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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Lord Byron's 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (With Byron's Biography)' is a remarkable work of Romantic poetry that follows the titular character on a journey through various European landscapes as he contemplates life, love, and the human condition. Byron's lyrical style and vivid imagery capture the essence of the Romantic era, with themes of nature, beauty, and melancholy prevalent throughout. The incorporation of Byron's own biography alongside the poetic text provides readers with a deeper understanding of the author's personal experiences and influences on his writing. This combination of poetry and biography offers a unique and insightful perspective on Byron's literary genius and the emotional depth of his work. 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' stands as a timeless classic that continues to resonate with readers today, showcasing Byron's mastery of language and his ability to evoke powerful emotions through his writing. Fans of Romantic poetry and those interested in the life and works of Lord Byron will find this book to be a valuable addition to their collection, providing both literary enjoyment and historical insight into one of the greatest poets of the Romantic era. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (With Byron's Biography)
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and John Galt’s The Life of Lord Byron to illuminate the dynamic between a poet’s imaginative creation and the narratives that crystallize around a lived career. The poem presents a restless traveler whose reflections on history, landscape, and desire have come to signify the modern condition of wandering selfhood. The biography traces the contours of the person behind that figure. Side by side, they highlight how art can refract experience and how a life can be read through its most resonant work, without reducing either to mere illustration of the other.
Presented together, the works trace a shared meditation on self-fashioning, mobility, and the burdens of fame. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage explores freedom and fatigue in the face of empire, memory, and ruin; Galt’s account follows choices and consequences that anchor such themes in recognizable circumstances. The unifying current is the idea of pilgrimage as ethical and aesthetic journey: a search for meaning through movement, contemplation, and expressive daring. Our aim is to foreground this arc across genres, showing how the imaginative traveler and the historical individual converge and diverge, each enriching the other’s aura while guarding the distinct claims of poetry and life.
This pairing resists isolating Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage from the human situations that informed its emotional register, as it also prevents the life narrative from being heard without the counterpoint of artistic voice. Unlike single-work publications, the collection encourages immediate cross-reading, so that images of travel, loss, and aspiration resonate across pages and perspectives. It seeks to emphasize continuity and tension rather than to corroborate incidents, proposing a conversation between modes of truth-telling. That stance allows readers to approach each work on its own terms while perceiving how imagination and biography draw and redraw the outline of a distinctive public identity.
The collection’s design places lyric meditation beside biographical narration to cultivate reflective rather than forensic attention. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage offers a voice that stylizes interiority through scene and symbol; The Life of Lord Byron attends to circumstance, temperament, and consequence. The aim is to invite an experiential double vision: one strand composed of patterned stanzas and emotional weather, the other of episodes and character studies. In that juxtaposition, questions of authorship, persona, and myth-making emerge as central. The combination proposes that understanding flows not from hierarchies of evidence, but from sustained encounter with two complementary acts of representation.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Life of Lord Byron speak to one another through a shared lexicon of travel, retrospection, and self-scrutiny. The poem’s wandering consciousness moves across coasts, capitals, and ruins, converting geography into ethical reflection. Galt’s narrative, by contrast, follows Byron through situations that establish motives, obligations, and reversals. Read together, they propose that movement through space is also movement through states of mind. Scenes of departure and return echo across both texts, as do meditations on reputation and solitude, so that the biographical subject and the poetic persona seem to mirror and interrogate each other.
Motifs recur with suggestive persistence. The sea delineates both danger and liberation; ruins mark the passage of power and the press of memory; gatherings and duels of principle give shape to conflicts between duty and desire. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage elaborates these images into a mosaic of mood, while the biography situates similar signs amid decisions and their aftermath. Both works pose questions about allegiance—to nation, to art, to intimate conviction—and about the costs of pursuing freedom. The repetition of such images across genres creates a reflective chamber where symbol and circumstance exchange light, deepening the resonance of each.
Contrasts sharpen the dialogue. The poem’s cadence and imagery suggest a sensibility that shapes reality through ardor and irony, whereas the biography’s pacing favors sequence, explanation, and a testing of character amid events. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage often attends to the felt pressure of history through emblematic scenes; The Life of Lord Byron attends to choices made in time. One work cultivates an interior vista; the other narrates external passage. Together they delineate two modes of truth: patterned insight and narrated causality. Their alternation keeps either from hardening into doctrine, sustaining a subtle interplay between impulse, judgment, and fate.
Influence circulates directly within these pages because the biographer writes about the poet whose voice fills the poem. Galt considers the making and meaning of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as part of Byron’s trajectory, noting how imaginative success reconfigures circumstance and expectation. The biography, in presenting perspectives on the poem’s significance for Byron’s life, becomes a commentary on the poem’s themes of wandering, defiance, and reflection. In turn, the poem’s portrayals of isolation and yearning inflect how the life story is perceived, so that each work not only describes but also frames the other’s claims to insight and authority.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
The collection remains vital because it stages an encounter between a singular poetic imagination and a life told in the third person, revealing how modern ideas of identity, travel, and celebrity were crystallized. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage presents the wanderer as a moral and emotional barometer; The Life of Lord Byron shows how such a figure intersects with decisions, loyalties, and consequences. Together they invite reflection on the ethics of self-presentation, the allure of distance, and the weight of belonging. These questions remain pressing in an era defined by mobility, mediation, and the public negotiation of private feeling.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage has long been regarded as a landmark of narrative verse, shaping expectations about how personal sensibility and historical consciousness might be fused. Galt’s The Life of Lord Byron became a notable resource for understanding the poet’s circumstances and temperament, contributing to the formation of a durable cultural image. Read together, they help explain why the term “Byronic” persists as shorthand for a particular poise of defiance, melancholy, and wit. The pairing clarifies that such an image arises from both crafted art and retrospective narration, a dual inheritance that continues to organize discussions of Byron’s legacy.
The afterlives of these works extend across literature, performance, and visual culture, where the solitary traveler and conflicted public figure recur as emblems of ambition and estrangement. Their language and situations have been adapted, quoted, and transformed, keeping alive debates about heroism, liberty, and self-mastery. Scholars regularly return to the tension between personal myth and factual record that the works crystallize, noting how the interplay of voice and narrative still provokes argument. This collection highlights that durability by presenting the poem and the biography together, allowing their echoes to register anew without presuming a single, definitive interpretation.
By convening a concentrated dialogue between art and life, the collection offers a framework for discerning how cultural icons are made and unmade. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage articulates an attitude toward history and desire that remains recognizable; The Life of Lord Byron articulates how that attitude intersected with responsibilities, relationships, and public scrutiny. The resulting triangulation—poem, person, portrayal—supports renewed study of self-representation and its ethical stakes. It also invites creative responses that draw on the energies of both texts. In this way, the collection sustains ongoing inquiry while honoring the distinctive achievement of each contributor.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage emerges from the aftershock of the Napoleonic Wars, when Europe’s map was redrawn and its roads, fortresses, and capitals still bore recent scars. The Congress of Vienna sought balance, yet left behind unsettled national aspirations and a pervasive sense of loss. Against this backdrop, the poem’s reflective traveler surveys ruins not merely as picturesque relics but as witnesses to imperial ambition and human cost. The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt situates the poet’s movements and choices within this reordered continent, treating journeys and alliances as historically conditioned acts rather than purely private caprices of temperament.
Within Britain, the Regency years concentrated power in aristocratic institutions even as public agitation for reform intensified. Parliamentary privilege coexisted with popular presses, and debates on liberty, religious toleration, and political economy sharpened. As a peer, the poet at the center of Galt’s biography occupied an ambiguous space between authority and critique. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage registers that tension: it contemplates national glory while scrutinizing its burdens. Galt’s narrative, attentive to appointments, patronage, and the rituals of rank, shows how public office, social expectation, and reputation shaped the poet’s opportunities and limits, illuminating the entanglement of private feeling with political structure.
The poem’s itinerary tracks a Europe in motion, where the old Grand Tour reappears in altered form. Travel was newly possible yet closely policed by passports and wary authorities, and the Mediterranean became a stage for encounters among crumbling empires and rising nationhoods. Iberian battlefields, Adriatic ports, and Balkan frontiers mark the poem’s horizon, translating diplomacy into landscape. Galt’s biography complements this view by reconstructing the practicalities of movement—routes, escorts, and letters of introduction—through which cultural exchange occurred. Mobility itself becomes a political fact, and the Pilgrimage’s melancholy cadences reflect both freedom’s exhilaration and the fatigue of a continent in recovery.
Philhellenism animated British and continental sympathies, as classical admiration met modern insurgency in the eastern Mediterranean. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage approaches Greek antiquity with a dual consciousness: reverence for the ancient world and awareness of contemporary subjugation. The Life of Lord Byron traces the poet’s engagements in that arena, where ideals of liberty collided with the realities of finance, logistics, and diplomacy. The poem’s invocations of ancestral glory thereby assume immediate urgency, while the biography narrates the practical commitments that followed. Together they register the political stakes of classical feeling in an age when the fate of small nations tested Europe’s settlements.
At home, wartime debts, enclosure, and early industrialization strained the social fabric. Food prices and unemployment spiked; protest and repression followed in uneven waves. The poem’s sensibility—its mixture of weariness, desire for expanses, and suspicion of triumphant narratives—accords with such disquiet. Galt’s biography, attentive to patronage networks and the economics of literary celebrity, shows how fortunes and obligations conditioned choices of residence, travel, and publicity. The juxtaposition of a roaming speaker and an author tethered by credit, class, and expectation captures the socio-economic paradoxes of the period, where mobility and precariousness advanced together.
The expanding press magnified reputations and exposed them to scrutiny. Periodical culture amplified controversies, while laws of libel and the theater of parliamentary debate shaped what could be said and how. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage gained rapid notoriety, its voice resonating with readers hungry for candor and spectacle. Galt’s biographical method navigates this publicity, sifting correspondence, testimony, and rumor with a decorum suited to a public eager for revelation yet wary of scandal. The biography thus participates in, and critiques, the very machinery that propelled the poem’s fame, revealing how opinion, print, and power intertwined.
Religious life remained contested, with an established church, energetic dissent, and campaigns for civil inclusion animating public discourse. The poem’s skeptical, questing register converses with this environment, staging encounters with Catholic and Orthodox rites alongside reflections on belief and doubt. Galt’s narrative, mindful of public morality and private conviction, situates devotional habits within education, travel, and sociability. The pilgrim motif acquires historical specificity: pilgrimage becomes not merely spiritual journeying but an index of confessional politics across Europe. Thus, doctrinal debate and cultural rite inform the poem’s scenes, while the biography frames conscience as a lived negotiation.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage crystallizes a shift from neoclassical order toward an aesthetics of feeling, landscape, and the sublime. Mountains, seas, and ruins serve not as backdrops but as catalysts for introspection, translating geography into states of mind. The poem blends travel chronicle with meditative lyric, adopting an intimate voice that refuses easy consolation. The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt aligns with this turn by tracking the forms through which sensibility became public: letters, conversational display, and the staging of self. Together, poem and biography map a culture where interior experience and outward spectacle continually refract one another.
The work helped define a recognizably modern figure: a proud, wounded, self-dramatizing persona whose restless mobility becomes a philosophy of life. Childe Harold is both mask and mirror, a crafted speaker whose melancholy channels contemporary disillusion. Galt’s biography probes the relation between that persona and the living subject, asking how poise, privacy, and performance intersect. By juxtaposing textual voice with documented habit, the biography charts the mechanics of self-fashioning. The ensuing dialectic—between poetic inwardness and biographical demystification—structures the anthology, inviting readers to observe how myth accrues and how it may be soberly re-scaled.
An antiquarian temper runs through the poem, where classical ruins invite moral and historical comparison. Inscriptions, coins, and monuments become prompts for ethical speculation about transience and empire. The Life of Lord Byron, for its part, exhibits a documentary impulse: collation of dates, itineraries, and testimonies that ground aesthetic impression in verifiable circumstance. This pairing reflects an age fascinated by the material traces of the past and the protocols of recording the present. The poem aestheticizes memory; the biography archives it. Their dialogue rehearses a broader cultural project of recovering antiquity while inventing modern methods of evidence.
Technological and commercial changes in print culture widened the audience for ambitious poetry and for literary lives. New distribution networks, faster presses, and aggressive booksellers carried both Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Life of Lord Byron across Britain and abroad. The biographical volume belongs to a thriving tradition that imagined character through correspondence and public acts, balancing edification with curiosity. Poetry and prose thereby entered a shared marketplace of personality, where readers sought continuity between page and person. The anthology’s paired forms reveal how medium shapes authority: lyric urgency courts sympathy, while biography assembles credibility piece by piece.
