Lady Byron Vindicated

But the tender bloom of heart is gone e’er youth itself be past.
Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
Are driven o’er the shoals of guilt, or ocean of excess:
The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again.’

Only a few days before she left him for ever, Lord Byron sent Murray manuscripts, in Lady Byron’s handwriting, of the ‘Siege of Corinth,’ and ‘Parisina,’ and wrote,—

‘I am very glad that the handwriting was a favourable omen of the morale of the piece: but you must not trust to that; for my copyist would write out anything I desired, in all the ignorance of innocence.’

There were lucid intervals in which Lord Byron felt the charm of his wife’s mind, and the strength of her powers.  ‘Bell, you could be a poet too, if you only thought so,’ he would say.  There were summer-hours in her stormy life, the memory of which never left her, when Byron was as gentle and tender as he was beautiful; when he seemed to be possessed by a good angel: and then for a little time all the ideal possibilities of his nature stood revealed.

The most dreadful men to live with are those who thus alternate between angel and devil.  The buds of hope and love called out by a day or two of sunshine are frozen again and again, till the tree is killed.

But there came an hour of revelation,—an hour when, in a manner which left no kind of room for doubt, Lady Byron saw the full depth of the abyss of infamy which her marriage was expected to cover, and understood that she was expected to be the cloak and the accomplice of this infamy.

Many women would have been utterly crushed by such a disclosure; some would have fled from him immediately, and exposed and denounced the crime.  Lady Byron did neither.  When all the hope of womanhood died out of her heart, there arose within her, stronger, purer, and brighter, that immortal kind of love such as God feels for the sinner,—the love of which Jesus spoke, and which holds the one wanderer of more account than the ninety and nine that went not astray.  She would neither leave her husband nor betray him, nor yet would she for one moment justify his sin; and hence came two years of convulsive struggle, in which sometimes, for a while, the good angel seemed to gain ground, and then the evil one returned with sevenfold vehemence.

Lord Byron argued his case with himself and with her with all the sophistries of his powerful mind.  He repudiated Christianity as authority; asserted the right of every human being to follow out what he called ‘the impulses of nature.’  Subsequently he introduced into one of his dramas the reasoning by which he justified himself in incest.

In the drama of ‘Cain,’ Adah, the sister and the wife of Cain, thus addresses him:—

‘Cain, walk not with this spirit.
Bear with what we have borne, and love me: I
Love thee.

Lucifer.  More than thy mother and thy sire?

Adah.  I do.  Is that a sin, too?

Lucifer.                        No, not yet:
It one day will be in your children.

Adah.                           What!
Must not my daughter love her brother Enoch?

Lucifer.  Not as thou lovest Cain.

Adah.                           O my God!
Shall they not love, and bring forth things that love
Out of their love?  Have they not drawn their milk
Out of this bosom?  Was not he, their father,
Born of the same sole womb, in the same hour
With me?  Did we not love each other, and,
In multiplying our being, multiply
Things which will love each other as we love
Them?  And as I love thee, my Cain, go not
Forth with this spirit: he is not of ours.

Lucifer.  The sin I speak of is not of my making
And cannot be a sin in you, whate’er
It seems in those who will replace ye in
Mortality.

Adah.  What is the sin which is not
Sin in itself?  Can circumstance make sin
Of virtue?  If it doth, we are the slaves
Of’—

Lady Byron, though slight and almost infantine in her bodily presence, had the soul, not only of an angelic woman, but of a strong reasoning man.  It was the writer’s lot to know her at a period when she formed the personal acquaintance of many of the very first minds of England; but, among all with whom this experience brought her in connection, there was none who impressed her so strongly as Lady Byron.  There was an almost supernatural power of moral divination, a grasp of the very highest and most comprehensive things, that made her lightest opinions singularly impressive.  No doubt, this result was wrought out in a great degree from the anguish and conflict of these two years, when, with no one to help or counsel her but Almighty God, she wrestled and struggled with fiends of darkness for the redemption of her husband’s soul.

She followed him through all his sophistical reasonings with a keener reason.  She besought and implored, in the name of his better nature, and by all the glorious things that he was capable of being and doing; and she had just power enough to convulse and shake and agonise, but not power enough to subdue.

One of the first of living writers, in the novel of ‘Romola,’ has given, in her masterly sketch of the character of Tito, the whole history of the conflict of a woman like Lady Byron with a nature like that of her husband.  She has described a being full of fascinations and sweetnesses, full of generosities and of good-natured impulses; a nature that could not bear to give pain, or to see it in others, but entirely destitute of any firm moral principle; she shows how such a being, merely by yielding step by step to the impulses of passion, and disregarding the claims of truth and right, becomes involved in a fatality of evil, in which deceit, crime, and cruelty are a necessity, forcing him to persist in the basest ingratitude to the father who has done all for him, and hard-hearted treachery to the high-minded wife who has given herself to him wholly.

