He owed it to himself to make this complaint; his total silence would have been wrong; it was necessary once for all to defend his character and reputation, and when he ran the risk of losing the esteem of the world his sensibility could not show itself in too lively a manner.
But if he thus raised his voice to immortalize these indignities, it was not because he recoiled from suffering.
"Let him come forward," exclaimed he, "whoever has seen me bow the head, or has remarked my courage wane with suffering."
Already, at the time of the unexampled persecution raised against him in London, when the separation from his wife took place, he wrote to Murray:—
"February 20th, 1816.
"You need not be in any apprehension or grief on my account. Were I to be beaten down by the world and its inheritors, I should have succumbed to many things years ago. You must not mistake my not bullying for dejection; nor imagine that because I feel, I am to faint."[80]
In all he wrote at this fatal period of his life, one perceives the wide gaping wound, which is however endured with the strength of a Titan, who at twenty-nine is to become quite a philosopher, good, gentle, almost resigned.
"The camel labors with the heaviest load,
And the wolf dies in silence,—not bestow'd
In vain should such example be; if they,
Things of ignoble or of savage mood,
Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay
May temper it to bear,—it is but for a day."[81]
Like all those who feel deeply the joys and griefs of their fellow-men, Lord Byron had received from nature all that could render him capable of moderating the external expression of his sensibility, when injustice was personal to himself. Moreover, circumstances, alas! had only too much favored the development of this noble faculty in him. For, very early, he had received severe lessons from those terrible masters who nurture great souls to self-control; from reverses, vanished illusions, perils, wrongs. The storms however it was his destiny to encounter, though violent, not only did not cause him to be shipwrecked, but even helped to encircle his brow with the martyr's halo.
But, we may be asked, whether this great control which Lord Byron exercised over himself, with regard to obstacles, dangers, and human injustice, existed equally with regard to his own passions. To those who should doubt it, and who, forgetting that Lord Byron only lived the age of passions, without taking into consideration all the circumstances that rendered difficult to him what is easier for others, should pretend that Lord Byron gave way to his passions oftener than he warred against them, to such we would say: "What was he doing, then, when, at barely twenty-two years of age, he adopted an anchorite's régime, so as to render his soul more independent of matter? When he shut himself up at home, with the self-imposed task of writing whole poems before he came out, in order to overcome his thoughts, and maintain them in a line contrary to that which his passions demanded? When, grieved, calumniated, outraged, he preferred exile rather than yield to just resentment, and in order to avoid the danger of finding himself in situations where he might not have preserved his self-control?"