'I have dined regularly to-day, for the first time since Sunday last; this being Sabbath too,—all the rest, tea and dry biscuits, sixper diem. I wish to God I had not dined, now! It kills me with heaviness, stupor, and horrible dreams; and yet it was but apint of bucellas, and fish. Meat I never touch, nor much vegetable diet. I wish I were in the country, to take exercise, instead of being obliged tocoolby abstinence, in lieu of it. I should not so much mind a little accession of flesh: my bones can well bear it. But the worst is, the Devil always came with it, till I starved him out; and I willnotbe the slave ofanyappetite. If I do err, it shall be my heart, at least, that heralds the way. O my head! how it aches! The horrors of digestion! I wonder how Bonaparte's dinner agrees with him.'—Moore's Life, vol. ii. p. 264.
'I have dined regularly to-day, for the first time since Sunday last; this being Sabbath too,—all the rest, tea and dry biscuits, sixper diem. I wish to God I had not dined, now! It kills me with heaviness, stupor, and horrible dreams; and yet it was but apint of bucellas, and fish. Meat I never touch, nor much vegetable diet. I wish I were in the country, to take exercise, instead of being obliged tocoolby abstinence, in lieu of it. I should not so much mind a little accession of flesh: my bones can well bear it. But the worst is, the Devil always came with it, till I starved him out; and I willnotbe the slave ofanyappetite. If I do err, it shall be my heart, at least, that heralds the way. O my head! how it aches! The horrors of digestion! I wonder how Bonaparte's dinner agrees with him.'—Moore's Life, vol. ii. p. 264.
From all the contemporary history and literature of the times, therefore, we have reason to believe that Lord Byron spoke the exact truth when he said to Medwin,—
'My own master at an age when I most required a guide, left to the dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels, in 1809, with a joyless indifference to the world and all that was before me.'—Medwin's Conversations, p. 42.
'My own master at an age when I most required a guide, left to the dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels, in 1809, with a joyless indifference to the world and all that was before me.'—Medwin's Conversations, p. 42.
Utter prostration of the whole physical man from intemperate excess, the deadness to temptation which comes from utter exhaustion, was his condition, according to himself and Moore, when he first left England, at twenty-one years of age.
In considering his subsequent history, we are to take into account that it was upon the brain and nerve-power, thus exhausted by early excess, that the draughts of sudden and rapid literary composition began to be made. There was something unnatural and unhealthy in the rapidity, clearness, and vigour with which hisvarious works followed each other. Subsequently to the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold,' 'The Bride of Abydos,' 'The Corsair,' 'The Giaour,' 'Lara,' 'Parisina,' and 'The Siege of Corinth,' all followed close upon each other, in a space of less than three years, and those the three most critical years of his life. 'The Bride of Abydos' came out in the autumn of 1813, and was written in a week; and 'The Corsair' was composed in thirteen days. A few months more than a year before his marriage, and the brief space of his married life, was the period in which all this literary labour was performed, while yet he was running the wild career of intrigue and fashionable folly. He speaks of 'Lara' as being tossed off in the intervals between masquerades and balls, &c. It is with the physical results of such unnatural efforts that we have now chiefly to do. Every physiologist would say that the demands of such poems on a healthy brain, in that given space, must have been exhausting; but when we consider that they were cheques drawn on a bank broken by early extravagance, and that the subject was prodigally spending vital forces in every other direction at the same time, one can scarcely estimate the physiological madness of such a course as Lord Byron's.
It is evident from his Journal, and Moore's account, that any amount of physical force which was for the time restored by his first foreign travel was recklessly spent in this period, when he threw himself with a mad recklessness into London society in the time just preceding his marriage. The revelations made in Moore's Memoir of this period are sad enough: those to Medwin are so appalling as to the state of contemporary society in England, as to require, at least, the benefit of the doubt for which Lord Byron's habitual carelessness of truth gave scope. His adventures with ladies of the highest rank in England are there paraded with a freedom of detail that respect for womanhood must lead every woman to question. The only thing that is unquestionable is, that Lord Byron made these assertions to Medwin, not as remorseful confessions, but as relations of hisbonnes fortunes, and that Medwin published them in the very face of the society to which they related.
When Lord Byron says, 'I have seen a great deal of Italian society, and swum in a gondola; but nothing could equal the profligacy of high life in England ... when I knew it,' he makes certainly strong assertions, if we remember what Mr. Moore reveals of the harem kept in Venice.
But when Lord Byron intimates that three married women in his own rank in life, who had once held illicit relations with him, made wedding-visits to his wife at one time, we must hope that he drew on his active imagination, as he often did, in his statements in regard to women.
When he relates at large his amour with Lord Melbourne's wife, and represents her as pursuing him with an insane passion, to which he with difficulty responded;and when he says that she tracked a rival lady to his lodgings, and came into them herself, disguised as a carman—onehopesthat he exaggerates. And what are we to make of passages like this?—
'There was a lady at that time, double my own age, the mother of several children who were perfect angels, with whom I formed aliaisonthat continued without interruption for eight months. She told me she was never in love till she was thirty, and I thought myself so with her when she was forty. I never felt a stronger passion, which she returned with equal ardour....'Strange as it may seem, she gained, as all women do, an influence over me so strong that I had great difficulty in breaking with her.'
