The Soul of Nature: Caspar David Friedrich and Byron’s Childe Harold

A cold, wet February day – perfect backdrop for a journey into Romanticism—off on the M4 bus to the Met to see Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature 

The exhibit is there until May 11, 2025 so if you are in NYC it’s highly recommended.

To whet your interest – or to compensate if you can’t visit –  there is an extensive online gallery

A knock-on pleasure was the reminder of Byron and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage  – especially the third canto which I first read in high school. (Thank you Mr. Caws.) I spent the afternoon re-reading it. 

The Romantic Difference

Byron and Friedrich were both Romantic visionaries, but their approaches to nature were strikingly different.

Artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) painted stark and silent landscapes that evoke silence, mystery, and spiritual encounters with nature.

Poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) wrote brilliant verses that  pulse with human feeling, where nature is an extension and expression of his own emotional turmoil.

Friedrich’s landscapes suggest mystery and hushed reverence for nature as something unknowable, sublime. Byron, by contrast, made nature a stage for human drama. Friedrich’ s figures are silent and often solitary in a vast landscape. Byron infuses his scenes with restless movement and emotional anguish. 

(To be fair to Byron, he could also be a biting satirist, political commentator, and critic. But that’s another story.) 

Pictures from an Exhibition and Words from a Childe 

Here then are a few pictures from the exhibit together with lines from Canto III of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written in  1816. The one is not an illustration of the other but rather – the resonance, the vibe, the feel of the Romanticism that had literary and artistic Europe in its grip.  

Byron’s rise was meteoric –  his good looks, wit, and lyrical genius made him the darling of Regency England. The publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) made him famous. He was a celebrity darling, until he wasn’t. Four years later, in 1816  he was separated from his wife, the subject of dark rumors, and shunned by the society that had once embraced him. The “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (as per his former lover Lady Caroline Lamb) celebrity poet took off into self-imposed exile. He began to write Canto III as he crossed the channel to Ostend.

Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
…
Still must I on; for I am as a weed,
Flung from the rock, on Ocean’s foam, to sail
Where’er the surge may sweep, the tempest’s breath prevail.

Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where roll’d the ocean, thereon was his home; 
Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam;
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker’s foam,
Were unto him companionship; they spake
A mutual language, clearer than the tome
Of his land’s tongue, which he would oft forsake
For Nature’s pages glass’d by sunbeams on the lake.

Let Joy be Unconfined and an Empire’s Dust

His first stop was the battlefield where, just the year before, the British and Prussian armies had defeated the French in the final battle of the Napoleonic Wars. He describes the scene on the eve of the battle:

There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men.
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell;
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

Did ye not hear it? – No; ’twas but the wind,
Or the car rattling o’er the stony street;
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when youth and pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

In Childe Harold, Byron does not celebrate the victory that ended Napoleon’s regime. He was a committed Bonapartist and lifelong supporter of liberal causes, and he questioned the value of this victory. He mourned its political consequences and focussed instead on the personal loss of his cousin – Frederick Howard – “young, gallant Howard” – of the 10th Hussars who was killed leading a charge.

For Byron, Waterloo represented not just a military defeat for Napoleon but a setback for rationalism and a triumph for tyranny.

Stop! — for thy tread is on an Empire’s dust!
An Earthquake’s spoil is sepulchred below!
Is the spot mark’d with no colossal bust?
Nor column trophied for triumphal show?
None; but the moral’s truth tells simpler so,
As the ground was before, thus let it be; — 150
How that red rain hath made the harvest grow!
And is this all the world has gained by thee,
Thou first and last of fields! king-making Victory?

It is

           … this place of skulls,
The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo.

And he asks: 

Fit retribution! Gaul may champ the bit
And foam in fetters; — but is Earth more free?
Did nations combat to make One submit;
Or league to teach all kings true sovereignty?

The Fate of Heroes

He who ascends to mountain-tops, shall find
The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow.
He who surpasses or subdues mankind,
Must look down on the hate of those below.
Though high above the sun of glory glow,
And far beneath the earth and ocean spread,
Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow
Contending tempests on his naked head,
And thus reward the toils which to those summits led.

