THE
BYRON CONTROVERSY.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
LADY BYRON VINDICATED.
A History
OF
THE BYRON CONTROVERSY
FROM ITS BEGINNING IN 1816 TO THE PRESENT TIME.
BY
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
LONDON:
SAMPSON LOW, SON, AND MARSTON
CROWN BUILDINGS, 188 FLEET STREET.
1870.
(_All rights reserved._)
NOTE
BY
THE PUBLISHERS.
The subject of this volume is of such painful notoriety that any
apology from the Publishers may seem unnecessary upon issuing the
Author's reply to the counter statements which her narrative in
_Macmillan's Magazine_ has called forth. Nevertheless they consider it
right to state that their strong regard for the Author, respect for her
motives, and assurance of her truthfulness, would, even in the absence
of all other considerations, be sufficient to induce them to place
their imprint on the title-page.
The publication has been undertaken by them at the Author's request,
'as her friends,' and as the publishers of her former works, and from
a feeling that whatever difference of opinion may be entertained
respecting the Author's judiciousness in publishing 'The True Story,'
she is entitled to defend it, having been treated with grave injustice,
and often with much maliciousness, by her critics and opponents, and
been charged with motives from which no person living is more free.
An intense love of justice and hatred of oppression, with an utter
disregard of her own interests, characterise Mrs. STOWE'S
conduct and writings, as all who know her well will testify; and the
Publishers can unhesitatingly affirm their belief that neither fear
for loss of her literary fame, nor hope of gain, has for one moment
influenced her in the course she has taken.
LONDON: _January 1870_.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER II.
THE ATTACK ON LADY BYRON 6
CHAPTER III.
RÉSUMÉ OF THE CONSPIRACY 50
CHAPTER IV.
RESULTS AFTER LORD BYRON'S DEATH 57
CHAPTER V.
THE ATTACK ON LADY BYRON'S GRAVE 102
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
LADY BYRON AS I KNEW HER 132
CHAPTER II.
LADY BYRON'S STORY AS TOLD ME 153
CHAPTER III.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY OF EVENTS 171
CHAPTER IV.
THE CHARACTER OF THE TWO WITNESSES COMPARED 199
CHAPTER V.
THE DIRECT ARGUMENT TO PROVE THE CRIME 217
CHAPTER VI.
PHYSIOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 247
CHAPTER VII.
HOW COULD SHE LOVE HIM? 262
CHAPTER VIII.
CONCLUSION 269
PART III.
MISCELLANEOUS DOCUMENTS.
THE TRUE STORY OF LADY BYRON'S LIFE (AS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
IN 'THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY') 274
LORD LINDSAY'S LETTER TO 'THE LONDON TIMES' 304
DR. FORBES WINSLOW'S LETTER TO 'THE LONDON TIMES' 310
EXTRACT FROM LORD BYRON'S EXPUNGED LETTER TO MURRAY 312
EXTRACTS FROM 'BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE' 315
LETTERS OF LADY BYRON TO H. C. ROBINSON 318
DOMESTIC POEMS BY LORD BYRON 323
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
The interval since my publication of 'The True Story of Lady Byron's
Life' has been one of stormy discussion and of much invective.
I have not thought it necessary to disturb my spirit and confuse my
sense of right by even an attempt at reading the many abusive articles
that both here and in England have followed that disclosure. Friends
have undertaken the task for me, giving me from time to time the
substance of anything really worthy of attention which came to view in
the tumult.
It appeared to me essential that this first excitement should in a
measure spend itself before there would be a possibility of speaking
to any purpose. Now, when all would seem to have spoken who can speak,
and, it is to be hoped, have said the utmost they can say, there seems
a propriety in listening calmly, if that be possible, to what I have to
say in reply.
And, first, why have I made this disclosure at all?
_To this I answer briefly, Because I considered it my duty to make it._
I made it in defence of a beloved, revered friend, whose memory stood
forth in the eyes of the civilised world charged with most repulsive
crimes, of which I _certainly_ knew her innocent.
I claim, and shall prove, that Lady Byron's reputation has been the
victim of a concerted attack, begun by her husband during her lifetime,
and coming to its climax over her grave. I claim, and shall prove, that
it was not I who stirred up this controversy in this year 1869. I shall
show _who did do it_, and who is responsible for bringing on me that
hard duty of making these disclosures, which it appears to me ought to
have been made by others.
I claim that these facts were given to me unguarded by any promise or
seal of secrecy, expressed or implied; that they were lodged with me
as one sister rests her story with another for sympathy, for counsel,
for defence. _Never_ did I suppose the day would come that I should
be subjected to so cruel an anguish as this use of them has been to
me. Never did I suppose that,--when those kind hands, that had shed
nothing but blessings, were lying in the helplessness of death,--when
that gentle heart, so sorely tried and to the last so full of love, was
lying cold in the tomb,--a countryman in England could be found to cast
the foulest slanders on her grave, and not one in all England to raise
an effective voice in her defence.
I admit the feebleness of my plea, in point of execution. It was
written in a state of exhausted health, when no labour of the kind was
safe for me,--when my hand had not strength to hold the pen, and I was
forced to dictate to another.
I have been told that I have no reason to congratulate myself on it as
a literary effort. O my brothers and sisters! is there then nothing in
the world to think of but literary efforts? I ask any man with a heart
in his bosom, if he had been obliged to tell a story so cruel, because
his mother's grave gave no rest from slander,--I ask any woman who had
been forced to such a disclosure to free a dead sister's name from
grossest insults, whether she would have thought of making this work of
bitterness a literary success?
Are the cries of the oppressed, the gasps of the dying, the last
prayers of mothers,--are _any_ words wrung like drops of blood from the
human heart to be judged as literary efforts?
My fellow-countrymen of America, men of the press, I have done you one
act of justice,--of all your bitter articles, I have read not one.
I shall never be troubled in the future time by the remembrance of
any unkind word you have said of me, for at this moment I recollect
not one. I had such faith in you, such pride in my countrymen, as
men with whom, above all others, the cause of woman was safe and
sacred, that I was at first astonished and incredulous at what I
heard of the course of the American press, and was silent, not merely
from the impossibility of being heard, but from grief and shame. But
reflection convinces me that you were, in many cases, acting from a
misunderstanding of facts and through misguided honourable feeling;
and I still feel courage, therefore, to ask from you a fair hearing.
Now, as I have done you this justice, will you also do me the justice
to hear me seriously and candidly?
What interest have you or I, my brother and my sister, in this short
life of ours, to utter anything but the truth? Is not truth between man
and man and between man and woman the foundation on which all things
rest? Have you not, every individual of you, who must hereafter give
an account yourself alone to God, an interest to know the exact truth
in this matter, and a duty to perform as respects that truth? Hear me,
then, while I tell you the position in which I stood, and what was my
course in relation to it.
A shameless attack on my friend's memory had appeared in the
'Blackwood' of July 1869, branding Lady Byron as the vilest of
criminals, and recommending the Guiccioli book to a Christian public
as interesting from the very fact that it was the avowed production
of Lord Byron's mistress. No efficient protest was made against
this outrage in England, and Littell's 'Living Age' reprinted the
'Blackwood' article, and the Harpers, the largest publishing house in
America, perhaps in the world, re-published the book.
Its statements--with those of the 'Blackwood,' 'Pall Mall Gazette,' and
other English periodicals--were being propagated through all the young
reading and writing world of America. I was meeting them advertised
in dailies, and made up into articles in magazines, and thus the
generation of to-day, who had no means of judging Lady Byron but by
these fables of her slanderers, were being foully deceived. The friends
who knew her personally were a small select circle in England, whom
death is every day reducing. They were few in number compared with the
great world, and were _silent_. I saw these foul slanders crystallising
into history uncontradicted by friends who knew her personally, who,
firm in their own knowledge of her virtues and limited in view as
aristocratic circles generally are, had no idea of the width of the
world they were living in, and the exigency of the crisis. When time
passed on and no voice was raised, I spoke. I gave at first a simple
story, for I knew instinctively that whoever put the first steel point
of truth into this dark cloud of slander must wait for the storm to
spend itself. I must say the storm exceeded my expectations, and has
raged loud and long. But now that there is a comparative stillness I
shall proceed, first, to prove what I have just been asserting, and,
second, to add to my true story such facts and incidents as I did not
think proper at first to state.
CHAPTER II.
THE ATTACK ON LADY BYRON.
In proving what I asserted in the first chapter, I make four points:
1st. A concerted attack upon Lady Byron's reputation, begun by Lord
Byron in self-defence. 2nd. That he transmitted his story to friends to
be continued after his death. 3rd. That they did so continue it. 4th.
That the accusations reached their climax over Lady Byron's grave in
'Blackwood' of 1869, and the Guiccioli book, and that this re-opening
of the controversy was my reason for speaking.
And first I shall adduce my proofs that Lady Byron's reputation
was, during the whole course of her husband's life, the subject of
a concentrated, artfully planned attack, commencing at the time of
the separation and continuing during his life. By various documents
carefully prepared, and used publicly or secretly as suited the case,
he made converts of many honest men, some of whom were writers and men
of letters, who put their talents at his service during his lifetime in
exciting sympathy for him, and who, by his own request, felt bound to
continue their defence of him after he was dead.
In order to consider the force and significance of the documents I
shall cite, we are to bring to our view just the issues Lord Byron had
to meet, both at the time of the separation and for a long time after.
In Byron's 'Memoirs,' Vol. IV. Letter 350, under date December 10,
1819, nearly four years after the separation, he writes to Murray in
a state of great excitement on account of an article in 'Blackwood,'
in which his conduct towards his wife had been sternly and justly
commented on, and which he supposed to have been written by Wilson, of
the 'Noctes Ambrosianæ.' He says in this letter: 'I like and admire
W----n, and he should not have indulged himself in such outrageous
license.... When he talks of Lady Byron's business he talks of what he
knows nothing about; and you may tell him _no man can desire a public
investigation of that affair more than I do_.'[1]
[Footnote 1: The italics are mine.]
He shortly after wrote and sent to Murray a pamphlet for publication,
which was printed, but not generally circulated till some time
afterwards. Though more than three years had elapsed since the
separation, the current against him at this time was so strong in
England that his friends thought it best, at first, to use this article
of Lord Byron's discreetly with influential persons rather than to give
it to the public.
The writer in 'Blackwood' and the indignation of the English public,
of which that writer was the voice, were now particularly stirred up
by the appearance of the first two cantos of 'Don Juan,' in which the
indecent caricature of Lady Byron was placed in vicinity with other
indecencies, the publication of which was justly considered an insult
to a Christian community.
It must here be mentioned, for the honour of Old England, that at
first she did her duty quite respectably in regard to 'Don Juan.' One
can still read, in Murray's standard edition of the poems, how every
respectable press thundered reprobations, which it would be well enough
to print and circulate as tracts for our days.
Byron, it seems, had thought of returning to England, but he says, in
the letter we have quoted, that he has changed his mind, and shall not
go back, adding: 'I have finished the Third Canto of "Don Juan," but
the things I have heard and read discourage all future publication.
You may try the copy question, but you'll lose it; the cry is up, and
the cant is up. I should have no objection to return the price of the
copyright, and have written to Mr. Kinnaird on this subject.'
One sentence quoted by Lord Byron from the 'Blackwood' article will
show the modern readers what the respectable world of that day were
thinking and saying of him:--
'It appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having exhausted
_every species_ of sensual gratification--having drained the cup of
sin even to its bitterest dregs--were resolved to show us that he is
no longer a human being even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned
fiend, laughing with detestable glee over the whole of the better and
worse elements of which human life is composed.'
The defence which Lord Byron makes, in his reply to that paper, is of a
man cornered and fighting for his life. He speaks thus of the state of
feeling at the time of his separation from his wife:--
'I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and private
rancour; my name, which had been a knightly or a noble one since my
fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman, was
tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered and muttered and murmured
was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for
me. I withdrew; but this was not enough. In other countries--in
Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depth of the
lakes--I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed
the mountains, but it was the same; so I went a little farther, and
settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who
betakes him to the waters.
'If I may judge by the statements of the few friends who gathered
round me, the outcry of the period to which I allude was beyond all
precedent, all parallel, even in those cases where political motives
have sharpened slander and doubled enmity. I was advised not to go to
the theatres lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament
lest I should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure
my most intimate friend told me afterwards that he was under the
apprehension of violence from the people who might be assembled at the
door of the carriage.'
Now Lord Byron's charge against his wife was that SHE was
directly responsible for getting up and keeping up this persecution,
which drove him from England,--that she did it in a deceitful,
treacherous manner, which left him no chance of defending himself.
He charged against her that, taking advantage of a time when his
affairs were in confusion, and an execution in the house, she left him
suddenly, with treacherous professions of kindness, which were repeated
by letters on the road, and that soon after her arrival at her home
her parents sent him word that she would never return to him, and she
confirmed the message; that when he asked the reason why, she refused
to state any; and that when this step gave rise to a host of slanders
against him she silently encouraged and confirmed the slanders. His
claim was that he was denied from that time forth even the justice of
any tangible accusation against himself which he might meet and refute.
He observes, in the same article from which we have quoted:--
'When one tells me that I cannot "in any way _justify_ my own
behaviour in that affair," I acquiesce, because no man can "_justify_"
himself until he knows of what he is accused; and I have never
had--and, God knows, my whole desire has ever been to obtain it--any
specific charge, in a tangible shape, submitted to me by the
adversary, nor by others, unless the atrocities of public rumour and
the mysterious silence of the lady's legal advisers may be deemed
such.'
Lord Byron, his publishers, friends, and biographers, thus agree
in representing his wife as the secret author and abettor of that
persecution, which it is claimed broke up his life, and was the source
of all his subsequent crimes and excesses.
Lord Byron wrote a poem in September 1816, in Switzerland, just after
the separation, in which he stated, in so many words, these accusations
against his wife. Shortly after the poet's death Murray published
this poem, together with the 'Fare thee well,' and the lines to his
sister, under the title of 'Domestic Pieces,' in his standard edition
of Byron's poetry. It is to be remarked, then, that this was for some
time a private document, shown to confidential friends, and made use of
judiciously, as readers or listeners to his story were able to bear it.
Lady Byron then had a strong party in England. Sir Samuel Romilly and
Dr. Lushington were her counsel. Lady Byron's parents were living, and
the appearance in the public prints of such a piece as this would have
brought down an aggravated storm of public indignation.
For the general public such documents as the 'Fare thee well' were
circulating in England, and he frankly confessed his wife's virtues and
his own sins to Madame de Staël and others in Switzerland, declaring
himself in the wrong, sensible of his errors, and longing to cast
himself at the feet of that serene perfection,
'Which wanted one sweet weakness--to forgive.'
But a little later he drew for his private partisans this bitter
poetical indictment against her, which, as we have said, was used
discreetly during his life, and published after his death.
Before we proceed to lay that poem before the reader we will refresh
his memory with some particulars of the tragedy of Æschylus, which
Lord Byron selected as the exact parallel and proper illustration of
his wife's treatment of himself. In his letters and journals he often
alludes to her as Clytemnestra, and the allusion has run the round of
a thousand American papers lately, and been read by a thousand good
honest people, who had no very clear idea who Clytemnestra was, and
what she did which was like the proceedings of Lady Byron. According
to the tragedy, Clytemnestra secretly hates her husband Agamemnon,
whom she professes to love, and wishes to put him out of the way that
she may marry her lover, Ægistheus. When her husband returns from the
Trojan war she receives him with pretended kindness, and officiously
offers to serve him at the bath. Inducing him to put on a garment, of
which she had adroitly sewed up the sleeves and neck so as to hamper
the use of his arms, she gives the signal to a concealed band of
assassins, who rush upon him and stab him. Clytemnestra is represented
by Æschylus as grimly triumphing in her success, which leaves her free
to marry an adulterous paramour.
'I did it, too, in such a cunning wise,
That he could neither 'scape nor ward off doom.
I staked around his steps an endless net,
As for the fishes.'
In the piece entitled 'Lines on hearing Lady Byron is ill,' Lord Byron
charges on his wife a similar treachery and cruelty. The whole poem
is in Murray's English edition, Vol. IV. p. 207. Of it we quote the
following. The reader will bear in mind that it is addressed to Lady
Byron on a sick-bed:--
'I am too well avenged, but 'twas my right;
Whate'er my sins might be, _thou_ wert not sent
To be the Nemesis that should requite,
Nor did Heaven choose so near an instrument.
Mercy is for the merciful! If thou
Hast been of such, 't will be accorded now.
Thy nights are banished from the realms of sleep,
For thou art pillowed on a curse too deep;
Yes! they may flatter thee, but thou shalt feel
A hollow agony that will not heal.
Thou hast sown in my sorrow, and must reap
The bitter harvest in a woe as real.
_I have had many foes, but none like thee_;
For 'gainst the rest myself I could defend,
And be avenged, or turn them into friend;
But thou, in safe implacability,
Hast naught to dread,--in thy own weakness shielded,
And in my love, which hath but too much yielded,
And spared, for thy sake, some I should not spare.
And thus upon the world, trust in thy truth,
And the wild fame of my ungoverned youth,--
On things that were not and on things that are,--
Even upon such a basis thou hast built
A monument whose cement hath been guilt!
The moral Clytemnestra of thy lord,
And hewed down with an unsuspected sword
Fame, peace, and hope, and all that better life
Which, but for this cold treason of thy heart,
Might yet have risen from the grave of strife
And found a nobler duty than to part.
But of thy virtues thou didst make a vice,
Trafficking in them with a purpose cold,
And buying others' woes at any price,
For present anger and for future gold;
And thus, once entered into crooked ways,
The early truth, that was thy proper praise,
Did not still walk beside thee, but at times,
And with a breast unknowing its own crimes,
Deceits, averments incompatible,
Equivocations, and the thoughts that dwell
_In Janus spirits, the significant eye
That learns to lie with silence_,[2] the pretext
Of prudence with advantages annexed,
The acquiescence in all things that tend,
No matter how, to the desired end,--
All found a place in thy philosophy.
The means were worthy and the end is won.
I would not do to thee as thou hast done.'
[Footnote 2: The italics are mine.]
Now, if this language means anything, it means, in plain terms, that,
whereas, in her early days, Lady Byron was peculiarly characterised by
truthfulness, she has in her recent dealings with him acted the part
of a liar,--that she is not only a liar, but that she lies for cruel
means and malignant purposes,--that she is a moral assassin, and her
treatment of her husband has been like that of the most detestable
murderess and adulteress of ancient history,--that she has learned to
lie skilfully and artfully, that she equivocates, says incompatible
things, and crosses her own tracks,--that she is double-faced, and
has the art to lie even by silence, and that she has become wholly
unscrupulous, and acquiesces in _any_thing, no matter what, that tends
to the desired end, and that end the destruction of her husband. This
is a brief summary of the story that Byron made it his life's business
to spread through society, to propagate and make converts to during
his life, and which has been in substance reasserted by 'Blackwood' in
a recent article this year.
Now, the reader will please to notice that this poem is dated in
September 1816, and that on the 29th of March of that same year, he
had thought proper to tell quite another story. At that time the deed
of separation was not signed, and negotiations between Lady Byron,
acting by legal counsel, and himself were still pending. At that time,
therefore, he was standing in a community who knew all he had said
in former days of his wife's character, who were in an aroused and
excited state by the fact that so lovely and good and patient a woman
had actually been forced for some unexplained cause to leave him. His
policy at that time was to make large general confessions of sin,
and to praise and compliment her, with a view of enlisting sympathy.
Everybody feels for a handsome sinner, weeping on his knees, asking
pardon for his offences against his wife in the public newspapers.
The celebrated 'Fare thee well', as we are told, was written on the
17th of March, and accidentally found its way into the newspapers at
this time 'through the imprudence of a friend whom he allowed to take a
copy.' These 'imprudent friends' have all along been such a marvellous
convenience to Lord Byron.
But the question met him on all sides, What is the matter? This wife
you have declared the brightest, sweetest, most amiable of beings, and
against whose behaviour as a wife you actually never had nor can have
a complaint to make,--why is she _now_ all of a sudden so inflexibly
set against you?
This question required an answer, and he answered by writing another
poem, which also _accidentally_ found its way into the public prints.
It is in his 'Domestic Pieces,' which the reader may refer to at the
end of this volume, and is called 'A Sketch.'
There was a most excellent, respectable, well-behaved Englishwoman, a
Mrs. Clermont,[3] who had been Lady Byron's governess in her youth,
and was still, in mature life, revered as her confidential friend. It
appears that this person had been with Lady Byron during a part of her
married life, especially the bitter hours of her lonely child-bed, when
a young wife so much needs a sympathetic friend. This Mrs. Clermont was
the person selected by Lord Byron at this time to be the scapegoat to
bear away the difficulties of the case into the wilderness.
[Footnote 3: In Lady Blessington's 'Memoirs' this name is given
Charlemont; in the late 'Temple Bar' article on the character of Lady
Byron it is given Clermont. I have followed the latter.]
We are informed in Moore's Life what a noble pride of rank Lord Byron
possessed, and how when the headmaster of a school, against whom he had
a pique, invited him to dinner, he declined, saying, 'To tell you the
truth, Doctor, if you should come to Newstead, I shouldn't think of
inviting _you_ to dine with _me_, and so I don't care to dine with you
here.' Different countries, it appears, have different standards as to
good taste; Moore gives this as an amusing instance of a young lord's
spirit.
Accordingly, his first attack against this 'lady,' as we Americans
should call her, consists in gross statements concerning her having
been born poor and in an inferior rank. He begins by stating that she
was
'Born in the garret, in the kitchen bred,
Promoted thence to deck her mistress' head;
Next--for some gracious service unexpressed
And from its wages only to be guessed--
Raised from the toilet to the table, where
Her wondering betters wait behind her chair.
With eye unmoved and forehead unabashed.
She dines from off the plate she lately washed;
Quick with the tale, and ready with the lie,
The genial confidante and general spy,--
Who could, ye gods! her next employment guess,--
An _only infant's earliest governess_!
What had she made the pupil of her art
None knows; _but that high soul secured the heart,
And panted for the truth it could not hear
With longing soul and undeluded ear_!'[4]
[Footnote 4: The italics are mine.]
The poet here recognises as a singular trait in Lady Byron her peculiar
love of truth,--a trait which must have struck everyone that had any
knowledge of her through life. He goes on now to give what he certainly
knew to be the real character of Lady Byron:--
'Foiled was perversion by that youthful mind,
Which flattery fooled not, baseness could not blind,
_Deceit infect_ not, nor contagion soil,
Indulgence weaken, or example spoil,
Nor mastered science tempt her to look down
On humbler talent with a pitying frown,
Nor genius swell, nor beauty render vain,
Nor envy ruffle to retaliate pain.
We are now informed that Mrs. Clermont, whom he afterwards says in his
letters was a spy of Lady Byron's mother, set herself to make mischief
between them. He says:--
'If early habits,--those strong links that bind
At times the loftiest to the meanest mind,
Have given her power too deeply to instil
The angry essence of her deadly will;
If like a snake she steal within your walls,
Till the black slime betray her as she crawls;
If like a viper to the heart she wind,
And leaves the venom there she did not find,--
What marvel that this hag of hatred works
Eternal evil latent as she lurks.'
The noble lord then proceeds to abuse this woman of inferior rank in
the language of the upper circles. He thus describes her person and
manner:--
'Skilled by a touch to deepen scandal's tints
With all the kind mendacity of hints,
While mingling truth with falsehood, sneers with smiles,
A thread of candour with a web of wiles;
A plain blunt show of briefly-spoken seeming,
To hide her bloodless heart's soul-harden'd scheming;
A lip of lies; a face formed to conceal,
And without feeling mock at all who feel;
With a vile mask the Gorgon would disown,--
A cheek of parchment and an eye of stone.
Mark how the channels of her yellow blood
Ooze to her skin and stagnate there to mud,
Cased like the centipede in saffron mail,
Or darker greenness of the scorpion's scale,--
(For drawn from reptiles only may we trace
Congenial colours in that soul or face,)
Look on her features! and behold her mind
As in a mirror of itself defined:
Look on the picture! deem it not o'ercharged
There is no trait which might not be enlarged.'
The poem thus ends:--
'May the strong curse of crushed affections light
Back on thy bosom with reflected blight,
And make thee in thy leprosy of mind
As loathsome to thyself as to mankind!
Till all thy self-thoughts curdle into hate,
Black--as thy will for others would create;
Till thy hard heart be calcined into dust,
And thy soul welter in its hideous crust.
O, may thy grave be sleepless as the bed,
The widowed couch of fire, that thou hast spread
Then when thou fain wouldst weary Heaven with prayer,
Look on thy earthly victims--and despair!
Down to the dust! and as thou rott'st away,
Even worms shall perish on thy poisonous clay.
_But for the love I bore and still must bear_
To her thy malice from all ties would tear,
Thy name,--thy human name,--to every eye
The climax of all scorn, should hang on high,
Exalted o'er thy less abhorred compeers,
And festering in the infamy of years.'
March 16, 1816.
Now, on the 29th of March 1816, this was Lord Byron's story. He states
that his wife had a truthfulness even from early girlhood that the most
artful and unscrupulous governess could not pollute,--that she always
_panted_ for truth,--that flattery could not fool nor baseness blind
her,--that though she was a genius and master of science, she was yet
gentle and tolerant, and one whom no envy could ruffle to retaliate
pain.
