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The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge Certain in Uncertainty

Emily A. Bernhard Jackson

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge

10.1057/9780230290563 - The Development of Byron's Philosophy of Knowledge, Emily A. Bernhard Jackson


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The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge Certain in Uncertainty Emily A. Bernhard Jackson


Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, University of Arkansas


© Emily A. Bernhard Jackson 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-0-230-23151-1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bernhard Jackson, Emily A., 1968– The development of Byron’s philosophy of knowledge: certain in uncertainty / by Emily A. Bernhard Jackson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-230-23151-1 1. Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788–1824–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788–1824–Philosophy. 3. Knowledge, Theory of, in literature. I. Title. PR4392.P5B47 2010 821’.7–dc22 2010027485 10 19

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‘Everything is true, only the opposite is true, too; you must believe both equally or be damned.’ Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

– Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to Sidney Colvin





Contents Acknowledgments

viii x

Note on Texts

xi

Introduction

1

1.

Philosophies, Skepticism, and Morals: a Background in Enlightenment

13

2.

Traveling on Shaky Ground: Childe Harold I and II and the Beginning of Byronic Knowing

32

3.

Worse than Faithless: Plenitude and the Loss of Knowledge in The Giaour

57

4.

Talking Turkey: Unmasking Knowledge in the Last of the Eastern Tales

81

5.

Traveling on Stormy Seas: Childe Harold III and the Difficulties of Development

103

6.

Knowing on Demand: Staging Knowledge-Claims in Manfred’s Mental Theatre

131

7.

‘A lively reader’s fancy does the rest’: Don Juan and the Certainty of Doubt

156

Reckoning Up

181

Notes

186

References

212

Index

226

vii



List of Abbreviations

I am deeply pleased to discover myself the author of a book, and I selfishly wish to add to my pleasure by thanking the colleagues, friends, and more than friends who helped me find myself in this position. Foremost, I am grateful to Dr. Laura Quinney, who guided me through all the stages of production. She has never steered me wrong, and I hope I have repaid her patience and good advice. Dr. Susan Lanser, too, helped and pushed me. Dr. Yoon S. Lee gave thoughtful and useful feedback, for which I am grateful. My most delighted appreciation goes to Dr. Jerome McGann. I know he does not care for lengthy or effusive thanks, so take each word of this expression of gratitude for 10,000 such words, and there we shall have an end to it. For financial assistance that allowed me to perform valuable research, I thank the University of Arkansas and Brandeis University. A good deal of the revision of my manuscript was undertaken while I was Arkansas Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and I thank both Wolfson and Arkansas for that invaluable fellowship year. I am particularly grateful to Anne Barton for her support and guidance during my time at Wolfson. I am grateful too to Paula Kennedy, Ben Doyle, and Steven Newman at Palgrave, who took such care with me and were convinced of this book’s worth long before I was; I would also like to thank Palgrave’s two anonymous readers, whose comments substantially improved my manuscript. I also wish to thank Alan Richardson, whose course at Boston College made me a Romanticist and a Byronist, and whose research and thought continue to give me something to emulate. I am grateful to Haidée Jackson, the curator of Newstead Abbey, who made the likeness of Byron on this book’s cover available to me. I acknowledge the permission to use the likeness granted by Nottingham City Museums and Galleries, Newstead Abbey. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as ‘The Harold of a New Age: Childe Harold I and II and Byron’s Rejection of Canonical Knowledge,’ in Romanticism on the Net 43 (2006), and is reproduced here by permission of the editor, Michael Eberle-Sinatra. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Manfred’s Mental Theatre and the Construction of Knowledge,’ SEL 47 (2007): 799–824. I gratefully acknowledge the editors of those journals for granting permission to reprint that material here. viii



Acknowledgments

Like Byron, I have a long list of personal debts. I would not be who I am without Ashley Bruce and Jennifer Piddington; neither does what I do, but both cared as much about this project as if it were their own. My debt to Roselyn Farren is enormous; if it had not been for her continual willingness to challenge and believe in me simultaneously this manuscript would not exist. I must also thank Stephen Dineen, who is surely the luckiest find any person anywhere has ever made during any junior year abroad. I also thank Mina Gorji for her willingness to respond thoughtfully to seemingly endless writings. Richard Sha has been selflessly giving with his advice and time, and I owe him a very great deal. A group of people at Wolfson supported me and cultivated my happiness while I worked on my project, and without them both I and this manuscript would be very different: Mercedes Okumura, Angel Garcia, Olga Goulko, Marta Machala, Mykhalo Tomkyn, and Sasha VicenteGrabovetsky. I am also grateful for the love and help of Christine Dymond, as well as thankful for the support, emotional and intellectual, I received along the way from James Wallace and Beth Kowaleski Wallace, Jeremy Burns, Joseph Candido, Peter Cochran, Craig Crowder, Marilyn Gaull, Gordon Heier, Milton Kornfeld, Eric Larson, Jack Lyons, Davis McCombs, Susan Marren, Allisonn Molloy, Mike O’Hallaran, Alan Rawes, William St. Clair, L. E. Wilson, and Mikhail Xifaras – and, of course, Augusta Murphy. I owe a special debt to T. H. Jackson, patient and fair but firm line-by-line editor. If this book displays verbal grace, clarity, or care for language anywhere outside the Byron quotations, it is because of this most keen-eyed and delicate-eared of writing instructors. At the risk of producing the kind of acknowledgments in which, as Peter Manning says, ‘an author implicates everyone he has known since childhood,’ I close by implicating two people who knew me even before childhood. What I owe to my parents, Thomas Jackson and Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, surpasses expression: never did a daughter, or a scholar, have so much for which to be grateful. I therefore dedicate this book to these two English professors, mentors, models, praisers, taskmasters, believers, financial backers, and friends, who supported me through all my many beginnings, and without whom I would have had none.



Acknowledgments ix

List of Abbreviations Byron, George Gordon, Baron. Byron’s Letter and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand (volume number given after abbreviation, e.g. BLJ 3) Byron Marchand, Leslie. Byron: A Biography Essay Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding DJiC McGann, Jerome J. Don Juan in Context IHM Reid, Thomas. An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense OT Beattie, James. Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism NTV Berkeley, George. An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision PHK Berkeley, George. Principles of Human Knowledge Treatise Hume, David. A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding

x



BLJ

Note on Texts

xi



Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Byron’s works are taken from the Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980–93), hereafter CPW (where relevant, volume number given after abbreviation, e.g. CPW 3). Quotations from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I & II and Don Juan are cited by canto and stanza number, those from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III by stanza number, those from Lara by canto and line number; all other poems are cited by line number. Manfred is cited by act, scene, and line number.




Introduction Only Fuff-Fuff and Passades: What It Means to Know Byronically

Prepare for rhyme––

In a flight of literary fancy, one might imagine each subject of critical study a Gulliver on the grass, scholars the Lilliputians who explore the great supine body before them. In the case of Lord Byron, this exploration has included a certain lingering about the shriveled right calf, a great deal of reconnaissance in the genital region, and much close investigation of the heart, that seat of love and loyalty – not to mention considerable contemplation of the facial features. Substantially less time has been spent poking about the cranial regions. There, most critics have found only a series of paths too short or too narrow to merit investigation. Indeed, whereas the doctors who autopsied Byron found his brain unusually large physically (Byron 1232 n2), scholars have consistently doubted the skill, size, and subtlety of the intellect housed in that organ. Willis Pratt spoke for many critics of his time when he wrote in 1957 that ‘Byron’s was not a mind that worked with … careful precision; … anything like sustained reasoning was beyond his grasp’ (144). While wincing at its harshness, more recent Romanticists would, one suspects, still largely agree with this assertion. Discussions of Byron’s intellectual contributions to Romanticism remain thin on the ground, and in his Byron’s Dialectic (1993), the one recent book which does analyze the philosophical elements of Byron’s work at length, Terence Hoagwood is able to remark with an assurance that presumes general concurrence, ‘Certainly Byron contributed nothing to philosophical argumentation; he constructed no useful philosophical systems, and there is no evidence that he had any understanding of any philosophical complexities whatsoever’ (89). 1



– English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

I disagree with both Pratt and Hoagwood, and my disagreement forms the basis for what follows. In this study, I contend that in the course of his major works Byron shapes a well thought-out and fully articulated philosophy of knowledge, one with significant practical implications. He arrives at this philosophy by a process of gradual intellectual consideration that begins early in his career and solidifies by means of progressive speculation and testing. To put it simply, as he produces his poetry from 1812 to 1824, Byron comes to believe that stable, objective knowledge or truth does not exist; he progressively arrives at the conclusion that all so-called knowledge is in fact manufactured, subjective belief: it is often accepted as actual knowledge by those who receive it, but it is malleable nonetheless. The poetry Byron writes during these twelve years both works through and demonstrates the development of his thought in this area. He begins his development in the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (CHP), and by the time he writes Don Juan he is a thorough skeptic. To put this in more philosophically accurate terms, terms I will use throughout this book, Byron comes to assert that what is understood as knowledge is not that knowledge which modern philosophers define quite precisely as ‘Whatever is … true … Knowledge must be infallible by definition … it is assumed to be stable across radically varying circumstances,’ but rather what they call ‘knowledge-claims,’ beliefs that, although certainly held by and justified to the individual who holds them, are not true, not infallible (Hendricks 7–8, 13–17). Nor is this all. Even as he comes to see knowledge as merely knowledge-claims, Byron also seeks to show his readers the way in which this version of knowing offers them opportunity and freedom. From a subtle demonstration in Lara to far more obvious announcements in Don Juan, Byron impresses upon his audience that, since knowledge is manufactured and knowing is nothing more than claiming, they can choose to interpret the world in new ways. Thus, they can change both their position in it and the way it runs. Byron never turns his back on the fact that people are entities fully immersed in a real, quotidian existence – as Laurence Lockridge puts it, he has ‘an indefatigable interest in the human fact of things’ (449) – and he is always occupied with the mind and will that might allow humans to change that existence for the better.1 For Byron, individually created knowledge offers the possibility for such change. In the course of this study, I consider at least one work from each stage of Byron’s mature career. For the most part, I have chosen poems traditionally accepted as major: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. A Romaunt,



2 The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge

Cantos I and II (1812), The Giaour (1813), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III (1816), Manfred (1816), and Don Juan (1818–24).2 The exception is Lara, which I discuss in my fourth chapter. This text marks an important step in Byron’s formation of a theory of knowledge; thus, although it is not generally considered as among his most important poems, it is a major work for the subject of this study.3 I do not posit a simple or straightforward path for Bryon’s philosophy. Indeed, far from it: on a number of occasions Byron simply could not advance his thinking, and in the case of Harold’s third canto he seems to have been profoundly bewildered about where he was going or what he actually should – and did – believe. His philosophy, then, does not develop perfectly, nor is the final product perfect: questions still remain. Nonetheless, what I see in Byron’s work is a development of thought, with all the halts, pauses, and irritatingly confusing moments that mark any development. Any piece of literary criticism that seeks to assert that its subject thought or wrote philosophically would be seriously deficient if it did not give at least some sense of the philosophical background from which that subject sprung and the philosophical milieu in which he or she operated. Both in my first chapter and in the course of the chapters that follow it, I have sought to present those philosophers and philosophies that predominated in Byron’s period, and those with which he would have been familiar. At least part of what Byron does in the course of his development is explore and play with canonical philosophers, and where his ideas draw upon or directly reflect philosophical writings, I have drawn attention to that. Nonetheless, this is a book about the development of Byron’s philosophy of knowledge. Although this study makes ample reference to and use of the philosophy and relevant culture of the Romantic and pre-Romantic periods, its goal is to examine Byron’s thought, to analyze deeply and fully the question of what Byronic knowledge looks like, and to study carefully the way in which Byron arrived at his final understanding of what knowledge is and what it might be. Although this book considers a Byron who is fully aware of and influenced by the philosophical conversations and convictions of his day, it is not designed as a work of historicist criticism, nor as source study. Rather, I seek to establish clearly and carefully that Byron fully and consciously worked out a philosophy of knowledge, and I wish to trace this working out in his major poems. I frankly own that my goal here is at least in part to lift Byron out of his time, not to anchor him in it. Malcolm Kelsall has recently argued that Byron’s poetry expresses a political involvement broader than



Introduction 3

simple engagement with the politics of the Romantic period: ‘in poetic utterance … principle itself becomes liberated from the specifics of time and place, acquiring in Byron’s provocative utterance a numinous and transhistorical resonance’ (53).4 It is this resonance that interests me; I seek to suggest some ways in which Byron wrestles with ideas that are as relevant today as they were in the nineteenth century, and to look at his answers to questions that both philosophers and ordinary people continue to struggle over now. A number of previous writers have already gone some way toward this examination. In his Byron as Sceptic and Believer (1938), Edward Marjarum argues that ‘there is no department of thought which by its relationships and ramifications is so representative of [Byron’s] intellectual activity as his ceaseless reflection upon the significance of the traditional beliefs by which man has for ages sought to interpret his experience’ (ix). In the introduction to his The Blind Man Traces the Circle: On the Patterns and Philosophy of Byron’s Poetry, in 1969, Michael Cooke emphasizes an evolving Byronic philosophy in his reference to Byron’s ‘ever more purposive and skillful manipulations of imagery and structure to convey epistemological insights’ (xi–xii).5 Both of these assertions come with caveats, however: before Marjarum makes his bold declaration, he feels it necessary to issue qualifications, describing Byron’s thinking as ‘remarkable more for its vigor rather than its profundity,’ and granting that he ‘was not a profound and original thinker’ (vi, viii). For Cooke, Byron’s ongoing epistemological explorations do not resolve into any definitive view but rather finish, in The Island, in a stance that ‘resembles the time-honored position of charitable ascetism’ (my emphasis); he tacitly admits the unsatisfactory nature of this non-resolution in his wistful rumination, ‘One wonders whether Byron would have further consolidated and articulated this position; certainly its possibilities for poetry could have been more substantially and grippingly given than in The Island’ (212). Starting in the 1980s, when romantic irony began to be a frequent focus of scholarly discussion, Byron’s skeptical outlook became something of a vogue topic, but approaches to it remained problematic. In her ground-breaking study English Romantic Irony, Anne Mellor calls Byron ‘the finest literary exponent’ of romantic irony, and Don Juan the ‘locus classicus of English romantic irony’ (3, 31). In that poem, she argues, Byron was able to reconcile the Calvinist side of his nature, so much on display in the poems, with the sardonic wit of his letters, producing an epic that joyously adumbrates the simultaneously destructive and reconstructive chaos that is the hallmark of English




romantic irony.6 In his Intervals of Inspiration, which appeared eight years after English Romantic Irony, Donald Reiman joins Mellor in asserting that Juan is the text in which Byron at last found his skeptical voice. For him, however, the source of this outlook is very different from the one Mellor finds: it is Byron’s sense of himself as a ‘universal outsider.’ This leads him to employ ‘Academic or Pyrrhonist Skepticism to distance himself from the creeds that compete for his allegiance,’ which in turn leads to a view of the world that acknowledges the relativism of all its creeds and beliefs (309–43). Again, Juan is the definitive text, the one in which the turn toward understanding relativism at last occurs. For both Mellor and Reiman, then, Don Juan is the terminus post quem of Byron’s poetic philosophy. For each (although less so in Reiman’s case) it is as if the poem emerges whole and without precedent or precursor in Byron’s oeuvre. But the outlook each finds in the poem seems too complete to have occurred so abruptly – in between poems, as it were. Both a commitment to fecund chaos and a resolution to shuck off the unsatisfactory shackles of imposed coherence are not to be entered into lightly, and Don Juan has sober antecedents and progenitors in Byron’s earlier works. Moreover, both Reiman and Mellor insist on seeing Byron’s outlook as firmly grounded in personal experience, and this too is troubling. For Mellor, the trigger mechanism for Byron’s ascent to romantic ironist was ‘human love […] Byron’s affair with Marianna Segati’ (38), while for Reiman, the impetus to skepticism was ‘irrational forces within him’ to which ‘Byron was so clearly subject … that he inevitably saw the inadequacies of all rationalistic explanations of human behavior’ (308). But the suggestion that he either needed the experience of love (if that is how one can describe his relationship with Segati) to free him up, or all his life merely grunted and sweated under the weary load of ‘irrational forces,’ does a disservice to Byron’s intellect. Seemingly, neither Reiman nor Mellor views Byron as a thinker, a serious underestimation. In the same year as Reiman, Lillian Furst and Frederick Garber also considered Byron’s skeptical-ironic outlook. Both argued for a less personal basis for Byron’s irony; ‘to Byron,’ writes Furst, ‘“what is here” on this earth, as he put it in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (4.cv), is a vast spectacle of incongruences that testify to the uncertainty of all things’ (166), and his representation of the world, and his vision of how it might be comprehended, are reflections of this outlook. Like Reiman, Furst disagrees with Mellor as to the shape and ultimate result of Byron’s romantic irony, finding in it not a rejuvenative tendency but rather an



Introduction 5

open-ended ‘disorder’ that is an accurate reflection of the world as Byron understands it (115). Garber, for his part, treats Byron’s ironic outlook largely as it relates to the construction of self in his works, but he joins Furst and Reiman in concluding that the taste of Byronic irony is resolutely bitter: while in Byron’s works ‘[t]he world’s repeated instability is matched by that potency in consciousness which remakes the whole system, that remaking is ‘only for a while’ (310–11).7 Garber is, however, the first critic to suggest that Byron’s skepticism and irony might have a practical application. As he sees it, Juan is ‘by and about humanized consciousness. That consciousness is humanized in … that it knows all that it cannot do but is devoted to a kind of work that it can do particularly well’ (311–12). This suggestion that Byron’s irony is not merely a mental affect but a realization that is intended to lead to ‘work’ influences my own ideas here, particularly those about Juan. Furthermore, for me, as for Furst, Byron’s view of the world and the philosophy he devises about knowing that world have little to do with his inner state. I have more difficulty, however, with both Furst’s and Garber’s interpretation of this view as a gloomy one, or at least as one that leads Byron into gloom. Like Alan Rawes, I see Byron’s evolving philosophy as leading to a more positive apotheosis (xii). This is not to say that many of Byron’s poems are not themselves gloomy – after all, as David Hume pointed out, philosophizing can be a gloomy business – and I would not argue for a poetByron who is ultimately joyous, or even cheerful (with the carefree overtones that word possesses). But Don Juan seems to me an ample demonstration that for Byron skepticism, and the relativism it engenders, are liberating and empowering; that poem’s deep pleasure in confusion and juxtaposition argue for a view of ‘disorder’ as not only endemic but also fertile.8 In making this argument about Byron’s skepticism, my views come very close to those of Hoagwood (indeed, this entire study owes much to Hoagwood’s book). He argues persuasively for a Byron who was a skeptic – or who at least was skeptical – from a very early point (36–39). Unlike Mellor, Furst, and Rawes, and more firmly than Garber, Hoagwood sees Byron’s skepticism, and his persistent irony, as having some very realworld potential: as he aphoristically phrases it, ‘Possibilities of action are multiplied by the demystification of dogma’ (89). Moreover, even as he discounts Byron’s ability to engage with skepticism intellectually – ‘this conceptual frame functions less as an analytical construct than an intuitive and imaginative mode’ (98–99) – he argues persuasively for a Byron who had cogent skeptical views, and who was aware of his forebears. In all these points I am in agreement with Hoagwood.




My study and approach diverge from Hoagwood’s in some significant ways, however. First, for Hoagwood Byron expresses his thought more by intuition (as the quotation above suggests) than by intellectual design; moreover, his approach to Byron’s thinking openly rejects intentionality (16). My study, on the other hand, assumes a Byron who was an extremely intelligent and thoughtful man, and one whose eventual skeptical stance is deeply analytical, intentional, and considered, albeit simultaneously imaginative. Perhaps more significantly, Hoagwood argues that Byron’s skepticism was total or nearly total from a very early point (38). I see this same skepticism rather as developing, beginning as mistrust of conventional ideas about knowledge and gradually working its way toward complete skepticism. Where Hoagwood posits a belief system that burst fully formed onto the scene, I suggest one that germinates gradually. Most importantly, Hoagwood and I diverge in the purpose of our studies, and in the skepticism of our approaches to Byron’s skepticism. Whereas he seeks to examine ‘the historically specifiable and historically effective conceptual and preconceptual frame within which [Byron’s intended meanings] are … constituted’ (15), I seek to examine the meanings themselves. Moreover, he takes a position that is skeptical even of the possibility of identifying a writing, thinking self that one might label ‘Byron’: in Byron’s Dialectic, to assume ‘the prior and absolute existence of individuals with private personalities’ is a mistake, for ‘any hermenutic that locates a self … as a prime mover outside the fabrications of artifice is … no skeptical discourse at all’ (21–22). I believe that there exist selves anterior to social construction, and I assume in this study that there exists a writing, thinking self that I call Byron. This self is multi-faceted, contradictory and argumentative among itself; it disagrees with its past conclusions and sometimes its present ones; it changes its mind or struggles to understand its own thought; but it nonetheless exists: as Tom Mole puts it, its ‘continuity is assured precisely because it registers [its own] shifts’ (139). Thus, as I freely admit, I do not write skeptical discourse, but rather comment on a monologue of emerging skepticism.9 ‘Skepticism’ itself has always been a loose term, so a little clarification about what precisely it means with reference to Byron might help. Philosophy draws a distinction between skepticism, which ‘questions our cognitive achievements, challenging our ability to obtain reliable knowledge … of ethical matters, of the past, of other minds … and so on,’ and global skepticism, which ‘casts doubt upon all our attempts to seek the truth’ (Hookway 794). Skepticism may be limited to one area of knowing; global skepticism doubts the existence of any truth at all.



Introduction 7

Using these terms, Byron’s eventual philosophy in fact should be termed global skepticism, for he is dubious about the very existence of knowledge. As his works progress they come to suggest that in the final analysis everything short of a very narrow slice of objective experience – ‘that person vanished’ (Lara, II), ‘here is a dead man’ (Don Juan V.34–35) – is the production of an individual mind (although that mind may not be aware that it is producing it). Lockridge has asserted that ‘Byronic authenticity is discovered in his mock-serious display of skeptical, experiential mind as the validating or invalidating source of its own observations and judgments’ (420) but I would argue that ‘mock-serious’ should be erased here. Byron is earnest in his commitment to the mind as source of observation and judgments and, as Lockridge suggests, to his belief that those observations and judgments can thus be taken as valid knowledge-claims. As is often the case, one finds a more delightful representation of this rather severe intellectual stance in one of Byron’s letters. Writing to his friend John Cam Hobhouse about a fleeting sexual involvement of 1818, Byron remarked, ‘there is no liaison only fuff-fuff and passades’ (BLJ 6: 40). This statement neatly manages to demonstrate Byron’s active endorsement – indeed, practice – of individually created knowledge: passade is a word from dressage connected to passado, a fencing term Byron almost certainly intended his friend to think of here, for in fencing parlance it means ‘a thrust’ (‘Passado’). Fuff-fuff, meanwhile, is Byron’s own neologism, apparently designed to capture simultaneously both the main activity and the insignificance of this affair, for ‘fuff’ was used at this time both to describe heavy breathing and as an exclamation of contempt (‘Fuff’).10 More importantly, however, substitute ‘certainty’ for ‘liaison’ and the statement is as accurate a rendition of Byron’s ideas about knowledge as one could hope to find. As the works discussed herein make plain, for him, finally, true knowledge is an impossibility, and what is generally accepted as knowledge is, if not entirely fuff-fuff, certainly nothing more than a series of impotent passados. In an effort to prove this, as I proceed I concentrate almost entirely on Byron’s poetry. Recent criticism has made it plain that Byron’s letters and private prose are worthy subjects of study in their own right, and should be viewed as texts in which Byron presents his thoughts as lucidly and significantly as he does in his poetry. One has only to turn, again, to Hoagwood’s book to see the way in which the letters and journals can augment a reading of the poetry.11 But although Byron was a gifted letter writer and an observant and ruminative journal keeper, he




presented himself to the public as a poet, presented his thoughts and beliefs publicly in the form of poetry, and is thought of today as a poet. For these reasons, my consideration centers on his poetry, although I bring in his more private writings where they are relevant. While I have chosen to focus closely on the poems, I have deliberately chosen not to focus on their author. Some thirty years ago Bernard Blackstone wrote, ‘A good many books on Byron which set out with the best intentions to discuss his poetry in depth have found themselves deflected all too often into the by-ways of biography’ (xi). Little has changed since then. A great deal of current Byron criticism tends to fall back on the facts of his life in order to read his work; as recently as 2004 one could find a scholar asserting, ‘In writing his own story and seeming to live what he wrote, he made it impossible to discuss his works apart from his life’ (Douglass 7). Numerous critical approaches especially relevant to the study of Byron’s works (particularly gender and queer studies) have created awareness of the vital role that biography may play in reaching full understanding of an author’s canon. Furthermore, as my chapters on Childe Harold III and Manfred show, I do feel that Byron’s life and extra-poetical self can play important roles in understanding his work, and I discuss these roles as necessary. But it seems to me that Byron more than any other Romantic has suffered from having his work examined, explained, and excused through his life – as if that life were the only key to everything in that work. For this reason, I have actively avoided bringing in biographical detail unless I consider it absolutely relevant. If I have a particular version of Byron in the forefront of my study, I also have a particular version of his readers. Because my project is concerned with what Byron’s works attempt to tell their audience, it of necessity advances a certain vision of that audience. While it would be unrealistic to imagine Byron’s contemporary readers as all possessing the interest and determination of modern academics, evidence from scholars, as well as from contemporaneous reviews, suggests that the Romantic reading public was more than capable of nuanced, even counterintuitive, readings of Byron’s work.12 The reader assumed in what follows, then, is not the bovine specimen Phillip Martin imagines in his Byron: A Poet Before His Public, ‘predominantly uninformed … voluntarily undiscriminating’ (39), but rather the ‘increasingly engaged’ one of whom Stephen C. Behrendt writes, ‘whose sophistication as readers and critics of what they read was … growing daily.’ This reader would have been alive to Byron’s epistemological manipulations, in full possession of what William St. Clair describes as ‘the freedom … to choose … which passages to give the most attention to, to skip, to argue, to resist, to read against



Introduction 9


When I saw ‘Rimini’ [The Story of Rimini] in MS., I told him that I deemed it good poetry at bottom, disfigured only by a strange style. His answer was, that his style was a system, or upon system, or some such cant; and, when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless. In 1815, he wrote directly to Hunt himself on the same subject, ‘I have not time nor paper to attack your system—which ought to be done— were it only because it is a system’ (BLJ 4: 332; 6: 46). In 1821, in the pamphlet Letter to John Murray Esqre, he fulminated about the title of William Lisle Bowles’s Invariable Principles of Poetry: I do hate that word ‘invariable.’—What is there of human—be it poetry—philosophy—wit, wisdom—science—power—glory—mind— matter—life—or death—which is ‘invariable’? (‘Letter’ 129) What Byron objects to with these comments, however, is not reasoning or careful thought but rather the way in which systems and set modes of thinking (a belief in invariability) close off reasoning and thought. When he writes only two sentences earlier in his letter to Moore that Hunt is ‘spoilt by Christ-Church Hospital and a Sunday newspaper—to say nothing of the Surry Jail, which conceited him into a martyr,’ he shows that what he objects to is Hunt’s adherence to certain set beliefs, inculcated by influences rather than by thinking: he does not object to system in the sense of the laying out of ideas, and the working through them, with considered clarity. Daniel Watkins has written that Byron ‘understood that every system is predicated on a knowable set of assumptions and that systematic analysis



the grain, to be influenced by irrelevancies … to be distracted, to slip into dreams, to disagree but continue reading’ (Behrendt, ‘Romantic Reader’ 99; St. Clair, Reading Nation 5). I am aware that my assertion that Byron deserves to be thought of as a poet with a philosophy is contentious. There are a variety of reasons why the idea of a considered Byronic philosophy has not been entertained before – perhaps willingness to accept at face value Byron’s insistence that he was not intellectually inclined; perhaps ingrained prejudice that decrees that glamor and celebrity – not to mention incest and whoring – do not go hand in hand with profundity. Certainly a large portion of the blame for the lack of belief must rest with Byron himself. Here is a man notoriously and outspokenly against systems of all kinds. Writing to Thomas Moore in 1818, Byron remarked about Leigh Hunt:

must stand or fall according to the viability of those assumptions’ (Social Relations 18). Byron’s objection to systems, I would argue, is an objection to those constructs that do not interrogate their own axioms – that assume rather than question viability. One has only to look at Byron’s comments on religion to see that he sees the value of methodical thinking: ‘I do not know what to believe—which is the devil—to have no religion at all—all sense and senses are against it—but all belief and much evidence is for it—it is walking in the dark over a rabbit warren’ (BLJ 5: 216); ‘A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment—and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct—must be morally wrong—and when the World is at an end—what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?’ (BLJ 9: 45). Of course the reader notices immediately that both these moments of reasoning dissolve into uncertainty, but that does not show a detestation of systematic thought or of systems on the part of their writer, merely a recognition that careful thought and systematic reasoning lead to a negation of any blind, simplistic set of assumptions.13 Hoagwood argues that Byron’s ‘rehearsal of skeptical principles … is the articulation (often a disorderly articulation) of a critical method’ (23). The disorder in Byron’s skepticism is the world’s, not his, however, and when he embraces it, it is in acknowledgment that a true system of thinking can only lead to a repudiation of systems. But let me not insult Byron by ending on system. Rather, let me move back to philosophy and finish, appropriately for a book on this poet, with a bit of exemplary satire. Unsuccessful representations of Byron in films, novels, and plays abound. In his Arcadia (1993), however, Tom Stoppard manages to create one of the few excellent fictionalizations of the poet by the simple expedient of keeping him entirely offstage and putting in his place a number of Byronic substitutes. Set on the fictional English estate Sidley Park in 1809, 1812, and 1993, Arcadia is relevant here not just because Byron is one of its central characters, but because it asks its audience to consider how people determine what they know – indeed, how they determine that they know. In a pivotal scene, the bombastic don Bernard Nightingale, who believes he has discovered evidence proving that Byron killed a man in a duel after sullying both that man’s writing and his wife, reads the paper in which he makes this ‘revelation’ to an audience that includes the highly skeptical mathematician Valentine Coverly: Bernard:

Byron’s letters tell us where he was on April 8th and on April 12th … But on the 10th he was at Sidley Park, as attested by the game book preserved there: ‘April 10th 1809,



Introduction 11


forenoon … Self – Augustus – Lord Byron. Fourteen pigeon, one hare (Lord B.).’ But, as we know now, the drama of life and death at Sidley Park was not about pigeons but about sex and literature. Valentine: Unless you were the pigeon. (II.4)


With his cultivated insouciance and his determination to shock the academic world, Bernard fancies himself a renegade, a Byronic Hero. But it is Valentine who is really the Byronic substitute in this exchange, for it is he who metaphorically voices the poet’s own beliefs. In Byron’s philosophy of knowledge each of us is free to subvert the dominant paradigm, free to fly from the guns of certainty into the open air of possibility. In Byron’s philosophy, each of us is the pigeon.


1

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery… – to Thomas Moore, 1815 In developing his stance on knowledge, Byron engages with one of the ongoing philosophical investigations of his age. In many ways this is unsurprising. Byron was both highly intelligent and highly curious, and the disputes about how and if knowledge could be acquired, with their dependence on evaluation of plausibility, and their appeals to different beliefs about what was obvious and ‘natural,’ would have appealed to his questing mind.1 In addition, the liveliness of most eighteenth-century epistemological investigations – their provocative assertions, their iconoclastic conclusions, the quick wit of many of the philosophers – would have jibed with his own approach and thus appealed to him. Finally, as the quotations in my introduction show, even a cursory investigation of his private writings and letters shows a man interested in questions of knowing throughout his life. Intellectually and temperamentally, then, Byron makes a plausible epistemologist. That Byron knew and engaged with British Enlightenment philosophy from quite early in his adult life is clear from a letter he wrote to Francis Hodgson when he was 23. In it he observes, ‘As to miracles, I agree with Hume that it is more probable men should lie or be deceived, than that things out of the course of nature should so happen,’ as neat a summary of Hume’s conclusion about miracles in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding as one could hope to find (BLJ 2: 97).2 Moreover, according to the reading list he compiled in 1807 during his 13



Philosophies, Skepticism, and Morals: a Background in Enlightenment

last month at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had read ‘Paley, Locke, Bacon, Hume, Berkeley, Drummond, Beattie, and Bolingbroke … Hobbes,’ writers from all sides of past and ongoing epistemological debates.3 The 1816 and 1827 sale catalogues for his library show that he owned Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1772), Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1805), Paley’s Philosophy (1806), Voltaire’s Works (1778), Stewart’s Philosophical Essays (1810), and Smith’s Philosophical Essays (1799), as well as Hume’s Correspondence (1820) (Complete Miscellaneous Prose 5, 236–55). Byron’s formal education was certainly spotty, but his self-education was both broad and deep. Needless to say, a man does not read every book on his shelves,4 but even Byron’s early mature poetry shows his engagement with Enlightenment philosophy. Childe Harold I and II makes use of George Berkeley’s Immaterialism in the course of questioning the link between perception and knowledge, while The Giaour and Lara explore both Berkeley and John Locke extensively as they outline an approach to knowing that is uniquely Byron’s. As Byron’s works progress, so does his thinking, but it always remains involved with the philosophers of his time. By the time he arrives at Don Juan he has developed a theory of knowledge that has worked through elements of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and even the Scottish thinker William Drummond. First among British Enlightenment epistemologists, and the first upon whom Byron clearly draws, is Locke. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) Locke posited an intrinsic connection between reality and the perceiving subject; ‘Ideas … enter [the Mind] by the Senses simple and unmixed,’ Locke wrote. ‘These simple Ideas, the Materials of all our Knowledge, are suggested and furnished to the Mind, only by … two ways, viz. Sensation and Reflection’ (II.ii.§§1–2). To posit such a connection between Mind and Materials opened the door to all kinds of questions about the legitimacy of objective knowing. Although Locke argues that external experiences are needed if the mind is to produce knowledge, his assertion that knowledge depends upon breadth of experience suggests that the subject (and his experiences, or lack thereof) is at least to a large degree responsible for creating his own knowledge. Because knowledge arises through a combination of sense experience and reflection, and because that knowledge is formed only when the mind does something to sense experiences (abstracts, combines, or compares them), the mind is both the progenitor and the limitation of knowledge for Locke. Interestingly, he seems to see this as leading to a subjective discovery that is both empowering and illuminating: ‘For, I think, we may as




rationally hope to see with other Mens Eyes, as to know by other Mens Understandings. So much as we ourselves consider and comprehend of Truth and Reason, so much we possess of real and true Knowledge’ (I.iv.§22). Thus, for Locke, understanding discovered by the perceiver him- or herself will always be closer to ‘real and true Knowledge.’ This is a conclusion that Byron will endorse wholeheartedly in his later works. Locke’s model of the knowing mind suggests two conclusions that Byron’s works uphold. The first is that the mind plays a role in producing the ‘Ideas’ it holds. The second is that because the mind is capable of being highly changeable (Tuveson 27), so, perhaps, is the knowledge it produces. In Childe Harold I and II, Byron joins his culture’s arbiters of taste in endorsing Locke’s most basic assertions about the construction of ideas. As he proceeds, however, he comes to lay much more stress on the mind’s changeability. But both of Locke’s conclusions raise difficulties, not the least of which is the question, if men know only their own impressions, can they ever know the actuality of the world, and how can they be sure if (or that) they do? This question was addressed by the one modern philosopher Byron openly engages with in his works (in Juan XI.1), George Berkeley. In his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), Berkeley takes Locke’s suggestion that ‘Things, the Mind contemplates … are none of them, besides it self, present to the Understanding … [and therefore] ’tis necessary that something else, as a Sign or Representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: And these are Ideas’ (Essay IV.xxi.§4),5 and follows it to a bolder assertion: that ‘We see only the appearances, and not the real qualities of things. What may be the extension, figure, or motion of anything really and absolutely, or in itself, it is impossible for us to know, but only the proportion or the relation they bear to our sense’ (PHK §87). For Berkeley, perception makes existence, hence the famous esse est percipi. Hence also his assertion that objects exist only as the mind perceives them. Since shape, extension, and indeed all primary and secondary qualities can change depending on the status of the perceiver (where he stands, what his body temperature is, whether he is color blind), all those qualities are mind-dependent: sensible properties are merely mental perceptions, and like all mental productions can vary widely (PHK §§30–87). Berkeley further argues that objects are simply bundles of properties (he believes all perceivers have only



A Background in Enlightenment 15

knowledge of the properties associated with an object, not with the substance of the object itself), and thus he can complete his syllogism by asserting that all objects are simply ideas: ‘For what are … Objects but the things we perceive by Sense, and what, I pray you, do we perceive besides our own Ideas and Sensations?’ (PHK §4). Berkeley does not wish to suggest that objects are merely products of our minds; he wishes rather to suggest that all objects are grasped and comprehended only through thought. Objects do not exist only in the mind, but they exist only for the mind: ‘“esse est percipi” … amounts to no more than that; what is perceived necessarily exists for the mind that perceives it, but not necessarily within that mind’ (Stoneham 142). It is this aspect of Berkeleyan Immaterialism that finds the clearest echo in Byron’s own thinking. By giving perception, sensation, and ideas the central role he does, Berkeley suggests that sensible objects can only be experienced, discussed, or dealt with as they affect a mind; he implies that, whether objects have objective existence or not, they can only be comprehended subjectively. As we will see, in his earlier works Byron makes a similar argument, not just about objects but also about meaning. In Childe Harold I and II, and to a lesser extent The Giaour, he adheres strongly to the assumptions of Immaterialism, albeit simultaneously extending them. Berkeley meant his philosophy to refute both skepticism and atheism, and it is therefore deeply ironic that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was both linked to and overshadowed by the skepticism of David Hume. Berkeley was understood to be the gateway, albeit unwittingly, to Humean doubt: ‘The Bishop of Cloyne had that warm concern for religious and moral principles which became his order: yet the result of his inquiry was, a serious conviction, that … the belief of material substances, and of abstract ideas, are the chief causes of all our errors in philosophy,’ wrote Thomas Reid; Hume ‘proceeds upon the same principles, but carries them to their full length; and as the Bishop undid the whole material world, this author, upon the same grounds, undoes the world of spirits, and leaves nothing in nature but ideas and impressions’ (IHM Intro §5). Indeed, one can easily trace the connection between Berkeley and Hume, not least because Hume often alludes to and adapts Berkeley’s arguments about objects and perception.6 Interestingly, in the case of Byron’s thought the path from Immaterialism to skepticism seems to have been precisely, if not smoothly, followed. The first of his major works show him matching and exploring Berkeley’s conclusions, while his middle and later poems show a closer and closer affinity with the work of Hume. Throughout, he retains close ties to





Colour, figure, motion, extension and the like, considered only as so many sensations in the mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or images, referred to things or archetypes existing without the mind, then are we involved all in scepticism … All this scepticism follows, from our supposing a difference between things and ideas, and that the former have a subsistence without the mind, or unperceived. It were easy to dilate on this subject, and show how the arguments urged by sceptics in all ages, depend on the supposition of external objects. (PHK §87)7 Much later, Hume’s most virulent public enemy, James Beattie, refused to take Berkeley at his (admittedly sophistic) word, arguing that although Berkeley had written ‘to banish scepticism,’ his use by later authors proved that his ‘system’ led to it, ‘and if a machine disappoint its inventor so far as to produce effects contrary to those he wished, intended, and expected; may we not, without breach of charity, conclude, that he did not perfectly understand his plan?’ (OT 312). Byron’s thinking, too, seems to have grasped that Immaterialism suggests the inevitability of skepticism, although the reaction to this displayed in his works is not Beattie’s virulence but relaxed acceptance of the progression. Hume’s stance, the stance toward which Byron moves, is at first glance quite easy to sum up. In the Treatise Concerning Human Nature (1739/40) and to a somewhat lesser degree in its redaction, the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1777), Hume advances the belief that people can know almost nothing – indeed, nothing at all, if one accepts his assertion that the senses give no access to an actual outside world, but only to a perceiver’s impressions of that world. For Hume, as for Locke, ‘knowledge’ is a technical term; it means ‘the perception of agreement or disagreement between ideas.’ What is usually called knowledge he seems to put under the term ‘probability’: judgment concerning matters of fact. To Hume, however, most of these judgments are flawed, because they are based on the relation between cause and effect, and that relation itself does not, in fact, exist outside the human mind: ‘this connexion, tie, or energy lies merely in ourselves, and is nothing but that determination of



Locke – but then, so did Berkeley and Hume. Berkeley’s insistence that objective perception can be reduced to sensation and bundle theory does seem to push its readers willy nilly into the area of skepticism, a risk Berkeley himself appears to have recognized and attempted to defuse by connecting materiality, rather than immateriality, with doubt:


When I reflect on the natural fallibility of my judgment, I have less confidence in my opinions, than when I only consider the objects concerning which I reason, and when I proceed still farther, to turn the scrutiny against every successive estimation I make of my faculties, all the rules of logic require a continual diminution and at last a total extinction of belief and evidence. (I.iv.§1) Like Locke’s model of the knowing mind, this extract suggests two conclusions. The first is that the mind may test and investigate its own determinations, finding them false if the investigation indicates so. This in turn suggests that knowing is a potentially controllable act. The mind may alter its opinions, and if the reflection is conscious enough, the alteration may be equally conscious: what one knows may be actively altered if one is determined and rigorous enough. Byron will make these extensions of Hume cornerstones of his final theory of knowledge. While Byron may have come to believe Hume’s assertions of dubiety, the philosopher’s contemporaries in Scottish philosophy were not equally convinced. Skepticism is troubling not because it causes us to doubt the world but because it reveals to us the flaws in our certainty of the world,8 and it was precisely this aspect of Hume’s philosophy that exercised his opponents, and that provoked the reaction best expressed in the works of Reid.9 Reid felt that ‘Hume’s sceptical System is all built upon a wrong & mistaken Account of the intellectual Powers of Man, so it can onely be refuted by giving a true Account of them’ (MS of IHM). Reid set out to give this account in his Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), in the process becoming the founder of the Common Sense school of philosophy and earning a place at the forefront



the mind, which is acquir’d by custom, and causes us to make a transition from an object to its usual attendant.’ Moreover, because causality is, in fact, inference, any real knowledge or certainty also does not exist, ‘For … the understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life’ (I.iv.§7). In Robert Lance Snyder’s words, ‘Humean analysis … disallows any transcendence of one’s experience and reduces everything to the conjunctive principle of psychological association’ (23). For Hume, most judgment is based on lack of rigor. People produce expectation and call it certainty, and this is the result of their own laziness and carelessness. Indeed, Hume seems to suggest that skepticism is the natural result of intellectual examination:

of the Scottish Enlightenment. Like any educated Englishman of his era, Byron was thoroughly imbued with the ideas of that Enlightenment and thus with Reid’s ideas (albeit as filtered through an English education and an anglicized upbringing), so Reid’s ideas were familiar to him. Reid held that because our senses are designed by God, they are trustworthy (Brookes xv). For him, belief in existence, of objects and sensations, is simply a matter of basic logic. The fact that people experience is evidence in and of itself that what is experienced exists: ‘He must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me, that would reason me out of my reason and senses’ (IHM I.§8). Moreover, the consistency of sense experience is evidence both that objects exist and of at least sensible cause and effect: ‘How do they [the senses] all constantly and invariably suggest the conception and belief of external objects, which exist whether they are perceived or not? … Not by custom, surely; not by reasoning, or comparing ideas, but by the constitution of our nature’ (IHM VI.§xii). Reid believed that we do have innate conceptions, those ‘primary Notions’ dismissed by Locke (Essay I.ii.§1),10 and he moreover believed that our logic and ‘good sense’ (VII) suggest to us that we ought to trust our senses as reliable until they are proven otherwise – and that since there is no evidence to suggest that they are not trustworthy, we should trust them: ‘I am resolved to take my own existence, and the existence of other things, upon trust; and to believe that snow is cold, and honey sweet’ (I.§vii).11 In other words, where Reid and Hume differ practically is on the question of whether we have any ‘justificatory grounds’ (Vernier 19) for believing the evidence of our senses – believing our ‘common sense.’12 For Reid skepticism is not the logical outlook it is for Hume; it is, rather, something close to madness: ‘every operation of the sense, in its very nature, implies judgment or belief, as well as simple apprehension … Such original and natural judgments are therefore part of that furniture which nature hath given to the human understanding … A remarkable deviation from them, arising from a disorder in the constitution, is what we call lunacy’ (VII). The difference is that for Hume skepticism was a commonsense stance based on empirical observation, whereas for Reid it flew in the face of both such sense and such observation. One of the most interesting steps Byron’s works take is to discover a middle path that allows both philosophers to be right, an amalgamation in which the voice of skepticism is the voice of common sense. It would not be quite accurate to say that Byron is the only Romanticera writer to attempt this synthesis, for in the early and mid-nineteenth century something similar was attempted by the Scottish philosopher




Thomas Brown. A doctor and a poet, Brown also wrote something of a defense of Hume, arguing that his ideas on causality were not antireligious. This work, first published as a pamphlet in 1806, is best known in its book form, Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, which appeared in 1818 and was immensely popular: there, Brown ‘argues against the notion that there are efficient causes in nature, or anywhere else, hidden from view … he concurs with Hume in arguing that neither reason nor experience can ground the belief in the uniformity of nature that makes induction possible’ (‘Brown’). Despite this, the book can only be called ‘something of a defense,’ because, although Brown largely agrees with Hume’s assertions about causation, he does also give weight to Reid’s arguments and attempt to show how they might be reconciled with Hume’s, or at the very least how they misrepresent them (5–6). Although the Inquiry appeared too late to have an influence on the early part of Byron’s career, it was hugely popular, and may well have influenced his final philosophical conclusions.13 For all his peace-making, Brown ultimately sided more with Hume than with Reid; Reid, for his part, was a gentleman philosopher, and as a result his response to Hume is measured, an approach that provoked mystified anger in his disciple James Beattie.14 Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism (1770) was a wholesale condemnation of Hume’s Treatise, designed to refute Hume’s ideas with the contempt Beattie felt they and their author deserved. On Truth was hysterical and inaccurate: Roger Robinson has argued that it demonstrates that Beattie either ‘never fully understood’ Hume’s writings, ‘or even that he deliberately misunderstood them’ (xxxvi), and Hume himself called Beattie ‘that bigotted silly Fellow, Beattie’ (Letters I: 301). Nonetheless, it was a roaring success, and its author became a celebrity (Bormann 404); while Hume’s Treatise gathered dust on the shelves, Beattie was fêted across Britain and Europe. Beattie’s complaint against Hume was both simple and sweeping. As far as Beattie was concerned, Every doctrine is dangerous that tends to discredit the evidence of our senses, external or internal, and to subvert the original instinctive principles of human belief. In this respect the most unnatural and inconsequential absurdities, such as the doctrine … of perceptions without a percipient [a reference to Hume’s theory of identity] are far from being harmless … Alas! What is become of the magnificence of external nature, and the wonders of intellectual





In contrast to Hume’s skepticism, Beattie followed Reid in asserting that humans can and do know truth constitutionally, simply because it accords with rational sense. But Beattie took a much stronger stance than Reid: ‘all that we know of truth and falsehood is that our constitution determines us in some cases to believe, in others to disbelieve; and that to us is truth which we feel that we must believe; and that to us is falsehood which we feel that we must disbelieve.’ He further averred that ‘Truth is that which the constitution of rational nature determines rational beings to believe: or it may be defined, the conformity of propositions with the nature of things. A definition of it is, indeed, unnecessary; for every man knows what he means when he says of one affirmation, that is true; and of another, that is not true’ (OT 2.1.2; Elements 2.4.2). Contemporary critics of Hume all took him to task on one or more of the same four grounds: they drew attention to the implications of skepticism; they pointed out the dire religious ramifications of his views; they mocked them as incredible; and they alleged a natural human need to believe certain things, things Hume undermined (Popkin 66). While Beattie’s attack encompasses all of these – ‘Perhaps our modern sceptics are ignorant, that, without the belief of a God, and the hope of immortality, the miseries of human life would often be insupportable’ (526–27) – he also spoke out of a genuine conviction that Humean skepticism was built on inherently flawed ground:15 If [Hume] or his admirers can prove, that there is a possibility of expressing [his ‘system’] in words which do not imply a contradiction, I will not call it nonsense. If he or they can prove, that it is compatible with any one acknowledged truth in philosophy, in morals, in religion natural or revealed, I will not call it impious. If he or they can prove, that it does not arise from common facts misrepresented, and common words misunderstood, I shall admit that it may have arisen from accurate observation, candid and liberal inquiry, perfect knowledge of human nature, and the enlarged views of true philosophic genius. (OT 281–82) Even such specious reasoning was lost in the furore of opinions that followed Beattie and coalesced into late eighteenth-century opinion of Hume. One sees the flavor of these in George Campbell’s ‘The Happy



energy, the immortal beauties of truth and virtue, and the triumphs of good conscience! (OT 523, 281)


Influence of Religion on Civil Society, a Sermon Preached at the Assizes at Aberdeen, Sunday, May 23, 1779’:

But more private commentators also expressed horror at views of ‘the Great Infidel’ (Boswell 220), and these give us a useful glimpse of how Hume, at least, was understood in the period surrounding Byron’s youth. To the public, Berkeley seems to have been a kind of misguided eccentric. As a person he appears to have been held in high esteem, and his status as a bishop softened responses to his philosophy, as Reid’s comment shows.16 Hume, proclaimed unbeliever and one who dismissed the notion of objective morality, had no such protection, and responses to his philosophy colored opinions of his more mainstream works, as well.17 One early reviewer of the History suggested that Hume’s stance on religion ‘is far from such as becomes a gentleman, and may, we apprehend, prejudice his reputation even as a historian.’ Private readers were less delicate in expressing their opinions. One Hanna Hume (unrelated) condemned to her daughter Hume’s supposed desire ‘to overturn natural & revealed religion & all morality & to establish atheism … He says if you pretend to know or believe anything then you are fools & then adds as impudently as absurdly that he knows with the utmost certainty that his own opinions are true. You will doubt whether he is mad or wicked.’ George Ridpath, a minister in Berwickshire, thought Hume’s Natural History of Religion ‘entertaining … but its tendency is very bad.’ One anonymous reader asserted in private writings in the late mid-century, ‘The sentiments he [Hume] inspires, is a contempt for Human nature – indignation – rancor – & painful feelings of the Heart, without one Ray or balancing Hope, or Sublime consolation.’ Speaking to his fellow members of the Perth Literary and Antiquarian Society at the century’s end, Reverend James



Let it not be pretended, that there is no danger from the reasonings of the sceptic, because these are far above the comprehension of vulgar understandings. For those men will fondly adopt the conclusion who are incapable of apprehending aught of the premises … And if once our faith is subverted, is any so blind as to imagine, that religion will fall alone? Can her disgrace fail to be accompanied by that of virtue or good manners? In such a general ruin—what will be safe? Can we be vain enough to imagine,—that our laws and liberties, or any part of the constitution, will long survive? The subject is too full of horror to expatiate on. (3)


After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz and Hartley, and could find in neither of them an abiding place for my reason, I began to ask myself: is a system of philosophy, as different from mere history and historic classification, possible? … I was for a while disposed to answer … in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect, and to classify. But I soon felt that human nature itself fought up against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did I find that the scheme [that is, simply observation, collection, and classification] taken with all its consequences and cleared of all its inconsistencies was not less impracticable than contra-natural … How can we make bricks without straw? Or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by occasion of experience; but the very facts so learnt force us inward on the antecedents, that must be pre-supposed in order to render experience itself possible. (79) If this seems to put Coleridge firmly in the camp of those who cleave to a conviction that some mental attributes are innate, his later remarks in the Biographia mark him out as bearing those prejudices against Hume that earlier readers expressed: ‘There are those among the judges of “English metaphysicians” [philosophers] … whose “prejudices” are … formidable, inasmuch as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles, which had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious tenets defended by Hume, Priestley and the



Scott warned against ‘the false philosophy … adopted by some writers in our own country.’ In her 1806 commonplace book, one Elizabeth Rose condemned what she called ‘modern sceptics,’ but since this condemnation occurs in a section entitled ‘Of Mr Hume’s Philosophy – From Dr. Beattie’s Essay on Truth,’ one can be pretty sure which modern skeptic she means: ‘Do they with sacrilegious hands attempt to violate this last refuge of the miserable, & rob them of the only comfort that had survived the ravages of misfortune malice & tyranny! … Ye traitors to human kind, ye murderers of the human soul, how can ye answer for it to your own hearts.’18 Romantic responses to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume are difficult to locate,19 but one that bridges the gap between public and private is the opinion expressed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria. There, Coleridge describes with typical prolixity a kind of instinctive dismissal of the first two:

French fatalists or necessitarians’ (158). On the evidence of these comments, at least, it would seem not much had changed in fifty years.20 As Elizabeth Rose’s extract (which draws heavily on Beattie) makes plain, a goodly portion of such responses (although presumably not Coleridge’s) were based not on reading Hume but on reading those who wrote against him (Towsey 107). For the purposes of this study it is important to make a number of observations about these antagonistic primary readers. The first is that Hume’s opponents often read him wrong – not surprisingly, they often read him wrong in precisely those areas where reading him wrong would raise the most alarm. Most elementally, they accused him of Pyrrhonian skepticism, in the face of Hume’s own description of Pyrrhonism as ‘excessive scepticism’ and his arguments in favor of mitigated skepticism (Enquiry XII.§iii).21 In addition, underlying many of their attacks was the conviction that Humean skepticism was a demonstration of almost Satanic pride. Hume himself insisted that ‘Modesty and Humility, with regard to the Operations of our Natural Faculties, is the result of Scepticism’ (Letter 116); despite this, many if not most of his opponents attributed to him a ‘diabolical’ inellectual arrogance (Towsey 106). Such misreadings matter perhaps incidentally because one hears an echo of them in Byron’s complaint that he ‘did not expect that because I doubted the immortality of Man—I should be charged with denying ye existence of a God.—It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves … that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be overrated’ (BLJ 3: 64). They matter significantly because they, and the resulting inaccurate comprehension of Hume by many readers of the period, make it plain that such flawed comprehension was the result of sloppy, or perhaps even determinedly prejudiced, reading. Given Berkeley’s own obscurities, misreading him is an easy matter, and Don Juan (as we will see) shows that Byron either did or did not do it, but misreading Hume (whose style was much admired even by his detractors22) is a matter of inattention. This in turn means that a clear-headed individual reader can quite easily read Hume’s works differently from the way his contemporaries did. In other words, the fact that Hannah Hume and James Beattie (and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) saw Hume as a Pyrrhonian menace does not mean that George Gordon Byron would perforce do the same. More widely, it is worth pointing out that as much as the Common Sense philosophers and Hume disagreed, in certain ways they reached similar conclusions. Sir James Steuart pointed out that Beattie’s ‘truth’ looked very much like simple assertion (not to say perception), declar-





ing that ‘Beattie’s immutable truth is nothing more than fluctuating opinion’ (quoted in Robinson xxxiii), while Joseph Priestley brusquely declared that Beattie’s

a reading that brings Beattie perilously close to the looseness of skepticism, and even closer to Immaterialism. In a famous 1812 conversation, the polymath James Mackintosh remarked to Thomas Brown that ‘on the question of the existence of the external world Reid and Hume “differed more in words than opinion.”’ ‘“Yes,” Brown replied, “Reid bawled out, We must believe in an outward world; but added in a whisper, We can give no reason for our belief. Hume cries out, We can give no reason for such a notion; and whispers, I own we cannot get rid of it”’ (quoted in Strawson 15). In fact, a careful reading of Reid and Hume reveals one way in which the two men do not cancel each other out but rather offer an opportunity for a canny synthesis. Reid encourages his readers to use their own ‘good sense,’ but this sense can be used to be skeptical of accepted wisdom. Indeed, Reid himself implies as much when he writes that ‘It must require … great caution, and great application of mind, for a man that is grown up in all the prejudices of education, fashion, and philosophy, to unravel his notions and opinions, till he finds out the simple and original principles of his constitution’ (I.§2). It would seem that this unraveling and eradication of prejudices must begin with a kind of skepticism: a person of ‘great application of mind’ can use his own common sense to test received wisdom and, where it is found lacking, to dismiss it. This model of ‘skeptical common sense’ is typical in Byron, where the voice of common sense almost always speaks questioningly, contradicting, qualifying, altering. Perhaps less pleasingly, one also finds a similarity between Beattie’s method of thinking and Byron’s. Roger Robinson has pointed out that much of Beattie’s objection to Hume lay in the fact that skepticism was based on hypothesis: ‘Where, in Beattie’s view, the science of the human mind had gone wrong, starting with Descartes, followed by Locke and Berkeley, and culminating in Hume, was to work with speculation and



doctrine appears to be entirely subversive of all truth; since, speaking agreeably to it, all that we can ever say is, that certain maxims and propositions appear to be true with respect to ourselves, but how they may appear to others we cannot tell; and as to what they are in themselves, which alone is, strictly speaking, the truth, we have no means of judging at all; for we can only see with our own eyes, and judge by our own faculties (51)

hypothesis rather than natural observation.’ One sees something of this in the snappish observation in On Truth that ‘I shall be told, that many of the controversies in metaphysics are merely verbal; and the errors proceeding from them of so abstract a nature, that philosophers run little risk … of being influenced by them in practice’ (513). Beattie, Robinson writes, ‘had a particular aversion to “systems” of a hypothetical kind’ (x). Perhaps Byron’s reading in the Scottish Enlightenment affected his opinion of abstract thinking and assumption as well as his knowledge base. One more philosopher bears mention. More than thirty years after Beattie’s book appeared, its ideas – along with those of nearly every other philosopher – were attacked by the Scottish philosopher and politician William Drummond in his Academical Questions (1805). Drummond, as a follower of Hume, was naturally a philosophical enemy of Reid, but he was also a sternly rigorous interrogator of all philosophies. Even Francis Jeffrey seems to have been cowed by his approach, writing in his review that ‘The subjects of his investigation are so various, his criticisms so unsparing, and his conclusions so hostile to every species of dogmatism, that we have been sometimes tempted to think, that he had no other view in this publication, than to expose the weakness of human understanding, and to mortify the pride of philosophy’ (164).23 Academical Questions was the only book Drummond had published by 1807, the year in which Byron includes Drummond’s name on his reading list, and certainly there is a good deal in it that calls up Byron. To begin with, Drummond changes the philosophical stakes by suggesting that skepticism is the logical outlook of the sophisticated man: ‘In proportion as men are rude, uncultivated, and uncivilized, they are determined in their opinions, bold in their presumptions, and obstinate in their prejudices. When they begin to doubt, it may be concluded, they begin to be refined’ (39). Moreover, he sees no contradiction between philosophy and sociability; ‘why should it be imagined,’ he asks, ‘that the mind grows severe, as it becomes enlightened, or that knowledge of man unfits us for the society of mankind?’ (v). Drummond sketches a portrait of the skeptic as urbane intellectual, one whose doubts and queries mark him out as a cut above – as ‘refined’ suggests – even as they do not deprive him of his bonhomie. For Byron, as lively in company as he was pensive in private – ‘I … am … a facetious companion, well to do with those with whom I am intimate, and … loquacious and laughing,’ he wrote to Thomas Moore (BLJ 5: 186) – such an image would have had powerful attractions.





The contradictions in our reasonings are as numerous and various, as in our characters and conduct … Let us therefore consider, how often we deny assertions, founded upon what others believe they know to be true … Let us recollect, that some, perhaps all, of us have changed our opinions, after having had an intimate conviction, that we clearly perceived what we asserted. Locke and even Des-Cartes himself, were convinced that there is no colour in the grass, and no heat in the fire. Malbranche [sic] and Berkeley denied the existence of a material world, Hume said, he did not see the real table, while he surveyed that, which others have generally taken for it. These were all grave philosophers; and yet if you were to state their opinions as your own, many honest persons would conclude, from what they would believe to be a most distinct perception, that you were gone wrong in the head. (145–47) There is much here that calls Byron’s poetry to mind – not merely the delight in argument and the crisp upending in the final sentence, but also the sardonic reasoning and the writing’s pleasurable mingling of erudition and wit. If Drummond added little to philosophy as a philosopher, he added much as its questioner. Moreover, he offered an admirable approach to knowledge and the world in his conviction that ‘[e]very man, who is in the habit of employing his reason, must wish it to be satisfied about the objects of his belief. It is necessary upon all speculative points, to withhold assent, until we be led to give it by a process of reasoning, which is clear to the understanding’ (36). This belief, along with



Furthermore, as Jeffrey’s description suggests, Drummond’s approach is marked by the query, rather than the assertion: ‘It belongs not to me to decide,’ he announces when considering the materialists, for example, ‘how the materialist is to evade the difficulties, which I urge against his system. I must still ask, what becomes of his first principles, and of his universal axioms, if he admit a contradiction to them in any instance?’ Drummond denies nothing, but he doubts everything, and he is frank about the inadequacies of human comprehension, asserting that ‘all human knowledge is obscure and imperfect … the intellectual vision of man is dim and clouded.’ What is more, he is a thoroughgoing sensationalist, with an apparent absolute conviction (perhaps the only conviction he allows to be absolute) that ‘my perceptions determine every attitude I bestow’ (391–2, 411–12, 97). For Drummond, knowing is always subjective, always variable, and always suspect, as he shows in his argument against Descartes’s ‘all that is clearly and distinctly perceived is true’:

Drummond’s tendency to challenge every knowledge-claim he encounters, finds practical application again and again in Byron’s poetry, where he, ‘born for opposition,’ wars ‘– at least in words – … with all who/War with Thought’ (Don Juan XV.22, IX.24). Of course, all these philosophers deal with objects when they consider perceptions, not with the world of meaning and truth that is Byron’s concern. Still, many of them do also consider the question of whether the perceived world might be accurately represented in words, and what risks are involved in moving perception into expression. For Locke, there seems to be an inherent slippage between reality and the words in which people express it: ‘Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing but the Ideas in the mind of him that uses them … because Words are many of them learn’d, before the Ideas are known, for which they stand: Therefore some, not only Children, but Men, speak several words no otherwise than Parrots do’ (III.ii.§§2–7). Berkeley’s relationship with words is deeply problematic, a puzzle perhaps best demonstrated when, in the New Theory of Vision, he requests that the reader perform a bizarre anti-linguistic feat: for language being accommodated to the common notions and prejudices of men, it is scarce possible to deliver the naked and precise truth without great circumlocution, impropriety, and (to an unwary reader) seeming contradictions; I do therefore once for all desire whoever shall think it worth his while to understand what I have written concerning vision, that he would not stick in this or that phrase, or manner of expression, but candidly collect my meaning from the whole sum and tenor of my discourse, and laying aside the words as much as possible, consider the bare notions themselves … (§120) For Hume, too, language is often a demonstration of accepted thoughtlessness; in the Abstract of his Treatise, speaking of himself in the third person, he explains his method of evaluating terminology: when he ‘suspects that any philosophical term has no idea annexed to it (as is too common) he always asks, from what impression that pretended idea is derived? And if no impression can be produced, he concludes that the term is altogether insignificant’ (129). Most interestingly, Reid views words, particularly written words, as largely inadequate conduits for meaning: the signs that are naturally expressive of our thoughts may, I think, be reduced to these three kinds: modulations of the voice, gestures,





Reid suggests that the moment meaning is articulated it becomes inaccurate.24 This is something that Byron, too, comes to suspect. Indeed, this question of the synaptic gap between what is and what is expressed, and the difference the latter makes to the former, is central to Byron’s thought. One finds it not only in his assertion that ‘Words are things’ in Don Juan (an observation that takes on a different significance when considered in light of Locke’s remark about the immediate signification of words), but also in an investigation of the link between language and meaning as early as both The Giaour and Lara, where words become reality. In Byron’s works one can see bodied forth the impact that, Gavin Budge avers, the British ‘counter-Enlightenment’ had on issues of rhetoric (28–29). The poetry of the Romantic period is known for its philosophical engagements, and so it is not surprising to find Byron making use of philosophy. But it is perhaps unexpected to find him engaging with the philosophy of the British Enlightenment, rather than with the German thought that appealed to Wordsworth and Coleridge, or the French philosophes so associated with skepticism and revolution. The reason he does not use the former may be simple: Byron neither read nor spoke German, and he didn’t much care for the one German philosopher he met, Wilhelm von Schlegel. He certainly does make use of French philosophers – both Pierre Bayle and Michel de Montaigne exert a strong influence over his writing, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a central symbol in Childe Harold III – but Budge has cogently argued that Romanticists should place greater emphasis on the influence of English empiricist philosophy on Romantic authors (18), and in the case of Byron this seems especially valid.25 A good deal of the eighteenth-century writing and controversy about skepticism originated in Aberdeen, where Byron lived until he was 10, and where he received his early education. In addition, the British Enlightenment, and the Scottish Enlightenment, were lively and central concerns in Britain during Byron’s youth, as his reading list makes plain, and a good deal closer to home than French and certainly German philosophical discussion. Byron is of course the most cosmopolitan of the male Romantic poets, but certain attributes – his common sense, his clear-eyed shrewdness – suggest an affinity with more British and Scottish ways of approaching philosophy in the period.



and features … Is it not a pity that the refinements of a civilized life, instead of supplying the defects of natural language, should root it out, and plant in its stead dull and lifeless articulations of unmeaning sounds, or the scrawling of insignificant characters? (VII)

As for why Byron focused his investigations on the question of knowledge, there are, I think, two answers. Temperamentally and intellectually he was a questioner and a lover of controversy – ‘I … / liked poetic war to wage … / As boys love rows, my boyhood liked a squabble’ (Don Juan IV.98–99) – and the investigation of knowledge in the early nineteenth century demanded querying and invited controversy. At the same time, as the quotations from his Detached Thoughts in my introduction show, he was inclined to engage with questions that required reconsiderations of accepted doxa or careful thought about how and why those accepted truths came to be accepted. Any investigation of the process of knowing necessarily involves such reconsideration and such thought. Finally, I think he was simply interested in the issue of how and why men acquire knowledge. His political leanings, his experiences in vastly different cultures as his life progressed, his early experiences of himself as intrinsically divided – English and Scottish, poor and noble, fat and thin, to name but a few – would all prompt engagement with such a question: reading in epistemology would tempt that engagement further. Re-examining his works in light of the philosophers here discussed reveals a perhaps surprising Byron. This is a writer informed by and set firmly in a long line of thinkers, reacting to and interacting with them. Certainly Berkeley’s Immaterialism and Hume’s skepticism are the most obvious influences. But one also finds Byron echoing Locke’s conviction that ‘[God] has given [men] a mind that can reason, without being instructed in methods of syllogizing; the understanding is not taught to reason by these rules; it has a native faculty to perceive the coherence or incoherence of its ideas, and can range them right, without any such perplexing repetitions’ (IV.xvii.§4), and Reid’s belief that ‘original and natural judgments are … part of the furniture which nature hath given to the human understanding’ in his persistent insistence that each man has the ability to determine for himself. Furthermore, one sees the influence of Drummond in his blend of urbanity and profundity, as well as his determination to question and undermine rather than to answer. Meanwhile, if one recognizes in Beattie precisely the sort of commentator that Byron mocked, one also finds in him an unexpected precursor to Byron’s own concrete approach, and an inverted influence – something to work against rather than for. Byron did not always read philosophy in canonical ways; his reactions to Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Reid in particular can differ from the usual and result in unexpected conclusions. Nonetheless, however iconoclastic his engagement was, it was present. Both






by reading for himself and by experiencing and gaining access to ideas because they were present in his cultural, social, and intellectual circles, Byron drew upon a remarkably fecund field of thought that preceded and swirled about him. The influences were many and varied; the ways in which he iterates, refigures, and advances upon them are his own.


2

I deny nothing, but doubt everything. – Byron to Francis Hodgson, 4 December 1811 Although he himself suggests otherwise in Don Juan, with Byron it is not so simple to begin with the beginning. Is that beginning English Bards and Scotch Reviewers? Hours of Idleness? When the topic is Byron and philosophy, however, it seems safe to assert that the beginning is Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, Cantos I and II. Seasoned by travel in unknown lands, tried by the deaths of those close to him, and a practiced politician by the time of their publication, the Byron of Childe Harold’s first cantos was an altogether different man from the author of English Bards, and Harold’s first portion heralds an important moment of origin: the first exercise of Byron’s mature thought. Recent scholarship has illuminated complexities and subtleties that reveal Harold I and II as an insightful and iconoclastic political document; these same complexities mark the start of Byron’s investigations into the process of knowing.1 Persistently subverting the ideas and assertions it at first seems to uphold, the poem marks the beginning of Byron’s investigations into the concept of knowledge, simultaneously engaging with, testing, and extending Enlightenment philosophy to draw conclusions of its own. Harold is by its very nature intimately involved with the question of knowledge, since, as travel literature, it purports to offer its readers access to places unknown and not fully known. Indeed, Harold gave its readers something most travel literature of the period could not: experience of a continent closed to the majority of them for the preceding twenty years.2 When the Napoleonic Wars effectively cut England off from Europe and the East, most travel writing was similarly constrained.3 As its opening 32



Traveling on Shaky Ground: Childe Harold I and II and the Beginning of Byronic Knowing

Childe Harold I and II and the Beginning of Byronic Knowing 33

Whilome in Albion’s isle there dwelt a youth Who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight; But spent his days in riot most uncouth, And vex’d with mirth the drowsy ear of Night. Ah, me! in sooth he was a shameless wight, Sore given to revel and ungodly glee; Few things on earth found favour in his sight Save concubines and carnal companie, And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree. (I.2) Harold’s hazy wickedness in the early lines becomes much more clear, and thus much more shocking, once the narrator defines it through sight: concubines, carnality, and unseemly class-blending revelry. These enjoyments are themselves rendered more offensive by their association with vision, the wassailers becoming even more shameful (and shameless) because they are ‘flaunting,’ wantonly visual. In the same way, Harold’s attempt at reform is presented in visual terms: Apart he stalk’d in joyless reverie, And from his native land resolved to go, And visit scorching climes beyond the sea; With pleasure drugg’d, he almost long’d for woe, And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below. (I.6) Overwhelmed and satiated as he is, he does not resolve to alter himself so much as to alter, literally, his view. As the poem continues, so does vision continue to be the primary means of presentation and comprehension: ‘And fast the white rocks



announcement makes clear, however, Childe Harold purported to allow the thwarted traveler to know the real, contemporary Europe, as well as exotic locales farther east: ‘The following poem was written, for the most part, amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe. It was begun in Albania; and the parts relative to Spain and Portugal were composed from the author’s observations in those countries’ (Complete Poetical Works [CPW] 2: 56). Byron had traveled where his readers could not, and Childe Harold shared his knowledge with readers. Unsurprisingly for a travel poem, the primary conduit for this knowledge is vision. Indeed, the poem proper announces from the beginning that it is a work in which sight is the dominant mode of experiencing events and emotions:


Cintra’s mountain [greet] them on their way, And Tagus dashing onward to the deep, His fabled golden tribute bent to pay; And soon on board the Lusian pilots leap, And steer ’twixt fertile shores where yet few rustics reap. (14) The reader grasps the actual and metaphorical lay of the land quickly: Portugal presents its tourist-appropriate beauties, including the requisite jaunty sailors and humble menials arranged about the scenery. In the extended description of Portugal and Lisbon that follows these lines, however, Harold seems to train its readers’ eyes bit by bit, progressively revealing the city and deepening understanding of it by means of sight. Each successive stanza begins with a visual cue – ‘Oh, Christ! it is a goodly sight to see / What heaven hath done for this delicious land!’, ‘What beauties doth Lisboa first unfold! / Her image floating on that noble tide’ (I.15; I.16, my emphases). Each of these is followed by a description and by a meditation that complicates the original observation. For example, the stanza that begins, ‘Oh, Christ! it is a goodly sight to see / What heaven hath done for this delicious land!’ twists in the middle, complicating that initial exclamation: Oh, Christ! it is a goodly sight to see What heaven hath done for this delicious land! What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree! What goodly prospects o’er the hills expand! But man would mar them with an impious hand: And when the Almighty lifts his fiercest scourge ’Gainst those who most transgress his high command,



faded from his view, … / And then, it may be, of his wish to roam / Repented he’; ‘Look o’er the ravage of the reeking plain; / Look on the hands with female slaughter red’; ‘The scene was savage, but the scene was new; / This made the ceaseless toil of travel sweet’ (I.12, I.88, II.43). Indeed, vision becomes a tool for teaching the work’s readers not only how to understand but also how to understand multivalent complexity. Early in Canto I, for example, as Harold’s ship enters Portuguese waters, the narrator directs attention to the unfolding view with a remark that is both announcement and direction: ‘New shores descried make every bosom gay’ (14.201). The opening description that follows presents an apparently simple view. The narrator and Harold, and, vicariously, the reader, see


The first glimpse is not enough. What makes the view more than a series of clichés (the delicious land with its blushing fruits and goodly prospects) is the thought that follows, the consideration of the juxtaposition between nature’s gifts to Portugal and man’s depredations against the same country. Through this consideration the narrator arrives at a broader conclusion, a religious philosophy that makes vengeance against France not merely the result of jingoism, but the inevitable punishment for moral transgression. Similarly, the stanza that opens with an apostrophe to the beauties of Lisbon goes on to juxtapose that initial impression with the harsh realities revealed in a second glance; the beauties that first unfolded hide ‘A nation swoln with ignorance and pride, / Who lick yet loath the hand that waves the sword / To save them from the wrath of Gaul’s unsparing lord’ (I.16). Byron seems to be teaching the reader to note the complexities that invest a sight with meaning, to ‘lay in a stock of ideas,’ as his contemporary Anna Larpent put it.4 Vision thus leads to a grasp of the intricacy – political, moral, social, geographical – of the sight viewed, even as sight itself becomes a more intricate process. The reader’s eye is progressively trained not only to stare more comprehensively, but to see more comprehendingly. In pairing vision and understanding, Byron conforms to the prevailing spirit of his times. As early as 1711 Joseph Addison suggested that a particular kind of visual response marked out a particular kind of discernment, which in turn indicated superior powers of comprehension: ‘A man of polite imagination is let into a great many pleasures, that the vulgar are not capable of receiving […] He meets with a secret refreshment in a description, and often feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows, than another does in the possession’ (‘Spectator No. 411’). For Addison, ‘polite imagination’ is inextricably linked with a way of seeing, and this way of seeing is in turn linked with greater understanding and deeper comprehension. As the date of these remarks shows, the notion of a significant connection between vision and understanding was well-rooted in English culture by the time Byron arrived on the scene, and it remained prevalent in the Romantic period: drawing manuals that detailed what to draw and why, as well as guidebooks that told one what to look at and why (and, sometimes, how to behave while looking) began ‘as a trickle in the early decades of the eighteenth century and reach[ed] a flood in the following century,’ and cultural battle lines



With treble vengeance will his hot shafts urge Gaul’s locust host, and earth from fellest foemen purge. (I.15)

were drawn over which sights constituted ‘high’ and worthy viewing, and which did not (Bermingham 781; Hemingway 48; Wood 6–7).5 The skilled eye, moreover, was understood to be an instructor of morality. Authors of the literature of Sentiment and Sensibility so popular in the period underscored again and again the important role of visual experiences in cultivating morals. Novels such as Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling and aesthetic criticism like Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (both part of Byron’s library) held that visual experiences were a conduit to the growth of political and moral decency (Nicholson 239).6 In 1748, William Gilpin mused, ‘when I … stand astonished before the cartoons [of Raphael], … I can feel my mind expand itself, my notions enlarge, and my heart better disposed, either for a religious thought or a benevolent action’ (quoted in Bermingham 104), while in his Memoirs (circa 1789) Edward Gibbon connected visual skill with both benevolence and knowledge, averring that ‘a correct and exquisite eye which commands the landskip of a country, discerns the merits of a picture, and measures the proportions of a building is more closely connected with the finer feelings of the mind’ (136). Improved morality was the companion of increased comprehension, and both were the products of visual acuity. Not only does Byron situate his poem as a text that can help its readers to achieve discernment through vision – a skill that Georgian arbiters of taste referred to as a ‘discipline’ ‘which must be improved by extensive study and meditation’ (Kames 333; Hemingway 57) – but he also offers readers a protagonist sanctioned by authorities of the time as the most reliable instructors of such knowledge. In Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, first printed in 1790 and republished in the same year that Harold I and II appeared, Archibald Alison expressed the belief that ‘[i]t is only in the higher stations […] or in the liberal professions of life, that we expect to find men of either delicate or comprehensive taste’ (I: 89). The nominal hero of Childe Harold was, of course, a bona fide holder of one of the higher stations, a man of ‘name / And lineage long’ (I.3). Even better, the author of the poem was himself a genuine aristocrat. At this stage Byron was most familiar to his newspaper- and quarterly-reading audience as the noble author of English Bards and possessor of a seat in the House of Lords (Mason 428–31). When the Duchess of Devonshire described the not-yet-famous-overnight author of Childe Harold to her son, for instance, she had to jog his memory by writing, ‘You probably remember the Edinburgh Review’s criticism of his “Minor Poems”: … On this, stung to the quick, he published his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ (quoted in Rutherford, Critical Heritage, 35). John Murray played upon this familiarity when he emphasized Byron’s title in advertisements for




Childe Harold: ‘Lord Byron’s new Poem.—In a few days will be published, handsomely printed in 4to. CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE; a Poem: […] By LORD BYRON’ (‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’). Byron’s rank let his readership tread vicariously on exclusive ground, for his intrepid nature – ‘I goes into society (with my pocket pistols),’ he wrote to Francis Hodgson from Portugal (BLJ 1: 215) – made him relish a journey that most feared to take, and his money and nobility allowed him the privilege of taking it in the first place. The poem that resulted offered its readers both sights from which they were otherwise barred and the opportunity to learn how to see these sights like a lord.7 In linking vision and knowledge as they do, both Byron and his culture draw on the most elementary ideas of John Locke (although the conviction that nobility would lead the way to enlightenment was the period’s own contribution). For Locke, ‘Our senses, conversant about particular sensible Objects, do convey into the Mind, several distinct Perceptions of things … And thus we come by those Ideas, we have’ (II.i.§3). Such ideas, acquired by sensation and reflection, are passive mental receptions, but they are in turn shaped actively by the mind into complex ideas. That such complex ideas can be valid or invalid, useful or useless, clear and distinct or obscure and confused, Locke makes plain (see II.xxix–xxxii), just as he asserts that by training and practice the skill of discerning ‘clear, distinct, and complete Ideas’ can be honed (IV.xii.§6). Locke even posits that demonstration and discovery (the linguistic connection to sight is plain, and in fact throughout the essay Locke’s language of enlightenment is heavily visual) can make the truth of morality irrefutably obvious: ‘I doubt not, but if a right method were taken, a great part of Morality might be made out with that clearness, that could leave, to a considering Man, no more reason to doubt, than he could have to doubt of the Truth of Propositions in Mathematicks’ (IV.xii.§8). The cultural critics surrounding Byron emphasize this link more heavily than he, but Childe Harold joins them in upholding the Lockean connection between sense experience and comprehension. Yet Harold’s use of Locke differs from that of the other cultural arbiters. To begin with, all the poem’s visual revelations tend to lead not to comprehension but rather to exposures of the persistent paradoxicality of whatever is surveyed. A closer look at Byron’s anatomization of Portugal in I.15–17, for example reveals not comprehension, even comprehension of complexities, but confusion. Not only does each meditation complicate the observation that preceded it, but each progressive observation and its accompanying meditation move the reader’s focus to a completely different area, so that at one moment one is contemplating rustics on the





But whoso entereth within this town, That, sheening far, celestial seems to be, Disconsolate will wander up and down, ’Mid many things unsightly to strange ee; For hut and palace show like filthily: The dingy denizens are rear’d in dirt; Ne personage of high or mean degree Doth care for cleanness of surtout or shirt, Though shent with Egypt’s plague, unkempt, unwash’d, unhurt. (I.17) The supposed attainment of deeper understanding – as the narrator pulls back the ‘sheening’ skin of Lisbon to reveal the grubby actuality beneath – is undone by the instabilities inherent in that understanding. Direction and physical placement are compromised: the observer will ‘wander up and down.’ Rich and poor become equal: ‘Hut and palace show like filthily.’ Meaning itself is confounded in the final line, first by the mention of the puzzlingly specific, but unspecified, ‘Egypt’s plague’ (Is this Napoleon? One of the ten plagues? If so, which one?), and then by ‘unhurt,’ which, placed at the end of the stanza, throws what preceded into question: Lisbon’s denizens are filthy; they are degraded, disgraced (‘shent’); yet they also remain unhurt. That this final adjective is presumably meant ironically – contrasting physical wholeness with political mortification – only adds to the interpretive difficulties. Which is the reader to believe, that the Portuguese are unharmed; that they are degraded morally but not physically; or that they are filthy both physically and morally? As the stanza has already suggested, it is impossible to be certain, for here are many things that readers’ eyes will never parse, much that is ‘unsightly to strange ee.’8



shore, but at the next one is considering the military relationship between Portugal and England, and at the next the plight of the Portuguese people. Moving from one short burst to the next, often within a few lines, the stanzas are apt to disorientate, not absorb. The complexities may result not in deeper understanding, but in the impression that there can be no understanding at all. Stanzas undermine themselves, and elements within them destabilize precisely the comprehension and power that sight is supposed to give the viewing reader. In its consideration of the acquisition of ideas, Harold emphasizes the ‘several’ tucked into Locke’s observation that ‘Our senses … do convey into the Mind, several distinct Perceptions of things,’ and privileges the complex over the simple. Consider, for example, the stanza that guides the reader through Lisbon:


Childe Harold repeats this peculiar act of visual confusion again and again throughout its first canto. The text frequently produces instability through heavy irony, as when it describes the Battle of Talavera as ‘a splendid sight to see / (For one who has no friend, no brother there),’ vividly painting its ‘rival scarfs of mixed embroidery, / […] various arms that glitter in the air,’ before pointing out that ‘The Grave shall bear the chiefest prize away’ (I.40), or renders the bullfight of Cadiz as simultaneously valorous combat in miniature and base brutality at its worst: In costly sheen and gaudy cloak array’d, But all afoot, the light-limb’d Matadore Stands in the centre, eager to invade …

Again he [the bull] comes; nor dart nor lance avail, Nor the wild plunging of the tortur’d horse; Though man and man’s avenging arms assail, Vain are his weapons, vainer is his force. One gallant steed is stretch’d a mangled corse; Another, hideous sight! unseam’d appears, His gory chest reveals life’s panting source, The death-struck still his feeble frame he rears, Staggering, but stemming all, his lord unharm’d he bears. (I.74–77) If the stanza mocks both the bullfight and war by representing the bullfight as war, it simultaneously provides the reader with a vivid representation of the pageantry and excitement of the event. The contest is thus both exalted and belittled, and the reader, who may turn away in disgust from ‘the ungentle sport,’ at the same time may find herself beguiled by the depiction of the ‘light-limb’d Matadore’ and his ‘nimble courser’ (I.80; I.74; I.76). This is an event that vision cannot help one understand, for here the visual fosters two understandings that, although logically contradictory, in fact coexist. One could argue that such moments simply offer a form of irony, albeit a brutal one, and that Byron, again, uses these and other such passages in Harold to heighten his reader’s awareness of the complexity of what she sees. But there is a dissonance in these portrayals that suggests Byron is not simply striving for the demonstration of complexity that is irony’s hallmark, but rather is seeking to challenge the idea of demonstration altogether. The elements of these depictions are contradictory, yet their contradictions are never resolved. Talavera is simultaneously glorious and



Thrice sounds the clarion; lo! the signal falls …

shameful; the bullfight is both exciting – ‘The den expands, and Expectation mute / Gapes round the silent circle’s peopled walls’ – and contemptible – ‘Such the ungentle sport that oft invites / The Spanish maid, and cheers the Spanish swain’ (I.75, 80). While these representations are accurate, they are not ironic so much as paradoxical. At best, the reader must attempt to reconcile two contradictory comprehensions of the same event, an exercise as likely to end in confusion as enlightenment. At worst (a worst which is, I think, the point of these moments) she must admit that no such reconciliation is possible, that contemplation in both its senses cannot yield understanding. These moments, gory and emotional as they may be, link to Locke’s discussion of Ideas in Book II of the Essay. There, the philosopher suggests that complex ideas, particularly, become more confused and less clear when ‘the particulars that make up any Idea are … so jumbled together that it is not easily discernible, whether it [the complex Idea] more belongs to the Name that is given it, than to any other’ (xxix.§8) – that is, when the idea contains so many attributes that it is not clear what exactly it is. Repeatedly, Harold suggests that many, if not all, ideas, perceptions, and reflections – in the text, experiences of sights and the processing of those experiences and those sights – are confused and obscure in this way. Confusion, the text intimates, is an inherent element of complexity. Curiously, in suggesting this Byron, while seeming to challenge or complicate Locke, may also be acting as a kind of Lockean literalist, reminding Harold’s readers that even the apparently simplest of ideas has layers of sedimentary complexity (something Locke himself suggests with his repudiation of innate ideas in Book I of the Essay). This gesture of an intellectual push that is simultaneously an endorsement and an expansion of the philosopher with whom he engages will become a hallmark of Byron’s works. The subversion of the connection between vision and knowledge in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I and II is not entirely iconoclastic, however, for it in fact allies itself with another of the period’s approaches to vision and comprehension. This approach saw visual experience and response as subjective, influenced not only by light, shadow, and distance, but also by the psychology of the perceiver; as one recent scholar puts it, the approach posited vision as ‘inherently unstable … always subjective, for finally we can experience … in no other way than through our own sense and sensibility’ (Bermingham 125). The connection to both George Berkeley and Immaterialism seems obvious.9 In fact, in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, Berkeley announces his conviction that If we had not constantly found certain sensations arising from the various disposition of the eyes, attended with certain degrees of dis-





As Berkeley’s linking of vision and judgment indicates, for him visual comprehension is a matter of deduction based on mindset and experience. What we see is merely what we perceive: videri est percipi, one might say. Moreover, as his final phrase suggests, for Berkeley vision is not the only conduit to judgment that is circumstantial and malleable: all comprehension depends on circumstance, perception, and available evidence. Childe Harold I and II takes a similar stance, with more subtlety but increasing vigor.10 In fact, much of what the poem suggests about perception and knowledge echoes to a remarkable degree what Berkeley asserts in both the New Theory and the Principles of Human Knowledge. And in Harold I and II, as in the New Theory, what at first seems an argument against relying too heavily on a certain means to enlightenment soon reveals itself as a wholesale questioning of understanding itself. The version of this challenge that registered most clearly with Byron’s contemporaneous readers lay in the poem’s political subversions. Recent critics have drawn attention to Harold I and II’s persistent complication of the meaning supposedly instantiated in geographical sites and political events:11 in its depictions of Talavera and Albuera, for instance, the poem grants no superiority to any cause or army – ‘Three hosts combine to offer sacrifice’ – and effectively demolishes the figurations of just and chivalric war that Byron’s critics, at least, felt were essential to representations of these battles (I.41–43). When the Antijacobin’s reviewer complained that ‘[t]he indiscriminate abuse lavished on the troops, without any distinction as to the cause which they are respectively engaged to support’ in the poem’s depiction of the Battle of Albuera, ‘resembles the rant of democracy in its wildest form’ (351–52), he was not just showing his conservative colors; he was also emphasizing a quite real test that these stanzas posed for contemporary understanding of those battles. In a representation in which the side of good and the side of evil (France) are blended, the implication is ‘that all involved are equally complicit’ (Oliver 127).12 By emphasizing the carnage of the battlefield little more than a year after Albuera had occurred, and by blending the British, Spanish, and French forces in his praises and condemnations, Byron was holding up to the light shopworn jingoistic beliefs that exercised significant public political power.13 Anger and sublimated fear at this examination may lie behind



tance, we should never make those sudden judgments from them concerning the distance of OBJECTS; no more than we would pretend to judge a man’s thoughts by his pronouncing words we had never heard before. (20)

such critical remarks as William Roberts’s comment in the British Review that Harold was ‘no child of chivalry’ (280). What Childe Harold produces here, however, is not simple repudiation of accepted political convictions, but rather complication of them. The text does not negate the categories ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or dismiss the possibility of comprehension; instead, it suggests that categories and comprehension are more complex affairs than its contemporary readers might suppose. That is, these sites cannot simply be unpacked into right and wrong. As the depictions of the armies as ‘mingling foes’ with unspecified ‘victim … fond ally’ (I.43, 41) suggest, each figure may just as easily be another: one man’s foe is another man’s fond ally. Categorization is not dismissed, but it is rendered less certain, and that lack of certainty is suggested to be more accurate than clear categorization – ‘democracy in its wildest form,’ the text here implies, may in fact be accurate knowing. This becomes more apparent when the poem moves into its second canto. As Harold makes his way through Albania, text as well as notes suggest a land that is at least equal, if not superior, to Greece in its topography and perhaps its denizens: ‘Fierce are Albania’s children, yet they lack / Not virtues, were those virtues more mature. / Where is the foe that ever saw their back?’ Moreover, in famed Attica such lovely dales Are rarely seen, nor can fair Tempe boast A charm they know not; loved Parnassus fails, Through classic ground and consecrated most, To match some spots that lurk within this lowering coast. (II.46, 65) Greece and its ‘hereditary bondsmen’ do not come out of these comparisons and implied comparisons well.14 But the poem does not simply suggest Albania as a kind of alternate Greece. Rather, its Albania contains Greece, such that each becomes the other. ‘The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian, and the Moor’ mingle in Tepalene; the river Kalamas was ‘once the Acheron’ (II.57, stanza 55n): the scene is savage, but the scene is not entirely new. This ‘hybrid’ Albania contradicts the canonical Romantic view of the East as homogeneous cultural other, offering instead a Levantine nation rich in complexity and ethnic mingling (Leask, ‘Polemic’ 111). The resulting picture acts as a more general challenge to contemporary divisions between occident and orient, barbarism and civilization (and civility), Self and Other, and their usual respective rankings. A world in which savage Suliotes are kinder than the wreckers of Cornwall (II.66) and in which a spring of messiah-linked living water bubbles




forth in the court of a tyrant who is himself simultaneously gentle and savage (John 4:11–13, 7:38; CHP II.62) is a world in which received constructions of comprehension – social, political, and religious – teeter.15 Both political and cultural figurations are only the productions of supposed knowledge, however, not supposed knowledge itself, and supposed knowledge is what Byron is harassing here. This becomes plain in the interaction between Harold’s second canto and the explosion of footnotes and appendices attached to it. Although the first canto also has notes, only in the second do they appear in such profusion. One reason for this is fairly clear: in the second canto, Harold ventures into countries with which his readers are less likely to be familiar, and so more editorial explanation is necessary. But these notes do not serve a straightforward instructive purpose. Indeed, as the canto progresses it becomes plain that their plenitude is meant not to explain, but to unsettle. In at least one case, for example, the notes effect a formal enactment of the instability embedded in the text of the poem. When Byron translates a song of the Suliotes into English, glosses – even for English words – proliferate. Appearing attached to what offers itself as a translation, the glosses in fact compromise that passage’s position as a translation. Byron offers such a quantity of clarifications that his stanzas start to resemble a foreign text in their own right. In at least one passage, the exercise comes perilously near parody: Dark Muchtar his son to the Danube is sped, Let the yellow-haired* Giaours† view his horse-tail‡ with dread; When his Delhis§ come dashing in blood o’er the banks, How few shall escape from the Muscovite ranks! (685–88) Should a translation really require so much translation? Tom Mole argues that, by glossing the foreign terms he inserts into his poems (or the foreign uses of familiar terms, such as ‘horse-tail’), ‘Byron reduces the frisson of alterity’ these would otherwise produce (‘Narrative’ 92). I would argue just the reverse: that such glossing increases the frisson because it emphasizes the alterity. Moreover, I would argue that Byron uses this frisson as a deliberate means of fostering confusion. In choosing to translate his own translation, he produces a kind of mental cross-gartering of the concepts of ‘translation’ and ‘foreign text’: this passage could be either and is simultaneously both. Moreover, crowded as they are at the foot of the page,16 these glosses force the reader into a bifurcated reading. She must constantly shift focus to page bottom, then return to the text with concentration




compromised. The very layout thus literally disrupts the reader’s comprehension, forcing her to enact the disorder that the first canto created with its sudden shifts in perspective.17 Whereas there the narrator shifted his gaze, here the reader must do so, in a metatextual repetition of the earlier textual device. The moment thus offers two types of cognitive instability: the destabilization incurred by having to switch from the text to its explanation and back again, and the instability created by the confusion between foreign text and translation instantiated in the passage. In this moment, Byron again advances his agenda. However briefly and however subtly, he suggests that instability may inhere not just in the visual or in the connection between the visual and meaning, but in the idea of definitive meaning itself. The canto’s narrative notes and appendices unsettle the text in this way more openly and more thoroughly. Instructive apparatus was virtually a requirement for the travel genre, but Harold’s notes, full of clarification and general information though they are, are not typical explanatory devices. They are enlightening, but they are also, to use Nigel Leask’s phrase, ‘at odds with the poetic text’ (British 109). Breezy, witty, frequently pompous or tetchy, largely in the first person or inflected with personality, often they simply take up Byron’s own particular hobbyhorses, and just as often they make no pretension to objectivity or politeness, in either sense of that word. In a note supposedly intended to define ‘Pindus’ in the line, ‘He pass’d bleak Pindus, Acherusia’s lake’ (II.47), for example, Byron writes, ‘According to Pouqueville, the lake of Yanina; but Pouqueville is always out.’ Four lines later, the phrase ‘To greet Albania’s chief’ gets the following explanation: ‘The celebrated Ali Pacha. Of this extraordinary man there is an incorrect account in Pouqueville’s Travels.’18 In a long note on the meditative and exhortatory stanza 73 – ‘Fair Greece, sad relic of departed worth! / Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!’ – Byron begins with some snide raillery at the expense of Sydney Owenson: I will request Miss Owenson, when she next borrows an Athenian heroine for her four volumes, to have the goodness to marry her to somebody more of a gentleman than a ‘Disdar Aga,’ (who by the by is not an Aga), the most impolite of petty officers, the greatest patron of larceny Athens ever saw (except Lord E[lgin]) and the unworthy occupant of the Acropolis … (CPW 2: 199) He goes on to give a rambling, lighthearted description of his experiences of Athens and its environs, and ends with a discussion of the character and potential of the Greeks.




All of these latter digressions do, at least, fulfill the requirements of a travel narrative, deepening as they do an understanding of the lands described. But as the above extract makes plain, all are so different in tone from the poem they supposedly augment, and so different in voice from that of either its narrator or its hero, that the effect is not to deepen the reader’s comprehension but to divert it by involving her in a completely different piece of writing. Whereas the poem is a sublime and deliberately contemplative travelogue, its notes are, as Francis Jeffrey put it, ‘flippant, lively, tranchant and assuming […] neither very deep nor very witty; though rather entertaining’ (475). At least one reader, the anonymous critic of the Eclectic Review, protested loudly, wondering if it could ‘be believed’ that the same author who wrote passages of great beauty in the poem proper could also have written ‘the caustic animadversions on a book called Ida of Athens, the production of a Miss Owenson’ (638–39). Such a remark makes plain the mental dissonance – the confusion of belief – that Harold I and II often evokes. This insistence on instability, both visual and cognitive, also gestures toward Berkeley. Discussing existence and perception in the Principles, Berkeley points out the way in which the attributes of what is perceived alter with the circumstances of the perceiver: ‘to the same eye at different stations, or eyes of a different texture at the same station, [figure and extension] appear various. Again, it is proved that sweetness is not really in the sapid thing, because the thing remaining unaltered the sweetness is changed into bitter, as in the case of a fever or otherwise vitiated palate’ (§14). The complications incurred by the coexistence of and relationship between Harold’s text and notes suggest that not only sensible attributes but also sites and experiences appear different when contemplated with different perceptions. In poetic perception, things appear one way; in more factual or more personal perception (as in the apparatus), they appear another. Stance is important, yet one stance does not cancel another out. As in Berkeley, the fact that multiple perceptions can and do exist, each equally valid depending on ‘where you stand,’ requires not a dismissal but a rethinking of canonical epistemological structures. Where Byron extends Berkeley is in his suggestion that ‘perception’ and ‘view’ have mental as well as sensible valances; that a point of view is as variable and influential as the physical eye. As the work begins its final section, such destabilization continues to exert its effect in the poem proper. The text persistently sets surfaces against what lies beneath. Turkish carnival, at first offered as the arena of romantic delights – ‘Oh Love! young Love! bound in thy rosy band, / Let sage or cynic prattle as he will, / These hours, and only these, redeem





And whose [Carnival] more rife with merriment than thine, Oh Stamboul, once the empress of their [the Greeks’] reign? Though turbans now pollute Sophia’s shrine, And Greece her very altars eyes in vain … (II.79) Everywhere, appearance belies actuality, and a surface hides a contradictory depth. Knowledge is crossed, destabilized, subverted: young love is simultaneously a cover for deep-rooted hate; merry Carnival is a mask for degradation; unchanged Marathon is, in fact, entirely changed. As if this were not enough, there is Harold’s cacophony of voices to contend with. There has been a great deal of critical discussion of precisely how many speakers populate Childe Harold: most commentators find two, the narrator and Harold, but a small minority hear three (the narrator, Harold, and a poet persona).19 The difficulty with these voices, however, lies not in their number but in the attempt to determine which of them speaks when. While one can, for example, be certain that the narrator utters the poem’s early descriptions of Harold, one cannot be sure who pronounces the opening invocation to the Muse. It seems unlikely that the narrator, aptly described as the epic’s ‘mythic consciousness’ (Shilstone 19), would introduce the poem as ‘this lowly lay of mine’ (I.1). Yet there is nothing but a stanza break to indicate that this speaker is a separate entity from the narrator whose words follow. Even the archaisms that could be considered the narrator’s defining tic are present in the invocation: ‘nor mote my shell awake the weary nine’ (I.1). Similarly, the lamentations that appear near the end of each canto seem clearly to be the utterances of no character or persona, but of Byron himself: ‘And thou, my friend! Since unavailing woe / Bursts from my heart, and mingles with the strain— / […] What hadst thou done to sink



Life’s years of ill!’ – is soon upended to show what hides below: ‘But, midst the throng in merry masquerade, / Lurk there no hearts that throb with secret pain, / Even through the closest searment half betrayed?’ (II.81–82). If Harold shows its reader the ‘true-born patriot’ of Greece, ‘who skulk[s] in peace,’ it immediately shows the way that seemingly peaceful patriotism masks servitude, sorrow, and hypocrisy: ‘The bondsman’s peace, who sighs for all he lost, / Yet with smooth smile his tyrant can accost’; if it points out the plain of Marathon, that plain is ‘Unchanged in all except its foreign lord’ (II.83; II.89). Each observation prefaces (or even contains) its own contradiction. Even episodes that seem straightforward, such as the observation of Turks in Constantinople, turn out to be visual ironies that disguise more than they reveal:

so peacefully to rest?’; ‘All thou coulds’t have of mine, stern Death! thou hast; / The parent, friend, and now the more than friend’ (I.92; II.96). Only the latter of these apostrophes can be claimed for Byron with any certainty, however, appearing as it does after his suspension of the narrative in stanza 94 of the second canto – and even this is not so certain, for it is not at all clear which voice announces this suspension, or which voice readers should assume speaks the passage that follows that suspension. Throughout the poem, voices mingle and separate, step forward and recede, often with no certain indication of when circumstances have changed. This commingling might become less troubling when one remembers that Byron’s contemporaries largely recognized no difference between author and narrator: reviews of Childe Harold consistently refer to ‘the author’ where present-day critics would say ‘the narrator,’ for example. Yet these same reviews make it plain that those readers who wrote for journals and quarterlies, at least, were troubled by a lack of uniformity in the narrative voice. In particular, they did not like the way Byron unexpectedly slipped between personae, which these reviewers read as tones or styles. The most common objection was that Byron did not sufficiently differentiate his utterances and ideas from those of Harold. The Critical Review regretted that ‘He seems, in many respects, to be so nearly identified with his own “Childe Harold,” that it is not easy always to distinguish the reflections of the ideal from those of the real traveller’ (569), while the Eclectic delicately chastised both protagonist and author for the blending: Sometimes the Childe forgets (accidentally, we believe) the heartstruck melancholy of his temper, and deviates into a species of pleasantry which, to say the truth, appears to us very flippant and very unworthy of the person to whom it is attributed. At other times, the noble poet is himself made to give expression to opinions and feelings, which would have much better suited the wretched Harold. (632) Almost as frequent, and far more vociferous, were complaints over the poem’s interweaving of what reviewers saw as radically different tones. The Critical seemed to speak more in sorrow than in anger – ‘The general complexion of the work is serious, and even melancholy. The occasional bursts of humour are, therefore, unpleasant as breaking in too abruptly upon the general tone of the reader’s feelings’ (571–72) – but the Eclectic did not hide its outrage, demanding, ‘Can it be believed that the author




of the passages [of ‘beauties’] we have quoted could write such stanzas as [those satirizing an English Sunday]? Can anything be more flippant […]?’ (638). Finally, critics also caviled at Byron’s insertion of ‘personal’ matter into his text. ‘As no reader will probably open Childe Harold with the view of inquiring into the religious tenets of the author, we cannot but disapprove, in point of taste, these protracted meditations,’ wrote George Ellis in the Quarterly Review, ‘We object to them, also, because they have the effect of producing some little traces of resemblance between the author and the hero of the piece’ (198). The Critical objected to his condemnations of Lord Elgin, ‘private feelings’ it felt should not be admitted into a public work. Jeffrey, writing in the Edinburgh, took Byron to task for airing his personal grievances against that journal in the forum of public poetry (476–77). If these objections seem to have been largely moral – and all of these remarks have, to one degree or another, a whiff of moral concern – the potential immorality had its root in a confusion that the critics acknowledged. These readers struggled with the uncertainty the text created, and they feared its results: Byron could be confused with his gloomy hero; readers could be led to believe that it was acceptable to intermingle the comic and the serious; religious doubts could be connected with the noble author, and thus glamorized. Intermingling spelt confusion – one might say that it made it ‘not easily discernible whether’ any assertion in the poem ‘more belongs to the Name that is given it, than to any other’ – and confusion spelt trouble. Even when Byron links his poetic speech to a particular poetic speaker, however, he courts confusion. Undoubtedly the poem’s single most difficult instance of speech attribution is the one moment that should be its clearest: the line in I.27 where the poem, having offered several stanzas of rumination, simply announces, ‘So deem’d the Childe.’ This would be a welcome clarification, were it not for the fact that what it gives with one hand it takes away with the other. Told who deemed, the reader must now attempt to figure out what he deemed. The declaration is preceded by fifteen stanzas of unassigned meditation, which can be divided roughly into three sections: one on Portugal in general, one on Cintra in particular, and a two-stanza entr’acte about William Beckford. Any one of these, or all of them together, could be Harold’s deemings. On the other hand, the stanza that directly precedes the assertion can be read as a selfcontained commentary: And ever since that martial synod met, Britannia sickens, Cintra, at thy name; And folks in office at the mention fret,





Here I acknowledge a certain fellow feeling with the Critical and the Eclectic. If the Childe makes these remarks, it is a surprise to discover how closely his tone resembles the ironic timbre of the Byronic persona. Yet if he does not make them, the narrator’s announcement seems perverse indeed. William Galperin asserts that ‘the [speaker’s] attribution was plainly erroneous,’ arguing that this is a moment in which the narrator impresses his ‘surmise regarding Harold’s surmise’ upon the narrative (253). But this is not so plain. The text does not make it clear that what precedes the attribution – or at the very least some of what precedes it – is not ‘Harold’s surmise.’ Nor does it make it clear, however, that it is his surmise, or what portion of it is, or even precisely what is meant by ‘so’ in ‘So deem’d the Childe’ (these thoughts? in this manner?). Just about all that does seem clear is that the moment’s apparent clarification is merely more obfuscation. As Galperin neatly sums it up, ‘one reality’ is replaced ‘with a reality that is equally … arbitrary’ (257). Even where reality is not arbitrary, it is often problematic, subject to alteration: ‘Oh! many a time, and oft, had Harold lov’d, / Or dream’d he lov’d, since Rapture is a dream’; ‘Come! blue-eyed maid of heaven! – but thou, alas, / Didst never yet one mortal song inspire—’; ‘’Tis night, when Meditation bids us feel / We once have lov’d, though love is at an end: / The heart… / Though friendless now will dream it had a friend’ (I.82; II.1; II.23). Everywhere one finds the Byronic backtrack, sometimes folding in on itself, always undermining the notion of precise comprehension. On occasion this reaches almost fever pitch: Childe Harold had a mother—not forgot, Though parting from that mother he did shun; A sister whom he lov’d, but saw her not Before his weary pilgrimage begun: If friends he had, he bade adieu to none. Yet deem not thence his breast a breast of steel. (I.10) ‘Though,’ ‘but,’ ‘if,’ ‘yet’: the stanza fidgets and squirms, struggling to fit into the itchy jacket of accuracy. This correctio will become a hallmark of



And fain would blush, if they could, for shame. How will posterity the deed proclaim! Will not our own and fellow-nations sneer, To view these champions cheated of their fame, By foes in fight o’erthrown, yet victors here, Where Scorn her fingers points through many a coming year? (I.26)

Byron’s works, refined to perfection in the Eastern Tales, but even these first appearances challenge the idea that one can ever be certain that one is certain. While these devices and destabilizations connect to Berkeley and his perceptions that change ‘at different stations,’ they once more also connect to Locke. Certainly in his complicating gestures Byron emphasizes the variability of point of view, and the significance of that variability, but in his persistent recourse to qualification and his revelations of the contradictory depths beneath apparently smooth surfaces, in particular, he again refers to and deepens Locke’s discussion of obscure or confused ideas. Shortly before Locke considers the causes of confusion in complex ideas, he avers that the ‘cause of Obscurity in simple Ideas, seems to be either dull Organs; or very slight and transient Impressions made by the Objects; or else a weakness in the Memory, not able to retain them as received’ (II.xxix.§3). Harold’s figurations of cities and people suggest quite the opposite: that the cause of obscurity in simple ideas seems to be sharp organs and deep impressions, and that if the fault lies in a memory that cannot retain impressions as received, that lack of retention arises from continued reflection and concomitant revelation of complexity. In making this suggestion, furthermore, the poem connects, albeit more lightly, to Locke’s assertion later in the same book of the Essay (shortly before his remark on jumbled particulars) that confusion about ‘any complex Idea’ can arise when it ‘is made up of too small a number of simple Ideas’ (II.xxix.§7). The revelations of depth, the multiple and confused narrative voices, and above all the endemic qualification imply that no idea is made up of a small number of simple ideas. Harold I and II suggests that all ideas, no matter how basic or apparently simplistic, are complex and, ultimately, perhaps both confused and confusing. It is thus not surprising that in Harold’s representations of Greece, that synecdoche for wisdom, the text’s confusions and retractions reach their height. This Greece offers not reassurance but constant uncertainty, paradox and confusion piled upon each other.20 Nor are these uncertainties merely the visual ones discussed earlier. Greece consistently confounds understanding. It is ‘Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!’ Its citizens, reminded that ‘Who would be free themselves must strike the blow,’ are then immediately informed, ‘But not for you will Freedom’s altars flame.’ Contemplations of quondam glories like the battle of Marathon turn on a sixpence, leading back only to reminders of present degradation: The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow; The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear;





Greece’s former greatness is everywhere tinged with despair, a despair that gains poignancy only from invocations of former greatness. Again, even the notes confound. Commenting on the stanza in which he urges Greece to ‘uncreate’ its ‘long accustom’d bondage,’ Byron writes, ‘The Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns as heretofore, and God forbid they ever should! but they may be subjects without being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they are free and industrious, and such may Greece be hereafter’ (CPW 2: 201). It is perhaps possible to understand the difference between ‘free’ and ‘independent’ in the note itself (although considering the methods of exacting ‘industriousness’ employed in the sugar islands and other British colonies, one wonders exactly what is being promoted here), but it is more difficult to reconcile the stanza’s propagandist euphoria with the note’s flat denial of it. The Greece Harold offers its readers is simultaneously deserving and undeserving, capable and incapable, but it is seldom just one or the other. The site of Harold’s redemption, then, is equivocal. Or perhaps it would be better to call it a site of redemption by equivocality. For if Greece is always ambivalent, this very ambivalence allows it to be a place of succor and relief. ‘He that is lonely hither let him roam, / And gaze complacent on congenial earth,’ advises Byron (or the narrator, or the Byronic persona), offering Greece as the ideal destination for the ‘parted bosom’ that ‘clings to wonted home’ (II.92). One might pause to ask, He that is lonely, why not just go home? The answer is that for Byron Greece is the ideal home because it is both home and not home. It is ‘congenial earth’ because it always cannot quite erase the reminder of its uncongeniality: ‘he whom Sadness sootheth may abide / And scarce regret the region of his birth’ (II.92, my emphasis). Furthermore, as these lines show, Greece is equally paradoxical in its emotional effect, for ‘gazing o’er the plains where Greek and Persian died’ (II.92), the viewer may find his sadness eased by solemn sorrow, just as his loneliness has been soothed by a reminder of how lonely he is. Greece can be only because it is not, and it can soothe only because it exacerbates. And it is here, within sight of, and within this site of, profound



Mountains above, Earth’s, Ocean’s plain below; Death in the front, Destruction in the rear! Such was the scene—what now remaineth here? What sacred trophy marks the hallow’d ground, Recording Freedom’s smile and Asia’s tear? The rifled urn, the violated mound, The dust thy courser’s hoof, rude stranger, spurns around. (II.90)

ambivalence that Harold, and the narrator, and maybe even Byron, find their rest. That rest, however, is as equivocal as the rest of the poem. It is a commonplace of writing about Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I and II that it features a most unpilgrimage-like pilgrimage, notable for its aimlessness rather than its aim.21 Yet given the ambivalence instantiated in the poem, how could it be otherwise? Harold’s complex of complications suggests that anything and anywhere may be a goal: one may head toward the Holy Land or toward Greece (that holy land of bards), but one may discover vastly more value and knowledge on the fields of Spain or the mountainsides of Albania.22 Here, too, it is possible to read the poem’s debt to Enlightenment philosophy. After all, if ‘[t]hings remaining the same, our ideas vary, and which of them, or even whether any of them at all represent the true quality existing in the thing, it is out of our reach to determine’ (PHK §87), then value and knowledge would seem to depend on the viewer, not the battlefield, cathedral, or region viewed. Furthermore, if ‘general certainty is never to be found but in our ideas. Whenever we go to seek it elsewhere, in experiments or observations without us, our knowledge goes not beyond particulars’ (Essay II.xi.§27), then it would stand to reason that any journey anywhere is potentially as intellectually rich – and as intellectually risky – as any journey anywhere else. What matters is the mind that journeys, the impressions it receives, the reflections it makes, and the perceptual representations it produces. Harold I and II, with its eponymous hero who is simultaneously constantly and evanescently present, and with its assertions and conclusions that are always and necessarily the perceptions of an observing consciousness (whomever that consciousness may belong to at any given moment), drives home this point and its implications. In light of this, it is less of a surprise that Harold ends his poem not only a wanderer but an agnostic – denied even the certainty of atheism – standing in ruined modern Greece but contemplating unruined ‘Iona,’ simultaneously asserting the irreducible power of Hellenic majesty and asserting that that power has already been reduced: Yet to the remnants of thy splendour past Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied, throng; Long shall the voyager, with th’Ionian blast, Hail the bright clime of battle and of song; Long shall thine annals and immortal tongue Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore. …





This dichotomous pilgrim and his ambivalent pilgrimage make perfect sense in a poem that bears ambiguity as its standard. Moreover, they make perfect sense in a poem as deeply informed by Enlightenment thought as is Harold I and II. Both Locke and Berkeley took great care to show that their philosophical ideas did not obviate the existence of God, but the very fact that they did so suggests that those ideas prompt such a conclusion. It would be too much, I think, to say that Byron structured Harold’s religious ambivalence to emphasize this awkward Enlightenment position, but it would not be too much to say that any poem as influenced by these philosophers as is Harold I and II would find it difficult to come down on the side of religious orthodoxy (even leaving aside the question of Byron’s own opinions on the issue). Perhaps the reader ought not to be startled, then, that Harold’s narrative proper ends on this note of pervasive doubt. After all, the text announces its commitment to confusion from its very first stanza, that invocation to the Muse: Oh, thou! in Hellas deem’d of heav’nly birth, Muse! form’d or fabled at the minstrel’s will! Since sham’d full oft by later lyres on earth, Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill: Yet there I’ve wandered by thy vaunted rill; Yes! sigh’d o’er Delphi’s long-deserted shrine, Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still … (I.1) Here is the poem in little. There is a figure both formed by the poet and simultaneously possessing an independent existence (though ‘form’d […] at the minstrel’s will,’ she may still, he suggests, ignore his call); there, sly hints that compromise assumptions without fully endorsing or disproving them (‘deem’d of heav’nly birth, […] thy vaunted rill’); there, an ancient site simultaneously great and debased (‘Delphi’s long-deserted shrine’); and all of it sprinkled with enough retractions and revisions to confuse whatever certainty might remain: ‘or,’ ‘yet,’ ‘save that.’ As the icing on the cake, Byron throws in a pun – are those ‘later lyres’ or ‘later liars’? – to mirror the ironies to come.23



Let such approach this consecrated land, And pass in peace along the magic waste; But spare its relics – let no busy hand Deface the scenes, already how defaced! (II.91, 93)


Fittingly, Harold I and II ends with a similar exercise in confusion, one that also connects back to Byron’s original concern, the link between vision and knowledge. These cantos finish with one final repudiation of the ability of sight to grant revelation and comprehension:

Appearances are ‘false to the heart’ in both senses of the phrase. What seems to be a smile is merely a conduit for sorrow, and the immersion into society is unmasked not as a pleasure but as a continual grim masquerade. This commentary demonstrates not the power but the weakness of both sight and knowledge: one may see, but one may not necessarily discern; what one knows may be only what one has been taught to believe. Interestingly, in its suggestion that expression can mask emotion via a series of ‘distorting’ cues this stanza links to an arresting moment in Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision: As we see distance, so we see magnitude. And we see both in the same way that we see shame or anger in the looks of a man. Those passions are themselves invisible, [but] they are nonetheless let in by the eye along with colours and alterations of countenance, which are the immediate object of vision: and which signify them for no other reason than barely because they have been observed to accompany them. (65) Like Byron, Berkeley recognizes that appearances can be ‘False to the heart.’ Moreover, in his movement from physiological vision to more abstract interpretation he prefigures the trajectory of Childe Harold I and II. Byron, however, makes a metonymy where Berkeley makes a metaphor: for Byron, it is not that vision is like understanding, but rather that vision is merely one form of understanding. He mirrors Berkeley in making the connection between vision and knowledge, but whereas Berkeley’s main concern remains vision, Byron’s main concern is knowing. Shifting focus, Byron moves Berkeley’s Enlightenment concentration on the senses to



Then must I plunge again into the crowd, And follow all that Peace disdains to seek? Where Revel calls, and Laughter, vainly loud, False to the heart, distorts the hollow cheek? … To feign the pleasure or conceal the pique, Smiles form the channel of a future tear, Or raise the writhing lip with ill-dissembled sneer. (II.97)

a more Romantic – and particularly Byronic – concentration on how the mind processes experiences. For all that this owes a debt to the earlier philosopher, it also shifts the question into different territory. Yet as the above stanza’s opening lines suggest, Harold I and II does not end with a wholesale dismissal of the possibility of comprehension, but rather with a final demonstration that meaning may be more complex than one may suppose: questions may be simultaneously rhetorical devices and legitimate queries; a sneer may be both dissembled and not dissembled; a young lord of ‘early years’ may at the same time be imbued with ‘the ills of Eld’ (II.98). In none of these figurations is a certainty precisely proven false. Rather, in all cases, and in all cases in Harold’s first cantos, Byron stretches a certainty so that it can no longer be trusted to be what it is. While this movement is hesitant, it has interesting ramifications. Harold’s representation of the world as multifariously perceivable suggests that the mind is capable of retaining several different versions of an object or experience at once, that it can recognize that what it perceives is not what is – what Berkeley refers to as the ‘rerum natura’ (PHK 45) – but rather is one of many possible versions of what is. It also suggests that the mind can, if not perceive and grasp such things from various different viewpoints simultaneously, be aware that there are several different viewpoints for the grasping while choosing only one. Significantly, this stance is not skepticism; it dismisses neither reality nor the possibility of interpreting reality effectively (nor, to invoke the period’s larger complaints against Hume, does it dismiss God or identity). Rather, it begins to suggest a vastly greater complexity inherent in the known world, and in the knowing of it.24 There is no denying that this suggestion seems to lead to skepticism: as Beattie charged, ‘Hath not the event proved … from the use to which later authors have applied it, that [Berkeley’s] system leads directly to atheism and universal scepticism?’ (OT 312). But in Childe Harold I and II Byron is not there yet. At the risk of reducing by categorization, one might say that at this moment he is not yet Humean, but still Berkeleyan, not in that he announces adherence to either of these thinkers, but in that he explores and undermines the accepted epistemological paradigm rather than dismissing it wholesale. Rare, if not non-existent, are moments in Harold I and II in which representations, sights, or comprehensions are revealed as opposite to what they are commonly understood to be. The poem never asserts that readers, and by extrapolation people, cannot know. Instead, it suggests that in order to know they must come to know that knowing means knowing more – more fully, more complexly, more confusingly.





in Greece, Hobhouse and I wrangled every day. His guide was Mitford’s fabulous History. He had a greed for legendary lore, topography, inscriptions … He would potter with map and compass at the foot of Pindus, Parne, and Parnassus, to ascertain the site of some ancient temple or city. I rode my mule up them. They had haunted my dreams from boyhood … John Cam’s dogged perseverance in pursuit of his hobby is to be envied; I have no hobby and no perseverance. (quoted in Records 82) Like Berkeley’s viewer, who recognizes that there is no ‘necessary connection’ between the visible and the tangible, Byron realizes that ‘visible figures are the marks of tangible figures,’ not the things themselves (NTV §140, my emphasis): one must ride one’s mule up mountains to know them. Even more, he presents himself as precisely congruent to the narrator and author of Childe Harold, sharing those personae’s suspicions that received knowledge is not to be relied upon. Yet Byron is wrong in his final assessment of himself; he has more resolve than he gives himself credit for. The Enlightenment disturbances of Childe Harold I and II grow and metamorphose in the works that follow: they are the first steps onto a mountain Byron will continue to struggle up throughout his works, the first thoughtful moves in the making of a philosophical stance. In their challenges to the accuracy of received conceptions of knowing, Harold’s first two cantos mark the beginning of a quest, and a questioning, in which Byron will persevere for the rest of his writing career.



