Byron: Heritage and Legacy (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Byron Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull The nineteenth century invented major f...

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Byron

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory. PUBLISHED BY PALGR AVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson

FORTHCOMING TITLES: The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in 19th Century Literary Culture, by Lynn Parramore

Byron He ri ta g e a nd Leg a c y

Edited by Cheryl A. Wilson With a Foreword by Charles E. Robinson and Introduction by Bernard Beatty

BYRON

Copyright © Cheryl A. Wilson, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60029–4 ISBN-10: 0–230–60029–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Foreword Charles E. Robinson

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

List of Abbreviations Introduction Bernard Beatty

Part I 1

2

xiii 1

Byron’s International Reception

Byron’s “Fragments of Stone” in the American Court of Appeals Nora Liassis “To be redde on the banks of the Ohio!”: Byron in Nineteenth-Century American Culture Peter X. Accardo

3 Byron’s Influence on Early Canadian Literature Tracy Ware

7

21 25

4 Teaching Byron en Acadie: “Elle vous suit partout” Paul M. Curtis

35

5 Claiming a “Great Briton” for Bulgaria: Reflections on Byron’s Bulgarian Reception (1880s–1920s) Ludmilla K. Kostova

45

6 The Transformations of the Byron Legend: Methodological Reassessment Mirosława Modrzewska

61

vi

Contents

Part II Influences on Byron’s Work 7

Byron and the Dragons of Eden Marilyn Gaull

8

My Brother’s Keeper: The Biblical Heritage in Byron’s Cain Wolf Z. Hirst

9 10

Lord Byron, Virgil, and Thyrza Philip J. Cardinale The Handling of Hebrew Melodies Tom Mole

73

83 93 103

11 One Ton per Square Foot: The Antecedents of The Vision of Judgement Peter Cochran

115

12 Heritage and Innovation in Byron’s Narrative Stanzas Catherine Addison

127

13 Inheriting Humors, Legating Humor: The Will of Manfred Bernard Beatty

139

Part III Byron’s Literary Inheritors 14

15

16

The Gloom and Cheerfulness of Childe Harold and Elizabeth Bennet Shobhana Bhattacharji

151

Byron and Wordsworth: Satan’s Neoclassical and Romantic Heirs Jonathon Shears

165

Transgressing Romanticism: Byron and Heine’s Carnevalesque Use of Romantic Irony Alexandra M. Böhm

177

17 Byron, Darwin, and Paley: Interrogating Natural Theology Christine Kenyon Jones

187

18

197

Byronic Anger and the Victorians Andrew M. Stauffer

Contents

vii

Afterword The International Byron Conference, August 2001: Ideas, Inspirations, and Aftershocks Compiled by Cheryl A. Wilson

207

Appendix

223

Bibliography

233

Notes on Contributors

251

Index

257

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Foreword

I

n the Dedication to Don Juan, Byron counseled the Lake poets to “change your lakes for ocean” and expressed an internationalism that has been central to the International Byron Society and to the various national committees that have hosted Byron conferences for more than thirty years in Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, as well as the United States of America. I was privileged to act as host for two separate ten-day conference/tours at the University of Delaware, the first in 1979 and the second in 2001, the latter actually beginning in Boston (for two overnights); moving by way of the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, to New York City (for three overnights); and eventually arriving at the University of Delaware (for four overnights). This 2001 conference was larger and more international than the first, the Byron world having grown in the twenty-two intervening years. Sixty-eight individuals proposed or submitted papers, thirty-nine were selected by the program committee, and a hundred and fifty-five individuals (from twenty different countries) registered for and attended the conference. The papers were delivered in such venues as the Colonial Inn, Concord, Massachusetts; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the New York Public Library, with the hosts being the Keats-Shelley Association and the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection; the Pierpont Morgan Library; New York University; the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware; and the University of Delaware. Of these thirty-nine conference papers, eighteen are printed herein by authors representing the Republic of Bulgaria, Canada, the Republic of Cyprus, Germany, India, Israel, Poland, South Africa, United Kingdom, and United States. (Other countries represented by additional speakers and participants were the Republic of Armenia, France, the Republic of Georgia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Lebanon, Lithuania, the Republic of Montenegro, and Romania.) Such an international road show required great planning and incurred many debts, and thanks are especially due to Peter X. Accardo, Marilyn Gaull, Marsha M. Manns, Jack G. Wasserman, and

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Foreword

Cheryl A. Wilson for all of their excellent planning: almost all buses ran on time, and almost all schedules were kept. Scores of others should be named here, but space allows for only Bernard Beatty, Doucet Fischer, Kainoa Harbottle, Elizabeth Karlin, Gail Lanius, Kevin McCullen, Connee McKinney, Pansy Michaels, Jan O’Neill, Alvin “Roby” Roberson, and Nanette Robinson. I fondly recall Jack Wasserman bullying the Byron Board of Directors to undertake this conference at a time when others, including myself, urged delay—and had we delayed, the effects of 9/11 might have canceled any attempt for a conference in 2002 or in subsequent years. As indicated in the afterword to this volume, the conference participants stayed at the Millenium Hotel that faced the Twin Towers—and we were there five weeks to the day before the tragedy of September 11, 2001, when the Millenium itself almost came to an end. Wasserman (with whom I exchanged almost daily e-mails for more than a year) is also acknowledged here as the one who raised the most funds so that we could offer each of the forty speakers and some of the session chairs a bursary: indeed, half of the $40,000 raised provided grants to fifty participants. Again, space prevents me from listing all of the donors, but I here acknowledge the following “Distinguished Benefactors”: Randolph H. Guthrie, MD; William Lese; Peter Myrian; David P. and Louise Roselle; Mrs. Dorothy Wasserman; Joseph Byron Yount III; the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Foundation; the British Consulate General (New York); the Byron Society of America; the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; the Greek Consulate (New York) and the Government of Greece; the Hellenic University Club of Wilmington, Inc.; the Keats-Shelley Association of America; and the University of Delaware. Among other donors were Geoffrey Bond and the Trustees of the Maureen Crisp “Young Scholars Fund.” Those who inquire may request a copy of Peter Accardo’s “Byron in Nineteenth-Century American Culture,” the exhibition catalogue prepared for the displays at the Houghton Library, Harvard University from . The conference program and the exhibition catalogue will return all the participants in the conference and many of the readers of this volume to an earlier time of innocence. CHARLES E. ROBINSON University of Delaware United States of America

Ack nowledgments

I

am grateful to the participants in the 2001 International Byron Conference, particularly those who chose to share their work through contributions to this volume, and to the members of the International Byron Society and the board of the Byron Society of America for their support of this project, especially Charles E. Robinson and Bernard Beatty. I would also be remiss in not mentioning my invaluable graduate assistants Jill Wagner, who tirelessly assisted with the preparation of the essays, and Melissa Lingle-Martin, who worked with the proofs. I would like to thank the publishers of the following works for their kind permission to reprint all or parts of several of the essays collected here that have appeared previously in print. Some of the material in “Byron, Darwin and Paley: Interrogating Natural Theology” by Christine Kenyon Jones appears in her book Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001). “The Handling of Hebrew Melodies” is reprinted from Essay 6 of Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2007). Philip J. Cardinale’s essay “Lord Byron, Virgil, and Thyrza” originally appeared in Vergilius 48 (2002) 55–66. Peter Cochran’s essay “One Ton per Square Foot: The Antecedents of The Vision of Judgement” appeared in the Keats-Shelley Review 19 (2006): 64–75. And, a version of Catherine Addison’s essay “Heritage and Innovation in Byron’s Narrative Stanzas” appeared in The Byron Journal 32 (2004): 9–20. The quotation from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow manuscript journal (MS AM 1340 183) in Peter Accardo’s essay appears by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University and the Trustees of the Longfellow House Trust. CHERYL A. WILSON

Indiana University of Pennsylvania United States of America


Abbreviations

George Gordon Byron. Byron’s Letters and Journals. 13 vols. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. London: John Murray, 1973–1994. CHP Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in CPW. CMP George Gordon Byron. The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Ed. Andrew Nicholson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. CPW George Gordon Byron. The Complete Poetical Works. 7 vols. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980–1993. DHA Heine, Heinrich. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke Düsseldorfer Ausgabe. Vol. 6. Ed. Manfred Windfuhr. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973– 1997. DJ Don Juan in CPW. KSA II Schlegel, Friedrich. Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. Ernst Behler. Vol. 2. Munich: Thomas-Verlag, 1958. KSA XVIII Philosophische Lehrjahre 1796–1806 nebst philosophischen Manuskripten aus den Jahren 1796–1828. Ed. Ernst Behler. Vol. 18 of Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe. Ernst Behler, gen. ed. 35 vols. 1958. Paderborn et.al.: Schöningh, 1963. MS AM Manuscript Journal: 1829. MS Am 1340 (183) Houghton University Library, Harvard University. BLJ


I n t roduc t ion Bernard Beatty

B

yron: Heritage and Legacy, theme of the conference and of this collection has three terms: Byron, Heritage, Legacy. It is important that there are three terms and not just two. From one point of view, this book is about historical contexts. From another point of view, it is about Byron. Byron, I think, would approve. He set himself against the separation of poetry from life, from history, from politics, from ethics, and from thought. He set himself against the separation of English culture from European culture and world events. He was interested in the world, and the world was, and remains, interested in him. This book is about Byron and his worlds, and about Byron’s words. Here, then, are eighteen essays by scholars from the United States, Canada, Western and Eastern Europe, South Africa, Israel, and India, on a range of subjects and contexts that Byron would recognize instantly as some of his own major interests—the Bible, Virgil, prehistory, scientific theories, animals, national cultures, the relation of religion to ethics and aesthetics, and the thought and writings of his own contemporaries. And Byron would think it perfectly proper to see these disparate things gathered together in a primarily literary context much as he was used to in the journals of his own times— such as the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review. We, by and large, no longer take the naturalness of this association for granted and come at it in more consciously constructed ways. That is one context for this volume. But there is another that derives directly from these “more consciously constructed ways.” In the flurry of theories, countertheories, and antitheories, which have formed, disrupted, and partly erased the history of what used to be called “literary criticism” in the past fifty years, the word “contexts” has assumed a more aggressive and less ancillary force. For some, the entity “literature” is no more than a chimera generated by different contexts. There is nothing to attend to, it is suggested, other

2

Bernard Beatty

than the contexts themselves, in themselves and in their intersections. Byron’s poetry, on this view, is simply a meeting of the waters—be they economic, sociopolitical, or broadly historical and cultural. The present volume does not take or proceed from a theoretical position here, but, of course, it is of its time and gladly presents itself as part of a growing interest in the relation of literary texts to other and to extraliterary contexts. Nevertheless, a reading of it will suggest that Byron’s poems and letters have an attracting shape and force of their own which is not conferred by context alone. Byron detested the separation of poetry from life, but he did not think that poetry was simply to be explained by things external to its own fashioning. He was, roughly speaking, a classicist here. His poetry is meant to be attended to in itself and in relation to its concerns and what brings it about rather than bypassed or swallowed up by some other governing drive or explanatory language. There is, and not by accident, a more than intermittent concern with the close reading of Byron’s text in the following pages. Hence the three terms of the title are meant. This book is about Byron, man and poet, and it is a book about contexts. That, I think, is how it should be. Etymologically, “context” derives from contexere (“weaving together”). Byron’s life and his poetry weave many different things together and so does this book. But “weaving” implies threads and pattern. It is a spatial, not a temporal, term. “Heritage” and “Legacy” do not work like this. They imply a “before” and an “after.” What particular past did Byron derive his ideas and forms from? What effect did his ideas and forms have on the particular future that separates and joins us and him? These are also primary concerns of this volume. Many essays examine them explicitly; most do so implicitly. Once again, we must not make the mistake of making Byron vanish into these things or imagine that he is simply held together at the point where they meet. We understand him better through them, but they do not explain him away. Yet who else but Byron, in his Ravenna Journal, would choose to define poetry in this way: “What is Poetry?—The Feeling of a Former World and a Future”? This volume takes Byron at his word and tries to trace something of that “Former World and a Future” as both heritage and legacy. The structure of the book naturally follows from these considerations. The three sections roughly correspond to past, present, and future, on the one hand, and to outer and inner frames of Byron’s own ideas and practices, on the other. They do not do so in an absolutely rigid fashion, for this would make contexts superior to what they contextualize. Byron was much concerned with the defense of fact,

Introduction

3

disliked obscurantism, and resisted the idea that poetry was simply a fiction unrelated to the true and the good—but his definition of poetry begins with the word “Feeling.” We cannot wholly know the past and can only guess at the future. Knowledge, in Byron’s view (Manfred has much to say on the subject), can never wholly grasp its object. We might go further and agree with Manfred that knowledge tends to paralyze or kill what it most seeks to know in its particular living form by seeing it only as an object. Poetry and literary scholarship must try to proceed with more delicacy than this and not make impossible the blurred but real recognitions and insights that Byron intends by the word “Feeling.” We hope that this book works as a whole not only to make some specific points and investigations that invite words like “perspectives” and “overview,” but also to suggest more tactile and under the surface kinds of connection. The first section of the book utilizes the international character of its contributors to examine the multinational reception of Byron’s poetry and personality. This is one aspect of “legacy.” It thus forms a helpful parallel to Richard Cardwell’s edited two-volume collection of essays on The Reception of Byron in Europe (2004), but the present essays have a broader, often extra European, and also a less systematic perspective. The second section of the book bears on Byron himself in relation to ideas and forms which he receives and generates from Hebraic and Latin originals, from scientific discoveries, and to the specifically critical reading of his own texts and verse forms. They concern Byron in himself and what he draws upon or inherits as his “heritage.” These things cannot be wholly separated but they can be distinguished, and they demand different kinds of attention. This is the centre of the book. The final section is mainly concerned with Byron’s immediate, and immediately succeeding, contexts of authors and writers. The presence here of Wordsworth and Heinrich Heine, or Paley and Darwin, will not surprise us though the perspectives taken may, but we are less prepared for a comparison between Byron and Jane Austen or for Byron’s influence on Victorian Anger. So much for the shape of the volume. But it had its own shaping by its own “before and after” and, after some thought and discussion— which were not cut off from “Feeling”—the editor and publishers thought it right to make this relation to time and event explicit and incorporate it into the book. Everything written in these pages was conceived and delivered in earliest form not long before September 11, 2001, in the United States (at Boston, New York, or Delaware). Most of the contributors, including me, stayed in the Millenium Hotel

4

Bernard Beatty

immediately opposite the Twin Towers, which dominated the view out of my bedroom window. It is impossible to forget these circumstances. I think the decision by the editor and publishers to record this is a brave and correct one. “Heritage and Legacy” reads rather differently now. No one had a stronger sense of the interrelation of contingency, politics, history, feeling, and thought than Lord Byron. These interrelations form his subject matter and inform his forms. It would be odd if this volume, produced in and across the circumstances of 2001 to the present, did not incorporate them somehow into its text, and so there is an afterword in which contributors briefly describe their sense of New York before the catastrophe and after. It would not be appropriate for me to say any more than this except that I think that the volume is the better for it, and that Byron would have approved of this too.

Pa rt I

Byron’ s International R eception


1

By ron’s “Fr agm e n ts of St on e” i n t h e A m e r ic a n C ou r t of A ppe a l s Nora Liassis

Byron never visited Cyprus, although some of his friends did.

“‘Cyprus—is an Island I have long been sick of—” he told Holland in an erotically loaded comment on Greek mythology (BLJ 3: 31). All the same, he would have been gratified to know of the historic link forged between his name and verse and a small village church on the northern peninsula of the island. In October 1990, the chief judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Indiana handed down a landmark ruling befitting the sentiment of a Romantic poet outspoken in his stand against the dismantling of the Parthenon. This essay considers the validity of Byronic reference in this far-reaching decision, which set a legal precedent for concerted campaigns against the illicit global trade in antiquities. Under appeal from the Federal Court in Indiana was the fate of celebrated victims of Cyprus’ troubled history. Four sets of wondrous religious mosaics, dated sixth century AD, had long been regarded as rare masterpieces, indeed holy relics, of early Byzantine art: “Remnants of things that have pass’d away,” noted the judge. The opening statement of the Court’s Subject Opinion was a twelveline quotation from the “temple in ruin” scene of The Siege of Corinth (1816), specifically lines 450–61 connecting Alp’s meditation at the temple interlude with the apparition of Francesca, an ostensibly

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Nora Liassis

Romantic encounter negated by a phantom maiden and Alp’s choice of an “immortality of ill” (Siege 605). Byron in 1809 had passed by the ruins of Roman Corinth, with the Acrocorinth fortress towering overhead, near the spot where Paul had surveyed this great cosmopolitan city, despised that very temple with its rampant hedonism, and addressed his letter on love. Byron told Leigh Hunt in 1816 (regarding Siege and Parisina) that he was “so partial to their place (& events connected with it) that I have stamped them while I could” (CPW 3: 479). “Byron,” says the judge, “writing here of the Turkish invasion of Corinth in 1725, could as well have been describing the many churches and monuments that today lie in ruins on Cyprus, a small, war-torn island in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea” (Trial 5).1 Although court judgments are not prefaced with Romantic verse, Chief Judge William Bauer, a history major, was “filled with the historical significance of the mosaics and suggested that Lord Byron should have had the responsibility for the writing” (Bauer). His associate Joseph Heyd, a Byron student, produced his copy of The Siege of Corinth to inspire the content of the findings. Together, sharing Byron’s poetic sympathies, they wrote up a compelling intertextual exchange on the moral and cultural legacy of Romantic “ruins of empire” within a contemporary framework for justice. At the strategic crossroads of three continents, Cyprus has 9,000 years of civilization, and European travelers often felt compelled to comment on the bequest of history. Byron’s Cambridge friend, Professor Edward Clarke, touring Cyprus in June 1801, remarked on “this island that had so highly excited us and amply gratified our curiosity by its most interesting antiquities” (315). And a later visitor, Byzantinist Robert Byron, heading for Oxiana in 1933, pronounced, “History in this island is almost too profuse. It gives one a sort of mental indigestion” (6). Under a legion of invaders and rulers Cyprus witnessed, to quote The Curse of Minerva (1811), “successive tyrannies expire” while it managed to sustain its own cultural heritage amid foreign impact (96). However, just as the time of Byron’s first tour of Greece (1809–11), so the period since 1974 has been politically adverse to safeguarding culture; “plunder from a bleeding land” graphically depicts the chaotic scenario (CHP II.13). From then until now human displacement and looted art have remained unresolved issues. Acclaimed Turkish Cypriot poet and academic Mehmet Yas¸in summed up the catastrophe: “Cyprus is being estranged from itself; the historic, environmental, communal, and cultural structure is being spoiled” (“Perishing Cyprus”).

“Fragments of Stone” in American Court

9

The Preamble to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict states, “Damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind.” The cultural legacy of Cyprus has above all been dominated by church heritage, ever since the arrival of key figures such as Mark, Lazarus, and Andreas. Cypriot Christians give witness in the Acts of the Apostles, and the monotheistic proselytizing of “That fellow Paul—the parvenù!” in 45 AD led to the island’s conversion to Christianity (Vision of Judgement 20). The Orthodox Church became fundamental to Greek Cypriot identity, although Byron’s religious skepticism, it seems, did not endear him to Orthodoxy, its churchmen, or its churches. St. Sophia he rated “inferior in beauty and size” to some mosques and cathedrals (BLJ 1: 251). His allegation that “Indeed a more abandoned race of miscreants cannot exist than the lower orders of the Greek clergy” (CPW 2: 194) was echoed by one of his contemporaries, William Turner, in Cyprus in 1815 as he observed the mastery of priests over peasants: “In short, these Greek priests, everywhere the vilest miscreants in human nature, are worse than usual in Cyprus from the power they possess” (583). Even so, Byron’s name is now linked with the small village of Lythrankomi and its church of Panagia Kanakaria. The little domed Church is a less imposing structure than the fortress of Corinth where Byron in his fourth Oriental Tale depicts the destruction of the citadel and its church. In the final onslaught between “Christians” and “Othmans” despoliation reigns: statues are felled, shrines spoilt, and the consecrated chalice is “a glittering prize” (Siege 955). Because churches constitute a conspicuous cultural symbol (an estimated 500 Cypriot churches have been looted regularly since 1974), the pillage of the famed Kanakaria mosaics came as no surprise. Between 520 and 530 AD a complex mosaic was applied to the dome of the sanctuary apse, “[f]ashioned by long forgotten hands” of Cypriot artists and silversmiths (Siege 451). Each mosaic piece, about two-feet square, was composed of hundreds of jewel-like bits of glass, marble, and stone. The overall landscape was paradisiacal with palm trees and a decorative frieze enclosing twelve apostle medallions in roundels, three-quarter life-size with silver halos, flanking archangels around the central image of Madonna and child. These mosaics, in the Constantinople-cum-Hellenistic tradition, were “thoroughly metropolitan in theme and composition, but included iconographic features which, in a work dating probably from the first year of Justinian’s reign (527–565 AD), must be counted conservative and provincial”

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(Megaw and Hawkins 133–35). Just so, the ensemble was regarded by World Heritage as a valuable ethnographic index of the high quality of church decoration in the provinces in the early Byzantine era and has been favorably compared in workmanship and color with the mosaics of St. Catherine’s in the Sinai, and those of San Vitale in Ravenna, center of early Christian art in the West. A. H. S. Megaw, director of antiquities during the British colonial period, recorded the looting in his 1977 monograph on the church, co-authored with the renowned Byzantine restorer E. J. W. Hawkins. The Church of the Panagia Kanakaria at Lythrankomi in Cyprus: Its Mosaics and Frescoes was a volume that became solid testimony of Cyprus’ ongoing search for the lost mosaics. Furthermore, no one could claim that they were uncared for—a common justification for removal of treasures overseas—as the mosaics had undergone cleaning and indexing from 1950 and were listed in the UNESCO Collection of World Art (1963 Series). The Megaw text also included numerous close-up photographs, taken after substantial restoration work in the mid-1960s. Why was this mosaic decoration such a significant eastern “text” for its own congregation and, equally, an enticement for illicit collectors? First, it is a rare surviving example of the period before Iconoclasm, the “War against Icons” (726–843 AD) initially decreed by Leo III. By a twist of fate, the recurrent Arab raids on Cyprus (648–961 AD) brought the island to the brink of devastation but protected these mosaics from the destruction of sacred images that swept the Eastern Roman Empire. With the Constantinople court so remote, priests and monks, promoting icons as the votive focus for illiterate peasants, became the stalwarts of Greek Orthodox culture. The fifth-century basilica was destroyed in the raids but rebuilt; its ornamented apse survived. More importantly, this is unique full-frontal iconography—the one and only example on record in Byzantine art where the Virgin is surrounded by a shining mandorla (almond-shaped halo), always reserved exclusively for depictions of Christ’s divinity (artistic inspiration is probably Apocalypse Book 12, recounting a woman crowned with a halo of twelve stars). The mosaics thus affirm the Virgin as “Theotokos,” mother of God, not merely mother of Christ. The Panagia Kanakaria (The Virgin Caresser) is regaled on a lyre-shaped throne holding an adolescent. The geometric mandorla sets them apart from the Archangels Michael and Gabriel flanking them. Travel writer Colin Thubron stood in front of the apse in 1972: “[T]he Christ Child shone above me with the look of a boy-emperor, and dangled a gold-shod foot as if he might descend” (239). In passing, one can detect here a parallel with that


11

otherworldly duo in the heavenly sanctuary of The Siege of Corinth as the carnage draws near: “Her, and the boy-God on her knee, / Smiling sweetly on each prayer” (910–11). Until 1976, then, having survived the vicissitudes of history, the mosaics were “relics that time and barbarism have left” (CPW 2: 191). Two years later, harassed priests and villagers fled south abandoning the church and mosaics—a dramatic real-life instance of “Her sons too weak the sacred shrine to guard” (CHP II. 12). In November 1979, tourists brought fragments of tesserae to the Department of Antiquities, which could not access the occupied areas. Thieves had broken through windows on the domed roof and forcibly removed the frescoes by placing adhesive cloth over them. Cyprus sought immediate assistance to locate its looted art. Formal appeals were made to UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the International Council of Museums and Sites, auction houses, the American Congress, and institutes such as Dumbarton Oaks Institute for Byzantine Studies. Certainly, tracking the mosaics was a more daunting task than the pursuit of the Parthenon marbles had been in the 1800s, when the identity of the “classic Thieves” and their shipment of the antiquities to “northern climes” was public knowledge (14, 15). Even so, in countering the defendant’s accusation of the plaintiffs’ lack of diligent search, Gary Vikan, former senior associate at Dumbarton Oaks, gave witness at trial that Cyprus “stands apart” in its efforts to recover stolen cultural properties (Trial 19). Finally, in 1989, the government and the Church of Cyprus, as dual custodians of heritage, initiated repatriation procedures for the return of the smuggled art in the successful two-stage legal drama of Cyprus v. Goldberg.2 They took an Indiana art dealer to federal court in her hometown to retrieve four of the mosaics: the lower part of the Virgin and Child (the upper half is missing); the medallions of apostles Matthew and James; and the torso of Michael, the luminous angel with the broken wing, for whom Goldberg developed a special fascination. However, the overlapping laws of Cyprus, the United States, and the international community were not the only practical considerations. In 1976, the mosaics were hurriedly given a fake export license by an illegal regime and then housed in Germany for some years. The contract was signed in the Netherlands on July 2, 1988, and the mosaics were viewed, paid for, and delivered in crates at Geneva airport’s “free port” on July 7, 1988. The purchase price of $1.2 million ($3 million was initially demanded) was broken down into $100 bills, carried in two satchels. Goldberg, for her part, noted the condition of the mosaics at this first viewing: “They were very dull and

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it was very apparent that they . . . had numerous fissures, or splits, in them, that they were just marginally held together with glue . . . they were so fragile that when I bent down to start to touch them, thinking that maybe I was going to lift it up to look at the back, literally a piece separated in my hand.” But she “wanted them more than ever” (Trial 10). The following day they were freighted to the United States where Goldberg immediately proceeded to locate possible buyers. To complicate further the ongoing search by Cyprus, the ensemble had been broken down into sixteen fragments—“made plural by the vandals’ axes” was the court’s graphic comment (Trial 8). Later in 1997, more details of the extent of this vandalism would emerge after an eight-month sting operation in Munich, which resulted in an “archaeological” discovery of an outrageous kind. German police located photograph albums going twenty years back depicting looters on scaffolds removing mosaic fragments from the Kanakaria apse. The notebooks contained drawings showing workers which portions to hack off, directing them particularly to the faces. Hence, documented testimony attests to the loss of the organic unity in a blatant case of “wanton and useless defacement,” or “Thy walls defac’d, thy mouldering shrines remov’d” (CPW 2: 191, 15). A sixth mosaic, the apostle Thomas (value $8.6 million), was located in a hoard of Cypriot Byzantine treasures (estimated value $46 million) stuffed into the fake ceilings, walls, and floors of two Munich apartments owned by the Kanakaria looter, a Turkish archaeologist. Thus, the trial judge was to opine quite rightly that Goldberg was not the chief culprit: “Unfortunately, when these mosaics surfaced they were in the hands not of the most guilty parties, but of Peg Goldberg and her gallery” (Trial 23). Indeed, the tracking of the mosaics reads like an odyssey in which their role as a collective object of worship became distorted by a hedonistic “congregation” of unscrupulous, multinational dealers who, while protesting that they “fell in love with them,” got down to business as usual and worked up glossy brochures (Trial 9). Goldberg anticipated a quick resale, and Byron’s appraisal of classic marbles rings equally true of the exquisite mosaics: “[T]o whatever spot of earth these ruins were transported . . . there they would still exist in the perfection of their beauty, and in the pride of their poetry” (CMP 133). This was yet another variation on the indignant spectator of The Curse of Minerva who “Admires the plunder, but abhors the thief” (198). In 1988, brokers for Goldberg and Feldman Fine Arts Inc., a firm based in Carmel, Indianapolis, offered the four mosaics for an inflated price of $20 million to potential buyers. One was the


13

J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. Luckily, its antiquities’ curator Dr. Marion True had a working relationship with the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus and promptly alerted the Republic’s law enforcement. With regard to such national laws on authenticity and rightful ownership, Professor Patty Gerstenblith of De Paul University, authority in Cultural Heritage Law and member of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee to the President (2002–3), applies a postmodern rendering in the phrase “Aromantic Byronism.” She upholds the legal contextualization of the mosaics for a culturally rich source nation like Cyprus and exposes the duplicity in dealers’ familiar claims that such countries cannot preserve their own culture. “The nation,” Gerstenblith says, “remains the only entity with the ability to protect the physical remains of its past. While protective national laws are what some would likely categorize as the product of Aromantic Byronism, many nations today, including the United States, use them as one method to reduce incentives to purchase undocumented antiquities and thus prevent the looting and destruction of archaeological sites” (“Museums”).3 Although American courts have granted few judgments on restoration of cultural property against their own citizens, this case generated intense media speculation worldwide, as in the BBC’s Omnibus documentary “The Kanakaria Mosaics” (1990). The trial held points of legal interest too, according to Professor Lauren Robel, Dean of the Indiana University School of Law: “History had given Cyprus little reason to be optimistic about the willingness of other countries to thwart the interests of their own citizens to protect those of a faraway island nation. Yet in this federal courtroom, almost matter-of-factly, the nation of Cyprus would have its national treasures returned, and the Indianapolis art dealer would go home over one million dollars poorer” (841). More poetically, Dan Hofstadter, whose investigation into the saga of the mosaics resulted in a fifty page article in The New Yorker (July 1992), and a subsequent book Goldberg’s Angel, explained: “The spirit of a people, even a small people, is inevitably furnished with memories of material things—of mountains and rivers and cities and shrines—and the appearance of an unmistakably Cypriot angel [Michael] on the shoulder of some lady in Indianapolis was not something that either the Church or the Republic of Cyprus could tolerate” (Goldberg’s 54). Following the first District Court hearing in Indiana, which began on May 30, 1989, Federal Judge James Noland handed down an eighty-six page ruling, denouncing the dealer for lack of “due diligence” and a too cursory enquiry into “property title” before her

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transaction (Trial 24). Incidentally, both court hearings dealt not with the looter (who was arrested in Germany in 1997) but with the art dealer and her prospect of monetary gain. Goldberg had borrowed the $1.2 million from a National Bank in Indianapolis and agreed to split the resale profits with her attorney and two art dealers. One dealer, convicted by a French court for art forgery, claimed to be a direct descendant of both Rembrandt and Rubins. In his sensational book Hot Art, Cold Cash (1993), Michael van Rijn revealed the brash exploits of a flamboyant master-dealer operating in the bizarre art underworld. So Goldberg had not acted in good faith. Largely ignorant of Byzantine art, she had failed to seek an authoritative source, choosing instead to negotiate with dubious strangers in a hasty business venture. During the ongoing litigation, public activities pressed for repatriation of the mosaics. For instance, a large-scale petition in the New York Times (July 21, 1989) was headlined, “STOP THE ILLEGAL SALE OF STOLEN BYZANTINE MOSAICS FROM TURKISHOCCUPIED CYPRUS IN THE UNITED STATES.” Organized by distinguished Byzantine scholar Doula Mouriki, the petition focused on the looting of the Kanakaria Church, referring to the mosaics as “priceless fragments.” Signed by 2,000 American academics and cultural figures, this petition was vindicated by the court’s ruling. The court gave judgment in favor of the plaintiffs: “There was nothing farfetched about Judge Noland’s decision, but what he apparently did not suspect was that his judgment, if upheld, would end by creating a new set of international standards for the purchase of ancient art, since unknown provenance, artificially high appraisals, suspicious middlemen, and lightning transactions are the stuff of the antiquities trade” (Goldberg’s 82). Noted German Byzantine scholar Klaus Gallas welcomed the verdict “as a necessary deterrent for the whole international art market where numerous items of ancient cultures, unearthed by illicit excavations, are traded” (14). The “bickering agents” (CPW 2: 189) lodged a timely appeal but lost in the higher court hearing (October, 1990). In spring 1991, with the mosaics in an Indianapolis vault waiting to go home, the American Supreme Court declined to hear Goldberg’s appeal. The second appeals hearing, with its Byronic references, was argued in January, 1990, and decided in October, 1990. It ruled that “the church has a valid, superior and enforceable claim to these treasures, items of vast cultural, religious and monetary value, which therefore must be returned to it” (Trial 24). Seventh Circuit Judge Richard D. Cudahy, sitting on the same bench, upbraided the dealer for not


15

running a documented authenticity check before her reckless transaction. Then he took the case onto a wider standing, adding a global dimension by concurring with the UNESCO Convention on World Cultural Heritage (1972) and its subcategory in Article I defining “pictures, paintings and drawings produced entirely by hand on any support and in any material.” Cudahy stated, “The mosaics are the virtually unique remnants of an earlier artistic period and should be returned to their homeland and their rightful owner. This is the case not only because the mosaics belong there, but as a reminder that greed and callous disregard for the property, history and culture of others cannot be countenanced by the world community or by this court” (Trial 27). Keeping culture in its rightful context was a Byronic argument, too: “I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture . . . but why did I do so? The ruins are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less so without them” (CMP 133). By the same token, Gallas, a reputable authority on the mosaics, revisited Kanakaria and was shocked to see what was in effect an updated version of iconoclasm in “the most painful bleeding wounds of the church: the naked surfaces of the apse.” He goes on to say in an article aptly titled “Where the Heavens are Plundered”: “The case of the odyssey of the mosaics, an important world cultural artifact, sets a terrifying example for hundreds, even thousands of lost works of art, which have disappeared and which on rare occasions resurface later as stolen goods on the international market in antiquities” (Gallas 14). On an encouraging note, the church has not become an animal pen or social club: “Heavy, massive, wooden doors keep the House of God closed. A Turk from the village keeps the key; he is the official warden and willingly lets you in the Christian sacred place” (Gallas 14). The chief judge also concluded in favor of the appellants with reference to The Siege of Corinth in Byronic language: “As Byron’s poem laments, war can reduce our grandest and most sacred temples to mere ‘fragments of stone.’ Only the lowest of scoundrels attempt to reap personal gain from this collective loss. Those who plundered the churches and monuments of war-torn Cyprus, hoarded their relics away, and are now smuggling them and selling them for large sums, are just such blackguards” (Trial 23). Similarly, Byron, who declared himself to be “not a collector or admirer of collections,” had tough words for the moral degeneracy inherent in such cultural pillage at a time when Childe Harold and the marbles, the poet and the “pilferer” (or “deliverer” of endangered treasures), were concurrently

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rivals for public acclaim (CPW 2:91). Lord Elgin is described as a “felon” (Curse 148) with “His mind as barren and his heart as hard” (CHP II. 12), pitting his imperial character against a defenseless landscape. Looting and spoilage on a mass scale was for Byron inexcusable “dastardly devastation” (CPW 2: 191). Even when viewing the marbles in London, before his Greek adventure, he foregrounded the dismemberment above all else: . . . Phidian freaks, Mis-shapen monuments, and maimed antiques; And make their grand saloons a general mart For all the mutilated blocks of art. (English Bards 1029–32)

Likewise, whereas the Cyprus mosaics had been placed on a round apse back in the sixth century, the dealer, believing that they would sell better if flattened, had the stones reset. This was the type of “lawless gain,” not aesthetic regard, that Byron denounces with biting satire in “his Lordship’s ‘stone shop’” of The Curse of Minerva. Despoliation had its eye to the market then as well as now, and Elgin finally debt-stricken was obliged to make “[t]he state receiver of his pilfer’d prey” (Curse 146, 182, 174). Edward Clarke’s letter quoting from the Disdar’s in situ observation provided Byron with “tenfold weight to my testimony” on the dismantling of the Acropolis: “great part of the superstructure with one of the triglyphs was thrown down by the workmen whom Lord Elgin employed” (CPW 2: 191–92). Correspondingly, when Judge Noland handed down the first decision in August, 1989, he reiterated that the mosaics were structurally immovable. This issue of permanency of fixture was taken up by Catherine Sease of the Field Museum in Chicago, appointed by the Cyprus Church as conservator along with Danae Thimme. Sease presented a damning assessment on the mutilation: “The most fundamental aspect of the appearance of the mosaics, namely that they had all been mounted on curved walls, and were meant to be curved, was ignored. Much time and effort went into producing as flat and rigid a surface as possible” (“Case”). She also noted the sequence of damage: the adhesive layer backing the mosaics was ripped from the wall, loosening tesserae; inadequately packed, they cracked in transit; restoration work hastily commissioned by Goldberg did further damage because “the restorer clearly did not understand the materials he was working on” (“Case”). Such accumulative damage not only cost the mosaics depth and perspective but stands as a concrete example that objects


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ending up in private hands have no guarantee of proper conservation. This tampering means, in effect, that even if the 170 Kanakaria villagers eventually go home, the mosaics will not. Regardless of any settlement of the divided island, the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia has become the permanent home of the mosaics since 1992, thereby providing “enough of the past for the future to grieve” (Siege 457). As a commingling of art, nationalism, and religion, the mosaics alleviate to some extent the emotional privation of a displaced extant congregation but are scarcely representative of the spiritual totality of place at Lythrankomi. On such decontextualization of a visible object of culture, Gerstenblith makes a valid point. Noting that the antiquities’ market tends to hold a one-dimensional view of an object as exclusively aesthetic, she argues for “the necessity of fostering a new ‘culture’ of collecting, one that focuses on the full story which cultural objects can tell” (“Museums”). With this case in 1990 the Indiana Court linked two sites of worship—ancient Corinth and Byzantine Christendom. Both portray a sense of sociocultural impoverishment, or as the court put it, “collective loss,” whether by siege in 1715 or subjugation in 1974. Kanakaria though, from 1974 to 1976, was a haven of spiritual refuge amidst the fortune of war, until its abandonment and subsequent indiscriminate looting motivated by “sacrilegious lust” (Curse 200). Kanakaria then became a topos of fragmentation, of desecration, like the Acropolis; “the Parthenon,” notes Byron, “was a place of worship thrice sacred to devotion: its violation a triple sacrilege” (CPW 2: 190). As a responsive observer, Byron identifies Near Eastern ruins—both moral and actual—as a recurrent Romantic theme. However, the trial quotation from The Siege, a sympathetic reflection on the vestiges of empire, is concerned less with Romantic longing for a bygone era than with the abiding legacy fashioned by “creatures of clay.” This ongoing stewardship of cultural heritage is acknowledged in direct quotation by the court: “What we have seen, our sons shall see; / Remnants of things that have passed away” (Siege 459–60). The protection of heritage has become universally accepted, and cultural rights are aligned with human rights. Yet as the trial hearings demonstrated, the judicial ordinances of Cyprus, the United States, and international law were further complicated by the stashing of the mosaics in Germany, the purchase agreement in the Netherlands, and the delivery in Switzerland. On such complex cross-border issues regarding looted art, Byron’s poetic sentiment ought to guide legal precedent, insists presiding judge William Bauer: “Works of art of such intrinsic value, visual or poetic, deserve a law of their own that

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needs the sensitive appreciation of history, and expression of the Lord Byrons of this world. Those of us who deal in the mundane affairs of life should be required to seek inspiration from the poets, artists and musicians who have added beauty to our world” (Bauer). One wonders what Byron would have made of this interpretation, which promotes The Siege of Corinth in a new light. His disparagement of the tale is well known: “which I feel ashamed of after the others—publish or not as you like I don’t care one damn—if you don’t—no one else shall—& I never thought or dreamed of it except as one in the collection—If it is worth being in the 4th vol. put it there & nowhere else—& if not put it in the fire” (BLJ 4: 331–32). Un-Romantic notions these are to be sure, yet the case of the mosaics of Kanakaria, interesting from many perspectives, not least from a literary point of view, has certainly broken new ground for Byron and his fourth Oriental Tale. As William St. Clair notes, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage has dominated all discussion of the Elgin Marbles whose organic dismemberment presents an analogy with the Goldberg saga (189). And, concurrent to the hearings, The San Francisco Examiner published an editorial on the marbles aptly titled “The Parthenon Marbles,” which restates Byron’s aversion to such tampering: “Blind are the eyes that do not shed tears while seeing, O Greece beloved, your sacred objects plundered by profane English hands.” This may not be a bona fide paraphrase of Canto Two, stanza fifteen, but the Examiner touches upon a significant point; like the mosaics, the 2,500 year old Parthenon marbles are essential to the aesthetic stability of the building, not freestanding decorative sculptures. The editorial continues, “[C]urators and customs agents would look harshly these days at someone who bribes corrupt overlords in a conquered province, steals statuary by the ton, papers the crime with fraudulent documents, and then ships the priceless loot 1,500 miles to his homeland” (“The Parthenon Marbles”). As Byron noted of the Acropolis and other natural landmarks: “it is the ‘Art’—the Columns—the temples . . . which give them their antique and their modern poetry— and not the spots themselves” (CMP 133). Ultimately, The Siege of Corinth has become part of legal history. Byron’s name and verse now officially appear in legal texts and correspondence, court transcripts, law school files, state records, mass communications, and websites in the aftermath of the far-reaching decisions of Case 89–304C and Case 89–2809. These much-publicized hearings on the restoration of cultural property uphold Byron’s rationale that art belongs in its rightful context and that human creativity can make meaningful even ordinary spots, like a small domed


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church amidst the olive trees of Lythrankomi. “Such,” he vigorously maintained, “is the Poetry of Art” (CMP 133). Unbeknown to him, through his poetic legacy to the cultural nationalism of a vulnerable island-state (which was never on his itinerary), Byron has helped to ensure a future for its past.

Notes 1. The Kanakaria Mosaics: The Trial, hereafter as Trial. 2. The Cyprus lawsuit alleged that Goldberg violated Indiana law against criminal conversion and possession of stolen property. She had been approached about the mosaics in Amsterdam by a dealer in Orthodox art. 3. On September 3, 2003, the United States extended for another three years an emergency import restriction of Byzantine material (including mosaics and frescoes) from Cyprus, a restriction originally initiated in April, 1999, at the request of the Government of Cyprus. The restriction ranges in date from approximately the fourth century AD through the fifteenth century AD. Federal Register Notice. April 12, 1999. 64 (69): 17529–31.


2

“To be r e dde on t h e b a n k s of t h e Oh io!”: By ron i n Ni n e t e e n t h- C e n t u ry A m e r ic a n C u lt u r e 1 Peter X. Accardo

Dallas’s nephew (son to the American Attorney-general) is arrived in this country, and tells Dallas that my rhymes are very popular in the United States. These are the first tidings that have ever sounded like Fame to my ears—to be redde on the banks of the Ohio! —Lord Byron, Journal Entry for December 5, 1813 (BLJ 3: 229)

S

ince colonial times, English authors have found a ready market for their works across the Atlantic. The first generations of Americans imported many of their books from Britain; their responses to them contained the seeds of an American intellectual tradition. The most widely read and influential writer in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America was John Milton. “From New England to the Carolinas,” one critic observed, “Americans asked Milton to witness their thought or speak their deepest convictions” (Sensabaugh 4). A later generation of American writers, said another, “still largely dependent on England for cultural resources, reproduced on a smaller scale the ‘Age of Pope’” (Sibley viii). Mather

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Byles, a nephew of the Puritan Cotton Mather and a poet himself, corresponded with the “Bard of Twickenham” and was even favored with a polite reply. Most British authors, it seems, were flattered by accounts of their transatlantic fame. Dr. Johnson, in spite of his disagreement with prevailing American views on taxation and the slave trade, could still confide to a Philadelphia attorney, “[y]ou are not mistaken in supposing that I set a high value on my American Friends, and that you should confer a very valuable favor upon me, by giving me an opportunity of keeping myself in their memory” (Redford 12). Johnson elsewhere remarked of an American reprint of Rasselas: “The impression is not magnificent, but it flatters an Authour [sic], because the Printer seems to have expected that it would be scattered among the People” (13). George Gordon, Lord Byron was born on January 22, 1788, just five months after the signing of the American Constitution and one year before George Washington was elected president of the United States. From an early age, Byron held the young republic in high esteem. Soon after the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in March, 1812, Byron was gratified to hear that his reputation not only reached across the Atlantic but also stretched far into the American interior. Throughout his life—in his letters and journals, in his verse, and in reported conversations—Byron celebrated America and the founding fathers, especially George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and he made passing reference to William Penn, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. He also expressed an early interest in Joel Barlow, author of The Columbiad; “never envied any men more than he did Lewis and Clarke” [sic]; and devoted eight stanzas in Don Juan, Canto Eight to the “back-woodsman of Kentucky,” Daniel Boone. Byron’s appreciation of America increased after he met a small group of young American scholars who traveled abroad during the period known as the “Era of Good Feelings.” The group included the statesman Edward Everett, historians George Ticknor and George Bancroft, and Harvard librarian Joseph Coolidge—a future in-law of Thomas Jefferson. Byron may even have met a future vice president of the United States, George Mifflin Dallas. To each he offered special courtesies and letters of introduction. “Whenever an American requests to see me—(which is not unfrequently),” Byron wrote in his journal, “I comply—1stly. because I respect a people who acquired their freedom by firmness without excess—and 2ndly. because these transatlantic visits ‘few and far between’ make me feel as if talking with Posterity from the other side of the Styx”

“To be redde on the banks of the Ohio!”

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(BLJ 9: 17). The person most responsible for introducing Byron to an American audience was Washington Irving, America’s first man of letters. But Byron had already left England for the Continent when the author of the celebrated Sketch Book gained admittance to the literary circle that gathered at 50 Albemarle Street, the residence of Byron’s publisher, John Murray. Byron’s years in Italy provided still more occasions to meet Americans; in addition to Coolidge and Bancroft, he mingled with American naval officers and sailors on board the USS Constitution and the USS Ontario and corresponded with Dr. Joshua Henshaw Hayward, a young medical student from Harvard. Among his attendants at Missolonghi were Benjamin Lewis, an African American slave, and George Jarvis, the first American to serve alongside Greek patriots in their struggle for independence. The vogue for Byron in America mirrored that of England and the rest of Europe. Nearly one hundred editions of his works appeared during his brief lifetime. Yet Byron never received an “almighty dollar” in royalties, as international copyright protections were not yet in place. However, in 1815, he received from George Ticknor an American edition of his works “and expressed his satisfaction at seeing it in a small form, because in that way, he said, nobody would be prevented from purchasing it. It was in boards, and he said he would not have it bound, for he should prefer to keep it in the same state in which it came from America” (Life 62). Twenty-five years later, the novelist Frederick Marryat “applied to the largest publishers in New York and Philadelphia, to ascertain . . . how many copies of Byron had been published. The reply was, that it was impossible to say exactly, but that they considered from one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand copies, must have been sold!” (208). Some of his tales, including The Corsair, The Bride of Abydos, and Mazeppa, were adapted for the American stage, as were his historical dramas. Byron inspired a host of American imitators, prompting the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to remark, “every village had its little Byron” (1829). An American painter studying in Florence, William Edward West, took Byron’s portrait ad vivum, while Rembrandt Peale, best known for his iconic portraits of the founding fathers, depicted Byron and Newstead Abbey, his ancestral home, in early lithographs. Newspapers and journals steadily furnished biographical notices of Byron and his circle well into the century. An Atlantic Monthly article defending Lady Byron in the separation controversy nearly brought ruin to its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and an anecdote about an English dowager living in Florence with a treasure hoard of Byron’s

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and Shelley’s correspondence contained the germ of Henry James’ novella, The Aspern Papers. In short, Byron was never out of touch with his American readership.

Note 1.

This essay originally appeared as the Introduction to Byron in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University in conjunction with the XXVII International Byron Conference in 2001. Catalogues are available upon request from Charles E. Robinson ([email protected]).

