The exclamation marks, the bravado, the carefree assumption that the ancient past could be brought back to life (this from the author of Childe Harold and The Giaour), all tell the same tale. All along, this has been not real politics, but only the ‘poetry of politics’. Byron the poet remains a poet. The cause of Italian liberation will not transform him into a man of action. His dramatic hero Sardanapalus, when the moment came, might show true courage, playing at being a king, but it could only ever be a futile gesture. Words are not, after all, not yet, ready to become things.
The complete collapse of the Carbonaro movement in northern Italy came six days later, on 24 February. For a few days longer, Byron kept up his journal, and the last of his hopes. The final defeat of Neapolitan forces came on 7 March, and on the twenty-third, a month after the collapse in the north, Naples was back under the rule of Ferdinand, its Bourbon king, with the Austrian army to enforce it.61 It was all over. Ruefully, Byron summed up his feelings for the benefit of his friend, the Irish poet Tom Moore, quoting an unnamed Teresa: ‘As a very pretty woman said to me a few nights ago, with the tears in her eyes, as she sat at the harpsichord, “Alas! the Italians must now return to making operas.” I fear that and maccaroni are their forte, and “motley their only wear.”’62
From that time on, Byron's loss of interest in the cause of Italian liberation was sudden, total, and permanent.
Caught wrong-footed
If Byron had really been looking for a political cause to embrace that winter and spring, he need not have looked very far beyond the shores of Italy. The day before the final defeat of the liberals in Naples, on 6 March, the standard of revolt against Ottoman rule was raised above the river Pruth, in what is today Romania. The Greek Revolution had begun. A month later, much of what is now Greece was up in arms. All over Europe, during the next few months, liberal opinion rallied to the side of the Greeks, while governments everywhere condemned the uprising. Soon, volunteers were descending from all parts of the continent (though not, yet, from Great Britain).63 Byron might well have felt a twinge of responsibility, as he read of these expeditions. True, he had never in his own person given explicit public support to the idea of a Greek revolution. But popular awareness of the present-day condition of Greece owed a good deal to his own literary fame. The latest cantos of Don Juan were in press – they would be published on 8 August. The lines inserted into the story of Juan and Haidée, ‘The Isles of Greece’, would be there for all to read, topical now in a way that Byron could never have imagined during his idyll with Teresa by the Brenta. How many of the new wave of volunteers would be setting out with copies of Childe Harold or The Giaour tucked into their rucksacks? What was he to say when even Pierino, Teresa's brother, threatened to become one of them, and earnestly exhorted him to go with him?64
By the middle of April, news from Greece was in all the European newspapers. And throughout April and May, Byron was scouring the papers in all the languages he could read – not to find out what was happening in the country that had once meant so much to him, but for reports of the unauthorised stage production of Marino Faliero in London.65 It is not until 20 May that he so much as mentions the Greek Revolution, for the first time, in a surviving letter. Tucked in among other items is this, written to Hobhouse on that day: ‘Our Greek acquaintances are making a fight for it – which must be a dilemma for the Allies – who can neither take their part (as liberals) nor help longing for a leg or a wing & bit of the heart – of Turkey.’ Realpolitik meets the language of the nursery dinner table. Two weeks later, he would add, apparently as an afterthought, in a letter to Moore: ‘The Greeks! what think you? They are my old acquaintances – but what to think I know not. Let us hope howsomever.’66
Byron's throwaway style can be deceptive. When he is laconic it does not necessarily mean that he is indifferent. Events in Greece had caught him unprepared, coming so soon after his disillusion with the political cause of Italy. He writes no less than the truth when he confesses that he does not know what to think about them. For the last five years, he had made his home in Italy. He had embedded himself deeply into Italian society, history, and culture. Nothing, if he could help it, would move him from the comfortable routine he had established with the Gambas in Ravenna. Too bad if there was not, after all, going to be a ‘row’ with the Austrians, in which he could have made common cause with his Italian friends. But he had never been happy with the idea of throwing in his lot with a bunch of ‘ruffians’ like Hobhouse's radical friends in England – and he knew perfectly well that not all of the Carbonari were as well-born or as cultivated as the Gambas. During the opening stages of the Greek Revolution, Byron became more defensive than ever. He said nothing in public, and in private so little that the rare, half-amused, half-grudging asides in his letters only make the surrounding silence the more clamorous. In the spring and summer of 1821, faced with the news from Greece, Byron could neither think nor act. He had gone to ground.
