Subject: george gordon byron's revolutionary romantic impressions in the novel "don juan" table of contents plan: Introduction chapter I. Bayron's political free thought

Picture 2. The Statue of Lord Byron at Denkmal Messolongi

3. 
   “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage”
   

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is an extensively written romance consisting of four cantos and around 4,500 verses⁷. Cantos I and II were published in 1812, Canto III in 1816, and Canto IV in 1818. Byron gained his first poetic fame with the publication of the first two cantos.
“Childe” is a title from medieval times, designating a young noble who is not yet knighted. Disillusioned with his aimless life devoted to pursuing pleasure, Childe Harold seeks distraction by going on a solitary pilgrimage to foreign lands. The first two cantos describe his travels through Portugal, Spain, the Ionian Islands, and Albania, ending with a lament on the occupation of Greece by the Ottoman Turks. In the third canto the pilgrim travels to Belgium, the Rhine Valley, the Alps, and the Jura. On each segment of the journey, Byron evokes associated historical events and people, such as the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Napoleon before the Battle of Waterloo. In the fourth canto the imaginary pilgrim is replaced by the poet himself, speaking in the first person about Venice, Ferrara, Florence, and Rome and the artists and heroes associated with those cities.
To Byron’s literary public, the work offered a poetic travelogue of picturesque lands and gave vent to the prevailing moods of melancholy and disillusionment. The world-weary Childe Harold came to personify the so-called Byronic hero, thus becoming one of the best-known types of the age. The work also voiced with a frankness unprecedented in the literature of that time the disparity between romantic ideals and the realities of the world.
It hardly mattered to his admiring readers that Harold made an unconvincing young pilgrim-knight in an under-plotted script. They were in on the autobiographical secret, and Harold attained immediate notoriety as the "Byronic hero". The presentation of an attractive, fashionably disillusioned personality in a series of fascinating foreign settings is successful, and such a ploy doesn't need much of a plot-line.
The first part of the "Pilgrimage" is colourful, panoramic, politically impassioned. As an appealing, and revealing, innovation, Byron adds informative and sometimes witty footnotes about the places and people he encounters, ensuring that the reader participates in the tour: it's almost the equivalent of a TV documentary at times, with the poem giving us the pictures and the prose notes the explanations. But as verse-writing, to be frank, a lot of it is fairly unexceptional.
The full potential of the writer, uniting all the disparate parts of his genius – his ruthlessly comical social insight as well as his romantic agonies – would perhaps only be fully consolidated in his great masterpiece Don Juan.
“I awoke one morning and found myself famous”.⁸
But the Childe Harold "concept" is still to undergo important developments, when, around eight years after the first instalment, while living in Italy, Byron writes the two further Cantos that complete the project.
Canto II presents Childe Harold’s travels to Greece and Albania. Again, Harold is the point-of-view character but seldom becomes involved in the actual events of the story except to reflect on them. One theme of Canto II is Byron’s frustration at the despoiling of ancient Greek treasures. An admirer of the Classical world, Byron was saddened by the dilapidated condition of the Greek ruins he visited and enraged at the vandalism he perceived that outsiders—particularly the British Lord Elgin—were committing in taking the architecture and statuary out of Greece for display in their home countries. To Byron, this looting of the ancient world was another form of oppression, as the forces of the present ravaged the civilizations of the past.
Byron seems to forget and then recall his protagonist, Harold, and bring him back into the narrative as point-of-view character. In the first several stanzas, Byron bewails the state of Athens as he saw it on his travels. The ideal city of his classical education was strewn with the damaged and worn out shells of formerly glorious buildings. For example, the Parthenon had been damaged in 1687 during the Venetian siege and was used as an ammunition storage area by the Turks. He wants to know where are the “men of might” (line 11) who might restore Athens and Greece to their former glory, but they are “sought in vain” (line 17) amid the ruins of this once great civilization.
