CHAPTER XXIX

“Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom (but one must sleep or die, like Southey’s sea-snake inKehama) at twelve. After breakfast we sit talking till six.From six till eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide Ravenna from the sea. We then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning.”

They gossiped about many things, and considered, among other matters, what would be the best place for Byron, the Gambas, and Madame Guiccioli to live in. Switzerland had been proposed, but Shelley urged objections which Byron admitted to be sound. Switzerland was “little fitted for him.” The English colonies would be likely to “torment him as they did before,” ostentatiously sending him to Coventry, and then spying on him when there. The consequence of his exasperation might be “a relapse of libertinism,” a return to the Venetian way of life, “which he says he plunged into not from taste, but from despair.”

Perhaps the last-named danger was rather less than Shelley supposed; for the drapers’ and bakers’ wives of Geneva and the Canton of Vaud are neither so attractive nor so accommodating as those of Venice; but, on the whole, this wayward sprite, as he is commonly esteemed—so wayward that he had been expelled from his University and had sacrificed a large fortune to an unnecessary quarrel with his father—showed common sense and worldly wisdom in his advice. He showed so much of it, indeed, and showed it so clearly, that Byron begged him to write to Madame Guiccioli and put the case to her; which he duly did “inlame Italian,” eliciting an answer very eloquent of his correspondent’s growing anxiety as to her hold upon Byron’s heart. Madame Guiccioli agreed to the proposal, but then begged a favour: “Pray do not leave Ravenna without taking Milord with you.”

But that, of course, was rather too much to ask. The most that Shelley could promise was that he would undertake every arrangement on Byron’s behalf for his establishment at Pisa, and would then “assail him with importunities,” if these should be necessary, to rejoin his mistress; and it seems that they were necessary, for two months or more later, we find Shelley writing to him: “When may we expect you? The Countess G. is very patient, though sometimes she seems apprehensive that you will never leave Ravenna.”

The Countess, indeed, in supplying Moore with biographical material, showed herself at her wit’s end to devise excuses for Byron’s delay, not too wounding to her vanity; and Shelley, at the time, showed a tendency to reconsider his estimate of their relations: “La Guiccioli,” he wrote in October, “is a very pretty, sentimental, innocent Italian, who has sacrificed an immense fortune for the sake of Lord Byron, and who, if I know anything of my friend, of her, and of human nature, will hereafter have plenty of leisure and opportunity to repent her rashness.” It was a harsh judgment, based in part, no doubt, on what Shelley had been told of Byron’s treatment of Miss Clairmont; but it indicated a real danger-spot.

Byron had ceased to love passionately, if he had ever done so, and he did not love blindly. We need not, indeed, accept Miss Clairmont’s statement that, at the end, he was “sick to death of Madame Guiccioli,” and that it was chiefly for the purpose of escaping from her that he joined the Greek insurgents. That utterance was the voice of a jealous woman endeavouring to appease her own affronted pride. But though there was no question of Byron’s giving Madame Guiccioli a rival of her own sex, she was now destined to encounter the rivalry, hardly less serious, of his political interests and ambitions. All through the period of his residence at Ravenna things had been working towards that conclusion; and the circumstances of the removal showed how near they had now got to it.

“We were divided in choice,” Byron wrote to Moore, “between Switzerland and Tuscany, and I gave my vote for Pisa, as nearer the Mediterranean, which I love for the sake of the shores which it washes, and for my young recollections of 1809. Switzerland is a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their English visitors; for which reason, after writing for some information about houses, upon hearing that there was a colony of English all over the cantons of Geneva, &c., I immediately gave up the thought, and persuaded the Gambas to do the same.”

Which is true enough as far as it goes, but is something less than the whole truth, since it omits to mention the increasing seriousness in Byron’s character, and his new tendency to transfer the bitterness of his indignation from the authors of his own wrongs to the political tyrants of the political school of Metternich.

Switzerland could afford no scope, in that direction, for his energies. The Swiss, it is true, have their revolutions from time to time; but these are petty and trivial. Strangers have a difficulty in understanding the points at issue; and the interference of strangers is not solicited. The revolutionist from abroad is only welcome in Switzerland when he is resting, or when a price is put upon his head—neither of which conditions Byron could claim to fulfil. In Italy, however, and over against Greece, he would be in the midst of the most hospitable revolutionists in the world; and his chance of passing from love and literature to fighting and statesmanship was bound to come to him if he would wait for it.

THE TRIVIAL ROUND AT PISA

From Ravenna to Pisa, from Pisa to Genoa, from Genoa to Cephalonia, from Cephalonia to Missolonghi and an untimely death in a great cause still very far from victory—these are the remaining stages of the pilgrimage. We have a cloud of witnesses—Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Medwin, Lady Blessington, and others; but only the merest fragment of their long depositions can be presented here.

