Selected Poems (2 page)
West understood Byron’s self-conscious role-playing, for the portraits were engraved, widely reproduced and disseminated, as frontispieces, in annuals and as images purchasable separately. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses sighs (half boastfully, half elegiacally) that he is ‘become a name’;
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by age twenty-five Byron had
entered the public imagination in the language of Byromania (a term coined by his future wife on beholding his adoring female fans), Byronism, and Byronic – this adjective describing not only him and his gallery of heroes, but destined to be applied to their lineage throughout the century, the progenitor of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff and later, a figure in Bertrand Russell’s
A History of Western Philosophy
(1945). He was the epitome of mysterious glamour and also a commodity opportunistically manufactured by his publisher, the celebrity machinery of the newspapers, reviews, magazines and caricaturists, and his own eye for the dramatic. The force was felt across Europe, and beyond, generating fresh inspiration not only in literature but also in the other arts: in Théodore Géricault’s vivid illustrations of the Eastern tales (a watercolour of The Giaour led to a suite of lithographs executed in 1823 with Eugène Lami illustrating
Mazeppa, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos
and
Lara
), in numerous paintings by Eugène Delacroix (including
The Death of Sardanapalus
(1827)), the apex of French high Romantic painting), in Hector Berlioz’s
Harold in Italy
(1834), in which the composer determined to ‘make [the solo viola] a kind of melancholy dreamer in the style of Byron’s Childe Harold’,
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in Robert Schumann’s setting of
Manfred
(1848–9) and in Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s symphony
Manfred
(1885). In all these figures Byron awakened, in Delacroix’s phrase, ‘that insatiable desire to create’.
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The magnetism apparent in the visual and verbal representations proceeded from, and rebounded upon, the man. Walter Scott, fellow Scot, fellow literary lion, fellow sufferer from lameness, was transfixed:
A countenance, exquisitely modeled to the expression of feeling and passion, and exhibiting the remarkable contrast of very dark hair and eye-brows, with light and expressive eyes, presented to the physiognomist the most interesting subject for the exercise of his art. The predominating expression was that of deep and habitual thought, which gave way to the most rapid play of features when he engaged in interesting discussion; so that a brother poet compared them to the sculpture of a beautiful alabaster vase, only seen to perfection when lighted up from within… but those who had an opportunity of studying his features for a length of time, and upon various occasions, both of rest and emotion, will agree with us that their proper language was that of melancholy.
Scott was writing anonymously in 1816 for the most widely read periodical of the day, the
Quarterly Review
, not coincidentally published by Byron’s publisher, John Murray: the anonymity, expressed in the inclusive editorial first person, assumed universal agreemen.
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In a giddy suspension of disbelief, fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had rhapsodized to a friend in April of the same year – the month Byron left England forever amid the scandal surrounding his separation from his wife (see Part II):
if you had seen Lord Byron, you could scarcely disbelieve him – so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw – his teeth so many stationary smiles – his eyes the open portals of the sun – things of light, and for light – and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering.
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Reading the countenance for its animating sentiments and passions, Scott and Coleridge were part of a burning Romantic-era romance with Byron, involving not only brother poets but also women poets, among them Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, enthralled by his dark and dazzling celebrity. Society belles who couldn’t possess the lord nonetheless felt the theatrics. Margaret Mercer Elphinstone borrowed Byron’s Albanian dress for a masquerade the same year that he donned the costume for the Phillips portrait,
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and Byron did not at all mind the layered transvestite spectacle: a Regency ‘Beauty’ decked out as an Albanian dandy, and a female impersonation of Phillips’s ‘Byron’. ‘The more the merrier,’ he said in the last year of his life in portraits, anticipating the diverse interpretations that would multiply and prolong his fascination:
One will represent me as a sort of sublime misanthrope, with moments of kind feeling. This,
par example
, is my favourite
rôle
. Another will portray me as a modern Don Juan; and a third… will, it is to be hoped, if only for opposition sake, represent me as an
amiable
, ill-used gentleman ‘more sinned against than sinning.’ Now, if I know myself, I should say, that I have no character at all… I am so changeable, being every thing by turns and nothing long.
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If Byron suggests a certain unease at the distance between a mercurial nature and public perception, he is here largely unthreatened by it, understanding the series of portraits as extending the grasp of Byronism.
Others were sharply critical of such Byronic performances. John Scott, the influential editor of the
London Magazine
, objected to the ‘confusion’ between the ‘poetical sympathies’ of readers and their ‘recollection of some fact of the author’s life, or a conviction of an analogy to the author’s own character’. He continued:
The impression left on the mind, is neither strictly that of a work of art, to be pronounced upon according to the rules applicable to art, – nor of a matter-of-fact, appealing to the principles of sound judgment in such cases; – but what is striking in poetry is made a set-off against what is objectionable in morals, – while that which would be condemned as false, theatrical, or inconsistent, according to the laws of poetical criticism, is often rendered the most taking part of the whole composition by its evident connection with real and private circumstances, that are of a nature to tickle the idle, impertinent, and most unpoetical curiosity of the public. This sort of balancing system is not fair.
