BYRON
Byron was the Frank Sinatra, the Mick Jagger, of his time. Such was his effect that soon
after “Childe Harold” was published, he walked into a drawing room and a sixty-fiveyear-old woman swooned and had to be taken out of his presence before she could
recover. About a year later, there was an English woman taking a Grand Tour of the
continent who ran into Byron in Italy. Despite his overpowering effect, she at least had
enough presence of mind to get her daughter behind her, and forbid Byron to even look at
her daughter, lest it put ideas in their minds that she could never erase. We know from
diaries at the time that there was a lady who had never met Byron but who became
convinced that he wanted to marry her. She slowly slid into insanity.
How does one explain this effect?
A part of it was the fact that Byron was a lord, an aristocrat who moved in the highest
circles of English society.
Another part of the effect was that he was a poet—sensitive, handsome, and also lame.
For many years the explanation of his lameness was that he had a clubbed foot, but recent
medical studies have cast some doubt on that. He did have to wear specially made boots
all his life in order to walk.
He stood about 5’8,” had to watch his weight all the time, and did that primarily by
boxing and swimming. A part of the legend has to do with his epic attempts to swim the
Hellespont and recreate mythology. Byron had a serious desire to write a myth or legend,
then to live it—so he was much like Hemingway in this respect.
Byron was also very vain about his hair, often putting it up in curlers.
Many people referred to the glorious, moonlight pallor of his face. In the revisionist times
in which we live, there are those who think that this glorious moonlight pallor was from
the purgatives and laxatives that Byron was addicted to to control his weight.
Many people think of Byron in terms of the Don Juan legend, but Byron’s own view of
this was that he was more sinned against than he sinned. But he, of course, popularized
that image of himself by writing a work designed after the legend.
Paradoxically, the woman Byron married seemed to be the one woman who was not
susceptible to this charm. She was a rather straight-laced woman named Anne Isabella
Milbanke, a mathematician, “the princess of parallelograms.” When he proposed to her,
she turned him down, and wrote in her letters that she didn’t understand the phenomenon
of Byron, that she thought the whole society had been driven mad by Lady Caroline
Lamb (wife of Viscount Melbourne), who carried on a notorious liaison with Byron.
Milbanke turned down his first proposal, but started to write him letters designed to
improve his character. When he proposed again, she not only accepted, but sent one letter
of acceptance to one address, another to another, to make sure he received her answer.
Byron’s response in his diaries: “It never rains unless it pours.”
Byron grew tired of Lady Caroline Lamb, who used to follow him everywhere, showing
up at dinner parties, appearing in his room at night disguised as a boy, swearing that she
was pregnant. Byron finally left her and wrote in his diary: “I am haunted by the skeleton
of her.” In response, she travelled to her country home, dressed the village girls in
cheesecloth, had a roaring bonfire built, and burned Byron in effigy. She wrote a voodoo
poem about Byron, and later, a novel about their stormy relationship. During their last
meeting, she tried to slash her wrists with a scissors.
The point of these anecdotes is to underscore the fact that no one ever discusses Byron in
strictly literary terms. There are important reasons for that. There is a blurring between
Byron the poet and Byron the man, to a degree that is not true of the other Romantic
poets. It is very hard for us to understand the impact Byron had on his time.
Coleridge wrote of Byron, “So beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw. His eyes
were open portals to the sun . . .”
Sir Walter Scott said, “His face was like an alabaster vase lighted up from within.”
Byron had an Irish friend, a quasi-pirate, who wrote: “He had the form and features of an
Apollo . . .”
Goethe wrote, “He had personality of eminence such as has never been and is not likely
ever to come again.” Goethe thought Byron was the perfect hero of his time. But he also
said something contradictory about Byron: “The moment he reflects, he is a child.”
There was also a negative reaction to Byron that began in his own age.
Thomas Carlyle wrote, “Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe.
Imagining what the bust of Byron should look like, T. S. Elio later wrote, “That pudgy
face suggesting a tendency to corpulence, that weakly sensual mouth, that restless
triviality of expression . . .” Byron’s reputation declined in the early 20th century because
of this.
If you think of the other Romantic poets, with the exception of Wordsworth, they were
not major figures in their own day. Blake was very obscure. Shelley and Keats died
before they became major, influential poets. Coleridge was known as a brilliant talker,
but not a great poet. But to this day, on the continent, Byron is considered to be the
greatest English poet after Milton. He has an influence among the French and other
nations that far surpasses the other Romantics. His cultural impact was profound. With
that in mind, we can see why Bertrand Russell devotes a chapter in The History of
Western Philosophy to Byron.
On the other hand, in the 20th century, Byron’s reputation declined at first. But since the
middle of the century his reputation has been on the ascent. Again, though, there is a
paradox, because his early repuation among his contemporaries was based on his works
about the Byronic hero, but modern scholarship rests his reputation on his epic satire,
Don Juan.
The other key paradox of Byron is this: Byron is for many people the arch Romantic
rebel. But in reading Byron’s letters and poems, we see that he had little use for the other
Romantic poets. He satirizes them constantly.
Byron looked for his literary models not to his contemporaries, but to Pope, the great
Neoclassical satirist. Arnold thought that Byron was a great poet, but that he never wrote
a great poem.
It is best to begin the reading of Byron by thinking about paradox. How is it that this
poet—who dismissed the other Romantic poets and who looked back to Pope for his
notions about the art and craft of poetry—is considered by many people to be the greatest
English Romantic poet?
How do we explain Arnold’s contention? Even though Don Juan is a great poem, and the
other poems are very good, many people still think seriously about what Arnold said.
Think of Shelley’s line from the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”: “I fall upon the thorns of
life and bleed.” That line doesn’t sound as good when you’re forty as it does when you
are sixteen. There are similar passages in Byron that have embarrassed scholars who
loved him in their youth.
It is impossible to draw a neat line between Byron’s life in the world and his life in art.
And one of the reasons we can’t do that is that he didn’t himself. He imagined and
created himself in art and then, like Hemingway, went out to try to live that work of art in
life. So there is always this matter of “self-dramatization” to consider in thinking about
Byron.
Despite the obvious differences between Byron and the other Romantic poets, though, in
some very general ways there are a lot of similarities.
More ideas about Byron’s poetry:
One reason people were so attracted by what Byron wrote is the fact that England was at
war, and the English aristocracy and upper-middle class could not make their usual tours
of the continent. They had to live a more parochial life on the island.
Byron was writing works that were set on the continent and in some of its more exotic
parts—Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Albania. Byron’s work appealed to readers who
were starved for information and descriptions of interesting places and people, and this
led to their appeal for the Byronic hero.
In reading Byron we have to impose some criteria that are different. We need to think
about:
1. Personality more than ideas.
In Byron, personality tends to be more important than ideas. You don’t turn to Byron,
especially the Byron of the Byronic hero, for profound ideas. This is was Goethe was
getting at, despite his admiration for Byron.
Instead of ideas, we have this incredibly magnetic personality, but the personality is more
than just autobiographical writing. He is drawing upon his life, but it’s not the same as
with poets and novelists who merely do that.
The literary term for this is “self-dramatization.” It suggests that although he draws upon
his life, he gives it a highly dramatic effect. There is a heightening of his life. He has an
uncanny ability to somehow tap unconscious drives and the world of dreams, and to do it
in a way that also touches upon what makes the heros of myth and tragedy heroic.
Byron takes the events of his life and casts them in such a way that they become heroic
and mythic—larger than life. That’s what’s meant by self-dramatization, turning life into
a work of art.
Keats talks about this in a very different but somewhat related way when he talks of
Shakespeare living “a life of allegory. His works are merely the comments on it.”
Byron lived a life of allegory, but not in the deep tragic sense that Shakespeare does in
his plays. Rather he dramatizes his own life in a more melodramatic sense. His heroes
(Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain) are like traditional tragic heroes, but there is something
exaggerated and hyperbolic about them. There is something intensely emotional that
brings the work closer to melodrama than tragedy.
2. Not themes but moods.
Byron’s poetry is very much about capturing certain moods. In the early works about the
Byronic hero, the mood he captures is Weltschmertz—”world sorrow.” It captures the
disillusion of the sensitive young man once he realizes there is an ubridgable gap between
the world as it is, and the world as it might be.
One can think about Byron in terms of the the Lost Generation of Hemingway and
Fitzgerald. Byron, like them, was an expatriot. He left England relatively early in his
career never to return. He writes about England from a distance. This distance from
England has a lot to do with the mood of Weltschmertz in “Childe Harold” and
“Manfred.”
In his later works, the distance gives him intellectual and artistic freedom to write satire,
to have aesthetic distance and become a pointed critic of English society. The mood in
Don Juan is filled with mockery and irony and humor.
Fairchild: “Aspiration, melancholy, mockery. The history of a mind too idealistic to
refrain from blowing bubbles, to realistic to refrain from pricking them.” This is another
paradox of Byron. Actually it represents two sides of the same coin.
Here’s a good way to approach the mood/theme paradox:
There is much talk about the Romantic quest for the ideal, the world as we can imagine it.
The question often for the Romantic writer is this: what is the relationship between the
actual world as we know it and the world as we might imagine it.
The typical Neoclassical writer would have no problem with the relationship between the
actual and the ideal. Their tendency would be to say that the actual world is ideal, that
there are only seeming imperfections in it. If we only had the perspective to see the total
reality, we would be aware that all these seeming imperfections are a part of God’s plan.
In his “Essay on Man,” Pope writes, “All that is is right.” That’s the conservative,
established position in the Augustan world.
Most of the Romantics would have another take on this. They, too, would not see a great
problem between the actual and ideal world, because they would say that the only reality
is the ideal. This is the view of the transcendentalist, of the visionary poet-prophet. That
view is not so easily held, of course. Wordsworth and Coleridge wrestled and quarrelled
with and qualified that a great deal. But that outlook was the general tendency of their art.
The “spot of time” is the only reality—everything else is just the daily round of mundane
activities.
There are a couple of other positions that can be taken:
1. There is an unbridgeable gap between the real and the ideal. This is what the
realist says. This world will never be paradise. Accept it.
2. Byron: There is an unbridgeable gap between the real and the ideal, but unlike
the realist, Byron cannot accept that dicotomy. He forever yearns for the ideal. But unlike
the transcendentalist, he can never find it.
This is what makes Byron his kind of arch Romantic. His poetry is a record of the moods
that follow from this compulsive quest for the ideal—a quest that is always weighted
down by Byron’s hard-headed, realistic refusal to delude himself that what he finds is the
ideal.
In much of his poetry, you have a kind of nostalgic reflection about a time when the ideal
did exist. Usually it is something he associates with an early love, a love which was
characteristically self-destructive.
“The Ruins of Paradise,” according to Gleckner, is where Byron lives. This has to do
with the myth of origins, the time when he was the young Byronic hero before his heart
was broken.
But in his later poetry, he will take this same theme about the unbridgeable gap between
the real and ideal and turn it into some of the greatest satire written in English—
particularly in the cantos about Haidee, and the kind of paradise that Juan creates with
Haidee on an island. He is creating paradise.
About the second generation of Romantics:
Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge lived at a time when many of the leading thinkers and
philosophers and artists felt that there was going to be a utopia on earth following the
French Revolution. The great dream fails, but nevertheless they once believed that it
could happen. When it fails, they take those utopian hopes and internalize them. They redirected their hope inward, to the imaginative life, and believed that there could be a
world regenerative there, through the lamp of the human imagination.
By the time Byron, Shelley and Keats reach their maturity, the French Revoltuion is not
only over, but there is an incredible backlash by the establishment to restore the kind of
monarchy and tyranny of the past, much like the Holy Roman Empire.
Another paradox is the fact that Byron was very conscious of this backlash, and the fact
that he was Lord Byron, an aristocrat. He was capable of petty aristocratic gestures, but
he also died fighting for Greek independence. He hated the rabble, the mob, but
nevertheless celebrated freedom for all.
One can never dismiss the personal in the case of Byron, nor the cultural.
Byron’s poem “Darkness” is an apocalyptic poem, but unlike Blake, who sees the light in
the darkness, Byron only sees the cataclysmic darkness that represents the end of the
world. There is a kind of darkness—a less intense belief in what the imagination can
create—in the second generation of English Romantic poets. But the desire for
redemption is just as great. There is just waning confidence that it will happen.
For example, Shelley can’t find some permanent concrete expression of “intellectual
beauty”—it is always behind some veil. In “Prometheus Unbound,” he finally writes that
“the deep truth is imageless.” The second generation is not even confident that it can
articulate what truth is.
Some thoughts about the Byronic Hero:
1. Drawn from Byron’s life. He models his hero out of his image of himself—not
himself necessarily, but his image of himself.
2. He models the Byronic Hero after his ancestors—his father was a sea captain,
his uncle a kind of corsair, his other ancestors were medieval lords. In the original
version of “Childe Harold,” there is an archaic language that is supposed to capture the
atmosphere of the Middle Ages, and Childe is a young man in training to be a knight.
3. A major influence of the Byronic hero is Milton’s portrait of Satan in Paradise
Lost. One of the characterisitcs of the Byronic hero is his satanic stance.
4. another influence is the Biblical character Cain, the cursed, marked man. Byron
wrote a play entitled Cain.
5. Another literary influence is the hero of the Gothic novel. Anne Radcliffe was
writing The Italian. The Monk, written by Byron’s friend Matthew G. Lewis, is another
example. The Byronic hero is a powerful, hypnotic figure who could seduce woman, a
demon. Bryon is drawing on “dark Romanticism”—things that are both satanic and erotic
at the same time.
6. A major historical influence was Napolean. Byron referred to himself
as “the Napolean of the realms of rhyme.”
7. the other great influence was Rousseau and his Confessions. Byron is writing
what we call today “confessional poetry.” In Manfred he writes, “my pain shall find a
voice.” That’s one of the sources of the Byronic hero’s great appeal. Byron gives voice to
the Weltschmertz—the kind of disillusionment that often follows a major war. His works
captures the conflict between passion and law and order.
8. The mythic Prometheus is another major influence. Byron takes as corrupt the
moral order that would have Prometheus sentenced to eternal punishment. His poem
“Prometheus” explores this theme. The assumption in the poem is that Prometheus is a
hero because the gods are less virtuous than we are. Therefore, the rebel who seeks to
destroy order becomes the hero. This is all about a clash of values that occurs in a time of
crisis in culture. There are those people who urge you to take the common realistic sense
of things. Byron wants complete human freedom, the rejection of any order.
B. F. Skinner, in his book Beyond Human Freedom, argues that we as humans are afraid
of freedom, that it is too chaotic, too full of possibility. Byron would argue against this.
There can never be enough freedom for Byron.
In this very general way, Byron links with all the other Romantic poets, because all of
them write poems that apotheosize and diefy the human. Wordsworth’s way of deifying
the human is to stand at the top of Mt. Snowden and present to us the potential sublimity
of the human mind.
Byron’s way is very different. He suggests to us that there is a way of life that is larger
and greater and freer and more human than a life of acceptance, one that accepts political
and social order. In this way, he’s like Blake, but his poetry has nothing of the visionary
poet-prophet in it that Blake’s has.
Byron is not an oracle the way Blake was, a poet who would chant the deep mysterious
secrets and truths. Byron doesn’t have those truths, he has the truths of a life by example.
He portrays for us the large emotions that we have, emotions that refuse to be cramped by
society. He always strives to make his statements as powerfully as possible. He is a hero
by example, rather than a hero by oracle.
9. Another tradition at work here in trying to understand the Byronic hero is that
the of “The Man of Feeling.” Byron comes straight out of this literary tradition. In the
17th century there was an English philosopher, the earl of Shaftsbury, who started to talk
about the relationship between feeling and morality.
Shaftsbury argued that the person who was moral was the person with great emotional
capacity for sympathy and empathy. That notion began to disintegrate in the 18th
century, but all sorts of novels before that had as their heros the “Man of Feeling.” Henry
Mackenzie’s novels are a good example, along with all the popular novels of sentimental
fiction.
Through these novels, the notion that feeling was an index to morality degenerated into
the notion that the ability to display emotion was an index to morality. These, of course,
are two very different things. Editors would mark “juicy” passages, such as, on page 4,
heroine drops a tear, on page 205, young man goes into paroxysms of grief. It was the
equivalent of today’s Harlequin novels without the sex.
When we get to Jane Austen, she starts to satirize this, as in Sense and Sensibility. Sense
stands for common sense, and sensibility stands for the life of the feelings, and the
deliberate attempt to cultivate the feelings—to become a sensitive young man or woman.
But Byron comes very much out of this tradition. He was very much the Romantic Man
of Feeling. And for him, the heart is a code, a source of great values. Paradoxically,
though (as usual with Byron), the heart is both our greatest blessing and our greatest
curse. We’ll see that expressed over and over again in Byron’s poetry. This is what
prompted Arnold to write: “He dragged across Europe the pageant of his bleeding heart.”
10. The other great influence on Byron in terms of the Man of Feeling was Goethe
and The Sorrows of Young Wurther. This is all about Weltschmertz. Wurther also had
this quest for the ideal, articulated in terms of love. The love doesn’t work out and
Wurther commits suicide. This is another recurring impulse in Byron, this quest for
oblivion and self-destruction.
This aspect of German literature is called Sturm and Drang, storm and stress, and is
another way of understanding the Byronic hero. Again, one sees an aggressive, aspiring
epitome of human will, a hero who will destroy anything that stands in his way, and will
refuse to accept anything less.
Thus, the Byronic hero is :
— the Romantic Man of Feelings and Sturm and Drang
— the satanic figure
— the outlaw, the rebel
— the epitome of the concept of the Ubermenche—the Overman.
11. In the notion of the Ubermenche there is a connection between Byron and
Neitzche. Byron constantly parades his superiority over the herd, the crowd. In Byron, we
do have what Wordsworth called for in poetry, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feeling,” but its not the contemplative, rustic feeling of Wordsworth.
Byron is the aristocratic Superman of Feeling. He is superior to all laws of society and
social mores; they have no meaning to him.
What the Byronic hero often does . . .
He’s a rebel, but he’s not a rebel who wants to reform society, he’s a rebel who wants to
complete obliterate society and live in freedom outside of it.
There are many readers of Byron who find him ultimately to be a nihilist, someone
without values, someone who ultimately can’t sustain a belief in anything. That may not
be ultimately true, but when one reads Byron’s poetry there are shades of that. That’s one
of the reasons his early works are not tragedies, but melodramas.
Byron doesn’t take life quite seriously enough for them to be a tragedies. Instead, they
have the kind of exaggeration and hyperbole of a melodrama. There is no Hamlet in
Byron. There is only the self-conscious posturing of a Superman, someone who would
put on the mantle of Satan but not in a deeply serious way.
In Canto I of “Childe Harold,” Byron explains why he goes to Hades: he’s tasted
everything that life has to offer, so he might as well taste the fleurs du mal, the flowers of
evil. He wants an interesting new sensation. He has run so long through sin’s labyrinth
that he needs to have new experience, whatever it might be.
Bertrand Russell identifies what he thinks is the essence of Byron as “cosmic, titanic selfassertion.” This is an excellent phrasing of what the Byronic hero symbolizes. In Byron,
we have probably the greatest expression in literature of the human will. It may be a will
that can never achieve its aim—because of the unbridgeable gap between the real and the
ideal—but on the other hand, it is a will that is unyeilding and can never be defeated, in
the same way that Prometheus never yeilds.
That’s the essence of the Byronic hero: someone who refuses to accept the given, the
norm, and instead tries to articulate some larger vision of our fate and destiny. Even if he
can’t acheive that destiny, the Byronic hero can articulate it, and refuse to accept
anything less than it.
One can see, then, that all sorts of rivers flow into the creation of the Byronic hero:
Literary influences:
— sentimental fiction of Goethe and Rousseau
— Gothic novel
— Milton’s Satan
— Prometheus
Historical influences:
— Napolean
— Byron’s relatives and ancestors
Biblical and quasi-Biblical influences:
— Cain
— The Wandering Jew
12. Most importantly, though, there his own life. Byron’s genius in his early
works was his ability to somehow take all of these influences and transcend them, to
create a hero who was not only a composite of previous figures, but one who somehow
has a magic about him that is only touched in the world of dreams.
Byron says of Childe Harold that he was the child of his imagination, and Harold really
is. There’s something heightened about the hero, something larger than life—not just the
Superman tradition—that reminds us of the great tragedies and myths, even if Byron’s
works about the Byronic hero don’t quite achieve that status themselves, because Byron
can’t take them seriously enough.
Byron, like Hemingway, was embarrassed about being a poet. Many suggest that the
Byronic hero is an expression of Byron, but after reading Don Juan and his letters, mnay
conclude that the Byronic hero really disguises the real Byron.
The real Byron is an incredibly witty man of the world, someone who is perhaps the most
sophisticated of all the English poets in the first half of the 19th century.
Passage from a letter: “I by no means rank poetry or poets high on the scale of intellect. I
prefer the talents of action more than a sentence, or even a silence, all those speculations
of those mere dreams of another existence, and spectators . . .”
Journal entry: “Action, action, action.”
You can hear Hemingway beating his chest.
Despite all the legends of Byron as womanizer, Byron’s greatest loves in his life were
men. His greatest love was a young man at college with him, and Byron died not in the
company of a woman, but in the company of a valet who was probably his lover. That’s
the other side of the coin for the Don Juan figure, as well.
Berlioz wrote the Corsair overture after Byron’s poem. You’re not going to have great
symphonies after poems by Wordsworth (even though Wordsworth is by far the greater
poet).
Byron symbolizes an attitude with which the modern person finds a great deal of
sympathy. Byron’s legecy in terms of culture, as opposed to literature, is far greater than
the legecy of any of the other Romantics. His legacy is his modern sensibility. Stephan
Dedalus’s hero in The Portrait of the Artist is not Coleridge or Wordsworth or Blake—
it’s Byron. Stephan aspires to be “the hawk-like man of his own imagination.” That’s
what Byron does. He’s not a visionary poetry-prophet.
In terms of the great Romantic metaphor of unity, Byron’s wedding is not the wedding of
man and nature, but the wedding of Byron to his own imaginative creation. In this way
does he live a life of allegory.
Summary:
We’re not looking for ideas, we’re looking for a personality that captures the Spirit of the
Age.
Don’t look for themes so much as moods. Think about the contrasting moods of
Weltschmertz on the one hand and satire on the other. They both spring from a mind that
is idealistic, that aspires for the ideal, an uncompromising mind that will never settle for
anything less than the ideal, but a mind that is too hard-headed and realistic to ever
delude itself that the ideal can be finally realized.
What one senses in Byron is the recognition of an unbridgeable gap between the ideal
and the real.
Byron’s poetry records a journey, with a very modern sensibility, through the world. Like
some of the other Romantics, Byron is one of the first existential writers. The old world
lies in ruins, Europe lies in ruins, the French Revolution is over, and if anything, things
are worse, because the conservative establishment is reasserting its power and control.
Byron writes about what it is like to be adrift in that world.
Childe Harold:
Byron is very much influenced by the 18th century novel and the picaresque hero, i.e.