And Onwards to the Ruins of the Rhine.

Beneath these battlements, within those walls,
Power dwelt amidst her passions; in proud state
Each robber chief upheld his armed halls,
Doing his evil will, nor less elate
Than mightier heroes of a longer date.

To Switzerland and the Sublime

          … Above me are the Alps,
The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls,
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps,
And throned Eternity in icy halls
Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls
The avalanche — the thunderbolt of snow!
All that expands the spirit, yet appals,
Gather around these summits, as to show
How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below.

Alone and at One with Nature

Where Friedrich’s figures stand in stillness before nature’s majesty, Byron throws himself into it, merging with the storm, the crag, the endless horizon. Friedrich’s fog-enshrouded world invites quiet introspection; Byron’s windswept landscapes are alive with longing and defiance.

Is it not better, then, to be alone,
And love Earth only for its earthly sake?
…
Is it not better thus our lives to wear,
Than join the crushing crowd, doom’d to inflict or bear?

I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture: I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshy chain,
Class’d among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.

A Peacock, a Monkey, and a Dog

Of course, Byron was not alone.  He arrived at Ostend accompanied by servants – William Fletcher, who had worked on his estate, Robert Rushton, the son of one of his tenants, a Swiss manservant called Berger, and a very young private physician with literary ambitions – John Polidori, MD. There are accounts that mention a peacock, a monkey and a dog. That would fit with Byron’s flamboyant style but I have not been able to confirm them.

They travelled in a custom-built coach modeled on one that had belonged to Napoleon and had been taken from his HQ at Genappe. It was lavishly outfitted with a day bed, a dining facilities, and a small library. This Regency era version of a stretch limo proved impractical as Polidori recounts it broke down several times on the way through Flanders. 

The Sublime

Byron found inspiration in Switzerland’s Alpine grandeur, channeling its dramatic landscapes into Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III. He and Shelley rode into the mountains, marveling at glaciers like “a frozen hurricane” and roaring waterfalls. 

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?

But he ultimately did not find the consolation he sought. 

The Suffering 

What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?
The heart’s bleed longest, and but heal to wear
That which disfigures it; and they who war 
With their own hopes, and have been vanquish’d, bear
Silence, but not submission: in his lair
Fix’d Passion holds his breath, until the hour
Which shall atone for years; none need despair:
It came, it cometh, and will come, — the power
To punish or forgive — in one we shall be slower.

Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake,
With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring. 
This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing.

Geneva

Byron arrived in Geneva on May 25, 1816, and stayed at the Hôtel d’Angleterre. It was here that he met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his lover the teenage Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and their infant son William, and re-connected with Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.

The meeting was not an accident.

It had been orchestrated by Clairmont. She was eight months younger than Mary and the daughter of William Godwin’s second wife. It was she who had encouraged Mary’s dramatic elopement with the already-married Shelley and had accompanied them on their 1814 journey through France, Switzerland, and the Low Countries. 

Clairmont and Byron had an affair during his last few weeks in England. Finding herself pregnant, she orchestrated the move to Geneva in hopes of rekindling the relationship and securing support from him. It was she who ensured their paths crossed in Switzerland.

The presence of these scandalous celebrities immediately stirred gossip—Shelley’s atheism, his libertarian views on love, his unconventional travel arrangements with two young women, and the recent scandal of his abandoned first wife, Harriet Westbrook, raised whispers of immorality and debauchery. The cloud of infamy that now loomed over Byron’s head created the perfect media storm of salacious scandal and sensation 

Byron and Shelley became Fast Friends

The hotel was expensive and subjected them to what Byron called “staring boobies” –  English tourists.

They rented  neighboring houses in the hamlet of Cologny, four miles north of Geneva. Byron took the grand Villa Diodati with his entourage, while the Shelleys and Clairmont settled into a more modest lakeside home. 

I have taken a very pretty villa in a vineyard — with the Alps behind — & Mt. Jura and the Lake before — it is called Diodati’ — Lord Byron in his letter to his friend, John Hobhouse, June 1816

But there was no escape from the notoriety that followed them all.

The summer began well but then everything changed.