The life at Pisa, where Byron at last arrived in November 1822, was, at first, quite commonplace and uneventful. One reads of a trivial round of functions rather than of duties punctually discharged at the same hour of every day. Byron, we gather, lay late in bed, but ultimately rose, and ate biscuits and drank soda-water, and received the visits of his English acquaintances, and rode out with them to an inn, and practised shooting at a mark, and then rode home again. After that came dinner, and a call upon the Gambas, and an interview with Madame Guiccioli; and then, that ceremony finished, the late hours of the night and early hours of the morning were devoted, sometimes to conversation, but more often to literarycomposition. That was all; and it would have seemed little enough if the witnesses had not taken the view that, whatever Byron did, he was giving a performance, and that whoever saw him do it was a privileged spectator at a private view and under an obligation to report the spectacle.

They did take that view, however, and devoted themselves, in the modern phraseology, to “interviewing” Byron. He was so different from them—so much greater—and so much more interesting—that they could no more converse with him lightly, on common topics and on equal terms, than they could so converse with a monster advertised as the leading attraction of a freak museum. Shelley, indeed, might do so, being his friend as well as his admirer, and one who moved naturally on the same plane of thought; but the others could only approach him humbly from below, sit at his feet, and talk to him about himself. After his back was turned, they might presume to quiz and satirise—Leigh Hunt did so, and so, too, to a less extent, did both Trelawny and Lady Blessington; but, at the time, they could get no further than begging permission to ask questions.

The permission was always accorded. Byron had never seriously resisted the doctrine that his private affairs were of public interest; and he had, at this period of his life, completely succumbed to it. No topic was so delicate that his interlocutors felt any obligation to avoid it. His quarrel with Lady Byron; his adventures with Lady CarolineLamb and Lady Oxford, his excursions into inebriety with Sheridan and Scrope Davies; his losses at hazard with the dandies; the moral laxity of the Venetian interlude; the placid pleasure which he found in his relations with Madame Guiccioli: on all these topics he talked at large and at length whenever any stray companion started them. His readiness thus to gossip with all comers on his most intimate affairs is noticed somewhere by Hobhouse as one of the gravest defects of his character; but very likely there was not much else to talk about in that dull provincial town; and in any case Byron did not invariably tell the truth.

Trelawny says that he delighted to “bam” those who conversed with him; but that queer slang word has long since gone out of date. A more modern way of putting it would be to say that he liked to “gas,” having no inconsiderable contempt for those who tried to pump him, and being more anxious to tell them things that would astonish them than to supply them with accurate information. Having left London in the days of the dandies, he had taken some of the ideals of the dandies to Italy with him, though he had coated them with a cosmopolitan veneer. He still liked to swagger in the style of a buck of the Regency who spared neither man in his anger nor woman in his lust and could carry any quantity of claret with heroic lightness of heart. Or, at all events, he liked to swagger in that way from time to time; though one can see, collating the confidences withthe letters, that there were also moments at which the mask was lifted and the real man appeared.

But the real man was also a new man—or, at all events, a man whose character was undergoing a radical transformation under the very eyes of his friends. Shelley seems to have been the only one of them who perceived the change—he is, at any rate, the only one who has recorded it. Byron, he said, was “becoming a virtuous man;” and the expression may pass, and may be regarded as confirmed by the testimony of the other companions, if we do not give the word “virtue” too rigid an interpretation. The Venetian libertinism had been left behind for ever. With it had been left the old passions and the old bitterness, and the old lack of aim or of ambition to do more than enrapture the women and rub the self-righteous the wrong way. Byron, in fact, was becoming calm, tolerant, practical and sincere—learning to look forward instead of backward—a man who was at last ready, and even resolved, to make sacrifices in order to achieve.

Even his feelings towards Lady Byron and her family seem to have undergone a change at about this time, though not a change which indicated any probability of reconciliation. A little while before, at Ravenna, he had composed two epigrams on the subject: one addressed “To Medea,” on the anniversary of his wedding:

“This day of all our days has doneThe most for me and you;’Tis just six years since we wereOneAndfivesince we were Two!”

and the second on hearing simultaneously thatMarino Falierohad failed on the stage, and that Lady Noel had recovered from an illness which had seemed likely to be fatal:

“Behold the blessing of a lucky lot!My play isdamned,and Lady Noel not.”

Now, at Pisa, we find him acknowledging the gift of a lock of his child’s hair, and writing to Lady Byron thus:

“The time which has elapsed since the separation has been considerably more than the whole brief period of our union, and the not much longer one of our prior acquaintance. We both made a bitter mistake; but now it is over, and irrevocably so. For, at thirty-three on my part, and a few years less on yours, though it is no very extended period of life, still it is one when the habits and thought are generally so formed as to admit of no modification; and as we could not agree when younger, we should with difficulty do so now.”