'There was a lady at that time, double my own age, the mother of several children who were perfect angels, with whom I formed aliaisonthat continued without interruption for eight months. She told me she was never in love till she was thirty, and I thought myself so with her when she was forty. I never felt a stronger passion, which she returned with equal ardour....
'Strange as it may seem, she gained, as all women do, an influence over me so strong that I had great difficulty in breaking with her.'
Unfortunately, these statements, though probably exaggerated, are, for substance, borne out in the history of the times. With every possible abatement for exaggeration in these statements, there remains still undoubted evidence from other sources that Lord Byron exercised a most peculiar and fatal power over the moral sense of the women with whom he was brought in relation; and that love for him, in many women, became a sort of insanity, depriving them of the just use of their faculties. All this makes his fatal history both possible and probable.
Even the article in 'Blackwood,' written in 1825 for the express purpose of vindicating his character, admits that his name had been coupled with those of three, four, or more women of rank, whom it speaks of as 'licentious, unprincipled, characterless women.'
That such a course, in connection with alternateextremes of excess and abstinence in eating and drinking, and the immense draughts on the brain-power of rapid and brilliant composition, should have ended in that abnormal state in which cravings for unnatural vice give indications of approaching brain-disease, seems only too probable.
This symptom of exhausted vitality becomes often a frequent type in periods of very corrupt society. The dregs of the old Greek and Roman civilisation were foul with it; and the apostle speaks of the turning of the use of the natural into that which is against nature, as the last step in abandonment.
The very literature of such periods marks their want of physical and moral soundness. Having lost all sense of what is simple and natural and pure, the mind delights to dwell on horrible ideas, which give a shuddering sense of guilt and crime. All the writings of this fatal period of Lord Byron's life are more or less intense histories of unrepentant guilt and remorse or of unnatural crime. A recent writer in 'Temple Bar' brings to light the fact, that 'The Bride of Abydos,' the first of the brilliant and rapid series of poems which began in the period immediately preceding his marriage, was, in its first composition, an intense story of love between a brother and sister in a Turkish harem; that Lord Byron declared, in a letter to Galt, that it was drawn fromreal life; that, in compliance with the prejudices of the age, he altered the relationship to that of cousins before publication.
This same writer goes on to show, by a series of extracts from Lord Byron's published letters and journals, that his mind about this time was in a fearfully unnatural state, and suffering singular and inexplicable agonies of remorse; that, though he was accustomed fearlessly to confide to his friends immoralities which would be looked upon as damning, there was now a secret to which he could not help alluding in his letters, but which he told Moore he could not tell now, but 'some day or other when we areveterans.' He speaks of his heart as eating itself out; of a mysteriousperson, whom he says, 'God knows I love too well, and the Devil probably too.' He wrote a song, and sent it to Moore, addressed to a partner in some awful guilt, whose very name he dares not mention, because
'There is grief in the sound, there is guilt in the fame.'
'There is grief in the sound, there is guilt in the fame.'
He speaks of struggles of remorse, of efforts at repentance, and returns to guilt, with a sort of horror very different from the well-pleased air with which he relates to Medwin his common intrigues and adulteries. He speaks of himself generally as oppressed by a frightful, unnatural gloom and horror, and, when occasionally happy, 'not in a way thatcanoroughtto last.'
'The Giaour,' 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'Parisina,' 'The Siege of Corinth,' and 'Manfred,' all written or conceived about this period of his life, give one picture of a desperate, despairing, unrepentant soul, whom suffering maddens, but cannot reclaim.
In all these he paints only the one woman, of concentrated, unconsidering passion, ready to sacrifice heaven and defy hell for a guilty man, beloved in spite of religion or reason. In this unnatural literature, the stimulus of crime is represented as intensifying love. Medora, Gulnare, the Page in 'Lara,' Parisina, and the lost sister of Manfred, love the more intensely because the object of the love is a criminal, out-lawed by God and man. The next step beyond this is—madness.
The work of Dr. Forbes Winslow on 'Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Nerves'[49]contains a passage so very descriptive of the case of Lord Byron, that it might seem to have been written for it. The sixth chapter of his work, on 'Anomalous and Masked Affections of the Mind,' contains, in our view, the only clue that can unravel the sad tragedy of Byron's life. He says, p. 87:—
'These forms of unrecognised mental disorder are not always accompanied by any well-marked disturbance of the bodily health requiring medical attention, or any obvious departure from a normal state of thought and conduct such as to justify legal interference; neither do these affections always incapacitate the party from engaging in the ordinary business of life.... The change may have progressed insidiously and stealthily, having slowly and almost imperceptibly induced important molecular modifications in the delicate vesicular neurine of the brain, ultimately resulting in some aberration of the ideas, alteration of the affections, or perversion of the propensities or instincts....'Mental disorder of a dangerous character has been known foryears to be stealthily advancing, without exciting the slightest notion of its presence, until some sad and terrible catastrophe, homicide, or suicide, has painfully awakened attention to its existence. Persons suffering from latent insanity often affect singularity of dress, gait, conversation, and phraseology. The most trifling circumstances stimulate their excitability. They are martyrs to ungovernable paroxysms of passion, are inflamed to a state of demoniacal fury by the most insignificant of causes, and occasionally lose all sense of delicacy of feeling, sentiment, refinement of manners and conversation. Such manifestations of undetected mental disorder may be seen associated with intellectual and moral qualities of the highest order.'
