The Love Affairs of Lord Byron

by Francis Henry Gribble

It was suggested to him, for instance, that as a man of letters, a scholar, and an antiquary, he might be interested to visit the stronghold of Ulysses. “Do I look,” he asked indignantly, “like one of those emasculated fogies? I detest antiquarian twaddle. Do people think I have no lucid intervals, and that I came to Greece to scribble nonsense? I will show them that I can do something better.” On another occasion, when he was taken to a monastery, and the Abbot received him in ecclesiastical costume, with the swinging of odorous censers, and presented him with an address of fulsome flattery, he burst into tempestuous rage, exclaiming: “Will no one release me from the presence of these pestilential idiots? They drive me mad.”

It was at this time that the idea was mooted of electing Byron to be King of Greece. A King would be wanted, it was said, as soon as the Turks had been turned out, and no one would cut a nobler figure on the throne than Byron. He heard what had been said, and smiled on the proposal. “If they make me the offer,” he wrote, “I will perhaps not reject it”; and one feels quite sure that he would not have rejected it. To found a dynasty and be privileged, as a royal personage, to repudiate Lady Byron and take another wife, in order that the throne might have an heir—that would, indeed, have been a triumph over the polite Society which had cold-shouldered him and the pious people who had denounced his morals; and there can be little doubt that Byron aspired to win it, and would have won it if he had lived. He was very far, however, from stooping to conciliate the electors with smooth words; in a State Paper, addressed to the Greek Central Government, he lectured them severely:

“I desire the well-being of Greece and nothing else. I will do all I can to secure it; but I will never consent that the English public be deceived as to the real state of affairs. You have fought gloriously; act honourably towards your fellow citizens and the world, and it will then no more be said, as has been repeated for two thousand years, that Philopæmen was the last of the Grecians.”

The man of action spoke there; and the man of action also came out in Byron’s expressions of disdain for his colleague, Colonel Stanhope—the “typographical colonel,” as he called him—who maintained that the one thing needful for the salvation of the Greeks was that they should “model their institutions on those of the United States of America, and decree the unlimited freedom of the Press.” Byron knew better than that. He was not to be persuaded that “newspapers would be more effectual in driving back the Ottoman armies than well-drilled troops and military tactics.” He knew that fighting would be necessary, and he was awaiting his chance of fighting with effect.

His chance came when Mavrocordatos, emerging from the ruck of revolutionary leaders, arrived to raise the siege of Missolonghi, after mopping up a Turkish treasure ship by the way, and invited Byron to join him, placing a brig at his disposal for the voyage. “I need not tell you,” he wrote, “to what a pitch your presence is desired by everybody, or what a prosperous direction it will give to all our affairs.” The “typographical colonel,” who was already with Mavrocordatos, wrote at the same time: “It is right and proper to tell you that a great deal is expected from you, both in the way of counsel and money ... you are expected with feverish anxiety. Your further delay in coming will be attended with serious consequences.” Whereupon Byron, resolving at last to take the plunge, wrote to Douglas Kinnaird, who was managing his affairs for him in London: “Get together all the means and credit of mine you can, to face the war establishment, for it is ‘in for a penny, in for a pound,’ and I must do all that I can for the ancients.” And so, with Pietro Gamba, to the dismal swamp, where he was “welcomed,” Gamba tells us, “with salvos of artillery, firing of muskets, and wild music.”

“Crowds of soldiery,” Gamba continues, “and citizens of every rank, sex, and age were assembled on the shore to testify their delight. Hope and content were pictured in every countenance. His lordship landed in a Spezziot boat, dressed in a red uniform. He was in excellent health, and appeared moved by the scene.”

Moved by the scene, indeed, he doubtless was. The scene was the beginning of his rehabilitation in the eyes of those who had treated him with contempt—the beginning of the proof that he had the qualities of a leader, and could wield other weapons besides the pen—the demonstrative proclamation that the path of duty was to be the way to glory. The scarlet uniform was an appropriate tribute to the solemnity of the occasion on which he formally entered upon his last and best new way of life. He did not enter upon it, however, “in excellent health,” as Gamba says, but as a broken man with a shattered constitution, who had but a little time in which to do his work before the inevitable malaria came up out of the marsh and gripped him.

Meanwhile, however, Mavrocordatos gave him a commission as commander-in-chief—archi-strategos was his grandiloquent title—and he did what he could. He took 500 of those “dark Suliotes” whom he had sung in the early cantos of “Childe Harold” into his pay, and was prepared to lead them to the storming of Lepanto. He did something to mitigate the inhumanities of the war by insisting upon the release of some Turkish prisoners whom his allies proposed to massacre. Maintaining his character as man of action, he suppressed a converted blacksmith, who arrived from England with a cargo of type, paper, bibles and Wesleyan tracts, proposing to use the tracts for cartridges and turn the type into small shot. And then, having leisure on his hands, he wrote one poem, which he showed to Colonel Stanhope, saying: “You were complaining the other day that I never write any poetry now. This is my birthday, and I have just finished something which, I think, is better than what I usually write.”

I
“’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move;
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!
II
“My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!
III
“The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze—
A funeral pile!
IV
“The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share,
But wear the chain.
V
“But ’tis not thus—and ’tis not here—
Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now,
Where glory decks the hero’s bier,
Or binds his brow.
VI
“The sword, the banner, and the field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.
VII
“Awake! (not Greece—she is awake!)
Awake my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home.
VIII
“Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood!—unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.
IX
“If thou regret’st thy youth, why love?
The land of honourable death
Is here:—up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!
X
“Seek out—less often sought than found—
A soldier’s grave, for thee the bed;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest.”

“We perceived,” Count Gamba comments, “from these lines ... that his ambition and his hope were irrevocably fixed upon the glorious objects of his expedition to Greece, and that he had made up his mind to ‘return victorious or return no more.’” Readers who are better acquainted than Count Pietro alike with the English language and with the circumstances of the case will find rather more than that in them. They also reveal the memory which Byron fell back upon and lived with at the hours when he rested from the strain of his revolutionary enthusiasm. It was not the memory of Count Pietro’s sister. Byron could not possibly have been thinking of her when he cried out that his love was a lonely fire at which no torch was kindled; for her love for him was far fiercer and more enduring than his love for her. His thoughts, it is quite clear, had once more strayed back to Mary Chaworth; and the internal evidence of that is confirmed by the mention of her name in two separate passages of those “Detached Thoughts” which he threw on paper just before he left Ravenna. His attachment to her, he then remembers, threw him out “on a wide, wide sea.” He speaks of her as “My M.A.C.,” and continues in a passage often quoted: