CHAPTER XXIV

“Madame de Staël, who helped all her friends to make the best of themselves, did what she could to make him cut a dignified figure without success; and when the first moment of curiosity had passed, his society ceased to attract, and no one was glad to see him.”

Which clearly indicates, in spite of the offensive priggishness of the witness, that the tide of hostile opinion was, indeed, flowing too strongly for even Madame de Staël to stem it.

She did her best, however; for she was no prude, but a woman with a great heart, who had herself sought happiness in marriage, and failed to find it there, and had openly done things for which, if she had been an Englishwoman, Mrs. Grundy, instead of lionising, would have turned and rent her. She went further, and proposed to write to Lady Byron and try to arrange terms of peace; and Byron thanked her, and let her do so.

Not, of course, that he had the least desire to return to Lady Byron’s society. He was presently to thunder at her as his “moral Clytemnestra”; and Cordy Jeaffreson’s suggestion that his irrepressible rhetoric was “only the superficial ferment covering the depths of his affection for her,” and that “the woman at whom he railed so insanely was the woman who shared with his child the last tender emotions of his unruly heart” is as absurd a suggestion as ever a biographer put forth. Hobhouse has told us that Byron never was in love with Lady Byron; and, after what we have seen of Lady Byron’s conduct and correspondence, it is hard to believe that any man would have been in love with her after living with her for a twelvemonth. Moreover, we know from “The Dream” where Byron’s heart was at this time, as always, and we know from his own, as well as from Miss Clairmont’s confessions, with how little regard forLady Byron’s feelings he was just then diverting himself in the Genevan suburbs; and we may fairly conclude that what he desired was not to return to her, but merely to be set right with the world by a nominal reconciliation, which would still leave him free to live apart from her.

He did not get what he wanted, and Lady Byron was quite within her rights in withholding it. He had allowed himself to be manœuvred into a false position, and had no claim upon her to help him to manœuvre himself out of it; while she, on her part, was much too high principled to strain a point in favour of a returning prodigal—especially if, as is probable, information had reached her as to his proceedings in his exile. So she rejected his overtures in that cold, judicial, high-minded way of hers; and Byron did not repeat them, but made it clear that he had meant nothing by them, seeing that—

His reason is in “The Dream” which he wrote in July 1816. It was another of his bursts of candour, telling the world (and Lady Byron) yet again how he loved Mary Chaworth, and always had loved her, and always would, and how, even on his wedding day, the memory of her had come between him and his bride:

“A change came o’er the spirit of my dream.The Wanderer was returned—I saw him standBefore an Altar—with a gentle bride;Her face was fair, but was not that which madeThe Starlight of his boyhood:—as he stoodEven at the altar, o’er his brow there cameThe self-same aspect, and the quivering shockThat in the antique Oratory shookHis bosom in its solitude: and then—As in that hour—a moment o’er his faceThe tablet of unutterable thoughtsWas traced,—and then it faded as it came,And he stood calm and quiet, and he spokeThe fitting vows, but heard not his own words,And all things reeled around him; he could seeNot that which was, nor that which should have been—But the old mansion and the accustomed hall,And the remembered chambers, and the place,The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,All things pertaining to that place and hourAnd her who was his destiny, came backAnd thrust themselves between him and the light.”

That was his Parthian shaft; and Cordy Jeaffreson’s view of “The Dream” as “a lovely and elaborate falsehood, written to persuade all mankind that he never loved the woman whose heart he was yearning to recover” is much too preposterous to be admitted. Mary Chaworth’s husband knew that it was no figment. He recognised the reference to a certain “peculiar diadem of trees” on his estate, and gave orders that those trees should be cut down. Lady Byron had no such remedy open to her; but she knew what was meant and wrapped herself up in her virtue; while Byron, on his part, turned to the diversions whichwere to help him to live in the face of the world’s contumely.

Alike for him and for Shelley and the two ladies who attended him there was a good deal of that contumely as long as they remained in the Hotel d’Angleterre; and it may almost be said that they invited it by making themselves conspicuous. In Shelley’s relations with Miss Godwin and Miss Clairmont there was at least the appearance of promiscuity—an appearance on which it did not take gossip long to base positive asseveration.[11]Byron, already an object of curiosity on account of his supposed misdeeds, had made himself conspicuous by his coach, and his retinue, and his manner of travellingen seigneur. So that the other boarders stared when he arrived, and stared still more when they saw him fraternising with his brother poet and the ladies, not only wondering what the eccentric party would be up to next, but keeping close watch on their comings and goings, following them to the lake-side when they went out boating, awaiting them on the lake-side when they landed on their return, lining up to inspect them as often as carriages were brought to the door to take them for a drive.