Byron turns briefly from mourning the loss of the classical world to mourning a more personal loss, that of his recently deceased friend John Eldeston (stanza 9). He ties this personal tragedy to the more universal tragedy of Greece’s lost glory in order to add poignancy to the desecration of Greek history, even as he elevates the loss of his former schoolmate to the level of grand tragedy by coupling it with the ruins of Greek temples.
Stanzas 11-15 accuse Elgin of cultural robbery in no uncertain terms. To Byron, caught up in the cause of Greek political independence and seeking some foundation in the classical world he loved so dearly, Elgin became the face of despoliation and a regular target of Byron’s poetic, prose, and verbal attacks. Elgin represented British indifference or apathy to the plight of the Greeks, as well as a form of cultural parasitism Byron despised. He had made his journey to experience cultures other than England’s, not to see them stolen from their birthplace by British pirates.
Harold’s visit to Greece again declares the wonders and majesty of Greece’s past while decrying her current desolation. Byron contrasts the present occupation of Greece by the Turks (and English treasure-hunters) with the past glories of Greek civilization in order to draw an even sharper contrast between the situation in his day and the situation as Byron thought it should be.
Byron also was frustrated with the modern Greeks, particularly in contrast to their classical forbears. In stanza 84 he seeks to rouse them, but later he is forced to mourn the loss of truly heroic men who would defend Greece against both political and cultural incursion. The Greeks Byron met on his journey were too docile, too used to being under the rule of outsiders, to ever truly revolt against Turkish authority or English vandalism.
The dozen stanzas describing Harold’s sailing through the Mediterranean vaguely parallel Odysseus’ journey sailing through the area in epic myth. Stanzas 29 and 30 specifically connect the Calypso of The Odyssey by Homer to the woman “Florence,” actually Constance Spencer Smith, wife of the British minister at Stuttgart and with whom Byron had a torrid affair in 1810. Byron was infatuated by Constance’s beauty and inflamed to passion by her status as seemingly unattainable (she was married, after all) and politically volatile (she had been arrested by Napoleon for unknown reasons and escaped with the help of another would-be suitor). When Byron learned of her “unfaithfulness” with yet another man, he broke off the relationship, paradoxically injured by the infidelity of his married lover. In this stanza, Byron cites his own situation, “check’d by every tie” (line 7), as his reason for not succumbing to her charms and remaining, just as Odysseus left the enthralling Calypso to continue his journey back home to his waiting wife and son. Harold’s stand against Florence’s charms in stanza 33 point to a man learning the dangers of love and seeking not to be captured by another’s beauty. Stanzas 34 and 35 continue this theme by declaring that the sorrows of love are not worth the debasement a man must undergo to find it.
Again, much of the detail in the travelogue is autobiographical, such as when, in stanzas 36 through 72, Byron describes Harold’s travels through Albania, particularly Harold’s visit to the “court” of the warlord bandit Ali Pacha. In a series of stanzas he describes the festivities of Ali Pacha’s mixed band of warriors, creating a parallel scene to the Spanish revelries of canto I. These men, too, are bloody in their demeanor and celebrate their lives violently, yet with great enthusiasm. Byron even includes a parallel description of Turkish women,
who—in contrast to the brave Spanish females—are docile and content in their roles as mothers and home makers (stanza 61).
Of particular biographical interest are Byron’s closing stanzas to this canto. Prior to adding these stanzas to Childe Harold, Byron had learned of the deaths of his mother, his dog, and three of his friends all in the space of two months. The most mourned of these losses is John Edleston, with whom Byron had shared an intimate relationship at school and for whom his affections had continued into manhood. Stanza 95 eulogizes Edleston in ambiguous terms (Byron had after college distanced himself from his beloved choirboy); he describes Edleston as “gone” (line 1) and yet “bound” to him (line 2), and the “youth” and “affection which do the binding are not clearly defined as either Byron’s or Edleston’s characteristics. The grief and pain are unambiguous, however, as Byron says, “What is my being? thou hast ceased to be!” (line 5).
