Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  Finally, whatever Shelley's feelings may have been at the personal level, a consequence of his wife's closeness to Mavrokordatos was that during the first three months of the Greek Revolution he, too, had had the benefit of extensive and privileged information about the progress of events there, updated on an almost daily basis. This information Shelley would soon have the opportunity to share with Byron.

  Reunion in Ravenna

  When Byron rather peremptorily summoned Shelley to visit him in Ravenna, at the end of July, the reason had nothing to do with Greece. Two more urgent matters pressed upon him.

  The first was Allegra, his illegitimate daughter by Claire. To the extent that Byron had kept in touch with Shelley at all after their time together in Venice, it had been to complain whenever Claire pestered him about Allegra. The girl was now four years of age, and at the beginning of March Byron had sent her away to be educated in a convent. It fell to Shelley and Mary to pass on this news to Claire. She wrote at once to Byron, and begged him, instead, to have the child educated in England. Shelley wrote to him too. Shelley had been appalled by the way Teresa Viviani, the ‘Emilia’ of his poem ‘Epipsychidion’, had been kept a virtual prisoner in a Catholic institution while others arranged a loveless marriage for her. In a little more than ten years time, this must surely be Allegra's future, too.

  From that exchange, the idea of a meeting between the two men took root – ‘alone’, as Byron stipulated. But the months went by at Bagni di San Giuliano without any word from Ravenna. Then, suddenly, at the end of July, Byron was in such a hurry for Shelley to visit him that he even offered to pay the expenses for his journey – something which later, if not then, Shelley might have found insulting. Impatiently, not to say imperiously, Byron followed this up a few days later with the briefest of curt notes: ‘D[ea]r S. – I wrote to you last week.’54 Byron need not have worried. By the time this reached Pisa, on 8 August, Shelley was already in Ravenna.

  There was a reason for this urgency. On 10 July, Pietro Gamba, Teresa's brother, had been arrested. Soon after, both Pierino and Ruggero, Teresa's father, had been given notice to leave the Papal States within twenty-four hours. It was part of a round-up of all those who had been implicated in the revolutionary movement that had ended so ignominiously in February.55 This meant that Teresa had to leave Ravenna too. Under the terms of her separation from her husband, if she was not living with her male relatives, it would be her turn to be shut up in a convent. What Byron saw as good for his four-year-old daughter would not do for his mistress. To escape this fate, Teresa, at Byron's insistence, left Ravenna on 25 July. No sooner had she gone, than she began to badger him by letter, writing ‘sheer lunacies’, as he complained to her brother.56 The way he explained it to Shelley, Byron had no appetite to return to his old Venetian habits (of which he knew his friend disapproved). There was nothing for it, then, but for Byron to leave Ravenna himself and, soon, to rejoin Teresa and her family.57 But where was he to go? The Gambas were proposing Switzerland. If he were to leave Italy, what should he do about Allegra? Within a week of Teresa's departure, Byron had despatched his hasty summons to Shelley. To Pierino he explained that the visitor was ‘a relative of Allegra's’, whom he was expecting so as ‘to decide about the child's future’.58

  This was the immediate spur to the meeting. But Byron had made decisions on Allegra's behalf before, without thinking to consult Shelley. There was another reason why Byron urgently needed a meeting with Shelley that summer. In April, the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, had published an adulatory poem in memory of King George III, who had died the previous year. It was called A Vision of Judgement. In his preface to this poem, Southey had seen fit to attack certain unnamed poets

  of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul!

  To this detested ‘school’ of contemporary poetry Southey gave the name ‘Satanic’, because of the writers’ ‘Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety’.59

  Byron was used to attacks of this sort, though he would never grow a thick skin. This one was different, for two reasons. The first was that he was being attacked not as an individual but as one of a ‘school’. Perhaps his friend Tom Moore was implicated too. But the real thrust of the Poet Laureate's attack was directed against Shelley. Like it or not, Byron was being lumped together with a self-proclaimed atheist, the author of Queen Mab and of its still more stridently political ‘Notes’. Whether or not Southey had been the origin of the rumours that linked Byron's name with Shelley's in a so-called ‘league of incest’, as Byron believed, he certainly knew the story and now seemed to allude to it publicly.60 The attack concluded: ‘This evil is political as well as moral, for indeed moral and political evils are inseparably connected.’ Rumour, personal slurs, political radicalism, and religious heterodoxy were forced together, just as unavoidably as Byron's name as a poet was joined implicitly with that of Shelley in the ‘Satanic school’.

