to the heap. Almost all
the stories are coloured by prejudice. Even when they seem to be
derived from the same source, they are often mutually contradictory;
so that it is, as a rule, a hopeless task to try to distinguish between
fact and fiction, or do more than disengage a general impression of
discordant temperaments progressing from incompatibility to open
war.
Even the period of the engagement is reported not to have been of
unclouded happiness. A son of Sir Ralph Milbanke’s Steward at
Seaham has furnished recollections to that effect. “While Byron was
at Seaham,” says this witness, “he spent most of his time pistol-
shooting in the plantation”—a strangely moody occupation for an
affianced man; and he adds that, on the wedding morning, when all
was prepared for the ceremony, “Byron had to be sought for in the
grounds where he was walking in his usual surly mood.” Mrs.
Beecher Stowe tells us that Miss Milbanke, observing that her lover
did not rejoice sufficiently in his good fortune, offered to release him
from his promise—whereupon he “fainted entirely away,” and so
convinced her, for the moment, of the sincerity of his affection.
Similar stories, equally well attested and equally unconvincing,
cluster round the departure of the married couple for Halnaby where
they spent their honeymoon. Lady Byron told Lady Anne Barnard
that the carriage had no sooner driven away from the door of the
mansion than her husband turned upon her with “a malignant sneer”
and derided her for cherishing the “wild hope” of “reforming him,”
saying: “Many are the tears you will have to shed ere that plan is
accomplished. It is enough for me that you are my wife for me to
hate you.” The Steward’s son, giving an alternative version of the
story, declares that “insulting words” were spoken before leaving the
park—“after which he appeared to sit in moody silence, reading a
book for the rest of the journey.” Byron’s own account of the
incident, as given to Medwin, was as follows:
“I was surprised at the arrangements for the journey, and somewhat
out of humour to find a lady’s maid stuck between me and my bride.
It was rather too early to assume the husband; so I was forced to
submit, but it was not with a very good grace. Put yourself in a
similar situation, and tell me if I had not some reason to be in the
sulks.”
These three stories, it is clear, cannot all be true; and none of them
can either be proved or disproved, though the last was contradicted
by Hobhouse who said that he had inspected the carriage and found
no maid in it. Similarly with the stories which follow. According to the
Steward’s son, Sir Ralph Milbanke’s tenants assembled to cheer
Byron on his arrival at Halnaby—but “of these he took not the
slightest notice, but jumped out of the carriage and walked away,
leaving his bride to alight by herself.” There is also a story told by
another authority, who cannot, however, have been an eye-witness,
to the effect that Byron, awaking from his slumbers on his nuptial
night, exclaimed, in his surprise at his strange surroundings, that he
supposed he was in Hell.
All these stories, of course, are exceedingly shocking, if true; but
there are no means of ascertaining whether they are true. Nothing
can be positively affirmed except that the beginnings were
inauspicious, and must have seemed the more inauspicious to Lady
Byron because of that fond belief of hers, that her rejection of Byron
in 1812 had caused him two years’ mental agony, now at last to be
happily removed by her condescending tenderness. A vast amount
of tact—a vast amount of give-and-take—would have been needed
to make a success of a marriage concluded under that
misapprehension; and Lord and Lady Byron were both of an age at
which tact is, as a rule, a virtue only known by name.
Of Byron’s tact we have an example in the famous dialogue: “Do I
interrupt you, Byron?”... “Damnably.” Of Lady Byron’s tact we shall
discover an instance at the crisis of her married life. In the
meantime we must note that they made up their first quarrel—which
may very well have been less serious at the time than it appeared to
be in retrospect—and, at any rate, kept up appearances sufficiently
well to deceive their closest friends. From Halnaby they returned to
Seaham, where nothing happened except that Byron discovered his
father-in-law to be a bore, addicted to dreary political monologuising
over wine and walnuts. They next visited Mrs. Leigh at Six Mile
Bottom, and then they proceeded to 13 Piccadilly Terrace—that
unluckily numbered house, hired from the Duchess of Devonshire, in
which many catastrophes were to occur, and a distress was presently
to be levied for non-payment of the rent.
Mrs. Leigh, it will be observed, was pleasantly surprised to observe
that the marriage seemed to be turning out well. She had the more
reason to be surprised because she shared none of Lady Byron’s
illusions as to the part which she had played, for the past two years,
in Byron’s emotional and imaginative life. She was in her brother’s
confidence, and knew all about Lady Caroline Lamb, all about Lady
Oxford, and—more particularly—all about Mary Chaworth.
Consequently she had had her apprehensions, which she confided to
Byron’s friend Hodgson. A few extracts from her letters to Hodgson
will bring this point out, and show us how the marriage looked from
her point of view. On February 15, 1815, she wrote:
“It appears to me that Lady Byron sets about making him happy in
quite the right way. It is true I judge at a distance, and we generally
hope as we wish; but I assure you I don’t conclude hastily on this
subject, and will own to you, what I would not scarcely to any other
person, that I had many fears and much anxiety founded upon many
causes and circumstances of which I cannot write. Thank God! that
they do not appear likely to be realised.”
