So that we find Byron launched yet again on a new way of life—the last before his final and famous transference of his energies from love to revolutionary politics.
Evidently it was a relief to him to find himself a lover instead of a cavaliere servente—even at the risk of having a dagger planted, on some dark night, between his shoulder blades. Evidently, too, he loved “the lady whom I serve” better than he had loved her at the beginning of the liaison, and better than he was to love her towards the end of it. But, even so, it was no absorbing love that possessed him—no love that diverted his thoughts from morbid introspection, or made him feel that, merely by loving, he had fulfilled his destiny and played a worthy part in life. On the contrary he could write in the Diary which he then kept for six weeks or so: “I go to my bed with a heaviness of heart at having lived so long, and to so little purpose;” and he could compose the well-known epigram:
Through life’s road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragged to three-and-thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing—except thirty-three.
Nationalism, movements, risings, revolutions, and the rest of it might well seem a welcome excitement to a man so blasé and so inured to sensations that love, though he vowed that he “loved entirely” could not lift him to a more exalted frame of mind than that; and his attachment to Madame Guiccioli may well have gained an element of permanence from the fact that she belonged to a family of conspirators in league against priests and kings.
CHAPTER XXVIII
REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES—REMOVAL FROM RAVENNA TO PISA
The origin of Byron’s revolutionary opinions is wrapped in mystery. He certainly was not born a revolutionist; there is no record of his becoming one for definite reasons at any definite moment of time; and if it were alleged that he assumed revolutionism for the sake of swagger and effect, or had it thrust upon him by the household of the Gambas, the propositions, though pretty obviously untrue, could not very easily be disproved.
What he chiefly lacked in the character of revolutionist was the fine enthusiasm of the men of 1789, their pathetic belief in the perfectibility of human nature, and their zeal for equality and fraternity as things of equal account with liberty. His view of human nature was thoroughly cynical, and he was far too proudly conscious of his own place in the social hierarchy to aspire to be merely citizen Byron in a world from which all honorific distinctions had disappeared. Indeed we find him, in some of his letters, actually gibing at Hobhouse because his activities as a political agitator have brought him into contact with ill-bred associates; and that, as will be admitted, is a strange tone for a sincere revolutionist to take.