Lady Byron Vindicated

CHAPTER IV.  RESULTS AFTER LORD BYRON’S DEATH

At the time of Lord Byron’s death, the English public had been so skilfully manipulated by the Byron propaganda, that the sympathy of the whole world was with him.  A tide of emotion was now aroused in England by his early death—dying in the cause of Greece and liberty.  There arose a general wail for him, as for a lost pleiad, not only in England, but over the whole world; a great rush of enthusiasm for his memory, to which the greatest literary men of England freely gave voice.  By general consent, Lady Byron seems to have been looked upon as the only cold-hearted unsympathetic person in this general mourning.

From that time the literary world of England apparently regarded Lady Byron as a woman to whom none of the decorums, nor courtesies of ordinary womanhood, nor even the consideration belonging to common humanity, were due.

‘She that is a widow indeed, and desolate,’ has been regarded in all Christian countries as an object made sacred by the touch of God’s afflicting hand, sacred in her very helplessness; and the old Hebrew Scriptures give to the Supreme Father no dearer title than ‘the widow’s God.’  But, on Lord Byron’s death, men not devoid of tenderness, men otherwise generous and of fine feeling, acquiesced in insults to his widow with an obtuseness that seems, on review, quite incredible.

Lady Byron was not only a widow, but an orphan.  She had no sister for confidante; no father and mother to whom to go in her sorrows—sorrows so much deeper and darker to her than they could be to any other human being.  She had neither son nor brother to uphold and protect her.  On all hands it was acknowledged that, so far, there was no fault to be found in her but her utter silence.  Her life was confessed to be pure, useful, charitable; and yet, in this time of her sorrow, the writers of England issued article upon article not only devoid of delicacy, but apparently injurious and insulting towards her, with a blind unconsciousness which seems astonishing.

One of the greatest literary powers of that time was the ‘Blackwood:’ the reigning monarch on that literary throne was Wilson, the lion-hearted, the brave, generous, tender poet, and, with some sad exceptions, the noble man.  But Wilson had believed the story of Byron, and, by his very generosity and tenderness and pity, was betrayed into injustice.

In ‘The Noctes’ of November 1824 there is a conversation of the Noctes Club, in which North says, ‘Byron and I knew each other pretty well; and I suppose there’s no harm in adding, that we appreciated each other pretty tolerably.  Did you ever see his letter to me?’

The footnote to this says, ‘This letter, which was PRINTED in Byron’s lifetime, was not published till 1830, when it appeared in Moore’s “Life of Byron.”  It is one of the most vigorous prose compositions in the language.  Byron had the highest opinion of Wilson’s genius and noble spirit.’

In the first place, with our present ideas of propriety and good taste, we should reckon it an indecorum to make the private affairs of a pure and good woman, whose circumstances under any point of view were trying, and who evidently shunned publicity, the subject of public discussion in magazines which were read all over the world.

Lady Byron, as they all knew, had on her hands a most delicate and onerous task, in bringing up an only daughter, necessarily inheriting peculiarities of genius and great sensitiveness; and the many mortifications and embarrassments which such intermeddling with her private matters must have given, certainly should have been considered by men with any pretensions to refinement or good feeling.

But the literati of England allowed her no consideration, no rest, no privacy.

In ‘The Noctes’ of November 1825 there is the record of a free conversation upon Lord and Lady Byron’s affairs, interlarded with exhortations to push the bottle, and remarks on whisky-toddy.  Medwin’s ‘Conversations with Lord Byron’ is discussed, which, we are told in a note, appeared a few months after the noble poet’s death.

There is a rather bold and free discussion of Lord Byron’s character—his fondness for gin and water, on which stimulus he wrote ‘Don Juan;’ and James Hogg says pleasantly to Mullion, ‘O Mullion! it’s a pity you and Byron could na ha’ been acquaint.  There would ha’ been brave sparring to see who could say the wildest and the dreadfullest things; for he had neither fear of man or woman, and would ha’ his joke or jeer, cost what it might.’  And then follows a specimen of one of his jokes with an actress, that, in indecency, certainly justifies the assertion.  From the other stories which follow, and the parenthesis that occurs frequently (‘Mind your glass, James, a little more!’), it seems evident that the party are progressing in their peculiar kind of civilisation.