Childe Harold I and II refigures knowing as a self-divided and selfdividing plenitude. This poem of commencement does not empty the concept of knowledge so much as unbalance it by stuffing it too full. Byron pushes, but he does not destroy: he denies nothing, but he certainly doubts everything. Reminiscing to Edward Trelawny some ten years after the journey that led to Childe Harold’s first cantos, Byron recalled a method of proceeding that mirrors the themes of his poem:

3 Worse than Faithless: Plenitude and the Loss of Knowledge in The Giaour

Byron’s 1813–14 Eastern Tales are the most purely imaginative of his works. Despite their possible connections to the events of Byron’s life in the East, their exotic settings, highly colored plots and dramatic tone are both their impetus and their hallmark.1 In fact, precisely because the Tales are so firmly imaginative, it is surprising to discover that they, like the more sober Childe Harold I and II, are vehicles for Byron’s philosophical investigations. In both form and content, the Eastern Tales continue to move Byron’s epistemological inquiry forward, pushing Harold I and II’s suspicions about knowledge in both clearer and more fruitful directions. The first of the Tales, The Giaour, undertakes this investigation immediately and fully. Whereas Harold I and II voices uncertainty about any conceptualization that presents knowledge as stable and reliable, The Giaour begins to dismiss such conceptualizations altogether. Harold’s first two cantos leave Byron in a somewhat awkward position, since while they suggest that conventional formulations of knowledge are unreliable, they do not dismiss stable knowledge entirely. A similar stance of uncertainty, however, is a common starting point for a number of the British Enlightenment philosophers with whom Byron was familiar: Locke determined to investigate ‘our understandings’ after he and his friends ‘had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming anywhere nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us’ (Essay, Epistle); Berkeley declares the purpose of the Principles to be to ‘try if I can discover what those Principles are which have introduced all … doubtfulness and uncertainty … into the several sects of Philosophy’ (Intro §4); even Reid insists that he ‘shall be ready to change my opinion’ if the ‘candid and 57



Um! People sometimes hit near the truth, but never the whole truth. – Byron, journal entry, 1814

discerning Few’ disapprove of his conclusions (IHM, Dedication, iv). Byron thus seems to owe to the philosophy on which he draws not merely his intellectual underpinnings but also his method of procedure: from doubt to conviction via investigation. One can also say that The Giaour is the first text in which Byron advances this investigation firmly forward, drawing upon empirical thinkers to enrich his work in unexpected ways, even as he also draws out their conclusions to unexpected ends. In the introduction to the Principles, Berkeley writes that ‘it will be found that when language is once grown familiar, the hearing of the sounds … is oft immediately attended with those passions, which at first were wont to be produced by the intervention of ideas, that are now quite omitted,’ requesting the reader ‘to reflect with himself, and see if it does not often happen … that the passions of fear, love, hatred, admiration, disdain, and the like, arise immediately in his mind upon the perception of certain words, without any ideas coming between them.’ For Berkeley, this slippery connection between ideas and language is one of the greatest barriers to obtaining comprehension; in the Principles he writes that ‘it will be found that when language is once grown familiar, the hearing of the sounds or sight of the characters is oft immediately attended with those passions, which at first were wont to be produced by the intervention of ideas, that are now quite omitted,’ while in the Theory of Vision Vindicated he figures language as ‘a great number of arbitrary signs, various and apposite’ (Intro §20; TVV §40). The Giaour is deeply concerned with this insecure connection between language and ideas, a concern it demonstrates in strikingly Berkeleyan figurations that render the flaws of conventional knowledge structures precise and graspable. In the poem, as in the Principles, language is not a means but a barrier to knowing. Yet if in The Giaour Byron joins Berkeley in linguistic interest, he moves beyond him by shaping the text so that it asserts that the connection between language and knowing is slippery because knowledge itself is elusive. And it is this epistemological elusiveness that is the poem’s real concern. As in Harold I and II, devaluation of vision as a path to certain knowledge runs like a thread through The Giaour. The poem gives added weight to this devaluation, moreover, by linking it to a challenge of the ability of language to express truth as well. This is most obvious in the presentation of the poem’s hero. Nothing in The Giaour seems more certain than the Giaour himself: he is described repeatedly, and sometimes minutely, by a broad array of narrators. Yet this multi-voiced




rendering of the protagonist, apparently offering maximum understanding, in fact demonstrates the flaws that consistently undermine such understanding, for the Giaour, seemingly fully revealed, really offers only confusion. However well defined this hero may appear, he is considerably less than he seems. Presenting the Giaour in cumulative fragments spoken by different narrators yields two results that would seem to oppose but in fact reinforce each other. Each speaker describes what he sees, but the description, like all descriptions, is filtered through his own understanding and beliefs.2 Logically, this should result in constant suspicion on the reader’s part, since each of the narrators has biases, and almost always ones that conflict with those of the other narrators. But text uses these biases to advantage. The very different narrators describe the Giaour almost identically. The Muslim fisherman’s ‘Though young and pale, that sallow front / Is scathed by fiery passion’s brunt, / … bent on earth, thine evil eye…’ (194–96), is matched by Hassan’s ‘I know him by his pallid brow; / I know him by his evil eye’ (611–13), which is itself mirrored in the Christian monk’s ‘Oft will his glance the gazer rue— / For in it lurks the nameless spell / That speaks—itself unspeakable—,’ and, a few lines later, ‘See—by the half-illumin’d wall, / His hood fly back—his dark hair fall— / That pale brow wildly wreathing round …’ (837–39; 893–95). Readers can cross-check descriptions between narrators with widely different faiths and loyalties and be certain that, because these narrators agree, they are telling the truth. Nor is this only true of physical characteristics. Despite difference in loyalties, religions, and nationalities, all the narrators agree on the Giaour’s personality and his effect on viewers: ‘He stood – some dread was on his face, / Soon hatred settled in its place … / … o’er his soul / Winters of memory seem’d to roll,’ the fisherman reports; Hassan speaks of his ‘envious treachery’; the monk remarks his ‘spirit yet unquell’d and high, … / If ever evil angel bore / The form of mortal, such he wore’ (234–62; 613; 840–913). Yet the text does not rest at this seeming agreement. Rather, it undermines these judgments at every turn, showing that they are based in prejudice or assumption. ‘I know thee not, I loathe thy race,’ the fisherman apostrophizes the Giaour when he first sees him; the monk declares that that Giaour has committed ‘some dark deed he will not name,’ and admits that the Giaour ‘broods within his cell alone, / His name and race alike unknown’ (191; 806–07). Nonetheless, both are happy to elaborate at length on the protagonist’s feelings, background, and intentions. But Byron takes care to riddle these assumptions with demonstrations of their flaws. Sometimes these are obvious admissions that the speakers are



Plenitude and the Loss of Knowledge in The Giaour 59

imposing meaning: ‘Right well I view, and deem thee one, / Whom Othman’s sons should slay or shun,’ says the fisherman. Sometimes the poem offers more subtle indicators of its narrators’ flawed knowledge, as in the fisherman’s frequent resort to rhetorical questions, questions that reveal his gaps in understanding – ‘And what are these to thine or thee / That thou should’st either pause or flee?’, ‘And did he fly or fall alone?’ (232–33; 278) – or as in the monk’s rigid certainty, which renders supposition fact – ‘Great largess to these walls he brought, / And thus our abbot’s favour bought’; ‘… [he] not from piety but pride / Gives wealth to walls that never heard / Of his one holy vow nor word’ (816–17; 902–04). There is also the quiet but consistent use in all the narrators’ descriptions of words and phrases that indicate uncertainty – ‘seemed,’ ‘seems,’ ‘wonder,’ and the omnipresent ‘as if.’ Again and again the text emphasizes that the knowledge these speakers claim is suspect. Additionally, from the first the technique of the poem’s narration creates complicity in false knowing. The speeding Giaour, paused suddenly on a cliff-top, for example, is an image to set the heart pounding. The dramatic language and powerful images work to break down any wall between reader and narrator, creating a passage that invites complete emotional immersion in the moment it portrays: Who thundering comes on blackest steed? With slacken’d bit and hoof of speed … ’Twas but an instant—he restrained That fiery barb so sternly reined— ’Twas but a moment that he stood Then sped as if by death pursued; But in that instant, o’er his soul Winters of Memory seemed to roll, And gather in that drop of time A life of pain, an age of crime What felt he then—at once opprest By all that most distracts the breast? (180–268) The poem here deploys the ‘expressive phonology’ that is a hallmark of oral storytelling: ‘emphatic lengthening’ of certain words and syllables, and changes in vocal pitch, rhythm, volume, all of which ‘constitute a key emotionological resource in narrative contexts’ (Herman 322–23). That thundering! That ‘fiery barb so sternly reined’! That ‘life of pain, an age of crime’! The strong, clear language has its emotional force




matched by rhythmic emphasis: ‘Thundering,’ ‘blackest,’ ‘fiery,’ and ‘sternly’ all have stressed first syllables, and the nouns in ‘A life of pain, an age of crime’ are similarly emphasized. The short lines, often made up of even shorter phrases, increase the impact and add a sense of urgent excitement. Overcome with the spectacle of it all, a reader may well not notice that every piece of information advanced in these lines, beyond the Giaour’s physical actions, is speculative: the winters of memory ‘seem’ to roll, the speeding is only ‘as if’ pursued, and on either side the description is bracketed by questions that reveal the speaker’s uncertainty. These lines are structured so that the powerful drama outweighs the modest qualification, and the result is a textual moment that invites belief not in the truth but in what should be the truth. In the narrators’ observations and in these expressive passages, The Giaour draws upon both Berkeley and Locke. In the prejudices advanced as convictions, one finds a direct link to Berkeley’s Principles, where the philosopher ‘entreats’ his reader ‘to reflect within himself, and see if it does not often happen either in hearing or reading a discourse, that the passions of fear, love, hatred, admiration, disdain, and the like, arise immediately in his mind upon the perception of certain words, without any ideas coming between’ (Intro §20), and to his assertion in the New Theory of Vision that ‘upon hearing a certain sound, the IDEA is immediately suggested to the understand-ing which custom had united with it … That one IDEA may suggest another to the mind it will suffice that they have been observed to go together, without any demonstration of the necessity of their coexistence …’ (§§17, 25). Both in its emphasis on the prejudices of his narrators and in its manipulation of words for effect, the poem also engages with Locke, who argues that ‘because by familiar use from our Cradles, we come to learn certain articulate Sounds very perfectly, and have them readily on our Tongues, … but yet are not always careful to examine, or settle their Significations perfectly, it often happens that Men … do set their Thoughts more on Words than Things’ (III.ii.§7). The fisherman and the monk have both mistaken appearances for actualities, just as they have allowed their experience to cloud their judgment, and the text, manipulated for dramatic effect so that it focuses more on words than on what they mean, has primed its reader to do the same. In connecting with Locke and Berkeley in this way the poem moves from sensation into the realm of epistemological investigation. The text’s use of vision and language as tools to undermine knowing grounds its dismissal of knowledge in the rational idiom. Employing




the concerns of the philosophers, The Giaour connects to conversations outside poetical confines, thus not only lending itself gravitas but also giving the ideas it explores a legitimacy they might otherwise lack. Even as the philosophers thus add to the poem, however, the poem returns the favor. In its use of their ideas, one sees an advantage that poetry, at least Byron’s poetry, possesses over philosophy. While Locke and Berkeley are limited to telling, or at best arguing from evidentiary demonstrations, The Giaour shows, and thus makes real, what the philosophers only assert. ‘The communicating of ideas marked by words is not the chief and only end of language … There are other ends, as the raising of some passion, the exciting to or deterring from an action, the putting the mind in some particular disposition,’ Berkeley writes, ‘and I think [this] does not infrequently happen in the familiar use of language’ (PHK Intro §20). Undermining his narrators and manipulating his readers, but leaving a clear enough trail for these machinations to be noticed by cooler heads, Byron actualizes the philosophy his precursors allege, moving their abstruse considerations into the realms of general accessibility. He thus fulfills one of Berkeley’s chief requirements for a sensible and successful philosopher: ‘we ought to think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar’ (PHK §51). Lending added depth to the text’s demonstrations, is that in addition to sharing Locke and Berkeley’s concerns Byron takes them further. In the course of the Essay and the Principles, both Locke and Berkeley wrestle with the difficult connection between words and ideas. Both are troubled by the conviction that, while words are clearly humanity’s only way of communicating ideas even semi-successfully, they do not necessarily correspond to those ideas. ‘I find,’ Locke observes with some exasperation at the end of Book II, ‘that there is so close a connexion between Ideas and Words, … that it is impossible to speak clearly and distinctly of our Knowledge, which all consists in propositions, without considering, first, Language’; while Berkeley seems deeply anxious about the dangers of language, seeking ‘an entire deliverance from the deception of words … It were … to be wished that everyone would use his utmost endeavours to obtain a clear view of the ideas he would consider, separating from them all that dress and encumbrance of words’ (PHK Intro §§23–24). The Giaour extends these concerns, suggesting that the problem with ‘Knowledge’ may not be that it consists in the wordy impediment of ‘propositions,’ or the subjective winking of observation, or the ‘dress and encumbrance of words,’ but rather, as a reliable construct it may not exist at all.





at the time the seven Islands were possessed by the Republic of Venice, and soon after the Arnauts were beaten back from the Morea, which they had ravaged for some time subsequent to the Russian invasion. The desertion of the Mainotes, on being refused the plunder of Misitra, led to the abandonment of that enterprise, and to the desolation of the Morea, during which the cruelty exercised on all sides was unparalleled even in the annals of the faithful. (CPW 3: 39–40) Happily enjoying this introduction to a myrrh-scented Oriental tragedy, a reader is suddenly thrust into a political tale of considerable and elaborate confusion, full of Mainotes and Arnauts, Misitras and Moreas, and the complex ins and outs of recent Greek history.3 David Seed suggests that the poem’s prose preface ‘does it a serious disservice in reducing its narrative to a bald explicit outline, thereby acting in anticipation against the poem’s exploitation of mystery and suggestion’ (21), but it is difficult to agree with him, simply because the Advertisement is anything but ‘a bald explicit outline.’ Based on the evidence it offers, it is almost impossible to tell what kind of story will follow: a tale of love lost and revenged, a political screed, a military history, or some combination of all three. Moreover, it is difficult to determine whether the Advertisement’s end adds resonance to its beginning (the political situation perhaps has a direct influence on the actions of the characters), or whether it has simply wandered off topic. In this way, the Advertisement is an accurate preview of the poem it precedes, for the confusion it demonstrates in miniature is writ larger throughout the text that follows.4 This confusion inheres, for instance, in The Giaour’s method of scattering allusive fragments of knowledge throughout, proleptic seeds that sprout understanding only hundreds



The suggestion of this possibility precedes even the poem itself. The Giaour’s prefatory Advertisement neatly outlines the story it introduces, but even as it does so it compromises understanding of that story. ‘The tale which these disjointed fragments present, is founded upon circumstances now less common in the East than formerly,’ it begins. ‘… The story, when entire, contained the adventures of a female slave, who was thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea for her infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover.’ So far, so romantic. But then, in the middle of a sentence, the paragraph abruptly changes trajectory, focus, and perhaps even purpose:


of lines later. One such is the reader’s first clear sight (via the fisherman narrator) of the Giaour, pausing from his wild ride to scan the scene below: A moment on his stirrup stood— Why looks he o’er the olive wood? … To-night—set[s] Rhamazani’s sun—, To-night—the Baraim feast’s begun— … But what are these to thine or thee, That thou should’st either pause or flee? (220–33)

Strange rumours in our city say Upon that eve she fled away; When Rhamazan’s last sun was set … And far beyond the Moslem’s power Had wrong’d him with the faithless Giaour. … But others say that on that night, By pale Phingari’s trembling light, The Giaour upon his jet black steed Was seen—but seen alone to speed (447–70) The passages demonstrate the way in which The Giaour’s style toys with comprehension, nudging readers to acknowledge the flawed nature of any claimed knowledge. Separated, the extracts seem unconnected (or perhaps merely connected by time); placed adjacent to one another, however, they make it plain (that is, as plain as anything is in the poem) that the Giaour is not simply pausing in sweeping rage, or galloping off and leaving Leila to her fate (as at least one critic has supposed5). Rather, in the moment when he ‘on his stirrup stood’ he is scanning the landscape for her, ‘fled away’ that same night. What links the two passages is the final sunset of Ramadan, which occurs in each. Between them, however, come a description of Hassan’s ruined palace (280–351), two sustained metaphors (388–421; 422–38), and an elliptical suggestion of Leila’s own death (352–81). Only after this large amount of intervening matter comes the information necessary for realizing that the craning Giaour of the narrative’s beginning was seeking to catch sight of the woman who had escaped to meet him. What is more, once one arrives at



This moment remains a puzzle, no answer for the fisherman’s queries supplied and no motive given for the Giaour’s pause, until some 200 lines later, when the same speaker muses over Leila’s disappearance:

the later section, one must not only still have the earlier moment and its accompanying sense of confusion at the forefront of one’s mind in order to make the connection, but must also be able to recognize this passage as the explanation of that earlier moment. Even then one cannot be sure that the connection is correct: ‘To-night—sets Rhamazani’s sun’ seems to indicate the end of Ramadan, but is it really the same as ‘Rhamazan’s last sun’? Reading, and understanding, becomes a tricky business here.6 Yet more opaque are the two sustained insect passages early in the poem, the representation of the Kashmiri butterfly, ‘the insect-queen of Eastern spring,’ and of the ‘Scorpion girt by fire’ (389; 423). Presented back to back, unmoored from what precedes or immediately follows them, they at first appear both arbitrarily inserted in and puzzlingly unrelated to the poem that surrounds them. Like the Giaour posed on the cliff-top, their meaning becomes clear only as one proceeds through the text. Admittedly, the puzzle of the butterfly can be solved soon enough: she is a metaphor for Leila, who appears less than a hundred lines later, ‘high and graceful’ in her queenly pride and perfection (474–516). The scorpion, however, remains a mystery until the Giaour’s confession at the poem’s end. There, one can at last recognize the analogue to the insect’s ‘Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes,’ and ‘sting … dart[ed] into her desperate brain’ in the Giaour’s fixation on his past and his memories that ‘stung … my every thought to strife’ (422; 429–32; 1195). Furthermore, only after this connection has been made can one understand why the fragments are placed as they are. The image of the bruised butterfly, treated ruthlessly by ‘gayer insects fluttering by,’ now links logically with Leila’s merciless death (which precedes it), and the extended metaphor for the suffering, obsessively devoted Giaour could belong nowhere else but next to that passage which images his lost love. Yet we must wait nearly a thousand lines before we can reach this full comprehension. Until then the insect passages remain odd aberrations in an already confusing text. These moments of intermingled bewilderment and enlightenment reach their apogee in the vampire curse leveled at the Giaour in the poem’s most bewildering set piece: But first, on earth as vampire sent, Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent: Then ghastly haunt thy native place, And suck the blood of all thy race; There from thy daughter, sister, wife, At midnight drain the stream of life;





This isolated piece of grand guignol seems more notable for its ghoulishness than its relevance to the rest of the poem; the Giaour never becomes a vampire, and the curse is never obviously followed up or even referred to again. Nevertheless, it does have its fulfillment in the larger poem. It is just that this fulfillment, like the other dangling connections the text leaves, must be carefully excavated.7 Most obviously, the curser’s wish that ‘fire unquench’d, unquenchable— / Around— within—thy heart shall dwell,’ finds reflection in the Giaour’s selfprofessed ‘searching throes of ceaseless pain’ and in the scorpion simile (751–54; 1005). But connection can also be found in the monk’s nervous description of the Giaour – ‘By all my hope of sins forgiven / Such looks are not of earth nor heaven!’ (914–15) – as well as the Giaour’s own admission that after Leila’s murder, ‘I breathed, / But not the breath of human life,’ and his description of himself as he will be after death, ‘That lifeless thing the living fear’ (1192–93; 1280). More convincing than any of these, however, is the self the Giaour presents in his confession: a man dead in all but body, obsessed by a passion as single-minded as a vampire’s lust for blood.8 Brooding over his obsession and frenzied with ‘the cherished madness’ of his heart (1191), the Giaour does indeed go ‘stalking to [his] sullen grave’; he does indeed ‘with Gouls and Afrits rave’ (783–84). Such moments of delayed and plaited comprehension are not limited to the text proper, either. Once more the apparatus assists, interweaving annotations and text into destabilization. There is no denying the curious nature of The Giaour’s notes, with their long perorations and peculiarly free-associative structure. Contemporary reviewers, in fact, objected to them on just such grounds: ‘It were to be wished,’ grumbled Thomas Denman in the Monthly Review, ‘that the noble author had omitted all the notes … except those which are absolutely necessary to render the text intelligible; since they are in a style of sprightliness which ill accords with the narrative’ (207).9 ‘Sprightliness,’ however, might not be the adjective that springs to mind when one is faced with the note to line 89 of the prologue (‘The first—last look—by death revealed’): I trust that few of my readers have ever had an opportunity of witnessing what is here attempted in description, but those who have will probably retain a painful remembrance of that singular beauty which pervades, with few exceptions, the features of the dead, a few



Yet loathe the banquet which perforce Must feed thy livid living corse (755–62)


hours. … after ‘the spirit is not there.’ It is to be remarked in cases of violent death by gun-shot wounds, the expression is always that of languor, whatever the natural energy of the sufferer’s character; but in death from a stab the countenance preserves its traits of feeling or ferocity, and the mind its bias, to the last. (CPW 3: 416)10

I gazed upon him where he lay, And watched his spirit ebb away … I search’d but vainly search’d to find, The workings of a wounded mind; Each feature of that sullen corse Betrayed his rage, but no remorse. (1085–92) Even after this, one must turn back to, or be able to bring to mind, the description of Hassan in battle with the Giaour some 400 lines earlier, remembering the ‘quenchless hate’ that Hassan feels in the moments before he is stabbed, and connect the passage above and that earlier one to the even earlier note. Only the ability to connect these three extracts offers full comprehension. With these passages and the memory of the note in mind, one can understand (although the Giaour does not) why the Giaour could not see remorse in Hassan’s features, but only rage: ‘in death from a stab the countenance preserves its traits of feeling or ferocity, and the mind its bias, to the last.’ Equally, the note is now no longer inappropriate. It suddenly has a recognizable purpose.11 Only at this late moment do these seemingly unconnected passages now come into their full, interconnected meaning, a meaning which cannot be grasped until one recognizes and synthesizes all three of them. Here is a radical act of enfolded analepsis and prolepsis, one in which the text simply offers the proleptic and analeptic artifacts without ever pointing toward their eventual significance.



The note’s sudden turn from justified explanation to extraneous grisly musing seems bizarre, entirely unmotivated by anything in the line it glosses, and the second sentence seems more a product of caprice and Byron’s notorious wandering attention than of anything else. In fact, however, the note is neither capricious nor tangential. It is, rather, a quite legitimate and useful piece of information – but one must wait to recognize it as such for almost a thousand lines, until the Giaour has nearly finished his final confession. There, describing his murder of Hassan, the poem’s hero rages:


By observing what passes in our Minds, how our Ideas there in train constantly some vanish [sic], and others begin to appear, we come by the Idea of Succession … By observing a distance in the part of this Succession, we get the Idea of Duration … By being able to repeat those Measures of Time, or Ideas of stated length of Duration in our Minds, as often as we will, we can come to imagine Duration, where nothing does really endure or exist. (II.xiv.§32) The Giaour telescopes time, linking disparate passages to create comprehension that defies both Succession and Duration (since the elements in any complete piece of knowledge may come in any order and after any amount of time). This does seem at this stage to be more a game than anything else – it’s not clear what the text might be trying to suggest – but it is a game that disturbs one of the most elemental building blocks of human understanding: comprehension of time. The work The Giaour more nearly evokes is Hume’s Treatise, with its assertion that constant conjunction leads people to false certainty. The certainty Hume deals with is that of cause and effect – ‘We call to mind [the] constant conjunction [of two items or experiences] in all past instances. Without any farther ceremony, we all the one cause and the other effect, and infer the existence of the one from that of the other’ (I.iii.§6) – but The Giaour’s innovation is not only to move this certainty from the realm of objects and occurrences to the realm of ideas, but also to prove Hume correct by inverting him. That is, The Giaour constantly offers causes and effects it only reveals to be causes and effects long after they have been presented as unrelated events, figurations, or remarks: their conjunction is not constant, but it should be. As a result, the poem demonstrates that experience leads not to the certainty of cause and effect, but to the certainty that one cannot determine cause and effect, or even recognize when one has an effect,



It is tempting to conclude that The Giaour here plays with Locke’s theories on the connection of ideas: ‘Some of our Ideas have a natural Correspondence and Connexion one with another … Besides this there is another Connexion of Ideas wholly owing to Chance or Custom; Ideas that in themselves are not at all of kin, come to be so united in some Mens Minds, that ’tis very hard to separate them’ (II.xxxiii.§5). The poem seems to suggest that it is not an easy matter to differentiate between these two kinds of ideas, or even to determine which ideas might fall into the first category. Furthermore, the text seems also to be playing with Locke’s notion of how humans come to understand duration:

or what it might be the effect of. Furthermore, it suggests that certainty of disjunction must be qualified and changed just as often as Hume suggests knowledge of conjunction must: we must be prepared to alter our knowledge in both directions. In other words, The Giaour has advanced significantly in epistemological consideration from Childe Harold I and II. Where the earlier poem suggested the concept of stable knowledge was dubious, this one suggests it is altogether inaccurate. Moreover, by displaying the complexity of knowledge, The Giaour allows knowledge to undermine itself. The text suggests that as we come to know more, one of the things we come to know is that conceptions of knowledge as stable and certain cannot be correct. In The Giaour connections interweave backward and forward, and as a result the text’s model of knowing (which resembles, not incidentally, the way knowledge is formed in the extra-textual world) demonstrates precisely how complex and malleable a construction ‘knowledge’ is. To figure knowledge this way is a different thing from figuring it as Harold I and II does. Conceptions are not just complex in The Giaour, but their complexity chips away at strict cognitive boundaries. In supplying a multiplicity of meanings, often contradictory but nonetheless equally and simultaneously possible, the poem makes knowing not a straightforward act but a multi-sided process, with an end result that is potentially ungraspable precisely because there are so many different versions of knowledge available. In The Giaour, more than one knowledge may coexist about one thing at one time: the poem’s guiding principle is ‘both either and or,’ and this guiding principle works to undermine the canonical constructions of knowledge. In fact, this ungraspability is often not merely potential in the text. If the poem is littered with moments that demonstrate that knowledge is accretive (W. Marshall, ‘Accretive,’ 502), there are also passages that suggest that it is simply inaccessible. Furthermore, such moments are without fail those in which knowing, and knowing specifically, would seem to be most necessary. The most obvious example is Leila’s death. The manner of this can be guessed at from clues planted in the Advertisement and the final note. When connected, these seem to indicate that as punishment for her infidelity to Hassan Leila has been tied living in a sack and then drowned: ‘a young female slave, who was thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity.’ The event is also foreshadowed and then alluded to in hindsight by the fisherman, but it is conspicuously absent from the text itself. What is most significant about the lines that stand in





for Leila’s drowning is not the fisherman’s elliptical hints – ‘The burthen ye so gently bear, / Seems one that claims your utmost care’; ‘I watch’d it [the bundle] as it sank, methought / Some motion from the current caught / Bestirr’d it more’ (360–61; 376–78) – but the striking blank that lies between them, placed after the emir has ordered the fisherman to cease rowing, but before that fisherman has begun his retrospective description:

Seed writes that ‘Byron cuts off the emir’s words in mid-sentence’ (21), and although this is correct it is not precisely correct. The text does not just have the emir break off: it absents the moment of Leila’s death obviously from the text. In this instance where knowledge is most vital (for nowhere else does the reader learn exactly what happened to Leila) it is also most significantly absent. Nor is this an isolated occurrence, for a similarly ragged excision occurs in the description of Hassan’s death later in the poem. There, between the epigrammatic portrayal of the Giaour and Hassan in battle and the depiction of the murdered Sultan lying dead, stands another gap, absence where presence would be most welcome: Friends meet to part—Love laughs at faith; —True foes, once met, are joined till death! * * * * * * With sabre shiver’d to the hilt, Yet dripping with the blood he spilt (653–56) As in the case of Leila, the actual moment of death is missing. Here, this lack of understanding is even more marked, for the line of asterisks is followed by an extended portrayal of the unidentified corpse, ‘His turban far behind him roll’d, / And cleft in twain its firmest fold; / His crimson robe by falchion torn’ (659–61). There intervene another eight lines of description before the speaker at last names the dead man: ‘Fall’n Hassan lies’ (659). Until he is named, we do not know which



‘Rest from your task—so—bravely done, Our course has been right swiftly run, Yet ’tis the longest voyage, I trow, That one of’— * * * * * * * * * * Sullen it plunged, and slowly sank, The calm wave rippled to the bank (370–75)


of the two combatants has been slain, since the Giaour’s ‘Arnaut garb’ means that he, too, wears a turban (615). This is a moment of central importance to the poem, the climax of its action, yet the text holds back revelation for thirteen lines. Moreover, even when the identity of the dead man is at last revealed, Hassan defies categorization:

Hassan is at the same time dead and alive, ‘his unclos’d eye / Yet lowering on his enemy,’ both himself and that enemy, ‘that foe with brow / As dark as his that bled below.’ This revelation offers no certainty.12 In both the death of Leila and the death of Hassan, then, one finds at the climactic moment not clarification but willful mystification. Yet this does not seem a ploy to tease, nor to spare, nor to encourage one to supply what is missing. One might read these excisions as demonstrations of delicacy on Byron’s part, respect for the dead at the moment of death, but there is more to them than that. These withholdings stand as indicators of those places where cognition simply cannot reach, where understanding fails in its efforts to parse and to grasp. They seem intended to show that certain moments, often those in which comprehension seems most vital, surpass understanding. This blankness finds its echo in the poem’s consistent resort to figurative language as a means of description. It is not merely that the poem’s narrators almost without fail turn to simile when they wish to depict: ‘He came, he went, like the Simoom / That harbinger of fate and gloom’ (282–83); ‘As rears her crest the ruffled Swan, … Thus rose fair Leila’s whiter neck’ (507–11) – or that they create emotion and drama by use of the telling image: ‘all is still, / But the lattice that flaps when the wind is shrill’ (324–25). After all, that is what poetry does. More arresting and significant is the text’s tendency to substitute long, cumulative similes and metaphors for specific important incidents and experiences. It thus leaves not merely blank spaces but spaces that are simultaneously overfull and empty: agglomerations of images that



Fall’n Hassan lies—his unclos’d eye Yet lowering on his enemy, As if the hour that seal’d his fate, Surviving left his quenchless hate; And o’er him bends that foe with brow As dark as his that bled below.— (669–74)


As rolls the river into ocean, In sable torrent wildly streaming; As the sea tide’s opposing motion In azure column proudly gleaming, Beats back the current many a rood, In curling foam and mingling flood; While eddying whirl, and breaking wave, Roused by the blast of winter rave; … Thus—as the stream and ocean greet, With waves that madden as they meet— (620–33) One finds the same result in the monk’s impenetrably architectural description of the Giaour, a metaphor in which a man is so transformed into a building that it is difficult to comprehend the point of the analogy: It was no vulgar tenement To which such lofty gifts were lent. … The roofless cot decayed and rent, Will scarce delay the passer by— The tower by war or tempest bent, While yet may frown one battlement, Demands and daunts the stranger’s eye— Each ivied arch—and pillar lone, Pleads haughtily for glories gone! (874–82) Most tellingly, one finds such an overfull but empty space in the Giaour’s own series of substitutes for inexpressible love, each intended to convey the power of that emotion but in actuality demonstrating how difficult it is to convey: If changing cheek, and scorching vein— Lips taught to writhe, but not complain— If bursting heart, and madd’ning brain—



seem to provide understanding but in fact mask it. This occurs in the description of the clash between the Giaour’s and Hassan’s forces, an escalating crescendo of similes that may be intended to render the scene of battle more vivid, but that in fact render it almost unrecognizable as a battle through their delays and overly sustained metaphor:


If these stand-ins help one to understand the Giaour, it is only by simultaneously demonstrating how inaccessible he is, his feelings rendered through means that reveal their own dubiety: ‘If … If …’ And so it is with all this figurative language. It permits comprehension only by rendering that comprehension impressionistic, inaccurate. If the poem provides understanding of the two bands in battle, if it provides understanding of the Giaour’s emotional power over others, it only does so by showing what these are like. What they are remains inaccessible. We learn the truth, The Giaour suggests, only slant, and its slantedness makes what we learn simultaneously both more and less known. Marjorie Levinson has situated The Giaour as a Romantic Fragment Poem, a genre that ‘occurred within what has come to seem a tradition of formal innovation tending toward enlarged freedom of literary form,’ and one whose writers expected readers to take the poems’ difficulties as ‘essential or at least contributive to the work’s design’ (23, 35). Certainly The Giaour’s involvement with its audiences has been marked a number of times,13 but this involvement, I would argue, is intended to show not the role of readers in creating the text, but the extent to which, necessary though it may be, even reader involvement cannot create a text accurately. It is true that it is almost impossible to understand The Giaour’s narrative without several readings, but these readings, and their constructions of the poem’s events and larger meaning, produce not the text’s evolution or resolution but its persistent irresolution, its progressive, poet-created self-revision and self-doubt. Like the metaphors and similes, and like the curious interweaving of past, present, and future information, the poem’s fragmented structure underlines the insecurity of the information it offers. The Giaour does not enlist its readers to prove the poem’s cohesiveness. It co-opts them to prove the poem’s lack of it. ‘Truth,’ writes Locke, ‘… seems to me to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified do agree or disagree with one another’ (Essay IV.v.§2). One might argue that this is the central guiding principle of The Giaour, which vivifies it in striking representations of just how such agreements and disagreements are made, and where they break down. In The Giaour, knowledge, always proleptic, always analeptic, woven strands of hints, allusions, and possibilities, is always raveled and unraveled, and one can never be certain



And daring deed, and vengeful steel— And all that I have felt—and feel— Betoken love—that love was mine … (1105–10)

which occurs when. But again Byron also follows on from Locke. The philosopher’s statement carries within it the suggestion that truth is arbitrary. If it is nothing but the joining of signs as the things signified suit each other, there is the implication that when those ‘things signified’ cease to agree or disagree – because new information is added or old information is reconfigured, because opinion changes, because a different reader is reading – then truth itself changes. Byron foregrounds this implication, using not just The Giaour’s position as Romantic Fragment Poem but also many other aspects of its form (its notes, its lacunae, its poetic language) to suggest that understanding is not only, or simply, partial, but sometimes perhaps even absent. The Giaour’s most cohesive intra-textual assertion of this comes in the form of its eponymous hero’s final speech. The Giaour’s monologue stands as a fitting culmination of the poem it ends. For one, it is an exercise in opposition, with lines that contradict themselves as well as each other: ‘Yet lurks a wish within my breast / For rest—but not to feel ’tis rest—’; ‘I would not, if I might, be blest / I want no paradise— but rest’; ‘I die—but first I have possest, / And come what may, I have been blest’ (994–95; 1269–70; 1114–15). For another, the Giaour’s understanding of his own experiences evolves and shifts as he progresses through his re-enactment of them. His speech is also filled with those self-revising qualifiers familiar from Childe Harold and a mirror in miniature of The Giaour’s own autorevisions: ‘My days, though few, have passed below / In much of joy, but more of woe’; ‘I lov’d her, friar! nay, adored—’; ‘And she was lost—and yet I breathed, / But not the breath of human life’ (982–83; 1029–30; 1192–93). Byron distills into his protagonist’s tempestuous final utterance all the ideas that have been scattered throughout the text. Moreover, the information the confession reveals forces re-evaluation of its teller. In the revelations of his speech the Giaour confutes not only the prejudices of the monk and fisherman narrators, but also the vision of him that the text as a whole has encouraged. The oddest of these confutations is certainly the sudden revelation of a bosom friend from his boyhood, and his request that the monk deliver to that friend a ring once given as ‘[m]emorial of a youthful vow’ (1223). All of a sudden, the reader finds herself transported from a dramatic account of revenge and undying passion into a sentimental tale of the first order, complete with the rhetorical query, ‘And what than friendship’s manly tear / May better grace a brother’s bier?’ (1249–50). Nothing in any of the versions of the Giaour previously presented by himself or by the other narrators has hinted at such a rosy past, or such a noble friend-




ship. It has been suggested that Byron included such purple passages in the poem knowing that they would be excerpted in albums and keepsake books,14 but this seems insufficient motivation for including a 35-line passage that has no apparent link to anything that surrounds it. If Byron intends these lines to be sentimental, it seems he also intends them to jar, yet again, assumptions about knowledge. In fact, one has only to imagine them inscribed in isolation to realize how jarring they are: this extended description of adolescent friendship and deathbed yearning for its delights – ‘earlier days, and calmer hours / When heart with heart delights to blend, / … Our golden youth’ (1218–39) – would suggest a very different source than the poem in which it appears. Discovered within that poem, it necessitates substantial refiguring of the Giaour. This refiguring is accompanied by a more fundamental one. The fisherman, Hassan, the nameless narrator, and the title of the work itself have all identified the poem’s hero as ‘The Giaour’: ‘the infidel.’ Yet the Giaour’s repeated professions of loyalty to Leila in his monologue show that he is in fact no infidel at all. Indeed, the Giaour is faith personified. Leila is his savior – ‘her / who died for me’ (1034) – and like God all and present in all: ‘She was a form of life and light, / That, seen, became a part of sight, / And rose, where’er I turn’d mine eye’ (1127–29). The monk’s confused description of his guest turns out to be correct: ‘Yet seems he not of Othman race, / But only Christian in his face’ (810–11); the Giaour is faithful to neither of the poem’s religions. Yet the monk does not know that he is correct, any more than Hassan knows that at the moment in the midst of battle when he hurls his accusation – ‘Apostate to his own vile faith!’ (616) – the Giaour is in fact being most true to that faith. That is revealed only much later, when the Giaour represents the murder of Hassan as his sacrifice to Leila: ‘I, alas! too late to save, / Yet all I then could give—I gave— / ’Twas some relief—our foe a grave’ (1070–72). Both the monk and Hassan understand much more, and much more truly, than they realize. In addition, the text leaves its reader to ferret out the ironic connection between the Giaour’s revelations and these narrators’ assumptions. Thus does it doubly summarize itself, with its protean version of an elusive comprehension. And there is yet another summary in these lines, for while the Giaour’s revelation of faith emphasizes yet again the slipperiness of supposedly stable understanding, it also acts as the final example of the poem’s guiding figuration of knowledge. For all that the Giaour’s faith is idiolectic, it is indisputably a true one. He is as devoted to Leila as Hassan is to Allah, or as the monk is to the




Christian God. His religion is thus at the same time both rankest apostasy and a perfect demonstration of a man in high communion with his deity: both either and or. While Byron uses this portion of The Giaour as a final opportunity to point out the paradoxes at the heart of knowing, he also uses it to suggest for the first time an idea that will become central to his philosophy of knowledge: that choice has a place in the production of putative knowledge. Although the Giaour has not made a conscious or active choice, he has chosen his faith – ‘She was my life’s unerring light’ (1145) – and the god he cleaves to is as real for him as any other the poem presents, or perhaps more real: ‘On her might muftis gaze, and own / That through her eye the Immortal shone’ (491–92). The fact that he has chosen to believe in no way dilutes the power of what he believes in, or the power of his belief in it: ‘thou wert, thou art / The cherish’d madness of my heart’ (1190–91). Taken together, these suggest not just that the strength of knowledge does not depend on its truth, but also that a person may deviate from conventional comprehension to form his own. The Giaour demonstrates this choosing of knowledge in his idiosyncratic approach to morality, too. This is not limited to his rather confused grasp of how forgiveness works, ‘Thou wilt absolve me from the deed [of murder], / For he was hostile to thy creed!’ (1038–39), but is also manifested in his version of Hassan’s death: The very name of Nazarene Was wormwood to his Paynim spleen, Ungrateful fool! Since but for brands, Well wielded in some hardy hands; And wounds by Galileans given, The surest pass to Turkish heav’n; For him his Houris might still wait Impatient at the prophet’s gate. (1040–47) Well, one could say, that’s one way of looking at it. The Giaour’s understanding of his deed and its ethical implications, although unusual, is nonetheless plausible. In fact, it makes excellent use of logic and reveals some keen religious understanding. The fact that this understanding is not true in the sense of ‘infallible by definition’ (Hendricks 8) does not make it untrue. If the poem thus questions the conventional figuration of understanding as the recognition of objective givens – questions the configuration of it as knowledge rather than as knowledge-claims – it





simultaneously, through its protagonist’s total certainty in his own knowledge-claim, demonstrates the role choice might play in determining understanding. Such choice is here figured as subconscious and unacknowledged, but it is present. Curiously, however, the Giaour seems to be groping toward awareness of choice as an element in knowing, for early in his monologue he makes his one truly startling confession: that he recognizes his own understanding of his life’s central occurrence, his passion and its results, as open to interpretation.

The Giaour’s acknowledgment that construal plays a central role in the event that defines him creates a striking moment. Such matter-of-fact admission – ‘Yet did he but what I had done / Had she been false to more than one’ (1062–63) – arrests the poem’s narrative and flow, forcing a nearly wholesale re-evaluation. The Giaour is no longer a singularly devoted lover, nor even a fiery convert of revenge,15 but rather a kind of chilling reification and extension of the Lockean assertion about truth: a man who recognizes his construction of knowledge as arbitrary, yet commits to it anyway. In this representation of the hero one might see Byron cleaving to Berkeley’s ideas more fully while at the same time turning to create something dependent upon, but separate from, both Berkeley and Locke’s thought. The Giaour has, in a sense, unhooked the stitches that hold together the unthinking ‘passions of love, hatred, … and the like … [and] the perception’ of that which represents them (PHK §1), but here the means of perception is not words, but actual understanding – that is, perception itself. Famously, Berkeley writes of ‘unthinking things’ that ‘[t]heir esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have an existence out of the minds … which perceive them’; slightly earlier he puts this even more baldly: ‘the existence of an idea consists in being perceived’ (PHK §§2–3). The Giaour understands this and demonstrates it perfectly, with the significant difference that Byron shifts the meaning of ‘idea’ from the philosophical ‘Representation of the thing [the mind] considers’ (Essay IV.xxi.§4) to the more common ‘conception,’16 under which rubric he includes emotions and experiences. Thus, in The Giaour, in one perception, the idea of love is truth; in another, it is treachery.



Faithless to him—he gave the blow, But true to me—I laid him low; Howe’er deserv’d her doom might be, Her treachery was truth to me (1064–67)

Here we find an advance on Harold I and II, as well. Where in that poem sites and their meaning were held up to scrutiny, here it is the meaning of comprehension itself that is questioned. This extension of Berkeley, and the reification of Locke’s suggestion that truth is no more than ‘the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified do agree or disagree with one another,’ create an intriguing textual intimation. The Giaour hints not just that people may choose their understanding, but that they may see, or may come to see, that they have chosen. The Giaour’s choice, it is true, comes with extreme results and portrays him as teetering on the edge of sociopathy, but given that most of the poem’s readers are unlikely to be apostates riven with jealous rage and in possession of the falchion to assuage it, the hint has wider implications. If one can recognize that truth consists of ‘nothing but the joining and separating of signs,’ and free oneself from what Berkeley calls ‘the doctrine of abstraction’ (PHK §100), one may come to see knowledge not as a given but as something that each person can, and perhaps does, create and recreate. This is the first appearance of a concept that will form a central part of Byron’s mature philosophy of knowledge, and the implications of which will be explored more fully in the last of the 1813–14 Eastern Tales, Lara. There are problems here, of course. For one, the Giaour’s attitude is harshly presented and thus alienating: still relatively new to his ideas, Byron lacks the confidence to express them most effectively. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to argue for The Giaour as a poem that expresses a consistent view about the position of knowledge right from the start, or even as it progresses. As this chapter has shown, the text seems ambivalent as to whether knowledge is merely uncertain or is out-and-out unreliable. Yet Byron is a writer who often thinks as he writes, and as the poem progresses it moves more firmly toward a figuration of knowledge as simply absent, and of knowledge-claims as the actual mode of constructing knowing. Indeed, the poem’s final lines suggest this. They do this both allusively in the monk’s remark that the Giaour ‘pass’d – nor of his name and race / Hath left a token or a trace’ (1329–30), so that the final view of the text’s hero and main subject is as unknown, and they do it directly in his closing assertion that ‘This broken tale was all we knew / Of her he lov’d, or him he slew’ (1333–34). The Giaour’s monologue has not so far presented itself as a tale of ‘her he lov’d or him he slew’, nor has the poem. Rather, each has presented itself as a tale of what the many narrators, the title, and the text itself, have made plain is the central focus of the poem: the Giaour. Of him, however, we learn nothing more, and what we have learned seems not to be




so very much after all. ‘Such is my name, and such my tale,’ he tells the monk (1319), but in fact we never learn either the Giaour’s name or any tale that might be called fully ‘his.’17 In these ending moments, the poem performs one final act of oblique truth-telling, and one final act of undermining. Who has been the subject of the poem, Hassan, Leila, the Giaour – or perhaps all three? Or is it that, as with the earlier extended metaphors of tower and waves, one can only know the Giaour by inference, by that which is connected with him, only by indirection find his direction out? The text is not telling. The Giaour, then, offers Byron’s first firm demonstration that the concept ‘knowledge’ is fundamentally flawed, and if it does not state outright whether that flaw is merely uncertainty or wholesale impossibility, the end of the poem certainly suggests the latter. Of course, the knowledge that knowledge is uncertain is itself certain knowledge, and the knowledge that knowledge is impossible demonstrates the possibility of knowing. It is pleasant to think that Byron recognizes these paradoxes and short-circuits them by declining to take a stance either way, and this conclusion is not entirely implausible. At the same time, however, it is worth remembering that as a writer trained by empiricism Byron would be inclined to travel toward a conclusion rather than jump to one. In this view, his extensions of Berkeley and Locke are a kind of testing, and his conclusion on the subject an intermediate conclusion that is also potentially a building block for future conclusions. Thus his unwillingness to come down on either side of the question is not only a neat piece of apposite wit but also the mark of a careful thinker. It is no accident that this initial dismissal of stable knowledge occurs in a poem so heavily Oriental as The Giaour. As has been shown elsewhere, its instability works to break down the dichotomies that inhere in the Orientalist construct of the East as other.18 If one takes that construct not as a thing in itself but rather as a metaphor or metonymy, however, Orientalism becomes the clearest and most timely representation of the false dichotomies and masked ambiguities that also inhere in all other constructs of knowing. In other words, here Byron’s vehicle is his tenor. He does not seek to undermine Orientalist assumptions, but rather the larger assumptions about binaries and about the nature and possibility of knowing that underlie Orientalist assumptions. What one learns about Orientalism, like what one learns about the poem and the world of the poem, branches out to encompass the world outside the text, as well. In fact, one can make an argument for a final apposite irony here. Perhaps the fact that the poem is set in a world that was




real to Byron – a world whose reality and real relationship to him were, as with Harold I and II, among its selling points19 – has a second layer of significance, too. Although the poem’s world was Oriental fantasy to most of its readers, it was a reality to its writer: not just metaphorically but literally, to Byron it was a real world. The world of The Giaour is thus both imaginary – unreal – and real, both either and or, at the same time. Thus it, too, is a demonstration of the impossibility of knowing for certain. Childe Harold I and II suggested that knowledge is neither as simple nor as trustworthy as it might seem. The Giaour simultaneously follows through on that suggestion, making plain just how unreliable ‘knowledge’ can be, and it follows it to a more unexpected end by demonstrating fundamental flaws at the heart of conceptions of stable knowledge. At this stage, Byron posits such unreliability as the result of plenitude. Situations, people, and experiences are always both either and or, unstable because they contain too much. The Eastern Tales that follow The Giaour, however, turn away from this version of knowledge as suspect because of its abundance, and instead advance a vision of knowledge rather as knowledge-claims that are untrustworthy because they are created out of absence and lack. One need only think of the dual character of Selim in Bride of Abydos, and of the utter opacity of Conrad in The Corsair – a poem in which mystery is integral even in the final lines – to realize that Byron continues his exploration of the flaws inherent in conventional knowledge throughout the 1813–14 Tales.20 This exploration fittingly reaches its conclusion in the last of these Tales, Lara. There, in a poem that has mystery, absence, and illusion as its main devices, Byron dismantles conventional knowledge entirely, and at the same time begins to formulate his own version of what knowing might actually be.