They did not like it, and moved into villas on the other side of the Rhone, only to discover that the Hotel d’Angleterre overlooked them, and that its obliging landlord had set up a large telescope so that his visitors might survey their proceedings the more commodiously. This obliged them tomove again—Byron to the Villa Diodati, and Shelley to the Maison Chapuis or Campagne Mont Allègre—and there at last they were able, as the party of the Libertins in the Geneva of the Reformation put it, to “live as they chose without reference to the preachers.”

To much that they did there the preachers, even those of Calvin’s time, could have taken no exception. They talked—the sort of talk that would have been high over the heads of their censors of the d’Angleterre; they rowed on the lake, and sang in their boat in the moonlight; they read poetry, and wrote it. Shelley pressed Byron to read Wordsworth; and he did so, with results which are apparent in the Third Canto of “Childe Harold,” where we find the Wordsworthian conception of the unity of man with Nature reproduced and spoiled, as Wordsworth most emphatically insisted, in the reproduction. There was a week of rain during which the friends decided to fleet the time by writing ghost stories, and Mary Godwin wrote “Frankenstein.” There was also a circular tour of the lake, undertaken without the ladies, in the course of which Shelley had a narrow escape from drowning near Saint Gingolph. These things were a part, and not the least important part, of the diversions which helped Byron to defy the slanderers whom he could not answer. So was his short trip to the Oberland with Hobhouse. And, finally, meaning so little to him that one naturally keeps it to theend and adds it as a detail, there was the “affair” with Miss Jane Clairmont.

On this branch of the subject he wrote to Mrs. Leigh, who had heard exaggerated rumours:

“As to all these ‘mistresses,’ Lord help me—I have had but one. Now don’t scold; but what could I do?—a foolish girl, in spite of all I could say or do, would come after me, or rather went before—for I found her here—and I have had all the plague possible to persuade her to go back again; but at last she went. Now, dearest, I do most truly tell thee that I could not help this, that I did all I could to prevent it, and have at last put an end to it. I was not in love, nor have any love left for any; but I could not exactly play the Stoic with a woman who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophise me. Besides, I had been regaled of late with so many ‘two courses and adesert’ (Alas!) of aversion, that I was fain to take a little love (if pressed particularly) by way of novelty.”

The love had been pressed, as we have seen, and as Miss Clairmont, in her age, admitted, very particularly indeed. She had dreamt, she admits—and she would have us think that Shelley and Mary Godwin expected—that her alliance with “the great Lord Byron” was to be permanent; and this though she declares, elsewhere in her confessions, that she did not really love him, but was only dazzled by him, and that her heart, in truth, was Shelley’s.

It was an ambitious dream; and it would be easy to make a list of reasons why it was impossible that it should come true. The mood in which she found Byron was only one of them. The defects and limitations of her own qualities furnish others. She was a tradesman’s daughter, and, though well-educated, not without vulgarity; pretentious, but superficial; stage-struck, a romp, and a mimic. If she ever mimicked Byron—if, in particular, she ever mimicked his lameness—a good deal would be explained.

One does not know whether she did or not. What one does know is that he shook her off rather roughly, and, never having loved her, presently conceived a dislike for her; and that though she bore him a child—the little Allegra, so named after her birthplace, who only lived to be five years of age, and now lies buried at Harrow. To Allegra, indeed, Byron was good and kind—he looked forward, he told Moore and others, to the time when she would be a support to the loneliness of his old age; but to Allegra’s mother he would have nothing more to say. How she hunted him down, and how she and the Countess Guiccioli made each other jealous—these are matters into which it is unnecessary to enter here. The conclusions which Miss Clairmont drew, as she told Mr. Graham, was that Byron’s attitude towards women was that of a Sultan towards the ladies of his harem. No doubt it was so in her case—and through her fault; for her plight was very much like that of the worshipper of Juggernautwho should prostrate himself before the oncoming car and then complain because the wheels pass over him.

Probably, if she had been less pressing, or less clinging, he would have been more grateful; for there assuredly was cause for gratitude even though there was no room for love. Vulgar, feather-headed, stage-struck little thing that she was, Jane Clairmont, by throwing herself at Byron’s head, and telling him, without waiting to be asked, that she, at least, would count the world well lost for him—and still more perhaps by bringing him into relation with the Shelleys—had rendered him real help in the second desperate crisis of his life. One may repeat, indeed, that she helped him to live through that dark period; and if she knew that, or guessed it, she may well have felt aggrieved that his return for her passion was so inadequate.

