In leaving this subject, I have an appeal to make to the men, and more
especially to the women, who have been my readers.
In justice to Lady Byron, it must be remembered that this publication of
her story is not her act, but mine. I trust you have already conceded,
that, in so severe and peculiar a trial, she had a right to be understood
fully by her immediate circle of friends, and to seek of them counsel in
view of the moral questions to which such very exceptional circumstances
must have given rise. Her communication to me was not an address to the
public: it was a statement of the case for advice. True, by leaving the
whole, unguarded by pledge or promise, it left discretionary power with
me to use it if needful.
You, my sisters, are to judge whether the accusation laid against Lady
Byron by the 'Blackwood,' in 1869, was not of so barbarous a nature as to
justify my producing the truth I held in my hands in reply.
The 'Blackwood' claimed a right to re-open the subject because it was not
a private but a public matter. It claimed that Lord Byron's unfortunate
marriage might have changed not only his own destiny, but that of all
England. It suggested, that, but for this, instead of wearing out his
life in vice, and corrupting society by impure poetry, he might, at this
day, have been leading the counsels of the State, and helping the onward
movements of the world. Then it directly charged Lady Byron with meanly
forsaking her husband in a time of worldly misfortune; with fabricating a
destructive accusation of crime against him, and confirming this
accusation by years of persistent silence more guilty than open
assertion.
It has been alleged, that, even admitting that Lady Byron's story were
true, it never ought to have been told. Is it true, then, that a woman
has not the same right to individual justice that a man has? If the
cases were reversed, would it have been thought just that Lord Byron
should go down in history loaded with accusations of crime because he
could be only vindicated by exposing the crime of his wife?
It has been said that the crime charged on Lady Byron was comparatively
unimportant, and the one against Lord Byron was deadly.
But the 'Blackwood,' in opening the controversy, called Lady Byron by the
name of an unnatural female criminal, whose singular atrocities alone
entitle her to infamous notoriety; and the crime charged upon her was
sufficient to warrant the comparison.
Both crimes are foul, unnatural, horrible; and there is no middle ground
between the admission of the one or the other.
You must either conclude that a woman, all whose other works, words, and
deeds were generous, just, and gentle, committed this one monstrous
exceptional crime, without a motive, and against all the analogies of her
character, and all the analogies of her treatment of others; or you must
suppose that a man known by all testimony to have been boundlessly
licentious, who took the very course which, by every physiological law,
would have led to unnatural results, did, at last, commit an unnatural
crime.
The question, whether I did right, when Lady Byron was thus held up as an
abandoned criminal by the 'Blackwood,' to interpose my knowledge of the
real truth in her defence, is a serious one; but it is one for which I
must account to God alone, and in which, without any contempt of the
opinions of my fellow-creatures, I must say, that it is a small thing to
be judged of man's judgment.
I had in the case a responsibility very different from that of many
others. I had been consulted in relation to the publication of this
story by Lady Byron, at a time when she had it in her power to have
exhibited it with all its proofs, and commanded an instant conviction. I
have reason to think that my advice had some weight in suppressing that
disclosure. I gave that advice under the impression that the Byron
controversy was a thing for ever passed, and never likely to return.
It had never occurred to me, that, nine years after Lady Byron's death, a
standard English periodical would declare itself free to re-open this
controversy, when all the generation who were her witnesses had passed
from earth; and that it would re-open it in the most savage form of
accusation, and with the indorsement and commendation of a book of the
vilest slanders, edited by Lord Byron's mistress.
Let the reader mark the retributions of justice. The accusations of the
'Blackwood,' in 1869, were simply an intensified form of those first
concocted by Lord Byron in his 'Clytemnestra' poem of 1816. He forged
that weapon, and bequeathed it to his party. The 'Blackwood' took it up,
gave it a sharper edge, and drove it to the heart of Lady Byron's fame.
The result has been the disclosure of this history. It is, then, Lord
Byron himself, who, by his network of wiles, his ceaseless persecutions
of his wife, his efforts to extend his partisanship beyond the grave, has
brought on this tumultuous exposure. He, and he alone, is the cause of
this revelation.
And now I have one word to say to those in England who, with all the
facts and documents in their hands which could at once have cleared Lady
Byron's fame, allowed the barbarous assault of the 'Blackwood' to go over
the civilised world without a reply. I speak to those who, knowing that
I am speaking the truth, stand silent; to those who have now the ability
to produce the facts and documents by which this cause might be instantly
settled, and who do not produce them.
I do not judge them; but I remind them that a day is coming when they and
I must stand side by side at the great judgment-seat,--I to give an
account for my speaking, they for their silence.
In that day, all earthly considerations will have vanished like morning
mists, and truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, will be the only
realities.
In that day, God, who will judge the secrets of all men, will judge
between this man and this woman. Then, if never before, the full truth
shall be told both of the depraved and dissolute man who made it his
life's object to defame the innocent, and the silent, the self-denying
woman who made it her life's object to give space for repentance to the
guilty.
PART III. MISCELLANEOUS DOCUMENTS.
THE TRUE STORY OF LADY BYRON'S LIFE,
AS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 'THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.'
The reading world of America has lately been presented with a book which
is said to sell rapidly, and which appears to meet with universal favour.
The subject of the book may be thus briefly stated: The mistress of Lord
Byron comes before the world for the sake of vindicating his fame from
slanders and aspersions cast on him by his wife. The story of the
mistress versus wife may be summed up as follows:--
Lord Byron, the hero of the story, is represented as a human being
endowed with every natural charm, gift, and grace, who, by the one false
step of an unsuitable marriage, wrecked his whole life. A narrow-minded,
cold-hearted precisian, without sufficient intellect to comprehend his
genius, or heart to feel for his temptations, formed with him one of
those mere worldly marriages common in high life; and, finding that she
could not reduce him to the mathematical proprieties and conventional
rules of her own mode of life, suddenly, and without warning, abandoned
him in the most cruel and inexplicable manner.
It is alleged that she parted from him in apparent affection and good-
humour, wrote him a playful, confiding letter upon the way, but, after
reaching her father's house, suddenly, and without explanation, announced
to him that she would never see him again; that this sudden abandonment
drew down upon him a perfect storm of scandalous stories, which his wife
never contradicted; that she never in any way or shape stated what the
exact reasons for her departure had been, and thus silently gave scope to
all the malice of thousands of enemies. The sensitive victim was
actually driven from England, his home broken up, and he doomed to be a
lonely wanderer on foreign shores.
In Italy, under bluer skies, and among a gentler people, with more
tolerant modes of judgment, the authoress intimates that he found peace
and consolation. A lovely young Italian countess falls in love with him,
and, breaking her family ties for his sake, devotes herself to him; and,
in blissful retirement with her, he finds at last that domestic life for
which he was so fitted.
Soothed, calmed, and refreshed, he writes 'Don Juan,' which the world is
at this late hour informed was a poem with a high moral purpose, designed
to be a practical illustration of the doctrine of total depravity among
young gentlemen in high life.
Under the elevating influence of love, he rises at last to higher realms
of moral excellence, and resolves to devote the rest of his life to some
noble and heroic purpose; becomes the saviour of Greece; and dies
untimely, leaving a nation to mourn his loss.
