Chapter XIX: Byron: His Self-Absorption

When he had become for the second time a homeless and solitary pilgrim, Byron began to occupy himself again with the poem of travel in which his youthful sentiments had found expression. He added the Third and Fourth Cantos to _Childe Harold_. He turned back and felt the youthful feelings once again. But what breadth and depth they had gained in the interval! The chord struck in the First and Second Cantos was composed of three notes--the note of solitariness, the note of melancholy, and the note of freedom. Each one of these had become far clearer and more resonant.

Throughout the first half of the work it is the feeling of solitariness which produces the love of nature. "To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell," to climb the trackless mountain and lean over the foaming waterfall, alone, was not solitariness, but communion with nature; true solitariness was to wander amidst "the crowd, the hum, the shock of men," unloving and unloved. (_Childe Harold_, ii. 25, 26, 27.) The outbursts in the stanzas referred to are evoked by remembrances of the poet's childhood, spent in the beautiful mountain districts of Scotland, or of his visit to the hermit's home on "lonely Athos." This was still a love of the solitude of nature which resembled Wordsworth's, and which was based upon fear of an unknown, strange world of men and women. The difference between Wordsworth's and Byron's feeling was no more than this--that Wordsworth dwelt silently on the natural impression, in the manner of the countryman and the landscape painter, while Byron seized it with the longing, nervous ardour of the townsman; and, moreover, that Wordsworth loved nature best in her quiet moods, Byron in her wrath. (_Childe Harold_, ii. 37.)

In the second half of the work the character of the poet's solitariness has changed. There is a marked difference between the desire for solitary communion with nature which Harold felt as an inexperienced youth, and that which he felt as a man, at the end of his first circumnavigation of the world of men and things. It was now no longer fear of human beings, but disgust with them, which drove him to take refuge with nature. Society, the best society of a great metropolis, which to the untrained eye seemed so humane, so right-thinking, so refined and chivalrous, had turned its wrong side towards him--and the wrong side is interesting, but not beautiful. He had learned how much friendship the ruined man may reckon on, had learned that the only force which he who is making plans for his future can exactly calculate is the self-love of his fellow-men, with its consequences. So he withdrew into himself again; and the poetry he wrote at this time is not for men of a sociable nature. But the man who has had even a short experience of what it is to turn his back on his fellow-men--who in his desire to escape from them has left his home, his country, in search of a new earth and new skies--who in the solitudes of his choice has felt the sight of an approaching human being equivalent to a foul spot on his pure, free horizon--in the souls of this man and his like, Byron's lyric outbursts will find an echo.

Childe Harold is a solitary. He has learned that he is "the most unfit of men to herd with man," because he is unable "to submit his thoughts to others ... to yield dominion of his mind to spirits against whom his own rebelled." But,

"Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where roll'd the ocean, thereon was his home.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam,
Were unto him companionship; they spake
A mutual language, clearer than the tome
Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake
For Nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake."

Amongst men he droops like a wild-born falcon with clipt wing. But in his case, to fly from, is not to hate, mankind. It is not discontent or defiance which keeps his "mind deep in its fountain," but fear lest it should "overboil in the hot throng," where in a moment

"We may plunge our years
In fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears."

He feels that it is better to be alone, and thus to become a portion of what surrounds him. High mountains are "a feeling" to him, but the hum of human cities is a torture. The mountain, the sky, and the sea are a part of him, and he is a part of them, and to love them is his purest happiness. In solitude he is least alone; then his soul is conscious of infinity, a truth which purifies it from self. Harold has not loved the world, nor has it loved him. He is proud of not having "flattered its rank breath," nor bowed the knee to its idols, nor smiled hypocritically, nor echoed the cries of the crowd. He was _among_ them, but not _of_ them. But he desires that the world and he should part fair foes. "I do believe," he says,

"Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things,--hopes which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful ...
That two, or one, are almost what they seem."[1]

The feeling of solitariness gradually becomes the feeling of _melancholy_. This note, too, had been struck in the first two cantos; but their melancholy was nothing but the discontent of youth. With a wasted youth behind him, he had stood, like a phlegmatically mournful Hamlet, at the grave of Achilles, declaiming, with a skull in his hand, on the worthlessness of life and fame--this young poet who had not yet tasted the sweetness of celebrity, and who in reality hungered for nothing so much as for that very fame which, with so much argumentative philosophy, he feigned to condemn and despise. Now he has tasted it, and learned how little nourishment is to be derived from such food.

His heart is

"Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies; and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same and still the more, the more it breaks."

In the depth of his dejection he turns to the element in nature which, by its contrast with his present mood, solaces his sufferings--the sea, the free, open sea, upon whose mane he had laid his hand as a boy, and which knows him as the horse knows his rider. He loves the sea because it is unconquerable, because time cannot even write a wrinkle on its brow, and it rolls now as it rolled at the dawn of creation. But everything in nature reminds him of suffering and warfare. The peal of distant thunder is to him an alarm-bell, "the knoll of what in me is sleepless--if I rest." Even the beautiful, calm lake of Nemi does not remind him of anything peaceful and sweet; he calls it "calm as cherished hate." (iv. 173.)

His melancholy becomes actually choleric. Could he breathe all his passion "into _one_ word, and that one word were Lightning," he would speak. "Anything but rest!" is his watchword. "Quiet to quick bosoms is a hell." There is a fire in the soul which, once kindled, is quenchless, and the flames of which rise ever higher and wilder; there is a fever which is fatal to all whom it attacks.