Smollet’s Humphrey Clinker.
There’s also the tradition of the medeival quest romance. But in comparing “Childe
Harold” to the medieval quest one finds a striking difference. In Byron, there is no sense
of a knight on a quest for a holy grail. Instead, there’s the sense that he’s going to go
wherever the wind takes him.
Also, we can not take this as seriously as we might the beginning of the Faerie Queene.
There’s something about it that’s hyperbolic. Notice the sense of superiority. Even the
ocean becomes a steed that he masters with his masculine power.
Perhaps the most important line of the poem is this: “the wandering outlaw of his own
dark mind.”
Byron parades his hero through most of the great social arenas at the beginning of the
19th century—and people are reading this with great excitment as it fleshes out what
they’ve read in the newspapers—but ultimately the poem represents a psychological
journey. Childe Harold is “The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind.” So as different
as Byron appears from Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, ultimately, his hero is, like
theirs, a hero of consciousness.
Though he presents himself in terms of the active knight, the hero does very little in the
poem, and the real important focus is on his meditations and reflections. In fact, “Childe
Harold” is on one level a descriptive-meditative poem. What the Byronic hero reflects on
is most important. So in its own way, the poem is about what we half-create as well as
perceive.
Summary comments:
The Byronic hero is strongly influenced by Byron’s own life, but Childe Harold and the
other Byronic heros are what Byron calls his “dream visions.” They are expressions of
his creativity: they arise from his emotions, from his unconscious drives, from his deepest
convictions.
Byron is able to turn them into works of art that have striking parallels to the figures of
tragedy and myth. They touch our sense of what is mythic and what is tragic, what is
larger than life.
When you think of the Byronic hero as a representative of the Romantic Man of Feeling,
suddenly you can begin to see some of the parallels to the writings of Blake and
Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth writes, “tis to create, and in creating, live a
being more intense.” There is the sense that creativity is tied to feeling, and that when we
express our feelings, when imagination and consciousness flow out, it makes us “a being
more intense,” it makes us alive, it gives us what Wordsworth calls “our god-like hours.”
Byron also gives the tradition of the picaresque wanderer a distinctly Romantic, and in
many ways a modern, cast. His picaresque hero is not just a wanderer, he’s an exile. He’s
“the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind.”
Because the quest of the Byronic hero is often a quest without any sense that he will ever
find the ideal, the holy grail, that also lends it a kind of modern coloring. It places the
Byronic hero in a kind of existential stance.
Think about the Ubermenche: this larger-than-life figure creates his own moral code. He
refuses to believe that society’s mores or values or codes or laws have any authority on
him. Indeed, as the Superman, the Byronic hero does not try to transform society. Instead,
one of his deepest desires is almost to obliterate society, and live in complete freedom
outside it.
Key Questions: What is the significance of the Byronic hero? What does he mean? Why
is he so attractive? Why is he the epitome of the Zeitgeist, the age, the culture?
The most important definition of his significance comes from Bertrand Russell. He
represents “titanic, consmic self-assertion.” He represents an extraordinary assertion of
the human will, and human possibities. He represents ultimate refusal, ultimate rebellion.
He is someone who will not accept the world as it is, but tries to find some new kind of
human possibility.
When one thinks back to Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, they all do that. Blake does
it in the same kind of rebellious way as Byron. There are strong parallels between Blake’s
“Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” his celebration of energy, and Byron’s celebration of the
Byronic hero.
All of the Romantics give voice to, as “The Intimations Ode” pute it, “obstinate
questionings of sense and outward things.” It’s just that Byron does that in a Promethean
way, in an overtly and dramatically rebellious way.
All of the Romantics are trying to define some new human possibilities of existence.
That’s why the Byronic hero is a celebration of the individual, of the self, which leads
back to the notion of the apotheosis of the human.
For Wordsworth, the apotheosis of the human is the child in The Prelude, or the poet who
moves from “glad animal movements” to hearing “the still sad music of humanity,”
living in the years that bring the philosophic mind.
For Coleridge, the apotheosis of the human may be Sara at the end “Dejection: An Ode,”
where the whole world represents something that’s brought to life by the flowing out of
her joy, a joy which animates existence.
But for Byron, his particular vision of the apotheosis of the human is to be found in the
Byronic hero—in his will and his refusal to accept.
Ultimately, he is a hero of consciousness, as we see most vividly in Manfred.
One must remember, too, the Weltchmertz, the world sorrow, of the sensitive young man
who realizes the unbridgeable gap between the world as it is and the world as it might be,
a world as he can imagine it in dream.
Byron is unlike the realist who sees and accepts the unbridgeable gap. Instead, he asks: Is
that all there is? and he dreams that there is more.
Byron’s great ability is not so much to make us think about something we haven’t
thought about before; it’s his ability to say with great intensity what we may already
know.
Byron wrote the first two cantos of “Child Harold” in England, then left, and wrote the
next two later on. So there is a difference in tone and technique. Originally, Byron was
serious about portraying Harold as a Childe, a medieval knight in training.
Key passages of “Childe Harold”:
Satanic stance:
Canto 1, stanza 2
Whilome in Albion’s isle there dwelt a youth,
Who ne in Virtue’s way did take delight;
But spent his days in riot most uncouth,
And vex’d with mirth the drowsy ear of Night.
Ah me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;
Few earthly things found favour in his sight
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.
(Once upon a time)
(archaic: human being, spirit)
(drinkers, revelers)
This is the satanic mode, but notice this is not tragedy. There is something curious about
this figure.
Nor florid prose, nor honeyed lines of rhyme,
Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.
See stanza 5:
he through Sin’s long labyrinth had run
This stanza also gives expression to another repeated motif in Byron’s writings on the
Byronic hero: that of the incest taboo. The beloved who can never be his.
Had sigh’d to many though he loved but one,
And that loved one, alas! could n’er be his.
Ah, happy she! to ‘scape from him whose kiss
Had been pollution unto aught so chaste;
See also stanza 6:
Apart from his native land resolved to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;
With pleasure drugg’d, he almost long’d for woe,
And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below.
This is the satanic hero, but this is not the same frightful Lucifer or Satan we see in
Blake’s “Tyger.” This is a lord taking on a satanic pose. In this sense he his very much
like the heros in the Gothic novel.
When you read the Byronic hero, always look for this Satanic convention, the mark of
Cain, the fatal, doomed man, the fallen angel.
Something else that characterizes the Byronic hero is misanthropy—hatred of other
humans.
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Byron was considered by many to this day as the arch Romantic, but he didn’t think of
himself that way, He looked back to Pope and Dryden for his models, his literary ideals.
Many modern readers feel that Byron doesn’t achieve some of the distinctive
contributions of some of the other Romantic poets.
There is enormous paradox in Byron’s work with respect to point of view. Byron was a
skeptic in the sense that he could not commmit himself to a particular philosophy or
system, but at the same time, he was not a modern relativist. He had a deep desire to
believe in some commitment, but intellectually he would withdraw from any such
ultimate belief.
There is an interesting interelationship between the life and art of Byron—it’s self-dramatization. He draws on his own life, but it’s more than disguised autobiography.
Childe Harold is the child of his imagination. He brings with it his deepest convictions,
what the other Romantics called “reverie.” It is an artistic treatment that heightens it.
Childe Harold holds many thing in common with heros of myth.
The best book on the influences on Byronic hero is Peter Thorslev’s “The Byronic Hero.”
Romantic man of feeling: early version of confessional literature, but does not come out
of the tradition of literary subjectivity, but back to the 17th century and thinkers such as
Shaftsbury.
Ian Wyatt’s book on Austen has good chapter on Man of Feeling, sense and sensibility,
the cultivation of feeling.
In Byron, the heart is the barometer of action. He’s like Wordsworth in this way. In this
respect Byron is typically Romantic, rather than someone looking back to the
Neoclassical ideals of Pope.
Byronic Hero as exile and wanderer, the picaresque hero. Byron read and loved these
works, but there’s also a different dimension to it. The Byronic hero simply throws
himself to wherever the winds will take him. There’s a kind of existential stance here, a
much more modern sensibility. This is a knight on a quest without a prefixed destination,
and not much hope that he will find the Holy Grail.
Crucial is his Satanic stance—the fallen angel, “the wandering outlaw of his own dark
mind.” This is an expression of what Peckam calls cultural transcendence. The Romantic
writer may not have a specific program, some new myth, but he certainly attacks the old
myths.
Crucial is also the Ubermenche. This comes back to the notion of the Romantic
subjectivity. As Peckam puts it, the self is the source of all order and meaning and
identity in the world. Byron simply exagerrates that. This hero accepts no code but his
own—usually the code of his heart and his feelings. And he refuses to recognize that
conventional morality has any claims upon him. That’s why he’s self-exiled.
Also is the figire of the Titan—half-god, half-man, who’s at war with himself. The heart
may be a code, but what we usually find is the inner conflict between the head and the
heart.
There are a host of other stances, i.e. the sensitive soul, the lonely soul (Leslie
Marchand). The Byronic hero as a misanthrope full of ennui and boredom.
One final dimension to this discussion of the Byronic hero is this: we’ve talked about
stances, postures, but what’s the ultimate meaning, the significance of the Byronic hero?
Hippolyta Taine refers to the age’s ruling personage. The Byronic hero captures the spirit
of the age, the cultural force. What this force portrays is “titanic, cosmic self assertion.”
Ultimate refusal, ultimate denial, rebellion, the unconquerable will.
It is in this dimension that we find the literary legacy of the Byronic hero. This sort of
metaphysical attitude, in particular, the depth in Manfred. In this ultimate refusal,
rebellion, and self-assertion there’s a kind of attitude which has continued in the literature
that followed, sometimes with a direct indebtedness to Byron. We see connections to
Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Hemingway, Mailer, Ginsberg. The Byronic Hero
reflects a modern attitude often found during a lost generation, a generation living in a
self-imposed exile. There is a mood of disillusionment, a sense of the futility of
existence. The quest for such a hero is an aimless wandering, a roaming around with no
pre-destiny.
Finally, there’s a defiance that is often expressed through self-indulgence and through
violations of conventional morality. That’s what makes it Byronic.
Related to this disillusionment is what writers at the time referred to as Weltzschmertz—
world sorrow.
Byron, unlike Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, sees that unbridgeable gap between the
real and the ideal. But unlike the realist he refuses to accept that, and so his work on the
Byronic hero records the variety of moods he feels when he faces that unbridgeable gap,
ranging from aspiration to melancholy. His work is about “life’s enchanted cup that
sparkles near the brim.”
In very general terms, think how the Byronic hero reflects Romanticism as we’ve
discussed it with Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.
1. The apotheosis of the human.
In Wordsworth, this is expressed for example by the child or the sublime shepherd. The
Byronic hero is Byron’s way of talking about human possibilities. But for Byron, he
thinks that those human possibilities are there only unless you refuse to accept certain
things and conditions. So he’s different from Wordsworth, closer to Blake, who said,
“damn braces, bless relaxes.”
2. Promethean aspiration.
This relates to the “Rime of Ancient Mariner.”
3. Hero of consciousness.
For all the Byronic hero’s bravado, he is not out there on a knightly quest doing great
deals. Essentially he’s thinking and reflecting.
4. “Childe Harold” can be seen as a descriptive-meditative poem.
Descriptions are there to give Byron an opportunity to reflect upon his world, to share
with us his feelings about it. Manfred is in his tower thinking. This is Byron’s way of
creating a hero of consciousness. It’s a very different way from Wordsworth and
Coleridge, but one nonetheless.
5. The modern theme of alienation.
We see this especially in Manfred. In “Childe Harold,” this theme is often expressed
through melancholy. Later, a darker vision arises in Byron that we don’t find consistently
in Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Coleridge had fears and doubts that the world is
knowable and divine—that’s what’s reflected in his deconstruction of the Christian myth
in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
The attempt of the Christian Humanists during the Renaissance was to try to resurrect the
depraved human will. Before that, you had class as an index of morality, the learned
person was the moral person, because that’s how we lift ourselves up and walk on two
legs after the fall.
In “Childe Harold” and Manfred, Byron isn’t satirizing the Romantic man of Feeling,
he’s going straight with it. That was the sign of his greatness, the incredible capacity to
feel.
Later Byron will satirize the bluestockings, the women of his time writing books about
the man of feeling. He will satirize the notion of Promethean aspiration, a very
ambivalent notion. In Don Juan, he will assert that what passes for feeling is not love but
warfare based upon cold hard cash.
Byron is interested in the way that feeling causes us to deceive ourselves, but he’s also
interested in the way ideas cause us to deceive ourselves. So it’s not an attack on feeling
to celebrate thinking.
Everything is open to satire in Don Juan. It’s a comedy of manners. The silly creatures
that we are, but also the cruel ones.
6. Byron’s new treatments of myths:
—The myth of the romance, the knightly quest.
— The myth of Satan in Paradise Lost.
“Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature,” the subtitle of Natural
Supernaturalism, is instructive because it points to how the Romantic poets took received
myths and notions and adapted them to their own time, to a new age.
Byron does not give us the redemptive view, the providential design of history, that the
other Romantic poets do. That’s why he’s left out of Abrams’s book. That’s why Peckam
sees Byron as the example of negative romantism, based on a more honest view of life,
more healthy because it doesn’t deceive.
The best book on the fallen world is Gleckner’s book, “The Ruins of Paradise.”
To thumb your nose at the taboo of incest is the best way to exhibit cultural
transcendence—it is a violation of one of the more sacred mores. Byron’s also suggesting
that the only way to fulfill yourself, the only way to come to complete self-realization, is
through this kind of negative way.
Like Frankenstein, there is a figure of Romantic legend (Cain, Wandering Jew, Lucifer,
Prometheus). They defy not just for the sake of defiance, but because this is absolutely
necessary in order to become the dilated self.
As Wordsworth says in Book 3 of The Prelude,
there’s not a man
That lives who hath not had his godlike hours,
That’s what Byron’s after, but for Byron, it doesn’t take place in a spot of time, it takes
place when you become the Ubermenche, larger than life.
How can that be done?
Think of all the lines in “Childe Harold” where he’s a falcon, and society wants to clip
his wings. The boundless air is his home. He wants to get beyond the manacles. We are
falcons with an ethereal spark, but we are also creatures of clay—“fiery dust.”
For Byron, we are dust, but we’re fiery dust. Society’s conventions are like the clay—
mortality, convention, prejudice. All these for Byron are like gravity that brings us back
to earth. Incest becomes a way of overcoming all this. In Canto the Third, Stanza 6,
Byron writes,
‘Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense
This aspect goes beyond defiance for defiance’s sake.
Also, incest carries with it the notion of union. What else is implicit in incest? The notion
of union with self. It’s not love with another woman, it’s love with a mirror image, so
we’re back to Romantic subjectivity again. The Platonic tradition lies behind this, the
soul mate. Does Byron ever get beyond this narcissitic, solipsistic notion of self union?
He is trying to transcend in Manfred, but does he ever reach it? No, Manfred is more
open-ended.
Also, it’s not just that the fall happened in the past, not just that the Byronic hero lives in
the fallen world, but who caused the fall? He did.
In Act 2, scene 2, line 211, Manfred says, “I loved her, and destroy’d her.”
When Astarte’s spirit reappears, she tells him about a poison, and what’s that poison?
Also, it’s the incantation of Astarte. It’s not Astarte herself, but a spirit of her summoned
up by Manfred himself. So the image is a projection of his own mind, something in
himself.
The incantation functions almost like a sphinx. The incantation can’t answer the question,
because it’s only what he imagines, what he can answer or guess at. This is very similar
to what we find in Prometheus Unbound. When Asia journey’s down to the cavern, she’s
told that the prophecy begins and ends in thee.
The irony is this: What does he want from Astarte? Forgetfulness, oblivion. He doesn’t
want forgiveness. This is characteristic of this kind of figure, the exile and the wanderer.
What have we read in “Childe Harold” and Manfred that helps us understand this desire
for oblivion?
Literally, when we think of incest and the fall, we have to remember that in Byron’s
expressions of it, the union of incest is always cast in the past. So the poem takes place in
the fallen world. We’re in the ruins of paradise.
What is the Romantic notion of the myth of the fall and how they secularize it? What
does it represent in terms of consciousness and psychological interpretations?
In infancy there is no separation between the infant consciousness and the world, the
womb. There is an ultimate union of self and other. As Abrams describes it, the fall is an
act of sundering, of separation between self and other. The experience of total oneness—
of child with mother, or of a religious experience of an oceanic extension of being, is
shattered.
At first that’s very painful: it leads to solipsism, isolation, self-consciousness in the
negative sense. But that is a necessary stage to something later, something more
intense—self-awareness, imagination. Byron is writing about this, but he tends to focus
on the time right aften the fall, the consequences, rather than later, as in Wordsworth, of
reaching some higher knowledge.
Byron imagines a myth of origins in the union of Manfred and Astarte, but for him it’s
always only a memory. We don’t see it portrayed in Manfred, though we do in Don
Juan—in the Haidee Cantos.
We know that Manfred and Astarte aren’t reunited. We don’t even know literally what
happens to Manfred.
Back to “Childe Harold”:
“Childe Harold” testifies to Bloom’s theory of Romanticism—that it is an
internalization of the medieval quest romance motif. “The wandering outlaw of his own
dark mind” signals that this is a journey within. Everything that Byron is commenting on
is really a projection of an interiorized journey.
Look at passages about feeling and love and Rousseau. In Canto the Third,
Stanza 11, Byron writes,
But who can view the ripened rose, nor seek
To wear it? who can curiously behold
The smoothness and the sheen of Beauty’s cheek,
Nor feel the heart can never all grow old?
Who can contermplate Fame through clouds unfold
The star which rises o’er her steep, nor climb?
Harold, once more within the vortex, rolled
On with the giddy circle, chasing Time
Yet with a nobler aim than in his Youth’s fond prime.
(optimistic, foolish)
Byron says here that love may have been real in the past (here Byron does temporally
what other Romantics do spatially), but there’s a gap between the real and the ideal.
What else reveals the Byronic hero?
— The sense of time as chaos.
— The sense of the vampire sucking life from the beloved, and then regretting his
act. The constant clash between the desire to freeze time (i.e. Wordsworthian spot of
time) with the vortex of time ever spinning.
— One of the most important things, though, is the Byronic need for
transcendence. It’s not going to be his final view, but this here is Byron’s view of a love
that can never grow old, his version of the “spot of time.” But of course, it does grow old.
— Wordsworth goes to Tintern Abbey and in a moment of transcendence says
that “I hope in this moment that there is life and food for future years.” Wordsworth is
always trying to connect the spirit that rolls through all things with this life. What we
have to try to do is escape clock time for the world of the imagination. Blake gives us the
same view in the Night the Ninth of the Four Zoas: “I cast away dark futurity, for lo, the
future is in this moment.”
We’ve talked about the fascination with children, idiots, animals in the Romantics. The
common denominator shared by these people is that they lack solipsistic selfconsciousness, and an awareness of time. Byron, here, begins with that kind of
transcendental yearning that is typical of the Romantics (which Byron almost always
expressed concretely in terms of love for a woman), but recognizing that it won’t last,
that the vortex begins to suck all of this down the drain.
Another passage about love (with a wonderful description of Rousseau) comes in stanzas
77 and 78.
Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau,
The appostle of Affliction, he who thre
Enchantment over Passion, and from Woe
Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first drew
The breath which made him wretched; yet he knew
How to make Madness beautiful, and cast
O’er erring deeds and thoughts, a heavenly hue
Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they passed
The eyes, which o’er them shed tears feelingly and fast.
His love was Passion’s essence—as a tree
On fire by lightningl with ethereal flame
Kindled he was, and blasted; for to be
Thus, and enamoured, were in him the same.
But this was not the love of living dame,
Nor of the dead who rise upon our dreams,
But of ideal Beauty, which became
In him existence, and o’erflowing teems
Along his burning page, distempered though it seems.
Clearly, Rousseau is a double here for the Byronic hero. There is a connection here
between beauty and self-destruction.
Also, it has to do with the fact of consciousness.
For Byron, love here functions in the same way that the French Revolution did for the
earlier Romantics. It is something ideal.
Shelley’s “Alastor” is to a certain extent about what’s at stake here. Alastor is the young
poet who falls in love with the prototype of all love and beauty, but he bypasses an Indian
maid who loves him to go on a doomed quest. Part of the reason that love and selfdestruction go together is that this is not love of woman, but of ideal beauty. This is
Byron as arch romantic imagining a perfection that does not exist, and being destroyed
himself in an attempt to find it anyway.
“There is a fire and motion of the soul which will not dwell in its own narrow being, a
fire beyond the fitting medium of desire.” (Source?)
So you have the human condition as Pope saw it, as a realist saw it, that we are both
angels and men, that’s the human condition. Byron won’t accept that. What he wants to
do is live out the angel within him. To do that, you’ve got to go “beyond the fitting
medium of desire,” beyond the 18th century golden mean.
Byron talks about a “fever at the core, fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.”
(Source?)
That is essential to the Byronic hero—he’s always the fallen angel, the fated man, he’s
always self-destoyed, but it’s not because of society’s values, but because of his own
greatness of desire, his refusal to accept anything less than that.
It’s the other part of the Promethean legend. For Blake and Coleridge, Prometheus
becomes a figure who sacrifices himself, martyrs himself for mankind. But in doing so,
he demonstrates the human possibility that we can all be half-man, half-god.
Byron takes Prometheus in another way. He sees Prometheus as the ultimate aspirer, one
who goes beyond the fitting medium of desire. Prometheus, for Byron, is destroyed not
for other people, for bringing fire to the world, but for bringing fire to his own psychic
life, for burning above in the way that Rousseau does. Fire is a recurring image for Byron
for passion.
For Byron, to grasp for this kind of meaningful existence, for the vision of ideal beauty,
is to end your life. Whereas, for the other Roamntics, this ideal was the only real
existence. Everything else in the world was non-existent for them.
For Byron, it’s similar to love—love is the only time when he is truly human, but for
some reason, the love is self-destructive. That’s the paradox at the heart of Byron’s vision
on one level.
It’s like the knight in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” He follows La Belle Dame, and the
end is always to be on the cold hillside, and to be starving like the knights in the dream.
That’s what happens to Alastor, too. He is only alive, perhaps, when he goes on the quest,
but the quest will end literally in a gulf, a vortex.
Here we’re getting into that element of Romanticism that common readers see as very
negative.
Let’s look at the creation and understanding passage, Canto the Third, Stanza 6:
‘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
Mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
(Harold)
And feeling still with thee in my crushed feelings’ dearth.
How do you understand the implications of this stanza?
1. The only true existence is in the act of creating. But for Byron, unlike some of
the other Romantics, intensity, passion, desire, and aspiration are the prime motivators of
his urge to create.
The attitude sharply contrasts with Wordsworth, the poet of “emotion recollected in
tranquility,” of “soft inland murmurs” and “the quiet of the sky.” Wordsworth is a poet of
peace and quiet very unlike Byron, the poet of titanic emotion, of living on the edge and
intensity of being. Byron’s closer to Blake and Oscar Wilde.