It is in this same circle and paper that Lady Byron’s private affairs come up for discussion.  The discussion is thus elegantly introduced:—

Hogg.—‘Reach me the black bottle.  I say, Christopher, what, after all, is your opinion o’ Lord and Leddy Byron’s quarrel?  Do you yoursel’ take part with him, or with her?  I wad like to hear your real opinion.’

North.—‘Oh, dear!  Well, Hogg, since you will have it, I think Douglas Kinnard and Hobhouse are bound to tell us whether there be any truth, and how much, in this story about the declaration, signed by Sir Ralph’ [Milbanke].

The note here tells us that this refers to a statement that appeared in ‘Blackwood’ immediately after Byron’s death, to the effect that, previous to the formal separation from his wife, Byron required and obtained from Sir Ralph Milbanke, Lady Byron’s father, a statement to the effect that Lady Byron had no charge of moral delinquency to bring against him.18

North continues:—

‘And I think Lady Byron’s letter—the “Dearest Duck” one I mean—should really be forthcoming, if her ladyship’s friends wish to stand fair before the public.  At present we have nothing but loose talk of society to go upon; and certainly, if the things that are said be true, there must be thorough explanation from some quarter, or the tide will continue, as it has assuredly begun, to flow in a direction very opposite to what we were for years accustomed.  Sir, they must explain this business of the letter.  You have, of course, heard about the invitation it contained, the warm, affectionate invitation, to Kirkby Mallory’—

Hogg interposes,—

‘I dinna like to be interruptin’ ye, Mr. North; but I must inquire, Is the jug to stand still while ye’re going on at that rate?’

North—‘There, Porker!  These things are part and parcel of the chatter of every bookseller’s shop; à fortiori, of every drawing-room in May Fair.  Can the matter stop here?  Can a great man’s memory be permitted to incur damnation while these saving clauses are afloat anywhere uncontradicted?’

And from this the conversation branches off into strong, emphatic praise of Byron’s conduct in Greece during the last part of his life.

The silent widow is thus delicately and considerately reminded in the ‘Blackwood’ that she is the talk, not only over the whisky jug of the Noctes, but in every drawing-room in London; and that she must speak out and explain matters, or the whole world will set against her.

But she does not speak yet.  The public persecution, therefore, proceeds.  Medwin’s book being insufficient, another biographer is to be selected.  Now, the person in the Noctes Club who was held to have the most complete information of the Byron affairs, and was, on that account, first thought of by Murray to execute this very delicate task of writing a memoir which should include the most sacred domestic affairs of a noble lady and her orphan daughter, was Maginn.  Maginn, the author of the pleasant joke, that ‘man never reaches the apex of civilisation till he is too drunk to pronounce the word,’ was the first person in whose hands the ‘Autobiography,’ Memoirs, and Journals of Lord Byron were placed with this view.

The following note from Shelton Mackenzie, in the June number of ‘The Noctes,’ 1824, says,—

‘At that time, had he been so minded, Maginn (Odoherty) could have got up a popular Life of Byron as well as most men in England.  Immediately on the account of Byron’s death being received in London, John Murray proposed that Maginn should bring out Memoirs, Journals, and Letters of Lord Byron, and, with this intent, placed in his hand every line that he (Murray) possessed in Byron’s handwriting. . . . .  The strong desire of Byron’s family and executors that the “Autobiography” should be burned, to which desire Murray foolishly yielded, made such an hiatus in the materials, that Murray and Maginn agreed it would not answer to bring out the work then.  Eventually Moore executed it.’

The character of the times in which this work was to be undertaken will appear from the following note of Mackenzie’s to ‘The Noctes’ of August 1824, which we copy, with the author’s own Italics:—

‘In the “Blackwood” of July 1824 was a poetical epistle by the renowned Timothy Tickler to the editor of the “John Bull” magazine, on an article in his first number.  This article. . .  professed to be a portion of the veritable “Autobiography” of Byron which was burned, and was called “My Wedding Night.”  It appeared to relate in detail everything that occurred in the twenty-four hours immediately succeeding that in which Byron was married.  It had plenty of coarseness, and some to spare.  It went into particulars such as hitherto had been given only by Faublas; and it had, notwithstanding, many phrases and some facts which evidently did not belong to a mere fabricator.  Some years after, I compared this “Wedding Night” with what I had all assurance of having been transcribed from the actual manuscripts of Byron, and was persuaded that the magazine-writer must have had the actual statement before him, or have had a perusal of it.  The writer in “Blackwood” declared his conviction that it really was Byron’s own writing.’

