Lady Byron Vindicated

Nine years after her death, when it was fully understood that no story on her side or that of her friends was to be forthcoming, then her calumniators raked out from the ashes of her husband’s sepulchre all his bitter charges, to state them over in even stronger and more indecent forms.

There seems to be reason to think that the materials supplied by Lord Byron for such a campaign yet exist in society.

To ‘The Noctes’ of November 1824, there is the following note apropos to a discussion of the Byron question:—

‘Byron’s Memoirs, given by him to Moore, were burned, as everybody knows.  But, before this, Moore had lent them to several persons.  Mrs. Home Purvis, afterwards Viscountess of Canterbury, is known to have sat up all one night, in which, aided by her daughter, she had a copy made.  I have the strongest reason for believing that one other person made a copy; for the description of the first twenty-four hours after the marriage ceremonial has been in my hands.  Not until after the death of Lady Byron, and Hobhouse, who was the poet’s literary executor, can the poet’s Autobiography see the light; but I am certain it will be published.’

Thus speaks Mackenzie in a note to a volume of ‘The Noctes,’ published in America in 1854.  Lady Byron died in 1860.

Nine years after Lady Byron’s death, when it was ascertained that her story was not to see the light, when there were no means of judging her character by her own writings, commenced a well-planned set of operations to turn the public attention once more to Lord Byron, and to represent him as an injured man, whose testimony had been unjustly suppressed.

It was quite possible, supposing copies of the Autobiography to exist, that this might occasion a call from the generation of to-day, in answer to which the suppressed work might appear.  This was a rather delicate operation to commence; but the instrument was not wanting.  It was necessary that the subject should be first opened by some irresponsible party, whom more powerful parties might, as by accident, recognise and patronise, and on whose weakness they might build something stronger.

Just such an instrument was to be found in Paris.  The mistress of Lord Byron could easily be stirred up and flattered to come before the world with a book which should re-open the whole controversy; and she proved a facile tool.  At first, the work appeared prudently in French, and was called ‘Lord Byron jugé par les Témoins de sa Vie,’ and was rather a failure.  Then it was translated into English, and published by Bentley.

The book was inartistic, and helplessly, childishly stupid as to any literary merits,—a mere mass of gossip and twaddle; but after all, when one remembers the taste of the thousands of circulating-library readers, it must not be considered the less likely to be widely read on that account.  It is only once in a century that a writer of real genius has the art to tell his story so as to take both the cultivated few and the average many.  De Foe and John Bunyan are almost the only examples.  But there is a certain class of reading that sells and spreads, and exerts a vast influence, which the upper circles of literature despise too much ever to fairly estimate its power.

However, the Guiccioli book did not want for patrons in the high places of literature.  The ‘Blackwood’—the old classic magazine of England; the defender of conservatism and aristocracy; the paper of Lockhart, Wilson, Hogg, Walter Scott, and a host of departed grandeurs—was deputed to usher into the world this book, and to recommend it and its author to the Christian public of the nineteenth century.

The following is the manner in which ‘Blackwood’ calls attention to it:—

‘One of the most beautiful of the songs of Béranger is that addressed to his Lisette, in which he pictures her, in old age, narrating to a younger generation the loves of their youth; decking his portrait with flowers at each returning spring, and reciting the verses that had been inspired by her vanished charms:—

‘Lorsque les yeux chercheront sous vos rides
Les traits charmants qui m’auront inspiré,
Des doux récits les jeunes gens avides,
Diront: Quel fut cet ami tant pleuré?
De men amour peignez, s’il est possible,
Vardeur, l’ivresse, et même les soupçons,
Et bonne vieille, an coin d’un feu paisible
De votre ami répétez les chansons.
“On vous dira: Savait-il être aimable?
Et sans rougir vous direz: Je l’aimais.
D’un trait méchant se montra-t-il capable?
Avec orgueil vous répondrez: Jamais!’”