Formally, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage reanimates the Spenserian stanza, marrying narrative breadth to reflective pause and musical recurrence. Its apostrophes amplify public address while preserving interiority, and its notes and asides cultivate a learned, worldly persona. The Life of Lord Byron counterbalances such ornament with measured prose that privileges sequence, cause, and corroboration. The result is a composite aesthetic: stately stanzaic meditation alongside disciplined narration. Each text comments on the other’s method—poetry as heightened testimony of feeling, biography as due process of fact—offering readers complementary pathways through the same historical sensibility.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Early readers linked the poem’s meditations on liberty and ruin to a restless postwar politics, and such associations only intensified with subsequent European uprisings. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was enlisted as both lament and incitement, its cadences finding new echoes as constitutional hopes rose and fell. The Life of Lord Byron supplied a record against which these hopes could be measured, presenting ideals rendered practical through travel, negotiation, and risk. Canonization began in this atmosphere, with the poem serving as an emblem of a generation’s unsettled conscience, and the biography becoming a touchstone for framing the costs of public commitment.
Victorian reassessment tempered admiration with caution. Respectability demanded that fervor be domesticated; the poem’s cosmopolitan melancholy was often read through imperial self-confidence and moral didacticism. Travel writing expanded as an educational genre, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage became a model for reflective tourism even as it was trimmed to suit decorum. The Life of Lord Byron, mined for exemplary episodes, functioned as both tribute and admonition, encouraging discipline where the poem courted passion. Yet the pair endured, their tension—between aspiration and restraint—rendering them unusually adaptable to a culture negotiating authority, faith, and expanding global reach.
In the twentieth century, two world wars cast Europe’s ruins in a new, harrowing light. Readers found in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage a vocabulary for grief and disillusion that preceded, yet seemed to anticipate, modern catastrophe. The traveler’s estrangement resonated with exile and displacement on a continental scale. The Life of Lord Byron gained renewed value as a documentary repository, its dates and itineraries anchoring historical empathy in specific places. Critical debate sharpened around the uses of biography: whether it illuminates art or reduces it to pathology. The anthology weathered this scrutiny, its dual forms inviting complementary, not reductive, reading.
Postcolonial and global perspectives reframed the Mediterranean and Balkan passages, scrutinizing how the poem stages cultural contact and authority. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage now serves as evidence for the imaginative geographies through which a British observer approached contested regions. The Life of Lord Byron, attentive to finance, mediation, and practical alliance, complicates any simple tale of altruism or domination. Together they enable nuanced accounts of solidarity and vantage. The texts neither escape their era’s assumptions nor collapse into them, making the anthology a fertile site for examining how admiration, advocacy, and hierarchy coexist in the making of modern international feeling.
Contemporary scholarship applies new tools and questions. Editorial work sifts variants and notes; geospatial projects retrace journeys; environmental readings attend to storms, coasts, and mountains as agents rather than scenery. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is read for its ethics of attention and its uneasy cosmopolitanism, while The Life of Lord Byron is reassessed as an early exercise in evidence-based literary history. Debates persist over self-invention versus sincerity, over the responsibilities of fame, and over how biography should handle intimacy. The anthology’s durability lies in this openness: it continues to invite historical correction while sustaining the imaginative force that first made it influential.
Synopsis (Selection)
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
A disillusioned young traveler moves through the war-scarred and storied landscapes of Europe and the Mediterranean, turning the itinerary into meditations on glory, decay, liberty, and identity. Descriptive scenes and historical reflections fuse with a self-consciously melancholic voice, shaping the archetype of the Byronic hero in an elegiac, expansive tone. Read alongside Galt’s biography, the poem’s mixture of personal pose and public commentary gains context, revealing how Byron’s real journeys and fame inform—but do not fully define—the poem’s wandering persona.
The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt
Galt traces Byron’s path from upbringing and education to literary rise, extensive travels, public controversies, and later civic and political engagements, blending reportage with character study. The biography foregrounds temperament, social milieu, and reputation to explain both the poetry’s themes and the poet’s public image, adopting a measured yet occasionally moralizing perspective. In conversation with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, it illuminates the historical itineraries behind the poem while marking the distance between Byron’s lived experience and the crafted figure of the world-weary traveler.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (With Byron's Biography)
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Preface to the Second Volume.
The text of the present edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is based upon a collation of volume i. of the Library Edition, 1855, with the following MSS.: (i.) the original MS. of the First and Second Cantos, in Byron's handwriting [MS. M.]; (ii.) a transcript of the First and Second Cantos, in the handwriting of R. C. Dallas [D.]; (iii.) a transcript of the Third Canto, in the handwriting of Clara Jane Clairmont [C.]; (iv.) a collection of "scraps," forming a first draft of the Third Canto, in Byron's handwriting [MS.]; (v.) a fair copy of the first draft of the Fourth Canto, together with the MS. of the additional stanzas, in Byron's handwriting. [MS. M.]; (vi.) a second fair copy of the Fourth Canto, as completed, in Byron's handwriting [D.].
The text of the First and Second Cantos has also been collated with the text of the First Edition of the First and Second Cantos (quarto, 1812); the text of the Third and of the Fourth Cantos with the texts of the First Editions of 1816 and 1818 respectively; and the text of the entire poem with that issued in the collected editions of 1831 and 1832.
Considerations of space have determined the position and arrangement of the notes.
Byron's notes to the First, Second, and Third Cantos, and Hobhouse's notes to the Fourth Canto are printed, according to precedent, at the end of each canto.
Editorial notes are placed in square brackets. Notes illustrative of the text are printed immediately below the variants. Notes illustrative of Byron's notes or footnotes are appended to the originals or printed as footnotes. Byron's own notes to the Fourth Canto are printed as footnotes to the text.
Hobhouse's "Historical Notes" are reprinted without addition or comment; but the numerous and intricate references to classical, historical, and archæological authorities have been carefully verified, and in many instances rewritten.
In compiling the Introductions, the additional notes, and footnotes, I have endeavoured to supply the reader with a compendious manual of reference. With the subject-matter of large portions of the three distinct poems which make up the five hundred stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage every one is more or less familiar, but details and particulars are out of the immediate reach of even the most cultivated readers.
The poem may be dealt with in two ways. It may be regarded as a repertory or treasury of brilliant passages for selection and quotation; or it may be read continuously, and with some attention to the style and message of the author. It is in the belief that Childe Harold should be read continuously, and that it gains by the closest study, reassuming its original freshness and splendour, that the text as well as Byron's own notes have been somewhat minutely annotated.
In the selection and composition of the notes I have, in addition to other authorities, consulted and made use of the following editions of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:—
i. Édition Classique, par James Darmesteter, Docteur-ès-lettres. Paris, 1882.
ii. Byron's Childe Harold, edited, with Introduction and Notes, by H. F. Tozer, M.A. Oxford, 1885 (Clarendon Press Series).
iii. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, edited by the Rev. E.C. Everard Owen, M.A. London, 1897 (Arnold's British Classics).
Particular acknowledgments of my indebtedness to these admirable works will be found throughout the volume.