In September of the same year she is a monster of unscrupulous deceit
and vindictive cruelty. Now, what had happened in the five months
between the dates of these poems to produce such a change of opinion?
Simply this:--
1st. The negotiation between him and his wife's lawyers had ended in
his signing a deed of separation in preference to standing a suit for
divorce.
2nd. Madame de Staël, moved by his tears of anguish and professions of
repentance, had offered to negotiate with Lady Byron on his behalf, and
had failed.
The failure of this application is the only apology given by Moore and
Murray for this poem, which gentle Thomas Moore admits was not in quite
as generous a strain as the 'Fare thee well'.
But Lord Byron knew perfectly well, when he suffered that application
to be made, that Lady Byron had been entirely convinced that her
marriage relations with him could never be renewed, and that duty both
to man and God required her to separate from him. The allowing the
negotiation was, therefore, an artifice to place his wife before the
public in the attitude of a hard-hearted, inflexible woman; her refusal
was what he knew beforehand must inevitably be the result, and merely
gave him capital in the sympathy of his friends, by which they should
be brought to tolerate and accept the bitter accusations of this poem.
We have recently heard it asserted that this last-named piece of poetry
was the sudden offspring of a fit of ill-temper, and was never intended
to be published at all. There were certainly excellent reasons why
his friends should have advised him not to publish it _at that time_.
But that it was read with sympathy by the circle of his intimate
friends, and believed by them, is evident from the frequency with which
allusions to it occur in his confidential letters to them.[5]
[Footnote 5: In Lady Blessington's conversations with Lord Byron, just
before he went to Greece, she records that he gave her this poem in
manuscript. It was published in her 'Journal.']
About three months after, under date March 10, 1817, he writes to
Moore: 'I suppose now I shall never be able to shake off my sables in
public imagination, more particularly since my moral ---- clove down my
fame.' Again to Murray in 1819, three years after, he says: 'I never
hear anything of Ada, the little Electra of Mycenæ.'
Electra was the daughter of Clytemnestra, in the Greek poem, who lived
to condemn her wicked mother, and to call on her brother to avenge the
father. There was in this mention of Electra more than meets the ear.
Many passages in Lord Byron's poetry show that he intended to make this
daughter a future partisan against her mother, and explain the awful
words he is stated in Lady Anne Barnard's diary to have used when
first he looked on his little girl,--'What an instrument of torture I
have gained in you!'
In a letter to Lord Blessington, April 6, 1823, he says, speaking of
Dr. Parr:[6]--
'He did me the honour once to be a patron of mine, though a great
friend of the _other branch of the house of Atreus_, and the Greek
teacher, I believe, of my _moral_ Clytemnestra. I say _moral_ because
it is true, and is so useful to the virtuous, that it enables them to
do anything without the aid of an Ægistheus.'
[Footnote 6: Vol. vi. p. 22.]
If Lord Byron wrote this poem merely in a momentary fit of spleen, why
were there so many persons evidently quite familiar with his allusions
to it? and why was it preserved in Murray's hands? and why published
after his death? That Byron was in the habit of reposing documents in
the hands of Murray, to be used as occasion offered, is evident from
a part of a note written by him to Murray respecting some verses so
intrusted: 'Pray let not these _versiculi_ go forth with my name except
_to the initiated_.'[7]
[Footnote 7: 'Byron's Miscellany', vol. ii. p. 358. London, 1853.]
Murray, in publishing this attack on his wife after Lord Byron's death,
showed that he believed in it, and, so believing, deemed Lady Byron a
woman whose widowed state deserved neither sympathy nor delicacy of
treatment. At a time when every sentiment in the heart of the most
deeply wronged woman would forbid her appearing to justify herself from
such cruel slander of a dead husband, an honest, kind-hearted, worthy
Englishman actually thought it right and proper to give these lines
to her eyes and the eyes of all the reading world. Nothing can show
more plainly what this poem was written for, and how thoroughly it did
its work! Considering Byron as a wronged man, Murray thought he was
contributing his mite towards doing him justice. His editor prefaced
the whole set of 'Domestic Pieces' with the following statements:--
'They all refer to the unhappy separation, of which the precise causes
are still a mystery, and which he declared to the last were never
disclosed to himself. He admitted that pecuniary embarrassments,
disordered health, and dislike to family restraints had aggravated his
naturally violent temper, and driven him to excesses. He suspected
that his mother-in-law had fomented the discord,--which Lady Byron
denies,--and that more was due to the malignant offices of a female
dependant, who is the subject of the bitterly satirical sketch.
* * * * *
'To these general statements can only be added the still vaguer
allegations of Lady Byron, that she conceived his conduct to be the
result of insanity,--that, the physician pronouncing him responsible
for his actions, she could submit to them no longer, and that
Dr. Lushington, her legal adviser, agreed that a reconciliation
was neither proper nor possible. _No weight can be attached to
the opinions of an opposing counsel upon accusations made by one
party behind the back of the other, who urgently demanded and was
pertinaciously refused the least opportunity of denial or defence._ He
rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but _consented when
threatened with a suit in Doctors' Commons_.'[8]
[Footnote 8: The italics are mine.]
Neither John Murray nor any of Byron's partisans seem to have pondered
the admission in these last words.
Here, as appears, was a woman, driven to the last despair, standing
with her child in her arms, asking from English laws protection for
herself and child against her husband.
She had appealed to the first counsel in England, and was acting under
their direction.
Two of the greatest lawyers in England have pronounced that there
has been such a cause of offence on his part that a return to him is
neither proper nor possible, and that no alternative remains to her but
separation or divorce.
He asks her to state her charges against him. She, making answer
under advice of her counsel, says, 'That if he _insists_ on the
specifications, he must receive them in open court in a suit for
divorce.'
What, now, ought to have been the conduct of any brave, honest man,
who believed that his wife was taking advantage of her reputation for
virtue to turn every one against him, who saw that she had turned on
her side even the lawyer he sought to retain on his;[9] that she was
an unscrupulous woman, who acquiesced in every and any thing to gain
her ends, while he stood before the public, as he says, 'accused of
every monstrous vice, by public rumour or private rancour'? When she,
under advice of her lawyers, made the alternative legal _separation_ or
open investigation in court for divorce, what did he do?
[Footnote 9: Lord Byron says, in his observations on an article in
'Blackwood': 'I recollect being much hurt by Romilly's conduct:
he (having a general retainer for me) went over to the adversary,
alleging, on being reminded of his retainer, that he had forgotten it,
as his clerk had so many. I observed that some of those who were now so
eagerly laying the axe to my roof-tree might see their own shaken. His
fell and crushed him.'
In the first edition of Moore's Life of Lord Byron there was printed a
letter on Sir Samuel Romilly, so brutal that it was suppressed in the
subsequent editions. (See Part III.)]
HE SIGNED THE ACT OF SEPARATION AND LEFT ENGLAND.
Now, let any man who knows the legal mind of England,--let any lawyer
who knows the character of Sir Samuel Romilly and Dr. Lushington, ask
whether _they_ were the men to take a case into court for a woman that
had no _evidence_ but her own statements and impressions? Were _they_
men to go to trial without proofs? Did they not know that there were
artful, hysterical women in the world, and would _they_, of all people,
be the men to take a woman's story on her own side, and advise her in
the last issue to bring it into open court, without legal proof of
the strongest kind? Now, as long as Sir Samuel Romilly lived, this
statement of Byron's--that he was condemned unheard, and had no chance
of knowing whereof he _was accused--never appeared in public_.
It, however, was most actively circulated _in private_. That Byron was
in the habit of intrusting to different confidants articles of various
kinds to be shown to different circles as they could bear them, we have
already shown. We have recently come upon another instance of this
kind. In the late eagerness to exculpate Byron, a new document has
turned up, of which Mr. Murray, it appears, had never heard when, after
Byron's death, he published in the preface to his 'Domestic Pieces'
the sentence: '_He rejected the proposal for an amicable separation,
but consented when threatened with a suit in Doctors' Commons_.' It
appears that, up to 1853, neither John Murray senior, nor the son who
now fills his place, had taken any notice of this newly found document,
which we are now informed 'was drawn up by Lord Byron in August 1817,
while Mr. Hobhouse was staying with him at La Mira, near Venice,
given to Mr. Matthew Gregory Lewis, _for circulation among friends in
England_, found in Mr. Lewis's papers after his death, and _now_ in the
possession of Mr. Murray.' Here it is:--
'It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the
legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared "their lips to be sealed
up" on the cause of the separation between her and myself. If their
lips are sealed up, they are not sealed up by me, and the greatest
favour _they_ can confer upon me will be to open them. From the first
hour in which I was apprised of the intentions of the Noel family to
the last communication between Lady Byron and myself in the character
of wife and husband (a period of some months), I called repeatedly and
in vain for a statement of their or her charges, and it was chiefly
in consequence of Lady Byron's claiming (in a letter still existing)
a promise on my part to consent to a separation, if such was _really_
her wish, that I consented at all; this claim, and the exasperating
and inexpiable manner in which their object was pursued, which
rendered it next to an impossibility that two persons so divided could
ever be reunited, induced me reluctantly then, and repentantly still,
to sign the deed, which I shall be happy--most happy--to cancel, and
go before any tribunal which may discuss the business in the most
public manner.
'Mr. Hobhouse made this proposition on my part, viz. to abrogate
all prior intentions--and go into court--the very day before the
separation was signed, and it was declined by the other party, as
also the publication of the correspondence during the previous
discussion. Those propositions I beg here to repeat, and to call
upon her and hers to say their worst, pledging myself to meet their
allegations,--whatever they may be,--and only too happy to be informed
at last of their real nature.
'BYRON.'
'August 9, 1817.
'P.S.--I have been, and am now, utterly ignorant of what description
her allegations, charges, or whatever name they may have assumed,
are; and am as little aware for what purpose they have been kept
back,--unless it was to sanction the most infamous calumnies by
silence.
'BYRON.'
'LA MIRA, near VENICE.'
It appears the circulation of this document must have been _very
private_, since Moore, not _over_-delicate towards Lady Byron, did not
think fit to print it; since John Murray neglected it, and since it has
come out at this late hour for the first time.
If Lord Byron really desired Lady Byron and her legal counsel to
understand the facts herein stated, and was willing at all hazards to
bring on an open examination, why was this _privately_ circulated?
Why not issued as a card in the London papers? Is it likely that
Mr. Matthew Gregory Lewis, and a chosen band of friends acting as a
committee, requested an audience with Lady Byron, Sir Samuel Romilly,
and Dr. Lushington, and formally presented this cartel of defiance?
We incline to think not. We incline to think that this small serpent,
in company with many others of like kind, crawled secretly and
privately around, and when it found a good chance, bit an honest
Briton, whose blood was thenceforth poisoned by an undetected falsehood.
The reader now may turn to the letters that Mr. Moore has thought fit
to give us of this stay at La Mira, beginning with Letter 286, dated
July 1, 1817,[10] where he says: 'I have been working up my impressions
into a _Fourth_ Canto of Childe Harold,' and also 'Mr. Lewis is in
Venice. I am going up to stay a week with him there.'
[Footnote 10: Vol. iv. p. 40.]
Next, under date La Mira, Venice, July 10,[11] he says, 'Monk Lewis is
here; how pleasant!'
[Footnote 11: Ibid. p. 46.]
Next, under date July 20, 1817, to Mr. Murray: 'I write to give you
notice that I have _completed the fourth and ultimate canto of Childe
Harold_.... It is yet to be copied and polished, and the notes are to
come.'
Under date of La Mira, August 7, 1817, he records that the new canto is
one hundred and thirty stanzas in length, and talks about the price for
it. He is now ready to launch it on the world; and, as now appears, on
August 9, 1817, _two days after_, he wrote the document above cited,
and put it into the hands of Mr. Lewis, as we are informed, 'for
circulation among friends in England.'
The reason of this may now be evident. Having prepared a suitable
number of those whom he calls in his notes to Murray 'the initiated,'
by private documents and statements, he is now prepared to publish his
accusations against his wife, and the story of his wrongs, in a great
immortal poem, which shall have a band of initiated interpreters, shall
be read through the civilised world, and stand to accuse her after his
death.
In the Fourth Canto of 'Childe Harold,' with all his own overwhelming
power of language, he sets forth his cause as against the silent woman
who all this time had been making no party, and telling no story,
and whom the world would therefore conclude to be silent because she
had no answer to make. I remember well the time when this poetry, so
resounding in its music, so mournful, so apparently generous, filled
my heart with a vague anguish of sorrow for the sufferer, and of
indignation at the cold insensibility that had maddened him. Thousands
have felt the power of this great poem, which stands, and must stand to
all time, a monument of what sacred and solemn powers God gave to this
wicked man, and how vilely he abused this power as a weapon to slay the
innocent.
It is among the ruins of ancient Rome that his voice breaks forth in
solemn imprecation:--
'O Time, thou beautifier of the dead,
Adorner of the ruin, comforter,
And only healer when the heart hath bled!--
Time, the corrector when our judgments err,
The test of truth, love,--sole philosopher,
For all besides are sophists,--from thy shrift
That never loses, though it doth defer!--
Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift
My hands and heart and eyes, and claim of thee a gift.
* * * * *
'If thou hast ever seen me too elate,
Hear me not; but if calmly I have borne
Good, and reserved my pride against the hate
Which shall not whelm me, _let me not have worn
This iron in my soul in vain,--shall THEY not mourn?_
And thou who never yet of human wrong
Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis,
Here where the ancients paid their worship long,
Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss,
And round Orestes bid them howl and hiss
_For that unnatural retribution,--just
Had it but come from hands less near_,--in this
Thy former realm I call thee from the dust.
Dost thou not hear, my heart? awake thou shalt and must!
It is not that I may not have incurred
For my ancestral faults and mine, the wound
Wherewith I bleed withal, and had it been conferred
With a just weapon it had flowed unbound,
But now my blood shall not sink in the ground.
* * * * *
'But in this page a record will I seek;
Not in the air shall these my words disperse,
Though I be ashes,--a far hour shall wreak
The deep prophetic fulness of this verse,
And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse.
That curse shall be forgiveness. Have I not,--
Hear me, my Mother Earth! behold it, Heaven,--
Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?
Have I not suffered things to be forgiven?
Have I not had my brain seared, my heart riven,
Hopes sapped, name blighted, life's life lied away,
And only not to desperation driven,
Because not altogether of such clay
As rots into the soul of those whom I survey?
* * * * *
'From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy,
Have I not seen what human things could do,--
From the loud roar of foaming calumny,
To the small whispers of the paltry few,
And subtler venom of the reptile crew,
_The Janus glance of whose significant eye,
Learning to lie with silence, would seem true,
And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh,
Deal round to happy fools its speechless obloquy_?'[12]
[Footnote 12: The italics are mine.]
The reader will please notice that the lines in italics are almost,
word for word, a repetition of the lines in italics in the former poem
on his wife, where he speaks of a _significant eye_ that has _learned
to lie in silence_, and were evidently meant to apply to Lady Byron and
her small circle of confidential friends.
Before this, in the Third Canto of 'Childe Harold,' he had claimed the
sympathy of the world, as a loving father, deprived by a severe fate of
the solace and society of his only child:--
'My daughter,--with this name my song began,--
My daughter,--with this name my song shall end,--
I see thee not and hear thee not, but none
Can be so wrapped in thee; thou art the friend
To whom the shadows of far years extend.
* * * * *
'To aid thy mind's developments, to watch
The dawn of little joys, to sit and see
Almost thy very growth, to view thee catch
Knowledge of objects,--wonders yet to thee,--
And print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss,--
This it should seem was not reserved for me.
Yet this was in my nature,--as it is,
I know not what there is, yet something like to this.
* * * * *
'_Yet though dull hate as duty should be taught_,
I know that thou wilt love me; though my name
Should be shut out from thee as spell still fraught
With desolation and a broken claim,
Though the grave close between us,--'t were the same,
I know that thou wilt love me, though to drain
My blood from out thy being were an aim
And an attainment,--all will be in vain.'
To all these charges against her, sent all over the world in verses
as eloquent as the English language is capable of, the wife replied
nothing.
'Assailed by slander and the tongue of strife,
Her only answer was,--a blameless life.'
She had a few friends, a very few, with whom she sought solace and
sympathy. One letter from her, written at this time, preserved by
accident, is the only authentic record of how the matter stood with her.
We regret to say that the publication of this document was not brought
forth to clear Lady Byron's name from her husband's slanders, but to
shield him from the worst accusation against him, by showing that this
crime was not included in the few private confidential revelations that
friendship wrung from the young wife at this period.
Lady Anne Barnard, authoress of 'Auld Robin Grey', a friend whose
age and experience made her a proper confidante, sent for the
broken-hearted, perplexed wife, and offered her a woman's sympathy.
To her Lady Byron wrote many letters, under seal of confidence, and
Lady Anne says: 'I will give you a few paragraphs transcribed from
one of Lady Byron's own letters to me. It is sorrowful to think that
in a very little time this young and amiable creature, wise, patient,
and feeling, will have her character mistaken by every one who reads
Byron's works. To rescue her from this I preserved her letters, and
when she afterwards expressed a fear that anything of her writing
should ever fall into hands to injure him (I suppose she meant by
publication), I safely assured her that it never should. But here this
letter shall be placed, a sacred record in her favour, unknown to
herself.
'I am a very incompetent judge of the impression which the last Canto
of "Childe Harold" may produce on the minds of indifferent readers.
'It contains the usual trace of a conscience restlessly awake, though
his object has been too long to aggravate its burden, as if it could
thus be oppressed into eternal stupor. I will hope, as you do, that it
survives for his ultimate good.
'It was the acuteness of his remorse, impenitent in its character,
which so long seemed to demand from my compassion to spare every
semblance of reproach, every look of grief, which might have said to
his conscience, "You have made me wretched."
'I am decidedly of opinion that he is responsible. He has wished to
be thought partially deranged, or on the brink of it, to perplex
observers and _prevent them from tracing effects to their real causes_
through all the intricacies of his conduct. I was, as I told you, at
one time the dupe of his acted insanity, and clung to the former
delusions in regard to the motives that concerned me personally, till
the whole system was laid bare.
'He is the absolute monarch of words, and uses them, as Bonaparte did
lives, for conquest, without more regard to their intrinsic value,
considering them only as ciphers, which must derive all their import
from the situation in which he places them, and the ends to which he
adapts them, with such consummate skill.
'Why, then, you will say, does he not employ them to give a better
colour to his own character? Because he is too good an actor to
over-act, or to assume a moral garb, which it would be easy to strip
off.
'In regard to his poetry, egotism is the vital principle of his
imagination, which it is difficult for him to kindle on any subject
with which his own character and interests are not identified; but by
the introduction of fictitious incidents, by change of scene or time,
_he has enveloped his poetical disclosures in a system impenetrable
except to a very few_; and his constant desire of creating a sensation
makes him not averse to be the object of wonder and curiosity, even
though accompanied _by some dark and vague suspicions_.
'Nothing has contributed more to the misunderstanding of his real
character than the lonely grandeur in which he shrouds it, and his
affectation of being above mankind, when he exists almost in their
voice. The romance of his sentiments is another feature of this mask
of state. I know no one more habitually destitute of that enthusiasm
he so beautifully expresses, and to which he can work up his fancy
chiefly by contagion.
'_I had heard he was the best of brothers, the most generous of
friends, and I thought such feelings only required to be warmed and
cherished into more diffusive benevolence. Though these opinions are
eradicated, and could never return but with the decay of my memory_,
you will not wonder if there are still moments when the association of
feelings which arose from them soften and sadden my thoughts.
'But I have not thanked you, dearest Lady Anne, for your kindness in
regard to a principal object,--that of rectifying false impressions.
I trust you understand my wishes, which never were to injure Lord
Byron in any way; for, _though he would not suffer me to remain his
wife, he cannot prevent me from continuing his friend; and it was from
considering myself as such that I silenced the accusations by which my
own conduct might have been more fully justified_.
'It is not necessary to speak ill of his heart in general; it is
sufficient that to me it was hard and impenetrable,--that my own must
have been broken before his could have been touched. I would rather
represent this as _my_ misfortune than as _his_ guilt; but, surely,
that misfortune is not to be made my crime! Such are my feelings; you
will judge how to act.
'His allusions to me in "Childe Harold" are cruel and cold, but
with such a semblance as to make _me_ appear so, and to attract all
sympathy to himself. It is said in this poem that hatred of him will
be taught as a lesson to his child. I might appeal to all who have
ever heard me speak of him, and still more to my own heart, to witness
that there has been no moment when I have remembered injury otherwise
than affectionately and sorrowfully.
'It is not my duty to give way to hopeless and wholly unrequited
affection; but, so long as I live, my chief struggle will probably
be not to remember him too kindly. I do not seek the sympathy of the
world, but I wish to be known by those whose opinion is valuable and
whose kindness is dear to me. Among such, my dear Lady Anne, you will
ever be remembered by your truly affectionate
'A. BYRON.'
On this letter I observe Lord Lindsay remarks that it shows a noble
but rather severe character, and a recent author has remarked that it
seemed to be written rather in a 'cold spirit of criticism.' It seems
to strike these gentlemen as singular that Lady Byron did not enjoy the
poem! But there are two remarkable sentences in this letter which have
escaped the critics hitherto. Lord Byron, in this, the Third Canto
of 'Childe Harold,' expresses in most affecting words an enthusiasm
of love for his sister. So long as he lived he was her faithful
correspondent; he sent her his journals; and, dying, he left her and
her children everything he had in the world. This certainly seems like
an affectionate brother; but in what words does Lady Byron speak of
this affection?
'I _had heard he was the best of brothers_, the most generous of
friends. I thought these feelings only required to be warmed and
cherished into more diffusive benevolence. THESE OPINIONS ARE
ERADICATED, AND COULD NEVER RETURN BUT WITH THE DECAY OF MEMORY.'
Let me ask those who give this letter as a proof that at this time no
idea such as I have stated was in Lady Byron's mind, to account for
these words. Let them please answer these questions: Why had Lady Byron
ceased to think him a good brother? Why does she use so strong a word
as that the opinion was eradicated, torn up by the roots, and could
never grow again in her except by decay of memory?
And yet this is a document Lord Lindsay vouches for as authentic, and
which he brings forward _in defence_ of Lord Byron.
Again she says,'Though he _would not suffer me to remain his wife_, he
cannot prevent me from continuing his friend.' Do these words not say
that in some past time, in some decided manner, Lord Byron had declared
to her his rejection of her as a wife? I shall yet have occasion to
explain these words.
Again she says, 'I silenced accusations by which my conduct might have
been more fully justified.'
The people in England who are so very busy in searching out evidence
against my true story have searched out and given to the world an
important confirmation of this assertion of Lady Byron's.
It seems that the confidential waiting-maid who went with Lady Byron
on her wedding journey has been sought out and interrogated, and, as
appears by description, is a venerable, respectable old person, quite
in possession of all her senses in general, and of that sixth sense of
propriety in particular, which appears not to be a common virtue in our
days.
As her testimony is important, we insert it just here, with a
description of her person in full. The ardent investigators thus
speak:--
'Having gained admission, we were shown into a small but neatly
furnished and scrupulously clean apartment, where sat the object
of our visit. Mrs. Mimms is a venerable-looking old lady, of short
stature, slight and active appearance, with a singularly bright and
intelligent countenance. Although midway between eighty and ninety
years of age, she is in full possession of her faculties, discourses
freely and cheerfully, hears apparently as well as ever she did,
and her sight is so good that, aided by a pair of spectacles, she
reads the Chronicle every day with ease. Some idea of her competency
to contribute valuable evidence to the subject which now so much
engages public attention on three continents may be found from her
own narrative of her personal relations with Lady Byron. Mrs. Mimms
was born in the neighbourhood of Seaham, and knew Lady Byron from
childhood. During the long period of ten years she was Miss Milbanke's
lady's-maid, and in that capacity became the close confidante of her
mistress. There were circumstances which rendered their relationship
peculiarly intimate. Miss Milbanke had no sister or female friend
to whom she was bound by the ties of more than a common affection;
and her mother, whatever other excellent qualities she may have
possessed, was too high-spirited and too hasty in temper to attract
the sympathies of the young. Some months before Miss Milbanke was
married to Lord Byron, Mrs. Mimms had quitted her service on the
occasion of her own marriage with Mr. Mimms; but she continued to
reside in the neighbourhood of Seaham, and remained on the most
friendly terms with her former mistress. As the courtship proceeded,
Miss Milbanke concealed nothing from her faithful attendant; and
when the wedding-day was fixed, she begged Mrs. Mimms to return and
fulfil the duties of lady's-maid, at least during the honeymoon. Mrs.
Mimms at the time was nursing her first child, and it was no small
sacrifice to quit her own home at such a moment, but she could not
refuse her old mistress's request. Accordingly, she returned to Seaham
Hall some days before the wedding, was present at the ceremony, and
then preceded Lord and Lady Byron to Halnaby Hall, near Croft, in the
North Riding of Yorkshire, one of Sir Ralph Milbanke's seats, where
the newly married couple were to spend the honeymoon. Mrs. Mimms
remained with Lord and Lady Byron during the three weeks they spent at
Halnaby Hall, and then accompanied them to Seaham, where they spent
the next six weeks. It was during the latter period that she finally
quitted Lady Byron's service; but she remained in the most friendly
communication with her ladyship till the death of the latter, and for
some time was living in the neighbourhood of Lady Byron's residence
in Leicestershire, where she had frequent opportunities of seeing her
former mistress. It may be added that Lady Byron was not unmindful of
the faithful services of her friend and attendant in the instructions
to her executors contained in her will. Such was the position of Mrs.
