“If anything happens to my present Amica, I have done with passion for ever, it is my last love. As to libertinism, I have sickened myself of that, as was natural in the way I went on, and have at least derived that advantage from vice, to love in the better sense of the word. This will be my last adventure. I can hope no more to inspire attachment, and I trust never again to feel it.”
But then, in a letter to Murray, dated August 9, there is a relapse and a change of tone:
“My ‘Mistress dear,’ who hath ‘fed my heart upon smiles and wine’ for the last two months, set out for Bologna with her husband this morning, and it seems that I follow him at three to-morrow morning. I cannot tell how our romance will end, but it hath gone on hitherto most erotically—such perils and escapes—Juan’s are a child’s play in comparison.”
Gallantry, not passion, is the note there; but, on the other hand, passion and not gallantry prevails in the letter to the Countess, written on a blank page of her copy of “Corinne,” which Byron had read in her garden in her absence:
“My destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, seventeen years of age, and two out of a convent. I wish that you had stayed there, with all my heart, or, at least, that I had never met you in your married state.
“But all this is too late. I love you and you love me—at least you say so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation in all events. But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you.”
“Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and the ocean divide us—but they never will unless you wish it.”
A series of contradictions with which we must be content to be perplexed; though perhaps they indicate nothing except that Byron changed his mind from time to time, and was more in love on some days than on others. And that, of course, it may be urged, is pretty much the same as saying that he was not, in the fullest sense of the words, in love at all.
That his feelings for the Countess differed from his feelings for the wives of the baker and the draper is, indeed, clear enough. Otherwise he would not have drawn the invidious distinction which we have seen him drawing between the “libertinism” of the earlier intrigues and the “romance” of the later one. Those passions had depended solely on the senses; into this one sentiment and intellectual sympathy entered. That is what his biographers are thinking of when they say that the new attachment either lifted him out of the mire or, at least, prevented him from slipping back into it. That, in particular, is what Shelley meant when he wrote of Byron as “greatly improved in every respect” and apparently becoming “a virtuous man,” and added, by way of explanation: “The connection with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him.”
But that, after all merely signifies that Byron, having a lady instead of a loose woman for his mistress, had to forswear sack and live cleanly—a thing which the painful effects of his excesses on his health had already disposed him to do. It does not signify that he had found a love which filled his life, or healed his wounds, or effaced the memories of his earlier loves; and there is, in fact, a poem of the period to which Mr. Richard Edgcumbe points as circumstantial proof that, even when he was paying his suit to Madame Guiccioli, Byron’s heart was in England, with Mary Chaworth.