The Greeks had risen against their Turkish masters, a committee of
enthusiastic lovers of liberty had been formed in London to advance the
cause, and this committee had persuaded Byron to act as their agent
in Greece. From the point of view of what the cant of the day calls
publicity, the choice was an excellent one; considered with a harsh and
practical eye, it was absurd. This nervous, temperamental artist with
the habits and posing mannerisms of a regency beau, this traveller who
scarce could walk a hundred yards on his shrunken and deformed feet,
yet hid his pain and weakness in a cloak of attitudes,—surely here was
no man to manage a horde of wily Levantines all trying to advance their
own fortunes, and snatch what they could for themselves of the English
subsidy.
Having accepted the task, Byron turned at once to the practical friend.
“My dear T,” he wrote, “you must have heard that I am going to Greece.
Why do you not come to me? I want your aid, and am exceedingly anxious to
see you.”
War and adventure! Trelawny wasted no time in exchanging the vineyards of
Italy for Grecian mountain slopes and olive trees. Then came a mistake.
He abandoned Byron, and went off to adventure by himself.
Tre had never really liked the noble lord, perhaps because Byron, being
a man of the world, had a clearer understanding than Shelley of Trelawny
the man and his place in life. A stray letter of Claire Clairmont’s,
Byron’s sometime mistress, suggests that Tre secretly cherished
resentment for some sharp remark. Whatever the explanation may be of
Tre’s hidden attitude, the practical man had no intention of wasting his
time with the poet, but left him to his fate. He seems to have forgotten
that he had come to Greece with Byron and at Byron’s invitation and
suggestion.
“I well knew that once on shore, Byron would fall back on his old routine
of dawdling habits, plotting, planning, shilly-shallying and doing
nothing,” he complained. And again, “Could I then longer waste my life
in union with such imbecility, amid such scenes as there are here, when
there is excitement enough to move the dead?”
The angry phrases make the adventurer’s motives clear and perfectly
comprehensible, yet leave the abandonment of the poet a matter for
controversy. Byron had called Tre to his side, Tre had accepted with
alacrity; there was no solemn engagement, no cant about duties and so
on; Trelawny was free to do as he pleased. A meticulous sense of honor
might have detained him, but then the finer shades of honor never plagued
Trelawny.
Crossing from the island of Cephalonia to the mainland, the free-lance
now made his way through the grey mountains and the ravaged country
side to the camp of Odysseus, chieftain of Eastern Greece. Tre thought
him a man after his own heart, and wrote enthusiastically of his new
friend. Of all the feudal leaders of rebellious Greece, this was
the man! The adventurer’s life began to be worth living, there were
ambuscades, descents on villages, attacks on Turkish cavalry, and looting
expeditions. He was fighting for liberty, as Shelley would have wished
him, but he had no illusions about those “pallid slaves,” the newly
liberated Greeks. He quite agreed with Colonel Napier’s famous remark,
“My dear Mr. Trelawny, no one should assume any direction in Greek
affairs ... without the help of a portable gallows.”
Meanwhile in the mud and malaria of Missolonghi, lived the man whom every
feudal chieftain hoped to coax into his hands, the noble Lord Byron,
agent in chief of the Greek committee. At Odysseus’ suggestion, Trelawny
set out for Missolonghi to plead the chieftain’s cause. He arrived there
in the rain, and met dejected stragglers riding away,—the English milord
was dead. The fretful, bewildered satirist had perished like a bird
caught in a net of dirty twine.
On receipt of this news, Tre gathered together the wreckage of Byron’s
entourage of adventurers who had drifted in to fight for the Greeks, and
led those who were worth leading to Odysseus. He had now married Tarsitza
Kamenou, the chieftain’s sister, and had thus become a member of the
family. Presently Odysseus made a kind of truce with the Turks, and
Trelawny retired to hold the chieftain’s stronghold, a romantic cave high
in the crags of Mount Parnassus. It was while he was in this cave that
an English adventurer whom he had befriended tried to assassinate him.
Trelawny was dangerously wounded. “Two musket balls,” he wrote, “fired
at the distance of two paces, struck me and passed through my frame work
and damn near finished me.” With truest chivalry, Tre spared his cowardly
assailant, and rescued him from his Greek associates, who wished to do
unpleasant things.
Events moved fast. Odysseus, falling into the hands of the Greek
loyalists, was adjudged a traitor, and thrown from the Acropolis.
Tarsitza bore a daughter, and, this accomplished, disappeared from the
scene; some say into a convent. With the help of friends in the British
Navy, Tre then escaped from Parnassus to a refuge in the Ionian Isles,
and lingered there two or three years watching events. “I do not wish to
visit England in my present state of poverty,” he wrote.
Then came the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino in ’27, and a
breathing spell of success for the Greeks. In the July of the following
year, the adventurer reached Southampton with his little half-Greek
daughter in his arms.
V
With the return from Greece, the great days of adventure are at an end,
the rest of Trelawny’s long life is the story of the kind of man the
world calls a “character.”
The pause in England was brief, and in 1829 he returned to Italy, took
a house in Florence, and busied himself bringing up his little daughter
Zela, born to him of his Greek wife, and writing his autobiographical
romance. It seems reasonably sure that sometime during these Italian
years he proposed to Mary Shelley, but without success; the lady was
not exactly a person to be an incident in anybody’s life. The pirate,
now a man of forty, then translated his affections to Claire (Jane)
Clairmont whom he had met at Lerici in the romantic days. This love
affair by letter lasted for long years. Tre was still Tre the corsair
and Byronic lover. “Yes, Jane,” he wrote, in a letter full of rhetoric
and misspelling,—“much as endurance has hardened me, I must give you
the consolation of knowing that you have inflicted on me indiscribable
tortures.”...
