When, in the autumn of 1816, Switzerland began to be overrun by crowds
of English tourists, residence there became intolerable to Lord Byron,
and he betook himself with Mr. Hobhouse, the travelling companion of
his youth, to Italy. At Milan he met Beyle, one of the most acute of
observers; and it is a strong proof of the extraordinary impression
produced by the poet's personality, that he captivated even this man,
who was always on his guard against being led into hasty enthusiasms,
and who quickly detected what was assumed in Byron's manner. Beyle
writes: "Ce fut pendant l'automne de 1816, que je le rencontrai au
théâtre de la _Scala_, à Milan, dans la loge de M. Louis de Brême. Je
fus frappé des yeux de Lord Byron au moment où il écoutait un sestetto
d'un opéra de Mayer intitulé _Elena_. Je n'ai vu de ma vie rien de
plus beau ni de plus expressif. Encore aujourd'hui, si je viens à
penser à l'expression qu'un grand peintre devrait donner au génie,
cette tête sublime reparaît tout-à-coup devant moi. J'eus un instant
d'enthousiasme.... Je n'oublierai jamais l'expression divine de ses
traits; c'était l'air serein de la puissance et du génie."
From Milan Byron proceeded to Venice, the city which he preferred
to all others, and which he has celebrated in the Fourth Canto of
_Childe Harold_, in _Marino Faliero_, in _The Two Foscari_, in the _Ode
to Venice_, and in _Beppo_, which last work was written in Venice.
Never had he been overcome by such deep depression as now; never had
forgetfulness been so desirable. The enchanting climate and air of
Italy acted on him like a charm. He was twenty-nine. With its beautiful
women, its loose morals, and all its southern manners and customs,
Venice invited to a wild revel of the senses. An ardent longing for
happiness and enjoyment was part of Byron's nature; and it is also to
be remembered that his defiant temper had been thoroughly roused. He
had been stigmatised as capable of every enormity; he might just as
well, for once, give his countrymen abroad something real to write home
about, and the old women at home real cause to swoon; they wrote and
they swooned whatever his behaviour was.
His first proceedings in Venice were to engage a gondola and gondolier,
a box at the theatre, and a mistress. The last was easily found. He
had taken apartments in the house of a merchant, whose wife, Marianna
Segati, then aged twenty-two, he describes as having large, black,
Oriental eyes and being in "appearance altogether like an antelope."
She and Byron became so enamoured of each other, that Byron allowed
Hobhouse to go on alone to Rome. "I should have gone too," he writes,
"but I fell in love, and must stay that over." The young beauty
compelled him to join, in her company, in all the distractions of the
Carnival. He devoted his nights, like the born Venetian, to pleasure;
but in his fear of becoming stout, he adhered to his usual extremely
sparing diet, ate only vegetables and fruit, and was obliged to drink
large quantities of his favourite beverage, rum and water, to keep up
his strength. For he was completing _Manfred_ at this time. We receive
a sad impression of the aimlessness of his life when we read that,
to counterbalance all the distractions, to give his days a centre of
gravity, he spent several hours of each at the Armenian monastery of
San Lazaro, learning Armenian from the monks. The mornings were devoted
to this, the afternoons to physical exercise, chiefly riding. He had
his horses brought to Venice, and with Shelley and other friends used
to cross over to the Lido and ride there.
We have a reminiscence of the talk during these rides in Shelley's
_Julian and Maddalo_. At sunset he and Byron see on one of the islands
a dreary, windowless pile, rising in dark relief against the flaming
sky behind it. They hear, clanging from the open tower on the top of
the house, the iron tongue of a bell. Said Byron:--
"What we behold
Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,
. . . . . . . . . . . and ever at this hour
Those who may cross the water, hear that bell
Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell
To vespers . . . . . . . . . . . .
And like that black and dreary bell, the soul
Hung in a heaven-illumined tower, must toll
Our thoughts and our desires to meet below
Round the rent heart and pray--as madmen do
For what--they know not."
No better image of Byron's own life at this period could be desired.
Most assuredly at this time his longings and desires were like maniacs,
all gathered together only once a day by the bell of the madhouse.
It was with difficulty, after being ill with a sharp fever, contracted
in the unhealthy air of Venice, that he tore himself away from Marianna
Segati long enough to pay a short visit to Ferrara and Rome. After his
return, however, his violent passion for her subsided, as he began to
discover that she sold the jewellery he gave her, and made as much
profit generally as she could, out of her position as his mistress.
During the first part of his stay in Venice, Byron had mixed much in
the refined society which had its chief meeting-place at the house of
the cultivated, literary Countess Albrizzi; now he withdrew himself
entirely from its restraining influence. He rented for himself and his
menagerie a magnificent palace on the Grand Canal. This palace soon
became a harem, in which the favourite sultana was a beautiful young
woman of the lower orders, Margarita Cogni, who, from the circumstance
of her husband being a baker, was called Byron's Fornarina. Her face
was of "the fine Venetian cast of the old time"; her figure, though she
was perhaps rather tall, was also fine, and exactly suited the national
dress. She had all the naïveté and droll humour of the Venetian lower
classes, and, as she could neither read nor write, she could not plague
Byron with letters. She was jealous; she snatched off the masks of
ladies whom she found in Byron's company, and she sought his presence
whenever it suited her, with no great regard to time, place, or
persons. He writes: "When I first knew her, I was in 'relazione' with
la Signora, who was silly enough one evening at Dolo, accompanied by
some of her female friends, to threaten her.... Margarita threw back
her veil (fazziolo), and replied in very explicit Venetian, '_You_ are
_not_ his _wife_. _I_ am _not_ his _wife_: you are his Donna, and _I_
am his _Donna_: your husband is a _becco_, and mine is another. For
the rest, what _right_ have you to reproach me? If he prefers me to
you, is it my fault?' Having delivered this pretty piece of eloquence,
she went on her way, leaving a numerous audience with Madame ----
to ponder at her leisure on the dialogue between them."[1] In time
Margarita established herself as housekeeper in Byron's house, reduced
the expenses of the establishment to less than half, marched about in
a gown with a train, and wore a hat with feathers (articles of dress
which had been the height of her ambition), beat the maids, opened
Byron's letters, and actually studied her alphabet in order to be able
to detect which of them were from ladies. In her wild way she loved
him; her joy at seeing him return safe from a sail in which his boat
had been caught in a storm, was that of a tigress over her returned
cubs. Her ungovernableness increased to such an extent that Byron was
obliged to tell her that she must return home. After trying to attack
him with a knife, she threw herself in her anger and despair into the
canal. She was rescued and sent home, and Byron wrote her story at full
length to Murray; he knew that his letters to his publisher were passed
from hand to hand like public documents; and half the pleasure of his
excesses consisted in the certainty of their creating a scandal in
England.
From the letter just quoted it is easy to see that the dissolute
Venetian life did not absorb him heart and soul; he quite saw the
comic side of it all. And it was actually of service in furthering
his development as a thinker and a poet. His friends at home were in
despair at the way in which he was compromising his dignity and his
reputation; but this wild, jovial, Carnival life, lived amongst the
women of the people under the bright Italian skies, was producing a
new, realistic style in his poetry. In the works of his youth he had,
sadly, and with a heart wrung with anguish, described the ebb-tide
of life; in _Beppo_ the spring-tide suddenly began to rise. _Beppo_
was real life, in a setting of laughter and jest. In Byron's youthful
pathos there had been a certain monotony, along with a good deal of
artificiality. In this work his genius, as it were, sloughed its skin;
the monotony was broken by a constant change of theme and key, the
artificiality was dispelled by hearty laughter. In his youthful satire
there had been a good deal of snappishness and a decided lack of grace
and humour. Now that his own life had for a short time assumed the
character of a Carnival play, the Graces, of their own accord, came
tripping and twining through his verses, keeping time to the tinkling
of the bells of humour.
_Beppo_ is the "Carnival of Venice" itself--that old theme which
Byron, like another Paganini, found upon his way, lifted on the point
of his divine bow, and proceeded to adorn with a multitude of daring
and ingenious variations, with a luxurious embroidery of pearls and
golden arabesques. There had come into his hands an English comic poem
on the subject of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, in
which the Honourable John Hookham Frere had imitated the first poem
written in the _ottava rima_ (Berni's paraphrase of _Orlando Furioso_).
