Lady Byron Vindicated. Гарриет Бичер-Стоу
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she pledged her troth and her faith and her love, under probabilities of severe, disturbing, perhaps fearful trials, in the future. . . .
‘But I think Lady Byron ought not to have printed that Narrative. Death abrogates not the rights of a husband to his wife’s silence when speech is fatal. . . to his character as a man. Has she not flung suspicion over his bones interred, that they are the bones of a—monster? . . . If Byron’s sins or crimes—for we are driven to use terrible terms—were unendurable and unforgivable as if against the Holy Ghost, ought the wheel, the rack, or the stake to have extorted that confession from his widow’s breast? . . . But there was no such pain here, James: the declaration was voluntary, and it was calm. Self-collected, and gathering up all her faculties and feelings into unshrinking strength, she denounced before all the world—and throughout all space and all time—her husband, as excommunicated by his vices from woman’s bosom.
. . . .
‘’Twas to vindicate the character of her parents that Lady Byron wrote,—a holy purpose and devout, nor do I doubt sincere. But filial affection and reverence, sacred as they are, may be blamelessly, nay, righteously, subordinate to conjugal duties, which die not with the dead, are extinguished not even by the sins of the dead, were they as foul as the grave’s corruption.’
Here is what John Stuart Mill calls the literature of slavery for woman, in length and breadth; and, that all women may understand the doctrine, the Shepherd now takes up his parable, and expounds the true position of the wife. We render his Scotch into English:—
‘Not a few such widows do I know, whom brutal, profligate, and savage husbands have brought to the brink of the grave,—as good, as bright, as innocent as, and far more forgiving than, Lady Byron. There they sit in their obscure, rarely-visited dwellings; for sympathy instructed by suffering knows well that the deepest and most hopeless misery is least given to complaint.’
Then follows a pathetic picture of one such widow, trembling and fainting for hunger, obliged, on her way to the well for a can of water, her only drink, to sit down on a ‘knowe’ and say a prayer.
‘Yet she’s decently, yea, tidily dressed, poor creature! in sair worn widow’s clothes, a single suit for Saturday and Sunday; her hair, untimely gray, is neatly braided under her crape cap; and sometimes, when all is still and solitary in the fields, and all labour has disappeared into the house, you may see her stealing by herself, or leading one wee orphan by the hand, with another at her breast, to the kirkyard, where the love of her youth and the husband of her prime is buried.
‘Yet,’ says the Shepherd, ‘he was a brute, a ruffian, a monster. When drunk, how he raged and cursed and swore! Often did she dread that, in his fits of inhuman passion, he would have murdered the baby at her breast; for she had seen him dash their only little boy, a child of eight years old, on the floor, till the blood gushed from his ears; and then the madman threw himself down on the body, and howled for the gallows. Limmers haunted his door, and he theirs; and it was hers to lie, not sleep, in a cold, forsaken bed, once the bed of peace, affection, and perfect happiness. Often he struck her; and once when she was pregnant with that very orphan now smiling on her breast, reaching out his wee fingers to touch the flowers on his father’s grave. . . .
‘But she tries to smile among the neighbours, and speaks of her boy’s likeness to its father; nor, when the conversation turns on bygone times, does she fear to let his name escape her white lips, “My Robert; the bairn’s not ill-favoured, but he will never look like his father,”—and such sayings, uttered in a calm, sweet voice. Nay, I remember once how her pale countenance reddened with a sudden flush of pride, when a gossiping crone alluded to their wedding; and the widow’s eye brightened through her tears to hear how the bridegroom, sitting that sabbath in his front seat beside his bonny bride, had not his equal for strength, stature, and all that is beauty in man, in all the congregation. That, I say, sir, whether right or wrong, was—forgiveness.
Here is a specimen of how even generous men had been so perverted by the enchantment of Lord Byron’s genius, as to turn all the pathos and power of the strongest literature of that day against the persecuted, pure woman, and for the strong, wicked man. These ‘Blackwood’ writers knew, by Byron’s own filthy, ghastly writings, which had gone sorely against their own moral stomachs, that he was foul to the bone. They could see, in Moore’s ‘Memoirs’ right before them, how he had caught an innocent girl’s heart by sending a love-letter, and offer of marriage, at the end of a long friendly correspondence,—a letter that had been written to show to his libertine set, and sent on the toss-up of a copper, because he cared nothing for it one way or the other.
They admit that, having won this poor girl, he had been savage, brutal, drunken, cruel. They had read the filthy taunts in ‘Don Juan,’ and the nameless abominations in the ‘Autobiography.’ They had admitted among themselves that his honour was lost; but still this abused, desecrated woman must reverence her brutal master’s memory, and not speak, even to defend the grave of her own kind father and mother.
That there was no lover of her youth, that the marriage-vow had been a hideous, shameless cheat, is on the face of Moore’s account; yet the ‘Blackwood’ does not see it nor feel it, and brings up against Lady Byron this touching story of a poor widow, who really had had a true lover once,—a lover maddened, imbruted, lost, through that very drunkenness in which the Noctes Club were always glorying.
It is because of such transgressors as Byron, such supporters as Moore and the Noctes Club, that there are so many helpless, cowering, broken-hearted, abject women, given over to the animal love which they share alike with the poor dog,—the dog, who, beaten, kicked, starved, and cuffed, still lies by his drunken master with great anxious eyes of love and sorrow, and with sweet, brute forgiveness nestles upon his bosom, as he lies in his filth in the snowy ditch, to keep the warmth of life in him. Great is the mystery of this fidelity in the poor, loving brute,—most mournful and most sacred
But, oh that a noble man should have no higher ideal of the love of a high-souled, heroic woman! Oh that men should teach women that they owe no higher duties, and are capable of no higher tenderness, than this loving, unquestioning animal fidelity! The dog is ever-loving, ever-forgiving, because God has given him no high range of moral faculties, no sense of justice, no consequent horror at impurity and vileness.
Much of the beautiful patience and forgiveness of women is made possible to them by that utter deadness to the sense of justice which the laws, literature, and misunderstood religion of England have sought to induce in woman as a special grace and virtue.
The lesson to woman in this pathetic piece of special pleading is, that man may sink himself below the brute, may wallow in filth like the swine, may turn his home into a hell, beat and torture his children, forsake the marriage-bed for foul rivals; yet all this does not dissolve the marriage-vow on her part, nor free his bounden serf from her obligation to honour his memory,—nay, to sacrifice to it the honour due to a kind father and mother, slandered in their silent graves.
Such was the sympathy, and such the advice, that the best literature of England could give to a young widow, a peeress of England, whose husband, as they verily believed and admitted, might have done worse than all this; whose crimes might have been ‘foul, monstrous, unforgivable as the sin against the Holy Ghost.’ If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? If the peeress as a wife has no rights, what is the state of the cotter’s wife?
But, in the same paper, North again blames Lady Byron for not having come out with the whole story before the world at the time she separated from her husband. He says of the time when she first consulted counsel through her mother, keeping back one item,—
‘How weak, and worse than weak, at such a juncture, on which hung her whole fate, to ask legal advice on an imperfect document! Give the delicacy of a virtuous woman its due; but at such a crisis, when the question was whether her conscience was to be free from the oath of oaths, delicacy should have died, and nature was privileged to show unashamed—if such there were—the records of uttermost pollution.’
Shepherd.—‘And