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We get not Byron's "self-torturing sophist", but a martyred sage who suffered and died at the hands of Christians, 'he who makes out of Christians human beings'. Toward the end he is apostrophized as the 'Great Endurer, and bidden to leap joyously into Charon's boat and go tell the spirits about this 'dream of the war of frogs and mice, the hand-organ doodle-doodle of this life'.
There is another aspect in which we may look at this great King; we think of him not only as a doer but as a sufferer; and not only as an endurer of disappointment, a bearer of toil, difficulty, trouble, but as one who bore in his body a "white martyrdom" of great pain, perhaps even anguish; and this for some twenty years. Alfred was always a loyal son of the Church.
"'Yudhishthira said, "How, O Bharata, should a learned man adorned with modesty behave, O chastiser of foes, when assailed with harsh speeches in the midst of assemblies by an ignorant person swelling with conceit?" The endurer, in such a case, communicates the demerit of all his own bad acts to the person who under the influence of wrath indulges in abuse.
On the occasion of a severe famine in Burgundy, she collected a band of her mendicant friends in a stable, and burned them all, saying that 'par pitié elle hauoit faict cela, considerant les peines que ces pauvres debuoient endurer en temps de si grande et tant estrange famine.
Perhaps in some cases this was a fault; but one cannot dwell on the mistaken side of such a phase, when it possesses another side so full of beneficent aid to humanity. And it must be remembered that with all this susceptibility, he was not a suffering poet, like Shelley, but distinctly an endurer. His moral enthusiasm was deeper than that of any scheme or system.
I seem born to be buffeted by friends and fortune, and nature has made me a careless endurer of buffetings. I now, however, began to grow very impatient of remaining at school, to be flogged for things that I did not like. I longed for variety, especially now that I had not my uncle's to resort to, by way of diversifying the dullness of school with the dreariness of his country seat.
Humble with the proud, haughty with the humble, encounterer of dangers, endurer of outrages, enamoured without reason, imitator of the good, scourge of the wicked, enemy of the mean, in short, knight-errant, which is all that can be said!"
Is this he, that through successive years, contended with the severest mental and bodily afflictions; who knew the cause, but rejected the remedy? who, in 1807, declared himself "rolling rudderless," "the wreck of what he once was," "with an unceasing overwhelming sensation of wretchedness?" and in 1814, who still pronounced himself the endurer of all that was "wretched, helpless, and hopeless?"
Humble with the proud, haughty with the humble, encounterer of dangers, endurer of outrages, enamoured without reason, imitator of the good, scourge of the wicked, enemy of the mean, in short, knight-errant, which is all that can be said!"
Humble with the proud, haughty with the humble, encounterer of dangers, endurer of outrages, enamoured without reason, imitator of the good, scourge of the wicked, enemy of the mean, in short, knight-errant, which is all that can be said!"
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