The reading of Frere's work aroused in Byron the desire to attempt
something in the same style, and the result was _Beppo_, the complete
originality of which effaced every recollection of a model. Now he had
found the form which suited his purpose, the weapon which he could
wield with the most effect--the _ottava rima_, with its sextett of
alternate rhymes, to the solid mass of which the concluding rhymed
couplet adds now a jest, now a key, now a stylistic antic, now a
stinging wit-dart.
And what is the poem about? About just as little as Alfred de Musset's
_Namouna_, or Paludan-Müller's _Danserinden_, which were written in
much the same style sixteen years later (1833). The story in itself is
nothing: A Venetian goes to sea, and stays so long away that his wife
makes sure he is dead. She has long been as good as married to another
man, when he suddenly turns up again. He has been sold as a Turkish
slave, and, on his return, dressed as a Turk, he finds his wife at a
masked ball, on the arm of the Count who has now for several years
filled his place. When the couple, returning from the ball, step out
of their gondola, they find the husband standing at the door of his
own house. As soon as all three have recovered a little from the first
surprise, they call for three cups of coffee, and conversation begins
in the following style, Laura speaking:
"Beppo! what's your pagan name?
Bless me! your beard is of amazing growth!
And how came you to keep away so long?
Are you not sensible 'twas very wrong?
"And are you _really, truly_, now a Turk?
With any other women did you wive?
Is't true they use their fingers for a fork?
Well, that's the prettiest shawl!--as I'm alive!
You'll give it me! They say you eat no pork," &c. &c.
This is all the explanation the husband receives, or asks. As he
cannot go about dressed as a Turk, he borrows a pair of trousers from
Laura's _cavaliere servente_, the Count, and the story ends in perfect
amicability on all sides. In itself it is of little importance, but it
was Byron's study for his masterpiece, _Don Juan_--the only one of his
works which, as it were, contains the whole wide ocean of life, with
its storms and its sunshine, its ebb and its flood.
Byron's friends tried every means in their power to induce him to
return to England, in the hope of thereby reclaiming him from the life
he was leading. But instead of returning he sold Newstead Abbey, which
in his youth he had vowed he would never part with (receiving £94,000
for it). Indeed, so strong was his antipathy to the thought of return,
that he could not even bear the idea of being taken back as a corpse.
"I trust," he writes, "they won't think of 'pickling, and bringing me
home to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall.' I am sure my bones would not rest
in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I
believe the thought would drive me mad on my deathbed, could I suppose
that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back
to your soil. I would not even feed your worms, if I could help it."
But now occurred an event which in an unforeseen manner put an end
to the polygamy in which Byron was living in Venice--an event that
constituted a turning-point in his life. In April 1819, he was
presented to Countess Teresa Guiccioli, daughter of Count Gamba of
Ravenna, a lady who was at this time only sixteen, and had just been
married to Count Guiccioli, a man of sixty, who had been twice left
a widower. The introduction took place against the inclination of
both; the young Countess was tired that evening and longed to go home,
and Byron was unwilling to make new acquaintances; both assented
only from the desire to oblige their hostess. But no sooner had they
entered into conversation than a spark, which was never extinguished,
passed from soul to soul. The Countess afterwards wrote:--"His noble
and exquisitely beautiful countenance, the tone of his voice, his
manners, the thousand enchantments that surrounded him, rendered him so
different and so superior a being to any whom I had hitherto seen, that
it was impossible he should not have left the most profound impression
upon me. From that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay at
Venice, we met every day."
A few weeks later, Teresa was obliged to return with her husband to
Ravenna. The parting with Byron agitated her so terribly that during
the course of the first day's journey she fainted several times; and
she became so ill that she arrived at Ravenna half dead. She was also
much distressed at this time by the loss of her mother. The Count owned
several houses on the road from Venice to Ravenna, and it was his
habit to stop at these mansions, one after the other, on his journeys
between the two cities. From each the enamoured young Countess now
wrote to Byron, expressing in the most passionate and pathetic terms
her despair at leaving him, and entreating him to come to Ravenna. Very
touching is the description which she gives, after her arrival, of the
complete change in all her feelings. She, who formerly had thought of
nothing but balls and fêtes, has, she says, been so entirely changed by
her love that solitude has become dear and welcome to her. She will,
according to Byron's wish, "avoid all general society, and devote
herself to reading, music, domestic occupations, riding"--everything,
in short, that she knew he would most like. Longing and grief brought
on a dangerous fever, and symptoms of consumption showed themselves.
