Lady Byron Vindicated

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  '“A. BYRON.”'

  It is the province of your readers, and of the world at large, to judge between the two testimonies now before them,—Lady Byron's in 1816 and 1818, and that put forward in 1869 by Mrs. B. Stowe, as communicated by Lady Byron thirteen years ago. In the face of the evidence now given, positive, negative, and circumstantial, there can be but two alternatives in the case: either Mrs. B. Stowe must have entirely misunderstood Lady Byron, and been thus led into error and misstatement; or we must conclude that, under the pressure of a lifelong and secret sorrow, Lady Byron's mind had become clouded with an hallucination in respect of the particular point in question.

  The reader will admire the noble but severe character displayed in Lady Byron's letter; but those who keep in view what her first impressions were, as above recorded, may probably place a more lenient interpretation than hers upon some of the incidents alleged to Byron's discredit. I shall conclude with some remarks upon his character, written shortly after his death by a wise, virtuous, and charitable judge, the late Sir Walter Scott, likewise in a letter to Lady Anne Barnard:—

  'Fletcher's account of poor Byron is extremely interesting. I had always a strong attachment to that unfortunate though most richly-gifted man, because I thought I saw that his virtues (and he had many) were his own; and his eccentricities the result of an irritable temperament, which sometimes approached nearly to mental disease. Those who are gifted with strong nerves, a regular temper, and habitual self-command, are not, perhaps, aware how much of what they may think virtue they owe to constitution; and such are but too severe judges of men like Byron, whose mind, like a day of alternate storm and sunshine, is all dark shades and stray gleams of light, instead of the twilight gray which illuminates happier though less distinguished mortals. I always thought, that, when a moral proposition was placed plainly before Lord Byron, his mind yielded a pleased and willing assent to it; but, if there was any side view given in the way of raillery or otherwise, he was willing enough to evade conviction . . . . It augurs ill for the cause of Greece that this master-spirit should have been withdrawn from their assistance just as he was obtaining a complete ascendancy over their counsels. I have seen several letters from the Ionian Islands, all of which unite in speaking in the highest praise of the wisdom and temperance of his counsels, and the ascendancy he was obtaining over the turbulent and ferocious chiefs of the insurgents. I have some verses written by him on his last birthday: they breathe a spirit of affection towards his wife, and a desire of dying in battle, which seems like an anticipation of his approaching fate.'

  I remain, sir, your obedient servant,

  LINDSAY.

  DUNECHT, Sept. 3.

  DR. FORBES WINSLOW'S LETTER TO THE LONDON 'TIMES.'

  TO THE EDITOR.

  SIR,—Your paper of the 4th of September, containing an able and deeply interesting 'Vindication of Lord Byron,' has followed me to this place. With the general details of the 'True Story' (as it is termed) of Lady Byron's separation from her husband, as recorded in 'Macmillan's Magazine,' I have no desire or intention to grapple. It is only with the hypothesis of insanity, as suggested by the clever writer of the 'Vindication' to account for Lady Byron's sad revelations to Mrs. Beecher Stowe, with which I propose to deal. I do not believe that the mooted theory of mental aberration can, in this case, be for a moment maintained. If Lady Byron's statement of facts to Mrs. B. Stowe is to be viewed as the creation of a distempered fancy, a delusion or hallucination of an insane mind, what part of the narrative are we to draw the boundary-line between fact and delusion, sanity and insanity? Where are we to fix the point d'appui of the lunacy? Again: is the alleged 'hallucination' to be considered as strictly confined to the idea that Lord Byron had committed the frightful sin of incest? or is the whole of the 'True Story' of her married life, as reproduced with such terrible minuteness by Mrs. Beecher Stowe, to be viewed as the delusion of a disordered fancy? If Lady Byron was the subject of an 'hallucination' with regard to her husband, I think it not unreasonable to conclude that the mental alienation existed on the day of her marriage. If this proposition be accepted, the natural inference will be, that the details of the conversation which Lady Byron represents to have occurred between herself and Lord Byron as soon as they entered the carriage never took place. Lord Byron is said to have remarked to Lady Byron, 'You might have prevented this (or words to this effect): you will now find that you have married a devil. Is this alleged conversation to be viewed as fact, or fiction? evidence of sanity, or insanity? Is the revelation which Lord Byron is said to have made to his wife of his 'incestuous passion' another delusion, having no foundation except in his wife's disordered imagination? Are his alleged attempts to justify to Lady Byron's mind the morale of the plea of 'Continental latitude—the good-humoured marriage, in which complaisant couples mutually agree to form the cloak for each other's infidelities,'—another morbid perversion of her imagination? Did this conversation ever take place? It will be difficult to separate one part of the 'True Story' from another, and maintain that this portion indicates insanity, and that portion represents sanity. If we accept the hypothesis of hallucination, we are bound to view the whole of Lady Byron's conversations with Mrs. B. Stowe, and the written statement laid before her, as the wild and incoherent representations of a lunatic. On the day when Lady Byron parted from her husband, did she enter his private room, and find him with the 'object of his guilty passion?' and did he say, as they parted, 'When shall we three meet again?' Is this to be considered as an actual occurrence, or as another form of hallucination? It is quite inconsistent with the theory of Lady Byron's insanity to imagine that her delusion was restricted to the idea of his having committed 'incest.' In common fairness, we are bound to view the aggregate mental phenomena which she exhibited from the day of the marriage to their final separation and her death. No person practically acquainted with the true characteristics of insanity would affirm, that, had this idea of 'incest' been an insane hallucination, Lady Byron could, from the lengthened period which intervened between her unhappy marriage and death, have refrained from exhibiting her mental alienation, not only to her legal advisers and trustees, but to others, exacting no pledge of secrecy from them as to her disordered impressions. Lunatics do for a time, and for some special purpose, most cunningly conceal their delusions; but they have not the capacity to struggle for thirty-six years with a frightful hallucination, similar to the one Lady Byron is alleged to have had, without the insane state of mind becoming obvious to those with whom they are daily associating. Neither is it consistent with experience to suppose that, if Lady Byron had been a monomaniac, her state of disordered understanding would have been restricted to one hallucination. Her diseased brain, affecting the normal action of thought, would, in all probability, have manifested other symptoms besides those referred to of aberration of intellect.

