Reading Byron: Poems - Life - Politics 1800854625, 9781800854628

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Notes on Author and Contributors
Author’s Foreword
Introduction • Jerome McGann
PART I: POEMS
Reading Byron’s Poems
1 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Types of History
2 Lara: Acts of Will
3 Understanding Manfred: The Sense of an Ending
4 Cain: One Drama, Two Orthodoxies
5 Empty Spaces in Don Juan: A Reading of the Norman Abbey Cantos
PART II: LIFE
Reading Byron’s Life
6 At Albany
7 At Seaham
8 From Venice to Ravenna
PART III: POLITICS
Reading Byron’s Politics
9 Liberty and Licence
10 The Paradoxes of Nationalism
11 Byron as Political Icon
Conversations with Gavin Hopps
Bernard Beatty: A Bibliography
Acknowledgements
General Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

R e a di ng By ron

LI V ER POOL ENGLISH TE X TS A ND ST UDIE S 92

READING BYRON Poems – Life – Politics

BERNARD BEATTY introduced by Jerome McGann edited by David Woodhouse and concluded in conversation with Gavin Hopps

Reading Byron

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2022 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2022 Liverpool University Press Bernard Beatty, Gavin Hopps, Jerome McGann and David Woodhouse have asserted the right to be identified as the authors and editors of this book in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-80085-462-8 eISBN 978-1-80085-529-8 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

in memory of Vincent Newey 1943–2020

Contents

contents List of Illustrations ix Abbreviations xi Notes on Author and Contributors xiii Author’s Foreword xv Introduction by Jerome McGann

1

PART I: POEMS Reading Byron’s Poems

10

1 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Types of History

17

2 Lara: Acts of Will

37

3 Understanding Manfred: The Sense of an Ending

59

4 Cain: One Drama, Two Orthodoxies

85

5 Empty Spaces in Don Juan: A Reading of the Norman Abbey Cantos

115

PART II: LIFE Reading Byron’s Life

138

6 At Albany

141

7 At Seaham

153

8 From Venice to Ravenna

169 vii

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PART III: POLITICS Reading Byron’s Politics

184

9 Liberty and Licence

187

10 The Paradoxes of Nationalism

197

11 Byron as Political Icon

207

Conversations with Gavin Hopps

221

Bernard Beatty: A Bibliography

241

Acknowledgements 249 General Bibliography 251 Index

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Illustrations Illustrations 1. Albany in 1830 after a drawing by Thomas H. Shepherd. Byron’s rooms were on the ground floor at the back of the house. 140 2. Seaham Hall in the mid-nineteenth century.

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3. Palazzo Guiccioli, Ravenna. Byron’s study (in which he wrote Cain) is on the second floor immediately to the right of the balcony.

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Abbreviations Abbreviations BCH

Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). BLJ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1974–94). CHP Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (all references are to Canto and stanza unless otherwise stated). CMP Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). CPW Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93). CVA Lord Byron’s Cain: Twelve Essays and a Text with Variants and Annotations, ed. Truman Guy Steffan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). DJ Byron’s Don Juan (all references are to Canto and stanza unless otherwise stated). HVSV His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell Jr (New York: Macmillan, 1954). PL Paradise Lost (all references are to Book and line number using the text in The Complete Poems of John Milton, ed. B.A. Wright [London: Dent, new edition 1980]). All references to Byron’s poems other than CHP and DJ use the line numbers of CPW unless otherwise stated (for some shorter or interpolated poems, a page reference is provided for ease of location). References to the Bible are to the Authorized King James Version. Quotations (and line numberings) are taken from the following editions: The Poetry of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978); The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (one-volume Twickenham edition, xi

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1963 [London: Methuen Reprint, 1989]); The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974); Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton: 1977); The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969).

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Notes on Author and Contributors Notes on Author and Contributors BERNARD BEATTY was born in Chester in 1938. He was educated there at the King’s School, then by the Dominican Order and subsequently at the University of Birmingham, where he wrote a thesis on Byron supervised by Terence Spencer. Bernard taught in the School of English at Liverpool University from 1964 to 2005; he remains a Senior Fellow at Liverpool and Associate Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Byron’s Don Juan (1985, reissued 2017) and Byron’s Don Juan and Other Poems (1987). He has co-edited five collections of essays on Byron and written on Romanticism, the Scriptures and aspects of literary theory, as well as on individual authors ranging from Dryden to Wilde. Bernard is a vice president of the Byron Society and the Newstead Abbey Byron Society, and edited The Byron Journal from 1988 to 2005. He has lectured on Byron in the United States, Canada, Japan and most major European countries. Twice winner of the Elma Dangerfield Prize for Book of the Year on Byron, Bernard was awarded the Peter Cochran Award for Lifetime Achievement in Byron Studies in 2018. He is married, plays the organ and piano, and was a choirmaster for many years. GAVIN HOPPS is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Theology at the University of St Andrews. His publications include a collection of essays in honour of Bernard Beatty, titled Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, co-edited with Jane Stabler (2006); Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart (2009); Byron’s Ghosts: The Spectral, the Spiritual and the Supernatural (2013); and The Extravagance of Music (2018), co-authored with David Brown. He is currently working with Jane Stabler on the new Longman edition of the complete poetical works of Lord Byron, and is completing a monograph entitled Romantic Enchantment: Fantasy, Theology and Affect. xiii

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JEROME McGANN is University Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia. He edited the complete poetical works of Lord Byron for the Clarendon Press (1980–93) and his monographs include Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (1969); Don Juan in Context (1976); and Byron and Romanticism (2002). Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Documents of American Settlement and Byron and the Poetics of Adversity were published in 2022 by the University of Chicago Press and Cambridge University Press respectively. Jerome’s collection of nonsense parodies, Children’s Ours of a Certain Age, was privately printed in 2020 with illustrations by Stephen Margulies. DAVID WOODHOUSE is Treasurer of the Byron Society. His 1996 PhD was titled Shades of Pope: Byron’s Development as a Satirist and his more recent literary criticism can be found in The Byron Journal, Prospettive su Byron and The Hazlitt Review. With John Leigh, David co-wrote Football Lexicon (2004), described by Adam Hurrey as ‘the Bible of football vernacular’. His latest monograph, Who Only Cricket Know: Hutton’s Men in the West Indies 1953/54 (2021), has won Book of the Year Awards from The Cricket Society/MCC, The Sunday Times and Wisden.

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Author’s Foreword Author’s Foreword This book has both accidental origin and serious purpose. Its accidental origin was a conversation in Kyiv en route to a Byron conference in Armenia, when it was suggested that I might collect in one place some of the 50 or so articles I have written about Byron over the last 50 or so years. The tiny seed thus planted turned into the mustard tree proposed in the book’s title. For the Poems section, I have written five new essays. For the Life section, I am publishing two lectures for the first time, along with a slightly revised Byron Journal essay. The Politics section refashions three previously published pieces but the larger part of the book, and the dialogue with Gavin Hopps that rounds it off, is new. The three-fold structure Poems – Life – Politics implies comprehensiveness. My essays certainly try to represent Byron’s own comprehensiveness, but they do not aim to be comprehensive in themselves. Nor do they aim for a consistent tone, in that some come replete with scholarly apparatus and some are lighter, written to the voice as public lectures with few digressive footnotes. These pieces could have been wholly rewritten so that all the essays had much the same academic credentials and ambience but I did not want to do that apart from retouching here and there. I must ask the reader to adjust, as in reading Byron, though on less skilfully managed a scale, to different kinds of attention, register and concern. That said, Byron’s Poems, Life and Politics manifestly ‘hang together’ in the sense that D.H. Lawrence uses the expression in his Fantasia. The serious purpose of Reading Byron is to take Byron seriously and root that seriousness in actually reading him rather than reading about him. The popular imagination often holds a picture of Byron as Rupert Everett with a limp, the fact of his being a poet just part of the pageant. The modern academy, despite during my lifetime developing more careful interest in his poems, still places them as some kind of appendage to the literature of his period, whereas they were the most read during that period and are worth reading in any age. xv

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There is no single way of reading Byron, though there are wrong ways. To read him is to be prepared to open both mind and heart. That is the proper responsibility of the reader. The proper responsibility of the writer is to let Byron emerge from the shadow of ‘Byron’.

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Introduction Jerome McGann Introduction What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with   the price Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children. William Blake, The Four Zoas, Night the Second Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing. Basil Bunting, Briggflatts

Bernard Beatty has been one of our time’s most important readers of Byron’s poetry for a simple but crucial reason: his clear grasp of the intellectual power of the verse. What Bernard writes of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – that it is ‘recognizably addressed to our understanding’ – applies to all the work, even to those poems – English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, for instance – where Byron’s own understanding, as he let us know, was muddled. ‘Recognizably’ is the keyword. The enlightenment Byron wants for himself he wants for us: ‘I wish men to be free | As much from mobs as kings—from you as me’ (DJ IX, 25). Beyond that controlling judgement, Bernard reads Byron as Shelley and Goethe read him, though his lucid prose rarely permits itself their stylistic flights. ‘I never saw the true poetical power greater in any man than in him’, Goethe told Eckermann (at length and in multiple ways). He had to a surpassing degree ‘Erfindung und Geist’, ‘inventiveness and intellect’.1 1 See Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzen Jahren des Lebens (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1836), 205, 254. The phrase is regularly translated as

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And Shelley’s astonishment at Cain is famous: he described it as ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘a revelation not before communicated to man’.2 Blake said Byron was Elijah redivivus. So unusual is Byron’s poetical power that a reader who chooses to meet it, as Bernard does, will discover the challenge it presents. Bernard thinks that Byron gave fresh meaning to Kant’s Enlightenment watchword – sapere aude. That brave declaration gains a special resonance when, as in Byron’s and some other poetical cases, feelings and emotions are explicitly stirred by what Blake called ‘the price of experience’. Bernard keeps his head on straight when he reads Byron because he grasps the intimate relation between the life and the work. The most serious poetry will let you know that you don’t buy significant experience for a song or a poem; and if in the mortal world of getting and spending your experiences were as intense and irregular as Byron’s – ‘unquiet feelings’ driven to an ‘extreme verge’ (DJ IV, 106) – the price to pay for the poems would be very high indeed. Because Byron’s verse passes that cost on to the reader, you must take special care with it, and most especially with a language which is, like Lara’s strange character, treacherously lucid.3 Few readers of Byron have recognized that as well as Bernard, whose prose sets an example of how to pay attention. Byron’s rhythms – sometimes swift, sometimes driving, always quick and quick-witted – often make attentiveness very difficult. So have his insidious clarities distracted some of our most vocational critics, like Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot. They set a bad example of reading in general when they read Byron thus:

‘invention and thought’. ‘Erfindung’ would be wrongly rendered as Romantic ‘imagination’ because ‘Erfindung’ implies a gift that is consciously deployed (i.e. classical ‘inventio’) and recognizable as such. In pairing the word with ‘Geist’, Goethe is pointing up the energetic character of Byron’s poetic intelligence and arguing that ‘Dichtung’ is his proper linguistic means (‘Lord Byron ist nur gross, wenn er dichtet, sobald er reflectirt, ist er ein Kind’ [191]). Simply and obviously, Byron is not Wordsworth. So did G. Wilson Knight do well to put Byron among his Poets of Action (London: Methuen, 1967). 2 Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 388. 3 In a nice essay on Coleridge, Byron and ‘superstition’, Gavin Hopps says that The Siege of Corinth is ‘precise in its vagueness’. See ‘Inhabiting a Place beyond “To be or not to be”: The Playful Devotions of Byron and Coleridge’, The Coleridge Bulletin 25 (2005), 16.

2

i n t roduc t ion as a poet [Byron] has no fine and exact sense for word and structure and rhythm; he has not the artist’s nature and gifts.4 Of Byron one can say, as of no other English poet of his eminence, that he added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words.5

I’ll never understand how such learned readers could be so mistaken.6 For the truth is hiding in plain sight everywhere in Byron’s work. Even more pertinently, that truth about Byron’s language and style is the very index of its philosophical character, as Goethe saw. ‘What I call inventiveness’, Goethe wrote, ‘I never saw in anyone in the world to a greater degree than in him’. Commenting on the excellence of The Deformed Transformed, he put a salient gloss to his judgement: the work has ‘no weak passages … not a place where you do not find inventiveness and intellect’ (‘Erfindung und Geist’).7 Given the recovery of Byron’s work over the past 50 years, few now would dissent from that judgement of his ottava rima verse. But in certain important respects it is more true of, say, The Giaour, of Manfred, of Childe Harold – even Cantos I–II – of Cain and all the plays. And one day the secrets of his lyric address will again be as clear to us as they were to Poe and especially Baudelaire. ‘More true’ because, as nineteenth-century readers saw, where Don Juan’s candor is mostly comic and disarming, the dark poems are bedeviled and naked. They are armed visions: mad, bad and dangerous to know.  Nor all that easy to know, because the close attention they demand yields unrewarding rewards, negative enlightenment. While the ‘mental theatre’ of Manfred and Cain is the great exponent of

4 Matthew Arnold, ‘Byron’ [1881], collected in Essays in Criticism: Second Series (London, Macmillan, 1888), 198. 5 T.S. Eliot, ‘Byron’ [1937], collected in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 200–1. 6 William Hale White (the ‘Mark Rutherford’ discussed by Bernard in Chapter 11) wrote a trenchant riposte to Arnold, who selectively misread Goethe’s ‘sobald er reflectirt, ist er ein Kind’. See his ‘Byron, Goethe, and Mr. Matthew Arnold’, Contemporary Review 40 (1881). Among others, Peter Manning and I have pushed back against Eliot’s essay: see Manning’s ‘Don Juan and Byron’s Imperceptiveness to the English Word’ (Studies in Romanticism 18.2 [1979]) and my ‘Suffering, Sacred, or Free: Romantic Revolutions of the Word, with Special Reference to Byron’, Studies in Romanticism 60.2 (2021). 7 Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 200, 254.

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Byron’s refractory poetics, the program is fully worked out in the Tales, for which The Giaour’s famous ‘trailing anacoluthon’ (lines 68–102) is an epitome. Lara sets out in similar fashion: asking why Lara left home, where he went and why he came back, the poem spends more than 50 lines (11–64) not answering. ‘Prying’, ‘keen’ and ‘fast enquiry’ proliferate to ‘[unfold] nought’ but the ‘mental net’ of the poem itself (I, 93, 410; II, 105; I, 381). Lara wastes no time designing its artful problems for the reader: 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: There be bright faces in the busy hall, Bowls on the board, and banners on the wall; Far chequering o’er the pictured window plays The unwonted faggots’ hospitable blaze; And gay retainers gather round the hearth With tongues all loudness, and with eyes all mirth. (I, 1–10)

Readers will not, cannot, clearly see what is being done here until they are well into the second canto and the outbreak of the peasant revolt. But the passage is littered with provokingly suggestive words that echo across the poem: ‘unhop’d’, ‘unforgotten’, ‘self-exiled’, ‘checquering’, ‘unwonted’. Their immediate job here is to unsettle the final couplet’s ‘gay retainers’, ‘all loudness’ and, in particular, ‘all mirth’. This party has been thrown to celebrate conditions resented in silence and only momently forgotten. Indeed, ‘half forgets’ is a key prosodic annunciation, a leitmotiv in this poem but a recurrent resource for Byron, especially in constructions fostered by the dialectical prosody he lifted from Dryden and especially Pope: And all my sins and half my woe (The Giaour, 1201) And thus, half sportive half in fear, I said (The Corsair I, 446) All love, half languor, and half fire (Mazeppa, 216)

These are just three typical prosodic variations of the many he spins from that half/all trope. In Lara they are decisive. The poem’s half-forgotten political secret – that its world is dangerously unstable both ‘through[out] Lara’s wide domain’ and across ‘the bounding main’ (I, 1, 12) – is, like the 4

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‘secret’ of Kaled, ‘The secret long and yet but half-conceal’d’ (II,  515).8 The trope is decisive because when such secrets are exposed, ‘all’ that they conceal gets half again concealed by the exposure. Zeno’s paradox is for Byron a mappa mundi of an inquiring spirit’s soul. We have always (only and barely) had – it is one of Byron’s primal insights – an ‘unwilling interest’ (I, 380) in the light. It is ‘a light | To lesson ages, rebel nations, and | Voluptuous princes’ (Sardanapalus V, i, 440–42); it is a light for the benighted, the victors and the vanquished, equally ‘doom’d to inflict or bear’ (CHP III, 71). In Byron’s day, it was a light for the dark Congresses of Vienna and Verona – a ‘light’ that ‘shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not’ (John 1: 5). The central passage in Lara – stanzas 17–19 in Canto I – makes a portrait of that soul. It is a composite drawing, a palimpsest of Lara, of the narrator, of Byron, and – if they are doing what Bernard does throughout this book – of the reader. Not coincidentally, it turns out three of the poem’s 12 explicit all/half tropes (I, 308, 320, 336). Two of them show with particular clarity the kind of prosodic variations licensed by their dark dialectics: A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped By choice the perils he by chance escaped; 8 Few phrases in this poem have been more badly read than ‘the bounding main’. While it can now seem a poetic cliché, it was in fact one of Byron’s most striking poetic inventions. It didn’t come from nowhere, however – as Lucretius said, nothing comes from nothing. Byron crafted it from a phrase in Pope’s ‘Epistle to the Earl of Burlington’ (‘the roaring Main’ [line 200]). Tennyson lifted it directly from Byron to write, in In Memoriam, ‘the bounding main’ (xi, 12), ‘the bounding sky’ (xvii, 6) and ‘the bounding hill’ (lxxxix, 30), and the phrase eventually found its way into popular culture through the late nineteenth-century doggerel song ‘Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main’. After that, it was easy to stop paying attention to Byron’s invention. Most important here is the salience of the word ‘bounding’. Its primary meaning is that ocean establishes the boundaries of land domains. But because ‘main’ specifically signifies ‘the open ocean’, ‘bounding’ leaks a suggestion of turbulent and dangerous conditions (see The Corsair I, 501). Finally, note that the first two sections of Lara begin with couplets that rhyme with each other: first we get ‘domain/chain’, then ‘again/main’. For this poem, those are far from insignificantly implicated rhymes. Finally, remember that Byron knew the word ‘main’ could signify land as well as open ocean (see DJ VII, 31). So there is yet another rhyme hidden in plain sight here: (do)main/ main. Despite all boundaries, rules, conventions and ‘commandment[s]’ (Lara I, 19), danger is everywhere. Perhaps rightly understood, they exist primarily as signs to beware – for the otherwise comfortable readers of verse, Coleridge’s ‘wedding guest’, to pay attention.

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r e a di ng by ron But ’scaped in vain, for in their memory yet His mind would half exult and half regret: (I, 317–20)

That first couplet is so perfectly unstable we can scarcely not think it means as well to say this ‘thing’ will also have ‘escaped | By chance the perils he by choice had shaped’ – and ‘shaped’, as well as ‘escaped’, ‘in vain’. So does the verse keep calling judgement to judgement by throwing up distinctions that keep breaking down even as they are being presented. They partly keep breaking down because they all equally reflect the narrator, the poem, Byron and – most pertinently – the reader: ’Till he at last confounded good and ill, And half mistook for fate the acts of will: (I, 335–36)

Everything proposed by that excellent couplet – every way it might be parsed – is questionable. While Lara’s unreliable narrator’s unreliability was never more clearly presented, we may well feel more bereft for having seen that. The couplet is a perfect emblem of what Byron wrote of himself six years earlier. Bringing judgement to the poets and critics of his day, he dared to think – and actually write – that he was ‘Just skilled to know the right and chuse the wrong’ (English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 690). That is candor set at such an ‘extreme verge’ it might read like despair. Bernard does not make that reading mistake with Byron’s ‘dark imaginings’ (Lara I, 317). So the tale of Lara ‘is a tour de force which unites reader, poet, and Lara’. It is a tour de force because its architectonic and prosodic excellence – what he calls its music – ‘disquiets the reader with information that cannot be musically appeased’. Byron is trying to make the darknesses concealed in its ‘stereotypical ingredients’ more visible, with racy, self–conscious balancings [that communicate] an imbalance at the centre of Lara’s corrupt consciousness, and also within the poet and reader who cannot trust their response to what they read but gain dark pleasure from their complying half-awareness.

That kind of poetry makes ‘terrible demands’ on its readers because its goal is ‘the strange and terrible chamber of the unmasked human heart, half-aware and wholly aware’. Although rhetorical flourishing is not Bernard’s style, we give him a pass here when he confesses that, ‘apart from some of the Psalms, or Job, or some of the Prophetic writings’, 6

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poetry rarely delivers an ‘experience’ of this kind. It is a place that leaves us ‘exultant, trapped, unsurrendering, terrified’. You don’t buy a ticket to such places for a song or a poem.

7

Pa rt I

Poems

Reading Byron’s Poems Reading Byron’s Poems We can make a rough and ready distinction between two kinds of reading. The first we could call ‘customary’. The reader will almost certainly be exercising it in reading this sentence. We customarily read without difficulty, understanding and reacting as we go without pause or prolonged reflection on what we are doing. The second kind of reading responds to some kind of encountered difficulty and this difficulty invites hesitation and the conscious activity of interpretation. Reading as such involves interpretation, of course, but interpretative reading is self-conscious of this. We should read Byron’s poetry in both customary and interpretative ways. This seems obvious enough but it is not. We cannot read anything without some kind of expectations as to the kind of thing it is. We do not approach the leading article in a popular newspaper in the same way as Macbeth. These expectations will derive from our own experience but, very largely, they will be influenced by general opinion, consciously and unconsciously absorbed. I have not read Le Roman de la Rose, Das Kapital, Mein Kampf or Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of Vanities, though I have toyed with the idea of reading all of them. If I were to do so I would have very strong, though very different, presumptions as to the sort of thing that I would find there and what would be expected of me as their reader. These expectations are unavoidable – we could not read without them in some form or other – but they can also be an obstacle to seeing what is there. I am unlikely, for instance, to be an absolutely open reader of either Mein Kampf or Das Kapital since my presumption is that both, in their different ways, are poisonously wrong. Something of this is the case with Byron’s poetry. There are many intelligent and sensitive accounts of it but they little disturb a received and long-established set of presumptions. These presumptions bear directly on the distinction raised in my first paragraph between the ease of customary reading and the difficulty of interpretive reading. 10

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Byron, widely read in his lifetime, has had a huge number of readers in many countries – probably more than any English poet apart from Shakespeare. He is what we might now call a good communicator. Like Pope, whom he intensely admired, many lines in his verse have passed into popular speech. When poetry was taken to be close to and dependent on, though not identical with, rhetoric – as it was for Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Racine and Dryden – this was all to the good. But poetry in the last two centuries has increasingly disassociated itself from rhetoric. This disassociation began more or less in Byron’s lifetime, and he was opposed to it. Rhetoric uses common and tried means to engage its listeners but Keats, for example, is almost certainly referring to Byron’s poetry when he reacts against the presence of Strange thunders from the potency of song; Mingled indeed with what is sweet and strong, … (‘Sleep and Poetry’, lines 231–32)

Keats had, by then, probably read Childe Harold, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair and Lara,1 all of which are dark and insistently voiced ‘thunders’. Byron once defined thunder as ‘that grand natural article of Sound in heaven, and Similie upon earth’.2 Instead, Keats tells us that poetry should be ‘A drainless shower | Of light’ (235–36) and so resemble the best Victorian child, since it is seen and not heard. Poetry, thus conceived, can have nothing to do with dramatically voiced word sequences fashioning anew inherited tropes that have been found to work. John Stuart Mill, strongly influenced by Romanticism, famously distinguishes it from such rhetoric: eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener.3 1 Beth Lau, Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 116–17. 2 In context (CMP, 144), this remark was carrying some irony, but Byron knew his Book of Job, where ‘God thundereth marvellously with his voice’ (37: 5) and his Spectator (no. 407), where Addison and Steele imagined Saint Paul ‘pouring out the thunder of his Rhetoric’. Byron connotes thunder with vatic utterance and powerful eloquence, connecting the two in his ‘Monody on the Death of Sheridan’: ‘His was the thunder …’ (CPW IV, 19). 3 From the essay usually known as ‘What is Poetry?’ [1833], collected under the title ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’ in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, gen. ed. J.M. Robson, 33 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981–91), I, 348.

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I found this an attractive idea and swallowed it whole when I first read it many years ago. But it is obviously wrong. Whoever overheard Paradise Lost? We can, of course, distinguish eloquence from poetry (but that does not entail that poetry should not use eloquence) and the essential purpose of poetry is not to persuade. Like all art it is, in the first instance, something made but it exists in relation to human responses. Mill cancels most poetry in order to justify his own limited sensibility. Clearly Byron’s poetry, like Homer’s, falls foul of Mill’s pronouncement since it is consciously addressed to a listener and uses customary ways of gaining their attention. For Mill, ‘all poetry is of the nature of soliloquy’.4 Manifestly some poetry is like this but even soliloquies are delivered on stage rather than in the private study. They are designed to be heard rather than overheard by an audience, for soliloquies are always performances. Many of the best passages in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which is both lyrical and dramatic, should be heard as performed soliloquies recognizably addressed to our understanding. Mill’s aesthetic could barely recognize them as poetry. Showers are, by definition, brief. Hence Keats’s collocation of poetry with showers implies both occasionality and small scale. It is not surprising that, by the mid-nineteenth century, poetry has, for the first time, become increasingly identified with short poems as in Palgrave’s popular Golden Treasury of 1861. Mill is certain that brevity not only characterizes lyric poetry but also that poetry written for overhearing is not a sustained activity. Indeed, it is now taken for granted, in most school and even many University syllabuses, that ‘poetry courses’ should consist entirely of short poems. Byron, however, like Chaucer and Dante, excels in long poems that remain eminently readable. Poetry has its origins in extended narratives as much as song. We read long poems at a different pace than short ones. Byron, in particular, develops an aesthetic of rapidity in his Tales and some passages in his ottava rima poems. For much of the time, we should read his long poems at a steady pace almost as quickly as we read most prose, though we should always internally voice as well as see them. The deliberate use of syntactical and vocal impediments to pace in much of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a calculated exception to Byron’s usual practice. The slightly slowed but steady paced, virtually ‘customary’, reading appropriate to Byron’s poems does not correspond to contemporary expectations of poetry or to common practice. If we expect poetry 4 Mill, ‘What is Poetry?’ (Collected Works, I, 349).

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to be a shower of light then we will try to suspend our normal forms of attention and savour it. This is what we do when we adjust to Keats’s Ode to a Grecian Urn by stilling ourselves into the urn’s declared condition as the ‘foster-child of silence and slow time’. We are not invited to register it in its common constitution as an urn. We have come to think of this receptive, specialized and set-apart stillness as ‘poetic’ and therefore we do not know what to do with Byron’s verse. It accosts and engages us much more directly through an encountered, ever-varied human voice – sometimes eloquent, sometimes conversational, sometimes dramatic, sometimes gently lyrical. Indeed, if we can read much of Byron’s poems at a pace not far removed from that of our customary reading of prose, we will not only be departing from Keats’s aesthetic but from the whole tendency of poetry since Byron’s lifetime. Poetry is primarily brief, lyrical and felt (the ‘Golden Treasury’ view of things), or it is concise, densely intellectual, ambiguous, symbolic and full of unusual word play (the ‘New Critical’ view of things), or it is non-referential play of untetherable words (the ‘Post-Modern’ view of things). Whatever it is, it is difficult, unusual, removed from norms of language and not immediately accessible. It has no place in the public square. In different ways the expectations of most modern readers of poetry are governed by these successive diktats, and none of them help in reading Byron. He expects his readers to be widely representative of the public at large and that they will understand what they read in immediacy of living engagement. As he wrote to his publisher John Murray in 1819: ‘is Childe Harold nothing? you have so many “divine” poems, is it nothing to have written a Human one?’ (BLJ VI, 105). What is certain is that the sequence of expectations that I have set out has been accompanied by, and has also occasioned, a huge drop in public awareness and acquaintance with poetry and a downgrading of its cultural and general importance. A good reason for reading Byron’s verse is that it reopens that dismal history, questions it and offers the possibility of an escape from it. The increasingly respectful attention paid, not only by academics and critics, to Don Juan from about a century ago (about a century after Byron’s death) is a small sign of that reopened possibility. This is one of the reasons why Byron wrote it in the manner and at the time that he did, against the ‘spirit of the age’ and yet because of it. His poem retains its character of counter-force. On the other hand, positive modern appraisal of Don Juan has often gone hand in hand with a rejection of the ‘dark’ poems upon which Byron’s 13

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‘Byronic’ reputation originally rested. Don Juan is Byron’s greatest poem but the dark poems, which are my main concern in this book, are both important and attractive in themselves. However, they have, for the most part, not found a working vocabulary that can register them. Moreover Don Juan, though it stands in dialectical relation, cannot itself be properly understood without reference to their concerns. Adjusting to Byron’s poetry is not only a matter of revelling in – rather than condescending to – his range and accessibility. If we look again at some early responses to reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the Tales, we find emphases of a different kind. Byron’s original, rapidly expanded readership found an exhilarating mix of the illumination of common human concerns and topical issues, together with a sense of being taken into new and difficult emotional and intellectual territory. Readers noticed his energy, bleakness and astonishing articulacy as something new, which yet carried the living past with it. Lady Sydney Morgan, for example, said that Childe Harold ‘has more force, fire, and thought than anything I have read for an age’.5 Walter Scott found in the same poem ‘a depth in his thought, an eager abundance in his diction, which argued full confidence in [his] inexhaustible resources’.6 Scott’s ‘depth’ and Morgan’s ‘force’ remind me of Shelley’s marvellous tribute to Byron’s crafted thinking:            I recall The sense of what he said, although I mar The force of his expressions. (Julian and Maddalo, lines 130–32)

The conjunction of Byron’s thought with force and depth, so strongly present in these reactions by Byron’s first readers (and Morgan, Scott and Shelley were, on any view, very accomplished readers) has largely been lost by later ones, even if important ‘bridge-thinkers’ such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche did not doubt it.7 For Byron, though more accessible than 5 Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence, 2 vols (London: W.H. Allen, revised edition, 1863), II, 21 – italics hers. 6 George Allan, Life of Sir Walter Scott, Baronet; with Critical Notices of His Writings (Edinburgh: Thomas Ireland Jr, 1834), 308 – italics mine. 7 See, for example, Ralph S. Fraser, ‘Nietzsche, Byron, and the Classical Tradition’, in Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition, ed. James C. O’Flaherty, Timothy F. Sellner and Robert M. Helm (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, second edition, 1976); Frederick Shilstone, ‘Byron, Kierkegaard, and the Irony of “Rotation”’, Colby Quarterly 25.4 (1989).

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many poets, can quite often be difficult to follow because his thought is difficult. This is so because his relentless enquiry into the nature and contrariety of human willing, its muffled relation to the intellect, and its inexplicable lurch towards violence and repeated transgression is something unexpected and unfamiliar today. There is no one way to explain the relentlessness of this enquiry, just as there is no single way of reading Byron and no single key to understanding him. But Reading Byron is grounded in the belief that Byron had more theological and scriptural knowledge than the average reader of his times, and certainly much more of such knowledge than the average reader of our times. I foreground Byron’s religious sensibility in the ‘dark’ poems, and tentatively suggest a religious trajectory in his poetic career, partly to restore a perspective that has been lost. Attempts to put Byron ‘in context’ rarely recognize the context that was still the most operative one in the early nineteenth century, despite and because of the French Revolution. Religion mattered to Byron in the public sphere, not least because he was accused of being an ‘infidel’ more than any other poet of the period. But it also mattered to him in the private sphere – indeed, it could be argued that the private sphere, the sense of individual conscience and personal consciousness, was a creation of the Christian tradition. It is now assumed that the sceptical side of Byron, which he sometimes flaunts, is his only side. But some of the earliest formations of his mind and heart were religious, and in my opinion he thinks and feels in a more deeply Christian way than Coleridge about metaphysics and ethics. But if my attempts to retune the ear to what Byron calls ‘the Old Text’ are in this sense a work of recovery, I hope they might play their part in the discovery of new perspectives on Byron’s poetry. I have very little in common with Marxism, and nor did Walter Scott, but The Historical Novel by George Lukács altered my understanding of Scott and enabled me to articulate what hitherto I could not. This book is not written for those who share all my assumptions, nor to convert the reader to them, but as an invitation to inhabit and test the explanatory power of interpretations that proceed from them. Needless to say, Byron despised ‘cant religious’ as much as any other form of cant, and his fascination with the mysteries of paradox did not always take a religious form. Most obviously in his classical tragedies but everywhere in his verse, he constantly probes the impossible but necessary balancing of civilization, celebrated by Byron but shown to be intrinsically linked with repression, and the maintenance of personal 15

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and public liberty, also celebrated but sometimes its own enemy. Don Juan is a remarkably sustained exploration of sexual love and its attendant social forms in deliberately contrasted locations and manners, but still against the backdrop of appalling human violence. The phrase ‘sustained’ is the right one. Byron does not think in some systematic and consecutive fashion in his poetry; he does so by holding his attention to certain paradoxes and imponderables over and over again on a very large scale and to some purpose. This is where his ‘force’ and ‘depth’ of thought are to be found. But it is found, too, in the concision, odd word choice and syntax, and unexpected connections of diverse references in phrases and lines of verse, as Jerome McGann has deftly demonstrated in his discussion of Lara’s crossing the ‘bounding main’ in his introduction to this volume. Here we encounter the difficulty that twentieth-century critics prized in the close reading of poetry, but it is a difficulty of Byron’s peculiar fashioning to which we need to adjust. To read him properly, to register what is going on in his poetry, we need to read it in large doses fairly quickly, but also, fairly frequently, to be stopped in our tracks. Readers should expect, then, both intelligibility (Shelley’s simple formulation is the right one – ‘The sense of what he said’), engaging accessibility, and difficulty both large-scale and small-scale when reading Byron’s poems. To do so they should set aside, so far as they can, simplified images of Byron as man and as poet. I have here stressed and will continue to stress Byron’s force and seriousness as a thinker, because it is insufficiently acknowledged. Yet we read Byron not only for his arresting cast of thought, but also because his management of words and sequences delights us, because – as Arnold put it – ‘our soul | Had felt him like the thunder’s roll’,8 because he can present a vast range of experiences with authority, and because he can make us laugh. That his poetry does all these things I will try to show in the coming five chapters.

8 ‘Memorial Verses, April 1850’, lines 8–9 (The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. C.B. Tinker and H.F. Lowry [London: Oxford University Press, 1950], 270). It is curious and instructive that Arnold, like Keats, associates Byron’s poetry with thunder.

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Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Types of History : Types of History

Of the Scriptures themselves I have ever been a reader & admirer as compositions … Byron to Annabella Milbanke, 15 February 1814 (BLJ IV, 60) The ability to interpret typologically is essential to critics of our older literature. The ability to declare typology absent is a kind of proof of sound modern critical method. Earl Miner, Literary Uses of Typology

The first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt were published in 1812. Byron prefaced them with the information that the poem was ‘begun in Albania’ (in 1809) and ‘written, for the most part, amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe’ (CPW II, 3). The first canto embarks from a fictionalized but recognizably dilapidated Newstead and then treads, for the most part, over the war-desolated Iberian Peninsula. The second canto makes pilgrimage through ‘ancient’ Greece back to the political and cultural fons et origo of Athens, but also crosses a temporal threshold into ‘modern’ Greece under the Ottoman yoke and a geographical border into the world of Islam. The third canto, written and published in 1816, takes us on a tour of northern Europe, from the English Channel to the Alps and from the skulls of Waterloo to the gigantic minds associated with Lake Geneva. The fourth canto, begun in 1817 and published in 1818, rises up from the ‘sea Cybele’ 17

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Venice, lingers under the ‘deep blue sky’ of Rome and ends back at the deep blue sea. Although all four cantos were soon collected in one volume, their piecemeal composition and serial publication has led many readers, especially professional academics, to question the extent to which Byron gave ‘connexion to the piece’ (CPW II, 4). The most common debating point is the ‘Harold problem’, the apparently awkward correlation of the poet/narrator and the eponymous Childe, who is gradually eliminated from the poem.1 More fundamentally, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is sometimes read as three separate poems in the sequence of publication (I–II; III; IV) or as two discrete units (I–II; III–IV) reflecting the decisive breaks of Byron’s separation and Napoleon’s final abdication.2 However, when I first read the poem as an undergraduate, the most striking feature of that reading experience was the proliferation of apparently unrelated voices within quite short reaches of text, a proliferation that nevertheless imparted a single, recognizable character to all four cantos. I found this exhilarating. It reminded me of The Waste Land and In Memoriam. Later on, I found Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella comparable. But the structures with which I was more familiar at that time were those of nineteenth-century symphonic music. Berlioz’s Harold in Italy is one of many testaments to the immense influence of Childe Harold upon music and the other arts. Even if it bears little direct relationship to the poem, it provided excellent parallels, as did the Symphonie Fantastique. I certainly read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a poem in four movements with a leitmotif, contrasts, interludes, recapitulations, implicit rather than formal development. When I first read criticism of Byron’s poem, I was appalled and surprised by the condescension displayed to its idiom and its structure. Everyone, at that time, seemed to agree that it was flashy and incoherent; in particular, it was said to have no structure.3 To me, 1 I have addressed the ‘Harold problem’ en passant in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I and II in 1812’, The Byron Journal 41.2 (2013), and ‘Improvisation and Hybrid Genres: Reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, European Legacy 24:3–4 (2019). 2 Jerome McGann usefully summarized such common approaches to Childe Harold in his edition of 1980 (CPW II, 265). In ‘Improvisation and Hybrid Genres’ (p. 275), I have argued that the poem ‘can and should be composed into a whole’ and that, like nineteenth-century symphonies or Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, ‘it offers the right directions to us as, at once, project and entity’. 3 Andrew Rutherford’s Byron: A Critical Study (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1961) is illustrative. Rutherford finds the poem’s transitions ‘sometimes arbitrary and

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the poem was all structure and diction, and the harmonization of its diverging voices was its most pleasing feature. The reader will, I hope, forgive this personal account. I introduce it as representative rather than exemplary. Without the working model of Romantic music perhaps I would not have been able to hold onto what I immediately liked in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. There was still a problem that did not occur to me and that, at the time, I could neither pose nor have solved. Byron enjoyed Rossini and Mozart, hummed Italian songs and had an ear that served him ‘prettily’ (DJ XII, 75). But he manifestly did not have the benefit of listening to Berlioz and did not intend to write a symphonic poem. What then was the source of his sense of structure? An answer of sorts could be given by a compilation of various literary genres known to him, over and above the Romance traditions that his subtitle ambivalently invokes.4 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is clearly a topographical poem, elegiac in a ruined eighteenth-century landscape, ethical in the manner of Juvenal and Johnson, historical with the ‘solemn sneer’ of Gibbon and Volney, suffused with the ‘Gothick’ art of Beckford, Lewis and Radcliffe, touched by the sensibility of La Nouvelle Héloise, Spenserian and ‘proto-Wordsworthian’ via James Beattie, cosmopolitan via Goldsmith, Le Sage and Voltaire.5 The most obvious precedent for the mixture of many of these elements is James Thomson’s The Seasons which, like Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Dunciad and Gulliver’s Travels, has four movements and was issued in separate parts before being presented as a single poem. One of the reasons why most reviews of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage hailed it as ‘original’ was that it worked like Thomson’s familiar poem but incorporated clearly new elements into the mélange. None of this, however, explains what is most obvious in reading it. I loved, for example, the daring transition in Canto II from the wild anapaests of the Albanian war song to the lapidary cadence of ‘Fair awkward’, certainly in comparison to Don Juan. He is particularly frustrated by the Harold problem, finding the character ‘unconvincing’ and his affectations ‘superficial, boring, rather silly’. In short, the poet’s experiences are ‘only half-digested, half-transformed into a work of art’ (27–35). 4 In ‘Improvisation and Hybrid Genres’, I touch upon the tension between Byron’s cosmopolitan epigraph and his archaic subtitle, which looks back to old traditions but also to the more recent revivalism of Percy’s Reliques and Scott’s minstrelsy. 5 Peter Thorslev’s The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962) remains a good introduction to the sources which fed into Childe Harold and the Tales.

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Greece! sad relic of departed worth!’ (II, 73). There is nothing like this Shakespearean modulation in Thomson. We have to fly over the gap as our voice, surprised but finding an altogether new source of eloquence, alters identity and character yet entertains a coherence between modern and ancient Greece, barbaric and cultivated taste, whose disruption is the source of our present voice tone. The effect, and no effect is more typical of Byron’s practice, is of the interposition of a voice from elsewhere that claims immediate and whole attention in the present tense, yet does not annihilate or hopelessly relativize the context that it has disrupted. Coherent reflection is fractured but, unlike the ‘broken mirror’, which multiplies fragments of suffering (III, 33), this fracturing restores to a larger wholeness that which it has violated; it removes the distance that reflection, however painful in character, has from its object. The interposition is itself, of course, rhetorical. But because the rhetorical gesture is unmistakably exhibited, we receive the emotional force of the rhetorical change while also, more coolly, accrediting the dramatic nature of its interruptions and juxtapositions. Voice effortlessly and singly carries the strains that analysis declares to be impossibly multiple. Byron often seems to think that this is what poetry is. He gives a suitably startling example to make the point. He interrupts his presentation of Spanish women in Canto I by an address to Parnassus: Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey, Not in the phrenzy of a dreamer’s eye, Not in the fabled landscape of a lay, But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky, … Though here no more Apollo haunts his grot, And thou, the Muses’ seat, art now their grave, Some gentle Spirit still pervades the spot, … (I, 60, 62)

When he comes to ease us back into main text, Byron is awkward: Of thee hereafter. —Ev’n amidst my strain I turn’d aside to pay my homage here; Forgot the land, the sons, the maids of Spain; … (I, 63)

This admission of interruption will be worked to comic effect in Don Juan but, as Childe Harold progresses, it is often compressed or omitted and we are left with the unmitigated fact of altered voice and pace. If the Parnassus stanzas are dovetailed more slackly back into their context, 20

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still they initially rise up from it, like Parnassus itself ‘soaring snow-clad’, with the authority of the wholly unexpected. We notice this as rhetoric but the admission is of the author writing the text somewhere else than Spain and thus destroying his own travelogue conventions. This interruption cannot be arbitrary because it is by Parnassus itself, evident seat of the Muses of this vital, elegiac poem and – equally evidently – ‘their grave’. The Muses are always offering themselves and yet this offering is most strikingly and powerfully received as interruption. These stanzas claim the authority of the factual bulk and fictional topos of Parnassus for the habitual mode of the poem. What we recognize here we apply elsewhere. The whole mode of the poem and of poetry is, we come to see, interruption. Interruption is a rhetorical device, and yet the record of the extra-rhetorical sequence that produced the poem. The poem is ‘Parnassian’ in Hopkins’s sneery sense,6 and yet it is always ready to encounter an actual Parnassus and thus subvert ‘the fabled landscape of a lay’. If we suggest that the mode of Byron’s non-dramatic poetry is interruption, this is likely to carry with it as part of its intelligibility the post-modern assumption that continuous ‘interruption’ demolishes any fixed sense of structure. This is not the case. If it were, interruption would cease to be recognizable as such. We could invoke various models for a structure that can accommodate interruption (including conversation or the original idea of a concerto), but I suspect that Byron learned it through reading the Scriptures, which have been edited to criss-cross and integrate interrupting passages, and, like Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, are fables of real history. This, not Berlioz, was the most important model for the structure of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and it supplies the answer to the question that I did not ask, but should have, when I first read the poem as a quasi-musical organization.7 By the Scriptures I mean both the local style of narrative, midrash, divan and named book but also – and especially – the Scriptures 6 For Hopkins’s antithesis of poetic diction that is merely ‘Parnassian’ and the ‘language of inspiration’, perhaps developed from Coleridge’s juxtaposition of ‘Fancy’ and ‘Imagination’, see Note-books and Papers, ed. H. House (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 29–30 and Further Letters, ed. C.C. Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, second edition, 1956), 215–20. 7 Frances Young has argued at length that there is a useful analogy between musical structures and the structure, typological reading, and hence theology, of the Scriptures. See The Art of Performance: Towards a Theology of Holy Scripture (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990).

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taken as a whole. That indeed is the point. The Jewish and Christian traditions that formed and transmit the Scriptures do so because they can be received as a single revelation. The story of Cain, for instance, is a story in its own right, but it is offered as part of the narrated sequence from Creation to Flood and reviewed as a passing moral exemplum in the Wisdom books. In the New Testament, the death of Abel is used by Christ as a type for his rejection; it becomes a type of his own death (I John 3: 12–15), and in the Apocalypse it is a type of Christian martyrdom (6: 10). If we find and hear the story in the Scriptures, we are bound to relate these other contexts to it as we read. It is clear from Cain that Byron did exactly this. Moreover, all readings of the Scriptures are haunted by the notion of coherence that their single main referent (God) and their single interpretative community (Israel/the Church) necessarily suggest. In Derrida’s terminology, the text of les Ecritures becomes recognized as the book of the Bible. This coherence is not extra to reading the Book, but shapes its character. In Don Juan, the narrator confesses that he cannot rest his eye on anything in the world that does not bespeak ‘confusion’ or ‘blunder’: If it be Chance; or if it be according    To the Old Text, still better: —lest it should Turn out so, we’ll say nothing ’gainst the wording, … (DJ XI, 4)

Here the Scriptures (‘the Old Text’) represent in their own indivisible ‘wording’ a world that is coherent, though it seems not to be. It is important that the Scriptures authorize both the coherence and the ‘seems not to be’. As a total literary model, they sanction a much looser, apparently more improvised structure than any classical genre (even the medley of ‘satura’). It is odd therefore to read the story of Cain for what it might tell us on its own about natural theology, or the origin of evil, or very early history. Yet the reaction to Byron’s Cain shows us that, by the early nineteenth century, this was happening more often than not. We should see this new reading-for rather than reading-of the Scriptures as the direct result of the protracted demise of typological reading which, for all its excesses, is the best reading of the Christian Scriptures ever undertaken, for it matches both the openness and the coherence of what it attends to. This demise was accomplished in stages via the assaults of scholasticism, Reformation, humanism, Enlightenment, textual scholarship, archaeology, history and the beginnings of social 22

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anthropology.8 The Encyclopédie carefully arranged all known knowledge as an anti-Bible by the non-cohering sequence of the alphabet. Byron’s waking mind was heir to this but he did not first encounter the Scriptures this way; nor, though he claimed to read them every day, did he do so for sideways and incidental gleanings or for anything. His use of the title ‘A Mystery’ for Cain is a deliberate by-passing of these presumptions. He read the Scriptures more in the manner of Dryden than of Lessing, Fichte or Renan.9 Like Dryden, he took history with biblical seriousness but interrelated and paralleled history with history. If therefore we are to look for a relationship between Byron’s poetry and the Scriptures, we should not look primarily for phrases, attitudes, concepts or themes. It is easy enough to find ‘It came to pass’ in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (II, 69) and pronounce it ‘biblical’,10 and miss the deeply biblical structure implicit in constantly relating one part of the poem or ‘the Old Text’ with another. The story of Abel’s death is interrupted and put to one side but then gathered at the other end of time and reading into the story of Christ’s death, which it always archetypally was. The interruption is disruptive but confers new coherence. Interruption is the sign that we are attending not only to a specific history but to types of history in which one sequence can represent 8 Of course, allegorical reading of the Scriptures did not disappear for good in the eighteenth century, despite Swift’s loathing of it in A Tale of a Tub, since it is bound up with liturgical practice, was revived as part of the revival of interest in patristic writings in the nineteenth century, and has been extensively commented on in the twentieth century. See for example George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) and Earl Miner (ed.), Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Miner instances Bishop Horne’s commentary on the Psalms as proof of this continuity despite the pressure of historical criticism. The seventh edition appeared within four years of the appearance of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Horne’s commentary treats the Psalms as a sustained allegory. Miner comments: ‘Perfectly orthodox conceptions of typology of this kind were accessible to believers like Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as to freethinkers such as Shelley and Byron’ (391–92). 9 I have in mind particularly Annus Mirabilis, Absalom and Achitophel, and The Fables. Other instances of scriptural structuring might be Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s History Plays and, more distantly, The Faerie Queene. Needless to say, Paradise Lost is wholly unscriptural in mode. That is what justifies its ways to man. 10 Byron uses the phrase ‘it came to pass’ as a parody of biblical style when the narrator of Don Juan sits next to Parson Pith (XVI, 81).

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another. The effect of reading like this is far-reaching. It had certainly not died out in Byron’s time because the liturgical reading, familiar to him at Harrow School or Trinity College, for instance, presupposes the congruence of its disparate selection and because the Scriptures, on any intelligent, non-rationalist reading, are clearly self-referential.11 It would be absurd to suggest that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a miniature Bible, but it is odd how the typological connection has been missed even in those many studies which have attended to Byron’s religion.12 Byron did not read the Bible as he read Horace or Virgil, Richard Knolles’s History of the Turks or Gibbon. It is not a matter of the biblical sublime, biblical themes or history, or even of the stylistic features that Erich Auerbach so famously unearthed. What Byron learned and loved – ‘I am sure that no man reads the Bible with more pleasure than I do’ (HVSV, 569) – was the openness of biblical narrative to later insertions that then become the transformed text. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a miniaturized Bible at least in this respect.13 And there is the whole habit of mind that reads forwards and backwards, defines poetry as ‘the feeling of a Former world and Future’ (BLJ VIII, 37), can find an Exodus in the Return from Babylon and intimates an imminent Destruction in the heedless feasting of the Israelites at Sinai, the courtiers of Sardanapalus at Nineveh or the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball before Waterloo. In an early version of Canto I of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron put in a comic note to his comic verses, later omitted, on Sir John 11 ‘The internally allusive character of the Hebrew texts […] is more like the pervasive allusiveness of Eliot’s The Waste Land or Joyce’s Ulysses than, say, the occasional allusiveness of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. In this central regard, the Hebrew Bible, because it so frequently articulates its meanings by recasting texts within its own corpus, is already moving toward being an integrated work, for all its anthological diversity’ (Robert Alter, The World of Biblical Literature [London: SPCK, 1992], 51). It is obvious that the Christian Bible presupposes an even greater integration than this. 12 See Travis Looper, Byron and the Bible (London: Scarecrow Press, 1978); Wolf Hirst (ed.), Byron, the Bible and Religion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991); E.M. Marjarum, Byron as Skeptic and Believer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939); David J. Leigh, ‘Infelix Culpa: Poetry and the Skeptic Faith in Don Juan’, Keats-Shelley Journal 28 (1979). 13 Alan Rawes has suggested that Byron may have had Canto I of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in front of him as he was writing Canto II, and that some of the numbered stanzas appear to pair across the cantos (‘Was Byron or Was He Not? Further Thoughts on Byron’s Numerology’, The Byron Journal 22 [1994]). If this is so, Byron is fashioning his own text like a scriptural editor.

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Carr: ‘Porphyry said that the prophecies of Daniel were written after their completion, and such may be my fate here’ (CPW II, 281). Byron was quite right. Detailed apocalyptic prophecy is normally written post hoc, and Byron uses this device himself for non-comic purposes throughout The Prophecy of Dante and in Marino Faliero’s immense final diatribe unfolding the future disasters of Venice. These are, in effect, detailed pseudonymous prophecies. Nevertheless, Byron normally stands unconcealed within the open history that he addresses like a mainstream prophet. Unlike a prophet, he does not primarily announce the actions of God. How far can the analogy be taken? We can set out a number of main working parallels between the Scriptures and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The first is the transferability of two types of history: the personal and the public. The interrelation of these two as modes of perception is a commonplace of Romanticism. In Byron’s case it owes at least as much to Jerusalem as to the Köningsberg ‘whose vaunt, | … | Has lately been the great Professor Kant’ (DJ X, 60). Byron’s interest in history is the counterpart of his interest in acts of will. Harold is ‘The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ – a metaphysical version of Ahasuerus and Cain, ‘The fabled Hebrew wanderer’ (CHP III, 3; I, line 854) – and a point of intersection of mythical, historical, personal and public histories. In the Psalms, for instance, we find individual lament and history, royal canticles, national invocation and history, praise or supplication for the natural cycle of growth, and uncontainable theophanic interventions. Byron lists some of these in his Hebrew Melody ‘The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept’ (lines 11–15). There is constant transition between these modes. Scholars argue still and unavailingly as to whether some individual laments are personally or liturgically framed or represent public/royal confession. Israel is a nation and a person. David is a person and a nation. For Christian readers, Israel is a type of the Church and David is a type of Christ. In the customary four senses of reading, Jerusalem may stand morally for the soul, allegorically for the Church and analogically for heaven, as well as literally for a historical city.14 From any reader’s standpoint, and there can be no more primary standpoint than that of a reader, we find ourselves adjusting throughout large stretches of the 14 The example is a commonplace. The most extensive discussion of the history of allegorical reading is in Henri de Lubac, Exégèse Mediévale: les quatre sens de l’ écriture (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64), 4 vols.

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Scriptures from first to second to third person; confusing, separating and then reassembling personal and public histories with the natural cycle of growth, decay and regrowth, and the ever-possible reversals or renewals ab extra by God. Hence, we find ourselves strongly conscious of the gap between Waterloo and Byron’s domestic crisis in 1816 but then we are forced to connect these two spheres, just as later the poem instructs us to connect the destruction of the Coliseum with the destiny of the English public who rejected but still read Byron. When we find his own family imaged in the Dacian family of the dying gladiator, we should be no more surprised than when Dryden, steeped in scriptural procedures, instructs us to connect Titus Oates with the rebellion against King David. If we read the book of Hosea, for instance, it is hard to know at first whether the adultery of Hosea’s wife or the apostasy of Israel is tenor or vehicle. There is the same presumption of passage from domestic to public catastrophe as in Childe Harold, where Rome, ruined but still regnant, is ‘my country! city of the soul!’ (IV, 78). Dryden can interpolate the recent death of the Duke of Ormonde’s son into Absalom and Achitophel just as Byron can include the death of Edleston or Wingfield or the Princess of Wales or the infancy of his daughter in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The obvious difference is the only difference. Dryden expects us to recognize this as an explicit allegorical conceit that yet reveals the truth. Byron does not. He does not fully acknowledge the models upon which he relies, though, unlike Shelley, neither is he seeking them out to subvert them. Romanticism knowingly looks to non-classical precedents but often feels its way, without knowing it, into the single most important reading model that is non-classical – the Scriptures. This is not to make the point that Yale critics have made about Wordsworth and others, namely that there is a secularized supernaturalism at the centre of Romanticism, nor is it merely to rehearse the valid point that the style of the Scriptures had become an explicit model for the literary sublime.15 I am concerned with prevailing reading habits, not ideas in themselves or ideas of writing. It is the habit of scripture-reading and its mode that is transferred to Byron and operates within him. With the mode come certain still operating assumptions. 15 This becomes particularly true after the appearance of an English translation of Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews in 1787 (originally published in Latin in 1741).

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A good example is Byron’s rather puzzling relation to Portugal in Canto I.16 The Portuguese come in for largely inexplicable dislike. They are ‘shent with Egypt’s plague’, miserable inhabitants of what looks like a ‘celestial’ city and a ‘glorious Eden’ of a landscape (I, 17–18). But their principal fault appears to be murder: ‘Throughout this purple land, where law secures not life’ (I, 21). Byron was so convinced of this that he wrongly interpreted a sequence of crosses designed to mark a route as a record of assassinations.17 He associates such brigandage with Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal. This, bizarrely as it might appear, is seen as an action of ‘the Almighty’, who uses ‘Gaul’s locust host’ to chastise the murderous Portuguese (I, 15), much as Amos presents a sequence of disasters visited upon surrounding nations for purely moral faults. In turn, this is linked to the ignominy of the Convention of Cintra, and hence to England’s supportive relation to Portugal and its court. The latter has allowed ‘the Babylonian whore’ to build a ‘dome’ despite ‘the blood which she hath spilt’ (I, 29). These stanzas provide our only introduction to the Peninsular Wars and to the whole field of political concern in the poem. What is most puzzling about them is also the best clue to their understanding. For Byron, apparently, war takes its origin in murder. The fratricide of Cain and Abel or Romulus and Remus generates a bloody sacrifice to the Giant of War (I, 39). The Spanish are presented as fighting the French with ‘flashing scimitar’ in the same spirit that they wield the ‘secret knife’ in blood feuds or to defend ‘the sister and the wife’ (I, 87, and see I, 80). Spanish women who delight in the bull-fight produce admired Amazon soldiers like the Maid of Saragossa (I, 54–56). The reversed sexual energies that founded Spanish chivalry are traced to the Moorish occupancy caused by the treacherous alliance between Julian and the Caliph’s lieutenant after Roderick had violated Julian’s daughter (I, 35). In this way, and it is a biblical way, assassination on the streets of Lisbon, infestation by locust hosts of French soldiers, sexual violation and treacherous revenge at the outset of Spanish history all fuse with present political consequence and the Convention of Cintra. In such a cross-referring fabric, the unhistorical fictional alien who is Harold represents the alienations of historical author and real history. 16 Compare Nigel Baker, ‘Byron and Childe Harold in Portugal’, The Byron Journal 22 (1994). 17 See the long note originally intended to gloss stanza 21 of Canto I, first published by Byron’s erstwhile literary agent R.C. Dallas in 1824 and reproduced at CPW II, 274–76.

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An exceptionally neat example of this pattern is the section on the Rhine in Canto III. Byron moves uninterruptedly from Waterloo to personal elegy to self to Napoleon – who should have been ‘like a tower upon a headlong rock’ (III, 41) – to selves like Napoleon imaged as isolated figures on a high mountain. Then he interrupts dramatically: ‘Away with these!’ (III, 46). We are now to behold a fecund landscape beneath the mountains and fertilized by the ‘majestic Rhine’. As ‘Harold gazes’ on this feminized scene, our glance moves down with his (‘streams and dells’), across, then up (‘cornfield, mountain, vine’) until it encounters ‘chiefless castles’ topping the hills. There we stay. The castles ‘stand, as stands a lofty mind’ (III, 47). We are back where we started with a tower upon a headlong rock and deviant heroic consciousness (Napoleon, Byron, Harold and males in general). When we return to the river, we carry to it ‘the blood of yesterday’ washed down by its tide so that it appears ‘stainless’ in itself but not to our ‘blackened memory’ (III, 51). This is not a matter of Harold or Byron imposing their sensibility on what they see. Nor of an already inscribed landscape. A corruption of moral being is primary but we cannot ‘trace | Home to its cloud this lightning of the mind’ (IV, 24), for the fault line obscures the underlying connections that remain palpable to our alienated consciousness. Our consciousness thus detects its own hidden role in that alienation. Across this gap, Byron publicly sends from the Rhine, within and without his Parnassian poem, fresh flowers that will be withered on arrival and accompanying verses to his sister, as a witness to her representation in the landscape and their ‘pure’ love (III, 55). All this at the height of the incest scandal! Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage records almost as clearly as the Scriptures the disastrous history brought about by self-founded human will. ‘Almost as clearly’, because this is not all that it does and because it does not assume that history can be fully recognized only once the availability of Christ’s redemption has been recognized.18 What is it that Byron sets against ‘This uneradicable taint of sin’ (IV, 126) in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage? In Canto II, modern Greeks are seen briefly as the scattered children in Egypt and Babylon awaiting their new Moses (II, 73). This was Shelley’s hint for Hellas but the 18 See Chapter 2, where I make the point that Barth’s Church Dogmatics deliberately begins with Christology and only comes to sin in its fourth volume because, for a Christian, sin cannot be seen for what it is, and in this sense seen at all, without accepting the Redemption.

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overwhelming force of Byron’s Greek canto is elegiac, not prophetic, and its hope is liberal. We are a little surprised when Harold in Canto III is said to have drunk briefly ‘from a purer fount, on holier ground’ and, pausing, we work out that this must mean Canto II and Greece. He ‘deem’d its spring perpetual; but in vain!’ (III, 9). All that Harold found in Greece was ruins representing a splendid but not wholly pure history and some Balkan costumes and customs. The opening section of the canto introduces Greece as an exemplum of the soul’s immortality, with doubt and confident bitterness (as first drafted), then with cautious welcome (as revised and published). The change came about at the behest of Byron’s worried English friends. It is a good counter-example to the recent mania for editing texts to their supposed pristine form, since the freeway between bitterness about death and the conviction of immortality runs throughout the poem. Byron does not have an underlying stable view that is being censored and ought to be restored. Here, the alternation is Byron’s equivalent to the Bible’s opposed but interconnecting bestowals of destruction and salvation. One or other of these is always the burden of prophetic exhortation. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, these lie alongside one another but there is no salvation. What we have instead is ‘Art’. When we run the correspondences forward at the opening of Canto II from the ruined temple without its god, to the ruined Greeks without their ‘polish’d’ culture, to the ruined skull without its inhabiting spirit (II, 1–7), the direction is intentionally and cumulatively dispiriting. But the sequence can be run the other way. The temple, perfect in some cases, ruined in others, may still represent what the once living skull endured and thought and, in our recognition of that, we are conscious of inextinguishable sources of energy and form. This is why the poem can so easily run together a Romantic glorification of the processes of creative consciousness – ‘’Tis to create, and in creating live | A being more intense’ (III, 6) – with a classical celebration of Stoical endurance and the autonomy of created forms. ‘So easily’, but not all at once. The poem has to grow into this assimilation and discover by the end of Canto IV that this is what it exists for and as. Harold does not have a via, as Manfred has, but Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage itself absorbs the interruptions that engender it. The poem is an instance of what it celebrates. The harbinger of this is the first two cantos. How can a ‘Gothic’ and modern Peninsular War canto generate an elegy for ancient and modern Greece? Two kinds of ruins; two kinds of sentiment. Neither of them seems to be Hebraic or Christian. 29

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In the Bible, the ruinous process of an alienating history produced by corrupt human willing is set against the unaccountable gift of a sacred land, city and temple that embody an original purity of encounter with God in the wilderness of wandering. Full realization of this encounter is increasingly transferred to the prophetic/apocalyptic future offering a renewed land and a new Jerusalem. The Jews, taken to Babylon, fashion another idea of the human city that is now Babel, a denial or false version of Jerusalem. Rome, for the early church, becomes, via the Apocalypse, a new instance of this idolatrous and persecuting Babylon, but it also becomes an image of the new promised international Jerusalem, centre of a universal church.19 In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, various human cities (Lisbon, Seville, Cadiz, Yanina, Athens, Constantinople, Venice, Rome) represent human ruinings, but themselves ‘stand’ – a word repeated and emphasized – and, like works of art, their buildings, retaining pristine ‘Glory’, may be ‘Despoiled yet perfect’ (IV, 147). Rome, last of Harold’s sequence of cities and customary end of European pilgrimage, is the synthesis of the Spanish and Greek cantos. The restless energies of the poem’s wildernesses, precipitated in the slaughter, storm and mountains of Canto III, collect in this enormous pile of ruins, which is yet urbs aeterna. Rome becomes a battleground between the poet’s nihilistic insistence on the public and private catastrophes of human history and his reiterated conviction of immortality. If we add in the final address to Ocean in the poem, we seem to be very close to Shelley’s Hellas. We can certainly understand why Shelley liked this address and the poem so much, though he was appalled by the ‘contempt & desperation’ in Canto  IV.20 The Ocean, like Shelley’s ‘chrystalline sea | Of thought and its eternity’ (Hellas, 698–99), creates, destroys and recreates forms; Rome is a special image, like Shelley’s Athens, of eternal form, consciousness, and human imperfecting and perfecting, in endless process made out of it. But in Byron’s poem, as never in Shelley, suffering links mortality and immortality, and history is as real as its types. Of the four imperishable objects that Byron sets up as the culmination of his poem’s pilgrimage through the repetitions of ruin, three are linked directly to suffering. The Laocoon sculpture is of ‘torture dignifying pain’ (IV, 160); the Apollo Belvedere looks serene but is made out of 19 See CHP I, 29 and the identification of London as ‘mighty Babylon’ in Don Juan (XI, 23). 20 Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 58.

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the Promethean fire ‘which we endure’ (IV, 163); the Pantheon has no direct relation to pain but comes immediately after the long account of the Coliseum with, at its centre, suffering Byron (explicitly represented forever in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) and suffering gladiator (implicitly represented in sculpture). We overlay the Pantheon with this other circle of timeless horror, and we carry both of these finally to the most important of the four sites – St Peter’s. The linear basilica is crowned by another circle into which, like the circling, advancing poem itself, we wonderingly advance. St Peter’s dome has the circular perfection of the Pantheon but it is raised, like the Coliseum, over and around a tortured body dignifying pain (‘Christ’s mighty shrine above his martyr’s tomb’ [IV, 153]). It is a gigantic appeasing space made up, as in the Coliseum stanzas, of outrage and forgiveness (IV, 134–35). The building allows ‘wanderers o’er Eternity’ (III, 70) to move endlessly into its always growing ‘Vastness’, but at the same time it assuages their restlessness by a ‘musical’ containment (IV, 156). This curious blend of Gothic yearning and classical calm raised over triumphant suffering intermingles impossibly the creative/destructive ‘fever at the core’ of ‘the soul’s secret springs’ (III, 42–43) – in Harold, Napoleon and Rousseau – with the contemplative stillness after storm or battle on Lake Leman and Thrasimene. As Mark Storey exactly notes, ‘this conjunction’ in the poem, of a kind of ‘immortal patience’, is arrived at ‘by a pained and tortuous route’.21 Most lines of development and repetition in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – ruined Greek temples, sacral landscapes, public violence, fevered inner disquiet – can fasten here. And here, too, both musical and biblical models hold. It is Byron’s wont in writing to set up impossible contrarieties, declare and suffer their clash, but then via generative and unexpected modulation achieve their resolution in some new and liberating containment: But thou, of temples old, or altars new, Standest alone—with nothing like to thee— Worthiest of God, the holy and the true. Since Zion’s desolation, … (IV, 154)

As we and the poet have made our movement to Rome, so for Rome God has left desolated Jerusalem. Here the new temple of St Peter’s functions like the old Temple, by typologically representing the heavenly 21 Mark Storey, Byron and the Eye of Appetite (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 151.

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liturgy as seen by Moses. St Peter’s prepares us for what the Mosaic experience of the vision of God on a high mountain now represents. For Moses did not see God ‘face to face’ (IV, 155) on Sinai and his incomplete vision becomes a type of the complete vision now transferred to a Christian heaven. An impressively precise knowledge of such correspondences lies behind these lines, but there is a twist. It is not now the liturgy that replicates and joins heavenly vision. The architecture of the ‘o’erwhelming edifice’ offers an experience of the sublime since, rather than housing the ark of the covenant, it is itself the ‘ark of worship’ (IV, 158, 154). Here, ‘Art’ as such becomes a typological vehicle. It is not, however, the building as aesthetic artefact that is signified but the experience of adjusting via the building: ‘growing with its growth, we thus dilate | Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate’ (IV, 158). This Kantian aesthetic, in which the mind is apparently enlarged by something huge but really enjoys its own expansion as the sublime masters its particulars, is countered in various ways. The circularity of this extension and the religiously accredited meaning that attaches to such expansion, for example, is insisted on, as is the formal beauty of the building and its occasioning by a narrow tomb. St Peter’s is a contained infinity that is both preparation for and type of heaven, rather than being a rival and displacing sublimity. Byron thought of mentioning the altar and its worship but, correctly, erased the line.22 In this way, Byron blurs back into the normal aesthetic privileging of his poem, subtly augmented by the comparison, but prevents that aesthetic from being a self-grounded substitute for religious understanding. Byron’s explicit Hebraism at this culminating point of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage fends off the very connections that it brings into view, but still might enable us to recognize the implicit Hebraism of structure that is the main contention of this chapter. The most obvious and pervasive form of interruption in the text is caused by its ‘accretive structure’.23 22 ‘And glorious high altar where forever burns’: the lines originally drafted after stanza 155 are reproduced at CPW II, 176. 23 In 1961, William H. Marshall picked up the phrase ‘accretive structure’ from Oliver Elton’s originating use half a century earlier (A Survey of English Literature 1780–1830, 2 vols [London: E. Arnold, 1912], I, 249). Marshall used it to explain and to condemn the structure of The Giaour, which grew from 407 to 1,334 lines through its various additions (‘The Accretive Structure of Byron’s “The Giaour”’, Modern Language Notes 76.6 [1961]). Marshall thought that these additions had a ‘devastating effect’ on the consistency of the poem and its hero. Curiously,

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Byron inserts additional stanzas into his poems while writing, at proof stage and after publication. He does not do so because the Bible does. The Bible is like this because it is put together over long stretches of time and by different people. But the form of the Bible, deeply attended to, instructs us in habits of reading and coherence that Byron naturally transfers to his poetry. There is a relationship between accretive structures and typological reading. There is a relationship, too, between Byron’s love of the unspecifyingly paratactic, biblical ‘And’ to introduce his stanzas, and their latency for insertions and additions. The Scriptures are shaped and ordered but retain an existential character because they preserve as well as conceal the history of their formation, which parallels the haphazard but cohering history that they record. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is like this and The Prelude, a confessional epic, is not. A good example is Byron’s interpolation of three stanzas (IV, 135–37) after the great ‘prophetic’ curse in the Coliseum. The curse is turned into ‘Forgiveness’. The model is explicitly scriptural, as a rejected stanza shows.24 Forgiveness may heap coals of fire on the forgiven. What is more to our purpose is the close resemblance between this alteration by insertion and the frequent insertions of an oracle of consolation into an oracle of destructive judgement in the Old Testament. Sometimes the earlier passage is altered. More usually it is left but transformed by the context created by the new interpolation. When this happens regularly, we learn to treat the biblical text as an open and existential space thronged by voices that suggest larger and larger patterns of containment within a single, ever-developing, ever-recapitulated history. This resembles some Gothic buildings, accreting chapels of different dates, like Norman Abbey since it ‘Form’d a whole which, irregular in parts, | Yet left a grand impression on the mind’ (DJ XIII, 67). It may seem curious that Byron, though he thought Westminster Abbey was ‘worth the whole collection’ of London’s buildings (DJ XI, 25), uses St Peter’s rather than a Gothic church like Santa Croce (CHP IV, 54–59) or Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (the only Gothic church in Rome) as the climactic sacred space in his poem. But St Peter’s is the natural culmination of pilgrimage and Marshall never asks why Byron felt this compulsion to triple the length of his poem. Nor does he connect it with the many accretions to the text of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, with the two additional cantos later added to the original poem or with the increasing length of each of the cantos (93/98/118/186 stanzas respectively). 24 This stanza, beginning ‘If to forgive be “heaping coals of fire” …’ is reproduced at CPW II, 169 (compare Proverbs 25: 22 and Romans 12: 20).

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Byron is able subtly to remake it in his poem’s image while respecting its given character. A Gothic building would displace classical Greece and Rome. Instead, Byron takes the sky-elevated Pantheon of St Peter’s and there reclaims and rediscovers classical form, redolent of the Gothic and mountain energies that have generated the pilgrim’s way to it. It has both ‘gigantic elegance’ and Hebraic ‘glory’ (IV, 156, 157). Throughout the poem we have learned to overlay catastrophe, landscape, building, art and ruin with the suffering, creating, sinful, immortal self, and with each other. We move from one to the other and find one in the other, as the allegorical reader of the Scriptures moves in and out of moral, literal and prophetic significations. Byron, like the Scriptures, deals with types of history. And yet, of course, we are not reading the Scriptures. God does not act, even in Portugal, as lord of the history that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage unfolds. The redemption that the poem offers and attains by the end of Canto IV is through the transmutation of transient agonies, public and private, caused by one kind of human willing into abiding tragic postures created by another. These agonies, unlike those of Shelley’s Maniac, can be told and contemplated and, thus far, give us a ‘more beloved existence’ (IV, 5). That existence cannot be trusted to do or disclose anything of itself, but its ambiguous Promethean energies, unredeemed, may receive celebration of a kind. There is no leakage here from unacknowledged religion to false sentiment. On the other hand, the existential mode of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Judaic-Christian in essence, remains in tension with the despoiled yet perfect classical forms that represent it. In principle, this existential mode could generate a different poem. One of the most striking features of its conclusion helps us to recognize what it might lead to. In the address to Ocean, Byron recalls his childhood relationship with the sea:    For I was as it were a child of thee,    And trusted to thy billows far and near, And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here. (IV, 184)

The hand that Manfred extends to the Abbot and, later, that Abel extends to Cain, is here placed in mastery upon the lion’s mane of the sea and extended to the awed, intimate reader. But the mastery is that of ‘a child’, and it is placed in trust. The contrast with the dialectically entailed opposites of the opening of the third Canto is presumably 34

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deliberate. There the poet, sustained by will alone, was the triumphant rider of the horses of the sea and also the weed flung by their turbulence ‘from the rock’ (III, 2). Now there is no more claim to this fraught invincibility. A new pairing emerges. The child is undoubted lord of the sea but, literally, is borne upon it trustingly as a swimmer. The mastery is real but is itself a gift. The Latin word mansuetudo means ‘meekness’ via its etymological derivation ‘trained to the hand’. Wild beasts are tamed by their increasing responsiveness to a hand. Here, the child swimmer’s hand laid on the sea in adult mastery is dominant, yet buoyant only insofar as it submits to the supporting waves. The daring of the figure of speech here (only a god or a daemon can say ‘Peace’ to the unpastured sea hungering for calm, or to the waves ‘Be still’) represents the further daring of speech itself as apparent performative act. It is the authoritative immediacy of ‘as I do here’ that takes our breath away by its unexpected meekness in mastery. Interruption can go no further than this.

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Lara Acts of Will : Acts of Will

What determinant is it then that Socrates lacks in determining what sin is? It is will, defiant will. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death ’Till he at last confounded good and ill,
 And half mistook for fate the acts of will: …

Lara I, 335–36

Byron’s ‘Tales’ – the six narrative poems he wrote between 1813 and 1816 – proved immensely popular, dramatically increased their poet’s celebrity and shaped the very distinctive public perception of both Byron and his poetry in the years immediately following the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I and II in 1812. This is especially true of the three that I think are the best: The Giaour, The Corsair and Lara. I want to take Lara as representative of the Tales because I think that it is the best of them all. One of the many things Lara has to recommend it is the deft handling and pacing of its narrative sequence, which I can set out clearly because Byron makes it so clear to the reader. It begins with the return of Lara to some unspecified land in the west, after a long mysterious absence in the east. It presents him through an unusually extended character sketch, and then reveals him through two contrasted dramatic scenes: an unexplained shriek in the middle of the night and his reaction to being accused of some crime in the mysterious past hinted at in the beginning of the poem. Canto II has quite a different character but unfolds 37

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the inexorable consequences of Canto I. Lara’s accuser mysteriously disappears; Lara is immediately involved in a violent fight with Otho, his host, who defends the honour of the accuser; there is then a jump of time in which Lara has become the popular, comparatively enlightened leader of his people, who then back him against what we might call the feudal establishment in a battle with Otho, which Lara loses. The poem ends with a protracted death scene choreographed through the reactions of Kaled, the boy-girl companion who has been with Lara throughout the poem, to its expiring hero. The poem runs rapidly – Francis Jeffrey commented upon the ‘unparalleled rapidity of narrative’ in The Giaour (BCH, 61), and the same is true here – but the narrative stages are very clearly marked. So, too, is the careful management of information, supplied and withheld, through which Byron controls our reactions to characters and events. The first readers of the Tales noted and admired these things. Scott, for example, commenting very pertinently on The Giaour, commended Byron’s ‘condensing’ of the narrative, ‘by giving us only those striking scenes which you have shown to be so susceptible of poetic ornament’ (BCH, 69). Yet it was the Byronic hero, most fully developed in Lara, who most caught public imagination. This was undoubtedly because of novel presentation, erotic frisson and a public fascination with the extent to which Byron was revealing himself in his heroes. But it was also, I will argue, because Lara is more than a character in a fiction who, tantalizingly, may or may not be Byron. Rather it is the puzzling nature of Lara’s being that opened or reopened questions about our placing in a larger world than the merely social one of the novel, while, at the same time, implying that this larger world is bound up with death and kinds of transgression, especially murder guilt, which break the bounds of settled moral thinking about the norms of human life. In this Lara resembles The Ancient Mariner, which, along with Christabel, is such an obvious influence upon the Tales. But Coleridge is not interested in the origin and character of human acts of will, whether free or fated, whereas this is Byron’s major concern in the poems up to and including Manfred. What are the sources of Byron’s preoccupation with the human will? Doubtless the stories about his suicidal and even murderous ancestors pumped into him from childhood played a part. Although it is hard to know the extent of the influence of Calvinism upon him in Aberdeen, its emphasis on human depravity and God’s apparently arbitrary elections combined, in the context of the Tales, with Byron’s 38

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interest in the teachings of Islam.1 But Byron also inhabits and, from his contemporaries’ point of view, reopens wider traditions of thought that the optimism of the Enlightenment, and its more sceptical emphasis on philosophical questions of epistemology rather than metaphysics, had put to one side. Byron was greatly influenced by, and often stood inside, both Enlightenment modes, even if his inclinations were more towards its epistemological scepticism than its confidence in progress. He sometimes seems to entertain the idea that what he calls ‘man’s research’ (CHP III, 105), be it the historical study of a Voltaire or the scientific study of a Newton, is a ‘thing to counterbalance human woes’ (DJ X, 2). But, in all his poetry, he is generally less preoccupied with the march of the human mind than in the locus of erring will and agonized consciousness which, like the Scriptures, he often calls the ‘heart’. In Don Juan, Plato is facetiously mocked for presuming to impose a ‘system’ upon ‘the controlless core | Of human hearts’ (I, 116). In the darker idiom of Childe Harold, the song ‘To Inez’ warns us not to ‘venture to unmask | Man’s heart, and view the Hell that’s there’ (CPW II, 40). The Byronic hero wears an iron mask on his heart but cannot prevent the lava flow of his inner hell reaching and disrupting the surface, and telling tales on his countenance that thus may be both ‘marble’ and ‘livid’ (Lara, I, 211, 84). How seriously we read Lara depends upon where we situate it. I want to direct this chapter by placing the poem as explicitly as possible in the larger tradition that undoubtedly shaped Byron’s thinking. And I will begin with Plato. In Don Juan, Byron includes Plato in a list of thinkers who ‘knew this life was not worth a potato’ (VII, 4). He needed a comic rhyme but he was right in the sense that Plato distrusted and devalued the world that presents itself to us through our senses, a position that Don Juan also counters: ‘Nothing more true than not to trust your senses; | And yet what are your other evidences?’ (XIV, 2). In a parallel way, Plato thought that wrong actions proceeded from wrong reasoning, and that 1 See my essay ‘Calvin in Islam’, first given as a lecture in Prague, which acknowledges the insights, if not the whole truth, of two sententiae: Lady Byron’s belief that these poems conflated Calvinist and Muslim notions of predestination, and Edward Said’s that ‘Orientalism’ responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object (‘Calvin in Islam: A Reading of Lara and The Giaour’, Romanticism 5.1 [1999]).

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if we reasoned correctly we could not act wrongly. The theory has a certain plausibility. Newman considered that it was still operative in Peel’s view that opening the labouring classes to education would mean that they would be more likely to act in morally good ways. Newman mercilessly savaged this political programme with Byronic relish in The Tamworth Reading Room. Behind him stood centuries of sustained Christian investigation from Saint Paul onwards. A central figure here is Saint Augustine, whom Hannah Arendt called ‘the first philosopher of the Will’.2 This is because Christian exegesis of the Scriptures is centred on contrasting acts of willing: Christ’s resistance to Satan’s temptation and His obedient acceptance of the painful tree of the cross are seen as reversing the first disobedience of Adam and Eve taking the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It is a commonplace of Byron criticism that he was fascinated by the story of Adam and Eve as archetypal transgressors, but of course the Judaic-Christian tradition was not the only one on which he could draw to deny the Platonic contention that the wellspring of human transgression was a deficiency of reason. Ovid’s Medea, in the seventh book of his Metamorphoses, famously exclaims ‘video meliora proboque, | deteriora sequor’ (‘I see and desire the better: I follow the worse’).3 Medea’s sentiment is more or less identical with Saint Paul’s ‘For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I’ (Romans 7: 15). For both, it is not reason but the will where the fault lies. Paul’s deep concern with this problem is built into his theology, but Ovid’s sense of it is dispersed into the various narratives of his Metamorphoses that present a variety of human experiences, both recognizable and bizarre, where human choices, chance and the different choices of the gods mingle in ways that Plato would regard with distaste. For Ovid and the narrator of Don Juan it is love that conquers reason, but for Saint Paul and the Byron of the Tales it is more mysterious – something innate in the will. I propose that Byron’s Tales can be seen as mediating between Ovid’s choice of narratives to illumine human experience and Saint Paul’s 2 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols (New York: Harcourt, 1978), II, 84. It should be noted that Saint Augustine was also central to an attempt to bring together the two traditions I am describing here. 3 Byron is almost certainly alluding to this moment in Metamorphoses (VII, 20–21) in the line from English Bards and Scotch Reviewers quoted by Jerome McGann in his introduction to this book: ‘Just skilled to know the right and chuse the wrong’ (690).

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sustained interest in the relation between the occluding of the human will and the mystery of sin. It is the conjunction of strikingly original narratives, which yet use some stereotypical ingredients, with what Jeffrey termed ‘a sort of demoniacal sublimity’ (BCH, 100) that made the Tales immensely popular and influential throughout Europe and beyond. The Enlightenment saw itself, by definition, as the extirpator of darkness, for it had Plato’s confidence in the ability of reason to cure human ills. Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and his Tales told a different and more compelling story to a world chastened by over 20 years of nearly continuous warfare resulting from a blood-stained revolution led by would-be rationalists like Robespierre. Yet, in England especially, the Tales soon went out of fashion and were later seen as precisely this – a fashion that held and then lost attention. This judgement persists. It was helped by the still often-quoted remarks by Byron to Thomas Moore about writing Lara rapidly ‘amidst balls and fooleries, and after coming home from masquerades and routs, in the summer of the sovereigns’ (BLJ IX, 170–71). When Byron appears in this social world of ‘balls and fooleries’, he does so as ‘Byron’ playing a part that, unlike the performance of a dandy, is not his whole self.4 ‘Coming home’, as we shall see in Chapter 6, would be to the seclusion of his rooms in Albany – an inner space to which he rarely invited visitors and in which, like Lara in his chamber, he would (aside perhaps from the mimic violence of practising fencing and boxing) think, and read and write. The worst modern approach to the Tales imagines ‘Byron’ in his study, an already cynical socialite, carelessly tossing off the latest histrionic confection of the ‘Oriental’ and the ‘Gothick’ to titillate his captive audience. More attention is sometimes paid to the poetry in the recent attempts to, as it were, bring the Tales out of the closet, whether the concentration on ‘sexuality’ emphasizes Freudian anxiety or Foucauldian rapture. Another set of modern readings imagines Byron at Albany as ‘an Enlightenment intellectual’, applying that gaze to the power relations between West and East, and between male and female.5 I think that 4 Byron in fact disliked parties, dancing and dining in public. An entry in his 1814 journal is as representative of the period in his life when Lara was composed: ‘to go out amongst the mere herd, without a motive, pleasure, pursuit—’sdeath! “I’ll none of it”’ (BLJ III, 249–50). 5 This phrase appears (on page 85) in ‘The Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour’ by Marilyn Butler, which arguably inaugurated ‘New Historicist’ readings of Byron’s Tales. This essay was first published in a collection I edited with my friend and colleague Vincent Newey (Byron and the Limits of Fiction [Liverpool: Liverpool University

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early readers saw something different and knew better. Their attention was captured by the narratives and the psychology of Byronic heroes, and some of them were interested in wider contexts, but they discerned something darker and deeper. George Ellis, reviewing Lara and other Tales for the Quarterly, was discomforted by the way they exceeded ‘the legitimate pretensions of poetry’ and invaded ‘the province of metaphysics’ (BCH, 67). The province of Lara, to use its own terminology, is ‘man o’er-laboured with his being’s strife’ (I, 632), a dark metaphysics of a new kind, which yet reopened modes of thinking that the Enlightenment had either ignored or ridiculed. It is more like the realm of Hamlet or the Existentialists, in that Byron links ‘being’ with a concern for the hidden depths of the self and its stricken yet unsubdued awareness of death. Hazlitt, for instance, who did not care for them, said that Byron’s Tales were ‘flowers strewed over the face of death’.6 ‘Metaphysical’ is a word that Byron used himself more than once to describe Lara. If Lady Byron is to be believed, he responded with a shudder to her remark that the poem was ‘mysterious […] like the darkness in which one fears to behold spectres’, by observing that it was ‘the most metaphysical of his works’ (HVSV, 112). We know for certain he told Leigh Hunt that Lara ‘is too little narrative—and too metaphysical’ (BLJ IV, 295). There is a tinge here, as often in Byron’s use of the word, of ‘unintelligible’ or ‘not very readable’. But he is using it in a serious way, as he would use it of Manfred and Cain, though not in Aristotle’s sense. The metaphysical concern of Lara is the mysterious darkness of sin. Many of the narratives that particularly interested Byron centre on transgression of some kind. This is not the case with most of his contemporaries. For them, transgression, when it occurs at all, is primarily seen as access to fresh or intense or more real kinds of experience, which are in some way conferred rather than willed or sought, whether this intensity of experience results from stealing a boat, taking advantage of a sleeping woman or shooting an albatross.7 The guilt of the Byronic Press, 1988]). See also Nigel Leask’s British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially 54–67 in relation to Lara. 6 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays, ed. John Mee and James Grande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 282. The quotation is from the essay on Byron first collected in The Spirit of the Age (1825). 7 Wordsworth’s guilt at stealing a boat is bound up with but also displaced by his

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hero in the Tales is certainly associated with an intensity of experience that dwarfs other kinds of intensity. For example, the strange expression ‘guilt had glowed’ is used of Lara (I, 353). ‘Glowing’ is a word that Byron most frequently associates with sexual attraction. Behind his usage here will certainly be Pope at his most Ovidian in Eloisa to Abelard: ‘How glowing guilt exalts the keen delight!’ (230). Enigmatic sexual guilt, and its mingling with murder guilt, is one of the fascinations of the Tales. Byron is also expert in fashioning Gothic set pieces. But he always focuses on the acts of will that are exercised or thought to be suspended through transgression. For the same reason, he is as (or more) interested in the horrific (albeit perhaps rewardingly intense) consequences of transgression than the gains or immediacy of its experiencing, which he usually associates with the incoherence of violent action and passion. Parisina is unmistakably structured as a textbook example of how a passionate experience of transgression (the illicit intercourse of Hugo and Parisina) is displaced and relativized by the intensity of Azo’s enduring guilt over his responsibility for their deaths. Macbeth, the Shakespeare play that Byron quotes from most frequently, opens with seven scenes sequencing the antecedents to a transgressive act of will (accomplished offstage), and then four whole acts of ghastly entailed aftermath. Byron is always more interested in aftermath than he is in antecedents, though the horrors of aftermath are shown to be painfully tethered to the antecedents that generated them. Byron’s Lara, who ‘half mistook for fate the acts of will’ (I, 336), is more Macbeth than Ancient Mariner. Byron originally wrote ‘his wayward will’, but the ‘half mistook’ was there from the beginning. The contrast with Keats’s celebrated use of ‘half’ (‘half in love with easeful Death’) is easily made. Byron may be ‘half in love’ with Lara’s blurred obliquity but he presents it clearly as a choice of will rather than of intensifying or easeful imagining. What is described in the third person here is boasted of directly by the Giaour: newly discovered awareness of his singled-out proximity to ‘unknown modes of being’ (1805 Prelude, I, 420 [William Wordsworth: The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and S. Gill [New York: Norton, 1979], 50); In ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ [1820], an act of violation is presented as enviable bliss when Porphyro melts into Madeleine’s dream ‘as the rose | Blendeth its odour with the violet’ (lines 320–21). Roses and violets neither transgress nor will. For the way Coleridge’s presentation of transgression ‘contemplates patterns rather than bears consequences’, see my essay ‘Fiction’s Limit and Eden’s Door’ (Byron and the Limits of Fiction, 1–6).

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r e a di ng by ron I wish’d it then—I wish it still,
 Despair is stronger than my will.
 Waste not thine orison—despair
 Is mightier than thy pious prayer; I would not, if I might, be blest, … (The Giaour, lines 1265–69)

Here the Giaour redirects onto ‘Despair’ that responsibility for his own will that Lara blames on ‘fate’, yet he still asserts his will in ‘I would not’. He, too, is in a condition of half-mistaking. As Robert Gleckner argued, The Giaour is, in its fundamental concerns, more obviously the precursor of Lara than The Corsair.8 The Giaour rarely speaks until the last third of the poem – his confession – where he does nothing else. Lara is a man of few words, which is why his repressed speech is transferred into a shriek (I, 204–6) that he cannot control. In the great pageant scene of his death he says nothing to those around him, but talks, as he has often done, in an unknown language with Kaled. If he sees himself as ‘a stranger in this breathing world’ (I, 315), it is because he more readily speaks the language of another world than the one around him. There is a striking parallel to this co-existence of silence and volubility in the celebrated stanza in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, where Byron is at his most articulate in voicing his being in the midst of a thunderstorm while at the same time declaring that this astonishing flow of voice is nothing of the kind but ‘a most voiceless thought’ (III, 97). Twenty-first century readers will tend to place this foregrounded, never wholly explained, ‘metaphysical’ intensity of being as a fictional strategy and psychological study. It is certainly both of these, but Byron here and elsewhere uses the vocabulary of sin, which is introduced as early as line 61 in Lara. He clearly does not do so simply as Gothic intensification but as an indication of sin’s manifest yet mysteriously unintelligible character. Modern readers, again, will tend to link Byron’s never yielded sense of sin backwards to his upbringing in Aberdeen, his lifelong reading of the Bible and the surviving presence of pre-Enlightenment modes of thought in his times. This may well be so but Byron is as much the precursor as the inheritor of thought about sin. Kierkegaard, for instance, who owned a ten-volume translation of Byron’s poems, directly contested Plato’s assumptions: 8 Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 154–56.

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The difficulty with the Socratic definition is that it leaves undetermined how ignorance itself is to be more precisely understood, the question of its origin, etc. That is to say, even if sin be ignorance (or what Christianity would perhaps prefer to call stupidity), which in one sense cannot be denied, we have to ask, is this an original ignorance […] or is it a super-induced, a subsequent ignorance? If it is what the last question implies, then sin must properly have its ground in something else, it must have its ground in the activity with which a man has laboured to obscure his intelligence. But also when this is assumed, the stiff-necked and tough-lived difficulty returns, prompting the question whether at the instant a man began to obscure his intelligence he was distinctly conscious of what he was doing. If he was not distinctly conscious of this, then his intelligence was already somewhat obscured before he began, and the question merely returns again. If it is assumed on the contrary that when he began to obscure his intelligence he was distinctly conscious of it, then sin (even though it be unconsciousness, seeing that this was an induced state) would not lie in the intelligence but in the will, and the question which must be raised is about the relation of the intelligence and the will to one another.9

It is Christian tradition, via Saint Paul, Saint Augustine and its developed interest in interior life, that enables Kierkegaard to critique ancient Greek thought in this precise way. We have acknowledged that Byron is tributary to both traditions but he was certainly intensely aware, by temperament and the earliest formations of his mind and heart, of the problem that Kierkegaard here articulates. The relation of intelligence to will is most fully dealt with in Cain but Lara, too, like Macbeth, ‘has laboured to obscure his intelligence’ in order to half mistake his own ground of willing. He remains, however, ‘distinctly conscious’ of this. Byron, like Kierkegaard, is fascinated by the origin of actions though, as he confesses in Don Juan, ‘To trace all actions to their secret springs | Would make indeed some melancholy mirth’ (XIV, 59). The springs are ‘secret’ because, as Kierkegaard argues, we deliberately obscure our intelligence by an act of will which thus hides its responsibility. The narrator of Lara himself says exactly this, though the comment is here about Kaled: ‘Yes—there be things that we must dream and dare, | And execute ere thought be half aware’ (I, 604–5). This obscuring of intelligence (‘half mistook’, ‘half aware’) is represented by night in Lara. Lara seeks it out and night, in turn, finds him out. 9 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death [1849], trans. Walter Lowrie (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 142–43.

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In the daytime light we are conscious of Lara’s maintenance of a certain style. It is this that makes him a Byronic hero and performs his unaltering will. He superintends and conserves his own being while, in another ‘half aware’ way, he recklessly expends it. He is stylish in both the economy of his conservation and the extravagance of his self-expenditure. He is both Beau Brummell and Volpone. Again, he is, as Byron wrote in the ‘Epistle to Augusta’ about a version of himself, ‘cunning in mine overthrow | The careful pilot of my proper woe’ (23–24). The word ‘proper’ here is splendidly chosen since it means appropriate, de facto belonging to him, and possessed, de jure belonging to him. The frankness is disarming but by no means total. In the next stanza, Byron makes exactly Lara’s half mistake. He declares that the day that gave him being also ‘gave me that which marred | The gift—a fate or will that walked astray’ (27–28). It is as though Byron accepts the responsibility for actions inherent in accepting the punishment that follows them but still wishes to blur responsibility by an ‘or’ (‘a fate or will’) at their point of origin. In Lara, this ‘or’ occurs in three territories. It is a feature of Lara’s psychology, it is a characteristic feature of Byron’s ambiguous narratives, which thus reduplicate in the puzzled reader the condition that is being presented in the text, and it is a feature of sin. The last is the most important of these in that it is the ground of the others. Sin is real to Byron in a way that it is not to his Romantic contemporaries, even Blake and Coleridge. In the understanding inaugurated by Saint Augustine and PseudoDionysius, sin cannot have a mode of being of its own otherwise it would, impossibly, have the goodness inherent in existence. Put another way, sin cannot be caused by God since then He would have created something of which He could not say, as in the first book of Genesis, ‘and God saw that it was good’. Sin, therefore, exists as a mode of negation or privation parasitic upon the intrinsically good being of a deformed existent. Sin has no presence of its own and, hence, no origin of its own that can be discerned, but sin itself is readily discernible in the dislocation of existents and existence as we habitually encounter it. Lucifer (and Byron) understand this exactly in Cain when Lucifer corrects Cain, who claims to ‘thirst for good’, with theological precision: ‘And who and what doth not? Who covets evil | For its own bitter sake?— None—nothing!’ (II, ii, 238–40). And yet, manifestly, evil is coveted. There is something wholly familiar and yet wholly inexplicable about coveting and choosing what embitters us. Byron’s Tales ask why this can be, especially in the context 46

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of the scale and intensity of human violence. The ‘Enlightenment’ part of him, perhaps most evident in his prose, will seek partial explanations in material circumstances and psychological motivation.10 There is another part of him, appalled and fascinated, that wonders whether the whole business of human life in its unknown origins is on the side of darkness, hence his interest in Lucifer, Manicheism and demons. But Byron’s deepest compulsion, when wrestling with the condition of ‘man o’er-laboured with his being’s strife’, is to look back to man’s first disobedience, what he calls ‘This uneradicable taint of sin’ (CHP IV, 126). The mystery of the Fall compels him to feel the burden of transgression in a Christian way, even if he cannot ‘sign up’ to all Christian doctrine: a line in The Giaour, inflammatory to its first readers, talks of death as ‘The first dark day of nothingness’ (70). Byron can certainly be preoccupied by whether death is ‘nothingness’, and remains opens to persuasion about this, but he is more fascinated still by the wilful choice of what the Calvinist theologian Karl Barth calls an ‘inner nothingness’, the ‘mad exchange’, mysterious, inexplicable and self-deceiving, whereby ‘Man does want to pass his limits, to be as God’.11 For Byron, transgression occasions the exaltation of Promethean suffering, yet also Lara’s ‘wither’d heart that would not break’ (I, 130) and the dereliction of Cain’s consciousness after he has murdered his brother. This ‘mad exchange’ is exactly the puzzling point where Byron’s sustained poetical thinking about the origins and aftermath of transgression, from the Giaour to Fletcher Christian, and the more precisely theological thinking of an Augustine, Kierkegaard or Barth traverse the same ground though with a different trajectory. Theology must centre in the dark mystery of the Crucifixion but, though the dark mystery remains central, it is transformed by and into the light 10 Byron knew his Voltaire, Gibbon and Bayle as well as anybody, and these are some of the writers that come to mind when using the word ‘Enlightenment’ as a shorthand. But it should be remembered that the English authors of the recent past Byron most admired were Dryden, Pope, Swift and Johnson, who have some affinities with continental ‘Enlightenment’ but also separate themselves from it: Dryden became a Catholic, Pope was one, Johnson was a High Anglican, Swift was some sort of Christian. There is a cult of the heroic will in Dryden (partly influenced by Corneille); Pope savages the increasing confidence of science; Johnson is haunted by the will’s tendency to deceive itself in false wishes; Swift’s satire is often directed against rationalism. 11 Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, 5 vols (Church Dogmatics Volume IV, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961–69]) I, 419–22.

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of Easter. The dark mystery of Byronic heroes in the Tales never finds light. Byron is both appalled by this and yet in some way celebrates it. He is on both sides in Lara and all the dark poems. He presents with interior sympathy the exaltation of the will in peculiar men and accepts their superiority to others. This is even linked with bright values, as in the Romantic version of a Prometheus who will never be reconciled with Zeus, so Lara is presented as a superior and often charming being. He is adored by Kaled and portrayed as the brave and popular leader of an uprising against a corrupt aristocracy. At the same time, he is also cursed, sterile, held by guilt arising from unacknowledged events, and finally, a cypher of negation, shaking his fist against God and the circumstances of life. The reader is led into sympathy with Lara and also to judgement on him, and is intrigued and unsettled by this partly because it uncovers dilemmas and uncertainties in the reader too. Lara and Byron are cagey about where Lara’s evil originates. Is it evil at all? If so, does it arise from faulty youth, inherent disposition, undisclosed events in an unknown territory, trafficking with spirits, the murder of Ezzelin? In the case of the murder, the tale shows us the before and after, then a rumour and then another little tale. At any point of clarification, we will find that there is some further reference back. This is characteristic of all the Byronic heroes up to Manfred. The concealment of origin in an apparent indication of origin is the métier of sinfulness. The mechanics of this are first exposed in the aetiological myth of the Fall, which Byron is inclined to grasp at as sensible (by which he means ‘feelable’ not reasonable). The Fall as presented in Genesis is very explicit about evasive transfers of responsibility: And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. (Genesis 3: 12–13)

Adam blames Eve, then Eve blames the serpent, as the origins of their own act. In Lara there are two such blurrings. At the moment of misdirection, the will refuses to recognize it as such. This refusal is aided by a further reference back to fate, chance, upbringing or genes. A refusal of recognition, an anagnorisis consequent upon internal misdirection, leads to and is itself bound up with an externalized misdirection. Lara’s responsibility for Ezzelin’s murder is a puzzle for emancipated readers, because we have begun to accept that there could always be some explaining 48

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antecedent for transgressive actions and because the consequence of claiming to be the origin of our being seems intimately bound up with what, as modern enlightened interpreters of the Prometheus myth, we take to be value. Being ‘self-centred’ may still be classed as a vice, but ‘Be your own centre’ has become a recommended, at-hand, democratic virtue rather than the difficult route to Prometheus’s ‘concentered recompense’ or Lucifer’s self-exalting advice: ‘Nothing can | Quench the mind, if the mind will be itself | And centre of surrounding things’ (‘Prometheus’, 57; Cain I, i, 213–15). The self-standing individual is seen as courageously rooted in the energies of outsider (‘unallied’) opposition rather than standing within the gratefully accepted given. Lara’s stance is exactly this. He grieves, yet also vaunts that he is ‘a stranger in this breathing world’ (I, 315). In so doing, he is in league with what seems to be an opposite stance – being ‘a citizen of the world’ – for both repudiate givenness of place and time. Faced with this convincing self-exultation, we find ourselves therefore refusing to believe that Lara is simply a murderer even though we suspect that he is and therefore that we might, imaginatively, be. Byron plays this game on us again more subtly in Manfred, whereas Cain’s dramatized fratricide shows us directly what Lara and Manfred hide. This presupposes that Lara did murder Ezzelin. Byron deliberately blurs this so that the reader can continually and painfully rediscover – even in some way be complicit – in the crime. Towards the end of the poem, he stresses the relative enlightenment of Lara’s ‘milder sway’ over his ‘menials’ (II, 172, 174) and his skills and courage as their leader (‘Commanding, aiding, animating all’ [II, 368]). As usual, Byron qualifies his positives, for Lara perhaps only ‘played the courteous lord and bounteous host’ (II, 191), yet he seems a more positive figure than those opposed to him. Momentarily he is not ‘a stranger in this breathing world’ but, in appearance at least, an acknowledged participant in it. As Byron intends, we almost forget the murder of which he stands accused, and Lara becomes a more complex figure in a more complicated poem. For all that, almost all readers assume that Lara did kill Ezzelin. William H. Marshall produced an elaborate argument, based on a comparison with Gulnare in The Corsair, that Kaled did so. I agree with Robert Gleckner that this is mistaken but I know at least two distinguished Byronists who think, on other grounds, that Kaled’s guilt is a possibility.12 Since, however, 12 Compare Marshall’s The Structure of Byron’s Major Poems (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 50–62 with Gleckner’s Byron and the Ruins of

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the murderer – or the one who disposes of the body – is seen wearing a silver-cross badge of knighthood identical to that of Lara, and since there is no reason for Kaled to wear this, the figure on the horse must be Lara. At the very least therefore, Lara is accomplice to the murder. Nothing is absolutely clear, we are not in an open world of light, but both poem and poet are, I think, responsible for the general assumption that Lara kills Ezzelin and for the haze that surrounds this assumption. This interpretation, apart from general probability (‘Who else than Lara could have cause to fear | His presence?’ [II, 133–34]) is supported within the poem by signalled details that are hard to explain in any other way. Lara responds to Ezzelin’s challenge by going into a ‘deep abstraction’ linked by the narrator to Lara’s ‘remembrance’ of the ‘deeds’ of which Ezzelin has accused him (I, 483, 489, 455). Then, coming to himself, he repeats Ezzelin’s ‘to-morrow’ in a low tone that ‘show’d resolve, determined, though unknown’ (I, 495). Next, in passing by Ezzelin, he directs a strange smile towards him that discloses the workings of his ‘heart secure | Of all that he would do, or could endure’ (502–3). Kaled alone understands the relation of Lara’s ‘resolve’ and ‘all that he would do’ to his smile: ‘When Kaled saw that smile his visage fell, | As if on something recognized right well’ (610–11). As Jonathon Shears notes, this is presumably ‘the seal’ on Lara’s decision to kill Ezzelin that night.13 And it is precisely the moment when Kaled should execute his instinctive movement to dissuade Lara ‘ere thought be half aware’ (I, 605), but he fails to do so. Lara’s smile, etched in antithesis, fuses controlled ironical behaviour, exultant secreted flow of life, and sudden, precise, murderous determination. After the murder, he pretends to wait for the man he has killed ‘With self-confiding, coldly patient air’ (II, 30). It is this point, which we are not allowed to see directly, that marks Lara as Cain’s descendant, Manfred’s progenitor, an uncommon common murderer. He cannot believe that this is all that he is and, in Lara, the deliberately flaunted obscurity of the narrative of Ezzelin’s murder makes the reader guiltily co-operative in this refusal to credit what we guess and know. In this way, we also participate in that obscuring of our intelligence of which Kierkegaard speaks. But I do not think that whatever is the ‘something’ that Kaled ‘recognized right well’ disturbs Paradise, 154. All the other Byronists I have consulted assume that Lara murders Ezzelin. 13 Jonathon Shears, ‘“A tale untold”: The Search for a Story in Byron’s Lara’, The Byron Journal 34.1 (2006), 6.

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him because it reveals some Richard III-like ability in Lara to disguise murderous intention. Rather, Kaled is familiar from Lara’s past with a hidden propensity to extreme violence of which Lara is dreadfully aware, like the man who registers the impulse within himself to jump from a precipice in Don Juan (XIV, 5–6). In this, Lara’s interior resembles that of Byron’s Cain. Lara’s heart, we are told, is both ‘merciless’ and has an inexplicable ‘fierceness’. The ‘to-morrow’ will change both Lara and the poem. It takes the reader into new territory, but returns Lara and Kaled to that which was once familiar. There are no deaths in Canto I. The murder of Ezzelin takes place between the two cantos. The second is wholly a world of violence. René Girard argued convincingly that from earliest times we have been appalled and bewildered by the inexplicably sudden and frequent onset of violence and its rapid, uncontrollable spread.14 I have argued elsewhere that part of the success of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was owing to its unflinching presentation of the new European violence over 26 years that originated in the taking of the Bastille and ended in ‘the crowning carnage, Waterloo’ (The Vision of Judgment, line 38).15 Byron’s Cain represents and re-examines the biblical story that records the first eruption of such violence and its link with transgression in Eden. Byron stresses, in an explanation that again shows his intelligent preoccupation with the origin of transgressive actions, that this eruption proceeds from prior disposition and passionate will rather than the rational intelligence involved in premeditated crime: he [Cain] falls into the frame of mind—that leads to the Catastrophe— from mere internal irritation—not premeditation or envy—of Abel—(which would have made him contemptible) but from rage and fury against the inadequacy of his state to his Conceptions—& which discharges itself rather against Life—and the author of Life—than the mere living. (BLJ IX, 53–54)

Lara is a more controlled figure than Cain but his ‘almost careless coolness’ (II, 59) is only ‘temperate seeming’ (I, 352). In a moment, it can change into Cain’s ‘rage and fury’: Then all was stern collectedness and art,
 Now rose the unleavened hatred of his heart; (II, 77–78) 14 René Girard, La Violence et le Sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972). 15 Bernard Beatty, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I and II in 1812’, The Byron Journal 41.2 (2013).

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The Oxford English Dictionary instances Byron’s curious use of ‘unleavened’ here to mean ‘unchanged or unaffected by a transforming influence’. The meaning must be that his ‘collectedness’ is an ‘art’, whereas the hatred in his heart, though habitually concealed, is fixed. This in turn provides a helpful gloss on the posture of violence that was exposed after the night shriek in Canto I, as Lara lies ‘stretch’d’ on cold marble with his ‘half drawn sabre near’ (I, 213): And still defiance knit his gathered brow;
 Though mix’d with terror, senseless as he lay,
 There lived upon his lip the wish to slay; (I, 216–18)

Again, the curious use of ‘lived upon his lip’ implies some permanent ‘rage and fury’ linked with his vitality and his killing sword arm. He opposes ‘Otho’s phrenzy’ (II, 64) with the same ‘wish to slay’ which, when Otho falls but is not dead and the crowd tries to restrain him, drives Lara almost to turn the ‘thirsty point’ (II, 81) of his sword on them. The ‘wish to slay’ once enacted revives an unslakable thirst for more. The detail is harbinger of the spread of violence from one act into the violent war that follows and results from it, for ‘A word’s enough to raise mankind to kill’ (II, 223). Girard could not wish for a better example of his thesis. What is striking is Lara’s animation and at-homeness in the war: Where foe appeared to press, or friend to fall, Cheers Lara’s voice, and waves or strikes his steel, Inspiring hope, himself had ceased to feel. (II, 369–71)

The sword, either as directing gesture or delivering a killing blow, is natural in his hand. Byron calls the detail again to our attention by his use of ‘instinctively’ when Lara receives the fatal arrow wound: That hand, so raised, how droopingly it hung! But yet the sword instinctively retains, Though from its fellow shrink the falling reins; (II, 385–87)

The conjunction of ‘stern collectedness’ and ‘unleavened hatred’, of violence and silence, is represented in Lara’s inability to speak when dying (II, 424), and yet he can deliver the sudden flow of speech ‘in that other tongue’ that constitutes his ‘dying tones’ (444). The onlookers of this death ‘understood not’ (443) this impenetrable, loquacious 52

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‘darkness’ (453) just as those ‘rarely call’d attendants’ outside Lara’s chamber ‘heard, but whisper’d—“that must not be known—”’ (I, 135, 139), and those who tend him after his paroxysm hear but cannot understand his strange speech. This speech, we are told, is meant for an ear ‘that cannot hear’ (I, 234). Lara’s shriek, borne perhaps out of its Radcliffean setting with ‘Gothic windows’ and shadowy pictures, is not primarily there as it would be in Radcliffe for atmospheric or narrative purposes (although it is also there for these reasons). Shrieks are frequent and expected in Radcliffe’s novels and belong to the kind of feminine sensibility in which she is most interested. No reader expects a Byronic hero, especially Lara, to shriek. We are as appalled as his retainers are. The night shriek blurs narrative event and metaphysical disclosure. It is a malign sign of that ontological excess that characterizes Byronic heroes from the Giaour to Manfred – indeed, such excess is the reason why Nietzsche, who owned three editions of Byron including one in English, so admired Manfred as harbinger of the Übermensch. It will be writ large two years later in the concluding section of Byron’s ‘Darkness’ where two enemies ‘beheld | Each other’s aspects’ and ‘saw, and shriek’d, and died— | Even of their mutual hideousness they died’ (65–67). Lara’s shriek is similarly directed to some hideous adversary. In Radcliffe’s novel, the heroine’s shriek will be occasioned by some mysterious terror which, after being explained rationally, will cease to exist. It is not a permanent feature of the heroine’s consciousness. But Lara’s shriek discloses something permanently within as well as, on occasion, without him. Radcliffe always cancels the apparent supernatural but Lara’s experience is linked with the strange voices that his servants also sometimes hear when he is supposedly alone. Lara’s shriek, though immersed in its Gothic narrative, is addressed not only to the reader of such narratives but to some larger answering acknowledgement in the reader as a troubled human being, aware of the frightening proximity of consciously ordered appearance and the chaotic promptings, knowledge, memories and fears of an uncontrolled, trapped, unsurrendering, terrified dark interior that only really becomes evident in psychic disturbances, unwonted facial expressions and gestures, compulsive actions, or sometimes in versions of laughter. Here, Lara’s shriek is a forced disclosure of that central subterranean connection between flow of life and withheld essence, ‘Vitality of poison’ (CHP III, 34), that constitutes Byronic heroes and slays those whom they touch by secret contagion or by concealed or indirect murder. The great cry that rises up in any reading of Byron’s dark poetry and, in Walter Ong’s 53

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words, ‘makes its terrible demands on those persons who hear it’, is more directly experienced than anything else that I have read, apart from some of the Psalms, or Job, or some of the Prophetic writings.16 It is sourced here in the strange and terrible chamber of the unmasked human heart, half-aware and wholly aware. But if this is so, how can it be so? The cry in Job or the Miserere psalms consists in bringing to light the universal and inescapable character of sin without having a worked-out metaphysic of sin. It is the transformation of individual terror, ungroundedness and fault into a condition grasped as primordial but not articulated quite as such. Christianity’s strange claim to uncover sin, as it were for the first time, may have at least this plausibility to a non-Christian that it is the nature of origins to be uncovered via their furthest consequences just as physicists try to get as close as possible to the expanding limits of the cosmos in order to know more about its starting point. Barth’s Church Dogmatics, therefore, deliberately begins with Christology and only comes to sin in its fourth volume because sin cannot be seen for what it is, and in this sense seen at all, without accepting the Redemption, which, as it were, brings Leviathan fully out of the water for the first time, in the single act of receiving it, being visibly destroyed by it, and invisibly destroying it on the cross. If we follow this argument through for the moment it leads us to ask how Byron can represent sin, and he does this as certainly as Baudelaire does, without representing redemption. Byron repeatedly engaged with their interdependence, the sense that the first cannot be seen without the second. He was convinced of the inescapability of sin. He was less convinced about the offer of redemption, because it involved the sacrifice of the innocent for the guilty. But we should still be careful not to read off ‘sin’ in Byron as an oddity that can be confidently referred back to the psyche as ultimate origin or to literature as its neutral occasion of play. In the Judaic-Christian tradition, sin, having no origin, cannot be disclosed through origin. Aquinas understands this through reasoning; Byron understands it as a founding intuition supported by experience. Thinking, as such, even that of an Aquinas, can no more get to possible irreducible sin than Cain’s flight to Hades can show him actual unthinkable death. 16 Walter J. Ong, ‘A Dialectic of Aural and Objective Correlatives’, Essays in Criticism 8.2 (1958), 168.

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This analysis, set out at some length, will be helpful in explicating a puzzling event at Lara’s death: For when one near display’d the absolving cross, And proffered to his touch the holy bead
 Of which his parting soul might own the need, 
 He look’d upon it with an eye profane, 
 And smil’d—Heaven pardon! if ’twere with disdain; 
 And Kaled though he spoke not, nor withdrew 
 From Lara’s face his fix’d despairing view, 
 With brow repulsive, and with gesture swift, Flung back the hand which held the sacred gift, 
 As if such but disturbed the expiring man, 
 Nor seem’d to know his life but then began, 
 That life of Immortality, secure, 
 To none, save them whose faith in Christ is sure! (II, 477–89)

We notice at once that Kaled here now does ‘execute ere thought be half aware’. It is her most decisive, and only violent, act. The audacious word here is ‘repulsive’. It plays wittily on the repelling act in which she is engaged, but that act, momentarily, renders her face repulsive – a version of what frightened her earlier in Lara’s face. We are reminded of this because when Lara looks on the cross and rosary beads that are offered to him, he smiles in a way that clearly references the earlier moment. It is curious that he does not smile sneeringly at the someone who proffers the cross to him but ‘look’d upon it’ (the single cross rather than the multiple rosary beads). The smile therefore is the same as that he gives to Ezzelin. It is directed to an adversary as is the mutual smile of enemies in ‘Darkness’, and the enemy here must be Christ. Since it is only 20 lines on that Kaled’s ‘raven hair’ is described attractively as ‘glossy tendrils’ (II, 509), Byron’s decision to make her repulsive is significant. Without being ‘repulsive’ in some sense she could not cross over into the meaning and character of Lara’s death. She would remain the other side of it like Astarte, Francesca, Medora and even Zuleika. Her own brow has to be marked with the sign of Cain while she looks ‘on Lara’s brow—where all grew night’ (II, 475). Lara, like Cain, has ‘death | Written upon his forehead’ (II, i, 74–75) but Kaled, too, is sealed as Cain’s kin now. What she rejects here is the repulsive object of the cross, which also represents the spectacle of a dying male body much like Lara’s. Kaled has Mary’s posture under the cross but looks on the unsaving spectacle of ‘the expiring man’ 55

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with ‘fix’d despairing view’ (II, 486, 483). Here, ‘the hand which held the sacred gift’ (485) is repelled with violence because even momentary consideration of its possibility as gift would undo that fixity of will that seeks to pass into the death which the cross unfreezes. If I am right in interpreting Kaled’s reaction to that first smile as remembered recognition of Lara’s past violence, which will now be repeated with Ezzelin and have unlimited extension, then the conjunction of Lara’s smile and Kaled’s sudden, surprising violence when she ‘Flung back the hand that held the sacred gift’ is a repetition of the earlier moment where smile and violence coincide. Such repetition in changed mode is both significant and musically pleasing. The narrator comments, with an irony as telling as any in Don Juan, that Kaled ‘Nor seem’d to know his life but then began’ (II, 487). The ‘seem’d to know’ belongs to a postulated pious narrator, present in other places in the poem, who can be noted ironically by the reader for the tale is clearly not an endorsement of the narrator’s Christianity. On the other hand, the reader is surprised by this explicitness and it is equally obvious that the tale cannot be read as an exposé of such faith, since Lara’s smile and Kaled’s violent action reject the sacred gift with a vigour that must correspond to their recognition that such a faith might be the antithetical reproach to Lara’s elaborately protracted scene of death as absolute end of life and narrative. The gift is in direct speaking antithesis to their mode of being, which is why it must be rejected immediately and violently. Moreover the ‘Nor seem’d to know’, which presumably applies in the first instance to Kaled’s foreignness – she knows nothing of Christianity but instantly recognizes Lara’s recognition of an adversary – must apply more deeply in this tale of ‘seeming’ and knowing obscuration to Lara’s own processes of will. Kaled loved the whole man beyond the fixed style of his earlier smile, which she understood as willing murder (and now his own death) and would undo if she could. She loves beyond her knowing. Here she tends that smile as a chosen style representing the whole man in his victorious, defeated expiry and dashes away the defeated, victorious cross lest any movement of Lara’s will in dying should be suspended and therefore redirected by looking on it. In doing so she becomes a magnificent human lover, like Adam deliberately joining Eve’s transgression in Book IX of Paradise Lost for the best of human (‘tragic’) reasons, when ‘he scrupl’d not to eat | Against his better knowledge’ (PL IX, 997–98) – and thus obeys his will rather than his intelligence. Yet just as Adam and Eve after their transgression find their minds suddenly ‘darkend’ (IX, 1054) and their relationship immediately 56

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alters, so Byron surprises us by making the hitherto comely, gentle and attentive Kaled unexpectedly violent to another, and repulsive in that violence. She shares, momentarily, in Lara’s double character exhibited in the juxtaposition of his disdainfully controlled smile and her violently uncontrolled action. Why does Byron put in this scene in Lara? The simplest explanation is that Byron, as a thinking poet, is working towards the insight that Barth would later arrive at as a Christian theologian: the odd sequence where full acknowledgement of the character of sin can only be made in the light of redemption, almost as though the latter comes first. If Byron is always drawn to represent unmistakably and specifically sin and the connection between sin, murder and death – they are fixed, interconnected reference points in his mind – then he needs the perspective of possible salvation for it to be made discernible. Hence the Giaour’s semi-confession, Francesca’s offer of ‘mercy’s gate’ to Alp (The Siege of Corinth, 593), and perhaps the necessity of a sequel to The Corsair. Similarly, Azo’s final condition is revealed as sinful because it comes after Hugo’s ‘penitential holiness’, which accepts the gift of absolution (Parisina, 415–18). Lara recommends a Christian diagnosis but it does not recommend the Christian salve that it indicates. It is not a purposefully Christian poem – indeed, one half of Christianity seems to be used to spite the other – but I am arguing that it is more consistently religious than it is political, psychological or about love. We might see this when the narrator, changing tack, asks at the end of the poem why Kaled should love Lara: Why did she love him? Curious fool!—be still— Is human love the growth of human will? (II, 530–31)

The question, presented as answer here, returns us to what is clearly the main concern of the poem and of this chapter. The poem centres not in love but the occluded origins of action and desire in Lara’s will and the entailed aftermath of this. The narrator momentarily inclines to the alternative of ‘fate’ rather than ‘will’, but goes on to present a list of possibilities and concludes that ‘seal’d is now each lip that could have told’ (II, 539). The poem then returns to its own major mystery – the murder of Ezzelin – which it re-narrates as a new tale from the standpoint of a bystander like the fisherman in The Giaour. All the indications point to Lara as murderer but the watching serf cannot see who it is that throws Ezzelin’s weighted body into the river because the 57

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murderer’s ‘face was mask’d’ (II, 588). Lara’s face is always in some sense masked. Only Kaled can read it, just as only she can understand the language that he uses with her. The last lines of the poem present Kaled frenziedly re-enacting her death-bed nurturing of Lara (and her intent look at the unmasked face of his marble, livid heart) or writing ‘strange characters along the sand’ (II, 625). The effect is of deft musical recapitulation – surprise, pathos and closure – which, in another way, disquiets the reader with information that cannot be musically appeased. The whole tale handles its stereotypical ingredients with racy, self-conscious balancings but communicates an imbalance at the centre of Lara’s corrupt consciousness, and also within the poet and reader who cannot trust their response to what they read but gain dark pleasure from their complying half-awareness. Pascal famously compared the human sphere to the range of finite numbers, intelligible and always particular but necessarily proceeding from and running towards two definite but unknowable infinities. Byron situates the human will between two abysses into which his heroes casually rush and fearfully tread. In both cases there is an alternative, self-created abyss (‘its own origin of ill and end’ [Manfred III, iv, 131]), which displaces that ‘thirst for good’ which Byron’s Lucifer sees as natural to all existents. Yet we are not reading a Pauline epistle. As when we read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we are inhabiting a narrative sequence that pleases and engages us. I began this chapter by outlining the clarity of that sequence in Lara, which is in pleasing tension with the obscure processes in the Byronic hero’s interior and the deliberate withholding of narrative information by Byron the poet. Byron’s art of concealment in Lara is one reason why, as readers, we remain not disconfirmed in our own tendency to endorse, excuse, identify or at least stay with the unfolding character of a concealed yet palpable transgression. The poem is a tour de force which unites reader, poet and Lara, by turns exultant, trapped, unsurrendering, terrified. Like Byron, we see both sides of a darkness that is at once fictional and humanly representative. The curious character of Lara and the Tales is given in this tension between fictional intensities and theological shadowings, the exotically new and the startlingly stilloperative old antinomies whose concurrence fascinated and disturbed Lara’s original readers – and should disturb us still.

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Understanding Manfred The Sense of an Ending : The Sense of An Ending

In December 1925 Sergey Yesenin, the most popular poet of the day, had committed suicide, writing a farewell poem which ends, ‘To die is nothing new—but then, | what new is there in life?’ Saying he was afraid that this might demoralise other Soviet writers, Mayakovsky gently parodied these lines: ‘In this life it’s not difficult to die— | to construct life is significantly more difficult.’ And then, in April 1930, Mayakovsky himself committed suicide. Robert Chandler, ‘Writer Who Caught the Reality of War’1 Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die.

Manfred III, iv, 151

Frank Kermode argued in The Sense of an Ending that human beings find it hard to accept the brevity and provisionality of their lives. The end is certain but the character and timing of this end is unknown. Hence, we often postulate some golden age in the past, a present, unprecedented time of upheaval, and a possibly transformed future brought about by events in the present. The unknowability and humiliating relativity of our present is thus transformed into a dangerously meaningful and privileged moment. Byron, quite often but not always, positions himself 1 The Critic (July/August 2020) (https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/july-august-2020/ writer-who-caught-the-reality-of-war/).

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in time like this. Similarly, Kermode argued that we read and create local fictions within this larger fiction – epics, dramas, novels – where the realized character and timing of the fictional ending are set out and placed since we need ‘need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems’ in order to make sense of them.2 This enables a whole to be understood in a way that no living person can understand their own unfinished and not obviously sequential lives (although most of us are troubled that we cannot do so). This analysis was well received. Not least because, at the very advent of criticism’s post-modernist swerve, it seemed to preserve that tie between the aesthetic and the ethical that Dr Johnson presupposed. I have never been convinced by it. The analysis seems to depend upon an a priori credo, based on an absence, that is not itself up for examination. Kermode’s epigraph from Peter Porter’s ‘The Historians Call Up Pain’ sets it up as a limited but possible ‘eschatology’ for moderns who no longer live in an age of faith. The epigraph establishes Kermode’s argument as the well-articulated heir to Arnold and Leavis, and their more troubled attempts to establish through sheer assertion a moral basis within literature, displacing religion, that can bestow some of religion’s salvific benefits. Such attempts in turn parallel a clear, though not always acknowledged, line from ostensibly ethical Wordsworth, via De Quincey and even Baudelaire, to ostensibly aesthetic Pater and Oscar Wilde.3 It is not surprising that Kermode wrote an excellent book on Wallace Stevens, whose ‘secular mysticism’, founded like Wordsworth’s on the elevation of Nature, is as misty as Arnold’s, but far more self-confident. Byron wished as much as Dr Johnson and Alexander Pope to presume a necessary connection between aesthetic representation and ethical judgement but found that he was increasingly out of step with his more advanced contemporaries, who seemed to him intent on separating them. He came to think, partly rightly, partly wrongly in my view, that his Tales and the first cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage contributed to that displacement of represented life, upon which we may pass judgements, by the cult of the ostentatiously imagined, which evades judgement by denying the claims of any other centrality. This Byron 2 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 7. 3 Bernard Beatty, ‘Wordsworth’s and Byron’s Links with British and French Decadence’, in Decadent Romanticism: 1790–1814, ed. Kostas Boyiopoulos and Mark Sandy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

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deplored. The ottava rima poems, and their conversational concern with stylized but recognizable human lives in varied societies (even when, as in The Vision of Judgment, these are dispersed in ‘neutral space’), are his most obvious reaffirmation of the Aristotelian link between morality and mimesis. Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’ asks its readers rhetorically, just as much as Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, why there cannot be found In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?4

Byron, adrift in Switzerland after the disaster of his marriage, was dosed by Shelley with ‘Wordsworth physic’ of precisely this kind.5 It worked neither for him nor for Manfred. Manfred would not have been started without the Alps,6 but it does not end up, as The Prelude does, on a high mountain. Manfred’s version of this on the Jungfrau leads to the humiliation of his person rather than to exaltation of his powers of mind. Yet Byron attached considerable importance to where Manfred ended up. Very unusually, he wrote two versions of the ending. Manfred is notoriously a composition of a ‘metaphysical—and inexplicable kind’ (BLJ V, 170), forcing many questions upon its readers while declaring them to be unanswerable. Was Astarte Manfred’s sister or not, did he kill her directly or was he only in some larger sense responsible for her death? Is she primarily some projected ‘anima’ corresponding to Manfred’s ‘animus’ or a character in the same sense as he is? How should we combine the various belief systems that the play seems to endorse at different times, or sometimes at one and the same time? While some early readers and modern critics have found Manfred ‘eclectic and unstable’,7 others have sought nobly to wrestle with its enigmas, not least the final enigma of Manfred’s last words. But there has been surprisingly little critical interest in how our understanding of these last words, which remain the same in both versions, might be 4 ‘Sunday Morning’, lines 21–22 (Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems [London: Faber & Faber, 1955], 67). 5 Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron [1824], ed. Ernest J. Lovell Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 194. 6 Byron initially said that Manfred was written ‘for the sake of introducing the Alpine scenery’ (BLJ V, 188), and later that the ‘germs’ of the drama could be found in his Alpine Journal describing that scenery (BLJ V, 268). 7 Philip Martin, Byron: A Poet before his Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 108.

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affected by the substantial changes Byron made to the ending of his dramatic poem. Byron rewrote the final act of Manfred because William Gifford (his unofficial editor) urged it, but also because this coincided with his own opinion, recorded in a letter to Murray on 14 April 1817: The third act is certainly d—d bad—& […] has the dregs of my fever— during which it was written.—It must on no account be published in its present state;—I will try & reform it—or re-write it altogether—but the impulse is gone—& I have no chance of making any thing out of it. (BLJ V, 211)

The new third act must have been written between 26 April and 6 May 1817, when he wrote from Rome: ‘I send you in two other covers, the new third act of “Manfred.”—I have rewritten the greater part […] The Abbot is become a good man—& the Spirits are brought in at the death’ (BLJ V, 219). If the bulk of the play was written in September 1816, its first conclusion the following February 1817 and the new conclusion in late April and May, the circumstances of its composition differ markedly from those of almost all of his other poems (even before we note that the curse that ends Act I and the Ashtaroth song used in the original Act III may have been written as early as 1812/13).8 Byron characteristically through-composes, adjusting lines and phrases as he does so, but then, especially in the pre-ottava rima works, he often interpolates or adds extra lines to the completed poem. If, as in his two longest poems, there are significant gaps in their composition, this does not bother their author since the character of both poems is open-ended to the future development of their narratives and the future circumstances of the poet. However, radically altering the final section of Manfred, his first attempt at drama, clearly made Byron stand back and reconsider the nature of the poem as a whole. There is no relation between the original Act III and Act I but, in the revision, the reprise of the spirits, Manfred’s domination of them, and his evident, almost comic anger at their delay in obeying him, clearly reference its opening scene. This has effects within both the musical and signifying structures of the poem. 8 The composition history is well summarized by Jerome McGann (CPW IV, 461–65) and by Peter Cochran in Manfred: An Edition of Byron’s Manuscripts and a Collection of Essays (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2015) – a version of this edition can also be accessed on his website, petercochran.wordpress.com.

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The new Act III is somewhere between a ‘reform’ and a ‘re-write’ (BLJ V, 211). Its essential structure remains the same – a meeting with the Abbot, an address to the setting sun, and a death scene – but it is over twice as long as the original act. The extended meeting with the Abbot, the preliminaries to the death scene, and its dramatic placing have wholly altered their character. Manfred’s famous last line therefore almost certainly has different resonances in its new context. This is what made Byron so angry when Gifford and Murray failed to hear them from Albemarle Street, and cut the line from the first published text. From Venice in August 1817, Byron wrote to Murray: ‘You have destroyed the whole effect & moral of the poem by omitting the last line of Manfred’s speaking’ (BLJ V, 257). Would he have said this about ‘Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die’ in its original context? Byron’s summary of the essential difference between the two endings (a refashioning of the Abbot’s character and the reintroduction of the spirits) is right, but it is clear that much thought has gone into a number of altered, deleted or added details. For instance, the original Act III opens with the Abbot greeting Manfred, whereas in the second version (it will be easier to talk about the two versions as IIIa and IIIb from now on)9 there is a time indicator and then an important short soliloquy by Manfred, during which he notices an ‘Inexplicable stillness’ in his interior that he has not experienced before and that he wants to note down (III, i, 7). A brief comment on both will be helpful. We can have no precise idea as to how long the action of Manfred takes. It is hard to imagine that a movement from a hall in Manfred’s castle to the Jungfrau, from there to the Chamois Hunter’s cottage and then to a waterfall, an appearance in Arimanes’ hall, back to the castle and then to the tower, which is ‘at some distance’ from it, could take place within a normal 24 hours. It is equally impossible, however, to imagine Manfred sleeping (‘My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep’ [I, i, 3]) or eating at any point. He rejects the drink that the Chamois Hunter offers him. There are no intermissions. The time indicators are: Midnight (I, i, stage direction) Morning (I, ii, stage direction) ‘It is not noon’ (II, ii, 1) 9 In his edition, Peter Cochran sets out IIIa and IIIb in their entirety. References in this chapter follow McGann’s edition, where ‘III’ means IIIb and any lines particular to IIIa (set out in an appendix in CPW ) are designated as such.