Mimms towards Lady Byron; and we think no one will question that
it was of a nature to entitle all that Mrs. Mimms may say on the
subject of the relations of Lord and Lady Byron to the most respectful
consideration and credit.'
Such is the chronicler's account of the faithful creature whom nothing
but intense indignation and disgust at Mrs. Beecher Stowe would lead
to speak on her mistress's affairs; but Mrs. Beecher Stowe feels none
the less sincere respect for her, and is none the less obliged to her
for having spoken. Much of Mrs. Mimms's testimony will be referred to
in another place; we only extract one passage, to show that while Lord
Byron spent his time in setting afloat slanders against his wife, she
spent hers in sealing the mouths of witnesses against him.
Of the period of the honeymoon Mrs. Mimms says:--
'The happiness of Lady Byron, however, was of brief duration; even
during the short three weeks they spent at Halnaby, the irregularities
of Lord Byron occasioned her the greatest distress, and she even
contemplated returning to her father. Mrs. Mimms was her constant
companion and confidante through this painful period, and she does not
believe that her ladyship concealed a thought from her. _With laudable
reticence, the old lady absolutely refuses to disclose the particulars
of Lord Byron's misconduct at this time; she gave Lady Byron a solemn
promise not to do so._
* * * * *
'So serious did Mrs. Mimms consider the conduct of Lord Byron, that
she recommended her mistress to confide all the circumstances to her
father, Sir Ralph Milbanke, a calm, kind, and most excellent parent,
and take his advice as to her future course. At one time Mrs. Mimms
thinks Lady Byron had resolved to follow her counsel and impart her
wrongs to Sir Ralph; but on arriving at Seaham Hall her ladyship
strictly enjoined Mrs. Mimms to preserve absolute silence on the
subject--a course which she followed herself;--so that when, six weeks
later, she and Lord Byron left Seaham for London, not a word had
escaped her to disturb her parents' tranquility as to their daughter's
domestic happiness. As might be expected, Mrs. Mimms bears the
warmest testimony to the noble and lovable qualities of her departed
mistress. She also declares that Lady Byron was by no means of a cold
temperament, but that the affectionate impulses of her nature were
checked by the unkind treatment she experienced from her husband.'
We have already shown that Lord Byron had been, ever since his
separation, engaged in a systematic attempt to reverse the judgment of
the world against himself, by making converts of all his friends to a
most odious view of his wife's character, and inspiring them with the
zeal of propagandists to spread these views through society. We have
seen how he prepared partisans to interpret the Fourth Canto of 'Childe
Harold.'
This plan of solemn and heroic accusation was the first public attack
on his wife. Next we see him commencing a scurrilous attempt to turn
her to ridicule in the First Canto of 'Don Juan.'
It is to our point now to show how carefully and cautiously this Don
Juan campaign was planned.
Vol. IV. p. 138, we find Letter 325 to Mr. Murray:--
'VENICE: January 25, 1819.
'You will do me the favour to _print privately, for private
distribution, fifty copies of "Don Juan."_ The list of the men to whom
I wish it presented I will send hereafter.'
The poem, as will be remembered, begins with the meanest and foulest
attack on his wife that ever ribald wrote, and puts it in close
neighbourhood with scenes which every pure man or woman must feel
to be the beastly utterances of a man who had lost all sense of
decency. Such a potion was too strong to be administered even in a
time when great license was allowed, and men were not over-nice. But
Byron chooses fifty armour-bearers of that class of men who would
find indecent ribaldry about a wife a good joke, and talk about the
'artistic merits' of things which we hope would make an honest boy
blush.
At this time he acknowledges that his vices had brought him to a state
of great exhaustion, attended by such debility of the stomach that
nothing remained on it; and adds, 'I was obliged to reform my way of
life, which was conducting me from the yellow leaf to the ground with
all deliberate speed.'[13] But as his health is a little better he
employs it in making the way to death and hell elegantly easy for other
young men, by breaking down the remaining scruples of a society not
over-scrupulous.
[Footnote 13: Vol. iv. p 143.]
Society revolted, however, and fought stoutly against the nauseous
dose. His sister wrote to him that she heard such things said of it
that _she_ never would read it; and the outcry against it on the part
of all women of his acquaintance was such that for a time he was quite
overborne; and the Countess Guiccioli finally extorted a promise from
him to cease writing it. Nevertheless, there came a time when England
accepted 'Don Juan,'--when Wilson, in the 'Noctes Ambrosianæ,' praised
it as a classic, and took every opportunity to reprobate Lady Byron's
conduct. When first it appeared the 'Blackwood' came out with that
indignant denunciation of which we have spoken, and to which Byron
replied in the extracts we have already quoted. He did something more
than reply. He marked out Wilson as one of the strongest literary men
of the day, and set his 'initiated' with their documents to work upon
him.
One of these documents to which he requested Wilson's attention was the
private autobiography, written expressly to give his own story of all
the facts of the marriage and separation.
In the indignant letter he writes Murray on the 'Blackwood' article,
Vol. IV., Letter 350--under date December 10, 1819--he says:--
'I sent home for Moore, and for Moore only (who has my journal also),
my memoir written up to 1816, and I gave him leave to show it to
whom he pleased, _but not to publish_ on any account. _You_ may read
it, and you may let Wilson read it if he likes--not for his public
opinion, but his private, for I like the man, and care very little
about the magazine. And I could wish Lady Byron herself to read
it, that she may have it in her power to mark anything mistaken or
misstated. As it will never appear till after my extinction, it would
be but fair she should see it; that is to say, herself willing. Your
"Blackwood" accuses me of treating women harshly; but I have been
their martyr; my whole life has been sacrificed to them and by them.'
It was a part of Byron's policy to place Lady Byron in positions before
the world where she _could_ not speak, and where her silence would be
set down to her as haughty, stony indifference and obstinacy. Such was
the pretended negotiation through Madame de Staël, and such now this
apparently fair and generous offer to let Lady Byron see and mark this
manuscript.
The little Ada is now in her fifth year--a child of singular
sensibility and remarkable mental powers--one of those exceptional
children who are so perilous a charge for a mother.
Her husband proposes this artful snare to her,--that she shall mark
what is false in a statement which is all built on a damning lie, that
she cannot refute over that daughter's head,--and which would perhaps
be her ruin to discuss.
Hence came an addition of two more documents, to be used 'privately
among friends,'[14] and which 'Blackwood' uses after Lady Byron is
safely out of the world to cast ignominy on her grave--the wife's
letter, that of a mother standing at bay for her daughter, knowing that
she is dealing with a desperate, powerful, unscrupulous enemy.
'KIRKBY MALLORY: March 10, 1820.
[Footnote 14: Lord Byron took especial pains to point out to Murray
the importance of these two letters. Vol. V. Letter 443, he says: 'You
must also have from Mr. Moore the correspondence between me and Lady
B., to whom I offered a sight of all that concerns herself in these
papers. This is important. He has _her_ letter and my answer.']
'I received your letter of January 1, offering to my perusal a
Memoir of part of your life. I decline to inspect it. I consider
the publication or circulation of such a composition at any time as
prejudicial to Ada's future happiness. For my own sake, I have no
reason to shrink from publication; but, notwithstanding the injuries
which I have suffered, I should lament some of the _consequences_.
'A. BYRON.
'To Lord Byron.'
Lord Byron, writing for the public, as is his custom, makes reply:--
'RAVENNA: April 3, 1820.
'I received yesterday your answer, dated March 10. My offer was an
honest one, and surely could only be construed as such even by the
most malignant casuistry. I could answer you, but it is too late, and
it is not worth while. To the mysterious menace of the last sentence,
whatever its import may be--and I cannot pretend to unriddle it--I
could hardly be very sensible even if I understood it, as, before it
can take place, I shall be where "nothing can touch him further".... I
advise you, however, to anticipate the period of your intention, for,
be assured, no power of figures can avail beyond the present; and if
it could, I would answer with the Florentine:--
'"Ed io, che posto son con loro in croce
... e certo
La fiera moglie, più ch' altro, mi nuoce."[15]
'BYRON.
'To Lady Byron.'
[Footnote 15:
'And I, who with them on the cross am placed,
... truly
My savage wife, more than aught else, doth harm me.'
_Inferno_, Canto, XVI., Longfellow's translation.
]
Two things are very evident in this correspondence: Lady Byron
intimates that, if he publishes his story, some _consequences_ must
follow which she shall regret.
Lord Byron receives this as a threat, and says he doesn't understand
it. But directly after he says, 'Before IT can take place, I shall be,'
&c.
The intimation is quite clear. He _does_ understand what the
consequences alluded to are. They are evidently that Lady Byron will
speak out and tell her story. He says she cannot do this till _after
he is dead_, and then he shall not care. In allusion to her accuracy
as to dates and figures, he says: 'Be assured no power of figures can
avail beyond the present' (life); and then ironically _advises_ her to
_anticipate the period_,--i.e. to speak out while he is alive.
In Vol. VI. Letter 518, which Lord Byron wrote to Lady Byron, but did
not send, he says: 'I burned your last note for two reasons,--firstly,
because it was written in a style not very agreeable; and, secondly,
because I wished to take your word without documents, which are the
resources of worldly and suspicious people.'
It would appear from this that there _was_ a last letter of Lady Byron
to her husband, which he did not think proper to keep on hand, or show
to the 'initiated' with his usual unreserve; that this letter contained
some kind of _pledge_ for which he preferred to take her word, _without
documents_.
Each reader can imagine for himself what that _pledge_ might have been;
but from the tenor of the three letters we should infer that it was a
promise of silence for his lifetime, on _certain conditions_, and that
the publication of the autobiography would violate those conditions,
and make it her duty to speak out.
This celebrated autobiography forms so conspicuous a figure in the
whole history, that the reader must have a full idea of it, as given by
Byron himself, in Vol. IV. Letter 344, to Murray:--
'I gave to Moore, who is gone to Rome, my life in MS.,--in
seventy-eight folio sheets, brought down to 1816 ... also a journal
kept in 1814. Neither are for publication during my life, but when I
am cold you may do what you please. In the mean time, if you like to
read them you may, and show them to anybody you like. I care not....'
He tells him also:--
'You will find in it a detailed account of my marriage and its
consequences, as true as a party concerned can make such an account.'
Of the extent to which this autobiography was circulated we have the
following testimony of Shelton Mackenzie, in notes to 'The Noctes' of
June 1824.
In 'The Noctes' Odoherty says:--
'The fact is, the work had been copied for the private reading of a
great lady in Florence.'
The note says:--
'The great lady in Florence, for whose private reading Byron's
autobiography was copied, was the Countess of Westmoreland.... Lady
Blessington had the autobiography in her possession for weeks, and
confessed to having copied every line of it. Moore remonstrated, and
she committed her copy to the flames, but did not tell him that her
sister, Mrs. Home Purvis, now Viscountess of Canterbury, had also made
a copy!... From the quantity of copy I have seen,--and others were
more in the way of falling in with it than myself,--I surmise that at
least half a dozen copies were made, and of these _five_ are now in
existence. Some particular parts, such as the marriage and separation,
were copied separately; but I think there cannot be less than five
full copies yet to be found.'
This was written _after the original autobiography was burned_.
We may see the zeal and enthusiasm of the Byron party,--copying
seventy-eight folio sheets, as of old Christians copied the Gospels.
How widely, fully, and thoroughly, thus, by this secret process, was
society saturated with Byron's own versions of the story that related
to himself and wife! Against her there was only the complaint of an
absolute silence. She put forth no statements, no documents; had no
party, sealed the lips of her counsel, and even of her servants; yet
she could not but have known, from time to time, how thoroughly and
strongly this web of mingled truth and lies was being meshed around her
steps.
From the time that Byron first saw the importance of securing Wilson on
his side, and wrote to have his partisans attend to him, we may date
an entire revolution in the 'Blackwood.' It became Byron's warmest
supporter,--is to this day the bitterest accuser of his wife.
Why was this wonderful silence? It appears by Dr. Lushington's
statements, that, when Lady Byron did speak, she had a story to tell
that powerfully affected both him and Romilly,--a story supported by
evidence on which they were willing to have gone to public trial.
Supposing, now, she had imitated Lord Byron's example, and, avoiding
public trial, had put her story into private circulation; as he sent
'Don Juan' to fifty confidential friends, suppose she had sent a
written statement of her story to fifty judges as intelligent as the
two that had heard it; or suppose she had confronted his autobiography
with her own,--what would have been the result?
The first result might have been Mrs. Leigh's utter ruin. The world may
finally forgive the man of genius anything; but for a woman there is no
mercy and no redemption.
This ruin Lady Byron prevented by her utter silence and great
self-command. Mrs. Leigh never lost position. Lady Byron never so
varied in her manner towards her as to excite the suspicions even of
her confidential old servant.
To protect Mrs. Leigh effectually, it must have been necessary to
continue to exclude even her own mother from the secret, as we are
assured she did at first; for, had she told Lady Milbanke, it is
not possible that so high-spirited a woman could have restrained
herself from such outward expressions as would at least have awakened
suspicion. There was no resource but this absolute silence.
Lady Blessington, in her last conversation with Lord Byron, thus
describes the life Lady Byron was leading. She speaks of her as
'wearing away her youth in almost monastic seclusion, questioned by
some, appreciated by few, seeking consolation alone in the discharge of
her duties, and avoiding all external demonstrations of a grief that
her pale cheek and solitary existence alone were vouchers for.'[16]
[Footnote 16: 'Conversations,' p. 108.]
The main object of all this silence may be imagined, if we remember
that if Lord Byron had not died,--had he truly and deeply repented,
and become a thoroughly good man, and returned to England to pursue a
course worthy of his powers, there was on record neither word nor deed
from his wife to stand in his way.
HIS PLACE WAS KEPT IN SOCIETY, ready for him to return to
whenever he came clothed and in his right mind. He might have had the
heart and confidence of his daughter unshadowed by a suspicion. He
might have won the reverence of the great and good in his own lands and
all lands. That hope, which was the strong support, the prayer of the
silent wife, it did not please God to fulfil.
Lord Byron died a worn-out man at thirty-six. But the bitter seeds he
had sown came up, after his death, in a harvest of thorns over his
grave; and there were not wanting hands to use them as instruments of
torture on the heart of his widow.
CHAPTER III.
RÉSUMÉ OF THE CONSPIRACY.
We have traced the conspiracy of Lord Byron against his wife up to its
latest device. That the reader's mind may be clear on the points of the
process, we shall now briefly recapitulate the documents in the order
of time.
I. March 17, 1816.--While negotiations for separation were
pending,--'_Fare thee well, and if for ever_.'
While writing these pages, we have received from England the testimony
of one who has seen the original draught of that 'Fare thee well.' This
original copy had evidently been subjected to the most careful and
acute revision. Scarcely two lines that were not interlined, scarcely
an adjective that was not exchanged for a better; showing that the
noble lord was not so far overcome by grief as to have forgotten his
reputation. (Found its way to the public prints through the imprudence
of _a friend_.)
II. March 29, 1816.--An attack on Lady Byron's old governess for having
been born poor, for being homely, and for having unduly influenced his
wife against him; promising that her grave should be a fiery bed,
&c.; also praising his wife's perfect and remarkable truthfulness and
discernment, that made it impossible for flattery to fool, or baseness
blind her; but ascribing all his woes to her being fooled and blinded
by this same governess. (Found its way to the prints by the imprudence
of _a friend_.)
III. September 1816.--Lines on hearing that Lady Byron is ill. Calls
her a Clytemnestra, who has secretly set assassins on her lord; says
she is a mean, treacherous, deceitful liar, and has entirely departed
from her early truth, and become the most unscrupulous and unprincipled
of women. (Never printed till after Lord Byron's death, but circulated
_privately_ among the '_initiated_.')
IV. Aug. 9, 1817.--Gives to M. G. Lewis a paper for circulation
among friends in England, stating that what he most wants is _public
investigation_, which has always been denied him; and daring Lady Byron
and her counsel to come out publicly. (Found in M. G. Lewis's portfolio
after his death; never heard of before, except among the 'initiated.')
Having given M. G. Lewis's document time to work,--
January 1818.--Gives the Fourth Canto of 'Childe Harold'[17] to the
public.
[Footnote 17: Murray's edition of 'Byron's Works,' Vol. ii. p. 189;
date of dedication to Hobhouse, Jan. 2, 1818.]
Jan. 25, 1819.--Sends to Murray to print for private circulation among
the 'initiated' the First Canto of 'Don Juan.'
Is nobly and severely rebuked for this insult to his wife by the
'Blackwood,' August 1819.
October 1819.--Gives Moore the manuscript 'Autobiography,' with leave
to show it to whom he pleases, and print it after his death.
Oct. 29, 1819, Vol. IV. Letter 344.--Writes to Murray, that he may read
all this 'Autobiography,' and show it to anybody he likes.
Dec. 10, 1819.--Writes to Murray on this article in 'Blackwood'
against 'Don Juan' and himself, which he supposes written by Wilson;
sends a complimentary message to Wilson, and asks him to read his
'Autobiography' sent by Moore. (Letter 350.)
March 15, 1820.--Writes and dedicates to I. Disraeli, Esq., a
vindication of himself in reply to the 'Blackwood' on 'Don Juan,'
containing an indignant defence of his own conduct in relation to his
wife, and maintaining that he never yet has had an opportunity of
knowing whereof he has been accused; accusing Sir S. Romilly of taking
his retainer, and then going over to the adverse party, &c. (Printed
for _private circulation_; to be found in the standard English edition
of Murray, vol. ix. p. 57.)
To this condensed account of Byron's strategy we must add the crowning
stroke of policy which transmitted this warfare to his friends, to be
continued after his death.
During the last visit Moore made him in Italy, and just before Byron
presented to him his 'Autobiography,' the following scene occurred, as
narrated by Moore (vol. iv. p. 221):--
'The chief subject of conversation, when alone, was his marriage, and
the load of obloquy which it had brought upon him. He was most anxious
to know _the worst_ that had been alleged of his conduct; and, as this
was our first opportunity of speaking together on the subject, I did
not hesitate to put his candour most searchingly to the proof, not
only by enumerating the various charges I had heard brought against
him by others, but by specifying such portions of these charges as I
had been inclined to think not incredible myself.
'To all this he listened with patience, and answered with the most
unhesitating frankness; laughing to scorn the tales of unmanly outrage
related of him, but at the same time acknowledging that there had
been in his conduct but too much to blame and regret, and stating one
or two occasions during his domestic life when he had been irritated
into letting the "breath of bitter words" escape him, ... which he now
evidently remembered with a degree of remorse and pain which might
well have entitled them to be forgotten by others.
'It was, at the same time, manifest, that, whatever admissions he
might be inclined to make respecting his own delinquencies, _the
inordinate measure of the punishment dealt out to him had sunk deeply
into his mind, and, with the usual effect of such injustice, drove him
also to be unjust himself; so much so, indeed, as to impute to the
quarter to which he now traced all his ill fate a feeling of fixed
hostility to himself, which would not rest, he thought, even at his
grave, but continue to persecute his memory as it was now embittering
his life_. So strong was this impression upon him, that, during one of
our few intervals of seriousness, he conjured me by our friendship,
if, as he both felt and hoped, I should survive him, not to let
unmerited censure settle upon his name.'
In this same account, page 218, Moore testifies that
'Lord Byron disliked his countrymen, but only because he knew that his
morals were held in contempt by them. The English, themselves rigid
observers of family duties, could not pardon him the neglect of his,
nor his trampling on principles; therefore, neither did he like being
presented to them, nor did they, especially when they had wives with
them, like to cultivate his acquaintance. Still there was a strong
desire in all of them to see him; and the women in particular, who did
not dare to look at him but by stealth, said in an under-voice, "What
a pity it is!" If, however, any of his compatriots of exalted rank and
high reputation came forward to treat him with courtesy, he showed
himself obviously flattered by it. It seemed that, to the wound which
remained open in his ulcerated heart, such soothing attentions were as
drops of healing balm, which comforted him.'
When in society, we are further informed by a lady quoted by Mr.
Moore, he was in the habit of speaking of his wife with much respect
and affection, as an illustrious lady, distinguished for her qualities
of heart and understanding; saying that all the fault of their
cruel separation lay with himself. Mr. Moore seems at times to be
somewhat puzzled by these contradictory statements of his idol, and
speculates not a little on what could be Lord Byron's object in using
such language in public; mentally comparing it, we suppose, with
the free handling which he gave to the same subject in his private
correspondence.
The innocence with which Moore gives himself up to be manipulated by
Lord Byron, the _naïveté_ with which he shows all the process, let
us a little into the secret of the marvellous powers of charming and
blinding which this great actor possessed.
Lord Byron had the beauty, the wit, the genius, the dramatic talent,
which have constituted the strength of some wonderfully fascinating
women.
There have been women able to lead their leashes of blinded adorers; to
make them swear that black was white, or white black, at their word;
to smile away their senses, or weep away their reason. No matter what
these sirens may say, no matter what they may do, though caught in a
thousand transparent lies, and doing a thousand deeds which would have
ruined others, still men madly rave after them in life, and tear their
hair over their graves. Such an enchanter in man's shape was Lord Byron.
He led captive Moore and Murray by being beautiful, a genius, and a
lord; calling them 'Dear Tom' and 'Dear Murray,' while they were only
commoners. He first insulted Sir Walter Scott, and then witched his
heart out of him by ingenuous confessions and poetical compliments; he
took Wilson's heart by flattering messages and a beautifully-written
letter; he corresponded familiarly with Hogg; and, before his death,
had made fast friends, in one way or another, of the whole 'Noctes
Ambrosianæ' Club.
We thus have given the historical _résumé_ of Lord Byron's attacks
on his wife's reputation: we shall add, that they were based on
philosophic principles, showing a deep knowledge of mankind. An
analysis will show that they can be philosophically classified:--
1st. Those which addressed the sympathetic nature of man, representing
her as cold, methodical, severe, strict, unforgiving.
2nd. Those addressed to the faculty of association, connecting her with
ludicrous and licentious images; taking from her the usual protection
of womanly delicacy and sacredness.
3rd. Those addressed to the moral faculties, accusing her as artful,
treacherous, untruthful, malignant.
All these various devices he held in his hand, shuffling and dealing
them as a careful gamester his pack of cards according to the
exigencies of the game. He played adroitly, skilfully, with blinding
flatteries and seductive wiles, that made his victims willing dupes.
Nothing can more clearly show the power and perfectness of his
enchantments than the masterly way in which he turned back the moral
force of the whole English nation, which had risen at first in its
strength against him. The victory was complete.
CHAPTER IV.
RESULTS AFTER LORD BYRON'S DEATH.
At the time of Lord Byron's death, the English public had been so
skilfully manipulated by the Byron propaganda, that the sympathy of
the whole world was with him. A tide of emotion was now aroused in
England by his early death--dying in the cause of Greece and liberty.
There arose a general wail for him, as for a lost pleiad, not only
in England, but over the whole world; a great rush of enthusiasm for
his memory, to which the greatest literary men of England freely gave
voice. By general consent, Lady Byron seems to have been looked upon as
the only cold-hearted unsympathetic person in this general mourning.
From that time the literary world of England apparently regarded Lady
Byron as a woman to whom none of the decorums, nor courtesies of
ordinary womanhood, nor even the consideration belonging to common
humanity, were due.
'She that is a widow indeed, and desolate,' has been regarded in all
Christian countries as an object made sacred by the touch of God's
afflicting hand, sacred in her very helplessness; and the old Hebrew
Scriptures give to the Supreme Father no dearer title than 'the widow's
God.' But, on Lord Byron's death, men not devoid of tenderness, men
otherwise generous and of fine feeling, acquiesced in insults to his
widow with an obtuseness that seems, on review, quite incredible.
Lady Byron was not only a widow, but an orphan. She had no sister for
confidante; no father and mother to whom to go in her sorrows--sorrows
so much deeper and darker to her than they could be to any other human
being. She had neither son nor brother to uphold and protect her. On
all hands it was acknowledged that, so far, there was no fault to be
found in her but her utter silence. Her life was confessed to be pure,
useful, charitable; and yet, in this time of her sorrow, the writers
of England issued article upon article not only devoid of delicacy,
but apparently injurious and insulting towards her, with a blind
unconsciousness which seems astonishing.
One of the greatest literary powers of that time was the 'Blackwood:'
the reigning monarch on that literary throne was Wilson, the
lion-hearted, the brave, generous, tender poet, and, with some sad
exceptions, the noble man. But Wilson had believed the story of Byron,
and, by his very generosity and tenderness and pity, was betrayed into
injustice.
In 'The Noctes' of November 1824 there is a conversation of the Noctes
Club, in which North says, 'Byron and I knew each other pretty well;
and I suppose there's no harm in adding, that we appreciated each
other pretty tolerably. Did you ever see his letter to me?'
The footnote to this says, '_This letter, which was PRINTED in Byron's
lifetime, was not published till_ 1830, when it appeared in Moore's
"Life of Byron." It is one of the most vigorous prose compositions in
the language. Byron had the highest opinion of Wilson's genius and
noble spirit.'
In the first place, with our present ideas of propriety and good taste,
we should reckon it an indecorum to make the private affairs of a
pure and good woman, whose circumstances under any point of view were
trying, and who evidently shunned publicity, the subject of public
discussion in magazines which were read all over the world.
Lady Byron, as they all knew, had on her hands a most delicate and
onerous task, in bringing up an only daughter, necessarily inheriting
peculiarities of genius and great sensitiveness; and the many
mortifications and embarrassments which such intermeddling with her
private matters must have given, certainly should have been considered
by men with any pretensions to refinement or good feeling.
But the literati of England allowed her no consideration, no rest, no
privacy.
In 'The Noctes' of November 1825 there is the record of a free
conversation upon Lord and Lady Byron's affairs, interlarded with
exhortations to push the bottle, and remarks on whisky-toddy. Medwin's
'Conversations with Lord Byron' is discussed, which, we are told in a
note, appeared a few months after the _noble_ poet's death.
There is a rather bold and free discussion of Lord Byron's
character--his fondness for gin and water, on which stimulus he wrote
'Don Juan;' and James Hogg says pleasantly to Mullion, 'O Mullion! it's
a pity you and Byron could na ha' been acquaint. There would ha' been
brave sparring to see who could say the wildest and the dreadfullest
things; for he had neither fear of man or woman, and would ha' his joke
or jeer, cost what it might.' And then follows a specimen of one of
his jokes with an actress, that, in indecency, certainly justifies the
assertion. From the other stories which follow, and the parenthesis
that occurs frequently ('Mind your glass, James, a little more!'), it
seems evident that the party are progressing in their peculiar kind of
_civilisation_.
It is in this same circle and paper that Lady Byron's private affairs
come up for discussion. The discussion is thus elegantly introduced:--
_Hogg._--'Reach me the black bottle. I say, Christopher, what, after
all, is your opinion o' Lord and Leddy Byron's quarrel? Do you
yoursel' take part with him, or with her? I wad like to hear your real
opinion.'
_North._--'Oh, dear! Well, Hogg, since you will have it, I think
Douglas Kinnard and Hobhouse are bound to tell us whether there be any
truth, and how much, in this story about the _declaration_, signed by
Sir Ralph' [Milbanke].
The note here tells us that this refers to a statement that appeared
in 'Blackwood' immediately after Byron's death, to the effect that,
previous to the formal separation from his wife, Byron required and
obtained from Sir Ralph Milbanke, Lady Byron's father, a statement to
the effect that Lady Byron had no charge of moral delinquency to bring
against him.[18]
[Footnote 18: Recently, Lord Lindsay has published another version of
this story, which makes it appear that he has conversed with a lady who
conversed with Hobhouse during his lifetime, in which this story is
differently reported. In the last version, it is made to appear that
Hobhouse had this declaration from Lady Byron herself.]
North continues:--
'And I think Lady Byron's letter--the "Dearest Duck" one I
mean--should really be forthcoming, if her ladyship's friends wish to
stand fair before the public. At present we have nothing but loose
talk of society to go upon; and certainly, _if the things that are
said be true, there must be thorough explanation from some quarter,
or the tide will continue, as it has assuredly begun, to flow in a
direction very opposite to what we were for years accustomed_. Sir,
they must _explain this business of the letter_. You have, of course,
heard about the invitation it contained, the warm, affectionate
invitation, to Kirkby Mallory'----
Hogg interposes,--
'I dinna like to be interruptin' ye, Mr. North; but I must inquire, Is
the _jug_ to stand still while ye're going on at that rate?'
_North._--'There, Porker! These things are part and parcel of
the chatter of every bookseller's shop; _à fortiori_, of every
drawing-room in May Fair. _Can_ the matter stop here? Can a great
man's memory be permitted to incur damnation while these saving
clauses are afloat anywhere uncontradicted?'
And from this the conversation branches off into strong, emphatic
praise of Byron's conduct in Greece during the last part of his life.
The silent widow is thus delicately and considerately reminded in the
'Blackwood' that she is the talk, not only over the whisky-jug of the
Noctes, but in every drawing-room in London; and that she _must_ speak
out and explain matters, or the whole world will set against her.
But she does not speak yet. The public persecution, therefore,
proceeds. Medwin's book being insufficient, another biographer is to
be selected. Now, the person in the Noctes Club who was held to have
the most complete information of the Byron affairs, and was, on that
account, first thought of by Murray to execute this very delicate task
of writing a memoir which should include the most sacred domestic
affairs of a noble lady and her orphan daughter, was _Maginn_. Maginn,
the author of the pleasant joke, that 'man never reaches the apex of
civilisation till he is too drunk to pronounce the word,' was the first
person in whose hands the 'Autobiography,' Memoirs, and Journals of
Lord Byron were placed with this view.
The following note from Shelton Mackenzie, in the June number of 'The
Noctes,' 1824, says,--
'At that time, had he been so minded, Maginn (Odoherty) could have got
up a popular Life of Byron as well as most men in England. Immediately
on the account of Byron's death being received in London, John Murray
proposed that Maginn should bring out Memoirs, Journals, and Letters
of Lord Byron, and, with this intent, placed in his hand every line
that he (Murray) possessed in Byron's handwriting.... The strong
desire of _Byron's family and executors_ that the "Autobiography"
should be burned, to which desire Murray foolishly yielded, made such
an hiatus in the materials, that Murray and Maginn agreed it would not
answer to bring out the work then. Eventually Moore executed it.'
The character of the times in which this work was to be undertaken will
appear from the following note of Mackenzie's to 'The Noctes' of August
1824, which we copy, with the _author's own Italics_:--
'In the "Blackwood" of July 1824 was a poetical epistle by the
renowned Timothy Tickler to the editor of the "John Bull" magazine,
on an article in his first number. This article ... _professed_ to
be a portion of the veritable "Autobiography" of Byron which was
burned, and was called "My Wedding Night." It appeared to relate
in detail _everything_ that occurred in the twenty-four hours
immediately succeeding that in which Byron was married. It had plenty
of coarseness, and some to spare. It went into particulars such as
hitherto had been given only by Faublas; and it had, notwithstanding,
many phrases and some facts which evidently did not belong to a mere
fabricator. Some years after, I compared this "Wedding Night" with
what I had all assurance of having been transcribed from the actual
manuscripts of Byron, and was persuaded that the magazine-writer must
have had the _actual_ statement before him, or have had a perusal of
it. The writer in "Blackwood" declared his conviction that it really
was Byron's own writing.'
The reader must remember that Lord Byron died April 1824; so that,
according to this, his 'Autobiography' was made the means of this gross
insult to his widow three months after his death.
If some powerful cause had not paralysed all feelings of gentlemanly
honour, and of womanly delicacy, and of common humanity, towards Lady
Byron, throughout the whole British nation, no editor would have dared
to open a periodical with such an article; or, if he had, he would have
been overwhelmed with a storm of popular indignation, which, like the
fire upon Sodom, would have made a pillar of salt of him for a warning
to all future generations.
'Blackwood' reproves the 'John Bull' in a poetical epistle, recognising
the article as coming from Byron, and says to the _author_,--
'But that _you_, sir, a wit and a scholar like you,
Should not blush to produce what he blushed not to do,--
Take your compliment, youngster; this doubles, almost,
The sorrow that rose when his honour was lost.'
We may not wonder that the 'Autobiography' was burned, as Murray says
in a recent account, by a committee of Byron's _friends_, including
Hobhouse, his sister, and Murray himself.
Now, the 'Blackwood' of July 1824 thus declares its conviction that
this outrage on every sentiment of human decency came from Lord Byron,
and that his honour was lost. Maginn does not undertake the memoir. No
memoir at all is undertaken; till finally Moore is selected, as, like
Demetrius of old, a well-skilled gilder and 'maker of silver shrines,'
though _not_ for Diana. To Moore is committed the task of doing his
best for this battered image, in which even the worshippers recognise
foul sulphurous cracks, but which they none the less stand ready to
worship as a genuine article that 'fell down from Jupiter.'
Moore was a man of no particular nicety as to moralities, but in that
matter seems not very much below what this record shows his average
associates to be. He is so far superior to Maginn, that his vice is
rose-coloured and refined. He does not burst out with such heroic
stanzas as Maginn's frank invitation to Jeremy Bentham:--
'Jeremy, throw your pen aside,
And come get drunk with me;
And we'll go where Bacchus sits astride,
Perched high on barrels three.'
Moore's vice is cautious, soft, seductive, slippery, and covered at
times with a thin, tremulous veil of religious sentimentalism.
In regard to Byron, he was an unscrupulous, committed partisan: he was
as much bewitched by him as ever man has been by woman; and therefore
to him, at last, the task of editing Byron's 'Memoirs' was given.
This Byron, whom they all knew to be obscene beyond what even their
most drunken tolerance could at first endure; this man, whose foul
license _spoke out_ what most men conceal from mere respect to the
decent instincts of humanity; whose 'honour was lost,'--was submitted
to this careful manipulator, to be turned out a perfected idol for a
world longing for an idol, as the Israelites longed for the calf in
Horeb.
The image was to be invested with deceitful glories and shifting
haloes,--admitted faults spoken of as peculiarities of sacred
origin,--and the world given to understand that no common rule or
measure could apply to such an undoubtedly divine production; and so
the hearts of men were to be wrung with pity for his sorrows as the
yearning pain of a god, and with anger at his injuries as sacrilege on
the sacredness of genius, till they were ready to cast themselves at
his feet, and adore.
Then he was to be set up on a pedestal, like Nebuchadnezzar's image on
the plains of Dura; and what time the world heard the sound of cornet,
sackbut, and dulcimer, in his enchanting verse, they were to fall down
and worship.
For Lady Byron, Moore had simply the respect that a commoner has for
a lady of rank, and a good deal of the feeling that seems to underlie
all English literature,--that it is no matter what becomes of the woman
when the man's story is to be told. But, with all his faults, Moore was
not a cruel man; and we cannot conceive such outrageous cruelty and
ungentlemanly indelicacy towards an unoffending woman, as he shows in
these 'Memoirs,' without referring them to Lord Byron's own influence
in making him an unscrupulous, committed partisan on his side.
So little pity, so little sympathy, did he suppose Lady Byron to be
worthy of, that he laid before her, in the sight of all the world,
selections from her husband's letters and journals, in which the
privacies of her courtship and married life were jested upon with a
vulgar levity; letters filled, from the time of the act of separation,
with a constant succession of sarcasms, stabs, stings, epigrams, and
vindictive allusions to herself, bringing her into direct and insulting
comparison with his various mistresses, and implying their superiority
over her. There, too, were gross attacks on her father and mother, as
having been the instigators of the separation; and poor Lady Milbanke,
in particular, is sometimes mentioned with epithets so offensive, that
the editor prudently covers the terms with stars, as intending language
too gross to be printed.
The last mistress of Lord Byron is uniformly brought forward in
terms of such respect and consideration, that one would suppose that
the usual moral laws that regulate English family life had been
specially repealed in his favour. Moore quotes with approval letters
from Shelley, stating that Lord Byron's connection with La Guiccioli
has been of inestimable benefit to him; and that he is now becoming
what he should be, 'a virtuous man.' Moore goes on to speak of the
connection as one, though somewhat reprehensible, yet as having all
those advantages of marriage and settled domestic ties that Byron's
affectionate spirit had long sighed for, but never before found; and in
his last _résumé_ of the poet's character, at the end of the volume, he
brings the mistress into direct comparison with the wife in a single
sentence: 'The woman to whom he gave the love of his maturer years
idolises his name; and, _with a single unhappy exception_, scarce an
instance is to be found of one brought ... into relations of amity with
him who did not retain a kind regard for him in life, and a fondness
for his memory.'
Literature has never yet seen the instance of a person, of Lady Byron's
rank in life, placed before the world in a position more humiliating to
womanly dignity, or wounding to womanly delicacy.
The direct implication is, that she has no feelings to be hurt, no
heart to be broken, and is not worthy even of the consideration which
in ordinary life is to be accorded to a widow who has received those
awful tidings which generally must awaken many emotions, and call for
some consideration, even in the most callous hearts.
The woman who we are told walked the room, vainly striving to control
the sobs that shook her frame, while she sought to draw from the
servant that last message of her husband which she was never to hear,
was not thought worthy even of the rights of common humanity.
The first volume of the 'Memoir' came out in 1830. Then for the first
time came one flash of lightning from the silent cloud; and she who
had never spoken before spoke out. The libels on the memory of her
dead parents drew from her what her own wrongs never did. During all
this time, while her husband had been keeping her effigy dangling
before the public as a mark for solemn curses, and filthy lampoons,
and _secretly_-circulated disclosures, that spared no sacredness
and violated every decorum, she had not uttered a word. She had
been subjected to nameless insults, discussed in the assemblies of
drunkards, and challenged to speak for herself. Like the chaste lady
in 'Comus,' whom the vile wizard had bound in the enchanted seat to
be 'grinned at and chattered at' by all the filthy rabble of his
dehumanised rout, she had remained pure, lofty, and undefiled; and the
stains of mud and mire thrown upon her had fallen from her spotless
garments.
Now that she is dead, a recent writer in 'The London Quarterly' dares
give voice to an insinuation which even Byron gave only a _suggestion_
of when he called his wife Clytemnestra; and hints that she tried the
power of youth and beauty to win to her the young solicitor Lushington,
and a handsome young officer of high rank.
At this time, _such_ insinuations had not been thought of; and the only
and chief allegation against Lady Byron had been a cruel severity of
virtue.
At all events, when Lady Byron spoke, the world listened with respect,
and believed what she said.
Here let us, too, read her statement, and give it the careful attention
she solicits (Moore's 'Life of Byron,' vol. vi. p. 275):--
'I have disregarded various publications in which facts within my
own knowledge have been grossly misrepresented; but I am called upon
to notice some of the erroneous statements proceeding from one who
claims to be considered as Lord Byron's confidential and authorised
friend. Domestic details ought not to be intruded on the public
attention: if, however, they _are_ so intruded, the persons affected
by them have a right to refute injurious charges. Mr. Moore has
promulgated his own impressions of private events in which I was most
nearly concerned, as if he possessed a competent knowledge of the
subject. Having survived Lord Byron, I feel increased reluctance to
advert to any circumstances connected with the period of my marriage;
nor is it now my intention to disclose them further than may be
indispensably requisite for the end I have in view. Self-vindication
is not the motive which actuates me to make this appeal, and the
spirit of accusation is unmingled with it; but when the conduct of
my parents is brought forward in a disgraceful light by the passages
selected from Lord Byron's letters, and by the remarks of his
biographer, I feel bound to justify their characters from imputations
which I _know_ to be false. The passages from Lord Byron's letters, to
which I refer, are,--the aspersion on my mother's character (p. 648,
l. 4):[19] "My child is very well and flourishing, I hear; but I must
see also. I feel no disposition to resign it to the _contagion of its
grandmother's society_." The assertion of her dishonourable conduct
in employing a spy (p. 645, l. 7, &c.): "A Mrs. C. (now a kind of
housekeeper and _spy of Lady N.'s_), who, in her better days, was a
washerwoman, is supposed to be--by the learned--very much the occult
cause of our domestic discrepancies." The seeming exculpation of
myself in the extract (p. 646), with the words immediately following
it, "Her nearest relations are a----;" where the blank clearly implies
something too offensive for publication. These passages tend to throw
suspicion on my parents, and give reason to ascribe the separation
either to their direct agency, or to that of "officious spies"
employed by them.[20] From the following part of the narrative (p.
642), it must also be inferred that an undue influence was exercised
by them for the accomplishment of this purpose: "It was in a few
weeks after the latter communication between us (Lord Byron and Mr.
Moore) that Lady Byron adopted the determination of parting from him.
She had left London at the latter end of January, on a visit to her
father's house in Leicestershire; and Lord Byron was in a short time
to follow her. They had parted in the utmost kindness,--she wrote
him a letter, full of playfulness and affection, on the road; and,
immediately on her arrival at Kirkby Mallory, her father wrote to
acquaint Lord Byron that she would return to him no more."
[Footnote 19: The references are to the first volume of the first
edition of Moore's Life', originally published by itself.]
[Footnote 20: 'The officious spies of his privacy,' p. 650.]
'In my observations upon this statement, I shall, as far as possible,
avoid touching on any matters relating personally to Lord Byron
and myself. 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 on my mind that Lord Byron was under the influence
of insanity. This opinion was derived in a great measure from the
communications made to me by his nearest relatives and personal
attendant, who had more opportunities than myself of 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 this 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 nature of Lord Byron's
conduct towards 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. On the day of my departure, and again on my arrival at
Kirkby (Jan. 16), I wrote to Lord Byron in a kind and cheerful tone,
according to those medical directions.
'The last letter was circulated, and employed as a pretext for the
charge of my having been subsequently _influenced_ to "desert"[21] my
husband. It has been argued that I parted from Lord Byron in perfect
harmony; that feelings incompatible with any deep sense of injury had
dictated the letter which I addressed to him; and that my sentiments
must have been changed by persuasion and interference when I was
under the roof of my parents. These assertions and inferences are
wholly destitute of foundation. When I arrived at Kirkby Mallory, my
parents were unacquainted with the existence of any causes likely to
destroy my prospects of happiness; and, when I communicated to them
the opinion which had been formed concerning Lord Byron's state of
mind, they were most anxious to promote his restoration by every means
in their power. They assured those relations who were with him in
London, that "they would devote their whole care and attention to the
alleviation of his malady;" and hoped to make the best arrangements
for his comfort if he could be induced to visit them.
[Footnote 21: 'The deserted husband,' p. 651.]
'With these intentions, my mother wrote on the 17th to Lord Byron,
inviting him to Kirkby Mallory. She had always treated him with an
affectionate consideration and indulgence, which extended to every
little peculiarity of his feelings. Never did an irritating word
escape her lips in her whole intercourse with him. The accounts given
me after I left Lord Byron, by the persons in constant intercourse
with him, added to those doubts which had before transiently occurred
to my mind as to the reality of the alleged disease; and the reports
of his medical attendant were far from establishing the existence of
anything like lunacy. Under this uncertainty, I deemed it right to
communicate to my parents, that, if I were to consider Lord Byron's
past conduct as that of a person of sound mind, nothing could induce
me to return to him. It therefore appeared expedient, both to them and
myself, to consult the ablest advisers. For that object, and also
to obtain still further information respecting the appearances which
seemed to indicate mental derangement, my mother determined to go to
London. She was empowered by me to take legal opinions on a written
statement of mine, though I had then reasons for reserving a part
of the case from the knowledge even of my father and mother. Being
convinced by the result of these inquiries, and by the tenor of Lord
Byron's proceedings, that the notion of insanity was an illusion, I no
longer hesitated to authorise such measures as were necessary in order
to secure me from being ever again placed in his power. Conformably
with this resolution, my father wrote to him on the 2nd of February
to propose an amicable separation. Lord Byron at first rejected this
proposal; but when it was distinctly notified to him that, if he
persisted in his refusal, recourse must be had to legal measures, he
agreed to sign a deed of separation. Upon applying to Dr. Lushington,
who was intimately acquainted with all the circumstances, to state in
writing what he recollected upon this subject, I received from him the
following letter, by which it will be manifest that my mother cannot
have been actuated by any hostile or ungenerous motives towards Lord
Byron:--
'"MY DEAR LADY BYRON,--I can rely upon the accuracy of
my memory for the following statement. I was originally consulted
by Lady Noel, on your behalf, whilst you were in the country. The
circumstances detailed by her were such as justified a separation;
but they were not of that aggravated description as to render such
a measure indispensable. On Lady Noel's representation, I deemed a
reconciliation with Lord Byron practicable, and felt most sincerely
a wish to aid in effecting it. There was not on Lady Noel's part
any exaggeration of the facts; nor, so far as I could perceive, any
determination to prevent a return to Lord Byron: certainly none was
expressed when I spoke of a reconciliation. When you came to town,
in about a fortnight, or perhaps more, after my first interview with
Lady Noel, I was for the first time informed by you of facts utterly
unknown, as I have no doubt, to Sir Ralph and Lady Noel. On receiving
this additional information, my opinion was entirely changed: I
considered a reconciliation impossible. I declared my opinion, and
added, that, if such an idea should be entertained, I could not,
either professionally or otherwise, take any part towards effecting it.
'"Believe me, very faithfully yours,
'"STEPH. LUSHINGTON.
'"Great George Street, Jan. 31, 1830."
'I have only to observe, that, if the statements on which my legal
advisers (the late Sir Samuel Romilly and Dr. Lushington) formed
their opinions were false, the responsibility and the odium should
rest with _me only_. I trust that the facts which I have here briefly
recapitulated will absolve my father and mother from all accusations
with regard to the part they took in the separation between Lord Byron
and myself.
'They neither originated, instigated, nor advised that separation;
and they cannot be condemned for having afforded to their daughter
the assistance and protection which she claimed. There is no other
near relative to vindicate their memory from insult. I am therefore
compelled to break the silence which I had hoped always to observe,
and to solicit from the readers of Lord Byron's "Life" an impartial
consideration of the testimony extorted from me.
'A. I. NOEL BYRON.
'Hanger Hill, Feb. 19, 1830.'
The effect of this statement on the literary world may be best judged
by the discussion of it by Christopher North (Wilson) in the succeeding
May number of 'The Noctes,' where the bravest and most generous of
literary men that then were--himself the husband of a gentle wife--thus
gives sentence: the conversation is between North and the Shepherd:--
_North._--'God forbid I should wound the feelings of Lady Byron, of
whose character, known to me but by the high estimation in which
it is held by all who have enjoyed her friendship, I have always
spoken with respect!... But may I, without harshness or indelicacy,
say, here among ourselves, James, that, by marrying Byron, she took
upon herself, with eyes wide open and conscience clearly convinced,
duties very different from those of which, even in common cases, the
presaging foresight shadows ... the light of the first nuptial moon?'
_Shepherd._--'She did that, sir; by my troth, she did that.'
_North._--'Miss Milbanke knew that he was reckoned a rake and a
_roué_; and although his genius wiped off, by impassioned eloquence
in love-letters that were felt to be irresistible, or hid the worst
stain of, that reproach, still Miss Milbanke must have believed it a
perilous thing to be the wife of Lord Byron.... But still, by joining
her life to his in marriage, she pledged her troth and her faith and
her love, under probabilities of severe, disturbing, perhaps fearful
trials, in the future....
'But I think Lady Byron ought not to have printed that Narrative.
Death abrogates not the rights of a husband to his wife's silence
when speech is fatal ... to his character as a man. Has she not
flung suspicion over his bones interred, that they are the bones of
a--monster?... If Byron's sins or crimes--for we are driven to use
terrible terms--were unendurable and unforgivable as if against the
Holy Ghost, ought the wheel, the rack, or the stake to have extorted
that confession from his widow's breast.... But there was no such
pain here, James: the declaration was voluntary, and it was calm.
Self-collected, and gathering up all her faculties and feelings
into unshrinking strength, she denounced before all the world--and
throughout all space and all time--her husband, as excommunicated by
his vices from woman's bosom.
* * * * *
''Twas to vindicate the character of her parents that Lady Byron
wrote,--a holy purpose and devout, nor do I doubt sincere. But filial
affection and reverence, sacred as they are, may be blamelessly, nay,
righteously, subordinate to conjugal duties, which die not with the
dead, are extinguished not even by the sins of the dead, were they as
foul as the grave's corruption.'
Here is what John Stuart Mill calls the literature of slavery for
woman, in length and breadth; and, that all women may understand the
doctrine, the Shepherd now takes up his parable, and expounds the true
position of the wife. We render his Scotch into English:--
'Not a few such widows do I know, whom brutal, profligate, and savage
husbands have brought to the brink of the grave,--as good, as bright,
as innocent as, and far more forgiving than, Lady Byron. There
they sit in their obscure, rarely-visited dwellings; for sympathy
instructed by suffering knows well that the deepest and most hopeless
misery is least given to complaint.'
Then follows a pathetic picture of one such widow, trembling and
fainting for hunger, obliged, on her way to the well for a can of
water, her only drink, to sit down on a '_knowe_' and say a prayer.
'Yet she's decently, yea, tidily dressed, poor creature! in sair worn
widow's clothes, a single suit for Saturday and Sunday; her hair,
untimely gray, is neatly braided under her crape cap; and sometimes,
when all is still and solitary in the fields, and all labour has
disappeared into the house, you may see her stealing by herself, or
leading one wee orphan by the hand, with another at her breast, to the
kirkyard, where the love of her youth and the husband of her prime is
buried.
'Yet,' says the Shepherd, 'he was a brute, a ruffian, a monster. When
drunk, how he raged and cursed and swore! Often did she dread that, in
his fits of inhuman passion, he would have murdered the baby at her
breast; for she had seen him dash their only little boy, a child of
eight years old, on the floor, till the blood gushed from his ears;
and then the madman threw himself down on the body, and howled for
the gallows. Limmers haunted his door, and he theirs; and it was hers
to lie, not sleep, in a cold, forsaken bed, once the bed of peace,
affection, and perfect happiness. Often he struck her; and once when
she was pregnant with that very orphan now smiling on her breast,
reaching out his wee fingers to touch the flowers on his father's
grave....
'But she tries to smile among the neighbours, and speaks of her boy's
likeness to its father; nor, when the conversation turns on bygone
times, does she fear to let his name escape her white lips, "My
Robert; the bairn's not ill-favoured, but he will never look like his
father,"--and such sayings, uttered in a calm, sweet voice. Nay, I
remember once how her pale countenance reddened with a sudden flush
of pride, when a gossiping crone alluded to their wedding; and the
widow's eye brightened through her tears to hear how the bridegroom,
sitting that sabbath in his front seat beside his bonny bride, had
not his equal for strength, stature, and all that is beauty in man,
in all the congregation. That, I say, sir, whether right or wrong,
_was--forgiveness_.'