  During the last thirty years, I have not met with a case of insanity (assuming the hypothesis of hallucination) at all parallel with that of Lady Byron's. In my experience, it is unique. I never saw a patient with such a delusion. If it should be established, by the statements of those who are the depositors of the secret (and they are now bound, in vindication of Lord Byron's memory, to deny, if they have the power of doing so, this most frightful accusation), that the idea of incest did unhappily cross Lady Byron's mind prior to her finally leaving him, it no doubt arose from a most inaccurate knowledge of facts and perfectly unjustifiable data, and was not, in the right psychological acceptation of the phrase, an insane hallucination.

  Sir, I remain your obedient servant,

  FORBES WINSLOW, M.D.

  ZARINGERHOF, FREIBURG-EN-BREISGAU, Sept. 8, 1869.

  ——-

  EXTRACT FROM LORD BYRON'S EXPUNGED LETTER.

  TO MR. MURRAY.

  'BOLOGNA, June 7, 1819.

  . . . 'Before I left Venice, I had returned to you your late, and Mr. Hobhouse's sheets of “Juan.” Don't wait for further answers from me, but address yours to
Venice as usual. I know nothing of my own movements. I may return there in a few days, or not for some time; all this depends on circumstances. I left Mr. Hoppner very well. My daughter Allegra is well too, and is growing pretty: her hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her ways, Mr. Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features: she will make, in that case, a manageable young lady.

  'I have never seen anything of Ada, the little Electra of my Mycenae . . . . But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should not live to see it. I have at least seen —— shivered, who was one of my assassins. When that man was doing his worst to uproot my whole family,—tree, branch, and blossoms; when, after taking my retainer, he went over to them; when he was bringing desolation on my hearth, and destruction on my household gods,—did he think that, in less than three years, a natural event, a severe domestic, but an expected and common calamity, would lay his carcass in a cross-road, or stamp his name in a verdict of lunacy? Did he (who in his sexagenary . . .) reflect or consider what my feelings must have been when wife and child and sister, and name and fame and country, were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar?—and this at a moment when my health was declining, my fortune embarrassed, and my mind had been shaken by many kinds of disappointment? while I was yet young, and might have reformed what might be wrong in my conduct, and retrieved what was perplexing in my affairs? But he is in his grave, and—What a long letter I have scribbled!' . . .

  * * * * *

  In order that the reader may measure the change of moral tone with regard to Lord Byron, wrought by the constant efforts of himself and his party, we give the two following extracts from 'Blackwood:'

  The first is 'Blackwood' in 1819, just after the publication of 'Don Juan:' the second is 'Blackwood' in 1825.

  'In the composition of this work, there is, unquestionably, a more thorough and intense infusion of genius and vice, power and profligacy, than in any poem which had ever before been written in the English, or, indeed, in any other modern language. Had the wickedness been less inextricably mingled with the beauty and the grace and the strength of a most inimitable and incomprehensible Muse, our task would have been easy. 'Don Juan' is by far the most admirable specimen of the mixture of ease, strength, gaiety, and seriousness, extant in the whole body of English poetry: the author has devoted his powers to the worst of purposes and passions; and it increases his guilt and our sorrow that he has devoted them entire.