The authoress dwells with a peculiar bitterness on Lady Byron's entire
silence during all these years, as the most aggravated form of
persecution and injury. She informs the world that Lord Byron wrote his
Autobiography with the purpose of giving a fair statement of the exact
truth in the whole matter; and that Lady Byron bought up the manuscript
of the publisher, and insisted on its being destroyed, unread; thus
inflexibly depriving her husband of his last chance of a hearing before
the tribunal of the public.
As a result of this silent persistent cruelty on the part of a cold,
correct, narrow-minded woman, the character of Lord Byron has been
misunderstood, and his name transmitted to after-ages clouded with
aspersions and accusations which it is the object of this book to remove.
* * * * *
Such is the story of Lord Byron's mistress,--a story which is going the
length of this American continent, and rousing up new sympathy with the
poet, and doing its best to bring the youth of America once more under
the power of that brilliant, seductive genius, from which it was hoped
they had escaped. Already we are seeing it revamped in
magazine-articles, which take up the slanders of the paramour and enlarge
on them, and wax eloquent in denunciation of the marble-hearted
insensible wife.
All this while, it does not appear to occur to the thousands of
unreflecting readers that they are listening merely to the story of Lord
Byron's mistress, and of Lord Byron; and that, even by their own showing,
their heaviest accusation against Lady Byron is that she has not spoken
at all. Her story has never been told.
For many years after the rupture between Lord Byron and his wife, that
poet's personality, fate, and happiness had an interest for the whole
civilized world, which, we will venture to say, was unparalleled. It is
within the writer's recollection, how, in the obscure mountain-town where
she spent her early days, Lord Byron's separation from his wife was, for
a season, the all-engrossing topic.
She remembers hearing her father recount at the breakfast-table the facts
as they were given in the public papers, together with his own
suppositions and theories of the causes.
Lord Byron's 'Fare thee well,' addressed to Lady Byron, was set to music,
and sung with tears by young school-girls, even in this distant America.
Madame de Stael said of this appeal, that she was sure it would have
drawn her at once to his heart and his arms; she could have forgiven
everything: and so said all the young ladies all over the world, not only
in England but in France and Germany, wherever Byron's poetry appeared in
translation.
Lady Byron's obdurate cold-heartedness in refusing even to listen to his
prayers, or to have any intercourse with him which might lead to
reconciliation, was the one point conceded on all sides.
The stricter moralists defended her; but gentler hearts throughout all
the world regarded her as a marble-hearted monster of correctness and
morality, a personification of the law unmitigated by the gospel.
Literature in its highest walks busied itself with Lady Byron. Hogg, in
the character of the Ettrick Shepherd, devotes several eloquent passages
to expatiating on the conjugal fidelity of a poor Highland shepherd's
wife, who, by patience and prayer and forgiveness, succeeds in reclaiming
her drunken husband, and making a good man of him; and then points his
moral by contrasting with this touching picture the cold-hearted
pharisaical correctness of Lady Byron.
Moore, in his 'Life of Lord Byron,' when beginning the recital of the
series of disgraceful amours which formed the staple of his life in
Venice, has this passage:--
'Highly censurable in point of morality and decorum as was his course of
life while under the roof of Madame ----, it was (with pain I am forced
to confess) venial in comparison with the strange, headlong career of
licence to which, when weaned from that connection, he so unrestrainedly,
and, it may be added, defyingly abandoned himself. Of the state of his
mind on leaving England, I have already endeavoured to convey some idea;
and among the feelings that went to make up that self-centred spirit of
resistance which he then opposed to his fate was an indignant scorn for
his own countrymen for the wrongs he thought they had done him. For a
time, the kindly sentiments which he still harboured toward Lady Byron,
and a sort of vague hope, perhaps, that all would yet come right again,
kept his mind in a mood somewhat more softened and docile, as well as
sufficiently under the influence of English opinions to prevent his
breaking out into open rebellion against it, as he unluckily did
afterward.
'By the failure of the attempted mediation with Lady Byron, his last link
with home was severed: while, notwithstanding the quiet and unobtrusive
life which he led at Geneva, there was as yet, he found, no cessation of
the slanderous warfare against his character; the same busy and
misrepresenting spirit which had tracked his every step at home, having,
with no less malicious watchfulness, dogged him into exile.'
We should like to know what the misrepresentations and slanders must have
been, when this sort of thing is admitted in Mr. Moore's justification.
It seems to us rather wonderful how anybody, unless it were a person like
the Countess Guiccioli, could misrepresent a life such as even Byron's
friend admits he was leading.
During all these years, when he was setting at defiance every principle
of morality and decorum, the interest of the female mind all over Europe
in the conversion of this brilliant prodigal son was unceasing, and
reflects the greatest credit upon the faith of the sex.
Madame de Stael commenced the first effort at evangelization immediately
after he left England, and found her catechumen in a most edifying state
of humility. He was, metaphorically, on his knees in penitence, and
confessed himself a miserable sinner in the loveliest manner possible.
Such sweetness and humility took all hearts. His conversations with
Madame de Stael were printed, and circulated all over the world; making
it to appear that only the inflexibility of Lady Byron stood in the way
of his entire conversion.
Lady Blessington, among many others, took him in hand five or six years
afterwards, and was greatly delighted with his docility, and edified by
his frank and free confessions of his miserable offences. Nothing now
seemed wanting to bring the wanderer home to the fold but a kind word
from Lady Byron. But, when the fair countess offered to mediate, the
poet only shook his head in tragic despair; 'he had so many times tried
in vain; Lady Byron's course had been from the first that of obdurate
silence.'
Any one who would wish to see a specimen of the skill of the honourable
poet in mystification will do well to read a letter to Lady Byron, which
Lord Byron, on parting from Lady Blessington, enclosed for her to read
just before he went to Greece. He says,--
'The letter which I enclose I was prevented from sending by my despair of
its doing any good. I was perfectly sincere when I wrote it, and am so
still. But it is difficult for me to withstand the thousand provocations
on that subject which both friends and foes have for seven years been
throwing in the way of a man whose feelings were once quick, and whose
temper was never patient.'
* * * * *
'TO LADY BYRON, CARE OF THE HON. MRS. LEIGH, LONDON.
'PISA, Nov. 17, 1821.
'I have to acknowledge the receipt of "Ada's hair," which is very soft
and pretty, and nearly as dark already as mine was at twelve years old,
if I may judge from what I recollect of some in Augusta's possession,
taken at that age. But it don't curl--perhaps from its being let grow.
'I also thank you for the inscription of the date and name; and I will
tell you why: I believe that they are the only two or three words of your
handwriting in my possession. For your letters I returned; and except
the two words, or rather the one word, "Household," written twice in an
old account book, I have no other. I burnt your last note, for two
reasons: firstly, it was written in a style not very agreeable; and,
secondly, I wished to take your word without documents, which are the
worldly resources of suspicious people.
'I suppose that this note will reach you somewhere about Ada's
birthday--the 10th of December, I believe. She will then be six: so
that, in about twelve more, I shall have some chance of meeting her;
perhaps sooner, if I am obliged to go to England by business or
otherwise. Recollect, however, one thing, either in distance or
nearness--every day which keeps us asunder should, after so long a
period, rather soften our mutual feelings; which must always have one
rallying point as long as our child exists, which, I presume, we both
hope will be long after either of her parents.