  Byron read this tirade, almost certainly, on 7 May.61 He must have realised at once that he was going to have to make his mind up, finally, about Shelley, and take a public position. At the personal level, he knew the allegation of incest to be untrue, at least in the literal sense, since Mary and Claire were not blood relations.62 But he was not at all sure about the nature of Shelley's relations with Claire, a suspicion that has been shared by modern biographers. Byron was capable of being as much shocked by Shelley's private life as Shelley was by Byron's. When the future of Allegra was at stake, and stung to cruelty by Claire's persistence, he could even blame the deaths of the Shelleys’ own children on the irregular lifestyle of a household that included Claire as well as Mary.63 On the other hand, when Claire or Allegra were not involved, Byron's judgement of Shelley was usually generous. That June, he wrote to a friend, without any sign of irony: ‘Shelley is truth itself – and honour itself – notwithstanding his out-of-the-way notions about religion.’64

  To this new dilemma Byron responded in the same way as he had done to others over the course of the past eighteen months. He set about dramatising it in verse. If the British public had been informed that he and Shelley were conspiring together to form a ‘Satanic school’ of poetry, then he, Byron would come up with something to fit the bill. On 16 July, exactly a week after he had finished The Two Foscari, and a fortnight before he summoned Shelley to join him, he began to write a new drama that could truly, and literally, be called ‘satanic’, since the Devil is one its main characters. He called it Cain. It was finished three weeks after Shelley's departure.65

  Cain is one of the most Shelleyan of all Byron's works.66 The knowledge that God forbids to the faithful is granted to Cain by Lucifer. This turns out to be the knowledge, not of Good and Evil, as in Genesis, but of life and death. It is Byron's old theme of mortality. Lucifer in this play at times talks very like Shelley:

  Nothing can

  Quench the mind, if the mind will be itself

  And centre of surrounding things – ’tis made

  To sway.67

  This was the affirmative belief that Shelley's Julian had tried without success to instil in Count Maddalo. Cain is convinced, and falls.

  It looks as though Byron had made up his mind, by the second half of July 1821, to make common cause and be publicly damned along with Shelley. But even once he had embarked on writing Cain, and at the point when the departure of Teresa from Ravenna gave a practical edge to his thinking, he may still have wavered. Then came news of yet another attack published in the British press. Once again Byron's name was linked with Shelley's. According to an article in the Literary Gazette, the ‘Notes’ to Queen Mab, recently re-published in a widely circulated pirated edition, had
been the work not of Shelley, but of Byron.68

  It may have been that article, rather than the question of Allegra's future, that decided him. Or it may have been both together. Before he could go on with the drama, before he could answer Southey in public, before he could decide what to do about Allegra and whether or not to join Teresa and the Gambas in Switzerland or somewhere else, Byron had first to have it out with Shelley. Hence the peremptory summons to Ravenna at the end of July.

  Shelley arrived at the Palazzo Guiccioli in Ravenna at ten o'clock in the evening on Monday 6 August. The two men sat up talking until five the next morning. Byron had prepared a test for Shelley, and lost no time in springing it on him. In Venice, the British consul, Richard Hoppner, and his Swiss-born wife had acted for a time as unofficial guardians of Allegra. The couple had grown fond of the girl, and had also got to know the Shelleys and Claire when they had visited in 1818. A year ago, Hoppner had written to Byron to pass on a series of allegations he had heard from the Shelleys’ former maidservant, Elise. At the time, Byron had been content to allow this letter to reinforce his prejudices against allowing Allegra ever to return to Claire and the influence of the Shelleys. Now, a great deal more was at stake. In defiance of its writer's explicit request, Byron gave Shelley Hoppner's letter to read, and then watched for his reaction.

  According to Elise, who had been with the Shelleys at the time, Claire had had a child by Shelley when she and the Shelleys had been in Naples at the end of 1818. Byron may still have been hoping to wring from Shelley an admission that he, rather than Byron, was the father of Allegra, even though he had long ago seemed to accept the reasons why this could not be so.69 It was not this that shocked Shelley to the core. Elise had told the Hoppners that Shelley was habitually cruel to Mary and beat her, that he had attempted to force an abortion on Claire, and then that he had abandoned Claire's child after it was born. Shelley may or may not have confessed to Byron the truth that lay behind these smears. A child had been born in Naples. Shelley had falsely registered the birth, giving himself and Mary as the parents. His ‘Neapolitan charge’, a girl, had died eighteen months later.70 If he did, he may also have revealed a secret that has eluded all modern biographers, namely the true parentage of Elena Adelaide Shelley. Mary, when at Shelley's request she wrote to Mrs Hoppner, passionately denying the allegations, made no reference to this fact.71 It is possible that Shelley did not, either.

  However frank he may have been with Byron about these matters, Shelley's horrified outrage at the charge of cruelty comes through with ringing candour in the account of the evening he wrote at once for Mary. Byron, observing this face to face, cannot have been less than impressed. Shelley had passed the test, and more.

  A number of consequences followed. Shelley was surprised and delighted to find Byron easily persuaded to change his plans and choose Tuscany as the place of his exile with the Gambas. Bemused by this success, Shelley suddenly found himself charged with writing to Teresa, whom he had never met, to persuade her of the advantages of this new plan. He was also expected to find a house for Byron, his entourage, his horses, and his menagerie in Pisa, as soon as he went back. The only casualty of these arrangements was little Allegra. Shelley did at least take the trouble to visit her in the convent, something that Byron never did. But, despite Shelley's attempt to persuade Byron to bring her with him to Pisa, Allegra remained where she was.