And also:

“Whether the offence has been solely on my side, or reciprocal, or on yours chiefly, I have ceased to reflect upon any but two things—viz. that you are the mother of my child, and that weshall never meet again. I think if you also consider the two corresponding points with reference to myself, it will be better for all three.”

The letter, for whatever reason, was never sent; but it has, nevertheless, its value as a document illustrative of Byron’s ultimate attitude towards the great blunder of his life. There is no renewal of love, and no desire for the renewal of intimate relations; but, on the other hand, there is no more angry talk about shattered household gods. Instead, there is a new spirit of toleration. Byron recognises, at last, that Lady Byron has a perfect right to be the sort of woman that she is—that she may even be a woman of some merit, though on him her very virtues jar. So he takes the tone of a man who parleys politely under a flag of truce; and then turns and goes his way, a little disappointed perhaps, but on the whole indifferent. He had thought it worth while to send Lady Byron messages about the pleasure which he found in the company of the Venetian harlots; but he sent her none about the charms of Madame Guiccioli. He had travelled too far from her for that, and got too completely out of touch with her, and acquired too many new interests which she did not share.

It should be added, however, that in many of his new interests Madame Guiccioli herself hardly shared. She was a charming woman—almost exactly the woman to suit him—pretty and plump and intelligent, and yet ready to acquiesce in hishabit of regarding her sex from the standpoint of an Oriental Satrap. It gratified him to relapse into her society when strenuous activities had tired him; for he found her restful as well as amiable. But her affection was no substitute for those strenuous activities; and his need for her love seems to have diminished as the desire to assert and prove himself by doing something strenuous and striking grew upon him. An eloquent fact is that, having suspended the writing of “Don Juan” at her request, he presently resumed it—and that though her objection to “Don Juan” was that it stripped the sentiment from love; which indicates that, though he still loved her in his fashion, he loved no more than he chose to, and certainly not enough to let his love stand between him and any serious enterprise.

There are biographers, indeed, who doubt whether he would have been willing to marry Madame Guiccioli if unexpected circumstances had enabled him to do so; but, according to Lady Blessington, the irregularity of their relations was a cause of great distress to him:

“I am bound by the indissoluble ties of marriage toonewho willnotlive with me, and live with one to whom I cannot give a legal right to be my companion, and who, wanting that right, is placed in a position humiliating to her and most painful to me. Were the Countess Guiccioli and I married, we should, I am sure, be cited as anexample of conjugal happiness, and the domestic and retired life we lead would entitle us to respect. But our union, wanting the legal and religious part of the ceremony of marriage, draws on us both censure and blame. She is formed to make a good wife to any man to whom she attaches herself. She is fond of retirement, is of a most affectionate disposition, and noble-minded and disinterested to the highest degree. Judge then how mortifying it must be to me to be the cause of placing her in a false position. All this is not thought of when people are blinded by passion, but when passion is replaced by better feelings—those of affection, friendship, and confidence—when, in short, theliaisonhas all of marriage but its forms, then it is that we wish to give it the respectability of wedlock.”

Such is the report, confirming the view that the ardour of Byron’s passion had by this time burnt itself out, and exhibiting him in the novel light of a lover tired of love-making but desirous of domestication. The desire does, at times, overtake even the most disorderly; and it is credible enough that Byron had come to entertain it. He had entertained it once before, on the eve of his marriage; and it is the kind of desire that recurs even after the first experiments have proved unsatisfactory. So it was with Byron, the wife, and not the estate of matrimony, being held responsible for the failure; only the desire was not, in his case, the ruling passion. That passion was to do something,and to be seen doing it, the second condition being as essential as the first, in defence of the victims of the Holy Alliance or any other tyranny.

It was a passion destined very soon to be gratified, the end coming in a dismal swamp, but in a blaze of glory. We will tell the story—or as much of it as needs to be told—in a moment; but we must first attend Byron a little longer on the trivial round—riding out to the inn, and shooting at a mark, and riding home again—in order that we may note how certain deaths and other incidents aided and threw light upon the further development of his character.

FROM PISA TO GENOA

It was while Byron was at Pisa that his natural daughter, the little Allegra, died, after a rapid illness, of typhus fever at her Convent School. He disliked her mother—we have noted the reasons why it was hardly to be expected that he would do anything else—but he had viewed the child as the gift of heaven, precious, though at first undesired. He had played with her in his garden at Ravenna, and had made a will leaving her £5000, and was at once too fond and too proud to make any mystery of the relationship. All his friends, as well as his sister were apprised of it, and received news, from time to time, of the child’s physical and moral progress. Nearly all of them were informed of her death. “It is a heavy blow for many reasons, but must be borne—with time,” he wrote to Murray. “The blow was stunning and unexpected,” he told Shelley. “I suppose that Time will do his usual work—Death has done his.” To Sir Walter Scott he commented:

“The only consolation, save time, is that she is either at rest or happy; for her few years (only five), prevented her from having incurred any sin, except what we inherit from Adam.”

