It is a source of great pleasure to me, your friendship – to be beloved – and Love – under whatever circumstances – is still happiness – the void in my affections is filled up – and though separate – I have lost that despairing dreary feeling of loneliness – I look forward with something of hope.
I am anxious to get to sea. Write to me here – and let me know your address – I do not like to importune you about writing. There are some pleasant women here, which induces me to go more into society than usual ….
Dear, I am not in the vein for writing –
Your unalterably
Attached
Edward.
May 15 1823
Florence31
At the time of this letter Trelawny probably had nothing fixed in mind when he spoke of the sea, but over the next months the unspoken possibility of joining Byron on an expedition took on a solid form. From the very start of their acquaintance there had always been desultory talk of travel in one direction or another, and when the idea of fighting for Greek independence suddenly became more than talk in the early summer of 1823, Trelawny was ready to join the crusade. ‘I wish Lord Byron was as sincere in his wish of going to Greece – as I am,’ he confided to Mary Shelley,
every one seems to think it a fit theatre for him … at all events tell him how willingly I will embark in the cause – and stake my all on the cast of the die – Liberty or nothing.32
By the early summer of 1823 Greece had been at war with Ottoman Turkey for just over two years, drawing men from all over Europe and America to a country that had long held a special place in the Western imagination. From the day in March 1751 when James Stuart and Nicholas Revett landed at the port of Athens to make the first accurate drawings of its ruins, travellers, painters, scholars, dilettanti, soldiers and architects had all made their way out to Greece, sketching and plundering its sites, charting its battlefields and searching the modern Greek’s physiognomy for some trace of its ancient lineaments, some link between the Greece which languished under Turkish rule and the land that had produced the poetry of Homer and the sculpture of the Acropolis.
It was in 1809 that the twenty-one-year-old Byron had first followed in this tradition, travelling with his long-suffering Cambridge friend John Cam Hobhouse through Ali Pasha’s Albania to Delphi, Athens, and on to Smyrna, Ephesus and Constantinople. In the years before this ‘pilgrimage’, Byron had gained a minor reputation in England as an aristocratic poetaster and satirist, but it was with the verses of ‘Childe Harold’, published on his return, that he not only made his own name but cast this old Philhellenism into the form that was to galvanize Romantic Europe into action.
Oh, thou, Parnassus! whom I now survey,
Not in the phrensy of a dreamer’s eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,
But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!
What marvel if I thus essay to sing?
The humblest of the pilgrims passing by
Would gladly woo thine Echoes with his string,
Though from thy heights no more one Muse will wave her wing.
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!
Who now shall lead thy scatter’d children forth,
And long accustom’d bondage uncreate?
Not such thy sons who whilome did await,
The hopeless warriors of a willing doom,
In bleak Thermopylae’s sepulchral strait –
Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume,
Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb?
Where’er we tread ’tis haunted, holy ground;
No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,
But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,
And all the Muse’s tales seem truly told,
Till the sense aches with gazing to behold
The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon;
Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold
Defies the power which crush’d thy temples gone:
Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon.33
There is not an idea here that was new – not an idea of any sort it could be argued – but faced with verses of this power it is as idle to think of Byron as a product of Philhellenism as it is to see Shakespeare as a mere child of the Elizabethan Renaissance. The excitement and sentiments displayed were certainly no more Byron’s invention than was the ‘Byronic hero’, and yet in ‘Childe Harold’ and his Eastern Tales he succeeded in setting the stamp of his personality on a whole movement, giving it a new and popular currency and charting the emotional and topographical map-references from which Philhellenism has never tried to escape.
It is not simply that there is no figure in Philhellene history to compare with Byron, there is no second to him. What we are looking at in the verses of ‘Childe Harold’ or ‘Don Juan’ is some kind of literary take-over, at a whole disparate, woolly and amorphous movement captured and vitalized by the specific genius of one man. Before Byron, it is safe to say, for all its seriousness, its achievements, its intelligence, there was no folly of which western Philhellenism was incapable: after Byron, for all its romantic froth, there was nothing to which it would not aspire.
The mountains look on Marathon –
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;34
The history of the Philhellene movement is so impossible to imagine without Byron that it always comes as a surprise to remember that for almost three years of the war his involvement remained no more than this ‘dream’. On the outbreak of rebellion in 1821, he had returned to the theme of Greek freedom with some of the most famous lyrics in ‘Don Juan’ and, again, in the following year, there had been some desultory talk of volunteering, but his letters for this period – for the years that Trelawny knew him – are the letters of a man submerged in a life of literary and social affairs that left little room for Greece. It was a life full of gossip and flirtations, of boats, business and his mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, of Italian politics and proof-reading, of arguments about Pope and the deaths of Shelley and Keats, of Leigh Hunt’s financial affairs and repulsive children, of rows with his publisher Murray and over Allegra, of Lady Byron and his half-sister Augusta – a life at once so full and empty as to be much like any other except that it was lived out by Byron. In 1823 Byron could as easily have gone to Spain as Greece; or Naples, or South America, or a South Sea Island, or nowhere at all. Chance, pique, sloth, lust, avarice, good nature and pride might still have disposed of him in any of a dozen ways that summer: only myth pushes him towards Greece with a confidence that will brook no dissent.
Given how much was at stake there is something alarming in the precariousness of this historical process, in its casual and arbitrary shedding of options until all that was left was the brittle chain of events that in 1823 lead Byron from Italy to Missolonghi. During the months that Trelawny chafed impatiently at his irresolution, the London Greek Committee had done all it could to flatter and cajole Byron into a proper sense of his destiny, and yet it remains as hard to define what it was that finally