"Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies; and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same and still the more, the more it breaks."
In the depth of his dejection he turns to the element in nature which,
by its contrast with his present mood, solaces his sufferings--the sea,
the free, open sea, upon whose mane he had laid his hand as a boy,
and which knows him as the horse knows his rider. He loves the sea
because it is unconquerable, because time cannot even write a wrinkle
on its brow, and it rolls now as it rolled at the dawn of creation. But
everything in nature reminds him of suffering and warfare. The peal
of distant thunder is to him an alarm-bell, "the knoll of what in me
is sleepless--if I rest." Even the beautiful, calm lake of Nemi does
not remind him of anything peaceful and sweet; he calls it "calm as
cherished hate." (iv. 173.)
His melancholy becomes actually choleric. Could he breathe all his
passion "into _one_ word, and that one word were Lightning," he would
speak. "Anything but rest!" is his watchword. "Quiet to quick bosoms
is a hell." There is a fire in the soul which, once kindled, is
quenchless, and the flames of which rise ever higher and wilder; there
is a fever which is fatal to all whom it attacks.
"This makes the madmen who have made men mad
By their contagion; Conquerors and Kings,
Founders of sects and systems, to whom add
Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all unquiet things
Which stir too strongly the soul's secret springs,
And are themselves the fools to those they fool;
Envied, yet how unenviable! what stings
Are theirs! One breast laid open were a school
Which would unteach mankind the lust to shine or rule.
Their breath is agitation, and their life
A storm whereon they ride, to sink at last,
And yet so nursed and bigoted to strife,
That should their days, surviving perils past,
Melt to calm twilight, they feel overcast
With sorrow and supineness, and so die;
Even as a flame unfed, which runs to waste
With its own flickering, or a sword laid by,
Which eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously."
And in a still more despairing mood Harold cries:
"We wither from our youth, we gasp away--
Sick--sick; unfound the boon--unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first--
But all too late,--so are we doubly curst.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same,
Each idle--and all ill--and none the worst--
For all are meteors with a different name,
And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Our life is a false nature--'tis not in
The harmony of things,--this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew--
Disease, death, bondage--all the woes we see,
And worse, the woes we see not."
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!" And to the Spaniards he cried:
"Awake, ye sons of Spain! awake! Advance!
Lo, Chivalry, your ancient goddess, cries."
And it was in the course of his first tour, too, that he thus
apostrophised the subjugated Greeks, who went on hoping for help from
other nations:--
"Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?
Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!
True, they may lay your proud despoilers low,
But not for you will Freedom's altars flame.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When riseth Lacedemon's hardihood,
When Thebes Epaminondas rears again,
When Athens' children are with hearts endued,
When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men,
Then may'st thou be restored; but not till then."
But his love of liberty at that time was of a purely political nature;
it was the free-born Englishman's indignation at seeing other nations
unable to shake off a foreign yoke to which his own nation would never
have dreamt of submitting.
Now he has learned what liberty in the wide, full, universal meaning of
the word is. Now he feels that free _thought_ is the first essential
requisite of all spiritual life.
"Yet let us ponder boldly--'tis a base
Abandonment of reason to resign
Our right of thought--our last and only place
Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine:
Though from our birth the faculty divine
Is chain'd and tortured--cabin'd, cribb'd, confined,
And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine
Too brightly on the unprepared mind,
The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the blind."
And it is his intention not merely to ponder, but to act. Invoking
Time, the great avenger, whom he reminds that he has borne the hatred
of the world with calm pride--and he has experienced all its varieties
of hatred,
"From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From the loud roar of foaming calumny
To the small whisper of the as paltry few,
And subtler venom of the reptile crew"--
he concludes with the prayer: "Let me not have worn this iron in my
soul in vain!"
Now, his personal woes shrink into nothing when he beholds the
gigantic ruins of Rome; and, like the Sulpicius with whose feelings
Chateaubriand endowed the hero of _Les Martyrs_, he feels the
insignificance of his fate compared with that which has swept away the
cities of Greece. He writes:--
"Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wandering in youth, I traced the path of him,
The Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind,
The friend of Tully."
And when, not satisfied with liberty of thought alone, he turns his
attention to practical matters and occupies himself with the great
political struggles of the day, he does not content himself with
repeating the old invocations to the departed, or with crying to Venice
that she has drowned the glory and honour of centuries in the mire of
slavery, and that it would be better for her to be whelm'd beneath the
waves. No, he boldly attacks the mighty, the victors of Waterloo, whom
he scornfully calls "the apes of him who humbled once the proud"; and
then passes from the outward, political aspect of the great European
conflicts, to their inner, social significance.
To all appearance, he says, France has uprooted old prejudices, and
laid in ruins "things which grew, breathed from the birth of time,"
only to see dungeons and thrones rebuilt upon the same foundation.
"_But this will not endure_." Mankind have at last felt their strength.
And even though France "got drunk with blood to vomit crime,"
"Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunderstorm _against_ the wind;
Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,
The loudest still the tempest leaves behind;
Thy tree hath lost its blossoms, and the rind,
Chopp'd by the axe, looks rough and little worth,
But the sap lasts--and still the seed we find
Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North;
So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth."