Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  Meanwhile, beginning in the immediate aftermath of that summer, Shelley would have no compunction about capitalising on the ascendancy he felt he had gained, though probably without ever divining its cause. It was time, he risked urging in his very first letter, for Byron put behind him the mere popular success he had achieved so far, and devote his talents, instead, to an ‘Epic Poem’ suitable for the age.75 Less than two months later, Shelley would allude with easy familiarity to his own radical opinions on politics back home. Clearly this subject, too, had been part of those elusive conversations in Switzerland: ‘I earnestly hope that, without such an utter overthrow as should leave us the prey of anarchy, and give us illiterate demagogues for masters, a most radical reform of the institutions of England may result from the approaching contest.’76

  The summer of 1816 would prove a turning point. Byron's inchoate ‘war’ against the entire human condition was for the first time, since he had abandoned the House of Lords, touched by the possibility of engagement with a defined cause. By the end of 1816, there can have seemed little likelihood of that ever happening. Byron the rebel had still no great inclination to turn himself into a revolutionary, still less to make common cause with others in the hope of changing the world around him. But, although he probably did not realise it, a start had been made.

  The idea had come to him at the Villa Diodati, sitting up late on the night when the pact to write ghost stories had been conceived, after the others had gone to bed:

  I do believe,

  Though I have found them not, that there may be

  Words which are things…77

  It was an idea he had first tried out, back in 1813, in the same journal in which he had imagined for himself a future career as a political leader.78 Byron could often be disparaging about his own craft. But here he moves towards faith in the poet as a maker: his words have power in the world. It is a cruder, but more immediate and tangible, expression of the claim that would later be made by Shelley, that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.79 The stanza ends with a similarly guarded affirmation about his fellow human beings:

  That two, or one, are almost what they seem, –

  That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.80

  These were the new thoughts that had been aroused in the author of the ‘oriental tales’ by the congenial company of that evening at the Villa Diodati. It was a beginning.

  Part II The road to revolution (1816–1823)

  Chapter 3 Reluctant radical

  ‘Something nobler than to live and die’

  Byron left Switzerland a month after Shelley, Mary, and Claire had departed for England. Once again in the company of Hobhouse, who had now arrived from England, he turned his Napoleonic coach in the opposite direction and headed south across the Alps. From his first sight of Italy, first in Milan, then in Venice, Byron threw himself into Italian intellectual society. His poems were translated, and the translators got into trouble with the Austrian censors. Here, the rulers were not just hated conservatives, as they were in England. They were servants of a foreign monarch, the Habsburg emperor. Byron's experience of political oppression in Milan and Venice was nothing like the dramatic, exotic condition of ‘slavery’ he had witnessed in Ottoman lands. Its victims were people like himself, of a class and education that did not exist beyond the bounds of Christian Europe. These experiences came early on, in the autumn of 1816, and were never forgotten.1

  For the next three years, Byron chose to make his home in Venice. There he wrote a fourth (and as it turned out final) canto of Childe Harold, based on the journey he made, in the spring of 1817, by way of Ferrara and Florence, to Rome. In Venice, he found a new poetic voice, one that perfectly captured both his love of the dissolute lifestyle he experienced there and his sardonic distance from it. This emerges in his first comic poem, Beppo, based on a real anecdote from Venetian life. Beppo was written in the autumn of 1817 and published the following March. For the first time, in this poem, Byron adopts the Italian verse form, ottava rima, and also shows his delight in a range of minor and major Italian poetry of the previous centuries.2 By the summer of 1818, he had embarked on a more ambitious poetic venture, using the same verse form and the same sardonic narrative voice. This was to become the first canto of his epic poem Don Juan.

  Greece, it seemed, had been left far behind. To a visiting American, who tracked him down to his idyllic country retreat on the mainland of the Veneto: ‘His residence in Italy, he said, had given him great pleasure; and spoke of the comparatively small value of his travels in Greece, which, he said, contained not the sixth part of its attractions.’3 What set Byron thinking again about Greece, and his youthful adventures there, was the arrival of Shelley, at three in the afternoon of Sunday, 23 August, 1818, at the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal, where he was now living.4 In all, Shelley would spend a little over twenty days in Venice, spread over the next two months, to the end of October.

  Shelley was now married to Mary, after the suicide of his first wife, Harriet, at the end of 1816. The couple had set out from England in the spring, with Claire and little ‘Alba’, who was now to be delivered to Byron and baptised Allegra. While they were in Venice, the younger of the Shelleys’ two children died – Clara Everina, aged one year and twenty-two days. Against this unhappy private background, the two poets would go riding in the late afternoons on the Lido, the long, narrow island that protects the Venetian lagoon from the sea, and was then uninhabited. As the sun was setting they would be rowed back in Byron's gondola to the Palazzo Mocenigo. There they would talk long into the night.5 Shelley's masterly conversational poem ‘Julian and Maddalo’ includes a distillation of these meetings and the intense debates he held with Byron over those two months.

  Byron read to Shelley the first canto of Don Juan. It was not quite, perhaps, what the younger poet had had in mind, when he had first presumed to direct his new friend's energies towards the epic of the age. Shelley was generous enough, though, to recognise in the new poem ‘a thing in the style of Beppo, but infinitely better’.6 On the other hand, the fourth canto of Childe Harold, that had been published in England since the Shelleys had left, and which Byron also now read to him, Shelley disliked intensely.7 He will not have said so to Byron's face, but he hated its tone of personal defiance, that had troubled him in Manfred too. In this latest canto, Byron seemed to be proposing a cyclical, perhaps a fatalistic, view of history. ‘For Time hath not rebuilt them’, one of Byron's stanzas begins, referring at once to the ruins of Roman Italy and of ancient Greece, ‘but uprear'd / Barbaric dwellings on their shattered site’. Further on, the poet tries to draw a ‘moral of all human tales; / ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past[.]’8 This Shelley saw as defeatism. He refused absolutely to endorse it. The heart of Shelley's quarrel with Byron, as he expressed it in ‘Julian and Maddalo’, came down to this:

  We are assured

  Much may be conquered, much may be endured,

  Of what degrades and crushes us. We know

  That we have power over ourselves to do

  And suffer – what, we know not till we try;

  But something nobler than to live and die[.]9

  Shelley's poem even includes a hint, in its prose preface, as to what that ‘something nobler’ might be, in his friend's case. Count Maddalo, the lightly fictionalised version of Byron, is not only ‘a person of the most consummate genius’. He is ‘capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country’.10 For the purposes of the poem, Byron's determination to go native in Italy (which Shelley deplored) has been turned into a fact: Maddalo is an Italian, of an ancient Venetian family. So while they rode together along the edge of the Adriatic on the Lido Shelley must have been urging Byron to take a hand, directly, in the political revival of Italy. Of the two poets, it was always Shelley who had the makings of the true revolutionary.11 There is no indication that Byron was at all receptive to the idea at the tim
e. Still, a seed had been sown.

  As well as talking politics, the poets revived their older discussions about Greece. It was now that Shelley did his best to persuade his friend to read Plato, though probably without success.12 When Byron next took up his epic poem Don Juan in the aftermath of Shelley's visit, he decided to bring his young hero from his native Spain to Greece. In this way, Byron brings his ‘unplann'd’ epic into contact with the fountain-head of the epic genre, Homer's Odyssey.13

  The idea of linking up his own epic with the world of Homer's heroes may have been prompted, or encouraged, by his recent conversations with Shelley. But Homer's world, for Byron, meant primarily his own, the one that he had experienced on his travels in Greece. The material that makes up most of the next three cantos of Don Juan derives very largely from his memories of those travels. This was when he remembered the folksong about a beautiful girl called Haidee, and amalgamated with it what he remembered of the manuscript poem from Crete, The Shepherdess, that Marmarotouris would have helped him construe at the convent in Athens. In the spontaneous passion that unites the shipwrecked hero with the beautiful Greek girl, far from social constraints, rules, pieties, or even loyalty to past love, Byron relives his own sense of sexual liberation that had come to him in Greece in 1810 and 1811. At the same time, he finds a way to acknowledge his friend Shelley's admiration for the classic beauty of ancient sculpture, and so, briefly, to unite his own and Shelley's very different ideals of Greece:

