MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON SWAYING agreeably upon red plush cushions to the move- ments of a Swiss train, I watched the lake flash in and out of the wistaria, the flowering chestnuts and the vivid trees. I had brought with me a lecture delivered recently at Nottingham by Professor Heinrich Straumann of Zurich University, a lecture upon Byron in Switzerland. As my train passed out of the station at Geneva, out among the lawns and lilac of Versoix, I could see across the water the hill of Cologny, with the Villa Diodati (the least changed of all the many houses in which Byron lived) standing yellow against its little wood. It was on May 25th, 1816, that Byron first reached the shore of the Lake of Genzva. In the heavy, somewhat ostentatious, travelling carriage which he had purchased in Brussels, he had rumbled all the way from Waterloo, along the Rhine to Basle, and thus, via Berne, Avenches and Moudon, to Geneva. Beside him in the carriage chattered the young and envious Polidori ; Fletcher and the Swiss courier Berger followed in the luggage cart behind. On reaching Secheron, outside the city walls, they stopped at the Hotel d'Angleterre, of which today only a single outhouse remains among the trams which jangle along the Rue de Lausanne. Tired by his journey, irritated by the vanity of Polidori, distressed at having made a fool of himself in London, enraged by the startled stares of the English tourists in the hotel lounge, Byron arrived in one of his most sulky moods. When asked to fill up a registra- tion form he did so angrily. Against nom, he wrote Byron: against prenom, he wrote Lord : against profession, he wrote Anglais : against patrie, he wrote Angleterre : and against age, he wrote furiously too years. Monsieur Dejean, the tiny proprietor of this famous hostelry, accompanied by the tame crane which always followed him, came bowing into Byron's apartments, begging this irritable centenarian to state his proper age. Byron crossed out too and added 28, let us hope with one of his entrancing sidelong smiles.
The fame of the Pilgrim of Eternity had not at that date penetrated to the city of Calvin. Professor Straumann has pointed out that it was not until three years later that the Swiss public became aware of the Byron legend ; it was in 1819 that a translation of the Prisoner of Chillon burst suddenly upon an enraptured Switzerland, a translation made by Rudolf Wyss, author of the Swiss Family Robinson. Moreover Geneva in those days was a small city behind its fortifications and its gates. Even in 1833 John Ruskin could describe it as a "bird's nest of a place," as a little town with a cluster of water-mills, a few grand houses, and a street of penthouses, of which strange constructions only one has survived until tcday. It was not, therefore, the attentions of the Swiss which rendered intolerable to Byron any further sojourn in the Hotel d'Angleterre ; it was the prying whispering presence of the English tourists, of whom, as we learn from the police registers, as many as ',too were present in Geneva at the time. Immediately he set about finding a more private residence, and on the afternoon of May 27th he rowed across the lake to inspect the Villa Diodati on its hill. It was on his return from this inspection, as he was limping up from the jetty across the lawn of the hotel, that he was accosted by Claire Clairmont and introduced by her to Mrs. Shelley and her husband. It was agreed that they would all migrate together across the lake. Byron installed himself with lavish luxury in the Villa Diodati. The Shelleys rented a small cottage at Montallegre, on the slope below. I have in my possession a reproduction of a photograph of that cottage taken in 1883 before it was destroyed. It was a tiny affair.
We have always been assured that Byron thereafter was enraged because the tourists across the water would use the telescope of the hotel at Sicheron to spy upon his movements. It is just possible that, on a clear day, they might, in fact, have been able to identify Mary Shelley and Claire climbing up the steep meadow to the Villa and to watch their white movements on the balcony. After all,
Napoleon from the cliffs of Boulogne was able to count the houses in Folkestone and to "observe people moving about " ; telescopes must have indeed been far-sighted in those days. But Byron, none the less, was happy during those summer months at the Villa Diodati, happy, in spite of the telescope and the intolerable presence of Claire, happy above all when sailing round the lake with Shelley and visiting the sites immortalised in La Nouvelle Heloise. One of the many charms of Byron is that a student can find material in his writings for any thesis which he wishes to expound. One can prove that he loathed Switzerland, finding it a " curst selfish, swinish country of brutes." With equal ease one can discover that he was enraptured by Swiss scenery, delighted by the "patient, pious, proud and free" spirit of its people, soothed by :— "A pastoral fable—pipes in the liberal air
Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd."
I doubt myself whether Byron was really attuned to the horrid majesty of the mountains, any more than he was attuned to the "tokens of insipid civilisation." What he really liked were rather wild people and places where one could ride and bathe and bask lazily in hot sun.
Swaying on my red cushions to the movement of the train and that of these conjectures, I caught a sudden sight between the chestnuts of the brown roof of Coppet with its light green shutters below. Byron was never addicted either to dominating women or to people who monopolised the conversation ; in 1812, in fact, he had referred disrespectfully to Madame de Stael, calling her "Old Mother Stale." He was pleased, none the less, to be invited to Coppet, delighted when an English visitor fainted on his slow entry into the tapestried saloon, grateful to Madame de Stael for her ready generosity of mind, amused by the gifted prisoners whom she retained as her guests. He enjoyed talking to Sismondi ; he found Schlegel in tremendous form ; he admired the beauty of John Rocca ; and he was fascinated by old Bonstetten, who all those years ago at Cambridge had lacerated the fragile feelings and crashed into the spiritual loneliness of Thomas Gray. I like to think of Byron in the saloon at Coppet, sipping bad tea from blue porcelain emblazoned with a great S and a baronial crown, listening quite patiently to Madame de Stael waving her willow wand to mark the cadence of her periods, and rowing back across the water at night with a copy of " Adolphe " in his pocket and the stanzas of the third canto of " Childe Harold" rolling uncompleted in his mind. And then the Shelleys left, John Cam Hobhouse arrived, they went a most exhausting expedition up into the mountains, Polidori was dismissed, and the course set for Italy and Missolonghi.
Professor Straumann contends that Byron derived great spiritual and intellectual benefit from his sojourn in Switzerland. He believes that it gave him an added awareness of the tremendous forces of nature and with it a deeper conviction of the magnitude of man's unconquerable mind. It certainly produced "Manfred," "The Prisoner of Chillon," and some pretty stanzas about Rousseau, Clarens and Vevey. "To me," he wrote, "high mountains are a feeling." I fear that I remain unconvinced by this momentary Wordsworthian mood. Yet during those summer months at the Villa Dicdati he did assuredly shed something of the old splash-and-dash romanticism, acquiring a more intellectual and a more serious tinge. A fresh experience was assuredly brought to him by that quiet interlude between the torments of Piccadilly Terrace and the self-indulgence which ensued. Yet I wonder whether it wa's the lake or the mountains which caused this deepening of thought and feeling. As my train lumbered into Lausanne I found myself doubting whether Byron had ever been influenced by anybody or anything, except perhaps, except : —
" Se non tu forse, Shelley, Spirito di Titan°, entro virginee forme."
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