Читать книгу Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (With Byron's Biography) - Lord Byron - Страница 251

FOOTNOTES:

113 [Stanzas i.-xv. form a kind of dramatic prologue to the Second Canto of the Pilgrimage. The general meaning is clear enough, but the unities are disregarded. The scene shifts more than once, and there is a moral within a moral. The poet begins by invoking Athena (Byron wrote Athenæ) to look down on the ruins of "her holy and beautiful house," and bewails her unreturning heroes of the sword and pen. He then summons an Oriental, a "Son of the Morning," Moslem or "light Greek," possibly a Canis venaticus, the discoverer or vendor of a sepulchral urn, and, with an adjuration to spare the sacred relic, points to the Acropolis, the cemetery of dead divinities, and then once more to the urn at his feet. "'Vanity of vanities—all is vanity!' Gods and men may come and go, but Death 'goes on for ever.'" The scene changes, and he feigns to be present at the rifling of a barrow, the "tomb of the Athenian heroes" on the plain of Marathon, or one of the lonely tumuli on Sigeum and Rhoeteum, "the great and goodly tombs" of Achilles and Patroclus ("they twain in one golden urn"); of Antilochus, and of Telamonian Ajax. Marathon he had already visited, and marked "the perpendicular cut" which at Fauvel's instigation had been recently driven into the large barrow; and he had, perhaps, read of the real or pretended excavation by Signor Ghormezano (1787) of a tumulus at the Sigean promontory. The "mind's eye," which had conjured up "the shattered heaps," images a skull of one who "kept the world in awe," and, after moralizing in Hamlet's vein on the humorous catastrophe of decay, the poet concludes with the Preacher "that there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave." After this profession of unfaith, before he returns to Harold and his pilgrimage, he takes up his parable and curses Elgin and all his works. The passage as a whole suggests the essential difference between painting and poetry. As a composition, it recalls the frontispiece of a seventeenth-century classic. The pictured scene, with its superfluity of accessories, is grotesque enough; but the poetic scenery, inconsequent and yet vivid as a dream, awakens, and fulfills the imagination. (Travels in Albania, by Lord Broughton, 1858, i. 380; ii. 128, 129, 138; The Odyssey, xxiv. 74, sq. See, too, Byron's letters to his mother, April 17, and to H. Drury, May 3, 1810: Letters, 1898, i. 262.)]

do Ancient of days! august Athenæ! where.—[MS. D.]

dp Gone—mingled with the waste——.—[MS. erased.]

114 ["Stole," apart from its restricted use as an ecclesiastical vestment, is used by Spenser and other poets as an equivalent for any long and loosely flowing robe, but is, perhaps inaccurately, applied to the short cloak (tribon), the "habit" of Socrates when he lived, and, after his death, the distinctive dress of the cynics.]

dq ——gray flits the Ghost of Power.—[MS. D. erased.]

dr ——whose altars cease to burn.—[D.]

ds ——whose Faith is built on reeds.—[MS. D. erased.]

115 [Compare Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, act iii, sc. 1, lines 5-7—

"Reason thus with life:

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing

That none but fools would keep."]

dt Still wilt thou harp——.—[MS. D. erased.]

du Though 'twas a God, as graver records tell.—[MS. erased.]

116 [The demigods Erechtheus and Theseus "appeared" at Marathon, and fought side by side with Miltiades (Grote's History of Greece, iv. 284).]

117 [Compare Shakespeare, Hamlet, act v. sc. 1, passim.]

118 [Socrates affirmed that true self-knowledge was to know that we know nothing, and in his own case he denied any other knowledge; but "this confession of ignorance was certainly not meant to be a sceptical denial of all knowledge." "The idea of knowledge was to him a boundless field, in the face of which he could not but be ignorant" (Socrates and the Socratic Schools, by Dr. E. Zeller, London, 1868, p. 102).]

119 [Stanzas viii. and ix. are not in the MS.

The expunged lines (see var. i.) carried the Lucretian tenets of the preceding stanza to their logical conclusion. The end is silence, not a reunion with superior souls. But Dallas objected; and it may well be that, in the presence of death, Byron could not "guard his unbelief," or refrain from a renewed questioning of the "Grand Perhaps." Stanza for stanza, the new version is an improvement on the original. (See Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron, 1824, p. 169. See, too, letters to Hodgson, September 3 and September 13, 1811: Letters, 1898, ii. 18, 34.)]

dv Frown not upon me, churlish Priest! that I Look not for Life, where life may never be: I am no sneerer at thy phantasy; Thou pitiest me, alas! I envy thee, Thou bold Discoverer in an unknown sea Of happy Isles and happier Tenants there; I ask thee not to prove a Sadducee;*] Still dream of Paradise, thou know'st not where,**] Which if it be thy sins never let thee share.[***] —[MS. D. erased.]

*]The Sadducees did not believe in the Resurrection.—[MS. D.]

**]

But look upon a scene that once was fair.—[Erased.] Zion's holy hill which thou wouldst fancy fair.—[Erased.]

***]

As those, which thou delight'st to rear in upper air.—[Erased.] Yet lovs't too well to bid thine erring brother share.—[D. erased.]

120 [Byron forwarded this stanza in a letter to Dallas, dated October 14, 1811, and was careful to add, "I think it proper to state to you, that this stanza alludes to an event which has taken place since my arrival here, and not to the death of any male friend" (Letters. 1898, ii. 57). The reference is not to Edleston, as Dallas might have guessed, and as Wright (see Poetical Works, 1891, p. 17) believed. Again, in a letter to Dallas, dated October 31, 1811 (ibid., ii. 65), he sends "a few stanzas," presumably the lines "To Thyrza," which are dated October 31, 1811, and says that "they refer to the death of one to whose name you are a stranger, and, consequently, cannot be interested (sic) ... They relate to the same person whom I have mentioned in Canto 2nd, and at the conclusion of the poem." It follows from this second statement that we have Byron's authority for connecting stanza ix. with stanzas xcv., xcvi., and, inferentially, his authority for connecting stanzas ix., xcv., xcvi. with the group of "Thyrza" poems. And there our knowledge ends. We must leave the mystery where Byron willed that it should be left. "All that we know is, nothing can be known."]

dw Whate'er beside} Howe'er may be Futurity's behest.[*] Or seeing thee no more to sink in sullen rest.—[MS. D.]

*][See letter to Dallas, October 14, 1811.]

121 [For note on the "Elgin Marbles," see Introduction to the Curse of Minerva: Poetical Works, 1898, i. 453-456.]

dx

The last, the worst dull Robber, who was he? Blush Scotland such a slave thy son could be— England! I joy no child he was of thine: Thy freeborn men revere what once was free, Nor tear the Sculpture from its saddening shrine, Nor bear the spoil away athwart the weeping Brine.—[MS. D. erased.]

dy

This be the wittol Picts ignoble boast.—[MS. D.] To rive what Goth and Turk, and Time hath spared: Cold and accursed as his native coast.—[MS. D. erased]

122 ["On the plaster wall of the Chapel of Pandrosos adjoining the Erechtheum, these words have been very deeply cut—

'Quod non fecerunt Goti,

Hoc fecerunt Scoti'"

(Travels in Albania, 1858, i. 299). M. Darmesteter quotes the original: "mot sur les Barberini" ("Quod non fecere Barbari, Fecere Barberini"). It may be added that Scotchmen are named among the volunteers who joined the Hanoverian mercenaries in the Venetian invasion of Greece in 1686. (See The Curse of Minerva: Poetical Works, 1898, i. 463, note 1; Finlay's Hist. of Greece, v. 189.)]

dz What! shall it e'er be said by British tongue, Albion was happy while Athenæ mourned? Though in thy name the slave her bosom wrung, Albion! I would not see thee thus adorned With gains thy generous spirit should have scorned, From Man distinguished by some monstrous sign, Like Attila the Hun was surely horned,A Who wrought the ravage amid works divine: Oh that Minerva's voice lent its keen aid to mine.—[MS. D. erased.]

What! shall it e'er be said by British tongue, Albion was happy in Athenæ's tears? Though in thy name the slave her bosom wrung, Let it not vibrate in pale Europe's ears,B The Saviour Queen, the free Britannia, wears The last poor blunder of a bleeding land: That she, whose generous aid her name endears, Tore down those remnants with a Harpy's hand, Which Envious Eld forbore and Tyrants left to stand.—[MS. D.]C

A Attila was horned, if we may trust contemporary legends, and the etchings of his visage in Lavater.—[M.S.]

B Lines 5-9 in the Dallas transcript are in Byron's handwriting.

C Which centuries forgot——.—[D. erased.]

ea After stanza xiii. the MS. inserts the two following stanzas:—

Come then, ye classic Thieves of each degree, Dark HamiltonA and sullen Aberdeen, Come pilfer all the Pilgrim loves to see, All that yet consecrates the fading scene: Ah! better were it ye had never been, Nor ye, nor Elgin, nor that lesser wight. The victim sad of vase-collecting spleen. House-furnisher withal, one ThomasB hight, Than ye should bear one stone from wronged Athenæ's site.

Or will the gentle Dilettanti crew Now delegate the task to digging Gell,C That mighty limner of a bird's eye view, How like to Nature let his volumes tell: Who can with him the folio's limit swell With all the Author saw, or said he saw? Who can topographize or delve so well? No boaster he, nor impudent and raw, His pencil, pen, and spade, alike without a flaw.—[D. erased.]

A [William Richard Hamilton (1777-1859) was the son of Anthony Hamilton, Archdeacon of Colchester, etc., and grandson of Richard Terrick, Bishop of London. In 1799, when Lord Elgin was appointed Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Hamilton accompanied him as private secretary. After the battle of Ramassieh (Alexandria, March 20, 1801), and the subsequent evacuation of Egypt by the French (August 30, 1801), Hamilton, who had been sent on a diplomatic mission, was successful in recapturing the Rosetta Stone, which, in violation of a specified agreement, had been placed on board a French man-of-war. He was afterwards employed by Elgin as agent plenipotentiary in the purchase, removal, and deportation of marbles. He held office (1809-22) as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and as Minister at the Court of Naples (1822-25). From 1838 to 1858 he was a Trustee of the British Museum. He published, in 1809, Ægyptiaca, or Some Account of the Ancient and Modern State of Egypt; and, in 1811, his Memorandum on the Subject of the Earl of Elgin's Pursuits in Greece. (For Hamilton, see English Bards, etc., line 509; Poetical Works, 1898, i. 336, note 2.)]

B Thomas Hope, Esqr., if I mistake not, the man who publishes quartos on furniture and costume.

Thomas Hope (1770-1831) (see Hints from Horace, line 7: Poetical Works, 1898, i. 390, note 1) published, in 1805, a folio volume entitled, Household Furniture and Internal Decoration. It was severely handled in the Edinburgh Review (No. xx.) for July, 1807.]

C It is rumoured Gell is coming out to dig in Olympia. I wish him more success than he had at Athens. According to Lusieri's account, he began digging most furiously without a firmann, but before the resurrection of a single sauce-pan, the Painter countermined and the Way-wode countermanded and sent him back to bookmaking.—[MS. D.]

See English Bards, etc., lines 1033, 1034: Poetical Works, 1898, i. 379, note 1.]

eb Where was thine Ægis, Goddess——.—[MS. D. erased]

ec ——which it had well behoved.—[MS. D.]

123 [The Athenians believed, or feigned to believe, that the marbles themselves shrieked out in shame and agony at their removal from their ancient shrines.]

124 [Byron is speaking of his departure from Spain, but he is thinking of his departure from Malta, and his half-hearted amour with Mrs. Spencer Smith.]

ed ——that rosy urchin guides.—[MS.]

ee Save on that part——.—[MS. erased.]

ef From Discipline's stern law——.—[MS.] ——keen law——.—[MS. D.]