‘This charming picture,’ ‘Blackwood’ goes on to say, ‘has been realised in the case of a poet greater than Béranger, and by a mistress more famous than Lisette.  The Countess Guiccioli has at length given to the world her “Recollections of Lord Byron.”  The book first appeared in France under the title of “Lord Byron jugé par les Témoins de sa Vie,” without the name of the countess.  A more unfortunate designation could hardly have been selected.  The “witnesses of his life” told us nothing but what had been told before over and over again; and the uniform and exaggerated tone of eulogy which pervaded the whole book was fatal to any claim on the part of the writer to be considered an impartial judge of the wonderfully mixed character of Byron.

‘When, however, the book is regarded as the avowed production of the Countess Guiccioli, it derives value and interest from its very faults.[26 - The italics are mine.—H. B. S.]  There is something inexpressibly touching in the picture of the old lady calling up the phantoms of half a century ago; not faded and stricken by the hand of time, but brilliant and gorgeous as they were when Byron, in his manly prime of genius and beauty, first flashed upon her enraptured sight, and she gave her whole soul up to an absorbing passion, the embers of which still glow in her heart.

‘To her there has been no change, no decay.  The god whom she worshipped with all the ardour of her Italian nature at seventeen is still the “Pythian of the age” to her at seventy.  To try such a book by the ordinary canons of criticism would be as absurd as to arraign the authoress before a jury of British matrons, or to prefer a bill of indictment against the Sultan for bigamy to a Middlesex grand jury.’

This, then, is the introduction which one of the oldest and most classical periodicals of Great Britain gives to a very stupid book, simply because it was written by Lord Byron’s mistress.  That fact, we are assured, lends grace even to its faults.

Having brought the authoress upon the stage, the review now goes on to define her position, and assure the Christian world that

‘The Countess Guiccioli was the daughter of an impoverished noble.  At the age of sixteen, she was taken from a convent, and sold as third wife to the Count Guiccioli, who was old, rich, and profligate.  A fouler prostitution never profaned the name of marriage.  A short time afterwards, she accidentally met Lord Byron.  Outraged and rebellious nature vindicated itself in the deep and devoted passion with which he inspired her.  With the full assent of husband, father, and brother, and in compliance with the usages of Italian society, he was shortly afterwards installed in the office, and invested with all the privileges, of her “Cavalier Servente.”’

It has been asserted that the Marquis de Boissy, the late husband of this Guiccioli lady, was in the habit of introducing her in fashionable circles as ‘the Marquise de Boissy, my wife, formerly mistress to Lord Byron’!  We do not give the story as a verity; yet, in the review of this whole history, we may be pardoned for thinking it quite possible.

The mistress, being thus vouched for and presented as worthy of sympathy and attention by one of the oldest and most classic organs of English literature, may now proceed in her work of glorifying the popular idol, and casting abuse on the grave of the dead wife.

Her attacks on Lady Byron are, to be sure, less skilful and adroit than those of Lord Byron.  They want his literary polish and tact; but what of that?  ‘Blackwood’ assures us that even the faults of manner derive a peculiar grace from the fact that the narrator is Lord Byron’s mistress; and so we suppose the literary world must find grace in things like this:—

‘She has been called, after his words, the moral Clytemnestra of her husband.  Such a surname is severe: but the repugnance we feel to condemning a woman cannot prevent our listening to the voice of justice, which tells us that the comparison is still in favour of the guilty one of antiquity; for she, driven to crime by fierce passion overpowering reason, at least only deprived her husband of physical life, and, in committing the deed, exposed herself to all its consequences; while Lady Byron left her husband at the very moment that she saw him struggling amid a thousand shoals in the stormy sea of embarrassments created by his marriage, and precisely when he more than ever required a friendly, tender, and indulgent hand to save him.

‘Besides, she shut herself up in silence a thousand times more cruel than Clytemnestra’s poniard: that only killed the body; whereas Lady Byron’s silence was destined to kill the soul,—and such a soul!—leaving the door open to calumny, and making it to be supposed that her silence was magnanimity destined to cover over frightful wrongs, perhaps even depravity.  In vain did he, feeling his conscience at ease, implore some inquiry and examination.  She refused; and the only favour she granted was to send him, one fine day, two persons to see whether he were not mad.

‘And, why, then, had she believed him mad?  Because she, a methodical, inflexible woman, with that unbendingness which a profound moralist calls the worship rendered to pride by a feelingless soul, because she could not understand the possibility of tastes and habits different to those of ordinary routine, or of her own starched life.  Not to be hungry when she was; not to sleep at night, but to write while she was sleeping, and to sleep when she was up; in short, to gratify the requirements of material and intellectual life at hours different to hers,—all that was not merely annoying for her, but it must be madness; or, if not, it betokened depravity that she could neither submit to nor tolerate without perilling her own morality.

‘Such was the grand secret of the cruel silence which exposed Lord Byron to the most malignant interpretations, to all the calumny and revenge of his enemies.

‘She was, perhaps, the only woman in the world so strangely organised,—the only one, perhaps, capable of not feeling happy and proud at belonging to a man superior to the rest of humanity; and fatally was it decreed that this woman alone of her species should be Lord Byron’s wife!’

In a note is added,—

‘If an imaginary fear, and even an unreasonable jealousy, may be her excuse (just as one excuses a monomania), can one equally forgive her silence?  Such a silence is morally what are physically the poisons which kill at once, and defy all remedies; thus insuring the culprit’s safety.  This silence it is which will ever be her crime; for by it she poisoned the life of her husband.’

The book has several chapters devoted to Lord Byron’s peculiar virtues; and under the one devoted to magnanimity and heroism, his forgiving disposition receives special attention.  The climax of all is stated to be that he forgave Lady Byron.  All the world knew that, since he had declared this fact in a very noisy and impassioned manner in the fourth canto of ‘Childe Harold,’ together with a statement of the wrongs which he forgave; but the Guiccioli thinks his virtue, at this period, has not been enough appreciated.  In her view, it rose to the sublime.  She says of Lady Byron,—

‘An absolute moral monstrosity, an anomaly in the history of types of female hideousness, had succeeded in showing itself in the light of magnanimity.  But false as was this high quality in Lady Byron, so did it shine out in him true and admirable.  The position in which Lady Byron had placed him, and where she continued to keep him by her harshness, silence, and strange refusals, was one of those which cause such suffering, that the highest degree of self-control seldom suffices to quiet the promptings of human weakness, and to cause persons of even slight sensibility to preserve moderation.  Yet, with his sensibility and the knowledge of his worth, how did he act? what did he say?  I will not speak of his “farewell;” of the care he took to shield her from blame by throwing it on others, by taking much too large a share to himself.’

With like vivacity and earnestness does the narrator now proceed to make an incarnate angel of her subject by the simple process of denying everything that he himself ever confessed,—everything that has ever been confessed in regard to him by his best friends.  He has been in the world as an angel unawares from his cradle.  His guardian did not properly appreciate him, and is consequently mentioned as that wicked Lord Carlisle.  Thomas Moore is never to be sufficiently condemned for the facts told in his biography.  Byron’s own frank and lawless admissions of evil are set down to a peculiar inability he had for speaking the truth about himself,—sometimes about his near relations; all which does not in the least discourage the authoress from giving a separate chapter on ‘Lord Byron’s Love of Truth.’

In the matter of his relations with women, she complacently repeats (what sounds rather oddly as coming from her) Lord Byron’s own assurance, that he never seduced a woman; and also the equally convincing statement, that he had told her (the Guiccioli) that his married fidelity to his wife was perfect.  She discusses Moore’s account of the mistress in boy’s clothes who used to share Byron’s apartments in college, and ride with him to races, and whom he presented to ladies as his brother.

