CHAPTER XXVI

“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.”

“B.”

This change in the “way of life” meant, of course, in the first instance, the restoration of the draper’s and baker’s wives to the baker and draper respectively, and the return of the professional prostitutes to the places in which they normallyplied their trade. It also meant, in the second place, the courtship of the Countess Guiccioli, a branch of the subject to be dealt with in a separate chapter.

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.

“An additional proof,” says Moore, “that, in this short, daring career of libertinism, he was but desperately seeking relief for a wronged and mortified spirit, and‘What to us seem’d guilt might be but woe,’—is that, more than once, of an evening, when his house has been in the possession of such visitants, he has been known to hurry away in his gondola, and pass the greater part of the night upon the water, as if hating to return to his home.”

“An additional proof,” says Moore, “that, in this short, daring career of libertinism, he was but desperately seeking relief for a wronged and mortified spirit, and

‘What to us seem’d guilt might be but woe,’—

is that, more than once, of an evening, when his house has been in the possession of such visitants, he has been known to hurry away in his gondola, and pass the greater part of the night upon the water, as if hating to return to his home.”

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 adraper’s to a baker’s wife, could thus search for, even if he could not “set up,”

“a mark of everlasting lightAbove 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.

“I became acquainted with Lord Byron,” she wrote to Moore, “in the April of 1819; he was introduced to me at Venice by the Countess Benzoni at one of that lady’s parties. This introduction, which had so much influence over the lives of us both, took place contrary to our wishes, and had been permitted by us only from courtesy. For myself, more fatigued than usual that evening on account of the late hours they keep at Venice, I went with great repugnance to this party, and purely in obedience to Count Guiccioli. LordByron, too, who was averse to forming new acquaintances—alleging that he had entirely renounced all attachments, and was unwilling any more to expose himself to their consequences—on being requested by the Countess Benzoni to allow himself to be presented to me, refused, and, at last, only assented from a desire to oblige her. His noble and exquisitely beautiful countenance, the tone of his voice, his manners, the thousand enchantments that surrounded him, rendered him so different and so superior a being to any whom I had hitherto seen that it was impossible he should not have left the most profound impression upon me. From that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay at Venice, we met every day.”

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:

“About the 20th I leave Venice, to take a journey into Romagna; but shall probably return in a month.”

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:

“Now to go to Cuckold a Papal Count, who, like Candide, has already been ‘the death of two men, one of whom was a priest,’ in his own house is rather too much for my modesty, when there are several other places at least as good for the purpose. She says they must go to Bologna in the middle of June, and why the devil then drag me to Ravenna? However I shall determine nothing till I get to Bologna, and probably take some time to decide when I am there, so that, the Gods willing, you may probably see me again soon. The Charmer forgets that a man may be whistled anywherebefore, but thatafter, a journey in an Italian June is a Conscription, and therefore she should have been less liberal in Venice, or less exigent at Ravenna.”

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:

“Dante’s tomb, the classical pine wood, the relics of antiquity which are to be found in that place, afforded a sufficient pretext for me to invite him to come, and for him to accept my invitation.He came, in fact, in the month of June ... while I, attacked by a consumptive complaint, which had its origin from the moment of my quitting Venice, appeared on the point of death.... His motives for such a visit became the subject of discussion, and these he himself afterwards involuntarily divulged; for having made some inquiries with a view to paying me a visit, and being told that it was unlikely he would ever see me again, he replied, if such were the case, he hoped that he should die also; which circumstance, being repeated, revealed the object of his journey.”

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:

“I cannot makehimout at all, he visits me frequently, and takes me out (like Whittington the Lord Mayor) in a coach andsixhorses.... By the aid of a Priest, a Chambermaid, a young negro-boy, and a female friend, we are enabled to carry on our unlawful loves, as far as they can well go, though generally with some peril, especially as thefemale friend and priest are at present out of town for some days, so that some of the precautions devolve upon the Maid and Negro.”