He desired, too, that the child’s relationship to him should be proclaimed on a tablet to be set up in Harrow Church; but that was impossible owing to the prejudices of the Vicar and Churchwardens. It seemed to them that “every man of refined taste, to say nothing of sound morals,” would practise hypocrisy in such a matter. The Vicar wrote to Murray to say so, and to ask him to point out to Byron that, in the case of ex-parishioners, the Churchwardens had the power not only to advise hypocrisy but to enforce it; and he enclosed a formal prohibition from one of them, running thus:

“Honoured Sir,I object on behalf of the parish to admit the tablet of Lord Byron’s child into the church.“James Winkley, Churchwarden.”

“Honoured Sir,

I object on behalf of the parish to admit the tablet of Lord Byron’s child into the church.

“James Winkley, Churchwarden.”

It was the pitiful performance of a clerical Jack-in-Office; and we will leave it and pass on, merely noting that Byron, more than once, in defining his duties to Allegra, affirmed and illustrated his own religious position. One of his avowed reasons for not allowing her to be brought up by her mother was that Jane Clairmont was “atheistical.” For himself, he said, he was “a very good Christian,” though given to expressing himself flippantly. The affirmation is confirmed by Shelley’s description of him, half playful and half-shocked, as “no better than a Christian,” and by the account of his opinions given by Pietro Gamba in a letter toDr. Kennedy—from which it appears that though Byron might, like his own Cain, defy the God of the Shorter Catechism, he was profoundly reverent in his attitude towards really holy things.

Count Pietro reports two conversations with him on these sacred matters; the first talk taking place at Ravenna:

“We were riding together in the Pineta on a beautiful Spring day. ‘How,’ said Byron, ‘when we raise our eyes to heaven, or direct them to the earth, can we doubt of the existence of God? or how, turning them inwards, can we doubt that there is something within us, more noble and more durable than the clay of which we are formed? Those who do not hear, or are unwilling to listen to these feelings, must necessarily be of a vile nature.’ I answered him with all those reasons which the superficial philosophy of Helvetius, his disciples and his masters, have taught. Byron replied with very strong arguments, and profound eloquence, and I perceived that obstinate contradiction on this subject, which forced him to reason upon it, gave him pain.”

Later, at Genoa, the subject came up again:

“In various ways I heard him confirm the sentiments which I have already mentioned to you.“‘Why, then,’ said I to him, ‘have you earned for yourself the name of impious, and enemy of all religious belief, from your writings?’ He answered,‘They are not understood, and are wrongly interpreted by the malevolent. My object is only to combat hypocrisy, which I abhor in everything, and particularly in religion, and which now unfortunately appears to me to be prevalent, and for this alone do those to whom you allude wish to render me odious and make me out worse than I am.’”

“In various ways I heard him confirm the sentiments which I have already mentioned to you.

“‘Why, then,’ said I to him, ‘have you earned for yourself the name of impious, and enemy of all religious belief, from your writings?’ He answered,‘They are not understood, and are wrongly interpreted by the malevolent. My object is only to combat hypocrisy, which I abhor in everything, and particularly in religion, and which now unfortunately appears to me to be prevalent, and for this alone do those to whom you allude wish to render me odious and make me out worse than I am.’”

Decidedly we have a more serious Byron there—a child becoming a man, emerging from frivolity, and putting away frivolous and childish things; and one gets the same impression of mental and moral evolution repeated when one reads Byron’s appreciation of Shelley, written under the shock of the news of his sudden death—passages which it is a labour of love to copy out:

“I presume you have heard that Mr. Shelley and Captain Williams were lost on the 7th ultimo in their passage from Leghorn to Spezzia, in their own open boat. You may imagine the state of their families: I never saw such a scene, nor wish to see another. You were all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, thebestand least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison.”“There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justicenow, when he can be no better for it.”“You are all mistaken about Shelley. You do not know how mild, how tolerant, how good he was in society; and as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room, when he liked, and where he liked.”

“There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justicenow, when he can be no better for it.”

“You are all mistaken about Shelley. You do not know how mild, how tolerant, how good he was in society; and as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room, when he liked, and where he liked.”

Those are the appreciations; and one quotes them, not for Shelley’s sake, but for Byron’s, and because the power to appreciate Shelley’s worth in spite of his eccentricities is a test of character. His shining spirituality cannot be perceived by the gross who are in bondage to the conventions of ethics, politics, or religion, or by those, not less gross, who are the slaves of their lusts. To love him was impossible except for one who looked beyond the material to the ideal. It is so now, and it was more especially so in his lifetime, when belief in his wickedness was almost an article of the Christian faith. But Byron stands the test, and his relations with Shelley are further proofs of his final progress towards moral grandeur.

