DEPARTURE FOR GREECE

A book might be written—indeed more than one book has been written—about that picturesque last phase of Byron’s life which dazzled the imagination of mankind. Coming to it at the end of a book already long, one owes it to one’s sense of proportion to treat it briefly, noting only the outstanding facts. The details, when all is said, are of small importance. What matters is that here is an instance, almost unique in history, of a poet transforming himself into a man of action, and proving himself a very competent man of action, very sober and sensible, and quite free from the characteristic vices of the poetical and artistic temperaments.

So far, though he had succeeded as a poet, Byron had failed as a man. The one deep and sincere passion of his life had only made trouble for him; and still more trouble had been made by his own violence, and vanity, and faults of temper. Through them he had allowed himself to be manoeuvred into a false position from which, in the bitterness of his indignation at the injustice done to him, he had made no serious effort to escape. Sitting in the midst of the wreck of his household gods, he had given vent to his anger in winged words; while, at the same time, making the persecution which he endured an excuse for sensual indulgence. Sensuality had wrecked his health without yielding him any real satisfaction, and, of course, without giving his censors any reason to reconsider their disapproval. He understood now what a poor figure he would have cut, in the eyes alike of his contemporaries and of future generations, if he had died, as he so nearly did, in the days of his degradation, in the arms of the baker’s wife, or of some hired mistress. He understood, too, that he was capable of greater things than any of these virtuous people who would then have pointed the finger of scorn at him. He had thought to demonstrate as much by his association with the Carbonari. It was not he who had failed the Carbonari, but the Carbonari who had failed him. That failure being however, through their fault and foolishness, complete, it still remained for him to give his proofs, in a much more striking style, in Greece.

Though he had but a poor opinion of his colleagues, he was thoroughly in earnest about the cause. He had always hated bullying, and the Turks were bullies. He was always at war with hypocrites—and it seemed to him that an absolute government was an organised hypocrisy. It was not necessary, therefore, for him to love revolutionists in order to be willing to help them to work out their salvation; and he certainly did not love the Greeks. It is recorded that he gave up keeping a diary because he found so much abuse of the Greeks creeping into it; and he sometimes spoke of them with excessive bitterness: “I am of St. Paul’s opinion,” he said, “that there is no difference between Jews and Greeks, the character of both being equally vile;” and his conduct, at the beginning of his expedition, was somewhat of a disappointment to romantic people.

The eyes of romantic Europe were upon him, and far too much was expected from the magic of his presence and his name. He would, at once, people thought, raise an army and march to Constantinople. Arriving before Constantinople, he would blow a trumpet, and the walls of the city would fall down flat. “Instead of which,” they complained, he had settled down comfortably in a villa in the Ionian Islands, and was writing a fresh canto of “Don Juan.” But that was not true. Byron was, indeed, living in a villa—for even a romantic poet must live somewhere; but the only poetry which he wrote in his villa was a war song. For the rest, he was wisely trying to master the situation before committing himself—refusing to stir before he saw his way.

For the situation was, just then, far from satisfactory. Their initial successes had turned the heads of the Greeks, and now their leaders were at loggerheads. Each of them was anxious to secure Byron’s help, not for a nation, but for a faction, and to engage him, not in revolt against the common enemy, but in internecine strife. As Finlay puts it:

Trelawny, who was more keen about the fighting than about the cause, accused him of “dawdling” and “shilly-shallying,” and went off, without him, to join the forces of one of the sectional chiefs.[12] Byron, just because he took the revolution more seriously than Trelawny, sat tight. His immediate purpose was to reconcile the rival factions, and raise money for them. Pending the conclusion of a loan, he advanced them a good deal of his own money, and those who imagined that he was merely out to see sights and amuse himself, quickly discovered their mistake.

It was suggested to him, for instance, that as a man of letters, a scholar, and an antiquary, he might be interested to visit the stronghold of Ulysses. “Do I look,” he asked indignantly, “like one of those emasculated fogies? I detest antiquarian twaddle. Do people think I have no lucid intervals, and that I came to Greece to scribble nonsense? I will show them that I can do something better.” On another occasion, when he was taken to a monastery, and the Abbot received him in ecclesiastical costume, with the swinging of odorous censers, and presented him with an address of fulsome flattery, he burst into tempestuous rage, exclaiming: “Will no one release me from the presence of these pestilential idiots? They drive me mad.”

It was at this time that the idea was mooted of electing Byron to be King of Greece. A King would be wanted, it was said, as soon as the Turks had been turned out, and no one would cut a nobler figure on the throne than Byron. He heard what had been said, and smiled on the proposal. “If they make me the offer,” he wrote, “I will perhaps not reject it”; and one feels quite sure that he would not have rejected it. To found a dynasty and be privileged, as a royal personage, to repudiate Lady Byron and take another wife, in order that the throne might have an heir—that would, indeed, have been a triumph over the polite Society which had cold-shouldered him and the pious people who had denounced his morals; and there can be little doubt that Byron aspired to win it, and would have won it if he had lived. He was very far, however, from stooping to conciliate the electors with smooth words; in a State Paper, addressed to the Greek Central Government, he lectured them severely:

The man of action spoke there; and the man of action also came out in Byron’s expressions of disdain for his colleague, Colonel Stanhope—the “typographical colonel,” as he called him—who maintained that the one thing needful for the salvation of the Greeks was that they should “model their institutions on those of the United States of America, and decree the unlimited freedom of the Press.” Byron knew better than that. He was not to be persuaded that “newspapers would be more effectual in driving back the Ottoman armies than well-drilled troops and military tactics.” He knew that fighting would be necessary, and he was awaiting his chance of fighting with effect.

