And this real cause was a grief he wished to keep secret. Separation from friends, their departure, even when he was to meet them again, likewise caused him sadness. Especially was this the case with regard to Moore, whom he loved so much, and whose society had an unspeakable charm for him:—"I can only repeat," he said, "that I wish you would either remain a long time with us, or not come at all, for these snatches of society make the subsequent separations bitterer than ever."[181]
And in the next letter he says:—"I could be very sentimental now, but I won't. The truth is, that I have been all my life trying to harden my heart, and have not yet quite succeeded—though there are great hopes—and you do not know how it sunk with your departure."
This influence is ever visible. The English climate was always distasteful to him, and its fogs displeased him more since he had revelled in the splendor of Eastern suns; moreover, mists grew darker and colder when his imagination was still more influenced by his heart. At those moments his first thought ever was—"Let me depart, let me seek a bright sun, a blue sky." When to his great regret, the East was closed against him by the plague of 1813, in his disdain for northern countries, he exclaimed:—
"Give me a sun, I care not how hot, and sherbet, I care not how cool, and my heaven is as easily made as your Persian's." Making allusions to this verse—
"A Persian's heaven is easily made,—
'Tis but black eyes and lemonade."
But we know that he was thinking of this voyage, in order to divert his mind from the regret of having been obliged, from motives of honor and prudence, to give up accompanying into Sicily a family he liked very much. However, the sight of a camel sufficed to carry him back to Asia and the Euxine Sea, and to make him cry out: "Quando te aspiciam!"
It was also at this time that he wrote to Moore, "All convulsions with me end in rhyme." To overcome certain agitations of heart, he wrote the "Bride of Abydos," and directly afterward the "Corsair."
But if the melancholy, more or less deep, that cast its shadows over this brilliant period of his triumphs, wore specially the above character, it changed somewhat after his marriage. Thenceforward his melancholy sprang less from the heart, than from bitter disenchantment; from the suffering of a proud nature, cruelly wounded in its sentiment of justice by indignities, calumnies, persecutions, unexampled under such circumstances. Having already spoken of this marriage, I shall leave to regular biographers the detailed account of this painful period, so as only to consider it here under the sole aspect of the griefs it caused. I will not even stop to mention the unaccountable melancholy occasioned by a presentiment before marriage, nor the mysterious sort of agony that seized upon him just as he was about to kneel for the nuptial ceremony in church, nor even the sadness brought about by his first experience of the disposition of the person with whom he had so imprudently linked his fate. I will say, rather, that the melancholy caused and produced by this marriage was really grief; and of the kind that most harshly tries, not only firmness of soul, but likewise true virtue. For all the baseness, cowardice and spirit of revenge that had lain hidden a moment while his triumphal car passed on, united at this moment to overwhelm and cast him down. And the means employed were, instinct with such perversity, that his great moral courage, always so powerful in helping him to bear contradictions, disappointments, and personal misfortunes, were no longer of any assistance, threatened as he was with the greatest calamity that can possibly befall a man of honor—namely, to be misjudged, calumniated, accused, thought capable of deeds quite contrary to his high nature. Neither his courage, firmness, nor even the testimony of conscience could shield him from great unhappiness. And he suffered all the more that the blame incurred proceeded from worthy persons who had been mischievously led into error; nor could he conceal from himself that he had voluntarily contributed to produce this unhappy state of things, by not sufficiently avoiding certain appearances, by not attaching sufficient importance to the opinion of his fellow-men, and having lent himself, too easily, to misinterpretation.
"The thorns which I have reaped," said he later (but he thought it much earlier), "are of the tree I planted,—they have torn me,—and I bled; I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed."[182]
In addition to all this, Lord Byron had to experience the effects of a phenomenon of a terrible character, a phenomenon almost peculiar to England, the tyrannical power of its public opinion. This power, that gives form and movement to what is called the great world in England, weighed so heavily on the weak minds of several persons calling themselves friends, that, with few exceptions, and though all the while persuaded of the injustice of such opinion, after a few feeble efforts at changing it, and showing the wrong done to Lord Byron, they lost courage to declare their belief. Not only did they no longer protest, but they even pretended to believe part of the stupid calumnies spread abroad. To a heart firm and devoted as his, which, under similar circumstances, would have fought to the death in defense of outraged justice and a persecuted friend, this was one of the most cruel trials imposed on him by adverse destiny. What he must have suffered at this period has been already spoken of in another chapter. I will only say here, that, despite time, and the philosophy, which, subsequently, restored partial serenity, this wound never quite closed, since, even in the fourteenth canto of "Don Juan," written shortly before his last journey into Greece, he still made allusion to it, saying ironically:—