Here is a specimen of how even generous men had been so perverted by
the enchantment of Lord Byron's genius, as to turn all the pathos and
power of the strongest literature of that day against the persecuted,
pure woman, and for the strong, wicked man. These 'Blackwood' writers
knew, by Byron's own filthy, ghastly writings, which had gone sorely
against their own moral stomachs, that he was foul to the bone. They
could see, in Moore's 'Memoirs' right before them, how he had caught an
innocent girl's heart by sending a love-letter, and offer of marriage,
at the end of a long friendly correspondence,--a letter that had been
written to _show_ to his libertine set, and sent on the toss-up of a
copper, because he cared nothing for it one way or the other.
They admit that, having won this poor girl, he had been savage, brutal,
drunken, cruel. They had read the filthy taunts in 'Don Juan,' and the
nameless abominations in the 'Autobiography.' They had admitted among
themselves that his honour was lost; but still this abused, desecrated
woman must _reverence_ her brutal master's memory, and not speak, even
to defend the grave of her own kind father and mother.
That there was _no_ lover of her youth, that the marriage-vow had been
a hideous, shameless cheat, is on the face of Moore's account; yet
the 'Blackwood' does not see it nor feel it, and brings up against
Lady Byron this touching story of a poor widow, who really had had a
true lover once,--a lover maddened, imbruted, lost, through that very
drunkenness in which the Noctes Club were always glorying.
It is because of such transgressors as Byron, such supporters as
Moore and the Noctes Club, that there are so many helpless, cowering,
broken-hearted, abject women, given over to the animal love which they
share alike with the poor dog,--the dog, who, beaten, kicked, starved,
and cuffed, still lies by his drunken master with great anxious eyes
of love and sorrow, and with sweet, brute forgiveness nestles upon his
bosom, as he lies in his filth in the snowy ditch, to keep the warmth
of life in him. Great is the mystery of this fidelity in the poor,
loving brute,--most mournful and most sacred!
But, oh that a noble man should have no higher ideal of the love of a
high-souled, heroic woman! Oh that men should teach women that they
owe no higher duties, and are capable of no higher tenderness, than
this loving, unquestioning animal fidelity! The dog is ever-loving,
ever-forgiving, because God has given him no high range of moral
faculties, no sense of justice, no consequent horror at impurity and
vileness.
Much of the beautiful patience and forgiveness of women is made
possible to them by that utter _deadness to the sense of justice_ which
the laws, literature, and misunderstood religion of England have sought
to induce in woman as a special grace and virtue.
The lesson to woman in this pathetic piece of special pleading is,
that man may sink himself below the brute, may wallow in filth like
the swine, may turn his home into a hell, beat and torture his
children, forsake the marriage-bed for foul rivals; yet all this does
not dissolve the marriage-vow on her part, nor free his bounden serf
from her obligation to honour his memory,--nay, to sacrifice to it
the honour due to a kind father and mother, slandered in their silent
graves.
Such was the sympathy, and such the advice, that the best literature
of England could give to a young widow, a peeress of England, whose
husband, as they verily believed and admitted, might have done
_worse_ than all this; whose crimes might have been 'foul, monstrous,
unforgivable as the sin against the Holy Ghost.' If these things be
done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? If the peeress
_as a wife_ has no rights, what is the state of the cotter's wife?
But, in the same paper, North again blames Lady Byron for not
having come out with the whole story before the world at the time
she separated from her husband. He says of the time when she first
consulted counsel through her mother, keeping back one item,--
'How weak, and worse than weak, at such a juncture, on which hung her
whole fate, to ask legal advice on an imperfect document! Give the
delicacy of a virtuous woman its due; but at such a crisis, when the
question was whether her conscience was to be free from the oath of
oaths, delicacy should have died, and nature was privileged to show
unashamed--if such there were--the records of uttermost pollution.'
_Shepherd._--'And what think ye, sir, that a' this pollution could hae
been, that sae electrified Dr. Lushington?'
_North._--'Bad--bad--bad, James. Nameless, it is horrible; named,
it might leave Byron's memory yet within the range of pity and
forgiveness; and, where they are, their sister affections will not be
far; though, like weeping seraphs, standing aloof, and veiling their
wings.'
_Shepherd._--'She should indeed hae been silent--till the grave had
closed on her sorrows as on his sins.'
_North._--'_Even now she should speak_,--or some one else for her,--
... and a few words will suffice. _Worse_ the condition of the dead
man's name cannot be--far, far better it might--I believe it would
be--were _all_ the truth somehow or other declared; and declared it
must be, not for Byron's sake only, but for the sake of humanity
itself; and then a mitigated sentence, or eternal silence.'
We have another discussion of Lady Byron's duties in a further number
of 'Blackwood.'
The 'Memoir' being out, it was proposed that there should be a complete
annotation of Byron's works gotten up, and adorned, for the further
glorification of his memory, with portraits of the various women whom
he had delighted to honour.
Murray applied to Lady Byron for her portrait, and was met with a cold,
decided negative. After reading all the particulars of Byron's harem of
mistresses, and Moore's comparisons between herself and La Guiccioli,
one might _imagine_ reasons why a lady, with proper self-respect,
should object to appearing in this manner. One would suppose there
might have been gentlemen who could well appreciate the _motive_ of
that refusal; but it was only considered a new evidence that she was
indifferent to her conjugal duties, and wanting in that _respect_ which
Christopher North had told her she owed a husband's memory, though his
crimes were foul as the rottenness of the grave.
Never, since Queen Vashti refused to come at the command of a drunken
husband to show herself to his drunken lords, was there a clearer case
of disrespect to the marital dignity on the part of a wife. It was a
plain act of insubordination, rebellion against law and order; and
how shocking in Lady Byron, who ought to feel herself but too much
flattered to be exhibited to the public as the head wife of a man of
genius!
Means were at once adopted to subdue her contumacy, of which one may
read in a note to the 'Blackwood' (Noctes), September 1832. An artist
was sent down to Ealing to take her picture by stealth as she sat in
church. Two sittings were thus obtained without her knowledge. In the
third one, the artist placed himself boldly before her, and sketched,
so that she could not but observe him. We shall give the rest in
Mackenzie's own words, as a remarkable specimen of the obtuseness,
not to say indelicacy of feeling, which seemed to pervade the literary
circles of England at the time:--
'After prayers, Wright and his friend (the artist) were visited by
an ambassador from her ladyship to inquire the meaning of what she
had seen. The reply was, that Mr. Murray _must_ have her portrait,
and was compelled to take what she refused to give. The result was,
Wright was requested to visit her, which he did; taking with him,
not _the_ sketch, which was very good, but another, in which there
was a strong touch of caricature. Rather than allow _that_ to appear
as her likeness (a very natural and womanly feeling by the way), she
consented to sit for the portrait to W. J. Newton, which was engraved,
and is here alluded to.'
The artless barbarism of this note is too good to be lost; but it
is quite borne out by the conversation in the Noctes Club, which it
illustrates.
It would appear from this conversation that these Byron beauties
appeared successively in pamphlet form; and the picture of Lady Byron
is thus discussed:--
_Mullion._--'I don't know if you have seen the last brochure. It has a
charming head of Lady Byron, who, it seems, sat on purpose: and that's
very agreeable to hear of; for it shows her ladyship has got over any
little soreness that Moore's "Life" occasioned, and is now willing
to contribute anything in her power to the real monument of Byron's
genius.'
_North._--'I am delighted to hear of this: 'tis really very noble in
the unfortunate lady. I never saw her. Is the face a striking one?'
_Mullion._--'Eminently so,--a most calm, pensive, melancholy style of
native beauty,--and a most touching contrast to the maids of Athens,
Annesley, and all the rest of them. I'm sure you'll have the proof
Finden has sent you framed for the Boudoir at the Lodge.'
_North._--'By all means. I mean to do that for all the Byron Beauties.'
But it may be asked, Was there not a man in all England with delicacy
enough to feel for Lady Byron, and chivalry enough to speak a bold word
for her? Yes: there was one. Thomas Campbell the poet, when he read
Lady Byron's statement, believed it, as did Christopher North; but it
affected him differently. It appears he did not believe it a wife's
duty to burn herself on her husband's funeral-pile, as did Christopher
North; and held the singular idea, that a wife had _some_ rights as a
human being as well as a husband.
Lady Byron's own statement appeared in pamphlet form in 1830: at
least, such is the date at the foot of the document. Thomas Campbell,
in 'The New Monthly Magazine,' shortly after, printed a spirited,
gentlemanly defence of Lady Byron, and administered a pointed rebuke to
Moore for the rudeness and indelicacy he had shown in selecting from
Byron's letters the coarsest against herself, her parents, and her
old governess Mrs. Clermont, and by the indecent comparisons he had
instituted between Lady Byron and Lord Byron's last mistress.
It is refreshing to hear, at last, from somebody who is not altogether
on his knees at the feet of the popular idol, and who has some chivalry
for woman, and some idea of common humanity. He says,--
'I found my right to speak on this painful subject on its now
_irrevocable publicity_, brought up afresh as it has been by Mr.
Moore, to be the theme of discourse to millions, and, if I err not
much, the cause of misconception to innumerable minds. I claim to
speak of Lady Byron in the right of a man, and of a friend to the
rights of woman, and to liberty, and to natural religion. I claim a
right, more especially, as one of the many friends of Lady Byron,
who, one and all, feel aggrieved by this production. It has virtually
dragged her forward from the shade of retirement, where she had hid
her sorrows, and compelled her to defend the heads of her friends and
her parents from being crushed under the tombstone of Byron. Nay, in a
general view, it has forced her to defend _herself_; though, with her
true sense and her pure taste, she stands above all special pleading.
To plenary explanation she _ought_ not--she never _shall_ be driven.
Mr. Moore is too much a gentleman not to shudder at the thought of
that; but if other Byronists, of a far different stamp, were to force
the savage ordeal, it is her enemies, and not she, that would have to
dread the burning plough-shares.
'We, her friends, have no wish to prolong the discussion: but a few
words we _must_ add, even to her admirable statement; for hers is a
cause not only dear to her friends, but having become, from Mr. Moore
and her misfortunes, a publicly-agitated cause, it concerns morality,
and the most sacred rights of the sex, that she should (and that,
too, without more special explanations) be acquitted out and out, and
honourably acquitted, in this business, of all share in the blame,
which is one and indivisible. Mr. Moore, on further reflection, may
see this; and his return to candour will surprise us less than his
momentary deviation from its path.
'For the tact of Mr. Moore's conduct in this affair, I have not to
answer; but, if indelicacy be charged upon me, I scorn the charge.
Neither will I submit to be called Lord Byron's accuser; because a
word against him I wish not to say beyond what is painfully wrung
from me by the necessity of owning or illustrating Lady Byron's
unblamableness, and of repelling certain misconceptions respecting
her, which are now walking the fashionable world, and which have been
fostered (though Heaven knows where they were born) most delicately
and warily by the Christian godfathership of Mr. Moore.
'I write not at Lady Byron's bidding. I have never humiliated either
her or myself by asking _if_ I should write, or _what_ I should write;
that is to say, I never applied to her for information against Lord
Byron, though I was justified, as one intending to criticise Mr.
Moore, in inquiring into the truth of some of his statements. Neither
will I suffer myself to be called her champion, if by that word be
meant the advocate of her mere legal innocence; for that, I take it,
nobody questions.
'Still less is it from the sorry impulse of pity that I speak of
this noble woman; for I look with wonder and even envy at the proud
purity of her sense and conscience, that have carried her exquisite
sensibilities in triumph through such poignant tribulations. But
I am proud to be called her friend, the humble illustrator of her
cause, and the advocate of those principles which make it to me more
interesting than Lord Byron's. Lady Byron (if the subject must be
discussed) belongs to sentiment and morality (at least as much as Lord
Byron); nor is she to be suffered, when compelled to speak, to raise
her voice as in a desert, with no friendly voice to respond to her.
Lady Byron could not have outlived her sufferings if she had not wound
up her fortitude to the high point of trusting mainly for consolation,
not to the opinion of the world, but to her own inward peace; and,
having said what ought to convince the world, I verily believe that
she has less care about the fashionable opinion respecting her than
any of her friends can have. But we, her friends, mix with the world;
and we hear offensive absurdities about her, which we have a right to
put down.
* * * * *
'I proceed to deal more generally with Mr. Moore's book. You speak,
Mr. Moore, against Lord Byron's censurers in a tone of indignation
which is perfectly lawful towards calumnious traducers, but which will
not terrify me, or any other man of courage who is no calumniator,
from uttering his mind freely with regard to this part of your hero's
conduct. I question your philosophy in assuming that all that is
noble in Byron's poetry was inconsistent with the possibility of his
being devoted to a pure and good woman; and I repudiate your morality
for canting too complacently about "the lava of his imagination,"
and the unsettled fever of his passions, being any excuses for his
planting the _tic douloureux_ of domestic suffering in a meek woman's
bosom.
'These are hard words, Mr. Moore; but you have brought them on
yourself by your voluntary ignorance of facts known to me; for you
might and ought to have known both sides of the question; and, if the
subject was too delicate for you to consult Lady Byron's confidential
friends, you ought to have had nothing to do with the subject. But you
cannot have submitted your book even to Lord Byron's sister, otherwise
she would have set you right about the imaginary spy, Mrs. Clermont.'
Campbell now goes on to print, at his own peril, he says, and without
time to ask leave, the following note from Lady Byron in reply to an
application he made to her, when he was about to review Moore's book,
for an 'estimate as to the correctness of Moore's statements.'
The following is Lady Byron's reply:--
'DEAR MR. CAMPBELL,--In taking up my pen to point out
for your private information[22] those passages in Mr. Moore's
representation of my part of the story which were open to
contradiction, I find them of still greater extent than I had
supposed; and to deny an assertion _here and there_ would virtually
admit the truth of the rest. If, on the contrary, I were to enter into
a full exposure of the falsehood of the views taken by Mr. Moore, I
must detail various matters, which, consistently with my principles
and feelings, I cannot under the existing circumstances disclose. I
may, perhaps, convince you better of the difficulty of the case by
an example: It is not true that pecuniary embarrassments were the
cause of the disturbed state of Lord Byron's mind, or formed the
chief reason for the arrangements made by him at that time. But is it
reasonable for me to expect that you or any one else should believe
this, unless I show you what were the causes in question? and this I
cannot do. 'I am, &c.,
'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'
[Footnote 22: 'I (Campbell) had not time to ask Lady Byron's permission
to print this private letter; but it seemed to me important, and I have
published it _meo periculo_.']
Campbell then goes on to reprove Moore for his injustice to Mrs.
Clermont, whom Lord Byron had denounced as a spy, but whose
respectability and innocence were vouched for by Lord Byron's own
family; and then he pointedly rebukes one false statement of great
indelicacy and cruelty concerning Lady Byron's courtship, as follows:--
'It is a further mistake on Mr. Moore's part, and I can prove it to be
so, if proof be necessary, to represent Lady Byron, in the course of
their courtship, as one inviting her future husband to correspondence
by letters after she had at first refused him. She never proposed a
correspondence. On the contrary, he sent her a message after that
first refusal, stating that he meant to go abroad, and to travel for
some years in the East; that he should depart with a heart aching,
but not angry; and that he only begged a verbal assurance that she
had still some interest in his happiness. Could Miss Milbanke, as a
well-bred woman, refuse a courteous answer to such a message? She sent
him a verbal answer, which was merely kind and becoming, but which
signified no encouragement that he should renew his offer of marriage.
'After that message, he wrote to her a most interesting letter about
himself,--about his views, personal, moral, and religious,--to which
it would have been uncharitable not to have replied. The result was
an insensibly increasing correspondence, which ended in her being
devotedly attached to him. About that time, I occasionally saw Lord
Byron; and though I knew less of him than Mr. Moore, yet I suspect I
knew as much of him as Miss Milbanke then knew. At that time, he was
so pleasing, that, if I had had a daughter with ample fortune and
beauty, I should have trusted her in marriage with Lord Byron.
'Mr. Moore at that period evidently understood Lord Byron better than
either his future bride or myself; but this speaks more for Moore's
shrewdness than for Byron's ingenuousness of character.
'It is more for Lord Byron's sake than for his widow's that I resort
not to a more special examination of Mr. Moore's misconceptions. The
subject would lead me insensibly into hateful disclosures against poor
Lord Byron, who is more unfortunate in his rash defenders than in
his reluctant accusers. Happily, his own candour turns our hostility
from himself against his defenders. It was only in wayward and bitter
remarks that he misrepresented Lady Byron. He would have defended
himself irresistibly if Mr. Moore had left only his acknowledging
passages. But Mr. Moore has produced a "Life" of him which reflects
blame on Lady Byron so dexterously, that "more is meant than meets
the ear." The almost universal impression produced by his book is,
that Lady Byron must be a precise and a wan, unwarming spirit, a
blue-stocking of chilblained learning, a piece of insensitive goodness.
'Who that knows Lady Byron will not pronounce her to be everything the
reverse? Will it be believed that this person, so unsuitably matched
to her moody lord, has written verses that would do no discredit to
Byron himself; that her sensitiveness is surpassed and bounded only by
her good sense; and that she is
'"Blest with a temper, whose unclouded ray
Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day"?
'She brought to Lord Byron beauty, manners, fortune, meekness,
romantic affection, and everything that ought to have made her to
the most transcendent man of genius--_had he been what he should
have been_--his pride and his idol. I speak not of Lady Byron in the
commonplace manner of attesting character: I appeal to the gifted Mrs.
Siddons and Joanna Baillie, to Lady Charlemont, and to other ornaments
of their sex, whether I am exaggerating in the least when I say, that,
in their whole lives, they have seen few beings so intellectual and
well-tempered as Lady Byron.
'I wish to be as ingenuous as possible in speaking of her. Her manner,
I have no hesitation to say, is cool at the first interview, but is
modestly, and not insolently, cool: she contracted it, I believe, from
being exposed by her beauty and large fortune, in youth, to numbers
of suitors, whom she could not have otherwise kept at a distance.
But this manner could have had no influence with Lord Byron; for
it vanishes on nearer acquaintance, and has no origin in coldness.
All her friends like her frankness the better for being preceded by
this reserve. This manner, however, though not the slightest apology
for Lord Byron, has been inimical to Lady Byron in her misfortunes.
It endears her to her friends; but it piques the indifferent. Most
odiously unjust, therefore, is Mr. Moore's assertion, that she has had
the advantage of Lord Byron in public opinion. She is, comparatively
speaking, unknown to the world; for though she has many friends, that
is, a friend in everyone who knows her, yet her pride and purity and
misfortunes naturally contract the circle of her acquaintance.
'There is something exquisitely unjust in Mr. Moore comparing her
chance of popularity with Lord Byron's, the poet who can command
men of talents,--putting even Mr. Moore into the livery of his
service,--and who has suborned the favour of almost all women by the
beauty of his person and the voluptuousness of his verses. Lady Byron
has nothing to oppose to these fascinations but the truth and justice
of her cause.
'You said, Mr. Moore, that Lady Byron was unsuitable to her lord: the
word is cunningly insidious, and may mean as much or as little as may
suit your convenience. But, if she was unsuitable, I remark that it
tells all the worse against Lord Byron. I have not read it in your
book (for I hate to wade through it); but they tell me that you have
not only warily depreciated Lady Byron, but that you have described a
lady that would have suited him. If this be true, "it is the unkindest
cut of all,"--to hold up a florid description of a woman suitable to
Lord Byron, as if in mockery over the forlorn flower of virtue that
was drooping in the solitude of sorrow.
'But I trust there is no such passage in your book. Surely you must be
conscious of your woman, with her "_virtue loose about her, who would
have suited Lord Byron_," to be as imaginary a being as the woman
without a head. A woman to suit Lord Byron! Poo, poo! I could paint to
you the woman that could have _matched_ him, if I had not bargained to
say as little as possible against him.
'If Lady Byron was not suitable to Lord Byron, so much the worse
for his lordship; for let me tell you, Mr. Moore, that neither your
poetry, nor Lord Byron's, nor all our poetry put together, ever
delineated a more interesting being than the woman whom you have so
coldly treated. This was not kicking the dead lion, but wounding
the living lamb, who was already bleeding and shorn, even unto the
quick. I know, that, collectively speaking, the world is in Lady
Byron's favour; but it is coldly favourable, and you have not warmed
its breath. Time, however, cures everything; and even your book,
Mr. Moore, may be the means of Lady Byron's character being better
appreciated.
'THOMAS CAMPBELL.'
Here is what seems to be a gentlemanly, high-spirited, chivalric man,
throwing down his glove in the lists for a pure woman.
What was the consequence? Campbell was crowded back, thrust down,
overwhelmed, his eyes filled with dust, his mouth with ashes.
There was a general confusion and outcry, which reacted both on him
and on Lady Byron. Her friends were angry with him for having caused
this re-action upon her; and he found himself at once attacked by
Lady Byron's enemies, and deserted by her friends. All the literary
authorities of his day took up against him with energy. Christopher
North, professor of moral philosophy in the Edinburgh University,
in a fatherly talk in 'The Noctes,' condemns Campbell, and justifies
Moore, and heartily recommends his 'Biography,' as containing nothing
materially objectionable on the score either of manners or morals. Thus
we have it in 'The Noctes' of May 1830:--
'Mr. Moore's biographical book I admired; and I said so to my little
world, in two somewhat lengthy articles, which many approved, and
some, I am sorry to know, condemned.'
On the point in question between Moore and Campbell, North goes on
to justify Moore altogether, only admitting that 'it would have been
better had he not printed any coarse expression of Byron's about the
old people;' and, finally, he closes by saying,--
'I do not think that, under the circumstances, Mr. Campbell himself,
had he written Byron's "Life," could have spoken, with the sentiments
he then held, in a better, more manly, and more gentlemanly spirit, in
so far as regards Lady Byron, than Mr. Moore did: and I am sorry he
has been deterred from "swimming" through Mr. Moore's work by the fear
of "wading;" for the waters are clear and deep; nor is there any mud,
either at the bottom or round the margin.'
Of the conduct of Lady Byron's so-called friends on this occasion it is
more difficult to speak.
There has always been in England, as John Stuart Mill says, a class
of women who glory in the utter self-abnegation of the wife to the
husband, as the special crown of womanhood. Their patron saint is
the Griselda of Chaucer, who, when her husband humiliates her, and
treats her as a brute, still accepts all with meek, unquestioning,
uncomplaining devotion. He tears her from her children; he treats her
with personal abuse; he repudiates her,--sends her out to nakedness
and poverty; he installs another mistress in his house, and sends for
the first to be her handmaid and his own: and all this the meek saint
accepts in the words of Milton,--
'My guide and head,
What thou hast said is just and right.'
Accordingly, Miss Martineau tells us that when Campbell's defence came
out, coupled with a note from Lady Byron,--
'The first obvious remark was, that there was no real disclosure; and
the whole affair had the appearance of a desire, on the part of Lady
Byron, to exculpate herself, while yet no adequate information was
given. Many, who had regarded her with favour till then, gave her up
so far as to believe that feminine weakness had prevailed at last.'
The saint had fallen from her pedestal! She had shown a human frailty!
Quite evidently she is not a Griselda, but possessed with a shocking
desire to exculpate herself and her friends.
Is it, then, only to slandered _men_ that the privilege belongs of
desiring to exculpate themselves and their families and their friends
from unjust censure?
Lord Byron had made it a life-long object to vilify and defame his
wife. He had used for that one particular purpose every talent that
he possessed. He had left it as a last charge to Moore to pursue
the warfare after death, which Moore had done to some purpose; and
Christopher North had informed Lady Byron that her private affairs
were discussed, not only with the whisky-toddy of the Noctes Club,
but in every drawing-room in May Fair; and declared that the 'Dear
Duck' letter, and various other matters, must be explained, and urged
somebody to speak; and then, when Campbell does speak with all the
energy of a real gentleman, a general outcry and an indiscriminate
_mêlée_ is the result.
The world, with its usual injustice, insisted on attributing Campbell's
defence to Lady Byron.
The reasons for this seemed to be, first, that Campbell states that he
did _not_ ask Lady Byron's leave, and that she did _not_ authorise him
to defend her; and, second, that, having asked some explanations from
her, he prints a note in which she declines to give any.
We know not how a lady could more gently yet firmly decline to make
a gentleman her confidant than in this published note of Lady Byron;
and yet, to this day, Campbell is spoken of by the world as having
been Lady Byron's confidant at this time. This simply shows how very
trustworthy are the general assertions about Lady Byron's confidants.
The final result of the matter, so far as Campbell was concerned, is
given in Miss Martineau's sketch, in the following paragraph:--
'The whole transaction was one of poor Campbell's freaks. He excused
himself by saying it was a mistake of his; that he did not know what
he was about when he published the paper.'
It is the saddest of all sad things to see a man, who has spoken from
moral convictions, in advance of his day, and who has taken a stand for
which he ought to honour himself, thus forced down and humiliated, made
to doubt his own better nature and his own honourable feelings, by the
voice of a wicked world.