2. Byron compares his creation to child, offering images of union. For
Wordsworth, it was union of man and nature. Nature was the other. But for Byron, the
union is with his own creation, with himself.
We’re back, again, then to things we talked about in terms of incest and mirror images,
but for Byron it is the other within. It’s more Wordsworth’s “huge and mighty forms that
do not live like living men,” or Victor Frankenstein’s monster.
But for Byron it is clearly a self-creation. Byron has internatized more of the outside
world than Wordsworth, and projected more of himself into it. But what makes Byron’s
strategy a truer one is that it is all projection, that there is no natural religion, no divine
order. All we have is the self in Byron.
Wordsworth and Coleridge want to believe in an external “spirit that rolls through all
things.” There’s always a “one Life within is and abroad.” They want to ground the
imagination in nature (see Hartman’s thesis on the naturalized imagination).
But Byron doesn’t do that. There are some passages in “Childe Harold” that are
transcendental romantic poetry in the true Wordsworthian vein, but that is exception for
Byron. Nature is also a mirror for the self.
The second generation are finding ways of letting go of God, that the first generation
weren’t ready to do. Read J. Hillis Miller’s book, “The Disappearance of God”—it begins
here. Wordsworth still has the hope that the landscape can be divine.
When you get to Arnold and Tennyson, they can’t believe that, so for them nature
symbolizes the peace and beauty possible in human existence, but it has no metaphysical
implication. Arnold writes “To Nature”—“where nature ends, man begins.” Byron, Keats
and Sheely are in between these two. They can’t believe in a genius loci. For Keats,
nature is beauty, a reminder of a classical world that once was, but it’s not divine. Yet he
has not yet reached the sort of social vision that Arnold, Tennyson, and Browing have.
Question for test: In terms of the Byronic hero, what links Byron to Wordsworth, Blake
and Coleridge, but then what is distinctively Byronic about it?
To see that the issues we address in Don Juan don’t suddenly erupt there, look at Canto
the Third, stanza 111,
Thus far have I proceeded in a theme
Renewed with no kind auspices:—to feel
We are not what we have been, and to deem
We are not what we should be,—and to steel
The heart against itself; and to conceal,
With a proud caution, love, or hate, or aught,—
Passion or feeling, purpose, grief, or zeal,—
Which is the tyramt Spirit of out thought,
Is a stern task of soul:—No matter,—it is taught.
There’s yearning, but also some doubt. It’s undercut at the end.
In Canto the Fourth, stanza 164, he writes,
But where is he, the Pilgrim of my Song,
The Being who upheld it through the past?
Methinks he cometh late and tarries long.
He is no more—these breathings are his last—
His wanderings done—his visions ebbing fast,
And he himself as nothing:—if he was
Aught but a phantasy, and could be classed
With forms which live and suffer—let that pass—
His shadow fades away into Destruction’s mass.
This prefigures some of the doubt that will inform Don Juan, signalling the destruction of
Childe Harold, Manfred, and the Byronic hero.
---Why is Manfred a particularly vivid example of the Byronic hero?
Manfred is a closet drama—not meant to be performed. It takes the form of a play, but its
defining, distinctive qualities are representative of the kind of lyric poetry we find in
English Romanticism.
There’s really only one character: almost all of the other characters are simply extensions
of Manfred, representing aspects of the hero. Literally we are to take them as having an
external existence, but symbolically they are extensions of Manfred.
Or, the few characters that aren’t extensions, like the Abbot or the Chamois Hunter are
dramatic foils, simply there to illustrate by contrast what the Byronic hero is all about.
Thus, this fits with the notion of Romanticism as an expression of a sense of
internalization as a way of exploring the kinds of questions that a work of art tries to
entertain. The Romantic writer almost always suggests that the way to come to terms
with those questions is to look within. The play begins with Manfred shutting his eyes not
to sleep but to think:
MANFRED. The lamp must be replenish’d, but even then
It will not burn so long as I must watch.
My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
These two words, “enduring thought,” point to what the play is all about.
As different as Manfred is from Wordsworth’s “poet” in The Prelude or Coleridge’s
“thinker” in the conversation poems, or figures like Chistabel or the Mariner, he is linked
with them in the most general terms by the fact that all are heros of consciousness. The
literary works which revolve around them are not explorations of great actions but of
human consciousness and thought.
In Manfred, one way to understand this theme is to concentrate on his “enduring
thought”: thought that may never be realized in the ideal way that Manfred wishes, i.e. a
lasting love with Astarte. But on the other hand, that thought can never be conquered or
vanquished. It endures.
One way to think about Manfred as the Byronic hero is to see the play through the
literary lens of Faust, a major influence. Even more significant is the figure of
Prometheus, the great mythological figure of Romanticism.
Manfred as Prometheus represents Byron’s way of deifying the human. Manfred is
another demigod who represents the potential sublimity of human nature.
For Byron, though, his final perception differs from that of the visionary poet-prophets
such as Blake and Wordsworth. Byron does not believe ultimately that one can find a
concrete embodiment of the ideal, or at least not one that is lasting. And the way that he
expresses that particular conviction in Manfred is by showing us a hero who can never
carry out his will.
What makes this figure heroic is that his will is never broken. We return to Bertrand
Russell’s famous definition of the Byronic hero. What he symbolizes is “cosmic, titanic
self assertion.”
For Byron, Manfred reveals his humanity in his accusations of injustice, in resistance and
defiance. It’s in the moment of defiance and suffering and pain that Manfred summons
together his true nature, and we as readers understand why he’s heroic. This is a typically
Byronic perspective on that dilemma.
Another, more general, way of placing Byron’s hero in the context of Romanticism is to
see Manfred as Byron’s expression of the hero of consciousness. When we read Manfred,
we realize that in terms of action almost nothing happens.
Think also of the Byronic hero as Ubermenche—Superman. This causes isolation. Here
we have Byron’s way of expressing the potential deification of the human. Most of us are
of the herd, the rabble.
The other reason for isolation is that the Byronic hero always sees himself as cursed,
fated to die without achieving his ideal. But he always says that the reason for that has to
do with the self, he insists that he is self-condemned. He does that because he refuses to
admit that society’s laws, codes, mores can have any claim upon him. He believes that
those laws reflect the “mind forged manacles”—things that would demean him if he
accepted them. So his isolation springs from the fact that he destroys himself, but he
always reaches “beyond the fitting medium of desire.” (CH?)
It’s not that he chooses to be happy or sad—he must, like the hawk, soar into boundless
air. But he says there is clay like gravity that is always bringing him back to earth. The
phrase “fiery dust” is essential.
We’re again back to the notion of paradox: If you see yourself as “fiery dust,” as bound
to aspire “beyond the fitting medium of desire” (because to do less would be to become
less than human), then a variety of moods inevitably follow—moments of pleasure and
happiness as well as sorrow and grief.
While the goal of the typical person is to become content, the Byronic hero chooses to
aspire like Prometheus. It inevitably follows that there will be a moment in which he
thinks he achieves his goal, bringing momentary happiness. Or a moment in which he
nostalgically remembers a time that was like paradise.
But it also inevitably follows from a realistic view of the world that he will spend time in
Welschemertz—despair and loneliness. The poetry of the Byronic hero then is like a
record or journal of the kinds of feelings that follow from that way of being in the world.
Romaticism is not so much a theory or style of art as it is a way of being in the world.
You can take this in two different ways. There is what’s known as “the Romantic
sensibility”—personality and feeling (and thus related to the common usage of the word,
someone as a “real romantic”) which have to do with people who cultivate feeling, the
inner life, whatever the cost.
Ultimately for Byron in Don Juan, to be Romantic is not simply to have a certain
sensibility, it is to take a certain stance towards life.
This is a very modern concept and stance that goes beyond defiance. In Manfred and
“Childe Harold,” being Romantic is transcending the ordinary mythology of his culture
(because he does not believe in those mythologies) through defiance. In Don Juan the
hero must go beyond defiance.
Like the American Transcendentalists, Wordsworth and Byron both want to transcend,
but they do that in very different ways. Wordsworth is a visionary poet-prophet who
speaks to us as a kind of oracle, expresses truths that transcend what we ordinarily think,
the kinds of truths that we can only understand when we “see into the life of things,”
when we have a “spot of time.” It’s transcendent in a visionary way.
For Byron, we talk about transcendence in a far different way: we talk about the
transcendence that comes from defiance. Ultimately at the end of his works, he does not
leave us with a vision that we can embrace. There’s no wedding of man and nature, no
“one Life within us and abroad.” There is no Blakean apocalyptic moment in which past,
present and future exist all at once. There’s only the kind of transcendence that comes
through defiance.
Peckam is very interested in Romaticism in terms of cultural transcendence, and what
happened at the end of the Enlightenment, a period of rationalism in which the
philosphers thought there could be an utopian existence. When that moment ends, the
modern world begins. The term Peckam uses for the kind of Romanticism found in Byron
is “negative Romaticism.”
Byron, unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, is not affirming some positive vision.
Contrarily, Peckam argues, Byron’s negative Romanticism is a utopia healtier than the
Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, because theirs strives for a positive solution
to the problem.
Peckam begins with a thesis that in modern art the basic assumption is that the self is the
source of order, value, and meaning. Blake is the best example— “There is No Natural
Religion.” He is asserting that all of the old myths which posit some natural and divine
pattern are false. Patterns, Blake says, which we see outside ourselves are actually created
by the human mind.
Peckam begins with this assumption about modern culture. Wordsworth and Coleridge,
as visionary poet-prophets, for all of their celebration of the self, need to have it both
ways. They need to believe in some kind of external validation of their intimations of
immortality. They imagine a Nature which mirrors that back to them. They argue that
patterns are out there, that there is “a spirit that rolls through all things.”
Byron has his moments, but he ultimately dismisses the Wordsworthian vision as an
intoxicating madness. Pechkam thus argues that Byron is a more modern writer, more
helpful toward the ultimate solution that we are still trying to find in the twentieth
century.
In Manfred, we find consciousness, the growth of a poet’s mind, all of the major themes
of English Romanticism. Manfred realizes that such consciousness comes through
suffering.
The opening speech of Manfred represents the typical Romantic descent into
consciousness:
grief should be the instructor of the wise;
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
This is the first of many references in Byron’s poetry to the myth of The Fall and the
story of Eden. For Byron, though, this introduces the theme of full consciousness. We all
live east of Eden—this gives us a double perspective. On the one hand we are always
nostalgically looking back to that Eden which we imagine once existed. On the other
hand, The Fall is a necessary step towards our full humanity.
This is similar to The Prelude, in which the infant babe is attached to the mother and
literally can not distinguish between “I” and “not I.” As wonderful as those moments are,
our full humanity entails a sundering, initially painful, but ultimately the only way to
reach a full sense of self and to live in the world most artists write about.
But for Byron that doesn’t ever take us to a final ideal, a growth toward full awareness as
in The Prelude. There is a growth and full awareness for Byron, but it rarely culminates
in a “spot of time” because of the unbridgeable gap he sees between the real and the
ideal, between the world as it is, and the world as he is capable of imagining it.
The way in which we see the heroism of the Byronic hero is in his suffering, like
Prometheus. As First Destiny says of Manfred in Act 2, scene 4, lines 428-31:
His sufferings
Have been of an immortal nature, like
Our own; his knowledge and his powers and will,
As far as is compatible with clay,
Which clogs the ethereal essence, have been such
As clay hath seldom borne; his aspirations
Have been beyond the dwellers of the earth,
And they have only taught him what we know—
That knowledge is not happiness
Suffering leads to knowledge, but knowledge does not lead to happiness: this is what
Manfred learns.
What we have in Manfred is a hero of consciousness. He is at war with society
(represented by the Abbot with his conventional morality) but ultimately he is at war with
himself, because he is also made of clay—“clay that clogs the ethereal essence.”
Through references to Cain, Byron represents Manfred and the Byronic hero as cursed. In
the first scene of the play, Manfred summons the spirits:
—Spirits of earth and air,
Ye shall not thus elude me: by a power,
Deeper than all yet urged, a tyrant-spell,
Which had its birthplace in a star condemn’d,
The burning wreck of a demolish’d world,
A wandering hell in the eternal space;
By the strong curse which is upon my soul,
The thought which is within me and around me,
I do compel ye to my will. Appear!
The Byronic hero is also a wandering comet, an outlaw, someone who will not last long,
who is cursed. Here is the Wandering Jew theme. The curse is that of selfhood—Byron
can’t get outside himself. On a psychological level, the curse is the inability to respond
emotionally to anything outside of himself, in particular the inability to respond with love
to Astarte.
Finally, though, Byron has tasted of the tree of knowledge, like Faust in his lab or temple,
trying to divine the secrets of the universe. This makes him unable to exist in the ordinary
world. Full consciousness of good and evil gives him knowledge, but knowledge does not
lead to happiness.
Byron links his hero with Satan. He is hell, carries hell with him. Along with this is
nostalgic memory of a ruined paradise, The Seventh Spirit says,
The star which rules thy destiny
Was ruled, ere earth began, by me:
It was a world as fresh and fair
As e’er revolved round sun in air;
Its course was free and regular,
Space bosom’d not a lovelier star.
The hour arrived—and it became
A wandering mass of shapeless flame,
A pathless comet, and a curse,
The menace of the universe;
This world explodes and Manfred is compared to a comet that is broken off from it,
destined to wander. The Romantic writer imagines this kind of idyllic world and creates a
myth of origins.
The ideal world may never have been, but the Romanitic writer must imagine it in order
to make sense of the world in which he does live.
Another important thing is the need for oblivion in Manfred. The spirits are summoned
by Manfred, and when he is asked what he wants, his response is “forgetfulness.”
The SEVEN SPIRITS
Earth, ocean, air, night, mountains, winds, thy star,
Are at thy beck and bidding, Child of Clay!
Before thee at thy quest their spirits are—
What wouldst thou with us, son of mortals—say?
MANFRED. Forgetfulness—
FIRST SPIRIT. Of what—of whom—and why?
MANFRED. Of that which is within me; read it there—
Ye know it, and I cannot utter it.
On the one hand, this is very consistent with Byron’s “negative” version of
Romanticism—of an unbridgeable gap between the real and the ideal. He is self-cursed,
so at times the only solution that he can imagine is non-existence, living in oblivion.
Many readers consequently talk about Byron’s nihilism, his ultimate inability to believe
in the human. Coleridge also compares himself with the old moon in the arms of the new
moon in “Dejection: An Ode.” He talks about being cursed, imprisoned. He too has a
hopeless love affair, but unlike Bryon, Coleridge ultimately (through empathy and
sympathy and imagination) lives through Sara, imagines the world as a paradise by
seeing it through her eyes.
If Manfred is a hero of consciousness, he often sees himself as the enemy. He is in fact
more detrimental to himself than society is to him. There is a constant war going on
within him, between his head and heart. In Byron’s view, the head and heart are eternally
at war, but also war within themselves.
One of the ways he portrays this is through the “unpardonable sin,” the “all nameless
hour”—incest.
Byron had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. The significance of incest for
the Byronic hero involves narcissism, the egotistical sublime. He falls in love with his
sister, as close as he can get to himself. Astarte can be seen as an extension of Manfred, a
mirror image of himself.
Incest is also a cultural taboo, so Byron’s glorification of it involves transcendence and
defiance. What better way to assert the superiority of the Ubermenche? He dismisses the
concerns of society, violating its greatest taboo—love at its most illicit and overpowering.
Finally, there exists a more positive association behind the theme of incest—the Platonic
tradition of completing the self, of twins representing two halves of the same soul.
Much of Romanticism is about a journey to complete the self. Think of The Prelude.
Ultimately in Romantic literature, that otherness is found within, some lost part of the self
that was always there but buried. There is a deep drive to complete the self; this has
major psychological significance.
In Wuthering Heights, there is some sense that Heathcliff and Katherine are twin souls.
Incest thus becomes an ideal way for Byron to express some of his most important
recurring concerns.
Astarte is a mirror image of Manfred. He says of her:
MANFRED. She was like me in lineaments—her eyes
Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But soften’d all, and temper’d into beauty;
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe: nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears—which I had not;
And tenderness—but that I had for her;
Humility—and that I never had.
Her faults were mine—her virtues were her own—
I loved her, and destroy’d her!
This makes explicit the incest theme. This is made clear as well in Don Juan, in the
Haidee Cantos. Bryon portrays love as both a blessing and a curse. In the moment of love
we recreate paradise. But Byron sees something paradoxical in the act of love. We not
only create paradise but destroy it. Why? Byron doesn’t give us a direct answer. He only
asserts through repetition that it is the inevitable pattern. We destroy the ones we love.
For Byron, the ideal would be love with a beautiful woman who is a mirror image of
himself. But he also images that love is always destroyed, and destroyed by the Byronic
hero himself.
As in Faust, the spirits come for Manfred, but unlike Faust, Byron’s Manfred refuses to
admit that these spirits have any claim upon him. He feels he is at least as immortal as
they are, because of his “enduring thought.” “I do defy thee,” he says. This is the ultimate
Byronic stance. “Back to thy hell, thou hast no power over me.”
At the end of the work, we don’t know what happens to Manfred. He somehow vanishes.
We do know that he is not claimed by the spirits of the underworld. What are we to think
at the end of this work? What is the point of view?
At the end of many tragedies, what we end with is some sense of Aristotelian catharsis, a
kind of purging of the self. This is possible to have in this work, but Byron does not tell
us explicitly that this is so.
In other tragic works, there is some kind of renewal of the self at the end, for example the
myth of the Pheonix. The bird plunges into the fire but emerges purified and renewed.
There is no sense of that in Manfred either. All we are left with is no answer. We are left
with the mood and personality of Manfred, as well as his stance, his way of being in the
world.
Byron does clearly suggest that the isolated self is the final and total reality—and here
again is his existential viewpoint. He gives us the sense that we are alone in an alien and
godless universe. There are powers on earth, but no God who is a supreme witness. There
are only powers of good and evil, which are merely extensions of ourselves. We only
have “awful freedom” to create our own world, and our own selves.
There are all sorts of parallels between the Byronic hero and Victor Frankenstein.
Romantic literature celebrates creation. The ultimate irritation of the artist is to create and
then be told that you are made in the image of God, merely a copy.
There is a good way to understand the stories of Faust, Prometheus, Frankenstein, the
Byronic hero. They are about individuals who don’t want to recognize and limits on the
self, who want to create, and who find themselves in a world in which society says that
“you are only a copy of God,” yield and obey.
The Byronic hero is left to reject that world, the world of the man of action (represented
by the Chamois Hunter) and the world of morality (represented by the Abbot). When this
is done, the hero finds himself with “awful freedom” (like the Mariner)—but it is lonely,
alien, godless. The burden is overwhelming. This is the burden of total consciousness.
This is what we are left with in Manfred—not an answer, but a way of viewing and being
in the world.
Here is one way of viewing the transition from classical to modern literature: in the
Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy emphasizes that “character is fate.” It is no longer powers
that are out there and up there that determine our fates, we determine fate ourselves.
How? By aspiring “beyond the fitting medium of desire.”
Byron’s works are celebrations of aspiration. They rebel against moderation. But the
paradox is that we can’t win either way. If we take the kind of archrebel stance that
Manfred and Childe Harold do, we will die without maintaining the concrete embodiment
of the ideal. But if we do not aspire, we become only clay. This is Byron’s view of the
world. He can’t accept the common sense view of the world. Thus, his hero is fated to
fail.
Don Juan, however, presents something completely different. Don Juan is not about the
Byronic hero. The question is: What is it about?
Byron wrote this to his publisher in 1822: “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: it may be now and then voluptuous: . . . No Girl will ever be seduced by reading
D.J. . . .”
A literary satire is a little unusual in the age of Romanticism. The great age of satire was
the Neoclassical Age. Most of the other Romantic poets did not appreciate satire.
But it is also about other things. What else?
Also to his publisher: “You ask me for the plan of Donny Johnny: I have no plan—I had
no plan; but I had or have materials; . . . if continued, it must be in my own way. You
might as well make Hamlet (or Diggory) ‘act mad’ in a straight waiColeridgeoat as
trammel my bufoonery, if I’m to be a bufoon: their gestures and thoughts would only be
pitiably absurd and ludicrously restrained. Why, Man, the Soul of such writing is its
license. . . . You’re too earnest or eager about a work never intended to be serious.”
Byron wrote Don Juan over several years. He would write a canto and send it back to
England from his exile in Italy and have it circulate among his friends. The more he
wrote, the more he came to conceive of the work as a kind of coat-hanger on which he
could hang all of his random thoughts and perceptions about the world in which he lived.
It offers a kind of social commentary which was not as serious in many ways as we
would think if we consider it a satire.
Many people who loved Byron in the nineteeth century loved the Byron of the Byronic
hero. It was a figure that appealed to young men. But Byron’s greatness lies not so much
on his creation of the Byronic hero but on Don Juan.
Byron said of himself, I am “a man of the world, never in earnest, laughing at all things.”
He is a sophisticated, artistocratic man for whom the world was a comedy. Don Juan is a
reaction against the Divine Comedies: it is a human comedy. The spirit of the poem is in
its language, wit and humor.
Byron casts the poem as a mock epic. He takes the conventions of the epic and
burlesques them, deflates them. In this respect it is like Chaucer’s Nuns Priest’s Tale,
where a chicken in the barnyard debates the great metaphysical ideas of Boethius and
other philosophers. There are similar deflations in Don Juan, as well as the raising of
common things.
The driving force behind the epic is the epic hero. The epic hero in his very person is
supposed to embody all of the ruling beliefs of the culture. But Byron begins his work
without having a hero to write about: “I want a hero.”
He pokes fun at the triviality of the world. This basic premise punches holes in literary
expectations of the epic and our heroic notions of the world. Heroism is impossible in the
modern world. Byron sees the world as so ephemeral that it cannot sustain a hero. Heros
come and go. He is writing about commonplaces.
In this way, he is linked with Wordsworth and Coleridge. At the heart, they all hold the
basic assumption that meaning must be found in the commonplace.
Byron will take the Prometheus myth that he celebrates in Childe Harold and Manfred,
and use it to deflate.
He attacks the poets of his time, their pretensions while celebrating the commonplace.
Wordsworth said that poerty is “a man speaking to other men.” The one poem in the
Romantic period that best examplifies that ideal is Don Juan. It’s all a great conversation
piece, with no rhyme or meaning except digression. He takes the flimsiest story and uses
it to express what’s on his mind, and what he feels, at the moment.
Byron sees the legendary Don Juan as a cavalier savant—a lover of a woman who had to
enter into a marriage for reasons other than love. The epic convention of a descent into
hell is expressed though the image of marriage.
Don Juan, his character, is based on the legend of Don Juan, but he shares very little in
common with the womanizer. In fact, Byron felt himself and his Don Juan to be more
sinned against than sinning—like Helen of Troy. Women seduced him first. Juan is very
passive in the work. He is not a very rounded character, more a simple norm against
which Byron can point out the absurdities of the world in which he exists.
