“Nothing could be more delightful than these rides on the Lido were to me. We were from half to three quarters of an hour crossing the water, during which his conversation was always most amusing and interesting. Sometimes he would bring with him any new book he had received, and read to me the passages which most struck him. Often he would repeat to me whole stanzas of the poems he was engaged in writing, as he had composed them on the preceding evening; and this was the more interesting to me because I could frequently trace in them some idea which he had started in our conversation of the preceding day, or some remark the effect of which he had evidently been trying upon me. Occasionally, too, he spoke of his own affairs, making me repeat all I had heard with regard to him, and desiring that I would not spare him, but let him know the worst that was said.”
The two reports must be read, of course, not as contradicting but as supplementing one another; so that a just estimate of the actual situation may not be very difficult to arrive at.
Byron, it is important to remember, though he had so many adventures, was only thirty years of age; and at thirty even a man of genius is still very young; and a very young man is always apt, given the provocation, to challenge public attention by going to the devil conspicuously and with a blare of trumpets. He may or may not like, and therefore nurse, the idea that he has tied his life up into such a knot that nothing but death—his own death or another’s—can untie it; but he is quite ready, as a rule, to accept the tangle, if not to welcome it, as an excuse for a sensational plunge into the abysms of debauchery. And this is especially so if his passions are strong, and if his private affairs have been a public pageant, watched, whether for praise or censure, by innumerable eyes.
Both those conditions were fulfilled in Byron’s case. Consequently he set out to swagger to the devil—as cynical now as he had once been sentimental—convinced, or at any rate affecting to be convinced, that, in a so-called love affair, nothing mattered but the sensual satisfaction; promiscuous in his habits and careless of his health—pleased to let Lady Byron know that he found more pleasure in the society of the scum of the stews of Venice than in hers—delighted also to think that the community at large were shocked by his dissolute proceedings. We have just seen him asking his sister to inform his wife what he was doing and how he was living. His friend Harness, who had long since lost sight of him, assures us that one of his great joys was to send defamatory paragraphs about himself to the continental newspapers in the hope that the English press would copy them, and that the world would believe him to be even worse than he was. He was vicious, that is to say, and he was also, as the Duc de Broglie called him, a “fanfaron of vice.”
It was a phase which he had to pass through, but no more; for such a man could not possibly go on living such a life for long. The real risk for his reputation was that he should die before the phase was finished, die in a house which was little better than a brothel, with Venetian prostitutes tearing each other’s hair and scratching each other’s faces by his bedside. The end, indeed, might easily have come in that ignominious fashion; for he had a recurrence of the malaria to which he had been liable ever since his first journey to Greece, and, in view of the liberties which he had taken with his constitution, it is rather surprising that he recovered from it. Still, he did recover; and, whether ill or well, he never quite lost sight of the better possibilities.
His harem claimed his days, but not, as a rule, his nights. There came, pretty regularly, an hour when the revelry ceased and the domestic female companions were packed off to their several beds; and then pens and ink and ardent spirits were set before Byron, and he wrote. It was, indeed, just when his life was most dissolute that his genius was brightest. He wrote “Manfred,” the poem in which he responded to the challenge of his calumniators, and showed that he could, if he chose, cast a halo round the very charge with which they had sought to crush him. He wrote the Fourth Canto of “Childe Harold,” in which we see the last of the admired Byronic pose. He began “Don Juan,” the poem in which the sincere cynic, who has come to cynicism by way of sentiment, passes with a light step from the pathetic to the ribald, and, attacking all hypocrisies, from those of Mrs. Grundy to those of the Holy Alliance, brushes them impatiently away like cobwebs.
Byron, in short, remained a fighter even in the midst of his self-indulgences; and for the fighter there is always hope. Self-indulgence brings satiety, but fighting does not, when it can be seen that the blows are telling; and there could be no question of the effect of Byron’s blows. Though the sea rolled between him and his countrymen, he shocked them as they had never been shocked before. Regarding him as the wickedest of wicked men, they admitted that his was a wickedness that had to be reckoned with, which was exactly what he wished and had intended. Perhaps he shocked them more for the fun of the thing than as the conscious champion of any particular cause; but that does not matter. The greatest builders are nearly always those who are building better than they know; and the building, at any rate, saved Byron from suffering too much harm from the loose manner of his life, and helped him to await his opportunity.
“I am only a spectator upon earth, until a tenfold opportunity offers. It may come yet,” he wrote to Moore about this time. The passage is enigmatical, and may only refer to some dream of vengeance cherished against Lady Byron and her advisers. On the other hand, it may just as well be a second reference to that resolution to “do something,”—something which “like the cosmogony or creation of the world will puzzle the philosophers of all ages,”—formulated in the letter to Moore already quoted. The letter, at all events, is quickly followed by news of the illness already mentioned, and of which there is a more or less particular account in one of the letters to Murray:
“You ask about my health: about the beginning of the year I was in a state of great exhaustion, attended by such debility of stomach that nothing remained upon it; and I was obliged to reform my ‘way of life,’ which was conducting me from the Yellow leaf to the Ground, with all deliberate speed. I am better in health and in morals, and very much yours ever,
“B.”