  And thus they form a group that's quite antique,

  Half naked, loving, natural, and Greek.14

  Canto II of Don Juan was written during December 1818 and January 1819. Its later stages indicate that the idyll and its tragic end, that take up most of the following two cantos, had already begun to take shape in Byron's mind. But nine months would elapse before he returned to the poem, to produce the most famous of all the lines that he ever wrote on the subject of Greece, its past, and its future. What happened during these months had nothing to do with Greece. But it would shape the course of the remainder of his life.

  Byron fell in love. And in the process he found a political cause to which – just possibly – he thought he might be able to commit himself.

  Words and things

  Her name was Teresa (Plate 5a). She was twenty-one years old and had recently become the third wife of a much older man, Count Alessandro Guiccioli. Byron met her after the theatre, at a late-night conversazione, a party for the intellectual and aristocratic elite of Venice, on either the second or the third of April 1819. Teresa's father, Count Ruggero Gamba, despite his aristocratic title and lineage, was a committed republican. Both her own and her husband's families came from Ravenna, the provincial city near the Adriatic coast in Romagna, a part of Italy that belonged at the time to the Papal States. Freedom for Italy from rule by the Pope, the hated Austrians, or their dynastic allies in different parts of the country, was an article of faith for all the Gambas.15

  Plate 5a. Teresa Guiccioli, by E. C. Wood, lithograph published in The Byron Gallery, London, 1838 (National Library of Scotland)

  After that first meeting, Byron and Teresa spent ten days together in Venice, meeting in gondolas and at a ‘little house’ that he used as a place of assignation. Byron claimed to have had hundreds of affairs of this sort, in two and a half years in Venice. That this one was going to be different emerged only after Teresa's husband intervened to take her back to Ravenna. There she became seriously ill after a miscarriage. Byron, for all the bravado of his letters in which he makes light of his feelings, followed her to her home town. To a normally hard-headed correspondent he confessed: ‘I do not know what I should do – if She died – but I ought to blow my brains out – and I hope that I should.’16

  Teresa recovered. Soon, when his horses had arrived from Venice, Byron would go out riding with her in the huge pine forest that separates Ravenna, once a thriving seaport, from the sea. In mid-June, she asked him to write a poem for her, on a favourite subject. He had already published a poem about one great Italian poet, Torquato Tasso. Here in Ravenna lay buried the greatest of them all, Dante Alighieri: ‘his tomb is within fifty yards of my “locanda”, the effigy & tombstone well preserved’, wrote Byron to Hobhouse.17 Would he write a poem for her, on Dante? He agreed at once. The four short cantos that make up The Prophecy of Dante were begun on 18 June 1819, and finished within a month. The poem's publication, in April 1821, would fortuitously coincide with breaking news, in western Europe, of revolution in Greece.18

  The Prophecy of Dante is the most overtly political poem that Byron ever wrote on an Italian theme. Writing to his publisher, John Murray, he explained that its subject was ‘a view of Italy in the ages down to the present’.19 Its strongly polemical tone suggests that what Dante will ultimately prophesy will be nothing less than the awakening of national consciousness and the imminent political liberation of Italy. The poem was never finished according to this plan. By the spring of the following year Byron had become sufficiently involved in the politics of Italian liberation to realise that he would need real gifts of prophecy to guess what might happen next. So he decided to publish the four cantos as they stood, leaving the ‘prophecy’ suspended rather vaguely in the period of the Renaissance.

