CHILDE HAROLD IV

Byron had called Manfred ‘mental theatre’, and his most ‘metaphysical’ piece. It certainly abandoned completely his concern for the everyday, and yet the conclusion it reached was to plunge its writer back into the very real world. It does not announce the death of metaphysics, since that remains one of the main human ways of thinking about our lives, but it certainly comes close. At the very least, metaphysics must always be aware that it is a human creation. In Italy Byron was to find a literary model which could carry this new world view without the contradictions we have discussed in Manfred. The key driving force was the realization that meaning was ‘artificially’ produced – that it was a product, not of nature or a supernatural being, but of man and his civilization. This leads Byron in his later years first to adopt the highly contrived Italian verse form known as ottava rima, and secondly to espouse a rigidly classical view of dramatic construction. Both of these developments saw him prefer neoclassical models of poetry to what (when he learned of the term) he called the Romantic, in disparaging tones. And the final canto of Childe Harold, though retaining the verse form of the earlier cantos and some of their mannerisms, is also coloured by this new palette.

The ‘pilgrim's shrine’ of Canto IV is now not Greece, but Rome. While this is obviously simply a reflection of where the poet himself happened to be, its cultural significance is highlighted by the texture of the poem. Whereas Greece defined the borders of civilization and nature in terms of a natural civilization, Rome represents civilization as art. Saint Peter's and the statues of the Vatican are ‘the fountain of sublimity’, and from them (in a very eighteenth-century phrase) man may ‘learn what great conceptions can’. Italy is the country of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso. If Byron identifies with the human struggles of these figures (particularly Tasso) in ways which accentuate their Haroldian qualities (isolation, political oppression, exile from love), they are also figures who have succeeded in enriching human life.