“A Higher and more Extended Comprehension”: Byron’s Three Weeks in Rome1

Peter Cochran

Byron spent twenty-two days on his only visit to Rome, arriving on April 29th 1817, and leaving on May 20th.2  Our knowledge of his activities there is lessened by the fact that Hobhouse, his companion, seems to have kept no diary for the visit – a strange omission, for Hobhouse’s diaries are otherwise very consistently kept.  Lady Dorchester, Hobhouse’s daughter and editor / censor, writes, inaccurately:

But Childe Harold IV was started, according to its earliest manuscript, on June 26th, and Byron finished the draft on July 19th.  According to his later, surviving diary, Hobhouse does not hear about it until he comes back to Venice on July 31st.  In both Some Account of A Long Life and Recollections of A Long Life, he writes that he kept no diary for the Rome visit:

Hobhouse’s Rome diary may yet turn up.  The present essay is an attempt to make up for the current deficiency, and to see what can be deduced about Byron’s stay in Rome.

While at Rome Byron re-wrote the third act of Manfred (which he sent to Murray on May 5th), started thinking about Childe Harold IV (it is to be supposed), and sat for his bust to Thorwaldsen.  Despite these sedentary activities he claims to have “lived out of doors ever since my arrival”.5  He visited St. Peter’s, where he witnessed Pius VII presiding at the funeral of a Cardinal Bracchi,6 and saw also the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Campus Martius, and the Palatine.7  He rode out (“on horse-back several hours a day” between May 1st and 10th)8 to Alba, Tivoli, Frascati, Licenza, Aricia, and on other excursions.  This would have been (he doesn’t mention the fact) through dangerous country, with severed arms and legs nailed up everywhere by way of discouragement to banditti.9  He made two trips to the falls of Terni, which later in the year he was to celebrate at Childe Harold IV, stanzas 66-72.10

One reason for his spending so much time outside the city may be explained by a passage from Stendhal, who had visited Rome on February 6th 1817:

Joseph Forsyth had had the same insanitary tale to report:

There was little entertainment to be had in the city.  Stendhal continues:

The day before he left Byron witnessed a triple guillotining.13  This would have taken place at what is now the Piazza del Popolo, then Rome’s answer to Tyburn, at the north end of the Via del Corso.  Had he been there fifty years earlier, the condemned men would not have been guillotined (one of them wasn’t, properly, even in 1817 – his head was cut in half, not his neck).  Fifty years earlier, the condemned would have had their skulls crushed with heavy hammers.

We know that Byron climbed on to the roof of St. Peter’s, as far as the cross, because Lady Liddell is reported14 as meeting him there, and as telling her daughter to avert her innocent eyes from him, ‘saying, “Don’t look at him, he is dangerous to look at”’.  A later writer15 reports finding Byron’s and Hobhouse’s autographs on the cross: but the same was often said of their autographs on Bonnivard’s column in the dungeon at Chillon.

In the Sistine, one of the damned in Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement reminded Byron of Southey:

Byron seems to have been determined to keep his visit short.  “Address all answers to Venice as usual”, he writes to Murray on May 5th: “I mean to return there in ten days”.17  On May 9th, with more caution: “Address all answers to Venice for there I shall return in fifteen days”.18  His paramount need to return to Venice is an obsession, and he always under-estimates how long the Rome visit will delay him.

On May 10th he tells Augusta “I … shall return to Venice in fifteen days from this date”.  By May 11th and 12th he has given up trying to be precise, and writes both to Kinnaird and to Moore that he will “return to Venice in a few days”.19

Yearnings for the company of his Venetian mistress Marianna Segati seem to have been his reason for wanting to get back.  “I must go back to Lombardy” he writes to Murray on May 9th “– because I am wretched at being away from M[ariann]a”.20

The need to return to her perhaps intensified the experience of his visit.

Evidence of Byron’s address in Rome is provided by a letter from Torlonia, his Venetian banker, which is addressed thus (word in square brackets stamped, not hand-written):

To live at number 66 Piazza di Spagna would put Byron opposite, and slightly to the south of, the house by the Spanish Steps, where Keats was to die five years later.  The idea comes originally from the American scholar Harry Nelson Gay, co-founder of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, who is quoted in a 1914 newspaper article22 as announcing the discovery of this letter.  Number 66 is a relatively humble dwelling: Gay speculated that Byron might have preferred it, because in Venice he had not begun to live in the grand style, and number 66 would have reminded him of the Frezzeria in Venice, where Marianna lived.  Also, number 66 was in 1914 “occupata dalla Società per la protezione degli animali” and his discovery was thus, Gay said, an excellent augury, for Byron was of course a great lover of animals too, and the “padrone di Boatsvain”.

