Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  It is while the blow is about to fall, and Lambro is waiting in the wings, that Byron stops the action to describe the entertainment that the couple have been enjoying during her father's absence. At the end of a long list of exotic diversions comes a song. Here Byron inserts the sixteen stanzas, in a different metre, that begin, ‘The isles of Greece…’. Best known are the lines:

  The mountains look on Marathon –

  And Marathon looks on the sea;

  And musing there an hour alone,

  I dream'd that Greece might still be free[.]30

  Modern editors and commentators do not take seriously the evidence of Thomas Medwin, who reported two separate conversations with Byron, not long after these cantos had been published, in 1821, in which he claimed that ‘The Isles of Greece’ had been written years before, at the same time as the second canto of Childe Harold.31 Byron may have been deliberately ‘mystifying’ Medwin. But even if the stanzas were entirely new in 1819, Byron was looking back to the days when he had indeed ridden round the bay of Marathon, and to the younger, more impressionable self of that time. What may have triggered this unexpected throwback was news from Greece that will have reached Venice some months before, but may have thrust itself literally under his nose while he was writing, in the form of an article in the October issue of the Edinburgh Review.32

  A delayed and unintended consequence of the arrangements concluded at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815, that had given Great Britain control of the Ionian Islands, was that the mainland town of Parga had to be ceded to Ali Pasha. In April 1819, some 800 Souliot families chose to dig up the bones of their ancestors from beneath their houses and decamp en masse to Corfu rather than submit to their arch-enemy, Ali. Byron had never forgotten those warriors who had rescued him and Hobhouse when they had been shipwrecked not far from Parga in 1809. Among the patriotic verses he inserted into the entertainment for Juan and Haidée at this point, are these:

  On Suli's rock, and Parga's shore,

  Exists the remnant of a line

  Such as Doric mothers bore;

  …

  Trust not for freedom to the Franks [i.e., western Europeans] –

  They have a king who buys and sells…33

  Not the least shocking aspect of the cession of Parga, to liberal sensibilities at the time, was that the British government in Corfu had accepted a substantial sum of money from Ali in return for ceding the territory. In reality, this was paid as compensation for the displaced townspeople.34 But this was not how matters were presented in the Edinburgh Review – hence Byron's jibe that the king of an unnamed England ‘buys and sells’. In these stanzas, as once before in Childe Harold, the Greeks are urged, if they want freedom enough, to trust no outside help but to stand up for themselves.

  But apart from this glancing topical allusion to an event that will have excited Byron's sympathy for the losers, everything else about ‘The Isles of Greece’ is ambivalent.35 For all their tone of revolutionary fervour, it is not even clear whether the stanzas as a whole are an exhortation to action or to fatalism. ‘Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!’ the hearers are three times urged, before the peroration: ‘Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!’36 Are the hearers being urged to throw down the cup, untasted, in an act of defiance, or only to drain it dry and accept their inglorious lot?

  When they are quoted out of context, it is easy to assume the stanzas of ‘The Isles of Greece’ are spoken by Byron, even if he is striking a byronic pose. In fact, the whole inserted poem is part of a performance. The lines are to be imagined as sung by the poet who has been brought on to entertain Haidée and her foreign lover. What we are told about this poet is not calculated to inspire confidence. He is a ‘sad trimmer’, a word which can mean either the assistant of a lowly tradesman, or a turncoat in politics.37 This trimmer, we are told, is a consummate performer who can satisfy an audience of any nation with what it likes to hear. Where he comes from, what his own nationality is, we are not told. The verses themselves are contradictory. At one point he speaks of Greece as ‘my country’, then later addresses the Greeks as ‘you’.38 It is impossible to pin down where this voice is coming from. Even the words we have just been reading turn out to be no more than hypothetical:

  Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung,

  The modern Greek, in tolerable verse[.]39

  Poets in general, we are next told, in a critique as old as Plato, are ‘liars’.40 But then, as happens so often in Don Juan, the voice of the author takes over. He continues, and the tone changes again:

  But words are things, and a small drop of ink,

  Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces

  That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think[.]41

  The thought is familiar from The Prophecy of Dante, and before that from the addition to the third canto of Childe Harold, made on the night of the ghost stories at the Villa Diodati. Here, it leads into a meditation that lasts for several stanzas and develops in a different direction from the expected one. It turns out that Byron is thinking not about words as the motive for action, but rather more subtly, that history is all in the telling. Even the most heroic or inspired action is given meaning only through being memorably told. If it had not been for the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the fame of Achilles, Odysseus, and all the other heroes of the Trojan War would have disappeared along with the traces of the city they had fought over, that Byron had searched for in vain, in the Troad. As he now understood it, a person's glory owes more to what he calls ‘the historian's style’ than to any intrinsic quality of the individual or actual deed he has done. He was once again recalling Homer's ‘fame of men’, the idea of posthumous glory that had motivated the legendary heroes of Homer and the modern-day Greek klefts – though not the heroes of the intervening ‘Turkish tales’.

  The ‘poetry of politics’

  The idyll at La Mira ended at the end of October, with the expected return of Teresa's husband. Now back at the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal, sitting up late at night, while the domestic drama was played out by day, Byron brought the idyll of Juan and Haidée to its violent conclusion.42 Juan is sold into slavery. Haidée dies of grief, taking her unborn foetus with her. Real life was superficially, at least, more civilised, certainly subtler and more surprising. On Christmas Eve, 1819, having already closed up the Palazzo Mocenigo, and with the agreement of both Teresa's father and her husband, Byron moved to Ravenna, there to make his home, for the next two years, bizarrely enough in the house of the man he was cuckolding.

  There was no question, in Catholic Italy, of divorce for Teresa. But strings were pulled and the next best thing achieved. In July 1820, she was granted a legal separation from her husband. It came with a condition: either she must live with her father, Ruggero Gamba, or retire to a convent.43 Byron could never live openly with Teresa, as man and wife. But the papal dispensation had an unintended consequence. From this time on, until his departure for Greece, Byron too would live, if not quite under the paternal roof, then in ever closer proximity to the whole Gamba family. Liked by all the Gambas, he would soon find himself made warmly welcome by these aristocratic republicans.

  Within days of the dispensation allowing the separation, in July 1820, Teresa's brother Pietro returned to Ravenna from studying at Rome. He was two years younger than his sister, so only twenty when Byron first met him. Before long, Byron, too, would be calling him Pierino, as he was known affectionately to his family. Accounts emphasise his physical resemblance to Teresa, his impetuosity, bordering on naivety, and above all his enthusiasm for revolutionary politics. Pierino's devotion to Byron from that time on would be unshakeable – until he too died an early death from fever in the cause of the Greek Revolution. There could well have been an unstated homoerotic element to this relationship on Byron's side.44

  In the circles in which Byron now moved, talk of revolution had been going on since March, when news had reached Italy of a liberal putsch in Spain. King
Ferdinand VII had been forced to restore a liberal constitution. For the time being – indeed until the spring of 1823 – it looked as if the Spanish liberals were going to win the day. Now, in July, with Pierino from Rome came breaking news of another revolution, this time closer to home. In Naples, on 5 July, the restored Bourbon king had also been compelled to accept a constitution and to call a parliament in October. Young Pietro Gamba was wild with excitement. The rebels who had triumphed in Naples all belonged to the secret society of which he and his father Ruggero were also members, the Carbonari.45

  Whether Byron actually ever became a member of the Carbonari is uncertain. Their initiation rituals were based on those of Freemasonry, a movement that had been growing in Europe since the last decades of the previous century. Clandestine meetings in the forest, the storing of arms, and an aura of conspiracy all clearly appealed to Byron. For a time, his admiration for Ruggero and a half-amused, half-romantic attachment to Pierino seem almost to have trumped his feelings for Teresa. Added to this, he found that, in those circles, people looked up to the English milord – or so, at least, the Austrian authorities believed.46

  It was all very exciting. Here, at last, was the possibility of taking an active role, as once he had dreamed of doing. But as the hour for action (possibly) approached, Byron found himself violently torn. On the one side, he had seen enough of the effects of autocratic rule, since he had first come to Italy four years ago, to know that he hated it. His thoughts about England, too, had been turning increasingly belligerent, ever since he heard that unarmed demonstrators had been shot and killed by the militia outside Manchester, the previous August (the event known as the ‘Peterloo Massacre’).47 On the other hand, at the very time when he found himself more and more drawn into the conspiracy of the Carbonari in Ravenna, the idea of radical social reform threw him on to the defensive. Byron, to the end, would remain fiercely loyal to his class.48 To take up arms against the aristocracy would be to make war against his own self.

  He tried to explain this to Hobhouse, who at the time, and to his alarm, was standing for parliament as a Radical Whig. There was a distinction to be drawn, he insisted, one that went back to the French Revolution. With moderate reformers, such as Mirabeau and Lafayette, Byron could sympathise. But Robespierre and Marat had been no better than ‘ruffians’. ‘I do not think the man who would overthrow all laws – should have the benefit of any’, he insisted. And he went on: ‘I protest, not against reform – but my most thorough contempt and abhorrence – of all that I have seen, heard, or heard of the persons calling themselves reformers, radicals, and such other names.’49 The trouble was, these were the very names, with only the difference of language, that were being used by his new friends the Gambas and their like-minded compatriots in Romagna.

  No wonder Byron found it so hard, during 1820, in Ravenna, to throw in his lot wholeheartedly with the cause of Italian liberation. Unable to resolve the conflict for himself, he turned it, instead, into a drama in verse. A month after the revolution in Spain, and within days of Hobhouse's election to the House of Commons, in April he embarked on the tragedy Marino Faliero.50 The subject is taken from an episode in Venetian history that seems to have attracted his attention on his very first days in the city: the revolution against the established political order that the head of state himself had led, in the year 1355, thereby forfeiting both his life and his posthumous reputation.

  Marino Faliero, the way Byron tells it in his play, is the story of a nobleman who joins a revolution against his own social class. Like his own version of Dante, and the enigmatic Lara before him, Byron's Doge resorts to political action as the means to pursue a private grudge by wrapping it up in a public cause.51 Faliero struggles to make this a respectable position. The way he is described by others in the play is transparently a projection of how Byron saw himself in 1820. First and foremost, ‘a child of greatness’, it comes across as a secondary consideration that ‘his mind is liberal’.52

  The drama of Faliero's inner conflict comes to a head near the mid-point of the play. Contemptuously, and gratuitously, the Doge insults his plebeian accomplices, even while he promises to be ruthless in destroying the class to which he belongs. In language that recalls the doomed Manfred, and Lara before him, he cannot even decide whether he is acting of his own free will or not:

  And thou dost well to answer that it was

  ‘My own free will and act’, and yet you err,

  For I will do this!…

  And yet I act no more on my free will,

  Nor on my own feelings – both compel me back;

  But there is hell within me and around,

  And like the demon who believes and trembles

  Must I abhor and do.53

  These lines bear witness to the intensity of the inner pressures that were tearing Byron, too, apart that spring and summer, while he wondered whether, or how far, to throw in his lot with his new friends, the Gambas, and their political hopes for Italy.54

  There was a solution. He had glimpsed it the year before, when he had written The Prophecy of Dante. He had toyed with it teasingly, inconclusively, in the episode of Don Juan that includes ‘The Isles of Greece’. But of this solution there is no sign in the play. What is missing from Marino Faliero, that was present in these poems of 1819, is the new idea of the nation. To have found room for this idea in a play set in fourteenth-century Venice would have been anachronistic. And Byron was proud of his historical accuracy. But the omission must have a deeper cause. It has been said that Marino Faliero looks deliberately backwards. The political resonances of the play have more to do with the England Byron had left behind than with Italy in 1820.55 In Italy, the new struggle was for national liberation, as it could not be in England. In fighting for a nation, which in principle ought to include all social classes, including his own, Byron would be able to honour his commitment to ‘reform’ and ‘liberation’, without tying himself into the self-destructive, and ultimately absurd, bind that in his play costs Faliero his head and does nothing to change the political constitution of Venice. But, in the summer of 1820, Byron could not yet see this.

  There was another reason, too, for holding back from full commitment in 1820. If he was sceptical about his own motives, he was still more so about the Carbonari themselves. Were they even serious? What chance of success did they have? Politically and strategically, they were weak. This was apparent to Byron from the beginning. One of his very first references to taking an active role comes in a letter to Murray from April 1820:

  I shall if permitted by the natives remain to see what will come of it – and perhaps to take a turn with them…in case of business – for I shall think it by far the most interesting spectacle and moment in existence…I…feel more for them as a nation than for any other people in existence – but they want Union – and they want principle – and I doubt their success.56

  Repeatedly through the letters of that year, Byron's favourite word to refer to the hostilities that he believes are imminent is ‘row’.57 There is a schoolboyish air to this bravado. When he jokes grimly about the risks, it is hard to tell whether he is talking about a glorious battlefield or the threat of ambush by a bravo in the pay of Teresa's jealous husband.58 This was not so much politics as a personal vendetta projected on to a grand stage – the scenario, indeed, of so many of Byron's poems and plays.

  The anticlimax came early in the new year, 1821.

  The year in Ravenna began with a succession of snow, thaw, mist, and mud that clogged the forest paths. During its first two months, Byron once again embarked on a journal. The long deferred ‘row’ was finally imminent. Austrian troops were expected to begin crossing the river Po, on their way to crush the constitutionalist rebels in Naples. The local Carbonari were preparing to resist them.

  While tension mounted in the streets outside, Byron began to occupy himself with writing another tragedy. This time, he quarried the theme from the History of Greece by William Mitford, that he had been rerea
ding. Sardanapalus, whose name gives the play its title, according to a Greek story had been the last king of the Assyrians, who abandoned his regal duties to a life of selfish, sensual pleasure. Only when it is too late does he rouse himself to lead his followers in a heroic rearguard action against rebels determined to depose him. Finally, rather than submit, he has himself immolated on a funeral pyre which is a true bonfire of the vanities.

  Like the previous play, this one too projects dilemmas of Byron's own at the time when he was writing it. The debauched Sardanapalus, deaf to the duties of his office, is Byron of the Venice years. In the portrayal of his two women characters, Byron embeds coded allusions to his estranged wife, to Teresa, and to his half-sister Augusta.59 The historical backcloth may be changed, but the dilemma of Sardanapalus is once again between the personal and the political. In imagining himself as the Assyrian king, awakened at the last moment to his true nature and his true role in life, Byron goes further than he ever had, until now, in disavowing his own past career as a poet. But he still does so in a poem. Writing these plays was not political action. It was an alternative to political action.

  On 9 February, Pierino brought news that the Austrian army was expected at the Po in six days’ time. That would be the signal for a general uprising, to prevent the troops from crossing. But the day came and nothing happened. Byron noted in his diary only: ‘Last night finished the first act of Sardanapalus. To-night, or tomorrow, I ought to answer letters.’ By next day, he knew that the ‘Barbarians’, as he called the Austrians, were already across the river. Perhaps they had been forewarned of the plan. Even then, while the fate of the whole movement hung in the balance, and he was still affirming his commitment to it, the language of his journal betrays him: ‘It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object – the very poetry of politics. Only think – a free Italy!!! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus.’60