FROM PISA TO GENOA

It was while Byron was at Pisa that his natural daughter, the little Allegra, died, after a rapid illness, of typhus fever at her Convent School. He disliked her mother—we have noted the reasons why it was hardly to be expected that he would do anything else—but he had viewed the child as the gift of heaven, precious, though at first undesired. He had played with her in his garden at Ravenna, and had made a will leaving her £5000, and was at once too fond and too proud to make any mystery of the relationship. All his friends, as well as his sister were apprised of it, and received news, from time to time, of the child’s physical and moral progress. Nearly all of them were informed of her death. “It is a heavy blow for many reasons, but must be borne—with time,” he wrote to Murray. “The blow was stunning and unexpected,” he told Shelley. “I suppose that Time will do his usual work—Death has done his.” To Sir Walter Scott he commented:

He desired, too, that the child’s relationship to him should be proclaimed on a tablet to be set up in Harrow Church; but that was impossible owing to the prejudices of the Vicar and Churchwardens. It seemed to them that “every man of refined taste, to say nothing of sound morals,” would practise hypocrisy in such a matter. The Vicar wrote to Murray to say so, and to ask him to point out to Byron that, in the case of ex-parishioners, the Churchwardens had the power not only to advise hypocrisy but to enforce it; and he enclosed a formal prohibition from one of them, running thus:

It was the pitiful performance of a clerical Jack-in-Office; and we will leave it and pass on, merely noting that Byron, more than once, in defining his duties to Allegra, affirmed and illustrated his own religious position. One of his avowed reasons for not allowing her to be brought up by her mother was that Jane Clairmont was “atheistical.” For himself, he said, he was “a very good Christian,” though given to expressing himself flippantly. The affirmation is confirmed by Shelley’s description of him, half playful and half-shocked, as “no better than a Christian,” and by the account of his opinions given by Pietro Gamba in a letter to Dr. Kennedy—from which it appears that though Byron might, like his own Cain, defy the God of the Shorter Catechism, he was profoundly reverent in his attitude towards really holy things.

Count Pietro reports two conversations with him on these sacred matters; the first talk taking place at Ravenna:

Later, at Genoa, the subject came up again:

Decidedly we have a more serious Byron there—a child becoming a man, emerging from frivolity, and putting away frivolous and childish things; and one gets the same impression of mental and moral evolution repeated when one reads Byron’s appreciation of Shelley, written under the shock of the news of his sudden death—passages which it is a labour of love to copy out:

Those are the appreciations; and one quotes them, not for Shelley’s sake, but for Byron’s, and because the power to appreciate Shelley’s worth in spite of his eccentricities is a test of character. His shining spirituality cannot be perceived by the gross who are in bondage to the conventions of ethics, politics, or religion, or by those, not less gross, who are the slaves of their lusts. To love him was impossible except for one who looked beyond the material to the ideal. It is so now, and it was more especially so in his lifetime, when belief in his wickedness was almost an article of the Christian faith. But Byron stands the test, and his relations with Shelley are further proofs of his final progress towards moral grandeur.

One cannot say the same of his relations with Leigh Hunt; but then Leigh Hunt was a very different sort of person from Shelley; and his behaviour towards Byron was peculiar. Invited to Pisa to arrange for the production of a new newspaper or magazine, he arrived with a sick wife and several children, with no visible means of support, and with the ill-concealed intention of sponging up innumerable guineas from the stores of the originators of the enterprise. The guineas were not refused to him. Byron seems to have let him have about five hundred guineas in all, as well as some valuable copyrights and board and lodging for himself and his family on the ground floor of his own palace. He found the noisy children a nuisance, however, and resented the desire to sponge; with the result that relations were quickly strained, and the reluctant host and clamorous guest regarded each other with suspicion and dislike.

One of Hunt’s complaints was that the guineas, instead of being poured into his lap in a continual golden shower, were doled out, a few at a time, by a steward. Another was that there was a point in the palace which no member of the household of the Hunts was allowed to pass without a special invitation, and that a savage bull-dog was stationed there to guard the passage. The former precaution was probably quite necessary, and the latter charge is probably untrue; though, the palace being full of bull-dogs, and the Hunt children being, as Byron said, “far from tractable,” one can readily imagine the nature of the incident on which it was based. In any case, however, the essential facts of the situation are that Byron, though he had once been sufficiently in sympathy with Hunt to visit him when in prison, for calling the Regent a fat Adonis of fifty, now found that he disliked him, and kept him at arm’s length; while Hunt, on his part, taking offence at the aloofness of Byron’s attitude, avenged himself by writing a very spiteful book, full of unpleasant truths not only about Byron, but also about Madame Guiccioli.The Countess, he says, did not know how to “manage” Byron. When he “shocked” her, she replied by “nagging”—the prime offence, it will be remembered, of Lady Byron herself. It was a policy which might have served when she was in the full bloom of youth; but that happy time was passing. She was beginning to look old and weary, and to go about as one who carried a secret sorrow locked up in her breast. “Everybody” noticed the change: “In the course of a few months she seemed to have lived as many years. It is most likely in that interval that she discovered that she had no real hold on the affections of her companion.”