3

B y ron’s I n f lu e nc e on E a r ly C a na di a n L i t e r at u r e Tr a c y Wa r e

A

ccording to William Ruddick, “The direct influence of Byron’s poetry and the example given by his death were immediate and powerful outside of England,” but in contemporary England Byron’s “political principles were either dismissed as irrelevant to the appreciation of his poetry or condemned as shallow and insincere on grounds largely arising from a knowledge of his personal or social situation” (25–26). Such a claim sounds ominous for early Canadian literature, which is sometimes assumed to lag behind international influences by three decades or more (Trehearne 308–11). But Byron’s influence on early Canadian literature was immediate and remarkably political, even with poets who did not fully share his principles, for they were generally more interested in Byron’s work than his life. In Jean Baptiste (1825), Levi Adams suggests the virtues of Byron’s satire in an account of the “bleak Canadian fall, or winter”: They’re very much like Byron’s poetry— .... Now here—now there—now sideways or uphill,— Or in a cahot, if there’s snow d’ye see . . . . (II. 607, 610–12)

The reference to a “cahot” (or rut) is more than a colorful detail, for it shows the influence of Adams’ more talented contemporary, George Longmore, who describes the cahot at length in The Charivari; or

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Canadian Poetics (1824). Adams’ poem is at best uneven, and it includes several lines and one full stanza of asterisks, in an attempt to suggest the licentiousness that he could not depict. The attempt recalls both the American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck’s similar use of asterisks in Fanny (1819), an imitation of Beppo, and James Russell Lowell’s verdict on Fanny: “a pseudo Don Juan / With the wickedness out that gave salt to the true one” (qtd. in Leonard 39). Nonetheless, Byron’s influence enables Adams to blend two of the vernaculars of Lower Canada while mocking his digressive speaker. Earlier in the poem, Adams professes his dislike for politics, then notes that Byron “brought them in, for sake of their variety, / ‘To stuff with sage that verdant goose society’ ” (I. 407–8). The last line is quoted, slightly inaccurately, from Don Juan: “my business is to dress society, / And stuff with sage that very verdant goose” (XV. 93, 741–42). This canto made a strong impression on Adams, for he alludes to it again in his second canto: “‘There’s music in all things, if men had ears’ / Says Byron . . .” (II. 161–62). Byron says precisely that in the fifth stanza of canto fifteen (39). Because that canto was not published until April 1824, it must have been sent to Montreal almost immediately for Adams to refer to it in 1825. Byron’s also influenced the work of John Richardson. In 1828, Richardson used ottava rima to celebrate Tecumseh, with whom Richardson fought in the War of 1812. As Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman write, Richardson takes Byron’s “pessimistic view of the possibility of reconciling either past and present or indigenous tradition and Euro-American ‘civilization,’ ” and “insistently argues for a both / and construction yoking savagery and civilization, martial prowess and passive fortitude, without attempting to impose facile reconciliations” (xxiii, xxiv–v). They refer to such passages as this excerpt from Tecumseh’s father’s speech in the second canto: The white-man terms us cruel, while his blade Alone leaps thirsting for some victim’s blood; He hunts the peaceful Indian from his glade, To seek for shelter in the pathless wood; Then talks of direst treason, when dismay’d He hears the war-cry where their homes once stood; Nor fails the wily hunter to abhor, Who differs from him but in forms of war! (II. 169–176)

One oddity of Tecumseh, and of Richardson’s work in general, is that such powerful reversals coexist with all kinds of stereotypical attitudes. For instance, the Indians are “like hell-fiends raging to

Byron and Early Canadian Literature

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devour” (IV. 228), and yet the poem ends with the American troops scalping Tecumseh’s corpse (IV. 329–36). In this respect, Richardson makes the kind of partial critique described by Nigel Leask when he argues that “Byron’s Tales are subversive of orientalist discourse only in so far as the qualities attached by the West to the oriental (fatalism, violence, eroticism, intoxication) are now shown also to be characteristics of the European imperialist” (61). Another oddity is that in the first edition of Tecumseh, Richardson turns on Byron: To some more lofty muse—some nobler song, Should be the joy to sing the valiant’s boast; Such as to him, the soul of verse, belong, Who on Italia’s fair, voluptuous coast, Doth waste his giant mind in syren lays, Nor longer sings the deeds of other days. (“Historical Collation” 175 [Appendix])

As D. M. R. Bentley writes, “There can be no question that Don Juan is the source of the stanza form of Tecumseh . . . and little doubt that Richardson erred once in choosing so playful a form . . . and again in adhering too strictly to” it (Mimic 141). Of course, ottava rima can be used for other purposes, as in Italian Renaissance epics or Yeats’ “Among School Children,” but Tecumseh is not in that league, and in any case, Richardson would soon write his own imitation of Don Juan in Kensington Gardens in 1830: A Satirical Trifle. So he had anxieties of influence as well as anxieties of empire. In the Preface to The Huron Chief and Other Poems (1830), Adam Kidd styles himself as a “youthful” admirer of Byron and Thomas Moore: “The little birch canoe, in which I have safely glided through the tranquil lakes of the Canadas, could not securely venture on the boiling surge, and foaming breakers, over which Childe Harold and Lalla Rookh triumphantly rode in their magnificent Gondolas” (3). Such modesty was not characteristic of the man whom Bentley calls “the most controversial poet of pre-Confederation Canada” (Mimic 154). The Huron Chief shows the influence of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in its travels through North America, its interest in exotic cultures, its attacks on imperial authorities, and its ethnographic footnotes.1 Byron is invoked in the following stanza: For me, I hate all whining cant; And, doubly so, the Churchman’s rant, If even sent from sides of iron, By hill, by dale, by grot, or fountain,

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Tracy Ware Against the great, immortal BYRON! In all the poising of a M***T**N, Who nothing loves, but what’s his own, Or some thing else that wears a gown. (509–16)

As Bentley explains, the asterisks carefully fail to conceal an attack on the Venerable Archdeacon George Jehoshaphat Mountain, who rejected Kidd as a candidate for the Anglican ministry and, in Mary Jane Edwards’ words, “defended the refusal of the Church of England to allow Byron . . . to be buried in Westminster Abbey” (375).2 In his “Monody, to the Shade of Lord Byron,” Kidd mocks the judgment of the dean of Westminster and predicts that when an eventually free Greece invokes Byron’s name, he will “shine with brighter fame, / And scorn pale envy’s narrow power” (139–40). Byron supports the “opposition to the high centres of secular and ecclesiastical authority in Lower Canada and the United States” (Bentley, Mimic 154) that leads Kidd to tell the polished man, Brought up in Europe’s fashioned plan, That never could his formal art, Or all that school-taught lore has given, Such graceful happiness impart, As cheers the Indian’s forest heaven— Who gives, or asks, with greatest ease, Whate’er his heart or soul can please. (453–60)

Byron makes a similar contrast between the “free-born forest” and “the sweet consequence of large society, / War, Pestilence, the despot’s desolation ” in Don Juan (VIII. 61–68, 519, 539–40). The most successful of the early Canadian responses to Byron, however, is the first: George Longmore’s The Charivari (1824). Because his works were often published anonymously or pseudonymously, his identity was unknown to modern scholars until Mary Lu MacDonald discovered it in 1977.3 Longmore was born in Quebec City in 1793, attended military college in England, served in the Peninsular War, and returned to Lower Canada in October of 1819. There he wrote The Charivari and much of the Tales of Chivalry and Romance, which includes a poem on Tecumseh, an essay on and an elegy for Byron, and a “Translation, From the Italian of Monti’s Mascheroniana” inspired by Stendhal’s report of Byron’s admiration for the original.4 In November, 1824, he left for England, from where his military career took him to Scotland, Mauritius, and eventually Cape


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Colony (South Africa) in 1834. In Cape Colony, he became “the first Serjeant-at-Arms and first Librarian of the Cape Legislature,” and he “also served as Aide-de-Camp to two governors” (MacDonald, “Further” 163). He continued to write, publishing at least seven volumes of poetry in Cape Colony, including Don Juan, A Sequel (1850). Partly because of his extraordinarily varied experience, Longmore’s work has a cosmopolitan wit lacking in his Canadian predecessors. Longmore’s essay on Byron establishes the position to which he adheres throughout his career. Instead of depicting “virtue in its highest state of perfection” or “vice in its most loathesome colours,” Lord Byron . . . has taken the intermediate path, and pourtrayed man as he is, and not as he ought to be;—He has chosen for his heroes— beings imperfect and inclined to err, and has depicted them, neither all goodness nor all evil, nor has he ever tried to extenuate their faults. (“Lord Byron” 294 [Longmore Tales of Chivalry and Romance])

For Longmore, Byron’s greatness is most evident in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, “particularly the 3rd and 4th Cantos,” and in “those beautiful Tales” (295, 298). Not surprisingly for a veteran of the Peninsular War, Longmore argues that the “greatest shade in the character of Lord Byron, was his want of nationality, and applying in some instances a caustic to irritate the sore, rather than a balsam to heal the wound” (295). The first canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is his main example, though he is also uneasy with Byron’s attitude towards Napoleon. Notwithstanding this reservation, and his belief that the “plays are inferior in composition” (298), Longmore finds that Byron’s poetry carries “conviction so forcibly to the mind, that although we have not the candour to acknowledge openly, yet have the sense to feel within us, the truth of the censure he has brought home in so direct a manner to our corrupt hearts” (298). He does not say so in his essay, but his own satirical works make it clear that Beppo and Don Juan are also important. The full title of The Charivari; or Canadian Poetics: A Tale, After the Manner of Beppo, published under the pseudonym “Launcelot Longstaff,” reveals a debt to Byron. Like Byron before him, Longmore employs a self-mocking narrator who digresses on digression (as in stanza fifty of Beppo): But stay, these long digressions metaphysical Are always thrusting themselves in, between Me, and my story; and in authors,—this I call Tiresome to a degree, to intervene

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Tracy Ware Some curs’d advice or other, grave, or quizzical When on the plot,—attention should have been,— The only man, who does not, this way, tire one, Is that most fascinating fellow—Byron. (1225–32)

Earlier, the narrator defends Don Juan by claiming to “have something to learn still, / Why he who speaks Truth boldly, should do ill” (511–12). Unlike Adams, who sees only the surface disorder of Byron’s poetry, Longmore understands that digressions must be both witty and pertinent. For instance, his digressions on winter are appropriate since part of the humor of the poem’s conclusion derives from the coldness of the season, and since his poem compares England and Canada as Beppo compares England and Italy. In one of those digressions, he describes the sleigh-driver who sits And reins them now, now cracks the lashing thong. Away, they go, almost as wild as wits Career, or Folly’s capering thro’ a throng; And are an emblem in their sliding carriage, Of the first, smoothe, swift, merriments of marriage. But then there’s such a thing as an upset And, oh, those curs’d cahots, but to be sure This rests upon the course you take, and yet Suppose they’re found on all roads, where’s your cure? It makes my simile,—(if you so get A toss, or jolt,) not at all premature, For Hymen is the road, most of us take And they are fortunate, who get no shake . . . (625–40)

Longmore wittily adapts the Pegasus myth to Canada. Earlier he follows Byron in using the myth ironically to mock uninspired poetry (“Lend me, old Pegasus, thy jaded hack!” 8), but here his source is probably Pope’s Essay on Criticism: ‘Tis more to guide than spur the Muse’s Steed; Restrain his Fury, than provoke his Speed; The winged Courser, like a gen’rous Horse, Shows most true Mettle when you check his Course. (84–87)

Substituting a sleigh for the horse of inspiration, Longmore argues for the necessity of artistic restraint. When the driver neglects his reigns, the course taken by his vehicle resembles “Folly’s capering thro’ a throng.” The comparison between the ride and a marriage


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foreshadows the wedding and the ensuing “jolt” to the initial “merriments of marriage” in this poem (Ware, “George Longmore” 8–9). In both cases, there is no avoiding the cahots, which Longmore glosses in a footnote as “a rut or hollow found in the snow, by the cariole or traineau, passing along its surface on the snow first falling.” To “the Canadian, or to those who have sojour’d in the country, the explanation of its meaning is superfluous” (33n). Longmore is equally resourceful in adapting Byron’s contrast between Italian passion and “Our cloudy climate, and our chilly women” (Beppo 389). The narrator explains the reason for frostbite: mighty Thor The Scandinavian god, did this no doubt, With good intent; having perceiv’d what war The passions wage, where the hot sun shows out Its rays in warmer climes, deem’d it a bore To set mankind’s weak senses to the rout, And so to cool the sad effects of season, Sent his priest Boreas, to bring Love to Reason. (121–28)

No more than Byron is Longmore able to favor cool reason over warm love, and so in the next stanza he addresses the reader: “What hast thou never sigh’d, and never kiss’d, / And art that prude in love, a Platonist?” (135–36). Like Byron before him, who claims, “Even Petrarch’s self, if judged with due severity, / Is the Platonic pimp of all posterity” (DJ V. 7–8), Longmore mocks both Plato and Petrarch, as in this ironic apostrophe to Love: Was it not thee, who stirr’d great Alexander With Thaïs by his side, to fire the porch, Of fam’d Persepolis—and young Leander, Whose love the waters quench’d, tho’ Hero’s torch Shone bright to guide—myriads to whom a pander, Thy aid hath been, besides—to kill or scorch; Not to omit poor Petrarch in his cowl, Thou mad’st to rove like any midnight owl. (153–60)

The reference to “poor Petrarch in his cowl” foreshadows the hero’s later appearance in his dressing gown and night-cap, while the allusions inflate the frame of reference, as the poem descends in steps of controlled bathos from “great Alexander” to “a pander.” With all its digressions, The Charivari tells the story of the wedding of Baptisto, an elderly bachelor, and Annette, a widow. Carl F. Klinck

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notes that the “subject matter of The Charivari was as indigenous as anything relating to the white man in Canada could be: the folk custom of interrupting the nuptial bliss of an incongruously matched couple by a noisy serenade had roots and branches among the French people of the lower province” (Klinck, “The Charivari” 35). MacDonald shows that the custom “was one of the main topics of discussion in Montreal from June until September 1823,” because an extended and riotous charivari led to destruction and one death (“Introduction” 7–8).5 In this context, Baptisto’s wisdom resides in keeping his “evenness of temper,” which enables him to take “the only likely method, to appease / A mob,—who are most difficult to please” (1290, 1295–96). So he provides “thirty gallons of rum” (1368) and accepts the ritual humiliation of donning a pair of horns (1363–64). The narrator’s summary pits Baptisto’s tolerance and good humor against those who would suppress the custom: And having got Baptisto to his bed Once more—in safety to his heart’s delight And all the crowd dispers’d who had been led To join in sports, which Custom form’d, not spite, And which, I trust, will ever still be said;— Tir’d of my idle rhymes,—I wish, Good night, To all, who may or have not been amus’d With thoughts, in harmless humour here diffus’d. (1385–92)

The passage may be read on two further levels. First, Longmore suggests a parallel between marriage and the proposed union of Upper and Lower Canada when he warns of “these, ‘soi-disant’ patriots,— their communion / Bars any creed, whose psalmody is ‘Union’ ” (1127–28). As Bentley comments, In the vehement resistance of Louis-Joseph Papineau and his followers . . . to the union with Upper Canada that had been proposed by British merchants in 1822, was there not a reactionary and nationalistic urge to take Lower Canada along the road to self-determination? Were Montreal’s increasingly violent charavaris not a sign at least of the potential for social unrest to be channelled towards rebellious ends? (Mimic 127)6

Second, the resemblance between the “motley group of bards” (33) in the opening lines and the bizarrely dressed figures in the charivari, both of which are attributed to a personified fancy (14, 1029), suggests a reason for the poem’s first subtitle: the charavari may be an emblem of early “Canadian poetics.”


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Longmore is probably also the author of “Dramfed, A Dramatic Poem,” which appeared anonymously as “a Parody upon Lord Byron’s Celebrated Drama of ‘Manfred.’ ”7 As MacDonald argues, “Both the source of the inspiration and the wit of the parody point to him” (“George Longmore” 289). Manfred begins in “a Gothic gallery,” where Manfred states that “The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life” (I.i.12). “Dramfed” begins in an attic, where Dramfed states that “The tree of prudence doth not bring forth grapes / For abstinence” (I.i.12–3). Manfred summons the seven “Spirits of earth and air” (I.i.41) in order to ask for “Oblivion, self-oblivion” (I.i.144), which they cannot deliver. As the scene ends, the seventh spirit takes the “shape of a beautiful female figure” and a voice pronounces this curse: “O’er thy heart and brain together / Hath the word been pass’d—now wither!” (I.i.260–61). Dramfed asks the spirits for “quenchless thirst, without the weaker spell / Of wild intoxication,” which they cannot deliver (I.i.127–28). As the scene ends, the seventh spirit takes the form of “a chrystal goblet,” and the chorus of spirits pronounces this curse: “To thy lips, the goblet fated, / ‘Tis drawn— now get intoxicated!—” (I.i.255–56). In the famous second scene, Manfred is “alone upon the Cliffs” of the Jungfrau, where he contrasts himself with an eagle and considers suicide. He is saved by a Chamois Hunter, who says, as the two “descend the rocks with difficulty,” “You should have been a hunter” (I.ii.125). In his second scene, Dramfed is alone upon a roof, where he contrasts himself with a cat, which distracts him before he too considers suicide. He is then seized by a Watchman, who says, as the two enter a window, “he should have been a chimney-sweep” (I.ii.105). For the early Canadian writers examined in this paper, however, it was not the diabolical Byron of Manfred that mattered. For Adams and Longmore, it was the Byron of Beppo and Don Juan; for Richardson, it was the Byron of the heroic tales; for Kidd, it was the Byron of principled dissent. Because they saw Byron’s work as more important than his life, these writers would have agreed with an anonymous review of The Deformed Transformed, which appeared in the same issue of The Canadian Review as “Dramfed.” According to that reviewer, who was probably Longmore, “Many in a review of his writings have entered into a discussion, on his private life, which appears to us perfectly foreign to the rights they may deem themselves invested with to judge of him in his avocations as an author” (56).8 Longmore judged Byron most shrewdly when he took Beppo as his model for The Charivari. In so doing, he brought a healthy irreverence to early Canadian literature.9

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Notes 1. Byron’s influence is discussed by Bentley in Introduction to The Huron Chief (Bentley and Steele xiii–iv). 2. Bentley notes that the phrase “sides of iron” “may well encompass both Oliver Cromwell, old Ironsides himself, the scourge of Ireland, and George Ironside (1760–1830), the superintendent of Indian Affairs in Amherstburg, Upper Canada, from 1820 to 1830” (Bentley and Steele xiii). 3. Introduction to the Golden Dog edition of The Charivari 3–10; “George Longmore: A New Literary Ancestor”; and “Further Light on a Life: George Longmore in Cape Colony.” Both The Charivari and Tales of Chivalry and Romance were mistakenly (and tentatively) attributed to Adams by Carl F. Klinck, in “The Charivari and Levi Adams.” Klinck accepts MacDonald’s attribution in his Introduction to the Golden Dog edition of Adams, Jean Baptiste, 6. 4. This anonymously published volume is discussed briefly in Chew 200, 219 2n. 5. Also Palmer 19. 6. For a contrary view, Mazoff 34. 7. Originally published in The Canadian Review and Literary and Historical Journal 104–10; rpt. in Ware, “‘Dramfed, A Dramatic Poem,’ by George Longmore?” 8. Like Longmore, the reviewer maintains that “the first charge against [Byron] as an author . . . is his ingloriousness as a Britain, and an unpatriotic feeling towards the land of his sires, which nursed and educated him” (56). Using Longmore’s phrasing, the reviewer calls Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage “the master-piece of his talents” (54), praises the tales (54), criticizes Napoleon (55), and spells forms of “portray” as “pourtray” (54, 56, 57; see Tales of Chivalry and Romance, 294; The Charivari, 494; “Dramfed,” I.i.175). The main difference between the review and Longmore’s essay is that the former was written before the author knew of Byron’s death (54n), while the latter is a tribute to a recently deceased writer. 9. I am indebted to the Canadian Poetry Press; to Mary Lu MacDonald, who pointed me toward “Dramfed” and gave me a copy of Longmore’s Don Juan, A Sequel; to Les Monkman; and to D. M. R. Bentley, the general editor of the Canadian Poetry Press. Thanks also to Catherine Addison, Paul Curtis, and Linda Montag.

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Te ac h i ng B y ron “E L L E V O U S S U I T

AC A DI E: PA R T O U T ” EN

Paul M. Cur tis

Thomasina: When you stir your rice pudding Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd? Septimus: No. Thomasina: Well I do. You cannot stir things apart. Septimus: No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination . . . —Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

I

have chosen Stoppard’s Arcadia for my epigraph not for his satire of The International Byron Society—“the Byron gang”—but rather for the ironic filiations he traces through one family’s history, on the one hand, and through misconstrued manuscripts on the other.1 Lord Byron is present in Stoppard’s play, although he never appears on stage. Likewise, Byron and his poetry will remain offstage for the initial segment of my essay as my first objective is to provide a “crisp epitome” (Gould 38) of the deportation of the Acadian people, Le

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grand dérangement, which began in 1755, as well as the role of the poet’s grandfather, Admiral John “Foul Weather Jack” Byron, during this dark period of Acadian history. The question that grounds my paper is: how might I best teach Byron’s poetry to the descendants of an eighteenth-century “ethnic cleansing” suffered in small part, at least, at the hands of the poet’s grandfather? With characteristic lucidity, Peter Graham’s discussion of Stoppard’s play, “Et in Arcadia nos,” and Paul Alpers’ “What Is Pastoral?” trace the Arcadian aesthetic that is original to the Peloponnese and was appropriated by subsequent Latin poets, Ovid and Virgil. Stoppard’s play engages this ideal while revealing the aleatory nature of one family’s passage through time—the play is situated in the Regency England of 1809 and the contemporary England of 1993. Implicit within this temporal passage is the desire to return to an aesthetic— broadly speaking pastoral—precedent, and this desire leads astray the gentle residents of Sidley Park (and the one not-so-gentle Byron critic in 1993). The common ground shared by an idealized landscape and “hot” letters in manuscript just discovered is cast in a temporal relativism made all the more apparent by rhetorical obliquity. This pleasing obliquity is a feature of pastoral literature—here I have in mind the poetry of Theocritus, Virgil, Spenser, and Pope—the allusive complexity of which resembles a series of Chinese boxes, each one neatly contained by, and yet containing, another. Manuscripts are “hot,” especially in the case of Byron’s Regency years, in direct proportion to the themes of love, fame, and ambition, all of which, in the context of Stoppard’s play, render attempts at “interpretation” futile.2 The cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary density of the word “Arcadia” extends to the story of Acadie, which begins with Giovanni de Verrazzano who first used the word “Arcadie” in 1524 in order to describe to François I (1494–1547), King of France, the natural beauty of the North American coastline (especially the trees!). Various antique maps, those of Gastaldi in 1548, Zaltieri in 1556, and de Milo in 1570 designate present day Nova Scotia by the name of “Larcadia.” Samuel de Champlain, founder of Québec city and Geographer Royale, also used the word “Arcadie” in 1603 as well as its variant “Accadie” in 1613 (Arsenault 13–14). Through the appropriation of this mythically resonant name by geographers and explorers, the discovery of a New World Arcadia implies a desire to return to an idealized garden, a desire that is driven by the unalterable loss of the original. Acadie changed hands between the French and the English six times in the space of one hundred years, and on August 10, 1755,

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the infamous Charles Lawrence, the British colonial lieutenant governor, issued the order for the deportation of the French-speaking Acadians who inhabited the Isthmus of Chignecto, which connects southeastern New Brunswick and western Nova Scotia. The Acadian population (estimated to be 12,000 in 1746) had remained neutral in a North America that was vigorously contested. The French and Roman Catholic Acadians were sympathetic to the enemies of the English. As English subjects, Acadians had refused repeatedly to take an oath of allegiance to the English monarchs George I (1714–1727) and George II (1727–1760). Under pressure from the government of Massachusetts and the British Admiral Boscawen, Lawrence inflated the apparent threat posed by the Acadians in order to justify the deportation order.3 For the first time in the history of English law, Judge Jonathan Belcher ruled in favor of the confiscation of land and property owned by the Acadians, and the subsequent profits from this confiscation were used to defray the transportation costs incurred by the deportation. Several thousand Acadians were forcibly ejected from their lands by a military force under the command of General Monckton and were transported to nine of the English colonies, from Georgia to New York.4 The deportees were not welcome in the (generally Puritan) colonies, where they were forced to languish aboard ship, the victims of malnutrition and smallpox. Only in Maryland, which was already home to English Catholics, were the deportees accepted. The deportation continued for the next seven years, and Acadians from Cape Breton (formerly Île Royale) and Prince Edward Island (formerly Île St Jean) were deported to France before the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756. By 1785, many of the Acadians living in France returned to the New World at Louisiana, which had become a Spanish possession in 1762. Historians now estimate that the number of people deported was between ten and eighteen thousand, one-third of whom did not survive. Many Acadians escaped capture and hid in the forests or fled to the neighboring French colony of Québec, which would soon fall to the English in 1759. The rich farmland reclaimed from the sea by the Acadians was gradually occupied by Protestant immigrants from Europe—mostly British but German as well. As early as 1762, Acadians regained the right to own land in the English Colony, and those who had escaped deportation began to return, finding themselves to be postexilic refugees in the land of their heritage. Their story is captured in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Evangeline” (1847), the poetic chronicle of the deportation of the citizens of Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, and the love of Evangeline and her Gabriel.

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After the fall of Québec City in 1759 to General Wolfe, the only Canadian-born governor-general of the beleaguered French colony, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial Marquis de Vaudreuil, commanded his chief of artillery, le chevalier Le Mercier, to go to Versailles to petition for four thousand troops and the requisite supplies. He was granted four hundred. Of the six ships that left Bordeaux April 10, 1760, only three completed the crossing: a frigate, Le Machault, and two storeships, Le Bienfaisant and Le Marquis de Malauze. These three, under the command of Captain Chénard de la Giraudais, captured several English Vessels off Gaspé, May 16, and Giraudais decided the next day to take refuge in the Baie de Chaleurs in order to escape the English patrolling the Gulf of the St. Lawrence to the north. Once in the Baie, they joined forces with 1,500 Acadians who had passed a miserable winter in the area. On June 17, 1760, Governor Whitmore, stationed at the Fortress of Louisbourg, received intelligence of the French squadron and gave Captain John Byron the task of destroying the French force. At the command of five ships, Byron left Louisbourg the next morning.5 Confined in the Baie de Chaleurs, on the run from two English flotillas, the French tried to reinforce their position. They sunk several small vessels at two points in the Restigouche River in order to block the channel, and, on the north shore of the river within cannon range of these obstacles, they constructed two batteries with several guns and powder taken from Le Machault. The English naval superiority in number and firepower was offset, initially, by the shallow draught of the river and the maneuverability of the French vessels within its narrow banks. Byron’s Fame, a ship of the line of seventyfour cannons, became grounded in the mud and took several hours to free, during which time and under the cover of darkness the French, with their superior land force, lost the chance to board and capture the flagship. The defensive strategy used by the French, despite their batteries on shore, left them without an escape route. After seventeen days of fighting, having exhausted their munitions, the French fired their ships and fled inland. Captain Byron bombarded and destroyed the Acadian village at Pointe à Bourdeau before quitting the river. A battle’s renown might be measured according to daring military strategy or in terms of slaughter. Neither is the case for “The Battle of the Restigouche,” which has been described, incorrectly I believe, as a mopping up operation (Rowse 133). The French had thirty killed and wounded; the British casualties were ten killed and ten wounded. Captain Byron estimated that twenty-two French vessels, the majority sloops and schooners, were destroyed, and that the French lost a total

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of 200,000 pounds sterling in cargo supplies. In the larger political context of The Seven Years’ War, however, the battle was significant. The pretext for The Seven Years’ War was, from the British perspective, the French alliance with Russia and Austria against Frederick the Great. In effect, this was the first time that a war begun in Europe had for its principal objective the conquest of the French colonies in America. The Battle of the Restigouche was the final and misdirected attempt by France to secure its colony there. Much of Lord Byron’s international appeal resides in the experience of his poetry as a language of freedom; that is, Byron’s use of language itself as a force for liberation rather than simply a means of conveying stories about liberation. Many readers of Byron, I presume, would have difficulty imagining what it would mean to lose their native language, and, through an inexorable process of cultural assimilation, be obliged to speak the language of some other majority culture. The verbal expression of one’s individual or cultural identity is part of the native language and would be compromised if expressed in another language. “I’ve taught me other tongues,” states the persona of Childe Harold, canto four, who goes on to confirm that “. . . I twine / My hopes of being remembered in my line / With my land’s language” (IV. 8–9). I teach English Language and Literature at a small French University whose mandate is to promote and protect the history and language of the Acadian people. This mandate is a difficult one to realize, given that only by the midtwentieth century in New Brunswick was the right to an education in the French language secure. Thus, many of my Acadian students feel more at ease speaking and writing English than they do French. They have been made to feel inadequate, insecure, or ineffectual as speakers of proper French. How might the Byron connection outlined above provide my students surer access to his verse and, indirectly, to the history of their own culture? The possibilities range from the reading of specific poems to the examination of larger narrative strategies, each possibility fitting within another, much like the image of the aforementioned Chinese boxes. Substituting one word in Cecil Lang’s important phrase, then, Byron’s “biographical imperative” becomes for my purpose a “genealogical” one as well (“Narcissus” 143). Byron makes two direct references in his poetry to his grandfather–the one in “Epistle to Augusta” and the other in Don Juan canto two, stanza 137.6 Both references are to Admiral Byron’s reputation for being “tempest-tost” and to his autobiographical narrative, published in 1768, The Narrative of the

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Honourable John Byron containing an Account of the Great Distresses Suffered by Himself and his Companions on the Coast of Patagonia from the Year 1740, till their Arrival in England, 1746. The “Epistle to Augusta” would provide a strong introduction to Byron’s unique rhetoric for any attentive reader, especially an Acadian one. Addressing Augusta from an Alpine landscape in August, 1816, poet-Byron uses Admiral Byron to image the pain of separation as well as the uncertainty of the future. And let us not forget that Admiral Byron was the grandfather of Augusta as well as of Colonel Leigh, her husband (and first cousin). 1. My Sister—my sweet Sister—if a name Dearer and purer were—it should be thine. Mountains and Seas divide us—but I claim No tears—but tenderness to answer mine: Go where I will, to me thou art the same— A loved regret which I would not resign— There yet are two things in my destiny A world to roam through—and a home with thee. 2. The first were nothing—had I still the last It were the haven of my happiness— But other claims and other ties thou hast— And mine is not the wish to make them less. A strange doom was thy father’s son’s and past Recalling—as it lies beyond redress— Reversed for him our grandsire’s fate of yore He had no rest at sea—nor I on shore. 3. If my inheritance of storms hath been In other elements—and on the rocks Of perils overlooked or unforeseen I have sustained my share of worldly shocks The fault was mine—nor do I seek to screen My errors with defensive paradox— I have been cunning in mine overthrow The careful pilot of my proper woe. (I–III)

The first three stanzas are remarkable for the sustained subjunctive mood and the initial division between land and sea that Byron later fuses with the images of time past and future. Most unusual is the nested possessives in the phrase “thy father’s son’s” in which poet-Byron refers to himself by means of the third-person “son.”

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This oblique manner of self reference continues in line seventeen: “Reversed for him our grandsire’s fate of yore” (emphasis added).7 Byron’s legerdemain with his personae is a commonplace of Beppo and Don Juan, both ottava rima poems that elaborate the metrical experiment first attempted in the “Epistle to Augusta.” In the midst of many Byrons, therefore, the “Epistle” produces yet another pronominal “Byron” who is detached from, yet a creation of the poet.8 The syntax of the couplet in stanza two, moreover, enacts the reversal it describes through a clever chiasmus: the sequence “him” (poetByron) and “grandsire” crosses over the sequence in the next line, “He” (grandsire) and “I” (poet-Byron). The couplet permits Byron to observe himself and then claim the unfortunate legacy of his grandsire, all the while drawing attention to the couplet’s form as a scheme of this relationship. The process of naming begun hypothetically in stanza one, “. . . if a name / Dearer and purer were—it should be thine,” culminates in the famous couplet of stanza three: “I have been cunning in mine overthrow / The careful pilot of my proper woe.” Byron’s autobiography to 1816 is held in the ominous phrase, “The careful pilot”; a “pilot’s” burden by definition is nautical, linking Byronic woe across generations. The notion of progress in the “Epistle” is characteristically Byronic, framed as it is by the “master-spell” of irony (CHP III. 107). Byron often images forward progress retrospectively as he does in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Thus bending o’er the vessel’s laving side, To gaze on Dian’s wave-reflected sphere; The soul forgets her schemes of Hope and Pride, And flies unconscious o’er each backward year. None are so desolate but something dear, Dearer than self, possesses or possess’d A thought, and claims the homage of a tear; A flashing pang! Of which the weary breast Would still, albeit in vain, the heavy heart divest. (II. 24)

or Don Juan: I can’t but say it is an awkward sight To see one’s native land receding through The growing waters; it unmans one quite, Especially when life is rather new: I recollect Great Britain’s coast looks white, But almost every other country’s blue,

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Paul M. Curtis When gazing on them, mystified by distance, We enter on our nautical existence. (II. 12)

This retrospective progress produces a nostalgia—the pain associated with returning home—that is all the more powerful for its probing of pain with little or no hope of return: “. . . not in vain / Even for its own sake do we purchase pain” (“Epistle” V. 39–40). I am hesitant here to cast Byron under the sign of the refugee, although he has been called such. Making the important distinction between the casual nature of traveling and leaving one’s homeland, is Stephen Minta: As I left Albania, I thought again about the irreconcilable nature of these two kinds of movement [travel vs. exile], which have in common only that both are a form of surrender. The lucky surrender out of choice, out of the sheer love of the game, the rest from necessity. The two worlds are, indeed, far apart. Byron, however, touches them both; for he was, in his short life, first traveler, then refugee. (66)

The feeling of Elle vous suit partout—be the source of the feeling Edelston, Augusta, “Norman Abbey,” or Aurora Raby—is a strong feature of Byron’s poetry written after 1816 and one that should find a sympathetic reception from Acadians, a people who managed with great difficulty to return home only to be threatened today with cultural assimilation.9 If I may recall Thomasina’s image of the pudding and jam by way of conclusion, at times one is given a glimpse into the mix of history. I never expected to find a link between Acadie and Lord Byron. However small this link might be, it is an important confirmation of Byron’s unprecedented internationalism.

Notes 1. “Elle vous suit partout” appears in the context of Donna Julia’s farewell letter to Juan (DJ I. 198). McGann informs us that “This was the motto on one of Byron’s seals” (CPW 5: 680), and refers the reader to poem No. 87, “The Cornelian,” which alludes to the Cornelian heart given to Byron by the Cambridge choir boy, John Edelston, in December 1805 or July 1806. 2. Byron considers the deceptive nature of these three in “The Epistle to Augusta” (1816) stanza 13: With false Ambition what had I to do? Little with love, and least of all with fame!

Teaching Byron

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

EN

ACADIE

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And yet they came unsought and with me grew, And made me all of which they can make—a Name. Yet this was not the end I did pursue— Surely I once beheld a nobler aim. But all is over—I am one the more To baffled millions which have gone before. Correspondence from England that advised the aggressive Lawrence to delay was itself delayed, thus permitting the deportation to go forward. Robert Monckton succeeded Lawrence in 1755 and supervised the deportation. Monckton, after whom the university is named ironically, was second in command to Wolfe during the attack on Québec and was wounded in the Plains of Abraham. René Babineau lists the names of the vessels, their types, departure points, destinations, and number of deportees in Les Exilés et la Louisiane Acadienne, 12–13. I am indebted to my colleague J. G. P. Delaney for his knowledge of Acadian history and for bringing this Byron connection to my attention. Andrea Kirkpatrick, curator of Canadian and International Art, New Brunswick Museum, informs me of the existence of two portraits of John Byron: “ . . . an engraving in the British Museum collection listed as bust-length, entitled ‘The Nautical Lover,’ from Town and Country Magazine, 1773 (2–3/4 x 2–3/8 inches), and an oil by Sir Joshua Reynolds (but not listed in a catalog of his work), half-length, no. BHC 2592 in the collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich” (Kirkpatrick). For the history of the Battle of the Restigouche and regarding Admiral John Byron, I have consulted Bona Arsenault (above), John Byron, Proulx Beattie and Bernard Pothier, Little, which includes “Copy of letter from Captain the Hon. John Byron, R. N., on board H. M. S. FAME, Bay of Chaleurs, 11 July, 1760,” 20–24, Dictionnaire biographique du Canada, 132b–33b; The Canadian Encyclopedia, various entries pertaining to “Acadia,” MacBeath. Byron’s squadron consisted of three men-of-war: the Fame, flagship; the Dorsetshire, Capt. Campbell; the Achilles, Capt. Samuel Barrington; and two frigates: the Repulse, Capt. John Carter Allen; and the Scarborough, Capt. Scott. An allusion to John Byron’s Narrative also appears in DJ II. 71–72. The McGann edition lists the following variants for line 13: “A strange doom hath been ours—but that is past,” “brother’s but tis,” “son.” (CPW 4: 36). Line 15 has no variants. Lines 71 and 72 also beg to be considered in the light of this pronominal play: “I feel an ebb in my philosophy / And the tide rising in my altered eye” (emphasis added). For other examples of pronominal play, see James Soderholm, “Byron’s Ludic Lyrics.”

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Paul M. Curtis 9. The description of Norman Abbey might well serve as the epitome of Don Juan in all of its variety: Huge halls, long galleries, spacious chambers, join’d By no quite lawful marriage of the Arts, Might shock a Connoisseur; but when combined, Form’d a whole which, irregular in parts, Yet left a grand impression on the mind, At least of those whose eyes are in their hearts. We gaze upon a Giant for his stature, Nor judge at first if all be true to Nature. (XIII. 67) Aurora Raby, perhaps the central feminine figure of the English cantos, is described in terms of the Christian, as opposed to the Arcadian, myth of the return: “She look’d as if she sat by Eden’s door, / And grieved for those who could return no more” (XV. 45).

5

C l a i m i ng a “Gr e at Br i t on” for Bu l g a r i a : R e f l ec t ions on B y ron’s Bu l g a r i a n R ec e p t ion (1880s –1920s) 1 Ludmilla K. Kos tova

G. B. Shaw’s play “Arms and the Man” (1894) presents late-nineteenth-

century Bulgaria as a demi-Oriental Balkan periphery, which is desperately trying to make up for a long period of Ottoman domination and cultural isolation by reproducing outdated forms of Western culture. Significantly, Byronism is among them. In the context of the play, Byronism is the distinctive characteristic of Sergius Saranoff, an emblematic figure standing for the young nation, who is described as “a clever imaginative barbarian” cultivating “the half tragic, half ironic air . . . by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries” (45). Shaw’s representation of Bulgaria’s belated Byronism reflects an assumption about cultural transmission to which literary historians and theorists of influence resorted repeatedly throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Virgil Nemoianu remarks, it involved “an epidemic vision of fixed cultural categories” automatically transferred from West to East, “despite a lag of thirty or fifty years” (123). Much though scholars may resent the dubious legacy of simplistic images of culture that earlier ages have bequeathed, Shaw’s and, by implication, his contemporary littérateurs’ conception of Byronism and its Eastern European

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metamorphoses does make sense in political—if not purely cultural— terms. Caroline Franklin has also drawn attention to the fact that the particular brand of nationalism Byron was instrumental in producing primarily appealed to the peoples ruled by repressive Oriental and European imperial regimes in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna (“Some Samples” 141). As an Ottoman province that made its earliest bids for independence around the middle of the nineteenth century and eventually achieved independence in the late 1870s, Bulgaria might at first glance appear perfect for the belated development of a native Byronic strand, complete with Conrad-like heroes proudly flouting Muslim oppression. However, such a development never came to pass, and Bulgarian nationalism found other literary expressions. Byron’s legacy did play a significant role in the country’s cultural and political life, however. The present essay considers select aspects of that role by focusing on three narratives about the “uses” of Byronism between the 1880s and the 1920s.2 Each narrative embodies a set of political, aesthetic, and moral choices, which its Bulgarian “protagonists” made in approaching Byron’s work and/or life. Kalliopi Nikolopoulou presents the relationship between later readers and past authors in terms of “mobile intimacy forged in the passage of time . . . through the passing down of texts” (my emphasis 230). The adjective “mobile” suggests that the intimacy between texts and readers is historically determined and may differ from one individual or group to another. Viewed from this perspective, the three narratives under consideration shed light on the particular brands of intimacy that Byron’s Bulgarian readers aimed at establishing with him as they tried “to keep [the poet] in sync with [their own] world” and respective cultural and/or political agendas (Nikolopoulou 230). Despite individual differences, those agendas primarily focused on national issues. Because of Bulgaria’s domination by the Ottoman Empire (1390s– 1878), cultural contacts between Bulgaria and Europe and North America were few and sporadic until the second half of the nineteenth century. As Bulgaria started opening up to the world, the reception of foreign literatures became linked to a political-cultural scenario of de-Orientalization, which was an expression of strong anti-Ottoman feeling by the nation’s educated elite. Central to the scenario was the denigration of the period of Muslim-Oriental rule and its representation as a historical detour from Bulgaria’s “proper” road of development within European Christian civilization. Predictably, the scenario was targeted at healing the trauma of the nation’s separation

Claiming a “Great Briton” for Bulgaria

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from that civilization. “Catching up” with “Europe” and the rest of the “enlightened” world was part of the healing process. The scenario was by no means unique to Bulgaria. Indeed, the country shared its distinctive features with its Christian neighbors in southeastern Europe.3 What made Bulgaria’s situation rather different, however, was the importation of an ideology, including a species of Orientalism, in the Saidean sense of the word, from Russia.4 As a result, Russia acquired the role of “a third voice” (Thompson 24) in Bulgarian political and cultural relations with Western and/or Eastern “others.” Thus, Russian influence was often represented as an important cultural factor in Bulgaria’s attempts to “catch up” with the “civilized” world. Apart from being perceived as a source of inspiration and an example by virtue of its own cultural attainments, Russia was also a mediator insofar as it was via Russian culture and language that a number of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Bulgarian intellectuals gained access to Western European and North American systems of ideas and artistic achievements. The reception of the work of British writers, including Byron, was part of that process. Russia was not the only intermediary, however, between Bulgaria and Anglophone cultures, insofar as a number of Bulgarians were educated abroad, especially in Austria Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, and France. The German-speaking cultures in particular provided ideas that shaped Bulgarian views of Britain and North America. Images of the countries in which the literature was produced impacted Bulgarian readers’ perceptions of the oeuvres themselves.5 For example, French was one of the major mediating languages in translating Byron and many other British and American writers into Bulgarian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but Francophone literary ideas did not have much of an impact on Bulgarian images of Britishness/Englishness6 or, for that matter, on Byron’s reception in Bulgaria.7 Though few Bulgarians are known to have studied in Great Britain during the nineteenth century, the presence of American Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of American schools such as the famous Robert College in Istanbul did contribute to the spread of British and North American literature among Bulgarians.8 Stimulated by the influence of such a variety of mediating agencies, the rising Bulgarian intelligentsia made strenuous efforts to educate the widening reading public by increasing general knowledge of key literary developments in Europe and North America.9 Appropriating Byron’s legacy was part of that process. The poet’s clarion call was practically unheeded in the country until the 1870s, after Byronism

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had been eclipsed elsewhere both as a literary fashion and as a social fad. 10 On the other hand, when Bulgarian intellectuals did turn to his work, they made a point of representing it as exemplary. This is borne out by an anthology of poems and extracts from longer canonical literary texts, which two eminent Bulgarian writers, Ivan Vazov (1850–1921) and Konstantin Velichkov (1855–1907), compiled and published in 1884. The anthology, whose full title was Balgarska khristomatia ili sbornik ot izbrani obraztsi po vsichki rodove sachineniya s prilozhenie na kratki zhizneopisaniya na nai-znachitelnite pisateli (Bulgarian Reader or Anthology of Selected Examples of All Genres of Literary Composition with an Appendix of Short Biographies of the Most Eminent Writers), was intended primarily for secondary school students. However, Vazov and Velichkov sincerely hoped that it would likewise impact “people of all ages and walks of life” (Balgarska I. 3).11 Their main aim was to educate the entire Bulgarian reading public by familiarizing it with canonical European writers and texts. The format of the anthology or reader was suited to this goal insofar as it comprised translations of both short pieces and extracts from longer literary texts. André Lefevere has commented on the “enormous part” that “the genre of the extract played in the culture of Europe from the second part of the eighteenth to the third decade of the nineteenth century” as “it was the most economical way to disseminate new works of literature in other languages” (6). The anthologized extract was also ideal for late-nineteenth-century Bulgarian culture, which was painfully aware of its “belatedness” and therefore set a high value upon economical ways of literary dissemination. In Vazov and Velichkov’s Khristomatia, Byron is represented by an extract from canto one of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (“Adieu, adieu! My native shore”), the opening part of Mazeppa’s tale, and a rendition of Mikhail Lermontov’s 1836 Byronic poem “Umirayushchii gladiator” (“The Dying Gladiator”). The farewell section of Childe Harold and the extract from Mazeppa were both translated by Dimitar K. Popov (1855–1908), a graduate of Robert College and an important figure in Bulgarian political and cultural life.12 His translation of the Childe’s leave taking received high praise for its musical quality and was repeatedly anthologized and included in school textbooks until the 1950s when a new translation of the poem appeared (Kostadinova 362–63). The extract from Mazeppa was probably selected because of “the Cossack Prince’s” Eastern European identity and the presumed familiarity of the Bulgarian reading public with the poem’s Ukrainian


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setting. Many late-nineteenth-century Bulgarian disseminators of Byron’s work were attracted by poems including familiar details, such as place names or historical figures that had impacted Bulgarian history. For instance, The Bride of Abydos was repeatedly translated during the 1890s and the first two decades of the twentieth century13 presumably because of its references to “Paswan,” that is Osman Pazvantoglu (1758–1807), the maverick Bosniak-Ottoman governor of the Danubian town of Vidin and the surrounding district (II, XIII, XIV, XV). Vidin itself is called “Widin” in the poem (II, XIV), which also refers to “Sophia’s plain” (II, XIV). Significantly, Byron does not identify “Widin” or “Sophia” as specifically Bulgarian sites, and, unlike his fellow traveler John Cam Hobhouse, hardly ever mentions the Bulgarians in his writing.14 Lermontov’s Byronic hybrid “Umirayushchii gladiator” was rendered into Bulgarian by Ivan Vazov himself. The Russian poem reflects its author’s complex relationship with Byron (Diakonova and Vatsuro 341–44). It includes a free translation of stanzas 139–42 from canto four of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as well as a section that has no direct correspondence to any part of Byron’s text. Vazov’s editorial decision to include this particular piece of poetry was culturally and politically meaningful. To understand its full impact, one needs to consider Lermontov’s free translation in relation to Byron’s original as well as Vazov’s reaction to Bulgaria’s recent history and the role of the European Great Powers in it. Lermontov’s free translation of the “Gladiator” extract from Childe Harold canto four involved considerable modification, but the Russian poet nevertheless conveyed something of the original’s bitter irony and melancholy reflection on the essential similarity between past and present. Commenting on the stance of the narrator in Don Juan, Kirsten Daly notes the evasive character of the ironic technique that Byron employs in key parts of the later poem (196–97). This technique “confound[s] readers’ expectations and offend[s] their sensibilities” by emphasizing “the paucity of moral outrage” (Daly 197). The “Gladiator” extract has a similar effect. The Childe starts with a representation of the Roman Coliseum as a site where “eager nations” met to watch the gladiatorial games and appeals to readers’ sympathies by stressing the violent nature of the spectacle and the spectators’ indifference to the loss of human life. His next move, however, is to emphasize the inevitability of death and the relative unimportance of the circumstances in which it occurs (“What matters where we fall to fill the maws / Of worms”) (IV. 139). The cynicism of the last statement is partially offset by the imaginative reenactment of a Dacian

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gladiator’s death in the next two stanzas (CHP IV. 140–41). The gladiator is said to have remembered his “rude hut by the Danube,” his wife, and his children, and his pointless death (he is “butcher’d to make a Roman holiday”) is identified as a sign of the moral and political degradation of Pax Romana (CHP IV. 141). The empire’s decline would eventually be followed by its destruction by gothic barbarians, who unwittingly avenged the Dacian’s death. Like Byron, Lermontov emphasizes the Roman crowd’s indifference to the gladiator’s fate but infuses more empathy into the description of the gladiator’s last thoughts and emotions. For Lermontov, too, the wanton loss of human life signals Rome’s moral decline and presages the empire’s inevitable downfall. However, unlike Byron, the Russian poet explicitly addresses his contemporary “European world” (evropeiskii mir) and warns that a similar fate may well be in store for it (I. 76). Such an idea concerning the impending doom of modern empires is only implied in Childe Harold’s melancholy reflections. Vazov chose to translate and include this particular piece of Byronic poetry because of Lermontov’s address to the “European world” as well as the gladiator’s “Danubian” identity, which brought him close to the Bulgarian reading public. The address to “the European world,” however, also points to a link between Byron’s Bulgarian reception and the current emotional response to recent political events. Writing in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin of 1878, which revised the outcome of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and thwarted the establishment of a larger Bulgarian state by restoring certain territories to the Ottoman Empire, Vazov strongly resented the policies of the European Great Powers. An admonitory address to “the European world,” therefore, provided an appropriate rhetorical vehicle for his feelings, and that he should have actually attributed that address to Byron is highly significant. In doing so, the Bulgarian writer included Byron among the liberal critics of the Great Powers’ political decisions. This involved bold manipulation but also perceptive evaluation of Lermontov’s debt to Byron. Vazov was indignant at Great Britain’s support of the tottering Ottoman Empire and had earlier expressed his indignation in poems about Benjamin Disraeli, the Tory Prime Minister, and John Blunt, the British Consul in the Thracian city of Edirne (classical Adrianople) around 1876–1877 (Vazov, “Disraeli” 63; “Blunt” 65). A look at his poetry likewise reveals that Vazov’s resentment at Great Britain’s pro-Ottoman policy did not result in simple Anglophobia. He was aware of the anti-Ottoman stance of Disraeli’s political opponent, the Liberal leader William Gladstone, and he was filled with


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admiration for Lord and Lady Strangford, who also supported the Bulgarian cause (Vazov, “To Lady Strangford” 87–88). Vazov does not go so far as to proclaim Gladstone and the Strangfords Byron’s spiritual heirs, but the distinction between “good” and “bad” Britons, which is evident in his poetry, was to impact the subsequent phases of Byron’s reception in Bulgaria. This distinction gradually became part of a particular political configuration, which was intimately linked to the scenario of de-Orientalization as well as to Bulgarian images of Englishness/Britishness. The second narrative further bears out these ideas. Hostility to the pro-Ottoman stance of conservative British politicians led Bulgarian littérateurs to emphasize Byron’s status as an exile from his native land. The British, it would appear, had failed in appreciating one of their greatest poets. This approach to Byron is illustrated in Bulgarian critical writings and original poetry produced in the 1890s. In 1892, two young Bulgarian intellectuals, Pencho Slaveikov (1866–1912) and Dr. Kristyu Kristev (1866–1916), commemorated the centenary of P. B. Shelley’s birth in the pages of the journal Misal (Thought) of which Kristev was the founding editor. Kristev produced an essay entitled “P. B. Shelley” to which Slaveikov appended a poem by Shelley in his own translation (Misal 2, 173–189). The two Bulgarians accorded Shelley unstinting praise for his visionary utopianism. At the same time, Slaveikov and Kristev did not forget Byron and proceeded to place him together with Shelley in a pantheon of Romantic rebels against the modern world’s gross materialism and Philistine disregard of art and culture. Within the latter context Britain was seen to occupy a prominent place. While recent Bulgarian history provided sufficient justification for a negative attitude to Pax Britannica,15 Salveikov and Kristev had borrowed some of the means for expressing it from the German context (Pointner and Geisenhanslueke 240–48). By the early 1890s, Kristev had already completed his education at the University of Leipzig; Slaveikov was to study there, too, between 1892 and 1896, but he had already acquired considerable knowledge of German literature and critical writing prior to his departure. Both Kristev and Slaveikov were familiar with Heinrich Heine’s strictures on the English and combined “native” prejudice against them with the German-Jewish writer’s views on English national character.16 For Heine, the English were a Kraemernazion. He also dubbed them “the Phoenicians of the North Sea” and “the chosen people of prose” (548). While Heine professed to be shocked by English Philistine attitudes and unromantic habits, he also admitted that the

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otherwise despicable Kraemernazion had produced two great poets, Shakespeare and Byron.17 Significantly, Heine himself was rather flattered when, in his youth, he was called “the German Byron” (Hentschel 73). However, Heine also stressed the anomalous position of poets in England: being possessed of imagination, something the English generally lacked, they “[came] into conflict with the people—the snub-nosed, low-browed people without occiput” (548). Thus, according to Heine, English poets were misfits in their own country, and exile was their only means of survival. In 1892, Slaveikov produced a “Shelleyan” rhapsody entitled “Sartse na sartsata” (“Heart of Hearts”) in which he expressed his admiration for Shelley’s visionary humanitarianism and, by implication, his “Heinean” contempt for the modern world’s gross materialism and Philistine attitudes. The poem is reminiscent of Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo” insofar as it focuses on a debate concerning the purpose and meaning of human life. Its protagonist “Shelley” vehemently asserts his determination to be humanity’s benefactor in a heated argument with a group of friends. One of these friends is probably meant to represent Byron: he is an individualist, who urges “Shelley” to cultivate the detachment of a Mont Blanc and gaze with indifference upon the common herd seething below (Slaveikov I. 263). “Byron’s” emphatically individualistic stance may be interpreted as mirroring the rising interest in the “real” Byron’s poem Manfred, which eventually came to be viewed by the poet’s Bulgarian admirers as the quintessential Byronic poem (Kostadinova 358–61). Characteristically, Manfred was viewed through Nietzschean spectacles, and the rising tide of the poem’s popularity reflected an increasing interest in Nietzsche’s ideas. Slaveikov reaffirmed his predilection for “stormy geniuses” such as Byron and Shelley in an essay about Alfred Tennyson, which he produced after his return from Germany and presented to the Bulgarian Literary Society in 1899. The essay, which was subsequently published in Misal (1900), bore the ironically evocative title of “Chestit poet” (“A Happy Poet”). In this essay, Slaveikov is frankly dismissive of Tennyson’s life, if not of his poetic achievements. Indeed, Slaveikov particularly admired “Dora” and “Enoch Arden” and translated the former into Bulgarian. For Slaveikov, Tennyson’s life and temperament fully reflected his nation’s essentially bourgeois mentality and fundamental lack of spirituality (Slaveikov, “Chestit poet” 13–27). Slaveikov’s sympathies were quite obviously with profoundly misunderstood rebels who did not feel “at home” in British society and produced their poetry in and through pain and suffering. For him the


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great poet was the unacknowledged benefactor of the common herd, which vilified him but nevertheless profited from the fruits of his talent. Byron and Shelley were both assumed to fit that description. The image of Byron as a social outcast and the object of petty hatred in his lifetime endured in the Bulgarian context, and this perception is illustrated by some of the writing that was produced to commemorate the centenary of the poet’s death in 1924. Bulgarian interest in Byron’s life and work had been developing at a steady pace in the meantime,18 and that interest reached a climax in the 1920s when disillusionment and despair dominated the country’s intellectual life in the aftermath of two Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and the disasters of World War I. Bulgaria had made an unsuccessful bid for territories with ethnically mixed populations that were also claimed by the other successor states of the Ottoman Empire in southeastern Europe. The peace treaties concluded after the wars—the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest and the 1919 Treaty of Neully—provided controversial solutions to Balkan territorial disputes and were resented by most Bulgarians. The situation was further worsened by economic instability, as ethnic Bulgarian refugees poured in from the contested territories. These circumstances did not appear to be conducive to a massive search for novel aesthetic bearings and artistic experimentation. Relatively few writers, artists, and musicians took an interest in Central and Western European modernist agendas. However, nostalgic exploration of the legacy of Romanticism and post-Romantic practices, such as the production of symbolist poetry, were among the distinctive features of the cultural scene. Within this context, the Byronic figure of Manfred acquired a particular prominence and appeared to eclipse the poet’s other “fatal men.” The centenary of Byron’s death in 1924, therefore, came at an opportune moment and was duly commemorated by a group of Bulgarian intellectuals of varying tastes, educational backgrounds, and professional and political affiliations, who published a collection of essays and poems called Vspomenatelen sbornik (Commemorative Collection). The Collection summed up the main tendencies in Bulgaria’s reception of Byron’s life and work: it opened with a quasiByronic poem decrying human envy, professional jealousy, and distrust of genius and went on to acknowledge the Bulgarian debt to German interpretations with an essay fittingly entitled “Euphorion” and a Nietzschean fantasia on Manfred. The Collection likewise included a Romantic-nationalist piece on “the Anglo-Saxon character” and its relationship to the Balkans and

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Bulgaria, which was called “Nachaloto na Childe Harold: Byron v Albania” (“The Beginning of Childe Harold: Byron in Albania”). Its author was Konstantin Stefanov (1873–1940), an Evangelical Christian who had been educated by American missionaries in southwestern Bulgaria and had subsequently gone to the United States where he earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Yale University. To support himself at Yale he worked on a farm and drove a trolley car (“Macedonian Student”). After the completion of his MA in 1901 Stefanov decided to continue his education at the University of Berlin but was overcome by homesickness and returned to Bulgaria. His subsequent career was checkered in the extreme: it included a brief stint as a dragoman to John MacDonald, a British journalist writing for the London Daily News, which led to his imprisonment by the Ottoman Government in Macedonia; a diplomatic posting in Athens; two PR jobs in London and Berne respectively; and an academic position at Sofia University.19 The diverse events of Stefanov’s life indicate, among other things, how “small” the world had become by the beginning of the twentieth century owing to the rapid development of communications and the growing mobility of people across the globe. Stefanov’s contribution to Vspomenatelen sbornik differs markedly from his colleagues’ pieces. While others emphasize Byron’s stance as a misunderstood rebel or obsess over Manfred’s titanic defiance of eternal powers, Stefanov is primarily interested in “domesticating” the British poet by demonstrating his “proximity” to the Bulgarian context. Stefanov’s career shows that he was very much a “border” figure, a mediator between his own culture and what he persisted in calling “Anglo-Saxondom,” that is, the cultures of Great Britain and North America, which he assumed to possess a high degree of uniformity. His mediation was institutionalized in 1913, when he represented the Bulgarian Government in Great Britain, and between 1917 and 1919, when he was a member of the Bulgarian Cultural Commission in Berne. On both occasions, Stefanov tried to dispel anti-Bulgarian feeling and win Western public opinion over to his country’s side. In 1919, he produced two pamphlets We Macedonians and We Thracians and a longer book entitled The Bulgarians and Anglo-Saxondom, purporting to shed light on the Bulgarian national character and to remind latter-day British and American politicians of earlier champions of the Bulgarians such as William Gladstone and the American missionary Dr. Albert Long. Similar propagandist ploys were employed by other South Eastern European governments in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and the approaching end of World War I, as it was paramount


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for each Balkan country to outstrip its rivals in the region and win the “battle for minds and hearts in Europe and America” (Roessel 147). Stefanov was likewise aware that the majority of his fellow-Bulgarians knew fairly little about “Anglo-Saxondom,” harbored strong prejudice against Protestants, and resented the cynicism and ruthlessness with which Great Britain and other mighty powers had treated their country from the 1870s onward. Offsetting negative attitudes and reminding the Bulgarian public that “Anglo-Saxondom” also had a “human face” was Stefanov’s main purpose in “Byron in Albania.” One distinctive trait of Stefanov’s representation of Byron is the emphasis he places on the poet’s Britishness. He admiringly calls Byron “velikiya brit” (“the great Briton”) (Stefanov, “Albania” 27).20 For Stefanov, forging a link between “the great Briton” and Bulgaria is crucial. Therefore, he focuses attention on Byron’s pronouncements upon the affinity between Albanians and Scottish Highlanders in the Notes to canto two of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (CPW 2: 193). As Massimiliano Demata has demonstrated, Byron’s analogy between “Western and Eastern savages” reflected eighteenth-century Scottish philosophical ideas of social evolution, i.e. Albanians and Highlanders were seen to belong to a similar evolutionary level (61). Stefanov claimed that Byron’s analogy could be extended to include Montenegrins and Macedonians as well as any Bulgarians that Byron might have encountered in the course of his Balkan tour. For him, the affinity between “Balkanites” and Highlanders has nothing to do with their belonging to the same (low) level of social evolution but is a matter of spiritual kinship. The final inference to which this line of argument is meant to lead is that “the Anglo-Saxon character” to which the Celtic Highlanders are (somehow!) assimilated should not be regarded as an instance of total foreignness. Similarities exist between this character and the positive “all-Balkan” character, which Bulgarians also share. The mission of the well-meaning scholar and cultural mediator, then, is to “discover” these similarities in such classic texts as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and to pass such “discoveries” on to the wider public, thus combating prejudice. Stefanov’s reflections on the “kinship” between “Anglo-Saxons” and Bulgarians are followed by comments on Byron’s own personal character. Readers are told that the Albanian bessa (credibility, keeping one’s word) was “second nature” to him and that this explained his unswerving loyalty to the cause of Greek independence (Stefanov, “Albania” 28). The author then reminds readers that such staunch loyalty is an “Anglo-Saxon” national characteristic (Stefanov, “Albania” 28). The merits of two other public figures more closely

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linked to Bulgaria, “the great Gladstone” and “the noble Bourchier” (James Bourchier—a correspondent of the Times in the Balkans between 1888 and 1915), are also used by way of illustration (Stefanov, “Albania” 28). Caught between the conflicting claims of several fields of cultural power (British, American, Bulgarian, all-Balkan) Stefanov assimilates the characteristics of Balkan nations often decried for their “barbarism” to those of an imagined “Anglo-Saxondom” which he regards as superior. Led by a desire to forget recently experienced history, the author invents a history of his own in which Bulgaria’s fate is benevolently presided over by a select company of staunch and faithful Anglo-Saxon heroes. Byron is assigned a prominent place in this elite formation. Of the Bulgarian littérateurs writing during this period, Stefanov arguably achieves the highest degree of intimacy with Byron. His comments on the poet’s life and work are informed by an ethically sound desire for dispelling prejudice and building bridges between cultures, and he was to continue his reflections on Byron in a longer piece entitled Byron—poetat na svobodata i na mirovata skrab (Byron: the Poet of Liberty and World Grief ) (1930). Stefanov’s later text is fairly close in spirit to “Byron in Albania”; in fact, it includes a slightly modified version of the earlier article. The 1930 text expresses Stefanov’s concern over the social impact of Byronic individualism as exemplified by Manfred, the poem that was most popular in Bulgaria. Stefanov’s solution is to establish a firm distinction between Byron as an historical individual and his literary (anti)hero Manfred. Stefanov even goes so far as to proclaim the “godless” Manfred the progenitor of latter-day Bolshevism and communism (Byron 31). His creator, on the other hand, could have developed in a very different direction if the circumstances of his life had been different. Thus, if he had not died from fever in Missolonghi, Byron could have become king of Greece and (possibly) exerted a favorable influence upon the overall destiny of the Balkan Peninsula. Stefanov tentatively hints that Byron could have prevented the region from eventually becoming Europe’s notorious “powderkeg” (Byron 36). Byron’s Bulgarian reception did not end with Stefanov’s reflections on the poet’s hypothetical impact on Balkan history. More texts were produced, but the overall approach to “the great Briton” drastically changed—the element of intimacy perceptibly diminished. The 1924 Vspomenatelen sbornik came in for a heavy barrage of criticism from Bulgaria’s leading Modernist poet and avant-garde critic Geo Milev (1895–1925). The collection, Milev averred, “did not in any way do


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justice to Byron’s grandiose image” nor did it do credit to his “great name” (204). Milev was particularly irritated by Stefanov’s attempt to marry literary biography to latter-day nationalist politics by, as it appeared to him, clumsily linking Byron’s name to Bulgaria’s territorial claims in the aftermath of the country’s defeat in the Balkan Wars and World War I. Milev wrote, Konstantin Stefanov, Professor of English at the University [of Sofia], whose sole advantage [over the other contributors] is that he can read Byron in the original, recounts a highly amusing episode . . . only to launch into a speech about Macedonia’s “righteous cause” and to bring in the names of “the great Gladstone” and “the noble Bourchier” . . . But the English poet’s titanic figure is simply not there. (204)

For Milev, doing justice to Byron’s “titanic figure” was important but what mattered even more was to consign the Romantic poet safely to the past. Byron was a rebel but also a “decadent aristocrat” (204). There was no room for his “hyper-despair” and “mystical horror before the secrets of existence” in the emphatically modern present into which Milev wished to propel Bulgarian culture (204). The particular kinds of intimacy with the past that were engendered through nation-centered explorations of the Byronic legacy were no longer deemed relevant. While Geo Milev’s desire for new vistas appears perfectly legitimate from a present-day perspective, the significance of the three narratives that form the main subject of this essay should also be acknowledged. The strategies that their “protagonists” employed may appear naïve at times, but the efforts they made to relate Byron’s legacy to the concerns of their native culture are nevertheless worthy of respect and further study. “The great Briton’s” Bulgarian reception may appear fairly modest at first glance, but a closer look at it reveals unexpected treasures of critical ingenuity and creative (mis)reading.

