Volume 3 — INTRODUCTION TO THE SIEGE OF CORINTH.

In a note to the "Advertisement" to the Siege of Corinth (vide post, p. 447), Byron puts it on record that during the years 1809-10 he had crossed the Isthmus of Corinth eight times, and in a letter to his mother, dated Patras, July 30, 1810, he alludes to a recent visit to the town of Corinth, in company with his friend Lord Sligo. (See, too, his letter to Coleridge, dated October 27, 1815, Letters, 1899, iii. 228.) It is probable that he revisited Corinth more than once in the autumn of 1810; and we may infer that, just as the place and its surroundings—the temple with its "two or three columns" (line 497), and the view across the bay from Acro-Corinth—are sketched from memory, so the story of the siege which took place in 1715 is based upon tales and legends which were preserved and repeated by the grandchildren of the besieged, and were taken down from their lips. There is point and meaning in the apparently insignificant line (stanza xxiv. line 765), "We have heard the hearers say" (see variant i. p. 483), which is slipped into the description of the final catastrophe. It bears witness to the fact that the Siege of Corinth is not a poetical expansion of a chapter in history, but a heightened reminiscence of local tradition.

History has, indeed, very little to say on the subject. The anonymous Compleat History of the Turks (London, 1719), which Byron quotes as an authority, is meagre and inaccurate. Hammer-Purgstall (Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman, 1839, xiii. 269), who gives as his authorities Girolamo Ferrari and Raschid, dismisses the siege in a few lines; and it was not till the publication of Finlay's History of Greece (vol. v., a.d. 1453-1821), in 1856, that the facts were known or reported. Finlay's newly discovered authority was a then unpublished MS. of a journal kept by Benjamin Brue, a connection of Voltaire's, who accompanied the Grand Vizier, Ali Cumurgi, as his interpreter, on the expedition into the Morea. According to Brue (Journal de la Campagne ... en 1715 ... Paris, 1870, p. 18), the siege began on June 28, 1715. A peremptory demand on the part of the Grand Vizier to surrender at discretion was answered by the Venetian proveditor-general, Giacomo Minetto, with calm but assured defiance ("Your menaces are useless, for we are prepared to resist all your attacks, and, with confidence in the assistance of God, we will preserve this fortress to the most serene Republic. God is with us"). Nevertheless, the Turks made good their threat, and on the 2nd of July the fortress capitulated. On the following day at noon, whilst a party of Janissaries, contrary to order, were looting and pillaging in all directions, the fortress was seen to be enveloped in smoke. How or why the explosion happened was never discovered, but the result was that some of the pillaging Janissaries perished, and that others, to avenge their death, which they attributed to Venetian treachery, put the garrison to the sword. It was believed at the time that Minetto was among the slain; but, as Brue afterwards discovered, he was secretly conveyed to Smyrna, and ultimately ransomed by the Dutch Consul.

The late Professor Kölbing (Siege of Corinth, 1893, p. xxvii.), in commenting on the sources of the poem, suggests, under reserve, that Byron may have derived the incident of Minetto's self-immolation from an historic source—the siege of Zsigetvar, in 1566, when a multitude of Turks perished from the explosion of a powder magazine which had been fired at the cost of his own life by the Hungarian commander Zrini.

It is, at least, equally probable that local patriotism was, in the first instance, responsible for the poetic colouring, and that Byron supplemented the meagre and uninteresting historic details which were at his disposal by "intimate knowledge" of the Corinthian version of the siege. (See Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Hon. Lord Byron, London, 1822, p. 222; and Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron, by George Clinton, London, 1825, p. 284.)

It has been generally held that the Siege of Corinth was written in the second half of 1815 (Kölbing's Siege of Corinth, p. vii.). "It appears," says John Wright (Works, 1832, x. 100), "by the original MS., to have been begun in July, 1815;" and Moore (Life, p. 307), who probably relied on the same authority, speaks of "both the Siege of Corinth and Parisina having been produced but a short time before the Separation" (i.e. spring, 1816). Some words which Medwin (Conversations, 1824, p. 55) puts into Byron's mouth point to the same conclusion. Byron's own testimony, which is completely borne out by the MS. itself (dated Jy [i.e. January, not July] 31, 1815), is in direct conflict with these statements. In a note to stanza xix. lines 521-532 (vide post, pp. 471-473) he affirms that it "was not till after these lines were written" that he heard "that wild and singularly original and beautiful poem [Christabel] recited;" and in a letter to S. T. Coleridge, dated October 27, 1815 (Letters, 1899, iii. 228), he is careful to explain that "the enclosed extract from an unpublished poem (i.e. stanza xix. lines 521-532) ... was written before (not seeing your Christabelle [sic], for that you know I never did till this day), but before I heard Mr. S[cott] repeat it, which he did in June last, and this thing was begun in January, and more than half written before the Summer." The question of plagiarism will be discussed in an addendum to Byron's note on the lines in question; but, subject to the correction that it was, probably, at the end of May (see Lockhart's Memoir of the Life of Sir W. Scott, 1871, pp. 311-313), not in June, that Scott recited Christabel for Byron's benefit, the date of the composition of the poem must be determined by the evidence of the author himself.

