"Ravenna, Dec. 25. 1820.
"You will or ought to have received the packet and letters which I
remitted to your address a fortnight ago (or it may be more days),
and I shall be glad of an answer, as, in these times and places,
packets per post are in some risk of not reaching their
destination.
"I have been thinking of a project for you and me, in case we both
get to London again, which (if a Neapolitan war don't suscitate)
may be calculated as possible for one of us about the spring of
1821. I presume that you, too, will be back by that time, or never;
but on that you will give me some index. The project, then, is for
you and me to set up jointly a _newspaper_--nothing more nor
less--weekly, or so, with some improvement or modifications upon
the plan of the present scoundrels, who degrade that
department,--but a _newspaper_, which we will edite in due form,
and, nevertheless, with some attention.
"There must always be in it a piece of poesy from one or other of
us _two_, leaving room, however, for such dilettanti rhymers as may
be deemed worthy of appearing in the same column; but _this_ must
be a _sine quâ non_; and also as much prose as we can compass. We
will take an _office_--our names _not_ announced, but
suspected--and, by the blessing of Providence, give the age some
new lights upon policy, poesy, biography, criticism, morality,
theology, and all other _ism_, _ality_, and _ology_ whatsoever.
"Why, man, if we were to take to this in good earnest, your debts
would be paid off in a twelvemonth, and by dint of a little
diligence and practice, I doubt not that we could distance the
common-place blackguards, who have so long disgraced common sense
and the common reader. They have no merit but practice and
impudence, both of which we may acquire; and, as for talent and
culture, the devil's in't if such proofs as we have given of both
can't furnish out something better than the 'funeral baked meats'
which have coldly set forth the breakfast table of all Great
Britain for so many years. Now, what think you? Let me know; and
recollect that, if we take to such an enterprise, we must do so in
good earnest. Here is a hint,--do you make it a plan. We will
modify it into as literary and classical a concern as you please,
only let us put out our powers upon it, and it will most likely
succeed. But you must _live_ in London, and I also, to bring it to
bear, and _we must keep it a secret_.
"As for the living in London, I would make that not difficult to
you (if you would allow me), until we could see whether one means
or other (the success of the plan, for instance) would not make it
quite easy for you, as well as your family; and, in any case, we
should have some fun, composing, correcting, supposing, inspecting,
and supping together over our lucubrations. If you think this worth
a thought, let me know, and I will begin to lay in a small literary
capital of composition for the occasion.
"Yours ever affectionately,
"B.
"P.S. If you thought of a middle plan between a _Spectator_ and a
newspaper, why not?--only not on a _Sunday_. Not that Sunday is not
an excellent day, but it is engaged already. We will call it the
'Tenda Rossa,' the name Tassoni gave an answer of his in a
controversy, in allusion to the delicate hint of Timour the Lame,
to his enemies, by a 'Tenda' of that colour, before he gave battle.
Or we will call it 'Gli,' or 'I Carbonari,' if it so please you--or
any other name full of 'pastime and prodigality,' which you may
prefer. Let me have an answer. I conclude poetically, with the
bellman, 'A merry Christmas to you!'"
* * * * *
The year 1820 was an era signalised, as will be remembered, by the many
efforts of the revolutionary spirit which, at that time, broke forth,
like ill-suppressed fire, throughout the greater part of the South of
Europe. In Italy, Naples had already raised the Constitutional standard,
and her example was fast operating through the whole of that country.
Throughout Romagna, secret societies, under the name of Carbonari, had
been organised, which waited but the word of their chiefs to break out
into open insurrection. We have seen from Lord Byron's Journal in 1814,
what intense interest he took in the last struggles of Revolutionary
France under Napoleon; and his exclamations, "Oh for a
Republic!--'Brutus, thou sleepest!'" show the lengths to which, in
theory at least, his political zeal extended. Since then, he had but
rarely turned his thoughts to politics; the tame, ordinary vicissitude
of public affairs having but little in it to stimulate a mind like his,
whose sympathies nothing short of a crisis seemed worthy to interest.