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Time indicators are usually given in the opening words of the scene. The sequence from darkness to early midday, then evening light and then again to darkness is clearly signalled and significant. Manfred, unsleeping, goes from midnight to midnight. The play seems to take place in a notional 24 hours of uninterrupted consciousness, which holds together scenes of very different character that are largely without intrinsic connection. Byron’s least classical play is, in some ways, his most classical. This imagined sustaining of a single act of consciousness gives the play its intense character. It is also the subject of the play and is why, like Samson Agonistes, it proceeds but does not progress. Both the energy and pain-filled being of Manfred depend upon his intense awareness that his anguished present can neither open into a new future nor escape a guiltridden past. He is trapped within ‘a continuance of enduring thought’ (I, i, 4) from which only ‘Forgetfulness’ (I, i, 136) or death can deliver him, though he fears and boasts that he dwells in his despair within which he will ‘live—and live for ever’ (II, ii, 150). Unlike the opening of any version of the Faust story, Manfred begins not with the desire for some new possibility born out of dissatisfaction but inside the ineradicable enclosure of aftermath. Like Milton’s Samson, its hero cannot exercise his will but lives to do nothing else. Mayakovsky’s confident sense that we can and ought ‘to construct life’, and that this is harder and more significant than death, which is manifestly ‘not difficult’, would make no sense to Manfred, to Byron or to readers of the poem.10 Such an analysis is inescapable, but is not the whole truth. For instance, at the end of the first Act, the spirits insist that neither can they give Manfred ‘self-oblivion’ (I, i, 144), nor do they know whether death will give it to him. He responds by asking to behold them ‘face to face’. He seems to do so because he likes the ‘sweet and melancholy sounds’ of their voices (I, i, 175–76). He then seems to deny his desire because ‘there 10 This is true notwithstanding the popular, partly true argument that Byron was at pains to control the presentation of his image. That is something other than constructing a life.

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is no form on earth | Hideous or beautiful to me’ (I, i, 184–85), a claim immediately displaced by his being shown the shape of a beautiful female figure, to which he responds ecstatically: ‘I yet might be most happy.—I will clasp thee’ (I, i, 190). The curse upon Manfred, almost grotesquely redirected from Byron’s curse upon his wife, follows. It is the first and most extreme of three criticisms of Manfred by others in the drama, which means that this most endorsed Byronic hero is as ambiguously presented as his predecessors from the Giaour to Alp. But Manfred’s desire springs from an appetite for beauty, giving repose in the present, which contradicts his hopeless cleaving to sterility (‘barkless, branchless, | A blighted trunk […] to be thus, eternally but thus’ [I, ii, 67–70]). The pattern is repeated when, standing on the Jungfrau, he asks the earth, daylight and mountains: ‘Why are ye beautiful? I cannot love ye’ (I, ii, 9), which we take at face value until, later, placed by the cataract in Act II, his eyes ‘drink this sight of loveliness’ and he palpably delights at some length in the beauty of the Witch of the Alps and the associated landscape with its rose tints upon the ‘glacier’s virgin snow’ (II, ii, 9, 20–21). It is clear that he can love what he beholds but refuses to allow this to modify his articulated, partly boastful, sense of absolute estrangement. He summons the Spirit up so that, again, he may ‘gaze on thee a moment’ (II, ii, 32). His soliloquy opening the last scene of IIIb salutes the night sky with the single exclamation ‘Beautiful!’ (III, iv, 2). Manfred’s intense, repeated aesthetic pleasure in present beauty, experienced rather than simply recalled or aspired to, contradicts ‘I cannot love ye’, and is manifestly at odds with his repeated insistence that no new experience is possible for him. All this bears on whether his dying words confirm his defiance in entrapment’s defining last embrace or whether they should be taken in parallel with the lines placed as the opening to the revised IIIb, in which an ‘Inexplicable stillness’ has ‘enlarged’ his ‘thoughts with a new sense’ (III, i, 7, 16). Here, he at last acknowledges that he is capable of being surprised by a new positive experience. It is clear that a play representing uninterrupted consciousness could only end with the cessation of that consciousness whose final mode, predictable or surprising, might well establish ‘the whole effect & moral of the poem’. What effect do Manfred’s dying words have in their originating context in IIIa? They are preceded by a short farcical scene where the Abbot, presented comically as venal and shallow, is discomfited by the appearance of Ashtaroth, summoned for this purpose, who bears him off to a high mountain singing a rude anti-clerical song. Then, in a surprising 65

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volte-face, Manfred regrets his ‘pranks fantastical’ and produces the first version of his sense of sudden inner calm. This is presented quite differently from IIIb, since he does not register it as ‘a new sense’ and it is linked to ‘a fixed foreboding on my soul’. Manfred explains this as an automatic reaction to the absurd high jinks that he has presided over, a calm after a ‘hurricane’, which nevertheless is ‘no repose’ (IIIa, i, 51, 53, 54–55, 58). Then follows the sunset scene, which is a present registering of the beautiful but which we associate in IIIa with the ‘fixed foreboding’ that precedes it and the death scene that immediately succeeds it (without any intervening scenes as in IIIb). But in the second and final scene of IIIa we are, to our surprise, released from Manfred’s presiding consciousness. The whole scene up to and including his death is suddenly presented through outsider eyes. It is significant that these outsiders are all servants who are incapable of understanding what they see, though we share the intentness of their gaze. The servants are, for unexplained reasons, on watch outside the tower when their reminiscences of Manfred’s past are interrupted by seeing that the tower is on fire. For only the second time in the play (the first is when the Chamois Hunter interrupts Manfred’s attempt at suicide), we have a recognizable dramatic action. It is of a curious nature that is directly linked to Manfred’s last words. Herman, the oldest of the servants, whose old age is repeatedly emphasized, rushes into the tower to save his master. Manuel urges the other unnamed servants to follow but they decline. Then, in a curious bit of theatrical business for a determinedly untheatrical play, Manuel and Herman can be heard, not very credibly, from within the room at the top of the tower shouting the news of Manfred’s apparent death and then awkwardly bringing the body down the stairs until they can be seen bringing it into view. What is emphasized is their devoted concern for Manfred’s body and his weakness. His cheek is black, his heartbeat is faint and he can indicate only that he wants to stay put, rather than be taken to his castle, by a feeble motion of his hands and faint utterances. Significantly, Manuel reveals that he, too, is old and therefore cannot catch Manfred’s ‘faint sounds’ (IIIa, iii. 30–33). Then he launches into a version of the ghost of Hamlet’s father’s lament that he died ‘Unhous’led, disappointed, unanel’d’, for Manfred similarly is dying ‘unshrived— untended’ (IIIa, ii, 39).11 This is the context that situates both Manfred’s 11 Hamlet I, v, 77. I am indebted to Peter Cochran for this point: see the note on page 98 of his edition of Manfred.

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quite specific reference to ‘Old man’ and his objection to the supposed difficulty of dying without spiritual aid. It is fully intelligible within its sequential placing but if, in this context, it is the ‘whole effect & moral of the poem’ then it will limit it to these two simple meanings. The ending is also extremely unpleasant. The Chamois Hunter, appalled by Manfred’s self-centred despair, still noted his ‘cautious feeling for another’s pain’ (II, i, 80). There is not much sign of that here. Manfred displays no gratitude for the heroic actions and loyalty of his aged servants, treats them with scorn and hauteur, and dies on a contemptuous rebuke to the most loyal and concerned of them. He dies, moreover, simply as the subject of some inexplicable supernatural event – a fire that kills him and lights up the tower but, equally inexplicably, disappears. All this is accompanied by theatrical thunder. The whole is of a piece with the ‘pranks fantastical’ that he deplored earlier, except that he is no longer orchestrating such pranks but rather is helplessly subject to them. Inevitably, since the whole scene has been dramatized from the viewpoint of the servants, rather than from our customary stake inside Manfred’s consciousness, we now view that expiring consciousness from an emotional distance with much less sympathetic engagement than they show. We are outsiders, and kept out. Manfred’s parting shot to Manuel seems more concerned with keeping his end up than with registering the momentous event that has preoccupied him throughout the play. These words therefore cannot have the enigmatic character that they have in IIIb and that lingers after the play’s conclusion. Moreover, the manhandling of Manfred’s supine body and the desacralizing entrance of Manuel and Herman into the tower room – where no servant has previously been allowed to enter ‘To pore upon its mysteries’ (III, iii, 10) – destroys his vaunted aura as a superior kind of being who can ‘champion human fears’ (II, ii, 205), leaving him with only a rather petulant assertion of social superiority. He has lost what hitherto has been habitual, his style. It is hard not to agree with Gifford’s judgement that ‘Manfred should not end in this feeble way – after beginning with such magnificence & promise’.12 Can anything be said in its favour? I have emphasized the unity of the play because of its single run of time and its immersion in the rhetorized promulgation of a single consciousness. Yet Byron is almost equally anxious to make it evident that it activates and depends upon multiple contexts that prevent any 12 Gifford’s note to Murray, reproduced on page 8 of the introduction to Cochran’s edition.

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single pattern of coherence. Cumbersome as it may seem, it will help to list some of the most obvious of these: Byron’s recent and current life especially in relation to the marriage breakdown and Augusta is an obvious biographical context, together with the Alps, Faust, Prometheus, murder guilt and witch drama (Macbeth), Wordsworthian Nature, Manichee/Zoroastrian duality, Neo-Platonism (via Thomas Taylor), Christianity, the Gothic (Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Beckford’s Vathek, Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, M.G. Lewis’s The Monk), and even Freemasonry.13 There is a corresponding jumble of different social classes (aristocratic, Abbot, pastoral hunter, servants), different entities (human beings, spirits, ghosts or phantoms, Nemesis, Arimanes) and diverse forms of utterance and tone (soliloquies, songs, conversation). Byron calls this ‘a mixed mythology of my own’ (BLJ V, 195). Version IIIa sustains, even expands, this mixture through the songs and pranks of Ashtaroth, the sustained viewpoint of servants and the theatrical realism of the fire in the tower with its distant voices, difficult descent of the staircase, and Manfred’s charred face and suddenly enfeebled being. Critics hostile to Manfred tend to underestimate the peculiar force of voice and voices in the play.14 Byron takes to rhyme naturally. Blank verse, for him, begins as unadorned song, though in his later plays he will fashion it more experimentally and much closer to the run of speech. Manfred talks naturally to singing voices, which he hears ‘As Music on the waters’ (I, i, 177). When he talks to speaking voices, such as the Abbot or Chamois Hunter, we are conscious that his voice has to be adjusted to common speech because his natural register lies elsewhere. The Chamois Hunter is an indispensable contrary to Manfred’s Zarathustran song and the interaction between the two is one of the best things in the play. Byron may not achieve such fine clashes of voicing in IIIa, but this is his intention in his original draft. 13 Jonathan Gross argues this connection, evidenced by the key and casket asked for by Manfred (III, i, 5), in ‘Freemasonry and Mental Theatre in Manfred ’. This essay appears in On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron’s Manfred: Commemorative Essays, edited by Omar F. Miranda on the Romantic Circles website (https:// romantic-circles.org/praxis/manfred/praxis.2019.manfred.gross.html). All the essays in this fine collection take Manfred seriously, showing how far attention to the play has shifted in the last 60 years from the largely patronizing criticism that preceded it. 14 But see Diego Saglia’s excellent essay ‘Voice in Manfred: Sign, Symbol, and Performance’ in On the 200th Anniversary (https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/ manfred/praxis.2019.manfred.saglia.html).

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Version IIIb, by contrast, is much more homogenous. It would be possible, and Jerome McGann often wants to go in this direction, to prefer IIIa because it would confirm the ironized theatrical nature of the poem as a whole. This would entail elevating Manfred ’s plays of voice in elaborately diverse contexts over the relentless sustaining of a single consciousness in which Manfred and his author have heavily invested. Version IIIa privileges the first where version IIIb deliberately privileges the second: its theatrical business with returned spirits is a repetition of the first scene, it carefully eschews ‘pranks fantastical’, and it subordinates theatrical effect to Manfred’s triumphantly controlling consciousness. How should we choose between them? There are five principal changes that Byron made in IIIb. The first and most obvious is the extended role of the Abbot, who now appears in two scenes, is present at Manfred’s death, delivers an eight-line judgement on him (‘This should have been a noble creature …’ [III, i, 160–67]) and is treated by Manfred and the poet with marked respect. Second, there is an address to the moon, which now follows and weakens the elegiac force of the preceding address to the setting sun. This recalls Manfred’s experience of the beauty of the moonlight in the Coliseum years before, and is followed by his surprise at his own turn of thought, much as he is surprised by the sudden interior calm at the beginning of the revised act. Third comes the return of the spirits, initially a single ‘genius of this mortal’ (III, iv, 81), who then summons up his ‘brethren’, a troop to whom Manfred declares himself superior, exactly as in the opening scene of the play. They disappear, apparently at his bidding though they came ‘unbidden’ (72), and Manfred is conscious of his imminent death, for which no apparent cause is given. Fourthly, the Abbot is the sole witness of this last scene. There are no servants, so the old man reference, carefully prepared by inserted references to his age, is transferred to the Abbot but with an entirely different tone. Something of the original sense is maintained since the Abbot asks Manfred to pray and urges him ‘Die not thus’, but this is concern rather than a rebuke and in contrast with Manuel’s choric exclamation, which is not directed at Manfred. Fifthly, Manfred’s reply is not a response to the injunction to pray but to the Abbot’s question: ‘how fares it with thee?’ (III, iv, 150). So it has the force of ‘this is how I am faring, ’tis not so difficult to die’, where what is announced is both communicated fact and personal discovery. The operatic outdoor scene of IIIa is replaced by a curious quiet intimacy between the two figures alone in the interior high room of the tower. 69

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If IIIb is at pains to avoid the ‘pranks fantastical’ of a witch drama and elevate Manfred above the mere magician of IIIa, the new ending is nevertheless bound to recall the Faust story as IIIa does not. We expect the return of spirits at the end of any Faust story, but Byron turns that story inside out by making his Faust the master – though not the cause (this is carefully blurred) – of his own ending. All this is more in keeping with the rest of the play than IIIa. Manfred has always asserted his equality with, or superiority to, whatever spiritual force he encounters, but he does so now with a final defiant explicitness unmatched earlier. He does so by recasting his earlier reference to his ‘Promethean spark’ (I, i, 154) through an overt replay of Milton’s Satan’s boast that ‘The mind is its own place, and in it self | Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n’ (PL I, 254–55). Manfred, similarly, proclaims that though he feels that his soul is ebbing away as he speaks (III, iv, 99–100) yet his mind is immortal and is ‘its own origin of ill and end’ (III, iv, 131). This speech, the most explicitly satanic/Promethean assertion of any Byronic hero, is delivered with angry physical force; the pulse of raw energy in Manfred is most fully presented in it. It is followed by instant reversal. The Abbot is appalled by the sudden transformation: ‘Alas! how pale thou art’ (III, iv, 142). The magnificently sustained rhodomontade has turned in an instant to unsustainable accents proceeding from a ‘gasping throat’ (III, iv, 143–44). The improvised theatre of IIIa is transformed into this single vivid moment of dramatic change. In IIIb a crowded scene dominated by Manfred’s angry, self-sustaining voice is suddenly quiet, and the voice has lost its power. It is a repetition of the change at the end of Act I where Manfred’s rising declamatory voice preparatory to his suicide jump is turned instantly into ‘I am all feebleness’ (I, ii, 114). But whereas Manfred had to be bullied into taking the hand of the Chamois Hunter so that he could be led to safety, he offers his hand to the Abbot.15 The crucial question is whether this dramatic change is a change of stance. Manfred is suddenly physically changed. Is he changed from his defiant ‘I stand | Upon my strength’ (III, iv, 119–20), when facing the spirits, into a different frame of confidence shorn of bravado when he is facing death, or is the change merely a physical one, so that he dies 15 In a progression typical of their exchanges, Manfred says ‘nay, grasp me not’ when he becomes afflicted by vertigo, the Chamois Hunter replies with a firm ‘give me your hand’, and the fact his instruction has been obeyed is acknowledged by the words ‘softly—well’ (I, ii, 113, 119–20).

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in a quietened version of his habitual defiance? If the latter, then the ‘the whole effect & moral’ of both endings is, despite their different modulation, essentially the same. I think that there are three very different ways of coming at this question in this particular case (needless to say I am not setting out general norms of literary interpretation), and each yields a rather different answer. The first we could christen ‘New Critical’. Here we choose to be face to face with a contextless poem whose interpretation and evaluation depends wholly on our careful scrutiny of the words and sequence of the text. If that is our method, then it seems to me that we would find the ending of IIIb preferable to that of IIIa, for reasons much like Gifford’s, and we would find Manfred’s last words suggestive but enigmatic (which judgement would probably apply to the whole play). If tempted to probe the enigma further, then it seems likely that the habitual extra-literary assumptions and preferences of the critic will govern the interpretation, as was often manifestly the case with New Critics. Peter Cochran, in his online edition, notes that the final line ‘gains greatly in strength’ by being addressed to the Abbot but seems to align that strength with Manfred’s earlier defiance of the spirits.16 The second approach proceeds from what we might call the ‘steadystate’ view of Byron. This is welcome insofar as Byron is sometimes thought to be so given to contradictions that he has no kind of coherence at all. It can be less welcome in its assumption that Byron is fully paid up to a set of principles that always drive his writing, whereas I believe his writing always drives him to think beyond a mere set of principles. In a recent essay, Tom Mole has traced Byron’s attitudes to the moment of dying, and demonstrated that he is in principle consistently opposed to the notion of ‘facing death piously, trusting that, through God’s grace, the soul would find repose and reward in heaven, where the individual would be reunited with loved ones who had gone before’. Mole therefore unhesitatingly reads off the final line of Manfred as its protagonist refusing ‘to expire on any terms but his own’. Manfred is like the other Byronic heroes who insist on ‘controlling their own final hours and meeting death on their own 16 Cochran’s note to IIIb, iv, 184 in his online edition of Manfred; compare the notes on pages 123–24 of his printed edition. In the introduction to the printed edition, Peter does acknowledge ‘the paradoxical way in which, the nearer [Manfred] comes to dying, the more serene he becomes’ (16), but he repeats that ‘Manfred ends in defiance’ (18).

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terms’.17 Mole is perhaps too brisk when he finds nothing enigmatic in Manfred’s final words, in the same way that he privileges Hugo’s ‘haughty’ pride on the scaffold over the facts he has ‘meekly’ prayed and confessed (Parisina, 443, 462–64). But his general argument convinces. If the most apposite consideration is Byron’s steady-state frame of mind about good and bad modes of dying, then Manfred dies defiant and there is no real difference between his death in IIIa and in IIIb. The third approach reverses the steady-state view of Byron, which by definition cannot be taken unawares in the way that Manfred, to his surprise, is. Instead it tries to determine the meaning of the play’s ending in relation to Byron’s changing life and development as a poet. I think that this is the most fruitful of the three approaches, since it has the most explanatory power, and the additional advantage that it establishes Manfred as some sort of pivot, marking a before and after in Byron’s poetry and his attitude to poetry. I will therefore devote the last sections of this essay wholly to it. Elsewhere in this volume, in Chapter 8, I set out the sequence that led to Byron leaving Venice and promiscuity, and settling in Ravenna to an insider social life based on fidelity to Teresa Guiccioli. It was a considerable change. The movement from the literary world of Diodati and the adjacent Swiss Alps to living above a shop in a busy street in Venice, which immediately preceded this change, was equally momentous but of a different character. The composition of Manfred straddles that change. Byron had never seen anything on the scale of the Alps before, but the withered trees that he saw and wrote up in his journal for 23 September 1816 represented the past to him, rather than new experience: ‘Passed whole woods of withered pines—all withered—trunks stripped & barkless—branches lifeless—done by a single winter—their appearance reminded me of me & my family’ (BLJ V, 102). He was writing most of Manfred at exactly this time, and the key terms of the Alpine Journal are put into Manfred’s mouth: ‘Wrecks of a single 17 Tom Mole, ‘Byron and the Good Death’, in Byron and Marginality, ed. Norbert Lennartz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 234, 238. Mole half-acknowledges that the quasi-Anglican notion of a ‘good’ Christian death is a bowdlerization. Christ Himself, who manifestly feared death in Gethsemane and experienced God’s absence from the cross, a kind of uncertainty, did not die a ‘good’ Christian death.

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winter, barkless, branchless’ (I, ii, 67). The whole point of ‘Wordsworth physic’ is that, bringing renewal, it restores the child’s wonder to adult life so that memory untethers imagination. But here, for Byron and Manfred, imagination is tethered by memory (‘reminded me of me and my family’). Similarly, when Byron is in Diodati he is in the company of the Shelleys and Monk Lewis. He speaks English not French. When he moves to Venice, however, in November 1816, he is soon delighted to be able to use the Italian that he had learned in Athens and to acquire Venetian patois alongside learning Armenian (begun early December). One week after his arrival, he rejoices – in an excited letter to Thomas Moore – to be in ‘the greenest island of my imagination’ with an adjacent gondola, and he announces ‘Besides, I have fallen in love’ (BLJ V, 129). He spends the rest of the letter expounding Marianna Segati’s many physical charms, including the attractiveness of her Venetian dialect. Clearly Byron is, in mind and body, in a new and surprising place. Version IIIa was written in Venice and version IIIb was written wholly in Rome after Byron had lived for six months in Italy. There is no trace of Italy in IIIa but his trip to Rome must be the reason for Manfred’s unexpected reminiscence of the Coliseum in IIIb, manifestly the germ of Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he began a month later after completing Manfred. Byron carefully fits it into the progressive time scheme, at once vague and precise, of his drama. After 33 lines of detailed reminiscence, Manfred remarks ‘’Tis strange that I recall it at this time’ (III, iv, 42). This can be explained only by his thoughts suddenly taking the ‘wildest flight’ (43), and seems to reflect Byron’s own embarrassed surprise that it is included in a poem that has carefully avoided reference outside Manfred’s trapped consciousness (apart from recalling the origins of its enclosure in the unexplained death of Astarte). But the famous lines on the Coliseum serve another purpose, for Byron clearly wishes us to link them with Manfred’s self-conscious awareness of a sudden ‘Inexplicable stillness’ in his interior, a new feature of the opening scene in IIIb, which has given him ‘a new sense’ (III, i, 7, 16). The moon’s light has a curious double character for it both uncovers what is ‘beautiful’ in the scene and makes beautiful ‘that which was not, till the place | Became religion’ in some inexplicable way. This religion is ‘of the great of old’ (III, iv, 35–39). The past here, therefore, is no longer a paralysing cause of present anguish, as it has been throughout the play, but sources a present richness of overflow in the heart (‘the heart ran o’er’ [38]). The glow of past moonlight experience 73

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in Rome and present moonlight experience in the interior of the Tower is identical in uncovering the beautiful, in response to which Manfred could not possibly say, as he did on the Jungfrau, ‘I cannot love ye’ (I, ii, 9). In proleptic miniature the movement from Jungfrau to Coliseum is the movement from the third to the fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. It is the antithesis of defiance for something that is gratefully received. As such, it could not have been included in IIIa. But then neither could the Armenian abbot of San Lazzaro, whom Byron describes on 27 December as ‘a fine old fellow’ presiding over a seventy-strong community of ‘learned & accomplished men’ (BLJ, V, 152, 137). The Abbot of IIIa is a standard comic fiction but the Abbot of IIIb is an informed, concerned and reasonable man, like the monks on San Lazzaro. Byron had known and liked the Capuchin friar in Athens, but his fictional friars and monks derive from Horace Walpole, ‘Monk’ Lewis and centuries of Protestant caricature rather than experience. Between writing in Switzerland (Autumn 1816) and in Rome (Spring 1817) he had become Italianized, fallen in love and become familiar with a number of non-fictional monks whom he respected. He had had little respect for Catholicism in Spain or Orthodoxy in Greece, but his attitude to Italian Catholicism was much more positive.18 Byron’s occupancy of, proximity to, or remembrance of place often strongly influences the character and tone of his poems but Manfred is a special case, begun in the place in which the poem is set but ended in a very different one, which would soon lead to Byron developing a quite different idiom. That new idiom bursts forth five months after Manfred in Beppo, the intervening period having been taken up by the composition of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV. Beppo is openly situated in Venice, its announced place of writing. It has often been observed that the return of Beppo towards the end of the poem turns Byron’s earlier ‘samples of the finest Orientalism’ (408) inside out. Beppo is a ‘renegado’ Turk with the Byronic hero’s ‘pertinacity’ of stare, a pirate apparently hell-bent on shattering the social conventions of his native city. Laura’s tame lover bridles at the offensive dark stranger but wonders if ‘perhaps ’tis a mistake’ (700). This must be a normal way of talking for him. The ‘Turk’ angrily repudiates this but the Count then repeats his ‘perhaps’ with a courteous invitation to coffee (‘Such things perhaps, we’d best 18 See my essay ‘“Something sensible to grasp at”: Byron and Italian Catholicism’, in Byron and Italy, ed. Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

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discuss within’ [716]). The Turk, turning into Beppo again, accepts and is instantly controlled by Laura’s tirade of inconsequential questioning: he is ‘received’ by her and ‘re-baptized’ (777). But the change in him is first accomplished by his acceptance of the Count’s proffered ‘perhaps’, which is also his acceptance of the mode of the poem governed both by Laura within it and by the poet, who presents himself as ‘A broken Dandy lately on my travels’ (410) – that is, as the antithesis of Manfred. ‘Perhaps’, a word used only once in the whole of Childe Harold and only four times in the Tales (never by a hero), is used eight times in Beppo and over 100 times in Don Juan. I wanted to argue that the movement in Byron’s poetry from Manfred to Beppo, reflecting his own movement from the vertical of the Alps to the horizontal of Italy, is already just perceptible in the move and change of tone from IIIa to IIIb. Similarly, I wanted to argue that Byron’s poetry up to and including Manfred is primarily concerned with acts of will that are both self-destructive and yet somehow privileged examples of dark courage. This was the contention of the second chapter in this book. After Manfred, however, Byron locates a different kind of vitality in submission to the contingencies of creative consciousness (‘I never know the word which will come next’ [DJ IX, 41]), and the uncontrollable randomness of events (e.g. Mazeppa’s ride). Pivotal here is the word ‘perhaps’. I still want to do this. But it is not so simple. The first poem Byron writes in ottava rima is also governed by a ‘perhaps’. However, the ‘Epistle to Augusta’ is not an Italian but an Alpine poem, mingling description of presently observed mountain landscape with memories of Newstead and the unique bond with his sister that the lake there provides. The third stanza of the poem ends with the wonderful phrase which, as I touched upon in Chapter 2, encapsulates the condition of the Byronic hero from Harold to Manfred: ‘I have been cunning in mine overthrow | The careful pilot of my proper woe’ (23–24). Yet in the fifth stanza Byron notes that ‘Something—I know not what—does still uphold | A spirit of slight patience’ (39–40) and in the next octave enlarges the ‘I know not what’ into a governing ‘perhaps’ that sets out three possibilities: Perhaps—the workings of defiance stir    Within me,—or perhaps a cold despair— Brought on when ills habitually recur,—    Perhaps a harder clime—or purer air—

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Manfred would certainly recognize this account of his experience, but he could not and never does use the word ‘perhaps’. In this stanza, Byron’s ‘perhaps’ does not govern a coherent set of possibilities because, initially, we are bound to take it as puzzling over the possible explanations for this unexpected gift of ‘slight patience’. That fits the third possibility, which refers directly to a ‘change of soul’ and accounts for it by a change in climate. But the other two possibilities (‘the workings of defiance’ and ‘a cold despair’) are precisely the conditions that his ‘slight patience’ prises him out of. We don’t notice this incoherence because we have enlarged the ‘perhaps’ to cover all three possibilities – defiance, despair, patience – being puzzlingly present at the same time. But then either all of them together or some change of soul has produced ‘a strange quiet’ which, in the next stanza, Byron associates with childhood innocence: ‘And even at moments I could think I see | Some living things to love’ (55–56). The exactness of these correspondences to Manfred’s own sense of his experience, which he is too much inside to set out under a speculative ‘perhaps’, is remarkable. The tone of the epistle is a curious one, at once lyrical (‘We are entwined—let death come slow or fast’ [127]) and discursive/conversational (‘I did remind thee of our own dear lake’ [73]). It invokes ‘Wordsworth physic’ (‘To mingle in the quiet of her [Nature’s] sky—’ [84]), Manfred’s continual consciousness (‘My years have been no slumber’ [109]) together with a tone both calmly confident and curiously proximate to lightness of touch. Nowhere is this lightness more evident than in the un-Manfredian use of ‘perhaps’ to characterize Manfredian experience. Manifestly Italy, as yet unvisited, does not confer this lightness except in the ottava rima, used confidently and well though in quite a different fashion from Byron’s later practice. The problem that this sets me is not an uncommon one. The writing of Manfred is both a culmination of the line that begins with Harold and the Giaour and, as culmination, a marker of change already just perceptible. Yet marking change is not the same as changing. The conversion of Saint Francis from a troubadour life in fine clothes to ascetic abandonment in beggar’s rags, for example, and Luther’s move from entering a monastic community that could form his ‘I’ to leaving it so as to live within his 76

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self-standing ‘I’, are familiar to us through quoted phrases and often-cited dramatic scenes, but there was no single moment of change in either case. It took place over years. The same is true of Byron, whose preoccupation with ‘fate or will that walked astray’ (‘Epistle to Augusta’, 28) began with Harold and the Giaour, culminates in ‘Prometheus’ and Manfred, but is still being probed in his cluster of dramatic monologues from The Prisoner of Chillon to The Prophecy of Dante. And yet, within 1816–18, there are clear markers of Byron’s decisive volte-face so that ‘fate or will’ are increasingly replaced or situated by their opposite. On a smaller timescale, Donna Julia’s decision to change (‘And whispering “I will ne’er consent”—consented’) has been preceded by experiments in ‘little preludes to possession’ (DJ, I, 117, 74) months before this. Neither she nor the reader can know exactly when she changed. Byron’s foray into lightness of touch in the ‘perhaps’ of his epistle is a ‘little prelude’ to the foundational ‘perhaps’ by which the Count transforms the operatic ‘Turk’ into conversational Beppo a year later. Manfred was written between the two and, formally, continues to fend off the mode of ‘perhaps’ and the possibility of surprise, as the Tales always do and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage usually does. Yet, as we’ve seen, Manfred can be surprised. The nub of the question is whether his last lines are a surprise to Manfred and the reader and then, if so, what are we to make of this? I want to argue that they are a surprise, first of all by considering the new role of the Abbot. In both versions, the Abbot is the culminating last appearance of rejected but foregrounded Christian counters to the Byronic hero’s will in death. His direct ancestor is the friar to whom the Giaour makes a Rousseauist rather than Catholic confession. The friar is addressed both as ‘Father’ (971), with the ability to ‘bid the sins of others cease’ (973), and as ‘old man’ (1160), but the Giaour’s grief ‘Looks not to priesthood for relief’ (1207). Conrad does not die, which is presumably why Lara must be, in some broad sense, the sequel to The Corsair. Lara dies Conrad’s postponed death. There, as we have seen in Chapter 2, ‘the absolving cross’ (II, 477) offered to him is angrily rejected, but both offer and rejection are highlighted. In The Siege of Corinth, Alp encounters the ghost of Francesca, who urges him to ‘Wring the black drop from thy heart’ and ‘sign | The sign of the cross’, which will ensure that ‘to-morrow’ they will be united for ever (532–35). But Alp’s ‘heart was swollen, and turned aside’ (608). Parisina works in a different way. The apparent hero is Hugo, who repents of his adultery, confesses and is absolved. This is set up in deliberate contrast with Azo, the perverse 77

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Byronic hero, who chooses to live on with a heart ‘That would not yield—nor could forget’ (550). Our primary interest now centres on him, for his intensity of feeling is, to the reader’s surprise, greater than that of the lovers’ meeting that opens the poem. Yet the pattern of two choices – absolution or the proud rejection of absolution – is the same. And it is this same choice, comically in IIIa, with sustained seriousness in IIIb, that the Abbot offers Manfred. The difference lies in that the Abbot in IIIb, far from censuring Manfred’s ‘black blood’, praises him as ‘a noble creature’ and even praises his spiritual understanding, which he diagnoses as nothing other than the recognition of sin, and therefore the commencement of atonement (III, i, 78–85). Manfred’s reply to this is quite unlike the Giaour’s, Lara’s or Azo’s absolute rejection of proffered absolution. He deflects the choice by elaborated parallels with the suicide of the Emperor Otto and, in reply to the Abbot’s further question ‘And why not live and act with other men?’, counters it with ‘Because my nature was averse from life’ and, in this, finds an exalted ‘desolation’ (III, i, 88–96, 124–27). If we apply the Abbot’s question to the ending of IIIa then Manfred’s deliberate distancing from his loyal servants at the moment of his death maintains his refusal to ‘live and act with other men’. But when applied to IIIb, it cannot be read like this. The Abbot is Manfred’s social equal, they treat one another with respect and listen to one another. Manfred’s tone in his last words is quite different in IIIb compared to IIIa as a result. Far more important, Byron deliberately draws attention to Manfred’s dying request: ‘Fare thee well— | Give me thy hand’ (III, iv, 148–49). Manfred dies holding and wanting to hold another human hand as opposed to remaining in superior isolation from his servants. One of the manifest meanings of ‘’tis not so difficult to die’ is that it gives some antidote to a common fear, especially natural in an old man, based on their shared mortal nature. Earlier, Manfred had said to the Abbot ‘The lion is alone, and so am I’ (III, i, 123), making the same identification as the poet’s ‘the wolf dies in silence’ (CHP IV, 21). But Manfred, by choice, dies neither alone nor in silence. Surely this is living and acting with other men or, at any rate, it is as close as Manfred ever gets to it. At this moment, too, we could not talk of a division between knowledge and life or between dust and deity. Manfred’s foundational divisions no longer operate in this final singleness where, at last, consciousness, self-consciousness, understanding and being coincide. Similarly, if by temperament, his ‘joy was in the Wilderness, to breathe | The difficult air of the iced mountain’s top’ (II, ii, 62–63) then something must have 78

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changed if he no longer seeks out or prizes that difficulty, but can now even recommend the ‘not so difficult’. Whether or not Manfred’s tone registers these manifest changes in his last words, his last words belong to the pattern of his noting something surprising rather than as a repetition of his habitual stance. This is clearly far more the case in IIIb than in IIIa. If this then is the ending, what sense is there in it? All the possibilities that the poem has entertained through its mixed mythologies are ruled out. The most obvious one, signalled by the Abbot’s vocabulary (III, iv, 152–53) and closing the play, is that Manfred may be damned. His use of ‘earthless flight’ for Manfred’s soul recalls Astarte’s announcement to Manfred that ‘To-morrow ends thine earthly ills’ (II, iv, 152), which leaves open whether he might be subject to unearthly ills. But Byron’s reversal of the Faust ending in Manfred’s repudiation of the spirits and of the traditional Don Juan ending where, instead of being grasped by the hand of the Stone Guest, Manfred grasps the living hand of the Abbot in amity, makes it impossible to imagine that Manfred is in the traditional hell or some version of it brought about by his own consciousness. I don’t think that many readers speculate where Manfred is after ‘He’s gone’ (III, iv, 152). We are not in the territory of Don Juan Canto V, where the examination of the assassinated commander’s body (he looks very dead) is in tension with the narrator’s musings (how can the mind die?). This is not to say the reader imagines that the entity Manfred is annihilated. Manfred is Byron’s first extended foray into the extensive use of immortal spirits as characters who outnumber the five human ones. They accept Manfred’s claim that he has almost equivalent force to theirs and he boasts and complains constantly of the immortal nature of his consciousness. The play does not allow us to treat this as illusion. But Manfred comes to an ending. In fiction, however, as in life, endings are not always endings. Lear and Cordelia die but Hermione, to Leontes’s and the audience’s surprise, comes back to life. As Byron observes: All tragedies are finish’d by a death,    All comedies are ended by a marriage; The future states of both are left to faith, … (DJ III, 9)

What is Manfred’s future state? It is better to treat this as a question about fictions rather than as a metaphysical one, though that it can be asked at all is because, as Byron 79

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often repeats, Manfred is a metaphysical poem. I traced a line in the Tales through a series of climactic deaths, which ends in Manfred. But we can trace another line, adumbrated in Hugo’s death in Parisina, which begins with the Prisoner of Chillon’s recovery of conscious interactions after section IX of the poem, where he has passed into a state where he loses all sense of being alive, continues in Mazeppa’s awakening from his death experience on a dead horse, Juan’s similar recovery from inanition after nearly drowning, and culminates in Torquil’s resurrection within the hollow rock of The Island, which he had seen as ‘the tombstone of the wave’ (IV, 56). Torquil’s resurrection is set in operatic contrast with the defiant suicide of Fletcher Christian, a more determined version of Manfred’s would-be leap from the Jungfrau, which obliterates his body on the rocks below and, presumably, him. It is obvious that Byron’s switch of interest from the defiant to the yielding will as evidence of vital life coincides with and is directly connected to a change in his poetry and in the fashioning of quasi-resurrection sequences. Byron’s Prometheus is defined by his defiant will carried into death as concluding victory. Byron’s Don Juan is defined by his ability to rise to new life from apparent endings without his will being involved at all. There is no possibility of rising to new life for Manfred, obviously, but his ending is not as definite as Lara’s and it is significant that Manfred was begun two months after Byron had initiated that concern with life after endings in The Prisoner of Chillon. Beppo is a comedy, and comedy’s home territory is not taking endings seriously. The peculiar force of The Prisoner of Chillon is that it, too, devalues apparent endings but is not comic in tone. The ending of Manfred in IIIb is pitched midway between these two. Is it possible to determine the tone more precisely than this? Tone is the vehicle of meaning but it can sometimes control meaning. Byron’s unrivalled mastery of tone is such that, if indeed Manfred’s eight words give ‘the whole effect & moral of the poem’ – a remark made in August 1817 and therefore concerning the entire poem seen from the perspective of its revised ending – then it is likely that a specific tone is not only required for it but will be the best guide to its meaning. In such matters, we shall have to be guided by clues. One such is Astarte’s announcement that Manfred will die ‘To-morrow’ (II, iv, 152). This appears to contradict my argument that the play takes a virtual 24 hours. It could be resolved pedantically by imagining some undramatized night and much of the following day between Astarte’s pronouncement, prefaced by ‘The moon is rising’ (II, iii, 1), and the next indicator, ‘It wants but one till sunset’ (III, i,1). Or it could be 80

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resolved by the final scene, opened by ‘The stars are forth’ (III, iv, 1), taking place after midnight. But no reader imagines anything remotely like this. The basic sequence is from the opening scene at midnight to a final scene taking place at a similar time, and everything else, however impossibly, happening between them. This being the case, Astarte’s ‘To-morrow’ is like the ‘to-morrow’ of Francesca’s ghost to Alp. Both Alp and Manfred are to step permanently into some other order of time that exists beyond the end of the fictions but is postulated within them. There is nothing problematic in the tone but the meaning has an oracle’s ambiguity, for tomorrow can be part of a sequence or a step outside a sequence. Manfred has been in his own version of Macbeth’s paralysed ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow’, which annihilates the apparent movement it announces. The tomorrow into which Manfred steps after pronouncing the word ‘die’ releases him from tomorrow as unchanging sequence into an unimaginable single change presented to him by Astarte, who, like Francesca’s ghost, is the other side of such change. The argument fits the change that musical settings of the poem have signalled in their version of Manfred’s end, and it fits that sense, almost of relief, in Manfred’s final utterance. But it does not fit with Byron’s own change from the full orchestra of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III to the witty chamber music of Beppo. Neither Schumann nor Tchaikovsky were orthodox believers. They modulated into a not very specific pantheism. Their elegiac/triumphant settings of Manfred’s end are deliberately designed to fend off pathos and doubt in the face of what Byron, in his version of Villon’s phrase, described as ‘a “grand peut-être”’ (BLJ VIII, 35). Is this ‘peut-être’ the same as the ‘perhaps’ that Byron used in his epistle, or the rather different ‘perhaps’ that the Count uses to Beppo? I don’t think that it is like either of these, for it is a simple binary – either we are mortal or we are not – and it is specifically ‘a grand one’: ‘Every body clings to it—the stupidest, and dullest, and wickedest of human bipeds is still persuaded that he is immortal’ (BLJ VIII, 35). There is nothing light about something which we desperately ‘cling to’. Manfred takes his immortality for granted so the ‘grand peut-être’ is not his at the moment of death, rather a more general, unstated ‘perhaps’ present in the tone of his words. The reasons for this are not hard to seek. Those who take for granted that there is a simple continuation from Manfred’s ‘I stand | Upon my strength—I do defy—deny—’ (III, iv, 119–20) to his last words must assume that he dies like Byron’s Prometheus, who finds 81

r e a di ng by ron     concentered recompense, Triumphant where it dares defy, And making Death a Victory. (‘Prometheus’, lines 57–59)

But Byron’s Prometheus has not lost his adversary at the moment of this death. His victory consists simply in his refusal to yield. He is in the same situation at death as he has been throughout his existence. He has lived through his will and dies with the same will. Manfred is the opposite of this. At the beginning of the play he summons spirits with difficulty and in the last scene of IIIb he vanquishes them (stage direction: ‘The Demons disappear’). In the final moments of the scene the site of his spiritual contestations throughout the play has disappeared also. He is simply alone with another human being. There is nothing and no one for him to defy. Correspondingly, there is no further need for him to live, as Prometheus does, solely through his will and his claim to superiority, and neither does he nor anyone else see his death as victory. He hasn’t yielded, of course, but he is in a place that he has never been in before, he can reach out for the hand of a fellow human being, and his words must have a different tone than any that we have previously encountered. From the standpoint of the rest of the play, he is in a ‘tomorrow’. Manfred represents the furthest reach of the Byronic hero but his last words also reach out from the invincible to the ‘vincible’, to acceptance of the unexpectedly given as renewed and renewable life. If I essay, in conclusion, to find an appropriate phrase for this new tone it might help to consider the word ‘humour’. Byron wrote Manfred at exactly the point where the old vocabulary of ‘humours’ was finally discredited. Byron knows and uses both the old and new meaning of the word in Don Juan.19 ‘Humour’ is not used in Manfred but the old usage is implied in the Incantation where Manfred is told: From thy own heart I then did wring The black blood in its blackest spring; (I, i, 234–35) 19 When Juan is ill at Catherine’s Court, ‘Some said ’twas a concoction of the humours, | Which with the blood too readily will claim kin’ (X, 40). Two cantos later when Juan is received in London’s ‘best society’ he is liked, however, for ‘The talent and good humour he displayed’ (XII, 85), which is the new and modern usage of the word. Compare my previous essay ‘Inheriting Humors, Legating Humor: The Will of Manfred ’, in Byron: Heritage and Legacy, ed. Cheryl A. Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

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The vocabulary is identical to Francesca’s ghost urging Alp to ‘Wring the black drop from thy heart’ (Siege of Corinth, 534). In humours theory, blood is associated with the cheerful ‘sanguine’ temperament, whereas black bile is the cause of melancholy. But Byron circumvents this by transferring blackness from bile to blood. In thus associating bitterness and the living flow of blood, as in his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage phrase ‘Vitality of poison’ (III, 34), Byron thinks like Gray who, famously, distinguished between white and black melancholy. The former (Gray’s own temperament) is given to lassitude, whereas the latter is associated with a perverse energy. Manfred, broadly speaking, is the embodiment of black melancholy. But there is no trace of melancholy or defiance in his last words in IIIb. Might we hazard then, prefacing it with our own ‘perhaps’, that he dies, to his own surprise, in something of a good humour sited midway between Byron’s use of an exploratory ‘perhaps’ in his ‘Epistle to Augusta’ and the ‘perhaps’ that invites Beppo into Laura and her Count’s comic life? Such a life prizes the incohering gifts of immediate life rather than a tenacious hold upon difficult life. Something of this, as I have shown, has been recognized earlier by Manfred in his delight in present beauty and recognition that, out of the blue, his ‘thoughts’ have been enlarged by ‘a new sense’, even if he has refused to live out of it. Now, for a brief moment, he lives and dies wholly in the good-humoured acknowledgement of such ‘a new sense’. It is a notable marker of Byron’s own literary turn from the dark energies of his Harold (wholly absent from Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which Byron began on completing Manfred) to the bright energies of Beppo and Don Juan. My lengthy argument has led nowhere else but to this point and it is, I propose, the sense of Manfred’s ending. It has at least the merit of explaining why the ‘whole effect & moral of the poem’ depend upon Manfred’s last eight words.

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Cain One Drama, Two Orthodoxies : One Drama, Two Orthodoxies Cain was published (with Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari) in 1821. Perhaps no text by a great English writer has been more widely and immediately attacked.1 And few have suffered as much from the assumptions of its first assailants being taken for granted by later critics. Francis Jeffrey, to that point Byron’s most sympathetic reviewer, read Cain as an assault upon ‘the reasonableness of religion in general’.2 Leslie Marchand, one of Byron’s great twentieth-century champions, concurred that the play was an ‘outpouring … of Byron’s revolt against conventional religious orthodoxy’.3 These readings have something to do with the steady-state view of Byron to which I referred in the previous chapter, sometimes with an added condescension towards his ability as a dramatist. According to Philip Martin, the only theatrical thing about Cain is a ‘rather frivolous impulse to be offensive’.4 A reluctance to believe Byron when he says that ‘Cain is nothing more than a drama—not a piece of argument’ (BLJ IX, 103) tends to go hand in hand with an inability to read the play in the dramatic sequencing that he sets up, with considerable originality and evident thought, through the relation of its three Acts. 1 For a full account, see Robert Mortenson’s Byron’s Waterloo: The Reception of Cain, A Mystery (Seattle: Iron Press, 2015). 2 In ‘Lord Byron’s British Reputation’ (Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 5.2 [January 1924]), Richard Ashley Rice argues that this was the most important of all Jeffrey’s reviews of Byron in the Edinburgh and, more than any other single text, the reason for the decline of Byron’s English reputation from 1822. 3 Leslie Marchand, Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction (London: John Murray, 1965), 84. 4 Martin, Byron: A Poet before his Public, 155.

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Arguably even more pernicious is a steady-state view of religious ‘orthodoxy’, as if it can be as readily referenced as Wedgwood pottery. Byron facetiously rejected his conservative publisher’s attempts to water down some of the highly provocative material in Act II because such passages could not be altered without ‘making Lucifer talk like the Bishop of Lincoln’ (BLJ IX, 53). Yet perhaps the real problem for Murray’s readership was not the blasphemous material – many would be familiar already with what one reverend reviewer called ‘the very off-scourings of Bayle and Voltaire’ (BCH, 220) – but that Lucifer was talking rather like the Bishop of Lincoln. His ‘piece of argument’, even if adopted for evil ends in outer space, was uncomfortably similar in its manner of procedure to Anglican ‘orthodoxy’, which read the Scriptures for explicable moral truth rather than complex history and paradox.5 Byron’s play leaves Lucifer’s arguments unrefuted. Instead, the ideas of the first two Acts are balanced by the actions of the last, which open up an entirely different kind of religious orthodoxy, rationally defensible but not rationally demonstrable. Hence the ‘two orthodoxies’ of my title. The drama consists in the clash of ideas and action. England in 1821, though nominally Christian, was not very orthodox for clear reasons. From the 1688 settlement onwards, it was essential that the Church of England, reluctantly accepting the toleration of nonconformist worship, should still be recognized as the established Church, membership of which was more or less co-extensive with being English. An agreed narrative supported this. It asserted that the Church was the historic embodiment of Christianity in England, that all its doctrines (and these should not be an extensive list) were derived from the Scriptures, that its preaching should be directed to good living rather than doctrine,6 and that the beliefs of the Church 5 Byron was probably aware that a former Bishop of Lincoln, George Pretyman Tomline, was now publishing a biography of Pitt with Murray: Tomline’s Refutation of Calvinism, which went through eight editions between 1803 and 1823, began with the premise that God’s design allowed men to act ‘according to the determination of reason’ (page 6 of the 1823 edition). 6 R. Barry Levis demonstrates by a detailed comparison of sermons on the same text that, after about 1720, there was a clear tendency for preachers to modify doctrinal emphases and foreground moral ones directed to the good management of daily situations and common events, so that they ‘softened the implications of the scriptural texts that their Stuart predecessors articulated’ (‘The Pragmatic Pulpit: Politics and Changes in Preaching Styles in the Church of England, 1660–1760’, Journal of Church and State 56.3 [2014], 485).

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were consonant with reason. This last point is important. On the Continent, even before the French Revolution, a breach was opened out between Christianity, especially Catholicism, and reason. But not in England. Anglican John Locke’s On the Reasonableness of Christianity and A Letter Concerning Toleration associated two keywords of the Enlightenment (reason and toleration) and the Church with both.7 This was the package that maintained both social stability and a certain self-satisfaction in eighteenth-century English society at its own exemplary moderation. It was threatened, but not seriously so, by the rise of Methodism. William Paley’s ostentatiously rational arguments in various writings (1785–1809) gave fresh support to the received consensus. Byron would ‘most likely’ have read Paley’s Natural Theology,8 although it is unclear whether his observation (in one of his parliamentary speeches) that Paley was ‘not strictly orthodox’ (CMP, 38) was the result of his own reading. The Edinburgh Review praised Paley for the ‘judicious disposition of his forces’,9 the kind of judicious disposition that its editor, Jeffrey, would find manifestly lacking in Cain. It was the Evangelical William Wilberforce, appalled by the erosion of doctrinal belief in England, who argued that it was but one step from Paley’s Natural Theology to Paine’s Deist and radical Age of Reason.10 William Pitt, equally appalled by Wilberforce’s conversion in 1785, once accompanied him to hear a sermon by the celebrated Evangelical preacher Richard Cecil: ‘You know, Wilberforce, I have not the slightest idea what that man has been talking about’.11 Byron’s Calvinist tutors in Aberdeen and his own temperament would have enabled him to understand what ‘that man’ was talking about far better than Pitt’s tutor at Pembroke College (the future Bishop of Lincoln). Pitt’s reaction seemed to prove 7 William Bulman gives a much more extended and sophisticated version of the establishment of a contract between religion, reason and civic order than I have sketched here in his Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and its Empire, 1648–1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 8 Christine Kenyon Jones, ‘Byron, Darwin, and Paley: Interrogating Natural Theology’, in Byron: Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters, ed. C.A. Wilson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 118. 9 Review of ‘Dr. Paley’s Natural Theology’ in Edinburgh Review 1 (1802), 304. 10 In his review of Natural Theology for the Christian Observer, Wilberforce opined that some of Paley’s assertions were ‘both untenable and unsafe’ and formed ‘the grounds of the theological system of Thomas Paine’ (13 [1803], 165–66). 11 William Hague, William Pitt the Younger (London: Harper Collins, 2004), 237–38 (see also 217–18).

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Wilberforce’s point that the typical Englishman was ‘little acquainted’ with Christianity ‘as distinct’ from ‘Religion in general’ and ‘mere Morality’.12 Nevertheless, it suited Pitt, during a war against a revolutionary France, which now emblematically dissociated Christianity from reason, to try to accommodate Evangelical piety in a national ship where undogmatic, ‘reasonable’ Anglicanism provided ballast. Wilberforce’s viewpoint was the received one by the mid-nineteenth century. Evangelicals and the Oxford movement, from opposite perspectives, pilloried the barely extant ‘orthodoxy’ of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But in 1821 the older view was still operative. Southey, accredited poet laureate and recognized pillar of ‘orthodoxy’, is a telling example. He was convinced that the orthodox creed would ‘not stand the test of sound criticism’ and that ‘the story of the Fall, the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, and the miracles must be given up’.13 As we shall see later, he did not believe in the Holy Trinity. Like Byron, he rejected the idea of hell. Unlike Byron, he also rejected the notion of original sin. Yet The Anti-Jacobin review of Southey’s A Vision of Judgement (an inert vision of judgement and heaven that, unlike Byron’s The Vision of Judgment, carefully avoids biblical and traditional terminology) praised it as advancing ‘his fame, as a poet and a christian, to a still higher pinnacle than it had before attained’ (my italics).14 More informed commentators, such as The Eclectic Review, founded by and edited by Dissenters, might note that Southey’s objections to the ‘oddities’ of Methodism in his life of Wesley concealed an objection to Christianity itself.15 But, even if some might have baulked at the intemperance of the preface to A Vision 12 William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity [1797] (T. Cadell and W. Davies, sixth edition, 1798), 7–9: ‘He was born in a Christian country; of course he is a Christian: his father was a member of the Church of England; so is he’. 13 Southey, in correspondence with his brother Thomas, dated 23 January 1811 (New Letters, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols [New York: Columbia University Press, 1965], II, 6). 14 Anti-Jacobin Review and Protestant Advocate 60 (June 1821), 325. 15 Adverse reactions to the life of Wesley, by the Evangelical Christian Observer as well as the Dissenting Eclectic, are cited by Geoffrey Carnall in a summary of Southey’s religious beliefs which also records Shelley’s view, formed after a meeting with the Lake poet in 1811, that Southey ‘is no believer in original sin: he thinks that which appears to be a taint of our nature is in effect the result of unnatural political institutions: there we agree’ (Robert Southey and His Age [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960], 216–17).

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of Judgement, most Anglicans would have found little objectionable in the way Southey’s outburst against Byron’s ‘Satanic school’ in 1821 came to the defence of ‘revealed religion’ almost as a postscript to its defence of ‘moral purity’, ‘national manners’ and the ‘well-being of society’.16 This was the England that, indignant and horrified, read Cain in the same year. The play opened questions that were deemed shut and animated feelings now unaccustomed. Its articulations undermined the assumptions that had re-established the Church of England after 1688 and had been reasserted by Paley. Even those less eager than Southey to conflate the characters of Lucifer and Byron were discomfited by the way reason was associated with aggressive scepticism rather than religion, and that utilitarian justifications for suffering were ridiculed. Cain and Abel acquire sisters to whom they are married in defiance of moral norms (but then what other women could there be?), and scriptural narratives are reopened for enquiry. If Paley’s style of reasoning could be bracketed then there were no readily available arguments to combat Lucifer’s reasoning. To look for them would be to disturb ‘the contented ignorance of theology common among Englishmen’.17 Cain seemed to invite the repudiation of religion as such, or acknowledgement of a deeper and more complex Christianity. Neither was wanted. Jeffrey’s review of Cain is a clear instance of this minimalist, rational ‘orthodoxy’. He actually was ‘bred a moderate Presbyterian’, unlike Byron, who used this phrase jokily of himself when narrating Don Juan (XV, 91) but was bred an Anglican Episcopalian, under the further influence of immoderate Calvinism. Jeffrey’s moderation, in sharp distinction to ‘Auld Licht’ Presbyterianism, shared the liberal, rationalist assumptions of the English Church. Whether for genuine or pragmatic reasons – Southey often charged him with ‘infidelity’ during their own long-running feud – Jeffrey’s review falls back on those assumptions: The fact is, that here the whole argument—and a very elaborate and specious argument it is—is directed against the goodness or the power of the Deity, and against the reasonableness of religion in general; and there is no answer 16 Robert Southey, A Vision of Judgement (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821): the reference to ‘revealed religion’ is on page xx; the other phrases are taken from pages xvii–xviii. 17 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘The Influence of Arminianism in England’, in Man’s Faith and Freedom: The Theological Influence of Jacobus Arminius, ed. Gerald O. McCulloh (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1962), 46.

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Jeffrey’s ‘Deity’ is a less distinct, more accommodating figure than ‘God’. The operative negative terms are ‘elaborate argument’, ‘strenuous’, ‘offensive’. The operative positive terms are ‘reasonableness’, ‘answer’. The play should present a reasonable answer to elaborate and offensive arguments that it has put in Lucifer’s mouth. Cain doesn’t do this since it is directed against the ‘reasonableness’ of the theology of Locke and Jeffrey himself. Byron is far more interested in an older theology, and in reading the Scriptures as Scriptures, than they are. Jeffrey, hitherto an astute critic of Byron, can be as wrong-footed in his understanding of dramatic aesthetics as he is in theology: Nor is this argumentative blasphemy a mere incidental deformity that arises in the course of an action directed to the common sympathies of our nature. It forms, on the contrary, the great staple of the piece—and occupies, we should think, not less than two-thirds of it;—so that it is really difficult to believe that it was written for any other purpose than to inculcate these doctrines—or at least to discuss the question upon which they bear. (BCH, 234)

Jeffrey at least goes on to praise Byron for the characterization of Cain and for bringing about the catastrophe of Act III ‘with great dramatic skill and effect’ (CVA, 366). Cain is two-thirds ideas with which he disagrees (‘argumentative blasphemy’), and one-third dramatic action, which he admires. Yet he neither asks, nor notices that he does not ask: what is the relation of the first two-thirds of the play (ideas) to its last third (action ‘brought about with great dramatic skill and effect’)? Can a play showing dramatic action to be the disastrous result of the ideas that it has presented ‘inculcate’ those ideas? Jeffrey is intelligent and writes well. ‘Harroviensis’, who wrote a very different review of Cain, is less intelligent and writes less well, but he does what Jeffrey never does – he reads the play as a play.18 He gets two fundamental things right. Cain is about the relation of the first two-thirds to the last third, and the concern with ideas in the first two-thirds of the play is dramatically instrumental rather than expository. Cain was written by Lord Byron rather than George Bernard Shaw. It places 18 A Letter to Sir Walter Scott, Bart, in Answer to the Remonstrance of Oxoniensis on the Publication of Cain, a Mystery, by Lord Byron (London: Rodwell & Martin, 1822).

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ideas in relation to life rather than above or outside it. In particular, it demonstrates Manfred’s insight that ‘The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life’ (I, i, 12). Manfred in some sense killed Astarte because he chose ‘Knowledge’ rather than ‘Life’, though we are not shown or told precisely how this happened. Cain murders Abel for the same reason, but we see this in full view. It is the separation of knowing from living, embraced by Manfred in his youth so that he can say ‘with my knowledge grew | The thirst of knowledge’ (II, ii, 94–95), that is the ultimate source of his murder guilt. Cain embraces the same separation when he chooses to leave Adah and follow Lucifer. This, too, is the ultimate source of his act of murder. Cain says, it is almost a boast, that Adah ‘understands not | The mind which overwhelms me’ (I, i, 188–89). Harroviensis correctly understands that Act II, where indeed Cain’s mind is completely overwhelmed, is not a privileged discussion piece between intellectuals intent on knowledge but a skilful presentation of Lucifer’s subtle attempt to push Cain into ‘the frame of mind’ in which he can and will kill. Byron wanted Murray to prefix Harroviensis’s review to further editions of Cain. Doubtless this was in part a political move – Byron claimed to be ‘astonished’ (BLJ IX, 123) by the public assault against both him and his production, and wished to counter it – but he undoubtedly agreed with the review’s fundamental points. We should recall the letter to Murray quoted in Chapter 2: […] the object of the demon is to depress him still further in his own estimation than he was before—by showing him infinite things—& his own abasement—till he falls into the frame of mind—that leads to the Catastrophe—from mere internal irritation […] from rage and fury against the inadequacy of his state to his Conceptions—& which discharges itself rather against Life—and the author of Life—than the mere living. (BLJ IX, 53–54)

Byron’s points are those that Harroviensis understood and Jeffrey did not: Act II is a temptation scene, not a scene in a discussion play, and it is the cause of Act III: ‘by showing him infinite things […] till he falls into the frame of mind—that leads to the Catastrophe’. Anthony Howe puts it very well: ‘Lucifer does not produce an independent, Enlightenment reasoner, but a murderer and an acolyte’.19 Ian Dennis 19 Anthony Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 56.

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makes a similar observation: ‘Lucifer’s accusations against Jehovah are a shifting, repetitive jumble of resentments but this – as the poet himself repeatedly claimed – is an aspect of characterization and dramatic action, not a sign of Byron’s intellectual limitations’.20 However, I think it is fair to say that ‘mainstream’ readings take little notice of the poet’s claims or the play’s structure: Peter Schock provides a list of some of these in an article that is itself a prime example of taking Byron’s offensive intent as read, assuming that the play is written in the spirit of Paine and Shelley against ‘orthodoxy’ and that Cain ‘fails to achieve the intellectual liberation Lucifer sets before him’.21 In Lara and Manfred, Byron is concerned with the obscuring of the will’s responsibility for the actions and frames of mind in which the protagonists find themselves. Byron is interior to this obscuring, since he is partly in league with such ‘dark imaginings’ (Lara I, 317). But, by 1821, he has changed and can now place such ‘dark imaginings’ from the outside, where before he was inside. If we contrast the grand operatic set-piece account of the death of Lara with the death of Fletcher Christian in The Island, then the change from Byron in 1814 to Byron in 1823 is obvious. The first is a dark celebration in a poem that gives us nothing else to celebrate; the second is a placed dead-end in a poem that celebrates a bright ending. I argued in the last chapter that the subtle managing of Manfred’s death in the final version of the play is where this huge shift in Byron’s reading of life is, ‘perhaps’, perceptible for the first time. Cain is written the other side of this shift. Act II shows how a frame of mind is established in the primordial murdering precursor of Lara and Manfred. This process seems to be intellectual but is volitional. In Chapter 2, I quoted the lines in Don Juan where Byron says that ‘To trace all actions to their secret springs | Would make indeed some melancholy mirth’ (XIV, 59). Act II of Cain is the closest Byron comes to such a tracing. Lucifer selects his victim, already self-alienated from family, in the opening scene. Lara, the poem’s narrator tells us, stood ‘a stranger in this breathing world’ (I, 315). Manfred tells us this himself: 20 Ian Dennis, ‘Cain: Lord Byron’s Sincerity’, Studies in Romanticism 41.4 (2002), 667–68. 21 Peter A. Schock, ‘The “Satanism” of Cain in Context: Byron’s Lucifer and the War Against Blasphemy’, Keats-Shelley Journal 44 (1995), 208. Schock lists similar readings in his third footnote on page 183. Contrast with Robert Ryan, ‘Byron’s Cain: The Ironies of Belief’ (Wordsworth Circle 21.1 [1990]), which intelligently bemoans the long-standing consensus that Cain is a rational assault on orthodoxy.

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My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers, Made me a stranger; though I wore the form, I had no sympathy with breathing flesh, … (II, ii, 55–57)

Lucifer’s object is to separate Cain still further from the breathing world of his family and make him the habitué of a breathless one, which will presage his punishment as alien wanderer: My spirit buoys thee up to breathe in regions Where all is breathless save thyself. (II, ii, 116–17)

The consequence (and it clearly is a consequence – ‘till he falls into the frame of mind—that leads to the Catastrophe’) is that Cain takes Abel’s breath away from him (curiously, the Hebrew word Abel means breath in the sense of insubstantiality, as in ‘no more than a breath’). Then, in a startling dramatic reversal, Cain tries to will it back again as Lear, self-deceived, does with dead Cordelia:       Stir—stir—nay, only stir! Why, so—that’s well!—thou breath’st! breathe upon me! (III, i, 331–32)

The dramatic tension between breathless and breathing regions rests on a theological tension between knowledge and love. Lucifer uses the distinction between knowledge and love to separate Cain from Adah. Cain is alienated from his family in the opening prayer and ridicules the theodicy into which he has been introduced, but he is strongly attached to Adah. It is essential that Lucifer detaches Cain from Adah both physically (through the space trip) and intellectually by distinguishing knowledge from love, privileging the former, aligning Adah with love, and then nudging Cain into choosing knowledge rather than her. It is Adah who makes the patristic distinction between the seraphs who ‘love most’ and the cherubs who ‘know most’ (I, i, 421). Lucifer instantly demolishes any suggestion that love could be superior to knowledge: And if the higher knowledge quenches love, What must he be you cannot love when known? Since the all-knowing cherubim love least, The seraphs’ love can be but ignorance: (I, i, 423–26)

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This does not stop Adah saying ‘Oh, Cain! choose love’. But Cain denies that love depends on choice and he refers back, as he always does, to an obscuring antecedent: For thee, my Adah, I chose not—it was Born with me—but I love nought else. (I, i, 432–33)

In fact, he does choose knowledge (Lucifer) rather than love (Adah). His refusal to choose is itself an act of choice presented as nothing of the kind. Cain hates declaring a choice for this reason. His later agitated inability to choose between the two altars offered by Abel is almost comic. ‘Choose for me’ (III, i, 211), he says to Abel, correctly intuiting that any act of choice involves a stake in life. Cain understands, too, that praying presupposes choice, which is why he refuses to join in the communal prayer which opens the play. These primly circumspect opening prayers certainly call attention to the very problems they ostensibly brush aside (‘Yet didst permit the serpent to creep in’; ‘Each to his task of toil—not heavy’ [I, i, 19; 48]). Cain exploits these awkward gaps. His a-theism is a denial of his family’s specific theism. He grates against the same answer being given to all his questions: ‘“’twas his will, | And he is good.” How know I that?’ (I, i, 75–76). Rather than such submission, Lucifer offers the Promethean stance of ‘being | Yourselves, in your resistance’ (I, i, 212–13), which is prayer’s antithesis. Only after Abel’s death is prayer wrenched out of Cain (‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ [III, i, 333]). An ancient problem is involved here. Can we will only insofar as we know or can we love beyond specific knowing? This dispute interests Byron, as it did Dante, though it is hard to be sure how much Byron knew of its complex theological history. In Chapter 2, in order to interpret Lara, I invoked Kierkegaard’s insistence that the human will often obscures its own operation and transfers responsibility to knowledge. This obscuring is Lucifer’s whole purpose in Act II. The first step is his claim that the seraphs’ willing is ‘but ignorance’ because it depends on less knowledge than the cherubim possess. As Blackwood’s puts it in jest of the ‘poor, sneaking, talking devil’ presented in Cain, ‘Thomas Aquinas would have flogged him more for his bad logic than his unbelief’.22 Because the cherubim love less than the seraphs, it does not follow that they do not 22 ‘Letter from Paddy’ [attributed to Eyre Evans Crowe], Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 11 (April 1822), 463.

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love at all or that their knowledge has quenched actual love (as opposed to possible seraphic love) in them. Lucifer craftily takes his cue from Adah here who says that Lucifer must be a cherub ‘since he loves not’, but her use of ‘most’ in the distinction between the seraphs who ‘love most’ and the cherubs who ‘know most’ of itself implies that both seraphs and cherubs love and know but can be distinguished by the extent and priority of their love and knowledge. Cain lets slip a phrase which indicates that Lucifer’s description of the cherubs is not his own. He talks ecstatically about the song of the ‘vesper bird’, which ‘seems to sing of love, | And mingles with the song of cherubim, | As the day closes over Eden’s walls’ (II, ii, 264–66). Here, cherubs clearly love as well as know or, at least, their song mingles with love.23 The tone here is an unusual one. Unlike Manfred, who often references song and whose speech is always proximate to lyricism, Cain habitually chops logic with Lucifer: his first utterance is a question, and his final one is an exclamation. Nevertheless, this is not the whole Cain, as Act III will reveal. In the play as it unfolds itself, we modify clear-cut and ‘known’ attitudes. Cain is not a rationalist treatise on the origin of Evil or the injustice of God but a drama about will acting and acted upon in time. Its sequencing forces us to change perspectives. The suspension of normal time in the space flight corresponds to the magnification of tiny movements of will and settlements of heart when consciousness, apparently taken up with what it beholds, is being orientated in a particular way. Cain will understand this after the murder but not beforehand (‘I am awake at last’ [III, i, 378]). Act III dramatizes the effects of the change brought about earlier and forces us, like Cain himself, to rethink the first two Acts. In a play that abuts onto classical tragedy, this is Byron’s version of reversal (Aristotle’s peripeteia). For instance, most readers do not warm to Abel in the first two Acts, but when he dies in Act III we discover, as Cain does, that our presumed knowledge is not and never was co-extensive with his being. The puzzling relationship between knowing and loving is handed directly to audience and reader in the same sequence as it is to Cain himself. Death puts an end to, while wholly revealing, the possibility that was lovable in Abel’s present being but unavailable to unloving knowledge. Remorse is for the Abel whom we thought we knew but 23 There may well be an echo here of Adam’s delight when he recalls how ‘Cherubic Songs by night from neighbouring Hills | Aereal Music send’, which he too associates with love rather than knowledge (see PL V, 545–51).

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didn’t. We thought that Abel’s voice was as ‘dull’ as that of Gessner’s Abel, on whom Byron commented negatively (CVA, 261), but Cain yearns ‘for a word more of that gentle voice’ (III, i, 356) so we reassess what we thought straightforward. As Abel dies, he undergoes a transformation that may be wholly new or proceed from something implicit in the being that we have patronized. We do not know. Lucifer insists that God is ‘So restless in his wretchedness’ that, as relief from (but also expression of) this restlessness, he ‘must still | Create and re-create’ (I, i, 162–63). This assertion seems to undermine the stanza in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage where Byron boasts of the ‘being more intense’ that the poet enjoys in the act of creation. Adah, well informed as usual, produces the appropriate orthodox reply that Good doesn’t create out of deficiency but is diffusive of itself (I, i, 478–81). This would justify Byron’s creation too, since it would be a product not of Byron’s restless ‘self’ (‘What am I? Nothing’) but of the overflowing ‘Soul of my thought’ (CHP III, 6). Adah’s theology is always better informed than that of her parents. Lucifer’s ridiculing of love’s priority over knowledge is, then, a display of intellectual obfuscation in order to bring about Cain’s alienated ‘frame of mind’. We are impressed and dazzled, and respond to some undertow of feeling present in it from Byron’s real but intermittent pessimistic nihilism, displayed most obviously five years earlier in his ‘Darkness’ – which the play both expresses and, unlike ‘Darkness’, places. But such rhetoric is not a proclamation of the dramatist’s own opinions but his skilful dramatization of Lucifer’s bid for Cain’s will disguised as intellectual instruction. Something of Byron’s own lurch to doubt is in it. Yet it is written not out of that doubt but out of Byron’s dramatic shaping, in which Lucifer acts as a seducer rather than a professor. The choice between love and knowledge is played out with dramatic exactness. Cain frequently denies that he can will beyond what he knows. When Lucifer asks him ‘wouldst thou be as I am?’ Cain replies ‘I know not what thou art’. When Lucifer asks if he would have the realm of death present, Cain fields the same reply: ‘Till I know | That which it really is, I cannot answer’ (II, i, 78–79; II, ii, 13–15). Lucifer overtly supports this logic and has coached Cain in it. Thus Cain’s replies repeat the form of Lucifer’s own reply to Cain’s earlier question ‘But shall I know it?’: ‘As I know not death, | I cannot answer’ (I, i, 289–90). Yet when Lucifer wants Cain to do something, he makes a different sort of appeal, asking insistently what sits ‘nearest’ to his heart. Cain immediately answers ‘the mysteries of death’ (II, i, 139–40), although 96

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his heart’s desire here does not correspond to any knowledge that he yet has, for he admitted earlier ‘I | Know nought of death’ (II, i, 60–61). If the will can love beyond its explicit knowing and in this way ‘make’ love, so Cain can will the negation that he does not yet know and thus ‘make’ death. Lucifer coaches Cain in this by tempting Cain’s heart directly while always overtly talking of the priority of knowledge to will. He uses the same formula when he wishes to direct Cain’s agitated thought of Abel into his will: ‘And thy brother— | Sits he not near thy heart?’ (II, ii, 338–39). The centre of Act II lies in this distinction and its obfuscation so that Cain does not notice that it is his will rather than his intellect with which Lucifer is concerned. That is why Byron chose as epigraph the verse in Genesis describing the serpent as the most ‘subtil’ beast of the field. Byron understands Abel’s murder as a re-enactment and completion of that estrangement brought about by the Fall, which brings death into the world. Lucifer’s advocacy of knowledge is, at first, brilliantly plausible in its own right, but then skilfully deceptive within the play rather than the play’s own considered advertisement for scepticism. Byron, for example, parallels the silence of the habitually articulate Cain in the presence of his assembled family before and after the murder. Both reveal his will and establish, on a huge scale, the basic structure of lyric form (A (i) B A (ii)). Between them lies the space flight because Cain’s will has to separate itself from the breathing world and enter its own invented space before bringing death into the world. Cain’s ‘I fain would be alone a little while’ (I, i, 57) is the cue for Lucifer’s entry. In the opening tableau, Cain announces the linking of his will with the stance of rejection and refuses to acknowledge God’s will by praying. In the second tableau – Cain’s dramatically prolonged second silence by the corpse of Abel – his will, displacing God’s, is announced and singled out by Eve as the cause of all that we have seen and as the principal subject of the drama. We cannot accept the unmaternal ferocity of her verbal onslaught, but we will agree with its essential point. Our embarrassment here is like the discomfort readers feel when forced to recognize that Lara is a murderer: ADAM.          […] let it be borne     In such sort as may show our God, that we     Are faithful servants to his holy will. EVE [pointing to Cain]. His will! the will of yon incarnate spirit     Of death, whom I have brought upon the earth     To strew it with the dead. (III, i, 416–21)

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Cain’s will, which expressed itself, as male wills often do, in violent physical action, now lies exposed in the might-have-been otherwise of punishment (III, i, 557–58).24 His will is framed by two different female wills. Adah mourns but still chooses love (545–51); Eve’s mourning is redirected into a verbal violence that seeks to re-establish control over and punish male violence. Eve’s monumental curse modifies our relation to Cain. It even partially exonerates him, because it reveals his mother’s genes as antecedent precipitation of his will. Later he uses this as an excuse, relying again, even after the murder, on a deferring reference back (506–8). Nevertheless, Eve’s excoriating identification of Cain’s will as causal both of death and of the knowledge in which all now stand is an essential part of the play’s design. Her curse stands as dramatic, structural and ethical antithesis to Adah’s convincing refusal to judge and her plea for mercy (465–66, 486). Byron maintains a steady view of Eve for her curse is co-ordinated with her opening prayer where, unlike Adah who praises God as the author of a world that can be loved, she curiously chooses to praise God for separating and dividing ‘Morning from night’ (I, i, 6), just as she now takes savage delight in Cain’s future separation from nature and humanity. Cain is theatrically placed between these two voices and stances. The cadence and form of Eve’s curse refashion Cain’s own repetition of Abel’s phrase about Jehovah’s pleasure in ‘his acceptance of the victims’, which he singles out incredulously – ‘His! | His pleasure!’ (III, i, 296–98) – just as Eve does. Cain is thus punished by the repetition of his own outraged, justice-claiming, death-dealing cadence. His mother, immediate cause of the life that he has and the life that he has shed, stands in the same withered voluble space as Manfred anathematizing the universe on the Jungfrau. Her impromptu speech comes out of her divided being, causer and curser of his life, primal mother revealed as mother of division, just as surely as Cain’s murderous act – protesting violence, enacting violence – does. The sudden violent energy of her curse on her son’s life verbally re-enacts Cain’s eruption of anger before killing his brother. For all the power of Act III, might the contention of Jeffrey and his critical heirs still hold that in Byron’s text ‘there is no answer so much as attempted to the offensive doctrines that are so strenuously inculcated’? Wasn’t Byron facetiously acknowledging this himself when he had 24 Compare Manfred: ‘And to be thus, eternally but thus, | Having been otherwise’ (I, ii, 70–71).

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a giggle with Moore (BLJ VIII, 216) about the ‘small talk’ between Lucifer and Cain in Act II being ‘not quite canonical’? Wolf Hirst, the most convincing heir of Harroviensis, helps us deal with the objection by pointing to the connections between Cain and the Book of Job.25 Exactly as in Byron’s play, no answer is given to Job’s charge that God has acted unjustly to him, or to the more general implication of divine injustice. That is because there is no answer. No set of intellectual propositions could possibly accomplish this task. To think so is to side with Job’s comforters, who use arguments remarkably like those of Adam in Byron’s play. Would Jeffrey have sided with them and preferred some version of William Paley’s reasonings to set Byron’s Lucifer aright? I fear so. In the Book of Job, God replies in a whirlwind, a bewildering act of power. He implies that there is no ground upon which human and divine intellects can meet. This is a rebuke to Job and to Job’s premises, but he is praised for maintaining his conviction of injustice, rewarded and accepted whereas the comforters are rejected. Job’s charges against God are both repudiated and allowed to stand. Nothing as positive as this happens at the end of Cain, though there is a similar ambiguity. But Byron, un-biblically, chooses to have Cain’s unaccepted sacrifice scattered by the whirlwind that unsettles Job, a direct act of the unseen God, and Cain is humbled and accepts the humbling in his admission that his declared pursuit of justice was ‘a dreary dream’ from which he is now ‘awake at last’ (III, i, 378). He accepts too, for here he is the antithesis of Job, that it led directly to his own violent and unjust act. Readers who will have been sympathetic to Cain’s sense that they have not heard any arguments justifying apparently unmerited suffering and rampant evil in a world governed by a just and loving God should similarly revise their understanding of what the play is there to show. That the Book of Job made a deep impression upon Byron’s mind is shown by his versification of an extract from it in Hebrew Melodies (‘A Spirit Passed Before Me’). Byron was careful to follow the sequence and most of the significant words of Genesis 4. However, the bald statement ‘But unto Cain and to his offering he [God] had not respect’ (4: 5) is displaced by Job’s whirlwind. This, as in the Book of Job, manifests God’s presence but also scatters Cain’s sacrifice. ‘God’ was essentially an unpleasant idea in Act II, but Act III represents a move to bodies and actions. It is this change, rather than some intellectual intervention set up 25 Wolf Hirst, ‘Byron’s Lapse into Orthodoxy: An Unorthodox Reading of Cain’, Keats-Shelley Journal 29 (1980).

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to counter Lucifer’s arguments, that thrusts Lucifer out of the play as no longer relevant to it. He is simply referred to as ‘that proud spirit’ in the past tense (e.g. III, i, 45). In an often-quoted letter to Murray, Byron says that he wants ‘to make a regular English drama’, which is directed not to the conditions of present English theatrical practice but to ‘a mental theatre’ (BLJ VIII, 187). It might seem that Byron’s theatrical intentions were identical to those of Joanna Baillie, who wrote for mental rather than theatrical presentation. But they are not. Byron’s mental theatre remains a grand theatre. Byron loved acting, London theatre and Italian opera houses. He had the most theatrical imagination of the British Romantics. Our mental imagining in Cain should take vivid theatrical form, and I have seen it performed convincingly. The movement from two figures (Lucifer and Cain) in a breathless world to a breathing world of violent action is theatrically conceived. At the imagined stage-centre of Act III lies first of all a sleeping baby whose ‘cheeks are reddening’ and who ‘laughs and stretches out his arms’ (III, i, 26, 149). Baby Enoch’s body is then almost immediately displaced by the stretched-out, lifeless body of Abel, murdered, then probably grasped by Cain as he seeks to revive him, kissed by Zillah on ‘those lips once so warm’ (454) and then again, most movingly, by Adah at the play’s conclusion (‘ADAH stoops down and kisses the body of ABEL’). These two bodies in turn are centre-stage throughout almost the entire Act. Lucifer presents the human body as merely ‘a servile mass of matter’, which is incongruously linked with ‘high thought’ (II, i, 51, 50), but the loving interactions of Cain and Adah with their baby, Adah’s graceful tender action in stooping to kiss her brother’s body, and our horrified reaction to his vividly realized murder, make such a distinction ridiculous. The two silent bodies of Enoch and Abel, touched and talked about, anchor the last Act in physical time and place in contrast to Act II, which is concerned with establishing a ‘frame of mind’. The last third of the play reverses Lucifer’s arguments. It displaces the empty imagined world of Act II and instates a given place in which we live, feel and die in mind and body rather than merely thinking about living and dying. The basic structure of the play, on which my reading depends, has been insufficiently recognized. I will try to set it out as unmistakably as possible. Act I presents Gessner’s world – pastoral, stylized, with Cain as dissident presence – but out of this Byron skilfully develops the play’s essential triad: Cain, Adah and Lucifer. The much more abstract Act II was doubtless partly conceived out of Satan’s space flight in Paradise Lost but reimagined as through the vast, cold and empty spaces now familiar 100

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since Newton and with the knowledge of vast spaces of un-biblical time brought about by geological investigation. It is an extraordinarily unsettling intervention, whether into Gessner’s narrative or that of Genesis. Just as unexpected is Act III’s instatement of the essential elements of the biblical narrative in intensely realized, dramatically physical, form. Byron’s genius – that word is out of fashion but still seems the best one here – consists in his ability to show the necessary connections between these three very different Acts. The space flight and the violent murder of Abel are as unclassical as may be. But the single developing concentration in the play where, as Aristotle recommends, there is sequence of plot and unity of time, make it, like Manfred, a deeply classical, unclassical play quite unlike anything that precedes it. Byron does what he does best: he puts very disparate things together and connects them. To understand the play, we have to enter it, make these connections and read them off. The incomplete nature of narrative information and the manifest bias of narrators in The Giaour and Lara force the reader to attend to narrative as a problem. This attention is not there to problematize meaning but to include the reader in the unfolding of the poems and in difficult ethical problems, which can be presented only through a story-telling that calls attention to itself.26 Something similar, though it is differently conducted, happens to the reader of Manfred. In Cain, it is the unobvious dramatic structure, produced by the space-flight dialogue in the centre of the play into which a familiar biblical figure is incongruously lifted and by which he is motivated, that is presented to the reader’s attention in a similar way. Byron does not think like Lucifer or Jeffrey. Shelley must often have heard from Byron the conviction that he attributes to him in Julian and Maddalo:       my judgement will not bend To your opinion, though I think you might Make such a system refutation-tight As far as words go (lines 192–95)

Byron distrusted ‘refutation-tight’ systems including the purported system of his Lucifer. He thinks through paradoxes, large-scale juxtapositions and sequences and through their small-scale equivalent in metaphors. 26 I am indebted to Jerome McGann for the insight which is the germ of this paragraph.

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Byron does not think within or outside Cain but through its controlled unfolding as a whole. The shift from Acts I and II to Act III is a shift from one theology to another. The sudden emphasis on bodies and the concomitant introduction of feelings as well as thoughts, together with the use of Job’s whirlwind, are clues here. Peter Schock assumes that Byron, like Byron’s wife and Lucifer, is a Socinian (i.e. that he believes Christ is not God). Lucifer always brings Christ into view in order to undeify Him and remove any sense that Christ as Redeemer associates God with love. Having speculated that a solitary God must create in order to waylay his restlessness, he goes on to suggest:        —perhaps he’ll make One day a Son unto himself—as he Gave you a father—and if he so doth Mark me!—that Son will be a Sacrifice. (I, i, 163–66)

Lucifer presents the Son here as exalted but created and therefore not divine. This Arian position, as Byron knew from Gibbon, divided the early Church until the formulated acceptance of the Trinity in the Creed, and the acceptance of Mary as ‘Mother of God’, rejected it. The knowledgeable Lucifer presents Christ’s Crucifixion as a sadistic distraction set up by God to relieve the monotony of His existence, a drama of which He is audience. The loving Adah presents it as a saving act in which God directly participates (III, i, 85–86). It is essential for Lucifer to rule out the possibility that God can act within the world for the same reasons that he must separate knowledge from love. God must be the omnipotent outsider who sets everything up and is callously indifferent to any woeful consequence. That both Byron and Lucifer are well informed about Trinitarian disputes and their relevance to the play is shown in the curious dialogue about belief between Cain and Lucifer when they are about to move out of earth’s gravity into pure space at the opening of Act II. This is presented as analogous to Saint Peter walking on the waters so long as he believed but sinking as soon as he did not. A frightened Cain is assured that he will not fall into the abyss of space provided he has faith in Lucifer, who claims that this injunction is identical to ‘the edict of the other God’ (II, i, 3–6). Since it is actually Christ who tells Peter it is his doubt that is responsible for his sinking (Matthew 14: 31), then Lucifer is implying 102

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that Christ is ‘the other God’. Cain, of course, has no means of knowing this since Christ is not mentioned. Yet later in the same speech, Lucifer expands the point and tells Cain that there will come a time when ‘A man shall say to a man, “Believe in me, | And walk the waters”’ (II, i, 18–19). Here Lucifer is very careful, since the reference is much more explicit, to use the Socinian formula ‘A man shall say to a man’ in order to exclude any possibility that the speaker is, in any sense, God. Lucifer therefore knows three attitudes to Christ’s divinity – Socinian, Arian and orthodox – and is extremely careful to manage his dialogue in order to prevent any hint of the orthodox one being known to Cain. What then is the other theology that the play adumbrates? It is a non-rational but not irrational theology that begins from and never leaves paradox. Paradox, bypassed in Paley’s evidential reasoning, characterizes orthodox theology, which brandishes the polarities on which the creed depends: God is three and one, Christ is God and Man, Mary is Virgin and Mother, bread and wine become body and blood, fullness of life involves dying to self and, crucially, God’s omnipotent and saving character is most fully shown in His incarnation as a helpless child lying in a crib and His mutilated appearance in a murdered, mourned, mercy-giving body. These latter two narratives, which became primary Christian icons, are the two governing images (the living body of an infant and the body of a murdered man who forgives in the act of dying) placed centre-stage in Act III. Abstract thought is dramatically displaced by two bodies. A specifically Christian theology begins with these paradoxes. It will be marked – this is especially obvious in early Christian theology – by finding the Christ of the New Testament in what is now seen as the Old Testament and, consequently, by privileging allegorical reading. This orthodox theology, founded on paradox rather than ‘reasonableness’, is precisely the theology that Locke, Lady Byron and Jeffrey wish to suppress. Jeffrey’s review of Cain specifically finds in it ‘the mischief of all poetical paradoxes […] which […] are never brought to the fair test of argument’ (CVA, 364). This connection between the helpless bodies of infant and murdered man in the New Testament and in Cain is startling. But it is Byron who makes the connection in his audacious adjustment of Genesis that finds Christ in the Old Testament. The account in Genesis gives no words to the dying Abel but Byron does:    O God! receive thy servant, and Forgive his slayer, for he knew not what

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Any reader of Byron will at once recognize the similarity with Manfred’s death – ‘give me thy hand’, although there is no indication that Cain takes the offered hand – and will recognize the unmistakable echo of Christ’s words to the soldiers crucifying Him: Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. (Luke 23: 34)

The association of Abel’s sacrifice and death with that of Christ is in the New Testament and became a Christian commonplace. It is, in the first instance, typological but, in a developed Christology, Christ, in some real sense for a believer, speaks and is present in Abel. This is the dramatic effect in Cain. We suddenly hear another voice, unimaginable and unexpected, in Byron’s text. No one in the play can pick up this reference any more than Abel does. Goethe thought that ‘through the whole piece there runs a kind of presentiment of the coming of a Saviour’ (CVA, 328). Such an identification is characteristic of orthodox theology, which is grounded in large connections between New and Old Testaments. It is neither Socinian nor, in Jeffrey’s, Locke’s and Paley’s sense, ‘reasonable’. Byron’s play presupposes that there is some sort of recognizable God ‘out there’, prayed to in the opening scene and constantly upbraided by Cain. Yet if Abel speaks Christ’s words and Job’s whirlwind responds to Cain’s sacrifice, then God in some sense acts within the text of the play, in which case Christ and God, though not the same, must be one. Lucifer is anxious to forestall such thinking since it prevents God from being arraigned as callous outsider to the history that He inaugurates. In orthodox belief, Christ’s salvific body, wholly innocent but suffering violent injustice, answers the insoluble problems that the Book of Job and Byron’s Cain raise. But it does so not through discourse, just as Cain’s articulated questions about death, abruptly halted, turn into incoherent stammerings (III, i, 321–33, 336–57, 371–79) in the presence of Abel’s dead body. Logical reasoning is nothing other than its sequential process, but deeper insights can come about only by the sudden collapse of logical process in the face of an irreducible complex in concrete form, which presents itself as mystery and paradox. Thought can continue here but only in a different manner. How far was Byron interested and proficient in such Christian orthodoxy? Certainly more interested and proficient than the poet who accused him

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of setting up a ‘Satanic school’. In the same letter of 1811 from which I quoted earlier, Southey told his brother that ‘the nature of the Fall and the question of the Trinity and the superhuman nature of Christ may safely be left undefined’.27 In this he was not unusual. Many English Christians, while using Trinitarian formulas in worship, did not much concern themselves with the doctrine, though, throughout the eighteenth century, it was not wise to question it publicly. Newton kept his doubts to himself. Yet Unitarianism, that strangely English then American hybrid of Christianity and Rationalism, was a natural extension of the emphasis on the reasonableness of Anglican beliefs, as is evident from Lady Byron’s enthusiasm for Locke’s Treatise, which she recommended to her husband, and by the early nineteenth century it was more respectable than Methodism. Coleridge of course adopted Unitarianism before he became a Trinitarian. The Doctrine of the Trinity Act of 1813, which amended the 1697 Blasphemy Act to authorize Unitarian forms of worship, reflected Unitarianism’s growing acceptability. Unitarians remained a vocal minority, since to be one involved a more definite concern with the religious doctrines than most people wanted to have. Yet the Trinity Act accommodated a blurring, which corresponded to Southey’s ‘the question of the Trinity … may safely be left undefined’. Byron has a much deeper interest in such definitions even when he does not fully accept them. That this involved not only his intellect but large parts of his being is shown by his jokes. Two in particular are to the point. Byron would have been appalled by the general tenor of Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode, which was associated with a national injunction for public rejoicing in January 1816 at the final defeat of France. But six years later he still remembered and singled out Wordsworth’s contention that God’s    most dreaded instrument In working out a pure intent Is Man—arrayed for mutual slaughter,— Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!28

Byron drily noted: 27 New Letters, II, 6. 28 Thanksgiving Ode, January 18, 1816; with Other Short Pieces Chiefly Referring to Recent Public Events (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown 1816), 17 [lines 279–82].

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r e a di ng by ron    ‘Carnage’ (so Wordsworth tells you) ‘is God’s daughter:’ If he speak truth, she is Christ’s sister, … (DJ VIII, 9)

Byron is being sardonic but he instantly pictures relationships within God and the absoluteness of Christ’s Sonship. The joke reveals his instant Trinitarian imagining (at least in the 1820s when he was writing both Cain and Don Juan). Wordsworth never thought like this. He never blasphemed because he had no understanding of the possibility of blasphemy. Byron, however, detects a double blasphemy: the first has to do with identifying one’s own vindictive reading of history with God’s in the manner of Eve’s curse in Act III or Southey’s in his Vision of Judgement; the other has to do with the thought that is made both possible and impossible if the doctrine of the Trinity is taken seriously. It involves imagining relationships within the Godhead as actual. Such relationships cannot be imagined without the input of faith. Byron jokes about this in stanzas written not long after the jibe at Wordsworth:    […] but 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 established the whole Trinity    On so uncontrovertible a level, That I devoutly wished the three were four, On purpose to believe so much the more. (DJ, XI, 5–6)

The reference to ‘illness’ is both jokey and meant: it both undermines religious faith and yet substantiates it as an act of the whole person rather than simply the mind. It is thus aligned with Act III rather than Act II of Cain. Byron’s list is of some of the doctrines that Southey thought could ‘safely be left undefined’. He is often jokey about such doctrines, and liked Morgante Maggiore for reasons that E.H. Coleridge put very well: That which attracted Byron to Pulci’s writings was, no doubt, the co-presence of faith, a certain simplicity of faith, with an audacious and even outrageous handling of the objects of faith.29 29 Ernest Hartley Coleridge (ed.), Works: Poetry, 7 vols (London: John Murray,

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This ‘co-presence’ and ability to mix tones is one of the reasons why Byron resembles Chaucer more than any other British poet. Such a ‘co-presence’ is often triggered by the incongruous juxtaposition of the spiritual and the physical, as in Byron’s suspicion that his increasing ability to accept paradoxical dogmas was caused or helped by the ‘shocks’ of illness. But the co-presence of the spiritual and the physical is the direct and knowing object of Byron’s attention, at once serious and apparently flippant: […] I am really a great admirer of tangible religion; and am breeding one of my daughters a Catholic, that she may have her hands full. It is by far the most elegant worship, hardly excepting the Greek mythology. What with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics and the real presence, confession, absolution,—there is something sensible to grasp at. Besides, it leaves no possibility of doubt; for those who swallow their Deity, really and truly, in transubstantiation, can hardly find any thing else otherwise than easy of digestion. I am afraid that this sounds flippant, but I don’t mean it to be so; (BLJ IX, 123)

It does sound flippant and he does not mean it to be so. When Byron says that he very much inclines ‘to the Catholic doctrines’ (BLJ IX, 119) at the time of writing Cain, ‘doctrines’ include not only credal formulas but the indissoluble tissue of tangible and spiritual entities that Byron lists in the letter above. Jeffrey’s vocabulary (‘against the goodness or the power of the Deity, and against the reasonableness of religion in general’) finds religion, albeit as ‘argumentative blasphemy’, in the abstractions and empty spaces of Act II of Cain but he cannot find it in the eruption of tangibles in Act III (breath, sleeping, reddening cheeks, hands, arms, blood, milk, touching, kissing, violently striking on the temples, wounds, dying, corpse) nor in the fusion of the breathed-out dying words of Abel and Christ. Byron can. Byron talks about the Trinity in a different way in Cephalonia, if the conversations recorded by the army doctor James Kennedy are 1898–1904), IV, 280. Coleridge also quotes the observation of John Addington Symonds that Pulci’s readers are puzzled by ‘the paradoxical union of persiflage with gravity, a confession of faith alternating with a profession of mockery’. Byron’s own Advertisement to his translation of the first canto of the Morgante advises that its tendency to ‘ridicule’ does not necessarily imply irreverence: ‘It has never yet been decided entirely, whether Pulci’s intention was or was not to deride the religion, which is one of his favourite topics’ (CPW IV, 247–48).

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reliable. Kennedy, like Paley, believed that Christianity’s truth could be demonstrated entirely by reason. Like Jeffrey, he rebuked Byron for not putting in counter-arguments to those of Lucifer in Cain. Byron maintained that the great ‘difficulties’ in believing could not be removed simply by reason: ‘there is, for instance, the doctrine of the Trinity, which is alone quite appalling’ (HVSV, 445). Kennedy refused both to speculate and to be appalled. Byron instantly countered that the Creed of Athanasius ‘and the fathers of the Church’ had done just this. Kennedy was uninterested in and uninformed about such approaches whereas Byron was not. Indeed, Byron would have had considerable ammunition to hand from a more orthodox theology than that of Kennedy because when he went to Greece in 1823, as David Goldweber points out, he took a large number of books about religion with him.30 These included sermons, various defences of Christianity, Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted and, strikingly, William Jones’s The Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity proved from Scripture. Jones was an eighteenth-century Hutchinsonian High Anglican. It is hard to imagine any other Romantic poet putting this last book in his travel bag. Manifestly it represents the second of the two orthodoxies in Cain. What did Byron mean by ‘appalling’? I used the word some paragraphs ago (‘Byron would have been appalled by the general tenor of Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode’). I did so in the common modern usage where it means ‘disliked intensely, outraged by’. That sense did not exist in Byron’s time, for ‘appalling’ retained its original meaning, derived from growing pale, of inducing terror and dismay. Byron always uses it like this. A particularly striking instance is in The Deformed Transformed: What a good Christian you were formed to be— But what cold Sceptic hath appalled your faith And transubstantiated to crumbs again— The body of your Credence! (Part III, fragment, 44–47; CPW VI, 575)

By demolishing the faith of a believer, the sceptics appal (terrorize, dismay) him. Byron presents this through a vivid physical image of such demolition, where what is believed to be the Body of Christ dissolves back into mere bread. Only Byron could have coined the remarkable phrase ‘the body of your Credence’, reflecting exactly that sense of the spiritual 30 David Goldweber, ‘Byron, Catholicism, and Don Juan XVII’, Renascence 49.3 (1997).

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directly available in ‘something sensible to grasp at’ (cf. ‘swallow their Deity’), which he outlines and defends. The essential point is that such a reversal is appalling. Believing in the Trinity is an appalling reversal of exactly the opposite kind: an impossible riddle is the foundation of the most real actuality precisely ‘quia impossibile’ (DJ XVI, 5). Cain is similarly ‘appalled’ – the italicized stage direction indicates paralysed stupefaction – when, in reply to Abel’s dying request for him to give him his hand, he says ‘My hand! ’Tis all red, and with— | What? (A long pause. —Looking slowly round)’ (III, i, 321–22). Unlike Manfred’s Abbot, Cain does not take the proffered hand but gazes, stupefied, at his own. Abel’s immediately preceding words – ‘Forgive his slayer, for he knew not what | He did’ (319–20) – align his own dying body and the innocent blood on Cain’s hands with what, for a believer, is the absolutely realized instance of ‘The body of your Credence’. The kinds of physical/spiritual, typological and Trinitarian resonances operative in Cain represent Byron feeling his way into another theology that he wants to understand. This must be why he took Jones’s The Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity with him in 1823, and, in a different but associated way, why he increasingly accepted the tangible as sign of the spiritual in Italian sacramental practice, which reverses the scepticism dependent upon the separation of the two. Both tangible signifying bodies and Christologically signifying words from the New Testament play their part in the absolute reversal dramatized in Act III of Cain, whereas the first two acts depend upon articulations (Calvinist, Deist, sceptical) with which Byron had been long familiar and which he knew well from Bayle’s Dictionary. When Byron interpreted Cain’s murder of Abel as primarily a discharge against ‘Life—and the Author of Life’, he is interpreting it far more theologically than the book of Genesis does. Bayle admitted that the ‘two principles’ argument of Manicheans is a more rational explanation of human experience than the orthodox one that makes God responsible for everything but not, somehow, for evil. Byron got all this from Bayle and his Lucifer got it from Byron (II, ii, 404). Bayle, characteristically Calvinist in this, never suggests that God’s identification with suffering and injustice in the Crucifixion is any kind of answer, albeit not addressed to the philosophical mind, to the problem of the co-existence of God and evil. It would not occur to him to do so because Calvinism sees the Crucifixion in quasi-judicial terms as satisfaction for God’s wrath, not a display of mercy in itself but a mechanism whereby mercy can be administered to the elect. This does 109

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not have narrative agency or emotional force, unlike the Gospel accounts or Byron’s masterly presentation of Abel’s death. In this way, Cain forms part of what I would call Byron’s Catholic trajectory (not of course his only trajectory), which began, perhaps, when he moved from Presbyterian Scotland into the ruins of a Catholic Abbey presided over by an image of ‘The Virgin Mother of the God-born child’ (DJ XIII, 61). The statues would have ‘appalled’ (in the modern sense) John Knox and been destroyed in his and, probably, Byron’s Aberdeen. Byron’s stay in the Capuchin friary in Athens, if Fr Paolo’s account of Byron’s strange visit to him is to be credited, is the first indication of any positive sense of Catholicism.31 But it is the move to Italy that seems to have been crucial, not least because it presented the interaction of the spiritual and the material, something that always tantalized Byron, as a matter of course. Laura’s domination of Venetian society marks Byron’s sudden ability to write about a world in which Santa Maria della Salute, just as much as the Doge’s palace, dominates the Grand Canal onto which his own palazzo abuts. Adah is a first flowering of that feminine Catholic theology, but its manifest fruit is Aurora Raby. Through her, the transcendent force of the ruined Abbey church and the ghost of the Black Friar, Byron daringly reimagines his former home as the secret dwelling place of the ‘old faith and old feelings’ (DJ XV, 46) that built it. My two-fold argument has been negative in origin. I have tried to show what is wrong with two settled habits of interpretation: an inattention to Cain’s structure and an assumption that it is ‘an outpouring … of Byron’s revolt against conventional orthodoxy’. How can this be turned round into a positive understanding of the whole play? Cain’s last words offer help. Although Gifford advised Murray to make various cuts to Cain, the last words of the play were left to stand: ‘But with me! —’ If they had not been, perhaps this too would ‘have destroyed the whole effect & moral of the poem’. We should recall Cain’s early request to Lucifer, which is also dependent upon a ‘but’:        Let me but Be taught the mystery of my being. (I, i, 321–22). 31 Hubert Lauvergne’s note on this in his Souvenirs de la Grèce is quoted in full, translated and discussed by C.W.J. Eliot in ‘Lord Byron, Father Paul, and the Artist William Page’ (Hesperia 44.4 [1975]).

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Byron’s title page designates Cain as ‘A Mystery’. Mediaeval Mystery plays do not present Cain’s character as mysterious. He is simply the type of the jealous angry man. The Angel in Act III picks up the standard characterization (‘Stern hast thou been and stubborn from the womb’ [III, i, 503]). But Byron’s Cain has ended up with the complex knowledge and self-knowledge from which earlier Byronic heroes such as Lara and Manfred have started out. Like them, he will live for ever within the stricken aftermath of murder guilt. But the condition is not the same. Byronic heroes are mysterious to us and to themselves, whereas Cain should be wholly intelligible to himself and to us, for we have followed the events and processes that have led up to his ‘But with me! —’ He is responsible for the murder of his brother, which is a manifestation both of his choice of knowledge rather than life and the resultant movement of his will, which discharges itself against ‘Life and the author of Life’. He has been taught ‘the mystery of my being’ in a way that annihilates his mystery. Manfred, though in a new place at the end of the play and a new form of consciousness, remains in charge as he has been throughout. He accepts death, but is still in control both of its style and his drama’s conclusion. He remains in charge of his conversation with the Abbot and tells him what to do (‘Give me thy hand’). Manfred retains the mystery of his being whereas Cain’s is wholly exposed, for he is not, and never has been, in like control. He exits because of God’s decision to expel him, and he accepts Adah’s magisterial encouragement to leave whereas Manfred seeks out solitude and the ‘difficult air’ of mountain tops because he wants to. We might think that we now understand Cain’s words exactly as he does. Yet Cain’s ‘But with me’ is not the last line of the play. It is set out as such, but it is not a metrical line – unlike ‘Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die’. The whole last line consists of two antiphonal voices of three, four, and again three syllables: [Cain] O Abel! [Adah] Peace be with him! [Cain] But with me! —

Byron wants the full force of Cain’s permanent and painful knowledge of his actual being to register. His final anguished open syllable reverberates beyond the play’s conclusion. Nevertheless, this knowledge is now bound up with the lasting horror and loving regret in his heart expressed in ‘O Abel!’ Cain begins the play separated from his family group in prayer. He ends it with an inward turn to his dead brother exiting as a family group with wife and children. Adah clearly represents 111

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love as she has throughout the play. She has always been a counter presence. Now she stage-manages Cain’s exit. She tells him four times that they must ‘depart together’ (528), and assures him that she ‘will divide thy burden with thee’ (551), which, lightly but perceptibly, echoes ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens’ (Galatians 6: 2). Her final instruction is particularly telling: Lead! thou shalt be my guide, and may our God Be thine! Now let us carry forth our children. (III, i, 554–55)

We picture this happening – a family group led by Cain with both him and Adah carrying a child. The pivot of the play has been Cain’s decision, superintended by Lucifer, to separate from Adah under the formality of knowledge separating from and superior to love. The last tableau reverses this. Love and knowledge leave together. Love tells Cain what to do and promises to accompany him. She does so with a hope that ‘may our God | Be thine’ (it is not quite clear to whom ‘our’ refers here), which is also a blessing since all blessings are implicitly or explicitly imprecatory in form (‘May God bless’). The blessing is directed towards a task. Adah’s repeated injunction to depart transforms Cain’s exit under the formality of punishment and curse into a possible task for him to fulfil. Adah’s injunction (‘Lead! … Now’) picks up another Byronic alteration to the Genesis narrative. Byron repeats the biblical formula of God’s punishing judgement of Cain but then adds new verses after it: ‘Go forth! fulfil thy days! and be thy deeds | Unlike the last!’ (III, i, 517–18). The Angel’s injunction gives Cain a positive task (‘be thy deeds | Unlike the last!’) that is not present in Genesis. It proleptically imports Kierkegaard’s insight that guilt, insofar as it opens up authentic recognition of the guilty self, also opens up the possibility of change in that self to be accepted as a task. The biblical Cain is not presented with this chance and it is no more possible wholly to separate Byron’s Cain from the Cain of Genesis than it is wholly to separate Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar from Plutarch’s. Nevertheless, the possibility is present in Byron’s play, and Adah is its moving spirit. Her insistence on leaving together and dividing Cain’s burden with herself means that she, wholly without guilt, shares Cain’s guilt, which is transformable into task rather than simply burden. The actual divided burden that they exit with is the children whom she instructs Cain to carry forth with her. They represent the future, not that past in which Cain chose solitude – and 112

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then companionship with Lucifer, whose ‘brotherhood’s with those who have no children’ (II, ii, 274). Cain’s use of the phrase ‘Eastward from Eden will we take our way’ (III, i, 552) picks up Genesis 2: 8, but audaciously alters ‘Eastward in’ to ‘Eastward from’. It implies that the departure is from Eden, even though the play is set in the ‘Land without Paradise’. This, together with Cain’s use of ‘we’, addressing Adah, mandates a comparison with Milton’s Adam and Eve leaving Paradise ‘hand in hand’ and its comparably subtle tensions between ‘rest’ and ‘wandring’, ‘Providence’ and ‘solitarie way’ (PL XII, 646–48). Byron had referenced Milton’s lines positively two years earlier in his description of Juan and Haidee: ‘And thus they wander’d forth, and hand in hand’ (DJ II, 184). We cannot fully register this muted positivity, since we know that the biblical Cain did not depart shadowed by hope, nor did he find it. Nevertheless Cain, because of this extremely carefully constructed balance of forces and understandings in its conclusion, together with the fusion of Abel’s dying words with those of Christ, transforms the Genesis account. This, surely, is the Cain that Shelley (who much admired the play) discussed with Byron and then, outraged, told Mary that by what he said ‘in talking over his Cain […] I do believe that he is little better than a Christian!’32 Byron wasn’t a believing Christian but there can be no question that he has deliberately introduced profoundly Christian resonances, at key points, into his text. I began this chapter with Francis Jeffrey’s outrage at Cain’s undermining one theology, and have ended it with Shelley’s outrage that it was supporting another. Jeffrey, scandalized, assumed that Byron was arguing against Genesis; Shelley, equally scandalized, feared that he was Christianizing it. The two viewpoints cannot be reconciled, for the two theologies are not the same. Nor is it, in my opinion, helpful to think of Cain as simply heterodox or simply orthodox. Byron conceived Cain as a speculative drama dependent upon carefully dramatized tensions. Even so, if pitched against one orthodoxy in the first two acts, it is even more decisively pitched in favour of another orthodoxy in its decisive final act. Insightful as Presbyterian Jeffrey can be, ‘atheist’ Shelley was the better reader of Byron’s poetry and he had a clearer sense of the content of Christian orthodoxy. Understanding of Cain must always be rooted in attentive reading of it as, first and foremost, a play. 32 E.J. Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author [1878], ed. Rosemary Ashton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 99.

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Empty Spaces in Don Juan A Reading of the Norman Abbey Cantos : Empty Spaces Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space … Anthony and Cleopatra For infinite as boundless space The thought that Conscience must embrace, … The Giaour, lines 273–74

In my two books on Don Juan, while I emphasized the religious underpinning of the poem’s astonishing inventiveness, I tried to remain loyal to its multifariousness, poise, advertised secularity and that play between facetiousness and seriousness that is so important in it.1 Here, though, to use Byron’s own words in the poem, ‘I now mean to be serious’ (XIII, 1). Byron meant those words, and yet his tongue is manifestly in his cheek. I want to be serious without my tongue in my cheek. I want to take a rather earnest and single-facing reading in a more consistent way than the poem appears to invite, and to see how it might illuminate the interactions in its last cantos. I do so because it is the easiest way to locate and indicate important kinds of thinking in the poem, which otherwise tend not to be noticed. I also want to link very broadly this mode of attention to Don Juan with the kinds of reading I have brought to other poems of Byron in this book. Because I want to take this reading as far as it can go, I will be taking as already read 1 Byron’s Don Juan (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985); Don Juan and Other Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin [Masterstudies series], 1987).

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what Jeffrey called Don Juan’s habitual ‘jerk’ against ‘all things serious and sublime’ (BCH, 203). There are more continuities than are sometimes appreciated between the ‘light’, ‘burlesque’ Don Juan and the ‘dark’, ‘romantic’ poems I have concentrated on so far. One of them is a concern with space, by which I mean both literal space (as in this or that visited or inhabited place) but also cosmic space and interior psychological spaces of various kinds. Space is usually very important in Byron’s major poems; indeed, the spatial sometimes governs their meanings. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage depends upon the movement and interaction between inner and outer spaces. Critics have tended to concentrate on Don Juan’s concern with time more than its concern with space, although Camille Paglia made a wonderful comparison between the experience of reading the poem and the experience of driving in an open-topped car on the ‘long, straight superhighways’ that criss-cross the ‘vast space’ of the United States: ‘To traverse or skim the American landscape in such a vehicle is to feel the speed and aerated space of Don Juan’.2 Instead of Paglia’s quite proper acknowledgement of the openness of scale that characterizes the poem as a whole, I want to work with a smaller frame, which operates within a single section. I will try to delineate three kinds of empty space in Norman Abbey that characterize both places and inner modes of being. Lady Adeline Amundeville is the most extended character portrait in the poem.3 The first thing that we notice about her is the crowded schedule of her day. There seem to be no empty spaces in it, nor any sense of space that is not commandeered by the purposive, even if often escapist, filling of the moment. We find Lady Adeline, for example, immediately after the second dinner party, provoking others to break ‘Forth into universal epigram’ (XVI, 104) about her departed guests, who themselves, at the same moment, are busy praising her sincerity and poise. She says very little herself, damning others with Addison’s ‘faint praise’, but she is the most active force there. We catch the voice of her thoughts in the 2 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 358. 3 For excellent readings of Adeline with different emphases to mine, see Drummond Bone’s ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV, Don Juan and Beppo’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, which he edited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 118–32; Peter Graham, Don Juan and Regency England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 157–96.

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previous stanza (‘Their hideous wives, their horrid selves and dresses’). Byron’s readers may recall here the similar conversation between Beppo and Laura ‘Discussing all the dances gone and past; | The dancers and their dresses, too, beside’ as they float back home (691–92). The life of Beppo runs through Laura and Venetian conversation but the life of Don Juan does not run through Adeline’s scabrous cabal here. Adeline’s information comes from constant looking. Byron likes and praises intense attentiveness to another’s face, as Kaled’s to Lara’s or Haidee’s to Juan’s, but Adeline never loses herself in her gaze. She sings the song of the Black Friar to Juan because she    watched the changes of Don Juan’s brow, And from its context thought she could divine    Connections stronger than he chose to avow … (XVI, 37)

She adjusts to these changes in Juan not only because she is sexually attracted to him but also because such adjustment is second nature to her:    and watching, witching, condescending To the consumers of fish, fowl and game, … (Betraying only now and then her soul By a look scarce perceptibly askance Of weariness or scorn) … (XVI, 95–96)

This ‘look’ proceeds from a certain singleness in Adeline, but her consciousness in itself is crowded by what she beholds and manipulates. She thus really neither looks nor is. Mediating between her singleness and this cluttered awareness is a faculty called ‘mobility’ in the next stanza – a concept that Byron’s conversations with Lady Blessington helped make famous4 – and the narrator makes a wry comment on it: ‘for surely they’re sincerest, | Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest’ (97). That this is meant to be ironical is confirmed not only by Adeline’s earlier look that betrays ‘her soul’, while she is thus acted on, but also by the ambiguity of the word ‘acted’, which Byron now picks up. This ‘mobility’, he says, makes ‘your actors’ and orators, ‘Little that’s great, but much of what is clever’ (98). 4 Lady Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron [1834], ed. Ernest J. Lovell Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 33, 47, 71–72.

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To be in a space is to occupy a particular place that enables particular relations. When Byron (and presumably Adeline) carefully places Juan at table between Adeline and Aurora, we are given a literal rendering of what it is to be strongly acted on by what is nearest through the contrast between the two who are either side of him, like Shakespeare set between the Fair Youth and Dark Lady in Sonnet 144. Adeline ‘With two transcendent eyes seemed to look through him’ (XV, 75), but Aurora ‘scarcely look’d aside’ (78). She is not ‘mobile’ in Adeline’s sense, sitting with ‘indifference’ at the banquet (77) and, earlier in the canto, we are told: ‘She gazed upon a world she scarcely knew | As seeking not to know it’ (47). Elsewhere Aurora’s knowledge is emphasized. Her ‘indifference’ is a specifically contemplative, not a Stoical, apatheia, and the ‘world’ that she does not seek to know is specifically this world, the apparently ‘nearest’, the mundus of the Amundevilles. She is Innocence in the world but not simply innocent of the world, as Byron’s ‘or’ tells us: ‘She had so much, or little, of the child’ (55). When Adeline sees this her ‘malicious eyes | Sparkled with her successful prophecies’ (78). The ‘prophecies’ were that Aurora was ‘prim, silent, cold’ (49). Adeline’s eyes ‘look’d as much as if to say, “I said it”’ (79). Her looking is never to the larger contours in which events occur but epigrammatically orientated to Vanity Fair, which values only the nearest and the latest, and delights in fashionable transformations of space. Under the Amundevilles, the Abbey is to be given ‘New buildings of correctest conformation’ in the Gothic style (XVI, 58), while the ‘remnant of the Gothic pile’ (XIII, 59) with its returning ghost and gushing ‘Gothic fountain’ pass unregarded. Yet Adeline, though alert to the nearest and latest, passes judgement constantly, separating herself from the Worldly Town (Amundeville), which is the only world that she knows and values. Therefore, she is separated by speech from what she becomes by watching, but her separated soul has no content of its own. It does not recognize the space that her mobility ransacks. It is advertised only in the other malicious look whose sparkle of life announces her rejoicing in the power that her separation gives her. Hence the poet tells us that ‘Our gentle Adeline had one defect— | Her heart was vacant, though a splendid mansion’ (XIV, 85). Adeline ‘knew not her own heart’ (XIV, 91) and therefore does not directly know the empty space that it contains. Within that unacknowledged space, however, Adeline ‘had that lurking demon’, recognized by the world as ‘Firmness’ in successful heroes, but otherwise 118

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known ‘As obstinacy’ (89). Adeline ‘knew not her own heart’ because her heart, never ‘indifferent’, is made up of what it watches together with the baffled sense of its own unyielded unfulfilment. Her ‘obstinacy’ is a diffused version of a Byronic hero’s will. Cain, we recall, is ‘stubborn from the womb’ (III, i, 503). It is curious that Lady Adeline Amundeville is introduced to us as ‘The fair most fatal Juan ever met, | Although she was not evil, nor meant ill’ (XIII, 12). The responsibility evidently lies with ‘Destiny and Passion’, but then, suddenly, a guiding phrase from Lara is reworked in the racier idiom of Don Juan to expose this obscuring: ‘Fate is a good excuse for our own will’. Once again, ‘heart’ can mean ‘will’, for it is ‘her heart, | Which really knew or thought it knew no guile’ that causes her to persuade Lord Henry to ‘counsel Juan’ (XIV, 65). Hence it is no accident that Adeline’s empty heart is ‘a splendid mansion’ in the splendid mansion of Norman Abbey, which, in this canto, unfolds the spectacle of its continually active boredom before us, much as the empty spaces of the Seraglio in Canto V conserve its displaced sexuality.5 If this seems too allegorical, it is not yet allegorical enough to match Don Juan. Norman Abbey is not just a splendid mansion and crowded space open to Lady Adeline’s epigram eyes; it reintroduces the ruins of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage into this very different poem. In this way it opens the possibility of the largest synthesis that Byron ever attempts, for it bridges the gulf between invincible and vincible modalities that shape the two different kinds of Byron’s major poems. Norman Abbey’s church is an abiding ruin which, principally, offers a space analogous to that of St Peter’s and which, to be seen, involves a similar shift of consciousness: A mighty window, hollow in the centre,    Shorn of its glass of thousand colourings, Through which the deepen’d glories once could enter,    Streaming from off the sun like seraph’s wings, Now yawns all desolate: now loud, now fainter,    The gale sweeps through its fretwork, and oft sings The owl his anthem, where the silenced quire Lie with their hallelujahs quench’d like fire. But in the noontide of the Moon, and when    The wind is winged from one point of heaven, 5 Anne Barton percipiently noted that at Norman Abbey ‘the dominant emotion is boredom’, apart from the ‘cold’ purposiveness of Lord Henry Amundeville (Byron: Don Juan [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 74).

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Truly transcendent eyes would have to have something of this ‘seraph’s wings’ sparkle in them, but the sparkle would come, like the extraordinary music, from pure space. The huge arch, like the dome of St Peter’s, is both absolute uncluttered space and absolute containment of space. Like St Peter’s, too, but more secretly, the arch transfers, via its aesthetic shaping, a silenced earthly liturgy of hallelujahs to its archetype in a heavenly seraphic liturgy of unearthly sound. Where can we find the human equivalent that Byron is bound to make? We have not far to look: Aurora […]    Was more Shakespearian, if I do not err. The worlds beyond this world’s perplexing waste    Had more of her existence, for in her There was a depth of feeling to embrace Thoughts, boundless, deep, but silent too as Space. (XVI, 48)

The word ‘embrace’, here strangely applied to thoughts and space, is mirrored in the two arms of the huge arch of Norman Abbey that embrace the space between them. Similarly, the ‘depth of feeling’ that embraces the boundless space and consciousness of Cain’s sky-trip floods that emptiness with Adah’s seraphic intuition – now moved into the centre of Don Juan. The house is the outwardly splendid mansion, busy social life, and perplexing waste of Adeline’s ‘vacant’ heart, but it can be seen too by contemplative attention as a paradise ruined and regained in its ‘lucid lake, | Broad as transparent, deep, and freshly fed | By a river’ (XIII, 57). This subtly receptive landscape and the huge, empty, joining arch signify a heart entrusted not to epigrams but to silence and space. Aurora and the building are acted on by what is nearest in a different sense from Adeline. Aurora is more like Lara or Conrad or Manfred, but where they construct their own divinity and kneel to their own desolation, she embraces the nothingness – the arch is ‘hollow in the centre’ (XIII, 62) – that paralyses them.6 6 I trace some of these parallels in ‘Fiction’s Limit and Eden’s Door’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool

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Hence Aurora’s inner mansion is known to her and has no demons. She is ‘always clear, | As deep seas in a Sunny Atmosphere’ (XVI, 94). Her eyes, we’re told, ‘sadly shone, as seraphs’ shine’ (XV, 45). The knowledge of both kinds of sad knowledge and radiant being, vincible and invincible consciousness, which preside in the house and Abbey, is held in singleness here. Aurora sits, too, across the divide, previously unpicturable, between narrative and narrator. Yet Aurora’s heart and space also form words, and they author poetry although she inhibits talk. When Adeline and her friends pull her guests to pieces, Aurora does not join in, and welcomes Juan’s similar silence. The stanza on Aurora’s silent thought, however, comes immediately after that on Adeline, her epigrams and her fondness for Pope. All three women in these cantos are seen in relation to authors. As we have seen, Aurora is ‘more Shakespearian’ (XVI, 48). In the next stanzas, we have an equivalent description of the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke. Her mind ‘was upon her face’ and she once ‘was seen reading the “Bath Guide”’, but she mainly prefers poems penned ‘to herself’ (XVI, 49–50). We are clearly supposed to put together three kinds of interior consciousness, three ways of writing and three ways of using and seeing a building. Here we are operating as we do when we read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, but Byron is setting it all out for us and making a map of the poem’s own self-consciousness about its procedures and sources of continuation – a map which refers, as all maps do, beyond itself. The Duchess is not ‘mobile’ in Adeline’s sense because she does not react to the multiplicity of things but selects those things that may be wholly referred to herself. To achieve this, she needs a shrewd but ludic sense of risk. Hence her intermittent reading is either playful or referred to herself as proof that she has won the local game of living. Aurora reads constantly (XV, 85). This lectio preserves her from ennui, from the aimless vacancy that demons can fill and mobility hide, but it is in itself University Press, 1998). See also T.L. Ashton, ‘Naming Byron’s Aurora Raby’, English Language Notes 7.2 (December 1969). The last canto of Don Juan suggests an exact transference from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to her. She is an orphan ‘in the strict sense of the phrase’ and the narrator comments parenthetically: ‘But many a lonely tree the loftier grows | Than others crowded in the Forest’s maze’ (XVII, 1). This is almost a quotation of ‘But from their nature will the tannen grow | Loftiest on loftiest and least shelter’d rocks’ (CHP IV, 20). The continuity is obvious; more remarkable is the jump from the spirituality of Promethean resistance to the asceticism and moral growth of an orphan girl reimagined in the same rhetorical figure.

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an exercise of patience. Her reading is associated with Minerva’s wisdom, with her knowledge of her own dark history – analogous to the Abbey’s ruining – as a Catholic orphan,7 and with her knowledge of the sweep of alienated human history, which she sees from her vantage point ‘by Eden’s door’, grieving ‘for those who could return no more’ (XV, 45). Byron, curiously as we may think, calls all this ‘Shakespearian’ and associates it with thought, which embraces space. One reason for this is that Shakespeare does not write about himself.8 Nor, on the other hand, does he write, as Adeline would, about ‘what is nearest’ to him in the Elizabethan or Jacobean social world. If this analysis is correct, it follows that Byron is not doing so either – or, at the very least, is anxious not to be seen as doing so. It should be clear that, though Byron is interweaving many modes of writing, the Shakespearean one is central because it can accommodate the others. Byron’s Norman Abbey, hugely ambitious in its deft, understated way, brings together the world of Beppo and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. It is, in my view, the most achieved major section of any English Romantic poem. Lady Adeline is its declared centre but she was clearly something of a problem to Byron. He likes her and is obviously like her in what she does, though not in what she omits. If he is going to show English life through frozen sexual consciousness, and he had always planned to do that, then a figure like Adeline is inevitable. But the particular mode of her rapid receptivity to others, together with her separated epigrammatic consciousness, is too close to the narrator’s own procedures in the poem for comfort. Like her and like champagne, he is ‘A hidden nectar under a cold presence’ (XIII, 38). We do not join in Adeline’s dissection of her guests’ faults, but the narrator has mocked their pretensions to gentility just as Adeline has. If narrator and narrative wholly coincided, the poem would have turned into a social satire. It is necessary, therefore, for purely ad hoc reasons, to demonstrate some other model of immediacy than that of Adeline’s mobility. Byron has always known of such a model, has shown Manfred on the edge of it, shuffled Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage around ‘the abyss’ from which its ‘voice proceeds’ (IV, 166–67), and 7 As an orphan left ‘to the care of guardians good and kind’ (XV, 44), Aurora resembles her prototype, Leila, who is given by Juan himself to ‘A goodly guardian’ (XII, 41). 8 This point forms the basis of G. Wilson Knight’s quirky but impressive collocation in Byron and Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).

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made us taste it in St Peter’s. At the end of Don Juan, he takes the new step of making a woman its vehicle, claiming a Shakespearean mode of writing for it, and no longer sidestepping the religious belief that goes with it. In this way, too, as in The Vision of Judgment, which is set ‘in neutral space’, Don Juan avoids clear satiric judgement on its English world. The poem stands with Aurora, who is confessedly non-judgemental (XVI, 106), but delivers a judgement by her mode of being. What she delivers a judgement on, fundamentally, is the absence of true space in the Amundevilles’ splendid house. Aurora lives openly within a spoliated house, but her interior life is lived within the unspoiled space available to her contemplative, moral consciousness. She is unsundered knowledge and life. For her, knowledge (‘as seeking not to know it’) is based not on Cain’s gazing but on the entrustment implicit in the way her thoughts embrace space. She has Adah’s heart but her heart journeys in Cain’s space, which she internalizes as a specifically human possession rather than dehumanizing emptiness. The inhuman space that Cain enters in Act II removes the possibility of intimacy, whereas Aurora embraces infinite space, both spiritually and tactilely, as a foundational human possibility of being (XVI, 48). Aurora is a sign, therefore, that Cain’s quest for knowledge, however misled, is as potentially religious in itself as Adah’s commitment to love. Aurora’s loving entrustment to a knowledge that exceeds her knowing is the opposite of ‘obstinacy’, which is derived from ‘stare’ (‘to stand’). Adeline ob-stands and is mobile; Aurora moves into and around (‘embraces’) the mysterious, adjacent but always unknowable stillness of space. Such entrustment is the finally preferred mode of the poem which, despite Haidee’s death, the Siege and Catherine’s death-dealing sexuality, has audaciously maintained immediacy, but at the cost of giving up more and more in order to do so.9 Its habitual criss-crossing between life and knowledge has been largely displaced by the narrator’s knowing chit-chat as a form of life. This yielding of Don Juan’s comic resources is especially marked in the section from the Siege to the English Cantos. It produces a recognized strain in the reader, whose own entrustment to 9 For examples of readings of Aurora that engage intelligently with mine, but deny that she forms part of a ‘Catholic trajectory’, see Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 156–60 and Fred Parker, ‘Between Satan and Mephistopheles: Byron and the Devil’, Cambridge Quarterly 35.1 (2006), 26–29.

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the poem is maintained only by the narrator’s relentless ingenuity in the much thinner territory in which we now find ourselves. Something is clearly missing from the poem. This is the third of the three forms of emptiness that concern us. Remarkably, it is this very yielding of resources that then becomes represented within, and replenishes, the English Cantos themselves in the great singing space of the Abbey’s arch and the great space from which Aurora, wholly yielding all resources of self, draws Shakespearean sustenance. Aurora’s space, though stilled, is also active, since her embrace of it unites the otherwise sundered forms of knowing and willing. She is cherub and seraph. That is why the arch of the Abbey sings with ‘a voice to charm’: ‘Sad, but serene, it sweeps o’er tree or tower’ (XIII, 64). The phrase ‘Sad but serene’ pairs unmistakably with Aurora as ‘Radiant and grave’, with ‘eyes which sadly shone’ (XV, 45). The song of the arch is like Memnon’s statue which will ‘harp at a fixed hour’ (XIII, 64). The Abbey is, therefore, the place of two forms of music: its own and the harp played by Lady Adeline as she sings the song of the Black Friar who, like the arch’s ‘strange unearthly sound’ (63), is the vital sign of a nothingness. The whole of Don Juan, narrative and digression, action and contemplation, can be reviewed and regenerated from this uninterrupted space more vitally than we can take the whole of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage into its final apotheosis of Art and Ocean. This new and extraordinarily daring step – we might call it ‘Shakespearean’ – unites and aligns different orders and valuations of emptiness: moral, fictional, religious. It has ad hoc poetic advantages and can be described perfectly well in these terms, but it is occasioned also by the internal logic of Don Juan and by Byron’s own increasingly religious understanding of the comic principle that ‘’Tis always best to take things upon trust’ (XVI, 6). Trust moves beyond what can be fully known. To understand Aurora, we must find her generating opposite in Byron’s habitual mode of thinking. Neither Adeline nor Fitz-Fulke is this opposite, for they exist within Aurora’s world of Shakespearean comedy. We have to find the other hatching polarity of that world – tragic consciousness. Here is its most extreme version in Byron’s poetry: MARINA.      Are you content? DOGE. I am what you behold. MARINA.      And that’s a mystery. DOGE. All things are so to mortals; who can read them     Save he who made? or, if they can, the few     And gifted spirits, who have studied long

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    That loathsome volume—man, and pored upon     Those black and bloody leaves his heart and brain,     But learn a magic which recoils upon     The adept who pursues it: all the sins     We find in others, nature made our own;     All our advantages are those of fortune;     Birth, wealth, health, beauty, are her accidents,     And when we cry out against Fate, ’twere well     We should remember Fortune can take nought    Save what she gave—the rest was nakedness,     And lusts, and appetites, and vanities,     The universal heritage, to battle     With as we may, and least in humblest stations,     Where hunger swallows all in one low want,     And the original ordinance, that man     Must sweat for his poor pittance, keeps all passions     Aloof, save fear of famine! All is low,     And false, and hollow—clay from first to last,     The prince’s urn no less than potter’s vessel.     Our fame is in men’s breath, our lives upon     Less than their breath; our durance upon days,     Our days on seasons; our whole being on     Something which is not us!—So, we are slaves,     The greatest as the meanest—nothing rests     Upon our will; the will itself no less     Depends upon a straw than on a storm;     And when we think we lead, we are most led,     And still towards death, a thing which comes as much     Without our act or choice, as birth, so that     Methinks we must have sinn’d in some old world,    And this is hell: the best is, that it is not    Eternal. MARINA. These are things we cannot judge    On earth. (The Two Foscari, II, i, 330–67)

This magnificent tirade cannot be cut and needs to lead up both to its own conclusion and Marina’s unaccepting register. The Doge’s horrified insight – ‘nothing rests | Upon our will’ and therefore ‘our whole being’ must rest on ‘Something which is not us’ – identifies that elemental ungroundedness from which Byronic heroes, wishing to rest everything ‘Upon our will’, recoil with fascinated horror. This is the space that Aurora radiantly embraces. The song of the arch, similarly, is caused by 125

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something other than itself, which sounds in its contoured emptiness. We can only understand Aurora’s curious, smiling quietness as of one whose whole being, like that of the musical arch and the ‘unspoil’d’ statue above it, rests on ‘Something which is not us’. But then Don Juan so rests, for the poem is not written out of Adeline’s clever openness to ‘what is nearest’, but out of Aurora’s Shakespearean openness to the ‘not us’, which enables what comes next to happen, even if what comes next is Haidee’s death. Aurora mourns and, in so doing, loves but lets go of what she loves. Haidee’s death is ‘a thing which comes as much | Without our act or choice, as birth’. She dies with ‘a sinless child of sin’ (DJ IV, 70) within her (‘Is human love the growth of human will?’ [Lara II, 531]), and she is buried beside her father, a prototype of Doge Foscari, who loves and slays his son. But even Haidee’s death exists in what comes to be secretly recognized as Aurora’s poem, for it is entrusted comically, absurdly as it seems in Canto IV, to the continuing poem, which will only gain a vantage point to talk of Haidee again when Aurora appears. Each of them, we are told, ‘was radiant in her proper sphere’, and we recognize Haidee’s unimaginable restoration in the orphan seraph (‘High, yet resembling not his lost Haidee’ [XV, 58]). Leonard Goldberg comments that it is as though Aurora is ‘situated at the shore where Haidee is lost, and recuperates what her double possessed’.10 But there is something of Haidee in Lady Adeline too. Both preside at festive meals which, however differently, embody a self-founding human order that will be disrupted by the return of Lambro, the presumed dead father (owner of the ruined paradise), and presumed dead Black Friar (owner of the ruined Abbey). Paul Ricoeur has argued that ‘peregrination and narration are grounded in time’s approximation of eternity, which, far from abolishing their difference, never stops contributing to it’.11 We would not attend to narrative so compulsively unless, always, it signified in straw and storm the ‘Something which is not us’, as well and as much as the contours of familiar life. In Don Juan, the established linear narrative is returned to the circle of the narrator’s consciousness, but that, too, is bound ‘still 10 Leonard Goldberg, ‘Byron and the Place of Religion’, in Hirst (ed.), Byron, the Bible, 161. (Note that CPW places an accent on the first ‘e’ of Haidee in the English cantos but we have followed its earlier practice of not accenting.) 11 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative [published in French in 1983–85 as Temps et Récit], trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–88), I, 29.