4

I know that two and two make four—& should be glad to prove it too if I could—although I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 & 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure. – Byron to Lady Byron, 1813 Responding to Leigh Hunt’s praise of Lara in 1815, Byron wrote to him, ‘I fear you stand almost single in your liking of “Lara” … —it is too little narrative—and too metaphysical to please the greater number of readers’ (BLJ 4: 295). In this statement he proved himself a remarkably accurate judge of his own writing. It is true that Lara remains among the least-admired of Byron’s works, but it is equally true that it is an important step in the development of Byron’s metaphysics.1 Lara is a poem in which everything seems to be clear but in fact almost nothing is known, and by means of this construction Byron at last dismisses the idea of stable, certain knowledge. Moreover, it is the first of his works in which he openly gives extra-textual readers the power to create meaning, thus moving the ability to create knowledge from the realm of poetic fiction to the realm of reality. Lara is, one might say, Byron’s Janus poem, setting its face against the certainty of knowledge even as it opens its eyes and the eyes of its readers to the pervasiveness of knowledge-claims. It is Janus-like, too, in that although it evokes and builds upon Enlightenment philosophy – particularly that of Hume – it is also the work in which Byron begins to think most independently about knowledge formation and the reader’s potential relationship with it. Byron walks a delicate line in Lara. The text progressively and continually reveals that the knowledge it proffers is in fact absence of knowledge, or at best highly flawed knowledge. It repeatedly supplies information that it quickly or even simultaneously reveals as somehow compromised, 81



Talking Turkey: Unmasking Knowledge in the Last of the Eastern Tales

hiding these compromises close enough to the surface that the text becomes an ambiguous palimpsest. So pervasive is this practice, and so plausible are the assertions that the text offers and dismantles, that the poem comes to suggest that perhaps all knowledge is like this. It simultaneously demonstrates to its readers – who process the ‘too little narrative,’ supplying its defects – the role each reader plays in producing supposed knowledge from what are merely knowledge-claims. The point of Lara is not that nothing happens in it, but rather that if you pay attention you can see that nothing happens in it, and see the role you play in making that nothing happen. At the same time, the poem effects this through such a delicate balance of revelation and concealment that it risks not working. In fact, although Lara is ultimately successful in what it does, the degree to which it communicates that success to its audience is debatable. Admittedly, recognizing the poem’s manipulations can be a tricky business, given that it does at first appear to be simply a melodrama in often plodding verse: ‘’tis quickly seen / Whate’er he [Lara] was, ’twas not what he had been’; ‘Not unrejoiced to see him once again, / Warm was his welcome to the haunts of men’ (I.65–66, vii.95–96).2 Yet it is not that such lines frustrate from their melodrama or their obscurity; it is rather that the frustration, melodrama, and obscurity all spring from the curious elusiveness of the lines. The description in the first couplet above, for example, is largely meaningless, since although it announces that Lara has changed, it tells neither what he has changed from nor what he has changed into (this is even more marked when the line appears in context, which has not supplied and does not go on to supply this information). The second couplet, for its part, manages multiple internal contradictions: not only is ‘not unrejoiced’ a deeply equivocal means of constructing ‘happy,’ but it scarcely seems a ‘warm … welcome.’ Indeed, both couplets substitute absence for presence, even as both simultaneously give the impression of passing along information. Even these relatively early examples, then, suggest the poem’s curiously stifled complexity. In fact, the poem’s manipulations begin with its opening quatrain: The Serfs are glad through Lara’s wide domain, And Slavery half-forgets her feudal chain; He, their unhop’d, but unforgotten lord, The long self-exiled chieftain is restored … (I.1–4) The initial couplet misdirects the reader, suggesting that the poem will focus on the serfs, not their lord, a misdirection not corrected until the focus abruptly shifts to Lara ten lines later, in the second strophe: ‘The




chief of Lara is returned again’ (I.11).3 More troubling, however, is the description ‘unhop’d but unforgotten.’ Lara’s vassals no longer yearn for him, but they cannot forget him, either, and that very lack of eradication, particularly when linked with their evident joy at his return, is a vestige of the hope they no longer hold. Their inability to forget suggests an inability to cease hoping, even as that inability is openly denied. ‘Unhop’d’ and ‘unforgotten’ are not precisely contradictory, but they are not precisely complementary, either: there is a cognitive chafing here, an ambiguity that bubbles under the text. ‘Self-exiled’ complicates the matter further. ‘Self-exile’ is not an exile but a choice. Lara, then, appears to be at the same time criminal and volunteer, his sentence both impressed and willingly taken up – and yet, because this is true, neither quite impressed nor quite willingly taken up. The passive ‘is restored’ highlights this confusion. Presumably Lara restores himself (what follows bears this out), but the verb removes such accountability, setting responsibility for his return onto some mysterious outside force that has performed the reinstatement. Self-exiled, Lara is not clearly also self-restored. If one asks what made him leave, one must also ask what, or who, made him return. In fact, these four lines contain the seeds of many questions – not just, Where has Lara been? and, Why did he return? (both legitimate queries for a poem to elicit at its start), but also, Why does slavery only half forget its chain? Why can Lara’s serfs not forget him? Why have they ceased to hope for him? What does it mean to be self-exiled? What can it mean? Moreover, the questions figure the poem’s central subject, Lara, as simultaneously both one thing and its opposite: not quite forgotten and yet forgotten; departing by choice and dismissed; both recalled and boldly deciding to return. The passage thus suggests not The Giaour’s ‘both either and or,’ but a construction ultimately far emptier: ‘both and therefore neither.’ Where the formulation that underlies The Giaour admits a multiplicity of simultaneous meanings that challenge the idea of stable, assured knowledge (a grotto at the same time pleasant and menacing, a body that both blooms with life and is dead), Lara’s persistently reappearing linked dichotomies instead yoke two contradictory possibilities (exile and voluntary exodus, forgetting and remembering) which, because they cannot coexist, resolve into mutual annulment. In order to see what Lara is doing here, we must turn back to those observations of Hume’s on cause and effect that The Giaour also appears to use. Hume theorizes that The nature of experience is this. We remember to have had frequent instances of the existence of one species of objects and also



Unmasking Knowledge in the Last of the Eastern Tales 83


By offering contradictory attributes and states as simultaneous possibilities, the text deflates the possibility of constant conjunction. We cannot say for certain that Lara’s exile is forced, as the word ‘exile’ has constantly indicated, and we cannot quite say he has been restored, as the passive construction would specify. Thus even at this very early stage Lara invokes Hume, but it does so to create a view of knowledge considerably more stringent than that Hume contributed to The Giaour. Lara is ‘a tale told not to fill a gap, but to create one’ (Shears 4): the implication of its guiding construction is not that knowledge is multiple but that it is non-existent. Again and again this text will promise much, but deliver nothing. As in The Giaour, the most obvious example of this is the poem’s hero. Even before Lara appears on the scene he is a man of shreds and patches, not defined but hinted at and side-stepped: And why had Lara crossed the bounding main? … It skills not, boots not step by step to trace His youth through all the mazes of its race; Short was the course his restlessness had run, But long enough to leave him half undone. … from the hour he waved his parting hand Each trace waxed fainter of his course, till all Had nearly ceased his memory to recall. His sire was dust, his vassals could declare, ’Twas all they knew, that Lara was not there; Nor sent, nor came he, till conjecture grew Cold in the many, anxious in the few. His hall scarce echoes with his wonted name, His portrait darkens in its fading frame … (I.12–34) Revisiting Childe Harold I and II, the passage declines to give Lara’s background, and the descriptions it does offer are marked by ambiguities



remember, that the individuals of another species of objects have always attended them, and have existed in a regular order of contiguity and succession with regard to them … We likewise call to mind their constant conjunction in all past instances. Without any farther ceremony, we call the one cause and the other effect, and infer the existence of the one from that of the other … Thus in advancing we have … discovered a new relation betwixt cause and effect … This relation is their CONSTANT CONJUNCTION. (I.iii.§6)

– traces that ‘wax fainter,’ but do not vanish; a hall that both echoes with his name and does not; a portrait that darkens but does not disappear. They are also marked by presence that is again actually the presence of absence. His vassals know only that he is not there; he remains a topic of speech because he is resolutely silent (‘Nor sent, nor came he, till conjecture grew’). Even when he is directly described, that description does not offer clarity: ‘Short was the course his restlessness had run, / But long enough to leave him half undone’ (I.23–24). The Lara outlined by this explanation is as self-contradictory as the one portrayed in the poem’s first lines. His course has been both short and long; he is both restless and not; he is both damaged and undamaged (‘half undone’). Such hints and indirect explanations are, of course, common literary devices – in fact, they may be necessary gestures with a hero who has not yet arrived. But once Lara does appear nothing changes. ‘He comes at last in sudden loneliness’ the narrator announces (I.43), and although this is a memorable characterization, after a pause it is disconcertingly so, for it depends heavily on elusiveness for its effect. One can feel what ‘sudden loneliness’ is even as one utters the words, but one cannot define it.4 As soon as one attempts to parse the description, the comprehension vanishes; it cannot stand up to sustained analysis. This evocative phrase grants the reader immediate understanding of the poem’s hero, but the effect depends entirely on that understanding’s surpassing logical comprehension, dissipating before attempts at analysis. The reader can grasp Lara only by not grasping him. In devising his protagonist by these means, Byron exploits and simultaneously undermines the common reading tendency toward literary characterization. Literary characterization is a kind of mental filing system in which a reader identifies general schemata and structures in a given character, retrieves those from a cognitive database of character types, and thus is able to ‘identify’ that character as belonging to a particular type.5 In the case of Lara, that type is the Byronic Hero, and the poem effects the identification not merely by making its protagonist lonely, emotionally tortured, and daring before he arrives (I.16, 20) but also by supplying a series of canonical cues a mere thirteen lines after his first appearance: He lives, nor yet is past his manhood’s prime, Though sear’d by toil, and something touch’d by time; … That brow in furrowed lines had fix’d at last, And spake of passions, but of passions past: …





These ‘intertextual echoes’ (Margolin 77) – the glance similar to the Giaour’s, the ‘Coldness of mien’ like Harold’s – immediately link Lara to previous Byronic Heroes.6 In fact, Lara’s reviewers made the identification easily. ‘The noble Lord,’ wrote the British Critic, ‘has not forsaken his favourite model of intellectual and moral deformity. Such as were Childe Harold, The Giaour, Selim, Conrad, such also is Lara’ (406); the Quarterly Review complained that ‘the affinity of [Lara’s] character to those of the Giaour and Childe Harold, is so marked, as to do away the merit, whatever it may be, of singularity, to give him the appearance of a copy from a capricious original’ (Ellis 453).7 Yet even as the poem offers characterizations through which to recognize Lara, it undermines them. For every assumption his text encourages, Byron offers evidence against that same assumption: ‘some deep feeling it were vain to trace / At moments lighten’d o’er his livid face’; ‘That brow in furrow’d lines had fixed at last, / And spake of passions, but of passions past,’ ‘All these seem’d his.’ If readers are to determine Lara, they must be determined to do so in the face of persistent undermining and reversal of the very evidence offered.8 Nor are such contradictory acts limited to Lara’s opening strophes. The protagonist is everywhere complicated even as he is explained. He is, for example, repeatedly compromised by that favorite Byronic device, the qualifier: ‘He [Lara] lives, nor yet is past his manhood’s prime, / Though seared by toil’; ‘Yet he was firm, or had been firm till now’ (I.55–56; 215, my italics). These and other similar characterizations offer no reading of Lara that is not crossed or thrown open to question; they say nothing that they do not immediately render suspect. The eradication of potential knowledge does not just occur retroactively, either. It is often interwoven with the very comprehension it is destroying. When Lara is not qualified he is frequently defined by negation: ‘He did not follow what … all pursued …, / Nor shadowy honour, nor substantial gain, / Nor beauty’s preference, and the rival’s pain’; ‘But Lara stirr’d not, changed not’ (I.103–06; 421, my italics). ‘Not much he loved long questions of the past,’ the narrator announces in an early description (I.85). If one can overlook the drama created by



Coldness of mien, and carelessness of praise; A high demeanour, and a glance that took Their thoughts from others by a single look All these seem’d his, and something more beneath … And some deep feeling it were vain to trace At moments lighten’d o’er his livid face. (I.55–84)

the opening syntatic inversion and the medial molossus, however, it becomes clear that this assertion offers no actual information. Does Lara prefer short questions of the past? Does he like long questions about some other period? Does he just not care for questions, but will answer if pressed? Is it the length, or the era, or both, that is the problem? Affirmations reveal themselves as complications; certainties are unmasked as queries. By these means, the text suggests that one can know nothing, that negativity and uncertainty are intrinsic parts of certainty. Lara’s most successful occluding gesture, however, involves neither negation nor qualification but a more pervasive equivocation. Simply, knowledge of Lara is repeatedly framed not as certainty but only as possibility. At first glance, for example, ‘Ambition, glory, love, the common aim … / Within his breast appeared no more to strive, / Yet seem’d as lately they had been alive …’ When he gazes upon the gathered crowd at Otho’s party, ‘His brow belied him if his soul was sad’ – a curious construction that manages to come out in favor of Lara’s happiness only by tempering it with the suggestion that it hides its opposite (I.79–83; 398, my italics). The fan dancer of Romantic literature, Byron offers tantalizing glimpses of knowledge, only to snatch them immediately back.9 The poem thus remains in the region of possibility and supposition only. Lara retains his ambiguity even in death. He is struck down just at the moment when he seems most alive, a downfall portrayed as literally just the other side of elevation: … he waved his hand on high, And shook— why sudden droops that plumed crest? The shaft is sped—the arrow’s in his breast! That fatal gesture left the unguarded side, … That hand, so raised, how droopingly it hung! (II.379–85) The gesture of bold defiance is at the same time the gesture that causes his end. But if this moment offers hope that the poem’s resolute denial of certainty may after all yield to The Giaour’s more cognitively positive ‘both either and or,’ what follows nips that hope in the bud.10 It does so both by the irony of the either/or it here provides – there is not much hope in a paradox that resolves itself in and into death – and by immediately continuing on to provide Lara with a final gesticulation that is as opaque as it is apparently significant: Rose Lara’s hand and pointed to the East: Whether (as then the breaking sun from high





Roll’d back the clouds) the morrow caught his eye, Or that ’twas chance, or some remember’d scene That raised his arm to point where such had been, Scarce Kaled seem’d to know, but turn’d away … (II.467–72)

… on his breast, Besides the wound that sent his soul to rest, They found the scatter’d dints of many a scar, Which were not planted there in recent war; Where’er had pass’d his summer years of life, It seems they vanish’d in a land of strife; But all unknown his glory or his guilt, These only told that somewhere blood was spilt … (II.540–47) ‘Which were not planted’; ‘It seems’; ‘somewhere.’ While the penultimate line again suggests the Giaour – ‘He pass’d – nor of his name and race / Hath left a token or a trace’ (1329–30) – in this case the reader is not even left with that poem’s contradictory confession; instead suggestion substitutes for substance to the last.11 But while Lara is the most obvious target of suppositious belief, he is not the only one. His page Kaled is subject to the same paradoxical delineations: ‘If aught he loved, ’twas Lara; but was shown / His faith in reverence and in deeds alone’; ‘Kaled his name, though rumor said he bore / Another ere he left his mountain-shore’ (I.554–55; I.584–85, my italics). Like his master, Kaled remains comprehended by means of incomprehensibility, knowledge of him produced out of rumor, assumption, and contradiction. Indeed, the passage that describes Kaled’s appearance demonstrates the difficulty of pinning down even what seems to be the simplest physical attribute: Light was his form, and darkly delicate That brow whereon his native sun had sate, But had not marr’d, though in his beams he grew, The cheek where oft the unbidden blush shone through; Yet not such blush as mounts when health would show All the heart’s hue in that delighted glow;



This pointing is utterly impenetrable, and the narrator admits as much, offering not a single certain interpretation but a variety of possible motivations and meanings. The poem’s last view of Lara leaves him equally mysterious:


The qualifiers and retractions seem to indicate a search for precision, but they result in confusion. Kaled is also the conduit for the text’s most dexterous subversion of understanding, the revelation in the second canto that the boy-page is in fact a girl. The disclosure of this fact late in the poem constitutes yet another example of the falsity of supposed knowledge, of course, but it also makes a less repetitive point. Kaled’s revelation of her self in this passage is twinned with a similar revelation that slipped smoothly by some 600 lines earlier, and the combination of the two marks an important moment in Lara’s cognitive manipulations. In that earlier moment Kaled’s true sex is also exposed, but the lines play on conventional assumptions about gender attributes in such a way that this revelation seems not the truth but an error, a series of odd attributes easily explained away. In this earlier passage, the poem offers not nothing presented as something, but something presented as nothing. In so doing, it offers an instance of the way knowledge may be undermined by assumption, rather than created by it. Suggesting in this initial, earlier, description that Kaled may have had ‘higher birth … and better days,’ the narrator muses, No mark of vulgar toil that hand betrays, So femininely white it might bespeak Another sex, when matched with that smooth cheek, But for his garb, and something in his gaze, More wild and high than woman’s eye betrays; A latent fierceness that far more became His fiery climate than his tender frame: True, in his words it broke not from his breast, But from his aspect might be more than guessed. (I.576–84) The knotted structure of this passage effectively disguises precisely what the lines are saying and what they are not. A paraphrase would read something like this: the whiteness of Kaled’s hand would make one believe him a woman, were it not for his male clothing and something unwomanly in his eyes, something that he never gives voice to, but that one could deduce the probable existence of by looking at his face. With this confused mixture of admission and dismissal, the lines simultaneously reveal Kaled’s true sex long before the recognized moment of disclosure



But ’twas a hectic hint of secret care That for a burning moment fevered there (I.528–35)


[He] strove to stand and gaze; but reel’d and fell, Scarce breathing more than that he lov’d so well. Than that he loved! Oh! never yet beneath The breast of man such trusty love may breathe! That trying moment hath at once reveal’d The secret long and yet but half-conceal’d; In baring to revive that lifeless breast, Its grief seem’d ended, but the sex confest; And life return’d, and Kaled felt no shame— What now to her was Womanhood or Fame? (II.510–19) What now is the reader to make of those earlier confident dismissals? Reading retroactively, one can see the revelation of gender, in this case not a proleptic hint like those dotting The Giaour but an accrual of evidence blatantly laid out (‘that hand … So femininely white … that smooth cheek … [a] tender frame’). Yet this evidence, this actual knowledge, was obscured by expectation masking itself as understanding – expectation now suddenly revealed in all its naked ignominy as a series of assumptions. The resulting suggestion (expanded on in Manfred and Don Juan) is that one may be fooled by seeming plausibility and logic to ignore truth and replace it with fiction. Whether certainty of truth or certainty of lack of truth, knowledge may equally well be knowledge-claims validated by lack of attention. There may, however, be a further layer here. Female transvestism was a central element in many Gothic texts, most memorably Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. It is possible that by offering a similar set of cognitive nodes, in a similarly Gothic text, Lara intends its hints to be picked up and intends for its readers to guess (or even assume) from the first canto on that Kaled is a girl.12 Indeed, the New Monthly Magazine remarked of Kaled, ‘Incidents



and persuade the reader to disregard the revelation by surrounding it with a series of ultimately empty suggestions that play on accepted ‘knowledge.’ Kaled cannot be a girl because he dresses like a boy, and no girl would dress like a boy. He cannot be a girl because he is fierce, and no girl would be fierce. It doesn’t make any difference that this ferocity is ‘latent,’ because, even though it doesn’t display itself openly, observers can read hints of it in his face, and the ‘aspect’ does not lie. Then, again carrying over a trick from The Giaour, these assertions are let lie fallow for 576 lines. There Kaled, frenzied after Lara’s death, inadvertently unmasks herself:

and characters of a similar description have been common in romances of all ages,’ adding, ‘but we do not recollect an instance in which the mystery is so well kept up as in this’ (37). As this last comment suggests, while the revelation of Kaled’s sex comes late in the poem, Rosario/ Matilda’s in The Monk, at least, comes fairly soon after her initial appearance. It is thus equally possible that – by not producing the anticipated outcome relatively quickly – the text intended readers to readjust their expectations, and as a result created a state of considerable mental disorientation when the definitive revelation did occur. Lara’s bait and switch thus turns into a kind of bait and switch and bait, and its undermining of knowledge anticipates the thoroughgoing cognitive destruction of Don Juan. In this moment, as in the later poem, certainty is as likely to be capricious as legitimate, but it is as likely to be legitimate as capricious: knowledge-claims may masquerade as knowledge, but knowledge may also be dismissed as knowledge-claims.13 In both cases, however, the text demonstrates the degree to which knowledge is based on assumptions that are themselves based on past experience, and simultaneously demonstrates how flawed such bases are. In its assertion that assumption lies at the root of knowing, Lara once more brings to life comments Hume makes in the Treatise. For Hume, all determinations of cause and effect are based on precisely such assumption: suppose we observe several instances, in which the same objects are always conjoined together … [A]fter we have observ’d the resemblance in sufficient numbers of instances, we immediately feel a determination of the mind to pass from one object to its usual attendant … when I consider the influence of this constant conjunction, I perceive that such a relation can never … operate on the mind, but by means of custom. (I.iii.§14) The poem’s qualifications, negations, and hesitations all work to show that the mind creates certainty by papering over uncertainty. Yet again, however, the text builds upon Hume by offering a conclusion that the philosopher does not. Hume seems to suggest that the tendency to rely on assumption is not active (‘custom’ operates upon us), and also that it is the result of past experience applied to present or future occurrences. In contrast, Lara asserts that belief is formed by ignoring contradictory evidence in the present moment. Proffering but also noticeably retracting, Lara simultaneously creates and debunks knowledge: its persistent qualifications and its tendency to define by negation or impression




undermine the assertions with which they intermingle, so that any potential categorization is unstable. The result of this is twofold. First, Lara reveals the extent to which knowledge may be unreliable, and it does this in a way significantly different from that of The Giaour. In The Giaour, knowing is a mosaic. Knowledge may or may not be true; it may be undermined or altered by addition; but it is not quite fully eradicated. In Lara, however, knowing is always knowing not. As we have seen, knowledge is either delimited by negation; or it is endlessly proved wrong by being refigured; or it is only impression or assumption, not certain; or it is opaque, as vague and hidden as that ‘something more beneath’ that Lara allegedly possesses (I.78). Moreover, although the text hides this instability, it doesn’t hide it terribly well. Its emendations are by no means as subtle as those in The Giaour, for instance, and they are so endemic that they become a textual tic. Precisely by not smoothly hiding its epistemological ruptures, Lara suggests that it is possible to spot such flaws, and hence possible to unmask knowledge as the sham it is. Where The Giaour hinted that people may see that they have chosen understanding, Lara suggests that knowledge is not chosen but created: that it can be manufactured, which is quite a different thing from being selected. Moreover, the ruptures – nearly hidden but almost obvious – allow the poem’s canny readers to come face to face with the extent to which they may be complicit in figuring falsity as certainty. The text is transparent enough to allow careful readers to see this for themselves – ‘Not much he loved long questions of the past’ – but opaque enough to allow the revelation of complicity to come as something of a surprise (since the deception is only disclosed by careful re-reading), and thus to have a stronger impact. In fact, the text does not just suggest this complicity; it also demonstrates it. In its depictions of those who follow and those who oppose Lara in his eventual uprising, it shows the process of knowledge creation, and the degree to which people’s ‘knowledge’ is based on their own hopes and personal investments. The serfs who follow Lara into rebellion ‘waited but a leader’ (II.230), and because Lara presents himself as one, and because he seems like one – there is, after all, his ‘high demeanour’ (I.71) – the yearning vassals accept him.14 As if this were not dubious enough, their more specific motives for selecting him are summed up in a phrase: ‘The million judged but of him as they found’ (II.197). There is a nice Humean pun here – all of us, the philosopher alleges, judge but as we find, in the sense of ‘determine’ rather than ‘discover’ – but there is also a serious point. Hume argues that ‘When we are accustom’d to see two impressions conjoin’d together, the appearance or




idea of the one immediately carries us to the idea of the other’ (Treatise I.iii.§8); that is, what we find may be what we expect to find, rather than what may be true. The text in fact goes on to prove that the association, the cognitive ‘carrying,’ the serfs perform is entirely unfounded. Despite his cheerful gate (II.181), his welcoming hall (II.191), and his good manners (II.203), Lara is not the waited leader. He is, rather, a man ‘By circumstance compell’d to plunge again / In self-defence amidst the strife of men.’ Worse still, ‘He raised the humble but to bend the proud’ (II. 232–33, 253). ‘The million judged but of him as they found’ is thus scrupulously accurate, but ironically so: Lara’s followers do judge of him as they find him, but the emphasis in that phrase falls on ‘they,’ not on ‘found,’ and that makes all the difference. Yet if the million mistake their knowledge of Lara, so do the few. Those who range themselves against him are as much victims of appearance as those who stand with him. Indeed, even more than his eagerly following vassals, those who battle Lara make the mistake of relying on what they believe to be knowledge, but what the poem reveals as emptiness: Who else than Lara could have cause to fear His [Ezzelin’s] presence? who had made him disappear If not the man on whom his menaced charge Had sate too deeply were he left at large? … The sweeping fierceness which his soul betrayed, The skill with which [Lara] wielded his keen blade; Where had his arm unwarlike caught that art? Where had that fierceness grown upon his heart? For it was … … the deep working of a soul unmix’d With aught of pity where its wrath had fix’d; Such as long power and overgorged success Concentrates into all that’s merciless … (II.133–50) The nobles here depend on almost every one of the relations Hume posits as causes of erroneous belief in cause and effect (Treatise I.iii. §§2–6). They assume that because Lara is the most recent victim of Ezzelin’s calumny he therefore had the greatest reason to kill him – they thus invoke Hume’s ‘priority,’ ‘contiguity,’ and ‘sucession.’ They further assume that Lara’s ‘fierceness’ is the result of some deep-seated rage that is itself perforce the result of ‘long power and overgorged success’ – they thus adhere to Hume’s ‘necessary connexion’ and ‘constant conjunction.’ And in Lara





He stood a stranger in this breathing world, An erring spirit from another hurl’d; A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped By choice the perils he by chance escaped; … His early dreams of good outstripp’d the truth, And troubled manhood follow’d baffled youth … But haughty still, and loth himself to blame, He call’d on Nature’s self to share the shame, And charged the faults upon the fleshly form 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.314–36) Lara begins as a stranger, becomes Milton’s Satan, and ends as a thing, deprived of subjecthood and utterly opaque. What is more, he himself reads himself incorrectly, mistaking arbitrary occurrence for cause and effect and dismissing his own role in creating both his identity and his understanding of it. ‘Charging’ the wrong effect to the wrong cause and mistaking contiguity for causation, in this single unqualified description Lara is like Hume’s faulty philosopher, with his ‘Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole’ (Treatise, Intro). Revealed, the poem’s hero is merely revealed as a reasoner as mistaken as everyone else in his text. This is yet another example of Byron’s skepticism of knowledge, but there is a significant development. For Hume, deeming of this sort is illogical and distastefully inexact (see Treatise I.iii). In Lara it is dangerous. Nobles and vassals alike mold error and lack of information into actuality, and the result is bloodshed and destruction.15 While this



as in Hume, there is no actual basis for believing any of these. In this way, Lara vivifies Hume while dismantling knowledge in its own terms. Lara’s enemies reason on faulty ground, and while it helps the text’s philosophical bona fides that those grounds are Hume’s, for Byron’s own philosophy it matters only that they are truly faulty. The enemies’ determination is guesswork, and erroneous guesswork. There is one exception to Lara’s persistent ambiguity. In the middle of the first canto, the text presents him straightforwardly. Nicely, however, that presentation not only literally increases his opacity, but also shows him as subject to the very same tendency as other readers of him in the poem:

reification of Hume’s ideas harks back to the murderous Giaour who was a similar reification of Locke’s theories, this case demonstrates not how close Byron is to the philosopher upon whom he draws, but how far he has come from him. Lara’s anthropomorphizing of Hume suggests quite clearly the potential consequences of unthinking acceptance of evidence as knowledge: political destruction and death. But in suggesting this, the poem puts forward precisely the opposite of what Hume concludes in the Treatise. Where Hume asserts that custom will come to bind people together in the face of the fragmentary potential of skepticism – ‘the object of prudence is to conform our actions to the general usage and custom’ (III.iii.§2) – Lara suggests that lack of skepticism, unthinking ‘custom,’ may come to destroy both societies and individuals within them. On the battlefields of Lara, a bit of skepticism would go a long way. Thus, even as it invokes Hume, Lara makes space for Common Sense philosophy. ‘He must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me,’ Thomas Reid writes, ‘that would reason me out of my reason’ (IHM I.§8). Lara asserts that reason ought to take pride of place in the evaluation of knowledge, but ‘reason’ here is the doubting mind, the cold eye that dismisses accustomed supposition in favor of conclusions based on carefully evaluated evidence. Interestingly, Reid accuses skepticism of lacking just such an eye, of being unwilling to do the grunt work of discovery: It is genius, and not the want of it, that adulterates philosophy. … A creative imagination disdains the mean offices of digging for a foundation, of removing rubbish, and carrying materials: leaving these servile employments to the drudges in science, it plans a design, and raises a fabric. Invention supplies materials where they are wanting, and fancy adds colouring. … The work pleases the eye, and wants nothing but solidity and a good foundation. (IHM I.§2) The philosophy Byron advances does not do this. Instead, it posits good sense as the root cause of skepticism, and skepticism as the product of good sense, for it demands that one examine what is given to determine if it is also what is true. The poem is the first appearance of a suggestion that will be more firmly advanced in Juan: that skepticism is a form of common sense, perhaps the only form in a world where custom has come to be a shackle rather than a safeguard. Perhaps to demonstrate this, and certainly to demonstrate the epistemological traps readers may fall into, Lara drives its point home by




laying such traps for its own readers. As it proceeds, the poem leaves a series of gaps and confusions in itself that it never satisfactorily resolves; it leaves resolution to those who encounter them. As with The Giaour once more, Lara’s simplest method of doing this is by expressive phonology. One need only look at the elusively evocative ‘He comes at last in sudden loneliness, / And whence they know not, why they need not guess.’ The portentous diction, the heavy emphasis on ‘last’ and ‘lone’ (not to mention ‘know’), with a concomitant lack of stress on ‘not’; and the rhythm of the second line, which lends a weighted finality to the second, seemingly informative, clause, combine to create a satisfying sense of revelation where there is none. The poem employs similar devices in the assertion, at Lara’s moment of rage in Canto II, that ‘The storm [of anger] that once had sent itself and slept … / Burst forth and made him all he once had been, / And is again’ (242–47). Since one of the poem’s central tenets is that no one knows what Lara ‘once had been,’ it means nothing to describe him as resembling that former self. But the heavy spondee that opens the second line, the minute pause engendered by the break between the second and third lines, and the propulsive rush of that third line, all work to give an emotional charge that overpowers intellectual processing. By conveying import chiefly via emotional suggestion, the rhythm, meter, and language of such lines produce a sense that information has been passed along when it has not. We are once more in The Giaour’s territory. But while the method here may be the same as in the earlier poem, the result is quite different. Where The Giaour used these manipulations to mask the fact that such lines revealed only a narrator’s suppositions, or that knowledge is present but ungraspable, Lara uses its manipulations to disguise the fact that the lines reveal nothing at all. Lara is something unknown – the same unknown something he has been before. He comes after a long wait, but the origin of and reason for his coming remain unknown. In these and other cases, knowledge of him is no knowledge at all.16 Wrapped in his counter-intuitive ‘sudden loneliness,’ jerked back and forth by his corrective prepositions, evoked in his ‘seems’ and his ‘perchances,’ Lara exists only as a character who is continually being erased.17 This presentation of Lara is merely the most obvious example of the way the poem produces representations that do not stand up under examination. The larger text is littered with phrases that appear deliberately designed to undermine accepted assumptions or understanding by linking and thus eliding what would seem to be securely defined opposites. The challenges are sometimes open, as in the comment on




‘history’s pen,’ that ‘praise or blame supplies, / And lies like truth, and still most truly lies’ (I.189–90). Sometimes phrases undermine by eliding differences, either between opposites or simply between concepts in a way that reduces them to irrelevance, as when the portraits of Lara’s ancestors are described as ‘all they left of virtue, or of crimes’ (I.184), or in the narrator’s roll call of revolutionary motives, ‘Religion—freedom— vengeance—what you will, / A word’s enough to raise mankind to kill’ (II.222–23).18 In all cases, however, common differences and definitions are undermined, their ambiguity and consequently their suspect nature revealed. In this way, Lara is reminiscent of Berkeley, rather than Hume, and of Berkeley’s observation that ‘it will be found that when language is once grown familiar, … sight of the characters is oft immediately attended with those passions, which at first were wont to be produced by the intervention of ideas, that are now quite omitted. May we not, for example, be affected with the promise of a good thing, though we have not an idea of what it is?’ (PHK Intro §20). The words used to describe Lara invoke certain ideas and passions, and the connection, right or wrong, is made. The puzzlingly ambivalent descriptions affect with emotional responses, but there are real difficulties in reconciling them to any logically definitive idea. Berkeley asserts that ‘since propriety [is] regulated by custom, language [whose associations to ideas are entrenched by custom] is suited to the received opinions, which are not always the truest’ (PHK I.52), and this Lara dramatically demonstrates. As we have seen, descriptions of Lara link to no concrete knowledge – that brow, for instance, ‘speaks of’ passions (one might say, is attended with them), rather than bearing their incontrovertible marks – but the leap from word to idea is immediate for those who observe Lara. In fact, by its frequent association of uncertainty with its proffered information, Lara rather seems to yearn with Berkeley for ‘… an entire deliverance from the deception of words, which I dare hardly promise myself; so difficult a thing is it to dissolve a union so early begun, and confirmed by so long a habit as that betwixt words and ideas’ (PHK Intro §23).19 Where Lara deviates from Berkeley, however, is in promising its readers just such deliverance. For although Lara performs the same emotionological maneuvers as The Giaour, in this poem the narrator is not an intrusive first-person speaker (or a series of them), but rather a covert thirdperson narrator. As a result, there is no gap between information and audience: if Lara’s furrowed brow is read as an indication of his simultaneously passionate and intellectual nature rather than, say, the result of squinting




for years in a sunny climate, that reading is the choice of the reader, not of a guiding hand within the text. Moreover, given the frequent occurrence of qualifiers, negations, and suppositions, when Lara is created by a reader that creation occurs in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is a risky endeavor. If the poem in this way demonstrates the way meaning is constructed in the text, it also demonstrates, merely by the language constructions through which it presents itself, the way in which forming the meaning of the text is a similar exercise. Having revealed this possibility, Lara offers a chance to put it into practice – a meaning to create. Although the mystery of who murdered Ezzelin is never solved, the poem does offer a conglomeration of evidence that may be used to adduce (or manufacture) a solution. Towards the poem’s end, the narrator retells a story told by a serf who may have observed the disposal of Sir Ezzelin’s body: ‘(a peasant’s is the tale) / … Himself unheeded watched the stranger’s course’ (550–64). The narrator presents the tale straightforwardly. For a good portion he states only uninflected facts – ‘He [the serf] heard a tramp—a horse and horseman broke / From out the wood—before him was a cloak / Wrapt round some burthen at his saddle-bow’ (II.559–61) – and what moments of speculation he does offer seem simply retellings of the serf’s own conjectures: ‘He caught a glimpse as of a floating breast, / And something glittered starlike on the vest’ (II.578–79). Certainly one cannot deny that the narrator interjects his own substantial passage of suggestion as he reaches the tale’s end, … if in sooth a star its [the corpse’s] bosom bore, Such is the badge that knighthood ever wore, And such ’tis known Sir Ezzelin had worn Upon the night that led to such a morn. If thus he perish’d, Heaven receive his soul! His undiscover’d limbs to ocean roll; And charity upon the hope would dwell It was not Lara’s hand by which he fell. (II.590–97) but as Daniel Watkins points out, this narrator’s ‘interpretation is speculative at best … emphasiz[ing] that even the most specific and isolated events are subject to ignorance and mystification’ (Social Relations 105). The passage thus highlights the poem’s larger message about the dubiety of knowledge. But precisely this emphasis – the refusal of the narrator to supply a definitive resolution to the story – opens up the necessity for





And she would sit beneath the very tree Where lay his drooping head upon her knee; And in that posture where she saw him fall, His words, his looks, his dying grasp recall; And she had shorn, but saved her raven hair, And oft would snatch it from her bosom there, And fold, and press it gently to the ground, As if she staunched anew some phantom’s wound. (II.612–19) Kaled is the poem’s definitive depiction of the creating reader. She imbues Lara’s last moments with a meaning that the rest of the poem has not been able to supply: ‘Herself would question, and for him reply’ (II.620). She creates new situations, or restructures old ones: there is an exhorted flight ‘from some imagined spectre in pursuit’ (II.622), which seems to refigure Lara’s last moments as shared escape rather than as her rescue of a dying man, but which may (the use of ‘spectre’ suggests) be an attempt to save him from the source of his mysterious midnight collapse, or even retell some event from his missing past. Kaled apparently reconstructs all this to her own satisfaction, the pathetic satisfaction of the mourner who seeks to conjure the lost one afresh before her eyes. She enacts openly what the poem suggests all readers do, and by doing this she stands before the poem’s audience as both a revelation and a model. Lara, then, is a fulcrum text in Byron’s development of his philosophy of knowledge. It extends The Giaour’s intimation that knowledge may be a matter of choice into an assertion that it is simply indecision



individual interpretation. Each reader may gather and sift the halfevidence, qualifiers, and hints into some kind of plausibility, however flawed she recognizes that exercise to be, and arrive at her own knowledge-claim for the manner of Ezzelin’s death. Indeed, this is the only way to arrive at a conclusion for that particular narrative strand. By actively and openly providing hints that must be construed and creating blanks that must be filled if a final conclusion is to be reached, Lara marks out for the audience their own part in the creation of knowledge-claims. Most narratives silently prod readers toward decision-making and creation of knowledge; Lara here moves that action into the open.20 Furthermore, the poem’s final ending provides a model for such creation. Bereft after her companion’s death, Kaled manifests her sorrow not only in a grief that ‘tam’d a spirit once too proud’ (II.602), but in repeated re-creations of Lara’s last moments:

and contradiction dressed up as certainty, and it constructs and lays bare the disclosures that lead to this assertion.21 This is a good deal of weight for a single slender text to support, but Lara more than manages it. The poem’s structure, its persistent repetition of self-undermining gestures, manages to undercut all it seemingly proffers – Byron himself labeled it ‘two cantos of darkness and dismay’ (BLJ 4: 133).22 Additionally, Lara does not hide its textual manipulations, as does Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I and II and, to a lesser degree, The Giaour. They are close enough to the poem’s surface to be, if not completely obvious, a nagging distraction that disrupts the reading experience – a kind of holistic expressive phonology working against what the text apparently states. Moreover, while Kaled may be a read as a metaphor for the active reader, both Lara’s personal obscurity and the peasant’s reported tale of body disposal do leave the poem’s reader ‘in a position analogous to that of the witness of Kaled’s final ravings and tracings … or that of the hidden peasant who watches Ezzelin’s body as it is cast by the unknown horseman … fictively stationed at the edge of a drama the interior significance of which remains undisclosed and private’ (Goldberg 671).23 Readers must make a Lara, and a story, because the text forces them to do so. At the same time, the text tells them repeatedly that such manufacture will never result in knowledge. Despite this, however, Lara has been read, and has been putatively understood by reviewers and later scholars. At least to some extent, then, it seems that some readers have gone about fulfilling the task the text offers. Yet Lara more than any other Byron poem has called forth a kind of critical crabbiness. Reviewers complained about its gaps – ‘Mystery and murder … without cause and consequence, obscure and deform this … story,’ mourned the New Monthly Magazine (157)24 – and modern scholars have dismissed it as unsuccessful.25 All of this seems to me to indicate that at some level readers recognize what the text makes them do, and they don’t like it (shades once more of Hume, and of the reaction to the Treatise). It may simply be that Lara is up against a tendency Berkeley recognized and bemoaned: ‘No sooner do we hear the words of a familiar language pronounced in our ears, but the ideas corresponding thereto present themselves to our minds … so closely are they united that it is not in our power to keep out the one, except we exclude the other also’ (NTV 51). This may be especially true in the case of the words of great ‘force and vivacity’ (Treatise I.iii.§10) Lara tends to play with. Reactions to the poem suggest that although its readers can slow down enough to be troubled by the faulty unions between its words and the ideas to which they supposedly correspond,




they cannot slow down enough to spot those unions consciously. This is why Lara is simultaneously the most openly philosophical of Byron’s works and the least successful at conveying that philosophy. Moreover, Lara’s endorsement of cognitive individualism may be valid, but it is also a great stumbling block. No matter how real and accurate Kaled’s vivifications may be to her, for example, they remain inaccessible to others. She traces ‘characters’ in the sand, and while to her they are like Berkeley’s characters, ‘attended with those passions, which at first were wont to be produced by the intervention of ideas,’ to others they are merely ‘strange’ (II.625). However much power it may give her to shape people and events, her individual understanding is resolutely hers alone. The very uniqueness of her creative device cuts her off from others, and her isolation means that she can do nothing but fruitlessly produce a knowledge that will never have the chance to do anything. Kaled’s generative ability offers her no power or freedom, merely misery and frustration. Her ‘truth’ as the poem finally acknowledges, has been ‘too dearly proved’: the establishment of this type of creative ability has come at the price of her sanity and her ability to communicate. It seems that Byron has run up against two elemental problems in his paradigm. The first is that he can lead readers to discovery, but he cannot make them discover. Lara demonstrates, enacts, and even outright forces, but it cannot ensure that its readers will consciously and actively understand what it shows them about the dubiety of knowledge and their own ability to create valid knowledge-claims. Byron’s second problem seems to be a problem with the skeptical model itself. It is all very well to imply that each person may wrest the reins of mental creation into his or her own hands, but it is hard to resist the conclusion that to do so would result in a sort of anarchy of understanding, a whirling cacophony of individual determinations contradicting and canceling each other out. The poem suggests as much in its delineation of Lara, whose unique and mysterious moral code may allow him to stand aloof and play both sides against the middle, but also leaves him utterly isolated (and dead). It suggests it even more strongly in the text’s final vision of Kaled. It would appear that individual-centered knowledge is not, or not only, a force for liberty and strength, but also a recipe for confusion, disempowerment, and, potentially, destruction and tragedy. Despite all his undermining of convention and urgings of independence, then, Byron finds himself thwarted at the end of his enterprise by that very enterprise. The rosy cognitive possibility he has begun to map out reveals its own inherent flaw.




It is tempting to conclude that this seemingly irresolvable difficulty was what kept Byron from turning to narrative poetry again for almost two years after Lara. Nearer the truth, however, is that after April 1814 Byron had more immediate concerns than a philosophy of knowledge. Enmeshed in the difficulties of his marriage and its end, he was busy experiencing events that radically altered both his way of life and his conception of who he was.26 Childe Harold III, the narrative poem he embarked upon immediately after these events, is thus perhaps understandably not concerned with abstract questions of knowledge and its construction, but with how to fashion a new self and a new life in the face of complete loss. Every path of development must have its severances and stumbling blocks: Lara ends with the revelation of one of these, and Childe Harold’s third canto does nothing to remove it. Yet the issues confronted in Harold III do connect to questions about knowledge, and the revivified Harold does continue to wrestle with how, and if, it is possible to know. He fails to answer either question, but that failure is interesting in its own right.




5 Traveling on Stormy Seas: Childe Harold III and the Difficulties of Development

Written only four months after Byron’s (as he saw it) desertion by his wife, and undertaken on the very day that he left the country that had (as he saw it) turned its back on him, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III is the production of a man both literally and metaphorically at sea. Emerging from four months of trauma, the Byron who writes Childe Harold III does not seek to extend the philosophical questing that marks the other works I have discussed.1 Rather, he seeks to answer the concrete questions that might face any shattered exile: in the face of great loss, how does one reformulate one’s self? How does one construct, or reconstruct, one’s world? Can one do so?2 Yet these questions, emotionally vital to Byron in April of 1816, do connect to queries about how and whether one accesses knowledge or creates knowledgeclaims. Therefore, although Childe Harold’s third canto is neither overtly nor intentionally concerned with a philosophy of knowledge, it does engage with such a philosophy, albeit almost certainly unintentionally. Ultimately, however, that engagement proves both inconclusive and unsatisfactory. One of the advantages of Childe Harold III is that it is the only one of Byron’s major works before Don Juan to name one philosopher, Rousseau, and gesture emphatically toward another, Voltaire, and to engage meaningfully with both. One of the disadvantages of the poem for the purposes of this study, however, is that the text deals with these thinkers as symbolic figures, rather than engaging with them philosophically. As this chapter will show, this symbolic deployment can be seen as developmentally interesting, but it is only one small facet of this rebus of a text. 103



Begun at Sea. – notation on the back of the manuscript of Childe Harold III


Virtually everything that will frustrate and entice in Harold III is prefigured in the poem’s first stanza, Byron’s truncated apostrophe to his daughter:

In the first four-and-a-half lines of this passage, the text offers not simply a self-pitying rhetorical question about appearance, but an inquiry about definition. The assertive pronouns suggest Byron’s desire to claim and define his daughter (‘my fair child,’ ‘daughter of my house and heart’). Her resonance and value are (and, the pronouns also suggest, should be) determined by him and by her relationship to him. Indeed, as the four lines progress this claim appears to move toward certainty, suggested by the ‘we’ in which Ada becomes grammatically joined to Byron.3 But the question he poses – ‘Is thy face like thy mother’s …?’ – undermines the creative connection, revealing his fear that Ada will be essentially defined by another, that the link supplied by title and blood (‘house and heart’) will be trumped by the more obvious one of physical similarity and connection. Byron may lay claim to constructing Ada, but that claim is shadowed by a fear that this may not be possible, that creative power lies not with this individual mind but with the outside world.4 The arresting lacuna between lines three and four, in which Byron’s sentimental memory of patriarchal connection is replaced by the crueler reality of separation, emphasizes the sense of a man recognizing his own exclusion, and thus his loss of the power to define. Far more obvious than this subtle play with possession and loss, however, is the sudden jerk that snaps the fifth line in two. Just as it appears that Byron is about to move from framing a question to answering it, or at the very least to considering it, he abruptly switches tack and tone. Gone is the potentially painful but also potentially elucidating aporia, and in its place appears what seems to be a definitive turning away, a refusal to face the central question: ‘— / Awaking with



Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child! Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart? When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled, And then we parted, – not as now we part, But with a hope. –– Awaking with a start, The waters heave around me; and on high The winds lift up their voices: I depart Whither I know not; but the hour’s gone by, When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.

a start.’ Byron’s turn from another human to nature, and from connection with another to focus on the self, coupled with his defiant repudiation of his former homeland, enhances this sense of dismissal. It is as if, consciously or unconsciously, Byron has somehow been defeated by the complexity and reversals enacted in the three clauses of lines 4–5. This sense of arrest will be Harold III’s hallmark. Consistently, the text will offer a thesis, admit its antithesis, then be unable to move toward anything that even approaches resolution.5 There is Harold, who ‘deem’d his spirit now … firmly fixed / And sheath’d with an invulnerable mind,’ but who nonetheless finds himself slave to the world’s inevitabilities, ‘once more within the vortex … roll’d’ (10–11). There is Napoleon, ‘Conqueror and captive of the earth,’ whose pride brought him low, but whose very lowness is still a form of power, ‘thy wild name / … ne’er more bruited in men’s minds than now / That thou art nothing’ (37). There is Byron’s own thought, heavy with meaning but forever silenced because it cannot be spoken in ‘one word, / And that one word were Lightning’ (97). Each of these contradictory figurations and many more besides surge toward a climax like a man running at full speed, and each ends as prematurely and definitively as if that man had dashed into a brick wall: ‘Stop!,’ ‘Away with these!,’ ‘But this is not my theme’ (17; 46; 76). Harold III thus becomes a poem of permanent dichotomies. Moreover, all these dichotomies converge around the issue of meaning. Again and again, openly or (more often) obliquely, the poem will approach the question of who controls definition: the individual or the world that surrounds him? And again and again it will turn away from answering. The poem first attempts to resolve the question by means of Byron’s most obvious self-substitute, Harold. Jerome McGann has observed that Byron uses the historical ‘figurae’ in Childe Harold III as stand-ins for himself: Napoleon, Rousseau, Gibbon, and Voltaire all act as conduits that allow the poet to express his own ‘central attitudes of mind’ (CPW 2: 300).6 Yet surely no figure in Harold III is as closely allied with Byron as the poem’s hero, dragging his bleeding heart across Europe and trailing behind him the mental contradictions of his maker and twin. Harold is both his poet’s substitute and his reflection; thus it is only natural that he is the first figure through whom Byron seeks to come to grips with his inner turmoil. Byron begins this attempt in an attitude of defiance. Harold’s continuing story may seem grating or tedious to others – ‘Perchance my heart and harp have lost a string, / And both may jar’ – but Byron will define his poem according to his own needs: ‘Yet, though a dreary strain, to this



Childe Harold III and the Difficulties of Development 105

I cling; / … so that it fling / Forgetfulness around me—it shall seem / To me, though to none else, a not ungrateful theme’ (4). This is an audacious blow for self-centered determination. What gives Childe Harold III definition is the import and purpose Byron defines for it. It may have different meanings and values to others (dreariness, tunelessness, tedium), but Byron’s individual knowledge-claim gives it the only meaning that matters. Yet no sooner has he struck out for the power of self-determination than he draws back. Certainly Harold seeks to fashion a self by imposition of will alone: ‘He of the breast which fain no more would feel’ (8). Furthermore, he believes that his understanding of himself is a certainty, an impenetrable shield against the infringements of the outside world, ‘his spirit now so firmly fix’d / And sheath’d with an invulnerable mind, / That … / … he, as one might midst the many stand’ (10). This self-determination, however, has already been revealed as fantasy in the lines that precede it: ‘Secure in guarded coldness, he had mix’d / Again in fancied safety with his kind’ (10, my emphasis). In the face of the impinging outside world, self-created security becomes nothing more than fancy. In the end, Harold cannot escape outside influence; he is subject to the same immutable yearnings that govern all: But who can view the ripened rose, nor seek To wear it? who can curiously behold The smoothness and the sheen of beauty’s cheek, Nor feel the heart can never all grow old? … Harold, once more within the vortex, roll’d On with the giddy circle … (11) There is no space here for an individual to surpass the apparent givens of emotional, psychological, and social existence. Harold may not wish to feel, but he is required to do so by forces outside his control. It seems that no matter how strong-willed one may be, the best an individual can offer against the outside world is motivation, not action. Harold can ‘chase Time’ with a ‘nobler aim’ than he once had (11), but he cannot cease the chase. Nonetheless, he refuses to cede mental power. Rather than bend his knee to the world, he chooses isolation, with the accompanying certainty that he thus will not ‘yield dominion of his mind / To spirits against whom his own rebell’d; / Proud though in desolation; which could find / A life within itself, to breathe without mankind’ (12). Indeed, the





final full stanza devoted to him shows Harold altering and redefining experience to suit his needs:

‘Self-exiled,’ he has not had his position thrust upon him; he has chosen it for himself (one hears here an echo of Lara). He is truly ‘the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ (3), self-formed and self-defined. Furthermore, he has wrenched despair into pleasure, restructuring emotional devastation as grim delight. Yet the stanza simultaneously suggests the irony of this act of definition. Harold has power, certainly, but it is the power of the mad, the intemperate, the doomed. The position of the simile in lines 6–8, bracketed on either side by a description that appears to endorse his determinative abilities, reifies the passage’s ambivalence. Harold is both powerful and foolish, both a hero and a man intoxicated by his own delusions. The ability of the self to determine self-meaning is undermined in the very moment of its expression. In fact, this ambivalence has shown itself in the text earlier, albeit more delicately than here. Leaving behind Ada and England, Byron turns himself to face him in one of the canto’s most famous passages: Once more upon the waters! yet once more! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed That knows his rider. Welcome to their roar! Swift be their guidance, whereso’er it lead! … Still must I on; for I am as a weed Flung from the rock, on Ocean’s foam, to sail Where’er the surge may sweep, or tempest’s breath prevail. (2) In the space of six lines Byron changes from tamer to toy of oceans, no longer the Bellerophon of the waves but their victim. Yet what is perhaps most curious about this passage is not the abruptness and totality of the change it details but the sense the language carries of



Self-exiled Harold wanders forth again With nought of hope left, but with less of gloom; The very knowledge that he lived in vain, That all was over on this side the tomb, Had made Despair a smilingness assume, Which, though ’twere wild,—as on the plundered wreck When mariners would madly meet their doom With draughts intemperate on the sinking deck,— Did yet inspire a cheer, which he forebore to check. (16)

the poet’s own confusion. Byron may begin his stanza by drawing an allusive parallel between himself and Henry V (‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!’), a bold conqueror controlling his familiar steed and surging toward victory, but less than four lines later he is a kind of Mazeppa, whose steed ‘knows his rider’ only insofar as he knows that that rider desperately needs guidance. By the end of the stanza, any sense of volition or even humanity has vanished, as he reduces himself to an inanimate plaything of the elements. Byron seems genuinely to be struggling with his own definition of himself here, not at all certain whether he is the master or servant of the material world he seeks to mount and surmount.7 This confusion over the location of the seat of determinative power will be the poem’s other hallmark. Such confusion may arise because Byron is fully aware of the damaging potential that lurks in the mind’s generation of meaning. Calling forth the hero of his ‘youth’s summer … Long absent HAROLD’ in the stanzas that follow, he gives as his motivation his own bruising by the world. He has ‘grown aged in this world of woe,’ and thus he ‘can tell / Why thoughts seek refuge in lone caves, yet rife / With airy images’ (3–8). What follows, however, is not relief at the result of such a search but a conflict between its advantages and dangers, between the engendering self and itself. Byron begins firmly enough. He makes no bones about his belief that his creation, and creation of, Harold not only allows him to ‘in creating live / A being more intense,’ but also to reconstitute himself: What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou, Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth, Invisible but gazing, as I glow Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth, And feeling still with thee in my crush’d feelings’ dearth. (6) This is a firm declaration in favor of the power of the creating self, for the Harold who reconstitutes Byron is, after all, the product of Byron’s own mind. The mind, Byron thus suggests, can generate existences and experiences powerful enough to overcome the depredations of the outside world.8 Yet no sooner does he advance than he retreats. The generative mind has its danger as well as its promises: Yet must I think less wildly: —I have thought Too long and darkly, till my brain became,





Whatever one may say about the final assertion (surely there never was a man less able than Byron to feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate), what is most striking here is the drawing back from the previous stanza’s positivity. Byron’s mind may be the progenitor of his salvation, but it has also been the progenitor of his suffering. The very thoughts that allowed him to create his reconstitutive alter ego have also produced his cognitive chaos. Mental figurations may soothe one’s anguish, as Harold is meant to do, but they may also create that anguish, as those wild thoughts have done. In fact, the stanzas suggest that the two are intertwined, the ‘too long’ and dark thoughts leading to the creation of the ‘Soul of my thought!’ The mind is fecund, but its fecundity arises from a disorder that puts it, boiling and whirling, at something like the brink of hell. Just as in the arresting simile of stanza 16, ‘souls of the thought’ are here revealed as risk as much as reward.9 Having thus brought himself doubly face to face with his dilemma, however, Byron arrests his own reflections for the second time in seventeen stanzas: ‘Stop!’ (17). Moreover, also for the second time in seventeen stanzas he substitutes for these reflections the hard immutabilities of geography and history. Where the first stanza of the poem turned from Ada to the sea, however, its seventeenth turns from Harold to the land: Stop!—for thy tread is on an Empire’s dust! An Earthquake’s spoil is sepulchred below! Is the spot mark’d with no colossal bust? Nor column trophied for triumphal show? None; but the moral’s truth tells simpler so, As the ground was before, thus let it be; How that red rain hath made the harvest grow! (17) But if Byron seeks thus to escape from difficult questions of definition, he does not succeed; here again one finds human attempts to impose meaning (busts, columns) in conflict with the outside world (dust, the field itself). Whereas, however, the outcome of Harold’s struggle with that



In its own eddy boiling and o’erwrought, A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame: And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame, My springs of life were poison’d. ’Tis too late! Yet am I chang’d; though still enough the same In strength to bear what time can not abate, And feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate. (7)


Ah! Then and there was hurrying to and fro, And gathering tears, and tremblings of distress, And cheeks all pale, which but an hour ago Blush’d at the praise of their own loveliness; And there were sudden partings, such as press The life from out young hearts, and choking sighs Which ne’er might be repeated; who could guess If ever more should meet those mutual eyes, Since upon nights so sweet such awful morn could rise? And there was mounting in hot haste: the steed, The mustering squadron, and the clattering car, Went pouring forward in impetuous speed, And swiftly forming in the ranks of war; And the deep thunder peal on peal afar; And near, the beat of the alarming drum Roused up the soldier ere the morning star; While throng’d the citizens with terror dumb, Or whispering, with white lips—‘The foe! They come! they come!’ (24–25) Earth may obviate the meaning of Waterloo by using it merely to produce better ‘verdure’ (27); history may obviate that meaning by using the battle merely to facilitate ‘reviving Thraldom’ (19); but simply by its existence the text’s description of Waterloo and its emotional effects fix their



world was indeterminacy – smiling Despair, boiling thoughts – here there is no question that the outside world is more powerful than human efforts. The manmade markers would be merely ‘triumphal show,’ but the cyclical obduracies of the physical world reveal the ‘moral’s truth’: that Waterloo had no lasting impact, and that the blood shed in this human conflict has made no real difference, except perhaps to increase the creative powers of the earth.10 And here one begins to see that the push-me-pull-you structure of Harold III’s first stanzas was not vacillation but rather establishment of a pattern, for no sooner does the text assert this generative primacy on the part of the outer world than it undermines it yet again. Having averred that the battle of Waterloo has made not one whit of difference to any outside world – ‘Gaul may champ the bit / in fetters;— but is Earth more free? / … prove before ye praise!’ (19) – it goes on to recreate with piercing clarity the emotions and experiences of those nearest the battle:

individually created meaning in the mind of the reader. The very vividness of Byron’s description demonstrates the power the creating mind possesses to grant meaning and significance.11 These stanzas of reaction show the imagination prompted into creation by history, but only prompted. The human mind is primum genitor of meaning. Moreover, this section of Harold III suggests that the meaning imparted by the mind may overpower the earth’s seeming indifference after all. Flush with pride in ‘the fierce native daring which instils / The stirring memory of a thousand years’ (26), upon leaving the battlefield Byron is able to vivify the uncaring earth, refiguring natural phenomena as evidence of its human emotions, so that the leaves of Ardennes are ‘Dewy with nature’s tear-drops, as they pass, / Grieving, if aught inanimate e’er grieves, / Over the unreturning brave’ (27). Here is the first instance of a device that will be used more noticeably in the canto’s later stanzas on Leman and Clarens. It is not merely that the text employs the pathetic fallacy, or that it personifies natural occurrence as evidence of mourning that mirrors the author’s own. It is that this employment of the fallacy, and this personification, are themselves demonstrations of the epistemic power of the human mind. Byron peoples nature in his own image, and in and by doing so he makes it subject to his defining will. Vincent Newey argues that in the landscapes of Childe Harold III, ‘nature is very much a text to be read’ (158); he could easily have added that the nature that is read and its reader are one and the same. Both are the self. Indeed, for every instance in which the outside world imposes its own definition – irrelevancy – on Waterloo, the Waterloo stanzas offer an instance in which human definition stakes an overpowering claim. For each moment at which ‘The earth is covered thick with other [human] clay, / Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent, / Rider and horse, — friend, foe, — in one red burial blent’ (28), there is one in which individuals draw from the heap personal significance that overpowers nature’s or the world’s indifference, as Byron does with his kinsman Frederick Howard: … one I would select from that proud throng, Partly because they blend me with his line, And partly that I did his sire some wrong, And partly that bright names will hallow song; And his was of the bravest … There have been tears and breaking hearts for thee, And mine were nothing, had I such to give; But when I stood beneath the fresh green tree,





