TWO YEARS OF TRAVEL.
There is no romance of Munchausen or Dumas more marvellous than the
adventures attributed to Lord Byron abroad. Attached to his first
expedition are a series of narratives, by professing eye-witnesses, of his
intrigues, encounters, acts of diablerie and of munificence, in particular
of his roaming about the isles of Greece and taking possession of one of
them, which have all the same relation to reality as the _Arabian Nights_
to the actual reign of Haroun Al Raschid.[1]
[Footnote 1: Those who wish to read them are referred to the three
large volumes--published in 1825, by Mr. Iley, Portman Street--of
anonymous authorship.]
Byron had far more than an average share of the _émigré_ spirit, the
counterpoise in the English race of their otherwise arrogant isolation. He
held with Wilhelm Meister--
To give space for wandering is it,
That the earth was made so wide.
and wrote to his mother from Athens: "I am so convinced of the advantages
of looking at mankind, instead of reading about them, and the bitter
effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an islander,
that I think there should be a law amongst us to send our young men abroad
for a term, among the few allies our wars have left us."
On June 11th, having borrowed money at heavy interest, and stored his mind
with information about Persia and India, the contemplated but unattained
goal of his travels, he left London, accompanied by his friend Hobhouse,
Fletcher his valet, Joe Murray his old butler, and Robert Rushton the son
of one of his tenants, supposed to be represented by the Page in _Childe
Harold_. The two latter, the one on account of his age, the other from his
health breaking down, he sent back to England from Gibraltar.
Becalmed for some days at Falmouth, a town which he describes as "full of
Quakers and salt fish," he despatched letters to his mother, Drury, and
Hodgson, exhibiting the changing moods of his mind. Smarting under a
slight he had received at parting from a school-companion, who had excused
himself from a farewell meeting on the plea that he had to go shopping, he
at one moment talks of his desolation, and says that, "leaving England
without regret," he has thought of entering the Turkish service; in the
next, especially in the stanzas to Hodgson, he runs off into a strain of
boisterous buffoonery. On the 2nd of July, the packet, by which he was
bound, sailed for Lisbon and arrived there about the middle of the month,
when the English fleet was anchored in the Tagus. The poet in some of his
stanzas has described the fine view of the port and the disconsolate
dirtiness of the city itself, the streets of which were at that time
rendered dangerous by the frequency of religious and political
assassinations. Nothing else remains of his sojourn to interest us, save
the statement of Mr. Hobhouse, that his friend made a more perilous,
though less celebrated, achievement by water than his crossing the
Hellespont, in swimming from old Lisbon to Belem Castle, Byron praises the
neighbouring Cintra, as "the most beautiful village in the world," though
he joins with Wordsworth in heaping anathemas on the Convention, and
extols the grandeur of Mafra, the Escurial of Portugal, in the convent of
which a monk, showing the traveller a large library, asked if the English
had any books in their country. Despatching his baggage and servants by
sea to Gibraltar, he and his friend started on horseback through the
south-west of Spain. Their first resting-place, after a ride of 400 miles,
performed at an average rate of seventy in the twenty-four hours, was
Seville, where they lodged for three days in the house of two ladies, to
whose attractions, as well as the fascination he seems to have exerted
over them, the poet somewhat garrulously refers. Here, too, he saw,
parading on the Prado, the famous _Maid of Saragossa_, whom he celebrates
in his equally famous stanzas (_Childe Harold_, I., 54-58). Of Cadiz, the
next stage, he writes with enthusiasm as a modern Cythera, describing the
bull fights in his verse, and the beauties in glowing prose. The belles of
this city, he says, are the Lancashire witches of Spain; and by reason of
them, rather than the sea-shore or the Sierra Morena, "sweet Cadiz is the
first spot in the creation." Hence, by an English frigate, they sailed to
Gibraltar, for which place he has nothing but curses. Byron had no
sympathy with the ordinary forms of British patriotism, and in our great
struggle with the tyranny of the First Empire, he may almost be said to
have sympathized with Napoleon.
The ship stopped at Cagliari in Sardinia, and again at Girgenti on the
Sicilian coast. Arriving at Malta, they halted there for three weeks--time
enough to establish a sentimental, though Platonic, flirtation with Mrs.
Spencer Smith, wife of our minister at Constantinople, sister-in-law of
the famous admiral, and the heroine of some exciting adventures. She is
the "Florence" of _Childe Harold_, and is afterwards addressed in some of
the most graceful verses of his cavalier minstrelsy--
Do thou, amidst the fair white walls,
If Cadiz yet be free,
At times from out her latticed halls
Look o'er the dark blue sea--
Then think upon Calypso's isles,
Endear'd by days gone by,--
To others give a thousand smiles,
To me a single sigh.
The only other adventure of the visit is Byron's quarrel with an officer,
on some unrecorded ground, which Hobhouse tells us nearly resulted in a
duel. The friends left Malta on September 29th, in the war-ship "Spider,"
and after anchoring off Patras, and spending a few hours on shore, they
skirted the coast of Acarnania, in view of localities--as Ithaca, the
Leucadian rock, and Actium--whose classic memories filtered through the
poet's mind and found a place in his masterpieces. Landing at Previsa,
they started on a tour through Albania,--
O'er many a mount sublime,
Through lands scarce noticed in historic tales.
Byron was deeply impressed by the beauty of the scenery, and the
half-savage independence of the people, described as "always strutting
about with slow dignity, though in rags." In October we find him with his
companions at Janina, hospitably entertained by order of Ali Pasha, the
famous Albanian Turk, bandit, and despot, then besieging Ibrahim at Berat
in Illyria. They proceeded on their way by "bleak Pindus," Acherusia's
lake, and Zitza, with its monastery door battered by robbers. Before
reaching the latter place, they encountered a terrific thunderstorm, in
the midst of which they separated, and Byron's detachment lost its way for
nine hours, during which he composed the verses to Florence, quoted above.
Some days later they together arrived at Tepaleni, and were there received
by Ali Pasha in person. The scene on entering the town is described as
recalling Scott's Branksome Castle and the feudal system; and the
introduction to Ali, who sat for some of the traits of the poet's
corsairs,--is graphically reproduced in a letter to Mrs. Byron. "His first
question was, why at so early an age I left my country, and without a
'lala,' or nurse? He then said the English minister had told him I was of
a great family, and desired his respects to my mother, which I now present
to you (date, November 12th). He said he was certain I was a man of birth,
because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands. He told me
to consider him as a father whilst I was in Turkey, and said he looked on
me as his son. Indeed he treated me like a child, sending me almonds,
fruit, and sweetmeats, twenty times a day." Byron shortly afterwards
discovered his host to be, a poisoner and an assassin. "Two days ago," he
proceeds in a passage which illustrates his character and a common
experience, "I was nearly lost in a Turkish ship-of-war, owing to the
ignorance of the captain and crew. Fletcher yelled after his wife; the
Greeks called on all the saints, the Mussulmen on Alla; the captain burst
into tears and ran below deck, telling us to call on God. The sails were
split, the mainyard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting
in; and all our chance was to make for Corfu--or, as F. pathetically
called it, 'a watery grave.' I did what I could to console him, but
finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself in my Albanian capote, and lay
down on the deck to wait the worst." Unable from his lameness, says
Hobhouse, to be of any assistance, he in a short time was found amid the
trembling sailors, fast asleep. They got back to the coast of Suli, and
shortly afterwards started through Acarnania and AEtolia for the Morea,
again rejoicing in the wild scenery and the apparently kindred spirits of
the wild men among whom they passed. Byron was especially fascinated by
the firelight dance and song of the robber band, which he describes and
reproduces in _Childe Harold_. On the 21st of November he reached
Mesolonghi, whore, fifteen years later, he died. Here he dismissed most of
his escort, proceeded to Patras, and on to Vostizza, caught sight of
Parnassus, and accepted a flight of eagles near Delphi as a favouring sign
of Apollo. "The last bird," he writes, "I ever fired at was an eaglet on
the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto. It was only wounded and I tried to save
it--the eye was so bright. But it pined and died in a few days: and I
never did since, and never will, attempt the life of another bird." From
Livadia the travellers proceeded to Thebes, visited the cave of
Trophonius, Diana's fountain, the so-called ruins of Pindar's house, and
the field of Cheronea, crossed Cithaeron, and on Christmas, 1809, arrived
before the defile, near the ruins of Phyle, where, he had his first
glimpse of Athens, which evoked the famous lines:--
Ancient of days, august Athena! where,
Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were.
First in the race that led to glory's goal,
They won, and pass'd away: is this the whole--
A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour?
After which he reverts to his perpetually recurring moral, "Men come and
go; but the hills, and waves, and skies, and stars, endure"--
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds;
Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare;
Art, glory, freedom fail--but nature still is fair.
The duration of Lord Byron's first visit to Athens was about three months,
and it was varied by excursions to different parts of Attica; Eleusis,
Hymettus, Cape Colonna, (Sunium, the scene of Falconer's shipwreck), the
Colonus of OEdipus, and Marathon, the plain of which is said to have been
placed at his disposal for about the same sum that, thirty years later, an
American offered to give for the bark with the poet's name on the tree at
Newstead. Byron had a poor opinion of the modern Athenians, who seem to
have at this period done their best to justify the Roman satirist. He
found them superficial, cunning, and false; but, with generous historic
insight, he says that no nation in like circumstances would have been much
better; that they had the vices of ages of slavery, from which it would
require ages of freedom to emancipate them.