Instead, once again, he wrote a play. Again, he set it in his beloved Venice. He began The Two Foscari on 12 June (a week after the second mention of Greece in a letter), and finished it in a month. Jacopo Foscari, son of the Doge, is on trial for unspecified crimes against the state.67 His father places his civic duty above all ties of sentiment and family, acquiescing even in the judicial use of torture and the eventual sentence of banishment on his son, which together are enough to cause the young man's death. This time, the dramatic conflict that had divided Doge Faliero against himself is played out between two different characters, the older Foscari and his son. But, as the title and the family relationship together imply, these two separate individuals are inseparably and fatally bound together. Both love Venice with a deep passion. Each, by the end, has died for the city he loves. In the case of old Francesco Foscari, the Doge, this means the civic constitution of the state. For him the independent, self-governing Venetian state is, as it was for Byron, the best achievable form of human organisation in an imperfect world. For young Jacopo, whose eulogy on the beauties of his native city provides the play with one of its few lyrical passages, Venice is the site of personal happiness, fulfilment, freedom – something that it also was for Byron.68 The Two Foscari, more even than Marino Faliero or Sardanapalus, pits the private sphere against the public, individual happiness against civic duty and the good of the community.69
In dramatising this conflict, Byron has exaggerated a detail that was already in his sources, and which seems never to have been noticed.70 Young Jacopo has already served time (whether as a tour of duty or as punishment is not made clear) in Venice's overseas possessions in Greece. He recalls with horror
The hot gales of the horrid Cyclades,
Which howl'd about my Candiote dungeon, and
Made my heart sick.71
To be sent back to the colonial outpost of Candia, as Crete was known at the time, will be a fate literally worse than death:
In that accursed isle of slaves, and captives,
And unbelievers, like a stranded wreck
My very soul seem'd mouldering in my bosom,
And piecemeal I shall perish, if remanded.72
Jacopo's principled, lyrical, but also at times rather petulant refusal of his civic duty takes fire, in lines like these, from Byron's own inner conflict during the early summer of 1821.
This was Byron as he began to digest the news that kept arriving from Greece: disillusioned by his foray into political action with the Carbonari, and refusing as stubbornly as his dramatic projection, Jacopo Foscari, to uproot himself from the Italian world he had made his own, still less to acknowledge any political ‘duty’ to stand up for the Revolution that had broken out in the country to which he owed so much.
With the outbreak of revolution in Greece, the author of Childe Harold and the ‘oriental tales’ found himself in a bind from which there was no easy escape. It was not until Byron was visited for a second time by Shelley, this time in Ravenna in August 1821, that his thinking would begin to chan
ge. By that time the Shelleys would have come far closer to the politics of events in Greece than Byron himself was yet ready to do. How that came about, and what effect it had, will be the subjects of the next chapter.