The Summer of Darkness

The summer of 1816 was one of darkness and storms shaped by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East indies (Indonesia). This powerful set of explosions blasted vast quantities of gases, dust, and rock into the atmosphere. Rivers of incandescent ash poured down the mountain’s sides, the ground shook – sending tsunamis racing across the Java Sea. An estimated 10,000 of the island’s inhabitants died instantly.

The eruption had far flung and lasting consequences that shrouded and chilled the planet for months. It led to crop failures and famine across North America and Europe with an unseasonable chill that afflicted much of the Northern Hemisphere. 1816 was known as the “year without a summer”.

Switzerland was drenched in relentless rain. The thunder rolling through the mountains with lightning illuminating jagged peaks was dramatic. By autumn, Lake Geneva was seven and half feet above its normal level. 

Thy sky is changed! — and such a change!
Oh night, And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
Of a dark eye in woman! Far along,
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

Mary Shelley wrote to her sister Fanny back in London:

One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake (Geneva) was lit up- the pines on (Mount) Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a patchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads in the darkness.

This scene appears in her novel as a storm remembered by Victor Frankenstein: 

We witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura; and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump.

The stormy weather mirrored the turmoil within the Villa Diodati. Their emotional lives and relationships were tangled and often fraught.

Claire, desperate for Byron’s affection, found herself rejected. Byron’s doctor, the hapless Polidori became infatuated with Mary Shelley and simmered with jealousy and unrequited love,. Scandalous rumors spread through Geneva. Sightseers drifted by the villa in boats. Byron was accused of corrupting local youth. Many accounts claim that British newspaper condemned the setting as a sordid “league of incest” but that does not appear in any of the records I can find. Byron believed that it was a rumor started by his rival, the poet Robert Southey. The newspapers of 1816 did have plenty to say about Byron or the “Noble Childe” and followed his travels. They reported that he was living with two ladies.

A traveller describes that all the inns, lodging, and cabins at Geneva, are deluged with English migrants, and the whole circuit of the Lake, resembles an English watering place full of spendthrifts. The Star, London 22 October 1816.

Confined indoors by the weather, they entertained themselves with conversation, poetry, storytelling, and long nights fueled by wine and laudanum.

The Grim Terrors of a Waking Dream

On June 16, Byron proposed a ghost story contest. Two nights later, in the middle of yet another apocalyptic storm, Byron read from Coleridge’s Christabel and Kubla Khan. At one point, a delirious Shelley fled in terror, convinced Mary had grown eyes in place of her nipples. Polidori administered ether to calm him. 

That night, Mary conceived the idea that would become Frankenstein. She imagined a young scientist, grief stricken by the death his mother, and obsessed with conquering death. He assembles a living being from stolen corpses and animates it with a massive jolt of electricity. What he creates overwhelms him with horror. 

She gives a good account of this in her preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. 

In “Darkness”, Byron depicts the end of life on Earth caused by the death of the sun. He captured the unfolding environmental disaster of that summer, magnifying its effects to apocalyptic proportions.

By summer’s end, tensions fractured the group. Claire was pregnant and she and the Shelleys returned to England. Byron dismissed Polidori, and left Geneva for Italy.

The years that followed brought tragedy: Clairmont’s daughter Allegra died of typhus in April 1822; in July, Shelley drowned in Italy when his small boat overturned in a squall;  Polidori died at his father’s house in London a possible suicide, weighed down by gambling debts and depression; and Byron died of a fever in Greece in 1824. Clairmont ultimately denounced Byron and Shelley as “monsters of lying and cruelty”. She died a Catholic convert in Florence in 1870. 

From that storm-ridden summer emerged literary works that would leave a lasting mark. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein redefined Gothic fiction, Polidori’s The Vampyre set the stage for Bram Stoker Dracula, and Byron completed the third canto of Childe Harold  and The Prisoner of Chillon. 

Poor Harold, Bloody but Unbowed

I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d
To its idolatries a patient knee, —
Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles, — nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.

And so to Canto IV and to Italy

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more”

We left the museum into the grey drizzle of Fifth Avenue. Byron would have wanted a thunderstorm.