When he had become for the second time a homeless and solitary pilgrim,
Byron began to occupy himself again with the poem of travel in which
his youthful sentiments had found expression. He added the Third and
Fourth Cantos to _Childe Harold_. He turned back and felt the youthful
feelings once again. But what breadth and depth they had gained in the
interval! The chord struck in the First and Second Cantos was composed
of three notes--the note of solitariness, the note of melancholy, and
the note of freedom. Each one of these had become far clearer and more
resonant.
Throughout the first half of the work it is the feeling of solitariness
which produces the love of nature. "To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood
and fell," to climb the trackless mountain and lean over the foaming
waterfall, alone, was not solitariness, but communion with nature;
true solitariness was to wander amidst "the crowd, the hum, the shock
of men," unloving and unloved. (_Childe Harold_, ii. 25, 26, 27.)
The outbursts in the stanzas referred to are evoked by remembrances
of the poet's childhood, spent in the beautiful mountain districts
of Scotland, or of his visit to the hermit's home on "lonely Athos."
This was still a love of the solitude of nature which resembled
Wordsworth's, and which was based upon fear of an unknown, strange
world of men and women. The difference between Wordsworth's and Byron's
feeling was no more than this--that Wordsworth dwelt silently on the
natural impression, in the manner of the countryman and the landscape
painter, while Byron seized it with the longing, nervous ardour of the
townsman; and, moreover, that Wordsworth loved nature best in her quiet
moods, Byron in her wrath. (_Childe Harold_, ii. 37.)
In the second half of the work the character of the poet's solitariness
has changed. There is a marked difference between the desire for
solitary communion with nature which Harold felt as an inexperienced
youth, and that which he felt as a man, at the end of his first
circumnavigation of the world of men and things. It was now no longer
fear of human beings, but disgust with them, which drove him to take
refuge with nature. Society, the best society of a great metropolis,
which to the untrained eye seemed so humane, so right-thinking, so
refined and chivalrous, had turned its wrong side towards him--and
the wrong side is interesting, but not beautiful. He had learned how
much friendship the ruined man may reckon on, had learned that the
only force which he who is making plans for his future can exactly
calculate is the self-love of his fellow-men, with its consequences. So
he withdrew into himself again; and the poetry he wrote at this time is
not for men of a sociable nature. But the man who has had even a short
experience of what it is to turn his back on his fellow-men--who in his
desire to escape from them has left his home, his country, in search of
a new earth and new skies--who in the solitudes of his choice has felt
the sight of an approaching human being equivalent to a foul spot on
his pure, free horizon--in the souls of this man and his like, Byron's
lyric outbursts will find an echo.
Childe Harold is a solitary. He has learned that he is "the most unfit
of men to herd with man," because he is unable "to submit his thoughts
to others ... to yield dominion of his mind to spirits against whom his
own rebelled." But,
"Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where roll'd the ocean, thereon was his home.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam,
Were unto him companionship; they spake
A mutual language, clearer than the tome
Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake
For Nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake."
Amongst men he droops like a wild-born falcon with clipt wing. But in
his case, to fly from, is not to hate, mankind. It is not discontent or
defiance which keeps his "mind deep in its fountain," but fear lest it
should "overboil in the hot throng," where in a moment
"We may plunge our years
In fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears."
He feels that it is better to be alone, and thus to become a portion of
what surrounds him. High mountains are "a feeling" to him, but the hum
of human cities is a torture. The mountain, the sky, and the sea are a
part of him, and he is a part of them, and to love them is his purest
happiness. In solitude he is least alone; then his soul is conscious
of infinity, a truth which purifies it from self. Harold has not loved
the world, nor has it loved him. He is proud of not having "flattered
its rank breath," nor bowed the knee to its idols, nor smiled
hypocritically, nor echoed the cries of the crowd. He was _among_ them,
but not _of_ them. But he desires that the world and he should part
fair foes. "I do believe," he says,
"Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things,--hopes which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful ...
That two, or one, are almost what they seem."[1]
The feeling of solitariness gradually becomes the feeling of
_melancholy_. This note, too, had been struck in the first two cantos;
but their melancholy was nothing but the discontent of youth. With a
wasted youth behind him, he had stood, like a phlegmatically mournful
Hamlet, at the grave of Achilles, declaiming, with a skull in his hand,
on the worthlessness of life and fame--this young poet who had not yet
tasted the sweetness of celebrity, and who in reality hungered for
nothing so much as for that very fame which, with so much argumentative
philosophy, he feigned to condemn and despise. Now he has tasted it,
and learned how little nourishment is to be derived from such food.