Byron

Jane Stabler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780367475529
• eBook ISBN: 9781317884507
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Often seen as the exception to generalisations about Romanticism, Byron's poetry - and its intricate relationship with a brilliant, scandalous life - has remained a source of controversy throughout the twentieth century. This book brings together recent work on Byron by leading British and American scholars and critics, guiding undergraduate students and sixth-form pupils through the different ways in which new literary theory has enriched readings of Byron's work, and showing how his poetry offers a rewarding focus for questions about the relationship between historical contexts and literary form in the Romantic period.

Diverse and fresh perspectives on canonical texts such as Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred are included together with stimulating analyses of less well-known narrative poems, lyrics and dramas. A clearly structured introduction traces key developments in Byron criticism and locates the essays within wider debates in Romantic studies. Detailed headnotes to each essay and a guide to further reading help to orientate the reader and offer pointers for further discussion.

The collection will enable students of English literature, Romantic studies and nineteenth-century cultural studies to assess the contribution that different critical methodologies have made to our understanding of individual poems by Byron, as well as concepts like the Byronic hero and evolving definitions of Romanticism.

1	Introduction

Byron enjoyed gambling: ‘women – wine – fame – the table – even Ambition – sate now & then – but every turn of the card – & cast of the dice keeps the Gambler alive – besides one can Game ten times longer than one can do anything else.’¹ It is supremely appropriate, therefore, that critical work on Byron often appears as the wild card of English Romantic studies. Unlike the steady growth of work on the other members of the ‘Big Six’, Byron’s critical reputation in the twentieth century has fluctuated with what he called ‘glorious uncertainty’. The narrative overview which follows will enable readers to locate selected essays in a broad historical context. More detailed discussion of the conceptual framework for each essay is contained in the headnotes.

1920s–1930s: humanism, formalism and literary history

The reception of T. S. Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec in 1920 gives us an insight into the critical estimate of Byron in that decade. Under the heading ‘A New Byronism’, the anonymous Times Literary Supplement reviewer identified a fresh beginning for poetry after the death of Swinburne. This new poetic mode was conditioned by ‘reaction, disgust, ennui; … a continual rejection of themes and rhythms, but without anything positive to follow’. ‘Mr Eliot’, the reviewer continued, ‘does not convince us that his weariness is anything but a habit, an anti-romantic reaction, a new Byronism which he must throw off if he is not to become a recurring decimal in his fear of being a mere vulgar fraction’.²

‘Byronism’ in the 1920s was often described in this way, as an empty rhetorical pose and a reductive form of anti-Romanticism. It is very close to the pejorative view expressed by Byron’s contemporary reviewers, like Francis Jeffrey, and it shows a similar domination of poetic criticism by an idea of personality. H. J. C. Grierson was one of only a few critics in the 1920s to offer a positive evaluation of Byron’s writing without being enthralled by his biography. In a 1920 lecture, he praised Byron’s ‘masculine’ mind and the improvisatory manner of a poet who was also ‘a man among men and a man of the world’.³ ‘Muscularity’ and ‘manliness’ were retained as terms of approbation in English literary criticism throughout the first half of the twentieth century. They were even valued by critics like F. R. Leavis who, in other respects, tried to amend traditional critical evaluations. If we find Grierson’s references to Byron’s creative masculinity somewhat overdetermined, it is because Freudian theories have taught us that the detection and analysis of potential anxieties in any sort of writing is a valid field for interpretation. The ‘masculinity’ of Byron’s style (which was also remarked on by Virginia Woolf) remains a stimulating area of study, especially for the gender-orientated criticism of the 1970s and 1980s.

Another banner streaming in support of Byron, against the wind in the 1920s, was carried by the Cambridge professor, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (or ‘Q’). His flamboyant partisanship for Byron’s poetry contrasted sharply with the views of his young critical opponent in Cambridge, F. R. Leavis. Q argued that ‘Don Juan will some day be recognised for one of the world’s few greatest epics … it is, after Paradise Lost, our second English Epic’.⁴ Q’s comments allow us to distinguish two traditional critical concerns of the era: a belief in the authority of the canon, which has only to be ‘recognized’ by readers, and an assumption that English Literature has a strong claim to world attention. Academic debates in the 1920s and 1930s seemed preoccupied with the endorsement or denial of Byron’s ‘greatness’ based on the competing claims of Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement. Apart from isolated appreciation by writers like Q and the novelist Marie Corelli, most of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was regarded at the time as an embarrassing lapse in the history of English Literature.

‘Greatness’ is a vague word with many competing definitions which were influenced after 1918 by the circumstances of the critic in postwar society. Q, for example, valued the way that Byron exhibited courage ‘when disaster fell’ and dated his poetic maturity from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III, to which Q thought readers should respond ‘with hearts swelled as by a trumpet’.⁵ Q’s criticism of the lines on the death of young Howard was simply: ‘If that stanza be not poetry, I say, with all submission to his critics, that neither they nor I know yet what poetry is.’⁶ Q’s son had been killed while waiting to return home from active service abroad. This identification of particular lines as a measure of ‘what poetry is’ looked back to Matthew Arnold’s theory of poetic touchstones and forward to F. R. Leavis’s memorable visceral reactions to verse texture: ‘I feel it here’, he would tell his students, pressing on his rib cage. Despite the notorious disagreement between Q and Leavis about critical practice, it is interesting that their critical judgements about the high points of English verse were both driven by bodily sensibility.

Q’s Cambridge contemporaries, though with rather different orientations, Leavis, I. A. Richards and Richards’s student William Empson, along with the poet and critic T. S. Eliot competed during the 1920s and 1930s to direct the study of English Literature. Their views on Romantic poetry are generally perceived to have been negative while they elevated the newly created category of ‘Metaphysical’ verse. It proved difficult, however, to deal with Byron in the same category as other Romantic poets and his writing remained on the margins of critical debate. Recognizing the disparity of cultural experiences between different readers, Richards proposed that the readers of poetry should devote themselves to a total immersion in its delicate organization of experience. ‘The reader’ he declared in 1928, is required ‘to shut off no part of himself from participation’.⁷ Rather more grimly he went on to warn that ‘the orientation of attention is wrong if we put pleasure in the forefront’.⁸ Richards’s emphasis on seriousness, sincerity and minute detail combated persistent accusations that English Literature was not a legitimate object of study. As the American exponent of New Criticism, Allen Tate, put it: ‘Nobody who read I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism when it appeared in 1929 could read any poem as he had read it before. From that time on one had to read poetry with all the brains one had and with one’s arms and legs as well as what may be inside the rib cage.’⁹ Practical Criticism (1929) does not have much to say about Byron’s poetry, but Richards’s scattered comments in The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) suggest a positive response. Byron is classed, for example, with Swift and Voltaire as a universal satirist; Cain is (unusually) defended for violating the natural emphases and tones of speech, and in a discussion of probity and sincerity ‘When We Two Parted’ is put forward as a poem ‘in which there is no flaw’.¹⁰

1930s–1940s: formalist, moralist and New Critical approaches

Empson followed Richards by identifying the study of ‘ambiguity’ or verbal difficulty as the critical key. He found Byron’s early poetry lacking in this. Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) discusses symbols employed by Keats and Shelley at some length. Empson declares, however, that ‘only at the end of his life, in the first cantos of Don Juan in particular’, did Byron ‘[escape] from the infantile incest-fixation upon his sister which was till then all that he had to say’.¹¹ Empson, who elsewhere employed a Freudian approach to good effect, uses psychoanalysis in this case simply to dismiss Byron. Here, his own approach was a rigorously formalist one:

In so far as an ambiguity sustains intricacy, delicacy, or compression of thought, or is an opportunism devoted to saying quickly what the reader already understands, it is to be respected.… It is not to be respected in so far as it is due to weakness or thinness of thought, obscures the matter in hand unnecessarily.… [or] if the reader will not easily understand the ideas which are being shuffled, and will be given a general impression of incoherence.¹²

Empson’s preoccupation with the multiple meanings of words might be seen as the foundation for subsequent deconstructionist theories of the instability of language. The ambiguity of self in Byron’s writing is the focus of Vincent Newey’s essay in this volume (see Chapter 10) while Jerome Christensen and Andrew Elfenbein discuss the ambiguity of Byron’s sexual identity (see Chapters 11 and 7 respectively). In all cases, however, the critical field of vision has been widened to include the significance of Byron’s social context as well as detailed analysis of the words on the page.

As much as Q’s, F. R. Leavis’s literary criticism had an agenda, although in his case it inclined towards a rather different cultural ideal. Leavis believed in, and looked for, humanist morality and social vision in his close reading of texts: for him ‘morality’ defined a concern with the quality of organic social life and this remains a tenet of one kind of liberal humanism. While he attacked Shelley’s loosely associative imagery and ‘irresponsibility’, Leavis (like Richards) seemed to have had greater respect for Byron’s writing – or perhaps just for Byron as a man of action who upheld the ideal of ‘life’ in Don Juan. In his essay on ‘The Augustan Tradition’ in Revaluation (1936), Leavis chastises Byron for ‘schoolboy’ comedy and ‘recklessness’, but in a 1938 Scrutiny assessment of Arnold as critic, he praises Arnold’s ‘relative valuation of the great Romantics: Wordsworth he put first, then Byron (and for the right reasons), then Keats, and last Shelley. It is, in its independence and its soundness, a more remarkable critical achievement than we easily recognize to-day.’¹³ We may note here the limited extent of Leavis’s pantheon of ‘the great Romantics’, and his unshakeable confidence in what is ‘right’ and ‘sound’.

Byron passes some sort of test in Leavis’s essay; but we are not sure what or how (the ‘right reasons’ are never divulged). Leavis assumes that his status as a professional critic means readers should trust his judgement. His authoritative proclamations, however, did not always accord smoothly with Cambridge orthodoxy. In the later 1930s his precepts came under scrutiny by the wider academic community as well. René Wellek questioned Leavis about the moral code behind Revaluation, writing, ‘I could wish that you had stated your assumptions more explicitly and defended them systematically’.¹⁴ The Arnoldian tradition of English literary criticism bore the whips and scorns of Eliot during the first half of the twentieth century and continued into the second half of the century, when it was challenged by a growing number of different approaches. Political and social change, accelerated by the World Wars, challenged the view of a canon of literature which students of literature must experience or be forever intellectually impoverished. The comfortable (or comforting) belief in ‘greatness’ as an indubitable national asset was gradually removed by the disintegration of the British Empire. Later in the twentieth century, questions would be raised about the right and/or ability of middle-class English or Anglo-American males to decide what and how the world ought to read. Because of the cult of personality associated with his name, studies of Byron were often excluded from the fashion for downgrading Romantic poetry. The cult of the Byronic hero, however, led to a different form of disregard for Byron’s verse.

Throughout the 1930s critics of European literature concerned with identifying a Romantic ‘spirit’ were hostile both to Byron and his ‘legacy’. Mario Praz’s influential study The Romantic Agony (first published in English in 1933), produced a taxonomy of Byronic Satanism at the very time that some readers were becoming aware of the destructive forms of hero-worship currently gathering momentum in Europe. The issue of personality also seemed to influence Allen Tate, who in 1934 expressed his distaste for Byronic posturing. Tate saw Romanticism as a revolt of the individual will against all forms of a supposed ‘scientific’ order, and he quoted, approvingly, H. A. Taine on Byron:

‘Such are the sentiments wherewith he surveyed nature and history, not to comprehend them and forget himself before them, but to seek in them and impress upon them the image of his own passions. He does not leave the objects to speak for themselves, but forces them to answer him’.¹⁵

In this we can hear that dislike ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 JEROME J. MCGANN Lord Byron’s Twin Opposites of Truth [Don Juan]
• 3 DANIEL P. WATKINS The Dramas of Lord Byron: Manfred and Marino Faliero
• 4 NIGEL LEASK Resolving The Corsair: Lara and The Island
• 5 CAROLINE FRANKLIN ‘Quiet Cruising o’er the Ocean Woman’: Byron’s Don Juan and the Woman Question
• 6 SUSAN J. WOLFSON ‘Their She Condition’: Cross-dressing and the Politics of Gender in Don Juan
• 7 ANDREW ELFENBEIN The Shady Side of the Sword: Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli and Byron’s Homosexuality
• 8 PAUL ELLEDGE Chasms in Connections: Byron Ending (in) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 1 and 2
• 9 WILLIAM H. GALPERIN The Postmodernism of Childe Harold
• 10 VINCENT NEWEY Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III
• 11 JEROME CHRISTENSEN Marino Faliero and the Fault of Byron’s Satire
• 12 PETER J. MANNING Byron’s Imperceptiveness to the English Word
• 13 ANNE BARTON Don Juan Reconsidered: The Haidée Episode
• 14 J. DRUMMOND BONE The Art of Don Juan: Byron’s Metrics
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index