Byron’s Social Doctrine 29
can forgive the rogue for utterly falsifying every line of the
poem, and calls to mind the story of the abbé who wrote a
treatise designed to prove that the Swedish Constitution was
indissoluble and eternal. He had no sooner corrected the last
sheet than word came that the government had been de-
stroyed by Gustavus III. “The King of Sweden may over-
throw the constitution” said the abbé “but not my book.”11
What is there about Byron’s ode that is like the abbé’s book?
Napoleon had the opportunity of being something other
than a tyrant, but he had to don the purple and tyrannize,
as had those whom he conquered. Thus, he was doomed to
failure. We note that Byron did not include his name with
those who he thought were leaders “in talent and truth”:
Washington, Franklin, Penn, Mirabeau, or St. Just. Napoleon’s
return, then, falsified the ode in only one sense; in another
it made the poem even more durable than the abbé’s book,
for his return, signifying desire for supreme rule, bore out
Byron’s thesis that tyrants are conquered only by tyrants, as
he expresses it later in Childe Harold.
Another passage in Childe Harold gives an excellent
analysis of the attitude which drives men to tyrannize. It is
significant here in that Byron is again expressing the same
idea that he voiced two years earlier in the ode. He is still
speaking of Napoleon:
But quiet to quick bosoms is a Hell,
And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire
And motion of the Soul which will not dwell
In its own narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire;
And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore,
Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire
Of aught but rest; a fever at the core,
Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.18
Such agitation leads these men on, and they become so ac-
customed to conflict and strife that, after they have con-
quered all, their lives are empty, filled with sorrow and