'These forms of unrecognised mental disorder are not always accompanied by any well-marked disturbance of the bodily health requiring medical attention, or any obvious departure from a normal state of thought and conduct such as to justify legal interference; neither do these affections always incapacitate the party from engaging in the ordinary business of life.... The change may have progressed insidiously and stealthily, having slowly and almost imperceptibly induced important molecular modifications in the delicate vesicular neurine of the brain, ultimately resulting in some aberration of the ideas, alteration of the affections, or perversion of the propensities or instincts....
'Mental disorder of a dangerous character has been known foryears to be stealthily advancing, without exciting the slightest notion of its presence, until some sad and terrible catastrophe, homicide, or suicide, has painfully awakened attention to its existence. Persons suffering from latent insanity often affect singularity of dress, gait, conversation, and phraseology. The most trifling circumstances stimulate their excitability. They are martyrs to ungovernable paroxysms of passion, are inflamed to a state of demoniacal fury by the most insignificant of causes, and occasionally lose all sense of delicacy of feeling, sentiment, refinement of manners and conversation. Such manifestations of undetected mental disorder may be seen associated with intellectual and moral qualities of the highest order.'
In another place, Dr. Winslow again adverts to this latter symptom, which was strikingly marked in the case of Lord Byron:—
'All delicacy and decency of thought are occasionally banished from the mind, so effectually does the principle of thought in these attacks succumb to the animal instincts and passions....'Such cases will commonly be found associated with organic predisposition to insanity or cerebral disease.... Modifications of the malady are seen allied with genius. The biographies of Cowper, Burns, Byron, Johnson, Pope, and Haydon establish that the most exalted intellectual conditions do not escape unscathed.'In early childhood, this form of mental disturbance may, in many cases, be detected. To its existence is often to be traced themotivelesscrimes of the young.'
'All delicacy and decency of thought are occasionally banished from the mind, so effectually does the principle of thought in these attacks succumb to the animal instincts and passions....
'Such cases will commonly be found associated with organic predisposition to insanity or cerebral disease.... Modifications of the malady are seen allied with genius. The biographies of Cowper, Burns, Byron, Johnson, Pope, and Haydon establish that the most exalted intellectual conditions do not escape unscathed.
'In early childhood, this form of mental disturbance may, in many cases, be detected. To its existence is often to be traced themotivelesscrimes of the young.'
No one can compare this passage of Dr. Forbes Winslow with the incidents we have already cited as occurring in that fatal period before the separation of Lord and Lady Byron, and not feel that the hapless young wife was indeed struggling with those inflexible natural laws, which, at some stages of retribution, involve in their awful sweep the guilty with the innocent. She longed to save; but he was gone past redemption. Alcoholic stimulants and licentious excesses, without doubt, had produced those unseen changes in the brain, of which Dr. Forbes Winslow speaks; and the results were terrible in proportion to the peculiar fineness and delicacy of the organism deranged.
Alas! the history of Lady Byron is the history of too many women in every rank of life who are called, in agonies of perplexity and fear, to watch that gradual process by which physical excesses change the organism of the brain, till slow, creeping, moral insanity comes on. The woman who is the helpless victim of cruelties which only unnatural states of the brain could invent, who is heart-sick to-day and dreads to-morrow,—looks in hopeless horror on the fatal process by which a lover and a protector changes under her eyes, from day to day, to a brute and a fiend.
Lady Byron's married life—alas! it is lived over in many a cottage and tenement-house, with no understanding on either side of the cause of the woful misery.
Dr. Winslow truly says, 'The science of these brain-affections is yet in its infancy in England.' At that time, it had not even begun to be. Madness was a fixed point; and the inquiries into it had no nicety. Its treatment, if established, had no redeeming power. Insanity simply locked a man up as a dangerous being; and the very suggestion of it, therefore, was resented as an injury.
A most peculiar and affecting feature of that form of brain disease which hurries its victim, as by an overpowering mania, into crime, is, that often the moral faculties and the affections remain to a degree unimpaired, and protest with all their strength against the outrage. Hence come conflicts and agonies of remorse proportioned to the strength of the moral nature. Byron, more than any other one writer, may be called the poet of remorse. His passionate pictures of this feeling seem to give new power to the English language:—
'There is a war, a chaos of the mind,When all its elements convulsed—combined,Lie dark and jarring with perturbèd force,And gnashing with impenitent remorse,That juggling fiend, who never spake before,But cries, "I warned thee!" when the deed is o'er.'
'There is a war, a chaos of the mind,When all its elements convulsed—combined,Lie dark and jarring with perturbèd force,And gnashing with impenitent remorse,That juggling fiend, who never spake before,But cries, "I warned thee!" when the deed is o'er.'
It was this remorse that formed the only redeeming feature of the case. Its eloquence, its agonies, won from all hearts the interest that we give to a powerful nature in a state of danger and ruin; and it may be hoped that this feeling, which tempers the stern justice of human judgments, may prove only a faint image of the wider charity of Him whose thoughts are as far above ours as the heaven is above the earth.
HOW COULD SHE LOVE HIM?
It has seemed, to some, wholly inconsistent, that Lady Byron, if this story were true, could retain any kindly feeling for Lord Byron, or any tenderness for his memory; that the profession implied a certain hypocrisy: but, in this sad review, we may see how the woman who once had loved him, might, in spite of every wrong he had heaped upon her, still have looked on this awful wreck and ruin chiefly with pity. While she stood afar, and refused to justify or join in the polluted idolatry which defended his vices, there is evidence in her writings that her mind often went back mournfully, as a mother's would, to the early days when he might have been saved.