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:

“I see myDamaevery day at the proper and improper hours; but I feel seriously uneasy about her health, which seems very precarious. In losing her I should lose a being who has run great risks on my account, and whom I have every reason to love, but I must not think this possible. I do not know what Ishoulddo if she died, but I ought to blow my brains out, and I hope that I should. Her husband is a very polite personage, but I wish he would not carry me out in his Coach and Six, like Whittington and his Cat.”

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

“If anything happens to my presentAmica, I have done with passion for ever, it is mylastlove. As to libertinism, I have sickened myself of that, as was natural in the way I went on, and have at least derived that advantage from vice, tolovein the better sense of the word.Thiswill be my last adventure. I can hope no more to inspire attachment, and I trust never again to feel it.”

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

“My ‘Mistress dear,’ who hath ‘fed my heart upon smiles and wine’ for the last two months, set out for Bologna with her husband this morning, and it seems that I follow him at three to-morrow morning. I cannot tell how our romance will end, but it hath gone on hitherto most erotically—such perils and escapes—Juan’s are a child’s play in comparison.”

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:

“My destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, seventeen years of age, and two out of a convent. I wish that you had stayed there, with all my heart, or, at least, that I had never met you in your married state.“But all this is too late. I love you and you love me—at least yousay so, andactas if youdidso, which last is a great consolation in all events. ButImore than love you, and cannot cease to love you.”“Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and the ocean divide us—but they never will unless youwishit.”

“But all this is too late. I love you and you love me—at least yousay so, andactas if youdidso, which last is a great consolation in all events. ButImore than love you, and cannot cease to love you.”

“Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and the ocean divide us—but they never will unless youwishit.”

A series of contradictions with which we mustbe 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, oreffaced 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.

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 sheWalks by thy brink, and there perchance recallsA 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 bloodIs all meridian, as if never fannedBy 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.

BYRON’S RELATIONS WITH THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI AND HER HUSBAND AT RAVENNA

Countess Guiccioli speaks of Byron’s regard for her as “the serious attachment which he had wished to avoid, but which had mastered his whole heart, and induced him to live an isolated life with the person he loved in a town of Romagna, far from all that could flatter his vanity and from all intercourse with his countrymen.” The account is not altogether inaccurate, but it omits one important fact: the Countess’s own resolute insistence that Byron’s society was essential to her happiness and even to her life.

At first, it seems clear, his sole objective was the seduction of his neighbour’s wife. He was engaged, as he thought, upon an affair not of sentiment but of gallantry; and he had no idea that his neighbour’s wife, having consented to be seduced, would expect him to dance attendance on her for ever afterwards. So much seems evident from the letter in which he complains of being dragged to Ravenna in a blazing Italian June. His mistress, however, had compelled him to come by pleading illness; and she did not scruple to repeat that plea as often as she found any difficulty in getting her own way. “I am ill—so ill. Sendfor Lord Byron or I shall die;” that was the refrain which helped her to reorganise her life.

Having joined her at Ravenna, Byron, as we have seen, accompanied her to Bologna. It was at Bologna that he wrote the love letter, quoted in the preceding chapter, in Madame Guiccioli’s copy of “Corinne.” From Bologna, too, he wrote to Murray, asking him to use his influence to procure Count Guiccioli a nomination as British Vice-Consul—an unsalaried office which would entitle him to British protection in the event of political disturbances; and at Bologna, finally, occurred Countess Guiccioli’s second diplomatic indisposition.

“Some business,” she told Moore, “having called Count Guiccioli to Ravenna, I was obliged by the state of my health, instead of accompanying him, to return to Venice, and he consented that Lord Byron should be the companion of my journey. We left Bologna on September 15.... When I arrived at Venice, the physicians ordered that I should try the country air; and Lord Byron, having a Villa at La Mira, gave it up to me, and came to reside there with me. At this place we passed the Autumn.”

