The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 22

ostentatiously sending him to Coventry, and then spying on him when there.

The consequence of his exasperation might be "a relapse of libertinism," a return to the Venetian way of life, "which he says he plunged into not from taste, but from despair."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Switzerland could afford no scope, in that direction, for his energies.

The Swiss, it is true, have their revolutions from time to time; but these are petty and trivial. Strangers have a difficulty in understanding the points at issue; and the interference of strangers is not solicited. The revolutionist from abroad is only welcome in Switzerland when he is resting, or when a price is put upon his head--neither of which conditions Byron could claim to fulfil. In Italy, however, and over against Greece, he would be in the midst of the most hospitable revolutionists in the world; and his chance of pa.s.sing from love and literature to fighting and statesmanship was bound to come to him if he would wait for it.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE TRIVIAL ROUND AT PISA

From Ravenna to Pisa, from Pisa to Genoa, from Genoa to Cephalonia, from Cephalonia to Missolonghi and an untimely death in a great cause still very far from victory--these are the remaining stages of the pilgrimage.

We have a cloud of witnesses--Sh.e.l.ley, Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Medwin, Lady Blessington, and others; but only the merest fragment of their long depositions can be presented here.

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

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

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

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

But the real man was also a new man--or, at all events, a man whose character was undergoing a radical transformation under the very eyes of his friends. Sh.e.l.ley seems to have been the only one of them who perceived the change--he is, at any rate, the only one who has recorded it. Byron, he said, was "becoming a virtuous man;" and the expression may pa.s.s, and may be regarded as confirmed by the testimony of the other companions, if we do not give the word "virtue" too rigid an interpretation. The Venetian libertinism had been left behind for ever. With it had been left the old pa.s.sions and the old bitterness, and the old lack of aim or of ambition to do more than enrapture the women and rub the self-righteous the wrong way.

Byron, in fact, was becoming calm, tolerant, practical and sincere--learning to look forward instead of backward--a man who was at last ready, and even resolved, to make sacrifices in order to achieve.

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

"_This day of all our days has done The most for me and you; 'Tis just six years since we were_ One _And_ five _since we were Two!_"

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

"_Behold the blessing of a lucky lot!

My play is_ d.a.m.ned, _and Lady Noel not._"

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

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

And also:

"Whether the offence has been solely on my side, or reciprocal, or on yours chiefly, I have ceased to reflect upon any but two things--viz.

that you are the mother of my child, and that we shall never meet again. I think if you also consider the two corresponding points with reference to myself, it will be better for all three."

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

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

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

"I am bound by the indissoluble ties of marriage 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."

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

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

CHAPTER x.x.x

FROM PISA TO GENOA

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

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

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

"_Honoured Sir_,

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

"_James Winkley, Churchwarden._"

It was the pitiful performance of a clerical Jack-in-Office; and we will leave it and pa.s.s on, merely noting that Byron, more than once, in defining his duties to Allegra, affirmed and ill.u.s.trated his own religious position. One of his avowed reasons for not allowing her to be brought up by her mother was that Jane Clairmont was "atheistical." For himself, he said, he was "a very good Christian," though given to expressing himself flippantly. The affirmation is confirmed by Sh.e.l.ley's description of him, half playful and half-shocked, as "no better than a Christian," and by the account of his opinions given by Pietro Gamba in a letter to Dr.

Kennedy--from which it appears that though Byron might, like his own Cain, defy the G.o.d of the Shorter Catechism, he was profoundly reverent in his att.i.tude towards really holy things.

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

"We were riding together in the Pineta on a beautiful Spring day.

'How,' said Byron, 'when we raise our eyes to heaven, or direct them to the earth, can we doubt of the existence of G.o.d? or how, turning them inwards, can we doubt that there is something within us, more n.o.ble and more durable than the clay of which we are formed? Those who do not hear, or are unwilling to listen to these feelings, must necessarily be of a vile nature.' I answered him with all those reasons which the superficial philosophy of Helvetius, his disciples and his masters, have taught. Byron replied with very strong arguments, and profound eloquence, and I perceived that obstinate contradiction on this subject, which forced him to reason upon it, gave him pain."