125 An additional "misery to human life!"—lying to at sunset for a large convoy, till the sternmost pass ahead. Mem.: fine frigate, fair wind likely to change before morning, but enough at present for ten knots!—[MS. D.]

eg ——their melting girls believe.—[MS.]

eh Meantime some rude musician's restless hand Ply's the brisk instrument that sailors love.—[MS. D. erased.]

ei Through well-known straits behold the steepy shore.—[MS. erased.]

126 [Compare Coleridge's reflections, in his diary for April 19, 1804, on entering the Straits of Gibraltar: "When I first sat down, with Europe on my left and Africa on my right, both distinctly visible, I felt a quickening of the movements in the blood, but still felt it as a pleasure of amusement rather than of thought and elevation; and at the same time, and gradually winning on the other, the nameless silent forms of nature were working in me, like a tender thought in a man who is hailed merrily by some acquaintance in his work, and answers it in the same tone" (Anima Poetæ, 1895, pp. 70, 71).]

127 ["The moon is in the southern sky as the vessel passes through the Straits; consequently, the coast of Spain is in light, that of Africa in shadow" (Childe Harold, edited by H. F. Tozer, 1885, p. 232).]

128 [Campbell, in Gertrude of Wyoming, Canto I. stanza ii. line 6, speaks of "forests brown;" but, as Mr. Tozer points out, "'brown' is Byron's usual epithet for landscape seen in moonlight." (Compare Canto II. stanza lxx. line 3; Parisina, i. 10; and Siege of Corinth, ii. 1.)]

ej Bleeds the lone heart, once boundless in its zeal.—[D.] And friendless now, yet dreams it had a friend.—[MS.] or, Far from affection's chilled or changing zeal.—[MS.] Divided far by fortune, wave or steel Though friendless now we once have had a friend.— MS. D. erased.]

ek Ah! happy years! I would I were once more a boy.—[MS.]

el To gaze on Dian's wan reflected sphere.—[MS. D]

em ——her dreams of hope and pride.—[MS. D. erased.]

en None are so wretched*] but that——.—[MS.D.]

*] "Desolate."—[MS. pencil.]

eo T.t.b. [tres tres bien], but why insert here.—[MS. pencil.]

129 [In this stanza M. Darmesteter detects "l'accent Wordsworthien" prior to any "doses" as prescribed by Shelley, and quotes as a possible model the following lines from Beattie's Minstrel:—

"And oft the craggy cliff he lov'd to climb,

When all in mist the world below was lost,

What dreadful pleasure! there to stand sublime,

Like shipwreck'd mariner on desert coast,

And view th' enormous waste of vapour, tost

In billows, lengthening to th' horizon round,

Now scoop'd in gulfs, with mountains now emboss'd!

And hear the voice of mirth, and song rebound,

Flocks, herds, and waterfalls, along the hoar profound."

In felicity of expression, the copy, if it be a copy, surpasses the original; but in the scope and originality of the image, it is vastly inferior. Nor are these lines, with the possible exception of line 3—"Where things that own not Man's dominion dwell," at all Wordsworthian. They fail in that imaginative precision which the Lake poets regarded as essential, and they lack the glamour and passion without which their canons of art would have profited nothing. Six years later, when Byron came within sound of Wordsworth's voice, he struck a new chord—a response, not an echo. Here the motive is rhetorical, not immediately poetical.]

ep ——and foaming linns to lean.—[MS. D. erased.]

130 [There are none to bless us, for when we are in distress the great, the rich, the gay, shrink from us; and when we are popular and prosperous those who court us care nothing for us apart from our success. Neither do they bless us, or we them.]

eq This is to live alone—This, This is solitude.—[MS. D.]

