BOOKS.
BYRON AND HIS QUARREL WITH HIS WIFE.*
WE have hitherto only reviewed shortly the volumes that have appeared of this extremely interesting and valuable edition of Byron's letters, journals, and poems. The appearance of the third volume of the Letters deserves, however, special notice, for it contains a great deal of new matter — or, at any rate, of matter not hitherto published in book form—in regard to the quarrel between Byron and his wife. One's first impulse in regard to the domestic troubles of poets—and, indeed, of all public men
to leave them alone. It is at best a hideous business this disinterment of family skeletons, and, as a rule, no sort of good is to be got by making the dead bones rattle. But in the case of Byron it would be absurd to try to leave the skeleton alone, for the poet's quarrel with his wife has become past protest the point in his career which chiefly interests the public. This is not due solely to the fact that it is scandalous. It is rather because there is a mystery connected with the quarrel, and what the human mind delights in above everything is the unravelling of a secret. If we could know Lady Byron's reasons for separating from her husband in detail, we should probably find them somewhat common- place; but as long as the secret is a secret, it is sure to
• The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals. Vol. III. Edited by Rowland E. Brother° —Puems. Vol. II. Edited by E. Hartley Coleridge. Lonaon : John Murray. [es each v01.]
interest the world after the manner of the Tuning letters and the Man in the Iron Mask.
The letters which passed between Lady Byron and Byron's half-sister, Mrs. Leigh, directly after Lady Byron left her home, and till the deed of separation was signed, are printed in full in an appendix to the volume before us. If they do not solve the whole mystery, they certainly bring us within reason- able distance of the essential secret. It is clear from them that when Lady Byron left London for her father's house she was absolutely convinced that Byron's mind had given way, and that he was not a responsible being. 'Under these circum- stances she did what was most natural in a wife who loved her husband, as we cannot doubt that she did. She wrote to him in a moat conciliatory, and even tender, tone, and did her very best not to irritate him. She pressed him, indeed, to come to her father's house in the hope that the rest and quiet, and her care of him, might produce a restoration of his mental health. With this fixed idea in her mind, and with the knowledge of her sister-in-law, Lady Byron took the advice of doctors skilled in brain cases in order to dis- cover what was the nature of Byron's malady, and how best it could be cared and treated. To her astonishment the final verdict of the doctors was that Byron was not mad.
Upon this there came at once a great revulsion of feeling. If Byron was not mad, then he was bad, and bad beyond all possibility, we will not say of forgiveness, for Lady Byron did not show herself unforgiving, bat of a further con- tinuance of married life. Miss Milbanke had been famed for her mathematical studies, and with the remorseless logic.
of geometry she impaled her life upon the dilemma My husband is either mad or wicked. If mad, I will make any sacrifice to cure him. If wicked, I cannot again put myself in his power and submit to the intolerable mental tortures which he previously devised for me,—tortures which de- moralised him as much as they injured me.' But human life cannot be guided and governed by a syllogistic process of this kind. Lady Byron, if she had been advised by some person of wise mind and large experience, would have learnt that men can very well be half mad and half sane, that they can play at madness, and that though they are in no legal sense irresponsible, they often can and ought to be tr:a.ted as if they were out of their minds. However, we cannot fairly blame Lady Byron for not realising this, or for insisting that Byron must be either mad or sane. Again, considering Byron's pose as a man of gloom and wickedness who was wont to utter hints about poison, to flourish pistols, and to talk darkly of unforgiveable sins, it is not to be wondered at that a young woman who had a home to go to should dislike the idea of being again placed in his power. Besides, her amour propre might very legitimately have played a part in the business. To look after a madman and to bring him back to reason was a martyr's part. To submit to the vagaries, tantrums, and wild enormities of rhetoric of a man who was authoritatively declared to be sane was quite another matter. Then, too, in the last resort, the feeling If he is not mad, he must hate me beyond all limits' would be always ringing in Lady Byron's ears. But what high-spirited woman would like to force herself on a man whom she believed hated her, and a man, too, who had originally fooled her, as she would say, into the belief that she alone could save him P But though one can understand and sympathise with Lady Byron in her resolution, which, if not quite wise, was quite natural, we need not assume that Byron himself behaved quite as outrageously as she came to think he had. In the first place, we do not for a moment believe that he hated his wife. On the contrary, it is far more likely that he was fond of her, though not actually in love with her. Again, the notion that he married her, as Lady Byron ultimately thought he did, out of revenge, is absurd. No doubt he may have told her so,—say, after a scene, when she had asked him why he had married her if he treated her so unkindly. That was, of course, a purely fictitious reason, but it suited very well with the Lara-Manfred diabolic pose, and doubtless did what it was intended to do,—i.e., made his unfortunate wife's blood run cold.