At this place, too, the plot began to thicken in a manner which throws light upon Count Guiccioli’s character. He wrote proposing that Byron should lend him £1000; and when Byron refused to do anything of the kind, seeing that the Count wasa richer man than he, he demanded that the Countess should return to him; so that letters of October 29 and November 8 contain these significant passages:

“Count G. comes to Venice next week, and I am requested to consign his wife to him, which shall be done—with all her linen.”“Count G. has arrived in Venice, and has presented his spouse (who had preceded him two months for her health and the prescriptions of Dr. Aglietti) with a paper of conditions, regulations of hours and conduct and morals, &c., which he insists on her accepting, and she persists in refusing. I am expressly, it would seem, excluded by this treaty, as an indispensable preliminary; so that they are in high discussion, and what the result may be I know not, particularly as they are consulting friends.”

“Count G. comes to Venice next week, and I am requested to consign his wife to him, which shall be done—with all her linen.”

“Count G. has arrived in Venice, and has presented his spouse (who had preceded him two months for her health and the prescriptions of Dr. Aglietti) with a paper of conditions, regulations of hours and conduct and morals, &c., which he insists on her accepting, and she persists in refusing. I am expressly, it would seem, excluded by this treaty, as an indispensable preliminary; so that they are in high discussion, and what the result may be I know not, particularly as they are consulting friends.”

The view of the friends—that is to say of the Italy of the period—was that morals were of little but appearances of great importance. Married women might have lovers—one lover at a time—but their amours must be conducted in their own homes and under their husbands’ patronage. By running away with their lovers they put themselves in the wrong; and the men who ran away with them showed themselves ignorant of the manners of good society; so that Countess Belzoni, who knew all about the draper’s wife and the baker’swife and the promiscuous debaucheries of the Mocenigo Palace, remarked to Moore, who was passing through Venice at the time: “It is such a pity, you know. Until he did that, he had been behaving with such perfect propriety.”

So the debate proceeded; the girl wife and the sexagenarian husband giving each other pieces of their several minds, and the friends offering good advice to both of them, while Byron, who was excluded from the Council Chamber, sat below and wrote to Murray:

“As I tell you that the Guiccioli business is on the eve of exploding in one way or the other, I will just add that, without attempting to influence the decision of the Contessa, a good deal depends upon it. If she and her husband make it up you will, perhaps, see me in England sooner than you expect; if not, I shall retire with her to France or America, change my name, and live a quiet provincial life. All this may seem odd, but I have got the poor girl into a scrape; and as neither her birth, nor her rank, nor her connections by birth or marriage are inferior to my own, I am in honour bound to support her through: besides, she is a very pretty woman—ask Moore—and not yet one and twenty.”

That, once again, is not the language of a man whom an invincible passion has swept off his feet. It is the language of the man who lets himself be loved rather than of the man who loves—the manwho will preserve an even mind whether he retains his mistress or loses her, and whose affection for her only carries him to the point of saying that, whatever happens, at any rate he will not treat her badly. It is a point, at any rate, beyond that to which his affection for Miss Clairmont ever carried him; but it is hardly the furthest point to which it is possible for love to go.

“With some difficulty, and many internal struggles, I reconciled the lady with her lord,” is the language in which Byron relates the upshot of the negotiations. “I think,” he continues, “of setting out for England by the Tyrol in a few days”; but only six days later he has changed his plans. “Pray,” he then writes to Murray, “let my sister be informed that I am not coming as I intended: I have not the courage to tell her so myself, at least not yet; but I will soon,with the reasons.” And about the reasons there is, of course, no mystery.

Count Guiccioli, having gained the day, had carried his wife off to Ravenna, and Byron had missed her more than he had expected. Hoppner writes of him as “very much out of spirits, owing to Madame Guiccioli’s departure, and out of humour with everybody and everything around him.” He had had his belongings packed for his return to England, and had even dressed for the journey, but had changed his mind, and unpacked and undressed again at the last minute; and Madame Guiccioli, in the meantime, had hadher third diplomatic indisposition, and threatened yet again to die unless Byron were brought to her. So that presently, on January 2, 1820, we find Byron back again at Ravenna, and giving Moore a curious explanation of his movements:

“After her arrival at Ravenna the Guiccioli fell ill again too; and at last her father (who had, all along, opposed theliaisonmost violently till now) wrote to me to say that she was in such a state thathebegged me to come and see her—and that her husband had acquiesced, in consequence of her relapse, and thathe(her father) would guarantee all this, and that there would be no further scenes in consequence between them, and that I should not be compromised in any way. I set out soon after and have been here ever since. I found her a good deal altered, but getting better.”