Campbell had no steadiness to stand by the truth he saw. His whole
story is told incidentally in a note to 'The Noctes,' in which it is
stated, that in an article in 'Blackwood,' January 1825, on Scotch
poets, the palm was given to Hogg over Campbell; 'one ground being,
that _he_ could drink "eight and twenty tumblers of punch, while
Campbell is hazy upon seven."'
There is evidence in 'The Noctes,' that in due time Campbell was
reconciled to Moore, and was always suitably ashamed of having tried to
be any more generous or just than the men of his generation.
And so it was settled as a law to Jacob, and an ordinance in Israel,
that the Byron worship should proceed, and that all the earth should
keep silence before him. 'Don Juan,' that, years before, had been
printed by stealth, without Murray's name on the title-page, that had
been denounced as a book which no woman should read, and had been given
up as a desperate enterprise, now came forth in triumph, with banners
flying and drums beating. Every great periodical in England that had
fired moral volleys of artillery against it in its early days, now
humbly marched in the glorious procession of admirers to salute this
edifying work of genius.
'Blackwood,' which in the beginning had been the most indignantly
virtuous of the whole, now grovelled and ate dust as the serpent in
the very abjectness of submission. Odoherty (Maginn) declares that he
would rather have written a page of 'Don Juan' than a ton of 'Childe
Harold.'[23] Timothy Tickler informs Christopher North that he means
to tender Murray, as Emperor of the North, an interleaved copy[24] of
'Don Juan,' with illustrations, as the _only_ work of Byron's he cares
much about; and Christopher North, professor of _moral_ philosophy in
Edinburgh, smiles approval! We are not, after this, surprised to see
the assertion, by a recent much-aggrieved writer in 'The London Era,'
that 'Lord Byron has been, more than any other man of the age, the
_teacher_ of the _youth_ of England;' and that he has 'seen his works
on the bookshelves of _bishops'_ palaces, no less than on the tables of
university undergraduates.'
[Footnote 23: 'Noctes,' July 1822.]
[Footnote 24: 'Noctes,' September 1832.]
A note to 'The Noctes' of July 1822 informs us of another instance of
Lord Byron's triumph over English morals:--
'The mention of this' (Byron's going to Greece) reminds me, by the by,
of what the Guiccioli said in her visit to London, where she was so
lionised as having been the lady-love of Byron. She was rather fond
of speaking on the subject, designating herself by some Venetian pet
phrase, which she interpreted as meaning "Love-Wife."'
What was Lady Byron to do in such a world? She retired to the
deepest privacy, and devoted herself to works of charity, and the
education of her only child,--that brilliant daughter, to whose eager,
opening mind the whole course of current literature must bring so
many trying questions in regard to the position of her father and
mother,--questions that the mother might not answer. That the cruel
inconsiderateness of the literary world added thorns to the intricacies
of the path trodden by every mother who seeks to guide, restrain, and
educate a strong, acute, and precociously intelligent child, must
easily be seen.
What remains to be said of Lady Byron's life shall be said in the words
of Miss Martineau, published in 'The Atlantic Monthly:'--
'Her life, thenceforth, was one of unremitting bounty to society
administered with as much skill and prudence as benevolence. She lived
in retirement, changing her abode frequently; partly for the benefit
of her child's education and the promotion of her benevolent schemes,
and partly from a restlessness which was one of the few signs of
injury received from the spoiling of associations with _home_.
'She felt a satisfaction which her friends rejoiced in when her
daughter married Lord King, at present the Earl of Lovelace, in 1835
and when grief upon grief followed, in the appearance of mortal
disease in her only child, her quiet patience stood her in good stead
as before. She even found strength to appropriate the blessings of the
occasion, and took comfort, as did her dying daughter, in the intimate
friendship, which grew closer as the time of parting drew nigh.
'Lady Lovelace died in 1852; and, for her few remaining years, Lady
Byron was devoted to her grandchildren. But nearer calls never
lessened her interest in remoter objects. Her mind was of the large
and clear quality which could comprehend remote interests in their
true proportions, and achieve each aim as perfectly as if it were the
only one. Her agents used to say that it was impossible to mistake her
directions; and thus her business was usually well done. There was no
room, in her case, for the ordinary doubts, censures, and sneers about
the misapplication of bounty.
'Her taste did not lie in the "Charity-Ball" direction; her funds
were not lavished in encouraging hypocrisy and improvidence among
the idle and worthless; and the quality of her charity was, in fact,
as admirable as its quantity. Her chief aim was the extension and
improvement of popular education; but there was no kind of misery that
she heard of that she did not palliate to the utmost, and no kind of
solace that her quick imagination and sympathy could devise that she
did not administer.
'In her methods, she united consideration and frankness with singular
success. For one instance among a thousand: A lady with whom she had
had friendly relations some time before, and who became impoverished
in a quiet way by hopeless sickness, preferred poverty with an easy
conscience to a competency attended by some uncertainty about the
perfect rectitude of the resource. Lady Byron wrote to an intermediate
person exactly what she thought of the case. Whether the judgment
of the sufferer was right or mistaken was nobody's business but her
own: this was the first point. Next, a voluntary poverty could never
be pitied by anybody: that was the second. But it was painful to
others to think of the mortification to benevolent feelings which
attends poverty; and there could be no objection to arresting that
pain. Therefore she, Lady Byron, had lodged in a neighbouring bank
the sum of one hundred pounds, to be used for benevolent purposes;
and, in order to preclude all outside speculation, she had made the
money payable to the order of the intermediate person, so that the
sufferer's name need not appear at all.
'Five and thirty years of unremitting secret bounty like this must
make up a great amount of human happiness; but this was only one of
a wide variety of methods of doing good. It was the unconcealable
magnitude of her beneficence, and its wise quality, which made her a
second time the theme of English conversation in all honest households
within the four seas. Years ago, it was said far and wide that Lady
Byron was doing more good than anybody else in England; and it was
difficult to imagine how anybody could do more.
'Lord Byron spent every shilling that the law allowed him out of
her property while he lived, and left away from her every shilling
that he could deprive her of by his will; yet she had, eventually, a
large income at her command. In the management of it, she showed the
same wise consideration that marked all her practical decisions. She
resolved to spend her whole income, seeing how much the world needed
help at the moment. Her care was for the existing generation, rather
than for a future one, which would have its own friends. She usually
declined trammelling herself with annual subscriptions to charities;
preferring to keep her freedom from year to year, and to achieve
definite objects by liberal bounty, rather than to extend partial help
over a large surface which she could not herself superintend.
'It was her first industrial school that awakened the admiration of
the public, which had never ceased to take an interest in her, while
sorely misjudging her character. We hear much now--and everybody hears
it with pleasure--of the spread of education in "common things;" but
long before Miss Coutts inherited her wealth, long before a name was
found for such a method of training, Lady Byron had instituted the
thing, and put it in the way of making its own name.
'She was living at Ealing, in Middlesex, in 1834; and there she
opened one of the first industrial schools in England, if not the
very first. She sent out a master to Switzerland, to be instructed
in De Fellenburgh's method. She took, on lease, five acres of land,
and spent several hundred pounds in rendering the buildings upon it
fit for the purposes of the school. A liberal education was afforded
to the children of artisans and labourers during the half of the day
when they were not employed in the field or garden. The allotments
were rented by the boys, who raised and sold produce, which afforded
them a considerable yearly profit if they were good workmen. Those who
worked in the field earned wages; their labour being paid by the hour,
according to the capability of the young labourer. They kept their
accounts of expenditure and receipts, and acquired good habits of
business while learning the occupation of their lives. Some mechanical
trades were taught, as well as the arts of agriculture.
'Part of the wisdom of the management lay in making the pupils pay.
Of one hundred pupils, half were boarders. They paid little more than
half the expenses of their maintenance, and the day-scholars paid
threepence per week. Of course, a large part of the expense was borne
by Lady Byron, besides the payments she made for children who could
not otherwise have entered the school. The establishment flourished
steadily till 1852, when the owner of the land required it back for
building purposes. During the eighteen years that the Ealing schools
were in action, they did a world of good in the way of incitement
and example. The poor-law commissioners pointed out their merits.
Land-owners and other wealthy persons visited them, and went home and
set up similar establishments. During those years, too, Lady Byron had
herself been at work in various directions to the same purpose.
'A more extensive industrial scheme was instituted on her
Leicestershire property, and not far off she opened a girls' school
and an infant school; and when a season of distress came, as such
seasons are apt to befall the poor Leicestershire stocking-weavers,
Lady Byron fed the children for months together, till they could
resume their payments. These schools were opened in 1840. The next
year, she built a schoolhouse on her Warwickshire property; and, five
years later, she set up an iron schoolhouse on another Leicestershire
estate.
'By this time, her educational efforts were costing her several
hundred pounds a year in the mere maintenance of existing
establishments; but this is the smallest consideration in the case.
She has sent out tribes of boys and girls into life fit to do their
part there with skill and credit and comfort. Perhaps it is a still
more important consideration, that scores of teachers and trainers
have been led into their vocation, and duly prepared for it, by what
they saw and learned in her schools. As for the best and the worst of
the Ealing boys, the best have, in a few cases, been received into the
Battersea Training School, whence they could enter on their career as
teachers to the greatest advantage; and the worst found their school
a true reformatory, before reformatory schools were heard of. At
Bristol, she bought a house for a reformatory for girls; and there her
friend, Miss Carpenter, faithfully and energetically carries out her
own and Lady Byron's aims, which were one and the same.
'There would be no end if I were to catalogue the schemes of which
these are a specimen. It is of more consequence to observe that her
mind was never narrowed by her own acts, as the minds of benevolent
people are so apt to be. To the last, her interest in great political
movements, at home and abroad, was as vivid as ever. She watched every
step won in philosophy, every discovery in science, every token of
social change and progress in every shape. Her mind was as liberal
as her heart and hand. No diversity of opinion troubled her: she
was respectful to every sort of individuality, and indulgent to all
constitutional peculiarities. It must have puzzled those who kept up
the notion of her being "strait-laced" to see how indulgent she was
even to Epicurean tendencies,--the remotest of all from her own.
'But I must stop; for I do not wish my honest memorial to degenerate
into panegyric. Among her latest known acts were her gifts to the
Sicilian cause, and her manifestations on behalf of the antislavery
cause in the United States. Her kindness to William and Ellen Craft
must be well known there; and it is also related in the newspapers,
that she bequeathed a legacy to a young American to assist him under
any disadvantages he might suffer as an abolitionist.
'All these deeds were done under a heavy burden of ill health. Before
she had passed middle life, her lungs were believed to be irreparably
injured by partial ossification. She was subject to attacks so
serious, that each one, for many years, was expected to be the last.
She arranged her affairs in correspondence with her liabilities: so
that the same order would have been found, whether she died suddenly
or after long warning.
'She was to receive one more accession of outward greatness before she
departed. She became Baroness Wentworth in November, 1856. This is one
of the facts of her history; but it is the least interesting to us, as
probably to her. We care more to know that her last days were bright
in honour, and cheered by the attachment of old friends worthy to pay
the duty she deserved. Above all, it is consoling to know that she who
so long outlived her only child was blessed with the unremitting and
tender care of her grand-daughter. She died on the 16th of May, 1860.
'The portrait of Lady Byron as she was at the time of her marriage
is probably remembered by some of my readers. It is very engaging.
Her countenance afterwards became much worn; but its expression of
thoughtfulness and composure was very interesting. Her handwriting
accorded well with the character of her mind. It was clear, elegant,
and womanly. Her manners differed with circumstances. Her shrinking
sensitiveness might embarrass one visitor; while another would be
charmed with her easy, significant, and vivacious conversation. It
depended much on whom she talked with. The abiding certainty was, that
she had strength for the hardest of human trials, and the composure
which belongs to strength. For the rest, it is enough to point to her
deeds, and to the mourning of her friends round the chasm which her
departure has made in their life, and in the society in which it is
spent. All that could be done in the way of personal love and honour
was done while she lived: it only remains now to see that her name and
fame are permitted to shine forth at last in their proper light.'
We have simply to ask the reader whether a life like this was not the
best, the noblest answer that a woman could make to a doubting world.
CHAPTER V.
THE ATTACK ON LADY BYRON'S GRAVE.
We have now brought the review of the antagonism against Lady Byron
down to the period of her death. During all this time, let the candid
reader ask himself which of these two parties seems to be plotting
against the other.
_Which_ has been active, aggressive, unscrupulous? which has been
silent, quiet, unoffending? Which of the two has laboured to make a
party, and to make that party active, watchful, enthusiastic?
Have we not proved that Lady Byron remained perfectly silent during
Lord Byron's life, patiently looking out from her retirement to see
the waves of popular sympathy, that once bore her up, day by day
retreating, while his accusations against her were resounding in his
poems over the whole earth? And after Lord Byron's death, when all
the world with one consent began to give their memorials of him, and
made it appear, by their various 'recollections of conversations,' how
incessantly he had obtruded his own version of the separation upon
every listener, did she manifest any similar eagerness?
Lady Byron had seen the 'Blackwood' coming forward, on the first
appearance of 'Don Juan,' to rebuke the cowardly lampoon in words
eloquent with all the unperverted vigour of an honest Englishman. Under
the power of the great conspirator, she had seen _that_ 'Blackwood'
become the very eager recipient and chief reporter of the stories
against her, and the blind admirer of her adversary.
All this time, she lost sympathy daily by being silent. The world
will embrace those who court it; it will patronise those who seek its
favour; it will make parties for those who seek to make parties: but
for the often accused who do not speak, who make no confidants and no
parties, the world soon loses sympathy.
When at last she spoke, Christopher North says '_she astonished
the world_.' Calm, clear, courageous, exact as to time, date, and
circumstance, was that first testimony, backed by the equally clear
testimony of Dr. Lushington.
It showed that her secret had been kept even from her parents. In words
precise, firm, and fearless, she says, 'If these statements on which
Dr. Lushington and Sir Samuel Romilly formed their opinion were false,
the responsibility and the odium should rest with me only.' Christopher
North did not pretend to disbelieve this statement. He breathed not a
doubt of Lady Byron's word. He spoke of the crime indicated, as one
which might have been foul as the grave's corruption, unforgivable as
the sin against the Holy Ghost. He rebuked the wife for bearing this
testimony, even to save the memory of her dead father and mother, and,
in the same breath, declared that she ought now to go farther, and
speak fully the one awful word, and then--'a mitigated sentence, or
eternal silence!'
But Lady Byron took no counsel with the world, nor with the literary
men of her age. One knight, with some small remnant of England's old
chivalry, set lance in rest for her: she saw him beaten back unhorsed,
rolled in the dust, and ingloriously vanquished, and perceived that
henceforth nothing but injury could come to any one who attempted to
speak for her.
She turned from the judgments of man and the fond and natural hopes of
human nature, to lose herself in sacred ministries to the downcast and
suffering. What nobler record for woman could there be than that which
Miss Martineau has given?
Particularly to be noted in Lady Byron was her peculiar interest in
reclaiming fallen women. Among her letters to Mrs. Prof. Follen, of
Cambridge, was one addressed to a society of ladies who had undertaken
this difficult work. It was full of heavenly wisdom and of a large and
tolerant charity. Fénelon truly says, it is only perfection that can
tolerate imperfection; and the very purity of Lady Byron's nature made
her most forbearing and most tender towards the weak and the guilty.
This letter, with all the rest of Lady Byron's, was returned to the
hands of her executors after her death. Its publication would greatly
assist the world in understanding the peculiarities of its writer's
character.
Lady Byron passed to a higher life in 1860.[25] After her death, I
looked for the publication of her Memoir and Letters as the event that
should give her the same opportunity of being known and judged by her
life and writings that had been so freely accorded to Lord Byron.
[Footnote 25: Miss Martineau's Biographical Sketches.]
She was, in her husband's estimation, a woman of genius. She was
the friend of many of the first men and women of her times, and
corresponded with them on topics of literature, morals, religion,
and, above all, on the benevolent and philanthropic movements of the
day, whose principles she had studied with acute observation, and in
connection with which she had acquired a large experience.
The knowledge of her, necessarily diffused by such a series of letters,
would have created in America a comprehension of her character, of
itself sufficient to wither a thousand slanders.
Such a Memoir was contemplated. Lady Byron's letters to Mrs. Follen
were asked for from Boston; and I was applied to by a person in
England, who I have recently learned is one of the existing trustees
of Lady Byron's papers, to furnish copies of her letters to me for the
purpose of a Memoir. Before I had time to have copies made, another
letter came, stating that the trustees had concluded that it was best
not to publish any Memoir of Lady Byron at all.
This left the character of Lady Byron in our American world precisely
where the slanders of her husband, the literature of the Noctes Club,
and the unanimous verdict of May Fair as recorded by 'Blackwood,' had
placed it.
True, Lady Byron had nobly and quietly lived down these slanders in
England by deeds that made her name revered as a saint among all those
who valued saintliness.
But in France and Italy, and in these United States, I have had
abundant opportunity to know that Lady Byron stood judged and condemned
on the testimony of her brilliant husband, and that the feeling against
her had a vivacity and intensity not to be overcome by mere allusions
to a virtuous life in distant England.
This is strikingly shown by one fact. In the American edition of
Moore's 'Life of Byron,' by Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger,
Philadelphia, 1869, which I have been consulting, Lady Byron's
statement, which is found in the Appendix of Murray's standard edition,
_is entirely omitted_. Every other paper is carefully preserved. This
one incident showed how the tide of sympathy was setting in this New
World. Of course, there is no stronger power than a virtuous life; but,
for a virtuous life to bear testimony to the world, its details must be
_told_, so that the world may know them.
Suppose the memoirs of Clarkson and Wilberforce had been suppressed
after their death, how soon might the coming tide have wiped out the
record of their bravery and philanthropy! Suppose the lives of Francis
Xavier and Henry Martyn had never been written, and we had lost the
remembrance of what holy men could do and dare in the divine enthusiasm
of Christian faith! Suppose we had no Fénelon, no Book of Martyrs!
Would there not be an outcry through all the literary and artistic
world if a perfect statue were allowed to remain buried for ever
because some painful individual history was connected with its burial
and its recovery? But is not a noble life a greater treasure to mankind
than any work of art?
We have heard much mourning over the burned Autobiography of Lord
Byron, and seen it treated of in a magazine as 'the lost chapter in
history.' The lost chapter in history is _Lady_ Byron's Autobiography
in her life and letters; and the suppression of them is the root of
this whole mischief.
We do not in this intend to censure the parties who came to this
decision.
The descendants of Lady Byron revere her memory, as they have every
reason to do. That it was _their_ desire to have a Memoir of her
published, I have been informed by an individual of the highest
character in England, who obtained the information directly from Lady
Byron's grandchildren.
But the trustees in whose care the papers were placed drew back on
examination of them, and declared, that, as Lady Byron's papers could
not be fully published, they should regret anything that should call
public attention once more to the discussion of her history.
Reviewing this long history of the way in which the literary world
had treated Lady Byron, we cannot wonder that her friends should have
doubted whether there was left on earth any justice, or sense that
anything is due to woman as a human being with human rights. Evidently
this lesson had taken from them all faith in the moral sense of the
world. Rather than re-awaken the discussion, so unsparing, so painful,
and so indelicate, which had been carried on so many years around
that loved form, now sanctified by death, they sacrificed the dear
pleasure of the memorials, and the interests of mankind, who have an
indefeasible right to all the help that can be got from the truth of
history as to the living power of virtue, and the reality of that great
victory that overcometh the world.
There are thousands of poor victims suffering in sadness,
discouragement, and poverty; heart-broken wives of brutal, drunken
husbands; women enduring nameless wrongs and horrors which the delicacy
of their sex forbids them to utter,--to whom the lovely letters lying
hidden away under those seals might bring courage and hope from springs
not of this world.
But though the friends of Lady Byron, perhaps from despair of their
kind, from weariness of the utter injustice done her, wished to cherish
her name in silence, and to confine the story of her virtues to that
circle who knew her too well to ask a proof, or utter a doubt, the
partisans of Lord Byron were embarrassed with no such scruple.
Lord Byron had artfully contrived during his life to place his wife in
such an antagonistic position with regard to himself, that his intimate
friends were forced to believe that one of the two had deliberately
and wantonly injured the other. The published statement of Lady Byron
contradicted boldly and point-blank all the statement of her husband
concerning the separation; so that, unless _she_ was convicted as a
false witness, _he_ certainly was.
The best evidence of this is Christopher North's own shocked,
astonished statement, and the words of the Noctes Club.
The noble life that Lady Byron lived after this hushed every voice,
and silenced even the most desperate calumny, _while she was in the
world_. In the face of Lady Byron as the world saw her, of what use was
the talk of Clytemnestra, and the assertion that she had been a mean,
deceitful conspirator against her husband's honour in life, and stabbed
his memory after death?
But when she was in her grave, when her voice and presence and good
deeds no more spoke for her, and a new generation was growing up that
knew her not, _then_ was the time selected to revive the assault on her
memory, and to say over her grave what none would ever have dared to
say of her while living.
During these last two years, I have been gradually awakening to the
evidence of a new crusade against the memory of Lady Byron, which
respected no sanctity,--not even that last and most awful one of death.
Nine years after her death, when it was fully understood that no
story on her side or that of her friends was to be forthcoming, then
her calumniators raked out from the ashes of her husband's sepulchre
all his bitter charges, to state them over in even stronger and more
indecent forms.
There seems to be reason to think that the materials supplied by Lord
Byron for such a campaign yet exist in society.
To 'The Noctes' of November 1824, there is the following note _apropos_
to a discussion of the Byron question:--
'Byron's Memoirs, given by him to Moore, were burned, as everybody
knows. But, before this, Moore had lent them to several persons. Mrs.
Home Purvis, afterwards Viscountess of Canterbury, is _known_ to have
sat up all one night, in which, aided by her daughter, she had a
copy made. I have the strongest reason for believing that one other
person made a copy; for the description of the first twenty-four hours
after the marriage ceremonial has been in my hands. _Not until after
the death of Lady Byron, and Hobhouse_, who was the poet's literary
executor, can the poet's Autobiography see the light; _but I am
certain it will be published_.'
Thus speaks Mackenzie in a note to a volume of 'The Noctes,' published
in America in 1854. Lady Byron died in 1860.
Nine years after Lady Byron's death, when it was ascertained that her
story was not to see the light, when there were no means of judging
her character by her own writings, commenced a well-planned set of
operations to turn the public attention once more to Lord Byron, and
to represent him as an injured man, whose testimony had been unjustly
suppressed.
It was quite possible, supposing copies of the Autobiography to exist,
that this might occasion a call from the generation of to-day, in
answer to which the suppressed work might appear. This was a rather
delicate operation to commence; but the instrument was not wanting.
It was necessary that the subject should be first opened by some
irresponsible party, whom more powerful parties might, as by accident,
recognise and patronise, and on whose weakness they might build
something stronger.
Just such an instrument was to be found in Paris. The mistress of Lord
Byron could easily be stirred up and flattered to come before the world
with a book which should re-open the whole controversy; and she proved
a facile tool. At first, the work appeared prudently in French, and was
called 'Lord Byron jugé par les Témoins de sa Vie,' and was rather a
failure. Then it was translated into English, and published by Bentley.
The book was inartistic, and helplessly, childishly stupid as to any
literary merits,--a mere mass of gossip and twaddle; but after all,
when one remembers the taste of the thousands of circulating-library
readers, it must not be considered the less likely to be widely read
on that account. It is only once in a century that a writer of real
genius has the art to tell his story so as to take both the cultivated
few and the average many. De Foe and John Bunyan are almost the only
examples. But there is a certain class of reading that sells and
spreads, and exerts a vast influence, which the upper circles of
literature despise too much ever to fairly estimate its power.
However, the Guiccioli book did not want for patrons in the high places
of literature. The 'Blackwood'--the old classic magazine of England;
the defender of conservatism and aristocracy; the paper of Lockhart,
Wilson, Hogg, Walter Scott, and a host of departed grandeurs--was
deputed to usher into the world this book, and to recommend it and its
author to the Christian public of the nineteenth century.
The following is the manner in which 'Blackwood' calls attention to
it:--
'One of the most beautiful of the songs of Béranger is that addressed
to his Lisette, in which he pictures her, in old age, narrating to a
younger generation the loves of their youth; decking his portrait with
flowers at each returning spring, and reciting the verses that had
been inspired by her vanished charms:--
'Lorsque les yeux chercheront sous vos rides
Les traits charmants qui m'auront inspiré,
Des doux récits les jeunes gens avides,
Diront: Quel fut cet ami tant pleuré?
De mon amour peignez, s'il est possible,
L'ardeur, l'ivresse, et même les soupçons,
Et benne vieille, au coin d'un feu paisible
De votre ami répétez les chansons.
"On vous dira: Savait-il être aimable?
Et sans rougir vous direz: Je l'aimais.
D'un trait méchant se montra-t-il capable?
Avec orgueil vous répondrez: Jamais!"'
'This charming picture,' 'Blackwood' goes on to say, 'has been
realised in the case of a poet greater than Béranger, and by a
mistress more famous than Lisette. The Countess Guiccioli has at
length given to the world her "Recollections of Lord Byron." The
book first appeared in France under the title of "Lord Byron jugé
par les Témoins de sa Vie," without the name of the countess. A
more unfortunate designation could hardly have been selected. The
"witnesses of his life" told us nothing but what had been told before
over and over again; and the uniform and exaggerated tone of eulogy
which pervaded the whole book was fatal to any claim on the part of
the writer to be considered an impartial judge of the wonderfully
mixed character of Byron.
