My Recollections of Lord Byron
of the moral and social man. With Lord Byron these noble dispositions of
the heart and mind were naturally the consequence of his tastes and
opinions, which were essentially spiritualistic. With Shelley, though in
contradiction with his metaphysics, they were notwithstanding in harmony
with the beautiful sentiments of his soul, which, when he was only
twenty-three years of age, had already experienced the unkindness of
man. Their respective souls, wounded and hurt by the perfidiousness and
injustice of the world, felt themselves attracted to each other. A real
friendship sprang up between them. They saw one another often, and it
was in the conversations which they held together at this time that the
seed was sown which shortly was to produce the works of genius which
were to see the day at the foot of the Alps and under the blue sky of
Italy.
Although Lord Byron's heart was mortally wounded, still no feeling of
hatred could find its way into it. The sorrow which he felt, the painful
knowledge which he had of cruel and perfidious wrongs done to him, the
pain of finding out the timidity of character of his friends, and the
recollection of the many ungrateful people of whom he was the victim,
all and each of these sentiments found their echo in the "Prisoner of
Chillon," in the third canto of "Childe Harold," in "Manfred," in the
pathetic stanzas addressed to his sister, in the admirable and sublime
monody on the death of Sheridan, and in the "Dream," which according to
Moore, he must have written while shedding many bitter tears. According
to the same authority, the latter poem is the most melancholy and
pathetic history that ever came forth from human pen.
I shall not mention here the persecution to which Byron was subjected
then, nor the ever-manly, dignified, but heartrending words which it
drew forth from the noble poet in the midst of his retired, studious,
regular, and virtuous existence. I shall speak of it elsewhere; but I
will say now that so unexampled, atrocious, and foolish was this
persecution, that his enemies must have feared the awakening of the
public conscience and the effects of a reaction, which might make them
lose all the fruits of their victory, if they tarried in their efforts
to prevent it. The most cruel among them was the poet laureate, in whose
eyes Byron could have had but one defect--that of being superior to him.
True, Byron had mentioned him in the famous satire which was the work of
his youth; but he had most generously expiated his crime by confessing
it, in buying up the fifth edition so as to annihilate it, and by
declaring that he would have willingly suppressed even the memory of it.
This noble action had gained for him the forgiveness and even the
friendship of the most generous among them; but the revengeful poet
laureate was not, as Byron said, "of those who forgive."
This man arrived at Geneva, and at once set about his hateful work of
revenge. This was all the easier on account of the spirit of cant which
reigned in that country, and owing to the intimacy which he found to be
existing between Byron and Shelley, for whom likewise he had conceived a
malignant hatred. It must be said, however, that the laureate having to
account for, among other works, his "Wat Tyler" (which had been
pronounced to be an immoral book, and had been prohibited on that
account), rather trusted to his hypocrisy to regain for him the former
credit he enjoyed.
The intimacy between Byron and the spurned atheist Shelley presented a
capital opportunity for this man to take his revenge. He circulated in
Geneva all the false reports which had been current in London, and
described Byron under the worst colors. Switzerland was at that time
overrun by the English, whom the recently-signed Peace had attracted to
the Continent. The laureate took the lead of those who tried to make the
good but bigoted people of Geneva believe in all the tittle-tattle
against Byron which was passed about in London, and actually attempted
to make a scandal of his very presence in their town. When he passed in
the streets they stopped to stare at him insolently, putting up their
glasses to their eyes. They followed him in his rides; they reported
that he was seducing all the girls in the "Rue Basse," and, in fact,
although his life was perfectly virtuous, one would have said that his
presence was a contagion. Having found in a travellers' register the
name of Shelley, accompanied by the qualification of "atheist!" which
Byron had amiably struck out with his pen, the laureate caught at this
and gave out that the two friends had declared themselves to be
atheists. He attributed their friendship to infamous motives; he spoke
of incest and of other abominations, so odious, that Byron's friends
deemed it prudent not to speak to him a word of all this at the time. He
only learned it at Venice later.[10]
Loaded with this very creditable amount of falsehoods, most of which
were believed in Geneva, the laureate returned to London to spread them
in England, so as to prevent the effects of the beautiful and touching
poems which were poured forth from the great and wounded soul of Byron,
and which might have restored him to the esteem of all the honest and
just minds of his country.
Meanwhile Lady C. L---- having failed to discover any one who would
accept the reward she offered to the person who would take Byron's life,
had recourse to another means of injuring him--to a kind of moral
assassination--which she effected by the publication of her revengeful
sentiments in the three volumes entitled "Glenarvon." Such a work might
justify a biographer in passing it over with contempt without even
mentioning it; but as enemies of Lord Byron have made capital out of
this book,--as it found credence even with some superior minds, such as
Goethe's--as the intimacy which prefaced this revenge caused great
sensation all over England, and was a source of continual vexation and
pain for Byron--it must not be passed over without comment, as Moore did
to spare the susceptibility of living personages.
Lady C. L---- (afterward Lady M----) belonged to the high aristocracy of
England. Young, clever, and fashionable, but a little eccentric, she had
been married some years when she fell so desperately in love with Lord
Byron that she braved every thing for him. It was not Byron who made the
first advances, for his powers of seduction were only the attractions
with which nature had endowed him. His person, his voice, his look,--all
in him was irresistible. In presenting himself anywhere, he could very
well say with Shakspeare, in "Othello,"--
"This only is the witchcraft I have used."
Lord Byron, who was then only twenty-three years of age, and not
married, was flattered, and more than pleased, by this preference shown
to him. Although Lady C. L----'s beauty was not particularly attractive
to him, and although her character was exactly opposite to the ideal
which he had formed of what woman's character should be, yet she
contrived to interest him, to captivate him by the power of her love,
and in a very short time to persuade him that he loved her.
This sort of love could not last. It was destined to end in a
catastrophe. Lady L----'s jealousy was ridiculous. Dressed sometimes as
a page, sometimes in another costume, she was wont to follow him by
means of these disguises. She quarrelled and played the heroine, etc.
Byron, who disliked quarrels of all kinds (and perhaps even the lady
herself), besides being intimate with all her family, was too much the
sufferer by this conduct not to endeavor to bring her back to a sense of
reason and of her duty. He was indulging in the hope that he had
succeeded in these endeavors when, at a ball given by Lady Heathcote,
Lady L----, after vain efforts to attract Byron's attention, went up to
him and asked him whether she might waltz. Byron replied, half-absently,
that he saw no reason why she should not; upon which her pride and her
passion became so excited that she seized hold of a knife, and feigned
to commit suicide. The ball was at once at an end, and all London was
soon filled with accounts of this incident. Lady L---- had scarcely
recovered from the slight wound she had inflicted on herself, when she
wrote to a young peer, and made him all kinds of extravagant promises,
if he would consent to call out Byron and kill him. This, however, did
not prevent her calling again upon Lord Byron, not, however, says
Medwin, with the intention of blowing his brains out; as he was not at
home, she wrote on one of his books
"Remember me."
On returning home, Byron read what she had written, and, filled with
disgust and indignation, he wrote the famous lines
"Remember thee! Ay, doubt it not,"
and sent her back several of her letters sealed up. "Glenarvon" was her
revenge. She painted Byron in fiendish colors, giving herself all the
qualities he possessed, so as to appear an angel, and to him all the
passions of the "Giaour," of the "Corsair," and of "Childe Harold," so
that he might be taken for a demon.
In this novel, the result of revenge, truth asserts its rights,
notwithstanding all the contradictions of which the book is full. Thus
Lady L---- can not help depicting Byron under some of his real
characteristics. She was asked, for instance, what she thought of him,
when she met him for the first time after hearing of his great
reputation, and she answers, while gazing at the soft loveliness of his
smile,--
"What do I think? I think that never did the hand of God imprint upon a
human form so lovely, so glorious an expression."
And further she adds:--
"Never did the Sculptor's hand, in the sublimest product of his talent,
imagine a form and a face so exquisite, so full of animation or so
varied in expression. Can one see him without being moved? Oh! is there
in the nature of woman the possibility of listening to him, without
cherishing every word he utters? and having listened to him once, is it
possible for any human heart ever to forget those accents which awaken
every sentiment and calm every fear?"
Again:--
"Oh better far to have died than to see or listen to Glenarvon. When he
smiled, his smile was like the light of heaven; his voice was more
soothing from its softness than the softest music. In his manner there
was such a charm, that it would have been vain to affect even to be
offended by its sweetness."
But while she was obliged to obey the voice of passion and of truth, she
took on the other hand as a motto to her novel that of the "Corsair,"
which even applied to the "Corsair" is not altogether just, for he was
gifted with more than "one virtue:--"
"He left a Corsair's name to other times,
Link'd with one virtue and a thousand crimes."
It is, however, fair to add, that this revenge became the punishment of
the heroine; she never again found any rest, struggled against a
troubled mind, and never succeeded in forgetting her love. It is even
said that, diseased in mind and body, she was one day walking along one
of the alleys of her beautiful place, on the road to Newstead Abbey,
when she saw a funeral procession coming up the road in the direction of
Newstead. Having inquired whose funeral it was, and being told it was
that of the great poet, whose mortal remains were being conveyed to
their last resting-place, she fainted, and died a few days afterward.
His name was the last word she uttered, and this she did with love and
despair. In London, and wherever the authoress was known, the book had
no success, but the case was different abroad and in the provinces.
Attracted as he always was toward all that is good, great, and sincere,
Byron was wont to break the monotony of his retired life in the villa