One cannot say the same of his relations with Leigh Hunt; but then Leigh Hunt was a very different sort of person from Shelley; and his behaviour towards Byron was peculiar. Invited to Pisa to arrange for the production of a new newspaper or magazine, he arrived with a sick wife and several children, with no visible means of support, and with the ill-concealed intention of sponging up innumerable guineas from the stores of the originators of the enterprise. The guineas were not refused to him. Byron seems to have lethim have about five hundred guineas in all, as well as some valuable copyrights and board and lodging for himself and his family on the ground floor of his own palace. He found the noisy children a nuisance, however, and resented the desire to sponge; with the result that relations were quickly strained, and the reluctant host and clamorous guest regarded each other with suspicion and dislike.

One of Hunt’s complaints was that the guineas, instead of being poured into his lap in a continual golden shower, were doled out, a few at a time, by a steward. Another was that there was a point in the palace which no member of the household of the Hunts was allowed to pass without a special invitation, and that a savage bull-dog was stationed there to guard the passage. The former precaution was probably quite necessary, and the latter charge is probably untrue; though, the palace being full of bull-dogs, and the Hunt children being, as Byron said, “far from tractable,” one can readily imagine the nature of the incident on which it was based. In any case, however, the essential facts of the situation are that Byron, though he had once been sufficiently in sympathy with Hunt to visit him when in prison, for calling the Regent a fat Adonis of fifty, now found that he disliked him, and kept him at arm’s length; while Hunt, on his part, taking offence at the aloofness of Byron’s attitude, avenged himself by writing a very spiteful book, full of unpleasant truths not only about Byron, but also about Madame Guiccioli.

The Countess, he says, did not know how to “manage” Byron. When he “shocked” her, she replied by “nagging”—the prime offence, it will be remembered, of Lady Byron herself. It was a policy which might have served when she was in the full bloom of youth; but that happy time was passing. She was beginning to look old and weary, and to go about as one who carried a secret sorrow locked up in her breast. “Everybody” noticed the change: “In the course of a few months she seemed to have lived as many years. It is most likely in that interval that she discovered that she had no real hold on the affections of her companion.”

Assuredly if Hunt had nothing better to do in Italy than to take notes of this character it was high time to pack him off home again; and packed off he was, in due course, though not quite immediately. Before his departure Byron had moved from Pisa to Genoa, driven to this further migration by the fact that the Tuscan Government had in its turn, expelled the Gambas, and that Madame Guiccioli, for reasons already explained, was once more obliged to accompany them. If he had been as anxious to be rid of her as Hunt hints, and Cordy Jeaffreson, leaning upon Hunt’s testimony, explicitly declares, here was his opportunity. He did not take it, but accompanied her to her new home, where he was to live under the same roof with her; one of Hunt’s minor grievances being that he and his children—described by Byron in a letter to Mrs. Shelley as “dirtier and moremischievous than Yahoos”—were not admitted to the same boat with them, but had to travel in a separate felucca. Afterwards there was some talk of a further trip of the nature of a honey-moon—solus cum sola—to Naples; but this, for whatever reason, did not take place, and Byron remained at Genoa.

It was at Genoa that he met Lady Blessington, whose report of his regret that there was no way of regularising his intimacy with Madame Guiccioli we have already had before us. She and Leigh Hunt, if they do not contradict each other at every point, at least give very contrary impressions of the state of things. The difference may be due to the fact that, whereas Leigh Hunt was borrowing money with great difficulty, Lady Blessington was flirting with some success. Neither she nor Byron meant anything by it. Count d’Orsay, no less than Countess Guiccioli, barred the way to anything approaching attachment or intrigue. Lady Blessington only flirted to flatter her vanity; Byron only for the purpose of killing time and introducing variety into a somewhat monotonous life. Flirtation there was, however, or at all events the semblance of it, and one may fairly suppose it to afford a partial explanation of Countess Guiccioli’s nagging and martyred look, observed by Leigh Hunt’s prying eyes. Indeed there are passages in Lady Blessington’s Journal which suggest as much, the passage, for instance, in which Byron is reported as saying, not that he “was” but that he “had been” passionately in love with the Countess; and then this passage:

“Byron is a strangemélangeof good and evil, the predominancy of either depending wholly on the humour he may happen to be in. His is a character that Nature totally unfitted for domestic habits, or for rendering a woman of refinement or susceptibility happy. He confesses to me that he is not happy, but admits that it is his own fault, as the Contessa Guiccioli, the only object of his love, has all the qualities to render a reasonable being happy. I observed,à proposto some observation he had made, that I feared La Contessa Guiccioli had little reason to be satisfied with her lot. He answered: ‘Perhaps you are right: yet she must know that I am sincerely attached to her; but the truth is, my habits are not those requisite to form the happiness of any woman. I am worn out in feelings; for, though only thirty-six, I feel sixty in mind, and am less capable than ever of those nameless attentions that all women, but above all Italian women, require. I like solitude, which has become absolutely necessary to me; am fond of shutting myself up for hours, and, when with the person I like, am oftendistraitand gloomy.’”

