Nor was Byron ever an argumentative revolutionist of the school of the philosophic Radicals. Neither in his letters nor in his other writings does he give reasons for his revolutionary faith. He presents himself there as one who is a revolutionist as a matter of course—one to whom it could not possibly occur to be anything but a revolutionist. As for his motives, he assumes that we know them, or that they do not concern us, or else he leaves us to guess them, or to infer them from our general knowledge of his character and circumstances.
Apparently, since guess-work is our resource, he was a Revolutionist in Italy for much the same reason for which he had been a protector of small boys at Harrow. The same generous instinct which had made him hate bullies then made him hate oppressors now; and he hated them the more because he perceived that oppression was buttressed by hypocrisy. In particular he saw the Italians bullied by the Austrians in the name of the so-called Holy Alliance—that unpleasant group of potentates whose fanaticism was exploited by the cunning of Metternich, and who invoked the name of God and the principle of divine right for the crushing of national aspirations. That was enough to set him now sighing for “a forty-parson power” to “snuffle the praises of the Holy Three,” now proposing that the same Three should be “shipped off to Senegal,” and to enlist his sympathies on the Italian side. The rest depended upon circumstances; and the determining circumstances were that he was an active man on a loose end, and that his lot was cast among conspirators.
He was ready to conspire because of the trend of his sympathies; he actually conspired, in the first instance, partly to please the Gambas, and partly because he was bored; and his appetite grew with what it fed upon. It was not merely that conspiracy furnished him with occupation—the cause at the same time furnished him with an ideal, of which he was beginning to feel the need. Living for himself he had made a mess of his life; and his relations with Madame Guiccioli did not conceal the fact from him. His love for her was a pastime, and no more an end in itself than his attachment to the draper’s wife at Venice. But he felt the need of some end in itself, unrelated to his personal concerns, to round off his life, give it unity and consistency, and make it a progressive drama instead of a mere series of unrelated incidents; and he found that end in espousing the cause of oppressed nationalities.
No doubt there were other influences simultaneously at work. The most effective altruist is always something of an egoist as well; and it is likely enough that Byron heard the promptings of personal ambition as well as the bitter cry of outcast peoples. His place in a revolutionary army could not be that of a private soldier—he was bound to be its picturesque figure-head if not its actual leader; and that meant much at a time when all the Liberals of Europe closely followed every attempt to shake off the Austrian, or the Prussian, or the Papal yoke. So that here was his clear chance to rehabilitate himself—to issue from his obscure retreat in a sudden blaze of glory, and set the prophets saying that the stone which the builders rejected had become the head-stone of the corner. But, however that may be, and however much or little that object may have been present to his mind, it is at all events from the time of his active association with revolutionary movements that Byron’s life in exile begins to acquire seriousness and dignity.
So much in broad outline. The details, when we come to look for them, are obscure, insignificant, and disappointing. He joined the Carbonari, and was made the head of one of their sections—the Capo of the Americani was his official designation; but the Carbonari, though a furious, were a feeble folk. They had signs, and passwords, and secret meeting-places in the forest, and they whispered any quantity of sedition; but their secrets were “secrets de Polichinelle.” Spies lurked behind every door and listened at every keyhole, and their intentions were better known to the police than to themselves.
A rising was proposed and even planned. The poet’s letters to his publisher are full of dark references to the terrible things about to happen. A row is imminent, and he means to be in the thick of it. Heads are likely to be broken, and his own shall be risked with the rest. All other projects must be postponed to that contingency. He cannot even come to England as he had intended, to attend to his private affairs. And so on, in a series of letters, in one of which we find the significantly prophetic question, honoured with a paragraph to itself: “What thinkst thou of Greece?” It is the beginning, at last, of the awakening of Byron’s sterner and more serious self—the first occasion on which we see the fierce joys of battle clearly meaning more to him than the soft delights of love.
Only there was to be no battle this time, and hardly even a skirmish, and, in fact, very little beyond a scare. The Austrians were watching the Romagnese border much as a cat watches a mouse-hole. A week or so before the proposed insurrection was to have taken place, an Austrian army crossed the Po, and the proposed insurgents scattered and hid themselves. It only remained for the Government to arrest those of them whom it desired to keep under lock and key, and expel those whom it preferred to get rid of.
Byron himself might very well have been lodged in an Austrian or Papal gaol through a scurvy trick played on him by some of the conspirators. He had provided a number of them with arms at his expense; and then the decree went forth that all persons found in possession of arms were to be treated as rebels. Whereupon the chicken-hearted crew came running to the Guiccioli Palace and begged Byron to take back his muskets. He was out at the time, but returned from his ride to find his apartment turned into an armoury; and it still remains uncertain whether he escaped molestation, as he thought, because his servants did not betray him, or, as seems more probable, because the Government preferred not to have such an embarrassing prisoner on their hands.
If he would have been embarrassing as a prisoner, however, he was equally embarrassing as a resident; and, as his expulsion might have made a noise, it was decided to manœuvre him out of the country by expelling the Gambas. Where they went Madame Guiccioli would have to go too, and where she went Byron might be expected to follow. We get his version of the story, together with a glimpse at his feelings, and at the new struggle in his mind between love and ambition, in a letter to Moore dated September 19, 1821;
“I am all in the sweat, dust, and blasphemy of an universal packing of all my things, furniture &c., for Pisa, whither I go for the winter. The cause has been the exile of all my fellow Carbonics, and, amongst them, of the whole family of Madame G.; who, you know, was divorced from her husband, last week, ‘on account of P. P. clerk of this parish,’ and who is obliged to join her family and relatives, now in exile there, to avoid being shut up in a monastery, because the Pope’s decree of separation required her to reside in casa paterna, or else, for decorum’s sake, in a convent. As I could not say, with Hamlet, ‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ I am preparing to follow them.