  Like the earlier heroes of the ‘Turkish tales’, Dante in the second canto turns to politics as a way of relieving a personal sense of injury:

  And hast thou still to bleed,

  Italia? Ah! to me such things foreshown

  With dim sepulchral light bid me forget

  In thy irreparable wrongs my own[.]20

  Canto IV of the Prophecy makes it clear that the cause in which the medieval Dante has learned to subsume his private wrongs is the very modern one of the Italian nation: ‘Who toils for nations may be poor indeed / But free’.21 Canto II had ended with a rousing call to the Italians of the future to avoid ‘Division’ that ‘sows the seeds of woe’ and instead ‘with one deed – Unite!’22 In very similar terms, but in prose and with a practical object, Byron would in future address the leaders of the Greek Revolution. For now, he can have understood little of the political process in Italy. But he did know that Dante, in the early fourteenth century, had prefigured the idea of Italian unity, and that certain passages of the Divine Comedy had been taken to heart by Italians of Teresa's generation and her father's as prophetic of a united Italy.23 Although he seems not yet to have realised the significance of his discovery, Byron had stumbled into one of the most potent ideologies that would come to dominate the next two centuries in Europe: nationalism.24

  The final canto shows Byron, through the persona of Dante, straining for a new role in life:

  For what is poesy but to create

  From overfeeling good or ill; and aim

  At an external life beyond our fate,

  And be the new Prometheus of new men,

  Bestowing fire from heaven . . .25

  By this time, and probably quite recently, Byron had read Frankenstein, with its subtitle The Modern Prometheus. Evidently, Mary's novel impressed him.26 In these lines, Prometheus is, again, at once the fire-bringer and the giver of life. Byron's ‘new’ version of the mythical hero will create, through poetry, a new generation of human beings. Boldly disregarding all the cautionary force that most readers have detected in Mary's tale, the poet of The Prophecy of Dante takes upon himself the mantle of Victor Frankenstein, albeit in a different cause: to become a ‘modern Prometheus’ and create new life – that is, a new generation of minds attuned to a new way of political thinking, that today we call nationalism (Plate 4).

  Plate 4. Prometheus Creating Man in the Presence of Athena, Jean-Simon Berthélemy, 1802, detail, repainted 1826 (Louvre)

  The Prophecy of Dante does not yet suggest exchanging the role of poet for that of the man of action. It is as a poet that Dante speaks. The inconclusive call to the Italian people to a war for political liberation does not yet go beyond words. But, in a telling reminiscence of what he had w
ritten in Childe Harold, at one of the happiest moments at the Villa Diodati three years before, Byron makes Dante invoke ‘days of Old, / When words were things that came to pass’.27 The difficult passage from words to things was once again on his mind. However tentatively, he was again beginning to contemplate the possibility of political action. There was a long way still to be travelled. But the idea was there. Words might yet become things. The poet might yet be empowered to go beyond the confines of his art and become the ‘new Prometheus of new men’.

  October 1819 saw Byron, with Teresa, back in the vicinity of Venice. The setting for a short-lived idyll, before her husband was due to return and reclaim her, was a house on the mainland not far from the Venetian lagoon: the Palladian Villa Foscarini on the river Brenta at La Mira, on the road to Padua.28 This became the background to the idyll that Byron now began to write for his hero Don Juan, whom he had left being tended, after his shipwreck, by Haidee in her island cave, back in January. It was within that idyll, in turn, that Byron chose to embed his passionate lyrical stanzas on ‘the isles of Greece’, that have been read, ever since they were first published in 1821, as a call to the modern Greeks to take up arms against their oppressors. The truth is more complex.

  While he was at La Mira with Teresa, Byron wrote approximately 100 stanzas for the third canto of Don Juan.29 In these stanzas the idyllic situation of the lovers is prolonged, but little described. Juan and Haidée (her name has acquired an acute accent since the previous canto) have forgotten all about her father, the piratical chieftain now named as Lambro. But the reader knows that a vengeful Lambro is on his way home. The lovers are doomed – in much the same way and for the same reason that Byron's current idyll with Teresa at La Mira was doomed.