Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  Within weeks of arriving in Genoa, Byron would begin the twelfth canto of Don Juan with an astonishing paean addressed to the political power of money. His ideas here are ahead of their time for the early nineteenth century. The ‘true lords of Europe’, the poet declares, are not kings, princes, or generals, but bankers:

  Every loan

  Is not a merely speculative hit,

  But seats a nation or upsets a throne.

  …

  Cash rules the grove, and fells it too besides;

  Without cash, camps were thin, and courts were none[.]10

  The idea was still forming. But this, when the time came, would emerge as the cornerstone of Byron's policy for Greece. ‘Cash’ would become the foundation upon which a newly liberated nation would have to be built. These are the words not of the miser, but of what today we would call an economist. Or, as Byron would more jokily put it, using the terms available to him at the time, ‘my best Canto…/ Will turn upon “Political Economy”’.11

  Whether he knew it or not, as he set out from Pisa on 27 September, the embryo was growing.

  Ages of man

  For the journey to Genoa, Trelawny's services had once again been requisitioned to take command of the Bolivar. Byron himself had no thought of travelling that way, even though it would have made for a much easier journey. Medwin reported that, since the loss of Shelley and Williams, Byron ‘has not made one voyage in his yacht…and has taken a disgust to sailing’.12 He arranged for the Hunts to travel by sea. He himself, with the rest of his retinue, set out with the Napoleonic coach, picking up Ruggero Gamba at Lucca as they passed through. The two parties met up half way, at Lerici on the Bay of Spezia.

  This was the nearest town to the Casa Magni, Shelley's last home and the place to which he and Williams had been returning when they were drowned. ‘This place fills me with gloomy and desponding thoughts’, wrote Trelawny to Claire as soon as he arrived there aboard the Bolivar. The others must have felt the same. Next day, after Byron's party arrived, they all went aboard with Trelawny to be shown Shelley's house. Neither Byron nor Hunt had ever been there, while Shelley was alive.13 This was probably the only voyage Byron ever made in the Bolivar. He became ill on board. It is not even certain that they reached their destination. When they returned to Lerici, he was overtaken by what Trelawny described as ‘Spasms’ and Byron, more graphically, as ‘a violent rheumatic and bilious attack – constipation’, and later as ‘a fever and a portentious [sic] Constipation and inflammation’. He was then laid up for four days at the only inn in Lerici, a sorry place from the sound of it. When it was over, he would joke about the indignities to which he had been subjected by an inept local doctor, until he took matters into his own hands and cured himself.14 But he never afterwards referred to the expedition to the Casa Magni.

  To all appearances, Byron was fully restored when the party set out on the next leg of the journey, by sea as far as Sestri. He still would not go with Trelawny in the Bolivar, but chartered another boat instead. As they sailed up the coast, Teresa would recall, half a century later: ‘a cloud of grief passed over his eyes as he gazed at Villa Magni’.15

  Through the winter that followed, and into the spring, Byron's health never quite got over this episode. During the same period, he also lost a great deal of weight. From his letters, it is difficult to make out whether this was caused by his condition or was the result of deliberate dieting. In Genoa, an English doctor attended him ‘every other day’, and attributed his patient's ‘melancholy’ to lack of physical activity.16 This will not have helped. But, in his own mind, the problem went back even further than the episode at Lerici. ‘I never quite recovered that stupid long swim in the broiling Sun and saline Sea of August’, he wrote to Hobhouse in mid-December. The same tale will be repeated, for different recipients, with minor variations until April of the next year.17 Although Byron never mentions the fact, this had been the swim (in fact two swims, on two successive days) while the bodies of Shelley and Williams were being cremated on the shore.

  Physical decline, that winter, was beginning to oppress him. Health was part of it. Another was ageing. For some years now, he had been aware of the signs in himself. In the autumn it seems he acted on a threat he had made light-heartedly in Don Juan, to have a wig made.18 In January, he would pass the traditional midpoint of a man's life, thirty-five – the year ‘in the middle of the way’ in which Dante's Divine Comedy is set. Unlike other birthdays after his thirtieth, this one passed unremarked by Byron on the day. Instead, he brooded on this watershed all winter.