This the present state of Italy gave every promise of affording him;
and, in addition to the great national cause itself, in which there was
every thing that a lover of liberty, warm from the pages of Petrarch and
Dante, could desire, he had also private ties and regards to enlist him
socially in the contest. The brother of Madame Guiccioli, Count Pietro
Gamba, who had been passing some time at Rome and Naples, was now
returned from his tour; and the friendly sentiments with which,
notwithstanding a natural bias previously in the contrary direction, he
at length learned to regard the noble lover of his sister, cannot better
be described than in the words of his fair relative herself.
"At this time," says Madame Guiccioli, "my beloved brother, Pietro,
returned to Ravenna from Rome and Naples. He had been prejudiced by some
enemies of Lord Byron against his character, and my intimacy with him
afflicted him greatly; nor had my letters succeeded in entirely
destroying the evil impression which Lord Byron's detractors had
produced. No sooner, however, had he seen and known him, than he became
inspired with an interest in his favour, such as could not have been
produced by mere exterior qualities, but was the result only of that
union he saw in him of all that is most great and beautiful, as well in
the heart as mind of man. From that moment every former prejudice
vanished, and the conformity of their opinions and studies contributed
to unite them in a friendship, which only ended with their lives."[15]
The young Gamba, who was, at this time, but twenty years of age, with a
heart full of all those dreams of the regeneration of Italy, which not
only the example of Naples, but the spirit working beneath the surface
all around him, inspired, had, together with his father, who was still
in the prime of life, become enrolled in the secret bands now organising
throughout Romagna, and Lord Byron was, by their intervention, admitted
also among the brotherhood. The following heroic Address to the
Neapolitan Government (written by the noble poet in Italian,[16] and
forwarded, it is thought, by himself to Naples, but intercepted on the
way,) will show how deep, how earnest, and expansive was his zeal in
that great, general cause of Political Freedom, for which he soon after
laid down his life among the marshes of Missolonghi.
"An Englishman, a friend to liberty, having understood that the
Neapolitans permit even foreigners to contribute to the good cause, is
desirous that they should do him the honour of accepting a thousand
louis, which he takes the liberty of offering. Having already, not long
since, been an ocular witness of the despotism of the Barbarians in the
States occupied by them in Italy, he sees, with the enthusiasm natural
to a cultivated man, the generous determination of the Neapolitans to
assert their well-won independence. As a member of the English House of
Peers, he would be a traitor to the principles which placed the reigning
family of England on the throne, if he were not grateful for the noble
lesson so lately given both to people and to kings. The offer which he
desires to make is small in itself, as must always be that presented
from an individual to a nation; but he trusts that it will not be the
last they will receive from his countrymen. His distance from the
frontier, and the feeling of his personal incapacity to contribute
efficaciously to the service of the nation, prevents him from proposing
himself as worthy of the lowest commission, for which experience and
talent might be requisite. But if, as a mere volunteer, his presence
were not a burden to whomsoever he might serve under, he would repair to
whatever place the Neapolitan Government might point out, there to obey
the orders and participate in the dangers of his commanding officer,
without any other motive than that of sharing the destiny of a brave
nation, defending itself against the self-called Holy Alliance, which
but combines the vice of hypocrisy with despotism."[17]
It was during the agitation of this crisis, while surrounded by rumours
and alarms, and expecting, every moment, to be summoned into the field,
that Lord Byron commenced the Journal which I am now about to give; and
which it is impossible to peruse, with the recollection of his former
Diary of 1814 in our minds, without reflecting how wholly different, in
all the circumstances connected with them, were the two periods at which
these records of his passing thoughts were traced. The first he wrote at
a time which may be considered, to use his own words, as "the most
poetical part of his whole life,"--_not_ certainly, in what regarded the
powers of his genius, to which every succeeding year added new force and
range, but in all that may be said to constitute the poetry of
character,--those fresh, unworldly feelings of which, in spite of his
early plunge into experience, he still retained the gloss, and that
ennobling light of imagination, which, with all his professed scorn of
mankind, still followed in the track of his affections, giving a lustre
to every object on which they rested. There was, indeed, in his
misanthropy, as in his sorrows, at that period, to the full as much of
fancy as of reality; and even those gallantries and loves in which he at
the same time entangled himself partook equally, as I have endeavoured
to show, of the same imaginative character. Though brought early under
the dominion of the senses, he had been also early rescued from this
thraldom by, in the first place, the satiety such excesses never fail to
produce, and, at no long interval after, by this series of half-fanciful
attachments which, though in their moral consequences to society,
perhaps, still more mischievous, had the varnish at least of refinement
on the surface, and by the novelty and apparent difficulty that invested
them served to keep alive that illusion of imagination from which such
pursuits derive their sole redeeming charm.
With such a mixture, or rather predominance, of the ideal in his loves,
his hates, and his sorrows, the state of his existence at that period,
animated as it was, and kept buoyant, by such a flow of success, must be
acknowledged, even with every deduction for the unpicturesque
associations of a London life, to have been, in a high degree, poetical,
and to have worn round it altogether a sort of halo of romance, which
the events that followed were but too much calculated to dissipate. By
his marriage, and its results, he was again brought back to some of
those bitter realities of which his youth had had a foretaste. Pecuniary
embarrassment--that ordeal, of all others, the most trying to delicacy
and high-mindedness--now beset him with all the indignities that usually
follow in its train; and he was thus rudely schooled into the advantages
of _possessing_ money, when he had hitherto thought but of the generous
pleasure of _dispensing_ it. No stronger proof, indeed, is wanting of
the effect of such difficulties in tempering down even the most
chivalrous pride, than the necessity to which he found himself reduced
in 1816, not only of departing from his resolution never to profit by
the sale of his works, but of accepting a sum of money, for copyright,
from his publisher, which he had for some time persisted in refusing
for himself, and, in the full sincerity of his generous heart, had
destined for others.
The injustice and malice to which he soon after became a victim had an
equally fatal effect in disenchanting the dream of his existence. Those
imaginary, or, at least, retrospective sorrows, in which he had once
loved to indulge, and whose tendency it was, through the medium of his
fancy, to soften and refine his heart, were now exchanged for a host of
actual, ignoble vexations, which it was even more humiliating than
painful to encounter. His misanthropy, instead of being, as heretofore,
a vague and abstract feeling, without any object to light upon, and
losing therefore its acrimony in diffusion, was now, by the hostility he
came in contact with, condensed into individual enmities, and narrowed
into personal resentments; and from the lofty, and, as it appeared to
himself, philosophical luxury of hating mankind in the gross, he was now
brought down to the self-humbling necessity of despising them in detail.
By all these influences, so fatal to enthusiasm of character, and
forming, most of them, indeed, a part of the ordinary process by which
hearts become chilled and hardened in the world, it was impossible but
that some material change must have been effected in a disposition at
once so susceptible and tenacious of impressions. By compelling him to
concentre himself in his own resources and energies, as the only stand
now left against the world's injustice, his enemies but succeeded in
giving to the principle of self-dependence within him a new force and
spring which, however it added to the vigour of his character, could not
fail, by bringing Self so much into action, to impair a little its
amiableness. Among the changes in his disposition, attributable mainly
to this source, may be mentioned that diminished deference to the
opinions and feelings of others which, after this compulsory rally of
all his powers of resistance, he exhibited. Some portion, no doubt, of
this refractoriness may be accounted for by his absence from all those
whose slightest word or look would have done more with him than whole
volumes of correspondence; but by no cause less powerful and revulsive
than the struggle in which he had been committed could a disposition
naturally diffident as his was, and diffident even through all this
excitement, have been driven into the assumption of a tone so
universally defying, and so full, if not of pride in his own pre-eminent
powers, of such a contempt for some of the ablest among his
contemporaries, as almost implied it. It was, in fact, as has been more
than once remarked in these pages, a similar stirring up of all the best
and worst elements of his nature, to that which a like rebound against
injustice had produced in his youth;--though with a difference in point
of force and grandeur, between the two explosions, almost as great as
between the outbreaks of a firework and a volcano.