Notes 1. “Great Briton” is from Stefanov 27. 2. One of the texts I discuss was published in 1930 but is in many ways a continuation of attitudes and ideas its author expressed earlier. 3. Commentary on the Greek case, which has predictably received the greatest attention in discussions of the Balkan Christian countries’ political situation vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire and the West, appears in Leask (15–24); Herzfeld (esp. 89–108); Roessel (esp. 132–58). 4. Additional discussion of the relationship between Russia and Bulgaria can be found in Pundeff (93–166).

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Ludmilla K. Kostova 5. The connection between the reception of foreign literary texts and images of the national cultures in which they were produced is discussed in Warnke (48–51) and Frank and Geisenhanslueke. 6. Bulgarian representations of Great Britain share the continental synecdochic reduction of Britishness to Englishness. 7. Nineteenth-century French popular literature played an important role in transmitting what may be termed secondary Byronic elements into the Bulgarian context. Novels by Alexandre Dumas and Eugene Sue were particularly influential in this respect. 8. Founded in 1863 by Christopher Robert, a wealthy industrialist from New York, Robert College was the oldest American school outside the United States. According to Bulgarian-American historian Maria Todorova, it became “the most important foreign school in the Ottoman Empire” and greatly contributed to “the formation of minority elites” among the empire’s subject Christian populations (105). 9. Tatyana Stoicheva discusses the late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Bulgarian tendency of conflating British and American literature in “The (Non)-Constituting of ‘American Literature’ in Bulgarian Literary Discourse (1878–1944).” 10. The Bride of Abydos was the first of Byron’s poems to be translated into Bulgarian (1850). The translator Nikola Katranov (1829–1853) was something of a Romantic hero in his own right. He studied at Moscow University where he tried to arouse an interest in Bulgarian history and folklore and thus contribute to the cause of national independence. Katranov died at the age of 24 during an ill-fated visit to Bulgaria. His untimely death and his idealistic dedication to the Bulgarian national cause attracted the attention of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, who used him as a prototype for the Bulgarian protagonist of his 1860 novel Nakanune (On the Eve). Unfortunately, most of Katranov’s manuscripts, including his translation of The Bride of Abydos, were lost (Kostadinova 354–55). 11. Translation from Bulgarian is mine throughout this essay, unless otherwise indicated. 12. Detailed commentary on Dimitar K. Popov’s translations appears in Vladimir Philipov, “Prevodacheskoto delo na D. K. Popov” (D. K. Popov as a Translator). 13. According to Vladimir Philipov, The Bride was a great favorite with Bulgarian translators and readers between the 1890s and 1920s. He attributes the popularity of the poem to its “Oriental topic and use of local color” (“Angliiskata” 214). 14. John Cam Hobhouse discusses the Bulgarians and some of the other peoples of South Eastern Europe in Travels in Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in 1809 & 1810, Vol. I, 271–301. 15. The persistence of anti-British feeling among Bulgarian intellectuals is borne out by their support for the Boer side during the Second


16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

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Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). An anonymous congratulatory address to the president of the Transvaal Republic appeared in Misal (February 1900). The address stresses the kinship between Boers and Bulgarians and claims that the world should acknowledge “the divine right” of “small peoples” to “free and independent existence” (Address 138). Slaveikov regarded Heine as a mentor. In a prose sketch introducing his 1896 collection of poems Epic Songs, Slaveikov adopts the quasiGermanic identity of the poet Olaf Van Geldern and claims that when he was in Germany he received hospitality from three excellent hosts: a Hellene (Goethe), an Israelite (Heine), and a Teuton (Nietzsche). (Sabrani sachineniya I. 254). Heine claimed that Shakespeare was in a different position from modern poets because his talent developed in the Elizabethan age, before the English national character had been irreparably warped by religious hypocrisy and the mercantile spirit (Stigand 301). Bulgarian writer Lyudmil Stoyanov made a volume of Byron’s poetry the centre of a wartime story entitled “Childe Harold.” In it a Bulgarian officer finds a book of Byron’s poetry among the belongings of a dead British soldier and is reminded of his own schooldays and the cultural heritage he shares with the dead man (originally published in Nova Misal 1919). Several Web sites provide information about Konstantin Stefanov (a. k. a. Constantine Stephanove) and his family: http://www.yalealum.htm, http://library.ferris.edu/cochranr/const.htm, http://www.vladafone.co. uk.htm; downloaded on December 10, 2006. The word “brit,” which Stefanov uses, is very rare in Bulgarian, the common noun for “Britisher” being “britanets.” I suspect that it is a borrowing from Russian where it tends to occur in poetic contexts.


6

Th e Tr a nsfor m at ions of t h e B y ron L e ge n d: M e t hodol ogic a l R e a ssessm e n t Mirosława Modrze wska

Fiona MacCarthy’s Byron: Life and Legend was followed by an

impressive exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, entitled Mad Bad and Dangerous to Know. Both the book and the exhibition occasioned numerous reviews and articles that provide a useful starting place for an investigation of the influence of consumerist and ideological rhetoric on academic research. An advertisement for MacCarthy’s Byron was included in the exhibition brochure: it presented the book cover, with the famous portrait of Byron in Albanian dress, and a short description of the contents. In addition, the brochure included the story of European and American Byromania, a brief biography of Byron, a program of the lectures by renowned Byronists that accompanied the exhibition, and an account of MacCarthy’s book: Byron: Life and Legend by Fiona MacCarthy, is a new biography of Byron originating from John Murray—Byron’s own publisher. Drawing on Murray’s world-famous archive, this book presents ground-breaking research of Byron’s life and poetry for a whole new generation. Fiona MacCarthy, curator of the exhibition, is one of the leading biographers in Britain today. Her new book is available to purchase from the Gallery shops, priced £25 hardback.

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Mirosława Modrzewska

From the chronology of Byron’s life also contained in the brochure, visitors to the exhibit immediately learn about his “intense relationships with adolescent boys” (1798); his “indiscreet affairs with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, eclipsed by the scandal of incestuous relationship with his half sister Augusta Leigh” (1812–1815); the “rumour of incest and sodomy” (1816); his “dissolute life” in Venice, where he claimed “at least 200 liasons”; the “ménage à trois” with his mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, (1820–1821); and finally his unreciprocated love for his Greek page Lukas Chalandritsanos (1823– 1824). The interspersed titles of his poetic works look somewhat accidental, which has not passed unnoticed. In his critical review of the whole event, Peter Cochran comments, “Ignore the poetry. It’s the only way to make him [Byron] into an acceptable Blairite consumerist item” (“Anything to Avoid”). In his review of Fiona MacCarthy’s book for The Daily Telegraph, October 27, 2002, Jonathan Bate is also critical of such an approach: Because the definitive Leslie Marchand biography was written in the 1950s, when homosexuality was still illegal, it glosses over Byron’s clearly attested bisexuality. But MacCarthy over-compensates for her predecessor’s modesty: she makes pederasty into the central theme of Byron’s life. The evidence that she gathers is compelling, but the idea that it is the hidden key to Byron’s poetry is dubious. “Greek love” was a philosophical and political pose every bit as much as a sexual proclivity. Byron was a deeply literary poet and yet MacCarthy has no interest in his relationship to the literary tradition. It is little short of scandalous that an “authorized” biography of him should have 25 index entries under the heading “homosexual predilections” and one—yes, one—under the heading “reading.” (“Yes, and he was a poet too”)

Although such commentary speaks to the way in which Byron has been recreated for and by contemporary readers, the Byron legend also needs to be considered in the light of the special and consciously created meaning that myth and legend had for the Romantics. German writers and philosophers such as Schlegel, Schelling, J. Grimm, and others theorized that myths and legends serve as primary sources for religion, philosophy, and poetry. After Herder (Uber die Legende, 1797), European writers rehabilitated the legend as a source of historical truth and raised it to a status comparable to that of the poetic text: a symbolic recreation of historical events. The Romantic activity of legend or myth creation, then, went beyond literary creation and

Transformations of the Byron Legend

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into the field of collective imagination. In discussing the Romantic legend, Stanisław Rosiek explains, In the wider sense, as it emerged in the nineteenth century, the legend is also a nonhistorical explanation of history; it is a system of mythologized convictions about the national past and present, about the creators of history, literature and art. Woven around great events and personalities, legends raised them from the historical sphere to the mythical and symbolic one and gave them a clear axiological marking, either sanctifying them (the “golden” and “white” legends) or precipitating them into the abyss of eternal damnation (the “black” legends). . . . Often the same person or historical event acquired varied interpretations and evaluations. Legends not only presented and imposed a clear image of reality, but also shaped that reality, serving as exempla, and sometimes even unconditional directives of behaviour and stance. (171)

The varied patriotic mythology of the time had a lasting importance that shaped the collective imagination of nations throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Thus, one can begin to realize the history-creating power of personal legends built on important historical events and modeled on the motifs of the artist, prophet, political activist, or soldier. Such allegorical presentations of the lives of martyrs might have encoded the future freedom of an enslaved country such as Poland or Greece at the time. But patriotic or literary legends were never shaped once and forever; they were subject to changes and transformations, repeating the original stories until they became stereotypes and then reviving and modifying them again, ridiculing and parodying them and then returning to their original ethical and aesthetic values. From a literary historical perspective, legends, like any other literary conventions, undergo the processes of automization and de-automization, as described by Jurij Tynianov (45–65). A legend may go through many phases, such as transformation into a “black” version, which is the sign of de-automization. With regard to Byron, this process appears to be occurring in the activities of certain contemporary critics and writers. Fiona MacCarthy writes of the “cult” of Byron, rather than the “legend”; this is to use a term whose semantic connotations are considerably more negative. The stylizing of Byron as “Mad, bad and dangerous to know” (after Lady Caroline Lamb) in the National Gallery exhibit also represents a similar modification of the Byron story. Another noticeable trend is the highlighting of previously unnoticed and degrading facts of the author’s life or, as in Jerome McGann’s book

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Byron and Romanticism, the revelation of an unknown, antithetical, and dark portrait of Byron and analysis of the alleged hypocrisy and cant of Lord Byron’s poetry. This tendency is also visible in Duncan Wu’s feature on Byron for The Independent entitled “Not Such a True Romance.” The editor’s subtitle poses a question: “The notion of Lord Byron as darkly glamorous is a seductive one. But, asks Duncan Wu, has our love affair with the myth blinded us to less palatable truths about the great Romantic?” Then, in one of the final paragraphs of his article, devoted to the BBC film version of Byron that he had seen in a preview, Wu writes, The test of our moral superiority ought to be whether were there such a man to commit the same vices today, we would treat him with similar indulgence. It seems unlikely. Not that Byron should be considered the “Fred West of Eng lit,” but we should be aware that an agreeable but wholly fictional alter ego has displaced the tortured soul to be found in the wreckage of his life—an egomaniacal monster who made some catastrophically bad decisions that caused appalling suffering, especially to those closest to him. Typically, he imprisoned his four-year-old daughter Allegra in an Italian convent, refusing her access to her mother, despite her repeated pleadings. Allegra died just over a year later. I have yet to see that portrayed on screen—not, presumably, because it is undramatic, but because it doesn’t pander to the more anodyne Byron we prefer. (“Not Such a True Romance”)

These conflicts have also been discussed in relation to Byron’s poetry by critics such as Jerome McGann, who provides an expanded study of Byron’s minor poem “Fare Thee Well,” which the poet addressed to his wife, Anabella Milbanke, during the divorce procedure. In this poem, called a piece of “sentimental doggerel” by William Wordsworth, the poet presents himself as a brokenhearted, rejected husband expressing remorse and appealing to her feelings. Byron circulated the poem among London society and gave a copy to his publisher John Murray. Murray tried to protest but then published it on April 8, just before Byron left England forever. The purpose, according to McGann, was to manipulate public opinion in the context of rumors concerning Byron’s sodomy and his incestuous relationship with Augusta Leigh. How is one to read this poem, wonders McGann, if on the textual level it is a love poem, while the circumstances of publication reveal cold hypocrisy and manipulation bordering on hatred? (100–101). The postmodernist understanding proposed by Jerome McGann, in which Byron is presented as a poetic imposter and a “hero with a


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thousand faces,” the master of literary masquerade and public deceit, is the antithesis of the “golden” legend of Byron formed on the continent of Europe throughout the nineteenth century—a legend that some Byronists do find problematic. Peter Cochran, quoted above, claims that European Romantic poets and translators misread and misinterpreted Byron. He protests, “It was not Lord Byron whom the Gdan´sk shipyard workers quoted, but Byron filtered through the sentimentalisation of Mickiewicz [the Polish Romantic Poet]” (“Anything to Avoid”). Similarly, Kathryn Hughes in her review of Fiona MacCarthy’s biography indirectly states that the Byron legend has to be revised: One of the main tasks that Fiona MacCarthy sets herself in this new biography of Byron is to excavate his historical life, which lasted a swift but noisy 36 years, from two centuries’ worth of sentimental mythmaking.

Hughes’ final comment on the book is, to say the least, ambiguous and somewhat sardonic: MacCarthy, honorably, does not make fun of the hundreds of people down the centuries who have secretly felt that Byron was their imaginary friend. For it is quite clear that she believes, despite all the silliness, that Byron was indeed someone special. Not perhaps, because of his poetry, which is hardly read now (most people would find it difficult to quote a single line), but because he was the first Briton to show his countrymen that there were other nations in Europe that were worth believing in and dying for. (“Mad about the Boys”)

The importance of other nations for Byron is, indeed, at the heart of the interpretive problems surrounding the Byron life and legend. To understand this fully requires considerable literary and historical competence that embraces the struggle for freedom and national identity in many parts of nineteenth-century continental Europe, a struggle embodied in a series of bloody uprisings and persecutions and in massive migrations of people around Europe and America. In the Introduction to Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe: A Symposium, edited by Paul Graham Trueblood, Douglas Dakin gives a lengthy description of the historical background of the times and enumerates the national movements and revolts, including the Greek one, and then comments, “But all these events were relatively unimportant. Much more important was the economic revolution which the French political revolutions had

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perhaps hastened and the far-reaching effects of which were most clearly discernible in Britain” (20). The British economic point of view might be quite an obstacle in trying to understand the Byron legend in Poland, Greece, or any other country during the nineteenth century. And the literary activity concerning Byron in Poland, for instance, will be impenetrable in the circumstances of such a serious limitation of historical perception. But the literary legend of Byron on the Continent is and was a fact and thus cannot be ignored. For the purpose of clarity, then, I suggest the following methodological solutions. The Romantic, or nineteenth-century, legend of Lord Byron should be understood in its historical, linguistic, and cultural contexts, which differed across Europe and America and were differently adjusted to the local literary or political demand. Certain parts of the legend might have overlapped but, for example, in Germany the legend focused around the Faustian figure of Byron’s Manfred. And, as is explained by Cedric Hentschel, “It was both plausible and flattering to perceive Byron’s hero as a link in a dynasty of titans stretching from Goethe’s Faust to Nietzsche’s Superman” (87). In the Greek and the Polish legend the focus has been completely different, enhancing the Promethean and Tyrtean elements of the myth and presenting the figure of Byron as a Poet-Soldier, the embodiment of Romantic fullness of poetic thought transformed into action. Richard A. Cardwell explains the sources of the heroic myth of Byron in his Introduction to The Reception of Byron in Europe: For many nations the first contact was through newspaper or journal articles reporting details of Byron’s life rather than criticism of his poetry. In Greece, of course, the immediacy of Byron’s death provoked an instant response in the two Messolongi [sic] newspapers, Ellinika Hronika (The Greek chronicle) and the Telegrafo Greco (The Greek telegraph), but they were more concerned with the enormity of their political loss rather than with a cultural one. Certainly the news soon spread across Europe. But Byron was well-known before his heroic and iconic death. . . . In 1816 Byron was hailed as “the most popular living English poet.” (2)

However, a homogenous description of interpretations of Byron and his works cannot be cast in terms of nationality. Edoardo Zuccato, for instance, speaks about the variety of Byron’s reception in different phases and areas of Italian literary history: “a Catholic, sentimental Byronism prevailed in Lombardy; an anti-clerical Byronism emerged in Tuscany; and a wildly romantic Byronism was invented in the South” (80).


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The differences in interpretation of the Byron legend also depended on social class or political situation within the same nation, and “no country,” says Cardwell, offered a consistent pattern of reception, giving changing fashions, tastes, new literary and aesthetic preoccupations, new and unforeseen events and political interventions. For some countries, Poland and Italy especially, Byron became the model for a nascent Romantic expression. For the latter, Byron was the spokesman for a resistance to Classicism; for the former he represented a “history-creating power” in a new age offering new attitudes. (7)

Consequently, the literary life of the Byron legend varies in different linguistic and cultural contexts. This difference is not necessarily a result of the translators and poets transplanting the legend into their own languages, while ignorant or oblivious about certain facts of Lord Byron’s life or literary output; instead, it was due to the intellectual climate and the literary convictions of the Romantic epoch, in which faithful and imitative translation was dismissed as unoriginal and futile. The translators and poets consciously modified texts and stories to suit the needs of their readers and actually designed their own readers in their interpretations of Byron. In the case of the Polish reception, one might have found a poet in emigration writing for a reader trained in deciphering textual information disguised in the Byronic text to avoid Russian censorship. Such was the case of Adam Mickiewicz, who wrote his first Byronic poems as a Russian political exile (1823–1829) and then created the Slavonic myth of Lord Byron as a lecturer at the Sorbonne in Paris (1840–1844) (Modrzewska 307).1 Many of the Byronomaniacs of the time actually belonged to a multinational community of political exiles who settled in Paris or London (Cardwell 4). Byronism, in its various chronological phases, involved enormous translatorical efforts. The first translations were based on the French versions of Byron’s poetry by Pichot, which were rather controversial and not entirely accurate. But critics must maintain the distinction between unconscious translatorical mistakes and conscious interpretative activity. The Romantics, like George Sand, for example, believed the task of literature was to present life as it “should be” (Janion 209). Consequently, discussing all the departures from “the real Byron” in other languages is useless. The mode of reception and the shaping of a legend belong to the sphere of literary-historical facts bearing the features of the local literary and cultural trends and the conscious activity of the poet-translators, who take up their linguistic ventures

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in order to enrich their own local culture and tradition. Thus, Byron’s texts gain their multiple existences in different languages and cultures, adjusted to varied literary contexts. Similarly, the legend of Byron undergoes transformations and modifications, exhibiting the dynamics of affirmation and negation depending on the current literary trends or readership. Romantic myth and legend creation, with its characteristic use of stereotype, must also be seen as a consequence of the nineteenth-century processes of democratization of life and popularization of literary cul˙ ture at the time of the Napoleonic wars (Zółkiewski 415–27). Genres recognized till then as “low” (ballad, legend, song) became important and popular (Janion 451–55), and more people had access to poetry, which resulted in a general demand for currently appealing topics for a wide readership. The noticeable commercialization of the Byron legend that can be observed today in the biography by Fiona MacCarthy, among other works, may have a similar popularizing effect for the Byron legend in the West; however, as Duncan Wu observes, this popularizing may come at the cost of oversimplification or degradation of cultural or literary values: MacCarthy’s forte is her deployment of the facts, assembled skillfully, accurately, and usually in the right order. This book will tell you that Byron helped write an Armenian-English grammar, used “cundums,” and bit his nails. And MacCarthy’s conjectures about Byron’s sex life are probably right. But it is a sad comment on our culture that a fully researched biography such as this has little to say about what made Byron a great poet, while devoting several hundred pages to proving that he was a closet homosexual whose cover was the exaggerated number of female conquests which were his chief boast. (“Byron: Life and Legend”)

Such works may mark the birth of a new biographical literary genre, “a psychosexual biography,” as Frederick W. Shilstone puts it, springing from the sheer need of the market, called the “readership,” or the need of writers and publishers who want to sell more books and offer a new kind of entertainment. Will this new legend, close to the neopagan myth of the androgynous, flourish globally in the modern Internet culture? Will there be a market for a psychosexual myth of an artist, with all its simplified view of human existence, in every country in the world? Presumably, the future of biography might be determined by the prevalence of a system of hierarchical aesthetic or ethical values dividing different spheres of cultural activity into “high” and


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“low.” On the other hand, many literary genres not initially accepted as “high” (e.g. the eighteenth-century sentimental novel or folk ballad) were much later recognized as masterpieces—copied and imitated as models that, in turn, inevitably generated stereotypes and no longer entertaining conventions. Critics might speculate about the similar dynamics of this new genre, which having burnt out as a convention may have to be revived through a philosophical or spiritual dimension. The phenomena I have described go beyond strictly literaryhistorical considerations into the spheres of sociology of literature, culture, and even anthropology. Whichever of those aspects of Byron’s influential life and literature writers and critics choose to describe, they should nonetheless engage with the functional differences between descriptive study and normative criticism.

Note 1. In one of his Sorbonne lectures Mickiewicz writes, A new literary epoch, a new epoch of poetry, begins with Byron. This literature and this poetry reaches out to philosophy on the one hand and to real life on the other. We know how sharp was his penetration of political tasks, how he was always investigating the central mystery of human history. In none but him do we see so well the suffering of the extraordinary being at the turning point between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, those purposeless wanderings, those yearnings for an unknown future. Everything that tortured the minds, that stirred the souls of young people of our generation, Byron faithfully rendered in his writings and his life. In this respect he is a poet of real life. Similar feelings and similar pursuits also appear in Slavonic poets. (11)


Pa rt II

I nf lu ences on Byron’ s W ork


7

By ron a n d t h e Dr ag ons of E de n Marilyn Gaull

From a few bones he found in a suburb of Paris, George Cuvier

(1769–1832) constructed a population of flying dragons, gigantic reptiles, sloths, and predatory beasts that he claimed had been destroyed in a series of catastrophes or revolutions in prehistory, a temporal concept more original than what he discovered. However speculative, Cuvier’s vision of a ruined and resurrected natural world and his theory of extinction, crossed religious, linguistic, class, and geographic barriers, appealing to scientists, artists, and writers alike. Although prehistoric and ancient beyond conception, catastrophism was rooted in the contemporary, public, and international events between 1770 and 1830. Politically, Cuvier’s theory addressed the experience of those helpless generations who endured and survived the French and American revolutions, the Reign of Terror, the Napoleonic wars, everyone’s subsequent defeats, and the massacres, explosions, unprecedented fatalities, disfigurements, and displacement of huge populations. But Cuvier’s vision also addressed those who inflicted this suffering, the power-driven elitists for whom his reconstructions extended French and British colonizing to prehistory, to a doomed prehistoric world of extreme weather and terrestrial violence, an ugly but convincing alternative to the popular, sunny, and tropically based primitivism of the eighteenth century and of the Biblical pastoral tradition. Like the

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Marilyn Gaull

Victorian dinosaurs that followed, as W. J. T. Mitchell wrote in The Last Dinosaur Book, catastrophism expressed the unconscious and political fear of impending disaster and personal extinction. Although Cuvier’s catastrophism was secular, the bones conveyed those supernatural associations that new scientific theories, including Cuvier’s, were supposed to overcome. Some believed that the bones were vestiges of mythological creatures such as the sphinx, Griffin, Pegasus, mermaid, or minotaur—the monstrous and magical figures that Adrienne Mayor in The First Fossil Hunters traces to ancient Greece and Rome, those pagan cultures whose pseudo-histories were revived by eighteenth-century mythogogues. British geologists, who identified the bones with the Biblical Flood, interpreted them as evidence of the primitive, jealous, and punitive Old Testament God in whom many contemporary religious sects still believed. As either pagan or Hebraic, the meanings the bones acquired reflected the appetite for wonder, magic, religious belief, and the sublime in a secular age. Cuvier’s catastrophic theories and the evidence on which he based them also reflected an artistic and literary tradition, realistic in tendency although fantastic in execution. For example, the figures he and his assistants drew of fossil animals, such as the mammoth, mastodon, sea serpent, crocodile, giant deer, and the unlikely pterodactyl, appeared in John Martin’s The Deluge (1828) as a menagerie of drowning and terrified animals, inundated by a wayward comet, along with some exquisite semi-nudes in various poses of despair, an image that Cuvier declared “authentic.” On the basis of detail and function rather than religious conviction, Cuvier’s figures, the ecology in which he placed them, and Martin’s painting of them comprised a cultural record as much as a natural or even spiritual history, a collage assembled from Greek myth, folklore, superstition, The Arabian Nights, medieval romances, Celtic and Nordic epics such as Ossian and Beowulf, Perrault’s castle tales, the Brothers Grimm, contemporary diorama, pantomime, landscape painting, and even illustrated Bibles for children. To add veracity and emotional appeal to The Deluge, the explanatory pamphlet that accompanied the mezzotint quoted passages from Byron’s Heaven and Earth (Rudwick, Scenes 22–25). In contemporary British literature, catastrophism extended and reinterpreted the gothic and the elegiac graveyard school. From Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts,” Robert Blair’s “The Grave,” Thomas Gray’s “Elegy . . . in a Country Churchyard,” and William Blake’s illustrations of most of them, to Wordsworth’s The Excursion

Byron and the Dragons of Eden

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and Byron’s Childe Harold, nature had become a secular memorial to pointless ambition and human futility. To Shelley, who had “the capacity to imagine what we know” and the verbal power to carry “the facts of contemporary life . . . alive into the heart,” as he said in A Defense of Poetry, Cuvier’s catastrophic geology inspired a sublime and scientific passage invoking “The anatomies of unknown wing’d things,” comparable to Martin’s painting: The jagged alligator, and the might Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores, And weed-overgrown continents of the earth, Increased and multiplied like summer worms On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe Wrapped deluge round it like a cloak and they Yelled, gasped, and were abolished . . . . (Prometheus Unbound IV. 281–88)

While the Byronic hero and the prehistoric beasts express private fantasies, they also address the collective imagination, an elusive concept comprised of public events, natural history, and artistic expression, as well as archetypes—the “transcripts,” Charles Lamb called them in “Witches and other Night-Fears,” or an Edenic serpent surviving in the universal unconscious, according to Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden—from a time when primitive humans and dinosaur/ dragons peacefully co-habited. David Jones, on the other hand, in An Instinct for Dragons, claimed that the dragon image, which lay behind Cuvier’s sea serpents and pterodactyl, is a composite of the carnivores, serpents, and predatory birds who devoured human ancestors and their young when they were still monkeys. Though these dragons haunt children in their dreams and in the tales they like to hear, they also haunt adults, for, when adults feel helpless, overcome by crises, by the chaos of war, earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues, and inexplicable crime, these images take form in poetry, painting, film, popular novels, and are artfully reconstructed in theme parks or museums, contained and controlled, but pervasive and recurrent. Artists, scientists, and writers responded to the bones and the catastrophic theory behind them with a common creative process as well. Famous for constructing an entire beast from a single bone and the eons of time it represented, Cuvier’s creativity as much as Keats’s illustrated Wordsworth’s ideal “majestic intellect,” that “feeds upon infinity” and “broods over the dark abyss,” “send[ing] abroad / Kindred mutations,” “build[ing] up greatest things / From least suggestions”

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(the entire Prelude passage XIV. 67–119). For all the Romantic poets, creativity was a reciprocal act, literally an interaction between the artist and the subject, half-creating and half-perceiving, the observer becoming part of the observation, every expression a self-expression. Similarly, Cuvier’s perceptions of the beasts he reconstructed were shaped by his own emotions while they also reflected public events and contemporary history, expressing the same complicated power as such monumental literary figures as Oedipus, Don Quixote, King Lear, and the Byronic hero. And, just as later literary figures take their form from these iconic heroes, so all later images of prehistoric life forms, evolving like life itself, begin in Cuvier’s figures. Cuvier considered himself an artist as much as a scientist, a “new sort of antiquarian,” as he said in the opening of Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe (1825), and presented his theories in an imaginative and engaging style, such as the opening to the Discourse: When the traveler goes through fertile plains where tranquil waters nourish with their regular flow an abundant vegetation and where the ground, trodden by numerous people and decorated with flourishing villages, rich cities, and superb monuments, is never troubled except by ravages of war or by the oppression of men in power, he is not tempted to believe that nature has also had its internal wars and that the surface of the earth has been overthrown by revolutions and catastrophes. But his ideas change as soon as he seeks to dig through this soil, today so calm, or when he takes himself up into the hills which border the plain; his ideas expand, so to speak, with what he is looking at.

The visual power, the human observer, and the literary style led Balzac to compare Cuvier to Byron in the second chapter of The Magic Skin (1831). While Byron, he said, gave “admirable expression to certain moral conflicts,” Cuvier was “the great poet of our era,” the “immortal naturalist” who “has reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt cities, like Cadmus, with monsters’ teeth; has animated forests with all the secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has discovered a giant population from the footprints of a mammoth . . . . He treats figures like a poet.” The similarities among the scientist, the literary hero, and the poet, are as revealing as the differences. Like Childe Harold, Cuvier’s work was a romance, the knight on a quest for origins, for a lost civilization, in the rubble of European graveyards—an image geologists themselves invoked, comparing their pursuit of fossils to Don Quixote’s pursuit of dragons. Like Childe Harold, Cuvier was


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spiritually homeless, a wanderer, a survivor of three political regimes, three creations and destructions, reigns of terror and retribution, adapting to and appeasing those who had the power to destroy him. Although both Byron and Cuvier denied any personal identification with their creations, Cuvier’s beasts, like the Byronic hero express his personal idiosyncrasies, which in turn took on lives and forms of their own and haunted their creator and everyone who encountered them. Restless, passionate, and mysterious, as villain and victim, like the defeated Napoleon, both the contemporary hero and the ancient beasts conveyed all the discomforts and anxieties of impotent power, unfocused rage, and frustrated longing for ideals that no longer or may never have existed. Among the first generation of writers and artists who lived with these images, both the beasts and the catastrophes that destroyed them, Byron in turn reflected and shaped the literary and public response to an otherwise unthinkable, literally unimaginable, concept. Like Shelley, Byron prepared his vast audience to live with catastrophe and extinction, to live in an alien and vast world in which time and space are enlarged beyond human comprehension while individual human lives, their powers and capacity for understanding, are diminished. Consequently, theologically and philosophically, Cuvier and Byron represented a generation of the thoughtful and aware, wandering, like Arnold, “between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse 85–86), one defined by sacred history, the other by scientific reality. Like Childe Harold himself, writers and natural philosophers were all self-exiles, excluded from the spiritual history into which they had been born, the orderly, symmetrical, even domed universe created 6,000 years before by a rational and loving god for human pleasure and profit and the mysterious, expanding, self-generated universe of contemporary science that had no human purpose whatsoever except to perpetuate itself. By Charles Darwin’s birth in 1809, observations in astronomy, geology, anatomy, and biology had turned this hospitable earth into a wasteful, violent, and alien country, indifferent to human needs or divine origins, an older, larger, more mysterious earth than anyone had conceived, born in an explosion of gasses, expanding, infinite, and termed “fathomless” by astronomer William Herschel, and with “no sign of a beginning and no prospect of an ending,” according to geologist James Hutton. Anyone who looked with what Keats called “awakened eyes” could see, as Herschel did, that what some had considered clouds obscuring the stars were in fact the stars themselves,

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masses of them, among which the earth was insignificant, or see, as Hutton did, that the countryside was not created at once but shaped by eons of natural processes, incidental wind, rain, tides, and earthquakes. While the stars were symbols of permanence to guide human activities, they too were born and died, and, given the speed of light, had, like Cuvier’s fossils, often ceased to exist by the time they were visible. Like Herschel and Hutton, Cuvier looked with “awakened eyes” and “burst the limits of time,” as he wrote in Researches into Bone Fossils (1799). He saw his specimens as the debris of a belated and blasted landscape that no amount of philosophy or religious belief could restore. The effect, as Balzac wrote in his tribute Cuvier, was to diminish the significance of the contemporary, to reduce and belittle human accomplishment . . . . We ask ourselves the purpose of our triumphs, our hatreds, our loves, overwhelmed as we are by the destruction of so many past universes, and whether it is worth while to accept the pain of life in order that hereafter we may become an intangible speck.

Expanded time, infinite space, prehistoric beasts—in less than a decade, the 1790s, human beings had become an accident, an afterthought, and a facet of natural history rather than the consummation of spiritual history. In John Hunter’s dissection room and museum, artists, poets, and even Cuvier himself, saw the biological proof that human beings were, like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, an assemblage of replaceable parts. Miraculous structures such as hands and feet were mere analogs to wings, fins, and paws. Moreover, photosynthesis, fully formulated by 1793, implicated human beings in the same ecological system as grass and trees, dependant on the same green and growing things as goats, pigs, cows, insects, house pets, and canaries in a bell jar, the same creatures over which, according to Scripture, they had been given dominion (Gaull, “Sciences” 686–95). Instead of being literally inspired by divine energies, human beings were reduced to processes of recycled gasses, sun, rain, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, a “sad jar of atoms,” as Byron said. Collectively, these ideas imply a fragile, contingent, and mechanical natural system, with receding origins and without center. In Manfred and Heaven and Earth, Byron dramatized the human anguish of living in a beautiful world full of wonder, of having glory and aspirations, but still, born to die, a stranger and alone: “I look / Around a world where I seem nothing, with Thoughts which arise within me, as if they / Could master all things” (I.i.170–73). In other words,


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as only Byron realized, in the world of Cuvier and the new sciences, human beings were not only abandoned but also diminished by the very knowledge they created. Although more nature than spirit, natural laws were not made for them. As Arnold said, He taught us little . . . But our soul Had felt him like the thunder’s roll. With shivering heart the strife we saw Of passion with eternal law. (Memorial Verses 8–11)

Childe Harold, Cantos One and Two, appeared in 1812, followed a year later by the translation of Cuvier’s Theory of the Earth, as if one were setting the scene and creating the taste for the other, then, a second edition in 1815, Canto Three of Childe Harold in 1816, Manfred in 1817, Canto Four in 1818, Cain and Heaven and Earth in 1821, the last two drawing on both Cuvier and the apocryphal Book of Enoch. As popular reading, they joined the many narratives of human history, both biblical and secular, some providential and others bleak visions of nature as comprised of excess, waste, and misbegotten things. With the exception of Byron, the canonical poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, expressed the traditional spiritual version of recovery, even progress, as M. H. Abrams noted in Natural Supernaturalism. Such plots were so numerous, common, and familiar by 1830 that Carlyle called “the Creation of a World . . . little more mysterious than the cooking of a Dumpling” (Sartor Resartus 4). But Byron used the biblical plots as if they were fiction, as if the ritualistic dramatic form would exorcise the religious orthodoxy, which he saw behind the human unhappiness that catastrophism exposed—again, complementing and completing Cuvier, his unknown and silent partner. Just as Byron had socialized and secularized Milton’s Satan as the new antihero and embodied the desolation of the new sciences, so Cuvier had secularized and humanized the landscape, the animal and human history that it preserved, as well as the monstrous which had previously been attributed to divine interventions. To both, autonomy was an ideal human condition: Manfred’s claim, echoing Satan in Paradise Lost, that the mind “Is its own origin of ill and end—And its own place and time” is as much a resignation to the new science and the natural world it defined as a protest against the traditional spiritual world (III.iv.131–32). In Cain and Heaven and Earth, Byron included the difficult and destructive god of catastrophism, an “omnipotent tyrant” whose “evil is not good,” but one that is better than no god at all. “If

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according to some speculations,” he wrote in his journal between October, 1821, and May, 1822, “you could prove the world many thousands years older than the Mosaic Chronology—or if you could knock up Adam and Eve and the Apple and the Serpent—still what is to be put up in their stead?—or how is the difficulty to be removed? Things must have a beginning—and what matters when or how? a Creator is a more natural imagination than a fortuitous concourse of atoms . . .” (BLJ 9: 46–47). Or, in a satiric mode, turning on his own pretensions as well as everyone else’s, he anticipates another catastrophe, “So Cuvier says . . .”: When this world shall be former, underground, Thrown topsy -turvy, twisted, crisp’d, and curl’d, Baked, fried, or burnt, turn’d inside -out, or drown’d, Like all the worlds before, which have been hurl’d First out of, and then back again to chaos, The superstratum which will overlay us. (DJ IX. 37, 291–96)

Actually, Cuvier did not believe there would be another catastrophe; he believed in the more desolate prospect that God had abandoned both the natural and human world, that the ghosts of fossil animals haunted the countryside as evidence of previous interventions. The animal world Cuvier reconstructed was the next to last, the most recent, similar but extinct, following the same morphological principles as contemporary animals. Consequently, the mastodon and mammoth were simply prototypes of elephants and bison with correlating parts. But in 1809, he encountered and reluctantly acknowledged the pterodactyl, which violated all principles of symmetry and organic integrity. A winged reptile, this fantastic composite whose form and nature have changed very little over time was among the first of the flying fossils, its long pointed claws and extended beak with spiny teeth, closely resembling features of the flying dragons which had begun to appear everywhere. Derived from nature, culture, superstition, invention, and circumstance, the pterodactyl was a summing up of the same political, religious, literary, and archetypal themes as catastrophic theory. Whatever its origins and ends, its reconstruction closely resembled popular images of Satan as serpent, angels, vampires, the wyvern or flying dragon, and the dragon of Eden. Both predator and protector, it is a divine messenger who awakens in times of chaos to admonish, defend the weak, and restore peace or equilibrium. As wyverns, such creatures appeared on coats of arms and battle flags, symbols of political power or unity, not guardians of treasure but the treasure


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itself, which the fossil bones had become. While geologists invented new dragons, Byron lamented the loss of the old ones: the absence of the dragon, like the absence of a spiritual dimension in Childe Harold, implies that contemporary society had fallen away from the chivalric ideals of the old romances. Without dragons, without Satan, after the defeat of Napoleon, there were no great heroic adversaries to struggle against and no great causes to die for. The pterodactyl was the dragon everyone needed. Resembling angels—fallen angels—the pterodactyl gave geological basis to a curious religious revival, the apocryphal Book of Enoch. According to some versions, in Enoch, the Flood was God’s punishment to mortal women for copulating with his sons, the original angels, and producing the giants and monsters in the fossil bones that Cuvier had disinterred. This erotic/apocalyptic vision as Gayle Shadduck explains England’s Amorous Angels, 1813–1823, became the subject of at least five epic poems, including Byron’s Heaven and Earth, and initiated a burst of new angel imagery. Like that of pterodactyls and dragons, the image of angels evolved to reflect both social and cultural circumstance, briefly declining after Milton, revived by Swedenborg, expanded by Blake, satirized in Byron’s Vision of Judgement, and sentimentalized and exploited in Victorian novels and popular verse. This new population of angels were all ghosts of the dead, including children, virginal women in diaphanous gowns, militant male angels, a few elderly saint-angels, and some musicians with either trumpets or harps, all identified by their useless wings, vestigial limbs from their origins in ancient Egypt when they served as messengers between humans and the first generation of celestial gods. A whole history of angelic forms and functions came together in the pterodactyl, evidence to some of God’s presence in the human history and to others His absence. Along with catastrophic geology, pterodactyls, angels, and dragons, Europe and England were also invaded by vampires, another form that resembles the pterodactyl. From obscure origins as female demons in both ancient Greek and Norse mythology, they appeared in highly sexualized human form associated with destructive, depraved, predatory, or incestuous love. Extensions of both graveyard themes and gothic taste, they were common among Romantic authors such as Goethe, Southey, Coleridge, Keats, and Polidori, and as archetypes, released from deep in the earth and from deep in the human mind, they appear in dreams such as Fuseli’s The Night-Mare. As predatory and bloodsucking night-creatures, they were made to account for adolescent disorders, contagions, and the whole invasive theory of disease and inoculation that was invented to counteract it.

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While Cuvier and natural historians searched for the origins of life within the earth, Byron and the other poets searched for the origins of experience within the human mind, a new and unexplored territory for both science and literature, sharing a vital analogy between excavation and memory. In this search, the fossil figures, the dragons of Eden, the pterodactyls, angels, and vampires, challenged writers and artists to imagine what they knew, to conceive of the new unimaginable. The results were a rich creative moment associated with Byron and Romanticism. As Loren Eiseley explains in Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It, human beings, knowing nothing of their own origins, “became addicted to a naïve supernaturalism,” and “peopled the nature about [them] with baleful or beneficent beings which were often, in reality, the projected shadows of [their own] hopes and fears.” Without history, he continues, one becomes a “fabricator of illusions,” personifications of good and evil behind the otherwise unresponsive face of nature (28). Human beings need the moral dimension that Byron tried to live without and Cuvier found irrelevant (According to one story, Cuvier’s students dressed up in a devil’s costume and woke him up in the middle of the night, chanting “Cuvier, Cuvier, I have come to eat you.” Reportedly, Cuvier opened his eyes, remarked, “All creatures with horns and hooves are herbivores. You can’t eat me,” and went back to sleep.). Like the albatross in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the pterodactyl/dragon/angel/vampire and the catastrophes that released them were neither good nor evil but merely things and events that acquired moral values from the way human beings perceived and mentally processed them. The assumptions behind the science and the poetry have not changed. We still live in and are working out the paradigms of astronomy, biology, geology, physics, and mathematics, that appeared during Byron’s lifetime, and, like Keats, we still live with mystery, indecision, contradiction, and dualities, in a quantum world, still inventing monsters such as King Kong or Godzilla, dinosaurs or giant mushrooms, and apocalyptic movies to objectify our terror and overcome our helplessness. Reading Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Blake, or Shelley, will still accommodate the human mind to ambiguity, uncertainty, duality, the discovery of new dinosaurs, quarks, Black Holes, string theory, DNA, the birth and death of galaxies, and the challenges of surviving the natural disasters with which we are daily afflicted.

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My Bro t h e r’s K e e pe r : Th e Bi bl ic a l H e r i tage i n B y ron’s C A I N Wo l f Z . H i r s t

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yron’s Cain teaches the biblical lesson of human brotherhood. Whether it raises the question of innocent suffering latent in Genesis in all its intractable poignancy only to renew the Bible’s rejection of human recalcitrance in the face of divine inscrutability or, on the contrary, it depicts a heroic refusal to reconcile oneself to the mystery of a cosmos whose deity has lost its authority as a moral guide,1 the drama retains ethical implications of the original story not less relevant in a secular than in a religious context: 2 despite my repudiation of my fellow human being I remain his or her “keeper,” accountable for my actions, and actions are irreversible. This message, imparted in the dying Abel’s final injunction to Cain to “Comfort poor Zillah,” because “she has but one brother / Now,” is internalized by the hero with the painful realization that it is he who has brought death into the world, and that now, as the Angel tells him, “what is done is done” (III.i.335–36, 516). Thus, Cain reflects the scriptural position on human relationships. Most of the scenes, however, are pure invention, and consequently readers tend to forget Byron’s fidelity to his source and the central act of fratricide. Furthermore, when considering Byron’s daring characterization of his hero, one should remember how little the Bible

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reveals about Cain’s character. It reveals only that when his offering was spurned, he became “wroth,” his “countenance fallen” (Genesis 4: 5–6), and then at some point “Cain talked with Abel his brother,” but the subject and nature of their conversation and the situation “in the field” when “Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him” (4: 8) remains unclear. One can assume that the murder is connected with the rejection of Cain’s offering and may surmise that the murderer may have acted out of jealousy, spite, frustration, rebellion, hatred, or revenge. Like many readers, I take his reply to the Lord’s question “Where is Abel thy brother?” as a callous rejection of responsibility and as evasive and deceitful, or insolent and defiant, yet one cannot be quite sure. “I know not” just might indicate not indifference, evasion, or deceit but a sincere expression of confusion, and “Am I my brother’s keeper?” might express shocked acknowledgment of responsibility. The biblical account of the murder involves ambiguities and gaps—in Abel’s conduct, in God’s treatment of the two brothers, and in the nature of the Mark as well as in Cain’s actions and motives—but the act of murder itself does take place and convicts Cain.3 Beyond this guilt nothing is absolutely certain about the character of the biblical figure. Byron might conceivably have stopped his well-intentioned, sensitive, and high-principled hero from committing such a heinous crime, but the protagonist of his tragedy remains Cain, who fails to be his brother’s keeper. As the only act in Chapter Four of Genesis that conclusively condemns Cain is the act of fratricide, and since it recurs in Byron’s drama, the suggestion (made by many commentators) that Byron glorifies the biblical Cain should be modified. A rigorous analysis of the murderer in the Bible will not prove that he is morally inferior to Byron’s hero. But few read Scripture as closely as did Byron. If one does not fill in the gaps or try to resolve the ambiguities of the Cain and Abel episode, one is left primarily or even solely with the impression of Cain as slayer of his brother. His characterization as brutal, cowardly, hypocritical, envious, rancorous, and malicious is due to the cultural and religious tradition prevalent in 1821.4 This tradition ignores less known exegeses of the biblical story, those, for example, involving Cain as a penitent5 or a sacred executioner (Maccoby 24–26, 33; Goldberg 223). Although Byron was most probably not acquainted with all these exegeses, his poet’s intuition enabled him, as Harold Fisch says, to catch hints of the biblical subtext in which such meanings inhere (33). Byron explains in the Preface to his play that he will disregard certain generally accepted interpretations in order to remain faithful to the scriptural text; indeed, his idiosyncratic and

Biblical Heritage in Byron’s CAIN

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highly romanticized elaboration of the story does not contradict the brief account of Genesis. Playing upon the gaps and ambiguities in the Old Testament, Byron’s imagination frees him from the Cain of tradition, including stereotypes such as the coarse villain of the medieval mystery plays, thus ennobling and dignifying not so much the Cain of Genesis as the figure of the first murderer, which has evolved in the popular mind over the ages.6 Although in the post-biblical tradition the central feature of Cain is still the act of fratricide, the character that Byron’s inventiveness retrieved from the cryptic Old Testament story is closer to the conventional Byronic hero than to virtually all Cain figures in the tradition (a notable exception being Gessner’s). Few readers have found anything in the biblical episode to suggest the sensitivity of Byron’s protagonist: his innate sense of isolation, his obsession with human transience paradoxically coupled with a death wish, his insatiable hunger for enlightenment, or his blind and relentless pursuit of justice in the face of divine silence. Indeed, some have felt that he “reverses the roles of judge and judged” (Lowe 382; Hirst, “Contexts” 132). When Byron takes over from the biblical story the scene of fratricide—what in one of his letters he calls “the Catastrophe”—he exploits these traits of the Byronic hero to create a perfect peripeteia (BLJ 9: 53). The hero has been presented as an unflinching idealist who “thirst[s] for good” (II.ii.238) and remonstrates particularly against all undeserved pain, even that of animals (II.ii.289–305); therefore, when he impetuously intercedes against the slaughter of an innocent sheep and strikes the fratricidal blow, he inflicts the very injustice against which he inveighs. While contradicting the hero’s self-sacrificing tenderness and love, fratricide turns him into a “fugitive” (III.i.475) and leaves him literally “brotherless” (III.i.336, 464), an ironic comment upon his earlier intellectual restlessness and isolation. Byron spells out the traditional interpretation of Abel’s death as a prefiguration of Christ’s by putting Christ’s dying words into Abel’s mouth (III.i.319–20), but Cain’s futile offer of his own life in exchange for Abel’s (III.i.510–15) illustrates how the given catastrophe subverts the gesture of Cain as another potential Christ-figure. This catastrophe similarly undermines Cain’s quest for enlightenment, in particular his repeated inquiry into the nature of mortality, for which curse he blames his parents, while it is he himself who brings death into the world and leaves its mystery unsolved. The act of fratricide was perpetrated in a state of “internal irritation” caused by a cosmic journey, which Cain undertook to slake his thirst for

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heightened understanding and experience (BLJ 9: 53). The murder scene comprises the ironic reversal of a hubristic protagonist whose pronouncements on the intractable dilemma of divine benevolence in a world of innocent suffering, no matter how deliberate, rational, just, and noble they may have been, are dramatically vitiated by an overhasty, irrational, unjust, and heartless act. This peripeteia subverts the hero’s attacks on God and reasserts the scriptural position. The murder pushes into the background those unresolved theological questions that reflect the poet’s inner conflict and shifts the focus to a human being’s responsibility for the life of another human being, about which Byron is never of two minds. Although Cain’s blasphemies may very well have reflected Byron’s own questions about divine justice, he uses the catastrophe he has inherited from the biblical story to stage the anagnorisis of a murderer horrified at his deed rather than the internal debate of an author’s self-projection. At the end, Cain ceases his frontal attacks upon the deity. The residual complaint “I did not seek / For life” is immediately followed by the futile but Christ-like offer that through his own death “be restored / By God the life to him he loved: and taken / From me a being I ne’er loved to bear” (III.i.509–15). God loved Abel’s life, says Cain, but regarding his own life, instead of saying that God did not love it he says he (Cain) never loved it. The attack has been replaced by the offer of self-sacrifice. At this point, in his final reply, the Angel reaffirms Cain’s freedom of choice—which has been demonstrated on several occasions, notably in the sacrifice of love to knowledge (I.i.429–30, 558–62)—by reminding him that he will be answerable for his future deeds. At the same time, he makes the already quoted terse statement about the irrevocability of human acts: Who shall heal murder? what is done is done. Go forth! fulfil thy days! and be thy deeds Unlike the last! (III.i.516–18)

In the present context the expression “What is done is done” develops the implied contrast between being and doing in an attempt to resolve the paradox of how an individual plays out the role cast upon him or her. In keeping with the Lord’s words in Genesis “What hast thou done” (4: 10), Byron’s Angel has already rejected all possible insinuations in Cain’s well-known question about whether he is his “brother’s keeper” by making him accountable for what he has “done” (III.i.469). The double “done” in the Angel’s last speech


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subverts the double “am” of Cain’s fatalistic “That which I am, I am,” subtly reinforcing his rejection of what is usually understood as the hero’s second insinuation attempting to place blame elsewhere (III.i.509).7 But whatever is done, something is still left for Cain to do, although it cannot be the undoing of fratricide: he cannot “redeem [Abel] from the dust” so as to “heal murder” (III.i.511, 516). The ultimate redeemer alone can do this, healing the sins of humankind by his sacrifice on the cross, whereas Cain, despite Christ-like utterances, remains the primal murderer. Yet even he remains free to make the best of every opportunity for true regeneration. The Angel’s command to Cain to change his ways (Byron’s invention) is in the biblical spirit and compensates for the omission of a crucial biblical verse, namely the second of two verses (Genesis 4: 6–7) comprising a speech by God, which is sacrificed in the play in order to present the fratricide as an unpremeditated and impulsive act. Verse seven, with its rhetorical question “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?” and the cryptic but highly suggestive warning that “sin lieth at the door: and unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him,” was also an injunction to make the right choice following a failure. The biblical Cain disobeyed this injunction. Byron’s hero, who did not receive God’s admonition before the murder, now heeds the Angel’s simple, but not less forceful, exhortation that his future “deeds” should be “Unlike the last!” (III.i.517–18). This is evident in his caution against Adah’s threats (III.i.525), which demonstrates how he has learnt from his own threats (III.i.124–26, 308–14). In his dialogue with Cain, the Angel has the last word. Cain’s insistence of a moment ago that he did not “make [him]self” indirectly answered the question of who is the ultimate “keeper” of life (III.i.510). Cain placed the onus on the Creator of life by suggesting that man’s destiny does not lie in his own hands. Now, however, he does not contest the Angel’s plea on behalf of human choice, the choice God gave the biblical Cain before the murder. Truman Guy Steffan writes that Byron does not allude to any specific argument out of the “corpus of Calvinist and orthodox belief” in order to establish that man is “responsible for his own conduct” (26, 27). Such an allusion becomes unnecessary so long as Byron follows the Genesis story in emphasizing how the hero must bear the consequences of his acts. Both the source and Byron’s play leave free will unreconciled with divine providence: neither attempts to explain why God, Abel’s Creator and Keeper, did not prevent the murder, but both insist that a human individual must act as his fellow-human’s keeper.

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As the first murder story in the Bible, Chapter Four of Genesis anticipates the commandment “thou shalt not kill,” while also stressing that Cain and Abel are brothers and emphasizing the obligations involved in brotherhood. Byron alludes to the commandment when Abel opposes Cain with the words “Thou shalt not” (III.i.294), and Abel’s next speech repeats this phrase while beginning with the word “Brother” (III.i.305), a term which appears forty-two times in the play (with “brethren” occurring three and “sister” eight times). Scripture twice uses the expression “thy brother’s blood” (4: 10, 11) and not “Abel’s blood,” and the words “his brother” are made redundant in “And she [Eve] again bare his brother Abel” (4: 2), in “Cain talked with Abel his brother,” and in “Cain rose up against Abel his brother” (4: 8). Similarly redundant is the addition of “thy brother” in the Lord’s question “Where is Abel thy brother?” Cain’s memorable retort is not “Am I Abel’s keeper?” but “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (4: 9). Byron develops the idea of human fellowship by means of the frequent repetition and shrewd usage of the word “brother.” Cain and Adah refer to each other as brother and sister, never as husband and wife (though Cain once differentiates between his two sisters by calling his sister-wife “my Adah, my / Own and beloved” [I.i.187–88] and on one occasion uses the term “sister-bride” [II.ii.50]). Only Lucifer speaks of Adah as Cain’s “wife” (II ii.205). Byron’s introduction of Lucifer, the totally isolated spirit who “lov[es] nothing,” highlights the sense of brotherhood within the human community symbolized by the first family, in which all the children of Adam and Eve are literally brothers and sisters (II. ii.338). When Adah announces Abel’s arrival with the words “Our brother comes,” Cain prepares readers for his murderous repudiation of blood ties with the odd remark “Thy brother Abel,” whereas the latter’s welcome of “Cain! My brother” and his reference to Adah as “Our sister” counter Cain’s ominous self-exclusion (III.i.161–64). After the cosmic journey, in the dialogue preceding the murder, Cain never addresses Abel as “my brother,” and when he attempts to part from him peacefully, where this expression might be expected, it is replaced by “My Abel” (III.i.206). Abel calls Cain “brother” five more times (III.i.171, 195, 220, 280, 305), and only when perplexed by a first vague threat does he rise and exclaim: “Cain! What meanest thou?” (III.i.289). But as he falls dying and is about to forgive his murderer, Abel once more registers their mutual ties, asking “What hast thou done, my brother?” (III.i.317). At this point, Cain gives evidence of a sudden inner change by responding with the one-word exclamation “Brother!” (III.i.318). Henceforth he does call the slain


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Abel “My brother” (III.i.323, 353, 375), not without spelling out the irony of this appellation: What shall I say to him?—My brother!—No; He will not answer to that name; for brethren Smite not each other. (III.i.353–55)

Thus, when Adah tries to stay her mother’s curse on Cain with the plea “for he is my brother,” there may be some justice in Eve’s reply “He hath left thee no brother—” because for her the act of fratricide shatters all family ties and should separate the murderer from Adah as well as from herself (III.i.406–7). It is the poignant reminder of the magnanimous Abel that before the murder Zillah had two brothers and “has but one brother / Now” that jolts Cain into the awareness that henceforth he himself is left “brotherless” (III.i.335–36). Only after his death is Abel called Zillah’s “husband,” perhaps because now the bond of human brotherhood is broken (III.i.359, 408, 450). This bond of universal solidarity means that individuals are mutually responsible—they must do everything in their power to prevent murder and to protect others. All are brothers and sisters, each other’s keepers. Cain, learning through suffering, gradually comes to apprehend such notions despite outbursts that can be taken as expressions of his former obduracy. The cathartic movement towards reconciliation comprises Cain’s reminiscences from his childhood.8 The recollection of his early affection for Abel when the two embraced “In fondness brotherly,” makes him aware of the special obligation of an elder brother (III.i.537). Cain admits that he owes such an obligation by regarding himself as a father figure to Abel, whose task it should have been to “compose [Cain’s] limbs into their grave” (III.i.540).9 But although this one-family universe already contains some intimation of special duties towards a parent or a sibling, Cain is much more definite about human relations in general. Adam does not immediately invoke family relationships when, finding that one of his sons has been killed, he demands an explanation of the other: “—speak, Cain, since thou / Wert present” (III.i.387–88). Adam issues an implicit rebuke attempting to make Cain accountable for what happened to Abel. Zillah, however, is quite explicit in her accusation that Cain, whom she calls “the stronger” of the two men, failed to defend the weaker Abel, and in her pain she goes so far as to call Cain “cruel” for not coming “in time to save him” (III.i.365–69). At this point, Byron calls to mind Abel’s dying words to Cain enjoining him to fulfill his

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duty as Zillah’s one remaining brother, because her other brother, her husband Abel, will no longer be there to preserve and keep her, stand by her side, ease her burden and “[c]omfort” her (III.i.335). The central question “Am I then / My brother’s keeper?” (III.i.468–69) acquires a new dimension. Byron’s hero may very well be merely rehearsing the biblical Cain’s attempt to exculpate himself—although it remains that the latter might be speaking in confusion and with a shocked recognition of responsibility. A traditional reading might suggest a rhetorical question: “Can one expect me to know where my brother is all the time?” The biblical Cain also conveys lack of concern, but such an attitude could only be pretence in the case of Byron’s hero. The play makes two changes in Cain’s response to the question regarding where his brother is: the protagonist does not repeat the source character’s outright lie “I know not” (Genesis 4: 9), and he inserts the word “then” into the question about being his brother’s keeper, which may suggest that he is struck by some insight.10 These two changes contribute to the ambiguity of Cain’s question, which has already been made more ambiguous than the biblical original by his earlier expression of remorse. The possibility that this question is genuine and not a hypocritical rejection of guilt is less remote in Byron than in Genesis. Byron’s hero may be groping for an answer to the Angel’s question by formulating a rhetorical counterquestion: “Of course I know where my brother is—in the realm of death, about which I still know nothing except that Abel must have entered it. You ask a question to which you obviously know the answer better than I do in order that I may learn something about my relation to my dead brother and thus something about myself from the new situation in which ‘Death is in the world!’ (III.i.370).” But if this is an interpretation Byron would allow for his “Am I then / My brother’s keeper?” why did he omit the biblical Cain’s “I know not”? In the drama, these words too could have been understood more easily than in Genesis as words of sincerity: “I really don’t know what or where my brother is now that he is dead; what change has he undergone?” Possibly Byron here sacrifices his own preoccupation with the mystery of death—which he has imported into the play—so as to focus more emphatically on the biblical lesson of human brotherhood. Having recognized the validity of Zillah’s reproach that he ought to have defended his younger and more vulnerable brother, Cain, rather than trying to evade responsibility, may now be asking the Angel to confirm that it was indeed his duty to act literally as his brother’s “keeper,” or he may simply be accusing himself of having failed as Abel’s guard and protector. But no matter what


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the hero means when he asks “Am I then / My brother’s keeper?” and whatever is his final stand on the issue of the responsibility of a human being who, after all, did not “make [him]self” (III.i.510), the drama ultimately reaffirms the biblical position: Cain is indeed his brother’s keeper.

Notes 1. The view that the play does not side with its hero’s blasphemies is taken, for example, in my “Byron’s Lapse into Orthodoxy: An Unorthodox Reading of Cain,” and Introduction to Byron, the Bible and Religion, 14; in Bernard Beatty’s Byron’s Don Juan, 20 and Beatty (“Byron and the Eighteenth Century” 247); in Martyn Corbett (155); and in Robert Ryan (45, n4). Truman Guy Steffan (309–470) gives a detailed survey of earlier interpretations, most of which find the play blasphemous. More recently, Kao She-Ru has argued cogently that “Cain sticks to his obsession with justice according to his own standard till the end,” but I cannot accept the claim that “the tragic ending of the play actually verifies Cain’s previous indictments of divine injustice” (132). Larry Brunner, disputing the charge of impiety, pushes his argument too far by suggesting that Cain simply reaffirms the Christian idea that “love is God” (81). Ian Dennis gives a more balanced view: “It was and still is unclear whether [the play’s dogmatic] content really did constitute a kind of ‘theodicy-in-reverse’” (656). 2. Or one must broaden the meaning of “religious.” Mark Canuel writes, “Byron stresses [that] religion does not consist only of a human’s relationship with God but of one human’s relationship with others” (260). 3. This incontrovertible fact has so often been bypassed that Arturo Graf found it necessary to conclude his impressive discussion of literary Cain figures (“La Poesia di Caino”) with the forceful reminder: “Sia che si vuole: tu, Caino, hai ucciso il tuo fratello Abele” [No matter how you may put it, you, Cain, have killed your brother Abel]. 4. The ennobled protagonist of Salomon Gessner’s Der Tod Abels (1758), which Byron read at the age of eight (CPW 6: 228), changed the prevalent tradition for his time no more than Byron’s drama has changed it for ours. 5. Pierre Bayle, who greatly influenced Byron, mentions the opinion that the Mark consisted of the word “pénitence” (Dictionnaire Historique et Critique 2:5). Cf. one interpretation of the Mark in the Midrash: it made Cain “an example to penitents” (“Genesis Rabbah,” 22:13 in Midrash Rabbah, 1:191.) The awakening of Byron’s hero to the horror of his deed has repeatedly been called repentance by at least one critic (Brunner 95, 117, 121, 123). 6. Byron aptly described Cain, a Mystery as “a tragedy on a sacred subject” (BLJ 8: 205). Although nine days later he joked that his

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7.

8.

9.

10.

“Rhapsody” was “entitled ‘A Mystery’ . . . in honour of what it will probably remain to the reader” (BLJ 8: 216), I accept Byron’s explanation in the opening statement of his Preface that his play is “entitled ‘a Mystery,’ in conformity with the ancient title annexed to dramas upon similar subjects” (CPW 6: 228), a statement that critics have sometimes refused to take seriously (Steffan 297). Byron’s dramatization of Chapter Four of Genesis being more a matter of filling out than of alteration, the subtitle, by conjuring up the various medieval mysteries on his subject, draws attention to his drastic revision of the Cain tradition. When Moses asks for God’s name, the reply is “I am that I am” (Exodus 3: 14). Corbett notes that with the repeated “done” the Angel is “Echoing Cain’s own syntax” (173). Byron sacrifices the cathartic effect of the first half of the last line, Adah’s “Peace be with him!” to the theme of the eternal restlessness associated with the Cain curse by concluding with Cain’s desperate cry “But with me!—” According to Drummond Bone these three words help to show how difficult it is “to emerge from the play blaming anyone other than Cain for the tragedy,” and they even cast doubt on the continuation of the “domestic bond” (Byron 80). In The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt Hyam Maccoby discusses the tradition of Cain offering his son as a sacrifice. In the Preface Byron concedes that he made changes for the sake of the rhythm (CPW 6: 228), but the addition of “then” in line 468 was not made because of the need for an extra syllable. Byron could have produced two pentameters in a more faithful transcription of verse nine and the beginning of verse ten by writing, for example: “Angel: Where is Abel, thy brother? Cain: I know not. / Am I my brother’s keeper? Angel: What hast thou done?” W. Moelwyn Merchant suggests that “the single-word alteration brings bewilderment in place of defiance” (76–77, qtd. in Brunner 108). A very different interpretation appears in Leonard Michaels, “Byron’s Cain,” which demonstrates that the hero “does not even fully exist in the play’s imagined world until, as if by accident, he commits murder and enters it on his own terms” (78), and argues that “The addition of ‘then’ to the notorious question suggests that Cain has read the Bible . . . and discovers he is Cain” (71).

9

L or d B y ron, Vi rgi l , a n d Th y r z a Ph il ip J. C a rdin al e

Lord Byron’s first readings of the Roman poet Virgil occurred

under duress. In the spring of 1799, at age eleven, Byron was regularly tutored in Latin while a quack doctor named Lavender administered torturous medical treatments on his deformed foot. This was likely a quid pro quo arrangement: Byron had promised his mother that he would undergo the treatment, and she in turn promised to pay for his lessons. At least this is the impression one gets from the correspondence between mother and son, in which Byron repeatedly requests Latin tutorials that are eventually scheduled to coincide with this “therapy” (Moore 1: 27).1 One can imagine young Byron sitting down for his tutorials with mingled enthusiasm and dread. Along with the routine of reciting Latin declensions, conjugations, and memorized hexameters came an unsettling experience. Lavender had designed a screw-on brace to restore the child’s lame right foot to its “natural” position. During lessons Lavender would pour hot oils on the deformed limb, twist it forcibly in circles, and ratchet the brace around it as tightly as the boy could endure. The treatment was not only excruciating but utterly useless. In this state of torment Byron first experienced Virgil’s Aeneid. Byron had wanted to study Latin in part because of its association with nobility. He had unexpectedly ascended to the barony less than a year earlier and was eager to take on the trappings (BLJ 1: 39).2

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Virgil, the greatest of the Roman poets, and Cicero, the greatest orator, were natural selections for the curriculum, which was taught by a man named Dummer Rogers. A description of Rogers’s tutorials appears in Thomas Moore’s 1830 biography of Lord Byron, which mentions Rogers both praising the child’s retention of the Latin verses and wincing at his student’s “violent pain.” He concludes: “[Byron], many years after, when in the neighbourhood of Nottingham, sent a message, full of kindness, to his old instructor, and bid the bearer of it tell him, that, beginning from a certain line in Virgil which he mentioned, he could recite twenty verses on, which he well remembered having read with this gentleman, when suffering all the time the most dreadful pain. It was about this period, according to his Nurse May Gray, that the first symptom of any tendency towards rhyming showed itself in him” (Moore 1: 28). The final sentence links the period of Byron’s home schooling in Virgil’s poetry with his earliest attempts to compose his own verses. None of these verses survives, except for an epigram that harshly insults an elderly woman (CPW 1: 1), but Byron naturally would have looked to the poetry he was then translating as inspiration for his own poems.3 Another linguistically formative moment during Byron’s youth in which Virgil left a unique impression occurred on the 1804 Speech Day at Harrow School. Lord Byron was slated to recite the part of Drances to a crowd of visiting alumni in a three-way reenactment of the war council in Book Eleven of the Aeneid.4 This recitation was to be the first public oration of Byron’s life, and the sixteen-yearold apparently suffered great anxiety (Elledge 45, 57–63). Some time before the playbills for the performance were printed, the young lord abruptly backed out of his role by trading places with his classmate Thomas Leeke, who was reciting the sedate role of King Latinus. The reason for the change, according to Moore, was that Byron had realized that Turnus’s taunt pedibusque fugacibus (“your flying feet”)5 within the script would draw the audience’s attention to his deformity (Moore 1: 41).6 As such experiences might suggest, at Harrow Byron is thought to have developed an animus against Virgil and especially against the drudgery of reading the Latin epic at length (Tyerman 158). In Hints from Horace (1811), for example, Byron alludes to the freshman “forced . . . to groan / O’er Virgil’s devilish verses” (CPW 1: 297, 223–24) and in Italy in 1817 he forsook a trip to what he called “the Mantuan birthplace of that harmonious plagiary and miserable flatterer, whose cursed hexameters were drilled into me at Harrow” (BLJ 5: 211). This opinion was born of intense familiarity.

Lord Byron, Virgil, and Thyrza

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Harrow’s curriculum was modeled after Eton’s, which took Virgil as its cornerstone and could involve reading the entire Aeneid twice in Latin and reciting by memory hundreds of its verses at a time (Clarke 53–55, Tyerman 161). Despite what he would say later in life, however, the young lord’s attitude toward Virgil had been positive for a time. Virgil appealed to Byron when he was eighteen to nineteen years old and preparing his first public poetry volume, Hours of Idleness (1807). A rarely analyzed and significant poem therein is “The Episode of Nisus and Euryalus,” subtitled “A Paraphrase from the Aeneid, lib. 9” (CPW 1: 76–90).7 The poem was originally a Harrow exercise that Byron expanded while attending Cambridge. Not only is it his earliest known attempt at an epic style, but it is also a work of great private importance (CPW 1: 370).8 In letters written in the spring of 1807, Byron reveals unparalleled excitement about this work, mentioning it several times and calling it “the best in point of Versification I have ever written” (BLJ 13:2, 1:114, 1:118, 1:124–25). Versification, or attention to form in its moment-to-moment aspects, is an area in which Byron excelled perhaps more than any English poet. Here he attests to learning it as a teenager through translating the Latin epic. Even more references to “Nisus and Euryalus” might be extant if its covert subject were not in fact a clandestine love affair (Crompton 97–98). Byron first reports composing the poem in the months leading up to his emotional farewell with John Edleston, the young choirboy to whom he had become attached at Cambridge. In correspondence that summer he likens their relationship to that of Virgil’s two devoted Trojan compatriots: “We shall put Lady E. Butler & Miss Ponsonby to the Blush, Pylades & Orestes out of countenance, & want nothing but a Catastrophe like Nisus & Euryalus, to give Jonathan & David the ‘go by’” (BLJ 1: 124–25). Within this Virgilian paraphrase, Byron meant to identify himself as Nisus, while Euryalus—a name Byron had used previously as a pseudonym for his friend Delawarr— signifies Edleston (BLJ 1: 109). Homosexual overtones in Virgil did not go unnoticed in the early nineteenth century. In 1814 the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham attempted to argue against the notion that pederasty effeminizes men by invoking Virgil’s Nisus, Euryalus, and Corydon—all of whom appear in Byron’s poetry (qtd. in Crompton 97–98). Byron calls his “Nisus and Euryalus” manuscript a “Translation,” but the published subtitle—“A Paraphrase”—hints at its departure from the Aeneid (BLJ 1: 118, 13: 2). At first glance Byron’s rendering appears to mirror Virgil’s, but through subtle alterations with

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private resonance he stresses the youth of Nisus, his own double, and augments the fearlessness attributed to Euryalus/Edleston.9 Byron’s most substantive change, one that has a distinctly public resonance, is that he repeatedly inserts into the Latin text a contrast between the English words “Fame” and “Glory.”10 The prospect of personal fame was weighing on the poet’s teenage mind, and evident from the outset is its association with “Glory.” Byron’s word choice is interesting for its political associations: La Gloire!—literally “Glory!”—was a French battle cry during this period. In addition, around the time of this composition, Byron undertook the first overtly political act of his life: At Cambridge with his friend Matthews he joined a Whig Club, which idolized Napoleon as its hero of liberty and resistance to oppression (Bainbridge 135–37). Another indication that Byron used “Glory” in a positive, political way in “Nisus and Euryalus” is his letter of May 1, 1807, wherein he assures E. N. Long, “I am not insensible to Glory, & even hope before I am at Rest, to see some service in a military Capacity” (BLJ 13: 4). The use of “Glory” as a spur for heroic action within “Nisus and Euryalus” thus echoes contemporary military rhetoric. Byron’s alteration of Virgil becomes evident at line 17 of his paraphrase, where the poet introduces “Glory” to describe the Trojans’ desired “joint reward.” Then Virgil’s Nisus proclaims: aut pugnam aut aliquid iamdudum invadere magnum mens agitat mihi, nec placida contenta quiete est. (IX.186–87)

which is literally translated Long has been my heart been astir to dare battle or some great deed, and peaceful quiet contents it not. (Goold 2: 143)

Byron translates: My lab’ring soul, with anxious thought opprest, Abhors this station of inglorious rest; The love of fame with this can ill accord, Be’t mine to seek for glory with my sword. (“Nisus and Euryalus” 21–24, emphasis added)

Byron takes pains to insert “Fame” and “Glory.” The effect of these words is cumulative. In various forms the terms recur nine times between lines 17 and 51, and fourteen times overall in the poem. At


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line 49 Euryalus ends a discussion about the merit of these virtues by scorning “life” as inferior to “Glory,” and Byron’s use of italics here emphasizes his variation on Virgil. This is the only verse in Byron’s 406-line poem containing italics, and the 1808 second printing (after the author’s revisions) capitalizes and italicizes “Glory” alone. Byron’s Euryalus, in another inserted phrase, later proclaims that it is the pair’s destiny either “To rise in glory, or to fall in fame” (194). Thus if Nisus and Euryalus accomplish their mission they expect glory, but if they die their consolation will be fame.11 The contrast is akin to being a hero, known for a noble accomplishment, or a celebrity, merely known. Further, he articulates a difference in devotional principles: those who “rise in glory” are loyal to the objectives of war, while those “falling in fame” in this case succumb to passion. After Nisus sacrifices himself (and abandons his vital military objective) on behalf of Euryalus, one can see which trait has prevailed. Byron’s paraphrase concludes with a eulogy: Celestial pair! If aught my verse can claim, Wafted on Time’s broad pinion, yours is fame! Ages on ages, shall your fate admire No future day, shall see your names expire; While stands the Capitol, immortal dome! And vanquish’d millions, hail their empress, Rome! (401–6, emphasis added)

“Fame” is again imported; Virgil uses no equivalent. Byron’s original image of “vanquish’d millions” also undermines what is ostensibly a heroic death. Nisus and Euryalus are judged by Byron to be a “Celestial pair!” whereas in Virgil they are more optimistically a fortunati ambo, or “Happy pair!” (Goold 2: 143). Significantly, Byron has been drawn to one of Virgil’s most ironic passages, and through translating he augments that irony. At the episode’s end, Nisus and Euryalus have failed miserably as soldiers but nevertheless attained heroic immortality; they have earned “Fame” by dying for each other rather than faceless “Glory.” Byron here foreshadows the idea of epic heroism that he will express in Don Juan (1819–1824), which stresses the style of actions rather than the substance of the value systems that drive them (Wilkie 225). An important difference, however, is that Fame is never directly assailed in “Nisus and Euryalus,” whereas in Don Juan it is. Through this paraphrase, Byron essentially elevates to the surface questions that Virgil poses more subtly, questions that concern whether heroism ought to be defined by the intent and effect of actions or rather the manner in which they are performed.

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The fame/glory complex in Byron’s “Nisus and Euryalus” reappears in an episode of Don Juan, the Siege of Ismail in cantos seven and eight, which is replete with echoes of the fall of Troy in the Aeneid. Byron begins his siege with the verse “Oh Love! Oh Glory! what are ye who fly / Around us ever, rarely to alight?” (VII. 1), through which a Love/Glory opposition is set up that parallels the earlier fame/glory contrast. Here Byron is less enthusiastic about “Fame,” however, and subsumes it into Glory. Juan is told by his comrade, Johnson, to “choose / Between your fame and feelings,” when he is torn between protecting Leila (the child he is trying to deliver from danger, in an analogue to Aeneas’s Ascanius) or getting the “first cut” in sacking the town (VIII. 101). Fame in this sequence is ironically redefined. In what Byron promises the reader will be a “case . . . [that] may show us what fame is,” he claims that “Renown’s all hit or miss” and alludes to the registers of the dead in the Gazette (VII. 33–34). Glory becomes a target for savage satire, as Byron writes, Yet I love Glory;—glory’s a great thing;— Think what it is to be in your old age Maintained at the expense of your good king: A moderate pension shakes full many a sage, And heroes are but made for bards to sing, Which is still better; thus in verse to wage Your wars eternally, besides enjoying Half-pay for life, make mankind worth destroying.

(DJ VIII. 14)

Poets—including Byron’s younger self—are complicit in promoting war by praising its “Glory.” The Siege of Ismail further recalls “Nisus and Euryalus” at its climax, a scene in which the sultan and his sons die defending one another.12 Like Nisus, the sultan has the option of escaping, but he instead impales himself upon the weapons that killed his younger loved one (VIII. 117–18). Like Euryalus, the dying sultan’s son is likened through a simile to a budding flower whose head is lopped off.13 The effect of the sultan’s death is dramatic. The soldiers stop in their tracks and are forced to recognize that “determined scorn of life”—provided that such scorn derives from the love of fellow man rather than lust for Glory—is the essence of real “heroism” (VIII. 119). This is arguably the most concise example of heroism in Don Juan, and it has an important source in a Virgilian model of heroism. A final episode from Byron’s youth further reflects Virgil’s foundational importance to the budding poet. This incident again involves John Edleston, who died while Byron was away on his Mediterranean tour.14 Byron gave Edleston the pseudonym “Euryalus” while alive,


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but in mourning him the poet rechristened the choirboy with his more celebrated alias, “Thyrza,” and to this name—in an elegiac analogue to Catullus’s Lesbia poems—addressed some of his most poignant verses about lost love (CPW 1: 346–52, 354). More than a century after Byron’s death, scholars reached a consensus on the identity of Thyrza, ultimately deciding that the poet had lied about his lover being female, but apparently accepting the explanation he himself gives for the source of the pseudonym. The current critical standard edition of Byron’s Complete Poetical Works explains the meaning of “Thyrza” by citing the following portion of an editor’s note in E. H. Coleridge’s Works of Lord Byron (1898–1904): There can be no doubt that Lord Byron referred to Thyrza in conversation with Lady Byron, and probably also Mrs. Leigh, as a young girl who had existed, and the date of whose death almost coincided with Lord Byron’s landing in England in 1811. On one occasion he showed Lady Byron a beautiful tress of hair, which she understood to be Thyrza’s. He had never mentioned her name, and that now she was gone his breast was the sole repository of that secret. ‘I took the name of Thyrza from Gesner. She was Abel’s wife.’ (3: 31n, CPW 1: 457)

The poet thus revealed to Lady Byron that his allusion was to Salomon Gesner’s Death of Abel (1758, trans. 1761), a German novella retelling the Genesis story wherein a character named “Thirza” is Abel’s wife. Of course, Lord Byron had every reason to lie. Indeed, lying would have been prudent considering the religious leanings of his questioner, and the fact that sodomy was punishable by death at this time in England.15 In The Death of Abel, Thirza does little more than pray. In short, she is a character of whom the prim Annabella Milbanke would have approved. Her husband told her precisely what she wanted to hear. While Lord Byron was clearly fascinated with the figure of Cain, the idea that he would seriously refer to Edleston as Abel’s widow is perplexing.16 In the Preface to Cain: A Mystery (1821), the poet writes: “Gesner’s Death of Abel I have never read since I was eight years of age, at Aberdeen. The general impression of my recollection is delight; but of the contents I remember only that Cain’s wife was called Mahala, and Abel’s Thirza” (CPW 6: 228). This confirms that the name of Gessner’s “Thirza” was familiar to Byron in his childhood, but it is hardly the reminiscence one might expect from someone who had named his great lost love after the character. More likely, “Thyrza,” like Edleston’s earlier alias Euryalus, has its origin in a particular understanding of Virgil. Byron shows himself

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through allusions elsewhere to have been particularly fond of the Second and Seventh Eclogues.17 The former poem tells about the homosexual shepherd Corydon pining for the young boy, Alexis, and the latter pits Corydon against Thyrsis in a singing match. The contest is a sort of round song, wherein each singer answers the other, until Corydon is pronounced the winner. Byron perhaps uses the Corydon-Thyrsis relationship in the same way as he uses that of Nisus and Euryalus. “Thyrsis” in a feminized form becomes “Thyrza,” and this derivation not only accounts for the “y” in the pseudonym, but it also better fits Byron’s relationship with Edleston. By making Virgil’s “Thyrsis” into a woman’s name, Byron would not only have freed himself to write about his grief for Edleston, but he would also have retained a covert association with the boy’s previous pseudonym and a subtle reference to the nature of their bond. The echo of the name in Gessner provided the further advantage of a decoy. Byron elsewhere identifies Thyrza in a manner strongly linked with singing: he once told Mrs. George Lamb that she reminded him of Thyrza because “her singing [was] enchantment to him” (Byron, Works 3: 31). The poet and his teenage confidant, Elizabeth Pigot, separately record that it was Edleston’s singing voice that first captivated Byron. After being struck by his voice, the young lord invited the choirboy back to his quarters (BLJ 1: 124, CPW 1: 381). One might speculate that there the two youths may have thought up collaborative songs in a manner similar to Corydon and Thyrsis. Improvised singing was a popular pastime associated with male bonding and convivial drinking in early-nineteenth-century Britain, and typically the “catches” in such songs—wherein each speaker picked up, or “caught” the previous speaker’s last lyric—were witty and bawdy. The adult Byron a few years later reveals an acute consciousness of the possibility for a pseudonym deriving from Thyrsis. In Mazeppa (1817), Byron’s title character—an aged warrior recalling his youth in a court somewhat like Camelot—reminisces, It was a court of jousts and mimes, Where every courtier tried at rhymes; Even I for once produced some verses, And signed my odes “Despairing Thirsis.”

(151–54)

Byron scribbled the second couplet into the manuscript of Mazeppa as an afterthought (CPW 4: 493), and readers can only speculate on its personal relevance. Byron often wrote in sorts of codes, with private


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references that only those close to him would understand, and Latin constituted a form of schoolboy code.18 Just as Nisus considered the younger Euryalus his protégé, and Corydon considered Thyrsis his singing partner, so too does Byron seem to have regarded John Edleston. In the context of this chain of Virgilian allusions the pseudonym “Thyrza” originated, reflecting the Roman poet’s unique relation to Byron in his formative years.

Notes 1. Moore writes that the lessons were arranged so “that the boy might not lose ground in his education during th[e] interval” of his foot treatments, possibly implying that the foot treatments were arranged first and the lessons later permitted on the condition that Byron underwent the treatments. Another reason for the overlap was that the lessons took place during Byron’s visits to his Aunt Parkyns and her daughters, who were students of the same tutor, and they may have been taught in consecutive sessions. 2. The letter to Mrs. Byron of March 13, 1799, alludes to previous correspondence no longer extant in which the boy unsuccessfully sought Latin lessons. 3. “In Nottingham county there lives at Swine Green, / As curst an old lady as ever was seen; / And when she does die, which I hope will be soon, / She firmly believes she will go to the moon” (CPW I.1). 4. The war council occurs at Aen 11.302–445. Byron presumably recited 302–35. 5. Aen 11.389–91: “. . . an tibi Mavors / ventosa in lingua pedibusque fugacibus istis / simper erit?” or, Will your prowess remain forever lodged in that windy tongue, and in those flying feet? as rendered in the Loeb Virgil, (All translations herein cite Goold). Perhaps a better translation of pedibusque fugacibus is “shifty feet.” The taunt ends on one of Virgil’s rare half-lines, suggesting a heightened insult since the orator is inclined to stress the final words, then take a rhetorical pause to recover the rhythm. The student reciting Turnus was Robert Peel, the future Prime Minister of England. 6. Latinus likely was seated in this performance since he speaks from his throne in Virgil. Byron reused part of this oration in 1812 for the opening of his Roman Catholic Claims Speech before Parliament (CMP 33). 7. The source text is Aen 9.176–449. 8. Byron is thought to have composed a sixteen-line version of this poem (1–4, eight-line version of 5–14, 15–18) as a Harrow school exercise. This version appears in Poems on Various Occasions (January, 1807), and the complete “Nisus and Euryalus” for Hours of Idleness (June, 1807) was written between March and May.

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9. Byron stresses the youth of Nisus at lines 38, 58, and 237, and he emphasizes “Euryalus’s” fearlessness (through neglecting to translate Virgil’s timor at Aen 11.385) at line 315. 10. The Aeneid translations Byron would most likely consult show no parallels with this fame/glory contrast. Neither James Beresford’s 1794 Aeneis, which was in Byron’s Newstead Library (CMP 244), nor Dryden’s authoritative translation exhibit similar usages. Byron most likely worked from Virgil directly. 11. Fame need not be posthumous, however. If one partner dies the survivor inherits the fame, as Nisus points out at lines 30–31. 12. Wilkie (207) suggests that the model for the sultan’s fall lies in the second book of the Aeneid, and presumably he refers to Priam’s death. The Nisus and Euryalus episode of Aen. 9 seems a better source. 13. Compare “Nisus and Euryalus,” lines 379–84, with DJ VIII. 113, where, as CPW 5:934n 734 argues, the “brief blossoms” are the dying men. 14. Though he had not seen Edleston since 1807, his death caused Byron immense grief. Remarkably, he writes that it affected him more deeply than the roughly contemporaneous death of his own mother. News of Edleston’s passing came last in a series of deaths of people close to Edleston in mid-1811. Byron was informed by post on October 9 that Edleston had died the previous May, and he wrote Francis Hodgson the next day saying that Edleston’s death “shocked me more than any of the preceding” (BLJ 1: 110). “Wherever I turn . . . the idea goes with me,” he wrote a week later. “. . . I cannot live under my present feelings” (BLJ 2: 117). 15. An overview of the sodomy laws is given in Eisler (72–3). 16. Gesner’s “Thirza” married her brother, which is significant, considering Byron’s relationship with his half-sister at the time he made these comments to Lady Byron. 17. Corydon appears at DJ I. 42 and in lines associated with Hints from Horace (CPW 1: 319, line 32). Byron frequently alludes to Virgil’s phrase Arcades ambo (literally, “Both were Arcadians”), which introduces Thyrsis and Corydon in the Seventh Eclogue (l. 4). DJ IV. 93 and XIII. 44, and BLJ 7: 81 (Letter to Hobhouse, April 22, 1820) and 10: 68 (Letter to Murray, December 25, 1822). 18. Gary Dyer’s “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets: Being Flash to Byron’s Don Juan,” gives examples of some of Byron’s other techniques of covert communication.

10

Th e H a n dl i ng of HE BR E W ME LODI E S To m M o l e

By the end of 1814, when Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was in its

ninth edition and his verse tales numbered four, Byron was a poet with a number of problems. He had mined his experiences of exotic travels almost to exhaustion—he had some unpublished scraps of Oriental poetry but seemed incapable of turning them into a fifth verse tale. The sheen had worn off his celebrity, making fame a fact of life which was rapifly becoming routine. Worse still, his series of four Turkish Tales was charged with that most un-Byronic quality: predictability. Lord Byron, it was whispered, had written himself out, and what was to come promised only paler and paler imitations of his former glories. Where once Byron’s poetry had made him a celebrity, it now seemed that his poetry would be read only because he was a celebrity. George Daniel, in The Modern Dunciad (1814), put the complaint into Popeian couplets: The town is pleas’d when BYRON will rehearse, And finds a thousand beauties in his verse; So fix’d his fame—that write whate’er he will, The patient public must admire it still; Yes,—though bereft of half his force and fire, They still must read,—and, dozing, must admire[.] (76)

But while Byron was heading for an impasse and in need of a new direction, John Murray was becoming aware that the profitable poet

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he and Byron had collaboratively created was not a limitless source of reputation and income. Byron’s meteoric rise to fame was a business success story to make any entrepreneur proud. His relationship with his publisher, John Murray, was an important element of his celebrity. It also impacted on Byron’s writing in ways that have only recently begun to come into focus. Technological advances in printing and the expansion of commercial publishing meant that, in the Romantic period, poets were increasingly forced to engage with their publishers in new ways, while often theorizing poetry as something apart from, and untouchable by, commercial interests. In Byron’s case that engagement was often highly collaborative, but always subject to strain. Poet and publisher differed in their politics, but Murray’s political conservatism was less of a problem for Byron than his business caution. Murray had urged Byron to alter the freethinking stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage not because he objected to their content, but in case they should “deprive [him] of some customers amongst the Orthodox” (Smiles 208). An astute businessman, Murray hedged his bets and reduced his risks to a minimum. As well as Byron’s poems, he published the Tory Quarterly Review, and the wildly successful Domestic Cookery by Mrs. Rundell. Byron quipped, in a parody of John Clare: Along thy sprucest bookshelves shine The works thou deemest most divine— The “Art of Cookery,” and Mine My Murray. (CPW 4: 172, 13–16)

These different ventures clearly didn’t cohere into a list with a single strong flavor, and so it was important that each element had a distinctive individual identity in the marketplace. Murray had invested heavily in the image of Byron as aristocrat, traveler, and object of desire with just the right degree of thrillingly heterodox charm. With his purse and his reputation swelled by Byron’s success, Murray moved from Fleet Street to the more stylish West End in 1813. He bought the Albemarle Street premises of his old rival William Miller, who had turned down Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Murray wrote to a relative: I have lately ventured on the bold step of quitting the old establishment to which I have been so long attached, and have moved to one of the best, in every respect, that is known in my business, where I have succeeded in a manner the most complete and flattering. (Smiles 266)

The step was indeed bold: Murray had taken on a mortgage that he would not pay off until 1821 and, according to his biographer, “the

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step which Murray had taken was so momentous and the responsibility so great, that at times he was driven almost to the verge of despondency” (Smiles 235). Murray must have watched his star poet’s writing and its reception with some anxiety. After Lara’s publication, Byron was unable or reluctant to extend the sequence of tales any further and lacked the impetus to return to Childe Harold. He needed to find a new direction. But Murray wanted yet more of the poetry that had made Byron’s name and was making his publisher’s fortune. While Byron needed new subjects and new styles so as not to atrophy, Murray needed more of the same to sustain his income. In this essay I want to tell a story of conflict between the product identity that Byron and Murray had collaboratively created, and the poet who had begun to find that identity constraining. Critics have found it difficult to accommodate Hebrew Melodies into smooth narratives of Byron’s career, and they have tended to marginalize or dismiss the collection as alternately a sop or a fillip to the pious Annabella Milbanke.1 I suggest that the collection’s tactical importance of the collection lies precisely in this difficulty, and readers can account for its strangeness by understanding the tension between Byron’s tactical attempt to write a reformed and newly satisfying poetry and Murray’s subsequent strategy, which attempted to contain the lyrics within familiar Byronic parameters. Hebrew Melodies is Byron’s first, failed attempt to resist the logic of his celebrity, and when critics marginalize the collection, they repeat Murray’s strategy of containment. In this essay, then, I am concerned with Byron’s creative urge to write a different kind of poetry to that which sustained his fame and Murray’s business imperative to make sure that poetry could still be read as recognizably Byronic—that it was still part of the Byronic sequence which was, and must remain, closely associated with the house of Murray. Before he began Hebrew Melodies, there were complaints that all Byron’s poems were the same, that he was wasting his talent, and that his skepticism was a danger to public morality. The British Review could “scarcely criticise as fast as Lord Byron can write,” but fortunately it was spared the need to review every new poem “by the uniformity of his lordship’s productions” (Roberts, “Rev. of The Corsair” 506). The Critical Review accused Byron of squandering his talents on trash: “we regret to see powers that can unlock the springs of terror and pity with such fearful effect, wasted upon garish and incompatible fiction” (“Rev. of The Corsair” 154). And Byron was everywhere urged to reform, to take the lessons of Christianity to heart, and further to ennoble his poetry by directing it to virtuous ends.

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Byron could have ignored these criticisms if they had not chimed with a more personal dissatisfaction. In the two years between his first and second proposal to Annabella Milbanke, Byron had been in search of sensation: “in my pursuit of strong emotions & mental drams I found them to be sure and intoxicated myself accordingly— but now I am sobered my head aches & my heart too” (BLJ 4: 217). The heartache was caused by his affair with his half-sister Augusta, which emotionally fascinated and morally alarmed Byron. His moral hangover worsened when Annabella accepted his second proposal, leaving him “quite horrified in casting up my moral accounts of the two intervening years” (BLJ 4: 179). She assured him that throughout their strange and cautious courtship, “I honored you for that pure sense of moral rectitude, which could not be perverted, though perhaps tried by the practice of Vice” (Elwin 167), but Byron still affirmed that there was “nothing I would see altered in you—but so much in myself” (BLJ 4: 208). By the end of 1814, as his marriage drew closer, he promised anyone who would listen that he would reform, using the word “seriously” again and again. To Lady Melbourne: In course I mean to reform most thoroughly & become “a good man and true” in all the various senses of those respective and respectable appellations—seriously[.] (BLJ 4: 172)

To Thomas Moore: I must, of course, reform thoroughly; and, seriously, if I can contribute to her happiness, I shall secure my own. She is so good a person, that—that—in short, I wish I was a better. (BLJ 4: 178)

And to Lady Jersey: Pray forgive me for scribbling all this nonsense—you know I must be serious all the rest of my life—and this is a parting piece of buffoonery which I write with tears in my eyes expecting to be agitated. (BLJ 4: 196)

Marriage to the supremely moral Annabella would keep him away from Augusta and encourage him to leave behind the dissipation and disbelief of the last few years. “A wife would be my salvation,” he wrote in his journal (BLJ 3: 241). Doubtless, the salvation he was looking for was as much financial as spiritual, but his mercenary motives, and the disastrous outcome of his marriage, should not blind us to the serious thought that he gave to reforming during his engagement.


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Byron was not immediately enthusiastic about the Hebrew Melodies project when Douglas Kinnaird interceded on behalf of the composer, Isaac Nathan. But he came to see the project, I suggest, as an opportunity to write his way out of the poetic and moral problems in which he felt himself mired. Writing himself out of dissipation and into marriage, he asked Annabella to make fair copies of some of the lyrics during their engagement and honeymoon, and while visiting his future parents-in-law, he used the Milbanke family Bible, working from the book in which his marriage to Annabella would shortly be recorded (Ashton 26). Hebrew Melodies provided a chance to write a new kind of poetry, whose content would be part of Byron’s reformation and whose form was an innovation in his career. With the help of his unlikely collaborator, Isaac Nathan, and his first amanuensis, Annabella Milbanke, Byron would answer his newly strident critics and his newly awakened conscience at once. But Byron’s attempt to use Hebrew Melodies to move his poetry in the direction of a new moral and theological seriousness was compromised both by the literary marketplace in which he took up his position and by Murray’s handling of the collection’s physical production. When Isaac Nathan advertised, in the Gentleman’s Magazine for May 1813, that he was “about to publish ‘Hebrew Melodies’ all of them upwards of 1000 years old and some of them performed by the Antient Hebrews before the destruction of the Temple,” he was planning to move into a crowded but lucrative market (Ashton 5). Romantic-period readers were enthusiastic for the antiquarianism of Macpherson’s Ossian and Chatterton’s Rowley, and there was a growing vogue for national melodies, embodied by Moore’s Irish Melodies, which came out serially throughout the period. When Byron wrote Hebrew Melodies, he wove in a variety of Hebraisms and names of scriptural places and people. Importing Hebraic words to Hebrew Melodies reprised Byron’s technique of deploying Oriental words in his tales and archaisms in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. To some eyes, the diction of Hebrew Melodies was the same old thing played out against a new backcloth, with Scottish, Spenserian, or Turkish cycloramas replaced by picturesque views of Sinai. The British Review’s comments suggest why Byron’s attempt to produce a newly reformed seriousness through a shift into Judaic diction was compromised before it began. The reviewer provided a recipe for cooking up national melodies: The way to proceed is first to prepare your melodies, and then you have the whole world lying between the polar circles, north and south,

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wherein to choose for them a proper designation and origin. One thing only will remain, which is to sprinkle the composition over with a few names of places and persons belonging to its adopted country. (Roberts, “Rev. of Hebrew Melodies” 201)

Given the numbers in which national melodies collections were produced, the reviewer may well have felt swamped. Joseph Slater records books of Scottish Airs, Irish Melodies, Welsh Melodies, Scottish Melodies, Indian Melodies, and Welsh Airs (76), and the reviewer asserts that: If we should now see the melodies of Kamtschatka [sic], or of Madagascar, or of the Hottentots, advertised, we should not only not be surprised, but we should know what to expect[.] (200)

The reviewer describes a self-enfolded discourse in which ersatz markers of national authenticity were attached to generic lyrics in an utterly tendentious and endlessly transferable fashion, manufacturing kitsch to feed the public appetite for “authentic” specimens of antique national song. So long as the resulting confections were dusted with foreign words, as though with icing sugar, the public found them palatable. Byron’s attempt to reform required a “real” or “authentic” expression of religious themes, in contrast to the “degraded” poetry on which his celebrity rested and with which other authors flooded the market. But choosing the national melodies genre (as described by The British Review) made it all but impossible for Byron to write a reformed poetry. Because the Hebraisms of Hebrew Melodies could be read as interchangeable both with the foreign words that signified the nationality of other melodies from Ireland to India, and with the foreign words that spiced Byron’s tales, Byron’s attempt to write a “reformed” poetry fell at the first fence, failing to differentiate itself either from the rest of the market or from his previous productions. The second factor that compromised Byron’s attempt to move in a new direction, away from the staples of his celebrity, involves the physical appearance of these poems in several books in 1815. The collection was a departure not only from popular formulae, but also from familiar formats, and the book that Isaac Nathan would produce was contentious even before it appeared. Nathan reported that one evening when he was at Kinnaird’s house, Kinnaird said: Mr. Nathan, I expect a—a—that—a—you bring out these Melodies in good style—a—a—and bear in mind, that—a—a—his Lordship’s name does not suffer from scantiness—a—a—in their publication. (Lovell 85)


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Byron apparently visited Nathan the following day, saying “Nathan, do not suffer that capricious fool to lead you into more expense than is absolutely necessary; bring out the work to your own taste” (Lovell 85). Nathan’s taste, in fact, was for a handsome and expensive volume. When A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern with Appropriate Symphonies & Accompaniments came out in April 1815 it was in crown folio (measuring approximately 36 × 24 cm) with an ornate engraved title page and dedication to Princess Charlotte. It sold for one guinea. This volume contained twelve melodies, with each lyric printed once under the music and once separately.2 It was quite unlike anything Byron had published before: a larger format, more expensive, and with a different publisher and collaborators. This singularity was a problem for Murray not simply because he could not make money from books that other people published, but because it interrupted the previously unblemished association between publisher and celebrity poet. Murray would produce a multi-faceted strategy to repossess Hebrew Melodies, to contain its strangeness, and to rehabilitate it to the trajectory of Byron’s collaboration with him. This strategy is subsequently extrapolated by Romanticists who anthologize “She Walks in Beauty” and forget the rest, masking the character of Hebrew Melodies by reducing the collection to its most uncharacteristic poem. I shift focus here from the words Byron wrote to the books Murray published, from the poet’s tactical insistence on going his own way to the strategy which contains his tactics and reconnects his writing both to a linear narrative of poetic development and to a homogenizing set of Byronic traits. Murray first brought out an edition of Hebrew Melodies which went into direct competition with Nathan’s edition. Immediately after this he embedded the poems in the first collected editions of Byron’s works. The overall aim was to repossess Byron from Nathan by representing the melodies as part of Byron’s works and Byron’s works as part of Murray’s list. As early as January 1815, Murray asked “does your Lordship wish or not to incorporate the Melodies in your collected works[?]” (Nicholson, 123). This put Byron in rather a difficult position, since he had already given the copyright to Nathan. He wrote to ask if Nathan would allow Murray “the privilege” of including Hebrew Melodies in the forthcoming “complete edition of my poetical effusions . . . without considering it an infringement of your copyright” (BLJ 4: 249). Byron wrote to Murray on 6 January, “Mr Kinnaird will I dare say have the goodness to furnish copies of the Melodies if you state my wish upon the subject—you may have them if you think them worth inserting” (BLJ 4: 250). But Nathan

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was understandably reluctant to let the lyrics out of his hands, and Murray wrote to Byron on January 11: I was not wrong in suspecting that Mr Kinnaird would not allow us to have the Melodies—but Mr Hobhouse thinks it unreasonable that they should not be included in the edition of your Lordships [sic] works collected—We had agreed that they should not be printed separately—nor even announced as contained in the works—but those who had the works would find them there with a note stating that they had been set to music very beautifully by so & so—which we supposed might operate as an advantageous announcement of the Music—& they would just have filled up our rather meagre Vol 4— (Nicholson, 125)

As I will show, all the promises in this letter were disingenuous. Byron was irritated and exploded to Hobhouse on January 26, “‘The Melodies’—damn the melodies—I have other tunes—or rather tones—to think of—but—Murray can’t have them, or shan’t—or I shall have Kin[nair]d and Braham upon me” (BLJ 4: 260). The matter was still unresolved on February 17, when Murray wrote to Byron: I am delaying the publication of our edition in four volumes only until you find a leisure moment to strike off the dedication to your friend Mr. Hobhouse, who still thinks that it is not precisely the same thing to have music made to one’s poems, and to write poetry for music; and I advise you most conscientiously to abide by the determination of Mr. Hobhouse’s good sense. (Smiles 351)

This correspondence was all about the projected four-volume collected edition, but before that Murray published Hebrew Melodies in May 1815. This book was in demy octavo, cost 5s 6d, and contained twenty-four melodies, plus “On the Death of Sir Peter Parker, Bart.” It contained twice as many poems as Nathan’s volume, at a fraction of the price and, importantly, it was uniform with Byron’s other works.3 With this volume, Murray went into direct competition with Nathan’s book and detached the lyrics from the music for the first time. His ledgers show no record of any payment to Nathan for copyright (Ashton 213). Bringing out Hebrew Melodies in a format that matched the rest of Byron’s publications helped to accommodate it in Byron’s oeuvre, and this process was furthered by Murray’s plans for collected editions. Murray’s Hebrew Melodies came with title pages and half-titles for Byron’s collected works bound into the back, enabling and


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encouraging readers to bind up their own collected edition in two octavo volumes. These title pages invited readers to consolidate their Byron purchases into two volumes, buying those poems they had not got. Those readers who did not want to bind up their own collected edition in two volumes could wait for the projected four-volume edition in small octavo, “including Hebrew Melodies,” which was advertised in the back of Murray’s edition of the melodies.4 When this collected edition appeared, the melodies were in the fourth volume, along with thirty-six lyrics, which had previously been appended to successive editions of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This gave the impression that Hebrew Melodies was of a piece with Byron’s other lyrics rather than a significant development of Byron’s poetic concerns in a new direction. Murray went on adding volumes to this edition as Byron continued writing, producing a set of eight uniform volumes by 1818. Each of these three artifacts—Murray’s edition of Hebrew Melodies, the two-volume “do-it-yourself” collected works, and the four-volume collected works—contributed to the assimilation of Hebrew Melodies within Byron’s oeuvre. Together they formed the mainstays of Murray’s strategy for repossessing the poems, minimizing their strangeness, and making them seem like Byronic business as usual. The reviews indicate the success of Murray’s strategy for establishing his edition of Hebrew Melodies as the definitive one, and for rehabilitating the poems to the uniformity of Byron’s works. Of the twelve journals whose notices of the melodies are collected by Donald Reiman, seven reviewed Murray’s book, four reviewed Nathan’s and one, the Gentleman’s Magazine, noticed both. The dominance of his edition among the reviews may reflect Murray’s well-established connections among journalists and the fact that he could afford to send out more review copies of his much cheaper book. He also spent forty-eight pounds on “advertising &c” (Murray ledger, repr in Ashton 213). The reviewers continued the work Murray had started, making his book the version of Hebrew Melodies that mattered. Murray sold six thousand copies of his edition, and his ledgers show a profit of £836 5s, not including the related profit from the collected edition (ledger, repr. in Ashton 213). No reliable figures are available for Nathan’s edition, but soon after its publication he was forced to leave London to avoid his creditors.5 And so Byron returned, somewhat uneasily, to the verse tale. The Siege of Corinth and Parisina marked a return to the form that sustained Byron’s celebrity and to material that he thought he had abandoned. Both poems were assembled from fragments intended for a single tale,

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which Byron had been working on since as early as 1812.6 Byron had been tinkering with these fragments throughout his rise to celebrity, but he could not make them cohere into a poem. The fact that he gave the lines that later became the opening of Parisina to Nathan to publish in Hebrew Melodies as “It is the Hour” suggests that, while he was working on the melodies, he may have thought that these materials would never become a narrative poem. Had Hebrew Melodies been greeted as a new direction for Byron, refuting the charge of sameness and heralding his reform, he might well have abandoned these materials altogether. As it was, with Murray’s publishing strategy stressing the uniformity of Hebrew Melodies and Byron’s other poetry, he returned to the fragments yet again. Having decided around January 1815 that they should become not one but two poems, he worked up the fragments to produce two verse tales in his popular style. The story of Hebrew Melodies shows the strained interdependence of the celebrity poet and the enterprising publisher who made celebrity his business. Byron’s need to challenge himself with new poetic forms and styles in a protean saga of self-fashioning and refashioning was a headache for the businessman Murray, who was trying to create a recognizably branded Byron who would answer the demands of a large readership with minimal commercial risk. Byron’s return to the genre that characterized his celebrity suggests the extent to which business concerns feed back, influencing the kind of poetry that gets written. Byron’s risky tactical unpredictability succumbed to Murray’s profit-motivated strategy of containment. To account for the comparative neglect of Hebrew Melodies in current criticism, readers need to recognize that Byron and Murray were pursuing conflicting objectives when the collection first appeared and acknowledge that the ways in which Byron’s poems were first marketed may still affect our focal points within his corpus.

Notes 1. DISCUSSIONS OF Hebrew Melodies appear in Shilstone (99–112); Blackstone (129–45); Thomas, “Forging of an Enthusiasm” and “Finest Orientalism”; Franklin, “Samples of the Finest Orientalism”; Pont; and Chernaik. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass have waged a campaign for the Hebrew Melodies to be understood as songs, beginning with Douglass, “Hebrew Melodies as Songs”; continued by their contributions to the Paderborn Symposium: Burwick; and Douglass, “Isaac Nathan’s Settings for Hebrew Melodies”; and culminating in their facsimile edition of Nathan’s settings: A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern, by Isaac Nathan and Lord Byron.


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2. Full bibliographical descriptions appear in Ashton (210–11) and Burwick and Douglass (41). 3. Full bibliographical descriptions appear in Ashton (212–13, 200) and Wise (103–4). 4. As Wise notes, these advertisements are printed on sig. E4, and are therefore an integral part of the book. Some copies of Murray’s edition also have additional leaves of advertisements bound in. 5. Olga Phillips claims that Nathan’s edition sold ten thousand copies and made a profit of 5,000 pounds (78). She gives no source for these figures, and neither the number of copies nor the profit margin seems credible. Her inflated figures are reproduced in Ashton (48), Chernaik (12), and Franklin (Byron: A Literary Life 112). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that “the success of the volume was not sufficient to keep [Nathan] out of financial difficulties. He had previously been compelled, on account of large debts, to leave London and reputedly spent some time in the west of England and in Wales” (Legge). 6. Jerome McGann discusses the composition of both poems in CPW 4: 476–83, 488–90.


11

On e Ton pe r Squa r e Foot: Th e A n t e c e de n t s of T H E VI S I O N O F JU D G E M E N T Peter Cochran

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n January 29, 1820, King George III died in Windsor Castle at the age of eighty-two, having been blind and insane for the best part of the previous decade. He was and still is the longest-reigning king England ever had—amongst monarchs, only Victoria beats him for longevity—and his reputation at the time of his death had climbed higher than it had been at any point during his active reign. England, disgusted as ever with her present, nostalgic as ever for a past that never existed, ignored his notorious meanness, his dullness, and his amateur interest in agriculture. They even forgot the political incompetence that had made him unable to compromise with the American colonists. The national mourning was general, being coupled with a natural relief that George’s sufferings on earth had at last terminated. How extensive his sufferings would be in the beyond became, about a year after his death, a topic of literary debate: for his Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, wrote a poem on that very subject, called A Vision of Judgement. The blasphemy of A Vision of Judgement is without parallel. Southey’s implicit confidence in his own ability to read the mind of God is unequalled. Southey makes George get into Heaven and has the king welcomed by a party of British Worthies including Chaucer,

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Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, and even the republican Milton (“no longer here to Kings and Hierarchs hostile”), but excluding the Augustans Pope, Swift, and Johnson. The two chief witnesses for the prosecution, the pamphleteer Junius and the politician John Wilkes, are so overwhelmed by George’s beatitude that they retreat to Hell ashamed, having given no evidence, and the rejuvenated monarch enters Heaven amidst celestial rejoicing. The House of Hanover could not have anticipated a more fulsome homage in its wildest dreams. Although Southey was, as Laureate, expected to write something, no one could have anticipated anything so massive and sycophantic as this. When Southey’s Norwich friend William Taylor first read A Vision of Judgement, the only immediate precedent he could find for it was Vincenzo Monti’s timeserving poem In Morte di Ugo Basseville (I. 256). Taylor also affected to find A Vision comic in intention. Byron, who regarded Monti as an Italian Southey (“quel Giuda di Parnasso”—“that Judas of Parnassus” [BLJ 7:151–52]), would not have queried Taylor’s parallel. Examples of flattery of royals and nobility by European poets abound, but none have gone as far as did Southey and represented the monarch entering Heaven in triumph. Christian humility dictated that that “poem” was best written by God alone.1 Southey’s A Vision of Judgement, and the pompous hexameters in which it is written, have no literary precedents. Dante allows named historical people into Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in The Divine Comedy, and Michelangelo caricatures some historical people (including himself) in his Sistine Chapel Last Judgement. But Dante and Michelangelo are men of genius, while Southey is a hack (though he does compare his vision with that vouchsafed to “the Florentine,” at the end of his first part), and their selections for who goes where are based on their own moral and historical senses, not, as is Southey’s, on a crude predilection for one political dynasty over all others. No sensitive Christian could have written such a poem; for the authoritarian Southey, however, religion was a matter not of faith and belief, but of crude social cohesion. Byron, who hated Southey more than he hated any other human being (except Lady Byron), had many reasons for objecting to A Vision: foremost among them was Southey’s Preface, which called upon the legislature to deal with a group of poets Southey referred to as a “Satanic School,” amongst whom he intended Byron, Moore, and Shelley to be numbered. Byron answered not with A, but with The Vision of Judgement, which many think of as his finest completed work. To counter

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Southey’s hexameters, Byron wrote in ottava rima, his most perfect and flexible verse form. In The Vision, St. Peter is sitting at the Gate of Heaven, to which no one has been allowed entrance since the date of Byron’s birth. A flock of optimistic cherubim bring the deceased George III along, but Peter does not know who he is. Michael the Archangel and Satan debate for the king’s soul; the two chief witnesses for the prosecution, the pamphleteer Junius and the politician John Wilkes, are charitably disinclined to testify against such a sad old wreck; Southey is dragged up from the Lake District to read his Vision, as a way of settling the issue, but his poem is so bad that everyone flies his presence in horror. Byron’s poem ends, As for the rest—to come to the Conclusion Of this true dream—the telescope is gone Which kept my optics free from all delusion, And showed me what I in my turn have shown; All I saw farther in the last confusion Was that King George slipped into heaven for one— And when the tumult dwindled to a calm, I left him practising the hundredth Psalm. (106)2

As is not the case with A Vision of Judgement, multitudinous precedents exist for The Vision of Judgement, and I wish to categorize them and to examine a few. The idea of the afterworld derives from Book Eleven of Homer’s Odyssey, with Odysseus sacrificing at the mouth of “mirthless Hades,” and the more elaborate Book Six of Virgil’s Aeneid, the hero of which goes further than Odysseus and descends into the underworld itself, departing through the Ivory Gate of false dreams (Byron’s “true dream,” in the previous quotation, arrives, he would claim, through the opposite Gate of Horn). The concept of a judgment to be experienced by all who cross over to the next life finds its most striking pre-Christian manifestation in the final book of Plato’s Republic and is expressed very violently in the post-Christian Book of Revelation. The latter, with parts of Isaiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel, forms a substantial Biblical apocalyptic tradition, with which Byron was familiar (he read at least one chapter in this Bible every day). Though The Vision derives from this allegedly spiritual continuum, it also plays original, Byronic games with it. It is a long way from the confident judgment of Ezekiel, Now is the end come upon thee, and I will send mine anger upon thee, and will judge thee according to thy ways, and I will recompense upon

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thee all thy abominations. And mine eye shall not spare thee, neither will I have pity; but I will recompense thy ways upon thee, and thine abominations shall be in the midst of thee; and ye shall know that I am the Lord. (7: 3–4)

to the mock-diffidence of The Vision, I know this is unpopular—I know ’Tis blasphemous—I know one may be damned For hoping no one else may e’er be so— I know my catechism—I know we’re crammed With the best doctrines till we quite o’erflow— I know that all save England’s church have shammed, And that the other twice two hundred Churches And Synagogues have made a damned bad purchase.— (14)

Readers will find very little irony, diffidence (mock or otherwise), or implicit charity in Plato’s Republic or in the apocalyptic books of the Bible. Next in the list of Byron’s precedents are works that depict a judgment upon poets, set in the Beyond—the Beyond being regarded as the place where literary-critical questions will receive their final answer. Most important among them is The Frogs, by Aristophanes, in which the tragic dramatists Euripides and Aeschylus compete for the accolade of who best meets the needs of Athens in her present hour of distress. Aeschylus wins. Aristophanes (who, like Byron, equates poetic excellence with good civic conscience) would have been familiar to Byron from his Harrow schooldays, and a bowdlerized version of The Frogs was circulating privately in 1820, made by no less a man than John Hookham Frere (in whose work Byron had first seen the possibilities of ottava rima); one can easily imagine Byron reading it.3 Aristophanes implies the literary judgment of the Beyond to be definitive; Byron is not so sure, for he implies that the Christian God would have preferred Southey’s Vision (Cochran, “Blasphemous Judgement” 37–50) because his taste in letters is very poor—he only likes poems in praise of himself. Byron’s precedents also include works in which the Beyond is depicted, not as a place in which the present is transcended, but as one that is merely a larger version of this world, with all its compromises intact. Early readers of The Vision objected to such facetiousness. Byron replied to one of them, Douglas Kinnaird, on November 16, 1821: —As to “serious and ludicrous” read “Fielding’s journey from this world to the next”—or the Spanish Quevedo’s Visions—and judge


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whether I have at all infringed upon the permitted facetiousness upon such topics as means of Satire.—Recollect that I carefully avoid all profane allusion to the Deity—and as for Saints—Angels—and demons—they have been a sprightly people since the Wife of Bath[’s] times—and Lucian’s even till now. (BLJ 9: 62)

Readers might expect from what Byron says here, and from his pseudonym as writer of The Vision (“Quevedo Redivivus”), that the Sueños, or “Dreams,” of the seventeenth-century Spanish writer Quevedo would be first among these precedents, but they are not, being dark and uncharitable. A better contender is Henry Fielding’s Journey from this World to the Next, the moral ethos of which is well illustrated by the following quotation. Here, a variety of late-departed folk are queuing up at the judgment throne, hoping to prove their worthiness before Minos, and a playwright tries to gain admittance by boasting how much good his dramas have done by their strict morality. Minos tells the playwright to wait until someone comes who can prove eligibility deriving from this source, whereupon the dramatist, grumbling, adds that he once lent the whole Profits from a Benefit Night to a Friend, and by that Means had saved him and his Family from Destruction. Upon this, the Gate flew open, and Minos desired him to walk in, telling him, if he had mentioned this at first, he might have spared the Remembrance of his Plays. (Fielding 279)

How Robert Southey’s poems would fare in such an atmosphere is easy to imagine. Next, come dramatic works, which climax anagnoretically in the opening or reading of a document that the protagonist expects to bring him success, but which instead destroys him. Byron assigns this fate to Southey, when his Vision, which is intended to settle the question of whether or not George should get into Heaven, is, when read aloud, so bad that the rest of the characters fly to all points of the horizon, leaving St. Peter to knock Southey off his cloud and back into his Lake. At least two precedents for this idea are advertised in the text of Byron’s Vision itself: first, The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock’s bond, in which he has blind faith, is used with ease to destroy him. The play is quoted in Byron’s epigraph (“A Daniel come to judgement! Yea, a Daniel—I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word”). Next, Philip Massinger’s play A New Way to Pay Old Debts, in which the will that Sir Giles Overreach expects to give him triumphant advantage over his enemies turns out to be blank. A New

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Way is quoted towards the end of The Vision, and upon seeing the play Byron had been moved to convulsions by Edmund Kean’s acting of Overreach (BLJ 6: 206). Several other Shakespearean subtexts beneath The Vision of Judgement climax in bathos and disillusion for the overreaching protagonist (of whom Byron’s Southey is a travesty, as he is of Byron’s Manfred—Manfred really has fathomed the Mysteries, where Southey only claims that he has). At one extreme, Macbeth sets himself against the world, putting all his hopes on a promise, which he half-consciously knows will damn him. At the other, the last scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor (a universally neglected Byronic sourcebook) shows Falstaff anticipating erotic bliss, but instead getting pinched almost to death; Page expecting his daughter to be married to Master Slender, but instead finding her married to Fenton; and Dr. Caius expecting to be married to Ann Page, but instead finding himself “married” to the red-nosed Bardolph. Southey expects universal praise for his judgmental wisdom, poetic genius, and aptness for the role of God’s right-hand man: all he gets is a bash from St. Peter’s keys and a soaking in Derwentwater—just as Falstaff gets soaked in Thames-water in Act III of The Merry Wives. But Southey is not Falstaff—he cannot be invited home afterwards (Merry Wives V.v. 229–30)—he is the embarrassing sociopath who must, like Malvolio, Jacques, or Shylock, be expelled from the stage by the dramatist before the final harmony can be brought about. George III, as he waits at Heaven’s Gate, may be so senile that he expects nothing, but the craft with which he slips “into Heaven for one” suggests an eye on the main chance. Whether he will be accepted as part of the final harmony when order is restored remains an unresolved question. Next, are the works that depict the unsuccessful application of a tyrant for admission into the number of the Elect. First, is the Apocolocyntosis, said to have been written by Seneca at the start of the reign of the Emperor Nero. In it, the denizens of Elysium are startled to see an ungainly, semi-human figure shuffling in their direction, which no one can identify. Herakles is sent out to question the creature, who, it appears, is the previous Emperor, Claudius. Claudius is hampered by a severe speech-impediment but manages to convey to Herakles that he wants to get into the company of the Blessed. The company is unclear that he deserves to do so, and a process is instigated, at the end of which Claudius is condemned to Hades, where his punishment will be to rattle dice for all eternity in a box with holes in the bottom. The Apocolocyntosis, with its


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flattering references to the brilliant new young emperor Nero, did Seneca no good (if indeed he was its author), for Nero had Seneca murdered. Claudius, however, is portrayed with the same realism as Byron’s George III (who is at one point given an authentic “What? What?”). In a direct line from the Apocolocyntosis is Kataplous, a dialogue by the second-century Graeco-Syrian satirist Lucian (referred to in Byron’s letter to Kinnaird, quoted above). In Kataplous (the title means “the journey downwards”) a tyrant called Megapenthes (or “Greatwoe”) is rowed, protesting, across the Styx, and put on trial, to ascertain where it is best to send him. In a strange trial in which such items as his bedside lamp are called upon to testify to his wickedness, he too is condemned, and his punishment is to be forbidden to drink the waters of Lethe, so that he will never experience oblivion and will forever remember the crimes he has committed (this idea is borrowed by Milton in Paradise Lost [II. 604–14], and Milton’s portrait of the Devil is another important subtext to The Vision). In the same tradition as the Apocolocyntasis and Kataplous is the Julius Exclusus of Erasmus (a copy of whose Colloquies Byron possessed, who is quoted in Don Juan canto two, and who had produced editions of both Lucian and of the Apocolocyntosis). In this satire, Pope Julius II—patron of Michelangelo—arrives at Heaven’s Gate at the head of a huge, stinking army, and demands admission. St. Peter, the first Pope, pokes his head through the wicket and demands of Julius, the most recent Pope, who precisely he is. He refuses to believe the answer, and a long (not very dramatic) dialogue ensues in which Julius, in listing all his secular successes as evidence of his salvability, proves on the contrary his damnability. St. Peter refuses to let him in, and the dialogue ends with Julius threatening to bring up the artillery and blast his way into Heaven. The indebtedness of Byron’s The Vision of Judgement to the Julius Exclusus was pointed out within days of its publication by one “R.T.S.” in the Literary Gazette for October 26, 1822 (repr. in Reiman IV. 1448–49). These three works, by Seneca, Lucian, and Erasmus, are egalitarian in that they afford no privileges to tyrants and emperors and portray spirits and mortal men conversing on terms that show neither earthly nor celestial rank to be of any account. So much for tradition, but several contemporary works also influenced Byron in his writing of The Vision of Judgement. The first, Sheridan’s The Critic, was discussed by Jack C. Wills at the Sixth

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International Byron Seminar (in Robinson 85–105). In The Critic, a pompous nationalistic work, The Spanish Armada, is presented for ridicule, and its creator, Mr. Puff, anatomized. The differences are, firstly, that where The Spanish Armada, pretending to be a serious play, is created as a joke, Southey’s A Vision of Judgement, created as a serious poem, can only be read as a joke. Secondly, where Southey is presented by Byron as a mere rogue and parasite to whose dull poem none can listen, Mr. Puff is presented by Sheridan as a Falstaffian, endlessly fecund creator of entertaining trash and as a middleman between creators of and consumers of trash of a kind that one cannot imagine society doing without. Another precedent for Southey is Sir Fretful Plagiary, centerpiece to Act I of The Critic, who, seeming confident, is in fact falling apart with insecurity, and who, though demanding criticism, does not actually want it, and when given it, cannot take it, so that sincere conversation with him is impossible. He is another sociopathic embarrassment, like Shylock, Malvolio, or Jacques. Byron’s version of Southey, then, borrows from Puff in a self-identifying Horatian perspective, and from Plagiary in an angry Juvenalian perspective. As Jeffery Vail has shown, a close ideological kinship also exists between the radical styles of The Vision and Thomas Moore’s The Fudge Family in Paris (1818). Byron learned from Moore’s lightness of touch, and both The Vision and The Fudge Family “accomplish a deceptively casual undercutting of Tory authority . . . that is more damaging than any formal jeremiad” (Vail 80). Most of The Vision was written when Byron’s things were being packed up for the move from Ravenna to Pisa in October, 1821, and the only books he refused to have stowed away were, it seems, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels (BLJ 9: 86–87). The Vision contains at least eleven direct verbal lifts from the Waverley novels (Cochran, “The Vision of Judgement” 168–72), and in its humane view of history the spirit of Scott may be seen as a general influence on the poem, as can that of Fielding, of whom Scott was, according to Byron, the “Scotch” version (BLJ 8: 13). Another contemporary work in dialogue with The Vision is Adonais (1821), Shelley’s elegy for Keats, which Byron seems to have read in manuscript (Cochran, “Adonais” 193–205). Like The Vision, Adonais is aimed in part at Southey, imagined by Shelley as Keats’ murderer. Also like The Vision, Adonais depicts the process whereby a place is claimed for its protagonist among the immortals and borrows several ideas from A Vision of Judgement. Unlike The Vision, but like


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A Vision, however, Adonais is humorless and self-dramatizing. Here is Shelley’s self-portrait from Adonais: All stood aloof, and at his partial moan Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band Who in another’s fate now wept his own; As in the accents of an unknown land, He sung new sorrow; sad Urania scanned The Stranger’s mien, and murmured: “who art thou?” He answered not; but with a sudden hand Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, Which was like Cain’s or Christ’s—Oh! that it should be so! (298–306)

And here is Byron’s self-portrait from The Vision of Judgement: God help us all! God help me too! I am God knows as helpless as the Devil can wish— And not a whit more difficult to damn Than is to bring to land a late-hooked fish, Or to the butcher to purvey the lamb— Not that I’m fit for such a noble dish— As one day will be that immortal Fry Of almost every body born to die.— (113–20)

Unlike The Vision, Adonais makes an attempt, not at satirising the idea of the Beyond by placing it in the same time-space continuum as the present but at creating a true concept of transcendence and of infinity. Byron derived much from studying Adonais, and in The Vision does the opposite, sending up the very ideas of Heaven and Hell, as if they are locations in which no civilized person can believe. Byron does not just ridicule A Vision of Judgement but the whole of Southey’s oeuvre. Byron is at last signaling a continuity with his own early conservative self, before fame corrupted his talent, causing him to take Southey’s work as a model to improve on. The joke at the climax of The Vision, in which Southey “first sunk to the bottom, like his works, / But soon rose to the surface, like himself” (833–34), echoes a note Byron had written in 1811 to line 617 of the Augustan Hints from Horace, but which, like Hints, had never seen the light of day: A literary friend of mine, walking out one lovely evening last summer, on the eleventh bridge of the Paddington canal, was alarmed by the cry of ‘one in jeopardy’: he rushed along, collected a body of Irish

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haymakers (supping on buttermilk in an adjacent paddock), procured three rakes, one eel-spear and a landing-net, and at last (horresco referens) pulled out—his own publisher. The unfortunate man was gone forever, and so was a large quarto wherewith he had taken the leap, which proved, on enquiry, to have been Mr. Southey’s last work [The Curse of Kehama]. Its ‘alacrity of sinking’ was so great, that it has never since been heard of; though some maintain that it is at this moment concealed at Alderman Birch’s pastry premises, Cornhill. Be this as it may, the coroner’s inquest brought in a verdict of felo de bibliopolâ against ‘a quarto unknown’; and circumstantial evidence being strong against The Curse of Kehama it will be tried by its peers next session in Grub-Street . . . (CPW 1: 439)4

“Alacrity in sinking” is what Falstaff describes himself as possessing, after he has been flung into the Thames in The Merry Wives of Windsor (III.v.15), and so on—the complexity of Byron’s subtextual references could be analyzed ad infinitum. Robert Southey’s A Vision of Judgement is an insult to the literary tradition in which Southey claimed to work. Byron answered him with a travesty, which embodies many strands of the literary tradition in which Byron really did work. Southey’s A Vision of Judgement derives from no tradition and comes from nowhere but its creator’s abominable taste and blind vanity. Byron’s The Vision of Judgement supports the weight of 2,500 years of European writing as easily as the human body supports the weight of the atmospheric pressure— approximately one ton per square foot5 —in which it moves.6

Notes 1. When Dryden, in Threnodia Augustalis (1685), comes to the celestial destiny of Charles II, he is discreet: But what they did, and what they said, The Monarch who triumphant went, The Militant who staid, / Like Painters, when their heightening arts are spent, I cast into a shade. (252–56) 2. All Byron quotations from my edition. 3. The Preface to a privately bound edition of Frere’s translations in the Cambridge University Library, added after his death in 1846, says, “The first of these, ‘The Frogs,’ was nearly printed when he left England” (4–5). He left England in 1820.


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4. The joke would have been in poor taste in 1811, based as it was on the real case of a publisher (Payne of Payne and Mackinlay) throwing himself into the Paddington Canal. 5. In fact, one kilogram per square centimeter (information from http:// kids.earth.nasa.gov/archiv/air_pressure/[accessed July 1, 2001]). 6. I am grateful to Anne Barton and Tim Webb for their assistance with this essay.


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H e r i tage a n d I n novat ion i n By ron’s Na r r at i v e Sta nz a s Catherine Addison

Despite his political radicalism, Byron has always been admired for his poetic decorum, especially in his ottava rima verse. I use the word “decorum” without apology, in full recognition that it brings with it the label of “formalist.” Formalism has been admirably defended against a previous generation of theorists’ criticisms by several recent books on the subject (Clark 1–22; Levine 6). Among these, Susan Wolfson’s Formal Charges demonstrates that, far from being by nature quietist and conservative, formalist criticism may actually be quite radical (227–32). The formalist question underlying this essay concerns what can be said in a particular verse form. This question does not close itself on what has already been written in a specific form, but it is especially concerned with poets who seem, as does Byron, to master a form to the extent of making it imitate, parody, or include other forms. The virtuoso is of most interest because he plays with form, pushing it to the limits (Conrad 49). That so few poets in English use ottava rima puzzles George Saintsbury (1: 10); Swinburne (251–52) would say that there could be no competitor in the form after Byron. The more specific questions asked in this essay concern what forms in Byron’s work convey what themes, tones, and types of narrative presence or subjectivity. But these questions have a habit of turning round and asking how these forms give rise to—or, at least,

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encourage—particular themes and subjectivities. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a famous case of a poem that got out of hand and refused to “obey” the author’s original intentions. I believe that this was at least partly a result of form asserting itself. But form and theme are not simply at war in a poet’s composition; the exigencies of form lead the poet’s thought on to unpredicted regions (Lodge 89), and the cast of an individual poet’s thought molds developments in a form that might seem impossible in another poet—or another age of poetry. Forms do not exist in a Platonic vacuum but are implicated with the historical issues of heritage and legacy. This essay focuses mainly on heritage because most poets seem tacitly to corroborate Swinburne’s judgment about Byron’s inimitability. Even Auden claimed that he would “come a cropper” in Byron’s favored ottava rima and chose rhyme-royal instead for his “Letter to Lord Byron” (Collected 42). Byron did not invent the verse forms that he used in his major works, and he was often careful to acknowledge his precursors. However, he was not always quite accurate in his assessment of his own debts, just as he did not at first discover his own most suitable forebears. His admiration for Pope, for example, did teach the younger poet to turn a well-balanced closed couplet, but the form on its own was not a heritage especially conducive to Byron’s characteristically expansive and free-flowing discourse. Occasional couplets in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers would not shame an Augustan poet: “Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here, / To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?” (255–56). However, the somewhat stagey rhetoric of these lines, with their limited narrative capability, their carefully pointed parallelisms (“turgid . . . tumid”), and their overused inversions (“To turgid ode . . . dear”) were not calculated to lead a young nineteenth-century poet toward the discovery of a new and vital poetic voice. Byron was more innovative with what William Bowman Piper disdainfully calls the “Romance couplet,” a form that Piper traces back to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (49–50). Some of the “Turkish Tales” are written in this form, as are “The Island” and “The Lament of Tasso.” In Byron’s hands this measure often gains its forward momentum not so much from strong enjambment or the rhyming of lexically weak words as from the sheer excitement of the situation, which forces a reader to utter the lines with great speed. Byron was always a strong rhymer; Wimsatt puts him nearly on a par with Pope (164), whose legacy to the younger poet may chiefly have been in this skill, though Byron, rejecting Pope’s narrow ideas of propriety, could exploit it more adventurously. The dramatic—perhaps melodramatic—intensity of the

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following lines overrides the limiting effect of the two-line segments of which it is composed and encourages the passage, as Auden notes of all Byron’s verse, to be “read very rapidly, as if the words were single frames in a movie film” (Dyer’s 405). I need to quote at some length to demonstrate the effect: Cold as the marble where his length was laid, Pale as the beam that o’er his features play’d, Was Lara stretch’d; his half drawn sabre near, Dropp’d it should seem in more than nature’s fear; Yet he was firm, or had been firm till now, And still defiance knit his gather’d brow; Though mix’d with terror, senseless as he lay, There lived upon his lip the wish to slay; Some half-form’d threat in utterance there had died, Some imprecation of despairing pride; His eye was almost seal’d, but not forsook, Even in its trance the gladiator’s look That oft awake his aspect could disclose, And now was fix’d in horrible repose. (Lara 13)

But Byron’s narration was more successful with tetrameter couplets than with these pentameters. Most of the romances are in tetrameters, and the reason for their success is mainly that the immense and tumbling speed of these terrific tales which, with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, made him so popular, could more easily be represented by shorter lines whose rhymes follow more breathlessly one after another. Like Scott, from whom he inherited it, Byron varies the tetrameter couplet with triplets, alternate rhymes, thorn lines, and, occasionally, even pentameter couplets. The “latitude” of this style, which appealed to Scott (1), lends itself admirably to Byron’s requirements, even to the most volcanic of his moods: Who thundering comes on blackest steed? With slacken’d bit and hoof of speed, Beneath the clattering iron’s sound The cavern’d echoes wake around In lash for lash, and bound for bound; The foam that streaks the courser’s side, Seems gather’d from the ocean-tide: Though weary waves are sunk to rest, There’s none within his rider’s breast, And though to-morrow’s tempest lower, ‘Tis calmer than thy heart, young Giaour!

(The Giaour 180–90)

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The speed with which these lines must be uttered is not dependent only on their subject-matter—a galloping rider furiously observed by a strangely empathic speaker. In fact, this velocity is enforced on the reader mainly by the prosody of the lines. A four-beat line leaves little room for grammatical superfluities (Fussell 130); here, metrical stresses strike lexical stresses in words whose structural importance in the line is marked. Rhyme, which increases stress anyway, falls on words whose influence on the sentence is formative. These tetrameter “Turkish Tales” exhibit a poetic brilliance from which Byron needed eventually to escape. Their sentences are utterly lucid. Couplet rhyme and four-beat rhythm make nearly all their propositions emphatic. Their most memorable utterances are categorical statements, their plots, tales of extremity. With the exception of The Giaour, the tales all boast narrators who are omniscient and invisible, and they include no humor, which is a great shortcoming, considering the complex and ironic wit demonstrated in Byron’s other writings, especially his letters, of the period. This kind of monological discourse is capable of no development, but only of endless repetition. In fact, the plots of Byron’s early romances, including Manfred and Cain, tell one story: The Doom of the Dark Outsider (Torrance 209). The escape from this impasse was not so much into a different story as into a metalanguage, which drew attention to the poetry, the speaker, the reader, and the comedy (and pathos) at the heart of these relationships. This escape was made possible by Byron’s discovery of new verse forms. The Spenserian stanza is a significant form in Byron’s eventual transition from naïve to self-reflexive verse. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which uses this measure, was composed in two halves, the first two cantos being composed between 1809 and 1810 and the second two in 1816 and 1817. The “Turkish Tales” appeared in between them, perhaps riding on the success of the first two. The first two cantos are composed in a parodic imitation of Spenser, their anachronistic medievalism including use of diction such as “wight” and “Whilome” (I. 2). Although even these devices never cause Byron’s Spenserians to sound very like those of the Faerie Queene, and although in the end the stanza was in some ways uncongenial to him, Byron did benefit enormously from Spenser’s legacy. Spenser’s main aim in the invention of his stanza seems to have been the avoidance of isolation and disjunction. His adaptation of the English sonnet—in which the quatrains connect by means of interlacing rhymes—serves the same kind of prosodic interest. The Spenserian consists of alternating structures interpolated and concluded with couplets, but the contrast between these structures is


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modulated by rhymes that they share. The stanza thus abrogates the disjunction evident in its main precursor, the Italian ottava rima. William Empson points out that the Spenserian’s rhyme scheme, ABABBCBCC, is fundamentally ambiguous because it allows local affinities between lines to take on the appearance of couplets, quatrains, terza rima segments, and so on, according to their sense and syntax, but nevertheless the overall pattern denies total discreteness to any of these units (33–34). The fact that the last line is a hexameter also contributes to the Spenserian’s integrity, for it gives a strong sense of closure and punctuates each stanza as a unit. As Spenser uses his stanza, the lines are usually end-stopped, and both alternating and couplet patterns are very evident to the ear. In Byron, however, a circling movement—especially in the middle of a stanza—would disrupt the powerful forward progression of his narrative verse. What Byron’s Spenserians do is assert their totality rather than internal contrasts. The following is fairly typical of stanzas from the early part of Childe Harold: Childe Harold sail’d, and pass’d the barren spot, Where sad Penelope o’erlook’d the wave; And onward view’d the mount, not yet forgot, The lover’s refuge, and the Lesbian’s grave. Dark Sappho! could not verse immortal save That breast imbued with such immortal fire? Could she not live who life eternal gave? If life eternal may await the lyre, That only Heaven to which Earth’s children may aspire.

(II. 39)

The main semantic division in this stanza occurs between lines 4 and 5, but this coincides strategically with the middle of a couplet, which has the effect of healing up the hiatus. The whole stanza thus operates very much as a unit, wandering down from the factual first line, through historical objectivity and speculation, to the highly metaphysical hexameter that closes it. Such a lack of disjunction, however, does not entail mere repetition or addition. In the lingering process of this stanza, with its pauses for apostrophe and rhetorical question, a shift takes place, not merely of focus—from Harold to Sappho—but of subjectivity. To begin with, the Childe is the agent who “sail’d,” “pass’d,” and “view’d the mount,” and so recognition of the “lover’s refuge and the Lesbian’s grave” may at first appear to belong to him as well. But the increasing absorption of the discourse in Sappho’s elegiac significance and the categorical generalization of the last line convey a more authoritative tone than Harold, with all

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his posturing, can command in this poem. This shift in narration—or focalization—mirrors in miniature the general “problem” with Childe Harold, whose hero was to become gradually redundant as his narrator increasingly pushed him aside to communicate with the reader in his “own” voice. Whether or not this narrator may be identified with Byron himself is not important here; what is significant is that the Spenserian stanza encourages subjectivity and a sense of authorial presence by insisting that the narration progress in large units, which for Byron meant thickening description into meditation and personal commentary. The general consensus is that the final two cantos of Childe Harold are of much higher poetic quality than the first two. Interestingly, these later Spenserians resemble Spenser’s own use of his stanza even less than the earlier ones, mainly because Byron becomes much more cavalier with line endings, which Spenser himself almost always respects. Spenser also uses a great many syntactic inversions within lines of the Faerie Queene, but Byron, who, according to Yeats, strove continually for the “syntax and vocabulary of common personal speech” (Yeats 710; also Bottrall 221), does not use many inversions: Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin—his control Stops with the shore;—upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own, When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown. (IV. 179)

This stanza exhibits two related features that are absolutely typical of Byron’s later use of the Spenserian. The first is the overriding of the middle couplet (lines four and five) by means of enjambment, in this case of both the lines, though often only line five runs on. This technique makes the couplet much less evident, especially to a listener who cannot see a printed text, and speeds up the stanza considerably, for in Spenser the middle couplet tends to oppose the progressive movement of the preceding alternating rhymes. Spenser’s own stanzas ask for a measured reading that seldom accelerates even in moments of action or suspense. Byron’s narrator, on the other hand, eschews the classical ideal of temperance and impartiality and is inclined to passages of intense excitement such as this one, during which articulation is fast,


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emphatic, and cumulative. Thus, the middle couplet is not useful to him—unless as an obstacle to be overcome. The other significant feature of this stanza is its climactic use of the final Alexandrine. Here, the power of the line is accentuated by the diction, which ends with a triple negation, a favored device in Childe Harold, perhaps fostered by the six-beat line. Byron’s proclivity for crescendo is related to his habit of overriding the middle couplet because all the lines of the stanza appear to pour relentlessly on toward their resounding completion, with few turns or hindrances en route. The sheer size of this discourse unit, with its formidable ending, makes it the template for Byron’s elegiac grandeur in this poem. As Byron neared the end of Childe Harold canto four in 1817, his letters express weariness with his poetic enterprise and a sense of its completion (BLJ 5: 264–65). His sudden change of heart in October of the same year is well known, as is its cause, his discovery of John Hookham Frere’s ottava rima poem, now known as Whistlecraft, brought to Italy in lieu of tooth powder by Byron’s friend Douglas Kinnaird (BLJ 5: 267–68). This poem had an electrifying effect on Byron’s creativity at a moment of frustration. Frere’s poem was composed in conscious imitation of Pulci—and in English. Byron had already read Ariosto, Tasso, and other masters of the Italian ottava rima tradition (Vassalo 1–2), but he had probably never thought of trying out their style in his own language.1 Pulci is a more comic poet than those whom Byron had read, and his comedy is often dependent on sudden changes of tone, on unexpected revelations of the narrative self, and on grotesque juxtapositions of incongruities, which must have had an impact on Byron, who could project so mobile and witty a persona in his letters and yet remain so morbid in most of his poems. Within a few weeks of his encounter with Whistlecraft, Byron had completed Beppo, and soon after that he was to embark upon Don Juan. However, Byron’s ottava rima poems do not really resemble Pulci’s, even though he himself, in canto four of Don Juan, calls his own style “burlesque” and acknowledges a debt to Pulci (IV. 3, IV. 6). For, however light-hearted, satirical, absurd, or grotesque Don Juan may be by turns, it is also deadly serious at times; for example, when the narrator declares his “plain, sworn, downright detestation / Of every despotism in every nation” (IX. 24). In fact, Don Juan includes a myriad more moods and themes than Pulci’s work, and it cannot in the end be described as mere burlesque. Considering it so has led many of its readers—including Auden, who believed it to be “light verse”—to underestimate its importance (Collected 42). If Byron’s poem resembles any of his Italian precursors in this form, it must be Ariosto, who

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commands a great spectrum of tones, from hilarious to pathetic, who controls in his Orlando Furioso a huge variety of characters and strands of story, and who rejoices in the folly and fecundity of life while remaining conscious of its cruelties and continuing tolerant, amused, and sympathetic about all that he surveys and creates. Perhaps because of this variety of usage, ottava rima has been admired as a crucial structural unit in Don Juan (Jump 97, Mellor 61, West 62, Kernan 179, McGann 96). “It’s what one has looked for in vain,” writes Virginia Woolf, a little enviously, “an elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it” (3). But the form is not, as Woolf suggests, entirely without its own particular features. The ottava rima stanza resembles the English sonnet in that its special characteristic is disjunction between an extended alternating structure and a concluding couplet. The disjunction in both depends not only on the intrinsic contrast between alternate and couplet rhyme, but also on the fact that the couplet is an alien—it does not rhyme with any part of the alternating structure. This disjunction and alienation are exactly what Spenser was at pains to minimize in his stanza. Significantly, those aspects of the Spenserian against which Byron chafed are absent from the ottava stanza. No middle couplet hinders the progress of the opening structure; the quatrain is seamlessly extended to a sestet. And if the final couplet lacks the magnificence of a hexameter, it is nevertheless highlighted by its alien nature, and it can be used for crescendo where appropriate. The “Byronic-Spenserian” octave in Don Juan builds to a climax in its couplet: So fully flashed the phantom on his eyes, That when the very lance was in his heart, He shouted “Allah!” and saw Paradise With all its veil of mystery drawn apart, And bright Eternity without disguise On his soul, like a ceaseless sunrise, dart;— With Prophets, Houris, Angels, Saints, descried In one voluptuous blaze,—and then he died. (VIII. 115)

But ottava rima can also be employed for very different purposes, and its comical uses are not at all like anything ever attempted in Spenserians. Its formal disjunction offered Byron the opportunity for the dramatization of self that had in the end failed in Childe Harold, partly because in that poem the narrator and the protagonist were too similar. Both figures have a Past and are depicted as wandering moodily around Europe and the Near East, despairing of consolation and meditating—to different degrees of profundity—on


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monuments to loss. The narrator’s initial moralization on Harold’s “shameless[ness]” and “ungodly glee” (I. 2) soon stops, and afterward too little difference is left between them for reflections of the one upon the other to be more than images in a hall of mirrors. Discouraging sharp contrasts by nature, the Spenserian stanza must be held partly responsible for this parallelism, just as ottava rima should be seen as the material that gives rise to the drama of Don Juan. In the latter poem, both the protagonist and the narrator bear resemblance to aspects of Byron’s self, but they are polar opposites. The one is young, physical, and oddly passive, while the other is older, his “days of love . . . over” (I. 216), and yet he is furiously active mentally. Out of the contrast and counterpoint of their personalities, the self that is Byron’s presence in this poem becomes manifest. The discourse is no monologue like the last part of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage but an ongoing ironic dialogue that is founded most decorously on the disjunction built into the structure of the stanza. The most celebrated variant of the ottava characteristically uses the couplet for a sudden comic “sabotage” (West 27) of a serious theme developed in the sestet (II. 8), as in the following: They look upon each other, and their eyes Gleam in the moonlight; and her white arm clasps Round Juan’s head, and his around her lies Half buried in the tresses which grasps; She sits upon his knee, and drinks his sighs, He hers, until they end in broken gasps; And thus they form a group that’s quite antique, Half naked, loving, natural, and Greek. (DJ II. 194)

This couplet is not simply slapstick, but it is ironic in the sense that it embodies a shift of perspective from an empathic involvement in the lovers to a detached aesthetic appraisal of them, and the formal disjunction of the couplet is the perfect medium for such a shift, which is abrupt and complete. This is the typical example from Don Juan, in which the poet is “working with” the natural proclivity of the stanza and exaggerating it by means of a semantic turn at the point of disjunction. It is closely paralleled in Ariosto: —Astolfo, re de’Langobardi, quello a cui lasció il fratel monaco il regno, fu ne la giovinezza sua sì bello che mai poch’altri giunsero a quel segno.

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Catherine Addison N’avria a fatica un tal fatto a penello Apelle, o zeusi, o se v’è alcun più degno. Bello era, et a ciuscun così parea: Ma di molto egli ancor più si tenea.— (Orlando Furioso XXVIII. 4) ‘Astolfo, of the Lombard kingdom heir, After the monk, his elder brother, died, Was in his youth so handsome and so fair That few with him in beauty could have vied; Not Zeuxis nor Apelles could compare With all their art, however hard they tried. Handsome he was and so by all was deemed, But he more highly yet himself esteemed.’ (Trans. Barbara Reynolds)

As critics have observed (Mellor 61; McGann 96–97), the change need not be from serious to comic but may reverse this direction, as in Don Juan XII. 33, and Orlando Furioso XXVIII. 65. And the serious-comic dichotomy does not adequately account for the ironies and heteroglossia at play in both Don Juan and Orlando Furioso. Many of the shifts are from narrative to narrator, a movement evident also in Childe Harold, but without the shock effect possible in the disjunctive ottava stanza. A long stanza may lend itself to an increasingly self-conscious narration, but in contrast to the Spenserian’s gradual, dreamy drift, ottava rima encourages a sudden transition: Then, shrieking, she arose, and shrieking fell, With joy and sorrow, hope and fear, to see Him whom she deem’d a habitant where dwell The ocean-buried, risen from death, to be Perchance the death of one she loved too well: Dear as her father had been to Haidée, It was a moment of that awful kind— I have seen such—but must not call to mind. (DJ IV. 36)

This kind of transition can also be found in Orlando Furioso (III. 77). Shifts of perspective may be achieved without use of the first-person pronoun, of course. Any special effect, even the use of an unusual or comic rhyme will make the reader aware, at that particular moment, of the poem as artifact or as the representation of a very specific personality: The wind swept down the Euxine, and the wave Broke foaming o’er the blue Symplegades;


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’Tis a grand sight from off ‘the Giant’s Grave’ To watch the progress of those rolling seas Between the Bosphorus, as they lash and lave Europe and Asia, you being quite at ease; There’s not a sea the passenger e’er pukes in, Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine. (DJ V. 5)

Karl Kroeber suggests that the ottava rima itself is a constant reminder to the reader of the presence of Byron in his poem, yet this claim is too simple (34). As long as all the verses were consistently of one type, the reader would become used to the type and therefore deaf to most of its effects. But this poem constantly fluctuates between transparent narration and self-conscious display of technique or overt narrator’s commentary, between commentary on the fictional world and commentary on the narrator’s world, between the narrator’s statements about a world and his direct address to a contemporary or to the reader herself. And these fluctuations give the moments of self-reflexivity their force. The poem is not all digression; it devotes at least half of itself to the story. And although some of the narrator’s digressions are long, lasting many stanzas at a stretch, most are shorter than this. In fact, the dichotomy between narration and digression is only a larger equivalent of the disjunction within the stanza. Even during long digressive passages, most stanzas contain a shift to a different, more- or less self-conscious mode in the couplets. Even in the most transparently narrative passages, the couplets are slightly different in tone, more terse and trenchant, and hence (usually) more self-reflexive (but occasionally less so). What Byron discovered in this essentially disjunctive stanza was a canvas on which he could recreate the whole “Aurora Borealis” (VII. 2) of his own poetic and temperamental repertoire, the keynote of which is change. To him, prosodic disjunction is the equivalent of change. His poetry resembles Ariosto’s more than the other poets’ in this style because Ariosto has a larger sympathy and range of moods and types of self-characterization than the others. But even Ariosto falls short of Byron’s sheer scope of representation, perhaps because he was in the end restrained by a similar but less Puritanical version of Spenser’s temperance. This classicism prevents him from becoming carried away by his subject matter, even, for example, in his grief for Isabella, murdered by the brute Rodamonte in canto twenty-nine (27). Byron, freed by history and his own temperament from the restrictions of moderation, becomes angry or despairing, ironic, silly, or simply outrageous as the story or his thoughts provoke him, and thus his poetry includes more

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facets of human experience and is more variable as to the tempo of its reading and the mobility and range of its tones. Swinburne may be right when he claims that It is mere folly to seek in English or Italian verse a precedent or a parallel. The scheme of metre is Byron’s alone; no weaker hand could ever bend that bow, or ever will. Even the Italian poets, working in a language more flexible and ductile than ours, could never turn their native metre to such uses, could never handle their national weapon with such grace and strength . . . the ottava rima Byron has fairly conquered and wrested from them. (251–52)

Note 1. Byron had composed in ottava rima once before, in 1816, in one of his rare personal-confessional lyrics, “Epistle to Augusta.” Being nonnarrative, this poem is not in the Ariosto tradition, and it may be read simply as a variation of Byron’s fairly common eight-line lyric mode.

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I n h e r i t i ng Hu mor s, L eg at i ng Hu mor : Th e Wi l l of M A N F R E D Bernard Beatty

A lasdair MacIntyre argues in After Virtue that What I am, therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognise it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition.

Byron would agree with this and is certainly “one of the bearers of a tradition.” MacIntyre notes, however, that “The individualism of modernity could of course find no use for the notion of tradition” (206). This seems obvious. Yet it is commonly thought that Byron is a progenitor of “the individualism of modernity” as well as “bearer of a tradition.” How can these two postures be reconciled? That is one very general question that belongs as of right in this volume. MacIntyre’s main argument concerns the eclipse of Virtue. He argues persuasively that the recognition of unquestionable virtues founds societies and, conversely, virtues exist in relation to practical life in these actual societies. Virtues are the means and form by which human beings can reach the declared goal of happiness or a good life—this is the most valuable sense of “heritage.” Modern liberal societies, however, cannot specify such agreed upon goals by definition, since liberalism assumes that goals differ from group

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to group and individual to individual. All they can do is set certain rules that allow some kinds of diversity but protect the individual from others, and these rules do not, in themselves, suggest what the good life should be, nor can they form a legacy for the future. Moral argument is impossible in the modern world, therefore, since, at root, individuals can only express aversions and preferences. Why are we in this mess? Europeans, argues MacIntyre, began somewhere in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to relinquish a sense that morality is grounded in the working recognitions of historical societies which are themselves embedded and grounded further back as foundational and presupposed rather than being produced or agreed to by enquiry or discussion. This shift brought into view for the first time the newly separated entity of “morality,” and justifying it as an abstraction quite apart from the working recognitions and practices of historical societies became necessary. MacIntyre calls this the Enlightenment project to find a rational basis for morality without being able to specify an agreed end to human life which itself becomes simply a matter for discussion rather than a foundational telos to be acted on. The Enlightenment project is an attempt at an almost total emancipation from the claims and understandings of the past whilst claiming equivalent status to them. MacIntyre argues, rightly I think, that this enterprise failed and was bound to do so. The first person to fully discern this failure was Nietzsche who understood that all the apparently rational arguments of the Enlightenment project (up to Kant and Utilitarianism) were no more than the rhetorically disguised expression of assertions and preferences. He said simply “there are no moral facts” (Nietzsche, “Twilight” 501). Byron understood something of this, too, which is why he said of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “But he was phrenzied by disease or woe, / To that worst pitch of all, which wears a reasoning show (CHP III. 80, 759–60). But Nietzsche, of course, everywhere argues that all moralists are in Rousseau’s position, as Byron implies it, for morality can have no other basis than the self-founding will to power rather than the recognition of the Good and, once this is realized, it is the job of the society-transcending Übermensch to will into existence a larger world that is the embodiment of his untrammeled autonomy. What MacIntyre deplores—that all modern discussion of ethical life is a smokescreen for the confident acting out of aversions and preferences which are the primary and only reality—is the very thing that delights Nietzsche. Undoubtedly, a step in Nietzsche’s grasping of this principle was his intense admiration for Byron’s Manfred. He said: “I

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must be profoundly related to Byron’s Manfred: of all the dark abysses in this work I found the counterparts in my own soul” (Nietzsche, “Why” 56). And this is why Byron finds a surprisingly prominent place in Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. Thus, a second question of a sharper kind begins to take shape. Are modern readers bound to interpret much of Byron’s poetry and, especially, Manfred in the spirit of Nietzsche as Russell suggests? The two questions are related of course. Russell devotes a chapter to Byron because he thinks that Byron’s poetry helps to generate an influential kind of anarchic and amoral modernity. Manfred belongs, amongst other things, to the recognized tradition of the melancholy man. The opening setting for Manfred—a scholar’s chamber—is a recognized setting for melancholia. The curse on him says: “From thy own heart I then did wring / The black blood in its blackest spring” (I. i. 234–45). This black blood is a dead, but here reanimated, metaphor for effects about the heart caused by an excess of the melan chole meaning black bile. In the Renaissance, melan chole can be associated with villains and malcontents as in the incantation over Manfred. The Renaissance was heir both to the Galenic theory of melancholy humor, which treats it as a peculiarly nasty disease to be cured by purging or diet, and to the Aristotelian version in which melancholy is a disorder but one that confers insights and is often associated with genius (Klibansky 18). The Galenic version promotes satire and the comedy of humors, the Aristotelian version can produce Hamlet and Milton’s invocation in Il Penseroso to “divinest Melancholy.” Manfred is preceded by an epigraph from Hamlet, and Manfred seems to be a direct inheritor of Milton’s “divinest Melancholy.” Is “the individualism of modernity,” then, connected in any way to this inherited exaltation of melancholy? Two witnesses say that it is. Just as Nietzsche saw through Enlightenment rationality, so Kierkegaard saw through the cult of Romantic melancholy, which he associates with the aesthetical rather than the ethical person. The modern age is, for him, an age of despair (Kierkegaard, Either/Or 1: 115). But whereas Nietzsche founds the possibility of an affirmation, a tragic joy, on such despair, Kierkegaard sees it as a dead end. For him, the aesthetical person lives in and for the intensity of the conscious moment, which, since it is one of many such, disperses his self into a multiplicity of which he is proud. And yet the infinite multiplicity of desires and the instability of the moment makes him understand life as despair. Even this despair can form part of the will to intensity, however, as Kierkegaard notes in a passage that seems

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uncannily appropriate to the case of Manfred as he first appears in the play: His punishment has a purely aesthetic character; for even to say that his conscience awakens is too ethical an expression to use about him. Conscience exists for him only as a higher degree of consciousness, which expresses itself in a disquietude that does not, in a more profound sense, accuse him, but which keeps him awake, and gives him no rest in his barren activity. Nor is he mad; for the multitude of finite thoughts are not petrified in the eternity of madness. (Either/Or 1: 255)

Byron’s lines, in his own voice, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, “There is a very life in our despair, / Vitality of poison,” seem to be a direct anticipation of Kierkegaard’s insight (III. 34, 298–99). Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, then, direct readers to Byron’s concerns. Walter Pater is the second witness to the conjunction of a selfconsciously modern and aestheticized sensibility and a fundamental condition of melancholy. He famously recommends “a quickened multiplied consciousness” devoted wholly to the moment (which is a positive spin on Kierkegaard’s “multitude of finite thoughts”), yet even he implicitly agrees with Kierkegaard, for he describes this apparently exalted concentration as “gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch” (Pater 252, 250). This desperation is according to Kierkegaard’s exact specification for it is “a disquietude that does not, in a more profound sense, accuse him.” It is quite a small step from Pater to punk. Byron, of course, is suspicious of out and out aestheticism in Pater’s narrow sense. This suspicion forms part of his dislike of Keats, who is one of the progenitors of Pater’s perspective. Byron is always sufficiently both commonsensical and biblical in his understanding to maintain some relation with historical fact and sequence which Pater’s aesthetic imagination will try to dissolve into aesthetically paralleled moments between different cultures. Such is obviously the case, for example, with the magnificent portraits of Napoleon and Rousseau in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Byron enters into their mode of being, but he also passes judgment on them. Napoleon is not an ethical being. Byron accuses him of not being able to govern . . . thy pettiest passion, nor, However deeply in men’s spirits skill’d, Look through thine own, nor curb the lust of war (III. 38, 339–41)


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His is the aesthetics of present self-conferred and will-generated power. It fascinates and is recognized by Byron. Byron, however, critiques Napoleon not so much in Kierkegaard’s terms (“a disquietude, that does not, in a more profound sense, accuse him”) but almost in the older vocabulary of the humors, for Napoleon’s “spirit” is “antithetically mixt” (317). The precedents here stretch back through Pope’s Sporus who is “himself one vile Antithesis” and Dryden’s Achitophel who is, like Napoleon, “Resolv’d to Ruine or to Rule the State” because he has, antithetically, “a fiery soul” and “a pigmy body” (Pope 325; Dryden 174, 155). The whole point of humors theory is to temper, or bring into harmonious relationship, antithetical properties. Byron’s vocabulary is inherited, but his discernment is of a shift that occurred in his own time and presages MacIntyre’s future, which is why he singles out his own two representative “moderns,” Rousseau and Napoleon. Byron critiques these antitheses here and elsewhere (Lara, for instance, who “found his recompense in joy or woe” [I. 120]), but, like Manfred who complains of his “mixed essence,” (I. ii. 40–45) Byron recognizes himself as a version of them. Rousseau fares less well. He is “the apostle of affliction” (CHP III. 77, 726) who throws “enchantment over passion,” like Mozart’s Cherubino, “and from woe / Wrung everlasting eloquence” (CHP III. 77, 727–78). Rousseau is a man of words, which feelingly fix passing moments much as Byron’s defense of intensity in the famous sixth stanza of Canto Three of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage identifies creating the canto with living “a being more intense.” “Intensity” is a coming word, but Rousseau, like Napoleon, is again treated as almost a humors character suspended between psychological and physiological explanation. Nevertheless, Byron is thinking to his present moment and seems to anticipate exactly the posture of MacIntyre or Nietzsche exposing the Enlightenment project when he writes, “But he was phrenzied by disease or woe, / To that worst pitch of all, which wears a reasoning show” (III. 80, 759–60). This is a common idea with Byron; in one of his letters he writes, “How admirably we accommodate our reasons to our wishes” (November 22, 1813). The Rochefoucauldian observation is worldly wise, I suppose, but, though it incriminates himself, it still remains as an ethical judgment (“worst pitch”) of a kind that both Dr. Johnson and Alasdair MacIntyre would endorse. The quotation is enough to show that, despite all appearances, one should not see Byron’s portrait of the aesthetical melancholy Rousseau as itself aesthetical in the languid manner of Pater or of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy—that is

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a melancholiac’s own lovingly mediated version of a cultural complaint. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage could seem like this, but it is an ethical as well as a melancholy text, or, put another way, it takes for granted, even in its most Zarathustran moments, that the condition of melancholy is open to ethical scrutiny. The test case of this argument and of this essay, of course, remains Manfred. How, then, should it be read? Through the eyes of Nietzsche and Russell where Manfred is a proto Zarathustra, or through those of Kierkegaard? Is it, in Nietzsche’s formula “Beyond Good and Evil” and thus, in MacIntyre’s rather differently loaded sense “After Virtue,” or is it an anticipation of Kierkegaard’s struggle between the aesthetical and the ethical? A journalist would ask whether it is reactionary, Romantic, or modern? Even though most discussion of Manfred is, naturally enough, about Manfred, the two, unlike Zarathustra and Also sprach Zarathustra, are not more or less identical.1 Manfred himself is extra-social, selffounding, the refuser of any obligations to anyone but himself.2 More than any of Byron’s characters, he is an extra-historical fiction who makes himself up. For him The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts— Is its own origin of ill and end— And its own place and time— (III. iv. 129–32)

This speech makes the demons that come to fetch him to hell disappear. If it is true, he does not belong in a Faustian world at all; no larger mythology can finally claim him. An unoriginated mind has no history and belongs to no story. That is the good bit. The bad bit is that, like Napoleon, all human beings are not all mind but are made up of “a mix’d essence” of fiery soul and pigmy body, “passions and pure thoughts” (III.i.165), much like badly compounded humours. Nonetheless, Manfred, proto-Übermensch, declares “I stand / Upon my strength” (III. iv. 119–20). This defiant speech against the spirits who come to take him always forms the centre of those accounts of Manfred that read the whole play as endorsing Nietzsche’s Promethean and aesthetical reading of life. But again the business of punctuation is a good guide. Byron does not end the play at the close of this speech with Manfred’s defiance, death, or suicide as he could. In that case it would be a manifesto Promethean play.3 On the contrary, the defiant speeches modulate into a quiet coda, in the manner of music, and it is no wonder, nor is it


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misleading, that Schumann and Tchaikovsky orchestrated it. Musical reference has been important throughout the play—Manfred wishes to be “The viewless spirit of a lovely sound”—and deserves more attention than it has received (I.ii.53). Music, like humors medicine, aims to bring discordant elements into harmony. Manfred’s final line, “Old Man ’tis not so difficult to die,” is exquisitely orchestrated and confers peace. It is “a lovely sound, A living voice, a breathing harmony.” It is the most important line in the play. We know that. But why and what does it mean? I have always found Manfred the most baffling of Byron’s works and have never felt that I fully understood it. I am encouraged by Byron’s choice of the word “inexplicable” for it (BLJ 5: 170). May I here, nevertheless, propose a possible explication of its conundrum? MacIntyre stresses that true ethics is always a practical matter. It is about becoming that which you are not. Like athletes, ethical people begin with the recognition that they are not in the shape that they should be and they take steps to take on that other shape, not in the instantaneous way that Arnold puts on the shape of Achilles in The Deformed Transformed but through the exercising of time that Byron regularly employed in order to prevent his bodily girth increasing. Kierkegaard agrees. The aesthetical temperament is concerned with “is,” not with the abyssal “now” of the mystics, which discloses eternity, but with the present passing moment in which it delights and to which it makes itself over and by which it is betrayed. The ethical temperament, on the contrary, is concerned with action and change and, therefore, with “becomes” rather than simply “is.” It is why Byron left Italy for Greece in 1822 and thus became what he has since been recognized to be. “Becomes,” of course, has no value in itself. The distinction is not that between “Becoming” and “Being” or “Process” and “Stasis.” What matters is not what you are, nor the process of becoming as such, but what it is that you become. The question that has always puzzled me in Manfred is how the text moves from the beginning to the end. A real difference exists between the two, but I have always found it impossible to locate where and how it takes place, and yet the play, as play, seems to be about this. Manfred could not say “Old man ’tis not so difficult to die” at the beginning of the play nor indeed anywhere else but as this particular last line, so he must have changed. Now if Manfred is an aesthetical person in Kierkegaard’s sense, how could he change, how could he act, how could he become anything? He would seek the stability of self-assertion, the experiencing of romantic love as a

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replica of the desiring self, he would know, feel, yet boast the vitality of despair, and he would seek forgetfulness of anything that held him back to a past which constituted him. All of which, of course, he does. The play’s “foregrounded” consists almost entirely of this. But the foregrounded is not the play, nor do we get to its end by what it foregrounds. That is the whole difficulty of understanding Manfred. Does Manfred not spend much of the time repeating and narrating his past life? Is he not both actively seeking what he knows in advance will not satisfy him whilst, at the same time, secretly waiting for what will? That this is so is shown in Manfred’s consciousness at the beginning of Act III that he is suddenly experiencing an “Inexplicable stillness” and, Hamlet-like, he notes down “That there is such a feeling” since it “hath enlarged my thoughts with a new sense” (III.i.7, 15). In one way, this fastidious self-consciousness is out and out aesthetic, and Manfred is careful to repeat his familiar knowledge that “It will not last,” but the detail discloses that Manfred is waiting for “a new sense.” Why else should he use this phrase and be open to the surprise that it announces? I propose, therefore, that Manfred is best understood not through Nietzsche’s eyes but through those of Kierkegaard, though, of course, there is a strong Nietzschean pulse in the play. Jerome McGann, for instance, writes that “The play is Byron’s most Nietzschean work,” which is not silly but begs the question as to whether the play is “Nietzschean” altogether or whether it uses, situates, and critiques its Nietzschean motifs (“Introductory Note” 1038). Let us, for the moment, see things as Kierkegaard does. His Either/Or presents modern man as we will come to know him, beyond Good and Evil, as an aesthetical temperament that wholly understands its own determination to be self-constituting but which nevertheless, edgily, both remembers and waits in a manner that an Übermensch has strenuously put aside. The two modalities are “Either” to be self-constituted “Or” to be remembering and waiting. Waiting for “a new sense” is not an action in the accustomed sense but is on the edge of action because it involves interaction with real time not constituted or controlled by the self and which is capable of conferring surprise. It is, manifestly, in potency to action which, in turn, means in potency to become something else, whereas to be self-constituted is to be resistant to change coming from the outside (a posture of Promethean inner defiance is the only stance available here and is gladly assumed) and, equally, incapable of change coming from the inside since the self is simply identified with the will which can have no fulfillment outside of itself and no being apart from the naked determination


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to will itself as itself. The self is stuck with itself. Manfred’s real and only action in the play is his last moment of dying where he both loses self and seems to at last identify with it. Something like experiencing a new sense merges, to his evident surprise, with something that he does. He understands death as both his action and as something happening to him, which is, for Manfred, a surprisingly normal attitude. In one way, his last line is a rebuke to the abbot who invites him to pray and asks him (it’s a terrific choice of words) “how fares it with thee?” In another way, the abbot is accepted in the most basic ethical fashion: “Give me thy hand” and the words give comfort to an old man about to die himself —“’tis not so difficult.” The play, in other words, is about the relation of “is”—“to be thus” says Manfred, appalled but still asserting his essence—to the notion of becoming something (I.i.65). In Kierkegaard’s understanding, this is the relation between the aesthetical and the ethical. The fact that it is about this Either/Or relation, but the relation is not itself discussed or foregrounded, is the reason why Manfred is virtually impossible to describe. The sequence carries a meaning that cannot be got at apart from the sequence. By “sequence” I mean both the sequence of Manfred as a dramatic poem and the sequence of Byron’s works in which Manfred is both culmination—for the Byronic hero could go no further than this, he dies in Manfred’s death—and turning point. Hence, melancholy Manfred dies no longer subject to his inheritance of humors but in a good humor, and this is the legacy that will be put to such good use in Byron’s great comic poems—Beppo, The Vision of Judgement, and Don Juan that come after Manfred and are enabled by it.4

Notes 1. “Neither Manfred nor Byron need be mistaken for the conceptual structure that contains both” (Hoagwood 38). A helpful general comment though Manfred is surely an aesthetic and musical structure as well as a “conceptual” one in Hoagwood’s sense. 2. This is so when Manfred is being self-consciously “Manfred,” but the exchange with the chamois hunter that begins by Manfred accepting the aid of another, shows him in a different light, for the chamois hunter talks perceptively and correctly of Manfred’s “cautious feeling for another’s pain” (II .i. 80). The end of the scene shows Manfred pulling himself together into his habitual posture—“I know my path” he says and twice asserts “Follow me not.” 3. “Promethean” broadly speaking. Byron’s Prometheus has energy in defiance but, unlike Zarathustra and other neo-Promethean figures,

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we are told in the opening of the third section of his “Prometheus” that the Titan’s “god-like crime was to be kind / To render with thy precepts less the sum of human wretchedness.” 4. I would like to thank Shobhana Bhattacharji for her invaluable help in shaping this essay.