Assuredly if Hunt had nothing better to do in Italy than to take notes of this character it was high time to pack him off home again; and packed off he was, in due course, though not quite immediately. Before his departure Byron had moved from Pisa to Genoa, driven to this further migration by the fact that the Tuscan Government had in its turn, expelled the Gambas, and that Madame Guiccioli, for reasons already explained, was once more obliged to accompany them. If he had been as anxious to be rid of her as Hunt hints, and Cordy Jeaffreson, leaning upon Hunt’s testimony, explicitly declares, here was his opportunity. He did not take it, but accompanied her to her new home, where he was to live under the same roof with her; one of Hunt’s minor grievances being that he and his children—described by Byron in a letter to Mrs. Shelley as “dirtier and more mischievous than Yahoos”—were not admitted to the same boat with them, but had to travel in a separate felucca. Afterwards there was some talk of a further trip of the nature of a honey-moon—solus cum sola—to Naples; but this, for whatever reason, did not take place, and Byron remained at Genoa.

It was at Genoa that he met Lady Blessington, whose report of his regret that there was no way of regularising his intimacy with Madame Guiccioli we have already had before us. She and Leigh Hunt, if they do not contradict each other at every point, at least give very contrary impressions of the state of things. The difference may be due to the fact that, whereas Leigh Hunt was borrowing money with great difficulty, Lady Blessington was flirting with some success. Neither she nor Byron meant anything by it. Count d’Orsay, no less than Countess Guiccioli, barred the way to anything approaching attachment or intrigue. Lady Blessington only flirted to flatter her vanity; Byron only for the purpose of killing time and introducing variety into a somewhat monotonous life. Flirtation there was, however, or at all events the semblance of it, and one may fairly suppose it to afford a partial explanation of Countess Guiccioli’s nagging and martyred look, observed by Leigh Hunt’s prying eyes. Indeed there are passages in Lady Blessington’s Journal which suggest as much, the passage, for instance, in which Byron is reported as saying, not that he “was” but that he “had been” passionately in love with the Countess; and then this passage:

A man does not talk like that to a woman with whom he has just become acquainted unless he is flirting with her—albeit, it may be, giving her to understand, while in the act of flirting, that his heart is too withered to be long responsive to her charms. And that, it seems, at the end of many love affairs, was Byron’s final note. Even Madame Guiccioli did not really matter to him, though he acknowledged obligations to her and discharged them. Nothing mattered except one memory which, though it could never be anything more than a memory, still haunted him. He lived with that memory to the last, as we shall see. Being only a memory, and a painful one, it was rather a stimulus to action than a hindrance to it. But with the luxurious and uxorious love which does hinder action he had done. Whether he was tired of it or not, he felt that it was unworthy of him, and that life held nobler possibilities.

To an unknown lady who seems, at this date, to have offered him the free gift of her love, he answered, pooh-poohing the proposition. He looked upon love, he said, as “a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to make or to break matches, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned.” He added that he regarded his own “love times” as “pretty well over”; and so in fact they were. He needed a sharper spur than they could give him, and a more heroic issue than they could involve, if, during the few years left to him, he was to redeem the time and startle the world by deeds of which it had not imagined him to be capable. The revolt in Greece gave him his chance and he took it.

His sympathies, as we have seen, had long been enlisted on the Greek side, as had also those of the Gambas. Now the London Greek Committee placed itself in communication with him. “I cannot express to you,” he wrote to Edward BlaquiÈre, “how much I feel interested in the cause, and nothing but the hopes I entertained of witnessing the liberation of Italy itself prevented me long ago from returning to do what little I could, as an individual, in that land which it is an honour even to have visited.” To Sir John Bowring he added a significant detail: “To this project the only objection is of a domestic nature, and I shall try to get over it.”

He did get over it; and those who knew him best were confident that he would; but the fact that Madame Guiccioli tried to detain him is to be remarked as explaining a good deal. It explains why he did not care to take her to Greece, or even to the Ionian Islands, with him, fearing lest she should be a clog on his activities. It explains the comparative coldness of the letters which he addressed to her from the scene of action. It explains finally, if any explanation be needed, why hers was not the memory which he chose to live with in the dismal swamp in which his last days were passed.

And so off to Cephalonia with young Trelawny and Pietro Gamba.