I have consulted and derived assistance from Professor Eugen Kölbing's exhaustive collation of the text of the two first cantos with the Dallas Transcript in the British Museum (Zur Textüberlieferung von Byron's Childe Harold, Cantos I., II. Leipsic, 1896); and I am indebted to the same high authority for information with regard to the Seventh Edition (1814) of the First and Second Cantos. (See Bemerkungen zu Byron's Childe Harold, Engl. Stud., 1896, xxi. 176-186.)
I have again to record my grateful acknowledgments to Dr. Richard Garnett, C.B., Dr. A. S. Murray, F.R.S., Mr. R. E. Graves, Mr. E. D. Butler, F.R.G.S., and other officials of the British Museum, for constant help and encouragement in the preparation of the notes to Childe Harold.
I desire to express my thanks to Dr. H. R. Mill, Librarian of the Royal Geographical Society; Mr. J. C. Baker, F.R.S., Keeper of the Herbarium and Library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Mr. Horatio F. Brown (author of Venice, an Historical Sketch, etc.); Mr. P. A. Daniel, Mr. Richard Edgcumbe, and others, for valuable information on various points of doubt and difficulty.
On behalf of the Publisher, I beg to acknowledge the kindness of his Grace the Duke of Richmond, in permitting Cosway's miniature of Charlotte Duchess of Richmond to be reproduced for this volume.
I have also to thank Mr. Horatio F. Brown for the right to reproduce the interesting portrait of "Byron at Venice," which is now in his possession.
ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE.
April, 1899.
Introduction to the First and Second Cantos of Childe Harold.
The First Canto of Childe Harold was begun at Janina, in Albania, October 31, 1809, and the Second Canto was finished at Smyrna, March 28, 1810. The dates were duly recorded on the MS.; but in none of the letters which Byron wrote to his mother and his friends from the East does he mention or allude to the composition or existence of such a work. In one letter, however, to his mother (January 14, 1811, Letters, 1898, i. 308), he informs her that he has MSS. in his possession which may serve to prolong his memory, if his heirs and executors "think proper to publish them;" but for himself, he has "done with authorship." Three months later the achievement of Hints from Horace and The Curse of Minerva persuaded him to give "authorship" another trial; and, in a letter written on board the Volage frigate (June 28, Letters, 1898, i. 313), he announces to his literary Mentor, R. C. Dallas, who had superintended the publication of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, that he has "an imitation of the Ars Poetica of Horace ready for Cawthorne." Byron landed in England on July 2, and on the 15th Dallas "had the pleasure of shaking hands with him at Reddish's Hotel, St. James's Street" (Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron, 1824, p. 103). There was a crowd of visitors, says Dallas, and no time for conversation; but the Imitation was placed in his hands. He took it home, read it, and was disappointed. Disparagement was out of the question; but the next morning at breakfast Dallas ventured to express some surprise that he had written nothing else. An admission or confession followed that "he had occasionally written short poems, besides a great many stanzas in Spenser's measure, relative to the countries he had visited." "They are not," he added, "worth troubling you with, but you shall have them all with you if you like." "So," says Dallas, "came I by Childe Harold. He took it from a small trunk, with a number of verses."
Dallas was "delighted," and on the evening of the same day (July 16)—before, let us hope, and not after, he had consulted his "Ionian friend," Walter Rodwell Wright (see Recollections, p. 151, and Diary of H.C. Robinson, 1872, i. 17)—he despatched a letter of enthusiastic approval, which gratified Byron, but did not convince him of the extraordinary merit of his work, or of its certainty of success. It was, however, agreed that the MS. should be left with Dallas, that he should arrange for its publication and hold the copyright. Dallas would have entrusted the poem to Cawthorne, who had published English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, and with whom, as Byron's intermediary, he was in communication; but Byron objected on the ground that the firm did not "stand high enough in the trade," and Longmans, who had been offered but had declined the English Bards, were in no case to be approached. An application to Miller, of Albemarle Street, came to nothing, because Miller was Lord Elgin's bookseller and publisher (he had just brought out the Memorandum on Lord Elgin's Pursuits in Greece), and Childe Harold denounced and reviled Lord Elgin. But Murray, of Fleet Street, who had already expressed a wish to publish for Lord Byron, was willing to take the matter into consideration. On the first of August Byron lost his mother, on the third his friend Matthews was drowned in the Cam, and for some weeks he could devote neither time nor thought to the fortunes of his poem; but Dallas had bestirred himself, and on the eighteenth was able to report that he had "seen Murray again," and that Murray was anxious that Byron's name should appear on the title-page.
To this request Byron somewhat reluctantly acceded (August 21); and a few days later (August 25) he informs Dallas that he has sent him "exordiums, annotations, etc., for the forthcoming quarto," and has written to Murray, urging him on no account to show the MS. to Juvenal, that is, Gifford. But Gifford, as a matter of course, had been already consulted, had read the First Canto, and had advised Murray to publish the poem. Byron was, or pretended to be, furious; but the solid fact that Gifford had commended his work acted like a charm, and his fury subsided. On the fifth of September (Letters, 1898, ii. 24, note) he received from Murray the first proof, and by December 14 "the Pilgrimage was concluded," and all but the preface had been printed and seen through the press.
The original draft of the poem, which Byron took out of "the little trunk" and gave to Dallas, had undergone considerable alterations and modifications before this date. Both Dallas and Murray took exception to certain stanzas which, on personal, or patriotic, or religious considerations, were provocative and objectionable. They were apprehensive, not only for the sale of the book, but for the reputation of its author. Byron fought his ground inch by inch, but finally assented to a compromise. He was willing to cut out three stanzas on the Convention of Cintra, which had ceased to be a burning question, and four more stanzas at the end of the First Canto, which reflected on the Duke of Wellington, Lord Holland, and other persons of less note. A stanza on Beckford in the First Canto, and two stanzas in the second on Lord Elgin, Thomas Hope, and the "Dilettanti crew," were also omitted. Stanza ix. of the Second Canto, on the immortality of the soul, was recast, and "sure and certain" hopelessness exchanged for a pious, if hypothetical, aspiration. But with regard to the general tenor of his politics and metaphysics, Byron stood firm, and awaited the issue.