  He had been in Genoa only a fortnight, when he began his new canto of Don Juan, Canto XII (the one that goes on to extol the power of money and bankers):

  Of all the barbarous Middle Ages, that

  Which is the most barbarous is the middle age

  Of man;

  …

  Too old for youth, – too young, at thirty-five,

  To herd with boys, or hoard with good threescore, –

  I wonder people should be left alive[.]19

  The premature death of Shelley, who had always seemed to him the embodiment of youth, and what he saw as the protracted death of his own youth, as health and vigour left him during that winter in Genoa, brought Byron face to face with his old enemy, mortality. What, when a life is over – or all but over – had it all been for?

  The Casa Saluzzo (today called Mongiardino), on the edge of the village of Albaro, high on the hills above Genoa, would be Byron's last home in Italy. Just outside the gates, the spacious Villa Negrotto housed the Hunt family and, separately, the grieving Mary Shelley. In this way, the remnants of Shelley's ‘Pisa circle’ regrouped for a last, half-hearted stand – and the blighted project for The Liberal, despite everything, managed to produce four not inconsiderable issues.

  If life with Teresa and the Gambas was harmonious within the walls of the Casa Saluzzo, the same cannot be said for Byron's other relationships during this winter. He went out of his way to help Mary, paying her to copy his manuscripts and offering the services of his lawyer to help deal with Shelley's estate and family in England, but only succeeded in offending her in her fragile state.20 With the Hunts, things were far worse. Marianne Hunt could not bring herself to acknowledge the existence of Teresa, let alone to be civil to her. The Hunts’ six children, aged between one and thirteen, were allowed to run wild. Byron warned Mary, ‘They are dirtier and more mischievous than Yahoos; what they can't destroy with their filth they will with their fingers.’21 Even before they all left Pisa, Hunt had become sufficiently attuned to Italian ways to recognise the double edge to Byron's generosity in accommodating him and his family in the ground-floor apartments of the Casa Lanfranchi. In Italian households, the ground floor was traditionally used, if not for animals, then for servants or paid retainers, while the owners lived upstairs, on the piano nobile. Although the arrangement at Genoa was less demeaning, and involved a good deal less proximity, Hunt had taken umbrage. As the association continued, the list of Hunt's grievances against his patron lengthened.22

  By the end of February, Byron had made up his mind to extricate himself from The Liberal. At the time, only the first two issues had appeared. Such was the outcry against the new periodical, not least among his own friends, it was easy for Byron to persuade himself that his ‘connection with the work will tend to any thing but its success’.23 Even then, he would continue to support the Hunts financially, and to give Mary what assistance she would accept, for as long as he remained in Genoa.

  Another quarrel that had been simmering for more than a year had also come to a head. A little over a month after arriving in Genoa, Byron sacked John Murray as his publisher. For years, Murray had been not just a publisher but a valued confidant. It would not be quite the end of the friendship, or at least of their correspondence. Byron would continue to write to Murray and sometimes even to confide. But the winter in Genoa saw the end of what had been perhaps the most stable collaborative relationsh
ip of his life.24 From now on, his publisher would be the political Radical, John Hunt, brother of Leigh. Both socially and politically, Byron the poet was finding himself pushed more and more into the radical position that had been Shelley's, but never quite his own.

  The weather was cold and stormy, the Genoese hillside exposed to the elements. Byron became reclusive. Visitors were turned away from the Casa Saluzzo. All that winter, he remained out of sorts: irritable, listless, angry. In December, taking a break from Don Juan, he tried to work off his dissatisfactions by writing political satire. From Genoa, he had been closely following reports of the latest of the congresses at which the conservative Great Powers of Europe periodically came together to uphold their alliance and deliberate the foreign policy issues of the day. This one had begun at Verona on 20 October and continued into December. On the agenda were the continuing revolution against the monarchy in Spain, recent anti-Austrian movements in Italy, and the Greek Revolution.

  During the first half of December, while in Verona the Congress was slowly winding up, Byron weighed in with ‘a poem of about seven hundred and fifty lines…being all on politics &c. &c. &c. and a review of the day in general…a little…stilted and somewhat too full of “epithets of war” and classical & historical allusions’.25 The résumé is Byron's, written just after he sent the poem to Mary at the Villa Negrotto to have a fair copy made. The Age of Bronze has had its supporters in modern times – not least the late leader of the British Labour Party, Michael Foot.26 But Byron's assessment is close to the mark. The poem trumpets its author's long-held and rather broad-brush views on the failure of Napoleon, on the evils of the post-Napoleonic regimes, and on liberal revolution. There is nothing, here, of the subtler, tormenting doubts that had animated the play Marino Faliero two years before. Nothing, either, of the insight that Byron had put into the mouth of Dante, in his poem of 1819, that the cause of ‘nations’ might be different. One liberal revolution, in this poem, sounds much like another:

  On Andes’ and on Athos’ peaks unfurled,

  The self-same standard streams o'er either world[.]27

  For someone who had been thinking, a few months before, of going to take part in one of these conflicts, Byron in this poem shows surprisingly little interest in detail. There is certainly no sense that Greece means any more to its author than any of a dozen liberal causes, drawn from ancient and medieval history as well as modern, and rather indiscriminately lumped together.28

  The Age of Bronze shows Byron ready to pick a fight. But he has no more found his target in the poem than he had in letters in which he wondered about going to South America, Greece – or even Australia.29 Only days after he completed the poem, in January 1823, he was writing once again to Kinnaird about his financial affairs: ‘I wish to have these things settled as I think of going to Greece [or] perhaps to America.’ But there is no other mention of these plans the whole winter long. If Byron was serious, he had yet to do his homework, and the poem shows it. By far the most important political insight of The Age of Bronze, that is new, is carried over from his correspondence of the autumn and winter on the subject of money. In the poem, he amplifies at length the insight he had first begun to develop in Canto XII of Don Juan, about the controlling power of finance in the affairs of states.30

  The Age of Bronze is presented as satire. Its title implies that the present age is a degraded successor to the ages of gold and silver before it. According to the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, later echoed in Latin by Ovid, the men of the age of bronze had destroyed themselves by warfare. The pessimism implied by this choice of title all but outweighs any sense that the revolutions championed in the poem can possibly bring any real good into the world. The whole age is doomed to self-destruction.

  Early in the new year, and before he went back to work on Don Juan, Byron turned his imagination loose by transporting his reader to another of Hesiod's five ages:

  To lands where, save their conscience, none accuse;

  Where all partake the earth without dispute,

  And bread itself is gathered as a fruit;

  Where none contest the fields, the woods, the streams: –

  The Goldless Age, where Gold disturbs no dreams . . .31

  The scene is set among the islands of the South Pacific, imagined by Byron as an amalgamation of Hesiod's idyllic age of gold with the primitive condition of mankind as envisaged by Rousseau half a century before. Hesiod's age of gold was not literally that, but a time of universal harmony and happiness – hence Byron's play on words. Such an age must surely have been ‘goldless’, redeemed from the corrupting love of wealth. The Island, written in January and February 1823, is the last poem of any length that Byron completed.

