The following day the same procedure was repeated some miles further north, nearer to Viareggio, in the territory of Lucca. Here, because the site was close to a town, the crowd of onlookers was larger. Some effort was required to keep them at a distance.80 In this way, the bodies, first of Williams, then of Shelley, both badly decomposed, five weeks after death, were exhumed and cremated, the one to be reburied in England, the other in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.
What the devout peasants, soldiers, and well-dressed ladies thought of what they witnessed has not been directly recorded. But Trelawny, who masterminded the entire process and ensured its lasting fame through a series of vivid narratives, here and there allows a trace of the local reactions to peep through. On his way to carry out these obsequies, Trelawny presented his credentials to the provincial governor, who at first ‘hesitated at complying with so unprecedented an order’.81 Trelawny had to persuade him ‘as to its being the custom of our Country, and permitted by our creed &c’. This was stretching the truth for England in 1822. One of his earliest accounts dismisses the unfortunate official as ‘a very weak and superstitious man’. The common soldiers, stoical enough when called upon to exhume the badly decomposed corpses, once the burning began ‘appeared superstitiously fearful [and] had withdrawn themselves as far as possible’.82 Elsewhere, although he tends as a rule to play this down, Trelawny takes a certain quiet pride in the shocking ‘novelty’ of the manner chosen to dispose of the bodies of his friends.83 Not untypical of the general local response to these events will have been the distaste of Teresa. She did her best to dissuade Byron from taking part in an action that was not only contrary to the religion of the country but also, as she correctly predicted, would leave a permanent mark on his health.84
The explanation usually given for the gruesome rituals on the beach, at the time and ever since, is that they were required by local quarantine regulations. Mary and Jane were anxious to have their husbands’ bodies moved for proper burial. At first, it seemed that the authorities were prepared to allow this. But, at the very end of July, almost two weeks after the bodies had been washed ashore, the Health Department intervened. Permission was refused. It was at this point, as Medwin reports, that over the next few days, ‘A consultation took place between Byron, Hunt and Trelawny’ – to decide what to do.85 The intermediary in these negotiations was once again Dawkins, the British consul who had done his best to smooth over the consequences of the Masi affair. Dawkins’ next application to the authorities contained a significant new phrase: he asked to be allowed to move either a body ‘or else its ashes’. Quarantine regulations, it turned out only now, in response to this renewed appeal, did allow for this possibility, in cases where the terrain made the usual practice of burial in quicklime impossible.86 Cremation was not normal practice, as most biographers of the participants have supposed. But it was within the regulations.87 A loophole had been found, one that would satisfy both the widows and the health authorities.
But whose idea was it? Trelawny had been energetic in the search for the bodies, and tireless in his efforts to secure official permission for their removal and reburial.88 Once permission had been granted, Trelawny's practical skills and expertise would be essential to the success of his commission. He had been in India and half-remembered ‘the practice of the Hindus in using a funeral pyre’.89 He organised every detail and oversaw its execution. Trelawny was a natural Romantic. During those weeks he saw a succession of roles for himself. He acted out each of them with tact, ingenuity, and courage. Afterwards, he would relive the whole experience in powerful prose. In all his accounts of the cremations, Trelawny takes credit where it is due, perhaps here and there a little more. But he never claims to have been the originator.90 Hunt, by his own accounts as much as by Trelawny's, went along passively with the whole thing. Of Medwin's triumvirate, Hunt had been closest to Shelley for longest. The shock of his friend's sudden death seems to have left Hunt helpless. And Hunt was a newcomer, still struggling to grasp the essentials of life in a country he barely knew. Mary seems not to have been a party to the discussions. All she said at the time was that she did ‘not dislike’ the solution found.91
That leaves Byron. The idea must have been Byron's. It is consistent with what he had written in the aftermath of his Grand Tour, within days of the death of his mother and several of his friends: ‘I cannot strip the features of those I have known of the fleshly covering even in Idea without a hideous Sensation.’ ‘Surely’, he had concluded then, ‘the Romans did well when they burned the Dead.’92
From the earliest accounts, it is clear that the intention to mimic an ancient rite was there from the beginning. ‘I then procured incense, honey, wine, salt, and sugar to burn with the body’, writes Trelawny, not long after the event.93 Byron had determined that his fellow poet and rival ‘fallen angel’ would leave the world surrounded by the obsequies for a Homeric hero. The requirements of contemporary quarantine laws had been met, but in a manner probably not seen on that shore since antiquity. In this way, Shelley, who had so idealised the ancient Greeks, thanks to Byron and his friends finally became one.
For Byron, this was not mere antiquarianism. Whether or not he planned this consciously, it cannot have escaped him, while the plans for the cremations were going forward, that life was imitating his own art. Near the end of the play Sardanapalus, the hero had given instructions for his own immolation:
Now order here
Faggots, pine-nuts, and wither'd leaves, and such
Things as catch fire and blaze with one sole spark;
Bring cedar, too, and precious drugs, and spices,
And mighty planks, to nourish a tall pile;
Bring frankincense and myrrh, too, for it is
For a great sacrifice I build the pyre[.]94
All these things Trelawny faithfully accomplished to honour Williams and Shelley. But there is more. Sardanapalus’ immolation was perhaps intended to remind the play's readers of the legendary phoenix, renewed by fire. To this idea Byron had very recently returned, in the first part of The Deformed Transformed. As part of the deal with the Stranger, once Arnold has been reincarnated in the body of Achilles, his old deformed body is left behind like a corpse on the ground. The Stranger then performs an incantation over it, invoking fire to revive it so that the devil-stranger himself can enter it:
Fire! assist me to renew
Life in what lies in my view
Stiff and cold!
