The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 21

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's wife and the promiscuous debaucheries of the Mocenigo Palace, remarked to Moore, who was pa.s.sing 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 s.e.xagenarian 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 sc.r.a.pe; 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 pa.s.sion 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 man who 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 had her 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 the _liaison_ most violently till now) wrote to me to say that she was in such a state that _he_ begged me to come and see her--and that her husband had acquiesced, in consequence of her relapse, and that _he_ (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 such _liaisons_; 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 a _cicisbeo_ and 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. n.o.body 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 so short a notice, to say nothing of the embarra.s.sment of a c.o.c.ked 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 a.s.sures 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 their _serventi_," so that "you would suppose them relations," and might imagine the _servente_ to 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 a.s.sert himself. Whatever the reason, the arrangement only remained idyllic for about four months, and then, in May 1821, there began to be talk of divorce, "on account of our having been taken together _quasi_ in the fact, and, what is worse, that she does not _deny_ it."

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 a.s.sa.s.sinate 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 princ.i.p.al 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 an acquaintance, 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 manners and 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 pa.s.sion 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 he could 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 so _blase_ and 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.

CHAPTER XXVIII

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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sociates; 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 a.s.sumes 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 circ.u.mstances.

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 b.u.t.tressed 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 G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances; and the determining circ.u.mstances were that 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 appet.i.te 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 the Papal 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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.swords, and secret meeting-places in the forest, and they whispered any quant.i.ty 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 embarra.s.sing prisoner on their hands.

If he would have been embarra.s.sing as a prisoner, however, he was equally embarra.s.sing as a resident; and, as his expulsion might have made a noise, it was decided to manoeuvre 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 in _casa 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 all a 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sport, and also an intimation that she must either return to her husband or go to a convent.

Not suspecting that pa.s.sport and intimation came from the same source, she talks of the necessity of escaping by night lest the pa.s.sport 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 may be 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 circ.u.mstance 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 ma.n.u.scripts, 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 Sh.e.l.ley came, at his request, to visit him; and we may take Sh.e.l.ley's letters to Peac.o.c.k as our next testimony to his way of life. His establishment, Sh.e.l.ley 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 Circaean Palace was defective, and that in a material point. I have just met, on the grand staircase, five peac.o.c.ks, two guinea-hens, and an Egyptian crane." Then he proceeds:

"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 in _Kehama_) 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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,"