The permission was always accorded. Byron had never seriously resisted the doctrine that his private affairs were of public interest; and he had, at this period of his life, completely succumbed to it. No topic was so delicate that his interlocutors felt any obligation to avoid it. His quarrel with Lady Byron; his adventures with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, his excursions into inebriety with Sheridan and Scrope Davies; his losses at hazard with the dandies; the moral laxity of the Venetian interlude; the placid pleasure which he found in his relations with Madame Guiccioli: on all these topics he talked at large and at length whenever any stray companion started them. His readiness thus to gossip with all comers on his most intimate affairs is noticed somewhere by Hobhouse as one of the gravest defects of his character; but very likely there was not much else to talk about in that dull provincial town; and in any case Byron did not invariably tell the truth.
Trelawny says that he delighted to “bam” those who conversed with him; but that queer slang word has long since gone out of date. A more modern way of putting it would be to say that he liked to “gas,” having no inconsiderable contempt for those who tried to pump him, and being more anxious to tell them things that would astonish them than to supply them with accurate information. Having left London in the days of the dandies, he had taken some of the ideals of the dandies to Italy with him, though he had coated them with a cosmopolitan veneer. He still liked to swagger in the style of a buck of the Regency who spared neither man in his anger nor woman in his lust and could carry any quantity of claret with heroic lightness of heart. Or, at all events, he liked to swagger in that way from time to time; though one can see, collating the confidences with the letters, that there were also moments at which the mask was lifted and the real man appeared.
But the real man was also a new man—or, at all events, a man whose character was undergoing a radical transformation under the very eyes of his friends. Shelley seems to have been the only one of them who perceived the change—he is, at any rate, the only one who has recorded it. Byron, he said, was “becoming a virtuous man;” and the expression may pass, and may be regarded as confirmed by the testimony of the other companions, if we do not give the word “virtue” too rigid an interpretation. The Venetian libertinism had been left behind for ever. With it had been left the old passions and the old bitterness, and the old lack of aim or of ambition to do more than enrapture the women and rub the self-righteous the wrong way. Byron, in fact, was becoming calm, tolerant, practical and sincere—learning to look forward instead of backward—a man who was at last ready, and even resolved, to make sacrifices in order to achieve.
Even his feelings towards Lady Byron and her family seem to have undergone a change at about this time, though not a change which indicated any probability of reconciliation. A little while before, at Ravenna, he had composed two epigrams on the subject: one addressed “To Medea,” on the anniversary of his wedding:
“This day of all our days has done
The most for me and you;
’Tis just six years since we were One
And five since we were Two!”
and the second on hearing simultaneously that Marino Faliero had failed on the stage, and that Lady Noel had recovered from an illness which had seemed likely to be fatal:
“Behold the blessing of a lucky lot!
My play is damned, and Lady Noel not.”
Now, at Pisa, we find him acknowledging the gift of a lock of his child’s hair, and writing to Lady Byron thus:
“The time which has elapsed since the separation has been considerably more than the whole brief period of our union, and the not much longer one of our prior acquaintance. We both made a bitter mistake; but now it is over, and irrevocably so. For, at thirty-three on my part, and a few years less on yours, though it is no very extended period of life, still it is one when the habits and thought are generally so formed as to admit of no modification; and as we could not agree when younger, we should with difficulty do so now.”
And also: