THOMAS J.

BATA LI BRARY
TRENT UNIVERSITY
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/byronwrathrhymeOOOOunse
*
 Critical Studies Series

BYRON:
Wrath and Rhyme
BYRON:
Wrath and Rhyme

edited by

Alan Bold

VISION
and
BARNES & NOBLE
Vision Press Limited
Fulham Wharf
Townmead Road
London SW6 2SB
and
Barnes & Noble Books
81 Adams Drive
Totowa, NJ 07512

ISBN (UK) 0 85478 355 5

ISBN (US) 0 389 20373 4

© 1983 by Vision Press Ltd.

First published in the U.S.A. 1983
All rights reserved

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Unwin Brothers Ltd.,
Old Woking, Surrey.
Phototypeset by Galleon Photosetting,
Ipswich, Suffolk.
MCMLXXXIII
Contents
page

Introduction by Alan Bold 7

Part One: RHYME AND CRITICISM

1 Byron as a Scottish Poet by Tom Scott 17
2 Byron and the English Tradition
by Philip Hobsbaum 37
3 Voice, Tone, and Transition in Don Juan
by Edwin Morgan 57
4 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians
by Ronald Stevenson 78

Part Two: LITERATURE AND LIFE

5 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women
by Jenni Calder 103
6 Byron as Unacknowledged Legislator
by Geoffrey Camall 125
7 The Byronic Philosophy by Walter Perrie 142
8 The Rhetoric of Freedom by J. Drummond Bone 166
9 Byron and the Cult of Personality by J. F. Hendry 186
Notes on Contributors 211
Index 214
Introduction
by ALAN BOLD

In Harold Pinter's The Homecoming the domestic tyrant Max

throws out a casual rhetorical question: ‘How many other
houses in the district have got a Doctor of Philosophy sitting
down drinking a cup of coffee?’ By the same irreproachable
irrationality it is worth asking how many poets are notorious
enough to command an entry in The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous
People (1981). Quite a few, actually, including Ezra Pound,
Robert Burns and (of course) Byron who, according to Walter
Kempthorne,

was sexually initiated at the age of nine by the family nurse,

May Gray. For three years, the devout, bible-quoting Scottish
girl seized every chance to creep into the child’s bed and ‘play
tricks with his person’. Arousing the boy physically by every
variation she could think of, May also allowed him to watch
while she made love with her uninhibited lovers. Thus primed,
Byron—eager tor continued stimulation—moved with ease into
sexual activities during his four years at Harrow. There he
preferred the company of young boys. . . . In July 1813, Byron
flouted the ultimate sexual taboo—incest—by seducing his
married half-sister, Augusta Leigh.

So there you have it all in a few well-chosen words: the mad-

bad-dangerous Byron, the Freudian slip of a lad who indulged
in infantile sexuality, then graduated to homosexuality and
incest. No wonder a book calling itself The Dirty Bits: The Book
That Falls Open at Every Page (1981) begins with a quotation
from Don Juan:

His classic studies made a little puzzle,

Because of filthy loves of gods and goddesses,
Who in the earlier ages raised a bustle,
But never put on pantaloons or boddices.
7
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Byron became mythical in his own lifetime and immortal

after it, so it is helpful to demythologize the man in order to
appreciate the extent of the poetic achievement. The literary
taste of the Romantic period valued content above style, and
emotionally compelling content at that, and Byron’s work was
received largely as a projection of his personality. If it had only
amounted to that, then it would have been crippled by
psychological failings. However, Byron aspired to something
less ephemeral than metrical self-promotion. He believed that
the act of creation enabled him to transcend his physical
limitations as a person and to become an example to us all. He
is quite specific about this in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (III, vi):

’Tis to create, and in creating live

A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feelings still with thee in my crush’d feelings' dearth.

Whether one approves of it or not, that stanza contains the

message of the Byronic philosophy. It defines art as an impulse
that is larger than life and portrays the artist as a man
possessed by this all-consuming urge that has the power to
transfigure him. In making his poems Byron is not merely
advertising himself; he is declaring himself willing to abandon
the distractions of the earthly life in order to become ’A being
more intense’. The same sacrificial concept of the artist is
developed in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger, where the hero

worked, not like a man who works that he may live; but as one
who is bent on doing nothing but work; having no regard for
himself as a human being but only as a creator.

Hugh MacDiarmid, who incorporated that passage into his

The Kind of Poetry I Want, was likewise fascinated by the
sacrificial status of the really dedicated artist. In A Drunk Man
Looks at the Thistle his protagonist begins as a man intoxicated
by alcoholic spirit and ends as a spiritually transformed
creator ready for the supreme sacrifice:

8
 Introduction

A Scottish poet maun assume

The burden o’ his people’s doom,
And dee to brak’ their livin’ tomb.

Byron, who was ‘half a Scot by birth, and bred/ A whole

one’, does not perhaps immediately impress the reader as a
sacrificial poet, though he has frequently been cast in the role
ot political saviour. Like Scott and Hemingway and other
impetuous artists he did not like to dwell on the sedentary
nature of literary' composition, so drew attention to his more
obvious activities. The fiction of his myth shows a devil-may-
care man-of-action who knocks off cantos with effortless ease
in his spare time; the facts of his life tend to give the impression
of a cynic who could treat intelligent women, such as Claire
Clairmont, with contempt. Yet if we prefer the evidence of
Byron’s poetry to the combination of gullibility and gossip that
constitutes his myth, it is possible to see Byron as a self-
conscious artist with a vision of the human race as he knew it
and of himself as a representative individual willing to sacrifice
his life on the altar of artistic integrity. Given his unusual
experiences, this vision is not only interesting, it is illumi¬
nating. In pursuit of this vision it is important to respond to
what Byron himself wrote rather than accepting the anecdotal
evidence of his ostentatiously public private life.
As a person Byron was not what an impartial observer
would call noble; he could be insufferably arrogant and off¬
hand in his dealings with other people. Even an ineffectual
angel like Shelley felt like throttling him over his decision to
put his daughter Allegra in a convent rather than into the
arms of her mother Claire Clairmont. The poetic ideal he
envisaged, though, does have nobility, and Byron’s personal
affairs do not invalidate his artistic vision. This was always
understood by those who read him most attentively and
Engels shrewdly observed, in 1845, that

it is the workers who are most familiar with the poetry of Byron
[who] attracts their sympathy by his sensuous fire and by the
virulence of his satire against the existing social order.

Engels was wrong, however, in supposing that it was only

Byronic satire that appealed to the newly literate sections of

9
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

society. A Lancashire weaver, Benjamin Brierley, tells in his

autobiography Home Memories and Recollections of a Life (1886)
that he did not really take to literature until he was given a
poetic insight into the potential of humanity:

I must confess that my soul did not feel much lifted by the only
class of reading then within my reach. It was not until I joined
the companionship of Burns and Byron that I felt the ‘god
within me’.

That is the value of great poetry. In Byron's lifetime poetry

was seen, by the poets anyway, as a sublime expression of the
human spirit, and though this romantic approach has limita¬
tions, it is more profound than twentieth-century critical
attempts to cut poetry down to the size of manageable text. It
is not surprising, of course, that modernism encouraged the
cult of the fragment which, by its broken image, simulated
breakdown. Poetry was involved in the general cultural collapse
associated with World War One, and when the war was over it
was not easy to put poetry together again. Poets became adept
at incongruity, used the method of montage, relied on contrast
and counterpoint, retreated from the grand statement to the
ambiguous aside. In criticism F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards
encouraged a microscopic examination of selected texts, and
though this led to an awareness of linguistic texture and irony,
it also meant a lack of concern for poetry' that ambitiously
extended itself over the whole range of human thought. The
megapoets like Milton and Byron were out of favour and
poetry generally shrank in size and scope. The defeatist tone
that was critically established after World War One prevented
the postwar public from accepting long poems from modern
poets. Pound s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, MacDiarmid’s
Mature Art, Zukovsky’s A—all these are addressed to the many
and known only by the few.
Byron is a big poet. ‘My poem’s epic’, he declares in Don
Juan and he means what he says. He is at his best in long
stretches as he sets up an irresistible rhythm and carries the
reader along with him. It is absurd that Byron should have been
out of favour with the modernists until Auden wrote his ‘Letter
to Lord Byron’ and included it in Letters from Iceland (1937).
After all, the modernists advocated an allusive, irreverent and

10
 Introduction

rhythmically unlussy poetry and Byron is erudite, witty and a

master ol the conversational mode. Auden understood this and
addressed Byron as a misunderstood colleague:

You’ve had your packet from the critics, though:

They grant you warmth of heart, but at your head
Their moral and aesthetic brickbats throw.
A ‘vulgar genius’ so George Eliot said,
Which doesn't matter as George Eliot’s dead,
But T. S. Eliot, I am sad to find,
Damns you with: ‘an uninteresting mind’.

A thematic (not to say sartorial) survey of the English poetry

scene would rev eal a cult of drabness entirely appropriate to a
country whose critics value the poetic understatement more
than the visionary affirmation. The notion of what is seemly in a
poet and becoming to his calling was established in England,
this century, by T. S. Eliot. The ‘Reverend’ Eliot, as Ezra
Pound called this ‘most bank-clerkly of Englishmen’ in the
Cantos, had good reason to regard emotional stability as a
prerequisite of poetic security. He had had one clash with social
convention and it was one too many. His marriage to Vivien
Haigh-Wood in 1915 was a traumatic involvement for Eliot; his
disapproving father cut off his allowance and thereby cast him
out of the Edenic safety of his family and into the arms of an
unlikely Eve. Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land, was com¬
posed (or at least concluded) when the poet was in Lausanne
undergoing psychotherapy as a result of his divorce from the
family and marriage to Vivien. When he returned to England it
was to re-establish himself as a pillar of the critical, ecclesiastical
and publishing community. He established The Criterion (which
carried the noteless text of The Waste Land in the first issue of
October 1922); he was accepted into the established Church of
England in 1926; and he helped establish Faber & Faber
(formerly Faber & Gwyer) as the Englishman’s poetic castle.
To Eliot, the image of Byron was anathema. In an essay he
contributed to Bonamy Dobree’s From Ann to Victoria (1937) he
compared busts of Scott and Byron. Scott was, like Eliot, a man
who seemed to value his social standing more than his literary
readiness for action. Scott’s bust, therefore, has ‘an air of
nobility’:
11
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

But Byron—that pudgy face suggesting a tendency to corpulence,

that weakly sensual mouth, that restless triviality of expression,
and worst of all the blind look of the self-conscious beauty; the bust
of Byron is that of a man who was every inch the touring tragedian.

Eliot’s answer to this anomaly was to rid the realms of English

poetry of Byron and reclassify him ‘as a Scottish poet'. Byron
himself sanctioned the assessment in the celebrated passage of
Don Juan (X, xvii) when he describes himself as ‘half a Scot by
birth, and bred/ A whole one’ and goes on to conclude the
aside as follows (X, xix):

And though, as you remember, in a fit

Of wrath and rhyme, when juvenile and curly,
I railed at Scots to show my wrath and wit,
Which must be owned was sensitive and surly.
Yet ’tis in vain such sallies to permit;
They cannot quench young feelings fresh and early.
I ‘scotched, not killed’, the Scotchman in my blood
And love the land of‘mountain and of flood’.

That confession implies that Byron has outgrown his ‘fit/ Of

wrath and rhyme’, but Don Juan is as full of it as ever. Byron's
ability to control his indignation by giving it a memorable
artistic form is the essence of his art from the juvenilia to the
consummate artistry of Don Juan. Byron always approached
life with passion and so, naturally, he produced poetry that is
animated by a huge emotional appetite for life. Remarkably,
he gave all this artistic shape.
In ‘Darkness’, his Gothic evocation of the Apocalypse,
Byron shows a world at war with itself:

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
W ere chill’d into a selfish prayer for light . . .
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again:—a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death.

It will not escape the notice of the reader that for Byron the
most dreadful aspect of this nightmare is the paucity of

12
 Introduction

passion: for 'men forgot their passions’ and 'no love was left’.
Despite his erratic behaviour and occasionally cynical acts,
Byron regarded himself, rightly, as a man motivated by
passion for his lellow men and, less philosophically, for
women. He was, for all his affectations and neoclassical stylistic
mannerisms, a genuine romantic who believed it was the push
ot passion that made the world revolve. Shelley’s verse was
addressed to some ideal assembly where he would be at last
acknowledged as a legislator; Keats longed for a life of self-
indulgent sensuality; Byron, alone of the great romantic trio,
lived his life with existential urgency, but if he put his heart
into the business of living, then it is in his art that we find the
authorized version of the passion of the poet.
David Hume’s supposition (in A Treatise of Human Nature)
that 'Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’
could have been formulated in anticipation of Byron’s coming
for his reason was punctuated, even disturbed, by passion. But
whatever he was in person he was not, as an artist, passion’s
slave. In the poetry Byron masters his passion and makes it
into endurable art. Despite the wildness of some of his descrip¬
tions and the audacity of some of his assertions, Byron—in
form and on song—never loses technical control, and this
allows him to express his vision of a human race emancipated
from what he regards as antisocial rules and regulations.
Byron is a positive poet who expects to be criticized by
devotees of negativity and he is ready for them:

The lawyer and the critic but behold

The baser sides of literature and life,
And nought remains unseen, but much untold,
By those who scour those double vales of strife.

So he says in Don Juan (x, xiii), but if Byron is opinionated

about others, his attitude to himself also comes across clearly
in his poetry.
Intent on realizing his vision of human liberation, Byron
sees himself as a suitable subject for verse and as a creative
artist willing to make whatever sacrifice is necessary for the
perfection of his art. Since he felt it was possible to surmount
criticism by making himself superior to it, he has been judged
as a human failure whose flaws are preserved in his poetry.

13
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Not so. It is when we see Byron’s life and literature as

expressions of an ontological and artistic experiment that we
understand how personal mistakes in his life allowed him to
adjust his image of mankind in his poetry. The distance
between Childe Harold and Don Juan is a great one and the
massive gain in quality demonstrates that Byron’s priority was
his poetry. This, again, is something he pondered in Don Juan
XIV, xii):

I think that were I certain of success,

I hardly could compose another line.
So long I’ve battled either more or less
That no defeat can drive me from the Nine.
This feeling ’tis not easy to express
And yet ’tis not affected, I opine.
In play there are two pleasure for your choosing:
The one is winning and the other losing.

Byron may have lost in life but he was more careful in his art.
It is recognition of his artistic triumph that has brought this
book into being.

14
Part One:
RHYME AND CRITICISM
1
Byron as a Scottish Poet
by TOM SCOTT

My attention to the Scottish nature of Byron’s genius was first

drawn by T. S. Eliot in an essay, still to my mind the best on
the subject, first published in 1937 and again in On Poetry and
Poets, in 1957. Till then I had vaguely regarded him as an
English romantic inferior to the luscious Keats and ecstatic
Shelley. In fact Byron has more in common with Dryden and
Pope, from whom he learned his early poetics, and in spirit
and nature still more with Burns and Scott. He is a misfit in
the English scene precisely because, like the Scott of the verse
romances, he belongs mainly in the very different Scottish
tradition in poetry, and it is with some account of the nature of
that tradition that I must begin.
Scottish poetry is characterized by great extrovert energy,
both verbal and intellectual, sensational rather than intuitive,
common-sensible rather than philosophic, comic rather than
tragic, social rather than solitary, humour rather than solemnity
of subject and treatment. Its main strands are narrative and
lyric, with little meditative poetry of length, and almost no
drama. It tends also to be earthy rather than exalted, though
the natural and the supernatural are on easy terms with each
other. One need think only of the ballads, our staple poetry, to
see there narrative, lyric, earthy, supernatural, social, comic,
the humorous, hard-headed common-sense in abundance.
There is little of the high-falutin (some aureation among the
makars apart, and that but little of their work) and idealistic.
One cannot imagine Shakespeare, Spenser, much less Blake,
coming out of the Scottish tradition—leaving aside the fact that

17
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

the Scots language never developed such poetic potential as

Elizabethan English. Neither can one imagine Barbour (the
main poetic influence on Scott) or Henrysoun, Dunbar or
Burns coming out of the English tradition: but John Gay, even
Crabbe whom Byron called ‘Nature’s sternest painter [note the
words] yet her best’, we might almost be persuaded to gie the
kilt. Our poetry is rarely courtly, often folksy and hamely, rarely
pious but often irreverent, outrageous even, rumbustious and
orgiastic. There is nothing in English quite so outrageous as our
flyting tradition. Satire is common, but usually of the humorous
sort rather than the excoriating hatred of a Swift, and we are
more given to cursing than blessing, to abusing than praising.
We have an easy familiarity with both God and the Deil, though
the heroic Satanism of Milton is beyond us. Scottish poetry also
has a flair for nature-painting, to echo Byron, a keen sense of
weather, of the passing seasons and their phenomena, of the
everyday, and expresses these in physical, often onomatopoeic
language, objective rather than subjective. Almost all of the
above qualities can be found in two key poems: ‘The Tretis of
the tua mariit Wemen and the Wedo’ and ‘Tam o' Shanter’, but
also in most works by Dunbar and Burns. It is interesting,
incidentally, that in the one poem Childe Harold where Byron
makes the mistake of trying the Spenserian stanza, it is the
Scotsmen Beattie and Thomson he mentions as his models, not
Spenser himself.
I could go on, but I think enough has been said for my
purpose. Born in 1788, Byron was 8 when Burns died, and
Walter Scott 25. His boyhood in Aberdeen, where he lived till
he was 10, plus the fact that his mother was an heiress of that
fiery, proud clan the Gordons, was a harsh and painful
schooling of the man. His scoundrelly English father no sooner
got his hands on Catherine Gordon’s money than he squan¬
dered it, as he had done the fortune of his first wife, and left
her and her son in Aberdeen to dree out a wretched existence
in back-street lodgings, in poverty and neglect. She must have
been, if not heart-broken, deeply embittered, and with her
fiery Gordon temper she seems to have been driven half-mad.
The boy was born with a club foot, and his unsentimental
mother had him subjected to excruciating tortures to try to
straighten it out. These facts, plus the habitual cruelty of

18
 Byron as a Scottish Poet

children to each other, especially the afflicted, must have

made his childhood a season in hell. Geordie Byron was nae
spoilt bairn, at least until he inherited the title and Newstead
Abbey, itself encumbered with debts, in 1798. The surprising
thing, and v ery much to our purpose, is not that he never came
back to live in Scotland, but that his love of things Scottish
and pride in being Scottish remained throughout his life and
he was to boast that he was born half a Scot ‘and bred a whole
one'. It is not only in such a song as ‘Lachin y Gair’ that this
proud assertion of his Gordon blood is to be found, but, as
T. S. Eliot pointed out, in this triumphant stanza which
breaks the turgidness of so much of Childe Harold like a blast
from the bagpipe:

And wild and high the ‘Cameron’s gathering’ rose!

The war-note of Lochiel, which Albyn’s hills
Have heard, and heard, too, have her Saxon foes;—
How in the noon of night that pibroch thrills,
Savage and shrill! But with the breath which fills
Their mountain-pipe, so fill the mountaineers
With the fierce native daring which instils
The stirring memory of a thousand years,
And Ewan's, Donald’s fame rings in each clansman’s ears!

Nevertheless an alienation from Scotland, and from his poor

Scottish childhood, set in after the move south, and this was
encouraged by his education at Harrow and Cambridge. Even
more than most Scots, his feelings about Scotland and its
people were ambivalent, veering between violent love and
equally violent hate, with little in-between. This encouraged a
split between head and heart, an escape into an aloof, dis¬
dainful, intellectually superior persona, from the tormented,
turbulent feelings in his heart, the pain of the hurt sensitive
boy. Byron became, in a sense, an inversion of Jekyll, the
Satanic Hyde his normal self, the gentle Dr. Jekyll only
breaking out here and there. He was an actor who made
himself a suitable role and then played it for all he was worth,
in and out of season and reason. And in his childhood back¬
ground too was Calvinism with its presbyterian egalitarianism,
its doctrine of predestination of the elect and the damned.
Byron of course saw himself as one of the damned and

19
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

deliberately created a suitably Satanic role for himself to play

in life. It was of course pseudo, if only for one good reason: to
be good enough to think oneself damned is to be nearly saved.
Not even T. S. Eliot seems to have noticed that Byron is in fact
a very religious poet, perhaps the most so of his generation,
and that much of the inner torment between pride and
damnation, good and evil which is at the core of his work
stems from his religious background and temperament. The
accompanying feelings of inferiority stemming from his club
foot and miserable childhood merely enhance his conflict as an
aristocratic presbyterian—even if a lapsed presbyterian. He
was no Justified Sinner, who by contrast is genuinely Satanic
in denying his own evil.
Byron’s life and work were immensely influenced also by
two other main factors: his failure to fit in with the English
social scene of his time, and that which finally ensured his
exile from that society, his love for Augusta. His maiden
speech to the House of Lords on behalf of the oppressed
Nottingham weavers and other industrial workers, while
showing the innate goodness of the man, would not endear
him to the Establishment; but that was only a sign of the
essential incompatibility between him and English society. His
rather passive, intersexual nature, with its strong homosexual
side however latent and unexpressed, led him to seek in older
women something of the good, loving mother he had never
known. His relations with Lady Oxford and Lady Melbourne
may be evidenced. But even with his half-sister Augusta there
was an element of the son-mother relationship. If Byron ever
loved anyone not himself, he loved Augusta, truly, wholly, and
exclusively. The incestuous, or semi-incestuous, nature of the
relationship made it a doomed one in that society, indeed
probably would even today. His outraged, prim wife not only
left him but tried to poison Augusta against him, with some
success. The breach with Augusta—their final meeting is
almost as full of pathos as the tale of Paolo and Francesca—
and his exile from England as an Ishmael wanderer on the face
of the earth is to my mind the most important single factor in
Byron’s life. He loved Augusta as Orpheus did Eurvdice, and
the pain of that blighted love is responsible for much of the
ensuing story, including his Don-Juanism. He was marked out

20
 Byron as a Scottish Poet

for destruction. One is reminded again of Walter Scott’s

blighted love ot Williamina: but of course there is as much
contrast as comparison here. And Byron’s treatment of his
daughter by Augusta is a despicable tale, only less so than that
of his treatment of Allegra.
I think we have now said enough about Scottish poetry and
of Byron the man to proceed to our subject: Byron as a
Scottish poet. The first, most obvious thing about his work is
that it is written in English, not Scots or Gaelic (of which he
would have but little anyway). He is an example of Scottish
genius hnding itself as best it may in the alien medium of
English, which he writes like a brilliant foreigner. He is an
example of Edwin Muir’s contention that no Scot can write
anything but second-rate English. Virginia Woolf made a
similar point about Scott’s prose, saying the only time it came
alive w as w hen he wrote in Scots. The first evidence of Byron’s
Scottishness therefore is a negative one, the fact that he did not
write English as a native, is largely insensitive to its subtleties
and poetic potential—compare Keats e.g. Byron was a
brilliant verse-writer, but he used the language as if it were
prose. This is true of his first book Hours of Idleness, in which we
get excellent, correct versification, ‘poetical works’, and no
inspired utterance, with the possible exception of ‘Lachin y
Gair’. But even there the inspiration is of its Scottish subject,
not its English language. These poems mark him a child of the
eighteenth century and of Pope in particular, though here and
there he reads like Tom Moore not at his best. Even in ‘When
I roved a young Highlander’, a poem about his boyhood in
Aberdeenshire, the language is pedestrian, the verse correct
rather than inspired. Even in ‘To my Son’, written in 1807 to
his illegitimate son, only the subject reminds us of Burns.
Throughout the lyrics we get a poet who is trying to live up to
his models, to write Poetry, rather than break new ground
with something new to say. But they have vigour, skill, even
virtuosity and fluency, a rare energy which, indeed, calls for a
more energetic tongue than English: Scots. He rarely equals
the best in English lyric poetry—perhaps only in Hebrew
Melodies (his best and most original book of songs) and in it
perhaps only in ‘She walks in beauty, like the night’. The
fondness for couplets, with him all his life, and for triple verse

21
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

such as anapaestic, in these poems suggests a talent more epic

in nature than lyric, a thronging, sustaining energy rather
than a flair for catching fleeting moods, feelings, thoughts and
such. And epic indeed, as we know, his talent proved, or at
any rate narrative, in the wonderful tales which are his major
work. One lyric stands apart, though: ‘So we’ll go no more
a-roving.’ This is simply a translation of a Scots song attributed
to James V:

We’ll gang nae mair a-rovin,

A-rovin in the nicht
Tho the hert be neer sae lovin
And the muin be still as bricht.

The original has also a beautiful tune. The poems to Augusta,

which we know to spring from the most important experience
of his life, still somehow never seem to break through the
conventional corsetry of his verse into passionate utterance
and poetic fire. He tends to be rather sentimental than
passionate, to take up poses rather than attitudes, to be more
concerned with what he and his imagined readers think
‘poetry’ than with genuine utterance. His rhythm in most of
these short poems is mechanical, lacking a discriminating ear,
his diction is conventional and prosaic. One notes that senti¬
mentality too is a (bad) characteristic of Scottish literature of
the eighteenth century (one thinks of The Man of Feeling for
instance), and that the uncertainty in the English tongue is
characteristic of Scottish poets even today. But the sheer
vitality and energy of Byron’s mind, its hard-headed extro¬
version, its jocularity and satiric edge, and a certain sense of the
colloquial, almost at times slangy, and the occasional religiosity
here and there, are also Scottish traits. If there is one poem
among these minor pieces which foreshadows the later Byron,
and at the same time, shows the unmistakable note of the
Scottish tradition of comic rhyming which he brought over into
English in his later verse, via Pulci and Frere, it is ‘Granta’.
Listen to the echo ol Skinner’s ‘Tullochgorum’ in this stanza:

If David, when his toils were ended,

Had heard these blockheads sing before him,
To us his psalms had ne’er descended,—
In furious mood he would have tore ’em.

22
 Byron as a Scottish Poet

Slightly Scoticized, we get:

Gin Dauvit, when his tvles were endit,

Had hard thir dunnerheids sing afore ’im,
Til us his psaulms had ne’er descendit,—
In tearan rage he wad hae tore ’em.

I invite the reader to try putting other poems, such as ‘Lachin

y Gair’, into light Scots: Awa, ye braw landscapes, ye gairdens
o roses. . . . There you hear the true voice trying to get through
the thinner English.
Byron's first poem of some length is English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers. The title is a bit of a misnomer for, unfortunately
for the Edinburgh reviewers who savaged the boy’s first book
(he was 19), this Bard was a Scot, and he replied not with a
satire, as it is miscalled, but a flyting of his enemies. Satire
attacks the abuse, not the person(s): flyting abuses the
person(s). He might have sub-titled it with Scotland’s motto:
nemo me impune lacessit. That Byron was unconscious of the
flyting tradition he was working in and presented it as
(failed) Popean satire makes no difference to the fact: indeed,
it reveals his problem as a Scot working in English. The
poem rather falls between two stools, the flyting being some¬
what tamed by the English tradition yet too much present to
make good satire in that tradition. Also, Byron was essentially a
chatty, digressive poet (his greatest virtue in Don Juan) and
that is the enemy of sustained intensity. Like a retriever puppy
loose in a field of smells, he couldn’t stick to one scent but
followed up every one he happened on, dashing about all over
the place.
It is as well to consider all his ‘satires’ here. The Hints From
Horace is simply a rehash of that rather humdrum poet’s Arte
Poetica, of little real use to Byron, and the Horatian precepts
were ignored in practice, luckily. The Curse of Minerva is really
another flyting, this time of Lord Elgin for his rape of the
marbles from the Parthenon, the so-called Elgin marbles. The
heroic couplets are mostly in his imitation eighteenth-century
Poetic vein, too high-falutin for the most part. But here and
there it comes to life in passages of flyting, not only of Elgin
but of Scotland for producing him; and even in this he writes
from his Scottish experience:

23
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

And well I know within that bastard land

Hath Wisdom’s goddess never held command;
A barren soil, where Nature’s germs, confined
To stern sterility, can stint the mind;
Whose thistle well betrays the niggard earth,
Emblem of all to whom the land gives birth;
Each genial influence nurtured to resist;
A land of meanness, sophistry, and mist. . . .

So he goes on, lashing the negative side of Scotland and the

Scots as only a native can. So Byron looks at the thistle, and
flytes Elgin for his reiving. But he also goes on to praise the
good side of Scotland, which he sees chiefly in her writers and
soldiers.
The Waltz is not so much a satire as a mock-puritan jeu
d’esprit, poking fun at the sexiest dance of the time and at
Terpsichore, the ‘least vestal’ of the Muses. He has fun
finding rimes for ‘waltz’, including ‘Galt’s’, the Scottish
novelist he met on his travels, salts, assaults, exalts, halts,
and so on. The Blues is more truly satiric, on blue-stocking
women, but again exuberant fun, with here and there crambo-
clink riming of the kind common in Scots poetry' and his hall¬
mark in his later major works: scamp ill/example, shock it/
pocket, Madeira with pleasure/Windermere treasure, but it is
slight. The Vision of Judgment is probably the best of these
pieces, an uproarious flyting of Southey who had written a
sycophantic poem on the death of George the Third with that
title, and in the preface attacking Byron as leader of the
Satanic School. Southey was to Byron a despicable turncoat,
a republican turned monarchist for venial reasons. Parodying
Southey, Byron paints a comic picture of heaven which is
folksy and irreverent and indeed in places reminiscent not
only of Scots poetry but of certain medieval plays such as the
Townley ones. St. Peter’s keys are rusty, the lock dull, the
angels sing out of tune, wind up the sun and moon, curb a
runaway star or two, or a wild colt of a comet—it all bustles
with exuberant energy. But under it is withering scorn and
real outraged sensibility at the social evils of the time, the
carnage o( W aterloo, and much else, including an indictment
of George’s reign. On that score there is one gem which to
me is hall-marked Scottish:

24
 Byron as a Scottish Poet

‘God save the king!’ It is a large economy

In God to save the like. . . .

That surely is the kind of thing we might have heard from

one of the Bodies, or Gourlay himself, in The House with the
Green Shutters. Him—his mither used ti waash oor sterrs! He
can turn the comedy on himself too, but revealing the presby-
terian Calvinist in him:

God help us all! God help me too! I am

God knows, as helpless as the devil can wish,
And not a whit more difficult to damn
Than is to bring to land a late-hook’d fish. . . .

Here, too, much of the fun is in the riming, such as ‘his

perspiration was but ichor/ Or some such other spiritual
liquor’. . . . More than in any previous work we note a quality
I’ve not seen much spoken of re Byron, his sheer intelligence, a
large and vigorous mind, immensely read and alert to society
and all its vices and evils. He missed little and his range of
historical and literary reference is vast and accurate. His was a
very well-furnished mind indeed, and in many tongues. There
is much impassioned, angry social satire in the work as well as
the hilarious flvting of Southey.
Other features of the poem seem to me to have Scottish
affiliations. There is his joke about George being a better farmer
than he was a king, which reminds us of Allan Cunningham’s
satirical song about George the First, ‘The Wee, Wee, German
Lairdie’ ‘delvin in his kail-yairdie, sheughin kail and layin
leeks’. The dialogue between Michael and Satan has some¬
thing of the comedy of ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’, while the
slinking into heaven of George after he had been thrown out
by St. Peter and ‘practicing the hundredth psalm’ reminds me
of the middle Scots poem ‘Kynd Kyttok’: the humour is very
similar.
On the face of it few poems could be less Scottish than Childe
Harold, with the Spenser pastiche of the early cantos, soon to
be dropped, but a deeper look is necessary. I have already
quoted the stanza about the ‘Cameron’s Gathering’, but there
are other features. The poem is the first to give us the Byronic
hero, and he has much of the wandering Scot in his make-up,
something goliardic (and later poems have more of the soldier),

25
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

more at home in Europe than in England, more international

than the insular Englishman. We note too that he is inspired
by mountain scenery and the Rhine and such nature scenes as
touch off unconscious reminiscence of similar Scottish scenes,
the ‘Lachin y Gair’ strain, by wild scenery and wild tribesmen
of the mountains with whom he has a curious empathy: the
Albanian scenes, e.g. if not the Greek. The Byronic hero is
something pf an aristocratic picaro, and the picaresque novels
of the Scot Smollett are to some extent plebeian precursors of
the aristocratic Byronic hero, who culminates in the superb
scamp, Don Juan. The title is possibly an echo of ‘Childe
Rowland to the dark tower came’ but in the form of cheil it is
still common in Scots. The mask of Harold is more and more
dropped as the poem progresses (and it does progress, ending
with Byron having discovered his own voice and proper
subject: his own experience) and by the fourth canto Byron
himself has taken over and we get his best poetry up to that
time in the Italian scene. Again he responds to the mountains
(Appenines) and I can’t help feeling that in certain respects
Italy and Italians have things in common with the Scots: torn
by noble gangsters, passionate and violent natures (the douce
presbyterian is not the true Scot), oppressed and divided,
suffering from internal strife and external government. Is not
the elegiac note in the opening brooding on Venice akin to that
of the lament for ‘the broken image of the lost kingdom' which
Edwin Muir found in the soul of every Scot? Is it not, indeed,
akin to the note that sounds through the great pibrochs of the
Ceol Mor, the lament for the Celtic destiny? This canto was
much admired by Scott, who saw in Byron his own successor
and superior in the verse narrative. Byron himself compares
Scott with Tasso and Ariosto, calling Scott the ‘Ariosto of the
North’ and Ariosto ‘The southern Scott’ who both sang 'ladye-
love and war, romance and knightly worth’. And in the most
famous stanza of the whole canto he pays Scott the compli¬
ment of echoing his line ‘Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung’
{Lay of the Last Minstrel): ‘Without a grave, unknell’d, un¬
coffined, and unknown’ (clxxix).
The first of the verse tales mainly drawn from his eastern
journeys to my mind shows Scott’s specific influence, and
specifically The Lady of the Lake, throughout. Moore and

26
 Byron as a Scottish Poet

Southey had both written of the East of course, but neither of

them had Byron's range of actual experience of it. One
example may suffice to make my point. Scott in The Lady
writes:

The stag at eve had drunk his fill

Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill . . .

and Byron in The Giaour writes:

The sun's last rays are on the hill

And sparkle in the fountain rill . . .

and it’s not that there are few rimes to ‘hill’: it is an echo.
Incidentally, re the problem of the Scot writing in English,
take the Scott couplet over into light Scots:

The stag at een had drunk his fill

Whaur daunsed the muin on Monan’s rill . . .

is that not the true voice of his poetry? The specificity and
accuracy of detailed observation in this and other poems
seems to me a Scots trait, a respect for hard facts almost
scientific, and of course the Byronic hero with his tormented
conscience and deep sense of sin and damnation mixed with
Satanic pride is very much a Calvinist product:
The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes,
Is like the Scorpion girt by fire. . . .
So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,
Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath. . . .

The story of Leila and the Giaour is a screen on which Byron

can project and express something of his own conflict over
Augusta, the doomed love, the damned hero. Similar pro¬
jections and the same type of hero can be seen in Lara, The
Corsair, The Bride of A by do s, The Siege of Corinth and Parisina. In
these tales too, especially the Levantine ones, we note the
sense of fact, the poetry of fact, of history, in his careful notes
giving Turkish words and meanings customs and such,
Moslem lore, words and meanings, and how he himself probed
and questioned people in search of information, a scholarly
interest in truth and knowledge for its own sake as well as for
poetic material, a natural social researcher. One is reminded

27
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

to some extent of the later MacDiarmid and his forays in

science and technical lore. This surely is a Scots trait. It is
interesting that the four 'British' writers who have most
influenced Europe are Shakespeare and three Scots—Scott,
Ossian Macpherson and Byron—the latter indeed is the most
international, least insular of all our poets, and that too is a
Scottish trait. In these tales Byron takes the verse tale of the
‘Ariosto of the North’ a stage further both in technique and
subject matter, and the contradictory nature of his hero-figure,
at once damned as a great sinner and really a fine generous
nature twisted out of true by evil and hypocritical influences
and people around him. We know this figure well in our
literature, but perhaps he is not quite so contradictory' as he
seems: Byron was in fact a generous nature at odds with society:
but also predestinedlv damned in his own Calvinist conscience.
Both traits can co-exist, each in its own sphere of experience.
The religious trait is very much there in some of these tales, in
The Giaour especially with its title meaning infidel, its motifs of
sin, remorse, curse, damnation, Christianity-Moslem conflict:
all stemming from some undeclared titanic conflict in Byron
himself, and that stemming from his Calvinist Scottish back¬
ground. He is not a non-believer, but a confused, a lapsed
believer: but Byron is a heretic, unorthodox, and all the more
intense for that. And this conflict is not purely personal, he
expresses a crisis of faith in the soul of Europe, and it is this that
all Europe recognized. This is his true greatness, recognized by
Goethe and Pushkin among others, something far beyond the
actorry persona he cultivated, the role he invented and played
for himself. In this suffering, tortured hero, many of the best
minds in Europe saw themselves and their times.
This religious conflict in Byron is best evidenced in the
dramas Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari,
Werner, and most importantly Cain and Heaven and Earth. The
typical hero in these is Hamlet bred out of Faust by Byron, a
tormented puritan very close to Milton’s Satan. He never
resolved the conflict and one gets the impression that having
worked it over, given it expression, and probably recognizing
that it was insoluble anyway, he tired of it and sought refuge in
lighter things with a lighter style.
In making my case for Byron as a Scottish poet I do not

28
 Byron as a Scottish Poet

suggest that there are no other cases to be made. The opposite

one, Byron as an English poet, has never been made: it has been
taken as self-evident by all and sundry, hence the lack of under¬
standing ol Byron in official Eng. Lit. I want now to try
something more daring than I have yet done to bring out his
Scottishness:

It's kent, at least it sould be, that thurchoot

Aa countries o the Catholic persuasion.
Some weeks afore Shrove Tuesday comes aboot,
The folk aa tak their fill o recreation,
An buy repentance, ere they grouw devoot,
Houevir hiech their rank, or laich their station,
Wi fiddlin, feastin, dancin, drinkin, maskin,
An ither things that may be had for askin.

The meenit nicht wi murky mantle covers

The lift (an the mair murkily the better),
That time less lo'ed by husbands nor by lovers
Begins, an prudery' flings aside her fetter;
An gaiety on restless tiptae hovers,
Gigglin wi aa the gallants that beset her;
An there are sangs an quavers, roarin, hummin,
Guitars, and aakin ither sort o strummin.

An there are dresses brawlik, but fantastical,

Masks o aa times an nations, Turks an Jews,
An harlequins and clowns, wi feats gymnastical,
Greeks, Romans, Yankee-doodles, an Hindoos;
Aa kin dresses, ’cept the ecclesiastical,
Aa folk that, as their fancies hit, may choose,
But naebody in thir pairts may quiz the clergy,—
Sae tak heed, ye Freethinkers aa, I chairge ye.

I could go on, but let it suffice. Some lost poem by Robert

Burns? Or some later, forgotten poet? These are the opening
stanzas of Beppo, lightly Scoticized, by Byron. And Beppo was
his first serious essay in the stanza and style he borrowed from
Pulci and made his own in Don Juan. Pulci was a fifteenth-
century Florentine who wrote in his own dialect, and Byron
read him first in Frere’s translation, and was struck by the
form and its possibilities to him. In other words, the Scot in
him, having lost its own traditions, found them again, to some

29
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

extent, in this roundabout way. That this is what happened is

proved, in my view, by what Byron brought to the form which is
neither in Pulci nor Frere, a wilder, more elritch freedom and
imagination, exhilaration, comedy, wit, outrageous flyting and
satire, swift twistings and turnings of mood and attitude—in a
word vitality. Here Byron for the time leaves behind his brood¬
ing, damned presbyterian-cum-proud-aristocrat self and finds
his comic common-sense self, the self closest to Burns and
Fergusson. The very theme of the tales is significant: Beppo
returning to find his wife has acquired a lover in his absence and
instead of high tragedy resulting, the three of them sensibly set
up a menage a trois. Byron uses this common-sense to lambast the
hypocritical English high society which came between him and
Augusta and drove him into exile. The Scot takes revenge on
the English. The comic Muse moreover liberates in him his
greatest gift of all, the gift of the gab, of blethering on about
everything and anything that comes into his mind, relevant or
not, without for a moment being dull or uninteresting—
indeed, he is more likely to lose the reader when being strictly
relevant than when being outrageously digressive. This Byron
would have been at home in the howfs and clubs of Edinburgh
in his and earlier time, holding the floor, endlessly entertain¬
ing. He and Burns would have got on famously if they’d met.
What Byron brought to the stanza was the genius of the
Scottish tradition derived from his mother and her people, the
irrepressible Gordons: it is a mainly comic tradition from
which one cannot imagine the tragedies of Shakespeare, or any
other major tragedian, emerging. Even Henrysoun, who gave
us our best narrative tragedies, had essentially a comic vision
of life.
Beppo was written in 1817 and in the following year Byron
began his magnum opus, Don Juan, which occupied much of
his time for the next five years. Of the seventeen stanzas of the
’Dedication’ to Southey, Eliot points out (see above) that they
are unlike any English satire, that they are in fact a flyting in
the Scottish tradition, and he compares the opening stanza
with one from Dunbar’s flyting of Kennedy, and in his view
’one of the most exhilarating pieces of abuse in the language’.
This is so, and Eliot further links both Burns and Dunbar with
Villon, the greatest poet of the three, and by implication

30
 Byron as a Scottish Poet

ranges Byron with them all, but of lower rank, and praises him
for qualities too uncommon in English poetry and for the lack
ol some vices all too common in English. I mention this
because Eliot is not only the poet he is but also our best poetry
critic since Coleridge, and further, being an American, he sees
the English and Scottish scenes unblinkered by racial preju¬
dice, which no Englishman ever does and probably no Scots¬
man either.

Bob Southey! Ye’re a poet—Poet-Laureate,

An representative o aa the race;
Whit tho it’s true ye’ve turned oot a Tory at
Last,—yours has lately been a common case;
An, nou, my Epic Renegade! whit’re ye at?
Wi aa the Lakers, in an oot o place?
A nest o tunefu bodies, ti my eye
Lik ‘fowr and twinty Blackbirds in a pie’ . . .

Once again I have lightly Scoticized, to bring out Eliot’s point.

Further on, he says:

For me that, wanderin wi pedestrian Muses,

Dinna contend wi you on the wingit steed,
I wish yir fate may yield ye, when she chooses,
The fame ye envy, and the skill ye need;
An recollect a poet naethin loses
In giean ti his brithers their fu meed
o merit, and complaint o present days
Is no the certain path ti future praise.

But no more Scoticizing for the present; the point’s made.

Eliot quotes, for comparison, Dunbar’s

Lene larbar, loungeour, baith lowsy in lisk and lunye;

Fy, skolderit skyn, thow art both skyre and skrumple;
For he that rostit Lawrance had thy grunye,
And he that hid Sanct Johnis ene with ane womple
And he that dang Sanct Augustine with ane rumple
Thy foul front had, and he that Bartilmo flaid;
The gallowis gaipis eftir thy graceles gruntill
As thow wald for ane haggeis, hungry gled.

One stands rather in awe at the linguistic loss between

Dunbar and Byron; a time for two minutes silence. Just think
if Byron had inherited the fowth of Scots available to Dunbar!

31
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Southey would have been shrivelled in his skin. Not the least
Scottish trait in him is that he is a ‘guid hater’, and not only
Southey but Wordsworth, Coleridge and others come in for a
deal of flyting here and there throughout Don Juan. In Canto
III, e.g. stanzas xciv to c, he attacks all three, Wordsworth
particularly being flyted for The Excursion and other poems, his
mind denounced as vulgar and unfit to comprehend classical
references' and allusions, ending in the cry:

‘Pedlars,’ and ‘Boats,’ and ‘Waggons!’ Oh! ye shades

Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?
That trash of such sort not alone evades
Contempt. . . .

The essentially flyting nature of this poem and its kind of

comedy is not only to be found in particulars—and we shall
see more of that as we go on—but in general. It is the very
climate of the poem, the very temperament of the poet. Much
has been made of Byron’s aristocratism, and rightly so: but he
is even more of an aristocrat on his mother’s side (related to
royalty) than on his father’s, and a Scottish aristocrat is only
that much more aristocratic. But I reject the received opinion
that Don Juan is, for all his Spanishness, essentially English:
on the contrary, he is well contrasted with the English Johnson
in the Ismail cantos, and the Spanishness allows him to see
England and its life as a foreigner—as a Scot. The poem is
reductive, scornful, with that savage reductive humour of the
presbyterian Scot puncturing all pretensions, hawk-eyed for
the false and high-falutin, an almost philistine attack on idealism
and aesthetic preciousness. In life it is a vice which militates
against artistic achievement in Scotland, progress and eleva¬
tion, but its comic potential is obvious throughout the range of
Scottish literature, even from pre-Reformation times. Byronic
satire has more in common with the satire of Burns, among
others, than with the great English satirists he so much
admired, and this makes Byron unique in the whole range of
English. His nearest affinities in later years are the Ulster Scot,
Louis Macneice and, in such poems as The Georgiad, the South
African Scot Roy Campbell. His savaging of Southey and
Castlereagh among others was too much for English taste, and
his publisher Murray had many an anxious moment. It is

32
 Byron as a Scottish Poet

very' dangerous to tell the truth, and most unsociable.

Byron could be almost as generous in friendliness as vit¬
uperative in enmity, and no less Scottish in that too, as in his
saluting of his old enemy Jeffrey in Canto X (xvl-xvll):

Dear Jeffrey, once my most redoubted foe . . .

. . . Here's a health to ‘Auld Lang Syne!’
I do not know you . . .
. . . but you have acted on the whole
Most nobly, and I own it from my soul.

And when 1 use the phrase of ‘Auld Lang Syne!’

'Tis not addressed to you . . .
... for I would rather take my wine
\\ ith you, than aught (save Scott) in your proud city. . . .
But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred
A whole one, and my heart flies to my head,—

As ‘Auld Lang Syne’ brings Scotland, one and all,

Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills, and clear
streams,
The Dee, the Don, Balgounie’s brig’s black wall
All my boy feelings, all my gentler dreams
Of what I then dreamt . . .
My childhood in this childishness of mine:
I care not—'tis a glimpse of 'Auld Lang Syne\

The theme of being half a Scot is echoed negatively in Canto XI

(xii) when he says ‘half English as I am/ (To my misfortune). .
when he identifies himself with Juan’s astonished reaction to
being ambushed on Shooter’s Hill. In this episode too comes
the remarkable stanza in cant, commented on by Eliot as
‘something new in English verse’ and ‘first-rate’ at that:

Who in a row like Tom could lead the van,

Booze in the ken, or at the spellken hustle?
Who queer a flat? Who (spite of Bow-street’s ban)
On the high toby-spice so flash the muzzle?
Who on a lark, with black-eyed Sal (his blowing). . . .

