page_title: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
section_title: The Byronic hero
hierarchical_section_title: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage / Influence / The Byronic hero
caption_attribution_description: English: Eugene Onegin. Русский: Иллюстрация к роману А. С. Пушкина "Евгений Онегин" работы Д. Н. Кардовского. 1909.
context_page_description: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a long narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. The poem was published between 1812 and 1818. Dedicated to "Ianthe", it describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man, who is disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.
  The poem was widely imitated and contributed to the cult of the wandering Byronic hero who falls into melancholy reverie as he contemplates scenes of natural beauty. Its autobiographical subjectivity was widely influential, not only in literature but in the arts of music and painting as well, and was a powerful ingredient in European Romanticism.
context_section_description: The protagonist of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage embodied the example of the self-exiled Byronic hero. His antinomian character is summed up in Lord Macaulay's essay on Moore’s Life of Lord Byron (Edinburgh Review, 1831). "It is hardly too much to say that Lord Byron could exhibit only one man - a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart; a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection…It is curious to observe the tendency which the dialogue of Lord Byron always has, to lose its character of dialogue and to become soliloquy."
  The type was caricatured as the melancholy Mr Cypress in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, published in 1818, following the appearance of the Pilgrimage's Canto IV. The poet's misanthropic and despairing announcement there sums up the 'heroic' point of view: "I have no hope for myself or for others. Our life is a false nature; it is not in the harmony of things; it is an all-blasting upas whose root is earth, and whose leaves are the skies which rain their poison dews upon mankind. We wither from our youth; we gasp with unslaked thirst for unattainable good; lured from the first to the last by phantoms – love, fame, ambition, avarice – all idle, and all ill - one meteor of many names, that vanishes in the smoke of death."  Almost every word is transcribed from two of the canto's stanzas, 124 and 126.
  Once Byron's poem had launched the heroic prototype, it went on to be an influence on Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1825 – 32), where the poem's protagonist is compared several times to Childe Harold. Onegin shares the hero’s melancholy that cannot be pleased (1.38) and his dreaminess (4.44); but perhaps his mixture of behaviours are only so many masks, and in this respect he is likened to Melmoth the Wanderer as well as to Childe Harold (8.8). Tatiana too ponders whether Onegin’s guises make him “a Muscovite in Harold's dress, a modish second-hand edition” (7.24). 
  But however much that pose may have been appreciated in the first half of the 19th century, by World War 2 the reaction to the hero’s attitudes had veered to scepticism. C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters (1941), bracketed Childe Harold and Young Werther as Romantic types "submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses" for whom "five minutes' genuine toothache would reveal [their] romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were". Equally, the bluff hero of C. S. Forester's The Commodore (1945) dismissed Byron's poem as "bombast and fustian" while flipping through its pages for inspiration.
caption: Eugene Onegin as Byronic hero, Dmitry Kardovsky’s 1909 illustration
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