"The mischief was aggravated by the unfortunate occurrence that my
mother being unable to suckle her first-born child, it had been
nursed out of the house. Her maternal instinct, thus thwarted in
its origin, never revived. The care of children was ever after
distasteful to her. Losing this satisfaction to her affections,
unless she had company in the house she was lonely. As it was,
neither of them saw the issue to which the divided life was
tending."
That issue, as all the world knows, was a separation of the husband and
wife, and a life-long quarrel of almost unimagined bitterness. No wonder
that Bulwer's hand faltered when be tried to write of it, and that,
having brought his autobiography up to this point, he laid it by, not
daring to go on. He always cherished the intention of resuming it, but
could never bring himself to the point of doing so. He could not tell
the story; but Lady Lytton could, and did, continuing to do so till her
dying day. The picture of her which her son has given does not seem like
that of a woman who would do all the things which she notoriously did.
But doubtless she had her amiable and engaging side, and was half
maddened by her wrongs. Justin McCarthy says:--
"I do not know whether I ought to call it a quarrel. Can that be
called a quarrel, piteously asks the man in 'Juvenal,' where my
enemy only beats and I am beaten? Can that be called a quarrel in
which, so far as the public could judge, the wife did all the
denunciation, and the husband made no reply? Lady Lytton wrote
novels for the purpose of satirizing her husband and his
friends,--his parasites, she called them. Lady Lytton attributed to
her husband the most odious meannesses, vices, and cruelties; but
the public, with all its love of scandal, seems to have steadfastly
refused to take her ladyship's word for these accusations. Dickens
she denounced and vilified as a mere parasite and sycophant of her
husband. Disraeli she caricatured under the title of Jericho
Jabber. This sort of thing she kept always going on. Sometimes she
issued pamphlets to the women of England, calling on them to take
up her quarrel, which, somehow, they never did. Once, when Sir
Edward was on the hustings addressing his constituents at a county
election, her ladyship suddenly appeared, mounted the platform, and
'went' for him. I do not know anything of the merits of the
quarrel, but have always thought that something like insanity must
have been the explanation of much of her conduct. But it is beyond
doubt that her husband's conduct was remarkable for its quiet,
indomitable patience and dignity."
Let the veil drop over the blighted lives, knowing as we do that the
human heart is so dark and intricate a labyrinth that we cannot claim to
understand it by half knowledge, and that however we might judge these
two with any light which we can possibly have in our day, we should be
in danger of doing each a grievous wrong.
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