Note 378 — MARINO FALIERO, DOGE OF VENICE; AN HISTORICAL TRAGEDY, IN FIVE ACTS.
Reading edition
{339}[This appreciation of the Mysterious Mother, which he seems to have read in Lord Dover's preface to Walpole's Letters to Sir Horace Mann, provoked Coleridge to an angry remonstrance. "I venture to remark, first, that I do not believe that Lord Byron spoke sincerely; for I suspect that he made a tacit exception of himself at least.... Thirdly, that the Mysterious Mother is the most disgusting, vile, detestable composition that ever came from the hand of man. No one with a spark of true manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it."—Table Talk, March 20, 1834. Croker took a very different view, and maintained "that the good old English blank verse, the force of character expressed in the wretched mother ... argue a strength of conception, and vigour of expression capable of great things," etc. Over and above the reasonable hope and expectation that this provocative eulogy of Walpole's play would annoy the "Cockneys" and the "Lakers," Byron was no doubt influenced in its favour by the audacity of the plot, which not only put septentrional prejudices at defiance, but was an instance in point that love ought not "to make a tragic subject unless it is love furious, criminal, and hopeless" (Letter to Murray, January 4, 1821). He would, too, be deeply and genuinely moved by such verse as this—
"Consult a holy man! inquire of him! —Good father, wherefore? what should I inquire? Must I be taught of him that guilt is woe? That innocence alone is happiness— That martyrdom itself shall leave the villain The villain that it found him? Must I learn That minutes stamped with crime are past recall? That joys are momentary; and remorse Eternal?... Nor could one risen from the dead proclaim This truth in deeper sounds to my conviction; We want no preacher to distinguish vice From virtue. At our birth the God revealed All conscience needs to know. No codicil To duty's rubric here and there was placed In some Saint's casual custody."
Act i. sc. 3, s.f. Works of the Earl of Orford, 1798, i. 55.]