Lady Byron Vindicated

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Now, though we know of old that looks deceive,
And always have done, somehow these good looks,
Make more impression than the best of books.

Aurora, who looked more on books than faces,
Was very young, although so very sage:
Admiring more Minerva than the Graces,
Especially upon a printed page.
But Virtue’s self, with all her tightest laces,
Has not the natural stays of strict old age;
And Socrates, that model of all duty,
Owned to a penchant, though discreet for beauty.’

The presence of this high-minded, thoughtful, unworldly woman is described through two cantos of the wild, rattling ‘Don Juan,’ in a manner that shows how deeply the poet was capable of being affected by such an appeal to his higher nature.

For instance, when Don Juan sits silent and thoughtful amid a circle of persons who are talking scandal, the poet says,—

‘’Tis true, he saw Aurora look as though
She approved his silence: she perhaps mistook
Its motive for that charity we owe,
But seldom pay, the absent.

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He gained esteem where it was worth the most;
And certainly Aurora had renewed
In him some feelings he had lately lost
Or hardened,—feelings which, perhaps ideal,
Are so divine that I must deem them real:—

The love of higher things and better days;
The unbounded hope and heavenly ignorance
Of what is called the world and the world’s ways;
The moments when we gather from a glance
More joy than from all future pride or praise,
Which kindled manhood, but can ne’er entrance
The heart in an existence of its own
Of which another’s bosom is the zone.

And full of sentiments sublime as billows
Heaving between this world and worlds beyond,
Don Juan, when the midnight hour of pillows
Arrived, retired to his.’ . . .

In all these descriptions of a spiritual unworldly nature acting on the spiritual and unworldly part of his own nature, every one who ever knew Lady Byron intimately must have recognised the model from which he drew, and the experience from which he spoke, even though nothing was further from his mind than to pay this tribute to the woman he had injured, and though before these lines, which showed how truly he knew her real character, had come one stanza of ribald, vulgar caricature, designed as a slight to her:—

‘There was Miss Millpond, smooth as summer’s sea,
That usual paragon, an only daughter,
Who seemed the cream of equanimity
‘Till skimmed; and then there was some milk and water;
With a slight shade of blue, too, it might be,
Beneath the surface: but what did it matter?
Love’s riotous; but marriage should have quiet,
And, being consumptive, live on a milk diet.’

The result of Byron’s intimacy with Miss Milbanke and the enkindling of his nobler feelings was an offer of marriage, which she, though at the time deeply interested in him, declined with many expressions of friendship and interest.  In fact, she already loved him, but had that doubt of her power to be to him all that a wife should be, which would be likely to arise in a mind so sensitively constituted and so unworldly.  They, however, continued a correspondence as friends; on her part, the interest continually increased; on his, the transient rise of better feelings was choked and overgrown by the thorns of base unworthy passions.

From the height at which he might have been happy as the husband of a noble woman, he fell into the depths of a secret adulterous intrigue with a blood relation, so near in consanguinity, that discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion from civilised society.

From henceforth, this damning guilty secret became the ruling force in his life; holding him with a morbid fascination, yet filling him with remorse and anguish, and insane dread of detection.  Two years after his refusal by Miss Milbanke, his various friends, seeing that for some cause he was wretched, pressed marriage upon him.

Marriage has often been represented as the proper goal and terminus of a wild and dissipated career; and it has been supposed to be the appointed mission of good women to receive wandering prodigals, with all the rags and disgraces of their old life upon them, and put rings on their hands, and shoes on their feet, and introduce them, clothed and in their right minds, to an honourable career in society.

Marriage was, therefore, universally recommended to Lord Byron by his numerous friends and well-wishers; and so he determined to marry, and, in an hour of reckless desperation, sat down and wrote proposals to two ladies.  One was declined: the other, which was accepted, was to Miss Milbanke.  The world knows well that he had the gift of expression, and will not be surprised that he wrote a very beautiful letter, and that the woman who had already learned to love him fell at once into the snare.

Her answer was a frank, outspoken avowal of her love for him, giving herself to him heart and hand.  The good in Lord Byron was not so utterly obliterated that he could receive such a letter without emotion, or practise such unfairness on a loving, trusting heart without pangs of remorse.  He had sent the letter in mere recklessness; he had not seriously expected to be accepted; and the discovery of the treasure of affection which he had secured was like a vision of lost heaven to a soul in hell.

But, nevertheless, in his letters written about the engagement, there are sufficient evidences that his self-love was flattered at the preference accorded him by so superior a woman, and one who had been so much sought.  He mentions with an air of complacency that she has employed the last two years in refusing five or six of his acquaintance; that he had no idea she loved him, admitting that it was an old attachment on his part.  He dwells on her virtues with a sort of pride of ownership.  There is a sort of childish levity about the frankness of these letters, very characteristic of the man who skimmed over the deepest abysses with the lightest jests.  Before the world, and to his intimates, he was acting the part of the successful fiancé, conscious all the while of the deadly secret that lay cold at the bottom of his heart.

When he went to visit Miss Milbanke’s parents as her accepted lover, she was struck with his manner and appearance: she saw him moody and gloomy, evidently wrestling with dark and desperate thoughts, and anything but what a happy and accepted lover should be.  She sought an interview with him alone, and told him that she had observed that he was not happy in the engagement; and magnanimously added, that, if on review, he found he had been mistaken in the nature of his feelings, she would immediately release him, and they should remain only friends.

Overcome with the conflict of his feelings, Lord Byron fainted away.  Miss Milbanke was convinced that his heart must really be deeply involved in an attachment with reference to which he showed such strength of emotion, and she spoke no more of a dissolution of the engagement.

There is no reason to doubt that Byron was, as he relates in his ‘Dream,’ profoundly agonized and agitated when he stood before God’s altar with the trusting young creature whom he was leading to a fate so awfully tragic; yet it was not the memory of Mary Chaworth, but another guiltier and more damning memory, that overshadowed that hour.

The moment the carriage-doors were shut upon the bridegroom and the bride, the paroxysm of remorse and despair—unrepentant remorse and angry despair—broke forth upon her gentle head:—

‘You might have saved me from this, madam!  You had all in your own power when I offered myself to you first.  Then you might have made me what you pleased; but now you will find that you have married a devil!’

In Miss Martineau’s Sketches, recently published, is an account of the termination of this wedding-journey, which brought them to one of Lady Byron’s ancestral country seats, where they were to spend the honeymoon.

Miss Martineau says,—

‘At the altar she did not know that she was a sacrifice; but before sunset of that winter day she knew it, if a judgment may be formed from her face, and attitude of despair, when she alighted from the carriage on the afternoon of her marriage-day.  It was not the traces of tears which won the sympathy of the old butler who stood at the open door.  The bridegroom jumped out of the carriage and walked away.  The bride alighted, and came up the steps alone, with a countenance and frame agonized and listless with evident horror and despair.  The old servant longed to offer his arm to the young, lonely creature, as an assurance of sympathy and protection.  From this shock she certainly rallied, and soon.  The pecuniary difficulties of her new home were exactly what a devoted spirit like hers was fitted to encounter.  Her husband bore testimony, after the catastrophe, that a brighter being, a more sympathising and agreeable companion, never blessed any man’s home.  When he afterwards called her cold and mathematical, and over-pious, and so forth, it was when public opinion had gone against him, and when he had discovered that her fidelity and mercy, her silence and magnanimity, might be relied on, so that he was at full liberty to make his part good, as far as she was concerned.

‘Silent she was even to her own parents, whose feelings she magnanimously spared.  She did not act rashly in leaving him, though she had been most rash in marrying him.’

Not all at once did the full knowledge of the dreadful reality into which she had entered come upon the young wife.  She knew vaguely, from the wild avowals of the first hours of their marriage, that there was a dreadful secret of guilt; that Byron’s soul was torn with agonies of remorse, and that he had no love to give to her in return for a love which was ready to do and dare all for him.  Yet bravely she addressed herself to the task of soothing and pleasing and calming the man whom she had taken ‘for better or for worse.’

Young and gifted; with a peculiar air of refined and spiritual beauty; graceful in every movement; possessed of exquisite taste; a perfect companion to his mind in all the higher walks of literary culture; and with that infinite pliability to all his varying, capricious moods which true love alone can give; bearing in her hand a princely fortune, which, with a woman’s uncalculating generosity, was thrown at his feet,—there is no wonder that she might feel for a while as if she could enter the lists with the very Devil himself, and fight with a woman’s weapons for the heart of her husband.

There are indications scattered through the letters of Lord Byron, which, though brief indeed, showed that his young wife was making every effort to accommodate herself to him, and to give him a cheerful home.  One of the poems that he sends to his publisher about this time, he speaks of as being copied by her.  He had always the highest regard for her literary judgments and opinions; and this little incident shows that she was already associating herself in a wifely fashion with his aims as an author.

The poem copied by her, however, has a sad meaning, which she afterwards learned to understand only too well:—

‘There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling’s dull decay:
’Tis not on youth’s smooth cheek the blush alone that fades so fast;