Editor's Note: Knew Johnson, who left comments on her. Coleridge wrote an ode to GC.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, The Passage of the Mountain of Saint Gothard

By Elizabeth Fay

Critical Essay

Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, married into the wealthiest aristocratic family in England, was the most important social and political hostess of her day. She was also enormously gifted in intellect, imagination and taste. Under different life circumstances, she might well have found an imaginative, emotional, and financial outlet in literature as did Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, and others of her contemporaries. However, she was always deficient in self-confidence and found relief in social life and in various addictive behaviors, especially gambling.

During the decade leading up to the publication of her most important poem, The Passage of the Mountain of Saint Gothard, in 1802, Georgiana experienced a series of devastating personal events resulting from her husband's inability to countenance further her extravagances, gambling debts and personal bankruptcy. Although she had managed to stave off his anger by producing an heir, the Cavendish family was furious with her, ostracizing her and advising the Duke publicly to separate with his wife. At first the Duke refused, and even behaved in a protective manner to both Georgiana and her sister Harriet, herself the victim of spousal abuse and possibly a mishandled abortion. However, Georgiana's exposure on the Stock Exchange as a bankrupt (an ill-advised speculating firm, with her sister and Sheridan as partners), her affair with the politician Charles Grey, and the resulting pregnancy (her illegitimate daughter Eliza Courtney) produced a rupture. Georgiana, along with her sister and husband's mistress (both of whom angered the Duke by hiding the affair and pregnancy from him), were sent into exile on the continent as an alternative to separation. In addition to being sent without funds-the entire party was almost penniless and Georgiana forbidden to borrow money-the Duke demanded that she renounce her lover and have her baby adopted once it was born. She agreed to these conditions, since if she did not he would forbid her to even see their three children again, including the baby Hartington. As it was, he would not allow her to return for over a year. During that time the Duke left their children with a nurse and did not visit them.

While in exile, Georgiana and her party traveled through revolutionary France down to Nice. Crossing the border exposed them to looters and French banditti, but they arrived at Lake Geneva safely and stayed with Edward Gibbon. There, enjoying daily gatherings and a renewed social life, Georgiana met the scientist Sir Charles Blagden, through whom she developed a lifelong hobby, becoming a noted chemist and mineralogist. (The line in The Passage, "Here Adularia shines with vivid glow," is accompanied by a note that reveals her learning: "The adularia is a beautiful variety of the Feldt Spar, and is thus called after the ancient name of the mountain. The chrystals of St. Gothard are much celebrated; in it is also found the blue Shoerl or Sappar. . . and also a marble which has the singular quality of bending and being phosphoric it is called Dolomite. . . .") While in Switzerland they heard the news of Louis XVI's execution, which devastated their morale. With Switzerland no longer safe, they set off for Italy and Pisa for Harriet's health, where they received the even worse news of Marie Antoinette's last days, the Queen having been a personal acquaintance. Crossing the border was treacherous, the French having taken the Savoy mountain range and closed off all but the worst passage at St. Bernard. At Naples they frequented the court of the King and Queen, and enjoyed the society of the antiquarian Lord Hamilton and his wife Emma, and Georgiana was allowed to accompany Blagden and Sir Joseph Banks in their volcanic research on Mount Vesuvius and the surrounding ruins. Meanwhile France declared war on England and finally on May 18, 1793 they had a letter from the Duke inviting them home. Harriet collapsed in Rome and their mother stayed behind with her while Georgiana and the rest of the party returned. It was the passage through Switzerland that her poem describes.

When Georgiana returned she confessed to the Duke her gambling and borrowing debts, swearing that these were all of them, but she still did not reveal the full extent of her predicament to him. The fear of further domestic difficulties with the Duke arising from exposure from creditors kept her in a constant state of emotional turmoil, and in 1796 she suffered a catastrophic illness. In 1799 harassment by creditors, which she kept secret from everyone, meant for little relief from depression and despair. It was this continued emotional and psychological pressure that filters through as she revised her poem, The Passage of the Mountain of St. Gothard, adding an additional layer of nostalgia and melancholy to the painful emotions of the original composition.