On March 18, 1815: “Byron is looking remarkably well, and of Lady
B. I hardly know how to write, for I have a sad trick of being struck
dumb when I am most happy and pleased. The expectations I had
formed could not be exceeded, but at least they are fully answered.
“I think I never saw or heard of a more perfect being in mortal
mould than she appears to be, and scarcely dared flatter myself
such a one would fall to the lot of my dear B. He seems quite
sensible of her value.”
On March 31, 1815: “Byron and Lady B. left me on Tuesday for
London.... The more I see of her the more I love and esteem her,
and feel how grateful I am, and ought to be, for the blessing of such
a wife for my dear, darling Byron.”
On September 4, 1815: “My brother has just left me, having been
here since last Wednesday, when he arrived very unexpectedly. I
never saw him so well, and he is in the best spirits.”
This is evidence not extorted by questions but spontaneously
volunteered. If it proves nothing else, at least it proves that
appearances were kept up, and that Augusta was deceived. But
appearances, none the less, gave a false impression; and there were
other friends, more keen sighted than Augusta, who saw through
them. Hobhouse, in particular, did so. He too had had his anxieties,
and had been watching; and the notes in his Diary—some of them
contemporaneous with, but others subsequent to, Augusta’s letters—
are not unlike the rumblings of a coming thunderstorm.
On March 25, 1815: “I went to bed out of spirits from indeterminate
but chiefly low apprehensions about Byron.”
On April 1, 1815: “He advises me ‘not to marry,’ though he has the
best of wives.”
On April 2, 1815: “Lady Oxford walks about Naples with Byron’s
picture on her girdle in front.”
On July 31, 1815: “Byron is not more happy than before marriage.
D. Kinnaird is also melancholy. This is the state of man.”
On August 4, 1815: “Lord Byron tells me he and she have begun a
little snubbing on money matters. ‘Marry not,’ says he.”
On August 8, 1815: “Dined with Byron, &c. All grumbled at life.”
On November 25, 1815: “Called on Byron. In that quarter things do
not go well. Strong advice against marriage. Talking of going
abroad.”
There is nothing specific there; and when we set out to look for
something specific, we only run up against gossip of doubtful
authenticity. “Do I interrupt you?”... “Damnably,” may be assumed to
be authentic since Byron himself has admitted the repartee. It was
rude and reprehensible, though it was probably provoked. The
charges which young Harness, now in Holy Orders, heard preferred
by some of Lady Byron’s friends are rightly described by him as
“nonsensical”; but we may as well have them before us in order to
judge of the propriety of the epithet:
“The poor lady had never had a comfortable meal since their
marriage. Her husband had no fixed hour for breakfast, and was
always too late for dinner.
“At his express desire she had invited two elderly ladies to meet
them in her opera-box. Nothing could be more courteous than his
manner to them while they remained; but no sooner had they gone
than he began to annoy his wife by venting his ill-humour, in a strain
of bitterest satire, against the dress and manners of her friends.”
“Poor Lady Byron was afraid of her life. Her husband slept with
loaded pistols by his bed-side, and a dagger under his pillow.”
“Nonsensical” is decidedly the word for these allegations. The
incidents, even if true, could only be symptoms, not causes, of the
disagreement. Harness, perceiving that, seeks the true explanation
of the estrangement in the disposition of Lady Byron, whom he had
known as a girl. She “gave one the idea of being self-willed and self-
opinionated.” She “carried no cheerfulness along with her.” The
majority of her acquaintances “looked upon her as a reserved and
frigid sort of being whom one would rather cross the room to avoid
than be brought into conversation with unnecessarily.” A common
acquaintance remarked to Harness: “If Lady Byron has a heart, it is
deeper seated and harder to get at than anybody else’s heart whom
I have ever known.”
Et cetera. So far as we can judge Lady Byron by the letters in which
she subsequently announced, without formulating, her grievances,
the verdict seems a just one. She might be pictured, in the words of
the author of “Ionica” as one who
“Smiles at all that’s coarse and rash,
Yet wins the trophies of the fight,
Unscathed in honour’s wreck and crash,
Heartless, yet always in the right.”
Or rather one begins so to picture her—and is even justified in so
picturing her at the beginning—though presently, when one sees
how unfairly she fought in the great fight which ensued, one
changes one’s mind about her, withdraws such sympathy as one has
allowed to go out to her, and thinks of her husband when one comes
to the final couplet of the poem:
“And I, dear passionate Teucer, dare
Go through the homeless world with you.”
Yet Lady Byron had her grievances, and though they were quite
different from those which Harness has reported, they were not light
ones. Two grievances in particular must have been very trying to the
temper of a young bride who had been an only and spoiled child. In
the first place, and almost at once, there was trouble about money.
In the second place, and very soon, there was trouble about “the
women of the theatre.”
