"He did me the honour once to be a patron of mine, though a great friend of the _other branch of the house of Atreus_, and the Greek teacher, I believe, of my _moral_ Clytemnestra. I say _moral_ because it is true, and is so useful to the virtuous, that it enables them to do anything without the aid of an AEgistheus."
If Lord Byron wrote this poem merely in a momentary fit of spleen, why were there so many persons evidently quite familiar with his allusions to it? and why was it preserved in Murray"s hands? and why published after his death? That Byron was in the habit of reposing doc.u.ments in the hands of Murray, to be used as occasion offered, is evident from a part of a note written by him to Murray respecting some verses so intrusted: "Pray let not these _versiculi_ go forth with my name except _to the initiated_." {22b}
Murray, in publishing this attack on his wife after Lord Byron"s death, showed that he believed in it, and, so believing, deemed Lady Byron a woman whose widowed state deserved neither sympathy nor delicacy of treatment. At a time when every sentiment in the heart of the most deeply wronged woman would forbid her appearing to justify herself from such cruel slander of a dead husband, an honest, kind-hearted, worthy Englishman actually thought it right and proper to give these lines to her eyes and the eyes of all the reading world. Nothing can show more plainly what this poem was written for, and how thoroughly it did its work! Considering Byron as a wronged man, Murray thought he was contributing his mite towards doing him justice. His editor prefaced the whole set of "Domestic Pieces" with the following statements:--
"They all refer to the unhappy separation, of which the precise causes are still a mystery, and which he declared to the last were never disclosed to himself. He admitted that pecuniary embarra.s.sments, disordered health, and dislike to family restraints had aggravated his naturally violent temper, and driven him to excesses. He suspected that his mother-in-law had fomented the discord,--which Lady Byron denies,--and that more was due to the malignant offices of a female dependant, who is the subject of the bitterly satirical sketch.
"To these general statements can only be added the still vaguer allegations of Lady Byron, that she conceived his conduct to be the result of insanity,--that, the physician p.r.o.nouncing him responsible for his actions, she could submit to them no longer, and that Dr.
Lushington, her legal adviser, agreed that a reconciliation was neither proper nor possible. _No weight can be attached to the opinions of an opposing counsel upon accusations made by one party behind the back of the other, who urgently demanded and was pertinaciously refused the least opportunity of denial or defence_. He rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but _consented when threatened with a suit in Doctors" Commons._" {23}
Neither John Murray nor any of Byron"s partisans seem to have pondered the admission in these last words.
Here, as appears, was a woman, driven to the last despair, standing with her child in her arms, asking from English laws protection for herself and child against her husband.
She had appealed to the first counsel in England, and was acting under their direction.
Two of the greatest lawyers in England have p.r.o.nounced that there has been such a cause of offence on his part that a return to him is neither proper nor possible, and that no alternative remains to her but separation or divorce.
He asks her to state her charges against him. She, making answer under advice of her counsel, says, "That if he _insists_ on the specifications, he must receive them in open court in a suit for divorce."
What, now, ought to have been the conduct of any brave, honest man, who believed that his wife was taking advantage of her reputation for virtue to turn every one against him, who saw that she had turned on her side even the lawyer he sought to retain on his; {24} that she was an unscrupulous woman, who acquiesced in every and any thing to gain her ends, while he stood before the public, as he says, "accused of every monstrous vice, by public rumour or private rancour"? When she, under advice of her lawyers, made the alternative legal _separation_ or open investigation in court for divorce, what did he do?
HE SIGNED THE ACT OF SEPARATION AND LEFT ENGLAND.
Now, let any man who knows the legal mind of England,--let any lawyer who knows the character of Sir Samuel Romilly and Dr. Lushington, ask whether _they_ were the men to take a case into court for a woman that had no _evidence_ but her own statements and impressions? Were _they_ men to go to trial without proofs? Did they not know that there were artful, hysterical women in the world, and would _they_, of all people, be the men to take a woman"s story on her own side, and advise her in the last issue to bring it into open court, without legal proof of the strongest kind? Now, as long as Sir Samuel Romilly lived, this statement of Byron"s--that he was condemned unheard, and had no chance of knowing whereof he _was accused--never appeared in public_.
