The Countess, he says, did not know how to “manage” Byron. When he “shocked” her, she replied by “nagging”—the prime offence, it will be remembered, of Lady Byron herself. It was a policy which might have served when she was in the full bloom of youth; but that happy time was passing. She was beginning to look old and weary, and to go about as one who carried a secret sorrow locked up in her breast. “Everybody” noticed the change: “In the course of a few months she seemed to have lived as many years. It is most likely in that interval that she discovered that she had no real hold on the affections of her companion.”
Assuredly if Hunt had nothing better to do in Italy than to take notes of this character it was high time to pack him off home again; and packed off he was, in due course, though not quite immediately. Before his departure Byron had moved from Pisa to Genoa, driven to this further migration by the fact that the Tuscan Government had in its turn, expelled the Gambas, and that Madame Guiccioli, for reasons already explained, was once more obliged to accompany them. If he had been as anxious to be rid of her as Hunt hints, and Cordy Jeaffreson, leaning upon Hunt’s testimony, explicitly declares, here was his opportunity. He did not take it, but accompanied her to her new home, where he was to live under the same roof with her; one of Hunt’s minor grievances being that he and his children—described by Byron in a letter to Mrs. Shelley as “dirtier and more mischievous than Yahoos”—were not admitted to the same boat with them, but had to travel in a separate felucca. Afterwards there was some talk of a further trip of the nature of a honey-moon—solus cum sola—to Naples; but this, for whatever reason, did not take place, and Byron remained at Genoa.
It was at Genoa that he met Lady Blessington, whose report of his regret that there was no way of regularising his intimacy with Madame Guiccioli we have already had before us. She and Leigh Hunt, if they do not contradict each other at every point, at least give very contrary impressions of the state of things. The difference may be due to the fact that, whereas Leigh Hunt was borrowing money with great difficulty, Lady Blessington was flirting with some success. Neither she nor Byron meant anything by it. Count d’Orsay, no less than Countess Guiccioli, barred the way to anything approaching attachment or intrigue. Lady Blessington only flirted to flatter her vanity; Byron only for the purpose of killing time and introducing variety into a somewhat monotonous life. Flirtation there was, however, or at all events the semblance of it, and one may fairly suppose it to afford a partial explanation of Countess Guiccioli’s nagging and martyred look, observed by Leigh Hunt’s prying eyes. Indeed there are passages in Lady Blessington’s Journal which suggest as much, the passage, for instance, in which Byron is reported as saying, not that he “was” but that he “had been” passionately in love with the Countess; and then this passage:
“Byron is a strange mélange of good and evil, the predominancy of either depending wholly on the humour he may happen to be in. His is a character that Nature totally unfitted for domestic habits, or for rendering a woman of refinement or susceptibility happy. He confesses to me that he is not happy, but admits that it is his own fault, as the Contessa Guiccioli, the only object of his love, has all the qualities to render a reasonable being happy. I observed, à propos to some observation he had made, that I feared La Contessa Guiccioli had little reason to be satisfied with her lot. He answered: ‘Perhaps you are right: yet she must know that I am sincerely attached to her; but the truth is, my habits are not those requisite to form the happiness of any woman. I am worn out in feelings; for, though only thirty-six, I feel sixty in mind, and am less capable than ever of those nameless attentions that all women, but above all Italian women, require. I like solitude, which has become absolutely necessary to me; am fond of shutting myself up for hours, and, when with the person I like, am often distrait and gloomy.’”
A man does not talk like that to a woman with whom he has just become acquainted unless he is flirting with her—albeit, it may be, giving her to understand, while in the act of flirting, that his heart is too withered to be long responsive to her charms. And that, it seems, at the end of many love affairs, was Byron’s final note. Even Madame Guiccioli did not really matter to him, though he acknowledged obligations to her and discharged them. Nothing mattered except one memory which, though it could never be anything more than a memory, still haunted him. He lived with that memory to the last, as we shall see. Being only a memory, and a painful one, it was rather a stimulus to action than a hindrance to it. But with the luxurious and uxorious love which does hinder action he had done. Whether he was tired of it or not, he felt that it was unworthy of him, and that life held nobler possibilities.
To an unknown lady who seems, at this date, to have offered him the free gift of her love, he answered, pooh-poohing the proposition. He looked upon love, he said, as “a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to make or to break matches, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned.” He added that he regarded his own “love times” as “pretty well over”; and so in fact they were. He needed a sharper spur than they could give him, and a more heroic issue than they could involve, if, during the few years left to him, he was to redeem the time and startle the world by deeds of which it had not imagined him to be capable. The revolt in Greece gave him his chance and he took it.
His sympathies, as we have seen, had long been enlisted on the Greek side, as had also those of the Gambas. Now the London Greek Committee placed itself in communication with him. “I cannot express to you,” he wrote to Edward Blaquière, “how much I feel interested in the cause, and nothing but the hopes I entertained of witnessing the liberation of Italy itself prevented me long ago from returning to do what little I could, as an individual, in that land which it is an honour even to have visited.” To Sir John Bowring he added a significant detail: “To this project the only objection is of a domestic nature, and I shall try to get over it.”
He did get over it; and those who knew him best were confident that he would; but the fact that Madame Guiccioli tried to detain him is to be remarked as explaining a good deal. It explains why he did not care to take her to Greece, or even to the Ionian Islands, with him, fearing lest she should be a clog on his activities. It explains the comparative coldness of the letters which he addressed to her from the scene of action. It explains finally, if any explanation be needed, why hers was not the memory which he chose to live with in the dismal swamp in which his last days were passed.
And so off to Cephalonia with young Trelawny and Pietro Gamba.