The copy of the MS. of the Siege of Corinth was sent to Murray at the beginning (probably on the 2nd, the date of the copy) of November, and was placed in Gifford's hands about the same time (see letter to Murray, November 4, 1815, Letters, 1899, iii. 245; and Murray's undated letter on Gifford's "great delight" in the poem, and his "three critical remarks," Memoir of John Murray, 1891, i. 356). As with Lara, Byron began by insisting that the Siege should not be published separately, but slipped into a fourth volume of the collected works, and once again (possibly when he had at last made up his mind to accept a thousand guineas for his own requirements, and not for other beneficiaries—Godwin, Coleridge, or Maturin) yielded to his publisher's wishes and representations. At any rate, the Siege of Corinth and Parisina, which, says Moore, "during the month of January and part of February were in the hands of the printers" (Life, p. 300), were published in a single volume on February 7, 1816. The greater reviews were silent, but notices appeared in numerous periodicals; e.g. the Monthly Review, February, 1816, vol. lxxix. p. 196; the Eclectic Review, March, 1816, N.S. vol. v. p. 269; the European, May, 1816, vol. lxxix. p. 427; the Literary Panorama, June, 1816, N.S. vol. iv. p. 418; etc. Many of these reviews took occasion to pick out and hold up to ridicule the illogical sentences, the grammatical solecisms, and general imperfections of technique which marked and disfigured the Siege of Corinth. A passage in a letter which John Murray wrote to his brother-publisher, William Blackwood (Annals of a Publishing House, 1897, i. 53), refers to these cavillings, and suggests both an apology and a retaliation—

"Many who by 'numbers judge a poet's song' are so stupid as not to see the powerful effect of the poems, which is the great object of poetry, because they can pick out fifty careless or even bad lines. The words may be carelessly put together; but this is secondary. Many can write polished lines who will never reach the name of poet. You see it is all poetically conceived in Lord B.'s mind."

In such wise did Murray bear testimony to Byron's "splendid and imperishable excellence, which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects—the excellence of sincerity and strength."

TO JOHN HOBHOUSE, ESQ., THIS POEM IS INSCRIBED, BY HIS FRIEND.

January 22nd, 1816.

ADVERTISEMENT

"The grand army of the Turks (in 1715), under the Prime Vizier, to open to themselves a way into the heart of the Morea, and to form the siege of Napoli di Romania, the most considerable place in all that country,[331] thought it best in the first place to attack Corinth, upon which they made several storms. The garrison being weakened, and the governor seeing it was impossible to hold out such a place against so mighty a force, thought it fit to beat a parley: but while they were treating about the articles, one of the magazines in the Turkish camp, wherein they had six hundred barrels of powder, blew up by accident, whereby six or seven hundred men were killed; which so enraged the infidels, that they would not grant any capitulation, but stormed the place with so much fury, that they took it, and put most of the garrison, with Signior Minotti, the governor, to the sword. The rest, with Signior or Antonio Bembo, Proveditor Extraordinary, were made prisoners of war."—A Compleat History of the Turks [London, 1719], iii. 151.

NOTE ON THE MS. OF THE SIEGE OF CORINTH.

The original MS. of the Siege of Corinth (now in the possession of Lord Glenesk) consists of sixteen folio and nine quarto sheets, and numbers fifty pages. Sheets 1-4 are folios, sheets 5-10 are quartos, sheets 11-22 are folios, and sheets 23-25 are quartos.

To judge from the occasional and disconnected pagination, this MS. consists of portions of two or more fair copies of a number of detached scraps written at different times, together with two or three of the original scraps which had not been transcribed.

The water-mark of the folios is, with one exception (No. 8, 1815), 1813; and of the quartos, with one exception (No. 8, 1814), 1812.

Lord Glenesk's MS. is dated January 31, 1815. Lady Byron's transcript, from which the Siege of Corinth was printed, and which is in Mr. Murray's possession, is dated November 2, 1815.