'The time which has elapsed since the separation has been considerably
more than the whole brief period of our union, and the not much longer
one of our prior acquaintance. We both made a bitter mistake; but now it
is over, and irrevocably so. For at thirty-three on my part, and few
years less on yours, though it is no very extended period of life, still
it is one when the habits and thought are generally so formed as to admit
of no modification; and, as we could not agree when younger, we should
with difficulty do so now.
'I say all this, because I own to you, that notwithstanding everything, I
considered our reunion as not impossible for more than a year after the
separation; but then I gave up the hope entirely and for ever. But this
very impossibility of reunion seems to me at least a reason why, on all
the few points of discussion which can arise between us, we should
preserve the courtesies of life, and as much of its kindness as people
who are never to meet may preserve,--perhaps more easily than nearer
connections. For my own part, I am violent, but not malignant; for only
fresh provocations can awaken my resentments. To you, who are colder and
more concentrated, I would just hint, that you may sometimes mistake the
depth of a cold anger for dignity, and a worse feeling for duty. I
assure you that I bear you now (whatever I may have done) no resentment
whatever. Remember, that, if you have injured me in aught, this
forgiveness is something; and that, if I have injured you, it is
something more still, if it be true, as the moralists say, that the most
offending are the least forgiving.
'Whether the offence has been solely on my side, or reciprocal, or on
yours chiefly, I have ceased to reflect upon any but two things; viz.,
that you are the mother of my child, and that we shall never meet again.
I think, if you also consider the two corresponding points with reference
to myself, it will be better for all three.
'Yours ever,
'NOEL BYRON.'
The artless Thomas Moore introduces this letter in the 'Life,' with the
remark,--
'There are few, I should think, of my readers, who will not agree with me
in pronouncing, that, if the author of the following letter had not right
on his side, he had at least most of those good feelings which are found
in general to accompany it.'
The reader is requested to take notice of the important admission; that
the letter was never sent to Lady Byron at all. It was, in fact, never
intended for her, but was a nice little dramatic performance, composed
simply with the view of acting on the sympathies of Lady Blessington and
Byron's numerous female admirers; and the reader will agree with us, we
think, that, in this point of view, it was very neatly done, and deserves
immortality as a work of high art. For six years he had been plunged
into every kind of vice and excess, pleading his shattered domestic joys,
and his wife's obdurate heart, as the apology and the impelling cause;
filling the air with his shrieks and complaints concerning the slander
which pursued him, while he filled letters to his confidential
correspondents with records of new mistresses. During all these years,
the silence of Lady Byron was unbroken; though Lord Byron not only drew
in private on the sympathies of his female admirers, but employed his
talents and position as an author in holding her up to contempt and
ridicule before thousands of readers. We shall quote at length his side
of the story, which he published in the First Canto of 'Don Juan,' that
the reader may see how much reason he had for assuming the injured tone
which he did in the letter to Lady Byron quoted above. That letter never
was sent to her; and the unmanly and indecent caricature of her, and the
indelicate exposure of the whole story on his own side, which we are
about to quote, were the only communications that could have reached her
solitude.
In the following verses, Lady Byron is represented as Donna Inez, and
Lord Byron as Don Jose; but the incidents and allusions were so very
pointed, that nobody for a moment doubted whose history the poet was
narrating.
'His mother was a learned lady, famed
For every branch of every science known
In every Christian language ever named,
With virtues equalled by her wit alone:
She made the cleverest people quite ashamed;
And even the good with inward envy groaned,
Finding themselves so very much exceeded
In their own way by all the things that she did.
. . . .
Save that her duty both to man and God
Required this conduct; which seemed very odd.
She kept a journal where his faults were noted,
And opened certain trunks of books and letters,
(All which might, if occasion served, be quoted);
And then she had all Seville for abettors,
Besides her good old grandmother (who doted):
The hearers of her case become repeaters,
Then advocates, inquisitors, and judges,--
Some for amusement, others for old grudges.
And then this best and meekest woman bore
With such serenity her husband's woes!
Just as the Spartan ladies did of yore,
Who saw their spouses killed, and nobly chose
Never to say a word about them more.
Calmly she heard each calumny that rose,
And saw his agonies with such sublimity,
That all the world exclaimed, "What magnanimity!"'
This is the longest and most elaborate version of his own story that
Byron ever published; but he busied himself with many others, projecting
at one time a Spanish romance, in which the same story is related in the
same transparent manner: but this he was dissuaded from printing. The
booksellers, however, made a good speculation in publishing what they
called his domestic poems; that is, poems bearing more or less relation
to this subject.
Every person with whom he became acquainted with any degree of intimacy
was made familiar with his side of the story. Moore's Biography is from
first to last, in its representations, founded upon Byron's
communicativeness, and Lady Byron's silence; and the world at last
settled down to believing that the account so often repeated, and never
contradicted, must be substantially a true one.
The true history of Lord and Lady Byron has long been perfectly
understood in many circles in England; but the facts were of a nature
that could not be made public. While there was a young daughter living
whose future might be prejudiced by its recital, and while there were
other persons on whom the disclosure of the real truth would have been
crushing as an avalanche, Lady Byron's only course was the perfect
silence in which she took refuge, and those sublime works of charity and
mercy to which she consecrated her blighted early life.
But the time is now come when the truth may be told. All the actors in
the scene have disappeared from the stage of mortal existence, and
passed, let us have faith to hope, into a world where they would desire
to expiate their faults by a late publication of the truth.
No person in England, we think, would as yet take the responsibility of
relating the true history which is to clear Lady Byron's memory; but, by
a singular concurrence of circumstances, all the facts of the case, in
the most undeniable and authentic form, were at one time placed in the
hands of the writer of this sketch, with authority to make such use of
them as she should judge best. Had this melancholy history been allowed
to sleep, no public use would have been made of them; but the appearance
of a popular attack on the character of Lady Byron calls for a
vindication, and the true story of her married life will therefore now be
related.
Lord Byron has described in one of his letters the impression left upon
his mind by a young person whom he met one evening in society, and who
attracted his attention by the simplicity of her dress, and a certain air
of singular purity and calmness with which she surveyed the scene around
her.
On inquiry, he was told that this young person was Miss Milbanke, an only
child, and one of the largest heiresses in England.
Lord Byron was fond of idealising his experiences in poetry; and the
friends of Lady Byron had no difficulty in recognising the portrait of
Lady Byron, as she appeared at this time of her life, in his exquisite
description of Aurora Raby:--
'There was
Indeed a certain fair and fairy one,
Of the best class, and better than her class,--
Aurora Raby, a young star who shone
O'er life, too sweet an image for such glass;
A lovely being scarcely formed or moulded;
A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.
. . . .
Early in years, and yet more infantine
In figure, she had something of sublime
In eyes which sadly shone as seraphs' shine;
All youth, but with an aspect beyond time;
Radiant and grave, as pitying man's decline;
Mournful, but mournful of another's crime,
She looked as if she sat by Eden's door,
And grieved for those who could return no more.
. . . .
She gazed upon a world she scarcely knew,
As seeking not to know it; silent, lone,
As grows a flower, thus quietly she grew,
And kept her heart serene within its zone.
There was awe in the homage which she drew;
Her spirit seemed as seated on a throne,
Apart from the surrounding world, and strong
In its own strength,--most strange in one so young!'