As in the lines about Ada, meaning and value are here determined by the ‘I,’ not outside forces. Moreover, the fertile earth, first offered in ironic juxtaposition to Byron’s grief, becomes in his hands a means of emphasizing it. The green tree does not simply play its usual role, symbolizing life, but this symbolization is overpowered by Byron’s refiguration of it into a reminder of death – indeed, it becomes such a reminder precisely because it is a symbol of life. By a kind of brute mental will, Byron subjugates natural occurrence to the power of his defining imagination.12 Similarly the ‘reckless’ birds implicitly valorize the mourner who is sensible by comparison, while the stanza’s final line makes plain precisely the way in which the speaker’s version of what he sees before him vanquishes this moment of natural revivification. Filtered through Byron’s eyes and brain (shades of Berkeley), the topographical rebirth of Waterloo becomes only a symbol of death. As this hint of Berkeley and these troubled stanzas, suggest, Harold III’s tussles over the question of self-definition often open out into questions of definition and knowing more generally. Both Harold and Byron seek to understand how to constitute – or reconstitute – a broken self, and as the shape of the narrative, with its widening focus from self (1–7) to self in the world (8–15) to comprehension of the world itself (15ff.) suggests, the question of how to define the self progressively becomes intertwined with the question of who or what controls the ability to define at all: the individual or the world. These first sections seem to come down on the side of the individual. Nowhere is this vision of definition more clear than in the lines that follow, the passage describing the reactions of those left to mourn the dead: … though the sound of Fame May for a moment soothe, it cannot slake The fever of vain longing, and the name So honour’d but assumes a stronger, bitterer claim. They mourn, but smile at length; and smiling, mourn: The tree will wither long before it fall; The hull drives on, though mast and sail be torn;



Which living waves where thou didst cease to live, And saw around me the wide field revive With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring Come forth her work of gladness to contrive, Will all her reckless birds upon the wing, I turn’d from all she brought to those she could not bring. (29–30)


Even as a broken mirror, which the glass In every fragment multiplies; and makes A thousand images of one that was, The same, and still the more, the more it breaks; And thus the heart will do which not forsakes, Living in shatter’d guise, and still, and cold, And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches, Yet withers on till all without is old, Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold. (31–33) In this curiously unmoored presentation, the mirror this passage imagines seems to be both the heart (‘… as a broken mirror’) and the mourned person the heart holds dear (the image ‘of one that was’). The heart projects its sorrow onto everything, with the result that all it beholds or experiences are iterations of that sorrow, reminders of its loss. Moreover, this repetition obdurately overpowers outside influence and experience, so that the mourning heart creates its own world twice over: not only does it fashion a comprehension of life and experience separate from the seemingly objective occurrences of the real world, but it creates and perpetuates that understanding in a self-contained world of its own. For Byron the heart’s silent endurance is a victory.13 Its private adherence to sorrow is a demonstration of the power of individual cognitive determination over the outside world: discreetly but firmly, the heart maintains its interpretation of the outside world, stubbornly recasting all it encounters. That this victory is both painful and ironic makes it no less admirable to Byron, who finds that ‘There is a very life in our despair / Vitality of poison’ (298–99). By the end of the Waterloo section, then, Byron does seem to reach a definitive conclusion about the creation of so-called ‘knowledge.’ That conclusion privileges human construction of meaning over the natural world’s deconstruction. Whereas at the section’s beginning the battlefield was defined by nature, ‘As the ground was before, thus let it be’ (17), at the end human definition trumps all: Millions of tongues record thee [Waterloo], and anew Their children’s lips shall echo them, and say – ‘Here, where the sword united nations drew,



The roof-tree sinks, but moulders on the hall In massy hoariness; the ruin’d wall Stands when its wind-worn battlements are gone; The bars survive the captive they enthrall; The day drags through though storms keep out the sun; And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on:


Our countrymen were warring on that day!’ And this is much, and all which will not pass away. (35)

… in thy fortunes … Ambition steeled thee [Napoleon] on too far to show That just habitual scorn which could contemn Men and their thoughts, ’twas wise to feel, not so To wear it ever on thy lip and brow … If, like a tower upon a headlong rock, Thou hadst been made to stand or fall alone, Such scorn of man had help’d to brave the shock; But men’s thoughts were the steps which paved thy throne … (40–41) The difficulty is not with Napoleon’s scorn, which is both ‘just’ and ‘wise,’ but with his inability to keep that feeling to himself. It has been argued that the poem’s speaker ‘clearly wants to find in Napoleon a living example of a mind that has won solace from absolute isolation’ (Shilstone 134), but precisely the opposite seems true. Napoleon’s troubles stem from his inability to keep private certain beliefs – individual determinations – best enjoyed in isolation. Like his confrère Harold, Napoleon discovers that it is not possible for an individual mind, however strong, however Byronic, to impress its knowledge-claims on the outside world.14 These stanzas suggest, then, that it is not the inability but the desire to impress those feelings on the larger world which dooms an iconoclast: And there hath been thy [Napoleon’s] bane; there is a fire And motion of the soul, which will not dwell



Only human knowledge-claims remain. All else is ephemeral. Furthermore, it would seem the poem reaches not one but two conclusions here. If these lines suggest that man’s cognitive abilities emerge triumphant, they furthermore suggest that in order to triumph those abilities must be private, individuated. ‘Millions’ of tongues may give meaning to Waterloo, but the meaning itself is intimately created, passed down from parent to child and preserved as a connection between countryman and countryman, produced through and as the communal ‘our.’ The stanzas on Napoleon that follow the Waterloo section make it explicit that Byron feels the failure of individual definition is not systemic, but rather occurs when an individual seeks to impress his own knowledge-claims on the world:


In its own narrow being, but aspire Beyond the fitting medium of desire …

This inability to control not just ambition, but specifically the ambition to force the world to conform to one’s own knowledge-claims about it (for this flaw is the flaw of ‘Conquerors and Kings, / Founders of sect and systems’) is what ultimately dooms the quick-bosomed. They ‘stir too strongly the soul’s secret springs’ (43), and because the lines do not make it clear to whom that soul belongs, it seems they mean not just the souls of followers but of their Conquerors and Kings, as well. The difficulty, the stanzas appear to make plain, lies in the thinker’s determination to impose his thoughts upon the public: ‘what stings / Are theirs! One breast laid open were a school / Which would unteach mankind the lust to shine or rule’ (43).15 For the first time, it seems that the text has been able to achieve a resolution to its concerns about self-created knowledge. If determination remains inward, all is well. Like the hull and the roof-tree, the self-contained creating mind remains strong. If the one who advances knowledge-claims seeks to force those claims upon the outside world, however, the result is an ultimately empty superiority, a stormy isolation: He who ascends to mountain-tops shall find The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow; He who surpasses or subdues mankind, Must look down on the hate of those below. Though high above the sun of glory glow, And far beneath the earth and ocean spread, Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow Contending tempests on his naked head, And thus reward the toils which to those summits led. (45) The cognitive achiever who succeeds in his attempts to top the world only finds himself cut off, buffeted, and haunted by desires that he cannot fulfill, betwixt and between (‘high above the sun of glory glow / … far beneath the earth and ocean spread’): a kind of Tantalus of knowing. The problem, then, is not the creation of self-generated knowledgeclaims, but their dissemination. Indeed, the next stanza seems to say as much when, for the first time one of the poem’s brusque dismissals is followed not by a switch to another topic but by a conclusion: ‘Away



This makes the madmen who have made men mad By their contagion … And are themselves the fools of those they fool … (42–43)

with these! true Wisdom’s world will be / Within its own creation’ (46). That ‘Within’ suggests not only that true wisdom must remain within, but that it is to be found only within the realms that wisdom itself creates. That is, ‘true’ (perhaps in the sense of ‘real,’ and perhaps in the sense of ‘accurate’: both are plausible here) wisdom may be found only within the realm of individual knowledge-claims. These lines certainly seem to support the assertion that as Harold III progresses Byron comes to see feelings as inexpressible and unverifiable (Macleod 277), yet their tone also suggests that Byron again views this development not as a loss, but as a victory. True wisdom remains bounded within its own world, but it is true. Perceptive accuracy lies, Byronically, with the isolated yet adamant human mind. Yet again the text upholds, however subtly, the power of the individual to determine definition. Or perhaps not. For no sooner do the lines tie up their loose ends than they fray them again: ‘true Wisdom’s world will be / Within its own creation, or in thine, Maternal Nature!’ (46, my emphasis). Which is it to be? Once again the qualifier confuses matters. Faced with the power of the Rhine and its lofty castles, neither Byron nor Harold can decide, and both the superior mind and the world that surrounds it are simultaneously validated once more: There Harold gazes on a work divine, A blending of all beauties; streams and dells, Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountain, vine, And chiefless castles breathing stern farewells From grey but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells. And there they stand, as stands a lofty mind, Worn, but unstooping to the baser crowd … (46–47) Nature may create divinity – and a divinity, furthermore, explicitly linked with fruitfulness – but the castles, with their ‘grey but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells,’ simultaneously suggest the power of the mind, selfregenerating and able to transform defeat into a kind of victory. McGann has pointed out that ‘the Rhine castles exist in … [a] landscape of quiescent fecundity’ (‘Composition’ 421) and quiescence is, indeed, significant here, for it allows these symbols of human mental power to stand in direct contrast to that other such symbol, Napoleon. Where his power was destructive fire, theirs finds its end in quietly regenerative growth, not a flame that ‘eats into itself’ (44) but verdure that clothes and vivifies.16 Yet, as McGann also points out, by linking the two symbols





But thou, exulting and abounding river! Making thy waves a blessing as they flow Through banks whose beauty could endure for ever Could man but leave thy bright creation so, Nor its fair promise from the surface mow With the sharp scythe of conflict,—then to see Thy valley of sweet waters, were to know Earth paved like Heaven; and to seem such to me Even now what wants thy stream? – that it should Lethe be. A thousand battles have assail’d thy banks, But these and half their fame have pass’d away, And Slaughter heap’d on high his weltering ranks; Their very graves are gone, and what are they? Thy tide wash’d down the blood of yesterday, And all was stainless, and on thy clear stream Glass’d with its dancing light the sunny ray; But o’er the blackened memory’s blighting dream Thy waves would vainly roll, all sweeping as they seem. (50–51) This passage at first appears as if it will be a demonstration (if at the same time a condemnation) of humanity’s ability to create meaning: the Rhine, after all, would be beautiful and blessed were it not for the war man has thrust upon it. Yet the second stanza begins by suggesting the inadequacy of man’s attempts at designation: the natural world has, in fact, withstood these human impingements, its cleansing tides overpowering the corporeal flotsam and jetsam with which man sought to redefine it. In the end, however, the defining power of the individual trumps both natural and historical attempts at figuration: the Rhine has ‘wash’d down the blood of yesterday,’ but even its cleansing powers are no match



the passage hints not at a preference for one but at a hidden similarity between the two: the castles, lofty and unstooping like the emperor, do whisper of ‘the same kind of dangerous hubris which possessed Napoleon’ (‘Composition’ 421). Harold III thus continues to wrestle with the unresolved conflict of the Napoleon stanzas, and with all its potential difficulties. Moreover, the stanzas on the Rhine that follow this rumination repeat precisely the conflict of the Waterloo section. Once more, the historical world, the natural world, and the mind tussle over the creation of meaning.

for ‘memory’s blighting dream,’ which obstinately refigures the natural world to suit its own gloominess. Significantly, here the poem works not in a binary structure – individual mind v. an other – but rather in a progressive tripartite one – history v. nature v. memory. Historically imposed meaning is trumped by the refigurative power of the natural world, but both are overpowered by the creative abilities of the human mind, imposing its own meaning on what can only ‘vainly … seem’ sweeping. Thus the text dismisses the power of all outside forces, historical and natural, to impose their definitions on the mind. As if to underline this, the poem makes these hitherto-unowned ruminations the property of one specific human mind: ‘Thus Harold inly said’ (52). This moment harks back to Canto I’s puzzlingly sweeping ‘So deem’d the Childe’ (I.27), and this does not seem to be accidental, for the line has the same effect as that earlier utterance, muddying rather than clarifying. Does ‘thus’ mean ‘this is what’ or ‘this is how’? Even if it means ‘this is what’ (the most logical presumption), readers are left, again as in Canto I, with the question of precisely what Harold has said. Is it he or the omniscient narrator who has presented the proud Rhine castles, their romantic history, and the uneffacing Rhine? The question is a significant one, for it means the difference between mere description (on the part of the narrator) and definition (by Harold), but the answer is far from clear. Nor does the next stanza clarify matters. For no sooner does Harold say thus than he and his readers are brought face to face with yet another example of nature as retainer of intrinsic power to define: Thus Harold inly said, and pass’d along, Yet not insensibly to all which here Awoke the jocund birds to early song In glens which might have made even exile dear: Though on his brow were graven lines austere, And tranquil sternness which had ta’en the place Of feelings fiercer far but less severe, Joy was not always absent from his face, But o’er it in such scenes would steal with transient trace. (52) The natural world, it is thus suggested, does possess immanent meaning, one to which the human mind may gradually awaken whether it will or no – ‘Joy was not always absent from his face / But o’er it in such scenes would steal.’ Yet, Childe Harold III being the poem it has by this stanza become, this struggle over the power to define resolves itself only into irresolution. The possibility of turning exile into happiness remains




unfulfilled, the trace of joy only ‘transient.’ The word contrives to encapsulate the struggle the poem enacts, suggesting as it does liminal moments in which Harold’s imposed understanding is simultaneously overpowered and not quite overpowered by the world that surrounds him. It would be both tedious and pointless to proceed through Harold III highlighting every occurrence of this conflict, for all of the third canto is this way. From Waterloo to Ehrenbreitstein, from the Alps to Lac Leman, from Lausanne to Ferney, the text poses the potentially generative self against the potentially generative outside world, charts a struggle between the two, then snatches indecision from the jaws of resolution. Although the hallmark of the canto is its restless physical and mental movement, none of this movement brings Byron, or Harold, or the reader to any mental or physical resting place.17 In Childe Harold III, the ‘basis of a new choice’ to use Michael Cooke’s formulation, ‘is not a new belief, but a renewed need to believe arising from the failure of previous beliefs’ (52).18 This maelstrom of vacillation makes perfect sense, considering the total ruin Byron was escaping from in England and the complete unknown he was riding toward in Europe. But as he became more settled into his continental journey, as time passed and he drew further away from England geographically if not mentally, he appears to have reached firmer epistemic ground.19 It is perhaps not coincidental that Byron begins to achieve a more meditative state in Switzerland: he settles his mind, to the extent that he does settle it, on the ground where he would soon literally settle for the first time since leaving England. Nor is it altogether surprising that he reaches his resolution on Lac Leman. While the ocean is one of Byron’s most persistent and powerful motifs, it has so far been a source of nothing but trouble and confusion in Childe Harold III – rough master, barrier, indecisive guide. Leman, on the other hand, offers all the thematic comforts of ocean combined with a boundedness and opportunity for control that that body of water does not possess. Rather than being overpowered by the lake, Byron can be soothed. He makes this explicit in stanza 85, where his aquaphilia forsakes the tempestuous for the soothing: Clear, placid Leman! Thy contrasted lake With the wide world I dwelt in, is a thing Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring. This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing To waft me from distraction; once I loved Torn ocean’s roar, but thy soft murmuring





Leman’s effects are subtle, the warning stillness and the murmuring waters luring rather than oppressing. Whereas the sea seems to offer only confusion and destruction (‘torn ocean’), the lake is both a space of reconstitution and one that invites interpretation, its soft murmurs not quite articulate enough to make their own claims. Here one might pause to notice a third unsurprising surprise: that Byron should find his mental resting place beside a site that speaks to him in the voice of a sister.20 And yet if this simile is arresting for its (surely intentional) reminder of Byron’s personal circumstances, it is also arresting because it marks the beginning of the turn that occurs in this final portion of Harold III. When Byron figures Leman here, he does so by moving it from the outside world – the natural world – into the homely human world. In this world, a sister’s voice is the dominant tenor; the lake, and nature, are subordinated to this more personal connection and comprehension. Thus, the human imagination (which draws the connection between these two, and is able to understand and paint the power of the lake by defining it by means of the sororal voice) usurps epistemic power from the natural world. In fact, as the Leman stanzas proceed, they perform this gesture persistently. The shore is imbued with the scent of flowers ‘yet fresh with childhood’ – newly budded, but also, by implication, both filled with scents remembered from childhood and understood to be fresh because they are filled with the essence of childhood. The grasshopper becomes a lighthearted dandy, ‘an evening reveler, who makes / His life an infancy.’ Even the stars, ‘a beauty and a mystery,’ are rendered comprehensible in the observation that ‘All heaven and earth are still—though not in sleep, / But breathless, as we grow when feeling most.’ Repeatedly, nature is tenderly comprehended through its connections to the human, and to understand the natural world one need understand nothing more than familiar human experiences (86–89).21 The outside world is sieved through nostalgia and the commonplace, discreetly made tangible by such renderings. This subtle configuring bursts into the open with the coming of the lake storm. Critics have long recognized that the storm marks a significant moment in the canto, that it ‘not only reawakens [Byron’s] latent disquiet, it reanimates his questing impulsions by exposing the “wondrous” and “joyous” aspects of the storm’s tempestuous vigor’ (McGann, ‘Composition’ 429). Yet while it reawakens disquiet and questing, it also



Sounds sweet as if a sister’s voice reproved That I with stern delights should e’er have been so moved.


works to lay them to rest finally, for the storm’s vigor inspires Byron’s own, and the combination of dissatisfaction and energy that the rain calls forth at last leads to a definitive claim for the superiority of the individual generative mind over the defining powers of the outside world.22 This claim begins to make itself known clearly in the initial description of the conflagration:

Here and everywhere in the stanzas that follow, Byron’s nature is littered with evidence of his defining touch, whether in the night storm that he reshapes into ‘the light / Of a dark eye in woman’ or in the peaks he gifts with tongues; whether in the mountains he renders as parted lovers or in the lightning storms he personifies with hands to and from which they ‘fling their thunderbolts’ (94, 95). This touch of the defining mind is present, too, in the way that in these comparisons, he reverses the usual movement of simile upward, from the quotidian to the sublime (‘She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies’), offering instead movement downward, from the sublime to the quotidian (‘where the swift Rhone cleaves his way between / Heights, which appear as lovers who have parted’ [94]). Thus Byron seeks to give the natural world a human shape of his choosing, to impress upon it a structure of his making. Here at last, then, one finds the poet actively demonstrating the power of his own creating mind to refigure the world, indeed, to refigure it in his own image.23 Moreover, this refiguring is so contradictorily powerful that the natural world is effectively rendered more powerful, more rich and strange, by being siphoned through and remolded by Byron’s mind. It is not simply that the similes are arresting – although they are that. It is also that their very humanity, their humbleness and particularity, makes them more able to anatomize and explicate nature and its phenomena. By making Lac Leman into a sister, a storm into an angry woman, and a grasshopper into a sprightly dandy, the passage grants fuller access to the power, and to the delight, of the natural world. One could say that these comparisons reduce nature, but in performing this



… Oh night, And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong, Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light Of a dark eye in woman! Far along, From peak to peak, the rattling crags among Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud, But every mountain now hath found a tongue … (92)

reduction they simultaneously amplify it, a movement that harks backward to The Giaour’s ‘both either and or’ even as it looks forward to Don Juan’s celebration of paradoxical multiplicity. It is no accident that this demonstration of cognitive power occurs immediately after an extended peroration on Rousseau, for the Rousseau lauded therein is himself both a symbol and a progenitor of human creativity, in both meanings of the word. Significantly the text portrays such creativity as negative as well as positive: he is ‘the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau,’ ‘Kindled and blasted,’ and what he inspires is ‘a fearful monument /… Leaving but ruins’ (77, 78, 82). Indeed, Rousseau himself is a fearful monument to Byron. In this text in which the poet openly struggles with the question of what is to be gained and what lost by forging headlong forward, the ‘phrensied’ (80), outcast, destructive Rousseau can hardly be an unambiguous symbol.24 It is even more significant, however, that the text does not finally dismiss Rousseau as negative. For one, it is highly sympathetic to the philosopher’s own self-created figurations, pointing out their perhaps richer-than-ordinary value: But to that gentle touch, through brain and breast Flash’d the thrill’d spirit’s love-devouring heat; In that absorbing sigh perchance more blest Than vulgar minds may be with all they seek possest. (79) More importantly, Harold III does not precisely condemn Rousseau’s principles, or the public enactment and repercussions of them. Mankind have felt their strength, and made it felt. They might have used it better, but, allured By their new vigour, sternly have they dealt On one another; … … But they, Who in oppressions darkness caved had dwelt, They were not eagles, nourish’d with the day; What marvel then, at times, if they mistook their prey? (83) It is not the thinking or the goal that is at fault, but the circumstances under which they were applied – and, significantly in light of the conclusion of stanzas 43–45; it is because ‘ambition was self-will’d’ (82). There still remains hope for putting these democratic principles into practice more successfully. Rousseau’s ‘energy’ may ‘destroy himself as





… the scene which passions must allot To the mind’s purified beings; ’twas the ground Where early Love his Psyche’s zone unbound, And hallowed it with loveliness. (97) Yet no sooner does he grant the immanence of meaning in this natural world than he once more overpowers it with his own anthropomorphization: ‘here the Rhone / Hath spread himself a couch, the Alps have rear’d a throne’ (97, 104). Something has changed for Byron. His generative power gains force as he proceeds through the Swiss stanzas. By the time he comes to Lausanne and Ferney he is able to assert that their significance is generated by the mind: ‘Lausanne! and Ferney! ye have been the abodes / Of names which unto you bequeathed a name’ (105). The cities are made famous by their associations with thinking minds, and, in addition, they would be nothing without the interest and significance granted by the minds of those who believe Voltaire and Gibbon to be important thinkers. The power of the mind to create meaning is thus doubly validated. This claim of power is not unequivocal, however. Complications arise from the fact that this assertion of mental power follows an equally strong assertion of natural definition, and of the power that such definition has over the human mind: He who hath loved not, here would learn that lore, And make his heart a spirit; he who knows



well as the ancien régime’ (Duffy 73), but ultimately that is not a fault of the energy, but of those who wield it; in better hands, Byron implies, creative power will prove its positivity: ‘none need despair: / It came, it cometh, and will come, – the power / To punish or forgive – in one we shall be slower’ (84). Thus, the text suggests that the root of destruction is not the individual creating mind but rather these particular creators, who wrongly enacted Rousseau’s convictions. Admittedly, it cannot be said that having affirmed the potential of the creating mind and asserted his own power in the stanzas on Leman, Byron boldly continues on in the same vein. In fact, the famous stanza in which he bemoans his inability to capture meaning, contrasting his inadequacy with nature’s clean potency (‘could I wreak / My thoughts upon expression / … into one word / And that one word were Lightning’) immediately follows this section:25 nature is in the dominant creative position once again. Morever, he experiences another relapse when he comes to Clarens,


That tender mystery, will love the more, For this is Love’s recess … ’Twas not for fiction chose Rousseau this spot, Peopling it with affections; but he found It was the scene which passion must allot To the mind’s purified beings; ’twas the ground Where early Love his Psyche’s zone unbound, And hallow’d it with loveliness … (103–04)

But let me quit man’s works, again to read, His Maker’s, spread around me, and suspend This page, which from my reveries I feed, Until it seems prolonging without end. The clouds above me to the white Alps tend, And I must pierce them, and survey whate’er May be permitted … Italia! too, Italia! looking on thee, Full flashes on the soul the light of ages, Since the fierce Carthaginian almost won thee, To the last halo of the chiefs and sages Who glorify thy consecrated pages; Thou wert the throne and grave of empires; still, The fount at which the panting mind assuages Her thirst of knowledge, quaffing there her fill, Flows from the eternal source of Rome’s imperial hill. (109–10) Thus the end of Harold’s third canto portrays the human mind not as ‘gigantic … / Titan-like’ (105), nor even as protean (106), but as panting acolyte.26 Yet once more, however, resolution cannot be so easily achieved. If by the end of the poem Byron undermines his figuration of the creative superiority of the human mind, he prefaces that undermining with yet another praise of the creative, and significantly for the works to come, skeptical, mind, offering in these stanzas Childe Harold III’s only unequi-



Further complications come from Byron’s final exhortation to himself, a passage that follows close on and figures both nature and history as purveyors of immanent meaning that man can learn and would gain from learning:

vocal praise, for the ironists Voltaire and Gibbon. The greatest power, to ‘multiply’ oneself ‘among mankind,’ ‘to shake a throne,’ to ‘sap … a solemn creed’ is reserved for the skeptic. While this cannot be read as precisely an endorsement of skepticism, coming as it does late in the text and so firmly stated, it at least demonstrates the direction in which Byron is moving. In addition, in this passage Byron nicely reveals his ability to understand the real concern of Beattie, Campbell, and their ilk in his observation that Gibbon’s foes were ‘stung to wrath, which grew from fear, / And doom’d him to the zealot’s ready Hell, / Which answers to all doubts so eloquently well’ (106–07). This statement not only recognizes the wellspring of anti-skeptical anger but is the first intimation of a powerful idea Byron will further illuminate in Don Juan: that free thought is not trammeled by logic and reason that demonstrate it to be unworkable or inaccurate, but by emotions and expectations that blind the thinker to its power. Furthermore, the text’s representation of these foes, with their quickly produced hell, ironically suggests the way in which the mind produces what it needs and makes it real, at least to itself. Beattie’s insistence in On Truth that it is ‘evident, from the use to which later authors have applied it, that [Berkeley’s] system leads directly to atheism and universal skepticism’ (312) and his insistence that as a result of Hume’s system, ‘All, around, above, and beneath, is one vast inanity, or rather an enormous chaos, encompassed with darkness universally and eternally impenetrable. Body and spirit are utterly annihilated’ (280–81) smack more of self-induced frenzy than legitimate response, and thus themselves stand as indications of how the mind manufactures perception, discovering danger and offering a solution both produced by itself. These lines thus suggest the way in which such constructions demonstrate the very tenets they come out against. Moreover, Byron undermines his undermining of creative power through formal means, by the simple but absolute expedient of breaking the narrative frame. Harold III draws to a close with a sudden acknowledgment that the entire narrative has been the product of a maker, not a record of actual experience but a constructed text, ‘woven into song,’ ‘… a harmless wile,— / The colouring of the scenes which fleet along, / Which I would seize, in passing, to beguile / My breast, or that of others’ (111–12).27 The struggle over meaning between the self and the outside world, the repeatedly inescapable fear that that world may emerge as victoriously definitive creator, have all, the reader is now reminded, been the creations of a creating self. Furthermore, this creating self has for 108 stanzas succeeded in imposing its mental creations on others.




What’s more, Byron takes care to make it plain that this creation still continues: ‘But let me quit man’s works, again to read / His Maker’s, spread around me, and suspend / This page, which from my reveries I feed’ (109). What at first appears as if it will be the acknowledgment of a higher cognitive power, one that is ‘Maker’ of both man and man’s works (including, presumably, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III), in fact turns out to be a far more ambiguous utterance. Who makes meaning, the author (or, in this case, the Author) or the reader? One may read Byron’s self-exhortation as a representation of both God and his works, nature, as teacher, as all-knowing Writer, but one may also read it as a revelation of Byron’s own mental power and ability as a reader. Reviewing Childe Harold III in the Eclectic, Josiah Conder remarked that ‘The scenery is at once revealed to our inmost feelings, not through the medium of description, as a picture, but in its effects upon the imagination. We do not see, we feel, the living landscape, by sympathy with the intense feelings of the poet’ (296): without this reader, these works of God would not have reached the reading public. As a reader of the landscape, Byron discovers and determines the meaning of the natural world around him (only made, not made meaningful, by God). As a writer he not only animates his narrative by means of his own mental ‘reveries’ and communicates those reveries and their attendant knowledge-claims to his readers, but has power instantly to destroy the narrative world simply by suspending his attention and shifting his eyes elsewhere. In this way, Byron the writer is remarkably like the God of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, ‘a mind which affects [the perceiver] every moment with all the sensible impressions … perceive[d]’ (50). In extending this image to include not just the Creator of the world but also the creator of the world of the text, Childe Harold III manages to suggest, without precisely dethroning nature’s Maker, that the mind – in this case, Byron’s mind – may exert power over his works.28 Once again, the individual, not nature or the outside world, holds the epistemological reins. As if to drive this point home, Byron proceeds to offer an overt declaration of his own power to determine value and meaning. Gone is Harold, who must leave the world in order to withstand it (12), and in his place is Byron, in the world but immune to it, subject only to himself: I have not loved the world, nor the world me; I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d To its idolatries a patient knee, — Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles, — nor cried aloud In worship of an echo; in the crowd





They could not deem me one of such; I stood Among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued. (113)

I do believe, Though I have found them not, that there may be Words which are things – hopes which will not deceive, And virtues which are merciful, nor weave Snares for the failing: I would also deem O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve; That two, or one, are almost what they seem,— That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream. (114) These are audacious assertions with which to begin to end so relentlessly equivocal a poem. Byron here ranges himself not just against what he has seen on his travels and in his life, but also against his own previous assertions (for example, his conviction that words could not be a ‘thing’ – lightning). He sets up firmly in favor of a mind that can assert power over experience and observation, and also over its own prior fears and convictions. Certainty, even self-produced certainty is malleable, open to shaping and reshaping by the mind. This genetic capacity reaches its zenith not in Byron’s avowed ability to manufacture a self or a world, but in his ability to manufacture another person. Having honed his powers on his surroundings and himself, Byron now mentally engenders his daughter, constructing her not as she may be, but as he would have her be. The tug of war between defining self and defining other, and between Byron and his wife, that began the poem here apparently achieves its resolution, as Byron molds Ada to his desires: … thou art the friend To whom the shadows of the far years extend … My voice shall with thy future visions blend, And reach into thy heart … I know that thou wilt love me; though my name Should be shut out from thee



This Byron, moreover, is not afraid to impress his beliefs upon the outside world, to envision a place that is nakedly the product of his own hopes and convictions:


I know that thou wilt love me; though to drain My blood from out thy being, were an aim, And an attainment,—all would be in vain,— Still thou would’st love me, still that more than life retain. (115–17)

The man who sends out into the world a single poem, the labour perhaps of years, may affect, with some pretence of probability, to scorn the voice of public censure or approbation, but he who, at intervals of only a few months, shall continue to court the expectations of the world with the successive fruits of his poetic talent, not only exists a pensioner upon public fame, but lives even from hand to mouth upon popular applause. Every poem [Lord Byron] publishes is a living witness that he bows to the idolatry of the world a patient knee. (609) Indisputably, there is something odd about a celebrity poet, offering to readers a poem thoroughly informed by events that are partially responsible for his celebrity (which celebrity is partially responsible for producing his readership), using that poem to announce to that readership that he cares not a jot about their opinions or those of anyone else. Added to this is the fact that Byron may not love the world nor the world him, but, as the declaration suggests, it takes two to dance that particular tango. A writer may claim that he defines himself against the world, but he is only able to do so because he is simultaneously acknowledging that the world has already defined him. Moreover, Byron does not claim that the meaning with which the world has imbued him – its ‘frown or smile’ (112) – is wrong. He simply claims that he will disregard it and create a different knowledge-claim about himself. Similarly, he does not claim that the thoughts of the crowd among which he stands are wrong, but merely that he does not share them. It would seem, then,



Here, Byron’s knowledge produces his daughter; his statements are simple assertions of fact: ‘thou art,’ ‘my voice shall,’ ‘I know … I know.’ That Ada may be encouraged to fear or hate him, that she may never encounter his poetry, that she may never feel a bond with him at all, are simply impossibilities. He knows what role she will play, how he and she will relate, and his knowledge makes it so.29 The lines and their writer create what will be. The objective facts are irrelevant. Yet there are difficulties in these final moments, too. For one thing, there is the paradoxicality of Byron’s world-spurning. As the reviewer for the British Critic observed,

that in this all-but-final moment the individual and the world that face him part fair foes indeed. Neither wrests control of knowledge from the other, and the knowledge-claims of each remain equally valid, if consistently in opposition. Additionally, the incantatory repetitions of the final passage addressed to Ada actually undermine what they seek to assert more than they reinforce it. The textual reiterations (‘I know that thou wilt love me’; ‘I know that thou wilt love me’) smack less of assurance than reassurance, seeming the utterances not of one who makes it so but of one who wishes it were so. Even in these most final of the poem’s final stanzas the reader can see that the struggle of Canto III still has not reached resolution. Rather than displaying the power of the poet’s creating mind, the poem’s last verses, indeed its final lines, reveal Byron still wrestling with his original question, seeking to exert himself against the confines of the world with only equivocal success: ‘Fain would I waft such a blessing upon thee, / As, with a sigh, I deem thou might’st have been to me!’ (118). Like the Harold of the first stanzas, the Byron of the last stanzas merely fains. He defines his daughter according to his wishes, but this definition is conditional. It is what might have been, not what is. In the end, Byron can only guess at what Ada might have been. Final definition is, literally, beyond him.30 It is thus not so clear at the poem’s end whether the mind can formulate knowledge according to its desires: perhaps it can only wish to know, impotent in the face of an adamant objective reality. Because all this makes it sound as if Byron consciously seeks to confront and resolve an epistemological question in Harold III, it bears repeating that he does not. If his fight in the third Harold is epistemological, it is epistemological only in that he seeks to fashion an epistemology of the self. The canto is ultimately concerned with ontology – with rage, and abandonment, and the reconstruction of self that follows them.31 Byron himself seems to have realized that this was his dominant concern during the months in which he produced the poem; a letter he wrote (fittingly) to Augusta Leigh while on the journey that produce Harold III acknowledges the mental burden and entrapment that the canto adumbrates: I am a lover of Nature—and an admirer of Beauty—I can bear fatigue— & welcome privation—and have seen some of the noblest views in the world.—But in all this—the recollections of bitterness—& more especially of recent & more home desolation—which must accompany me through life—have preyed upon me here—and neither the music of the Shepherd—the crashing of the Avalanche—nor the torrent—the mountain —the Glacier—the Forest—nor the Cloud—have for one





The Byron of this passage, and of this canto, is not concerned with knowing, or knowledge-claims, or the construction of meaning. He is concerned with ‘identity’: losing it, gaining it, and by doing the first perhaps contriving to do the second. Yet curiously enough the letter manages to suggest the intimate connection between self and knowing. Byron cannot be soothed by what he sees because his own mind’s interests and comprehensions remain obdurate; his ‘wretched identity’ cannot overmaster the ‘majesty and power’ of the natural world. In this same way, the central conflict of Childe Harold III still connects to Byron’s larger concerns. If this chapter has shown anything, it has shown that for Byron the construction of selfhood is intertwined with the construction of knowledge-claims. The essence of the self is inextricably bound up with the way that self comprehends the outside world, and that comprehension, in turn, is what makes the world for the self. This obviously connects with Berkeley’s ideas on perception – ‘what are … objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what, I pray you, do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensation?’ (PHK §4) – but it suggests an instability in the experience that Berkeley does not, for it suggests that the world the self makes may be malleable. If the essential self changes, so may the self’s perception, and hence version, of the world. In Harold’s third canto, however, Byron is not able to explore this connection between knowing and being. Not yet free from his own traumas, he cannot contemplate the larger, more abstract, questions of power and freedom at which the poem hints. Yet if Harold III is a liminal text, part of its liminality stems from the fact that it did push – or perhaps free – Byron to explore these questions. For the issue of what it means to know, and how that knowing frees or entrammels the knower, is central to Byron’s next major work, Manfred.



moment—lightened the weight upon my heart—nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty & the power and the Glory—around— above—& beneath me. (BLJ 5: 104–05)

6

Opinions are made to be changed—or how is truth to be got at? we don’t arrive at it by standing on one leg? – Byron to John Murray, 9 May 1817 The assertion that Manfred is a skeptical work will hardly come as a shock: a number of writers have made this statement and considered its ramifications from various angles. They have, for example, argued that the play enacts skeptical beliefs Byron long held, or, more recently, examined the way that its skepticism reflects simultaneously emergent theories in science and natural history. Curiously, however, few have explored the various manifestations of skepticism in the text itself at length, or reflected on precisely why Byron may have employed it.1 A close examination of the radical skepticism in Manfred, however, yields important discoveries about Byron’s philosophical development. In Manfred, Byron frames knowledge as a series of choices, and a series of rejections. In so doing, he suggests that what is usually thought of as knowledge is always fundamentally unsound – knowledge-claims rather than knowledge – and that actual knowledge is inherently unattainable. Moreover, for the first time he demonstrates that choosing or rejecting a given knowledge-claim may be an active decision. Critics have often been troubled by the epistemological instability of Manfred. In the London Magazine, John Scott complained of it, and of Byron’s works in general, that they were addressed to the poetical sympathies of his readers while their main interest is derived from awakening a recollection of some fact of the author’s life, or a conviction of an analogy to the author’s own 131



Knowing on Demand: Staging Knowledge-Claims in Manfred’s Mental Theatre


More recent writers have suggested that the play’s ambivalences limit its dramatic or philosophical effect, or have argued that they are the pained demonstration of a divided or deeply flawed self (either Manfred’s or Byron’s). Anne Mellor, for example, asserts that ‘Manfred has allowed his critical, skeptical intelligence to overwhelm his creative enthusiasm … has enclosed himself inside a tragic view of the human condition’ (37) while Alan Richardson argues that ‘Byron’s analysis of self-consciousness, as presented in Manfred, is sketchy and incomplete, largely because he chose not to separate villain and hero, seducer and seduced’ (‘Danger’ 58).2 What such readings fail to notice, however, is that both the play and its writer seem quite untroubled by its confusions. Indeed, although it is always a delicate matter to interpret Byron’s comments to others about his works, even allowing for the defense mechanisms (excessive selfmockery or equally excessive contempt) that he habitually employed, his first description of Manfred to John Murray seems to relish its ambiguity: —it is in three acts—but of a very wild—metaphysical—and inexplicable kind.—Almost all the persons—but two or three—are Spirits of the earth & air—or the waters—the scene is in the Alps—the hero a kind of magician who is tormented by a species of remorse—the cause of which is left half-unexplained—he wanders about invoking these spirits—which appear to him—& are of no use—he at last goes to the very abode of the Evil principle in propria persona—to evocate a ghost—which appears—& gives him an ambiguous and disagreeable answer—and in the 3d. act he is found by his attendants dying in a tower—where he studied his art—. (BLJ 5: 170)3 Here is the same backtracking and flip-flopping one finds in the play itself and, despite a flippancy that seems ill-suited to the drama’s apparent sobriety, the result is by far the most accurate extant précis of Manfred. This is simply because, unlike his critics, Byron does not see the play’s uncertainty as negative. Rather, he revels in it: the acts are inexplicable; the hero is a ‘kind of’ magician; the solution that sort-of magician elicits is ‘ambiguous’; even the climax is not the definitive death, but ‘dying.’ Byron’s abstract suggests that complication, uncertainty, and irresolvability are intrinsic to Manfred, and in this way, too, it is an accurate representation of the play.



character. A confusion is thus occasioned … The impression left on the mind, is neither strictly that of a work of art, to be pronounced upon according to the rules applicable to art,—nor of a matter-of-fact, appealing to the principles of sound judgment. (51)

Instantiating these conclusions as it does, Manfred marks the end of what one might call the quest stage of Byron’s intellectual development – a stage that also includes Childe Harold III and follows the exploratory stage that culminates in Lara. It is perhaps ironic that the end of Byron’s quest brings him once more in line with Hume, since the Humean evisceration of uncertainty was what stalled him at the end of Lara, but Manfred does not simply show Byron moving from unhappiness to acceptance. Instead, Byron here takes Hume’s skepticism and builds upon it to suggest that knowledge is not only dubious (as Hume would have it), but also multivalent, often self-contradictory, almost endlessly open to interpretation, and thus not knowledge at all, but rather knowledge-claims. In fact, Manfred synthesizes Hume with Berkeley, ultimately demonstrating that because all perception is the product of the self, it is subjective, uncertain, and hence and most significantly, malleable. Manfred raises questions as soon as one encounters the text, perhaps even before. The first indication that Byron may be playing with the definition of knowledge lies in the ontological confusion which must inform any experience of the play. Remarking with grim mysteriousness on an article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Monthly Magazine in which the writer claimed to reveal ‘the supposed origin of this dreadful story,’ Byron wrote to Murray, ‘the Conjecturer is out—& knows nothing of the matter—I had a better origin than he can devise or divine for the soul of him’ (BLJ 5: 249).4 In fact, this enigmatic ‘better origin’ was widely known to be Byron’s involvement with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. The play’s allusions to and obvious connections with that relationship were recognized not just by those intimately familiar with his personal circumstances – his wife and a select few confidantes – but by the larger reading public. A review in London’s The Day and New Times, for example, wrote that Manfred ‘committed incest! Lord Byron has coloured Manfred into his own personal features’ (quoted in Marchand, Byron, 699).5 That Byron intended the allusions to be spotted, at least by his friends and perhaps by a wider audience, seems clear from the numerous inquiries he made to correspondents seeking to gauge their opinions of the play, not to mention a letter he wrote to Leigh herself, asking if Manfred had created a ‘pucker’ in England (CPW 4: 466). Byron intended Manfred to be the story of Manfred, but he also intended it to be the story of Lord Byron. Thus, the drama is a form of confession, but not a confession in anything like a standard or straightforward sense. Rather, Byron constructs a text in which a (supposedly) sincere declaration comes in the form of playacting, but by so doing he undermines both confession and playacting. One may recognize that some of Manfred is a representation of



Staging Knowledge-Claims in Manfred’s Mental Theatre 133

Byron’s actual thoughts and emotions about a specific situation and some is pure invention, but one has no way of knowing which is which. The play contains too much, too obviously, of Byron’s actual feelings and thoughts for it to work as an unconsciously confessional piece, but it contains too much of fiction to work as a nakedly confessional one.6 It does not have Childe Harold I & II’s unassailable parallels to its author’s life, but neither, given what readers knew and know about Byron, is it completely divorced from that life. It is thus both fiction and non-fiction simultaneously. This construction results in an intensely confused encounter with the drama. Manfred can only achieve its full resonance if one always bears in mind and yokes together both stories, Byron’s and the title character’s. At the same time, since the two stories are not identical, and since each sheds light upon the other, one must keep them separate. One is thus left tussling with two ‘knowledges,’ neither of which yields a satisfactory interpretation of the play on its own, but the combination of which (that is, a situation in which one reads Manfred’s experiences and thoughts as directly analogous to the life of Lord Byron) also fails to yield such an interpretation.7 This continual mental bifurcation is an impossible reading position. One simply cannot hold both possible versions of the play in one’s mind at once. In order to approach and comprehend the text, then, one coherent version must be accepted from the many possibilities presented. Versions may be exchanged (so that, for example, the Manfred calling up spirits in Act I may be accepted as Manfred, there being no analogue in Byron’s own life, but the Manfred pleading with Astarte in Act III may be understood to be Byron in disguise, given knowledge of his affair with Leigh8), but in each case the Manfred selected is one of two available versions, and accepting one means disregarding another, equally valid, candidate. Significantly, however, fastening on one version of Manfred does not result in the total exclusion of the other version. Although one may indeed assign Manfred a particular identity without thinking about it, the dismissed persona is at the very least never far from one’s mind, and at most may force one to replay the same scene several times consecutively, choosing a different version of Manfred each time in order to grasp all the possible valances of a textual moment. Choosing one Manfred therefore has the curious effect not just of delineating what is (however temporarily), but of reminding one what is not. In short, such choice enhances the awareness that many subtexts remain unexplored, and that each of those abandoned subtexts may be as legitimate as that which has been




selected. As a result, both play and protagonist place themselves on shaky epistemological ground, but it is ground of a curious type. One must ‘choose a Manfred’ in order to read, but the choice will never be wrong. Then again, it will also never be quite right. Each choice leads to a plausible reading, but each reading is as plausible, and as implausible, as any other. Additionally, it is impossible for an informed reader to perform a reading that does not have lingering behind it the knowledge that a choice has been made, and the knowledge that this choice has entailed both loss and gain simultaneously. It is possible that in presenting itself and its protagonist this way Manfred deliberately picks up a thread from Hume’s Treatise. There, the philosopher asserts that ‘A greater force and vivacity in the impression naturally conveys a greater [force and vivacity] to the related idea; and ’tis on the degrees of force and vivacity that the belief depends … A lively impression produces more assurance than a faint one’ (I.iii.§13). This construction suggests that the lively impression takes precedence over the faint one, but it does not suggest that it eradicates it: one has options in belief, and one inclines toward the more vivacious option, but Hume does not suggest that the fainter option necessarily vanishes. The interweaving of Manfred and Byron in the experience of reading Manfred seems to play upon this possibility that faint impressions linger on even as the livelier are selected. It is difficult to draw a definite connection here, because Manfred’s construction and choices call into play a meaning of ‘belief’ different from Hume’s, but a possible connection cannot be entirely dismissed. Early reviewers picked up on the divided nature of Manfred, character and drama, and on the sense of division that arises when one reads it. ‘Byron has sought no external symbol in which to embody the inquietudes of his soul,’ wrote John Wilson. ‘He takes the world and all that inherit it for his arena and his spectators; and he displays himself before their gaze.’ As a result, Wilson wrote, Manfred and Byron’s other works ‘are merely bold, confused, and turbulent’ (97, 94). Interestingly, at least one reviewer seems to have at least felt the Humean nature of the text’s confusion. William Roberts wrote in the British Review that Manfred … confesses himself to have been a man of crime and blood; and yet a certain air of native nobleness, a mysterious grandeur of character, an elevation far above ordinary humanity, all these qualities are made to throw a sort of brilliance around him. … These representations go beyond mere contradictoriness of character; they involve a confusion of principle, and operate very fatally and diffusively in





However coincidentally, one hears in this a calmer echo of Beattie’s assertion against Humean skepticism that ‘Every doctrine is dangerous that tends to discredit the evidence of our senses … and to subvert the original instinctive principles of human belief’ (OT 523). But Humean overtones or no, these reviewers recognized the shaky ground on which Byron places his readers, and they deprecated it. What they did not do, however, was consider its purpose. Byron does not create his protagonist as he does simply to tantalize (although that is certainly part of why he does so), or to confuse (although, knowing Byron, that too is not implausible). He has a larger goal in view. For this divided reading experience is in fact the first of many demonstrations that, for the Byron who writes Manfred, knowledge is a matter of active (although not necessarily fully conscious) choice. Each moment of comprehension, belief, and acceptance results from a rejection or neglect of other possible beliefs and interpretations. To be sure, one might argue that this is true of all encounters with the theatrical, indeed all encounters with any form of fiction that one knows to be fiction. What is willing suspension of disbelief if not the choice to accept a certain reality in the face of ample contradictory evidence? But with Manfred there is a significant difference from these other encounters with fiction. Here, once a reader has made her first choice to believe, to accept the world of the text, Byron sets up a network of choices within that text, as well. The drama repeatedly confronts one with moments in which one must choose to disregard certain evidence and contradictions and cast in one’s lot with others. One may certainly argue that most authors do this silently, that all plot development is a demand to recommit to suspension of disbelief, but that is precisely the point: Byron does it aloud. In an unexpected evocation of readers’ independence, even integrity, he offers them clear paths to alternate readings and leaves the decision up to them. Deductive assurance is undermined in the drama itself from its opening soliloquy. Here the hero presents himself complete in a mere 25 lines. But it is an odd kind of introduction: My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep … … in my heart There is a vigil, and these eyes but close To look within; and yet I live, and bear The aspect and the form of breathing men … Philosophy and science, and the springs



strengthening prejudices, which are at the bottom of our falsest estimations of men and things. (Roberts 87)


Manfred delineates himself not by describing what is true of him, but by describing what is not true of him. Instead of defining attributes, he offers a series of negatives and blanks. Where a concrete fact is offered – ‘I have had my foes’ or ‘many [have] fallen before me’ – it is snatched back immediately – ‘But none have baffled me,’ ‘But this avail’d not.’ When he describes himself, it, too, is in terms of absence: ‘I have no dread / And feel the curse to have no natural fear, / Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes’ (I.i.24–7). Knowledge of him is in fact constructed out of a lack of knowledge, or simply out of lack (he possesses ‘no dread … no natural fear’).9 Dramatically, this is a bang-up introduction, intriguing right from the start, and the intrigue results from a species of epistemological subversion. This is, of course, a form of irony, but the irony is extreme here: it does not so much subvert the apparent meaning as eviscerate it.10 The monologue thrusts the burden of definition onto the reader, who, given only a series of the most general clues, must shape the protagonist’s character and motivation according to her own extrapolations and assumptions. When Manfred announces that his powers, mental and martial, ‘avail not,’ the reader is not told why; when he asserts his immunity to dread, love, and ‘natural fear,’ the reader is not given the motivating factor for such invulnerability. Neither does Byron, nor his protagonist, clarify the monologue’s central mystery instead, leaving unidentified the ‘all-nameless hour’ that altered Manfred profoundly. The text forces the reader to advance possibilities to fill all these absences, to attempt to name the moment. In short, it forces her to supply the meaning. Forced to bear the burden of decision in these early moments, readers never lose that responsibility as the play continues. But whereas the weight is at first imposed by absence, as the action progresses the issue becomes not too little meaning but too much. For even when he offers an



Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world, I have essayed, and in my mind there is A power to make these subject to itself— But they avail not: I have had my foes, And none have baffled, many fallen before me— But this avail’d not:—Good, or evil, life, Powers, passions, all I see in other beings, Have been unto me as rain unto the sands, Since that all-nameless hour. I have no dread And feel the curse to have no natural fear, Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes, Or lurking love of something on the earth.— (I.i.3–27)


A Spirit: Another Spirit:

He is convulsed—This is to be mortal And seek the things beyond mortality. Yet, see, he mastereth himself, and makes His torture tributary to his will. Had he been one of us, he would have made An awful spirit.11 (II.iv.158–63)

To them, true eternals with the altered vision and understanding that that suggests (I.i.149–51), Manfred is more dust than deity, a mortal thing that only seeks the things beyond mortality. Through these widely variant descriptions of Manfred, the text draws attention to the subjective and shifting nature of understanding. Different understandings produce different points of view, and these in turn produce a different knowledge of Manfred. In each case, this knowledge is a matter of a kind of necessitated selection, rather than of certainty. With several different interpretive options on offer, ‘knowledge’ is the choice of the individual, who selects which Manfred he (or, in the Spirits’ case, it) will ‘know’ to be the true one. But the text does not make this choice of knowledge a matter of perspective and leave it at that. Throughout, it demonstrates the way in which actual knowing is a complex – perhaps an impossible – matter. Harking back to Harold I and II, it repeatedly upends certainty to show that it is not so certain, that being is a radically more complex state than seeming suggests. Again, it does this most obviously in its approach to Manfred’s characterization. At first, Manfred’s position seems clear. He is, of course, the Byronic Hero: proud and mighty, yet tortured, responsible



apparently graspable definition of Manfred, Byron makes it multiple, and thus, always, elusive. The clearest example of this is the question of the protagonist’s status. Manfred’s own interpretation of himself is quite clear. He believes that his constant quest for knowledge has raised him above other mortals, and in his opinion, although he appears to be like other men he is in truth far above them: ‘though I wore the form, / I had no sympathy with breathing flesh’ (II.ii.56–57). To him, his learning and his agony have tempered him into more deity than dust. The Spirits’ version of Manfred, however, is quite different. To them, he is firmly earthbound, a ‘Child of Clay’ (I.i.131, 133), ‘Son of the Earth’ (I.ii.33), ‘Child of the Earth’ (II.iv.34), ‘mortal’ (II.iv.58; III.iv.81, 104). No matter how knowledgeable or mighty, he remains a breathing man. For this reason, his agonies mark him out to the Spirits not as less mortal but as more so. Even in their moment of greatest admiration for him, they dwell upon his human condition:

for a ‘half-unexplained crime’ (Jeffrey 418). His innate superiority and sense of guilt are equally telling signs of his iconic status. He therefore need not clarify himself, his situation, or his background. He need only conform to type (a type in which elision and vagueness play an integral part), and his work is done. The difficulty is that Manfred often does not conform to type: the text provides considerable evidence to contradict his Byronic status. Many critics have pointed out that Manfred’s supposed power over the spirits is less than total.12 In fact, it is almost non-existent. His spells, for example, are strong enough to call up supernatural beings, but not strong enough to make them do his bidding: he can call spirits from the vasty deep, and they will come – but not much more. Indeed, the beings he summons have a way of demonstrating not Manfred’s powers but his limits. In the first scene of Act I, despite his assertion that he compels them ‘to my will’ (49), it takes three attempts before he can force the Spirits he calls to appear, and when they do there unfolds a curious tug of war in which they deflate him at every turn.13 ‘Forgetfulness,’ Manfred responds when they ask what he seeks from them, but the Spirits point out that ‘We can but give thee that which we possess’ (I.i.139) – forgetfulness, by its very nature a form of absence, is not a possession and cannot be given.14 Unchastened, Manfred attempts to exert his power again, and his rejoinder has a fine titanic ring: Slaves, scoff not at my will! The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark The lightning of my being is as bright Pervading, and far darting as your own … Answer, or I will teach ye what I am. (I.i.153–57) But the Spirit is having none of it. ‘We answer as we answered; our reply / Is even in thine own words,’ it shrugs, and a thoroughly outmaneuvered Manfred must ask, ‘Why say ye so?’ (I.i.159–61). The Spirits’ actions, their arrivals and disappearances, give the lie to all Manfred’s pretensions of immortalistic ability, and even he himself, at least to some extent, recognizes their game; ‘Ye mock me,’ he admits (I.i.190–92, 152). Later, when he does manage to pressure Nemesis into conjuring up the Phantom of Astarte, he cannot control the encounter, or make it yield what he seeks: Phan: Manfred! To-morrow ends thine earthly ills. Farewell! Man: Yet one word more—am I forgiven?