But he could not help it. His heart was out of his keeping, and he could not give what he did not possess. A “passade” was all that he was capable of just then; but that this “passade” did really help him to feel his feet again in stormy waters, and bring him back once more to cheerfulness and self-respect, is amply proved, first by the change of tone which appears in his more intimate writings, and then by the new, and worse, way of life into which we see him falling after the curtain has been rung down on the episode.

Shelley departed, taking Miss Clairmont and her sister with him, sorely, as there is reason to believe,against the former’s wish, towards the end of August; the honeymoon, such as it was, having lasted about three months. Towards the end of the time, visitors began to arrive—“Monk” Lewis, and “Conversation” Sharp, and Scrope Davies, and Hobhouse—but most particularly Hobhouse who wrote Mrs. Leigh a reassuring letter to the effect that her brother was “living with the strictest attention to decorum, and free from all offence, either to God or man or woman,” having given up brandy and late hours and “quarts of magnesia” and “deluges of soda-water,” and appearing to be “as happy as it is consistent for a man of honour and common feeling to be after the occurrence of a calamity involving a charge, whether just or unjust, against his honour and his feeling.”

That was written on September 9; and it approximated to the truth. Having despatched his report, Hobhouse took Byron for the tour already referred to—over the Col de Jaman, down the Simmenthal to Thun, up the Lake of Thun to Interlaken, and thence to Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, Brienz, and back by way of Berne, Fribourg, and Yverdon. Byron kept a journal of the journey for his sister to peruse. In the main it is merely a record, admirably written, of things seen; but now and again the diarist speaks out and shows how exactly his companion had read and interpreted his mind.

“It would be a great injustice,” Hobhouse had continued to Mrs. Leigh, in reference to the“calamity” and the “charge,” “to suppose that he has dismissed the subject from his thoughts, or indeed from his conversation, upon any other motive than that which the most bitter of his enemies would commend. The uniformly guarded and tranquil manner shows the effort which it is meant to hide.” And there are just two passages in the Diary in which we see the tranquil manner breaking down. In the first place at Grindelwald:

“Starlight, beautiful, but a devil of a path. Never mind, got safe in; a little lightning; but the whole of the day as fine in point of weather as the day on which Paradise was made. Passedwhole woods of withered pines, all withered; trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless; done by a single winter—their appearance reminded me of me and my family.”

In the second place, at the very end of the tour:

“I ... have seen some of the noblest views in the world. But in all this—the recollections of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the Shepherd, the crashing of the Avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the Glacier, the Forest, nor the Cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my old wretched identity inthe majesty, and the power and the glory, around, above, and beneath me.”

A striking admission truly of the unreality and insincerity of the Byronic presentation of Wordsworth’s Pantheism, and concluding with an exclamation which shows clearly how distinct a thing Byron’s individuality was to him, and how far he was from picturing himself, in sober prose, as “a portion of the tempest” or anything but his passionate and suffering self:

“I am past reproaches; and there is a time for all things. I am past the wish of vengeance, and I know of none like for what I have suffered; but the hour will come when what I feel must be felt, and the—but enough.”

And so up the Rhone valley and over the Simplon to Italy, where his life was to enter upon yet another phase.

FROM GENEVA TO VENICE—THE AFFAIR WITH THE DRAPER’S WIFE

As long as Hobhouse remained with Byron nothing memorable happened. There was a good deal of the schoolmaster about Hobhouse, though he could sometimes unbend in a non-committal way; and in the presence of schoolmasters life is seldom a drama and never an extravaganza. The change, therefore, in the manner of Byron’s life did not occur until, tiring of his friend’s supervision, he declined to accompany him to Rome. In the meantime, first at Milan and then at Verona, he held up his head, and passed like a pageant through the salons of the best continental society.

Milan, he told Murray, was “very polite and hospitable.” He parted there from Polidori, who was expelled from the territory on account of a brawl with an Austrian officer in a theatre; and he dined with the Marquis de Brême—an Italian nobleman equally famous for his endeavours to popularise vaccination and suppress mendicity—to meet Monti the Italian poet and Stendhal the French novelist. “Never,” wrote Stendhal of that meeting, “shall I forget the sublime expression of his countenance; it was the peaceful look of power united with genius.” And a long account of Byron’s sojournat Milan was contributed by Stendhal to theForeign Literary Gazette.