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towards death’, and its termination (‘Without our act or choice’) will be signalled by the suddenly unfinished poem. The linear narrative, for its part, repeats the cyclical pattern of love, loss and love again. Norman Abbey marks a change of mode that both discloses and transforms this pattern. Juan now acts within an increasingly stable and multi-charactered world. The devices that previously propelled the poem forward are now found as engaging but emblematic characters within it and themselves represent different dimensions of narrative. Norman Abbey is itself both temporal Regency world and Eden’s door – a stagingpost between quotidian things (Juan takes up an ‘old newspaper’ when the ghost vanishes [XVI, 26]) and Something not us. The fictionality of its realistic social set-up and the fictionality of its Gothic ghost story, however, are not wholly constitutive of ‘that out of which’ narrative and history happen. The house’s social organization is controlled by Adeline’s mobility, its contingent happenings are brought about by Fitz-Fulke’s mischief, and what is gravely, radiantly unalterable in it may be seen in and is seen by Aurora Raby. The Black Friar, history’s orphan, comes out of the same distant Catholic past and mysterious space as Aurora, but his appearance is used by Fitz-Fulke to arouse Juan strongly by what is nearest. The narrator makes a game out of empty space and physical presence. Juan tries to embrace space in a farcical parody of his attraction to Aurora (XVI, 120). Adeline, correctly, sees both women as enemies of her mode of being (‘she dreaded first | The magic of her Grace’s talisman’ [XIV, 62]). The gaps between these things cause the comedy of incongruity. Their unity is that of comedy itself – the other polarity to Foscari’s tragic protest. It is the jump across the two that is impossible to picture, because there is no space for the jump. It is only by rereading Foscari’s speech, which offers no handholds for hope, that we can gesture towards what is unconcealed in it. The energy of the Doge’s speech, almost its gaiety, is other than its content. This is not a Nietzschean joy at facing, willing and outfacing the worst, though Foscari, like any Byronic hero, does will what he claims unwillingly to suffer. Rather, it comes about by maintaining a single hold on the incomprehensibility of suffering. How can we be ‘most led’, when ‘we think we lead’? How is it possible that our being, the totality of us as us, rests on and must derive its being from ‘Something which is not us’? To mean this is to move into italics as Foscari, like Cain, does. How can our being then be our being? On this analysis, the only thing that is truly ours is non-being. This is exactly Cain’s conclusion: ‘I’ll stay here’, he says to Lucifer when he has been shown the realm of 127

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death (II, ii, 106). He will dwell in the incomprehensible termination of his thought as meaningless extension in space. Cain sounds tired but will live on, whereas the Doge is full of energy but will shortly die. And Cain’s conclusion is Aurora’s mode of existence, too, and can, through a different relation of will, just as well be called ‘sanctity’ (XV, 52). Holiness dwells deliberately in the renounced nothingness of self, an incomprehensibility that is also an unknowing. This is the foundation of Aurora’s ‘indifference’. She derives her astonishing fullness of being from knowing that she derives it from fullness of being; but to talk of this ‘fullness’ we would have to use the negations of indifference and embraced space to bypass the conceptual frame set up by ‘fullness of being’. She does not talk of it at all but indicates and knows it in immediacy by her silence. Into this silence, Juan’s instinctive immediacy and the whole voluble poem’s immediacy of consciousness is attracted and homed. Byron is astonishingly sure-footed here as he reverses the ground that he has covered in those poems centring in ‘acts of will’ and ‘A silent suffering, and intense’ (‘Prometheus’, 6). Aurora is the exact antipodes to the Byronic hero to whom she is, nevertheless, heir. The Promethean consciousness is intoxicated with internal and external space, agonizingly straining for indifference – Manfred’s ‘Inexplicable stillness’ (III, i, 7). It refuses this incarnating submission but, in refusing it as incomprehensible, sees it, pulses with inexplicable energy and is only a hair’s breadth away from it. The power of the last cantos of Don Juan comes from Byron’s ability to interweave something of this unspecified negative theology with an urbane, realistic, but religiously defamiliarized representation of Regency social life. Adeline is the presiding Lady Holland of a household that echoes her own self-confidence: ‘Her chief resource was in her own high spirit’ (XIII, 31). This confidence is justified insofar as the impression she makes on her own social world is exactly as she wishes, but she can control it only inasmuch as it recognizes her exemplary possession of its own chief resources. Fitz-Fulke makes no such acknowledgement and, hence, from Adeline’s point of view, operates a powerful but unintelligible ‘magic’ (XIV, 62). Adeline hates and fears Aurora by a similar instinct because ‘she did not like the quiet way | With which Aurora on those baubles look’d’ (XV, 53). In these two fears, of course, we find her own sexual jealousy, but the drama is primarily one of will. Adeline, we’re told, wishes to save Juan’s ‘soul’ (XV, 28) by superintending a marriage for him. Momentarily we can see her as Manfred to Juan’s Astarte. She wants him to share and become her mode of empty being 128

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and, in that sense, murder the vitality that she senses in him and that she links, correctly, to the forfended Fitz-Fulke and Aurora. She is sexually attracted to him, yet does not want him as a lover but rather for him to live out of his own stage-managed resources of spirit as she does. Marriage is, for her, a monitored relation between public and private existence, which uses each for the benefit of the other, does not believe in either of them and refuses any resources except her own. Her exercise of willing therefore operates via omission. Identifying this space and noting its relation to the others will complete this investigation. Here is Adeline’s self-constituting procedure at work: Now it so happen’d, in the catalogue    Of Adeline, Aurora was omitted, … (XV, 48) And this omission […] Made Juan wonder, as no doubt he must.    This he express’d half smiling and half serious; When Adeline replied with some disgust,    And with an air, to say the least, imperious, She marvell’d ‘what he saw in such a baby As that prim, silent, cold Aurora Raby?’ (XV, 49)

We notice here how Adeline’s omission, when queried, makes her unmistakably ‘imperious’. The imperiousness lies farther back in the unacknowledged omission itself. Will of this kind principally operates in a refusal to acknowledge ‘Something which is not us’. Doge Foscari rails against it; Adeline pretends that it is not there by maintaining a style that keeps it out of mind. The network of connections is very tightly woven in Norman Abbey. Adeline’s omission is of its exact opposite: Aurora’s entrusted dependence on space. Adeline omits Aurora’s space. Aurora’s presence judges this omission. Adeline’s unknown, vacant heart is the opposite of Aurora’s, who ‘kept her heart serene within its zone’ (XV, 47). When the narrator talks of her ‘coldness or her self-possession’ (57), we suspect that the ‘coldness’ is seen by Adeline and the ‘self-possession’ by the poet: the ‘or’ here in its context must prefer what comes after it. This ‘self-possession’ is linked directly with Aurora’s abandonment of self to space so that the ‘baubles’ and ‘Follies’ forming the concern of Adeline’s mobility ‘made no impression’ on her inherently receptive ‘wax’ 129

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(XV, 53, 57). Space is both nearness and depth to Aurora. We should see this ‘self-possession’ in relation to the two polarities of poetry, which are for Byron as they are for Pope: the ethical and the musical. He sings, he says, in a phrase of stunningly casual accuracy, in two ways: ‘by night— sometimes an owl, | And now and then a nightingale’ (XV, 97). The owl is here ‘sage Minerva’s fowl’, and it is Minerva whom Aurora admires more than the Graces (XV, 85). But Aurora is radiant, ‘A beauteous ripple’ (XV, 55), as well as grave. Her self-possession derives from both. Byron, who admired Pope as ‘the moral poet of all Civilization’ (CMP, 150), designed Don Juan as a moral critique of the civilization known to him. It is an ethical poem. Unlike Lara, Manfred and Cain, it does not begin and was not conceived as a ‘metaphysical’ poem but in its final cantos the inhabitants of Norman Abbey are placed both morally and, knowing or unknowing, in proximity to ‘worlds beyond this world’s perplexing waste’ (XVI, 48). Aurora is the human hypostasis of the conjunction of the ethical and metaphysical modalities. As we have noted, it is her mode of ‘boundless’ being that passes judgement on vacant hearts and ‘Follies’. Hence it is her self-possession that exposes the restless boredom of the house as not being the norm that it assumes. The poem is more precise in what it shows us than this familiar moralism may suggest. One of the main things in which we are fitfully interested as the poem proceeds is whether it is a fable of Juan’s surviving innocence or of his corruption. It seems that, through the Siege and Catherine and ‘all | The Coteries’ (XI, 54) of English High Society, Juan has become a little dissipated. A reliable judgement is passed on him, however, by Lady Pinchbeck, whom he has chosen to be the guardian of the innocent Leila. She ‘thought him a good heart at bottom, | A little spoiled, but not so altogether’ (XII, 49). In Norman Abbey itself, we are shown a ruined building but an unspoiled landscape. Amundeville society is clearly spoiled, but quite prepared to judge the spoliations of others. Lord Henry is a magistrate and Norman Abbey keeps ‘The present culprit’ of an unmarried mother waiting while it keeps up its dedicated mobility (XVI, 63–64). Only Aurora keeps her heart serene within its zone and therefore, unspoiled, looks out, gazes, smiles on, mourns over, refuses to judge, brings wholly into view a wholly spoiled human order. She is a delicately de-rhetorized embodiment of Byron’s lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: ‘That curse shall be Forgiveness’ (IV, 135). Within the house, Juan, ‘a little spoiled’ it’s true, retains a good heart at bottom. Juan’s movement to Aurora is thus inevitable. It is the desire both of eros and for the kalon. But the pattern is deeper and subtler. 130

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Over the despoliated holiness of the Abbey sits still above the arch ‘The Virgin Mother’ who ‘look’d round, | Spared by some chance when all beside was spoil’d’ (XIII, 61). Like this emblem, Aurora, spared by the time that has orphaned and fostered her, is preserved alongside ‘all beside was spoil’d’. She preserves within the thinned spaces of the poem that founding biblical covenant between pure space and pure heart, the absolutely unrepresentable and the wholly personal that itself reveals, without explicit judging, the omissions, and moral and historical despoliations in which she lives, as all human beings do. In this way she functions according to Barth’s insight about the epistemological dependence of the constraints of sin on the offer of redemption. Without the unexpected gift of her presence within the poem, we could not see the vanities of Norman Abbey as vanitas just as, if the statue of Our Lady were not wholly unspoiled, we would not be able to register the nature of the despoliation on which she ‘look’d round’. As we read forwards into Don Juan we discover, as perhaps Byron did, the ethical discriminations of his satire increasingly seeking out their inexpressible but, in Aurora, explicitly religious foundation. Norman Abbey occupies material and immaterial spaces and does so from its opening description in Canto XIII. In this, Byron is quite unlike the other Romantics and his refusal of their kind of seriousness has made it hard for us to see his own. We can now look at the same parallel from the standpoint of music, which restructures time and contours the empty space into which it sounds. Music is a sign of the two kinds of self-possession. We should pair, as we have suggested earlier, the harp-song of the empty arch with Adeline’s harp-song. The arch sings whenever ‘The wind is winged from one point of heaven’ (XIII, 63), but, though she is clearly being manipulative, we do not know why Adeline sings: ’Twere difficult to say what was the object    Of Adeline, in bringing this same lay To bear on what appeared to her the subject    Of Juan’s nervous feelings on that day. (XVI, 51)

The narrator’s edgy syntax here matches Adeline’s always motivated, mobile, but objectless willing. As so often at the end of Don Juan, Byron runs alongside one another the discontinuous mode of local irony like this and the continuous mode of large-scale allegory that puts together Aurora’s space and that of the arch, Adeline’s song and the building’s 131

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song.12 We can see this in the song itself. Byron is at pains to avoid making Adeline’s song a force in its own right within the poem so as to upset that larger scheme. He frames it very carefully, as he did Donna Julia’s letter in Canto I. There is silence (‘the pause followed’) after the song expires, which ‘Pervades a moment those who listen round’ (XVI, 41), but no mystery is allowed for we are referred briskly to the polite applause that greets and places it, and to the exact calculations that Adeline makes in ‘as ’twere without display, | Yet with display in fact’ (42) soliciting it. The music bespeaks its possession. The applause of the admiring circle thus matches the respectful conversation of her guests when they leave. Adeline’s song, and this discussion of it, leads directly into the account of Adeline as a poet who likes Pope, and to Aurora’s Shakespearean depth of feeling. Hence the ironic framing of Adeline’s song leads back into the larger allegorical frame, for her calculations in the song parallel the poem’s self-consciousness about its procedures at this point. The narrator’s mobility of manner throughout Don Juan, for example, is without display yet with display in fact. Correspondingly, the poem itself is entrusted, beyond the narrator’s situated art and self-possession as mobility, to the vital nothingness that Adeline omits but that her house, like a nightingale, sings and, in singing, announces itself as another. This vast, quasi-allegorical presumption is prevented from being a separate and stateable patterning – Norman Abbey remains a plausible English country house – without, however, being subordinated to the whole-scale openness of irony. Byron talks of Shakespeare and space, seraphs and hallelujahs, and he is at pains to remind us of Aurora’s Catholicism, but he does not talk of God. God, correctly, is omitted in Cain and in Don Juan because God cannot be talked about at all and is talked about all the time. An indication of this is wittily pointed out by Paul Elledge: ‘Our major source of information about the Black Friar turns out to be the ballad composed, arranged and performed, after some self-serving, foot-shuffling, shilly-shallying, by Adeline – harp angelically foregrounded’. Her song is therefore ‘the human equivalent of the “strange unearthly sound” sung by the mighty 12 The formulation of this point is derived from de Man’s remarks on the identical structure of irony and allegory: ‘in both cases, the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous’ (Blindness and Insight, second edition [London: Methuen, 1983], 209). On the other hand, de Man argues that irony deconstructs the stability of allegory, whereas in my view the later cantos of Don Juan seem to show that allegory can be generated in some way out of irony, and is never wholly stable.

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arch of the ghost’s Abbey’.13 Adeline sings what she omits and indicates what she denies. Yet Aurora’s space is not the space occupied by our old unorthodox friend from Königsberg – transcendental subjectivity. We do not step inside Aurora’s consciousness nor to anything which, even as ‘God’, we can already form a concept of or rhetorically induce. Nor, on the other hand, is this space some indeterminate set of possibilities inherent in life. Fitz-Fulke is an unmistakable sign of the difference. Her playfulness is welcome and saluted but severely restricted within the poem as we can see from its last unfinished canto, where her sexual success or failure is subordinated to the narrator’s ironical guessing. Without Aurora, she could not find a positive place in the poem at all. Aurora’s transcending space is at the side of, yet floods, the unacknowledging world of the Amundevilles. We are not invited into or through it. It is there as a fact within the poem. In another sense, it is the enabling fact of the poem and it is that of which the poem cannot speak. God is omitted in a wholly different sense by the Amundevilles, whose world – ‘the world’– is crowded, multiple, busy, and the constantly repeated sign only of vanitas experienced as ennui. The poem itself, which brings us to Lady Adeline’s world, is written – so the narrator tells us – as a diversion from boredom (XIV, 11), but the narrator does not generate Aurora Raby. Judgement of a kind then is passed on ‘the world’ in this worldly poem. Lady Adeline Amundeville lies at the centre of the world’s appearances. What is at stake is not what sort of person she is or what sort of society she maintains but ‘how much of Adeline was real’ (XVI, 96). The question is asked in what has always been seen as the most realistic section of the poem, and relativizes that realism. That it should be Juan who has this absolute thought can be occasioned only by his own movement to Aurora, who ‘had renewed | In him some feelings he had lately lost’, feelings which (says the narrator grudgingly) ‘Are so divine, that I must deem them real’ (XVI, 107). Juan’s experience of the ghost similarly destroys his sense of the substantiality of the splendid daytime mansion of the Amundevilles. Between them he is reduced to silence and is incapable of joining in the house’s customary mobility. What is nearest to him now is this incomprehensibility that he finds represented in Aurora, and moves towards. The relentless exposure of 13 W. Paul Elledge, ‘Immaterialistic Matters: Byron, Bogles, and Bluebloods’, Papers on Language and Literature 25.3 (1989), 277. The article gives an excellent account of the role of the ghost in the Norman Abbey cantos.

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incongruity in Don Juan, the source of its repeated claim to truth and of its comic humour and rhyme scheme, is here sourced in the immediate, unknowing experience of ‘Something which is not us’. At the very end of Byron’s version of the Don Juan legend, the ‘Something which is not us’ that carried Don Giovanni off to hell reveals itself to and as love. The reversal is astonishing and has not been sufficiently noted because Byron has become boxed in as sinner or satirist. Take these apparently ‘unreal’ presences away and there is no standard by which Adeline’s behaviour is not as exemplary and substantial as her guests imagine. The narrator can offer nothing better. But of Adeline we can say with absolute precision and simplicity that she is empty because she has no space, and that she is lovable (by the author but not Juan) yet cannot love. These are not assertions about character but about mode, and are justified by the mode of the poem itself. Adeline is a character without a mode of being and Aurora is a mode of being without a character. Where then does this logic lead us? Adeline Amundeville must be unreal because of what she omits. She omits what ‘the world’ always omits. She covers this omission by her mobility, which seeks to hide the fatal truth that ‘nothing rests | Upon our will’. Her omission must be of ‘Something which is not us’, which she detects, cannot understand, and loathes in Fitz-Fulke’s mischievous dependence on contingency and Aurora’s faithful dependence on the un-circumscribable God, who is nowhere directly named in relation to her. The poem delineates one sort of emptiness as a critical representation of the world of the Amundevilles, another as the embodiment of spiritual fullness. The two forms of Norman Abbey – splendid dead mansion and ruined living monastery – correspond exactly to this distinction. The omission of the second by the first is the immediate occasion of the renewed narrative (Adeline’s interfering plans for Juan’s marriage), of the Black Friar narrative and, as a bonus, of Fitz-Fulke’s escapade in the guise of the Friar, which parodies and clarifies the larger sequence. The poem recovers narrative confidence for the first time since the Seraglio cantos by answering one omission with another; visibly emptied of its habitual resources of continuation in its second half, it finds that emptiness represented negatively in Adeline’s mobility and weariness, and positively as renewed life in Aurora’s grave radiance. This transition is absolute, surprising and more than sufficient to generate the renewed, albeit contained, sexual farce of Canto XVI based on comic contingency and Fitz-Fulke’s play. For this to be possible, Byron has to make the most surprising omission of all. He has to omit – in the sense of progressively sideline 134

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– Lady Adeline Amundeville, the character whom he originally intended to dominate the English Cantos. The last canto begins, ‘The world is full of orphans’ (XVII, 1), and, of course, Aurora is the only orphan in Norman Abbey. There, a few stanzas later, Don Juan ends, interrupted for good by Byron’s Hellenic contingency and the author’s death, framed by the uninterruptible pause that ‘Pervades a moment those who listen round’ (XVI, 41). Across this space we interpret its meanings as I do here.

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Life

Reading Byron’s Life Reading Byron’s Life Poems are made to be heard and read, but lives, in the first instance, are there to be lived, through the natural process of growth and ageing and through myriad interactions. Byron interacted more than most in his comparatively short life. After death we encounter someone through recollections and writings of various kinds and, in a rather different way, by their own writings, if they left any. Although we rely on texts there can be, especially in the very famous, all kinds of unwritten traditions often simplified into Daumier cartoon versions which, just as in reading Byron’s poetry, influence our view of someone and our response to texts. In Byron’s case, these still persist and influence us. They still haunt the pages of our national press. The earliest lives or recollections of Byron were written by those who knew him, such as Thomas Moore. Moore was himself a poet and devoted quite a lot of serious attention as a matter of course to Byron’s poetry in his The Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron (1830). Increasingly, Byron’s life, already a matter of public fascination in his own lifetime, came to dominate discourse (especially in England), and his poetry was read, when read at all, through an all too at-hand version of his life and personality. Modern professional biographies, of which Fiona MacCarthy’s Byron: Life and Legend (2002) is an excellent example, assiduously gather and sift material in impressively workmanlike ways but, in their haste to grasp Byron’s singularity and decode what is mysterious and elusive in it, tend to fit him into a bourgeois version of pop psychology that could scarcely be budged by their crudely confident but alarmingly sparse acquaintance with his difficult poems. Indeed, confidence never seems to be lacking in those who explain Byron to us. It would be helpful to have a new version of Moore’s Life for our times. The closest thing to it is Leslie Marchand’s magnificent three-volume biography of 1957 (later condensed into a one-volume version in 1971), which is irreplaceable in its sustained, intelligent attention. Yet though 138

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giving proper space to the poetry and relishing it, Marchand is not Byron’s deepest reader, partly because the period of his own formation as a critic had no vocabulary for Byron nor sophisticated interest in him. In this section I try to do something much more modest. This book reflects my own opinion that it is Byron’s poetry that should have most claim on our attention, and I deplore any reading of his poems that simply registers them as direct or indirect expression of his life. Nevertheless, his poetry and life do intertwine in obvious ways. ‘Reading Byron’ should always entail some sense of these interactions. I have chosen three places and two periods in Byron’s life and simply tried to set out what happened in them as closely as I can. My reader is asked here to pick up, without strongly formed preconceptions, a sense of how Byron lived forwards in these episodes both as man and poet. The first two places are connected insofar as Byron’s bachelor sojourn at Albany in 1815 immediately precedes his marriage at Seaham and then his unhappy life in Piccadilly Terrace which ended in his decision, both forced and voluntary, to leave England and his estranged wife and child for the Continent in 1816. The change from solitude inside his rooms at Albany to his sudden immersion in the family life of the Milbankes at Seaham as a married man is a dramatic one. So, too, is the change from Byron’s promiscuous and self-directed bachelor life in glamorous Venice to his entry into the life of provincial Ravenna as Teresa Guiccioli’s accredited cavalier servente and virtual member of the Gamba family in 1819. Byron was an extraordinary man but he often did very ordinary things and he was intensely observant of ordinary circumstances. We know what happened next in his life but he didn’t. His directed immersion in his inner life, his creative life, and the life around him was always bound up both with intense memories of events and personalities that had formed him, and a sense, almost childlike, of expectancy and openness to possibility. These characteristics shape his poetry too, but my concern in these three chapters is to trace them through setting out the details of his life in Albany, then his three sojourns in Seaham, and then the move from Venice to Ravenna, where I try to reproduce something of Byron’s confused state of mind and purpose while he was making a decisive change in his manner of living. Byron is differently placed and appears differently in each location but he is intelligible and, in his phrase, ‘changeable yet somehow idem semper’ (always the same) in all three.

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1. Albany in 1830 after a drawing by Thomas H. Shepherd. Byron’s rooms were on the ground floor at the back of the house.

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At Albany At Albany Anyone who has been well and truly bitten by the Byron bug tends to be not at all ‘twice shy’, but rather seeks more and still more of the same. This is true of reading his poetry and letters, but it is also true of visiting those places most associated with him. ‘Associated with’ is not quite the right phrase. Byron had the knack of inhabiting places so that they seem to inhabit him. To visit them is to sustain a conversation with him rather than simply imagine long-vanished events. And so it is unremarkable that many Byronists have trudged willingly enough from Aberdeen to Newstead to Harrow to Trinity College and thence from one end of Europe to the other until attaining the end of their pilgrimage in Messolonghi, Hucknall and, since 1969, Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. I must admit that, though I have much travell’d in these particular realms of gold, there was one Byronic haunt that I had not been able to enter, though oft told about it: Byron’s rooms at Albany. I finally accomplished this in January 2011 when, due to the good offices and never-failing courtesy of Damon de Laszlo, I was able to breathe the pure serene of A2 Albany, which is where Byron lived from 27 March 1814 until his marriage. My rather arch use of Keats’s words to describe this encounter with a real place that has long been imagined is not inappropriate. Keats’s sonnet describes his first encounter with Homer. Byron’s main room at Albany is Keatsian Homeric in that it was bookish – it was where he read, thought and wrote – and Homeric in the opposite and un-contemplative sense because Byron also used it to practise the boxing techniques that Gentleman Jackson had just taught him. But this is to anticipate. I will describe Albany itself, its history and its milieu, then Byron’s apartments and his sojourn there, my impression of the rooms as they are at present, and then I will try, briefly, to situate this episode in his life. 141

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Albany, which we might now call ‘an apartment block’, though it is a very superior one, began as a grand private dwelling, Melbourne House. The first Viscount Melbourne (then Sir Peniston Lamb) bought Lord Holland’s seventeenth-century house on the site, demolished it and commissioned Sir William Chambers to build a much grander one in its place. Like other grand houses there, it was set back from Piccadilly by some hundred feet and separated from it by a wall and arched entrance. It was constructed in the early 1770s at considerable expense. Chambers, who was in competition with Robert Adam for this project, also designed Somerset House and George IV’s state carriage, which is still used for coronations. Melbourne House was one of a number of palatial private houses built on the north side of Piccadilly from the Restoration onwards, when much of Piccadilly was still open countryside. John Murray’s Albemarle Street, for instance, was part of the original site of Lord Clarendon’s sumptuous mansion, constructed while Clarendon was still Charles II’s Lord Chancellor. After his disgrace, it was pulled down, to great popular delight. Melbourne House itself was adjacent to Burlington House, which had belonged to the Dukes of Devonshire and Portland. Thus when Byron, dressed as a monk, went to a grand ball in honour of the Duke of Wellington on 1 July 1814, he had only to walk next door, for the ball was in Burlington House. In the winter of 1815/16, a shed in the courtyard of Burlington House sheltered the Elgin Marbles. The courtyard had been used for a magnificent banquet held in honour of the Regent and allied sovereigns on 20 June 1814. Likewise, Melbourne House was a prestige building in a prime position, whose magnificence, when completed, was shown off to the genteel public by two musical concerts. Here William Lamb was born in 1779. He became, of course, the long-suffering husband of Caroline Lamb and, as Viscount Melbourne, the first Prime Minister of Queen Victoria. Later, together with Devonshire House, Melbourne House became one of the principal haunts of the Prince of Wales (not yet Prince Regent), who was one of many to be smitten by its hostess. On Christmas Day 1791 the house changed hands. It became the property of the Duke of York and Albany. The Duke, on a visit to Viscount Melbourne, suggested a house-swap. He had lived in Whitehall since 1788 (the year of Byron’s birth). Consequently, York House became Melbourne House and Melbourne House became York House. The Duke was the younger brother of the Prince of Wales and George III’s favourite son. He became a successful commander-in-chief of the British Army, honoured by a tall column and statue in the Mall, and 142

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dishonoured by those children who still sing the satirical nursery rhyme about the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ who marched his men to the top of the hill and marched them down again. He was, despite his virtuous father’s disapproval, an inveterate gambler, drinker and fornicator but, unlike his elder brother, he was popular with many sections of the public. Viscount Melbourne was pleased enough to make the swap, since his wealth had diminished and the Piccadilly house was already mortgaged. The exchange wiped out his debts and gave him ready cash. The Duke of York’s old house adjacent to Downing Street then became the new Melbourne House that Byron knew from his liaison with Caroline Lamb. It was also, even more fatefully, the place where he first met Lady Melbourne’s niece Annabella Milbanke. Later still, after its purchase by Lord Dover, it became Dover House. The Duke of York’s finances were no better than Melbourne’s and his wife disliked London, so he became anxious to make money out of his new property rather than incur the expense of its upkeep. The first scheme was to demolish the existing structure and build houses on the vacated area. The second was to turn it into a ‘magnificent and convenient Hotel’ to be called The Royal York.1 There were precedents for this. The Piccadilly house of William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, had been turned into exactly such a hotel, which was sufficiently magnificent for the Tsar Alexander and his sister to stay there in 1814 after Napoleon’s first downfall. Napoleon had abdicated a week or so after Byron moved into his new address. He complained to Moore about seeing ‘Louis the Gouty’ (the restored Louis XVIII) ‘wheeling in triumph into Piccadilly’ (BLJ IV, 100). York’s hotel scheme was superseded by a more unusual one. The house was to be sold to an enterprising builder, Alexander Copland, who would knock down the outer wall and gates to replace them with shops and houses. The main house would be converted into ‘elegant and convenient Sets of independent Freehold Apartments’.2 These were advertised in a prospectus of 1802, but the idea of a hotel lingered in the proposal to have a common dining room supervised by a maître d’ hôtel, and hot and cold baths. This combination of separate rooms and common dining and bathing facilities resembles the senior parts of a public school or an Oxbridge College as much as the arrangements of a hotel. In the 1 Sheila Birkenhead, Peace in Piccadilly: The Story of Albany (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958), 43. 2 Birkenhead, Peace in Piccadilly, 44.

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event, these common facilities were not provided but the building, even today, has something of the feel of a public school. The architect of the redevelopment was Henry Holland, whose services had been called upon by many great Whig families and who, suitably enough, had designed Brooks’s Club, haunt of Fox and Sheridan. Now that the Duke of York no longer owned the building, it could no longer be called York House. Perhaps Copland had a business man’s sense of what would sound like a desirable address. In any event, the Duke’s second title was settled upon for the new venture. ‘Albany’ it has been ever since. Like a school or college, Albany developed its own structures and terminology. Apartments were called ‘sets’ and their owners were to be called ‘proprietors’. The latter could not sell, lease or modify their property without the consent of the Trustees, who were thus responsible for the ‘tone’ of the building. They could insist, for instance, on repairs but the expenses were borne by the proprietors. Staircases were lettered, again like many Oxbridge colleges, with the adjoining sets numbered accordingly (A1, B2, etc.). ‘A’ was the most prestigious letter because it meant you had a set in the main house. At the back of the house, and at right angles to it, two ranges were built to accommodate more sets, where the back garden had been situated. Between the two was a covered passageway called ‘the Ropewalk’ of some 500 feet in length. Byron, with rooms in the original house, could simply write ‘2 Albany’ as his address, and anyone could find him. From the beginning it was insisted that ‘the Premises […] shall be called Albany’,3 and so it has remained though the phrase ‘the Albany’ is often used. These slight discriminations, known as it were only to insiders, are characteristically potent, because understated, pieces of English snobbery. Thus, Byron could write: ‘Viscount Althorpe [sic] is about to be married, and I have gotten his spacious bachelor apartments in Albany’ (BLJ IV, 91). This shows that Byron was not a proprietor. Viscount Althorp sublet his apartments to him on a seven-year lease, just as – after his own marriage – Byron rented his next nearby property (13 Piccadilly Terrace) from the Duchess of Devonshire. Byron knew Albany not long after its transformation through his visits to Henry Angelo and Gentleman Jackson. He writes to Angelo on 16 May 1806: ‘On my arrival in Town which will take place in a 3 This information, like much detail in the present essay, is derived from the extremely informative ‘Albany’ in Survey of London: volumes 31 and 32: St James Westminster, Part 2 (1963), 367–89. The Survey’s general editor is F.H.W. Sheppard.

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few Days, you will see me at Albany Buildings’ (BLJ I, 92). He was introduced to the house itself by ‘Monk’ Lewis, who had taken one of the first sets to be let, and later bought K1. Lewis had inherited a considerable fortune and had rather more ready cash than Byron but he sought out the company of aristocracy. At the turn of the century, he cultivated a friendship with Lady Melbourne’s favourite son, George Lamb.4 Byron dined in K1 on 4 December 1813. He must have been attracted to this most eminent and up-to-date of bachelor addresses, not least because of his involvement with the Melbournes in their newer house and the traces of them in their old one. He bided his time until a vacancy arose and then he wrote to Lady Melbourne soon after moving in: ‘I am in my & your Albany rooms—I think you should have been included in the lease’ (BLJ IV, 87). He probably wrote this in the main room of his set, which had once been Lady Melbourne’s library and in which he had established his own. Byron furnished it in a strongly masculine way, with silver urns bought from Greece, swords, a screen decorated with pugilists and an untidy assortment of books, but the graceful, well-lit room had belonged to a woman so it had a double character. When he moved in on 27 March 1814, he took with him Fletcher, of course, and, to most people’s surprise, Mrs Mule, his grumpy old servant from previous London addresses. She seems to have been so intimidating that Byron’s friends hoped he would leave her behind in Bennet Street. Characteristically, he stayed loyal to her. She would have slept on the top floor of the house (designed for maids), but I do not know whether Fletcher stayed there or in the main apartment, in which case he could not have been allocated a separate room. On one occasion, 15 July 1814, Byron clambered up to the top of the house with Hobhouse to see James Sadler and a Miss Thompson ascend in a hot air balloon from the courtyard of the next-door Burlington House.5 One of Byron’s later outbursts against Wordsworth had more immediate provocations, but I wonder whether this ascent was at the back of his mind: ‘And he must needs mount nearer to the moon, | Could not the blockhead ask for a 4 They informally studied literature and philosophy together, Lewis acknowledging that 33 lines of his imitation of Juvenal’s thirteenth satire were ‘by the Hon. George Lambe [sic]’ (The Love of Gain: A Poem [London, J. Bell, 1799], 27). But by 1800 relations had cooled and Lewis gravitated more towards Holland House. 5 I am grateful to Peter Cochran for this reference in Hobhouse’s diary – it is one of only three that Hobhouse makes to Albany (see http://petercochran.wordpress. com/hobhouses-diary/).

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balloon?’6 The kitchens for Byron’s apartments were in the basement below. This has now been turned into a large and splendid vaulted dining room, but I presume that Lewis’s meal, which upset Byron’s digestion (BLJ III, 230), was brought in from outside. Byron stayed in Albany from March until December 1814, but he was not there all the time. He visited Six Mile Bottom, Cambridge, Newstead, Hastings and Seaham. While in Albany, he went to parties, balls, suppers, cafés, to his box at Covent Garden, and visited friends, his nearby publisher and the Princess of Wales. His letters at this time are full of gossip and increasing concern about his looming marriage after Annabella accepted his second proposal on 9 September. He wrote to Lady Jersey a month later: ‘you know I must be serious all the rest of my life’ (BLJ IV, 196). Yet he also insists that he is not doing much that is serious: ‘I have bought a macaw and a parrot, and have got up my books; and I box and fence daily, and go out very little’ (BLJ IV, 100). As always, however, he is writing poetry. He sends some new stanzas to be included in The Corsair, writes ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’ and ‘She Walks in Beauty’, and, most importantly, Lara. At Murray’s instigation, he agrees to extend the battle section of the poem: ‘You demanded more battle—there it is—’ (BLJ IV, 134). People call on him but, for the most part, his set is a place of solitude and quiet where he can exercise, read, think and write. His journal gives a vivid picture of how he spent his time there: I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of, that I never am long in the society even of her I love, (God knows too well, and the Devil probably too,) without a yearning for the company of my lamp and utterly and tumbled-over library […] Per esempio,—I have not stirred out of these rooms for these four days past: but I have sparred for exercise (windows open) with Jackson an hour daily, to attenuate and keep up the etherial part of me. The more violent the fatigue, the better my spirits for the rest of the day; and then, my evenings have that calm nothingness of languor, which I most delight in. To-day I have boxed one hour—written an ode to Napoleon Buonaparte—copied it—eaten six biscuits—drunk four bottles of soda water—redde away the rest of my time— (BLJ III, 257)

Boxing and fencing were fashionable pastimes for young bachelors. Henry Angelo, who had instructed Byron in fencing when he was at Harrow and Cambridge and had also been fencing master to the Duke of York, had his academy in the shops that had replaced the outer wall 6 Don Juan III, 99. The literary allusion is to the opening stanza of Peter Bell: ‘There’s something in a flying horse, | And something in a huge balloon …’.

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of Melbourne House. There, too, though no lease has been found to prove it, was Gentleman Jackson, introduced to him by Angelo. Sheila Birkenhead, to whom all students of Albany are forever indebted, thinks that Jackson probably had an arrangement to make use of Angelo’s premises.7 Leslie Marchand takes this as fact (BLJ I, 162, note 1). The fencer and the boxer had shared rooms in Bond Street. Angelo had moved out of these premises by the time Byron moved into Albany, but his pupil arranged for him to call at noon as often as possible. Angelo would sit on Byron’s sofa and chat with the poet ‘for an hour or more’.8 These regular physical exertions correspond to his swimming, pistolshooting and horse-riding in other locations. We can sense Byron at all times in the course of a life ‘At once adventurous and contemplative’ (DJ IV, 107), trying to establish and maintain a certain balance of activities of very different kinds: social and public life, sexual intimacies, care for and identification with animals, athletic exercise, intellectual camaraderie and friendship, solitude, reading, writing letters, writing poetry. All this goes on in miniature in Albany. The entrance of his former lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, into this male preserve must have been deeply resented. Byron’s letter to Lady Melbourne of 26 June 1814 suggests that the incursions were regular: You talked to me—about keeping her out—it is impossible—she comes at all times—at any time—& the moment the door is open in she walks—I can’t throw her out of the window— (BLJ IV, 132)

There does not seem to have been any formal prohibition of female visitors or residents but it was taken for granted that Albany was a peculiarly masculine haunt like Mount Athos, though prostitutes often swarmed around it. Women began to take up residence from the late 1880s, it seems. Byron’s comic but real exasperation reminds me of Pope’s similar mock indignation in the opening paragraph of his ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’: What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide? They pierce my Thickets, thro’ my Grot they glide. (lines 7–8)

The reason for the importunity is different but in both cases the sanctum of a writer is violated. Presumably, Lady Caroline dressed in her pageboy 7 See Birkenhead, Peace in Piccadilly, 54–55. 8 Birkenhead, Peace in Piccadilly, 90.

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outfit on these occasions to get past the porter (there were two, dressed in scarlet livery, posted at the front and back entrance). She must have done so on the most famous of her invasions, when Byron was out. No one seems certain of the exact date but it must have been not long before 28 May 1814, when Byron, writing to Lady Melbourne, refers to ‘an inroad which occurred when I was fortunately out’ (BLJ IV, 119). Like Hephaestus setting fire to the great temple of Diana at Ephesus, Caroline seemed intent on being remembered – and has been. Yet despite her personal verve and intellectual gifts, she is so largely through association. There is a certain pathos in her ‘Remember me!’, scrawled inside an open copy of Beckford’s Vathek on Byron’s table (which was always covered with books), since it is only known as a result of Byron writing his ‘Remember thee! Remember thee!’ because of it. She later claimed that there was a poignant follow up to this adventure. She wrote to Thomas Medwin in 1824: the last time we parted for ever, as he pressed his lips on mine (it was in the Albany) he said ‘poor Caro, if everyone hates me, you, I see, will never change’.9

Three comments seem appropriate. First, this cannot have happened like this, if it happened at all. Second, Lady Caroline is less fussy than Byron (‘it was in the Albany’). Outsiders are more likely to say ‘the Albany’ than insiders. Third, she is fictionalizing Albany as a Romantic setting, whereas Albany is one of only a few of his domiciles that Byron does not fictionalize. In this it resembles his palazzo in Genoa where he wrote his greatest poetry. Albany is where he writes fictions and takes refuge from other people’s fictions. These borders between fact and fiction would blur later in Albany’s history. Where else would Wilde’s Jack Worthing live? Where else would Georgette Heyer, doyenne of Regency fictionalists, choose to live? She and her husband were residents in F3 between 1942 and 1966. It is not difficult to find out the kind of people who lived in Albany round the time of Byron’s stay. All were aristocratic, sub-aristocratic or, like ‘Monk’ Lewis, well-to-do. Often, they were the sons of aristocrats who left Albany if they inherited the main title, but this was not always the case. The Second Marquess of Sligo, for instance, who met and travelled with Byron in Greece, retained his Albany address until 1813. But there were also generals, admirals, architects, clergymen and 9 Quoted in Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (London: John Murray, 1971), 171.

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politicians (including MPs and ministers such as George Canning, who lived at A5, and William Whitbread) and eminent lawyers such as Henry Brougham. There were other authors too, most notably W.S. Rose, who was a poet and translator and had been an MP. Later the inhabitants were less obviously part of, or on the fringes of, an aristocratic world: Macauley, Gladstone, J.B. Priestley, Graham Greene and Aldous Huxley, for instance. Gladstone breakfasted and dined with Wordsworth in L2 on ‘several occasions’. On one such occasion, Wordsworth arrived early just as Gladstone was about to have morning prayers with his servant. Wordsworth asked to join them. I rather doubt whether Byron had morning prayers with Fletcher and Mrs Mule. And, on this or another occasion, Wordsworth was ‘vehement against Byron’.10 Albany became more associated with successful p ­ rofessional people and a cultured ambience, as it still is. Back in the 1810s, one fellow inhabitant of Albany caught my attention because he seemed a miniature version of Byron. Chandos Leigh was three years younger, the grandson of the second Duke of Chandos (hence the name). He too went to Harrow and enjoyed cricket, but then went on to Oxford (as Byron had wanted to do) rather than Cambridge. Leigh Hunt’s father was employed by the third Duke of Chandos, and his first name was given to him as a tribute to Chandos Leigh, who remained in touch with him. Leigh is thus an early bridge between Byron and Hunt. Later, Chandos Leigh became part of the Holland House circle and published poems. Byron twice suspected that it was Chandos Leigh who was negotiating to buy Newstead Abbey. He dined with Byron on the night that the poet left London for good in April 1816. But there the paths diverge. Chandos Leigh married, settled down at his father’s seat (Stoneleigh Abbey), where he put much energy into founding a cricket club, and was ennobled as Baron Leigh. Byron, we may recall, may have been imagining or half-imagining a not dissimilar trajectory, which was common enough. Gladstone lived in L2 at Albany as a bachelor between the ages of 23 and 29. He left it to get married just as Byron’s immediate predecessor in A2, Viscount Althorp, had done. Byron clearly sees this as a pattern that might apply 10 From Gladstone’s diary entry for 8 June 1836, it is not entirely clear whether the animus against Byron was gleaned second-hand from Wordsworth’s disciple Thomas Talfourd, or directly from Gladstone’s own ‘intercourse’ with the poet (John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols [London: Macmillan, 1903], I, 135–36).

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to himself, for in the letter to Moore quoted earlier, explaining he has taken the soon-to-be-married Althorp’s ‘spacious bachelor apartments in Albany’, he goes on to say a few lines later: ‘I have also, more or less, been breaking a few of the favourite commandments; but I mean to pull up and marry,—if any one will have me’ (BLJ IV, 92). Indeed, Byron’s own next stage, like that of Chandos Leigh or Gladstone, was to leave Albany, marry, have a family and establish a home rather than a bachelor pad. It is curious, then, that Leigh was with Byron at precisely the moment when the poet was to leave England for good and carve out a destiny that, at least in its customary domestic arrangements, was more like the pattern of Harrow, Cambridge and Albany than it was like the sort of life that Leigh settled into at Stoneleigh Abbey. Byron wrote to Annabella not long before leaving Albany in the series of roundabout steps that would take him to Seaham and to her: If there were no other inducements for me to wish to leave London—the utter solitude of my situation with only my Maccaw to converse with—would be sufficient—though he is not the least rational of my acquaintance—I read—but very desultorily […]. However—solitude is nothing new—nor even disagreeable to me—at least it was not till now—but I much question whether I shall ever be able to bear it again—I hope not to be put to the test— (BLJ IV, 211).

On the same day, he writes to Lady Melbourne with almost the same phrase: ‘I am now quite alone with my books & my Maccaw’ (BLJ IV, 212). Byron, however varied his existence, always disliked the sense that any particular mode of it was coming to an end, or that his known address would be given up to an unknown future. Chandos Leigh takes us to another literary connection because he was a cousin of Jane Austen. She visited Stoneleigh in 1806. Her brother, Henry Austen of the banking firm of Austen and responsible for – as it were – marketing her books, had rooms in Albany Courtyard. It is probable but not certain that Jane Austen visited him there. But he had moved out in 1807 so Byron would not have met either of them. As always, Byron seems tantalizingly close to Jane Austen’s world but we cannot know whether he stepped inside it. What then do Byron’s rooms look like now and what intimations do they give of his past presence? These are my impressions. As I stepped out of Piccadilly and into the quiet square that fronts the house, I was struck by how little must have changed since 1814. Ten bombs fell on Albany in the Second World War and destroyed much of 150

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one of the wings built onto its rear, but the main house, though all its windows were smashed, remained more or less intact. The main steps (of Sicilian marble) are post-Byron, but the lamps are those that Byron would have known (converted from oil when he was there to gas in 1818, and then to electricity). Water was not laid on in the house until the mid-nineteenth century. One of the night porter’s jobs was ‘to Pump the Water into the several Cisterns’.11 Providing water, coal and lights to all the inhabitants in Regency times must have been a never-ending and, usually, visible task. In Byron’s time there were over 60 residents. To get into the building, one has to pass an alert porter just inside the main door, exactly as Caroline Lamb did. I was rather overwhelmed by the muted but splendid vista that opened up. Once, when the Melbournes presided here over a gay social world (the adjective used primarily in its original sense), I would have found myself at the foot of a very grand staircase of the type still preserved in the second Melbourne House. This, of course, had to be swept away when Albany was redeveloped, leaving a very high narrow corridor with a patterned floor (the mosaics post-date Byron) that leads right through the building to its other entrance with hidden Piranesi-esque staircases branching upwards from it to the sets high above. It was all rather dark, quiet and sombre. It seemed a domesticated English Escorial, confidently aware of its calculated discretion. To reach Byron’s set, I traversed the long corridor to the last door on the left. I did not quite know what to expect. I found myself in a narrow, rather pokey entrance space with two grand doors at either side. I was courteously ushered into one of them to leave my coat. It was a small, undistinguished chamber, which I was told was Byron’s bedroom. Try as I could, I found it hard to envisage. From there, through a low square entrance (plainly post-Byron), and then a high door, I found myself suddenly in Byron’s main room and it was hard not to gasp. Whereas everything I had previously encountered spoke of Albany and discreet bachelors, this proclaimed ‘Melbourne House’ and confident social life. The room is very high, lit by magnificent full-length bow windows that had been designed to look over the gardens of Melbourne House but now face the Ropewalk. The Laszlos have furnished it with a pleasing mixture of good taste and long-established comfort. The room was adorned with many portraits by Philip de Laszlo, of whom I knew little but soon resolved to know much more. The effect of coming into such an opulent private room 11 Birkenhead, Peace in Piccadilly, 54.

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after negotiating a subdued though still monumental public space was like coming into a theatre. Byron is the poet of space and it is easy to see why he exulted in his ‘spacious bachelor apartments’. He repeats the word in his journal entry for 28 March 1814, which celebrates his new abode with unconcealed glee. Hitherto, all the entries are simply prefixed by a date but Byron puts ‘Albany’ together with the date for this one. He says that his accommodation is ‘spacious’, with ‘room for my books and sabres. In the house, too, another advantage’ (BLJ III, 255). My entrance into this spectacular room was not the one that Byron’s visitors would have used. Next to the main room is a smaller (though lofty-ceilinged) ante-chamber with a fireplace. Originally the apartment was entered through this room and then into the grand room. This, together with a short corridor, the small bedroom and access to kitchens below was the whole of Byron’s domain – simultaneously majestic and contracted. I do not know why Byron’s bedroom was so small. The sets were originally designed to have relatively spacious bedrooms. Certainly, there would not have been room in it for the elaborate four-poster baronial bed that Lady Blessington spotted a decade later in Genoa, but Byron was often much less fussy about his sleeping arrangements than Fletcher. Perhaps the most striking feature of A2, apart from its combination of compactness and grandeur, is its silence. Albany itself is quiet and Byron’s rooms at the rear of the building are quieter still. The apartment does not feel a part of a larger communal edifice but self-contained, both in the estate-agent sense and in a more encompassing psychological one. It is redolent both of withdrawal and enclosure in the heart of bustling, fashionable London. Perhaps it is no accident that Byron inherited an abbey, chose to live in a Capuchin convent in Athens and sought the quiet Armenian monastery on the isle of San Lazzaro, which abuts on to but is separated from the splendour and sometimes sordid gaiety of Venice. His rooms at Albany prefigure this, I think, and they provide a real clue to his ability to imagine, with equal success, Laura in the heart of Venetian fashionable society and Manfred withdrawn from all human company save a couple of servants. After all it was in this desirable modern London residence that he was writing this description of Lara and himself: He stood a stranger in this breathing world, An erring spirit from another hurled; A thing of dark imaginings, … (I, 315–17).

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At Seaham At Seaham ‘Byron at Seaham’ does not quite have the ring of ‘Byron at Newstead’ or ‘Byron in Venice’ or ‘Byron and Greece’. We can picture Byron in these places and there are indeed pictures of Byron in these places. Not so Seaham. If you put ‘Byron at Newstead’ or ‘Byron in Venice’ or ‘Byron and Greece’ into Google Image you would instantly turn up various pictures of Byron in these places, but if you type in ‘Byron and Seaham’ you get pictures of Seaham Hall only as it is now – the outside of the house or the room in which he was married, again as it is now. And it is quite hard to imagine Byron in that room. Why is this? Byron, all told, spent over seven weeks in Seaham. That is more than twice the time that he spent in Rome, but he wrote 1,665 lines of verse about Rome and the city’s effect on his inner life, whereas Seaham appears briefly in only one poem. Despite this, his outer life pivots round events in Seaham far more than his sojourn in Rome. Indeed, he would never perhaps have gone to Rome without the events of Seaham. There is no picture of Byron at Seaham in fact or in our head, because Byron does not make one. He does not mythologize it as a place (perhaps he did – who knows? – in his Memoirs). He is unable to control it (again perhaps his Memoirs did so retrospectively). Rather, he has to play a role already assigned to him in three stages – the suitor, the bridegroom, the newly married man. All he can do is circumscribe the role as a form of damage limitation. Annabella and her mother wanted a big wedding, which would have given Byron even less room to manoeuvre. So he vetoed that. Well, if not that, then marriage in the local church at Seaham? Byron vetoed that too, even when Lady Milbanke assured him that it would be kept as quiet as possible. The Vicar of Seaham was present for the wedding at the Hall but did not conduct it. Until the Marriage Act of 1753 you could get married anywhere and without witnesses. This led to all kinds of lawsuits, so the new statute stipulated that marriage must be in a Church of England church before 153

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2. Seaham Hall in the mid-nineteenth century.

witnesses and a minister. To get round this, Byron had to apply, and presumably pay, for an Archbishop of Canterbury’s special licence (£4 or £5 in Regency money), which enabled him to wed in the drawing room and do so, as he wrote to Annabella, ‘without fuss or publicity’ (BLJ IV, 243). This was unusual, and an option only for the wealthy, but not that odd. Princess Charlotte, whose death Byron saluted at the end of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, was married in a private ceremony at Carlton House a year after Byron’s marriage. It was quite common to have only a few guests. Generally speaking, Byron prefers to choose the parts he plays, rather than being chosen. He wrote to Hobhouse on 17 October 1814 (a month after Annabella had accepted him): ‘I confess that the character of wooer in this regular way does not sit easy upon me’ (BLJ IV, 213). The phrase ‘this regular way’ is indicative of what Byron found tricky. He did not like playing the part of the mourner in the regular way, though he can mourn like no else can in verse. He did not attend his mother’s funeral, and I cannot find any reference to him attending anyone else’s (apart from Shelley’s cremation, which he could not face in its entirety). He mourns the famous dead at their tombs, and will happily lie on Peachy’s tomb at Harrow or Churchill’s grave at Dover, but he does not visit the tombs of his friends because he would have to play the expected 154

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part of the mourner. He arranges Allegra’s funeral with great care but entirely at a distance. He is never seen at Bagnacavallo as the doting or grief-stricken father. He was very awkward when introduced publicly into the House of Lords and when he had an audience with the Sultan in Constantinople. It is with great difficulty, though he does do it, that Byron learns to play the expected part of a cavalier servente in Ravenna after having ridiculed such a role in Beppo. He was sufficiently in love with Teresa Guiccioli to do this in the regular way. Was he sufficiently in love with Annabella to play the parts of suitor, bridegroom and newly married man? Just about it seems, because he did it, but only just about. Byron usually allows us to follow his footsteps, and indeed his following in the footsteps of other historical figures, through the crafted self-dramatization of his letters and his poetry. Although his letters provide a flavour of his time in County Durham, we have to reconstruct what happened mainly through what outsiders said and saw, especially in the first two Acts of the Seaham drama. Act I: Byron as Suitor Byron arrived at Seaham on 2 November 1814, late in the evening. He was never in a hurry to get there, and Annabella had for months tried to persuade him to come. Annabella had accepted his second offer of marriage, to his surprise, on 9 September, two years after she had turned him down and she renewed immediately her parents’ formal invitation to the house. He had been expected, then, since September. She had pretended earlier to be in love with George Eden to make Byron jealous. Eden then disappears from our history but ends up as Governor-General of India. Byron himself had been much preoccupied with money in the weeks before this. His finances, up until domicile in Italy, were always precarious but he was determined to see if he could show his future parents-in-law that he had sufficient funds to make a decent settlement upon his wife. This meant hurrying up the sale of Newstead. Again, this was what he should have been doing but something that he had never done before. Byron also knew that Sir Ralph Milbanke’s assets had been ‘dipped by electioneering’ (BLJ IV, 208).1 1 Sir Ralph served as MP for County Durham between 1790 and 1812, ostensibly retiring on the grounds of ill health. He was essentially a Foxite Whig: the final speech of his parliamentary career was in favour of Catholic relief, two years before Byron made a similar speech in the Lords.

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Annabella was in her room reading when she heard the carriage arrive. She was undoubtedly in a state of extreme agitation but this is how she describes it: He had been expected for the two preceding days. My Mother was impatient & dissatisfied at the delay. I remained calm, with that perfect self-possession which had not suffered any interruption since the time that I accepted the offer of marriage. I was sitting in my own room reading, when I heard the Carriage. I put out the Candles, deliberated what should be done, resolved to meet him first alone. It was so arranged. He was in the drawing room standing by the side of the Chimney-piece. He did not move forwards as I approached towards him, but took my extended hand & kissed it. I stood on the opposite side of the fireplace. There was a silence. He broke it. ‘It is a long time since we have met’—in an undertone. My reply was hardly articulate. I felt overpowered by the situation, and asking if he had seen my parents, I made an excuse to leave the room, in order to call them—but they had met him at the door. They returned with me to the drawing room. I sat by him. The conversation became general. I think he talked of Kean, and with an animation of manner that seemed to proceed from agitated spirits. When we were to retire he asked me what time I generally appeared in the morning. I said we assembled about ten. We shook hands & parted. I went to bed, my imagination coloured by hope, but tranquil, & feeling obedient to the Disposer of the future. I rose early and went to the Library, thinking that a lover’s feelings might anticipate the hour. But I waited till near twelve, and then finding that I had symptoms of head-ache, I determined to take a walk, supposing that B. must have left his room by the time of my return.2

That is what she wrote then. Over 40 years later she recalled the same scene rather differently and wrote of herself in the third person: No sooner did she see him than she felt most distinctly, ‘he is coarser, sullied, since we last met’—it was like a death-chill.3

I must confess to admiring Annabella’s first account of that meeting. It is very well written and, in general, she writes well. But there is something horrible about it, too. Byron is awkward and embarrassed, inconsiderate; she is more attractive but incipiently judgemental as well as longing for him to embrace her. Then there is the customary sense of 2 This recollection is reproduced by Malcolm Elwin in Lord Byron’s Wife (London: John Murray, 1962), 227–28. 3 Annabella to Harriet Becher Stowe, 1 November 1856, reproduced by Elwin in Lord Byron’s Wife, 228.

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herself in the third person (explicit in the later version), where she both reveals her ungovernable feelings and her desire to control both them and the situation. She can’t bear to meet him in front of others so she tells everyone what to do – you meet him and then send him straight to me – the telling phrases are ‘deliberated what was to be done’ and ‘it was so arranged’. She is both out of control and in control. The passage reads a little bit like Elizabeth Bennett with Darcy but Annabella bifurcates herself into two. Her ‘I’, or perhaps her id, wishes to be Cathy to Byron’s Heathcliff, presumably a new feeling for her. Byron had compared her to Clarissa (BLJ III, 108). She wishes to be literally and metaphorically swept off her feet. But her superego, or her ‘she’, wishes to control the whole thing. She arranges the form and place of meeting. She decides when it is to end. Unsure and agitated, like a novice nun, she casts herself as she wishes herself to be: ‘perfect self-possession’, ‘tranquil and obedient to the Disposer of the future’. Her choice of words is extremely significant. Whether she knows it or not, she is quoting Milton, who was (his version of) a Unitarian like her. In Paradise Lost, before the Fall, Adam addresses Eve and suggests that, because they must start their ‘pleasant toil’ of gardening before dawn on the morrow, ‘night bids us rest’:    To whom thus Eve, with perfet beauty adornd. My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst Unargu’d I obey; so God ordains, God is thy Law; thou mine: to know no more Is womans happiest knowledge, and her praise. (PL IV, 634–38)

This is too close to be a coincidence. Sleep before an early start, ‘Disposer’, ‘obey’/‘obedient’, a sense of an ordained future – all are in both. Annabella must be, consciously or unconsciously, recalling Milton. But Eve is talking in the first instance about her husband, and Annabella is talking in the first instance about God. The two blur. Neither Eve nor Annabella will, in fact, obey. Anabella, like Milton, believes in obedience, but, like Milton and unlike Byron, is disposed to believe that everything she does and thinks is right. The Disposer will dispose the right kind of future and confirm her sense of self-possession and the future with Byron on her own terms. It is hard to imagine either a religious or an amorous sensibility more different from Byron’s religious and amorous sensibility than this. But this very sense of difference, the charge of difference, between two extremely self-aware people, makes the scene, to me at any rate, extremely 157

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sexual. Two people usually sure of what they are doing, though in quite different ways, are now suddenly stymied. And her sudden breaking away, unable just to be there, is a sign of this. It would actually have been better, I think, if they had met in the company of others first and then, bit by bit, worked out how to be alone together. We must recall that they had been very little in one another’s company, only on two or three occasions.4 ‘It is a long time since we have met’, observes Byron quite pertinently, saying in effect (though they had corresponded almost every day since the engagement) ‘we are not used to one another yet’. Byron did not get on very well with Lady Milbanke but rubbed along with Sir Ralph. He wrote to Lady Melbourne: ‘Your brother pleases me much […] he is to my mind the perfect gentleman——but I don’t like Lady Mil[bank]e at all’. In this letter, he complains about Annabella’s silence, ‘which perplexes me extremely’. Presciently he notes: ‘I fear she won’t govern me—& if she don’t it will not do at all’ (BLJ IV, 228–29). That’s his version of obedience. Later, he discovered that what she wanted was ‘the eloquence of action’ – she is, he says, ‘quite caressable into kindness and good humour’ (BLJ IV, 231). We might be surprised by this. Byron’s first assignation alone with Teresa did not involve intercourse, but the next one did since, as Teresa observed, ‘B. was not a man to confine himself to sentiment’.5 But this had been preceded by lots of conversations where, as Teresa put it very intelligently, ‘the topic of […] conversation had become secondary; by this time the important thing was the fact of talking’. Byron was used to listening to women in company and then alone, establishing the fact of talking, and then, if attracted, letting nature take its course. That sequence was unavailable to him in Seaham. Instead, Annabella was either silent or drawing, in Byron’s words, ‘some inference’ from ‘the least word—or alteration of tone’ (BLJ IV, 231). In the absence of establishing the fact of talking, Byron could only establish the eloquence of action, which pleased and yet alarmed her both by his warmth and, almost certainly, by her response to it. Familiar feelings to him, unfamiliar to her. So she suggested (re-establishing control again) that he should 4 Lady Melbourne observed of the correspondence that led up to Byron’s renewed proposal: ‘Pyramus, & Thisbe of old were nothing to these Lovers […] these have made love at 250 Miles distance’ (Byron’s “Courbeau Blanc”: The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne, ed. Jonathan D. Gross [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998], 183). 5 Lord Byron’s Life in Italy (Vie de Lord Byron en Italie), trans. Michael Rees, ed. Peter Cochran (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 125 and n.

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leave: they could not live under the same roof until they were married. As soon as he had gone, she regretted it and wrote to him that evening and then the following day with passion: ‘The spirit of Self-denial which has always strangely possessed me, must have tyrannized over me when I agreed to your departure’.6 She can be eloquent in written words, even owning up to ‘when you were here I so often appeared “the most silent woman in the world”’. The inverted commas suggest either that Byron had told her directly what he had told Lady Melbourne – ‘she […] is the most silent woman I ever encountered’ (BLJ IV, 228) – or that her aunt had passed this observation on to her. There it is then. Act I. Byron the suitor at Seaham. Act II: Byron the Bridegroom Byron set off from Cambridge to Seaham on Boxing Day 1814 with Hobhouse, his nominated groomsman (a term that predates ‘best man’). It was possible to have any number of groomsmen, just as you could have any number of bridesmaids. ‘Never was lover in less haste’ (26 December) is the most oft-quoted sentence from Hobhouse’s diary entries on the journey, a theme that is kept up throughout their slow progress northwards: ‘went as far as Newark in snow and rain […] The bridegroom more and more less impatient’ (27 December); ‘We went as far as Thirsk today—indifference, almost aversion’ (29 December). Hobhouse may have been projecting some of his own aversion to losing his closest bachelor companion. He was probably right also to discern a reluctance in Byron to go ahead: at Christmas, while Hobhouse was keeping male company at Trinity, Byron went to see his half-sister in Six Mile Bottom. There he is supposed to have written a letter asking Annabella to call off the engagement, which Augusta persuaded him not to send. But, then again, Byron usually delayed departure from anywhere. It took him ages to move from Ravenna to Pisa, endlessly promising Teresa later and later dates when he was going to arrive. Groom and groomsman arrived at Seaham on Friday, 30 December at eight in the evening. According to Hobhouse, who admits he was not actually present, Annabella received Byron differently this time: ‘she heard Byron coming out of his room—ran to meet him—threw her 6 Annabella to Byron, 19 November 1815, reproduced by Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife, 234. In a letter to Lady Melbourne dated six days earlier, Byron had described Anabella as ‘very self-tormenting—and anxious—and romantic’ (BLJ IV, 231).

