Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 4. Naturalism in England

by Georg Brandes

When one remembers the dissimilarity of Thorvaldsen's and Byron's natures, remembers that in all probability Thorvaldsen never read a line of Byron's poetry, and also that the poet did not show his best side to the sculptor, the result of the meeting of the two great men must be regarded as extraordinarily satisfactory. The bust gives what is necessarily a feeble and incomplete, but nevertheless a true and beautiful representation of a main aspect of Byron's character which one would hardly have expected Thorvaldsen to grasp. The idyll is that sculptor's real province. When he sets himself to represent Alexander's triumphal entry into Babylon, he is much more successful with the shepherds, the sheep, the fishermen, the women, the children, the procession in general, than with the hero himself; the heroic is not to the same extent his affair; how much less, then, the combatant nature in the complicated, modern form of it which has been dubbed the dæmonic. And yet he understood Byron. In the bust (not in the statue) he has given the world a monument of him, which, although it satisfied neither the Countess Guiccioli nor Thomas Moore, is worthy both of the poet and of the artist. If Thorvaldsen had really known Byron, the work would probably have been still better; the face would have had a touch of the frankness and attractiveness which impressed all who knew him well. This is absent. But the Danish sculptor has succeeded in penetrating into what lay beneath the gloomy expression which he considered an assumed one, and showing us the suffering, the restlessness, the genius, the noble and terrible power.

It was, undoubtedly, with the Byron of the Museum that the next generation to his in Denmark grew up. But the image presented to them there was invariably connected in their minds with the story of the poet's visit to Thorvaldsen's studio, and with the latter's observation: "It was his fancy to be unhappy;"[1] and they wondered why such a great man should not have been perfectly natural. And so the first attitude of the Danes to Byron was a wrong, or at any rate an uncertain one. And an uncertain one it still remains. He is little fitted to be the hero of the present age. The very things which were much more effectual than his greatness as a poet in arousing the admiration of our grandfathers and grandmothers, are the things that repel the present generation—all those mythical traditions (which really obscure his history to us) of Byron the stage hero, with the tie which every one imitated; Byron, the hero of romance, whose pistols were his constant companions, and whose amorous adventures were as famous as his verse; Byron, the aristocrat, with the title which he valued so highly, but which makes little impression on a generation that recognises no aristocracy but that of the intellect. And our practical age has, moreover, a distinct contempt for what Byron sometimes imagined his honour required him to be, and sometimes really was—the dilettante.

It was a matter of honour with him to practise his art in a non-professional manner. His position and his pursuits (so he writes in the preface to his first volume of poetry) make it highly improbable that he will ever take up the pen again. In 1814, at the very summit of the celebrity won for him by his first narrative poems, he determines to write no more poetry, and to suppress all that he has written. A month afterwards he writes Lara. Jeffrey criticised the character of the hero as too elaborate. Byron asks (in a letter of 1822): "What do they mean by 'elaborate?' I wrote Lara while undressing after coming home from balls and masquerades, in the year of revelry 1814." We feel that he lays stress on the careless manner of production and the planlessness consequent thereon, from a desire to show that he is not a professional poet, but, in the first instance, a man of the world, in the second, that which his gifts forbade his being, namely, a poetical dilettante.

Though he was incapable of being a dilettante in the calling in which he was determined to play that part (a determination which nowadays detracts from our respect for him), he was indisputably one in another field of activity, where it was by no means his intention, namely, in politics. Practical though he always showed himself to be when it came to political action, his politics were in reality—whether he took part in the conspiracies of the Carbonari at Ravenna or led the Suliotes at Missolonghi—the politics of the emotionalist and the adventurer. His first proceeding after he had resolved to go to Greece was to order for himself and his friends gilded helmets with his crest and motto engraved on them. The great politician of our days is the man who lays plans, adheres to them and develops them year after year, and, obstinate and regardless of side issues, carries them out in the end, without the heroic apparatus, but with the hero's determination.

It must not be forgotten that a whole succession of Byron's admirers and imitators have forced themselves in between him and us, obscuring the figure, and confusing our impression, of the great departed. Their qualities have been imputed to him, and he has been blamed for their faults. When the literary reaction set in against those who had understood him half and wrongly—against the brokenhearted, the blasés, the enigmatical, writers—his great name suffered along with theirs; it was swept aside along with the lesser ones. It had deserved better of fate.