The opportunity to revise earlier poems came from the composition of a new one: when her friend Sheridan began his tragedy Pizarro, he asked Georgiana to contribute a song. She wrote a patriotic hymn "of an embattled people fighting against a barbaric opponent," with obvious repercussions for the war declared on France. The play was enormously popular (an unprecedented run of 31 nights) and the song was independently successful as well (Foreman 311). This success encouraged Georgiana to prepare some of her manuscript poems for publication, beginning with The Passage. The poem is written as both a travel poem and a memoir from the period of exile, and it is framed as an apology to her children for having left them alone for so long in England. Although the poem is written after she knows she will return to her family, the verses capture the melancholy of her exile and sense of bereavement and guilt.

The passage through Switzerland as she describes it resonates to Wordsworth's Prelude description of his own passage from France into Switzerland. But there are also numerous connections in the poem to the traditions of poems of travel, of exile, and of sensibility, showing that Georgiana was fully aware of and ready to participate in the current trends in literature. Like the song for Sheridan's play, her poem also allows itself political overtones, and her interest in following Napoleon's progress can be read back into the poem through its personal sense of crisis and melancholy and her use of the Alps to symbolize emotional and political struggles for liberation. In particular she alludes to the legendary defeat of the Turks by the Swiss at the Battle of St. Gotthard in 1664. This was the second important defeat of the Turks, symbolizing for Europe the certain blocking of Turkish conquest of the West (Spencer 2). Swiss patriotism and civic resolve, compounded by their struggle for independence in 1313 and the legend of William Tell, acquires through history an ideal for a heroism both of the private soul and of the public spirit. In Georgiana's poem the heroism of the tiny nation against the invading forces has particular resonance not just to her present situation, but to the French incursion into Switzerland and to Napoleon's increasing conquests. Such resonance was intensified by 1799 as she revised her material.

The Passage partakes of both literary tradition and a variety of genres, as well as of the currents in sensibility popularized by Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, among others. Although Georgiana knew Robinson principally as the Prince Regent's former mistress, she also kept abreast of her literary career. Revised in 1799 and published by piracy from privately circulating copies, the poem was translated by L'Abbe de Lille and formally published in 1802. It was enormously popular, and was further translated into German and Italian, but without Georgiana's permission, and she had no earnings from the poem whatsoever. Embarrassed socially and financially, suffering severe physical ailments in consequence, similarly involved in intellectual and political circles and in close involvement with the Prince, and likewise exiled to Europe, Robinson's and Georgiana's lives were parallel in many ways. Mary Robinson's Swiss mountain poems of the next year in Lyrical Tales (1800) unsurprisingly show similarities to Georgiana's Passage. Charlotte Smith, ten years Georgiana's senior, also suffered domestic and financial entanglements equally melancholic, albeit brought on by her husband rather than herself, and resulting in poems that associated loss and painful memories with landscapes in her Elegaic Sonnets (1784).

Using picturesque and sublime landscape motifs and the conventions of travel poetry, Georgiana's poem combines personifications of rivers and other geophysical entities, with an allegory of her exposure to exile as a human experience and an imaginative one. This is the allegorical line recognizable in the tradition of exile literature, and which Byron would exploit more capaciously in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The title "The Passage," for instance, multiply figures the crossing of the Alps, the passage home, and a life trial. By contrast, Byron's "Pilgrimage" signals quest, outbound passage, and the search for trials. More resonantly, Byron's invocation to his own daughter in Childe Harold III may be a conscious inversion of Georgiana's final stanza in which she looks forward to coming home to her children. Although her poem is dedicated to her children, there is no mention of them, of her maternal status, or of her separation from family (as opposed to home or homeland), until the final stanza. Byron, by contrast, replaces the invocations to muses that begin Cantos I and II with an invocation to Ada in III that clearly signals a farewell that will not, unlike Georgiana's, be overturned. His exile, the gesture implies, is irrevocable and his loss of child and family final. The pathos of that point for readers familiar with The Passage and Devonshire House would have been deep.

