‘Autobiography,’ Memoirs, and Journals of Lord Byron were placed with this view.
The following note from Shelton Mackenzie, in the June number of ‘The Noctes,’ 1824, says,—
‘At that time, had he been so minded, Maginn (Odoherty) could have got up a popular Life of Byron as well as most men in England. Immediately on the account of Byron’s death being received in London, John Murray proposed that Maginn should bring out Memoirs, Journals, and Letters of Lord Byron, and, with this intent, placed in his hand every line that he (Murray) possessed in Byron’s handwriting. . . . . The strong desire of Byron’s family and executors that the “Autobiography” should be burned, to which desire Murray foolishly yielded, made such an hiatus in the materials, that Murray and Maginn agreed it would not answer to bring out the work then. Eventually Moore executed it.’
The character of the times in which this work was to be undertaken will appear from the following note of Mackenzie’s to ‘The Noctes’ of August 1824, which we copy, with the author’s own Italics:—
‘In the “Blackwood” of July 1824 was a poetical epistle by the renowned Timothy Tickler to the editor of the “John Bull” magazine, on an article in his first number. This article. . . professed to be a portion of the veritable “Autobiography” of Byron which was burned, and was called “My Wedding Night.” It appeared to relate in detail everything that occurred in the twenty-four hours immediately succeeding that in which Byron was married. It had plenty of coarseness, and some to spare. It went into particulars such as hitherto had been given only by Faublas; and it had, notwithstanding, many phrases and some facts which evidently did not belong to a mere fabricator. Some years after, I compared this “Wedding Night” with what I had all assurance of having been transcribed from the actual manuscripts of Byron, and was persuaded that the magazine-writer must have had the actual statement before him, or have had a perusal of it. The writer in “Blackwood” declared his conviction that it really was Byron’s own writing.’
The reader must remember that Lord Byron died April 1824; so that, according to this, his ‘Autobiography’ was made the means of this gross insult to his widow three months after his death.
If some powerful cause had not paralysed all feelings of gentlemanly honour, and of womanly delicacy, and of common humanity, towards Lady Byron, throughout the whole British nation, no editor would have dared to open a periodical with such an article; or, if he had, he would have been overwhelmed with a storm of popular indignation, which, like the fire upon Sodom, would have made a pillar of salt of him for a warning to all future generations.
‘Blackwood’ reproves the ‘John Bull’ in a poetical epistle, recognising the article as coming from Byron, and says to the author,—
‘But that you, sir, a wit and a scholar like you,
Should not blush to produce what he blushed not to do,—
Take your compliment, youngster; this doubles, almost,
The sorrow that rose when his honour was lost.’
We may not wonder that the ‘Autobiography’ was burned, as Murray says in a recent account, by a committee of Byron’s friends, including Hobhouse, his sister, and Murray himself.
Now, the ‘Blackwood’ of July 1824 thus declares its conviction that this outrage on every sentiment of human decency came from Lord Byron, and that his honour was lost. Maginn does not undertake the memoir. No memoir at all is undertaken; till finally Moore is selected, as, like Demetrius of old, a well-skilled gilder and ‘maker of silver shrines,’ though not for Diana. To Moore is committed the task of doing his best for this battered image, in which even the worshippers recognise foul sulphurous cracks, but which they none the less stand ready to worship as a genuine article that ‘fell down from Jupiter.’
Moore was a man of no particular nicety as to moralities, but in that matter seems not very much below what this record shows his average associates to be. He is so far superior to Maginn, that his vice is rose-coloured and refined. He does not burst out with such heroic stanzas as Maginn’s frank invitation to Jeremy Bentham:—
‘Jeremy, throw your pen aside,
And come get drunk with me;
And we’ll go where Bacchus sits astride,
Perched high on barrels three.’
Moore’s vice is cautious, soft, seductive, slippery, and covered at times with a thin, tremulous veil of religious sentimentalism.
In regard to Byron, he was an unscrupulous, committed partisan: he was as much bewitched by him as ever man has been by woman; and therefore to him, at last, the task of editing Byron’s ‘Memoirs’ was given.
This Byron, whom they all knew to be obscene beyond what even their most drunken tolerance could at first endure; this man, whose foul license spoke out what most men conceal from mere respect to the decent instincts of humanity; whose ‘honour was lost,’—was submitted to this careful manipulator, to be turned out a perfected idol for a world longing for an idol, as the Israelites longed for the calf in Horeb.
The image was to be invested with deceitful glories and shifting haloes,—admitted faults spoken of as peculiarities of sacred origin,—and the world given to understand that no common rule or measure could apply to such an undoubtedly divine production; and so the hearts of men were to be wrung with pity for his sorrows as the yearning pain of a god, and with anger at his injuries as sacrilege on the sacredness of genius, till they were ready to cast themselves at his feet, and adore.
Then he was to be set up on a pedestal, like Nebuchadnezzar’s image on the plains of Dura; and what time the world heard the sound of cornet, sackbut, and dulcimer, in his enchanting verse, they were to fall down and worship.
For Lady Byron, Moore had simply the respect that a commoner has for a lady of rank, and a good deal of the feeling that seems to underlie all English literature,—that it is no matter what becomes of the woman when the man’s story is to be told. But, with all his faults, Moore was not a cruel man; and we cannot conceive such outrageous cruelty and ungentlemanly indelicacy towards an unoffending woman, as he shows in these ‘Memoirs,’ without referring them to Lord Byron’s own influence in making him an unscrupulous, committed partisan on his side.
So little pity, so little sympathy, did he suppose Lady Byron to be worthy of, that he laid before her, in the sight of all the world, selections from her husband’s letters and journals, in which the privacies of her courtship and married life were jested upon with a vulgar levity; letters filled, from the time of the act of separation, with a constant succession of sarcasms, stabs, stings, epigrams, and vindictive allusions to herself, bringing her into direct and insulting comparison with his various mistresses, and implying their superiority over her. There, too, were gross attacks on her father and mother, as having been the instigators of the separation; and poor Lady Milbanke, in particular, is sometimes mentioned with epithets so offensive, that the editor prudently covers the terms with stars, as intending language too gross to be printed.
The last mistress of Lord Byron is uniformly brought forward in terms of such respect and consideration, that one would suppose that the usual moral laws that regulate English family life had been specially repealed in his favour. Moore quotes with approval letters from Shelley, stating that Lord Byron’s connection with La Guiccioli has been of inestimable benefit to him; and that he is now becoming what he should be, ‘a virtuous man.’ Moore goes on to speak of the connection as one, though somewhat reprehensible, yet as having all those advantages of marriage and settled domestic ties that Byron’s affectionate spirit had long sighed for, but never before found; and in his last résumé of the poet’s character, at the end
