But ‘the Snake’ had proved persuasive yet again. In early September, three weeks after Shelley had left him, Byron wrote to Murray to announce his imminent departure for Pisa. The letter is full of grumbles – about the careless printing of the new cantos of Don Juan, and about the revolution that had failed to happen in Italy last winter. But if Byron has washed his hands of the Italian cause once and for all, this letter introduces a new tone. And this may well reflect something of the tenor of his conversations with Shelley. The Italians, he wrote: ‘will rise again some day – for these fools of the Government are blundering – they actually seem to know nothing; for they have arrested & banished many of their own party – & let others escape – who are not their friends. – What thinkst thou of Greece?’80
This is only the third recorded mention by Byron of the Greek Revolution. This one is prompted by a more positive reflection on the failure of the Carbonari. History might still, in the long run, turn out to be on their side – as indeed would prove to be the case, forty years later. Nothing would induce Byron to throw in his lot with that particular cause again, after having been let down so badly, as he saw it, last winter. And so his thoughts turn to Greece.
This was the time when he was putting the finishing touches to the drama Cain, with its bleak but resolute conclusion. A few days later, he was still thinking of Greece: ‘At present I am going into Tuscany – and if the Greek business is not settled soon – shall perhaps go up that way…But my going will depend upon more certain information than is yet to be obtained – things are so disguised there.’81 This comes in one of Byron's rare letters addressed to his estranged wife. This one, probably, was never sent. These occasions bring out his most solemn side. Transposed into a more jocular tone, more suitable to a very different recipient, the poet Tom Moore, the idea appears again, all within the space of a few days. It is from this second letter that we learn of the role of Pierino, who had probably been the first to urge Byron to think of going to Greece, and who eventually would accompany him there:
It is awful work, this love, and prevents all a man's projects of good or glory. I wanted to go to Greece lately (as every thing seems up here) with her [Teresa's] brother, who is a very fine, brave fellow (I have seen him put to the proof), and wild about liberty. But the tears of a woman who has left her husband for a man, and the weakness of one's own heart, are paramount to these projects, and I can hardly indulge them.82
These words were written just over a month after Shelley's departure from Ravenna. During that visit, or in its immediate aftermath, an idea had taken root. But, as often happened with Byron, the impulse did not last long. Already, by the time of his letter to Moore, he had put it behind him, not to be mentioned again for many months to come.83 As September progressed, Byron began to apply himself to the more immediate plans he had laid with Shelley and the Gambas, although he still kept putting them off.
Shelley, on the other hand, returned to Pisa fired up with the project for his most ambitious composition since Prometheus Unbound. Soon, it would take shape as the ‘lyrical drama’ Hellas. In this play, Shelley updates Aeschylus’ The Persians, written to celebrate the Greek victory over the Persian invaders in the battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, so as to comment upon the present conflict in Greece. But with one very significant difference. Aeschylus’ drama had been written and performed eight years after the event. Victory for the Greeks, and their future freedom from Persian rule, were assured before Aeschylus began writing. This was not the case in the Peloponnese in the autumn of 1821, however ‘glorious’ the contest as reported in Pisa. Shelley could have written a propaganda play, simply endorsing what Mavrokordatos had told him and Mary earlier in the year: that in the present struggles of the Morea the ancients were being reborn and history was about to repeat itself. But this was not Shelley's way. As the chorus of Greek captive women expresses it, half-way through:
Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystàlline sea
Of thought and its eternity[.]84
Greece – that is, ancient Greece – is not history, but an idea, the product of thought. By the end of the play, ‘thought’ has triumphed over ‘mutability’, Shelley's term for the unstable, unpredictable flux of history.85 In the drama, the Greeks of 1821 are not victorious. Their revolution is crushed by the Ottomans. It is in quite a different sense that the political claim of Mavrokordatos and the Greeks the Shelleys knew at Pisa is endorsed towards the end, again in the words of the chorus: ‘Greece, which was dead, is arisen!’86 The ultimate triumph of Greece, as Shelley conceives it, will be in the mind. It will come about regardless of the vagaries of real history, and will touch everybody. This is what Shelley means by his famous statement in the Preface, that ‘We are all Greeks.’87 We are all equally the inheritors of an idea that is not bounded by history but exists for all time, and may be endlessly renewed. Greece is no longer fixed in a remote and unredeemable past. Greece, as an idea, has become an aspiration to be realised in the future.
When Byron read Hellas the following April, Mary reported that he ‘seem[ed] pleased with it’.88 Whether or not the poem chimed with the conversations that Byron remembered having with Shelley in Ravenna, it offered him, and anyone else who read it, a way of thinking about the Greek Revolution that excused him from having to think about any particular Greeks, ancient or modern. It also solved Byron's old problem in thinking about a Greek revival: would not a reborn Greece be as unnatural and as deadly as the vampire of contemporary Greek superstition, or as Victor Frankenstein's ingeniously animated ‘Creature’? No, according to Shelley, because Greece is eternal and so can never die.
Byron may not have read the poem very closely. If he did, he would no doubt have been sceptical. Shelley's idea of Greece had never been his. But one thing was clear. In the words of the poem's epigraph, that Shelley left in the original Greek but incorporated, translated, into the Preface: the Greek Revolution was a ‘glorious contest’, and he, Shelley, was its prophet.
Hellas was finished by the end of October. Dutifully, perhaps, on 1 November 1821, Shelley inscribed the dedication to ‘His Excellency Prince Alexander Mavrocordato’ in token of his ‘admiration, sympathy, and friendship’. On the same day, Byron arrived in Pisa.
Chapter 5 Death by water, transfiguration by fire
News from the front
The group of British expatriates that within a few months would gain notoriety as the ‘Pisa circle’ was now almost fully formed.1 Thomas Medwin, Shelley's cousin, who had shared a house with him and Mary the winter before, returned from Rome shortly after Byron's arrival. Medwin's friend from the Indian Army, Edward Williams, with his common-law wife Jane, had been near neighbours and good friends of the Shelleys for most of the past year. Williams had been drawn to Pisa by his admiration for Shelley as a poet. He himself had ambitions as a dramatist. The latest house moves had brought both couples back into the centre of Pisa. The Shelleys were now renting the top floor of Tre Palazzi di Chiesa on the Lung’Arno. The Williamses lived in the flat below them. Almost opposite, across the river, was the Casa Lanfranchi. This building of the fifteenth century had been judged suitably grand for Byron and his large household. All the arrangements at the Tuscan end had been made by Shelley. Teresa, obedient to the terms of her separation from her husband, lodged with her father and brother, a few streets away.
The Irishman John Taaffe had been introduced to the Shelleys at about the same time as Mavrokordatos. In some ways the odd man out in the group, being a staunch Catholic and conservative in his politics, Taaffe had become a regular visitor before Byron's arrival, and was quickly accepted by Byron too.2 Last to arrive, in mid-January, was Edward John Trelawny. ‘Incurable romancer’ or, to those who knew him later in Greece, ‘Lord Byron's jackal’, Trelawny was a Cornishman of wild and exotic appearance who had once served in the Royal Navy as a midshipman.3 He was often supposed to have been the original on which Byron had b
ased the character of Conrad, the Corsair. The reality was the other way round. Ever since he had begun reading Byron's poems in the 1810s, Trelawny had created for himself a personality and a past based on Byron's fictional creations. At his first appearance in Pisa, Trelawny made a strong impression on the rest of the group, and particularly on Mary.4 Only Byron seems to have seen through the facade to detect, or at least to suspect, the fantasist beneath. That would not prevent him from coming to rely on Trelawny, at moments when a ‘jackal’ was called for.
Finally, there was a missing member, an invisible planet whose distant orbit exerted a gravitational pull on those of the ‘circle’ proper. This was Leigh Hunt, former editor of the Examiner, poet and fearless columnist who had earned the friendship of Shelley and the respect of Byron when he had spent two years in Surrey Gaol after libelling the Prince Regent.5 Hunt was the key to the two poets’ plans, hatched in Ravenna, to establish a new radical journal that they would edit together from Pisa. The Liberal was the only practical or tangible rationale for the circle to exist at all. From the beginning, Byron had had the ground floor of the Casa Lanfranchi fitted out to accommodate Hunt, his wife Marianne, and their six small children. A leitmotiv throughout the six or so months that the ‘Pisa circle’ lasted is news, and more often the lack of it, of the Hunts’ ever-expected arrival from England.
