LOVE 422 In a letter to Moore he declared : " My spouse and I agree to admiration. Swift says no wise man ever married ; but for a fool I think it the most ambrosial of all future states. I still think a man ought to marry upon lease, but am very sure I should renew mine at the expiration though the next were for ninety and nine years." Byron, however, although he endeavoured to discipline himself to constancy, at the end of a month came to the conclusion that he did not love his wife, but still he hoped that the birth of an heir would prove an unbreak- able link in the chain which bound him to her. Happiness, however, was impossible ; the man's extraordinary and irregular habits frightened his wife, and shortl}^ after the birth of her daughter, she visited her parents, and from their house wrote to her husband saying that she could never return to him. For some in- explicable reason this decision elect- rified England; the air became filled with vague in- sinuations, and a wave of unjustifi- able wrath against the poet swept over the country. On one day he was the idol of the world, the darling of his country ; on the next he was hounded into exile by the relentless forces of outraged propriety, with the echo of a nation's curses ringing in his ears. Ot her men have been fickle husbands without being deprived for a day of what Byron lost for ever. Moreover, the only charge which can be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt against the poet in his relations to his wife is that of incompatibility of temperament. And how could any temperament be com- patible with his ? " The street boys," writes Castelar, " flung mud upon him. In the theatres he was hissed. The most obscene libels attributed to him the most shameful vices. The daily papers represented him with horrible carica- ture. Fathers hid their daughters from his basilisk glances. ... To the eyes of society he was a devil illuminated with genius." The blow stunned Byron; there was but one thing which he could do. In April, 1816, LORD F)om the mezzoli>it by C. Turner-, he crossed from Dover to Ostend, and went into exile. For three years he wandered over the face of Europe, a restless genius. The poet Shelley was often his companion, and the history of his travels would fill another Odyssey. Disgusting or delightful, according to the reader's point of view, the story cannot fail under any circumstances to be entrancing. Ultimately Byron arrived at Venice, and at Venice he met Theresa Guiccioli, the woman who until his death guided his destinies. Instinctively, magnetically, the two were drawn the one towards the other. In Byron, Theresa saw the fulfilment of her dreams ; and in Theresa the poet saw the realisation of that for which during many weary years he had been search- ing. The mind of the woman thirsted for a taste of life, and was im- pelled irresistibly towards that of the poet, which was seeking peace and consolation. At the time when she met Byron, Theresa, although a married woman, was still a child in body and mind. The daughter of Gamba, an im- pecunious count, she had spent her childhood in the shadow of a cloister; and then, at the age of sixteen, she was wedded to Count Guiccioli, a noble- man of wealth, but forty-four years her senior. She was a pretty girl — a blonde, with thick masses of golden hair. Her life had been a lonely one, and she had read much and widely. The result was that she became an idealist, developed a rich and vivid imagination, and longed to see and feel in reality the things which she had seen in books and dreams. It was at a reception given by the Countess Benzoni one evening in April, 1819, that her passion for Byron first swept over her. " Suddenly the young Italian found her- ' self," writes Moore, " inspired with a passion of which until that moment her mind could not have formed the least idea. She had thought of love as an amusement, and now became its slave." Before long her husband discovered the nature of her relations with Byron, and, hoping by separation to cure BYRON after the painting by IF. E. ITest