At first he seems to have supposed that he was merely a visitor like another; and a letter to Hoppner, dated January 20, shows him uncertain as to the duration of his stay:

“I may stay a day, a week, a year, all my life; but all this depends upon what I can neither see nor foresee. I came because I was called, and will go the moment that I perceive what may render my departure proper. My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning, nor the microscopic accuracy of the close to suchliaisons; but ‘time and the hour’ must decide upon what I do.”

Here, yet again, one detects a note of hesitation incompatible with perfect love. The very letter, however, which expresses the hesitations also contains directions for the forwarding of his furniture, which looks as though Byron already foresaw and accepted his fate. He was destined, in fact, to live with the household of the Guicciolis on the same terms on which he had previously lived with the household of the Segatis—engaging an apartment in their mansion, and paying a rent to the husband while making love to the wife—and to be what the Italians call acicisbeoand the English a tame cat. He admits, in various letters, that that is his position, and that he does not altogether like it. “I can’t say,” he tells Hobhouse, “that I don’t feel the degradation;” but he nevertheless submits to it, describing himself to Hoppner as “drilling very hard to learn how to double a shawl,” and giving the same correspondent a graphic picture of his first appearance in his new character:

“The G.’s object appeared to be to parade her foreign lover as much as possible, and, faith, if she seemed to glory in the scandal, it was not for me to be ashamed of it. Nobody seemed surprised; all the women, on the contrary, were, as it were, delighted with the excellent example. The Vice-legate, and all the other Vices, were as polite as could be; and I, who had acted on the reserve, was fairly obliged to take the lady under my arm, and look as much like a Cicisbeo as I could on soshort a notice, to say nothing of the embarrassment of a cocked hat and sword, much more formidable to me than it ever will be to the enemy.”

A picture in which no one’s part is dignified, and no one’s emotions are strained to a tense pitch, but everybody is happy and comfortable in an easy-going way. One gets the same impression from Byron’s reply to Murray’s suggestion that he should write “a volume of manners, &c. on Italy.” There are many reasons, he says, why he does not care to touch that subject in print; but he assures Murray privately that the Italian morality, though widely different from the English, has nevertheless “its rules and its fitnesses and decorums.” The women “exact fidelity from a lover as a debt of honour, while they pay the husband as a tradesman, that is not at all.” At the same time, he adds, “the greatest outward respect is to be paid to the husbands, not only by the ladies, but by theirserventi,” so that “you would suppose them relations,” and might imagine theserventeto be “one adopted into the family.”

But this was an Arcadian state of things too good to last. Exactly how or why it came to an end one does not know; but probably because, while the Countess was too vehemently in love to control the expression of her feelings, Byron’s European importance overshadowed her husband, made him feel foolish, and challenged him to assert himself. Whatever the reason, the arrangement only remained idyllic for about four months, andthen, in May 1821, there began to be talk of divorce, “on account of our having been taken togetherquasiin the fact, and, what is worse, that she does notdenyit.”

She was so far from denying it, indeed, that she protested that it was a shame that she should be the only woman in Romagna who was not allowed to have a lover, and declared that, unless her husband did allow her to have a lover, she would not live with him. Her family took her part, saying that her husband, having tolerated her infidelity for so long, had forfeited, his right to make a fuss about it. The ladies of Ravenna, and the populace, also made the business theirs, and supported the lovers, on general principles, because they were of the age for love and the husband was not, and also because Count Guiccioli was an unpleasant person and unpopular.

He was, indeed, not only unpleasant and unpopular, but also reputed to be a desperate and dangerous character, careful, indeed, of his own elderly skin, but quite capable of hiring bravos to assassinate those who crossed his path. “Warning was given me,” Byron writes to Moore, “not to take such long rides in the Pine Forest without being on my guard;” and again:

“The principal security is that he has not the courage to spend twenty scudi—the average price of a clean-handed bravo—otherwise there is no want of opportunity, for I ride about the woods every evening, with one servant, and sometimes anacquaintance, who latterly looks a little queer in solitary bits of bushes.”