Chapter 4 ‘Prophet of a noble contest’
Italian platonics, Greek passions
While the year 1820 was drawing towards its close, and all Italy waited to see if the summer's revolution in Naples would lead to the ‘row’ with Austria that Byron anticipated, a chance acquaintance brought to the Shelleys’ home in Pisa the most intellectually gifted among the future political leaders of the Greek Revolution.1
Born in 1791, Alexandros Mavrokordatos was a year and a half older than Shelley, three years, almost to the day, younger than Byron. The impression he made on the Shelleys at that first meeting seems never to have been recorded. This is how he struck another young Englishman, who encountered him three years later at Missolonghi:
The ensemble of his head was excessively fine, being very large in proportion to his body; and its bulk was not a little increased by his bushy jet black hair and prodigious whiskers. His thick eye-brows and huge mustachios gave a wild, romantic, expression to his features, which could not but produce a striking effect on a stranger. The expression of his physiognomy was that of a clever, penetrating, ambitious man. His large Asiatic eyes, full of fire and wit, were tempered by an expression of goodness. His looks had not, perhaps, sufficient dignity; for they had a kind of indecision, and timid flutter, which prevented him from looking any one stedfastly [sic] in the face. His stature was much below the usual size and his carriage altogether…unmartial[.]2
The author of that portrait, Julius Millingen, has been unjustly treated by posterity, partly because he was one of the doctors who bled Byron to death, and partly because after the Revolution was over he made his home in Constantinople and for almost forty years served as court physician to a succession of Sultans until his death in 1878.3 But Millingen could be an acute observer, and we will meet him again. What must have astonished the Shelleys most of all about their ‘turbaned friend’, as Shelley soon took to calling him, was his dress. Mavrokordatos had not yet adopted the thick spectacles that he would use to counteract his myopia, or the western frock coat that later, in Greece, would mark him out as westernised. In Pisa he still wore the robes and turban of the Ottoman court that he had fled two years before (Plate 6a).4
Plate 6a. Alexandros Mavrokordatos in Geneva, 1819, lithograph published in Taschenbuch für Freunde der Geschichte des griechischen Volkes älterer und neuerer Zeit (Heidelberg, 1824) (Athens: Gennadius Library)
Mavrokordatos owed the courtesy title ‘prince’ to his uncle, Ioannis Karatzas (Caragià). The family belonged to the Orthodox Christian, Greek-speaking elite of Constantinople known as ‘Phanariots’, after the Phanar district of the city where the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church has its seat. The Phanariots were among the most highly educated subjects of the Sultan. During the preceding centuries, many of them had risen to positions of trust and influence within the empire. Since the early eighteenth century, the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, that make up two-thirds of today's Romania, had been fiefdoms handed out by the Sultan to these Greek families to rule. From 1812 to 1818, Mavrokordatos’ uncle had been hospodar, or prince, of Wallachia, ruling from his semi-feudal court at Bucharest. The young Mavrokordatos had gained political experience working in his uncle's administration, where over six years he had risen to the rank of megas postelnikos, or secretary to the government.
Then, in 1818, Karatzas had fallen foul of the Ottoman authorities. He and his immediate family had to flee Bucharest for their lives. They took refuge in the west, first in Geneva, then in Pisa. There had been for some time a sizeable Greek community in the nearby seaport of Livorno (known to the English as ‘Leghorn’). Pisa had already been chosen as the place of his exile by another high-profile fugitive from Bucharest, the Orthodox Metropolitan (bishop) Ignatios of Hungary and Wallachia, who still retained the title of his former see, although now officially living in retirement. Ignatios was already proving something of a magnet for young Greeks eager to study abroad. Greek students had begun enrolling in ever greater numbers at the university of Pisa, and the Tuscan authorities were keeping a watchful eye on their activities. Ignatios and the Orthodox community he led were at this time suspected (quite rightly) of close and possibly subversive links with Russia.5 Later, the bishop would become an influential, if always somewhat inscrutable, figure behind the scenes of the Greek Revolution (Plate 6b). For several years, Mavrokordatos would continue to look up to Ignatios as a political, rather than a spiritual, mentor.
Plate 6b. Metropolitan Ignatios of Hungary and Wallachia, Pisa, 1816, lithograph by Lassinus Carolus (Athens: Gennadius Library, Scrapbook no. 026,v. 4, p. 9)
At the time when he met the Shelleys, Mavrokordatos had recently turned his political mind to the great conundrum of nineteenth-century geopolitics that would soon become known as the ‘Eastern Question’. How long would the Ottoman empire last? How could the balance of the European powers be maintained during its dissolution and after? These questions Mavrokordatos addressed in a treatise that he wrote in French in 1820, but which remained unpublished during his lifetime. Like Ignatios, Mavrokordatos thought that a new war between Russia and Turkey was likely, if not inevitable. Victory this time would most likely go to Russia. But the Greek population of the empire was a force to be reckoned with, in its own right. Either by their own efforts or with outside help the Greeks would be capable of establishing an ‘empire’ of their own, favourably disposed towards the western powers, and strong enough to guarantee the future ‘political balance of Europe’.6 It was the beginning of a far-reaching vision to which Mavrokordatos would later endeavour to convert the British Foreign Secretary. Later still, it would become Byron's too.