  'The moral strain of the whole poem is pitched in the lowest key. Love, honour, patriotism, religion, are mentioned only to be scoffed at, as if their sole resting-place were, or ought to be, in the bosoms of fools. It appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, having drained the cup of sin even to its bitterest dregs, were resolved to show us that he is no longer a human being, even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend, laughing with a detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed; treating well-nigh with equal derision the most pure of virtues, and the most odious of vices; dead alike to the beauty of the one, and the deformity of the other; a mere heartless despiser of that frail but noble humanity, whose type was never exhibited in a shape of more deplorable degradation than in his own contemptuously distinct delineation of himself. To confess to his Maker, and weep over in secret agonies the wildest and most fantastic transgressions of heart and mind, is the part of a conscious sinner, in whom sin has not become the sole principle of life and action; but to lay bare to the eye of man and of woman all the hidden convulsions of a wicked spirit, and to do all this without one symptom of contrition, remorse, or hesitation, with a calm, careless ferociousness of contented and satisfied depravity,—this was an insult which no man of genius had ever before dared to put upon his Creator or his species. Impiously railing against his God, madly and meanly disloyal to his sovereign and his country, and brutally outraging all the best feelings of female honour, affection, and confidence, how small a part of chivalry is that which remains to the descendant of the Byrons!—a gloomy visor and a deadly weapon!

  'Those who are acquainted (and who is not?) with the main incidents in the private life of Lord Byron, and who have not seen this production, will scarcely believe that malignity should have carried him so far as to make him commence a filthy and impious poem with an elaborate satire on the character and manners of his wife, from whom, even by his own confession, he has been separated only in consequence of his own cruel and heartless misconduct. It is in vain for Lord Byron to attempt in any way to justify his own behaviour in that affair; and, now that he has so openly and audaciously invited inquiry and reproach, we do not see any good reason why he should not be plainly told so by the general voice of his countrymen. It would not be an easy matter to persuade any man who has any knowledge of the nature of woman, that a female such as Lord Byron has himself described his wife to be would rashly or hastily or lightly separate herself from the love with which she had once been inspired for such a man as he is or was. Had he not heaped insult upon insult, and scorn upon scorn, had he not forced the iron of his contempt into her very soul, there is no woman of delicacy and virtue, as he admitted Lady Byron to be, who would not have hoped all things, and suffered all things, from one, her love of whom must have been inwoven with so many exalting elements of delicious pride, and more delicious humility. To offend the love of such a woman was wrong, but it might be forgiven; to desert her was unmanly, but he might have returned, and wiped for ever from her eyes the tears of her desertion: but to injure and to desert, and then to turn back and wound her widowed privacy with unhallowed strains of cold-blooded mockery, was brutally, fiendishly, inexpiably mean. For impurities there might be some possibility of pardon, were they supposed to spring only from the reckless buoyancy of young blood and fiery passions; for impiety there might at least be pity, were it visible that the misery of the impious soul equalled its darkness: but for offences such as this, which cannot proceed either from the madness of sudden impulse or the bewildered agonies of doubt, but which speak the wilful and determined spite of an unrepenting, unsoftened, smiling, sarcastic, joyous sinner, there can be neither pity nor pardon. Our knowledge that it is committed by one of the most powerful intellects our island ever has produced lends intensity a thousand-fold to the bitterness of our indignation. Every high thought that was ever kindled in our breasts by the Muse of Byron, every pure and lofty feeling that ever responded from within us to the sweep of his majestic inspirations, every remembered moment of admiration and enthusiasm, is up in arms against him. We look back with a mixture of wrath and scorn to the delight with which we suffered ourselves to be filled by one, who, all the while he was furnishing us with delight, must, we cannot doubt it, have been mocking us with a cruel mockery; less cruel only, because less peculiar, than that with which he has now turned him from the lurking-place of his selfish and polluted exile to pour the pitiful chalice of his contumely on the surrendered devotion of a virgin bosom, and the holy hopes of the mother of his child. It is indeed a sad and a humiliating thing to know, that in the same year, there proceeded from the same pen two productions in all things so different as the fourth canto of “Childe Harold” and his loathsome “Don Juan.”

  'We have mentioned one, and, all will admit, the worst instance of the private malignity which has been embodied in so many passages of “Don Juan;” and we are quite sure the lofty-minded and virtuous men whom Lord Byron has debased himself by insulting will close the volume which contains their own injuries, with no feelings save those of pity for him that has inflicted them, and for her who partakes so largely in the same injuries.'—August, 1819.

  * * * * *

  'BLACKWOOD,'—iterum.

  'We shall, like all others who say anything about Lord Byron, begin, sans apologie, with his personal character. This is the great object of attack, the constant theme of open vituperation to one set, and the established mark for all the petty but deadly artillery of sn
eers, shrugs, groans, to another. Two widely different matters, however, are generally, we might say universally, mixed up here,—the personal character of the man, as proved by his course of life; and his personal character, as revealed in or guessed from his books. Nothing can be more unfair than the style in which this mixture is made use of. Is there a noble sentiment, a lofty thought, a sublime conception, in the book? “Ah, yes!” is the answer. “But what of that? It is only the roué Byron that speaks!” Is a kind, a generous action of the man mentioned? “Yes, yes!” comments the sage; “but only remember the atrocities of 'Don Juan:' depend on it, this, if it be true, must have been a mere freak of caprice, or perhaps a bit of vile hypocrisy.” Salvation is thus shut out at either entrance: the poet damns the man, and the man the poet.