“I was wretched enough when I wrote it, and had been so for many a long day and month: at present I am less so, for reasons explained in my late letter; and as I never pretend to be what I am not, you may tell her, if you please, that I am recovering, and the reason also if you like it.”
Which is to say that he wishes Lady Byron to be told, totidem verbis, and on authority which she cannot question, that, having lived connubially with both, he very much prefers the draper’s wife to her. And so, no doubt, he did; for though the draper’s wife, as well as Lady Byron, had her faults, they were the faults of a naughty child rather than a pedantic schoolmistress, and therefore less exasperating to a man in the mood to which Byron had been driven. She might be—indeed she was—very jealous and very violent; but at least she did not assume airs of moral superiority and deliver lectures, or parade the heartlessness of one who is determined to be always in the right.
So that Byron delighted to have her about him. “I am very well off with Marianna, who is not at all a person to tire me,” he told Murray in one letter; and in another he wrote: “She is very pretty and pleasing, and talks Venetian, which amuses me, and is naïve, and I can besides see her, and make love with her at all or any hours, which is convenient to my temperament.” Just that, and nothing more than that; for such occasional outbursts of sentiment and yearnings after higher things as we do find in the letters of this date leave Signora Segati altogether on one side.
There is something of sentiment, for instance, in a letter to Mrs. Leigh informing her that Miss Clairmont has borne Byron a daughter. The mother, he says, is in England, and he prays God to keep her there; but then he thinks of the child, and continues:
“They tell me it is very pretty, with blue eyes and dark hair; and, although I never was attached nor pretended attachment to the mother, still in case of the eternal war and alienation which I foresee about my legitimate daughter, Ada, it may be as well to have something to repose a hope upon. I must love something in my old age, and probably circumstances will render this poor little creature a great, and, perhaps, my only comfort.”
There is sentiment there; and there also is sentiment, although of a different kind, in a letter written at about the same date to Moore:
“If I live ten years longer you will see, however, that it is not over with me—I don’t mean in literature, for that is nothing; and it may seem odd enough to say, I do not think it my vocation. But you will see that I shall do something or other—the times and fortune permitting—that, ‘like the cosmogony, or creation of the world, will puzzle the philosophers of all ages.’ But I doubt whether my constitution will hold out. I have exorcised it most devilishly.”
This is a strikingly interesting, because an unconsciously prophetic, passage. Byron’s ultimate efforts to “do something”—something quite unconnected with literature—is the most famous, and some would say the most glorious, incident in his life. We shall come to it very soon, and we shall see how his constitution, so sorely tried by an indiscreet diet and excessive indulgence in all things from love to Epsom Salts, just allowed him to begin his task, but did not suffer him to finish it. Enough to note here that Byron saw the better even when he preferred the worse, and never lost faith in himself even in his most degraded years, but always looked forward, even then, to the day when he would shake off sloth and sensuality in order to be worthy of his higher self.
He divined that the power to do that would be restored to him in the end—that social outlawry, though it might daze him, could not crush him—that it would come to be, in the end, a kind of education, and a source of self-reliance. But not yet, and not for a good many years to come. Before the moral recovery could begin, the moral collapse had to be completed; and the affair with the draper’s wife was only the first milestone on the downward path. We shall have to follow him past other milestones before we see him turning back.