My Recollections of Lord Byron
with him. There have been hints in abundance, and shrugs and shakings of
the head, and '_Well, well, we know_,' and '_We could if we would_,' and
'_If we list to speak_,' and '_There be that might an they list._' But
we are not aware that there is before the world, substantiated by
credible, or even by tangible evidence, a single fact indicating that
Lord Byron was _more to blame than any other man who is on bad terms
with his wife_."
And after having said how the persons consulted by Lady Byron, and who
had advised her to separate from her husband, formed their opinion
without hearing both parties, and that it would be quite unjust and
irrational to pronounce, or even to form, an opinion on an affair so
imperfectly known, Mr. Macaulay continues in these words:--
"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its
periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces, and
family quarrels, pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk
about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years our
virtue becomes outrageous. We can not suffer the laws of religion and
decency to be violated. We must make a stand against vice. We must teach
libertines that the English people appreciate the importance of domestic
ties. Accordingly some unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than
hundreds whose offenses have been treated with lenity, is singled out as
an expiatory sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from
him. If he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by
the higher orders, and hissed by the lower. He is, in truth, a sort of
whipping-boy, by whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of
the same class are, it is supposed, sufficiently chastised. We reflect
very complacently on our own severity, and compare with great pride the
high standard of morals established in England with the Parisian laxity.
At length our anger is satiated. Our victim is ruined and heart-broken,
and our virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years more. It is clear
that those vices which destroy domestic happiness ought to be as much as
possible repressed. It is equally clear that they can not be repressed
by penal legislation. It is therefore right and desirable that public
opinion should be directed against them. But it should be directed
against them uniformly, steadily, and temperately; not by sudden fits
and starts. There should be one weight and one measure. Decimation is
always an objectionable mode of punishment. It is the resource of judges
too indolent and hasty to investigate facts and to discriminate nicely
between shades of guilt. It is an irrational practice, even when adopted
by military tribunals. When adopted by the tribunal of public opinion,
it is infinitely more irrational. It is good that a certain portion of
disgrace should constantly attend on certain bad actions. But it is not
good that the offenders should merely have to stand the risks of a
lottery of infamy, that ninety-nine out of every hundred should escape,
and that the hundredth, perhaps the most innocent of the hundred, should
pay for all. We remember to have seen a mob assembled in Lincoln's Inn
to hoot a gentleman against whom the most oppressive proceeding known to
the English law was then in progress. He was hooted because he had been
an unfaithful husband, as if some of the most popular men of the age,
Lord Nelson for example, had not been unfaithful husbands. We remember a
still stronger case. Will posterity believe that, in an age in which men
whose gallantries were universally known, and had been legally proved,
filled some of the highest offices in the state and in the army,
presided at the meetings of religious and benevolent institutions, were
the delight of every society, and the favorites of the multitude, a
crowd of moralists went to the theatre, in order to pelt a poor actor
for disturbing the conjugal felicity of an alderman? What there was in
the circumstances either of the offender or of the sufferer to vindicate
the zeal of the audience we could never conceive. It has never been
supposed that the situation of an actor is peculiarly favorable to the
rigid virtues, or that an alderman enjoys any special immunity from
injuries such as that which on this occasion roused the anger of the
public. But such is the justice of mankind. In these cases the
punishment was excessive, but the offense was known and proved. The case
of Lord Byron was harder. True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him.
First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or
rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without knowing any thing
whatever about the transactions in his family, flew into a violent
passion with him, and proceeded to invent stories which might justify
its anger. Ten or twenty different accounts of the separation,
inconsistent with each other, with themselves, and with common sense,
circulated at the same time. What evidence there might be for any one of
these the virtuous people who repeated them neither knew nor cared. For
in fact these stories were not the causes, but the effects of the public
indignation. They resembled those loathsome slanders which Lewis
Goldsmith, and other abject libellers of the same class, were in the
habit of publishing about Bonaparte; such as that he poisoned a girl
with arsenic when he was at the military school, that he hired a
grenadier to shoot Desaix at Marengo, that he filled St. Cloud with all
the pollutions of Capreae. There was a time when anecdotes like these
obtained some credence from persons who, hating the French Emperor
without knowing why, were eager to believe any thing which might justify
their hatred.
"Lord Byron fared in the same way. His countrymen were in a bad humor
with him. His writings and his character had lost the charm of novelty.
He had been guilty of the offense which, of all offenses, is punished
most severely; he had been overpraised; he had excited too warm an
interest; and the public, with its usual justice, chastised him for its
own folly. The attachments of the multitude bear no small resemblance to
those of the wanton enchantress in the Arabian Tales, who, when the
forty days of her fondness were over, was not content with dismissing
her lovers, but condemned them to expiate, in loathsome shapes, and
under cruel penances, the crime of having once pleased her too well.
"The obloquy which Byron had to endure was such as might well have
shaken a more constant mind. The newspapers were filled with lampoons.
The theatres shook with execrations. He was excluded from circles where
he had lately been the _observed_ of all _observers_. All those creeping
things that riot in the decay of nobler natures hastened to their
repast; and they were right; they did after their kind. It is not every
day that the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified by the agonies
of such a spirit, and the degradation of such a name. The unhappy man
left his country forever. The howl of contumely followed him across the
sea, up the Rhine, over the Alps; it gradually waxed fainter; it died
away; those who had raised it began to ask each other, what, after all,
was the matter about which they had been so clamorous, and wished to
invite back the criminal whom they had just chased from them. His poetry
became more popular than it had ever been; and his complaints were read
with tears by thousands and tens of thousands who had never seen his
face."
These observations of Macaulay are applied by Mr. Disraeli to Lord
Cadurcis, who, in his novel called "Venetia," is no other than Lord
Byron:--
"Lord Cadurcis," says he, "was the periodical victim, the scapegoat of
English morality, sent into the wilderness with all the crimes and
curses of the multitude on his head. Lord Cadurcis had certainly
committed a great crime, not his intrigue with Lady Monteagle, for that
surely was not an unprecedented offense; nor his duel with her husband,
for after all it was a duel in self-defense: and, at all events,
divorces and duels, under any circumstances, would scarcely have excited
or authorized the storm which was now about to burst over the late
spoiled child of society. But Lord Cadurcis had been guilty of the
offense which, of all offenses, is punished most severely. Lord Cadurcis
had been overpraised. He had excited too warm an interest; and the
public, with its usual justice, was resolved to chastise him for its own
folly. There are no fits of caprice so hasty and so violent as those of
society. Cadurcis, in allusion to his sudden and singular success, had
been in the habit of saying to his intimates that he 'woke one morning
and found himself famous.' He might now observe, 'I woke one morning and
found myself infamous.' Before twenty-four hours had passed over his
duel with Lord Monteagle, he found himself branded by every journal in
London as an unprincipled and unparalleled reprobate. The public,
without waiting to think, or even to inquire after the truth, instantly
selected as genuine the most false and the most flagrant of the fifty
libellous narratives that were circulated of the transaction. Stories,
inconsistent with themselves, were all alike eagerly believed, and what
evidence there might be for any one of them, the virtuous people, by
whom they were repeated, neither knew nor cared. The public, in short,
fell into a passion with their daring, and, ashamed of their past
idolatry, nothing would satisfy them but knocking the divinity on the
head."
And this same Mr. Disraeli, whose testimony is all the more precious as
coming from a Tory celebrity, after having described the shameful
reception given by the noble House to Lord Cadurcis, when he presented
himself there after the duel, and the atrocious conduct of the stupid
populace clamoring against him outside, goes on in these terms:--
"And indeed to witness this young, and noble, and gifted creature, but a
few days back the idol of the nation, and from whom a word, a glance
even, was deemed the greatest and most gratifying distinction--whom all
orders, classes, and conditions of men had combined to stimulate with
multiplied adulation, with all the glory and ravishing delights of the
world, as it were, forced upon him--to see him thus assailed with the
savage execrations of all those vile things who exult in the fall of
every thing that is great and the abasement of every thing that is
noble, was indeed a spectacle which might have silenced malice and
satisfied envy!"
To these just appreciations formed by some of Lord Byron's biographers
we might add many more; but the limits we have assigned to this work not
admitting of it, we will only add, as a last testimony, the most severe
of all; him of whom Moore said, "that, if one wished to speak against
Lord Byron, one had only to apply to him," that is, to Lord Byron
himself.
In 1820, when Lord Byron was at Ravenna, an article from "Blackwood's
Magazine," entitled "Observations on Don Juan," was sent him.
It contained such unfounded strictures on his matrimonial conduct, that,
for once, Lord Byron infringed his rule and could not help answering it.
The extracts from his defense, "_if defense it can be called_," says
Moore, "_where there has never yet been any definite charge, will be
read with the liveliest interest._" Here, then, is a part of these
extracts:--
"It is in vain, says my learned brother, that Lord Byron attempts in any
way to justify his own behavior with regard to Lady Byron.
"And now that he has so openly and audaciously invited inquiry and
reproach, we do not see any good reason why he should not be plainly
told so by the voice of his countrymen."
"How far the openness of an anonymous poem, and the audacity of an