In that sense he functions in the way that Gulliver does—as a kind of foil for society.
Byron is very influenced by the 18th century novel, the picaresque hero of Smollett,
Fielding, Richardson. He loved the Tom Joneses and Humphrey Clinkers of literature.
Juan emerges from that tradition of wanderers through the world. Ironically, he becomes
a symbol of rationality, so that Byron can point out the irrationalities of the world.
Byron is not a nature poet, but in this work one of the things Byron satirizes are things
that aren’t natural—all of the pretenses we create to delude ourselves, to deny our own
human nature. Thus, Juan not only symbolizes rationality, but “the natural man” as
well—the man who acts with basic human impulses and instincts in a world that has
forgotten how to do that.
He also symbolizes innocence. He experiences the world as a naive.
The work, though, is ultimately not about Juan. There is another character who is more
important than Juan: the narrator.
The narrator is not naive; rather he is Juan’s antithesis. He is the person speaking in
Byron’s letters—the man of the world never in earnest about anything. In fact, the poem
is ultimately about the interplay between the narrator and Juan. Byron is not Don Juan,
but there is a part of him in Juan. The narrator is very much like Byron, but not identical
either. In the end, the work is about the interplay between the two.
What Byron is attacking in this work is “cant.”
In the dictionary, “cant” means hypocrisy, but Byron has a sophisticated definition of his
own. Byron is very much like Jane Austen—he’s writing about the way in which we use
language. Austen is interested in how we use language to make the hard realities of life
endurable. Marriage is a business contract—women in Austen’s society had to sell
themselves literally in order to live.
But her interest is whether marriage can be more than a business contract, even if it is
that. When the fool Collins proposes to Elizabeth and she says no, he employs a linguistic
power gesture by saying that she does not have the power to say no to him. He
completely pushes her away, claiming that women say no but mean yes.
Byron, too, is attacking the use of language to hide what’s real. What’s interesting is that
Byron thinks that cant is based on self-deception. The worse thing is to use language to
deceive oneself.
How does the notion of cant help us understand Donna Inez and Donna Julia in
particular?
Satire is a literary genre in which the writer tries to expose the serious gap between the
world as it is, and the world as it ought to be. There is a structural parallel here between
satire’s intentions and Byron’s treatment of the Byronic hero.
Don Juan may be viewed as an epic satire. But all attempts to pinpoint Don Juan’s genre
ultimately fail, because the poem exists as a means by which Byron could talk about
whatever he wanted to talk about. It is a great conversation poem.
The picaresque wanderings of Don Juan offer an occasion for the narrator to present the
views of a sophisticated man who takes very little seriously. Byron does have a serious
purpose in the satire. He attempts to expose cant.
Again, Byron is interested in how we use language not to communicate the truth but to
conceal the truth. In Byron’s eyes, cant is ultimately based on self- delusion, which gives
rise to the most comic possibilities of all.
Thinking of satire in a more traditional sense, what is it that Byron is attacking? What are
the focuses of his satire? Three things:
1. He attacks some of his fellow writers, especially the other Romantic poets.
Byron felt Southey valued authority more than freedom.
2. He attacks the political structure of his time. As Lord Byron the aristocrat,
Byron may not have liked the rabble or democracy. Nevertheless, he did celebrate the
freedom of the individual and attacked all of the political tyrants that he saw enslaving
the individual. He attacks the oligarchical governments arising as a sort of backlash
against the French Revolution.
3. He attacks society, cant, hypocrisy, and self-delusion.
Ultimately for Byron there is a kind of common demoninator between the three focuses.
Don Juan celebrates the natural and the common—not the landscape like Wordsworth
and Coleridge. By nature, Byron means human nature—what makes us natural. Cant
leaves us unnatural.
In terms of the commonplace, Byron is not following Wordsworth, who takes a
commonplace event like sailing out onto a lake in a stolen boat and finds a moment of
visionary revelation.
In Don Juan, Byron condemns Coleridge’s Promethean aspiration in metaphysics. Of
course this is paradoxical, because there are moments in Don Juan when Byron celebrates
human aspiration—but these are also moments which he thinks are real and natural.
One of his attacks on the Romantics is his disbelief in the whole transcendental aspects of
their poetry. Wordsworth, Colreridge and Blake fit the traditional mold of the poetprophet with some profound truth to deliver. Byron thinks this is all nonsense and selfdelusion.
He attacks Southey’s manhood—“quite a dry Bob.”
He also attacks Wordsworth. Byron doesn’t believe in systems. For Byron, Wordsworth’s
work is not poetry because it is metaphysical babble, more like prose than verse. Byron is
a a man of the world. These are parochial, provincial, narrow poets who know nothing of
the world.
Don Juan is not a rounded character. Rather, he is a norm of reasonableness and
naturalness that Byron uses as a foil to contrast the irratioanlity of the world.
Juan’s antithesis is the narrartor. Byron takes himself and divides himself into these two
characters. He’s clearly more the narrator, but elements of his personality can be found in
Juan as well. Here is the Byron of inevitable yearning. Ultimately the poem is about the
interplay between these two characters. Meaning takes place in the middle.
You find in the poem a constant split between the emotions of Juan and the emotions of
the narrator. There’s also a big difference between what the situation seems to call for,
and the actual response of the narrator. A slide takes place.
Sometimes the narrator or Juan strikes a very serious, earnest, sentimental pose; but by
the time we get to the end of the stanza, all these feelings and attitudes are undercut,
ironically deflated by the narrator.
The other thing that distinguishes Byron from the other Romantics is the fact that his
verse is less preoccupied by the concrete image or symbol. Byron’s poetry is not
concentrated or condensed in that way. You have to look not for one word in Byron—you
have to look at a larger unit like the stanza rather than an image or line.
The narrator does the opposite of what Byron did in his works about the Byronic hero,
where he creates the world-weary, misanthropic, Weltzsmertz hero. These are intended to
make us identify with a larger-than-life figure. Don Juan attempts to do just the opposite,
attempting to distance us from these types of figures. He takes a satiric, ironic
perspective.
Jane Austen is a good parallel. A typical scene is in a parlor, and the hero is usually
seated alongside the wall, watching. Or she is with her best friend at a distance. Irony and
satire demand a certain aesthetic distance.
See Canto II, stanzas 18-20. Juan is on a ship leaving Spain.
XVIII
“Farewell, my Spain! a long farewell!” he cried,
“Perhaps I may revisit thee no more,
But die, as many an exiled heart hath died,
Of its own thirst to see again thy shore:
Farewell, where Guadalquivir’s waters glide!
Farewell, my mother! and, since all is o’er,
Farewell, too, dearest Julia!—(Here he drew
Her letter out again, and read it through.)
XIX
“And, oh! if e’er I should forget, I swear—
But that’s impossible, and cannot be—
Sooner shall this blue ocean melt to air,
Sooner shall earth resolve itself to sea,
Than I resign thine image, oh, my fair!
Or think of any thing excepting thee;
A mind diseased no remedy can physic
(Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick).
XX
“Sooner shall heaven kiss earth (here he fell sicker),
Oh, Julia! what is every other woe?
(For God’s sake let me have a glass of liquor;
Pedro, Battista, help me down below.)
Julia, my love! (you rascal, Pedro, quicker)—
Oh, Julia! (this curst vessel pitches so)—
Belovéd Julia, hear me still beseeching!”
(Here he grew inarticulate with retching.)
Byron begins the scene with his hero pouring out his heart and ends it with the hero
pouring out his guts, vomiting over the ship. Later, the ship starts to sink, the crew is out
of food, they have to restort to cannibalism. Julia’s love letter is what they use to make up
lots to see who will be cannibalized next.
The irony is notable and no accident. Byron is not suggesting that love is a sham; he is
saying that we make love a sham through self-delusion.
The interplay between the head and the heart is a complex subject in Byron. If we allow
the heart to control us without using our judgement, we will destroy ourselves.
Another matter of technique: the Hudibrastic line, after Butler’s Hudibras, in which he
rhymed on more than one syllable. For example, in stanza 22, Byron rhymes
“intellectual” and “hen pecked you all.” He does this again and again for comic effect.
This is great fun, but it is ultimately attached to something serious for Byron.
Byron has a serious vision underlying the humor. A green isle in contrast to the coldness
of England. What really rules the world in England is money, not love.
Byron attacks the cant of both Donna Inez and Donna Julia. Donna Inez represents the
moral cant of respectability. She deceives herself in her views about morality,
appearances and respectability. “Wishing each other not divorced but dead, they [Donna
Inez and Don Jose] lived together respectably.”
Donna Inez is greatly influenced by Byron’s view of his wife, Anabella Milbank, the
“princess of parallelograms.” Inez reads French romances, dirty books. She is a false
paragon of virtue who endeavors to give Juan moral breeding. She edits the books he
reads, i.e. St. Augustine, who explains his sins a little too well. Don Juan can’t learn
about the body because of Donna Inez’s strict, perpendicular, moral rectitude. For Byron,
this is based upon self-delusion, moral cant.
Nature vs. Civilization is one of the largest themes in literature.
One would think that Byron would celebrate civilization, but he celebrates the natural
man, as well. This comes forth in his satrirization of Donna Inez, who tries to teach Don
Juan to be civilized.
Donna Julia on the other hand represents the cant of sensibility—the life of feelings, in
particular the life in which we intentionally cultivate ideas. Byron accuses Donna Julia of
deluding herself that she, a young woman, can be married to a much older man. This is
again unnatural in Byron’s view. Donna Julia deludes herself into thinking that her
feelings for Juan are Platonic, something other than what they are.
Another way to look it is that Byron believes that life is about reaction. In the English
Cantos, Byron says that if you want to live in this world, you’ve got to respond to the
world of experience on its own terms. There is no system—life is about reaction.
The poem often presents paradoxical situations. Love creates paradox, and it creates The
Fall. It is like Promethean aspiration. Love represents the essence of our humanity. It
entails reaching out to another human being. It has the power to create an Edenic
paradise. But there is something paradoxical, because in the moment that we love, we
begin the process of The Fall. Why is a mystery. We are all “fiery dust”—both an
ethereal spirit and the clay that clogs that ethereal spirit.
For Byron, love is an aurora borealis that illuminates for a moment the waste and icy
clime of this world. This poem is on the one hand a very sharp satire on women—they
are much more harshly satirized than men. But at the same time it is a great hymn to love.
One reason some readers see Byron as a nihilist is that, ultimately, there is no fixed point
of view in the poem. He takes nothing seriously, always undercutting himself. But Byron
is Lord Byron—he is conscious of his noble lineage. He writes with the insolence of
someone within a very rigid class structure.
He is also an exile who left England in a kind of disgrace, writing the poem from Spain,
Albania, Italy. So there is the kind of detachment of someone in exile, the wandering
outlaw of his own dark mind.
Byron jokes about love as sex. But there are all sorts of contradictory impulses in the
poem. Everything in life is process and change. For every thesis there is an antithesis.
Juan will rise and fall through love over and over again.
Byron does suggest something beyond that—that the mind has to become more sensible.
In place of the constant rise and fall, for Byron, we must find judgement, and gradually
become more “gate” (marred, deteriorated, damaged, tainted) and “blase” (apathetic to
pleasure as a result of excessive indulgence, worldweary, sophisticated, worldly-wise).
We must becoem someone capable of becoming more sophisticated, more in control of
himself.
There may be some kind of gain of experience that yields a little bit of hardness and selfprotectiveness. But it is misleading that this is ultimately what the poem is about, because
the heart always flies up into his mind and melts it again.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Byron - Class 4
Summary:
Manfred seems to have more depth and coherence than the more typical works about the
Byronic hero.
It’s a closet drama, not to be performed. This is important if you think about the Byronic
hero. It’s one more sign that the Byronic hero of consciousness. This is all the usual sort
of interior monologue with most of the characters simply being facets of Manfred or
dramatic foils to cast that titanic personality in relief.
Peter Throlev argues that Manfred epitomizes many of the literary figures that go into
making him. On the one hand he is the hero of heart, or sensibility. He has the
Weltscmertz of that hero.
He’s like the exile or the wanderer, too, because these figures are usually searching for
self-oblivion.
On the other hand, Manfred is also like the Faust figure in his infinite aspiration for the
ideal. In that respect, he’s also like the Prometheus and Satanic figures.
What’s different about Manfred from our discussion of the Byronic hero in Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage?
Here Byron seems to be emphasizing the will of the Byronic hero—that it is in resistance,
definance, and other assertions of the will that we discover Manfred’s heroism.
On the one hand, he can never carry out his will, he can never realize the ideal because
“life’s enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim.”
But on the other hand again, his will is so superhuman that it can’t be broken either.
And that then leads to another facts that finds more expression in Manfred than in Childe
Harold: suffering. Suffering as an index of heroism and immortality for Byron.
It’s more than the will, though. We also talked about the references in the work to the
Fall, and the nostalgic memories Manfred has of some beautiful world before the Fall.
For example, as he looks at the sun near the end of the play, it reminds him of a time in
which the people who dwelled on earth were the product of the embrace of angels—half
men, half gods. He also talks earlier in the play about a time when there was a beautiful
wortld, but that he was a comet that somehow jumped and became a flaming mass, wildly
soaring around the universe.
So we have these references to the Fall, that are a way that the Romantic poet charts a
kind of phenomenology of being. Self-awareness begins with the act of sundering that
constitutes the Fall. It’s a necessary step to full self awareness.
Byron on the other hand in this work seems to emphasize consciousness in another way:
solipcism. Self-consciousness.
It’s that kind of enervating absorption of self that leads to the inability to feel that is
crucial to Manfred as well. He talks about the curse of selfhood with the image of the
comet. Thus we come to another way in which many of the Romantics explore the hero
of consciousness—and that is to emphasize the burden of full consciousness.
Think of those lines at the beginning of the play, in which Manfred announces,
grief should be the instructor of the wise;
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
He announces in the opening lines that he’s not asleep—that his eyes are closed to lead to
that inward introspection. It’s that pattern we’ve seen in so many Romantic works in
which we begin with an image of descent into consciousness.
Manfred’s emblem of his curse is the comet. When we get to Prometheus Unbound, we
see that Prometheus’s emblem is the lamp. Manfred, whatever his Promethean aspiration,
seems to be the comet rather than the lamp.
Crucial to the comet is the notion of wandering the skies. But the irregularity of its course
is even more central. This is cultural transcendence, negative Romanticism, rebellion,
defying what is, rather than what might be.
On the other hand there’s the lamp of consciousness and imagination. Everything for
Byron is endurance. So the comet is an interesting way of connecting the lamp of the
imagination and consciousness with endurance—for Byron, the lamp must be replenished
through titanic self-assertion.
Part of the paradox, though, is this: he both wants consciousness, and, of course, oblivion.
What do you think the final point of view is in Manfred about the hero’s fate?
The Byronic hero doesn’t develop. He is a stance. Byron’s greatness lies in the way he’s
able to capture that stance. In this work he doesn’t learn anything that he doesn’t know in
the beginning. Byron is depicting immortal endurance.
Manfred is a being unchanged by purely tyrannical, demeaning forces at work in the
world. What we might call lack of character development, Byron is seeing as a triumph
of the immortal spark in the face of things that would snuff out the lamp.
Manfred echoes Milton’s Satan—“myself am Hell.” The whole world lies within him.
It’s just that paradise is impossible.
Does it end on a despairing note?
We are supposed to believe that he dies, but he doesn’t go to hell, persay. It’s a kind of
mystery. The Abbot is the voice of conventional morality saying that Manfred must
repent before he dies, or he will be damned. And Manfred very cavalierly says, “old man
it’s not so difficult to die.” It’s a hyperbolic gesture that is typical of the Byronic hero.
The questions that are often asked about the ending are of this sort:
— Does this work end the way a tragedy does, with some sense of catharsis?
Some sense of self-realization or self-fulfillment, some sense of expiation?
We don’t necessarily believe at the end of this play that Manfred’s vision of the world is
a just one, or a moral one—only that he has rejected a system that is incommensurate to
judge his vision.
Manfred doesn’t state his ideal, then find it at the end. Instead he finds non-being. Think
about the same thing at the end of Frankenstein, where the monster dives into the funeral
pyre. Is it peace or just non-existence?
What Manfred desires is somehow wrapped up with his relationship with Astarte. But he
doesn’t have a catharsis about that in the end. He knows that he loved her, and that he
destroyed her, but that doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t have wanted her.
We’re back to the paradox that there are these creatures that populate the mind. There’s
always something that woos us to heaven’s brink, as well as something that makes us
cling to earth. We are forever caught in between—a falcon with our wings clipped. Yes,
we destroy ourselves and others. That’s wrong. But Byron never says one shouldn’t try,
one shouldn’t aspire, for the thing for which that is the inevitable consequence.
The play could have been written where Manfred is seen as a good man with a tragic
flaw. But Byron has said that,
There’s a fever at the core, there’s a fire
and motion in the soul that will not dwell
in its own narrow being, but aspire
beyond the fitting medium of desire. (Source?)
It becomes a destructive fever. But the point of the passage is not: don’t burn with the
fever. The point is that we must burn with the fever if we are to be truly human. But that
there is no possibility of it ending any other way that self destruction.
If you think about Astarte as the planet Venus, and the aspiration for some ideal
embodied by her, there’s a connection to Shelley’s “Alastor” and Keats’s “Endymion.” In
all three works, you have young men who desire beautiful women associated with the
stars, moon. It represents a desire for something that nature—not in the Wordsworthian
sense of Nature, but in the sense of the phenomenal world—can never give.
And so the end of the journey is implicit in what drives it. It will fail in the end. That is
what makes it Byronic rather than Wordsworthian, Coleridgean, or Blakean. Given the
terms in which Byron frames it, the play can’t end in any other way. But he never then
dismisses the terms as being incorrect, unworthy or immoral.
You can think of the Byronic hero as a 19th century expression of Hamlet in certain
ways. There is a duality, a division within the self: “To be or not to be, that is the
question.”
What Byron seems to suggest is that this duality is a reflection of basic conflicts and
ambiguities in life. That’s the nature of existence, and it’s not something that can be
reconciled. It simply is. For many of the Romantics, Hamlet became the great symbol for
themselves as introspective artists. Here we see “the wandering outlaw of his own dark
mind.”
Byron sees a universe made up of and driven by paradox, ambiguity, conflict. And its
source is also in the self. There’s always a sense in the works about the Byronic hero of
the titan at war with himself. Ultimately, Manfred isn’t at war with the world, he’s at war
with himself. He uses conflict with the world (i.e. Abbot) simply to externalize the
conflict within himself.
Byron’s work can be seen as a precursor to existential humanism. There is nothing
outside the naked self that is a repository of meaning. So, the burden on the naked self is
to create meaning. Manfred creates meaning, but it’s not meaning in the sense that it is
something that can last. It is something that is illusory, and tends to be located in the past,
in nostaglic memory.
Coleridge has this fear. In the “Rime” the Mariner speaks of being on the sea alone, after
the crew has died. He says, “so lonely ‘twas that there God scarce seemed to be.” That
fears lurks below the surface. But the ultimate vision Coleridge has is something else. At
its most simplistic, it is the struggle with the self to create meaning through some kind of
sympathetic identification with a power outside the self. Coleridge imagines a solution,
even if he’s frightened that it may not be the real solution.
With Byron we don’t see that—he can’t, or won’t, posit a solution.
Think of it in terms of Byron’s concept of the poet. We have no oracle here. There is no
seer issuing forth a better understanding of the world. Instead what we have is a model.
For Byron the value of the model is in the integrity of the human mind. We are god-like.
We may not be able to become all that we might be, but we can refuse to succumb to
what petty systems and authoritarian figures would degrade us into being. That’s the
work’s appeal to readers, that kind of arch defiance. At least I won’t go gentle into that
good night.
In some ways, though, Manfred does go into that good night. We might expect him to
rage against the dying of the life, or to commit suicide, something drastic like that.
But let’s think about the options Byron has a a writer. He can have Manfred commit
suicide in the end. But remember he has already decided against that on the Alps because
its demeaning. That’s yeilding a way. Heaven is not an options. He’s not going to go to
Hell—that’s one of Byron’s main points, to counter the limited vision of the Abbot. But
he’s got to end the play. There’s no point in going on. He could have had Manfred simply
defy some more, and live on. But the play has to move to some kind of denoument. It is a
weak ending, there’s no doubt about that. He ends with a whimper rather than a bang. It’s
somewhat anticlimatic. But Manfred can’t live on.
From Byron’s point of view we are supposed to read Manfred’s last words—“old man it
isn’t so difficult to die”—as triumphant, even if he does go ultimately into that good
night. This is the triumph of the brooding self against the world. In that regard it’s very
Hamlet-like.
Think of Shelley’s ending for Prometheus Unbound. Shelley gives us a huge gesture of
Romantic Humanism. In general terms, we can shape our lives—growing like what we
contemplate. But he makes one other point—that we will always have with us death and
mutability. There is always a coiled doom— Jupiter/Demagorgon—that can be released
at any time. There are things we cannot control.
Byron does believe in some kind of aperonal power—death, suffering, mutability . . .
those are givens. So whatever we do, we have to recognize that ultimately, we are going
to be ruled by them. The question is: what can we do with the life that is given us. This is
one possible way of looking at the ending as well.
Byron believes that there is some kind of supreme Power (though his thinking about it
wasn’t as complex as Shelley’s). But whatever it is, he doesn’t really concern himself
with it. It’s not a personal God, not anthropomorphic. This Power is a far more important
conception for Shelley.
But when we talk about the Byronic hero as a kind of demigod, we’re talking about it in
the Blakean sense—that “all deities reside in the human breast.” We are creatures of dust
and clay, but we have a spark within us that transcends that. That’s what divinity is all
about. It’s the Romantic apotheosis of the human. It’s trying to identify with what is
divine within ourselves—that’s what we mean when we talk about the Byronic hero as
god-like, a demigod.
Instead, Byron would say that the God of the Bible is a tyrannt—a way for the social and
political forces of his day justified their actions. All the systems we see are limited, such
as the Abbot’s. The world is far to chaotic and fertile, as we later see in Don Juan, to
systematize it.
For Byron, the world is governed by false gods, by the frustrated libidos of the English
aristocracy, etc. These are petty systems that don’t hold up to truth, or the largeness of
vision embodied in the Byronic hero.
We can’t really take the spirits very seriously. They’re kind of like Gothic trappings.
Byron wanted to create an atmosphere of the sort that you find in the Gothic novel, so he
brings up Arimanes to bring in an association with Milton’s Lucifer. But beyond that it’s
just there for dramatic effect. They’re all extensions of Manfred’s mind. History is far
more important to Byron than the occult.
No truth will ever last for Byron. It’s like the moment when Manfred did embrace
Astarte, it is a momentary truth. But no truth can last. This has to do with Romantic
irony.
The Byronic hero never really discovers the big truth. What he does is enact over and
over the process of getting to the truth. Truth really is a way, rather than a final
conclusion.
For Byron, the way doesn’t lead to a final solution, it leads to continuing self-realization.
