Childe Byron

Until recently, readers could turn only to the scholarly biography of Byron by the late Leslie Marchand, published in three volumes over forty years ago in 1957. Suddenly, two new biographies have appeared, first Phyllis Grosskurth’s somewhat turgid and not convincing psychological account, Byron: The Flawed Angel, and now Benita Eisler’s densely informative account of Byron’s life, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame. Neither biographer knows how to read Byron’s poetry, but Eisler’s is rewarding on its own terms.

Eisler’s subtitle is a useful reminder of Byron’s twin genius for writing and for libertinism. Indeed, at the beginning of Byron’s writing life, one is hard put to distinguish them, for his sexual and travel adventures became the subject — or at least the underlying matter — of his poetry. He had so many romantic liaisons that the public may have loved Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as much for its author’s exploits as for its protagonist. Its first printing sold out in three days in March, 1812, establishing Byron in the public eye as a passionate youth grown world-weary and disillusioned — a figure that would, after Byron’s success, dominate romantic literature. But Byron himself would several years later turn the voice that had started out pretty much as self advertisement into the sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued narrator of his masterpiece, Don Juan.

In his short life, Byron became both more famous and more notorious as his libertinism became more known, and he was finally driven out of England. He lived abroad for the rest of his life, where he wrote Don Juan and joined the underground Carbonari in Italy’s revolt against the occupying Austrians. At the end, because he again longed for excitement and because his own writing had helped to kindle European enthusiasm for the Greek cause, Byron organized an expedition to assist in Greece’s war for independence from the Turks. He showed great practicality and leadership in funding and training his regiment. But he succumbed to a series of feverish attacks in the malarial swamps of Missolonghi and died — it is said from the doctors’ determination to bleed him heavily — just after he had reached his thirty-sixth birthday. To this day Byron is revered by the Greeks as a national hero.

The nearest one can come to a modern equivalent to Byron is someone like John Lennon — both wonderfully talented, wildly popular, and notoriously moody and skeptical about the society he lived in — except that Byron was from the oldest British nobility, was outstandingly handsome (he dieted off his baby fat by eating only crackers and soda water), and had even more sexual energy than most pop stars. Because he was a peer, when he made a success (and some money) from Childe Harold, he was taken up by the highest reaches of London’s sexually promiscuous Whig society. For his lovers, Byron tended to choose married women. During his long liaison with his great love, his half-sister Augusta, she was pregnant or nursing the entire time, at least once with Byron’s child, about which her husband was complaisant. (It would be interesting to know if Byron knew that his own father, while marrying two heiresses and running through their money, had had a sexual liaison with his own — full — sister, to whom he wrote passionate letters and with whom he once set up house.)

Eisler has trawled through unpublished accounts of public-school life of the time in order to make her convincing case of Byron’s other, homosexual liaisons while he was at Harrow (and throughout his life). But even today we would not call Byron homosexual, and it is clear he loved women, passionately and sexually, whenever he was with them. Being persuaded he must marry (for money), in January, 1815, Byron married Annabella Milbanke, the niece of Caroline Lamb’s hated mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne. After protracted hesitation on both sides — Annabella was a bluestocking gifted in mathematics and a devout Christian — she could not resist the idolized author of Childe Harold. After their marriage, she was sexually and emotionally enthralled by Byron.

But Byron seems to have had some sort of nervous breakdown after marrying Annabella, related to his liaison with Augusta. When Annabella gave birth to their daughter Ada, Byron drove mother and child out of his house and back to Annabella’s parents. There, Annabella finally realized that Byron was involved with Augusta and sued for separation, threatening to reveal “secrets” about Byron’s life if he did not comply. It has never been discovered if there were secrets beyond what we already know, but Byron left England, never to return. Eisler believes that Byron’s deformity, a malformed right foot that made him limp, caused him to believe that “he had a special dispensation from the moral sanctions imposed upon others and a lifelong entitlement to the forbidden.” But this is false psychologizing. “Byron’s deformity” doesn’t begin to explain his clear-eyed vision of his society.

Byron settled down in Geneva for a time. Having had to leave England themselves for similar reasons, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and her half-sister Claire Clairmont (who had pursued Byron and had evidently arranged that the Shelleys meet him) had settled nearby. Here took place the famous scene in which Byron suggested they all write a ghost story to be read aloud, and eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley produced Frankenstein. The two poets didn’t take the assignment seriously. But they did discuss their craft and the state of England. Shelley was not of nearly so grand a lineage as Byron, being the son not of a peer but of a mere baronet, but Shelley had Byron’s great intelligence — and a great deal more money — and he stead-fastly supported Byron’s writing.

Eisler regards the two as politically incompatible, claiming that Shelly found Byron “an eighteenth-century libertine who wanted to break laws, not change them,” but this judgment utterly fails to understand Byron, who all his life hated tyranny.

Byron and Shelley agreed on much that was wrong with the state of England, with its demented King George III, debauched Prince Regent, censorship, and curtailment of liberties. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, however, who surrendered their first enthusiasm for the French Revolution to caution and skepticism, Byron in Don Juan found the great Duke of Wellington merely the “best of cut-throats,” and the Holy Alliance (by which Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1815 agreed to rule Europe in concert “to protect Religion, Peace and Justice” against the Turk) just another device to shackle mankind:

 

Shut up the bald-coot bully Alexander!

Ship off the Holy Three to Senegal;

Teach them that “sauce for goose is sauce for gander,”

And ask them how they like to be in thrall?

The poem damns England as the “once adored,”

 

False friend, who held out Freedom to Mankind,

But now would chain them — to the very mind.