'_When, however, the book is regarded as the avowed production of
the Countess Guiccioli, it derives value and interest from its very
faults._[26] There is something inexpressibly touching in the picture
of the old lady calling up the phantoms of half a century ago; not
faded and stricken by the hand of time, but brilliant and gorgeous as
they were when Byron, in his manly prime of genius and beauty, first
flashed upon her enraptured sight, and she gave her whole soul up to
an absorbing passion, the embers of which still glow in her heart.
[Footnote 26: The italics are mine.--H. B. S.]
'To her there has been no change, no decay. The god whom she
worshipped with all the ardour of her Italian nature at seventeen is
still the "Pythian of the age" to her at seventy. To try such a book
by the ordinary canons of criticism would be as absurd as to arraign
the authoress before a jury of British matrons, or to prefer a bill of
indictment against the Sultan for bigamy to a Middlesex grand jury.'
This, then, is the introduction which one of the oldest and most
classical periodicals of Great Britain gives to a very stupid book,
simply because it was written by Lord Byron's mistress. _That fact_, we
are assured, lends grace even to its faults.
Having brought the authoress upon the stage, the review now goes on to
define her position, and assure the Christian world that
'The Countess Guiccioli was the daughter of an impoverished noble. At
the age of sixteen, she was taken from a convent, and sold as third
wife to the Count Guiccioli, who was old, rich, and profligate. A
fouler prostitution never profaned the name of marriage. A short time
afterwards, she accidentally met Lord Byron. Outraged and rebellious
nature vindicated itself in the deep and devoted passion with which
he inspired her. With the full assent of husband, father, and
brother, and in compliance with the usages of Italian society, he was
shortly afterwards installed in the office, and invested with all the
privileges, of her "Cavalier Servente."'
It has been asserted that the Marquis de Boissy, the late husband of
this Guiccioli lady, was in the habit of introducing her in fashionable
circles as 'the Marquise de Boissy, my wife, formerly mistress to Lord
Byron'! We do not give the story as a verity; yet, in the review of
this whole history, we may be pardoned for thinking it quite possible.
The mistress, being thus vouched for and presented as worthy of
sympathy and attention by one of the oldest and most classic organs
of English literature, may now proceed in her work of glorifying the
popular idol, and casting abuse on the grave of the dead wife.
Her attacks on Lady Byron are, to be sure, less skilful and adroit
than those of Lord Byron. They want his literary polish and tact; but
what of that? 'Blackwood' assures us that even the faults of manner
derive a peculiar grace from the fact that the narrator is Lord Byron's
mistress; and so we suppose the literary world must find grace in
things like this:--
'She has been called, after his words, the moral Clytemnestra of
her husband. Such a surname is severe: but the repugnance we feel
to condemning a woman cannot prevent our listening to the voice of
justice, which tells us that the comparison is still in favour of
the guilty one of antiquity; for _she_, driven to crime by fierce
passion overpowering reason, at least only deprived her husband of
physical life, and, in committing the deed, exposed herself to all its
consequences; while Lady Byron left her husband at the very moment
that she saw him struggling amid a thousand shoals in the stormy sea
of embarrassments created by his marriage, and precisely when he more
than ever required a friendly, tender, and indulgent hand to save him.
'Besides, she shut herself up in silence a thousand times more cruel
than Clytemnestra's poniard: _that_ only killed the body; whereas
Lady Byron's silence was destined to kill the soul,--and such a
soul!--leaving the door open to calumny, and making it to be supposed
that her silence was magnanimity destined to cover over frightful
wrongs, perhaps even depravity. In vain did he, feeling his conscience
at ease, implore some inquiry and examination. She refused; and the
only favour she granted was to send him, one fine day, two persons to
see whether he were not mad.
'And, why, then, had she believed him mad? Because she, a methodical,
inflexible woman, with that unbendingness which a profound moralist
calls the worship rendered to pride by a feelingless soul,--because
she could not understand the possibility of tastes and habits
different to those of ordinary routine, or of her own starched life.
Not to be hungry when she was; not to sleep at night, but to write
while she was sleeping, and to sleep when she was up; in short, to
gratify the requirements of material and intellectual life at hours
different to hers,--all that was not merely annoying for her, but it
must be _madness_; or, if not, it betokened depravity that she could
neither submit to nor tolerate without perilling her own morality.
'Such was the grand secret of the cruel silence which exposed Lord
Byron to the most malignant interpretations, to all the calumny and
revenge of his enemies.
'She was, perhaps, the only woman in the world so strangely
organised,--the only one, perhaps, capable of not feeling happy and
proud at belonging to a man superior to the rest of humanity; and
fatally was it decreed that this woman _alone_ of her species should
be Lord Byron's wife!'
In a note is added,--
'If an imaginary fear, and even an unreasonable jealousy, may be her
excuse (just as one excuses a monomania), can one equally forgive her
silence? Such a silence is morally what are physically the poisons
which kill at once, and defy all remedies; thus insuring the culprit's
safety. This silence it is which will ever be her crime; for by it she
poisoned the life of her husband.'
The book has several chapters devoted to Lord Byron's peculiar virtues;
and under the one devoted to magnanimity and heroism, his _forgiving_
disposition receives special attention. The climax of all is stated to
be that he forgave Lady Byron. All the world knew that, since he had
declared this fact in a very noisy and impassioned manner in the fourth
canto of 'Childe Harold,' together with a statement of the wrongs which
he forgave; but the Guiccioli thinks his virtue, at this period, has
not been enough appreciated. In her view, it rose to the sublime. She
says of Lady Byron,--
'An absolute moral monstrosity, an anomaly in the history of types
of female hideousness, had succeeded in showing itself in the light
of magnanimity. But false as was this high quality in Lady Byron, so
did it shine out in him true and admirable. The position in which
Lady Byron had placed him, and where she continued to keep him by
her harshness, silence, and strange refusals, was one of those which
cause such suffering, that the highest degree of self-control seldom
suffices to quiet the promptings of human weakness, and to cause
persons of even slight sensibility to preserve moderation. Yet, with
his sensibility and the knowledge of his worth, how did he act? what
did he say? I will not speak of his "farewell;" of the care he took
to shield her from blame by throwing it on others, by taking much too
large a share to himself.'
With like vivacity and earnestness does the narrator now proceed to
make an incarnate angel of her subject by the simple process of denying
everything that he himself ever confessed,--everything that has ever
been confessed in regard to him by his best friends. He has been in
the world as an angel unawares from his cradle. His guardian did not
properly appreciate him, and is consequently mentioned as that _wicked_
Lord Carlisle. Thomas Moore is never to be sufficiently condemned
for the facts told in his biography. Byron's own frank and lawless
admissions of evil are set down to a peculiar inability he had for
speaking the truth about himself,--sometimes about his near relations;
all which does not in the least discourage the authoress from giving a
separate chapter on 'Lord Byron's Love of Truth.'
In the matter of his relations with women, she complacently repeats
(what sounds rather oddly as coming from her) Lord Byron's own
assurance, that he _never_ seduced a woman; and also the equally
convincing statement, that he had told _her_ (the Guiccioli) that his
married fidelity to his wife was perfect. She discusses Moore's account
of the mistress in boy's clothes who used to share Byron's apartments
in college, and ride with him to races, and whom he presented to
_ladies_ as his brother.
She has her own view of this matter. The disguised boy was a lady
of rank and fashion, who sought Lord Byron's chambers, as, we are
informed, noble ladies everywhere, both in Italy and England, were
constantly in the habit of doing; throwing themselves at his feet, and
imploring permission to become his handmaids.
In the authoress's own words, 'Feminine overtures still continued
to be made to Lord Byron; but the fumes of incense never hid from
his sight his IDEAL.' We are told that in the case of
these poor ladies, generally 'disenchantment took place on his side
without a corresponding result on the other: THENCE many
heart-breakings.' Nevertheless, we are informed that there followed the
indiscretions of these ladies 'none of those proceedings that the world
readily forgives, but which his feelings as a man of honour would have
condemned.'
As to drunkenness, and all that, we are informed he was an anchorite.
Pages are given to an account of the biscuits and soda-water that on
this and that occasion were found to be the sole means of sustenance to
this ethereal creature.
As to the story of using his wife's money, the lady gives, directly in
the face of his own Letters and Journal, the same account given before
by Medwin, and which caused such merriment when talked over in the
Noctes Club,--that he had with her only a marriage portion of £10,000;
and that, on the separation, he not only paid it back, but doubled
it.[27]
[Footnote 27: In 'The Noctes' of November, 1824 Christopher North says,
'I don't call Medwin a liar.... Whether Byron bammed him, or he, by
virtue of his own stupidity, was the sole and sufficient bammifier of
himself, I know not.' A note says that Murray had been much shocked by
Byron's misstatements to Medwin as to money-matters with him. The note
goes on to say, 'Medwin could not have invented them, for they were
mixed up with acknowledged facts; and the presumption is that Byron
mystified his gallant acquaintance. He was fond of such tricks.']
So on the authoress goes, sowing right and left the most transparent
absurdities and misstatements with what Carlyle well calls 'a composed
stupidity, and a cheerful infinitude of ignorance.' Who _should_ know,
if not she, to be sure? Had not Byron told her all about it? and was
not his family motto _Crede Byron_?
The 'Blackwood,' having a dim suspicion that this confused style of
attack and defence in reference to the two parties under consideration
may not have great weight, itself proceeds to make the book an occasion
for re-opening the controversy of Lord Byron with his wife.
The rest of the review is devoted to a powerful attack on Lady Byron's
character,--the most fearful attack on the memory of a dead woman we
have ever seen made by living man. The author proceeds, like a lawyer,
to gather up, arrange, and restate, in a most workmanlike manner, the
confused accusations of the book.
Anticipating the objection, that such a re-opening of the inquiry was
a violation of the privacy due to womanhood and to the feelings of a
surviving family, he says, that though marriage usually is a private
matter which the world has no right to intermeddle with or discuss,
yet--
'Lord Byron's was an exceptional case. It is not too much to say,
that, had his marriage been a happy one, the course of events of the
present century might have been materially changed; that the genius
which poured itself forth in "Don Juan" and "Cain" might have flowed
in far different channels; that the ardent love of freedom which sent
him to perish at six and thirty at Missolonghi might have inspired
a long career at home; and that we might at this moment have been
appealing to the counsels of his experience and wisdom at an age
not exceeding that which was attained by Wellington, Lyndhurst, and
Brougham.
'Whether the world would have been a gainer or a loser by the exchange
is a question which every man must answer for himself, according to
his own tastes and opinions; but the possibility of such a change in
the course of events warrants us in treating what would otherwise be a
strictly private matter as one of public interest.
'More than half a century has elapsed, the actors have departed from
the stage, the curtain has fallen; and whether it will ever again be
raised so as to reveal the real facts of the drama, may, as we have
already observed, be well doubted. But the time has arrived when we
may fairly gather up the fragments of evidence, clear them as far as
possible from the incrustations of passion, prejudice, and malice, and
place them in such order, as, if possible, to enable us to arrive
at some probable conjecture as to what the skeleton of the drama
originally was.'
Here the writer proceeds to put together all the facts of Lady Byron's
case, just as an adverse lawyer would put them as against her, and
for her husband. The plea is made vigorously and ably, and with an
air of indignant severity, as of an honest advocate who is thoroughly
convinced that he is pleading the cause of a wronged man who has been
ruined in name, ship-wrecked in life, and driven to an early grave, by
the arts of a bad woman,--a woman all the more horrible that her malice
was disguised under the cloak of religion.
Having made an able statement of facts, adroitly leaving out
ONE,[28] of which he could not have been ignorant had he
studied the case carefully enough to know all the others, he proceeds
to sum up against the criminal thus:--
[Footnote 28: This one fact is, that Lord Byron might have had an open
examination in court, if he had only persisted in refusing the deed of
separation.]
'We would deal tenderly with the memory of Lady Byron. Few women have
been juster objects of compassion. It would seem as if Nature and
Fortune had vied with each other which should be most lavish of her
gifts, and yet that some malignant power had rendered all their bounty
of no effect. Rank, beauty, wealth, and mental powers of no common
order, were hers; yet they were of no avail to secure her happiness.
The spoilt child of seclusion, restraint, and parental idolatry,
a fate (alike evil for both) cast her into the arms of the spoilt
child of genius, passion, and the world. What real or fancied wrongs
she suffered, we may never know; but those which she inflicted are
sufficiently apparent.
'It is said that there are some poisons so subtle that they will
destroy life, and yet leave no trace of their action. The murderer
who uses them may escape the vengeance of the law; but he is not the
less guilty. So the slanderer who makes no charge; who deals in hints
and insinuations: who knows melancholy facts he would not willingly
divulge,--things too painful to state; who forbears, expresses pity,
sometimes even affection, for his victim, shrugs his shoulders, looks
with
"The significant eye,
Which learns to lie with silence,--"
is far more guilty than he who tells the bold falsehood which may be
met and answered, and who braves the punishment which must follow upon
detection.
'Lady Byron has been called
"The moral Clytemnestra of her lord."
The "moral Brinvilliers" would have been a truer designation.
'The conclusion at which we arrive is, that there is no proof whatever
that Lord Byron was guilty of any act that need have caused a
separation, or prevented a re-union, and that the imputations upon him
rest on the vaguest conjecture; that whatever real or fancied wrongs
Lady Byron may have endured are shrouded in an impenetrable mist of
her own creation,--a poisonous miasma in which she enveloped the
character of her husband, raised by her breath, and which her breath
only could have dispersed.
"She dies and makes no sign. O God! forgive her."'
As we have been obliged to review accusations on Lady Byron founded
on old Greek tragedy, so now we are forced to abridge a passage from
a modern conversations-lexicon, that we may understand what sort of
comparisons are deemed in good taste in a conservative English review,
when speaking of ladies of rank in their graves.
Under the article 'Brinvilliers,' we find as follows:--
'MARGUERITE D'AUBRAI, MARCHIONESS OF BRINVILLIERS.--The
singular atrocity of this woman gives her a sort of infamous claim to
notice. She was horn in Paris in 1651; being daughter of D'Aubrai,
lieutenant-civil of Paris, who married her to the Marquis of
Brinvilliers. Although possessed of attractions to captivate lovers,
she was for some time much attached to her husband, but at length
became madly in love with a Gascon officer. Her father imprisoned
the officer in the Bastille; and, while there, he learned the art of
compounding subtle and most mortal poisons; and, when he was released,
he taught it to the lady, who exercised it with such success, that,
in one year, her father, sister, and two brothers became her victims.
She professed the utmost tenderness for her victims, and nursed them
assiduously. On her father she is said to have made eight attempts
before she succeeded. She was _very religious_, and devoted to works
of charity; and visited the hospitals a great deal, where it is said
she tried her poisons on the sick.'
People have made loud outcries lately, both in America and England,
about violating the repose of the dead. We should like to know what
they call this. Is this, then, what they mean by _respecting_ the dead?
Let any man imagine a leading review coming out with language equally
brutal about his own mother, or any dear and revered friend.
Men of America, men of England, what do you think of this?
When Lady Byron was publicly branded with the names of the foulest
ancient and foulest modern assassins, and Lord Byron's mistress was
publicly taken by the hand, and encouraged to go on and prosper in her
slanders, by one of the oldest and most influential British reviews,
what was said and what was done in England?
That is a question we should be glad to have answered. Nothing was done
that ever reached us across the water.
And why was nothing done? Is this language of a kind to be passed over
in silence?
Was it no offence to the house of Wentworth to attack the pure
character of its late venerable head, and to brand her in her sacred
grave with the name of one of the vilest of criminals?
Might there not properly have been an indignant protest of family
solicitors against this insult to the person and character of the
Baroness Wentworth?
If virtue went for nothing, benevolence for nothing, a long life of
service to humanity for nothing, one would at least have thought, that,
in aristocratic countries, rank might have had its rights to decent
consideration, and its guardians to rebuke the violation of those
rights.
We Americans understand little of the advantages of rank; but we did
understand that it secured certain decorums to people, both while
living and when in their graves. From Lady Byron's whole history, in
life and in death, it would appear that we were mistaken.
What a life was hers! Was ever a woman more evidently desirous of
the delicate and secluded privileges of womanhood, of the sacredness
of individual privacy? Was ever a woman so rudely dragged forth,
and exposed to the hardened, vulgar, and unfeeling gaze of mere
curiosity?--her maiden secrets of love thrown open to be handled by
_roués_; the sanctities of her marriage-chamber desecrated by leering
satyrs; her parents and best friends traduced and slandered, till one
indignant public protest was extorted from her, as by the rack,--a
protest which seems yet to quiver in every word with the indignation of
outraged womanly delicacy!
Then followed coarse blame and coarser comment,--blame for speaking
at all, and blame for not speaking more. One manly voice, raised for
her in honourable protest, was silenced and overborne by the universal
roar of ridicule and reprobation; and henceforth what refuge? Only this
remained: 'Let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the
keeping of their souls to him as to a faithful Creator.'
Lady Byron turned to this refuge in silence, and filled up her life
with a noble record of charities and humanities. So pure was she, so
childlike, so artless, so loving, that those who knew her best, feel,
to this day, that a memorial of her is like the relic of a saint. And
could not all this preserve her grave from insult? O England, England!
I speak in sorrow of heart to those who must have known, loved, and
revered Lady Byron, and ask them, Of what were you thinking when you
allowed a paper of so established literary rank as the 'Blackwood,' to
present and earnestly recommend to our New World such a compendium of
lies as the Guiccioli book?
Is the great English-speaking community, whose waves toss from Maine
to California, and whose literature is yet to come back in a thousand
voices to you, a thing to be so despised?
If, as the solicitors of the Wentworth family observe, you might be
entitled to treat with silent contempt the slanders of a mistress
against a wife, was it safe to treat with equal contempt the
indorsement and recommendation of those slanders by one of your oldest
and most powerful literary authorities?
No European magazine has ever had the weight and circulation in America
that the 'Blackwood' has held. In the days of my youth, when New
England was a comparatively secluded section of the earth, the wit
and genius of the 'Noctes Ambrosianæ' were in the mouths of men and
maidens, even in our most quiet mountain-towns. There, years ago, we
saw all Lady Byron's private affairs discussed, and felt the weight of
Christopher North's decisions against her. Shelton Mackenzie, in his
American edition, speaks of the American circulation of 'Blackwood'
being greater than that in England.[29] It was and is now reprinted
monthly; and, besides that, 'Littell's Magazine' reproduces all its
striking articles, and they come with the weight of long established
position. From the very fact that it has long been considered the Tory
organ, and the supporter of aristocratic orders, all its admissions
against the character of individuals in the privileged classes have a
double force.
[Footnote 29: In the history of 'Blackwood's Magazine,' prefaced to
the American edition of 1854, Mackenzie says of the 'Noctes' papers,
'Great as was their popularity in England it was peculiarly in
America that their high merit and undoubted originality received the
heartiest recognition and appreciation. Nor is this wonderful when it
is considered that for one reader of "Blackwood's Magazine" in the old
country there cannot be less than fifty in the new.']
When 'Blackwood,' therefore, boldly denounces a lady of high rank as a
modern Brinvilliers, and no sensation is produced, and no remonstrance
follows, what can people in the New World suppose, but that Lady
Byron's character was a point entirely given up; that her depravity was
so well established and so fully conceded, that nothing was to be said,
and that even the defenders of aristocracy were forced to admit it?
I have been blamed for speaking on this subject without consulting Lady
Byron's friends, trustees, and family. More than ten years had elapsed
since I had had any intercourse with England, and I knew none of them.
How was I to know that any of them were living? I was astonished to
learn, for the first time, by the solicitors' letters, that there were
trustees, who held in their hands all Lady Byron's carefully prepared
proofs and documents, by which this falsehood might immediately have
been refuted.
If they had spoken, they might have saved all this confusion. Even
if bound by restrictions for a certain period of time, they still
might have called on a Christian public to frown down such a cruel
and indecent attack on the character of a noble lady who had been a
benefactress to so many in England. They might have stated that the
means of wholly refuting the slanders of the 'Blackwood' were in their
hands, and only delayed in coming forth from regard to the feelings
of some in this generation. Then might they not have announced her
Life and Letters, that the public might have the same opportunity as
themselves for knowing and judging Lady Byron by her own writings?
Had this been done, I had been most happy to have remained silent. I
have been astonished that any one should have supposed this speaking
on my part to be anything less than it is,--the severest act of
self-sacrifice that one friend can perform for another, and the most
solemn and difficult tribute to justice that a human being can be
called upon to render.
I have been informed that the course I have taken would be contrary to
the wishes of my friend. I think otherwise. I know her strong sense
of justice, and her reverence for truth. Nothing ever moved her to
speak to the public but an attack upon the honour of the dead. In her
statement, she says of her parents, 'There is no other near relative to
vindicate their memory from insult: I am therefore compelled to break
the silence I had hoped always to have observed.'
If there was any near relative to vindicate Lady Byron's memory, I
had no evidence of the fact; and I considered the utter silence to
be strong evidence to the contrary. In all the storm of obloquy and
rebuke that has raged in consequence of my speaking, I have had two
unspeakable sources of joy; first, that they could not touch _her_;
and, second, that they could not blind the all-seeing God. It is worth
being in darkness to see the stars.
It has been said that _I_ have drawn on Lady Byron's name greater
obloquy than ever before. I deny the charge. Nothing fouler has been
asserted of her than the charges in the 'Blackwood,' because nothing
fouler _could_ be asserted. No satyr's hoof has ever crushed this pearl
deeper in the mire than the hoof of the 'Blackwood,' but none of them
have defiled it or trodden it so deep that God cannot find it in the
day 'when he maketh up his jewels.'
I have another word, as an American, to say about the contempt shown
to our great people in thus suffering the materials of history to be
falsified to subserve the temporary purposes of family feeling in
England.
Lord Byron belongs not properly either to the Byrons or the Wentworths.
He is not one of their family jewels to be locked up in their cases.
He belongs to the world for which he wrote, to which he appealed, and
before which he dragged his reluctant, delicate wife to a publicity
equal with his own: the world has, therefore, a right to judge him.
We Americans have been made accessories, after the fact, to every
insult and injury that Lord Byron and the literary men of his day have
heaped upon Lady Byron. We have been betrayed into injustice and a
complicity with villany. After Lady Byron had nobly lived down slanders
in England, and died full of years and honours, the 'Blackwood' takes
occasion to re-open the controversy by recommending a book full of
slanders to a rising generation who knew nothing of the past. What
was the consequence in America? My attention was first called to the
result, not by reading the 'Blackwood' article, but by finding in a
popular monthly magazine two long articles,--the one an enthusiastic
recommendation of the Guiccioli book, and the other a lamentation over
the burning of the Autobiography as a lost chapter in history.
Both articles represented Lady Byron as a cold, malignant, mean,
persecuting woman, who had been her husband's ruin. They were so full
of falsehoods and misstatements as to astonish me. Not long after, a
literary friend wrote to me, '_Will_ you, _can_ you, reconcile it to
your conscience to sit still and allow that mistress so to slander that
wife,--you, perhaps, the only one knowing the real facts, and able to
set them forth?'
Upon this, I immediately began collecting and reading the various
articles and the book, and perceived that the public of this generation
were in a way of having false history created, uncontradicted, under
their own eyes.
I claim for my country, men and women, our right to _true_ history.
For years, the popular literature has held up publicly before our eyes
the facts as to this man and this woman, and called on us to praise or
condemn. Let us have _truth_ when we are called on to judge. It is our
_right_.
There is no conceivable obligation on a human being greater than
that of _absolute justice_. It is the deepest personal injury to an
honourable mind to be made, through misrepresentation, an accomplice
in injustice. When a noble name is accused, any person who possesses
truth which might clear it, and withholds that truth, is guilty of a
sin against human nature and the inalienable rights of justice. I claim
that I have not only a right, but an obligation, to bring in my solemn
testimony upon this subject.
For years and years, the silence-policy has been tried; and what has it
brought forth? As neither word nor deed could be proved against Lady
Byron, her silence has been spoken of as a monstrous, unnatural crime,
'a poisonous miasma,' in which she enveloped the name of her husband.
Very well; since silence is the crime, I thought I would tell the world
that Lady Byron had spoken.
Christopher North, years ago, when he condemned her for speaking, said
that she should speak further,--
'She should speak, or some one for her. One word would suffice.'
That one word has been spoken.
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
LADY BYRON AS I KNEW HER.
An editorial in 'The London Times' of Sept. 18 says:--
'The perplexing feature in this "True Story" is, that it is impossible
to distinguish what part in it is the editress's, and what Lady
Byron's own. We are given the _impression_ made on Mrs. Stowe's mind
by Lady Byron's statements; but it would have been more satisfactory
if the statement itself had been reproduced as bare as possible, and
been left to make its own impression on the public.'
In reply to this, I will say, that in my article I gave a brief
synopsis of the subject-matter of Lady Byron's communications;
and I think it must be quite evident to the world that the _main
fact_ on which the story turns was one which could not possibly be
misunderstood, and the remembrance of which no lapse of time could ever
weaken.
Lady Byron's communications were made to me in language clear, precise,
terrible; and many of her phrases and sentences I could repeat at this
day, word for word. But if I had reproduced them at first, as 'The
Times' suggests, word for word, the public horror and incredulity would
have been doubled. It was necessary that the brutality of the story
should, in some degree, be veiled and softened.