Some idea of the course which their acquaintance took, and of the manner
in which he was piqued into thinking of her, is given in a stanza or
two:--
'The dashing and proud air of Adeline
Imposed not upon her: she saw her blaze
Much as she would have seen a glow-worm shine;
Then turned unto the stars for loftier rays.
Juan was something she could not divine,
Being no sibyl in the new world's ways;
Yet she was nothing dazzled by the meteor,
Because she did not pin her faith on feature.
His fame too (for he had that kind of fame
Which sometimes plays the deuce with womankind,--
A heterogeneous mass of glorious blame,
Half virtues and whole vices being combined;
Faults which attract because they are not tame;
Follies tricked out so brightly that they blind),--
These seals upon her wax made no impression,
Such was her coldness or her self-possession.
Aurora sat with that indifference
Which piques a preux chevalier,--as it ought.
Of all offences, that's the worst offence
Which seems to hint you are not worth a thought.
. . . .
To his gay nothings, nothing was replied,
Or something which was nothing, as urbanity
Required. Aurora scarcely looked aside,
Nor even smiled enough for any vanity.
The Devil was in the girl! Could it be pride,
Or modesty, or absence, or inanity?
. . . .
Juan was drawn thus into some attentions,
Slight but select, and just enough to express,
To females of perspicuous comprehensions,
That he would rather make them more than less.
Aurora at the last (so history mentions,
Though probably much less a fact than guess)
So far relaxed her thoughts from their sweet prison
As once or twice to smile, if not to listen.
. . . .
But Juan had a sort of winning way,
A proud humility, if such there be,
Which showed such deference to what females say,
As if each charming word were a decree.
His tact, too, tempered him from grave to gay,
And taught him when to be reserved or free.
He had the art of drawing people out,
Without their seeing what he was about.
Aurora, who in her indifference,
Confounded him in common with the crowd
Of flatterers, though she deemed he had more sense
Than whispering foplings or than witlings loud,
Commenced (from such slight things will great commence)
To feel that flattery which attracts the proud,
Rather by deference than compliment,
And wins even by a delicate dissent.
And then he had good looks: that point was carried
Nem. con. amongst the women.
. . . .
Now, though we know of old that looks deceive,
And always have done, somehow these good looks,
Make more impression than the best of books.
Aurora, who looked more on books than faces,
Was very young, although so very sage:
Admiring more Minerva than the Graces,
Especially upon a printed page.
But Virtue's self, with all her tightest laces,
Has not the natural stays of strict old age;
And Socrates, that model of all duty,
Owned to a penchant, though discreet for beauty.'
The presence of this high-minded, thoughtful, unworldly woman is
described through two cantos of the wild, rattling 'Don Juan,' in a
manner that shows how deeply the poet was capable of being affected by
such an appeal to his higher nature.
For instance, when Don Juan sits silent and thoughtful amid a circle of
persons who are talking scandal, the poet says,--
''Tis true, he saw Aurora look as though
She approved his silence: she perhaps mistook
Its motive for that charity we owe,
But seldom pay, the absent.
. . . .
He gained esteem where it was worth the most;
And certainly Aurora had renewed
In him some feelings he had lately lost
Or hardened,--feelings which, perhaps ideal,
Are so divine that I must deem them real:--
The love of higher things and better days;
The unbounded hope and heavenly ignorance
Of what is called the world and the world's ways;
The moments when we gather from a glance
More joy than from all future pride or praise,
Which kindled manhood, but can ne'er entrance
The heart in an existence of its own
Of which another's bosom is the zone.
And full of sentiments sublime as billows
Heaving between this world and worlds beyond,
Don Juan, when the midnight hour of pillows
Arrived, retired to his.' . . .
In all these descriptions of a spiritual unworldly nature acting on the
spiritual and unworldly part of his own nature, every one who ever knew
Lady Byron intimately must have recognised the model from which he drew,
and the experience from which he spoke, even though nothing was further
from his mind than to pay this tribute to the woman he had injured, and
though before these lines, which showed how truly he knew her real
character, had come one stanza of ribald, vulgar caricature, designed as
a slight to her:--
'There was Miss Millpond, smooth as summer's sea,
That usual paragon, an only daughter,
Who seemed the cream of equanimity
'Till skimmed; and then there was some milk and water;
With a slight shade of blue, too, it might be,
Beneath the surface: but what did it matter?
Love's riotous; but marriage should have quiet,
And, being consumptive, live on a milk diet.'
The result of Byron's intimacy with Miss Milbanke and the enkindling of
his nobler feelings was an offer of marriage, which she, though at the
time deeply interested in him, declined with many expressions of
friendship and interest. In fact, she already loved him, but had that
doubt of her power to be to him all that a wife should be, which would be
likely to arise in a mind so sensitively constituted and so unworldly.
They, however, continued a correspondence as friends; on her part, the
interest continually increased; on his, the transient rise of better
feelings was choked and overgrown by the thorns of base unworthy
passions.
From the height at which he might have been happy as the husband of a
noble woman, he fell into the depths of a secret adulterous intrigue with
a blood relation, so near in consanguinity, that discovery must have been
utter ruin and expulsion from civilised society.
From henceforth, this damning guilty secret became the ruling force in
his life; holding him with a morbid fascination, yet filling him with
remorse and anguish, and insane dread of detection. Two years after his
refusal by Miss Milbanke, his various friends, seeing that for some cause
he was wretched, pressed marriage upon him.
Marriage has often been represented as the proper goal and terminus of a
wild and dissipated career; and it has been supposed to be the appointed
mission of good women to receive wandering prodigals, with all the rags
and disgraces of their old life upon them, and put rings on their hands,
and shoes on their feet, and introduce them, clothed and in their right
minds, to an honourable career in society.
Marriage was, therefore, universally recommended to Lord Byron by his
numerous friends and well-wishers; and so he determined to marry, and, in
an hour of reckless desperation, sat down and wrote proposals to two
ladies. One was declined: the other, which was accepted, was to Miss
Milbanke. The world knows well that he had the gift of expression, and
will not be surprised that he wrote a very beautiful letter, and that the
woman who had already learned to love him fell at once into the snare.
Her answer was a frank, outspoken avowal of her love for him, giving
herself to him heart and hand. The good in Lord Byron was not so utterly
obliterated that he could receive such a letter without emotion, or
practise such unfairness on a loving, trusting heart without pangs of
remorse. He had sent the letter in mere recklessness; he had not
seriously expected to be accepted; and the discovery of the treasure of
affection which he had secured was like a vision of lost heaven to a soul
in hell.
But, nevertheless, in his letters written about the engagement, there are
sufficient evidences that his self-love was flattered at the preference
accorded him by so superior a woman, and one who had been so much sought.
He mentions with an air of complacency that she has employed the last two
years in refusing five or six of his acquaintance; that he had no idea
she loved him, admitting that it was an old attachment on his part. He
dwells on her virtues with a sort of pride of ownership. There is a sort
of childish levity about the frankness of these letters, very
characteristic of the man who skimmed over the deepest abysses with the
lightest jests. Before the world, and to his intimates, he was acting
the part of the successful fiance, conscious all the while of the deadly
secret that lay cold at the bottom of his heart.
When he went to visit Miss Milbanke's parents as her accepted lover, she
was struck with his manner and appearance: she saw him moody and gloomy,
evidently wrestling with dark and desperate thoughts, and anything but
what a happy and accepted lover should be. She sought an interview with
him alone, and told him that she had observed that he was not happy in
the engagement; and magnanimously added, that, if on review, he found he
had been mistaken in the nature of his feelings, she would immediately
release him, and they should remain only friends.