That’s what is important. Everything in life would make us deny what we could have
been. Truth is “something evermore about to be.”
The Byronic hero’s defiant resistance to an supposed “fixed truth” gives voice to this
kind of thinking. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for.” For
Byron, there are only flickering moments of truth in which that flame within the self
leaps up, the fever at the core. We momentarily know who and what we are, i.e. Love.
Byron blows the bubble up in Manfred: the bubble is trying to call Astarte back, hoping
she can tell him some truth that will make it all right. In “Childe Harold” he blows the
bubble up more. (In Manfred there is a sense that this is hopeless from the beginning—
but he still blows the bubble). It’s in Don Juan that he pops it.
Don Juan exemplifies Romantic Irony best, especially in terms of system. In the works of
the Byronic hero, Byron attacks other systems—those of conventional religion and
politics. These are false systems that need to be undermined.
In Don Juan, he embraces what Anne Mellor talks about as Romantic Irony—the
embracing of the fact that life is too fertile, too chaotic to ever reduce it to one system.
We see the perpetual creation/destruction/creation of the self.
In the works about the Byronic hero, the emphasis is more on destruction of system rather
than creation of self.
Don Juan:
This is a Romantic fragment—a work in progress when Byron died. It was written over a
period of five years. But there was a period for about a year and a half where he didn’t
write on it at all.
There are those who say that it is only in Don Juan that we can see Byron’s true
personality. Many believe that despite everything about self-dramatization in the works
about the Byronic hero, Bryon actually hid the essence of his peronality in those works.
Another thing to think about is the reaction of the public. This was a work that Byron’s
friends were very worried about when it became public, because of its licentiousness, it
immorality, its attacks on the leading poets of the day, ad hominum attacks on Lady
Byron, etc.
What Byron may not have realized living in exile was that the Regency Period that he
knew was ending, the period that allowed all sorts of licentiousness and indescretion.
Byron is attacking a certain kind of morality, but there was another kind of morality that
was beginning to emrge in the middle class. We are not too far away from the beginning
of Methodism and Evangelicalism. We’re not too far from the Victorian poets, who see
this great age of progress, who see England leading the world, and civilization moving
forward.
Byron reveals no sense of that at all. He’s writing out of a period of about five years
earlier. So the immorality of the poem stood out for this changing audience.
Ultimately we need to think about point of view in Don Juan—a far more
complex subject in Don Juan than “Childe Harold” or Manfred.
A third of the poem is digression, mostly in the English Cantos. Most scholars agree that
the best parts of the poem are in its digressions. The digressions are central not only to
the essence of the poem, but also the the design and purpose of the poem.
Think about the descent into hell associated with marriage.
In a letter to Murray, Byron wrote: “To how many Cantos this may extend I know not . . .
this was my notion: to make him a cavilier cervante in Italy, a cause for divorce in
England, so as to show the different ridicules of the societies of each of those countries.
To make him gradually gate and blase . . . I have no quite fixed whether to have him end
in hell or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest.”
Cant: The closest synonym we have is hypocrisy. But Byron has a very distinct notion of
cant. This is what he Byron says about cant in a letter to Lady Blessington: “There are but
two sentiments to which I am constant. A strong love of Liberty, and a devastation of
cant.”
Byron’s view of cant is much like Jane Austen’s and her notions about marriage as a
business contract. But it can be something more than that as well, in Austen’s view. But it
is in the way that we use language that we reveal what we think about marriage. In terms
of cant, there’s the horrible scene where the reverend Collins in Sense and Sensibility
proposes to Elizabeth Bennet, and she tells him no. She tries to do it politely, because she
values human feelings. But he keeps telling her that he knows this is the fashion of young
women to say no when they mean yes. What he’s saying to her is that language means
nothing. And in the end of the scene, he sweeps his hand out and the suggestion is that
he’s telling her that she’s powerless—that he’s going to buy her in the marraige
marketplace. He suggests that everything Elizabeth is saying is mere words. Austen
abhors that, and attacks it. Byron, in a different spirit is doing the same thing.
Byron goes on to imply that what makes people use cant, what explains
their use of it, is self delusion.
Take Donna Julia’s love for Juan early in the affair, where she talks about her “Platonic”
love for him. She’s deluding herself that she doesn’t have passionate feeling for Juan.
This is her self-deception.
Take Donna Inez—how does Byron focus on her? Her education of Don Juan. She has
him reading expurgated versions of the books. Byron is attacking the fact that this is
unnatural to suppress the passions.
Theme isn’t necessarily what we look for in Byron. But there is the theme of Nature vs.
Civilization. And Byron falls on the side of nature. Byron’s satire is directed at the way
we deny what is natural. Cant denies what’s nature. How do we deny what’s natural? By
deceiving ourselves.
Take Donna Inez’s relationship with her husband Don Jose. “Wishing each other not
divorced by dead, they lived respectibly as man and wife.” In her case it’s the moral cant
of respectability.
In Julia’s case it’s the moral cant of sensibility. She wants to be like the heroines of the
bluestocking novels. So she decieves herself. She can’t admit to herself that what she
really feels is sexual desire for Juan. So she tries to distort it into an image of Platonism,
thinks of him as her brother. The result is inevitable.
Donna Inez is deceiving herself not because of her feelings (sensibility, like Julia), but
because of intellectual (sense). She’s got this grand scheme for educating Juan, but it’s
dishonest because she censors the sexual passages. She’s modelled on Lady Byron, “the
princess of parallelograms”—full of abstract notions that deny sensual pleasure.
She knew the Latin—that is, “the Lord’s prayer,”
And Greek—the alphabet—I’m nearly sure;
She read some French romances here and there,
Although her mode of speaking was not pure;
For native Spanish she had no great care,
At least her conversation was obscure;
Her thoughts were theorems, her words a problem,
As if she deem’d that mystery would ennoble ‘em.
Here is Byron’s comment on self-deception.
Later, as Juan gets more involved with Donna Julia, Byron speculates as to why Donna
Inez allows Donna Julia to get involved with her son Juan. Ther suggestion is that
because Donna Inez once had an affair with Don Alfonso—Julia’s older husband—and
Don Alphonso threw her over for a younger woman.
So it’s a matter of jealousy and revenge. She allows Julia to get involved with her son to
pay Alfonso back for rejecting her. Inez is one of the “very clever people” who can’t see
why they do things.
Byron is attacking cant and hypocrisy, and they are very interesting subjects in his hands.
It has to do with what he calls “verbal decorum.” The way in which we use language to
disguise our true feelings. Ultimately it has its roots in self-deception. And what we
deceive ourselves about is what is natural and what is unnatural.
What’s new about Byron’s satiric epic is his emphasis on the true, the common, the
simple. He rhyme’s Juan with “true one.”
Here is a poet who’s looking at what is natural, true and simple, and satirizing things that
aren’t like that. He’s saying that we get ourselves into problems when we deceive
ourselves, and symptomatically, it leads to this kind of use of language.
As a character, the function of Juan is as a natural man. He is the natural man who acts on
instinct, rather than cant.
He’s representative of innocence, as well. The poem on a grand scale is about a journey
from innocence to experience. Byron said at one point that he was more sinned against
than he sinned. Juan is like Gulliver in his innocence.
He is also the rational man. He is what Byron believed he himself was deep down. In the
face of all the irrational absurdities of the world we have Juan as an antithesis.
Juan is also a foil against which the narrator can express his views. Juan is the
experiencer, the narrator is the observer, the commentator. Byron uses him as a device to
allow himself to comment on all sorts of things. Juan is like a coathanger. You can hang
all sorts of things on him.
August 12, 1819 letter to Murray:
You ask me for the plan of Donny Johnny: I have no plan—I had no plan; but I had or
have materials . . . but if continued, it must be in my own way. You might as well make
Hamlet ‘act mad’ in a strait waiscoat as trammel my buffoonery, if I am to be a buffoon:
their gestures and my thoughts would only be pitiably absurd and ludicrously
constrained. Why, Man, the Soul of such writing is in its license . . . you’re too earnest
about a poem intended to giggle and make giggle.”
Also about Don Juan: “it may be bawdy, but is it not good English . . . it may be
profligate, but is it not life?”
Juan is thus the passive innocent who becomes an excuse for writing a descriptivemeditative poem of a sort.
To Trelawney, a Hemingway-like rogue, Byron wrote, “Now confess. You expected me
to be a sing-song driveller of poesy. Are you not surprised to find me a man of the world,
laughing at all things mundane.”
If you think about the great satirists, they are conservatives, they want to preserve the
status quo. Byron is not a writer of the establishment at all. Even Austen believes she is
writing on behalf of a very coherent civilization, where people share the same values.
They may forget, and her job as a satirist is to remind them of those values and universal
truths. The traditional satirist’s job is to point out the discrepancy between the way they
live, and they way that they want to live.
Byron is unlike Austen, Swift, Johnson in many respects. He doesn’t feel sustained by a
public. Austen could feel that she could be a codifier of society’s values. Byron can’t feel
that. He’s not even in England. He’s an exile. He’s not a spokesman for the status quo.
His insolence and the freedom of being an exile.
Also, there are people who say this is not a satire because it gives us no glimpse of the
ideal. Satire is about the gap between the real and the ideal.
And a more problematic and interesting question is the point of view. Usually a satirist
has a very clear point of view. But that’s not true in Don Juan, and how does that
complicate matters and the issue of satire?
We do know what Byron thinks about all sorts of subjects. We know what he thinks
about cant, for example. We may not be as clear about the opposing ideal to cant.
Byron doesn’t necessarily have a solution in general for what he sees going on in politics,
art, and society. In terms of life, does he have a particular view of life? Where is Byron in
this poem in terms of point of view and values? Is he a nihilist? There are all sorts of
ways that scholars attempt to answer this question.
Mock epic uses epic conventions to mock something else. For example, in Chaucer’s
Nun’s Priest’s Tale, we have Chanticleer the rooster’s story. Chaucer trots out all these
great epic conventions and philosophical debates, but we’re talking about chickens in the
barnyard. This is Chaucer’s way of mocking philosophical ideas about dreams, and
Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, etc. It’s similar to burlesque.
For example, Byron adopts the epic descent into Hell. Byron uses the epic convention to
satirize contemporary manners, especially marriage.
There’s a strong link between style and content. This is Ridenour’s thesis. On the one
hand, Byron is attacking the heroic, the whole notion of Promethean aspiration that we
have seen him celebrate in the works about the Byronic hero.
He attacks it because he thinks it’s one of the things that explains cant and self deception.
He questions the notion that we can soar (like Southey the flying fish flopping on the
deck of a ship—impotence tied up with politics, aesthetics), wondering if life is really
about something far more simple, common sensical, and true.
But Ridenour also says that Byron will sometimes write in the high style in his poem in
non-satiric ways—at the end of Canto One, for example. Donna Julia is center-stage and
talks about love as a woman’s whole existence. They have but one option: “to love again
and be again undone.” This is the high style.
References to the Fall are often set in the high style.
Part of the function of the narrator is always to be self-aware—never to delude himself.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Class 5
The key to Don Juan rests is four things: genre, satire, point-of-view, and style.
In terms of the reaction to Don Juan, the moral reaction was a work that was offensive.
But it is important to see that the artists of the time recognized what a great work of art
Don Juan was. Goethe called it a “work of boundless genius,” amd Shelley claimed that
“every word is preganant with immortality.”
In terms of literary influences.
1. The picareque novel - major influence.
2. Satiric prose Romances.
3. Folk literature - tales, fablieau, literary romances
4. Byron’s own life - details like Donna Inez modelled on his wife
Thinking about all the prose influences on Byron, it’s not surprising that many readers
see Don Juan as a kind of novel in verse. He took the picaresque literature and added to
that what made the 18th century psychological concerns, the intellectual substance you
find in Feilding, for example.
It’s not, though, that the work is of a piece. It was written over a long period of time. So
one other generalization about it as a novel in verse is this: in the first half of the poem,
it’s like the prose romance. The second half, particularly the English Cantos, its much
more like the novels Tackeray was writing—comedies of manners, much more realistic
in its episodes.
So Byron moves from comic romance to comic realism in Don Juan.
Another way to see it as an epic. There are all sorts of allusions to epic conventions.
Canto the First, stanza 200 reads,
My poem’s epic, and is meant to be
Divided in twelve books; each book containing,
With love, and war, a heavy gale at sea,
A list of ships, and captains, and kings reigning,
New characters; the episodes are three:
A panoramic view of hell’s in training,
After the style of Virgil and of Homer,
So that my name of Epic’s no misnomer.
This is the most extended reference to his plans. He was serious about that, if he can be
said to be serious about anything. Throughout the poem there are continual references to
epic conventions, but he writes a mock epic.
In terms of Tradition and Revolution in Romanticism, how does Byron take this central
literary tradition and make a modern epic?
What he asks us to think about is the common truths. This is a lot like the “Preface to
Lyrical Ballads, in one sense. Byron takes the heroic style and lampoons them in favor of
more common values. In place of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Byron gives us a very Human
Comedy.
It is difficult to write on common things, said Horace. That’s the task Byron sets for
himself.
In the last stanza of the dedication, Byron addresses southy, saying,
Meantime, Sir Laureate, I proceed to dedicate,
In honest simple verse, this song to you.
He takes simplicity as his goal—“To build up common things with common places.”
So Byron is going to write about common things, and much like Wordsworth, attempts to
use the lanaguge of the common man. For Byron, it becomes a very serious attack on
society. People deceive themselves in thinking of transcendental and metaphysical
notions and sytems. They mistake fiery dust, sex, passion for Platonic ideals. Byron sees
that as ridiculous.
So he’s going to write not an epic but a mock epic, and he’s going to attack the cant of
his society.
Another major way to look as the poem as a whole is to look at it as a satire on cant and
verbal decorum. There are three main areas that Byron attacks:
1. Politics.
2. Poets. Those two aren’t really separate subjects. The leading literary magazines
at this time almost always had a political bias. So Byron is quite right to connect the two.
He sees Southey’s defects as a poet wrapped up with his misguided politics, his Toryism.
3. But the most important area Byron satirizes is in society, and specifically Love.
We also have to think about point of view. The satirist, at least in the 18th century, tended
to be conservative, a proponent of the status quo. But Byron is attacking the
establishment. Yet he writes not only as a rebel, but as an aristocrat. He also writes with
the freedom, maybe even the irresponsibility of an exile, a foreigner.
It also seems relevant that Byron—unlike Pope, Dryden, Swift, Dr. Johnson—is aware of
a resistent public, and he doesn’t feel in Don Juan that that public supports and sustains
him the way they did in the work about the Byronic hero.
Jerome McGann’s new book argue that after the Napoleonic Wars, people needed a
symbol to model themselves after and they chose the Byron of the Byronic hero. The
thesis is that Byron undermined that effort in Don Juan.
Finally, we need to think about the problem of uncertainty of Byron’s point of view.
Normally in reading a satire you know exactly what the author’s point of view is; but in
Byron’s case, we feel uncertain.
In terms of the epic, Byron’s point of view is level with life. He doesn’t speak as the
transcendental seer. He speaks as someone who understands what is natural and rational.
He looks at life straight on.
Ultimately, though, we don’t talk about this work as either an epic or a satire. We do
what Byron himself did and call it an “epic satire.” It is a blending of both traditions.
One way to appreciate that is to realize that on the one hand it is a poem that celebrates
and idealizes love, turns love into an epic subject, but on the other hand it satirizes
women. Normally, we would think of those things as compatible. But that is reflective of
the contradictory impulses that drive this work.
Epic satire is another way of trying to articulate what Anne Mellor talks about as
Romantic irony.
At the beginning of Canto the Seventh, Byron writes,
my present tale is,
A non-descript and ever-varying rhyme,
A versified Aurora Borealis,
Which flashes o’er a waste and icy clime.
When we know what all are, we must bewail us,
But ne’ertheless I hope it is no crime
To laugh at all things—for I wish to know
What, after all, are all things—but a show?
It’s got all the spontaneity and verve of the northern lights. In that sense it’s a
conversation poem. It also reminds us not to pay so much attention to its story, but to
observe closely all its rich digressions. That’s the real heart of it: the plot is not all that
important.
Finally, though, writers like McGann say that this poem is like a lot of the other
Romantic poems in that it is a kind of spiritual autobiography. The difference is that in
Don Juan that is more implicit than explicit.
Wordsworth announces the growth of the poet’s mind. Keats’s letters are full of his own
self-awareness of the life and struggles of the poet. Here, the world we see and what
happens to Don Juan imply Byron’s notions about how we become a self.
It’s limited, because Juan himself is not a round character, a full character. So we have to
judge it more by what the narrator says than what Juan himself will say. But think of
Morse Peckam’s definition of Romanticism—that it is about inventing the self.
Also, we need to think about style. First of all, there are some interesting relationships
between style and genre. Earlier it was mentioned that the first half of the poem was a
comic romance, the second a realistic comedy.
The truth is that many readers see the heart of this poem as a medley in terms of its form
and style. Certainly that’s what Byron himself suggests with the term “epic satire.”
You’ve got the romance of Canto One, and the incredibly brutal realism of Canto Two,
with the shipwreck and the cannibalism. You’ve got the beautiful lyricism of the Haidee
Cantos, and the biting, acidic satire of the English Cantos. Some readers compare Byron
to Chaucer in this regard. Both possess an increndible range of interests, tones, stances.
We can also think about style not just in terms of the mock heroic, but also in terms of
Byron’s view of himself in the poem. A lot of this is influenced by Fielding’s novels.
Feilding talks about himself as a kind of showman. There’s the mass panorama of the
world that he creates in his novels, and Fielding is the master showman. Byron is often
described in those terms.
So we can think about this as being a conversation poem and Byron is the great
improvisator. Stanzas 19 and 20 of Canto 15 read,
XIX
I perch upon an humbler promontory,
Amidst life’s infinite variety:
With no great care for what is nicknamed glory,
But speculating as I cast mine eye
On what may suit or may not suit my story,
And never straining hard to versify,
I rattle on exactly as I’d talk
With any body in a ride or walk.
XX
I don’t know that there may be much ability
Shown in this sort of desultory rhyme;
But there’s a conversational facility,
Which may round off an hour upon a time.
Of this I’m sure at least, there’s no servility
In mine irregularity of chime,
Which rings what’s uppermost of new or hoary,
Just as I feel the Improvvisatore.
Here is the great improvisor, the witty digressor. Spontanetity is his guide. Byron adopts
the pose of the man of the world simply voicing his random thoughts and moods on a
variety of subjects. He has no set design. He tells us “I want a hero.”
In the sixth and seventh stanzas of Canto the First, Byron writes,
VI
Most epic poets plunge “in medias res”
(Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road),
And then your hero tells, whene’er you please,
What went before—by way of episode,
While seated after dinner at his ease,
Beside his mistress in some soft abode,
Palace, or garden, paradise, or cavern,
Which serves the happy couple for a tavern.
VII
That is the usual method, but not mine—
My way is to begin with the beginning;
The regularity of my design
Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning,
Of course that’s what he does all the way through the poem—sin against while he draws
power from tradition. Byron begins Canto the third, “Hail, Muse! et cetera.” Later, in
stanza 138 of Canto the Eighth, he writes, “Carelessly I sing,” and goes on in Canto the
Ninth, stanza 41, to write,
XLI
But I am apt to grow too metaphysical:
“The time is out of joint,”—and so am I;
I quite forget this poem’s merely quizzical,
And deviate into matters rather dry.
I ne’er decide what I shall say, and this I call
Much too poetical: men should know why
They write, and for what end; but, note or text,
I never know the word which will come next.
Sterne is the other 18th century author who exerted a tremendous influence on Byron,
especially in terms of values—moreso that Fielding. Tristram Shandy is the story that
never gets told. The novel is “a donkey serendae.”
In Canto the Third, stanza 96, he writes,
But let me to my story: I must own,
If I have any fault, it is digression—
Leaving my people to proceed alone,
While I soliloquize beyond expression;
But these are my addresses from the throne,
Which put off business to the ensuing session:
Forgetting each omission is a loss to
The world, not quite so great as Ariosto.
Everything is extemporaneous, improvised, unplanned. Byron simply takes the old story
of Don Juan as a pretext for his version of a descriptive-meditative poem.
Don Juan is the picaresque hero, the innocent, more sinned against than sinning. He’s a
kind of Gulliver against which we can view the absurdities of the world. He’s the rational
man.
Another thing about style: the stanza. The basic unit is not the word or the line, but the
stanza. Byron is not an imagist. Most of his images are, in the great 18th-century
tradition, illustrations. They are pictures that capture something, illustrations of an idea.
Byron tends to accumulate image after image, rather than write in a compressed style.
What does he try to do in a particular stanza?
1. He uses the concluding couplet in particular to undercut what has
come before.
2. Earlier we talked about medley and Romantic irony. We see then that Byron
often holds antithetical views within the parameters of the same stanza.
3. Also, he often uses Juan and the narrator as two different points of view in the
same stanza. At the begining of the stanza, he uses Juan the character to strike some
Romantic pose, some idealistic view of life. But then that is undercut by the interplay
then provided by the narrator.
Juan experiences, the narrator analyzes.
Juan feels, the narrator analyzes.
There is a constant interplay between the two, which creates a kind of slide pattern.
Byron will begin by striking a very earnest pose, but by the time we’re at the end of the
stanza we’re in laughter, rather than tears. This is another example of Anne Mellor’s
notion of Romantic Irony—its alternating impulses of self-creation and self-destruction.
The best example of this is the love letter from Donna Julia that he reads on the ship until
he’s seasick. Here is a series of stanzas in which Juan begins by pouring out his heart,
and by the end he’s pouring out his guts. We begin by having Juan taking the stance of
the romantic lover, and the narrator undercutting it by telling us what’s going on. But
notice that by the second stanza Juan is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. This is
crucial to the success of the poem: the kind of interplay between the narrator and Juan.
It’s a mistake, though, to identify Byron solely with the narrator. That’s our tendency.
The narrator is like the Byron we discover in the letters. But there is a part of Byron
that’s in Juan, as well.
Still, Byron can’t sustain that kind of single-mindedness Juan represents. We’re back to
Fairchild’s notion of Byron’s aspiration:
“Aspiration. Melancholy. Mockery.
The history of mind too idealistic to refrain from blowing bubbles,
too realistic to refrain from pricking them.”
What’s new technically here is this: in the works about the Byronic hero, we were
encouraged to identity with the speaker, we wanted to become heroic like Childe Harold,
like Manfred. True, there are times here where we identify with Juan—but what we’re far
more conscious of is the narrator successfully
distancing us from Juan.
In terms of Romantic irony, we identify with Juan but we also disassociate ourselves
from Juan through the narrator’s undercutting remarks.
One of the tensions for Byron in writing a mock epic is that the epic often celebrates war,
and here Byron asks us to rethink the hero as warrior. For him, Love is hell, instead of
war is hell.
Byron called himself “The grand Napolean in the realm of rhyme,” as opposed to
Wordsworth’s metaphysical and unrhymed verse.
