It is also by his latest affections that he proved how, if he had been united to a woman after his own heart, he might have enjoyed and given all the domestic happiness that God vouchsafes us here below, and that when love should have undergone the transformations produced by time and custom, he would have known how to replace the poetic enchantments of love's first days, by feelings graver, more unchanging too, and no less tender and sacred.
But we must interrogate those who knew and saw him personally, and in the first place Moore; for not only was Moore acquainted with Lord Byron's secret soul, but to him had the poet confided the treasure of his memoirs, whose principal object was to throw light on the most fatal event of his life, and whose sacrifice, made in deference to the susceptibilities of a few living nullities, will be an eternal remorse for England. Now this is how Moore expresses himself on this subject:—
"With respect to the causes that may be supposed to have led to this separation, it seems needless, with the characters of both parties before our eyes, to go in quest of any very remote or mysterious reasons to account for it."
After observing that men of great genius have never seemed made for domestic happiness, through certain habits, certain wants of their nature, and certain faults, which appear, he says, like the shade thrown by genius in proportion to its greatness, Moore adds that Lord Byron still was, in many respects, a singular exception to this rule, for his heart was so sensitive and his passions so ardent, that the world of reality never ceased to hold a large place in his sympathies; that for the rest, his imagination could never usurp the place of reality, neither in his feelings nor in the objects exciting them.
"The poet in Lord Byron," says Moore, "never absorbed the man. From this very mixture has it arisen that his pages bear so deeply the stamp of real life, and that in the works of no poet with the exception of Shakspeare, can every various mood of the mind—whether solemn or gay, whether inclined to the ludicrous or the sublime, whether seeking to divert itself with the follies of society or panting after the grandeur of solitary nature—find so readily a strain of sentiment in accordance with its every passing tone."
Nevertheless he did not completely escape the usual fate of great geniuses, since he also experienced, though rarely, and always with good cause, that sadness which, as Shakspeare says,—
"Sicklies the face of happiness itself."
"To these faults, and sources of faults, inherent in his own sensitive nature, he added also many of those which a long indulgence of self-will generates—the least compatible, of all others, with that system of mutual concession and sacrifice by which the balance of domestic peace is maintained. In him they were softened down by good-nature. When we look back, indeed, to the unbridled career, of which this marriage was meant to be the goal—to the rapid and restless course in which his life had run along, like a burning train, through a series of wanderings, adventures, successes, and passions, the fever of all which was still upon him, when, with the same headlong recklessness, he rushed into this marriage, it can but little surprise us that, in the space of one short year, he should not have been able to recover all at once from his bewilderment, or to settle down into that tame level of conduct which the close observers of his every action required. As well might it be expected that a steed like his own Mazeppa's—
'Wild as the wild deer and untaught,
With spur and bridle undefiled,'
should stand still, when reined, without chafing or champing the bit.[144]