My Recollections of Lord Byron
their duty to extend a larger amount of forbearance and indulgence in
return for the glory and happiness of being the companions of these
noble beings? It is remarked, in support of the above theory, that
almost all men of genius who have married--Dante, Milton, Shakspeare,
Dryden, Byron, and many others--were unhappy. But have these observers
examined well on which side lay the cause of unhappiness? Who will say
that if Dante, instead of Gemma Donati, "the ferocious wife" (a thought
expressed by Lord Byron in his "Prophecy," evidently to appropriate it
to himself, speaking of "_the cold companion who brought him ruin for
her dowry_);" who will say that if Dante, instead of Gemma Donati, had
married his Beatrice Portinari, she would not have been the companion
and soother of his exile? that the bread of the foreigner shared with
her would not have seemed _less bitter_? and that he would not have
found it _less fatiguing to mount, leaning on her, the staircase leading
to another's dwelling_?--
"Lo scendere e il salio per l'altrin scale."--DANTE.
And can we doubt that Milton's misfortune was caused by his unhappy
choice of a wife, since almost directly after her arrival at their
conjugal home she became alarmed at her husband's literary habits and
also at the solitude and poverty reigning in the house, and finally
abandoned him after a month's trial? To speak only of England, was it
not from similar causes, or nearly so, that the amiable Shakspeare's
misfortune arose--also that of Dryden, Addison, Steele? And, indeed, the
same may be said of all the great men belonging to whatsoever age or
country.
If we were to enter into a polemic on this subject, or simply to make
conscientious researches, there would be many chances of proving, in
opposition to the axiom, that the fault of these great men lay in the
bad choice of their helpmates. In truth, if there have been a Gemma
Donati and a Milbank, we also find in ancient times a Calpurnia and a
Portia among the wives of great men; and, in modern times, wives of
poets, who have been the honor of their sex, proud of their husbands,
and living only for them. Ought not these examples at least to destroy
the absolute nature of the theory, making it at best conditional? The
larger number of great men, it is true, did not marry; of this number
we find, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes,
Voltaire, Pope, Alfieri, and Canova; and many others among the poets and
philosophers, Bacon, Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, and Leibnitz.
What does that prove, if not that they either would not or could not
marry, but certainly not that they were incapable of being good
husbands? Besides, a thousand causes--apart from the fear of being
unhappy in domestic life, considerations of fortune, prior attachments,
etc.--may have prevented them. But as to Lord Byron, at least, it is
still more certain with regard to him than to any other, that he might
have been happy had he made a better choice: if circumstances had only
been tolerable, as he himself says. Lord Byron had none of those faults
that often disturb harmony, because they put the wife's virtue to too
great a trial. If the best disposition, according to a deep moralist, is
that which gives much and exacts nothing, then assuredly his deserves to
be so characterized. Lord Byron exacted nothing for himself. Moreover,
discussion, contradiction, teasing, were insupportable to him; his
amiable jesting way even precluded them. In all the circumstances and
all the details of his life he displayed that high generosity, that
contempt of petty, selfish, material calculations so well adapted for
gaining hearts in general, and especially those of women. Add to that
the _prestige_ belonging to his great beauty, his wit, his grace, and it
will be easy to understand the love he must have inspired as soon as he
became known.
"Pope remarks," says Moore, "that extraordinary geniuses have the
misfortune to be admired rather than loved; but I can say, from my own
personal experience, that Lord Byron was an exception to this
rule."[143]
Nevertheless, Lord Byron, though exceptional in so many things, yet
belonged to the first order of geniuses. Therefore he could not escape
some of the laws belonging to these first-rate natures: certain habits,
tendencies, sentiments--I may almost say infirmities--of genius deriving
their _origin from the same sympathies, the same wants_.
He required to have certain things granted to him: his hours for
solitude, the silence of his library, which he sometimes preferred to
every thing, even to the society of the woman he loved. It was wrong to
wish by force to shut him up to read the Bible, or to make him come to
tea and regulate all his hours as a good priest might do. When he was
plunged in the delights of Plato's "Banquet," or conversing with his own
ideas, it was folly to interrupt him. But this state was exceptional
with him. "_One does not have fever habitually_," said he of himself,
characterizing this state of excitement that belongs to composition; and
as soon as he returned to his usual state, and that his mind, disengaged
from itself, came down from the heights to which it had soared, what
amiability then, what a charm in all he said and did! Was not one hour
passed with him then a payment with rich usury for all the little
concessions his genius required? And lastly, if we descend well into the
depths of his soul, by all he said and did, by all his sadness, joy,
tenderness, we may be well convinced that none more than he was
susceptible of domestic happiness.
"If I could have been the husband of the Countess G----," said he to
Mrs. B----, a few days only before setting out for Greece, "we should
have been cited, I am certain, as samples of conjugal happiness, and our
retired domestic life would have made us respectable! But alas! I can
not marry her."
