exasperation under the miseries of his embarrassments, the colder she remained. She never forgot herself, while he always did. His bursts of passion rose to such a height, that they almost equalled those of his mother, and apprehensions of insanity were by no means unjustified. He often spoke as if he dreaded the possibility of madness, and he afterwards admitted that he was not surprised that he was considered to be insane.' Among the sixteen points submitted by his wife to the judgment of the medical men in the investigation which she promoted, this was understood to be one-that he had been thrown into convulsions by Kean's performance of the part of Sir Giles Overreach, just as his mother had once been by the acting of Mrs. Siddons. On another occasion he was said to have thrown his watch, which he had worn from his earliest boyhood and throughout his pilgrimage, into the fire-place and dashed it to pieces with the poker. It is evident that his constant custom of having loaded firearms near him must, in such a state of mind, justly have caused alarm. He actually once discharged a pistol in his wife's bedroom and in her presence-a fact which is admitted even by the Countess Guiccioli.2 If this rested merely on the statement of Lady Byron, we should assign no more weight to it than to the account she gave of the outrageous language which he used to her. Thus on returning home at night, he told her so she informed Lady Anne Barnard-that he came from the haunts of vice; and to the same lady she averred, that he frightened her during her confinement by a false report that her mother was dead; and that he exclaimed, when 1 Compare the Stanzas to Augusta— 2 ii. 592. 'When all around grew dark and drear he first saw his infant in the cradle, 'Oh what an instrument of torture have I received in thee!' On these and similar points Lady Byron poured out her heart, in the year 1818, both in conversation and by letters, to her old friend Lady Anne Barnard, from whose private family memoirs Lord Lindsay has published the above and other passages. It is, however, only too probable that misunderstanding, exaggeration, and perhaps mortified feelings on Lady Byron's part, colour all these statements, as well as the story of Byron's throwing off the mask on the day of his marriage, to which allusion has already been made; we do not, however, mean to deny that such like acts of bitterness, or bad jokes practised against his wife, may with too much justice be laid to his charge. We come, lastly, to one of the most important elements in all these proceedings-the interference of the public. If any relation in life should be excluded from publicity, undoubtedly marriage is that relation; certainly the public has neither the right to drag its concerns before its tribunal, nor does it possess the means to pass a fitting judgment upon them. Byron indeed, loving as he did to lay bare the secrets of his home and heart to the inspection of the world, had no right to be surprised, when his love affairs and his marriage became-at first, indeed, contrary to his intention-the subject of public discussion. Society treated him here as capriciously as his mother formerly had done; after first irrationally pampering and caressing him, with equal want of reason it overwhelmed him with insults and revilings; from the throne of glory upon which society had placed him, it dragged him down to place him in the pillory, and to brand him as a criminal. Byron had forfeited the good graces of orthodoxy, both religious and political; he had already inwardly broken with it, and 1 The Times, September 3, 1869, it couldnot be long ere the rupture should be manifested. He who maintained views so heretical, both in politics and religion, as Byron had professed in Childe Harold' and elsewhere, was readily credited with every offence. It must have been some great crime which drove his pious, patient, virtuous wife from him. The frenzy of public opinion against him seems alone explicable by the widely disseminated belief in the commission of incest. Orthodox society found a certain satisfaction in working itself up into a holy indignation; a battle pro aris et focis had to be fought against an outlaw. The world at the same time ceased to think and examine; whatever was asserted was taken up and repeated, and those who most loudly vociferated their accusations knew so little of the facts of the case, that they could not possibly form a true judgment of the guilt or innocence of the persons concerned. Above all, it would have been well, if Society had not forgotten, that they who dwell in glass houses should not be the first to throw stones. The upper classes were not a whit more pure than Byron; they were so far worse, that to their immorality they added hypocrisy. In the descending scale from those classes, moral corruption might perhaps decrease, but in the same ratio blind fanaticism increased and flourished. All classes, however, were on a par in this respect, that they all were seized with a burning fever of indignation against Byron; Byron became, in a word, the scape-goat which English society drives forth from time to time into the wilderness laden with the crimes and curses of the multitude.' His friend Shelley was another scape-goat of the same kind. When Byron appeared in the Upper House, no one greeted him but Lord Holland; even his acquaintances shunned him, so that after a few minutes he left the House, never to enter 1 Compare Disraeli in Venetia; Macaulay in his famous article. it again. He did not venture to appear at parties or in the theatre: even in the streets he was insulted and hissed by the mob.' Byron, though touched and wounded as he had never been before, did not, however, lose the elasticity of his spirit. But his position in society was completely undermined and destroyed, his pride profoundly mortified, and his heart assailed with the most conflicting feelings. Had the separation been his own work, he would doubtless have more easily accommodated himself to it; but that it should have been initiated by his wife, and that he should have been forced to accede to it, was a heavy blow to his self-love, which had grown accustomed to success. Yet there were hours when he felt drawn towards his wife, and when for her sake he would readily have sacrificed his pride. The two celebrated poems 2 Fare thee well,' and 'A Sketch,' enable us to look into the very depths of his shattered feelings. The latter, a more than bitter satire on the mischief-maker Mrs. Clermont, could not fail to add intensity to the general indignation against him; it was, in truth, an unworthy abuse of poetry, which here was perverted to the purposes of private revenge. On the famous Farewell' opinions were divided. Some pro nounced it an outpouring of the deepest love, which no woman with a heart could resist; Madame de Staël, when she read it, is said to have uttered the saying which has become notorious: How gladly would I have been unhappy in Lady Byron's place.' Others, again, doubted the genuineness of the feelings expressed in it, and Moore3 himself confesses that, at first, he could not altogether 1 [This is positively denied by Hobhouse: Lord Byron was never hissed as he went to the House of Lords; nor insulted in the streets.'— West Review, January, 1825, p. 25.] 2 They were written in March 1816. Life of Byron, iii. 230. stifle his doubts; but when he afterwards read in Byron's 'Memoirs' the account of the origin of this poem, he changed his opinion, and was convinced of its truthfulness. 'He there described, and in a manner whose sincerity there was no doubting, the swell of tender recollections under the influence of which, as he sat one night musing in his study, these stanzas were produced—the tears, as he said, falling fast over the paper as he wrote them.' The poem is evidently the product of impulse; Byron really felt at the time what he wrote, but what he then felt in the silent hours of that night, he did not continue to feel throughout life: his frame of mind, if real, was evanescent. But the transient feelings of that moment have been enshrined by the poet in a form which the world will not willingly let die: and the force of his genius is seen in giving such touching expression to the perennial sentiments of the human heart. Moore, who could not but disapprove of the publication of these two poems, exonerates Byron, so far, by explaining that their publication was a breach of confidence in a friend, to whom Byron had shown them. But then he should have publicly protested against their being given to the world; whereas, the manner in which the 'Poems on his Domestic Circumstances,' accompanied by a sketch of his life, were suppressed, is far from being satisfactory. The only apology that can be made for him, is, that at this crisis, he was stung to the quick. At a later period, however, it must be admitted, that he frequently made his domestic misery the topic of conversation, in an utterly unworthy manner and in violation of all good taste, for which he was once taken to task by Lady Blessington in some very telling verses. Thus, too, he deliberately dated 1 Life of Byron, iii. 20. 2 Conversations with Lord Byron, p. 46. |