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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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:
"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 Shelley 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,"
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 Shelley 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 Shelley
could promise was that he would undertake every arrangement on Byron's
behalf for his establishment at Pisa, and would then "assail 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
Shelley 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 Shelley, 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 Shelley had been told of
Byron's treatment of Miss Clairmont; but it indicated a real danger-spot.
Byron had ceased to love passionately, 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 sex, 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
circumstances 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 shores 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 passing from love and literature to fighting and
statesmanship was bound to come to him if he would wait for it.