in his own creations the state of happiness before
the Fall, but this is not supplied by the world:
Where are the charms and virtues which
we dare
Conceive in boyhood and pursue as
men,
The unreach’d Paradise of our despair?
(122)
We get the impression, in fact, that, ‘from
the opening of the canto, we are led gradually
inward, from the physical [... ] to the mental
[...] andfinally into a meditation upon the
activity of mind itself, and from history to art
to the creative process at its most intense and
active’. The celebration of creativity at the
expense of nature is highlighted in the poetic
discussion of the statue of Venus: ‘We stand,
and in that form and face behold / What Mind
can make, when Nature’s self would fail’ (49).
Hence, for Jane Stabler, the experience of the
sublime inChilde Harold IV‘comes when the
self apprehends the entirety of a work of art’.
While the speaker ofChilde Harold IIIidealises
nature, in Canto IV he is alienated from it and
turns instead to the inventive achievements of
human beings.
Yet his voice wavers in stanza 163 when
discussing ‘this poetic marble’ and provokes
Vincent Newey’s response: ‘The greatness of
the poem ironically questions the greatness of
transcendent Art at the very point where Art’s
‘‘eternal glory’’ is most patently foregrounded.’
It is not long before nature is once again being
idealised. Suddenly it offers the panacea the
speaker needs:
There is a pleasure in the pathless
woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and Music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature
more,
From these our interviews, in which I
steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet can not all
conceal. (178)
Communion with the objective is now pre-
ferred to communion with creative subjectivity:
‘there are things whose strong reality / Outshines
our fairy land’ (6). ‘What mind can make’ does
not, then, outshine objective ‘reality’, but the
objective is not allowed to outshine the subjective
for very long either. Both jostle for attention—
and both receive it: Byron’s is, as Newey puts it, a
‘compositeperception—notan‘‘either...or’’but
an ‘‘and... and’’’, and the canto’s ‘constant term’
is ‘a swirling concatenation of creative and inter-
pretative acts, a sort of heterogeneous chain of
events’. Alan Rawes pushes Newey’s insight in a
particular direction and claims that ‘an important
feature of the canto’ is ‘that it is always unstable’.
But is instability what we are seeing here, or a
determinedly sustained ambivalence?
Ambivalence seems to better fit the canto’s
contradictory attitude towards reason. Byron’s
relationship with reason inChilde Harold IVis a
complicated one. The canto’s image of Horace
fastens together Romantic notions of the subjective
creativity of a poet and classical ideas of ration-
ality. The speaker’s farewell to Horace seems to
give preference to the Romantic—‘it is a curse / To
understand, not feel thy lyric flow’ (77)—but, then,
we have a critic who declares that ‘Byron’s speaker
identifies himself with the cause of Reason, with
the belief of the ‘‘Enlightened’’ men of the eight-
eenth century, that to know the truth is a good in
itself from which other goods may follow’. The
same reader goes on to attribute to Byron the
conviction that ‘Reason is the divine faculty, it is
what is God-like in man’. What invokes these
contradictory readings of the poem, however, is
not, I suggest, its instability, but its consistent
double-mindedness. ‘It is not that Byron cannot
make up his mind, but that he sees everything in
essentially [... ] two ways’, says Newey—one of
the very few critics attuned to the canto’s radical
doubleness. Thus, for example, in Venice, the
speaker’s sympathy for the real place is stimulated
both by actualities (117) and the fictions of Otway,
Radcliffe, Schiller and Shakespeare (18), and he
lives in the contradictions this generates. The men-
tal images the speaker creates—through reason,
imagination and/or feeling—are allowed to coexist
with, even while contradicting, the immediate here
and now, and vice versa.
Byron can thus bring historical events closer
and closer to his own subjectivity, and, in Byron’s
case, Romantic sensibility ‘identifies individual
experience with historical process’. The proc-
ess of identification seems to be complete by
stanza 25:
But my soul wanders; I demand it back
To meditate amongst decay, and stand
A ruin amidst ruins.Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage