MRS. STOWE ON LADY BYRON.
IT is certainly a curious fact that some persons of genius can develop an ideal trait into a character that seems full of the realism of precise and petty traits, while the very same per- sons, having to deal with a real character, not only fail to give us any such transcript of it as we could recognize, but even turn it into a character wholly and sentimentally unreal, which not only does not resemble the original, but does not resemble real life at all. This seems to us to have been what Mrs. Stowe has done for Lady Byron. Her new " Vindication " contains a chapter on Lady Byron as she impressed the great American novelist. And we confess that this chapter interests us more than the rest of the " Vindica- tion," which deals very feebly with the main difficulty of the case,—the letters to Mrs. Leigh. As, till these letters appeared, we were amongst the staunchest supporters of the reasonableness of believing any direct testimony of Lady Byron's on this bead, and the unreasonableness of believing any direct testi- mony of Lord Byron's, no one could question our impar- tiality when we declared that the letters to Mrs. Leigh published in the Quarterly Review in our opinion threw the whole onus of proof on the vindicators of Lady Byron's tale which seemed to us wholly incompatible with the authenticity of these letters. To that opinion we still hold. Mrs. Stowe has made a great effort so far to modify her original hypothesis as to meet the natural inference from these letters. She suggests that Mrs. Leigh had persuaded Lady Byron that Lord Byrou's conduct and self-accusations were the result of insanity, and that Lady Byron for some time believed her, and from the wish to soothe the imaginary excitement under which she supposed her husband to be labouring, wrote the very extraordinary " Dear Duck " letter sent to him on the journey home ;—that under the influence of fresh intelligence from town, she then abandoned the theory of Lord Byron's madness, but retained her belief in Augusta Leigh's perfect innocence, reconciling the inconsistencies of the case by assuming that attempts had been made on Mrs. Leigh's virtue which the latter attributed to insanity, and which she had easily repelled ;—and that it was in this state of mind that Lady Byron made her confession to Dr. Lushington, only discovering
the truth in later years. Now, this is not an hypothesis which will really hold water. In the first place, a shrewd lawyer would never have decided so peremptorily as Dr. Lushington did that Lady Byron could never return to her husband, had the only ground
been certain supposed attempts which the victim of them believed to be explicable by the theory of insanity, without the most rigid investigation of the facts. But, in the next place, the affectionate and confidential letters to Mrs. Leigh, expressing as they do the deepest gratitude to her for staying with Lord Byron at such a crisis, and not a word of warning or alarm at the perils of her situation, are wholly inconsistent with the hypothesis. Lady Byron, had she believed what Mrs. Stowe attributes to her, could not but have warned Mrs. Leigh in the most earnest language that she was not only under a mistake as to Lord Byron's insanity, but that she was in danger of the most revolting kind from that mistake, and entreated her to leave Lord Byron's roof. Of this
there is not even a hint. All the letters to Mrs. Leigh written between the separation and the interview with Dr. Lushington are couched in the most affectionate and, as regards Mrs. Leigh herself, the most trustful and thankful terms. We assert, with- out a doubt, that Mrs. Stowe's explanation of these letters is far more improbable than the supposition that Lady Byron's mind was disordered on the special topic of this terrible element in her life. And with this we will leave a subject which we deeply regret that Mrs. Stowe ever broached, and which we trust it may not be necessary again to return to,—and turn instead to what seems to us much more worthy of consideration, the curious
literary inefficiency of the portrait of Lady Byron given by a woman who has shown such extraordinary genius in painting imaginary characters with the utmost reality and vigour. This is Mrs. Stowe's first picture:— "Lady Byron, though slight and almost infantino in her bodily pre- sence, had the soul, not only of an angelic woman, but of a strong reasoning man. It was the writer's lot to know her at a period when she formed the personal acquaintance of many of the very first minds of England ; but, among all with whom this experience brought her in connection, there was none who impressed her so strongly as Lady Byron. There was an almost supernatural power of moral divination, a grasp of the very highest and most comprehensive things, that made her lightest opinions singularly impressive. No doubt, this result was wrought out in a great degree from the anguish and conflict of these two years, when, with no one to help or counsel her but Almighty God, she wrestled and struggled with fiends of darkness for the redemption of her husband's soul."
