WITH BYRON IN ITALY THE YEARS 1817, 1818, 1819 Au VENICE INTRODUCTORY RRIVING in Venice late in the year 1816, this city became at once to Byron the “fairy city of his heart." Her canals, her gondolas, her streets, her bridges, palaces, balconies, piazzas, carnivals, pictures, politics, history, all appealed to his poetic imagination and reckless mood of the The fragment "Venice (p. 7) probably was the first poetic expression of his feelings, although it lay in manuscript nearly ninety years, to be published first in our own century. moment. In almost his first letter to his publisher, John Murray, he writes to ask that he will send him an English prose work called " View of Italy," for the sake of securing certain facts for his own poetical purposes. He has seen the black veil painted over the place where the picture of Marino Faliero should appear among the Doges, the Giant's Staircase, where he was crowned and discrowned and decapitated, but can find no good account in Venice of that Doge and his conspiracy, or the motives for it. He has determined to write a tragedy having the fiery character and strange story of Faliero for its subject, — an undertaking requiring so much research, however, that it was four years before the work was completed. The story of another Doge, Francis Foscari, and his son Jacopo, also appealed to him, although the publication of "The Two Foscari" likewise was deferred some years. The indignant "Ode to Venice" shows how he took to heart her servile condition, while its spirited appeal at the close expresses what is revealed also at other times and places - Byron's admiration of America and American liberty, — "better be Where the extinguish'd Spartans still are free, One spirit to the souls our fathers had, One freeman more, America, to thee!" A visit which Byron made to Rome in the spring of 1817, stopping at Foligno, Ferrara, and Florence on the way, resulted in several poems. Ferrara and Tasso's prison cell there inspired the fine "Lament of Tasso"; the Coliseum and the Palaces of the Casars at Rome suggested one of the choicest passages of the third act of "Manfred," which he had brought to Italy in an unfinished state; the fourth, last, and best canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,' dealing with the feelings and thoughts of this rapid 66 journey, was thrown off at a white heat, a poem of one hundred and thirty stanzas, afterwards increased to one hundred and eighty-six, being written in thirtythree days immediately upon his return to Venice. Beppo," Byron's first attempt in the mock-heroic style, of which mention already has been made; " Mazeppa," perhaps the best known of all his tales in verse, and the first four cantos of "Don Juan" also belong to the Venice period. 66 It is difficult to reconcile the tale of such a long and brilliant list of masterpieces, to say nothing of his study of the Armenian language, “in order to have something craggy to break his mind on," with the parallel tales reporting his depraved and sensual life at this time. But such unwilling witnesses as his guests, Shelley, whose admiration of Byron's poetry was excessive, Thomas Moore, his enthusiastic biographer, Hobhouse, his life-long friend, to say nothing of Byron's own letters from Venice, are not to be gainsaid. The French traveller, Henri Beyle, however, attributes Byron's reputation to English stupidity; and after going into raptures over his personal charms and into rage over the injustice done him, adds: “If at the age of twenty-eight, when he can already reproach himself with having written six volumes of the finest poetry, it had been possible thoroughly to know the world, he would have been aware that in the nineteenth century there is but one alternative, to be a blockhead or a monster. Were I in his place, I would pass myself off as dead, and commence a new life as Mr. Smith, a worthy merchant of Lima." So long as Byron remained in England he had refused to accept any pay for his writings, feeling that his position as a lord and a gentleman would be compromised by the acceptance of money. But having once reconciled himself to a contrary position, he soon becomes quite a grasping man-of-business, and will take nothing less than the highest prices for his wares. This decision is worth more than a passing mention, because for the first time in the history of English authorship a nobleman became brave enough to confess himself an author by profession. Authors of noble, even of royal rank, had written and published, but they had held themselves aloof from anything so sordid as money compensation. In England, Byron had given away his copyrights to impecunious friends, even while borrowing money for his own needs at extortionate terms from London usurers. In now deciding that he might and would accept the strong and steady stream of wealth pouring in from the sale of his works, and apply it to his own use in living according to his rank, he was acting in opposition to the prejudices of his order and to the sentiment of all English society. His long hesitation and pain preceding seem almost laughable now, but they serve to mark the great change of mental attitude in the last hundred years. Murray's list of payments to the poet during the first five years of his Italian residence foots up to nearly $63,000. He spent, however, as royally as he earned, and in Italy, as later in Greece, a very large proportion of this amount was devoted to the cause of the liberty of the people. VENICE A FRAGMENT 'Tis midnight-but it is not dark The ocean-city's dreaded Doge. But which their doom may none divine: |