Eliot further comments: ‘It is not a bit like Crabbe, but it is

rather suggestive of Burns.’ Even more like Villon, but that
merely underlines the point. Byron himself notes that he has
drawn heavily on a popular song for this stanza, in itself a

33
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Burns characteristic. Returning to the ‘Auld Lang Syne’

stanza, the Burns’ song begins ‘Should auld aquentance be
forgot’. . .: there may be some significance in the fact that
Byron more than once rimes ‘aquaintance’ with ‘-entence’.
His dropping of the ‘g’ in many ‘ing’ rimes might be a Scots
trait, but could also be an aristocratic affectation. But when he
rimes ‘hour’ with ‘four’ (as in Canto V, xxx) we can hardly
doubt that he is hearing the Scots ‘fowr’.
Scotland and things Scottish seem rarely to have been far
from his consciousness, as in the footnote to Canto V, liii, in
which he tells the story of the Scot who complained that the
eating of six kittiwakes did nothing to whet his appetite. And
in the same canto (lxxvii) he gives us:

Which girt a slight chemise as white as milk . . .

Which—as we say—or as the Scotch say, whilk . .

while in xcviii he refers to the beauty of Mary, Queen of

Scots. There are several references to Walter Scott, each one
more complimentary than the last, and betraying a genuine
fellow-feeling and admiration, in one case seeing himself as
Scott’s successor as a poet. He is not, therefore, unconscious
of his essential Scottishness, but he does not grasp its impli¬
cations for him as a Scottish genius writing in the foreign
medium of English for a mainly English audience. Or if he
had grasped it, he saw no alternative to trying to do what he
could in English. It was not yet time for a MacDiarmid, and
the folk route taken by Burns was too remote from him. But
Byron was by no means purely lowland Scots, and his high¬
land ancestry gave him no living root in the Gaelic: but that
his poetry has much in common with the Gaelic tradition as
well as the lowland Scots is also evident in his work, not least
in his love of clear description and of rich trappings and
apparel (e.g. Canto III, lxi—lxxvii), delight in the sumptuous
and ornamentation, of splendour, colour, display, the hard
classical light—indeed, his very Hellenism. But I leave that
aspect of his Scottishness to be followed up, I hope, by those
more fortunate in their Gaelic heritage than I am. It is at
least as obviously present in his work as the lowland Scots
affinities, if not more so: and I don’t mean the kind of thing
we get in Canto VI, xiii:

34
 Byron as a Scottish Poet

His Highness gazed upon Gulbeyaz’ charms,

Expecting all the welcome of a lover
(A ‘Highland welcome’ all the world over).

And in any case the Celtic love of finery and lush description is
common enough in the poetry of the Makars and elsewhere in
the literature—some of the romances, e.g.
The flyting note can sometimes be so savage—and not only
about Southey or Castlereagh—as to be almost Swiftian in its
sweeping misanthropy:

Dogs or men!—for I flatter ye in saying

That ye are dogs—your betters far—ye may
Read, or read not, what I am now essaying
To show ye what ye are in every way. . . .
(Canto VII, vii)

But this is rare, and Byron is no misanthrope in truth, and

there is much comedy in his flyting, humour in his satire, and,
typical of the Scots tradition, humanity in his humour.
Medicine comes in for quite a lot of mickey-taking in Scots,
from Henrysoun’s ‘Sum practices of Medycin’ to Burns’s
‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’. Byron too has his tilt at it in Canto
X (xli, xlii).

But here is one prescription out of many:

‘Sodae sulphat. 3vj. 3fs. Mannae optim.
Aq. fervent. J.3 ifs. 3ij. tinct. Sennae
Haustus’ (and here the surgeon came and cupp’d him)

This is the way physicians mend or end us,

Secundum artem\ but although we sneer
In health—when ill, we call them to attend us,
Without the least propensity to jeer. . . .

The joke has its bitter irony for us, for it was almost certainly
the leeching attentions of a quack doctor that cost him his life
at Missolonghi in 1824, a few years after he penned these lines.
Poets indeed often prophesy their own fates. The flyting note
can take a more general target too at times, as in the marvellous
catalogue of guests at the house party in Canto XIII. The
catalogue convention is a favourite one among Scots poets
(think of the one in Dunbar’s ‘Remonstrance to the King’
e.g.), and can give rise to an elritch, abandoned comedy

35
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

outrageously uncontrolled. (I may be allowed, I hope, to

remark here that I wrote my catalogue of passengers on ‘The
Ship’ some twelve years before I came across this canto otDon
Juan: up to then I had only known some earlier, more famous
cantos.) Byron gets almost the whole of the English Establish¬
ment into that fantastic house party, mocks them all, and
richly enjoys doing so, running on from lxviii to xcix: all seen
from outside, as a foreigner (Scottish Byron, Spanish Juan)
might see them, seeing their ridiculousness from a different
national tradition and set of values, as well as part of the
eternal human comedy seen from a position, and values, of no
time or place. I cannot agree with Eliot that the last four
cantos are the best of the whole poem (my taste perhaps is too
picaresque), but I do agree that they are quite unlike any other
verse in English before or since. The reason is that they were
written by a Scot, though in the medium of English, and the
very different temperament transcends the language:

The noble guests, assembled at the Abbey,

Consisted of—we give the sex the pas—
The Duchess of Fitz-Fulke; the Countess Crabby;
The Ladies Scilly, Busey;—Miss Eclat,
Miss Bombazeen, Miss Mackstay, Miss O'Tabby,
And Mrs. Rabbi, the rich banker’s squaw;
Also the honourable Mrs. Sleep,
W ho look’d a white lamb, yet was a black sheep. . . .

Note the riming of squaw with pas and eclat, thus giving the
Scots aw sound a backthrow up the stanza. Such rimings are
common in Byron, but how conscious he was of the Scots ear
they betray I do not know: certainly he does it quite deliber¬
ately for comic effect, as when he rimes soul with foul. But
whether he knows it or not, he is enjoying his Scots lug and the
rich comic tradition in Scots.
Space considerations force me to end here, but indeed no
more is needed. If the reader refers back to my opening
description of the main characteristics of the Scottish tradition
in poetry, I think he will agree that the case for considering
Byron a Scottish poet of genius finding himself as best he may
in the medium of English is made and sustained.

36
2
Byron and the English
Tradition
by PHILIP HOBSBAUM

The old-fashioned kind of literary history would have it that

there were two generations of Romantic poets. Wordsworth,
Coleridge and, notionally, Southey were held to represent an
older generation; Byron, Shelley and Keats some sort of
second wave. ‘Had they lived, Venetia or Umbria might
perchance have been to them, at least for a time, a selected
and common sojourn, a Lake district. . . Readers of Don
Juan may well imagine what Byron would have done with a
fantasy such as that. He had views about his contemporaries
that were decidedly anti-Romantic. So far as the Lake Poets
were concerned he thought Coleridge the best of a bad bunch,
though he voiced a liking for ‘Christabel’—‘I won’t have you
sneer at Christabel’, he writes to John Murray, ‘it is a fine wild
poem.’2 Of Wordsworth he writes ‘There is undoubtedly
much natural talent spilt over “the Excursion” but it is rain
upon rocks where it stands & stagnates—or rain upon sands
where it falls without fertilizing—who can understand him?’3
His references to Shelley as a poet are suspiciously few, and it
is clear that he preferred his friend’s company to his writing.
He does, however, in a letter actually addressed to Shelley
commend The Cenci.4 Of Keats he spoke severely:

Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation—he is always

flogging his Imagination . . . soliciting his own ideas into a state
which is neither poetry nor any thing else. . . ,5

37
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

All this should be quite enough to indicate that, unless he

mistook his purpose, Byron cannot be regarded as part of any
Romantic ‘school’.
However, one must remember that, as Wilson Knight says,
he ‘had only Wordsworth’s shorter poems and The Excursion on
which to base his judgments’.6 Nevertheless, he disliked the
tendency of what he knew so much that it is hard to imagine
him paying more than formal regard to, say, The Prelude. It is
true, however, that he was to alter his opinion of Keats after
the latter’s death and in response to the volume that contained
‘Hyperion’.7 One can only acknowledge the fitness of the
respect which the greatest anti-Romantic of the time had for
this least Romantic of all Keats’s works.
What, then, were Byron’s positives? His preferences do not
show him bearing much relationship to the groupings of the
historians. In 1813 he made a kind of Gradus ad Pamassum of
contemporary poets.8 Scott heads the pyramid; Samuel Rogers,
a figure unread today, is put in the second class; Thomas
Campbell and Thomas Moore in a third; the ‘Lake Poets’,
fourth. Later on Byron almost certainly would have set,
alongside Rogers, Crabbe, in spite of that poet’s ‘coarse and
impracticable subject’.9 This tendency in taste is hardly, in
any conventional sense, Romantic. Indeed, Byron greeted the
word as an unwelcome innovation. He wrote in 1820:

I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great

struggle about what they call ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic,’—terms
which were not subjects of classification in England, at least
when I left it four or five years ago. Some of the English
Scribblers, it is true, abused Pope and Swift, but the reason was
that they themselves did not know how to write either prose or
verse; but nobody thought them worth making a sect of.10

Byron had his positives; however, except for a consistent

regard for Scott, these were not initially invested in writers of
his own time. Right through his career, though, he had the
most unswerving admiration for Pope. There are more than
150 references to Pope and his works in the eleven-volume
edition of Byron’s letters and journals edited by Leslie
Marchand. Fifty of the references occur in a single volume,
that for 1821, when Byron was in the middle of a controversy

38
 Byron and the English Tradition

with \\ illiam Lisle Bowles. Bowles had produced an edition of

Pope carrying a number of deprecatory comments about that
poet’s life as well as his poems. Byron produced two ‘letters’ in
defence. One of them was published as a pamphlet in 1821;
one, presumably as a result of conciliatory gestures on the part
of Bowles," was withheld. It was in the second of these, first
printed in 1835, that Byron gives voice to the most moving of
his encomia. Referring to Pope’s detractors among the (hypo¬
thetical) second wave of Romantic poets, Byron writes:

If they had said nothing of Pope, they might have remained

‘alone with their glory,’ for aught I should have said or thought
about them or their nonsense. But if they interfere with the
'little Nightingale’ of Twickenham, they may find others who
will bear it—/ won’t. Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor
age, can ever diminish my veneration for him, who is the great
moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all
stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my
manhood, perhaps (if allowed to me to attain it), he may be the
consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of Life. Without
canting, and yet without neglecting religion, he has assembled
all that a good and great man can gather together of moral
wisdom cloathed in consummate beauty. ... A thousand years
will roll away before such another can be hoped for in our
literature. But it can want them—he himself is a literature.12

With all this admiration on his part, why is Byron so

radically unlike Pope? He does not resemble him, even when
he essays deliberate imitation. Consider his attempt to adapt
Pope’s lines on the Duke of Buckingham to himself when
recovering from a fever contracted at Patras while travelling in
the Morea:

On a cold room’s floor, within a bed

Of iron, with three coverlids like lead,
A coat and breeches dangling o’er a nook,
Where sits a doctor, and prescribes a puke,
Poor Byron sweats—alas! how changed from him
So plump in feature, and so round in limb,
Grinning and gay in Newstead’s monkish fane
The scene of profanation and Champagne,
Or just as gay with scribblers in a ring
Of twenty hungry authors banqueting,

39
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

No whore to fondle left of half a score,

Yet one thing left him, which he values more,
Here victor of a fever and its friends
Physicians and their art, his lordship mends.13

We must make every allowance for a jeu d’esprit, especially one

undertaken in such dispiriting conditions. Even so, it is obvious
that Byron has little ear for the form in which he is writing.
This piece shows only a vestigial sense of its great original:

In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half-hung,

The floors of plaister and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw.
With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies—alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!
Gallant and gay, in Cliveden’s proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;
Or just as gay, at Council, in a ring
Of mimicked Statesmen and their merry King.
No Wit to flatter, left of all his store!
No Fool to laugh at, which he valued more.
There, Victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame; this lord of useless thousands ends.14

In Byron’s line 1 the scansion is clumsy and the enjambe-

ment to line 2 is a functionless lurch. The rhythm of line 2 is
forced: ‘iron’ is unacceptably disyllabic and this occasions a
stress on ‘with’, emphasizing a weak word and so going against
the sense. Line 5 is cacophonous, and the change of rhythm
after the word ‘sweats’, attempted in direct imitation of Pope,
does not come off. A contrast between this and the original
clearly would operate to the younger poet’s disadvantage.
‘Gallant and gay, in Cliveden’s proud alcove’ dances; ‘Grinning
and gay in Newstead’s monkish fane’ drags!
Of course, Byron’s piece comes early, in 1810. But Pope had
written imitations that were technically flawless at a far earlier
period of his life. The ‘Imitation of Waller' dates from 1701,
when Pope was thirteen, and the ‘Imitation of Spenser’, which
may have been Byron’s favourite,15 is no later than 1709. This
suggests that Byron had less affinity with Pope than Pope had

40
 Byron and the English Tradition

with the poets from whom he learned. But to make the point
adequately we must look at works of greater distinction.
There is, in all of Byron s output, no more effective essay in
couplets than 'A Sketch’. It is a satire upon Mrs. Clermont, a
confidante of the estranged Lady Byron. John Murray reported
that Samuel Rogers and John Hookham Frere—names
important in the Byron circle—'agree that you have produced
nothing better . . ,’.16

Mark how the channels of her yellow blood

Ooze to her skin, and stagnate there to mud,
Cased like the centipede in saffron mail,
Or darker greenness of the scorpion’s scale—
(For drawn from reptiles only may we trace
Congenial colours in that soul or face)—
Look on her features! and behold her mind
As in a mirror of itself defined:
Look on the picture! deem it not o’ercharged—
There is no trait which might not be enlarged. . . .17

Yet, for all its force, the venom rises too near the surface. The
fault is over-explicitness. There is too much end-stopping
here; there are too many rhetorical gestures. If Byron of all
poets was unable to retrieve the characteristically antithetical
couplet of Pope, it had gone irretrievably. This was a time
when metres were growing more fluid, when forms such as the
dramatic monologue were evolving, when the novel was in
rapid development. These couplets of Byron look backward to
a civilization that had ceased to exist. We certainly find in ‘A
Sketch’ hints of Pope’s portrait of Atticus. But the superficial
similarities only point up the profound underlying difference:

A lip of lies; a face formed to conceal,

And, without feeling, mock at all who feel . . . (Byron).18

. . . Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,

And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer . . . (Pope).19

. . . This female dog-star of her little sky,

Where all beneath her influence droop or die . . . (Byron).

. . . Like Cato give his little Senate laws,

And sit attentive to his own applause . . . (Pope).

41
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Byron bludgeons incontinently; Pope pierces the vital organ.

‘What Byron evidently valued in Pope was his ability to
achieve a high degree of rhetorical shapeliness and to make
that shapeliness enforce a coherent development of meaning
writes A. B. England20; but there is more to it than that.
Byron’s own words attest, over and over again, that he
regarded his own time as ‘the age of the decline of English
poetry’,21 and for Byron this decline was more than a matter
of writing verse. In what deserves to be regarded as a central
critical document he wrote to Murray:

With regard to poetry in general I am convinced the more I

think of it—that [Moore] and all of us—Scott—Southey—
Wordsworth—Moore—Campbell—I—are all in the wrong—
one as much as another—that we are upon a wrong revolutionary-
poetical system—or systems—not worth a damn in itself—&
from which none but Rogers and Crabbe are free—and that the
present & next generations will finally be of this opinion.—I am
the more confirmed in this—by having lately gone over some of
our Classics—particularly Pope—whom I tried in this way—I
took Moore’s poems & my own & some others—and went over
them side by side with Pope’s—and I was really astonished (I
ought not to have been so) and mortified—at the ineffable
distance in point of sense—harmony—effect—and even
Imagination Passion—& Invention—between the little Queen
Anne’s Man—& us of the lower Empire—depend upon it [it] is
all Horace then, and Claudian now among us. . . .22

That Byron was not alone in this opinion is shown by a

comment written on the manuscript of his letter by William
Gifford, whose sub-Popian couplets had influenced the younger
poet greatly: ‘There is more good sense, and feeling and
judgment, in this passage, than in any other I ever read, or
Lord Byron wrote.’23 Byron reveals more even than Gifford
seems to see: it is an almost religious yearning for a lost
civilization. Repeatedly Byron avers that he wishes he had
adopted a different plan in his own composition; that if he had
to begin again he would model himself after the example of
Pope.24 But poetry, as Byron came to realize, cannot be
remodelled in this way. If Byron was to fulfil his capabilities, it
would have to be in a mode other than that of Pope.
In any case, the tradition of Pope could never have been

42
 Byron and the English Tradition

consonant with Byron’s highly individual personality. Pope,

for all his oddities of health and (given the time) religion,
wrote from the centre ol his society. Even at his most apparently
negative, Pope implies an agreed code of behaviour:
Oh! could I mount on the Maeonian wing,
Your Arms, your Actions, your Repose to sing!
What seas you traversed! and what fields you fought!
Your Country’s Peace, how oft, how dearly bought!
How barb’rous rage subsided at your word,
And Nations wondered while they dropped the sword!
How, when you nodded, o’er the land and deep,
Peace stole her wing, and wrapt the world in sleep. . . ,25

This is from Pope’s ‘Epistle to Augustus’. The poem is, among

other things, an ironic treatment of George II; in particular, it
refers to his philistinism regarding the arts, together with his
pacific foreign policy—‘Your Country’s Peace, how oft, how
dearly bought. . . !’ The irony is lightly touched: such was
Pope’s sense of hierarchy that he could not avoid, in imitating
Horace’s praise of the genuine Augustus, treating with courtesy
his own, spurious, one.
In contrast to this, Byron’s genius was subversive. He wrote
from a position outside a society that he believed to be rotten.
The portait of his George is a directed jet of contempt at a vul¬
nerable target, and is couched in a deliberately indecorous metre:
In the first year of freedom’s second dawn
Died George the Third; although no tyrant, one
Who shielded tyrants, till each sense withdrawn
Left him nor mental nor external sun:
A better farmer ne’er brush’d dew from lawn,
A worse king never left a realm undone!
He died—but left his subjects still behind,
One half as mad—and t’other no less blind. . . .

He’s dead—and upper earth with him has done;

He’s buried; save the undertaker’s bill,
Or lapidary scrawl, the world is gone
For him, unless he left a German will:
But where’s the proctor who will ask his son?
In whom his qualities are reigning still,
Except that household virtue, most uncommon,
Of constancy to a bad, ugly woman. . . .26

43
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

There is no seeking after rhetorical shapeliness here. The

effect is one of instability, localized in the variegation and
versatility of the rhymes. No one has written better about
Byron’s metric than W. H. Auden:

The stanza divides by rhyme into a group of six lines followed

by a coda of two; the poet can either observe this division and
use the couplet as an epigrammatic comment on the first part,
or he can take seven lines for his theme and use the final one
as a punch line.27

What are functionless enjambements and forced rhymes in

Byron’s earlier sets of couplets become special effects in the
ottava rima. As Auden further remarks, the form in Byron’s
hands provided opportunities ‘for the interpolated comment
and conversational aside’.28 The reader has to be continually
on the lookout for tricks and turns and unexpected let-downs:

‘God save the king!’ It is a large economy

In God to save the like. . . ,29

‘Economy’ is audacious enough in itself—a pun on the word

‘save’—and it is driven home by a series of unforeseeable
rhyme-words. ‘Economy’ is made to rhyme, outrageously,
with ‘one am I’ and ‘alone am I’. It is all part of a debunking
process, but the objects of Byron’s ironic attention are cate¬
chized from no secure standpoint. It is not for him to reform;
he observes, and he mocks at what he observes. This is the
difference between Pope and Byron. Pope can be sublime:

Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see

Men not afraid of God, afraid of me. . . .30

Byron, on the other hand, is audacious. Of ‘the crowning

carnage, Waterloo’ he says:

This by the way; ’ tis not mine to record

What angels shrink from. . . ,31

Byron s world has no centre: ‘The path is through perplexing

ways’, ‘as the veering wind shifts, shift our sails’.32 If there is a
norm, it is specific and individual: the impulse of comradeship
between man and man, the unexpected shaft of pity that
causes the strong to form an alliance with the weak. There is
nothing quantifiable; nothing that adds up to a philosophy.

44
 Byron and the English Tradition

The mode of verse seen in Don Juan and The Vision ofJudgment
had fluctuated in and out of English literature for some time,
though Byron had the privilege of manipulating it to stage
centre. It is a mode naturalized in English; but its origins, use¬
fully anatomized by R. D. Waller, are Italian.33 There flourished
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a kind of burlesque
poetry related to such epics as La Chanson de Roland. In the Mor-
gante Maggiore (ante 1487), for example, Charlemagne becomes a
foil and Roland (or Orlando) a pawn. The author, Luigi Pulci,
plays for comedy: most of the activity is ascribed to the uncon¬
ventional figure of Rinaldo, and there is a good deal of digression.
The chief imitators of Pulci in the sixteenth century were
Boiardo, Ariosto and Berni. Ariosto’s poem, Orlando Furioso
(1532)—Roland run mad—proved intermittently influential
in English. The Elizabethan version by Sir John Harington is a
masterpiece in its own right. It is full of witty, irreverent and
irrelevant buffoonery. To the unhistorical eye, indeed, it would
seem unmistakably Bvronic:

For at the chink was plainly to be seen

A chamber hanged with fair and rich array
Where none might come but such as trusty been.
The Princess here in part doth spend the day,
And here he saw a Dwarf embrace the Queen
And strive awhile, and, after homely play,
His skill was such that ere they went asunder
The Dwarf was got aloft, and she lay under. . . ,34

It is hard to believe that, with his early interest in Ariosto,35

Byron had never come across Harington, Ariosto’s greatest
English exponent. In her helpful account of Byron’s reading,
Elizabeth French Boyd points out that as a boy he was given
the run of well-stocked libraries at Dulwich, Harrow and
Burgage Manor.36 The vein of mocking irreverence here—
‘Much did the King this foul prospect mislike’37—would have
been congenial to Byron, even if he could not, at that stage,
effectively learn from it.
One finds the mode surfacing at periods of political turmoil,
especially those bearing a degree of disaffection from France.
Marius Bewley38 has drawn our attention to sundry recrud¬
escences in the seventeenth century:

45
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Favours are oft, unhappily, by chance

Bestowed: for, 'mongst those courtiers that did wear
The Prince’s points, a Marquess was of France,
Who for some heinous fact he had done there,
Hanged in effigy, fled from France for fear,
And so for refuge to Carleon came,
Monsieur Marquis Jean Foutre was his name. . . ,39

. . . Thus was he gulled, as once a King of France

Paid a French monsieur for a prancing steed—
Gave him a purse whose richness did enhance
The enclosed gem, supposed a noble meed.
But when for golden mountains he did gape,
He oped the purse, and only found a rape. . . .40

The work of Sir Francis Kynaston and Nathaniel Whiting, from

whom these quotations are taken, forms a kind of assault upon
the expectations of the reader. There are characters with far¬
fetched names; there are ridiculous rhymes; there are absurd
situations. In Albino andBellama, from which the second quota¬
tion comes, a monk disguises himself as a nun and insinuates
himself into a convent where he impregnates all the inmates!
This would have been a plot to engage the future author of the
oda episode in Don Juan, and here again it is quite possible that
Byron had come across the work of some, at least, of his
seventeenth-century predecessors. There was Edward Fairfax,
whose translation (1604) of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata w as in
Byron’s own library,41 and Sir William D’Avenant, whose
Gondibert (1651) Byron would have come across in connection
with his reading of Drvden and who, in any case, was widely
excerpted. There was also William Chamberlayne whose
Pharonmda (1659) was praised and excerpted in Southey’s
‘Vision of the Maid of Orleans’ (1799) and which is further
represented in Campbell’s Specimens of the British Poets (1819)—
also in Byron’s library.42 There is, moreover, a close resemblance
between Book III Canto III of this last and the Gulbeyaz
episode of Don Juan, though both may have had a common
source in Firenzuole, whose works Byron acquired in Italy.43
An eighteenth-century forerunner may well be a singular poem
by John Gay, ‘Mr Pope’s Welcome from Greece’, in which John
Underhill, following W. J. Courthope, found echoes of Ariosto.44

46
 Byron and the English Tradition

1 he work of poets such as these shows a remarkable resem¬

blance in technique and tone to that of a group of litterateurs
writing in the early nineteenth century. It is with this group,
more than with Pope and much more than with the second wave
of Romantics, that Byron should be associated. The litterateurs
in question shared a desire to bring before the public the Italian
romances which had surfaced in the English tradition so far
only intermittently. John Herman Merivale, William Stewart
Rose and John Hookham Frere, among others, used regularly
to visit Murray in his parlour and advise him on his publications.
Not altogether flatteringly, when the publication of various
addenda to his letters on Pope was being discussed, Byron
referred to this group as Murray’s Utican Senate!45
John Herman Merivale seems to have been a key figure.
Byron may have made his acquaintance as early as 1805, when
he was a boy at Harrow and Merivale was a young man
courting the headmaster’s daughter. The acquaintance was
consolidated by the fact that the headmaster’s son, Henry
Drury, in subsequent years became not only Merivale’s
brother-in-law but Byron’s close friend. We do not know how
much of his research into Italian poetry Merivale imparted in
conversation but, between May 1806 and June 1807, he wrote
about Pulci in the influential Monthly Magazine and illustrated
his articles with copious extracts:
Morgante had a rustic palace made
Of sticks, earth, leaves, in his own barbarous way,
And here at ease his mighty members laid,
Securely guarded, at the close of day.
Orlando knocked; the giant, sore dismayed,
Waked from the heavy sleep in which he lay;
And, when he opened, like a thing astound,
Scared by a frightful dream, he gazed around.

He thought a furious serpent had assailed him;

And, when to Mahound for relief he prayed,
That nought his Pagan deity availed him;
But, when Christ’s holy name he called for aid,
Straightway the serpent’s wonted fury failed him.
Waked from this dream, towards the door he made—
‘Who knocks?’ with rough and grumbling voice he cried.
‘Soon shalt thou know—’ the Paladin replied. . . 46

47
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Byron never wavered in his regard for Merivale. He praised

the poem Merivale wrote in imitation of Pulci, Orlando in
Roncesvalles,47 and, according to Jerome McGann,48 this poem
may have encouraged Byron’s first attempt at ottava nma.
Certainly Byron repeatedly invoked Merivale as an authority
on Italian poetry49; along with, that is, William Stewart Rose.
William Stewart Rose was, in his own way, as remarkable a
figure as Merivale. He published his translation of Giambattista
Casti, an eighteenth-century straggler after the great Floren¬
tines, in 1819. Byron claimed to have read Casti in the original.
Nevertheless, one can be reasonably certain that Rose helped
him not only with Pulci, whom he did not read till later,51 but
with his development of what was, for him, a new style.
Indeed, so close was the intellectual community of the two
men that Frere, well acquainted with them both, at first took
Rose to be the author of Byron’s first publication in his new
mode.52 One can see why Frere was of this opinion if one looks
at Rose’s dedication of his version of Casti to Ugo Foscolo, yet
another of this circle who had attracted Byron’s regard.53
Foscolo appears to have been bilingual in Italian and English
and therefore especially capable of understanding Rose's
endeavour:

Dear Foscolo, to thee my dedication’s

Addressed with reason. Who like thee is able
To judge betwixt the theme and variations?
To whom so well can I inscribe my fable,
As thee? since I, upon good proof may sing thee
Doctum sermones utriusque linguae,54

The quotation from Horace55 may imply an ethos more ideal

than the one actually inhabited by these young poets and
scholars. However, they certainly operated as an intellectual
community, and, under their influence, Byron came to see his
need for a change of style. ‘I certainly am a devil of a
mannerist—& must leave off.’56 He had completed Canto IV
of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and, as Leslie Marchand remarks,
‘he was growing tired of that vein.’57 During this period,
however, he was much in the company of Rose,58 and it was,
according to Jerome McGann,59 Rose who gave Byron Frere’s
Whistlecraft. I he effect was galvanic. T have since written a

48
 Byron and the English Tradition

poem (of 84 octave stanzas) humourous, in or after the excellent

manner of Mr Whistlecraft (whom I take to be Frere . . ,).’60
The poem was Beppo, and it was Frere of all these poets
favouring the Italians who most influenced Byron’s work:
Princes protecting Sciences and Art
I've often seen, in copper-plate and print;
I never saw them elsewhere, for my part,
And therefore I conclude there’s nothing in’t;
But every body knows the Regent’s heart;
I trust he won't reject a well-meant hint;
Each board to have twelve members, with a seat
To bring them in per ann. five hundred neat:—

From Princes I descend to the Nobility:

In former times all persons of high stations,
Lords, Baronets, and Persons of gentility,
Paid twenty guineas for the dedications:
This practice was attended with utility;
The patrons lived to future generations,
I he poets lived by their industrious earning,—
So men alive and dead could live by Learning. . . .

. . . Lastly, the common people I beseech—

Dear People! if you think my verses clever,
Preserve with care your noble Parts of speech,
And take it as a maxim to endeavour
To talk as your good mothers used to teach,
And then these lines of mine may last for ever;
And don’t confound the image of the nation
With long-tailed words in osity and ation. . . .6I

This would seem startling to a twentieth-century reader who

had never come across ‘Whistlecraft’ before. Superficially it is
not easy to tell Frere’s work from that of Byron. Both exhibit an
extent of wild rhyming, of direct address to the reader, of
far-fetched digression.62 However, Byron is marked apart by
the superior energy of his portraiture. It is the difference between
But every body knows the Regent’s heart;
I hope he won’t reject a well-meant hint . . ,63
and
Gaunt Famine never shall approach the throne.
Though Ireland starve, great George weighs twenty stone .. ,63

49
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Frere is willing to wound, but Byron is not afraid to strike. Far

more than Frere, Byron takes audacious risks with tone. He
draws upon Romantic attitudes only to deflate them:

But in his native stream, the Guadalquivir,

Juan to lave his youthful limbs was wont;
And having learned to swim in that sweet river,
Had often turn’d the art to some account:
A better swimmer you could scarce see ever,
He could, perhaps, have pass’d the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did. . . .6S

The romance of words like ‘Guadalquivir’ and phrases like ‘to

lave his youthful limbs’ is brought down into a real world of
men. It is all quite distinct from the legendary subject-matter
favoured by Frere. Leander seems no longer a remote hero but
a contemporary of Byron and his swimming acquaintance, the
Lieutenant of Marines.66 The effect is not only to familiarize
the exotic; it is to inform a measure of the exotic into the
familiar.
Especially characteristic of Byron is his control of the anti¬
climax. Sometimes the effect is sudden; sometimes it works in
successive stages of deflation. But the result is always to
eradicate convention from the verse:

‘Go, little book, from this my solitude!

I cast thee on the waters, go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good.
The world will find thee after many days.’
When Southey’s read, and Wordsworth understood,
I can’t help putting in my claim to praise—
The four first rhymes are Southey’s, every line:
For God’s sake, reader! take them not for mine!67

We will find nothing so immediate in Frere; nor in Merivale

and Rose, either. This seems to be an extension of Byron’s own
speaking voice, in so far as it can be inferred from reports of his
conversation and from his own remarkable letters:

Southey should have been a parish-clerk, and Wordsworth a

man-midwife—both in darkness. I doubt if either of them ever
got drunk. . . ,68

50
 Byron and the English Tradition

Byron projects something akin to this tone of voice in his

poetry and so seems to get very close to the reader. Personal
interpolation becomes, paradoxically, part of the narrative; so
do highly autobiographical statements:

No more—no more—Oh! never more on me

The freshness of the heart can fall like dew . . ,69

and direct appeals:

They accuse me—Me—the present writer of

The present poem—of—I know not what. . . ,70

This gives the verse a flavour which acts as a connective

through all the fluctuations of tone and contrasts of linguistic
register. It is not altogether true to say that Rose and Frere,
and their predecessors, outraged decorum; their importance is
that they showed Byron a way to turn his outrage into poetry.
He could not learn directly from Pulci. His own translation of
that poet, compared with that of Merivale, is painstaking and
lifeless—as Ronald Bottrall said.71 The fact that Byron never
lost faith in his effort72 does not affect one’s feeling that Byron
required an English intermediary between himself and the
Italians in order to evolve his greatest poetic comedy. His best
work relates to Rose and Frere rather than to Casti and Pulci.
However, times were changing. Byron was not only the
greatest exponent of the subversive mode in verse; he was the
last. A greater degree of flexibility even than he could encom¬
pass was on the way; but it was to transpire in the form not of
verse but of prose. Don Juan’s true successor is Martin Chuzzle-
wit\ especially the American chapters, with their preposterously
named characters and scalding ironies. Indeed, America was a
country to which Byron might well, had Don Juan continued,
have sent his hero; he always maintained a high regard for the
new republic. ‘America is a Model of force and freedom &
moderation. . . .’ ‘I would rather have a nod from an Ameri¬
can, than a snuff-box from an emperor. . . .’ ‘To be the first
man—not the Dictator—not the Sylla, but the Washington or
the Aristides—the leader in talent and truth—is next to the
Divinity. . . !’73 In real life Byron himself seriously contem¬
plated going to Venezuela.74 There is no reason why Don Juan
could not have explored territory further flung even than that.

51
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Its scheme was comprehensive: ‘since you want length you

shall have enough of Juan for I’ll make 50 cantos...’; ‘I
meant to have made him a Cavalier Servente in Italy and a
cause for a divorce in England—and a Sentimental “Werther-
faced” man in Germany—so as to show the different ridicules
of the society in each of those countries . . ‘there shall be
such a poem—as has not been since Ariosto—in length—in
satire—in imagery—and in what I please. . . .’7S
The very incompleteness of Don Juan as it stands seems to be
an essential trait in its structure. ‘Byron’s logic asserts that all
systems and forms being, by their nature, inadequate to life,
the poet can hope to describe things as they are only by being
unsystematic’, writes Darrell Sheraw.76 He is right: the poem
breaks off in mid-episode; but can we picture Don Juan with a
foreseeable conclusion? Any such outcome would have been
incongruous with the general air of happy improvisation:
the fact is that I have nothing plann’d,
Unless it were to be a moment merry. . . .77

There is a pattern, but it cannot be typified in ordinary

narrative terms; not even those of the picaresque novel. For
example, the theme of people not finding w hat they are look¬
ing for is voiced early in the poem:
Under the bed they search’d, and there they found—
No matter what—it was not that they sought. . . ,78

It surfaces intermittently through the discursive structure—

which ends, fortuitously and yet characteristically, with that
same gesture:
he had made at first a silly blunder,
And that in his confusion he had caught
Only the wall, instead of what he sought.79

Don Juan would have found nothing more satisfactory' if his

author had lived to be 50 and created him Governor of
Massachusetts. Don Juan is not a development but an accumu¬
lation. Its author is neither Romantic prophet nor Classical
spokesman: either stance would have committed him to being
a Master of Ceremonies. As it was, Byron found his role within
the English tradition as its Lord of Misrule.

52
 Byron and the English Tradition

NOTES

1. Emile Legouis, Louis Cazamian and Raymond Las Vergnas, A History of

English Literature (1926-27, rev. ed. London, 1964), Book V, Chapters 1
and 4; esp. p. 1041.
2. Byron, Letter to John Murray, 30 September 1816, but see also letter to
James Hogg, 24 March 1814. References to Byron’s letters, unless
otherwise stated, are based on Leslie A. Marchand’s edition of the
Letters and Journals (London, 1973-82).
3. Byron, Letter to Leigh Hunt, 30 October 1815.
4. Byron, Letter to P. B. Shelley, 26 April 1821.
5. Byron, Letter to Murray, 9 November 1820.
6. G. Wilson Knight, Laureate of Peace: On the Genius of Alexander Pope
(London, 1954), p. 122.
7. Byron, Note to 'Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s
Magazine' (1820) dated 12 November 1821, reprinted in R. E. Prothero,
Byron’s Letters and Journals (London, 1898-1904), Vol. IV, pp. 491-92.
8. Byron, Journal, 24 November 1813.
9. Letter to Murray, 15 September 1817.
10. Byron, Dedication (to Goethe) of Marino Faliero (14 October 1820).
Reprinted in Prothero, op. cit., Vol. V. See p. 104.
11. Byron, Letter to Lord Kinnaird, 20 November 1821.
12. Byron, ‘Observations upon “Observations”. A Second Letter to John
Murray, Esq., on the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and
Writings of Pope' (25 March 1821; not published until 1835). Reprinted
in Prothero, op. cit., Vol. V. See p. 590. Quotations within this
quotation are, respectively, from ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at
Corunna’ by Charles Wolfe and from the Life of Pope (1769) by Owen
Ruffhead.
13. Byron, Letter to John Cam Hobhouse, 25 September 1810.
14. Pope, Moral Essays, Epistle III, to Allen, Lord Bathurst, 11. 299-314.
Text of this and other quotations from Pope based on that given in the
Twickenham Edition, ed. John Butt (London, 1963).
15. Byron, Letter to the Earl of Clare, 20 August 1807.
16. Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and his Friends: Memoirs and Correspondence of the
Late John Murray (London, 1981), quoted by Elizabeth French Boyd,
Byron’s ‘Don Juan’: A Critical Study (London, 1945), p. 10.
17. Bvron, ‘A Sketch’; see Letter to Murray, 30 March 1816. The text of this
and of future quotations from Byron’s poems with the exception of Don
Juan is based on that which appears in the relevant volume of the Oxford
Edition of Standard Authors.
18. This, together with the subsequent quotation from Byron, is from ‘A
Sketch’.
19. This, together with the subsequent quotation from Pope, is from ‘An
Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’.
20. A. B. England, Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ and Eighteenth Century Literature (Lewis-
burg and London, 1975), p. 50.

53
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme
21. Byron, ‘Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Magazine’,
reprinted in Prothero, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 485.
22. Byron, Letter to Murray, 15 September 1817.
23. See Prothero, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 169n.
24. Byron, ‘Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Magazine’,
reprinted in Prothero, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 488; letter to Murray,
15 September 1817.
25. Pope, The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated: ‘To
Augustus’, 11. 394—401.
26. Byron, The Vision of Judgment (1821), stanzas viii, xii.
27. W. H. Auden, ‘Don Juan’, The Dyer’s Hand (London, 1963), p. 399.
28. Ibid., p. 398.
29. Byron, The Vision of Judgment, stanza xiii.
30. Pope, Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II: 11. 208-9.
31. Byron, The Vision of Judgment, stanza vi.
32. Byron, Don Juan, Canto I, cxxxiii; Canto II, iv. The text of this and of
other quotations from Don Juan is based upon the edition by T. G. Steffan,
E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1973).
33. R. D. Waller, Introduction to J. H. Frere’s The Monks and the Giants
(London, 1926).
34. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, translated by Sir John Harington, Book XXVIII.
Text based on that in my anthology, Ten Elizabethan Poets (London and
Harlow, 1969) and adapted from Graham Hough’s edition (London,
1963).
35. Byron, Letter to John M. B. Pigot, 9 August 1806; and see Elizabeth
French Boyd, op. cit., p. 171 n.
36. Elizabeth French Boyd, op. cit., pp. 84ff.
37. As note 34.
38. Marius Bewley, ‘The Colloquial Mode of Byron’, Scrutiny, Vol. XVI
(1949).
39. Sir Francis Kvnaston, Leoline and Sydanis (1642), stanza xxiv; text based
on Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, Vol. II, ed. George Saintsbury
(Oxford, 1906).
40. Nathaniel Whiting, Albino and Bellama (1638), 11. 2296-301; text based
on Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. G. Saintsburv as above, Vol. III.
41. Elizabeth French Boyd, op. cit., p. 101.
42. Ibid., p. 100.
43. Ibid., p. 127.
44. Poems of John Gay, ed. John Underhill (London and New York, 1893),
Vol. 1, p. 290.
45. Byron, Letters to Murray, 26 February and 12 March 1821; and see
Elizabeth French Boyd, op. cit., p. 6.
46. John Herman Merivale, translated extracts from Morgante Maggiore by
Luigi Pulci. Text as in The Monthly Magazine, May 1806-June 1807.
47. Byron, Letter to John Herman Merivale, January 1814; and see letters
to Francis Hodgson, 29 June 1811 and 3 January 1813.
48. Jerome J. McGann, ‘Don Juan’ in Context (London, 1976), p. 53.
49. See, for example, Byron’s letters to Merivale, January 1814; to Murray,

54
 Byron and the English Tradition
10 April and 2 September 1814, and 5 March 1820; and Byron’s
Journal, 6 March 1814.
50. Byron, Letter to Pryse Gordon, June 1816.
51. Byron, Letters to Murray, 25 March and 12 April 1818; note on one of'
Rose’s poems, May 1818; letters to John Cam Hobhouse, 3 March,
25 March and 11 November 1818; and see T. G. Steffen, Byron’s ‘Don
Juan’: The Making of a Masterpiece (Austin, Texas, 1957), p. 8n.
52. Jerome J. McGann, op. cit., p. 54.
53. Byron, Preface to Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818); letter to
Murray, 8 October 1820.
54. \\ illiam Stewart Rose, The Court and Parliament of Beasts, freely translated
from the ‘Animali Parlante’ of Casti (1819).
55. Horace, Odes, III, viii—'versed in the lore of either tongue’, as the Loeb
edition has it; and see Jerome J. McGann, op. cit., Chapter Five.
56. Byron, Letter to Murray, 9 March 1817.
57. Leslie A. Marchand, Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction (London,
1965), pp. 145-46.
58. Byron, Letter to Murray, 4 September 1817; to Samuel Rogers,
3 March 1818; to Murray, 25 March 1818; to Hobhouse, 25 March
1818.
59. Jerome J. McGann, op. cit., p. 54; and see Byron’s letter to Murray,
25 March 1818.
60. Byron, Letter to Murray, 17 September 1817; and see R. D. Waller, op.
cit.,—‘They angled in the same waters. . .’.
61. William and Robert Whistlecraft (i.e., John Hookham Frere), The
Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work (1817): Proem. Text
based upon the edition by R. D. Waller, entitled The Monks and the Giants
(London, 1926).
62. M. K. Joseph makes an interesting attempt to quantify the various
proportions of digressiveness in each episode, in his Byron the Poet
(London, 1964), pp. 198-99.
63. As note 61.
64. Byron, Don Juan, Canto VIII, cxxvi; and see Canto IX, xxxix; Canto
XI, lxxviii; etc. For text see note 32.
65. Byron, Don Juan, Canto II, cv.
66. Byron, Letter to Murray, 21 February 1821.
67. Byron, Don Juan, Canto I, ccxxii.
68. Byron, Letter to James Hogg, 24 March 1814.
69. Byron, Don Juan, Canto I, ccxiv.
70. Ibid., Canto VII, iii.
71. Ronald Bottrall, ‘Byron and the Colloquial Tradition in English Poetry’,
Criterion, Vol. XVIII (1939).
72. Letter to Thomas Moore, 24 May 1820; to Hobhouse, 8 June 1820;
letters to Murray, 7 August and 28 September 1820, and 19 January,
1 March and 12 September 1821; letter to Thomas Moore, 4 March
1822; to Douglas Kinnaird, 8 March 1823.
73. Byron, Letter to Hobhouse, 12 October 1821; to Moore, 8 June 1822;
Journal, 23 November 1813. My attention was originally drawn to this

55
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme
possibility by my wife, Rosemary; to whom I owe other, less readily
assignable, perceptions in this paper.
74. Byron, Letter to Hobhouse, 3 October 1819.
75. Letters to Murray, 6 April 1819, and 16 February 1821; to Douglas
Kinnaird, 31 March 1823.
76. C. Darrell Sheraw, 1Don Juan. Byron as Un-Augustan Satirist’, Satire
News Letter, Vol. X (1973).
77. Byron, Don Juan, Canto IV, v.
78. Ibid., Canto I, cxliv.
79. Ibid., Canto XVI, cxxii.

56
3
Voice, Tone, and
Transition in Don Juan
by EDWIN MORGAN

‘Byron is a perfect chameleon’, concluded his friend Lady

Blessington, who recorded the gist of his frank conversations
with her. She thought he had ‘no fixed principles’ of conduct or
of belief, even if he had ruling sentiments (love ofliberty, hatred
of cant). If the chameleon is an animal that changes colour for
self-protective purposes, is this how we are to see Byron?
Certainly he gave no single constant impression. In company,
he could be constrained and withdrawn, or warm and loqua¬
cious, depending on the size and congeniality of the group. Both
reactions seem too spontaneous to be consciously self-protective,
and their main consequence was to increase the interest and
curiosity felt by observers of his unpredictable, tantalizing
personality. If his silence concealed nothing more than diffi¬
dence and being ill at ease, it may be that his loquacity con¬
cealed more. He loved wit and repartee, and in the right mood
he could throw out a chain of ideas of extraordinary richness,
linked by lightning connections scarcely sensed by the hearer;
but he disliked sustained argument, and when Leigh Hunt once
tried to persuade him that good argument needed logic and
reason, his answer was: ‘For my part, it is the last speaker that
convinces me.’ This eternal impressionability, the lack of
patience with reason, the search for unknown links-forward
rather than known links-back, is certainly zestful and creative,
and one of the keys to his poetic method, but it may at the same

57
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

time be self-protective in a man who is loath to expose a central

jostle of unresolved beliefs and counter-beliefs to the hard clear
light that step-by-step argument would place them in. He is
quite capable of making a virtue of contingency:
The great object of life is Sensation—to feel that we exist—even
though in pain—it is this ‘craving void’ which drives us to
Gaming—to Battle—to Travel—1to intemperate but keenly felt
pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the
agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.
(Letter to Annabella Milbanke, 6 September 1813)

This is the philosophy of a man of moods, who if often bored or

abstracted enjoys the contrast that a sudden excitement
brings. Those who expect to find the languid humours of a
world-weary Romantic may be disconcerted by bursts of brisk
no-nonsense wit; others, led to expect the wit, may find a dark
immovable object they cannot even probe. John Galt, travelling
on the same boat as Byron from Gibraltar to Malta in 1809,
noted his general waywardness, which he thought partly a
pose, but was struck more persuasively by a deeper contrast
between the sociable ‘day’ Byron and the abstracted solitary
‘night’ Byron, the latter being like ‘a man forbid’, sitting on a
rail in silence and staring into the darkness. When we say that
Byron was temperamental and moody, then, we have many
witnesses, not least himself. But the contrasts are not only
between sensation and sensation, as the letter to Annabella
might suggest, or between sensation and the lack of it, as Hunt
observed. Sensation, feeling, craving, pursuit, agitation—to
use the words of the letter—are not all in all. A different
contrast emerges if one compares passages from two other
letters. Writing to Thomas Moore on 2 March 1815, Byron is
the very image of a man in a down mood:
I am in such a state of sameness and stagnation, and so totally
occupied in consuming the fruits—and sauntering—and play¬
ing dull games at cards—and yawning—and trying to read old
Annual Registers and the daily papers—and gathering shells
on the shore—and watching the growth of stunted gooseberry
bushes in the garden—that I have neither time nor sense to say
more than
Yours ever,
B.