Phan: Farewell! Man: Say, shall we meet again? Phan: Farewell! (II.iv.149–56)

Man:

C. Hunter:

Patience and patience! Hence—that word was made For brutes of burthen, not for birds of prey; Preach it to mortals of a dust like thine,— I am not of thine order. Thanks to heaven! I would not be of thine for the free fame Of William Tell … (II.i.35–40)

In contrast to the Hunter’s frank good sense Manfred’s declaration seems foolish, its drama reduced to flash and bombast.16 Nor is this an isolated moment. One often has the sense that Byron is in fact encouraging a degree of mockery of his hero, not least by giving him an unfortunate tendency toward self-contradiction. ‘The lion is alone, and so am I,’ Manfred tells the Abbot, but to his assertion that he is like the most lone Simoom, Which dwells but in the desart … And seeketh not, so that it is not sought, But being met is deadly (III.i.123–33) one must add his earlier revelation that both his outcast state and his dominance are remarkably easily breached: For if the beings, of whom I was one, —Hating to be so—crossed me in my path, I felt myself degraded back to them, And was all clay again. (II.ii.76–79) In the same way, there is something disconcertingly illogical about his oxymoronic comparison between Astarte and himself, ‘She had the same



The Phantom chooses either to disregard Manfred’s requests or to interpret them in ways he did not expect and cannot control. This climactic moment is a scene of ambivalence, inviting not admiration for Manfred’s dominance but pathos at his frustration and piteousness.15 His interactions with humans achieve much the same undercutting. For the Chamois Hunter, Manfred’s much-self-vaunted difference is not a sign of pre-eminence but a burden to be rejected thankfully:

lone thoughts and wanderings’ (II.ii.109): if they are the same, how can they be lone? Manfred may ignore these self-contradictions, but they remain to trouble the text. Behind the bravado and the attributes of the Byronic Hero the drama places another Manfred, one who, as Jeffrey harumphed, ‘merely muses and suffers from the beginning to the end’ (419). In proffering a combination of evidences that may lead to disparate, even contradictory, conclusions, Manfred here performs the most obvious example of a fusion of Berkeley and Hume that also guides the play more generally. Completing the process first touched on in Harold I and II, Manfred moves Byron from the realm of Berkeley firmly into the realm of Hume, and it does so by employing Berkeley to justify Hume. It does not take much looking to notice the ways in which Manfred cleaves to Berkeley’s central assertions regarding perceptions: there are the eyes that ‘but close / To look within’; there is Manfred’s assertion in the final act that the mind ‘derives / No colour from the fleeting things without, / But is absorb’d in sufferance or in joy, / Born from the knowledge of its own desert’ (III.iv.133–36). Where Berkeley argues that ‘Colour, figure, motion, extension, and the like, considered only as so many sensations in the mind, are perfectly known … there being nothing in them which is not perceived’ (PHK §87), however, Byron’s play on that ‘color’ moves the philosopher’s assertion from the objective to the psychological realm. After all, if sensible object properties are only perception, and change in ‘the proportion or the relation they bear to our senses’ (PHK §87), is this not also true for our understanding of events, experiences, and persons? And this suggestion prompts another, a Humean extension of Berkeley: if we know (in the current sense) only what we perceive, then it certainly seems to be an accurate conclusion that ‘all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation … When I am convinc’d of any principle, ’tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence’ (Treatise I.iii.§8). Manfred works in precisely this way with his self-evaluations, as do the Spirits and the Chamois Hunter. For all of them, comprehension and interpretation is a matter of giving preference to one set of arguments over another; they reason via their feelings. Generations of remarks about Astarte and Manfred, starting with the New Day and Times’s assertion of incest, have shown this to be the case outside the text, as well. Hume remarks ‘’Tis not solely in poetry … we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy’ (I.iii.§8). Byron suggests that the two disciplines may be closer than even Hume suspects.




But Byron’s demonstration of Hume’s assertion simultaneously softens the philosopher’s viewpoint and makes it more stringent. He suggests that determination of superior plausibility can spring not just from soft, untutored ‘feeling,’ but also from reasoning and evaluation. Even though one may attempt to grasp the essence of Manfred via rational sifting of evidence, the multiplicity of the evidence and the many different viewpoints through which it arrives makes such sifting nearly, if not entirely, impossible. Manfred suggests that the problem with knowing is not that if we are not careful we will get it wrong, but that, because there are so many possibilities, no matter how careful we are we can never get it completely right. Furthermore, it intimates that this may be no bad thing. Manfred is both Byron and Manfred; he is both superior and inferior; he is of a higher order, but that higher order is not necessarily higher in terms of happiness. None of these cases offers an either/or, but neither do they offer examples of ‘both and therefore neither.’ Rather, Manfred moves on from both Lara and The Giaour by suggesting that multiplicity increases possibility. Manfred’s other demonstration that certainty of determination in fact masks an inability to determine occurs in the play’s famous central mystery, the status and death of Astarte. Perhaps the oddest aspect of Manfred is that it leaves unanswered precisely those questions which require an answer if one is to understand what motivates the hero: Who is Astarte? How did she die? What part did Manfred play in that death? The answers to the three questions have been a topic of debate ever since the play’s publication.17 Part of the difficulty, at least with the issue of identification, may be purely practical: given the tenor of its times, Manfred could scarcely announce openly that its hero’s dead and muchmourned lover was his sister. Yet the text’s discretion on the topic is hardly total, since rather than avert its gaze tactfully from the issue of Astarte’s connection to Manfred, the drama returns to it at every turn.18 By employing a combination of curtailed hints and clumsy lacunae, Manfred does not remain silent on the subject so much as remind its readers that it remains silent, thus persistently keeping the subject of Astarte’s identity alive by means of rhetorical manipulation. Furthermore, it repeatedly emphasizes that the reader’s assumptions about Astarte are selfmanufactured, and that the text has said nothing about it at all. Consider, for example, Manuel’s lengthy but significantly truncated recounting of Astarte’s death: Count Manfred was, as now, within his tower,— … with him





The sole companion of his wanderings … … the only thing he seem’d to love,— As he, indeed, by blood was bound to do, The lady Astarte, his— Hush! who comes here? (III.iii.41–47)

Oh! I but thus prolonged my words, Boasting these idle attributes, because As I approach the core of my heart’s grief— But to my task. I have not named to thee Father or mother, mistress, friend, or being, With whom I wore the chain of human ties; If I had such, they seem’d not such to me— Yet there was one— (II.ii.97–104) Pauses, interpolations, lists, and caesurae combine to induce increasing eagerness and excitement, but to evade actual disclosure. In fact, such disclosure is delayed even at the moment it seems to arrive. Urged on by the Witch, Manfred at last explains, albeit obliquely, who Astarte is: She was like me in lineaments—her eyes, Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone Even of her voice, they said were like to mine; But softened all … (II.ii.105–08) It seems fairly straightforward. But even here, play and subversion continue. For one, this leaves the reader none the wiser as to who Astarte was, only as to who she was like. Additionally, even this assertion of similitude is compromised. Manfred does not say he and Astarte were identical; he says ‘they said’ the two were identical. What he offers is not truth but reportage, second-hand opinion given as fact.19 Yet because of the passage’s deliberate heightening of anticipation, this mere allegation of likeness is taken as truth. Readers may be aware that they are being teased, but because they cannot know how much of what Manfred says is unreliable, they must, at least to some extent, accept his description. It may be wrong, but, after all, it may also be right.



Excessive garrulousness postpones the revelation; interruption prevents it. Nor is this the only such preclusive break. Manfred’s prologue to his description of Astarte to the Witch of the Alps is full of the same suspensions that plague Manuel:


Manfred’s description of Astarte’s death a few lines later performs this same confusing move:

Once one takes away the drama of it all, one notices that there are no answers here, only more questions. What does it mean for a heart to gaze on another heart (or to wither, for that matter)? If Manfred did not shed Astarte’s blood, what exactly was his contribution to her death? If her blood was not shed by him, then by whom? This is a sublime moment of Manfred’s ‘gothic claptrap’ (Bostetter 278). What Manfred offers is in fact dramatic rhetoric as a disguise for absence of explanation.20 In this moment, certainly meant as some form of revelation, Byron reveals nothing. Yet it is one of the oddities of Byron criticism that this seems to have gone unnoticed. In fact, the many decades of scholarly detective work on this passage, attempting to determine what exactly it discloses about the manner of Astarte’s death, demonstrate how well Byron has played his game. This concatenation of irrelevance, of bait and switch (‘I have shed / Blood, but not hers—and yet her blood was shed’), disguises its own emptiness. Readers know nothing, yet because the scene is staged as one of shocking disclosure, it pushes them to feel that by its end they must, surely, know something.21 These obfuscations, then, do more than make Manfred coyly (albeit, to judge by the reviews, barely) acceptable to a Romantic audience; they also accomplish the hoodwinking of the unwary reader.22 For, as I have said, Byron’s obscurancy is not, and was not, immediately recognized as such. Everyone who reads the play ‘knows’ that Astarte was Manfred’s sister, although no one in the drama ever says so.23 Byron creates situations (largely tortured confidences) of the sort in which secrets are revealed. He has his characters use the sort of language reserved for dark revelations. He heightens audience expectation by using particular formal and dramatic devices. Expressive phonology rears its head once more. The result is a stereotypical scene of disclosure – but no disclosure follows. Yet readers, primed and ready, feel certain (even if only for a moment) that they have discovered something. In this way, Byron undermines knowledge by reversing the



Man: I loved her, and destroy’d her! Witch: With thy hand? Man: Not with my hand, but heart—which broke her heart— It gazed on mine, and withered. I have shed Blood, but not hers—and yet her blood was shed— I saw—and could not staunch it. (II.ii.117–21)

point he makes in the rest of Manfred. There, the reader’s ability to choose knowledge destabilizes its position as an absolute. Here, the text’s ability to withhold knowledge while seeming to supply it demonstrates the essential emptiness of the concept of knowing. Knowledge is revealed as a complete illusion. What counts, yet again, is what one believes, not what one knows. The line between truth and fictional creation is very thin, both inside the world of Manfred and in the process of reading it. This thinness is tantamount to a demonstration of the fundamental volatility of any truth, a reminder of the extent to which an individual’s own knowledge is a process of manipulation and selection. Unsurprisingly, Manfred again stands as the test case for this conclusion. For Manfred has, adamantly, chosen his version of himself and his situation for himself. He has determinedly papered over the cracks and inconsistencies – inconsistencies such as those ‘same lone thoughts’ – to devise a unified whole to which he is fully committed, despite the contradictions and counter-readings offered by others. Indeed, in his climactic confrontation with his Genius and its attendant Spirits he offers what might be Byron’s epistemological manifesto, one that gifts the perceiver, rather than the perceived, with power in the scene of knowing: Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel; Thou never shalt possess me, that I know. … The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts— Is its own origin of ill and end— And its own place and time—its innate sense When stripped of this mortality, derives No colour from the fleeting things without, But is absorb’d in sufferance or in joy, Born from the knowledge of its own desert. (III.iv.125–36) Manfred undercuts his Genius (whose pompous superiority, appropriately, is a mirror of his own) simply by asserting his right to freedom of thought. No wonder ‘’tis not so difficult to die’ (III.iv.151). It all depends on your point of view. Perhaps to emphasize this, at critical descriptive moments Byron stresses the self-centeredness of Manfred’s creative powers. Critics have long read Manfred’s consistent self-reference, his continual recourse to ‘I,’ as an example of his narcissism.24 Most interesting about this recourse, however, is that his most extravagant narcissism appears at those moments when he tells the story of Astarte. Yet this is only logical. Manfred must strain these





revelations through himself. Astarte must be fashioned from bits of her creator, likeness and difference based only on the one who envisions her: Pity, and smiles, and tears—which I had not; And tenderness—but that I had for her; Humility —and that I never had. Her faults were mine—her virtues were her own. (II.ii.113–16)

If I had never lived, that which I love Had still been living; had I never loved, That which I loved would still be beautiful— Happy and giving happiness. What is she? What is she now?—a sufferer for my sins— A thing I dare not think upon—or nothing. (II.ii.193–98) While this is a supremely narcissistic view, its narcissism lies in the genetic and constructive power it grants Manfred. Manfred’s ‘I, I, I’ is the repetition of a solipsist, but it is also the declaration of an originator. Indeed, his final phrase is not so much egocentrism as simple truth: without him there to define and value her, Astarte would be nothing. Yet even as these are striking reminders of the solipsism and selfdetermination at the heart of supposed knowing, they also position Manfred, like the Giaour, as an example of philosophical abstraction moved into the literal and psychological realm. Where the Giaour became a ‘living’ representation of Locke and Lara’s conflict brought Hume’s ideas to life, Manfred is here a striking personification of Berkeley’s theories, his narcissism a kind of logical demonstration of the real-world (or dramaworld) ramifications of Immaterialism. Manfred can only describe Astarte in relation to himself, and can only siphon her situation and her fate through himself, because this is how phenomena are understood – even, according to Manfred, psychological experiences: both knowledge of objects and judgment ‘are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas formed by help of memory and imagination – either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways’ (PHK §1).



Her existence devolves into his; she lives but in his voice. Her death, too, depends upon him. As he tells it, he creates it, so that he becomes the powerful center, Astarte the passive cipher who reflects him.25

As this quotation suggests, Manfred also links to Berkeley, and to Hume, in his interpretation of Astarte’s death. This he does via his guilt. Guilt is a psychological state that manufactures and becomes its own truth; it need bear no relation to actual facts. A person can feel guilty whether or not he actually is guilty.26 In fact, it does not really matter what happened to Astarte, or what Manfred’s role in her fate was. All that matters is what Manfred believes happened, and this belief alone prompts and motivates the action of the play. To put it another way, Manfred has fashioned his truth – it may be what ‘actually happened’ or it may not, but that is irrelevant. Here again the play connects to Hume’s assertion that ‘probable reasoning’ is ‘nothing but decid[ing] from my feeling concerning the superiority of [an argument’s] influence’ (Treatise I.iii.§8), but it also connects to his argument in Book III of the Treatise that ‘vice entirely escapes you … till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action … Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compared to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind’ (III.i.§1). As we have seen, suggestions that such might be the case caused considerable consternation amongst Manfred’s reviewers (and as we will see they have considerable ramifications for Don Juan). They cause considerable confusion in the text itself, as well. Of course, there is another layer here. It is a testament to Byron’s abilities that one tends to forget that not just Manfred’s guilt but the entire world of Manfred is false. So caught up in the action of the play and its powerful protagonist does one become that one fails to notice the way yearning, expectation, and textual sleight of hand combine to influence any epistemological conclusion within the text. Again one might argue that this is true in any powerfully imagined text, but the difference here between the interpretive ambiguity of Manfred and that of, for example, Hamlet is the burden Byron places upon readers to supply the text’s epistemological absences. A ‘dramatic poem,’ intended to be read rather than performed, fiendishly and elusively plotted and characterized, Manfred has been devised by its author to depend not merely on reader response but on reader creation, something he stresses repeatedly: the reader’s mind, the mental theatre, necessarily plays a signal role in his enterprise.27 In offering Manfred’s collection of contradictions, maneuverings, and sly absences, Byron shifts the burden of construction onto readers more than he has in any previous work. Like Manfred’s, the reader’s eye closes only




to look within, to produce the world of the play at her discretion. By moving genetic control to this most private of dramatic closets, Byron gives readers leave to fashion any version of the play that they desire. The indeterminacy of knowledge is thus both more strongly stressed and more multi-faceted than it has been in Byron’s other works. If each reader creates the play with her mind’s eye, each reader will see a different play. There is no risk, as there would be in a stage production, that knowledgeclaims in and of Manfred will be misunderstood as objective truth.28 The end result of this is a far more demanding stance than any Byron has taken in his previous work. Rather than positioning the reader as a progressive acquirer of understanding, as in Childe Harold, or as the victim of an unreliable or unrevealing narrator, as in the Eastern Tales, he argues for her as an active constructor of knowledge, not so much a miner as an architect at the coalface of meaning. That Byron chooses as his venue for this revelation a work whose gravity and weight seem obvious, and one in which certainty and absolutes would seem to be vital, is characteristic of the writer he is turning into; this debunking is, for example, common in Don Juan. As with that later work, Manfred allows, indeed forces, readers to assume a role that in its very performance challenges accepted notions of knowledge, reality, and truth. Where Hume in the Treatise figures the mental actions of humans with regard to certainty as active, not passive – we ‘remember to have had frequent instances’ of correlation; we ‘trace the relations of cause and effect’; we ‘build upon’ perceptions (I.iii.§6, §12, §5, my emphases) – Byron suggests that, if they are active, they may be conscious, too. ‘There is a great difference betwixt such opinions as we form after a calm and profound reflection, and such as we embrace by a kind of instinct or natural impulse,’ Hume argues (I.iv.§2). Manfred draws out this thread of implication and spins it into its own web. In the text and in the reading experience, tracing, remembering, and building upon, as well as determining, understanding, and knowing are all either figured as active procedures or presented in a way that lays bare the role active determination plays in the construction of knowledge. And in laying this bare the play moves it into the realm of the conscious. Seeing it in front of one, one is suddenly aware of the way in which all belief is the product of choice, of ‘feeling concerning the superiority’ of one argument over another. Thus, the text uses both Hume and Berkeley as steps in what one might call an adumbrated syllogism:29 if both knowledge of objects and judgment ‘are either ideas … or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas formed by help of memory and imagination’ (PHK §1); and if conviction about such perception and ‘probable reasoning’ is




‘nothing but decid[ing] from my feeling concerning the superiority of [an argument’s] influence’ (Treatise I.iii.§8); then it is logical to conclude that people pick and choose knowledge – and that a keen-eyed and vigilant reader and thinker may do so consciously. Furthermore, in case textual demonstration does not do the trick, the play provides an example. Manfred acts as a kind of objective (or, in this case, subjective) correlative for the reader. By making his protagonist a man tortured by a sense of guilt, Byron also makes him the ultimate creating reader, one who has devised knowledge and reality completely according to his own wishes. Manfred is like a bug squirming on a mounting pin, but he is both bug and pin. Yet, like all good mockeries, Manfred has a final tease in its tail. Along with the reader’s role as impresario comes a thorough alteration in her understanding of the very concept of knowledge. Throughout, Manfred suggests that the most accurate view of knowledge is to see it as amorphous, inconclusive – as knowledge-claims. Any reader, the drama hints, and by extension any person, is thus like the poets of Don Juan III, those ‘liars,’ able to ‘take all colours – like the hands of dyers’ (86.8). The play’s subversions and tricks, its lacunae and unanswered questions, call into question the whole concept of epistemological plausibility, of the existence of any knowledge that could truly be called such.30 If one has a number of possibilities from which to choose, Manfred implies, there is nothing to stop one from chopping and changing – like the reader who switches from Manfred equals Manfred to Manfred equals Lord Byron, then back again – or from choosing none and simply navigating the welter of possibilities as effectively as possible. In this way, the reader’s experiment in theatre management brings home not only the recognition of the freedom each person possesses to shape intellectual and moral reality, but a concomitant acknowledgment that already established intellectual and moral givens are questionable at best, worthless at worst. If all knowledge is protean, previously accepted doxa are effectively rendered null.31 In this conclusion, too, Byron draws upon Hume – and not just because the philosopher remarks that poets are ‘liars by profession’ (I.iii.§10). In an Appendix to the Treatise, intended to be inserted in I.iii.§7, Hume asserts firmly I conclude, by an induction which seems to me very evident, that an opinion or belief is nothing but an idea, that is different from a fiction, not in the nature, or the order of its parts, but in the manner of its being conceiv’d … An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea … And in philosophy we can go no farther, than





assert, that it is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.

Our judgments concerning cause and effect are deriv’d from habit and experience; and when we have been accustomed to see one object united to another, our imagination passes from the first to the second, by a natural transition, which precedes reflection, and which cannot be prevented by it. Now ’tis the nature of custom not only to operate with its full force, when objects are presented, that are exactly the same with those two which we have been accustom’d; but also to operate in an inferior degree, when we cover such as are similar. (I.iii.§13) Not surprisingly, Hume does not look well on such rules or the beliefs that arise from them: ‘men form general rules, and allow them to influence their judgment, even contrary to present observation and experience’ (I.iii.§13). As Manfred demonstrates, Byron does not think much of them, either. Where he differs from Hume, however, is in his ideas regarding the possibility that the imagination might resist the influence of general rules. Manfred’s persistent movement of offering alternatives to those conclusions that general rules might encourage (that a hero who appears powerful is actually powerful, that a guilty confession is evidence of a crime) suggests that the ‘natural transition’ inculcated by custom can be prevented by reflection: that knowledge can in fact be recognized as knowledge-claims, and can be refigured or altered. What distinguishes Manfred from Byron’s other works, then, is that it does not just engage with or build upon an Enlightenment philosopher, but also seeks to answer questions that that philosopher (however implicitly) poses, and draws questions out of his philosophy. What might a situation look like if one recognized the ‘beliefs’ it engendered as created? Manfred offers the opportunity to find out. What might one do when



If the mystery and subsequent determinations about Astarte’s demise demonstrate most clearly the truth of this avowal, the rest of the play, with its hero who asserts, ‘Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel; / Thou never shalt possess me, that I know’ as if the two words were synonymous, and its reminder, in the form of the Chamois Hunter, that convictions of superiority are all a matter of viewpoint, suggests it more subtly but equally forcefully. Moreover, the play seems to be influenced throughout by Hume’s conviction that our beliefs are frequently founded on general rules:

faced with a situation that, if carefully observed, calls forth ‘CREDULITY, or a too easily faith in the testimony of others’ (Treatise I.iii.§9)? Manfred shows that, too. Most interestingly, in another Appendix to the Treatise Hume wonders, ‘Whether there be anything to distinguish belief from the simple conception beside the feeling of sentiment? And whether this feeling be any thing but a firmer conception, or a faster hold, that we take of the object?’ He does not appear to answer this question clearly and distinctly anywhere in the book proper,32 but Manfred does, and its answer, by all appearances and evidence, is No. Thus one might say that in this case it is not so much that Hume adds to a reading of Byron, but that Byron adds to Hume – and this addition turns Hume’s philosophical suggestions into Byron’s own philosophical assertion. It is typical of Byron that he should make this point, profound but also profoundly ludic, by means of mockery, and mockery of his own creation at that. Like William Drummond, he too wonders why it ‘should be imagined that the mind grows severe, as it becomes enlightened’ (39). For Manfred is, as this chapter has shown, something of a hybrid text; as one reads, one often has the sense that Byron is mocking his hero and his melodrama, its extravagant bombast and glower begging its own debunking.33 In fact, in mocking itself and its hero, and mocking the possibility of truth by doing so, Manfred positions skepticism as an approach that frees and empowers: if knowledge is multiple or uncertain, one may choose the knowledge one likes, and that knowledge may support or subvert a given paradigm, as one pleases. In a sense, this seems only a logical conclusion to be drawn by a man whose sense of humor and intellectual interest have remained equally strong throughout his career, but it makes him starkly different from Hume’s opponents, with their thundering fears that skepticism would lead to ‘general ruin—what will be safe? … The subject is too full of horror to expatiate on’ (Campbell), and from Hume himself, who was led into political conservatism and existential gloom by skepticism (Treatise I.iv.§7) and a concomitant fear that if reason cannot establish the existence of an external world, custom becomes the only safe means of maneuver: ‘Custom, then, is the great guide of human life’ (Enquiry V.§6). But just because Hume found skepticism and its possible ramifications a worrying reason to cleave to a conservative view of the world, that does not mean such is the only possible reading of skepticism. One may just as plausibly read its loosening of the trammels of certainty as an invitation to play, to enjoy the liberty of manufacturing knowledge-claims, and to recognize that freedom from dominant expectations and modes of understanding can lead to freedom from other dominant paradigms as well – social, intellectual, and political.




Yet one difficult question about Manfred and knowledge still remains unanswered. The alteration from Harold III’s confusion to Manfred’s philosophical certainty (even if that certainty is certainty of uncertainty) is so marked that one cannot help but wonder what prompted it. What change occurred, what precipitating event or experience effected such a complete and confident transformation? It is tempting to offer pat psychological explanations – to argue that the total alteration in Byron’s circumstances and own understanding in the first half of 1816 made him restructure his view of knowledge; or to argue that his own ability to reshape a harsh world into one more palatable to him offered a practical demonstration that prompted philosophical assertion; or to argue that having passed through the crucible of trauma and destruction he emerged mentally a new man. There would be some validity in all these assertions. At the same time, it is worth remembering that in the summer of 1816 Byron wrote at remarkable speed, and so had a constant outlet in which to consider and refine his ideas. Within three months he produced not just Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III and the first two acts of Manfred, but also ‘Darkness’ and The Prisoner of Chillon.34 This latter poem can and should be seen as a bridge work for Byron, connecting the other two, since it offers a protagonist who successfully mentally reshapes his world – although not quite as successfully as Manfred does. Byron’s Prisoner turns imprisonment to freedom, isolation to reciprocal communion, and subjugation to sovereignty: With spiders I had friendship made … Had seen the mice by moonlight play, And why should I feel less than they? We were all inmates of one place, And I, the monarch of each race, Had power to kill— yet strange to tell! In quiet we had learned to dwell, Nor slew I of my subjects one, What Sovereign hath so little done?35 (381–89) As a result, his knowledge-claims predominate over knowledge for him. He produces an understanding of his life more bearable than the actual truth of his circumstances, and more useful and valuable to him. Indeed, the Prisoner’s transformation of his life is so thorough, and so believable to him, that The Prisoner of Chillon suggests that individual knowledge-claims not only deserve the same status but have the same





effect as actual knowledge: ‘so much a long communion tends / To make us what we are’ (392–93). With its gesture toward Hume’s observation that ’Tis universally allow’d … that … a man on top of a mountain has no larger an image presented to his senses, than when he is coop’d up in the narrowest court or chamber. ’Tis only by experience that he infers the greatness of the object from some peculiar qualities of the image; and this inference of the judgement he confounds with sensation, as is common on other occasions … (Treatise I.i.§9)

A lunatic takes his flock-bed for a throne, and his dungeon for a palace. I cannot persuade him to the contrary, for he assures me, that he has the clearest perception of what he has asserted … The prisoner, who dreams in his dungeon, imagines himself walking abroad in the fields, or in the streets. He enjoys the sweets of fancied liberty … He suspects not, that the world, which he has revisited, exists only in himself; and that he must shortly awake to the conviction of his error – to solitude, captivity, and sorrow. Is there no being, who resembles this dreamer? Is there not one, who perceives his own ideas, and calls them external objects; who thinks he distinguishes truth and sees it not …? Is there not one … who passes from the cradle to the grave, the dupe and often the victim of the illusions, which he himself has created? (145–46, 167) By picking up this representation of the imprisoned lunatic as everyman, Prisoner presents its protagonist as an allegory for any human, for any reader and thinker. Byron emphasizes this parallel by structuring the poem so that it invites disagreement with the Prisoner, refiguring his story to suit their understanding. Admittedly, even as he offers this demonstration of the creative power of the human mind,36 Byron cannot quite contrive a way to make that power active. His Prisoner makes no mental effort; he does not consciously effect his own change in understanding. Such active determination must wait for Manfred. Nonetheless, The Prisoner of Chillon should



Prisoner is Byron’s first concrete demonstration that a human mind can mentally refigure the meaning of the world to suit its needs. Moreover, the poem also links to some key examples in Drummond’s Academical Questions:

be understood as another step in Byron’s philosophical development, a text that explains at least to some degree what seems like a sudden sea change between Childe Harold III and Manfred. Neither the literary nor the biographical explanation can entirely account for such a thorough alteration, however, and thus one is again left asking why, or how, Byron moved from Childe Harold III to Manfred. I would suggest that the answer is not a single one but rather a combination of the three factors above: chaotic alteration, time, and consideration. One should not dismiss the role played in Byron’s thinking by the change in his circumstances, and by his understanding of that change. Troubled by the question of whether experiences could be defined differently by different individuals, and already inclined to believe that they could (as The Giaour and Lara show), Byron had the fact confirmed to him by the breakdown of his marriage: ‘The truth I have always stated—but there are two ways of looking at it—,’ he wrote to Lady Byron in 1819 (BLJ 6: 261). Stalled at the end of Lara by apparently insurmountable evidence that an idiosyncratic knower is doomed to silence and frustrated passivity, his own determined exodus and hegira, not to mention his ability to continue to articulate his thoughts and form new communities, showed him otherwise. Additionally, however, the simple passage of time allowed his ideas to ferment and rise. His swift exit from England and subsequent perorations may have absorbed his conscious mind, but in so doing they subsumed his intellectual concerns, thus allowing for the subconscious work that is often the most significant part of any thought process. At the same time, though, Byron’s writing life demonstrates that to some degree this work was not all subconscious. After the extempore exorcisms of Childe Harold III, The Prisoner of Chillon shows him taking another step toward his eventual conclusion in Manfred. Thus one may imagine the transition from inchoate to comprehensible philosophy of knowledge as – in a typically Byronic (and typically human) construction – both the product of long thought and struggle and the result of a sudden breakthrough. In this ‘both either and or’ manner Byron arrived at his verse drama, and at his philosophical stance. Stuart Sperry suggests that Manfred is ‘a play of deep personal and psychological catharsis … It enacts a ritual exorcism of the spirits … It is only when we go to Byron’s later work, to the comic irony and detachment of Don Juan, that we can judge the necessity of this divestiture’ (201). I would add that this divestiture brings with it, as all divestitures do, an accompanying unveiling. In Manfred, what Byron unveils is a philosophy that is, like the poet who devised it and (he hopes) the audience






who finishes reading it, a combination of those twinned figures, the ‘young hero and jaded narrator’ of Don Juan (McVeigh 612). Disillusioned by an awareness of the instability of knowledge and of its fallibility, this philosophy recognizes the uselessness of judgment, of exerting the power of definition over epistemological vicissitudes. Rather, it revels in the multiplying opportunities provided by epistemological instability, rejecting the limits imposed by categorization in favor of cognitive freedom. In taking this philosophical stance, Byron’s implication, one that his final long poem will demonstrate in full, is that the most successful reaper of knowledge is someone who recognizes its inherent shiftiness; someone who keeps eyes and self open to all experience; someone who is a receptor rather than a constructor of determinations and conclusions. Someone, in fact, remarkably like Don Juan.


7 ‘A lively reader’s fancy does the rest’: Don Juan and the Certainty of Doubt

I do not want a hero, for I have one. Don Juan plants doubt in everything, even doubt itself (IX.17), and in doing so it openly demonstrates in both form and narrative the instability, assumption, and uncertainty that Byron’s philosophical explorations concluded lie at the root of knowledge. Simultaneously, it enlists the reader into demonstrations of precisely how integral those attributes are to that paradigm of knowing, and of how they may be subverted. Whereas Manfred is the culminating step in his explorations, Juan is the demonstration of Byron’s fully developed concept of knowledge and his beliefs about the ramifications of that concept. In Juan, Byron’s philosophy of knowledge is fully and richly vivified, and the glittering, exuberant result is a fitting end to his epistemological pilgrimage. It is not possible to offer an exhaustive analysis of Don Juan and its philosophical enactments in a single chapter. The poem is so fecund that any anatomization, no matter how exacting, must fall short. In this case, inadequacy is complicated by familiarity, since I follow in the footsteps of a number of scholars who have already asserted that in Juan Byron lays out his own version of the structure of truth and knowledge.1 But my goal here is not to prove the truth of these assertions yet again. It is, rather, to focus on what I consider the most significant devices that make Juan the ultimate expression of Byron’s philosophy – its formal manipulations, its tone, and its hero – and to consider their larger significance as signposts of the theory of knowledge that Byron developed over the six years preceding it.2 156



I’m a man of no convictions. At least I think I am. – Christopher Hampton, The Philanthropist

Don Juan and the Certainty of Doubt 157

Don Juan sows doubt from its opening stanza:

Juan is a hero by litotes, chosen not because of what he is, but because of what he isn’t: likely to disappoint. And this act of negative selection breeds the poem’s first confusion. While the opening stanza makes it plain that Juan has been picked because he is the hero least likely to prove unsatisfactory, it is not at all clear whether he is least likely to prove unsatisfactory because he is most heroic or because he is least heroic. Selecting Don Juan as a protagonist might say something about what kind of tale one might be going to tell, but proffering him as a hero precisely because he can’t be debunked hardly seems promising. In fact, it may be that Juan is intended to come trailing negative associations. Moyra Haslett has argued that popular knowledge of the traditionally libertine Don Juan figure was a factor in the outraged public and critical reaction to Byron’s after all exceedingly mild and innocent protagonist.3 True, the stories ‘we all have seen’ hardly make the Don Juan figure a positive one, but while this may have inspired journalistic opprobrium it may also have rendered Don Juan ideal for Byron: his imperfections cannot come as a disappointment.4 Don Juan’s very inferiority, the stanza suggests, makes him superior; it is precisely his inadequacy that makes him a positive choice. Furthermore, difficulties are increased by the fact that intonation indicates that this Don Juan is not our ancient friend: the rhyme words paving the way to his name set up the ‘Jew-un’ rather than ‘Hwan’ pronunciation.5 Thus the text makes it plain even before his arrival that Juan is not the man he is made out to be. We have not seen this Don Juan in the pantomime. When it comes to definition, then, Juan is indeed the heir to the Giaour, Lara, and Manfred, for from the first the poem presents him as an insoluble contradiction, his most important attributes apparently dependent upon an important lack of attribute. In an even more disorienting twist on the already disorienting protagonists who precede him, in Juan the reader must reconcile herself to a hero who may be a hero only because he is really no hero at all.



I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one: Of such as these I should not care to vaunt; I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan, We all have seen him in the pantomime Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time.

No matter how confusing this link to the infamous lothario may be, however, it performs a significant task that at the outset links the poem to its dominant influence, Hume. In his discussion of literature in the Treatise, Hume argues that some leaven of truth is necessary in a poem, for without it poetry, ‘however ingenious, will never be able to afford much pleasure.’ He goes on to assert that truth facilitates both mental receptiveness and mental acquiescence in the reader: ‘’Tis evident, that poets make use of this artifice of borrowing the names of their persons, and the chief events of their poems, from history, in order to procure a more easy reception for the whole, and cause it to make a deeper impression on the fancy and affections’ (I.iii.§10). Tantalizingly given this remark and his strong connection to Hume, Byron was adamant in his belief that successful literature could not be entirely fancy,6 and while Don Juan is not a character from history, he is a figure with a history that gives him the ‘force and vivacity’ Hume felt necessary for instilling belief in a reader: in the Romantic period he was familiar from stage productions both past and present, and he was already a cultural archetype. Thus, according to Humean logic, using him increases the chances that what the poem says will be more easily received and will have a greater impact. Thus, the poem begins with assumptions at once intact and compromised, its first stanza showing the audience that the cognitive ground is shaky and ever-shifting. In this way, the stanza acts as a synecdoche for the text it introduces, but it also draws together the threads gradually unwound over the course of Byron’s previous works. As in Childe Harold I and II and Manfred, for example, on close examination what is presented turns out to be very different than it seemed at first. As in The Giaour and Lara the multiplicity of its contradictory certainties – hero and non-hero, familiar figure and unfamiliar figure, old friend and new acquaintance – both disallows definitive dismissal of any possibility and pushes the onus of determination onto any reader who may wish for it. What The Giaour and Lara reached for and Manfred grasped, Don Juan lays out before its audience even in its opening octet. The first stanza also models the comic construction that will become the poem’s hallmark. Much of the humor in Don Juan operates through a pattern of reversal or upending, the most overt jokes almost always working by inversion or subversion. This is most obvious in the couplets that end its stanzas, where the humor lies in successfully matching words that, like Juan, are most appropriate because they seem least so. Perhaps the most famous example is the couplet that ends the speaker’s early rumination on the dangers of mismatched marriages: ‘But – Oh! ye lords




of ladies intellectual, / Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?’ (I.22). The first line sets up an impossible situation: what could rhyme with intellectual? The second line subverts this expectation of impossibility not once but twice: first by the fact that there is a rhyme, and second by the nature of the rhyme – that it should be the preposterous combination of ‘hen-peck’d you all.’ As the poem progresses, it repeatedly sets up such impossible conditions for rhyme, then resolves them: ‘me hopes / Cheops’ (I.219), ‘Seraskier / extremely dear’ (VIII.79), ‘critic is / τç’ (III.111) (this last reverses the usual movement, working from possible to impossible, and so is a double subversion). Juan here works to undermine unbelief rather than belief, and in the process it points out that unbelief is a form of belief. In creating this effect, such couplets operate very similarly to the biographical connection planted in Manfred. Enjoying each joke to the full – grasping not just its wit but the verbal skill that underlies and is part of its wit – requires retention of both the sounds of the words and their meaning. In order to appreciate the aural humor of the rhyme, however, readers must sacrifice the meaning of the statement, even if only momentarily, and pay attention solely to the sound of the end words. Conversely, in order to appreciate the verbal joke, readers must sacrifice the auditory humor of the rhyme, even if only momentarily, and pay attention solely to the meaning of the words. Yet in order to enjoy the joke to the full, they need to retain both sound and sense. As one reads for sense, one must remember that it does not destroy the rhyme, and as one appreciates the rhyme, one must remember that part of its beauty lies in the fact that it does not destroy the sense on which one is not currently focusing. Just as in Manfred, knowledge here depends on the suppression of other knowledge, and on the simultaneous awareness of the knowledge being suppressed. And just as Manfred does, Juan reminds its readers that significance may be divided and subdivided; there may be more than one way of looking at a situation; full significance may be both graspable and always elusive.7 In addition, because the last two lines of a given stanza almost always form a coherent and progressive whole, reading the first of the pair involves a kind of postponement of comprehension. The reader cannot understand the first line’s complete significance, its complete meaning in the couplet as either cognitive or aural joke, until she has arrived at the final word of the second line. The moment she does, any kind of meaning she might have assigned to the ending of the first line is completed – but it is simultaneously compromised, since the final line often adds wit or even sense to the first. A version of this cognitive rug-pulling occurs at





the beginning of Canto V, as the poem sets the scene for Juan’s arrival at the slave market:

Here the final couplet works in a curious way. Logically, its first line should draw the laugh, ‘pukes’ being an unexpected jerk into the vulgar.8 But it is the harmless ‘Euxine’ that actually makes the joke. Astonishment plays a part here, as it does in ‘intellectual / hen-peck’d you all’ – it is almost impossible to imagine what might rhyme with ‘pukes in.’ Most of the enjoyment, however, comes from the hairpin turn from one kind of humor to another, the upending of expectation: the reader anticipates low humor, ‘puke’ having prepared her for it, but a classical name forces a sudden movement from bathos to sophistication. But the very pairing of words compromises ‘Euxine’; the fact that it can be rhymed with ‘pukes in’ reveals unexpectedly earthy connections. This is why the joke works – readers are laughing at Euxine, not with it. Refining a maneuver Byron first used in The Giaour, Juan here shapes meaning both proleptically and analeptically. The meaning of a word is changed by its match at the end of the next line, and simultaneously the meaning of the final word is inflected by its link to the earlier one. The poem’s dirty jokes perform a similar service, depending as they do on double entendres.9 Even leaving aside the much-invoked ‘dry Bob’ of the Dedication, one can point to Julia’s advice to the fleeing Juan that ‘you may yet slip through / The passage you so often have explored’ (I.182), to Juan’s gazing upon Haidée ‘as one who is awoke / By a distant organ’ (II.152), or to the speaker’s throwaway observation that the second most noble form of love ‘may be christened Love Canonical, / Because the clergy take the thing in hand’ (V.9).10 Byron does not include these moments merely because he cannot resist a good pun (although there is that, too). For their effect, indeed their very existence, puns depend on the fact that the word in which they occur simultaneously means something and something else. Sexual puns – and one might argue in the early nineteenth century especially homosexual puns – increase this effect, since one of their meanings is forbidden discourse, a secret given open airing. Like its



The wind swept down the Euxine, and the wave Broke foaming o’er the blue Symplegades; ’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. (5)

formal manipulations, then, these jokes bring home how many possible meanings may lie in a single phrase, and they effect a consistent instability throughout the poem.11 These games with language once again take up the concerns of Locke first adumbrated in The Giaour. ‘When I began to examine the Extent and Certainty of our Knowledge,’ observes Locke in the Essay, ‘I found it had so near a connexion with Words, that … though it terminated in Things, yet it was for the most part so much by the intervention of Words, that they seem’d scarce separable from our general Knowledge’ (III.ix.§21). The difficulty with this for Locke is that Words in fact are separable from Knowledge. They are neither accurate representations of reality nor conduits for meaning one can be certain is shared: ‘Words … stand for nothing but the Ideas in the mind of him that uses them’ (III.ii.§2). Juan’s wordplay, its linguistic manipulations, its delays of full comprehension, are all demonstrations of Locke’s assertions. Indeed, they suggest that even the connection between words and ideas in the individual’s mind can be shaky, since those ideas can change rapidly (as in the poem’s couplets), and the connection is thus loosened or altered. Moreover, Locke avers that ‘Words … come to be made use of … not by any natural connexion, that there is between particular articulate Sounds and certain Ideas, … but by a voluntary Imposition; whereby such a Word is made arbitrarily the Mark of such an Idea’ (III.ii.§1). Picking up this thread from The Giaour, Juan shows this to be true with its organs that are also organs, its innocent words revealed as linchpins, and its tendency to make words and jokes do dual duty.12 Moreover, in its engagement with language, the text connects to another of Locke’s statements, that ‘Because Men would not be thought to talk barely of their own Imaginations, but of Things as they really are; therefore they often suppose their Words to stand also for the reality of things’; ‘because by familiar use from our Cradles, we come to learn certain articulate Sounds very perfectly, and have them readily on our Tongues, … but yet are not always careful to examine, or settle their Significations perfectly, it often happens that Men … do set their Thoughts more on Words than Things’ (III.ii.§5; §7).13 In fact, Canto III echoes Locke nearly word for word: ‘But words are things, and a small drop of ink, / Falling like dew upon a thought, produces / That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think’ (88).14 What follows, however, is a demonstration not just of the truth of Locke’s observation, but of the mistakes that result from such supposition and ‘setting.’ The present century was growing blind To the great Marlborough’s skill in giving knocks, Until his late life by Archdeacon Coxe.





Marlborough is given shape by Cox; Milton is what Johnson made him; ‘Troy owes to Homer what whist owes to Hoyle’ (90), its goals and its meaning.15 Words shape the reality of things, which suggests that reality itself is at least elusive and at most, if so malleable, perhaps essentially protean. Here, words do not represent knowledge so much as make it. Yet the problem this suggests is precisely the problem that bedeviled Locke and Berkeley: words are all we have to share and express meaning (see Essay III.iii.§20; PHK I.§24). Where the poem deviates from the two philosophers is that it more than suggests that manipulation of language is manipulation of meaning, and that just as words may be manipulated, so may the knowledge they express. ‘Glory long has made the sages smile; / ’Tis something, nothing, words, illusion, wind’ (90): by linking words with wind and nothingness, the remark suggests not only the mutability of words but their role as conjurers of false truths.16 If words are things, then things are words, and may be as easily altered, reshaped, or ‘joined negatively and affirmatively in propositions as their relative definitions make them fit to be so joined; … and all this without any knowledge of the nature or reality of things existing without [outside] us’ (Essay IV.viii.§9).17 In joining words in exactly this way, Juan once more follows on from The Giaour and calls truth into question by presenting it as Locke does: ‘Truth seems to me to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified do agree or disagree with one another’ (IV.v.§2). The poem persistently joins and separates signs into configurations that reveal the arbitrary nature of truth and knowledge constructions. If in the third canto of Childe Harold Byron believed that ‘there may be / Words which are things’ (III.114), by the time he reached Don Juan he has lost that hope.18 Juan also reflects Byron’s philosophy through its deployment of tone. It is commonly understood as a comic poem, and of course it is. But that label ignores great portions of it which are only partially comic, or not so at all: the speaker’s descriptions of Julia’s bereavement and



Milton’s the prince of poets—so we say; A little heavy, but no less divine: An independent being in his day— Learn’d, pious, temperate in love and wine; But, his life falling into Johnson’s way, We’re told this great high priest of all the Nine Was whipt at college—a harsh sire—odd spouse, For the first Mrs. Milton left his house. (90–91)


Haidée’s truly tragic death; the aftermath of the shipwreck; the Siege of Ismail. In these episodes the tone changes entirely, and the text becomes another kind of poem altogether.19 Equally often, however, the tone changes within the space of a stanza, or even a few lines.

… No more—no more—Oh! never more, my heart, Canst thou be my sole world, my universe! Once all in all, but now a thing apart, Thou canst not be my blessing or my curse. The illusion’s gone forever, and thou art Insensible, I trust, but none the worse, And in thy stead I’ve got a deal of judgment, Though heaven knows how it ever found a lodgement. (I.213–15) A sudden tonal alteration in the fourth line of 213 moves the stanzas from comedy to tragedy. Moreover, the change is total: while it lasts, sorrow is as complete as the laughter that surrounds it. The epic comedy becomes a bittersweet tragedy – ‘I / Have squander’d my whole summer while ’twas May’ – then turns back again with the brisk self-mockery of the final line and the unexpected ‘judgment / lodgement’ rhyme. One sees a swifter version of this in the speaker’s self-puncturing remark in Canto V that ‘I pass my evenings in long galleries solely, / And that’s the reason I’m so melancholy’ (58). The result of these sorts of changes is a fluctuating, disconcerting work that is everything and can be anything, sometimes at a moment’s notice. As a result, it ultimately defies definition, even its selfdefinition. ‘My poem’s epic, and is meant to be,’ the speaker announces early on (I.200), but never was there an epic more domestic than Don Juan, with its great journeys prompted by incorrect shoes and its political losses caused by forgetting the price of oats (I.181; XVI.89). And never was there a comedy more like a tragedy, or a tragedy more like an Eastern Tale. The text makes this generic uncertainty most delicately clear in those passages that mingle rather than slip between tones. The description of



But now at thirty years my hair is gray– (I wonder what it will be like at forty? I thought of a peruke the other day); My heart is not much greener; and, in short, I Have squander’d my whole summer while ’twas May, And feel no more the spirit to retort; I Have spent my life, both interest and principal, And deem not, what I deemed, my soul invincible.


London and Juan’s reaction to it in Canto X, for example, interweaves the seemingly contradictory tones of satire and sentimental pleasure so tightly that neither can be extricated from the other:

A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye Could reach, and here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe, through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool’s head—and there is London Town! But Juan saw not this: each wreath of smoke Appeared to him but as the magic vapour Of some alchymic furnace, from whence broke The wealth of worlds (a wealth of tax and paper): The gloomy clouds, which o’er it as a yoke Are bowed, and put the sun out like a taper, Were nothing but the natural atmosphere, Extremely wholesome, though but rarely clear. (81–83) The speaker’s scorn and joy weave in and out, his excitement peeping on tiptoes over the edge of his mockery. London may be ‘A mighty mass of brick and smoke, … / Dirty and dusky,’ but woven into this gloom are the sails and the steeples that, through his personifying verbs, reflect back the eager viewer’s pleasure. This is one of the few moments in the poem when Juan, the speaker, and Byron are all, in some sense, one: the speaker describes Juan’s excited reaction to London while simultaneously mirroring it in the terms of his own description of the city, and both reaction and description are the products of the memories of the exiled poet. Yet what lies at the bottom of the mingling is experience of division. Juan is



The sun went down, the smoke rose up, as from A half-unquenched volcano, o’er a space Which well beseemed the ‘Devil’s drawing-room,’ As some have qualified that wondrous place. But Juan felt, though not approaching home, As one who, though he were not of the race, Revered the soil, of those true sons the mother, Who butchered half the earth, and bullied t’other.

not English, but he feels the emotions of a returning Englishman; Byron and the speaker (who here, at least, are interchangeable) condemn the London they know for its smog, its taxes, and its barbarism, but they still draw in their breath when they see it before them: ‘—and there is London Town!’ Just as the ‘foolscap crown’ of St. Paul’s dome is simultaneously an object of cynicism and a gateway to thrilled recognition, so anticipation, love, and belonging cannot be picked apart from rejection, satire, and alienation in these stanzas that are at the same time both and neither. Coherence and division, too, coexist. This passage requires readers to recognize that an experience, and full comprehension of that experience, may require the mingling of two seemingly incompatible understandings. The poem contrives the most extreme demonstration of this incomprehensibility in the next canto, with its portrayal of Juan’s unfortunate first experience in London. Accosted by a footpad at the very moment he is musing upon England’s laws (a neat if heavy-handed destabilization in itself), mild-mannered Juan shoots his assailant dead: He from the world had cut off a great man, Who in his time had made heroic bustle. Who in a row like Tom could lead the van, Booze in the ken, or at the spellken hustle? Who queer a flat? Who (spite of Bow-street’s ban) On the high toby-spice so flash the muzzle? Who on a lark, with black-eyed Sal (his blowing) So prime, so swell, so nutty, and so knowing? (XI.19) Gary Dyer has recently discussed the potential significance of the coded language here (‘flash’), concluding that readers ‘are left wondering’ how much of their ignorance about this and other scenes in Juan ‘is due specifically to our not being flash’ (574). For some readers, certainly, the answer is ‘all of it.’20 To many, if not the entirety, of Juan’s female, middle- and lower-class audience, this ‘description’ of Tom would have been incomprehensible.21 On the other hand, although certain readers (largely male, largely sporting) would have been able to translate Tom’s requiem, they would not have been able to share in the value system that underlay it. ‘Who could lead the thieves in attack in a fight, drink in the thieves’ hideout, or steal at a theatre as Tom could? Who could cheat a fool as well or rob on horseback despite the threat of constables? Who, when out with his girlfriend Sal, was so lusty, so well dressed, so devoted, and so clued in?’ (Dyer 564): these attributes, except the last, were hardly




likely to carry much weight even for those of Juan’s readers who were flash. Indeed, what makes the stanza a joke is the very idea of extolling these particular characteristics, so criminal and so meager. But underlying this understanding of Tom as a figure of fun is another version of him, another knowledge. Merely by introducing flash into the description, the lines are a reminder that in some other world, the world that would describe him in this language, Tom is a hero, that there he has skills worthy of admiration. And what of ‘black-eyed Sal, his blowing’? ‘Give Sal that!’ Tom cries, thrusting his neckerchief at Juan as he dies (XI.16). In this other world, Tom is a man in love, as Juan has been, a man who has someone to mourn him, as Juan has had. Yet for most readers, barred by language or by a particular constructed worldview, this Tom can only be glimpsed. ‘Flash’ points out to them that there is another kind of ‘knowing’ here, at the same time that it keeps them from gaining access to it.22 The encryption boldly emphasizes that here some understanding remains hidden. In so doing, it suggests that such may also be the case in other, less clear-cut, situations. Perhaps, this passage suggests, all people are never ‘full flash,’ but always ‘fairly diddled’ (XI.17). In this suggestion that meaning arrives hand in hand with suppression, Juan connects once more not only to the works that precede it (most obviously Lara and Manfred), but also to its presiding philosopher. Hume makes space for quite a careful discussion of poetry in the Treatise, where he suggests that linguistic deployment plays a signal role in fostering belief: ‘’Tis difficult for us to withhold our assent from what is painted out to us in all the colours of eloquence; and the vivacity produc’d by the fancy is in many cases greater than that which arises from custom and experience. We are hurried away by the lively imagination of our author or companion’ (I.iii.§10). Juan’s machinations seem designed to support this assertion. The speaker’s vivacity does carry the audience along, and the poem’s changes of tone and its statements about and demonstrations of the power of language assert that words do have the power to hurry us away – to move us into the acceptance of meaning without a backward glance.23 Moreover, in a move that is by now expected, Juan extends Hume, too, for where the philosopher simply declares that we are hustled into precipitate belief by the writer’s silver tongue, Juan suggests that in our haste we not only arrive at belief too soon but also ignore many other possible, and equally valid, beliefs that lie potential in the same information. Tom is a low footpad, but if we were not distracted by language we might see that he is also a dying lover. London is grim and rapacious, but if we sit on the other side of the vis-à-vis it is also throat-catchingly joyful.




We are not merely hurried away by eloquence, the poem shows; we are hurried away from. Unexpectedly, however, in its deployment of idiom Juan also shows Byron disagreeing with Hume. Shortly after his remark about rhetoric, Hume observes that ‘how great soever the pitch may be, to which this vivacity rise, ’tis evident, that in poetry it never has the same feeling with that which arises in the mind when we reason … The mind can easily distinguish betwixt the one and the other; and whatever emotion the poetical enthusiasm may give to the spirits, ’tis still the mere phantom of belief or persuasion’ (I.iii.§10). Juan’s ability to produce in its narrative widely different emotions, fully realized, at the turn of a line elides the world of poetry and the outside world in its vividness. So complete are the worlds the poem creates, even for a few lines, that they seem real. The deceptions of Juan are as surprising when finally revealed as any actual deception, and in creating this parallel the text suggests not that poetry is like life, but that life is like this poem. Vivacity can deceive just as fully in the real world as it does in the text. This contradiction of Hume suggests that Byron’s final philosophical construction differs from his in a similarly elemental way. Hume’s distinction between poetry and reality offers a slim straw to grasp: people can at least be more certain in reality than in poetry. But Byron’s elision of distinction strikes out in favor of more total skepticism, an assertion that in the actual world belief may be as dependent on the unreliable suasions of force and vivacity as it is in the poetic world. As the speaker puts it, ‘I leave it to your people of sagacity / To draw the difference between false and true, / If such can e’er be drawn by man’s capacity’ (XIV.90). These differences, he suggests, may simply remain unrecognizable. Byron, then, marks out as his philosophical territory the ‘enormous chaos, encompassed with darkness universally and eternally impenetrable’ that Beattie so feared from Hume (OT 280–81), and indeed that Hume himself saw as ‘inviron[ing]’ him in ‘deepest darkness, … utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty’ (Treatise III.iv.§7). This deviation from Hume, however, harks back to Manfred’s deviation – to the way that earlier work found ludic freedom in skepticism – not least because Juan seems as unperturbed by skepticism as that text was. Juan’s persistent and predominant comedy demonstrates a spirit even happier with the multiple uncertainties of skepticism than Manfred was, and its form and narrative suggest an eagerness to embrace the opportunities that such uncertainties offer. Where Manfred suggested that the outcome of skepticism need not be anxiety, Juan both advances and continues the




drama’s assertion by presenting a more total skepticism, but suggesting that such a skepticism may be a cause for active, aware pleasure. As we shall see, in Byron’s philosophy skepticism has much positive potential. While Juan deviates from Hume in the level of skepticism it expresses, however, it follows him once more when it uses its hero as an epistemological device. Like almost all of Byron’s protagonists so far discussed, Juan is a specific and multi-faceted illustration of what his poem writes large, and as such he demonstrates the flaws that lie at the root of categorical definitions and the benefits to be gained from cognitive freedom. Admittedly, such an active role at first seems unlikely for this hero. Juan’s inertia has become a critical axiom, and he is famous for being acted upon. What is curious about his passivity, however, is the form it takes. Impressively active on fields of battle both domestic (his scuffle with Don Alfonso in Canto I, his pursuit of the supposedly ghostly friar in Canto XVII) and public (his barring of the spirit-room door during the shipwreck in Canto II and, more obviously, his participation in the Siege of Ismail), he is not really passive.24 What he is, to be strictly accurate, is pliable. Thrust into a given situation, Juan adapts. His passivity is not corporeal but ontological, an inertia of self. Juan – in this respect at least like saints – Was all things unto people of all sorts And lived contentedly without complaints In camps, in ships, in cottages, or courts, Born with that happy soul which seldom faints, And mingling modestly in toils or sports. (XIV.31) Here is Juan’s pliability – he ‘lived contentedly without complaints’ – and also an indication of what underpins that pliability. There is a comfort with change, but also something more: an easeful lack of expectation and a chameleon-like plasticity, implied not just by Juan’s contentment, but by his ‘happy soul’ and his modesty. If Julia (and puberty) want to make him a partner in adultery, he will oblige. If the necessities of the battlefield require him to be a valiant soldier, very well. True, he objects strongly when he is required to disguise himself as an Oriental concubine, but he gives in soon enough, even making the most of the masquerade. Outraged to such a degree that only the threat of castration can force him into transvestism, he becomes sufficiently cheerful in a few stanzas to respond to Johnson’s teasing concern for his maidenly virtue with a joke: ‘“Nay,” quoth the maid, “the Sultan’s self shan’t carry me, / Unless His Highness promises to marry me”’ (V.84).25 In their casual





change of gender, the lines themselves suggest how quickly and completely Juan adapts. Refraining from the construction of meaning, apparently content to have his own meaning determined by the situation or the people surrounding him, Juan neither judges nor condemns. Instead, he experiences and enjoys, to his considerable benefit. The poem makes its hero’s affinity plain in the one moment in which Juan does evince real firmness: his reaction to the rough wooing of the quarter-Sultaness Gulbayez. Gulbayez’s abrupt demand and the assumptions that lie behind it – ‘a glance on him she cast, / And merely saying, “Christian, canst thou love?” / Conceived that phrase was quite enough to move’ (V.116) – stir Juan into actual vocal defiance:

‘Thou ask’st if I can love? be this the proof How much I have loved—that I love not thee! In this vile garb, the distaff, web, and woof, Were fitter for me: Love is for the free! I am not dazzled by this splendid roof. Whate’er thy power, and great it seems to be, Heads bow, knees bend, eyes watch around a throne, And hands obey—our hearts are still our own.’ (V.126–27) Supposedly this rebellion is prompted by Juan’s lingering love for Haidée: ‘he had got Haidée into his head: / However strange, he could not yet forget her’ (124). But there has already been a hint that Haidée is not so important to Juan as she once was, for she merits only the inferior middle position in the list of his reasons for gloom as he stands in the slave market – ‘Perhaps his recent loss of blood might pull / His spirit down; and then the loss of wealth, / A mistress, and such comfortable quarters’ (V.8). Moreover, the speaker now suggests that Juan’s anger at Gulbayez’s advance may have a source other than the pain of still-lingering love: ‘he / Felt most indignant at not being free’ (V.121, my emphasis). Indeed, one cannot help noticing that Juan’s fierce outcry is not for his lost love but against the present strictures. He will not ‘serve’; ‘Love is for the free.’ He does not mourn; he resents. And what he resents is Gulbayez’s attempt to control him. ‘And thus heroically he stood resigned / Rather than sin,’ the speaker marvels, but he must admit, ‘ – except to his own wish’ (V.141). Juan’s objection is to any determination outside his own.26



‘The prison’d eagle will not pair, nor I Serve a sultana’s sensual phantasy.


