THE PUBLIC PREPOSSESSION FOR BYRON.
AiIRS. BEECHER STOWE will probably repent her impul-
sive and unjustified confession, when she sees the incredulity with which her story has been received in both England and America, and the sort of wild reaction it has really caused in Byron's favour. This absolute incredulity seems to us, we confess, much as we regret and blame Mrs. Stowe's rashness, irrational in the extreme. If wise men must admit that a story so horrible might very possibly be plausibly accounted for without assuming the utterly inadmissible hypothesis of either Lady Byron's falsehood or Mrs. Stowe's falsehood, on the one hand, and without assuming either of those ladies' intellectual derangement on the other, yet certainly no sensible man would for a moment, while all the positive evidence is on one side and nothing but the most ambiguous inferential evidence on the other, go to the absurd extreme taken up just now by English and American opinion of absolutely and obstinately discrediting the testimony given. Perhaps the wisest thing that Lady Byron's executors could now do would be to publish at once the authentic documents in their possession. No doubt the " altum silentium," the " premat nox alta " policy, for which Mr. T. Arnold so eloquently contends in the Daily News, was the right policy, but it is possible no longer. After Mrs. Beecher Stowe's terrible error—terri- ble, we mean, in its practical results, for there can be no manner of doubt (and ought to have been none in Lady Byron's mind, if she had really been the shrewd as well as the good woman Mrs. Beecher Stowe gives her credit for being) that the mere currency of such a story, instead of limiting the circulation and diminishing the morbid fascinations of Byron's poems, would, whether disbelieved or believed, have multiplied it tenfold—after this terrible blunder of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's, we say, probably the best thing to be done is to adopt the policy of frankness, and so allay the morbid curiosity which will never rest while the literary executors of Lady Byron preserve silence. Then, with all the evidence produced, the morbid public excitement would pro- bably subside, and we should no longer have acute critics putting every promising line of Lord Byron's poetry to the rack, in order to ascertain whether it yields up what is supposed to be damning evidence against him, or what is held to be equally con- clusive proof of his innocence. As it is, no more singularly successful device could have been invented for raising to the zenith Lord Byron's literary popularity than this discredited statement,—con- necting his name, as it does, with a dark accusation which is held by some not only to be still unproven, but demonstrated baseless.
But, to take leave of this very disagreeable controversy, the feature of the public mind which is to us most striking and un- expected, is the extraordinary depth of the prepossession which it has revealed in favour of Byron,—and that not merely Byron the poet, but Byron the man. Anything more irrational, as we have said, than the blank and positive disbelief with which the only evidence bearing on the subject that would have any value at all in a court of justice has been received on all sides, it is impossible to conceive. We do not say, we do not think for a moment, that any conclusive evidence has as yet been produced. But the rebutting evi- dence so passionately relied on,—Lord Lindsay's negative evidence, for instance, that Lady Byron did not hint the facts to Lady Anne Barnard, the Standard's literary evidence or no evidence gathered from the poems, more than outweighed by the Saturday Review's opposite argument published on the same day,—simply amounts to this, that all the conceivable sources of evidence don't yield up corroborating particulars. Mrs. Beecher Stowe's version of Lady Byron's story is treated as if it were not even a capital item of evidence, and all,—for this is what we want to insist on,—from the passionate prepossession for Byron which pervades both England and America. Mr. William Howitt's vivid description of Lady Byron's liability to sudden changes from cordial to icy moods —which is, no doubt, truthful enough, and by no means surprising in a woman who had suffered as she did,—is dwelt upon as if it had the slightest tendency to prove that Lady Byron was subject to life- long illusions, and was, in fact, deranged, a supposition for which, we will venture to say, there never was the shadow of evidence in the mind of any one of those many friends who directly or indirectly have given their estimate of her to the public. The simple truth is that English and American opinion is obviously .determined not to weigh, but to discredit, what it has heard. We all feel that Mrs. Beecher Stowe—doubtless actuated by generous impulses — has done a rash, and mischievous, and unjustifiable thing in communicating what she had heard from Lady Byron without first consulting with Lady Byron's literary executors and descendants. This has set public feeling against her, but this could certainly not have been sufficient to lead to the hasty and absurd conclusion that her inaccurate recollection of Lady Byron's statement is as wide of the mark in its main drift as it is in its minute incidental details, were not the public mind violently prejudiced in Lord Byron's favour. This is to our minds the cardinal fact of the recent excitement. Byron is still a pet, a darling, of the English-speaking races, not merely as a poet, but as a man.
For ourselves, we confess that, supposing Mrs. Beecher Stowe's story to be in the main true—which seems to us on the evidence more likely than not, though the evidence is, of course, as yet quite sinsifted, and open to all the contingencies of prima facie evidence in general—it would not alter seriously our previous estimate of the moral character of Lord Byron. It would show, indeed, what was not before known, that he was a man who could violate mot merely every moral principle—that was known—but the -deepest natural instincts of human nature ; in other words, that there was natural disease in his instincts, as well as moral disease in his will. But would any candid reader of his poems be seriously surprised at that? Still more, does it not almost relieve the guilt (properly so called,—i.e., the responsible guilt) involved in the mali- cious audacity of his naked satire, to know that there was a radical taint, not merely in his will, as there is in all profligate men, but in the very basis of his natural instincts ? Consider only the ineffable meanness of Byron in lampooning his wife before the public as he did. Say what you may of the various eloquent tributes to her paid in various poems, and of the partially ficti- tious element in those characters in the disguise of which he held her up to public ridicule, still there is no manner of question but that he did lampoon her, and lampoon her in a way which he intended to be intelligible to all the world,—and that, though he himself admitted that all the wrong had been on his side, if not all the suffering on hers. _Now, does not this inexpressibly malicious and mean insult, this dragging of her unoffending and innocent figure into the heart of some of his most witty, profane, and obscene satire, strictly imply that very absence of common natural in- stincts which in a stronger and more concrete sense this story of Mrs. Stowe's would prove ? We do not Roan this as any confirmation of its truth, for we well know how utterly worth- less as evidence that sort of indirect reasoning is. We only mean this, —that English and American readers must have read Byron to very little purpose if their moral estimate of him would be gravely changed for the worse by the truth of this disclosure, supposing it to be true ; and yet it seems by the chorus of angry incredulity with which it is received, that it would make the whole difference between their regarding him merely as a man of violent natural passions and perverted genius, and as a man of intrinsi- cally distorted nature. For ourselves, with the highest estimate of his marvellous genius, we confess that it would make very little difference in our conception of him whether this horrid story be true or false. Whether true or false, there is no manner of doubt that there was the genuine malign devil in him only too often, that malign devil, we mean, which not only bears a grudge against divine law, but which invites mocking insurrec- tion against natural feelings and instincts because they are natural. Mrs. Stowe's picture of Byron in his study with his half-sister, on the morning when Lady Byron was leaving his roof for ever, refusing his hand to his wife, and asking mockingly, as he put his hands behind him and retreated to the mantel-piece, "When shall we three meet again ? " may, no doubt, turn out to be erroneous, or falsely coloured, but it is in the very spirit of the malignant and brilliant mockeries of "Don Juan." There is moral cruelty of the most base and naked character at the very root of Byron's satire, intolerance not only of law, but of instinct,—the element, in short, which Goethe de- lineates so powerfully in Mephistopheles where he lures the raw and innocent student into his devilish snares. We are disposed to think that the crime attributed to him, by tending to establish something like original disease of nature, should probably rather relieve our estimate of his individual responsibility, and justify us in attributing, more or less, to a taint of insanity what might otherwise be referred to mere voluntary wickedness. Lady Byron's belief that there was both angel and devil in Lord Byron was doubtless true enough, as a popular mode of stating that there was in him a far fiercer conflict of antagonistic principles than in ordinary men, and one, moreover, of a kind which gave him far less chance of self-mastery than ordinary men even of strong passions can command. The deeper you carry the root of his depravity, the more right you gain, in one sense, to judge charitably of himself, i.e., of all in him which he had really in his own power. It seems to us simply astonishing that the British public should fire up as it does at the mere suggestion of this view of Byron, —though it be quite right in condemning the mode in which the view is obtained, and reserving judgment as to the facts. There is but one character in all fiction which seems to us to bear comparison at all with the true Lord Byron, and that is Miss Emily Bronte's " Heatheliff," in Wuthering Heights, who is a savage and rustic edition of the character which Byron himself paints for us. In Heatlicliff, too, there is angel as well as devil, though the latter vastly preponderates. "I can hardly," says Heathcliff of his wife, and in her presence, "regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character, and acting on the false impressions she cherished. But at last I think she begins to know me : I don't perceive the silly smiles and grimaces that provoked me at first, and the sense- less incapability of discovering that I was in earnest when I gave
her my opinion of her infatuation and herself Are you sure, Isabella, that you hate me? If I let you alone for half an hour, won't you come sighing and wheedling to me again ? . . . If she desired to go, she might : the nuisance of her presence outweighs the gratification to be derived from tormenting her." That might be an excerpt from some of Lord Byron's outbursts against his wife. Certainly, the English public are right in condemning the unjustified, rash, and sentimental impulsiveness which has drawn the curtain from what may fairly be called, in one of Emily Bronte's powerful and lurid phrases, "these clouded windows of hell." Certainly, too, they are right in suspending their judgment as to the facts till further evidence. But as cer- tainly, their air of surprise, offence, horror, and indignation that Byron should, even for a moment, and on evidence, be supposed guilty of any charge so horrible, betrays the radically superficial and worthless judgment with which they
"Have watched the fount of fiery life Which served for that Titanic strife."
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