58
 Voice, Tone, and Transition in ‘Don Juan’

Yet the sharpest contrast to that passage comes in another

letter to the same correspondent, five years later, from Ravenna
(9 December 1820), and is not a report of the delights of some
elated sensation or excitement but is concerned with right
action, with duty. The local garrison commander is shot near
Byron’s house, and lies dying in the street. A crowd gathers,
makes a great noise, but does nothing to help; there is even a
doctor, who conceals the fact that he is one. Byron reacts
instantly: disgusted, pragmatic, British, taking charge.

As nobody could, or would, do any thing but howl and pray,

and as no one would stir a finger to move him, for fear of
consequences, I lost my patience—made my servant and a
couple of the mob take up the body—sent off two soldiers to the
guard—despatched Diego to the Cardinal with the news, and
had the commandant carried upstairs into my own quarter. But
it was too late, he was gone—not at all disfigured—bled
inwardly—not above an ounce or two came out. . . . You are to
know that, if I had not had the body moved, they would have
left him there till morning in the street for fear of consequences.
I would not choose to let even a dog die in such a manner,
without succour:—and, as for consequences, I care for none in
a duty.

This admirable practicality—and the splendid last phrase is

set down with absolutely no self-consciousness—has the effect
of almost, though possibly not quite, negating his remarks
about ‘sensation’. The incident was exciting, and in another
part of the letter he describes, almost like a novelist, how the
man ‘only said, “O Dio!” and “Gesu!” two or three times’
before he died. But mainly what he illustrates is the inculca¬
tion of certain moral ideas and habits of action which occupy
an area of constancy, of reliability, in a character otherwise
fluid and variable. The imprint of this, too, is seen in his
poetry.
Byron in company; in the streets; in correspondence. But
what of Byron in his room, writing his private journals—has
he any helpful secrets? Not secrets, perhaps, but some instruc¬
tive examples of association and transition, caught on the wing
in a more purely unpremeditated way than in the famous
digressions of Don Juan. Two are worth noting, and both are
called ‘strange’. The shorter one (Ravenna Journal, 2 February

59
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

1821) is a tribute to the sudden effect of music. After rumi¬

nating on his bad habit of waking too early in the morning, in
a state of either despondency, or thirst, or anger, and wonder¬
ing whether all this is hypochondria or a case of premature
senility, he writes, without a break:

Oh! there is an organ playing in the street—a waltz, too! I must

leave off to listen. They are playing a waltz which I have heard
ten thousand times at the balls in London, between 1812 and
1815. Music is a strange thing.

The music, utterly accidental as it is, makes him stop what he

is doing, and yet seems to carry forward, as if in another
dimension, his thoughts of time passing and place changing.
In a longer passage (Ravenna Journal, 12 January 1821), he is
kept indoors by bad weather, reading letters from England
and a collection of English poetry. Suddenly there is a change
of direction, as his reading of the song ‘Sabrina fair’ in
Milton’s Comus sets off an unforeseen train of reminiscences
about a dead friend of his youth, Edward Noel Long.

How strange are my thoughts!—The reading of the song in

Milton, ‘Sabrina fair’ has brought back upon me—I know not
how or why—the happiest, perhaps, days of my life (always
excepting, here and there, a Harrow holiday in the two latter
summers of my stay there) when living at Cambridge with
Edward Noel Long, afterwards of the Guards,—who, after
having served honourably in the expedition to Copenhagen (of
which two or three thousand scoundrels yet survive in plight
and pay), was drowned early in 1809, on his passage to Lisbon
with his regiment in the St. George transport, which was run
foul of, in the night, by another transport.

He goes on to evoke the summer days of an intense romantic

friendship when he and Long, as students at Cambridge, rode,
dived, swam, read, played music together, and crowns the
story with a reference to his even deeper attachment to the
choir-boy John Edleston. The associative triggering comes
from water (the element in which Sabrina, guardian nymph of
the River Severn, lived, in which Long and Byron dived and
swam in the River Cam, and in which Long drowned in the
Atlantic Ocean) and from music (the song invoking Sabrina,
the intimate music-making of the masque in which it is set,

60
 Voice, Tone, and Transition in ‘Don Juan ’

and the flute-and- cello evenings in Cambridge when Byron

was his friend s audience); and Byron’s bisexual nature makes
him see, at a flash, the features of Edward Long under the wet
loose train of Sabrina’s hair. He calls the thought-sequence
’strange’ because it has arisen so quickly, ‘I know not how or
why’. But w hat is strange in the prose of a personal diary may
flourish naturally in the verse of a long poem which delights in
real or apparent spontaneity. Shelley, interestingly enough,
used the same word to characterize the poetry as Lady
Blessington had used of the poet. ‘The language in which the
whole [of Don Juan Cantos III—V] is clothed—a sort of
chameleon under the changing sky of the spirit that kindles
it—is such as those lisping days could not have expected’
(letter to Byron, 21 October 1821). What does this chameleon
change from, and to?
Byron said many, and sometimes contradictory, things
about Don Juan in his letters. It was ‘meant to be a little quietly
facetious upon every thing’ (September 1818); it was ‘the most
moral of poems (Lebruary 1819); it was a ‘human’ poem after
so many ‘divine’ ones (April 1819); he had ‘no plan’ but he did
have ‘materials’ (August 1819); it was ‘the sublime of that there
sort of writing’ and could not have been written by anyone
‘who has not lived in the world’ (October 1819); ‘to how many
cantos this may extend, I know not’ (Lebruary 1821); but
some day it would be recognized as ‘a Satire on abuses of the
present states of Society’ (December 1822). The range of
comments fits the fluidity of the man. The poem is both lightly
facetious and highly moral; it has no plan and is a planned
social satire; it is erotic but sublime. Clearly a poem of such
great length, composed over several years, must have grown
and developed in the conceptions that motivated it, but it is
harder than usual to see any ruling structure, not only because
the work is unfinished but because Byron never decided how
many cantos it was to have (24? 100? 150?—these were all
forecasts he made at different times) or what goal the narrative
and chronology were making for (the Lrench Revolution and
its aftermath? the fight for Greek independence?—these he
considered). Add to that the fact that the emotional and
intellectual climax of the poem as we have it comes half-way
(Canto VIII, the siege of Ismail), with a distinct slackening of

61
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

interest in the last cantos dealing with Juan’s visit to England,

and any sense of a satisfying architectonics is postponed to the
vista of a much longer poem where extremely powerful revolu¬
tionary or military scenes in France or Greece might have
redeemed the slack and restored the balance. To a reader in
the late twentieth century, however, architectonics is not
everything, either in art or for that matter in life. Don Juan may
indeed seem dll the more appealing, with a kind of proleptic
modernity, in its foretaste of so many later unfinished long
poems, like Pound’s Cantos, MacDiarmid’s Mature Art, William
Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Olson’s Maximus Poems, Berry¬
man’s Dream Songs, and Lowell’s Notebook and History. In all
these examples, the poem eventually becomes, whatever its
organizing principles may once have been (narrative, philo¬
sophical, epic), an accompaniment or doppelganger of the
poet himself, rising and falling with the fluctuations of the
poet’s life, a work not so much unfinished as unfinishable.
There is an uneasy moment in Don Juan, near the end of Canto
XII, when Byron realizes that this is exactly where a con¬
ventional twelve-book epic would end, and brazens out his
awareness both of epic traditions (which indeed he has
acknowledged and illustrated throughout the poem) and of his
original way of breaking them:

But now I will begin my poem. ’Tis

Perhaps a little strange, if not quite new,
That from the first of Cantos up to this
I’ve not begun what we have to go through.
These first twelve books are merely flourishes,
Preludios, trying just a string or two
Upon my lyre, or making the pegs sure;
And when so, you shall have the overture.

My Muses do not care a pinch of rosin

About what’s called success, or not succeeding:
Such thoughts are quite below the strain they have chosen;
'Tis a ‘great moral lesson’ they are reading.
I thought, at setting off, about two dozen
Cantos would do; but at Apollo’s pleading,
If that my Pegasus should not be founder’d,
I think to canter gently through a hundred.
(XII, liv—lv)
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 Voice, Tone, and Transition in ‘Don Juan’

‘Success’ would be Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy; the great

task conceived, mapped out, and completed. He is doing
something else, which he cannot even define for himself, far
less for his readers. But he offers them a jaunty ticket for the
forward voyage.
This is an art of improvisation, though we have to use the
term carefully. We know that Byron had watched, met, and
talked to Tommaso Sgricci, the Italian theatrical improvvisatore,
who strung together impromptu verses on subjects suggested
by the audience, but this would interest him as a sort of
parallel activity rather than influence his own style, which was
already formed. He does, nevertheless, tip his hat in Sgricci’s
direction in Don Juan, when he defends what he mock-modestly
calls his 'desultory' rhyme’ as chiming out the matters upper¬
most in his mind from moment to moment of writing, ‘Just as I
feel the Improvvisatore (XV, xx). And the fact that Sgricci’s was
an oral, public art, an art of the voice and not the pen, does
help to remind Byron of the importance of ‘voice’ in his own
art, of the effect of good lively free conversation he never had to
destroy other qualities to obtain. He characteristically gives
the impression of devaluing his own facility in this respect,
when he says:

I rattle on exactly as I’d talk

With anybody in a ride or walk. (XV, xix)

Not exactly; nor is it really rattling on. But in so far as he

conveys the sense and presence of a racy speaker, within the
strict confines of his chosen metrical system, an achievement
that is much more remarkable than his usually non-versewriting
critics give him credit for, we cannot but feel the nearness of the
man to his persona, so many accounts of his conversation, and
of the tone and calibre of his voice, have been recorded, quite
apart from the additional evidence of his extraordinarily frank,
immediate, spirited, communicative, ‘speaking’ letters. Colonel
Leicester Stanhope, one witness among many, described his
conversation as ‘a mixture of philosophy and slang, of every¬
thing,—like his Don Juan .
The sense of an identifiable and ‘modern’ speaking voice, the
voice of a worldly but well-read, playful but sharp and ardent
British writer of the early nineteenth century, seems to have

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

been desired by Byron for two contrasting purposes. The social

reality of the ‘I’ in the poem, his knowledge of and comments on
undisguised contemporary and recent events, helps to persuade
the reader of Don Juan, if he is pondering the speaker’s cate¬
gorizing of it as an epic, that one way to accept the category is to
see it as a ‘true’ epic, its material firmly based in the British and
Mediterranean world of the period from 1789 to 1823. On the
other hand, ‘documentary’ is scarcely a word one would apply
to it, and the vigorous, versatile, descanting, reader-conscious
voice, with its sudden flights and digressions, helps to keep the
poem opened up, as every poem must be, towards the imagina¬
tion; an unmodulating, low-keyed, deadpan voice, or a voice
restrained by decorums of rhetoric, would not meet the case,
but Byron’s own voice, transmuted only by being raised, as it
were, to a higher power by the demands of the poetry, is ideal
for the variety of pursuits and targets that appear, disappear,
and reappear.
The historical reality is opposed to what he calls the ‘laby¬
rinth of fables’ that swallows and numbs readers of earlier epics,
and he sees himself as being in the epic succession onlv if
readers will accept, as he buoyantly believes they will, one
notable jolt to their expectations:

There’s only one slight difference between

Me and my epic brethren gone before,
And here the advantage is my own, I ween
(Not that I have not several merits more,
But this will more peculiarly be seen);
They so embellish, that 'tis quite a bore
Their labyrinth of fables to thread through,
Whereas this story’s actually true.
(I, ccii)

One cannot push this too far. Even the most diligent historical
novel needs fictional characters, including very often the hero
or heroine. At the beginning of the first canto, the speaker
admits that only Don Juan will suit his purposes, not (as he
might have chosen) Nelson or Wolfe, Danton or Buonaparte.
1 he mention of such names, however, and the accompanying
references to ‘gazettes’ and ‘Trafalgar’, are sufficiently indica¬
tive of the ‘truthful’ aspect of the poem, and before long Juan

64
 Voice, Tone, and Transition in ‘Don Juan ’

is seen acting within the historical framework. It is not only

the historical truth of great events that Byron is interested in:
he has a conception of a true portrayal of ‘human things and
acts , a bird s eye view ot ‘that wild. Society’, a glance ‘thrown
on men of every station’:

Besides, my Muse by no means deals in fiction:

She gathers a repertory of facts,
Ot course with some reserve and slight restriction,
But mostly sings of human things and acts—
And that's one cause she meets with contradiction;
For too much truth, at first sight, ne’er attracts;
And were her object only what’s called glory,
With more ease too she’d tell a different story.

Love, war, a tempest—surely there’s variety;

Also a seasoning slight of lucubration;
A bird’s-eye-view, too, of that wild, Society;
A slight glance thrown on men of every station.
If you have nought else, here’s at least satiety,
Both in performance and in preparation;
And though these lines should only line portmanteaus,
Trade will be all the better for these Cantos.
(XIV, xiii-xiv)

Even the wry joke at the end somehow contributes to his sense
that although he has now and again to explain himself to his
uneasy readers (‘For too much truth, at first sight, ne’er
attracts’), he has the confidence of his own wide sweep and
purview of real things. The truths may be well-observ ed facets
of human conduct, human relationships; truths such as a
novelist would use. They may be moral, within traditions of
satirical stripping-down and exposure, as he warns the reader
in a striking stanza:
But now I’m going to be immoral; now
I mean to show things really as they are,
Not as they ought to be: for I avow,
That till we see what’s what in fact, we’re far
From much improvement with that virtuous plough
Which skims the surface, leaving scarce a scar
Upon the black loam long manured by Vice,
Only to keep its corn at the old price.
(XII, xl)

65
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

The double meaning of‘improvement’, moral and agricultural,

serves to remind the reader of recent changes in society and to
sharpen the ‘modern’ edge of the attack, while not losing the
older reverberations of ‘plough' and ‘loam and ‘manure’.
Elsewhere, on a deeper level, the speaker envisages a universal
midnight unmasking, when the world as it really is would be
seen as almost the exact opposite of what we customarily
suppose it to be. In two forceful stanzas, he uses imagery' from
Othello, supreme play of deception, to illustrate the point:

’Tis strange,—but true; for truth is always strange;

Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!
How oft would vice and virtue places change!
The new world would be nothing to the old,
If some Columbus of the moral seas
Would show mankind their souls’ antipodes.

What ‘antres vast and deserts idle’ then

Would be discover’d in the human soul!
What icebergs in the hearts of mighty men,
With self-love in the centre as their pole!
What Anthropophagi are nine or ten
Of those who hold the kingdoms in control!
Were things but only call’d by their right name,
Caesar himself would be ashamed of fame.
(XIV, ci—cii)

But the poem, to be true to Byron, had to be true to his

moods, to his waywardness. Here, too, he has valuable com¬
ments to make through his poem’s speaker. At the beginning of
the seventh canto he is in transition from a theme of love (the
vengeful jealousy of the sultan’s wife, Gulbeyaz, in Constanti¬
nople) to a theme of war (the Russian seige of the Turkish
fortress of Ismail on the Danube). Love and Glory are invoked,
but questioned. The possessive, ruthless love of Gulbeyaz,
commanding that Juan and Dudu be sewn into sacks and
thrown into the Bosphorus, was real enough, but hardly
glorious; and the forthcoming battle, ‘glorious’ in conventional
terms, was not going to be glorious either. This is not to say that
true love and glory do not exist—the speaker is defending

66
 Voice, Tone, and Transition in ‘Don Juan ’

himselt against a charge of cynicism—but that they are

flickering, evanescent, hard to grasp or pin down, appearing to
us as shows when we are searching for substance. To meet these
shifting and inconstant visions, which flash or twist above us
like a shower of meteors or the Northern Lights, the speaker’s
poetry will itself shift and flicker, constant in its inconstancy:

O Love! O Glory! what are you who fly

Around us ever, rarely to alight?
There’s not a meteor in the Polar sky
Of such transcendent and more fleeting flight.
Chill, and chain'd to cold earth, we lift on high
Our eyes in search of either lovely light;
A thousand and a thousand colours they
Assume, then leave us on our freezing way.

And such as they are, such my present tale is,

A nondescript and ever-varying rhyme,
A versified Aurora Borealis,
Which flashes o’er a waste and icy clime.
(VII, i-ii)

‘Ever-varying’ is the key word, in keeping with Byron’s own

voice and temperament. But the changes, like the changing,
dancing, shimmering folds of the aurora borealis, are a change
of patterns, or half-patterns, rather than some anarchic
amorphousness. In the same way, he pauses to describe in
some detail, and with great relish, the ever-changing rainbow
which appears as a good omen in the sky shortly before Juan is
saved from shipwreck in the second canto. It is not the fact
that it might be a good omen which interests the speaker, who
shows himself to be duly sceptical about sailors’ superstitions
while accepting their occasional usefulness (‘It is as well to
think so, now and then’), but the nature of the changing
shapes and colours themselves—the transience that strikes a
chord in his mind and makes him dissolve the rainbow in a
scatter of comparisons ranging from the beautiful to the
grotesque:

Now overhead a rainbow, bursting through

The scattering clouds, shone, spanning the dark sea,
Resting its bright base on the quivering blue;
And all within its arch appear’d to be

67
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Clearer than that without, and its wide hue

Wax’d broad and waving, like a banner free,
Then changed like to a bow that’s bent, and then
Forsook the dim eyes of these shipwreck’d men.

It changed, of course; a heavenly chameleon,

The airy child of vapour and the sun,
Brought forth in purple, cradled in vermilion,
Baptized in molten gold, and swathed in dun,
Glittering like crescents o’er a Turk’s pavilion,
And blending every colour into one,
Just like a black eye in a recent scuffle
(For sometimes we must box without the muffle).

Our shipwreck’d seamen thought it a good omen—

It is as well to think so, now and then;
’Twas an old custom of the Greek and Roman,
And may become of great advantage when
Folks are discouraged; and most surely no men
Had greater need to nerve themselves again
Than these, and so this rainbow look'd like hope—
Quite a celestial kaleidoscope.
(II , xci—xciii)

The metaphors and similes leap over one another in their

eagerness, not to define a static object but to accompany a
richly changing one. The rainbow is a bridge; a banner; a bent
bow; a chameleon; a baby; a Turkish crescent; a black eye; a
kaleidoscope. ‘It changed, of course’; otherwise, what use would
it have been to the speaker! Byron, no great lover of the static art
of painting, would have seen little virtue in the fixed, tubelike
rainbow of Millais’ The Blind Girl, double though it is. But
literature, like life itself, flickers, infinitely tantalizing and
suggestive, forming and breaking up similitudes and patterns.
The final ‘kaleidoscope’ is a good illustration of Byron’s sense of
the language as a developing and malleable medium. The
kaleidoscope was invented in 1817, and Byron saw one in 1818,
just before he wrote these stanzas. It is the quickness with which
he sees the potential of the new word that we notice, and his
figurative use of it, applied to the rainbow, is the earliest
recorded in N.E.D. The kaleidoscope’s combination of pattern
and change would recommend it particularly to Byron.

68
 Voice, Tone, and Transition in ‘Don Juan’

Meteor—aurora borealis—rainbow—chameleon—kaleido¬
scope. Do we have our man there, our poem, or are they both

like the borealis race,

That flit ere you can point their place?

Byron’s art has been found hard to define, and critics have
often expressed some dissatisfaction with it, not helped in their
enquiries by the poet’s jokiness (‘Hail, Muse! etcetera.’—III, i)
or by his reiterated praise of spontaneity ( Why, Man, the
Soul of such writing is its licence’—letter to John Murray, 12
August 1819). ^ et some 2,000 stanzas of ottava rima had to be
engineered, rhymes had to be found, cantos had to be ended
and begun, a considerable range of characters had to be made
psychologically convincing, and the relation and balance
between story and digression had to be thought about. Too
much organization would have been death to the very spirit of
Don Juan, but is the art sufficient for Byron’s unique purposes?
His best effects, like Spenser’s (how he would have disliked
that 'like'!), may be appealed to, or experienced, but scarcely
quoted, since they emerge over many pages, out of the flux and
eddying of the poem, and are cumulative rather than pointed.
This is not to say that local felicities and virtuosities are not
frequent, from single lines and phrases (‘A mighty mass of
brick, and smoke, and shipping’, ‘that costive Sophy’, ‘But
they will not find liberty a Troy’, ‘without risk or/ The
singeing of a single inky whisker’, ‘A lonely pure affection
unopposed’, ‘Half naked, loving, natural, and Greek’, ‘Carotid-
artery-cutting Castlereagh’, ‘gentlemen in stays, as stiff as
stones’, ‘The calentures of music’) to whole stanzas where he
accepts and dispatches with eclat some peculiar challenge (the
Latin prescription Juan is given when he falls sick in Russia, at
X, xli; the flash or canting language used elegiacally as a
tribute to the footpad Juan shoots on his entry into London, at
XI , xix). His command of rhyme is a great pleasure: bold,
ingenious, outrageous; he takes a positive delight in extending
all the normal expectations, rhyming with words from Latin,
Greek, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic,
Turkish, Persian, Aramaic, Gaelic, and Scots. Sometimes it is
what is not said, as in the wonderful pause between two
connected stanzas at VIII, cix-cx, where—whether through

69
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

the exigencies o Hottava rima, or by a stroke of genius, or more likely

a mixture of the two—the last-ditch defence of the Khan and his
five sons during the siege of Ismail is given sudden pathos:
Nay, he had wounded, though but slightly, both
Juan and Johnson; whereupon they fell,
The first with sighs, the second with an oath,
Upon his angry sultanship, pell-mell,
And all around were grown exceeding wroth
At such a pertinacious infidel,
And pour’d upon him and his sons like rain,
Which they resisted like a sandy plain

That drinks and still is dry. At last they perish'd. . . .

And sometimes a brilliant passage is created out of the revita¬
lizing of an ancient convention, as in the much-quoted ‘ubi
sunt’’ of XI, lxxvi— lxxxvi, where the speaker, looking back on
the decade before 1822, can hardly believe the changes that
have occurred, in a time of political and social ferment. As
befits the chameleon, he warms to the theme of change, but
the remarkable characteristic of these eleven stanzas is the
way in which they manage to be highly comic, witty, cutting,
and ‘modern’ (in 1822, but the feeling is still there), and yet at
the same time shadowed with intimations of mortality in the
old ubi sunt manner. On the one hand all seems robust satire:
Where’s Brummell? Dish’d. Where’s Long Pole Wellesley?
Diddled.
Where’s Whitbread? Romilly? Where’s George the Third?
Where is his will? (That’s not so soon unriddled.)
(XI, lxxviii)
But somehow, and even within the robust tone, there is place
for Edward Young, author of Night Thoughts and other works of
edifying gloom and memento mori\
‘Where is the world?’ cries Young, at eighty—‘Where
The world in which a man was born?’ Alas!
Where is the world of eight years past? ’Twas there—
I look for it,—’tis gone, a globe of glass!
Crack’d, shiver’d, vanish’d, scarcely gazed on, ere
A silent change dissolves the glittering mass.
Statesmen, chiefs, orators, queens, patriots, kings,
And dandies, all are gone on the wind’s wings.
(XI, lxxvi)

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 Voice, Tone, and Transition in ‘Don Juan’

‘A silent change dissolves the glittering mass.’ Like the Love

and Glory shining and vanishing at the beginning of Canto
VII, contemporary history also, sharp and specific as it is, a
whole world of manners and personalities and actions, nothing
seeming to be more real, steals away from decade to decade,
undermined by forces we cannot see or hear. It is surely a very
uncommon art that can produce a hilarious ubi sunt which is an
ubi sunt all the same.
The larger-scale effects, which are the least amenable to
analysis and evaluation because they involve such abrupt
shifts not only of subject-matter but equally of tone and
atmosphere, are nevertheless important in a long poem, whose
length might well be thought to accommodate its variety.
Having decided that he would not plunge in medias res as
earlier epic poets had done but instead would ‘begin with the
beginning’ (I, vii) because (with tongue positively rolling in
cheek) the regularity of his design ‘Forbids all wandering as
the worst of sinning’, the speaker seems to promise a straight¬
forward, almost novelistic narrative. This, very obviously, was
not to be, and the amount of ‘wandering’ becomes so great as
the story progresses that it can be seen eventually as a sort of
equivalent of in medias res, with interruptions of the action not
for flashback or explanatory purposes as in Virgil or Milton
but for expatiatory flights into another dimension, the mental
dimension of the speaker’s (i.e. virtually Byron’s) thoughts
and opinions on a large variety of subjects. Naturally he comes
to admit and comment on these ‘wanderings’, as he comments
on almost every aspect of the poem at some point within it (not
from uneasiness but out of an exuberant conviction that the
reader will be interested in his originality—a mighty maze,
and all without a plan!), begging our indulgence for many and
unconscionable digressions. ‘If I have any fault,’ he says (cries
of‘No!’ expected), ‘it is digression’ (III, xcvi), neglecting his
characters while he soliloquizes and gives his ‘addresses from
the throne’. The didactic function is developed in a later canto:

Oh, pardon my disgression—or at least

Peruse! ’Tis always with a moral end
That I dissert, like grace before a feast:
For like an aged aunt, or tiresome friend,

71
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

A rigid guardian, or a zealous priest,

My Muse by exhortation means to mend
All people, at all times, and in most places,
Which puts my Pegasus to these grave paces.
(XII, xxxix)

That the digressions are very often didactic would not be

disputed, but the variety of mood and tone with which they
are presented gives them a much greater interest than ‘grave
paces’ might suggest. Much of Byron’s art can be revealed
from two of the more extended digressionary passages, in
Cantos I and III.
The artistic method may be said to be being tried out in the
first canto (I, cxv—cxxxvi). The youthful Juan is sitting in a
summer-house on a pleasant June evening with Julia, Don
Alfonso’s young wife; as the sun sets, and the moon comes up,
they embrace, and she consents to be his lover. ‘Here’, says the
speaker, ‘my chaste Muse a liberty must take—’, but the
chaste reader, whether relieved or disappointed, is quickly
reassured that the ‘liberty’ in question is not erotic but
literary: a digression is coming, to fill in the five months that
we are to imagine elapsing between that embrace and the next
one to be described. The digression, after the Sterne-like
teasing of the previous stanzas, leads with a straight lyrical
listing of things that are sweet and desirable—the distant song
of a gondolier, the sound of a waterfall, a rich grape-harvest—
which modulates to a more mocking tone as the sweets and
desirables widen to include a woman’s revenge, a belated
legacy, a quarrel with a tiresome friend, and then returns
briefly to the lyrical mode with praises of the sweetest thing of
all, ‘first and passionate love’. Immediately a tangent offers
itself: Adam’s first love led to the Fall, the fruit plucked from
the Tree of Knowledge has led to an ‘age of oddities let loose’,
a welter of discoveries and inventions good and bad—the
guillotine, galvanism, vaccination, rockets, polar voyages,
miners’ safety-lamps. Man is indeed a strange phenomenon,
and—with a partial return to his setting-off point, though the
digression is not finished yet—‘Pleasure’s a sin, and some¬
times Sin’s a pleasure.’ Man goes to his grave without knowing
much about his meaning or his fate:

72
 Voice, Tone, and Transition in "Don Juan ’

\\ hat then?—I do not know, no more do you—

And so good night.—Return we to our story:
Twas in November, when fine days are few. . . .

But this is a false start: wait for it! A little meditation on

November follows, with evocative description of the season,
indoors and outside: a dusting of snow on the far-off peaks,
rough seas breaking on the promontory', ‘sober suns’ setting at
five o'clock, the wind gusting while a family piles wood on the
fire, the speaker's personal (and rather delightful) summing-
up:

There's something cheerful in that sort of light,

Even as a summer sky’s without a cloud:
I'm fond of fire, and crickets, and all that,
A lobster salad, and champagne, and chat.

And then at last: ‘ 'Twas midnight—Donna Julia was in

bed. . . .' And the story proceeds with Juan and Julia surprised
and unmasked by the jealous Don Alfonso. There is a con¬
necting thread, if one wants it, through the whole digression,
but that thread is perhaps little more than the tight-rope on
which Byron dances his various and unforeseen steps.
The third canto offers more developed, more rich transitions,
in the long digression in its latter part (III, lxxviii-cxi). The
action stops while Juan and his ideal love Haidee are enjoying
a celebration on their island, just as her father, the pirate
Lambro, unexpectedly returns and is about to put an end to
their idyllic relationship, Juan banished and Haidee dead of
despair and grief. The digression is therefore an interlude
between love and death, and might be expected to show high
seriousness; which indeed it does, yet a seriousness mingled
with broad comedy, keen satire, and literary criticism, in a
fairly audacious amalgam that tests the reader’s sympathy and
receptivity to the limit. There are, however, links and connec¬
tions of a most interesting kind, some clear enough, others
more oblique or subterranean.
Juan and Haidee, exotically dressed and surrounded by
every Levantine luxury from iced sherbet to tame gazelles,
have finished their feast and now sit back to enjoy a suite of
entertainers—‘Dwarfs, dancing girls, black eunuchs, and a
poet’. The presence of the poet, though natural enough in the

73
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

circumstances, gives an initial signal to the reader that the

story is going to be interrupted, and so it proves. The poet is
described as well-known, and ‘a very pleasant fellow’ in
company, but a time-server, a ‘sad trimmer’. He will sing
encomiums on the sultan and the pasha, or ‘God save the
King’, or ‘Qa ira’, as the occasion demands. He is not devoid
of grace, however, and the situation of the remote island, the
friendly non-authoritarian audience, encourages him to be
bold for once, so that

without any danger of a riot, he

Might for long lying make himself amends;
And singing as he sung in his warm youth,
Agree to a short armistice with truth. (Ill, lxxxii)

From this unworthy vessel there is then delivered the famous

lyric, ‘The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!’. It well deserves
its fame, and in writing it Byron had the brilliant second
thought of changing the ottava rima to a scaled-down version of
it—six lines instead of eight, four feet instead of five, but a
rhyming couplet still closing the stanza—and by this means
keeping both separateness and continuity. (11 is one of the many
features which show the hand of the artist, whatever Byron may
say about his carelessness.) The poem is both a plangent elegy
for Greece, once culturally and politically great and now sunk in
apathy under foreign domination, and a muted call to arms.
Like a Wagnerian motif, Byron’s belief in the duty of a poet to
act as precursor or harbinger of change sounds out here as it so
often does when the authorial temperature is right. The singer
of the poem is at once bitterly self-critical (the lyre of Sappho
and Anacreon has grown ‘degenerate’ in his hands) and what we
would call an ‘extremist’ in his nationalism (praising the ancient
Greek tyrants because at least they were Greek, not Persian or
Turkish). He wants the Greeks to remember their military
history, and act on the recollection.

The mountains look on Marathon—

And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

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 Voice, Tone, and Transition in ‘Don Juan’

T he ferv ent but guilt-ridden bard, having his moment of

truth as he recites before Juan and Haidee, fades out and is
replaced by a more general meditation on whether the pen
after all is mightier than the sword. It begins straight and
serious:

But words are things, and a small drop of ink.

Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper—even a rag like this,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his!
(Ill, lxxxviii)

But then, with a characteristic modulation, as the speaker

warms to his theme he begins to toss and turn it, look at it from
unexpected angles, find modern examples which naturally
resist a too solemn tone, and move it step by step towards
specific literary criticism, though never quite losing the thread
of a poet’s obligations to society. ‘Troy owes to Homer what
whist owes to Hoyle.’ But what state, what realm, what power
owes anything to the Lake Poets and their friends? What are
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey but renegades whose
names ‘cut a convict figure,/ The very Botany Bay in moral
geography’? Wordsworth (who as we know heartily returned
Byron’s dislike) is the main target, mocked at for puerility, for
tediousness, for provinciality, as against what the speaker
would no doubt claim as his own adultness, readability, and
internationalism. The attack, entertaining enough in the
main, in a boisterous sort of way, ends on a sour and savage
note:
‘Pedlars,’ and ‘Boats,’ and ‘Waggons!’ Oh! ye shades
Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?
That trash of such sort not alone evades
Contempt, but from the bathos’ vast abyss
Floats scumlike uppermost, and these Jack Cades
Of sense and song above your graves may hiss—
The ‘little boatman’ and his Peter Bell
Can sneer at him who drew ‘Achitophef!
(III, C)

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

After this explosion, there could only be an abrupt change

of tack. At first, it is an apparent return to the story, though
the narrative does not in fact take up again till eighteen
stanzas later (IV, viii), and all that is happening is that the
reader is temporarily (helpfully!) reminded of the two lovers,
now left alone at the end of the revelry. ‘T’ our tale’, says the
speaker, but really this is no more than a chord struck
between two greatly different sections of his huge digression.
As the lovers watch the twilight, an evocative lyrical mode
suddenly emerges, the battle of the books is forgotten, and an
evening hymn in praise of nature, with ‘Ave Maria!’ repeatedly
punctuating it like a vesper-bell, shows yet another side of the
speaker, and of Byron. Woven into it, with some cunning, are
passages translated from Sappho and Dante (whose names
preserve continuities from the earlier part of the digression),
emphasizing the mysteriously softening and healing influences
of the twilight hour. These influences are allowed to bring the
passage to an end with an unexpected reference to Nero, a
tyrant justly destroyed, but whose tomb, as Suetonius records,
was strewn with flowers by ‘some hands unseen’. The references
to Nero links back to the mention of the Greek tyrants in the
poet’s song at the banquet, but makes of course an entirely
different point. Bravura carries off the ‘Ave Maria!’ passage,
but only just; examined closely, it has some elements of the
factitious, almost of kitsch. Its defence is made more readily
w hen one takes it in its place as one strand in a very long poem,
and in fact, reading the poem at a natural speed, and coming to
it in its context, one finds it strangely moving.
‘But I’m digressing . . .’ the speaker has the grace to add, and
closes the canto with a sardonic joke. Read Aristotle's Poetics, he
says, for a perfect defence of the length and variousness of epics.
The shorter digressions tend to be more manageable,
involving fewer shifts of tone, but still make capital out of
contrast, as for example the sprightly and perceptive discourse
on money at the beginning of Canto XII, or the passage on
literary fame and bluestockings at the end of Canto IV. At parts
where the story is itself at its most intense and serious, as during
the siege of Ismail in Cantos VII—VIII, digression is instinc¬
tively held in check, but never quite disappears. Canto VIII
closes with a couple of highly effective transitions, from exalted

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 Voice, Tone, and Transition in ‘Don Juan’

prophecy addressing future generations to a light familiar

address to the reader, and from that to straight narrative pathos
in a very plain style in the concluding stanza. At the end of the
carnage, when the Russians have at last taken Ismail, and
Suvvarrow has sent back his boastful and blasphemous rhyming
message to the Empress, the speaker bursts out with
his promise that he ‘will teach, if possible, the stones/ To rise
against Earth’s tyrants’, adding:

And when you hear historians talk of thrones,

And those that sate upon them, let it be
As we now gaze upon the mammoth’s bones,
And wonder what old world such things could see,
Or hieroglyphics on Egyptian stones,
The pleasant riddles of futurity—
Guessing at what shall happily be hid,
As the real purpose of a pyramid.
(VIII, cxxxvii)

But immediately he turns to the reader and reminds him how he

has kept his word to write an epic with its promised ‘sketches of
Love—Tempest—Travel—War’—and all of it ‘very accurate,
you must allow’. However, this is a tone which will not do to end
that canto with, so he swiftly closes the digression and returns
momentarily to the story, on its most personal level, describing
an ounce of good squeezed from the horror of war, as Juan goes
off with the little Turkish girl he has saved:

The Moslem orphan went with her protector,

For she was homeless, houseless, helpless; all
Her friends, like the sad family of Hector,
Had perish’d in the field or by the wall:
Her very place of birth was but a spectre
Of what it had been; there the Muezzin’s call
To prayer was heard no more! and Juan wept,
And made a vow to shield her, which he kept.
(VIII, cxli)

The quiet proleptic assurance of the last three words is a fine

touch, and one of those necessary positives which appear like
beacons in the flux throughout the poem, reminiscent perhaps,
in their emphasis on immediate, self-committing action, of
Byron’s encounter with the dying soldier in Ravenna.

77
4
Byron as Lyricist: The Poet
Among the Musicians
by RONALD STEVENSON

Academic criticism is almost unanimous in declaring ‘So we'll

go no more a-roving’ to be Byron’s outstanding lyric. Andrew
Rutherford finds it one of the rare exceptions to ‘the metrical
banality and sentimentalism which Moore’s works encouraged’
and enlaurels it as ‘the best of Byron’s handful of great lyrics’.1
Professor John Jump places it together with Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage, The Prisoner of Chillon, ‘She walks in beauty’, Stanzas
for Music and the Epistle to Augusta and a few other lyrics in a
body of work essentially different from his major achievement
of poems in ottava rima. He characterizes its ‘poignant “lyrical
cry” ’ and claims that it suggests something of the range of his
best work, uniting ‘great power and simplicity of feeling with
utter clarity of style’.2
Such is the innocence of Academe. It arises because the
majority of literary commentators appear to be musically
illiterate. Were they able to read music and were their interest
to engender research into folksong, they would acknowledge
that Byron’s ‘best lyric’ was lifted from the refrain of an old
Aberdeenshire ballad ‘The Jolly Beggar’. Byron wrote:

So, we’ll go no more a-roving,

So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

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 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

The refrain of ‘The Jolly Beggar’ is:

And I’ll gang nae mair a-rovin,
A-rovin i the nicht.
I’ll gang nae mair a-rovin,
Though the miine shine ne’er sae bricht.

The ballad exists in many versions, all given in Bronson’s

monumental study of the child ballad-tunes.3 To quote two
variants of the folksong verse:
There was a Jolly beggar, and a-begging he was bound,
And he took up his quarters into a land’art town.

There was a auld beggar man

An’ he was dressed in green
An’ he was askin’ lodgins
At a place near Aiberdeen.

And there we have it. Aberdeen—the city of Byron’s boy¬

hood, where he lived with his Gordon mother on Broad Street
(the Gordons of Gight—pronounced ‘Gecht’—Gight on the
Ythan below Fyvie in Aberdeenshire—where the laddie
George Gordon attended the Grammar School and spent a
summer holiday on Ballaterach farm on the Dee’s south bank,
opposite Cambus o’ May).4
Bronson refers to the disputed attribution of ‘The Jolly
Beggar' to James V of Scotland and avers that it ‘has been
current for at least three hundred years’5 and has entered oral
tradition in Scotland, England, Ireland and as far west as
Missouri. Two of the tunes he gives are quoted in music
examples 1 and 2.*
In appropriating a folksong for one of his poems, Byron was
merely continuing the tradition and practice of Ramsay, Burns
and Scott. The opening stanzas of many of Burns’s best-loved
lyrics are actually folksong texts, such as ‘Ye Banks & Braes’,
‘John Anderson’ and ‘Sweet Afton’. The same applies to Scott’s
‘Jock o’ Hazeldean’, ‘Bonnie Dundee’ and ‘Blue Bonnets over
the Border’. Moore occasionally practised the same inspired
plagiarism: an example is ‘The Song of Fionnula’ (‘Silent, O
Moyle’) which, in one of his scholarly footnotes, he attributes to
a manuscript translation by the Countess of Moira, from the
Irish Gaelic.
* All music examples are given on pp. 94-99.

79
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the music of

fashionable London salons of, say, 1820 had seeped down
through the British bourgeosie to the working class. So it was
that as a child of a Lancastrian family of Scots descent, in the
1930s I played piano accompaniments to my proletarian
father’s singing of Moore’s Irish Melodies and Scots folksong.
The kind of music—no, the actualmusic!—that Byron heard
sung by his bosom cronie Tom Moore (generally to harp
accompaniment) was what I was hearing as a child of 10 or so.
The result was that, when I began to compose music myself
(at about 14) my first essays were song-settings of poems by-
Moore, Scott—and Byron’s ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’
(Ex. 3).
Years later, in the 1950s, the Australian composer and
folklorist Percy Grainger drew my attention to the Victorian
English composer Maude Valerie White’s setting of Byron's ‘So
we’ll go no more a-roving’ (Ex. 4), a truly great song worthy of
revival and a rare case of a love-lied composed by a woman—
shades of‘burning Sappho’!
Those literati who are not particularly interested in music
often forget that the root of the word ‘lyric’ is the Greek for the
musical instrument, the lyre (lyra), that was introduced to
Ancient Greece from Asia, through Thrace (home of the
Orpheus legend). The Greek distinction between the epical and
the lyrical was the difference between what was spoken and
what was sung. Hegel’s Asthetik (1832) contends that the epic is
objective, the lyric subjective. But even the epicists Homer and
Hesiod were represented by the lyre, though their work is
polarized to that of Pindar and Bacchylides the lyricists. Greek
poetry was always accompanied by the lyre.
There is something symbolic about Byron, the lad bred in
Scotland—after his many later personal Odyssies, wearing the
various mantles of Manfred, Childe Harold or Don Juan—
embarking on his final mission to Greece, the birthland of lyric
poetry.
Lyric poetry, made for music, has its own internal music: the
fundamental tones which generate the harmonics which the
composer perceives in its vibrations.
What was the specific resonance of Byron’s lyric poetry? For
instance, how did he speak? What was his accent? Was it

80
 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

Aberdonian? Or had the Harrovian and then the Cambridge

Standard English planed the rough grain of the Doric? We can
only guess. We have a little internal evidence. We know that his
mother had the Scots leid—and a sharp tongue at that. He had
a Scots nurse in Aberdeen in the 1790s: Agnes Grey. In later life
(1821) he wrote a sketch Aberdeen—Old and New, or the Auldtoun
andNewtoun (that was his orthography). He tells us that he was
sent at 5 to Mr. ‘Bodsy’ Bowers’s School. But then he
incorrectly remembers the meaning of the Scots word Bodsie
(Chambers Scots Dictionary: ’a nickname given to a short,
thickset person'). He translates it (perhaps with a touch of the
Beau Brummel) as ‘dapper’. But again we catch the severe
Presbyterian tones of his remembered first lesson in reading by
rote: the monosyllables ’God made man, let us love him.’ He
turns a page and, not yet literate, pretends to read but goes on
repeating his seven-worded maxim. He is rewarded by getting
his ears boxed (‘which they did not deserve, seeing that it was
by ear only that I had acquired my letters’, he adds with pauky
humour). Later he had the ‘saturnine’ Paterson for tutor: a
shoemaker’s son, ‘but a good scholar, as is common with the
Scotch’. Another ‘rigid Presbyterian’. Again we hear the
thunder-tones—in Latin. Later still, he attends Aberdeen
Grammar School (he adds the note: Scotice ‘Schule’—Aberdonice
‘Squeel’).
Byron’s letter to James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, dated
‘Albany, March 24’ (1814) is another indication of the acute¬
ness of his ear for the long ‘ee’ vowel so characteristic of
Aberdonian Scots—think only of the Aberdonian greeting ‘Ane
Gweed New Yeir!’. He playfully chides Hogg for his Scots
rhymes:

My dear sir, you may depend upon it, you never had name yet,
without making it rhyme to theme. I overlook that sort of
thing, however, and so must you, in your turn, pass over my
real or supposed ruggedness. The fact is, that I have a theory
on the subject, but that I have not time at present for explain¬
ing it.

There he puts an Aberdonian vowel—‘neem’ for ’name’—into

the mouth of Hogg the Borderer. Lor Byron, Scots was
Aberdonian.
81
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Anatole France, in a conversation published with his

approval in 1922, opines on the subject of rhyme:

Rhyme is not a difficulty to true poets. As they think in

metaphors, they have at their disposal a much more extensive
vocabulary than prose-writers and can easily find all their
rhymes therein.
What is a metaphor? A comparison. Now, one can compare
everything to anything: the moon to a cheese and a bruised
heart to a cracked pot. The metaphors therefore furnish an
almost unlimited provision of words and rhymes.
Better still, the rhyme draws attention to the metaphor as
though by the tinkling of a bell.
Add that each poet has his own metaphors, his own varie¬
gated epithets and, consequently, an immense reserve of rhymes
which is the peculiar quality of his genius.
Corneille rhymes by means of heroic words: front, affront,
outrage, rage. . . .
Racine rhymes by means of tender and sorrowful adjectives:
deplorable, miserable. . . .
La Fontaine’s rhymes are satirical. Those of Moliere jovial, etc.
In fact, every great poet discovers a new region. In the case of
one it is the land of heroism; in that of another, of burning
passion; in that of a third, of jeering and banter; in that of a
fourth, of generous gaiety.
Rhymes full of imagery are, as it were, the flowers of those
mysterious shores. They abound under the steps of the explorer.
He has but to stoop to choose those whose colours blend.
The bouquet of rhymes is the perfume, the adornment of the
shores on which each dreamer has landed. It is the shade of his
imagination.
And, truth to tell, with excellent poets, imagination and
sensibility make up for everything, even intelligence.7

How does this apply to Byron? He is a virtuoso of rhyme,

perhaps the most brilliant virtuoso in the English language.
He has a most un-English, a most Scottish, bravura. Proof of
those asseverations is found in his Don Juan. Whereas other
poets may have a specific resonance, Byron’s poetry has
multiple resonances.
But that Aberdonian ‘ee’ is intrusive in his poetry: a residual
element from his Scottish childhood. Take a few examples
from his shorter poems. From Stanzas for Music:

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 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name,

There is griet in the sound, there is guilt in the fame:
But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart
The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart.

The ‘ee’ sound occurs twice in line 1 and twice in line 3; once
each in lines 2 and 4. (Note the musical symmetry.) It recurs
like a sullen bell-stroke. But if we infer the Aberdonian ‘ee’
sound in the words ‘trace’, ‘name’, ‘fame’ (remembering the
letter to James Hogg), the bell strikes nine times. Another
case:

There be none of Beauty’s daughters

With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me:
W hen, as if its sound were causing
The charmed ocean’s pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming
And the lull’d winds seem dreaming. . . .

Observ e the ‘ee’ sound in lines 2 and 4, in the penultimate line

and its double, consecutive employment in the last line.
What is the emotional significance of that ‘ee’ sound? Well,
it's a veryr closed sound. It’s the sound of a sneer. Maybe a sneer
that can curl into a smile, but still a sneer. It is the cipher of the
Luciferic in Byron. It is worlds away from the open sound of
Blake’s poetry, which is full of the ‘ah’ sounds of wonderment,
the sounds of glad day (to borrow the title of one of his designs).
Byron’s sound-world as lyricist is different, too, from say
that of Wilfred Owen. I once wrote an article in The Listener8 in
which I took Owen’s poem ‘Strange Meeting’ and explored its
vowel sounds and their emotional content. The poem, you will
recall, describes a soldier’s nightmare, meeting in hell the
enemy he killed. This enemy tells what he might have done
with his life. Here Owen’s words are woven out of the sound of
pain:
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Notice particularly the vowel sounds of the second line: ow—

ugh—ow—ugh—ugh—oo!