The publication, by Lord Lindsay, of Lady Anne Barnard's communication,
makes it now possible to tell fully, and in Lady Byron's own words,
certain incidents that yet remain untold. To me, who know the whole
history, the revelations in Lady Anne's account, and the story related
by Lady Byron, are like fragments of a dissected map: they fit
together, piece by piece, and form one connected whole.
In confirmation of the general facts of this interview, I have the
testimony of a sister who accompanied me on this visit, and to whom,
immediately after it, I recounted the story.
Her testimony on the subject is as follows:--
'MY DEAR SISTER,--I have a perfect recollection of going
with you to visit Lady Byron at the time spoken of in your published
article. We arrived at her house in the morning; and, after lunch,
Lady Byron and yourself spent the whole time till evening alone
together.
'After we retired to our apartment that night, you related to me
the story given in your published account, though with many more
particulars than you have yet thought fit to give to the public.
'You stated to me that Lady Byron was strongly impressed with the idea
that it might be her duty to publish a statement during her lifetime,
and also the reasons which induced her to think so. You appeared at
that time quite disposed to think that justice required this step, and
asked my opinion. We passed most of the night in conversation on the
subject,--a conversation often resumed, from time to time, during
several weeks in which you were considering what opinion to give.
'I was strongly of opinion that justice required the publication of
the truth, but felt exceedingly averse to its being done by Lady Byron
herself during her own lifetime, when she personally would be subject
to the comments and misconceptions of motives which would certainly
follow such a communication.
'Your sister,
'M. F. PERKINS.'
I am now about to complete the account of my conversation with Lady
Byron; but as the credibility of a history depends greatly on the
character of its narrator, and as especial pains have been taken
to destroy the belief in this story by representing it to be the
wanderings of a broken-down mind in a state of dotage and mental
hallucination, I shall preface the narrative with some account of
Lady Byron as she was during the time of our mutual acquaintance and
friendship.
This account may, perhaps, be deemed superfluous in England, where so
many knew her; but in America, where, from Maine to California, her
character has been discussed and traduced, it is of importance to give
interested thousands an opportunity of learning what kind of a woman
Lady Byron was.
Her character as given by Lord Byron in his Journal, after her first
refusal of him, is this:--
'She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled; which is
strange in an heiress, a girl of twenty, a peeress that is to be in
her own right, an only child, and a savante, who has always had her
own way. She is a poetess, a mathematician, a metaphysician; 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.'
Such was Lady Byron at twenty. I formed her acquaintance in the year
1853, during my first visit in England. I met her at a lunch-party in
the house of one of her friends.
The party had many notables; but, among them all, my attention was
fixed principally on Lady Byron. She was at this time sixty-one years
of age, but still had, to a remarkable degree, that personal attraction
which is commonly considered to belong only to youth and beauty.
Her form was slight, giving an impression of fragility; her motions
were both graceful and decided; her eyes bright, and full of interest
and quick observation. Her silvery-white hair seemed to lend a grace
to the transparent purity of her complexion, and her small hands
had a pearly whiteness. I recollect she wore a plain widow's cap of
a transparent material; and was dressed in some delicate shade of
lavender, which harmonised well with her complexion.
When I was introduced to her, I felt in a moment the words of her
husband:--
'There was awe in the homage that she drew;
Her spirit seemed as seated on a throne.'
Calm, self-poised, and thoughtful, she seemed to me rather to resemble
an interested spectator of the world's affairs, than an actor involved
in its trials; yet the sweetness of her smile, and a certain very
delicate sense of humour in her remarks, made the way of acquaintance
easy.
Her first remarks were a little playful; but in a few moments we were
speaking on what every one in those days was talking to me about,--the
slavery question in America.
It need not be remarked, that, when any one subject especially occupies
the public mind, those known to be interested in it are compelled to
listen to many weary platitudes. Lady Byron's remarks, however, caught
my ear and arrested my attention by their peculiar incisive quality,
their originality, and the evidence they gave that she was as well
informed on all our matters as the best American statesman could be.
I had no wearisome course to go over with her as to the difference
between the General Government and State Governments, nor explanations
of the United States Constitution; for she had the whole before her
mind with a perfect clearness. Her morality upon the slavery question,
too, impressed me as something far higher and deeper than the common
sentimentalism of the day. Many of her words surprised me greatly, and
gave me new material for thought.
I found I was in company with a commanding mind, and hastened to
gain instruction from her on another point where my interest had
been aroused. I had recently been much excited by Kingsley's novels,
'Alton Locke' and 'Yeast,' on the position of religious thought in
England. From these works I had gathered, that under the apparent
placid uniformity of the Established Church of England, and of 'good
society' as founded on it, there was moving a secret current of
speculative enquiry, doubt, and dissent; but I had met, as yet, with
no person among my various acquaintances in England who seemed either
aware of this fact, or able to guide my mind respecting it. The moment
I mentioned the subject to Lady Byron, I received an answer which
showed me that the whole ground was familiar to her, and that she was
capable of giving me full information. She had studied with careful
thoughtfulness all the social and religious tendencies of England
during her generation. One of her remarks has often since occurred to
me. Speaking of the Oxford movement, she said the time had come when
the English Church could no longer remain as it was. It must either
_restore the past, or create a future_. The Oxford movement attempted
the former; and of the future she was beginning to speak, when our
conversation was interrupted by the presentation of other parties.
Subsequently, in reply to a note from her on some benevolent business,
I alluded to that conversation, and expressed a wish that she would
finish giving me her views of the religious state of England. A portion
of the letter that she wrote me in reply I insert, as being very
characteristic in many respects:--
'Various causes have been assigned for the decaying state of the
English Church; which seems the more strange, because the clergy have
improved, morally and intellectually, in the last twenty years. Then
why should their influence be diminished? I think it is owing to the
diffusion of a spirit of free enquiry.
'Doubts have arisen in the minds of many who are unhappily bound by
subscription _not_ to doubt; and, in consequence, they are habitually
_pretending_ either to believe or to disbelieve. The state of Denmark
cannot but be rotten, when _to seem_ is the first object of the
witnesses of truth.
'They may lead better lives, and bring forward abler arguments; but
their efforts are paralysed by that unsoundness. I see the High
Churchman professing to believe in the existence of a church, when the
most palpable facts must show him that no _such_ church exists; the
"Low" Churchman professing to believe in exceptional interpositions
which his philosophy secretly questions; the "Broad" Churchman
professing as absolute an attachment to the Established Church as the
narrowest could feel, while he is preaching such principles as will at
last pull it down.
'I ask you, my friend, whether there would not be more faith, as
well as earnestness, if _all_ would speak out. There would be more
unanimity too, because they would all agree in a certain basis. Would
not a wider love supersede the _creed-bound_ charity of sects?
'I am aware that I have touched on a point of difference between
us, and I will not regret it; for I think the differences of mind
are analogous to those differences of nature, which, in the most
comprehensive survey, are the very elements of harmony.
'I am not at all prone to put forth my own opinions; but the tone in
which you have written to me claims an unusual degree of openness
on my part. I look upon creeds of all kinds as chains,--far worse
chains than those you would break,--as the causes of much hypocrisy
and infidelity. I hold it to be a sin to _make_ a child say, "_I
believe_." Lead it to utter that belief spontaneously. I also consider
the institution of an exclusive priesthood, though having been of
service in some respects, as retarding the progress of Christianity at
present. I desire to see a _lay_ ministry.
'I will not give you more of my heterodoxy at present: perhaps I need
your pardon, connected as you are with the Church, for having said so
much.
'There are causes of decay known to be at work in my frame, which lead
me to believe I may not have time to grow wiser; and I must therefore
leave it to others to correct the conclusions I have now formed from
my life's experience. I should feel happy to discuss them personally
with you; for it would be _soul to soul_. In that confidence I am
yours most truly,
'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'
It is not necessary to prove to the reader that this letter is not in
the style of a broken-down old woman subject to mental hallucinations.
It shows Lady Byron's habits of clear, searching analysis, her
thoughtfulness, and, above all, that peculiar reverence for _truth_ and
sincerity which was a leading characteristic of her moral nature.[30]
It also shows her views of the probable shortness of her stay on earth,
derived from the opinion of physicians about her disease, which was a
gradual ossification of the lungs. It has been asserted that pulmonary
diseases, while they slowly and surely sap the physical life, often
appear to give added vigour to the play of the moral and intellectual
powers.
[Footnote 30: The reader is here referred to Lady Byron's other
letters, in Part III.; which also show the peculiarly active and
philosophical character of her mind, and the class of subjects on which
it habitually dwelt.]
I parted from Lady Byron, feeling richer in that I had found one more
pearl of great price on the shore of life.
Three years after this, I visited England to obtain a copyright for the
issue of my novel of 'Dred.'
The hope of once more seeing Lady Byron was one of the brightest
anticipations held out to me in this journey. I found London quite
deserted; but, hearing that Lady Byron was still in town, I sent to
her, saying in my note, that, in case she was not well enough to call,
I would visit her. Her reply I give:--
'MY DEAR FRIEND,--I _will_ be indebted to you for our
meeting, as I am barely able to leave my room. It is not a time for
small personalities, if they could ever exist with _you_; and, dressed
or undressed, I shall hope to see you after two o'clock.
'Yours very truly,
'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'
I found Lady Byron in her sick-room,--that place which she made so
different from the chamber of ordinary invalids. Her sick-room seemed
only a telegraphic station whence her vivid mind was flashing out all
over the world.
By her bedside stood a table covered with books, pamphlets, and files
of letters, all arranged with exquisite order, and each expressing some
of her varied interests. From that sick-bed she still directed, with
systematic care, her various works of benevolence, and watched with
intelligent attention the course of science, literature, and religion;
and the versatility and activity of her mind, the flow of brilliant
and penetrating thought on all the topics of the day, gave to the
conversations of her retired room a peculiar charm. You forgot that
she was an invalid; for she rarely had a word of her own personalities,
and the charm of her conversation carried you invariably from herself
to the subjects of which she was thinking. All the new books, the
literature of the hour, were lighted up by her keen, searching, yet
always kindly criticism; and it was charming to get her fresh, genuine,
clear-cut modes of expression, so different from the world-worn phrases
of what is called good society. Her opinions were always perfectly
clear and positive, and given with the freedom of one who has long
stood in a position to judge the world and its ways from her own
standpoint. But it was not merely in general literature and science
that her heart lay; it was following always with eager interest the
progress of humanity over the whole world.
This was the period of the great battle for liberty in Kansas. The
English papers were daily filled with the thrilling particulars of that
desperate struggle, and Lady Byron entered with heart and soul into it.
Her first letter to me, at this time, is on this subject. It was while
'Dred' was going through the press.
'CAMBRIDGE TERRACE, Aug. 15.
'MY DEAR MRS. STOWE,--Messrs. Chambers liked the proposal to
publish the Kansas Letters. The more the public know of these matters,
the better prepared they will be for your book. The moment for its
publication seems well chosen. There is always in England a floating
fund of sympathy for what is above the everyday sordid cares of life;
and these better feelings, so nobly invested for the last two years in
Florence Nightingale's career, are just set free. To what will they
next be attached? If you can lay hold of them, they may bring about
a deeper abolition than any legislative one,--the abolition of the
heart-heresy that man's worth comes, not from God, but from man.
'I have been obliged to give up exertion again, but hope soon to be
able to call and make the acquaintance of your daughters. In case you
wish to consult H. Martineau's pamphlets, I send more copies. Do not
think of answering: I have occupied too much of your time in reading.
'Yours affectionately,
'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'
As soon as a copy of 'Dred' was through the press, I sent it to
her, saying that I had been reproved by some excellent people for
representing too faithfully the profane language of some of the wicked
characters. To this she sent the following reply:--
'Your book, dear Mrs. Stowe, is of the little leaven kind, and must
prove a great moral force; perhaps not manifestly so much as secretly.
And yet I can hardly conceive so much power without immediate and
sensible effects: only there will be a strong disposition to resist
on the part of all hollow-hearted professors of religion, whose
heathenisms you so unsparingly expose. They have a class feeling like
others.
'To the young, and to those who do not reflect much on what is offered
to their belief, you will do great good by showing how spiritual food
is often adulterated. The bread from heaven is in the same case as
bakers' bread.
'If there is truth in what I heard Lord Byron say, that works of
fiction live only by the amount _of truth_ which they contain, your
story is sure of a long life. Of the few critiques I have seen, the
best is in "The Examiner." I find an obtuseness as to the spirit and
aim of the book, as if you had designed to make the best novel of the
season, or to keep up the reputation of one. You are reproached, as
Walter Scott was, with too much scriptural quotation; not, that I
have heard, with phrases of an opposite character.
'The effects of such reading till a late hour one evening appeared to
influence me very singularly in a dream. The most horrible spectres
presented themselves, and I woke in an agony of fear; but a faith
still stronger arose, and I became courageous from trust in God, and
felt calm. Did you do this? It is very insignificant among the many
things you certainly will do unknown to yourself. I know more than
ever before how to value communion with you. I have sent Robertson's
Sermons for you; and, with kind regards to your family, am
'Yours affectionately,
'A. I. NOEL BYRON.
I was struck in this note with the mention of Lord Byron, and, the next
time I saw her, alluded to it, and remarked upon the peculiar qualities
of his mind as shown in some of his more serious conversations with Dr.
Kennedy.
She seemed pleased to continue the subject, and went on to say many
things of his singular character and genius, more penetrating and more
appreciative than is often met with among critics.
I told her that I had been from childhood powerfully influenced by
him; and began to tell her how much, as a child, I had been affected
by the news of his death,--giving up all my plays, and going off to
a lonely hillside, where I spent the afternoon thinking of him. She
interrupted me before I had quite finished, with a quick, impulsive
movement. 'I know all that,' she said: 'I heard it all from Mrs. ----;
and it was one of the things that made me wish to _know_ you. I think
_you_ could understand him.' We talked for some time of him then; she,
with her pale face slightly flushed, speaking, as any other great
man's widow might, only of what was purest and best in his works, and
what were his undeniable virtues and good traits, especially in early
life. She told me many pleasant little speeches made by him to herself;
and, though there was running through all this a shade of melancholy,
one could never have conjectured that there were under all any deeper
recollections than the circumstances of an ordinary separation might
bring.
Not many days after, with the unselfishness which was so marked a
trait with her, she chose a day when she could be out of her room,
and invited our family party, consisting of my husband, sister, and
children, to lunch with her.
What showed itself especially in this interview was her tenderness
for all young people. She had often enquired after mine; asked about
their characters, habits, and tastes; and on this occasion she found an
opportunity to talk with each one separately, and to make them all feel
at ease, so that they were able to talk with her. She seemed interested
to point out to them what they should see and study in London; and
the charm of her conversation left on their minds an impression that
subsequent years have never effaced. I record this incident, because it
shows how little Lady Byron assumed the privileges or had the character
of an invalid absorbed in herself, and likely to brood over her own
woes and wrongs.
Here was a family of strangers stranded in a dull season in London, and
there was no manner of obligation upon her to exert herself to show
them attention. Her state of health would have been an all-sufficient
reason why she should not do it; and her doing it was simply a specimen
of that unselfish care for others, even down to the least detail, of
which her life was full.
A little while after, at her request, I went, with my husband and son,
to pass an evening at her house.
There were a few persons present whom she thought I should be
interested to know,--a Miss Goldsmid, daughter of Baron Goldsmid, and
Lord Ockham, her grandson, eldest son and heir of the Earl of Lovelace,
to whom she introduced my son.
I had heard much of the eccentricities of this young nobleman, and
was exceedingly struck with his personal appearance. His bodily frame
was of the order of the Farnese Hercules,--a wonderful development of
physical and muscular strength. His hands were those of a blacksmith.
He was broadly and squarely made, with a finely-shaped head, and dark
eyes of surpassing brilliancy. I have seldom seen a more interesting
combination than his whole appearance presented.
When all were engaged in talking, Lady Byron came and sat down by
me, and glancing across to Lord Ockham and my son, who were talking
together, she looked at me, and smiled. I immediately expressed my
admiration of his fine eyes and the intellectual expression of his
countenance, and my wonder at the uncommon muscular development of his
frame.
She said that _that_ of itself would account for many of Ockham's
eccentricities. He had a body that required a more vigorous animal life
than his station gave scope for, and this had often led him to seek
it in what the world calls low society; that he had been to sea as a
sailor, and was now working as a mechanic on the iron work of 'The
Great Eastern.' He had laid aside his title, and went in daily with the
other workmen, requesting them to call him simply Ockham.
I said that there was something to my mind very fine about this, even
though it might show some want of proper balance.
She said he had noble traits, and that she felt assured he would
yet accomplish something worthy of himself. 'The great difficulty
with our nobility is apt to be, that they do not _understand_ the
working-classes, so as to feel for them properly; and Ockham is now
going through an experience which may yet fit him to do great good when
he comes to the peerage. I am trying to influence him to do good among
the workmen, and to interest himself in schools for their children. I
think,' she added, 'I have great influence over Ockham,--the greater,
perhaps, that I never make any claim to authority.'
This conversation is very characteristic of Lady Byron as showing her
benevolent analysis of character, and the peculiar hopefulness she
always had in regard to the future of every one brought in connection
with her. Her moral hopefulness was something very singular; and in
this respect she was so different from the rest of the world, that it
would be difficult to make her understood. Her tolerance of wrong-doing
would have seemed to many quite latitudinarian, and impressed them
as if she had lost all just horror of what was morally wrong in
transgression; but it seemed her fixed habit to see faults only as
diseases and immaturities, and to expect them to fall away with time.
She saw the germs of good in what others regarded as only evil. She
expected valuable results to come from what the world looked on only
as eccentricities;[31] and she incessantly devoted herself to the task
of guarding those whom the world condemned, and guiding them to those
higher results of which she often thought that even their faults were
prophetic.
[Footnote 31: See her character of Dr. King, Part III.]
Before I quit this sketch of Lady Byron as I knew her, I will give one
more of her letters. My return from that visit in Europe was met by the
sudden death of the son mentioned in the foregoing account. At the time
of this sorrow, Lady Byron was too unwell to write to me. The letter
given alludes to this event, and speaks also of two coloured persons
of remarkable talent, in whose career in England she had taken a deep
interest. One of them is the 'friend' she speaks of.
'LONDON, Feb. 6, 1859.
'DEAR MRS. STOWE,--I seem to feel our friend as a bridge,
over which our broken _outward_ communication can be renewed without
effort. Why broken? The words I would have uttered _at one time_ were
like drops of blood from my heart. Now I sympathise with the calmness
you have gained, and can speak of your loss as I do of my own. Loss
and restoration are more and more linked in my mind, but "to the
_present_ live." As long as _they_ are in God's world they are in
ours. I ask no other consolation.
'Mrs. W----'s recovery has astonished me, and her husband's prospects
give me great satisfaction. They have achieved a benefit to their
coloured people. She had a mission which her burning soul has worked
out, almost in defiance of death. But who is "called" without being
"crucified," man or woman? I know of none.
'I fear that H. Martineau was too sanguine in her persuasion that the
slave power had received a serious check from the ruin of so many of
your Mammon-worshippers. With the return of commercial facilities,
_that_ article of commerce will again find purchasers enough to raise
its value. Not that way is the iniquity to be overthrown. A deeper
moral earthquake is needed.[32] We English had ours in India; and
though the cases are far from being alike, yet a consciousness of what
we ought to have been and ought to be toward the natives could not
have been awakened by less than the reddened waters of the Ganges. So
I fear you will have to look on a day of judgment worse than has been
painted.
[Footnote 32: Alluding to the financial crisis in the United States in
1857.]
'As to all the frauds and impositions which have been disclosed by
the failures, what a want of the sense of personal responsibility
they show. It seems to be thought that "association" will "cover a
multitude of sins;" as if "and Co." could enter heaven. A firm may be
described as a partnership for lowering the standard of morals. Even
ecclesiastical bodies are not free from the "and Co.;" very different
from "the goodly fellowship of the apostles."
'The better class of young gentlemen in England are seized with
a mediæval mania, to which Ruskin has contributed much. The
chief reason for regretting it is that taste is made to supersede
benevolence. The money that would save thousands from perishing or
suffering must be applied to raise the Gothic edifice where their last
prayer may be uttered. Charity may be dead, while Art has glorified
her. This is worse than Catholicism, which cultivates heart and eye
together. The first cathedral was Truth, at the beginning of the
fourth century, just as Christianity was exchanging a heavenly for an
earthly crown. True religion may have to cast away the symbol for the
spirit before "the kingdom" can come.
'While I am speculating to little purpose, perhaps you are
_doing_--what? Might not a biography from your pen bring forth again
some great, half-obscured soul to act on the world? Even Sir Philip
Sidney ought to be superseded by a still nobler type.
'This must go immediately, to be in time for the bearer, of whose
meeting with you I shall think as the friend of both. May it be happy!
'Your affectionate
A. I. N. B.'
One letter more from Lady Byron I give,--the last I received from her:--
LONDON, May 3, 1859.
'DEAR FRIEND,--I have found, particularly as to yourself,
that, if I did not answer from the first impulse, all had evaporated.
Your letter came by 'The Niagara' which brought Fanny Kemble to learn
the loss of her best friend, the Miss F---- whom you saw at my house.
'Her death, after an illness in which she was to the last a minister
of good to others, is a soul-loss to me also; and your remarks are
most appropriate to my feelings. I have been taught, however, to
accept survivorship; even to feel it, in some cases, Heaven's best
blessing.
'I have an intense interest in your new novel.[33] More power in
these few numbers than in any of your former writings, relating, at
least, to my own mind. It would amuse you to hear my grand-daughter
and myself attempting to foresee the future of the love-story; being,
for the moment, quite persuaded that James is at sea, and the minister
about to ruin himself. We think that Mary will labour to be in love
with the self-devoted man, under her mother's influence, and from that
hyper-conscientiousness so common with good girls; but we don't wish
her to succeed. Then what is to become of her older lover? Time will
show.
[Footnote 33: 'The Minister's Wooing.']
'The lady you desired to introduce to me will be welcomed as of you.
She has been misled with respect to my having any house in Yorkshire
(New Leeds). I am in London now to be of a little use to A----; not
ostensibly, for I can neither go out, nor give parties: but I am the
confidential friend to whom she likes to bring her social gatherings,
as she can see something of the world with others. Age and infirmity
seem to be overlooked in what she calls the harmony between us,--not
perfect agreement of opinion (which I should regret, with almost fifty
years of difference), but the spirit-union: can you say what it is?
'I am interrupted by a note from Mrs. K----. She says that she cannot
write of our lost friend yet, though she is less sad than she will
be. Mrs. F---- may like to hear of her arrival, should you be in
communication with our friend. She is the type of youth in age.
'I often converse with Miss S----, a judicious friend of the W----s,
about what is likely to await them. She would not succeed here as well
as where she was a novelty. The character of our climate this year has
been injurious to the respiratory organs; but I hope still to serve
them.
'I have just missed Dale Owen, with whom I wished to have conversed on
spiritualism.[34] Harris is lecturing here on religion. I do not hear
him praised.
[Footnote 34: See her letter on spiritualistic phenomena, Part III.]
'People are looking for helps to believe, everywhere but in life,--in
music, in architecture, in antiquity, in ceremony; and upon all
these is written, "Thou shalt _not_ believe." At least, if this be
faith, happier the unbeliever. I am willing to see _through_ that
materialism; but, if I am to rest there, I would rend the veil.
* * * * *
'June 1.
'The day of the packet's sailing. I shall hope to be visited by you
here. The best flowers sent me have been placed in your little vases,
giving life to the remembrance of you, though not, like them, to pass
away.
'Ever yours,
'A. I. NOEL BYRON.'
Shortly after, I was in England again, and had one more opportunity of
resuming our personal intercourse. The first time that I called on Lady
Byron, I saw her in one of those periods of utter physical exhaustion
to which she was subject on account of the constant pressure of cares
beyond her strength. All who knew her will testify, that, in a state of
health which would lead most persons to become helpless absorbents of
service from others, she was assuming burdens, and making outlays of
her vital powers in acts of love and service, with a generosity that
often reduced her to utter exhaustion. But none who knew or loved her
ever misinterpreted the coldness of those seasons of exhaustion. We
knew that it was _not_ the spirit that was chilled, but only the frail
mortal tabernacle. When I called on her at this time, she could not see
me at first; and when, at last, she came, it was evident that she was
in a state of utter prostration. Her hands were like ice; her face was
deadly pale; and she conversed with a restraint and difficulty which
showed what exertion it was for her to keep up at all. I left as soon
as possible, with an appointment for another interview. That interview
was my last on earth with her, and is still beautiful in memory. It was
a long, still summer afternoon, spent alone with her in a garden, where
we walked together. She was enjoying one of those bright intervals
of freedom from pain and languor, in which her spirits always rose
so buoyant and youthful; and her eye brightened, and her step became
elastic.
One last little incident is cherished as most expressive of her. When
it became time for me to leave, she took me in her carriage to the
station. As we were almost there, I missed my gloves, and said, 'I must
have left them; but there is not time to go back.'
With one of those quick, impulsive motions which were so natural to her
in doing a kindness, she drew off her own and said, 'Take mine if they
will serve you.'
I hesitated a moment; and then the thought, that I might never see
her again, came over me, and I said, 'Oh, yes! thanks.' That was the
last earthly word of love between us. But, thank God, those who love
worthily never meet for the _last_ time: there is always a future.