Byron: The Last Phase Part 37

'As to Augusta * * * *, whatever she is, or may have been, _you_ have never had reason to complain of her; on the contrary, you are not aware of the obligations under which you have been to her. Her life and mine--and yours and mine--were two things perfectly distinct from each other; when one ceased the other began, and now both are closed.'

Lord Lovelace seeks to make much out of that statement, and says in 'Astarte':

'It is evident, from the allusion in this letter, that Byron had become thoroughly aware of the extent of Lady Byron's information, and did not wish that she should be misled. He probably may have heard from Augusta herself that she had admitted her own guilt, together with his, to Lady Byron.'

What _navete_! Byron's meaning is perfectly clear. Whatever she was, or may have been--whatever her virtues or her sins--she had never wronged Lady Byron. On the contrary, she had, at considerable risk to herself, interceded for her with her brother, when the crisis came into their married life. Byron's intercourse with his sister had never borne any connection with his relations towards his wife--it was a thing apart--and at the time of writing was closed perhaps for ever. He plainly repudiates Lady Byron's cruel suspicions of a criminal intercourse having taken place during the brief period of their married existence. He could not have spoken in plainer language without indelicacy, and yet, so persistent was Lady Byron in her evil opinion of both, these simple straightforward words were wholly misconstrued. Malignant casuistry could of course find a dark hint in the sentence, 'When one ceased, the other began'; but the mind must indeed be prurient that could place the worst construction upon the expression of so palpable a fact. It was not Lady Byron's intention to complain of things that had taken place _previous_ to her marriage; her contention had always been that she separated from her husband in consequence of his conduct while under her own roof. When, in 1869, all the doc.u.mentary evidence upon which she relied was shown to Lord Chief Justice c.o.c.kburn, that great lawyer thus expressed his opinion of their value:

'Lady Byron had an ill-conditioned mind, preying upon itself, till morbid delusion was the result. If not, she was an accomplished hypocrite, regardless of truth, and to whose statements no credit whatever ought to be attached.'

Lord Lovelace tells us that all the charges made against Lady Byron in 1869 (when the Beecher Stowe 'Revelations' were published) would have collapsed 'if all her papers had then been accessible and available'; and that Dr. Lus.h.i.+ngton, who was then alive, 'from the best and kindest motives, and long habit of silence,' exerted his influence over the other trustees to suppress them! Why, we may ask, was this? The answer suggests itself. It was because he well knew that there was nothing in those papers to fix guilt upon Mrs. Leigh. It must not be forgotten that Dr.

Lus.h.i.+ngton, in 1816, expressed his deliberate opinion that the proofs were wholly insufficient to sustain a charge of incest. In this connection Lady Byron's written statement, dated March 14, 1816, is most valuable.

'The causes of this suspicion,' she writes, 'did not amount to proof ... and I considered that, whilst a possibility of innocence existed, every principle of duty and humanity forbade me to act as if Mrs.

Leigh was actually guilty, more especially as any intimation of so heinous a crime, even if not distinctly proved, must have seriously affected Mrs. Leigh's character and happiness.'

Exactly one month after Lady Byron had written those words, her husband addressed her in the following terms:

'I have just parted from Augusta--almost the last being you had left me to part with, and the only unshattered tie of my existence.

Wherever I may go, and I am going far, you and I can never meet again in this world, nor in the next. Let this content or atone. If any accident occurs to me, be kind to _her_; if she is then nothing, to her children.'

It was, as we have seen, five years before Lady Byron could bring herself to make any reply to this appeal. How far she fulfilled the promise then made, 'to befriend Augusta Leigh and her children in any future circ.u.mstances which might call for her a.s.sistance,' may be left to the imagination of the reader. We can find no evidence of it in 'Astarte' or in the 'Revelations' of Mrs. Beecher Stowe.

CHAPTER VI

In order to meet the charges which the late Lord Lovelace brought against Mrs. Leigh in 'Astarte,' we have been compelled to quote rather extensively from its pages. In the chapter ent.i.tled 'Manfred' will be found selections from a ma.s.s of correspondence which, without qualification or comment, might go far to convince the reader. Lord Lovelace was evidently 'a good hater,' and he detested the very name of Augusta Leigh with all his heart and soul. There was some reason for this.

She had, in Lord Lovelace's opinion, '_subst.i.tuted herself for Lord Byron's right heirs_' ('Astarte,' p. 125). It was evidently a sore point that Augusta should have benefited by Lord Byron's will. Lord Lovelace forgot that Lady Byron had approved of the terms of her husband's will, and that Lady Byron's conduct had not been such as to deserve any pecuniary consideration at Lord Byron's death. But impartiality does not seem to have been Lord Lovelace's forte. Having made up his mind that Mrs.

Leigh was guilty, he selected from his papers whatever might appear most likely to convict her. But the violence of his antagonism has impaired the value of his contention; and the effect of his arguments is very different from that which he intended. Having satisfied himself that Mrs. Leigh (though liked and respected by her contemporaries) was an abandoned woman, Lord Lovelace says:

'A real reformation, according to Christian ideals, would not merely have driven Byron and Augusta apart from each other, but expelled them from the world of wickedness, consigned them for the rest of their lives to strict expiation and holiness. But this could never be; and in the long-run her flight to an outcast life would have been a lesser evil than the consequences of preventing it. The fall of Mrs. Leigh would have been a definite catastrophe, affecting a small number of people for a time in a startling manner. The disaster would have been obvious, but partial, immediately over and ended.... She would have lived in open revolt against the Christian standard, not in secret disobedience and unrepentant hypocrisy.'

Poor Mrs. Leigh! and was it so bad as all that? Had she committed incest with her brother after the separation of 1816? Did she follow Byron abroad 'in the dress of a page,' as stated by some lying chronicler from the banks of the Lake of Geneva? Did Byron come to England in secret at some period between 1816 and 1824? If not, what on earth is the meaning of this mysterious homily? Does Lord Lovelace, in the book that survives him, wish the world to believe that Lady Byron prevented Augusta from deserting her husband and children, and flying into Byron's arms in a 'far countree'? If that was the author's intention, he has signally failed. There never was a moment, since the trip abroad was abandoned in 1813, when Augusta had the mind to join her brother in his travels. There is not a hint of any such wish in any doc.u.ment published up to the present time. Augusta, who was undoubtedly innocent, had suffered enough from the lying reports that had been spread about town by Lady Caroline Lamb, ever to wish for another dose of scandal. If the Lovelace papers contain any hint of that nature, the author of 'Astarte' would most a.s.suredly have set it forth in Double Pica. It is a baseless calumny.

In Lord Lovelace's opinion,

'judged by the light of nature, a heroism and sincerity of united fates and doom would have seemed, beyond all comparison, purer and n.o.bler than what they actually drifted into. By the social code, sin between man and woman can never be blotted out, as a.s.suredly it is the most irreversible of facts. Nevertheless, societies secretly respect, though they excommunicate, those rebel lovers who sacrifice everything else, but observe a law of their own, and make a religion out of sin itself, by living it through with constancy.'

These be perilous doctrines, surely! But how do those reflections apply to the case of Byron and his sister? The hypothesis may be something like this: Byron and his sister commit a deadly sin. They are found out, but their secret is kept by a select circle of their friends. They part, and never meet again in this world. The sin might have been forgiven, or at least condoned, if they had 'observed a law of their own'--in other words, 'gone on sinning.' Why? because 'societies secretly respect rebel lovers.'

But these wretches had not the courage of their profligacy; they parted and sinned no more, therefore they were 'unrepentant hypocrites.' The 'heroism and sincerity of united fates and doom' was denied to them, and no one would ever have suspected them of such a crime, if Lady Byron and Lord Lovelace had not betrayed them. What pestilential rubbis.h.!.+ One wonders how a man of Lord Lovelace's undoubted ability could have sunk to bathos of that kind.

'Byron,' he tells us, 'was ready to sacrifice everything for Augusta, and to defy the world with her. If this _had not been prevented_ [the italics are ours], _he would have been a more poetical figure in history_ than as the author of "Manfred."'

It is clear, then, that in Lord Lovelace's opinion Byron and Augusta were prevented by someone from becoming poetical figures. Who was that guardian angel? Lady Byron, of course!

Now, what are the facts? Byron parted from his sister on April 14, 1816, _nine days prior to his own departure from London_. They never met again.

There was nothing to 'prevent' them from being together up to the last moment if they had felt so disposed. Byron never disguised his deep and lasting affection for Augusta, whom in private he called his 'Dear Goose,'

and in public his 'Sweet Sister.' There was no hypocrisy on either side--nothing, in short, except the prurient imagination of a distracted wife, aided and abetted by a circle of fawning gossips.

It is a lamentable example of how public opinion may be misdirected by evidence, which Horace would have called _Parthis mendacior_.

Lord Lovelace comforts himself by the reflection that Augusta

'was not spared misery or degradation by being preserved from flagrant acts; for nothing could be more wretched than her subsequent existence; and far from growing virtuous, she went farther down without end temporally and spiritually.'

Now, that is very strange! How could Augusta have gone farther down spiritually after Byron's departure? According to Lord Lovelace, 'Character regained was the consummation of Mrs. Leigh's ruin!'

Mrs. Leigh must have been totally unlike anyone else, if character regained proved her ruin. There must be some mistake. No, there it is in black and white. 'Her return to outward respectability was an unmixed misfortune to the third person through whose protection it was possible.'

This cryptic utterance implies that Mrs. Leigh's respectability was injurious to Lady Byron. Why?

'If Augusta had fled to Byron in exile, and was seen with him as _et soror et conjux_, the victory remained with Lady Byron, solid and final. _This was the solution hoped for by Lady Byron's friends_, Lus.h.i.+ngton and Doyle, as well as Lady Noel.'

So the cat is out of the bag at last! It having been impossible for Lady Byron to bring any proof against Byron and his sister which would have held water in a law-court, her friends and her legal adviser hoped that Augusta would desert her husband and children, and thus furnish them with evidence which would justify their conduct before the world. But Augusta was sorry not to be able to oblige them. This was a pity, because, according to Lord Lovelace, who was the most ingenuous of men: 'Their triumph and Lady Byron's justification would have been complete, and great would have been their rejoicing.'

Well, they made up for it afterwards, when Byron and Augusta were dead; after those memoirs had been destroyed which, in Byron's words, 'will be a kind of guide-post in case of death, and prevent some of the lies which would otherwise be told, and destroy some which have been told already.'

In allusion to the meetings between Lady Byron and Augusta immediately after the separation, we are told in 'Astarte' that

'on all these occasions, one subject--uppermost in the thoughts of both--had been virtually ignored, except that Augusta _had had the audacity_ to name the reports about herself with all the pride of innocence. _Intercourse could not continue on that footing_, for Augusta probably aimed at a positive guarantee of her innocence, and at committing Lady Byron irretrievably to that.'

This was great presumption on Mrs. Leigh's part, after all the pains they had taken to make her uncomfortable. Lady Byron, we are told by Lord Lovelace, could no longer bear the false position, and 'before leaving London she went to the Hon. Mrs. Villiers--a most intimate friend of Augusta's'--and deliberately poisoned her mind. That which she told Mrs.

Villiers is not stated; but we infer that Lady Byron retailed some of the gossip that had reached her through one of Mrs. Leigh's servants who had overheard part of a conversation between Augusta and Byron shortly after Medora's birth. After the child had been taken to St. James's Palace, Byron often went there. It is likely that Augusta had been overheard jesting with Byron about his child. We cannot be sure of this; but, at any rate, some such expression, if whispered in Lady Byron's ears, would be sufficient to confirm her erroneous belief.

Mrs. Villiers, we are told, began from this time to be slightly prejudiced against Augusta. She believed her to be absolutely pure, but with lax notions of morality. This sounds like a contradiction in terms, but so it was; and through the wilful misrepresentation of Lady Byron and her coterie, Augusta's best friend was lured from her allegiance. Mrs.

