Missolonghi.
It was in 1823, when he was living in Genoa—whither he had gone from Pisa (and before this, Ravenna)—that his sympathies were awakened in behalf of the Greeks, who since 1820 had been in revolt against their Turkish taskmasters. He had been already enrolled with those Carbonari—the forerunners of the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis—who had labored in vain for the independence and unity of Italy; and in many a burst of his impassioned song he had showered welcoming praises upon a Greece that should be free, and with equal passion attuned his verse to the lament—that
“Freedom found no champion and no child
Such as Columbia saw arise when she
Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled.”
How much all this was real and how much only the romanticism of the poet, was now to be proven. And it was certainly with a business-like air that he cut short his little agaceries with the Lady Blessington, and pleasant dalliance with the Guiccioli, for a rallying of all his forces—moneyed or other—in the service of that cause for which the brave Marco Bozzaris had fallen, fighting, only three months before. It was in July that he embarked at Genoa for Greece—in a brig which he had chartered, and which took guns and ammunition and $40,000 of his own procurement, with a retinue of attendants—including his trusty Fletcher—besides his friends Trelawney and the Count Gamba. They skirted the west coast of Italy, catching sight of Elba—then famous for its Napoleonic associations—and of Stromboli, whose lurid blaze, reflected upon the sea, startled the admiring poet to a hinted promise—that those fires should upon some near day reek on the pages of a Fifth Canto of Childe Harold.
Mediterranean ships were slow sailers in those days, and it was not until August that they arrived and disembarked at Cephalonia—an island near to the outlet of the Gulf of Corinth, and lying due east from the Straits of Messina. There was a boisterous welcome to the generous and eloquent peer of England; but it was a welcome that showed factional discords. Only across a mile or two of water lay the Isle of Ithaca, full of vague, Homeric traditions, which under other conditions he would have been delighted to follow up; but the torturing perplexities about the distribution of moneys or ammunition, the jealousies of quarrelsome chieftains, the ugly watch over drafts and bills of exchange, and the griping exactions of local money-changers, made all Homeric fancies or memories drift away with the scuds of wind that blew athwart the Ionian seas.
He battled bravely with the cumulating difficulties—sometimes maddened to regret—other times lifted to enthusiasm by the cordial greeting of such a chieftain as Mavrocordatos, or the street cheers of a band of Suliotes. So months passed, until he embarked again, in equipage of his own, with his own fittings, for Missolonghi, where final measures were to be taken. Meantime he is paying for his ships, paying for his Suliotes, paying for delays, and beset by rival chieftains for his interest, or his stimulating presence, or his more stimulating moneys. On this new but short sea venture he barely escapes capture by a Turkish frigate—is badly piloted among the rocky islets which stud the shores; suffers grievous exposure—coming at last, wearied and weakened, to a new harborage, where welcomes are vociferous, but still wofully discordant. He labors wearily to smooth the troubled waters, his old, splendid allegiance to a free and united Greece suffering grievous quakes, and doubts; and when after months of alternating turbulence and rest there seems promise of positive action, he is smitten by the fever of those low coasts—aggravated by his always wanton exposures. The attack is as sudden as a shot from a gun—under which he staggers and falls, writhing with pain, and I know not what convulsional agonies.
There is undertaken an Italian regimen of cupping and leeching about the brow and temples, from which the bleeding is obstinate, and again and again renewed. But he rallies; attendants are assiduous in their care. Within a day or two he has recovered much of the old vires vitæ, when on a sudden there is an alarm; a band of mutinous Suliotes, arms in hand, break into his lordship’s apartments, madly urging some trumpery claim for back-pay. Whereupon Byron—showing the old savagery of his ancestors—leaps from his bed, seizes whatever weapon is at hand, and gory—with his bandaged head still trickling blood—he confronts the mutineers; his strength for the moment is all his own again, and they are cowered into submission, their yataghans clinking as they drop to the tiled flooring of his room.
’Twas a scene for Benjamin West to have painted in the spirit of Death on the Pale Horse, or for some later artist—loving bloody “impressions.” However, peace is established. Quiet reigns once more (we count by days only, now). There is a goodly scheme for attack upon the fortress which guards the Gulf of Lepanto (Corinth); the time is set; the guards are ready; the Suliotes are under bidding; the chieftains are (for once) agreed, when, on the 18th, he falters, sinks, murmurs some last words—“Ada—daughter—love—Augusta—” barely caught; doubtfully caught; but it is all—and the poet of Childe Harold is gone, and that turbulent, brilliant career hushed in night.
It was on April 19, 1824, that he died. His body was taken home for burial. I said home; ’twere better to have said to England, to the family vault, in which his mother had been laid; and at a later day, his daughter, Ada, was buried there beside him, in the old Hucknall-Torkard church. The building is heavy and bald, without the winning picturesqueness that belongs to so many old country churches of Yorkshire. The beatitudes that are intoned under its timbered arch are not born of any rural beatitudes in the surroundings. The town is small, straggly, bricky,[78] and neither church nor hamlet nor neighbors’ houses are suffused with those softened tints which verdure, and nice keeping, and mellow sunshine give to so many villages of southern England. Hucknall-Torkard is half way between Nottingham and Newstead, and lies upon that northern road which pushes past Annesley into the region of woods and parks where Sherwood forest once flung its shadows along the aisles in which the bugle notes of master Robin Hood woke the echoes.
But Hucknall-Torkard church is bald and tame. Mr. Winter, in his pleasant descriptive sketch,[79] does indeed give a certain glow to the “grim” tower, and many a delightful touch to the gray surroundings; but even he would inhibit the pressure of the noisy market-folk against the church-yard walls, and their rollicking guffaw. And yet, somehow, the memory of Byron does not seem to me to mate well with either home or church quietudes, and their serenities. Is it not proper and fitting after all that the clangor of a rebellious and fitful world should voice itself near such a grave? Old mossy and ivied towers in which church bells are a-chime, and near trees where rooks are cawing with home-sounds, do not marry happily with our memories of Byron.
Best of all if he had been given burial where his heart lies, in that Ætolian country, upon some shaggy fore-land from which could have been seen—one way, Ithaca and the Ionian seas, and to the southward, across the Straits of Lepanto, the woody depths of the Morea, far as Arcadia.
But there is no mending the matter now; he lies beside his harsh Gordon mother in the middle of the flat country of stockings, lace curtains, and collieries.
Another poet, William Lisle Bowles, in a quaint sonnet has versed this Gordon mother’s imaginary welcome to her dead son:—
“Could that mother speak,
In thrilling, but with hollow accent weak,
She thus might give the welcome of the dead:
‘Here rest, my son, with me; the dream is fled;
The motley mask, and the great stir is o’er.
Welcome to me, and to this silent bed,
Where deep forgetfulness succeeds the roar
Of life, and fretting passions waste the heart no more!’”