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--Shelley, 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. Shelley, 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 succumbed 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 lust and could carry any quantity 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. Shelley 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 pass, 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
passions 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_ damned, _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 document illustrative of Byron's ultimate attitude 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 gods. 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 sex 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 substitute for those strenuous
activities; and his need for her love seems to have diminished as the
desire to assert 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 circumstances 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
entitle 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 noble-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 passion, but when passion 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 passion
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 passion. That passion 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 passion 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.