CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE (Canto iv.)
| The Yellow Dwarf.] | [May 2, 1818. |
‘I do perceive a fury in your words, but nothing wherefore.’
The fourth and last canto of Childe Harold has disappointed us. It is a falling off from the three former ones. We have read it carefully through, but it has left only the same impression on our minds that a troubled dream does,—as disturbed, as confused, as disjointed, as harassing, and as unprofitable. It is an indigestion of the mind. It is the lassitude or feverish tossing and tumbling of the imagination, after having taken a surfeit of pleasure, and fed upon the fumes of pride. Childe Harold is a spoiled child of the Muses—and of Fortune. He looks down upon human life, not more with the superiority of intellect than with the arrogance of birth. The poet translates the lord into high sounding and supercilious verse. It is Agamemnon and Thersites in one person. The common events and calamities of the world afford matter for the effusions of his spleen, while they seem resented as affronts to his personal dignity.
‘And as the soldiers’ bare dead bodies lay,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly, unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.’
So when ‘the very age and body of the time’ comes between his Lordship’s speculative notions and hereditary prejudices, he stops the nose at it, and plays some very fantastic tricks before the public, who are lookers-on. In general, the idle wants, the naughty airs, the ill humours and ennui, the contempt for others, and disgust at themselves, common to exalted birth and station, are suffered to corrupt and stagnate in the blood that inherits them;—they are a disease in the flesh, an obstinate tumour in the mind, a cloud upon the brow, a venom that vents itself in hateful looks and peevish words to those about them; but in this poem and this author they have acquired ‘an understanding and a tongue,’—are sublimed by imagination, systematised by sophistry—mount the steps of the Capitol, fulmine over Greece, and are poured in torrents of abuse on the world. It is well if the world like it—we are tired of the monotony of his Lordship’s griefs, of which we can perceive neither beginning nor end. ‘They are begot of nothing, born of nothing.’ He volunteers his own Pilgrimage,—appoints his own penance,—makes his own confession,—and all—for nothing. He is in despair, because he has nothing to complain of—miserable, because he is in want of nothing. ‘He has tasted of all earth’s bliss, both living and loving,’ and therefore he describes himself as suffering the tortures of the damned. He is in love with misery, because he has possessed every enjoyment; and because he has had his will in every thing, is inconsolable because he cannot have impossibilities. His Lordship, in fact, makes out his own hard case to be, that he has attained all those objects that the rest of the world admire; that he has met with none of those disasters which embitter their lives; and he calls upon us to sympathise with his griefs and his despair.
This will never do. It is more intolerable than even Mr. Wordsworth’s arbitrary egotism and pampered self-sufficiency. He creates a factitious interest out of nothing: Lord Byron would destroy our interest in all that is. Mr. Wordsworth, to salve his own self-love, makes the merest toy of his own mind,—the most insignificant object he can meet with,—of as much importance as the universe: Lord Byron would persuade us that the universe itself is not worth his or our notice; and yet he would expect us to be occupied with him.
——‘The man whose eye
Is ever on himself doth look on one,
The least of Nature’s works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful ever.’
These lines, written by one of these two poets, might be addressed to both of them with equal propriety.
Lord Byron, in this the fourth and last Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, seems to have worn out the glowing fervour of his genius to a calx, and to have exhausted the intense enthusiasm of his favourite topics of invective. There is little about himself, historically speaking—there is no plot, no story, no interest excited, no catastrophe. The general reflections are connected together merely by the accidental occurrence of different objects—the Venus of Medici, or the statue of Pompey,—the Capitol at Rome, or the Bridge of Sighs at Venice,—Shakespear, and Mrs. Radcliffe,—Bonaparte, and his Lordship in person,—are brought together as in a phantasmagoria, and with as little attention to keeping or perspective, as in Hogarth’s famous print for reversing the laws of vision. The judgements pronounced are often more dogmatical than profound, and with all their extravagance of expression, common-place. His Lordship does not understand the Apollo Belvidere or the Venus de Medicis, any more than Bonaparte. He cants about the one and against the other, and in doing the last, cuts his own throat. We are not without hopes that his friend Mr. Hobhouse will set this matter right in his ‘Historical Illustrations’; and shew that, however it may suit his Noble Friend’s poetical cross-purposes, politically and practically speaking, a house divided against itself cannot stand. He first, in his disdain of modern times, finds nothing to compare with the grandeur of antiquity but Bonaparte; and then ‘as ’twere in spite of scorn,’ goes on to disdain this idol, which he had himself gratuitously set up, in a strain of effeminate and rancorous abuse worthy of Mr. Wordsworth’s pastoral, place-hunting Muse. Suppose what is here said of ‘the child and champion of Jacobinism’ to be true, are there not venal tongues and venal pens enough to echo it, without his Lordship’s joining in the cry? Will ‘the High Legitimates, the Holy Band’ be displeased with these captious efforts to level the object of their hate to the groveling standard of royalty? Is there not a division of labour even on Mount Parnassus? The other writers of prose and verse, who enter the Temple of Fame by Mr. Murray’s door in Albemarle-street, have their cues. Mr. Southey, for instance, never sings or says, or dreams of singing or saying, that the Prince Regent is not so great a man as Julius Cæsar. Why then should Lord Byron force the comparison between the modern and the ancient hero? It is because the slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion. The league between tyrants and slaves is a chain of adamant; the bond between poets and the people is a rope of sand. Is this a truth, or is it not? If it is not, let Lord Byron write no more on this subject, which is beyond his height and his depth. Let him not trample on the mighty or the fallen! Bonaparte is not Beppo.
The versification and style of this poem are as perverse and capricious as the method or the sentiments. One stanza perpetually runs on into the next, making the exception the rule, merely because it properly ends in itself; and there is a strange mixture of stately phraseology and far-fetched metaphor, with the most affected and bald simplicity of expression and uncouthness in the rhymes. It is well his Lordship is born so high, or all Grub street would set him down as a plebeian for such lines as the following:—
[‘I lov’d her[[46]] from my boyhood,’ &c. (stanza 18 and part of 19)].
What will the Critics of the Cockney School of Poetry say to this?—Lie on, and swear that it is high patrician poetry, and of very noble birth.
The introductory stanzas are on the same subject, Venice; and are better.
[‘I stood in Venice, on the bridge of sighs,’ &c. (stanzas 1, 2, and 3)].
The thought expressed in the last stanza, ‘but nature doth not die,’ is particularly fine, and consolatory to the mind. We prefer the stanza relating to the tomb of Petrarch, to any others in the poem:—
[‘There is a tomb in Arqua;—rear’d in air,’ &c. (stanzas 30–33)].
The apostrophe to Tasso and to his patron is written with great force, but in a different spirit:—
[‘Ferrara! in thy wide and grass-grown streets,’ &c. (stanzas 35–38)].
In the same strain, and with an alternate mixture of enthusiasm and spleen, the author pays the tribute of acknowledgement to the artist of ‘the statue that enchants the world,’ to the shades of Michael Angelo, Alfieri, ‘the starry Galileo,’ Machiavel, and to the Bard of Prose, ‘him of the Hundred Tales of Love’—Boccacio.
From these recollections the poet proceeds to describe the fall of the Velino, ‘a hell of waters.’ We cannot say but that we think his powers better suited to express the human passions than to reflect the forms of nature. In the present instance, however, the poet has not invoked the genius of the place in vain: it represents, in some measure, the workings of his own spirit,—disturbed, restless, labouring, foaming, sparkling, and now hid in labyrinths and plunging into the gloom of night. The following description is obscure, tortuous, perplexed, and abortive; yet who can say that it is not beautiful, striking, and impassioned?—
[‘How profound
The gulf! and how the giant element,’ &c. (stanzas 70–72)].
We’ll look no more: such kind of writing is enough to turn the brain of the reader or the author. The repetitions in the last stanza are like interlineations in an imperfect manuscript, left for afterselection; such as, ‘Hope upon a death-bed’—‘Love watching madness,’—‘Unworn its steady dies’—‘Serene its brilliant hues,’—‘the distracted waters’—‘the torture of the scene,’ &c. There is here in every line an effort at brilliancy, and a successful effort; and yet, in the next, as if nothing had been done, the same thing is attempted to be expressed again with the same labour as before, the same success, and with as little appearance of repose or satisfaction of mind.
It is in vain to attempt a regular account of the remainder of this poem, which is a mass of discordant things, incoherent, not gross, seen ‘now in glimmer and now in gloom,’ and ‘moving wild laughter in the throat of death.’ The poem is like the place it describes:—
‘The double night of ages, and of her,
Night’s daughter, Ignorance, hath wrapt and wrap[[47]]
All round us: we but feel our way to err:
The ocean hath his chart, the stars their map,
And Knowledge spreads them on her ample lap;
But Rome is as the desart, where we steer
Stumbling on recollections; now we clap
Our hands, and cry “Eureka!” it is clear—
When but some false mirage[[48]] of ruin rises near.’
This is undoubtedly fine: but Rome was glorious, before she became a ruin; stately, before she was laid low; was ‘seen of all eyes,’ before she was confounded in oblivion. Lord Byron’s poetry, in its irregular and gloomy magnificence, we fear, antedates its own doom; and is buried in a desolation of his own creating, where the mists of fancy cloud, instead of lighting up the face of nature; and the fierceness of the passions, like the Sirocco of the Desart, withers and consumes the heart. We give this judgment against our wills; and shall be happy, should we live to see it reversed by another generation. All our prejudices are in favour of the Noble Poet, and against his maligners. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is dedicated to Mr. Hobhouse, and there are passages both in the dedication and the poem which would bribe our opinions, were they to be bribed either by our admiration of genius or our love of liberty. Such are the following passages:—
[‘What from this barren being do we reap,’ &c. (stanzas 93–95)].
But we must conclude; not, however, till we have made two extracts more. We shall not give the passages relating to his separation from his wife, or the death of the Princess Charlotte: we see nothing remarkable in the events, or in his Lordship’s reflections on them. As to his vow of revenge, which is to end in forgiveness, it is unconscious, constitutional caprice and contradiction: it is self-will exerting itself in straining at a violent conclusion; and then, by another exertion, defeating itself by doing nothing. So also he expatiates on the boundless anticipated glories of a female reign, which were never likely, and are now impossible, only that he may rail at lady Fortune in good set terms, and indulge a deeper disgust at all that is real or possible. We will give what is better than such cant,—the description of the dying Gladiator, and the conclusion of the poem:—
[‘I see before me the Gladiator lie,’ &c. (stanzas 140 and 141)].
O si sic Omnia! All, however, is not so. The stanzas immediately following, on the story of the Grecian Daughter and the Apollo Belvidere, are in as false and sophisticated a taste, as these are pure and sublime. But, at the close of the poem, in addressing the pathless ocean,—the self-willed, untamed mighty world of waters,—his genius resumes its beauty and its power, and the Pilgrim sinks to rest in strains as mild and placid as the breath of childhood, that frets itself asleep.
[‘My task is done—my song hath ceased—my theme,’ &c. (stanzas 185 and 186)].