It is also by his latest affections that he proved how, if he had been
united to a woman after his own heart, he might have enjoyed and given
all the domestic happiness that God vouchsafes us here below, and that
when love should have undergone the transformations produced by time and
custom, he would have known how to replace the poetic enchantments of
love's first days, by feelings graver, more unchanging too, and no less
tender and sacred.
But we must interrogate those who knew and saw him personally, and in
the first place Moore; for not only was Moore acquainted with Lord
Byron's secret soul, but to him had the poet confided the treasure of
his memoirs, whose principal object was to throw light on the most fatal
event of his life, and whose sacrifice, made in deference to the
susceptibilities of a few living nullities, will be an eternal remorse
for England. Now this is how Moore expresses himself on this subject:--
"With respect to the causes that may be supposed to have led to this
separation, it seems needless, with the characters of both parties
before our eyes, to go in quest of any very remote or mysterious reasons
to account for it."
After observing that men of great genius have never seemed made for
domestic happiness, through certain habits, certain wants of their
nature, and certain faults, which appear, he says, like the shade thrown
by genius in proportion to its greatness, Moore adds that Lord Byron
still was, in many respects, _a singular exception to this rule_, for
his heart was so sensitive and his passions so ardent, that the world of
reality never ceased to hold a large place in his sympathies; that for
the rest, his imagination could never usurp the place of reality,
neither in his feelings nor in the objects exciting them.
"The poet in Lord Byron," says Moore, "never absorbed the man. From this
very mixture has it arisen that his pages bear so deeply the stamp of
real life, and that in the works of no poet with the exception of
Shakspeare, can every various mood of the mind--whether solemn or gay,
whether inclined to the ludicrous or the sublime, whether seeking to
divert itself with the follies of society or panting after the grandeur
of solitary nature--find so readily a strain of sentiment in accordance
with its every passing tone."
Nevertheless he did not completely escape the usual fate of great
geniuses, since he also experienced, though rarely, and always with good
cause, that sadness which, as Shakspeare says,--
"Sicklies the face of happiness itself."
"To these faults, and sources of faults, inherent in his own sensitive
nature, he added also many of those which a long indulgence of self-will
generates--the least compatible, of all others, with that system of
mutual concession and sacrifice by which the balance of domestic peace
is maintained. In him they were softened down by good-nature. When we
look back, indeed, to the unbridled career, of which this marriage was
meant to be the goal--to the rapid and restless course in which his life
had run along, like a burning train, through a series of wanderings,
adventures, successes, and passions, the fever of all which was still
upon him, when, with the same headlong recklessness, he rushed into
this marriage, it can but little surprise us that, in the space of one
short year, he should not have been able to recover all at once from his
bewilderment, or to settle down into that _tame level_ of conduct which
the close observers of his every action required. As well might it be
expected that a steed like his own Mazeppa's--
'Wild as the wild deer and untaught,
With spur and bridle undefiled,'
should stand still, when reined, without chafing or champing the
bit.[144]
"Even had the new condition of life into which he passed been one of
prosperity and smoothness, some time, as well as tolerance, must still
have been allowed for the subsiding of so excited a spirit into rest.
But, on the contrary, his marriage was at once a signal for all the
arrears and claims of a long-accumulating state of embarrassment to
explode upon him; his door was almost daily beset by duns, and his house
nine times during that year in possession of bailiffs; while, in
addition to these anxieties, he had also the pain of fancying that the
eyes of enemies and spies were upon him, even under his own roof, and
that his every hasty word and look were interpreted in the most
perverted light.
"He saw but little society, his only relief from the thoughts which a
life of such embarrassment brought with it was in those avocations which
his duty, as a member of the Drury Lane Committee, imposed upon him. And
here, in this most unlucky connection with the theatre, one of the
fatalities of his short year of trial, as husband, lay. From the
reputation which he had previously acquired for gallantries, and the
sort of reckless and boyish levity to which--often in very bitterness of
soul--he gave way, it was not difficult to bring suspicion upon some of
those acquaintances which his frequent intercourse with the green-room
induced him to form, or even (as in one instance was the case) to
connect with his name injuriously that of a person to whom he had
scarcely ever addressed a single word.
"Notwithstanding, however, this ill-starred concurrence of
circumstances, which might have palliated any excesses either of temper
or conduct into which they drove him, it was, after all, I am persuaded,
to no such serious causes that the unfortunate alienation, which so soon
ended in disunion, is to be traced.
"'In all the unhappy marriages I have ever seen,' says Steele, 'the
great cause of evil has proceeded from slight occasions,' and to this
remark, I think, the marriage under our consideration would not be
found, upon inquiry, to be an exception. Lord Byron himself, indeed,
when at Cephalonia, a short time before his death, seems to have