Overcome with the conflict of his feelings, Lord Byron fainted away. Miss
Milbanke was convinced that his heart must really be deeply involved in
an attachment with reference to which he showed such strength of emotion,
and she spoke no more of a dissolution of the engagement.
There is no reason to doubt that Byron was, as he relates in his 'Dream,'
profoundly agonized and agitated when he stood before God's altar with
the trusting young creature whom he was leading to a fate so awfully
tragic; yet it was not the memory of Mary Chaworth, but another guiltier
and more damning memory, that overshadowed that hour.
The moment the carriage-doors were shut upon the bridegroom and the
bride, the paroxysm of remorse and despair--unrepentant remorse and angry
despair--broke forth upon her gentle head:--
'You might have saved me from this, madam! You had all in your own power
when I offered myself to you first. Then you might have made me what you
pleased; but now you will find that you have married a devil!'
In Miss Martineau's Sketches, recently published, is an account of the
termination of this wedding-journey, which brought them to one of Lady
Byron's ancestral country seats, where they were to spend the honeymoon.
Miss Martineau says,--
'At the altar she did not know that she was a sacrifice; but before
sunset of that winter day she knew it, if a judgment may be formed from
her face, and attitude of despair, when she alighted from the carriage on
the afternoon of her marriage-day. It was not the traces of tears which
won the sympathy of the old butler who stood at the open door. The
bridegroom jumped out of the carriage and walked away. The bride
alighted, and came up the steps alone, with a countenance and frame
agonized and listless with evident horror and despair. The old servant
longed to offer his arm to the young, lonely creature, as an assurance of
sympathy and protection. From this shock she certainly rallied, and
soon. The pecuniary difficulties of her new home were exactly what a
devoted spirit like hers was fitted to encounter. Her husband bore
testimony, after the catastrophe, that a brighter being, a more
sympathising and agreeable companion, never blessed any man's home. When
he afterwards called her cold and mathematical, and over-pious, and so
forth, it was when public opinion had gone against him, and when he had
discovered that her fidelity and mercy, her silence and magnanimity,
might be relied on, so that he was at full liberty to make his part good,
as far as she was concerned.
'Silent she was even to her own parents, whose feelings she magnanimously
spared. She did not act rashly in leaving him, though she had been most
rash in marrying him.'
Not all at once did the full knowledge of the dreadful reality into which
she had entered come upon the young wife. She knew vaguely, from the
wild avowals of the first hours of their marriage, that there was a
dreadful secret of guilt; that Byron's soul was torn with agonies of
remorse, and that he had no love to give to her in return for a love
which was ready to do and dare all for him. Yet bravely she addressed
herself to the task of soothing and pleasing and calming the man whom she
had taken 'for better or for worse.'
Young and gifted; with a peculiar air of refined and spiritual beauty;
graceful in every movement; possessed of exquisite taste; a perfect
companion to his mind in all the higher walks of literary culture; and
with that infinite pliability to all his varying, capricious moods which
true love alone can give; bearing in her hand a princely fortune, which,
with a woman's uncalculating generosity, was thrown at his feet,--there
is no wonder that she might feel for a while as if she could enter the
lists with the very Devil himself, and fight with a woman's weapons for
the heart of her husband.
There are indications scattered through the letters of Lord Byron, which,
though brief indeed, showed that his young wife was making every effort
to accommodate herself to him, and to give him a cheerful home. One of
the poems that he sends to his publisher about this time, he speaks of as
being copied by her. He had always the highest regard for her literary
judgments and opinions; and this little incident shows that she was
already associating herself in a wifely fashion with his aims as an
author.
The poem copied by her, however, has a sad meaning, which she afterwards
learned to understand only too well:--
'There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay:
'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone that fades so fast;
But the tender bloom of heart is gone e'er youth itself be past.
Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt, or ocean of excess:
The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again.'
Only a few days before she left him for ever, Lord Byron sent Murray
manuscripts, in Lady Byron's handwriting, of the 'Siege of Corinth,' and
'Parisina,' and wrote,--
'I am very glad that the handwriting was a favourable omen of the morale
of the piece: but you must not trust to that; for my copyist would write
out anything I desired, in all the ignorance of innocence.'
There were lucid intervals in which Lord Byron felt the charm of his
wife's mind, and the strength of her powers. 'Bell, you could be a poet
too, if you only thought so,' he would say. There were summer-hours in
her stormy life, the memory of which never left her, when Byron was as
gentle and tender as he was beautiful; when he seemed to be possessed by
a good angel: and then for a little time all the ideal possibilities of
his nature stood revealed.
The most dreadful men to live with are those who thus alternate between
angel and devil. The buds of hope and love called out by a day or two of
sunshine are frozen again and again, till the tree is killed.
But there came an hour of revelation,--an hour when, in a manner which
left no kind of room for doubt, Lady Byron saw the full depth of the
abyss of infamy which her marriage was expected to cover, and understood
that she was expected to be the cloak and the accomplice of this infamy.
Many women would have been utterly crushed by such a disclosure; some
would have fled from him immediately, and exposed and denounced the
crime. Lady Byron did neither. When all the hope of womanhood died out
of her heart, there arose within her, stronger, purer, and brighter, that
immortal kind of love such as God feels for the sinner,--the love of
which Jesus spoke, and which holds the one wanderer of more account than
the ninety and nine that went not astray. She would neither leave her
husband nor betray him, nor yet would she for one moment justify his sin;
and hence came two years of convulsive struggle, in which sometimes, for
a while, the good angel seemed to gain ground, and then the evil one
returned with sevenfold vehemence.
Lord Byron argued his case with himself and with her with all the
sophistries of his powerful mind. He repudiated Christianity as
authority; asserted the right of every human being to follow out what he
called 'the impulses of nature.' Subsequently he introduced into one of
his dramas the reasoning by which he justified himself in incest.
In the drama of 'Cain,' Adah, the sister and the wife of Cain, thus
addresses him:--
'Cain, walk not with this spirit.
Bear with what we have borne, and love me: I
Love thee.
Lucifer. More than thy mother and thy sire?
Adah. I do. Is that a sin, too?
Lucifer. No, not yet:
It one day will be in your children.
Adah. What!
Must not my daughter love her brother Enoch?
Lucifer. Not as thou lovest Cain.
Adah. O my God!
Shall they not love, and bring forth things that love
Out of their love? Have they not drawn their milk
Out of this bosom? Was not he, their father,
Born of the same sole womb, in the same hour
With me? Did we not love each other, and,
In multiplying our being, multiply
Things which will love each other as we love
Them? And as I love thee, my Cain, go not
Forth with this spirit: he is not of ours.
Lucifer. The sin I speak of is not of my making
And cannot be a sin in you, whate'er
It seems in those who will replace ye in
Mortality.
