The Last Attachment E-Book

Iris Origo

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The last - and arguably most intense - love affair of one of the greatest British poets Teresa Guiccioli was just nineteen, and recently married to a jealous husband nearly three times her age, when she met Byron. He was one of the most infamous men in Europe; she was an inexperienced but beautiful provincial noblewoman. For the next four years, until Byron went to Greece, this formed the basis of a passionate, scandalous, and very intense love affair. Iris Origo, bestselling biographer and author of War in Val d'Orcia, was the first to have access to over a hundred love letters and family papers from the time of this affair. She uses these to illustrate the moving story, told with authority and clarity, of Byron and Teresa's turbulent romance. Iris Origo (1902-1988) was a British-born biographer and writer. She lived in Italy and devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at La Foce, which she purchased with her husband in the 1920s. During the Second World War, she sheltered refugee children and assisted many escaped Allied prisoners of war and partisans in defiance of Italy's fascist regime and Nazi occupation forces. Pushkin Press also publishes her bestselling diaries, War in Val d'Orcia, her memoir, Images and Shadows, and A Study in Solitude: The Life of Leopardi - Poet, Romantic and Radical. The newly discovered diary covering the years 1939-1940, A Chill in the Air, is forthcoming from Pushkin Press.

Leseprobe

Lord Byron

Teresa Guiccioli

THE LAST ATTACHMENT

The Story of Byron & Teresa Guiccioli

As told in their unpublished letters and other family papers

Iris Origo

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

Contents

TITLE PAGEINTRODUCTION PROLOGUE    1  Venice   2  Ravenna   3  Bologna—La Mira—Venice   4  Ravenna Again   5  Filetto   6  Farewell to Ravenna   7  Pisa–Montenero   8  Casa Saluzzo   9  News from Greece 10  Living After  UNPUBLISHED DOCUMENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT

Introduction

I have lived in far countries, abroad, or in the agitating world at home… so that almost all I have written has been mere passion—passion, it is true, of different kinds, but always passion: for… my indifference was a kind of passion, the result of experience, and not the philosophy of nature.

BYRON

Three years after Byron’s death, the Contessa Teresa Guiccioli—the object of the poet’s last, longest and perhaps deepest attachment—wrote to Barry that his letters to her were ‘a treasure of goodness, affection and genius, which for a hundred reasons I cannot now make public’.1 Thirty years later, however, roused to indignation by reading Leigh Hunt’s malicious book, Lord Byron and his Contemporaries, she told John Murray that she did not care what the consequences to her own reputation might be, ‘so long as none of the documents and letters are lost, which can reveal the great and kind heart of Lord Byron in its true light’.2 And finally, on her deathbed in Italy in 1873, she is said to have expressed to her sister-in-law her desire that all her papers should be published. ‘The more Byron is known,’ she said, ‘the better he will be loved.’3

Since then seventy-five years have passed. And now, owing to the courtesy of Count Carlo Gamba, Teresa’s great-nephew,—to whom she left her villa at Settimello and all its contents—Teresa’s papers and treasures have at last come to light. The treasures—Byron’s ‘relics’, as she called them—still lie in the carved mahogany box in which Teresa kept them. There is the locket containing her hair, and hung on a chain of her hair, which Byron was wearing when he died, and which Augusta Leigh sent back to her; there is another locket, containing Byron’s hair, which he gave to Teresa when he sailed for Greece. There, too, carefully wrapped up by Teresa, with an inscription in her writing, lies a curious, moving assortment of objects: a piece of the wall-hangings of the room in Palazzo Gamba where Byron used to visit Teresa, Byron’s handkerchief and a fragment of one of his shirts,—and a crumbling rose-leaf, with the branch of a tree and a small acorn, from Newstead Abbey. Finally there is a fat little volume bound in purple plush: the copy of Corinne in which he wrote his famous love-letter to Teresa in Bologna.

The papers in this collection have proved to be as exciting and interesting a hoard as the most exacting biographer could hope for. They include, not only 149 of Byron’s love-letters, mostly in Italian, to Teresa, and some of her answers, but Teresa’s ‘Vie de Lord Byron’,—her unpublished account of his life in Italy, which she wrote in her old age and thought too intimate to be published during her lifetime. In addition there are the documents of the Guiccioli lawsuits, containing a complete account of the complicated circumstances which led to Teresa’s separation from her husband, and there are Pietro Gamba’s letters to his sister from Greece, besides many other letters to her from Shelley, Lady Blessington, Lamartine, John Murray and others. In short, we have at last—with all the gaps filled in by information at which, until now, it was only possible to guess—the full story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli.

It is not—this must be admitted—a wholly pleasant story, and it is one which it is difficult to tell impartially. There is a temptation to take sides: either to portray Byron as an unscrupulous cad, seducing a pretty young woman who had fallen desperately in love with him, laughing at her in his letters to his friends, and gradually cooling off, to leave her abandoned and alone; or, alternatively, to depict Teresa as a designing minx, who, tired of her elderly husband and her dreary provincial life, flung herself at Byron’s head until he was perforce obliged to turn a fugitive love-affair into a ‘romance in the Anglo fashion’. Or else the whole affair could be presented in the manner of the Goldonian Comedy—with the audience’s sympathy focused on the two lovers, and with Count Guiccioli (the avaricious, calculating husband) as the villain, Fanny Silvestrini as the obliging confidante, Count Ruggero as the noble father, and Pietro as the young gallant. Even the minor parts could be allotted—the venal priest, the maid, the Moorish page-boy,—and, in the pine-forest of Ravenna, the chorus of conspirators.

But now, with these new papers before us, none of these simplified versions will do. The actors too often speak out of part—and the story that emerges is too full of discrepancies and inconsistencies. Besides, there are a few minor points which, to my mind, even now remain obscure. I am still not quite certain about the motives of Count Guiccioli; I do not know what Byron meant by his letter on page 190; I am not always sure when Teresa is, or is not, speaking the truth. The reader, too, must guess and draw his own conclusions. I have merely attempted to fill in the background—to complete the story with passages from Byron’s other letters at the time or from the accounts of his contemporaries, and to give such information as seemed necessary about the people, the setting and the local history. But I have carefully refrained from adding any imaginary details or touches of ‘local colour’: any information that the book contains can be confirmed by some record.

For it is the papers themselves—the scribbled, passionate love-letters, the painstaking police reports, the formal ecclesiastical decrees, the gossip of observant contemporaries—that must tell the story. They provide a singularly intimate and unvarnished account of the daily life of this little group of people, 130 years ago. Their passionate protestations, their jokes, their retractions and lies, their plans and disappointments, all that constituted the most private aspect of their lives—these are now laid before us in merciless detail. Now, after more than a century, we can follow the negro page carrying Teresa’s notes to Byron up the staircase of Palazzo Guiccioli, or stand with the groom Morelli, watching by the front door to warn the lovers of the Count’s return. We can look out from Teresa’s balcony in Palazzo Lanfranchi in the moonlight—and Mary Shelley’s carriage is clattering up the Lungarno, and she is calling out, ‘Sapete alcuna cosa di Shelley?’ We are in Teresa’s sitting-room in Casa Saluzzo, and Byron comes in, very cross, and gives her an unpleasant letter for Mary—and when he has gone out again, she turns it over and over and peers at the seal, and does not dare to look inside. We are with Byron—bored and flat and sad—on the Hercules in Leghorn harbour, and Pietro Gamba is standing over him with a pen, to make him write to Teresa his last meagre note of farewell.

Here is the story of two passionate, unstable human beings—one of them a great poet, and a very odd man—the other a young woman of quite exceptional vitality and strength of will. They loved each other; they quarrelled; they trampled ruthlessly on whatever stood in their way. Of the two of them it was, curiously enough, Byron who occasionally played the moralist. Teresa, for all her convent-school training, appears to have been unaware throughout that any moral problem was involved. They committed themselves, and they drew back again. One of them was often disloyal, the other sometimes insincere. Each of them in turn—Byron in Ravenna, Teresa in the English circle in Pisa—had to conform, for the other’s sake, to the ways of a bewildering and alien society. As time wore on, one of them became plaintive, the other exasperated. But at all times they were quite extraordinarily alive. They galvanized everyone who came near them. In these letters, they are living still.