What Byron did not share was Shelley’s belief in an ideal future; he was too skeptical of man’s nature for that.

In the fall of 1817, he established himself in Venice, where he finished his tragedy Manfred, wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold, and Beppo — a short preview of the narrative style and stanza of Don Juan. At the same time, after frenzied debauchery that, he claimed, involved more than two hundred women, he settled down with Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of the elderly Count Allesandro Guiccioli, for whom he served as cavaliere servente, the lover taken in recompense for an arranged marriage. Here he began Don Juan and completed his transformation from Romantic lyricist to English satirist.

At the beginning of his literary life, Byron, born in 1788, provided his English and European contemporaries with what the Frenchman Hippolyte Taine in 1850 called the Romantic Age’s “ruling personage”: “the model that contemporaries invest with their admiration and sympathy” — the “Byronic hero,” moody, passionate, erotic, and oblivious to mundane life. This personage is an original creation of the Romantic Age and of Byron in particular. From him descend Heathcliff, Captain Ahab, Eugene Onegin, and the vulgarized figure of Nietzsche’s superman. Indeed, the Romantic Age rewrote earlier protagonists to make them types of the Byronic hero. Thus Marlowe’s Faustus and Milton’s Satan became Romantic heroes after the fact.

But this hero is essentially a poseur, and what Byron wrote early in his career — no matter that the whole of Europe was thrilled by the Byronic hero — was “poetry of pose,” as Maurice Bowra pointed out in The Romantic Imagination: “Byron’s continental admirers did not distinguish the false from the true in his work or his personality. They were so fascinated by his early poems that they continued to prize them even when he had begun to compose in a different and more truly creative spirit.”

Most “men of feeling” could not follow Byron into Don Juan. Wordsworth regarded Byron as “a monster” and “a Man of Genius whose heart is perverted.” Coleridge thought his poetry “Satanic,” and even Keats called Don Juan “Lord Byron’s last flash poem.” Byron returned their opinions: Wordsworth was a bore, Coleridge was “a shabby fellow,” and Keats had the weakness to let bad reviews destroy him: “‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.”

Shelley alone was an exception. He liked Byron personally and had an excellent understanding of what was good in his poetry. Indeed, for a poet whose work is not nearly so good as Byron’s, Shelley was a wonderful friend. He said frankly what the faults were in such works as The Deformed Transformed, but he gave Don Juan unqualified praise for its “power and beauty and wit” and the true portrait of human nature “laid on with the eternal colors of the feelings of humanity.”

Beyond his Romantic pose and genuinely brave and sometimes heroic adventures, Byron is a writer fully in the great tradition of English satire — which was brought to a cutting edge by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, the eighteenth-century poets whose verse Byron’s fellow Romantics felt themselves to be rebelling against. Byron particularly admired Swift’s four-beat line and acerbic wit. In the character of the narrator of Don Juan Byron created a great, complex, comic invention who takes us through what Byron called his “satire on abuses of the present state of society.” He wrote to his publisher, “I maintain that it is the most moral of poems; but if people won’t discover the moral, that is their fault, not mine.” In his “hero,” Don Juan, Byron stated that he meant to depict “a vicious and unprincipled character, and lead him through those ranks of society, whose high external accomplishments cover and cloak internal and secret vices.” And if English society saw itself portrayed therein, so much the better.

Eisler’s judgments on Don Juan are often wide of the mark; she seems not to understand how satire works. She claims, for example, that “snuffling over the fate of Don Jose [Don Juan’s martyred father, cuckolded by his mother], Byron’s satirical edge sagged to self-pity.” That’s her false verdict on the following lines:

 

It was a trying moment that which found him

Standing alone beside his desolate hearth,

Where all his household gods lay shivered round him;

No choice was left his feelings or his pride

Save death or Doctors’ Commons — so he died.

Anyone who rhymes pride with died has hardly succumbed to self-pity.

The poem begins by setting itself in the epic tradition, which over the centuries after Homer was used by poets to characterize society. But this narrator is still undecided at the beginning of his epic:

 

I want a hero: an uncommon want,

When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,

The age discovers he is not the true one;

Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,

I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,

We all have seen him in the pantomime

Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time.

Here the chief fault of ottava rima is made its virtue, the couplet collapsing the sublime into the ridiculous. Don Juan (pronounced “Joo-on” by Byron) is one of the longest poems in English, but it is a masterpiece. Shelley immediately recognized it as “something wholly new and relative to the age” and “every word of it . . . pregnant with immortality.” Early in our century, Virginia Woolf declared it

the most readable poem of its length ever written. . . . It’s what one has looked for in vain — an elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it. . . . He wasn’t committed to be poetical; and thus escaped his evil genius of the false romantic and imaginative.

In relating the travels and emotional episodes in Byron’s life to the poems he wrote, Eisler is excellent and accomplished. She summarizes plots well, even giving an extended summary of Don Juan (which really has no plot). But in Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, Eisler hardly seems to know that beyond the best-known of his lyric poetry — She walks in beauty like the night, or The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, or The mountains look on Marathon, and Marathon looks on the sea — Byron is one of the supreme satirists in the English language.

A satirist’s job is to hold a mirror up to fallen human nature wherein we may recognize ourselves. Byron’s pity and scorn encompass us all, as well as himself. Surprisingly devoid of prurient interest, Don Juan reveals that Byron’s libertinism may have been a precondition for writing the poem, but it is not a precondition for reading it. Rarely is great poetry so immediately available. In an age when Wordsworth and Coleridge had determined to write poetry in “the real language of men,” Byron alone succeeded in actually speaking that language.

Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.