Byron may be attacking Promethean aspiration, but paradoxically, within the poem he
sometimes warms to a Romantic vision of life—like the Haidee Cantos. When he does
that, he embraces the language of heroic Romanticism.
Byron wants to get back to common sense. He’s not celebrating the common man, as did
Wordsworth. Byron was an aristocrat. But he loathed the high style, etc.
We’ve talked about Canto One: on the one hand Donna Inez represents the moral cant of
respectability, “wishing each other not divorced but dead, they lived respectibily as man
and wife.” Byron attacks her for that. But even more so he attacks her theory of
education, because he sees it as unnatural.
Wordsworth’s view about educatrion in The Prelude is that we are born natural and
creative, but that society with its habit and custom takes that creativity away from us.
(“Bless the infant babe.”) Byron is talking about the same thing here. We are naturally
curious, naturally educable. But society distorts that education. Both are very
Rouseauvean in this regard.
But Byron shows this through the hypocrisy of Donna Inez in trying to deny what’s
natural, what’s true. All it takes is a little common sense and reason, Byron holds, to
understand that Donna Inez’s system is corrupt.
Remember that the old feudal society has broken down, so these questions are coming up
in terms of education.
Think about this: In what sense does the style of this poem become crucial to the themes
of this poem?
We’re not talking about mere technique. We’re talking about something that goes hand in
glove. Romantic irony is not a mere verbal technique, it’s a way of being in the world.
Irony is not just a mere device to deflate for the later Romantics. It has to do with a whole
way of conceiving the world, and to be a successful participant in that world.
Donna Inez’s kind of education stifles the body. For Byron, like Blake, the body is
natural, and to repress it is a corruption. We’ve talked about the fact that personality is
more important than ideas in Byron, and that mood is more important than themes. But
there are themes, of course. One of the themes is nature vs. civilization, and Byron comes
down on the side of nature. Civilization is represented by the cant of Donna Inez, and
nature by the feelings of Don Juan.
What happens to Juan and Julia? And how does this get us to Juan and Haidee? What is
the vision that Byron presents in the last part of Canto One as Julia and Juan become
involved?
In Canto the First, 127, Byron writes of first love:
CXXVII
But sweeter still than this, than these, than all,
Is first and passionate love—it stands alone,
Like Adam’s recollection of his fall;
The tree of knowledge has been pluck’d—all’s known—
And life yields nothing further to recall
Worthy of this ambrosial sin, so shown,
No doubt in fable, as the unforgiven
Fire which Prometheus filch’d for us from heaven.
One of the meanings of this is that Love is somehow connected with the Fall.
Another major theme in the poem besides Nature v. Civilization is Love, and Byron in
Canto the Ninth, stanza 76, says of all the varieties of Love:
LXXVI
The noblest kind of love is love Platonical,
To end or to begin with; the next grand
Is that which may be christen’d love canonical,
Because the clergy take the thing in hand;
The third sort to be noted in our chronicle
As flourishing in every Christian land,
Is when chaste matrons to their other ties
Add what may be call’d marriage in disguise.
(masturbation)
(adultery)
There are all sorts of love in between: natural love, sensual love, romantic love, etc.
What else are the implications of the passage above about Donna Julia and Juan? What
causes the fall between Julia and Juan’s romance? We know she’s 23 married to a 50 year
old man. He’s 16. Who is Byron blaming?
She says her only fault was that she loved Juan too much. She writes that in her letter to
him from the nunnery. Men have all the options. What Byron is suggesting is that for
women, the only spot of time they can have is in Love. But not for men, according to
Byron. Love undoes her. Byron is also blaming the strictures that repress her, a young
vital woman. She’s not a temptress.
On another level, this poem is about the antithetical claims of the head and the heart. Julia
knows that this is how it must end, in failure. But she has to go ahead with it anyway,
because of the strong feelings of her heart.
Think of Byron’s phrase, “Fiery dust.” Passion is fiery dust—that’s why it is “ambrosial
sin.” But it’s also the fires of hell. The fire than animates us, that shapes the clay into a
work of art. Yet it’s also the fire that consumes the clay at the same time. In Canto the
First Byron writes,
CCXIV
No more—no more—Oh! never more on me
The freshness of the heart can fall like dew,
Which out of all the lovely things we see
Extracts emotions beautiful and new,
Hived in our bosoms like the bag o’ the bee:
Think’st thou the honey with those objects grew?
Alas! ‘t was not in them, but in thy power
To double even the sweetness of a flower.
CCXV
No more—no more—Oh! never more, my heart,
Canst thou be my sole world, my universe!
Once all in all, but now a thing apart,
Thou canst not be my blessing or my curse:
The illusion’s gone for ever, and thou art
Insensible, I trust, but none the worse,
And in thy stead I’ve got a deal of judgment,
Though heaven knows how it ever found a lodgment.
CCXVI
My days of love are over; me no more
The charms of maid, wife, and still less of widow,
Can make the fool of which they made before,—
In short, I must not lead the life I did do;
The credulous hope of mutual minds is o’er,
The copious use of claret is forbid too,
So for a good old-gentlemanly vice,
I think I must take up with avarice.
What’s the perspective of these stanzas in terms of the opposing claims? The opposing
claims of the heart and judgement.
At least at one time Love was his whole universe. His earlier comment about men having
other involvements may be something he’s learned. Now he says that he is fallen, and
somehow that kind of amatory feeling has been greatly tempered by other things. There is
disillusionment and cynicism. But how can you read the lines about the heart and not
think of an arch romantic who believes in the power of love to create a transcendent
experience? But it is almost always the nostalgic look back. Byron has very ambivalent
and paradoxical attitudes about Love.
The point of these stanzas is that with Byron it’s like one big crystal—you keep turning it
and turning it and there are all different facets of the crystal. But there are also facets that
are not just different, but that are opposing, contradictory.
Ultimately, though, we need to describe the poem in a way that gets at Byron’s values
and his point of view. But here, even in Donna Julia, we have a variety of different
attitudes.
When we get to the Haidee Cantos, Byron says more about this than in Canto One,
between Julia and Juan. This poem has been called a great hymn to love and a satire on
women. In reading those passages in which the narrator is sympathetic to Julia, we still
must remember that Byron satirizes women throughout. Byron is no feminist. But he
seems sympathtic to those women who experience passionate, natural expression of love,
such as Julia and Haidee.
Haidee Cantos:
Byron writes of “soul and heart and sense in concert.” In these young lovers we have a
vision of pre-consciousness, of a realm prior to enervating self-consciousness. Byron
associates this with children. It’s an ideal that comes before self-consciousness.
Haidee dies because of this. But she also dies, more importantly, because there’s
something about Love itself. It creates paradise, but at the moment that it creates
paradise, it destroys itself. This is something that Byron has been thinking about for a
long time.
This kind of Love is the best that we have, but it is also self-destruction. Why is it selfdestructive? Byron ultimately gives no answer outside of the fact that it is a paradox. It’s
one of those mysteries of human life that good and evil should be so curiously
intertwined.
Key phrase to dwell upon: “enlargement of existence,” the dilated self. This is Byron’s
way of expressing it. Love as an enlargement of existence.
In what sense do the Haidee Cantos show a fortunate fall?
Wordsworth singles out those experiences in life when the genius loci called forth the
imagination, awakened a kindred spirit within him. In Don Juan, Byron isn’t interested in
imagination in the way Wordsworth is. The enlargement of the self in this poem is
through Love, not the creative imagination.
You have in the Haidee Cantos this wonderful capacity to Love awakened in Juan. It’s a
fortunate fall, then, for when he leaves the island, each new experience he has calls forth
that wonderful capacity to love.
Two general questions:
What is Byron’s view of Love? It’s enlargement of existence. “This to create and in
creating live a being more intense.” Love is a lot like art—it is a transfiguring,
transcendent experience. It is becoming a being more intense.
Probably the one deity we have left in the fallen world, in Byron’s view, is love. Love
can lead to oblivion of self-consciousness. It can provide a moment when “soul and heart
in concert move.”
On the other hand, what his poetry is about is not so much Love, but what happens to
Love. Love is normally a memory for Byron. Think back to the Byronic hero. Astarte is
in the past. One of the most important questions then is what’s life like, and how does it
affect love?
We love, it’s brief, it’s momentary, we fall. Love itself helps bring about that fall. It is
“like a poison.” Think of Manfred: “I loved her, and destroy’d her.” The fall is that love
is brief, but more distinctively Byronic is the further notion that it begins to create the fall
itself from the moment it begins.
In the beginning of Juan and Haidee’s love it’s a “perfect bliss” but actually it’s not a
perfect bliss becuase at the moment of that perfect bliss there’s also a “poison” creeping.
Love has somehow mixed in with it its own destruction. Haidee is Eve’s daughter. Every
strong feeling has mixed in with it its own destruction. The human mind is wonderful, but
it’s also a “sad jar of atoms.” It has all this human potential, but we are a curious mixture
of atoms working at cross purposes.
What else does Byron comment on about the course of Love?
1. To love is to experience bliss, but it will always be brief, always
lead to a fall.
2. Women, in particular, are undone by love. Their whole life is on this one throw
of the dice. Then comes “nursing and dressing, etc.” But let’s not forget Lady Adeline.
What happens after we love?
Here is where a variety of critical views enter in. Some would say it’s a fortunate fall. We
fall, but we’re on a circuitous journey or spiral and we will reach this state again.
Another way of looking at the question is the way Harold Bloom does. This one
experience is the heart of the whole poem. There is a kind of tenderness, lyricism and
compassion that we never find in the poem again. In this sense, it’s not a fortunate fall—
at least not for Haidee. It may lead to a further cultivation of Juan’s fundamental
humanity.
Love is by its nature sensual, sexual, passionate. If we try to deny that we deceive
ourselves, argues Byron.
We can think with Gleckner that their is tension between the heart and the head, and love
and its fall lead to judgement. Gradually we have to restrain feelings (they will eventually
destroy us, because they are “a fever at the core”). For sanity’s sake, we have to gain
judgement and common sense. What happens is we learn to steel the heart. We “man”
ourselves against some of these feelings.
Michael Cooke sees this as far too dark.
Of course, we can subsume this whole subject into the larger subject of Romantic Irony
and its sense of constant alternation. But some readers don’t see this neutrally, as the
same old alternation. They see some kind of change in the claims of love.
Love and its fall is going to be repeateded over and over again, but that is good. In life
there are going to be continual falls but at least there’s always the continual possibility to
enlarge the self again through love.
Think about the rhythm of the poem: it tends to function with respect to a continuous
sequence of thesis and antithesis, something like that of experience itself.
Let’s look at some key stanzas in the Haidee Cantos:
CLXXIII (173)
It was such pleasure to behold him, such
Enlargement of existence to partake
Nature with him, to thrill beneath his touch,
To watch him slumbering, and to see him wake:
To live with him forever were too much;
But then the thought of parting made her quake;
He was her own, her ocean-treasure, cast
Like a rich wreck—her first love, and her last.
This passage points to the recurrent Romantic theme of transcendence, of going beyond
the ego and enervating self-consciousness through union with someone else. It also points
to the dilated self—containing all existence in the self. The entire world is united and
fused with the two lovers.
CLXXXIX (189)
They fear’d no eyes nor ears on that lone beach,
They felt no terrors from the night, they were
All in all to each other: though their speech
Was broken words, they thought a language there,—
And all the burning tongues the passions teach
Found in one sigh the best interpreter
Of nature’s oracle—first love,—that all
Which Eve has left her daughters since her fall.
Notice that Juan speaks Spanish and Haidee speaks Greek, or something like that. The
only way they can speak is through love. Byron is talking here about a state that is before
the fall, a state in which thought and feeling are not yet disassociated. They “thought a
language.” But there is a reminder of the fall and a comparison of Haidee to Eve.
CXCII (194)
Alas! they were so young, so beautiful,
So lonely, loving, helpless, and the hour
Was that in which the heart is always full,
And, having o’er itself no further power,
Prompts deeds eternity can not annul,
But pays off moments in an endless shower
Of hell-fire—all prepared for people giving
Pleasure or pain to one another living.
CXCIII (195)
Alas! for Juan and Haidée! they were
So loving and so lovely—till then never,
Excepting our first parents, such a pair
Had run the risk of being damn’d for ever;
And Haidée, being devout as well as fair,
Had, doubtless, heard about the Stygian river,
And hell and purgatory—but forgot
Just in the very crisis she should not.
Again Byron paints for us the Edenic picture, but always juxtaposes it with what’s to
come. Because in Byron’s imagination, these two are always associated.
CXCIX (199)
Alas! the love of women! it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing;
For all of theirs upon that die is thrown,
And if ‘t is lost, life hath no more to bring
To them but mockeries of the past alone,
And their revenge is as the tyger’s spring,
Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real
Torture is theirs, what they inflict they feel.
CC (200)
They are right; for man, to man so oft unjust,
Is always so to women; one sole bond
Awaits them, treachery is all their trust;
Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond
Over their idol, till some wealthier lust
Buys them in marriage—and what rests beyond?
A thankless husband, next a faithless lover,
Then dressing, nursing, praying, and all’s over.
Notice that in the early stanzas we have the narrator reporting what Juan feels, and
reporting it in a way that encourages us to sympathize and identify with him. But by the
end of these stanzas, the narrator is starting to step back, and not give us a vision of the
young Adam and Eve, of an island beyond time, but of a man looking at contemporary
society.
Women are finally bought into marriage by lust. It’s this kind of line that leads people to
talk about Byron’s nihilism, one who sees no redeeming value or virtue in life, one who
believes “all is ultimately nothingness.”
208
But Juan, had he quite forgotten Julia?
And should he have forgotten her so soon?
Canto the Third begins:
Hail, Muse! et cetera.—We left Juan sleeping,
Pillow’d upon a fair and happy breast,
And watch’d by eyes that never yet knew weeping,
And loved by a young heart, too deeply blest
To feel the poison through her spirit creeping,
Or know who rested there, a foe to rest,
Had soil’d the current of her sinless years,
And turn’d her pure heart’s purest blood to tears!
If you think back to Manfred, this is very similar to what Manfred says about himself in
that poem. We notice that, even though that’s a work about the Byronic hero, Byron
imagines the ideal in Manfred as a union between Manfred and Astarte. But by the time
the poem ends, we are in the fallen world, and that is only a painful memory for Manfred.
But Astarte, when she is summoned up as a spirit, says to Manfred very much what the
narrator of Don Juan says here—that it is Haidee’s love that is somehow, paradoxically,
responsible for the fall.
III
In her first passion woman loves her lover,
In all the others all she loves is love,
Which grows a habit she can ne’er get over,
And fits her loosely—like an easy glove,
As you may find, whene’er you like to prove her:
One man alone at first her heart can move;
She then prefers him in the plural number,
Not finding that the additions much encumber.
Here again, the narrator steps in to undercut the sentiment. We’ve just had one of the
most beautiful passages in the entire poem, and then the narrator says that women
eventually prefer men in the plural number. That kind of undercutting of sentiment that
causes us to delude ourselves.
V
‘T is melancholy, and a fearful sign
Of human frailty, folly, also crime,
That love and marriage rarely can combine,
Although they both are born in the same clime;
Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine—
A sad, sour, sober beverage—by time
Is sharpen’d from its high celestial flavour
Down to a very homely household savour.
Canto the Fourth, statza 8 reads
VIII
Young Juan and his lady-love were left
To their own hearts’ most sweet society;
Even Time the pitiless in sorrow cleft
With his rude scythe such gentle bosoms; he
Sigh’d to behold them of their hours bereft,
Though foe to love; and yet they could not be
Meant to grow old, but die in happy spring,
Before one charm or hope had taken wing.
Notice that Time, like Juan earlier, is “the foe to love.” Again, Haidee’s island is outside
of time, like all those mythic islands, and a “spot of time.”
IX
Their faces were not made for wrinkles, their
Pure blood to stagnate, their great hearts to fail;
The blank grey was not made to blast their hair,
But like the climes that know nor snow nor hail
They were all summer: lightning might assail
And shiver them to ashes, but to trail
A long and snake-like life of dull decay
Was not for them—they had too little clay.
X
They were alone once more; for them to be
Thus was another Eden; they were never
Weary, unless when separate: the tree
Cut from its forest root of years—the river
Damm’d from its fountain—the child from the knee
And breast maternal wean’d at once for ever,—
Would wither less than these two torn apart;
Alas! there is no instinct like the heart—
XI
The heart—which may be broken: happy they!
Thrice fortunate! who of that fragile mould,
The precious porcelain of human clay,
Break with the first fall: they can ne’er behold
The long year link’d with heavy day on day,
And all which must be borne, and never told;
While life’s strange principle will often lie
Deepest in those who long the most to die.
XV
All these were theirs, for they were children still,
And children still they should have ever been;
They were not made in the real world to fill
A busy character in the dull scene,
But like two beings born from out a rill,
A nymph and her beloved, all unseen
To pass their lives in fountains and on flowers,
And never know the weight of human hours.
So Byron’s vision is of paradise, and Byron shows us the snakes in the garden. On the
one hand, the snake is personified by Lambro. If they are children, he represents the adult
world, the larger society, the world of experience.
Byron’s last vision of Juan and Haidee is something different from anything we’ve
discussed so far in this section. See stanzas 70-72:
LXX
She died, but not alone; she held within
A second principle of life, which might
Have dawn’d a fair and sinless child of sin;
But closed its little being without light,
And went down to the grave unborn, wherein
Blossom and bough lie wither’d with one blight;
In vain the dews of Heaven descend above
The bleeding flower and blasted fruit of love.
LXXI
Thus lived—thus died she; never more on her
Shall sorrow light, or shame. She was not made
Through years or moons the inner weight to bear,
Which colder hearts endure till they are laid
By age in earth: her days and pleasures were
Brief, but delightful—such as had not staid
Long with her destiny; but she sleeps well
By the sea-shore, whereon she loved to dwell.
LXXII
That isle is now all desolate and bare,
Its dwellings down, its tenants pass’d away;
None but her own and father’s grave is there,
And nothing outward tells of human clay;
Ye could not know where lies a thing so fair,
No stone is there to show, no tongue to say
What was; no dirge, except the hollow sea’s,
Mourns o’er the beauty of the Cyclades.
Byron isn’t content to have Lambro’s anger and Haidee’s death be the final vision. As
you see here, he lets us know that Haidee is pregnant, and when she dies, that embryonic
life dies, as well. There is a kind of harshness and coldness about this vision.
The baby dies, and that’s what Byron shows us. The last sight we see, then, is Byron’s
vision of what a world without love and without heart would be like. The island is
desolate and bare. Ultimately, there is no hope in Byron’s poetry that art itself can
memorialize through all eternity, there is no dirge except the seas.
So as you try to come to terms with Byron’s point of view, you have to remember
passages such as this, as well as passages of heightened beauty and intensity.
There are more positive aspects of this part of the poem: Byron does speak of the
“enlargement of existence” as his ideal, and it is similar to a line in “Childe Harold.”
Byron is talking about the sublime aspects of nature, and he says: “there stirs the feeling
infinite.”
That is Byron’s view of love at its best. In moments of love, there is a kind of
transcendence of self, an expansion of the possibilities of being human, an “enlargement
of existence.” For Byron, this widening of the senses, this pleasure, is the closest we
come to infinity. This is his equivalent of Blake’s Albion, and Wordsworth’s Nature.
At the end of canto IV, stanza 72, love has become an illusion. We still can recover it in
the world of dreams and art. People read this part of the poem in three different ways:
1. Once we leave the Haidee Cantos, a kind of tenderness passes out of the poem, never
to return.
2. Another way to read it is that judgement and sanity start to chasten the feelings of the
heart, but that the heart, having once been enlarged, never forgets that. Judgement starts
to modify or erode the heart, but we never forget that enlargement of existence we once
had. A more hopeful reading.
3. One other way is to come back to the rhythm of the poem. These sorts of erotic
feelings that Juan and Haidee feel for one another are not lost—they come again and
again, wave after wave. What time and life and experience bring to to us over and over
again is love, both with its pain and its ecstasy. That’s what it means to be human in the
fallen world, to somehow try to deal with both of these facts, and try to live a human
existence.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Class 6
Probably the most famous part of Don Juan is Canto One. But there are two other famous
parts: the Haidee Cantos and the English Cantos.
In the Haidee Cantos we see the same sort of medley that is true of the poem as a whole.
Much of it represents the most sustained lyric vision in the poem, and in that sense there
is less variety and medley than in other parts.
But if you go back and re-read the episode, particularly at the conclusion of the Cantos
where the Haidee episode ends, we still have a lot of the digressions, themes of
mutability, literary criticism, and some harsh realism.
We have the medley, but what Byron portrays in the Haidee Cantos is “enlargement of
existence.” Looking at the way Byron pictures the lovers, it is his version of Romantic
idealism that we’ve seen in Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. This is what Wordsworth
calls a spot of time.
Byron once said that Greece and the Mediterranean represented the “greenest isles” of his
imagination. These are those wonderful islands in the stream that Byron contrasts very
vividly with the English climate of our years. They are islands, also in that they are set
off from time, and in that sense they are like the transcendental spots of time. That’s why
one of the snakes in the garden is Time.
Even Byron’s portrait of Juan and Haidee as children is similar in a way to some of the
Romantic expressions of children as being in a state of pre-self-consciousness. He
nostaglically creates a paradisal existence, a world that is not meant to grow old but can
only maintain its integrity outside of time, or be shortlived.
Be we can see in the Haidee Cantos not only this beautful expression of Byron’s ideal,
but we also see the way he characteristically associates it with the Fall, another major
recurring Romantic myth. Byron secularizes the Fall again.
What happens at the end of the Haidee episodes? There are a variety of readings that give
different emphasis on this. The narrator steps in and says that the heart can no longer be
his sole universe, his entire world, but what he gains from that experience is judgement.
We’ve seen that even in the works of the Byronic hero. In these works we have inner
conflict between the heart and the head. The Byronic hero is often referred to as a “titan
at war with himself.”
Perhaps a more precise way of talking about that dynamic in Don Juan is to see it as a
dialectic. In the dialectic, as Juan goes on, he gains judgement. The claims of the heart
are somewhow qualified by stronger claims of judgement and reason.
Some people pick up on that structure and give it a different emphasis. Gleckner picks up
on Byron’s references to “steeling” his heart. Byron also talks about dipping the heart in
the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.
What Juan learns is how to steel the heart against feelings and experience—he “mans”
himself, but becomes less of a human being while he becomes more of a man.
Others like Bloom would take it to more of an extreme and claim that there’s a tenderness
that passes out of the poem forever after this episode.
So you have on the one hand a description of a dialectic (Gleckner)—of restraining the
heart for sanity’s sake, a potentially positive thing. On the other hand, you have
something very negative and dark.
Then their are those like Anne Mellor who read this as the first of many repetitions of the
fall, and that that is what life is all about. That’s the way Wordsworth presents a spot of
time. There are those who would say that the central structure of The Prelude is its
repetitions of spots of time. So this is part of the humanizing process in Don Juan. That is
certainly realistic and perhaps very positive.
Mellor in Romantic Irony talks about those things in the work that can be transfiguring—
love, art (the poem itself, the creative exercise of the human mind), wine.
These are all instances of the enlargement of existence—the closest we get to divinity.
There are moments in which we summon what is most human about us, what is most
heroic.
In the case of Manfred, these are suffering, resistence, defiance. That was the occasion
for summoning that full humanity and knowing the divinity of our humanity.
In a work like Don Juan, Mellor would argue, the thing that allows us to do that is the act
of creating the poem itself, and love.
Ridenour points out Byron’s attack on art that tries to transcend. Byron gazes level with
life, rather than being the kind of transcendent seer.
In a more positive way, we can link art to the fall in the more traditional notion of
Christian humanism—that we are fallen, but that we would resurrect our fallen human
nature.
How do we do that? Through education. Thus, you have the attention to education in the
16th and 17th century. Art then becomes another way of learning, something to cultivate
in order to stand erect.
If we think of the Prometheus myth, Promethus gave human the ability to stand erect.
There are some passages in Don Juan where Byron is talking about the ability of art and
learning to counterbalance evil.
But the problem is that Byron has paradoxical notions about all of these things. On the
one hand, there’s sublime art, the grand style, the heroic—that’s something he attacks,
one of the many ways we deceive ourselves. What he wants to do in his epic satire is strip
away all those veils of pretense, cant and self-deception. Art then should allow us to see
life at its common place, its true place.
Many scholars quote the second stanza of Canto the Seventh when they want to talk
about the art of the poem. Byron claims that his work is,
A non-descript and ever-varying rhyme,
A versified Aurora Borealis,
Which flashes o’er a waste and icy clime.
When we know what all are, we must bewail us,
But ne’ertheless I hope it is no crime
To laugh at all things—for I wish to know
What, after all, are all things—but a show?
Critics who write about the art of Don Juan are talking about passages like that in which
Byron self-consciousnessly reflects upon what he is trying to do with this work of art
itself—what it is and what its relationship is to life. Thus, art can be another transfiguring
experience.
What’s the icy clime? The world, life. The Aurora Borealis is art. What’s he suggesting
about art?
Like love, there is something in art to counterbalance human ill. It exists in contrast. It’s
spontaneous. It’s privileged, it’s sublime.
It provides light, so we’re back to M. H. Abrams’s theory of art as a lamp, the
imagination beaming value onto the world, the brief illumination on the world. It’s
beautiful and magical. It’s an eruption, a convulsion. “Poetry is the lava of the
imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake.” (Source?)
It’s spontaneous but it’s also cathartic—it’s like that safety valve on a steam engine. It
also brings heat. Because below is a waste and icy clime, light brings the warmth, the
passion, the feeling.
“The great object of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even if in pain.”
To be a being more intense, that’s part of his goal. Here is something that contrasts with
ordinary existence. Reality is essentially a waste and icy clime, but there is something
else, something of redeeming value. That’s his poem. He is the showman on the platform,
and here’s the light he shines forth. When Byron talks about things he truly cares about
he does revert to the lanaguge of heroism, the grand style, Promethean aspiration.
But it is important also to see what he writes after this: “When we know what we all are,
we must bewail us.”
This isn’t what Wordsworth or Coleridge would say after celebrating a transcendent
image. Byron’s point is that art’s function is to reveal through the light it brings forth
what is real, what’s not pretense. Even if what is real is painful, the light of art beams
forth a truth that strips away cant, etc.
Here is life, a waste and icy clime. Art brings meaning into it, but art doesn’t present us
with transfiguring visions like that of Haidee very often. What it does in Byron most
often is unmask pretense and cant. And so the bitter vision of the satirist and the ironist
can be redemptive because it’s true and real, and that alone can be a healing experience.
Byron implies that there is a virtue in an honest look at the world as it is through art. The
whole problem is with people who try to deny what the world is all about. Sometimes
they try to do it with silly romantic notions.
Of course, this is just one way to read this passage. That’s not necessarily the way other
readers see it. Some say that it reflects Byron’s nihilism—that the world is a waste and
icy clime and that is all there is.
Art is instruction, too, for Byron. This is Byron’s allegiance to the poerty of Pope and
before that, Horace and the classical writers. The moral function of art to instruct.
On the other hand, he’s the archtypal Romantic man of feeling. And so the other purpose
of art is to display feeling, to escape certain kinds of feelings, and to portray certain other,
truer, kinds of feelings. It is important to feel as we write. So there are really two very
different views about the function of art coexisting in the same poem.
Byron makes this point himself near the end of the poem. In stanza 87 of Canto the
Fifteenth, he writes,
But if a writer should be quite consistent,
How could he possibly show things existent?
It is in the nature of life, according to Byron, for one to have this kind of double
consciousness. Remember Fairchild’s quote: “A mind too idealistic to refrain from
blowing bubbles, but too realistic to refrain from pricking them.”
Byron is a man of the world. He’s not a Laker. He’s not a fool. And if you’re not a fool,
you write about these beautiful moments. But then you’ve got to be true
to reality. That’s the realism of Byron.
So again, it’s the “slide pattern” of the poem. He’s got to undercut, because that’s being
true to life. We’re back to dialectic and Romantic irony. Life is made up of inconsistent,
paradoxical elements, and if we’re going to be true to life, a dual vision is the only kind
of vision that we can have.
On a psychological side, Byron is not this scientifically objective reporter whose telling
us: here’s this, and here’s its opposite. Byron simply yearns in this world. He feels he’s
too honest to let his yearning over take him. Honesty for him is yielding to the claims of
both heart and the mind.
To be honest for Byron is not just to realize that the heart and the head both have their
claims, but that they exist in conflict with one another. And here’s the rub: they also exist
in conflict with themselves. The heart has two enemies: the head and itself. Same with
the head. They are forever in unresolved conflict.
English Cantos and Mobility:
Byron hated system and relied upon process and experience. He saw the self as a set of
relationships, and as a process. The end of the Newtonian universe of fixed mathematical
laws led to a new view of the universe as process and organicism, and new imagery like
the drunken boat. Byron is always going to reject anyone, like Bishop Berkeley, who has
a system.
While it’s true that Juan is an innocent, scholars see the gap between Juan and the
narrator as narrower in the English Cantos.
Mobility: it’s not like being manic depressant, nor is it like being a moody person. It has
to do with a way of responding to experience. It’s not some kind of swing of the sort we
talked about in “Resolution and Independence.”
What is Byron suggesting about the relationship between the things outside of us, and
these changing, mobile feelings?
This isn’t insincerity: “Be not what you seem, but what you see.”
Certainly we can read that as a satiric attack on cant.
Somehow it’s connected to spontaneity.
How is Juan shown to possess mobility?
By the time Juan arrives in England, he’s really not the same person as he was in the
Haidee Cantos. There may be things he brings with him.
He seems adaptable—he becomes what he sees. The first simile Byron uses to describe
Juan in the beginning of the English Cantos is that he’s like “a skater gliding across the
surface of the ice.”
This is no longer the inexperienced innocent. He may not be corrupt, but this isn’t that
boy of the past who fell in love with Nature’s bride. He’s very adaptable.
How do women respond to him? They are attracted to him.
How does he reposnd to them? He’s the cameleon. It’s not the same as Keat’s cameleon
poet, but it’s close.
Harold Bloom says that what Byron does with mobility is take the great Romantic ideal,
and give it a realistic social vision. It’s one thing for Keats to be the cameleon poet, who
can delight in describing an Iago as well as an Imogen, or who felt he’d once connected
so closely to a billiard ball that he could feel its roundness. But it is similar in the ways
we come to know reality.
Juan was “pleased to be either what they made him or took him for.” That is, he almost
becomes the work of art itself, in adapting himself to society. He possesses and practices
the art of being at ease in all climes.
That’s not totally different from what he suggests about mobility in terms of Lady
Adeline. It’s adapability. It’s becoming a part of the world in which you live.
Now that sounds a lot like what he attacks in terms of cant, adapting to social codes,
mores, customs, habits. So why isn’t he attacking the mobility and adaptibility of Juan
and Lady Adeline? Why in fact does he admire it?
Because it’s not systematic. Other people structure and adapt their lives to organized
syatems, but these two take in anything because it is experience—it is truth because it is
real, it happened. That’s the truest way of reacting to experience—on its own terms.
What Byron is suggesting here is a style of living. This is the ultimate argument Anne
Mellor talks about in Romantic Irony. We’re not talking about a technique, but a way of
being in the world.
Mobility is not the same thing as Romantic irony, but it seems to fit under that general
umbrella. If you approach life with a system in hand—first of all it can only tell you what
the system itself allows and is prepared to except as information.
The truest way of life is one that is elastic—this is a lot like Keats and negative
capability. He too is trying to get away from system, because system will limit
information and therefore limit understanding. For Keats, you have to suspend whatever
it is that makes you a self or an ego.
That’s why for Keats the poet is the most unpoetical of all things. He has no self. He is
always becoming another being—a nightingale, an urn. Byron is taking that high
Romantic notion and socializing it.
The English Cantos:
What is he interested in in these cantos? What’s his basic point of view on English
society?
English society is static as compared to the process embodied in Romantic conceptions of
the universe, and in Byron’s art in Don Juan.
How does he classify the people of English society? As “the bores and the bored.”
This is a very serious issue, because the poem captures some kind of fin de siecle ennui
that is at the core of the society.
The reality of society, for Byron, is warfare. Byron talks earlier about other kinds of
warfare, now he transposes it onto English society. A man gets robbed on “Shooter’s
Hill,” which overlooks London.
What else is the real—the icy clime—that the Aurora Borealis of art illuminates?
A repeated attack is that society is cold. Byron exposes the sterility and frigidity od moral
norm as opposed to creativity and passion. Early in the poem he quips, “adultery is much
more common where the climate is sultry.” This is the opposite of the “English climate of
our years, where winter ends in July only to recomense in August.” This is a very serious
attack on their lack of heart and passions. In stanza 37 of Canto the Thirteenth, Byron
write,
What say you to a bottle of champagne?
Frozen into a very vinous ice,
Which leaves few drops of that immortal rain,
Yet in the very centre, past all price,
About a liquid glassful will remain;
And this is stronger than the strongest grape
Could e’er express in its expanded shape:
It’s similar here to Blake’s view of the “mind forg’d manacles.” There are all these selfimposed restraints upon feeling. The problem is that when you try to deny feeling, it
intensifies it, yes, but it also perverts it. Byron shows a people who are cold, but he also
shows that there is passion buried there. The problem is that it is corrupted, it’s perverted.
What does Byron say rules their lives? Money—cold cash. A part of the coldness of
society has to do with the power that’s going on here.
And the image of warfare is always buried here. Byron called himself the “grand
Napolean in the realms of rhyme,” and some readers see this as his Waterloo. It is a
sexual battlefield, but the real games have to do with power, money, position, lust
without love. It’s about marriage in disguise.
There is an earlier passage in the Haidee Cantos where he talks about the ritual of
marriage—he says that there is love, then a rich man comes along and buys the women,
then comes dressing, nursing, praying, and all’s over. It’s this kind of sterile ritual, a
contract going on, that he exposes. This is the sort of thing that Jane Austen writes about,
but Byron has an even harsher viewpoint that love in society is like warfare, and it’s
money, power, and position that really determine all the moves of the game.
In stanzas 62-69 of Canto the Fifteenth, the members of English society sit down to
dinner and Byron presents biting images of warfare:
LXII
Great things were now to be achieved at table,
With massy plate for armour, knives and forks
For weapons; but what Muse since Homer’s able
(His feasts are not the worst part of his works)
To draw up in array a single day-bill
Of modern dinners? where more mystery lurks,
In soups or sauces, or a sole ragoût,
Than witches, bitches, or physicians, brew.
LXIII
There was a goodly “soupe à la bonne femme,”
Though God knows whence it came from; there was, too,
A turbot for relief of those who cram,
Relieved with “dindon à la Périgeux;”
There also was—the sinner that I am!
How shall I get this gourmand stanza through?—
“Soupe à la Beauveau,” whose relief was dory,
Relieved itself by pork, for greater glory.
LXIV
But I must crowd all into one grand mess
Or mass; for should I stretch into detail,
My Muse would run much more into excess,
Than when some squeamish people deem her frail.
But though a bonne vivante, I must confess
Her stomach’s not her peccant part; this tale
However doth require some slight refection,
Just to relieve her spirits from dejection.
LXV
Fowls “à la Condé,” slices eke of salmon,
With “sauces Génevoises,” and haunch of venison;
Wines too, which might again have slain young Ammon—
A man like whom I hope we shan’t see many soon;
They also set a glazed Westphalian ham on,
Whereon Apicius would bestow his benison;
And then there was champagne with foaming whirls,
As white as Cleopatra’s melted pearls.
LXVI
Then there was God knows what “à l’Allemande,”
“À l’Espagnole,” “timballe,” and “salpicon”—
With things I can’t withstand or understand,
Though swallow’d with much zest upon the whole;
And “entremets” to piddle with at hand,
Gently to lull down the subsiding soul;
While great Lucullus’ Robe triumphal muffles
(There’s fame)—young partridge fillets, deck’d with truffles.
LXVII
What are the fillets on the victor’s brow
To these? They are rags or dust. Where is the arch
Which nodded to the nation’s spoils below?
Where the triumphal chariots’ haughty march?
Gone to where victories must like dinners go.
Farther I shall not follow the research:
But oh! ye modern heroes with your cartridges,
When will your names lend lustre e’en to partridges?
LXVIII
Those truffles too are no bad accessaries,
Follow’d by “petits puits d’amour”—a dish
Of which perhaps the cookery rather varies,
So every one may dress it to his wish,
According to the best of dictionaries,
Which encyclopedize both flesh and fish;
But even sans confitures, it no less true is,
There’s pretty picking in those petits puits.
LXIX
The mind is lost in mighty contemplation
Of intellect expanded on two courses;
And indigestion’s grand multiplication
Requires arithmetic beyond my forces.
Who would suppose, from Adam’s simple ration,
That cookery could have call’d forth such resources,
As form a science and a nomenclature
From out the commonest demands of nature?
Here Byron comes across very much like Pope in his use of epic similes, as in the “Rape
of the Lock.” The dinner is a polite disguise of the warfare that is really going on below
the surface.
Byron also evokes the cannibalism of the earlier canto. Dinner is also associated with and
parodies communion. He writes of “mess/Or mass”—the great hour of “union.”
Byron over and over again refers to their being cold, but there’s another word: polish.
The smooth facade, the vacuity, the shallowness—these are the characteristics Byron
espcies and eschews.
But he also says that about Lady Adeline. In this context, “polish” connotes attractiveness
and mastery.
What is Byron’s view of Lady Adeline?
When she sees Juan looking at Aurora Raby, she gets jealous. She is like a mother who
wants to be a matchmaker for Juan because she’s the grand dame of this particular social
set. But at the same time, she not aware that she’s very attracted to Juan.
In this regard she is a lot like Donna Julia: there’s some self-deception going on on her
part, as well. Aurora Raby challenges Lady Adeline’s sense of self. Again, it’s that
complex vision of Byron’s.
Juan doubts that Lady Adeline is real and he thinks her heart is vacant, that her heart isn’t
in love with her husband. This too sounds a lot like Donna Julia and Don Alfonso.
But Byron has a different view of her. Obviously her heart isn’t vacant because she has
feelings for Juan. She is the “fair most fatal Juan ever met.” She’s fatal because she’s a
possibility. Haidee is a fantasy—that relationship could never exist in the real world.
But Lady Adeline exists in this world. She is someone replete with human possibilities.
Byron criticizes Lady Adeline, but he also shows her virtue in mobility.
The polish links her with the world that he’s condemning, but for her it becomes
something else. Lady Adeline is much like the way Byron is beginning to describe Juan.
She too is someone who is at ease in all climes.
Why besides mobility is she attractive?
Many readers of Byron see Lady Adeline as representing the best of English society. For
her, the polish is something more than superficial charm. It’s the real charm of England.
She’s not so hypocritical. She may be deceiving herself, yes, but she’s not ruthlessly
hypocritical.
Aurora Raby is her polar opposite. Byron’s general take on Aurora Raby is that she is
mysterious, austere, that she lives in another world. She’s the star above the landscape.
She lives in a kind of paradise, a little like Haidee.
But Lady Adeline really is in this world—she’s a real women, and that’s why she’s
potentially more fatal than Aurora Raby, who is always at a remove.
The other pole to Lady Adeline is Fitz-Falk—the graceful graceless. She yields to her
appetites all the time. She has no self-control or integrity. Byron asks us to think about
the differecne between a woman like this and a woman like Lady Adeline, who does have
feelings that’s she’s unaware of.
While there’s something self-deceptive about her feelings for Juan, there’s also
something admirable. She’s not going to abandon her marriage to Sir Henry over a casual
one-night affair as Fitz-Falk would. If she does it, it is because she has some true feelings
for Juan.
Byron sets up the possibility that they might have an affair. He admires the kind of selfcontrol and self-discipline Lady Adeline has. That’s part of her polish.
This is the thrust of a lot of the scholarhsip in the 70s and 80s. The paradoxical nature of
the woman is important, especially of Haidee and Lady Adeline. Haidee springs to Juan’s
defense. There’s also a strength about Lady Adeline. It’s domesticated in the English
drawing room now. But they are similar in that respect.
The main thing to consider about Lady Adeline is this: it’s easy to pick up on the poem’s
many criticisms of her. He talks about her calm polish. He says that she is conjugal but
cold with her husband and knew not her heart, so there’s some self-deception about her.
Then there are cliches about Lady Adeline’s character. She’s marble without defect.
But he also says she’s a heroine at one point. We’ve got the passages about mobility. So
it’s important not to see her simply as a Donna Julia character. She represents something
different from the rest of society. She’s not one of the bores and the bored. She is
someone, given the options open to her as a woman, who represents the best that society
can offer.
Byron’s view of English society is not just that acid attack that we’ve talked about.
Byron’s reactions to his society are complex, just as they were for him as a person.
Think of the analogy that Byron was the “grand Napolean of the realms of rhyme.” We
have to remember that Byron has been in exile, so he sees himself as a kind of Napolean.
What he does is return England and meets his Waterloo in the form of Lady Adeline.
In Canto the Eleventh, stanza 67, he writes,
Then dress, then dinner, then awakes the world!
Then glare the lamps, then whirl the wheels, then roar
Through street and square fast flashing chariots, hurled
Like harnessed meteors. Then along the floor
Chalk mimics painting, then festoons are twirled, (decorative chains)
Then roll the brazen thunders of the door,
Which opens to the thousand happy few
An earthly paradise of ormolu.
(gilded brass used to ornament)
The tremendous excitement, glamor, charm, beauty of English society is depicted here.
One thing to keep in mind is the fact that, no matter how sharp Byron’s attack on society,
it doesn’t erase this kind of strong attachment to it.
Byron’s tone and point of view can be celebratory. Stanza 76 reads:
LXXVI
“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? ‘T was there—
I look for it—‘t is 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.
Here he feels the passage of time. This is an old literary motif that goes back to classical
literature, goes back to Anglo Saxon literature: “ubi sunt” or “where are they now.” In the
passage “‘Tis gone, a globe of glass, cracked, shivered, vanished, scarcely gazed on, ere a
silent change dissolves the glittering mass,” Byron is pointing out the fragility but also
the beauty ofthe world. Nostalgically, he rememberes it all.
Byron attacks the Englsih people for their moral frigidity—and here we come to the more
serious purpose of the poem. In one line, he directly says: You are not a moral people.
He’s talked about the “English climate of our years.” In Canto 12, he refers to “The
English winter ending in July only to recomense in August.”
As Byron looks at English society, he divides it into two classes. Society is one polished
hoard formed of two mighty tribes, “the bores and the bored.”
The great disease of England for Byron, then, is boredom, ennui. Everywhere is a kind of
cultural malaise.
He attacks this ennui as a kind of superficiality, and at the end of Canto 13, he says that
all that is aristocratic is “polished, smooth, and cold.” These are the controlling
metaphors that Byron uses for Englsih society. He’s talking about the superficiality of
society, something that lends itself easily to cant, which is the main object of his satire.
He’s also talking about a moral coldness that denies feeling.
Interestingly, though, when he gets to Lady Adeline, he’s going to use the same
metaphors, but in positive ways, because Byron’s vision was not a simple one.
Finally, Byron says that what underlies all of this is a love of money, of “cold cash.” It’s
not love that rules the world, but money.
Canto the Twelfth, stanza 13:
XIII
“Love rules the camp, the court, the grove,”—“for love
Is heaven, and heaven is love:”—so sings the bard;
Which it were rather difficult to prove
(A thing with poetry in general hard).
Perhaps there may be something in “the grove,”
At least it rhymes to “love;” but I’m prepared
To doubt (no less than landlords of their rental)
If “courts” and “camps” be quite so sentimental.
XIV
But if Love don’t, Cash does, and Cash alone:
Cash rules the grove, and fells it too besides;
The coldness of English society, for Byron, masked the ultimate reality of greed,
materialism, and money. That’s why cant is what he attacks. People talk about being
ruled by their passions, but he says, not in England.
Canto the Fourteenth, stanza 102, the last stanza:
CII
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 of ten
Of those who hold the kingdoms in control
Were things but only call’d by their right name,
Cæsar himself would be ashamed of fame.
Byron sees his journey, the picaresque wanderings of Don Juan, as ending in ‘antres vast
and deserts idle’ in the human soul. So it is a journey inward. And that human soul he
compares to both the North Pole, with its icebergs, and to self-love.
What happens to Juan when he enters England? Some interesting things. What he says of
Juan may seem to you to be a criticism, but I don’t think it is.
He begins by describing Juan as a skater on the ice. The image suggests that, if one is to
live successfully, survive and maintain one’s sanity in society, there is an art to that—the
art of escape. What’s interesting is that this is a dangerous sport, because beneath the thin
layer of ice is an abyss, the abyss of nothingness and meaninglessness.
“Be what you see, not what you are.” This may seem to be advocating hypocrisy, but it’s
not. He goes on the say about Juan: “Juan was all things unto people, of all sorts.”
What Juan has mastered is the art of living in all climes. There’s a cameleon-like
adaptabiliy in Juan, and Byron seems to value that. He says about Juan that he was “what
women pleased to make or take.”
The word that Byron uses to try to explain this is “mobility.”
He says this about Lady Adeline in stanza 97 of Canto the Sixteenth:
XCVII
So well she acted all and every part
By turns—with that vivacious versatility,
Which many people take for want of heart.
They err—‘t is merely what is call’d mobility, [*]
A thing of temperament and not of art,
Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;
And false—though true; for surely they’re sincerest
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.
She is playing a role. We can think of playing a role as hypocritical, and certainly Byron
is attacking the English for that. But here he is talking about playing a role, in terms of
trying to respond artfully to life.
It is ultimately a philosophy of response, and what lies behind it, is Byron’s assumption
that there is no system, no ultimate truth. Truth is not so much a thing as it is a process, or
a way. This is one of the most modern things in the poem. Truth is not some absolute.
Byron doesn’t believe in a world of absolutes, only in constant change and process. Truth
becomes a way of living humanly in this kind of world. And Byron chooses as the
concept to express all that as “mobility”—being able to respond to life on its own terms
with self-awareness, humor, and the intensity that comes from creativity. That is what
Juan ultimately exemplifies for Byron, and that’s what Juan admires in Lady Adeline.
We need to emphasize that Byron was very influenced by the 18th-century
novel, by Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Sterne and Austen.
There are a lot of similarities between Byron and Austen in the English Cantos, and
essentially what he is writing in the English Cantos is a novel in verse, a comedy of
manners.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Class 7
Paradox in Byron extends even to his concept of poetry; he has two very different
concepts of poetry that emerge from his works.
The first is a concept we associate with neo-Classical poetry, particularly Pope. It’s a
view that sees poetry has having a very serious moral function, that poetry does instruct
by delighting, and that oftentimes the form that has to take is satire.
In this poem, Byron presents it and emphasizes in his letters that it is a very serious,
satiric attack on cant, particularly in society. On the other hand, there is a kind of joie de
vivre in Byron that suggests something very different.
Byron is also in his own way the Romantic man of feeling, and does seem to share the
Romantic view that poetry is confessional, that it has its source in feeling, as Wordsworth
defines it in The Preface.
In Byron’s case, it’s not emotion recollected in tranquility—it’s emotion that comes out
as the lava of the imagination.
When Byron comes to the English Cantos, in the early Cantos about London, we have
recherchée du temps perdu . Byron is nostagically yearning, remembering the days that
once were. At times he has an enormously positive response to the charm and beauty of
English society, a kind of magic as life really erupts in the late evening in the English
aristocratic circles.
At the same time, that positive feeling is expressed with a kind of sadness, the ubi sunt
motif. There is a glory that has passed away from the earth, that Byron remembers during
those days in which he was “the Napoleon in the realms of rhyme,” in which he was the
leading lion in English society.
In the English Cantos, however, Byron quickly moves to a satiric attack on cant, on
verbal decorum that’s based upon self-deception. But he adds some new levels in the
English Cantos. He shows us an England that’s ruled by coldness. He announces this
metaphorically in his view of the “English winter which ends in July only to recommence
in August.”
And it’s a coldness because of the denial of natural feeling and a love of cold, hard cash.
Money and power rule the world.
When Byron looks at English society, he describes its coldness in terms of polish,
smoothness, marble—a reflection of all of the things Byron believes to be unnatural.
These motifs also signify the monotony of English life, which leads him to another
attack. He divides English society into “the bored and the borers.” A very serious issue
for him is ennui ; he talks about the racks of pleasure and ennui.
There’s a kind of decadence in society. In one sense he’s writing a bit out of touch
because he’s been away, and as I mentioned to you he seems completely unaware of the
evangelical spirit that is beginning to develop in England, with the rise of the middle
class, the celebration of progress and materialism.
But for him there’s the dangers of boredom. He talks about being a Columbus who sails
into the Northwest Passage of the human soul. What he finds there is an empty desert.
This is a serious, moral perspective.
He also describes a kind of sexual battlefield. But somehow sexual interplay, money and
power are all jumbled up together.
We talked about Lady Adeline; on the one hand, in his description of her cold, patrician
polish and Juan’s accusation that she’s conjugal but cold, we seem to see at first an
epitome of what Byron is attacking.
But many readers of Don Juan, particularly later scholars, see something very different.
They agree that Byron is satirizing her; she is practicing self-deception in her relationship
with Juan in ways that are not so different from what Donna Julia did with the young
Juan.
At the same time Byron seems to admire her charm. In her case, the polish reflects both a
coldnes but also a charm, a kind of self-control, self-discipline, that people like the
Duchess of Fits-Falk lack, in their complete abandonment to sensuality and pleasure.
This leads to the significance of mobility: it’s a kind of agility and flexibility and
openness ot the moment. Byron makes similar comments about Juan: he was what
women pleased to make him, or take him for, that he was at home in all climes.
So there’s something of the chameleon about Juan as well. Now there are ironies with
that, the irony that the natural man is at home anywhere. How natural is that? But
Byron’s vision is one in which Juan and that narrator begin to come closer together in
their ability not simply to passively be a puppet of events, but to respond to events with
mobility.
Ridenour talks a lot about paradox in Byron. It’s that, in certain of the most human of
situations, our actions at the same time make those experiences experiences of grace but
also lead to sin and destruction. It’s not that you can look at it either way, it’s that if you
look at it as Bryon does, it is both an occasion of transcendence and an occasion of sin.
In love, love does recreate paradox: it is an occasion of grace; at the same time, love is
destruction of itself. There’s a mystery about it. In the moment of going out to another
human being, we destroy them.
We’ve seen that going back to Manfred and Astarte, and we see it again with Haidee and
Juan the first time they embrace. There’s a poison creeping through her, at the same time
that there’s an enlargement of existence. It’s a paradox.
Byron’s notion about Promethean aspiration is the same thing. It is an occasion of
transcendence, but also an occasion of self deception, and foolishness and it leads to
flapping like a fish on the deck of a ship.
Most of the charges that Byron is a nihilist come from earlier writers. Scholars like
Mellor look at the chaos and they see that not as a problem but actually as a virtue.
Teleological writers find the presence of chaos a problem. Nihilism, though, goes beyond
this. Words like “despair,” “nothingness,” are the appropriate ones for scholars who are
essentially saying that Byron sees a world without any redeeming values at all. The root
meaning of “nihilism” comes from “nothingness.”
What are the bases of the charges of nihilism, for those kinds of responses to the poem,
that Bryon sees the world as ultimately not redemptive. What evidence is there for this in
the poem?
Many would say that he does put something in the place of nothingness—his own poem,
Pope, writers whom he admires, the great classical writers.
We’ve talked about Byron’s hatred of system. Readers who find Byron nihilistic are
saying there’s no system, but they’re saying that from a moral perspective, rather than
Byron’s ontological or epistemological perspective.
The writers who use the term nihilism aren’t talking about Byron’s view of the poets,
they’re talking about his view of human nature and existence and value. Is there anything
of value in the world as Byron sees it? Is there anything in this poem that provides at least
some justification for readers of and writers on Don Juan who have that reaction to the
poem?
What does Byron use as the image for the end of the Haidee Cantos? What specifically is
he referring to? Her unborn child with her. It’s not just Romeo and Juliet, both of them
taking poison. Byron goes further than he has to. There’s this unborn child who dies
without ever seeing life. Darker than we’d expect him to think.
It’s not that Byron doesn’t take a moral point of view. That’s a part of it, but that his
vision is of a world in which there’s nothing of value.
It’s first that love always ends this way. We’re not left with a vision of redemption that’s
possible. There’s a vision of redemption, but that always ends with the ruins of paradise,
to use Gleckner’s phrase.
What does Byron believe? Does he really believe in the transforming, transfiguring
redemptive power of love? And what’s the final image that we have?
In Canto the Seventh, stanza 6, Byron asks,
Must I restrain me, through the fear of strife,
From holding up the nothingness of life?
I want us not to completely leap over a hundred years of reading Byron to accept some
more contemporary interpretations of him.
By moral, I mean that not as a code but in terms of a sense of values. Is there anything in
life that gives it a meaning beyond mere day-to-day existence? Someone who’s a nihilist
would say no. Here Byron ends that stanza on the word “nothingness.” A nihilist is
someone who may believe that we have a reason to live, but it’s only taking each day one
step at a time, without any sense of anything that gives it value beyond mere existence for
its own sake.
What is Byron’s vision, and what does he do as a result of that, and what is the purpose
of this poem?
There are very positive ways of dealing with this, from Mellor, from Kierkëgaard. My
only point is, I’d like us to not completely blot out what many readers of Byron have
thought for many years, without at least pausing.
Think about the mad laugh, about Beckett and the absurd. To think of values in a world
like this is absurd, and the poem becomes a mad laugh. In fact, Byron writes at one point,
that he only wrote the poem to be “a moment merry.” It comes in stanza 5 in Canto the
Fourth:
V
Some have accused me of a strange design
Against the creed and morals of the land,
And trace it in this poem every line:
I don’t pretend that I quite understand
My own meaning when I would be very fine;
But the fact is that I have nothing plann’d,
Unless it were to be a moment merry,
A novel word in my vocabulary.
This may suggest his own purpose: life is absurd, but let’s pay our money and go to the
movies. Let’s write this poem.
Can you find other examples that people could use to support a view about nihilism?
There’s the shipwreck, the cannibalism. It’s not an accident that this beautiful love letter
that Byron has Donna Julia write about love, this letter that is her whole existence, gets
ripped up and uses as the lots to decide who lives and who dies. That’s a very dark vision,
and what does it say about the love between Juan and Julia?
Remember that in the moment of transfiguration with Haidee, the narrator suddenly says,
“he had quite forgotten Julia.” Here’s woman who’s given her whole life for him, and
she’s locked away in a convent for the rest of her years. Before his ship’s voyage is over,
she’s forgotten by him. What are we to make of that?
Then think in particular about “nothingness.” Remember in our discussion of the Aurora
Borealis—it flashes over a “waste and ice-filled clime.” If this is a wasteland, then is
there any England? That’s nihilism.
At the start of Canto the Seventh he writes,
I
O Love! O Glory! what are ye 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.
Here he’s lampooning heroic aspirations. It’s apocalyptic, but not in the way that we
talked about it with Blake and Wordsworth. It’s not that there’s world which ends only to
make way for the new Jerusalem. It’s the emphasis on the last days.
Byron has a poem you should read called “Darkness.” It’s apocalyptic in that sense. We
are struggling in darkness. Think of the concluding famous lines of Arnold’s “Dover
Beach.” Byron’s not saying that love can change that. His is, in these passages, that “we
are on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.” We’re chilled, we’re
chained, in some kind of post-holocaust future.
III
They accuse me—Me—the present writer of
The present poem—of—I know not what—
A tendency to under-rate and scoff
At human power and virtue, and all that;
And this they say in language rather rough.
Good God! I wonder what they would be at!
I say no more than hath been said in Danté’s
Verse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes;
IV
By Swift, by Machiavel, by Rochefoucault,
By Fénélon, by Luther, and by Plato;
By Tillotson, and Wesley, and Rousseau,
Who knew this life was not worth a potato.
‘T is not their fault, nor mine, if this be so—
For my part, I pretend not to be Cato,
Nor even Diogenes.—We live and die,
But which is best, you know no more than I.
Here’s Byron taking up the charge of nihilism. In his time it wouldn’t have been posed
that way, but people did regard it as an immoral poem. Throughout this poem, we get a
sense that all is vanity, the life is nothingness, that we die and we don’t know what
happens next.
At the start of Canto the Fourteenth he writes,
I
If from great nature’s or our own abyss
Of thought we could but snatch a certainty,
Perhaps mankind might find the path they miss—
But then ‘t would spoil much good philosophy.
One system eats another up, and this
Much as old Saturn ate his progeny;
For when his pious consort gave him stones
In lieu of sons, of these he made no bones.
That’s another image that’s like nothingness, the “abyss.” Very similar to what Mellor
and others mean by chaos. Byron is certainly using it in a negative sense.
Finally, look at the last two stanzas of Canto the Fourteenth:
CI
‘T is 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.
CII
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 of ten
Of those who hold the kingdoms in control
Were things but only call’d by their right name,
Cæsar himself would be ashamed of fame.
The narrator compares himself to a Columbus of the moral seas. That is an issue that
readers of Byron have always had to deal with. Today we have in the scholarship with
Mellor, Rajan, people using more contemporary theory, a very different take on this
issue.
One generalization is that at times of cultural crisis, what creates the crisis in culture is
that writers, artists, and thinkers reflect on the ruling myths of culture, compare those
myths to experience, and find that the two don’t match.
But then, the impulse of the writer is to look within for a myth that does work, like what
Joyce does in Portrait . His culture is in crisis, he does not believe in any of the ruling
myths; but what he does is create his own myths, a myth drawn from the self. He
becomes the hawk-like man. Wordsworth does the same thing in The Prelude.
Wordsworth has tradition crumbling at his feet. He can’t write Paradise Lost , he
certainly can’t write Pope’s “Essay on Man,” because that’s not what he sees. Instead he
turns inward, to the growth of the poet’s mind. It’s those spots of time that create the
structure. His metaphor is “lost”—lost to the world that’s known, fixed, and mystified by
mists.
It appears as if there’s no irony at all in the Haidee Cantos. On the other hand, if you read
the section as a whole—particularly the beginnings and ends of cantos—you’ve got the
narrator coming in with comic comments that work to qualify what you’ve got in the
lyric celebration of Haidee.
What ultimately does Byron want to accomplish in this poem, what’s his point of view?
Why is there so much disagreement among readers of Don Juan?
Look at the start of Canto the Eleventh and Byron’s passages about Bishop Berkeley.
I
When Bishop Berkeley said “there was no matter,”
And proved it—‘t was no matter what he said:
They say his system ‘t is in vain to batter,
Too subtle for the airiest human head;
And yet who can believe it? I would shatter
Gladly all matters down to stone or lead,
Or adamant, to find the world a spirit,
And wear my head, denying that I wear it.
II
What a sublime discovery ‘t was to make the
Universe universal egotism,
That all’s ideal—all ourselves!—I’ll stake the
World (be it what you will) that that’s no schism.
Oh Doubt!—if thou be’st Doubt, for which some take thee;
But which I doubt extremely—thou sole prism
Of the Truth’s rays, spoil not my draught of spirit!
Heaven’s brandy, though our brain can hardly bear it.
Byron begins by wanting to be honest, simple, true, to talk about what is common and
real, as opposed to our self-deceptive illusions. Here he argues that the only way to ever
be true to thine own self is through doubt.
Look at stanza 88 from Canto the Fifteenth:
LXXXVIII
If people contradict themselves, can I
Help contradicting them, and every body,
Even my veracious self?—But that’s a lie:
I never did so, never will—how should I?
He who doubts all things nothing can deny:
Truth’s fountains may be clear—her streams are muddy,
And cut through such canals of contradiction,
That she must often navigate o’er fiction.
Someone who doubts cannot deny, at least not in the way that the atheist does. It’s more
like the agnostic. For Byron, being honest is about being led to doubt.
Look again at the start of Canto the Fourteenth:
I
If from great nature’s or our own abyss
Of thought we could but snatch a certainty,
Perhaps mankind might find the path they miss—
But then ‘t would spoil much good philosophy.
One system eats another up, and this
Much as old Saturn ate his progeny;
For when his pious consort gave him stones
In lieu of sons, of these he made no bones.
II
But System doth reverse the Titan’s breakfast,
And eats her parents, albeit the digestion
Is difficult. Pray tell me, can you make fast,
After due search, your faith to any question?
Look back o’er ages, ere unto the stake fast
You bind yourself, and call some mode the best one.
Nothing more true than not to trust your senses;
And yet what are your other evidences?
III
For me, I know nought; nothing I deny,
Admit, reject, contemn; and what know you,
Except perhaps that you were born to die?
He talks about system again, but concludes with being true, with the fact that he knows
nothing, except that we die.
So we’ve got these passages about nothingness, which we’ve got to take seriously, but
then we’ve got these passages about doubt which we have to take just as seriously.
One way to deal with a vision of nothingness, and a kind of intellectual commitment to
skepticism and doubt is to think about “mobility.” Byron may be urging us to take the
moment and try to find what’s of value in the moment, because there’s not a system,
unless it’s nothingness. That’s one way of looking at it. There are other ways of dealing
with this aspect of the poem.
What Byron suugests is that you are responding to the moment, but without losing the
past. It’s not complete relativism and subjectivity. There’s some kind of context that
informs that response to the present moment. I think that’s what he means by “without
losing the past.”
The question is, what is the meaning of the past? It’s not really the past, it’s what
previous experience does. It gives you judgement, it checks feeling, and the completely
unfettered soaring of human passion.
The past also provides the next opportunity for something meaningful, that somehow his
relationship with Haidee is leading to something that is possible in the real world, with
Lady Adeline, or with Aurora Raby.
Because Haidee is a myth. It could never happen apart from within the human
imagination. It could happen with Lady Adeline. It might not; that could be another fall.
It could happy with Aurora, because he’s left the world of myth for the world of society
and politics.
What Byron holds up for us is not an oracle—that’s what Wordsworth does, what Blake
does, what Coleridge does. What Byron holds up is an exemplum.
What we are to learn is not some transcendent idea, some vision; we’re simply to see
someone experience life in a humanly productive way. That’s not what Wordsworth
comes to, or at least it’s a minor point.
Wordsworth is an exemplum, but what we come away with is thinking that “there are
huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men,” but which rolls through all
things. Or we end with the sense that the imagination is an awful power which can show
us past, present and future all at once.
With Byron there are no transcendent truths or visions. But there’s this image of how to
live. What is that image, though? What should we live according to Don Juan?
We do have those examples, like Haidee, even if they’ve always ended in ruin before.
They’re there, and they exist in counterpart.
Also, in terms of a “roll with the punches” philosophy, there are those who would say
about this poem that what he shows us is that life is not about action, but about reaction.
That is, there are no systems that are true, “No Natural Religion” as Blake puts it. And so
our only guide is not some set of ideas, but some way of being and reacting. This is
Romantic irony as Mellor defines it. We can only react in the most human way. And that
is with the kind of agility, good humor, wit—all of the things that break out in this poem
when that Aurora Borealis flashes.
We can also think about something in Rajan’s book, coming from Kierkegaard. There are
people who, if what they suddenly realize that there is no such thing as The Truth, the
response is great anxiety, depression, and a feeling that life has no meaning. That’s not
Byron’s response.
Byron responds more this way: If there is no such thing as The Truth, what a relief! I can
spend my life as freely and creatively as I want. There’s not some code or system that the
world inscribes that I’ve got to live up to. It’s the ultimate freedom.
Truth, then, doesn’t become some absolute universal. Truth simply becomes a process, a
way of dealing with what’s true to the moment in a Socratic way. Mobility suggests the
same thing.
Remember though that Byron does believe in love, in freedom, and he’s willing to die in
Greece for freedom. He does claim that there has been a glory which has passed away
from the world. And what better place to see that in all of its reality than Greece—one of
the cradles of civilization that is now on its knees. And if one could bring it back, just as
if one could find Haidee or Aurora or Lady Adeline, certainly Juan has shown us in the
poem that he’s going to die every time.
On one hand, we’ve got to realize that paradox, inconsistency and doubt are very
important in this poem. So we’ve got Byron on the one hand saying about his heart, “no
longer can thou be my sole world, my universe.”
That’s at the end of Canto the First. In the very next canto, there’s this scene in which
Lambro returns. One of the most beautiful scenes in the whole work. He looks down on
this island paradise that he’s created, and the line the narrator uses (I think it’s supposed
to be a kind of indirect reporting of what Lambro thinks), is “without parts is no whole.”
I think that Byron always believed that. In the last cantos, while we’ve talked about Juan
moving closer to the narrator, perhaps the narrator moves a little closer to Juan because
Byron becomes aware that he too is in danger not only of a stasis, but of sterility, of the
kind of ennui that he sees in his own society. Maybe he fears that his own heart could
become that kind of desert.
Look at the end of Canto Fourteenth:
XCVII
Whether Don Juan and chaste Adeline
Grew friends in this or any other sense,
Will be discuss’d hereafter, I opine:
At present I am glad of a pretence
To leave them hovering, as the effect is fine,
This isn’t completely definitive because it lacks that humor, that joy of life, but in terms
of Byron’s intellectual vision, this comes as close as anything else to capturing it. There’s
a word there that’s crucial: “hovering.” That’s what mobility is about, and Romantic
irony: hovering.
It’s a state of in-betweeness that conveys a sense of tension, and that’s what Byron
always is about: a sense of life as process.
On the one hand there is a darkness to the vision because human life is seen against the
backdrop of forces that we can never change, or affect. There’s the final image of sic
transit gloria mundi , but there’s also the image of the new bubbles. There’s this eternal
process.
So “becoming” is important; this is Schlegel again, and the possibilities of renewal with
it. So think about that, and about our discussion of the Aurora Borealis, that art can
illuminate the world.
But in Byron’s case it’s not like the transcendental seer, it’s not always a vision that takes
us beyond this world. In fact, in this poem, it’s often a vision that simply forces us to
confront the facts, if you’re going to be honest and true.
The hypocrisy, the cant, the self-deception that underlies many of our activities—Byron
feels that we can’t live human lives if we fool ourselves like that. That is what much of
human life is about. If we’re going to move onward, we’ve got to see life for what it is.
But then there is a kind of pleasure and magic in art in doing that.
But I guess the last line I’d leave you with is a little different. It comes right after the
passage about Bishop Berekely:
that which after all my spirit vexes,
Is, that I find no spot where man can rest eye on,
Without confusion of the sorts and sexes,
Of beings, stars, and this unriddled wonder,
The world, which at the worst’s a glorious blunder—
I think that’s Byron’s vision—that the world is a glorious blunder, chaotic, paradoxical,
and we have to doubt everything. But for all it’s coldness, it’s a “glorious” blunder.
In this poem you can’t call Byron an idealist, not solely that, but I don’t think you can
call him a cynic either. It’s realism. Life is made up of those moments of transcendence,
of enlargement of existence, but they’re rare, they don’t last; it’s also a world of cruelty,
of warfare, and you’ve got to be realistic.
But Byron also becomes much more accepting in this poem. Imperfection, blunders—we
simply have to accept that, and then be as human as we can in that world.
There is alternation, of blowing bubbles and pricking them. But rather than see alterations
that are separated in time and space, the poem is about the hovering in moments that
involve both at the same time, just as there are occasions for grace and sin at the same
time.
For Byron, art instructs, even if the vision is a vision of nothingness, skepticism, paradox,
imperfection. That’s the function of art, to make us see life steadily.
As Byron gets further into the poem, there is more and more digression. Mellor makes a
point about that, that links Byron in interesting ways to the other Romantics. She talks
about digression as violation.
In Blake, we had the Promethean hero who violates the moral order of the universe.
Byron does that, but he does it through digressions. They violate linear structure, time
and place, logic. And that then is the great freedom of poetry.
Feminist readings of Byron would certainly emphasize Byron as appropriating women—
being very narcissistic, seeking himself in women. At the same time, those are potentially
transcendent, transfiguring experiences. Those are moments in which there can be an
enlargement of existence.
Byron doesn’t believe in religion in either an evangelical or a fundamentalist way; that’s
as close as we get to what the religious try to articulate as the divine.
With Byron, that isn’t presented as the option in the way that Arnold presents it as the
only option in “Dover Beach.” Arnold says, at least let us be true to one another. It’s the
private, subjective solution.
For Byron, there’s wit, art, and ultimately, mobility. It’s just in day-to-day life, living
humanly. In that sense he reminds me a lot of Jane Austen. For Austen, it’s the reflective
ability that gives us the freedom to make life something other than a business transaction.
That’s a part of Byron’s vision, the most dramatic, sublime expression in Don Juan.