“It is awful work, this love, and prevents all a man’s projects of good or glory. I wanted to go to Greece lately (as everything seems up here), with her brother, who is a very fine, brave fellow (I have seen him put to the proof) and wild about liberty. But the tears of a woman who has left her husband for a man, and the weakness of one’s own heart, are paramount to these projects, and I can hardly indulge them.”
Greece again, it will be observed, and an indication that Byron is at last more anxious to be up and doing something as the champion of desperate causes than to lie bound with silken chains about the feet of a mistress! A proof, too, that his mistress, on her part, already perceiving that causes may be her rivals, feels the need of working on his feelings with her tears! Moore prints the letters in which she appeals to him in the first excitement of her passions and apprehensions: “Help me, my dear Byron, for I am in a situation most terrible; and without you I can resolve upon nothing.” She has received, it seems, a passport, and also an intimation that she must either return to her husband or go to a convent. Not suspecting that passport and intimation came from the same source, she talks of the necessity of escaping by night lest the passport should be taken from her. She is in despair, and cannot bear the thought of never seeing Byron again. If that is to be the result of quitting Romagna, then she will remain and let them immure her, regarding that as the less melancholy fate. And so forth, in language which may be merely hysterical, but more probably indicates a waning confidence in her lover.
But her tears prevailed. Byron, it is true, lingered at Ravenna for some months after her departure; but that is a circumstance of which we must not make too much. He had his apartment at Ravenna; he had his belongings about him; and they were considerable, including not only furniture, and books, and manuscripts, and horses, and carriages, and dogs and cats, but a large menagerie of miscellaneous live-stock. He could hardly be expected to go until he and the Gambas had arranged where to settle; and their arrangements called for much discussion and balancing of pros and cons.
It was during the time of indecision that Shelley came, at his request, to visit him; and we may take Shelley’s letters to Peacock as our next testimony to his way of life. His establishment, Shelley reports, “consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon;” and in a postscript he adds: “I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circæan Palace was defective, and that in a material point. I have just met, on the grand staircase, five peacocks, two guinea-hens, and an Egyptian crane.” Then he proceeds:
“Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom (but one must sleep or die, like Southey’s sea-snake in Kehama) at twelve. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six till eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide Ravenna from the sea. We then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning.”
They gossiped about many things, and considered, among other matters, what would be the best place for Byron, the Gambas, and Madame Guiccioli to live in. Switzerland had been proposed, but Shelley urged objections which Byron admitted to be sound. Switzerland was “little fitted for him.” The English colonies would be likely to “torment him as they did before,” ostentatiously sending him to Coventry, and then spying on him when there. The consequence of his exasperation might be “a relapse of libertinism,” a return to the Venetian way of life, “which he says he plunged into not from taste, but from despair.”
Perhaps the last-named danger was rather less than Shelley supposed; for the drapers’ and bakers’ wives of Geneva and the Canton of Vaud are neither so attractive nor so accommodating as those of Venice; but, on the whole, this wayward sprite, as he is commonly esteemed—so wayward that he had been expelled from his University and had sacrificed a large fortune to an unnecessary quarrel with his father—showed common sense and worldly wisdom in his advice. He showed so much of it, indeed, and showed it so clearly, that Byron begged him to write to Madame Guiccioli and put the case to her; which he duly did “in lame Italian,” eliciting an answer very eloquent of his correspondent’s growing anxiety as to her hold upon Byron’s heart. Madame Guiccioli agreed to the proposal, but then begged a favour: “Pray do not leave Ravenna without taking Milord with you.”
But that, of course, was rather too much to ask. The most that Shelley could promise was that he would undertake every arrangement on Byron’s behalf for his establishment at Pisa, and would then “assail him with importunities,” if these should be necessary, to rejoin his mistress; and it seems that they were necessary, for two months or more later, we find Shelley writing to him: “When may we expect you? The Countess G. is very patient, though sometimes she seems apprehensive that you will never leave Ravenna.”
The Countess, indeed, in supplying Moore with biographical material, showed herself at her wit’s end to devise excuses for Byron’s delay, not too wounding to her vanity; and Shelley, at the time, showed a tendency to reconsider his estimate of their relations: “La Guiccioli,” he wrote in October, “is a very pretty, sentimental, innocent Italian, who has sacrificed an immense fortune for the sake of Lord Byron, and who, if I know anything of my friend, of her, and of human nature, will hereafter have plenty of leisure and opportunity to repent her rashness.” It was a harsh judgment, based in part, no doubt, on what Shelley had been told of Byron’s treatment of Miss Clairmont; but it indicated a real danger-spot.
Byron had ceased to love passionately, if he had ever done so, and he did not love blindly. We need not, indeed, accept Miss Clairmont’s statement that, at the end, he was “sick to death of Madame Guiccioli,” and that it was chiefly for the purpose of escaping from her that he joined the Greek insurgents. That utterance was the voice of a jealous woman endeavouring to appease her own affronted pride. But though there was no question of Byron’s giving Madame Guiccioli a rival of her own sex, she was now destined to encounter the rivalry, hardly less serious, of his political interests and ambitions. All through the period of his residence at Ravenna things had been working towards that conclusion; and the circumstances of the removal showed how near they had now got to it.