His chance came when Mavrocordatos, emerging from the ruck of revolutionary leaders, arrived to raise the siege of Missolonghi, after mopping up a Turkish treasure ship by the way, and invited Byron to join him, placing a brig at his disposal for the voyage. “I need not tell you,” he wrote, “to what a pitch your presence is desired by everybody, or what a prosperous direction it will give to all our affairs.” The “typographical colonel,” who was already with Mavrocordatos, wrote at the same time: “It is right and proper to tell you that a great deal is expected from you, both in the way of counsel and money ... you are expected with feverish anxiety. Your further delay in coming will be attended with serious consequences.” Whereupon Byron, resolving at last to take the plunge, wrote to Douglas Kinnaird, who was managing his affairs for him in London: “Get together all the means and credit of mine you can, to face the war establishment, for it is ‘in for a penny, in for a pound,’ and I must do all that I can for the ancients.” And so, with Pietro Gamba, to the dismal swamp, where he was “welcomed,” Gamba tells us, “with salvos of artillery, firing of muskets, and wild music.”

Moved by the scene, indeed, he doubtless was. The scene was the beginning of his rehabilitation in the eyes of those who had treated him with contempt—the beginning of the proof that he had the qualities of a leader, and could wield other weapons besides the pen—the demonstrative proclamation that the path of duty was to be the way to glory. The scarlet uniform was an appropriate tribute to the solemnity of the occasion on which he formally entered upon his last and best new way of life. He did not enter upon it, however, “in excellent health,” as Gamba says, but as a broken man with a shattered constitution, who had but a little time in which to do his work before the inevitable malaria came up out of the marsh and gripped him.

Meanwhile, however, Mavrocordatos gave him a commission as commander-in-chief—archi-strategos was his grandiloquent title—and he did what he could. He took 500 of those “dark Suliotes” whom he had sung in the early cantos of “Childe Harold” into his pay, and was prepared to lead them to the storming of Lepanto. He did something to mitigate the inhumanities of the war by insisting upon the release of some Turkish prisoners whom his allies proposed to massacre. Maintaining his character as man of action, he suppressed a converted blacksmith, who arrived from England with a cargo of type, paper, bibles and Wesleyan tracts, proposing to use the tracts for cartridges and turn the type into small shot. And then, having leisure on his hands, he wrote one poem, which he showed to Colonel Stanhope, saying: “You were complaining the other day that I never write any poetry now. This is my birthday, and I have just finished something which, I think, is better than what I usually write.”

I
“’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move;
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!
II
“My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!
III
“The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze—
A funeral pile!
IV
“The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share,
But wear the chain.
V
“But ’tis not thus—and ’tis not here—
Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now,
Where glory decks the hero’s bier,
Or binds his brow.
VI
“The sword, the banner, and the field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.
VII
“Awake! (not Greece—she is awake!)
Awake my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home.
VIII
“Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood!—unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.
IX
“If thou regret’st thy youth, why love?
The land of honourable death
Is here:—up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!
X
“Seek out—less often sought than found—
A soldier’s grave, for thee the bed;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest.”

“We perceived,” Count Gamba comments, “from these lines ... that his ambition and his hope were irrevocably fixed upon the glorious objects of his expedition to Greece, and that he had made up his mind to ‘return victorious or return no more.’” Readers who are better acquainted than Count Pietro alike with the English language and with the circumstances of the case will find rather more than that in them. They also reveal the memory which Byron fell back upon and lived with at the hours when he rested from the strain of his revolutionary enthusiasm. It was not the memory of Count Pietro’s sister. Byron could not possibly have been thinking of her when he cried out that his love was a lonely fire at which no torch was kindled; for her love for him was far fiercer and more enduring than his love for her. His thoughts, it is quite clear, had once more strayed back to Mary Chaworth; and the internal evidence of that is confirmed by the mention of her name in two separate passages of those “Detached Thoughts” which he threw on paper just before he left Ravenna. His attachment to her, he then remembers, threw him out “on a wide, wide sea.” He speaks of her as “My M.A.C.,” and continues in a passage often quoted:

“Alas! why do I say My? Our Union would have healed feuds, in which blood had been shed by our fathers; it would have joined lands broad and rich; it would have joined at least one heart, and two persons not ill-matched in years (she is two years my elder); and—and—and—what has been the result? She has married a man older than herself, been wretched, and separated. I have married, and am separated; and yet we are not united.”