And this is her last :— " The party had many notables; but among theta all, my attention was fixed principally on Lady Byron. She was at this time sixty-ono years of age, but still had, to a remarkable degree, that personal attrac- tion which is commonly considered to belong only to youth and beauty. Her form was slight, giving an impression of fragility ; her motions were both graceful and decided ; her eyes bright, and full of interest and quick observation. Her silvery-white hair seemed to lend a grace to the transparent purity of her complexion, and her small hands had a pearly whiteness. I recollect she wore a plain widow's cap of a tran- sparent material ; and was dressed in some delicate shade of lavender, which harmonized well with her complexion. When I was introduced to her, I felt in a momont the words of her husband :—
There was awe in the homage that she drew ; Her spirit seemed as seated on a throne.'
Calm, self-poised, and thoughtful, alio seemed to mo rather to resemble an interested spectator of the world's affairs, then an actor involved in its trials; yet the sweetness of her smile, and a certain very delicate sense of humour in her remarks, made the way of acquaintance easy. Her first remarks were a little playful ; but in a few moments we were speaking on what every one in those days was talking to me about,—the slavery question in America. It need not bo remarked, that,. when any one subject especially occupies the public mind, those known to be interested in it are compelled to listen to many weary platitudes. Lady Byron's remarks, however, caught my car and arrested may atten- tion by their peculiar incisive quality, their originality, and the evidence they gave that she was as well informed on all our matters as tho best American statesman could be. I had no wearisome course to go over with her as to the difference between the General Government and State Government, nor explanations of the United States Constitution ; for she bad tho whole before her mind with a perfect clearness. Her morality upon the slavery question, too, impressed me as something far higher and deeper than the common sentimentalism of the day. Many of her words surprised me greatly, and gave mo now material for thought. I found I was in company with a commanding mind."
Now we are doing no injustice to a woman whose character was, as we believe, above all slander, and of the first order as regards benevolence, by saying that Mrs. Stowe's empty portraitures of ideal excellences do not convey any lifelike conception of Lady Byron at all, and would no more be recognized as like her than Mr. Armitage's fresco of her in University Hall, which was developed entirely, we believe, out of the artist's inner conscious- ness. Everything that has transpired about Lady Byron speaks of a woman alike of bad judgment and of a somewhat ambitious intellect,—ambitious, we mean, in proportion to its powers,—and
of this Mrs. Stowe gives us no conception. Her marriage was, as she herself, we suppose, afterwards believed, a fatal mistake, and as Lord Byron malevolently hinted, on the very day of his
wedding, an ambitious mistake, a mistake half rooted in the belief that she would have the power and strength to wean him from frightful vices of the existence of which she did not pretend to be ignorant. No doubt the literature of the day, which was always drawing pictures of young girls reforming noble-minded rakes by their love and self-denial and nobility as wives, was likely enough to have fostered this great enterprise iu her, and should be held partly responsible for it. Still, no doubt, the mistake was in some degree due to a very marked intellectual ambition which is almost always visible in Lady Byron's letters and papers, and which none who knew her well would deny. As the world knows, she was something of a versifier in her youth, and the pleasure in a certain eccentricity of intellectual expression never really left her. Her writing, to us, has a marked savour of intellectual effort. She writes to Mrs. Stowe, for instance, in a letter published by Mrs. Stowe in this book in relation to some friend's death, "Her death is a suet-fuss to me also,"—an unpleasant phrase which sufficiently marks a certain hard school of sentimentalism. So, again, in one of her letters to Mr. Crabb Robinson, she gets quite trans- cendental in describing her views of a literary enterprise then about to be started,—the National Review. It was just at the time of the resignation of Lord Aberdeen's government, in con- sequence of the miseries of the Army in the Crimea, and the succession of Lord Palmerston to office :— " Has not the nation been brought to a conviction that the system should be broken up? and is Lord Palmerston, who has used it so long and so cleverly, likely to promote that object ? But, whatever obstacles there may be in State affairs, that general persuasion must modify other departments of action and knowledge. 'Unroasted coffee' will no longer be accepted under the official seal,—another reason for a now literary combination for distinct special objects, a review in which every sepa- rate article should be convergent. if, instead of the problem to make a circle pass through three given points, it were required to find the centre from which to describe a circle through any three articles in the Edinbutgh or if Review, who would accomplish it ? Much force is lost for want of this one-mindedness amongst the contributors."