Then Byron set out for Ravenna. He found the Countess in bed,
apparently in a very serious condition. He writes: "I greatly fear
that she is going into a consumption.... Thus it is with every thing
and every body for whom I feel anything like a real attachment.... If
anything happens to my present Amica, I have done with the passion for
ever--it is my last love. As to libertinism, I have sickened myself
of that, as was natural in the way I went on, and I have at least
derived that advantage from vice, to _love_ in the better sense of the
word." The attitude assumed towards the young foreigner by the Count
astonished every one; he showed him all manner of polite attentions;
used to come for him every day with a "coach and six," and drive about
the country with him, like "Whittington with his cat," Byron declared.
It was a happy time for Byron. This, his one perfect and fully returned
attachment, brought back all the emotions of his youth. The beautiful
_Stanzas to the Po_, which reveal deep, chivalrous feeling, and end
with the prayer, "Let me perish young!" were the first-fruits of the
new passion. He loved truly and with his whole heart, and loved like a
youth, without at any point taking up a position outside of his feeling
or attempting to rise superior to it. When, in August, the Countess was
obliged to accompany her husband on his visits to his other estate,
Byron went daily to her house, and, causing her apartments to be
opened, sat turning over her books and writing in them. On the last
page of a copy of _Corinne_ he wrote the following note:--
MY DEAREST TERESA--I have read this book in your
garden;--my love, you were absent, or else I could not
have read it. It is a favourite book of yours, and the
writer was a friend of mine. You will not understand
these English words, and _others_ will not understand
them--which is the reason I have not scrawled them in
Italian. But you will recognise the handwriting of him
who so passionately loved you, and you will divine that,
over a book which was yours, he could only think of love.
In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in
yours--_Amor mio_--is comprised my existence here and
hereafter.... Think of me, some times, when the Alps and
the ocean divide us,--but they never will, unless you
_wish_ it.
BYRON.
BOLOGNA, _August_ 25, 1819.
It is needless to compare the expressions in this note with those of
the farewell letter to Lady Caroline Lamb; one feels at once that this
is the language of a truer love.
When, in September, Count Guiccioli was called away by business to
Ravenna, he left the young Countess and her lover to the free enjoyment
of each other's society at Bologna; and he was quite agreeable, when
the physicians ordered her to Venice, that Lord Byron should be the
companion of her journey. Byron had a villa at La Mira, near Venice; he
placed it at her disposal, and resided there with her. Of the journey
and the ensuing period she wrote to Moore after Byron's death: "But I
cannot linger over these recollections of happiness;--the contrast with
the present is too dreadful. If a blessed spirit, while in the full
enjoyment of heavenly happiness, were sent down to this earth to suffer
all its miseries, the contrast could not be more dreadful between the
past and the present, than what I have endured from the moment when
that terrible word reached my ears, and I for ever lost the hope of
again beholding him, one look from whom I valued beyond all earth's
happiness."
The woman to whom the world owes a debt of gratitude for having saved
Byron from ruining himself by degrading dissipation, lost her standing
in the eyes of Italian society from the moment when she took up her
residence in her lover's house. The Italian moral code of that day--of
which De Stendhal's Italian tales give an excellent idea--permitted a
young married woman to have a friend (_Amico_); and, indeed, regarded
him practically as her husband, but only on the condition that those
outward conventions were respected, which Countess Guiccioli was now
disregarding.