131 [The MS. of stanza xxvii. is on the fly-leaf of a bound volume of proof-sheets entitled "Additions to Childe Harold," It was first published in the seventh edition, 1814. It may be taken for granted that Byron had seen what he describes. There is, however, no record of any visit to Mount Athos, either in his letters from the East or in Hobhouse's journals.

The actual mount, "the giant height [6350 feet], rears itself in solitary magnificence, an insulated cone of white limestone." "When it is seen from a distance, the peninsula [of which the southern portion rises to a height of 2000 feet] is below the horizon, and the peak rises quite solitary from the sea." Of this effect Byron may have had actual experience; but Hobhouse, in describing the prospect from Cape Janissary, is careful to record that "Athos itself is said to be sometimes visible in the utmost distance (circ. 90 miles), but it was not discernible during our stay on the spot." (Murray's Handbook for Greece, p. 843; Childe Harold, edited by H. F. Tozer, p. 233; Travels in Albania, 1858, ii. 103. Compare, too, the fragment entitled the Monk of Athos, first published in the Hon. Roden Noel's Life of Lord Byron, 1890.)]

132 ["Le sage Mentor, poussant Télémaque, qui était assis sur le bord du rocher, le précipite dans le mer et s'y jette avec lui.... Calypso inconsolable, rentra dans sa grotte, qu'elle remplit de ses hurlements."—Fénelon's Télémaque, vi., Paris, 1837. iii. 43.]

133 [For Mrs. Spencer Smith, see Letters, 1898, i. 244, 245, note. Moore (Life, pp. 94, 95) contrasts stanzas xxx.-xxxv., with their parade of secret indifference and plea of "a loveless heart," with the tenderness and warmth of his after-thoughts in Albania ("Lines composed during a Thunderstorm," etc.), and decides the coldness was real, the sentiment assumed. He forgets the flight of time. The lines were written in October, 1809, within a month of his departure from "Calypso's isles," and the Childe Harold stanzas belong to the early spring of 1810. "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?" Moreover, he speaks by the card. Writing at Athens, January 16, 1810, he tells us, "The spell is broke, the charm is flown."]

134 [More than one commentator gravely "sets against" this line—Byron's statement to Dallas (Corr. of Lord Byron, Paris, 1824, iii. 91), "I am not a Joseph or a Scipio; but I can safely affirm that never in my life I seduced any woman." Compare Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi, 1890, ii. 12, "Never have I employed the iniquitous art of seduction ... Languishing in soft and thrilling sentiments, I demanded from a woman a sympathy and inclination of like nature with my own. If she fell ... I should have remembered how she made for me the greatest of all sacrifices.... I should have worshipped her like a deity. I could have spent my life's blood in consoling her; and without swearing eternal constancy, I should have been most stable on my side in loving such a mistress."]

er Brisk Impudence——.—[MS.]

es Youth wasted, wretches born——.—[MS. erased.]

135 [Compare Lucretius, iv. 1121-4—

"Adde quod absumunt viris pereuntque labore,

Labitur interea res, et Babylonica fiunt:

Languent officia, atque ægrotat fama vacillans."]

et Climes strange withal as ever mortal head.—[MS.]

eu Suspected in its little pride of thought.—[MS. erased.]

136 ["Were counselled or advised." The passive "were ared" seems to lack authority. (See N. Eng. Dict., art. "Aread.")]

ev

Her not unconscious though her weakly child. or, ——her rudest child.—[MS. erased.]

137 [Compare the description of the thunderstorm in the Alps (Canto III. stanzas xcii.-xcvi., pp. 273-275); and Manfred, act ii. sc. 2—

"My joy was in the wilderness; to breathe

The difficult air of the iced mountain-top—

In them my early strength exulted; or

To follow through the night the moving moon,

The stars and their development; or catch

The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew dim."

Beattie, who describes the experiences of his own boyhood in the person of Edwin in The Minstrel, had already made a like protestation—

"In sooth he was a strange and wayward youth.

Fond of each gentle and each dreadful scene.

In darkness and in storm he found delight;

Not less than when on ocean-wave serene

The Southern sun diffus'd his dazzling sheen;

Even sad vicissitude amus'd his soul."