It, however, was most actively circulated in _private_. That Byron was in the habit of intrusting to different confidants articles of various kinds to be shown to different circles as they could bear them, we have already shown. We have recently come upon another instance of this kind.
In the late eagerness to exculpate Byron, a new doc.u.ment has turned up, of which Mr. Murray, it appears, had never heard when, after Byron"s death, he published in the preface to his "Domestic Pieces" the sentence: "_He rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but consented when threatened with a suit in Doctors" Commons_." It appears that, up to 1853, neither John Murray senior, nor the son who now fills his place, had taken any notice of this newly found doc.u.ment, which we are now informed was drawn up by Lord Byron in August 1817, while Mr. Hobhouse was staying with him at La Mira, near Venice, given to Mr. Matthew Gregory Lewis, _for circulation among friends in England_, found in Mr.
Lewis"s papers after his death, and _now_ in the possession of Mr.
Murray." Here it is:--
"It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared "their lips to be sealed up" on the cause of the separation between her and myself. If their lips are sealed up, they are not sealed up by me, and the greatest favour _they_ can confer upon me will be to open them. From the first hour in which I was apprised of the intentions of the Noel family to the last communication between Lady Byron and myself in the character of wife and husband (a period of some months), I called repeatedly and in vain for a statement of their or her charges, and it was chiefly in consequence of Lady Byron"s claiming (in a letter still existing) a promise on my part to consent to a separation, if such was _really_ her wish, that I consented at all; this claim, and the exasperating and inexpiable manner in which their object was pursued, which rendered it next to an impossibility that two persons so divided could ever be reunited, induced me reluctantly then, and repentantly still, to sign the deed, which I shall be happy--most happy--to cancel, and go before any tribunal which may discuss the business in the most public manner.
"Mr. Hobhouse made this proposition on my part, viz. to abrogate all prior intentions--and go into court--the very day before the separation was signed, and it was declined by the other party, as also the publication of the correspondence during the previous discussion.
Those propositions I beg here to repeat, and to call upon her and hers to say their worst, pledging myself to meet their allegations,--whatever they may be,--and only too happy to be informed at last of their real nature.
"BYRON."
"August 9, 1817.
"P.S.--I have been, and am now, utterly ignorant of what description her allegations, charges, or whatever name they may have a.s.sumed, are; and am as little aware for what purpose they have been kept back,--unless it was to sanction the most infamous calumnies by silence.
"BYRON."
"La Mira, near Venice."
It appears the circulation of this doc.u.ment must have been _very private_, since Moore, not _over_-delicate towards Lady Byron, did not think fit to print it; since John Murray neglected it, and since it has come out at this late hour for the first time.
If Lord Byron really desired Lady Byron and her legal counsel to understand the facts herein stated, and was willing at all hazards to bring on an open examination, why was this _privately_ circulated? Why not issued as a card in the London papers? Is it likely that Mr. Matthew Gregory Lewis, and a chosen band of friends acting as a committee, requested an audience with Lady Byron, Sir Samuel Romilly, and Dr.
Lushington, and formally presented this cartel of defiance?
We incline to think not. We incline to think that this small serpent, in company with many others of like kind, crawled secretly and privately around, and when it found a good chance, bit an honest Briton, whose blood was thenceforth poisoned by an undetected falsehood.
The reader now may turn to the letters that Mr. Moore has thought fit to give us of this stay at La Mira, beginning with Letter 286, dated July 1, 1817, {28a} where he says: "I have been working up my impressions into a _Fourth_ Canto of Childe Harold," and also "Mr. Lewis is in Venice. I am going up to stay a week with him there."
Next, under date La Mira, Venice, July 10, {28b} he says, "Monk Lewis is here; how pleasant!"
Next, under date July 20, 1817, to Mr. Murray: "I write to give you notice that I have _completed the fourth and ultimate canto of Childe Harold_. . . . It is yet to be copied and polished, and the notes are to come."