The peril of violence may have been the greater because the Count could not find a lawyer willing to take up his case; the advocates declining, as one man, to act for him on the ground that he was either a fool or a knave—a fool if he had been unaware of the liaison and a knave if he had connived at it and “waited for some bad end to divulge it.” The stiletto, however, remained in its sheath, and the matter, after all, was settled in the Courts. The Countess, supported by her family, applied for the separation which she had previously resisted; and the Count, on his part, resisted the separation which he had previously demanded, raising particular objections to the claim that he should pay alimony.

But he had to pay it. The papal Court decreed a separation, fixing Madame Guiccioli’s allowance at £200 a year, but, at the same time, ordained with that indifference to liberty and justice which distinguishes Churches whenever they attain temporal power, that the wife whose injuries it was professing to redress, should not be allowed to live with her lover, but must either reside in the house of her parents or get her to a nunnery. She went on July 16 to a villa about fifteen miles from Ravenna. Byron visited her there twice a month, but continued to occupy his hired apartment in her husband’s house—a fact which by itself sufficiently justifies his reiterated protests that the mannersand customs of Italy are beyond the comprehension of the English. A letter to Moore dated August 31 gives us his own view of his proceedings as well as of the relations which he conceives to subsist between genius and disorder:

“I verily believe that nor you nor any man of poetical temperament can avoid a strong passion of some kind. It is the poetry of life. What should I have known or written had I been a quiet mercantile politician or a lord-in-waiting? A man must travel and turmoil, or there is no existence. Besides, I only meant to be a Cavalier Servente, and had no idea it would turn out a romance in the Anglo fashion.”

So that we find Byron launched yet again on a new way of life—the last before his final and famous transference of his energies from love to revolutionary politics.

Evidently it was a relief to him to find himself a lover instead of a cavaliere servente—even at the risk of having a dagger planted, on some dark night, between his shoulder blades. Evidently, too, he loved “the lady whom I serve” better than he had loved her at the beginning of the liaison, and better than he was to love her towards the end of it. But, even so, it was no absorbing love that possessed him—no love that diverted his thoughts from morbid introspection, or made him feel that, merely by loving, he had fulfilled his destiny and played a worthy part in life. On the contrary hecould write in the Diary which he then kept for six weeks or so: “I go to my bed with a heaviness of heart at having lived so long, and to so little purpose;” and he could compose the well-known epigram:

Through life’s road, so dim and dirty,I have dragged to three-and-thirty.What have these years left to me?Nothing—except thirty-three.

Nationalism, movements, risings, revolutions, and the rest of it might well seem a welcome excitement to a man soblaséand so inured to sensations that love, though he vowed that he “loved entirely” could not lift him to a more exalted frame of mind than that; and his attachment to Madame Guiccioli may well have gained an element of permanence from the fact that she belonged to a family of conspirators in league against priests and kings.

REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES—REMOVAL FROM RAVENNA TO PISA

The origin of Byron’s revolutionary opinions is wrapped in mystery. He certainly was not born a revolutionist; there is no record of his becoming one for definite reasons at any definite moment of time; and if it were alleged that he assumed revolutionism for the sake of swagger and effect, or had it thrust upon him by the household of the Gambas, the propositions, though pretty obviously untrue, could not very easily be disproved.

What he chiefly lacked in the character of revolutionist was the fine enthusiasm of the men of 1789, their pathetic belief in the perfectibility of human nature, and their zeal for equality and fraternity as things of equal account with liberty. His view of human nature was thoroughly cynical, and he was far too proudly conscious of his own place in the social hierarchy to aspire to be merely citizen Byron in a world from which all honorific distinctions had disappeared. Indeed we find him, in some of his letters, actually gibing at Hobhouse because his activities as a political agitator have brought him into contact with ill-bred associates; and that, as will be admitted, is a strange tone for a sincere revolutionist to take.

