"All I ask is a preference for accuracy as relating to Italy and other places."
In books, monuments, and the fine arts, it was always truth that interested him. Except Sir Walter Scott's productions, he gave no place in his library to novels; other works of imagination, especially poetry, were excluded; two-thirds of his books were French works. His reading lay chiefly in history, biography, and politics.
Among the books Murray sent him were some travels: "Send me no more of them," he wrote, "I have travelled enough already; and, besides, they lie."[201]
Books with effected sentiment of any kind, imaginary itineraries, made him very impatient. High-sounding phrases jarred on his ears; and I thoroughly believe that the forty centuries' looking down from the Pyramids upon the grand French army somewhat spoilt his hero for him.
What he especially sought for in monuments and among ruins was their authenticity. It was on this sole condition that he took interest in them.
Campbell, in his "Lives of English Poets," had averred that readers cared no more for the truth of the manners portrayed in Collins's "Eclogues" than for the authenticity of the history of Troy:—
"'Tis false," says Lord Byron in his memoranda, after having read Campbell; "we do care about 'the authenticity of the tale of Troy.' I have stood upon that plain daily, for more than a month, in 1810; and if any thing diminished my pleasure, it was that the blackguard Bryant had impugned its veracity. It is true that I read 'Homer Travestied' (the first twelve books), because Hobhouse and others bored me with their learned localities, and I love quizzing. But I still venerated the grand original as the truth of history (in the material facts) and of place: otherwise, it would have given me no delight. Who will persuade me, when I reclined upon a mighty tomb, that it did not contain a hero? Its very magnitude proved this. Men do not labor over the ignoble and petty dead—and why should not the dead be Homer's dead? The secret of Tom Campbell's defense of inaccuracy in costume and description is, that his 'Gertrude,' etc., has no more locality in common with Pennsylvania than with Penmanmawr. It is notoriously full of grossly false scenery, as all Americans declare, though they praise parts of the poem. It is thus that self-love forever creeps out, like a snake, to sting any thing which happens, even accidentally, to stumble upon it."
In order then, that Lord Byron might take an interest in either a place, a monument, or a work of art, he must associate them in his mind with some fact which had really taken place. By what was he most impressed on reaching Venice?
"There is still in the Doge's Palace the black veil painted over Faliero's picture, and the staircase whereon he was first crowned Doge and subsequently decapitated. This was the thing that most struck my imagination in Venice—more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of Shylock: and more, too, than Schiller's 'Armenian,' a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy. It is also called the 'Ghost Seer,' and I never walked down St. Mark's by moonlight without thinking of it. And 'at nine o'clock he died.' But I hate things all fiction, and therefore the Merchant and Othello have no great attractions for me, but Pierre has. There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a liar."
The little taste which he entertained for painting came from the impression that, of all the arts, it was the most artificial, and the least truthful. In April, 1817, he wrote to Murray as follows, on the subject:—