As for hypocrisy, he felt incapable of doing justice to it unaided. "Oh for a forty-parson power!" he cries in Don Juan:—
"Oh for a forty-parson power to chant
Thy praise, Hypocrisy! Oh for a hymn
Loud as the virtues thou dost loudly vaunt,
Not practise! Oh for trump of cherubim!"
Such a state of matters was inevitable at a period which has so much in common with the age when the ancient religions and theories of life were in process of dissolution; a period when an old theological theory of the universe and of life, everywhere undermined and riddled by science, and unable to support itself by its own inherent truth, was obliged to cling to the conventional morality of the upper classes, which it made as rigid as possible in order to have a support in it; a period when ecclesiastical authority and narrow-minded social conservatism, both in a tottering condition, were endeavouring to uphold each other. Taking a bird's-eye view of the psychological history of Europe during the first two decades of the century, it actually seems to us as if the whole edifice of hypocrisy, the foundations of which were laid in the writings of the French émigrés, which rose steadily in those of the German Romanticists, and towered to a giddy height during the French Reaction, now suddenly fell on the head of one man.
Macaulay, in his essay on Moore's Life of Byron, writing on this subject, says:—"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces, and family quarrels, pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated. We must make a stand against vice. We must teach libertines that the English people appreciate the importance of domestic ties. Accordingly some unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than hundreds whose offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out as an expiatory sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from him. If he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by the higher orders, and hissed by the lower. He is, in truth, a sort of whipping-boy, by whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of the same class are, it is supposed, sufficiently chastised. We reflect very complacently on our own severity, and compare with great pride the high standard of morals established in England with the Parisian laxity. At length our anger is satiated. Our victim is ruined and heart-broken. And our virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years more."
If the causes of Byron's downfall were of a complex nature, the means were simple enough. It was compassed by the Press, the only effective instrument in such cases. Several of the papers and magazines had taken the opportunity to spread slanders about him when criticising his verses to the Princess Charlotte; and more than one of them periodically calumniated him. Now they were all at liberty to discuss and attack his private life freely, thanks to the anonymity which, in spite of the want of naturalness and the corruption it entails, still prevails in the English Press. What anonymity really means is simply this, that the paltriest scribbler, who is hardly fit to hold the pen with which he writes his lies, is enabled to put the trumpet of moral public opinion to his lips, and let the voice of injured virtue resound in thousands of homes. Nor is it enough that the one anonymous writer should be able to constitute himself the voice of the public in the thousands of copies of one newspaper; he can assume hundreds of forms, can write with all kinds of fanciful signatures, and in a dozen different newspapers and magazines. A single scribbler would have sufficed to provide the whole Press with base attacks on a man outlawed by public opinion; it is easy, then, to imagine the number that were made on Byron, whose enemies were legion. Among the names given him by the Press he himself remembered Nero, Apicius, Caligula, Heliogabalus, and Henry VIII.—that is to say, he was accused of inhuman cruelty, of insane brutality, of animal and unnatural lust; he was painted with all the colours which vileness smears on its palette. The most terrible of all the accusations was that which even then went the round of the newspapers, and which sullied the fair name of the being dearest to him—the accusation of incest. And to all this he could not answer a word! He could not fight with the mire that bespattered him.
Slanders sped from mouth to mouth. When Mrs. Mardyn, the Drury Lane actress, made her first appearance after the divorce, she was hissed off the stage, because of the perfectly groundless report of a liaison between her and Byron, to whom, as a matter of fact, she had only spoken twice. He himself could not appear on the streets without danger. On his way to the House of Lords, where his presence was ignored, he was insulted by a respectable crowd.
Defence or retort being impossible, no course was left him, proud as he was, but to bow his head and go. "I felt," he writes, "that, if what was whispered, and muttered, and murmured, was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me." On the 25th of April, 1816, he set sail, never to return alive.
It is from this moment that Byron's true greatness dates. The blow struck by the Edinburgh Review had roused him, for the first time, to intellectual activity. This new blow made of him a knight. There is no comparison possible between what Byron wrote before, and what he wrote after, the event which he himself regarded as his greatest misfortune. It was a misfortune sent him by the genius of History, to snatch him from the unmanning influence of idolisation, to sever the enfeebling connection between him and that society and social spirit against which it was his historic mission to arouse, with more fortune and more power than any other individual, the hostility which was its undoing.
[1] Byron has described Rousseau in a stanza which might have been written about himself:—