Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 2.djvu/275

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CANTO III.]
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE.
239

XXXVII.

Conqueror and Captive of the Earth art thou!
She trembles at thee still, and thy wild name[1]
Was ne'er more bruited in men's minds than now

That thou art nothing, save the jest of Fame,

    after the first abdication at Fontainebleau, the dominant note is astonishment mingled with contempt. It is the lamentation over a fallen idol. In these stanzas (xxxvi.-xlv.) he bears witness to the man's essential greatness, and, with manifest reference to his own personality and career, attributes his final downfall to the peculiar constitution of his genius and temper. A year later (1817), in the Fourth Canto (stanzas lxxxix.-xcii.), he passes a severe sentence. Napoleon's greatness is swallowed up in weakness. He is a "kind of bastard Cæsar," self-vanquished, the creature and victim of vanity. Finally, in The Age of Bronze, sections iii.-vi., there is a reversion to the same theme, the tragic irony of the rise and fall of the "king of kings, and yet of slaves the slave."

    As a schoolboy at Harrow, Byron fought for the preservation of Napoleon's bust, and he was ever ready, in defiance of national feeling and national prejudice, to celebrate him as "the glorious chief;" but when it came to the point, he did not "want him here," victorious over England, and he could not fail to see, with insight quickened by self-knowledge, that greatness and genius possess no charm against littleness and commonness, and that the "glory of the terrestrial" meets with its own reward. The moral is obvious, and as old as history; but herein lay the secret of Byron's potency, that he could remint and issue in fresh splendour the familiar coinage of the world's wit. Moreover, he lived in a great age, when great truths are born again, and appear in a new light.]

  1. ——and thy dark name
    Was ne'er more rife within men's mouths than now
    .—[MS.]