Textual enactment also works to underline this representation of Juan as unhooked from category or definition. Stanza 148 of Canto III, with its description of the rescued Juan resting, observed by Haidée, is perhaps the wittiest example:

The ruminations of this stanza’s first six lines are not assigned to Haidée, as they might have been. Instead, both the sestet and the couplet are spoken by the same voice, the speaker’s, despite the fact that the couplet entirely deflates the sestet. As a result the sentimental version of Juan is not separate from the more rational version of him. Juan is pretty, and he is exhausted; no doubt he does ‘droop like the willow’ and appear ‘Fair as the crowning rose.’ These are apt metaphoric descriptions. But in addition to the world of metaphor, there is the world of fact. There no doubt Juan is ‘rather yellow’ – after all, shipwreck and a couple of weeks in a lifeboat will do that to a boy. The two worlds do not cancel each other out; the couplet’s first line – ‘In short, he was a very pretty fellow’ – links them by acknowledging Juan’s beauty even as it suggests another way of expressing it. The worlds coexist.27 As was true of Manfred, one may read Juan one way, or one may read him another, or (as the stanza’s holistic structure and intra-penetration suggest), one may read him both ways at once. In short and yet again, the stanza reminds one that there is more than one possible understanding lurking in each single act of knowing. What Byron creates in Juan, then, is a figure of cognitive freedom. This is true both in terms of his existence – Juan himself has no essential meaning – and in terms of discovery: Juan has no interest in the significance of his experiences, or in deriving from them (or from anything) a stable, reliable truth. Furthermore, he has no interest in constructing or discovering a stable, reliable self. In fact, he seeks nothing. As a result of this disinterest, however, he gains everything. In the course of Juan’s journey, undertaken like Harold’s to ‘mend his former morals or get new’ (I.191), his indeterminacy, and his lack of interest in determinacy, offer him much more than was granted to Byron’s questing first



And she bent o’er him, and he lay beneath, Hush’d as the babe upon its mother’s breast, Droop’d as the willows when no winds can breathe, Lull’d like the depth of ocean when at rest, Fair as the crowning rose of the whole wreath, Soft as the callow cygnet in its nest; In short, he was a very pretty fellow, Although his woes had turn’d him rather yellow.


whether in pronouncing concerning the identity of a person, we observe some real bond among his perceptions, or only feel one among the ideas we form of them. This question we might easily decide, if we wou’d recollect what has already been prov’d at large, that the understanding never observes any real connexion among objects, and that even the union of cause and effect, when strictly examin’d, resolves itself into a customary association of ideas. For from thence it evidently follows, that identity is nothing really belonging to these different perceptions, and uniting them together; it is merely a quality, which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination, when we reflect upon them. (I.iv.§6) Juan reifies Hume’s conclusion. He literally is different identities in the course of the poem: Greek househusband, Russian maître en titre, suave foreigner in England.28 The wide-eyed young stripling from Seville has vanished entirely by the time Juan becomes a man about town in London, but because he continues under a single nominal identity, ‘Juan,’ such ‘interruptions and variations’ make no difference to our idea of his ‘identity and sameness’ (Treatise I.iv.§6).29 Once more Juan demonstrates not only the uncertainty of knowledge but how easily one may be blinkered away from recognizing that uncertainty. Nicely, moreover, where Hume dismisses memory as a possible source of identity – ‘memory does not so much produce as discover personal identity, by shewing us the relation of cause and effect among our different perceptions’ (I.iv.§6) – Don Juan demonstrates memory’s lack of plausibility by giving its hero (and for that matter itself) identity but almost no memory at all. Except for that pesky moment when he gets Haidée into his head, Juan is a model of forgetfulness, to such an extent that even the speaker seems surprised by his poor memory in II.208: ‘But Juan! had he quite forgotten Julia? / And should he have forgotten her



protagonist. Circumstance and pliability have brought Juan down paths that determination never could have found. McGann’s lovely sum-up of the narrative’s arbitrary pattern, ‘Events might have been otherwise, and with just as much reason, but they weren’t’ (DJiC 101), could well also be the summing up of Juan, and of Juan. In such figurations Juan adumbrates Hume’s most disturbing rejection of certainty, the dismissal of a continuous or stable personal identity. For Hume, the central question in determining whether cohesive personal identity exists is

so soon?’ (although he charitably chalks it up to sexual arousal). Juan thus enacts Hume’s assertion that ‘we can … extend our identity beyond our memory,’ suggesting that even knowledge of the self – or of a self – is fungible, and perhaps even an encumbrance. While Juan thus elaborates upon a hint first buried in The Prisoner of Chillon, it elaborates on it to a result less obviously gloomy (and obviously less gloomy) than that poem. In the pleasure and freedom Juan’s chameleon self brings him the text gestures toward the pleasure that loosening such trammels might bring anyone.30 Interestingly, Juan also takes up Hume’s observations on coherence and identity in its most famous formal device, its digressions. Obviously,Juan’s digressions work as epistemological destabilizations. Trying to focus on the hero’s path, the reader is constantly pulled onto byways, and the diversions ensure that attention is always unsettled – expecting a digression, in the midst of one, or having just returned from one. They also ensure that the narrative is consistently compromised, substituting distraction and disorder for full comprehension. In fact, the text seems keen to enhance this effect by prefacing many of its resumptions with textual throat-clearings: ‘But to the narrative …,’ ‘’Tis time we should return to plain narration …,’ ‘However, ’tis no time to chat / On general topics …’ (IV.113; VI.57; XI.44). If one tries to envision Don Juan without the tangents, however, one discovers that the digressions are in fact intrinsic to both structure and effect. They appear tangential because they veer off from what appears to be the main topic at the moment, but their very frequency, and the speaker’s seeming inability and lack of wish to suppress them, calls into question such labels as ‘main topic’ and ‘digression.’31 Indeed, one of the reasons why the digressions so unsettle the narrative is that they quite often simply take it over, switching the subject and the reader’s attention so completely that the original narrative is pushed aside, a distraction from the distraction that has become the main focus. The result is not disarray, however, but a kind of interwoven cognizance, in which the poem’s two strands become equally interesting, valid, and important. There are not two worlds here, just one, of which the narrative and the digressions are two smaller parts. The speaker himself suggests this with his modestly corrected plea to the reader, ‘Oh, pardon me digression, or at least / Peruse’ (XII.39). It is not clear what in Don Juan should be pardoned, and what perused.32 As for the speaker’s announcements as he returns from supposed tangent to alleged main point, these are, I suggest, signposts of an irony that the poem’s matter demonstrates more fully, the irony inherent in attempting to divide the material and the immaterial.33 In Juan, such an




attempt is ironic because it is simultaneously demanding and futile. Yes, this was a digression, the text reminds one in those moments when the speaker makes his awkward bows – ‘But to my subject—let me see—what was it?— / Oh!—the third canto—and the pretty pair’ – but it reminds one of this partly by emphasizing how non-digressive it all seemed. The speaker’s encomium for Macassar’s oil, his opinions on the misfortune of having your name misspelt in the military gazettes and on the many failings of Robert Southey, as well as the details of his own life that crop up, or seem to crop up: all these poetic side streets are fascinating in their own right, not so much distractions as additional, perhaps even greater, attractions. One can spend considerable time in Don Juan attempting to sort the essential wheat from the digressive chaff, but this exercise will always be unsuccessful simply because the poem’s voice, its style, its manner, its remarks – in short, itself – all work to erase any distinction between what matters and what does not. A Humean would say that the ‘vivacity’ of the digressions, while they are ongoing and therefore ‘recent observations,’ communicates an ‘original force’ that inclines one to commit to them as fully as to the supposed master narrative when it is ongoing (Treatise I.iii.§13). But we are all Byronians now, so instead we will say that we read ‘what’s uppermost, without delay’ (14.7), and that Don Juan shows that the distinction between ‘uppermost,’ ‘important,’ and ‘true’ is impossible to parse.34 But although demonstrating the complexity or arbitrary nature of knowledge is one goal of the poem, it is not its entire goal. Juan’s expressed convictions of life’s indeterminacy and cognition’s instability are also the gateways to a larger point that the digressions begin to reveal. For the digressions show that, as in Manfred and The Giaour, significance is a matter of point of view. ‘Don Juan,’ McGann proposes, ‘argues that while the world is the subject of our understanding, it is not subject to our understanding’ (DJiC 112). I would elaborate on this assertion and say that Don Juan both declares and demonstrates that, precisely because the world cannot definitively be made subject to our understanding, it is always subject to our understanding. That is, because we can never definitively pin down the world, or our experiences, and most of all can never pin down those twin uncertainties knowledge and truth, we are always able to shape the world ourselves.35 As the poem itself puts it, ‘In play there are two pleasures for your choosing / The one is winning—and the other losing’ (XIV.12). ‘Choosing’ is not an accidental word here. Juan is full of pleasures that are for the reader’s choosing: the pleasure of determining meaning, the pleasure of assigning definition, the pleasure of judging. Don Juan shows its readers the instability of meaning so that it




may also show them that they possess the power to make meaning. Creating a world in which everything is multifarious and open to interpretation, the text both unmasks the determinative choices its readers have been making all along and encourages (if not forces) them to make those choices with active awareness. Indeed, the poem offers itself up as a sacrifice to reader determination repeatedly. There is, for example, the persistent appearance of the Byronic qualifier: ‘Nothing so difficult as a beginning / In poesy, unless perhaps the end,’ ‘The world is all before me, or behind’ (IV.1; VI.24; XIV.9). Which is it? The reader is free to decide. Then there are the curious blanks between Cantos V and VI and VII, when Juan is inexplicably whirled from one place to another: readers must fill in (or not fill in) those gaps, constructing both Juan and his story. These manipulations take Juan’s pliability from intra-textual to extra-textual, and make it plainer than they did in Lara that readers work to create knowledge. Byron is not a writer who fights for his right to run the show, but one who graciously cedes determination. One sees this in the speaker’s description of Juan as ‘Our hero (and I trust, kind reader, yours)’ (IX.23), and his abjuration of determinative power in Canto XIII, ‘gentle reader! when you gather meaning, / You may be Boaz, and I, modest Ruth’ (96). In fact, the poem occasionally acknowledges the reader’s power openly: ‘all descriptions garble / The true effect … / … An outline is the best, / A lively reader’s fancy does the rest’ (VI.98). And because the poem is a world in miniature, it implies that in the outside world, too, people may create and commit to their own knowledge-claims. In life as in the poem, determination is not self-determined, but determined by the self. A number of scholars have argued for meaning in Juan as a mutual construction, created equally by Byron (or the poem’s speaker) and actual or imagined readers.36 But Juan does not in the end seem interested in such mutually created definition – it seems progressively more interested in having the reader create meaning entirely. Whereas, for example, VI.98 suggests that the reader is supplied with a base and then engenders or elaborates, by the time one reaches XIII.96 the reader owns the field of knowledge: it is the speaker who is dependent for determinations. Furthermore, the poem’s progressively looser shape and broader canvas, its sense that it is not on its way somewhere but simply on its way – in short, its evolution into a picaresque narrative37 – suggest that Byron became increasingly interested in telling his story rather than in giving that telling a single focal purpose.38 This vision of Byron as, finally, a man comfortable with, indeed actively endorsing, reader-created meaning gains credence from episodes outside




the text as well as in. When Mary Shelley worked as Byron’s fair copyist for Juan, on one documented occasion he supplied her with two possible stanza endings (to VI.2) and allowed her to select the one she found best, which he then let stand. This is an extreme example of authorial abnegation, but it is an indication of what Byron was, at least on occasion, willing to give up.39 Moreover, shortly before he departed for Greece Byron observed to Lady Blessington, ‘if I live, and return from Greece with something better and higher than the reputation or glory of a poet, opinions may change …; my laurels may cover my faults better than the bays have done, and give a totally different reading to my thoughts, words, and deeds’ (363–64). While this is certainly a reiteration of Byron’s consistent complaint that he has been misunderstood, and a cynical observation about the grounds of public reputation (‘my laurels may cover my faults …’), its striking final phrase reveals a Byron who not only understands the way in which circumstances – even circumstances far outside those that might have influenced a given text’s production – can affect the meaning of texts, but also reveals a Byron who understands how much the reader (or beholder) creates that meaning. Here, the meaning of Byron’s ‘thoughts, words, and deeds’ is entirely at such a beholder’s mercy. In light of this endorsement of individual determination, it is perhaps less surprising that the one philosopher Don Juan engages with openly is Berkeley: When Bishop Berkeley said ‘there was no matter,’ And proved it – ’twas no matter what he said: They say his system ’t is in vain to batter, Too subtle for the airiest human head; And yet who can believe it? I would shatter Gladly all matters down to stone or lead, Or adamant, to find the world a spirit, And wear my head, denying that I wear it. What a sublime discovery ’twas to make the Universe universal egotism, That all’s ideal – all ourselves! – I’ll stake the World (be it what you will) that that’s no schism. Oh Doubt! – if thou be’st Doubt, for which some take thee; But which I doubt extremely – thou sole prism Of the Truth’s rays, spoil not my draught of spirit! Heaven’s brandy, though our brain can hardly bear it.





In true Byronic fashion, this knotty passage manages to endorse and condemn Berkeley simultaneously. Where the speaker’s assertion in lines 5–7 of the first stanza suggests that Berkeleyan Immaterialism is wrong (since one cannot prove the world a spirit), it also suggests it is to some degree right (since one cannot shatter matters down to stone or lead).40 But if the stanzas cast glancing doubt on Immaterialism, they uphold Berkeley’s fundamental argument about the source of perception, for they echo his assertion that the state of the body determines the state of the thing perceived: ‘sweetness is not really in the sapid thing, because the thing remaining unaltered the sweetness is changed into bitter, as in the case of a fever or otherwise vitiated palate’ (PHK §14). Byron endorsed this belief in Childe Harold I and II, and it remains a cornerstone of this final articulation of his philosophy of knowledge. Juan as a whole holds up the body as an important locus of experience and a primary producer of comprehension, from Juan’s romantic discovery that ‘he had lost his dinner,’ to the shipwreck survivors who make moral room for cannibalism at the ‘natural’ urgings of their stomachs, to the disquisition on sickness that follows Canto IX’s Berkeley stanzas: … as I suffer from the shocks Of illness, I grow much more orthodox. The first attack at once proved the Divinity (But that I never doubted, nor the Devil); The next, the Virgin’s mystical virginity; The third, the usual Origin of Evil; The fourth at once establish’d the whole Trinity On so uncontrovertible a level, That I devoutly wish’d the three were four, On purpose to believe so much the more. (5–6)41 Admittedly, in this regret that the world of belief cannot be altered to suit the body’s sensible needs, Juan performs a reductio ad absurdum of



For ever and anon comes Indigestion, (Not the most ‘dainty Ariel’) and perplexes Our soarings with another sort of question: And that which after all my spirit vexes, Is, that I find no spot where man can rest eye on, Without confusion of the sorts and sexes, Of beings, stars, and this unriddled wonder, The world, which at the worst’s a glorious blunder … (XI.1–3)

Berkeley’s insistence on the physical basis of knowledge, but it nonetheless upholds the connection between the body and belief. The difficulty with trusting the body and its senses, however, is that they are subject to change: the sweet turns sour in the febrile mouth. Whereas Berkeley does not address this as a difficulty, Juan does: ‘Nothing more true than not to trust your senses; / And yet what are your other evidences?’ (XIV.2). One scarcely expects to find Byron a peacemaker among philosophers, yet this couplet mingles Berkeley and Hume with Reid to a surprisingly synthetic result. It admits Berkeley’s assertion that the senses are the source of knowledge, admits Hume’s assertion that sensory evidence is unreliable, yet also admits that the senses must be trusted because they are all we have to go on – acquiescing to Reid’s assertion that ‘I am resolved to take my own existence and the existence of other things, upon trust; and to believe that snow is cold and honey sweet … He must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me, that would reason me out of my reason and senses’ (IHM I.§8). As in Lara, this invocation of Reid is an invocation of common sense as the solution to a dilemma, and it is in fact as Humean as it is Reidian, for Hume insists that ‘the great subverter of … the excessive principles of skepticism is … common life … common sense’ (Enquiry XII.§§2–3). In fact, as is also the case with Lara, Juan uses Reid ultimately in the service of skepticism, for the lines still suggest that the senses to be trusted are ‘yours.’ The only truth is in the individual experience and perception, unreliable as those are; any reason outside that is unknown. In arriving at this determination Don Juan mirrors remarks Thomas Brown makes in his Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect some four years earlier: When Berkeley … denied [the external world’s] existence, what dangerous consequences might have been supposed to flow from the denial! How absurd, it might be said, did all social virtue become, to man, who was to be for ever in a state of solitude … yet no evil consequences can flow from them; because they are opposed to feelings, akin to those which are the ultimate source of all conviction and paramount to demonstration itself. (479) For Brown, too, the senses (‘feelings’) are the basis of certainty, but for him the solitude engendered by locating knowing in individual perception is a gloomy prospect. Not so for Byron, for Juan suggests he sees it as a locus of freedom, and of power. As Byron’s proposition that he might return from Greece with ‘something better and higher than the reputation or glory of a poet’ in his





And I will war, at least in words (and – should My chance so happen – deeds), with all who war With Thought; – and of Thought’s foes by far most rude, Tyrants and sycophants have been and are. I know not who may conquer: if I could Have such a prescience, it should be no bar To this my plain, sworn, downright detestation Of every despotism in every nation. It is not that I adulate the people: Without me, there are demagogues enough, And infidels, to pull down every steeple, And set up in their stead some proper stuff. Whether they may sow scepticism to reap hell, As is the Christian dogma rather rough, I do not know. I wish men to be free As much from mobs as kings – from you as me. (IX.24–25) One need only observe the radical change in subject matter and vituperation of tone after Byron switched publishers from John Murray to John Hunt to recognize how deeply and integrally political the poem is, and how much that informs Byron’s skeptical calls for freedom.43 But Byron’s brusque conclusion that ‘one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another’ and Juan’s speaker’s declarations that he will war with all who war ‘With thought’ and that ‘I wish men to be free / As much from mobs as kings – from you as me’ all suggest that politics is merely a particular manifestation of Byron’s concern, rather than the concern itself. As the speaker puts it at the start



remark to Blessington suggests, the most tempting explanation for this adherence to freedom of interpretation is a political one. Given Byron’s intense political involvement, especially during the period when he wrote Juan, this is plausible.42 Certainly he intended Juan to be political; the poem is packed with covert and overt political statements. Indeed, a good deal of the lifelong detestation of institutions that Juan reveals was driven by Byron’s political beliefs, so that one finds such private remarks as ‘As for me, … I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments … The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another’ (BLJ 3: 242), reflected in the text:

of the stanza immediately following those above, ‘being of no party, / I shall offend all parties.’ He does not wish to pull down one political paradigm and install another. Rather, he wishes to do away with all paradigms. Don Juan is not a political poem in that its concern is governments or ‘playing at Nations’ (BLJ 11: 80). It is a political poem in that it recognizes that, to use a well-worn phrase, the personal is political, and nothing is more political than that which is most personal: thought. ‘I may stand alone,’ the speaker announces at the end of Canto XI, ‘But would not change my free thoughts for a throne’ (90). In the end kings or political parties do not matter. Mental freedom does. Here, then, is the first assertion of the Byronic philosophy. In Don Juan, the stable certainty Byron queried in Childe Harold I and II and undermined with progressively greater success in the poems that followed, is replaced with multiple possible understandings. Nothing is certain; nothing is certainly true. Free thought is its own throne. But this is perhaps not so exalted a concept as Juan’s speaker suggests. Pyrrhonian skepticism leaves the reader (and the believer) profoundly adrift; Hume himself found radical skepticism a bleak prospect (Treatise I.iv.§7), and a number of Byronists have asserted that Byron’s stance gives him a similarly gloomy outlook.44 It would seem that ‘to float, / Like Pyrrho, on a sea of speculation’ would be a risky business: ‘what if carrying sail capsize the boat? / … a calm and shallow station / Well nigh the shore, where one stoops down and gathers / Some pretty shell, is best for moderate bathers’ (IX.18). But as Don Juan and all the works before it have shown, Byron is not a moderate bather, and he is not much interested in encouraging others to linger near the shore. Thus, as Juan’s diffused formal disagreement with Hume suggests, Byronic skepticism brings with it neither hopelessness nor helplessness. Instead, in his theory’s second assertion, Byron shows his readers that a world in which there is no objective or universal ground of knowledge is a world in which anyone may be epistemological master. While this opens the door to demagoguery and casuistry, his works suggest it also demonstrates that any scrupulous observer – any careful viewer, to return to Childe Harold I and II – may withstand such bullying or persuasion and come to determine, while not the truth, a truth. Knowledge, Juan suggests, is both grasped and made, because each individual may make what she will of the elements she grasps. Moreover, each such version of knowing is as valid as any other. ‘The king-times are fast finishing,’ Byron wrote in his journal in 1821. ‘There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist, but the peoples will conquer in the end’ (BLJ 8: 26). What is most significant




here is not the apocalyptic nature of the vision, nor Byron’s arguable prescience, nor even the sentiment he expresses: it is his use of the word ‘peoples.’ While this of course means ‘various populaces,’ its plurality demonstrates that for Byron determination is and ought to be multiple – there is no one ‘people,’ for whom a single answer can do, but many peoples, each of whom will reach their own understanding of right. As the journal entry suggests, then, with the substitution of instability for stability, and of knowledge-claims for knowledge, comes the morethan-mitigating force of power. In the end, Byron shows his readers that, faced with a world in which there is no objective or universal ground, they are free to determine what is understood, what is accepted, even what will be true. This is his philosophical stance. Juan’s tone and content, its self-generating and self-determining narrative, bespeak not the wan grimness of nihilism but the pulsing delight of creation. Its destruction is only that which precedes rebirth.45 One learns from the Byron of Don Juan that life is slippery and infinitely multivalent, and that therefore it may be many things: a picaresque adventure, a moral tale, a Restoration comedy, a Bildungsroman, a roman-à-clef, a sex comedy, a stinging satire, a screed for settling personal scores, a guidebook to the curiosities of the world, even a new bible (I.204–06). Moreover, one learns from the Byron of Don Juan that the individual may decide which of these it is to be, or if it is to be all at once. The individual may make its meaning. ‘Why,’ says Juan’s speaker, ‘I’m Posterity – and so are you’ (XI.19): a small statement, yet a great declaration of liberty – and a triumphant declaration of power.




I am first affrighted with that forlorn solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy, and fancy myself, some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human commerce, and left utterly abandon’d and disconsolate … – David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature The last sentence of the previous chapter offers a perfect ending for any scholarly book: firm, rousing, victorious. The bold exuberance of the final quotation from Don Juan is by itself enough to make a reader close her Goethe and open her Byron, convinced of the intellectual rigor and ultimate wisdom of his major works. Who wouldn’t want to stop there? Yet this book’s argument cannot stop there, for to do so would be to ignore the difficulty at the center of Byron’s philosophy. While all the works I have discussed show the freedom to be gained through independent knowing, they cannot disguise the fact that it is, at bottom, an arid freedom. No matter how much Byron may assert the empowering potential of his epistemic model, the Byronic Hero, that avatar of the individual creating mind, remains in isolation, unable to share his own particular understanding with others. The paradigm of knowing that Byron outlines does indeed offer power to the enlightened reader, and Don Juan is indeed the most exuberant representation of that power. But in whatever other ways Juan resembles and builds upon its forebears in Byron’s oeuvre, it also shares with them the basic underlying position of its hero: Juan – like Harold, like Manfred, even like the mute and supplicating Kaled – is fundamentally alone, unable to share his life, his experiences, and whatever self he may have. 181



Reckoning Up

It would appear, then, that Byron has not been able to address the flaw that bedeviled him at the end of Lara, after all. The isolation that it seems must inevitably result from truly independent cognition creeps into all the works that follow that poem. It is all very well to laud the generative power of individual-centered understanding, but Byron’s works repeatedly show that the risk of such a version of knowledge is that its end will be not power but powerlessness, not the sound of a rebellion rising but the sound of one hand clapping. Juan may be a parody of the Byronic Hero, but like all parodies he retains something of what he mocks, and even he bears this sour core at the center of his laissez-faire existence. Shipwrecked, enslaved, sexually exploited, paraded as a curiosity before the bored English gentry of Byron’s glory days, he remains alone, forming no sustaining relationship that is not ultimately destroyed. Faced with this outcome of Byron’s epistemological construct, apparently inescapable even to the poet, a critic must ask, if each person forms his or her own knowledge, how can anyone communicate, let alone effect change? Consciously or unconsciously, Byron’s works answer this question through their protagonists, and the answer seems to be: Change cannot be effected. Byron’s heroes wander lonely through their poems, unmoored and uncommunicative to the last. Yet simultaneously (and typically) the works also provide another answer, and that answer seems to be: Change can be effected. After all, in killing Hassan the Giaour brings down a government; Lara mounts a rebellion; Juan single-handedly thaws Lady Adeline Amundeville’s ‘very vinous ice’ (XIII.37). Perhaps this lonely, ineffectual cognitive freedom is not so ineffectual after all. And perhaps it is not quite so lonely. The Giaour has his Leila, Lara his Kaled, the Prisoner of Chillon his mice and spiders, even Manfred his pleasurable guilt, and if these comforts seem cold to Byron’s readers, they nevertheless seem to satisfy his protagonists. Perhaps loneliness and isolation are in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, such an admission would seem to be part and parcel of accepting Byron’s epistemology. But this also feels too pat, another refusal to engage with that central knot. An engagement that attempted not to smooth but to resolve this aporia would have to admit that no real resolution is possible. Such an engagement would have to confess that, yes, this is a grim philosophical stance, and its ramifications are equally gloomy. It does end in power of a sort, but power that seems itself only to end in isolation and sterility. To support this conclusion one need only turn once more to Don Juan. If that poem revels in comedy, it seems to do so in the face of just such a sorrowful realization: ‘if I laugh at any mortal thing / ’Tis that I may not weep’ (IV.4).




Reckoning Up 183

Yet the trajectory of Byron’s work argues against such a gloomy philosophical conclusion. Lara presents Byron’s version of knowledge as just such isolation and emptiness, but Byron continued to push on from that text, and the works that follow figure lack of knowledge quite differently. While the protagonists of those works undeniably are predominantly isolated, the texts that contain them figure epistemic freedom as just that: freeing, empowering, a source of delight. Don Juan most of all does not feel like a battle against sorrow. For all its sternness and its bitterly deployed satirical rage, it retains its apparent conviction that skepticism lends itself to fecundity, right up until its last stanza’s representation of the morning after the night before:

Here as throughout the poem, uncertainty inspires thought (which is it best to encounter?), creativity, and wit (see also XIV.1). The grimness that is the apparent logical conclusion of Byron’s philosophy does not, in the end, triumph in his greatest exemplar of that philosophy. Yet the poem is the conclusion of that philosophy, and thus we are at paradox again. One can begin to discover a solution to this apparent contradiction by turning to Hume. As the epigraph to this section shows, he experienced the gloom and isolation radical skepticism engenders. In fact, his description of his mental state sounds like nothing so much as an anticipation of the Byronic Hero. Yet only a few sentences after his admission that ‘the intense view of those manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so weighed upon me … [that I] begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness,’ Hume defines the power that inoculates the philosopher against his discoveries: ‘since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to the purpose, and cures me … I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, I am merry with my friends …’ For Hume, human nature itself preserves the philosopher from the result of his realizations.1 One may be in a deplorable condition, but the option of backgammon still exists. What is more, one may well discover that ‘when after three or four hour’s amusement I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear to be … cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous’ (175). Interaction with the world undermines even the most settled dejection.



Which best is to encounter, ghost or none, ’Twere difficult to say, but Juan looked As if he had combated with more than one …

There is an echo of Hume in Byron’s assertion to Thomas Moore that his character had been misread by Francis Jeffrey: ‘I was not, and, indeed, am not even now, the misanthropical and gloomy gentleman he takes me for, but a facetious companion, well to do with those with whom I am intimate, and as loquacious and laughing as if I were a much cleverer fellow’ (BLJ 5:186). There is an echo of him, too, in the observations by Don Juan’s narrator that ‘Man, being reasonable, must get drunk’ and that ‘So little do we know what we’re about in / This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting’ (IV.4, IX.17). While the second of these two assertions shares something of Hume’s suggestion that the skeptic should doubt the legitimacy even of his own skepticism, the first gestures toward an explanation for how isolated possessors of individuated knowledge manage to go on: they just do. If such a conclusion invites accusations of willful naïveté, I would argue in response that this simple utterance in fact gets to the root of an insoluble human complexity that Byron recognized. Responding to Francis Cohen’s objections to the swift fluctuations between comedy and tragedy in Juan – Cohen argued that ‘we are never scorched and drenched at the same time’ – Byron wrote to John Murray, Blessings on his experience!—Ask him these questions about ‘scorching and drenching.’—Did he never play at Cricket or walk a mile in hot weather?—did he never spill a dish of tea over his testicles in handing the cup to his charmer …?—did he never swim in the sea at Noonday with the Sun in his eyes and on his head—which all the foam of ocean could not cool? (BLJ 6: 207) One sees a vision of people as epistemically both scorched and drenched even in Byron’s own protagonists. They may remain ostentatiously isolated, but they nonetheless fully immerse themselves in the pleasures of society – falling in love, attending parties, and making merry with flaunting wassailers of high and low degree. The philosophical realizations made in private moments are counteracted by simple social or quotidian experiences: ‘I leave the thing a problem, like all things. / The morning came, and breakfast, tea, and toast, / Of which most men partake, but no one sings’ (XVI.13). Epistemological problems can be left to their own devices: there is toast to eat. Aware that instability and isolation are the inevitable outcomes of Byronic knowing, Byron suggests, we still can – indeed, must – ignore them and live life actively ignoring them. Indeed, if Juan shows its readers anything, it shows them that a man going nowhere, plotlessly, nonetheless has a lively, engrossing time




getting there: just as we – heading only toward death in a life whose narrative is entirely created either by our own shaping hands or, analeptically, by the hands of others – dine, play backgammon, and laugh as if we were all much cleverer fellows. Taking up the issue of what one might call Byron’s dual thought, Alvin Kernan argues that Juan possesses as one of its central tenets the conviction that ‘Everything may change, but nothing can be done about it; and the world as immediately sensed is full of joy and pleasure’ (192). It seems to me, however, that neither the poem nor the philosophy it elaborates separates comprehension in this way, so that acknowledgment of continual flux is made secondary to an acknowledgment of the world’s pleasures. Rather, Byron sees the comprehension of flux and difference and the ability to disregard it as equally immediate. We know the former, but we do the latter. Man’s a phenomenon, and in the face of irrefutable evidence that each of us comprehends the world differently, that attempts at connection are futile, we nevertheless forge friendships, embark on love affairs, and create relationships based on convictions of shared understanding. And from these relationships that we understand, really, are not communions, we take pleasure and sustenance. Or, as Byron might have put it less lyrically but more frankly, we know that we will scald our testicles, but we hand the cup of tea to our charmer nonetheless.



Reckoning Up 185

Notes

1. In this concern, Byron most clearly resembles Blake, a resemblance that becomes even more striking as one proceeds through Byron’s works. For a more lengthy discussion of this parallel, see Lockridge, 432–33. 2. The dates in parentheses are those of publication. 3. I begin with the first two cantos of Childe Harold rather than with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) because only with the first two cantos of Harold does Byron truly begin to become what I would call an independent poet, less reliant upon the norms, expectations, and opinions of his contemporaries and more focused on his own interests and beliefs. 4. For considerations of Byron as a political writer, see, among many others, Erdman; Foot; Kelsall, Byron’s Politics; McGann, ‘The Book of Byron’; Cronin, ‘Asleep in Italy’; and, more recently, Bevis, ch. 1. 5. I have been able to find only one full-length study of Byron’s philosophical position written between 1938, the year Marjarum’s book appeared, and 1969, the year in which Cooke published his study: Frank Rainwater’s dissertation, ‘Lord Byron: A Study of the Development of His Philosophy, with Special Emphasis Upon the Dramas.’ 6. In Dark Interpreter, published the same year as English Romantic Irony, Tilottama Rajan offers a different version of Byronic irony altogether. At the very end of the book, Rajan contemplates ‘the apparently anti-Romantic direction of Byron’s career, from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which renounces the sentimental illusions of quest-romance and realizes the nothingness of human endeavors before the power of the ocean, to Don Juan, which tries to subsume the nihilism of Childe Harold by replacing romantic irony with pragmatic irony’ (265–66n). 7. In Romantic Ideology, Jerome McGann suggested that Mellor’s version of both Romanticism and Romantic irony seems to suppress the despair that is so much a part of Byron’s work, including Don Juan (22–23). Perhaps this is why these next three studies considering Byronic skepticism made despair an integral part of their analysis. 8. Writing about Childe Harold IV, Rawes asserts, ‘Here we find Byron on the threshold of writing comic verse which revels in the fecundity of creative thought as both a refuge from, and a redemption of, man’s lamentable fate’ (see Byron’s Poetic Experimentation, 37). Juan is that comic verse. 9. For single-text considerations of Byron’s skepticism, see for example, Leigh; Goldberg; and Cooper. 10. The OED’s fourth definition of passade is, ‘A transitory love affair; a brief romance’, with Byron as the first source (‘Passade’). As for ‘fuff-fuff,’ Byron was an expert in creating such onomatopoeic words. He once described Italian women as suffering greatly from their hot climate, in which they grew ‘flumpity in a short time after breeding’ (BLJ 6:193). 186



Introduction

Notes 187 11. For an excellent more recent study of Byron’s prose, see Nicholson, ‘Byron’s Prose.’ 12. See, for example, Klancher and Behrendt, ‘The Romantic Reader’. 13. Barry Milligan notes of the word ‘system’ that ‘during the years immediately following the Napoleonic wars that word was strongly associated with the anti-revolutionary principles of legitimacy [and] traditional hierarchy’ (182). This may have contributed to Byron’s hatred of the term.

1. Andrew Nicholson describes Byron as ‘unquestionably not only a voracious reader, but also an extremely attentive and discerning one’ (Complete Miscellaneous Prose 255). 2. Hume writes that ‘no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact, which it endeavours to establish … When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle’ (Enquiry 77). 3. Byron’s formal education was certainly spotty, but his self-education seems to have been both broad and deep. This list of philosophers is taken from a much longer ‘Reading List,’ in which he noted down the books he had ‘perused before the age of fifteen,’ subdivided by country and topic. See Marchand, Byron, chs. 2 and 3 for a fuller description of Byron’s education. 4. Commenting about this list in the margin of his copy of Moore’s Life, John Hobhouse wrote, ‘Certainly he did not read these books,’ but later wrote, ‘As Lord Byron says he read these volumes I am inclined to believe the fact, but it is certain he never gave any sign of this knowledge afterward’ (quoted in Marchand, Byron, 85). 5. What precisely an ‘idea’ was for Locke remains a very knotty question. As the quotation suggests, an idea was not what we today think of when we hear the word: an abstract notion or bodiless thought production. For Locke, those preceded ideas. Ideas themselves seem to have been mental impressions of outside objects. That being said, Locke’s version of ideas also invites the possibility that there may be some difference between the idea and that object which prompted its formation: ‘’tis necessary that something else, as a Sign or Representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: And these are Ideas.’ 6. See, for instance, his remark in I.i.§vii of the Treatise that ‘A very material question has been started concerning abstract or general ideas, whether they be general or particular in the mind’s conception of them. A great philosopher has disputed the receiv’d opinion in this particular, and has asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them … I look upon



Chapter 1

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

this to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters …’ Moreover, Berkeley spent a considerable portion (some fourteen sections) of the latter part of the Principles explaining that souls and Spirits, and hence God, ‘are not to be known in the same manner as senseless inactive objects’ (§142), but rather that ‘God is known as certainly and immediately as any other mind or spirit whatsoever’ (§147). Robert Fogelin has argued that it is ‘deeply disturbing to come face to face with the actual mechanisms that do generate beliefs, for then we cannot help but being struck by their inadequacy’ (213). For more on reactions to Hume’s Treatise, see Wright. Using extension as his example, James Van Cleve explains that ‘Negatively, [Reid’s] doctrine is that a being endowed with sensations and rational powers alone would never be able to arrive at any conception of extension. There is no “internal” connection between any sensation and anything extended – no resemblance between them nor any connection discernible by reason. Positively, Reid’s doctrine is that the conception of extension is innate, not in the sense that we have it from birth, but in the sense that it is triggered in us by certain sensations from which it could never have been abstracted. We are enabled to form the conception of extended things only because we are innately programmed to do so’ (109). As John Greco neatly explains, ‘First, note that there are three options available when undertaking an investigation into our cognitive faculties: (a) we may begin by trusting none of our faculties until we have reason for believing them trustworthy, (b) we may begin by trusting some of our faculties but not others, or (c) we may begin by trusting all of our faculties until we have reason for believing them untrustworthy. Reid argues that the first option is a nonstarter and that the second is inconsistent. Hence we are left with the third option: to begin by trusting all of our faculties until we have reason not to. But if we adopt this third methodology, Reid argues, we will find no reason to think that our cognitive faculties are not trustworthy. In other words, the only viable methodology leads us to Reid’s broad foundationalism’ (152). ‘“Common sense” can mean two things, in fact: widespread popular conviction on the one hand, or the basic principles at work in human reasoning and belief formation on the other’ (Stanford Encyclopedia). For Reid the term meant a combination of these two, but more largely the latter. For more on this, see Michelle Faubert. Reid and Hume corresponded, and in one letter Reid wrote, ‘A Little Philosophical Society here [in Aberdeen] … is much indebted to you for its entertainment. Your company would, although we are all good Christians, be more acceptable than that of St. Athanasius’ (Letters of David Hume, 376–77). Beattie felt that Reid showed too much deference and respect to Hume, given the implications of Hume’s work, and believed that the only legitimate way to respond to Hume was an ‘all-out attack’ (Robinson viii). Vincent Bevilacqua writes, ‘To Scottish philosophers like Beattie, Reid, Smith, Kames, and Campbell the dictates of common sense comprised an incontrovertible rebuttal to the philosophical skepticism and epistemological idealism of Berkeley and Hume’ (202).



188 Notes

16. Kenneth Winkler has asserted that a survey of biographical articles ‘from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries has persuaded me that Berkeley the man has been held almost universally in enormously high esteem.’ See ‘Berkeley’s Life and Works,’ 14–33. 17. Although Hume claimed he had not ‘denied the Immateriality of the Soul in the Common Sense of the Word,’ Treatise I.iv.§5 seems to show him doing precisely that. It was known that he had died unconvinced of the existence of an afterlife, although even on his deathbed he seems to have retained a quick wit on the subject, as James Boswell describes: ‘I asked him if it were not possible that there might be a future state. He answered that it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn …“Well,” said I, “Mr. Hume, I hope to triumph over you when I meet you in a future state, and remember you are not to say you was joking with all this infidelity.” “No, no,” said he. “But I shall have been so long there before you come that it will be nothing new”’ (257). 18. Quotations in this paragraph are as follows: Flexman, quoted in Towsey 99; Hume, quoted in Towsey 106; Ridpath 73; anonymous reader, quoted in Towsey 102; Scott, quoted in Allan 19; Rose, quoted in Towsey 111. 19. I have found only two sources: Ernest Tuveson’s The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism; and Fred Parker, Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson. 20. For more on Coleridge’s links to British Enlightenment philosophy, including, unexpectedly, Reid, see Jackson; and McKusick. 21. See, for instance, Reid, Introduction §6. Curiously, Hume’s detractors often seemed as surly at the fact that Hume did not practice the Pyrrhonism he allegedly espoused as they were at the fact that he allegedly espoused it. ‘Pyrrho the Elean, the father of this philosophy,’ wrote Reid, ‘seems to have carried it to greater perfection than any of his successors: for if we may believe Antigonus the Carystian, quoted by Diogenes Laertius, his life corresponded to his doctrine. And therefore, if a cart run against him, or a dog attacked him, or if he came upon a precipice, he should not stir a foot to avoid the danger, giving no credit to his senses. But his attendants … took great care to keep him out of harm’s way … Nor is it to be doubted, but this author’s friends would have been equally careful to keep him from harm, if ever his principles had taken too strong a hold of him … the Treatise of human nature … contains manifest indications, that the author every now and then relapsed into the faith of the vulgar, and could hardly, for half a dozen pages, keep up the skeptical character’ (I.§5). For more on what Pyrrhonist skepticism is, see Sinnott-Armstrong. 22. William Rose of the Monthly Review argued that if Hume’s works are considered ‘in one view, as sprightly and ingenious compositions … there is a delicacy of sentiment, an original turn of thought, a perspicuity, and often an elegance, of language, that cannot but recommend his writings to every Reader of taste,’ while one deeply anti-Humean reader managed to give with one hand the compliment she took away with the other: ‘but strong is truth & it will prevail; in spite of such unphilosophic nonsences, tho’ adorned with all the Elegance of Mr Hume’s acute wit and Elegant Language’ (quoted in Towsey 99, 101–02).



Notes 189

190 Notes 23. What Jeffrey almost certainly did not know was that Academical Questions was supposed to have a second volume in which Drummond answered rather than asked, but the furore that greeted volume 1 meant that volume 2 was pulled from the press (Hoagwood, Introduction, Academical Questions, iii). 24. For further discussion of the issue of language and meaning in British Enlightenment philosophy, see Losonky; Ott; Hernandez; and Schuhmann; as well as Bevilacqua. 25. For Byron’s engagement with Continental philosophy, see Aycock; and Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, for example. For Byron’s personal interactions with Schlegel, see BLJ 5: 86, 88; BLJ 8: 164–65, 167, 172–73.

1. See, for example, Susan Oliver, ch. 3; and Tatiana Kuzmic, on Byron’s complication of Edward Said; as well as Stephen Cheeke; and Diego Saglia. Other recent extended examinations of Childe Harold I and II include Nicholas Mason; and the first chapters of Alan Rawes, Byron’s Poetic Experimentation; Matthew Bevis, ch. 1; Philip Martin, ‘Heroism and History’; and Nigel Leask, ‘Byron.’ William Galperin has considered Byron and the visual specifically. 2. Although British men and women did travel to Europe during this period – as one reads descriptions of Byron’s travels, for example, one is struck by the number of wandering Britons he encountered – they were almost invariably members of the upper classes, and often, it seems, more than simple tourists. Leask has recently explained that the wealthy could travel through the Levant rather than across Europe, such travel facilitated by a little light spying: for ‘elite British … travellers, the pursuit of classical topography and removable antiquities also normally went hand in hand with diplomacy and de facto intelligence-gathering’ (‘Byron,’ 104). There is little evidence to suggest that Byron took the latter route. 3. The inaccessibility of most of Europe, combined with the need to create a sense of British pride, power, and worth in the face of the French threat, led to a boom in travel literature that focused on the nation itself. In place of exotic European locales came domestic scenes such as those described in Daniel Webb’s Observations and Remarks, During Four Excursions, Made to Various Parts of Great Britain in the Years 1810 and 1811 and Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (1810). Poetical works set abroad were also replaced with such localized epics as John Thelwall’s The Hope of Albion; or Edwin of Northumbria (1801), John Ogilvie’s Britannia: A National Epic Poem in Twenty Books (1801), and Robert Southey’s Madoc (1805). Such texts sought to offset the lack of European access by creating a British epic mythology. For an excellent overview of the history of British travel writing, see Barbara Korte. For discussions of Harold as a species of travel poem, see Rosemary Bechler; and Georg Roppen and Richard Sommer, among others. For consideration of the part Byron’s works played in the creation of tourism in the nineteenth century, see Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing. 4. Larpent (1758–1832), wife of John Larpent, the Lord Chamberlain’s Inspector of Plays from 1778–1824, kept a diary in which she recorded her own experi-



Chapter 2

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

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11. 12.

13.

14.

ences with the interests and landmarks of London and the events of her time. For an excellent overview of the central role of vision, and its connection to comprehension in the Romantic period, see Suzanne Matheson, ‘Viewing.’ For more on this conviction and its expression, see John Dwyer; and Andrew Hemingway. Andrew Elfenbein writes that the ‘1812 Childe Harold offered its version of upper-class tastes commodified for the consumption of a wider reading public. But this commodification involved not descriptions of English scenery […] but scenes in Portugal, Albania, Greece, and Spain, where only an aristocrat with Byron’s money and connections could travel’ (Byron and the Victorians, 29). For a careful anatomization of Harold’s readers based on publisher’s figures and economic factors, see William St. Clair, ‘The Impact of Byron’s Writings.’ Saglia suggests that this stanza instantiates the canto’s larger theme of ‘hatred/attraction towards Iberia by way of a confused attitude that exalts the beauties of Cintra or the grandeur of landscape and architecture, while denouncing the bestial conditions of the inhabitants’ (73). For a lengthier discussion of this view of vision in Georgian art and culture, see Anne Bermingham. For further discussions of ways of seeing in the Romantic period, see Gillen Wood’s excellent The Shock of the Real; as well as Jonathan Crary. The definitive source on Byron and vision is undoubtedly Galperin. Pointing to Byron’s professed aversion to Sensibility and its tenets, Michael Vicario suggests that Harold I and II may reflect his efforts to sabotage ‘those aspects of “sickly Sensibility” he finds at the core of the romance tradition’ (112). This determination may well have played a role in Byron’s repeated dismantling of the connection between seeing and knowing, so dear to Sensibility. See Cheeke; Oliver; and Saglia. Peter Manning, for his part, draws attention to yet another act of deliberate confusion in the battle stanzas: the poet blends together two separate scenes – the battles of Talavera and Albuera, in actuality separated by two years (Byron and His Fictions 178). Philip Martin has marked Childe Harold I and II as the beginning of Byron’s interrogation of ‘the notion of the heroic,’ an interrogation here captured in the poem’s ‘sceptical accounts of the carnage of modern warfare’ (‘Heroism’ 96). Richard Cronin has pointed out that Childe Harold shows in its representation of these battlefields that there is no proper way of looking at them: ‘to respond to such splendour is to be inhuman, to fail to respond to it is to be blind’ (‘Mapping,’ 20). Cheeke has pointed out the way in which Harold’s figuration of Albania in Canto II, and the authority that his observations in the poem as a whole gain from his ‘being there,’ challenge a ‘hegemony of the classical’ deeply rooted in Romantic minds (56, 13). For the place of Greece in Romantic culture, see M. Byron Raizis; William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free; and Elizabeth-Christina Mattheu. Cheeke’s assertion is further complicated, of course, by Byron’s own lifelong attachment to Hellenistic Greece, and to Greece as a nation, and as a repressed nation.



Notes 191

15. Impressed as he is by Albania, and depressed as he is by the contemporary state of Greece, however, Byron never loses his love for the classical Greece that has been. This powerful nostalgia is yet another demonstration of the poem’s tendency toward complication rather than destruction. 16. In the first edition, these notes are at page bottom. Longer explanatory notes and appendices are at the end of the poem. 17. Saglia comments of Byron’s shifting scenes and perspectives that ‘the palimpsestic, scattered nature of reflection … is accompanied by the scattered micropatterns of a seminal, unified prospect that has been broken up. Byron’s Spain is made up of fragments … rather than of a sequence of complete panoramas’ (82). Oliver suggests that this fragmenting is a deliberate political strategy on Byron’s part: ‘Episodes in which feudal tropes and oriental stereotypes become intermingled follow one another in rapid flow and close succession, as Byron poses implied questions about the values associated with European medievalism on the one hand and the orient on the other. The two cantos thus transmute into a major critique of how Empires, and Imperial expansion, are viewed’ (154–55). 18. As Oliver points out, Byron’s persistently snide condemnations of Charles Pouqueville’s Travels through the Morea, Albania, and Several Other Parts of the Ottoman Empire… have both political and personal overtones. Pouqueville created an image of the East as barbarous, unevolved, and entirely different to the West that sat poorly with Byron. Furthermore, at the time of the publication of Childe Harold I and II, Pouqueville’s Travels was perhaps the text most influential in shaping western perceptions of the Ottoman Empire (145). It was thus to some degree competition for Harold, or at the very least a text Byron would want to position as inferior to Harold. 19. See, for example, Peter Thorslev, 128; Robert Gleckner, 44; and Frederick Shilstone, generally. 20. Addressing the seemingly goal-less nature of Harold’s pilgrimage, Shilstone has asserted that ‘Greece clearly becomes the pilgrimage’s shrine, the last best hope for Harold’s redemption’ (29). But it seems more a shrine to ambivalence than to anything else. 21. Gleckner, for one, writes that ‘[u]nlike the traditional pilgrim or traveler, Byron’s Harold reaches no goal, indeed has no goal to reach’ (51). E. D. Hirsch, addressing this absence of an end point, suggests that the ‘very unfixedness of the goal permits the pilgrimage to continue: if politics fails there is nature; if love fails there is travel itself; some beckoning Eden always remains intact’ (483). Mark Storey says simply that the poem ‘does not know, any more than its hero, where it is going’ (81). 22. Cheeke writes that ‘Childe Harold appears to be written not merely by an English nobleman traveling on the continent, but also by a sequence of spots … that in some sense speak for themselves. Looking at it this way … [Byron’s] psychological interiority is an effect that the poem’s places produce as their histories are articulated’ (41). One observation that this remarkable insight leads to is that a man whose own interior is profoundly altered by the places that affect him may come to understand the malleability of both self and certainty, an understanding that will have profound implications in Byron’s later works and philosophical thinking.



192 Notes

23. One might spare a thoughtful moment, too, for the wassailers of Canto I, stanza 2: ‘flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.’ The adjective is, strictly speaking, superfluous – retiring wassailers being, one imagines, thin on the ground – and with this unnecessary modifier Byron contrives a comedic unsettling of both noun and adjective. 24. Berkeley, in fact, argued for this view of the world as a defense against skepticism: ‘Colour, figure, motion, extension and the like, considered only as so many sensations in the mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or images, referred to things or archetypes existing without the mind, then are we involved all in scepticism. We see only the appearances, and not the real qualities of things. What may be the extension, figure, or motion of anything really and absolutely, or in itself, it is impossible for us to know, but only the proportion or the relation they bear to our sense. Things remaining the same, our ideas vary, and which of them, or even whether any of them at all represent the true quality existing in the thing, it is out of our reach to determine. So that, for ought we know, all we see, hear, and feel, may be only phantom and vain chimera, and not at all agree with the real things, existing in rerum natura. All this scepticism follows, from our supposing a difference between things and ideas, and that the former have a subsistence without the mind, or unperceived. It were easy to dilate on this subject, and show how the arguments urged by sceptics in all ages, depend on the supposition of external objects’ (PHK §87).

Chapter 3 1. For a long time the Tales were seen as nothing but dramatic: Paul West called them ‘certainly inferior,’ Michael Sundell ‘contrived,’ and as late as 1999 Bernard Beatty felt it necessary to advise readers, ‘The main thing to do with Byron’s stories is to read them as such’ (5; 598; 72). Recent investigations, however, have found much rich food for thought. See Cheryl Fallon Giuliano; Caroline Franklin; Jeffrey Schneider; Eric Meyer; Joseph Lew; as well as others cited throughout this chapter. 2. As Rawes writes, ‘the poem offers a series of responses … [that] do not so much dramatize the Giaour as whet our curiosity about him … by dramatizing his impact on a watcher’ (Poetic Experimentation, 30). 3. See Barbara Ravelhofer for a detailed explanation of the historical situation to which Byron alludes here. 4. Daniel Watkins has written that ‘the Advertisement … reminds us that the action takes place amidst sweeping and momentous change’ (Social Relations 35). For more on this, see Frederick Garber, ch. 2. For readings of The Giaour as a text with application to nineteenth-century politics, see Jerome McGann, ‘The Book of Byron and the Book of a World’; and Marilyn Butler. 5. Pondering the opening scene, Lew muses that it ‘has never been clear to me why the Giaour manages to have his sexual tryst with Leila and escapes, leaving her behind’ (192). 6. The fisherman’s opening description of the Giaour has prompted a number of speculative interpretations, all firmly advanced. Beatty, for example, writes



Notes 193

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

that ‘the Giaour is clearly fleeing from someone,’ although this seems far from clear in the text (‘Calvin in Islam,’ 73). Byron, of course, gives details that could support any number of interpretations, thus successfully undermining all. Butler finds the link between the curse and the text in the curser’s condemnation of the Giaour to suffer most in the arms of those humans he loves most: ‘In gloating over the Giaour’s hell to come, in the arms of human loved ones, the fisherman ironically anticipates his [the Giaour’s] dying preference of eternity under any conditions with Leila’ (91). Peter Wilson calls the Giaour, ‘a human form of decay,’ while Scott Simpkins describes him as a man ‘damned but not yet in hell’ (Wilson 122; Simpkins 93). See also Ken Gelder, ch. 2. Ravelhofer points out that Byron was ‘very keen’ on having his annotations noted by reviewers. She also argues for a dialogue between notes and poem. She sees the notes as providing ‘sane, funny prose … an antidote on doting readers who are … carried away by the immediacy of the poem proper’ (8). See also Tom Mole, ‘Narrative Desire.’ Byron’s reference to gunshot wounds here probably draws on John Hunter’s A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-Shot Wounds (1794). Hunter, a distinguished Scottish physician, is perhaps best known for inoculating his penis with syphilitic pus in order to track the progression of the disease, although whether or not he actually did this is now disputed. See George Qvist for more information. Commenting on this note, Cheeke links it to the passage it appears to modify precisely through its grotesque practicality, suggesting it demonstrates ‘a certain matter-of-factness which is characteristic of Byron’s notes, especially when they are supporting moments of textual mystery or supernaturalism,’ and pointing out the way in which it ‘authenticates death’ (59). The Giaour’s complex connection to Hassan can itself be read as another example of the way Byron weaves uncertainty into the fabric of his poem. For considerations of the links between the two men, see Manning, Byron and His Fictions; and Beatty, ‘Calvin in Islam.’ Moreover, CPW 3 includes an 1814 illustration to the poem that depicts the Giaour gazing at the fallen Hassan, the two men’s faces nearly identical (Hassan has a beard, and the Giaour does not). The Giaour is famous as a poem of fragments, and famous as a poem in which those fragments – deliberately arranged by Byron in no particular order – unsettle both the process of reading and any possible conclusion a reader might draw about the narrative’s plot and resolution. Bernard Beatty has argued that as readers proceed through the poem ‘we are trying to sort everything out, but, at the same time, we are retaining the actual flow of the tale’s evolution’ (‘Calvin in Islam,’ 73). As Mark Storey puts it, ‘different narrators, jumbled tenses, further a disorientation which prevents any easy … judgement. For Byron, this is extremely important’ (40). For more on the significance of The Giaour as a Romantic Fragment Poem, see Nigel Leask’s discussion in British Romantic Writers and the East; and Butler, as well as David Seed; Christopher Strathman; and Mole, ‘Narrative Desire.’ Andrew Elfenbein suggests that ‘Byron may have written the purple passages in Childe Harold and the Turkish Tales with the knowledge that they would be excerpted’ (Victorians 55).



