Her attacks on Lady Byron are, to be sure, less skilful and adroit than those of Lord Byron. They want his literary polish and tact; but what of that? ‘Blackwood’ assures us that even the faults of manner derive a peculiar grace from the fact that the narrator is Lord Byron’s mistress; and so we suppose the literary world must find grace in things like this:—
‘She has been called, after his words, the moral Clytemnestra of her husband. Such a surname is severe: but the repugnance we feel to condemning a woman cannot prevent our listening to the voice of justice, which tells us that the comparison is still in favour of the guilty one of antiquity; for she, driven to crime by fierce passion overpowering reason, at least only deprived her husband of physical life, and, in committing the deed, exposed herself to all its consequences; while Lady Byron left her husband at the very moment that she saw him struggling amid a thousand shoals in the stormy sea of embarrassments created by his marriage, and precisely when he more than ever required a friendly, tender, and indulgent hand to save him.
‘Besides, she shut herself up in silence a thousand times more cruel than Clytemnestra’s poniard: that only killed the body; whereas Lady Byron’s silence was destined to kill the soul,—and such a soul!—leaving the door open to calumny, and making it to be supposed that her silence was magnanimity destined to cover over frightful wrongs, perhaps even depravity. In vain did he, feeling his conscience at ease, implore some inquiry and examination. She refused; and the only favour she granted was to send him, one fine day, two persons to see whether he were not mad.
‘And, why, then, had she believed him mad? Because she, a methodical, inflexible woman, with that unbendingness which a profound moralist calls the worship rendered to pride by a feelingless soul, because she could not understand the possibility of tastes and habits different to those of ordinary routine, or of her own starched life. Not to be hungry when she was; not to sleep at night, but to write while she was sleeping, and to sleep when she was up; in short, to gratify the requirements of material and intellectual life at hours different to hers,—all that was not merely annoying for her, but it must be madness; or, if not, it betokened depravity that she could neither submit to nor tolerate without perilling her own morality.
‘Such was the grand secret of the cruel silence which exposed Lord Byron to the most malignant interpretations, to all the calumny and revenge of his enemies.
‘She was, perhaps, the only woman in the world so strangely organised,—the only one, perhaps, capable of not feeling happy and proud at belonging to a man superior to the rest of humanity; and fatally was it decreed that this woman alone of her species should be Lord Byron’s wife!’
In a note is added,—
‘If an imaginary fear, and even an unreasonable jealousy, may be her excuse (just as one excuses a monomania), can one equally forgive her silence? Such a silence is morally what are physically the poisons which kill at once, and defy all remedies; thus insuring the culprit’s safety. This silence it is which will ever be her crime; for by it she poisoned the life of her husband.’
The book has several chapters devoted to Lord Byron’s peculiar virtues; and under the one devoted to magnanimity and heroism, his forgiving disposition receives special attention. The climax of all is stated to be that he forgave Lady Byron. All the world knew that, since he had declared this fact in a very noisy and impassioned manner in the fourth canto of ‘Childe Harold,’ together with a statement of the wrongs which he forgave; but the Guiccioli thinks his virtue, at this period, has not been enough appreciated. In her view, it rose to the sublime. She says of Lady Byron,—
‘An absolute moral monstrosity, an anomaly in the history of types of female hideousness, had succeeded in showing itself in the light of magnanimity. But false as was this high quality in Lady Byron, so did it shine out in him true and admirable. The position in which Lady Byron had placed him, and where she continued to keep him by her harshness, silence, and strange refusals, was one of those which cause such suffering, that the highest degree of self-control seldom suffices to quiet the promptings of human weakness, and to cause persons of even slight sensibility to preserve moderation. Yet, with his sensibility and the knowledge of his worth, how did he act? what did he say? I will not speak of his “farewell;” of the care he took to shield her from blame by throwing it on others, by taking much too large a share to himself.’
With like vivacity and earnestness does the narrator now proceed to make an incarnate angel of her subject by the simple process of denying everything that he himself ever confessed,—everything that has ever been confessed in regard to him by his best friends. He has been in the world as an angel unawares from his cradle. His guardian did not properly appreciate him, and is consequently mentioned as that wicked Lord Carlisle. Thomas Moore is never to be sufficiently condemned for the facts told in his biography. Byron’s own frank and lawless admissions of evil are set down to a peculiar inability he had for speaking the truth about himself,—sometimes about his near relations; all which does not in the least discourage the authoress from giving a separate chapter on ‘Lord Byron’s Love of Truth.’
In the matter of his relations with women, she complacently repeats (what sounds rather oddly as coming from her) Lord Byron’s own assurance, that he never seduced a woman; and also the equally convincing statement, that he had told her (the Guiccioli) that his married fidelity to his wife was perfect. She discusses Moore’s account of the mistress in boy’s clothes who used to share Byron’s apartments in college, and ride with him to races, and whom he presented to ladies as his brother.
She has her own view of this matter. The disguised boy was a lady of rank and fashion, who sought Lord Byron’s chambers, as, we are informed, noble ladies everywhere, both in Italy and England, were constantly in the habit of doing; throwing themselves at his feet, and imploring permission to become his handmaids.
In the authoress’s own words, ‘Feminine overtures still continued to be made to Lord Byron; but the fumes of incense never hid from his sight his IDEAL.’ We are told that in the case of these poor ladies, generally ‘disenchantment took place on his side without a corresponding result on the other: THENCE many heart-breakings.’ Nevertheless, we are informed that there followed the indiscretions of these ladies ‘none of those proceedings that the world readily forgives, but which his feelings as a man of honour would have condemned.’