Moreover, these papers light up a facet of Byron’s character which, until now, has been unfamiliar: they show him living in an Italian setting. And the extent to which these new surroundings affected and changed him appears in a manner which is not only interesting, but sometimes disconcerting.

Byron himself, indeed, tried to tell his friends about it: ‘Now I have lived among the Italians,—not Florenced and Romed and Galleried and Conversationed it for a few months, and then home again—but been of their families, and friendships and feuds, and loves and councils, and correspondence, in a part of Italy least known to foreigners; and have been amongst them of all classes, from the Conte to the Contadino.’4 But neither his friends at the time, nor his biographers, paid much attention to all this. His life in Ravenna has been treated merely as a part of the whole paraphernalia of conspiracy and romance in which the histrionic side of his nature delighted: one more scene in the great Italian performance, like the quarrels with the Fornarina, or the swim across the Venetian Lagoon. But now it has become apparent that this was not the whole truth. If in Venice he was still the ‘Englishman in Italy’, a foreigner playing a part, in Ravenna he had been ‘inoculated into a family. This’, he added, ‘is to see men and things as they are.’5

It is. But it can only be achieved at a price. In this case, it implied nothing less than a partial change of personality—a change which no reader who compares Byron’s Italian letters with his English ones, can feel to be for the better. It is not that they are written in bad Italian. Although they are the letters of a foreigner, they are also unmistakably those of a man of letters, and they contain certain amusing indications as to where and how he learned his Italian: a Dantesque expression or a quotation from Tasso stand beside a Venetian phrase, straight from the mouth of the Fornarina, or a piece of Romagnolo dialect. What is disconcerting about these early letters is that their elaboration of phrase and conventionality of idiom are matched by an almost equal, a wholly un-Byronic, conventionality of sentiment. At first, indeed, this is so marked that one is inclined to wonder whether this is not merely Byron overplaying his part; perhaps, in his desire to be the perfect Cavalier Servente in the Italian manner, he has copied some phrases outright from a polite letter-writer’s manual of Venice—or has allowed not only single words (as he frankly admits), but whole sentences, to be suggested by Lega Zambelli, the priest turned secretary. ‘Sentiment, the most beautiful and fragile thing in all our existence.’ ‘How much happier than I is this letter, which in a few days will be in your hands—and perhaps even will be brought close to your lips.’ ‘When I weep, my tears are from the heart, and are of blood.’ These are not sentences which, if we encountered them without a signature, we should ever guess to be Byron’s. As the correspondence goes on, it is true, such sentences become less frequent. Not only does he gain a greater ease in the use of the Italian language, but he allows himself a lighter touch, more recognizably his own. ‘It would suit me better to be with you in a desert, than without you in Mahomet’s paradise, which is considerably more agreeable than ours.’—‘I kiss you more often than I have ever kissed you—and this (if Memory does not deceive me) should be a fine number of times, counting from the beginning.’—But still, I think the reader will agree that the writer of these letters is an unfamiliar Byron.

For one thing, he is more deeply involved. If the adventure started like many others, with a mixture of physical attraction and contempt—if, indeed, he was faintly irritated, as well as flattered, by this new silly young woman who threw herself at his head—the relationship very soon changed, and held him. Its progress is revealed in these letters. But here, too, it is curious to note that the feeling, although quite unmistakably genuine, is all within the Italian convention of the period. Passion, jealousy, storms, reconciliations, protestations of eternal fidelity (‘your friend and lover forever’, is the most frequent signature)—it is all, to English ears, curiously formal. What is odd in these earlier letters, too, is a total absence of his usual flippancy and irony—with which, however, he made sufficiently free in his letters about the affair, to his friends at home. Teresa did not either like or understand irony; and though occasionally, in the later letters, Byron does laugh at her, it is as one smiles at a child, who will not share the joke.

What is the explanation of all this? I think it is to be found in Teresa’s own character. Teresa was in some ways—like Caroline Lamb and Augusta—a silly woman; but she was not a stupid one; and she had all the strength of a one-track mind. From the moment that her passion for Byron held her, she knew what she wanted, and it was a foregone conclusion that she would get it. She persuaded her father, a simple and upright country gentleman, that nothing was wrong in her relations with Byron, long after the evidence of his senses must have told him the contrary. She defeated the complicated manoeuvres, and stood up to the brutality and violence, of her husband. She imposed an acceptance of the situation (however much people might gossip behind her back) on the whole tight little society of Ravenna, and even on her own correct, affectionate, family circle. And finally, she imposed her will upon Byron himself. He struggled, he grumbled, he tried to laugh at her; but in the end, he did what she wanted. ‘I have come, I have gone—I have come back, I have remained—it is more than a year that I have done nothing but obey you in every respect.’ Moreover she succeeded in shaping this relationship according to her standards, her view of life. For in such cases it is always the narrower, but more positive, purpose that wins.

There is an interesting account, in the diary of one of the most assiduous of Byron’s Venetian friends, the Cavaliere Mengaldo, of how he once visited Byron’s ‘Casino’ at Santa Maria Zobenigo. What shocked him, although he was himself no Puritan, was the casualness of Byron’s affairs. ‘Je fus effrayé de son horrible système!’ The Latin convention in the pursuit of pleasure, as in domesticity, is a strict one—and it was Byron’s refusal to conform to it that so profoundly scandalized his Venetian observers. But in the end he too was caught. A girl of nineteen, by her very limitations, her unawareness of any other world than that familiar to her, translated their passion into the only language that she knew—and her lover (first, we suspect, as a joke, a tour de force, then in all seriousness—and finally, as a habit) made it his language, too. He became—this was what shocked and disconcerted Mrs. Hunt and Mary Shelley so much—Italianized.

What was the quality in Teresa which—in spite of her inexperience, her lack of sensitiveness and her silliness—enabled her to achieve all this? It hardly seems worth while to examine in detail the controversy about her looks. From her contemporaries we have, on the one hand, such distressing adjectives as ‘chumpy’ and ‘fubsy’—while, on the other hand, Shelley thought her ‘very pretty’, Lady Blessington, ‘decidedly handsome… Her complexion delicately fair, her hair of rich golden tint, her bust and arms exquisitely beautiful’; and Lord Malmesbury, ‘handsome, with a brilliant complexion’ and ‘a profusion of auburn hair’. Undoubtedly, at the time she met Byron, we must grant her brilliancy of colour and complexion—what the Victorians called ‘bloom’—fine eyes and teeth, and beautiful arms and bust. But her legs were too short. The real point, however, is not what her looks were, but what Byron thought of them. He thought her ‘fair as sunrise—warm as noon’6—as pretty as Caroline Lamb and much gentler—and endearingly funny, too, in her sky-blue riding-habit and her hat like Punch’s.

But in any case, the strength of physical attraction is not dependent only—or even chiefly—upon looks. Teresa and Byron suited each other—as to that there can be no question. Every line of the correspondence confirms this; even in the later phase, when weariness and exasperation had crept in, there remain the little jokes of physical intimacy, half-unintelligible to any reader but one—and the pervading sense that, whatever else went wrong, that remained all right.

But even the most delightful physical relation is not, by itself, enough; the evenings, as Byron wrote at La Mira, always seem longer than the nights. What else was it in Teresa that attracted him so strongly? I think it was her sheer vitality, her youthful high spirits. To self-conscious, complex human beings, there is something extremely restful in the company of people less highly organized than themselves—and Teresa possessed to the full not only the freshness and zest of youth, but a certain childlike ruthlessness, a quality which Byron always found attractive. Life with her was uncomplicated, gay and exciting. If she sometimes talked affected nonsense, it was the kind of nonsense that he found diverting—perhaps even, at first, a little touching;—and then it was leavened by so unlimited an admiration, so unrestrained a devotion! ‘Mio Byron!’

In some ways Byron’s love for Teresa more closely resembled his feeling for Augusta, than what he felt for any other woman—and perhaps it was just for this reason that their relationship lasted for so long. To both Augusta and Teresa he showed the same half-humorous, half-mocking tenderness; with both of them he found the release from self-consciousness that brought him gaiety and peace. For Byron did not want women to understand him: Annabella had understood him, and what had that led to? He wanted them to amuse him. ‘I ask nothing of a woman but to make me laugh,’ he had brutally told his wife in the first days of their marriage. ‘I can make Augusta laugh about anything. No one makes me happy except Augusta.’7 And to Augusta herself, he wrote about Teresa: ‘She has a good deal of us, too. I mean that turn for ridicule like Aunt Sophy and you and I and all the B.s.’8 Teresa’s absurdities, too, were just the kind that Augusta would enjoy: ‘She is an equestrian, too, but… she can’t guide her horse—and he runs after mine—and tries to bite him—and then she begins screaming in a high hat and sky-blue riding-habit—making a most absurd figure.’9 She was as silly as Augusta—and amoral, too, in very much the same way. Like her, she could not really believe that anything was wrong that did not cause anyone any pain—and she continued to be kind, even to the people she was deceiving. Byron used, in writing to her, the same symbol, the +, that he had used with Augusta. ‘Ah,’ he had said on one occasion, showing Augusta this mark in Annabella’s presence, ‘if she knew what that means.’10 And to Teresa, after making use of this symbol for the first time, he wrote, ‘There can be few crosses more holy for us than these.’

But Teresa, for all this, was only partly like Augusta. She had, as I think these papers show, far greater staying power: she had more guts, and—for all her sentimentality—more sense. It is now necessary, I think, to reconsider the previous estimate of her. ‘The nice, pretty girl without pretensions, good hearted and amiable’, of Mary Shelley’s description, is evidently not enough; and still less Leigh Hunt’s ‘buxom parlour-boarder, composing herself artificially into dignity and elegance’.11 (For Teresa had snubbed Mrs. Hunt.) ‘Stupid,’ says Miss Mayne, ‘at once insensitive and sentimental… so obtuse that he could not shake her off.’12 ‘Insincere,’ says her husband’s grandson, Alessandro Guiccioli, ‘with more calculation than sentiment, cold, selfish and comfort-loving.’13 In all these opinions there is, perhaps, a grain of truth. But I think that Drinkwater was nearer to it when he spoke of Teresa as ‘a woman of more quality and character than history has commonly realized’,—and above all when he said, of Byron’s love for her, ‘He talked at times as if this was not so, but then he talked at times as if everything was not so that was… He had, on the whole, a more genuine and lasting respect for her than he had for any other woman in his life.’14

These new papers confirm this assertion. Byron’s early letters have a quite unmistakable note of genuine passion; and as, in the later letters, passion fades, it is replaced by a semi-conjugal bond of half-humorous, resigned acceptance. Teresa’s answers show, in the midst of much flowery rhetoric and exasperating romanticism, an equal passion, and unexpected flashes of both insight and shrewdness. They show, above all, an unquestioning, disinterested devotion, which, in the long years in which she survived him, continued to manifest itself in a fierce and irrepressible loyalty. Leigh Hunt, in his spiteful record of his own grievances, professed to believe that, during the last year at Pisa and Genoa, Byron found this devotion so cloying that Teresa at last became aware that he was tired of her. ‘In the course of a few months, she seemed to have lived as many years.’15 Mr. Harold Nicolson clearly implies that by then she had become nothing but an obstacle and a burden. I think that the truth was rather more complicated than this. To Lady Blessington, before leaving for Greece, he admitted that he was ‘worn out in feelings’—but at the same time he added, perhaps not without a wry smile, that if he and Teresa could be married, they would be ‘cited as an example of conjugal happiness’. This passage, in Teresa’s own copy of Lady Blessington’s book, is heavily underscored—and in the margin she has written ‘God bless him!’

* * *

The letters of Byron and Teresa, as well as the greater part of the ‘Vie de Lord Byron,’ are almost wholly concerned with the two lovers’ personal affairs, and throw but little light on the other side of Byron’s life in Ravenna:—his part in the Italian revolutionary movement. But in the other sources I have consulted—the minute and detailed police reports of the day, the archives of the Vatican and of Venice, Bologna, Ravenna, Florence, Forlì and Pisa, the contemporary Memoirs of the Carbonari, and the works of Italian scholars,—a good deal of information about Byron’s political activity has come to light. This new information suggests that his part in the Romagna rising was greater than has generally been realized—and was actuated by very much the same motives as his expedition to Greece. Had he remained in Italy a few years longer and met a Sanfedista bullet in the insurrection of 1831, he might have been the hero of the Italian war of independence, instead of that of Greece. As it is, his activities in Italy have always been slightly slurred over, or dismissed, while his Greek venture has been thrown into the limelight.

One reason for this comparative neglect is that the whole emphasis of his biographers, in writing of his life in Ravenna, has always been upon his liaison with Teresa—or upon his literary work during this period. Another reason is that the documents about the Carbonari are in Italian and are not easy to find. Moreover the most interesting, for British readers, has disappeared. This was Byron’s own account of the Carboneria, and of his share in the Romagna insurrection—the notes, presumably, which he had in mind when he wrote in 1821: ‘Some day or other, if dust holds together, I have been enough in the Secret (at least in this part of the country) to cast perhaps some little light upon the atrocious treachery which has replunged Italy into Barbarism.’16 These notes, together with some others on more personal matters, he handed over in July 1823, as he was sailing from Leghorn, to his Venetian friend Mengaldo—presumably not liking to put such dangerous papers into the hands of the Gambas, who were about to return to the Romagna. Mengaldo, however, burned the whole envelope, unopened, ‘on the shores of the Adriatic’—and with it, all that Byron could have told us about the secrets of the Carbonari.17

But, even without these notes, it is now possible to form a fairly accurate picture both of the activities of the Carbonari in the Romagna and of the degree to which Byron shared in them. Various Italian writers have taken some pains to prove—on quite insufficient evidence—that Byron’s participation in the Italian struggle for liberty was a mere consequence of his having been, as they affirm, a Freemason. They attempt to link up his activity in the Romagna with his previous meetings with the Liberal intellectuals in Milan (Pellegrino Rossi, Lodovico di Breme, Silvio Pellico) and, on the other hand, with his subsequent venture in Greece. This was also the line taken in the reports of the Austrian and Papal police, which described the English Mylord as a sinister emissary of England, seeking to extend English Liberal influence (like Lord Bentinck in Sicily) in order to sap the power of the Holy Alliance all over the Continent.

All this, however, presupposes a complete misconception of Byron’s attitude to public matters. He was in politics a dilettante, an aristocrat at odds with society, an intellectual with a strong partiality for liberty. But this partiality was not attached to any definite political structure: it was merely a personal taste. As Bertrand Russell pertinently remarks, ‘the freedom he praised was that of a German Prince or a Cherokee Chief, not the inferior sort that might conceivably be enjoyed by ordinary mortals’.18 When he found himself, as he did in the Romagna, in a country ruled by a despotic and oppressive government, his sympathies went out, in typically English and amateurish fashion, to that section of society which was oppressed, while at the same time, in Italy as in Greece, his historical imagination was fired by the idea of a renascence of the two great nations of the past. ‘Only think, a free Italy! Why, ’tis the very poetry of politics.’19 But it was in him—although leavened by the practical common sense which he showed again in Greece*—a poet’s vision, not a statesman’s.

In actual prosaic fact, the risings in the Romagna were not a very important episode. The anxious police spies who opened Byron’s letters and dogged his footsteps were correct in considering him one of the moving spirits of the conspiracy; but the plan was wholly dependent on concerted action in the South, and it fizzled out the moment the Neapolitan army was dispersed. Nevertheless Byron was right in saying that ‘the more selfish calculation ought never to be made on such occasions…’

It is not one man nor a million, but the spirit of liberty that must be preserved. The waves which dash upon the shore are, one by one, broken, but the ocean conquers nevertheless. It overwhelms the Armada, it wears the rock. In like manner, whatever the struggle of individuals, the great cause will gather strength.20

Mr. Harold Nicolson has gone so far as to affirm that, if Byron had deserted the Hellenic cause, there would have been no Navarino. It would perhaps be rash to make a similar claim for the poet’s influence on the Risorgimento—largely because he did not have the good fortune to die in Italy. But certainly in Italy, as in Greece, the results of Byron’s intervention were entirely disproportionate to the immediate achievement: he came to be ‘more important as a myth, than as he really was’.21 The rising in which he took part was only a minor affair, but it was one of the first faint rumblings which, all over Europe, heralded the great revolutionary storm of 1848; and Byron’s name is still remembered by Italians, as that of a friend of Italy and of her freedom.

Finally, the part that Byron played in Italy was important to himself. One of the ingredients was, of course, a certain pleasure in the whole mise en scène: he enjoyed the encounters in the Pineta with the bands of conspirators who cheered him as he rode by; he enjoyed the ‘camaraderie’ of their banquets—slightly spurious, for what would he have said if his friendship with them had entailed his giving up a single one of his privileges as ‘Pari d’Inghilterra’? He remained with them, too, the ‘Cherokee Chief’. He liked to write home about the danger of receiving a stiletto in his back, about secret plots and documents, and weapons concealed in his cellar.

And beneath all this, there was something more. The motive which underlay the Italian venture and the Greek one was the same: a desire for rehabilitation in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen. The ‘tremulous web of sensitiveness’ which Moore had already noted—the constant preoccupation with English opinion which Lady Blessington was to observe†—is already evident in the pages of the Ravenna Journal. The smallest scrap of news from England, indeed, the slightest breath of approval or criticism, had for Byron a reality which nothing in his life abroad ever acquired. In vain did he declare that he had shaken off the dust of the country which had misunderstood and insulted him; in vain did he achieve fame and success all over the Continent. Never could he rid himself of the nagging conviction that the only true criterion of fame and success, the only true achievement, lay in the opinion of Englishmen, at home. Always he remained what he called himself in signing the visitor’s book in the Armenian monastery at Venice: ‘Lord Byron, inglese.’

This constant preoccupation with English opinion is, perhaps, the key to all his public behaviour abroad. ‘If I live,’ he told Lady Blessington (and Teresa has marked the passage in the margin), ‘and return from Greece with something better and higher than the reputation or glory of a poet, opinions may change, as the successful are always judged favourably of in our country; my laurels may cover my faults better than the bays have done.’22 For Byron had to the full the intellectual’s admiration for the man of action. ‘A man’, he told Teresa, ‘ought to do more for society than write verses.’ And elsewhere he had written: ‘If I live ten years longer, you will see, however, that it is not over with me—I don’t mean in literature, for that is nothing; and it may seem odd enough to say, I do not think it my vocation.’23 When in the Ravenna Journal, on his thirty-third birthday, he deplores the passing of the years, not ‘so much for what I have done, as for what I might have done,’24 it was not of literary achievement that he was thinking. It was—at Ravenna as at Missolonghi—a ‘nobler aim’. The Italian venture—undertaken with a similar mixture of motives, a similar irresolution and conflict, fraught with a similar exasperation with the people whose cause he was defending—was the prelude to the Greek tragedy.

NOTES

1. September 21st, 1827.

2. Unpublished letter, belonging to Sir John Murray, June 2nd, 1858.

3. Elliot Papers.

4.Letters and Journals, V, p. 79. To John Murray, September 23rd,1820.

5. Ibid., V, p. 70. To Moore, August 31st, 1820.

6. Correspondence, II, p. 109. To Douglas Kinnaird.

7. Journal of Lady Byron—quoted by Maurois, Byron, II, p. 17.

8. Lovelace, Astarte, p. 308. October 5th, 1821.

9. Byron to Augusta Leigh, July 26th, 1819. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

10. Maurois, Byron, I, p. 251.

11. Hunt, Lord Byron and some of his contemporaries, I, p. 68.

12. Mayne, Byron, p. 350.

13.I Guiccioli, I, p. 18 and II, p. 88.

14. Drinkwater, The Pilgrim of Eternity, p. 293.

15. Hunt, op. cit., I, p. 68.

16.L.J., V, p. 403. Ravenna, May 21st, 1821.

17. Meneghetti, Lord Byron a Venezia, p. 166. There is no other record of this incident.

18. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 776.

19.L.J.,V, p.205.