  The drama Cain went forward. Byron's own Vision of Judgment, his brilliant comic parody of Southey's poem, would soon be completed. Within a couple of weeks of Shelley's departure from Ravenna, Byron would add an appendix to The Two Foscari, that he had recently sent to Murray to be published. In this appendix, he explicitly hit back at the preface to A Vision of Judgement, but also implicitly rose to the challenge contained in Southey's diatribe against a ‘Satanic school’. Without naming Shelley either, Byron took the opportunity to dispose of the other allegation he had recently received, that concerned the two poets. Not only was he, Byron, not the author of the ‘Notes’ to Queen Mab: ‘No one knows better than their real author, that his opinions and mine differ materially upon the metaphysical portion of that work; though in common with all who are not blinded by baseness and bigotry, I highly admire the poetry of that and his other publications.’72

  This was the first time that Byron praised Shelley's poetry in public. And if he was at pains to keep his distance from his friend's opinions on matters metaphysical, he went on to ally himself with the radical politics of the ‘Notes’ to Queen Mab. Overcoming the misgivings that he had dramatised in his two Venetian plays, Byron now declared his conviction ‘that a revolution is inevitable’ in England, even as he disclaimed any personal benefit, as an aristocrat, that he could expect from it. The reluctant Radical was edging closer to the position of his radical friend and fellow-poet. In this passage he even uses the plural: ‘Mr Southey accuses us…’.73 Against the grain of his own nature, Byron was beginning to make common cause with others – even in a ‘Satanic’ school of poetry.

  In the same spirit, by the time Shelley left Ravenna, Byron had agreed to join with him and his politically radical friend Leigh Hunt in a new project, that would be at once literary and political. This was to be a periodical called The Liberal. The initial outlay would be provided by Byron. The Liberal would be published in England, but controlled jointly by the three of them from Pisa. After the failure of the Carbonari, here was another way for Byron to attempt to convert ‘words’ into ‘things’ and to contribute directly to political life in England. Again, the willingness to cooperate in a higher interest – however hedged about – is new.

  In tribute to the persuasive powers that had brought these things about, it was now that Byron devised a new nickname for Shelley: ‘the Snake’ or ‘serpent’. The nickname was derived, as Byron explained it, from ‘the Serpent who tempted Eve’, according to a mildly humorous allusion to the story in Goethe's Faust. Shelley was tall and thin, particularly when set beside a short, and at this time rather portly, Byron, and so reminded him of one of the serpent's ‘Nephews – walking about on the tip of his tail’.74 Byron himself termed this a ‘buffoonery’. But it was more than that. After all, the story of the tempter in Paradise, and its fantastical sequel in his own drama Cain, had been preoccupying him all through the time of Shelley's visit. But Shelley either missed this, or misunderstood it. Byron would never know the crippling effect that he was to have on the final year of Shelley's life. But Shelley would have been even more surprised, could he have had any inkling of the true power the devilish ‘Snake’ would come to exercise over Byron's last years, beginning with those ten days in Ravenna.

  ‘We are all Greeks’

  By the time of Shelley's visit to Byron in Ravenna, the Greek Revolution was five months old. Byron – the celebrity who had made his name with poetry written ‘in Greece or of Greece’ – had still made no public statement on what was happening there.75 He had finished The Two Foscari on 9 July, still implicitly jibbing as furiously as Jacopo against the prospect of returning to the ‘hot gales of the horrid Cyclades’ or acknowledging the political and moral ‘duty’ that the new situation in Greece might possibly impose on him.

  It was Shelley who began to winkle him out.

  It turned out that Byron at Ravenna did have access to news from Greece, even if his own letters make no mention of the fact. We have Shelley to thank for the information that ‘We have good rumours of the Greeks here.’76 Byron seems to have tried to dampen his friend's zeal by lending him the novel by Thomas Hope, Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Greek, that had been published two years before. Byron loved this scurrilous, picaresque story of a modern Greek trickster and chameleon, who will try anything to stay alive. He assured Shelley that the thoroughly debased picture it gives of ‘modern Greek manners’ was true to life.77

  But Shelley had an answer to this. Thanks to what Mavrokordatos had told him in Pisa, Shelley had newer information about the Greeks than had been available to the author
of Anastasius:

  the flower of their youth returning to their country from the universities of Italy, Germany, and France, have communicated to their fellow-citizens the latest results of that social perfection of which their ancestors were the original source…The munificence and energy of many of the Greek princes and merchants, directed to the renovation of their country with a spirit and a wisdom which has few examples, is above all praise.78

  Not, perhaps, Shelley's exact words to Byron at Ravenna. But this is how he would write up his rebuttal of Anastasius some two months later, back in Pisa, in the Preface to Hellas.

  Byron's immediate response to Shelley's enthusiasm seems to have been grudging at best. On the day of his guest's departure from Ravenna he was tetchily fuming about the financial consequences for himself, should the revolution in Greece spark a war between Russia and Turkey. ‘There “will be a Turkish war” –’, he wrote to his banker, Douglas Kinnaird, ‘and yet you tell me not to be disturbed “about the funds”?’ And to his publisher: ‘I am in great discomfort about the probable war – and with my damned trustees not getting me out of the funds.’79