194 Notes

15. See Carl Lefevre. 16. The OED’s first use of the word in this way occurs in 1612, with this definition in use ever since (‘Idea’ IIIb). 17. In her more historically located reading, Susan Oliver puts it neatly when she writes that ‘Byron’s poem is left straddling the borders of the Near East and the West, and his hero, who is neither a Muslim nor a Christian but is associated with both, is as elusive and perpetually problematic to one as to the other … Byron leave his readers with a couplet that testifies to the apparent inevitability and infinite irresolution of division, conflict and destruction’ (177). 18. See, for example, Butler; Meyer; and Lew; as well as Colin Jager; A.R. Kidwai; and Mohammed Sharafuddin. 19. According to the Marquess of Sligo, who arrived in Athens after the fact and learned of the story via rumor, and whom Byron asked to publicize the story when The Giaour was published, Byron had saved the life of a young Turkish girl who had, by order of the Waiwode of Athens, been sewn into a sack and was to be drowned. Byron encountered the execution party and managed to save the life of the girl, whom he knew, by a combination of threats and bribes. Legend has since suggested that Byron was the girl’s lover, perhaps even the cause of her sentence (Marchand, Portrait, nn.89–90). 20. Space and the scope of this study do not permit me to grant individual attention to each of the Tales, so I have chosen to focus on those most important to the emergence of Byron’s philosophy. For related in-depth discussions of Bride and Corsair, see for instance, Watkins, Social Relations; L. Adam Mekler; and Abigail Keegan.

Chapter 4 1. Lara has suffered at the hands of changes in scholarly focus. Karl Kroeber called it ‘the last and most interesting of Byron’s early verse stories’ (142); Carl Lefevre put it ‘among the best of [Byron’s] contemporarily popular, histrionic poems of exotic adventure’ (471); while Manning argues that ‘Lara is more steadily self-contemplative analytic than Byron’s previous work’ (Byron and His Fictions 52), but denunciations of the poem are both more recent and more plentiful. For further readings, see Hoagwood, ‘Byron, Rogers, Murray’; Gleckner; as well as, more recently, Franklin; and Fallon Giuliano. 2. For more on the alleged poor quality of Byron’s writing in Lara, see Philip Martin, Byron, ch. 2. 3. This misdirection links with the similar moves in both the Advertisement and the final lines of The Giaour, perhaps explaining why Byron wrote to John Murray of Lara that ‘as connected with the other tales … [it] completes the series’ (BLJ 4: 165). 4. Mark Storey has pointed out the strange appropriateness of the first line’s anastrophe: ‘Strictly speaking, it is his arrival that is “sudden”; but the loneliness gets its surprisingly right, and bleak, epithet’ (55). 5. For more on characterization, see Gerrig and Allbritton; and Ralf Schneider. 6. The phrase ‘intertextual echoes’ is Uri Margolin’s. It refers to words or description that call ‘to our minds same-named or similar characters in other



Notes 195

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

literary works’ (77), and that by their allusions make characterization immediate and complete with very little prompting from the text in hand. Interestingly, the magazines practiced not only literary characterization but also what one might call authorial characterization. Lara was published anonymously, in an edition with Samuel Rogers’s Jacqueline, but reviewer after reviewer recognized it as Byron’s work based on its plot and hero: ‘This poem, undoubtedly the work of our noble and justly admired bard, is much in the style of his Lordship’s former tales,’ wrote the Belle Asemblée (131); the Theatrical Inquisitor observed that ‘The first of these poems [Lara] is said to be the production of Lord Byron. If we may judge from internal evidence, the report is correct, and illusive as such criterion may be in general, in the present instance it has most probably led to a just result’ (101); the British Critic held up the poem’s Advertisement and the ‘testimony of every bookseller’s shop window in the metropolis,’ as evidence that ‘we shall not be thought guilty either of presumption or impropriety in considering the poem of Lara as the avowed production of Lord Byron’ (402). This tendency toward characterization no doubt also plays a role in the still persistent, and still erroneous, tendency to announce that Lara is an actual, not metaphysical, sequel to The Corsair, despite the fact that Byron’s carefully prevaricative Advertisement to the first three editions undermines this conclusion by playing the same games as the poem proper: ‘The reader of “Lara” may probably regard it as a sequel to a poem that recently appeared: whether the cast of the hero’s character, the turn of his adventures, and the general outline and colouring of the story, may not encourage such a supposition, shall be left to his determination.’ For a discussion of the role emendation plays in Byron’s works as a whole, see Riley, who suggests that one ‘may interpret this discursive turn as the concrete, rhetorical form of Byron’s skepticism’ (i). For more on the machinations of qualification and negation in the poem, see Phillipson, 314; and Watkins, Social Relations, 97, 106. Shears elegantly points out an even deeper layer of ambiguity here: ‘it is difficult to know whether the arrow is shot from this story or some other story that is left untold – has Lara been shot down, deservedly or not, due to the actions presented to the reader, for actions we do not hear about or by mere chance?’ (‘“A tale untold,”’ 6). Shilstone argues that Lara’s death is the symbol of Byron’s renunciation of ‘his quest to define a sustaining, autonomous mind’ (91–92), but in fact it would be difficult to find a mind more autonomous than Lara’s, cut off as it is from any form of connection to or interpretation by those who view him. On Lara’s death see also Oliver; and Elledge, Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor, 27. I thank Dr. David Fallon for first alerting me to this possibility. Lewis’s narrator says of Rosario (later Matilda), ‘[S]uch of his features as accident discovered, appeared the most beautiful and noble. Rosario was the only name by which he was known in the Monastery. No one knew from whence he came, and when questioned in the subject he preserved a profound silence … The youth had carefully avoided the company of the Monks: he answered their civilities with sweetness, but reserve, and evidently showed that his inclination led him to solitude. To this general rule the superior was the only



196 Notes

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

exception. To him he looked up with a respect approaching idolatry …’ (67–68), a description Byron echoes with remarkable faithfulness in describing Kaled. For more on this connection, see Oliver, 188; and Leask, British Romantic Writers, 57–58. Kaled’s final unveiling may also be Byron’s attempt to nullify the homoerotic overtones of Lara and Kaled’s relationship. For more on this, see Leask, British Romantic Writers, 57–58; and Crompton, 208; as well as Neff; and Keegan. For more on the implications, particularly the social implications, of this acceptance, see Watkins, Social Relations, 102. See Levinson, 98. See not only the earlier, ‘Short was the course his restless had run, / But long enough to leave him half undone’ (I.23–24), but also the description of Lara’s menials at I.135–54, as well as I.254, I.423, I.447, II.74, II.377, among others. ‘Lara’s obscure past,’ argues Daniel Watkins, ‘is a source of personal and social confusion, focusing the inability of characters to gain full knowledge,’ and the same is true of his present. Both are shrouded in a cultivated haze that ‘gives itself to us in terms of what the culture being described does not know, and this fact should warn us not to accept at face value’ the story’s representations (Social Relations, 94–95). See also Elledge, Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor, 25; and Jacobson, 33. Mark Phillipson writes of the portraits’ blurred description ‘virtues, crimes, who can tell’ (311), while Carl Lefevre argues of the list of revolutionary motives that ‘It would be hard to imagine a more scornful expression of political defeatism than this cynical equating of the great slogans of religion and freedom with vengeance and “what you will”’ (475). Thus, to quote Susan Oliver, ‘language constitutes both a refuge and a problem’ in the poem (186). Comprehension and creation of Ezzelin’s murder have been a popular pastime amongst Lara’s readers since its first appearance. One of the earliest, George Ellis, decided that no murder had occurred at all, and in his Quarterly review he ‘frankly threw’ himself ‘upon Lord Byron’s generosity,’ requesting that he ‘revive … the brave Sir Ezzelin; whom, though lost, or mislaid, or purloined, we cannot believe to have been actually deprived of existence’ (452). In his Structure of Byron’s Major Poems, William Marshall suggests that Kaled is the murderer, arguing that ‘as a woman Kaled would have the double motive to destroy Ezzelin arising from her love for Lara and her aversion to discovery’ (61). More recently critics such as Shilstone (88) and Fallon Giuliano (804) have offered their solutions to the mystery. Indeed, scholars often iron out puzzling spots in Lara by creating their own answers. They have accounted for the skull that Lara keeps on his reading table (Lefevre, 474), the books he keeps by him (Shilstone, 87), the mysterious shriek and discovery of the prostrate Lara in the night (Phillipson, 312; Rawes, 48), Lara’s hesitation before he accepts Otho’s terms of combat (W. Marshall, Structure, 56), and the language Lara speaks to Kaled (Beatty, ‘Calvin in Islam,’ 81). This goes some way toward indicating the truth of the poem’s suggestion that knowledge is created and toward proving the success of Byron’s encouragements to readers to create their own knowledge.



Notes 197

21. Gleckner has asserted that if ‘the Giaour were to return to his ancestral home, he would be a Lara’ (156). Further linkings of the two tales can be found in Beatty, ‘Calvin in Islam’ (81); and Storey (54–62). 22. For more on this, see Goldberg, 655–59, and Watkins, who argues that ‘Byron seems to have worked consciously to create the dark, oppressive quality that characterizes the narrative, for he studiously avoided specific details and adamantly refused to provide the vaguest hint of context for the story … [The] strategy of obscuring the contextual dimensions of the narrative focuses the need to look to the deeper structures of ideas in the tales’ (Social Relations 89–90). 23. See also Oliver, who asserts that ‘Byron encourages and excites his readers’ individual speculation’ (186). 24. The Monthly Review regretted that ‘whatever the effect of such pieces may be in exciting interest, it is clear that no moral influence can be produced if actions be not ascribed to some motive’ (84–85), while the Eclectic Review complained of the poem’s discourse that ‘of all descriptions of cant, the cant of scepticism is the most offensive, and the most nearly allied to absurdity’ (398). Helpfully, the Monthly suggested the motive Byron ought to have supplied: ‘we regret that the opportunity has been lost for producing the fine moral effect which might have been given to [Lara], by imputing the practice of Gaming to the early life of the hero. No other vice would account for his actions; and none would suit so well the nature of his crimes’ (85). 25. Garber finds that it lacks ‘the interest or imaginative intensity of The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos’ (67, n.16); Storey judges it inferior to ‘the far richer Giaour’ (54); while Franklin asserts that it is ‘singularly disappointing’ (164); and Phillipson condemns its progressive ‘degeneration’ (312). 26. A little more than a month after their separation Byron wrote to Lady Byron seeking some sort of (however rhetorical) reassurance, ‘I have not denied my state of mind—but you know it’s causes—& were those deviations from calmness never followed by acknowledgement & repentance?—was not the last which occurred more particularly so?—& had I not—had we not—the days before we parted—every reason to believe we loved each other—that we were to meet again—were not your letters kind?—had I not acknowledged to you all my faults & follies—& assured you that some had not—& would not be repeated?’ (BLJ 5: 24–25).

Chapter 5 1. Almost all critics agree in finding a direct connection between the tone and matter of Harold III and the circumstances that led to Byron’s departure from England; Robert Gleckner sums it up best when he writes that ‘[p]erhaps the first major obstacle to a clear understanding of Childe Harold III is the date of its composition, 1816, that most momentous and turbulent year of Byron’s separation from Lady Byron, of bitter charge and countercharge, of national



198 Notes

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

ignominy, isolation from Augusta, and final exile from England. If it is difficult to avoid biographizing Byron’s poems of other years, it is well-nigh impossible to resist it here’ (225–26). For more on this connection, see Kenneth Bruffee; Frederick Shilstone; and Jerome Christensen. Edward Trelawny had rather less sympathy for Byron than do any of these scholars, remarking that ‘If he had left his wife and cut society … he would have been content: that his wife and society should have cast him off, was a mortification his pride could never forgive nor forget’ (Recollections, 44). For more on this, see Alan Rawes, ‘1816–17: Childe Harold III and Manfred.’ Rawes writes that the poem ‘offers Byron a poetic opportunity: to explore the means of recovery from pain, and movement forward from and beyond it, that are available to him’ (119). In Autobiographial Writing and British Literature, 1783–1834, James Treadwell sees Byron creating a far more devious and exploitative connection between himself and Ada in these lines: ‘Ada was a central element in the publicprivate discourse of the 1816 crisis, so her appearance in the first line of the new publication, alongside her mother, draws the clearest possible attention to the scandalous circumstances that Byron’s departure from England might have been supposed to have put behind him’ (187). Paul Elledge has wondered whether the ‘face’ in this stanza is ‘synecdochic, and the question about a broader similarity between mother and daughter exclusive of himself?’ (‘Talking,’ 202), while Hill argues that ‘Ada’s appearance belies whatever identity she shows with her father, a genetic joke that will repeat itself whenever he calls her face to mind’ (127). Bo Earle states that ‘self-identification via self-contradiction becomes routine in Canto III’; he finds a tendency to define and validate by paradox in the poem’s form as well as its subject matter, and in the persistently contradictory figures Byron holds up for admiration. For further discussions of these figures and their meanings within the poem, see Jock Macleod; Martin Procházka; and Robert Lance Snyder, among others. For more on the meaning of the ocean in these lines, see Gleckner, 232; Shilstone, 135; and Hill. Discussing this passage, Macleod sees a direct connection between Byron’s desire for creation and his struggles not just with outside world but with himself: ‘What Byron wants to forget is “the weary dream” of his excessive egotism (his “selfish” grief or gladness). And in order to set aside this egotistical world-weariness he needs “to create, and in creating live / A being more intense.” Writing will offer just that emotional intensity Byron needs to feel himself alive again’ (261). For other readings of the mind in Harold III, see Shilstone, 135–36; Newey, ‘Authoring,’ 161; and Stephen Cheeke’s recent suggestion that Byron’s figuration of the creating mind serves a particularly historically influenced purpose, for ‘the third canto has a powerful contrary impulse to escape the materialism of souvenir collecting and lapidary inscription [then prevalent], to escape the inscripted landscapes of human history altogether and to discover a freedom in wandering over “Eternity”…’ (75). For more on the uses of Waterloo in Canto III, see Bainbridge, who observes that for Byron, ‘Waterloo means nothing more than a richer harvest’ (77),



Notes 199

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

as well as Pafford, who reads the stanzas as ‘more notable illustrations of Byron’s recognition of historic scene as the great stimulant of the imagination’ (116). For more on this, see Cheeke (71). One thinks here of Byron’s famous remark in a letter to Augusta about the clump of trees he and Hobhouse passed in the Alps in 1816: ‘Passed whole woods of withered pines—all withered—trunks stripped & barkless—branches lifeless—done by a single winter—their appearance reminded me of me and my family’ (BLJ 5: 102). L. Adam Mekler offers another reading of this passage, arguing that the final line has ‘the lack of linguistic power associated with confinement in the imaginary,’ and that ‘the heart is compelled to endure’ (471). In discussing this Canto as Byron’s response to the many poems that celebrated and praised Waterloo, Bainbridge argues for a reading of Napoleon that makes him both the metaphor he is commonly read as and an actual historical figure, thus increasing his power as a symbol: ‘Byron … assimilates Napoleon within the cult of the Byronic hero, embodying in him the spiritual condition of the entire Canto. He thus gives the misanthropy and duality of the Byronic hero a specific historical and political dimension, incorporating it within the poem’s anti-legitimist stance. It becomes an expression of the political gloom of the post-Waterloo world, one which powerfully counters the triumphalism of other accounts of Waterloo’ (79). Both Ward Pafford and Gleckner see Napoleon as the poem’s symbol of precisely this danger. See Gleckner, 247; and Pafford, 118. For a more nuanced reading of Napoleon, see Michael V. DePorte. See Hodgson for an in-depth reading of Byron’s use of fire imagery in this canto. ‘Alternations from fierceness to tenderness, from grave to gay, from man to nature, from personal to impersonal,’ as Bernard Blackstone says (187), and he might well have added, from sight to site. The topic of Childe Harold III’s structure, or lack of structure, remains a vexing one. William Marshall saw in the poem an ‘organic pattern’ (Structure, 81) but Michael G. Cooke, among others, has argued against this conclusion; he asserts that ‘semblances of order – the framing stanzas on Byron’s daughter or, on another level, philosophical transcendentalism – prove otiose and are hardly even asked to dissimulate the central disarray of Byron’s experience’ (41). A number of scholars attempt to resolve the question via compromise; one recent such reading suggests that Byron’s ‘ruminations and comments are presented in a complex fashion in which the credibility and reliability of a view presented in one stanza are undercut through a different view expressed in preceding or succeeding stanzas’ (Ravindran, 82). This description of the text’s structure seems the most accurate to me. For more on this see John Hodgson; and Mark Kipperman, ch 10. Although my earlier caveats about interpreting Byron’s remarks about his writing still stand, it does seem that he himself recognized the influence his situation had on Childe Harold III. Writing to Thomas Moore with typical defensive self-deprecation, he remarked that the Canto was ‘a fine indistinct piece of poetical desolation … I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, loves unextinguishable,



200 Notes

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies’ (BLJ 5: 165). Manning suggests that the ‘layers of conflict laid bare by the failure of Byron’s marriage and his self-exile from England vividly appear in the conflation of mother, sister, and lover in this scene’ (Byron and His Fictions, 68). In choosing this lake, and this name, Byron may well be making a pun on ‘leman,’ the word for sweetheart, and particularly ‘unlawful sweetheart.’ He had used the word with this meaning himself in Harold I.9 (‘leman’). Along similar lines, Kipperman sees in this passage a turn to nature that is revealed as in fact a turn to the self, an ‘outward turn’ that was ‘not really a true “meeting” with external nature, but was in fact the mind’s created ideal of nature’ (187). For more on the connection between the peaceful Lac Leman and mental creation, see Bernard Blackstone, 194, and, especially, Newey, ‘Authoring.’ The storm sequence has received more attention than almost any other single moment in Childe Harold III, with the exception of the allegedly Wordsworthian nature stanzas, 69–75. For considerations of it as it relates specifically to Byron’s mental power, see Shilstone, 126; Newey, ‘Authoring,’ 161, and Kipperman, 186–88. Pafford makes a similar point, arguing that in Harold III, ‘[i]nterest in nature per se comes to be incidental to a questioning of its relation and value to the living mind that contemplates its wonders in order not to catalogue, describe, and analyze, but to define their meaning for man’ (111). In contrast, Shilstone avers that ‘the storm sequence … provides the best opportunity yet for the obliteration of self-consciousness’ (126). Macleod observes that the ‘possibility of bringing about another French revolution with its attendant evils … suggests to Byron that there is a danger in aspiring to be like Rousseau’ (274). For more on the significance of this moment, see Sheila Emerson. Two years after the publication of Childe Harold III, Thomas Brown’s Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect (1818) wrestled with the same issue of whether the mind or the world contains power – which Brown capitalized and defined as synonymous with causation (15). One of Brown’s central goals in the Inquiry was a reconciliation of Reid and Hume similar to the one Byron more tangentially attempts, and although of course the Inquiry appeared too late to influence Harold III, it is nonetheless interesting that Byron was not alone in his explorations of creative power and the possibilities of synthesizing philosophers. It is also possible that the Inquiry had some influence on Don Juan. Here again the third canto mirrors the first canto, with its abrupt announcement in its final stanza that ‘Here is one fytte of Harold’s pilgrimage / Ye who of him may further seek to know, / Shall find some tidings in a future page’ (93), and the second canto’s more gentle but nonetheless arresting reminder that there exists outside of it one ‘who thus in too protracted song, / Hath soothed [his] idlesse with inglorious lays’ (94). Once again, Brown’s Inquiry also wrestles with the question of God’s power in and over the world, managing to reach an intriguing compromise: ‘GOD the Creator and GOD the Providential Governor of the world, are not, necessarily, GOD the immediate producer of every change. In that great system



Notes 201

which we call the Universe all things are what they are in consequence of his primary will; but if they were wholly incapable of affecting any thing, they would, virtually, themselves be as nothing … GOD is the Author of all the changes which take place; for it was in order that they might be the antecedents of the very changes which are consequent on their presence that he formed them [material objects] with the powers or qualities, which those changes are believed by us to exhibit. But it is in this sense only, that GOD is the Author of them; and to suppose that he is himself the real operator, and the only operator of every change, is to suppose, that the universe which he has made exists for no purpose’ (105–09). 29. In fact, Lady Byron did encourage Ada to dissociate herself from Byron, and perhaps even to dislike and fear him actively. As is well known, she kept the family’s Thomas Phillips portrait of Byron in Albanian dress hidden from her daughter behind a green curtain until Ada was 20, and Ada herself recounted to a friend a childhood conversation in which she asked her mother why she did not have a father, only to have Lady Byron respond in a ‘fearfully stern and threatening manner’ that kept her daughter ‘from ever speaking to her again on that subject.’ For more, see Benjamin Woolley. 30. Elledge elegantly demonstrates the poignant complexity of this passage: ‘the canto closes with a decisive if poignant disjunction: the father/poet would dispatch the blessing but does not; the child might but will not (or cannot) reciprocate’ (‘Talking through’ 214). He is not alone in hearing the hollow echo of failure in these stanzas. McGann remarks that in them Byron’s ‘effort to advise his daughter with his own sage counsel is a fine piece of dramatic pathos, for the more he speaks the more evident becomes his own desperate sense of instability, loneliness and loss,’ while Blackstone finds in them a ‘lame and impotent conclusion’ to the poem (McGann, ‘Composition,’ 426–36; Blackstone, 205). For more on this, see also W. Marshall, Structure, 80; Shilstone, 140; and Newey, ‘Authoring,’ 164. 31. For studies that focus on Childe Harold III as an ontological text, see Snyder; and, more recently, Treadwell’s consideration of the canto as a strange species of autobiographical exercise.

Chapter 6 1. In Byron’s Dialectic, Hoagwood offers the critical literature’s most thorough examination of the role skepticism plays in Manfred. He performs scarcely any textual analysis of the play, however (38–41). In his ‘Manfred and Skepticism,’ Stephen Behrendt takes the skeptical nature of the play as a jumpingoff point, but his article discusses only how a consideration of Manfred’s skepticism may be a useful teaching tool. For an examination that discusses this skepticism as part of a postructuralist analysis, see Bruce David Wyse. For discussion of Manfred’s relationship with Romantic scientific discourses, see Mark D. Meritt; and for a consideration of the play’s ethical concerns, see William D. Melaney. 2. See also Stuart Sperry; James Twitchell; and Daniel McVeigh. 3. This synopsis describes the first version of the play; the third act Byron describes is the original one he later abandoned.



202 Notes

4. The article in question was ‘Sketch of a Tradition related by a Monk in Switzerland.’ It appeared in the same issue as John Wilson’s review of Manfred, which made reference to it. 5. Marchand writes that ‘ugly rumors persisted in London’ of Byron’s sexual involvement with Leigh, and tells of an encounter in which a friend of John Cam Hobhouse informed Hobhouse that ‘Lady B[yron] told that B had boasted to her of going to bed to his sister’ (Byron, 613). This particular review, expurgated and with the accusation made allusively, was reprinted in the Gentleman’s Magazine 87.2 (July 1817): 45–47. 6. For more on Manfred as confession, see James Soderholm, ‘Byronic Confession.’ 7. For the modern reader, this situation is further complicated by the fact that the Lord Byron supposedly present in Manfred was itself at least partially a construct designed to titillate and meet expectations, not necessarily to offer actual revelation, a means for Byron to satisfy the audience’s hunger to see the real Lord Byron while in fact keeping his true self hidden and inviolate. See McGann, ‘Byron and the Anonymous Lyric.’ 8. Of course, alternate readings present themselves here. Considering the state of Byron’s reputation in 1817, readers may well have thought he made a regular habit of necromancy, while begging and abjection hardly seemed his style. 9. As Michael Cooke puts it, Manfred’s ‘opening speech – and the first words of the drama – straightway engages us in … doing without’ (65). The result, however, is not a complete absence of truth, but a confusion (descriptive and formal) that increases possible meaning. 10. Clearly my reading of Manfred places it within the paradigm of English romantic irony as Mellor defines it. Mellor writes, however, that ‘even as he denies the absolute validity of his own perceptions and structuring conceptions of the universe … [the romantic ironist] must affirm and celebrate the process of life by creating new images and ideas’ (4–5). I see Manfred as determinedly not doing this, and thus I hesitate to use the term ‘romantic irony’ in this piece. For Mellor’s discussion of Manfred, see Irony, ch. 2. 11. McGann remarks of the pun on ‘awful,’ ‘once Byron makes this stylistic move within and against his play all conventional understandings are hurled into an abyss’ (‘Byron and Wordsworth,’ 184). 12. See, for example, Alan Richardson, Mental, 46; Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, 34; and Martyn Corbett, 22. In contrast, Alex Dick says, ‘the Spirits are infinitely pliable to Manfred’s power’ (111), but the text does not bear him out. 13. See Richardson, Mental, for an illuminating reading of this scene and of Manfred’s encounter with the Phantom. 14. For a differing view, see Soderholm, ‘Byron, Nietzsche, and the Mystery of Forgetting.’ 15. For a different interpretation, see Corbett and Atara Stein, both of whom assert that the Phantom, in Stein’s words, ‘predicts Manfred’s imminent death’ (203; Corbett, 40). 16. As Daniel McVeigh suggests, ‘the possibility always remains latent’ that the world inhabited by characters such as the Chamois Hunter (and later, the Abbot) is more genuine than the one Manfred delineates for his reader. McVeigh goes on to argue that ‘Byron in no sense wishes to turn his hero into a mockery’ (608), but the text repeatedly belies this assertion.



Notes 203

17. For example, Roberts wrote in his review, ‘His [Manfred’s] very love appears to have been of the sort that lies under a natural interdict’ (86), while the Day and New Times, as we have seen, was more certain. Many scholars further assume that Manfred’s relationship with Astarte and her death are linked, but Robert Gleckner trenchantly points out that ‘the causal links’ are ‘difficult to determine’ (216–17). 18. D. L. MacDonald sensibly remarks that ‘it would be absurd to argue that Byron should have treated his incestuous themes more frankly, or that he could have published his tragedy if he had.’ Nonetheless, he suggests, the drama ‘refers to [incest] obsessively, but by aposiopesis’ (37, 33). 19. For a recent consideration of the larger literary resonances of this description, see Elfenbein, ‘Paranoid Poetics.’ For an earlier related discussion, see Joanna Rapf. 20. Hume emphasizes that rhetoric plays a powerful role in fostering belief: ‘’Tis difficult for us to withhold our assent from what is painted out to us in all the colours of eloquence; and the vivacity produc’d by the fancy is in many cases greater than that which arises from custom and experience. We are hurried away by the lively imagination of our author or companion’ (I.iii.§10). 21. For critical guesses as to the causes of Astarte’s death, see Gleckner, 254; Eggenschwiler, 76; Garber, 133; and Samuel Chew, 70. 22. In what is still the best writing on the subject, Bertrand Evans argues that Manfred does not reveal Astarte’s fate, or the precise extent of his involvement in it, because he cannot do so: the revelation would transform Manfred from a hero to a villain in the reader’s eyes: ‘Where illumination of the “past event” would have branded the protagonist a villain … the cloak of mystery which is never stripped from his agony adds to his attractiveness’ (752–73). While I believe that this may well be true, and I certainly believe that Manfred’s statements are not hints to be unraveled but deliberate obfuscations on Byron’s part, I think they serve a dual purpose. 23. This reading has been generally accepted since Byron’s own time, as has the belief that Astarte is meant to stand in for Augusta Leigh, but there are exceptions. Lady Byron, for one, believed that she was the model for Astarte. For discussions of Astarte’s thematic significance, see Alan Richardson, ‘The Danger of Sympathy’; and Loren Glass. 24. See Pamela Boker; and Stein. 25. Elfenbein observes that while Manfred ‘initially takes the guilt upon himself, claiming that he “destroyed her” and “broke her heart,” when he describes the fatal moment, agency passes from him to her as his heart becomes the subject of her gaze’ (Victorians, 36). As his comment makes clear, Manfred remains the central figure in the death in any case; Astarte exists only in reference to him. A number of scholars have remarked on her passivity. See, for example, Stein, 190; and Boker, 18. 26. Peter Manning argues that this is precisely what has happened to Manfred: ‘children often interpret the death of a parent as retribution for some imagined sin of their own, and so it is that Manfred assumes the responsibility for Astarte’s death’ (Byron and His Fictions, 81). 27. Byron’s most famous use of the phrase ‘mental theatre’ occurs in an 1821 letter to John Murray: ‘I want to make a regular English drama—no matter for the Stage or not—which is not my object—but a mental theatre.’ The



204 Notes

28.

29.

30.

31.

phrase is frequently taken to indicate what Byron wishes to be the subject of his dramas (anatomizations of the minds of his protagonists), but a comment in a letter to Lady Byron a few weeks later makes it clear that this is not at all what he meant: ‘I am trying an experiment—which is to introduce into our language—the regular tragedy—without regard to the Stage— which will not admit of it—but merely to the mental theatre of the reader’ (BLJ 8: 186–87, 210). What Byron means by ‘mental theatre,’ then, is the stage on which his dramas will be played out: the reader’s mind. There is continuing debate as to whether or not Byron, despite his disavowals, intended his plays to be performed. In ‘Byron’s Stage Fright,’ David Erdman offers the most complete argument that he did so intend, but he has been more than ably countered by Margaret J. Howell. In fact, stagings of Manfred in the years after Byron’s death palpably demonstrate how utterly unsuited it is to any but the mental theatre. An 1834 production by Alfred Bunn at Drury Lane (which butchered the text in order to render it performable) drew down the calumny of nearly all critics; the reviewer of the Literary Gazette declared that he had ‘never seen such a waste of gauze,’ and singled out for particular contempt some ‘little ginger-bread things behind the Principle of Evil’ in Manfred’s confrontation with Arimanes. Henry Crabb Robinson attended the first night and wrote in his diary, ‘There must be some merit in this poem since Goethe admired it—but as drama nothing could be worse … It is a sort of Don Juan without wit or fun or character … The performance of such a thing proves something like the extinction of drama as such.’ The Morning Chronicle’s reviewer, for his part, drew attention to the folly of producing onstage ‘fancies which the imagination of the reader may embody,’ but which on the stage became ‘contemptible or ludicrous.’ Fortunately, Bunn received his karmic come-uppance when he was beaten up by William Macready (alas, in an unrelated dispute) some while later. Unfortunately, dismal productions of Manfred were mounted at least twice more in the nineteenth century. See Howell, 99–120, for a full account. For an account of parodies of Manfred and their uses, see Laura Tunbridge. In this way, it also chimes with Locke, who believes that ‘[God] has given [men] a mind that can reason, without being instructed in methods of syllogizing; the understanding is not taught to reason by these rules; it has a native faculty to perceive the coherence or incoherence of its ideas, and can range them right, without any such perplexing repetitions … Tell a country gentlewoman that the wind is southwest, and the weather lowering, and like to rain, and she will easily understand that it is not safe for her to go abroad thin clad in such a day, after a fever; she clearly sees the probable connection of all these … without tying them together in those artificial and cumbersome fetters of several syllogisms, that clog and hinder the mind, which proceeds from one part to another quicker and clearer without them …’ (IV.xvii.§4). In a related statement that anticipates my argument, McGann asserts that rather than ‘proposing as the rule of art a “willing suspension of disbelief,”’ in Manfred, ‘Byron offers a rule founded in the deliberate installation of disbelief’ (‘Byron and Wordsworth,’ 198). Daniel P. Watkins remarks on the political valances of this position, observing that Byron ‘believed that social amelioration would be possible only when existing values assumed to be natural and universal were understood



Notes 205

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

as being historically and socially determined, serving specific ends that were not necessarily in the best interest of most people’ (Materialist Critique, 141). See also Marjean Purinton. In I.iii.§8, Hume does give something that might be a species of answer to the questions, but it is very hard to tell if it is, in fact, an answer, or just a recasting of ‘belief’: ‘’Tis not solely in poetry and music we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. When I am convinc’d of any principle, ’tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.’ As can be imagined, the literature on Hume and belief is vast; some of the most helpful studies with respect to the definition of belief and its position with relation to feeling, are Don Garrett; William Edward Morris; Jack C. Lyons; and Colin Howson. McGann gestures toward this conclusion when he writes that Manfred ‘can only succeed by attacking itself, satirizing and exposing itself to itself,’ in ‘Byron and Wordsworth,’ 195. See also Giorgio Melchiori. Byron was always an extraordinary swift and prolific writer, and he frequently wrote his works ‘A over B,’ beginning one before finishing the next. Even by his own standards, however, in 1816 and 1817 he seems to have written at white heat: in addition to Childe Harold III, Prisoner, ‘Darkness,’ ‘Prometheus,’ the first acts of Manfred, and numerous smaller poems in 1816, in 1817 he produced The Lament of Tasso, Childe Harold IV, Beppo, and completed Manfred twice, rewriting Act III – all the while indulging in what T. G. Steffan calls ‘casual affairs with many lower-class women’ (Don Juan, xxxix–xl). For more on the possible causes of this behavior, poetical and sexual, see Kay Redfield Jamison, ch. 5. William Gifford and John Murray cut these last two lines from the first published version of Prisoner. McGann restores them in the Complete Works. While I cannot agree with Terence Hoagwood that the couplet ‘was deleted by Murray, to Byron’s annoyance,’ since in the only letter in which he mentions the situation Byron seems at the most irritated but accepting (‘I could not attribute any but a good motive to Mr. G or yourself in such omission—but as our politics are so very opposite—we should differ as to the passages—however if it is only a note or notes—and a line or so—it cannot signify’), I also cannot agree with Leslie Marchand that the work was ‘in fact improved by the omission.’ See Hoagwood, Dialectic, 59, and BLJ 5: 169. The most common reading of The Prisoner of Chillon is as a poem that delineates its protagonist’s progressive slide into mental degradation. See, for example, Robert Gleckner; Vincent Newey, ‘Byron’s “Prisoner of Chillon”’; Andrea K. Henderson; and Ian Dennis. Respectfully, I disagree. I would argue that Prisoner is not a text which charts mental denigration or destruction, but one in which Byron represents the growth of an autonomously creative mind. I suggest that, as Byron presents it, the Prisoner’s progressive refiguration of his surroundings and circumstances can be read not simply as a delusion. It can and should also be understood as a demonstration of cognitive independence, of the triumph of the individual mind over a world and a situation that seem simply to be: im-malleable givens. I argue that what Byron presents to his audience is a man who, through the power of his own cognition, has effected a fundamental reorganization and redefinition of his self and situation. The



206 Notes

Notes 207 Prisoner has restructured his world to suit his needs, and Byron invites the reader to admire, not condemn, this action. For further discussions of The Prisoner, see Paul G. Trueblood; W. Marshall, Structure, 82–96; Andrew Rutherford; and more recently, Garber.

1. See, for example, Zachary Leader; Terence Hoagwood, Byron’s Dialectic; Peter Manning, ‘Don Juan and the Revisionary Self’; Andrew Cooper; Anne Mellor; David Leigh; and Michael Cooke. For a consideration of it as a postmodern text, see Jane Stabler ‘Byron, Postmodernism, and Intertextuality.’ For more general discussions of Juan, see William Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism; Bernard Beatty, Byron’s Don Juan; M. K. Joseph; and George M. Ridenour, cum multis aliis. 2. The difficulty with discussing Don Juan is that one must always bear in mind that the poem is Byron’s final work only because he died while writing it, not necessarily because he meant it to be so. Had he managed to survive the leeches of Greece, Byron might have gone on to write many more works. Moreover, those works might well have taken his philosophical explorations down new and different paths. In this chapter, I try very hard not to position Juan as Byron’s culmination or statement of some final, completed, perfect philosophy. Rather, I view it as Byron’s demonstration of the philosophy he had by that time worked out – what he might have worked out in the future one cannot know. 3. The Investigator, for example, thundered that ‘Don Juan, the hero of his lordship’s tale, is as complete a rake, as entire a sensualist, as the world ever saw, or the prurient imagination of the most abandoned writer ever formed, or could form, in its wildest fits’ (357). The Literary Chronicle asserted that ‘The story of Don Juan, or the Libertine, is one with which all classes, in all countries, are familiar,’ before going on to despair at the complete depravity not just of Juan but of his entire family: ‘The author of this poem has not been satisfied with making Don Juan only a libertine, but he has assigned the same character to his father, and has not spoken very respectfully of the mother’ (129). The Gentleman’s Magazine, for its part, suggested that the ‘jumble’ of the poem, ‘just as disgusting as fitting up a charnel house like Vauxhall … may be accounted for … by its being in the Spanish taste’ (49–50). 4. See also McGann, ‘The Book of Byron and the Book of a World,’ 287. 5. For more on Byron’s reasons for selecting this pronunciation, see Graham. 6. ‘But I hate things all fiction & therefore the Merchant & Othello––have no great associations to me—but Pierre has—and there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric–and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.—’ (Byron to John Murray, BLJ 5: 203). There is also Juan’s question and answer, ‘And after all, what is a lie? ’Tis but / The truth in masquerade’ (XI.37). 7. For more on the use and significance of the couplets, see Jerome McGann, DJiC, 96. 8. William Flesch in fact argues that ‘the joke itself has already been told with the shocking “pukes in”’ (203), and the phrase may well get a nervous



Chapter 7

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

titter. Many of the linguistic manipulations I discuss here are also considered by Flesch, although he often reaches quite different conclusions. See also John Cunningham for more on these games. Haslett asserts that present-day readers of Don Juan miss out on a considerable amount of the sexual humor ‘either because the sexual innuendo is no longer current, or because they do not realize how the most apparently “innocent” of statements was interpreted … by the contemporary reader’ (77). While this is certainly true, many jokes remain available to the discerning contemporary reader. Jonathan Gross also spots this pun (139) and makes the case for many others, heterosexual and homosexual. Indeed, Juan is littered with references to homosexuality, both heavily and barely coded. Louis Crompton thoroughly considers the homosexual subtexts of Don Juan (see particularly chs. 6–8); see also Dyer. For other discussions of Don Juan’s puns, jokes, and linguistic subversions, see, among many others, Ridenour, chs. 1 and 5 particularly; DJiC, chs. 5 and 6; and Manning, ‘Don Juan and the Revisionary Self.’ Cochran offers a reading of the significance of Juan’s typographical maneuvers in ‘Byron and the Politics of Editing.’ For an excellent consideration of the importance of language to philosophy, see Hacking. For considerations of Locke and language, see among many Laurence Nee; Gabriele Bernhard Jackson; Walter Ott; Hannah Dawson; and Michael Losonsky. As L. E. Marshall points out, Byron attributed the phrase ‘words are things’ to Mirabeau in a letter to Samuel Rogers (BLJ 4: 74), but the phrase does not appear in Mirabeau. Locke’s formulation appears, as I have said, in Human Understanding, which Byron owned (Nicholson, Complete Miscellaneous Prose, 237). There may be another pun here, too, for Byron’s image of ink connects it to semen, which in a different way ‘makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.’ This connection is strengthened by Byron’s reflection in his Detached Thoughts, ‘What a strange thing is the propagation of life! A bubble of seed which may be spilt in a whore’s lap, or in the orgasm of a voluptuous dream, might (for aught we know) have formed a Caesar or a Bonaparte’ (BLJ 9: 47). Edmond Hoyle’s A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742) was considered the definitive authority on the rules of the game in Byron’s time. Interestingly for Don Juan, the DNB describes Hoyle as ‘a careless editor, but possessed [of] a vigorous and original writing style.’ The force of this remark is underlined both by its reference to Shakespeare’s arch-dissembler Iago and by the specific remark of Iago’s to which he alludes: ‘Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; / ’Twas mine, ’tis his’ (3.3.157–58). For more on Byron’s uses of Othello, see Stabler, Byron, Poetics, 109–21; and Anne Barton. This extract appears in the third edition of the Essay. Jane Stabler writes that ‘Byron’s world of things is inextricably bound up with the work of art and with questions of readerly and writerly responsibility towards those things. Don Juan dances along an ever-varying line, but it has its pools of commitment’ (‘Postmodernism,’ 281). As this chapter will show, I agree with both these statements, although I find different pools of commitment than Stabler.



208 Notes

19. See also Kroeber, 152. 20. Byron offered no help with his arch suggestion in a note that ‘The advance of science and of language has rendered it unnecessary to translate the above good and true English … If there be any Gemman so ignorant as to require a traduction, I refer him to my old friend and corporeal pastor and master, John Jackson, Esq, Professor of Pugilism’ (CPW 5: 747). As Dyer points out, this annotation excludes more readers than it includes, implying as it does that the dialect is accessible only to ‘the privileged few … at Jackson’s studio’ (564). 21. Almost immediately after Murray began publishing Don Juan, there appeared a flood of cheap pirated versions that made it accessible to lower-class readers. When John Hunt took over publication with Canto VI, he issued a ‘common edition’ of the poem, priced at one shilling and specifically intended for those who had previously bought pirated editions. By the time Byron wrote Canto XI, then, he had – and was aware he had – a sizeable lower-class readership. For an examination of the progressive dissemination of the poem, see St. Clair, Reading Nation, ch. 16. Haslett discusses Don Juan’s female readers in her fourth chapter. 22. For more on this, see Dyer, 564. 23. Fred Parker offers a fascinating consideration of Hume’s own use of tone and style as a means of enacting his skepticism and showing how to live in the face of skepticism (150–54). 24. For discussions of Juan’s passivity, see W. Marshall, Structure, 176; Marchand, ‘Narrator,’ 37; Leader, 101; Michasiw, 39. On the other hand, Charles LaChance remarks, ‘despite his notorious inertia … Juan at times is brilliantly heroic’ (281). 25. Kim Ian Michasiw recognizes the importance of this incident for the poem as a whole when he writes that ‘[t]hroughout his travels, Juan has been made, remade, and even “maid”’ (39). For more on the significance of Juan’s crossdressing, see Susan Wolfson; Alan Richardson, ‘Escape from the Seraglio’; and Malcolm Kelsall, ‘Byron and the Women of the Harem.’ 26. In fact, the text repeats this structure at a later, military, moment, when John Johnson urges Juan to abandon Leila for plunder in Canto VIII, only to be rebuffed: ‘Juan answered, “Look / Upon this child – I saved her – must not leave / Her life to chance.”’ Again, however, Juan’s stance is not quite so firm as it at first appears: ‘“…but point me out some nook / Of safety, where she less may shrink and grieve, / And I am with you”’ (99). At this moment Juan is not pliable; he will not be moved. But once Leila is safely stashed and out of his hands, he does ‘march on through thunder’ (100), so he is not strictly speaking obdurate, either. Here, perhaps, is a moment that suggests the necessary pliability of pliability – the truly pliable are sometimes (although not fully) obdurate. Juan is not a brute, but he is not fixed as a fully noble protector, either. He is both, and either, and neither. 27. See Rutherford, Critical Study, 160–65; and Leader, 110–11, for two different explanations of this linking. 28. Juan thus bears out Peter Graham’s assertion that the negative consequences of ‘insularity in all its protean shapes’ form a central theme in Don Juan (44), for he embodies the polar opposite of insularity. 29. The text does bring home the thoroughness of this change, and the way in which it remains unnoticed, in Canto X, with the reappearance of Juan’s



Notes 209

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

Spanish relatives. This disconcerting reminder of Juan’s past life shows how thoroughly he has become someone else – who are these people? For more on Hume and the question of identity, see Jane L. McIntyre; Corliss Swain; Raymond Martin and Jon Barresi; and J. K. McDonough, among others. For more on this, see Curtis, ‘Digression.’ Mellor argues that by ‘giving as much weight to the digressions as to the plot, Byron has created a poem in which two competing ontological systems stand tensely side by side’ (59). But the word ‘tensely’ does not feel quite right here, for Byron’s two ontological systems seem not to chafe each other but rather to rub along quite happily. Bernard Beatty’s remark that ‘the poem thinks or, at any rate, is a paradigm of thinking’ (Don Juan 83) is, because it removes the tension, a more accurate representation of the poem. Mellor argues that Don Juan in fact embodies such irony, as the premier text of English romantic irony. My discussion of the poem’s use of irony is indebted to her reading. See Mellor, 43–76. For other authors’ identification and readings of Juan’s skepticism, see Leader, 263; Cooke, 144; Peter Manning, ‘Don Juan and Byron’s Imperceptiveness to the English Word’; and Jerome McGann, ‘Lord Byron’s Twin Opposites of Truth’; as well as Leigh and Cooper. McGann foreshadows this conclusion in the sentence before the one quoted above: ‘The poem will allow us to formulate not an idea about itself but only ideas about what it is saying at any particular moment’ (112). Deborah Forbes, for example, has suggested that ‘the narrator of Don Juan needs the moral censorship of his reader in order to give his own voice definition’ (145). For more on this see, among others, Stabler, ‘Postmodernism’; as well as Catherine Addison; Charles Eric Reeves; and Timothy J. Wandling. Manning writes that ‘Byron renounces the goal of a fictitious (and factitious) unity, of a designed poem whose meaning would be thoroughly determinate … In so doing, he reinstates the power of language to initiate an endless play of meanings’ (‘Revisionary,’ 223–34). See also McGann, ‘Twin Opposites’ and DJiC, 109–38; as well as Joseph; and Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 129–31. There has been much critical discussion of how Byron intended Juan to end. Scholars usually point to the outline he offered Murray in 1821 when he had finished Canto V: ‘I meant to take him the tour of Europe … and to make him finish as Anacharsis Cloots—in the French revolution … But I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell—or in an unhappy marriage’ (BLJ 8: 78). One notes here, however, the use of the past tense, as well as Byron’s remark in the same passage that ‘To how many cantos this may extend—I know not—not whether (even if I live) I shall complete it.’ In 1823 Byron promised Douglas Kinnaird that ‘all that remonstrance will ever obtain from me will be Canto on Canto as long as I can write’; since remonstrance was coming thick and fast, one can imagine the cantos continuing the same. In 1819 he promised Murray 50 cantos; in 1823 he promised Kinnaird 100 (BLJ 6: 135, 105; 8: 150). However, the circumstances and nature of Byron’s death mean that one can never have a last statement of his on any subject, merely a statement that happens to be last. Bearing this in mind, it is impossible to know how the poem might have ended, or if it would have ended at all.



210 Notes

39. See Peter Cochran, ‘Mary Shelley’s Fair Copying.’ Cochran rightly points out that the author/copyist relationship between Shelley and Byron was often a good deal more contentious than this, and it does not support the notion of an author who free-handedly gave control of his work to his (copying) reader. I do not mean to suggest that Byron flung away his power over the material creation of his poem, merely that there is evidence outside the text to suggest he believed in the reader’s control of meaning. Of course, this had been true from quite early in his career, when he began allowing William Gifford and Murray to determine the printing, and even the wording, of some poems. See also CPW 5: xxii; and Jerome McGann, A Critique, 34–51. 40. McGann points out that the stanzas ‘ridicule … Berkeley’s pure idealism’ (Fiery Dust, 298). See also Curtis, ‘The Mystery of Distance,’ which asserts that Byron ‘makes poetry by way of Berkeley’s idealist philosophy … [his] esse est percipi’ (60). 41. See Mellor, 44, on Juan’s privileging of the corporeal. 42. See Fiona MacCarthy, 374–95. Michael Robertson has argued for a view of the Byron who writes the poem as a ‘Whig aristocrat,’ suggesting that this is the key to its freedom and encouragement of freedoms: ‘Understanding Byron’s use of Whig conduct, one begins to appreciate how Don Juan is part of a tradition of behavior and not simply the unique effusion of one man … Byron was drawing on a social tradition rich in enthusiasm and contradiction’ (720). For other readings of Juan as a political poem see, among many others, Michael Foot; Malcom Kelsall, Byron’s Politics; David Walker; and Jack D’Amico. 43. Kurt Heinzelman has asserted that by the time he wrote Juan, Byron was ‘acutely aware that “Byron” [was] a political thing’ (375), while Kelsall reminds the reader that the poetic often is the political in the poem: ‘Lord Henry Amundeville’s country-house gathering … is not just a “party” but is party political’ (Byron’s Politics, 52). 44. See for example Robert Gleckner; and, less convincingly, LaChance. 45. As Mellor asserts, in Don Juan things ‘fall, always and again, but they fall to rise again – in a never-ending phoenix motion that is the pain and glory of the human condition’ (64). Mole similarly captures the optimism of the poem in his remark that ‘for the narrator, every fall from grace can become an occasion for a new reformation’ (Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 141).

Reckoning Up 1. Fred Parker suggests that Hume’s style in the Treatise is an answer to the question ‘How is one to reconcile living “like other people in the common affairs of life” with the knowledge that the security which accompanies such living is, from the perspective of strict reason, a grotesque illusion […]? … Such a question cannot be answered with a proposition or an argument, but only with a manner: see, this is how I do it. As reason breaks down, nothing is left to Hume … but his subjectivity, so that the only option left him is to express and record … his own personal and shifting “humour” or inclination, and helplessly to follow where this leads’ (150–54). Perhaps in this way, too, Hume influenced the style of Don Juan.



Notes 211

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Addison, Joseph, 35 Alison, Archibald, 36 Bayle, Pierre, 29 Beattie, James, 17, 24, 25–6, 30 On Truth, 20–1, 55, 125, 136, 167 Beckford, William, 48 Behrendt, Stephen C., 9–10 belief, see knowledge Berkeley, George, 15–16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 50, 53, 55, 112, 133, 148, 188, 189, 193 and atheism, 16 Byron’s extension of, 16, 45, 62, 78, 79, 141, 146 Immaterialism, 14, 16, 17, 30, 40, 176 and skepticism, 16, 17 on words, 28, 58, 97, 100, 162 works: New Theory of Vision, 15, 28, 40–1, 54 Principles of Human Knowledge, 15, 17, 45, 54, 57–8, 61–2, 77, 97, 100–1, 130, 141, 147, 175–7 Theory of Vision Vindicated, 58 Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 15, 126 Bermingham, Anne, 36, 40 Blackstone, Bernard, 9 Bormann, Dennis R., 20 Bostetter, Edward E., 144 Boswell, James, 22 Bowie, David, 107 Brookes, Derek R., 19 Brown, Thomas, 20, 25, 177, 201 Budge, Gavin, 29 Byron, George Gordon, Lord Eastern Tales, 50, 57, 78, 80, 81–102, 148, 163 incest, 10, 133–4, 141, 142 intellect, 1, 4, 5 marriage, 102, 103, 154

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226



Index

Index 227 Ellis, George, 86 Enlightenment philosophy British, 13–31, 52, 53, 56, 57, 81, 150 European, 29 Scottish, 19, 26, 29

Hunt, John, 178 Hunt, Leigh, 10, 81

Furst, Lillian, 5, 6

Jeffrey, Francis, 26, 27, 45, 48, 141, 184

Galperin, William, 49 Garber, Frederick, 5–6 Gibbon, Edward, 36, 105, 123, 125 Gilpin, William, 36

Kames, Henry Home, 36 Kelsall, Malcolm, 3–4 Kernan, Alvin, 185 knowledge absence of, 78, 81, 84, 87 and belief, 2, 19, 150 certainty, 68–9, 81, 87, 90, 91, 152, 171 choice and cognitive freedom, 2, 12, 76–7, 78, 82, 92, 98–9, 101, 108–9, 111, 115, 118, 121, 123, 124, 125–6, 131, 136, 138, 145, 147–9, 151, 153, 155, 168, 170, 172, 173–4, 175, 177–8, 180, 181, 182–3 complexity of, 69–70, 73–4, 80, 92, 138, 151, 170, 173 and confusion, 48, 53, 54, 101 impossibility of, 8, 79, 80, 131, 138, 145 instability, 44–6, 92, 131, 155, 156, 172, 173, 180 knowledge-claims, 2, 8, 76–7, 78, 80, 81, 90, 91, 99, 101, 103, 106, 114, 115, 116, 126, 130, 131–55, 174, 180 and language, 58–62, 73 and meaning, 105, 107, 108–11, 112, 114, 117, 123, 130, 137, 173–4, 175 moral, 36 objective, 2, 14 possibility of, 13, 30 systems, 10–11 uncertainty, 11, 48, 50, 57, 78, 79, 87, 91, 132, 133, 151, 152, 156, 171 and vision, 33–41, 44–6, 54, 58, 61–2 see also Byron; Enlightenment; skepticism



Haslett, Moyra, 157 Hemingway, Andrew, 36 Hendricks, Vincent, 2 Herman, David, 60 Hoagwood, Terence, 1, 6–7, 8, 11, 202, 206 Hobhouse, John Cam, 8 Hodgson, Francis, 13, 32, 37 Hume, David, 6, 16, 17–18, 19, 25, 26, 55, 81, 97, 125, 133, 168, 177, 187, 188, 204, 206 account of knowledge, 17–18 atheism, 22 backgammon, playing of, 183 Byron’s direct engagement with, 13, 14 Byron’s extension of, 18, 133, 141, 142, 146, 166 deathbed harassment by James Boswell, 189 negative opinions about, by other philosophers, 20–2 negative opinions about, by readers, 22–4 skepticism, 16, 18, 21, 24, 30, 133, 136, 179, 184 on words, 28 works Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 17, 24, 153 Treatise Concerning Human Nature, 17, 68–9, 83–4, 91–5, 135, 147–51, 100, 153, 158, 166–7, 171–2, 181, 183, 211

Immaterialism, 25, 146; see also Berkeley irony, 4, 5–6, 39, 137, 172–3

228 Index

Mackenzie, Henry, 36 Mackintosh, James, 25 Marchand, Leslie A., 133 Margolin, Uri, 86 Marjarum, Edward, 4 Marshall, William H., 69 Martin, Phillip, 9 Mason, Nicholas A., 36 McGann, Jerome J., 105, 116–17, 120, 171, 173, 186, 202, 205, 208, 210, 211 Mellor, Anne, 4–5, 6, 132, 203, 210, 211 Mole, Tom, 7, 43 Montaigne, Michel de, 29 Moore, Thomas, 10, 13, 26, 184 Murray, John, 36–7, 131, 132, 133, 178, 184 Newey, Vincent, 111

Orientalism, 79–80 Owenson, Sydney, 44, 45 Priestley, Joseph, 25 Rawes, Alan, 6 Reid, Thomas, 16, 20, 21, 22, 26, 188, 189, 201 Byron’s extension of, 177 An Inquiry into the Human Mind…, 18–19, 25, 30, 57–8, 95, 177 on words, 28–9 Reiman, Donald, 5, 6 reviewers’ responses to Byron’s works Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II, 41, 45, 47–8 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, 126, 128 Don Juan, 184, 207 The Giaour, 66 Lara, 81, 86, 90–1 Manfred, 131–2, 133, 135–6 Richardson, Alan, 132 Roberts, William, 42, 135 Robinson, Roger, 20, 25–6 Romanticism, 1, 9–10, 35, 73 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 29, 103, 105, 122–3 Rutherford, Andrew, 36 Schlegel, Wilhelm von, 29 Seed, David, 63, 70 Shears, Jonathan, 84 Shelley, Mary, 175 Shilstone, Frederick W., 46, 114 skepticism, 2, 4, 5, 6, 17–18, 25, 29, 125, 177, 179, 183 definition of, 7–8, 18 as form of common sense, 95 global, 7–8 in Childe Harold I and II, 55–6, 57, 58, 69 in Childe Harold III, 103–30 in Don Juan, 167–8, 179, 183 in The Giaour, 57–80, 83, 92, 99



language difficulty of, 162, 165 and meaning, 29, 105, 107 as philosophical device, in Byron, 95–7, 159–60, 165 as philosophical subject, 28–9, 161 power of, 161–2, 166 slipperiness of, 58, 85, 97 see also knowledge Larpent, Anna, 35 Leask, Nigel, 44 Leigh, Augusta, 129, 133, 134 Lewis, Matthew, 90–1 life as isolated and miserable, realization of, 182–4 possible antidote, 183–5 Locke, John, 14–15, 17, 18, 23, 25, 53, 61, 62, 95, 187, 205, 208 Byron’s extension of, 62, 77, 78, 79, 146 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 14, 19, 30, 37, 38, 40, 50, 57, 60, 68, 71, 73, 74 on words, 28, 29, 60, 62, 161–2, 208 Lockridge, Laurence, 2, 8

Index 229 in Lara, 83–4, 91, 92, 94–5, 97, 99–100, 101 in Manfred, 131–55 see also knowledge Snyder, Robert Lance, 18 Southey, Robert, 173 Sperry, Stuart, 154 St. Clair, William, 9–10 Stoppard, Tom, 11–12 Strawson, Galen, 25

Voltaire, 14, 103, 105, 123, 125 Watkins, Daniel, 10–11, 98 Wilson, John, 135 Wood, Gillen D’Arcy, 36 words as things, 29, 127, 161 not as things, 161–2 see also language Wordsworth, William, 29


Towsey, Mark R. M., 24 travel writing, 32–3, 44–5

Trelawny, Edward, 56 Tuveson, Ernest Lee, 15


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