Pa rt III

Byron’ s Literary Inherit ors


14

Th e Gl oom a n d Ch e e r f u l n e ss of C h i l de H a rol d a n d E l i z a be t h Be n n e t Shobhana Bhattacharji

Childe Harold bask’d him in the noonday sun, Disporting there like any other fly; Nor deem’d before his little day was done One blast might chill him into misery. But long ere a third of his had pass’d by, He felt the fullness of satiety: Then loathed he in his native land to dwell, Which seem’d to him more lone than Eremite’s sad cell. —CHP I. 4 It was [Elizabeth’s] business to be satisfied—and certainly her temper to be happy; and all was soon right again. —Pride and Prejudice 221

Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet is cheerful, Lord Byron’s Childe

Harold is not. This seems a straightforward contrast, but the issues involved raise numerous questions regarding gender and genre. Can Elizabeth and Harold be brought into the same area so that they may be fruitfully discussed? The presupposition of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is that Harold can take off on a whim and travel endlessly,

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an option Elizabeth cannot even consider. One day Harold is happy as a fly, suddenly he is filled with gloom and heads for foreign lands, virtually without another thought of home, but Elizabeth is constrained by being a woman in Regency society and makes certain choices accordingly. Her flippant younger sister Lydia, however, is proof that there may have been another option. Regency conduct books imply that it was considered fashionable to be like Lydia; then as now fashion must have been a temptation. Austen, however, makes Elizabeth her heroine and suggests that the values Elizabeth adopts are the correct ones. Here, cheerfulness becomes important; despite many provocations and her quick temper, Elizabeth invariably makes an effort at courtesy and conversation. Her life depends upon it, for if she were not perpetually well-behaved, she would not find a husband and would be consigned after her father’s death to poverty. For Byron’s Harold, however, courtesy and conduct are not even issues. The difference between Harold and Elizabeth calls attention to issues of genre, gender, and economics. These distinctions may be obvious, yet problems still remain, and here, I would like to offer an attempt at articulating and trying to resolve them, though much room for work remains. Austen had a tidy and safe approach to form; Byron preferred more or less unfettered literary adventure in Childe Harold. Austen chose the already popular form of the romantic comedy, while the generic term for Byron’s experimental poem is less certain, although the fact that Harold leaves “His house, his home, his heritage” is a clue. In the eighteenth century, adventuring abroad found expression in forms like the travelogue while the novel and sentimental comedy focused on domesticity (Kaul 14). Austen’s well-made novel about how to mould women of a particular class into ideal marriage material has a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end corresponding to the introduction, development, and marriage of its chief characters. Paradoxically, Austen allows readers to assume that Elizabeth’s world will carry on after the last full stop through her quick summary of life at Pemberley and chat in her letters about the future of the characters. Byron’s meandering poem, in contrast, ends because he wished to terminate it and Harold at the same time, and Byron must tell the reader what happens to Harold because his future could be anything at all, for as Byron tells readers emphatically, Harold has no life outside the poem. Of course, Childe Harold and Pride and Prejudice are both fiction but at least in the usual sense, Pride and Prejudice is the more realistic of the two. The dramatic, stylized, very selective comedy of Jane Austen with its fairy-tale plots, female wish fulfillment patterns

Childe Harold and Elizabeth Bennet

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of the most obvious kind, theatrical set pieces, ostended morality, heroes and heroines and villains, both intelligent and stupid, is rooted in a particular historical world and class that it exhibits in its freedom to be itself through choices and its strict enclosures which make many things impossible. This is what I mean by calling it “realistic” despite its unrealisms. Similarly, but the other way round, the stylized romaunt of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage with its Spenserians, romantic projections, elisions and avoidance of “reality” in many ways is nevertheless a telling exposure of a particular consciousness set in real history (Peninsular Wars, end of Venice’s independence). Both texts are real and unreal but in quite different ways. Moving, then, to Harold’s gloom. He is “sore sick at heart,” sheds a “sullen tear,” and indulges in “joyless reverie”; he is a “sated and melancholy ‘Childe’” who “lov’d but one, / And that one, alas! Could ne’er be his” (I. 46, 48, 49). If he has a reason for leaving home— romance does not have to give reasons—it would be the “Worse than adversity” problem: “He felt the fullness of satiety” because he had the means, the “luxury,” to be satiated (I. 33–34). Harold seems to be merely a wealthy, bored young man—a situation that spurs his travels. He is almost comical here; nevertheless, Harold’s initial stance enables Byron to sketch out a modality that will then be breathed in. Gloom is part of this: The reader is used to melancholy as in Gray but this is melancholy plus energy in nothingness, what Gray called black melancholy (i.e., energy in sadness) which his ‘white melancholy’ did not have. It is tricked out as something vaguely medieval and vaguely familiar, the sort of human restlessness Johnson describes in Rasselas, but actually it is new and exploratory and there is no knowing where it will end up. That is why early readers were thrilled by it. (Beatty)

The existential sadness of canto three is pitched at a different level but the opening of the poem is a route into a sadness that had not yet been articulated. Why is Harold gloomy and what sort of gloom is it? From the fourteenth century, gloom meant to look sullen or displeased; from the late-seventeenth-century Scottish, it meant a sullen look. In 1629, Milton used “gloom” to mean darkness and obscurity, and it is first associated with melancholy from 1744; indeed, Harold is glum and sullen, as the seventeenth-century Scots would have recognized.1 Is the mood explicable? Is the reader meant to understand its causes or accept it as a state of mind in which Harold leaves himself open to unusual thoughts?

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The comparison with the more realistic Pride and Prejudice raises the question of whether Harold could have remained at home and sorted out whatever it was that made him leave in the first place, but Byron says that he had a “thirst for travel” (I. 28). Is Harold pushed onward by a need to leave or a desire to travel? To say he could have remained at home and sorted out whatever it was that made him leave in the first place implies that Harold lives in the same world as Elizabeth, namely a realist novel. Obviously he does not. The exact genre of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage may be uncertain, but it is a poem, part revived romance, part fable, in which realistic solutions are irrelevant. The possibility of Harold staying home to sort out his problems does not float in this kind of text. But realism and romance are not necessarily opposed analytical categories, and reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a travelogue in relation to the realistic depictions of travel in Pride and Prejudice may provide a route to understanding these matters. Unlike Harold, Elizabeth is not free to travel. She and Darcy talk about the distance, discomfort, and expense of traveling from Longbourne to Mr. Collins’ home. Fifty miles is nothing for Darcy who can ride or go by carriages he owns, but the same journey is tedious for Elizabeth who has to find the money to travel as well as chaperones to accompany her. The disadvantages of travel in Jane Austen’s time included fatigue, short stops, the “rapidity of motion [that] sometimes occasions an overturn” (Malcolm 75). The difference is one of class and even more of gender.2 Darcy completely misunderstands that Elizabeth’s lack of money circumscribes her mode and area of travel, restricting her to the ambit of Longbourne. He assumes that she wants to be close to home because she is emotionally dependent on her family. The truth is that as soon as Elizabeth is married to Darcy, she breaks out of the Bennet cocoon, inviting only her favorite people to visit her. Does travel have a similar generic function in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage? I think so. One curious aspect of Harold’s journey is that the reader does not know how he traveled, where he stayed, or what he ate, and he has no visible source of income. He could not have traveled without strong economic support, but Byron gives few details about this, which is common to the romaunt genre. Readers do not, after all, ask how Sir Lancelot or Red Crosse Knight are victualed or financed. Sterne, Smollett, Scott, and other picaresque novelists emphasize economics; even Byron tells us when Juan eats and sleeps, but in romaunt these things are not discussed. Such vagueness is not uncommon in romance; the poem would not work at all if Harold


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had that degree of substantiality. But the fact that Harold is free to leave his home and travel is based on the assumption that he has the means and does not need a chaperone. Travelogues are journeys in space and in the mind. Byron’s title is “Pilgrimage.” The point of pilgrimage (in Protestant nineteenthcentury England) is that it is mediaeval, ironized, unreal, stylized, in quest of the marvelous and miraculous, and thus linked with romance and antirealism, but pilgrimage is not the same as romance, since actual Catholic pilgrims travel in a real world in a real time to a real place, they are historical. So pilgrimage works on both sides of the romance/realism divide and potentially (this is the hope of the pilgrim) unites the two. A pilgrimage is travel with a practical purpose—to get to a holy place. But it also has a moral purpose; the journey is not a neutral one but a means of sanctification and an image of life properly spent (improving morally and in quest for the heavenly Jerusalem). The holy place is the proper place to be—an image of the heavenly enduring city. This parallel may be a long way from Jane Austen who does not think in explicitly Christian terms and images (unlike Byron), with the exception of using recovery from sickness as an image of gaining moral health. Nevertheless, I want to argue that Elizabeth makes an invisible pilgrimage, conducted through time, into the proper place to be, a home forever, and resulting in a pledge of moral improvement.3 The metaphor of travel, then, persists in both texts, and the purport of this common emphasis becomes clearer when gloom and cheerfulness are given their due emphasis. I return to these now in the style of Childe Harold, by way of digressions, and use “happy” and “cheerful” here as shorthand for a tone and presentation of character; they do not imply inconsequential triviality. Jane Austen makes Elizabeth knowable. She is the only character in the novel whose mind readers are permitted to watch as it reorders its priorities through an interplay of external and inner experience, gaining knowledge in the way Wordsworth does in The Prelude. For example, Austen shows Elizabeth making mental adjustments upon receiving Darcy’s letter. However, the world is not displayed as dyed in Elizabeth’s perceptions and sensibility but exists independently of her. She has plenty of opinions about it but she cannot change it. For instance, She thinks Lydia should not be allowed to go to Brighton, but when she fails to change her father’s mind, she neither persists with her advice nor does she sulk because the father is the head of the family and decorum demands that she behave exactly as she does. Control and restraint mark her development. Elizabeth

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learns to live within the bounds of her community—she gives advice here and there, and she changes herself, but she does not attempt any structural change. What Harold and Elizabeth become depends on how they observe their worlds. Harold meditates on his, but Byron maintains a distance between observer and observed. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is altered by her observation and judgment; hers is a creative judgment—she remakes herself on the basis of her verdicts and their consequences, whereas Harold remains essentially who he is. It is the narrator’s tone that changes more than Harold. The poem is a pilgrimage but Harold is not really a pilgrim. The way Harold and Elizabeth observe their worlds reveals their situatedness within them. Harold meditates upon his world unselfconsciously as though he were by himself. Elizabeth, however, is very aware of being watched. Women of Elizabeth’s class were advised by conduct manuals such as Regency Etiquette to be graceful at all times because a prospective husband may be among the watchers. They were taught the skills that knitted the community together through shared rules of conduct as well as marriage (the overlap of genre and life). Elizabeth observes the people around her because she has to live with them, and by watching and judging them, she evolves a code of behavior that will sustain her within the community as well as benefit the community itself. When Elizabeth sets up her Pemberley utopia, then, she teaches Georgiana ideal social conduct by example. The formation of an ideal community is the goal of her invisible journey. How does this compare with Harold? Where the Bennets dine with twenty families, Harold has virtually no visible society about him except the family he has left behind and the yeoman and page who travel with him.4 Harold is isolated from people whereas Elizabeth is surrounded by them. She is seen in contrast to others while he is not. Readers do not “see” Harold possibly because no one in the poem does—Byron makes readers look at what Harold sees rather than at what he is. Harold simply does not belong to any social world though he occasionally is presented as a sort of outsider in some (Malta). Byron describes only outré societies (such as Ali Pasha’s) or dead ones (Venice) in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Harold is a free atom, not bound by a nucleus to a community, but outside society, whereas Elizabeth is bound up with her family. She is concerned about the family and the consequences of others’ actions. She is interested in what people do in the present and the future; in contrast, when Harold visits a place, he thinks about its past and its


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buildings but prefers not to mingle with “the throng” (I. 84). Having left his home, Harold remains aloof from other people. These contrasting relationships to society are partly a result of the context created for the protagonists. Jane Austen fixes Elizabeth within a class, place, and social hierarchy. Her lifelikeness depends greatly upon her social place, but “whence [came Harold’s] name / And lineage long, it suits [Byron] not to say” (I.3.19–20). Harold is a restless traveler who wants to be far from his home, which for him is a place of “heartless parasites” rather than of people (I. 3. 19–20). This is a basic issue of involvement and detachment—Harold is free to come and go and remain detached from society, Elizabeth is not, yet Austen makes her restriction a discipline that gives her joy. In canto three, Byron calls Harold the “wandering outlaw of his own dark mind,” but in canto one, Harold is glum without a cause. One could argue that the eighteenth-century melancholy to which Harold is heir does not have to have a cause. Such melancholy and sentiment, though used, is also critiqued in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in an example of the blurring that frequently occurs in Byron. The poem is an exploration and a pilgrimage; in the preface, Byron calls it an experiment—he will find what the poem is about and what it values by embarking upon it. The status of melancholy, exile, separateness— either pathetically (pathos), or satirized, or seen as an insight into mutability—remains uncertain. The poem has to feel its way. Austen, in contrast, knows beforehand the values that her novels celebrate, much as a satirist does, for example, Byron in The Blues, The Waltz, or The Age of Bronze. Austen does not explore problems within her narrative; her doubts seem to have been settled beforehand, making her novel sure and firm. But if Elizabeth Bennet had been as certain as her creator about what constituted ideal conduct, would she have needed to learn anything? Would she have made mistakes about the men she meets? During her metaphoric journey she learns to doubt (though there is a distinct difference in the uncertainty of Elizabeth and Harold) and by the time of the morality play narrative of Lydia’s elopement, Elizabeth is firmly herself. In the latter sections of the novel, Elizabeth is cheerful, while Lydia is sulky. In 1798, Jane Austen described an acquaintance as “silly & cross [and] extravagant,” a fair description of Lydia (Letters 26). Her readers would have recognized Lydia as a bad type whose characteristics were well-known. According to an 1813 encyclopedia, a “disordered” female menstruated before she was sixteen—Lydia is just about sixteen and ripe for marriage; she also has the other symptoms of disorderliness, such as “sighing and a warm imagination” (Weldon 49). As

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Austen is interested in moral rather than physical disorderliness, Lydia’s sins are clear. She is selfish, wastes money, expects others to rescue her from her scrapes, never thinks deeply upon her own or anyone else’s behavior, and is responsible for spoiling the family’s good name.5 In Jane Austen, morality is social morality. She does not treat it lightly; morality does not have shallow sources, and it is related to gloom and cheerfulness. Lydia is immoral, whereas from the mocking opening passages of Childe Harold, readers wonder whether Harold is moral or immoral. Lydia’s gloominess, which makes her a little like Harold, is part of her moral carelessness for which she will be punished, as Harold is not. Why does Austen present gloom and cheerfulness in the sharp binary oppositions of Lydia’s elopement? Can Harold be understood any better by placing the realist romantic comedy novel alongside the romaunt? Many of the motifs and patterns discussed so far come together in the journeys of the two Bennet sisters. Lydia longs to be in Brighton where she dreams of flirting with six soldiers at a time. The city’s din, chatter, and activity are Lydia’s idea of an “earthly paradise” (Austen 217). Elizabeth, meanwhile, looks forward to a trip to the Lake District, already made popular by Wordsworth for its secluded peace, the sort of thing he celebrated as “cheerful faith” in “Tintern Abbey.” When the trip is cancelled, she is disappointed but “it was her business to be satisfied—and certainly her temper to be happy; and all was soon right again” (221). Derbyshire, more than an alternative holiday venue to the Lake District, has Pemberley whose woods and waterways arouse in Elizabeth, if not on this visit, then certainly when she is its mistress, something close to Christian joy that is dependent upon restrictions on visitors and restraint in conduct. The literal and metaphorical journey of Harold away from control and into a spurious freedom parallels the conscious movement of Elizabeth, a moral travel into a cheerful constraint, which will nevertheless be a sort of freedom. Derbyshire is where Elizabeth will become herself and flourish. While Elizabeth is absent, Mr. Bennet denies Lydia permission to go to Brighton, and Lydia sulks, spreading gloom throughout the home. Nothing else is spoken about except the Brighton blight. As soon as Elizabeth returns to Longbourne, she sets about restoring cheerfulness, releasing the family from its restriction to a single mood and topic, and helping it become functional once more. Women of the Bennets’ class had to be versed in good conduct and domestic skills, and Austen makes cheerfulness a skill that helps run the small community of Longbourne. Cheerfulness is also a sign of good conduct,


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but it is not a magic charm, so Lydia remains untouched by Elizabeth’s cheerfulness and continues to sulk until Mr. Bennet sends her to Brighton, leading to the catastrophe of her elopement, which tarnishes the family name and jeopardizes her sisters’ marriage prospects. According to the conduct manual Regency Etiquette (1811), Lydia’s sulking at home but being lively outside it was typical of female behavior at the time (168), which in turn suggests that Austen copied Lydia from life, but in creating Elizabeth, she adventured forth like Harold. However, unlike Byron and Harold, Austen is clear about her goal, which is exemplified by Elizabeth’s growth into ideal conduct. Harold travels gloomily to well-known places, but Elizabeth goes into cheerfully restrained conduct where fashionable young women of her day preferred not to go. She is so witty, bright, and unusual that her personality casts into the shade her metaphoric journey away from the ordinary yet quite different lives of her best friend Charlotte, timid Anne de Bourgh, brash Mary Bennet, and above all vulgar Lydia. Each of these women embodies an extreme of conduct that makes her a dysfunctional member of society, but Elizabeth rejects their patterns of life. The light, bright, and sparkling story of courtship and manners is shored up by an underlying structure of the becoming of Elizabeth; her journey takes her through the results of remaining as one is and what one is. Austen repeatedly shows her in contrast with others until she emerges unique she is the heroine and the only one who chooses to become cheerfully restrained. Perhaps because their genres demand it, Harold does not change and develop as Elizabeth does. Byron’s voice changes, and the intensity of feeling increases, but Harold remains essentially what he was at the start of the poem. Cheerfulness was a specifically female Christian virtue in polite and educated classes where there was a “widespread dechristianization of males” (Hobsbawm 267).6 Thus, although Elizabeth is not pious in any obvious way, her cheerfulness is the practical version of the Biblical joy, one of the fruits of the Spirit listed in Galatians along with love, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and temperance, and Mr. Bennet is the proverbial father of a foolish child who may have been destined to have “no joy” had he not also begotten Elizabeth, his righteous child, and the course of joy (Proverbs 17:21, Galatians 5:22).7 The theme of travel also has Biblical undertones. Pride and Prejudice echoes the parable of the three servants, two of whom would enter “into the joy” of their Lord (Matt. 25:21). Harold, however, leaves his home and remains homeless thereafter. Homelessness is not an issue in the poem as it is in the novel. The terror of Elizabeth’s

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unmarried life is the possibility of losing Longbourne, which ends when she acquires a permanent home, the Biblical image of bliss. Rewarded in apparently secular terms for her female Christian conduct and skills of cheerfulness, she enters the joy of her lord, Darcy, and his Edenic Pemberley where she can finally be the good parent, wife, and lady of the estate, regulating the exclusivity of her paradise. In this domestic utopia, she continues to spread cheer (to Georgiana’s astonishment, she jokes with Darcy). In her blissful state, Elizabeth can act as she feels, making her identity as a perfect woman visible to her world, whereas at the end of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Harold vanishes into nothingness. Sinful Lydia is like the third servant of the parable whose unfaithfulness was punished with no fixed abode and perpetual Cain-like wandering. Incapable of longsuffering and a concomitant joyfulness,8 she is guilty of “works of the flesh,” fornication, lasciviousness, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions, divisions, and envyings, and those who “practise such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God” or be invited to Pemberley (Galatians 5:19, 21). She is subjected to exile, removal from a community, ostracism, and enforced solitariness—a punishment often reserved for Greek tragic protagonists—a conclusion that reasserts the moral order. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage does not include an equivalent assertion of authority. Harold is not exiled by anyone, he exiles himself. Just as he seems not to care for people, no one apparently cares enough to send him away—“Nor sought he friend to counsel or condole,” “And none did love him” (I. 8, 10). This contrast does not set up Byron’s poem as nihilistic and Austen’s novel as full of bracing moral lessons. Indeed, in his preface to Childe Harold cantos one and two, Byron explained that Harold was never intended as an example, further than to show that early perversion of mind and morals lead to satiety of past pleasure and disappointment in new ones, and that even the beauties of nature, and the stimulus of travel . . . are not lost on a soul so constituted and misdirected. (CHP Preface)

Byron is not telling the entire truth here, and it is precisely this blurring that marks the difference with Jane Austen. Byron jokes about the idea of Harold as an example, whereas Jane Austen has no trouble turning at least a part of her novel into a morality play, with its lessons unblurred. Marriageable women in Pride and Prejudice could remain in the community or be exiled from it to the outer darkness of poverty and


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homelessness. Harold, on the other hand, has the freedom to choose an attitude, and then, by going into exile, he frees himself from his community as well. Harold may have had bacchanalian companions, but he was never part of a community. Through her emphasis on cheerfulness, Jane Austen reminds readers that Christianity is, to an extent, social practice; the souls of her characters are tried in society.9 To be bound to it is not easy (Elizabeth must bear with her mother’s embarrassing and, from the point of view of the Bennet sisters’ marriage prospects, dangerous public behavior), but it is a discipline and a species of religion. Not being concerned about their communities, Harold and Lydia set out on endless journeys intimately connected with their moodiness. However, Harold’s journey is baffling, for readers cannot judge it as surely as they can judge Lydia’s. One thing is certain, though: Harold does not need to be cheerful because his life does not depend upon it. Why did Austen emphasize cheerfulness that derives from a commitment to one’s community? Childe Harold was criticized for its “deprecating melancholy”; possibly, it was judged against a contemporary emphasis on cheerful Christianity, which was recommended (oddly) by Unitarian Lady Byron, skeptic Leigh Hunt, and, it appears, Anglican Jane Austen (BLJ 2. 181, 225).10 Christianity is both joyful and sorrowful, with the two integrally related throughout its history. In the eighteenth century, such cheerfulness predominates and carries into the nineteenth century, to writers such as Tennyson or Arnold, presenting a choice between religious cheerfulness or modern despair (or dignified humanistic self-reliance or defiance). Byron is part of this continuum but knows far too much to be simply an instance of it.11

Notes 1. Gloom: c.1300 as a verb, “to look sullen or displeased,” perhaps from Scand. (cf. Norw. dial. glome “to stare somberly”); the noun is 1596 in Scottish, “sullen look,” from the verb. Sense of “darkness, obscurity”is first recorded 1629 in Milton’s poetry; that of “melancholy” is 1744 (gloomy in this sense is attested from 1590). Melancholy: c.1303, “condition characterized by sullenness, gloom, irritability,” from O Fr. melancholie, from L.L. melancholia, from Gk. melankholia “sadness,” lit. “black bile,” from melas (gen. melanos) “black” (see melanin) + khole “bile” (see Chloe). Medieval physiology attributed depression to excess of “black bile,” a secretion of the spleen and one of the body’s four “humors.” Adj. sense of “sullen, gloomy” is from 1526; sense of “deplorable” (of a fact or state of things) is from 1710.

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Shobhana Bhattacharji < ht t p://w w w.et y mon l i ne.com/ i ndex.php?s e a rc h = g lo om& searchmode=none> accessed September 24, 2006. Had she been a man, she could have earned her living as a soldier, clergyman, sailor, lawyer, or through trade, and the income alone would have made travelling more comfortable. The only income generating jobs for women were as poorly paid elementary school teachers, governessing, or as domestic servants. Prostitution was another possibility. Largely for reasons of class, none of these careers is available to Elizabeth. The relative immobility of women has been discussed in an essay on male and female bildungsroman by Susan Fraiman, “The Mill on the Floss, the critics, and the Bildungsroman.” “In a general way Jane Austen is a cultural Protestant opposed to the idea of literal pilgrimage as the reformers were. She belongs to the Miltonic transfer of external heroism and pilgrim-travel wholly to the inner life: You should stay put (stand fast in the puritan terminology) but at the same be on an inner pilgrimage or travel of a moral kind” (Zimmer). “In this ‘particular’ Childe Harold did not resemble his alter ego. Hobhouse and ‘part of the servants’ (Joe Murray, Fletcher, a German, and the ‘page’ Robert Rushton, constituted his ‘whole suite’), accompanied Byron in his ride across Spain from Lisbon to Gibraltar” (Byron, Works 52). Responding to my presentation at the 2001 International Byron Conference on which this paper is largely based, Peter Cochran said that his students (he taught in a girls school at the time) identified with Lydia; others at the conference also said that Jane Austen’s values made little sense to most readers. Such is not the case in India. My students, for example (I teach in a women’s college), straight away understand the issues of marriage and money, of restraint and good conduct, of family name, of the danger that the sisters of a girl who goes astray (she has a boyfriend, or elopes) will not be able to marry, of marriage as a life choice. In practice, however, Christianity was preferred to overt hostility or even to Enlightenment rationalism, and one supposes that whatever their degree of dechristianzation, the best young men of these classes looked for mates like Elizabeth. Jane Austen’s attitude to formal Christianity is not easy to follow in Pride and Prejudice. Church going is never mentioned in it. It is not true that Jane Austen “draws a curtain between her Sunday thoughts . . . and her creative imagination” (Ryle 117). Joy is a sign of God’s chosen who will be ransomed and rewarded with Zion; it is a quality of God and the Holy Ghost, as expressed in Psalm 105:43, Isaiah 51:12, John 15:11, 17:13, Acts 13:52, Romans 14:17, 15:13, Prov. 17:21, 23–24. Cheerfulness is not usually listed as a virtue by writers of Byron and Jane Austen’s time nor recognised as one by critics of our time.


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8. We also . . . do not cease to pray and make request for you, that ye may be fulfilled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all power, according to the might of his glory, unto all patience and longsuffering with joy . . . (Colossians 1:9–11). 9. It is not primarily about social practice. The Pharisees have morality and social practice to a tee. Christianity begins in the desert and ends up on Calvary and always retains these origins even though it is to be practised in the world. CHP knows things like this. Jane Austen does not and her novels would positively prevent one from seeing it (Zimmer). 10. Jane Austen’s connecting cheerfulness and nature (when Elizabeth visits Pemberley) is echoed by Leigh Hunt, a well-known anti-Christian who wanted to have a secular Sunday where you read edifying literature rather than the Bible, who says in his preface to Foliage (1818) that cheerfulness is our natural state, at one with a sense of justice among one’s fellow creatures, but the contemporary “ostentatious” taste for dancing and so on is “gaudiness and gross intemperance . . . [and a] frivolous disposition.” Hunt directs the readers to a conglomerate of French, German, and English writers’ attitudes to Greek and Shakespearean drama, taking the literary presentation of cheerfulness and gloom well beyond Elizabeth and Harold into maps of misreading, the nature and function of literature, and national bigotry, providing a rich archive for the possible sources of Pride and Prejudice and for exploring the grim in Harold’s pilgrimage (Hunt 133–34). I am grateful to Timothy Webb for drawing my attention to Leigh Hunt’s comments and for providing me with the relevant material. 11. I thank Bernard Beatty for his comments and advice that have helped shape this essay.


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B y ron a n d Wor ds wor t h: Sata n’s Neoc l a ssic a l a n d Rom a n t ic H e i r s Jonathon S hears

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he ways in which Wordsworth and Byron treat good and evil in their verse could not be more different, yet Milton, and Paradise Lost in particular, offers both poets a route forward. The purpose of the present essay is to initially chart the conceptually different renderings of Milton’s Satan that both writers sustain. Wordsworth’s response to Satan is characteristic of Romantic aesthetics, whereas Byron sees in Satan an unfolding drama that is closer to the psychology of French neoclassicism, particularly the work of dramatists such as Racine and Corneille. In 1800, Wordsworth composed the final lines to Book One of The Recluse, not published until 1814 in the Preface to The Excursion. These lines promote what could be described as a broadly Protestant rendering of ongoing inner renewal that orders the poet’s retrieval of memory in The Prelude. He declares that his purpose is “to weigh the good and evil of our mortal state” (I. 9).1 He follows this assertion with direct allusion to Paradise Lost: So prayed, more gaining than he asked, the Bard In holiest mood. Urania I shall need Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven! (I. 27)

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Invocation of the muse of Paradise Lost takes its most immediate association for Wordsworth from the act of casuistry—specifically weighing good and evil. Wordsworth, as so often, finds it is best to turn to Milton when in need of an index against which his own concepts of good and evil can be compared. Typically, he secularizes his Protestant theological culturing and thus moves the arena of good and evil from a theological context to the relative ground of the poet’s imagination. The qualifying “mortal state” displaces the poetic context from the state of timelessness, which belongs to Milton’s Satan and his fallen angels, into what amounts to the real world of Time. Wordsworth revisits Milton in order to declare his autonomy, to weigh again, as Milton had done previously, the qualities of good and evil in verse. Satan removed from his theological contest with God might be thought to cut an unusual figure—devoid of purpose and impetus. But Romantic poets frequently abstracted Satan from epic imperative to highlight his liberal values. Like Wordsworth, Shelley famously focuses on a rational Satan of “courage and majesty and firm and patient opposition” in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound. A similar logic runs through much recent criticism including that of Lucy Newlyn, Catherine Belsey, David Mikics, and Stevie Davies.2 I agree with Stanley Fish, however, when he argues for an unstated program of democratization of the character: “ambivalence and open-endedness—the watchwords of a criticism that would make Milton into the Romantic liberal some of his readers want him to be” (14). Paradise Lost requires that readers swallow Milton’s argument whole, however uncomfortable this might be, but Wordsworth wanted to cleanse Satan of his place in the religious battle by making his motives ambiguous. Hence, in his Annotations to Paradise Lost, Wordsworth recalls the climactic episode in Book Ten (lines 532–70) where Satan is reduced from “glorious chief” to a serpent— the comments clarify the good and evil Wordsworth weighed in The Recluse: Here we bid farewell to perhaps the first character ever exhibited in Poetry. And it is not to be lamented that he leaves us in a situation so degraded in comparison to the grandeur of his introduction . . . which excellently as it [is] executed I cannot but think unworthy of his [Milton’s] genius. (106)

Wordsworth’s objection focuses on the demise of Satan on an aesthetic level—the poetic genius of Milton is compromised by the

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fact that he must complete his narrative, creating a clash between Satan’s downfall, the context of his earlier lyrical majesty, and epic imperative. For Wordsworth, Satan’s last ignoble metamorphosis may be “well executed,” but this is despite, not because of, the fact that the episode is driven by Milton’s desire to integrate all parts into a governing story. To Wordsworth’s lyrical temperament, “telling a good story” conflicts with the more rewarding enterprise of “description, pathos, sentiment, or moral reflection” (Bennett 17). Joseph Wittreich argues that, “Wordsworth’s poetical admiration should not be confused with moral sympathy” (150). Satan, as a poetic representation of a religious character, should only be considered for the brilliance of his poetic incarnation, not for reasons of morality. Such confusion between poetic and moral admiration is the basis for Wordsworth’s desire to redefine contemporary notions of good and evil and to assess how they apply, if at all, to the reading process. The reasons that Wordsworth’s rendering of Satan ought to be described as Romantic are twofold. Firstly, the desire to abstract lyrically, decontextualize, and judge characters isolated from their purpose within the narrative is something found consistently not only in Wordsworth’s response to Paradise Lost but also in the responses of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Secondly, the urge for redefinition can be considered as part of the Romantic anxiety for originality that privileges novelty, fears imitation, and loathes plagiarism. Renaissance habits of allusion—as Barbara K. Lewalski and Charles Martindale have shown—were never so fraught. The cult of poetic originality was first verbalized at length in Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), and the tenet runs deep in Wordsworth. Young refers to the authority of Paradise Lost when in need of a metaphor with which to contrast originality and imitation. The practice of poetic imitation is figured as “Conscious guilt”—original composition, on the other hand, is blessed with the power to provide consolation from life’s “endless Evils”: Conscious guilt robs the Rose of its scent, the Lily of its lustre; and makes an Eden a deflowered and dismal scene. Moreover, if we consider life’s endless Evils, what can be more prudent than to provide for consolation under them? (7)

Such Romantic emphasis on originality decisively removes for Wordsworth, although perhaps not for the reader, any complicating considerations of artistic origins and precedents. Wordsworth is always certain that he follows the innovative “spirit” of Milton, never

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“poaching on his Manor” as he famously described Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Letters 394).3 Unsurprisingly, then, Wordsworth writes poetry that is mostly “guilt-free.” Ongoing inner renewal in the Prelude means that moments of apparent guilt such as the notorious boat-stealing passage take their place alongside, and emerging from the same source, as the epiphanies of Snowdon and the Vale of Chamounix. Wordsworth’s emphasis on originality emerges from the certainty that human beings are not innately evil but arrive at wicked ends from a perversion of their Godly purpose, making Wordsworth a liberal Protestant rather than a Calvinist and so not too far from Milton himself. Even then, guilty actions cannot be blamed on the individual consciousness in isolation but on a mesh of complex and relative circumstances. Nature and the native qualities of humanity are essentially good, which is perhaps the best definition of the Romantic Satan whose legacy Wordsworth sustains. The Romantic account of Satan makes his primary energy good while his flaws derive from fallacious reasoning and the circumstances, or plot, in which he finds himself. Wordsworth sustains Milton’s insistence on the fallibility of the will, but the tendency to depict Satan’s evil as relative to circumstance is a misreading based in aesthetic motivation. By reading in this way, Wordsworth demonstrates that he is not interested in evil as a dramatic conflict that plays out within Satan, but rather in the way suffering provides an opportunity for the expression of a positive liberal rendering of the natural world. If evil comes, then it comes like Eve’s dream, which Adam explains away without responsibility falling on the innocent: Evil into the mind of God or man May come and go, so unapproved, and leave No spot or blame. (Milton 117–19)

Wordsworthian blame floats unattached. Byron tries to fix it. When Byron alludes to Milton’s Satan he does so at points that dramatize the conflicted intentions of his characters and demonstrate a moral fixation on guilt that has a neoclassical intensity. The pattern is perhaps most identifiable in the frequent allusions that Byron makes to certain passages from Paradise Lost: Yet not for those, Nor what the potent victor in his rage Can else inflict, do I repent, or change, Though changed in outward lustre, that fixed mind.


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His form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined, and the excess Of glory obscured: as when the sun new risen Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs. (Milton I. 94–97, 591–99)

Byron most admired the consistency of Milton’s Satan, and indeed of Milton himself: He deigned not to belie his soul in songs, Nor turn his very talent to a crime— He did not loathe the sire to laud the son, But closed the tyrant-hater he begun. (“Dedication to Don Juan” 10)

In the extract from Paradise Lost, Milton goes beyond this, explicitly linking the innate qualities of Satan with his outward appearance. The ultimate chameleon, Satan, might be an unlikely symbol of the relationship between inherent personality and appearance, but in the second passage he undoubtedly is. The first passage reveals the true light of Satan’s innate and inextinguishable character, and when read in context, these two passages suggest that the antithetical presentation of Satan extends beyond individual lines. A pattern of echoes reverberates throughout the poem as Milton continually adjusts his narrative around Satan’s multifaceted facade. Byron, in turn, seizes on the antithesis of Satanic psychology. The passages above could be compared to descriptions of Conrad in The Corsair. When Conrad, disguised in the Pacha’s hall, reveals his true identity, the action is accompanied by a “burst of light”: “Up rose the Dervise with that burst of light, / Nor less his change of form appal’d the sight” (II. 4).4 Light is accompanied by change in appearance, recalling the “original brightness” of Satan’s true Nature. This change is followed by overt Satanic allusion, “demon death-blow” (151), “Flung o’er that spot of earth the air of hell!” (156). These lines should be read in the context of a sudden outburst of the innate, the true Nature. After all, Byron gives his most succinct commentary on the ambiguities of the human heart earlier in the same poem: “Slight are the outward signs of evil thought, / Within—within—’twas there the spirit wrought!” (I. 10). The

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Corsair continually suggests the possibility that hatred is more primal and instinctive to human origins even than love, and in doing so arouses the reader’s interest in an inner moral consciousness that is not reconcilable with the personal Wordsworthian program of renewal. The pattern of allusion to Satan’s original light is repeated in Marino Faliero. The Doge comments “I am resign’d to the worst; but in me still / Have something of the blood of brighter days” (V. i. 272–73). The allusion to Milton’s Satan remembering his own brighter days works doubly well. Not only does it emphasize Faliero’s “Fall,” and the attempted radical political change which Milton argued “perplexes monarchs,” but it also focuses the reader exactly on the point that Byron differs from Wordsworth in his relation to Milton’s Satan. Faliero is like Satan, a perplexer of monarchs, or in this case a perplexer of a similarly implacable social system in Venice, but he is also the Doge, the traditional figurehead of Venice and the equivalent of a monarch (whether he has had his powers removed or not). By making him monarch Byron also makes him, through allusion to Satan, his own perplexer, focusing attention on Faliero’s innate struggle, not the external political one. The allusion traps Faliero and the reader into facing their personal potential to be the origin of tragedy. The truth, which Faliero has privately guessed all along, reveals itself; the political machinations that surround him are only facilitators to the play’s tragic conclusion, they sanction it but are not its cause—this ultimately lies within the Doge himself. Byron’s fascination with the wicked or susceptible heart that undermines even the greatest figure is most likely derived from biblical sources: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17: 9). The theme is found in neoclassical drama, taking biblical events as its subject, such as Milton’s Samson Agonistes: But what availed this temperance, not complete Against another object more enticing? What boots it at one gate to make defence, And at another to let in the foe? (I. 558–62)

Whereas Wordsworth holds a Romantic confidence that human nature is innately good, only perverted for evil ends through the interference of the mature and misguided reason, or politically anachronistic social “systems,” Byron is closer to the Milton of Samson Agonistes. For Byron, strength and weakness emerge from the same indivisible impetus, like


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Satan’s pride, which makes him heroic yet flawed in the manner of an Aristotelian hamartia. Aristotle describes the tragic hamartia as a lack of “sympathetic insight” or “the blindness of the heart” (Aristotle on the Art of Poetry 41).5 He goes on to make the point that the “head” should be kept keen to further emphasize the potential for tragedy that lies within that human heart (41). At times, Byron appears to go as far as to separate head from heart in the manner of Pascal’s maxim: “Le Coeur a ses raisons que la raison connait point.” Anne Barton argues that Sardanapalus has such a temperament and defines it as neoclassical because “his weaknesses are obvious, and yet, like those of Shakespeare’s Marc Antony, they are also the source of his strength” (156).6 Yet, there is an equal measure in Byron of Corneille’s feeling that “Un premier mouvement ne fut jamais un crime” (from Horace). Because Byron’s heroes act within a world of moral conflict, the instincts of the reader towards either condemnation or forgiveness are always kept in play. Throughout The Corsair, readers are never allowed to forget that while Conrad has committed “a thousand crimes” he is also “linked with one virtue” which might outstrip in significance any other prior actions (III. 24). As with Sardanapalus, the reader cannot refine an exclusively virtuous motivation from Conrad’s base metal. Reader responses to Byronic heroes like Conrad or Faliero recall the seventeenth-century French tragedies of Racine and Corneille more directly than they do characters such as Wordsworth’s Michael, Vaudracour, or the Wanderer of The Excursion for whom readers feel pure sympathy. F. M. Doherty defined Byronic tragedy by linking it to the model of Milton’s Satan: “acting with knowledge, even when there is no hope of your actions having a happy outcome, no salvation possible, is what makes you a tragic protagonist for Byron. The figure at the centre of this belief is either Satan or Macbeth, and all which either figure represents of defiance and self” (227). For Doherty, “Byron’s sense of drama derives from division”—it is a division we can see worked out dramatically in the Byronic hero (231). But Byronic division extends not only inward but also outward from character to the ethical response of readers or viewers that reveals neoclassical precedent as well as Shakespearian. The motif of incest in Racine’s Phaedra makes it an obvious Byronic counterpoint: Phaedra invites moral judgment from an audience for her quasi-incestuous passion for her stepson Hippolytus, but guilt is just outrun by sympathy in a close fought race to the end of the drama. Like Byron’s heroes and Milton’s Satan, Phaedra embraces her guilt and sin in the final death scene as part of moral integrity. The power of Phaedra as a dramatic vehicle for conflict engages compassion against better judgment, and

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therein lies Racine’s tense drama. The nature of the odds stacked against Phaedra—“The gods are witness, they who in my breast / Have lit the fire fatal to all my line” (II. v. 697–80)—does not detract from her freedom to act even if, as John Cairncross argues, “her freedom of choice is virtually extinguished” (140). Byron in Sardanapalus recalls the similar theme of a declining dynasty: “the extinction of the line of Nimrod” (IV. i. 377–78). Yet, the colossal and unmanageable scale of moral horror at Phaedra’s abandonment of Hippolytus to death, pitted against her wholehearted acceptance of the guilt that kills her, is what tears at the audience’s sympathies. Any attempt to weigh ethics with compassion is doomed to break the dramatic scales as it finally breaks Phaedra. Wordsworth can return to Milton to “weigh” good and evil because he is not interested in the kind of dramatic and unweighable struggle that Phaedra undergoes—suffering is instead a prompt to the Romantic imagination. Byron, on the other hand, revisits Milton’s Satan in a manner akin to Racine’s neoclassical study of guilt and torment—the black dramas of the flawed heart are enacted on an ethical stage that defies solution and so ends in tragic death. Interestingly, much of the individual conflict that Racine depicts in Phaedra—and elsewhere in Iphigenia and Athalia—turns on the Aristotelian separation of the reason from the passions. Hippolytus pronounces, Reason, I see, gives way to violence. And since I have begun to speak my mind, Princess, I must go on: I must reveal A secret that my heart cannot conceal. (II. ii. 525–28)

Phaedra, like Lara and Manfred, conceals a terrible secret “Deep in my inmost heart you could not read” (II. v. 598–99), and the tragic deaths of both Hippolytus and Phaedra are set in motion when she relinquishes her rational control to love and then her heart to the deceitful nurse Oenone: “In short, the time for good advice is past. / Serve my wild heart, Oenone, not my head” (III. ii. 791–92). Byron uses the motif of head and heart most noticeably when Conrad attempts to separate out his intellect from his passions and almost confounds, and hence risks misunderstanding, the nature of his own tragedy: He call’d on Nature’s self to share the shame, And charged all faults upon the fleshly form


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She gave to clog the soul, and feast the worm; Till he at last confounded good and ill, And half mistook for fate the acts of will. (I. 28)

Like Wordsworth, Byron mentions the confounding of “good and ill.” Yet, this distinction is secondary here and serves to further emphasize the divide between the Romantic and neoclassical heirs to Milton’s Satan. In this case, of more importance, to both Conrad and the reader, is the confounding of “fate” and “will”—in other words, extrinsic influence and intrinsic motivation, or the head and heart motif that Adam uses to explain Eve’s dream in Paradise Lost V. 95–128. Although it appears at the end of this passage, Conrad’s other errors are clearly a result of this more basic one. His motivation comes from within. The only question that remains to him is whether he acts as a force of good or ill. As with most moral judgments, Byron stresses the culpability of Conrad, but as with Phaedra, readers retain sympathy for the character that is in excess of culpability. Doherty supports the argument, noting that the Byronic hero “is divided against himself, in inner turmoil, but in the end [chooses] a way which leads to a kind of integrity” (232). This theme recurs for each of Byron’s tragic heroes— they initially find fault in their own circumstances, like Conrad in the passage above, but can never wholly believe they were not the architect of their own downfall. Sardanapalus argues, “I am the very slave of circumstance” (IV.i.330); Conrad cries out in anguish, “Oh, Fate!—accuse thy folly, not thy fate” (I. 13); Faliero excuses his part in the plot to bring down Venice, “the task / Is forced upon me, I have sought it not” (III. i. 9–10); while Marina, in The Two Foscari, repeatedly blames the “law” for sanctioning Loredano’s crime. But, Sardanapalus and the Doge are forced to confront their own motivations, and Marina mistakes the law as the origin of tragedy when it only acts as a facilitator. Marina reads the Foscari’s tragedy as a battle between human nature and implacable law. Of course, this is another element of the French neoclassical stage. In Corneille’s Le Cid, Don Fernando effects the reconciliation of the dialectic of nature and law in order to resolve the plot by overturning an anachronistic custom: That custom, here established far too long, Ostensibly designed for righting wrongs, Robs the nations of their bravest and their best. (IV. v. 64–66)

Marina, however, is out of place in The Two Foscari. Her complaints impress but also grate on the reader, and her reading of the tragedy

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is mistaken. Gordon Spence argues that “Marina’s ineffective protests represent the voice of humanity and natural justice in opposition to tyranny,” and in a political sense he is right (27). Dramatically, such a reading would enforce a dialectic between nature and law, but I would prefer to adduce Bernard Beatty’s phrase, “the foregrounded is not the play.”7 If Marina’s argument were followed to its conclusion, a liberal emphasis—rather like that attributed by Wordsworth or Shelley to Milton’s Satan—would take the place of tragedy. I began by describing Wordsworth as decontextualizing Satan from his place in the epic narrative to absolve guilt and responsibility, promoting exclusively his liberal virtues. When Byron alludes to Milton’s Satan, he carries the epic context across because, like Satan within Paradise Lost, he knows that he takes his significance in relation to Milton’s God, not without Him. Conrad or Satan need to take their place in relation to the full details of the sequence of events in which they feature and encounter the agony of guilt. Wordsworth’s characters can be abstracted—witness the removal of the Vaudracour and Julia narrative from The Prelude. However, the origins of good and evil motivation are left inseparable in Byron’s verse, which, more than anything else, is what makes him Satan’s neoclassical heir. Through allusion to Milton’s Satan, the war between good and evil is made a solipsistic agony, which may be sanctioned by circumstances, but never originates there. For Wordsworth, on the other hand, a redefinition of good and evil is crucial to his rendering of a Romantic Satan as it removes ambiguity. He demythologizes good and evil, but they nevertheless combat in a war that essentially opposes intrinsic good to a wholly extrinsic evil, which lacks the interplay of drama. Wordsworth is able to weigh the two lucidly because they do not share the same source—Byron finds that his attempts to weigh them are defied and can only end in tragedy. So, which is the real Satan—Romantic or neoclassical? Do we have to choose either? Aristotle defines Form in the Poetics in a way that applies equally well to both Romanticism and neoclassicism and helps to address the problem. Different Forms require different modes of reading: “they differ from one another in three respects: either in using different media for the representation, or in representing different things, or in representing them in entirely different ways” (Aristotle, Poetics 31). Byron and Wordsworth create a Satanic dialectic that moves between the second and third of Aristotle’s categories, before ultimately resting in the third. In aesthetic terms, rather than representing two Satans, Byron and Wordsworth depict the same Satan, but in entirely different ways.


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Notes 1. Thomas Hutchinson, ed. Wordsworth: Complete Poetical Works, rev. E. De Selincourt. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1936. References to the “Prospectus” are taken from this edition. 2. The urge to read the “epic” Paradise Lost as though it were a dialogic text underwrites much modern Milton criticism. Catherine Belsey’s John Milton: Language, Gender, Power; David Mikics’ The Limits of Moralizing: Pathos and Subjectivity in Spenser and Milton; Lucy Newlyn’s Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader; Leslie Brisman’s Milton’s Poetry of Choice and its Romantic Heirs; and Stevie Davies’ Milton are all indebted to Romantic, or for my purposes Wordsworthian, reading habits. 3. Wordsworth’s more extensive views on Byron’s apparent “plagiarism” can be found in the Letter to Henry Taylor, December 26, 1823, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 2nd ed., The Later Years, I, 1821–1828. 236–38. 4. Citations for The Corsair are given by canto and stanza. 5. The hamartia corresponds to Achilles’ wrath in The Iliad or, for my purpose, Satan’s pride. 6. Barton also makes the point of Byron’s tragic heroes that “The human mind tends to be divided against itself, as Faliero knows only too bitterly: ‘Like the demon who believes and trembles / Must I abhor and do’” (III. ii. 520–21). 7. The discussion of the difference between foregrounded action and dramatic interiority can be found in Bernard Beatty’s essay in this volume.


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Tr a nsgr essi ng Rom a n t ic ism: B y ron a n d H e i n e’s C a r n e va l esqu e Use of Rom a n t ic I ron y Alexandra M. Böhm

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he affinity between Byron and Heine’s literary productions is common knowledge, yet accounts of their relationship have tended to be somewhat simplified and partial, neglecting important differences as well as central similarities.1 Elise von Hohenhausen was the first to speak publicly of the connection between the two poets in the early 1820s. When Heine moved to Berlin in 1821, he was a regular guest at Hohenhausen’s literary salon. At the usual Tuesday evening teas, Heine was encouraged to read out his Lyrisches Intermezzo and the tragedies Almansor and William Ratcliff in front of illustrious guests such as the Varnhagens or Adalbert von Chamisso. Although Heine was ridiculed by some of his listeners for what they thought was an overly sentimental tone in his writings, Elise von Hohenhausen insisted on calling him the “German Byron” (Werner 55). How much praise for Heine there was in this phrase becomes clear if one knows how devotedly Hohenhausen admired Byron and his poetry. Hohenhausen played a central role in creating the nineteenthcentury German Byron fashion. She translated Byron’s works, sent letters to him on the subject of his divorce, and wrote her own poems on Byron and his life (Ochsenbein 8–12).2 Following Hohenhausen’s

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famous remark, the comparison between Byron—the exiled aristocrat—and Heine—the Jewish outsider—became commonplace, especially as Heine seemed to embrace the association himself. Siegbert S. Prawer points out in Frankenstein’s Island: England and the English in the Writings of Heinrich Heine that though Heine grew up in an environment that laid great stress on French culture, he showed an early interest in the English language and its literature.3 From 1813 onwards Heine was familiar enough with English to read Shakespeare’s works in the original (5). So in 1820, when he almost certainly became acquainted with Byron’s works through the edition The Works of the Right Honourable Lord Byron in the popular “Pocket Library of English Classics” series by the brothers Schumann, he was anxious not only to read Byron in the original but also to translate Byron into German (Galley and Estermann 325).4 Indeed, Heine’s admiration for Byron may be seen most obviously in his early experiments in translating parts of Manfred, Childe Harold, and the “Fare Thee Well” poems.5 Not surprisingly, then, the points of comparison between the two poets that Heine’s friends and critics concentrated on were Weltschmerz, world weariness; “Zerrissenheit,”6 having a divided self (literal: being torn apart); and the undisguised subjectivity in their texts. As those features were not seen as literary devices but as the pure self-exposure of their authors, the ground for contrasting Heine unfavorably to Byron was prepared: Byron’s Weltschmerz was deep and earnest—Heine’s was superficial and false; Byron’s nobility and exile were opposed to the Jewish homelessness of Heine. Wolfgang Menzel may be seen as a paradigmatic example of those critics who combined anti-Semitism with the accusation that Heine’s Weltschmerz was put on. In his German literary history Die deutsche Literatur Menzel writes Heine flirted with fervent pain on the suffering of nations, with dreamlike, amorous distraction, with genial debauchery, lewdness and antiChristian freethinking—but he only flirted with it. He totally lacks Byron’s deep seriousness and especially Byron’s nobility. Already in his heart’s first outpourings his Jewishness was striking—his boasting, less with the favour of the pretty women than with the gold he affirmed in his poems and in his prose he would spend on them. (419)7

The general tendency of criticism, then, has been to allege that Heine’s pretence of, or “flirtation” with, Weltschmerz is a calculated way of profiting from the Byron fashion, which would guarantee him wealth and fame (Prawer 9, Ochsenbein 89).

