The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 23

Later, at Genoa, the subject came up again:

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

The Countess, he says, did not know how to "manage" Byron. When he "shocked" her, she replied by "nagging"--the prime offence, it will be remembered, of Lady Byron herself. It was a policy which might have served when she was in the full bloom of youth; but that happy time was pa.s.sing.

She was beginning to look old and weary, and to go about as one who carried a secret sorrow locked up in her breast. "Everybody" noticed the change: "In the course of a few months she seemed to have lived as many years. It is most likely in that interval that she discovered that she had no real hold on the affections of her companion."

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

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

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

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

But with the luxurious and uxorious love which does hinder action he had done. Whether he was tired of it or not, he felt that it was unworthy of him, and that life held n.o.bler possibilities.

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

His sympathies, as we have seen, had long been enlisted on the Greek side, as had also those of the Gambas. Now the London Greek Committee placed itself in communication with him. "I cannot express to you," he wrote to Edward Blaquiere, "how much I feel interested in the cause, and nothing but the hopes I entertained of witnessing the liberation of Italy itself prevented me long ago from returning to do what little I could, as an individual, in that land which it is an honour even to have visited." To Sir John Bowring he added a significant detail: "To this project the only objection is of a domestic nature, and I shall try to get over it."

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

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

CHAPTER x.x.xI

DEPARTURE FOR GREECE

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

So far, though he had succeeded as a poet, Byron had failed as a man. The one deep and sincere pa.s.sion of his life had only made trouble for him; and still more trouble had been made by his own violence, and vanity, and faults of temper. Through them he had allowed himself to be manoeuvred into a false position from which, in the bitterness of his indignation at the injustice done to him, he had made no serious effort to escape.

Sitting in the midst of the wreck of his household G.o.ds, he had given vent to his anger in winged words; while, at the same time, making the persecution which he endured an excuse for sensual indulgence. Sensuality had wrecked his health without yielding him any real satisfaction, and, of course, without giving his censors any reason to reconsider their disapproval. He understood now what a poor figure he would have cut, in the eyes alike of his contemporaries and of future generations, if he had died, as he so nearly did, in the days of his degradation, in the arms of the baker's wife, or of some hired mistress. He understood, too, that he was capable of greater things than any of these virtuous people who would then have pointed the finger of scorn at him. He had thought to demonstrate as much by his a.s.sociation with the Carbonari. It was not he who had failed the Carbonari, but the Carbonari who had failed him. That failure being however, through their fault and foolishness, complete, it still remained for him to give his proofs, in a much more striking style, in Greece.

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

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

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

"To n.o.body did the Greeks ever unmask their selfishness and self-deceit so candidly.... Kolokrotones invited him to a national a.s.sembly at Salamis. Mavrocordatos informed him that he would be of no use anywhere but at Hydra, for Mavrocordatos was then in that island.

Constantine Metaxa, who was Governor of Missolonghi, wrote saying that Greece would be ruined unless Lord Byron visited that fortress. Petra Bey used plainer words. He informed Lord Byron that the true way to save Greece was to lend him, the bey, a thousand pounds."

Trelawny, who was more keen about the fighting than about the cause, accused him of "dawdling" and "shilly-shallying," and went off, without him, to join the forces of one of the sectional chiefs.[12] Byron, just because he took the revolution more seriously than Trelawny, sat tight.

His immediate purpose was to reconcile the rival factions, and raise money for them. Pending the conclusion of a loan, he advanced them a good deal of his own money, and those who imagined that he was merely out to see sights and amuse himself, quickly discovered their mistake.

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

They drive me mad."

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

"I desire the well-being of Greece and nothing else. I will do all I can to secure it; but I will never consent that the English public be deceived as to the real state of affairs. You have fought gloriously; act honourably towards your fellow citizens and the world, and it will then no more be said, as has been repeated for two thousand years, that Philopaemen was the last of the Grecians."

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

His chance came when Mavrocordatos, emerging from the ruck of revolutionary leaders, arrived to raise the siege of Missolonghi, after mopping up a Turkish treasure ship by the way, and invited Byron to join him, placing a brig at his disposal for the voyage. "I need not tell you,"

he wrote, "to what a pitch your presence is desired by everybody, or what a prosperous direction it will give to all our affairs." The "typographical colonel," who was already with Mavrocordatos, wrote at the same time: "It is right and proper to tell you that a great deal is expected from you, both in the way of counsel and money ... you are expected with feverish anxiety. Your further delay in coming will be attended with serious consequences." Whereupon Byron, resolving at last to take the plunge, wrote to Douglas Kinnaird, who was managing his affairs for him in London: "Get together all the means and credit of mine you can, to face the war establishment, for it is 'in for a penny, in for a pound,'

and I must do all that I can for the ancients." And so, with Pietro Gamba, to the dismal swamp, where he was "welcomed," Gamba tells us, "with salvos of artillery, firing of muskets, and wild music."

"Crowds of soldiery," Gamba continues, "and citizens of every rank, s.e.x, and age were a.s.sembled on the sh.o.r.e to testify their delight.

Hope and content were pictured in every countenance. His lordship landed in a Spezziot boat, dressed in a red uniform. He was in excellent health, and appeared moved by the scene."

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

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

I

"_'Tis time this heart should be unmoved, Since others it hath ceased to move; Yet though I cannot be beloved, Still let me love!_

II

"_My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone!_

III

"_The fire that on my bosom preys Is lone as some volcanic isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze-- A funeral pile!_

IV

"_The hope, the fear, the jealous care, The exalted portion of the pain And power of love, I cannot share, But wear the chain._