"March 8. 1816.
"I rejoice in your promotion as Chairman and Charitable Steward,
&c. &c. These be dignities which await only the virtuous. But then,
recollect you are _six_ and _thirty_, (I speak this enviously--not
of your age, but the 'honour--love--obedience--troops of friends,'
which accompany it,) and I have eight years good to run before I
arrive at such hoary perfection; by which time,--if I _am_ at
all[92],--it will probably be in a state of grace or progressing
merits.
"I must set you right in one point, however. The fault was
_not_--no, nor even the misfortune--in my 'choice' (unless in
_choosing at all_)--for I do not believe--and I must say it, in the
very dregs of all this bitter business--that there ever was a
better, or even a brighter, a kinder, or a more amiable and
agreeable being than Lady B. I never had, nor can have, any
reproach to make her, while with me. Where there is blame, it
belongs to myself, and, if I cannot redeem, I must bear it.
"Her nearest relatives are a * * * *--my circumstances have been
and are in a state of great confusion--my health has been a _good_
deal disordered, and my mind ill at ease for a considerable period.
Such are the causes (I do not name them as excuses) which have
frequently driven me into excess, and disqualified my temper for
comfort. Something also may be attributed to the strange and
desultory habits which, becoming my own master at an early age, and
scrambling about, over and through the world, may have induced. I
still, however, think that, if I had had a fair chance, by being
placed in even a tolerable situation, I might have gone on fairly.
But that seems hopeless,--and there is nothing more to be said. At
present--except my health, which is better (it is odd, but
agitation or contest of any kind gives a rebound to my spirits and
sets me up for the time)--I have to battle with all kinds of
unpleasantnesses, including private and pecuniary difficulties, &c.
&c.
"I believe I may have said this before to you, but I risk repeating
it. It is nothing to bear the _privations_ of adversity, or, more
properly, ill fortune; but my pride recoils from its _indignities_.
However, I have no quarrel with that same pride, which will, I
think, buckler me through every thing. If my heart could have been
broken, it would have been so years ago, and by events more
afflicting than these.
"I agree with you (to turn from this topic to our shop) that I
have written too much. The last things were, however, published
very reluctantly by me, and for reasons I will explain when we
meet. I know not why I have dwelt so much on the same scenes,
except that I find them fading, or _confusing_ (if such a word may
be) in my memory, in the midst of present turbulence and pressure,
and I felt anxious to stamp before the die was worn out. I now
break it. With those countries, and events connected with them, all
my really poetical feelings begin and end. Were I to try, I could
make nothing of any other subject, and that I have apparently
exhausted. 'Wo to him,' says Voltaire, 'who says all he could say
on any subject.' There are some on which, perhaps, I could have
said still more: but I leave them all, and too soon.
"Do you remember the lines I sent you early last year, which you
still have? I don't wish (like Mr. Fitzgerald, in the Morning Post)
to claim the character of 'Vates' in all its translations, but were
they not a little prophetic? I mean those beginning, 'There's not a
joy the world can,' &c. &c., on which I rather pique myself as
being the truest, though the most melancholy, I ever wrote.
"What a scrawl have I sent you! You say nothing of yourself, except
that you are a Lancasterian churchwarden, and an encourager of
mendicants. When are you out? and how is your family? 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, though I am unwilling to take it from the mother. It is
weaned, however, and something about it must be decided. Ever," &c.
[Footnote 92: This sad doubt,--"if I _am_ at all,"--becomes no less
singular than sad when we recollect that six and thirty was actually the
age when he ceased to "be," and at a moment, too, when (as even the
least friendly to him allow) he was in that state of "progressing
merits" which he here jestingly anticipates.]
* * * * *
Having already gone so far in laying open to my readers some of the
sentiments which I entertained, respecting Lord Byron's marriage, at a
time when, little foreseeing that I should ever become his biographer, I
was, of course, uninfluenced by the peculiar bias supposed to belong to
that task, it may still further, perhaps, be permitted me to extract
from my reply to the foregoing letter some sentences of explanation
which its contents seemed to me to require.