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Over the next few years Heine, who was extremely aware of and sensitive to contemporary critique, repeatedly saw himself confronted with criticism that compared him with Byron to his own disadvantage. Thus, when in 1826 Heine publicly commented on his relationship to Byron in Die Nordsee: Dritte Abteilung (The North Sea: Third Part), his remark has to be seen in light of the preceding unfavorable criticism as a necessary act of liberation rather than as the personal confession as which it is staged: Truly, I feel very vividly at this moment that I am not echoing Byron, or more properly I am not his accomplice, my blood is not so splenetically black, my bitterness only comes from the gall of my ink, and if there is poison in me, then it is just an antidote to those snakes which lurk so threateningly amid the ruins of the ancient cathedrals and castles. Of all the great authors Byron is exactly the one who touches me most disagreeably when reading his works. (VI. 161–62)8

The critical self-distancing from Byron in Reisebilder (Travelogues) and especially in Die Nordsee III has led critics to assume that Heine’s Byronism had come to an end (Perraudin, “Heine” 256). Accordingly, recent studies still see the parallels between Heine and Byron existing primarily in their early texts and concentrate on the aspects of Weltschmerz and “Zerrissenheit” as well as the political dimension of their lives and works.9 However, Heine’s attitude towards Byron is much more complicated than is commonly assumed. Therefore, I would like to indicate certain areas where differentiation is necessary: firstly, the distinction between Heine’s regard for Byron and the widespread Byron fashion—the Byronic pose and tone—which Heine holds up to ridicule in his Reisebilder;10 secondly, the difference between the persona “Doktor Heine” in the Travelogues and the author Heine; thirdly, the nature and extent of Heine’s irony in his comments on Byron in the Reisebilder. Having outlined a number of common simplifications in accounts of the relationship between the poets, I would now like to focus on an important area of similarity that has been largely ignored in ByronHeine studies, this being the formal and thematic parallels of Byron’s ottava rima poems and Heine’s texts from the Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs) onwards, which have been neglected by literary scholars for the aforementioned reasons. The similarities between the texts include the importance of figures of disruption in their work, such as the juxtaposition of disparate objects in grotesque lists, and numerous forms of irony; the unrestricted intertextuality; the deliberate inclusion—even courting—of the arbitrary; and the pervasive use of

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bathos and the pluralism of genre and style. In addition, both writers evince a profound commitment to contemporary political issues and real historical people and events whilst holding onto a provocatively high degree of artificiality, and, finally, both foreground the material quality of language and play with the fictional construction and extra-fictional conception of the author. I would like to suggest that these correspondences between Byron’s ottava rima poems and Heine’s texts stem from a comparably ambivalent attitude toward High Romanticism. Byron’s late ottava rima poems as well as Heine’s literary productions are marked by an affinity for, and transgression of, Romanticism.11 This ambivalence manifests itself as a carnivalesque écriture, which usurps established forms and inverts their functions. To illustrate this point, I will discuss Byron and Heine’s inversion of one of the key concepts of Romanticism—Romantic irony. Both Byron’s ottava rima poems and Heine’s texts in general have been regularly associated with Romantic irony. Anne K. Mellor’s study English Romantic Irony is the first to deal with Don Juan as an example of Romantic irony at length. Mellor writes, “Byron’s mature works are probably the most masterful artistic examples of romantic irony in English” (31). Obviously, her view of Byron’s late works as examples of Romantic irony have to be seen in the context of M. H. Abrams’s organicist conception of Romanticism, which leads to his famous statement in Natural Supernaturalism: “Byron I omit altogether” (13). Jerome McGann points out in The Romantic Ideology that “[w]hat Mellor seeks to do is broaden Abrams’ basic categories so that they can be brought to include the ‘skeptical’ and ‘ironic’ productions of an artist like Byron, whom Abrams had difficulty accommodating to his scheme” (22). The studies of Mellor and others that interpret Byron’s irony in his later texts as Romantic irony support a very open conception of the term. Mellor, for instance, uses the term Romantic irony to describe paradoxes, contradictions, and inconsistencies: “[I]rony can manifest itself in the work of art as a process of simultaneous creation and de-creation: as two opposed voices or personae, or two contradictory ideas or themes, which the author carefully balances and refuses to synthesize or harmonize” (18). Mellor and many others use the term Romantic irony as the name for a rhetorical strategy not necessarily linked to the historical period of Romanticism. Nevertheless, the critics all refer to the German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel and his theoretical fragments and notes for a conception of Romantic irony.


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Turning to Heine, the situation becomes even more difficult. Over the last few decades, a great deal of controversy has arisen concerning whether Heine’s irony can be understood as Romantic irony or not. The supporters take a similar line to those Byron critics mentioned above. Jocelyne Kolb, for instance, sees “a sense of dualism” as fundamental to Schlegel and Heine and notes an “uncanny correspondence between the theories of the early Schlegel and the poetic practice of Heine” (400–401). The opponents, on the other hand, argue that Schlegel’s is a historical concept of irony, which is associated with German idealist philosophy and therefore restricted to literary products of a specific period of time, that is High Romanticism (Preisendanz 105–6). I wish to argue that no matter how open one’s notion of Romantic irony is, one must differentiate between Schlegel’s understanding of irony and the irony in Byron and Heine’s texts. In an analysis of the differences between Schlegel’s concept, on the one hand, and Byron and Heine’s use of irony, on the other, the disturbing modernity of Byron and Heine’s texts becomes clearly recognizable.12 Let us first turn to Schlegel. Schlegel did not develop a systematic theory of irony—only scattered notes on the subject of irony appear throughout his fragments and essays.13 However, as various critics have demonstrated, three different aspects of Schlegel’s concept of irony can be distinguished by systematizing his remarks (Strohschneider-Kohrs 79). Firstly, irony characterizes the process of creating art as an alternation between the act of self-creation and that of self-destruction. This means that intuitive creation has to be combined with free reflection. By reflecting on his own creations, the artist rises above himself and his state of being determined and unfree.14 Secondly, the constant change between determinedness and undeterminedness (Bedingtheit and Unbedingtheit), which Schlegel demands, fundamentally shapes the structure of the work of art. This change manifests itself in a text as repeated disruptions of the fictive world, for instance, by metafictional comments. The poetic reflection is endlessly multiplied as in an infinite series of mirrors, Schlegel writes in Athenäum fragment 116 (KSA II. 133–34). The third aspect of Schlegel’s concept of irony is its function of allegorically referring to the absolute, the infinite: “Irony is so to speak the επιδειξιζ of infinity, of universality, of the sense for the universe” (KSA XVIII. 128).15 For Schlegel, an attempt to approach infinity can only be made through irony, which dialectically posits and negates every finite and relative part of an infinite series.

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Readers may be tempted to connect the metafictional, digressive manner and the associative paradoxical quality of Byron and Heine’s texts with the structural aspect of Schlegel’s irony. However, for Schlegel the structure of irony, which is in its form paradoxical, serves as a way of representing the unrepresentable; that is to say, the ultimate aim of irony in art is to hint at totality and the absolute, which is not accessible by philosophical reflection.16 Behind Schlegel’s open form, then, is the claim to be creating a symbol of totality. Yet what happens in Byron and Heine’s texts is a carnevalesque inversion of Romantic irony. The form is usurped, but the function is reversed. What Schlegel intended as a way of referring to the highest—the unreachable and unrepresentable infinite—is in Byron and Heine a device that leads back to materiality. The debunking and materializing character of irony serves to counterbalance the metaphysical and speculative nature of High Romanticism.17 One of the most obvious examples in Don Juan is the much-quoted passage in the Julia episode, where “Young Juan wander’d by the glassy brooks / Thinking unutterable things” (I. 90). Juan’s metaphysical musings are eventually brought down to material needs: “He found how much old Time had been a winner— / He also found that he had lost his dinner” (I. 94). Here, Byron links Juan’s puberty to Wordsworth’s “self-communion” and Coleridge’s metaphysics. In this way, he brings the high claims of Romanticism back to the mundane materiality of life. Heine frequently uses the same device.18 The traveling narrator in Die Harzreise climbs the “Brocken” in the Harz Mountains and stays there in an inn overnight. When morning comes, he sets out with a group of people to watch the sunrise. This Romantic setting on top of the famous mountain of the Walpurgis Night is described in a highly poetic style, followed by a short poem, which the narrator says shall fix in words what he saw and felt. This mood is abruptly broken by a comment on his longings for breakfast: Meanwhile, my longing for breakfast was great, too, and after I had complimented my ladies, I hurried down to the warm room for coffee. It was necessary; my stomach was as empty as the St. Stephan’s cathedral of Goslar. (VI. 128)19

The frequent references to eating, drinking, defecation, indigestion, and copulation in both Byron’s ottava rima poems and Heine’s texts are clearly diametrically opposed to Schlegel’s demand that the self should transcend its own limitations. In a central poetological passage in Don Juan, Byron’s narrator states: “I perch upon an humbler


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promontory, / Amidst life’s infinite variety” (XV. 19). The dependency of the mind on the body and the material aspects of life are emphasized throughout Don Juan as in Canto Five, where the narrator wonders “who / Would pique himself on intellects, whose use / Depends so much upon the gastric juice?” (V. 32). The same is true for Heine. In the fragmentary story Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski (From the Memoirs of Sir Schnabelewopski), the narrator-protagonist repeatedly links the philosophical discussions of the students to the quality of the food they received: “When the roast was really bad, we disputed the existence of god” (V. 178).20 In contrast to Schlegel, though, the references to finite, material reality are not intended as negation in order to transcend finite reality but to revalue it for its own sake. What Mikhail Bakhtin writes in Rabelais and His World may in its general tendency be claimed for Byron and Heine, too: Degradation . . . has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place. (21)

Byron and Heine transform Romantic irony as a means of allegorically referring to the absolute into grotesque irony as a way of representing the contrasting, paradoxical, and open heterogeneity and multiplicity of the real. Byron and Heine’s combination of opposites, for instance, in grotesque listings, differs fundamentally from Schlegel’s notion of paradoxes. Schlegel’s statement “Irony is the form of the paradox” ultimately aims at a higher synthesis, which is governed by a fusionary ideal (KSA II. 153).21 Both Byron and Heine frequently juxtapose heterogeneous items without pointing to a higher, transcendental synthesis. In sentences like “Juan, after bathing in the sea, / Came always back to coffee and Haidee” (II. 171) and the opening of Die Harzreise “The city of Göttingen, famous for its sausages and university” (DHAVI. 83), 22 the unexpected conjunction of incongruous elements breaks up established hierarchies and reverses them.23 Since this device constitutes an irresolvable tension and ambivalence, the reader is forced out of familiar orders of thinking. Summing up, then, although Heine’s texts were written somewhat later than Byron’s, the poets’ use of irony is much closer to each other than to Schlegel’s concept of irony. Byron and Heine’s texts show a secularization and radicalization of irony that points towards the

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twentieth century. Both authors try to avoid dogma and ideology by polyperspectivism and decentralizing devices. Centrifugal forces in the text prevent the process of creating meaning from being brought to a stop. In their insistence on figures of ambiguity, Byron and Heine present themselves as poets in whose texts the point of reference is still Romanticism; however, its metaphysical orientation and poetic practices are qualified or rejected. The space that is left by rejecting the metaphysics of Romanticism—where the rejection is complete—is lamented but does not lead to nihilism.

Notes 1. The relation between the two authors is well-known, but the only detailed accounts are given by two positivistic studies at the turn of the nineteenth century: Melchior and Ochsenbein. These studies are similar to recent articles by Michael Perraudin and J. F. Slattery in that they concentrate on the influence Byron’s early works had on the young Heine’s tone and style. An interesting exception is Thomas Bourke’s, which focuses rather on the techniques of Byron’s “Donjuanismus” (111–210) and Heine’s “Stimmungsbrechung” (211–85). 2. Together with Friedrich Johann Jacobsen she even sent Byron an invitation to Holstein. Byron comments upon this proof of fame in his “Detached Thoughts”: “It was odd enough to receive an invitation to pass the summer in Holstein—while in Italy—from people I never knew” (BLJ 9: 24). 3. Düsseldorf, where Heine grew up, was then under French occupation. 4. The information regarding which copy of Byron’s works Heine used is from Friedrich Steinmann, an acquaintance during Heine’s Bonner time when he was most obviously devoted to Byron. 5. Nina Diakonova provides an analysis of Heine’s translations from Byron. 6. The aspect of “Zerrissenheit” in relation to Heine is the central focus of a recent study by Maria-Christina Boerner, a chapter on Byron and Heine is not missing. 7. Er kokettirte mit heißem Schmerz über die Leiden der Völker, mit traumhafter verliebter Zerstreuung, mit genialen Debauchen, mit Wollüstelei, mit antichristlicher Freigeisterei, aber er kokettirte nur damit. Der tiefe Ernst Byrons fehlte ihm gänzlich, und vor allem Byrons Noblesse. Denn schon in seinen ersten Herzensergießungen fiel sein Jüdeln auf, seine Prahlerei weniger mit der Gunst der Schönen, als mit dem Golde, das er dafür auszugeben in Prosa und in Versen versicherte. Wolfgang Menzel, Die deutsche Literatur. Stuttgart, 1836. Cit. after: Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb. All translations from the German in this essay are mine.


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8. Wahrlich, in diesem Augenblicke fühle ich sehr lebhaft, daß ich kein Nachbeter, oder besser gesagt Nachfrevler Byrons bin, mein Blut ist nicht so spleenisch schwarz, meine Bitterkeit kömmt nur aus den Galläpfeln meiner Dinte, und wenn Gift in mir ist, so ist es doch nur Gegengift wider jene Schlangen, die im Schutte der alten Dome und Burgen so bedrohlich lauern. Von allen großen Schriftstellern ist Byron just derjenige, dessen Lectüre mich am unleidlichsten berührt. Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke (Düsseldorfer Ausgabe). Hereafter quoted as DHA and number of volume in Latin figures. 9. Slattery sees in Byron and Heine’s political convictions and their Napoleon worship the only common ground after Heine’s polemic statement on Byron in Die Nordsee III in 1826. 10. In Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey) Heine writes: I think we too spoke of Angora cats, Etruscan vases, Turkish shawls, macaroni and Lord Byron (“Ich glaube wir sprachen auch von Angorakatzen, etruskischen Vasen, türkischen Shawls, Makaroni und Lord Byron,” DHA VI. 120). 11. Jonathan Bate even speaks with regard to Byron’s Don Juan of an “anti-Romantic manifesto” (228). This neglects, however, the specific ambivalence of Byron’s attitude toward Romanticism in Don Juan. 12. Steven E. Jones’s chapter on Byron, “Turning What Was Once Burlesque into Romantic: Byron’s Pantomimic Satire” gives a rather critical view of the tendency to subsume Byron’s ironic and satirical qualities “in larger plots of ultimate sincerity, higher synthesis, and self-transcendence,” (197). 13. The Lyceum fragments 37, 42, 48, 108 and the Athenäum fragments 51, 116, 228 represent Friedrich Schlegel’s most central remarks on irony as well as the two essays “On Incomprehensibility” (“Über die Unverständlichkeit”) and “On Goethe’s Meister” (“Über Goethes Meister”). 14. This aspect is especially emphasized in Lyceum fragment 37 in Schlegel 151; hereafter quoted as KSA and number of volume. 15. “Ironie ist gleichsam die επιδειξιζ der Unendlichkeit, der Universalität, vom Sinn fürs Weltall” (KSA XVIII. 128). 16. The background of German idealist philosophy and the aesthetics of Romanticism are discussed in Manfred Frank’s extensive and comprehensible study Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. 17. Virgil Nemoianu speaks of the “secularization of irony” in “the later phase of Romanticism” in his inspiring article “Romantic Irony and Biedermeier Tragicomedy.” 18. Whereas this device is more or less limited to Byron’s later works, especially the ottava rima poems, Heine uses it throughout his work—from the earliest rather sentimental poems to his final deathbed poetry.

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19. “Indessen, meine Sehnsucht nach einem Frühstück war ebenfalls groß, und nachdem ich meinen Damen einige Höflichkeiten gesagt, eilte ich hinab, um in der warmen Stube Kaffee zu trinken. Es that Noth; in meinem Magen sah es so nüchtern aus, wie in der Goslarschen Stephanskirche,” (DHA VI. 128). 20. “Wenn der Braten ganz schlecht war disputirten wir über die Existenz Gottes,” (DHA V. 178). 21. “Ironie ist die Form des Paradoxen,” (KSA II. 153). 22. “Die Stadt Göttingen, berühmt durch ihre Würste und Universität.” Interestingly, the structure is almost identical with the line “In Seville was he born, a pleasant city, / Famous for oranges and women” from Don Juan (I. 8). 23. In his article “Beppo: The Liberation of Fiction” Drummond Bone connects the “fertile multiplicity” of the grotesque lists with the sense of Carnival that “produces the odd sensation of liberation from the conventional way of looking” (107).

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B y ron, Da rw i n, a n d Pa l e y : I n t e r rog at i ng Nat u r a l Th eol ogy Ch ris tine Kenyon Jones

Some of Byron’s speculations and his attitudes toward the natural

world and its formation are remarkably close to many of Charles Darwin’s ideas. Byron may not have influenced Darwin in any very precise, direct sense, although Darwin clearly knew Byron’s poetry quite well and wrote that “up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, gave me great pleasure” (Barlow 158). Darwin went on to say, however, that in his middle age he completely lost his relish for poetry. Thus, critics would have little to gain in searching for direct influences and allusions to Byron in Darwin’s writings. What this essay considers instead is the way in which Byron and Darwin responded to the same stimulus, in the form of an influential author whose work they both read while they were undergraduates at Cambridge—the Reverend William Paley, author of a highly popular and influential work: Natural Theology (1802). In his own time Paley was famous for titles such as Principles of Morals and Political Philosophy (1785) and Evidences of Christianity (1794) as well as for his Natural Theology. He taught at Cambridge and then became archdeacon of Carlisle, and he might be described as a sort of religious utilitarian—one of the last theologians to consider that Christianity could be proved to be true by means of reasoning

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or common sense alone. His central idea was that God’s goodness to humankind could be demonstrated by the design of the natural world. He wrote with calm and persuasive elegance, and he provided an easy religious assurance to that British generation which had been so shocked and unnerved by the American and French Revolutions. Paley’s works became part of the syllabus at Cambridge and influenced many generations of undergraduates there. The don who was responsible for introducing them to the university syllabus in the first place was Byron’s tutor the Reverend Thomas Jones, and although there is little evidence of Byron doing much studying at Cambridge, Jones most likely got him to read Paley’s works. In fact, a list in Byron’s handwriting dated November, 1807, laconically records “Paley” among the authors he had read up to that point. The evidence for Darwin having read Paley is much clearer. In his autobiography, he wrote that he had to study some of Paley’s works in order to get his BA, and that the logic of Paley’s Evidences and of Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the academical course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation. (Barlow 101)

Paley’s major argument was that the features of the natural world demonstrated how God had made it especially for humankind to live in and showed his benevolence toward humankind through every part of its design. The famous opening of Natural Theology presents the deity as a watchmaker, purposefully building a world in many respects like a benign machine. This later gave rise to the opposing idea of the “blind watchmaker” of evolutionary theory, popularized by Richard Dawkins. Some critics have said of Darwin that he took Paley’s answers and converted them into questions, and the same is true of Byron. Many of Byron’s works—especially the late, so-called metaphysical dramas, Cain, Heaven and Earth, and The Deformed Transformed—reveal the poet in effect interrogating or arguing with Paley. Paley’s may be the comfortable, comforting, slightly complacent voice which is, as it were, just offstage in these dramas, putting forward the orthodox view which is rather ineffectually mouthed by Adam and Abel and so momentously rejected by Lucifer and Cain.

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The tone and purpose of Byron’s and Darwin’s work is, of course, very different. Darwin advanced his argument inch by inch, unpicking the mechanics of the kind of design posited by Paley but always fearful of the consequences for religion and society if the absence of God’s good purposes for humankind could be demonstrated. Byron, however, openly and angrily challenges the benevolence of the designing deity, arguing in the metaphysical plays that the God represented by nature may be a vindictive destroyer rather than a beneficent creator. Byron imaginatively interrogates Paley and suggestively foreshadows Darwinian themes in three main arenas. Each of these relates to ideas about evolution that were already current in the Romantic period, some of which had, in fact, been put forward for over a century before The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Darwin deduced the principle of natural selection from his observations of the natural world and demonstrated how it was a credible mechanism to account for the origination of different species. The idea, however, that species were not fixed was certainly available in Byron’s day through authors such as Cuvier, Byron’s major source for the geological and paleontological ideas in Cain and Heaven and Earth; the great eighteenthcentury French naturalist Buffon, whom Byron often cites; and of course Charles’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin (well known to all the Romantic poets). The first of the areas in which Byron and Darwin can be seen together in opposition to Paley is in the relationship between humankind and the rest of the universe. Both Byron and Darwin challenge Paley’s central tenet (i.e. that the universe was made for man, and that other animals were created merely to serve man), by downgrading the status of humankind. This decentralizing of man in the universe is taken further by promoting the status of other species and by positing a sense of kinship (both literal and metaphorical) between humans and other animals. For Darwin, this decentralizing of man was an inevitable result of his theory of natural selection. If the emergence of humankind was a chance result of natural processes that were blind—or indifferent—as to their effects, this demonstrated that the story of the universe was not one that privileged the human race. Byron started from a viewpoint that might appear to be the opposite of evolution. He took up the idea from Buffon, and from Rousseau, that the effect of civilization upon both humans and animals was to weaken and debilitate them. Rousseau’s Native American “Noble Savage” would be more powerful in every way than his European well-bred counterpart, and animals in captivity were less strong than their wild cousins. The process in action here was that

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of degeneration—literally, a falling away from the original genus, or type—as the generations went by. Darwin used the term in this sense, too, as a way of explaining variations within species. In Don Juan, taking up Cuvier’s notion that the world had been destroyed and remade many times before, the narrator suggests that every new Creation hath decreased In size, from overworking the material— Men are but maggots of some huge Earth’s burial. (IX. 39, 310–12)

In Cain the idea is made particularly explicit in the claim that, as Byron puts it in the Preface, “the pre-Adamite world was also peopled by rational beings much more intelligent than man, and proportionately powerful to the mammoth.” Lucifer contends that these “Living, high, / Intelligent, good, great, and glorious things,” were not only “As much superior unto all thy sire, / Adam, could e’er have been in Eden,” but also as much superior to Cain as he will be to his own descendants: “The sixty-thousandth generation . . . / In its dull damp degeneracy” (II. ii. 67–72). This sequence of ideas is one of Lucifer’s strategies to drive Cain to despair. Another device for the same purpose is to show Cain his own insignificance in comparison with the universe, when he takes Cain for a voyage among the stars. “[L]ook back to thine earth!” Lucifer commands, and Cain sees nothing but a mass Of most innumerable lights. ... Why, I have seen the fire-flies and fire-worms Sprinkle the dusky groves and green banks In the dim twilight, brighter than yon world Which bears them.

“Thou hast seen worms and worlds,” Lucifer responds (II. i. 98–126). Even Paley admitted that astronomy “is not the best medium through which to prove the agency of an intelligent Creator” (409), and Byron commented in an 1813 letter to William Gifford, It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves & our world when placed in competition with the mighty whole of which it is an atom that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be overrated. (BLJ 3: 64)


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Such musings on the stars were echoed by Darwin in an early notebook. The scientist William Whewell was considered profound because he says [the] length of days [is] adapted to [the] duration of sleep in man!! [the] whole universe [is] so adapted!! and not man to [the] Planets—[what an] instance of arrogance!! (Barrett 455)

Darwin and Byron wished to distance themselves from man’s “arrogance,” and the subsequent removing of him from the centre of attention in the universe brings about an accompanying emphasis on other species. Darwin, for instance, notes People often talk of the wonderful event of intellectual man appearing.—[but] the appearance of insects with other senses is more wonderful . . . . [The] introduction of man [is] nothing compared to the first thinking being. (Barrett 446)

Likewise Lucifer (and Byron, in the Preface to Cain) insists that the tempter of Eden was a real serpent, not an evil spirit, who was nevertheless more advanced than human beings in “wisdom” or intelligence: The snake was the snake— No more; and yet no less than those he tempted, In nature being earth also—more in wisdom, Since he could overcome them, and foreknew The knowledge fatal to their narrow joys. (Cain I. i. 223–27)

In both Byron and Darwin, the concept of kinship between humans and animals is not necessarily disadvantageous to man, as animals may be in some ways superior. Both writers take this idea further when they consider the way in which humankind and animals are brought together as common victims of a cruel or indifferent universe. In this second area of similarity, Byron and Darwin address the problem of pain and suffering in all species in relation to Paley’s supposedly beneficent creator. Animals are present everywhere in Cain. One of the most powerfully expressed themes of the work—that of the injustice of the innocent suffering on behalf of the guilty—is articulated in terms of animals and sacrifice. The “fumes of scorching flesh and smoking blood” (III. i. 299) of the animals on Abel’s altar become a symbol for the other kinds of “Molochism” (after Moloch, god of the Ammonites, to whom children were sacrificed in II Kings 22:10): the suffering of children on behalf of their parents, of descendants

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for their ancestors, and of Christ on the cross for the “sins of the whole world.” This argument was summed up in these notorious lines, which were removed by the publisher, John Murray, and never printed in Byron’s lifetime: perhaps he’ll make One day a Son unto himself—as he Gave you a father—and if he so doth Mark me!—that Son will be a Sacrifice. (I.i.163–66)

The existence of pain and suffering was perceived as one of the greatest challenges to Natural Theology but also as an opportunity for its greatest triumph. Paley used it as a means of instancing and substantiating the goodness of God: The annexing of pain to the means of destruction is a salutary provision, inasmuch as it teaches vigilance and caution: both gives notice of danger, and excites those endeavours which may be necessary to preservation. . . . Pain also itself is not without its alleviations. . . . I am far from being sure that a man is not a gainer by suffering a moderate interruption of bodily ease for a couple of hours out of the four and twenty. (Paley 531–33)

Byron acknowledged to Teresa Guiccioli in 1822 that it could “hardly be conceived how much [he] suffer[ed] at times” (Marchand III. 1047) from the pain of his deformed foot, and a doctrine which taught that bodily pain was in any way of benefit for the betterment of humanity evidently seemed to him utterly repugnant: “A material resurrection [of the body] seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment” (BLJ 9: 45). Like Byron, Darwin thought that the existence of animal suffering disproved the doctrine that pain was useful as a teacher, and he could also go further than Byron in explaining—if not the metaphysical “reason” for suffering—at least the way in which it operated through the struggle for existence: That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this with reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all the other sentient beings, and they often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent First Cause seems to me a strong one; whereas, as just


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remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection. (Life I. 311)

Darwin perceived animals and humans as being “melted together” by pain and suffering: If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, suffering and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake [of?] our origin in one common ancestor—we may be melted together. (Life II. 6)

The Darwinian world demonstrated in even more acute form than the Byronic what Thomas Huxley called “the moral indifference of nature” and “the unfathomable injustice of the nature of things” (Brooke 92). One of those unfathomable injustices, for Byron, was the existence of his deformed foot, and the parts of Paley’s argument that he must have disliked most were those which were based on the physical perfection of human and animal anatomy (particularly its bilateral symmetry). Paley believed that such fitness to purpose could not have developed as a result of chance and thus provided clear evidence of the existence of a divine designer. The muscular arrangement of the ankle, for example, was, Paley said, “so decidedly a mark of intention, that it always appeared to me to supersede, in some measure, the necessity of seeking for any other observation upon the subject” (155). It was precisely this challenge of making “other observations” which both Byron and Darwin took up in the third area of similarity between them, which is concerned with issues of design and deformity. Paley believed that his examples of the perfect fitness to purpose of human and animal anatomy contradicted Erasmus Darwin’s opinion that, as Paley put it, “the parts of animals may have been all formed by what is called appetancy, i.e. endeavour, perpetuated and imperceptibly working its effect, through an incalculable series of generations” (156). This is essentially the same as Lamarck’s idea that giraffes’ necks became longer from stretching to reach taller trees, and that these longer necks were then passed on to their offspring. Paley satirized the very possibility of this kind of evolution in a passage whose mocking tone now rebounds upon itself: A piece of animated matter, for example, that was endued with a propensity to fly, though ever so shapeless, though no other we will suppose than a round ball, to begin with, would, in a course of

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ages . . . acquire wings. The same tendency to loco-motion in an aquatic animal, or rather in an animated lump which might happen to be surrounded by water, would end in the production of fins: in a living substance, confined to the solid earth, would put out legs and feet; or if it took a different turn, would break the body into ringlets, and conclude by crawling upon the ground. (463–64)

The evolutionary discourse of the time, therefore, offered a specific challenge to Darwin to demonstrate the place of congenital deformities in nature. An ideal of physical perfection for a species must imply that species in general were originally designed and never changed. Darwin answered this challenge by showing that what were termed “monstrosities” were in some cases no different from “variations,” and could be inherited: Some authors use the term “variation” in a technical sense, as implying a modification directly due to the physical conditions of life; and “variations” in this sense are supposed not to be inherited: but who can say that the dwarfed condition of shells in the brackish waters of the Atlantic, or dwarfed plants on Alpine summits, or the thicker fur of an animal from far northwards, would not in some cases be inherited for at least some few generations? (Origin 101)

Darwin showed that such “peculiarities” were, in fact, the raw material for evolution, and that these apparent anomalies could be the first steps toward new species that were better adapted to their environment. The Darwinian thesis thus foregrounded and valued physical diversity, individuality, difference—even deviance—as a means of change and development, in a way that recalls arguments deployed by Byron in both political and personal arenas. Byron was, of course, particularly anxious about the inheritability of his own physical deformity. After the birth of his daughter Ada, Lady Byron’s companion Mary Anne Clermont recorded how “On the second day after the birth of the child Lord B finding me only in the room with the Infant asked particularly about its feet, and upon my offer of showing them to him said thank you, thank you” (Moore 18). In his writing, Byron’s response to his own deformity sometimes took the form of a defiance which claimed that there is a special value in human bodies that are not made in the perfect image of God, and Arnold in The Deformed Transformed states what, from the evidence of Byron’s letters, was also a personal creed for Byron: Deformity is daring. It is its essence to o’ertake mankind


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By heart and soul, and make itself the equal— Aye, the superior of the rest. There is A spur in its halt movements, to become All that the others cannot, in such things As still are free to both, to compensate For stepdame Nature’s avarice at first. They woo with fearless deeds the smiles of fortune, And oft, like Timour the lame Tartar, win them. (I. i. 313–22)

Notably, both Alain-René Lesage’s satiric and Mephistophelian devil Asmodeé, from whom Byron chose his own sobriquet, Le Diable Boiteux, and the Stranger/Caesar in The Deformed Transformed, deliberately select deformed bodies in which to operate, rather than any of the beautiful forms available to them (BLJ 4: 50, 51, 10: 136). Byron’s marginal note to the unfinished Deformed Transformed indicates, moreover, that he planned to develop the plot by having Arnold become jealous of Caesar because his wife Olimpia seems to prefer the hunchback (“owing to the power of intellect &c. &c. &c.”) to Arnold in his beautiful (and supernaturally sustained) Achillean shape. In the Pope/Bowles controversy, Byron sprang to the defense of the hunchbacked Alexander Pope for his supposed treatment of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and protested that the poet’s deformity need not have made him unattractive to men or women (CPW 6: 169-70). His reaction to attacks on himself in the Tory press in 1814 which called him “a sort of R[ichar]d 3d.—deformed in mind & body” was to proclaim in Greek in a letter (though not in print) that “a lame man fucks best” (BLJ 4: 49–51). Scholars cannot, of course, tell whether Darwin read Byron’s letters or knew Byron’s metaphysical plays. But Darwin had an enormously enquiring mind, and aspects of Byron’s work challenge religious and scientific orthodoxies in areas that would have been of interest to the young Darwin. If Byron and Darwin both took the answers of Paley and Natural Theology and turned them into questions, then Byron’s imaginative envisioning of the questions would have been available to the young Darwin at the time he began to define the topics he wanted to tackle. Byron’s imaginative response left the questions as questions: he drew attention to anomalies, inconsistencies, and failures of logic in Paley’s conception of the world, but he formulated no reply in philosophical or other terms. Darwin posed the same questions, but he also created alternative answers with far-reaching effects. These answers do not propose a more consoling world for humankind than Byron’s questions do—they endorse the minimization of man in the universe and, although they obviate the need for Byron’s cruel and unjust

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Jehovah, they propose instead a blind chance which is indifferent to the development or the fate of humankind. Many people, of course, also went on reading, and being convinced by, Paley—his work remained part of the final examinations at Cambridge until as late as the 1920s. There are those who are still shocked by Byron—but then, there are many who are still shocked by Darwin and who would feel more comfortable with Paley. And it is true to say that in many places, and in many senses, the three-cornered debate I have outlined is still being argued out.

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B y ron ic A nge r a n d t h e Vic t or i a ns Andrew M. Stauf fer

At every stage of his career, from English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

(1809) and The Curse of Minerva (1811) to Marino Faliero (1820) and Cain (1821), Byron was writing poetry occasioned and shaped by anger. He characteristically combines satiric impulses with a dramatic sense of himself as a figure of vengeance, producing a generic red-shift. For Byron, the resulting angry poetry—a combination of satire, dramatic curse, and confessional lyric—opposes Romantic sincerity with its theatricality, Romantic sympathy with its alienating effects, and Romantic transcendence with its commitment to mundane cycles of retribution. All of this helped make his legacy a particularly vexed one for the poets that followed. The Victorian reception of Byronism is frequently characterized by moments of staged rejection; in Byron and the Victorians, Andrew Elfenbein has shown the extent to which a number of Victorian authors defined themselves as evolving past Byronic immaturity. A renewed focus on the anger of Byron’s poetry helps us see the political and aesthetic implications of this process with more clarity. One might say that the key moment of the quintessential Victorian poem is organized around a remarkably displaced expression of Byronic anger. In Section CXXIV of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the poet turns to confront the spiritual doubts that have driven (or impeded) him thus far: If e’er when faith had fallen asleep, I heard a voice, “believe no more,”

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Andrew M. Stauffer And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep, A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered, “I have felt.” (9–16)1

Arriving in a simile (“like a man in wrath”) for a synecdochic trope (“the heart / Stood up”), this angry man is a rhetorical ghost who nevertheless becomes the rock upon which the poet founds his faith. In the Trial Edition of Tennyson’s elegy, this section concluded And the inner eye beheld again The form which no one understands, And glimpses of the shadowy hands, That reach through nature, molding men. (21–24)

So, after the many sections of powerful doubt in the poem, Tennyson chooses to have In Memoriam turn upon an image of angry affirmation. However, just before issuing In Memoriam to the public, he inserted this determining stanza immediately after the comparison of his heart to “a man in wrath”: No, like a child in doubt and fear: But that blind clamour made me wise; Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father near; (17–20)

Tennyson’s second thoughts dismantle the narrative of a man’s wrath, replacing that emotion with the doubtful fears of a child. In many ways, the addition of the stanza was a master-stroke that meant everything to Tennyson’s Victorian readers, 2 and it signals how Byronic, defiant anger was processed in the post-Romantic imagination. To discover the implications of the revision, readers might begin by asking how anger finds its way into this section of In Memoriam. It seems to arrive as a defense against hopelessness. Like the “still small voice” that asks in Tennyson’s “The Two Voices,” “Were it not better not to be?” (1, 3), a voice in this poem commands him to “believe no more.” In “The Two Voices,” Tennyson’s speaker ultimately rejects doubt and despair as he looks upon a father with his wife and child and his “frozen heart began to beat, / Remembering its ancient heat” (422–23). A similar trope governs this section of In Memoriam: “A warmth within the breast would melt / The freezing reason’s colder

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part” to the accompaniment of images of the father-child relation. In “The Two Voices,” this “heat” indicates a rush of generous and loving emotions to the heart, not the onset of indignation, but in both cases, the return of strong emotions breaks the numbing grip of reason. In In Memoriam, the heart’s words, “I have felt,” fail to specify just what it has felt, but anger is demonstrably one of those emotions. Anger evokes defensive physiological reactions, such as inflammations; a blister or boil is called “angry” when it is swollen, red, and hot—like the poet’s heart in stanza four. Threatened by the infectious assaults of doubt and reason, the heart as seat of the emotions warms to its task of rebuttal. But the voice of unbelief is not the only sound that provokes a rise in the heart’s temperature: the “ever-breaking shore / That tumbled in a Godless deep” shakes the poet as well. The uncanny reversal of this image—the shore breaking upon the waves—brings in the geological anxieties of the previous section, in which Tennyson exclaims There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes thou hast seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea. (CXXIII. 1–4)

The “ever-breaking shore” becomes a compact image for the climactic and tectonic changes that Lyell had identified as phenomena of the unsettling nature of the world. Reminding the poet of the meaningless and awesome forces of the universe, the sound of the shore is a source of ultimate indignity for humanity, and the poet’s heart responds with defiance, as if it were an indignant man. When the poet’s heart declares “I have felt,” it makes a self-evident assertion that borders on the tautological, since the heart is only a trope for the poet’s feelings. The organ thus stands up and makes answer in a kind of echo of the divine proclamation “I am that I am,” and of the voice of the Coleridgean primary imagination, “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (1: 202). Further, Tennyson seems to have associated the heart’s return with the Romantic poets. In a letter to James Spedding (1834), he writes of the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley which however mistaken they may be did yet give the world another heart and new pulses—and so we are kept going. (1: 20)

However, Tennyson’s revision to the poem may mark his realization that grounding faith in a vehement, Romantic assertion of personal

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passions may amount to nothing more than a declaration of selfreliance. So with the addition of stanza five—beginning, “No, like a child in doubt and fear,”—Tennyson not only revises his simile but makes the revision itself part of the final form and meaning of the poem. The word “No” that begins the inserted stanza preserves the moment of anger’s retraction, as it were in the amber of the poem, visible to readers perchance similarly tempted to wrath. The manly protest of the heart and the turn to childlike “blind clamour” amount to a snapshot of the proper Victorian disposition in regard to anger. In light of this added stanza, Tennyson seems to be consciously revising Byron’s address to Ocean in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto Four, where the poet calls the sea “the image of Eternity—the throne / Of the Invisible” (IV. 183) and remembers riding the breakers as a boy: . . . if the freshening sea Made them a terror—’twas a pleasing fear, For I was as it were a child of thee, And trusted to thy billows far and near, And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here. (IV. 184)

The trusting child is father to the faithful man, and here Byron binds his days in natural piety, embracing for a moment the latent pantheism of his Wordsworthian models and offering an image of man’s relation to God-the-father-in-nature that Tennyson feels compelled to correct. Retaining the same language and imagery, he firmly separates the threat of the “Godless deep” from the fatherly comforts that God provides to the poet who, like Byron, is “as a child.” As Tennyson’s additional stanza progresses, the poem makes a subtle transition from one vehicle to another, so that by the end of stanza five, the speaker himself has taken the place of his heart in the comparison. At first, it was his heart that was “like a man in wrath,” and then “like a child in doubt and fear”; however, the poet then reveals, “Then was I as a child that cries, / But, crying knows his father near” (19–20). Once he has banished anger, the poet no longer has need of the distance supplied by the “heart” synecdoche, which had allowed Tennyson to create a tiny angry man, separate from his speaker and himself. His irresponsible, thoughtless heart may react like a man in wrath, but, in a rather paradoxical demonstration of his humble maturity, the speaker cries like a child—“for it is to such as these as the kingdom of Heaven belongs” (Matt 19: 14).


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Of this section of In Memoriam as a whole, Herbert Tucker writes, Section CXXIV . . . recapitulates the doom of Romanticism in Tennyson’s masterpiece, and indeed in his career. The poet’s alienation finds itself in context as he abandons Romantic eminence for Victorian breadth; yet in this very cultural incorporation the poet continues to rely on the Romantic assertion of individual experience . . . as an indispensable means of saving its culture from itself. (404–5)

The turn from the Byronic assertion of the angry self figures Tennyson’s compromises with the demands of his culture, even as it preserves a space for the self in the history (if not in the continuing present) of that culture’s salvation. After all, the Victorians knew that performances of anger could be reconciled with the requirements of a Judeo-Christian society: Moses had smashed the tablets, and Christ had cleared moneychangers from the temple. But these heroic moments were necessarily assimilated into larger narratives of constructive effort and self-sacrifice for the human community, just as Tennyson’s poem gives up its wrath and becomes a little child, reaching out to those fatherly “hands / That reach through nature, moulding men.” Tennyson was one of many Victorian authors that struggled simultaneously with their Romantic inheritance and the place of anger in the tasks of personal and cultural redemption. His simile at the moment of his conversion from unbelief—“like a man in wrath”— plainly invokes Teufelsdröckh’s defiance of “The Everlasting No” in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.3 Like Tennyson’s speaker in Section CCXXIV, Teufelsdröckh finds himself in spiritual crisis, fearful that humans exist in a Godless, meaningless universe: To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, or Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! (1: 133)

Like the tumbling of the shore in Tennyson’s “Godless deep,” Carlyle’s rolling Steam-engine represents the mindless motion of a physical world no longer invested with the Wordsworthian “motion and the spirit” that “rolls through all things” (“Tintern Abbey” 110). Wandering in a hell of doubt (literally, “toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer” [134]), Teufelsdröckh suddenly turns

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like a man in wrath to confront the tormenting voice that has urged him to believe no more: all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself: “What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!” And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance. Thus had the EVERLASTING NO . . . pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its protest. Such a PROTEST, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: “Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)”; to which my whole Me now made answer: “I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!” It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism, perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man. (134–35)

By way of “Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance,” Teufelsdröckh changes the “temper” of his misery, banishing “fear” and “whining Sorrow” to become “a Man.” As in Tennyson’s poem, where “the heart / Stood up and answered” the voice of unbelief, here the “whole ME stood up . . . and with emphasis recorded its Protest.” As the fit of rage strikes him, Teufelsdröckh says, “I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god,” using a rhetoric that prefigures the heart’s proclamation of self-sufficiency and identity in Tennyson’s poem. Yet Tennyson’s speaker reverses himself immediately thereafter, so that he finds salvation in turning away from the defiant posture of “a man in wrath” to become like “a child in doubt and fear.” Furthermore, this moment of protest, called by Carlyle, “the most important transaction in Life,” remains merely a beginning, a phase of spiritual awakening that must itself be overcome by more peaceable


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and productive emotions (135). Having learned how to despise his own miseries, Teufelsdröckh must leave behind “Indignation and Defiance” in order to reach the affirmations of “The Everlasting Yea,” which itself is heralded by the proclamation, “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe” (147). Thus, the rejection of Byron, who is clearly associated in Carlyle’s mind with postures of angry defiance, comes as a logical accompaniment to the turn away from spiritual indignation and oaths of eternal hatred with which Teufelsdröckh met the Everlasting No. Like Shelley’s Prometheus, Carlyle’s representative must recall his curse, or at least grow beyond it, yet Carlyle celebrates the moment of anger in a Byronic manner, calling it a “Fire-baptism” that inaugurated Teufelsdröckh’s “Spiritual New-birth.” Correcting Shelleyean patterns with Byronic and vice versa, Carlyle establishes a post-Romantic plot of anger that Tennyson confronts and revises in Section CXXIV of In Memoriam. From a moral or ethical standpoint, anger seemed crucial to a moment of conversion that could be counted genuine only if that emotion was renounced thereafter. But from the vantage of aesthetics, anger looked theatrical, stagy—as it had to the Romantics, who represented another stage the Victorians wanted to progress beyond. In all cases, when they came to anger, the Victorian poets found themselves with a collective case of stagefright: that is, a fear that, once angry, they might never leave the many stages that that emotion represented. Robert Browning may be the exception that proves the rule, for, as Daniel Karlin has observed, “the artist as hater figures strongly in Browning’s poetry, and . . . there is a connection between hatred and creativity in his aesthetics” (94). Yet Browning’s exploration of hatred is predicated on his fierce commitment to dramatic and narrative poetry, a commitment not shared by the more expressive, less violent Tennyson. Browning began writing dramatic monologues as “Madhouse Cells,” a nice figure for a poetic form that contains the rhetoric of idiosyncrasy and emotional intensity within the charmed circle of dramatic action, separating it from the precincts of the normal. Browning took pains to ensure that his audience would read such poems as performances: the volume entitled Dramatic Lyrics (1842) begins with Browning’s note asserting that the poems therein are “always Dramatic in principle,” being “so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine” (365n). Furthermore, the poems that follow are emphatically displaced from Browning’s England, bearing titles such as “Italy,” “France,” “Incident of the French Camp,” and “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” This last—perhaps Browning’s purest poem of anger—makes doubly sure of its dramatic distance

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by announcing itself as a soliloquy in Spain, in a madhouse cell, or cloister. Even more peremptorily than Tennyson or Carlyle, Browning divides his lyric, expressive voice from the voice of anger. Browning repeatedly makes certain that his speakers’ anger, however energetically expressed, remains pent-up, immured in some way. Like the cloister of the angry monk, the confessional booth of “The Confessional” becomes another cell to get mad in: here, the female speaker was led to betray her lover. He is executed and she is imprisoned; her angry voice emerges from another cell, that “worst of dens” (I. 76), where she and her rage have been shut off from “your world outside” (I. 12). Similarly, as he makes his final speech in The Ring and the Book, the furious Guido finds himself in a comparable situation, imprisoned and demanding of his jailers Come, one good grapple, I with all the world! Dying in cold blood is the desperate thing, The angry heart explodes, bears off in blaze The indignant soul, and I’m combustion-ripe. (464–67)

Guido is a candidate for spontaneous combustion, not spontaneous overflow, because he has had to swallow his own anger in the face of the legal and ecclesiastical powers that have condemned him to death. Tennyson’s angry heart can stand up like a man, but Guido’s can only crouch like a caged wolf. However, by the conclusion of his monologue, Guido’s rage has turned into fear, so that he pleads, “let the madman live / Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!” (2,422–23). In either case, anger remains subject to Browning’s carceral logic: free to run wild within the narrowest of cages, enclosed by the thickest walls.4 As they did of Byron, the Victorian poets remained wary of anger, typically choosing to put their angry rhetoric in the mouths of madmen (e.g., the speaker of Tennyson’s Maud), comic characters (e.g., the speaker of Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”), or tragic figures in extremis (e.g., the speaker of Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”). In Sartor, Carlyle imagines that, betrayed by friend and lover, Teufelsdröckh has only one of three things he can next do: establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic poetry; or blow out his brains. In the progress towards any of which consummations, do not such readers anticipate extravagance enough: breast-beatings, brow-beatings (against walls), lion-bellowings of blasphemy and the like, stampings, smitings, breakages of furniture, if not arson itself? (119)


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The association of anger with “Bedlam”—reminiscent of Browning’s “Madhouse Cells” and their neighboring cloisters and prisons—is a marker of Victorian attitudes towards the more ferocious emotions of the Romantic subject. In this passage from Sartor, the reference to Byron’s person and poetic procedures is clear, and Carlyle collects the three options open to his alter-ego—insanity, suicide, and Byronism—under the sign of anger’s pointless, destructive explosions. Further, those “lion-bellowings” echo back to the roarings of Blake’s wrathful Rintrah and the corresponding fury of the French revolutionaries, who, to Walter Scott, were “animated . . . with the rabid fury of unchained wild beasts” (Life of Napoleon 1: 170). For Carlyle and his contemporaries, Byron’s extravagant anger had had its place in the political and cultural productions of the Romantic era, which had since yielded to the progressive meliorism of Victoria’s reign.

Notes 1. Christopher Ricks, ed., Poems. New York: Longman, ll. 9–16. Further references to Tennyson’s poetry will cite line numbers from this edition. 2. For example, Henry Sidgwick (who read In Memoriam in 1860) made approving comments on this particular stanza, (qtd. in Mattes 104). 3. Tennyson’s debt to Carlyle here has been noted by Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw in their edition of In Memoriam (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). 4. Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi, similarly imprisoned behind the “cloister-wall” (165), “shut within [his] mew” (47), and forced to paint souls instead of bodies, says, “So, I swallow my rage, / Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint / To please them” (242–44).