Adah. What is the sin which is not
Sin in itself? Can circumstance make sin
Of virtue? If it doth, we are the slaves
Of'--
Lady Byron, though slight and almost infantine in her bodily presence,
had the soul, not only of an angelic woman, but of a strong reasoning
man. It was the writer's lot to know her at a period when she formed the
personal acquaintance of many of the very first minds of England; but,
among all with whom this experience brought her in connection, there was
none who impressed her so strongly as Lady Byron. There was an almost
supernatural power of moral divination, a grasp of the very highest and
most comprehensive things, that made her lightest opinions singularly
impressive. No doubt, this result was wrought out in a great degree from
the anguish and conflict of these two years, when, with no one to help or
counsel her but Almighty God, she wrestled and struggled with fiends of
darkness for the redemption of her husband's soul.
She followed him through all his sophistical reasonings with a keener
reason. She besought and implored, in the name of his better nature, and
by all the glorious things that he was capable of being and doing; and
she had just power enough to convulse and shake and agonise, but not
power enough to subdue.
One of the first of living writers, in the novel of 'Romola,' has given,
in her masterly sketch of the character of Tito, the whole history of the
conflict of a woman like Lady Byron with a nature like that of her
husband. She has described a being full of fascinations and sweetnesses,
full of generosities and of good-natured impulses; a nature that could
not bear to give pain, or to see it in others, but entirely destitute of
any firm moral principle; she shows how such a being, merely by yielding
step by step to the impulses of passion, and disregarding the claims of
truth and right, becomes involved in a fatality of evil, in which deceit,
crime, and cruelty are a necessity, forcing him to persist in the basest
ingratitude to the father who has done all for him, and hard-hearted
treachery to the high-minded wife who has given herself to him wholly.
There are few scenes in literature more fearfully tragic than the one
between Romola and Tito, when he finally discovers that she knows him
fully, and can be deceived by him no more. Some such hour always must
come for strong decided natures irrevocably pledged--one to the service
of good, and the other to the slavery of evil. The demoniac cried out,
'What have I to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth? Art thou come to
torment me before the time?' The presence of all-pitying purity and love
was a torture to the soul possessed by the demon of evil.
These two years in which Lady Byron was with all her soul struggling to
bring her husband back to his better self were a series of passionate
convulsions.
During this time, such was the disordered and desperate state of his
worldly affairs, that there were ten executions for debt levied on their
family establishment; and it was Lady Byron's fortune each time which
settled the account.
Toward the last, she and her husband saw less and less of each other; and
he came more and more decidedly under evil influences, and seemed to
acquire a sort of hatred of her.
Lady Byron once said significantly to a friend who spoke of some
causeless dislike in another, 'My dear, I have known people to be hated
for no other reason than because they impersonated conscience.'
The biographers of Lord Byron, and all his apologists, are careful to
narrate how sweet and amiable and obliging he was to everybody who
approached him; and the saying of Fletcher, his man-servant, that
'anybody could do anything with my Lord, except my Lady,' has often been
quoted.
The reason of all this will now be evident. 'My Lady' was the only one,
fully understanding the deep and dreadful secrets of his life, who had
the courage resolutely and persistently and inflexibly to plant herself
in his way, and insist upon it, that, if he went to destruction, it
should be in spite of her best efforts.
He had tried his strength with her fully. The first attempt had been to
make her an accomplice by sophistry; by destroying her faith in
Christianity, and confusing her sense of right and wrong, to bring her
into the ranks of those convenient women who regard the marriage-tie only
as a friendly alliance to cover licence on both sides.
When her husband described to her the Continental latitude (the
good-humoured marriage, in which complaisant couples mutually agreed to
form the cloak for each other's infidelities), and gave her to understand
that in this way alone she could have a peaceful and friendly life with
him, she answered him simply, 'I am too truly your friend to do this.'
When Lord Byron found that he had to do with one who would not yield, who
knew him fully, who could not be blinded and could not be deceived, he
determined to rid himself of her altogether.
It was when the state of affairs between herself and her husband seemed
darkest and most hopeless, that the only child of this union was born.
Lord Byron's treatment of his wife during the sensitive period that
preceded the birth of this child, and during her confinement, was marked
by paroxysms of unmanly brutality, for which the only possible charity on
her part was the supposition of insanity. Moore sheds a significant
light on this period, by telling us that, about this time, Byron was
often drunk, day after day, with Sheridan. There had been insanity in
the family; and this was the plea which Lady Byron's love put in for him.
She regarded him as, if not insane, at least so nearly approaching the
boundaries of insanity as to be a subject of forbearance and tender pity;
and she loved him with that love resembling a mother's, which good wives
often feel when they have lost all faith in their husband's principles,
and all hopes of their affections. Still, she was in heart and soul his
best friend; true to him with a truth which he himself could not shake.
In the verses addressed to his daughter, Lord Byron speaks of her as
'The child of love, though born in bitterness,
And nurtured in convulsion.'
A day or two after the birth of this child, Lord Byron came suddenly into
Lady Byron's room, and told her that her mother was dead. It was an
utter falsehood; but it was only one of the many nameless injuries and
cruelties by which he expressed his hatred of her. A short time after
her confinement, she was informed by him, in a note, that, as soon as she
was able to travel, she must go; that he could not and would not longer
have her about him; and, when her child was only five weeks old, he
carried this threat of expulsion into effect.
Here we will insert briefly Lady Byron's own account (the only one she
ever gave to the public) of this separation. The circumstances under
which this brief story was written are affecting.
Lord Byron was dead. The whole account between him and her was closed
for ever in this world. Moore's 'Life' had been prepared, containing
simply and solely Lord Byron's own version of their story. Moore sent
this version to Lady Byron, and requested to know if she had any remarks
to make upon it. In reply, she sent a brief statement to him,--the first
and only one that had come from her during all the years of the
separation, and which appears to have mainly for its object the
exculpation of her father and mother from the charge, made by the poet,
of being the instigators of the separation.
In this letter, she says, with regard to their separation,--
'The facts are, I left London for Kirkby Mallory, the residence of my
father and mother, on the 15th of January, 1816. LORD BYRON HAD
SIGNIFIED TO ME IN WRITING, JAN. 6, HIS ABSOLUTE DESIRE THAT I SHOULD
LEAVE LONDON ON THE EARLIEST DAY THAT I COULD CONVENIENTLY FIX. It was
not safe for me to undertake the fatigue of a journey sooner than the
15th. Previously to my departure, it had been strongly impressed upon my
mind that Lord Byron was under the influence of insanity. This opinion
was derived, in a great measure, from the communications made me by his
nearest relatives and personal attendant, who had more opportunity than
myself for observing him during the latter part of my stay in town. It
was even represented to me that he was in danger of destroying himself.
'With the concurrence of his family, I had consulted Dr. Baillie as a
friend (Jan. 8) respecting the supposed malady. On acquainting him with
the state of the case, and with Lord Byron's desire that I should leave
London, Dr. Baillie thought that my absence might be advisable as an
experiment, assuming the fact of mental derangement; for Dr. Baillie, not
having had access to Lord Byron, could not pronounce a positive opinion
on that point. He enjoined that, in correspondence with Lord Byron, I
should avoid all but light and soothing topics. Under these impressions,
I left London, determined to follow the advice given by Dr. Baillie.
Whatever might have been the conduct of Lord Byron toward me from the
time of my marriage, yet, supposing him to be in a state of mental
alienation, it was not for me, nor for any person of common humanity, to
manifest at that moment a sense of injury.'
Nothing more than this letter from Lady Byron is necessary to
substantiate the fact, that she did not leave her husband, but was driven
from him,--driven from him that he might give himself up to the guilty
infatuation that was consuming him, without being tortured by her
imploring face, and by the silent power of her presence and her prayers.