The third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage continues the travelogue framework of the first two cantos, self-aware that Byron is beginning something of a sequel to the original publication of just the first two cantos. Byron opens and closes Canto III by addressing his absent daughter (she was taken by his wife when she left him). This apostrophe indicates Byron’s sense of loss and isolation in being bereft of his beloved daughter, and by extension the family of which she was a part and the union between himself and the former Lady Byron. Annabella Byron had already left her husband, taking their young daughter with them, and asked for a separation on the grounds that Byron was either insane or cruel. After much cajoling on the part of the poet, he finally agreed to it. By this time the English media was spreading rumors of infidelity, violence, and incest on Byron’s part, going so far as to call for his exile. In 1816 Byron left England, never to return. In so leaving, he also abandoned any reasonable hope of seeing his daughter again. One can see from this biography why this canto features a man traveling and turning his back on the conflicts in the world.
Besides crying out in self-pity, Byron also subtly calls upon his daughter Ada as his muse for Canto III. She will be his inspiration as he describes the battlefields and men of greatness who are the subject of this canto. At the same time, Byron does not hide Ada’s identity under a pseudonym as he did in the first two cantos; he is now ready to erase the line separating himself and the fictional “Childe Harold” completely by making this canto entirely autobiographical and expressive of his own political and philosophical beliefs in no uncertain terms. Harold is hardly mentioned.
Byron takes up several themes in Canto III. The first is the sense of isolation, brought to the fore by his apostrophe to his daughter Ada. Isolation pervades the poem by accentuating the other themes: the misunderstanding of genius, freedom from despotism, and the value of Nature.
Byron remarks on two great men of genius in Canto III, Napoleon and Rousseau. He suggests that both men continue to be misunderstood by their inferiors. Although Byron does not condone Napoleon’s attempt at tyranny, he nonetheless maintains an objective admiration for the man’s accomplishments and vision. France had “rights,” and Byron extols the bravery of one young man who fought for France’s rights against the coalition of nations that were trying to suppress France’s power in the late 18th century. As for Rousseau, while he expresses concern that some of Rousseau’s ideas were deluded, Byron acknowledges that the man was full of passion and drive beyond the scope of most men. Byron describes these giants in their different spheres as “madmen who have made men mad / By their contagion,” indicating the power of their presence and also their ability to influence others as a part of their greatness.
Byron supplements his admiration of Napoleon and Rousseau with his recurring theme of liberty. On visiting the battlefields of Waterloo and Morat, Byron sadly reflects that the defeat of a tyrant is not the same thing as a defeat of all tyranny. Byron contrasts Waterloo, a battle fought for aggression, with Morat, a battle fought by the Swiss to defend their liberty against the Burgundians in the 16th century. Waterloo will be remembered as merely bloody—to Byron, no war of aggression could be justified—whereas Morat was, to Byron, a justifiable battle in that it was undertaken in the defense of liberty. Byron couples Morat with the Greek battle of Marathon as “true Glory’s stainless victories.”
When Byron’s journey takes him to Lake Leman and the Alps, his poetry turns to the wonders of Nature and puts Rousseau in his natural Genevan context. Unlike Wordsworth, who saw Nature as something separate from and superior to man, wherein a person could experience purity and perfection and thus improve himself, Byron saw Nature as a magnification of man’s—particularly his own—greatness and follies. To Byron, Nature was not an escape from his problems, but a vast landscape of reminders. Vast glaciers, thundering avalanches, and wild storms only accentuated Byron’s own internal struggles and reminded him how dangerous and marvelous a piece of work is man. The Alps express the Romantic theme of the sublime, those things that awe man by being too large to fully comprehend, somewhat as a genius might seem to the vulgar.
Canto III, written several years after the first two cantos, is clearly the product of a more fully developed poetic sensibility, and the early stanzas make it clear that Byron knows he is writing something of a sequel. Byron has returned to his focus on realism after several forays into shorter, lighter verse, and has come back to it as a more seasoned architect of words. In many ways, Canto III is a different poem entirely from that of Cantos I and II; it is mainly the form of the poetic travelogue and the overarching themes of liberty, isolation, and individualism that connect these disparate works together.
