AT VENICE—THE AFFAIR WITH THE BAKER’S WIFE—DISSOLUTE PROCEEDINGS IN THE MOCENIGO PALACE—ILLNESS, RECOVERY AND REFORMATION

For six weeks or so in May and June 1817 Byron tore himself away from Marianna and visited Rome, where he dined with Lord Lansdowne, sat to Thorwaldsen for his bust, and gathered the materials for the Fourth Canto of “Childe Harold.” He refused, however, for Marianna’s sake, to go on with Hobhouse to Naples, but hurried back to her, bidding her meet him half-way, and afterwards taking her, but not her husband, to a villa at La Mira, on the Brenta, a few miles out of Venice. It seems that the neighbours, less particular than the leaders of English society, yet including a marquis as well as a physician with four unmarried daughters, hastened to call, if not on the lady, at all events on him. Monk Lewis paid him a short visit, and Hobhouse, on his return from Naples, stayed for some time in a house close by, studying in the Ducal Library, and amassing the erudition which appears in his notes to “Childe Harold.” Praise of Marianna, however, disappears from Byron’s letters at this period; and one may infer from his comment on the news of the death of Madame de StaËl that, if Marianna had ever made him happy, she had now ceased to do so.

“With regard to death,” he then wrote to Murray, “I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.”

This is not the note of a man who has found happiness in love or even pleasure in dissipation. Apparently the novelty of the new experiences was wearing off; and Byron was becoming sick of the isolation and uneventfulness of his life. He had gone to Venice largely because there was no English society there—and yet he missed it; Hoppner, the Consul-General being almost his only English friend. He had access to Venetian society, and to some extent, mixed in it; but he did not find it interesting. He tired of the receptions alike of Signora Benzoni the worldly, and of Signora Albrizzi the “blue,” at which, no doubt, he was stared at as a marvel of fascinating profligacy; and he also tired of Marianna Segati, who doubtless gave him an excuse for breaking off his relations with her; and then there followed a further and deeper plunge.

The departure of Hobhouse seems, as usual, to have given the signal. It was about the time of his departure that Byron gave up his lodging in the draper’s shop and moved into the Mocenigo Palace; and the letter in which Murray is advised that Hobhouse is on his way home continues thus:

A vow which he kept after a fashion as innumerable passages from innumerable letters prove—Moore, Murray, and James Wedderburn Webster receiving his confidences in turn. Venice, he assures the last named, “is by no means the most regular and correct moral city in the universe;” and he continues, describing the life there—not everybody’s life, of course, but the life with which he has chosen to associate himself:

Then to Moore there is talk of “a Venetian girl with large black eyes, a face like Faustina’s and the figure of a Juno—tall and energetic as a Pythoness, with eyes flashing, and her dark eyes streaming in the moonlight;” while to Murray there is a long account of the affair with Margarita Cogni, the baker’s wife, with whom the draper’s wife disputed publicly for Byron’s favours:

And Byron goes on to tell other stories of Margarita’s jealousy, relating that “she had inordinate self-love, and was not tolerant of other women ... so that, I being at the time somewhat promiscuous, there was great confusion and demolition of head-dresses and handkerchiefs; and sometimes my servants, in ‘redding’ the fray between her and other feminine persons, received more knocks than acknowledgments for their peaceful endeavours.” And then follows the story of Margarita’s flight from her husband’s house to Byron’s palace, and her husband’s application to the police to restore her to him, and her second desertion of “that consumptive cuckold,” as she styled him in open court, and her final success in settling herself as a fixture in Byron’s establishment, without his formal consent, but with his indolent acquiescence.She became his housekeeper, with the result that “the expenses were reduced to less than half, and everybody did their duty better.” But she also had an ungovernable temper, suppressed all letters in a feminine handwriting, threatened violence with a table-knife, and had to be disarmed by Fletcher; so that Byron at last tired of her and told her to go. She then went quietly downstairs and threw herself into the canal, but was fished out, brought to with restoratives, and sent away a second time. “And this,” Byron concludes, “is the story of Margarita Cogni, as far as it belongs to me.”

Like the story of Marianna Segati, it is hardly a story at all; and there seem to have been several other stories very much like it running concurrently with it. So, at all events, Byron told Augusta, who passed the news on to Hodgson, saying that her brother had written “on the old subject very uncomfortably, and on his present pursuits which are what one would dread and expect; a string of low attachments.” And if a picture of the life, drawn by an eye-witness, be desired, one has only to turn to Shelley’s letter on the subject to Thomas Love Peacock.

The subject of Shelley’s comments is the point of view and “tone of mind” of certain passages in “Childe Harold.” He finds here “a kind of obstinate and self-willed folly,” and he continues:

This, it is to be remarked, is the picture, not of an enemy, but of a friend—one who already admired Byron as the greatest poet of his generation, and was to learn to admire him as one of its greatest men: a man capable of doing great things as well as dreaming them. Evidently, therefore, it is, as far as it goes, a true picture, though there is something to be added to it—something which blackens, and also something which brightens it.

Byron, to begin with, was, during this dark period, as careless of his appearance as of his morals. It was not necessary to his facile conquests among the Venetian courtesans that he should be either sober or well-groomed. It may even, on the contrary, have been necessary that he should drink too much and go unkempt in order to live comfortably on their level. At all events he did drink too much—preferring fiery spirits to the harmless Italian wines—and indulged a large appetite for miscellaneous foods, and ceased his frequentation of the barber’s shop; with the result that the flesh, set free from its customary discipline, revolted and spread abroad, and Hanson, who came to Byron at Venice to settle about the sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman, reported to Augusta that he had found him “fat, immensely large, and his hair long.” James Wedderburn Webster, a few months later, heard of his “corpulence” as “stupendous;” and Byron, while objecting to that epithet, was constrained to admit that it was considerable.

There were limits, however, to his excesses; and if misconduct was sometimes three parts of life for him, there always remained the fourth part to be devoted to other activities and interests. Even at his most debased hours Byron never quite lost his love of literature and out-door exercise, or his genius for friendship with men of like tastes with himself, who judged him as they found him and not as his wife said that he was; so that a picture contrasting pleasantly from Shelley’s may be taken from Consul-General Hoppner, whom Byron took almost daily in his gondola to ride on the Lido:

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.”