| [an error occurred while processing this directive] |  |  |
 |  | |
| ||
| |||||||
| |||||||
|
| ||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
 More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. From Atlantic Unbound: Flashbacks: "The Byron Complex" (September 12, 2002) Jacques Barzun, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others assess the controversial life and poetry of Lord Byron. |
Men, Women, and the Byron-Complex
"In the nonacademic world of letters no one, apparently, either knows or cares whether Byron was a great poet. After a hundred years, the sole question that impassions people is: 'Just how much of a cad was he?'" by Katherine Fullerton Gerould ..... 
inety-eight years ago, in April, Lord Byron died at Missolonghi. Astarte has, within the year, been publicly reissued; two volumes of new Byron letters have been put forth by John Murray within a few months. It is natural that the files of the recent British reviews should be full of him. Natural, indeed, that ever since 1905 (when Lord Lovelace first made his extraordinary gesture of publication), any index of periodical literature should have been studded with Byron's name.Yet out of all the welter of articles and essays resultant upon Astarte and the new Letters, one curious fact emerges, dominant, obtrusive. As it was through all the nineteenth century, so now in the twentieth. None of the recent critics (unless it be Lord Ernle) cares a hang about Byron's poetry, or his prose. Mr. Percy Lubbock says frankly—too frankly, if that be his real opinion,—that everyone will read the Hobhouse collection of letters with only one purpose: to see if anything new can be gathered about the Byron-Augusta scandal. There is nothing new about Byron and Augusta in the Hobhouse collection, and therefore it is worth nothing. We would give it all for a slim volume of Keats's letters. Thus Mr. Lubbock. Mr. Maurice Hewlett, reviewing the volumes in the London Mercury, never hints at whether or not they sustain Byron's reputation as one of the great English letter-writers. He uses his three pages to vilify Byron the man, as far as his vocabulary will allow. After a hundred years, one ought to be able to consider a man's poetry on its merit. But in the nonacademic world of letters no one, apparently, either knows or cares whether Byron was a great poet. No one except Lord Ernle either knows or cares, as we have said, whether he was a better or a worse letter-writer than we had thought. After a hundred years, the sole question that impassions people is: 'Just how much of a cad was he?' One looks in vain for another instance quite like this. Lord Byron was not a king, not a great warrior or a great statesman; he was not the leader of a cause, the founder of a party, the winner or loser of a battlefield. His one adventure into public affairs—the espousing of the Greek cause—came late, and amounted to little. He was never, to any group of enthusiasts, a symbol; his name was never the equivalent of a theory or an ideal. He 'stood for' nothing, and therefore gathered no loyalties about him like a borrowed garment. His poetry and his personality were all that he had to make him significant. Scandal about Shelley has never been wanting; and we have recently acquired a scandal (God save the mark!) about Wordsworth. Yet people go on estimating the Lyrical Ballads and Prometheus Unbound much as they did before. Critics, however, persist still in abandoning criticism when they speak of Byron. You search their pages for any hint that he wrote Lara, The Bride of Abydos, or The Giaour; and when they mention Don Juan, their sole interest seems to lie in being able to name the woman he was living with when he produced a particular canto. The sequence of his works serves as a mere corroborative footnote to the chronique scandaleuse of his life. Scandals a hundred years old usually lack spice for anyone save the antiquary. But, though no one since Matthew Arnold, except Paul Elmer More, has bothered much about Byron's poetry, they are bothering still about Lord Byron and his amours. One would think he was a sufficiently great poet to be spoken of as such. Or Mr. Lubbock or Mr. Hewlett—since they were supposed to be reviewing the Murray volumes—might have thrown in a word or two about Byron's letters, which, as letters, are among the best we have. But no: Byron still arouses an emotion purely personal. People persist in taking him as if he were the defendant in a criminal suit. They are as passionately partisan as if he had not, for years, been dust beneath the stones of Hucknall Torkard church. This cannot be mere love of scandal; because, as we have said, scandal about other Romantic poets—Shelley or Wordsworth—leaves people able, still, to estimate them as poets. Certainly it is not natural preoccupation with great figures of English literature because they care nothing about 'placing' Byron's work in the magnificent sequence of English verse. No: they are simply squabbling over George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron; adoring or detesting him precisely as did those people who stood by him, or cold-shouldered him, at Lady Jersey's famous party. The simple fact is this: no woman has ever been able to keep her head about Byron; and now that he is dead, the men seem to be as bad as the women. What other private personality, in our Anglo-Saxon world, has ever been so persistent as this? It is easy to find excuses: easy to say that Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1869 (for she was the first cause of most of the modern talk), kindled the dying embers, and lit such a candle as, she trusted, should never be put out; easy to say that Lord Lovelace had a grandmother-complex, and felt constrained to produce the worst-written book of the century to vilify his grandfather. Even Lord Lovelace and Mrs. Stowe, who were two as good Byron-haters as you can find anywhere—but we shall come to that later. Easy to say that the controversy over Byron and Augusta dealt (to put it mildly) with peculiarly intriguing possibilities. Yet one must remember that, as Professor Strahan has just pointed out, at the time when Byron left England for Continental exile, there was sympathy abroad for Byron and none for Shelley, and that probably his going to the Shelleys was the coup de grace to Byron's reputation. In the minds of the British public, that is, even after the separation, Byron was a sinner, but Shelley was scum. There is something there, other than scandal,— other, even, than monstrosity of scandal,—to account for this clamor that bursts out, even to-day, about Byron—both for and against him—on the slightest excuse. That something is personality. Byron is so real, so vivid, so persistent, as a human being, that you cannot down him. Lucian makes Diogenes in Hades greet Alexander with: 'Dear me, Alexander, you dead like the rest of us?' Byron is not dead like the rest of them. He evokes the same kind of adoration, of contempt, of loyalty, that he would evoke if he walked down Piccadilly to-day. People either shed tears over him or spit when his name is mentioned. At least, Mr. Hewitt, K.C., is not far from tears; and Mr. Hewlett's pages come as near the gesture of expectoration as print can come. No woman, I said earlier, has ever been able to keep her head about Byron, living or dead. Miss E. C. Mayne, in her two-voume life, comes fairly near it; yet even Miss Mayne lapses from the judicial temper. Being a woman, I should not attempt, myself, to weigh evidence that concerned Byron. It is unfortunate that the man who had access to more facts about him than anyone else—Lord Lovelace, namely—should have been as incapable of either assembling, presenting, or weighing evidence, as any woman. For some years, I have hoped that some man with a judicial mind and an urbane temper would come forward and do us a new book about Byron. But one is constrained to believe that even men encounter a peculiar difficulty in dealing with him. Miss Mayne warns the women 'who are in love with Byron's ghost' that the Byron they love is the Byron his male friends saw and knew, and that, if they had known him in the flesh, they would have fared no better than Annabella Milbanke or Caroline Lamb. That will not prevent women from being in love with Byron's ghost, or even from writing love-letters to it. All women who have ever been in love with Byron are disqualified, naturally. But, curiously enough, the people who are not in love with him are equally disqualified. I do not know who was editing the Atlantic Monthly in 1869. [See endnote*] The gentleman is presumably dead, and lovers of literature, it is to be hoped, are not carrying flowers to his grave. He moulders with the man who, in the North American Review, emptied the vials of his scorn on Edward Coate Pinkney. Shelley would say that, wherever they are, they are with Gifford. It is almost impossible, you see, not to mention Mrs. Stowe in the Byron connection, not only because she 'started' everything, but because she proves, more amusingly even than Lord Lovelace himself, or the crew now writing about Byron in British reviews, the point we were making. Yet Mrs. Stowe, as the authoress of Lady Byron Vindicated (her elaboration and defense, in 1870, of her Atlantic and Macmillan performance of 1869), is not to be mentioned without preliminary apology—an exculpatory washing of hands. Permit me, therefore, before discussing Mrs. Stowe's discreditable publication, to