Byron may have frequented the Piazza di Spagna, for one of Bertel Thorwaldsen’s favourite spots was the Caffè Greco, on the Via Condotto, just around the corner.  The name of the Caffè degli Inglesi, however, in the Piazza itself, is unlikely to have recommended it to him.

There were plenty of English high-livers in Rome at the time, presided over by Lady Jersey.  Lady Frances Shelley, who had been there the previous Christmas, gives us this bitchy account of them, in a letter to the Duke of Wellington dated January 1817:

Although we think of Lady Jersey as Byron’s friend, it is unlikely that he would have taken much delight in the company Lady Shelley describes (who were a two-faced lot, to court both the Austrians and the Bonaparte family: Pauline Borghese, Napoleon’s sister, was famous for free-living).  He writes that he met Lady Jersey, not at Rome but at Foligno, on April 26th, and that he dined with the Marquis of Lansdowne on May 10th; otherwise he makes no references to the expatriates.

One expatriate he either missed meeting narrowly, or avoided in a cowardly way, was Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, to whom he owed money for the rent at 13, Piccadilly Terrace.  She recorded in her diary:

Byron had difficulty sorting his first impressions of the city.  On May 9th he wrote to Murray:

A generation later, George Eliot depicted the same problem of assimilation, in Middlemarch:

What can we tell of Byron’s attitude to Rome from the one piece of work he wrote there – the revised version of Manfred Act III?  The short, comical version which he had written in Switzerland had been criticised by William Gifford as trivial, and unworthy of both Byron himself and of Acts I and II.  Above all, Gifford had written,

Being in Rome may have strengthened Byron’s respect for traditional Christianity (by some measure, to judge by Childe Harold IV) and encouraged him to revise his first-draft charlatan-Abbot as a religious man, with a sincere desire to save Manfred’s soul.  However, if his Christian antagonist was to be such a powerful figure, the paganism of Manfred himself, in which he dies, unmoved by the Abbot’s words, would need reinforcing.  This is how Byron tries to achieve his effect:

Note that this was written before May 5th.29  The vision of the Colosseum and its environs which it displays (hard to recover now, for you can’t get into the Colosseum at night, and there are no trees growing in it) indicates therefore that Byron had been to it during the first six days of his visit.  The thought which he makes Manfred derive from the experience is, however, perverse.  “Leaving that beautiful which still was so, / And making that which was not” till everything around was beauty, is, for anyone who knows what went on in the Colosseum, rather more than your average moonlight could do.  For anyone with humanist feelings and beliefs, indeed, for anyone who, as Byron did, loves animals and dislikes bloodsports, “Religion, and … silent worship of the Great of Old” are the last things you experience there.  Horror, incredulity turning to laughter, and vocal detestation of “the Great of Old”, are more apt.  Are we to understand that Manfred is so arrogant, cruel and insensitive that he empathises more with the Emperors who built the Colosseum and ordered the games in it, than with its hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of tormented victims?

A couple of months later in 1817 we get an account of Byron’s (not Manfred’s) thoughts in the Colosseum.  The following stanzas are all in the first draft of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold, which he started on June 26th, and had completed by July 19th:

It is a misanthropic thought, more worthy of Manfred than the one Manfred is actually made to voice: except that Manfred could never smile through such phrases as “genial laws” and “imperial pleasure”, nor could he make the Shakespearean joke about the theatre in the last line.

Next, what we might in a post-2000 perspective call the Russell Crowe stanzas:

The sackings of Rome in 410 and 453, “By Alaric’s Goths, or younger Gaiseric’s Vandals”, to remould a later Don Juan line,30 and by the troops of Charles V in 1527, were only justice, Byron implies, for the mass-murders that occurred in the Colosseum, and the grossness of the imperialism in the name of which they were enacted.

We must be grateful that Byron wrote Childe Harold IV: we might otherwise have been tempted to interpret Manfred’s view of the Colosseum as his.

Byron echoes Manfred’s words: but the heroes on whose dust we tread now are brave, lowly gladiators from Dacia, not corrupt and sadistic emperors from Rome itself.

Chief among the “thieves, or what ye will” would have been the Austrians, whose Minister in Rome Byron’s old friend, Lady Jersey, had been so pleased to cultivate.

