Childe Harold

“ 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 [239] and their finish on that wild Continental holiday—beginning on Lac Leman and ending at Pisa and Genoa ”

“ I had taken up a red morocco-bound book, which was lying alone on the bureau. It was Byron, and turning over the leaves till I came to Don Juan, I read it through, and began Childe Harold, but the candle expired. I struck out my hands through the palpable darkness, to find the bed without disturbing mother, whose soul was calmly threading the labyrinth of sleep. I finished Childe Harold early in the morning, though, and went down to breakfast, longing to be a wreck! ”

“ From the dark barriers of that rugged clime, E'en to the centre of Illyria's vales, Childe Harold passed o'er many a mount sublime, Through lands scarce noticed in historic tales: Yet in famed Attica such lovely dales Are rarely seen; nor can fair Tempe boast A charm they know not ”

“ We cannot write Childe Harold, but we can grumble at both bed and board in every hotel under the sun; we can discover teasing midges in the air and questionable insects in the rooms; and we can discuss each bill presented to us with an industrious persistence which nearly drives landlords frantic and ourselves as well. In these kind of important matters we are indeed “superior” to Byron and other ranting dreamers of his type, but we produce no Childe Harolds, and we have come to the strange pass of pretending that Don Juan is improper, while we pore over Zola with avidity! ”

“ 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!" ”

“ But spite of the censures of the world, and reproaches of his own conscience, the powers of his genius continually grew till they even forced into the silence of astonishment the most heartless of his detractors. To say nothing of those grand and somber metaphysical dramas, Manfred, Cain, and the rest which he wrote in Italy, the poem alone of Childe Harold, ever ascending in magnificent strength, richness, and beauty, as it advanced, was sufficient to give him an immortality second to no other. ”

“ Strangely as their garb and intentions are altered, there is a lingering reminiscence about them of a certain Childe Harold who once set the world aflame. Like him they are troubled with a weight of woe and misfortune mysteriously beyond the conception of common men ”

“ Childe Harold, a man sated with the world, who roams from place to place, to kill time and escape from himself. The "childe" is, in fact, lord Byron himself, who was only twenty-two when he began the poem, which was completed in seven years. In canto i. the "childe" visits Portugal and Spain (1809) ; in canto ii. Turkey in Europe (1810) ; in canto iii. Belgium and Switzerland (1816) ; and in canto iv. Venice, Rome, and Florence (1817) .
("Childe" is a title of honor, about tantamount to "lord," as childe Waters, childe Rolande, childe Tristram, childe Arthur, childe Childers, etc.) ”

“ He it is whose strong, Full, flute-like music haunts thy stately verse. A worthy Levite of his court thou art! One sent among us to defeat the curse That binds us to the Actual. Yea, thy part, Oh, lute-voiced lover! is to lull the heart Of love repelled, its darkness to disperse. VII The Stanza of Childe Harold Who framed the stanza of Childe Harold? He It was who, halting on a stormy shore, Knew well the lofty voice which evermore, In grand distress, doth haunt the sleepless sea With solemn sounds. ”

“ What great and moral feeling pervade the two last cantos of "Childe Harold," melancholy though they be, like all things which are beautiful! How one feels that the pain they tell of has its origin in unmerited persecution, and how his intellect came to his aid, and enabled him to bear with calmness the uncertainties incident to our nature! What greatness of soul in the forgiveness of what to others would [Pg 33] seem unpardonable! What love of humanity and of its rights! ”

“ But the poet soon grew tired of that, and returned to his own English. Childe is used in the ancient sense of knight, and the poem tells of the wanderings of a gloomy, vicious, world-worn man.
There is very little story in Childe Harold. The poem is more a series of descriptions and a record of the thoughts that are called forth by the places through which the traveler passes. It is indeed a poetic diary. The pilgrim visits many famous spots, among them the field of Waterloo, where but a few months before the fate of Europe had been decided. To us the battle of Waterloo is a long way off. ”

“ Still, we fear, there is room for a doubt whether the world would ever have seen Childe Harold if the great poet had not happened to be also a morbidly vain and, in some respects, remarkably small man. ”

“ I now leave "Childe Harold" to live his day such as he is; it had been more agreeable, and certainly more easy, to have drawn an amiable character. It had been easy to varnish over his faults, to make him do more and express less, but he never was intended as an example, further than to show, that early perversion of mind and morals leads to satiety of [8] past pleasures and disappointment in new ones, and that even the beauties of nature and the stimulus of travel (except ambition, the most powerful of all excitements) are lost on a soul so constituted, or rather misdirected. ”

“ And if the reference be to men in general and life in general, and not to a particular sort of man living a particular sort of life away from other men, then we make bold to say, though in doing so we contradict Mr. Arnold roundly, that in Childe Harold alone there is “an ampler body of powerful work,” and that Childe Harold alone “deals with more of life,” than all Wordsworth’s poems, not even selected from, but taken in their integrity, without the diminution of a single passage or the omission of a single line. ”

“ Such incense easily ascends, and it was not surprising that his head should also suffer. "Childe Harold," of course, acted most on the imagination of women of powerful intellect and ardent nature, and thus his own peril grew afresh, involuntarily evoked by himself. For, if the prestige of position and circumstance adding lustre to genius, could act strongly even upon men, what must have been their combined influence when added to his personal beauty, upon women?—
" ... ”

“ If these earlier cantos of Childe Harold had been distinguished by the qualities of the later, namely, profound originality and vigorous honesty, they would not have made the noise in the world they did. Great honesty and great originality never find favour at once with the general public. ”

