under advice of her lawyers, made the alternative legal separation or open investigation in court for divorce, what did he do?
HE SIGNED THE ACT OF SEPARATION AND LEFT ENGLAND.
Now, let any man who knows the legal mind of England—let any lawyer who knows the character of Sir Samuel Romilly and Dr. Lushington, ask whether they were the men to take a case into court for a woman that had no evidence but her own statements and impressions? Were they men to go to trial without proofs? Did they not know that there were artful, hysterical women in the world, and would they, of all people, be the men to take a woman’s story on her own side, and advise her in the last issue to bring it into open court, without legal proof of the strongest kind? Now, as long as Sir Samuel Romilly lived, this statement of Byron’s—that he was condemned unheard, and had no chance of knowing whereof he was accused—never appeared in public.
It, however, was most actively circulated in private. That Byron was in the habit of intrusting to different confidants articles of various kinds to be shown to different circles as they could bear them, we have already shown. We have recently come upon another instance of this kind. In the late eagerness to exculpate Byron, a new document has turned up, of which Mr. Murray, it appears, had never heard when, after Byron’s death, he published in the preface to his ‘Domestic Pieces’ the sentence: ‘He rejected the proposal for an amicable separation, but consented when threatened with a suit in Doctors’ Commons.’ It appears that, up to 1853, neither John Murray senior, nor the son who now fills his place, had taken any notice of this newly found document, which we are now informed was drawn up by Lord Byron in August 1817, while Mr. Hobhouse was staying with him at La Mira, near Venice, given to Mr. Matthew Gregory Lewis, for circulation among friends in England, found in Mr. Lewis’s papers after his death, and now in the possession of Mr. Murray.’ Here it is:—
‘It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared “their lips to be sealed up” on the cause of the separation between her and myself. If their lips are sealed up, they are not sealed up by me, and the greatest favour they can confer upon me will be to open them. From the first hour in which I was apprised of the intentions of the Noel family to the last communication between Lady Byron and myself in the character of wife and husband (a period of some months), I called repeatedly and in vain for a statement of their or her charges, and it was chiefly in consequence of Lady Byron’s claiming (in a letter still existing) a promise on my part to consent to a separation, if such was really her wish, that I consented at all; this claim, and the exasperating and inexpiable manner in which their object was pursued, which rendered it next to an impossibility that two persons so divided could ever be reunited, induced me reluctantly then, and repentantly still, to sign the deed, which I shall be happy—most happy—to cancel, and go before any tribunal which may discuss the business in the most public manner.
‘Mr. Hobhouse made this proposition on my part, viz. to abrogate all prior intentions—and go into court—the very day before the separation was signed, and it was declined by the other party, as also the publication of the correspondence during the previous discussion. Those propositions I beg here to repeat, and to call upon her and hers to say their worst, pledging myself to meet their allegations—whatever they may be—and only too happy to be informed at last of their real nature.
‘BYRON.’
‘August 9, 1817.
‘P.S.—I have been, and am now, utterly ignorant of what description her allegations, charges, or whatever name they may have assumed, are; and am as little aware for what purpose they have been kept back—unless it was to sanction the most infamous calumnies by silence.
‘BYRON.’
‘La Mira, near Venice.’
It appears the circulation of this document must have been very private, since Moore, not over-delicate towards Lady Byron, did not think fit to print it; since John Murray neglected it, and since it has come out at this late hour for the first time.
If Lord Byron really desired Lady Byron and her legal counsel to understand the facts herein stated, and was willing at all hazards to bring on an open examination, why was this privately circulated? Why not issued as a card in the London papers? Is it likely that Mr. Matthew Gregory Lewis, and a chosen band of friends acting as a committee, requested an audience with Lady Byron, Sir Samuel Romilly, and Dr. Lushington, and formally presented this cartel of defiance?
We incline to think not. We incline to think that this small serpent, in company with many others of like kind, crawled secretly and privately around, and when it found a good chance, bit an honest Briton, whose blood was thenceforth poisoned by an undetected falsehood.
The reader now may turn to the letters that Mr. Moore has thought fit to give us of this stay at La Mira, beginning with Letter 286, dated July 1, 1817, {28a} where he says: ‘I have been working up my impressions into a Fourth Canto of Childe Harold,’ and also ‘Mr. Lewis is in Venice. I am going up to stay a week with him there.’
Next, under date La Mira, Venice, July 10, {28b} he says, ‘Monk Lewis is here; how pleasant!’
Next, under date July 20, 1817, to Mr. Murray: ‘I write to give you notice that I have completed the fourth and ultimate canto of Childe Harold. … It is yet to be copied and polished, and the notes are to come.’
Under date of La Mira, August 7, 1817, he records that the new canto is one hundred and thirty stanzas in length, and talks about the price for it. He is now ready to launch it on the world; and, as now appears, on August 9, 1817, two days after, he wrote the document above cited, and put it into the hands of Mr. Lewis, as we are informed, ‘for circulation among friends in England.’
The reason of this may now be evident. Having prepared a suitable number of those whom he calls in his notes to Murray ‘the initiated,’ by private documents and statements, he is now prepared to publish his accusations against his wife, and the story of his wrongs, in a great immortal poem, which shall have a band of initiated interpreters, shall be read through the civilised world, and stand to accuse her after his death.
In the Fourth Canto of ‘Childe Harold,’ with all his own overwhelming power of language, he sets forth his cause as against the silent woman who all this time had been making no party, and telling no story, and whom the world would therefore conclude to be silent because she had no answer to make. I remember well the time when this poetry, so resounding in its music, so mournful, so apparently generous, filled my heart with a vague anguish of sorrow for the sufferer, and of indignation at the cold insensibility that had maddened him. Thousands have felt the power of this great poem, which stands, and must stand to all time, a monument of what sacred and solemn powers God gave to this wicked man, and how vilely he abused this power as a weapon to slay the innocent.
It is among the ruins of ancient Rome that his voice breaks forth in solemn imprecation:—
‘O Time, thou beautifier of the dead,
Adorner of the ruin, comforter,
And only healer when the heart hath bled!—
Time, the corrector when our judgments err,
The test of truth, love—sole philosopher,
For all besides are sophists—from thy shrift
That never loses, though it doth defer!—
Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift
My hands and heart and eyes, and claim of thee a gift.
* * * *
‘If thou hast ever seen me too elate,
Hear me not; but if calmly I have borne
Good, and reserved my pride against the hate
Which shall not whelm me, let me not have worn
This iron in my soul in vain, shall THEY not mourn?
And thou who never yet of human wrong