Another consequence of the spirit of defiance now roused in him, and one
that tended, perhaps, even more fatally than any yet mentioned, to sully
and, for a time, bring down to earth the romance of his character, was
the course of life to which, outrunning even the licence of his youth,
he abandoned himself at Venice. From this, as from his earlier excesses,
the timely warning of disgust soon rescued him; and the connection with
Madame Guiccioli which followed, and which, however much to be
reprehended, had in it all of marriage that his real marriage wanted,
seemed to place, at length, within reach of his affectionate spirit that
union and sympathy for which, through life, it had thirsted. But the
treasure came too late;--the pure poetry of the feeling had vanished;
and those tears he shed so passionately in the garden at Bologna flowed
less, perhaps, from the love which he felt at that moment, than from the
saddening consciousness how differently he could have felt formerly. It
was, indeed, wholly beyond the power, even of an imagination like his,
to go on investing with its own ideal glories a sentiment which,--more
from daring and vanity than from any other impulse,--he had taken such
pains to tarnish and debase in his own eyes. Accordingly, instead of
being able, as once, to elevate and embellish all that interested him,
to make an idol of every passing creature of his fancy, and mistake the
form of love, which he so often conjured up, for its substance, he now
degenerated into the wholly opposite and perverse error of depreciating
and making light of what, intrinsically, he valued, and, as the reader
has seen, throwing slight and mockery upon a tie in which it was evident
some of the best feelings of his nature were wrapped up. That foe to all
enthusiasm and romance, the habit of ridicule, had, in proportion as he
exchanged the illusions for the realities of life, gained further empire
over him; and how far it had, at this time, encroached upon the loftier
and fairer regions of his mind may be seen in the pages of Don
Juan,--that diversified arena, on which the two Genii, good and evil,
that governed his thoughts, hold, with alternate triumph, their
ever-powerful combat.
Even this, too, this vein of mockery,--in the excess to which, at last,
he carried it,--was but another result of the shock his proud mind had
received from those events that had cast him off, branded and
heart-stricken, from country and from home. As he himself touchingly
says,
"And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep."
This laughter,--which, in such temperaments, is the near neighbour of
tears,--served as a diversion to him from more painful vents of
bitterness; and the same philosophical calculation which made the poet
of melancholy, Young, declare that "he preferred laughing at the world
to being angry with it," led Lord Byron also to settle upon the same
conclusion; and to feel, in the misanthropic views he was inclined to
take of mankind, that mirth often saved him the pain of hate.
That, with so many drawbacks upon all generous effusions of sentiment,
he should still have preserved so much of his native tenderness and
ardour as is conspicuous, through all disguises, in his unquestionable
love for Madame Guiccioli, and in the still more undoubted zeal with
which he now entered, heart and soul, into the great cause of human
freedom, wheresoever or by whomsoever asserted[18],--only shows how rich
must have been the original stores of sensibility and enthusiasm which
even a career such as his could so little chill or exhaust. Most
consoling, too, is it to reflect that the few latter years of his life
should have been thus visited with a return of that poetic lustre,
which, though it never had ceased to surround the bard, had but too much
faded away from the character of the man; and that while
Love,--reprehensible as it was, but still Love,--had the credit of
rescuing him from the only errors that disgraced his maturer years, for
Liberty was reserved the proud but mournful triumph of calling the last
stage of his glorious course her own, and lighting him, amidst the
sympathies of the world, to his grave.
Having endeavoured, in this comparison between his present and former
self, to account, by what I consider to be their true causes, for the
new phenomena which his character, at this period, exhibited, I shall
now lay before the reader the Journal by which these remarks were more
immediately suggested, and from which I fear they will be thought to
have too long detained him.