"This makes the madmen who have made men mad
By their contagion; Conquerors and Kings,
Founders of sects and systems, to whom add
Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all unquiet things
Which stir too strongly the soul's secret springs,
And are themselves the fools to those they fool;
Envied, yet how unenviable! what stings
Are theirs! One breast laid open were a school
Which would unteach mankind the lust to shine or rule.

Their breath is agitation, and their life
A storm whereon they ride, to sink at last,
And yet so nursed and bigoted to strife,
That should their days, surviving perils past,
Melt to calm twilight, they feel overcast
With sorrow and supineness, and so die;
Even as a flame unfed, which runs to waste
With its own flickering, or a sword laid by,
Which eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously."

And in a still more despairing mood Harold cries:

"We wither from our youth, we gasp away--
Sick--sick; unfound the boon--unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first--
But all too late,--so are we doubly curst.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same,
Each idle--and all ill--and none the worst--
For all are meteors with a different name,
And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Our life is a false nature--'tis not in
The harmony of things,--this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew--
Disease, death, bondage--all the woes we see,
And worse, the woes we see not."

In the First Canto of _Childe Harold_ we already find the _love of freedom_ (the third note in the chord struck by the poem) exalted as the one force capable of emancipating from the despair with which the universal misery (the _Weltschmerz_, as the Germans call it) has overwhelmed the soul. It has this power because it provides a practical task. During his first visit to Portugal, Childe Harold exclaimed: "Oh, that such hills upheld a free-born race!" And to the Spaniards he cried:

"Awake, ye sons of Spain! awake! Advance!
Lo, Chivalry, your ancient goddess, cries."

And it was in the course of his first tour, too, that he thus apostrophised the subjugated Greeks, who went on hoping for help from other nations:--

"Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?
Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!
True, they may lay your proud despoilers low,
But not for you will Freedom's altars flame.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When riseth Lacedemon's hardihood,
When Thebes Epaminondas rears again,
When Athens' children are with hearts endued,
When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men,
Then may'st thou be restored; but not till then."

But his love of liberty at that time was of a purely political nature; it was the free-born Englishman's indignation at seeing other nations unable to shake off a foreign yoke to which his own nation would never have dreamt of submitting.

Now he has learned what liberty in the wide, full, universal meaning of the word is. Now he feels that free _thought_ is the first essential requisite of all spiritual life.

"Yet let us ponder boldly--'tis a base
Abandonment of reason to resign
Our right of thought--our last and only place
Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine:
Though from our birth the faculty divine
Is chain'd and tortured--cabin'd, cribb'd, confined,
And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine
Too brightly on the unprepared mind,
The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the blind."

And it is his intention not merely to ponder, but to act. Invoking Time, the great avenger, whom he reminds that he has borne the hatred of the world with calm pride--and he has experienced all its varieties of hatred,

"From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From the loud roar of foaming calumny
To the small whisper of the as paltry few,
And subtler venom of the reptile crew"--

he concludes with the prayer: "Let me not have worn this iron in my soul in vain!"

Now, his personal woes shrink into nothing when he beholds the gigantic ruins of Rome; and, like the Sulpicius with whose feelings Chateaubriand endowed the hero of _Les Martyrs_, he feels the insignificance of his fate compared with that which has swept away the cities of Greece. He writes:--

"Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wandering in youth, I traced the path of him,
The Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind,
The friend of Tully."

And when, not satisfied with liberty of thought alone, he turns his attention to practical matters and occupies himself with the great political struggles of the day, he does not content himself with repeating the old invocations to the departed, or with crying to Venice that she has drowned the glory and honour of centuries in the mire of slavery, and that it would be better for her to be whelm'd beneath the waves. No, he boldly attacks the mighty, the victors of Waterloo, whom he scornfully calls "the apes of him who humbled once the proud"; and then passes from the outward, political aspect of the great European conflicts, to their inner, social significance.

To all appearance, he says, France has uprooted old prejudices, and laid in ruins "things which grew, breathed from the birth of time," only to see dungeons and thrones rebuilt upon the same foundation. "_But this will not endure_." Mankind have at last felt their strength. And even though France "got drunk with blood to vomit crime,"

"Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunderstorm _against_ the wind;
Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,
The loudest still the tempest leaves behind;
Thy tree hath lost its blossoms, and the rind,
Chopp'd by the axe, looks rough and little worth,
But the sap lasts--and still the seed we find
Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North;
So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth."

And of himself the poet writes:--

"But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain;
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire,
Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
Like the remember'd tone of a mute lyre."

Thus do the three chief feelings expressed in this beautiful poem--solitariness, melancholy, and love of freedom--gradually become one greater feeling; the mind of the poet widens and deepens with each canto. Wordsworth had identified his Ego with England; Scott and Moore had given the feelings of Scotland and Ireland expression in their poetry; but Byron's Ego represents universal humanity; its sorrows and hopes are those of all mankind. After this Ego has, in manly, energetic style, withdrawn into itself and lived for a time absorbed in its solitary grief, that grief widens into compassion for all the sufferings and sorrows of humanity; the hard, selfish crust of the Ego is broken, and there issues forth the ardent love of liberty, to encompass and to elevate the poet's whole generation. Now his mind is attuned to worship, and he cries:--

"Not vainly did the early Persian make
His altar the high places and the peak
Of earth-o'ergazing mountains . . . .
. . . . . . . . . come and compare
Columns and idol-dwellings, Goth or Greek,
With Nature's realms of worship, earth and air,
Nor fix on fond abodes to circumscribe thy prayer."

[1] _Childe Harold_, iii. 114.