DEATH IN A GREAT CAUSE

The end was not to come, as Byron may have hoped, on the field of battle. It was his health, as he had apprehended (though without, for that reason, taking any special care of it) that was to fail him. An imprudent plunge into the winter sea while on his way to Missolonghi had upset him; and though he had temporarily recovered, he was in no state to resist the pestilential climate of that dismal swamp. He knew it, and at the very time when Stanhope was writing home that “Lord Byron burns with military ardour and chivalry,” he was keenly conscious, as his own letters show, of the danger attending his residence in the most malarious quarter of a malarious town.

The risk, though inglorious in itself, was nevertheless the price of glory; and he paid it willingly. He was, once more, as famous as at the hour when “Childe Harold” had suddenly revealed his genius, and the fame which he now tasted was of a worthier kind. Then he had dazzled and fascinated. Now he enjoyed the love and admiration, not merely of idle women, but of a whole people, and discovered that he had the power to heal feuds and to lead men. He might, or might not, live to wear, or to refuse, a kingly crown; but at least he had lived to be hailed as the Liberator of a nation, and to be revered accordingly. An anecdote preserved by Parry, the artificer who was serving under him in charge of the arsenal, illustrates the adoration of the peasantry:

Such was the homage paid to him, by the humble as well as the great; but it soon became increasingly evident that though he had achieved the glory, death was to rob him of the crown. He began to have epileptic seizures; and in the midst of them, there was trouble with the Suliotes. There were only five hundred of them, and they preferred the insolent claim that one hundred and fifty of them should be promoted to be officers, and that the rest should be accorded a month’s pay in advance. Colonel Stanhope tells us how he quelled the mutiny:

The mutineers suppressed, the doctors came and bled him. He pulled through, whether in consequence of their treatment or in spite of it; but his regimen and his mode of life were not such as to restore him to vigour. He was sweeping away the coats of his stomach by large and frequent doses of powerful purgative medicaments; and in the intervals between the purges he partook freely of a comfortable and potent kind of punch which Parry mixed for him. It is no wonder, therefore, that relapse succeeded relapse and that just at that hour at which fortune seemed beginning to smile upon the Greeks, his life could be seen to be ebbing away.

On April 9, while riding with Gamba, he was caught in a violent storm of rain. “I should make a fine soldier if I did not know how to stand such a trifle as this,” he said to his companion; but two hours after his return he was shivering and complaining: “I am in great pain,” he said to Gamba. “I should not care for dying but I cannot bear these pains.” On April 11, he was well enough to ride again, but on the 12th, he was in bed with what was diagnosed as rheumatic fever, and the fever never again left him. The inevitable proposal to bleed him was repeated. At first he resisted, with the usual talk about the lancet being more deadly than the sword, but in the end he acquiesced. “There!” he said. “You are, I see, a d——d set of butchers. Take away as much blood as you like, and have done with it.”

They took twenty ounces of blood from him. It was an absurd treatment, and probably hastened the end; but he had bad doctors, and even the good doctors of these days knew no better. Moreover his constitution was shattered. He was falling to pieces like an old ruin, and it is doubtful whether the wisest treatment could have saved him. There was a further rally, however, and Gamba, who was laid up in an adjoining apartment with a sprained ankle, hobbled in to see him. “I contrived,” he writes, “to walk to his room. His look alarmed me much. He was too calm. He talked to me in the kindest way, but in a sepulchral tone. I could not bear it. A flood of tears burst from me, and I was obliged to retire.”

Soon after this, the final delirium set in. His attendants stood by his bedside weeping copiously. They could not, says Cordy Jeaffreson cynically, have wept more copiously “if there had been a prize of a thousand guineas for the one who wept most.” Afterwards he was alone, at one time with Parry, and at another time with Fletcher; and of his last articulate words there is more than one account. It is told that he spoke of Greece: “I have given her my time, my money, and my health—what could I do more? Now I give her my life.” It is told that he gesticulated wildly, as if mounting a breach to an assault, and calling, half in English, half in Italian: “Forward—forward—courage—follow my example—don’t be afraid.” It is told again that he stammered unintelligible messages to Lady Byron and to his sister.

But all that matters little. What matters is, not Byron’s last utterance, but his last action, now that neither love nor lust, nor despair, nor bitterness, nor sloth, nor self-indulgence, held him any longer in unworthy bondage. For he had died in the act of redeeming the many wasted years, and of fulfilling the prediction of his most degraded time, that, in spite of everything, he would come to achievement at last—not merely the literary achievement which was compatible with the life of a trifler and a man of pleasure, but the more glorious achievement which is only possible to those who consent to sacrifice their ease and make a free gift of their energies to a cause which they perceive to be greater than themselves.