“We were divided in choice,” Byron wrote to Moore, “between Switzerland and Tuscany, and I gave my vote for Pisa, as nearer the Mediterranean, which I love for the sake of the shores which it washes, and for my young recollections of 1809. Switzerland is a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their English visitors; for which reason, after writing for some information about houses, upon hearing that there was a colony of English all over the cantons of Geneva, &c., I immediately gave up the thought, and persuaded the Gambas to do the same.”
Which is true enough as far as it goes, but is something less than the whole truth, since it omits to mention the increasing seriousness in Byron’s character, and his new tendency to transfer the bitterness of his indignation from the authors of his own wrongs to the political tyrants of the political school of Metternich.
Switzerland could afford no scope, in that direction, for his energies. The Swiss, it is true, have their revolutions from time to time; but these are petty and trivial. Strangers have a difficulty in understanding the points at issue; and the interference of strangers is not solicited. The revolutionist from abroad is only welcome in Switzerland when he is resting, or when a price is put upon his head—neither of which conditions Byron could claim to fulfil. In Italy, however, and over against Greece, he would be in the midst of the most hospitable revolutionists in the world; and his chance of passing from love and literature to fighting and statesmanship was bound to come to him if he would wait for it.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE TRIVIAL ROUND AT PISA
From Ravenna to Pisa, from Pisa to Genoa, from Genoa to Cephalonia, from Cephalonia to Missolonghi and an untimely death in a great cause still very far from victory—these are the remaining stages of the pilgrimage. We have a cloud of witnesses—Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Medwin, Lady Blessington, and others; but only the merest fragment of their long depositions can be presented here.
The life at Pisa, where Byron at last arrived in November 1822, was, at first, quite commonplace and uneventful. One reads of a trivial round of functions rather than of duties punctually discharged at the same hour of every day. Byron, we gather, lay late in bed, but ultimately rose, and ate biscuits and drank soda-water, and received the visits of his English acquaintances, and rode out with them to an inn, and practised shooting at a mark, and then rode home again. After that came dinner, and a call upon the Gambas, and an interview with Madame Guiccioli; and then, that ceremony finished, the late hours of the night and early hours of the morning were devoted, sometimes to conversation, but more often to literary composition. That was all; and it would have seemed little enough if the witnesses had not taken the view that, whatever Byron did, he was giving a performance, and that whoever saw him do it was a privileged spectator at a private view and under an obligation to report the spectacle.
They did take that view, however, and devoted themselves, in the modern phraseology, to “interviewing” Byron. He was so different from them—so much greater—and so much more interesting—that they could no more converse with him lightly, on common topics and on equal terms, than they could so converse with a monster advertised as the leading attraction of a freak museum. Shelley, indeed, might do so, being his friend as well as his admirer, and one who moved naturally on the same plane of thought; but the others could only approach him humbly from below, sit at his feet, and talk to him about himself. After his back was turned, they might presume to quiz and satirise—Leigh Hunt did so, and so, too, to a less extent, did both Trelawny and Lady Blessington; but, at the time, they could get no further than begging permission to ask questions.