Afterword

Th e I n t e r nat iona l By ron C on f e r e nc e , August 2 0 01 : I de a s, I nspi r at ions, a n d A f t e r shoc k s Compiled by Cheryl A. Wilson

Tom Mole Montreal, Canada Everywhere north of the World Trade Center, New York is a rectilinear city, a managed arrangement of verticals and horizontals that stretch themselves in an orderly fashion around Central Park. Its cross-hatchings of avenues and streets make the stranger seem deceptively at home amidst the skyscrapers, while bestowing on him what E. B. White called “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” It becomes natural to locate yourself in its three dimensions by thinking in a kind of Cartesian coordinates: the hotel was at Broadway and Church Street, the room on the twenty-first floor, from where you could look down on the gargoyles of the gothic church opposite. I gave my paper in the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. The British Consul General held a reception for us at 51st and 3rd. Afterwards some of us dashed to the World Trade Center to try to get into the Windows on the World bar on the one hundred and seventh floor of the North Tower. Someone had heard that they closed the doors at eleven pm, so we had to hurry. Uniformed security men held the elevator doors open for us, laughing. The windows

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of the nightclub extended from floor to ceiling. From there I could see the city lights stretched out in their neat verticals and horizontals, like the rows and columns of a thousand account books, all showing a profit. On top of the World Trade Center sipping whisky and watching American women dance, it felt as though we had somehow magically and temporarily floated above the city’s noise and dirt into a bubble of affluence. The year before, Windows on the World had grossed $37.5 million. After we rode the elevators back down to the lobby, we walked through the World Trade Plaza to our hotel, just across Broadway. I looked up at the columns of steel and glass and the black night beyond. The lights of friendly airplanes winked across the sky. Bernard Beatty Liverpool, England I had visited the United States before but never stayed in New York. I remember arriving there very vividly. I went for a walk in the warm evening darkness almost as soon as I had booked into the Millenium Hotel. I sang a little tune to myself and felt, for some reason, very happy. The city seemed purposive but at peace with itself. The vast Twin Towers loomed up elegantly, glowing against the evening sky. One tower would have had the arrogance of Babel but the two together, masculine in form, feminine in symmetrical duality, gave peace and grace to the river beyond and the city stretching out either side. On some subsequent evening, I went with a group of mainly fellow English academics (or “Brits” as Americans would say) out of the hotel on an all too typically Anglo-Saxon search for a place to drink red wine after all the local pub-equivalents had closed. It must have been about 11:30 pm or so. Someone suggested going to the Twin Towers and finding the bar on the top floor. This seemed enterprising and attractive. I remember entering one of the Towers and finding that it was the wrong one and moving across the vast ground-floor halls looking up at the ever-moving sets of escalators moving up and through their cathedral-like space—above which the further invisible vertical bulk of the towers could only be guessed at. Cathedral space, perhaps, but it felt more like the engine room of some great ocean liner. It transpired that the bar atop New York’s world was closed or about to close. So we trooped back, like disappointed adolescents, to the hotel only to discover several colleagues in a bar there that remained open for a further hour or so to accommodate depraved

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English tastes where some red wine restored my good humor. That is all that I remember about the Twin Towers but it was enough to help me imagine what it must have been like for that elegant colossal verticality to tumble down into the huge supporting entrance space into which I had wandered so casually and cheerfully only a fortnight earlier. My other memory of New York was walking about a mile and a half across the city (to the evident disbelief of the hotel receptionist who gave me my route) at about eight am in dazzling sunshine and temperatures of more than 90 degrees en route to the Pforzheimer Library. I tried looking at the various buildings as I walked along but, since no one else was doing so, felt eccentric and stopped. Instead I did what I fancied New Yorkers did which was to be aware of the immediate street-life in front of me and yet somehow see this at the same time as I took in the always distant, always articulated, skyscraper and sky vista which framed it. I thought at the time that this helped me to understand why Americans make brilliant films and the English do not. When I eventually arrived at the Pforzheimer, I was perspiring like Niobe and suddenly found myself having lunch with Tim and Ruth Webb and Michael O’Neill in the delightful but icy cold restaurant there. From Vesuvius to Zembla in a few seconds. I shall forget neither of these experiences. Shobhana Bhattacharji Delhi, India I remember the heat in New York and how everyone assumed I would be used to it. Delhi was much cooler at that time. I enjoyed walking in the streets of NYC. I walked to one of the receptions and felt quite safe though my Indian hostess had said I should avoid wearing a bindi (the red dot on my forehead) for fear of dot busters. The first day, I took a taxi from the hotel to the place where I was staying, and got a Pakistani taxi driver, a Punjabi from Karachi. I talked to him in Hindustani; he said, “It is strange that you should. People from our part of the world prefer to speak English.” “Well, not me,” I said, “I have been talking only English for about ten days and I am exhausted. My tongue is sprained. It needs to stretch and relax.” He did not take the fare from me. Apparently this happens to Indians and Pakistanis all the time but I had not heard of it and was delighted—not because I had saved the fare but because a Pakistani had said this to an Indian. Perhaps my telling him I had been to Pakistan earlier that year in the first bus to cross the border after the

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Kargil War between our countries, and how overwhelmed we were by Pakistani hospitality moved him. But I think he was just a nice man. The Twin Towers were visible from every room in my friend’s flat. Utterly spectacular. Later I would be happy I had photographed the view. I liked the walk through Central Park—it is exactly like the movies. Peter Graham made three excellent observations on my paper at the British reception but I was too tired to register them. Alas. They are gone forever. I remember Mrs. Wasserman’s sweetness as she helped Alexandra who was not well. The drive into NYC—those rock formations and cliff sides. And then suddenly one is in the city. So strange. John Lennon’s apartment block. The UN, lunch in its cafeteria. Back in Delhi, with dinner guests from the United States, we watched the Twin Towers go down. I kept thinking, a few days ago we were across the street. Paul M. Curtis Moncton, Canada I did not attend the segments of the conference in Boston or New York. The morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, as director of the English Department, I was at my office desk taking care of administrative matters which I do not remember now. Dominique, my wife, telephoned from her place of work to inform me of the attack on the World Trade Center. She was watching live coverage of the event as she spoke to me. I could hear the unusual urgency in her voice but I did not understand the scope of what she was trying to describe to me. Dominique called a second time about an hour later and asked me to come home, which I did. I stayed. Pansy Michaels Lancaster, PA I had never thought much about the World Trade Center, those looming towers that had changed the skyline of New York City when erected in 1972. However, as I checked into my room atop the Millenium Hilton, I opened the drapes of my window and there it was. No longer gleaming pillars in the sky but rather rows and rows of windows through which I could see inhabitants of offices going about their daily routines, making phone calls, working on computers or gathering around the water cooler for a quick social moment with co-workers. I was amazed by the sheer size of the structures and wondered what it must take to maintain them on a daily basis. For


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three days, I passed the towers and one night even ventured into the basement to make a quick purchase at a drugstore that was located there. The corridor seemed to go for miles. On the last day as I packed my belongings to leave, I picked up a small memo pad from the desk in order to write a to do list. When the list was completed I threw the pad in my briefcase with other papers from the conference and forgot about it. Three weeks later the towers were down. I watched in awe as the news crews showed footage of the Millenium lobby where I had sat just weeks earlier. On the phone with friends who had been at the hotel with me, we traded “did you see that” and “can you believe this” stories about events we had seen or heard. Images of chandeliers swinging and plate glass windows buckling burned into our memories as we did an inventory to determine if all of our associates in New York were accounted for. As the cleanup progressed and other issues took precedence on the front page those images began to fade. About a year later while going through a pile of papers, I came across a small notepad. At the top was the logo of the Hilton Millenium Hotel. Memories rushed through my head as I remembered standing at the window looking into those offices. How many of those people had been lost in the rubble? People just going about their daily business with no idea that it would soon all come to an end. How fortunate had I been that I had not been underground in that corridor on September 11th. If you take a peak at my day-planner today, just inside the front cover is a small note pad. I carry it with me always and now and then look to remind myself just how lucky I am. Wolf Z. Hirst Haifa, Israel One or two days before my wife Esther and I returned to Israel after the 2001 International Byron Conference our nephew drove Esther and me back to her sister in Forest Hills. We crossed one of those huge bridges which gives you a gorgeous view of Manhattan. We all distinctly remember my saying what a wonderful sight Manhattan was and that I hoped to see it again from that bridge some time. The first phone call I remember making upon our return to Israel was to a colleague in order to find out what was going on in the Department of English at the University of Haifa. My call was taken by her daughter, Judith, an ex-student of mine. When we met recently at her brother’s wedding, Judith told me that she remembered that call well, and how

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she had asked me if I had not yet switched on the television. The date of that call was September 11. Ludmilla K. Kostova Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria A long session of the 2001 International Byron Conference was devoted to Byron’s reception in Eastern Europe with several of us presenting papers and the audience attempting to draw parallels and establish similarities between different national contexts. To this day, I do not know if we succeeded in changing some of the generally held preconceptions about Byron’s Eastern European reception and in persuading the audience that Albe was not admired in all parts of the region for the same reasons or that his legacy did not always engender local Byronisms. A month later, watching the televised destruction of a cityscape that was familiar to me both from movies and from recent experience was deeply disturbing. The 2001 terrorist strikes seriously weakened earlier hopes of a more harmonious world of greater human mobility and respect for cultural and religious diversity. The redrawing of sharp, mutually exclusive boundaries, the return to old schemata of irreconcilable differences between societies and a growing sense of threat, danger, and insecurity are among the worst consequences of those strikes. In the light of continuing terrorist attacks and acts of retaliation, the cross-cultural study of Byron’s legacy acquires new resonance. For all his controversial acts and opinions, Byron was a staunch champion of intellectual courage. He detested the tyranny of conventional moral standards and political prejudices and did not hesitate to criticize his own culture when the occasion called for it. Interpretations of his personal and literary legacy contributed to the emergence of an international critical audience questioning and reevaluating received ideas and forms of authority. Continuing this hermeneutic task is therefore of paramount importance—as is mingling Byron’s voice with the voices of his critical or admiring readers across the world. Nora Liassis Nicosia, Cyprus “When you get caught between the moon and New York city” Tuesday August 7, 2001. Back from the Hellenic Culture Foundation, suffused with images of Byron. At the Millenium Hilton, on a Conference Tour, taking it a day at a time. Day one of our “pilgrimage”


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was remarkable—homage to Romantic writers in Central Park, then the Metropolitan. Academic session at the New York Public Library, tomorrow the Pierpont Morgan—worthy places of heritage, of dream collections, of Byroniana. Byron scholars, a friendship network speaking one tongue “Byron,” debating how to wile away the evening. Wednesday night was sorted out—tickets to the long-playing “Cabaret” at Studio 54, showplace of opera, of discomania. Tickets to suspend belief with Sally Bowles in the Kit Kat Club, an anti-Romantic world of lost souls, fraught with moral poverty, political violence, Isherwood’s memorial to a world falling apart. But that first night, in the real world, the World Trade Center towered over us and Church Street—an “island” on an island, a grand dream for Manhattan, a daydream on borrowed time. Two vertical tunnels, conjoined bodies of steel, built forever. We are uplifted to a world of shimmering luminosity, of make-believe. “Windows on the World,” a jewel in the crown of the North Tower. Skyline architecture for a new millenium. Architecture that matters, that is meant to last. Dress code easy, plenty of “mirth and laughter,” a feeling of having the best seat in the house, 107 floors high with only the heavens above. Wonderful music, literally “caught between the moon and New York city . . .” Bayer Sager, Bacharach, and Allen would have approved—Billboard No. 1, and an Oscar. “Windows on the World,” itself a stellar performer, reaching for the stars for nearly thirty years. The barman told us that night that in 2000 “Windows” was the top-takings restaurant in United States. Approximately 200 people would be lost to sight over breakfast a month later—some of them at a conference too. Of course, we all window-walked—a foot in both worlds, a colonnade effect of precipitous, magical illusions opening, so disarmingly, onto open air and the city spread-eagled below. Writing our own narrative, scarcely a Romantic narrative, but held safe by steel and glass. And not the slightest inkling that this solitary “snapshot” in time would have no repeat performance. Now all eyes look down, walking floor Zero, imagining a steel icon, its victims and heroes. But not solitary Byronic heroes, those fabricated dark angels—but real daredevils, bighearted, unstinting, New York heroes. Byron would have understood the call for urban legends. Back in our separate worlds, a September day, 10:28 am, collapse of “Windows on the World,” a world caving in, a kaleidoscope of images falling apart. “The bright sun was extinguished . . .” wrote Byron, of another time and place, another dark day. In such darkness

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we became charged with a unique sensibility—of having been there “just before,” of needing to revisit our legacy of memory, like a familiar keepsake, just like Byroniana. Jonathan Shears Liverpool, England My fondest and most vivid memory of the American conference in 2001 was arriving in New York (it was the first time I had ever been to America) after a coach ride down from Boston. As we drove through the Bronx and Spanish Harlem, the lassitude of the day was suddenly replaced by a buzz of excitement—everyone was wide awake and uplifted. As soon as we arrived at the hotel I remember feeling impatient—a sensation that did not go until we left four days later. I do not recall checking in to the hotel or unpacking—what I do remember is standing outside the hotel waiting for our next coach and staring up at the unbelievable height of the Twin Towers (I do not think at that point I even knew that was what they were called). My sense of the geography of Manhattan was nonexistent and remained so, but my sense of the altitude of the city at that moment was immense. Later that night I went to the opposite extreme and visited the nightclub at the summit, but, not being the best with heights, I stayed well away from the ceiling-high windows. I happened to be at home a month later and remember seeing on television the second plane hit the tower before the broadcasters knew what was happening. The only emotion I remember experiencing at the time was fear—not something I could really define, just fear. Five years on I watched a documentary about the New York fire service, which reminded me of several lines from Byron’s The Corsair: He climbs the crackling stair—he bursts the door, Nor feels his feet glow scorching with the floor; His breath choaked gasping with the volumed smoke, But still from room to room his way he broke.

I do not think I will ever now be able to read them without thinking of 9/11. I cannot imagine what suffering so many people must have endured. Kristina Stankevicute Vilnius, Lithuania The 2001 Conference was my first trip to America, my first visit to New York, and my first acquaintance with the Byron Society. I liked


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the conference “excursion” to the Central Park. I remember my amazement at finding a sculpture of the Lithuanian King (in fact, he was Polish-Lithuanian King) Jogaila. Later, at one of the many conference lunches, I had a chance to talk to the Polish Byron scholar, Miroslawa Modrewzska, and we had a very nice chat about our “common” history. The visit to the World Trade Center, to the very top of one of the Twin Towers, was really memorable, for two reasons. First, I was happy that I joined the group who went to the disco, not the restaurant; second, it was the day of my birthday, and it was, I believe, the most impressive birthday celebration for me: on top of the Twin Towers, at a disco with great music, with a group of really nice colleagues, Byronists—and nobody knew it was my birthday, so it was the little secret of my extremely high spirits on that evening. Only a few weeks after my return home, the World Trade Center fell, and it was all on television, I was much affected—as if they had ruined something that belonged exclusively to me—the view of the city, the memory, the cityscape that had made a much deeper impression on me than I realized. It probably sounds selfish—there was so much human and other losses. I could not think of it all, and still cannot. But, as someone from another part of the world, someone who had only a very small contact with New York, I felt a very personal loss—the loss of a cherished memory. Andrew M. Stauffer Boston, MA My Back Pages It was a day in early September when the terrorists accomplished the massacre of the civilians. The killings were motivated and carried out by a group who, in their devotion to what they believed was the purest form of their faith, sought to purge the world of its enemies, and meanwhile to frighten—to terrorize—them into submission with the specter of sudden, violent death. The year was 1792, the country was France, and the dead were victims of a new and bloody turn of the Revolution that would become known as the Reign of Terror. Thousands of men and women of all ages were executed in the name of ideology in a period upon which the conservative English politician Edmund Burke would gaze and invent the word “terrorist” to describe its conductors. The newest September massacre, the one we Americans mournfully call our own, occurred just weeks after delegates from

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more than twenty nations had convened in New York City to discuss the life and works of Lord Byron, shaped as his were by the Revolutionary spirit of the era. Coming of age in these turbulent years of terror and war, Byron found his remarkable literary voice, one characterized by sardonic laughter, naked pathos, and defiant rage. This latter emotion was my subject at the 2001 conference, and the essay published here was presented in earnest innocence of the angry flood that was about to engulf the city, our country, and the world. In the days following September 11, I found myself listening to Bob Dylan constantly, especially “Hard Times in New York Town” and “My Back Pages.” And when I look back at my work on the angry passions, most of it completed by that time, I can only think, in Dylan’s terms, I was so much older then; I am younger than that now. At some stage of the 2001 conference, I shared a drink with Marilyn Gaull at the bar of the Millenium Hilton, right across the street from the World Trade Center. I am sure we talked about Byron and how to be happy (she is expert on both subjects). Friends and colleagues swirled through the lobby, and I think we all were experiencing that New York feeling: that we were close to the beating heart of the world. If we looked out the huge front windows at the towers that would soon fall to earth, I doubt we took much notice then. David Herbert Nottingham, UK Sunday August 5, 2001, will remain in my thoughts always. Following a delightful journey from Boston to witness at first hand the historic sights in Concord and Lexington, I was very privileged to present the opening lecture of this conference, following an enjoyable dinner at the equally historic Colonial Inn, Concord. The photograph that I had taken that afternoon, with my wife Sheilah, outside the Inn, hangs on my office wall and will always remind me of that very special day in my life—and indeed the sad events that were then looming on the horizon! The title of my paper that evening was “The Little White Lady.” Appropriately it deals with a severely physically disabled woman, dressed always in white, who lived in the vicinity of Byron’s ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, who found a new meaning to life through reading Byron’s poetry and was inspired to write her own poetry as a result. My thoughts on returning to United Kingdom and witnessing the tragic events of 9/11 were of the many friends we had been with in


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New York. Next was of the devastation to the sights so fresh in our memory, which we had visited only the previous month. I will close with a verse written by “The Little White Lady,” real name Sophia Hyatt, around 1820 when thinking of Byron, which I read at the conference and perhaps fits the occasion: Is not man from his birth doomed a pilgrim to roam O’er the world’s dreary wilds? Whence by fortune’s rude gust In his path, if some floweret of joy chanced to bloom, It is torn and its foliage laid low in the dust.

Eric Wishart Edinburgh, UK I recall the great heat of the 2001 August days, and the greater comfort to walk one evening with Marilyn Gaull along the Promenade in Battery Park City, while another group danced to the midnight hour on the top deck of the North Tower. My friends are analytic romantics and gave me much memorable pleasure in quiet walks through Central Park—with a monument to Robert Burns—and New York’s great civic libraries, so that next we should contemplate one day a visit to the new great library where Hellenism meets Islam, in Alexandria, that once was destroyed by fire. The Byronists are a curious itinerant lot, and I really have to round off with another image of pilgrimage to a site and country of both beauty and destruction: in Japan two years later we climbed Mount Fuji: they too have known fire and tempest in our atomic era. We need an example of Arnold Toynbee’s text, “A Study of History” and Basho’s zen Buddhism to lend the perspectives I should prefer, and a great indraw of breath to have trod so near the latent flashpoint. Marilyn Gaull New York In 1999, after the XXV annual Byron Conference, those who returned to Athens encountered the most damaging earthquake in a century. In the shocks and aftershocks, the city became a storm-tossed ship, but the Acropolis, after 5,000 years, remained lighted and intact. This earthquake, my first, its unpredictable power and the human helplessness, lay behind my paper on Cuvier, catastrophes, pterodactyls, and the artistic responses. The coincidence haunts me: only a month after presenting it, as I was walking under WTC I, a plane recalling those very pterodactyls exploded into the tower, and, soon, flaming

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people were diving from windows where our friends had danced only a month before. Then, as I tried to escape, over my head, another monster smashed into the second tower, and, within an hour, both towers collapsed in a whirlwind of fire and smoke that pursued us like an enraged prehistoric dragon out over the Hudson as we cringed in a little yellow water taxi. On an otherwise calm and sunny morning, the whole neighborhood that the Byronistas had shared on those hot days and nights, so clean and peaceful, was buried in heaps of rubble, toxic smoke, among things we did not know and things we could not imagine. But, using the same imaginative power we admire in Byron and the artists we love, those responsible for this atrocity did imagine it. Watching the collapsing towers on televison, one Romanticist said it was the very definition of the sublime. It was a dark side of imagination I was unprepared for; my paper proposing that poetry accommodates the human mind to ambiguities and disasters seemed irrelevant, patently false. In the weeks and now years since, I have thought often of my Byronista friends at the Millenium Hotel, when even the humidity seemed nurturing and war was history. Though I no longer believe, as I concluded in my paper, that Byron or any of the Romantic poets prepare one for disaster, or for anything, I began to see behind the texts, the similarity between their time and ours, terror that exceeded literary depictions, helplessness, waste, fear, like ours. The political terror and the uncertainty of nature they lived with may account for catastrophic theory and its unlikely appeal, “the crash of onset” as Coleridge wrote in Fears in Solitude, the “undetermined conflict,” which goes on to this day—not only in the pointless and unforgivable invasions and wars, but also the natural disasters, the tsunami in 2004 in which more 300,000 people were lost, an earthquake in Kashmir with 75,000 dead, genocide and famine in Africa, a hurricane in New Orleans all with incalculable losses, floods, droughts, plagues, wars, brutality, someone always beyond help, a hostile or, at best, indifferent natural world, a human one that constantly transgresses physical and emotional boundaries. The Romantic generations knew that the imagination can be dangerous and unpredictable, but each writer, at one time or another, balanced its allure, the privacy and escapism, with a social sense, “the human heart by which we live,” for which Wordsworth, after losing his brother at sea, expressed his thanks in Elegiac Stanzas. Similarly, balancing the perversions of imagination in 9/11, I rediscovered the community of spirit that as literary scholars we enjoy, in hundreds of e-mails from Romantic scholars all over the world, but, more touching


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still, in Charlie Robinson’s finding me when I could not have found myself. If the poetry does not comfort or prepare, if it inspires from time to time as much evil as good, the community of readers sustains us, to adapt a phrase from Keats, brings the “holiness of the Heart’s affections” to balance, correct, and compensate for the sometimes dangerous “truth of the imagination” (Letter, November 22, 1817). Charles E. Robinson Newark, DE Catherine Addison Rural Zululand, South Africa From: Charles Robinson Sent: Sun September 19, 9:38 am Subject: BYRON SOCIETY: AN EXTENDED FAMILY On behalf of the officers and directors of the Byron Society of America—and those who worked so hard on the International Byron Conference—I wish to thank the many Byronists worldwide who have sent to me expressions of sympathy for all of us in America and expressions of concern for those who live in Boston and New York. Each of us and our families are safe, and each of us wish to thank you for your wonderful e-mails and phone calls. E-mails that I sent out on Tuesday midday brought responses from Jack Wasserman and Marsha Manns that they and theirs were safe, but initially no response from Marilyn Gaull or Doucet Fischer. A phone call to Doucet on Wednesday evening brought news of her safety; and a phone call to Marilyn’s brother in Florida brought news of her safety and adventure. I finally talked to Marilyn on Thursday afternoon [as you might have experienced, it has been difficult to get a phone call through to NYC]: she was walking to the subway when the crash and explosion and collapse occurred—she then was evacuated to the wharf and taken to Liberty Island—and then, I believe, was treated for smoke inhalation and stayed overnight in a hospital in New Jersey, and then was returned to NYC on Wednesday afternoon. As of Friday, she had not been allowed to return to her residence. But she was back at her desk at NYU. Marsha and I have missed each other a number of times over the phone, and Jack Wasserman tells me that his office building was heavily damaged and he has not been able to go there. Some of you knew that Geoffrey Bond and his wife Dianora were in

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the air on Tuesday [I think Maureen Crisp was the first source of that information, telling us that his plane had been diverted to Halifax]. Geoffrey called Saturday and reported that he is safely back home at Burgage Manor. He had been diverted to Halifax with 12,000 others who were parked on the tarmac for a number of hours, before being accommodated in various places. Geoffrey and Dianora were given mattresses and blankets and spent three nights in an exhibition hall [or hanger]. They were given T-shirts and toothpaste and sundries, and treated by the Salvation Army as best could be managed. He said that he was unable to continue on his f light to NYC because his plane was forced to return all passengers to the airport of origination—hence he missed his brother’s wedding that was scheduled for Saturday. A few final points, not the least being the Millenium Hotel, where more than a 100 of us stayed [directly across from the World Trade Center] exactly five weeks before September 11. Those of you watching television probably heard that the Millenium was evacuated by 6 pm on Tuesday evening, that there was a fire by then or that evening, and that it might possibly still collapse. Some of you may have may have seen videotape of the hotel with blown-out windows and the wrecked lobby. A bit too close . . . Our best to you and yours—God bless us all, every one [especially the other Byron Society members who live and/or work in New York and Washington, all of whom we hope are safe]. And may we all be able to comfort as many of those who, for whatever reason, need comforting throughout the United States and the world. Charlie R Below is one of many eloquent e-mail messages I have received, this one from Catherine Addison: Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 11:07:14 +0200 From: caddison To: Charles Robinson Subject: World Trade Center Dear Charles, I cannot tell you how horrified I am about the current situation in Manhattan—and right where we all stayed for the New York phase


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of our conference—so recently! But although I cannot help feeling “there but for grace of God go I” I also feel the hideous pity of it. I would like all Americans to feel that they are not alone in grieving about this ghastly event. I get a stomachache trying to imagine what it must have been like in the upper stories when those planes crashed—or being buried alive somewhere under the rubble. I was wondering whether you knew anyone affected by this disaster—for example, Jack Wasserman? Is he and are all his family safe? And what about all those people that we met casually in the World Trade Center area—for example the newspaper woman on the corner who sang the headlines all day to passersby? And the hotel staff? Not knowing their names I suppose we will never know whether they survived or not . . . It is like a dream shattered. The United States has always seemed to us third-world and developing-world dwellers so permanent, so safe, so prosperous, in Adrian’s word so “normal,” compared with our own countries. And now this. It makes me feel sick all over. I hope that you will accept this as a kind of condolence letter even if you are not personally affected by the attack. You were the host and representative of your country during the conference and you entertained us visitors on a grand scale for which we are grateful. And now I—and I am sure, all the others—would like to share your grief a little. With best wishes, Catherine.


Appendix

THE XXVIIth INTERNATIONAL BYRON CONFERENCE LORD BYRON: HERITAGE AND LEGACY ACADEMIC PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE OF EVENTS AUGUST 4–13, 2001 Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, Harvard University New York City University of Delaware Sponsored and Arranged by The Byron Society of America and The University of Delaware in cooperation with The International Council of Byron Societies


SCHEDULE OF EVENTS SATURDAY, AUGUST 4 1730–1830 Conference Registration at Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, Harvard University. 1830–2030 Welcome by William P. Stoneman and Peter X. Accardo. Reception and Exhibition, Byron in America, organized and curated by Peter X. Accardo, who has also written the Exhibition Catalog. SUNDAY, AUGUST 5 0930–1045 Participants board “Old Town Trolleys” at Swissotel for tour of Boston’s historic Freedom Trail. Trolleys will stop at many famous landmarks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Boston and the Revolutionary War (“American War of Independence”). The tour will visit some of America’s most important historical sites, including the “new” State House (1795), Park Street Church (where the antislavery movement began and where Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and the victims of the 1770 Boston Massacre are buried), the Old Corner Bookstore (once the gathering place of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes), the “old” State House (1713), Faneuil Hall (the birthplace of American freedom from wicked King George III), and the Old North Church (where lanterns were hung to signal the start of Paul Revere’s ride to Lexington and Concord to warn that “The British are coming! The British are coming!”). 1045–1145 Visit to Boston’s famous Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market (where participants may shop or have a quick lunch). 1145 Short walk to Long Wharf to board boats for thirty-five-minute trip across Boston Harbor to the Charlestown Navy Yard for a visit to the USS Constitution (“Old Ironsides”), which Lord Byron boarded in 1822. 1500 Coaches depart Charlestown Navy Yard for Concord and Lexington, passing Bunker Hill, site of the first major battle of the American Revolution. 1545 Coaches arrive at Lexington/Concord to visit the National Park Service Minuteman Center, the site of Paul Revere’s capture, and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Henry David Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson, and the Alcotts are buried on Author’s Ridge. The visit will

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include a stop at Concord Bridge, where the first shot of the American Revolution was fired (“The shot heard ‘round the world”). 1830 Arrive Colonial Inn, Concord, for dinner (and cash bar). Lecture: David Herbert (UK): The Little White Lady 2030 Coaches depart Colonial Inn for Lexington Green (“Birthplace of American Independence”) to view the historic buildings and return to Swissotel. MONDAY, AUGUST 6 0900–1000 Visit to Longfellow House and garden. The house, now a National Historic Site, was used by the Continental Army’s new commander in chief, General George Washington, as his headquarters in 1775 and 1776. In 1837 it became the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), America’s most popular poet, whose bust was placed in Westminster Abbey in 1885. Longfellow resided in this house until his death. The house is undergoing renovation and is closed to the public, and the Byron Society is deeply grateful to James M. Shea for permitting this visit. 1015–1215 Academic Session I Chair: Stuart S. Peterfreund (United States) Speakers: Michael O’Neill (UK), Paul Douglass (United States), Nora Liassis (Cyprus) 1230 Coaches depart Cambridge for Farmington, Connecticut (approximately 120 miles) and New York City. NOTE: Box lunches will be distributed prior to boarding. 1500 (Est.) Arrive Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Welcome by Margaret K. Powell, Librarian, followed by a visit and reception. The Library was given to Yale by Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, a collector and the editor of the works of Horace Walpole, of Strawberry Hill. The Library, a remarkable repository of eighteenth-century English life, includes books, paintings, drawings, watercolors, and other materials (as well as over 3,000 books from Horace Walpole’s personal library). 1630 Depart Farmington for New York City. 1900 (Est.) Arrive Millenium Hotel at the World Trade Center. 2030 Coaches depart Millenium Hotel for Chinatown and a Chinese banquet in a private room at the Golden Unicorn restaurant. The New York metropolitan area reportedly has the largest Asian population

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outside of Asia, and participants will leave the coaches and stroll briefly through the amazing heart of “old Chinatown.” TUESDAY, AUGUST 7 0815 Enter Central Park, one of the most beautiful large greenswards in any of the world’s major cities. The Park was designed in the midnineteenth century in the English Romantic tradition with rolling meadows, formal gardens and fountains, and, at the same time, with foliage in its natural state, rocky hills (with spectacular vistas), waterfalls, bodies of water, and streams and rivulets. The west side of the Park contains a famous bird sanctuary (as well as Yoko Ono’s memorial garden for John Lennon). Participants will enter the Park first to visit the magnificent nineteenth-century statues of Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and America’s first popular poet, Fitz-Greene Halleck (“the American Byron”). Then follows a gentle walk north along shaded, paved trails towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art, passing Bethesda Terrace and its spectacular Fountain, America’s most exuberant beaux art setting. Participants will pause for coffee and tea at the Boat House Café before proceeding a little further to the Museum, visiting Turtle Pond (with wonderful vistas of the skyline of New York), the remarkable equestrian statue to “Poland,” and “Cleopatra’s Needle,” an ancient obelisk weighing 200 tons and standing 25 meters high. 0945 Arrive Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. 1000–1100 Guided tour of “The American Wing.” 1100–1330 Participants are free to explore more of the Museum, certainly one of the world’s three great art museums. There will be time for coffee or lunch in the Museum’s fine cafeteria as well as time for shopping in the Museum’s two-story shop. 1345–1600 Academic Session II Welcome on behalf of The New York Public Library Chair: Thomas Harris, CMG, British Consul General Speakers: Peter Cochran (UK), Wolf Z. Hirst (Israel), Tom Mole (UK) Respondent: Drummond Bone (UK) 1815–2015 Coaches arrive at Foundation for Hellenic Culture. Welcome by Ekatrini Myrivili, Acting Director. Reception and Exhibition, Images of Lord Byron and His Circle, from private collections.

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WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8 Morning Free. Participants may, on their own, take the famous Circle Line Cruise around Manhattan Island, shop in any of the celebrated neighborhoods or in the many shops adjacent to the Millenium Hotel (or in the vast mall beneath the World Trade Plaza, opposite the Millenium Hotel), or visit the United Nations, the Museum of Modern Art, or the glorious Frick Collection. 1345 Participants must make their own way to the Pierpont Morgan Library at Madison Avenue and 36th Street (29 East 36th Street). The library has an elegant café for light lunches and a lovely shop. Participants are asked to arrive at 1345. PLEASE BE PROMPT. Participants will proceed directly to the Auditorium of the Morgan Library, which is one of the world’s great houses of culture. Its spectacular collection of rare books, manuscripts, paintings, drawings, and objets d’art are maintained in an elegant, intimate building, which has made it one of New York’s most treasured landmarks. The library also holds America’s greatest collection of Lord Byron’s autographed manuscripts and Byroniana as well as an equally exceptional collection of Augusta Leigh material. 1345–1545 Academic Session III Welcome on behalf of The Pierpont Morgan Library Speakers: Robert Parks (United States), Fani-Maria Tsigakou (Greece), Marilyn Gaull (United States) 1545–1630 Through the courtesy and efforts of Robert Parks, participants have an opportunity to view a private exhibition of some of the Library’s Byron holdings. 1830–2030 Gala Reception. The Consul General and members of his staff will greet participants and guests. 2100 Informal walking tour of Battery Park City Esplanade to see illuminated Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. THURSDAY, AUGUST 9 1000–1215 Academic Session IV Welcome on behalf of New York University Chair: Hon. Carl Spielvogel, former U. S. Ambassador to the Slovak Republic Panelists: Anahit Bekaryan (Armenia), Bojka Djukanovic (Montenegro), Vitana Kostadinova (Bulgaria), Ludmilla K. Kostova

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(Bulgaria), Innes Merabishvili (Georgia), Miroslawa Modrzewska (Poland), Adrian Otoiu (Romania). 1245 Coaches depart for University of Delaware through New Jersey and across the great span of the Delaware Memorial Bridge to Delaware, the “First State.” 1830–2200 Gala reception and banquet. The Second Annual Leslie A. Marchand Memorial Lecture Kay Redfield Jamison, MD: The Moods of Lord Byron FRIDAY, AUGUST 10 0845–1045 Academic Session V Chair: Geoffrey Bond (UK) Speakers: Phil Cardinale (UK/United States), Linda Montag (Israel), Bernard G. Beatty (UK) 1115–1315 Academic Session VI Chair: Peter Myrian (Greece) Speakers: Jonathan D. Gross (United States), Timothy Webb (UK), Andrew M. Stauffer (United States) 1615 Coaches depart Christiana Towers and Embassy Suites Hotel for Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington. The Delaware Art Museum houses America’s finest collection of Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite artists, as well as an exceptional collection of American artists. 1700–1800 Coaches arrive Delaware Art Museum. Welcome by Steve Bruni (Director of Museum) and Nancy Miller-Batty (Chief Curator) Lecture: Sonia Hofkosh (United States): Byron’s Screen: Visual Representation and the Performance of Identity SATURDAY, AUGUST 11 0845–1045 Academic Session VII Chair: Peter W. Graham (United States) Speakers: Kainoa K. Harbottle (United States), Catherine Addison (South Africa), Alexandra M. Böhm (Germany) 1115–1315 Academic Session VIII Chair: Donald H. Reiman (United States) Speakers: Jonathon Shears (UK), Christine Kenyon Jones (UK), Allan Gregory (Ireland)

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1645 Coaches arrive Longwood Gardens, which is America’s premier display garden (and not to be missed). It was created by industrialist Pierre S. du Pont and consists of more than 1,000 acres (425 hectares) of gardens, woodlands, and meadows. There are twenty different outdoor gardens and twenty different indoor gardens, and over four acres of greenhouses. Participants, who have an opportunity for their own tour of the many sites, should not miss the Main Conservatory. 1815–1915 Reception in the Peirce-du Pont House, which dates from 1730 and is the oldest building at Longwood Gardens. It was the family homestead of the Peirce family until 1905 and then became the weekend residence of Pierre S. du Pont until his death in 1954. This reception was made possible by the generous support of President and Mrs. David Roselle, University of Delaware. 1930–2100 The Kennett Symphony will present Highland Fling, a program inspired by popular and traditional Scottish and Irish music. Pipes and drums, singers, and dancers will perform with the Symphony. Byronists are expected to observe proper decorum! 2115–2145 Illuminated display of Longwood’s famous fountains. SUNDAY, AUGUST 12 0845–1045 Academic Session IX Chair: Katherine Anne Kernberger (United States) Speakers: Christiane Vigouroux (France), Shobhana Bhattacharji (India), Sarah Wootton (UK) 1115–1315 Academic Session X Chair: M. Byron Raizis (Greece) Speakers: Tracy Ware (Canada), Paul M. Curtis (Canada) 1245–1315 Light lunch at the recently renovated Memorial Hall, which houses the Department of English and The Byron Society of America. The Michael Rees Byron Collection, which was donated in 1999 to The Byron Society Collection at the University of Delaware, occupies The Byron Lounge and Byron Room on the third floor. 1330–1500 Annual Meeting of the International Byron Council (Memorial Hall, Room 127). 1500–1645 Sherry and Tea Reception (Third Floor, Memorial Hall). Official Preview of The Byron Society Collection at the University of Delaware, with remarks by Marsha M. Manns.

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Participants are also invited to visit the nearby University of Delaware Library to see a small exhibition, Dark Romanticism: Byron, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and the Pursuit of the Supernatural (curated by Linda L. Stein). The library has exceptional special collections as well as state-of-the-art electronic resources that participants may inspect. 1830–1930 Reception at Oak Knoll Books, America’s finest dealer in materials relating to bibliography and the book arts, given by the proprietor, Robert D. Fleck. At the same time, the New Castle Historical Society will provide participants access to two historic houses. 1930–2200 Dinner at The Arsenal Restaurant in New Castle. This dinner was made possible by the generous support of The Hellenic University Club of Wilmington. MONDAY, AUGUST 13 0845–1115 Academic Session XI Chair: Brigitte Lohmar (Germany) Speakers: William W. Biddle (United States), Christina Doku (Greece), Suzanne Summerville (United States) End of the Twenty-seventh International Byron Conference


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Notes on Contribu to rs

Peter X. Accardo is assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. He is the author of Byron in America to 1830, published as a full issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin, and Byron in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, the catalog of an exhibition organized for the Twenty-seventh International Byron Conference. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Byron Society of America and is currently editing the first six annual Leslie A. Marchand memorial lectures. Catherine Addison, associate professor of English at the University of Zululand in South Africa, completed her doctorate with a dissertation on Byron at the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 1987. Her publications include articles on the reading of Don Juan, on irony in Don Juan, and on The Island as a revisionary text. Bernard Beatty, now senior fellow in the School of English at the University of Liverpool, is the author of Byron’s Don Juan (Croom Helm, 1985), and editor of Byron and the Limits of Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 1988), Liberty and Poetic License: New Essays on Byron (Liverpool University Press, 2003), The Plays of Lord Byron (Liverpool University Press, 1997), and Literature of the Romantic Period 1750–1850 (Liverpool University Press, 1976). He was also academic editor of The Byron Journal 1988–2004. Shobhana Bhattacharji who teaches at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi, has specialized in nineteenth-century British literature and is currently pursuing research in travel literature, children’s literature, and literature of World War II. She has contributed articles to The Byron Journal and the Dibrugarh Journal of English Studies, and edited and annotated The Romantics (5th ed., Doaba, 2006), Anglo-American Writing from 1930: A Reader (2nd ed., Doaba, 2006), Jane Austen: Mansfield Park (Penguin India, 2005) and Walter Scott: The Heart of Mid-Lothian ed. (Penguin India, forthcoming).

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Alexandra M. Böhm is currently teaching at the Department of German and Comparative Literature at the University of ErlangenNürnberg. She studied German, English, and American Literature at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and the University of Glasgow. Her PhD is on Byron and Heine’s modernism between ethics and aesthetics. She published various articles on nineteenth-century English, German, Russian, and French literature, has contributed an entry on Byron to a forthcoming encyclopedia of poetological works, and is editor of a volume on “Figures of Alterity: Forms of ‘Othering’ in Literature, Anthropology and the Sciences around 1800” (Königshausen/Neumann, 2007). Philip J. Cardinale received his doctoral degree from Oxford University in 2005, writing his dissertation on verse translations of Virgil’s Aeneid produced during the British Romantic Age. Peter Cochran, head of English and Drama at the Hertfordshire and Essex High School and editor of the Newstead Abbey Byron Society Review, earned his PhD at the University of Glasgow. He is on the committee of the London Byron Society, often lectures on Byron, and published Michael Rees’s translation of Teresa Guiccioli’s Vie de Lord Byron (University of Delaware Press, 2005). Paul M. Curtis, professor of English Language and Literature at the Université de Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, has published several articles on Lord Byron. Forthcoming are two chapters: “Romantic Indirection” in Romantic Form, Alan Rawes ed. (Palgrave) and “At His Old Lunes: Byron and Digression, Performance and Performative,” in Byron, Palgrave Advance Series, ed. Jane Stabler (Palgrave). He has also edited the selected proceedings of the Thirtieth International Byron Congress, Byron and the Romantic Sublime (Université de Moncton: 2005). Marilyn Gaull, research professor, The Editorial Institute at Boston University, at the time of the conference was Professor of English at New York University, is the editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism; the Human Context (W. W. Norton, 1988), executive director of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, founder with Richard Wordsworth and American director of the Wordsworth Summer Conference in Grasmere, and author of many articles and reviews on all the Romantic writers. Wolf Z. Hirst has served as the chair of the English Department of the University of Haifa, Israel, and is the author of John Keats


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(Twayne, 1981) and the editor of Byron, the Bible, and Religion (University of Delaware Press, 1991). Christine Kenyon Jones, who lectures in English at King’s College London, has published widely on Byron and the Romantics, including articles on Byron and his portraits; Byron, Keats, and consumption; Byron and his biographers; and representations of Byron in modern science fiction. She is also the author of Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Ashgate, 2001). Ludmilla K. Kostova is associate professor of British Literature and Cultural Studies at St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria. She has published widely on eighteenth-century, romantic and modern British literature and on issues of cultural encounter. Her book Tales of the Periphery: the Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (Universitetsko izd-vo Sv. sv. Kiril i Metodii, 1997) has been frequently cited by specialists in the field. Together with Corinne Fowler, she edited a special issue of Journeys —The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, Vol. IV/1 (2003), on ethics and travel. Her present contribution was revised and completed during a senior fellowship at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna, Austria (October 2006–January 2007). Nora Liassis is a regular presenter at Byron Conferences and a contributor to Romantic Studies seminars in Cyprus, Europe, and Australia. Her research areas include Byron and the Near East, Near Eastern travel writing (sixteenth–nineteenth century), Romanticism and Greek mythology, Ovid and Cyprus, the literature of topos, and prose poetry in translation. She is the dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at the European University Cyprus. Mirosława Modrzewska is an assistant professor at the University of Gdan´sk, Poland where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature. Her research focuses primarily on Romantic literature and Byron’s dramas and she has worked with some Polish translations of Byron’s poetry. Tom Mole is assistant professor of English at McGill University. His book, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Palgrave, 2007) argues that modern celebrity culture emerged in the Romantic period, and that Lord Byron should be studied as one of its earliest examples and most astute critics. He edited a volume of Blackwood’s Magazine 1817–1825: Selections from Maga’s Infancy (Pickering and Chatto, 2006), and has published

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articles in Romanticism, the Keats-Shelley Journal, the Byron Journal, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Charles E. Robinson is a Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where he hosted the Sixth International Byron Seminar in 1979 and this Twenty-seventh International Byron Conference in August 2001. He is the author of Byron and Shelley: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) and the editor of Lord Byron and His Contemporaries (University of Delaware Press, 1982), Mary Shelley’s Collected Tales and Stories (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 27 William Hazlitt Letters (Keats-Shelley Association, 1987), The Mary Shelley Reader (Oxford University Press, 1990), Mary Shelley’s Proserpine and Midas (Garland, 1992), and, most recently, the manuscripts of the two-volume Frankenstein Notebooks (Garland, 1996). From 1996 through 2006, he served as executive director of the Byron Society of America and as co-chair of Byron Society Collection at the University of Delaware. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Byron Society of America since 1976, organized the first six annual Leslie A. Marchand Memorial Lectures at the University of Delaware, and serves on the International Advisory Board of Directors of the Missolonghi Byron Center in Greece. He is currently working on a new edition of Frankenstein. Jonathon Shears teaches and lectures at the University of Liverpool. He has published articles on Byron’s tales and Milton’s influence on the Romantics. He is currently writing a book on Byron’s narrative verse that examines the metaphors Byron uses to understand storytelling. Andrew M. Stauffer is associate professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the editor of H. Rider Haggard’s She (Broadview, 2006) and (with James Loucks) the coeditor of the Norton Critical Edition of Robert Browning’s poetry. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Byron Society of America and has published widely on nineteenth-century British literature. Tracy Ware teaches Romanticism and Canadian Literature at Queen’s University (Canada). He has published on Wordsworth, Shelley, Trilling, Poe, Naipaul, Keneally, and various aspects of Canadian literature. He is the editor of A Northern Romanticism: Poets of the


255

Confederation (Tecumseh Press, 2000) in the Canadian Critical Editions Series. Cheryl A. Wilson is assistant professor of English and member of the Graduate Faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where she teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Literature and Women’s Studies. Her work on literature and performance has appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, Persuasions, Brontë Studies, Women’s Studies, and English Literature in Transition, as well as in collections on Rebecca West and May Sinclair. She is also the editor (with Margaret D. Stetz) of Michael Field and Their World (Rivendale Press, 2007).


Index

Abrams, M. H., 79, 180 Adams, Levi, 25–6, 30, 33–4 Aeschylus, 118 Alighieri, Dante, 116 American Revolution, 73, 225–6 Ariosto, 133, 135, 137–8 Aristophanes, 118 Aristotle, 171, 174 Arnold, Matthew, 77, 79, 161 Ashton, Thomas L., 107, 110, 111, 113 Auden, W. H., 128–9, 133 Austen, Jane, 3, 151–63 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 183 Balzac, 76, 78 Bancroft, George, 22–3 Barlow, Joel, 22 Barlow, Nora, 187–8 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 204 Barrett, Paul H., 191 Barton, Anne, 125, 171, 175 Bate, Jonathan, 62, 185 Bauer, William, 8, 17–18 Beatty, Bernard, 91, 153, 163, 174 Belcher, Jonathan, 37 Belsey, Catherine, 166, 175 Bennett, Andrew, 167 Bentham, Jeremy, 95 Bentley, D. M. R., 25–34 Blair, Robert, 74 Blunt, John, 50 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 29, 34, 77, 81, 96, 142–4, 185, 205

Boone, Daniel, 22 Bottral, Ronald, 132 Bourchier, James, 56–7 British Review, 105, 107–8 Brooke, John Hedley, 193 Browning, Robert, 203–5 Bulgaria, 45–59 Burton, Robert, 143 Byles, Mather, 21 Byron, Ada, 194 Byron, George Gordon, Lord Works: Age of Bronze, 157; Beppo, 26, 29, 30–1, 33, 41, 133, 147; “The Blues” 157; The Bride of Abydos, 23, 49, 58; Cain, 79, 83–92, 99, 123, 130, 160, 188–91, 197; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 15, 18, 22, 27, 34, 39, 41, 45, 48–9, 54–5, 59, 75–6, 79, 81, 103–5, 107, 109, 111, 128–36, 142–3, 148, 151–63, 168, 178, 200; The Corsair, 23, 105, 169–71, 175, 214; The Curse of Minerva, 8, 12, 16, 197; The Deformed Transformed, 33, 145, 188, 194–5; Don Juan, 22, 26–30, 34, 39, 41, 44, 49, 91, 97–8, 102, 121, 133–6, 147, 169, 180, 182–3, 185–6, 190; English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 16, 128, 197; “Epistle to

258

Index

Augusta,” 39–42, 138; The Giaour, 129–30; Heaven and Earth, 74–5, 78–9, 81, 188–9; Hebrew Melodies, 103–13; Hints from Horace, 94, 102, 123; Hours of Idleness, 95, 101; The Island, 128; The Lament of Tasso, 128; Lara, 105, 123, 143, 172; Manfred, 130, 139–48, 172, 178, 185; Marino Faliero, 170, 197; Mazeppa, 23, 48, 100; Parisina, 8, 111, 112; Ravenna Journal, 2; Sardanapalus, 171–3; The Siege of Corinth, 7, 8, 11, 15, 111; The Two Foscari, 173; The Vision of Judgement, 115–25, 147; “The Waltz,” 157; The Works of the Right Hon. Lord Byron, ed. Schumann, 178 at Cambridge, 8, 42, 95–6, 187–8, 196 and Christianity, 74, 83–92, 107, 117–18, 162–3, 178, 183, 187, 201 at Harrow School, 94–5, 101, 118 letters of, 2, 22–3, 30, 33, 46, 57, 68, 85, 94–5, 118 use of ottava rima, 26–7, 41, 117–18, 127–38, 179–80, 182, 185 and Romantic Irony, 177–86 and the “Satanic School,” 116, 204 use of satire, 16, 25, 98, 119, 121, 141, 185, 197 sexualtiy of, 62, 68, 95, 100 Byron, John, 38, 40, 43 Byron, Lady, see Milbanke, Annabella Cadmus, 76 Cairncross, John, 172 Calvinism, 87, 186

Canada, 1, 25–34, 35–44 Cardwell, Richard, 3, 66–7 Carlyle, Thomas, 79, 201–5 Catastrophism, 73–4, 79 Chalandritsanos, Lukas, 62 Champlain, Samuel de, 36 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 115 Cicero, 94 Clare, John, 104 Clarke, Edward, 8, 16, 22, 95 Clermont, Mary Anne, 194 Cochran, Peter, 62, 65, 162 Coleridge, E. H., 99 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 79, 81, 82, 128, 167, 182, 187, 199, 218, 231 Columbiad, 22 Conrad, Peter, 127 Coolidge, Joseph, 22, 23 Corneille, Pierre, 165, 171, 173 Critical Review, 105 Cudahay, Richard D., 14–15 Cuvier, Georges, 73–82, 189–90, 217 Cyprus, 7–19 Cyprus v. Goldberg, 11 Dakin, Douglas, 65 Dallas, George Mifflin, 21 Daly, Kirsten, 49 Daniel, George, 103 Dante, see Alighieri, Dante Darwin, Charles, 3, 77, 187–96 Darwin, Erasmus, 189, 193 Davies, Stevie, 166, 175 Dawkins, Richard, 188 Daymond, Douglas, 26 Demata, Massimiliano, 55 Disraeli, Benjamin, 50 Doherty, F. M., 171, 173 Dryden, John, 102, 124, 143 Edinburgh Review, 1 Edleston, John, 95–6, 98–102 Edwards, Mary Jane, 28 Eiseley, Loren, 82

Index Elfenbein, Andrew, 197 Elgin, Thomas Bruce, Lord, 16, 18 Elwin, Malcolm, 106 Empson, William, 131 Enlightenment, 140–1, 143, 162 Erasmus, 121 Euripides, 118 Everett, Edward, 22 Evolution, 55, 82, 189, 193–4 Fielding, Henry, 119, 122 Fisch, Harold, 84 Fish, Stanley, 166 Franklin, Benjamin, 22 Franklin, Caroline, 46, 112, 113 French Revolution, 188, 205 Frere, John Hookham, 118, 124, 133 Fussell, Paul, 130 Gallas, Klaus, 14–15 Gentleman’s Magazine, 107, 111 George I, King, 37 George II, King, 37 George III, King, 115–17, 119–21, 225 Gerstenblith, Patty, 13, 17 Gesner, Salomon, 99, 102 Gifford, William, 190 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 59, 66, 81, 185, 203 Graham, Peter, 36, 210 Gray, May, 95 Gray, Thomas, 74, 187 Greece, 8, 18, 28, 56, 63, 66, 74, 145 see also, Missolonghi Guiccioli, Teresa, 62, 192 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 26, 227 Hayward Henshaw, Joshua, 23 Heine, Heinrich, 3, 51–2, 59, 177–86 Henry, Patrick, 22 Hentschel, Cedric, 52, 66 Herschel, William, 77–8

259

Hobhouse, John Cam, 49, 58, 102, 110, 162 Hobsbawm, E. J., 159 Hohenhausen, Elise von, 177 Homer, 117 Hughes, Kathryn, 65 Hunt, Leigh, 8, 161, 163 Hunter, John, 78 Hutton, James, 77–8 Huxley, Thomas, 193 International Byron Society, ix, 35, 214, 219–20, 223–31 Irving, Washington, 23 James, Henry, 24 Jefferson, Thomas, 22 Johnson, Samuel, 22, 116, 143, 153 Jones, David, 75 Jones, Steven E., 185 Jones, Rev. Thomas, 188 Jump, John, 134 Kant, Immanuel, 140 Karlin, Daniel, 203 Keats, John, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 122, 142, 167, 219 Kidd, Adam, 27–8, 33 Kierkegaard, Soren, 141–7 Kinnaird, Douglas, 107–10, 118, 121, 133 Klinck, Carl F., 31–2, 34 Kolb, Jocelyne, 181 Kristeve, Kristyu, 51 Lamb, Caroline, 62–3 Lamb, Charles, 75 Lamb, Mrs. George, 100 Lawrence, Charles, 37, 43 Leask, Nigel, 27, 57 Leeke, Thomas, 94 Lefevere, Andre, 48 Leigh, Augusta, 39–42, 62, 64, 106, 138, 228 Lermontov, Mikhail, 48–50 Lesage, Alain-Rene, 195

260

Index

Lewalski, Barbara K., 167 Lewis, Benjamin, 23 Lodge, David, 128 Long, Albert, 54 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 23, 37, 225–6 Longmore, George, 25–34 Lovell, Ernest, 108, 109 Lowell, James Russell, 199 MacCarthy, Fiona, 61–3, 65, 68 MacDonald, John, 54 MacDonald, Mary Lu, 28–9, 32–4 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 139, 143 Madison, James, 22 Malcolm, J. P., 154 Marchand, Leslie A., 62, 192, 229 Marlowe, Christopher, 128 Marryat, Frederick, 23 Martin, John, 74–5 Martindale, Charles, 167 Massinger, Philip, 119 Mather, Cotton, 22 Mayor, Adrienne, 74 McGann, Jerome J., 42–3, 63–4, 113, 134, 136, 146, 180 Megaw, A. H. S., 10 Mellor, Anne K., 134, 135, 180 Menzel, Wolfgang, 178 Mickiewicz, Adam, 65, 67, 69 Mikics, David, 166, 175 Milbanke, Annabella, 23, 64, 99, 102, 105–7, 116, 161, 194 Milev, Geo, 56–7 Miller, William, 104 Milton, John, 21, 79, 81, 116, 121, 141, 153, 161–2, 165–75, 187 Minta, Stephen, 42 Missolonghi, 23, 56 see also, Greece Mitchell, W. J. T., 74 Monkman, Leslie, 26, 34 Montagu, Mary Wortley, Lady, 195 Monti, Vincenzo, 28, 116 Moore, Thomas, 27, 93–4, 101, 106–7, 116, 122, 194

Mountain, George Jehoshaphat, 28 Mouriki, Doula, 14 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 143 Murray, John, 23, 61, 64, 102, 103–13, 192 Napoleon, see Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoleonic Wars, 68, 73 see also, Bonaparte, Napoleon Nathan, Isaac, 103–13 Nemoianu, Virgil, 45, 185 Nero, 120–1 Newlyn, Lucy, 166, 175 Newstead Abbey, 23, 216 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 52–3, 59, 66, 140–4, 146 Noland, James, 13–4, 16 Ochsenbein, Wilhelm, 177–8, 184 Orientalism, 27, 45–7, 51, 58, 103, 107 Ovid, 36 Paley, Rev. William, 3, 187–96 Pascal, Blaise, 171 Pater, Walter, 142–3 Pazvantoglu, Osman, 49 Peale, Rembrandt, 23 Penn, William, 22 Perraudin, Michael, 179, 184 Petrarch, Francesco, 31 Pichot, Amédée, 67 Pigot, Elizabeth, 100 Piper, William Bowman, 128 Plato, 31 Poland, 63, 66–7, 227 Polidori, John, 81 Pope, Alexander, 23, 36, 116, 128, 143, 195 Pope/Bowles Controversy, 195 Popov, D. K., 48, 58 Prawer, Siegbert S., 178 Pulci, Luigi, 133 Quarterly Review, 1, 104 Quevedo, Francisco de, 119

Index

261

Racine, Jean, 165, 171–2 Realism, 121, 154–5 Redford, Bruce, 22 Reiman, Donald, 111, 121 rhyme-royal, 128 Richardson, John, 26–7, 33 Robel, Lauren, 13 Rogers, Dummer, 94 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 140, 142–3, 189, 195 Rowse, A. L., 38 Ruddick, William, 25 Russell, Bertrand, 141, 144 Russo-Turkish War, 50 Ryle, Gilbert, 162

Spedding, James Matthew, 199 Spence, Gordon, 174 Spenser, Edmund, 36, 130–2, 134, 137, 175 Spenserian Stanza, 107, 130, 132, 134–6, 153 St. Clair, William, 18 Stefanov, Konstantin, 54–7, 59 Steffan, Truman Guy, 87, 91–2 Stoppard, Tom, 35–6 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 23 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 81 Swift, Jonathan, 116 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 127–8, 138

Sagan, Carl, 75 Saintsbury, George, 127 Sand, George, 67 Saranoff, Sergius, 45 Schlegel, Friedrich, 62, 180–3, 185 Scott, Walter, 122, 129, 154, 205, 227 Sease, Catherine, 16 Seneca, 120–1 Sensabaugh, George F., 21 Seven Years’ War, 37, 39 Shadduck, Gaye, 81 Shakespeare, William, 52, 59, 116, 120, 163, 171, 178 Works: Hamlet, 141, 146; King Lear, 76; Macbeth, 120, 171 Shaw, George Bernard, 45 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 24, 51–3, 75, 77, 79, 82, 116, 122–3, 166–7, 174, 177, 179, 203 Works: Adonais, 122–3; A Defense of Poetry, 75; “Julian and Maddalo,” 52; Prometheus Unbound, 75, 166 Shilstone, Frederic W., 68, 112 Sibley, Agnes Marie, 21 Slater, Joseph, 108 Slaveikov, Pencho, 51–2, 59 Smiles, Samuel, 104, 105, 110 Southey, Robert, 81, 115–25

Taylor, William, 116 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 56, 161, 197–205 Thompson, Ewa M., 47 Thubron, Colin, 10 Ticknor, George, 22, 23 Torrance, Robert M., 130 True, Marion, 13 Trueblood, Paul Graham, 65 Tucker, Herbert, 201 Turner, William, 9 Tynianov, Juri, 63 Vail, Jeffery, 122 van Rijn, Michael, 14 Vazov, Ivan, 49–51 Velichkov, Konstantin, 48 Verrazzano, Giovanni de, 36 Vikan, Gary, 11 Virgil, 1, 36, 93–102, 117 Washington, George, 22, 226 Werner, Michael, 177 West, Paul, 134–5 West, William Edward, 23 Whewell, William, 191 Wilkes, John, 116–17 Wilkie, Brian, 97, 102 Wimsatt, W. K., 128

262

Index

Wittreich, Joseph, 167 Wolfson, Susan, 127 Woolf, Virginia, 134 Wordsworth, William, 3, 64, 74, 75, 79, 82, 155, 158, 165–75, 182, 187, 200, 201, 218 Works: Annotations to Paradise Lost, 166; The Excursion, 74, 165, 171; The Prelude, 76, 155, 165, 168, 174; The

Recluse, 165–6; “Tintern Abbey,” 158, 201 Wu, Duncan, 64, 68 Yas¸in, Mehmet, 8 Yeats, W. B., 27, 132 Young, Edward, 74, 167 Zółkiewski, Stefan, 68 Zuccato, Edward, 66

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