Marmarotouris’ first language was probably Albanian, as was the case with very many inhabitants of the region until the twentieth century.77 Judging from the short poem that he wrote as a present for Byron on his twenty-third birthday, the tutor was confused between the ancient and modern forms of Greek, a terrible speller, and a worse versifier:
Scion ever-blooming of Renownèd Britain
He blossomed like a phoenix over Greece
In Strength, wisdom exceeding all others
As those of Bengal exceed among Pearls;
Now let us bless this glorious day
That makes to rise anew this star.78
Following an old Greek tradition, the first letter of each line spells (more or less) Byron's name: VERONN, and just in case the recipient of this gift failed to notice it, the acrostic is spelt out again in letters down the side.
Probably, Marmarotouris scored more highly on politics than on language or poetry. When Byron wrote on 23 January 1811, ‘To talk, as the Greeks themselves do, of their rising again to their pristine superiority, would be ridiculous’, he was probably responding to something Marmarotouris had said in that day's lesson – or perhaps had been dinning into him, day after day. In this and other notes written at the time, Byron tries hard to do justice to the Greek point of view, as he had glimpsed it at Vostitsa in the Londos household and was now learning it more thoroughly from his tutor.
A year ago, while he had been writing the second canto of Childe Harold, he had lamented Greece's ‘lost Liberty’ and all but urged the subject Greeks to ‘strike the blow’ that would set them free.79 Now he was not so sure: ‘The Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns as heretofore, and God forbid they ever should! but they may be subjects without being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they are free and industrious, and such may Greece be hereafter.’80
He was familiar with the claim that was increasingly at this time being made by educated and partly educated Greeks (like Marmarotouris): that the Greeks of today were the lineal descendants of the Hellenes of old. Among European visitors it was fashionable to scoff at this. Fauvel, for instance, the French consul and rival to Elgin in the plunder of antiquities, was reported by Byron as refusing to believe that a people who were now so debased could possibly be descended from the originators of the world's greatest civilisation. Perhaps exasperated by both sides, Byron wrote:
As to the question of their descent, what can it import whether the Mainotes are the lineal Laconians or not? or the present Athenians as indigenous as the bees of Hymettus, or as the grasshoppers, to which they once likened themselves? What Englishman cares if he be of a Danish, Saxon, Norman, or Trojan blood? or who, except a Welchman, is afflicted with a desire of being descended from Caractacus?81
Byron may not yet have read the first volumes of the History of Greece by William Mitford, that would accompany him on his final voyage to Greece, many years later. But he had already found a position on this vexed topic that appealed to him, not least because he liked to provoke, and this one could be guaranteed to provoke everyone. ‘A Mr Roque’ (the French uncle of Theresa, the ‘maid of Athens’), Hobhouse had reported the previous winter, ‘said that Athenians today were the same canaille [rascals] as those in the times of Miltiades and the other heroes whom they maltreated’. In the ‘Notes’ to Childe Harold, Byron tactfully rephrased this to make it sound more complimentary to the Greeks than it was. Later, when he found the same opinion expressed in Mitford's History, he would adopt it as his own. The ancients, whom so many in his time revered, had been no better than the moderns.82
Byron abandoned his researches without finding the answer to these questions. ‘My own mind is not very well made up as to ye. Greeks’, he would write to Hobhouse while Childe Harold was in press, ‘but I have no patience with the absurd extremes into which their panegyrists & detractors have equally run’.83 Even at the time he died, in and for Greece, it is not clear that Byron had really made his mind up. But long before that it would have become a different question.
A lover's dust
What made it a different question was not anything that happened to him in Greece, but a series of events just after his return to England.
Byron in the spring of 1811 had reached an impasse. From his lawyer, John Hanson, he had learned that financially he faced ruin at home. The problems he had inherited with his title were beyond the lawyer's powers to resolve. His own debts, run up at Cambridge and in London, had made things much worse. Hanson urged him to sell his inherited home, Newstead Abbey. This Byron refused even to consider – in all the languages he knew, including both ancient and modern Greek.84 There was nothing else for it. He had no idea what he would do, once he got there, that would change matters. But on 22 April 1811, he set out to return to England.
Byron returned from his Grand Tour not so much a ‘citizen of the world’, as he liked to think of himself, as in today's terms a relativist.85 It was this that marked out his way of thinking from that of so many of his contemporaries and makes him in some ways seem so modern today. Byron's increasing scepticism about absolute values anticipates late-twentieth-century and twenty-first-century attitudes at many points. On the Greeks, as indeed on his own self, he was capable of simultaneously observing from different points of view, without judging between them. He enjoyed provoking his friends by comparing English society with what he had found in Turkey – not always favourably to the former.86 He could not accept the received consolations of religion. As he wrote to a friend in holy orders, shortly after he came back from Greece, ‘I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another.’ Well aware of the instability of his own will and moods, he saw no refuge, either, in the supposed integrity of the individual personality: ‘what nonsense it is to talk of Soul’, he wrote to the same correspondent, ‘when a cloud makes it melancholy, & wine – mad’.87 These ways of thinking are so familiar today, after more than a century of psychoanalysis, Modernism, and Postmodernism, that it is hard to grasp how disturbing they would have been in the first decades of the nineteenth century, not least to a character as volatile as Byron, still in his early twenties.
With these ideas and this temperament, Byron had nowhere to turn when first his mother and then three young male friends all died within a few months of his return to England. He had been on his way home to Newstead when news reached him that his mother was ill. By the time he arrived, she was dead. Just days later, he learned that Charles Matthews, he of the ‘pl & opt Cs’, had drowned in the River Cam. Another friend from student days, John Wingfield, had died a few months previously, while serving in the Peninsular War. This news, too, reached Byron at the same time. ‘Some curse hangs over me and mine’, he wrote on 7 August, when the experience was still raw.88 But what seems to have crystallised his feelings was none of these, but another death, that of John Edleston, whom he had known as a choirboy at Cambridge and had cherished ever since as an ideal of homoerotic desire.
Edleston had died in May, but it was not until October that the news caught up with Byron. ‘I heard of a death the other day that shocked me more than any of the preceding of one whom I once loved more than I ever loved a living thing’, he wrote on 10 October.89 The phrase ‘whom I once loved’ is telling. Whatever his feelings for the young man had been at Cambridge, they were already in the past. Evidently, Byron had made no attempt to contact Edleston since reaching England in mid-July. Unlike the other recent deaths, this was of someone younger even than himself. With the loss of Edleston (really, of the idea of Edleston), it was youth itself, and his own youthful desires, whose passing Byron found himself forced to face.
Everything that he had written while under the immediate impressions of his first sight of the ruins of ancient Athens came back to him now, with redoubled force. Sitting on a column-drum fallen from the Temple of Olympian Zeus below the Acropolis, he had made the imaginative connectio
n between ‘a nation's sepulchre’ and a human skull, picked out from a burial urn. Revising the poem a year later, either in Athens or on the journey home, he had added the lines that memorably encapsulate this idea:
Cold is the heart, fair Greece! that looks on thee,
Nor feels as lovers o'er the dust they lov'd[.]90
But, even then, there had been something impersonal about it. Not any more. The physical appearance of death was nothing new to Byron: at Newstead he had no fewer than four human skulls in his study (allegedly they were even on occasion pressed into service as drinking cups). In the same spirit he had contemplated the ruins of Athens. But the actual death of someone who had been close to him was something quite different.
During the weeks that followed the news about Edleston, Byron wrote several short poems in the young man's memory, one of them in Latin. He also inserted three new stanzas into his long poem about Greece and its ruins, which by this time was in proof:
Thou too art gone, thou lov'd and lovely one!
Whom youth and youth's affection bound to me;
Who did for me what none beside have done,
Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee.91
So far as is known, Edleston never performed any particular ‘services’ for Byron at Cambridge. Even while he lamented that youthful idol of unfulfilled desire, the poet was thinking also of Nicolo Giraud, who had nursed him back to life in Patras. With Nicolo left behind in Malta, and Edleston dead, Byron was mourning something in himself: the possibility of a fulfilment that he would never (probably) experience in England.
It has often been said that these personal losses, and particularly that of his own ‘youth and youth's affection’ in Edleston, give human depth and immediacy to a poem that is otherwise about exotic places and the traces of antiquity.92 But the equation works the other way, too. From this time on, Byron's memories of Greek antiquities, of the Greek landscape, of places ‘hallowed’ by a past even whose ruins have vanished, will become the gigantic emblem of human mortality. From now on, the question he had argued over with Marmarotouris and his cosmopolitan friends in Athens – the question of a ‘revival’ of ancient Greece in the modern world – will be not just a question of politics in a remote country. It will be a question of the most urgent, pressing, terrible relevance. Could anything, ever, as he had written in Childe Harold while he was in Athens, ‘Restore what Time hath laboured to deface’?93
It was entirely characteristic of Byron (hypersensitive, quick to take offence) to take these experiences of the common condition of humanity as a personal affront. With the addition to Childe Harold of those three stanzas in October 1811, and the sudden success of the poem when it was published the following March, the precocious ‘childe’ of the Grand Tour begins to be transformed into something else. It was time for the ‘byronic hero’ to step forward, and Byron himself to launch his own far-reaching brand of the great artistic movement of the day, Romanticism.94
Byron's ‘war’, in the beginning, was against mortality.
Chapter 2 …and modern monsters
Public fame, ‘private woes’
The field of battle had yet to be determined. Even before his Grand Tour, Byron had been preparing himself to make his mark on British politics in the House of Lords. As he recovered from the shocks of the summer and autumn of 1811, and while Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was being printed by John Murray, he returned to the political offensive. He made his maiden speech to the House on 27 February 1812. A second followed in April. Both speeches addressed liberal causes. The first opposed legislation to introduce capital punishment for the kind of industrial protest that had recently broken out in his home county of Nottinghamshire. The second proposed extending civil rights to Roman Catholics, who were still excluded from full participation in public life in Great Britain.1
Both these speeches were passionate, eloquent, and wholly sincere. Because Byron's liberal position seems self-evident, even unremarkable, today, it takes an effort of imagination to realise that in 1812 both of these were lost causes. Byron will not have imagined for a moment that he would persuade their lordships. He had no idea, at this time, of the practical art of politics. It was enough for him to make an impression. Midway between the dates of his two speeches, on 10 March, Murray published the first two cantos of Childe Harold. Overnight Byron was a celebrity. Probably not coincidentally, his political career in the House of Lords was all but over.
But not his political ambitions. A year and a half into his literary fame, in November 1813, he would confide to the pages of a short-lived journal: ‘To be the first man – not the Dictator – not the Sylla, but the Washington or the Aristides – the leader in talent and truth – is next to Divinity.’ And as for literature, the very next day: ‘Who would write, who had anything better to do?’2 Byron might have put the formalities of the British House of Lords behind him, but not necessarily the stage of world history. There was always a potentially ‘political’ Byron, right from the beginning. But in the years that immediately followed the success of Childe Harold, this was not the path that he chose to follow. Only a few months after these remarks, and while fully immersed in writing the ‘Turkish tales’, he seems to shrug off political engagement altogether – again in the privacy of his journal: ‘by the blessing of indifference, I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments’. The prevalence of any system, he thought, would be sufficient to drive him into support for its opposite. And he concluded: ‘The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another…[A]s to opinions, I don't think politics worth an opinion.’3
The years of the ‘Turkish tales’ were also Byron's ‘years of fame’, the celebrity years, when he was lionised by London society. This was when Lady Caroline Lamb, one of many married women with whom he had affairs, notoriously described him as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’– though here the pot was surely calling the kettle black. The great love of his life at this time seems to have been his half-sister Augusta Leigh. The threat of exposure, either for incest or for nameless crimes committed on his eastern travels, presumably related to his homosexual affair with Giraud, was a real and constant presence, no less in Byron's life than in the fictions he created during these years. Forbidden love is a more-or-less veiled theme in every one of the five tales, and continues into the later Parisina and Manfred, where the exotic setting has been replaced by more-familiar, western backdrops.