Byron, at the time of his marriage, was heavily in debt. His one idea
of economy had always been to obtain credit instead of paying cash;
and such cash as he had the handling of quickly slipped through his
fingers. He never denied himself a luxury, and seldom refused a
request for a loan. He had helped Augusta; he had helped Hodgson;
he had helped Coleridge. Now he found his expenses increased out
of all proportion to the increase of his income; while his creditors,
assuming that his wife had a fortune, proceeded to press for the
settlement of their accounts. Hence that “snubbing on money
matters” to which we have seen Hobhouse referring; and the word
“snubbing” may well have been a euphemism for more severe
remonstrance when executions began to be levied. There were no
fewer than ten executions in the house in the course of a few
months; and one can understand that the experience was
unfavourable to the temper of a young wife coming from a well-
ordered home in which precise middle-class notions on such subjects
had prevailed.
The simultaneous trouble about women, of course, made matters
worse. Whether there was trouble about Mary Chaworth or not is
uncertain; but, at any rate, Lady Byron met her and appears to have
felt the pangs of jealousy. “Such a wicked looking cat I never saw.
Somebody else looked quite virtuous by the side of her,” was her
commentary to Augusta; and, if she spoke of Mary Chaworth as a
cat, we need not suppose her to have been any more complimentary
in her references to those actresses whose acquaintance she knew
her husband to be making.
He had become, at this time, together with Lord Essex, George
Lamb, Douglas Kinnaird, and Peter Moore, a member of the Sub-
Committee of Management of Drury Lane Theatre. It does not
appear that the Sub-Committee did a great deal except waste the
time of the actual managers; but it is not to be supposed that they
were altogether neglectful of the amenities of their position. They
had “influence”; and upon the men who have “influence” actresses
never fail to smile. Some actresses smiled upon Byron for that
reason, and others smiled upon him for his own sake. Some of
them, it may be, drew the line at smiling; but others, as certainly,
did more than smile. Miss Jane Clairmont, in particular—but we shall
come to Miss Jane Clairmont presently.
How much Lady Byron knew, at the time, about these matters is
doubtful. She must have known a good deal, for actresses
sometimes called at the house; and any defects in her knowledge
may be presumed to have been eked out by conjecture. Knowledge,
conjecture, and gossip, operating in concert, cannot have failed to
make her feel uncomfortable. In this respect, as in others, things
were not falling out as she had expected. The fondly cherished belief
that her love was the one thing needful to Byron’s happiness, and
that he had moped for two years because she had withheld it from
him, was receiving every day a ruder shock.
The shocks were the more violent because Byron, in the midst of his
pecuniary embarrassments and theatrical philanderings, was
attacked by a disorder of the liver. No man is at his best when his
liver is sluggish; and Byron probably was at his worst—gloomy,
contentious, and prone to uncontrollable outbursts of passion. So
there were scenes—the sort of scenes that one would expect: Lady
Byron, on the one hand, coldly and reasonably reproachful—“always
in the right,” and most careful not to lose her temper; Byron, on the
other hand, talking to provoke her, boasting of abandoned
wickedness, falling into fits of rage, much as his own mother had
been wont to do when she rattled the fire-irons—throwing his watch
on the ground and smashing it to pieces with the poker.
Very likely he was angry with Lady Byron because he did not love
her—irritated beyond measure at every fresh revelation that she
could never be to him what Mary Chaworth might have been. The
beginning of unhappiness in marriage must often come like that. It
is not unnatural, though it is unreasonable, and not to be combated
by reason. Lady Byron, unhappily, had no other weapon than reason
with which to combat it; and it is quite likely that her very
reasonableness made the trouble worse. It did, at any rate, pass
from bad to worse—and then from worse to worst—during the
critical days of her confinement, at the end of 1815.
Those were the circumstances which paved the way for open war
and the demand for judicial separation. Or, at all events, those were
some of the circumstances; for the story is long, and intricate, and
involved, and darkened with the clouds of controversy. Byron’s
version of it, it is needless to say, is quite different from Lady
Byron’s. According to him the causes of the separation were “too
simple to be easily found out.” According to her, they included an
enormity of which he dared not speak; and the clash of these
conflicting allegations constitutes what has been called “the Byron
mystery.”
Perhaps it is not possible to solve the whole of that mystery even
now. New evidence, however, has lately been adduced, on the one
hand in Hobhouse’s Diary and Narrative, and on the other hand from
Lady Byron’s correspondence, printed by the late Earl of Lovelace in
“Astarte.” By sifting it, we may at least contrive to come nearer to
the truth—to put, as it were, a ring fence round the mystery—to
distinguish the assertions which have been proved from the
assertions which have been disproved, and to reduce within narrow
limits the fragment of the mystery which, until more conclusive
documents are produced, must still remain mysterious.
The late Earl of Lovelace, as is well-known, attempted to acquit his
grandmother of a charge of evil-speaking by convicting his
grandfather of a charge of unnatural vice. It will be necessary to
consider whether he has succeeded or failed in the attempt. The
latter charge, but for his revival of it, might have been waived aside
as equally calumnious and incredible. As it is, a biographer cannot
discharge his task without taking up the challenge. It shall be taken
up with every possible avoidance of unpleasant detail, but taken up
it must be; and the most convenient way to approach the subject
will be first to tell the story as it is presented by Hobhouse who
represented Byron throughout the negotiations.
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