REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES—REMOVAL FROM RAVENNA TO PISA

The origin of Byron’s revolutionary opinions is wrapped in mystery. He certainly was not born a revolutionist; there is no record of his becoming one for definite reasons at any definite moment of time; and if it were alleged that he assumed revolutionism for the sake of swagger and effect, or had it thrust upon him by the household of the Gambas, the propositions, though pretty obviously untrue, could not very easily be disproved.

What he chiefly lacked in the character of revolutionist was the fine enthusiasm of the men of 1789, their pathetic belief in the perfectibility of human nature, and their zeal for equality and fraternity as things of equal account with liberty. His view of human nature was thoroughly cynical, and he was far too proudly conscious of his own place in the social hierarchy to aspire to be merely citizen Byron in a world from which all honorific distinctions had disappeared. Indeed we find him, in some of his letters, actually gibing at Hobhouse because his activities as a political agitator have brought him into contact with ill-bred associates; and that, as will be admitted, is a strange tone for a sincere revolutionist to take.Nor was Byron ever an argumentative revolutionist of the school of the philosophic Radicals. Neither in his letters nor in his other writings does he give reasons for his revolutionary faith. He presents himself there as one who is a revolutionist as a matter of course—one to whom it could not possibly occur to be anything but a revolutionist. As for his motives, he assumes that we know them, or that they do not concern us, or else he leaves us to guess them, or to infer them from our general knowledge of his character and circumstances.

Apparently, since guess-work is our resource, he was a Revolutionist in Italy for much the same reason for which he had been a protector of small boys at Harrow. The same generous instinct which had made him hate bullies then made him hate oppressors now; and he hated them the more because he perceived that oppression was buttressed by hypocrisy. In particular he saw the Italians bullied by the Austrians in the name of the so-called Holy Alliance—that unpleasant group of potentates whose fanaticism was exploited by the cunning of Metternich, and who invoked the name of God and the principle of divine right for the crushing of national aspirations. That was enough to set him now sighing for “a forty-parson power” to “snuffle the praises of the Holy Three,” now proposing that the same Three should be “shipped off to Senegal,” and to enlist his sympathies on the Italian side. The rest depended upon circumstances; and the determining circumstances were that he was an active man on a loose end, and that his lot was cast among conspirators.

He was ready to conspire because of the trend of his sympathies; he actually conspired, in the first instance, partly to please the Gambas, and partly because he was bored; and his appetite grew with what it fed upon. It was not merely that conspiracy furnished him with occupation—the cause at the same time furnished him with an ideal, of which he was beginning to feel the need. Living for himself he had made a mess of his life; and his relations with Madame Guiccioli did not conceal the fact from him. His love for her was a pastime, and no more an end in itself than his attachment to the draper’s wife at Venice. But he felt the need of some end in itself, unrelated to his personal concerns, to round off his life, give it unity and consistency, and make it a progressive drama instead of a mere series of unrelated incidents; and he found that end in espousing the cause of oppressed nationalities.

No doubt there were other influences simultaneously at work. The most effective altruist is always something of an egoist as well; and it is likely enough that Byron heard the promptings of personal ambition as well as the bitter cry of outcast peoples. His place in a revolutionary army could not be that of a private soldier—he was bound to be its picturesque figure-head if not its actual leader; and that meant much at a time when all the Liberals of Europe closely followed every attempt to shake off the Austrian, or the Prussian, or the Papal yoke. So that here was his clear chance to rehabilitate himself—to issue from his obscure retreat in a sudden blaze of glory, and set the prophets saying that the stone which the builders rejected had become the head-stone of the corner. But, however that may be, and however much or little that object may have been present to his mind, it is at all events from the time of his active association with revolutionary movements that Byron’s life in exile begins to acquire seriousness and dignity.

So much in broad outline. The details, when we come to look for them, are obscure, insignificant, and disappointing. He joined the Carbonari, and was made the head of one of their sections—the Capo of the Americani was his official designation; but the Carbonari, though a furious, were a feeble folk. They had signs, and passwords, and secret meeting-places in the forest, and they whispered any quantity of sedition; but their secrets were “secrets de Polichinelle.” Spies lurked behind every door and listened at every keyhole, and their intentions were better known to the police than to themselves.

A rising was proposed and even planned. The poet’s letters to his publisher are full of dark references to the terrible things about to happen. A row is imminent, and he means to be in the thick of it. Heads are likely to be broken, and his own shall be risked with the rest. All other projects must be postponed to that contingency. He cannot even come to England as he had intended, to attend to his private affairs. And so on, in a series of letters, in one of which we find the significantly prophetic question, honoured with a paragraph to itself: “What thinkst thou of Greece?” It is the beginning, at last, of the awakening of Byron’s sterner and more serious self—the first occasion on which we see the fierce joys of battle clearly meaning more to him than the soft delights of love.

Only there was to be no battle this time, and hardly even a skirmish, and, in fact, very little beyond a scare. The Austrians were watching the Romagnese border much as a cat watches a mouse-hole. A week or so before the proposed insurrection was to have taken place, an Austrian army crossed the Po, and the proposed insurgents scattered and hid themselves. It only remained for the Government to arrest those of them whom it desired to keep under lock and key, and expel those whom it preferred to get rid of.

Byron himself might very well have been lodged in an Austrian or Papal gaol through a scurvy trick played on him by some of the conspirators. He had provided a number of them with arms at his expense; and then the decree went forth that all persons found in possession of arms were to be treated as rebels. Whereupon the chicken-hearted crew came running to the Guiccioli Palace and begged Byron to take back his muskets. He was out at the time, but returned from his ride to find his apartment turned into an armoury; and it still remains uncertain whether he escaped molestation, as he thought, because his servants did not betray him, or, as seems more probable, because the Government preferred not to have such an embarrassing prisoner on their hands.

If he would have been embarrassing as a prisoner, however, he was equally embarrassing as a resident; and, as his expulsion might have made a noise, it was decided to manoeuvre him out of the country by expelling the Gambas. Where they went Madame Guiccioli would have to go too, and where she went Byron might be expected to follow. We get his version of the story, together with a glimpse at his feelings, and at the new struggle in his mind between love and ambition, in a letter to Moore dated September 19, 1821;

Greece again, it will be observed, and an indication that Byron is at last more anxious to be up and doing something as the champion of desperate causes than to lie bound with silken chains about the feet of a mistress! A proof, too, that his mistress, on her part, already perceiving that causes may be her rivals, feels the need of working on his feelings with her tears! Moore prints the letters in which she appeals to him in the first excitement of her passions and apprehensions: “Help me, my dear Byron, for I am in a situation most terrible; and without you I can resolve upon nothing.” She has received, it seems, a passport, and also an intimation that she must either return to her husband or go to a convent. Not suspecting that passport and intimation came from the same source, she talks of the necessity of escaping by night lest the passport should be taken from her. She is in despair, and cannot bear the thought of never seeing Byron again. If that is to be the result of quitting Romagna, then she will remain and let them immure her, regarding that as the less melancholy fate. And so forth, in language which may be merely hysterical, but more probably indicates a waning confidence in her lover.

But her tears prevailed. Byron, it is true, lingered at Ravenna for some months after her departure; but that is a circumstance of which we must not make too much. He had his apartment at Ravenna; he had his belongings about him; and they were considerable, including not only furniture, and books, and manuscripts, and horses, and carriages, and dogs and cats, but a large menagerie of miscellaneous live-stock. He could hardly be expected to go until he and the Gambas had arranged where to settle; and their arrangements called for much discussion and balancing of pros and cons.

It was during the time of indecision that Shelley came, at his request, to visit him; and we may take Shelley’s letters to Peacock as our next testimony to his way of life. His establishment, Shelley reports, “consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon;” and in a postscript he adds: “I find that my enumeration of the animals in this CircÆan Palace was defective, and that in a material point. I have just met, on the grand staircase, five peacocks, two guinea-hens, and an Egyptian crane.” Then he proceeds:

“Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom (but one must sleep or die, like Southey’s sea-snake in Kehama) at twelve. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six till eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide Ravenna from the sea. We then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning.”