The whole account in her Journal gives promise of the eminence to which Lady Blessington afterward attained as a writer of fiction.
Lady Blessington was disappointed in Byron as Oscar Wilde was by the Atlantic and Mr Bernard Shaw is by the world. He did not reach the ideal she had framed of the author of Childe Harold and Manfred. He was a jovial, vivacious, even flippant man of the world. His brow should have been gloomy with sardonic melancholy, and his eyes shadowed by a hidden grief which not even love or the loveliness of Lady Blessington could assuage. But, alas, for the evanescence of ideals!
Lord Byron
(By D’Orsay)
[TO FACE PAGE 50
Of this meeting we also have Byron’s version. He writes to Moore:—
“Miladi seems highly literary, to which and your honour’s acquaintance with the family, I attribute the pleasure of having seen them. She is also very pretty, even in a morning,—a species of beauty on which the sun of Italy does not shine so frequently as the chandelier. Certainly English women wear better than their Continental neighbours of the same sex.”
Accounts differ as to whether Byron did or did not extend familiar friendship to the Blessingtons; it really does not much matter—if at all. But it is of importance to know that he fell before the charms of the irresistible D’Orsay. Indeed so blinded was he with admiration that he not only discovered the young Frenchman to be “clever, original, unpretending,” but also stated that “he affected to be nothing that he was not.” We fancy D’Orsay would not have counted an accusation of modesty as a compliment. In such a man, properly conscious of his gifts, modesty can only be a mockery. Mock modesty is to the true what mock is to real turtle—an insolent imitation. D’Orsay was above all things candid, when there existed no valid reason for being otherwise.