The introductions, Stendhal says, “passed with as much ceremonious gravity as if our introducer had been de Brême’s grandfather in days of yore ambassador from the Duke of Savoy to the court of Louis XIV.” He describes Byron as “a dandy” who “expressed a constant dread of augmenting the bulk of his outward man, concealed his right foot as much as possible, and endeavoured to render himself agreeable in female society;” and he proceeds to relate how female society sought to make itself agreeable to him:

“His fine eyes, his handsome horses, and his fame gained him the smiles of several young, lovely, and noble females, one of whom, in particular, performed a journey of more than a hundred miles for the pleasure of being present at a masked ball to which his Lordship was invited. Byron was apprised of the circumstance, but either fromhauteuror shyness, declined an introduction. ‘Your poets are perfect clowns,’ cried the fair one, as she indignantly quitted the ball-room.”

And then again:

“Perhaps few cities could boast such an assemblage of lovely women as that which chance had collected at Milan in 1817. Many of them had flattered themselves with the idea that Byron would seek an introduction; but whether from pride, timidity, or a remnant of dandyism, which inducedhim to do exactly the contrary of what was expected, he invariably declined the honour. He seemed to prefer a conversation on poetical or philosophical subjects.”

The explanation of his aloofness, Stendhal thought, might be that he “had some guilty stain upon his conscience, similar to that which wrecked Othello’s fame.” He suspected him of having, in a frenzy of jealousy, “shortened the days of some fair Grecian slave, faithless to her vows of love.” That, it seemed to him, might account for the fact that he so often “appeared to us like one labouring under an access of folly, often approaching to madness.” But, of course, as this narrative has demonstrated, Stendhal was guessing wildly and guessing wrong; and the thoughts which really troubled Byron were thoughts of the wreck of his household gods, and the failure of his sentimental life, and perhaps also of the failure of Miss Clairmont’s free offering of a naïve and passionate heart to awaken any answering emotion in his breast, or do more than tide him over the first critical weeks following upon the separation. So he wrote Moore a long letter from Verona, relating his kind reception by the Milanese, discoursing of Milanese manners and morals, but then concluding:

“If I do not speak to you of my own affairs, it is not from want of confidence, but to spare you and myself. My day is over—what then—I have had it. To be sure, I have shortened it.”

From Verona, too, he wrote on the same day to his sister, saying, after compliments and small-talk: “I am also growinggreyandgiddy, and cannot help thinking my head will decay; I wish my memory would, at least my remembrance.” All of which seems to show Byron defiant, but not yet reckless, preferring, if not actually enjoying, the society of his equals, and still paying a very proper regard to appearances. The change occurred when he got to Venice and Hobhouse left him there. Then there was a moral collapse, just as if a moral support had been withdrawn—a collapse of which the first outward sign was a new kind of intrigue.

Hitherto his amours had been with his social equals; and the daughters of the people had, since his celebrity, had very little attraction for him. Now the decline begins—a decline which was to conduct him to very degraded depths; and our first intimation of it is in a letter written to Moore within a week of his arrival. He begins with a comment on the decay of Venice—“I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation”—and he proceeds:

“Besides, I have fallen in love, which next to falling into the canal (which would be of no use as I can swim), is the best or the worst thing I could do. I have got some extremely good apartments in the house of a ‘Merchant of Venice,’ who is a good deal occupied with business, and has a wife in her twenty-second year. Marianna (that is hername) is in her appearance altogether like an antelope.... Her features are regular and rather aquiline—mouth small—skin clear and soft, with a kind of hectic colour—forehead remarkably good: her hair is of the dark gloss, curl, and colour of Lady Jersey’s: her figure is light and pretty, and she is a famous songstress.”

And so on at some length. Our only other witness to Marianna’s charms and character—a manuscript note to Moore’s Life quoted in Murray’s edition of the Letters—describes her as “a demon of avarice and libidinousness who intrigued with every resident in the house and every guest who visited it.” It is possible—it is even probable—that this description, made from a different point of view than Byron’s, fits her. Byron’s enthusiasm was for her physical, not her moral, attributes; and it does not appear that he was under any illusion as to the latter. The former, however, fascinated him; and we find him dwelling on them, in letter after letter, to Murray as well as Moore—the publisher, indeed, being the first recipient of the confidence that “Our little arrangement is completed; the usual oaths having been taken, and everything fulfilled according to the ‘understood relations’ of such liaisons.” Which means, very clearly, that the draper’s wife has become the poet’s mistress, with the knowledge of her husband, and to his pecuniary advantage.