The reader must remember that Lord Byron died April 1824; so that, according to this, his ‘Autobiography’ was made the means of this gross insult to his widow three months after his death.

If some powerful cause had not paralysed all feelings of gentlemanly honour, and of womanly delicacy, and of common humanity, towards Lady Byron, throughout the whole British nation, no editor would have dared to open a periodical with such an article; or, if he had, he would have been overwhelmed with a storm of popular indignation, which, like the fire upon Sodom, would have made a pillar of salt of him for a warning to all future generations.

‘Blackwood’ reproves the ‘John Bull’ in a poetical epistle, recognising the article as coming from Byron, and says to the author,—

We may not wonder that the ‘Autobiography’ was burned, as Murray says in a recent account, by a committee of Byron’s friends, including Hobhouse, his sister, and Murray himself.

Now, the ‘Blackwood’ of July 1824 thus declares its conviction that this outrage on every sentiment of human decency came from Lord Byron, and that his honour was lost.  Maginn does not undertake the memoir.  No memoir at all is undertaken; till finally Moore is selected, as, like Demetrius of old, a well-skilled gilder and ‘maker of silver shrines,’ though not for Diana.  To Moore is committed the task of doing his best for this battered image, in which even the worshippers recognise foul sulphurous cracks, but which they none the less stand ready to worship as a genuine article that ‘fell down from Jupiter.’

Moore was a man of no particular nicety as to moralities, but in that matter seems not very much below what this record shows his average associates to be.  He is so far superior to Maginn, that his vice is rose-coloured and refined.  He does not burst out with such heroic stanzas as Maginn’s frank invitation to Jeremy Bentham:—

Moore’s vice is cautious, soft, seductive, slippery, and covered at times with a thin, tremulous veil of religious sentimentalism.

In regard to Byron, he was an unscrupulous, committed partisan: he was as much bewitched by him as ever man has been by woman; and therefore to him, at last, the task of editing Byron’s ‘Memoirs’ was given.

This Byron, whom they all knew to be obscene beyond what even their most drunken tolerance could at first endure; this man, whose foul license spoke out what most men conceal from mere respect to the decent instincts of humanity; whose ‘honour was lost,’—was submitted to this careful manipulator, to be turned out a perfected idol for a world longing for an idol, as the Israelites longed for the calf in Horeb.

The image was to be invested with deceitful glories and shifting haloes,—admitted faults spoken of as peculiarities of sacred origin,—and the world given to understand that no common rule or measure could apply to such an undoubtedly divine production; and so the hearts of men were to be wrung with pity for his sorrows as the yearning pain of a god, and with anger at his injuries as sacrilege on the sacredness of genius, till they were ready to cast themselves at his feet, and adore.

Then he was to be set up on a pedestal, like Nebuchadnezzar’s image on the plains of Dura; and what time the world heard the sound of cornet, sackbut, and dulcimer, in his enchanting verse, they were to fall down and worship.

For Lady Byron, Moore had simply the respect that a commoner has for a lady of rank, and a good deal of the feeling that seems to underlie all English literature,—that it is no matter what becomes of the woman when the man’s story is to be told.  But, with all his faults, Moore was not a cruel man; and we cannot conceive such outrageous cruelty and ungentlemanly indelicacy towards an unoffending woman, as he shows in these ‘Memoirs,’ without referring them to Lord Byron’s own influence in making him an unscrupulous, committed partisan on his side.

So little pity, so little sympathy, did he suppose Lady Byron to be worthy of, that he laid before her, in the sight of all the world, selections from her husband’s letters and journals, in which the privacies of her courtship and married life were jested upon with a vulgar levity; letters filled, from the time of the act of separation, with a constant succession of sarcasms, stabs, stings, epigrams, and vindictive allusions to herself, bringing her into direct and insulting comparison with his various mistresses, and implying their superiority over her.  There, too, were gross attacks on her father and mother, as having been the instigators of the separation; and poor Lady Milbanke, in particular, is sometimes mentioned with epithets so offensive, that the editor prudently covers the terms with stars, as intending language too gross to be printed.