That was the simple truth. The cruel allegation against Mrs. Leigh seemed to be beneath contempt. As Sir Egerton Brydges pointed out at the time, Byron, being of a strong temperament, did not reply to the injuries heaped upon him by whining complaints and cowardly protestations of innocence; he became desperate, and broke out into indignation, sarcasm, and exposure of his opponents, in a manner so severe as to seem inexcusably cruel to those who did not realize the provocation. It was ‘war to the knife,’ and Byron had the best of it.
We propose to examine ‘Manfred’ closely, to see whether Astarte in any degree resembles the description which Lord Lovelace has given of Augusta Leigh.
Manfred tells us that his slumbers are ‘a continuance of enduring thought,’ since that ‘all-nameless hour’ when he committed the crime for which he suffers. He asks ‘Forgetfulness of that which is within him—a crime which he cannot utter.’ When told by the Seven Spirits that he cannot have self-oblivion, Manfred asks if Death would give it to him; and receives the sad reply that, being immortal, the spirit after death cannot forget the past.
Eventually the Seventh Spirit—typifying, possibly, a Magdalen—appears before Manfred, in the shape of a beautiful woman.
‘Manfred. Oh God! if it be thus, and thou
Art not a madness and a mockery,
I yet might be most happy.’
When the figure vanishes, Manfred falls senseless. In the second act, Manfred, in reply to the chamois-hunter, who offers him a cup of wine, says:
‘Away, away! there’s blood upon the brim!
Will it then never—never sink in the earth?
’Tis blood—my blood! the pure warm stream
Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours
When we were in our youth, and had one heart,
And loved each other as we should not love,
And this was shed: but still it rises up.
Colouring the clouds that shut me out from Heaven.’
One may well wonder what all this has to do with Augusta. The blood that ran in Byron’s veins also ran in the veins of Mary Chaworth, and that blood, shed by Byron’s kinsman, had caused a feud, which was not broken until Byron came upon the scene, and fell hopelessly in love with ‘the last of a time-honoured race.’ Byron from his boyhood always believed that there was a blood-curse upon him.
When, two years later, he wrote ‘The Duel’ (December, 1818), he again alludes to the subject:
‘I loved thee—I will not say how,
Since things like these are best forgot:
Perhaps thou mayst imagine now
Who loved thee and who loved thee not.
And thou wert wedded to another,
And I at last another wedded:
I am a father, thou a mother,
To strangers vowed, with strangers bedded.
***** *
‘Many a bar, and many a feud,
Though never told, well understood,
Rolled like a river wide between—
And then there was the curse of blood,
Which even my Heart’s can not remove.
***** *
‘I’ve seen the sword that slew him; he,
The slain, stood in a like degree
To thee, as he, the Slayer stood
(Oh, had it been but other blood!)
In Kin and Chieftainship to me.
Thus came the Heritage to thee.’