  In this poem Byron creates the idyllic counterpart to his satire on the present ‘Age of Bronze’. Like most literary golden ages, this one is under threat in its natural state, and is all but unattainable to the modern European. The natives of Otaheite (Tahiti) and the surrounding islands live in a state of nature and perfect harmony, like Hesiod's men of the first age, and like Rousseau's ‘noble savage’. This is a ‘field o'er which promiscuous plenty poured’. An ‘equal land without a lord’, it is the perfect antithesis of the Europe represented at the Congress of Verona. Into this earthly paradise Byron inserts the fugitive mutineers from HMS Bounty, and thereby creates the poem's narrative.32

  The well-known story of the mutiny and its consequences is treated very freely by Byron. Having despatched the hated Captain Bligh in his open boat, the mutineers make their home on an island that Byron calls Toobonai. There they are made welcome by the natives, especially the women. Of the real-life mutineers, Byron retains only the leader, Fletcher Christian. By suppressing his first name, and calling him only ‘Christian’, Byron quietly and provocatively reminds his readers of the Christian allegory by John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress. Needless to say, in the hands of the ‘pilgrim of eternity’, any element of allegory in this poem is not of the expected sort. Christian is one of the poem's two heroes. The other is a younger man, the inexperienced, idealistic, and tender-hearted Torquil.

  The action of the poem is triggered by the appearance of the Royal Navy off Toobonai, in pursuit of the mutineers. An unequal fight ensues, in which the natives make common cause with the pursued and are routed. All take to their canoes, with the Navy after them. Torquil is saved by the native girl he loves, Neuha, who leads him to a submarine cave where they can make love to their hearts’ content in a setting of perfect natural solitude. Meanwhile, the remaining mutineers are hunted down. Christian refuses to surrender and finally throws himself over a cliff to a gory death. By the end of the poem, the alien ships have gone, the mutineers are dead or captured – all except Torquil, who returns with Neuha to be accepted by her people and to live happily ever after in their island paradise.

  The South Pacific setting in this poem is not quite as exotic as it sounds. It has been described as ‘B[yron]'s Greece in Polynesian trappings’.33 Neuha's cave, improbably provisioned ahead of time for love-making and banqueting, is Haidee's cave from Canto II of Don Juan. Indeed, Neuha resembles Haidee very closely, not least in that she takes all the initiatives. There is a further echo of the same episode in Don Juan: the war song sung by the islanders recalls the song sung to entertain Juan and Haidée, ‘The Isles of Greece’, particularly in its refrain.34

  But it had been Shelley, not Byron in Don Juan, who had first imagined an idealised Greek landscape as a primitive earthly paradise or age of gold, and made that the setting for the fulfilment of an idealised love. In ‘Epipsychidion’, Shelley had written:

  It is an isle under Ionian skies,

  Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise,

  And, for the harbours are not safe and good,

  This land would have remained a solitude

  But for some pastoral people native there,

  Who from the Elysian, clear, and golden air

  Draw the last spirit of the age of gold,

  S
imple and spirited; innocent and bold.35

  This is the landscape to which Byron has added only a sprinkling of exotic touches drawn from his reading of travels in the South Pacific, to create the imaginary world of The Island.

  It has been argued, on good evidence, that Byron had also been reading or rereading some of Shelley's poems, and that The Island is, in part, his ‘elegy’ for Shelley.36 On this reading, young Torquil is an imaginative projection of Shelley, as Byron now thought of him. But, if this is so, where is Byron himself in the poem? One answer is that Torquil is not only Shelley. The young mutineer's Scottish childhood and his skill at swimming have been transposed from Byron's own life – as one of his notes to the poem effectively points out.37 So it is not precisely Shelley who is vindicated and given the rare privilege, in a poem by Byron, of finding happiness at the poem's end. Torquil is an idealised version of Shelley plus Byron – of what might have been, if Shelley had learned to swim and if he, Byron, had not also been the poem's other hero, Christian.

  Christian has been well described as ‘the last of the Byronic heroes’. We see him first, quite late in the poem:

  But Christian, of an higher order, stood

  Like an extinct volcano in his mood;

  Silent, and sad, and savage[.]38

  This is after the first battle, when his first thought is for young Torquil, the undeserving victim of what Christian now calls ‘my madness’. It is not often that a hero of Byron's regrets the actions that have brought him to an extreme situation. But Christian does, and this is the reason.