[Footnote 15: "In quest' epoca venne a Ravenna di ritorno da Roma e
Napoli il mio diletto fratello Pietro. Egli era stato prevenuto da dei
nemeci di Lord Byron contro il di lui carattere; molto lo affligeva la
mia intimità con lui, e le mie lettere non avevano riuscito a bene
distruggere la cattiva impressione ricevuta dei detrattori di Lord
Byron. Ma appena lo vidde e lo conobbe egli pure ricevesse quella
impressione che non può essere prodotta da dei pregi esteriori, ma
solamente dall unione di tuttociò che vi è di più bello e di più grande
nel cuore e nella mente dell uomo. Svani ogni sua anteriore prevenzione
contro di Lord Byron, e la conformità della loro idee e dei studii loro
contribuì a stringerli in quella amicizia che non doveva avere fine che
colla loro vita."]
[Footnote 16: A draft of this Address, in his own handwriting, was found
among his papers. He is supposed to have intrusted it to a professed
agent of the Constitutional Government of Naples, who had waited upon
him secretly at Ravenna, and, under the pretence of having been waylaid
and robbed, induced his Lordship to supply him with money for his
return. This man turned out afterwards to have been a spy, and the above
paper, if confided to him, fell most probably into the hands of the
Pontifical Government.]
[Footnote 17: "Un Inglese amico della libertà avendo sentito che i
Napolitani permettono anche agli stranieri di contribuire alia buona
causa, bramerebbe l'onore di vedere accettata la sua offerta di mille
luigi, la quale egli azzarda di fare. Già testimonio oculare non molto
fa della tirannia dei Barbari negli stati da loro occupati nell' Italia,
egli vede con tutto l'entusiasmo di un uomo ben nato la generosa
determinazione dei Napolitani per confermare la loro bene acquistata
indipendenza. Membro della Camera dei Pari della nazione Inglese egli
sarebbe un traditore ai principii che hanno posto sul trono la famiglia
regnante d'Inghilterra se non riconoscesse la bella lezione di bel nuovo
data ai popoli ed ai Re. L'offerta che egli brama di presentare è poca
in se stessa, come bisogna che sia sempre quella di un individuo ad una
nazione, ma egli spera che non sarà l'ultima dalla parte dei suoi
compatriotti. La sua lontananza dalle frontiere, e il sentimento della
sua poca capacità personale di contribuire efficacimente a servire la
nazione gl' impedisce di proporsi come degno della più piccola
commissione che domanda dell' esperienza e del talento. Ma, se come
semplice volontario la sua presenza non fosse un incomodo a quello che
l'accetasse egli riparebbe a qualunque luogo indicato dal Governo
Napolitano, per ubbidire agli ordini e participare ai pericoli del suo
superiore, senza avere altri motivi che quello di dividere il destino di
una brava nazione resistendo alla se dicente Santa Allianza la quale
aggiunge l'ippocrisia al despotismo."]
[Footnote 18: Among his "Detached Thoughts" I find this general passion
for liberty thus strikingly expressed. After saying, in reference to his
own choice of Venice as a place of residence, "I remembered General
Ludlow's domal inscription, 'Omne solum forti patria,' and sat down free
in a country which had been one of slavery for centuries," he adds, "But
there is _no_ freedom, even for _masters_, in the midst of slaves. It
makes my blood boil to see the thing. I sometimes wish that I was the
owner of Africa, to do at once what Wilberforce will do in time, viz.
sweep slavery from her deserts, and look on upon the first dance of
their freedom.
"As to political slavery, so general, it is men's own fault: if they
_will_ be slaves, let them! Yet it is but 'a word and a blow.' See how
England formerly, France, Spain, Portugal, America, Switzerland, freed
themselves! There is no one instance of a long contest in which men did
not triumph over systems. If Tyranny misses her _first_ spring, she is
cowardly as the tiger, and retires to be hunted."]
* * * * *