83
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Back to Byron. (But we can only define the sonics of his

poetry by comparison with other poets.) Like Corneille, Byron
too can employ heroic rhymes, as in The Destruction of Senna¬
cherib'.
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

The Corneillesque rhyme ‘fold/gold' is trumpet-toned; but

observe again the three ‘ee’ sounds in the penultimate line and
the two ‘ee’ sounds in the last line.
The trumpet sounds again in Byron’s castigation of Sassenach
arrogance in the early lyric T would I were a careless child':

The cumbrous pomp of Saxon pride

Accords not with the freeborn soul.
Which loves the mountain’s craggy side,
And seeks the rocks where billows roll.

There’s a group of the early lyrics in which Byron not only

writes nostalgically of Scotland but fancies himself a Gael:

When I roved a young Highlander o’er the dark heath,

And climb’d thy steep summit, oh More en of snow!
To gaze on the torrent that thunder'd beneath,
Or the mist of the tempest that gather’d below. . . .

Allowing for adolescent hyperbole, we must at least credit him

with acknowledging the Scots Gaelic language in his Lachiny
Gair, when so many others were (indeed, still are) ignorant of
.the treasures of this most ancient of Western European
languages that is even yet still (just about) living.
Of course, he loved ‘dressing-up', both poetically and
sartori.uly—remember Thomas Phillips's portrait of him in
Albanian dress9 and the portrait of him wearing the Homeric
helmet he ordered for his Greek adventure.10
The sonal palette of his poetry is bituminous and oriole: the
tone-colours of a brooding hero, a hero manque; his heroic
aspirations frustrated by a deeply troubled, complex psyche;
his helmet gleaming Rembrandtesquely from out of the envel¬
oping darkness.
Perhaps Gabriele D'Annunzio is the poet nearest to Byron

84
 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

in artistic type and also as a lyric poet with aspirations to be a

playwright and a man of action. Cast a cold eye on them, and
both sometimes may seem rather rididulous. But however that
may be, the lines in Don Juan (X, xvi—xix), addressed to
Jeffrey, were palpably written with a sincerity that shines
through even the wish to be clever and funny. It is this section
that contains the oft-quoted words
But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred
A whole one, and my heart flies to my head. . . .

And, in the tradition of well-travelled Scots, Byron was also

an internationalist whose works take account of other Euro¬
pean literatures—far more than does the poetry of any of his
British contemporaries. Already at Harrow, at the Chatter-
tonian age of 16, he was making creditable translations from
the Greek of Aeschylus and Anacreon and from the Latin of
Catullus and Horace. His love of Italian spurs him to com¬
memorate Tasso in a lament; to translate from the Florentine
of Luigi Pulci; and to emulate Dante’s terga rima in translating
the Francesca of Rimini episode (Canto V of LTnfemo)', to
translate two terge rime from II Purgatorio (Canto VIII) in Don
Juan (III, cviii); and to compose the extended The Prophecy of
Dante in terga rima—perhaps the most successfully sustained
example of its use in English apart from Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows', though maybe lacking the
mastery7 of terga rima exemplified by Goethe in ‘Ariels Gesang'
at the beginning of Faust, Part II.
Byron’s The Bride of Abydos opens:
Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime?

— echoing Goethe’s
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bliikn,

Kennst du es wohl?
Goethe (who also essayed English poetry) returned Byron’s
feelings for him ‘with something of the tenderness of a father
discovering in a prodigal the exuberance of his own youth’.11
Byron is the Poet of the Grand Tour, the anticipator of Karl
Baedecker, the publisher of guide-books covering the greater

85
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

part of the civilized world. Contemporaneously with his friend

Moore’s Lalla Rookh, Byron’s Turkish Tales, The Giaour and
The Bride of Ahydos opened magic casements on to ‘the gorgeous
East’. His poetic feet were shod with Napoleon’s ‘seven-league
boots’. He was in some ways Buonaparte’s Doppelganger,
casting a saturnine shadow across the map of Europe. Few
avoided his influence: his themes are taken up in the work of
Victor Hugo, Pushkin, Mickiewicz and George Sand; and the
tone-colours of his poetry were translated on to the canvases of
Delacroix and Turner.12
In America, Edgar Allan Poe recited Byron in his lecture
The Poetic Principle, choosing a minor poem:

Though the day of my destiny’s over,

And the star of my fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
The faults which so many could find;
Though thy soul with my grief was acquainted,
It shrunk not to share it with me,
And the love which my spirit hath painted
It never hath found but in thee.

Poe comments: ‘Although the rhythm, here, is one of the most

difficult, the versification could scarcely be improved. No
nobler theme ever engaged the pen of a poet.’ Poe avers that
this poem captures the Poetic Principle itself, which is ‘strictly
and simply, the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty’; the
Principle always being found in

an elevating excitement of the Soul—quite independent of that

passion which is the intoxication of the Heart—or of that Truth
which is the satisfaction of the Reason. For, in regard to
Passion, alas! its tendency is to degrade, rather than to elevate
the Soul. Love, on the contrary—Love—the true, the divine
Eros—the Uranian, as distinguished from the Dionaean Venus—
is unquestionably the purest and truest of all poetic themes.
And in regard to Truth—if, to be sure, through the attainment
of a truth, we are led to perceive a harmony where none was
apparent before, we experience, at once, the true poetical
effect—but this effect is referable to the harmony alone, and not
in the least degree to the truth which merely served to render
the harmony manifest.13

86
 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

T hose words of Poe’s are, in my view, worth re-reading. By

now, there should surely be the possibility of perspective on
such romantic prose; unless the bigotry of a self-consciously
modern aesthetic should allow distaste for the style to obscure
understanding of its content. Poe knew a thing or two about
what constitutes a true lyric—and wrote some outstanding
examples himself.
So did James Joyce, though we all know that his greatest
poetry was written in his prose. In Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, Stephen is asked by a fellow-student: ‘And who is
the best poet.J' Stephen (Joyce) names Byron. Ellmann’s
footnote tells us Joyce held to this opinion in later life. Joyce’s
character Leopold Bloom in Ulysses shares his creator’s
admiration for Byron’s poetry: Bloom gave Molly a copy of his
works during their courtship. Joyce unsuccessfully attempted
to persuade the American composer George Antheil (Ezra
Pound's protege) to write an opera based on Byron’s Cain and
had no more success in trying to interest the Swiss composer
Othmar Schoeck in the same idea.14
Earlier composers had based operas on libretti d’apres Byron:
Donizetti, Parisina\ Verdi, The Two Foscari. Neither was a
success.
What of Byron’s own interest in music? We no more look to
him than to Charles Lamb for anything more than superficial
comments on it. Such sporadic impressions of music as occur
in Byron’s The Waltz indicate that his attitude to the opera
house and the fashionable salons, with their baubles and
glitter, meant no more to him than did the atmosphere of the
beau monde, the casino and the prize-ring: ail purlieus of scandal.
It is true that volume 8 (1821) of Leslie A. Marchand’s monu¬
mental edition ot Byron’s Letters & Journals (Murray, London),
covering the idyllic period with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli
in Italy, include more references to music (though fragmen¬
tary) than do any of the other volumes.
Byron’s Hebrew Melodies were set to music by his friend the
Canterbury-born Jewish composer Isaac Nathan, with the
assistance of his fellow Jewish London-born composer and
singer John Braham. They were published in fascicles between
1815 and 1822 and were well received. Nathan studied
Hebrew at Cambridge but abandoned theology for music and

87
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

was articled to Domenico Corri in London. He specialized in

the Hebrew cantillations of the synagogue, but there is no
significant influence of this in his Byron settings. Nathan’s
music is like diluted Mendelssohn, although it antedates the
appearance of the German master’s works (Exx. 5 and 6). In
1829 Nathan published Fugitive Pieces & Reminiscences of Lord
Byron. He died in Australia in 1864.
In 1884 there appeared 2 Hebrew Melodies of Byron set to
music by the 18-year-old Busoni, settings of the same poems as
quoted in the Nathan examples. Unlike Nathan, Busoni (who
was not Jewish) did attempt to infuse something of Hebrew
cantillation in the piano introduction to ‘I saw thee weep’
(Exx. 7 and 7a). And Busoni set By the rivers of Babylon as a
chorale (Ex. 8).
Busoni, a Tuscan pacifist, began, in the very month in which
the Great War was declared (August 1914), a song-cycle with
orchestra, conceived as ‘a political panel’, presenting poems
by Victor Hugo, Carducci, Goethe and Byron: each set to
music in its original language: quattro grandi poeti, interpreti
dell’anima di quattro grandi nagioni (Tour great poets interpreted
in the spirit of four great nations’) in the composer’s own
words.15 The work was never completed. Busoni died, a victim
of the war though not a combatant: heart-broken by the
carnage and waste and the crack-up of culture. He was the
heir to Liszt as pianist and to the Berlioz oi' La Damnation de
Faust in his opera Doktor Faust.
Liszt’s oeuvre demonstrates a near-obsession with Byron’s
Mageppa. His Study Op. 1, No. 5 (composed at 16) is thefons et
origo of music he re-worked sixteen years later in his Tran¬
scendental Study for piano, which itself became the basis of his
symphonic poem Mageppa, alter a further twelve years, orches¬
trated with the assistance ofjoachim Raff (Exx. 9, 10, and 11).
The Mazeppa legend is based on the life of a historical
Polish nobleman Ivan Mazeppa (1644-1709), page to King
John Casimir of Poland. His mistress was the young bride of a
Podolian count who had Mazeppa tied naked to a wild horse
which was driven into the Ukraine. The horse collapsed after
careering for many miles. Mazeppa was rescued by Cossacks
and eventually was elected their chief. Liszt’s full score quotes
a motto from Byron: ‘Away! Away!’ and the whole of Victor

88
 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

Hugo s Byron-influenced poem on the same subject, as intro¬

duction. Liszt appears himself to have been tied to this wild
horse of his imagination and borne with it over a creative
career of nearly a quarter of a century.
In 1834, in response to a commission from Paganini, the
30-vear-old Berlioz composed Harold en Italie, his second
symphony. An unusual feature was the concertante viola part.
This casting of the sombre-toned viola in the role of Byron’s
brooding hero is a masterstroke (Ex. 12). Berlioz’s Lelio is
also based on Byron, but his Le Corsair, which is not, takes its
programme from Fenimore Cooper.
Byron acknowledged Goethe’s Faust as an influence, together
with Alpine scenery, on his semi-lyrical romantic drama
Manfred. Schumann set to music scenes from Goethe’s Faust
and from Byron’s drama. When he was composing his Manfred,
Schumann was entering the final stage in his mental break¬
down and identified his interior struggle with that of Byron’s
hero. Schumann’s wife Clara wrote a diary-note: ‘Byron’s
Manfred inspired Robert to an extraordinary degree.’ Schumann
himself declared: ‘Never before have I devoted myself with
such love and outlay of force to any work as to that of Manfred.’
It is unusual in form: largely a melodrame, that is, most of the
text is spoken to orchestral accompaniment and sung only at
the lyric peaks. It comprises an overture and fifteen numbers.
Schumann edited and abridged Byron's text in German trans¬
lation and added a concluding Requiem aetemam dona eis. The
best moments are the sciomantic scenes. Perhaps the most
beautiful is the luminous scene between Manfred and Astarte,
which takes the unusual form of a song without words for
orchestra (Ex. 13) while the reciter speaks the text: ‘Gerufen
hab ’ ich dich in stiller Nacht, aus Busch und Schlummer . . .’ (‘For I
have call’d on thee in the still night,/ Startled the slumbering
birds from the hush’d boughs ...’).
Perhaps the genre of melodrame is the ideal way of setting to
music Byron’s Sonnets, also—or any sonnets. Sonnet-form
has its own structured music and is generally too concentrated
and rich in content and thought-forms to bear setting melodi-
cally. There is no great song-setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
unless (just possibly) it be Bernard Van Dieren’s. Byron as
sonneteer is not on the same altitude as Shakespeare—who

89
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

is?—but the same observation applies.

Tchaikovsky was urged by Balakirev to compose a sym¬
phonic-poem-cycle in four movements on Byron's Manfred.
(Incidentally, Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa is based on Push¬
kin’s text, which only indirectly derives from Byron.) Mantred,
the ‘accursed wanderer’, could have been Tchaikovsky the
secret homosexual, the ‘victim of fate’. Tchaikovsky composed
his Manfred in 1885, eight years before his death. Its four
movements depict the hero’s wanderings in the Bernese Alps;
the apparition of the Rainbow Sprite above the Staubbach
waterfall; a Pastorale—the life of the mountain-dwellers; and a
witches’ sabbath in the gothic, subterranean palace of Ariman,
ending with Manfred’s pardon and death. It is scored for a
large orchestra. It is a masterpiece, yet seldom performed.
Like Schumann in his Manfred, Schoenberg in his 1942
setting of Byron’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte chooses the form of
spoken, rather than sung, text (the original English), this time
with string quartet and piano. Schoenberg, a Viennese Jew
exiled in the U.S.A. from Nazi Germany, certainly saw a
parallel between Napoleon and Hitler. Byron’s blistering
denunciation of Buonaparte provided Schoenberg with the
opportunity of expressing, with all the force of his pentateuchal
passion, his loathing of Nazism. He set the final stanza (excised
by Byron from the published text), referring to Washington,
‘the Cincinnatus of the West’, as a tribute to the composer’s
adopted country. Structurally, Schoenberg's dissonant 12-note
idiom here comes to terms with traditional, triadic harmony.
The work ends in E flat major, the tonality of Beethoven’s
Eroica, which was originally intended to be dedicated to
Napoleon (Ex. 14). During its course it alludes to another
Beethoven work, the ‘Fifth’, and its Morse-code ‘V for Victory’
motive (Ex. 15).
The English composer, Alan Bush, in 1961 composed his
Byron Symphony, Op. 53, his third symphony. It has four move¬
ments: Introduction and allegro (Newstead Abbey: Byron’s
youth); ceremonial march-theme and variations (Westminster:
Byron in the House of Lords); andante tranquillo (II Palazzo
Savioli: a love idyll); introduction and choral finale to a Greek
text by Solomos (Missolonghi: Byron’s death in the cause of
Greek freedom). The first movement’s first subject embodies

90
 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

Byron’s ardent youth (Ex. 16). This theme is the basis for the
sustained, periodized melody of the last variation in the
second movement. Here Bush has a unique conception: to set
to music the imagined intonation and gestures of Byron’s
speech to the Lords, against capital punishment for machine-
breakers in the Industrial Revolution (Ex. 17).
Another exceptional procedure of Bush’s is to repeat a
development section in the finale which was heard in the first
movement, when Byron is imagined as hearing the Greek
trumpets from afar, responding with the intense vitality of his
youth.
Again and again, one hears Byron, in his poetry, calling,
‘Away! Away!’: he is impatient for action. He pants after
freedom for mankind and for himself. He would gladly exchange
his quill for a brace of pistols. He is the brother-across-the-
centuries of Garibaldi and Che Guevara. With him the struggle
is the thing. One senses that he would rather be a brigand
in the mountains than a victor in the metropolis. He is for
eternal opposition, not a new Establishment. His spiritual
brothers are such brigands as Fra Diavolo, the Spanish brigand
Francisco Esteben El Guapo (Francis Stephen the Buck or
Dandy) and Don Jose Maria, called El Tempranillo (‘the early
bird ) who was the historical prototype of Merimee’s and
Bizet’s smuggler and bandolero in Carmen. He would have had a
fellow-feeling for Benedetto Mangone, of whom it is recorded
that, having ambushed a party of travellers that included
Torquato Tasso, he allowed them to pass unharmed out of his
reverence for poets and poetry. Mangone was finally taken and
bastinadoed to death in Naples. But he lived on in popular
verse (in ottava rima—Byron’s favourite verse-form!): ‘/o canto li
ricatti, il fiero ardire/ Del gran’ Pietro Mancino fuoruscita . . (‘Of
Pietro Mancino, that great outlawed man/ I sing, and all his
rage . . .’). Byron is a brigand of the spirit, not so much among
the poets as standing apart from them. His final action—
training liberation fighters in Greece—materialized the spirit
of his poetry. That he died in the Missolonghi marshes, not in
action but in fever, was the final irony.
He was a lyric poet with aspirations to the epic. The
frustration of his striving produced his mordant satire and the
sprawling, reckless form of his Don Juan, which has more in

91
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

common with Fielding’s Tom Jones than with his contem¬

poraries, and yet contains some of his finest lyric strains in the
Haidee episode. Byron the satirist was at daggers drawn with
his alter ego, the lyricist; for satire spits sibillants and plosives
and clenches the teeth in consonants, whereas lyric poetry
sings with open vowels and an open mouth. The bromine of
Byron’s satire flows like a red liquid through his verse. Like
bromine itself, when the satire is laid in thick layers, it
becomes black and a stench to delicate nostrils. Mixed with
the only other liquid element—the mercury of the lyric—in
the chemistry of his psyche, it produces a unique mercurous
bromide of poetry: a compound of satire and lyricism; a
strange unity of olla podrida and the perfumes of Araby.

Re-reading this essay, taking stock, I am a little surprised by

its Jugendstil. Perhaps, like Alan Bush, I have imagined the
trumpets of youth sounding over the years. Or maybe I am
recapturing something of my boyhood response to ‘So we’ll go
no more a-roving’, which itself was a response to a folksong
Byron heard when young. Perhaps the reader may grant that,
to some temperaments, Byron’s flamboyance is excited in
others. Naturally, those who do not respond in this way may
wish that others didn’t. Byron, for all his heroic aspirations, had
elements of cynicism. But we may also, if we choose, prefer to
regard some of his cynicism and some of his heroics as play¬
acting. He tells us he ‘will go no more a-roving' with us—but he
does\ His poetry has surv ived so late into the night. If mankind
does not destroy itself—(he wrote ‘Let there be light!’ said God,
and there was light!/ ‘Let there be blood!’ says man, and there’s
a sea!)—who knows but that Byron may go a-roving with those
as yet unborn, in a new dawn.

NOTES

1. Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study (Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh &
London, 1961).
2. John D. Jump, Byron (Routledge & Regan Paul, London & Boston,
1972).

92
 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

3. Bertrand Harris Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads

(Princeton, N.J., 1959). (Ref. Child No. 279, pp. 478ff.)
4. James Alison (ed.), Poetry of Northeast Scotland (Heinemann, London &
Edinburgh, 1976).
5. Bronson, op. cit.
6. In his Foreword to his piano transcription of Gershwin's The Man I Love
(New World Music Corp. Harms Inc., N.Y., 1944) Grainger includes the
Maude V alerie White setting ol Byron among his idiosyncratic list of‘the
finest love-songs' from Dowland to Gershwin.
7. Paul Gsell, translated from the French by F. Lees, Anatole France & his
Circle (John Lane/The Bodley Head, London, 1922).
8. Ronald Stevenson, Britten’s War Requiem in The Listener, B.B.C. Publica¬
tions, London, 2 November 1967.
9. The Thomas Phillips portrait, from which the illustration on the front
cover of this volume is reproduced, hangs in the National Portrait
Gallery, London.
10. Byron's Greek helmet is on display at Newstead Abbey. The portrait of
him wearing it is reproduced in Peter Brent, Lord Byron (W’eidenfeld &
Nicolson, London, 1974).
11. Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache, Goethe (Grove Press, Inc., N.Y.; Calder,
London, 1960).
12. Turner made designs for Byron’s Poems published by Murray (London,
1834). Turner's literary work Fallacies of Hope, while a reply to Campbell’s
Pleasures of Hope, owes something to Byron.
13. Edgar Allan Poe, The Poetical Works (Sampson Low, London, 1858).
14. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (O.U.P., N.Y., 1959).
15. Guido M. Gatti (ed.), La Rassegna Musicale (Firenze (Florence), Gennaio
(January) 1940).

93
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Ex. 1
- o-,

•) —y—

Ex. 2

Ex. 3
Byron Ronald Stevenson

Andante

94
 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

Ex. 4 Maude Valerie White

r#Ttr-K-r-ft-■ -H--
fl
s

')

late in - o - the night.-

0 k

^ > > 3 3 * * >

r
1 ft
:4
* : b u - „ i

t 99 4 -Q-
- ^ ,---J=£l

Ex. 5
Isaac Nathan

Ex. 6
Isaac Nathan

95
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Ex. 7 Busoni

Ex. 7a
ausdrucksvoll Busoni

Ex. 8
Moderato Busoni

rMf~—- -1-\-;-:-
—J— JJ_AL•
if- J
An Ba - by - lo is Was - sern wir wein - - ten und

T * * -w

i 1

tM r „ ff | ^ (ir
w-t—
dach - ten des Ta - ges in Leid

^>■4 .
1
—
na
—
-== 4 —
 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

Ex. 11

Ex. 12

Ex. 13
Langsam
Schumann
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Ex. 13 (continued)

4 Jin [71, ^- fTl n=i\ J

i ri r i rn— i ri ri h r
[ZlftzLl
■U— F-—
A » HP-
•S&. * ■S&i * *

Ex. 15

98
 Byron as Lyricist: The Poet Among the Musicians

Ex. 16
Alan Bush

Ex. 17

Cantabile ed espressivo

99
Part Two:
LITERATURE AND LIFE
'
5
The Hero as Lover:
Byron and Women
by JENNI CALDER

Byron's reputation in his lifetime owed a great deal to the

response of women, to himself and to his poetry. He lived at a
time when sexual competitiveness and success, at least amongst
the upper classes, occupied a place at the forefront of social
relations. It was an environment responsive to sexuality and
conducive to sexual adventuring. It was also a time when
women were making some impact beyond the sexual, domestic
and symbolic roles. Byron's emotional life was lived danger¬
ously; this may have been as much due to the fact that he
encountered some challenging women as to his own adven¬
turousness and compulsion to take risks. He came across
women who were not afraid to be clever, as well as women who
were apparently not afraid of their own sexuality or its con¬
sequences.
Yet it was also a time when conventions of behaviour
weighed heavily. Byron’s life and personality were full of
tensions and dislocations. His aristocratic inheritance con¬
flicted with his constrained and Calvinist early years. His
radical leanings did not quite tune in with his enjoyment of
privilege. Whatever his scorn of the mores of upper-class
society the ambience of Harrow, Cambridge and the London
social scene offered possibilities which Byron was not going to
ignore, and this ambience clung to him throughout his life.

103
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Opportunities for good wine, compliant women and stimulating

discourse were unquestioned: these were all high priorities. The
conventions, as Byron saw them, were essentially those of a
hypocritical society. The rules that were publicly acknowl¬
edged were not privately obeyed. Yet Byron needed the
conventions. He needed them for his poetry, his public stance
and his private satisfaction, for- convention, hypocritical or
not, gave him a structure to rebel against. Anarchy means
nothing, except in terms of a structured, ordered and con¬
sequently repressive society.
Anarchy is perhaps not quite the right word to use in
Byron’s case, although there are anarchic qualities in his
actions and attitudes. His projection of himself as hero was
very much the product of his education and his environment.
His models were Classical and military: they almost had to be.
The figures of his own time from whom he could not tear his
eyes away were Napoleon and Wellington, and like most
thinking people of his generation his attitude to Napoleon was
ambivalent. His experience of the Levant and Islam was
almost incidental, although it provided food for the nourish¬
ment of an exotic and individualist hero. But whatever the
models and the influences, heroic endeavour in a benign and
concurring society had little point, whether that endeavour
was expressed in writing or in action. He needed to believe
that what he saw as the fateful satanity of the Byrons was not
just a more colourful version of what everyone was like.
Amongst the many strands of irony that are woven into his life
one of the most piquant is that Childe Harold and the group of
’heroic’ poems written around the same time, with their hints
of extremes of feeling and behaviour, brought him such public
approval, or rather, and even more pleasurable, a kind of
disapproving adulation. Perhaps he left England not because
England would not accept him, but because he became too
popular, and thus the ground for rebellion was whipped away
from beneath his feet.
In tackling the subject of Byron and women there are a
multitude of questions which must be asked, but to which
there seem to be no very satisfactory answers. Was he merely a
sexual adventurer? Were his marriage, his relationship with
his sister Augusta, his penchant for boys, prostitutes and
104
 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women

married women, calculated exploits, intended primarily to

shock, or the enactment of some genuine need—if such a thing
can be defined? Were women his victims? If so, some of them
were clearly willing. Can his sexual ethic, if looked at objec¬
tively, be seen as anything other than an ideology of oppression
and exploitation—in contrast to his political ethic? And are
his attitudes to love and sex as expressed in his poetry genuine,
or merely fashionable, or the work of a rebellious poseur?
I can't attempt to answer these questions, only to explore
some of the possible responses and to pursue some of the more
tantalizing avenues that are opened up. Like all the more
satisfactory heroic figures Byron is both individual and repre¬
sentative, and thus contains the quintessential challenge and
attraction of the hero. The individualism includes those
elements of anarchy, the representativeness, the embodiment
of collective need. He is contradictory, yet emblematic in his
contradictions. He was representative in the tensions he con¬
tained. It wasn’t only that his early upbringing was humble
and democratic and he then embraced the new horizons of
aristocracy. He grew up at a time when the entrenched power
and privilege of the landowning class was being challenged,
when established values were being threatened, when both
class and the subservience of women were beginning to look as
if they were no longer the absolutes that they had seemed to
be. As an aristocrat he both capitalized on his privileged status
and suffered from all the difficulties of a landowner who could
no longer be dependent on the land. He did not choose the
route of the reforming landowner, which might have calmed
his uneasy conscience. His ambiguous relationship with
Newstead Abbey plagued him. He could not make it work for
him; he could only make money out of it by selling it; yet he
was reluctant to relinquish such a splendid symbol. He did not
accept the responsibilities of privilege, for he despised privilege.
Yet there are indications of paternalism.
Similarly, he both acknowledged the conventions of upper-
class society and learned to work the system that they repre¬
sented, and he mocked them and threatened them in a way
that thrilled that society itself. His flamboyance was aristo¬
cratic rather than bohemian, as much the product of having
learnt the ways of the wealthy as a reaction against them, or a

105
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

reaction against the austerity and Calvinism of his early back¬

ground. However, austerity, and the guilt that was the
inevitable child of Calvinism, were ingredients that had to be
preserved in his existence. The austerity was all the more
demanding for being self-imposed: his strict regimes of diet
and exercise, for example. The guilt was the more dramatic for
being a, reaction to extremes that one senses were pursued
precisely in order to generate guilt. The obvious examples are
his relationship with Augusta, and possibly also that with his
wife. Both austerity and extremes had to be present so that he
could react against them.
Writing was an ideal occupation for a man of feeling who
was distinctly not destined for a profession. Byron’s letters
alone are evidence enough that he lived and wrote with
intensity, in fact more impressive evidence than much of his
poetry, which is distinguished more by its magnificent excep¬
tions than by a consistent quality. Inevitably much of the
content of both his letters and his poetry concerns his relations
with women. At the same time there is underlying much of his
writing a feeling that this was not what life really should be all
about, that although affairs with women were quite fun—and
inevitable—they were not fundamentally serious. Yet relations
with women were to dominate his life. In a society of men and
women without professions, and whose daily objectives were
often sexual when they were not political, most often in a
rather trivial sense, the moves in the games of sexual com¬
petition were scrutinized with perhaps undue attention. It was
hardly possible for Byron to escape this, given that he was an
attractive man and soon discovered that he could play the
game very well. The sexual game, as a game, features in his
early poetry, overlaid with the conventions that made it
palatable.
He of course made an issue of not accepting the rules at face
value. But in his poetry even as he takes up an anti-romantic
stance:

Away with your fictions of flimsy romance;

Those tissues of falsehood which folly has wove!1

he is borrowing the language and rhythms of conventionalized

verse—though in this case love song rather than poetry'.

106
 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women

Give me the mild beam of the soul-breathing glance,

Or the rapture which dwells on the first kiss of love.1

There is something of the lightness and a hint of the irony of

John Gay here, just as there is a touch of Macheath in the
Bvronic pose. Byron condemns ‘romance’ because he sees it as
artificial; it does not stem from true experience. Conventional
love poems are ‘cold compositions’.2 He prefers the ‘effusions
that spring from the heart’. He implies that verse itself is a cold
calculation of language, yet uses it, does not depart from its
conventions, and if he is a little playful he is not satirical. The
hallmark of this particular convention is not coldness, but
lightness. It certainly has little to do with depth of feeling.
Byron was always going to have a problem when it came to
conveying depth of feeling. He was never very good at it in his
poetry.
This is of course an early poem, and most writers will serve
their apprenticeship by making use of accepted forms, and
indeed there is no reason not to. Yet Byron’s readiness to make
use of the conventional is much more present than one might
have imagined. The language, the form, the cultural parameters,
in particular the Classical ambience, that were available to
Byron were in many ways those of an earlier generation. This
is not to suggest that they were not those of his own generation
also, but does imply a continuity with the eighteenth century
which we tend to think the Romantic poets broke. The
cultural environment with which early nineteenth-century
writers were familiar would remain essentially the same, until
the balance of education itself shifted under pressure from a
changing society. Byron’s writing right through his lifetime is
stamped with the features of the eighteenth century and a
privileged classical education much more strongly than that
of, say, Wordsworth, who was much more exposed to other
cultural currents.
Part of the ‘romance’ which Byron might have been expected
to rebel against was the idealization of women, especially as
there were some notable eighteenth-century examples to
encourage him. He met and seems to have been somewhat
alarmed by Madame de Stael—‘she is frightful as a precipice’,
he comically proclaimed, referring to her looks.3 He made fun

107
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

of the ‘blues’, or bluestockings—there was a lot of it—fun¬

making—about. He seems to have genuinely respected the
talents and intelligence of the woman who became his wife,
Annabella Milbanke. But more conspicuous and more sugges¬
tive than the presence of clever women in fashionable society
was a dramatic change in the appearance of women which had
come as a direct result of the French Revolution. The stiff,
cumbersome, elaborate hooped skirts of an opulent and
elaborate French Court that was totally out of touch with real
life but yet led the way in European fashion, disappeared. At
the time the young Byron was embarking on experiences with
the opposite sex, women were wearing soft, clinging, figure-
enhancing garments that were in every sense unrestricting. It
was one of the most dramatic fashion changes ever, and was
full of social and sexual implications. It is debatable whether it
is artificiality or naturalness that most encourages the view of
women as sex objects. Whichever it is, Byron was not able to
depart from that most conventional of reactions. He satirizes
female behaviour, and criticizes it, but the ideal of female
beauty and of feminine character, and the acceptance of the
belief that females ought to be beautiful, is maintained. Don
Juan is not indiscriminate in his loves. His women are always
good-looking, in a conventionally feminine way, and although
they may be cuckolding their husbands, they have all the
appropriate female attributes.
If we look at a better known poem, one that has been safely
anthologized, we see the idealization process in operation. ‘She
walks in beauty’ was written about Byron’s cousin Mrs.
Wilmot, whom he met at a party wearing a black spangled dress.

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;

108
 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women

Where thoughts serenely sweet express

How' pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,

So soft, so calm, yet eloquent.
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!4

The poem is finely written, with a lilting emotional conviction

that makes it all the more interesting. If the central image is
slightly unusual (less so if we remember the black spangled
dress), the attitude of reverence towards female beauty is not
in the least out of the ordinary'. Neither language nor senti¬
ments are in any way unconventional. The description of
beauty and the implication of personality tell us a great deal
about a very important part of Byron’s attitude to women.
L nlike the earlier poem, quite different in tone, there is a
measured seriousness here, a consideredness, a current of calm
assessment. And ‘calm’ is a word that features, along with
others that contribute to the male conventionalization of the
female: ‘tender’, ‘grace’, ‘softly’, ‘serenely sweet’, ‘eloquent’
(of looks, not words), ‘smiles’, ‘glow’, ‘goodness’, ‘peace’,
‘pure’, ‘innocent’.
It would not be very helpful to take a doctrinaire feminist
line on this kind of thing, to condemn Byron for doing very
well w hat many poets have done indifferently, and for operating
within a conventional attitude to women which would persist
for a good deal longer and still underlies a great many
assumptions about human relations. The poem transcends the
stereotype—one way of defining a successful piece of writing.
The problem with Byron is that we know too much about him
to accept writing of this kind without question. Did a man for
whom fornication was so significant an activity really set such
store by purity and innocence? Or who apparently enjoyed
sexual conflict and all the excitements of intrigue and the
challenges of rebellion really value sweetness and serenity?
The answer is probably yes, and the affirmative still keeps us
rooted within a convention—the convention of the male double
standard. ‘She walks in beauty’ has the ring of conviction: the

109
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

poet, as a poet, believed in what he was setting down. Else¬

where the impression is that women were less important to
Byron as soothing angels than as providing opportunities for
living life more intensely, and intensity of living was essential
to him. But the evidence suggests, and particularly the evi¬
dence of his relationship with Augusta, that like so many men
Byron wanted women to be both angel and temptress. Poeti¬
cally, the problem was to bring the two together. He solved
that problem in Don Juan.
Of course Byron could as readily satirize as idealize, and the
double bluff of mockery can be pointed and amusing. He can
address a lady on the infelicities of keeping an outdoor
December assignation:

But here our climate is so rigid,

That love itself is rather frigid:5

-—and acknowledge the irony of the trappings of, presumably,

illicit love: the exchange of locks of hair and the formalized
expectations of the wooer and the wooed. The indications are,
though, that Byron enjoyed courtship rituals, in spite of this
youthful opinion of what he considered essentially trivial
formalities which was expressed in a letter to Augusta:

... I feel inclined to laugh at you, for love in my humble

opinion, is utter nonsense, a mere jargon of compliments,
romance, and deceit; now for my part had I fifty mistresses, I
should in the course of a fortnight, forget them all, and if by any
chance I ever recollected one, should laugh at it as a dream,
and bless my stars, for delivering me from the hands of the little
mischievous Blind God.6

He not only enjoyed the rituals of courtship, but proved to be

very good at just the kind of thing he mocks. He was able to
make the conventions work to his advantage, often at the same
time as he outrageously flouted them. Yet he was perhaps
never quite as outrageous as he made himself out to be, or as
the Victorian generation made him out to be. Certainly he
slept with boys and had adulterous affairs, but that was not
uncustomary for young men of his status and education.
Public school and university fostered the former, while the
latter was tacitly accepted as an appropriate way for young

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 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women

men to gain sexual experience. Married women were safer

and possibly friendlier than prostitutes.
As in most aspects of Byron’s life the contradictions are
monumental. He scorns the ’mere jargon of compliments’, yet
masters the accepted modes of seduction. He scorns love, enjoys
conquest, and demands passion. And woven into all this is a
tangle of double standards. ‘I am buried in an abyss of
sensuality,’ he writes tojohn Cam Hobhouse in February 1808,
\ . . I am given to Harlots, and live in a state of Concubinage, I
am at this moment under a course of restoration by Pearson’s
prescription, for a debility occasioned by too frequent connec¬
tion.'7 A little over a year later he is full of righteous indignation,
admittedly in a letter to his mother, at the behaviour of his
manservant Fletcher for associating with prostitutes, yet the
moral stance is genuine. Fletcher had also been guilty of
introducing a young lad to a ‘woman of the town’. Byron writes
of the ‘machinations of a scoundrel who has not only been guilty
of adultery, but of depraving the mind of an innocent stripling,
for no other motive, but that which actuates the devil himself,
namely, to plunge another in equal infamy . . ,’.8 Byron accepts
his own action as being inevitable, compelled by the curse of the
Bvrons, and accepts also the consequences with a certain
sanguinity—the ‘debility’ he refers to. His own involvements in
adultery, or with prostitutes are, in some moods, really driven by
the devil himself. The ‘infamy’ of his own behaviour is if
possible to be avoided by others.
The double standards are detectable everywhere, partly a
product of social attitudes, partly of Byron’s own genius for
self-delusion. He is decent—he sees that his illegitimate
children are properly cared for. Yet there is something almost
dismissive in his decency. ‘I cannot have the girl on the parish’,9
he writes to his agent John Hanson, of a maid at Newstead who
is pregnant by him, yet there is no examination of the conven¬
tion that accepts the inevitability of maids bearing the children
of young gentlemen, no scrutiny of values, and no curiosity in
the child he had fathered. It is of course not a simple case of
self-delusion, nor of a sensitive man at odds with both himself
and society. One of the reasons why Byron is so intriguing—
and attractive—a figure is precisely because he writes large,
exposes both deliberately and inadvertently so much of what a

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

sponge-like society absorbs and neutralizes. When the exposure

is as glittering, trenchant and enjoyable as it is in Don Juan it is
hard not to forgive him everything.
It is perhaps not unhelpfully simplistic to see the young
Byron facing a choice between two areas of action, sex or
politics, and to see the two as offering similar possibilities.
Byron was clearly not going to fit into the established political
life of early nineteenth-century Britain, although he flirted with
the idea. His talents didn’t really lie in that direction. Until he
found his feet as a writer, sexual relations gave him the
possibilities of social attack that he needed. But it was not a
period that was conducive to sexual politics. Too much was
acceptable, however tacit the acceptance. And however
exploitative Byron’s relations with women may have been, he
was probably not ruthless enough to use sex in this aggressive
way.
Byron’s restlessness was partly the result of not knowing
quite what his target should be, or what cause he should
mobilize. He could attack hypocrisy, injustice, specious govern¬
ment, but that wasn’t particularly difficult or challenging.
What was difficult was to find in England an embraceable
cause. The objects of his fragmented attacks were often too close
to what sustained him for comfort, and this further complicated
matters. Hence the need to create the Childe Harold persona,
the noble outcast, and to leave vague exactly the reasons for his
disquiet. Childe Harold and his kin are at the same time, it is
implied, the victims of women and the objects of their sym¬
pathy. The other side of Byron’s manipulation of sexual
politics, the use of unorthodox sexual relations as a means of
attacking society, was the rationalization. Byron quite genuinely
saw himself at times as victim, of his own sexuality as well as of
women. And the vehicle of sympathetic understanding has
always been one of the classic ways of women presenting in
acceptable fashion their own sexuality.
To attack government and royalty was easy—which is not
to suggest that Byron didn’t do it very well. The Vision of
Judgment surely still makes the reader wince on behalf of its
victims. To mount an attack on society as a whole was
altogether trickier, and in a sense out of Byron’s time, in spite
of reason and revolution. A comprehensive analysis of social

112
 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women

ills and the structure of exploitation was yet to come. Action

was the problem, and it was there that relations with women
came to the rescue: in that area action, for Byron, was not a
problem. It was a very easy way to demonstrate his prowess.
Deformity may have made the need for this particularly
strong; his unhappy relationship with his mother may have
contributed. The fact that he was fond of boys, and of one in
particular, John Edleston, whom he had known at Cam¬
bridge— ‘I certainly love him more than any human being’10—
may have reinforced a need to prove that he was successful
with women. I his is speculation, however interesting. What¬
ever the reasons, there can be no doubt that Byron made use
of sex and women in a number of ways.
To what extent can we trust his poetry, or trust his letters?
‘The great object of my life is sensation—to feel that we
exist—even though in pain—it is this “craving void” which
drives us to Gaming—to Battle—to Travel—to intemperate
but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal
attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplish¬
ment. . . ,’n In this letter to Annabella Milbanke he begins
with T’, and then generalizes—all men are the same. It could
be part of his attempt to make himself acceptable to the
fastidious Miss Milbanke. On the other hand, he enjoyed
shocking her. And is he describing here a fictive Byron (Childe
Harold) or the real man? The question is complicated by the
fact that Byron’s reality was itself partly his own invention. If
sex and gender were to be manipulated as weapons against
society, it required Byron’s mediating interpretation—a
public relations job—to make the most of it. This is what his
poetry was doing. He wrote in a letter to Thomas Moore ‘I can
never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of
excited passion12; but it was also a way of making passion
acceptable. Once it had been put into words it became inter¬
pretation, not actuality. Passion described, even implied, is
passion tamed. Language, particularly written language, has a
defusing effect often at the same time as it has an inflating,
self-enhancing tendency. If it is written down in sentences,
even—or especially—rhymed, metred sentences, it becomes
in a sense respectable, or at least safe. Even Don Juan is safe, as
is Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In both cases the limits of form and

113
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

convention control both the emotion and the threat.

Without poetry it was very difficult to know what strong
feeling was for, unless it was to be experienced simply for its own
sake. With Byron there is always the suggestion that passion
was escape. ‘I am totally absorbed in this passion’, he wrote to
Lady Melbourne of his affair with Frances Webster.13 There is
always a tension between the inward and the outgoing effects of
profound feeling. For Byron ‘love’ was often self-absorbing. Did
passion also make him more compassionate, sensitive, generous
towards human frailties? Don Juan suggests an answer in the
affirmative. Absorption in the love of women was certainly a
major objective in Byron’s existence, and the feeling was
heightened if it was dangerous. For anyone but Byron there
would have been enough danger in adultery; Byron experi¬
mented with incest. ‘I am much afraid that perverse passion
was my deepest after all’, he wrote,14 a month or so after his
remark about Frances Webster, and again to Lady Melbourne,
to whom he wrote with an honesty which often seems doubtful
elsewhere. His friendship with her was a cardinal factor in his
life for several years. He wrote often to his sister Augusta, and
often insisted that he could love no other woman as he loved
her. It was partly the fatal bond of the Byrons that he saw
drawing them together, partly the fact that she seemed to
understand him as no one else could—or that he believed this.
Certainly his wife did not understand him. Again, Byron’s
courtship and marriage were totally compatible with the society
in which he lived. Byron chose a woman who had money and
talents, a woman whom society might have chosen for him, but
whom he could never have loved. He conducted with her a
careful correspondence in which he protested his admiration and
respect and his belief that she would be good for him, encour¬
aging her to believe that she could reform him. That in itself
amounted to cruelty, and the cruelties would be compounded
after their marriage. He appeared to be accepting the conven¬
tional view of women, and conducting the courtship rituals as
society demanded. ‘I am good-humoured to women, and docile;
and if I did not fall in love with her, which I should try to prevent,
we should be a very comfortable couple’, he wrote in his
journal.15 Byron may have genuinely felt that Annabella
Milbanke could be his salvation, or genuinely wanted to believe it.

114
 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women

I yet wish to be good—with you I cannot but be happy—but I

never shall be what I would have been—luckily I do not wish to
be so now—reflection & experience have taught me that all
pursuits which are not founded on self-esteem & the good of
others—lead out to the same result. ... I am thankful that the
wildness of my imaginations has not altogether prevented me
from recovering the path of peace.16

Part of him may have felt a profound need for ‘peace’, but that
path would be closed to him, and he almost willed its closure.
Peace implied a retiral from the sexual battleground, and it
seemed highly unlikely that Byron could have convinced him¬
self that that was what he needed, or indeed that it was
possible.
He made every attempt to rationalize his proposed marriage
with Annabella. ‘There is something to me very softening in
the presence of a woman,—some strange influence, even if one
is not in love with them,—which I cannot at all account for,
having no very' high opinion of the sex. But yet,—I always feel
in better humour with myself and everything else, if there is a
woman within ken.’17 The problem was that the acceptance of
marriage was the acceptance of an institution shaped and
supported by just the hypocritical values that Byron detested,
and no amount of wry comment on Byron’s part could dis¬
guise that. Marriage would make him respectable; indeed that
was why he wanted it, in so far as he really did want it. For a
while it seemed that he was prepared to pay that price for
what he hoped would prove to be an escape from the self-
torture that his sexual liaisons seemed to lead to. His associa¬
tion with Caroline Lamb, for example, had proved a disaster
and an embarrassment, maybe because she out-Byroned
Byron, and marriage could perhaps be a way of laying that
ghost. Then there was Augusta; but he was never going to be
able to escape the anguish of that relationship. In Don Juan
Byron successfully describes sexual activity as innocent fun, in
spite of the irritations of subterfuge and deceit. There is very
little hint of that in his life.
Some years after his marriage, in a letter to his close friend
Thomas Moore—there is a quality of honesty in Byron’s
letters to Moore as there is in those to Lady Melbourne—in
the same letter in which he talks of poetry as ‘the expression of

115
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

excited passion’, he added ‘there is no such thing as a life of

passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal
feaver. Besides, who could ever shave themselves in such a
state?’18 Life could not have the continuous intensity of opera,
although a later Byronic figure Robert Louis Stevenson would
wish wistfully that it could, but nevertheless there had to be
arias and high notes. If the earthquake could not be ever¬
lasting it had to be repeated, and if the repeats would not come
naturally they would have to be artificially, or artfully, gener¬
ated. For someone who was so fond ol the idea of love, it was
extraordinary that Byron could contemplate marriage, which
he looked at coolly as a union of convenience in which love
would be an irrelevance. Although he uses the word in con¬
nection with his marriage, it is quite clear that by it he does
not mean passion, precisely because passion was eruptive, not
an even tenor of existence.
It is difficult to know to what extent Byron was self-deluded,
to what extent he was rather desperately trying to manipulate
what society offered into something that might be genuinely
‘good’ for him. His reaction against the failure of his marriage
suggests self-delusion. Whatever else it damaged, it damaged
his pride. Lady Byron outmanoeuvred him, in quite a different
way from Caroline Lamb, but the effect was similar. A broken
marriage, or a broken love affair, is a reasonable justification for
strong feeling and self-pity. Byron probably experienced more
intensity with the breaking than with the making of his marriage.