There were additions as well as omissions. The first stanza of the First Canto, stanzas xliii. and xc., which celebrate the battles of Albuera and Talavera; the stanzas to the memory of Charles Skinner Matthews, nos. xci., xcii.; and stanzas ix., xcv.,xcvi. of the Second Canto, which record Byron's grief for the death of an unknown lover or friend, apparently (letter to Dallas, October 31, 1811) the mysterious Thyrza, and others (vide post, note on the MSS. of the First and Second Cantos of Childe Harold), were composed at Newstead, in the autumn of 1811. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, quarto, was published on Tuesday, March 10, 1812—Moore (Life, p. 157) implies that the date of issue was Saturday, February 29; and Dallas (Recollections, p. 220) says that he obtained a copy on Tuesday, March 3 (but see advertisements in the Times and Morning Chronicle of Thursday, March 5, announcing future publication, and in the Courier and Morning Chronicle of Tuesday, March 10, announcing first appearance)—and in three days an edition of five hundred copies was sold. A second edition, octavo, with six additional poems (fourteen poems were included in the First Edition), was issued on April 17; a third on June 27; a fourth, with the "Addition to the Preface," on September 14; and a fifth on December 5, 1812,—the day on which Murray "acquainted his friends" (see advertisement in the Morning Chronicle) that he had removed from Fleet Street to No. 50, Albemarle Street. A sixth edition, identical with the fifth and fourth editions, was issued August 11, 1813; and, on February 1, 1814 (see letter to Murray, February 4, 1814), Childe Harold made a "seventh appearance." The seventh edition was a new departure altogether. Not only were nine poems added to the twenty already published, but a dedication to Lady Charlotte Harley ("Ianthe"), written in the autumn of 1812, was prefixed to the First Canto, and ten additional stanzas were inserted towards the end of the Second Canto. Childe Harold, as we have it, differs to that extent from the Childe Harold which, in a day and a night, made Byron "famous." The dedication to Ianthe was the outcome of a visit to Eywood, and his devotion to Ianthe's mother, Lady Oxford; but the new stanzas were probably written in 1810. In a letter to Dallas, September 7, 1811 (Letters, 1898, ii. 28), he writes, "I had projected an additional canto when I was in the Troad and Constantinople, and if I saw them again, it would go on." This seems to imply that a beginning had been made. In a poem, a hitherto unpublished fragment entitled Il Diavolo Inamorato (vide post, vol. iii.), which is dated August 31, 1812, five stanzas and a half, viz. stanzas lxxiii. lines 5-9, lxxix., lxxx., lxxxi., lxxxii., xxvii. of the Second Canto of Childe Harold are imbedded; and these form part of the ten additional stanzas which were first published in the seventh edition. There is, too, the fragment entitled The Monk of Athos, which was first published (Life of Lord Byron, by the Hon. Roden Noel) in 1890, which may have formed part of this projected Third Canto.
No further alterations were made in the text of the poem; but an eleventh edition of Childe Harold, Cantos I., II., was published in 1819.
The demerits of Childe Harold lie on the surface; but it is difficult for the modern reader, familiar with the sight, if not the texture, of "the purple patches," and unattracted, perhaps demagnetized, by a personality once fascinating and always "puissant," to appreciate the actual worth and magnitude of the poem. We are "o'er informed;" and as with Nature, so with Art, the eye must be couched, and the film of association removed, before we can see clearly. But there is one characteristic feature of Childe Harold which association and familiarity have been powerless to veil or confuse—originality of design. "By what accident," asks the Quarterly Reviewer (George Agar Ellis), "has it happened that no other English poet before Lord Byron has thought fit to employ his talents on a subject so well suited to their display?" The question can only be answered by the assertion that it was the accident of genius which inspired the poet with a "new song." Childe Harold's Pilgrimage had no progenitors, and, with the exception of some feeble and forgotten imitations, it has had no descendants. The materials of the poem; the Spenserian stanza, suggested, perhaps, by Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming, as well as by older models; the language, the metaphors, often appropriated and sometimes stolen from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from the classics; the sentiments and reflections coeval with reflection and sentiment, wear a familiar hue; but the poem itself, a pilgrimage to scenes and cities of renown, a song of travel, a rhythmical diorama, was Byron's own handiwork—not an inheritance, but a creation.
But what of the eponymous hero, the sated and melancholy "Childe," with his attendant page and yeoman, his backward glances on "heartless parasites," on "laughing dames," on goblets and other properties of "the monastic dome"? Is Childe Harold Byron masquerading in disguise, or is he intended to be a fictitious personage, who, half unconsciously, reveals the author's personality? Byron deals with the question in a letter to Dallas (October 31): "I by no means intend to identify myself with Harold, but to deny all connection with him. If in parts I may be thought to have drawn from myself, believe me it is but in parts, and I shall not own even to that." He adds, with evident sincerity, "I would not be such a fellow as I have made my hero for all the world." Again, in the preface, "Harold is the child of imagination." This pronouncement was not the whole truth; but it is truer than it seems. He was well aware that Byron had sate for the portrait of Childe Harold. He had begun by calling his hero Childe Burun, and the few particulars which he gives of Childe Burun's past were particulars, in the main exact particulars, of Byron's own history. He had no motive for concealment, for, so little did he know himself, he imagined that he was not writing for publication, that he had done with authorship. Even when the mood had passed, it was the imitation of the Ars Poetica, not Childe Harold, which he was eager to publish; and when Childe Harold had been offered to and accepted by a publisher, he desired and proposed that it should appear anonymously. He had not as yet come to the pass of displaying "the pageant of his bleeding heart" before the eyes of the multitude. But though he shrank from the obvious and inevitable conclusion that Childe Harold was Byron in disguise, and idly "disclaimed" all connection, it was true that he had intended to draw a fictitious character, a being whom he may have feared he might one day become, but whom he did not recognize as himself. He was not sated, he was not cheerless, he was not unamiable. He was all a-quiver with youth and enthusiasm and the joy of great living. He had left behind him friends whom he knew were not "the flatterers of the festal hour"—friends whom he returned to mourn and nobly celebrate. Byron was not Harold, but Harold was an ideal Byron, the creature and avenger of his pride, which haunted and pursued its presumptuous creator to the bitter end.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was reviewed, or rather advertised, by Dallas, in the Literary Panorama for March, 1812. To the reviewer's dismay, the article, which appeared before the poem was out, was shown to Byron, who was paying a short visit to his old friends at Harrow. Dallas quaked, but "as it proved no bad advertisement," he escaped censure. "The blunder passed unobserved, eclipsed by the dazzling brilliancy of the object which had caused it" (Recollections, p. 221).
Of the greater reviews, the Quarterly (No. xiii., March, 1812) was published on May 12, and the Edinburgh (No. 38, June, 1812) was published on August 5, 1812.
Notes on the MSS. of Childe Harold.
I.