His resurrection rests with me and you!
One little, marshy spark of flame –
And he again shall seem the same;
But I his spirit's place shall hold!95
Behind these passages and the real-life rituals on the beach lies the myth of Prometheus – at once benefactor of mankind through the gift of fire and creator of life. For Byron, too, the bizarre obsequies would become a rite of passage.
There is only one surviving letter in which Byron gives any account of the cremations. It was written eleven days afterwards. In it, he approaches the subject in a curious way:
The other day at Viareggio, I thought proper to swim off to my schooner (the Bolivar) in the offing, and thence to shore again – about three miles, or better, in all. As it was at mid-day, under a broiling sun, the consequence has been a feverish attack, and my whole skin's coming off, after going through the process of one large continuous blister, raised by the sun and sea together. I have suffered much pain; not being able to lie on my back, or even side; for my shoulders and arms were equally St. Bartholomewed. But it is over, – and I have got a new skin, and am as glossy as a snake in its new suit.
We have been burning the bodies of Shelley and Williams…96
A very brief account of the cremations follows. Before he even mentions the most important event, Byron has described his own experience of burning: the blistering and removal of his skin, the pain that followed, which he compares to being flayed alive (the fate of St Bartholomew). While Shelley's body is bein
g consumed on the pyre, Byron submits his own to an extreme ordeal in the same two elements that had brought about the final transformation of Shelley: water and fire. What emerges from the experience is a new outer man, ‘as glossy as a snake in its new suit’. Among the ‘Pisa circle’, ‘the Snake’ had always been Shelley. Byron, at the end of August, with the cremations and his own experience of being ‘St. Bartholomewed’ behind him, felt himself ready to take on the mantle of the man he had been playfully casting as his own doppelgänger in The Deformed Transformed. He may even have said something of this to Trelawny, who concluded his eulogy of Shelley, intended for publication in The Liberal a few months later, with the words, later deleted, ‘The “Pilgrim of Eternity” [Byron] has declared his intention of doing that justice to his [Shelley's] character & genius, which his long intimacy and great talent can so nobly execute.’97
Trelawny thought Byron had in mind a poem, an equivalent, perhaps, to Shelley's epitaph for Keats, ‘Adonais’. But Byron was contemplating something else entirely.
Byron's usual response to a crisis was to write more furiously than ever. Already, since the death of Allegra, he had been working on the resumed Don Juan at a terrific pace. During July, beginning in the aftermath of Shelley's death, he wrote the whole of Canto VIII. At the start of the week leading up to the cremations, as he reported to Moore, he was ‘hovering on the brink of another (the ninth)’.98
In its original form Canto IX began with an extended passage that has been recognised as Byron's undeclared epitaph on Shelley.99 ‘Death laughs’, the passage begins, and the words are repeated with the effect of a refrain or an incantation through three stanzas. This macabre meditation on the physical signs of death as a cruel mockery of life must surely have been written in the immediate aftermath of the exhumation of the corpses of Williams and Shelley on the fifteenth and sixteenth. The hideous condition of his friends’ bodies, from the action of the sea and the lime in which they had been buried, comes through clearly in the lines that insist on death smiling (the emphasis is Byron's):
He strips from man that mantle (far more dear
Than even the tailor's) his incarnate skin,
White, black, or copper – the dead bones will grin.100
Byron is still smarting from his own ordeal by sunburn. As he writes these lines his own flesh is peeling from him. In verse, he identifies himself with the condition of the corpse, just as he would do again in prose, a few days later, in the letter to Moore already quoted.
The upshot of this meditation is a profound melancholy. Then the mood changes abruptly. The snake has sloughed off its old, burnt skin. This is the new Byron that suddenly bursts out:
And I will war, at least in words (and – should
My chance so happen – deeds) with all who war
With Thought[.]
He goes on to announce his ‘downright detestation / Of every despotism in every nation’, and then to articulate the newfound political principle that he had several times glimpsed, but never until now been able to come to terms with, since at least his Carbonaro days:
It is not that I adulate the people;
Without me, there are Demagogues enough…
I wish men to be free
As much from mobs as kings – from you as me.101
Byron's tribute to Shelley, finally, will be not a poem, but a war. His will be a tribute not of words but (‘should…chance so happen’) of deeds.
By the time he wrote his one and only account of what had taken place at Viareggio, Byron was already turning over in his mind ways and means. The same letter to Moore ends: ‘I had, and still have, thought of South America, but am fluctuating between it and Greece…where I shall probably take a part of some sort.’ Like Arnold reincarnated in the body of Achilles, Byron is once again thinking of covering himself with ‘glory’. It is the first time he has mentioned the revolution in Greece since leaving Ravenna for Pisa almost a year before.
