Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824 -- Last years; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
'Women,' says Lord Lovelace, 'are said to excel in piecing together
scattered insignificant fragments of conversations and circumstances,
and fitting them all into their right places amongst what they know
already, and thus reconstruct a whole that is very close to the
complete truth. But Lady Byron's whole effort was to resist the light,
or rather the darkness, that would flow into her mind.'
In her effort to resist the light, Lady Byron seems to have admirably
succeeded. But, in spite of her grandson's statement, that she employed
any great effort to resist the darkness that flowed into her mind we
entirely disbelieve. We are rather inclined to think that, in her search
for evidence to convict Mrs. Leigh, she would have been very grateful for
a farthing rushlight.
We now leave 'Astarte' to the judgment of posterity, for whom, in a
peculiarly cruel sense, it was originally intended. If in a court of law
counsel for the prosecution were to declaim loudly and frequently about
evidence which he does not--perhaps dares not--produce, his harangues
would make an unfavourable impression on a British jury. We have no wish
to speak ill of the dead, but, in justice to Mrs. Leigh, we feel bound to
say that the author of 'Astarte,' with all his talk about evidence against
Byron and Augusta Leigh, has not produced a scrap of evidence which would
have any weight with an impartial jury of their countrymen.
But we will not end upon a jarring note. Let us remember that Lord
Lovelace, as Ada's son, felt an affectionate regard for the memory of Lady
Byron. It was his misfortune to imbibe a false tradition, and, while
groping his way through the darkness, his sole guide was a packet of
collected papers by which his grandmother hoped to justify her conduct in
leaving her husband. If Lady Byron had deigned to read Byron's 'Memoirs,'
she might have been spared those painful delusions by which her mind was
obsessed in later years. That she had ample grounds, in Byron's
extraordinary conduct during the brief period of their intercourse, to
separate herself from him is not disputed; but her premises were wrong,
and her vain attempt to justify herself by unsupported accusations against
Mrs. Leigh has failed.
Her daughter Ada, the mother of Lord Lovelace, had learnt enough of the
family history to come to the conclusion (which she decidedly expressed to
Mr. Fonblanque) that the sole cause of the separation was incompatibility.
There let it rest. The Byron of the last phase was a very different man
from the poet of 'The Dream.'
On the day that Byron was buried at Hucknall-Torkard the great Goethe, in
allusion to a letter which Byron, on the eve of his departure for Greece,
had written to him, says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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