For a long time before this, she had seen little of him. On the day of
her departure, she passed by the door of his room, and stopped to caress
his favourite spaniel, which was lying there; and she confessed to a
friend the weakness of feeling a willingness even to be something as
humble as that poor little creature, might she only be allowed to remain
and watch over him. She went into the room where he and the partner of
his sins were sitting together, and said, 'Byron, I come to say goodbye,'
offering, at the same time, her hand.
Lord Byron put his hands behind him, retreated to the mantel-piece, and,
looking on the two that stood there, with a sarcastic smile said, 'When
shall we three meet again?' Lady Byron answered, 'In heaven, I trust'.
And those were her last words to him on earth.
Now, if the reader wishes to understand the real talents of Lord Byron
for deception and dissimulation, let him read, with this story in his
mind, the 'Fare thee well,' which he addressed to Lady Byron through the
printer:--
'Fare thee well; and if for ever,
Still for ever fare thee well!
Even though unforgiving, never
'Gainst thee shall my heart rebel.
Would that breast were bared before thee
Where thy head so oft hath lain,
While that placid sleep came o'er thee
Thou canst never know again!
Though my many faults defaced me,
Could no other arm be found
Than the one which once embraced me
To inflict a careless wound?'
The re-action of society against him at the time of the separation from
his wife was something which he had not expected, and for which, it
appears, he was entirely unprepared. It broke up the guilty intrigue and
drove him from England. He had not courage to meet or endure it. The
world, to be sure, was very far from suspecting what the truth was: but
the tide was setting against him with such vehemence as to make him
tremble every hour lest the whole should be known; and henceforth, it
became a warfare of desperation to make his story good, no matter at
whose expense.
He had tact enough to perceive at first that the assumption of the
pathetic and the magnanimous, and general confessions of faults,
accompanied with admissions of his wife's goodness, would be the best
policy in his case. In this mood, he thus writes to Moore:--
'The fault was not in my choice (unless in choosing at all); for I do not
believe (and I must say it in the very dregs of all this bitter business)
that there ever was a better, or even a brighter, a kinder, or a more
amiable, agreeable being than Lady Byron. I never had, nor can have, any
reproach to make her while with me. Where there is blame, it belongs to
myself.'
As there must be somewhere a scapegoat to bear the sin of the affair,
Lord Byron wrote a poem called 'A Sketch,' in which he lays the blame of
stirring up strife on a friend and former governess of Lady Byron's; but
in this sketch he introduces the following just eulogy on Lady Byron:--
'Foiled was perversion by that youthful mind
Which flattery fooled not, baseness could not blind,
Deceit infect not, near contagion soil,
Indulgence weaken, nor example spoil,
Nor mastered science tempt her to look down
On humbler talents with a pitying frown,
Nor genius swell, nor beauty render vain,
Nor envy ruffle to retaliate pain,
Nor fortune change, pride raise, nor passion bow,
Nor virtue teach austerity,--till now;
Serenely purest of her sex that live,
But wanting one sweet weakness,--to forgive;
Too shocked at faults her soul can never know,
She deemed that all could be like her below:
Foe to all vice, yet hardly Virtue's friend;
For Virtue pardons those she would amend.'
In leaving England, Lord Byron first went to Switzerland, where he
conceived and in part wrote out the tragedy of 'Manfred.' Moore speaks
of his domestic misfortunes, and the sufferings which he underwent at
this time, as having influence in stimulating his genius, so that he was
enabled to write with a greater power.
Anybody who reads the tragedy of 'Manfred' with this story in his mind
will see that it is true.
The hero is represented as a gloomy misanthrope, dwelling with impenitent
remorse on the memory of an incestuous passion which has been the
destruction of his sister for this life and the life to come, but which,
to the very last gasp, he despairingly refuses to repent of, even while
he sees the fiends of darkness rising to take possession of his departing
soul. That Byron knew his own guilt well, and judged himself severely,
may be gathered from passages in this poem, which are as powerful as
human language can be made; for instance this part of the 'incantation,'
which Moore says was written at this time:--
'Though thy slumber may be deep,
Yet thy spirit shall not sleep:
There are shades which will not vanish;
There are thoughts thou canst not banish.
By a power to thee unknown,
Thou canst never be alone:
Thou art wrapt as with a shroud;
Thou art gathered in a cloud;
And for ever shalt thou dwell
In the spirit of this spell.
. . . .
From thy false tears I did distil
An essence which had strength to kill;
From thy own heart I then did wring
The black blood in its blackest spring;
From thy own smile I snatched the snake,
For there it coiled as in a brake;
From thy own lips I drew the charm
Which gave all these their chiefest harm:
In proving every poison known,
I found the strongest was thine own.
By thy cold breast and serpent smile,
By thy unfathomed gulfs of guile,
By that most seeming virtuous eye,
By thy shut soul's hypocrisy,
By the perfection of thine art
Which passed for human thine own heart,
By thy delight in other's pain,
And by thy brotherhood of Cain,
I call upon thee, and compel
Thyself to be thy proper hell!'
Again: he represents Manfred as saying to the old abbot, who seeks to
bring him to repentance,--
'Old man, there is no power in holy men,
Nor charm in prayer, nor purifying form
Of penitence, nor outward look, nor fast,
Nor agony, nor greater than all these,
The innate tortures of that deep despair,
Which is remorse without the fear of hell,
But, all in all sufficient to itself,
Would make a hell of heaven, can exorcise
From out the unbounded spirit the quick sense
Of its own sins, wrongs, sufferance, and revenge
Upon itself: there is no future pang
Can deal that justice on the self-condemned
He deals on his own soul.'
And when the abbot tells him,
'All this is well;
For this will pass away, and be succeeded
By an auspicious hope, which shall look up
With calm assurance to that blessed place
Which all who seek may win, whatever be
Their earthly errors,'
he answers,
'It is too late.'
Then the old abbot soliloquises:--
'This should have been a noble creature: he
Hath all the energy which would have made
A goodly frame of glorious elements,
Had they been wisely mingled; as it is,
It is an awful chaos,--light and darkness,
And mind and dust, and passions and pure thoughts,
Mixed, and contending without end or order.'
The world can easily see, in Moore's Biography, what, after this, was the
course of Lord Byron's life; how he went from shame to shame, and
dishonour to dishonour, and used the fortune which his wife brought him
in the manner described in those private letters which his biographer was
left to print. Moore, indeed, says Byron had made the resolution not to
touch his lady's fortune; but adds, that it required more self-command
than he possessed to carry out so honourable a purpose.
Lady Byron made but one condition with him. She had him in her power;
and she exacted that the unhappy partner of his sins should not follow
him out of England, and that the ruinous intrigue should be given up. Her
inflexibility on this point kept up that enmity which was constantly
expressing itself in some publication or other, and which drew her and
her private relations with him before the public.
The story of what Lady Byron did with the portion of her fortune which
was reserved to her is a record of noble and skilfully administered
charities. Pitiful and wise and strong, there was no form of human
suffering or sorrow that did not find with her refuge and help. She gave
not only systematically, but also impulsively.
Miss Martineau claims for her the honour of having first invented
practical schools, in which the children of the poor were turned into
agriculturists, artizans, seamstresses, and good wives for poor men.
While she managed with admirable skill and economy permanent institutions
of this sort, she was always ready to relieve suffering in any form. The
fugitive slaves William and Ellen Crafts, escaping to England, were
fostered by her protecting care.
In many cases where there was distress or anxiety from poverty among
those too self-respecting to make their sufferings known, the delicate
hand of Lady Byron ministered to the want with a consideration which
spared the most refined feelings.
As a mother, her course was embarrassed by peculiar trials. The daughter
inherited from the father not only brilliant talents, but a restlessness
and morbid sensibility which might be too surely traced to the storms and
agitations of the period in which she was born. It was necessary to
bring her up in ignorance of the true history of her mother's life; and
the consequence was that she could not fully understand that mother.
During her early girlhood, her career was a source of more anxiety than
of comfort. She married a man of fashion, ran a brilliant course as a
gay woman of fashion, and died early of a lingering and painful disease.
In the silence and shaded retirement of the sick-room, the daughter came
wholly back to her mother's arms and heart; and it was on that mother's
bosom that she leaned as she went down into the dark valley. It was that
mother who placed her weak and dying hand in that of her Almighty
Saviour.
To the children left by her daughter, she ministered with the
faithfulness of a guardian angel; and it is owing to her influence that
those who yet remain are among the best and noblest of mankind.
The person whose relations with Byron had been so disastrous, also, in
the latter years of her life, felt Lady Byron's loving and ennobling
influences, and, in her last sickness and dying hours, looked to her for
consolation and help.
There was an unfortunate child of sin, born with the curse upon her, over
whose wayward nature Lady Byron watched with a mother's tenderness. She
was the one who could have patience when the patience of every one else
failed; and though her task was a difficult one, from the strange
abnormal propensities to evil in the object of her cares, yet Lady Byron
never faltered, and never gave over, till death took the responsibility
from her hands.
During all this trial, strange to say, her belief that the good in Lord
Byron would finally conquer was unshaken.
To a friend who said to her, 'Oh! how could you love him?' she answered
briefly, 'My dear, there was the angel in him.' It is in us all.
It was in this angel that she had faith. It was for the deliverance of
this angel from degradation and shame and sin that she unceasingly
prayed. She read every work that Byron wrote--read it with a deeper
knowledge than any human being but herself could possess. The ribaldry
and the obscenity and the insults with which he strove to make her
ridiculous in the world fell at her pitying feet unheeded.
When he broke away from all this unworthy life to devote himself to a
manly enterprise for the redemption of Greece, she thought that she saw
the beginning of an answer to her prayers. Even although one of his
latest acts concerning her was to repeat to Lady Blessington the false
accusation which made Lady Byron the author of all his errors, she still
had hopes from the one step taken in the right direction.
In the midst of these hopes came the news of his sudden death. On his
death-bed, it is well-known that he called his confidential English
servant to him, and said to him, 'Go to my sister; tell her--Go to Lady
Byron,--you will see her,--and say'--
Here followed twenty minutes of indistinct mutterings, in which the names
of his wife, daughter, and sister, frequently occurred. He then said,
'Now I have told you all.'
'My lord,' replied Fletcher, 'I have not understood a word your lordship
has been saying.'
'Not understand me!' exclaimed Lord Byron with a look of the utmost
distress: 'what a pity! Then it is too late,--all is over!' He
afterwards, says Moore, tried to utter a few words, of which none were
intelligible except 'My sister--my child.'
When Fletcher returned to London, Lady Byron sent for him, and walked the
room in convulsive struggles to repress her tears and sobs, while she
over and over again strove to elicit something from him which should
enlighten her upon what that last message had been; but in vain: the
gates of eternity were shut in her face, and not a word had passed to
tell her if he had repented.
For all that, Lady Byron never doubted his salvation. Ever before her,
during the few remaining years of her widowhood, was the image of her
husband, purified and ennobled, with the shadows of earth for ever
dissipated, the stains of sin for ever removed; 'the angel in him,' as
she expressed it, 'made perfect, according to its divine ideal.'
Never has more divine strength of faith and love existed in woman. Out
of the depths of her own loving and merciful nature, she gained such
views of the divine love and mercy as made all hopes possible. There was
no soul of whose future Lady Byron despaired,--such was her boundless
faith in the redeeming power of love.
After Byron's death, the life of this delicate creature--so frail in body
that she seemed always hovering on the brink of the eternal world, yet so
strong in spirit, and so unceasing in her various ministries of mercy--was
a miracle of mingled weakness and strength.
To talk with her seemed to the writer of this sketch the nearest possible
approach to talking with one of the spirits of the just made perfect.
She was gentle, artless; approachable as a little child; with ready,
outflowing sympathy for the cares and sorrows and interests of all who
approached her; with a naive and gentle playfulness, that adorned,
without hiding, the breadth and strength of her mind; and, above all,
with a clear, divining, moral discrimination; never mistaking wrong for
right in the slightest shade, yet with a mercifulness that made allowance
for every weakness, and pitied every sin.
There was so much of Christ in her, that to have seen her seemed to be to
have drawn near to heaven. She was one of those few whom absence cannot
estrange from friends; whose mere presence in this world seems always a
help to every generous thought, a strength to every good purpose, a
comfort in every sorrow.
Living so near the confines of the spiritual world, she seemed already to
see into it: hence the words of comfort which she addressed to a friend
who had lost a son:--
'Dear friend, remember, as long as our loved ones are in God's world,
they are in ours.'
* * * * *
It has been thought by some friends who have read the proof-sheets of the
foregoing that the author should give more specifically her authority for
these statements.
The circumstances which led the writer to England at a certain time
originated a friendship and correspondence with Lady Byron, which was
always regarded as one of the greatest acquisitions of that visit.
On the occasion of a second visit to England, in 1856, the writer
received a note from Lady Byron, indicating that she wished to have some
private, confidential conversation upon important subjects, and inviting
her, for that purpose, to spend a day with her at her country-seat near
London,
The writer went and spent a day with Lady Byron alone; and the object of
the invitation was explained to her. Lady Byron was in such a state of
health, that her physicians had warned her that she had very little time
to live. She was engaged in those duties and retrospections which every
thoughtful person finds necessary, when coming deliberately, and with
open eyes, to the boundaries of this mortal life.
At that time, there was a cheap edition of Byron's works in
contemplation, intended to bring his writings into circulation among the
masses; and the pathos arising from the story of his domestic misfortunes
was one great means relied on for giving it currency.
Under these circumstances, some of Lady Byron's friends had proposed the
question to her, whether she had not a responsibility to society for the
truth; whether she did right to allow these writings to gain influence
over the popular mind by giving a silent consent to what she knew to be
utter falsehoods.
Lady Byron's whole life had been passed in the most heroic
self-abnegation and self-sacrifice: and she had now to consider whether
one more act of self-denial was not required of her before leaving this
world; namely, to declare the absolute truth, no matter at what expense
to her own feelings.
For this reason, it was her desire to recount the whole history to a
person of another country, and entirely out of the sphere of personal and
local feelings which might be supposed to influence those in the country
and station in life where the events really happened, in order that she
might be helped by such a person's views in making up an opinion as to
her own duty.
The interview had almost the solemnity of a death-bed avowal. Lady Byron
stated the facts which have been embodied in this article, and gave to
the writer a paper containing a brief memorandum of the whole, with the
dates affixed.