The two cantos of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" which chronicle the journey are also the record of the beginning of the Byronic pose. The picture of the Childe is the picture of René, with a difference--the difference being that, whereas Chateaubriand could never, even in a work of art, depreciate himself, Byron rejoiced in doing so. For the rest, the Childe was "tameless and swift and proud," and worthless, and weary, and disillusioned, and disgusted. He had "spent his days in riot most uncouth": he had "felt the fulness of satiety." It was well that he had not won the woman whom he loved because his kiss "had been polution unto aught so chaste." His boon companions were only "flatterers of the festal hour," and "none did love him, not his lemans dear." Wherefore behold him, on the Lisbon packet, in flight from himself, and seeking his "escape from life."
That is the picture; that, as perhaps it would be better to put it, is the pose. It was to become a sincere and natural posture before the end; but it is impossible, at this early stage, to take it very seriously. Byron would himself have been the first to repudiate the suggestion that such men as Matthews, Hobhouse, and Hodgson were "heartless parasites of present cheer." He had more respect for Matthews than for any man of his acquaintance; Hodgson was to be his most regular correspondent, and Hobhouse the chosen companion of his journey. Moreover, he was only twenty-one--an age at which a young man is eager to see the world and needs no excuse for setting out to do so. His conception of himself as a forlorn exile impelled to wander because the world has betrayed and trifled with him is, in the main, a young man's literary affectation.
An affectation, no doubt, for which certain realities had furnished a hint. The fear of impending pecuniary embarrassment may sometimes have given the sound of revelry a hollow ring. The sarcasm of the _Edinburgh_, though repaid in kind, had certainly left a thin skin sore. The icy politeness of Carlisle had chilled an expansive heart, and given Byron the impression that he was regarded as an intruder in his own domain. Conjoined with his mother's nagging, it had made something of a three-cornered quarrel from which it was good to escape. He had also found himself more sentimental than he ought to be about Mary Chaworth. Here, at any rate, was something to exaggerate--a foundation of bad temper on which a superstructure of pessimism might be raised. Byron duly raised it, for literary purposes. But he had his high spirits as well as his low spirits; and the farewell lines which he sent from Falmouth to Hodgson suggest anything rather than a heart bowed down with woe.