Now, that is undoubtedly Arced writing, and as ineffective as it is forced. Lady Byron means that it is a great advantage in a review to be written by like-minded men who have the same general ends in view, and whose papers, therefore, will produce a certain unity of moral impression. That is very well. But could it be expressed in more pedantic language than it is in the simile about the circle,—language better calculated to obscure a simple and natural meaning 7 The same remark applies still more forcibly to Lady Byron's high-flown criticism of her husband's hypothetical Calvinism, and of 'the angel' in him of which so much has been said. She drove this sort of theory very hard indeed,—drove it to eccentricity, and talked of what she could not have known anything, when she said in one of her letters to Mr. Crabb Robinson, .• It was impossible for me to doubt that could he [Lord Byron] have once been assured of pardon, his living faith in a moral duty and love of virtue would have conquered every temptation." If Lord Byron was as bad as he seems to us, and as his wife certainly believed him, the assurance of pardon from God would scarcely have done more for him than the assurance of pardon from man,—which, as regards the one he had most injured, we suppose he had. There is a certain theoretic pedantry and effort about Lady Byron's literary style, and a power of gravely taking up half-real assumptions (as in the "Dear Duck" letter) which seems to us one of her most marked features. Mrs. Stowe has wholly missed this, though it is one of the most marked weak- nesses of a character of great nobility ; and, doubtless, it was very closely connected indeed with the weak judgment of which Lady Byron never gave a more remarkable proof than in her marriage, first, and, next, in making an all but complete stranger, and that stranger a foreign author, her confidante in regard to the most delicate secrets of her life. If anything further were wanted to mark this weakness of judgment it would be the occasion on which she consulted Mrs. Stowe,—the issue of a cheap edition of Byron's poems, the popularity of which Lady Byron thought would be diminished, and their poisonous effects prevented, by a disclosure of this horrible scandal ! No doubt, in nobility of character and self-denying virtues Lady Byron was all that her friends represent her. But there can be no sort of doubt that there was a flaw, and a very serious one, somewhere, in her intellectual nature and practical judgment. When Mrs. Stowe calls her intellect 'inci- sive' she only just misses the truth. Incisive perhaps it was, but very far from subtle. It too often created the distinctions it insisted on, instead of discovering and marking distinctions
really existing. And this was so conspicuous in her and in all the papers left behind her which we have ever seen, that it seems strange to us how a great imaginative painter could have known her and not discerned so remarkable a feature of her character.
The truth is, we suspect, that as the sculptor is limited by his supply of marble, so the novelist is limited by the supply of the rough material of human nature in himself or herself out of which he or she has to mould her pictures. The novelist, however great, cannot go clear beyond the resources of his own nature and experience. Even Sir Walter Scott painted peasants and kings with almost equal power because there were both peasant and king in himself, but failed when he came to drawing-room chat which Miss Austen draws so wonderfully, because there was in his own mind no supply of this minute domestic material for portraiture. And so it has been with Mrs. Stowe. The poor sentimental style in which this " Vindication " has been written shows how utterly unable she is to paint the higher intellectual forms of English character. What strikes upon and jars us as feeble judgment and ambitious style in Lady Byron seems to Mrs. Stowe the natural expression of a high intellectual character. She cannot discern what does not exist in her own experience. All the shrewdness, humour, and wit, all the hardness and softness, the love and the hate of the rude forms of society peculiar to the negroes, and of the sharp Yankee go-a-head society, seem as fami- liar to her as her own soul. But when she comes to discriminate the forms of intellectual power in an old but to her quite fresh kind of society, she very naturally fails and confounds effort and eccen- tricity with keen discrimination and deep wisdom. To our minds, the true Lady Byron was by no means such that one cannot imagine a morbid and disturbing vein of thought to have, in some degree, unhinged her on a special topic, and clouded a judgment by no means originally of the strongest. At all events, the inter- pretation which Mrs. Stowe has now suggested of the letters to Mrs. Leigh can hardly be satisfactory to anyone but herself.
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