. . . she—or rather—the separation—has broken my heart—I

feel as if an Elephant had trodden on it—I am convinced I shall
never get over it—but I try. ... I breathe lead.19

This was in a letter to Augusta, on whom he could count for

sympathy. Later he wrote ‘that woman has destroyed me.’20
Caroline Lamb he claimed to hate, when she was being at her
most aggravating, following and pestering him. The tone of his
comments on Annabella is also full of hatred, so that we react
with suspicion at something like this, written to her:

... do not destroy whatever slender or remote hope I may still

cling to—but believe me when I tell you with the most sincere
& solemn truth to you and before God—that if there were a
means of becoming reunited to you I would embrace it.21

116
 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women

Sixteen days later he is confiding to Thomas Moore that he

has fallen in love—he is in Italy now—and indeed is involved
in a Mozartian incident which he describes with insouciant
good humour. 'I have fallen in love with a very pretty
Venetian of two and twenty . . . we have found and sworn an
eternal attachment—which has already lasted a lunar month’,
he wrote to Augusta.22 There were also, of course, the episode
with Cdaire Clairmont, which produced a daughter, and
numerous Venetian ladies.
It was at this stage in his life, in 1819, that Byron met
Teresa Guiccioli, who would dominate his emotional existence
until his death. It was a tangled and tortuous affair, plagued
by jealousies and misunderstandings and interferences. If
Byron in some ways rather enjoyed the intrigue and the
risks—the Contessa was married to a man forty years older
than herself—the negotiating of the minefield of Guiccioli
connections and Italian conventions soon became tedious and
at times almost unbearable. However, Byron had lost none of
his masterly touch at the manoeuvrings of the love affair, and
protested eternal love, in spite of all difficulties, to the object of
his affections. That he was still expert at declarations of love
we can see in his letters to Teresa, but his talent is within the
conventional, although the fact that he was writing in a
language not his own may have been a limiting factor. He was
able to write to her as ‘my only and last love’, ‘you shall be my
last passion.’23 It was indeed his last love, but it did not stand
in the way of other sexual relationships. And at the same time
as he was elaborating on his love for Teresa he was writing to
Augusta. ‘I have never ceased nor can cease to feel for a
moment that perfect and boundless attachment which bound
& binds me to you—which renders me utterly incapable of real
love for any other human being—what could they be to me
after you?’24 He was thinking seriously of marriage with Teresa,
if both of them were free, but the pull of Augusta was as strong
as ever. ‘I always loved you better than any earthly existence,
and I always shall unless I go mad.’25 It is possible that Byron
himself was surprised at how important his relationship with
Teresa had become, and possible also that he could continue
to express confidently the depth of his feelings for Augusta
because there was nothing that could be done about it. It was

117
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

a safe commitment, a safe passion, now confined to letters.

Teresa was a strong personality. Initially the conventions of
Venice appealed to Byron greatly. It was accepted that
married women would have lovers, as there was no pretence
that marriage was anything but a union of convenience. But
there were nevertheless certain rules: high standards of fidelity
and constancy were exacted in these extra-marital relation¬
ships, and a degree of discretion. Byron wrote at some length
about these arrangements to John Murray:
Their system has its rules—and its fitnesses—and decorums—
so as to be reduced to a kind of discipline—or game at hearts—
which admits few deviations unless you wish to lose it.—They
are extremely tenacious and jealous as furies—not permitting
their Lovers even to marry if they can help it—and keeping them
always close to them in public as in private whenever they
can.—In short they transfer marriage to adultery—and strike
the not out of that commandment.—The reason is that they
marry for their parents and love for themselves.—They exact
fidelity from a lover as a debt of honour—while they pay the
husband as a tradesman—that is not at all.—You hear a person’s
character—male or female—canvassed—not as depending on
their conduct to their husbands or wives—but to their mistress
or their lover.26

If Byron thought at first that the acceptance of extra-marital

liaisons were a sign of a sexually easy-going society, he soon
learnt differently. A difficulty for him was that in fact he
found the system hard to accept, for it was a labyrinth that
presented obstacle after obstacle to the progress of true love.
In the end he became bored with trying to negotiate it,
although his feelings for Teresa remained strong.
Other powerful feelings were growing more insistent. They
had always been there but had never found an appropriate
objective correlative. In a letter to John Cam Hobhouse of
October 1819, Byron wrote:
My taste for revolution is abated—with my other passions.—
Yet I want a country—and a home—and if possible—a free
one—I am not yet thirty two years of age—and I might still
be a decent citizen and found a house and a family. . . ,27
The abatement was temporary. Decent citizenship within the
limits of a hypocritical society was not acceptable. Freedom

118
 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women

had to be fought for before paternalism, in both its senses, was

possible. 1 he journey to Missolonghi was in a way the first
necessary step in the process of settling down, as well as
providing the literary hero at last with an opportunity to break
out into action, and to escape from tedious and sterile social
demands.
\\ hat is Byron's status as a heroic figure, and how can we
assess the hero as lover? There is no doubt that Byron took
advantage of women and exploited the opportunities that his
personal and his literary' magnetism gave him. Teresa reacted
to both, which flattered his vanity and spurred his own feel¬
ings. Yet he saw himself as the victim of strong passions. He
wanted to live life with intensity, and relished the danger and
the damage that he exposed himself to, but he was exposing
others at the same time. In his writing he created characters
who were simultaneously intensely involved and aloof, and
this suggests a need to protect himself. In the group of tales
that followed Childe Harold the love of women is woven into
accounts of heroic action and an atmosphere of diffuse
exoticism. Passion is transplanted from the intrigues of the
drawing room to a heroic, even epic, canvas. It is a translation
in quality as well as in environment, although the latter has a
great deal to do with the former. In The Giaour, for instance,
love is given a heroic dimension by action:

Yet death I have not fear’d to meet;

And in the field it had been sweet,
Had danger woo’d me on to move
The slave of glory, not of love,
I’ve braved it—not for honour’s boast;
I smile at laurels won or lost;
To such let others carve their way,
For high renown, or hireling pay:
But place again before my eyes
Aught that I deem a worthy prize—
The maid I love, the man I hate—
And I will hunt the steps of fate
To save or slay. . . ,28

Love is a passion to die for or to kill for. It demands sacrifice,

risk, courage on the part of both man and woman, and with all
this it is sanctified—‘love indeed is light from heaven.’ The

119
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

feeling itself, and the commitment, raises it above the sordid¬

ness of the adulterous intrigue or the exploitativeness of the
harem. However, although love is a major theme, or pivot of
action, in this group of poems, most of the language—and
they are long—is taken up with the communication of
ambience rather than with specific feeling.
Love may be an active passion in these poems, enhanced by
blood and daring, but the women are on the whole passive.
They are there to be admired by men, to be, in fact, pivots of
action rather than to act. This is Zuleika, in The Bride of
A by do s:

The light of love, the purity of grace,

The mind, the Music breathing from her face,
The heart whose softness harmonized the whole,
And oh! that eye was in itself a Soul!
Her graceful arms in meekness bending
Across her gently-budding breast. . . ,29

And so on: purity, grace, meekness, Music, harmony, Soul—

language like this defuses the sensuality of female beauty. The
more beautiful the woman the more likely she is to be not only
the victim of man’s lust but the pawn of man's ambition. It is
not surprising that the women tend to die. Given too much
substance, too much life, they become dangerous. The heroes
bear the burden of the victimization of women with a heavy
heart, yet they carry on. Just as the language of heroic romantic
love diverts the reader's attention from sex, so the hero's fierce
and solitary courage, the ‘loneliness and mystery’,30 divert
enquiry away from the possible responsibility for the heroine's
fate. Women, in other words, enhance the hero, but are
expendable. When Byron went to Greece he did not take
Teresa, but he felt guilty about leaving her behind.
It is of course the classic tendency. Byron did not invent it,
and it would have a long and flourishing tradition after him—
although partly thanks to him. It may be built into the heroic
tradition. It may not be possible for the hero to be lover
without at best exploiting women, at worst destroying them.
But only a step away from the heroic tradition is Don Juan.
\\ ith Don Juan Byron looked at the contemporary scene, and
cast away the escapist possibilities of exotic climes, heroic

120
 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women

traditions, and conventional poetic language. "How 1 do

delight in observing life as it really is!’ he exclaimed in his
journal.31 In Don Juan he wrote about the life he observ ed and
life as he would have wished to experience it. And suddenly he
has a poem peopled with flesh and blood men and women.
The men and women are flesh and blood, but of course the
life is not real, or rather the hero’s existence is not real. Much
of what Byron described was society as he had tangled with it,
the mores he had encountered on his early visit to Spain, and
with which he was more directly involved in Italy. Donna
Julia of Canto I, the attractive young woman married to an
older man, could have been Teresa Guiccioli. The double
standards he exposed he had both experienced and partici¬
pated in. The devout puritanism of Juan's mother and his
education devoid of "natural history’32 were also very close to
home. But in Juan Byron projected not what he himself was,
but what he might have wanted to be: genuinely innocent and
genuinely liberated from the false constraints and specious
ambitions and conquests of society. In spite of the freewheeling
stanza, the manipulation of rhyme, the deliberately fractured
versification—or perhaps because of these things—Byron’s
sixteen-canto, profoundly serious romp is full of a delicate and
deadly irony, wry, controlled, but above all generous—and
most noticeably generous to women.
Don Juan is both idealistic and realistic. Byron sidesteps the
whole problem of sexual conquest by presenting women as
equal players in the game, and at the same time avoids the
characterization of the female as calculating temptress—a
tendency that surfaced rather often in his life, where he
fluctuated between interpreting himself as sexual victim and
sexual conqueror. But if the ladies in Don Juan are real (they
are no less attractive than the Leilas and Zuleikas, but their
looks are substantive, and their presence physical rather than
sentimental), what about the sex? It is surely ideal. Juan inno¬
cently succumbs to innocent female beauty (not wiles) aided
and abetted by the time of year, the moon, the climate. There
are, Byron disingenuously argues, as we all know, forces at
work which will bring a man and a woman together in spite of
all their rational and moral inclinations, and it could not
possibly be Juan’s fault, or Julia’s, and besides, when we are

121
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

talking about a natural and mutual attraction blame is not a

part of things. In other words, Byron creates an environment
in which there is no need for sexual responsibility. Social
conventions may be flouted but human feelings are not damaged.
In Mozart’s Don Giovanni we have an exposure of human
vulnerability and a real tension between the romantic tempta¬
tions of seduction (for both seducer and seduced) and suffer¬
ing. This is not a part of Byron’s creation. He is interested in
exploring the possibilities of freedom in the three great arenas
of love, war and politics. His celebration of man’s relations
with woman is beyond the persuasive arts of Don Giovanni
because in Don Juan men and women are simply doing what
comes naturally. It is the difference between liberation and
libertinism. But there is a problem. Sex is and is not natural,
and cannot be stripped of the layers with which religion, culture
and social organization have coated it. Byron implies that guilt
and pain in sexual relations are the result of artificial con¬
straints and interpretations, and with this the twentieth-
century reader might be inclined to agree. Nevertheless, as soon
as there are communities of men and women there are controls,
and therefore artificialities. The fact that Byron uses Don Juan to
expose these artificialities, and the hypocrisies they breed, and
that this is done with such vivacity, is in itself seductive.
However, it is part of the idealism. The environment in which
Byron’s Juan operates is not amoral but ideal, gorgeously and
irresistibly—and self-consciously—ignoring certain of the
realities of human relations.
Juan moves through relations with women, political situa¬
tions, battlefields, fluidly and harmlessly. He learns as he goes,
absorbs, responds. He is the genuinely liberated hero, who
reminds us that the older and more persistent heroic tradition,
which seems to demand if not the victimization of women at
least an inability to accept them as active and equal partici¬
pants in experience, need not dominate. Somehow the critical
gaiety of Byron’s writing carries him through all kinds of
treacherous areas. He could do it in verse. He could not do it in
his own life. His own experience demonstrated just how
idealized Don Juan was. Whether Byron liked it or not, and
however hard he rebelled against it, he was buffeted by con¬
ventions of morality which he may have despised but with

122
 The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women

which he had to find a way of operating. Love, passion, the

embracing oi experience for its own sake, intensity of living
could not of themselves create the momentum that would
carry him past the shoals of prejudiced and hypocritical
attitudes.
V\ hen it came to the point freedom was not really about love
for women. He felt compelled to abandon the Contessa
Guiccioli in the cause of the liberation of Greece. Both heroism
and freedom had to go beyond commitment to an individual
human being. As Juan moved from the liberties of love to the
liberties of humankind so Byron endeavoured. Teresa might
have accompanied him, as she wished to, in the capacity of
angel; hardly in the capacity of comrade. ‘A mistress never is
nor can be a friend’, Byron had said revealingly some years
earlier.33 Perhaps his only female friend had been Lady
Melbourne. Freely expressed sexuality imposes its own bur¬
dens and restrictions.
The questions remain unanswered. One of the problems is
that Byron himself invites high expectations. His awareness
and self-awareness are such that the reader, like the deluded
Miss Milbanke, is anxious to believe the best of him, and is
then perhaps doubly disappointed to find that for all his
generosity of spirit he could never quite pull himself out of the
morass of mutually damaging relations between the sexes. If
we accept Byron’s heroism, his genuine commitment to a
creative liberation, we may also have to accept that the pain¬
less world of Juan’s loves is both a delightful fiction and a
conscious apology for the harsher realities of sexual exploitation.

NOTES

All quotations from Byron’s letters and journals are taken from Byron’s
Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand (John Murray, 1973—82).
Quotations from Byron’s poetry are taken from The Poetical Works of Lord
Byron (Oxford University Press, 1945).

1. ‘The First Kiss of Love’, Poetical Works, p. 8.

2. Ibid.
3. Quoted in Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (John Murray, 1971),
p. 169.

123
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme
4. ‘She walks in beauty’, op. cit., p. 77.
5. ‘To a Lady’, op. cit., p. 15.
6. Letter to Augusta Byron, 25 October 1804. Letters and Journals, Vol. I,
p. 52.
7. Letter to John Cam Hobhouse, 27 February 1808, ibid., p. 158.
8. Letter to Mrs. Catherine Gordon Byron, 19 May 1809, ibid., pp. 203—4.
9. Letter to John Hanson, 17 January 1809, ibid., p. 189.
10. Letter to Elizabeth Bridget Pigot, 5 July 1807, ibid., pp. 124—25.
11. Letter to Annabella Milbanke, 6 September 1813, Letters and Journals,
’ Vol. II, p. 109.
12. Letter to Thomas Moore, 5 July 1821, Letters and Journals, Vol. VIII, p.
146.
13. Letter to Lady Melbourne, 11 October 1813, Letters and Journals, Vol. II,
p. 143.
14. Letter to Ladv Melbourne, 25 November 1813, ibid., p. 174.
15. Ibid., p. 241. '
16. Letter to Annabella Milbanke, 26 September 1814, Letters and Journals,
Vol. IV, pp. 183—84.
17. Letters and loumals, Vol. II, P- 246.
18. Op. cit.
19. Letter to Augusta Leigh, 8 September 1816, Letters and Journals, Vol. V,
p. 91.
20. Letter to Augusta Leigh, 28 October 1816, ibid., p. 120.
21. Letter to Lady Byron, 1 November 1816, ibid., pp. 120—21.
22. Letter to Augusta Leigh, 17 November 1816, ibid., p. 129.
23. Letter to Teresa Guiccioli, 22 April 1819, Letters and Journals, Vol. VI,
p. 112.
24. Letter to Augusta Leigh, 17 May 1819, ibid., p. 129.
25. Letter to Augusta Leigh, 19 August 1820, Letters and Journals, Vol. VII,
p. 159.
26. Letter to John Murray, 21 February 1820, ibid., p. 43.
27. Letter to John Cam Hobhouse, 3 October 1819, Letters and Journals, Vol.
VI, p. 226.
28. The Giaour, Poetical Works, p. 261.
29. The Bride of Abydos, ibid., p. 266.
30. The Corsair, ibid., p. 302.
31. Letters and Journals, Vol. II, p. 240.
32. Don Juan, Poetical Works, p. 641.
33. Letters and Journals, Vol. II, p. 219.

124
6
Byron as Unacknowledged
Legislator
by GEOFFREY CARNALL

'\\ ho would write,’ asked Byron in his Journal on 24 November

1813, 'who had anything better to do?’ He was reflecting on a
report that William Windham, who had died some three years
earlier, regretted having not devoted himself entirely to litera¬
ture and the sciences, instead of involving himself so much in
politics. Byron dismissed Windham’s regret as the weakness
brought on by a painful terminal illness. In a more robust
condition, Windham would surely not have countenanced
cant of this kind. He had been ‘one of those who governed
nations'—not always, one should add, to the taste of Byron’s
political associates, but with independence and competence.
Why should he have wanted to be a metaphysician, a rhymer,
a scribbler? ‘I do think,’ said Byron, ‘the preference of writers
to agents—the mighty stir made about scribbling and scribes,
by themselves and others—a sign of effeminacy, degeneracy,
and weakness.’1
In writing thus, Byron was consciously setting himself
against a prevailing sentiment at a time when much was said
of the March of Intellect towards the Reign of Mind. Friend
and foe to the French Revolution were alike willing to agree
that writers like Voltaire and Rousseau had played a major
part in the subversion of the old regime, and of traditional
institutions everywhere; and if these institutions were not

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

altogether in jeopardy, then some credit would have to be

given to David Hume, whose religious scepticism had been
less influential than his cogent presentation, in essay and
history, of an enlightened conservatism in politics. If trade and
manufactures were expanding with unprecedented speed, it
was Adam Smith who had laid the foundations of a more
intelligent management of the - economy in The Wealth oj
Nations. For a year or two, at least, Godwin’s Political Justice
seemed to have based a utopian polity on irresistible reasoning;
after that, Malthus’s Essay on Population threatened to annihilate
Godwin’s reasoning with all the force that mathematical
demonstration could supply. Burke aroused effective opposition
to the revolutionary cause by bringing the rationalizing
thinkers into disrepute with his vindication of Prejudice. With
the exception of Burke, these were all thinkers who made their
mark primarily through their impact on the reading public.
another term which came in with the March of the Mind and
the Spirit of the Age. One might complain, as Coleridge did in
The Statesman’s Manual, about the multiplication of readers
whose heads and hearts were dieted at the circulating libraries
and the periodical press; but of the weight and importance of
that phenomenon there could be no doubt.
A special place was occupied by the new kind of journal of
opinion, the Edinburgh Review in particular, and its Tory
counterpart the Quarterly. Their characteristic anonymity
exalted the opinions of an individual contributor at least into
the views of a great party in the state (or faction, according to
one’s sympathies), at best into an utterance of the spirit of the
age. To be a reviewer was probably the most efficient way of
getting one’s ideas into circulation and influencing decision¬
makers. It is amusing to watch the excitement with which
Robert Southey and John Rickman planned to transform the
whole climate of political thinking with the review that they
wrote in 1811 for the Quarterly on Charles Pasley’s Military
Policy. It was to put an end to vacillating war-policies that
suited only the appeasers of Bonaparte. Southey in his remote
study in Keswick, Rickman sardonically observ ing the political
process at close quarters, had neither of them any direct
political role; but as reviewers their pretensions were unlimited.
On this occasion, unfortunately, they had tried to do too

126
 Byron as Unacknowledged Legislator

much: the editor was alarmed, assistance was sought at the

highest level, J. W. Croker softened the effect sufficiently to
make Southey disclaim all interest in the article. The uncom¬
promising ruthlessness of the men of ideas was tempered by
the exigencies of practical politics.2
In spite of such mishaps, Southey valued his role as guardian
ot sound values in the Quarterly. An even wider field of oppor¬
tunity opened to him (or so it seemed) when in 1813 he was
offered the post of Poet Laureate. He saw it, in a way that none
of his predecessors had done, as the office of National Bard,
serving the best interests of the people, panegyrizing merit and
condemning wickedness, strengthening religion and govern¬
ment. His appointment is a landmark in the history of attitudes
towards poetry: not a secure landmark, because the reform
party regarded the office as a ludicrous anachronism, and
Southey's acceptance of it as a sad apostasy, but still signifi¬
cant, because the Prince Regent evidently saw it as something
more than a mere court appointment, and allowed the new
Laureate to choose his own occasions for launching into verse.
His Royal Highness almost certainly got more than he bar¬
gained for: no previous Laureate had ventured to remind his
employer that ‘the Poet’s fame’ endures.

when the Monarch’s name

Is but an empty sound, the Conqueror’s bust
Moulders and is forgotten in the dust.

Hazlitt remarked on the uncourtliness of such sentiments,3 but

Southey would have been quite unconscious of impropriety:
they had become part of the commonplace of criticism. Poets
were recognized as an important contingent in the March of
Intellect. Back in 1759 Samuel Johnson was probably only
playing with the idea when he made Imlac in Rasselas claim
that the poet ‘must write as the interpreter of nature, and the
legislator of mankind’. Rasselas, after all, interrupted his
‘enthusiastick fit’ with the remark that Imlac had persuaded
him that ‘no human being can ever be a poet.’4 But in the
1760s, men like John Brown and Thomas Percy were begin¬
ning to yearn for the time when the bard was a weighty figure
in the commonwealth, and the immensely popular poetry of
‘Ossian’, as reconstructed by James Macpherson, established

127
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

the notion of the bard as the enduring voice of his society.5 By

the time that Wordsworth composed his preface to Lyrical
Ballads, he was able to take for granted that 'the Poet binds
together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human
society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.’6
W ith the emergence of Walter Scott and of Byron himself, the
pre-eminence of the poet as a social power was manifest. In an
extravagantly enthusiastic review of the fourth canto of Childe
Harold in the Edinburgh Review, John Wilson spoke of ‘the
warm, life-flushed and life-breathing’ poetry of his time, so
superior to the ‘languid, faint, cold’ delineations which sufficed
for readers a hundred years earlier.
This literature of ours, pregnant as it is with living impressions,—
gathered from Nature in all her varieties of awfulness and
beauty,—gathered too from those high and dread Passions of
men, which our ordinary life scarcely shows, and indeed could
scarcely bear, but which, nevertheless, have belonged, and do
belong, to our human life,—and held up in the powerful
representations of the poets to our consciousness at times, when
the deadening pressure of the days that are going by might
bereave us of all genial hope and all dignified pride,—we say it is
impossible for us to resist the belief that such pregnant, glowing,
powerful poetry, must carry influences into the heart of this
generation, even like those which are breathed from the heart of
Nature herself. . . 1

It is implicit in Wilson’s rhapsody that the welfare of society is

threatened by the ‘deadening pressure' of routine, and the point
is made more explicitly by Shelley two years later in his Defence
of Poetry, when he actually recalls Johnson's amused speculation,
and invests it with a passionate sense of conviction. Speaking of
the ‘electric life’ which burns in the work of his contemporaries—
"less their spirit than the spirit of the age’—he concludes:
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration;
the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the
present; the words which express what they understand not; the
trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire;
the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world.8

In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley spoke of con¬

temporary writers as ‘forerunners of some unimagined change

128
 Byron as Unacknowledged Legislator

in our social condition or the opinions which cement it’.9 The

cloud ol mind was about to discharge its collected lightning,
the cementing opinions would disintegrate, with consequences
which Shelley presents symbolically in the downfall of Jupiter.
Or, as Hazlitt expresses it in his summary history of the effects
of the French Revolution in the third chapter of the Life of
Napoleon, it was the printing press itself which had eventually
generated an enlightened public opinion, whose operation had
shattered ‘strongholds of pride and prejudice to atoms, as the
pent-up air shatters whatever resists its expansive force’.10
No writer ol the time was felt to have had more shattering
force, more ‘electric life’, than Byron. As Francis Jeffrey put it
in the Edinburgh, he surpassed all his contemporaries ‘in force
of diction, and inextinguishable energy of sentiment’.11 This
power had been generally acknowledged from the time of the
appearance of the first two cantos of Childe Harold in 1812, and
it was the security he felt in the public’s recognition of it that
emboldened him to be so disdainful of his own achievement.
Hazlitt thought this a conscious attempt to procure additional
admiration: ‘Whatever he does, he must do in a more decided
and daring manner than any one else; he lounges with extrava¬
gance, and yawns so as to alarm the reader!’12 But the disdain
for scribbling that he expressed in November 1813 was at least
partly the effect of disappointment with his own abortive
parliamentary career. At least a part of himself would have
enjoyed being an acknowledged legislator.
The main outline of his career in the House of Lords is well
known. His maiden speech almost exactly coincided with the
first publication of Childe Harold, and had been almost as
successful. He had attacked the proposal to introduce the
death-penalty for frame-breaking, speaking from his own
knowledge of those parts ofNottinghamshire where the Luddite
rioters had been most active. His conclusion has something of
the force of his most powerful poetry, and leaps out of the dreary
columns of the parliamentary report like a flash of lightning. He
imagines a victim of this new law dragged into a court for trial.

Still, there are two things wanting to convict and condemn him;
and these are, in my opinion,— Twelve Butchers for ajury, and a
Jefferies for a Judge!13

129
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

He made a second speech in support of a measure directed

towards Catholic emancipation, and had presented a petition
on behalf of the veteran advocate for parliamentary reform,
Major Cartwright. He had voted with the W higs, but had
evidently not been over-diligent in his attendance at the House
of Lords. In one of the debates on Catholic emancipation, he
had been fetched from a ball to take part in a division. He stood
for a moment on entering the chamber, waiting behind the
Woolsack. Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, turned round,

and, catching my eye—immediately said to a peer (who had

come to him for a few minutes on the Woolsack as is the custom of
his friends) ‘Damn them! they’ll have it now, by G-d!—the vote
that is just come in will give it them.”4

If Byron had been reluctant to leave 'the sound of revelry by

night’, at least on this occasion he could feel that he had made
some contribution to the emancipation of five millions of his
fellow-citizens.
His faltering interest in what he called his ‘senatorial duties’
was challenged in the autumn of 1813 by an approach to him
from a debtor imprisoned in the King’s Bench gaol, one W. J.
Baldwin. Baldwin wanted Byron to present a petition relating
to Lord Redesdale’s Insolvent Debtors’ Bill, and informed him
of the bad conditions in which prisoners were kept. Presenting
such a petition would have given him an opportunity to speak
about reform both of the law and of prisons: issues which
offered some scope for his eloquence. The main object of the
Redesdale Bill was to remove from creditors the power to keep
debtors in prison indefinitely. Sir Samuel Romilly had described
it as an important innovation, ‘which, as such, would have to
encounter every species of obstruction from those who are, on
all occasions, the defenders oflong-prevailing abuses’.15 Lord
Ellenborough the Lord Chief Justice thought that Redesdale
ought to have been put in a straitjacket, and November 1813
saw a good deal of manoeuvring going on to delay the appli¬
cation of the Act, now passed by both Houses of Parliament.
As for prisons, their evil state had emerged as one of the
current topics for reformers. Coldbath-Fields Prison had been
investigated in 1808—9; James Neild’s large survey of the state
of the prisons had been published in 1812, and prominently

130
 Byron as Unacknowledged Legislator

reviewed in the Edinburgh by Francis Jeffrey himself; while in

1813 Elizabeth Fry was making her first visits to Newgate. At
the end of November 1813, the Grand Jury of London
inspected Newgate and found it to be grotesquely overcrowded
and inadequate. The Commons discussed the matter on the
7 December, and Alderman Atkins of the City of London
earned some notoriety for his remark that when the prison had
been freshly cleaned in the morning, he would not be ashamed
to compare it with any dairy in the country. It was the
prisoners themselves who made the prison foul, particularly
the women. Of course, there were too many of them!16 Atkins
was felt to be particularly outrageous, and it is only fair to that
generation to add that 1813 was also the year in which the new
model prison at Millbank was begun.
It would not have been difficult for Byron to brief himself on
the subject, but he refused to take the matter up, explaining to
Baldwin that he did not wish to injure the cause 'by a
premature and precipitate pressure of the question upon the
legislature’. His letter is written with an evident and increasing
embarrassment, and at the end he averts his gaze from the
painful subject with something approaching incoherence:

I have read your address—and I have read it with a hope

almost for the sake of those to whom it is uttered—that their
situation is less grievous than it would lead me to believe—not
that I have any reason to doubt the statement—except the wish
that in this—or in any country—such oppression had never
existed.17

And so he pushed the matter out of his mind. Baldwin

continued to ‘bore’ him with the petition a little longer, but
Byron felt he had neither head nor nerves for the business. In
the privacy of his Journal he acknowledged that he was shirk¬
ing an evident duty. He was like Sterne, who preferred
‘whining over a “dead ass to relieving a living mother” ’. Lady
Oxford might have persuaded him, if she had been there, with
‘three words and half a smile’: she always encouraged him to
take his responsibilities as a peer seriously, especially on behalf
of the weak, but without her he could not stimulate himself
into making a speech. He was sick of ‘parliamentary mum¬
meries’, and doubtful of his capacity to become an orator. Not,

131
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

he added, that he had ever set out to do this con amore.

Identifying himself for the moment with Falstaff, he claimed
that ‘company, villainous company, hath been the spoil ol me’,
and that he had ‘drunk medicines’, if not to make him love
others, then at any rate to hate himself. He was sinking into
the condition of people like Scott and Moore, who might have
been ‘agents and leaders’, but had become mere spectators.
He had no ambition; at least (in a curious reservation) ‘if any,
it would be “aut Caesar aut nihil”.’18 He had, one infers, no
taste for becoming a secondary actor in the parliamentary'
opposition, with a dubious prospect of future pre-eminence—
certainly not the pre-eminence of a Caesar. On the other hand,
as a man of letters his standing was little short of imperial. The
Giaour, The Bride ojAbydos, and in 1814 The Corsair conjured up
in the public mind a spirit which could hardly find adequate
expression in the lobbies of Westminster.
It was easy enough to speak in general terms of the cloud of
mind discharging its collected lightning. The actual process of
improvement was apt to be advanced by temperaments less
overtly tempestuous than Byron’s and less exalted than
Shelley’s. To enter into the diligent perseverance of Romilly in
his penal reforms, or the tireless philanthropic committee-
work of people like William Allen and Fowell Buxton, or the
patient combination of shrewd industrial management and
social propaganda engaged in by Robert Owen, is to feel that
Byron is indeed a detached and dilettante figure. These fore¬
runners of the Victorian cult of earnest endeavour developed
in themselves the character appropriate to sustain the volun¬
tary philanthropic organizations that proliferated so abundantly
in the first decades of the nineteenth century'. They find their
poetic celebration in the revised version of Keats’s Hyperion,
written in 1819, but not published until 1867, in which he
speaks of the ‘thousands’

Who love their fellows even to the death.

Who feel the giant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour for mortal good.

In this poem, Keats probably had Byron in mind when he

dismissed the ‘careless Hectorers in proud bad verse’.19 All the

132
 Byron as Unacknowledged Legislator

same, Byron was not entirely irrelevant to this earnest

endeavour.
1 he relevance lay in the exemplary dramatization in much
of Byron’s work of a quality indispensable to the effective
reformer: relentless tenacity. The fact that he did not display
this quality in the context of Parliament is nothing to the
purpose. He created a myth, and it was the myth to which
people responded. When Romilly recognized that any useful
reform could expect to encounter obstruction by powerful
defenders of long-prevailing abuses, his words suggest the
strength of his own will, and his half-repressed exasperation
with attitudes that make his strength of will necessary. A
character-sketch in The Examiner of 14 November 1813 remarks
that Romilly has a reputation for being easily irritated, and
that his speeches have the air of someone whose feelings have
been wounded. He could afford to be more sparing in his
reproaches, and might even try a little flattery. But, the writer
goes on, this unconciliatory temper is very understandable. A
benevolent man will constantly encounter things that will
'disturb and agonize his feelings’. If he is also a contemplative
man,

he finds it impossible to disengage the painful idea from his

mind: it haunts his dreams and even his pleasures: distresses
upon distresses accumulate before his recollection or his
imagination, till he is irritated into a state of torture only
equalled by those sufferings of others from which it results. . . .
May not this sensation of uneasiness be the best security for the
exercise of active benevolence?20

While the mind of the Giaour or of Conrad the Corsair may be

irritated into a state of torture by misadventures that are too
theatrical to be taken seriously by most modern readers, one
can readily see how a reformer of the barbarous penal code,
thwarted again and again by an obstinate Lord Chief Justice,
might find some relief to his feelings in a passage such as this:

Dark and unearthly is the scowl

That glares beneath his dusky cowl.
The flash of that dilating eye
Reveals too much of times gone by;
Though varying, indistinct its hue,

133
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Oft will his glance the gazer rue,

For in it lurks that nameless spell,
Which speaks, itself unspeakable,
A spirit yet unquell’d and high,
That claims and keeps ascendency. . . .2l

That would have put Lord Ellenborough in his place! The

frustrations and uneasiness and insecurity inevitable in a
society subjected to the kind of changes that Regency England
was enduring are caught up in a sense of guilt so generalized
that it does not interfere with fantasies of dominance and self¬
vindication—perhaps even stimulates and enhances their
effect. As Jeffrey remarked of Conrad, he may be spoken of as a
ruffian, but he shows himself to be ‘a perfect pattern of
tenderness and humanity’, carrying his generosity to Quixotic
lengths.22
Earnest Victorians were apt to despise Byron’s self-indulgent
heroics. Carlyle came to dismiss the whining, theatrical dandy,
but even he, in his earlier manhood, had spoken of him as ’the
noblest spirit in Europe . . . full of fire and generous passion,
and proud purposes’.23 It was Matthew Arnold who attempted
to clarify the received view most carefully. He conceded that
Byron did not see the true way out of the state of things that
enraged him, ‘the slow and laborious way upward; he had not
the patience, knowledge, self-discipline, virtue, requisite for
seeing it.’ But Arnold warmed to him as a ‘passionate and
dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope’, waging battle against the
old impossible world with incomparable sincerity and strength.24
The fire, the passion, the purposefulness were essential
qualities of character for anyone with an ambition to improve
society, and they could be seen as valuable even in a perverted
state. Just as eighteenth-century devotees of sensibility had
admired even the weaknesses of an amiable character, so there
was something of a consensus in the early nineteenth century
that even the wickedness of a potent spirit should not distract
one—could not distract one—from the admirable energies
manifested. The ‘unconquerable will’ of Milton’s Satan was
felt to be particularly stirring, and even an evangelical moralist
like John Foster, the Baptist essayist, speaks of the temptation
to say ‘What a noble being this would have been, if goodness
had been his destiny!’ (Admittedly he adds that, if so, Milton

134
 Byron as Unacknowledged Legislator

committed a very serious error.)25 Foster’s observation occurs

in the course of his essay ‘On Decision of Character’, one of a
set of four Essays that first appeared in 1805, and enjoyed a
considerable reputation well on into the middle of the century.
The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon particularly valued the
’Decision of Character' essay, and constantly re-read it and
recommended it to friends and correspondents.
Foster argues that people of irresolute character are made
for subjection, passing like slaves from owner to owner. The
heart is fretted and exhausted by an alternation of contrary
motives, and Foster points out that long-wavering deliberation
can actually cost more to feeling than ‘some bold action of
difficult virtue’.26 It is a mark of the decisive character that it
consumes iittle energy in dubious musings and abortive
resolutions. It is also encouraged by the deference that resolu¬
tion spontaneously engenders. ‘When a firm decisive spirit is
recognised', he says, ‘it is curious to see how the space clears
around a man, and leaves him room and freedom.’27 Foster
enlarges on the various traits of a decisive character, and lays
particular emphasis on the strenuous will that must accom¬
pany the confident judgement.

The intellect must be invested, if I may so describe it, with a

glowing atmosphere of passion, under which the cold dictates of
reason take fire, and spring into active powers.28

Foster quickly perceives that all this may have little to do with
virtuous conduct. He points out the ‘seductive and pernicious
dignity’ that the untameable soul has in cases where every
moral principle is offended.

Often in the narrations of history and fiction, an agent of the

most dreadful designs compels a sentiment of deep respect for
the unconquerable mind displayed in their execution.29

It is at this point that he recalls Milton’s Satan; but not all

unconquerable minds, of course, are Satanic. Foster finds a
virtuous example in John Howard the prison-reformer: but
even he paid a price for his single-mindedness. He had no
leisure-feeling to spare for the variety of the scenes in which he
travelled. He could even visit Rome without a glance at the
ruins.
135
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Such a sin against taste is very far beyond the reach of com¬
mon saintship to commit. It implied an inconceivable severity
of conviction, that he had one thing to do, and that he who
would do some great thing in this short life, must apply
himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces, as,
to idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks
like insanity.30

Another unpleasing trait of the decisive character is that it is

with difficulty, combined with the Christian virtues of mildness
and patience. Firmness may result from overcoming feeling,
but it is more likely to be the effect of not having the feeling at
all.

To be tremblingly alive to gentle impressions, and yet to be able

to preserve, when the prosecution of a design requires it, an
immovable heart, amidst even the most imperious causes of
subduing emotion, is perhaps not an impossible constitution of
mind, but it must be the rarest endowment of humanity.31

Foster ends his essay with a regret that the illustrations he has
been able to give of the decisive character are conspicuous not
so much for goodness as for power. T attribute it’, he says
engagingly, ‘to defect of memory.’ But as it is, too many of
those capable of achieving objects of the grandest utility, and
of intimidating the collective vices of the age, have been ‘them¬
selves the very centres and volcanoes of those vices’.32
The dashing heroes of the Turkish tales provide a picturesque
commentary on Foster’s analysis. They are evidently meant to
display the utmost energy of character, including an intense
capacity for feeling, which, as Foster’s essay suggests, throws
the energy itself into even stronger relief. In his later work,
Byron enlarges on the feelings of guilt that paralyse the
decisive powers, but the element of stubborn resistance to
oppression remains, rejecting the sense of enslavement as
intolerable. At the end of his essay, Foster speculates on the
ultimate fate ol those great and wicked decisive characters
before the Supreme Tribunal where their adamantine resolu¬
tion must melt away. But Byron's Manfred shows no signs of
melting. He re-enacts the situation of Dr. Faustus—the
demonic spirits rise up to summon him to perdition—he defies
them, and—they disappear.

136
 Byron as Unacknowledged Legislator

I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey—

But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.—Back, ye baffled fiends!—
The hand of death is on me—but not yours!33

\\ hat Marlowe would have made of this is uncertain, and

Foster would certainly have shaken his head in disapproval:
but it is an audacious illustration of the space that clears
around a confident man, leaving him room and freedom.
The decisive character generates an atmosphere of success,
but may not always succeed. For many years Napoleon was a
symbol of energetic mastery , so that John Foster could speak
casually of the need for ‘a Buonaparte in morals’, and his
friend Joseph Hughes could speak of Foster’s own ‘Napoleonic
energy' as a writer.34 But in due course Napoleon’s power
failed him, to the consternation of his admirers. Byron, for one,
was ‘utterly bewildered and confounded’ by his abdication in
1814. Like Hazlitt, Byron wished that his hero had decided to
fight to the end. He did not have the sound feeling (said
Byron) that Macbeth had in not wishing to ‘kiss the ground
before young Malcolm's feet’. Sylla managed things better,
revenging and resigning in the height of his sway, ‘red with the
slaughter of his foes—the finest instance of glorious contempt
of the rascals upon record’.35 Hazlitt quoted Shakespeare too,
invoking the elder Percy in Henry IV, who had a juster idea of
war, where all order died, and—

each heart being set

On bloody courses, the rude scene may end.
And darkness be the burier of the dead!

Napoleon should have staked his success on the revolutionary

ardour of the people; but he would not unleash popular fury
because it might have overwhelmed him as well as the
Bourbons and their allies.36 Byron was quick enough to forgive
Napoleon when he returned from Elba, but the bloody conflict
of Waterloo sufficed even to satisfy the taste of a Sylla or a
Percy—‘the crowning carnage’ as Byron called it in The Vision
of Judgment, when the recording angels

threw' their pens down in divine disgust—

The page was so besmear’d with blood and dust.37

137
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Byron’s immediate reaction to both abdication and final

defeat of his hero is expressed in rather a commonplace way
in the poems explicitly devoted to the subject, and his deeper
feelings emerge more effectively in a poem not directly con¬
cerned with Napoleon at all: The Siege of Corinth. He was
writing this through much of 1815. Its catastrophe is of a
kind that strains the imagination of all-encompassing destruc¬
tion to the limit: at least, in the terms possible to a writer in the
early nineteenth century. He took the incident of an accidental
explosion in a gunpowder magazine, and turned it into the
deliberate mining of the church where old Minotti made his
last stand. The conquering Turks surge into the church and
see the high altar with the consecrated cup still on it.

Brightly it sparkles to plunderers’ eyes:

That morn it held the holy wine,
Converted by Christ to his blood so divine,
Which his worshippers drank at the break of day,
To shrive their souls ere they join’d in the fray.
Still a few drops within it lay:
And round the sacred table glow
Twelve lofty lamps, in splendid row,
From the purest metal cast;
A spoil—the richest and the last.

So near they came, the nearest stretch’d

To grasp the spoil he almost reach’d,
When old Minotti’s hand
Touch’d with the torch the train—
’T is fired!
Spire, vaults, the shrine, the spoil, the slain.
The turban'd victors, the Christian band,
All that of living or dead remain,
Hurl’d on high with the shiver’d fane,
In one wild roar expired!38

The explosion takes many further lines to describe, and Byron

enters into the business with enthusiasm. Minotti carries
decision of character as far as it will go: several hundred feet in
the air, in fact.
Thereafter Byron was more concerned to explore the stoical
endurance developed in the third and fourth cantos of Childe

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 Byron as Unacknowledged Legislator

Harold, and with particularly powerful effect in The Prisoner of

Chillon. Although the latter poem appears to describe the utter
desolation and subjection of Bonnivard, that effect is belied by
the vigorous rhythms which intimate the reckless willpower
that has never given in, sustaining itself in an apparently
hopeless situation. In fact, as Byron points out in his ‘advertise¬
ment , he wrote the poem before he knew the full story of
Bonniv ard, and the edifying sequel to his imprisonment, when
he was honoured by his fellow-citizens of Geneva, and served
the cause of religious toleration. Taken together, the Advertise¬
ment and the poem form a composition of considerable politi¬
cal impact: showing the contrast between the subjective
impression and the historical process. The unconquerable will
may or may not win the day, but there is never ground for
absolute despair.

In suggesting that there is a political relevance in poems

where the chief ingredient might seem to be a self-indulgent
egotism, I do not forget the caustic self-mockery that is so
evident in Byron’s letters and journals. Byron is never sure of
the status of any of the feelings that he articulates so elo¬
quently, and the chief difference between the poems mainly
considered here and the satirical poems in ottava rima on which
his modern reputation is based is that in the latter this uncer¬
tainty is freely expressed. But even the dashing manner in
which the intrepid passion of Conrad and Minotti astounds
the reader has the poise of an accomplished performer rather
than the dedication of a single-minded zealot. Byron repudiates
altogether the pretensions of the National Bard like Southey,
whose ‘grand heroics’ are exploded in The Vision of Judgment
with an effectiveness almost equal to the explosion at the end
of The Siege of Corinth. His conversational manner is offhanded
in a way completely appropriate to a writer who attached so
little importance to his own art, and valued those who governed
nations far more highly than he did the tribe of scribblers.
He discovered in the cause of Greek independence an active
career that he missed in the House of Lords. His patient
statesmanship among the Greek rebels has often been praised,
and it is curious that he once described his role in terms of a

139
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

dedicated philanthropy from which both in 1813 and the last

years of his life he seemed so comically remote. In his Journal
in September 1823 he remarks that
whoever goes into Greece at present should do it as Mrs. Fry
went into Newgate—not in the expectation of meeting with any
especial indication of existing probity, but in the hope that time
and better treatment will reclaim the present burglarious and
larcenous tendencies which have followed this General Gaol
delivery.39

The engaging persona of the author of Don Juan may hardly

seem more analogous to Elizabeth Fry than the Giaour him¬
self. But just as the implacable obstinacy of the latter may be
taken as an oblique and highly coloured representation of the
stamina necessary for the practical reformer, so the relaxed
and equable acceptance of adultery', shipwreck, harem, war,
and intrigue implies a tenacity that the practical legislator
needs if he is not to explode in a spasm of self-destructive fury.

NOTES

1. Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (1973-82), Vol. 3, pp. 219-
20. Hereafter referred to as LJ.
2. There is an account of this episode in mv Robert Southey and his Age
(Oxford, 1960), pp. 123-30.
3. W. Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (1930-34), Vol. 7, p. 88.
Hereafter referred to as Hazlitt.
4. S. Johnson, Rasselas, Chapters 10 and 11.
5. See J. Brown, Dissertation on Poetry and Music (1763), T. Percy, ‘Essay on
the Ancient Minstrels of England’, in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765). The influence of Macpherson’s work has been usefully assessed
in an as yet unpublished study by Alexander French.
6. Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (1974), p. 81. This
passage was first published in 1802.
7. Edinburgh Review, 30 (June 1818), 118-19.
8. Shelley’s Prose, ed. D. L. Clark (Albuquerque, 1954), p. 297.
9. Ibid., p. 328.
10. Hazlitt, Vol. 13, p. 40.
11. Edinburgh Review, 27 (December 1816), 277.
12. Hazlitt, Vol. 11, p. 70.
13. Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, 21 (1812), 972. 27 February 1812.
14. LJ, Vol. 9, p. 28.

140
 Byron as Unacknowledged Legislator
15. S. Romillv, Memoirs (1840), Vol. 3, p. 111.
16. Examiner, 12 December 1813, 790.
17. LJ, Vol. 3, p. 165 (14 November 1813).
18. LJ, Vol. 3, pp. 228-29, 206, 217.
19. The Fall of Hyperion, I, lines 156-59, 208.
20. Examiner, 14 November 1813, 734.
21. The Giaour, lines 832-41.
22. Edinburgh Review, 23 (April 1814), 220.
23. Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, ed. C. R. Sanders and K. J.
Fielding (Durham N.C., 1970—), Vol. 3, p. 68. 19 May 1824.
24. M. Arnold, Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1960-77),
Vol. 9, p. 236.
25. J. Foster, Essays in a series of Letters, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1811), p. 119.
26. Ibid., p. 99.
27. Ibid., p. 100.
28. Ibid., p. 115.
29. Ibid., p. 118.
30. Ibid., p. 124.
31. Ibid., p. 143.
32. Ibid., p. 165.
33. Manfred, Act 3, sc. 4, lines 138-41.
34. J. E. Rvland, Life and Correspondence of John Foster (1852), Vol. 1, pp. 198,
337n.
35. LJ, Vol. 3, p. 256; Vol. 4, p. 93.
36. Hazlitt, Vol. 15, p. 185.
37. The Vision of Judgment, stanza 5.
38. The Siege of Corinth, xxxii—xxxiii, lines 1001—20.
39. LJ, Vol. 11, p. 32.