In the Greek capital he lodged at the house of a respectable lady, widow
of an English vice-consul, who had three daughters, the eldest of whom,
Theresa, acquired an innocent and enviable fame as the Maid of Athens,
without the dangerous glory of having taken any very firm hold of the
heart that she was asked to return. A more solid passion was the poet's
genuine indignation on the "lifting," in Border phrase, of the marbles
from the Parthenon, and their being taken to England by order of Lord
Elgin. Byron never wrote anything more sincere than the _Curse of
Minerva_; and he has recorded few incidents more pathetic than that of the
old Greek who, when the last stone was removed for exportation, shed
tears, and said "[Greek: telos]!" The question is still an open one of
ethics. There are few Englishmen of the higher rank who do not hold London
in the right hand as barely balanced by the rest of the world in the left;
a judgment in which we can hardly expect Romans, Parisians, and Athenians
to concur. On the other hand, the marbles were mouldering at Athens, and
they are preserved, like ginger, in the British Museum.
Among the adventures of this period are an expedition across the Ilissus
to some caves near Kharyati, in which the travellers were by accident
nearly entombed; another to Pentelicus, where they tried to carve their
names on the marble rock; and a third to the environs of the Piraeus in
the evening light. Early in March the convenient departure of an English
sloop-of-war induced them to make an excursion to Smyrna. There, on the
28th of March, the second canto of _Childe Harold_, begun in the previous
autumn at Janina, was completed. They remained in the neighbourhood,
visiting Ephesus, without poetical result further than a reference to the
jackals, in the _Siege of Corinth_; and on April 11th left by the
"Salsette," a frigate on its way to Constantinople. The vessel touched at
the Troad, and Byron spent some time on land, snipe-shooting, and rambling
among the reputed ruins of Ilium. The poet characteristically, in _Don
Juan_ and elsewhere, attacks the sceptics, and then half ridicules the
belief.
I've stood upon Achilles' tomb,
And heard Troy doubted! Time will doubt of Rome!
* * * * *
There, on the green and village-cotted hill, is,
Flank'd by the Hellespont, and by the sea,
Entomb'd the bravest of the brave Achilles.--
They say so: Bryant says the contrary.
Being again detained in the Dardanelles, waiting for a fair wind, Byron
landed on the European side, and swam, in company with Lieutenant
Ekenhead, from Sestos to Abydos--a performance of which he boasts some
twenty times. The strength of the current is the main difficulty of a
feat, since so surpassed as to have passed from notice; but it was a
tempting theme for classical allusions. At length, on May 14, he reached
Constantinople, exalted the Golden Horn above all the sights he had seen,
and now first abandoned his design of travelling to Persia. Galt, and
other more or less gossiping travellers, have accumulated a number of
incidents of the poet's life at this period, of his fanciful dress,
blazing in scarlet and gold, and of his sometimes absurd contentions for
the privileges of rank--as when he demanded precedence of the English
ambassador in an interview with the Sultan, and, on its refusal, could
only be pacified by the assurances of the Austrian internuncio. In
converse with indifferent persons he displayed a curious alternation of
frankness and hauteur, and indulged a habit of letting people up and down,
by which he frequently gave offence. More interesting are narratives of
the suggestion of some of his verses, as the slave-market in _Don Juan_,
and the spectacle of the dead criminal tossed on the waves, revived in the
_Bride of Abydos_. One example is, if we except Dante's _Ugolino_, the
most remarkable instance in literature of the expansion, without the
weakening, of the horrible. Take first Mr. Hobhouse's plain prose: "The
sensations produced by the state of the weather"--it was wretched and
stormy when they left the "Salsette" for the city--"and leaving a
comfortable cabin, were in unison with the impressions which we felt when,
passing under the palace of the Sultans, and gazing at the gloomy cypress
which rises above the walls, we saw two dogs gnawing a dead body." After
this we may measure the almost fiendish force of a morbid imagination
brooding over the incident,--
And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival:
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunch'd on the whiter skull,
As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grow dull.
No one ever more persistently converted the incidents of travel into
poetic material; but sometimes in doing so he borrowed more largely from
his imagination than his memory, as in the description of the seraglio, of
which there is reason to doubt his having seen more than the entrance.
