The Life of Lady Byron
by . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 8vo. xvi+501 pp. Illus. $5.00.
IF it is true that there exists to-day a revival of interest in Byron, this book will surely add to its growth. While it will not put an end to controversy (nothing will ever do that) over certain unpleasant aspects of the poet’s life, it will, at least, convince all fair-minded readers that Lady Byron was not the cold and inhuman person that romantic opinion has too often and with too much vehemence held her to be. This work is biography at its best. It is not only a book for the scholar, thoroughly and convincingly documented, but a book for the general reader as well.
In spite of her virtuous bringing up at the hands of middle-aged parents who had waited fifteen years for her, their only child (they wanted and expected a boy), it is not too difficult to understand Annabella Milbanke’s infatuation for Byron. It is not too difficult, even, to understand how two years after her first refusal of him, and in the face of the most disinterested attitude ever presented by a lover to his lady, she married him that wintry day at Seaham. She knew some of his indiscretions and suspected others, she knew his temper and his scorn, but she was in love with him and that was enough. She did not need, what this book proves she had in such large degree, the feminine urge to protect and to reform.
It is less easy to understand why he married her. Born with a keen eye for the discernment of cant and hypocrisy, with a love of poetry and some urge to write it, she was yet without that touch of real imagination which gives one the ability to sympathize with the ways and opinions of others. She was held too rigidly in the confines of her own standards, and those standards were both high and narrow. But Byron insisted on her ‘placidity.’ Did he see in her some sane pattern to lead him out of his chaos? Was he really ill over the situation with his half-sister Augusta and disgusted with the memory of previous affairs? And, at least before the first proposal to Annabella, did he suppose that marriage with her would work some charm to keep him from the disastrous step into incest?
There was not even this possible excuse for the second proposal, made easy though it was by Annabella’s letters, for by this time the fate that he had feared had overtaken him and he had surrendered.
Is it enough to say of Annabella that she loved him, in answering the question why she stayed with him as long as she did? Think of him with his dagger and pistol, his rantings, and his loathsome insinuations about Augusta, while she had only to leave him. Had she left him promptly and returned to her parents at Seaham she would never have let herself in for all the condemnation she was to receive later just because she did stay with him. ‘Could he really have been so bad? her accusers were to ask, and to answer for her, ‘No.’
The inevitable separation after Ada’s birth does not spell the end of Lady Byron’s tragedy. That was to be lifelong. Consider the amazing correspondence and ‘friendship’ with Augusta, the interest in Medora and the next generation after Medora. Think of the ‘blackmail’ of her on the part of all of them. Was it as a relief from all this that she turned to her juvenile committees, her industrial and agricultural schools? Truly Lady Byron was a strange character. Anyone who would know Byron must know her and must, therefore, read this book, a masterpiece of its kind.
F. R. MCCREARY