Villiers was also informed of something else by Wilmot-Horton, another friend of Lady Byron's. The plot thickened, and, without any attempt being made to arrive at the truth, Augusta's life became almost unbearable. No wonder the poor woman said in her agony: 'None can know _how much_ I have suffered from this unhappy business, and, indeed, I have never known a moment's peace, and begin to despair for the future.'

The 'unhappy business' was, of course, her unwise adoption of Medora.

Through that error of judgment she was doomed to plod her way to the grave, suspected by even her dearest friend, and persecuted by the Byron family. Mrs. Villiers was a good woman and scented treason. She boldly urged Lady Byron to avow to Augusta the information of which she was in possession. But Lady Byron was at first afraid to run the risk. She knew very well the value of servants' gossip, and feared the open hostility of Augusta if she made common cause with Byron. This much she ingenuously avowed in a letter to Dr. Lus.h.i.+ngton. But, upon being further pressed, she consented to _write_ to Augusta and announce what she had been told. We have no doubt that the letter was written with great care, after consultation with Colonel Doyle and Lus.h.i.+ngton, and that the gossip was retailed with every outward consideration for Augusta's feelings. Whatever was said, and there is no evidence of it in 'Astarte,' we are there told that 'Augusta did not attempt to deny it, and, in fact, admitted everything in subsequent letters to Lady Byron during the summer of 1816.'

Lord Lovelace ingenuously adds: 'It is unnecessary to produce them here, as their contents are confirmed and made sufficiently clear by the correspondence of 1819, in another chapter.'

It is very strange that Lord Lovelace, who is not thrifty in his selections, should have withheld the only positive proof of Augusta's confession known to be in existence. His reference to the letters of 1819, which he publishes, is a poor subst.i.tute for the letters themselves. The only letter which affords any clue to the mystery is the 'Dearest Love'

letter, dated May 17, 1819, which we have quoted in a previous chapter.

The value of that letter, as evidence against Augusta, we have already shown. When compared with the letter which Byron wrote to his sister on June 3, 1817--a year after he had parted from her--the conclusion that the incriminating letter is not addressed to Augusta at all, forces itself irresistibly upon the mind. As an example of varying moods, it is worth quoting:

'For the life of me I can't make out whether your disorder is a broken heart or ear-ache--or whether it is you that have been ill or the children--or what your melancholy and mysterious apprehensions tend to--or refer to--whether to Caroline Lamb's novels--Mrs. Clermont's evidence--Lady Byron's magnanimity, or any other piece of imposture.'

It is really laughable to suppose that the writer of the above extract could have written to the same lady two years later in the following strain:

'My dearest love, I have never ceased, nor can cease, to feel for a moment that perfect and boundless attachment which bound and binds me to you--which renders me utterly incapable of _real_ love for any other human being--for what could they be to me after _you_? My own * * * * we may have been very wrong,' etc.

But Lord Lovelace found no difficulty in believing that the letter in question sealed the fate of Augusta Leigh. In the face of such a doc.u.ment, Lord Lovelace thought that a direct confession in Augusta's handwriting would be superfluous, and Sir Leslie Stephen had warned him against superfluity!

Colonel Doyle, an intimate friend of Lady Byron, seems to have been the only man on her side of the question--not even excepting Lus.h.i.+ngton--who showed anything approaching to common sense. He perceived that Lady Byron, by avowing the grounds of her suspicions to Mrs. Leigh, had placed herself in an awkward position. He foresaw that this avowal would turn Mrs. Leigh into an enemy, who must sooner or later avenge the insults heaped upon her. On July 9, 1816, Colonel Doyle wrote to Lady Byron:

'Your feelings I perfectly understand; I will even _whisper_ to you I approve. But you must remember that your position is very extraordinary, and though, when we have sufficiently deliberated and _decided_, we should pursue our course without embarra.s.sing ourselves with the consequences; yet we should _not neglect the means of fully justifying ourselves_ if the necessity be ever imposed upon us.'