There are few scenes in literature more fearfully tragic than the one between Romola and Tito, when he finally discovers that she knows him fully, and can be deceived by him no more.  Some such hour always must come for strong decided natures irrevocably pledged—one to the service of good, and the other to the slavery of evil.  The demoniac cried out, ‘What have I to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth?  Art thou come to torment me before the time?’  The presence of all-pitying purity and love was a torture to the soul possessed by the demon of evil.

These two years in which Lady Byron was with all her soul struggling to bring her husband back to his better self were a series of passionate convulsions.

During this time, such was the disordered and desperate state of his worldly affairs, that there were ten executions for debt levied on their family establishment; and it was Lady Byron’s fortune each time which settled the account.

Toward the last, she and her husband saw less and less of each other; and he came more and more decidedly under evil influences, and seemed to acquire a sort of hatred of her.

Lady Byron once said significantly to a friend who spoke of some causeless dislike in another, ‘My dear, I have known people to be hated for no other reason than because they impersonated conscience.’

The biographers of Lord Byron, and all his apologists, are careful to narrate how sweet and amiable and obliging he was to everybody who approached him; and the saying of Fletcher, his man-servant, that ‘anybody could do anything with my Lord, except my Lady,’ has often been quoted.

The reason of all this will now be evident.  ‘My Lady’ was the only one, fully understanding the deep and dreadful secrets of his life, who had the courage resolutely and persistently and inflexibly to plant herself in his way, and insist upon it, that, if he went to destruction, it should be in spite of her best efforts.

He had tried his strength with her fully.  The first attempt had been to make her an accomplice by sophistry; by destroying her faith in Christianity, and confusing her sense of right and wrong, to bring her into the ranks of those convenient women who regard the marriage-tie only as a friendly alliance to cover licence on both sides.

When her husband described to her the Continental latitude (the good-humoured marriage, in which complaisant couples mutually agreed to form the cloak for each other’s infidelities), and gave her to understand that in this way alone she could have a peaceful and friendly life with him, she answered him simply, ‘I am too truly your friend to do this.’

When Lord Byron found that he had to do with one who would not yield, who knew him fully, who could not be blinded and could not be deceived, he determined to rid himself of her altogether.

It was when the state of affairs between herself and her husband seemed darkest and most hopeless, that the only child of this union was born.  Lord Byron’s treatment of his wife during the sensitive period that preceded the birth of this child, and during her confinement, was marked by paroxysms of unmanly brutality, for which the only possible charity on her part was the supposition of insanity.  Moore sheds a significant light on this period, by telling us that, about this time, Byron was often drunk, day after day, with Sheridan.  There had been insanity in the family; and this was the plea which Lady Byron’s love put in for him.  She regarded him as, if not insane, at least so nearly approaching the boundaries of insanity as to be a subject of forbearance and tender pity; and she loved him with that love resembling a mother’s, which good wives often feel when they have lost all faith in their husband’s principles, and all hopes of their affections.  Still, she was in heart and soul his best friend; true to him with a truth which he himself could not shake.

In the verses addressed to his daughter, Lord Byron speaks of her as

‘The child of love, though born in bitterness,
And nurtured in convulsion.’

A day or two after the birth of this child, Lord Byron came suddenly into Lady Byron’s room, and told her that her mother was dead.  It was an utter falsehood; but it was only one of the many nameless injuries and cruelties by which he expressed his hatred of her.  A short time after her confinement, she was informed by him, in a note, that, as soon as she was able to travel, she must go; that he could not and would not longer have her about him; and, when her child was only five weeks old, he carried this threat of expulsion into effect.

Here we will insert briefly Lady Byron’s own account (the only one she ever gave to the public) of this separation.  The circumstances under which this brief story was written are affecting.

Lord Byron was dead.  The whole account between him and her was closed for ever in this world.  Moore’s ‘Life’ had been prepared, containing simply and solely Lord Byron’s own version of their story.  Moore sent this version to Lady Byron, and requested to know if she had any remarks to make upon it.  In reply, she sent a brief statement to him,—the first and only one that had come from her during all the years of the separation, and which appears to have mainly for its object the exculpation of her father and mother from the charge, made by the poet, of being the instigators of the separation.

In this letter, she says, with regard to their separation,—