Lady Byron’s married life—alas! it
is lived over in many a cottage and tenement-house,
with no understanding on either side of the cause of
the woeful misery.
Dr. Winslow truly says, ’The science of these
brain-affections is yet in its infancy in England.’
At that time, it had not even begun to be. Madness
was a fixed point; and the inquiries into it had no
nicety. Its treatment, if established, had no
redeeming power. Insanity simply locked a man
up as a dangerous being; and the very suggestion of
it, therefore, was resented as an injury.
A most peculiar and affecting feature of that form
of brain disease which hurries its victim, as by an
overpowering mania, into crime, is, that often the
moral faculties and the affections remain to a degree
unimpaired, and protest with all their strength against
the outrage. Hence come conflicts and agonies
of remorse proportioned to the strength of the moral
nature. Byron, more than any other one writer,
may be called the poet of remorse. His passionate
pictures of this feeling seem to give new power to
the English language:—
’There is a war, a chaos of
the mind,
When all its elements convulsed—combined,
Lie dark and jarring with perturbed
force,
And gnashing with impenitent remorse,
That juggling fiend, who never spake
before,
But cries, “I warned thee!”
when the deed is o’er.’
It was this remorse that formed the only redeeming
feature of the case. Its eloquence, its agonies,
won from all hearts the interest that we give to a
powerful nature in a state of danger and ruin; and
it may be hoped that this feeling, which tempers the
stern justice of human judgments, may prove only a
faint image of the wider charity of Him whose thoughts
are as far above ours as the heaven is above the earth.
It has seemed, to some, wholly inconsistent, that
Lady Byron, if this story were true, could retain
any kindly feeling for Lord Byron, or any tenderness
for his memory; that the profession implied a certain
hypocrisy: but, in this sad review, we may see
how the woman who once had loved him, might, in spite
of every wrong he had heaped upon her, still have
looked on this awful wreck and ruin chiefly with pity.
While she stood afar, and refused to justify or join
in the polluted idolatry which defended his vices,
there is evidence in her writings that her mind often
went back mournfully, as a mother’s would, to
the early days when he might have been saved.
One of her letters in Robinson’s Memoirs, in
regard to his religious opinions, shows with what
intense earnestness she dwelt upon the unhappy influences
of his childhood and youth, and those early theologies
which led him to regard himself as one of the reprobate.
She says,—