The story is not one on which to dwell. It is less a story, indeed, than a string of unrelatedincidents. Though spun out and protracted, it does not end but leaves off; and of the circumstances of its termination there is no record. Marianna’s avarice may have had something to do with it. So may her habit, above referred to, of intriguing with all comers. But nothing is known; and the one thing certain is that, though Byron was attracted, sentiment played no part in the attraction. It would seem too that he was only relatively faithful.

One gathers that from the account which he gives to Moore of a visit received from Marianna’s sister-in-law, whom Marianna caught in his apartment, and seized by the hair, and slapped:

“I need not describe the screaming which ensued. The luckless visitor took flight. I seized Marianna, who, after several vain attempts to get away in pursuit of the enemy, fairly went into fits in my arms; and, in spite of reasoning, eau de Cologne, vinegar, half a pint of water, and God knows what other waters beside, continued so till past midnight.”

Whereupon enter Signor Segati himself, “her lord and master, and finds me with his wife fainting upon the sofa, and all the apparatus of confusion, dishevelled hair, hats, handkerchiefs, salts, smelling-bottles—and the lady as pale as ashes, without sense or motion.” And then, explanations more or less suitable having been offered and accepted, “The sister-in-law, very much discomposed at beingtreated in such wise, has (not having her own shame before her eyes) told the affair to half Venice, and the servants (who were summoned by the fight and the fainting) to the other half.”

And so forth, and so forth. It is all very vulgar, and none of it of the faintest importance except for the sake of the light which it throws on Byron’s mind and disposition, though its importance is, from that point of view, considerable. It shows Byron sick of sentiment because sentiment has failed him and played him false, but grasping at the sensual pleasures of love as the solid realities about which no mistake is possible. It shows him, moreover, socially as well as sentimentally, on the down grade, consorting with inferiors, and in some danger of unfitting himself for the company of his equals.

The reckless note of the man resolved to enjoy himself, or at any rate to keep up the pretence that he is doing so, although his heart is bankrupt, is struck in one of the letters to Augusta. It refers to a previous letter, not published, in which the tidings of the “new attachment” has already been communicated, and to a letter addressed, some time previously, to Lady Byron; and it continues:

“I was wretched enough when I wrote it, and had been so for many a long day and month: at present I am less so, for reasons explained in my late letter; and as I never pretend to be what I am not, you may tell her, if you please, that I am recovering, and the reason also if you like it.”

Which is to say that he wishes Lady Byron to be told,totidem verbis, and on authority which she cannot question, that, having lived connubially with both, he very much prefers the draper’s wife to her. And so, no doubt, he did; for though the draper’s wife, as well as Lady Byron, had her faults, they were the faults of a naughty child rather than a pedantic schoolmistress, and therefore less exasperating to a man in the mood to which Byron had been driven. She might be—indeed she was—very jealous and very violent; but at least she did not assume airs of moral superiority and deliver lectures, or parade the heartlessness of one who is determined to be always in the right.

So that Byron delighted to have her about him. “I am very well off with Marianna, who is not at all a person to tire me,” he told Murray in one letter; and in another he wrote: “She is very pretty and pleasing, and talks Venetian, which amuses me, and is naïve, and I can besides see her, and make love with her at all or any hours, which is convenient to my temperament.” Just that, and nothing more than that; for such occasional outbursts of sentiment and yearnings after higher things as we do find in the letters of this date leave Signora Segati altogether on one side.

There is something of sentiment, for instance, in a letter to Mrs. Leigh informing her that Miss Clairmont has borne Byron a daughter. The mother, he says, is in England, and he prays Godto keep her there; but then he thinks of the child, and continues:

“They tell me it is very pretty, with blue eyes anddarkhair; and, although I never was attached nor pretended attachment to the mother, still in case of the eternal war and alienation which I foresee about my legitimate daughter, Ada, it may be as well to have something to repose a hope upon. I must love something in my old age, and probably circumstances will render this poor little creature a great, and, perhaps, my only comfort.”

There is sentiment there; and there also is sentiment, although of a different kind, in a letter written at about the same date to Moore:

“If I live ten years longer you will see, however, that it is not over with me—I don’t mean in literature, for that is nothing; and it may seem odd enough to say, I do not think it my vocation. But you will see that I shall do something or other—the times and fortune permitting—that, ‘like the cosmogony, or creation of the world, will puzzle the philosophers of all ages.’ But I doubt whether my constitution will hold out. I have exorcised it most devilishly.”