Nor was Byron ever an argumentative revolutionist of the school of the philosophic Radicals. Neither in his letters nor in his other writings does he give reasons for his revolutionary faith. He presents himself there as one who is a revolutionist as a matter of course—one to whom it could not possibly occur to be anything but a revolutionist. As for his motives, he assumes that we know them, or that they do not concern us, or else he leaves us to guess them, or to infer them from our general knowledge of his character and circumstances.

Apparently, since guess-work is our resource, he was a Revolutionist in Italy for much the same reason for which he had been a protector of small boys at Harrow. The same generous instinct which had made him hate bullies then made him hate oppressors now; and he hated them the more because he perceived that oppression was buttressed by hypocrisy. In particular he saw the Italians bullied by the Austrians in the name of the so-called Holy Alliance—that unpleasant group of potentates whose fanaticism was exploited by the cunning of Metternich, and who invoked the name of God and the principle of divine right for the crushing of national aspirations. That was enough to set him now sighing for “a forty-parson power” to “snuffle the praises of the Holy Three,” now proposing that the same Three should be “shipped off to Senegal,” and to enlist his sympathies on the Italian side. The rest depended upon circumstances; and the determining circumstances werethat he was an active man on a loose end, and that his lot was cast among conspirators.

He was ready to conspire because of the trend of his sympathies; he actually conspired, in the first instance, partly to please the Gambas, and partly because he was bored; and his appetite grew with what it fed upon. It was not merely that conspiracy furnished him with occupation—the cause at the same time furnished him with an ideal, of which he was beginning to feel the need. Living for himself he had made a mess of his life; and his relations with Madame Guiccioli did not conceal the fact from him. His love for her was a pastime, and no more an end in itself than his attachment to the draper’s wife at Venice. But he felt the need of some end in itself, unrelated to his personal concerns, to round off his life, give it unity and consistency, and make it a progressive drama instead of a mere series of unrelated incidents; and he found that end in espousing the cause of oppressed nationalities.

No doubt there were other influences simultaneously at work. The most effective altruist is always something of an egoist as well; and it is likely enough that Byron heard the promptings of personal ambition as well as the bitter cry of outcast peoples. His place in a revolutionary army could not be that of a private soldier—he was bound to be its picturesque figure-head if not its actual leader; and that meant much at a time when all the Liberals of Europe closely followed every attempt to shake off the Austrian, or the Prussian, or thePapal yoke. So that here was his clear chance to rehabilitate himself—to issue from his obscure retreat in a sudden blaze of glory, and set the prophets saying that the stone which the builders rejected had become the head-stone of the corner. But, however that may be, and however much or little that object may have been present to his mind, it is at all events from the time of his active association with revolutionary movements that Byron’s life in exile begins to acquire seriousness and dignity.

So much in broad outline. The details, when we come to look for them, are obscure, insignificant, and disappointing. He joined the Carbonari, and was made the head of one of their sections—the Capo of the Americani was his official designation; but the Carbonari, though a furious, were a feeble folk. They had signs, and passwords, and secret meeting-places in the forest, and they whispered any quantity of sedition; but their secrets were “secrets de Polichinelle.” Spies lurked behind every door and listened at every keyhole, and their intentions were better known to the police than to themselves.

A rising was proposed and even planned. The poet’s letters to his publisher are full of dark references to the terrible things about to happen. A row is imminent, and he means to be in the thick of it. Heads are likely to be broken, and his own shall be risked with the rest. All other projects must be postponed to that contingency. He cannot even come to England as he had intended,to attend to his private affairs. And so on, in a series of letters, in one of which we find the significantly prophetic question, honoured with a paragraph to itself: “What thinkst thou of Greece?” It is the beginning, at last, of the awakening of Byron’s sterner and more serious self—the first occasion on which we see the fierce joys of battle clearly meaning more to him than the soft delights of love.

Only there was to be no battle this time, and hardly even a skirmish, and, in fact, very little beyond a scare. The Austrians were watching the Romagnese border much as a cat watches a mouse-hole. A week or so before the proposed insurrection was to have taken place, an Austrian army crossed the Po, and the proposed insurgents scattered and hid themselves. It only remained for the Government to arrest those of them whom it desired to keep under lock and key, and expel those whom it preferred to get rid of.