Under date of La Mira, August 7, 1817, he records that the new canto is one hundred and thirty stanzas in length, and talks about the price for it. He is now ready to launch it on the world; and, as now appears, on August 9, 1817, _two days after_, he wrote the doc.u.ment above cited, and put it into the hands of Mr. Lewis, as we are informed, "for circulation among friends in England."
The reason of this may now be evident. Having prepared a suitable number of those whom he calls in his notes to Murray "the initiated," by private doc.u.ments and statements, he is now prepared to publish his accusations against his wife, and the story of his wrongs, in a great immortal poem, which shall have a band of initiated interpreters, shall be read through the civilised world, and stand to accuse her after his death.
In the Fourth Canto of "Childe Harold," with all his own overwhelming power of language, he sets forth his cause as against the silent woman who all this time had been making no party, and telling no story, and whom the world would therefore conclude to be silent because she had no answer to make. I remember well the time when this poetry, so resounding in its music, so mournful, so apparently generous, filled my heart with a vague anguish of sorrow for the sufferer, and of indignation at the cold insensibility that had maddened him. Thousands have felt the power of this great poem, which stands, and must stand to all time, a monument of what sacred and solemn powers G.o.d gave to this wicked man, and how vilely he abused this power as a weapon to slay the innocent.
It is among the ruins of ancient Rome that his voice breaks forth in solemn imprecation:--
"O Time, thou beautifier of the dead, Adorner of the ruin, comforter, And only healer when the heart hath bled!-- Time, the corrector when our judgments err, The test of truth, love,--sole philosopher, For all besides are sophists,--from thy shrift That never loses, though it doth defer!-- Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift My hands and heart and eyes, and claim of thee a gift.
"If thou hast ever seen me too elate, Hear me not; but if calmly I have borne Good, and reserved my pride against the hate Which shall not whelm me, _let me not have worn This iron in my soul in vain, shall_ THEY _not mourn_?
And thou who never yet of human wrong Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis, Here where the ancients paid their worship long, Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss, And round Orestes bid them howl and hiss _For that unnatural retribution,--just Had it but come from hands less near_,--in this Thy former realm I call thee from the dust.
Dost thou not hear, my heart? awake thou shalt and must!
It is not that I may not have incurred For my ancestral faults and mine, the wound Wherewith I bleed withal, and had it been conferred With a just weapon it had flowed unbound, But now my blood shall not sink in the ground.
"But in this page a record will I seek; Not in the air shall these my words disperse, Though I be ashes,--a far hour shall wreak The deep prophetic fulness of this verse, And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse.
That curse shall be forgiveness. Have I not,-- Hear me, my Mother Earth! behold it, Heaven,-- Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?
Have I not suffered things to be forgiven?
Have I not had my brain seared, my heart riven, Hopes sapped, name blighted, life"s life lied away, And only not to desperation driven, Because not altogether of such clay As rots into the soul of those whom I survey?
"From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy, Have I not seen what human things could do,-- From the loud roar of foaming calumny, To the small whispers of the paltry few, And subtler venom of the reptile crew, _The Ja.n.u.s glance of whose significant eye, Learning to lie with silence, would seem true, And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh, Deal round to happy fools its speechless obloquy_?" {31}
The reader will please notice that the lines in italics are almost, word for word, a repet.i.tion of the lines in italics in the former poem on his wife, where he speaks of a _significant eye_ that has _learned to lie in silence_, and were evidently meant to apply to Lady Byron and her small circle of confidential friends.
Before this, in the Third Canto of "Childe Harold," he had claimed the sympathy of the world, as a loving father, deprived by a severe fate of the solace and society of his only child:--
"My daughter,--with this name my song began,-- My daughter,--with this name my song shall end,-- I see thee not and hear thee not, but none Can be so wrapped in thee; thou art the friend To whom the shadows of far years extend.
"To aid thy mind"s developments, to watch The dawn of little joys, to sit and see Almost thy very growth, to view thee catch Knowledge of objects,--wonders yet to thee,-- And print on thy soft cheek a parent"s kiss;-- This it should seem was not reserved for me.
Yet this was in my nature,--as it is, I know not what there is, yet something like to this.