As well as possessing a rare grasp of politics, Mavrokordatos had a prodigious command of languages. At the time the Shelleys met him he was proficient in seven. To those he was about to add English, thanks mainly to Mary. Mavrokordatos’ intellect and the romantic glamour of his appearance and background appealed to each of the Shelleys in different ways and to differing degrees.
According to Thomas Medwin, Shelley's biographer, who was staying with them at the time, Shelley and Mavrokordatos read Paradise Lost and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon together, both in the original. Shelley prided himself on his classical scholarship and soon began to be riled by the claims of an educated native-speaker of the modern language. Like most English classical scholars, Shelley refused to pronounce the ancient language in the modern way. Mavrokordatos, in common with most Greeks to this day, insisted on the pronunciation that came naturally to him. Mavrokordatos tried to interest Shelley in the commentaries by Adamantios Korais on the first four books of the Iliad, that were just then being published in Paris, in Modern Greek. Although Medwin muddles the details, he was surely correct in saying that ‘Shelley's knowledge of the language as at present spoken, was very superficial’. For the rest, we know only that Shelley and Mavrokordatos would sometimes play chess together – badly.7
Shelley's irritation with Mavrokordatos was occasioned by more than arguments about pronunciation or textual criticism. To Claire, in May 1821, he would confide, ‘The Greek Prince comes sometimes, & I reproach my own savage disposition that so agreable [sic] accomplished and aimiable [sic] a person is not more agreable to me.’8 The truth was that the prince was visiting a good deal more frequently than that suggests. But it was not Shelley that he came to see. Mary's journal records meetings on no fewer than twelve days during that month, and sometimes two or three meetings on the same day. Between April and June 1821, Mavrokordatos wrote eighteen letters to Mary, in French, that she preserved. Only half of these letters have ever been published, very imperfectly, in a private publication that is now very rare.9 In a lightly joking tone which he probably borrowed from Mary, in a letter of 31 May, Mavrokordatos would add to his punctiliously o
bserved ‘complimens à Mr Shelley’: ‘I have not had the honour of meeting him for quite some years.’10 No wonder, then, that when a ship arrived at Livorno to convey their new friend to play his part in revolutionary Greece, Shelley's feelings, as he expressed them confidentially to Claire, were that ‘He is a great loss to Mary, and therefore to me – but not otherwise.’11
At some point, probably in January, it was agreed that Mavrokordatos would teach Mary Greek – that is, the ancient language in which her husband was already proficient. In exchange she would teach him English.12 By the middle of March, Mary had taken to indicating what were probably private meetings, by the Greek initials of his name, in lower case. Sometimes these appear on the same day when she also records a meeting with ‘Prince M.’ or some other variant of his name, which she was never very certain how to spell. Before news of the outbreak of the Greek Revolution arrived at the beginning of April to change the rhythm and the nature of their friendship, Mary and Mavrokordatos were enjoying one another's company, and often meeting alone. This is not to say that the relationship was overtly sexual. Nothing in his letters to her suggests that, and on her side it would not have been in character. But Mary's relationship with Mavrokordatos went hand in hand with Shelley's infatuation for the underage daughter of the governor of Pisa, Teresa Viviani. This was the episode, later consigned wearily by Mary to ‘Shelley's Italian platonics’, that gave rise to the poem ‘Epipsychidion’.13 The poem is Shelley's poetic declaration of love for ‘Emilia’, as his fantasy had renamed the sixteen-year-old convent girl whom he and Mary had both befriended.
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