This is a strikingly interesting, because an unconsciously prophetic, passage. Byron’s ultimate efforts to “do something”—something quite unconnected with literature—is the most famous,and some would say the most glorious, incident in his life. We shall come to it very soon, and we shall see how his constitution, so sorely tried by an indiscreet diet and excessive indulgence in all things from love to Epsom Salts, just allowed him to begin his task, but did not suffer him to finish it. Enough to note here that Byron saw the better even when he preferred the worse, and never lost faith in himself even in his most degraded years, but always looked forward, even then, to the day when he would shake off sloth and sensuality in order to be worthy of his higher self.

He divined that the power to do that would be restored to him in the end—that social outlawry, though it might daze him, could not crush him—that it would come to be, in the end, a kind of education, and a source of self-reliance. But not yet, and not for a good many years to come. Before the moral recovery could begin, the moral collapse had to be completed; and the affair with the draper’s wife was only the first milestone on the downward path. We shall have to follow him past other milestones before we see him turning back.

AT VENICE—THE AFFAIR WITH THE BAKER’S WIFE—DISSOLUTE PROCEEDINGS IN THE MOCENIGO PALACE—ILLNESS, RECOVERY AND REFORMATION

For six weeks or so in May and June 1817 Byron tore himself away from Marianna and visited Rome, where he dined with Lord Lansdowne, sat to Thorwaldsen for his bust, and gathered the materials for the Fourth Canto of “Childe Harold.” He refused, however, for Marianna’s sake, to go on with Hobhouse to Naples, but hurried back to her, bidding her meet him half-way, and afterwards taking her, but not her husband, to a villa at La Mira, on the Brenta, a few miles out of Venice. It seems that the neighbours, less particular than the leaders of English society, yet including a marquis as well as a physician with four unmarried daughters, hastened to call, if not on the lady, at all events on him. Monk Lewis paid him a short visit, and Hobhouse, on his return from Naples, stayed for some time in a house close by, studying in the Ducal Library, and amassing the erudition which appears in his notes to “Childe Harold.” Praise of Marianna, however, disappears from Byron’s letters at this period; and one may infer from his comment on the news of the death ofMadame de Staël that, if Marianna had ever made him happy, she had now ceased to do so.

“With regard to death,” he then wrote to Murray, “I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.”

This is not the note of a man who has found happiness in love or even pleasure in dissipation. Apparently the novelty of the new experiences was wearing off; and Byron was becoming sick of the isolation and uneventfulness of his life. He had gone to Venice largely because there was no English society there—and yet he missed it; Hoppner, the Consul-General being almost his only English friend. He had access to Venetian society, and to some extent, mixed in it; but he did not find it interesting. He tired of the receptions alike of Signora Benzoni the worldly, and of Signora Albrizzi the “blue,” at which, no doubt, he was stared at as a marvel of fascinating profligacy; and he also tired of Marianna Segati, who doubtless gave him an excuse for breaking off his relations with her; and then there followed a further and deeper plunge.

The departure of Hobhouse seems, as usual, to have given the signal. It was about the time of his departure that Byron gave up his lodging in the draper’s shop and moved into the Mocenigo Palace; and the letter in which Murray is advised that Hobhouse is on his way home continues thus:

“It is the height of the Carnival, and I am in theestrumand agonies of a new intrigue with Idon’t exactly know whom or what, except that she is insatiate of love, and won’t take money, and has light hair and blue eyes, which are not common here, and that I met her at the Masque, and that when her mask is off, I am as wise as ever. I shall make what I can of the remainder of my youth.”

A vow which he kept after a fashion as innumerable passages from innumerable letters prove—Moore, Murray, and James Wedderburn Webster receiving his confidences in turn. Venice, he assures the last named, “is by no means the most regular and correct moral city in the universe;” and he continues, describing the life there—not everybody’s life, of course, but the life with which he has chosen to associate himself:

“Young and old—pretty and ugly—high and low—are employed in the laudable practice of Love-making—and though most Beauty is found amongst the middling and lower classes—this of course only renders their amatory habits more universally diffused.”

Then to Moore there is talk of “a Venetian girl with large black eyes, a face like Faustina’s and the figure of a Juno—tall and energetic as a Pythoness, with eyes flashing, and her dark eyes streaming in the moonlight;” while to Murray there is a long account of the affair with Margarita Cogni, the baker’s wife, with whom the draper’s wife disputed publicly for Byron’s favours:

“Margarita threw back her veil, and replied in very explicit Venetian: ‘Youarenothiswife:Iamnothiswife:youare hisDonnaandIam hisDonna;yourhusband is a cuckold, andmineis another. For the rest what right have you to reproach me? if he prefers what is mine to what is yours, is it my fault? if you wish to secure him, tie him to your petticoat-string; but do not think to speak to me without a reply because you happen to be richer than I am.’ Having delivered this pretty piece of eloquence (which I relate as it was translated to me by a bye-stander), she went on her way, leaving a numerous audience with Madame Segati, to ponder at her leisure on the dialogue between them.”