She has her own view of this matter.  The disguised boy was a lady of rank and fashion, who sought Lord Byron’s chambers, as, we are informed, noble ladies everywhere, both in Italy and England, were constantly in the habit of doing; throwing themselves at his feet, and imploring permission to become his handmaids.

In the authoress’s own words, ‘Feminine overtures still continued to be made to Lord Byron; but the fumes of incense never hid from his sight his IDEAL.’  We are told that in the case of these poor ladies, generally ‘disenchantment took place on his side without a corresponding result on the other: THENCE many heart-breakings.’  Nevertheless, we are informed that there followed the indiscretions of these ladies ‘none of those proceedings that the world readily forgives, but which his feelings as a man of honour would have condemned.’

As to drunkenness, and all that, we are informed he was an anchorite.  Pages are given to an account of the biscuits and soda-water that on this and that occasion were found to be the sole means of sustenance to this ethereal creature.

As to the story of using his wife’s money, the lady gives, directly in the face of his own Letters and Journal, the same account given before by Medwin, and which caused such merriment when talked over in the Noctes Club,—that he had with her only a marriage portion of £10,000; and that, on the separation, he not only paid it back, but doubled it.[27 - In ‘The Noctes’ of November, 1824 Christopher North says, ‘I don’t call Medwin a liar. . . .  Whether Byron bammed him, or he, by virtue of his own stupidity, was the sole and sufficient bammifier of himself, I know not.’  A note says that Murray had been much shocked by Byron’s misstatements to Medwin as to money-matters with him.  The note goes on to say, ‘Medwin could not have invented them, for they were mixed up with acknowledged facts; and the presumption is that Byron mystified his gallant acquaintance.  He was fond of such tricks.’]

So on the authoress goes, sowing right and left the most transparent absurdities and misstatements with what Carlyle well calls ‘a composed stupidity, and a cheerful infinitude of ignorance.’  Who should know, if not she, to be sure?  Had not Byron told her all about it? and was not his family motto Crede Byron?

The ‘Blackwood,’ having a dim suspicion that this confused style of attack and defence in reference to the two parties under consideration may not have great weight, itself proceeds to make the book an occasion for re-opening the controversy of Lord Byron with his wife.

The rest of the review devoted to a powerful attack on Lady Byron’s character, the most fearful attack on the memory of a dead woman we have ever seen made by living man.  The author proceeds, like a lawyer, to gather up, arrange, and restate, in a most workmanlike manner, the confused accusations of the book.

Anticipating the objection, that such a re-opening of the inquiry was a violation of the privacy due to womanhood and to the feelings of a surviving family, he says, that though marriage usually is a private matter which the world has no right to intermeddle with or discuss, yet—

‘Lord Byron’s was an exceptional case.  It is not too much to say, that, had his marriage been a happy one, the course of events of the present century might have been materially changed; that the genius which poured itself forth in “Don Juan” and “Cain” might have flowed in far different channels; that the ardent love of freedom which sent him to perish at six and thirty at Missolonghi might have inspired a long career at home; and that we might at this moment have been appealing to the counsels of his experience and wisdom at an age not exceeding that which was attained by Wellington, Lyndhurst, and Brougham.

‘Whether the world would have been a gainer or a loser by the exchange is a question which every man must answer for himself, according to his own tastes and opinions; but the possibility of such a change in the course of events warrants us in treating what would otherwise be a strictly private matter as one of public interest.

‘More than half a century has elapsed, the actors have departed from the stage, the curtain has fallen; and whether it will ever again be raised so as to reveal the real facts of the drama, may, as we have already observed, be well doubted.  But the time has arrived when we may fairly gather up the fragments of evidence, clear them as far as possible from the incrustations of passion, prejudice, and malice, and place them in such order, as, if possible, to enable us to arrive at some probable conjecture as to what the skeleton of the drama originally was.’