Kirke White, too, who was almost Byron's contemporary, and whose verses he professed to admire—

"Would run a visionary boy

When the hoarse tempest shook the vaulted sky."

This love of Nature in her wilder aspects, which was perfectly genuine, and, indeed, meritorious, was felt to be out of the common, a note of the poetic temperament, worth recording, but unlikely to pass without questioning and remonstrance.]

138 [Alexander's mother, Olympias, was an Epiriote. She had a place in the original draft of Tennyson's Palace of Art (Life of Lord Tennyson,. 119)—

"One was Olympias; the floating snake

Roll'd round her ankles, round her waist

Knotted," etc.

Plutarch (Vitæ, Lipsiæ:, 1814, vi. 170) is responsible for the legend: Ὢφθη δέ ποτε καὶ δράκων κοιμωμένης τῆς Ὀλυμπιάδου παρεκτεταμένς τῷ σώματι, "Now, one day, when Olympias lay abed, beside her body a dragon was espied stretched out at full length." (Compare, too, Dryden's Alexander's Feast, stanza ii.)]

139 [Mr. Tozer (Childe Harold, p. 236) takes this line to mean "whom the young love to talk of, and the wise to follow as an example," and points to Alexander's foresight as a conqueror, and the "extension of commerce and civilization" which followed his victories. But, surely, the antithesis lies between Alexander the ideal of the young, and Alexander the deterrent example of the old. The phrase, "beacon of the wise," if Hector in Troilus and Cressida (act ii. sc. 2, line 16) is an authority, is proverbial.

" ... The wound of peace is surety,

Surety secure; but modest doubt is call'd

The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches

To the bottom of the worst."

The beauty, the brilliance, the glory of Alexander kindle the enthusiasm of the young; but the murder of Clytus and the early death which he brought upon himself are held up by the wise as beacon-lights to save others from shipwreck.]

140 [Byron and Hobhouse sailed for Malta in the brig-of-war Spider on Tuesday, September 19, 1809 (Byron, in a letter to his mother, November 12, says September 21), and anchored off Patras on the night of Sunday, the 24th. On Tuesday, the 26th, they were under way at 12 noon, and on the evening of that day they saw the sun set over Mesalonghi. The next morning, September 27, they were in the channel between Ithaca and the mainland, with Ithaca, then in the hands of the French, to the left. "We were close to it," says Hobhouse, "and saw a few shrubs on a brown heathy land, two little towns in the hills scattered among trees." The travellers made "but little progress this day," and, apparently, having redoubled Cape St. Andreas, the southern extremity of Ithaca, they sailed (September 28) through the channel between Ithaca and Cephalonia, passed the hill of Ætos, on which stood the so-called "Castle of Ulysses," whence Penelope may have "overlooked the wave," and caught sight of "the Lover's refuge" in the distance. Towards the close of the same day they doubled Cape Ducato ("Leucadia's cape," the scene of Sappho's leap), and, sailing under "the ancient mount," the site of the Temple of Apollo, anchored off Prevesa at seven in the evening. Poetry and prose are not always in accord. If, as Byron says, it was "an autumn's eve" when they hailed "Leucadia's cape afar," if the evening star shone over the rock when they approached it, they must have sailed fast to reach Prevesa, some thirty miles to the north, by seven o'clock. But de minimis, the Muse is as disregardful as the Law. And, perhaps, after all, it was Hobhouse who misread his log-book. (Travels in Albania, i. 4, 5; Murray's Handbook for Greece, pp. 40, 46.)]

141 [The meaning of this passage is not quite so obvious as it seems. He has in his mind the words, "He saved others, Himself He cannot save," and, applying this to Sappho, asks, "Why did she who conferred immortality on herself by her verse prove herself mortal?" Without Fame, and without verse the cause and keeper of Fame, there is no heaven, no immortality, for the sons of men. But what security is there for the eternity of verse and Fame? "Quis custodiet custodes?"]