While the ‘Pisa circle’ was still coming together, the Shelleys, Williams, and perhaps also Medwin were full of excitement as news continued to come in from Greece. Now that Mavrokordatos had left Pisa, they kept in touch with the Greek community through Georgios Argyropoulos, whose wife Ralou was the daughter of Karatzas, the former hospodar, and Mavrokordatos’ cousin.6 It was Argyropoulos who called at the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa on 11 November, a Sunday, with news of what in hindsight would become one of the most significant events in the whole course of the Greek Revolution.7 On 5 October 1821, the large fortified town of Tripolitsa (today's Tripoli), in the centre of the Peloponnese, had fallen to the Greeks after a prolonged siege. It was a victory of immense strategic importance. It also marked the first widely reported occasion on which the Greeks proved themselves no less capable than their enemies of treachery and indiscriminate slaughter. Despite a guarantee of safe conduct given to the Muslim inhabitants of the town, at least 8,000, including women and children, were massacred. In a gratuitous excess of violence against all who were not Orthodox Christians, the victors turned with equal ferocity on the small Jewish community.8
Once the scale of the savagery at Tripolitsa became known in Europe, it undoubtedly did the Greek cause much harm. On the other hand, in the eyes of most Greeks, at the time and for long afterwards, the Muslim population of Tripolitsa had merely paid a small part of the debt of violence perpetrated against Greek Christians during hundreds of years of slavery. Mary, at least, seems to have had no difficulty in accepting the Greek view. Writing to Maria Gisborne in England a few weeks later, she would brush aside anticipated criticism: ‘Some cruelties have ensued – But the oppressor must in the end buy tyranny with blood – such is the law of necessity.’9 Shelley, too, was still enthusiastic in December, writing to Claire: ‘The news of the Greeks continues to be more & more glorious – It may be said that the Peloponnesus is entirely free, & Mavrocordato has been acting a distinguished part[.]’ He and Mary were even considering moving to Greece to settle there permanently, once the revolution was over.10 At the end of November, Mary had gone back to learning Greek, though with Mavrokordatos gone she now had no one to teach her. Until the end of the year, Greek fever still ran high in the Shelley household.11
The same cannot be said of Byron. No sooner had Shelley heard the news from Tripolitsa, than he arranged to accompany Argyropoulos to the Casa Lanfranchi to introduce him to Byron.12 Byron's response has not been recorded, but the evidence suggests that he reacted quite differently from Shelley. He never mentions the capture of Tripolitsa in a surviving letter. If he ever returned the call or met Argyropoulos again, there is no record of it. During all the time that the ‘Pisa circle’ lasted, there is no indication that Byron took any interest in the Greek exiles living nearby, corresponded with them, or met any of them. For almost a year, in Pisa, Byron lived within a few hundred yards of Metropolitan Ignatios. Later, the bishop would lend his moral authority to Byron's expedition to Greece (though not without caveats). But it seems the two never met.
Something of what Byron felt about the violence at Tripolitsa may perhaps have been carried over into Canto VIII of Don Juan, written the following July. The subject is the horrors of the siege and sack of a Turkish town in an earlier war. The cause of liberty is not forgotten. But it is not uppermost in the poet's mind, in a canto that reads overwhelmingly as a denunciation of the senseless destruction of war.13 A fictional episode from that canto, in which Juan saves the life of a young Turkish girl among the victims, would later be played out in real life when Byron imitated Juan's action, at Missolonghi.14 Magnanimity towards the losers, and a horror of the kind of indiscriminate cruelty that had been in evidence in the sack of Tripolitsa, would distinguish Byron's behaviour and attitudes later, when he arrived in Greece. Now, at the end of 1821, it probably mattered more to Byron that he had actually been to Tripolitsa. He had been treated with respect (if a trifle louchely) by Veli Pasha. It made sense for him to sympathise with the losers.
After reports of the massacre at Tripolitsa had become current, by the end of the year, only the Shelleys still made sporadic efforts to keep in touch with news from Greece. No member of the ‘Pisa circle’ ever mentions the first Provisional Constitution of free Greece, drawn up near the site of the ancient sanctuary of Epidaurus in January 1822. Dismissed by some as a paper exercise, at the time and ever since, this document nonetheless laid the foundations for the kind of democratic nation state that most western supporters, including Byron and the Shelleys, wished to see in Greece. Among the chief architects of this constitution, as Byron would come to appreciate later, had been Mavrokordatos, who was also voted President of the Executive for the first year of its operation. But although the Shelleys had continued to follow Mavrokordatos’ career with evident approbation until the end of 1821, these later developments, that should have interested them both, seem to have made no impression, either on them or on anyone else in their circle.15
Only one event reported from Greece during the first half of 1822 seems to have made any impact at all on Byron and his new friends, and that was muted. The event was the death of Ali Pasha. Since Byron had met him at Tepelena in 1809, the pasha had gone on consolidating his position in northwest Greece and Albania. In 1820, in his old age, Ali had overreached himself, coming out against the Ottoman government in open rebellion. This action probably had the unintended consequence of hastening the outbreak of the Greek Revolution. Inveterate enemy of the Greeks that he was, Ali inadvertently gave great assistance to their cause, as his rebellion tied down Turkish forces elsewhere in the region. Finally, on 24 January 1822, the Sultan's armies entered Ioannina, Ali was executed, and his head sent to be displayed in Constantinople. By 13 March, news of these events had reached Pisa. Recollection of his meetings with Ali moved Byron to retell an anecdote from his travels in Greece that had more to do with his own poem The Giaour than with the pasha. His laconic epitaph on the ‘Mahometan Buonaparte’, flattened by Williams’ plain style, but in essence probably conveyed faithfully, was merely: ‘a brave man but an infamous tyrant’.16
As spring began to turn to summer, the ‘Pisa circle’ cannot have been unaware of one of the most widely reported atrocities of the entire Greek Revolution. Between mid-April and the end of June, the prosperous island of Chios had been razed on the order of the Sultan, in a calculated act of reprisal. Contemporary estimates put the number of Greek dead at 25,000, with 45,000 taken into slavery.17 These acts provoked the outrage even of Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary detested by both Byron and Shelley as the arch-enemy of liberal causes everywhere. An official protest to the Ott
oman government followed. Byron may never have known this, or have chosen to believe it if he did, but it was actually Castlereagh, as a direct result of these events, and not his successor Canning, who first among the representatives of the Great Powers of the day went some way towards recognising the rights of the Greeks as belligerents.18 It might not have been much, when weighed against the horrors that had been perpetrated in Chios, but it was the first step towards an international policy on Greece that Byron would later do his utmost to promote.
Byron's refusal to talk about events in Greece during these months in Pisa is of a piece with his policy – or lack of one – that he had begun at Ravenna before Shelley's visit. Even when the Revolution was a year old, and beyond, Byron was still not ready to take up a public position on a subject so strongly associated with his own reputation as a poet. Still less, among this new circle of friends, was he prepared to reveal his short-lived thoughts from last autumn, of going ‘up that way’ himself. Instead, when he resumed work on Don Juan, at some point between January and April 1822, from then until the end of July he laid his hero's adventures among the Turks.19
In any case, the members of the ‘Pisa circle’, and Byron and Shelley in particular, had matters of their own to preoccupy them during the first half of 1822. The growing tensions between Byron and Shelley, and the underlying as well as more obvious causes of these, need to be understood if one is to make any real sense of what Byron did next.
Fallen angels
A month after Byron's arrival, Mary marvelled that ‘Pisa…has become a little nest of singing birds’. On the surface, at least, all went well for several months more. In January, Shelley reported that he and Byron were ‘constant companions’.20 A routine had quickly become established. Most afternoons the men rode out of Pisa by the Porta alle Piagge to practise pistol shooting at targets in the grounds of a nearby farmhouse. Once a week, in the evening, Byron hosted dinners for the men at the Casa Lanfranchi. Mary, finding herself relegated to the company of Jane and Teresa, missed the intellectual stimulus she had always been used to. For Shelley, too, the new social Byron that emerged on these communal occasions must have come as a shock. Averse as he was, equally, to alcohol and gossip, Shelley soon found evenings at the Lanfranchi a strain: ‘my nerves are generally shaken to pieces by sitting up, contemplating the rest making themselves vats of claret &c. till 3 o’Clock in the morning’, he wrote towards the end of January.21
Byron's War Page 13