20. Ravenna Journal, January 11th, 1821. L.J., V, pp. 163–4.

21. Russell, op. cit., p. 780.

22. Lady Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 402.

23.L.J., IV, p.62.

24. Ibid., V, p. 182.

* ‘If there was one quality that characterized Byron more than another, it was his solid common sense.’—Disraeli.

† ‘Tremblingly alive to the censure or opinions of persons for whom he entertains little respect.’ ‘Byron seems to take a pleasure in censuring England and its customs, yet it is evident to me that he rails at it and them as a lover does at the failure of his mistress… Why talk so much and so constantly of his country, if he felt that indifference, nay, hatred to it which he professes?’ Lady Blessington, The Idler in Italy, p. 167.

I cannot exist without some object of attachment.

BYRON TO LADY MELBOURNE, 1813

I can hope no more to inspire attachment, and I trust never again to feel it.

BYRON TO HOPPNER, 1819

Prologue

On ne saurait s’y prendre de trop de façons, et par trop de bouts, pour connaître un homme.

SAINTE-BEUVE

On the happy occasion of the Espousals arranged and concluded between the Cavaliere Commendatore Alessandro Guiccioli and the Contessa Teresa Gamba Ghiselli daughter of Conte Ruggero, both of this city, it has been thought desirable to put on record the dowry assigned by Conte Ruggero to his aforesaid Daughter, as well as to establish the rules that will govern their future union…

In view of this Marriage Conte Ruggero Gamba Ghiselli, having come before this Notary Public and in the presence of Witnesses… has assigned and made over to his Daughter Contessa Teresa the dowry of scudi 4500…

The Cavaliere promises and guarantees to his Spouse the Contessa in case of her Widowhood—which God avert—a decent and comfortable provision from the Guiccioli Fortune, so long as she lives a Widow’s life, and the interest on her dowry remains with the Guiccioli family…1

This marriage contract, drawn up in the little provincial town of Ravenna in the Romagna, on January 20th, 1818, is the beginning of the story.

Forty years lay between the bride and bridegroom,2 and they had met for the first time three months before, when the bride had just come home from school. The second of Count Gamba’s five pretty daughters, she was, by all accounts, the most attractive, and moreover the prize pupil of S. Chiara, the new-fangled convent school at Faenza—which had been opened during the recent French domination. Here—although she was something of a little hoyden, quick-tempered and vain and, her schoolfellows whispered, extremely ambitious3—Teresa had received an education exceptional for a girl of her time. The Abbess, Madre Rampi,—a woman of great character—had decided to create a model establishment, in which girls (almost as if they were boys) would be given une éducation forte, comprising not only an appreciation of the classic authors of their own language, but a thorough training in the arts of eloquence and rhetoric. The school, indeed, was closed a few years later by the Church, on the grounds that so much learning was dangerous for women; but meanwhile its pupils had learned how to hold a conversation about Dante or Petrarch, and how to write letters in a style from which every trace of simplicity and naturalness was eliminated. Moreover at home Teresa had also enjoyed the teaching of her brother’s professor, Paolo Costa, who had imparted to her, as well as a love of literature, the rudiments of philosophy. She was, in short, a very well-educated young lady indeed, and aware of it; and perhaps this helped her to face with equanimity the prospect of marriage with a man who, whatever his faults (and it is not likely that much of the gossip had reached her ears), was known to be the wittiest and most cultivated man in Ravenna, who had been a friend of Alfieri’s, and was a patron of the theatre. Teresa, her sisters whispered enviously, would have her own box at the Opera—had not the Ravenna theatre been restored largely at the Count’s expense?—she would have a fine house, with many servants in livery, including two ‘mori’ in rich Oriental costumes, with pistols and daggers at their belts; she would drive in the Carnival cavalcade in a coach-and-six preceded by outriders with blue and white feathers in their caps. Besides, says the Count’s grandson, ‘my grandfather was a handsome man, vigorous, rich, intelligent, agreeable in conversation, skilled in seduction, of fine manners and illustrious family’. What more could a girl desire? And so, on a late autumn evening of the year 1817, a curious little scene took place in the drawing-room of Palazzo Gamba.