One of her letters in Robinson's Memoirs, in regard to his religious opinions, shows with what intense earnestness she dwelt upon the unhappy influences of his childhood and youth, and those early theologies which led him to regard himself as one of the reprobate. She says,—
'Not merely from casual expressions, but from the whole tenor of Lord Byron's feelings, I could not but conclude that he was abeliever in the inspiration of the Bible, and had the gloomiest Calvinistic tenets. To that unhappy view of the relation of the creature to the Creator I have always ascribed the misery of his life.'It is enough for me to know that he who thinks his transgression beyond forgiveness ... has righteousness beyond that of the self-satisfied sinner. It is impossible for me to doubt, that, could he once have been assured of pardon, his living faith in moral duty, and love of virtue ("I love the virtues that I cannot claim"), would have conquered every temptation. Judge, then, how I must hate the creed that made him see God as an Avenger, and not as a Father! My own impressions were just the reverse, but could have but little weight; and it was in vain to seek to turn his thoughts from that fixed idea with which he connected his personal peculiarity as a stamp. Instead of being made happier by any apparent good, he felt convinced that every blessing would be turned into a curse to him.... "The worst of it is, I do believe," he said.I, like all connected with him, was broken against the rock of predestination. I may be pardoned for my frequent reference to the sentiment (expressed by him), that I was only sent to show him the happiness he was forbidden to enjoy.'
'Not merely from casual expressions, but from the whole tenor of Lord Byron's feelings, I could not but conclude that he was abeliever in the inspiration of the Bible, and had the gloomiest Calvinistic tenets. To that unhappy view of the relation of the creature to the Creator I have always ascribed the misery of his life.
'It is enough for me to know that he who thinks his transgression beyond forgiveness ... has righteousness beyond that of the self-satisfied sinner. It is impossible for me to doubt, that, could he once have been assured of pardon, his living faith in moral duty, and love of virtue ("I love the virtues that I cannot claim"), would have conquered every temptation. Judge, then, how I must hate the creed that made him see God as an Avenger, and not as a Father! My own impressions were just the reverse, but could have but little weight; and it was in vain to seek to turn his thoughts from that fixed idea with which he connected his personal peculiarity as a stamp. Instead of being made happier by any apparent good, he felt convinced that every blessing would be turned into a curse to him.... "The worst of it is, I do believe," he said.I, like all connected with him, was broken against the rock of predestination. I may be pardoned for my frequent reference to the sentiment (expressed by him), that I was only sent to show him the happiness he was forbidden to enjoy.'
In this letter we have the heart, not of the wife, but of the mother,—the love that searches everywhere for extenuations of the guilt it is forced to confess.
That Lady Byron was not alone in ascribing such results to the doctrines of Calvinism, in certain cases, appears from the language of the Thirty-nine Articles, which says:—
'As the godly consideration of predestination, and our election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the workings of the spirit of Christ; ... so, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God's predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, wherebythe Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into recklessness of most unclean living,—no less perilous than desperation.'
'As the godly consideration of predestination, and our election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the workings of the spirit of Christ; ... so, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God's predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, wherebythe Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into recklessness of most unclean living,—no less perilous than desperation.'
Lord Byron's life is an exact commentary on these words, which passed under the revision of Calvin himself.
The whole tone of this letter shows not only that Lady Byron never lost her deep interest in her husband, but that it was by this experience that all her religious ideas were modified. There is another of these letters in which she thus speaks of her husband's writings and character:—
'The author of the article on "Goethe" appears to me to have the mind which could dispel the illusion aboutanotherpoet, without depreciating his claims ... to the truest inspiration.'Who has sought to distinguish between the holy and the unholy in that spirit? to prove, by the very degradation of the one, how high the other was. A character is never done justice to by extenuating its faults: so I do not agree tonisi bonum. It is kinder to read the blotted page.'
'The author of the article on "Goethe" appears to me to have the mind which could dispel the illusion aboutanotherpoet, without depreciating his claims ... to the truest inspiration.
'Who has sought to distinguish between the holy and the unholy in that spirit? to prove, by the very degradation of the one, how high the other was. A character is never done justice to by extenuating its faults: so I do not agree tonisi bonum. It is kinder to read the blotted page.'
These letters show that Lady Byron's idea was that, even were the whole mournful truth about Lord Byron fully told, there was still a foundation left for pity and mercy. She seems to have remembered, that if his sins were peculiar, so also were his temptations; and to have schooled herself for years to gather up, and set in order in her memory, all that yet remained precious in this great ruin. Probably no English writer that ever has made the attempt could have done this more perfectly. Though Lady Byron was not a poetparexcellence, yet she belonged to an order of souls fully equal to Lord Byron. Hers was more the analytical mind of the philosopher than the creative mind of the poet; and it was, for that reason, the one mind in our day capable of estimating him fully both with justice and mercy. No person in England had a more intense sensibility to genius, in its loftier acceptation, than Lady Byron; and none more completely sympathised with what was pure and exalted in her husband's writings.
