CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE BYRON 1788-1824 BYRON was born in 1788 and died in 1824, aet. 36, the sole offspring of an ill-assorted couple. His mother, whose fortune was quickly squandered by her profligate husband, separated from him and lived with her son on £130 a year in Aberdeen. When he was 10 the boy succeeded to the title of his grand-uncle and they moved to Newstead Abbey near Nottingham. He was quick and passionate and his bringing up accentuated all his faults. Well born and ill bred he was sensitively alive when a youth to the lameness which debarred him from most field sports; the one athletic exercise in which he excelled being swimming, and having no friends or connexions of his own rank, he was full of affectation and prejudices. Shy but quite remarkable for the extraordinary attachments of his early years, his nobler and truer self which gave life to his poetry was from childhood overlaid with artificiality, and a swaggering tone, which made it impossible to love the man, spoilt much of his best work. He seldom allowed his true opinions and emotions to appear, but preferred to masquerade in a costume of cyni cism and weak misanthropy which he could never abandon, so that, blended in his life and work there are always two distinct Byrons, and not to be disentangled," for he cherished," says Mr. Addington Symonds, "his inferior self, and mistook its weakness and its falsehood for strength and sincerity of insight." He went to Harrow, and, at 17, to Cambridge in 1805, in which year he published a volume of verse of no merit, for which he was fiercely attacked by Brougham in the Edinburgh. Brougham's sarcasm stung him into real poetry, and his Satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, was at once made much of. It is full of invective, a weapon he used all his life, and its judgments are really worthless. Indeed Byron never attained to the possession of any critical insight, and his strictures on his contemporaries are as ridiculous as his elevation of Pope above the heads of Milton and Shakespeare. Leaving Cambridge he went abroad and returned in 1812 to publish the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a poem on which his general reputation now chiefly rests, though probably Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment are those on which his fame will ultimately be founded. At all events Childe Harold took the reading public by storm, and Byron, as he says, woke up one morning and found himself famous." The enthusiasm which greeted Childe Harold's appearance would be subject to some deductions now; for, to quote Mr. Addington Symonds again," the poem is written in a declamatory style. The Pilgrim is a rococo creation to whom its author failed to communicate the breath of life, and when this fictitious hero disappears from the scene the stanzas invariably improve. Therefore the third and fourth cantos, written in the plenitude of Byron's powers, when Childe Harold has been all but forgotten might pass for a separate composition. In these cantos, with the person of the Pilgrim the affectation of Spenserian language, sparely but awkwardly employed in the first canto, is dropped. The vein of meditation is richer, deeper, more dignified in utterance. The personal emotion of the poet, saddened, and elevated by his cruel experience of life, finds vent in larger harmonies and more impassioned bursts of eloquence; while his enjoyment of Nature in her grander aspects is expressed with solemnity in the passages upon the Ocean and the Jura thunderstorm." There is no concealing of the fact that Byron's life was one of self-indulgence and excess, and it was in an attempt to escape from it that he married Miss Milbanke, the daughter of a Durham baronet. The union proved singularly unhappy and after a year Lady Byron, with her daughter Ada, left her husband, went to live at her father's house, and refused to return. Byron now became the subject of general reprobation and was accused of every vice; and though his poetry was popular the Author became very much the reverse. Again he left England in 1815. "I felt," he writes, "that if what was whispered and muttered and murmured was true I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew." This exile, though the life he led was lawless as The poem was the ever, marks a fresh increase in his poetic powers which we notice at once in Canto III of Childe Harold, written at Geneva in 1816, and in Canto IV, written at Venice in 1818. outcome of his wanderings and, like Don Juan, is a sort of diary; the verse full of digressions and personal feelings and invective, but with frequent and beautiful descriptions of each place he passed through or stayed in. After 1818 the next four years were occupied with Don Juan and then with The Vision of Judgment, a satire on a poem of the same name by Southey whom he treats to his fullest flow of invective. In 1823 he set out for Greece to endeavour to help her to obtain her independence. Hellas and Liberty were inspirations to him, and he wrote no finer lines than those on Greece in the Fourth Canto of Don Juan. The Isles of Greece! The Isles of Greece ! But all, except their sun, is set. The mountains look on Marathon- And musing there an hour alone, I dreamed that Greece might still be free; I could not deem myself a slave. Childe Harold professes to be a descriptive poem, but it is more truly an analysis and exhibition of the writer's own feelings and reflections, and the third Canto is mainly autobiographical. Byron's nature being one which needed pain to deepen it, |