Lady Byron Vindicated

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  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

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.’

Here the writer proceeds to put together all the facts of Lady Byron’s case, just as an adverse lawyer would put them as against her, and for her husband.  The plea is made vigorously and ably, and with an air of indignant severity, as of an honest advocate who is thoroughly convinced that he is pleading the cause of a wronged man who has been ruined in name, shipwrecked in life, and driven to an early grave, by the arts of a bad woman,—a woman all the more horrible that her malice was disguised under the cloak of religion.

Having made an able statement of facts, adroitly leaving out ONE,²⁸ of which he could not have been ignorant had he studied the case carefully enough to know all the others, he proceeds to sum up against the criminal thus:—

‘We would deal tenderly with the memory of Lady Byron.  Few women have been juster objects of compassion.  It would seem as if Nature and Fortune had vied with each other which should be most lavish of her gifts, and yet that some malignant power had rendered all their bounty of no effect.  Rank, beauty, wealth, and mental powers of no common order, were hers; yet they were of no avail to secure common happiness.  The spoilt child of seclusion, restraint, and parental idolatry, a fate (alike evil for both) cast her into the arms of the spoilt child of genius, passion, and the world.  What real or fancied wrongs she suffered, we may never know; but those which she inflicted are sufficiently apparent.

‘It is said that there are some poisons so subtle that they will destroy life, and yet leave no trace of their action.  The murderer who uses them may escape the vengeance of the law; but he is not the less guilty.  So the slanderer who makes no charge; who deals in hints and insinuations: who knows melancholy facts he would not willingly divulge,—things too painful to state; who forbears, expresses pity, sometimes even affection, for his victim, shrugs his shoulders, looks with

 
   “The significant eye,
Which learns to lie with silence,—”
 

is far more guilty than he who tells the bold falsehood which may be met and answered, and who braves the punishment which must follow upon detection.

‘Lady Byron has been called

 
   “The moral Clytemnestra of her lord.”
 

The “moral Brinvilliers” would have been a truer designation.

‘The conclusion at which we arrive is, that there is no proof whatever that Lord Byron was guilty of any act that need have caused a separation, or prevented a re-union, and that the imputations upon him rest on the vaguest conjecture; that whatever real or fancied wrongs Lady Byron may have endured are shrouded in an impenetrable mist of her own creation,—a poisonous miasma in which she enveloped the character of her husband, raised by her breath, and which her breath only could have dispersed.

 
   “She dies and makes no sign.  O God! forgive her.”’
 

As we have been obliged to review accusations on Lady Byron founded on old Greek tragedy, so now we are forced to abridge a passage from a modern conversations-lexicon, that we may understand what sort of comparisons are deemed in good taste in a conservative English review, when speaking of ladies of rank in their graves.

Under the article ‘Brinvilliers,’ we find as follows:—

MARGUERITE D’AUBRAI, MARCHIONESS OF BRINVILLIERS.—The singular atrocity of this woman gives her a sort of infamous claim to notice.  She was born in Paris in 1651; being daughter of D’Aubrai, lieutenant-civil of Paris, who married her to the Marquis of Brinvilliers.  Although possessed of attractions to captivate lovers, she was for some time much attached to her husband, but at length became madly in love with a Gascon officer.  Her father imprisoned the officer in the Bastille; and, while there, he learned the art of compounding subtle and most mortal poisons; and, when he was released, he taught it to the lady, who exercised it with such success, that, in one year, her father, sister, and two brothers became her victims.  She professed the utmost tenderness for her victims, and nursed them assiduously.  On her father she is said to have made eight attempts before she succeeded.  She was very religious, and devoted to works of charity; and visited the hospitals a great deal, where it is said she tried her poisons on the sick.’

 

People have made loud outcries lately, both in America and England, about violating the repose of the dead.  We should like to know what they call this.  Is this, then, what they mean by respecting the dead?

Let any man imagine a leading review coming out with language equally brutal about his own mother, or any dear and revered friend.

Men of America, men of England, what do you think of this?

When Lady Byron was publicly branded with the names of the foulest ancient and foulest modern assassins, and Lord Byron’s mistress was publicly taken by the hand, and encouraged to go on and prosper in her slanders, by one of the oldest and most influential British reviews, what was said and what was done in England?

That is a question we should be glad to have answered.  Nothing was done that ever reached us across the water.

And why was nothing done?  Is this language of a kind to be passed over in silence?

Was it no offence to the house of Wentworth to attack the pure character of its late venerable head, and to brand her in her sacred grave with the name of one of the vilest of criminals?

Might there not properly have been an indignant protest of family solicitors against this insult to the person and character of the Baroness Wentworth?

If virtue went for nothing, benevolence for nothing, a long life of service to humanity for nothing, one would at least have thought, that, in aristocratic countries, rank might have had its rights to decent consideration, and its guardians to rebuke the violation of those rights.

We Americans understand little of the advantages of rank; but we did understand that it secured certain decorums to people, both while living and when in their graves.  From Lady Byron’s whole history, in life and in death, it would appear that we were mistaken.

What a life was hers!  Was ever a woman more evidently desirous of the delicate and secluded privileges of womanhood, of the sacredness of individual privacy?  Was ever a woman so rudely dragged forth, and exposed to the hardened, vulgar, and unfeeling gaze of mere curiosity?—her maiden secrets of love thrown open to be handled by roués; the sanctities of her marriage-chamber desecrated by leering satyrs; her parents and best friends traduced and slandered, till one indignant public protest was extorted from her, as by the rack,—a protest which seems yet to quiver in every word with the indignation of outraged womanly delicacy!

Then followed coarse blame and coarser comment,—blame for speaking at all, and blame for not speaking more.  One manly voice, raised for her in honourable protest, was silenced and overborne by the universal roar of ridicule and reprobation; and henceforth what refuge?  Only this remained: ‘Let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him as to a faithful Creator.’

Lady Byron turned to this refuge in silence, and filled up her life with a noble record of charities and humanities.  So pure was she, so childlike, so artless, so loving, that those who knew her best, feel, to this day, that a memorial of her is like the relic of a saint.  And could not all this preserve her grave from insult?  O England, England!

I speak in sorrow of heart to those who must have known, loved, and revered Lady Byron, and ask them, Of what were you thinking when you allowed a paper of so established literary rank as the ‘Blackwood,’ to present and earnestly recommend to our New World such a compendium of lies as the Guiccioli book?

Is the great English-speaking community, whose waves toss from Maine to California, and whose literature is yet to come back in a thousand voices to you, a thing to be so despised?

If, as the solicitors of the Wentworth family observe, you might be entitled to treat with silent contempt the slanders of a mistress against a wife, was it safe to treat with equal contempt the indorsement and recommendation of those slanders by one of your oldest and most powerful literary authorities?

No European magazine has ever had the weight and circulation in America that the ‘Blackwood’ has held.  In the days of my youth, when New England was a comparatively secluded section of the earth, the wit and genius of the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ were in the mouths of men and maidens, even in our most quiet mountain-towns.  There, years ago, we saw all Lady Byron’s private affairs discussed, and felt the weight of Christopher North’s decisions against her.  Shelton Mackenzie, in his American edition, speaks of the American circulation of ‘Blackwood’ being greater than that in England.²⁹  It was and is now reprinted monthly; and, besides that, ‘Littell’s Magazine’ reproduces all its striking articles, and they come with the weight of long established position.  From the very fact that it has long been considered the Tory organ, and the supporter of aristocratic orders, all its admissions against the character of individuals in the privileged classes have a double force.

When ‘Blackwood,’ therefore, boldly denounces a lady of high rank as a modern Brinvilliers, and no sensation is produced, and no remonstrance follows, what can people in the New World suppose, but that Lady Byron’s character was a point entirely given up; that her depravity was so well established and so fully conceded, that nothing was to be said, and that even the defenders of aristocracy were forced to admit it?

I have been blamed for speaking on this subject without consulting Lady Byron’s friends, trustees, and family.  More than ten years had elapsed since I had had any intercourse with England, and I knew none of them.  How was I to know that any of them were living?  I was astonished to learn, for the first time, by the solicitors’ letters, that there were trustees, who held in their hands all Lady Byron’s carefully prepared proofs and documents, by which this falsehood might immediately have been refuted.

If they had spoken, they might have saved all this confusion.  Even if bound by restrictions for a certain period of time, they still might have called on a Christian public to frown down such a cruel and indecent attack on the character of a noble lady who had been a benefactress to so many in England.  They might have stated that the means of wholly refuting the slanders of the ‘Blackwood’ were in their hands, and only delayed in coming forth from regard to the feelings of some in this generation.  Then might they not have announced her Life and Letters, that the public might have the same opportunity as themselves for knowing and judging Lady Byron by her own writings?

Had this been done, I had been most happy to have remained silent.  I have been astonished that any one should have supposed this speaking on my part to be anything less than it is,—the severest act of self-sacrifice that one friend can perform for another, and the most solemn and difficult tribute to justice that a human being can be called upon to render.

I have been informed that the course I have taken would be contrary to the wishes of my friend.  I think otherwise.  I know her strong sense of justice, and her reverence for truth.  Nothing ever moved her to speak to the public but an attack upon the honour of the dead.  In her statement, she says of her parents, ‘There is no other near relative to vindicate their memory from insult: I am therefore compelled to break the silence I had hoped always to have observed.’

If there was any near relative to vindicate Lady Byron’s memory, I had no evidence of the fact; and I considered the utter silence to be strong evidence to the contrary.  In all the storm of obloquy and rebuke that has raged in consequence of my speaking, I have had two unspeakable sources of joy; first, that they could not touch her; and, second, that they could not blind the all-seeing God.  It is worth being in darkness to see the stars.

It has been said that I have drawn on Lady Byron’s name greater obloquy than ever before.  I deny the charge.  Nothing fouler has been asserted of her than the charges in the ‘Blackwood,’ because nothing fouler could be asserted.  No satyr’s hoof has ever crushed this pearl deeper in the mire than the hoof of the ‘Blackwood,’ but none of them have defiled it or trodden it so deep that God cannot find it in the day ‘when he maketh up his jewels.’

I have another word, as an American, to say about the contempt shown to our great people in thus suffering the materials of history to be falsified to subserve the temporary purposes of family feeling in England.

Lord Byron belongs not properly either to the Byrons or the Wentworths.  He is not one of their family jewels to be locked up in their cases.  He belongs to the world for which he wrote, to which he appealed, and before which he dragged his reluctant, delicate wife to a publicity equal with his own: the world has, therefore, a right to judge him.

We Americans have been made accessories, after the fact, to every insult and injury that Lord Byron and the literary men of his day have heaped upon Lady Byron.  We have been betrayed into injustice and a complicity with villainy.  After Lady Byron had nobly lived down slanders in England, and died full of years and honours, the ‘Blackwood’ takes occasion to re-open the controversy by recommending a book full of slanders to a rising generation who knew nothing of the past.  What was the consequence in America?  My attention was first called to the result, not by reading the ‘Blackwood’ article, but by finding in a popular monthly magazine two long articles,—the one an enthusiastic recommendation of the Guiccioli book, and the other a lamentation over the burning of the Autobiography as a lost chapter in history.