Next Byron describes the Pantheon, a mighty building, but one which inspires him with no original thoughts:

The hectoring stanzas on St Peter’s which follow (“Then pause, and be enlightened”) appear to me no more interesting than these on the Pantheon.  St Peter’s inspires many emotions, but any account which omits, as does Byron’s, that of the deepest aesthetic, historical and religious distaste, must be partial.  It seems Byron’s historical imagination would not allow him to see the place as a centre of power and cruelty in the way that he did the Colosseum.  No Spiritual Franciscans, Albigensians, or Knights Templar suffer in his imagination from its oppression as does his Dacian gladiator from that of the Roman Emperors.

I suggest that if we wish to know what gave Byron long-term inspiration in Rome, we may best be advised to look at places he does not include in Childe Harold IV.

Just around the corner from the Pantheon is the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, with its triptych on the life of St Matthew, by Caravaggio.  It’s difficult to imagine Byron missing it out – especially with the culture-vulture Hobhouse as his Forsyth-toting cicerone.31  And I would suggest that, although Byron was not ready for Caravaggio’s influence in May 1817, he stored away the ideas he saw in this work by this most subversive and unsettling of Renaissance painters, and used them later.

Here, from the left-hand part of the triptych, is The Calling of St Matthew:

Its visual as opposed to its narrative focus is neither Redeemer nor Saint, but the handsome, innocent-looking teenage boy who is sitting next to Matthew, and whose face bears the full impact of the light-source: he glows more than does the bearded Matthew.  Matthew looks uncertain about his Calling, and points a querying finger at his own bosom.  His uncertainty is natural, for it is no more obvious to the spectator than it is to him that Jesus has singled him out.  Jesus’s face is in partial shadow, his halo barely perceptible, his eyes inscrutable; and his finger might be pointing at the pretty young lad – who is much more charismatic than the undistinguished saint-to-be.  It is not a dramatic moment: two of Matthew’s companions – fellow tax-gatherers, perhaps – are so preoccupied with counting money that they’re not even looking up.  Could Jesus be pointing at someone else, Matthew responding under a misapprehension, and will Jesus, from embarrassment, be unable to rectify his own mistake?  The thought is reinforced when we notice that neither Matthew, the youth, nor the armed man at the front of the table, are looking at Jesus, but are staring beyond him.

Caravaggio underlines the mundanity of his interpretation by dressing everyone in early seventeenth-century gear.

Next, The Inspiration of St Matthew, the centrepiece of the triptych.

This is a comical sequel to the Calling.  Matthew may have gained a halo, but is as out of place and bewildered as writer of the first Christian book as he was when Jesus summoned him.  His dictating angel seems to have caught him unawares, so that he has not had time even to sit down comfortably.  His piteous glance seems to beg the angel to speak a little more slowly.  The picture reminds us of a scene from the later Byron:

At least we get a good look at the unfortunate Matthew here: but Caravaggio’s decision to dress or wrap the cherub in a soiled-looking sheet shows, again, where his feelings lie as a man.  The comedy is accentuated by his decision to have the space of art invade the space of life – the stool on which Matthew is kneeling is in danger of slipping out of the picture-surround and into the church.

Thirdly, The Martyrdom of St Matthew, on the right-hand side of the triptych.

As in The Calling, Caravaggio gives us another misleading focus.  His own interest is on the pale but perfect and near-naked physique of the executioner, while we are not even allowed a proper look at the doomed Saint’s face, which is foreshortened, its mouth invisible beyond the now-familiar bald pate and sharp nose (Caravaggio seems to have used this wizened old man as a frequent model).  All about, humans and angels swirl in revulsion and horror (the youth to the right has the same face as the pretty young lad in The Calling).  St Matthew’s feelings are as irrelevant, it seems, to the scene of his own Martyrdom, as they were to those of his Calling and to his Inspiration.  It’s not at all clear what qualities Christ saw in him.  Caravaggio always depicts him as a spectator at the major scenes of his own life.  His sainthood, judged in human terms, has been a piece of extraordinary bad luck.  Doubtless the Divine Will, in singling out so poor a subject, is showing its egalitarian Love for ordinary mortals – but a secularist could argue that it would have shown more Love if it had left Matthew to get on with his tax-collecting.

Such thoughts could have no voice in the formal, self-conscious rhetoric of Childe Harold.  The idea of a work of art whose focus is officially on one point but is in fact somewhere else – the idea of an artist’s semi-conscious feelings making his work go in one direction, while his conscious artistic will drives it in another – the idea of a protagonist at the mercy of circumstance – the idea of a man’s life shaped by forces he only dimly apprehends, and which, under the appearance of love, are in fact malign – the idea of a traditionally heroic tale travestied by being placed in a banal worldly perspective – these upsetting ideas surface eighteen months later in Don Juan.