And Byron goes on to tell other stories of Margarita’s jealousy, relating that “she had inordinate self-love, and was not tolerant of other women ... so that, I being at the time somewhat promiscuous, there was great confusion and demolition of head-dresses and handkerchiefs; and sometimes my servants, in ‘redding’ the fray between her and other feminine persons, received more knocks than acknowledgments for their peaceful endeavours.” And then follows the story of Margarita’s flight from her husband’s house to Byron’s palace, and her husband’s application to the police to restore her to him, and her second desertion of “that consumptive cuckold,” as she styled him in open court, and her final success in settling herself as a fixture in Byron’s establishment, without his formal consent, but with his indolent acquiescence.

She became his housekeeper, with the result that “the expenses were reduced to less than half, and everybody did their duty better.” But she also had an ungovernable temper, suppressed all letters in a feminine handwriting, threatened violence with a table-knife, and had to be disarmed by Fletcher; so that Byron at last tired of her and told her to go. She then went quietly downstairs and threw herself into the canal, but was fished out, brought to with restoratives, and sent away a second time. “And this,” Byron concludes, “is the story of Margarita Cogni, as far as it belongs to me.”

Like the story of Marianna Segati, it is hardly a story at all; and there seem to have been several other stories very much like it running concurrently with it. So, at all events, Byron told Augusta, who passed the news on to Hodgson, saying that her brother had written “on the old subject very uncomfortably, and on his present pursuits which are what one would dread and expect; a string of low attachments.” And if a picture of the life, drawn by an eye-witness, be desired, one has only to turn to Shelley’s letter on the subject to Thomas Love Peacock.

The subject of Shelley’s comments is the point of view and “tone of mind” of certain passages in “Childe Harold.” He finds here “a kind of obstinate and self-willed folly,” and he continues:

“Nothing can be less sublime than the true source of these expressions of contempt and desperation. The fact is that, first, the Italian women with whom he associates are, perhaps, the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon—the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; Countesses smell so strongly of garlic that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, L. B. is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices, which are not only not named, but I believe, seldom even conceived in England. He says he disapproves, but he endures. He is heartily and deeply discontented with himself; and contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts the nature and habits of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt and despair?... And he has a certain degree of candour while you talk to him, but, unfortunately, it does not outlast your departure. No, I do not doubt, and for his sake I ought to hope, that his present career must end soon in some violent circumstance.”

This, it is to be remarked, is the picture, not of an enemy, but of a friend—one who already admired Byron as the greatest poet of his generation, and was to learn to admire him as one of its greatest men: a man capable of doing great things as well as dreaming them. Evidently, therefore, itis, as far as it goes, a true picture, though there is something to be added to it—something which blackens, and also something which brightens it.

Byron, to begin with, was, during this dark period, as careless of his appearance as of his morals. It was not necessary to his facile conquests among the Venetian courtesans that he should be either sober or well-groomed. It may even, on the contrary, have been necessary that he should drink too much and go unkempt in order to live comfortably on their level. At all events he did drink too much—preferring fiery spirits to the harmless Italian wines—and indulged a large appetite for miscellaneous foods, and ceased his frequentation of the barber’s shop; with the result that the flesh, set free from its customary discipline, revolted and spread abroad, and Hanson, who came to Byron at Venice to settle about the sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman, reported to Augusta that he had found him “fat, immensely large, and his hair long.” James Wedderburn Webster, a few months later, heard of his “corpulence” as “stupendous;” and Byron, while objecting to that epithet, was constrained to admit that it was considerable.

There were limits, however, to his excesses; and if misconduct was sometimes three parts of life for him, there always remained the fourth part to be devoted to other activities and interests. Even at his most debased hours Byron never quite lost his love of literature and out-door exercise, or his genius for friendship with men of like tasteswith himself, who judged him as they found him and not as his wife said that he was; so that a picture contrasting pleasantly from Shelley’s may be taken from Consul-General Hoppner, whom Byron took almost daily in his gondola to ride on the Lido:

“Nothing could be more delightful than these rides on the Lido were to me. We were from half to three quarters of an hour crossing the water, during which his conversation was always most amusing and interesting. Sometimes he would bring with him any new book he had received, and read to me the passages which most struck him. Often he would repeat to me whole stanzas of the poems he was engaged in writing, as he had composed them on the preceding evening; and this was the more interesting to me because I could frequently trace in them some idea which he had started in our conversation of the preceding day, or some remark the effect of which he had evidently been trying upon me. Occasionally, too, he spoke of his own affairs, making me repeat all I had heard with regard to him, and desiring that I would not spare him, but let him know the worst that was said.”

