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 passion 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 gods, 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 association 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 nobody did the Greeks ever unmask their selfishness and
self-deceit so candidly.... Kolokrotones invited him to a national
assembly 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 nobler 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 Philopæmen 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 institutions 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,
sex, and age were assembled on the shore 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 constitution, 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 title--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 massacre. 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._
V
"_But 'tis not_ thus--_and 'tis not_ here--
_Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor_ now,
_Where glory decks the hero's bier,
Or binds his brow._
VI
"_The sword, the banner, and the field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free._
VII
"_Awake! (not Greece--she is awake!)
Awake my spirit! Think through_ whom
_Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home._
VIII
"_Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood!--unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be._
IX
"_If thou regret'st thy youth_, why love?
_The land of honourable death
Is here:--up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!_
X
"_Seek out--less often sought than found--
A soldier's grave, for thee the bed;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest._"
"We perceived," Count Gamba comments, "from these lines ... that his
ambition and his hope were irrevocably fixed upon the glorious objects of
his expedition to Greece, and that he had made up his mind to 'return
victorious or return no more.'" Readers who are better acquainted than
Count Pietro alike with the English language and with the circumstances of
the case will find rather more than that in them. They also reveal the
memory which Byron fell back upon and lived with at the hours when he
rested from the strain of his revolutionary enthusiasm. It was not the
memory of Count Pietro's sister. Byron could not possibly have been
thinking of her when he cried out that his love was a lonely fire at which
no torch was kindled; for her love for him was far fiercer and more
enduring than his love for her. His thoughts, it is quite clear, had once
more strayed back to Mary Chaworth; and the internal evidence of that is
confirmed by the mention of her name in two separate passages of those
"Detached Thoughts" which he threw on paper just before he left Ravenna.
His attachment to her, he then remembers, threw him out "on a wide, wide
sea." He speaks of her as "My M.A.C.," and continues in a passage often
quoted:
"Alas! why do I say _My_? Our Union would have healed feuds, in which
blood had been shed by our fathers; it would have joined lands broad
and rich; it would have joined at least _one_ heart, and two persons
not ill-matched in years (she is two years my elder);
and--and--and--what has been the result? She has married a man older
than herself, been wretched, and separated. I have married, and am
separated; and yet _we_ are _not_ united."
This last fact, indeed, may well have impressed him as the cruellest of
all. There had been two desperately unhappy marriages, and a shivering
and scattering of two sets of household gods; and yet he and she, through
whatever misunderstandings and scruples, had failed to set up their new
structure on the ruins. He, indeed, on his part, would have asked nothing
better than to be allowed to try that task of reconstruction; but she, on
hers, had been too good, or too weak, or too much under the influence of
well-meaning friends who believed the whole duty of woman to consist in
forgiving her husband and keeping up appearances. She had kept them up,
accepting martyrdom with a resignation worthy of a better cause than any
which her hard-drinking husband was capable of representing, believing
that she only sacrificed herself, and earning no gratitude worth speaking
of by doing so. But she had also sacrificed her lover.
He was one of those exceptional men who may do exceptional things with
impunity--and also one of those self-willed men who, having made up their
minds what is best, can never be contented with the second-best, but must
always be kicking against the pricks. Hence the stormy emotional career
through which we have followed him, and the many experiments, reckless but
half-hearted, with new ways of life; a reckless but half-hearted marriage;
reckless but half-hearted intrigues, first with the Drury Lane actresses,
and then with the Venetian light-o'-loves; a reckless but half-hearted
career as the _cicisbeo_ of an Italian nobleman's wife.
Two thoughts had been present to his mind through all these phases: the
thought in the first place that he owed it to himself to prove that he was
a better and a greater man than he had seemed to be, and to redeem the
mess which he had made of his life by some impressive action; the thought,
in the second place, of Mary Chaworth. We have seen the former thought
flashing out in a letter to Moore, who was probably one of the last men in
the world capable of understanding it. The latter thought is blazoned in
the letter written to Mary Chaworth in the midst of the Venetian revels,
and so absurdly asserted by Lord Lovelace to be a letter to Augusta Leigh.
It reappears, as we have seen, in the Detached Thoughts, and also in poem
after poem, from "The Dream" to the piece just cited. Evidently,
therefore, it was, indeed, the thought which Byron lived with--the thought
which, if not always with him, was always waiting for him when the
reaction following upon excitement made room for it. There would be no
escape from it until the hour when, as he put it, he looked around, and
chose his ground, and took his rest; and it only remains for us to picture
the last stormy scenes at the end of which rest was reached.