No statement is, of course, made in the letters to Mrs. Leigh as to what was the exact and immediate cause of quarrel, but it is not difficult, we think, to read between the lines. Byron, as we have said, loved posing as a bad, bold man, and the more people were taken in the more he posed. What seems most likely is that when Byron's liver was out of order, when he was in a bad temper, when he was excited by the act of composition, or perhaps when he had taken too much brandy, he said very outrageous things about himself and his past, and talked a great deal of stuff about his being stained with every vice and every crime, and how he had forfeited all hope of forgiveness by man and God, and so on and so on. A cool-tempered, sensible woman of the world would no doubt have said "Fudge "or "Don't be a fool, Byron," or still better, have paid no attention what- ever ; and Byron would thereafter have regarded her as a woman to be a little afraid of, and so as his good angel, for he had a hard common-sense side to his brain. But Lady Byron was not that sort of person at all,—a woman of intelligence rather than of sound and clear judgment. Besides, the chief quarrels took place in the months just before Lady Byron's confinement, and she may well be pardoned if she was imposed upon by her husband's exaggerations. There is one very pathetic though not very wise or clear. seeing letter of Lady Byron's addressed to Mr. Hodgson which illustrates so well what we mean that we will quote it entire :— "February 24th, 1816.
Dnan Sin,—I have received your second letter. First let me thank you for the charity with which you consider my motives. And now of the principal subject. I eagerly adopted the belief of insanity as a consolation, and, though such malady has been found insufficient to prevent his responsibility with man, I will still trust that it may latently exist, so as to acquit him towards God. This no human being can judge. It certainly does not destroy the powers of self-control, or impair the knowledge of moral good and evil. Considering the case upon the supposition of derangement, you may have heard what any medical adviser would confirm, that it is in the nature of such malady to reverse the affections, and to make those who would naturally be dearest the greatest objects of aversion, the most exposed to acts of violence, and the least capable of alleviating the malady. Upon such grounds my absence from Lord B. was medically advised before I left town, but the advisers had not then seen him, and since Mr. Le Mann has had opportunities of personal observation, it has been found that the supposed physical causes do not exist, so as to render him not an accountable agent. I believe the nature of Lord B.'s mind to be most benevolent ; but there may have been circumstances (I would hope the consequences, not the causes, of mental disorder) which would render an original tender- ness of conscience the motive of desperation, even of guilt, when self-esteem had been forfeited too far. No external motive can be so strong. I entrust this to you under the most absolute secrecy. Goodness of heart, when there are impetuous passions and no principles, is a frail security. Every possible means have been employed to effect a private and amicable arrangement, and I would sacrifice such advantages in terms as I believe that the Law would ensure to me to avoid this dreadful necessity. Yet I must have some security, and Lord B. refuses to afford any. If you could persuade him to the agreement, you would save me from what 1 most deprecate. I have now applied to Lord Holland for that end. If you wish to answer, and I shall always be happy to hear from you, I must request you to enclose your letter to Sir Ralph Noel, Mivart's Hotel, Lower Brook St., London, as I am not sure where I may be at that time. My considerations of duty are of a very complicated nature, but my duty as a mother seems to point out the same conduct that I pursue upon other principles, that I have partly explained. I must observe upon one passage of your letter that I have had expectations of personal violence, though I was too miserable to have feelings of fear, and those expectations would now be still stronger. In regard to any changes which the future state of Lord B.'s mind might justify in my intentions, an amicable arrangement would not destroy the opening for reconciliation. Pray endeavour to promote the dis- positions to such an arrangement; there is every reason to desire it.—Yours very truly, A. I. BYRON."
That letter seems to show beyond doubt that Byron had talked a great deal in the high diabolical manner noted above about having committed sins for which there could be no forgive- ness, of his being beyond all help or hope, and therefore of his intention to play the necessary part of devil with becoming completeness, grandeur, and sublimity,—as Lady Byron says in her last letter to Byron, he had expressed "a determination to be wicked." It is half humorous, but still more pathetic, to see how well Byron's exaggerations imposed on his wife, and what ruin it brought. Doubtless no one in the end was more annoyed than he was that he had frightened his wife so successfully. But perhaps a separation, sooner or
later, was inevitable. No one but a woman with a profound and almost cynical sense of humour, and at the same time a great and devoted love, and also, we fear it must be added, with a willingness to make considerable sacrifices of her own self-respect, could have arranged a successful and happy
married life for Byron. What he wanted was a wife who could say to him with perfect sangfroid : 'Well, my dear, if you really feel you must go and commit all the sins in Leviticus because you have done so already, go and commit them, only don't worry me about it any more, because it bores me.' It would have required a very coarse.fibred woman to say such things no doubt, but such a woman would have been the best wife for Byron. In truth, Byron was from the very first Ispoiling" for a sensational divorce, and it would have required a person greatly skilled in the management of naughty and wilful children to have kept him from having his way. Lady Byron was certainly not the woman to prevent him. She was deeply wounded by his pose, and instead of laughing at him, she began to theorise about it. Then she was lost, for she was building not on a reality, but on the sand, or rather on the mud, and mud of a not very pleasant kind.
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