The original MS. of the First and Second Cantos of Childe Harold, consisting of ninety-one folios bound up with a single bluish-grey cover, is in the possession of Mr. Murray.1 A transcript from this MS., in the handwriting of R. C. Dallas, with Byron's autograph corrections, is preserved in the British Museum (Egerton MSS., No. 2027). The first edition (4to) was printed from the transcript as emended by the author. The "Addition to the Preface" was first published in the Fourth Edition.
The following notes in Byron's handwriting are on the outside of the cover of the original MS.:—
The marginal remarks pencilled occasionally were made by two friends who saw the thing in MS. sometime previous to publication. 1812."
On the verso of the single bluish-grey cover, the lines, "Dear Object of Defeated Care," have been inscribed. They are entitled, "Written beneath the picture of J. U. D." They are dated, "Byron, Athens, 1811."
The following notes and memoranda have been bound up with the MS.:—
"Henry Drury, Harrow. Given me by Lord Byron. Being his original autograph MS. of the first canto of Childe Harold, commenced at Joannina in Albania, proceeded with at Athens, and completed at Smyrna."
"How strange that he did not seem to know that the volume contains Cantos I., II., and so written by Ld. B.!" [Note by J. Murray.]
"Sir,—I desire that you will settle any account for Childe Harold with Mr. R. C. Dallas, to whom I have presented the copyright.
"Received, April 1st, 1812, of Mr. John Murray, the sum of one hundred pounds 15/8, being my entire half-share of the profits of the 1st Edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 4to.
R. C. DALLAS.
£101:15:8.
Mem.: This receipt is for the above sum, in part of five hundred guineas agreed to be paid by Mr. Murray for the Copyright of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage."
The following poems are appended to the MS. of the First and Second Cantos of Childe Harold:—
1. "Written at Mrs. Spencer Smith's request, in her memorandum-book—
"'As o'er the cold sepulchral stone.'"
2. "Stanzas written in passing the Ambracian Gulph, November 14, 1809."
3. "Written at Athens, January 16th, 1810—
"'The spell is broke, the charm is flown.'"
4. "Stanzas composed October 11, 1809, during the night in a thunderstorm, when the guides had lost the road to Zitza, in the range of mountains formerly called Pindus, in Albania."
On a blank leaf bound up with the MS. at the end of the volume, Byron wrote—
"Dear Ds.,—This is all that was contained in the MS., but the outside cover has been torn off by the booby of a binder.
Yours ever,
B."
The volume is bound in smooth green morocco, bordered by a single gilt line. "MS." in gilt lettering is stamped on the side cover.
II.
Collation of First Edition, Quarto, 1812, with MS. of the First Canto.
The MS. numbers ninety-one stanzas, the First Edition ninety-three stanzas.
Omissions from the MS.
Stanza vii.
"Of all his train there was a henchman page,"—
Stanza viii.
"Him and one yeoman only did he take,"—
Stanza xxii.
"Unhappy Vathek! in an evil hour,"—
Stanza xxv.
"In golden characters right well designed,"—
Stanza xxvii.
"But when Convention sent his handy work,"—
Stanza xxviii.
"Thus unto Heaven appealed the people: Heaven,"—
Stanza lxxxviii.
"There may you read with spectacles on eyes,"—
Stanza lxxxix.
"There may you read—Oh, Phoebus, save Sir John,"—
Stanza xc.
"Yet here of Vulpes mention may be made,"—
Insertions in the First Edition.
Stanza i.
"Oh, thou! in Hellas deemed of heavenly birth,"—
Stanza viii.
"Yet oft-times in his maddest mirthful mood,"—
Stanza ix.
"And none did love him!—though to hall and bower,"—
Stanza xliii.
"Oh, Albuera! glorious field of grief!"—
Stanza lxxxv.
"Adieu, fair Cadiz! yea, a long adieu!"—
Stanza lxxxvi.
"Such be the sons of Spain, and strange her Fate,"—
Stanza lxxxviii.
"Flows there a tear of Pity for the dead?"—
Stanza lxxxix.
"Not yet, alas! the dreadful work is done,"—
Stanza xc.
"Not all the blood at Talavera shed,"—
Stanza xci.
"And thou, my friend!—since unavailing woe,"—
Stanza xcii.
"Oh, known the earliest, and esteemed the most,"—
The MS. of the Second Canto numbers eighty stanzas; the First Edition numbers eighty-eight stanzas.
Omissions from the MS.
Stanza viii.
"Frown not upon me, churlish Priest! that I,"—
Stanza xiv.
"Come, then, ye classic Thieves of each degree,"—
Stanza xv.
"Or will the gentle Dilettanti crew,"—
Stanza lxiii.
"Childe Harold with that Chief held colloquy,"—
Insertions in the First Edition.
Stanza viii.
"Yet if, as holiest men have deemed, there be,"—
Stanza ix.
"There, Thou! whose Love and Life together fled,"—
Stanza xv.
"Cold is the heart, fair Greece! that looks on Thee,"—
Stanza lii.
"Oh! where, Dodona! is thine agéd Grove?"—
Stanza lxiii.
"Mid many things most new to ear and eye,"—
Stanza lxxx.
"Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground,"—
Stanza lxxxiii.
"Let such approach this consecrated Land,"—
Stanza lxxxiv.
"For thee, who thus in too protracted song,"—
Stanza lxxxv.
"Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!"—
Stanza lxxxvii.
"Then must I plunge again into the crowd,"—
Stanza lxxxviii.
"What is the worst of woes that wait on Age?"—
Stanza lxxxvi.
"Oh! ever loving, lovely, and beloved!"—
Stanza lxxxvii.
"Then must I plunge again into the crowd,"—
Stanza lxxxviii.
"What is the worst of woes that wait on Age?"—
Additions to the Seventh Edition, 1814.
The Second Canto, in the first six editions, numbers eighty-eight stanzas; in the Seventh Edition the Second Canto numbers ninety-eight stanzas.
Additions.
The Dedication, To Ianthe.
Stanza xxvii.
"More blest the life of godly Eremite,"—
Stanza lxxvii.
"The city won for Allah from the Giaour,"—
Stanza lxxviii.
"Yet mark their mirth, ere Lenten days begin,"—
Stanza lxxix.
"And whose more rife with merriment than thine,"—
Stanza lxxx.
"Loud was the lightsome tumult on the shore,"—
Stanza lxxxi.
"Glanced many a light Caique along the foam,"—
Stanza lxxxii.
"But, midst the throng' in merry masquerade,"—
Stanza lxxxiii.
"This must he feel, the true-born son of Greece,"—
Stanza lxxxix.
"The Sun, the soil—but not the slave, the same,"—
Stanza xc.
"The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow,"—
Itinerary.
1809.
Canto I.
July 2.
