Byron: The Last Phase Part 2

CHAPTER III

On April 26, 1822, the Sh.e.l.leys left Pisa for Lerici, and on May 1 they took up their abode in the Casa Magni, situated near the fishing-village of San Terenzo. Towards the close of May, Byron moved to his new residence at Montenero, near Leghorn.

Leigh Hunt's arrival, at the end of June, added considerably to Byron's perplexities. The poet had not seen Hunt since they parted in England six years before, and many things had happened to both of them since then.

Byron, never satisfied that his promise to contribute poetry to a joint stock literary periodical was wise, disliked the idea more and more as time went on, and Sh.e.l.ley foresaw considerable difficulties in the way of keeping Byron up to the mark in this respect. Hunt had brought over by sea a sick wife and several children, and opened the ball by asking Byron for a loan of money to meet current expenses. Byron now discovered that Leigh Hunt had ceased to be editor of the _Examiner_, and, being absolutely without any source of income, had no prospect save the money he hoped to get from a journal not yet in existence. He ought, of course, to have told both Byron and Sh.e.l.ley that in coming to Italy with his family--a wife and six children--he would naturally expect one or both of his friends to provide the necessary funds. This information Hunt withheld, and although both Byron and Sh.e.l.ley knew him to be in pecuniary embarra.s.sment, and had every wish to a.s.sist him, they were both under the impression that Hunt had some small income from the _Examiner_. Byron was astonished to hear that his proposed coadjutor in a literary venture had not enough money in his pockets even for one month's current expenses. He was not inclined to submit tamely to Hunt's arrangements for sucking money out of him.

Beginning as he meant to go on, Byron from the first showed Hunt that he had no intention of being imposed upon, and the social intercourse between them was, to say the least of it, somewhat strained. Byron and Sh.e.l.ley between them had furnished the ground-floor of the Palazzo Lanfranchi for the Hunt family, and had Sh.e.l.ley lived he would, presumably, have impoverished himself by disburs.e.m.e.nts in their favour; but his death placed the Hunts in a false position. Had Sh.e.l.ley lived, his influence over Byron would have diminished the friction between Byron and his tactless guest. The amount of money spent by Byron on the Hunt family was not great, but, considering the comparative cheapness of living in Italy at that time, and the difference in the value of money, Byron's contribution was not n.i.g.g.ardly. After paying for the furniture of their rooms in his palace, and sending 200 for the cost of their voyage to Italy, Byron gave Leigh Hunt 70 while he was at Pisa, defrayed the cost of their journey from Pisa to Genoa, and supplied them with another 30 to enable them to travel to Florence. There was really no occasion for Byron to make Hunt a present of 500, which he seems to have done, except Hunt's absolute incapacity to make both ends meet, which was his perpetual weakness. From the manner in which Hunt treats his pecuniary transactions with the wide-awake Byron, it is evident that the sum would have risen to thousands if Byron had not turned a deaf ear to the 'insatiable applicant'

at his elbow.

On the first visit which Trelawny paid to Byron at the Palazzo Lanfranchi after Hunt's arrival, he found Mrs. Hunt was confined to her room, as she generally was, from bad health. Trelawny says:

'Hunt, too, was in delicate health--a hypochondriac; and the seven children, untamed, the eldest a little more than ten, and the youngest a yearling, were scattered about playing on the large marble staircase and in the hall. Hunt's theory and practice were that children should be unrestrained until they were of an age to be reasoned with. If they kept out of his way he was satisfied. On my entering the poet's study, I said to him, "The Hunts have effected a lodgment in your palace;"

and I was thinking how different must have been his emotion on the arrival of the Hunts from that triumphant morning after the publication of "Childe Harold" when he "awoke and found himself famous."'

Truth told, the Hunts' lodgment in his palace must have been a terrible infliction to the sensitive Byron. His letters to friends in England at this time are full of allusions to the prevailing discomfort. Trelawny tells us that

'Byron could not realize, till the actual experiment was tried, the nuisance of having a man with a sick wife and seven disorderly children interrupting his solitude and his ordinary customs--especially as Hunt did not conceal that his estimate of Byron's poetry was not exalted. At that time Hunt thought highly of his own poetry and underestimated all other. Leigh Hunt thought that Sh.e.l.ley would have made a great poet if he had written on intelligible subjects. Sh.e.l.ley soared too high for him, and Byron flew too near the ground. There was not a single subject on which Byron and Hunt could agree.'

After Sh.e.l.ley and his friend Williams had established the Hunts in Lord Byron's palace at Pisa, they returned to Leghorn, Sh.e.l.ley 'in a mournful mood, depressed by a recent interview with Byron,' says Trelawny.

It was evident to all who knew Byron that he bitterly repented having pledged himself to embark on the literary venture which, unfortunately, he himself had initiated. At their last interview Sh.e.l.ley found Byron irritable whilst talking with him on the fulfilment of his promises with regard to Leigh Hunt. Byron, like a lion caught in a trap, could only grind his teeth and bear it. Unfortunately, it was not in Byron's nature to bear things becomingly; he could not restrain the exhibition of his inner mind. On these occasions he was not at his best, and forgot the courtesy due even to the most unwelcome guest. Williams appears to have been much impressed by Byron's reception of Mrs. Hunt, and, writing to his wife from Leghorn, says:

'Lord Byron's reception of Mrs. Hunt was most shameful. She came into his house sick and exhausted, and he scarcely deigned to notice her; was silent, and scarcely bowed. This conduct cut Hunt to the soul. But the way in which he received our friend Roberts, at Dunn's door,[6]

shall be described when we meet: it must be acted.'

Sh.e.l.ley and Edward Williams, two days after that letter had been written--on Monday, July 8, 1822, at three o'clock in the afternoon--set sail on the _Ariel_ for their home on the Gulf of Spezzia. The story is well known, thanks to the graphic pen of Edward Trelawny, and we need only allude to the deaths of Sh.e.l.ley and Williams, and the sailor lad Charles Vivian, in so far as it comes into our picture of Byron at this period.

Byron attended the cremation of the bodies of Sh.e.l.ley and Williams, and showed his deep sympathy with Mary Sh.e.l.ley and Jane Williams in various ways.

Writing to John Murray from Pisa on August 3, 1822, he says:

'I presume you have heard that Mr. Sh.e.l.ley and Captain Williams were lost on the 7th ultimo in their pa.s.sage 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 Sh.e.l.ley, who was, without exception, the _best_ and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison.'[7]

Writing August 8, 1822, to Thomas Moore, Byron says in allusion to Sh.e.l.ley's death:

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

In another letter, written December 25, 1822, Byron says:

'You are all mistaken about Sh.e.l.ley. 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.'

Byron's opinion of Leigh Hunt, and his own connection with that ill-fated venture known as _The Liberal_, is concisely given by Byron himself in a letter to Murray. _The Liberal_, published October 15, 1822, was fiercely attacked in the _Literary Gazette_ and other periodicals. The _Courier_ for October 26, 1822, calls it a 'scoundrel-like publication.' Byron writes:

'I am afraid the journal is a _bad_ business, and won't do; but in it I am sacrificing _myself_ for others--I can have no advantage in it. I believe the brothers Hunt to be honest men; I am sure they are poor ones. They have not a rap: they pressed me to engage in this work, and in an evil hour I consented; still, I shall not repent, if I can do them the least service. I have done all I can for Leigh Hunt since he came here; but it is almost useless. His wife is ill, his six children not very tractable, and in the affairs of the world he himself is a child. The death of Sh.e.l.ley left them totally aground; and I could not see them in such a state without using the common feelings of humanity, and what means were in my power to set them afloat again.'

In another letter to Murray (December 25, 1822) Byron says:

'Had their [the Hunts'] journal gone on well, and I could have aided to make it better for them, I should then have left them, after my safe pilotage off a lee-sh.o.r.e, to make a prosperous voyage by themselves. As it is, I can't, and would not if I could, leave them amidst the breakers. As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinion between Leigh Hunt and me, there is little or none. We meet rarely, hardly ever; but I think him a good-principled and able man, and must do as I would be done by. I do not know what world he has lived in, but I have lived in three or four; and none of them like his Keats and Kangaroo _terra incognita_. Alas! poor Sh.e.l.ley! how he would have laughed had he lived, and how we used to laugh now and then, at various things, which are grave in the Suburbs!'

It is perhaps not generally known that Sh.e.l.ley bequeathed a legacy of 2,000 to Byron. Byron's renunciation of this token of friendship is ignored by Professor Dowden in his life of Sh.e.l.ley. Writing to Leigh Hunt on June 28, 1823, Byron says:

'There was something about a legacy of two thousand pounds which he [Sh.e.l.ley] has left me. This, of course, I declined, and the more so that I hear that his will is admitted valid; and I state this distinctly that, in case of anything happening to me, my heirs may be instructed not to claim it.'

Towards the end of September, 1822, Byron and the Countess Guiccioli left the Palazzo Lanfranchi, and moved from Pisa to Albaro, a suburb of Genoa.

At the Villa Saluzzo, where the poet resided until his departure for Greece, dwelt also Count Gamba and his son Pietro, who occupied one part of that large house, while Byron occupied another part, and their establishments were quite separate. The first number of _The Liberal_ which had been printed in London, reached Byron's hands at this time. The birth of that unlucky publication was soon followed by its death, as anyone knowing the circ.u.mstances attending its conception might have foreseen. Sh.e.l.ley's death may be said to have destroyed the enterprise and energy of the survivors of that small coterie, who, in the absence of that vital force, the fine spirit that had animated and held them together, 'degenerated apace,' as Trelawny tells us. Byron 'exhausted himself in planning, projecting, beginning, wishing, intending, postponing, regretting, and doing nothing. The unready are fertile in excuses, and his were inexhaustible.'

In December, 1822, Trelawny laid up Byron's yacht, _The Bolivar_, paid off the crew, and started on horseback for Rome. _The Bolivar_ was eventually sold by Byron to Lord Blessington for 400 guineas. Four or five years after Byron's death this excellent little sea-boat, with Captain Roberts (who planned her for Byron) on board, struck on the iron-bound coast of the Adriatic and foundered. Not a plank of her was saved.

'Never,' said Captain Roberts in narrating the circ.u.mstance many years afterwards, 'was there a better sea-boat, or one that made less lee-way than the dear little _Bolivar_, but she could not walk in the wind's eye. I dared not venture to put her about in that gale for fear of getting into the trough of the sea and being swamped. To take in sail was impossible, so all we had left for it was to luff her up in the lulls, and trust to Providence for the rest. Night came on dark and cold, for it was November, and as the sea boiled and foamed in her wake, it shone through the pitchy darkness with a phosphoric efflorescence. The last thing I heard was my companion's exclamation, "Breakers ahead!" and almost at the same instant _The Bolivar_ struck: the crash was awful; a watery column fell upon her bodily like an avalanche, and all that I remember was, that I was struggling with the waves. I am a strong swimmer, and have often contested with Byron in his own element, so after battling long with the billows, covered with bruises, and more dead than alive, I succeeded in scrambling up the rocks, and found myself in the evergreen pine-forest of Ravenna, some miles from any house. But at last I sheltered myself in a forester's hut. Death and I had a hard struggle that bout.'[8]

On April 1, 1823, Lord and Lady Blessington called on Byron at the Casa Saluzzo. Lady Blessington a.s.sures us that, in speaking of his wife, Byron declared that he was totally unconscious of the cause of her leaving him.

He said that he left no means untried to effect a reconciliation, and added with bitterness: 'A day will arrive when I shall be avenged. I feel that I shall not live long, and when the grave has closed over me, what must she feel!'

In speaking of his sister, Byron always spoke with strong affection, and said that she was the most faultless person he had ever known, and that she was his only source of consolation in his troubles during the separation business.

'Byron,' says Lady Blessington, 'has remarkable penetration in discovering the characters of those around him, and piques himself on it. He also thinks that he has fathomed the recesses of his own mind; but he is mistaken. With much that is _little_ (which he suspects) in his character, there is much that is _great_ that he does not give himself credit for. His first impulses are always good, but his temper, which is impatient, prevents his acting on the cool dictates of reason. He mistakes temper for character, and takes the ebullitions of the first for the indications of the nature of the second.'

Lady Blessington seems to have made a most searching examination of Byron's character, and very little escaped her vigilance during the two months of their intimate intercourse. She tells us that Byron talked for effect, and liked to excite astonishment. It was difficult to know when he was serious, or when he was merely 'bamming' his aquaintances. He admitted that he liked to _hoax_ people, in order that they might give contradictory accounts of him and of his opinions. He spoke very highly of Countess Guiccioli, whom he had pa.s.sionately loved and deeply respected.

Lady Blessington says: 'In his praises of Madame Guiccioli it is quite evident that he is sincere.'

Byron confessed that he was not happy, but admitted that it was his own fault, as the Countess Guiccioli, the only object of his love, had all the qualities to render a reasonable being happy. In speaking of Allegra, Byron said that while she lived her existence never seemed necessary to his happiness; but no sooner did he lose her than it appeared to him as though he could not exist without her. It is noteworthy that, one evening, while Byron was speaking to Lady Blessington at her hotel at Genoa, he pointed out to her a boat at anchor in the harbour, and said: 'That is the boat in which my friend Sh.e.l.ley went down--the sight of it makes me ill.

You should have known Sh.e.l.ley to feel how much I must regret him. He was the most gentle, most amiable, and _least_ worldly-minded person I ever met; full of delicacy, disinterested beyond all other men, and possessing a degree of genius, joined to a simplicity, as rare as it is admirable. He had formed to himself a _beau-ideal_ of all that is fine, high-minded, and n.o.ble, and he acted up to this ideal even to the very letter. He had a most brilliant imagination, but a total want of worldly wisdom. I have seen nothing like him, and never shall again, I am certain.'

We may, upon the evidence before us, take it for certain that Byron only admired two of his contemporaries--Sir Walter Scott and Sh.e.l.ley. He liked Hobhouse, and they had travelled together without a serious quarrel, which is a proof of friendship; but he felt that Hobhouse undervalued him, and, as Byron had a good deal of the spoiled child about him, he resented the friendly admonitions which, it seems, Hobhouse unsparingly administered whenever they were together. Tom Moore was a 'croney'--a man to laugh and sit through the night with--but there was nothing, either in his genius or his conduct, which Byron could fall down and worship, as he seemed capable of doing in the case of Sh.e.l.ley and Scott.

It is evident that Lady Byron occupied his thoughts continually; he constantly mentioned her in conversation, and often spoke of the brief period during which they lived together. He told Lady Blessington that, though not regularly handsome, he liked her looks. He said that when he reflected on the whole tenor of her conduct--the refusing any explanation, never answering his letters, or holding out any hopes that in future years their child might form a bond of union between them--he felt exasperated against her, and vented this feeling in his writings. The mystery of Lady Byron's silence piqued him and kept alive his interest in her. It was evident to those who knew Byron during the last year of his life that he anxiously desired a reconciliation with her. He seemed to think that, had his pecuniary affairs been in a less ruinous state, his temper would not have been excited as it constantly was, during the brief period of their union, by demands of insolent creditors whom he was unable to satisfy, and who drove him nearly out of his senses, until he lost all command of himself, and so forfeited his wife's affection. Byron felt himself to blame for such conduct, and bitterly repented of it. But he never could divest himself of the idea that his wife still took a deep interest in him, and said that Ada must always be a bond of union between them, though perchance they were parted for ever.

'I am sure,' said Lady Blessington, 'that if ten individuals undertook the task of describing Byron, no two of the ten would agree in their verdict respecting him, or convey any portrait that resembled the other, and yet the description of each might be correct, according to individual opinion. The truth is, that the chameleon-like character or manner of Byron renders it difficult to portray him; and the pleasure he seems to take in misleading his a.s.sociates in their estimation of him increases the difficulty of the task.'

On one occasion Byron lifted the veil, and showed his inmost thoughts by words which were carefully noted at the time. He spoke on this occasion from the depth of his heart as follows:

'Can I reflect on my present position without bitter feelings? Exiled from my country by a species of ostracism--the most humiliating to a proud mind, when _daggers_ and not sh.e.l.ls were used to ballot, inflicting mental wounds more deadly and difficult to be healed than all that the body could suffer. Then the notoriety that follows me precludes the privacy I desire, and renders me an object of curiosity, which is a continual source of irritation to my feelings. I am bound by the indissoluble ties of marriage to _one_ who will _not_ live 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 an example of conjugal happiness, and the domestic and retired life we lead would ent.i.tle 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 n.o.ble-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 pa.s.sion, but when pa.s.sion is replaced by better feelings--those of affection, friendship, and confidence--when, in short, the _liaison_ has all of marriage but its forms, then it is that we wish to give it the respectability of wedlock. I feel this keenly, reckless as I appear, though there are few to whom I would avow it, and certainly not to a man.'

There is much in this statement which it is necessary for those who wish to understand Byron's position at the close of his life to bear in mind.

We may accept it unreservedly, for it coincides in every particular with conclusions independently arrived at by the present writer, after a long and patient study of all circ.u.mstances relating to the life of this extraordinary man. At the period of which we write--the last phase in Byron's brief career--the poet was, morally, ascending.

His character, through the fire of suffering, had been purified. Even his pride--so a.s.sertive in public--had been humbled, and he was gradually and insensibly preparing himself for a higher destiny, unconscious of the fact that the hand of Death was upon him. 'Wait,' he said, 'and you will see me one day become all that I ought to be. I have reflected seriously on all my faults, and that is the first step towards amendment.'

CHAPTER IV