This friendship had one unfortunate result; the lady hated Byron and his
memory with an all consuming hate, and this poison spread to Trelawny’s
mind, making him cruelly hostile to a man he had never understood.
England again, and then a voyage to the United States, the purchase of
the freedom of a slave, and a swim in the Niagara River. At Niagara
a ferryman muttered that he was all “tuckered out.” “How old are
you?” cried Tre as he scrambled up the bank after his wild swim.
“Thirty-eight,” replied the ferryman. “Then you are not worth a damn,”
shouted the adventurer rudely. “You had better look out for the alms
house!”
English society welcomed him back; Shelley was coming into his own, the
Byron legend had taken root, the “Adventures of a Younger Son” had been a
striking success, and all the English world was anxious to see the last
of the great company. Picturesque, dark and Arabic as ever, and possessed
of great physical strength, Tre moved among the mirrors, the teacups and
the talk, spinning his wild yarns and blazing out in fine rhetorical
damnations of all poppycock and snobbery. After 1846, he retired to Usk
in Monmouthshire, married, and busied himself planting, building and
teaching scientific husbandry.
The seventies found him the last survivor of the past though Byron’s
giant gondolier, the romantic “Tita,” had grown old along with him. The
Hercules had come to England, found a place with the Disraelis, and
married Mrs. Disraeli’s maid.
Trelawny had now become venerable, grown a white beard, and brought up
two sons and a daughter. The little Greek girl had married very happily.
“Our friend Tre” was now a fierce, venerable, wild-eyed, magnificent
old man full of opinionated notions on many subjects. He had taken to
preaching natural living, the virtues of abstemiousness, and the folly of
wearing heavy underwear. To the generation of Rossetti and Burne Jones,
he was “Captain” Trelawny, the fiery ancient who had been a comrade and
friend of the gods.
Joaquin Miller saw him at the Savage Club in London. “On one occasion,”
wrote the Californian, “he came in while a winter storm was raging, and
he must have been wet all through. But he would not drink with us. His
collar was open after the fashion of Walt Whitman, and he had neither
overcoat nor umbrella. He stood with his back to the fire, straight and
strong as a mast, looked about over us in quiet disdain for a while, then
took off his coat, hung it over the back of a chair by the fire, and sat
by and watched it drying till the storm abated.” When Miller went to
visit him, old Tre “insisted in a most mysterious tone of voice that he
had blood from some extinct race of kings in his veins, and that he had
in early days been a famous pirate.” At eighty-one, he met undaunted the
unconquerable enemy. He rests beside Shelley in Rome.
What a life the great, bony, awkward boy had made for himself, what
a quality of courage and defiance it has! The man would have fought
the stars in the courses. Being what he was, he had to see life as a
struggle, and the best of him lies in the way that he accepted every
challenge with a singing joy. The fighting type of human being very often
finds a certain robust satisfaction in life, and so it was with Trelawny.
Whatever he had done, whatever he had been, life had been gloriously
worth living under the sun. And is it not strange that the great
adventure of this life of struggle and strange lands should have centred
about a lamp-lit room in a villa in Italy, and a friendship with the most
fragile and the unworldly being of his time?
_Four_: THOMAS MORTON OF MERRY-MOUNT
_Four_: THOMAS MORTON OF MERRY-MOUNT
I
In a little room built of brown logs, and with casement windows open to
the sun and the sounds of early summer, the pilgrim elders of Plymouth
sat at table discussing a scandal on the coast. The abomination was
amongst them, the sighing after strange flesh, yea, the very Calf of
Horeb! At a plantation on the sylvan shores of the Great Bay of the
Massachusees (for so was Boston Harbor anciently known) there had been
held a scandalous carousal, much “quaffing and drinking of wine and
strong liquors” and “friskings” worthy of the “madd Bacchinalians.”
So Morton of Merry-Mount, the Lord of Misrule, was still at his tricks!
This vagabond lawyer from London, this poet whose verses “tended to
lasciviousness,” this scholar who hurled Latin puns at the saints of the
elect, had gone far enough. “A feast of the Romans goddess Flora” in
their unprofaned and sanctified wilderness! Captain Standish shall bring
this scoffer to the rod, and his immoral merriment shall be stamped upon
and quenched as men quench the embers of a fire. Presently a drum sounds
its note of authority in the Plymouth street, and Standish marches away
on an expedition which is still echoing down New England history.
It is not difficult to imagine the scene in the log-built room, the
sombre elders with their lips drawn thin and judgment in their eyes,
the old, angry phrases of punishment and vengeance coined thousands of
years before under the desert’s pitiless sky, the narrator of the events
leaning forward to tell his unseemly news of the impious merriment, and
in the lulls of quiet and shocked meditation, the trills of a New England
cricket and the neighbourly talk of birds.
Morton of Merry-Mount, first of American defenders of cakes and ale,
song, music and the dance! The tale of how this man from Shakespeare’s
London scandalised the righteous of Massachusetts Bay, fought their
tyrannous abuse of power, and set them by the ears with a defiant
jollification is the first of American comedies. It begins with a
prologue in old England, a manor house in a wooded English park, and the
lamentations of a lady in distress.