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In underscoring Byron’s play at the borders between art and life, Scott identified one of the springs of Byron’s hold on his public. John Wilson teased out the paradox that nourished the fascination:
It might, on a hasty consideration, seem to us, that such undisguised revelation of feelings and passions, which the becoming pride of human nature, jealous of its own dignity, would, in general, desire to hold in unviolated silence, could produce in the public mind only pity, sorrow, or repugnance. But, in the case of men of real genius, like Rousseau or Byron, it is otherwise. Each of us must have been aware in himself of a singular illusion, by which these disclosures, when read with that tender or high interest which attaches to poetry, seem to have something of the nature of private and confidential communications. They are not felt, while we read, as declarations published to the world, – but almost as secrets whispered to chosen ears. Who is there that feels, for a moment, that the voice which reaches the inmost recesses of his heart is speaking to the careless multitude around him? Or, if we do so remember, the words seem to pass by others like air, and to find their way to the hearts for whom they were intended, – kindred and sympathizing spirits, who discern and own that secret language, of which the privacy is not violated, though spoken in hearing of the uninitiated, – because it is not understood. There is an unobserved beauty that smiles on us alone; and the more beautiful to us, because we feel as if chosen out from a crowd of lovers.
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An exotic spectacle and an erotically intimate friend: Byron had the power to enthrall.
II
Byron was born in London on 22 January 1788, the son of Captain John (‘Mad Jack’) Byron and his second wife, Catherine Gordon, a Scots heiress. The Captain having squandered her fortune, the family withdrew to Aberdeen in 1789, and he soon decamped to the Continent. Byron passed the next ten years in straitened circumstances; sensitive to the club-foot with which he had been born, left with a mother who displaced resentment against her absconded husband on to him, and with a Calvinist nurse whom he later said had early awakened his sexuality. In 1798 the fifth Baron Byron, ‘the wicked Lord’, died, and Byron unexpectedly inherited his title. Told that he was now the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, he asked his mother (according to his friend and memoirist Moore), ‘whether she could perceive any difference in him since he had been made a lord, as he perceived none himself’.
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Yet the difference, the more powerful for remaining elusive, helped to shape the poet.
Byron and his mother returned to England and moved into the debt-ridden Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, the estate presented to the Byrons by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century. The profound impact made on the lonely boy by the Gothic hall and its embodiment of a tempestuous family heritage can be seen in his first poems. In 1801 Byron was sent to school at Harrow; in the same year he probably met Augusta Byron, his half-sister from his
father’s first marriage. Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1805 and embarked upon dissipations that threatened his health and obligated him to moneylenders, but he also made enduring friends, such as John Cam Hobhouse, later a prominent politician, who strengthened his interest in liberal Whiggism.
Byron’s first published volume appeared in 1807. The various genres he imitated – Ossianic and erotic poems, satires, poems of sensibility – show a young writer seeking his public identity, but the diffident title,
Hours of Idleness
, and aristocratic signature, ‘Lord Byron, A Minor’, elicited a savage notice from Henry Brougham in the
Edinburgh Review
. Byron retaliated in 1809 with a couplet satire,
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
, excoriating the contemporary literary scene.
On reaching his majority at the age of twenty-one in 1809, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords, and then in July departed with Hobhouse on a Grand Tour of the Continent, shaped by the Napoleonic Wars that barred much of Europe to British travellers. They sailed to Lisbon, crossed Spain and proceeded by Gibraltar and Malta to Greece, venturing inland to Janina and Tepelini in Albania to visit a local overlord, Ali Pasha, through country little known to Westerners but a site in the struggle with the French for control of the eastern Mediterranean. There Byron began
Childe Harols Pilgrimage
, which he continued in Athens where he lodged with a widow whose daughter, Theresa Macri, he celebrated in ‘Maid of Athens.’ In March 1810 he sailed with Hobhouse for Constantinople, visited the site of Troy and swam the Hellespont in imitation of Leander. In the East Byron found a world in which the love of an older aristocrat for a beautiful boy was accepted; he also developed a political identity: he was to become the Western hero who would liberate Greece from the Turks.
Byron arrived in London in July 1811; shortly after his return his mother fell gravely ill and died before he could reach her at Newstead. In February 1812 he made his first speech in the House of Lords, denouncing the proposed death penalty for the stocking weavers of Nottingham who had smashed the new machines they blamed for their loss of work. A potential role as opposition speaker was diverted when at the beginning of March John Murray published the first two cantos of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
and, in Moore’s famous report, Byron ‘awoke one morning and found
myself famous’.
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The poem joined the immediacy of a travelogue with a disillusioned speaker, who voiced the melancholy of a generation wearied by prolonged war. Despite Byron’s claim that Harold was a fiction designed merely to connect a picaresque narrative, the novelty of an author speaking passionately in his own person overwhelmed readers. Even as Byron satirically discredited the chivalric code on which, in
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), Edmund Burke had rested the defence of the
ancien régime
(and which was still invoked to justify the war against Napoleon), the magnetism of his personality offered a new romance, offsetting the cynicism the poem displayed: the handsome, aristocratic poet, returned from exotic travels, himself became a figure of force.
Only someone circumstanced as Byron was could have effected this double operation, and the impact was tremendous. Byron followed the success of
Childe Harold
with a series of Eastern tales that added to his aura:
The Giaour
(1813);
The Bride of Abydos
(1813), written in four days;
The Corsair
(1814), written in ten, and selling 10,000 copies on the day of publication;
Lara
(1814), written in a month.
Hebrew Melodies
(1815) contains some of Byron’s most famous lyrics (‘She walks in beauty’ and ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’) and accorded with the vogue for nationalist themes. This sensationally successful phase of Byron’s career epitomizes the paradoxical convergence of Murray’s exploitation of the resources of advertising, publishing and distribution to foster best-sellerdom and star status, with a noble who gave away his copyrights because aristocrats did not write for money. Like all myths, ‘Byron’ did not resolve a contradiction but dramatically embodied it.