There is this peculiarity in Lord Byron, that the pure and the impure in his poetry often run side by side without mixing,—as one may see at Geneva the muddy stream of the Arve and the blue waters of the Rhone flowing together unmingled. What, for example, can be nobler, and in a higher and tenderer moral strain than his lines on the dying gladiator, in 'Childe Harold'? What is more like the vigour of the old Hebrew Scriptures than his thunderstorm in the Alps? What can more perfectly express moral ideality of the highest kind than the exquisite descriptions of Aurora Raby,—pure and high in thought and language, occurring, as they do, in a work full of the most utter vileness?
Lady Byron's hopes for her husband fastened themselves on all the noble fragments yet remaining in that shattered temple of his mind which lay blackened and thunder-riven; and she looked forward to a sphere beyond this earth, where infinite mercy should bring all again to symmetry and order. If the strict theologian must regret this as an undue latitude of charity, let it at least he remembered that it was a charity which sprang from a Christian virtue, and which she extended to every human being, however lost, however low. In her view, the mercy which tookhimwas mercy that could restore all.
In my recollections of the interview with Lady Byron, when this whole history was presented, I can remember that it was with a softened and saddened feeling that I contemplated the story, as one looks on some awful, inexplicable ruin.
The last letter which I addressed to Lady Byron upon this subject will show that such was the impression of the whole interview. It was in reply to the one written on the death of my son:—
'Jan. 30, 1858.'My dear Friend,—Ididlong to hear from you at a time when few knew how to speak, because I knew thatyouhad known everything that sorrow can teach,—you, whose whole life has been a crucifixion, a long ordeal.'But I believe that the Lamb, who stands for ever "in the midst of the throne, as it had been slain," has everywhere His followers,—those who seem sent into the world, as He was, to suffer for the redemption of others; and, like Him, they must look to the joy set before them,—of redeeming others.'I often think that God called you to this beautiful and terrible ministry when He suffered you to link your destiny with one so strangely gifted and so fearfully tempted. Perhaps the reward that is to meet you when you enter within the veil where you must so soon pass will be to seethatspirit, once chained and defiled, set free and purified; and to know that to you it has been given, by your life of love and faith, to accomplish this glorious change.'I think increasingly on the subject on which you conversed with me once,—the future state of retribution. It is evident to me that the spirit of Christianity has produced in the human spirit a tenderness of love which wholly revolts from the old doctrine on this subject; and I observe, that, the more Christ-like anyone becomes, the more difficult it seems for them to accept it as hitherto presented. And yet, on the contrary, it wasChristwho said, "Fear Him that is able to destroy both soul and body in hell;" and the most appalling language is that of Christ himself.'Certain ideas, once prevalent, certainly must be thrown off. An endlessinflictionfor past sins was once the doctrine:thatwe now generally reject. The doctrine now generally taught is, that an eternal persistence in evil necessitates everlasting suffering, since evil induces misery by the eternal nature of things; and this, I fear, is inferable from the analogies of Nature, and confirmed by the whole implication of the Bible.'What attention have you given to this subject? and is there any fair way of disposing of the current of assertion, and the still deeperunder-current of implication, on this subject, without admitting one which loosens all faith in revelation, and throws us on pure naturalism? But of one thing I always feel sure: probation does not end with this present life; and the number of the saved may therefore be infinitely greater than the world's history leads us to suppose.'I think the Bible implies a great crisis, a struggle, an agony, in which God and Christ and all the good are engaged in redeeming from sin; and we are not to suppose that the little portion that is done for souls as they pass between the two doors of birth and death is all.'The Bible is certainly silent there. The primitive Church believed in the mercies of an intermediate state; and it was only the abuse of it by Romanism that drove the Church into its present position, which, I think, is wholly indefensible, and wholly irreconcilable with the spirit of Christ. For if it were the case, that probation in all cases begins and ends here, God's example would surely be one that could not be followed, and He wouldseem to be far less persevering than even human beings in efforts to save.'Nothing is plainer than that it would be wrong to give up any mind to eternal sin till every possible thing had been done for its recovery; and that is so clearlynotthe case here, that I can see that, with thoughtful minds, this belief would cut the very roots of religious faith in God: for there is a difference between facts that we do not understand, and facts which wedounderstand, and perceive to be wholly irreconcilable with a certain character professed by God.'If God says He is love, and certain ways of explaining Scripture make Himlessloving and patient than man, then we make Scripture contradict itself. Now, as no passage of Scripture limits probation to this life, and as one passage in Peter certainly unequivocally asserts that Christ preached to the spirits in prison while His body lay in the grave, I am clear upon this point.'But it is also clear, that if there be those who persist in refusing God's love, who choose to dash themselves for ever against the inflexible laws of the universe, such souls must for ever suffer.'There may be souls who hate purity because it reveals their vileness; who refuse God's love, and prefer eternal conflict with it. For such there can be no peace. Even in this life, we see those whom the purest self-devoting love only inflames to madness; and we have only to suppose an eternal persistence in this to suppose eternal misery.'But on this subject we can only leave all reverently in the hands of that Being whose almighty power is "declared chiefly in showing mercy."'
'Jan. 30, 1858.
'My dear Friend,—Ididlong to hear from you at a time when few knew how to speak, because I knew thatyouhad known everything that sorrow can teach,—you, whose whole life has been a crucifixion, a long ordeal.
'But I believe that the Lamb, who stands for ever "in the midst of the throne, as it had been slain," has everywhere His followers,—those who seem sent into the world, as He was, to suffer for the redemption of others; and, like Him, they must look to the joy set before them,—of redeeming others.