George Gordon Byron, born on the 22nd of January 1788, was the son of a passionate and unhappy mother, who a short time before his birth left her dissipated, brutal husband. This man, Captain Byron, who had served for a time in America as an officer in the Guards, was known in his youth as "mad Jack Byron." He eloped to the Continent with the wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen, married her when her husband obtained a divorce from her, spent all her money, and treated her so badly that she died of grief a few years after her marriage. Captain Byron returned to England with his little daughter, Augusta, and, solely with the view of improving his circumstances, married a wealthy Scottish heiress, Miss Catherine Gordon of Gight, who became the mother of the man who still enjoys a world-wide fame. Immediately after the wedding Captain Byron began to make away with the fortune of his second wife. In the course of a year he had reduced it from £24,000 to £3000. She left him in France and, coming to London, gave birth there to her only child. By an accident, said to have occurred at the time of his birth, one of the child's feet was malformed.

Two years later the mother went with her boy to Scotland, and took up her residence at Aberdeen. Captain Byron, during a pause in his dissipations, followed them there, in the hope of extracting more money from his wife. She generously gave him the shelter of her roof for a time, and afterwards they still continued to visit each other, until Captain Byron, to evade his creditors, was obliged to return to France, where he died in 1791. When the news of his death reached his wife, who had never ceased to love him, her grief bordered on distraction, and her shrieks were so loud as to be heard in the street.

Uncontrollable passionateness, differing only in its manifestations and its force, was thus a characteristic of both Byron's parents. And farther back in the families of both, we find the same temperament, revealing itself in the mother's family in attempts at suicide and poisoning, and in the father's, now in heroic daring, now in reckless excess. Byron's paternal grandfather, Admiral John Byron, generally known as "hardy Byron," took part in the naval warfare against Spain and France, made voyages of discovery in the South Sea, circumnavigated the globe, and went through perils and adventures without number; the peculiarity that he could never take a voyage without encountering terrible storms gained him the nickname among the sailors of "foul-weather Jack." Byron compares his own fate with his grandfather's. The family temperament shows itself in its worst form in the poet's grand-uncle, William, Lord Byron, a dissolute brawler, who achieved notoriety by killing his neighbour, Mr. Chaworth (after a quarrel), in a duel fought without seconds. It was only in his quality of peer of England that he escaped sentence for murder; ever after his trial he lived on his estate of Newstead, shunned like a leper. He was hated by all around him; his wife procured a separation from him; among the superstitious country people extravagantly horrible stories of his doings circulated and were believed.

Thus the poet had wild blood in his veins. But it was also very aristocratic blood. On the mother's side he claimed descent from the Stuarts, from King James the First of Scotland; on his father's he was the descendant (though with a bar-sinister in the arms, a circumstance Byron himself never alludes to) of the Norman noble Ralph de Burun, who accompanied William the Conqueror into England. And when the grand-uncle just named lost, first his only son, and then, in 1794, his only grandson, it became probable that "the little lame boy who lives at Aberdeen," as his uncle called him, would inherit both Newstead and the family title.

It was with this prospect before him that the lame boy grew up. He was proud and uncontrollable by nature. When he was still in petticoats, his nurse reprimanding him angrily one day for having soiled a new frock, he got into one of his "silent rages" (as he himself called them), turned as pale as a sheet, seized his frock with both hands, and tore it from top to bottom. His mother's treatment of him was little calculated to correct these tendencies. She alternately overwhelmed him with reproaches and with passionate caresses; when she was in a rage she vented on him the anger which his father's treatment of her aroused; she sometimes even reproached him with his lameness. The fault lies partly with her that this physical infirmity cast such a dark shadow over little George's mind; he heard his own mother call him "a lame brat." Bandaging and various kinds of surgical treatment only increased the evil; the foot gave him much pain, and the proud little boy exercised all the strength of his will in concealing his suffering, and, as much as possible, his limp. Sometimes he was unable to bear any allusion to his deformity; at other times he would speak with a mocking bitterness of his "club-foot."