quote Swinburne's footnote about it. The whole paragraph of the footnote (from the Essays and Studies) must be set down, I fear. To set down less would be like not washing one's hands enough. The worst consequence...was not the collapse of such faint hopes or surmises as we might yet have cherished of some benefit to be received in the way of biography, some new and kindly light to be thrown on the life and character of Byron; it was the opportunity given to a filthy female moralist and novelist, who was not slow to avail herself of such an occasion to expound her beastly mind to all. Evidently the laurels of Mrs. Behn had long kept her successor from sleeping; it was not enough to have copied the authoress of Oroonoko in the selection of a sable and a servile hero; her American imitator was bent on following her down fouler ways than this. But I feel that an apology is due to the virtuous memory of the chaste Aphra: she was indeed the first 'nigger novelist'; and she was likewise a vendor and purveyor of obscene fiction; but here the parallel ends; for I am not aware that she ever applied her unquestionable abilities in that unlovely line of business to the defamation at second-hand of the illustrious and defenseless dead.Swinburne, as you see, kept his head no better than the rest of us; yet, considering the enormity of Mrs. Stowe's offense against taste, both public and private,—which no one felt so keenly as Lord Lovelace himself,—who can say that something of the kind was not deserved? The whole point about Mrs. Stowe, for most of us, is not her inaccuracy or her egregious breach of faith, about which Lady Byron's grandson was so bitter and contemptuous, nor yet the fact that she was ultimately responsible for Lord Lovelace's impotent volume; not even the gusto with which (though that is somewhat overrated by Swinburne) she set herself, with unctuous explicitness, to blacken the poet's character. Let us be temperate about Mrs. Stowe and admit that, while her position was contemptible, her purpose was not, like Mrs. Behn's, pornographic. The interesting fact, for us, as I say, is other. Here is your official Byron-hater, speaking officially. She had worn Lady Byron's own gloves, and considered Lady Byron the greatest Englishwoman of the century, if not of all time. Lady Byron's devoted grandson had fewer illusions about her. Part of Mrs. Stowe's purpose, according to herself, is to dissuade men and women from reading Lord Byron's remarkable poetry. She hopes, in blasting his personal reputation, to destroy his poetical popularity as well. Reading Byron's poetry, in her opinion, is one of the easiest descents into hell. Mrs. Stowe, it must be said, does not ignore the poetry, like so many of our contemporary commentators. She thinks it magnificent, and refers to her own youth, when young men and maidens chanted his verse with ecstasy. But now that she has held Lady Byron's hand, and heard 'the truth' about Augusta, she would prevent anyone else from being similarly inspired. Yet even Mrs. Stowe attempts to palliate Byron s crimes. Ancestral causes had sent him into the world with a most perilous and exceptional sensitiveness of brain and nervous system, which it would have required the most judicious course of education to direct safely or happily…. Byron's physical organization was originally as fine and as sensitive as that of the most delicate woman. He possessed the faculty of moral ideality in a high degree, and he had not, in the earlier part of his life, an attraction towards mere brutal vice.... In considering his subsequent history, we are to take into account that it was upon the brain and nerve-power, thus exhausted by early excess, that the draughts of sudden and rapid literary composition began to be made. There was something unnatural and unhealthy in the rapidity, clearness, and vigor with which his various works followed each other....And she inclines, if not to be convinced, to be much struck, by the following statement of Lady Byron's:— I could not but conclude that he (Lord Byron) was a believer in the inspiration of the Bible, and had the gloomiest Calvanistic tenets. To that unhappy view of the relation of the creature to the Creator aways ascribed the misery of his life.... I, like all connected with him, was broken against the rock of predestination.The last two quotations are from Mrs. Stowe's chapter entitled, 'How Could She Love Him?' It is quite clear that Mrs. Stowe saw perfectly how Lady Byron could love him; and she is obviously much taken (though from anyone but Lady Byron, one gathers, it would have shocked her) with the pretty theory that 'the truth about Augusta,' like everything else, was ultimately John Calvin's fault. Lady Byron, on her first