'I often think that God called you to this beautiful and terrible ministry when He suffered you to link your destiny with one so strangely gifted and so fearfully tempted. Perhaps the reward that is to meet you when you enter within the veil where you must so soon pass will be to seethatspirit, once chained and defiled, set free and purified; and to know that to you it has been given, by your life of love and faith, to accomplish this glorious change.
'I think increasingly on the subject on which you conversed with me once,—the future state of retribution. It is evident to me that the spirit of Christianity has produced in the human spirit a tenderness of love which wholly revolts from the old doctrine on this subject; and I observe, that, the more Christ-like anyone becomes, the more difficult it seems for them to accept it as hitherto presented. And yet, on the contrary, it wasChristwho said, "Fear Him that is able to destroy both soul and body in hell;" and the most appalling language is that of Christ himself.
'Certain ideas, once prevalent, certainly must be thrown off. An endlessinflictionfor past sins was once the doctrine:thatwe now generally reject. The doctrine now generally taught is, that an eternal persistence in evil necessitates everlasting suffering, since evil induces misery by the eternal nature of things; and this, I fear, is inferable from the analogies of Nature, and confirmed by the whole implication of the Bible.
'What attention have you given to this subject? and is there any fair way of disposing of the current of assertion, and the still deeperunder-current of implication, on this subject, without admitting one which loosens all faith in revelation, and throws us on pure naturalism? But of one thing I always feel sure: probation does not end with this present life; and the number of the saved may therefore be infinitely greater than the world's history leads us to suppose.
'I think the Bible implies a great crisis, a struggle, an agony, in which God and Christ and all the good are engaged in redeeming from sin; and we are not to suppose that the little portion that is done for souls as they pass between the two doors of birth and death is all.
'The Bible is certainly silent there. The primitive Church believed in the mercies of an intermediate state; and it was only the abuse of it by Romanism that drove the Church into its present position, which, I think, is wholly indefensible, and wholly irreconcilable with the spirit of Christ. For if it were the case, that probation in all cases begins and ends here, God's example would surely be one that could not be followed, and He wouldseem to be far less persevering than even human beings in efforts to save.
'Nothing is plainer than that it would be wrong to give up any mind to eternal sin till every possible thing had been done for its recovery; and that is so clearlynotthe case here, that I can see that, with thoughtful minds, this belief would cut the very roots of religious faith in God: for there is a difference between facts that we do not understand, and facts which wedounderstand, and perceive to be wholly irreconcilable with a certain character professed by God.
'If God says He is love, and certain ways of explaining Scripture make Himlessloving and patient than man, then we make Scripture contradict itself. Now, as no passage of Scripture limits probation to this life, and as one passage in Peter certainly unequivocally asserts that Christ preached to the spirits in prison while His body lay in the grave, I am clear upon this point.
'But it is also clear, that if there be those who persist in refusing God's love, who choose to dash themselves for ever against the inflexible laws of the universe, such souls must for ever suffer.
'There may be souls who hate purity because it reveals their vileness; who refuse God's love, and prefer eternal conflict with it. For such there can be no peace. Even in this life, we see those whom the purest self-devoting love only inflames to madness; and we have only to suppose an eternal persistence in this to suppose eternal misery.
'But on this subject we can only leave all reverently in the hands of that Being whose almighty power is "declared chiefly in showing mercy."'
CONCLUSION.
In leaving this subject, I have an appeal to make to the men, and more especially to the women, who have been my readers.
In justice to Lady Byron, it must be remembered that this publication of her story is not her act, but mine. I trust you have already conceded, that, in so severe and peculiar a trial, she had a right to be understood fully by her immediate circle of friends, and to seek of them counsel in view of the moral questions to which such very exceptional circumstances must have given rise. Her communication to me was not an address to the public: it was a statement of the case for advice. True, by leaving the whole, unguarded by pledge or promise, it left discretionary power with me to use it if needful.
You, my sisters, are to judge whether the accusation laid against Lady Byron by the 'Blackwood,' in 1869, was not of so barbarous a nature as to justify my producing the truth I held in my hands in reply.
The 'Blackwood' claimed a right to re-open the subject because it wasnota private but a public matter.It claimed that Lord Byron's unfortunate marriage might have changed not only his own destiny, but that of all England. It suggested, that, but for this, instead of wearing out his life in vice, and corrupting society by impure poetry, he might, at this day, have been leading the counsels of the State, and helping the onward movements of the world. Then it directly charged Lady Byron with meanly forsaking her husband in a time of worldly misfortune; with fabricating a destructive accusation of crime against him, and confirming this accusation by years of persistent silence more guilty than open assertion.
It has been alleged, that, even admitting that Lady Byron's story were true, it never ought to have been told.
Is it true, then, that a woman has not the same right to individual justice that a man has? If the cases were reversed, would it have been thought just that Lord Byron should go down in history loaded with accusations of crime because he could be only vindicated by exposing the crime of his wife?
It has been said that the crime charged on Lady Byron was comparatively unimportant, and the one against Lord Byron was deadly.
But the 'Blackwood,' in opening the controversy, called Lady Byron by the name of an unnatural female criminal, whose singular atrocities alone entitle her to infamous notoriety; and the crime charged upon her was sufficient to warrant the comparison.
Both crimes are foul, unnatural, horrible; and thereis no middle ground between the admission of the one or the other.