Byron and Hobhouse set sail from Constantinople on the 14th July,
1810--the latter to return direct to England, a determination which, from
no apparent fault on either side, the former did not regret. One incident
of the passage derives interest from its possible consequence. Taking up,
and unsheathing, a yataghan which he found on the quarter deck, ho
remarked, "I should like to know how a person feels after committing a
murder." This harmless piece of melodrama--the idea of which is expanded
in Mr. Dobell's _Balder_, and parodied in _Firmilian_--may have been the
basis of a report afterwards circulated, and accepted among others by
Goethe, that his lordship had committed a murder; hence, obviously, the
character of _Lara_, and the mystery of _Manfred!_ The poet parted from
his friend at Zea, (Ceos): after spending some time in solitude on the
little island, he returned to Athens, and there renewed acquaintance with
his school friend, the Marquis of Sligo, who after a few days accompanied
him to Corinth. They then separated, and Byron went on to Patras in the
Morea, where he had business with the Consul. He dates from there at the
close of July. It is impossible to give a consecutive account of his life
during the next ten months, a period consequently filled up with the
contradictory and absurd mass of legends before referred to. A few facts
only of any interest are extricable. During at least half of the time his
head-quarters were at Athens, where he again met his friend the Marquis,
associated with the English Consul and Lady Hester Stanhope, studied
Romaic in a Franciscan monastery--where he saw and conversed with a motley
crew of French, Italians, Danes, Greeks, Turks, and Americans,--wrote to
his mother and others, saying he had swum from Sestos to Abydos, was sick
of Fletcher bawling for beef and beer, had done with authorship, and hoped
on his return to lead a quiet recluse life. He nevertheless made notes to
_Harold_, composed the _Hints from Horace_ and the _Curse of Minerva_, and
presumably brooded over, and outlined in his mind, many of his verse
romances. We hear no more of the, _Maid of Athens_, but there is no fair
ground to doubt that the _Giaour_ was suggested by his rescue of a young
woman whom, for the fault of an amour with some Frank, a party of
Janissaries were about to throw, sewn up in a sack, into the sea. Mr. Galt
gives no authority for his statement, that the girl's deliverer was the
original cause of her sentence. We may rest assured that if it had been
so, Byron himself would have told us of it.
A note to the _Siege of Corinth_ is suggestive of his unequalled
restlessness. "I visited all three--Tripolitza, Napoli, and Argos--in
1810-11; and in the course of journeying through the country, from my
first arrival in 1809, crossed the Isthmus eight times on my way from
Attica to the Morea." In the latter locality we find him during the autumn
the honoured guest of the Vizier Valhi (a son of Ali Pasha), who presented
him with a fine horse. During a second visit to Patras, in September, he
was attacked by the same sort of marsh fever from which, fourteen years
afterwards, in the near neighbourhood, he died. On his recovery, in
October, he complains of having been nearly killed by the heroic measures
of the native doctors: "One of them trusts to his genius, never having
studied; the other, to a campaign of eighteen months against the sick of
Otranto, which he made in his youth with great effect. When I was seized
with my disorder, I protested against both these assassins, but in vain."
He was saved by the zeal of his servants, who asseverated that if his
lordship died they would take good care the doctors should also; on which
the learned men discontinued their visits, and the patient revived. On his
final return to Athens, the restoration of his health was retarded by one
of his long courses of reducing diet; he lived mainly on rice, and vinegar
and water. From that city he writes in the early spring, intimating his
intention of proceeding to Egypt; but Mr. Hanson, his man of business,
ceasing to send him remittances, the scheme was abandoned. Beset by
letters about his debts, he again declares his determination to hold fast
by Newstead, adding that if the place which is his only tie to England is
sold, he won't come back at all. Life on the shores of the Archipelago is
far cheaper and happier, and "Ubi bene ibi patria," for such a citizen of
the world as he has become. Later he went to Malta, and was detained
there by another bad attack of tertian fever. The next record of
consequence is from the "Volage" frigate, at sea, June 29, 1811, when he
writes in a despondent strain to Hodgson, that he is returning home
"without a hope, and almost without a desire," to wrangle with creditors
and lawyers about executions and coal pits. "In short, I am sick and
sorry; and when I have a little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I
shall march, either to campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where
I can at least have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence. I
am sick of fops, and poesy, and prate, and shall leave the whole Castalian
state to Bufo, or anybody else. Howbeit, I have written some 4000 lines,
of one kind or another, on my travels." With these, and a collection of
marbles, and skulls, and hemlock, and tortoises, and servants, he reached
London about the middle of July, and remained there, making some
arrangements about business and publication. On the 23rd we have a short
but kind letter to his mother, promising to pay her a visit on his way to
Rochdale. "You know you are a vixen, but keep some champagne for me," he
had written from abroad. On receipt of the letter she remarked, "If I
should be dead before he comes down, what a strange thing it, would be."
Towards the close of the month she had an attack so alarming that he was
summoned; but before, he had time to arrive she had expired, on the 1st of
August, in a fit of rage brought on by reading an upholsterer's bill. On
the way Byron heard the intelligence, and wrote to Dr. Pigot: "I now feel
the truth of Gray's observation, that we can only have _one_ mother. Peace
be with her!" On arriving at Newstead, all their storms forgotten, the son
was so affected that he did not trust himself to go to the funeral, but
stood dreamily gazing at the cortège from the gate of the Abbey. Five days
later, Charles S. Matthews was drowned.