Against the enemies of ‘Thought’. For a new kind of freedom, that will somehow be more than just a change of masters. This, from now on, will become the essence of Byron's war.
Chapter 6 The deformed transformed
A plan in embryo
There was nothing now to keep Byron in Pisa. By the beginning of September 1822, he was making plans to move his whole establishment to Genoa. This included, as well as the eight Hunts: the menagerie, several horses, the Napoleonic coach, and three geese, bought to be consumed at Michaelmas but destined in the event to last longer in Genoa than did Byron himself. Mary Shelley had elected to stay on in Italy for a time and was there already. So was Pierino, who had found a mansion huge enough that Byron could live in one part of it and Teresa and her relatives in another, thus satisfying the strict terms laid down by the Pope.1
Byron was impatient to be gone. But, as often happened, he dragged his feet. During his last weeks at Pisa, he confided to friends a little more of the scheme that he had touched on at the end of his letter to Moore, in which he had described the cremations of his friends. To Medwin, he called it ‘a plan I have in embryo. I have formed a strong wish to join the Greeks.’ And, according to Trelawny, it was now, and not before, that ‘his thoughts veered round to his early love, the Isles of Greece, and the revolution in that country – for before that time he never dreamt of donning the warrior's plume, though the peace-loving Shelley had suggested and I urged it’.2 Trelawny's is the only direct evidence we have that Shelley, while he was alive, had actually urged this course upon Byron. It was only now, with Shelley dead and posthumously made into an ancient Hellene, that Byron was – perhaps – beginning to take the idea seriously.
He was certainly beginning to talk that way. Hunt, who ought to have been in his confidence but it seems was not, would wonder afterwards if his patron ‘had already made arrangements for going’ to Greece, at the time he left Pisa for Genoa. And at least one person who should not have been, the Cavaliere Luigi Torelli, who was reporting on Byron's activities to the Tuscan authorities, was in a position to report: ‘Mylord has expressed his intention of not remaining in Genoa but of going on to Athens in order to make himself adored by the Greeks.’3 Trelawny, who knew him better, was not convinced. Recognising what he thought was another short-lived whim, he says that at the time he ‘took little heed’.
Then, on 15 September, Hobhouse arrived in Pisa. Accompanying his sisters on the Grand Tour of Italy, Hobhouse was bound to remind Byron of all that they had experienced together in Greece, on their own version of the Tour. For the next six days, Hobhouse spent a large part of each day with Byron. To judge from both men's accounts, and from Teresa's, there was something bitter-sweet about this meeting, after a gap of four years.4 Too much had changed, for both of them.
Hobhouse's visit has been credited with inspiring Byron's decision to depart for Greece ten months later.5 If anything, it probably had the opposite effect. Hobhouse was no visionary like Shelley. Now a Member of Parliament for the Radical Whigs, he took a serious, politician's interest in Greek affairs, and may have hoped that Byron would too. But if the two men did talk about Greece, no trace of their conversation remains, either in Hobhouse's diary or in Byron's letters. What Hobhouse does record is a reunion with a patriotic young Greek lawyer from Zante, Niccolò Carvelà (Karvelas), who had recently come to live in Pisa. He and Byron had met Carvelà, with his brother Francesco, in Switzerland and at Milan, six years before.6 But it was on Hobhouse, not on Byron, that Carvelà called, with news of Greek affairs. There is nothing in Hobhouse's account to suggest that Byron was present during their conversation, and no mention of Carvelà or Greece in Byron's surviving letters from this time.7 Later, when Byron urgently needed information about Greek events, Carvelà would be one of the first to whom he would turn. But that was still several months in the future. At Pisa it seems likely that he still held himself aloof, as he had done earlier from Shelley's Greek friends.
That Byron did have some larger scheme in mind, while he was preparing to
leave Pisa for Genoa, is evident not from anything he said about Greece, but from what he wrote to his friend and banker, Douglas Kinnaird, on quite a different subject. That subject was money. Since the death of Lady Noel, the mother of his estranged wife, in January 1822, Byron had been corresponding furiously on the subject of the considerable fortune that would now be his. The letters to Kinnaird become extremely frequent at this time. There are eleven of them written during September up to the eve of his departure from Pisa on the twenty-seventh. All of them are to some extent about money.
This is a new preoccupation for Byron. Friends noted it at the time. Biographers have done their best to explain it ever since. It is not, perhaps, so surprising, if we remember that at the time when Byron had been living with his wife the bailiffs had been camping in their house – a circumstance he chose to recall in other letters written during this same month.8 Byron has often been accused of avarice during the last two years of his life. With a varying mixture of apology and bravado he would acknowledge as much in himself. But, right from the beginning, there was more to it than that. As he explained it to Kinnaird: ‘In short – Doug. – the longer I live – the more I perceive that Money (honestly come by) is the Philosopher's Stone…[M]y avarice – or cupidity – is not selfish…I want to get a sum together to go amongst the Greeks or [South] Americans – and do some good.’9
Byron's War Page 16