The single fact of being able to say, "I never seduced any woman," is a very great thing, and we may well doubt whether many of his detractors could say as much. But let us relate facts.
In London the mother of a beautiful girl, hard pressed for money, had recourse to Lord Byron for a large sum, making him an unnatural offer at the same time. The mother's depravity filled him with horror. Many men in his place would have been satisfied with expressing this sentiment either in words or by silence. But that was not enough for his noble heart, and he subtracted from his pleasures or his necessities a sum sufficient to save the honor of the unfortunate girl. At another time, shortly before his marriage, a charming young person, full of talent, requiring help, through some adverse family circumstances, and attracted to Lord Byron by some presentiment of his generosity, became passionately in love with him. She could not live without his image before her. The history of her passion is quite a romance. Utterly absorbed by it, she was forever seeking pretexts for seeing him. A word, a sign, was all she required to become any thing he wished. But Lord Byron, aware he could not make her happy and respectable, never allowed that word to pass his lips, and his language breathed only counsels of wisdom and virtue.[46]
Even at Venice, when his heart had no preference, we find him saving a young girl of noble birth from the danger caused by his involuntary fascinations.[47] In Romagna, at Pisa, in Greece, he also gave similar proofs of virtue and of his delicate sense of honor.
Let us now examine his words. In 1813, with regard to "The Monk," by Lewis, which he had just read, Lord Byron wrote in his memoranda:—"These descriptions might be written by Tiberius, at Caprera. They are overdrawn; the essence of vicious voluptuousness. As to me, I can not conceive how they could come from the pen of a man of twenty, for Lewis was only that age when he wrote 'The Monk.' These pages are not natural; they distill cantharides.
"I had never read this work, and have just been looking over it out of sheer curiosity, from a remembrance of the noise the book made, and the name it gave Lewis. But really such things can not even be dangerous."
About the same period Mr. Allen, a friend of Lord Holland, very learned—a perfect Magliabecchi—a devourer of books, and an observer of mankind, lent Lord Byron a quantity of unpublished letters by the poet Burns—letters that were very unfit to see the light of day, being full of oaths and obscene songs. After reading them, Lord Byron wrote in his memoranda:——
"What an antithetical intelligence! Tenderness and harshness, refinement and vulgarity, sentiment and sensuality; now soaring up into ether, and then dragging along in mud. Mire and sublimity; all that is strangely blended in this admixture of inspired dust. It may seem strange, but to me it appears that a true voluptuary should never abandon his thought to the coarseness of reality. It is only by exalting whatever terrestrial, material, physical element there is in our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, or forgetting them quite, or, at least, by never boldly naming them to ourselves, only thus can we avoid disgust."
This is how Lord Byron understood voluptuousness. We might multiply such quotations without end, taking them from every period of his life; all would prove the same thing.
As to his poetry written at this time, especially the lyrical pieces where he expresses his own sentiments, what can there be more chaste, more ethereal? When a boy, he begins by consigning to the flames a whole edition of his first poems, on account of a single one, which the Rev. Dr. Beecher considered as expressing sentiments too warm for a young man. In his famous satire, written at twenty, he blames Moore's poetry for its effeminate and Epicurean tendencies, and he stigmatized as evil the whole poem of "The Ausonian Nun," and all the sensualities contained in it. In his "Childe Harold," his Eastern tales, his lyric poems above all, where he displays the sentiments of his own heart, every thing is chaste and ethereal. The way in which the public appreciated these poems may be summed up in the words used by the Rev. Mr. Dallas—the living type of Puritanism in its most exaggerated form—at a date when, through many causes, Lord Byron no longer even enjoyed his good graces.
"After 1816," says he (the time at which Lord Byron left England), "I had no more personal intercourse with him, but I continued to read his new poems with the greatest pleasure until he brought out 'Don Juan.' That I perused with a real sorrow that no admiration could overcome. Until then his truly English muse had despised the licentious tone belonging to poets of low degree. But, in writing 'Don Juan,' he allied his chaste and noble genius with minds of that stamp."