"I had certainly no right to say any thing about the unluckiness of your
choice, though I rejoice now that I did, as it has drawn from you a
tribute which, however unaccountable and mysterious it renders the whole
affair, is highly honourable to both parties. What I meant in hinting a
doubt with respect to the object of your selection did not imply the
least impeachment of that perfect amiableness which the world, I find,
by common consent, allows to her. I only feared that she might have been
too perfect--too _precisely_ excellent--too matter-of-fact a paragon for
you to coalesce with comfortably; and that a person whose perfection
hung in more easy folds about her, whose brightness was softened down by
some of 'those fair defects which best conciliate love,' would, by
appealing more dependently to your protection, have stood a much better
chance with your good nature. All these suppositions, however, I have
been led into by my intense anxiety to acquit you of any thing like a
capricious abandonment of such a woman[93]; and, totally in the dark as
I am with respect to all but the fact of your separation, you cannot
conceive the solicitude, the fearful solicitude, with which I look
forward to a history of the transaction from your own lips when we
meet,--a history in which I am sure of, at least, _one_ virtue--manly
candour."
[Footnote 93: It will be perceived from this that I was as yet
unacquainted with the true circumstances of the transaction.]
* * * * *
With respect to the causes that may be supposed to have led to this
separation, it seems needless, with the characters of both parties
before our eyes, to go in quest of any very remote or mysterious reasons
to account for it. I have already, in some observations on the general
character of men of genius, endeavoured to point out those
peculiarities, both in disposition and habitudes, by which, in the far
greater number of instances, they have been found unfitted for domestic
happiness. Of these defects, (which are, as it were, the shadow that
genius casts, and too generally, it is to be feared, in proportion to
its stature,) Lord Byron could not, of course, fail to have inherited
his share, in common with all the painfully-gifted class to which he
belonged. How thoroughly, with respect to one attribute of this
temperament which he possessed,--one, that "sicklies o'er" the face of
happiness itself,--he was understood by the person most interested in
observing him, will appear from the following anecdote, as related by
himself.[94]
"People have wondered at the melancholy which runs through my writings.
Others have wondered at my personal gaiety. But I recollect once, after
an hour in which I had been sincerely and particularly gay and rather
brilliant, in company, my wife replying to me when I said (upon her
remarking my high spirits), 'And yet, Bell, I have been called and
miscalled melancholy--you must have seen how falsely, frequently?'--'No,
Byron,' she answered, 'it is not so: at heart you are the most
melancholy of mankind; and often when apparently gayest.'"
To these faults and sources of faults inherent, in his own sensitive
nature, he added also many of those which a long indulgence of self-will
generates,--the least compatible, of all others, (if not softened down,
as they were in him, by good nature,) with that system of mutual
concession and sacrifice by which the balance of domestic peace is
maintained. When we look back, indeed, to the unbridled career, of which
this marriage was meant to be the goal,--to the rapid and restless
course in which his life had run along, like a burning train, through a
series of wanderings, adventures, successes, and passions, the fever of
all which was still upon him, when, with the same headlong recklessness,
he rushed into this marriage,--it can but little surprise us that, in
the space of one short year, he should not have been able to recover
all at once from his bewilderment, or to settle down into that tame
level of conduct which the close observers of his every action required.
As well might it be expected that a steed like his own Mazeppa's,
"Wild as the wild deer and untaught,
With spur and bridle undefiled--
'Twas but a day he had been caught,"
should stand still, when reined, without chafing or champing the bit.
Even had the new condition of life into which he passed been one of
prosperity and smoothness, some time, as well as tolerance, must still
have been allowed for the subsiding of so excited a spirit into rest.
But, on the contrary, his marriage (from the reputation, no doubt, of
the lady, as an heiress,) was, at once, a signal for all the arrears and
claims of a long-accumulating state of embarrassment to explode upon
him;--his door was almost daily beset by duns, and his house nine times
during that year in possession of bailiffs[95]; while, in addition to
these anxieties and--what he felt still more--indignities of poverty,
he had also the pain of fancying, whether rightly or wrongly, that the
eyes of enemies and spies were upon him, even under his own roof, and
that his every hasty word and look were interpreted in the most
perverting light.
As, from the state of their means, his lady and he saw but little
society, his only relief from the thoughts which a life of such
embarrassment brought with it was in those avocations which his duty, as
a member of the Drury Lane Committee, imposed upon him. And here,--in
this most unlucky connection with the theatre,--one of the fatalities of
his short year of trial, as husband, lay. From the reputation which he
had previously acquired for gallantries, and the sort of reckless and
boyish levity to which--often in very "bitterness of soul"--he gave way,
it was not difficult to bring suspicion upon some of those acquaintances
which his frequent intercourse with the green-room induced him to form,
or even (as, in one instance, was the case,) to connect with his name
injuriously that of a person to whom he had scarcely ever addressed a
single word.