You must either conclude that a woman, all whose other works, words, and deeds were generous, just, and gentle, committed this one monstrous exceptional crime, without a motive, and against all the analogies of her character, and all the analogies of her treatment of others; or you must suppose that a man known by all testimony to have been boundlessly licentious, who took the very course which, by every physiological law, would have led to unnatural results, did, at last, commit an unnatural crime.
The question, whether I did right, when Lady Byron was thus held up as an abandoned criminal by the 'Blackwood,' to interpose my knowledge of the real truth in her defence, is a serious one; but it is one for which I must account to God alone, and in which, without any contempt of the opinions of my fellow-creatures, I must say, that it is a small thing to be judged of man's judgment.
I had in the case a responsibility very different from that of many others. I had been consulted in relation to the publication of this story by Lady Byron, at a time when she had it in her power to have exhibited it with all its proofs, and commanded an instant conviction. I have reason to think that my advice had some weight in suppressing that disclosure. I gave that advice under the impression that the Byron controversy was a thing for ever passed, and never likely to return.
It had never occurred to me, that, nine years after Lady Byron's death, a standard English periodical would declare itself free to re-open this controversy, when all the generation who were her witnesses had passed from earth; and that it would re-open it in the most savage form of accusation, and with the indorsement and commendation of a hook of the vilest slanders, edited by Lord Byron's mistress.
Let the reader mark the retributions of justice. The accusations of the 'Blackwood,' in 1869, were simply an intensified form of those first concocted by Lord Byron in his 'Clytemnestra' poem of 1816. He forged that weapon, and bequeathed it to his party. The 'Blackwood' took it up, gave it a sharper edge, and drove it to the heart of Lady Byron's fame. The result has been the disclosure of this history. It is, then, Lord Byron himself, who, by his network of wiles, his ceaseless persecutions of his wife, his efforts to extend his partisanship beyond the grave, has brought on this tumultuous exposure. He, and he alone, is the cause of this revelation.
And now I have one word to say to those in England who, with all the facts and documents in their hands which could at once have cleared Lady Byron's fame, allowed the barbarous assault of the 'Blackwood' to go over the civilised world without a reply. I speak to those who, knowing that I am speaking the truth, stand silent; to those who have now the ability to produce the facts and documents by which this cause might be instantly settled, and who do not produce them.
I do not judge them; but I remind them that a day is coming when they and I must stand side by side at the great judgment-seat,—I to give an account for my speaking, they for their silence.
In that day, all earthly considerations will have vanished like morning mists, and truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, will be the only realities.
In that day, God, who will judge the secrets of all men, will judge between this man and this woman. Then, if never before, the full truth shall be told both of the depraved and dissolute man who made it his life's object to defame the innocent, and the silent, the self-denying woman who made it her life's object to give space for repentance to the guilty.
MISCELLANEOUS DOCUMENTS.
THE TRUE STORY OF LADY BYRON'S LIFE,
AS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 'THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.'
The reading world of America has lately been presented with a book which is said to sell rapidly, and which appears to meet with universal favour.
The subject of the book may be thus briefly stated: The mistress of Lord Byron comes before the world for the sake of vindicating his fame from slanders and aspersions cast on him by his wife. The story of the mistressversuswife may be summed up as follows:—
Lord Byron, the hero of the story, is represented as a human being endowed with every natural charm, gift, and grace, who, by the one false step of an unsuitable marriage, wrecked his whole life. A narrow-minded, cold-hearted precisian, without sufficient intellect to comprehend his genius, or heart to feel for his temptations, formed with him one of those mere worldly marriages common in high life; and, finding that she could not reduce him to the mathematical proprieties and conventional rules of her own mode of life, suddenly, and without warning, abandoned him in the most cruel and inexplicable manner.
It is alleged that she parted from him in apparent affection and good-humour, wrote him a playful, confiding letter upon the way, but, after reaching her father's house, suddenly, and without explanation, announced to him that she would never see him again; that this sudden abandonment drew down upon him a perfect storm of scandalous stories, which his wife never contradicted; that she never in any way or shape stated what the exact reasons for her departure had been, and thussilently gave scope to all the malice of thousands of enemies. The sensitive victim was actually driven from England, his home broken up, and be doomed to be a lonely wanderer on foreign shores.
In Italy, under bluer skies, and among a gentler people, with more tolerant modes of judgment, the authoress intimates that he found peace and consolation. A lovely young Italian countess falls in love with him, and, breaking her family ties for his sake, devotes herself to him; and, in blissful retirement with her, he finds at last that domestic life for which he was so fitted.
Soothed, calmed, and refreshed, he writes 'Don Juan,' which the world is at this late hour informed was a poem with a high moral purpose, designed to be a practical illustration of the doctrine of total depravity among young gentlemen in high life.
Under the elevating influence of love, he rises at last to higher realms of moral excellence, and resolves to devote the rest of his life to some noble and heroic purpose; becomes the saviour of Greece; and dies untimely, leaving a nation to mourn his loss.
The authoress dwells with a peculiar bitterness on Lady Byron's entiresilenceduring all these years, as the most aggravated form of persecution and injury. She informs the world that Lord Byron wrote his Autobiography with the purpose of giving a fair statement of the exact truth in the whole matter; and that Lady Byron bought up the manuscript of the publisher, and insisted on its being destroyed, unread; thus inflexibly depriving her husband of his last chance of a hearing before the tribunal of the public.