Sail from Falmouth in Lisbon packet. (Stanza xii. Letter 125.)
July 6.
Arrive Lisbon. (Stanzas xvi., xvii. Letter 126.) Visit Cintra. (Stanzas xviii.-xxvi. Letter 128.) Visit Mafra. (Stanza xxix.)
July 17.
Leave Lisbon. (Stanza xxviii. Letter 127.) Ride through Portugal and Spain to Seville. (Stanzas xxviii.-xlii. Letter 127.) Visit Albuera. (Stanza xliii.)
July 21.
Arrive Seville. (Stanzas xlv., xlvi. Letters 127, 128.)
July 25.
Leave Seville. Ride to Cadiz, across the Sierra Morena. (Stanza li.) Cadiz. (Stanzas lxv.-lxxxiv. Letters 127, 128.)
Canto II.
Aug. 6.
Arrive Gibraltar. (Letters 127, 128.)
Aug. 17.
Sail from Gibraltar in Malta packet. (Stanzas xvii.-xxviii.) Malta. (Stanzas xxix.-xxxv. Letter 130.)
Sept. 19.
Sail from Malta in brig-of-war
Spider
. (Letter 131.)
Sept. 23.
Between Cephalonia and Zante.
Sept. 26.
Anchor off Patras.
Sept. 27.
In the channel between Ithaca and the mainland. (Stanzas xxxix.-xlii.)
Sept. 28.
Anchor off Prevesa (7 p.m.). (Stanza xlv.)
Oct. 1.
Leave Prevesa, arrive Salakhora (Salagoura).
Oct. 3.
Leave Salakhora, arrive Arta.
Oct. 4.
Leave Arta, arrive han St. Demetre (H. Dhimittrios).
Oct. 5.
Arrive Janina. (Stanza xlvii. Letter 131.)
Oct. 8.
Ride into the country. First day of Ramazan.
Oct. 11.
Leave Janina, arrive Zitza ("Lines written during a Thunderstorm"). (Stanzas xlviii.-li. Letter 131.)
Oct. 13.
Leave Zitza, arrive Mossiani (Móseri).
Oct. 14.
Leave Mossiani, arrive Delvinaki (Dhelvinaki). (Stanza liv.)
Oct. 15.
Leave Delvinaki, arrive Libokhovo.
Oct. 17.
Leave Libokhovo, arrive Cesarades (Kestourataes).
Oct. 18.
Leave Cesarades, arrive Ereeneed (Irindi).
Oct. 19.
Leave Ereeneed, arrive Tepeleni. (Stanzas lv.-lxi.)
Oct. 20.
Reception by Ali Pacha. (Stanzas lxii.-lxiv.)
Oct. 23.
Leave Tepeleni, arrive Locavo (Lacovon).
Oct. 24.
Leave Locavo, arrive Delvinaki.
Oct. 25.
Leave Delvinaki, arrive Zitza.
Oct. 26.
Leave Zitza, arrive Janina.
Oct. 31.
Byron begins the First Canto of
Childe Harold
.
Nov. 3.
Leave Janina, arrive han St. Demetre.
Nov. 4.
Leave han St. Demetre, arrive Arta.
Nov. 5.
Leave Arta, arrive Salakhora.
Nov. 7.
Leave Salakhora, arrive Prevesa.
Nov. 8.
Sail from Prevesa, anchor off mainland near Parga. (Stanzas lxvii., lxviii.)
Nov. 9.
Leave Parga, and, returning by land, arrive Volondorako (Valanidórakhon). (Stanza lxix.)
Nov. 10.
Leave Volondorako, arrive Castrosikia (Kastrosykia).
Nov. 11.
Leave Castrosikia, arrive Prevesa.
Nov. 13.
Sail from Prevesa, anchor off Vonitsa.
Nov. 14.
Sail from Vonitsa, arrive Lutraki (Loutráki). (Stanzas lxx., lxxii., Song "Tambourgi, Tambourgi;" stanza written in passing the Ambracian Gulph. Letter 131.)
Nov. 15.
Leave Lutraki, arrive Katúna.
Nov. 16.
Leave Katúna, arrive Makalá (? Machalas).
1809.
Nov. 18.
Leave Makalá, arrive Guriá.
Nov. 19.
Leave Guriá, arrive Ætolikon.
Nov. 20.
Leave Ætolikon, arrive Mesolonghi.
Nov. 23.
Sail from Mesolonghi, arrive Patras.
Dec. 4.
Leave Patras, sleep at
Han
on shore.
Dec. 5.
Leave
Han
, arrive Vostitsa (Oegion).
Dec. 14.
Sail from Vostitsa, arrive Larnáki (? Itea).
Dec. 15.
Leave Larnáki (? Itea), arrive Chrysó.
Dec. 16.
Visit Delphi, the Pythian Cave, and stream of Castaly. (Canto I. stanza i.)
Dec. 17.
Leave Chrysó, arrive Arakhova (Rhakova).
Dec. 18.
Leave Arakhova, arrive Livadia (Livadhia).
Dec. 21.
Leave Livadia, arrive Mazee (Mazi).
Dec. 22.
Leave Mazee, arrive Thebes.
Dec. 24.
Leave Thebes, arrive Skurta.
Dec. 25.
Leave Skurta, pass Phyle, arrive Athens. (Stanzas i.-xv., stanza lxxiv.)
Dec. 30.
Byron finishes the First Canto of
Childe Harold
.
1810.
Jan. 13.
Visit Eleusis.
Jan. 16.
Visit Mendeli (Pentelicus). (Stanza lxxxvii.)
Jan. 18.
Walk round the peninsula of Munychia.
Jan. 19.
Leave Athens, arrive Vari.
Jan. 20.
Leave Vari, arrive Keratéa.
Jan. 23.
Visit temple of Athene at Sunium. (Stanza lxxxvi.)
Jan. 24.
Leave Keratéa, arrive plain of Marathon.
Jan. 25.
Visit plain of Marathon. (Stanzas lxxxix., xc.)
Jan. 26.
Leave Marathon, arrive Athens.
Mar. 5.
Leave Athens, embark on board the
Pylades
(Letter 136.)
Mar. 7.
Arrive Smyrna. (Letters 132, 133.)
Mar. 13.
Leave Smyrna, sleep at
Han
, near the river Halesus.
Mar. 14.
Leave
Han
, arrive Aiasaluk (near Ephesus).
Mar. 15.
Visit site of temple of Artemis at Ephesus. (Letter 132.)
Mar. 16.
Leave Ephesus, return to Smyrna. (Letter 132.)
Mar. 28.
Byron finishes the Second Canto of
Childe Harold
.
April 11.
