BYRON

Throughout his literary career Byron manifested so strange an admixture of courage and self-pity, sincerity and posing, faith in man and cynicism, radicalism and respect for tradition, serious thought and flippant comment, such a rapid shifting not only from one mood to another but from one idea to another, that it is extremely difficult to find a center from which to interpret his poetry. Nevertheless there is a serious strain of constructive thinking in him. If we leave out of account the more frivolous and the merely amusing of his verse, and also consider only incidentally his satiric writings, remembering that he was perhaps mainly a satirist, we can find certain basic principles of thought in his work, a view of the cosmos, a characteristic reaction to Nature and to human life; and can also discern a certain development of his views. Admittedly an incomplete interpretation of the poet, this approach to him has the advantage of setting forth whatever constructive philosophy there is in his world.

Like Shelley Byron was intensely modern in his emotions but backward looking in his thought. Again like Shelley he was a poet of revolt, an innovator, but his innovations were born of personal moods or of the temper of the times. He was too impatient of careful and constructive thinking to develop an original attitude of philosophical consistency, and when he did think he slipped back into fairly well defined formulae of eight

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eenth century ideas. His indebtedness to the eighteenth century ran deeper than merely the ardent advocacy and imitation of the poetry of Pope; whenever he adverted to first principles it gave him the foundation of his thought. We may not say with Goethe that when Byron reflects he is a child, but rather that when he reflects he is the child of the eighteenth century.

In general Byron's early work, as for instance, the first two Cantos of Childe Harold, is highly emotional and romantic-strong in the love of Nature and of unrestrained freedom, while his later work becomes gradually more intellectual; each contact with the rationalistic and skeptic spirit of the eighteenth century, reacting favorably on certain rebellious elements in his own nature, disillusioned him as to the worth of his emotions and in the end transformed him into the author of the satire of Don Juan. "My passions were developed very early," he says in Detached Thoughts. "Perhaps this was one of the reasons which caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts,-having anticipated life." There was also a sharp conflict between his thought as personal energy and desire and his thought as an inherited philosophy, which tended to the same end-the mock spirit of Don Juan.

I

As every one knows the first two Cantos of Childe Harold, published in 1812, when Byron was twenty-four, took the world by storm. The passionate energy in them, the spirit of adventure, the graphic and picturesque descriptions of places of historic interest, the rapid, kalidoscopic, movement from scene to scene, dazzled the reading public. The Cantos do not contain any philoso

phic profoundities; yet here for the first time Byron suggests the beginnings of a philosophy of life. He preaches. individualism undisciplined and freedom unrestrained. He sets up an antimony between Man and Nature, embracing as an individual the solitude and loveliness. of Nature and scorning companionship with man:

To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,

Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,

And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude; 'tis but to hold

Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd.

But midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,

To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,

And roam along, the world's tired denizen,

With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less,
Of all that flatter'd, follow'd, sought, and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude.

Canto II, 25, 26.

There is also in these Cantos an implicit spirit of satire which becomes explicit in his later writings. He implies a cynical attitude toward womankind:

But pomp and power alone are woman's care,
And where these are light Eros finds a feere;
Maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare.

Canto, I, 9.

He makes sneering remarks concerning Sabbath religious worship in London, where the "spruce citizen, wash'd artisan, and smug apprentice gulp their weekly air" as they make their way to church:

Ask ye, Baotian shades, the reason why?

'Tis to the worship of the solemn Horn,

Grasp'd in the holy hand of Mystery,

In whose dread name both men and maids are sworn,
And consecrate the oath with draught, and dance till morn.

Canto, I, 70.

As he reviews the past of Spain and Greece he is deeply impressed by a profound sense of the futility of life, the fatuity of personal existence, by a sort of Calvinistic sense of Fate:

Shall man repine

That his frail bonds to fleeting life are broke?
Cease, fool! the fate of gods may well be thine!
Wouldst thou survive the marble or the oak,

When nations, tongues, and worlds must sink beneath the stroke?

Canto II, 53.

Or again, in speaking of the Acropolis at Athens he says:

Look on this spot-a nation's sepulchre!
Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn.
Even gods must yield-religions take their turn;
'Twas Jove's 'tis Mahomet's-and other creeds
Will rise with other years, till man shall learn
Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds,-

Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds.

Canto II, 3.

The cynicism in these Cantos may be a mere pose of the youthful Byron, but the sense of man's mortality, of doubt and chance and mutability in man's being, which underlies the poem, reveals a note of deep reality in Bryon's thought. Both the negative and the cosmopolitan attitude toward all religions as here revealed is also a characteristic note.

Soon after the publication of the first two Cantos of Childe Harold Byron protested against identifying the hero with himself. Though no doubt it is wrong to make

such identification outwardly and literally, the serious and deeper experiences as represented in the poem are Byron's own. The hero's love of loneliness, his worship of the great things in history, his special devotion to the country of Greece, his sense of the futility of life, and the negation of religion, can be with confidence ascribed to the author himself.

The feeling of man's futile existence, of his smallness as set against his pretensions, Byron not only attests in this poem but in various passages in his letters written. soon after the poem. In writing to Mr. Gifford, for instance, June 16, 1813, Byron says: "It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be over-rated." This cosmopolitan attitude, as it were, toward the universe as a whole he again speaks of in a letter to Miss Milbanke, March 3, 1814: "Why I came here, I know not. Where I shall go, it is useless to inquire. In the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds-stars-systemsinfinity-why should I be anxious about an atom?"

Byron's anxiety about the atom, however, was always sufficiently great. Indeed the intensity and energy with which his personality undisguised asserts itself in his poetry is one of the marked characteristics of his genius. Under but the slightest disguise the heroes of Byron's oriental tales, as Selim in The Bride of Abydos (1813), Conrad in The Corsair (1813), and Lara in Lara (1814), the poet asserts his own egoistic energy and undisciplined personality, in a blaze of oriental color and with melodramatic effect. But it required the sting of a sharp reversal of personal fortune completely to reveal