The two reports must be read, of course, not as contradicting but as supplementing one another; so that a just estimate of the actual situation may not be very difficult to arrive at.

Byron, it is important to remember, though he had so many adventures, was only thirty years of age; and at thirty even a man of genius is still very young; and a very young man is always apt, given the provocation, to challenge public attention by going to the devil conspicuously and with a blare of trumpets. He may or may not like, and therefore nurse, the idea that he has tied his life up into such a knot that nothing but death—his own death or another’s—can untie it; but he is quite ready, as a rule, to accept the tangle, if not to welcome it, as an excuse for a sensational plunge into the abysms of debauchery. And this is especially so if his passions are strong, and if his private affairs have been a public pageant, watched, whether for praise or censure, by innumerable eyes.

Both those conditions were fulfilled in Byron’s case. Consequently he set out to swagger to the devil—as cynical now as he had once been sentimental—convinced, or at any rate affecting to be convinced, that, in a so-called love affair, nothing mattered but the sensual satisfaction; promiscuous in his habits and careless of his health—pleased to let Lady Byron know that he found more pleasure in the society of the scum of the stews of Venice than in hers—delighted also to think that the community at large were shocked by his dissolute proceedings. We have just seen him asking his sister to inform his wife what he was doing and how he was living. His friend Harness, who had longsince lost sight of him, assures us that one of his great joys was to send defamatory paragraphs about himself to the continental newspapers in the hope that the English press would copy them, and that the world would believe him to be even worse than he was. He was vicious, that is to say, and he was also, as the Duc de Broglie called him, a “fanfaron of vice.”

It was a phase which he had to pass through, but no more; for such a man could not possibly go on living such a life for long. The real risk for his reputation was that he should die before the phase was finished, die in a house which was little better than a brothel, with Venetian prostitutes tearing each other’s hair and scratching each other’s faces by his bedside. The end, indeed, might easily have come in that ignominious fashion; for he had a recurrence of the malaria to which he had been liable ever since his first journey to Greece, and, in view of the liberties which he had taken with his constitution, it is rather surprising that he recovered from it. Still, he did recover; and, whether ill or well, he never quite lost sight of the better possibilities.

His harem claimed his days, but not, as a rule, his nights. There came, pretty regularly, an hour when the revelry ceased and the domestic female companions were packed off to their several beds; and then pens and ink and ardent spirits were set before Byron, and he wrote. It was, indeed, just when his life was most dissolute that his genius wasbrightest. He wrote “Manfred,” the poem in which he responded to the challenge of his calumniators, and showed that he could, if he chose, cast a halo round the very charge with which they had sought to crush him. He wrote the Fourth Canto of “Childe Harold,” in which we see the last of the admired Byronic pose. He began “Don Juan,” the poem in which the sincere cynic, who has come to cynicism by way of sentiment, passes with a light step from the pathetic to the ribald, and, attacking all hypocrisies, from those of Mrs. Grundy to those of the Holy Alliance, brushes them impatiently away like cobwebs.

Byron, in short, remained a fighter even in the midst of his self-indulgences; and for the fighter there is always hope. Self-indulgence brings satiety, but fighting does not, when it can be seen that the blows are telling; and there could be no question of the effect of Byron’s blows. Though the sea rolled between him and his countrymen, he shocked them as they had never been shocked before. Regarding him as the wickedest of wicked men, they admitted that his was a wickedness that had to be reckoned with, which was exactly what he wished and had intended. Perhaps he shocked them more for the fun of the thing than as the conscious champion of any particular cause; but that does not matter. The greatest builders are nearly always those who are building better than they know; and the building, at any rate, saved Byron from suffering too much harm from theloose manner of his life, and helped him to await his opportunity.

“I am only a spectator upon earth, until a tenfold opportunity offers. It may come yet,” he wrote to Moore about this time. The passage is enigmatical, and may only refer to some dream of vengeance cherished against Lady Byron and her advisers. On the other hand, it may just as well be a second reference to that resolution to “do something,”—something which “like the cosmogony or creation of the world will puzzle the philosophers of all ages,”—formulated in the letter to Moore already quoted. The letter, at all events, is quickly followed by news of the illness already mentioned, and of which there is a more or less particular account in one of the letters to Murray:

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