thoughts about life. For the poet's thoughts are not abstractions, generalities; they come to him as visions— "airy images" that he finds in his soul's "haunted cell." So he makes his appeal, not to our reason, but to our imagination. As truly as painter or sculptor, he raises visible objects before the eye of the mind and delights us with beauty of form and colour. And lastly, the melody of verse enables him to make his appeal to the ear also. He, as well as the musician, wins us by beauty of sound. The story of Byron's life may be read elsewhere. It will be enough here to set down the barest outlines. He was born Jan. 22, 1788, and educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. His first volume of poems, Hours of Idleness (1807) was severely criticised by the Edinburgh Review, and he retorted by the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). After two years of travel in Spain, Greece and Turkey, he published the first two Cantos of Childe Harold (1812). It was then that he "awoke one morning and found himself famous." He married in 1815, but his wife left him in the following year, shortly after the birth of their daughter Ada. The sympathy of the English public was entirely with the wife, and Byron's unpopularity was as great as his previous popularity. He left England never to return. He settled at Geneva (1816), where he made the acquaintance of Shelley, and wrote the third Canto of Childe Harold, the Prisoner of Chillon, and part of Manfred. In 1817 he finished Manfred at Venice, and wrote the fourth Canto of Childe Harold. From 1817 to 1823 he lived in Italy-at Venice, Ravenna and Pisa. To this period belong Don Juan, Cain, and A Vision of Judgment. In 1823 he went to the help of the Greeks who were trying to throw off the yoke of Turkey. He served their cause splendidly, but he died of fever in the camp at Missolonghi, April 19, 1824, at the age of 36. Of Byron's character a word must be said; for some knowledge of it is necessary to the appreciation of Childe Harold. There is much in that poem of despondency, of railing against the hollowness of flatterers and the unfaithfulness of friends and lovers, of professions that the writer cares nothing for the verdict of the world, of signs that he is really very sensitive to what the world thinks and says. We cannot but feel that his thoughts are far too full of himself, and that it is this egotism which leads him to expect too much from others and to cherish bitterness when he is disappointed. He was indeed far from being an admirable character. He had been " 'untaught in youth his heart to tame" (Canto III. 7) and he “fed on bitter fruits" of his own planting. But we must remember the passionate temperament that he inherited from a selfindulgent line of ancestors; the lack of any wise early training; the deformity of his feet which debarred him from manly exercises and inspired him with resentment against the more fortunate; the personal beauty and attractiveness that surrounded him with flatterers; and, lastly, the atonement for many faults and follies that he was beginning to make by a life of devotion to an unselfish cause when he was cut off in the prime of his years. In the title, and in parts of the poem itself, Byron attributes his experiences and thoughts to an imaginary character, Childe Harold. 'Childe' is an archaic word for 'Knight.' When the first two Cantos appeared the question was hotly discussed whether by Harold Byron had meant himself. He denied his identity with Harold, and was justified in so doing. He had not been seeking in the person of Harold to draw his own portrait faithfully. Rather, he had sketched an imaginary personage who should be the central figure of a series of pictures drawn from his own life and travels. On the other hand, Childe Harold has no existence apart from his author, as Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and countless other characters in Shakespeare seem, when once created, to acquire an independent existence of their own. In other words, no dramatic faculty has gone to the creation of Childe Harold. He is a lay figure, and in the third and fourth Cantos Byron hardly seems to take the trouble to distinguish Harold any longer from himself. In style, Childe Harold partakes of the nature of several kinds of poetry. As a continuous narrative, it has about it something of the epic, which is a continuous tale of heroic deeds. But it has hardly enough action for the true epic. Again, as a series of separate pictures or episodes, it suggests the idyll or 'little picture,' a favourite form of composition with poets who feel a great epic to be something on a scale beyond their reach. Lastly, it has lyrical elements, not only in the songs interspersed, but in outbursts in the poem itself, such as the address to Ocean. Though the first two Cantos were received with great enthusiasm at the time of their publication, it is on the maturer work of the third and fourth Cantos, written some years later, that the fame of Byron's Childe Harold now chiefly rests. There is perhaps no English writer about whose claim to high poetic rank so much difference of opinion exists among competent judges; but it is safe to prophesy that many stanzas of Childe Harold will live as long as the English language. Among its special excellences we may note (1) that, beyond all other English poems, it gives expression to the 'romantic' character of strikingly beautiful scenery, and to that enhanced charm that scenery receives from association both with the remembered names of the past and with the thought of forgotten generations; (2) the art with which the scenes and episodes are linked together.; (3) the high level at which the interest is maintained through so long a composition; (4) the real pathos with which the " sense of tears in mortal things "1 is brought home to us; (5) the strength and range of the similes; (6) the splendour of the verses that, without any attempt at elaborate word-paint1 Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.-VIRGIL. ing, carry us into the very presence of the great and terrible things of Nature, a mountain torrent or thunderstorm; (7) the number of great 'single lines' that, once read, impress themselves on the memory-lines like "And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim," 2 or, "How that red rain hath made the harvest grow!" or, or, "By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone," "Laocoon's torture dignifying pain." There are deeper and subtler things elsewhere in English poetry; and we may search Childe Harold in vain for the unearthlier charm of romance that seems to cling about Keats' vision of "magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," or for such an intimate sympathy with the still small voices of Nature as we find in Wordsworth's : "The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound But the merits mentioned above-and the list might be largely extended-are surely enough for one work. It seems to have been a favourite with the greatest of English painters, for we are told that Turner "painted the labour of men, their sorrow, and their death. . . nearly in the same tones of mind which prompted Byron's poem of Childe Harold, and the loveliest result of his art, in the central period of it, was an effort to express on a single canvas the meaning of that poem." "" 1 1 Ruskin, Modern Painters, Pt. ix. 11. 26 (vol. v.). |