Bryon: Revolutionary, libertine and friend

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Allen, Brooke

THE MAIN TASK FOR ANY BIOGRAPHER intrepid enough to take on the subject of George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, is to give equal time to both versions of the man: Byron as he really was, and Byron as a symbol-what he meant to the world, what he stood for and to some extent still stands for today. These two Byrons are so very different that it is sometimes hard to make them coalesce into a single figure.

To Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Europe, Byron meant, quite simply, Liberty. His life, his poetry, and especially his death in Missolonghi where he had gone to assist in the Greek war for independence, inspired political and artistic revolutionaries for generations. The Risorgimento leader Giuseppe Mazzini claimed to know "no more beautiful symbol of the future destiny and mission of art than the death of Byron in Greece. The holy alliance of poetry with the cause of the peoples; the union-still so rare-of thought and action which alone completes the human Word." Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny openly identified themselves with Byron and what they perceived to be his ethos. One of the plotters executed in Russia's Decembrist rising went to the scaffold clutching a volume of Byron's poetry. Heine, Pushkin, Liszt, and any number of later Romantics constructed their own ideas of love and liberty around Byron's. Delacroix and Verdi based some of their most passionate works on his poems and dramas. Hector Berlioz, only half-jokingly, summed it all up as he recalled his youthful worship and emulation of the great Romantic: "He was loved! He was a poet! . . . He was free! . . . He was rich! . . . He had it all!"

Benita Eisler, one of Byron's more recent biographers, claimed that since neither music nor painting lend themselves to irony, Byronists like Verdi and Delacroix took only the unironic surface that Byron presented to the world and disseminated it for posterity. This is not strictly true: Mozart was an ironic composer, and in painting Byron's contemporary, Goya, put irony to work superbly in an oeuvre that was every bit as political as Byron's own. I think it is probably more accurate to say that Byron's Continental worshippers never understood his extremely English style of irony. The bitchy, insinuating English dandy, who watched his weight, fussed over his clothes, and enjoyed gossiping with malicious old ladies, is a side of Byron that the mythologizers rejected-or, rather, never really absorbed in the first place. Shelley, who knew him almost as well as anyone, believed that Byron was never a revolutionary so much as a libertine.

One thing we can be sure of: Byron took great pains to construct and groom his public image, and his relationship with his own renown is strikingly modern; like many a twenty-first-century, celebrity Byron courted fame and then backed away when its embrace became too rough. He sought fame, needed it, feared it, scorned it, craved it. His ambition was, perhaps, not so much to do great things as to project a great image. Already, at the age of sixteen, he knew what he wanted: "I will cut a path through the world or perish in the attempt. Others have begun life with nothing and ended Greatly. And shall I who have a competent if not a large fortune, remain idle, No, I will carve myself the path to Grandeur, but never with Dishonour." At the end of his life this ambition had not abated in the slightest. His friend Lady Blessington observed in 1823 that "Byron had so unquenchable a thirst for celebrity, that no means were left untried that might attain it: this frequently led to his expressing opinions totally at variance with his notions and real sentiments . . . there was no sort of celebrity he did not, at some period or other, condescend to seek, and he was not over nice in the means, provided he obtained it in the end."

In Don Juan, Byron presented the public with his ruminations on celebrity:

What is the end of fame? 'tis but to fill

A certain portion of uncertain paper:

Some liken it to climbing up a hill,

Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour;

For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,

And bards burn what they call their "midnight taper,"

To have, when the original is dust,

A name, a wretched picture, and worst bust.

What are the hopes of man? Old Egypt's King

Cheops erected the first pyramid

And largest, thinking it was just the thing

To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid:

But somebody or other rummaging,

Burglariously broke his coffin's lid.

Let not a moment give you or me hopes,

Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops.

Byron certainly got his share of wretched pictures, and worst busts: T. S. Eliot memorably described the Thorwaldsen bust as having immortalized "that weakly sensual mouth, that restless triviality of expression, and most of all that kind of look of self-conscious beauty"; Leigh Hunt's wife Marianne cruelly and quite accurately commented that the famous Harlow portrait of the young Byron "resembled a great school-boy, who had a plain bun given him, instead of a plum one": once one has read this remark, one can never take the painting seriously again.