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The fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage continues the poet’s journey into Italy: Venice, Arqua, Ferrara, Florence, and finally Rome. Again the narrator laments the fall of older civilizations—this time the subject is Venice. The city is depicted as a cultural ghost town, peopled by the “mighty shadows” of literary giants such as William Shakespeare (who placed scenes in Venice). Literature is noted as being more enduring than even the cultures which produce it; similarly, sculpture endures after civilizations fall.
Canto IV continues Byron’s autobiographical journey, this time throughout Italy. By now, Byron has completely given up the conceit that Childe Harold is anyone but the author himself; in his introductory notes (dedicated to this longtime friend John Hobhouse), Byron states that he “had become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive.” While he once vociferously defended Childe Harold as a creation of the imagination, Byron now concedes that his best work is truly autobiographical in nature and sees no reason to keep up the pretense of any narrator but himself.
Canto IV follows the earlier Cantos in its description of fallen civilizations, but here instead of merely bemoaning the loss of the past, Byron seeks to draw a lesson from their destruction. Even the mightiest of empires eventually falls—a fact brought home to Byron particularly during his time spent in Rome—so military and political greatness are not necessarily the measure of permanence or virtue. The work of human hands and that of human political institutions are ephemeral, and therefore even the suffering one might undergo at the hands of a tyrant is impermanent as well.
Byron finds permanence and stability elsewhere, particularly in Nature and in Art. Stanzas 47 through 61 of this canto extol the virtues and lasting qualities of art, be it sculpture, painting, or literature. By way of contrast, Byron mentions the fates of those who have added so much to human art and knowledge—Dante, Boccaccio, Galileo, and others—whose reputations or remains have been sullied by jealous men even as their contributions carry on long beyond their mortal lives. Great architectural achievements, such as the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and St. Peters’ Basilica, still hold wonder for the world-weary Byron.
Stanzas 61 and 62 redirect the reader away from Art, which imitates, to its subject, Nature, with which the poem concludes. Manmade beauty is a great and everlasting thing, but it is Nature which holds the highest place in Byron’s admiring heart. His visits to Nature on his travels have been interrupted by visits to pay homage to the long roll of heroes, poets, and dictators’ energetic passions who represent the strong minds and personalities of mankind.
The litany of tyrants in the section on Rome points to the persistence of tyranny even as it accentuates the brevity of any single tyrant’s reign. Byron concludes his study of despotism with a comparison: Napoleon was “a fool / of false dominion,” and the French Revolution failed through “vile Ambition,” whereas the contemporary American Revolution sprang from “undefiled” beginnings and thus will continue to thrive. This is just one of many lessons that Byron seems to hope his readers absorb by contemplating the pilgrimage. Childe Harold has been transcended and subsumed into Byron, and his travels have brought him into contact with the sublime in things both human and natural, but when faced with overwhelming concepts or just the overwhelming power of life itself, Byron’s answer has been to keep his mind active in appreciation of all that is great.
The passion for political liberation goes on flaring, conscious, now, of tragic paradox in a context of shattered empire. Revolutionary fervour is tempered by a sense of the cyclic nature of history: "The Roman saw these tombs in his own age,/ These sepulchres of cities, which excite/ Sad wonder, and his yet surviving page/ The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage."
The poet's emotional cycles harmonise more happily: hope and despair, emotion and objectivity, balance each other out. Byron is a great Romantic poet, but this greatness owes much to the Augustan quality of his intellect.
With hindsight, we can see in the "Pilgrimage" a poem that has grown up with its hero: as he becomes more emotionally and intellectually complex, so does the poem, while still maintaining a lively momentum as travelogue. It is in the company of a somberly reflective poet examining his life, rather than a boyishly posturing Byronic hero, that we enter Rome's ruined corridors of power, to thoughts of the ultimate human matter – dust.