Sail from Smyrna in the
Salsette
frigate. (Letter 134.)
April 12.
Anchor off Tenedos.
April 13.
Visit ruins of Alexandria Troas.
April 14.
Anchor off Cape Janissary.
April 16.
Byron attempts to swim across the Hellespont, explores the Troad. (Letters 135, 136.)
April 30.
Visit the springs of Bunarbashi (Bunarbási).
May 1.
Weigh anchor from off Cape Janissary, anchor eight miles from Dardanelles.
May 2.
Anchor off Castle Chanak Kalessia (Kale i Sultaniye).
May 3.
Byron and Mr. Ekenhead swim across the Hellespont (lines "Written after swimming," etc.).
May 13.
Anchor off Venaglio Point, arrive Constantinople. (Stanzas lxxvii.-lxxxii. Letters 138-145.)
July 14.
Sail from Constantinople in
Salsette
frigate.
July 18.
Byron returns to Athens.
Note to "Itinerary."
[For dates and names of towns and villages, see Travels in Albania, and other Provinces of Turkey, in 1809 and 1810, by the Right Hon. Lord Broughton, G.C.B. [John Cam Hobhouse], two volumes, 1858. The orthography is based on that of Longmans' Gazetteer of the World, edited by G. G. Chisholm, 1895. The alternative forms are taken from Heinrich Kiepert's Carte de l'Épire et de la Thessalie, Berlin, 1897, and from Dr. Karl Peucker's Griechenland, Wien, 1897.]
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
"L'univers est une espèce de livre, dont on n'a lu que la première page quand on n'a vu que son pays. J'en ai feuilleté un assez grand nombre, que j'ai trouvé également mauvaises. Cet examen ne m'a point été infructueux. Je haïssais ma patrie. Toutes les impertinences des peuples divers, parmi lesquels j'ai vécu, m'ont reconcilié avec elle. Quand je n'aurais tiré d'autre bénéfice de mes voyages que celui-là, je n'en regretterais ni les frais ni les fatigues."—Le Cosmopolite, ou, le Citoyen du Monde, par Fougeret de Monbron. Londres, 1753.
Preface ato the First and Second Cantos.
The following poem was written, for the most part, amidst the scenes which it attemptsb to describe. It was begun in Albania; and the parts relative to Spain and Portugal were composed from the author's observations in those countries. Thus much it may be necessary to state for the correctness of the descriptions. The scenes attempted to be sketched are in Spain, Portugal, Epirus, Acarnania and Greece. There, for the present, the poem stops: its reception will determine whether the author may venture to conduct his readers to the capital of the East, through Ionia and Phrygia: these two cantos are merely experimental.
A fictitious character is introduced for the sake of giving some connection to the piece; which, however, makes no pretension to regularity. It has been suggested to me by friends, on whose opinions I set a high value,c—that in this fictitious character, "Childe Harold," I may incur the suspicion of having intended some real personage: this I beg leave, once for all, to disclaim—Harold is the child of imagination, for the purpose I have stated.
In some very trivial particulars, and those merely local, there might be grounds for such a notion;d but in the main points, I should hope, none whatever.e
It is almost superfluous to mention that the appellation "Childe,"2 as "Childe Waters," "Childe Childers," etc., is used as more consonant with the old structure of versification which I have adopted. The "Good Night" in the beginning of the first Canto, was suggested by Lord Maxwell's "Good Night"3 in the Border Minstrelsy, edited by Mr. Scott.
With the different poems4 which have been published on Spanish subjects, there may be found some slight coincidencef in the first part, which treats of the Peninsula, but it can only be casual; as, with the exception of a few concluding stanzas, the whole of the poem was written in the Levant.
The stanza of Spenser, according to one of our most successful poets, admits of every variety. Dr. Beattie makes the following observation:—
"Not long ago I began a poem in the style and stanza of Spenser, in which I propose to give full scope to my inclination, and be either droll or pathetic, descriptive or sentimental, tender or satirical, as the humour strikes me; for, if I mistake not, the measure which I have adopted admits equally of all these kinds of composition."5 Strengthened in my opinion by such authority, and by the example of some in the highest order of Italian poets, I shall make no apology for attempts at similar variations in the following composition;g satisfied that, if they are unsuccessful, their failure must be in the execution, rather than in the design sanctioned by the practice of Ariosto, Thomson, and Beattie.
London, February, 1812.
ADDITION TO THE PREFACE.
I have now waited till almost all our periodical journals have distributed their usual portion of criticism. To the justice of the generality of their criticisms I have nothing to object; it would ill become me to quarrel with their very slight degree of censure, when, perhaps, if they had been less kind they had been more candid. Returning, therefore, to all and each my best thanks for their liberality, on one point alone I shall venture an observation. Amongst the many objections justly urged to the very indifferent character of the "vagrant Childe" (whom, notwithstanding many hints to the contrary, I still maintain to be a fictitious personage), it has been stated, that, besides the anachronism, he is very unknightly, as the times of the Knights were times of Love, Honour, and so forth.6 Now it so happens that the good old times, when "l'amour du bon vieux tems, l'amour antique," flourished, were the most profligate of all possible centuries. Those who have any doubts on this subject may consult Sainte-Palaye, passim, and more particularly vol. ii. p. 69.7 The vows of chivalry were no better kept than any other vows whatsoever; and the songs of the Troubadours were not more decent, and certainly were much less refined, than those of Ovid. The "Cours d'Amour, parlemens d'amour, ou de courtoisie et de gentilesse" had much more of love than of courtesy or gentleness. See Rolland8 on the same subject with Sainte-Palaye.
Whatever other objection may be urged to that most unamiable personage Childe Harold, he was so far perfectly knightly in his attributes—"No waiter, but a knight templar."9 By the by, I fear that Sir Tristrem and Sir Lancelot were no better than they should be, although very poetical personages and true knights, "sans peur," though not "sans réproche." If the story of the institution of the "Garter" be not a fable, the knights of that order have for several centuries borne the badge of a Countess of Salisbury, of indifferent memory. So much for chivalry. Burke need not have regretted that its days are over, though Marie-Antoinette was quite as chaste as most of those in whose honour lances were shivered, and knights unhorsed.10
Before the days of Bayard, and down to those of Sir Joseph Banks11 (the most chaste and celebrated of ancient and modern times) few exceptions will be found to this statement; and I fear a little investigation will teach us not to regret these monstrous mummeries of the middle ages.
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 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. Had I proceeded with the Poem, this character would have deepened as he drew to the close; for the outline which I once meant to fill up for him was, with some exceptions, the sketch of a modern Timon,12 perhaps a poetical Zeluco.13