“ In 1816 he was with him after his separation from his wife, and contributed notes to the fourth canto of Childe Harold, which was dedicated to him. On his return he threw himself into politics with great energy as an advanced Radical, and wrote various pamphlets, for one of which he was in 1819 imprisoned in Newgate. ”

“ His opinion that it is a man's duty to live a happy life appears rather quaintly in the sermonizing with which he felt called upon to temper the admiration expressed in his articles on Childe Harold, and it is implicit in many of his biographical studies. ”

“ Stanza 178.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin,—his control
Stops with the shore.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto iv. Stanza 179.
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown. [547:2]
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto iv. Stanza 179.
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow,—
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now. [547:3]
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto iv. Stanza 182. ”

“ Wherever he resided, he was an eyesore to the Austrian authorities; his letters were opened; the Italian translation of Childe Harold was prohibited in the Austrian provinces of Italy; and the police, as he well knew, were incited to assassinate him. Nevertheless, he calmly took his usual ride every day. On this, as on other occasions, his conduct and language were distinguished by a mixture of stoic heroism and boyish bravado. There is something attractively boyish in his writing to Murray: "I wonder if they can read my letters when they have opened them ”

“ Here it is only necessary to say that in a soul such as his, where rancor could never live, such a coldness wounded him without altering his sentiments in any way. After two years' absence he returned to England, and so heartily forgave Harness that he actually wished to dedicate to him the first two cantos of "Childe Harold," and only gave up this idea from a generous fear that its dedication might injure him in his clerical profession, on account of certain stanzas in the poem which were not quite orthodox. ”

“ Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Traduction française littérale, par l'Abbé A. Julien. Paris, Poussielque frères. 1883. [12o.
[Lorenz, 1886.]
IX.
Childe Harold, Édition classique, précédée d'une notice littéraire, par M. A. Elwall. Paris, Delalain frères. 1892. [12o.
[Lorenz, 1900.]
X.
Childe Harold, Édition classique, avec une notice biographique et littéraire, un appendice et des notes par Douglas Gibb. Paris, Belin frères. 1892. [12o.
[Lorenz, 1900.]
[197]
German. I.
Harold, der Verwiesene. Aus. d. Engl. v. Karl Baldamus. Leipzig, Hartmann. 1835. ”

“ Hobhouse has made some very valuable and accurate notes of considerable length, and you may be sure that I willPg 63 do for the text all that I can to finish with decency. I look upon Childe Harold as my best; and as I begun, I think of concluding with it. But I make no resolutions on that head, as I broke my former intention with regard to 'The Corsair.' However, I fear that I shall never do better; and yet, not being thirty years of age, for some moons to come, one ought to be progressive as far as intellect goes for many a good year. ”

“ This work is at once a parody of Childe Harold, and a satire on the typical young “Masher” of the period, who, having exhausted all modern forms of dissipation, finally “comes an awful cropper” in the slang of his tribe.
“Childe Chappie” bids farewell to the haunts of his boyhood in the following verses, sung to the accompaniment of a banjo.
I.
Adieu! adieu! Home life’s a bore
When one is twenty-two ”

“ A bad husband, a bad son, a bad father, has but to retire to some 'rose-leaf couch, where, nursing his dainty loves and slothful sympathies,' he may find, in a volume of this too-attractive bard, an apology for every sin of temper, every violation of duty; nay, so contagious is the influence of this Byron-mania, that our young men cultivate the failings of their chief, and seem to fancy that in becoming imitators of Childe Harold's eccentricities, they [Pg 140] may slide into his unrivalled genius. ”

“ He needed the encouragement of flattery.
One Dallas, a distant relative who now introduced himself and, for a season, doubled the parts, as it were, of literary mentor and literary valet, supplied the flattery, recognising that, whereas “Hints from Horace” was just a satire like another, “Childe Harold” was the expression of a new [Pg 104] sentiment, hitherto unheard in English literature. “Hints from Horace,” he thought, might be published, if the author wished it—it did not much matter one way or the other; but “Childe Harold” must be published. ”

“ Surely if the author of Childe Harold were indebted to any ancient poet for some ideas embodied in the lines cited, it was to Lucretius and not to Ovid that he should have owned the obligation.
A BORDERER.
Minor Notes. On the Word "raised" as used by the Americans.
—An American, in answer to an inquiry as to the place of his birth, says, "I was raised in New York," &c. Was it ever an English phrase? And if so, by what English writer of celebrity was it ever used? Dr. Franklin, in a letter to John Alleyne, Esq., Aug. 9, 1768, says:
"By these early marriages we are blest with more children ”

“ And such the storm of battle on this day, And such the frenzy, whose convulsion blinds To all save carnage, that, beneath the fray, An earthquake reeled unheededly away! None felt stern Nature rocking at his feet, And yawning forth a grave for those who lay Upon their bucklers for a winding-sheet; Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet. ”

“ Hard is his heart whom charms may not enslave; But Harold felt not as in other times, And left without a sigh the land of war and crimes.
XVII.
He that has sailed upon the dark blue sea, Has viewed at times, I ween, a full fair sight; When the fresh breeze is fair as breeze may be, The white sails set, the gallant frigate tight, Masts, spires, and strand retiring to the right, The glorious main expanding o'er the bow, The convoy spread like wild swans in their flight, The dullest sailer wearing bravely now, So gaily curl the waves before each dashing prow. ”