It was not light-mindedness that led her to expose herself to the
censure of public opinion. She saw her own relation to Lord Byron in
a poetic light; she regarded it as her mission to free a noble and
gifted poet from the fetters of ignoble connections, and to restore his
faith in pure and self-sacrificing love. She hoped to act on him as a
Muse. She was very young, and very beautiful--fair, with dark eyes;
small, but beautifully proportioned. West, the American painter, to
whom Byron sat for his portrait at the Villa Rossa, near Pisa, gives
the following description of her:--"Whilst I was painting, the window
from which I received my light became suddenly darkened, and I heard a
voice exclaim: '_E troppo bello!_' I turned, and discovered a beautiful
female stooping down to look in, the ground on the outside being on a
level with the bottom of the window. Her long golden hair hung down
about her face and shoulders, her complexion was exquisite, and her
smile completed one of the most romantic-looking heads, set off as it
was by the bright sun behind it, which I had ever beheld." The more
important it became to the Countess not to be regarded simply as one of
Byron's many mistresses, the more did she endeavour to raise his poetry
into a higher and purer atmosphere than that in which it moved at this
time.
One evening when he was sitting turning over the leaves of the
manuscript of _Don Juan_, two cantos of which had been completed before
his acquaintance with the Countess began, she leant over his shoulder,
pointed to a verse on the page he was just turning, and asked him
what it meant. "She had stumbled," writes Byron, "by mere chance on
the 137th stanza of the First Canto. I told her 'Nothing; but your
husband is coming.' As I said this in Italian with some emphasis, she
started up in a fright, and said, 'Oh, my God, is he coming?' thinking
it was her own." But this accident aroused her curiosity regarding
_Don Juan_; she read the two cantos in a French translation; her
delicacy was shocked by the indecency of much of the contents, and she
implored Byron not to go on with the poem. He at once promised what
his _Dictatrice_ demanded. This was Countess Guiccioli's first direct
influence upon Byron's work--and it was certainly not a beneficial
one; but she soon withdrew her prohibition, on the condition, however,
that there should be no obscenity in the part as yet unwritten. A
whole series of fine works which now proceeded from Byron's pen are
the beautiful and enduring mementos of his life with her. The manner
in which in _Don Juan_ he tore the veil from all illusions, and
mercilessly mocked at sentimentality, wounded the Countess's womanly
feelings; for woman is ever unwilling that the illusions which, as long
as they last, beautify life, should be rudely dispelled.
Countess Guiccioli, thus, did her utmost to prevent Byron writing
works calculated to destroy belief in human nature and the value of
life. The themes which she, the romantic lover of the grand, and the
ardent Italian patriot, led him to choose, were themes calculated
to elevate her countrymen's minds and quicken their desire for the
emancipation of their country from a foreign yoke. It was to gratify
her that he wrote _The Prophecy of Dante_, and translated from the
_Inferno_ the famous episode of _Francesca of Rimini_; and it was under
her influence that he wrote the Venetian dramas, _Marino Faliero_ and
_The Two Foscari_, plays which, though they are written in English,
really belong, from their style and subject, rather to Romance than
to English literature--just as they belong, as a matter of fact, to
the Italian, not the English, stage. They are plays with a passionate
political purpose, written in careless, and occasionally ill-sounding
iambics. Their aim was, by the employment of the strongest means
possible, to excite the lethargic Italian patriots to unanimous revolt
against the oppressors. They are scenically effective. Whilst under the
first impression of his attachment to the Countess, Byron also wrote
_Mazeppa_, the heroine of which bears her name; and her personality
was directly transferred to the two best and most beautiful female
characters which he created at this period--Adah in _Cain_, and Myrrha
in _Sardanapalus_.
In Countess Guiccioli Byron found the realisation of the ideal of
femininity which had always been before his eyes, but which in his
earlier narrative poems he had not succeeded in portraying naturally.
He himself naively confessed to Lady Blessington the difficulty in
which he found himself, and the manner in which he personified his
ideals. "I detest thin women," he said; "and unfortunately all, or
nearly all plump women have clumsy hands and feet, so that I am obliged
to have recourse to imagination for my beauties, and there I always
find them. I flatter myself that my Leila, Zuleika, Gulnare, Medora,
and Haidée will always vouch for my taste in beauty; these are the
bright creations of my fancy, with rounded forms, and delicacy of
limbs, nearly so incompatible as to be rarely, if ever, united.... You
must have observed that I give my heroines extreme refinement, joined
to great simplicity and want of education. Now, refinement and want of
education are incompatible, at least, I have ever found them so: so
here again, you see, I am forced to have recourse to imagination." The
concoctions were as impossible as they were beautiful; these fair ones
produced next to no impression of reality, herein resembling the heroes
whom they worshipped.