The Passage is accompanied by extensive notes, which serve to link the prose travelogue with the poem. Although notes are a familiar characteristic of travel poems, eighteenth-century locodescriptive poems, and sentimental poems such as Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, it is striking how close Georgiana's notes of personal and historical fact are to the ones Byron will append to Childe Harold I and II, especially the personal notes and then the lengthy disquisitions of II. Byron had some familiarity with Georgiana's family, Caroline Lamb being the daughter of Georgiana's sister Harriet, and may well have known the poem. Her notes begin familiarly: "We quitted Italy in August 1793, and passed into Switzerland over the mountain of Saint Gothard. The third crop of corn was already standing in Lombardy. . .We left Lady Spencer [her mother] and Lady [Harriet] Bessborough at the Baths of Lucca" (23). Like Byron's notes to Childe Harold a decade later, the notes to The Passage combine personal impressions and references to travel companions and friends, with longer historical notes and political commentary: "The whole of this extraordinary road was supposed to have been performed by the Swiss soldiers after the revolution in 1313, which secured liberty to Switzerland; it is imagined the government thus employed them in order to keep them quiet. . .The Revolution, known by the name of the Swiss League, began in its smallest canton, Switz; but the chief events happened at Altorf, capital of the canton of Uri. . . .after the revolution of 1313, it [the nation] took the name of Suitzerland [sic], from the canton Suitz [sic]having been the cradle of its liberty" (35). The intended audience is clearly larger than the circle of family and friends, and Georgiana probably intended to publish the poem herself until the newspaper piracy with its many mistakes and typos embarrassed her.

In the poem the speaker compares herself to personified geophysical entities as to nations, creating a sense of family and familial community out of anthropomorphized parts. In addressing Italy, she creates a triangulation between Italy as a maternal nation to its citizens and sister nation to England, to the mother and sister she leaves in Italy's care, to herself as sister to Harriet and as mother to the children to whom the poem is addressed. Comparing herself to Italy as "a parent, sister," but also to geography in general, she creates a geographical subjectivity, not an exile, but a personification-"I" is compared to both Italy and Helvetia, but also to the Tessino River, the Reuss River, the Rhine, and the Po. But the rivers, all four of which, she notes, originate in St. Gothard, are implicit comparatives to the traveler and to the exile as eternal traveler:

"And seems-Helvetia let thy toils be told. . .

No haunt of man the wary traveler greets,
No vegetation smiles upon the moor,
Save where the flow'ret breathes uncultur'd sweets,
Save where the patient monk receives the poor.

Yet let not these rude paths be coldly trac'd.,
Let not these wilds with listless steps be trod. . . ."

She then encounters (rather than compares herself to) "St. Gothard's summits," and returns to this theme: "My weary footsteps hop'd for rest in vain/ For steep on steep, in rude confusion rose. . . ." It is the confusion, as for Wordsworth, that produces the sublime (albeit prefaced by the picturesque, for Georgiana resorts to the conventions of travel writing):

"Sweet vale! Whose bosom wastes and cliffs surround,
Let me awhile thy friendly shelter share!
Emblem of life! Shere some bright hours are found
Amidst the darkest, dreariest years of care.

Delv'd thro' the rock, the secret passage bends;
And beauteous horror strikes the dazzled sight;

We view the fearful pass-. . . ."

The poem's farewell to Switzerland is quite different from that to Italy. If Italy is familial, domestic and affectionate, Switzerland is the land of "liberty," "gentle" rule "By social order form'd, by laws restrain'd." Its land is "gild[ed]" by "peaceful science," and its society peopled by literati (explicitly named in the notes: M. de Saussure, Mme. De Germary, Mr. Hubert, Mr. Senebier, Mr. Constant, Mme. De Montolieu). "Here, bliss domestic beams on every cheek."