A man does not talk like that to a woman with whom he has just become acquainted unless he is flirting with her—albeit, it may be, giving her to understand, while in the act of flirting, that his heart is too withered to be long responsive to her charms. And that, it seems, at the end of many love affairs, was Byron’s final note. Even Madame Guiccioli did not really matter to him, though heacknowledged obligations to her and discharged them. Nothing mattered except one memory which, though it could never be anything more than a memory, still haunted him. He lived with that memory to the last, as we shall see. Being only a memory, and a painful one, it was rather a stimulus to action than a hindrance to it. But with the luxurious and uxorious love which does hinder action he had done. Whether he was tired of it or not, he felt that it was unworthy of him, and that life held nobler possibilities.

To an unknown lady who seems, at this date, to have offered him the free gift of her love, he answered, pooh-poohing the proposition. He looked upon love, he said, as “a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to make or to break matches, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned.” He added that he regarded his own “love times” as “pretty well over”; and so in fact they were. He needed a sharper spur than they could give him, and a more heroic issue than they could involve, if, during the few years left to him, he was to redeem the time and startle the world by deeds of which it had not imagined him to be capable. The revolt in Greece gave him his chance and he took it.

His sympathies, as we have seen, had long been enlisted on the Greek side, as had also those of the Gambas. Now the London Greek Committee placed itself in communication with him. “I cannot express to you,” he wrote to Edward Blaquière, “how much I feel interested in the cause, andnothing but the hopes I entertained of witnessing the liberation of Italy itself prevented me long ago from returning to do what little I could, as an individual, in that land which it is an honour even to have visited.” To Sir John Bowring he added a significant detail: “To this project the only objection is of a domestic nature, and I shall try to get over it.”

He did get over it; and those who knew him best were confident that he would; but the fact that Madame Guiccioli tried to detain him is to be remarked as explaining a good deal. It explains why he did not care to take her to Greece, or even to the Ionian Islands, with him, fearing lest she should be a clog on his activities. It explains the comparative coldness of the letters which he addressed to her from the scene of action. It explains finally, if any explanation be needed, why hers was not the memory which he chose to live with in the dismal swamp in which his last days were passed.

And so off to Cephalonia with young Trelawny and Pietro Gamba.

DEPARTURE FOR GREECE

A book might be written—indeed more than one book has been written—about that picturesque last phase of Byron’s life which dazzled the imagination of mankind. Coming to it at the end of a book already long, one owes it to one’s sense of proportion to treat it briefly, noting only the outstanding facts. The details, when all is said, are of small importance. What matters is that here is an instance, almost unique in history, of a poet transforming himself into a man of action, and proving himself a very competent man of action, very sober and sensible, and quite free from the characteristic vices of the poetical and artistic temperaments.

So far, though he had succeeded as a poet, Byron had failed as a man. The one deep and sincere passion of his life had only made trouble for him; and still more trouble had been made by his own violence, and vanity, and faults of temper. Through them he had allowed himself to be manœuvred into a false position from which, in the bitterness of his indignation at the injustice done to him, he had made no serious effort to escape. Sitting in the midst of the wreck of his householdgods, he had given vent to his anger in winged words; while, at the same time, making the persecution which he endured an excuse for sensual indulgence. Sensuality had wrecked his health without yielding him any real satisfaction, and, of course, without giving his censors any reason to reconsider their disapproval. He understood now what a poor figure he would have cut, in the eyes alike of his contemporaries and of future generations, if he had died, as he so nearly did, in the days of his degradation, in the arms of the baker’s wife, or of some hired mistress. He understood, too, that he was capable of greater things than any of these virtuous people who would then have pointed the finger of scorn at him. He had thought to demonstrate as much by his association with the Carbonari. It was not he who had failed the Carbonari, but the Carbonari who had failed him. That failure being however, through their fault and foolishness, complete, it still remained for him to give his proofs, in a much more striking style, in Greece.

