LITMIR.BIZ

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her of his love, and a rather more fulsome declaration of homage to Goethe, ‘the undisputed Sovereign of European literature’.⁴² On 23 July they were ready to sail again, and took on board two dubious Greeks and a young Scotsman, Hamilton Browne, who had served in the Ionian Isles. Browne was rowed out to the ship by a friend, the son of the Reverend Jackson who had famously poisoned himself during the Irish troubles to thwart justice. Byron recognized the name and was quick with his sympathy. ‘His lordship’s mode of address,’ Browne wrote of this first meeting, ‘was peculiarly fascinating and insinuating – “au premier abord” it was next to impossible for a stranger to refrain from liking him.’⁴³

      Byron, however, was going to need more than charm to survive the months ahead as their brief stop in Leghorn underlined. While the Hercules was still in the roads, he wrote a final letter to Bowring, the Secretary of the London Greek Committee to which he had been elected, striking in it a note that can be heard again and again in his subsequent letters from Greece. ‘I find the Greeks here somewhat divided amongst themselves’, he reported,

      I have spoken to them about the delay of intelligence for the Committee’s regulation – and they have promised to be more punctual. The Archbishop is at Pisa – but has sent me several letters etc. for Greece. – What they most seem to want or desire is – Money – Money – Money … As the Committee has not favoured me with any specific instructions as to any line of conduct they might think it well for me to pursue – I of course have to suppose that I am left to my own discretion. If at any future period – I can be useful – I am willing to be so as heretofore. –⁴⁴

      The punctuation of Byron’s letters invariably gives a strong sense of rapidity and urgency of thought, an immediacy that makes him one of the great letter writers in the language, and yet curiously here it only serves to reinforce a sense of uncertainty and drift. It is a feeling that seems mirrored in the mood on the Hercules as each day put his Italian life farther behind him. There is an air of unreality about this journey, as if the Hercules and its passengers were somehow suspended between the contending demands of past and future, divorced from both in the calm seas that blessed the next weeks of their passage. It is hard to believe that, for all his clear-eyed and tolerant realism about the Greeks, Byron had any real sense of what lay ahead. The memory of Shelley’s corpse on the beach could quicken his natural fatalism into something like panic at the thought of pain but even this was a passing mood. As Trelawny later recalled, he had never travelled on ship with a better companion. The weather, after they left Leghorn, was beautiful and the Hercules seldom out of sight of land. Elba, the recent scene of Napoleon’s first exile, was passed off the starboard bow with suitable moralizings. At the mouth of the Tiber the ship’s company strained in vain for a glimpse of the city where Trelawny had buried Shelley’s ashes and prepared his own grave. During the day Byron and Trelawny would box and swim together, measure their waistlines or practise on the poop with pistols, shooting the protruding heads off ducks suspended in cages from the mainyard. At night Byron might read from Swift or sit and watch Stromboli shrouded in smoke and promise another canto of ‘Childe Harold’.

      And yet Byron, if he ever had been, was no longer the ‘Childe’ and in that simple truth lay a world of future misunderstandings. One of the most moving aspects of his last year is the way his letters and actions reveal a gradual firming of purpose, a steady discarding of the conceits and fripperies of his Italian existence, a unifying of personality, an alignment at last of intelligence and sensibility – a growth into a human greatness which mirrors the development of his literary talents from the emotional and psychological crudity of ‘Childe Harold’ into the mature genius of ‘Don Juan’.

      For anyone interested in poetry it is in that last masterpiece that the real Byron is to be found, but it was not the Byron that Trelawny had come to Italy in search of. Even before the Hercules had left Leghorn he was airing his reservations in letters to Roberts and Claire, but the fact is that his unease in Byron’s company was as long as their friendship itself. Eighteen months earlier, in January 1822, Trelawny had come looking for Childe Harold and found instead a middle-aged and worldly realist. He had come to worship and found a deity cynically sceptical of his own cult. ‘I had come prepared to see a solemn mystery,’ he wrote of their first meeting in the Palazzo Lanfranchi, ‘and so far as I could judge from the first act it seemed to me very like a solemn farce.’⁴⁵

      One of the great truisms of Romantic history is that Byron was never ‘Byronic’ enough for his admirers but this failure to live up to expectations seems to have constituted a more personal betrayal for Trelawny than it did for other acolytes. In trying to explain this there is a danger of ignoring the vast intellectual gap which separated the two men, yet nevertheless something is needed to account for the resentment which, even as they set off together, he was stoking up against Byron. Partly, of course, it was the bitterness of the disappointed disciple, but there was something more than that, something which Romantic myth and twentieth-century psychology in their different ways both demand to be recognized – the rage of the creature scorned in the language of one, of childhood rejection in the more prosaic terminology of the other.

      The moment words are put to it they seem overblown and lame by turns but it is impossible to ignore the evidence of a lifetime’s anger. No iconoclast ever had such a capacity for hero-worship as Trelawny and, of the long string of real or imagined figures who filled the emotional vacuum of a loveless childhood, Byron was the earliest and the greatest. In among the fantasies that Trelawny published as his Adventures, there is a description of his first meeting with the mythical De Ruyter, the imagined archetype and amalgam of all Trelawny’s heroes. It gives a vivid insight into what he had sought in Byron when he first came to Italy. ‘He became my model,’ he wrote,

      The height of my ambition was to imitate him, even in his defects. My emulation was awakened. For the first time I was impressed with the superiority of a human being. To keep an equality with him was unattainable. In every trifling action he evinced a manner so offhand, free, and noble, that it looked as if it sprung new and fresh from his own individuality; and everything else shrunk into an apish imitation.⁴⁶

      This kind of hero, however, was not a role that the thirty-five-year old Byron, with his anxieties over his weight or the thickness of his wrists, had either the inclination or temperament to fill. The helmets and uniforms in his luggage are reminders that, even in his last year, the exhibitionist in him was never entirely stilled, but the irony and self-mockery with which he treated himself in his poetry was now equally, if humorously, turned on his ‘corsair’. Trelawny, he memorably remarked, could not tell the truth even to save himself. In another variant on this he suggested that they might yet make a gentleman of him if they could only get him to tell the truth and wash his hands.

      For a man who was probably only too familiar with Trelawny’s battle against his father’s pet raven, this was a dangerously cavalier attitude to take to the child of his poetic imagination. ‘The Creator’, as Claire had warned Byron in her first letter to him before they met, ‘ought not to destroy his Creature.’⁴⁷ For a man, also, who in Pisan lore had been responsible for the death of Claire’s Allegra, this was doubly true. Byron was too careless, however, to see the trouble he was laying down. On board the Hercules a mixture of his own tolerance and Trelawny’s presumption kept relationships cordial, but it was a deceptive calm. ‘Lord B. and myself are extraordinarily thick,’ Trelawny wrote edgily to his friend Roberts in a letter from Leghorn.

      We are inseparable. But mind, this does not flatter me. He has known me long enough to know the sacrifices I make in devoting myself to serve him. This is new to him, who is surrounded by mercenaries. I am no expense to him, fight my own way, lay in my own stock, etc … Lord B. indeed does everything as far as I wish him.’⁴⁸

      It was a sad delusion but it was enough to preserve the peace of the voyage. At the

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