Lady Byron Vindicated | Page 8

before the public
in the attitude of a hard-hearted, inflexible woman; her refusal was
what he knew beforehand must inevitably be the result, and merely
gave him capital in the sympathy of his friends, by which they should
be brought to tolerate and accept the bitter accusations of this poem.
We have recently heard it asserted that this last-named piece of poetry

was the sudden offspring of a fit of ill-temper, and was never intended
to be published at all. There were certainly excellent reasons why his
friends should have advised him not to publish it at that time. But that
it was read with sympathy by the circle of his intimate friends, and
believed by them, is evident from the frequency with which allusions to
it occur in his confidential letters to them. {21}
About three months after, under date March 10, 1817, he writes to
Moore: 'I suppose now I shall never be able to shake off my sables in
public imagination, more particularly since my moral ----- clove down
my fame.' Again to Murray in 1819, three years after, he says: 'I never
hear anything of Ada, the little Electra of Mycenae.'
Electra was the daughter of Clytemnestra, in the Greek poem, who
lived to condemn her wicked mother, and to call on her brother to
avenge the father. There was in this mention of Electra more than meets
the ear. Many passages in Lord Byron's poetry show that he intended to
make this daughter a future partisan against her mother, and explain the
awful words he is stated in Lady Anne Barnard's diary to have used
when first he looked on his little girl,--'What an instrument of torture I
have gained in you!'
In a letter to Lord Blessington, April 6, 1823, he says, speaking of Dr.
Parr:-- {22a}
'He did me the honour once to be a patron of mine, though a great
friend of the other branch of the house of Atreus, and the Greek teacher,
I believe, of my moral Clytemnestra. I say moral because it is true, and
is so useful to the virtuous, that it enables them to do anything without
the aid of an AEgistheus.'
If Lord Byron wrote this poem merely in a momentary fit of spleen,
why were there so many persons evidently quite familiar with his
allusions to it? and why was it preserved in Murray's hands? and why
published after his death? That Byron was in the habit of reposing
documents in the hands of Murray, to be used as occasion offered, is
evident from a part of a note written by him to Murray respecting some
verses so intrusted: 'Pray let not these versiculi go forth with my name

except to the initiated.' {22b}
Murray, in publishing this attack on his wife after Lord Byron's death,
showed that he believed in it, and, so believing, deemed Lady Byron a
woman whose widowed state deserved neither sympathy nor delicacy
of treatment. At a time when every sentiment in the heart of the most
deeply wronged woman would forbid her appearing to justify herself
from such cruel slander of a dead husband, an honest, kind-hearted,
worthy Englishman actually thought it right and proper to give these
lines to her eyes and the eyes of all the reading world. Nothing can
show more plainly what this poem was written for, and how thoroughly
it did its work! Considering Byron as a wronged man, Murray thought
he was contributing his mite towards doing him justice. His editor
prefaced the whole set of 'Domestic Pieces' with the following
statements:--
'They all refer to the unhappy separation, of which the precise causes
are still a mystery, and which he declared to the last were never
disclosed to himself. He admitted that pecuniary embarrassments,
disordered health, and dislike to family restraints had aggravated his
naturally violent temper, and driven him to excesses. He suspected that
his mother-in-law had fomented the discord,--which Lady Byron
denies,--and that more was due to the malignant offices of a female
dependant, who is the subject of the bitterly satirical sketch.
* * * *
'To these general statements can only be added the still vaguer
allegations of Lady Byron, that she conceived his conduct to be the
result of insanity,--that, the physician pronouncing him responsible for
his actions, she could submit to them no longer, and that Dr.
Lushington, her legal adviser, agreed that a reconciliation was neither
proper nor possible. _No weight can be attached to the opinions of an
opposing counsel upon accusations made by one party behind the back
of the other, who urgently demanded and was pertinaciously refused
the least opportunity of denial or defence_. He rejected the proposal for
an amicable separation, but _consented when threatened with a suit in
Doctors' Commons._' {23}

Neither John