From _The Giaour_ to _The Siege of Corinth_, Byron's narrative
poems are of the Romantic type, but bear the imprint of a strong
individuality. Passion is idolised in both sexes. The heroes are,
to borrow an expression from _The Giaour_, "wracks, by passion left
behind"; but "wracks" which choose rather to continue being tossed by
its tempests than to live in drowsy tranquillity. They do not love
with the cold love begotten of a cold climate; theirs "is like a lava
flood." The most characteristic of these now extremely antiquated
Byronic heroes is the noble Corsair--who is proud, capricious,
scornful, revengeful to the point of cruelty, a prey to remorse, and
so nobly magnanimous that he will rather submit to the most barbarous
tortures than kill a sleeping enemy. This interesting bandit, with his
mysterious countenance, his theatrical deportment, and his boundless
chivalry towards woman, is the Byronic counterpart of Schiller's
Karl Moor. The sovereign of a law-abiding people, hampered by the
conventions of a court, could not be Byron's ideal man; there was no
possibility in such a life of romantic exploits, of perils by land or
by water. So he took a pirate chieftain, and, to the qualities induced
by such a man's manner of life, superadded the finest qualities of
his own soul. The Corsair, who is accustomed to wade in blood, turns
with a shudder from the young Sultana who loves him, when he sees the
little spot of blood on her forehead--not because it is imaginable that
a Conrad would have shuddered at so little, but because Byron himself
would have shrunk from such a sight. It has been cleverly said that the
real reason of the marvellous attraction of all the heroes and heroines
of these poems of Byron's youth for the general public was, that they
all moved where they had no joints. The public were not more enraptured
by the passion of the lyric portions and by the poetical gems inserted
here and there (almost always during the process of proof-reading),
than by the deeds which were really impossible to human nature. It was
admiration of the same kind as is displayed for the daring acrobat, who
does breakneck feats by unnatural contortions of his body.
But in these same characters some of the finer, deeper-lying qualities
of Byron's ideal also revealed themselves. Conrad's inflexibility under
suffering foreshadows Manfred's; and he will no more bow the knee
than will Cain to Lucifer, or Don Juan to Gulbeyaz. Compassion for
those less fortunately situated than himself, a feeling which never
disappeared from Byron's soul, exists, though chiefly in the shape of
hatred of despots, in Lara; and in both _The Giaour_ and _The Siege of
Corinth_ we have the longing for the emancipation of Greece. It was a
strange ordering of destiny that the poet himself should end his life
as a commander of just such wild men as those he had described. The
Viking blood in his veins gave him no rest until he himself became a
Viking leader, like the Normans from whom he was descended. And even if
all these desperadoes (Alp, the renegade, who leads the Turks against
his countrymen, no less than Lara, who makes war on his peers) are
simply the imaginary creatures of the poet's brain, there is in the
characters of all, one realistic trait, a trait which also develops in
those who attach themselves to them--the proud endurance of terrible
fates. The humour of _Beppo_ is the form in which naturalness overcomes
the staginess and artificiality of Byron's earlier works. The sympathy
with human suffering, which in his serious poetry gradually swallows up
all other sympathies, is the form in which the feeling of the reality
of life prevails over his Romanticism and supersedes it.
This feeling gained in intensity after his breach with England.
_The Prisoner of Chillon_ had described the suffering of the noble
Bonnivard, who for six long years was chained to a pillar in an
underground dungeon by a chain too short to allow of his lying down,
and compelled to witness the agonies and death of his brothers, who
were fettered in the same manner, without being able to put out his
hand to help them. On it followed _Mazeppa_--the youth bound to the
back of the wild horse, which gallops with dripping mane and steaming
flanks through the forests and across the steppes, whilst he, torn
from the arms of his beloved, whose fate is unknown to him, and
looking forward to a horrible fate himself, suffers agonies of thirst,
pain, and shame. So far Byron has by preference dwelt upon the things
that are most terrible to flesh and blood; even when, as in the case
of Bonnivard, there was a spiritual element in the suffering, and
the theme presented an opportunity for the description of a heroic
personality, he dwelt most on the purely physical torture. But now
that his sympathies were aroused for the great martyrs of Italy, his
conception of the tragic was ennobled.