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arms round his neck and burst into tears!!’ We inevitably contrast this moment with their standing either side of a chimney-piece. When the betrothed couple were back in company, Hobhouse observed Annabella’s ­characteristic of being out of control and in control: ‘of my friend she seemed dotingly fond, gazing with delight on his bold and animated bust—regulated however with the most entire decorum’. He also recorded that ‘Byron loves her when present, and, personally, as it is easy for those used to such indications to observe’. There were other guests present: William Hoare (one of Milbanke’s agents) and his family and Thomas Noel, Rector of Kirby Mallory, illegitimate son of Lord Wentworth (Annabella’s rich uncle). He had come to officiate at the wedding. Hobhouse called him ‘a buck parson of the better sort’ and said that ‘Byron won his heart by his kindness and open manner’ (30 December). This all seems and was a great deal jollier than Act I. The next day, they all had dinner at six, probably drank too much, and then, amazingly, set up a mock marriage that Hobhouse describes: ‘I being Lady Byron, Noel parsonifying, and Hoare giving me away’. Then they all shook hands for the New Year. New Year’s Day itself, according to Hobhouse, was less promising. The Hoares had gone and ‘we had not quite so jolly a dinner as yesterday, but tolerable’. It is hard to know whether groom or groomsman was the more anxious about the impending ceremony: ‘Byron at night said, “Well, Hobhouse, this is our last night to morrow I shall be Annabella’s”— (absit omen!!)’.7 But the next morning Hobhouse dutifully put on ‘full dress with white gloves’ and found Byron also ‘up and dressed’. At breakfast, Lady Milbanke’s hand ‘shook’ too much to make tea. Hobhouse gives an account of preparations for the wedding in the drawing room, where ‘kneeling mats’ were ‘disposed for the couple, and the others’ (Byron found them so uncomfortable he thought they were stuffed with peachstones). Hobhouse also provides a surprisingly detailed description of Annabella’s ‘very plain’ white muslin wedding-gown and jacket before moving on to the ceremony itself: Miss Milbanke was as firm as a rock, and during the whole ceremony looked steadily at Byron—she repeated the words audibly and well. Byron 7 Hobhouse’s Latin tag means literally ‘may omen be absent’, which Peter Cochran, in his online edition of the diary used in this chapter (petercochran.wordpress. com), glosses as ‘may what is said not come true’. A kinder paraphrase might be ‘may no ominous significance attach to the words’.

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at se a h a m hitched at first when he said ‘I, George Gordon’, and when he came to ‘with all my worldly goods I thee endow’, looked at me with a half-smile—they were married at eleven. I shook Lady Byron by the hand after the parson, and embraced my friend with unfeigned delight— he was kissed by mylady Milbanke—Lady Milbanke and Mrs Clermont were much affected. Lady Byron went out of the room, but soon returned to sign the register, which Wallis and I witnessed. She again retired hastily, her eyes full of tears when she looked at her father and mother, and completed her conquest, her innocent conquest. She came in her travelling dress, corn after a slate-coloured satin—pellice trimmed with white fur—and sat quietly in the drawing-room—Byron was calm and as usual I felt I had buried a friend … At a little before twelve I handed Lady Byron downstairs and into her carriage. When I wished her many years of happiness she said, ‘If I am not happy it will be my own fault’. Of my dearest friend I took a melancholy leave—he was unwilling to leave my hand, and I had hold of his out of the window when the carriage drove off.

There were eight people present. Augusta had been invited (Byron’s nearest relative after all), but declined because she had small children to look after. The ceremony would have been different, I think, if she had been there. We can add to Hobhouse’s account some curious details that amount to ill omens. I don’t know what Byron wore, but according to Thomas Moore he woke ‘with the most melancholy reflections, on seeing his wedding suit laid out before him. In the same mood, he wandered about the grounds alone, till he was summoned for the ceremony’.8 The wedding ring was one that had been found in the garden at Newstead – his mother’s wedding ring (Lady Milbanke was indignant that he had not bought Annabella a new one). Byron’s mother had had much chubbier fingers than Annabella’s so Annabella tied black ribbon round the ring to make it fit. Byron thought this a bad omen. Even worse, when they had gone to Halnaby Hall for the ‘treaclemoon’ (it was a journey of some 40 miles, bitterly cold, and Byron caught a cold), it fell off her finger into the fire grate. Another bad omen. Though her fingers were smaller than Byron’s mother’s, Annabella was not skinny. She loved food – especially, it seems, mutton chops, peaches and goose pie.9 Byron, not 8 Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (London, John Murray, 1971), 188. This does not quite square with Hobhouse’s account, where he and Byron retire to his room between breakfast and the ceremony. 9 Anne Fleming, Byron the Maker (Brighton: Book Guild Publishing, 2009), 195–96.

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of course always keen on women eating, liked her very rounded cheeks and called her ‘Pippin’ because of them. There was no reception after the wedding. Annabella simply left the room and returned in her travelling dress. But a wedding-cake had been made, which had gone mouldy (shades of Miss Havisham), so a new one had had to be baked.10 A curious detail. After the ceremony, Byron took a ring from his own finger and presented it to Sir Ralph as ‘a token of remembrance’, perhaps infuriating Lady Milbanke further, given that Byron had provided no other wedding gifts. The little bells of Seaham church rang out after the ceremony, and half a dozen muskets were fired in front of the house. The louder bells of Durham Cathedral were rung when the couple’s carriage passed through en route to Halnaby Hall (a large, ugly house pulled down in the 1950s; Seaham Hall is much nicer). It was there, according to Moore’s recollection of Byron’s memoirs, that the marriage was consummated on a sofa almost immediately after they arrived and before dinner.11 I don’t know whether the sofa survived or whether it was moved to the British Museum next to Shakespeare’s ‘second-best bed’. At some stage here, Hobhouse does not say what day, they all witnessed some Christmas mumming. Their wedding took place during the Twelve Days of Christmas, after all, a time of general jollification: Whilst at Seaham we saw the sword dance of the colliers, a singular custom/exhibition, begun and ended by a sort of pantomime games led by a pantaloon and fool, who ends by having his head cut off. The great address consists of the parties uniting themselves by holding their swords at each end, and going through all the contortions without letting them go. The business is opened with a song, which is to be found in the Tyne Melodies, and by a slow circular procession, dictated and controlled by the fool and pantaloon—the cutting off the head we did not see. The men are about ten in number, fantastically dressed, and although it is a Christmas, sport in their shirts.

If Byron and Annabella witnessed this, and they almost certainly did, what would they be thinking? A ritual sparring followed by a beheading. It may have reminded them of Joe Grimaldi; it strikes me today as a set-piece scene from Alfred Hitchcock. 10 Fleming, Byron the Maker, 192. Byron had a premonition of the mouldy cake (BLJ IV, 240). 11 Recorded by Hobhouse in his diary entry of 15 May 1824.

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Though there was no reception as such at the wedding itself, presumably apart from cake and perhaps whisky. Hobhouse tells us that there was a celebration a day or two later: I dined at Mr Hoare’s, Sir Ralph and Lady Milbanke, with Noel, Darnell, the Lord Barrington, a gold prebend and others, at a sort of wedding-dinner. I talked incessantly, and badly, and drank too much port, impelled by Noel [the officiating parson], who is a good fellow.

One gets the sense that everyone was rather more relaxed than when Byron and Annabella were around. I said that Byron does not mythologize Seaham itself but he does produce a poetic version of the wedding ceremony in ‘The Dream’ some 18 months after the event, where it is put into a sequence in which it is not pivotal but dramatic in the extreme:           I saw him stand Before an Altar—with a gentle bride; Her face was fair, but was not that which made The Starlight of his Boyhood;—as he stood Even at the altar, o’er his brow there came The selfsame aspect, and the quivering shock That in the antique Oratory shook His bosom in solitude; and then— As in that hour—a moment o’er his face The tablet of unutterable thoughts Was traced,—and then it faded as it came, And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke The fitting vows, but heard not his own words, And all things reel’d around him; (‘The Dream’, lines 145–58; CPW IV, 27)

This is quite a long way from Hobhouse’s account where Byron stumbles over his first words. There was unlikely to have been an altar in a drawing room (not then usually found in a permanent place even in Anglican churches until the Oxford Movement), nor is it likely that he would have been thinking primarily of ‘The Starlight of his Boyhood’, Mary Chaworth.12 The ‘antique Oratory’ is a reference to a small room (not a chapel exactly) in Annesley Hall where the protagonist of ‘The 12 Byron had however confided to Anabella at some length, in a letter of February 1814, about Mary’s ‘bitter’ destiny (BLJ IV, 55–56) and, shortly before his first visit to Seaham, regaled his now fiancée with further details of Mary ‘lying between life and death a few streets from me’ (IV, 224).

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Dream’ has an icy encounter with Mary (‘with a cold and gentle grasp | He took her hand’), and then departs. It is curious that this scene is then transferred to the drawing room of Seaham both for the wedding ceremony and that initial occasion in the same room where Byron takes Annabella’s hand and that is all that he does. The poem gives an idea of how Byron’s mind sometimes worked creatively through connections, and though it may well have been true that ‘all things reel’d round him’, when ‘he spoke the fitting vows’, Hobhouse’s account seems to give a better sense of the occasion – a public not private one – with Byron in his wedding suit and kneeling mats and cushions. The postures of the occasion were controlled by the occasion and not by Byron. The poem is a strange imaginative construct that yet hints at facts or emotions at the time or later that we cannot fully grasp. In ‘The Dream’ however, Byron can replay the scene his way. It is odd, I think, considering how the marriage is usually spoken of, that the 28-year-old Byron, looking back on his life, sees only two loves: the real one, Mary Chaworth, and his marriage. And he does so by focusing on two rooms that are fused – one inside Annesley and one inside Seaham Hall. His bride is ‘gentle’ and ‘fair’. Much like Annabella, he is both ‘calm and quiet’ and yet at the same time reeling with emotion. The emotion is, in the poem, tethered to a rush of memory from the buried past, but there is no reason to doubt that Byron also associates that emotion with the wedding itself. In the latter part of the poem, the two subsequent histories fuse. The Mary Chaworth figure loses her mind, and the ‘gentle bride’ loses her husband. I don’t think that Byron’s marriage, however awkward, began in misery. And, before he fictionalized it in ‘The Dream’, he certainly recognized it as fact. Writing to Moore from Halnaby Hall, he writes in a rather different idiom than ‘The Dream’: ‘I was married this day week. The parson has pronounced it—Perry has announced it—and the Morning Post, also, under the head of “Lord Byron’s Marriage”—as if it were a fabrication, or the puff-direct of a new stay-maker’. He adds in a postscript: ‘Lady Byron is vastly well’ (BLJ IV, 252–53). At Halnaby, the newly-weds seem to have spent a lot of time in the library discussing books. Annabella may have dipped into the volume of Byron’s complete works that Hobhouse had given to her as a wedding present; Hobhouse also seems to have left Byron the copy of Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works that he had been reading on his way to Seaham – while at Halnaby, Byron sent Murray a new note for The Corsair ‘from Gibbon’ (BLJ IV, 251). Almost as soon as Annabella became Byron’s 164

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wife, she became his amanuensis, or at least fair-copier. She wrote up some of the later Hebrew Melodies that Byron composed at Halnaby and Seaham in early 1815. This literary relationship continued even as their marital relationship was disintegrating. Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works also suggested to Byron a way of drawing together work-in-progress to produce Parisina, a poem about a marriage destroyed by an incestuous relationship. I wonder what Annabella thought of it while she was writing up the fair copy at some point during their months together in London. Act III: Byron the Husband Act III takes place after the ‘treaclemoon’, at Seaham from 21 January to 9 March. Byron had not been keen on the idea, but was persuaded to spend his twenty-seventh birthday with his new family. He and Annabella then spent their longest time together at Seaham Hall. Over seven weeks. I don’t think he ever spent that long in a single period at Newstead. It is difficult to know how it all went. There are different indicators. Byron displayed what Annabella quite shrewdly called his ‘companykindness’,13 behaving politely to his parents-in-law and joining in the methods of passing the time in a country house that he satirizes in Don Juan. He made up bout-rimés. He played draughts (perhaps not very well, since Teresa Guiccioli later commented on his lack of skill in playing draughts with her). He took tea, ‘damn tea’ (BLJ IV, 264). He participated in games that seem to have followed dinners with plenty of claret. In one of these games Byron snatched his mother-in-law’s wig off her head. I don’t think that Byron was being boorish here. I don’t think that we should underestimate the capacity of the upper classes to enjoy absolutely stupid and rather boisterous games (P.G. Wodehouse is a better guide to this sort of behaviour than Downton Abbey). Byron was just joining in. And it is important to remember that side of Seaham. Upper classes at home are more like those of the working classes than the middle classes. At the same time, Byron and Annabella were rather warily getting used to one another, which, at least up to a point, both of them did. He thanks her for getting up in the night to get him some lemonade. If Byron displayed his ‘company-kindness’ he also showed what she called his ‘child-side’ when he would talk of himself as ‘B’.14 They walk along 13 Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife, 275. 14 Marchand, Byron: A Portrait, 195.

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the cliffs and shore. There is a delightful episode where he challenges her to race him up the cliffs. Nevertheless, he was beset with money worries since Newstead had not been sold and this became a reason for his return to London, which initially he wanted to do on his own until she talked him out of it. They were going to move, as he well knew, into London accommodation, which he could not possibly now afford. A whole series of disasters were in the offing. The relation with Annabella is always extremely difficult to characterize. We know both too much and too little and, everywhere we turn, we step into long-reified judgements. I think it was fraught but not yet fractured at all, and it was certainly real. I will hazard, though, by way of interim conclusion, two much smaller-scale comments on this last stay at Seaham in general. The first is obvious enough. Byron got rather bored, not with Annabella, but with living within the confines, customs and expectations of a small country house. It is best to hear his own voice here, in a letter written on 2 February to Thomas Moore asking for news from the town: Since I wrote last, I have been transferred to my father-in-law’s, with my lady and my lady’s maid, &c. &c. &c. and the treaclemoon is over, and I am awake, and find myself married. My spouse and I agree to—and in— admiration. Swift says ‘no wise man ever married;’ but, for a fool, I think it the most ambrosial of all possible future states […] I wish you would respond, for I am here ‘oblitusque meorum obliviscendus et illis.’15 Pray tell me what is going on in the way of intriguery, and how the w——s and rogues of the upper Beggar’s Opera go on—or rather off—in or after marriage; or who are going to break any particular commandment. Upon this dreary coast, we have nothing but county meetings and shipwrecks; and I have this day dined upon fish, which probably dined upon the crews of several colliers lost in the late gales. But I saw the sea once more in all the glories of surf and foam, —almost equal to the Bay of Biscay, and the interesting white squalls and short seas of Archipelago memory. (BLJ IV, 263)

Annabella writes well, but this is something else, isn’t it? A month later, Byron writes to Moore again: I am in such a state of sameness and stagnation, and so totally occupied in consuming the fruits—and sauntering—and playing dull games at cards—and yawning—and trying to read old Annual Registers and the 15 Horace, Epistle I, xi, 9: ‘forgetting my friends and forgotten by them’. This tag had been used by Pope, Swift and Johnson in their correspondence.

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at se a h a m daily papers—and gathering shells on the shore—and watching the growth of stunted gooseberry bushes in the garden—that I have neither time nor sense to say more than                      Yours ever,                          B (BLJ IV, 277–78)

That is one thing then, and it is obvious enough. Byron felt cramped and bored, even when ‘consuming the fruits’. But there is another side. A clue to it is given in a letter to Moore six days later, on the eve of Byron and Annabella’s returning to London, via Six Mile Bottom, as a married couple: I have been very comfortable here,—listening to that d—d monologue, which elderly gentlemen call conversation, and in which my pious fatherin-law repeats himself every evening—save one, when he played upon the fiddle. However, they have been very kind and hospitable, and I like them and the place vastly, and I hope they will live many happy months. Bell is in health, and unvaried good-humour and behaviour. But we are all in the agonies of packing and parting; and I suppose by this time to-morrow I shall be stuck in the chariot with my chin upon a band-box. I have prepared, however, another carriage for the abigail [Mrs Clermont], and all the trumpery which our wives drag along with them. (BLJ IV, 280–81)

This sounds quite good-humoured to me. Although there is the usual light mockery of Sir Ralph’s interminable talk, and a joke about hoping that the interval before inheritance of the Milbankes’ assets might prove less interminable, Byron still sounds like a man dutiful enough to sign up for a marriage lease of ‘ninety and nine years’ (BLJ IV, 263). ‘I like them and the place vastly’ cannot possibly be said straight but equally it is not bitter and not unmeant. It is important to recall that there were not many occasions when Byron was integrated in part or in whole into a society. Nor did he wish to be. At Harrow and Cambridge certainly – but in a selective all-male society. Ditto the Capuchin convent at Athens. Something of the same in Cephalonia where, to his surprise, he was treated with straightforward courtesy by English soldiers and could relax. In Southwell, hothouse as it was, he was a recognized part of a distinct world in which women played a prominent role. In Venice, to an extent, he was welcome enough in the Conversazione of Contessa Albrizzi and Contessa Benzoni, as well as to a considerable number of women. But, most of all, in Ravenna he was accepted by all ranks of society, 167

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received by and well known to the Cardinal legates, and a part of the Gamba family who liked him just as he liked them. He boasted about the insiderly nature of his Italian life and enjoyed it. This, of course, as with Seaham, was because of a woman – Teresa Guiccioli, to whom he proposed marriage twice. All this disappeared when he went to Pisa and Genoa. There he was part of a much more literary expatriate world with Shelley and Leigh Hunt. I note that he calls Sir Ralph ‘Papa’. He does exactly the same thing with Ruggero Gamba, Teresa’s father. Byron had little experience of family life and none of a Papa (except a dim memory when he was three), but in Ravenna and here at Seaham he had. Here, he was, however oddly, but not that oddly, part of an English family. And he was a part of it, as he would say, ‘in this regular way’. The Byron of Byromania and Byronism, of Ken Russell, Mario Praz, Rupert Everett and even Fiona MacCarthy doesn’t take this Byron seriously or even see it. But it is there. I began this essay by recalling the varied places where Byron’s past presence can still be felt. Seaham, despite its dramatic position by the coast, is not ‘Romantic’, grand, aristocratic, ruined, doomed or sad. We are not invited into a buried history. It is an elegant, pleasing house, confident but not self-satisfied, almost cheerful in its demeanour. It represents a certain kind of English life more akin to Mansfield Park than to Wuthering Heights. Byron knowingly and willingly married into this world, which is not the world of Caroline Lamb or Lady Oxford though, curiously, it is not that far from the world of the Gambas, into which he virtually married four years later. And, for a brief while, he fitted into it. While I was, all too briefly, in Seaham, I felt something of this.

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From Venice to Ravenna From Venice to Ravenna On 30 April 1814 Byron wrote to Lady Melbourne about the possibility of marrying Annabella: Your Niece has committed herself perhaps—but it can be of no consequence—if I pursued & succeeded in that quarter—of course I must give up all other pursuits—and the fact is that my wife if she had common sense would have more power over me—than any other whatsoever—for my heart always alights upon the nearest perch—if it is withdrawn—it goes God knows where—but one must like something.— (BLJ IV, 111)

As with most things Byron writes, his words suggest different pathways all at the same time. Marriage will be the result of pursuit (with the sense perhaps of seeking to capture), but if he succeeded, he would give up other pursuits, in other words be faithful. The successful pursuer is the one with power, but Byron turns this round; the one pursued and gained would have absolute power over him. And then the image for the explanation of this, which everyone remembers: ‘my heart always alights upon the nearest perch’. A perch is not a semi-permanent nest, it is any available safe, elevated place where a bird can rest from flight like Cowper’s jackdaw: A great frequenter of the church, Where bishop-like, he finds a perch, And dormitory too.1

Why select some places rather than others for a perch? Because they are safe, because they can be trusted, because they won’t give way, because they will support, because they are available. For it is not Byron’s being but his heart that seeks a perch. ‘Maid of Athens, ere we part, | Give, 1 ‘The Jack Daw’ (1782), lines 4–6 (Poems, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–95], I, 422).

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oh, give me back my heart’ (CPW I, 280). Hearts can alight and, so to say, give themselves to that which lightly supports them. There is some delicacy in ‘alights upon’. Byron is not a lover at a distance.2 He seeks the nearest perch. But that is sufficient. He doesn’t seek lots of perches. He will give up all other pursuits, his wife will have real power over him. But if the perch is withdrawn (a strange image but then of course that is exactly what Annabella did by withdrawing to her parents’ house on 15 January 1816 and refusing all Byron’s entreaties to return), then the heart will have to find another perch, for ‘one must like something’. This confesses to a desire both to range and to settle, which is true of Byron and perhaps most human beings. We may laugh at naked Venus and Mars caught together in a net, but not without some prurient envy. On the other hand, we value Ulysses and Penelope, the great faithful couple: even Harold ‘Had sigh’d to many though he lov’d but one’ (CHP I, 5). The biblical narrative of permanent, loving covenant (God and Israel) as the basis of life and our habitual repeated infidelity (Israel’s fornication with false gods) is a flashlight with which, in Byron’s phrase, ‘to unmask | Man’s heart’ (CPW II, 40). Byron, like the psalmist, characteristically thinks of the heart as a dark place. We hide our contradictions from ourselves. Byron less so than most. There is no reason to doubt Byron’s intention, broadly speaking, to be faithful to Annabella when he married her. But within ten months, and when Annabella was eight months with child, he had a short affair with the actress Susan Boyce. He received a letter in Venice from Miss Boyce out of the blue in January 1819, which he burlesqued because she mixed up high sentiment with complaints about cuts in actresses’ salaries. Venice in January 1819 is where I want to begin. It was Byron’s third Carnival there. His first experience in 1817, not long after he had first arrived in the city, inspired Beppo some eight months later. A letter to Moore suggests he enjoyed the 1818 Carnival to the full: ‘I will work the mine of my youth to the last veins of the ore’ (BLJ VI, 10–11). In 1819, especially once he had seen off a stomach upset and the second canto of Don Juan, he threw himself into the festivities again: ‘I have not been in bed till seven or eight in the morning for these ten days past’ (BLJ VI, 99–100). The business of the Venetian Carnival, according to Beppo, is ‘fiddling, feasting, dancing, drinking, masquing, | And other things which may be had for asking’ (lines 7–8). In a characteristic, 2 With the arguable exception of his lines ‘To the Po’, Byron does not write great love poems inspired by the absence of the beloved.

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f rom v e n ic e to r av e n n a 3. Palazzo Guiccioli, Ravenna. Byron’s study (in which he wrote Cain) is on the second floor immediately to the right of the balcony.

much-quoted letter of 19 January 1819 to Hobhouse and Kinnaird, Byron tells us what these other things are by acting as his own Leporello and cataloguing the names of the Italian women he has bedded: ‘some of them are Countesses—& some of them Cobblers wives—some noble—some middling—some low—& all whores […] I have had them all & thrice as many to boot since 1817’ (BLJ VI, 92). Ravenna in December 1819 is where I want to end up. Byron arrived there on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, he made his first public 171

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appearance on the arm of Teresa Guiccioli, looking ‘as much like a Cicisbeo as I could on so short a notice’ (BLJ VI, 262). He was acknowledged without surprise or discourtesy both by Teresa’s family and by Romagnole society – at this first party ‘there were between two and three hundred of the best company I have seen in Italy’. The years of Venetian Carnival were over. Instead, Byron threw himself into the ‘less boisterous’ Ravenna Carnival in a different role, as Teresa’s cavalier servente, wearing a black beard and learning to fold her shawl. Once settled in Ravenna, he still invokes the spirit of the Venetian catalogue. but the fact he has ‘lived among the Italians’ is now registered more in social than sexual terms: ‘I […] have been amongst them of all classes—from the Conte to the Contadino’ (BLJ VII, 180). Twice in his life, in Athens in 1811 and in Venice for much of the time from 1817 until April 1819, Byron was openly promiscuous. With youths in Athens, with women in Venice. True there were some temporary perches – Nicolo Giraud, Margarita Cogni, Marianna Segati – but there is no intention ‘to give up all other pursuits’ (Byron’s phrase to Lady Melbourne). Pope in The Dunciad plays, in a conventional way, on the similarity of sound between Venice and Venus and says that the city is the shrine of Dullness. Byron, so enthusiastic about Venice and Italian women in his first Venetian poem – Beppo in 1817 – comes to the same perception in 1819: ‘I have had them all’ is at one and the same time a boast to his male friends, an excoriation of himself and a sign that he has had enough of the city. A year later Marino Faliero sums Venice up as ‘Prurient yet passionless’ and addresses the city as ‘thou Sea-Sodom’ (V, iii, 88, 99). ‘Prurient yet passionless’ is partly Byron’s verdict upon his own life in Venice. Marino Faliero sets Steno’s coarse jest about Angiolina being promiscuous against her actual marital fidelity, which the play clearly endorses. Angiolina is, miraculously, faithful in Venice of all places. It is Byron in the Ravenna of Dante (loyal to Beatrice) writing against Venice loyal to Venus.3 3 In 2009 I gave a lecture, for a Durham University series on Venice, which examined Byron’s complicated relationship with the city as both place of enchantment and sink of vice, exemplary polis and decayed oligarchy (‘A “More Beloved Existence”: From Shakespeare’s “Venice” to Byron’s Venice’, in Venice and the Cultural Imagination: ‘This Strange Dream Upon the Water’, ed. Michael O’Neill, Mark Sandy and Sarah Wootton [London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012]). Compare Tony Tanner, ‘Lord Byron: A Sea Cybele’, in Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 17–66. For a guide to Byron’s day-to-day life there, see Gregory Dowling, In Venice and in the Veneto with Lord Byron (Venice: Supernova, 2008).

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The year 1819 is where the move from promiscuity to fidelity takes place. New Year’s Eve in Ravenna at the very end of the year is the antithesis of Carnival in Venice at the start of the year. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice separates bad Venice dominated by quarrelling men (Shylock and Antonio) from good Belmont dominated by graceful Portia, who controls the final action of the play which is set in Belmont. Belmont is on the Brenta, which is where Byron wrote Beppo. But the Brenta is not his Belmont, whereas Ravenna, to which he finally moves in December, in a sense is. Byron quite liked being dominated by Margarita Cogni but only up to a point. When she invaded the Palazzo Mocenigo and, for a while, took over, Byron ‘told her quietly that she must return home’ (BLJ VI, 196). He can perch on her for a bit but she can’t perch on him. But the perch with Teresa that begins in April 1819 is the firmest one Byron’s heart managed. It is consolidated in December 1819, when Teresa publicly parades him as her cavalier servente on Christmas Day in Ravenna, and lasts until July 1823. He intends to be faithful and, by and large, is. Though Teresa is a perch, he does not simply alight there. Any bird flying over Venice would not use Ravenna 100 miles away as its nearest perch. And a bird would fly quicker than Byron’s coach. Unusually for Byron, he has to make a decision. Between his two visits to Ravenna caused by Teresa’s real illness after miscarriage and then what seems to have been a psychosomatic one to get Byron to come to her, Byron plays between the notion of returning to England, moving to South America or settling in Ravenna as her acknowledged lover dithers, and only at the end of the year deliberately chooses the latter. He has to make the move and, more successful here than Margarita Cogni, he moves into his lover’s house – her husband’s house. For him it is a move away from promiscuous, secretive Venice to a socially acknowledged, faithful relationship, where Teresa has more power than any than other woman over him, albeit a faithful relationship that depends upon Teresa’s adultery. Byron notes with amusement that, well after their affair had begun, Teresa wrote a sonnet for her cousin’s marriage urging her to be as constant as she was to her own husband Alessandro. At Teresa’s request, in June, Byron had translated the most famous of Italian adulteries, Dante’s account of Paolo and Francesca (their affair went on for ten years), but in the same month, also at her request, he starts The Prophecy of Dante (finished the following year in Ravenna). Paolo and Francesca matches Byron and Teresa’s initial status 173

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as secret lovers meeting in secret and sending secret notes to one another by intermediaries.4 He had compared their relationship to Paolo and Francesca in a letter of 25 April, and in another of 3 May, he says (in Italian as in most of his letters to Teresa): ‘Quella storia di amor funesto, che sempre m’interessava, adesso m’interessa doppiamente, dopo che Ravenna rinchiude il mio cuore’ [‘This story of a fatal love, which has always interested me, now interests me doubly, since Ravenna holds my heart’] (BLJ VI, 121–22). Byron likes the connection and seems to have enjoyed the necessarily secret antics of letters and assignations. In a letter to Teresa of 4 August he writes: ‘The hall! Those rooms! The open doors! The servants so curious and near—Ferdinando—the visitors! how many obstacles! But all overcome—it has been the real triumph of Love’ (BLJ VI, 199).5 But the long poem (The Prophecy of Dante) corresponds not to such escapades but to their publicly declared relationship in Ravenna. It is preceded by a sonnet to Teresa, where Byron talks of obeying her absolutely, just as – in ‘To the Po’ – he says that he is ‘The Slave again, Oh Love! at least of thee!’ (line 48 [CPW IV, 212]). Dante, whom Byron said was ‘hapless in his nuptials’ though devoted to Beatrice, only visited Venice once as ambassador from Ravenna. (It was fatal. He contracted malaria on the way back and died.) Byron’s decision to go to Ravenna is for fidelity and also, however reluctantly, the role of cavalier servente. I have set out the beginning and the end of 1819. Carnival to New Year’s Eve. We know what happened, but Byron didn’t. And yet, in a funny way, he did. He set out the move from what looks like promiscuity to what looks like fidelity or, more precisely, the move from a furtive and secret affair to a publicly acknowledged one in the first four cantos of Don Juan. Canto I was completed in late 1818, Canto II by 25 January 1819. Canto III (which in its original form comprised the two cantos later divided into III and IV) was completed by 30 November 1819. Writing to Murray on 9 August of Teresa, Byron says ‘I cannot tell how our romance will end—but it hath gone on hitherto most erotically—such perils—and escapes—Juan’s are a child’s play in comparison.—The fools think that 4 Stephen Cheeke provides a good analysis of this, and of the relationship of Byron and Teresa more generally, in the third chapter of Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 5 In the original Italian: ‘Quella sala! quelle camere! le porte aperte! la servitu cosi curiosa e vicina—Ferdinando! le visite! —&c. — —quanti ostacoli! ma tutti vinti—è stato il vero trionfo del’ Amor’.

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all my Poeshie is always allusive to my own adventures’ (BLJ VI, 206). Juan’s imagined escapades predate Byron’s real ones. So, if his poetry is allusive to his own adventures, it is so in prospect. A statement that might give us pause. The letters of 1819 represent Byron’s thoughts, anxieties, hopes and amatory life in great detail as though he has a compulsion to represent his doings, to an extent that I often find distasteful. The same is true of his letters to Lady Melbourne but there, at least, we could say that he sees her as a wise confidante. In his correspondence to Murray, which he knows will be read out to the male salon at Albemarle Street, he goes into detail, for instance, about just how soon it is possible to make love to Teresa after her miscarriage. I can’t find any excuse for such ‘locker-room’ boasting, except that Byron would not be Byron if he did not have an urge to theatrical self-exposure, an urge that is connected to good things in him. But he has no such compulsion in his poetry. That is redolent of Byron’s psyche, and his travels, but it is not normally ‘allusive’ to his doings in the way that Wordsworth’s or Cowper’s poetry often is. What is odd, however, and Byron seems to sense it here, is that Juan’s move from adulterous escapades in Seville to presiding publicly over a complex social world in Canto III with Haidee as his acknowledged virtual wife, mirrors Byron’s move from promiscuous Venice, via the escapades of meeting Teresa in secret, to his publicly acknowledged relationship with her as partner in Ravenna, where he appears with her in public before the cream of Ravenna’s clerical and aristocratic society. One of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell is ‘What is now proved was once only imagin’d’.6 In Byron’s case, he imagined a transition fictionally before he underwent it himself, and it seems at least plausible that the transition he imagined corresponded to something he wished to do himself but was not wholly aware of. He did not know in January 1819 that he was to leave Venice and the life he associated with it. In March 1818, he wrote to Hobhouse: ‘I have taken a Palazzo on the Grand Canal for two years—so that you see I won’t stir’ (BLJ VI, 25). But at the time he was listing all his conquests for Hobhouse and Kinnaird he concluded: ‘I have quite given up Concubinage’ (BLJ VI, 93). It is a joke but, in intention at least, he had. Byron’s imaginings of Juan’s transition, from secretive love in Seville to open love on Haidee’s isle, is exactly thought out. But, though Byron did envisage such a transition in his own life, it was only one 6 ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Plate 8 (Writings, ed. G.E. Bentley Jr, 2 vols [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978], I, 82).

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of many imaginings as to future possibility. The only stable thing here is that whatever was going to happen would mean cutting links with Venice and the promiscuous life with which it was associated. He imagined this, and then he did it. On 18 May, for instance, he went for a rendezvous with a ‘Venetian Girl (unmarried and the daughter of one of their nobles)’ but tripped when getting into his gondola and fell into the Grand Canal so he ‘went dripping like a Triton to my Sea-nymph’ (BLJ VI, 133). For all that, the intention is away from such escapades to a single attraction. On 3 October, for instance, he complains to Hobhouse about having the appearance of a cavalier servente but adds: ‘I am not yet thirty two years of age—I might still be a decent citizen and found a house and a family’ (BLJ VI, 226). The details are worth following. I have set up a simple transition from Venice to Ravenna, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Nor, of course, could it simply be an opposition between libertinism and faithful love. In Venice, the Contessa Benzoni (whom Byron liked and she liked him) had had the Count Ragone (who was obsessed with Byron) as a cavalier servente for a good 30 years. When she was 60 and he 70, they married and lived together happily for another 11 years. In Ravenna, on the other hand, Count Guiccioli was notorious – far more so than Byron at Newstead – for sleeping with all the maids in his household. He had six children by the most beautiful of these, Angelica Galliani, despite his first wife’s protests and then, when his wife died, married her. When Angelica in turn died, he looked around and settled on Teresa Gamba; she then had to be stepmother to all his children, who liked neither her nor their father. Despite these counter-examples, Venice had a long-standing reputation for promiscuity and Ravenna, with its long clerical history, did not. Similarly, there is no simple, single movement from Venice to Ravenna. Byron falls in love with Teresa and vice versa in April 1819. They had first met on his birthday the previous year only a few days after her marriage, and did not much notice one another. But their meeting in early April was a West Side Story moment (‘I’ve just met a girl named Teresa’). He arranged to meet her the next day and again the following day, when they made love. He did not seduce her. She was as keen as he was. He must have made love with her far more times than with any other person. But Teresa was, from the beginning, not one of that list of countesses and cobblers’ wives who were ‘all whores’. He declared publicly to the world his love for her and the strength of that love in terms that are a long way from the distancing and self-referential vocabulary of hearts 176

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and perches. There is no doubt that he was surprised by this. He had not expected it and yet the desire to live a wholly different life predates his falling for Teresa. It will help to be reminded of his vocabulary. The day after the West Side Story meeting, on 6 April, Byron tells Hobhouse: ‘I have fallen in love’. He explains that, though he has ‘hopes’, ‘one of her preliminaries is that I must never leave Italy; […] but I should not like to be frittered down into a regular Cicisbeo.—What shall I do! I am in love—and tired of promiscuous concubinage—& have now an opportunity of settling for life’ (BLJ VI, 107–8). On 22 April, to Teresa: ‘You, who are my only and last love […] You vowed to be true to me and I will make no vows to you; let us see which of us will be the more faithful’ (BLJ VI, 112).7 Before he wrote this, he had almost certainly written these lines in Don Juan: Haidee spoke not of scruples, ask’d no vows,    Nor offer’d any; she had never heard Of plight and promises to be a spouse,    Or perils by a loving maid incurr’d; She was all which pure ignorance allows,    And flew to her young mate like a young bird; And, never having dreamt of falsehood, she Had not one word to say of constancy. (II, 190)

Teresa would know rather more about constancy and inconstancy than Haidee. But the pattern is the same in fiction and fact. Byron and Teresa are not bound by vows but they are in a quasi-married relationship. Byron twice opens the possibility of marriage to her. The same curious fact/fictional reduplication happens when the lovers are ill. The sequence can be set out in the manner of a journalist’s shorthand report: Byron is in Venice. Teresa, in Ravenna, has a miscarriage and is very ill. Byron rushes there. She is in bed. He visits her every day, sometimes twice a day. She gets better. Alessandro, her husband, then wants to go to Bologna. So they all go. Byron hires a palazzo but Alessandro insists that he stays in his. He leaves them alone together for long periods. But then Alessandro has to go to Ravenna on business. Amazingly, he suggests that Byron accompanies Teresa to Venice to consult Byron’s doctor, Aglietti, about Teresa’s health (with the proviso that she should stay in his palazzo, not Byron’s). Teresa when 7 ‘Tu che sei il mio unico ed ultimo Amor […] Tu me giurasti la tua costanza, —ed io non ti giuro nulla, vedremmo chi di noi due sara più fedele’.

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she arrives says that she is exhausted, and so stays at Byron’s palazzo. It comes as no surprise. From there they move to Byron’s villa on the Brenta where, according to Fanny Silvestrini, they live as though they are in Armida’s bower.8 This is probably the closest Byron gets to an idyll like that of Juan and Haidee on her island (which he has probably just written). He is writing Canto III in La Brenta often, with Teresa, at his request, in the room as he writes. But then Moore arrives. Byron puts him up in the Palazzo Mocenigo and goes with him there. Whereupon Byron gets a fever. Teresa rushes to him and ministers to him in his bed in the same way that Haidee ministers to Juan when he is washed up on the isle. Like Haidee, both Teresa and Byron have the knack of restoring one another to life. A motif that Byron always associates with eros. When Byron and Teresa, in two carriages, are en route between Ravenna and Venice they spend the night (presumably not together) in a hotel in Padua. There, to their surprise, arrive the Contessa Benzoni and her aged paramour. The meeting is instructive. The Contessa and Conte are horrified because Byron and Teresa are, by staying in a hotel together when the husband is in a different town, not behaving according to the code of serventismo. The Contessa rebukes Byron for this, while saying that his previous conduct has been impeccable. All Venice knows of Byron’s affairs, but he was careful to keep up public appearances in a way that Teresa was much less concerned with – ‘O mio Byron’, she would say in public. Byron, though careful of appearances, does not want the role of cavalier servente, as in that first letter to Hobhouse where he looks forward to settling down but is horrified by the idea of being frittered down into a regal Cicisbeo. For the moment, it will help if I complete the time sequence of 1819. While Byron is still being tended to by Teresa at the Palazzo Mocenigo, an indignant Alessandro comes there, partly stirred by the complaints to him from Teresa’s father, who thinks the Byron/Teresa liaison is appalling. Alessandro gives a ‘me or him’ ultimatum to Teresa who, of course, says ‘him’. Byron is more cautious. On a number of occasions, he does actually suggest that they go away together, but he partly realizes the impossibility of this. He is unsure himself; from April to December he is in a permanent state of indecision, and he seems to have some sense of responsibility to Teresa, for such an action will ruin her public reputation for life. So he encourages Teresa to go back to Ravenna with 8 Rossini’s Armida, with a libretto based on scenes from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, was first performed in November 1817.

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her husband, though he is forced into promising her that he will follow her (otherwise she would refuse to go). He does not intend to do so; he thinks that he has made a sacrifice, in effect done the right thing. This means that Byron revives thoughts, which have been active throughout this whole period, that he will return to England and either stay there or, from there, go to South America. One strikingly odd thing here is his earlier decision to write to Augusta out of the blue, which he does only some six weeks after falling for Teresa. The letter, like his letters to Teresa, is over the top, invoking ‘that perfect & boundless attachment which bound & binds me to you—which renders me utterly incapable of real love for any other human being’ (BLJ VI, 129). In the same letter, he compares Augusta and himself with Paolo and Francesca, and hints that he would like to return to England – with the implication of resuming their affair. He uses some secret abbreviations which he also uses in his letters to Teresa. Popular estimates of Byron’s character as a rake without a heart seem almost appropriate here. What are we to make of it? He next writes to Augusta weeks later, a short, not over-the-top letter where he asks her, semi-seriously, to tell Annabella that he wishes to marry again and that she will probably wish to do the same. Can it be arranged? Later still, on 26 July in Ravenna (where Teresa remains ill), he replies to Augusta’s letter back to him, which is appalled by his proposal, doubtless in part because, very stupidly, Augusta has shown the letter to Annabella. He upbraids her a little in his not very loving reply, which tells her for the first time of Teresa, who has ‘set her heart on carrying me off from Venice out of vanity—and succeeded’. But he also boasts about flirting with Geltruda, a very attractive friend of Teresa (BLJ VI, 185–86). Doubtless Byron does have elements of the cad, the bounder and the absolute rotter in him. Yet it is a tad more complicated. Doubtless he flirted with the, by all accounts, very beautiful Geltruda but, almost from the beginning, both Byron and Teresa were prone to violent jealousy. If one appeared to look at someone else with interest the other would retaliate by appearing to do the same, and that applied here. Teresa sent Geltruda away. Similarly, Byron turned to Augusta, I think, because the intensity of the affair reminded him of his prior attraction, revived it in a way: the use of the same coded abbreviations, the same intensity in this letter as the Italian ones, but not sustained throughout, as in the letters to Teresa. If he were not to become Teresa’s cavalier, he still had the urge to be elsewhere than Venice and elsewhere than libertinism, and I suspect that he momentarily persuaded himself that 179

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Augusta represented another version of a single faithful attachment. The alternative was to go to South America via London with Allegra, with whom he was closer at this period than at any other (he was very agitated when she was ill for instance). Byron’s state of mind throughout these months is very exposed in his letters, but of course he is always still playing a part in them. We can only make guesses. He is in a state of indecision throughout but knows that a decision of some kind is imminent. Unusually for him, he suddenly finds that almost everyone, including Hobhouse for instance, is against the publication of Don Juan, and that it is slated in reviews. The previous year has seen good reviews for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto IV. This is the beginning of that reversal that he would later reflect up on with such panache in Don Juan itself: ‘But Juan was my Moscow’ (XI, 56). Second, a great chorus was telling him not to settle with Teresa. Hobhouse and the scurrilous Alexander Scott wanted him to stay a libertine; the dreadful Hoppners told nasty stories about Teresa. He meanwhile was writing three cantos of Don Juan as well as much else – the period 1819–23 with Teresa is the period of his greatest poetry. As usual with Byron, the opposition to Don Juan and to Teresa hardened his decision for them. But, as we’ve seen, he gave up Teresa to her husband and made preparations to leave. On 2 December, he writes a letter of farewell to Teresa. He decides to leave for England in the first instance and writes to everyone to this effect. Fanny Silvestrini gives the details: ‘He was ready dressed for the journey […] —his boxes being already on board the gondola. At this moment, my Lord, by way of pretext, declares, that if it should strike one o’clock before every thing was in order […] he would not go that day. The hour strikes and, he remains!’9 Byron preferred that decisions were made for him. Teresa obliged. She suddenly falls ill. It would be unfair to suggest she was not really ill, but also hard not to suspect a psychosomatic cause. Her father is horrified, and is soon convinced by Teresa that only Byron can, once again, cure her. So he – who has always opposed the liaison – sends for Byron with the acquiescence of Alessandro. Teresa sends a letter, to which Byron replies on 9 December: ‘Command me—you can arrange my future life’ (BLJ VI, 255). The next day he writes again promising 9 A fragment from a letter by Fanny quoted by Teresa in her Vie de Lord Byron en Italie, as translated by Michael Rees in an edition that provides a transcription of the original Italian letter in a footnote (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 206–7.

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‘I shall return—and do—and be—what you wish’, adding a postscript emphasizing that he has been sexually faithful to her: ‘I have not gone out of the house […] You can learn from others of my conduct’ (BLJ VI, 259).10 This time there is no consulting whether the clock chimes or not. He travels the hundred miles to Ravenna, flat out at two miles per hour in his huge carriage, and arrives on Christmas Eve to warm welcomes from everyone. What he had first only imagined – positively as ‘settling’ with ‘his last love’ and negatively as ‘frittered down to a Cicisbeo’ – has actually happened. Promiscuity in Venice has been displaced by fidelity in Ravenna.

10 9 December: ‘Disponi di me—tu hai tutti i diritti—[io] debbo la passata felicità a te—e tu puoi disporre della [futura?] mia vita’; 10 December: ‘tornarò—e farò—e sarò ciò tu vuoi’; ‘non sono sortito ci casa—ed appena di camera—e non sortirò […] Tu puoi informati dagli altri della mia condotta’.

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Pa rt III

POLITICS

Reading Byron’s Politics Reading Byron’s Politics Byron was seen in his lifetime, and is still seen today, as a political figure as well as a poet. There are good grounds for this, but it has also led to much simplification. Byron does not have our ideological reflexes. He is primarily interested in human flaws, kinds of self-deception, responses to injustice and oppression, and kinds of courage in distress or hope (which are both admirable and yet sometimes linked to the fault that gives rise to them) more than in political movements or political theories as such. He is always aware of the play of paradox in human thought and affairs. Unlike Shelley, Byron never imagines that some kind of social or political change could radically alter more than the surface patterns of human behaviour. He is certainly sympathetic to movements of revolutionary change, but his political thinking, like his poetical thinking, reveals, in Jane Stabler’s superb phrase, that ‘hospitality to contradiction’ which humanizes and energizes all his reactions and attitudes.1 The political contradictions in Byron tend to be boiled down to the premise that he was an ‘aristocratic liberal’. Such tensions were certainly evident from as early as his first serious volume of poetry, Hours of Idleness, a collection that begins with an elegy for his father’s ancestors, who fought and died for ‘the rights of a monarch, their country defending’ in the Civil War, but is quickly followed by a different kind of elegy for Charles James Fox, reflecting Byron’s Whig upbringing by his mother. Byron was probably the only boy at Harrow who boasted a bust of Napoleon. Lady Oxford tried to push him into a life of political action in the House of Lords as a Whig with radical leanings but he sat as an Independent and became disillusioned with day-to-day politics. His speeches there on Catholic Emancipation and 1 Jane Stabler, ‘Byron, Postmodernism and Intertextuality’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 270.

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on the Luddites are often positively instanced. The first, rather too theatrically given but exciting attention, is not as courageous as it might seem. Many senior members of the Government had long been in favour of Catholic Emancipation (more because of Anglo-Irish politics than religious toleration). However, Byron’s defence, not of the actions of the Luddites themselves, though sympathetic to their grievances, but of the wrongness of using capital punishment to deal with them, did display courage, conviction and independence, and was remembered in his ‘home’ county of Nottinghamshire. One way of thinking of the political trajectory of Byron’s life as a poet is that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was published in lavish quarto by a conservative publisher, whereas the later cantos of Don Juan were published in demy octavo by a liberal publisher and then, as William St Clair has shown (see Chapter 11), pirated in cheap editions so that the poem was read by more people within 20 years than any previous work of English literature. Don Juan is a very different, and much better, poem than Shelley’s Queen Mab, but St Clair has also shown that both poems were very widely read by the sort of public who attended or strongly supported the mass rally in favour of political reform at St Peter’s Square in Manchester in 1819 that Shelley immortalized in his Masque of Anarchy. This helped foster the sense of Byron as a friend of the many against the few, although he despised the leader of the Manchester rally, Henry Hunt, to the extent that he occasionally indulged in the fantasy of coming back to England to assassinate Hunt and then exercise his right to be tried by his peers in the House of Lords. On the Continent, too, partly because of Byron’s first journey there and his later self-proclaimed ‘exile’ there from 1816, he was strongly associated with revolution and its watchword ‘Liberty’, and with liberal nationalist movements of all kinds. The association came to be taken for granted, not least by anxious Austrian authorities in Italy. He was so because he proclaimed himself to be so in his poems, he supported Italian nationalist movements and Spanish uprisings against Ferdinand VII in the 1820s, and he went to Greece to fight for its independence. In Italy and Greece, his involvement was practical as well as intellectual and symbolic. This is a cohering picture but there are problems with it. Mazzini, for instance, the most eloquent and impassioned admirer of Byron as a progressive ‘Liberal’ figure, had to acknowledge that there was little obviously progressive or liberal in the Byronic hero who, though associated with outsiderly, even revolutionary, opposition to established 185

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authority (as we have seen in Lara’s case), was pessimistic about the future and was the antithesis of an egalitarian. Mazzini solves this by seeing the Byronic hero as a deliberately presented dead-end: The emptiness of the life and death of solitary individuality has never been so powerfully and efficaciously summed up as in the pages of Byron.2

Dostoyevsky entirely agreed but drew the opposite conclusion. Rather than separating the Byronic hero from the revolutionary world, he yokes them together: Byronism, though a momentary phenomenon, was a great, sacred and necessary one in the life of European mankind and, perhaps, in that of the entire human race. Byronism appeared at a moment of dreadful anguish, disillusionment and almost despair among men. Following the ecstatic transports of the new creed in the new ideals proclaimed at the end of the last century in France, […] the outcome was very different from what had been expected […] It was at this very moment that a great and mighty genius, a passionate poet, appeared. In his melodies there sounded mankind’s anguish of those days, its gloomy disillusionment in its mission and in the ideals which had deceived it.3

In my view, neither of these readings, immensely persuasive as they are, can be right, not least because they cancel one another out. On the other hand, taken together they do indicate why the figure of Byron and the disturbing force of his poems made him the accepted emblem of his times, both inviting and resisting attempts to decode him. The question arises whether Byron’s political attitudes are simply contradictory. I don’t think that they are, though they can seem so. That is because the clues to them, in the original sense of guidelines out of a labyrinth, are primarily to be found in his poetry, and the kinds of thinking that are habitual in them, which have been the major concern of this book. In these last three chapters I trace, so far as I can, Byron’s distinctions between and within liberty and licence, his straddling of both nationalism and internationalism, and I conclude by contrasting his image with received icons such as those of Lenin and Che Guevara in order to suggest what we might learn from his lifelong involvement with politics. 2 ‘Byron and Goethe’, collected in Life & Writings, 6 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1864–70), VI, 73–74. 3 I am grateful to Peter Cochran for pointing me to this journal entry of November 1877: see The Diary of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol, 2 vols (London: Cassell, 1949), II, 939.

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Liberty and Licence Liberty and Licence Eternal spirit of the chainless mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, … ‘Sonnet on Chillon’, lines 1–2 (CPW IV, 3) Here my chaste Muse a liberty must take—    Start not! still chaster reader—she’ll be nice henceForward, and there is no great cause to quake;    This liberty is a poetic licence, … Don Juan I, 120

Byron is the poet of ‘Liberty’. This is not a critic’s postulation but the judgement of the nineteenth century. Eugène Delacroix, the painter of Liberty Leading the People, also produced a painting of François de Bonnivard in prison, and may have taken as his inspiration the opening lines of the sonnet that Byron prefixed to The Prisoner of Chillon. Neither we nor Byron, however, would say of the sonnet: ‘Why Man the Soul of such writing is it’s [sic] licence’ (BLJ VI, 208). We know at once that Byron is now talking about Don Juan. Would it be too sweeping a statement to say that the works of the poet that find their centre in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are concerned with liberty and its antitheses, and those that find their centre in the spirit of Don Juan are concerned with licence and its constraints? I think we could say that this is a helpful preliminary assumption, but no more than that. The Venice of Beppo is a city of carnival licence compared to the London world to which it is addressed, but the licence operates within agreed constraints. The judgement offered on George III and even Robert Southey in The Vision of Judgment is, in the end, much more charitable than Southey’s judgements on Byron, yet it is still a judgement and the licentious Wilkes, licentious no longer, is moved to pity for his old adversary the 187

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King. Byron’s Vision invited the attentions of the Censor, of course, but it is a more Christian poem than Southey’s absurd projection of his political prejudices onto the cosmos, and it is not in league with anarchy. In the suppressed Dedication to Don Juan, Byron had accused Southey and the other Lakers of ‘still continued fusion | Of one another’s minds’, the source of a ‘narrowness’ that makes him wish ‘you’d change your lakes for ocean’ (stanza 5; CPW V, 4). The first chapter of this book celebrated Byron’s own extended address to the ocean at the end of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, where the poet both exalts in the ocean’s sublimity and delights in his own interchanges with it: ‘And trusted to thy billows far and near, | And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here’ (IV, 184). Byron does not fuse with the ocean in the sense that Wordsworth may be said to fuse with Nature, which he needs as a prompt to the activation of his innate powers of imagination. For Byron, characteristically, is in a quasi-sexual exchange with the ocean, which he delights in being dominated by (‘trusted’) and dominating (‘laid my hand’), as though the ocean is a living thing capable of relation. Byron’s associated taunt that the Lakers have secluded themselves from ‘better company’ (DJ Dedication, 5) is partly snobbish, but its main thrust is that ‘better company’ involves the social world at large which one belongs to and interacts with as a living being amongst others rather than selecting suitable objects with which to fuse. The poetry of Don Juan is ostentatiously sourced in precisely the unpredictable company in which his hero mingles (urban Seville, sailors, pirate island, harem, soldiers and generals in battle, Russian and English aristocrats both cold and promiscuous, footpads, country-estate life, Muslim and Catholic orphans, ghosts). Similarly, Byron’s conversational voice in the poem derives obviously enough from the ‘better company’ of many different kinds and nationalities with which he has mingled rather than fused. One of Byron’s most striking traits was his ability to adhere unswervingly to certain clear convictions and principles such as liberty – hence his disdain for the Lakers who had, in his view, swerved from theirs – while at the same time being far more aware than most people of the ambiguities, intricacies, secret connections, dead-ends, and historical twists and turns that shape the bewildering but sustaining paradoxes inherent in any attempt to understand life or establish clear value judgements that will apply to myriad circumstances. For instance, Delacroix assumes, not unreasonably, that Bonnivard, as celebrated in Byron’s prefatory sonnet, is the subject of The Prisoner of Chillon. Without Byron, Delacroix would never have chosen Bonnivard 188

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as his subject. But Byron’s dramatic monologue, despite the sonnet that introduces it, does not seem in the least concerned to activate the resonances naturally attaching to this Protestant witness to fortitude and faith in the face of injustice. Milton – another poet for whom ‘Liberty’ was a central value and whom Byron consequently admired – would most certainly have sought these out. Even Sir Walter Scott, less of a champion of liberty, would have carefully reconstructed the intricacies of Swiss politics and made something of the fact that Calvin returned to Geneva in the year of Bonnivard’s release. Byron does not, though he makes a casual nod to the possibility that he might have done some of this in the citation from a history of Geneva that became the ‘Advertisement’ to the poem.1 He does not even align his prisoner with the liberal Romantic valuation of liberty placed in the heart and mind, so wonderfully articulated in the sonnet prefixed to The Prisoner of Chillon. On the contrary, in the poem itself the frame of mind that the prisoner ends up with is so far from the historical or the Romantic that he confesses: It was at length the same to me, Fettered or fetterless to be. (The Prisoner of Chillon, lines 372–73)

The nameless prisoner does not sound like Bonnivard, or like one of the ‘sons’ of ‘Liberty’ celebrated in the sonnet, who when ‘consigned’ to fetters extend ‘Freedom’s fame […] on every wind’ (lines 5–8). Manifestly The Prisoner of Chillon tells a very different tale from Fidelio. Equally, it is clear that liberty is not always ‘Brightest in dungeons’. Should we conclude, then, that Byron falters in his belief in liberty? Or, perhaps, might we hazard that only someone passionately attached to liberty would be so interested in tracking its extinction in a consciousness ostensibly devoted to it? We might compare this supposition with Shelley’s addiction to deconstructing those ideal images of love to which he is so passionately attached. The author of Julian and Maddalo certainly had an ambiguously troubled sense of Byron’s attitude to liberty. The word ‘licence’ causes us similar problems. ‘Licence’ is customarily the unacceptable face of liberty. It is so for Saint Paul, worried that 1 Byron’s note (reproduced at CPW IV, 450–51) was first made the ‘Advertisement’ to The Prisoner of Chillon in the seventeen-volume Collected Works published by Murray in 1832.

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his demolition of the claims of the Law might be construed as an invitation to absolute licence. It is so for Milton, lover of liberty but not of Comus’s licence. Indeed, a line from one of Milton’s sonnets had become a polemical commonplace, invoked by Johnson in his political pamphlets of the 1770s against the spirit of Wilkes and often in the Regency period against the spirit of France by reviews like the Quarterly and the British: ‘Licence they mean when they cry libertie’.2 Byron may have this in mind when he qualifies his defence of ‘licence’ as the ‘Soul’ of his ottava rima style by adding: ‘—at least the liberty of that licence if one likes—not that one should abuse it’ (BLJ VI, 208). Literally, ‘licence’ means to be allowed or authorized to do something. Licence, provided it is of the right kind (from the Archbishop of Canterbury in this case), will authorize Byron’s marriage in Seaham as readily as, in the extended sense of the word, it will authorize Byron’s sexual abandon when he first arrives in Venice. Milton was official censor deputatus to Cromwell, and may have lost his job for licensing a translation of a Socinian catechism. Poets are customarily allowed more licence than other writers so there is, it seems, some connection between poetry and licence. However, Byron’s poetic ‘licence’ is, in Southey’s eyes, intimately connected with satanic licentiousness. The French Revolution’s Tree of Liberty is a value for the young Wordsworth and for Byron, who wishes to see ‘Freedom’s stranger-tree grow native’ in Spanish soil (CHP I, 90), but for others it was seen as presiding over the sexual and judicial licence of the Reign of Terror. Equality is associated more readily with liberty than with licence. The French Revolution rests upon the identity of the two but Marino Faliero, champion of his own and his people’s liberty, distinguishes sharply between them: ‘Not rash equality but equal rights’ (III, ii, 170). Sardanapalus, on the other hand, initially associates liberty with licence or something very close to it. So does Don Juan. But only up to a point. Those early readers who did not much like Don Juan tended to associate its poetic licences of rhyme and diction with the poem’s sustained study of a variety of extra-marital sexual relations in differing 2 Sonnet XII, line 11 (John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. S.P. Revard [Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009], 299). See Christine Rees, Johnson’s Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 82–94. One of the Quarterly’s invocations of Milton’s line with which Byron would certainly have been familiar was its attack on the open couplets, loose morals and dangerous politics of Hunt’s Story of Rimini (Quarterly Review, 14 [January 1816], 474).

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social worlds. There is no real equivalent to either in any other poetry of the time. For most nineteenth-century critics, both kinds of licence – poetical and sexual – were evidence of what was also wrong with Byron’s political defence of liberty. Byron did not quite see it that way. He insisted that Don Juan was a moral poem. Its form, however apparently novel and improvised, follows Italian, English and Scottish practice. Byron tells us so by producing a version of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore. Don Juan rhymes, often outrageously, but normally strictly, and its metre is much more orthodox than that of Southey’s Thalaba or Coleridge’s Christabel. In the same way, Byron is at some pains to tell us that his sexual frankness is much less extreme than Smollett’s or Fielding’s or Sterne’s. His licence is licensed – by which he means that it has ‘precedents’.3 It also has limits. Shelley describes love-making but Byron does not. Indeed, when the first occasion in the poem arrives where he might do so, he asks the reader whether he may ‘take a liberty’ and then explains that this liberty ‘is a poetic licence’ (I, 120). Byron’s jokes are clever and pertinent. It is worth unpicking this one. To ‘take a liberty’ is a phrase that belongs to courteous behaviour when someone uses it as an excuse for an insufficiently accommodated request. The formula, as in the poem, is ‘may I take the liberty of doing something?’ It expects the answer ‘yes’. But the formula may have sexual overtones, as in ‘may I take the liberty to sit beside you, hold your hand, etc?’ If we say that someone ‘took a liberty’, we are likely being censorious and the implication is often sexual. This is not the sense here. Byron’s request confirms him to be a courteous narrator who is aware of social forms. The modern phrase ‘the implied reader’ is not quite for him. By preference, and certainly in the ottava rima poems, Byron as narrator talks to an explicitly addressed reader. Keats does not, and indeed does not ‘narrate’ at all in Byron’s deliberated sense. Byron is politely asking this reader to allow him to take the liberty of moving a few months forwards in the story without relating what happened in between. He does so out of a larger courtesy. He will not describe the love-making of Juan and Julia, as he will not, later, describe consummation with Haidee, Dudù (except via the device of a dream that will signal it will take place), Catherine or Fitz-Fulke (in the latter case we cannot, for once, be sure that it has taken place at all, though we presume so). The 3 See my essay ‘Lord Byron: Poetry and Precedent’, in Literature of the Romantic Period, 1750–1850, ed. B. Beatty and R.T. Davies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1976).

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‘liberty’ that Byron takes therefore is one that enables him to tell the story as he pleases – that it is to say he is claiming ‘poetic licence’ – but its other purpose is to avoid a description of love-making that could not be accommodated within the polite norms of communicating with an equally polite stranger – the reader – whom he never wholly abandons. So he takes a narrative liberty in order to avoid sexual licence and, with consummate wit, points out that this is a ‘poetic licence’. So far so good. But if we ask where the narrator, with so much delicate concern for the reader’s feeling, actually takes us to, we find that he takes us to the rudest section in the canto. Julia is hiding Juan in her bed while, from the same bed, she delivers a tirade to her unfortunate husband in defence of her chastity. Byron now uses his customarily courteous acknowledgement of omission to quite different purpose. It becomes a comedian’s shared risqué joke with an audience complicit in his knowingness: He had been hid—I don’t pretend to say    How, nor can I indeed describe the where— Young, slender, and pack’d easily, he lay,    No doubt, in little compass, round or square; (I, 166)

This is about as licentious as Byron gets in Don Juan though we are aware of the narrator’s roving eye earlier on:          the black curls strive, but fail,    To hide the glossy shoulder, which uprears Its snow through all;—her soft lips lie apart, And louder than her breathing beats her heart. (I, 158)

This is perhaps the sort of erotic warmth that the Reverend Mr Becher might have reproved in Byron’s Southwell days. It is ‘licence’ of a different sort to the narrator’s poetic licence. My friend Peter Cochran, a scholar steeped in Byron’s poetry, took much delight in finding numerous examples of it, both heterosexual and homosexual. But Byron clearly calculates that neither the farce of Juan’s hiding and discovery nor the warm drawing of Julia’s panting charms breaches the magic line of which he is always aware. He will give us a comic picture of Juan and Julia in bed (but not an erotic one), yet he will remind the reader, through his engagingly enthusiastic (but not quite prurient) description of Julia’s attractive body, why Juan is in bed with her in the first place.

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Even here, it is important to emphasize that it is not only her body but her energetic spirit, evidenced in her improvised tirade, that attracts both reader and Juan to the body which it animates. These calculations are to be admired, and they indicate how sharp and how persistent Byron’s thinking is about liberty and licence in art and life. We would have to go back via Fielding to Chaucer to find a similar ability to mediate between bawdiness and delicacy. Any illustration of Julia in bed (energetically haranguing her suspicious husband while certain lumps suggest the hidden presence of Juan to the informed eye) might serve as a companion picture to Delacroix’s portrait of Bonnivard in chains. The picture would be an icon of liberty as well as licence, and the two illustrations together would suggest the play of Byron’s thinking on the subject. There are not, so far as we know, any illustrations of this scene in the various illustrated editions of Byron common in the nineteenth century. It was too licentious for the Victorians. A common subject for their illustrators was the intrinsically more risqué scene of the clothed Haidee beholding the naked body of the washed-up Juan and relishing, in the midst of her concern, ‘so white a skin’ (an unconscious precursor of Manet’s mingling of clothed and erotic unclothed in Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, which so shocked its first viewers). What must have appalled Victorian readers of Canto I is not only the assault on marital values but that any reader is bound to be cheering for the magnificently deceitful wife rather than the peevishly deceived husband. Byron then shares with his reader a sense of injustice at the cutting off of Julia’s life by her imprisonment – in a convent rather than the castle at Chillon – just as he expects the reader to be disturbed by Haidee’s death and (though the narrative deliberately obscures this) the fate that may await Gulbeyaz as the result of meeting Juan. There can be no question as to Byron’s sympathy with the exigencies of what he later calls the ‘she condition’ (XIV, 24). Yet Byron, as ever, is also interested in Julia’s sudden change from the vitality of her independence into the sullen enclosure of unchanging aftermath, for which her very vitality is in part responsible. He is interested too in the way in which she handles this knowledge, seeks to control it, and yet elements in her habitual personality, even her powers of attraction and control, are all too clearly exposed in the self-conscious letter that she writes to Juan. Equally important is the reader’s first realization that the desires of innocent Juan are as responsible for a trail of horrific consequences as the malign contrivances of the original Don Juan. Byron deftly passes this problem

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to his readers. Byron preserves all kinds of balances. We might say that this, too, is what liberty is for him. As we have seen, Byron was acutely aware of a tradition of writing that had often made these delicate calculations between licence and decorum. He consciously stood within it and invoked it as a defence when attacked. The texts in this tradition were, as he well knew, now becoming unreadable in the new breed of mixed company that allowed only grosser dividing lines between decorum and vulgarity. But the tradition was not, in his view, fundamentally licentious at all. It is true that Byron acknowledges Pope and Sterne and Restoration literature are sometimes indecent but the general lines of his defence, especially in his invocation of Fielding’s example, assert the legitimate inclusions of the diction and references of these writers within a polite but liberal tradition. It was the hypocrisy and anaemic prurience of his contemporaries that he wished to pillory rather than in any way implying acceptance of the view that tradition is corrupt and corrupting. Indeed, when Byron defends the liberty of Don Juan’s licence he goes on to compare it to ‘trial by Jury and Peerage—and the Habeas Corpus’ (BLJ VI, 208). Even if in this particular case he is also teasing his Tory publisher about the fact Habeas Corpus was currently suspended, he connects the defence of his allegedly licentious poem with the customary invocation of political tradition to defend present liberties under attack. Such invocations had become most customary for Whigs defending English liberties against George III’s political ambitions. ‘Liberty’ here, as in Gray’s ‘Progress of Poesy’ (completed six years before George came to the throne), looks for home-grown precedents in Anglo-Saxon law, the Magna Carta, the 1688 ‘Revolution’ and so on. If some new practice was condemned as revolutionary and destructive, then this tradition could be and was invoked to justify its customary nature. So it was by Richard Price, who argued in 1789 that the French Revolution was only a version of 1688. Burke, famously, denied that such an argument worked in this case. The liberty offered by the French Revolution, though it often used the same classical republican references as English Whigs to justify its actions and its preferred form, presented itself in practice as more unprecedented than this. No one accused the Anglo-Saxons or Runnymede Barons or the Seven Bishops of 1688 of being in league with ‘licence’, but The Anti-Jacobin takes for granted the connection between the French Revolution’s proclamation of liberty and unbridled licence, and makes much fun of it. Byron read it more enthusiastically than he read the 194

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reform-minded journal The Examiner, and yet he could never wholly condemn the Revolution.4 The problem for him is made more acute by the figure of Napoleon, who is the embodiment of the Revolution in the sense of ensuring that changes cannot be reversed but who rules in a more authoritarian fashion than Louis XVI or George III ever could. Similarly, Napoleon brings revolutionary change to many other nations, but also seeks to bind them to his imperial rule. Byron, as John Clubbe suggests, found in Napoleon ‘an irresistible lodestone’ but, once again, he has to try to find a magic line, a decorous line increasingly unrecognizable to his contemporaries, through these contrarieties.5 We cannot simply take Byron, as Verdi or Mazzini take him, to be the unqualified apostle of the libertarian ideals of Romantic nationalism.6 Neither can we endlessly deconstruct him or follow his deconstructions into a morass of indeterminacies as though this is definitive too. We can simply say that Byron loved freedom and we can mean something by it. Literary criticism needs to be capable of asserting simple ‘Truths that you will not read in the Gazettes’ (DJ IX, 10) as well as insisting upon the infinitely complex ways that truth has to ‘navigate o’er fiction’ (XV, 88).

