My Recollections of Lord Byron
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 wife to the husband being those of the
most playful affection, while the language of the husband toward 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 afterward 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, at least, that
his conscience was not troubled by any very guilty recollections.
"But though it would have been difficult perhaps, for the victims of
this strife themselves to have pointed out the real 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
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, was now turned against him by
his assailants, 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 Lady Byron 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 Milbank 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 the church. At the time
when, as the reader has seen from his own honey-moon letters, he in all
faith fancied himself happy, and even boasted, in the pride of his
imagination, 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 chronicles, 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, and other such
freaks.[145] 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 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
rumor 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, heaped 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 think that
inveighing against the vices of others is equivalent to virtue in
themselves, together with all those natural haters of success who,
having long been disgusted with the splendor 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. 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."
As to Lord Byron, he hardly attempted to defend himself. Among all these
slanders, he only wished to repel one that wounded his generous pride
beyond endurance; and so he wrote to Rogers:--
"You are of the few persons with whom I have lived in what is called
intimacy, and have heard me at times conversing on the untoward topic of
my recent family disquietudes. Will you have the goodness to say to me
at once, whether you ever heard me speak of her with disrespect, with
unkindness, or defending myself at her expense by any serious imputation
of any description against her? Did you never hear me say, 'that when
there was a right or a wrong, she had the right?' The reason I put these
questions to you or others of my friends is, because I am said, by her
and hers, to have resorted to such means of exculpation."
It makes one's heart bleed to see this noble intellect forced by the
stupid cruel persecution of wicked fools to descend into the arena and
justify himself. But he soon ceased all kind of defense. A struggle of
this sort was most repugnant to him. At first Lord Byron had counted on
his wife's return, which would, indeed, have proved his best
justification. When he saw this return deferred, he asked simply for an
inquiry, but could not obtain what he solicited. His accusers, unable to
state any thing definite against him, naturally preferred calumny and
_magnanimous_ silence to inquiry! At last, when he felt that reunion had
become improbable, and that his friends, for want of moral courage and
independence, confined themselves to mere condolence, he sought for
strength in the testimony of conscience and in his determination of one
day making the whole truth known. And he did so in effect, a year later,
while he was in Italy, and when all hope of reunion was over. Then it
was that he wrote his memoirs.
Here perhaps I ought to speak of one of England's greatest crimes, or
rather, of the crime committed by a few Englishmen: I mean _the
destruction of his memoirs_, a deed perpetrated for the sake of
screening the self-love and the follies, if not the crimes, of a whole
host of insignificant beings. But, having already spoken of that in
another chapter, I will content myself with repeating here that these
memoirs were all the more precious, as their principal object was to
make known the truth; that the impression they left on the mind was a
perfect conviction of the writer's sincerity; that Lord Byron possessed
the most generous of souls, and that the separation had no other cause
but incompatibility of disposition between the two parties. Had he not
given irrefragable proof of the truth of these memoirs, by sending them
to be read and _commented on_ by Lady Byron? We know with what cruel
disdain she met this generous proceeding. As to their morality, I will
content myself with quoting the exact expressions used by Lady B----,
wife of the then ambassador in Italy, to whom Moore gave them to read,
and who had copied them out entirely:--
"_I read these memoirs at Florence_," said she to Countess G----, "_and
I assure you that I might have given them to my daughter of fifteen to
read, so perfectly free are they from any stain of immorality._"
Let us then repeat once more, that they, as well as the last cantos of
"Don Juan," and the journal he kept in Greece, were sacrificed for the
sole purpose of destroying all memento of the guilty weakness of persons
calling themselves his friends, and also of hiding the opinions, not
always very flattering, entertained by Lord Byron about a number of
living persons, who had unfortunately survived him. It is difficult to
conceive in any case, how these memoirs written at Venice, when his
heart was torn with grief and bitterness, could possibly have been
silent as to the injustice and calumny overwhelming him, or even as to
the pusillanimous behavior of so-called friends; while even writers
generally hostile no longer took part against him.
For example, this is how Macaulay speaks of him,--Macaulay who was not
over-lenient toward Lord Byron, whom he never personally knew, and who
is seldom just as well from party spirit as from his desire of shining
in antithesis and high-sounding phrases:--
"At twenty-four he found himself on the highest pinnacle of literary
fame, along with Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and a crowd of other
distinguished writers. There is scarcely an instance in history of so
sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence. Every thing that could stimulate,
and every thing that could gratify the strongest propensities of our
nature, the gaze of a hundred drawing-rooms, the acclamation of the
whole nation, the applause of applauded men, the love of lovely
women,--all this world, and all the glory of it, were at once offered to
a youth to whom nature had given violent passions, and whom education
had never taught to control them. He lived as many men live who have no
similar excuse to plead for their faults. But his countrymen and
countrywomen would love and admire him. They were resolved to see in his
excesses only the flash and outbreak of that same fiery mind which
glowed in his poetry. He attacked religion; yet in religious circles his
name was mentioned with fondness, and in many religious publications his
works were censured with singular tenderness. He lampooned the prince
regent, yet he could not alienate the Tories. Every thing, it seemed,
was to be forgiven to youth, rank, and genius.[146]
"Then came the reaction. Society, capricious in its indignation as it
had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward
and petted darling. He had been worshiped with an irrational idolatry.
He was persecuted with an irrational fury. Much has been written about
those unhappy domestic occurrences which decided the fate of his life.
Yet nothing is, nothing ever was, positively known to the public but
this,--that he quarrelled with his lady, and that she refused to live