141
7
The Byronic Philosophy
by WALTER PERRIE

Byron’s death at Missolonghi contributed to the final achieve¬

ment of Greek independence. The pedestrian circumstances of
his death did not tarnish its glamour. Byron was to be a hero
in the cause of Liberty. His death was not his own but
belonged, as Byron may have intended, to the European
imagination. In France he became an icon for the post-Bourbon
Romantics. His admirers and imitators included most of the
major writers: Hugo, Gautier, de Musset, Lamartine, de
Vigny and de Nerval. Perhaps because the course of French
Romanticism had been so deflected by the obligatory' neo-
classicism of the First Empire, Byronism was to remain an
active force in French literature throughout the nineteenth
century. In Germany, though admired by Goethe and Heine
(Byron was the model for Euphorion in Faust II), his most
momentous influence was on the young Nietzsche who, in Ecce
Homo, recorded: ‘I must be profoundly related to Byron’s
Manfred; of all the dark abysses in this work I found the
counterparts in my own soul—at the age of thirteen I was ripe
for this book’, and compared it favourably to Faust. It was
largely Byron’s influence on Nietzsche—and the Byronic hero
as prototype for the Ubermensck—that led Bertrand Russell to
devote a chapter in his History of Western Philosophy to the
subject of Byronism and its influence on the history of ideas.
Despite the cursory nature of his comments, Russell does state
the main point when he says that Byron . . was more
important as a myth than as he really was’.1

142
 The Byronic Philosophy

In short, Byron attracted enthusiastic attention from writers

as remote from each other in time and space as Pushkin, Ibsen
and Leopardi. Nor was his influence confined to the literati. As
Andrew Rutherford has observed:

Byron became an ideal, an almost mythical figure in the minds

ol Continental liberals for whom Mazzini acts as spokesman:
\ . . The holy alliance of poetry with the cause of the peoples;
the union—still so rare—of thought and action—which alone
completes the human Word, and is destined to emancipate the
world; ... all that is now the religion and hope of the party of
progress throughout Europe, is gloriously typified in this
image . . . [of Byron at Missolonghi], The day will come when
Democracy will remember what it owes to Byron.’2

In Britain Byronism was the fashion of a few years, but not

much more than a decade after his death its influence had
already waned. For the rest of the century his reputation was
eclipsed by those of Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth. Below the
surface a Byronic influence was still at work and emerged,
briefly, among the aesthetes of the 1890s and again in some of
the ’public’ poetry of the 1930s, most notably in the work of
W. H. Auden. By and large though, Byron has been out of
favour with mainstream Anglo-American critics. His public
postures, his rhetoric, and his discursiveness have been
anathema to most contemporary opinion. Russell remarks that
‘To most of us, his verse seems often poor and his sentiment
often tawdry . . ,’,3 and T. S. Eliot described it as ‘. . . nothing
but sonorous affirmations of the commonplace’.4 How such
‘tawdry’ sentiment and ‘poor’ verse came to exercise such
profound and lasting influence, as they evidently have, is a
matter to which we must return, having looked at the contents
of the Byronic philosophy.
The closest Byron ever came to enunciating a set of intellec¬
tual or aesthetic arguments outwith his poetry was in his
letters ‘On the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and
Writings of Pope’ (1821) in which he claimed that ‘. . . poetry
is in itself passion, and does not systematize. It assails, but
does not argue; it may be wrong, but it does not assume
pretensions to Optimism.’5 Byronism is not to be found in any
manifesto. Nor was it exclusively the property of Lord Byron.

143
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Friends, lovers, enemies, commentators and biographers all

contributed to its manufacture. While Mary Shelley laboured
to create of her dead husband the feeble angel of Victorian
hagiography, Lady Byron was equally assiduous in creating the
depraved monster she needed to justify her own moral purity.6
Byronism was, therefore, a curious schist of rumour and malice,
fact and fancy, as well as of text's. It was as much a set of
attitudes towards Byron and his texts as it was of any argument
embedded in them. To be a supporter or opponent of Byronism
was to say something, not just about Lord Byron’s poems, but
about one’s attitudes to the world at large.
The outline which follows of the main components of the
Byronic philosophy concentrates on Childe Harold I/I I, and on
The Bride of Abydos as typical of the Turkish tales. I take the view
that all the main elements of Byronism were already present in
these early works (1812-13) and that Byron’s later writings and
career were poured into a mould of understanding established
by the early works and their reception. So much so, indeed,
that Byron’s later life has something of the quality of a self-
fulfilling prophecy about it; his early fame having made him a
victim of his own inventions so that, as the myth developed, it
became increasingly unlikely that Byron himself could escape
its confines.
The focal point of Byron’s work is invariably the feelings and
actions of a male hero-figure. Those feelings and actions are a
product of (a) personality and (b) circumstance or fate. Since
the former is also understood to be, in great measure, a product
of the latter, the Byronic hero is, essentially, a victim. His
character is acutely sensual and sensitive: passionate to a
greater degree than that of other men. He is, above all, energetic.
Circumstance, having marked out the Byronic hero as
different from other men, has endowed him not only with more
vitality and more intense appetites, but with greater abilities.
His is a ‘great soul’ and he is an aristocrat and leader of men.
In youth he has suffered some disappointment of his affections
and has committed some crime against established morality,
the nature of which is not generally specified. This disappoint¬
ment and/or crime has produced in him a strong sense of a loss
of innocence so that he sees himself as both fallen from grace
and as alienated from ordinary' society. His energetic disillusion

144
 The Byronic Philosophy

makes him deeply restless, compelling him to seek ever fresh

sensations and new experiences to whet his jaded appetites
and assuage his self-conscious suffering. He is profoundly
aware of being a prisoner of his own nature.
Melancholy and lonely, the Byronic hero hides his true
feelings behind a mask of aristocratic pride and hauteur. His
alienation from society, often imaged as an exile, is not merely
passive but shades over into a deliberate defiance of con¬
ventions: political, moral and religious. He questions the
sincerity of social ideals thereby making of himself a sceptic
and iconoclast. In his unhoused condition he finds allies in a
revolutionary or libertarian counter-world, but his pronounced
individualism and sense of aristocratic difference preclude any
espousal of egalitarianism. His are the chivalric and heroic
ideals of nobility, courage and personal honour.
At the heart of the Byronic hero’s motivations is a thwarted
idealism. He cannot reconcile his awareness of the actuality of
innocence (the wholly fallen could not know themselves to be
so), with the cynicisms and pragmatic evasions of social life.
He is, therefore, a naif whose primary value is a redemptive,
romantic love which he associates with purity and, hence, with
truth and beauty. In defiant mood, that idealism easily merges
into a Promethean fixation on moral absolutes. Implacably
hostile to utilitarian principles, he denounces society for its
cant and hypocrisy, seeing it as corrupt: the product of a
decline and fall built into the nature of the human condition.
Finally, he feels more akin to nature than to human society,
finding in nature an image of his own stormy, elemental
character and of that pre-lapsarian naturalness which he and
the social world have forfeited.
Childe Harold I/I I was published in 1812. By then Byron was
already known to the literary world as the author of English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) which had had all the benefits
of a succes de scandale as a powerful satire on the literary
establishment. Only a few weeks before the publication of Childe
Harold Byron had come to the attention of the political estab¬
lishment with a successful maiden speech in the Lords on the
Frame-Work Bill. Childe Harold was an immediate, spectacular
success and Byron was lionized by fashionable society. He
consolidated that success with the Turkish tales: The Giaour, The

145
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Bride of Abydos, Lara and The Corsair, the last of which sold
10,000 copies on publication day and went through seven
editions within a month.7
Childe Harold I/I I was largely composed during Byron’s
travels in Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece and Turkey in
1809—11. It is a rambling account of similar travels by the
Childe who is little more than a peg on which Byron can hang
his observations. Although Byron protested in the ‘Addition to
the Preface’ (1813) that he should not be identified with the
Childe, the protest was half-hearted and ineffective. Byron
undercuts his own protest by interrupting the poem from time
to time to speak in propria persona (e.g. at I, xciii and II, xvii).
This early use of a digressive narration linking different epi¬
sodes loosely together, sometimes in propria persona, is significant
for the later works. As Jerome McGann points out:

The key to the form of Don Juan, then, is the episodic method,
where fortuitousness, not probability is sought, and where plans
and designs operate only in restricted ways.8

What begins in Childe Harold I/I I as an only partly self-

conscious accent on circumstance and personality becomes in
Don Juan the stylistic cornerstone of the work. By the time of
Childe Harold III/IV, Byron’s intrusion into the poem has
become its central feature.
In the same ‘Addition to the Preface’ Byron set out his aim
as:

... to show, that early perversion of mind and morals leads to

satiety of past pleasures and disappointment in new ones, and
that even the beauties of nature, and the stimulus of travel
(except ambition, the most powerful of all excitements) are lost
on a soul so constituted, or rather misdirected.

The melancholy Childe goes on a sort of exotic Grand Tour to

escape his own feelings of disappointment and self disgust.
Unable to secure the favours of an idealized love, he has taken
to debauch:

Few earthly things found favour in his sight

Save concubines and carnal companie. ... (I, ii)

These pleasures, however, have soon palled:

146
 The Byronic Philosophy

Worse than adversity the C-hilde befell;

He felt the fulness of satiety:
Then loathed he in his native land to dwell. ... (I, iv)
Some crime of debauch is hinted at (I, iii) but not specified.
The Childe, however, is no mere tourist. As with virtually all
the Byronic heroes, his restlessness is linked to his fatality
through the figure of Cain:
Pleasure’s pall’d victim! life-abhorring gloom
Wrote on his faded brow curst Cain’s unresting doom.
(I, lxxxiii)
and the association is reinforced in the stanzas ‘To Inez’
(I, lxxxiv-v). The Childe, however, conceals his true feelings:
For his was not that open, artless soul
That feels relief by bidding sorrow flow,
Nor sought he friend to counsel or condole,
Whate’er this grief mote be, which he could not control.
(I, viii)
Like Lara and Manfred, the Childe prefers to retain an aura of
mystery.
Political themes surface briefly in Canto I when Byron
laments the loss of Spanish liberty under the Napoleonic
conquest (I, xlii—iv), but are much more in evidence in Canto
II. Byron sees Greece, in which the canto is largely set, as
fallen from its former glories:
They won, and pass’d away—is this the whole?
A schoolboy’s tale, the wonder of an hour!
The warrior’s weapon and the sophist’s stole
Are sought in vain, and o’er each mouldering tower,
Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the shade of power.
(II, ii)

Nostalgia for glories past colours Byron’s view of history as

deeply as it does the characters of his Byronic heroes, and the
theme is soon repeated on a personal note:

Who with the weight of years would wish to bend,

When Youth itself survives young Love and Joy?
Alas! when mingling souls forget to blend,
Death hath but little left him to destroy!
Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy?
(II, xxiii)

147
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Byron urges the Greeks to action:

Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
(II, lxxvi)

Despite the gloomy Childe, Cantos I/I I are highly readable.

The pace seldom flags and many of the descriptions are racy
and interesting in their own right. Nor were Byron's travels
particularly gloomy, and in later years he looked back on the
visit to Greece as one of the happiest times of his life. Part of
the reason for that happiness, especially after the departure of
his English companion Hobhouse for home, was that he was
then free to indulge his homosexual tastes without restraint.
As he wrote to Hobhouse in August 1810:

In short, what with the women, and the boys, and the suite, we are
very disorderly. But I am vastly happy and childish, and shall
have a world of anecdotes for you. . . ,9

Byron was never again quite so carefree. Within a few weeks of

his return to England, he was plunged in grief and it is from
this period that some of the gloomiest stanzas in Childe Harold
date. Not only did his mother die, but several close friends,
and he learned then of the death of John Edleston, the Trinity7
chorister whom he had idealistically loved and of whom he
wrote the Thyrza poems. One of these late additions to Childe
Harold is sadly prophetic:

What is my being? thou has ceased to be!

Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,
Who mourns o’er hours which we no more shall see—
Would they had never been, or were to come!
Would he had ne’er return’d to And fresh cause to roam!
(II, xcv)

From 1812-15 Byron, despite his tremendous popularity,

was increasingly troubled. He believed that his political
ambitions had failed, though he hadn’t tried very hard, realizing
perhaps that a discipline of compromise was beyond him. He
conducted numerous love affairs, none of which satisfied him,
and got into increasing financial difficulties, partly on account
of a riotously indulgent social life. His reputation as a rake
grew considerably, not least on account of his very public

148
 The Byronic Philosophy

pursuit by the lunatic Lady Caroline Lamb. More serious than

any ol these, however, was his tormenting affair with his half-
sister Augusta Leigh, and it was perhaps his sense of guilt on
that score which induced him to marry. It is from this period
that the Turkish tales date. As he wrote to Tom Moore in
November 1813:
. . . All convulsions end with me in rhyme; and to solace my
midnights, I have scribbled another Turkish story. ... I have
written this, and published it, for the sake of the employment, to
wring my thoughts from reality. . . ,10
The tale in question was The Bride of Abydos in which he treated
obliquely of his involvement with Augusta, as in Lara he was to
treat obliquely of a homosexual attachment, though these facts
were not, of course, known to his public.
For intellectual content the Turkish tales are all but inter¬
changeable. The story of The Bride is set at the court of Giaffir,
a pasha whose daughter, Zuleika, is shortly to be married off
to a powerful magnate whom she does not love. The hero of
the tale is her apparently effeminate brother Selim (I, iv). The
sensitive Selim is not, however, what he appears (II, x). He is
in love with Zuleika and she with him. They arrange to meet
secretly by night in a cave in the palace grounds. There, Selim
tells her of his love and of his true character. As in Hamlet,
Selim’s real father has been murdered by his uncle (Giaffir) for
political power. Giaffir is an ambitious tyrant. Selim has been
preserved by some whim of fate:
Why me the stern usurper spared,
Why thus with me his palace shared,
I know not. Shame, regret, remorse,
And little fear from infant’s force;
Besides, adoption as a son
By him whom Heaven accorded none,
Or some unknown cabal, caprice,
Preserved me thus. ... (II, xv)
In the first version Byron had intended Selim and Zuleika to
be brother and sister but thought better of it. Later, in Cain, he
did treat openly of the incest theme. Zuleika is an image of
innocence and purity, associated, as all such figures were for
Byron, with childhood, though, ambiguously, she is compared
with Eve before the Fall:
149
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Fail, as the first that fell of womankind . . .

Soft, as the memory of buried love;
Pure, as the prayer which Childhood wafts above. . . .
(I, vi)

Selim, who learned his true parentage from a slave (Haroun),

has effectively been a prisoner at court:
He rear’d me, not with tender help,
But like the nephew of a Cain. ... (II, xii)

Like Cain and the Childe, Selim is restless in his captivity:

What could I be? Proscribed at home,
And taunted to a wish to roam;
And listless left—for Giaffir’s fear
Denied the courser and the spear. ... (II, xviii)

Selim’s true nature is stormy and virile, associated, like those

of Conrad, Manfred, Lara, the Childe, Cain and Sardanapalus,
with lightning (I, xii).
While Giaffir has been absent on a military campaign,
Selim has taken his chance for freedom and gone wandering
through the Greek islands:
’Tis vain—my tongue can not impart
My almost drunkenness of heart,
When first this liberated eye
Survey’d Earth, Ocean, Sun, and Sky. ... (II, xviii)

In the course of his wanderings he has become the leader of a

band of free corsairs. This community of fellow-outcasts is
more, however, than merely an assemblage of bandits. Some
at least are political exiles:
And some to higher thoughts aspire,
The last of Lambro’s patriots there
Anticipated freedom share. ... (II, xx)

Selim is no egalitarian:
So let them ease their hearts with prate
Of equal rights, which man ne’er knew;
I have a love for freedom too. (II, xx)

Byron’s favourite epithet of abuse was ‘vulgar’. He did not

believe in an equality of rights because he did not believe in an
equality of powers.

150
 The Byronic Philosophy

Selim invites Zuleika to share his life as a free-roaming

outcast, and the imagery' at this point is consistently natural
rather than social, for social life is both corrupt and corrupting:

... in time deceit may come

\\ hen cities cage us in a social home:
There ev’n thy soul might err—how oft the heart
Corruption shakes which peril could not part! (II, xx)

Selim's corsairs are waiting offshore, but the lovers are dis-
urbed by Giaffir and his soldiers before they can escape.
Selim goes out to defend himself. As Eve to Adam, however,
Zuleika is the cause of Selim's fall. Turning at the shore for a
last glimpse of her, he is killed (II, xxv), as are all the com¬
rades who have come to his aid. Zuleika dies of grief in terms
which Byron thought rather applied to himself:

Ah! happy! But of life to lose the worst!

That grief—though deep—though fatal—was thy first!
(II, xxvii)

Giaffir is driven mad with grief for the death of his daughter,
and so the tale ends, not just with the death of the lovers, but
with the destruction of both communities, court and corsairs.
Byron was to repeat the theme in the Haidee episode of Don
Juan (IV, lxx—ii).
The cluster of related themes we have traced through Childe
Harold I/I I and The Bride continued to figure in Byron’s
mature works, though their treatment became vastly more
powerful; their exploration deepened and generalized. There
were no sudden thematic shifts in Byron’s development, though
there were, of course, important turning points in his career,
the most crucial of which was his exile of 1816. Before turning
to Byron’s later career, however, it will be instructive to
disentangle from the Byronic complex those elements which
can be directly related to Byron’s personal history before 1816.
To do so will not tell us why Byronism caught the imagination
of the age, but it will help to explain something of how Byron’s
personal experience fitted him for the mythic role he was later
to play.
The central fact of Byron’s biography is his overwhelming
sense of insecurity and of the capriciousness of fate. As he

151
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

recorded in a notebook of 1821: . I have always believed

that all things depend upon Fortune, and nothing upon
ourselves.’11 Born with a clubbed foot, he remained sensitive
about the fact throughout his life and once attempted to have
it amputated. As Marchand says, it ‘probably did more to
shape his character than it will ever be possible to calculate’.12
He was a plump, pretty child but a fat adolescent; a fact which
mortified him and he made violent efforts to control his
weight.13
Byron senior vanished from his life when Byron was 2,
leaving him in the care of a highly strung mother who alter¬
nated between extremes of rage and affection with extra¬
ordinary capriciousness. Even Byron’s social position can have
done nothing for his sense of security for it too came capriciously,
through the sudden death of the old Lord’s heir. Byron was, at
the age of 10, removed from the relatively poor, middle-class
life of Aberdeen to an alien world of rank and privilege
without, at first, the financial means to sustain that position.
As if these circumstances were not of themselves sufficient to
provide Byron with a series of complexes which would keep
any competent Freudian in a career for a lifetime, his early
experience was odd in a further, crucial respect.
Byron’s maternal grandmother had been a devout, illiterate
Calvinist who had left her mark on Byron’s mother. Whatever
of Calvinism Byron imbibed from his mother and from the
general ambience of Aberdeen in the 1790s was deeply coloured
by his nurse, May Gray, between his eighth and eleventh years.
In due course it was discovered that while May Gray had been
inculcating him with Old Testament Calvinism, reinforced
with frequent beatings, she had also been subjecting him to
some form of masturbatory sex-play. Miss Gray, it appears, was
also not averse to a regular ‘small refreshment’. As Gilbert
Phelps has noted: ‘The Bible myth became for Byron, in
consequence, a particularly apt parable for his own imagined
expulsion from an Eden of innocence and security.’14 Those
experiences are clearly the source for Byron’s lifelong detestation
of cant and hypocrisy and his insistence on sincerity as the
decisive virtue.15 As Nietzsche remarks, we never stress one
particular virtue until we notice its absence in our opponents.
Here, too, Marchand has located the source for some of the

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key Byronic imperatives. On the one hand, Byron took refuge

in a sentimental ideal of unsullied love. As Marchand says, his
early devotion to Mary Duff and Margaret Parker

. . . stimulated him to a ‘dash into poetry’ and became the

constant symbol to him of the ideally beautiful unpossessed
love, the sort ol image that usually blossoms in adolescence but
that in Byron was a dominating vision between the ages of eight
and twelve. It had numerous embodiments male and female
during the rest of his life.16

On the other hand, Byron’s ‘. . . premature sexual awakening,

caused disillusionment, the melancholy which springs from
physical disgust and the failure of the real experience to
measure up to the ideal'.17 Byron was driven by the despera¬
tion of his emotional needs not just into poetry and risky
situations—one imagines that what Augusta provided was,
above all, a symbolic, if illusory, security—but into the creation
of the Byronic myth.
Byron compensated for his insecurities with a cool public
persona and a driving ambition. There can be few doctrines
more clearly designed to produce a sense of insecurity than
Calvinism with its notion of Election and, as McGann says,
‘Filled with a desire for greatness, Byron looks to jama as a sign
of his election.’18 It is a simple transition from a sense of
difference originating in insecurities to a defiant sense of
personal destiny. Hugh MacDiarmid, another Scottish poet
with a presbyterian background, made the same transition.
Byron identified himself obsessionally with Napoleon and in a
journal entry for November 1813 we find the revealing dis¬
claimer, ‘But I have no ambition; at least, if any, it would be
aut Caesar aut nihiF,19 and we may recall his aside on the subject
in the ‘Addition to the Preface’ to Childe Harold.
As for his public life, that too was coloured by insecurity:
. . . his shyness had caused him to play his own hero, the aloof
and melancholy Childe Harold. They did not realize how much
his studied politeness and his cynical pose were a mask to hide
his lack of ease in an aristocratic society to which he had been a
stranger most of his life.20

Byron’s psychological difficulties are only of concern to us here

to the extent that they account for certain elements in Byronism.

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

For some understanding of the excitement Byron engendered

in society, we have to look beyond Byron to the milieu in
which he moved.
Some measure of Byron’s early fame can clearly be attributed
to his rank. In the last days of the reign of George Ilia Peer of
the Realm, as well as being a remote and romantic figure,
might still exercise a degree of influence on the machinery of
power inconceivable today. Byron’s friends in the tory and
Holland House circles in which he moved were, quite simply,
the ruling class. Something of the shocking quality of Childe
Harold and the Turkish tales for his contemporaries arose from
the fact that Byron was a member of that class. More signifi¬
cant, however, was the mood of that class in Byron’s lifetime.
That Jeffrey, in a sympathetic notice in the Edinburgh Review
(1812), could describe the inoffensive Childe as ‘this Satanic
personage’ strikes rather oddly on the modern ear but Jeffrey’s
attitude was that of the establishment. Until about 1790-91,
when alarm bells began to ring loudly in British tory circles, a
degree of liberal sentiment had been tolerated by the ruling
classes. By the panic year of 1797, any such toleration had
entirely evaporated as they felt themselves threatened with
anarchy and revolution: ‘Political fear meant religious revival,
an enormous boost in the growth of Evangelicalism and its
ascetic view of sex.’21 Up until the early years of the Regency,
the ruling classes themselves were, to some extent, exempt
from this ‘moral revolution’, but not for long:

Fear of sex, fear of conspiracy lurking in every corner, fear of

the masses who were both morally and politically inflammable
were forming a nexus of anxiety that was to last for several
decades.22

By the time of Peterloo (1819) and the publication of the first

Cantos of Don Juan, that nexus had sufficiently infected the
ruling classes for Byron’s friends to urge him against publica¬
tion. As Eric Trudgill observes:

In the nervous years after the Napoleonic wars there was still
enough conspiracy hysteria in existence, like that of 1797, to
promote the fear that political sedition might be affected through
moral subversion, and this subversion affected through immoral
literature.23

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 The Byronic Philosophy

It is only in such a context that we can understand how the

‘deliciously shocking character of his heroes, the daring
scepticism ot his metaphysics, and the unconventionality of his
political reflections . . ,’24 in 1812, could have turned by 1819
into the hysterical denunciation of a ‘cool unconcerned fiend,
laughing with detestable glee over the whole of the better and
worse elements ot which human life is composed’.25 Byron was
unfortunate enough to fall victim to the growing power of
middle-class moralism at a time when the ruling classes could
no longer escape its censure. It is but a short step from a Byron
urging the Greeks to liberate themselves from tyranny to a
Byron, as an influential member of the ruling class, urging
Britons to throw off a similar tyranny, and several commenta¬
tors have suggested that the government may have encouraged
the public campaign against Byron as a means of being rid of
someone of whom they were nervous.26
Had Byron's literary career ended in 1815, he would now be
a minor curiosity in the history of the Romantics, for while he
had achieved an unusual measure of public attention, he had
not fundamentally modified that tradition in which he worked.
Many of the elements we have considered from a Byronic
perspective were, in fact, the commonplaces of the Romantic/
Gothic tradition. The cult of personality, a concern for the
exotic, the criminal, the marginally scandalous, for nature and
for history, were all well-trodden paths since about 1780.
Shelley was far more of a radical than Byron. The turning
point in Byron’s career did not come until 1816.
Byron married Annabella Milbanke in 1815. As was obvious
from the beginning to Byron’s friends, the marriage was a
foolish one. It would be difficult to find two characters less
compatible than Byron and Lady Byron. In any case, Byron
seemed determined to drive the marriage on to the rocks if it
would not float there of its own accord. The marriage collapsed
in 1816 in bitterness and exaggeration and Byron, in the midst
of an extraordinary public uproar, fed by the malicious
Caroline Lamb, left the country. He never returned. He left in
a state verging on emotional collapse, convinced of persecution
and believing that all his hopes, political and emotional, had
been irretrievably crushed. This exile, in stark contrast to the
literariness of his pretended exile of 1809—11, presented him

155
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

with an unpleasantly harsh reality.

This catastrophe seemed to unlock Byron’s literary powers,
perhaps because it realized his own fantasies. Within two years
he had composed Childe Harold 11 I/I V, Manfred, and the open¬
ing Cantos ofDon Juan. Though the themes are much as before,
their treatment is so much more powerful as to transform Byron
from a minor exponent of Gothic Weltschmerz into one of the two
or three leading figures of European Romanticism. There is no
space here to follow Byron’s development in detail, but it is
necessary to look at one or two strands in Childe Harold.
Keeping to the rough form of a travelogue, Childe Harold III
(1817) takes us from Waterloo, across the Rhine and Alps, to
Italy where, with the exception of his expedition to Greece,
Byron lived for the rest of his life. As the Canto progresses Byron
increasingly forgets about the Childe and speaks in propna
persona. He tells us that he has resumed the poem:

So that it wean me from the weary dream

Of selfish grief or gladness—so it fling
Forgetfulness around me. ... (Ill', iv)

That, and stoicism, must enable him:

In strength to bear what time cannot abate,

And feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate. (Ill, vii)

The theme is reiterated at IV, xxi.

On the site of Waterloo he reflects on the political reaction
which has followed on the defeat of Napoleon:
What! shall reviving Thraldom again be
The patch’d-up idol of enlighten’d days? (Ill, xix)

and, identifying Napoleon as a kindred spirit, states the

Bvronic dilemma:

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. (III, xlii)
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 The Byronic Philosophy

For Byron, such figures as Napoleon, Milton’s Satan, the

Lucifer ol Cain and, ot course, himself, were marked out by
destiny to suffer: suffering being the price of a difference
marked by hybris:

. . . One breast laid open were a school

Which would unteach mankind the lust to shine or rule. . . .
(Ill, xliii)

For such ’wanderers o'er Eternity’ (III, lxx), there can be no

peace.
Byron now sees his own alienation as an instance of some¬
thing proper to particular types of soul, inherent in their
constitution. Rousseau, the ‘apostle of affliction’ (III, lxxvii),
is another such soul. Byron sees him as one of the moving
forces behind the Revolution and, hence, ultimately, behind
the Napoleonic catastrophe. In a curiously Burkeian passage
he makes clear the links between his politics, his view of
history , and the Byronic spirit:
They made themselves a fearful monument!
The wreck of old opinions—things which grew,
Breathed from the birth of time: the veil they rent
And what behind it lay, all earth shall view.
But good with ill they also overthrew,
Leaving but ruins, wherewith to rebuild
Upon the same foundation, and renew
Dungeons and thrones, which the same hour refill’d,
As heretofore, because ambition was self-will’d. (Ill, lxxxii)

The crucial line is the last one. He returned to the theme in

Childe Harold IV to make the link with personal history fully
evident:
And vile Ambition, that built up between
Man and his hopes an adamantine wall,
And the base pageant last upon the scene,
Are grown the pretext for the eternal thrall
Which nips life’s tree, and dooms man’s worst—his second
fall.
(IV, xcvii)

The concept of the Fall as both political/historical and per¬

sonal catastrophe is at the centre of Byronism. In opposition to
the hybris/ambition which leads to disaster, Byron sets the

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

concept of the brotherly band, such as was foreshadowed by

Selim’s corsairs:

While Waterloo with Cannae’s carnage vies,

Morat and Marathon twin names shall stand;
They were true Glory’s stainless victories,
Won by the unambitious heart and hand
Of a proud, brotherly, and civic band. ... (Ill, lxiv)

Byron’s only partly explicit ideal is that of the heroic self-

sacrifice of the lover-warrior band such as, under Leonidas,
faced the Persians at Thermopylae.
Canto IV is set in Italy and opens in Venice which, with the
decay of its former might and its many literary associations,
made an ideal locus for the Byronic spirit. For the first time,
Byron credits literature with some redemptive power:

The beings of the mind are not of clay;

Essentially immortal, they create
And multiply in us a brighter ray
And more beloved existence: that which Fate
Prohibits to dull life, in this our state
Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied.
First exiles, then replaces what we hate;
Watering the heart whose early flowers have died,
And with a fresher growth replenishing the void. (IV, v)

The imagery of the young heart as a rank garden—prompted

by Venice’s Shakespearian associations perhaps—is taken up
again and powerfully elaborated in IV, x. Only now can
Byron acknowledge:

My hopes of being remember’d in my line

With my land’s language. . . . (IV, ix)

This is in the strongest contrast to his earlier denunciations of

literature as, for example, in a journal entry for November
1813:

—but I do think the preference of writers to agents—the mighty

stir made about scribbling and scribes, by themselves and
others—a sign of effeminacy, degeneracy, and weakness. Who
would write, who had any better thing to do? ‘Action—action—
action'—said Demosthenes: ‘Actions—actions’ I say, and not
writing,—least of all, rhyme.27

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 The Byronic Philosophy

This marks a fundamental change for Byron and much of the

rest of the Canto is given over to a comparison and analysis of
power in its various forms, literary and political. In a lengthy
passage on Tasso and his patron, Alfonso of Este, Byron
compares political and literary power directly and concludes
that, in the long run, the latter is more effective (IV, xxxv—ix).
Linked with Byron’s discussion of power are his reflections
on love, for that is the basis of the self-sacrificial heroism which
alone is redemptive in history. For Byron, beauty, liberty and
love are ideal in the philosophical sense—that is, they are
products of mind. Byron, however, is no Berkeleian as his
attack on Berkeleian views in Don Juan makes clear (XI, i—ii et
seq.). Byron places a high value on the actual, on what is, and
continually stresses the factualness of his poetry and its truth¬
fulness. Byron never wholly lost his religious beliefs and in his
Detached Thoughts (1821) concludes that Mind is probably
eternal. He was very insistent that his daughter Allegra be
educated as a Christian and thought the Shelleys a bad
influence on theTFuIcTTlis accent on fact is clearly seen in his
defence of Don Juan to his friend Kinnaird: ‘It may be profli¬
gate but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have
written it who has not lived in the world?’28 The Byronic
dilemma is precisely that the world of fact seems so intractable
to the ideal. There is in Byronism a powerful element of mind/
body, is/ought dualism:
Oh, Love! no habitant of earth thou art—
An unseen seraph, we believe in thee,—
A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,—
But never yet hath seen, nor e’er shall see
The naked eye, they form, as it should be;
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven,
Even with its own desiring phantasy,
And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquench’d soul—parch’d, wearied, wrung,
and riven.

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,

And fevers into false creation:—where,
Where are the forms the sculptor’s soul hath seiz’d?
In him alone.
(IV, cxxi-ii)

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

The clearest statement of this complex of themes comes in

Byron’s final confrontation with Napoleon in Childe Harold
which he concludes:

What from this barren being do we reap?

Our senses narrow, and our reason frail,
Life short, and truth a gem which loves the deep.
And all things weigh’d in custom’s falsest scale;
Opinion an omnipotence,—whose veil
Mantles the earth with darkness, until right
And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale
Lest their own judgments should become too bright,
And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have too
much light. (IV, xciii)

The criminality of Byron’s own ideals, of his political ideals of

liberty and of his emotional ideals of homosexual or incestuous
attachments, is obviously at the root of this duality of good and
bad power. On the one hand, the ideal is represented by good
power—that is, that achieved through self-sacrificial love or
the ideality of art—and, on the other, the actual is represented
by bad power, which springs from ambition. Since heroic self-
sacrifice is called forth only by extreme circumstances, history
is inevitably a decline:

There is the moral of all human tales;

’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption,—barbarism at last. (IV, cviii)

But Byron, for all his grim stoicism, does not abandon hope
but sees it as made possible by a sort of perversity of spirit, a
view closely akin to that of the later Dostoyevsky:

Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,

Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind. . . .
(IV, xcviii)

The inevitable conclusion is that there is something out of

joint in the very conditions of existence and this leads Byron to
one of his most powerful statements of the Byronic philosophy:

Few—none—find what they love or could have loved,

Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed

160
 The Byronic Philosophy

Antipathies—but to recur, ere long,

Envenom'd with irrevocable wrong;
And Circumstance, that unspiritual god
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod.
Whose touch turns Hope to dust,—the dust we all have trod.

Our life is a false nature: ’tis not in

The harmony of things,—this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
7'his boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew—
Disease, death, bondage—all the woes we see,
And worse, the woes we see not—which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.

Yet let us ponder boldly—'tis a base

Abandonment of reason to resign
Our right of thought—our last and only place
Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine:
Though from our birth the faculty divine
Is chain’d and tortured—cabin’d, cribb’d, confined,
And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine
Too brightly on the unprepared mind,
The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the blind.
(IV, cxxv—vii)

In this curious combination of Calvinism and modernity, is

the core of Byronism.
For most of Canto IV Byron has spoken in propria persona,
forgetting the Childe. As he does so, his identification with his
own heroes becomes complete. This becomes hair-raisingly
clear when, towards the end of the Canto, Byron lets his sense
of destiny be seen at full stretch in the great Forgiveness Curse
(IV, cxxxi—viii) when he summons Nemesis to avenge him on
his detractors:

But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:

My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain;
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Something unearthly, which they deem not of,

Like the remember’d tone of a mute lyre,
Shall on their soften’d spirits sink, and move
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.
(IV, cxxxvii)

Byron can now take it for granted that his audience will
identify him as the speaker and be familiar enough with the
circumstances of his career not to require further information
about it. No other Romantic poet could reasonably have made
that assumption. From 1818 onwards, as his explorations of
the Byronic complex deepened through Cain, Don Juan and
Sardanapalus, Byron could build on that capacity to speak in
propria persona and, as he did so, the myth of Byron as Satanic
misanthrope or libertarian Prometheus gained in power and
resonance. In Italy, he supported the nationalists who wanted
Austria out and, finally, the image was consummated at
Missolonghi. By then, 1824, Byron had achieved a unique
identity between his literary works and his public image as a
man of action, as the Byronic hero. The enthusiasm of the
liberals is readily understood. It is only with these facts in
mind that we can finally see what gave the Byronic philosophy
its power.
Byron’s attacks on his contemporaries, and on the Lake
poets in particular, were notorious. As McGann points out:

According to Byron, the Lakers, by teaching theories of‘Imag¬

ination’ as a basic principle of poetry, have revoked altogether
the poet’s teaching function. They have literally lost their
minds, and Coleridge’s ‘metaphysics’—an explanation of poetry-
needing its own explanation—typifies the situation.29

For Byron poetry was only of value if it had a moral force. As

he wrote in the letter on Bowles, ‘In my mind, the highest of
all poetry- is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly subjects
must be moral truth . . .’,30 and ‘If the essence of poetry must
be a lie, throw it to the dogs, or banish it from your republic, as
Plato would have done. . . .’31 Hence, his defence of Don Juan
rests on its ethical intent: ‘. . . Don Juan will be known by and
bye, for what it is intended,—a Satire on abuses of the present
states of Society, and not an eulogy- of vice. . . ,’32
Byron’s dislike ol the Lake poets stemmed from his rather

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 The Byronic Philosophy

Calvinistic view that they were failing in their duty, that

‘Stern Daughter of the voice of God’, and his defence of Pope
springs Irom similar considerations. The underlying reason
for Byron's difference in view is the fact that, quite simply, in
one central respect, his experience of the world was wholly
different from theirs. One of the factors which most sharply
distinguishes the Augustans from the Romantics is the differ¬
ence in their respective audiences.33 By 1800 the directly
accessible audience of Augustan patrons had given way to
the 'public' which was at one and the same time an idealized
abstraction only nominally related to the people who bought
and read books, and the general mass of such people. Between
about 1780 and 1820 the phenomenal growth of the circulating
libraries had brought about basic changes in the nature of the
writer's public. As the nineteenth century developed, and
reading became increasingly a middle-class leisure occupa¬
tion, the divergence between the actual and ideal publics
widened enormously so that, increasingly, writers wrote for a
non-existent abstraction or simply became suppliers of the raw
materials for the distraction of the middle-classes—that is,
producers whose function was simply to write, not to act. That
dislocation between the writer and actual social conditions
rendered the writer impotent to affect those conditions directly
through his writings. It is a dislocation with which contem¬
porary' literature still struggles. As early as Keats and Words¬
worth, however, the retreat by poets from a sense of their
capacity to change actual conditions directly is clearly evident.
There is nothing disreputable about an introspective or sym¬
bolist poetry if nothing else is possible, and, as McGann says,
‘To know by symbols is to make up for what Wordsworth calls
“the sad incompetence of human speech’’ ’ (Prelude, IV, 592).
Byron opposes a discourse ruled by symbols, which drive into
silence and ecstatic revelation, with a discourse of ‘conversa¬
tional facility’ (Don Juan, XV, xx).34
Alone among the Romantics, Byron did not accept—because
he did not perceive—that dislocation. Byron’s social position
had given him a sense, not wholly illusory, of the real possibility
of power, of changing the lives and conditions of men. When
he changed political for literary ambitions, he carried over that
sense of congruence—albeit only as a possibility—between the

163
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

real (actuality and action) and the ideal (liberty, truth and
beauty). It is for this reason that Byron was so insistent on the
truthfulness of poetry and on its ethical task: "History, tradition,
and facts are Byron’s ground not because Byron is a materialist,
but because, for him, use and act are logically, and humanly,
prior to ideas.’35
We have already seen how Byron’s personal life contributed
to shaping his literary imperatives. Ironically, it was precisely
that marriage of personal circumstance to literary form which
enabled Byron—however fleetingly and precariously—to resolve
in his life and work the core dilemma of Romanticism, which is
the impotence of the artist to reconcile the desired with the
actual, action with talk. Romantic discontent with actual
conditions—with the effects of urbanization, loss of an im¬
mediate audience, the growth of revolutionary hopes and the
continued power of ancient, despotic structures—is the central
thread binding together Goethe and Beethoven, Byron and
Wordsworth. It was Byron’s unique combination of chivalric
and heroic ideals, a powerful sense of social and personal
corruption, and of the actuality of power, which gave the Byronic
myth its vitality and appeal. Only Byron was in a position to
live out the congruence, in Mazzini’s phrase, "of thought and
action’. It was that public role too which made him a mediator
between two ages, casting a long shadow forward into the
nineteenth and even twentieth centuries, and with a long look
backwards to the vanished Augustan wholeness (so he thought)
of deed and word. Byron summed it up in a memorandum in
his journal of 1821: ‘What is Poetry?—The feeling of a Former
world and Future.’36

NOTES

1. B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London, 1946), p. 780.

2. A. Rutherford (ed.), Byron: The Critical Heritage (London, 1970), pp
21-2.
3. B. Russell, op. cit., p. 774.
4. J. D. Jump (ed.), Byron: A Symposium (London, 1975), quoted by L.
Berry in his article, The Poet of Childe Harold, p. 36.
5. P. Gunn (ed.), Byron: Selected Prose (Middlesex, 1972), p. 420.

164
 The Byronic Philosophy
6. The best account of Byron’s fate at the hands of his biographers and
friends is to be found in Mrs. D. L. Moore’s The Late Lord Byron
(London, 1961).
7. L. A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (London, 1971), p. 162.
8. J. J. McGann, (1) Don Juan in Context (London, 1976), p. 103.
9. P. Gunn, op. cit., p. 77.
10. Ibid., p. 158.
11. Ibid., p. 447.
12. L. A. Marchand, op. cit., p. 9.
13. Wilma Paterson, in an article in World Medicine (May 1982), examines
the evidence of Byron’s attitudes to his weight and his associated
behaviour patterns and concludes, I think convincingly, that Byron was
an anorexic (pp. 35—8).
14. G. Phelps, The Byronic Byron, in J. D. Jump, op. cit., p. 67.
15. The most detailed account of this issue can be found in B. Grebanier,
The Uninhibited Byron (London, 1971), pp. 22—4, et. seq.
16. L. A. Marchand, op. cit., p. 21.
17. Ibid.
18. J. J. McGann, (2) Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago, 1968),
p. 16.
19. P. Gunn, op. cit., p. 168.
20. L. A. Marchand, op cit., pp. 118-19.
21. E. Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of
Victorian Sexual Attitudes (London, 1976), p. 30.
22. E. Trudgill, op. cit., p. 32.
23. Ibid., p. 144.
24. A. Rutherford, op. cit., p. 8.
25. ‘Remarks on Don Juan, in Blackwood’s Magazine, August 1819. Given in
A. Rutherford, op. cit., pp. 166-73.
26. A view suggested, for example, by G. Wilson Knight in his Byron and
Shakespeare (London, 1966), p. 101.
27. P. Gunn, op. cit., p. 171.
28. Ibid., p. 322.
29. J. J. McGann, (1) op. cit., p. 77.
30. P. Gunn, op. cit., p. 403.
31. Ibid., p. 407.
32. Ibid., p. 489.
33. R. Williams, Culture and Society 1780—1950 (Middlesex, 1963), pp. 48-64.
34. I. I. McGann, (1) op. cit., p. 111.
35. Ibid., p. 114.
36. P. Gunn, op. cit., p. 379.

165
8
The Rhetoric of Freedom
by J. DRUMMOND BONE

Byron’s enthusiasm for freedoms of different kinds needs little

underscoring. In practical matters his concept of freedom was
most often negatively defined—it was freedom from political,
social or economic oppression, freedom from convention,
freedom from hypocrisy, cant, humbug. He ignored any anatomy
of the state of freedom itself, and in the case of the Greek War of
Independence actively scorned any projected anatomy of the
free state—he would have nothing to do with Stanhope’s
Utopias—and there is little trace of the nineteenth century’s idee
fixe, the organic nation-state, in his pragmatic help for the
Italian Carabinieri—if unity is necessary for freedom it is as a
practical prerequisite:

To break the chain, yet . . .

What is there wanting then to set thee free,
And show thy beauty in its fullest light?
To make the Alps impassable; and we,
Her sons, may do this with one deed—Unite.
(The Prophecy of Dante, II, 139, 142-45)1

The same could be said for his Lords’ speeches on the 'Frame-
Work Bill’, the ‘Catholic Claims’ motion, and his presentation
of Major Cartwright’s Petition:

. . . the town and country were burthened with large detach¬

ments of the military; the police was in motion, the magistrates
assembled . . . the police, however useless, were by no means
idle: several notorious delinquents had been detected;—men,

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 The Rhetoric of Freedom

liable to conviction, on the clearest evidence, of the capital

crime of poverty. . . . YV hen a proposal is made to emancipate
or relieve, you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporise
and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be
passed offhand, without a thought of the consequences.

... [of the Catholics] it might as well be said, that the

negroes did not desire to be emancipated, but this is an
unfortunate comparison, for you have already delivered them
out of the house of bondage, without any petition on their
part. . . .

The petitioner, my lords, is a man whose long life has been

spent in one unceasing struggle for the liberty of the subject,
against that undue influence which has increased, is increasing,
and ought to be diminished; and whatever difference of opinion
may exist as to his political tenets, few will be found to question
the integrity of his intentions.2

The accent is on freedom as the opposite of actual limitation,

physical, economic, or mental. It is not a question of what the
content of the freedom once attained might be, but of the
removal of palpable restriction. This is partly a necessary con¬
sequence of the political tact involved, all the more so if we
believe that Byron’s speech on the Frame-Work Bill was
conditioned by Party tactics rather than prompted wholly by a
personal feeling of outrage.3 It also however suggests the
central problem of the ontology of the state of freedom, a
somewhat different matter from the problem of the 'free state’
in the political sense, which latter for Byron remained a strictly
pragmatic business of standing still by pushing against
encroachment from all points of the compass (in which meta¬
phor the poles might be characterized as ‘tyranny by the
throne’ and ‘tyranny by the people’).4 However to define the
state of freedom itself by negation is even simply on the face of
it unsatisfactory, a process treating a substance of acceptance
in terms of denial. The concept and contradictions of the inner
structure of freedom became more and more important philo¬
sophically, at least on the Continent, as existentialism grew
from Kierkegaard to Husserl. The first manifest signs of the
difficulty, if not actually its roots, can be seen in the literary
character of the Romantic Rebel who fills his existence with

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the rejection of social and religious convention. ‘Byronic Hero’

and 'Romantic Rebel’ have become virtually synonymous. But
Byron’s concept of the free hero (or rather the hero seeking
freedom) is not monolithic—it has both development and
inconsistency, and these are both produced by and help to
condition the rhetoric of his poetry. Moreover ‘freedom' in the
poetry is not simply a matter of a central character’s struggle
(in the Turkish Tales it might approximate to this, though
recent developments suggest otherwise5), but of explicit and
implicit examination of historical and other fictional examples
of its existence, or more often its failure to exist. Indeed the
very structure and modus operandi of some poems are discourses
on the difficult nature of freedom. It is these interactions of
form and content in his varying idea of individual freedom
which I wish to examine.
The notion of freedom as the rejection of restraint produces
the image of the hero as a social rebel or social outcast, for
perhaps curiously the two work interchangeably. The point is
worth labouring, for Byron’s own heroes have a habit of
equating the two, as do the texts of the poems in which these
heroes exist, but this is not a necessary equation, nor one made
by all or even most of his contemporaries. The rebel has a
particular cause, even if that particularity is of huge scope (one
could scarcely imagine one larger than that of Shelley’s
Prometheus), which may or may not result in his being cast
out, depending both on the scale of the rebellion and on its
success or failure. In the case of the ‘Byronic hero’ the process
is put into reverse, and the hero becomes a rebel or associated
with rebellion through being made an outcast, or indeed casting
himself as an outcast. Whereas for Wordsworth (in say ‘Lines
. . . in a Yew Tree’ in Lyrical Ballads) or Shelley (notably in
Alastor) the move into social detachment is seen negatively, in
Childe Harold Cantos I and II, or The Giaour, or The Corsair,
or even Don Juan, social exile is virtually a precondition of
rebelliousness or rebellious social criticism. Shelley’s com¬
ments on incest as an act of social rebellion are illuminating:

Incest is like many other incorrect things a very poetical cir¬

cumstance. It may be the excess oflove or of hate. It may be
that defiance of every thing for the sake of another which

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clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism, or it may be

that cynical rage which confounding the good & bad in existing
opinions breaks through them for the purpose of rioting in
selfishness & antipathy.6

The first case has a particular purpose, but the second at best
only a general one (for Shelley implicitly too general). Casting
oneself as an outcast, while masquerading as a freeing of
oneself from restriction, is in Shelley’s view an act of self¬
definition, in which the self is bounded by the rules it refuses to
obey—its freedom, its selfhood, is in other words defined: it is
that which is not bound by the incest taboo. Leaving aside the
obvious relevance to Manfred for the moment, it is usually true
that the being outcast, or the self outcasting, of the Byronic
hero is associated with particular social or metaphysical criti¬
cism, either in the hero himself, or in the texture of the poem
as a whole, or in both (as in Childe Harold, where it is of course
difficult to distinguish the eponymous hero in his ‘own’ poem).
But the blurring of the rebel/outcast distinction and the
prominence of outcast imagery help to emphasize the isolation,
and through the isolation the importance, of the hero-figure.
Following McGann’s recent collation of the latent political
references in the Turkish Tales in his new edition of the
poetical works much will no doubt be written about the anti¬
establishment implications of these works, and the social point
of Childe Harold has been more or less always obvious, even
with the toned-down stanzas and omitted notes. Yet at the
time, despite or because of Byron’s protestations to the con¬
trary, the centre of attention in all these poems—indeed the
very raison d’etre of the ‘follow-up’ Tales—was the outcast hero.
In so far as the hero dominates the poems the thrust against
repression is realized then most importantly as an ‘outcast
from’, not a ‘freedom for’, and the process of realization is not
a breaking down of restriction but a limiting of itself by con¬
trast and conflict.
The free-spirit’s becoming is thus paradoxically involved
with its limitation. No news this of course to existential
philosophy, but the practical consequences of this in Byron’s
rhetoric, or more strictly the causes of this paradox in his
rhetoric, have not I think been explored. Harold’s existence

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

outside of conventional society is established (and even the

word ‘established’ might already hint at contradiction) at the
beginning of the poem—‘Few earthly things found favour in
his sight. . . . Then loath’d he in his native land to dwell . . .
Nor sought he friend to counsel or condole. ... If friends he
had, he bade adieu to none’ (I, ii, 7; iv, 8; viii, 8; x, 5). The
sense of the free space in which he moves beyond our control is
carried by the mystery surrounding him—‘whence his name/
And lineage long, it suits me not to say ... As if the Memory of
some deadly feud/ Or disappointed passion lurk’d below'—
and in terms of the ‘plot’ by his setting sail from his ‘native
home’ to ‘traverse Paynim shores, and pass Earth’s central
line’ (I, iii, 1-2; viii, 3-4; xi, 9). But at the same time there is
an opposite movement towards definition, counterbalancing
the detaching of Harold from his context by fixing him as
uniquely definable, though undefined: ‘one sad losel soils a
name for aye. . . . Nor deem’d before his little day was done/
One blast might chill him into misery. . . ./ [he] Had sigh'd to
many though he lov’d but one,/ And that lov'd one, alas!
could ne’er be his . . .’ (I, iii, 5; iv, 3-4; v, 3—4). Clearly the
reader is being invited to have and to eat his cake. Harold is
presented as an outcast, both willingly and unwillingly, whose
existence is a mystery to us, but at the same time it is implied
that he does have an absolutely unique identity, and that the
mystery has a definite solution. Mysteriously then this con¬
textless individual, who insists on the meaninglessness of his
own life, carries with him the sense of an absolutely defining
context, or in other words the dramatization of his sense of
futility portrays that sense as full of meaning. It is no wonder
that Childe Harold was a popular poem, for in identifying with
the hero’s sufferings, and then with the hero’s poem, the reader
finds a context for his own sense of contextlessness, and what
is felt as isolation is transformed into heroic rejection. The
manoeuvre however is essentially a simplistic one as literary
devices go, a rhetorical sleight of hand rather than a serious
realization of the problem. The two levels of text do not
interact in themselves, they merely amalgamate in the reader’s
response (or, if one prefers, the text is unaware of itself; or from
yet another critical angle the character of Harold shows no
awareness of the complexity of his situation as isolato). This

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 The Rhetoric of Freedom

technique of surrounding the isolated outcast with the rhetoric

of sharp definition became a mannerism in the Tales. In The
Giaour for example the fragmented chronology actually aids
the definition of character and scene rather than cutting it
loose from context. It ‘freezes’ scenes, attaching them to an
eternal moment by detaching them from the flow of time—one
need look no further than the motto from Moore7 or the total
stillness of the poem's first six lines, in which the meaning of
the question ‘When shall such Hero live again?’ (presumably
paraphrasable as ‘At what future time, if any . . .?’, with the
question, the uncertainty, part and parcel) is turned upside
down in the sense by the certainty, the absolute and unchanging
quality of the moment described:

No breath of air to break the wave

That rolls below the Athenian’s grave,
That tomb which, gleaming o’er the cliff,
First greets the homeward-veering skiff,
High o’er the land he saved in vain;
When shall such hero live again?
(The Giaour, 1-6)

Perhaps the most extreme example is the juxtaposition of the

mystery of the Giaour’s identity (which as in Harold places
him—or displaces him—not only beyond the surrounding
Moslem society but also beyond the reader’s control) with the
image of his reining in his horse for a dramatic pause. Here we
hav e the sleight of hand of definition and mystery in rather
embarrassing obviousness, a Mills and Boon prototype:

One glance he snatch’d, as if his last,

A moment check’d his wheeling steed,
A moment breathed him from his speed,
A moment on his stirrup stood—
Why looks he o’er the olive wood?
(The Giaour, 217—21)

Indeed this image lasts until line 250. Sometimes the device
and the effect is more subtly handled, but it remains omni¬
present in the Tales.8
The dramatization of loneliness thus begs the question of
the meaning of the state of freedom in creating a seeming
meaning for the individual who has rejected or has been

171
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

rejected by society. Even in passages where a purpose is

overtly described, most notably in terms of love of nature, the
yoking of selfhood to larger context is seldom secure:
More blest the life of godly eremite,
Such as on lonely Athos may be seen,
Watching at eve upon the giant height,
Which looks o’er waves so blue, skies so serene,
That he who there at such an hour hath been
Will wistful linger on that hallow'd spot;
Then slowly tear him from the ’witching scene,
Sigh forth one wish that such had been his lot,
Then turn to hate a world he had almost forgot.
(Childe Harold, II, xxvii)

This is not only insecure in the intentional sense that the

outcast has to tear himself away from Nature once more (an
image of Nature which of course includes the divine), but also
in the obviousness of the situation and the rhetoric used to
suggest the transcendent but carefully not imprisoning con¬
text. The word ‘one’ appears yet again to move us into the
world of absolutes, and the loneliness of the 'eremite’ is taken
over by the loneliness of Athos, which dominates the scene of
which it is a part—the individual remains of ‘godly’ stature
while receiving the comfort of the ‘skies so serene’, just as the
‘he who there hath been’ receives the comfort of the identi¬
fication with the ‘eremite’ while retaining his own status as
outcast. It is well done certainly, but it is not deeply convincing.
Elsewhere in Childe Harold I and II the values of individual
freedom are explicitly extolled in opposition to the values of
religious and political reaction, surely enough, but my point is
that the state of selfhood independent of limiting context is in
the main realized as a finally unsatisfactory juggling of images
of isolation and attendant futility on the one hand, and definition
and dramatic (if mysterious) meaningfulness on the other.
It seems unarguable that Byron himself became increasingly
aware that at least his literary conception of the free self was
simplistic, a wallowing in its futility to the point where, in our
modern terms of catastrophe theory, it flipped into a meaning¬
ful state of self-dramatization—and this while remaining quite
detached from the practically valuable process of serving the
cause of freedom by the rejection of oppression. It is not

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 The Rhetoric of Freedom

possible however to trace a continuously progressive chron-

ology for this and indeed it would be surprising if one could—
why one should expect such rigour in art any more than in life
is difficult to understand, unless one confuses the patterning of
art with a teleological view of existence. This warning must
serve by way of qualification of the general tendency I shall
now try to trace.
The Byron of Childe Harold III picks up the theme of exile in
a much more self-conscious way than his earlier narrator,
scarcely surprisingly given his own exile:

In my youth’s summer I did sing of One,

The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind. . . .
(HI, iii, 1-2)

. . . still uncompell’d,
He would not yield dominion of his mind
To spirits against whom his own rebell’d;
Proud though in desolation; which could find
A life within itself, to breathe without mankind.
(Ill, xii, 5—9)

Self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,

With nought of hope left, but with less of gloom;
The very knowledge that he lived in vain,
That all was over on this side the tomb,
Had made Despair a smilingness assume. . . .
(Ill, xvi, 1-5)

The gradual merging of narrator and Harold in theory as well

as in practice begins in III, vi, a stanza looked at in some
detail below, but the effect is not to flatten the topography of
the poem’s point of view, but on the contrary to throw it into
much sharper relief. As can be seen from the above quotations,
the poem now shows an awareness of the contradictions
handled surreptitiously by the preceding Cantos—freedom is
a matter of self-exile, it entails ‘desolation’; yet paradoxically
this very desolation leads through pride to some sort of
desperate ‘smilingness’. A worrying over all this furnishes a
deal of the matter of III. Moreover, in the crucial stanza vi
just referred to, the process in which the desolation becomes
meaningful in the poem is characterized. The effect of the

173
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

narrator’s question at the end of the preceding stanza has been

‘Why do we write?’ He now answers:

’Tis to create, and in creating live

A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crush’d feelings’ dearth.

This describes the process of self-dramatization already noted.

The act of realizing a fictional alter-ego, for author and for
reader, turns the despair of author, reader, and alter-ego into
intense feeling—we feel still in the life we have imaged, even if
(this is implicit in the fact that the character in question is
Harold) that image is one of despair and dearth of feeling. So
111 is not only more aware of some of the inherent tensions of I
and II, it is also more aware of the reason for these Cantos’
existence and success. But this does not mean that a resolution
is reached formally, nor that a solution to the metaphysical
problem of the free self is suggested in the content. What does
happen is that contradiction and tension, rather than a trans¬
formation of tension into a transcendent Angst which is Angst's
own contradiction, become the poem’s most characteristic
structure. Many ‘solutions’ and objections to these solutions
are put forward, and in the putting forward the sense of the
problem is genuinely created.
Like the Chaldean, he could watch the stars,
Till he had peopled them with beings bright
As their own beams; and earth, and earthborn jars.
And human frailties, were forgotten quite:
Could he have kept his spirit to that flight
He had been happy; but this clay will sink
Its spark immortal. . . .
(Ill, xiv, 1-7)

This passage perhaps bears at first sight some resemblance to

the Nature-loving image of the monk on Mount Athos already
quoted above (p. 172). It is in fact significantly different. There

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 The Rhetoric of Freedom

is no attempt to bring the ‘he’ into the world of the Chaldean;

there is no attempt to identify either the ‘he’ or the Chaldean
with the object of his gaze other than in the explicit statement
that he, Harold, attempted such an identification; there is no
‘one wish’ that ‘such had been his lot1 because the failure to
remain in this state is an internal failing, not one imposed by
circumstance, unless in the sense that it is part of the inevitable
condition of the self's existence; and the contradiction in clay
sinking its own immortal spark is left simply as contradictory.
This stanza ends

... as if to break the link

That keeps us from yon heaven which woos us to its brink.

and leaves the emphasis on the unresolved relationship between

the individual and nature, where II, xxvii ends on ‘a world he
had almost forgot1, and thus brings us despairingly but never¬
theless definitely back to earth. In the next stanza of III we
find Harold immediately discontented ‘in Man’s dwellings’,
and imaged as a falcon ‘To whom the boundless air alone were
home’, and then again as a bird in a cage. The movements are
abrupt and explicit. There are other differences too which are
typical of the differences in the two Cantos—less emphasis in
III, xiv on adjectives and adverbs avoids the surreptitious yet
too obvious search for intensity in II, xxvii (‘godly eremite . . .
lonely Athos . . . giant height. . . waves so blue, skies so serene
. . . such an hour . . . wistful linger . . . hallow’d spot. . . slowly
tear . . . ’witching scene . . . one wish’), and its verse handles
both enjambment and caesura with much greater freedom, at
the same time this freedom creating the tension of which the
stanza speaks by displacing the ‘expected’ regularity. In short
the Canto II stanza presents the grandeur of Nature in indi¬
vidualist terms, and the individual’s sense of loss transformed
into drama, unaware that its form reverses its apparent con¬
tent; the Canto III stanza creates the tension of the isolated
self both in realization and in motive.
Occasionally, as I have said, the later work retreats to the
manner of the former—a good example is xxiii where the Duke
of Brunswick sits apart from ‘the festival’ in a ‘window’d
niche’, his isolation in fact dramatizing his heroism, which has
an inner, personal, motive—he is the type of isolation and of

175
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

commitment at one and the same time. But more usually the
values of individualism are left in their confusion. We move
from the image of the futility of grief in xxxiii and xxxiv—
‘There is a very life in our despair,/ Vitality of poison,—a
quick root/ Which feeds these deadly branches’ itself a mar¬
vellously disrupted and contradictory image of disruption and
contradiction—to the balancing of the scales in the judgement
of Napoleon, or rather to the impossibility of ever finding a
balance. His spirit is ‘antithetically mixt. . . . Conqueror and
captive of the earth art thou! . . . Oh, more or less than man
. . . 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. . . . This makes the madmen
who have made men mad. . . . Away with these! true Wisdom’s
world will be/ Within its own creation, or in thine,/ Maternal
Nature! . . (extracted from xxxvi—xlvi). The contradictions of
the free individual, his greatness and futility, his power for evil
and for good are realized in their agonizing contradictoriness;
we then turn from them to the hope of peace within Maternal
Nature. In fact the next few stanzas arguably find Byron
returning to his old manner of suggesting loneliness and loss
and transcending content at the same time, for in amongst the
‘Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountain, vine’, we find
‘chiefless castles breathing stern farewells/ From gray but
leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells’. A more clear-cut
example of union with Nature as an image of the content of life
when it is withdrawn from other contexts is to be found in the
‘Wordsworthian’ stanzas lxviii—lxxv, though even here doubt
creeps back in with the incessant phrasing of what should be
affirmation as question:
. . . shall I not
Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm?
The bodiless thought? the Spirit of each spot?
Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal lot?

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part

Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
(lxxiv, 6-9; lxxv, 1-2)

And so on to the end of that stanza. That this is self-hectoring

questioning rather than rhetorical reinforcement is clearly

176
 The Rhetoric of Freedom

shown by the abrupt about-turn of the next stanza—we move

from a transcendent vision to the grave:

But this is not my theme; and I return

To that which is immediate, and require
Those who find contemplation in the urn,
To look on One, whose dust was once all fire. . . .
(lxxvi, 1-4)

—and dive into the contradictions of another free-spirit,

Rousseau, who was a 'self-torturing sophist’, but yet ‘knew/
How to make Madness beautiful’.
Tension, contradiction, abrupt switches of subject and of
tone are ol the essence of Childe Harold III. The imponderables
of the state of individual freedom which while apparently the
subject were in fact spirited away, too easily dissolved, in the
rhetoric of the early cantos, here shape both rhetoric and
apparent content. But it could be argued still that they do so in
despite of Byron’s conscious direction, rather than because of
it, at least after the introductory seven stanzas.9 There can be
little doubt of his self-awareness in the metaphysical mental
theatre of Manfred.
The point has been made many times that Manfred traces
the hero’s rejection of all help and support on the grounds that
they would demand some subordination of his self,10 that self
which at one and the same time is his pride and his agony. The
problem of the state of freedom is at the centre of the drama—
to seek freedom is to reject the contexts which give meaning to
life. Manfred rejects the spirit’s claims that they control his
destiny, in particular the seventh spirit’s ideas of predeter¬
mination; he is saved from casual suicide (that is, from a
suicide based on the feeling that there is no value in life: ‘If it
be life to wear within myself/ This barrenness of spirit, and to
be/ My own soul’s sepulchre, for I have ceased/ To justify my
deeds unto myself—/ The last infirmity of evil. ..’ (I, ii, 25-9))
by the Chamois Hunter, the type of simple life, but simple life
is not enough for Manfred; he rejects what one might call the
‘Wordsworthian solution’, the aid of the ‘Spirit of the place’,
the love of the beauty of Nature; he refuses any pact with
Arimanes, the ‘Faustian solution’; and finally he rejects the
solace of religion in the person of the Abbot. At each attempt

177
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

to find a meaning for his soul’s existence he feels the absolute

freedom of his soul is to be in danger of being compromised.
There is not the equivocation of Childe Harold I and II which
seeks to insinuate a sense of significance into the feeling of
futility, and the contradictions apparent in Childe Harold III
are now directly addressed. To be free is to be isolated;
isolation .brings a sense of futility yet still one insists on
freedom.11 The only spectre in front of which Manfred is
subdued is Astarte, his sister, his other self, and it is his guilty
love for her which is the objective correlative of his withdrawal
from, or his being outcast by, the rest of the world.12 In the end
Manfred appears almost to will his own death, but this is not a
suicide in the face of an empty and valueless existence:

... I bear within

A torture which could nothing gain from thine:
The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts,—
Is its own origin of ill and end—
And its own place and time: its innate sense,
When stripp’d of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without,
But is absorb’d in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert. . . .
... [I] was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.
(Ill, iv, 127-40)

Manfred has rejected any transcendent reality, but what

Elledge calls the ‘vacuum of his selfhood’13 is in fact filled with
self-created meaning. His sense of value is no longer created by
a reference to social, moral, or religious systems outside him¬
self, but clearly this no longer leads inevitably to nihilism, for
the mind ‘makes itself/ Requital ... Is its own origin of ill and
end ... its own place and time . . . own destroyer, and . . . own
hereafter’. If freedom must reject, it can also create within
itself. What ontological status this created value has is another
problem, only hinted at in Manfred by the Abbot having the
last, doubtful, words—his doubts remaining unaffected by
Manfred’s triumphant assertion. But the main effect at the
end of the play is the revelation that meaning can be produced
from within, and does not depend on inevitably restricting

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 The Rhetoric of Freedom

systems ‘beyond' the individual.

However, though this is a major development in the depth
of Byron’s thinking about the problem of freedom, it is not
reflected in a thorough-going way in the form of the play.
Indeed Manfred, for all the hero’s agonizing, is in many ways
more sure ot itself than Childe Harold III, and in so far as this
is the case its form works against the intention of its content.
It becomes obvious early that the pattern of Manfred seeking
help and then rejecting it will be repeated throughout the play
(no later than the rejection of the Chamois Hunter), and the
sense of certainty in his episodic progress is not far removed
from the world of the morality play. The ‘set-pieces’ of the
sunset (III, ii) and the Coliseum by night (III, iv) return us
to the ‘frozen scene’ method of the early Harold and the
Tales. In the first the hero is in effect identified with the
‘chief Star!/ Centre of many stars’. As the sun sets Manfred
says: ‘He is gone—/ I follow.’ The reader through this identi¬
fication translates Manfred into precisely that transcendent
world he so steadfastly refuses. The same rather obvious use
of a dramatizing context underlies the Coliseum passage. ‘I
linger yet with Nature . . . and in her starry shade/ Of dim
and solitary loveliness,/ I learn’d the language of another
world' says Manfred (III, iv, 3—7), and we find ourselves
appreciating the comfort of the Universal context while still
feeling that the hero has not compromised his isolation, for
Nature has somehow become herself ‘solitary’. Manfred
remembers that it was ‘such a night’ as this—and he reminds
us at the end of his recollection again ‘’Twas such a night!’ to
drive home the particularity of the moment which raises it
out of time—‘When I was wandering ... I stood within the
Coliseum's wall,/ ’Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome’
(III, iv, 9—11), and magically his ‘wandering’ and the sense
of time’s irreversible passage in the decay of Rome is stopped
in its tracks in this one night. Once again by defining a
moment that moment is lifted out of time. It is the moon on
which our attention is directed here, and as the speaker’s
consciousness is filled with the sense of that moon’s tran¬
scendence so the reader identifies that consciousness with the
moon—it becomes Manfred who is unchanging as he stands
in the middle of the Coliseum, full of precisely that sense of

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

value in existence which in fact at this point in the drama he

lacks. Even if one were to argue that this is the moment at
which his sense of triumph begins, there would be an incon¬
sistency in dramatizing that triumph oj the self in terms of
natural beauty.14 The climax of the passage reads:

And thou didst shine, thou rolling Moon, upon

All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which soften’d down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and fill’d up,
As ’twere anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not, till the place
Became a religion. . . .
(Ill, iv, 31-8)

Not surprisingly ‘Manfred’ ‘apologizes’ for the digression—

not only by way of self-defence from the reader's question
‘What is this passage doing here?’, but more seriously to
present as random and free a scene which has been defining
him through a carefully structured (melo-) dramatic context:

’Tis strange that I recall it at this time;

But I have found our thoughts take wildest flight
Even at the moment when they should array
Themselves in pensive order.
(Ill, iv, 42-5)

Manfred’s last long speech, already quoted at some length

above (p. 178), again uses a defining context to create a sense of
significance and timelessness which does not exactly marry'
with the absolute freedom of which the text speaks, for of
course he is ‘quoting’ Satan in Paradise Lost Book I, 252-55.
True, the meaning has in some sense been freed from its
previous Miltonic existence, since here we read it as truth. But
clearly the reference has the effect of raising Manfred to Satan's
existential level, if one can so speak, and thus of dramatizing
his existence for the reader as the hero of a mythic structure.
Far from remaining himself for the reader at the crucial
moment when he realizes that he can only be himself, Manfred
becomes identified with the super-human.
There are various features of Manfred then which make it
less formally effective in rendering its central concern than the

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 The Rhetoric oj Freedom

non-theatrical but in fact much more dramatically tense Childe

Harold III, though again this latter has not the philosophical
depth ol Manfred. It is in Beppo that Byron manages finally
both a subtle analysis ol the state of freedom and a form with
which to express it—as of course it is Beppo that marks the
coming of his poetic maturity in general.
Beppo finds its characters free of the oppression of hypo¬
critical morality and the Puritan social conventions of England,
but there is no trace here ol the emptiness or isolation Byron
earlier associated with the free state. Nor is their freedom
compromised by a commitment to some purpose larger than
themselves. The content of their freedom is on the contrary a
limited, relative, and artificial value, yet for all that a value.
Not only has Manfred's lesson been learnt—meaning is created
Irom within, not an effect of reference to some external system—
but its relative, subjective, quality has been accepted; the
poem Beppo is both Manfred and his observer, the Abbot, at
the same time. In terms of the plot, Beppo’s return can be
accommodated within Laura’s relationship to the Count, as
his absence has been filled by the Count’s presence: the
’freedom’ of Beppo's absence does not empty Laura’s life, but
neither does her new ‘commitment’ usurp her freedom—she
has no need to react against either in order to define her self. It
is freedom, not commitment or rebellion, which fills her being.
The ironic setting of the poem in the Carnival (for the
etymology see stanza vi) underlines the freedom of the Venetian
society, for this is anything but a farewell to the flesh, and yet
the indulgence of the flesh is seen neither as hypocritical nor
importantly as a self-dramatizing gesture of rebellion.
It is the texture of the poem, in Nabokov’s sense,15 that
breaks quite new ground. To look first at an instance still
partly connected with the flow of the plot, the treatment of the
moment at which Beppo reveals his identity is almost the
reverse of the treatment of such crucial moments in the Tales.
If we say that this poem is ‘comic’, the earlier ones ‘serious’,
and only that, we say the obvious and nothing of worth; if we
say only that Beppo parodies Romantic melodrama we have
said something certainly, but little to explain the quality of the
effect produced. The Count and Laura, in particular Laura,
refuse to allow the poem to stop, to lift itself out of the

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

relativizing flow of time. There is no question here of a

second’s pause being inlaid with significance over the thirty-
three lines that it took for the ‘moment’ in which the Giaour
‘checked his wheeling steed’. On the contrary Laura’s one
wordless moment (‘She said,—what could she say? Why, not a
word’) is covered by the Count’s invitation to Beppo to enter
his own house, from which point the irony of Laura’s word¬
lessness is revealed in her continuous stream of questions over
two and a half stanzas. Time does not stand still at the climax
of the story—it speeds up:

. . . ‘Beppo! what’s your pagan name?

Bless me! your beard is of amazing growth!
And how came you to keep away so long?
Are you not sensible ’twas very wrong?

‘And are you really, truly, now a Turk?

With any other women did you wive?
1s t true they use their fingers for a fork? . . .’
(xci, 5-8; xcii, 1—3)

As Laura’s freedom creates itself before the reader’s eyes so the

possibility of dramatic definition, the setting of limits to the
significance of the moment, its elevation in Faulkner’s phrase
to a ‘symmetry above the flesh’,16 dissolves. The rhetoric does
not create significance by holding the moment static, it fills it
with meaning by releasing it.
I have only space to consider two more examples of this
rhetoric of freedom, but they are I believe typical of Byron’s
ottava rima method. Art itself, whether literary or plastic or,
though less frequently, musical, becomes increasingly import¬
ant to Byron as a type of the creation of meaning—artificial
certainly, but not the less meaningful for that (after Manfred
what other kind of‘meaning’ could there be?—the temptation
of the absolute had finally been rejected). Both aspects must
be present in his poems’ experience of art. Thus the description
of the reality of Italian female beauty gives way at the end of
xlv to a description of it first in mythological terms and then in
terms of Raphael’s and Canova’s art. This teaches us ‘all we
know of Heaven, or can desire’ (and incidentally the passage
claims that Canova’s sculpture is superior to words in the

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 The Rhetoric of Freedom

description of beauty). For all the praise, the art is still earth-
bound, and all the more so given the next stanza, which is
presented as an annotation and ends:

Since, as we all know, without the Sex, our Sonnets

\\ ould seem unfinished, like their untrimmed bonnets.

This reduces female beauty and the content of art to the level
of a piece of ribbon, and in doing so also reinforces its arti¬
ficiality, for it is as if a Sonnet could somehow exist indepen¬
dently of its subject. The point is that Beppo moves without
tension from one view to the other, from art as the giver of
significance to art as mere form, and in that movement creates
its own meaning as freedom.17 The state of freedom fills its
own meaning with itself.
Finally Byron’s presence in the poem in the guise of bewil¬
dered narrator, reminds us that as with Venetian society the
poem is clearly an artifice, it makes no appeal to divine or any
other transcendent authority, it spins meaning only out of
itself, and for all that it is a poem not of desolation and
nihilistic cynicism, but one which includes compassion and
calm assurance of value:

A certain lady went to see the show,

Her real name I know not, nor can guess,
And so we’ll call her Laura, if you please,
Because it slips into my verse with ease. (xxi, 5—8)

The gentle reader, who may wax unkind,

And caring little for the author’s ease,
Insist on knowing what he means, a hard
And hapless situation for a bard. (1, 5-8)

I’ve half a mind to tumble down to prose,

But verse is more in fashion—so here goes. (lii, 7-8)

The poem can see its own meaning as arbitrary, contextless,

free, without being reduced to futility. Beppo makes friends in
his old age by telling stories, even if the narrator does not
‘believe half of them’. Byron’s new rhetoric creates a freedom
which is not futile, but which does not either lose itself in
commitment. As time has been freed in this new freedom from

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

the compulsion to become eternity, so there is no absolute

moment for the ending of the poem:
My pen is at the bottom of a page,
Which being finish'd, here the story ends;
’Tis to be wish’d it had been sooner done,
But stories somehow lengthen when begun.

NOTES

1. Quotations are taken, for the sake of easy reference, from Ernest
Hartley Coleridge (ed.), The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (1905; reprinted
1958), except in the cases of poems published before April 1816, which are
from Jerome J. McGann (ed.), Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works,
Volumes I—III (1980-81).
2. Cobbett’s Political Register, Vols. XXI (1812) p. 966ff., XXII (1812)
p. 642fE, XXIII (1812) p. 4801T.
3. Kelvin Everest, ‘Luddites, Catholics and Whigs: Byron in Parliament', a
paper at the International Byron Seminar, University of Groningen,
1982.
4. See Don Juan, IX, xxiv-xxvi, for example, which include the lines:

... I wish men to be free

As much from mobs as kings—from you as me.

The consequence is, being of no party,

I shall offend all parties:—never mind!

5. The commentaries on the Turkish Tales in McGann, op. cit., Yol. Ill,
imply at least a gesture towards political allegory in the plots of the
poems. See also above p. 169.
6. F. L. Jones (ed.), The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1964), Yol. II, p. 154.
7. The motto from Moore reads:

One fatal remembrance—one sorrow that throws

It’s bleak shade alike o’er our joys and our woes—
To which Life nothing darker nor brighter can bring.
For which joy hath no balm—and affliction no sting.

8. A random selection: The Bnde of Abydos, I, [x], 253-56; The Corsair, III,
xxiv; Lara, II, xxiii; The Siege of Corinth, xxx; Parisina, xviii.
9. Though there are signs of a self-conscious weaving of cross reference at
least, the running Promethean imagery having often been noted; as the
merest hint of others one might note the words ‘gazing’ and ‘glow’ in vi
and lxxv; or the ‘eddy’ and ‘vortex’ images of vii, xi and elsewhere.

184
 The Rhetoric of Freedom

10. W. P. Elledge, Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor (1968), passim: K. P. A.

Drew, The Meaning of Freedom (1982), p. 187. Drew’s discussion of
Manfred, pp. 183—90, sees the hero firmly as a C.hilde Harold figure. As I
shall argue, this does not seem to me wholly true. His reading ofDon Juan,
pp. 190—203, makes an interesting comparison with that of'Beppo above,
pp. 181-84.
11. Kierkegaard, thinking of Byron, believed that the Continent ‘no longer
need be initiated into the secrets of boredom by some English lord, the
travelling member of a spleen club’ (The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee M.
Capel, 1966, p. 302), yet his The Concept of Anxiety links freedom and angst
in a remarkably Byronic way. See the new translation by Reidar Thomte
et at., 1980.
12. I am assuming that the old red-herring of the female figure in Act I not
being Astarte is well and truly buried—Manfred collapses before his
sister other-self, and in the Incantation is condemned to eternal selfhood.
13. Elledge, op. cit., p. 94.
14. Jessica and Lorenzo are also indulging in self-dramatization in the
passage following ‘The moon shines bright. In such a night as this . . .’
(Merchant of Venice, V, i).
15. Nabokov, Pale Fire, Shade’s poem, 803—15: ‘. . . It sufficed that I in life
could find . . . some kind of correlated pattern in the game. . . .’
16. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury: Quentin attempts to escape time by the
self-dramatization of imagined incest. His father characterizes the
impulse as a desire to be ‘symmetrical above the flesh’.
17. Stanzas xii—xv on Giorgione’s Tempesta (which Byron thinks of as the
Famiglia di Giorgione, see Ian Scott-Kilvert, The Byron Journal, Vol. 9
(1981), pp. 85-8) are another case in point. The painting is admired, yet
treated as a tourist object:

. . . when you to Manfrini palace go,

That picture (howsoever fine the rest)
Is loveliest to my mind of all the show;
It may perhaps be also to your zest,
And that’s the cause I rhyme upon it so.

It does not portray ‘love ideal’, and yet it is ‘Like the lost Pleiad seen no
more below’. Perhaps most to be remarked is the way in which even the
approach to the transcendent is now not realized in static terms, or at
most this is only very tentatively touched in (in the ‘One’ and the ‘fix’),
but as a ‘momentary gliding’ of someone truly beyond our knowledge,
free of speaker and text:

One of these forms which flit by us, when we

Are young, and fix our eyes on every face;
And oh! the Loveliness at times we see
In momentary gliding, the soft grace,
The Youth, the Bloom, the Beauty which agree,
In many a nameless being we retrace,
Whose course and home we know not, nor shall know. . . .

185
9
Byron and the Cult of
Personality
by J. F. HENDRY

The late Sir Herbert Read distinguishes in one of his essays1

between personality and character, as did Goethe. Personality
to Read was labile, or flexible, and character—inflexible.
‘Character is the product of a disciplined education . . . and
the result is a firm dependable set of ideas and reactions upon
which a definite type of society can be based.’ Perhaps to-day
we are less impressed by this than we should be, in view of our
knowledge of brain-washing techniques, but Read goes on to
point out that character ‘cultivates a taste, but this taste is
rational rather than aesthetic, retrospective and historical
rather than experimental and contemporary’.
As for personality, it is ‘distinguished by immediacy, and
what I would call lability, or the capacity to change without
loss of integrity. . . . The values of the personality are neither
moral nor social: they are religious or aesthetic.’
But it is Read’s conclusion that is his most valuable contri¬
bution to the subject. ‘The tautness of the social fabric depends
on their dialectical counterplay.’ In other words, they must be
allowed to interact, because dominance of one or the other
may upset the social structure.
Goethe’s view was not dissimilar. To him, personality, or
talent, was the private factor in creation, whereas character
was formed by experience in the world:

186
 Byron and the Cult of Personality

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille

Sich ein Charakter aber in dem Strom der Welt.2

(1 alent takes shape in quiet,/ But character in the stream of

the world.)

Goethe managed to reconcile both of these reasonably well

in his lifetime. Not so Byron, whom he admired, born in a
less propitious era. Goethe’s world consisted of a formal
society which, he tailed to see, did shape character, instead of
being shaped by it also, and shaped it not always in a
positive way. Good and bad characters, even at odds, become
too often, not themselves but Teal characters’, in the popular
sense, i.e. unreal, because they identify totally with their
various precepts and concepts, imposed by the society in
which they live. It was easier for Goethe, after The Sorrows
of Werther had helped unleash a cult of feeling in Europe, to
settle down to the role of Counsellor at the Court of Weimar,
than it was for Byron to try for a Parliamentary career in a
growing industrial society still dominated by concepts, or
myths, of character. The social currents in Byron’s world
were overwhelming and threatened to drown anyone rash
enough to try to swim against the stream.
One might almost say that these currents were becoming
too strong to allow much in the way of character formation at
all. After the French Revolution had come Napoleon—an
example, if you like, of a cult of personality, but at what cost,
and through what resistance? Byron’s admiration for the man
is understandable. Goethe, Schiller and Rousseau had already
launched the movement in Europe of ‘Sturm and Drang’, which
was more an expression of personality than of rationalism and
was as much an expression of individualism as the Je peruse,
done je suis’ of Descartes. Did not Byron repeat: ‘I feel, therefore
I am?’ The value attached to feeling and sentiment was there¬
fore to some degree already a cult of personality, as well as
a demonstration against economic and social inhibitions.
Character, as a concept, had begun to flake badly. Yet though
private life in England, among the aristocracy, was as cruel,
repressive and profligate as in France, it was given no publicity,
and scandal rarely became public. Yet the division which some
critics perceive in Byron’s nature between his character and his

187
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

personality actually existed therefore, before he was born, in

society as a whole.
In saying that Character, as a concept, had begun to ‘flake’,
we mean that the governing classes had lost insight into events.
Cromwellian action and the French Revolution are proof oi
that. What began to take its place was cant. ‘Cant is the
currency of false opinion, a profession of belief in something
which no one really believes, but which everyone finds con¬
venient.’ Cant, or myth, is equally widespread to-day. To
Byron it was the primum mobile of England, perfidious Albion, and
made it loathed abroad. He soon adopted his opposition to
‘cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral, but
always cant . . .’. And one is justified in saying that cant was
responsible for the first piece of criticism against him, which has
lasted until to-day: that he was a ‘poseur’, a cultivator of
personality, an actor, and therefore did not mean what he said.
There were other criticisms, that he was egocentric, ‘mad,
bad and dangerous to know’—according to Caroline Lamb—a
radical in politics; a satyr and impractical revolutionary; as well
as a poor versifier; his own humbug, and morbid son of a mad
father; who nevertheless managed to achieve a passing fame, or
notoriety, by exploiting his name and reputation.
To deal with these accusations of self-dramatization and
cultivation of personality it is necessary' to examine both the
meaning of the phrase ‘cult of personality’ and its various
ramifications, and later to trace whether these have any appli¬
cation to the poet’s life and work. For what it is worth, what
should be borne in mind is Vuillamy’s phrase that ‘It was
Byron’s defiance of cant rather than any alleged enormities of
conduct which eventually brought upon him the enmity of his
respectable countrymen.’4
It was Byron’s misfortune to live in a period when social
concepts were breaking down in the face of social images, and
with them ‘character’ and institutions, before individual
destiny, interpreted as ‘cult of personality’. It was a period of
transition, with a rising merchant class, and industrial dis¬
ruption producing misery among the working class that seemed
to threaten Jacobin revolution, as in France. A hero was
demanded, like Napoleon: or a scapegoat, like Byron.
In recent times, the phrase ‘cult of personality’ has been

188
 Byron and the Cult of Personality

applied by Mr. Krushchev to the adulation given Stalin and

later Mao-tse-Tung, in China. This of course was an artificial
‘social’ cult accorded leaders who had little personality in
themselves, if plenty of'character1, good or bad. Yet the phrase
masks the problem facing Russian thinkers, especially Marxists,
for a number of years: does society produce great men? Or is it
shaped by great men? Lenin, one might say, is at the heart of
the problem too, since he unmistakably shaped the revolu¬
tion. Is it personality or character that makes great men, one
might also ask? There is no doubt that opportunity is a factor,
but it takes a supreme leader to seize that opportunity, as
Napoleon did, and Lenin. So, is the hero an aspect of the cult,
individual or social, of personality? In the case of Byron, it is
fairly certain that society’s contribution to his career was the
privilege it accorded him of becoming a titled member of the
aristocracy, since otherwise he would scarcely have been
heard of. On the other hand, his personality might have
broken through in other and more revolutionary directions.
Just as Empire prevented Revolution at home (as absence of
Empire produced fascism in Europe), so foreign travel dis¬
tanced the poet’s mind from social issues at home, to a great
extent.
Nevertheless, it is impossible not to admit that his hostility
to society contained a personal note. His own personality was
in constant conflict—some might say adjustment—between
sensitivity and insensitivity, rebellion and conformity, sin and
remorse—a conflict which society merely fostered and embit¬
tered. To attain wholeness in himself he had to try to achieve a
vision of wholeness for society. It was a gigantic task, and one
not to be achieved by any simple cultivation of society and
personality. His crippled foot, like Achilles’s heel, became a
symbol of his mortal weakness; and his own estimate of himself
was that he did not possess any character at all. It was to Lady
Blessington that he confided his thoughts: ‘I am so change¬
able, being everything by turns and nothing long, that it
would be difficult to describe me. . . .’ This is Read’s ‘flexi¬
bility’ all right, but it was not understood as such, even by the
poet himself, and certainly not cultivated, but, if anything, a
reaction to the growing speed of social change. Yet there were
fixed points. ‘I have two constant sentiments, a love of liberty

189
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

and a detestation of cant, and neither is calculated to gain me

friends’, he told her.
That was true. What he faced in society is typified by the
biimpishness of the Duke of Wellington: ‘I hate the whole race
of them. There never existed a more worthless set than Byron
and his friends’, he said in conversation with Lady Salisbury.
Others felt differently about the importance of feeling, and
linked it to individual destiny, as did Novalis; ‘Oft fuhle ich jetzt
. . . (und) je tiefer ich es einsehe, dass Schicksal und Gemiit eines
Begriffes sind.’5 This is translated as: ‘I often feel, and ever
more deeply realize, that fate and character are the same in
conception’; but the translation is hardly accurate, for ‘Gemiit’
does not mean character, nor does ‘eines Begriffes’ mean ‘the
same in conception’, implying an extraneous agent. What is
meant is no doubt a comparison between destiny (‘Schicksal’)
and what might be called disposition; but T. S. Eliot repeats the
other version, in line with his own inclinations. Whichever is
preferred, it cannot be said to prove in Byron any cult of
personality, like Coleridge’s alleged cult of sincerity. ‘Gemiit’ in
fact is ‘mind’, ‘spirit’, or ‘soul’.
It does indicate, however, a conjunction between the indi¬
vidual, in this case, and the social history. Read puts it this
way, that as a symbolic figure, or myth, a poet has to fit into
the spirit of the age, or Zeitgeist. ‘In the Elizabethan Period, Sir
Philip Sidney was that man; he too had an heroic death.’
Sidney was a ‘natural centre’, in a free society, and Byron a
free spirit in a conventional society; and Byron’s Weltschmerg,
Read goes on to say, ‘was genuine enough,—unless we are
prepared to accept the view that his whole life was an affected pose.'6
But people are always inclined, whether or not they believe in
an Absolute Divinity, to condemn their own friends and
enemies in absolute terms, as being a - or a -, and
Byron has continued to be castigated in such terms by critics
who ought to know better.
The clearest exposition of Byron as an egotistic poseur is
given by Vuillamy, discussing what he terms the Byronic
‘fugue’. It is ‘a transformation and enlargement of personal
emotion, an escape into the realms of autonomous fantasy.
What is desired is ... an escape from the intolerable pressure
of environment and of conflict.’ He continues: ‘Byron was

190
 Byron and the Cult of Personality

disturbingly egocentric.' This second accusation contradicts the

first and is less serious, since any creator must concentrate on
his work, and scientists are not as prone to such criticism as
artists, for some reason. ‘W hat interested him was his own
emotional experience. . . .' It does not occur to Vuillamy that
this should be a natural process in any type of self-analysis or
analysis of the only reality an individual may know—himself
or herself.
Read recognizes the poet’s need to withdraw, as he says in
his own words, 'himself from himself', which seems to express
a distancing, we might say, of his personality from his character.
Then what, it will be asked, about his abominable behaviour
towards women? Is it not here that an accusation of ego¬
centrism and posing, as cold and distant, is justified? Edwin
Muir seems to think so when he retorts, to statements that it
was Byron who was pursued, that ‘the rabbit does not pursue
the trap.' But in the main, especially after the publication of
Childe Harold, Byron was pursued by women as much as many
a modern pop-singer, so that Muir’s remark about his ‘film¬
star' attitudinizing is neither fair nor accurate.
Though he cannot be accused of merely posing, however,
and was undoubtedly sincere in many of his affairs and
ventures, even if in others he was the victim of his passions,
one can legitimately talk of a growing cult of the personality
during the period in question, the era of Gentleman Jackson,
the boxer; of Beau Brummell; and Dandyism in general; and
above all, of the spread in Europe of the Romantic Movement,
in which personality was to play such a great part. In Russia,
Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onyegin owed much to Byronism, with the
proviso that in the novel in verse (as skilful, or even more so,
than Byron’s similar works), as in much Russian literature, it
w'as the woman who was superior. And in A Hero of Our Time,
by Lermontov, the coldness in love and war or duelling
exhibited by Pechorin is such that there does seem to exist the
blood-relationship between the author and Byron that is
sometimes claimed. Lermontov was said to have descended
from another Scot, or half-Scot, named Captain Learmont.
Finally, Byron’s Weltschmerz, accepted by Read as genuine,
was far more than the romantic stress on feeling and more of a
Faustian attempt to change the world. It was no less than

191
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Goethe who introduced Byron into his Faust II as Euphorion,

on account of the heroism of his death and of the fact that
Byron was neither Classical nor Romantic, but a man of the
present. ‘To understand and realise what this moment in 1827
is, and what to-morrow will be, is to understand and realise
what Byron is.’8 There could hardly be a greater compliment
to the man’s prophetic insight and sincerity, in work and in
life; and if we must go beyond the poetry to the life, it is more
convenient perhaps to examine the work first, as a proof of
Byron’s commitment to literature, which he sometimes pro¬
fessed, through modesty perhaps, to despise.
But this commitment to the present, or the actual, by no
means ignored history. To Byron, it could be said history' was
omnipresent. It is here that the question of the cult of per¬
sonality again enters, in a strange way.
He had been proud of his ancestors, among whom were
crusaders, and medieval knights, living in the times of Romance
and Courtly Love. Love and Heroism were always to be
inextricably connected and even confused in his mind, together
with the gallant, Platonic and less Platonic amours of the
poet-troubadours of those far-off times. These heroes were
essentially, in his view at least, liberators, freeing genuine love
from the trammels of arranged marriage and tyranny, and
even the Holy Land from the infidel. The Grail was a quest for
the absolute, and Byron’s own quest for identity had some¬
thing of the same obsession. Yet a line must be drawn, for the
cult of personality stopped short of tyranny, as far as the poet
was concerned. Caesar and Napoleon both lost their glamour
as liberators when they assumed a crown and became victims
of history, when they lost it.
This martial or heroic phase comes out most strongly in 'On
leaving Newstead Abbey’, as far as his early work is concerned,
with its glance at the Crusades and French and Civil Wars:

Shades of heroes, farewell! Your descendant, departing

From the seat of his ancestors, bids you, adieu!
Abroad, or at home, your remembrance imparting
New courage, he’ll think upon glory and you.

Together with his innumerable love-poems, his early martial

and Highland poems clearly constitute a kind of rehearsal for

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 Byron and the Cult of Personality

his later career, especially in their dramatic tone, which must

be regarded therefore as an attitude, rather than an empty
pose, and as search for and identification with the Absolute.
It is, of course, in Childe Harold, and The Bride of A by do s. The
Giaour, and The Corsair, that Byron finds and expresses the
heroic role, while denying that the heroes were self-portraits.
I he first two cantos ot Childe Harold were published on 29
February 1812, when, as he wrote, 'I awoke one morning and
found myself famous.' 'Projected on to the world-stage’ would
have been a more accurate description. These cantos ended
enticingly and aroused curiosity as to what might follow,
especially after the lines in I, ix:

Yea! none did love him—not his lemans dear—

But pomp and power alone are women’s care. . . .

These lines are significant, because pomp and power, as

aspects of tyranny, were his enemies, and to identify women
with them was to reduce women to enemies also, contemptible
enemies who had prostituted themselves to the power of a
‘soldateska'.
Childe Harold. like the other poems and especially The
Corsair, is full of the description of foreign countries that
probably led to the institution of the Grand Tour beloved of
V ictorians, but contains a real insight into character and
national traits which later produced Byron’s intense interest in
history.
There is much emphasis on freedom and on sailing, a symbol
of sex. Yuillamy maintains that the work represents a ‘type of
romantic individualism where the individual claims the rights
of a freedom which is to be as wide and wild as he pleases’,9
but this is contradicted by the bounds set in the poems to the
exercise of complete freedom and the apparent punishment
that attends it. Vuillamy’s terms are all concepts, but the poet
is concerned with images and with particulars, not with con¬
stricting rules and generalities.
His fondness for thunderstorms, earthquakes, battles and
shipwrecks is also commented on, as indicative of the poet’s
need for relief from his inner conflict; but they are surely
Eliot’s familiar ‘correlatives’. Vuillamy goes further: ‘The
sound of cannon or the roaring of a gale fills him with joy.’

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Anyone reading this would think that nuclear weaponry was

the creation of romantics instead of realists, and that down
through history writers, even like Wilfrid Owen, had promoted
and delighted in war. Byron’s list of ‘heroes’ at the beginning
of Don Juan should dispel that idea. His descriptions of violence,
storm and passion correspond to his own feelings but do have
an objective basis, and appear to offer an external solution to
personal as well as social problems. His battles were with
himself, on the whole, but did not exclude social questions.
Most people’s lives in modern society are governed by events
over which they have little or no control: events that disrupt
their existence or imprison them in a situation they cannot
alter and which they call ‘reality’. Byron’s world was like our
own in many ways, full of change, war and violence, reflected in
his work, though to-day few writers follow his example in
coming to grips with the present. Byron would not accept or
evade:
The fire and motion of the soul which will not dwell
In its own narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire. . . .

as he said in Childe Harold, expressing his attitude to history”

This makes the madmen who have made men mad
By their contagion; Conquerors and Kings,
Founders of sects and systems, to whom add
Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all unquiet things
Which stir too strongly the soul’s secret sprines. . . .
(Ill, xliii)
History, a contemporary' Russian poet10 has said, is the
story of human relations. If so, Byron would have retorted, it
certainly is a bloody business, for human relations are not the
same as social relations revolving round wealth and welfare.
Public history—full of concepts—pullulating over and over
again about prosperity, or dramatizing its own greed and lust
as somehow ‘instructive’, a quarrel in a brothel almost, was to
him not worth study and demanded action.
It is nonsense, therefore, to allege that by ‘withdrawing into
himself ’, i.e. dissociating himself from a world bent on its own
destruction, the poet was escaping from reality, because if that be
(or were) reality, there can be no escape. Had Byron really

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 Byron and the Cult of Personality

shrunk trom it, he would have deserved the epithet of coward,

which was in fact launched at him, or of vapid moralizer,
which was implied. That he went to meet it earns him the
award of ‘a violent temperament’; a renegade; a worthless
scribbler; a devil incarnate; yet he had written: ‘To fly from,
need not be to hate, mankind.’ And of the loneliness around
him:

Is it not better then to be alone

And love Earth only for its earthly sake?

In other words, to accept the natural world, free of human

concepts and theories, but rich in images that feed the mind?
He was developing fast when he penned the lines:

I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me. . . .

The same sentiments were acclaimed when repeated by

Rupert Brooke, but in Byron’s case they and others lead to the
charge of solipsism.
The constant struggle within him was expressed in terms of
Eros and Agape: ‘I cease to love thee when I love mankind’,
and despite the ambiguity, the conflict is the same.
To Edwin Muir, Byron dates. To Auden he has no imagina¬
tion; he is a comedian. Notice again the absolute categorization.
We all date, as part of our time, but these lines do not date,
and the wit and insight is far beyond any Auden ever displayed:
I speak not of men’s creeds—they rest between
Man and his Maker. . . .

So much for concepts. No wonder Bertrand Russell places

him in the pillory for indulging in the Romanticism that, in
Russell’s view, brought about Hitlerism, though in fact it was
conceptual rationalism—so predictable in its terms—which did
so. Byron’s history is almost apocalyptic:
There is the moral of all human tales;
’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory, and when that fails
Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last.

We ought to know about that, but this is not all. The cure
lies in the mind. There is more of the apocalyptic to come: ‘Of

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

its own beauty is the mind diseased . . or ‘Our life is a false

nature—’tis not in/ The harmony of things. . . Compare:
‘The graph of history’s a chart of the disease embodied in
humanity’.11
To complain of the violence of Byron’s verse in the period
that saw Waterloo, Peterloo and the stand of the Guards in the
Russian Decembrist Movement, is indeed to be blind: blind to
the depths of the Byronic contribution. English dislike of
rhetoric and histrionics obscured from its understanding much
reasoning, history and even prophecy. The Romantic move¬
ment was decadent and discredited, in the end, as barbaric
and baroque; but one poem, ‘Darkness’, strangely neglected,
is definitely apocalyptic in its portrayal of a world dying after
some cosmic catastrophe, in a kind of Wellsian or Orwellian
‘pre-historic’, or rather ‘post-historic’, savagery. It is pointless
to regard this as merely another aspect of the famous Byronic
gloom, or as the expression of some remnant of Calvinist
predestination, because it really sums up his view of human
history, judged in its own terms, from Cain to Waterloo. The
Holocaust, in fact, carried one stage further.
This is the answer to those who, like W. H. Auden, accuse
Byron of lack of vision and imagination, or to the others who
allege lack of sincerity, meaning the cultivation of a pose. He
himself was aware of his apparent inconsistencies, which, as if
anticipating Read, he ascribes to mobilite12 or ‘excessive
susceptibility of immediate impressions’: in other words, the
labile nature Read associates with personality. As for the
Imagination:

This is Byron’s social version of the Romantic term ‘Imagina¬

tion’, for mobility also reveals itself in the balance or recon¬
ciliation of opposite, or discordant qualities. . . . The great
Romantic contraries—emotion and order, judgement and
enthusiasm, steady self-possession and profound or vehement
feeling—all find their social balance in the quality of mobility.13

Constant adjustment to circumstances, in other words, to

ever-changing images, instead of unvarying opposition to
change, on principle, and a clinging to abstract concepts, seem
to demand just that vision, imagination and sincerity which
Byron is said to lack, though the lack may be ascribed to his

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 Byron and the Cult of Personality

detractors on the grounds that often we accuse others of our

own faults. It is the expansive nature of his imaging and vision,
indeed, which makes any metaphysical doctrine anathema to
him, and renders ridiculous the charge that he was no
philosopher.
It was this quality that earned for him the appellation of
‘chameleon’, and made it difficult for Lady Blessington to
understand what she felt was his dual personality, and his
“scoffing at himself and others, soon ‘after he has aroused
great interest', though this is clearly a relief from tension and a
healthy distrust of his own as well as others’ reactions. The
latter, too, is probably the explanation of his often repeated
assertion in his work that he could not be loved, or did not in
fact deserve to be loved. He had insight, in other words, into
his own failings, a quality that does not seem to merit the belief
in a dual personality, unless we accept the implication that to
have no insight into one’s failings is healthy and normal.
There are, on the other hand, certainly times in his work
when theatrical attitudes can be observed clearly, though after
all he was also a dramatist, and so had to be aware of his own
poses, on occasion. In The Corsair, for example, can be read his
description of:

. . . the closed hand, the pause of agony

That listens, starting, lest the step too near
Approach intrusive on that mood of fear. . . .

Anyone as creative as he could not avoid a feeling of being

besieged by impressions, objective as well as subjective, pro¬
ducing the chameleon aspect which Yeats attempts to describe
as ‘The Multiple Man’, Phase 26, in his interpretation of
history, expressed in A Vision.
Any dualism in his personality derived from this confronta¬
tion with himself as compared with his confrontation of the
world. The pirate portrayed in The Corsair—a man of action—
compares with The Giaour, to whom ‘Love is light from heaven’,
and is expressed even in The Bride of Abydos, in which the
theme of incest is dealt with rather ambiguously, since Selim
does inform Zuleika that he is not her brother. Augusta, with
whom Byron had an equally ambiguous relationship, to say
the least, was his half-sister. Dualism is thus involved here, but

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

again as confrontation between ‘himself’ (in the person of a

half-sister, another Byron) as an aspect of the external world
and his own person, individual and alone, facing that external
world. It had always been his problem to unite the two—
personality and character; image and concept—in Life. Passion
for Augusta must have been inspired by that feeling of other¬
worldly unity with her. Others have seen the task of Byron as
being to reconcile the contradictory elements in Romanticism,
and, one might add, in himself: namely, aspirations and
ambitions, social and individual, with what is ever termed the
realities of the social situation and the human condition; this to
be done perhaps by some form of action, but at least using
form, symbol and imagery to reach by means of myth the
unconscious mind, striving to free itself from the rigid prison of
rule. Thus in form, he is classical but in content romantic, a
factor common to other poets, such as Pushkin and Lermontov,
but also found in reverse, as in Eliot, where the form is
romantic but the content classical. Byron, of course, denied
that he was either. One reason for his revival, again, is the fact
that apart from his social commentary, and the comic aspect of
Don Juan, his verses are made to be recited in public, as
essentially spoken poetry. The popularity of poetry in Soviet
Russia is due to the same fact, that the existing culture is
essentially an oral culture. In Byron’s case it may be assumed
that, in its early stages at least, his work appealed especially to
the rising merchant class, which had less time and inclination
for perusing print.
Yet the Romantic/Classical dualism is also an aspect of
others probably more extreme in Byron than in any of his
contemporaries outside of Russia. It was in fact his Fate, the
destiny which overcame him at times with gloom, and yet
inevitably introduced also the other side of tragedy, comedy,
in Don Juan, where even Fate is treated with some scepticism:
‘(Fate is a good excuse for our own will).’14 In other words he
was aware of how much of his destiny depended upon himself.
T. S. Eliot, citing Novalis, citing perhaps Heraclitus, that
‘Character is Destiny’ or Fate, overlooked the dichotomy
between personality and character, so that in Byron's case, as
can be seen from his life, it was the character that ultimately
began to emerge and to involve him in the final scene at

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Missolonghi. And this dichotomy is the same as the other

examples ot his ‘dualism’, or the dialectic interplay even
between the elements, in his life, of Venus and Mars.
So interwoven indeed are his life and his poems that at times
it is difficult to disentangle the two, as in the alleged portrait of
Lady Byron, his wife, at the beginning of Don Juan; but an
examination of his personality and his cult of it, or society’s
cult ol it, is best made finally from the details of his life.
The balance he was seeking all his life to achieve between
these various aspects of dualism—or conflict, depending on
one's attitude—was a vital necessity to him when one con¬
siders the events of his childhood. The early beatings and
precocious sexual initiation in Aberdeen were enough in them¬
selves to have upset the balance of his nature, quite apart from
the mixed blood he had inherited from his Calvinist mother in
the Highlands and his debauched English father. Transfer
from the reality of life in Scotland, knowing poverty but a real
sense of personality, to the (to him) unnatural wealth and
self-indulgence of England only deepened that division. Where
the old life had been real, in the sense that one was committed
to events—this being a form of identity, or the balance he
sought—the new one was artificial, a masque of masks, where
any commitment, erotic or political, was a source of amuse¬
ment, or sometimes fear. Commitment must have become to
the poet a form of the identity he sought, and the recon¬
ciliation of the opposites he discovered in himself and in
society. In other words, it became commitment to oneself, and
to one’s personality, first of all, and not unthinking dependence
on institutions or creeds of one sort or another.
To win through to that, however, he had to rediscover the
old realities, of relations between men and women, as another
part of the same search for identity. Numerous love-affairs
were the inevitable result, at school and Cambridge, and, in
the end, travel abroad; but it was not until the publication of
Childe Harold that he found himself literally besieged by the fair
sex, and confronted by the erotic challenge of Lady Caroline
Lamb. The melancholy he suffered from was dissipated in her
presence. Not only was she attractive, but light-hearted and
witty in the way he needed, and with a sense of the theatrical
as well.
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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

It has often been said that all his life he wanted to be loved.
The phrase is as cynical, or as tragic, as one wishes to make it.
What seems reasonable to assume is that, in a partner, he
hoped to find that reflection of himself which most couples
find, one which would help him in his search for that unity of
being which is what is meant by identity. Absence of such an
experience necessarily threw him back on himself.
Caroline Lamb thus tested both his personality and his
character. Notorious before she met the famous poet for her
lack of either insight or inhibition, she prided herself on her
ability to manipulate homo sapiens. Curiously, however, on the
day after he met Caroline, Byron w as introduced to Miss Anne
Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, the country' cousin of Caroline's
husband, William Lamb, and was strangely intrigued. She
was the counterpart of Caroline in every way, withdrawn and
rather scholarly in outlook.
Between them these two ladies were to turn his life upside
down and finally drive him abroad. Throughout his affair with
Caroline and his marriage to Annabella, however, his behaviour
reveals much more character already than one would have
expected. The proof is contained in his published letters to
them and to friends.
The alleged affair with his half-sister, Augusta, on the other
hand, is less easy to discuss. Specific proof of incest is not
available, and the charge may or may not be part of the legend
of his wickedness. There can be no doubt, in any case, that
Byron’s attachment to Augusta was sincere and permanent, as
compared to his feelings for the other two women, which were
often ambiguous and subject to considerable self-control. To
regard the poet solely as an unprincipled seducer of all and
sundry is perhaps simply to accept him as he washed the
public to regard him. His relations with his half-sister would
then assume the pattern exhibited in that classic of sexual
intrigue, Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, the
theme of which is the fascination of deliberate, conscious evil.
Valmont, the central character, aided by his mistress, sexuallv
corrupts an innocent girl and delights in watching her degra¬
dation. Not even Byron’s most hostile critics accuse him of
that. Yet some incestuous passion almost certainly existed in
him, whether realized in practice or not.

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 Byron and the Cult of Personality

Reference is made from time to time, nevertheless, by

serious critics to some 'dark secret in Byron s life, which they
apparently rarely associate with Augusta, but make use of to
explain his terrible coldness and 'hauteur’ in public, which
can hardly be accounted for as an attempt to avoid adoring
women—since in fact it attracted them even more—or as a
repressed homosexuality, or incestuous feelings. Most probably
it was the fact that he himself could not love wholeheartedly,
like other people, that made him subject to gaiety and melan¬
choly by turns. His essential coldness oi intellect, as he began to
discover, was the alarming trait, since it questioned everything
and has few parallels in literature other than in Lermontov’s A
Hero of Our Time, where Pechorin is, if possible, still more
devilish, in the sense of cold and even calculating, than Childe
Harold, or Don Juan, whose humour he lacks. In both cases
there is the definite feeling that the coldness is in fact the
author’s own. So Caroline too, is accused of coldness. ‘I fold a
statue in my arms’, he writes, which must have been quite
maddening for a man whose ability to love depended on the
woman’s stimulation and faith:

You may be prudent, fair and chaste

But ah, my girl, you do not love!

His loves were thus a compound of peculiar feelings. He felt

that he was awakening souls—or personalities—in women; they
could have been more or less the same to him as they were to
the early introspective philosophers. What he awakened in
Caroline Lamb was, in the end, raging jealousy akin to mad¬
ness. She denied that she was cold. He had drawn her, she
said, like a magnet, though she had thought him ‘mad, bad
and dangerous to know’: in other words, a reflection of herself.
The affair that ensued became the scandal of London, par¬
ticularly because it was carried on in public. Caroline’s play
with a fruit-knife at Lady Heathcote’s was the last straw.
Whatever her motives, murder, suicide or dramatics, she had
disrupted a reception by a display in public of deep feelings,
that might have been overlooked had they been kept private,
like countless other love-affairs known to all but not displayed
in that way.
Byron’s coldness had been made evident, and he had

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

renounced her in a letter, asking her to ‘correct’ her vanity,

and ‘exercise her caprices upon others’. But the affair had
become a dangerous erotic gamble. And his real affection was
engaged, no doubt about that. This is shown by his irascible
reply to the message she scrawled on a book he was reading,
after she had broken into his flat when he was out—‘Remember
me

Remember thee! [he wrote] Ay, doubt it not.

Thy husband too shall think of thee!
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!

Involved, as he always was, in emotional scenes, it is

reasonable to assume that Byron was, finally, personally
horrified and even terrified by Caroline’s unpredictable and
reckless behaviour. Coming on top of his own bitterness on his
return from Greece, and his elevation to fame, this sudden
transition to the centre of the stage in a petty melodrama,
which threatened to destroy his name, reputation and even
life, must have produced in him a madness almost equal to
hers. He has been accused here, and in other cases, of behaving
dike a “cad” ’. The romantic cad was a well-known figure, of
course, exemplified in Lovelace (Lucifer), lover and destroyer
of Clarissa Harlowe in Richardson’s novel. The poet was no
cad in that evil sense.15
That Byron had a personality, and a charming one, there
can be no doubt; that he cultivated it, was only to be expected;
that at times he did so consciously, and with an air, like a
poseur, is not surprising, considering his dramatic character;
but that throughout he was merely an actor is not tenable,
despite the strictures of Edwin Muir. More probably his
apparent aloofness and depression were ways of safeguarding
his privacy and reflective nature. That women should feel it to
be due to unhappiness, because he lacked the solace only a
woman could give, and that his wickedness cried out for
conversion, was also ‘in character’, since women have often
felt they know the answer. At least Byron could deal with
them, and could hardly be averse to taking advantage, even
unfair advantage, of their protestations of affection—in which
he could not believe—but Caroline Lamb was something quite

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 Byron and the Cult of Personality

different and constantly invaded his privacy, entering into his

most secret thoughts and confidences, so that he had actually
to defend himself as il it were really a struggle to the death.
It may indeed have been Caroline’s contribution to his
wealth of experience that in the end made him the master of
satire he became. Just as his childhood had been a rehearsal of
the parts he had to play in later life in love and war, so the
Caroline episode probably produced the mastery of Don Juan,
once he had recovered confidence in himself.
He was in correspondence, meanwhile, with Miss Milbanke,
who was opposite in every way to Caroline. Outwardly she
was all he admired: intelligent, serious, and a woman of
principle who did not indulge in affairs. Marriage, he may
have thought, would lend him respectability, and no doubt the
lady’s virtue was also a challenge. She might even change him.
She clearly thought he could be changed, and noted his
various qualities in her Diary, including nobility of character.
Miss Milbanke was no fool and may have noticed what others
overlooked. Life after all is not static, nor are people, and
Byron was more changeable than most. There are grounds for
believing that he hoped she would be able to change him. But
a letter he had written to her should have put her on her
guard: ‘The great object of life is sensation—to feel that we
exist— ... It is this craving void which drives us to gaming—
to battle—to travel. . . .’
The ‘craving void’ has been felt by countless other artists
and philosophers, not to mention ordinary mortals. It is often
referred to as ‘the abyss’, ‘nothingness’, and all that is nega¬
tive. Herbert Read dismisses this feeling as ‘Angst’, perhaps
with justification, for the era was not so different from our
own, with Napoleon occupying Europe and invading Russia,
as did Hitler, and the Congress of Vienna muzzling develop¬
ment, much as East-West relations to-day still do. And has
this not already been called The Age of Anxiety? One feels,
however, that Byron’s ‘craving void’ was personal, which was
why he hoped that marriage would fill it. Loss of a sense of
identity is part of the ‘Angst’ feeling, and Byron had not found
the role he expected in Parliament, or even in society, where
he regarded his poetic reputation with some disdain, real or
otherwise. Read concludes that Byron was a nihilist, a word

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

which is very ambiguous when applied, as it is, to such

disparate characters as Tolstoy and the Russian revolutionary,
Nechayev, whom everybody feared, including revolutionaries.
Those who reject their society are not necessarily nihilists.
Byron comes, indeed, perilously close to nihilism in his
philosophy of history, but he nevertheless constantly questions
himself about his own identity, and the meaning of life, and
never denies freedom. In a period that saw the failure of the
Reform Bill, the action of the Luddites and Peterloo, there was
ample reason for his periodic dejection. He had never been a
systematic thinker, being opposed to most systems; but the
fact that Miss Milbanke was a thinker, disciplined as well as
attractive, must have fascinated him. She seemed an ideal foil:
a student of geology, and mnemonics, as well as of poetry; a
woman with iron principles, and none too happy about the
desires of the flesh. It has been alleged that Byron may have
wanted to arouse the passion in her, or to subdue her reluc¬
tance; but from his point of view, he may just as well have
thought he was in fact freeing her from her ridiculous con¬
cepts, by showing her the value of emotions and of real living.
As it was, what should have been mutual adjustment became
mortal combat.
They were married on 2 January 1815, and separated a year
later. For once, Byron was caught in a part he could not act.
He seems to have played the fool, as one might call it, by
exercising his sense of humour on his wife, in an attempt to
arouse her from her rigid attitude, but without much success,
and in the end she brought out all that was worst in him, in
baffled rage. Yet he appears to have behaved better than she
did, and to have been genuinely in love. It is odd that Caroline
should have called him ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’,
and that for a time Annabella Milbanke, too, thought him
insane. It is the reward of those who step outside of social
norms and exhibit some frustration because others do not
follow. A daughter Augusta Ada, born in December, gave him
much delight, and brings up the question as to why she was
named after Byron’s half-sister Augusta. The riddle as to how
Annabella could show so much affection for Augusta, whom
she suspected of having an affair with her husband, has not
been solved, and can help little in enlightening us as to

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 Byron and the Cult of Personality

Byron’s feelings in the matter. Augusta too had borne a

daughter, who was brought up to believe that Byron was her
father. Once this became public knowledge, Byron was ostra¬
cized. The only solution was to escape abroad.
Evidence of his sincerity appears, all the same, in a Journal
entry for 29 September 1816 when he writes that bitterness has
followed him throughout his travels. Nothing, not music, or
mountains, "the Glacier, the Forest nor the Cloud, have for
one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me
to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty and the power and
the glory around me above and beneath me.’ Only the fluency
of the language hints at a certain dramatic pose.
There is reason for suspecting that the ‘loss of identity’ he
sought in drink and sex was not really a loss, but the feeling
that he had never achieved stability of character. It was in
action that he felt he could achieve it, in line with the state¬
ment of Goethe that it was formed in the currents of life;
and it might almost be said that his personality was the
real, and any cult of it a public rather than a private
phenomenon, like so many cults in the entertainment ‘busi¬
ness’, especially in America. Byron was in fact, in that case,
cultivating character when he went abroad, and there are
witnesses to testify to this. Shelley in Venice in 1821 thought
he was becoming a ‘virtuous’ man. ‘There was a sharper
awareness of the symbolic role that circumstances had thrust
upon him, and for the rest of his life he never lost sight of
it.’16 Here is an admirable example of the fact that life is
dynamic, and that it is useless to talk of human beings in terms
of absolute qualities. It was, indeed, character he was devel¬
oping, but a character imposed on him by society as well as
by circumstances, a kind of negative personality, or negation of
the cult of personality thrust on him in London and meant to
destroy him, as it did. It is a complex situation. Only strength
of character and revolutionary sentiment could in the end
defeat the efforts of society to destroy him by portraying him
as an immoral monster.
Yet there are his amours in Venice, amounting to frenzied
sexual activity in every class of the population, which if true—
and the statistics available, his own, are not exactly worthy of
credence—appear to confirm, and glory in confirming, his evil

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 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

nature and grossness of appetite. Was that his real self? Was
he a raving seducer of the young and innocent?
Less harm would have come to him from the creatures who
composed the vagrant harem of the Palazzo Mocenigo, had he
possessed the cynical hardness and spiritual grossness to think
of them as animals. . . . However dissolute she might be, the
woman he regarded with passion became for a moment the
object of an affection that was no less tender than transient.17

Compared to Byron’s own version of his Venetian amours, this

is mild.
Some of them are Countesses, and some of them are cobblers’
wives; some noble, some middling, some low, and all whores. . . .
I have had them all, and thrice as many to boot, since 1817.18

Tenderness? Rampant rape? There is a conflict here, but

there was, of course, a growing conflict within himself, perhaps
at the gradual awareness of the new role engulfing him. What¬
ever the reason, he now plunged into debauchery, since, as he
concluded in his letter: ‘The night cometh.'
One of the affairs—that with a ‘tiger’, La Fornarina, wife of
a baker—became a curious admixture of sexual and physical
combat, repeating on a higher, or lower, level, that of his
marriage to Annabella. The result left him weak, but not so
emasculated as to be able to resist a married lady, Teresa
Guiccioli. To her, and it is an interesting follow-up, he was the
most wonderful of men, one whose character was more fas¬
cinating than his personality even. If the finest of characters
was that which gave much and exacted nothing, then Byron
was the finest of characters. In this, contempt for others and
for what was called life was also a factor. But she thought him
also modest, granting superiority to others in cases where it
seemed merited. In addition, he remained astonishingly faith¬
ful to her, and seemed to try hard to fit into the picture she saw
of him.
If she did not understand that he was a free spirit, a free
personality, exemplifying freedom for all mankind, she must
have begun to realize it when he left Venice for Greece and the
fight for Greek independence, to which he had sacrificed a
great deal of time and money. It was hard for him to leave her,
as his letters prove. The disconcerting fact is that he was

206
 Byron and the Cult of Personality

capable of really loving, as opposed to seducing, so many

women. He was impressed by the East and his poetry is full of
harems, but it is the genuine love, so often discovered, that
confounds, because it seems to strike at the virtues of monogamy.
His motives in going are clearly the result of his lifelong love
of Europe and of freedom, as well as of the opportunity offered.
That might have been his epitaph. ‘He was a lover of Europe’,
ot whom there are few, even in the European Community. But
even in his final gesture detractors cannot resist their own
temptation to make the poet less real, by playing on the word
‘mask’.

Byron wore perhaps the last of his many masks, not now that of
an aloof aristocrat or unprincipled lecher, not that of a hectic
lover, dandy or melancholy poet, but that of the man of action,
the warrior or hero, thus attempting once more to command reality.19

The italics are mine.

What this implies is that some divine or demonic force
enabled the man to assume these masks at will, and that he
was, presumably, evil, since all along he intended to command
reality, whatever that means. The repetition of such cant is
sickening. Lady Longford, in her introduction to the work
cited, puts matters straighter: ‘He hoped to force the world to
take off its own masks, look him straight in the face, and
acknowledge his existence and worth.’ The fact is that any
heroics at Missolonghi had no audience to speak of, so that the
mask was in fact himself. Dying, he showed the greatest of
courage in the most wretched of conditions and in a cause
more or less betrayed by the people who were supposed to
help. He displayed the character behind the personality, if by
character we mean living by a set of principles, or reactions,
which may be good or bad.
It was when the personality was displayed, in his attacks on
cant and corrupt politicians, and in multiple love-affairs—
including the alleged relations with Augusta—that he had to
assume the role of the enemy and be ostracized, for society,
then as now, battens on personality of any sort, owing to its
insatiable appetite for sensation, and hastens its own downfall.
A personality-cult is thus produced by society, and unless
moderated, becomes destructive and extended to wider areas.

207
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Byron is an example. We can fancy the origin of the cult.

‘Fellow had it in him to be a real sporting gentleman despite
his gammy leg. Friend of pugilists, no mean boxer himself, an
all rounder; why should he shut himself away, insist on being a
loner unless he had something to hide? All came out of course.
Something to do with his sister. And by gad if you believed the
rumours! Deserved horse-whipping. Best thing he ever did to
go away and get himself killed. All the same, these dreamers!’
English calumny does not have to be specific.
What comes under attack then, ascribing the cult to the
individual involved, and not to society, is ‘romanticism’ as
such and concern with freedom and spiritual values, as against
quiescence and universal materialism.
The romantic has been under attack for a long time,
especially in England, where it yields to ‘realism’, or ‘things as
they are’, the stability of quietism: in other words, to an
acceptance of whatever attitude at the moment appears to
furnish the greatest short-term stability, irrespective of right,
wrong or certain long-term disaster. The romantic attitude
represents, instead, constant mutual adjustment of personality
and society—constant movement, therefore, and change, not
of course per se—ensuring stability over the long term, in place
of the imposition of a classical concept, as expressed for
instance in totalitarianism.
It is a pity that Read gives up the attempt to understand
and regards Byron as ‘beyond good and evil’, a pernicious
doctrine which still assumes these as absolutes and fails to
bring out their roots in the human mind. To Byron, it was
living and loving that were important, not moral absolutes. He
could never have held that evil was pardonable, like some
character in a Dostoyevsky novel.
And Read could not be more wrong than when he alleges
that the poet contracted the current ‘Weltschmerz’, which
tempted him to philosophize, in sceptical terms. ‘During the
greatest horrors of the greatest plagues’, he writes, ‘. . . men
were more profligate than ever.’ Should this surprise a genera¬
tion which has learnt of the loutish profligacy in the Berlin
bunker? Nihilism leads naturally enough to nothingness and
bankrupt oblivion, but Byron was no nihilist, as Read implies.
Despite despair and doubt of any worthwhile historical goal,

208
 Byron and the Cult of Personality

and ot the impossibility of a creature like himsell ever being

loved because he knew that his own dissatisfaction with life
was not a basis for emotional ties—his life and death are those
ol one who never ceased struggling and fighting for true
freedom in the world.
It may give a wrong picture, but his portrait of a bullfight in
Spain comes to mind:

Foiled, bleeding, breathless, furious to the last

Full in the centre stands the bull at bay
Mid wounds and clinging darts . . .

and then the finale: ‘Once more through all he burst his
thundering way.’
It is a pity that those who brought him down still show no
sign ol understanding what cant means, and thus confirm the
horrifying vision he had of the human future.

NOTES

1. Annals of Innocence and Experience (Faber, London, 1940), pp. 90—1.

2. Goethe, Torquato Tasso (1790), i, 2.
3. C. E. Vuillamy, Byron (Michael Joseph, London, 1948), p. 3.
4. Op. cit., p. 26.
5. Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), Bk. II.
6. Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling (Faber, London, 0000).
7. C. E. Vuillamy, Byron (Michael Joseph, London, 1948), p. 286.
8. Francis Berry, ‘The Poet of Childe Harold’, in Byron: A Symposium,
edited by John D. Jump (Macmillan, London, 1975), p. 35.
9. C. E. Vuillamy, Byron (Michael Joseph, London, 1948), p. 285.
10. \ evgeny Yevtushenko, A Dove in Santiago (Seeker and Warburg,
London, 1982).
11. J. F. Hendry, The Orchestral Mountain 2nd Edition, (1st edn., Routledge,
London, 1943).
12. Note to Don Juan, Canto XVI, xcvii.
13. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Doubleday and Go., New York,
1961).
14. Don Juan, Canto XIII, xii.
15. For a brilliant analysis of the Romantic Cad see the essay ‘Robert
Lovelace: The Romantic Cad', by H. T. Hopkinson, in Horizon: A
Review of Literature, Vol. X, No. 56, August 1944, 80-104. Though
Annabella Milbanke and even Caroline may have been affected by the
figure of Clarissa Harlowe, in Richardson’s novel of the same name,

209
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme
Lovelace can only have contributed to the Byronic Legend, as a
preparatory myth, whether or not Don Juan may be said to approach
the cad syndrome.
16. Gilbert Phelps, ‘The Byronic Byron’, in Byron: A Symposium, edited by
John D. Jump (Macmillan, London, 1975), p. 73.
17. John Cordy JeafFreson, The Real Lord Byron (London, 1884), p. 264.
18. Peter Quennell (ed.), Byron, A Self-Portrait, Letters and Diaries, 1798 to
1824 (John Murray, London, 1950), 2 vols., II, P- 440.
19. Peter Brent, Great Lives: Byron (YVeidenfeld and Nicolson, London,
1974), p. 213.

210
Notes on Contributors

ALAN Bold was born in 1943 in Edinburgh. He has published many

books of poetry, including To Find the New, The State of the Nation and
This Fine Day as well as a selection in Penguin Modem Poets 15. His In
This Comer: Selected Poems 1963—83 represents his best work over the
past two decades. He has edited The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse, The
Martial Muse: Seven Centuries of War Poetry, the Cambridge Book of
English Verse 1939—75, Alaking Love: The Picador Book of Erotic Verse, The
Bawdy Beautiful: The Sphere Book of Improper Verse, Mounts of Venus: The
Picador Book of Erotic Prose and Drink To Me Only: The Prose (and Cons)
of Drinking. He has also written critical books on Thom Gunn and Ted
Hughes, George Mackay Brown, The Ballad, Alodem Scottish Literature and
AlacDiarmid: The Terrible Crystal. He has exhibited his Illuminated
Poems (pictures combining an original poetic manuscript with an
illustrative composition) in venues as varied as Boston University
and the National Library of Scotland.

J. DRUMMOND Bone was a Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol College,

Oxford, from 1968—72. From then until 1980 he was a Lecturer in
the Department of English and Comparative Literary' Studies at the
University of Warwick, and since 1980 he has been with the
Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He
has lectured widely on Byron, in conferences at such institutions as
the Universities of Bordeaux, Salzburg, and Mannheim. In 1975 he
became an editor of the Byron Journal, and since 1980 has edited its
academic content. He has published articles and reviews on Byron
and Shelley in Notes and Queries, Alodem Language Review, The Keats-
Shelley Alemorial Bulletin, and the Byron Journal. He is the editor of a
forthcoming history of the Romantic period, to which he has con¬
tributed the chapters on Byron and on Coleridge’s poetry.

jENNl CALDER was born in Chicago in 1941 and came to England

with her parents when she was 9. She read for her B.A. at New Hall,
Cambridge, and for her M.Phil. at Birkbeck College, London. She is
married to the writer, Angus Calder, lives in West Lothian and
works in the Education Department of the Royal Scottish Museum.

211
 Byron: Wrath and Rhyme

Her publications include Chronicles of Conscience, a study of George

Orwell and Arthur Koestler, There Must be a Lone Ranger, on the
myth and reality of the American Wild West, Women and Marriage in
Victorian Fiction, Heroes: From Byron to Guevara, The Victorian Home,
and R.L.S.: A Life Study.

GEOFFREY CARNALL has worked in India and Ireland, and now

teaches English at the University of Edinburgh. He has written
Robert Southey and his Age, which appeared in 1960, and he com¬
pleted the late John Butt’s volume of the Oxford History of English
Literature, The Mid-Eighteenth Century (1979).

J. F. HENDRY was born in Glasgow in 1912. He co-edited the wartime

anthologies The New Apocalypse, The White Horseman and The Crown and
Sickle, and edited The Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories. He is the
author of a volume of short stories The Blackbird of Ospo, a novel Femie
Bras, and a forthcoming biography of Rilke entitled The Sacred Threshold.

PHILIP HOBSBAUM was born in London in 1932, grew up in various

parts of Yorkshire, studied at the Universities of Cambridge and
Sheffield, has published eleven books including four collections of
poems, and is Reader in English Literature at the University of
Glasgow where he has taught for the last sixteen years.

EDWIN Morgan was born in 1920 in Glasgow. He was educated at

Rutherglen Academy, Glasgow High School, and Glasgow Uni¬
versity. He took his degree, in English, after war service with the
Royal Army Medical Corps mainly in the Middle East, 1940-46. He
lectured in English at Glasgow University from 1947 until 1980,
when he retired, as Assistant Lecturer 1947-50, Lecturer 1950-65,
Senior Lecturer 1965-71, Reader 1971-75, and from 1975 as Titular
Professor. He has written many books, including Essays (1974) and
Poems of Thirty Years (1982).

WALTER PERRIE was born in 1949 in the Lanarkshire mining village

of Quarter. Educated locallv and at Hamilton Academy, he took an
M.A. in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Full-time poet
and essayist, his last two volume-length poems have attracted con¬
siderable attention. 4 he recipient of various literary prizes and
awards, he lives in Edinburgh. His first collection of essays on the
philosophy of literature—Out of Conflict—was published in 1982.

212
 Notes on Contributors

TOM SCOTT was born in 1918 in Glasgow. His first poems were
published in 1941, since when he has published five further volumes
of verse (with as many yet to publish), a critical study of Dunbar
and some children's books. He has also edited several anthologies,
including The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, and contributed to many
journals. In 1957 he went belatedly to Edinburgh University taking
first an Honours M.A., then a Ph.D. in literature.

RONALD Stevenson is a Scottish composer/pianist and writer on

music. His 80-minute Passacaglia on D.S.C.H. for piano is published
by Oxford University Press and recorded by John Ogdon on the
E.M.I. label. Commissions include a MacDiarmid song-cycle Border
Boyhood (Aldeburgh Festival 1971: Peter Pears and the composer)
and two B.B.C. commissions, Peter Grimes Fantasy for piano
(B.B.C.2, 1971, the composer) and Piano Concerto No. 2 (B.B.C.
Radio 3, London Proms 1972, N.P.O./Del Mar/the composer). His
most recent commission is from Yehudi Menuhin for a Violin Concerto.
Stevenson has composed some 200 songs. As concert pianist he has
performed in Australia, Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, Ger¬
many, Italy, South Africa, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. He has
contributed many articles to The Listener, Books & Bookmen and the
leading music magazines, and is the author of Western Music: An
Introduction (1971) and Busoni: Aspects of a Genius (1983).

213
Index

Aeschylus, 85 Bnde of Abydos, 27, 85, 86, 120, 132, 144, 145,
Allen, William, 132 149-51, 193, 197; Cam, 28, 149, 157, 162;
Anacreon, 85 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 18, 25—6, 48, 78,
Antheil, George, 87 104, 119, 129, 138, 144-48, 151, 153, 154,
Ariosto, Ludovico, 26, 45, 52 156-62, 168, 169-77, 179, 193, 194, 199; The
Aristotle, 76 Corsair, 132, 145, 193, 197; The Curse of
Arnold, Matthew, 134 Minerva, 23; Don Juan, 23, 30—6, 37, 45, 46,
Atkins, Alderman, 131 51-2, 57-77, 85, 110,113, 115, 120-22, 140,
Auden, W. H., 44, 143, 195, 196 154, 156, 162, 168, 194, 198, 199; English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 23, 145; The
Bacchylides, 80 Giaour, 27, 86, 119, 145, 168, 171, 193, 197;
Baedecker, Karl, 85 Heaven and Earth, 28; Hebrew Melodies, 21;
Baldwin, W.J., 130 Hints from Horace, 23; Hours of Idleness, 21;
Barbour, John, 18 Lara, 27, 145, 149; Manfred, 28, 89, 90, 156,
Beattie, William, 18 169, 177-81; Marino Faliero, 28; Pansina, 27;
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 164 The Prisoner of Chillon, 139; Sardanapalus, 28,
Belsches, Williamina, 21 162; The Siege of Connth, 27, 138; The Two
Berlioz, Hector, 88, 89 Foscan, 28; The Vision of Judgement, 24, 45; The
Berni, Francesco, 45 Waltz, 24, 87; Werner, 28
Berryman, John, 62
Bewley, Marius, 45 Campbell, Roy, 32
Bizet, Georges, 91 Campbell, Thomas, 38, 46
Blake, William, 17 Canova, Antonio, 182
Blessington, Lady, 57, 61, 189, 197 Carducci, Giosue, 88
Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 45 Carlyle, Thomas, 134
Bottrall, Ronald, 51 Cartwright, Major, 130, 166
Bowers, Mrs. ‘Bodsy’, 81 Cash, Giambattista, 48, 51
Bowles, William Lisle, 39 Castlereagh, Lord, 32, 35
Bowles, Rev. W. L., 143 Catullus, 85
Boyd, Elizabeth French, 45 Chamberlavne, William, 46
Brahan, John, 87 Child, F. J.', 79
Bronson, B. H., 79 Clairmont, Claire, 117
Brooke, Rupert, 195 Clermont, Mrs., 41
Brown, John, 127 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 31, 32, 37, 126, 190
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 85 Cooper, James Fenimore, 89
Brummell, Beau, 70, 81, 191 Corneille, Pierre, 82, 84
Burke, Edmund, 157 Corri, Domenico, 88
Burns, Robert, 18, 29, 30, 34, 35 C.ourthope, W.J., 46
Bush, Alan, 90, 92 Crabbe, George, 18, 33, 38
Busoni, Ferruccio, 88 Croker, J. W„ 127
Buxton, Fowell, 132 Cunningham, Allan, 25
Byron, Lady, 58, 108, 113, 114—16, 123, 155,
199, 200, 203-6 D’Annunzio, Gabriel, 84
Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron, works bv: Dante, 76, 85
Beppo, 29-30, 49, 181-84; The Blues, 24; The Danton, G. J., 64

214
 Index
D’Avenant, Sir William. 46 Hogg, James, 81, 83
Delacroix, Eugene, 86 Homer, 80
Descartes, Rene, 187 Horace, 48, 85
Dieren, Bernard van, 89 Howard, John, 135
Donizetti, Gaetano, 87 Hughes, Joseph, 137
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 160 Hugo, Victor, 86, 88, 89, 142
Drury, Henry, 47 Hume, David, 126
Dryden, John, 17, 46 Hunt, Leigh, 57
DufT, Mary, 153 Husserl, Edmund, 167
Dunbar, William. 18, 31, 35
Ibsen, Henrik, 143
Edleston, John, 60, 113, 148
Eldon, Lord, 130 Jackson, Gentleman, 191
Elgin, Lord, 23-4 James V, 22, 79
Eliot, T. S„ 17, 19, 20, 30-1, 33, 36, 190, 193, Jefferies, Judge, 129
198 Jeffrey, Francis, 33, 85, 128, 131, 134, 154
Ellenborough, Lord, 130, 134 Johnson, Samuel, 127, 128
Ellmann, Richard, 87 Joyce, James, 87
England, A. B., 42 Jump, John, 78

Fairfax. Edward, 46 Keats, John, 17, 21, 37, 38, 143, 163
Fergusson, Robert, 30 Kierkegaard, Spren, 167
Fielding, Henry, 92 Knight, Wilson, 38
Firenzuola, Agnolo, 46 Kruschev, N., 189
Foscolo, Ugo, 48 Kynaston, Sir Francis, 46
Foster, John, 134—36
France, Anatole, 82 Laclos, Chaderlos de, 200
Frere, J. H., 22, 29-30, 41, 47-9, 51 La Fontaine, 82
Fry, Elizabeth, 140 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 142
Lamb, Caroline, 115, 116, 149, 155, 188, 199,
Galt, John, 24, 58 200-3
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 91 Lamb, Charles, 87
Gautier, Theophile, 142 Lamb, William, 200
Gay, John, 18, 46, 107 Learmont, Captain, 191
George II, 43 Leigh, Augusta, 20, 21, 22, 27, 106, 110, 114,
George III, 24, 25, 154 116, 117, 149, 153, 197, 198, 200-1, 204-5,
Gifford, William, 42 207
Godwin, William, 126 Lenin, V. I., 189
Goethe, J. W. von, 28, 85, 88, 89, 164, 186, Leopardi, Giacomo, 143
187, 193, 205 Lermontov, M. Y., 191, 198, 200
Gordon, Catherine, 18, 79 Liszt, Franz, 88
Grainger, Percy, 80 Long, Edward Noel, 60-1
Gray, May, 152 Longford, Lady, 207
Grey, Agnes, 81 Lowell, Robert, 62
Grieve, C. M„ 28, 34, 62, 153
Guevara, Che, 91 MacDiarmid, Hugh see Grieve, C. M,
Guiccioli, Teresa, 87, 117-18, 120, 123, 206 McGann, Jerome, 48, 146, 153, 162, 163, 169
MacNiece, Louis, 32
Hanson, John, 111 Macpherson, James, 28, 127
Harington, Sir John, 45 Malthus, Thomas, 126
Havdon, Benjamin Robert, 135 Mangone, Benedetto, 91
Hazlitt, William, 127, 129, 137 Mao Tse-tung, 189
Heathcote, Lady, 201 Marchand, Leslie, 38, 48, 87, 152-53
Hegel, G. W. F„ 80 Maria, Don Jose, 91
Heine, Heinrich, 142 Mary Queen of Scots, 34
Henrysoun, Robert, 18, 30, 35 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 164
Heraclitus, 198 Melbourne, Lady, 28, 114, 115
Hesiod, 80 Mendelssohn, Felix, 88
Hitler, Adolf. 90 Merimee, Prosper, 91
Hobhouse, John Cam, 111, 118, 148 Merivale, John Herman, 47-8, 50, 51

215
 Index
Nlickiewicz, Adam, 86 Sand, George, 86
Milbanke, Annabella see Byron, Lady Sappho, 76
Millais, John Everett, 68 Schiller, J. C. F., 187
Milton, John, 28, 60, 71, 134, 135 Schoeck, Othmar, 86
Moira, Countess of, 79 Schoenberg, Arnold, 90
Moliere, J. B. P. de, 82 Schumann, Clara, 89
Moore, Thomas, 21, 26, 38, 58, 80, 86, 113, Schumann, Robert, 89
115, 116, 132, 149 Scott, Sir Walter, 18, 21, 26, 28, 34, 38, 128
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 113, 122 Sgricci, Tommaso, 63
Muir, Edwin, 21, 26, 191, 195, 202 Shakespeare, William, 17, 89
Murray, John, 37, 41, 69, 118 Shelley, Marv, 144
Musset, Alfred de, 142 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 17. 37, 128-29, 132,
143, 155, 159, 168
Nabokov, Vladimir, 181 Sheraw, Darrell, 52
Napoleon, 64, 86. 104, 137, 160, 176, 187, 188, Sidney, Sir Philip, 190
203 Skinner, John, 22
Nathan, Isaac, 87-8 Smith, Adam, 126
Nechayev, 204 Smollett, Tobias, 26
Neild, James, 130 Southey, Robert, 24, 25. 27, 30-2, 35. 37. 46,
Nelson, Lord, 64 126, 127, 139
Nero, 76 Spenser, Edmund, 17
Nerval, Gerald de, 142 Stael, Madame de, 107
Nietzsche, F. W., 142, 152 Stalin, Josef, 189
Novalis, 190, 198 Stanhope, Colonel Leicester. 63, 166
Sterne, Laurence, 131
Olson, Charles, 62 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 116
Ossian see Macpherson, James Suetonius, 76
Owen, Robert, 132 Swift, Jonathan, 18
Owen, Wilfred, 83, 194
Oxford, Lady, 20, 131 Tasso, Torquato, 26, 45, 85, 91. 159
Tchaikovsky, P I , 90
Paganini, Niccolo, 89 Thomson, James, 18
Parker, Margaret, 1J>3 Tolstoy, Count Leo. 204
Pasley, Charles, 126 Trudgill, Eric, 154
Percy, Thomas, 127 Turner, W. J. M., 86
Phelps, Gilbert, 152
Phillips, Thomas, 84 Underhill, John, 46
Pindar, 80
Poe, Edgar Allan, 86-7 Verdi, Giuseppe, 87
Pope, Alexander, 17, 21, 38—44, 47, 163 Villon, Francois, 33
Pound, Ezra, 62, 87 Virgil, 71
Pulci, Luigi, 22, 29-30. 45, 47-8, 51, 85 Voltaire, 125
Pushkin, Alexander, 28, 86, 143, 191, 197 Vuillamy, C. E„ 188, 190-91, 193

Racine, Jean, 82 Waller, R. D., 45

Rail', Joachim, 88 Webster, Frances, 114
Raphael, 182 Wellington, Duke of, 104, 190
Read, Herbert, 186, 189, 190, 191, 1%, 203, White, Maude Valerie, 80
208 Whiting, Nathaniel, 46
Redesdale, Lord, 130 Williams, William Carlos, 62
Richardson, Samuel, 202 Wilmot, Mrs.. 108
Rickman, John, 126 Wilson, John, 128
Rogers, Samuel, 38 Windham, William, 125
Romilly, Sir Samuel, 130, 132, 133 Wolfe, James, 64
Rose, William Stewart, 47—8, 50 Woolf, Virginia, 21
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 125, 157, 177, 187 Wordsworth, William. 32, 37, 38, 75, 128, 143.
Russell, Bertrand, 142, 143, 195 163, 164, 168
Rutherford, Andrew, 78, 143
Yeats, W. B., 197
Salisbury, Lady, 190 Young, Edward, 70

216
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