4 This may seem a bold claim but The Anti-Jacobin, edited by Gifford, provided the parodic and satirical models (by Canning and Frere) for Byron’s attacks upon the Lakers. Byron also found in the bantling of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, arguably the heir of The Anti-Jacobin, one impulse for the narrative voice of Don Juan. For some of the criticism which would dissent from my view that The Examiner is less important, see Jonathan Gross, Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Jane Stabler, ‘Religious Liberty in the “Liberal”’ (2015), on Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. D.F. Felluga (https://www. branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=jane-stabler-religious-liberty-in-the-liberal); David Woodhouse, ‘The Dedication to Don Juan Re-Examined: Hazlitt – Wat Tyler – Don Giovanni’, The Byron Journal 45.2 (2017). 5 John Clubbe, ‘Byron, Napoleon, and Imaginative Freedom’, in Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron, ed. Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe and Charles E. Robinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 191. 6 Mazzini is a brilliant but simplifying expositor of Byron. Verdi’s political attitudes are not very complicated but he is attracted to the darkness of Byron’s imagination, as in his version of The Two Foscari, as well as to Byron’s liberal nationalism.

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The Paradoxes of Nationalism The Paradoxes of Nationalism Byron’s intense sympathy with distinct cultures and emerging nationalisms is obvious, but so too is his not unreasonable claim to be, like Socrates or Erasmus, a ‘citizen of the world’.1 It seems probable that if, as Byron does, we attach huge value to specific things – for example, Albanian song, Newstead Abbey’s particular ghost, Haidee’s beautiful black eyes – then we cannot escape relativizing and diminishing that specific life we cherish. We are bound to discard what we seek out so wholeheartedly. From this point of view the path of Harold, who registers each locale he visits but compulsively moves on to fresh (about to be stale) vistas, is the same as that of the traditional Don Juan, who denigrates and denies the moment of encounter with each separate woman by valuing nothing else. Don Juan is a life figure, but he brings the kiss of death, a blight of shame, to each person who yields to his heartless embrace. Tourism repeats the same pleasure-led, pleasureless spoliation. It is born of a declared love for particularity but it brings the same patronizing and undifferentiating attentiveness to all the compliant cultures that learn how to flaunt and package their precious inner histories for the half-interested stranger. The splendid Byron exhibition held at the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere in 1989–90 had many pictures of Byron’s Harrow, Rhine, Italy, Greece.2 It had, too, surprisingly large quantities of human hair. 1 Socrates is quoted as saying that he was neither an Athenian nor a Greek but a ‘citizen of the world’ in the fifth section of Plutarch’s De Exilio. Erasmus wrote in reply to repeated invitations to become a citizen of Zurich: ‘I wish to be a citizen of the world, not of a single city’ (Opus Epistolarum des. Erasmi, ed. P.S. and H.M. Allen, 12 vols [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–58] V, 217 [Letter 1342]). Byron puts a passage from Fougeret de Monbron’s Le Cosmopolite, ou le Citoyen du Monde (1753) as the epigraph to Childe Harold I–II (CPW II, 3). 2 ‘Byron: A Dangerous Romantic?’: an exhibition held at the Wordsworth Museum, Dove Cottage, Grasmere from 19 April 1989 to 15 January 1990.

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Each lock of hair was identified except for one. Byron had written on an attached piece of paper the year (1812, I think) and the admission that he forgot to whom it had belonged. The anonymity here was not so much the product of any particular act of forgetfulness. It was brought into being by the energy spent in specifying the others. It represented a habit of cherishing which renders anonymous. So, we might argue, does nationalism. Byron, something of a tourist himself in his enraptured yet fickle travelling, presented an array of natural cultures to his armchaired readers. He did so in the guise of Childe Harold and then of Don Juan. In each case, Byron appears to subvert the mode that he presents. Harold, ostensibly a pilgrim, flees from rather than towards his rest. Byron’s Don Juan is not at all anxious to behave like his Renaissance archetype. He stays put by inclination. It is only external circumstance that moves him on. What is the relation of pilgrimage to nationalism? It seems, at first glance, that pilgrimage already contains the same self-contradiction that we have already discerned. The Protestant Reformers’ hostility to pilgrimage was, we may hazard, provoked by the sheer proliferation and rivalry of innumerable holy places and things by the end of the Middle Ages. Such proliferation, the product of repeated special claims, appears to nullify special claims as such. However, Protestant iconoclasm may sting itself to death in time. Instead of holy rituals and holy places, Europeans were pointed to a holy text which, though mysterious, had to be rendered intelligible. The nations of Protestant, and then also Catholic, Europe increasingly founded their identity on their own language, which was now authorized by vernacular versions of the Scriptures. A curious thing then happened. Europeans no longer shared the same rituals or respected the same holy places. The ‘sacred’ summoned them now to their own vernacular traditions or to a Latin liturgy defiantly maintained (sometimes for nationalist reasons) but no longer representing, except as a sign of contradiction, the universal tradition of Christendom in the Western church. Latin culture continued, however, as a shared, potentially secular humanism. Pilgrimages did not disappear, but the Grand Tour began to dictate the routes and also the character of European travel. Inevitably, the secular pilgrim encountered and was shaped by the modern national cultures, emerged or nascent, that now crown the excavated tells of classical civilisation. Even the Alps, an irritating obstacle to the Christian pilgrim or northern scholar intent on visiting St Peter’s or Cicero’s Rome, becomes an object of curiosity 198

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in its own right, the home of a native people piping pastoral songs who can be drawn in sketches much like mountain goats. One of the reasons for the extraordinary success of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is that the poet activated so many of the resonances latent in an account of European travels ending up in Rome. All the different figurations of loss and invincibility presented in the poem terminate and cohere in the image of the damaged eternal city that concludes it. Rome is, for orphans of the heart, a lone mother of dead empire, a city of the soul and, but momentarily, ‘my country’ (IV, 78). It is the absolute confirmation of loss, and therefore of the elegiac as content and form of all human specifications. But, as confirmation of the triumph of form itself over the human loss that it signifies, it is an emblem ‘spared and blest by time’ (IV, 146). Ruined but surviving Coliseum and perfectly preserved Pantheon reinforce a single meaning in which loss becomes the material for something formally ineradicable. As such Rome remains, surprisingly, an appropriate terminus for pilgrimage. Byron often surprises in this way by offering a mode (here, pilgrimage), subverting it, but finally endorsing it in an unexpected fashion. Also present, however, in this celebration of what endures in the guise of loss, is Italian nationalism. Byron himself, of course, played some part in the early comic-opera stages of the Carbonari movement, and his poems, especially Childe Harold, were of immense importance in fashioning that fusion of liberal, conservative, humanist and romantic sentiment that echoes from Spain’s resistance to Napoleonic invasion through to the 90-day transformation of Eastern Europe when the Berlin Wall fell. Part of this fusion was already in place when Byron wrote. James Thomson and Thomas Gray, for instance, assumed that political freedom in England and elsewhere is authorized by all that is best in classical and European culture.3 The power of art formally to transcend the conditions of mutability and suffering, out of which it emerges, is seen as a pledge of eventual political freedom for all who aspire to it. This note sounds particularly strongly in the early cantos on Spain and Greece, but it never wholly displaces that oscillation between the bitter 3 The five parts of Thomson’s Liberty (1735–36), for example, are (i) Ancient and Modern Italy compared, (ii) Greece, (iii) Rome, (iv) Britain, (v) The Prospect. The last part is a prospect of the eventual coming of coming of ‘Liberty’ to the whole of Europe and beyond, beginning with France. Both ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard’ by Gray take for granted that poetry’s progress is the same as that of ‘Liberty’ and liberal ideas generally.

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and serene elegy that so marks Childe Harold. In the Italian canto, Byron is even more deft in his intertwining of hope and hopelessness, liberty, art, defeat and constraint. He compares the present condition of Venice, independent no longer, to that of the Athenian army, led unsuccessfully by Nicias against Syracuse. Plutarch tells the story at the end of his life of Nicias. Some of the captured Greeks were saved from slavery, so it is alleged, by singing or interpreting verses by Euripides. Hence,    When Athens’ armies fell at Syracuse,    And fetter’d thousands bore the yoke of war,    Redemption rose up in the Attic Muse,    Her voice their only ransom from afar;    See! As they chant their tragic hymn, the car    Of the o’ermaster’d victor stops, the reins    Fall from his hands—his idle scimitar    Starts from its belt—he rends his captive’s chains, And bids him thank the bard for freedom and his strains. (IV, 16)

Byron then applies this legend as a hopeful parallel to Venice’s present state: the fact that Venetians still preserve the ‘choral memory’ of Tasso ‘should have cut the knot | Which ties’ them to their Austrian oppressors (IV, 17). The allusion is hopeful because the Athenians were indeed freed by their love and knowledge of art; moreover, Tasso’s poem tells of a Gerusalemme that is finally liberata. On the other hand, the Athenians chant the ‘tragic hymn’ and have been hopelessly defeated. We have been told, too, only a few stanzas earlier that ‘In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more’ (IV, 3), and Tasso himself was never liberated. Byron, here and elsewhere, has a capacity to say two things at once in a way that is never careless or stands in need of further deconstruction. We feel – simultaneously – hope, indignation, irrevocable defeat, and art’s comprehending mimesis of these contrary poles of loss and endurance (‘fell at Syracuse’, ‘bore the yoke’) and triumph (‘Redemption rose up’). Anything further than this would tip the balance towards the liberal optimism that Byron, despite his sympathy for it, could never endorse without reservation. The furthest he goes in Childe Harold is Yet, Freedom! Yet thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind; (IV, 98)

The impossible life of ‘Freedom’ cannot be suppressed here but it seems to exist in some collusion between failed circumstance (the precipitating 200

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reference is to the French Revolution) and the indelible permanence of style. When the poem finally settles in Rome, it is harder still to allow for nationalist reverberations. The mediaeval tribune Rienzi is allowed a stanza to himself but Freedom’s thunderstorm has dwindled down to this: Rienzi! last of Romans! While the tree Of Freedom’s withered trunk puts forth a leaf, Even for thy tomb a garland let it be— (IV, 114)

Of course, such a reference undercuts itself. The reader is supposed to supply a certain indignant non-compliance with the sentiment here (Rienzi must not be the ‘last of Romans’). The same reader response, but working in the reverse direction, is elicited by Freedom’s wind-defying banner. We accept it as splendid rhetoric and acceptable sentiment precisely because we know that it could not be accepted as literal truth without its self-proclaimed hyperbole. Notwithstanding these manoeuvres, Childe Harold ends up with a weaker sense of nationalist aspiration than when it began. Why is this? Byron’s poem works so well, we have insisted, because it activates and, in some measure, synthesizes different registers. Rome – republican, imperial, papal, Renaissance, antiquarian and modern Italian – is an embodiment, richer than Spain, Greece, Switzerland or Venice, of these impossibly harmonized contrarieties. It is modern Rome that most resists this integration. Byron shows us contemporary Spain, Greece and Rhineland as well as their tainted golden past. He says almost nothing about contemporary Rome.4 Indeed this most inclusive of poets is scrupulously careful to fend off certain registers altogether. This is because Byron’s poetry handles contradictions and paradoxes continually: they are his métier, his stock in trade, and he knows when they can be put to work and when they cannot. He would not blush, or modify his reference to Tasso’s continued life in Venetian song, if a hostile critic had pointed out that stanza 3 tells us that Tasso’s echoes are now ‘no more’. On the 4 Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 315: ‘The picture of a Rome dominated by ruins and monuments but deserted of people is typically Romantic, and is often delivered to the reader (or viewer) under that most explicit of Romantic signs, the moonlight. The greatest English text offering such a scene is of course Childe Harold Canto IV. This Byron text is as central as it is, in the iconography of Romanticism, because its emblems belong to more than one form of Romantic consciousness’.

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contrary, he would assume that the critic knew little of life or of poetry: ‘But if a writer could be quite consistent, | How could he possibly show things existent?’ (DJ XV, 87). Yet the idea of Rome is hard to fuse with Italian nationalism. Even after 150 years of Italian unification it has never become what London, Paris, or even Madrid and Berlin represent for their respective nations and, in the Treaty of Rome, the city again threatens or promises to subsume the independent nations that met there to ratify it. Byron understands this from the beginning. It is one thing to transfer the rhetoric of republican Rome to the revolutionary freedom of new nation states in North or South America. Byron’s poetry is always ready to salute Washington or Bolivar as the re-embodiment of Roman virtus. However, Rome is, evidently, a supra-national ideal, which can be seen as authorizing either an empire such as Napoleon’s, or a universal brotherhood, but not nationalism in itself. Such an empire or brotherhood may be seen in secular, Enlightenment terms or in the Catholic, Universal Rome of Saint Peter and the popes. Denial of this image and function of Rome at the Reformation was an important step towards Europe’s division into independent nation states. Byron acknowledges this past history and, brilliantly, unites conservative and liberal sentiments in stanza 47 of Canto IV. The addressee is Italy but the reader momentarily fuses past Rome and Italian nationalism without noticing what is happening:             Roll

Parent of our Religion! whom the wide Nations have knelt to for the keys of heaven! Europe, repentant of her parricide, Shall yet redeem thee, and, all backward driven, the barbarian tide, and sue to be forgiven.

Here we conflate the Roman nurture of universal Christianity, Henry IV kneeling to Gregory VII at Canossa, the Reformation denial of the Papacy (papa = parent), the birth of nation states and the present liberal necessity for enlightened Europeans to come to the aid of Italy by driving the Austrians out of it, inevitably displacing the Papal States. Only Byron, by his insistent contemplation of historical processes and by his Shakespearean breadth of sympathy, could have so deftly presented and concealed these massive contradictions that yet may coalesce. For the most part, he is careful not to sustain this difficult note beyond a few lines. Rome cannot easily be cast as the central focus of national unity for Italians. We can see this diffidence at work most clearly in Byron’s stanzas on the Coliseum. 202

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The Coliseum stanzas contain a contradiction that Byron can easily manage, though it may disconcert the reader. Essentially, they celebrate the building and Rome itself as emblems of loss, endurance and style. Even the horror of the ‘bloody Circus’ (IV, 139) does not contradict this moralized aesthetic. Byron, however, plays a kind of trick on his readers. As we begin to read stanza 140 (‘I see before me the Gladiator lie’) and follow that magnificently Roman account of style in extremis (‘his manly brow | Consents to death, but conquers agony’), we take for granted that the formal properties of this death go along with the Coliseum that has staged it and with the Roman audience that carefully attends to it ‘In murmured pity, or loud-roared applause’ (139). Here is a grim but impressive version of Roman esprit in the massively willed building, dedicated to nothing else but this. The gladiator stanza is based on a very well-known sculpture that formed part of every Grand Tour. Hence we find bound together ruin, pain, will and artistic style. In the celebrated preceding passage (130–38), Byron, much like the gladiator, has exposed his own agony and its conquering in stanzas that, like the statue, ‘will breathe when I expire’. All this is Roman or, at any rate, neo-Roman. But as we read on, we discover that the gladiator’s death is hailed by an ‘inhuman shout’ and then (the leap is unexpected) we are taken from the eye-spectacle of public death to the interior vision of a heart:    He heard it, but he heeded not—his eyes    Were with his heart, and that was far away;    He reck’d not of the life he lost nor prize,    But where his rude hut by the Danube lay   There were his young barbarians all at play,   There was their Dacian mother—he, their sire,    Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday—    All this rush’d with his blood—Shall he expire And unavenged? —Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire! (IV, 141)

The concatenations here are bewildering in their diversity when spelt out, but the reading experience is wholly coherent. The gladiator, far from being Roman, is a Dacian. Nations have been subjugated in order to ‘make a Roman holiday’. The central human experience here is not linked with Rome and her Coliseum but with the Goths, who will later revenge such deaths by raiding Rome, destroying the Coliseum and laying the foundations for a Europe of unsubjugated separate nations. ‘Barbarian’, which had its customary bad odour in stanza 47 (‘Roll the barbarian tide’), has now very nearly become an honourable word. 203

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The ‘young barbarians all at play’ make a pastoral contrast with the butcherous play of Romans. The achievement of modern Europe is seen, in this stanza, as founded upon the destruction of ancient Rome. Curiouser still, the interior, almost Christianized heart of the gladiator, which becomes its agony rather than conquering it, is the basis for a summons to revenge and anger (‘glut your ire’). Yet it was precisely such revenge which was rejected in those earlier self-revelatory stanzas in which Byron declared ‘That curse shall be Forgiveness’ (IV, 135). Once again, the contradictions are real but reconcilable. Byron undoubtedly identifies himself with the gladiator’s exile from his wife and child and transfers the revenge that he has willed – but withdrawn – from English high society to the certain future destruction of Rome. What we need to note for present purposes is simply the insight that Byron authorizes here into the inherent opposition between Rome and independent nations. In stanza 139 the historical Coliseum crowd is summoned into the poem by ‘And here the buzz of eager nations ran’. Nearly the same phrase is repeated in stanza 142: ‘And here, where buzzing nations choked the ways’. These ‘buzzing nations’ have become, and now make up, ‘the Roman million’, who are thus brought together to witness and enjoy the spectacle of their own degradation in the death of a Dacian. This transformation of nations into imperial super-state is phantasmagoric and trivial:             And

Here, where the Roman million’s blame or praise Was death or life, the playthings of a crowd, My voice sounds much—and fall the stars’ faint rays On the arena void—seats crush’d—walls bow’d— galleries, where my steps seem echoes strangely loud.

If this was the argument, we would not forget it. But Childe Harold is a poem, and we do. No sooner is the Coliseum done with than the canto moves immediately and without intervening transitional device into an evocation of the Pantheon. The displaced perspective is at once restored in doing so. The Pantheon is a ‘Shrine of all saints and temple of all gods, | From Jove to Jesus’ (146). Its circular shape makes ‘A holiness appealing to all hearts’ (147). We rejoice that, despite Gothic ravages, it is ‘Despoiled yet perfect’. How can we accept this instant reinstatement of Rome as universal protector, in space and in time, of all local cults and cultures from ‘Jove to Jesus’? What would a butchered Dacian make of it all? Byron, who was just such a Dacian in his identification with the gladiator, is 204

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suddenly Roman again. It is a matter, in the first instance, of imagining in an old-fashioned way that we have moved, as tourists – whether Grand or package – customarily do, from one building (the Coliseum) to another (the Pantheon). Our perambulation, neutral as such, allows us automatically to adjust presuppositions in order to attend to what we see. It is easy to put this in a different idiom such as that supplied by the brilliant apologue of post-structuralist transience, Paul de Man. Here we would have to talk of the formal incoherence and habitual erasure of all small-scale intelligibilities. The movement from ruined Coliseum to perfect Pantheon undermines the very persistence (perfect Pantheon) that it salutes. There remains, nevertheless, some kind of coherence here. If old-style critics were too confident in their evaluations and interpretations despite the insidious proliferation of alternative certainties that they blithely brought into view, we must not necessarily endorse that mode of paralysed attention which the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, castigating Existentialism in 1968, magisterially articulated as ‘the eternal self-cancelling question mark’.5 It is perhaps unfair to blame nationalism for any of this. Nationalism has been around rather longer than post-structuralism. But nationalism has certainly prepared the ground both for post-structuralism and its necessary dialectic with new historicism. These approaches may be mutually dependent, but it is not clear whether they can really be ‘post’ or ‘new’. This is so because nationalism attaches unlimited value to time and place but thereby relativizes all the particulars that it cherishes. Rome is a gigantic exemplum of this self-cancellation and therefore a fitting resting place for the pilgrimage of Harold/Byron who, self-exiled, deny their own national origin and find themselves simultaneously strangers and at home in a succession of European lands. When Byron awoke in 1812 and famously found himself famous after publishing the first two cantos of Childe Harold, his fame was soon as much international as national. He transcended and confirmed the nationalist movements, which recognized their own features in his verse. They learned from Byron how to orchestrate their own nationalist aspirations but they also learned from him how to live an intensity based on alienation from origins. The intertwining of the two was, primordially, a metaphysical puzzle for Byron (‘the Fall’) and so it appears throughout his verse. Nevertheless, his sharpest and most specific insights are always formulated through his capacity to hold opposites together. This is never done in the manner of 5 Man in History: A Theological Study [1968] (London: Sheed and Ward, 1982), 84.

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Keats’s negative capability. Byron’s understanding, as G. Wilson Knight insisted, is genuinely Shakespearean rather than Keatsian Shakespearean. Strangely, Byron – often formally chary of Shakespeare though steeped in his verse – pays a final tribute to Shakespeare and to his own English nation at the end of Don Juan (despite writing it in Italy and being half-Scots). The most damaging, sustained criticism of any nation that Byron ever made is to be found in the last seven cantos of Don Juan. Yet these ‘English Cantos’ also contain – indeed they may be said to generate – his creation of Aurora Raby, who is saluted as ‘Shakespearian’ (XVI, 48). The point here is that Aurora, amidst her many resonances, undoubtedly represents English life in so far as it can be loved. She is the only heroine in the poem to whom Byron himself moves. To the experienced reader of Byron’s verse, it comes indeed as no more surprising that so profound and positive a tribute to English life (and to Shakespeare) should come out of the heart of Byron’s critique of that life, than that his most delicate and searching examination of the contradictions of nationalism should arise within his stanzas on the world-city of Rome.

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Byron as Political Icon Byron as Political Icon Icon means ‘image’. Any kind of image. But the term comes to us principally via the Greek Church’s settlement of the Iconoclast controversy by a wholesale identification of Orthodoxy with the veneration of icons in ad 843. In the first place, an image of divine life in a human face may be venerated as such. In the second place, the term ‘icon’ comes to us via Warburg’s use of ‘iconology’ and, more especially, Panofsky’s distinction between iconography and iconology where ‘icon’ means a term for the discernment of culturally determined rhetorical meaning in symbolic representations.1 There is already, perhaps, in this kind of erudite attentiveness, an opening to the vulgar world of the advertisement. Panofsky’s work certainly has, bit by bit, dispersed the words ‘icon’ and ‘iconic’ into wider critical use (one thinks of William Wimsatt’s 1954 formulation ‘verbal icon’) and more general and journalistic use.2 Don DeLillo, for instance, suggested in 1992 that what Andy Warhol ‘did with Mao in particular was to float this image free of history, so that a man who was steeped in war and revolution seems in the Warhol version to be a kind of a saintly figure on a painted surface, like a Byzantine icon’.3 This extended use of the term is older than Warburg and Panofsky, of course. Byron was three years old when Gravelot and Cochin produced their Iconologie: an enquiry, amongst other things, into the deliberately constructed imagery of the French Revolution to which its authors were 1 See Aby Warburg, Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum (Leipzig: H. Seemann, 1901), and Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939). 2 William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954). 3 Don DeLillo in an interview with Margaret Roberts: ‘“D” is for Danger – and for Writer Don DeLillo’, Chicago Tribune (22 May 1992), 5:1, 5.

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unsympathetic but attentive.4 We can say that ‘the icon’, neutral in origin, is still primarily religious in reference or implicit extension, that it has acquired political and sociological connotations, and that it is used in a broad aesthetic way which, recently, has become a media cliché. It follows a not dissimilar trajectory to the use of the once restricted word ‘charismatic’, which now, seemingly, is a required property of anyone aspiring to be a British Prime Minister. Religious terminology is regularly raided for the status and aura it confers without much regard for its original provenance. Our first port of call, then, must be the interrelation of political and religious resonance in the emergence of ‘the icon’. The origin of icons is complex and disputed. One origin, it seems, was political. The Byzantine Emperors in the sixth century permitted Christian icons to be publicly exhibited and, Peter Brown tells us, an icon of the Blessed Virgin was hung on the gate of Constantinople at the time of the Avar attack of 626 just as, in pagan times, the images of tutelary deities had been.5 The likely model for these public icons, according to Ernst Kitzinger, was the icon of the Emperor shown customarily as a single semi-divine figure looking straight ahead at the viewer.6 Wheels sometimes come full circle. On 7 November 1919, pictures of Lenin and Marx were hung on the arch above the entrance to Smol’nyi in Petrograd. After Lenin’s death, a special commission was set up to review his images and future imaging. One scheme implemented in 1924 was that each Soviet house should have a Lenin corner with some writings by Lenin and a picture of him. This was explicitly modelled on the krasnyi ugol, or ‘icon corner’, customary in Orthodox houses with icons and the Scriptures.7 The other interesting route for the origin of icons is linked to this. It is, of course, the portraits put on mummies or shrouds or coffins in the Egyptian and then the Romano-Greek Egyptian world. Susan Walker’s book on this topic, first published by the British Museum in 4 Hubert François Gravelot and Charles Nicolas Cochin, Iconologie par figures; ou, Traité de la science des allegories, emblêmes, etc, à l’usage des artistes, 4 vols (Paris: Le Pan, 1791), discussed in Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France: 1789–1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 11. 5 Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), 271. 6 Kitzinger, cited in Brown, Society and the Holy, 265–66. 7 Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 148.

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1997, shows some of these haunting images.8 Here you have a strikingly living face gazing out at the mourner. These eyes of a living person in death become, in the Orthodox icon which transmutes it, eyes that look at you from the other side of death. The icon places the worshipper in direct contact with the holy person who lives for ever in the eternal world opened up for us by the image, but who has being on the far side of the image. This is accomplished especially by the eyes of the image, which are windows into heaven. The painted icon has no force (it is just painted wood) until the light in the eyes is added at the very last stage of painting. The icon is as sacred as anything can be and yet, if Peter Brown is right – and he argues very persuasively – the cult of icons develops as a popular cult at the non-sacred west end of churches just as the liturgical ceremonial at the sacred east end is becoming more elaborate, esoteric and hidden from view. Icons are associated, it seems, with the cult of the holy man as a living icon who remains in stillness and belongs to (and is visited and revered by) the laity rather than to the increasingly distanced hierarchy.9 Icons are thus populist and yet set apart as ‘holy’. So far as I know Byron had no specific interest in this world of icons, though he would have seen enough of them in Greece, Ravenna and Venice. At the age of ten, and fresh from Presbyterian (safely iconoclast) Aberdeen, he saw a religious image perhaps for the first time: the stone icon of Madonna and Child high above the west door of Newstead Abbey. This certainly made a lasting impression on him. He writes about it vividly 24 years later and is principally concerned to stress that the Blessed Virgin ‘look’d round’ (DJ XIII, 61): that is to say, her eyes are alive. But he did know about political icons – did he not have, presumably to the irritation of many, a bust of Napoleon at Harrow? And he did know something about eyes, which always fascinated him just as his eyes fascinated others.10 I am thinking primarily of that striking passage in Marino Faliero where the Doge meets a conspirator and suddenly says that there are eyes ‘in Death’ because his ancestors overlook him (III, i, 94). 8 Susan Walker (ed.), Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 1997). See also Robin Cormack, Painting the Soul: Icons, Death Masks and Shrouds (London: Reaktion, 1997). 9 See Brown, Society and the Holy, 268–70, 272–73, 278 and 283. 10 We all know Coleridge’s reaction to Byron’s eyes: ‘things of light and for light’ (HVSV, 169). Samuel Rogers, not given to mystical insight, said something similar of Byron in Italy: A Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1830), 100–1.

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This is the most striking and important reference in Byron, but he was often susceptible to eyes in pictures of the dead: for instance, the pictures of his ancestors, which Mrs Byron moved from Newstead to Southwell and which, in a letter to Augusta (BLJ I, 72), he says look at him. These, in turn, frighten Don Juan in Norman Abbey: ‘death is imaged in their shadowy beams’ (XVI, 19). The eyes of the ghost of the Black Friar, as reported in the Ballad of the Black Friar, ‘may be seen from the folds between, | And they seem of a parted soul’ (XVI, lines 351–52). If you visited an Orthodox city a thousand years ago, you would see living inhabitants but you would also visit the relics of the local saints and see their icons everywhere just as visible as those of the living. The town is inhabited both by the visible living and the visible dead. The idea was commonplace then and seems strange now. But it would not have seemed strange to Byron. The idea of the Grand Tour, not quite turned into modern tourism, still mediated between the demands of the coming latter insistences and the fading, partly revived, idea of pilgrimage to the ancient relics and living presence of the all-powerful dead. When Byron, as Harold, visited the great cities of Europe, his attitude was remarkably similar to that of a pilgrim – somewhere between the cultural and religious pilgrim. He was as much, or more, interested in the dead of any place that he visited, as he was interested in meeting present inhabitants: the dead, who, as Manfred says about his visit to Rome, ‘still rule | Our spirits from their urns’. When we are conscious of this, then our hearts ‘bec[o]me religion’ (III, iv, 40–41; 38). Byron summons the dead and speaks to them (a dying gladiator, Doge Dandolo, Cecilia Metella), just as he does John Wilkes or George III, in a different idiom, in The Vision of Judgment.11 Is it possible then to be as precise about the character of a political icon as we can be about a religious one? In some ways, clearly not. The term is used by loose transference. But some precision is possible and desirable. I would propose that a political icon is an image of a person who is still alive the other side of death but is not in a transcendent eternity. The best modern examples are Lenin and Che Guevara. Lenin was, as we have seen, often represented through the traditions of religious iconography just as his body, incorrupt albeit non-miraculously, received the devotions of the faithful. But the standard image of Lenin transforms a photograph of him addressing crowds. The rostrum disappears, he is high above massed crowds non-realistically represented, and we recognize him through an agreed iconography. His hand is extended in exhortation, 11 CHP IV, 140ff; IV, 13ff; IV, 103; The Vision of Judgment, especially stanzas 66–67.

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but also in benediction both to the massed faithful and to the onlooker, and there is the beard, the high intellectual forehead, the uplifted chin (not unlike that of Churchill, and embodying similar defiance), as well as the bare head and the cap that sometimes covers it or is sometimes carried in the hand.12 All these things make Lenin instantly recognizable, just as Napoleon is recognizable through his sullen expression, hair brushed down on his left forehead, famous hat, on or off or sometimes elsewhere in the picture. The simplification and repetition of such ingredients, which make for instant recognition, is like that of religious iconography where we might recognize Mary Magdalene through her long hair and accompanying container of nard, or Peter through an aura of the conventional ineffectualness that he still bears in The Vision of Judgment but who remains clearly elevated through the identifying authority of his keys. Yet Lenin does not directly look at us. He addresses us through silent oratory of which his body is the sign. Roughly speaking, we can decode the picture as saying ‘Lenin’s ideas will live for ever and are addressed to the intelligence and to the masses in order to direct them to the wonderful future to which his hand already points and with which he is in direct contact’. This liberated world has some of the characteristics of the transformed heaven and earth of Jewish and Christian prophecy but it exists in an imagined future rather than an imaged eternity. Like Communism in general, it redirects the faith which it erases.13 I think we can undoubtedly call this famous image a political icon. We can do the same with the more directly iconic image of Che Guevara. He has a military cap just behind his curls with a star on it. He looks at us and slightly past us as though, like Lenin, he sees the future of which he is the harbinger. Unlike Lenin, he is not intellectual but sexy. The beard is untrimmed and suggests wayward virility. The colouring is unrealistic and strident. This image, even more than Lenin’s, denies Guevara’s death: though, like that of a martyr (I would hazard that Lenin counts as a confessor and doctor of his church), Guevara’s actual violent death is the source of the image’s success. This too is a political icon but, paradoxically, it presses closer to and is partly in league with the world that it holds in contempt: that of capitalism, advertisements, repeatable images whose surface denies the possibility of meaning or meaningful action – the world of Andy Warhol and his repeatable images of Marilyn Monroe (much 12 See Chapter 4 of Bonnell’s Iconography of Power, where several images and statues of Lenin are also reproduced following page 168. 13 See Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 150–51.

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as Monet, starting the rot, made repeatable, though diversified, images of Rouen Cathedral). Here it is a matter of constituency. Icons of Lenin and Guevara are, or were, designed for devotees – to bolster their faith – and also for possible converts, attracted by such confidence, intelligence and sexual force, who will enter the church that produces the images in the first place and has custody of them. But Guevara, detached from the church of Soviet Communism, was taken up by more general kinds of disaffection in Western youth, which in turn, since youth culture is a capitalist market, converted the political image into a fashion statement, a camera trick and a profitable production line in T-shirts. In the sense that I have tried to establish here, Byron is quite clearly not a political icon at all. He has no constituency (with the important exception of the Greek nation, which nevertheless does not have main custody of his image). His image has never been simplified into a single master set of signs. Is he, potentially, a naval hero like his granddad and Nelson, as in the Sanders portrait? Or is he a dishy Oriental voluptuary, as in the National Portrait Gallery’s 1835 replica by Phillips? Or, when the earlier version of that picture is cited (the one painted by Phillips in 1813, now in the British Embassy in Athens), is he perhaps a Lawrence of Arabia guerrilla fighter who has gone native on behalf of a small nation? Everyone who knows Byron knows the difficulty of recognizing him across the various images that we have of him. This is not a difficulty we find with Lenin, or Che Guevara, or for that matter Wordsworth. Byron has no single image, nor does he have a single political legacy. And yet the poet who wrote ‘there is that within me which shall tire | Torture and Time’ (CHP IV, 137) was entirely right. There was. Byron has eyes in death even if we cannot find any image of him that suggests this directly (the Thorwaldsen statue comes the closest in my view).14 My main point then is that Byron is not a political icon in a technical sense. Neither his image nor his testament is precise enough to serve as this. He is a political icon in a very broad sense, and I will come to this, but first I must deal with an objection to my thesis. As early as November 1918, Lenin gave instructions to Anatoly Lunacharsky, who rejoiced in 14 This essay is based on a lecture originally given at a conference at the National Portrait Gallery in 2002, which give rise to the book Byron: The Image of the Poet, edited by Christine Kenyon Jones including an article by Geoffrey Bond (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). Christine and Geoffrey have recently collaborated on an even more sumptuous volume, Dangerous to Show: Byron and His Portraits (London: Unicorn Press, 2020).

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the title of ‘Commissar of Enlightenment’, instructions for two projects ‘to promote art as a means of agitation’. Lenin thought, correctly, that the masses neither understood nor sympathized much with Bolshevism, so it was necessary to capture their imaginations immediately. To this end he wanted to pull down statues of the tsars and their generals and replace them with huge statues made very quickly, of gypsum in the first instance, of revolutionary heroes.15 The colossal size of these statues recalls the identical concern of the French Revolutionaries to construct huge statues of liberty in the guise of what came to be known as Marianne (a more matronly version was presented to New York in the form of the Statue of Liberty years later) and of Hercules crushing the hydra, where the hydra represents internal enemies. This latter motif was also used by the Communists. But it was not found easy to work out who the friends of the Russian Revolution were. The list eventually expanded to 67. Lenin often attended the unveilings of them, and made a speech. Not all of them were actually built. One on the list was to be of Lord Byron (alongside various prominent Russian socialists, Spartacus, Chopin, Robespierre, Cézanne, Garibaldi, Voltaire, Andrei Rublev and Rosa Luxemburg). I think Byron was the only Englishman or half-Scot amongst them.16 Byron was sometimes admitted to a Marxist pantheon, but his ‘mobilité’ made him an insecure occupant of this particular plinth. He agreed with Pope that there is no abstract form of government that we can call good (HVSV, 518). Personally I think he was a better friend of the people than ever Lenin was and, in any event, I don’t think that this Communist statue of Byron, if it was ever made (perhaps it now lurks in those strange parks of discarded Soviet colossi), disproves my contention that Byron was not a political icon in this formal sense. Evidence of another kind comes from Mark Rutherford’s 1887 novel The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane. The first part of the novel is set in London in 1814, the ‘Year of the Emperors’, when the Tsar was in London after Napoleon’s abdication and Louis XVIII, fêted by the Prince Regent and by London crowds, was en route back to France. The main character in the book, a ‘moderate Calvinist’ radical called Zachariah Coleman, is no more enthusiastic about these events than Byron was. He refuses to doff his cap as Louis XVIII’s entourage passes by, and as a result is roughed up by someone in the crowd. He is helped back to his house by a sympathetic stranger. The house is described as neat and obsessively tidy. Zachariah’s 15 Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 137–39. 16 Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 138.

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wife manifestly has no emotional warmth for her husband. On the walls of the front room ‘were portraits of Sir Francis Burdett, Major Cartwright and the mezzotint engraving of Sadler’s Bunyan’.17 Clearly these are left-wing icons, although two of the figures were still alive and had no eyes in death. It is impossible to imagine any radical having them on their walls now. Burdett was well known as the parliamentary leader of the radicals; he admired Byron’s speech on the Luddites in the House of Lords and was invited by Byron, on the death of his mother-in-law, to arbitrate as a fair man suitable to decide how much money Annabella should get from her mother’s estate and how much should go to Byron himself. The other icon, Major Cartwright, was the author of the petition that Byron defended and presented to the House of Lords in his third and final speech there. Byron is not on the wall. But the stranger, a Major Maitland and himself a revolutionary radical, returns later to the house and brings a book as a present: It has not been out long. Thirteen thousand copies were sold on the first day. It is The Corsair—Byron’s Corsair. My God, it is poetry and no mistake! […] if that does not make your heart leap in you, I’m much mistaken. Lord Byron is a neighbour of mine at the Albany.18

‘In the evening’, we are told, ‘Zachariah took up the book’ and found exactly what answered to his own inmost self, down to its very depths. The lofty style, the scorn of what is mean and base, the courage—root of all virtue—that dares and evermore dares in the very last extremity, the love of the illimitable, of freedom, and the cadences like the fall of waves on a sea-shore were attractive to him beyond measure. More than this, there was Love. His own love was a failure […] But when he came to Medora’s song […] love again asserted itself […] It will give energy to expression, […] enthusiasm to his zeal for freedom.19

This extract serves us well. Byron is not on the wall as an embodied political icon. We know what Burdett, Cartwright, and even Bunyan stand for, and their pictures stand for what they stand for: discernible and fully articulated political positions. Byron never had these and did not want to have them. When he defended Cartwright, he did so from the Independent benches of the Lords and carefully distinguished his 17 [William Hale White], The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane, by Mark Rutherford, edited by his friend Reuben Shapcott (London: Trübner & Co., 1887), 13. 18 [White], The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane, 22–23. 19 [White], The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane, 23, 25–26.

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defence of Cartwright’s absolute right to make such a petition from agreement with what the petition asked for. Byron was defending law and freedom, not a particular political position. Indeed, he had little sympathy for Cartwright’s political stance. My case is perhaps a little incommoded by the fact that later in Rutherford’s novel, Zachariah does have a picture of Byron on his wall and he is there surrounded not simply by radicals but by a whole host of cultural figures not unlike those 67 luminaries of Lenin’s commission. Nevertheless, the main line holds. Zachariah Coleman gets from Byron what Mark Rutherford or Hale White (his real name) got from him and did not get from radical theorists or demagogues: a palpable sense of freedom, energy and courage and a celebration of the impulse and pleasure of loving. It is the belief in these two freedoms – political and sexual – that, from the perspective of the 1840s when Rutherford’s novel is set, has been Byron’s force and legacy to the future. William St Clair’s work on the extent to which pirated copies of Byron’s Tales and Don Juan, together with Shelley’s Queen Mab, reached large lower-class audiences has confirmed Rutherford’s retrospective fiction.20 But this sense of energetic freedom, sexual and political, also reached middleand upper-class readers across Europe and beyond. It was crucial, for instance, to the ideas and confidence of Mazzini, and that is why Lenin admitted Byron to the Revolutionary Pantheon. Insofar as Byron is a political icon, this is what he summons us to. This is familiar territory but one that we have to traverse. Yet we must do so with a caveat. One of the reasons why Byron is now not much read in Italy or Spain or Germany or even in France, nor in Eastern Europe, is that his literary reputation is bound up with his political reputation as the progenitor of the sort of stale sentiments that most of Verdi’s operas (and I do not mean to patronize those amazing equivalents of Byron’s œuvre) inculcate: nationalism set against hereditary imperialism, sexual passion set against restraint, and a touch of the brigand outsider set against establishments. We identify him, naturally and correctly up to a point, with liberal nationalism. Italian and Greek nationalism in particular owe him a huge debt. He identified with ‘the People’ rather than with monarchs, and with outsider rather than insider groups. Who, we may ask a little wearily, does not? He seems old hat: but I don’t in fact think that he is at all. 20 See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 323–38.

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What were Byron’s own political convictions? He was a liberal (did he not agree to set up a journal with that name?). He was a nationalist (did he not defend the integrity of Spain, applaud the emergence of South American nations, belong to both Italian and Greek national movements?). He was a democrat (did he not sympathize with the Luddites rather than with Nottinghamshire landowners, to which by rank he belonged?). He was a revolutionary (did he not applaud revolution and detest the Congresses of Vienna and Verona which undid the effects of revolution?). To each of these we might say, ‘Ah yes, but he had a passionately elegiac sense of the past’ (we have seen this in his interest in eyes in death) – so that the Czech nationalists, for instance, were initially very unhappy to have such an incurable pessimist associated with their bright dreams of a Slav new state. He was, too, a citizen of the world who was immensely sympathetic to the Roman, and even the Ottoman, empire and never much criticized the British empire. He was an aristocrat who hated mobs, and he was suspicious of any revolution that attempted to sever a culture from its past (he thought that the American Revolution, to which he was sympathetic, had done that).21 As soon as we say these things, we are reminded that Byron is no fool and that the whole cast of his mind is engaged as much in constant qualification as it is directed by fervour. The danger of this procedure is that we may end up in the common position of Byron critics that Byron had no fixed position on anything and is simply a mass of unresolved contradictions. I don’t think that this is true either. It is helpful to bring the man himself to his own witness. Here he is talking about William Gifford. Gifford was an out-and-out Tory whose literary judgement Byron accepted absolutely. Gifford loved Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, but his ostensible allegiance was to those great Tory poets, Dryden, Swift and Pope. Byron loved them too and hated their denigration by, amongst others, liberal journalists writing in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner. It was a problem for him. If Gifford’s judgement was so trustworthy, why then was Gifford a Tory? ‘In politics he may be right too’, says Byron, ‘but that with me is a feeling and I can’t torify my nature’ (BLJ IV, 38). Byron means what he says – he isn’t a Tory and 21 William Parry reported Byron saying of the Americans: ‘They disinherited themselves of all the historical glory of England; there was nothing left for them to admire or venerate but their own immediate success, and they become egotists, like savages, from wanting a history … Time, I should hope, would approximate the institutions of both countries to one another’ (HVSV, 571).

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can’t turn himself into one. But the statement, offered to the general listener, and making rough general sense, can only make specific sense to the implicitly Tory listener, for the contention that politics is a feeling before it is anything else and that politics has to do with nature rather than reason is, by the time Byron is writing, certainly a Tory mind-cast: intelligible to Edmund Burke, who formulated it, or Chateaubriand, but not at all intelligible to Tom Paine, William Godwin or Vladimir Ilich (even though the latter would not have become ‘Lenin’ if his brother had not been executed as a regicide and thereby promoted certain feelings in his more famous sibling that belonged to nature rather than to reason). ‘Feeling’ is a tricky word. Byron uses it over and over again. He defines poetry as ‘the feeling of a Former world and Future’ (BLJ VIII, 37). Byron isn’t a theorist and is not interested in giving words definition outside their customary flow of use, although the Oxford English Dictionary credits him with an early usage of feeling in the musical sense of ‘playing or interpreting’ with ‘sympathetic interpretation of the emotional content’. Certainly the newish word ‘sensibility’ is, as it is Jane Austen’s, his ‘aversion’ (BLJ III, 217), and he critiques current emphasis on ‘feeling’ in The Blues (CPW VI, 308). But his customary uses of the word are favourable. He uses it particularly in his political plays – the Venetian tragedies, Sardanapalus and Werner. This suggests, I think, that his remark about Gifford is not a throw-off. The word normally means some sub-section of human powers. Byron uses it like this in Don Juan: Some talk of an appeal unto some passion,    Some to men’s feelings, others to their reason; The last of these was never much the fashion,    For reason thinks all reasoning out of season. (V, 48)

Passion, feeling, reason, are here three distinct potentiae. But the quotation implies that the customary hegemony of reason as the most important of the three is unsustainable, for reason undermines itself. This is Byron’s thought but it is also part of a tide of thinking in the early 1800s. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as part of its eighth definition of feeling ‘a fact or state of consciousness’ or something underlying subsequent divisions into thoughts, sensations and desires, and suggests that this is generated somewhere between Hume and Byron’s time. I think that Byron’s statement that politics ‘with me is a feeling’ is to be interpreted both in the older sense that if politics is a feeling then it is not primarily a 217

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thought, and also in a newer – barely articulated – sense that our political convictions come out of primal but historically fashioned adherences that cannot be easily modified by later reasoning or experience. Such a view is more or less identical to that of Edmund Burke. And I personally agree with this. Does this then make Byron a Tory? Not at all, and we should remember that Burke, without whom the survival of Toryism in the Conservative Party would be unthinkable, was always a Whig and never a Tory. Nor does that last statement mean that Byron is essentially a Whig, as Malcolm Kelsall makes him.22 Whiggism is in disintegration and in generative transformation in Byron’s lifetime. Both Byron and Burke play their parts in that. But it is worth taking the logic as far as we can, since the idea that Byron is basically a left-wing thinker or even a liberal seems to me equally dicey but dispiritingly widespread; and if he was this, then I would be wrong, Byron would be a political icon with a testament rather than a great poet with a distinct political feeling. Logically you only need one contrary to disprove a wrong generalization, so here it is. In Parisina, Byron describes the sudden change of circumstance that attaches to Parisina. Once acclaimed as Duchess regnant, she is, since her sudden accusation of adultery, suddenly deserted by the court that had fêted her. This is how Byron describes the change: Then,—had her eye in sorrow wept, A thousand warriors forth had leapt, A thousand swords had sheathless shone, And made her quarrel all their own. Now,—what is she? And what are they? Can she command, or these obey? (Parisina, lines 156–61)

There can be no doubt, as E.H. Coleridge annotates, that these lines derive from that famous passage in Burke’s Reflections on Marie Antoinette, which Paine so brilliantly derided (‘he pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird’).23 Paine had to deride it for precisely the same reasons as Byron’s for not agreeing with Gifford on politics: Burke’s passage contains so much feeling anterior to any reasoning that we can bring against it 22 Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). 23 Ernest Hartley Coleridge (ed.), Works: Poerty, 7 vols (London: John Murray, 1898–1904) III, 513; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790] and Other Writings, ed. Jesse Norman (New York: Everyman, 2015), 490; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Part One [1791], in Collected Writings, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 448.

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that it can only be answered by Paine’s vicious image, not by rational argument. Byron is using, perhaps referencing, Burke’s phraseology and sentiments, and he is doing so because he sees it as essential to this part of the poem. He needs imagery that elevates Parisina’s status and activates sexual and chivalrous reverences in order to keep us on her side against the alliance of pure power and ignoble clamour that will destroy her. Byron can inhabit all manner of feelings. But it is a Tory feeling that he knowingly inhabits and even recommends at this moment in the poem. It is a poetic strategy, but he is interior to this strategy. I repeat that I am not trying to turn Byron into a Tory. He isn’t. On the contrary, I am trying to show that he is no sort of specific political icon. He may critique marriage and the English Parliament, be rapturously in favour of sexual and political freedom but, unlike Shelley, who proselytizes for both freedoms, Byron does not ask you to sign up to socialism or to free love. He likes both Parliament and marriage – Beppo, however ironically, is an advertisement for both and he thought of marrying Teresa Guiccioli – though both are imperfect. He has no agenda, but he does have specific political feelings that enable him to intervene decisively in certain political events based on his judgement at the time, and this judgement will include on occasion feelings of the kind delineated in this passage of Parisina as well as feelings of the liberal revolutionary kind that someone like Mazzini correctly revered him for and that pushed Byron into identifying, awkwardly but really, with the Carbonari. The allegiances are quite different but the current of feeling can criss-cross between the two. Could we push the argument further, find no limit to Byron’s chameleon ability to inhabit different currents of feeling, and thus agree with Bertrand Russell that Byron’s intense sympathy with emerging nationalist causes in Greece and Italy, his admiration for Napoleon as reviver of heroic vision in a brazen world, and the often dark bias of his understanding make him an important link in the chain, via Nietzsche, as much with Nazi ideology as with the iconography of the early Soviet Union?24 Duncan Wu seems to think so, finding any suggestion that Byron was ‘the Che Guevara of his day’ risible and claiming that Byron’s innermost convictions constitute ‘an endorsement of tyranny’.25 24 Bertrand Russell, ‘Byron and the Modern World’, Journal of the History of Ideas 1.1 (1940). 25 Duncan Wu, 30 Great Myths about the Romantics (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 150, 154.

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This is an easy argument to make (it is for example certainly the case that Byron was sceptical of democracy), but the argument remains superficial and wrong-headed. Byron loathed tight intellectual systems based on unexamined simple premises and he would have loathed the rival collectivisms of communism and fascism that displace the human reaction to constantly changing contingent circumstances by crudely simplifying agendas based on simplifications of human nature and human aspirations. He feels with the aristocrat and with the underdog. He mocks authoritarian systems such as the Venetian, yet he admires its long duration and the beauty as well as the horror associated with it. He dislikes mob rule and demagoguery but sympathizes with ‘the People’. His behaviour in Greece in 1823–24, where he tried and persevered, not without some skill though not with spectacular success, to mediate between the vested interests, opinions and psyches of various insider and outsider groups in order to bring about eventual political success is evidence of his ability to understand a wide range of stances and feelings and direct them to possible action rather than postures. The contrast, for example, with Shelley’s activities in Dublin, where he used his imagination to bombard the political situation rather than understand, and have some effect on, contrary and long-standing currents of feeling, or for that matter with Bertrand Russell’s antics in the Committee of 100, is striking and wholly to Byron’s advantage. The left accuse the right of acting out of unexamined prejudices and irrational feelings in the service of unjust Power. The right accuse the left of a cult of pure Reason, which hates existent forms but cannot create better, even temporarily viable, ones. The opposition is real but there are also rational arguments on the right and real feelings on the left. Byron warily bridges the two. The space in which arguments and feelings merge, where it is not always clear which is generating which, is the sphere of Byron’s constant attention in his poetry and governs the muddled, glorious, inglorious character of his last days and death in Greece. If he is any kind of icon, and I am not sure that he should be or would want to be, it is because he has a wider pattern of sympathy with myriad forms of human life than most of us, while also being more passionate about forms of injustice. That is why large crowds of all classes queued to honour his body in Nottingham and then gathered to see him taken to burial in Hucknall Church. There let him rest.

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Conversations with Gavin Hopps Conversations with Gavin Hopps These two connected conversations between Gavin Hopps (GH) and Bernard Beatty (BB) about the presentation of Byron in this book took place in March 2021 (courtesy of a video link between St Andrews and Chester because of the lockdown restrictions in place at that time). Apart from some very minor amendments for the sake of clarity, this is a full transcript of two unrehearsed conversations. I GH: Well, first of all I want to say thank you. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be involved in this project and I enjoyed reading the manuscript enormously. I wanted to jump straight in by asking first of all something about the ‘recovery’ of Byron, or Byron’s reputation, that Jerome McGann mentions in his illuminating and appreciative introduction. He talks about this recovery over the last 50 years and praises you for your part in this. In turn, in your acknowledgements, you praise Jerome as the person who is most responsible for the fact that Byron’s poetry is taken seriously now. But I wanted to ask about the differences between his and your recovery of Byron for, in spite of this ‘mutual glance of great politeness’ between the two of you, it seems to me that they are rather divergent. So, for example, McGann emphasizes a kind of Enlightenment Byron and, in the introduction to this book and elsewhere, he talks about a more nihilistic Byron. Whereas you foreground, in a sense, Byron’s interest in and indebtedness to scriptural modes, you also highlight his ‘Catholic trajectory’ and speak about the fact that he’s as much related to Jerusalem as Königsberg. So I wonder if you could say something about your recovery of Byron over the last 50 years or so, which seems to be rather different from Jerome McGann’s?

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BB: I think it’s ‘rather more’ indebted to Jerusalem than ‘as much’ – I don’t think Byron is much indebted to Königsberg except in the vaguest of senses. Jerry McGann’s interest in enlightenment and materialism is perfectly proper, because anybody interested in Byron is going to know he has a sort of stake in both those things – they surround him, they contextualize him, they inform him. That’s not something I particularly emphasize, I emphasize almost the opposite of that. But the other term you used, ‘nihilistic’, is a point where we do coincide, though we would give different kinds of emphases to it, and where Jerry, if you like, picks up things from me in his generous introduction to the book: it is because he is, so to speak, battening down or battening into a kind of shared interest, or shared perception, of Byron as ‘dark’. Sometimes really astonishingly dark, and we share that. If I think of myself and, again, this isn’t directly answering your question but in another way is a kind of gloss on it, I left Catholicism for about 11 years in 1961. And in that process of leaving Catholicism – I had already become hooked on Byron – I found the articulation of my processes away from Catholicism, and everything it represented, to be articulated for me by Byron. Byron was part of it. And then again, 11 years later, when I reconverted to Catholicism, I found Byron again articulating my move back. Well, I can’t think of any other poet – leave Catholicism out of it if you want but use something analogous to that – I would find it very hard to think of any other poet who would articulate both those movements. Now I say that because in the first movement I would doubtless be closer to Jerry. Less so in the second movement, which wasn’t exactly out of nihilism (Nietzsche was very important to me and I still respect Nietzsche). So what I’m trying to say is that, though there are demarcations between myself and Jerry, there’s a kind of nucleus there. A dark Byron, very important to my book, was the main preoccupation of those who read him in the nineteenth century and rather slipped out of view. That’s a connecting point. As to the differences, yes, they’re obvious. But then I must pay a kind of debt of thanks to Fiery Dust. I didn’t agree with all of it, of course, but – at the time I read it – it was like a breath of fresh air to have such an intelligent mind reading Byron at a time when Byron’s intelligence was not taken for granted at all. Especially taking Childe Harold seriously, that was fantastically important to me. Jerry actually goes deeper on darker Byron, and I’m quite interested in the recent exchanges I’ve had with him, partly in connection with his new book on Byron, in that he seems to be coming back to that centre of interest. 222

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GH: You brought up Childe Harold in your comments just then, and I wanted to turn to your discussion of that poem in Chapter 1. I think you provide an absolutely wonderful and new reading of the poem where you argue that it’s a unified whole made up of interrupting and divergent voices. To this day, even though it’s many years ago now, I still remember the course on ‘voices in poetry’ that you taught at Liverpool, which I know meant so much to so many of your students. I wanted to dwell with questions of voice for a moment, because you highlight the scriptural structure of the poem and its quasi-musical organization. It seems to me that focusing on voice opens up a new way of thinking about Byron’s difference from the other Romantics, which is so often explained in terms of satire or even religion – Abrams, McGann and so forth. It also suggests other models for reading Byron, which is obviously at the centre of the book. So could you say a little more about the importance of voice and voices in Byron? BB: Yes. Just to go back to Jerry – he is extremely interested in voice in Byron, and sticks up for it like mad and has some intelligent things to say about it. The normal way in which his criticism has been received, precisely because he was a magisterial editor, emphasizes text and the whole cult of text. But actually, he is fantastically interested in voice, which I think anybody would have to be if they were (a) interested in Byron and (b) so to speak ‘got’ by Byron. Byron gets his teeth into you, to mix all the metaphors, through his voice in the first instance. First of all, the power of voice, just as voice – in the same way you can fall in love at first sight – the way you can be absolutely rapt by a corny thing like ‘Remember Me!’ in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, a dying moment where a voice can carry absolutely everything. Yes, Byron could do that, could do that as well as anybody. But it’s also a concatenation of voices, the assemblage of voices, the variety of voices, the ability of voice to proceed from somewhere primal, absolutely primal – consider Byron’s interest in things like screams and shrieks. Absolutely primal: that famous story of him singing a song on the lake at Geneva, where they think he’s going to sing a nice song and he sings his own weird version of the Albanian song – but it comes out as a scream, and it was just to get at them by that scream. Well, that’s one side. The other side is Byron’s extreme alertness to, immersion in, articulacy in conversation, conversational voices. He’s a great conversationalist. He’s a conversationalist because, first of all, he has listened. I don’t quite know how he did it, because his childhood wasn’t very 223

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crowded, you know, just with his mother and so forth, but somewhere along the line he listened, listened, listened, listened and acquired that facility of picking out the different kinds of ways people interact through conversation. Then, of course, there are other kinds of usages of voices in which Byron was extremely interested. He sang a great deal. He was obviously extremely receptive to music. When Mary Shelley remembered him, after his death, she was moved to tears by remembering some song that he used to sing to himself. He absolutely loved opera. So, three different voices. First, the primal voice – you get edges of the primal voice in Childe Harold and Manfred especially. Second, the civilized, conversational voice, which first really comes into English through Ben Jonson and more especially Dryden. Dryden sort of fixes the idea of ‘No, we’re not as good as Spenser and Shakespeare and that was a golden age – but, by heavens, we can converse in a way that they can’t’. That’s perfectly true. Byron is immersed in that conversational idiom which really emerged in the late seventeenth century in England. Third, the proximity to song: when Byron writes short poems, his normal form is song, which is one of the reasons why the criticism of the 30s, 40s and 50s, which was all over Donne’s metaphysical poetry, was not interested in him. GH: Perhaps to switch voices, I wanted to turn to the subject of Byron’s philosophical seriousness which, again, I think lies at the centre of your book. In Chapter 2 you put forward a brilliant defence of the philosophical seriousness of the Tales, and I sensed, behind the discussion of will in Chapter 2, you’re countering a couple of common and insufficiently contested views about Byron – that he’s a child when he thinks, and that his poetry is slapdash or insensitive to language – Goethe and Eliot. So, on the one hand, you talk about Byron’s dramatized exploration of will and sin, and see a philosophical seriousness in that. On the other hand, you discuss the haziness and obscurity that belong to those very notions or those experiences, so that the haziness or obscurity of the poems, in a sense, serves a representative function and has effects on the reader. So I wondered if you could say a little more in relation to Byron’s philosophical seriousness? BB: You’ve wrong-footed me in that your question moved from philosophical seriousness, so I started thinking about that, to the will, so I was priming myself to speak on that, and back to philosophical seriousness. 224

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Philosophical seriousness. It’s kind of an absurd phrase to use about Byron – in the sense that Kant is manifestly philosophically serious or Leibniz, or one might almost say Saint Augustine. Byron manifestly isn’t exactly like that. He’s not a philosopher. He doesn’t like philosophy. Philosophy normally proceeds in Western tradition through argument, and Byron dislikes argument. He isn’t a particularly good arguer, so in that sense he isn’t philosophical. And ‘serious’, again, is another odd epithet to use about Byron, since he makes such fun of serious people. In the sense that Wordsworth is ‘serious’, Byron isn’t serious. And yet, to go back and back and back, philosophy means all kinds of things. It’s Plato and Aristotle. It’s the British empirical philosophers, mainly concerned with knowledge. That shift from metaphysics is important to Byron, but he is metaphysical in the sense that he’s interested in what is. ‘What is?’ is absolutely primary to Byron, and it’s more important than ‘What can we know?’ or ‘What is knowledge?’ He is not a metaphysician in the strictest sense but his life instinct, so to speak, or his consciousness, is rooted in the problem of ‘What is?’ Nevertheless, that shift in attention from metaphysics to epistemology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of course affected him hugely – this whole discussion of knowledge in Don Juan where he makes fun of it and yet he knows he’s inside it. The usual kind of stuff which one can become bored to tears by. The primacy of the material or the primacy of mind goes all the way back to Parmenides, and we keep reviving it. Byron’s formed by that, but he’s not interested in that per se, and he’s not philosophically interested in that. He’s only interested in it because of what I pointed out a moment ago, his metaphysical interest in ‘What is?’ How does knowledge, and the whole kind of discussion voiced in the eighteenth century and still around him, the whole business of consciousness, relate to the larger question: the unsayable but ever-present business of ‘What is?’, ‘What is the case?’, ‘What is underlying the case?’. The possibility of what is. Now, to be concerned with that more or less every minute of the day and in everything he did – whether it’s a childish thing, a so-called serious thing or so-called flippant thing, it doesn’t matter what the devil it is – that is a kind of seriousness. It’s a real, deep seriousness. It makes him a thinker in some deep, proper sense. GH: I should try to wrong-foot you more often, as that was exactly in the territory I was aiming at, even though one would want to put quotation marks around most of the terms that got us there. On to a 225

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related subject – one of the key concerns of the book, it seems to me, is a kind of meta-concern with how we ‘get at’ Byron, or what Byron is doing, or what Byron is good at or why Byron is a great poet. One of the really valuable things you do in the book is to highlight helpful, and perhaps unhelpful, ways of reading Byron. So, for example, thinking about his work in relation to the scriptural model of harmonized but divergent voices, attending to his typological habits of mind, or his way of thinking by means of dramatized action; and on the ‘unhelpful’ side, reading him according to the terms set by the other Romantics, since as you point out towards the end of Part I, Byron’s refusal of the other Romantics’ kind of seriousness has made it hard for us to see his own. And so I wondered if you could say something about the ‘difficulty’ of getting at Byron and what Byron is doing? BB: Yes, I think that the real difficulty for me – and one of the reasons why Jerry and I get on – is that if you were born in the late 30s or 40s, if you were educated in the 50s and 60s and got a job round about then, and still through the 70s, all the various languages around you for talking about poetry and literature – which came from various places, the I.A. Richards language, for example – simply didn’t work for Byron. There weren’t any such languages around. So teaching students in the 60s and 70s was quite tricky because all the languages they were learning everywhere else made Byron seem an also-ran, so to speak. He couldn’t be brought into view, you couldn’t register him. Towards the end of my teaching career the change was quite remarkable. I don’t know when exactly but, say, from the 1990s onwards, Byron suddenly and obviously became much more accessible to students. I take it the reason was the onslaught of theory, which of course isn’t helpful to Byron, except in crude and silly ways. Nevertheless, theory destroyed all the other ways, and therefore, paradoxically, you could, in a certain sense, see Byron again. And this leads me on to another thing that has interested me recently. One of the most obvious and important things about Byron is that he is understandable – that you can read it. It’s much easier to read Byron – I don’t mean just from the standpoint of someone who already likes him but generally of any kind of reader – than it is to read Endymion, or to read Mallarmé or to read Prometheus Unbound. Byron preserves, as everyone knows, the link with eighteenth-century literature, with Pope and Dryden, the relationship with conversation, the relationship with ordinary speech, the distrust of too strong a movement away from 226

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that. Byron is readable. Byron is understandable. Now that makes it very difficult for people brought up in the later nineteenth century who say: ‘But the whole point of poetry is that it isn’t understandable – it’s obscure – it’s full of concetti – it’s The Waste Land – it’s symbols – it’s the unconscious – it’s anything you like – but it isn’t understandable’. For them, poetry doesn’t have any relationship with normal language, or if it does it is a very minor form of poetry. The whole reason, I think, why Byron is a great poet and why he sort of vrm, vrrm, vrrrms – if you can transcribe that – in the early nineteenth century is because there he is: an understandable poet. He is someone who has what Eliot mocks him for, schoolboy commonplaces, like the stanza about mutability at the end of Canto XV of Don Juan – ‘Between two worlds life hovers like a star’ and so forth. Any fool knows that life is bewildering, that we’re in a kind of middle of things. Any fool knows what Pope so brilliantly articulates – we’re ‘the glory, jest and riddle of the world’. And no one more than Byron knows that we’re the glory, jest and bloody riddle of the world. That’s understandable. Any fool can know what Byron’s experiences were with women in some sense, his experiences in relation to death, in relation to mutability. A whole series of topics that are standard – he voices them, he never fears them. He doesn’t mind clichés. He goes to Rome – he’ll talk about the bloody Coliseum. He’ll talk about the corny statues that everybody sees, and you’ll see a sunset. What else would you expect? So, for those reasons, he’s despised. And yet, for those very same reasons, he’s readable. He touches people, all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, and yet, yet, yet this very person, who is so human, who so deeply understands common kinds of human experience, and doesn’t shove them away in the way Keats will shove them away, takes you deeply into all kinds of strange territories, strange connections, strange darknesses, strange brightnesses even. That is where Byron’s greatness lies. He takes you and, so to speak, thrusts you into life. The only equivalent would be Shakespeare, I suppose. But Byron does that. Yes, yes. GH: Thank you. I wanted to return to the question of will, but to the larger trajectory of the interplay between will and yielding. In Chapter 5 on Don Juan, where you chart a movement, or a clearer movement, towards something like yielding, you focus of course on Aurora – but also on Adeline as a sort of model of obstinacy or fixity that is, in a sense, more parallel to the Byronic hero. I wondered where you would position Juan in relation to this trajectory of will and yielding? 227

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BB: An interesting and difficult question, because I haven’t really thought about it. Juan is obviously set up from the beginning as a yielder, and that’s most obviously shown in the Juan/Julia episode where he isn’t the initiator. So he’s a yielder and is a yielder all the way through. That’s his normal thing, and Byron wants that obviously as the antipodes to the traditional Don Juan figure, who was the opposite of the yielder. He wants it because that story represents that shift in himself, which he wishes to explore. It’s not just a shift that is just already there, given like a philosopher. No, no, it’s a shift in which he’s inside. All that time in the heroes he was exploring will. And now he’s doing exactly the opposite, the antithesis to that, which is yielding. So Juan is simply there. He’s typecast as a yielder. He doesn’t always yield, but even when he tries to be stubborn, when he tries to protect Haidee against Lambro, he is struck down and isn’t very effective. There is a strong refusal to yield to the Sultana but, as soon as she bursts into tears, her performance of yielding yields to his real yielding (of course he’s rescued by the arrival of the Sultan). He goes along with everybody. But, by the time you get to London and Norman Abbey, though he’s still yielding, he has a certain sort of social confidence. You know, he’s knocked about – he’s done various things – he’s received as a gentleman in London and all the rest of it – he goes to beautiful places. He’s empty. He’s bored, precisely, one might say, because he isn’t yielding in any kind of deep, strong sense. He’s going along with the custom, but he isn’t truly a yielder. Now, it’s when he gets to Norman Abbey that he has to, so to speak, learn to yield. Whereas before he was temperamentally a yielder, now he has to make yielding, one might almost say, an act of faith, which indeed it’s close to. There’s Adeline manipulating him one way, there’s the Duchess eyeing him up as a kind of bed-partner on the other, and then there’s the mysterious Aurora, who isn’t doing what all other women do, beckoning to him and coming to him and giving him instructions. On the contrary. There he has to, in a certain sense, yield to her influence, come to her orbit, allow that to happen to him. And that is conscious in him, whereas his previous yielding wasn’t conscious at all. It was just his temperament. GH: A final question for today that perhaps brings a few of these themes together. I wanted to ask about aftermath. One of the things that I most love about Byron is his concern with ‘afterwardsness’, in different forms: so we have the Byronic heroes, who in your lovely phrase are trapped inside ‘the ineradicable enclosure of aftermath’, but then we have certain 228

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late poems like Beppo, and Juan of course, where we have the ‘againness’ of things and a sort of ‘et cetera’. Here we don’t have the single concentrated lyrical intensity, the everything of love, the everything of loss, but rather we have a living on after love, after loss, or a focus on the againness of things. And I thought your discussion of will and yielding – and the urbane openness of ‘perhaps’ – extremely helpful in terms of thinking about this concern with afterwardsness. I wondered if you had any thoughts on this? BB: Yes, Byron must have had that feeling of afterwardsness, or aftermath or whatever, at a very early age. Whether it’s May Gray and sexuality, or whatever it was, he certainly had that feeling of having anticipated life. There are a number of comments on Childe Harold, people writing to him and saying, in effect: ‘How can you do that? You’re not an old man, you’re writing as though you’re an old man and it’s really quite convincing’. So he must have had that feeling then, but I think he had it particularly strongly after the break-up of his marriage, when he goes into Switzerland. And there, I think for the next year or two, it really hits him. I think he also strongly feels guilt now, a feeling of guilt for God knows what reasons. It’s very difficult to know. From quite an early time, and certainly after his first trip abroad, it seems to accentuate like mad. So he’s used to feeling guilt but it’s a rather generalized feeling of guilt, almost like angst or something of that kind. Now, when he’s in Switzerland, and later, I think he feels a specific feeling of guilt, that he hasn’t behaved well. He hasn’t behaved well in relation to his wife – that’s a huge thing – but he has behaved badly in general, getting drunk and so forth. I think he had a very strong sense of guilt, and he says it specifically in the ‘Epistle to Augusta’, and there are other places where he says it. Either way, it’s a kind of subtext in Manfred. The most extreme case may be Parisina, but there’s a sense he’s living on the other side of something for which he feels responsible. I don’t really talk about that shifting period of time in the book, although in recent years I’ve become rather obsessed by that period from 1816 to 1818, The Prisoner of Chillon, Canto IV of Childe Harold and Mazeppa in particular. That period of change. And then from that feeling, not that general dispersed guilt that he feels for whatever reason, but specific guilt to him that was very, very strong, he has a kind of lifting out of it, a lifting out of it for whatever reason. It’s maybe just a natural psychological movement. It might be his instinctive life. It might be something as simple as going to Italy 229

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and immersion in a life that he hasn’t been immersed in since exile. You know, how could you call that life in Diodati, chatting to people? It’s a sort of life, but it’s not life as Byron understands it. It isn’t the intensity of life that he must have had when he was in the East, when he lived like anything minute to minute, his eyes open to everything around him. All that had gone. He was living, as you say, in a kind of sterile aftermath. And he produces that great image of sterility, which is Manfred. But then out of that, in the movement to Italy, comes this extraordinary sense that life is bubbling all around him, and the life instinct is bubbling around in him. And that’s also to do, of course, with a different relationship to women. GH: Could I prompt you, while we’re on the subject, to take that a little further? Clearly there is a relation to guilt, and part of that was involved in the question, but I was also thinking about the Byronic hero’s refusal of an afterwards – you know, his saying ‘I want to stay with this, and this is all, and this is everything’. Whereas, in Juan, there is not only a trusting to contingency and a sort of openness to what may be, but also a sense that the this on which the Byronic hero is fixated doesn’t constitute all of life, that actually people do love again or lose again, or live without love and live on after loss. So, in addition to its light and dark eternities, Don Juan is also interested in things that are often left offstage in Romanticism – such as age, boredom, tea and toast or a whole range of mundane things that go on before or after the glowing moment of singularized intensity, as it were. BB: You’re right that in the earlier poems the heroes are locked in a ‘thisness’, which they can’t get out of – most obviously in Manfred, where of course I argue in Chapter 3 of the book that he may indeed slip out of it in that last scene. Nowness is the nowness supremely in Manfred, horror, horror, absolute horror, vitality in horror: ‘Look I’m alive – and it’s absolutely horrible – and all this is formed by something in the past which I did – or which happened to me – or which is maybe just built into the meaningless mess of things’. Horror, horror, horror. Now, now, now. And out of that comes Childe Harold Canto III – those great rhetorical outbursts, nihilistic ones if you like, to go back to the discussion about Jerry McGann. The nihilistic now. But then there is the other side of that. The word ‘now’ is a very important word in Byron: ‘And now they change’, he says in the account of the sunset over Friuli, ‘And now they change’. The ‘now’ in the latter part of Byron’s life, and 230

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this goes back to your philosophical seriousness, is linked with Byron’s much greater, deeper openness to what one might call the openness of being itself. The feeling that it’s absurd to put the human will against that. Yes, the difference between the two ‘nows’, the now that opens to the future – the now that you can’t circumscribe – and the now where you rejoice in its circumscription, and write out of that horror. That’s the division in Byron. You can see what a great poet he is – to be able to write out of those two very different things. GH: Can we conclude this first dialogue on the openness to the openness of being? BB: Yes, that’s a good place to stop. II GH: Moving from the section on Poems to the section on Life, I wanted to ask a linking question about the approach you adopt. In your Manfred chapter, you identify three ways of approaching the work, which you identify as new-critical, ‘steady state’ and another approach in relation to Byron’s changing life and development as a poet, which is your preferred approach. Now, as it’s not such common practice in literary studies nowadays to look at things in that way, I wondered if you could say something about why it is necessary or valuable to think about Byron’s works in relation to his life more widely? BB: Yes, it once wouldn’t have needed arguing, but we’re on the other side of the death of an author and all the rest of it. Authors have made a comeback. They could scarcely be erased, and Byron in particular can’t be erased. Two things to say: one going one way, one going the other. The first is that anyone reading Byron – more so than, say, reading Herrick – would be impelled in some sense to come into some sort of contact with his extra-poetic personality, so to speak. That’s just natural. It’s so obvious that it doesn’t need arguing that Byron’s presence haunts his texts in a way that isn’t the case with Keats. Keats’s sensibility is everywhere in his work but he doesn’t want his personality to be present, and that’s eventually worked out in negative capability. Well, Byron doesn’t really think like that. He thinks, if you like, more like Pope: that the poetry comes out of the whole man, although it comes out in a particular sort 231

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of way. That’s the first thing to say. In the case of Byron, it’s not only to do with the obvious parallels between his life and emotions and what goes on in the poetry, but it’s also a matter of his voice. Even if his voice is often a dramatic voice or, so to speak, performed or ‘over there’, it is a very distinctive voice in all its range. It makes itself present. So it would be extremely odd, as a result of reading his poetry, not to be interested in Byron in some sense as a person. On the other side of the question, years ago in conversation with John Clubbe, he made a point – which he often made – that if you came to a life of Beethoven, you would assume that the biographer knew a reasonable amount about music. That person wouldn’t necessarily be a professional musician, but would have listened to lots of music, would know Beethoven’s symphonies well in a musical fashion. Of course, as a biographer, you’d have to go through the normal historical jumps, you’d have to research it and test the evidence relating to Beethoven’s life, and all the rest of it. Nevertheless, the book as a whole wouldn’t simply make the crude, one might say in inverted commas ‘natural’, assumption that you have the life and then the music, and if there’s a connection, well, the life will explain it. Same for poetry: that dreadful, dreadful way of reading ‘To a Nightingale’ – ‘Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’ – and every student dutifully writes down that Keats is writing about the way his brother Tom dies. You know: ‘This happened, so it gets into the poetry’. Awful. Clubbe’s point was that what would go without saying in a musical biography isn’t really expected of literary biography. He wouldn’t be thinking of Marchand or Thomas Moore, but the three recent biographies, now I suppose becoming historical – Fiona MacCarthy, Benita Eisler, Phyllis Grosskurth – none of those have much understanding of poetry at all, least of all Byron’s poetry. Nor do they seem to have the slightest consciousness that they don’t have much understanding of Byron’s poetry, nor that this would be a requisite property for someone daring to write a book about Byron. No, no, no: write a book about this man over there, place him in various psychological stereotypes, and then make a few glancing references to the poetry. And so it’s all explained by his life. John Clubbe in fact proposed I might write a proper biography of Byron. I couldn’t do that really, because I’m not into history. But that’s what should be done. I don’t claim to do it, but there are little bits of it in this book. For example, in the essay on Manfred – it came about in that way, I didn’t plan it – when I talk about his movement from Switzerland to Italy, and a whole series of other things, and the 232

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way something of that is mirrored, so to speak, in a perceptible, or just perceptible, change of tone in the second version of Manfred: that, I suppose, is something of the sort of thing that John Clubbe would have wanted. Is that a sufficient reply? GH: Thank you, yes, and your comments about the three recent biographies lead us into the next area that I wanted to ask you about. Taking the Life chapters together, it seems to me that what you are offering is, in a sense, a work of revision and a series of corrective accounts of what you call ‘popular estimates’. So, for example, in the Albany chapter, instead of a dashing, posturing, swashbuckling Byron, we see a quieter, more bookish Byron, contemplative as well as adventurous. In the Seaham chapter, instead of the listless suitor and monstrous husband, we find a Byron who fits in, who’s willing to settle – almost, dare I say, a domesticated Byron. And in the Venice to Ravenna chapter instead of, or perhaps alongside, the portrait of Byron as concupiscently challenged or a heartless rake, we are presented with the Byron who is capable of fidelity. So I wanted to ask if you could say a little bit more about what you’re seeking to correct, or what you’re implicitly writing against, in the Life chapters? BB: I don’t really need to add anything because you’ve put it extremely well. That’s exactly what I was doing, whether or not I was consciously trying to do that from the outset. When I started off with Byron in the early 60s, the whole world around me was contemptuous or, even worse, praised him as an extraordinarily talented, secondary author who just happens to have the right views on war. I was surrounded by this. There were very few dissenting voices. The only real voice – there were other little voices – was Wilson Knight. He was an absolute godsend to me and I pay my homage to Wilson Knight in all kinds of ways: his essay in The Burning Oracle on the Tales and then his book on Pope, with that very long section on Byron and the Book of Life. He was a friend, so to speak. So I began with my book on Byron that was very much against what I then took to be the received view of Don Juan: that it was basically great because it was a satirical poem, and that it got into Byron’s verse the idiom of his letters, which is so much better than that nasty rhetoric that he used in Childe Harold. That view made me absolutely puke, so I started off there and I’m still there. My mother famously used to say: ‘Where are you going? You’re going off to lecture on Lord Byron again, aren’t you?’ And I’d say yes, and she would say he was a very bad man. 233

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Now she hadn’t read a word of Byron, but that still persists. Everyone knows about Byron. Everyone knows he’s a highfalutin philanderer and all the rest of it. So I suppose I’m always countering that. Yes, that’s true. I don’t know whether that’s a very complicated answer but the spirit of what you said is entirely right. GH: At my wedding, my aunt took a moment to come over to me and asked in a very earnest voice, as if she’d been anxiously saving up the question for years, ‘Why is it you work on Byron?’ BB: This is why, to an extent, one has to exaggerate. It’s dangerous saying that but, even so, to an extent you have to exaggerate. You have to put the other side of the case. Byron’s always on both sides of the case. In the original spoken version of the essay on Ravenna and fidelity, I delighted even more in that Terry-Thomas vocabulary of ‘Absolute bounder! Absolute rotter!’ in order to debunk it. Of course there are a lot of those elements in him. But basically he isn’t a rotter. GH: It’s precisely the issue of being on both sides of the case that I wanted to turn to now by moving onto the Politics chapters. It seems to me that here, too, you’re engaged in a corrective or revisionist project of sorts, though in these chapters it’s less about particular episodes or aspects of his life and more about overarching conceptions of Byron. In particular – and this is my annoying phrasing, not yours – you think about him in relation to singularity and multiplicity. So in the Liberty and Licence chapter, for example, you appear to be complicating a simplified Byron; in the Paradoxes of Nationalism chapter, you appear to be showing the coherence of a multitudinous Byron, and giving a portrait of, in your nice phrase, ‘harmonized contraries’. Then, in the final chapter on Byron as Political Icon, having established these two qualifications, as it were, you seem to be allowing the full, kaleidoscopic breadth and ‘manyness’ of Byron to fan out. In light of this balancing of singularity and multiplicity in the portrait of Byron that emerges in your writing, I wanted to ask if you could say something about Byron’s treatment of the one and the many, whether in relation to social class, particular causes, models of government or conceptions of selfhood – ‘Changeable too, yet somehow idem semper’ – or his exploration of eros, or – whatever! BB: Yes, I’m happy to do that, but the discussion of the one and the many and that sort of thing doesn’t really, as far as I can see, latch into a 234

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discussion about Byron’s politics as such. Politics is a very broad thing for Byron. It’s not a narrow thing, as it might be for Tom Paine or Godwin, it’s not a sort of specified territory. It abuts into all kinds of things, goes back to his childhood, back to the relation between men and women he heard from his mother, goes back to Harrow, where he sticks up for the younger boy in the way he will stick up for Greece later. It abuts into all kinds of territories. For the one and the many, I obviously think of Coleridge. The one and the many is a fantastic, ancient problem that everybody has. We live in a world of particularity. We know it through universals, and the presumption of our speech and our consciousness is palpable connectivity between the disparate. It sounds a sort of technical phase, but that’s everyday experience: the underlying connectivity of the dispersed palpable. It sounds a mouthful, but everybody, every day, experiences that – and Byron experienced that to a huge degree. Of course, the normal thing to do once you perceive the one and the many as a problem is to privilege the one, as Plato does most obviously and, so far as I understand it, Hinduism does, though here one is interested not so much in unity as the strange territory of non-duality (I always quite like the idea of ‘non-duality’). That’s one way of doing it. But the disadvantage is that this doesn’t explain why palpable singularity exists at all, which is where we are. It doesn’t ask that question, it bypasses that question in the way Buddhism bypasses a lot of questions because it’s simply concerned with what it’s seen. The other way in which we are more likely to go is the many. Materialism. There isn’t a ‘one’ – the ‘one’ is an illusion. You know, Bertrand Russell saying, in the sentence ‘This buttercup is yellow’, the ‘is’ doesn’t mean anything at all. I laugh because it’s stupid, and if that sounds a bit arrogant, Wittgenstein thought it was stupid too, so I’m in very good company. But if then you’re stuck with it, if you’ve got both the one and the many, which any sensible person is, which is the form of normal experience, what do you do about it? Is the multiple, in some sense, representing the one? Neo-Platonism, something of that kind? Byron sometimes goes a weeny bit in that direction, there are little shards of Neo-Platonism sometimes when he talks about love. But his sense of it is basically Christian. The idea that multiplicity is unity. There’s the nub of it. That move Coleridge made, when he ceased to be Unitarian, and he saw a connection between his thinking about the imagination and the Trinity. It isn’t the unity behind multiplicity, it isn’t a multiplicity that displaces unity, multiplicity is unity. Now that’s 235

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putting it very philosophically. But Byron’s into that. Don Juan is that. Yes, every stanza. GH: I had a couple of other more general questions. George Steiner once made a list of books he knew he wouldn’t get around to writing, which I’ve always thought was a very interesting thing to do, and I was wondering if there are any areas of Byron’s life or work that you feel need further investigation, revision or exploration? Thinking about what you’ve done in this book, are there are further areas that need this kind of revision? BB: You wrong-footed me at the end with the word ‘revision’. I’ll have to come back to revision. This book came about, as everything comes about, through history. It didn’t come about from my having a kind of a scheme and then thinking ‘I’ll carry through this scheme’. It wasn’t like that. It came about, as it were historically, and it needed to be shaped, and it’s been shaped – in a way, it’s an extremely shaped book. You know, Poems – Life – Politics. But it’s extremely selective, it doesn’t claim to be a complete account of Byron, and it certainly doesn’t claim to be a complete account of the poems. Don Juan is looked at only from a certain point of view. I talk about only one of the Tales. I don’t talk about the classical plays at all, except the speech from The Two Foscari, which I think is very important. And that middle period of Byron – The Lament of Tasso, Mazeppa, Chillon and all that, which I’ve come to find extremely interesting, and have recently talked about and written about – that isn’t in the book at all. So the book leaves out a whole series of things. But I’m concentrating very much, as you say correctly, in a revisionary mode, saying ‘Look, Byron isn’t taken seriously enough and the nature of his (very broadly understood) religious understanding, or religious sensitivities or stirrings, even his religious doubts, is not taken seriously – it’s either bracketed or sometimes sneered at, or more usually dusted over as though it’s a simple matter, whereas it isn’t’. I’m very conscious that I’m countering those views because I think religious understanding is present in Byron, extremely important in Byron. To have a proper view of Byron you don’t want to wholly inhabit the view that I present in this book. But if you knew nothing of that point of view, or it simply wasn’t available to you at all, you wouldn’t have a proper Byron in my view. I’m not really aware of having some general sense of ‘Things that ought to be done about Byron that haven’t been’. Byron is an extraordinary, 236

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comprehensive figure who finds thoughts and feelings and connections in all kinds of modes of life. And it is good that he’s been interpreted by lots and lots of different kinds of people. I’m a Byronist, I suppose. So are you. But there isn’t a Byronist ‘type’. We don’t fit a type. So I’m simply glad for that multiplicity. But, to finish the point and get perhaps somewhere to the nub of your question, do I have a kind of anxiety? It’s wonderful, and I keep crowing about it, that compared to when I first started working on Byron – working is not the right phrase, having the privilege of spending a lot of time in Byron’s company – it was all an adversarial set-up. You know, you were having to fight to make your voice heard. Now that isn’t the case. Granted, there’s still a lot of negativity and indifference, and the whole University and literary world is not in very good shape on any view, but it’s come a long way and it’s marvellous that it has. But, but, but – I’ve been reading quite a number of very recent essays on Byron, all of them by highly intelligent people, writing well, but somehow it seems to me the centre has slipped out of view. In writing about literature you have to be energized by something other than yourself. In history, presumably, it’s ‘What was the case?’ Even though there are various historical arguments, where you take sides or you put a revisionary view, you have to have some connection with something other than yourself. There should be something other than yourself. For anyone concerned with Byron it should primarily be Byron’s poems, in my view. That’s absolutely essential, and I worry a bit that we’ve deflected away from that into quite interesting areas – because heaven knows Byron is interesting in so many different ways – but we’re beginning to lose that sense of the centre. Yes. GH: To round things off, I had a final, slightly reflexive question about conversation. I know this is something that is extremely important to you and to Byron. Also, if I might take the liberty, I know how much I have learned personally from talking to you. I therefore wanted to ask if you could say something about the importance, and perhaps difference, of conversation in tutorials, at conferences, over lunch et cetera, as opposed to more fixed forms of academic engagement? BB: Yes. Well, I suppose at its most basic level, it goes back to the one and the many. Everything that we do is always particular, as in this particular enterprise of this moment. We are never ‘out of’ particularity, but we’re always alive. We never stop being alive, life is always revealing itself to us and life, of course, is something familiar. We look at the 237

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time, we get into certain habits of mind, we have certain friends, certain partialities and things we don’t like, and so forth and so forth. But life, even the life that we know and that is familiar to us, is, so to speak, never settled into. Or, if it’s settled into, it’s settled into with some kind of background awareness that you never can quite settle into it, if for no other reason than death. Now education, which, as we now use the term, is a specific application within certain contexts for certain purposes, just by its nature, can become detached. Not from life, because it can’t do that. But it can think it can do that, or be separated from that alwaysawareness we have every minute, every minute we are alive. The ‘What is it?’ that is both a kind of blankness and a kind of buzz in us. Now if education gets separated from that too far, it ceases to be educational altogether. The great apostle of this is Newman, in his idea of the University. Everyone always seems to think there have been tutorials at Oxbridge since the year dot. Well, they started in the nineteenth century and partly because of Newman. And, of course, where are tutorials now? The most you’re likely to get now, quite apart from virtual teaching, is 15 people in a room. And it’s not your room. It’s not the tutor’s room, it’s some room that doesn’t say ‘Life’. It says ‘Education’. You can see how my ire is rising. Is that enough? GH: I’d like to stoke your ire further. BB: I’m grateful for the way I was taught. I really am grateful for it. I was helped by it, formed by it. To take a particular single example, Eric Stanley, my tutor in my second year at University. A Mediaevalist. He kept on saying ‘I’m not a philosopher’ – and he wasn’t. He never said anything very profound. But he read. Like anything. He read Greek, Latin, the Bible, Anglo-Saxon, on which he is an authority, right up to modern literature. He read The Fairie Queene every year. He was brilliant on Byron. Now he never said anything incredibly interesting, but from him I got the love of literature, if you like, the idea that you could devote your life to it. It’s not central to life in the way that Leavis thought, where it’s usurping morality and all that sort of thing. It’s just part of a civilized person’s being alive. Now, I couldn’t get that in any other way, could I? GH: Perhaps, finally, to carry that on in relation to the living voice of conversation, I was wondering if you could say something about the ways of thinking and the things one can get at by means of the unscripted 238

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exchange, often casually entered into over lunch or having a drink, which seems to open up other territories, other ways of thinking, as opposed to the slightly more tense, choreographed, parametered exchanges of the classroom? BB: Yes, this is entirely true. In two ways, at least. One is that, if you’re talking to someone – and really it doesn’t matter whether it’s friends, or whether it’s a very famous professor, or someone whom you’ve got as a tutor, it doesn’t really matter who – you get to know not only what they know, but also what they don’t know, and how they live with what they don’t know and how they move, so to speak. It’s Aristotle, potency into act: how they move, from what they don’t know, or what they’re not sure of, out into a movement where they can begin to articulate something that they can see and hold. You can get that movement, potency to act, that old distinction. Very occasionally, you can see that in writing since people can try to reproduce it in the act of writing. But normally you can’t see it there, you see the finished product. In a conversation you get that relation to the unknown. I remember two conversations on a bus. One that I had with Stephen Minta a couple of years ago during a Byron conference. One of the most productive I’ve had. Or many, many years ago, again on a bus at a Byron conference, with Michel Charlot. I don’t know whether you remember him, a French Byronist, a schoolteacher, left-wing atheist. He said ‘I didn’t think I’d get on with you’ – but then we did, like a house on fire. Conversations on French poetry. On the world at large. As good as any I’ve had in any ‘intellectual’ forum. That’s happened to me, and it’s quite good just to be reminded of that, isn’t it? And – this might sound dreadfully pompous – especially now in the sort of world in which we live, where that’s been effaced by chat shows where people simply don’t learn from one another. And the other thing you get, of course, is the fact that two people together – it could be three, but let’s says two – can get to a place through conversation that neither of them could have got to on their own. Now that’s an experience one simply frequently has. Even, if you don’t mind me saying so, in this conversation now. Well, that’s fantastically precious, isn’t it? GH: Can we please stop there? Thank you, Bernard.

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Bernard Beatty A Bibliography Bernard Beatty: A Bibliography

Books 1. Byron’s Don Juan (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985; reissued by Routledge in 2017). 2. Byron: Don Juan and Other Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin [Masterstudies series], 1987). 3. Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022).

Co-edited Essay Collections 4. (with R.T. Davies) Literature of the Romantic Period, 1750–1850 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1976). 5. (with Vincent Newey) Byron and the Limits of Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988) [Bernard co-wrote the Preface on pp. vii–ix]. 6. (with Robert Gleckner) The Plays of Lord Byron: Critical Essays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997) [Bernard co-wrote the Introduction on pp. 1–4]. 7. (with Tony Howe and Charles E. Robinson) Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008) [Bernard wrote the Introduction on pp. 1–9]. 8. (with Jonathon Shears) Byron’s Temperament: Essays in Body and Mind (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2016) [Bernard co-wrote the Introduction on pp. 1–9]. 9. (with Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez) Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution: British Views on Spain, 1814–1823 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019) [Bernard co-wrote the Introduction on pp. xi–xix].

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Chapters and Sections in Books 10. ‘Lord Byron: Poetry and Precedent’, in Literature of the Romantic Period (4 above, 1976), 114–34. 11. ‘Rival Fables: The Pilgrim’s Progress and Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther’, in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1980), 263–81. 12. ‘The Transformation of Discourse: Epipsychidion, Adonais, and some lyrics’, in Essays on Shelley, ed. Miriam Allott (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), 213–38. 13. ‘Empedocles and Byron Once More’, in Essays & Studies 1988 – Matthew Arnold: A Centennial Review, ed. Miriam Allott (London: John Murray/ English Association, 1988), 80–95. 14. ‘Fiction’s Limit and Eden’s Door’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction (5 above, 1988), 1–38. 15. ‘Continuities and Discontinuities of Language and Voice in Dryden, Pope, and Byron’, in Byron: Augustan and Romantic, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 117–35. 16. ‘Byron and the Paradoxes of Nationalism’, in Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), 152–62. 17. ‘Reviewing Romanticism: The Sea and the Book’, in Reviewing Romanticism, ed. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 32–50. 18. ‘Repetition’s Music: The Triumph of Life’, in Essays & Studies 1992 – Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer/English Association, 1992), 99–114. 19. Entries on ‘Byron, George Gordon, sixth Lord’, ‘Peterloo’ and ‘Waterloo’, in A Handbook to English Romanticism, ed. Jean Raimond and J.R. Watson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 45–55; 211–13; 281–82. [Part of the entry on ‘Bonaparte, Napoleon’, pp. 33–37, was co-written by Bernard with J.R. Watson]. 20. ‘Unheard Voices, Indistinct Visions: Gray and Byron’, in Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays, ed. W.B. Hutchings and William Ruddick (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), 224–47. 21. ‘“The Present Moment” and “Times Whiter Series”: Rochester and Dryden’, in Reading Rochester, ed. Edward Burns (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 207–26. 22. ‘Byron and the Unsecular Scriptures’, in Byron as Reader: Papers delivered at the 7th Symposium of the ‘Gesellschaft für englische Romantik’ and the 22nd Conference of ‘The International Byron Society’ held at the Gerhard-Mercator-Universität Duisburg, ed. Petra Bridzun and Frank Erik Pointner (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2000), 86–99.

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be r n a r d be at t y: a bi bl io gr a ph y 23. ‘Two Kinds of Clothing: Sartor Resartus and Great Expectations’, in Rereading Victorian Fiction, ed. Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 44–58. 24. ‘Calvin in Islam: A Reading of Lara and The Giaour’, in Byron: East and West – Proceedings of the 24th International Byron Conference, Charles University, Prague, ed. Martin Procházka (Prague: Charles University of Prague/Karolinum, 2000), 79–94. 25. ‘Lord Byron: Three Modes’, in Byron: A Poet for all Seasons – Proceedings of the 25th International Byron Conference, Athens, ed. M.B. Raizis (Missolonghi: Missolonghi Byron Society, 2000), 136–49. 26. ‘Milk and Blood, Heredity and Choice: Byron’s Readings of Genesis’, in Eve’s Children: The Biblical Stories Retold and Interpreted in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Gerard P. Luttikhuizen (Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2003 [Themes in Biblical Narrative Volume V]), 143–54. 27. ‘Travelling with the Spirit and Travelling in the Body’, in Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth International Byron Conference, ed. Reiko Aiura and others (Kyoto: Japanese Byron Society, 2003), 1–15. 28. ‘The Force of “Celtic Memories” in Byron’s Thought’, in English Romanticism and the Celtic World, ed. Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 103–16. 29. ‘Byron and the Eighteenth Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 236–48. 30. ‘“An Awful Wish to Plunge Within It”: Byron’s Critique of the Sublime’, in Revue de l’Université de Moncton: Des actes sélectionnés du 30e Congrès International sur Byron, ed. Paul M. Curtis (Moncton: Université de Moncton, 2005), 265–76. 31. ‘Believing in Form and Forms of Belief: The Case of Robert Southey’, in Romanticism and Form, ed. Alan Rawes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 138–53. 32. ‘“Untrammelled Will and Suppressed Passions”: Byron’s Neo-Classical Theatre’, in Byron at the Theatre, ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 163–74. 33. ‘Inheriting Humors, Legating Humor: The Will of Manfred ’, in Byron: Heritage and Legacy, ed. Cheryl A. Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 139–48. 34. ‘A Toff in London’, in Byron and London, ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 131–42. 35. ‘Byron as a Political Icon’, in Byron: The Image of the Poet, ed. Christine Kenyon Jones (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 111–19. 36. ‘P.B. Shelley’, in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, ed. Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts and Christopher Rowland (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 451–61.

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r e a di ng by ron 37. ‘The Machinery of Faux Catholicism’, in The Gothic Byron, ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 79–89. 38. ‘The Heart of The Heart of Midlothian?’, in Walter Scott: The Heart of Mid-Lothian, ed. Shobhana Bhattacharji (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009), 609–20. 39. ‘General Laws and Variant Readings: Byron’s Men and Women’, in Byron and Women [and men], ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 1–14. 40. ‘Byron’s Don Juan’, in The Cambridge History of English Poetry, ed. Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 506–23. 41. ‘Byron and Religion’, in Byron’s Religions, ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 30–45. 42. ‘Authenticity Projected: Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and Cardinal Newman’, in Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900: Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey, ed. Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 67–80. 43. ‘Byron, Pope, and Feminine Endings’, in Byron’s Poetry, ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 129–45. 44. ‘A “More Beloved Existence”: From Shakespeare’s “Venice” to Byron’s Venice’, in Venice and the Cultural Imagination: ‘This Strange Dream Upon the Water’, ed. Michael O’Neill, Mark Sandy and Sarah Wootton (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 11–26. 45. ‘The Bric-à-Brac Wars: Robert Browning and Blessed John Henry Newman’, in Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities, ed. Jonathon Shears and Jen Harrison (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 83–98. 46. ‘Byron and Genre’, in Lord Byron and Genre, ed. Naji Oueijan (Beirut: University of Notre Dame, 2013), 29–40. 47. ‘Shelley, Shakespeare, and Theatre’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 546–60. 48. ‘Determining Unknown Modes of Being: A Map of Byron’s Ghosts and Spirits’, in Byron’s Ghosts: The Spectral, the Spiritual and the Supernatural, ed. Gavin Hopps (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 30–47. 49. ‘Wordsworth’s and Byron’s Links with British and French Decadence’, in Decadent Romanticism: 1790–1814, ed. Kostas Boyiopoulos and Mark Sandy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 43–58. 50. ‘“He Was a Man of Strange Temperament”: Reading Byron’s Mind and Matter’, in Byron’s Temperament (8 above, 2016), 10–29.

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be r n a r d be at t y: a bi bl io gr a ph y 51. ‘Byron Original and Translated’, in Byron Original and Translated: Proceedings of the 40th International Byron Conference, ed. Innes Merabishvili, Naji Oueijan and Ivane Javakhishvili (Tblisi: Tblisi State University, 2017), 15–32. 52. ‘Poetry, Politics and Prophecy: The Age of Bronze, The Vision of Judgment and The Prophecy of Dante’, in Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry, ed. Roderick Beaton and Christine Kenyon Jones (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 93–104. 53. ‘“Something sensible to grasp at”: Byron and Italian Catholicism’, in Byron and Italy, ed. Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 112–29. 54. ‘Can We Rethink Lord Byron as a Whole?’, in Essays on Byron in Honour of Dr Peter Cochran: Breaking the Mould, ed. Malcolm Kelsall, Peter Graham and Mirka Horová (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2019), 64–77. 55. ‘Detecting Spanish Fictions: Byron’s Don Juan Canto I’, in Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution (9 above, 2019), 229–48. 56. ‘Classicism and Neo-Classicism’, in Byron in Context, ed. Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 143–50. 57. ‘Making Madness Beautiful: Byron at Work 1816–1817’, in Byron: Fiction, Reality and Madness, ed. Mirosława Modrzewska and Maria Fengler (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020), 107–15. 58. ‘Byron and Shakespeare’, in Byron Among the English Poets: Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy, ed. Clare Bucknell and Matthew Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 19–34. 59. ‘Dramatic Monologues’, in Oxford Handbook of Byron, ed. Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 60. ‘Byron and Translation’, in Byron and Translation, ed. Maria Schoina (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming).

Articles in Periodicals 61. ‘Who wears the crown(s)? A rationale for editing forwards’, Downside Review 113.390 (1995), 1–19. 62. ‘Keats’s Salutary Weakness: A Reading of “Isabella”’, Aligarh Critical Miscellany 8 (1995), 44–61. 63. ‘Cain’s Legacy and Cain’s Tradition’, Wordsworth Circle 27.1 (1996), 4–9. 64. ‘Inspirational Literature: The Heresy of Historicism’, Downside Review 115.401 (1997), 282–99. 65. ‘Calvin in Islam: A Reading of Lara and The Giaour’, Romanticism 5.1 (1999), 70–86. 66. ‘And thus the peopled City grieves’, The Byron Journal 30 (2002), 11–20.

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r e a di ng by ron 67. ‘The Form of Oscar: Wilde’s Art of Substitution’, Irish Studies Review 11.1 (2003), 33–49. 68. ‘“Accomplished Verse” and “Awakened Hearts”: Byron’s “Thyrza” Poems’, The Byron Journal 33.2 (2005), 79–96. 69. ‘The Glory and the Nothing of a Name’, The Byron Journal 36.2 (2008), 91–104. 70. ‘A2 at Albany: Byron in 1814’, The Byron Journal 39.1 (2011), 1–10. 71. ‘The Byron Journal at Forty’, The Byron Journal 40.2 (2012), 103–13. 72. ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I and II in 1812’, The Byron Journal 41.2 (2013), 101–14. 73. ‘Byron at Home’, The Byron Journal 43.1 (2015), 15–27. 74. ‘“According to the Old Text”: Byron and the Sacred Scriptures’, The Byron Journal 43.2 (2015), 121–29. 75. ‘Byron’s Cowper: A Re-appraisal’, Cowper and Newton Journal 6 (2016), 49–63. 76. ‘Oceans and Lakes: Byron’s Interactions’, The Byron Journal 47.2 (2019), 123–37. 77. ‘Improvisation and Hybrid Genres: Reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, European Legacy 24:3–4 (2019), 264–82.

Selected Review Articles 78. Byron and the Ruins of Paradise by Robert Gleckner, Modern Language Review 64.3 (1969), 655–56. 79. Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor by Paul Elledge, Notes & Queries 215 (1970), 197–98. 80. Fiery Dust by Jerome McGann [et alia], Modern Language Review 71.1 (1976), 144–45. 81. Byron’s Heroines by Caroline Franklin; Don Juan by Anne Barton [et alia], Review of English Studies 47.185 (1996), 101–3. 82. Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe, Review of English Studies 48.190 (1997), 264–65. 83. The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore by Jeffrey Vail, The Byron Journal 30 (2002), 114–15. 84. British Satire 1785–1840, gen. ed. John Strachan, The Byron Journal 32.2 (2004), 153–55. 85. Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies, ed. Jane Stabler, The Byron Journal 36.2 (2008), 165–66. 86. Byron the Maker by Anne Fleming, The Byron Journal 37.1 (2009), 63–64. 87. ‘Romanticism’ – and Byron by Peter Cochran, The Byron Journal 40.1 (2012), 67–69. 88. Life Lessons from Byron by Matthew Bevis, The Byron Journal 42.2 (2014), 193.

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Selected Miscellanea 89. ‘Michael Rees: A Tribute on his Retirement’, The Byron Journal 20 (1992), 95. 90. ‘Lost Opportunity on Keats House’, letter to The Times (4 November 1995), 21. 91. Report on the 28th International Byron Conference [Kyoto], The Byron Journal 31 (2003), 101–3. 92. ‘Byron and the Olympic Spirit’, keynote speech given at the 3rd International Student Conference, Messolonghi, May 2004 (https:// www.messolonghibyronsociety.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Byron-andthe-Olympic-Spirit.pdf). 93. Introduction to Byron: Heritage and Legacy, ed. Cheryl A. Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–6. 94. (with Peter Cochran) ‘Byron and Drama: An E-Mail Exchange’, February 2008 (http://newsteadabbeybyronsociety.org/works/downloads/ bea_dialogue.pdf). 95. ‘Addressing Time: The Poetry of Lord Byron’, Byron Foundation Lecture given at the University of Nottingham, November 2008 (http:// newsteadabbeybyronsociety.org/works/downloads/bea_dialogue.pdf). 96. ‘Sardanapalus at the Globe 3 April 2009’, The Byron Journal 37.1 (2009), 55–56. 97. Preface to Danièle Sarrat’s Parisina et Darkness: Edition Bilingue (Nick McCann Associates, 2012), unpaginated. 98. ‘Lord Byron: Regency Aristocrat?’ lecture given at the Regency Conference in Bath 2015 (reproduced in Newstead Abbey Byron Society Review [2019], 63–80). 99. ‘Byron the Latinist: University of Oxford 12 December 2017’, The Byron Journal 46.1 (2018), 76–77. 100. ‘A Brief Memoir In Memoriam: Professor Vincent Newey: 28 September 1943–16 May 2020’, The Byron Journal 48.2 (2020), 97–99.

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Acknowledgements Acknowledgements Byron is often associated with spleen and was, at least partly, responsible for this himself. But another of his characteristics is gratitude. Scott singled out for praise Byron’s ‘generosity of spirit’. I doubt whether I can match that, but I am grateful to all manner of people, dear colleagues at Liverpool University, long-standing friends of many nations in the close but extended world of Byron scholarship, and my many students, especially those who studied for doctorates with me. My mind has been formed by them as much as anything or anyone else. I owe particular debts of gratitude in relation to the present book. The first and greatest is to its editor, David Woodhouse, a Byronist of wide, deep but unostentatious scholarship, who suggested this volume in Kyiv without realizing it would turn into a new work rather than a selection of the previously published essays he has listed in the bibliography. I am very grateful to David for his friendship, patience and advice, and for being the ‘onlie begetter’ of a book that foregrounds the darker and religious elements in Byron when his own predilection is for the lighter and sceptical elements. The second debt is to Shobhana Bhattacharji, a distinguished Byronist and a very dear friend over many years, who has read, and sometimes re-read, every essay in this volume and offered invaluable suggestions and graceful support. I hardly know how to thank Jerome McGann enough for his very generous introduction and the gift of his time in reading my book. He, more than any single living person, is responsible for the fact that Byron’s poetry is taken more seriously now than it was when Terence Spencer invited me to write a thesis on Byron in 1962. All those who read Byron now are in Jerome’s debt. Gavin Hopps, too, very kindly agreed both to read the book and to devise and conduct the interview that concludes it with his characteristically open thoughtfulness. He was my student once. Now I am his. 249

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And finally, my gratitude to Liverpool University Press, with whom I have been long associated, which has acquired a reputation for publishing many excellent books on Byron, and splendidly publishes The Byron Journal. The Press is unashamedly academic and independent in a world that is not always very understanding of, or sympathetic to, these categories. In particular, I am very grateful to Christabel Scaife, who has been courteously and intelligently supportive throughout the processes of publication. I am also grateful to the Press for allowing me to rework three essays previously published by them (see items 7, 16 and 70 in the bibliography); the last essay in the book is a revised and expanded version of a lecture previously published by Delaware University Press (see item 35). In thanking these, I must also conjoin my thanks to George Gordon, Lord Byron, whom I have read closely and written about for some 60 years without once being bored. This must prove the truth of Goethe’s view of what constitutes greatness: ‘As long as he expresses only these few subjective sentences, he can not yet be called a poet, but as soon as he knows how to appropriate the world for himself, and to express it, he is a poet. Then he is inexhaustible, and can be ever new’.

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General Bibliography General Bibliography Agulhon, Maurice. Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France: 1789–1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Allan, George. Life of Sir Walter Scott, Baronet; with Critical Notices of His Writings (Edinburgh: Thomas Ireland Jr, 1834). Alter, Robert. The World of Biblical Literature (London: SPCK, 1992). Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind, 2 vols (New York: Harcourt, 1978). Arnold, Matthew. ‘Byron’ [1881], collected in Essays in Criticism: Second Series (London, Macmillan, 1888), 163–204. —— Poetical Works, ed. C.B. Tinker and H.F. Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1950). Ashton, T.L. ‘Naming Byron’s Aurora Raby’, English Language Notes 7.2 (1969), 114–20. Baker, Nigel. ‘Byron and Childe Harold in Portugal’, The Byron Journal 22 (1994), 43–49. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Man in History: A Theological Study [1968] (London: Sheed and Ward, 1982). Barth, Karl. The Doctrine of Reconciliation, 5 vols (Church Dogmatics Volume IV, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark], 1961–69). Barton, Anne. Byron: Don Juan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 [Landmarks of World Literature series]). Birkenhead, Sheila. Peace in Piccadilly: The Story of Albany (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958). Blake, William. Writings, ed. G.E. Bentley Jr, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Blessington, Lady [Marguerite]. Conversations of Lord Byron [1834], ed. Ernest J. Lovell Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). Bone, Drummond (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Bonnell, Victoria E. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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Index Index

Abrams, M.H. 223 Adam, Robert 142 Addison, Joseph 11n., 116 Albrizzi, Contessa Isabella 167 Alexander I, Tsar 143 Althorp, Viscount (John Spencer) 144, 149–50 Angelo, Henry 144, 146–47 Aquinas, Saint Thomas 54, 94 Arendt, Hannah 40 Aristotle 42, 61, 95, 101, 225, 239 Arnold, Matthew 2–3, 16 and n., 60 Auerbach, Erich 24 Augustine, Saint 40, 45–47, 225 Austen, Henry 150 Austen, Jane 150, 157, 217 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 205 Balzac, Honoré de 18n. Barth, Karl 28n., 47, 54, 57, 131 Barton, Anne 119n. Baudelaire, Charles 3, 54, 60 Baxter, Richard 108 Bayle, Pierre 47n., 86, 109 Beattie, James 19 Becher, Reverend J.T. 192 Beckford, William 19, 68, 148 Beethoven, Ludwig van 189, 232 Benzoni, Contessa Marina 167, 176, 178 Berlioz, Hector 18–19, 21

Bible, books of Galatians 112 Genesis 46, 48, 97, 99, 101, 103, 109, 112–13 Job 6, 11n., 54, 99, 102, 104 John (gospel) 5 I John (epistle) 22 Luke 104 Matthew 102 Proverbs 33n. Psalms 6, 23n., 25, 54 Revelation (Apocalypse) 22, 30 Romans 33n., 40 Birkenhead, Sheila 147 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 94, 195n. Blake, William 1, 2, 46, 175 Boyce, Susan 170 Brougham, Henry 149 Brown, Peter 208–9 Brummell, Beau 46 Bunting, Basil 1 Bunyan, John 214 Burdett, Sir Francis 214 Burke, Edmund 194, 217–19 Butler, Marilyn 41n. Byron, Ada 26 Byron, Allegra 107, 155, 180 Byron, Lady (Annabella Milbanke) 17, 39n., 42, 65, 138, 143, Chapter 7 passim, 169–70, 229

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r e a di ng by ron Byron, Mrs (Catherine Gordon) 154, 161, 208 BYRON, GEORGE GORDON, Sixth Baron Calvinist influences upon 39n, 87, 109 Catholic sympathies and ‘trajectory’ 74, 107–10, 123n., 127, 132, 184–85, 221–22 contemporary reader responses 1–3 and n., 11, 14–16, 38, 42, 47, 86, 190, 215 critical condescension towards 2–3, 14, 18–19 and n., 61, 85, 233, 237 ‘Enlightenment’, part-child of 3, 22–23, 39, 41–42, 47 and n., 221–22 Islam, interest in 17, 38–39 and n., 188 methods of composition 17–18, 32, 62 musicality 6, 18–19, 21, 31, 56, 58, 62, 68, 120, 124, 130–32, 217 original sin and the Fall, fascination with 47–48, 51, 78, 88, 91–92, 97, 126, 205 places visited, or associated with Aberdeen 38, 44, 87, 110, 141, 209 Albania 17, 19, 197, 223 Albany 41, 139, Chapter 6 passim, 214, 233 Albemarle Street 63, 142, 175 Alps 17, 61 and n., 63, 65, 68, 72–75, 98, 198 Athens 17, 30, 73–74, 110, 152, 167, 172, 212 Bagnacavallo 155 Bologna 177 the Brenta 173, 178 Cephalonia 107, 167 Dover (Churchill’s Grave) 154 Geneva and environs 17, 31, 72–73, 189, 223, 230

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Genoa 148, 152, 168 Halnaby Hall 161–62, 164–65 Harrow School 24, 141, 146, 149, 150, 154, 167, 184, 197, 209, 235 Hastings 146 Hucknall Church 141, 220 Messolonghi 141 Newstead Abbey 17, 75, 141, 146, 149, 153, 155, 161, 165, 166, 176, 197, 209–10 Parnassus 20–21 Piccadilly Terrace 139, 144 Pisa 159, 168 Portugal 27, 34 Ravenna 72, 139, 155, 159, 167–68, Chapter 8 passim, 209, 233–34 Rhineland 28, 197, 201 Rome 18, 26, 30, 30–34, 62, 69, 73–74, 153, Chapter 10 passim, 227 Seaham 139, 146, 150, Chapter 7 passim, 190, 233 Six Mile Bottom 146, 159, 167 Southwell 167, 192, 210 Spain 20–21, 74, 199, 201, 216 Trinity College and Cambridge 24, 141, 146, 159, 167 Venice 18, 25, 30, 63, 72–74, 139, 152, 153, 167, Chapter 8 passim, 187, 190, 200–1, 209, 233 Waterloo 17, 24, 26, 28, 51 poems Beppo 74–75, 77, 80–81, 83, 117, 122, 155, 170, 172–73, 187, 229 ‘The Blues’ 217 Cain 2, 3, 22–23, 34, 42, 45–47, 49–51, 54–55, Chapter 4 passim, 119–20, 123, 127–28, 130, 132, 171

i n de x Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 1, 3, 5, 11, 12–14, Chapter 2 passim, 37, 39, 41, 44, 47, 51, 53, 60, 73, 74–77, 81, 83, 96, 116, 119, 121–22, 124, 130, 154, 170, 180, 187–88, 190, Chapter 10 passim, 210 and n., 216, 222–24, 229, 230, 233 The Corsair 4, 5n., 11, 37, 44, 49, 57, 77, 146, 164, 214 ‘Darkness’ 53, 55, 96 The Deformed Transformed 3, 108 Don Juan 1–3, 5n., 13–14, 16, 19, 22, 23n., 25, 30n., 33, 39–40, 45, 51, 56, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82 and n., 83, 89, 92, 106, 109–10, 113, Chapter 5 passim, 145–46, 147, 165, 170, 174–75, 177–78, 185, 187–88, 190–95, 198, 202, 206, 209–10, 215, 217, 225, 227–30, 233, 236 ‘The Dream’ 163–64 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 1, 6, 40n. ‘Epistle to Augusta’ 46, 75–77, 83, 229 The Giaour 3–4, 11, 32n., 37, 38, 43–44, 47, 53, 57, 65, 76–78, 101, 115 Hebrew Melodies 25, 99, 146, 165 Hours of Idleness 184 The Island 47, 80, 92 The Lament of Tasso 236 Lara 2, 4–6, 11, 16, Chapter 3 passim, 77–78, 80, 92, 94, 97, 101, 111, 117, 119–20, 126, 130, 146, 152, 186 Manfred 3, 29, 34, 38, 42, 48–50, 53, 58, Chapter 4 passim, 91–92, 95, 98 and n., 101, 104, 109, 111, 120, 122, 128, 130, 152, 224, 229–33 Marino Faliero 25, 172, 190, 209

Mazeppa 4, 75, 80, 229, 236 ‘Monody on the Death of the Right Hon. R.B. Sheridan’ 11n. Morgante Maggiore, translation of Canto I 106–7 and n., 191 ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’ 146 Parisina 43, 57, 72, 77–78, 80, 165, 218–19, 229 The Prisoner of Chillon 77, 80, 188–89, 236 ‘Prometheus’ 49, 77, 80–82, 128 The Prophecy of Dante 25, 77, 173–74 Sardanapalus 5, 24, 85, 190, 217 The Siege of Corinth 2n., 55, 57, 77, 81, 83 ‘Sonnet on Chillon’ 187–89 The Two Foscari 85, 124–27, 129, 195, 236 The Vision of Judgment 51, 61, 88, 123, 187–88, 210 and n. Werner 217 poetic and dramatic voicing 11–13, 18–20, 33, 68–70, 90, 104, 111, 116–17, 124, 188, 195n., 223, 226–27, 232 Presbyterian influences upon, early 89, 110, 209 religious sensibility and knowledge 15–16, 21–24, 32–33, 44, 46, 57, 90, 106, 109, 115, 123–24, 131, 209, 236 thought, depth of 1–2 and n., 14–16, 39, 63, 85, 115, 193 thought, modes of 42, 57, 101–2, 124, 184, 186, 236–37 Trinitarian tendencies 102, 106–9, 235–36 Canning, George 149, 195n. Carnall, Geoffrey 88n.

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r e a di ng by ron Carr, Sir John 24–25 Cartwright, Major John 214–15 Cézanne, Paul 213 Chambers, Sir William 142 Chandler, Robert 59 Charlot, Michel 239 Charlotte, Princess of Wales 26, 146, 154 Chateaubriand, F-R. 217 Chaucer, Geoffrey 11–12, 23n., 107, 193 Chaworth, Mary 163–64 and n. Cheeke, Stephen 174n. Chopin, Frédéric 213 Christian Observer 87n., 88n. Churchill, Charles 154 Churchill, Winston 211 Cicero 198 Clermont, Mrs Mary Anne 161, 167 Clubbe, John 195, 232–33 Cochin, C.N. 207–8 Cochran, Peter 62n., 63n., 66n., 71 and n., 145n., 160n., 186n., 192 Cogni, Margarita 172–73 Coleridge, E.H. 106–7 and n., 218 Coleridge, S.T. 2n., 5n., 15, 21n., 23n., 38, 43 and n., 46, 105, 191, 209n., 235 Copland, Alexander 143–44 Corneille, Pierre 47n. Cowper, William 169, 175 Cromwell, Oliver 190 Dante 11–12, 94, 172–74, 179 De Man, Paul 132n., 205 De Quincey, Thomas 60 Delacroix, Eugène 187–88, 193 DeLillo, Don 207 Dennis, Ian 91–92 Derrida, Jacques 22 Devonshire, Duchess of (Elizabeth Cavendish) 144 Dostoyevsky, F.M. 186

Dowling, Gregory 172n. Dryden, John 4, 11, 23 and n., 26, 47n., 216, 224, 226 Eckermann, J.P. 1 Eclectic Review 88 and n. Eden, George 155 Edinburgh Review 85n., 87 Edleston, John 26 Eisler, Benita 232 Eliot, T.S. 2–3, 18, 24n., 224, 227 Elledge, W. Paul 132–33 Ellis, George 42 Encyclopédie (ed. Diderot and d’Alembert) 23 Erasmus of Rotterdam 197 and n. Everett, Rupert xv, 168 Examiner 195 and n., 216 Ferdinand VII 185 Fichte, J.G. 23 Fielding, Henry 191, 193–94 Fletcher, William 145, 149, 152 Fox, C.J. 144, 155n., 184 Francis of Assisi, Saint 76 Franklin, Caroline 123n. Frere, J.H. 195n. Gamba, Ruggiero and family 139, 168 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 213 George III 142, 187, 194–95, 210 George IV (Prince Regent from 1811 to 1820) 142, 213 Gessner, Salomon 96, 100–1 Gibbon, Edmund 19, 24, 47n., 102, 164–65 Gifford, William 62–63, 67, 71, 110, 195n., 216–18 Girard, René 51–52 Giraud, Nicolo 172 Gladstone, William 149–50 and n. Gleckner, Robert 44, 49

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i n de x Godwin, William 217, 235 Goethe, J.W. von 1–3, 104, 224, 250 Goldberg, Leonard 126 Goldsmith, Oliver 19 Goldweber, David 108 Graham, Peter 116n. Gravelot, H.F. 207–8 Gray, May 229 Gray, Thomas 83, 194, 199 and n. Greene, Graham 149 Grimaldi, Joseph 162 Gross, Jonathan D. 68n., 195n. Grosskurth, Phyllis 232 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ 186, 210–12, 219 Guiccioli, Count Alessandro 173, 175, 177–80 Guiccioli, Contessa Angelica (née Galliani) 176 Guiccioli, Contessa Teresa (née Gamba) 72, 139, 155, 158–59, 165, 168, Chapter 7 passim, 219 ‘Harroviensis’ 90–91, 99 Hazlitt, William 42 Herrick, Robert 231 Heyer, Georgette 148 Hirst, Wolf 99 Hitchcock, Alfred 162 Hitler, Adolf 10 Hoare, William 160, 163 Hobhouse, John Cam 145 and n., 154, 159–64, 171, 175–78, 180 Holland, Lady Elizabeth 128 Holland, Henry (architect) 144 Homer 11–12, 141 Hopkins, G.M. 21 and n. Hoppner, Richard and Marie 180 Hopps, Gavin 2n., 221–39 Horace 24, 166 and n. Howe, Anthony 91 Hume, David 217 Hunt, Henry 185

Hunt, Leigh 42, 149, 168, 190n, 216 Huxley, Aldous 149 Jackson, John (‘Gentleman’) 141, 144, 146–47 Jeffrey, Francis 38, 41, 85, 87, 89–91, 98–99, 101, 103–4, 107–8, 113, 116 Jersey, Lady (Frances Villiers) 146 Johnson, Dr Samuel 19, 47n., 60, 166n., 190 Jones, William 108–9 Jonson, Ben 46, 224 Juvenal 19, 145n. Kant, Immanuel 2, 25, 32, 133, 225 Keats, John 11–12, 13, 16, 43 and n., 141, 191, 206, 227, 231, 232 Kelsall, Malcolm 218 Kennedy, James 107–8 Kenyon Jones, Christine 87n., 212n. Kermode, Frank 59–60 Kierkegaard, Søren 14, 37, 44–45, 47, 50, 94, 112 Kinnaird, Douglas 171, 175 Kitzinger, Ernst 208 Knolles, Richard 24 Knox, John 110 Lamb, Lady Caroline 143, 147, 151, 168 Lamb, George 145 and n. Laszlo, Damon de 141, 151 Lawrence, D.H. xv Le Sage, George-Louis 19 Leavis, F.R. 60, 238 Leibniz, G.W. 225 Leigh, Augusta 68, 159, 161, 179–80, 210 Leigh, Chandos 149–50 Lenin, V.I. 186, 208, 210–13, 215, 217 Lessing, G.E. 23 Levis, R. Barry 86n.

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r e a di ng by ron Lewis, M.G. ‘Monk’ 19, 68, 73–74, 145–46 and n., 148 Lincoln, Bishop of (G.P. Tomline) 86–87 and n. Locke, John 87, 90, 103–5 Louis XVI 195 Louis XVIII 143, 213 Lowth, Robert 26n. Lukács, George 15 Lunacharsky, A.V. 212–13 Luther, Martin 76 Luxemburg, Rosa 213 MacCarthy, Fiona 138, 168, 232 McGann, Jerome J. 16, 18n., 40n., 62n., 69, 101n., 201n., 221–223, 230 Mallarmé, Stéphane 226 Manet, Edouard 193 Marchand, Leslie 85, 138–39, 147, 232 Marshall, W.H. 32–33n., 49 Martin, Philip 61n., 85 Marx, Karl 10, 15, 208, 213 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 59, 64 Mazzini, Giuseppe 185–86, 195 and n., 215, 219 Medwin, Thomas 148 Melbourne, Lady (Elizabeth Lamb) 150, 157–58, 169, 171, 174 Melbourne, first Viscount (Peniston Lamb) 142 Melbourne, second Viscount (William Lamb) 142 Milbanke, Lady (Judith Noel) 153, 158, 161–63, 167 Milbanke, Sir Ralph 155 and n., 158, 160–63, 167 Mill, J.S. 11–12 Milton, John 11–12, 23n., 56, 64, 70, 100, 113, 157, 189–90 Miner, Earl 17, 23n. Minta, Stephen 239

Mole, Tom 71–72 Monbron, L-C. Fougeret de 157n. Monet, Claude 212 Monroe, Marilyn 211 Moore, Thomas 41, 73, 99, 138, 143, 150, 161–62, 164, 166–67, 170, 178, 232 Morgan, Lady Sydney 14 Mozart, W.A. 19 Mule, Mrs (Byron’s London housemaid) 145, 149 Murray, John 13, 62–63, 67n., 86 and n., 91, 100, 110, 142, 146, 164, 174–75, 189n. Napoleon Bonaparte 18, 27, 28, 31, 143, 184, 195, 199, 202, 209, 211, 213, 219 Newman, Cardinal 40, 238 Newton, Isaac 39, 101, 105 Nietzsche, Friedrich 14, 53, 127, 219, 222 Noel, Thomas 160, 163 Oates, Titus 26 Ong, Walter 53–54 Ovid 40, 43, 58 Oxford, Lady (Jane Harley) 168, 184 Paglia, Camille 116 Paine, Thomas 87, 92, 217–19, 235 Paley, William 87, 89, 99, 103–4 Palgrave’s Golden Treasury 12–13 Panovsky, Erwin 207 Parker, Fred 123n. Parmenides 225 Pascal, Blaise 58 Pater, Walter 60 Paul, Saint 11n., 40, 45, 58, 189 Peel, Robert 40 Percy, Bishop Thomas 19n. Peter, Saint 162, 202, 211

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i n de x Pitt the Younger, William 86n., 87–88 Plato 39–41, 44, 225, 235 Plutarch 112, 197n., 200 Poe, E.A. 3 Pope, Alexander 4, 5n., 11, 19, 43, 47n., 60, 121, 130, 132, 147, 166n., 172, 194, 213, 216, 226, 227, 231, 233 Porter, Peter 60 Praz, Mario 168 Price, Richard 194 Priestley, J.B. 149 Pseudo-Dionysius 46 Pulci, Luigi 106, 107n., 191 Purcell, Henry 223 Quarterly Review 42, 190 and n. Racine, Jean-Baptiste 11 Radcliffe, Anne 19, 53 Rawes, Alan 24n. Renan, J.E. 23 Rice, Richard A. 85n. Richards, I.A. 226 Ricœur, Paul 126 Rienzi (Nicola Gabrini) 201 Robespierre, Maximilien 41, 213 Rogers, Samuel 209n. Roman de la Rose, Le (Guillaume de Lorris et alia) 10 Rose, W.S. 149 Rossini, G.A. 19, 178n. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 19, 31, 77 Rublev, Andrei 213 Russell, Bertrand 219–20, 235 Russell, Ken 168 Rutherford, Andrew 18–19n. Sadler, James (balloonist) 145 Said, Edward 39n. Schiller, Friedrich 68 Schock, Peter A. 92 and n., 102 Schumann, Robert 81

Scott, Alexander 180 Scott, Sir Walter 14, 15, 19n., 38, 189, 249 Segati, Marianna 73, 172 Shakespeare, William 10, 11, 20, 23n., 42, 43, 45, 66, 68, 79, 81, 93, 112, 115, 118, 122–24, 126, 132, 162, 173, 202, 206, 224, 227 Shaw, G.B. 90 Shears, Jonathon 50 Shelley, M.W. 73, 113, 224 Shelley, P.B. 1–2, 14, 16, 23n, 26, 28, 30, 34, 61, 73, 88n, 92, 101, 113, 154, 168, 184–85, 189, 191, 215, 219–20 Sheridan, R.B. 11n., 144 Sidney, Sir Philip 18 Silvestrini, Fanny 178, 180 Smollett, Tobias 191 Socrates 37, 197 and n. Southey, Robert 88–89, 105–6, 187–88, 190–91 Spartacus 213 Stabler, Jane 184, 195n. Stanley, Eric 238 Steele, Richard 11n. Steiner, George 236 Sterne, Laurence 191, 194 Stevens, Wallace 60–61 Storey, Mark 31 Swift, Jonathan 19, 23n., 47n., 166, 216 Symonds, J.A. 107n. Tanner, Tony 172n. Tasso, Torquato 178n., 200–1 Taylor, Thomas 68 Tchaikovsky, P.I. 81 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 5n., 18 Thomas-Terry 234 Thompson, Miss (balloonist) 145 Thomson, James 19–20, 199 and n. Thorslev, Peter 19n.

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r e a di ng by ron Verdi, Giuseppe 195 and n., 215 Victoria, Queen 142 Villon, François 81 Volney, Comte de 19 Voltaire 19, 39, 47n., 86, 213 Walker, Susan 208–9 Walpole, Horace 68, 74 Warburg, Aby 207 Warhol, Andy 207, 211 Wesley, John 88 Whitbread, William 149 White, William Hale (‘Mark Rutherford’) 3n., 213–15 Wilberforce, William 87–88 and n. Wilde, Oscar 60, 148 Wilkes, John 187, 190, 210

Wilson Knight, G. 2n., 122n., 206, 233 Wimsatt, William K. 207 Wingfield, John 26 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 235 Wodehouse, P.G. 165 Wolfe, Tom 10 Woodhouse, David 195n. Wordsworth, William 2n., 19, 23n., 24n., 26, 33, 42–43n., 60–61, 68, 73, 76, 105–6, 108, 145–46, 149, 175, 188, 190, 197, 212, 225 Wu, Duncan 219 Yesenin, Sergey 59 York, Prince Frederick, Duke of 142–44, 146 Zeno 5

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