Though he had but a poor opinion of his colleagues, he was thoroughly in earnest about the cause. He had always hated bullying, and the Turks were bullies. He was always at war with hypocrites—and it seemed to him that an absolute government was an organised hypocrisy. It was not necessary, therefore, for him to love revolutionists in order to be willing to help them to work out their salvation; and he certainly did not love the Greeks. It is recorded that he gave up keeping a diary because he found so much abuse of the Greekscreeping into it; and he sometimes spoke of them with excessive bitterness: “I am of St. Paul’s opinion,” he said, “that there is no difference between Jews and Greeks, the character of both being equally vile;” and his conduct, at the beginning of his expedition, was somewhat of a disappointment to romantic people.

The eyes of romantic Europe were upon him, and far too much was expected from the magic of his presence and his name. He would, at once, people thought, raise an army and march to Constantinople. Arriving before Constantinople, he would blow a trumpet, and the walls of the city would fall down flat. “Instead of which,” they complained, he had settled down comfortably in a villa in the Ionian Islands, and was writing a fresh canto of “Don Juan.” But that was not true. Byron was, indeed, living in a villa—for even a romantic poet must live somewhere; but the only poetry which he wrote in his villa was a war song. For the rest, he was wisely trying to master the situation before committing himself—refusing to stir before he saw his way.

For the situation was, just then, far from satisfactory. Their initial successes had turned the heads of the Greeks, and now their leaders were at loggerheads. Each of them was anxious to secure Byron’s help, not for a nation, but for a faction, and to engage him, not in revolt against the common enemy, but in internecine strife. As Finlay puts it:

“To nobody did the Greeks ever unmask their selfishness and self-deceit so candidly.... Kolokrotones invited him to a national assembly at Salamis. Mavrocordatos informed him that he would be of no use anywhere but at Hydra, for Mavrocordatos was then in that island. Constantine Metaxa, who was Governor of Missolonghi, wrote saying that Greece would be ruined unless Lord Byron visited that fortress. Petra Bey used plainer words. He informed Lord Byron that the true way to save Greece was to lend him, the bey, a thousand pounds.”

Trelawny, who was more keen about the fighting than about the cause, accused him of “dawdling” and “shilly-shallying,” and went off, without him, to join the forces of one of the sectional chiefs.[12]Byron, just because he took the revolution more seriously than Trelawny, sat tight. His immediate purpose was to reconcile the rival factions, and raise money for them. Pending the conclusion of a loan, he advanced them a good deal of his own money, and those who imagined that he was merely out to see sights and amuse himself, quickly discovered their mistake.

It was suggested to him, for instance, that as a man of letters, a scholar, and an antiquary, he might be interested to visit the stronghold of Ulysses. “Do I look,” he asked indignantly, “like one of those emasculated fogies? I detest antiquarian twaddle. Do people think I have no lucid intervals, and that I came to Greece to scribble nonsense? I will showthem that I can do something better.” On another occasion, when he was taken to a monastery, and the Abbot received him in ecclesiastical costume, with the swinging of odorous censers, and presented him with an address of fulsome flattery, he burst into tempestuous rage, exclaiming: “Will no one release me from the presence of these pestilential idiots? They drive me mad.”

It was at this time that the idea was mooted of electing Byron to be King of Greece. A King would be wanted, it was said, as soon as the Turks had been turned out, and no one would cut a nobler figure on the throne than Byron. He heard what had been said, and smiled on the proposal. “If they make me the offer,” he wrote, “I will perhaps not reject it”; and one feels quite sure that he would not have rejected it. To found a dynasty and be privileged, as a royal personage, to repudiate Lady Byron and take another wife, in order that the throne might have an heir—that would, indeed, have been a triumph over the polite Society which had cold-shouldered him and the pious people who had denounced his morals; and there can be little doubt that Byron aspired to win it, and would have won it if he had lived. He was very far, however, from stooping to conciliate the electors with smooth words; in a State Paper, addressed to the Greek Central Government, he lectured them severely:

“I desire the well-being of Greece and nothing else. I will do all I can to secure it; but I willnever consent that the English public be deceived as to the real state of affairs. You have fought gloriously; act honourably towards your fellow citizens and the world, and it will then no more be said, as has been repeated for two thousand years, that Philopæmen was the last of the Grecians.”

The man of action spoke there; and the man of action also came out in Byron’s expressions of disdain for his colleague, Colonel Stanhope—the “typographical colonel,” as he called him—who maintained that the one thing needful for the salvation of the Greeks was that they should “model their institutions on those of the United States of America, and decree the unlimited freedom of the Press.” Byron knew better than that. He was not to be persuaded that “newspapers would be more effectual in driving back the Ottoman armies than well-drilled troops and military tactics.” He knew that fighting would be necessary, and he was awaiting his chance of fighting with effect.

His chance came when Mavrocordatos, emerging from the ruck of revolutionary leaders, arrived to raise the siege of Missolonghi, after mopping up a Turkish treasure ship by the way, and invited Byron to join him, placing a brig at his disposal for the voyage. “I need not tell you,” he wrote, “to what a pitch your presence is desired by everybody, or what a prosperous direction it will give to all our affairs.” The “typographical colonel,” who was already with Mavrocordatos, wrote at the sametime: “It is right and proper to tell you that a great deal is expected from you, both in the way of counsel and money ... you are expected with feverish anxiety. Your further delay in coming will be attended with serious consequences.” Whereupon Byron, resolving at last to take the plunge, wrote to Douglas Kinnaird, who was managing his affairs for him in London: “Get together all the means and credit of mine you can, to face the war establishment, for it is ‘in for a penny, in for a pound,’ and I must do all that I can for the ancients.” And so, with Pietro Gamba, to the dismal swamp, where he was “welcomed,” Gamba tells us, “with salvos of artillery, firing of muskets, and wild music.”

“Crowds of soldiery,” Gamba continues, “and citizens of every rank, sex, and age were assembled on the shore to testify their delight. Hope and content were pictured in every countenance. His lordship landed in a Spezziot boat, dressed in a red uniform. He was in excellent health, and appeared moved by the scene.”

Moved by the scene, indeed, he doubtless was. The scene was the beginning of his rehabilitation in the eyes of those who had treated him with contempt—the beginning of the proof that he had the qualities of a leader, and could wield other weapons besides the pen—the demonstrative proclamation that the path of duty was to be the way to glory. The scarlet uniform was an appropriatetribute to the solemnity of the occasion on which he formally entered upon his last and best new way of life. He did not enter upon it, however, “in excellent health,” as Gamba says, but as a broken man with a shattered constitution, who had but a little time in which to do his work before the inevitable malaria came up out of the marsh and gripped him.

Meanwhile, however, Mavrocordatos gave him a commission as commander-in-chief—archi-strategos was his grandiloquent title—and he did what he could. He took 500 of those “dark Suliotes” whom he had sung in the early cantos of “Childe Harold” into his pay, and was prepared to lead them to the storming of Lepanto. He did something to mitigate the inhumanities of the war by insisting upon the release of some Turkish prisoners whom his allies proposed to massacre. Maintaining his character as man of action, he suppressed a converted blacksmith, who arrived from England with a cargo of type, paper, bibles and Wesleyan tracts, proposing to use the tracts for cartridges and turn the type into small shot. And then, having leisure on his hands, he wrote one poem, which he showed to Colonel Stanhope, saying: “You were complaining the other day that I never write any poetry now. This is my birthday, and I have just finished something which, I think, is better than what I usually write.”

I“’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,Since others it hath ceased to move;Yet though I cannot be beloved,Still let me love!II“My days are in the yellow leaf;The flowers and fruits of love are gone;The worm, the canker, and the griefAre mine alone!III“The fire that on my bosom preysIs lone as some volcanic isle;No torch is kindled at its blaze—A funeral pile!IV“The hope, the fear, the jealous care,The exalted portion of the painAnd power of love, I cannot share,But wear the chain.V“But ’tis notthus—and ’tis nothere—Such thoughts should shake my soul, nornow,Where glory decks the hero’s bier,Or binds his brow.VI“The sword, the banner, and the field,Glory and Greece, around me see!The Spartan, borne upon his shield,Was not more free.VII“Awake! (not Greece—she is awake!)Awake my spirit! Think throughwhomThy life-blood tracks its parent lake,And then strike home.VIII“Tread those reviving passions down,Unworthy manhood!—unto theeIndifferent should the smile or frownOf beauty be.IX“If thou regret’st thy youth, why love?The land of honourable deathIs here:—up to the field, and giveAway thy breath!X“Seek out—less often sought than found—A soldier’s grave, for thee the bed;Then look around, and choose thy ground,And take thy rest.”

“We perceived,” Count Gamba comments, “from these lines ... that his ambition and his hope were irrevocably fixed upon the glorious objects of his expedition to Greece, and that he had made up his mind to ‘return victorious or return no more.’” Readers who are better acquainted than Count Pietro alike with the English language and with the circumstances of the casewill find rather more than that in them. They also reveal the memory which Byron fell back upon and lived with at the hours when he rested from the strain of his revolutionary enthusiasm. It was not the memory of Count Pietro’s sister. Byron could not possibly have been thinking of her when he cried out that his love was a lonely fire at which no torch was kindled; for her love for him was far fiercer and more enduring than his love for her. His thoughts, it is quite clear, had once more strayed back to Mary Chaworth; and the internal evidence of that is confirmed by the mention of her name in two separate passages of those “Detached Thoughts” which he threw on paper just before he left Ravenna. His attachment to her, he then remembers, threw him out “on a wide, wide sea.” He speaks of her as “My M.A.C.,” and continues in a passage often quoted:

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