Partly to protect a fraying reputation, at the end of 1814, Byron decided to marry. His choice fell on Annabella Milbanke, whose high principles and intelligence he would afterwards mock bitterly when he disparaged her as ‘the princess of parallelograms’ and his ‘moral Clytemnestra’. The marriage was a disaster. It lasted only just over a year. After the birth of a daughter, Ada, in 1815, threatened by bankruptcy and renewed scandal, Byron obtained a formal separation from Annabella. In April 1816, he determined to leave England for good. He never saw his daughter again, though he continued to think of her, not least while he was dying at Missolonghi.
During these years from 1812 to 1816, Greece was eclipsed but not forgotten. Nostalgia for the warmer climate and the freedoms experienced on his travels is a frequent theme in Byron's letters for about a year after his return. Thereafter, it reappears sporadically, but with diminishing frequency and ardour. He seems never altogether to have given up the idea of returning to Greece.4 On the other hand, after 1813, he never sounds quite serious about it either. Late in 1814, while he was waiting for Annabella's reply to his proposal of marriage, he plotted an escape to the east in case she should refuse him. Even during the time of his marriage, he toyed with revisiting Greece – with or without his wife.5
Meanwhile, the ‘Turkish tales’ poured one after another from his pen: The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos in 1813, The Corsair and Lara the year after, The Siege of Corinth in 1816. Byron himself would ten
d to denigrate these fictions as crowd-pleasers, but their boldness of conception has been reclaimed by criticism since the mid-twentieth century.6 All five draw deeply on his experiences in the east. Variously described as ‘Turkish’, ‘Eastern’, or ‘Oriental’, what these tales are not is conspicuously Greek. True, all but Lara are set in Ottoman lands that Byron would have thought of, through their historical associations, as Greek. Landscape and local customs are lovingly portrayed, and often bulked out with notes and anecdotes to remind the reader that all this is based on first-hand observation. But none features a Greek as a main character. Greece, ancient and modern, as Byron had experienced it and thought about it on his travels, in these poems as in his letters seems to tug him strongly only at the beginning, in 1812 and 1813. Thereafter, as the tales progress, the subject drops out of sight. The Byron of the oriental tales is not yet looking for a cause that could be called political. Instead, during these years, he devoted himself to honing his distinctive version of the Romantic rebel, the figure of the solitary, ‘byronic’ hero that would soon become fatally entwined with his own reputation.
It is well known that the heroes of these tales have a long pedigree. It goes back to the first murderer, Cain, in the Book of Genesis, to myths of cosmic disobedience by Satan in the Jewish and Christian traditions and by the titan Prometheus in the Greco-Roman, to the legend of Faust, recently refashioned by Goethe, and to the rebellious heroes of the dramas of Schiller, that Byron knew at second hand.7 Another avatar, closer to the geographical setting and to their creator's own experiences on his travels, is surely the Greek kleft, or his equivalent at sea, the privateer – a role actually assumed, for a time, by both the ‘giaour’ and Selim in Bride, and entirely consistent with the career and actions of Conrad the Corsair in the Aegean (Plates 2 and 3).8 The ‘excess’ that had so excited Byron on his first acquaintance with the Greek landscape and the tales and songs he heard about these klefts marks every one of these fictional heroes too.9 Other ingredients of the mix derive more directly from Byron's own obsessions and experiences: the secret guilt that is hinted at but never revealed; the hero as victim of past wrongs, usually not specified either; forbidden love (with clear echoes of his incest with Augusta in Bride, and pederastic relationship with Giraud in Lara);10 the willed refusal of any form or possibility of redemption.
Byron's War Page 5