The Childe Harold has been brought to its conclusion long before; its cantos, here and there splendidly ablaze with Nature—its storms, its shadows, its serenities; and the sentiment—now morbid, now jubilant—is always his own, though it beguiles with honeyed sounds, or stabs like a knife.
There have been a multitude of lesser poems, and of dramas which have had their inception and their finish on that wild Continental holiday—beginning on Lac Leman and ending at Pisa and Genoa; but his real selfhood—whether of mind or passion—seems to me to come out plainer and sharper in the Don Juan than elsewhere. There may not be lifts in it, which rise to the romantic levels of the “Pilgrimage;” there may be lack of those interpolated bits of passion, of gloom, of melancholy, which break into the earlier poem. But there is the blaze and crackle of his own mad march of flame; the soot, the cinders, the heat, the wide-spread ashes, and unrest of those fires which burned in him from the beginning were there, and devastated all the virginal purities of his youth (if indeed there were any!) and welded his satanic and his poetic qualities into that seamy, shining, wonderful residue of dirty scoriæ, and of brilliant phosphorescence, which we call Don Juan. From a mere literary point of view there are trails of doggerel in it, which the poet was too indolent to mend, and too proud to exclude. Nor can it ever be done; a revised Byron would be not only a Byron emasculated, but decapitated and devastated. ’Twould lack the links that tie it to the humanities which coil and writhe tortuously all up and down his pages. His faults of prosody, or of ethics, or of facts—his welter, at intervals, through a barren splendor of words—are all typical of that fierce, proud, ungovernable, unconventional nature. This leopard will and should carry all his spots. We cannot shrive the man; no chanters or churches can do this; he disdains to be shriven at human hands, or, it would seem, any other hands. The impact of that strong, vigorous nature—through his poems—brings, to the average reader, a sense of force, of brilliancy, of personality, of humanity (if gone astray), which exhilarates, which dashes away a thousand wordy memories of wordy verses, and puts in their place palpitating phrases that throb with life. An infinite capability for eloquent verse; an infinite capability for badnesses! We cannot root out the satanry from the man, or his books, any more than we can root out Lucifer from Milton’s Eden. But we can lament both, and, if need be, fight them.
Whether closer British influence (which usually smote upon him, like sleet on glass)—even of that “Ancient Oratory” of Annesley—would have served to whiten his tracks, who shall say? Long ago he had gone out from them, and from parish church and sermon; his hymns were the Ranz des Vaches on the heights of the Dent de Jaman, and the preachments he heard were the mellowed tones of convent bells—filtering through forest boughs—maybe upon the ear of some hapless Allegra, scathed by birth-marks of a sin that is not her own—conning her beads, and listening and praying!
Missolonghi.
It was in 1823, when he was living in Genoa—whither he had gone from Pisa (and before this, Ravenna)—that his sympathies were awakened in behalf of the Greeks, who since 1820 had been in revolt against their Turkish taskmasters. He had been already enrolled with those Carbonari—the forerunners of the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis—who had labored in vain for the independence and unity of Italy; and in many a burst of his impassioned song he had showered welcoming praises upon a Greece that should be free, and with equal passion attuned his verse to the lament—that
“Freedom found no champion and no child
Such as Columbia saw arise when she
Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled.”
How much all this was real and how much only the romanticism of the poet, was now to be proven. And it was certainly with a business-like air that he cut short his little agaceries with the Lady Blessington, and pleasant dalliance with the Guiccioli, for a rallying of all his forces—moneyed or other—in the service of that cause for which the brave Marco Bozzaris had fallen, fighting, only three months before. It was in July that he embarked at Genoa for Greece—in a brig which he had chartered, and which took guns and ammunition and $40,000 of his own procurement, with a retinue of attendants—including his trusty Fletcher—besides his friends Trelawney and the Count Gamba. They skirted the west coast of Italy, catching sight of Elba—then famous for its Napoleonic associations—and of Stromboli, whose lurid blaze, reflected upon the sea, startled the admiring poet to a hinted promise—that those fires should upon some near day reek on the pages of a Fifth Canto of Childe Harold.
Mediterranean ships were slow sailers in those days, and it was not until August that they arrived and disembarked at Cephalonia—an island near to the outlet of the Gulf of Corinth, and lying due east from the Straits of Messina. There was a boisterous welcome to the generous and eloquent peer of England; but it was a welcome that showed factional discords. Only across a mile or two of water lay the Isle of Ithaca, full of vague, Homeric traditions, which under other conditions he would have been delighted to follow up; but the torturing perplexities about the distribution of moneys or ammunition, the jealousies of quarrelsome chieftains, the ugly watch over drafts and bills of exchange, and the griping exactions of local money-changers, made all Homeric fancies or memories drift away with the scuds of wind that blew athwart the Ionian seas.