As a result of this silent persistent cruelty on the part of a cold, correct, narrow-minded woman, the character of Lord Byron has been misunderstood, and his name transmitted to after-ages clouded with aspersions and accusations which it is the object of this book to remove.
Such is the story of Lord Byron's mistress,—a story which is going the length of this American continent, and rousing up new sympathy with the poet, and doing its best to bring the youth of America once more under the power of that brilliant, seductive genius, from which it was hoped they had escaped. Already we are seeing it revamped in magazine-articles, which take up the slanders of the paramour and enlarge on them, and wax eloquent in denunciation of the marble-hearted insensible wife.
All this while, it does not appear to occur to the thousands of unreflecting readers that they are listening merely to the story of Lord Byron's mistress, and of Lord Byron; and that, even by their ownshowing, their heaviest accusation against Lady Byron is thatshe has not spoken at all. Her story has never been told.
For many years after the rupture between Lord Byron and his wife, that poet's personality, fate, and happiness had an interest for the whole civilized world, which, we will venture to say, was unparalleled. It is within the writer's recollection, how, in the obscure mountain-town where she spent her early days, Lord Byron's separation from his wife was, for a season, the all-engrossing topic.
She remembers hearing her father recount at the breakfast-table the facts as they were given in the public papers, together with his own suppositions and theories of the causes.
Lord Byron's 'Fare thee well,' addressed to Lady Byron, was set to music, and sung with tears by young school-girls, even in this distant America.
Madame de Staël said of this appeal, that she was sure it would have drawn her at once to his heart and his arms;shecould have forgiven everything: and so said all the young ladies all over the world, not only in England but in France and Germany, wherever Byron's poetry appeared in translation.
Lady Byron's obdurate cold-heartedness in refusing even to listen to his prayers, or to have any intercourse with him which might lead to reconciliation, was the one point conceded on all sides.
The stricter moralists defended her; but gentler hearts throughout all the world regarded her as a marble-hearted monster of correctness and morality, a personification of the law unmitigated by the gospel.
Literature in its highest walks busied itself with Lady Byron. Hogg, in the character of the Ettrick Shepherd, devotes several eloquent passages to expatiating on the conjugal fidelity of a poor Highland shepherd's wife, who, by patience and prayer and forgiveness, succeeds in reclaiming her drunken husband, and making a good man of him; and then points his moral by contrasting with this touching picture the cold-hearted pharisaical correctness of Lady Byron.
Moore, in his 'Life of Lord Byron,' when beginning the recital of the series of disgraceful amours which formed the staple of his life in Venice, has this passage:—
'Highly censurable in point of morality and decorum as was his course of life while under the roof of Madame ——, it was (with pain I am forced to confess) venial in comparison with the strange, headlong career of licence to which, when weaned from that connection, he so unrestrainedly, and, it may be added, defyingly abandoned himself. Of the state of his mind on leaving England, I have already endeavouredto convey some idea; and among the feelings that went to make up that self-centred spirit of resistance which he then opposed to his fate was an indignant scorn for his own countrymen for the wrongs he thought they had done him. For a time,the kindly sentiments which he still harboured toward Lady Byron, and a sort of vague hope, perhaps, that all would yet come right again, kept his mind in a mood somewhat more softened and docile, as well as sufficiently under the influence of English opinions to prevent his breaking out into open rebellion against it, as he unluckily did afterward.
'By the failure of the attempted mediation with Lady Byron, his last link with home was severed: while, notwithstanding the quiet and unobtrusive life which he led at Geneva, there was as yet, he found, no cessation of the slanderous warfare against his character; the same busy and misrepresenting spirit which had tracked his every step at home, having, with no less malicious watchfulness, dogged him into exile.'
We should like to know what the misrepresentations and slanders must have been, when this sort of thing is admitted in Mr. Moore'sjustification. It seems to us rather wonderful how anybody, unless it were a person like the Countess Guiccioli, could misrepresent a life such as even Byron's friend admits he was leading.
During all these years, when he was setting at defiance every principle of morality and decorum, the interest of the female mind all over Europe in the conversion of this brilliant prodigal son was unceasing, and reflects the greatest credit upon the faith of the sex.
Madame de Staël commenced the first effort at evangelization immediately after he left England, and found her catechumen in a most edifying state of humility. He was, metaphorically, on his knees in penitence, and confessed himself a miserable sinner in the loveliest manner possible. Such sweetness and humility took all hearts. His conversations with Madame de Staël were printed, and circulated all over the world; making it to appear that only the inflexibility of Lady Byron stood in the way of his entire conversion.
Lady Blessington, among many others, took him in hand five or six years afterwards, and was greatly delighted with his docility, and edified by his frank and free confessions of his miserable offences. Nothing now seemed wanting to bring the wanderer home to the fold but a kind word from Lady Byron. But, when the fair countess offered to mediate, the poet only shook his head in tragic despair; 'he had so many times tried in vain; Lady Byron's course had been from the first that of obdurate silence.'
Any one who would wish to see a specimen of the skill of thehonourable poet in mystification will do well to read a letter to Lady Byron, which Lord Byron, on parting from Lady Blessington, enclosed for her to read just before he went to Greece. He says,—
'The letter which I encloseI was prevented from sending by my despair of its doing any good. I was perfectly sincere when I wrote it, and am so still. But it is difficult for me to withstand the thousand provocations on that subject which both friends and foes have for seven years been throwing in the way of a man whose feelings were once quick, and whose temper was never patient.'