Notwithstanding, however, this ill-starred concurrence of
circumstances, which might have palliated any excesses either of temper
or conduct into which they drove him, it was, after all, I am persuaded,
to no such serious causes that the unfortunate alienation, which so soon
ended in disunion, is to be traced. "In all the marriages I have ever
seen," says Steele, "most of which have been unhappy ones, the great
cause of evil has proceeded from slight occasions;" and to this remark,
I think, the marriage under our consideration would not be found, upon
enquiry, to be an exception. Lord Byron himself, indeed, when at
Cephalonia, a short time before his death, seems to have expressed, in a
few words, the whole pith of the mystery. An English gentleman with whom
he was conversing on the subject of Lady Byron, having ventured to
enumerate to him the various causes he had heard alleged for the
separation, the noble poet, who had seemed much amused with their
absurdity and falsehood, said, after listening to them all,--"The
causes, my dear sir, were too simple to be easily found out."
In truth, the circumstances, so unexampled, that attended their
separation,--the last words of the parting wife to the husband being
those of the most playful affection, while the language of the deserted
husband towards the wife was in a strain, as the world knows, of
tenderest eulogy,--are in themselves a sufficient proof that, at the
time of their parting, there could have been no very deep sense of
injury on either side. It was not till afterwards that, in both bosoms,
the repulsive force came into operation,--when, to the party which had
taken the first decisive step in the strife, it became naturally a point
of pride to persevere in it with dignity, and this unbendingness
provoked, as naturally, in the haughty spirit of the other, a strong
feeling of resentment which overflowed, at last, in acrimony and scorn.
If there be any truth, however, in the principle, that they "never
pardon who have done the wrong," Lord Byron, who was, to the last,
disposed to reconciliation, proved so far, at least, his conscience to
have been unhaunted by any very disturbing consciousness of aggression.
But though it would have been difficult, perhaps, for the victims of
this strife, themselves, to have pointed out any single, or definite,
cause for their disunion,--beyond that general incompatibility which is
the canker of all such marriages,--the public, which seldom allows
itself to be at a fault on these occasions, was, as usual, ready with an
ample supply of reasons for the breach,--all tending to blacken the
already darkly painted character of the poet, and representing him, in
short, as a finished monster of cruelty and depravity. The reputation of
the object of his choice for every possible virtue, (a reputation which
had been, I doubt not, one of his own chief incentives to the marriage,
from the vanity, reprobate as he knew he was deemed, of being able to
win such a paragon,) was now turned against him by his assailants, not
only in the way of contrast with his own character, but as if the
excellences of the wife were proof positive of every enormity they chose
to charge upon the husband.
Meanwhile, the unmoved silence of the lady herself, (from motives, it
is but fair to suppose, of generosity and delicacy,) under the repeated
demands made for a specification of her charges against him, left to
malice and imagination the fullest range for their combined industry. It
was accordingly stated, and almost universally believed, that the noble
lord's second proposal to Miss Milbanke had been but with a view to
revenge himself for the slight inflicted by her refusal of the first,
and that he himself had confessed so much to her on their way from
church. At the time when, as the reader has seen from his own honey-moon
letters, he was, with all the good will in the world, imagining himself
into happiness, and even boasting, in the pride of his fancy, that if
marriage were to be upon _lease_, he would gladly renew his own for a
term of ninety-nine years,--at this very time, according to these
veracious chroniclers, he was employed in darkly following up the
aforesaid scheme of revenge, and tormenting his lady by all sorts of
unmanly cruelties,--such as firing off pistols, to frighten her as she
lay in bed[96], and other such freaks.
To the falsehoods concerning his green-room intimacies, and
particularly with respect to one beautiful actress, with whom, in
reality, he had hardly ever exchanged a single word, I have already
adverted; and the extreme confidence with which this tale was circulated
and believed affords no unfair specimen of the sort of evidence with
which the public, in all such fits of moral wrath, is satisfied. It is,
at the same time, very far from my intention to allege that, in the
course of the noble poet's intercourse with the theatre, he was not
sometimes led into a line of acquaintance and converse, unbefitting, if
not dangerous to, the steadiness of married life. But the imputations
against him on this head were (as far as affected his conjugal
character) not the less unfounded,--as the sole case in which he
afforded any thing like _real_ grounds for such an accusation did not
take place till _after_ the period of the separation.
Not content with such ordinary and tangible charges, the tongue of
rumour was emboldened to proceed still further; and, presuming upon the
mysterious silence maintained by one of the parties, ventured to throw
out dark hints and vague insinuations, of which the fancy of every
hearer was left to fill up the outline as he pleased. In consequence of
all this exaggeration, such an outcry was now raised against Lord Byron
as, in no case of private life, perhaps, was ever before witnessed; nor
had the whole amount of fame which he had gathered, in the course of the
last four years, much exceeded in proportion the reproach and obloquy
that were now, within the space of a few weeks, showered upon him. In
addition to the many who, no doubt, conscientiously believed and
reprobated what they had but too much right, whether viewing him as poet
or man of fashion, to consider credible excesses, there were also
actively on the alert that large class of persons who seem to hold
violence against the vices of others to be equivalent to virtue in
themselves, together with all those natural haters of success who,
having long sickened under the splendour of the _poet_, were now
enabled, in the guise of champions for innocence, to wreak their spite
on the _man_. In every various form of paragraph, pamphlet, and
caricature, both his character and person were held up to
odium[97];--hardly a voice was raised, or at least listened to, in his
behalf; and though a few faithful friends remained unshaken by his side,
the utter hopelessness of stemming the torrent was felt as well by them
as by himself, and, after an effort or two to gain a fair hearing, they
submitted in silence. Among the few attempts made by himself towards
confuting his calumniators was an appeal (such as the following short
letter contains) to some of those persons with whom he had been in the
habit of living familiarly.
[Footnote 94: MS.--"Detached Thoughts."]
[Footnote 95: An anecdote connected with one of these occasions is thus
related in the Journal just referred to:--
"When the bailiff (for I have seen most kinds of life) came upon me in
1815 to seize my chattels, (being a peer of parliament, my person was
beyond him,) being curious (as is my habit), I first asked him "what
extents elsewhere he had for government?" upon which he showed me one
upon _one house only_ for _seventy thousand pounds_! Next I asked him if
he had nothing for Sheridan? "Oh--Sheridan!" said he; "ay, I have this"
(pulling out a pocket-book, &c.); "but, my Lord, I have been in
Sheridan's house a twelvemonth at a time--a civil gentleman--knows how
to deal with _us_," &c. &c. &c. Our own business was then discussed,
which was none of the easiest for me at that time. But the man was
civil, and (what I valued more) communicative. I had met many of his
brethren, years before, in affairs of my friends, (commoners, that is,)
but this was the first (or second) on my own account.--A civil man;
fee'd accordingly; probably he anticipated as much."]
[Footnote 96: For this story, however, there was so far a foundation
that the practice to which he had accustomed himself from boyhood, of
having loaded pistols always near him at night, was considered so
strange a propensity as to be included in that list of symptoms
(sixteen, I believe, in number,) which were submitted to medical
opinion, in proof of his insanity. Another symptom was the emotion,
almost to hysterics, which he had exhibited on seeing Kean act Sir Giles
Overreach. But the most plausible of all the grounds, as he himself used
to allow, on which these articles of impeachment against his sanity were
drawn up, was an act of violence committed by him on a favourite old
watch that had been his companion from boyhood, and had gone with him to
Greece. In a fit of vexation and rage, brought on by some of those
humiliating embarrassments to which he was now almost daily a prey, he
furiously dashed this watch upon the hearth, and ground it to pieces
among the ashes with the poker.]
[Footnote 97: Of the abuse lavished upon him, the following extract from
a poem, published at this time, will give some idea:--
"From native England, that endured too long
The ceaseless burden of his impious song;
His mad career of crimes and follies run,
And grey in vice, when life was scarce begun;
He goes, in foreign lands prepared to find
A life more suited to his guilty mind;
Where other climes new pleasures may supply
For that pall'd taste, and that unhallow'd eye;--
Wisely he seeks some yet untrodden shore,
For those who know him less may prize him more."
In a rhyming pamphlet, too, entitled "A Poetical Epistle from Delia,
addressed to Lord Byron," the writer thus charitably expresses
herself:--
"Hopeless of peace below, and, shuddering thought!
Far from that Heav'n, denied, if never sought,
Thy light a beacon--a reproach thy name--
Thy memory "damn'd to everlasting fame,"
Shunn'd by the wise, admired by fools alone--
The good shall mourn thee--and the Muse disown."
]
* * * * *