IN THE VENETIAN SALONS—INTRODUCTION TO COUNTESS GUICCIOLI

Even at the time when the draper’s and baker’s wives were quarrelling over their claims to his attentions—even at the time when the baker’s wife was routing the rest of the harem, and threatening violence with carving-knives—Byron never quite lost his foothold in the Venetian salons. There were two such salons, such as they were—that of the Countess Albrizzi, who aspired to be literary, and was styled the Venetian de StaËl, and that of the Countess Benzoni, who aspired, in modern parlance, to be smart; and Byron was welcome in both of them, and could even wound the feelings of either hostess by preferring the receptions of her rival.

Both hostesses knew, of course, how he spent the time which he did not spend with them. They saw the draper’s wife in his box at the theatre; they saw the baker’s wife frolicking with him at the Carnival; they heard shocking stories of the “goings on” at the Mocenigo Palace. But they considered that these matters were not their business—or at all events did not concern them very much. They knew that English milords were mad, and that men of genius were mad; and, as Byron was both of these things, they could pardon him for possessing a double dose of eccentricity. Moreover, in a country in which most wives as well as most husbands were unfaithful, the fuss made about Lady Byron’s grievances, whatever they might be, appeared ridiculous. Why, they asked themselves, looking at the matter from their Italian view-point, could not Lady Byron take a lover and be happy instead of assuming the airs of a martyr, organising a persecution, and hiring lawyers to throw mud? And they noted, too, that Byron had picturesque ways of demonstrating that, though he followed depraved courses, he was, at the bottom of his heart, disgusted with them, and profoundly conscious of his capability of walking in sublimer paths.

Allowances, it was clear (to the ladies), must be made for a man (or at all events for a milord and a poet) who, even when passing from the arms of a draper’s to a baker’s wife, could thus search for, even if he could not “set up,”

“a mark of everlasting light
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow.”

They made the allowances, therefore, showing that, even if they sometimes disapproved, they were always ready to forgive when the footman threw open the door and announced the return of the prodigal. To Countess Albrizzi, on these occasions, “his face appeared tranquil like the ocean on a fine Spring morning,” while his hands “were as beautiful as if they had been works of art,” and his eyes “of the azure colour of the heavens, from which they seemed to derive their origin.” This, though Countess Albrizzi was nearly sixty years of age; so that one can readily imagine the impression made upon Countess Guiccioli, whose husband was sixty, but who was herself little more than seventeen.

Countess Guiccioli.

The girl Countess’s maiden name was Teresa Gamba; and she had been married to her elderly husband for his money. He was in his sixtieth year, and was worth about £12,000 a year. In his youth he had collaborated with Alfieri in the establishment of a national theatre. Now his principal interests were political—as were also those of the Gamba family—and the police had their eyes on them in consequence. His principal establishment was at Ravenna; and he was on the point of starting for Ravenna, breaking the journey at various mansions which he possessed upon the road, on the evening on which his wife, acting “purely in obedience,” to his instructions, attended the reception at which she lost her heart.He removed her from Venice a very few days afterwards; but by that time the mischief was done, and it was not the heart only that had been lost. Byron had pressed his suit with impetuous precipitation, and Countess Guiocioli had yielded—without, as it would seem, the least idea that there could be any harm in her doing so.

Morality, as has been said, is a matter partly of geography and partly of chronology; and, in the Italy of those days, no woman got credit for fidelity unless she had a lover, as well as a husband, to be faithful to. So Madame Guiccioli punctuated her departure with fainting fits, and then wrote Byron appealing letters, begging him to follow her as soon as she had prepared the minds of her relatives to receive him.

To do so occupied her until the first days of June; and the further development of events may be best related in extracts from Byron’s letters:

This to Murray, as early as May 6. On May 20, we find him still going, but not yet gone: “Next week I set out for Romagna, at least in all probability.” On June 2, a letter addressed to Hoppner from Padua shows that he has started, but that, the favours he sought having been accorded to him at Venice, he is not very anxious to take a hot and dusty journey for the purpose of following up the intrigue:

That letter is the first which throws light on the vexed question whether Byron really loved Madame Guiccioli, or merely viewed her as an eligible mistress. It is to be observed, however, that his conduct was less cynical than his correspondence, and that the Countess, on her part, saw no reason for suspecting insincerity. “I shall stay but a few days at Bologna,” is his announcement when he gets there; and the Countess relates his arrival:

The narrative adds that Count Guiccioli himself begged Byron to call in the hope that his society might be beneficial to his wife’s health; and it is, at all events, certain that Byron’s arrival was followed by a remarkably rapid recovery, explicable from the fact, set forth by Byron, that her complaint, after all, was not consumption but a “fausse couche.” The husband’s attitude, however, puzzled him. “If I come away with a Stiletto in my gizzard some fine afternoon,” he writes, “I shall not be astonished;” and he proceeds:

That, it will be agreed, is rather the language of Don Juan than of a really devout lover; but there is more of the lover and less of the Don Juan in the letters which succeed. In the letter to Murray, for instance, dated June 29:

And still more in a letter to Hoppner dated July 2:

But then, in a letter to Murray, dated August 9, there is a relapse and a change of tone:

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:

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.

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Three years had passed since he had seen her. Her mind had been temporarily deranged by her troubles, but she had recovered. She had been reconciled to her husband, and was living with him at Colwick Hall, near Nottingham. Close to the walls of that old mansion flows the river Trent; and Byron wrote the lines beginning:

“River that rollest by the ancient walls,
Where dwells the Lady of my love, when she
Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls
A faint and fleeting memory of me.”

The common supposition is that the river invoked is the Po, and that the lady referred to is Madame Guiccioli; but that can hardly be. Seeing that Madame Guiccioli was, at this time, beseeching Byron to come to her arms at Ravenna, her recollection of him could hardly be described as “fair and fleeting.” The allusion is evidently to an anterior passion; and Madame Guiccioli’s place in the poem comes in a later stanza:

“My blood is all meridian: were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be,
In spite of tortures, ne’er to be forgot,
A slave again to Love—at least of thee.”

And then again:

“A stranger loves the Lady of the land,
Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood
Is all meridian, as if never fanned
By the bleak wind that chills the polar flood.
“’Tis vain to struggle—let me perish young—
Live as I lived, and love as I have loved:
To dust if I return, from dust I sprung,
And then, at least, my heart can ne’er be moved.”

The conclusion here clearly is that Byron is committed to passion because his temperament compels it, and is very grateful to Madame Guiccioli for loving him, but that if Mary Chaworth should ever lift a little finger and beckon him, he would leave Madame Guiccioli and go to her.

So Mr. Edgcumbe argues; and he makes out his case—a case which we shall find nothing to contradict, and something to confirm when we get back to our story.

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