Byron himself might very well have been lodged in an Austrian or Papal gaol through a scurvy trick played on him by some of the conspirators. He had provided a number of them with arms at his expense; and then the decree went forth that all persons found in possession of arms were to be treated as rebels. Whereupon the chicken-hearted crew came running to the Guiccioli Palace and begged Byron to take back his muskets. He was out at the time, but returned from his ride to find his apartment turned into an armoury; and it still remains uncertain whether he escaped molestation,as he thought, because his servants did not betray him, or, as seems more probable, because the Government preferred not to have such an embarrassing prisoner on their hands.

If he would have been embarrassing as a prisoner, however, he was equally embarrassing as a resident; and, as his expulsion might have made a noise, it was decided to manœuvre him out of the country by expelling the Gambas. Where they went Madame Guiccioli would have to go too, and where she went Byron might be expected to follow. We get his version of the story, together with a glimpse at his feelings, and at the new struggle in his mind between love and ambition, in a letter to Moore dated September 19, 1821;

“I am all in the sweat, dust, and blasphemy of an universal packing of all my things, furniture &c., for Pisa, whither I go for the winter. The cause has been the exile of all my fellow Carbonics, and, amongst them, of the whole family of Madame G.; who, you know, was divorced from her husband, last week, ‘on account of P. P. clerk of this parish,’ and who is obliged to join her family and relatives, now in exile there, to avoid being shut up in a monastery, because the Pope’s decree of separation required her to reside incasa paterna, or else, for decorum’s sake, in a convent. As I could not say, with Hamlet, ‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ I am preparing to follow them.“It is awful work, this love, and prevents alla man’s projects of good or glory. I wanted to go to Greece lately (as everything seems up here), with her brother, who is a very fine, brave fellow (I have seen him put to the proof) and wild about liberty. But the tears of a woman who has left her husband for a man, and the weakness of one’s own heart, are paramount to these projects, and I can hardly indulge them.”

“It is awful work, this love, and prevents alla man’s projects of good or glory. I wanted to go to Greece lately (as everything seems up here), with her brother, who is a very fine, brave fellow (I have seen him put to the proof) and wild about liberty. But the tears of a woman who has left her husband for a man, and the weakness of one’s own heart, are paramount to these projects, and I can hardly indulge them.”

Greece again, it will be observed, and an indication that Byron is at last more anxious to be up and doing something as the champion of desperate causes than to lie bound with silken chains about the feet of a mistress! A proof, too, that his mistress, on her part, already perceiving that causes may be her rivals, feels the need of working on his feelings with her tears! Moore prints the letters in which she appeals to him in the first excitement of her passions and apprehensions: “Help me, my dear Byron, for I am in a situation most terrible; and without you I can resolve upon nothing.” She has received, it seems, a passport, and also an intimation that she must either return to her husband or go to a convent. Not suspecting that passport and intimation came from the same source, she talks of the necessity of escaping by night lest the passport should be taken from her. She is in despair, and cannot bear the thought of never seeing Byron again. If that is to be the result of quitting Romagna, then she will remain and let them immure her, regarding that as the less melancholy fate. And so forth, in language which maybe merely hysterical, but more probably indicates a waning confidence in her lover.

But her tears prevailed. Byron, it is true, lingered at Ravenna for some months after her departure; but that is a circumstance of which we must not make too much. He had his apartment at Ravenna; he had his belongings about him; and they were considerable, including not only furniture, and books, and manuscripts, and horses, and carriages, and dogs and cats, but a large menagerie of miscellaneous live-stock. He could hardly be expected to go until he and the Gambas had arranged where to settle; and their arrangements called for much discussion and balancing of pros and cons.

It was during the time of indecision that Shelley came, at his request, to visit him; and we may take Shelley’s letters to Peacock as our next testimony to his way of life. His establishment, Shelley reports, “consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon;” and in a postscript he adds: “I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circæan Palace was defective, and that in a material point. I have just met, on the grand staircase, five peacocks, two guinea-hens, and an Egyptian crane.” Then he proceeds:

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