meeting with Mrs. Stowe, told her that she (Mrs. Stowe) could have understood him. One rather doubts that Mrs. Stowe could have understood Byron; one is fairly sure that Byron would not have thought that she understood him; but one realizes that the compliment was by no means distasteful to her. Read Lady Byron Vindicated from cover to cover, and you will see that even Mrs. Stowe was not unaffected by the Byron complex. To be sure, she alone among his posthumous detractors seems not to have forgotten that he was a great poet—even if she does sympathize with Lady Byron's horror at his poems being made accessible to larger numbers of people by grace of a cheap edition. That, you will remember, is why (according to Mrs. Stowe) Lady Byron 'spoke out.' This loving woman was afraid that her husband's poetry would be more widely read. But of course Lady Byron's psychology is a muddle and a mess, and Lord Lovelace, devoting his hundreds of pages to defending her, has made the poor woman more incredible and unpalatable than ever. A good many of us were at peace with Lady Byron until we read Astarte. No one can read Lady Lovelace's memoir of her husband without sympathy for him. He walked for years in the shadow of his grandparents. To clear his grandmother from accusations of coldness and moral cruelty he wrote his book,—having brooded on the subject the better part of his life,—sacrificing his grandfather completely. Better that Byron should be called immoral than that Lady Byron should be called unfeeling! No one could accuse Lord Lovelace of 1oving his grandfather. He brushes aside the poetry, except as he thinks it serves to prove his scandalous point. Yet Lord Lovelace judges it well to remind us that there were extenuating circumstances in Byron's 'affair' with Augusta. And having explained, as well as he could, why this was not like other cases, he proceeds, in one of the most remarkable pages ever penned (when you consider that he is a special pleader on the other side), to declare that, ideally speaking, Augusta should have gone to Byron on the Continent, after the separation; that they should have flaunted their relation (as he conceives it to have been) in the eyes of Europe, cutting themselves off from every civilized contact (for every civilized community, he is convinced, no matter how remote, would have spewed them out); since then Byron would have been a truly poetical and sympathetic figure. Then we could have loved him. Even Lord Lovelace finds no evidence that Augusta ever wished to go to Byron; but that does not matter. She should have sacrificed herself, her husband; her children, her soul; she should have chucked everything and gone, so that we might love Byron—whose poetry, according to Lord Lovelace, was not of much account. No: the world certainly has a Byron-complex. Professor Strahan paints us a vivid picture of Byron's departure from England, after the scandal of the separation:— Crowds had watched his departure from Piccadilly for Dover; at his hotel at Dover women of position bribed the chamber maids to let them take over their clothes and duties for the evening, so that they might have a near look at the interesting monster; and the next day practically the whole town turned out to see him go to the packet. The same intense curiosity followed him to the end. At Venice, when he crossed in his gondola for his customary ride on the sands of the Lido, all the English visitors in Venice were waiting at San Nicolo to view his landing, some of the women using opera glasses, and some pressing so close that he had occasionally to push his way through them in order to mount his horse. His love of Ravenna was largely due to the fact that the absence of English people saved him from constant mobbing; but when he was going from that city to Pisa, and broke his journey for a night or so at Bologna, Rogers, who was there, told Macaulay that, when he left the hotel, every window in it was crammed with English sightseers.No bribing of chambermaids to-day would get us a glimpse of Byron, so it is easy to laugh at the poor ladies who made that rather unseemly gesture. But the attitude—mutatis mutandis—has persisted. He is a person, still. When Mrs. Stowe—a young thing, then—heard that Byron was dead, she went off and climbed a hill, to be alone all the afternoon with her thoughts of him. Later, she wanted his poetry annihilated, for moral reasons; but she could revert with tenderness to her own gesture of mourning. Mrs. Stowe is long since dead; but these people who are at present concerned with Byron are very like the ladies who bribed the chambermaids. Mr. Hewlett, Mr. Lubbock, and many others are not reading Byron; but they are craning their necks from balconies for glimpses of the man. I have said more than once, that no woman, friend or foe, can to this day quite keep her head about Byron. I still, believe that is true. But one woman I have encountered who came very near it. Several years ago I made pilgrimage, like so many others, to Newstead Abbey. The housekeeper, rather bored, did the honors. It dawned upon the woman at last that here were Americans who cared little for Dukeries—but a great deal for the poet. Nothing could mitigate her austerity; but she faced us finally in the drawing-room, cluttered with the possessions of the alien owners, and coldly, primly remarked: 'It is a great pity that Lord Byron did not marry Mary Chaworth, and settle down and keep up the place.' For her, Byron was simply a landed gentleman who had neglected his duty. Recently I have had occasion to contrast her attitude with that of Mr. Richard Edgcumbe, who, you will recall, has done his poor best to whitewash Augusta (that is, Byron, for no one cares a straw about poor Augusta) by ingenious scandal about Mary Chaworth Musters. According to him, Augusta was the screen for a late affair with the early love; all the compromising letters were really written to Mary; Medora was Mary's child—you know the argument, no doubt. As far as I am aware, no one is convinced by it; but any hypothesis will do to defend Byron, as any hypothesis will do to damn him. No one's reputation counts, for an instant, but Byron's own. If you hate him, you sacrifice Augusta, or Mary Chaworth, or Lady Frances Wedderburne Webster; if you love him, you say, like Professor Strahan, that the Guiccioli was the only woman he had ever pursued—the others had all pursued poor Byron. If you hate him, you speak of Lady Melbourne as hardly as Swinburne spoke of Mrs. Stowe—that impossible creature who received his daily, hourly letters, full of his disgusting affairs. If you love him, you grow lachrymose over what he suffered at the hands of Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady Frances Wedderburne Webster (Mr. Hewlett, being for the moment Leporello must have her on his list, though Lord Lovelace explicitly says that she does not belong there)—they might be, for all they matter, dancing-girls of the desert, to whom Mohammed denied a soul. The only impersonal treatment of Byron we have been favored with for many years has come from the British copywright laws. It is possible to buy the Oxford edition of Byron, in one volume, on India paper, in limp leather. As far as one can see, that is the sole compensation Byron has received for dying in 1894. For, to hear them talk, you would think his death notice was in this morning's paper. Somewhere, the ghost of Byron is mightily amused—and not a little pleased. Byron cared more for the House of Lords than for any Pantheon, one judges and he would rather be responsible for a Byron-complex a hundred years after his death than to be prescribed reading in every British schoolroom. He would have bowed with ironic grace to Matthew Arnold, but he would have liked better the people who cannot keep their heads about him. Even Maurice Hewlett's Billingsgate would have been more to his taste than any treatise on the metrical values of Don Juan or Childe Harold. His champions froth at the mouth over the obvious injustices done him: the burning of his own memoirs four days after his death; the charges made against a dead man who could not defend himself, and so forth, and so on. But, though Byron would have been his own best champion in any verbal ordeal, there is ample reason to believe that he would have taken the Byron-complex to be his sweetest and most satisfying revenge. He would rather be an obsession to the men and women of the twentieth century than to be in Westminster Abbey. His living admirers may resent slanders in his behalf; but, believe me, they waste their tears. Byron's ghost is perfectly appeased. * But the editor does very well, for the incident is famous in the Atlantic annals. Mr. James T. Fields had conducted the magazine with very great success from the hour when Mr. Lowell left it in his hands, but at this time, as it happened, he was abroad, and the assistant editor, Mr. Howells, had the difficult question thrust upon him as to the acceptance of Mrs. Stowe's unfortunate paper. In this situation, he consulted Dr. Holmes, godfather of the magazine; and it was by Dr. Holmes's express advice that the article was printed—and the magazine almost shattered. —THE EDITOR.
Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; September 1922; Men, Women, and the Byron-Complex; Volume 130, No. 3; page 289-295. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
|
Home |
Current Issue |
Back Issues |
Forum |
Site Guide |
Feedback |
Subscribe |
Search
| ||||
