While paying a visit in 1979 to the Institute of Russian Literature in Leningrad, I unexpectedly discovered a copy of The Works of Lord Byron, Complete in One Volume, published in Frankfurt am Main in 1826, and which came to the Institute from Pushkin's library. On the title page is this dedication in Polish: “Bajrona Puszkinowi poświęca wielbiciel obudwóch—A. Michiewicz” (“Here is Byron dedicated to Pushkin by an admirer of both of them—Adam Mickiewicz”). What impressed me was not the elegance of the dedication but the sign of a community transcending national boundaries: a volume of a great English author published in Germany had been presented to the foremost poet of Russia by a Polish poet in exile. This volume commemorates an internationalism of free spirits in which Byron's name, evoking an entire range of feelings and ideas, serves as the symbol of freedom.

“There was Byronism before Byron,” says William Rose in his study on the origins and development of the notion of Weltschmerz in German literature, and he continues: “Weltschmerz was epidemic in German literature for the forty years or more which preceded the publication of Childe Harold. … There is no doubt equal scope for an enquiry into the symptoms of ‘le mal du siècle’ in France before Chateaubriand, while a study on the same lines of the precursors of Byron in England should yield fruitful results.”¹

No doubt there was “Byronism before Byron” in Poland, whose artists also distrusted “reality” and lost confidence in the ideas of the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment was expected to bring the Poles a reform of their state, a constitution, democracy, and prosperity, but no such transformations occurred. Hopes ran high again during the Napoleonic wars, but the conqueror of Europe did not restore Poland. The feeling of bitterness, especially among young people, was even stronger than that of the preceding generation.

Poland! o'er which the avenging angel pass'd,
But left thee as he found thee, still a waste,
Forgetting all thy still enduring claim,
Thy lotted people and extinguish'd name,
Thy sigh for freedom, thy long-flowing tear.

These words of Byron, dedicated to Poland after the fall of Napoleon and uttered with pathos in The Age of Bronze (ll. 161-65), were not known to Adam Mickiewicz as a young man. Yet the Polish poet found other reasons for admiring Byron when he wrote to a friend in 1822: “It is only Byron I am reading now. I push away books written in any other spirit, as I have no liking for lies.”² The point here is that for the young Polish poet, who was then affected by private grief, Byron was not a teacher of pessimism. What Mickiewicz found in his lines was the truth of his own feelings and a critique and condemnation of hypocrisy. There was surely Byronism before Byron, but for Mickiewicz and for the entire generation born as the eighteenth century succeeded to the nineteenth, the name of the English poet became a symbol, a token of an adopted attitude, a declaration of community.

We all know how great was Shakespeare's authority in Europe during the Romantic period. It is, consequently, very significant that the volume that proclaimed the triumph of Romanticism in Poland—the Ballads and Romances of Mickiewicz—contains in the discourse on Romantic poetry preceding the poems a rather unusual comparison: “In the descriptive genre and in the tale Byron is what Shakespeare was in the dramatic genre.” What Mickiewicz has in mind is of course not prose fiction, but the Byronic poetic tale: perhaps the Turkish tales; or perhaps Beppo and the opening cantos of Don Juan, which the Polish author might have known at that time. According to Mickiewicz, Byron created “a new kind of poetry,” a new and feeling expression of “the passionate soul.”³ To some scholars, the equal footing conceded to Byron and to Shakespeare may seem extravagant, but Mickiewicz was right in finding certain common elements in both poets, such as pathos side by side with raw realism, sublimity with irony, lofty ideals with the grotesque. Both writers told him truths about the nature of man, but of the two Byron stood for unrestrained individualism, for revolt, for cult of genius and worship of freedom. Besides, he was a contemporary, still living and working when Mickiewicz was placing him in the gallery of patron spirits of the new Romantic literature.

Searching for genealogies and adducing great examples from the past were characteristic of all the new literary trends until the twentieth century. The futurists and other radical avant-garde groups were the first to proclaim that they had neither ancestors nor family archives. But the Romantics, though in revolt against tradition and the classroom brand of classicism, were very anxious to have a good pedigree, and in this very respect they were legitimists. When Victor Hugo wanted to point to the ancient roots of Romantic poetry and attitudes, the names that appeared the most frequently in his manifesto were those of Homer, Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, plus the Bible and—Byron. A comparative study of proclamations and manifestoes of the Romantic movement in Europe (from Italy to Scandinavia and from Madrid to Saint Petersburg) would reveal, undoubtedly, a similar and select assortment of the patrons of the new writing, with Byron's name among the predecessors and patrons of the new literature: he was the youngest, the closest to the new generation, and the most intelligible. He was also the most adaptable to the spiritual needs and experiences of differing societies, of various writers and their readers. H. G. Schenk says in The Mind of the European Romantics: “Although the enthusiasm for Byron's personality caught on all over Europe, the appeal of the poet whom Goethe hailed as the herald of world literature varied from nation to nation, in that each picked out that part of Byron's œuvre most congenial to itself.”⁴ Byron's language became in an incredibly short time an international language of the generation in revolt, of the spiritual and social outcasts alienated from the conventional rules of living and thinking.

The practice of adducing literary patrons is as old as literature itself. For a number of centuries, the writers of ancient Greece and Rome played this part for most European artists. The eighteenth century chose the patronage of Voltaire, but Byron's impact was something of a different quality. Voltaire's influence was traditionally unifying: it raised the representatives of different traditions to the level of French intellectual culture. But Byron's individualism offered no ready-made doctrine and thus could become a stimulus within the bodies of various national literatures. Voltaire provided a national lesson to be learned; Byron provided an international inspiration that respected individuality. That is why the cult of Byron contributed in so many literatures, and quite certainly in Polish literature, to an increase of originality. It also stimulated literary invention and favored personal features in poetic expression. All this is valid, of course, only for a certain period: with the formation of clichés and rigid patterns, the poets whom literary history posthumously honors as leaders of their age outgrew the fashion of Byronism. It was then cultivated only by belated followers. Still, Byron's name, even more glorious after his death in Greece in 1824, continued to inspire and enthuse. This enthusiasm is eloquently documented in the Paris lectures on Slavonic literatures given by Adam Mickiewicz in Collège de France in 1840-44. According to Mickiewicz, Byron was a spokesman for collective feelings:

Avec lord Byron commence l'époque nouvelle de la littérature, de la poésie. Cette littérature et cette poésie se rapprochent d'un côté de la philosophie, et d'un autre côté de la vie réelle. Personne n'a mieux que lui représenté les tourments de ces existences anormales qui ont marque le passage entre le XVIII^e et le XIX^e siècle, ce voyage sans but, cette recherche des aventures extraordinaires, ces élans vers un avenir dont on n'avait encore aucune idée. Tout cela remplissait les âmes des jeunes gens de notre génération; tout cela a été représenté par lord Byron avec une grande fidélité. Sous ce point de vue, c'est un poëte de réalité.⁵

Mickiewicz held Byron to be equally important as a harbinger of political ideas (“On connait aussi la hauteur et la sûreté de son coup d'oeil lorsqu'il jugeait les questions politiques”) and as a metaphysical poet (“son désir incessant de sonder et de connaître les mystères de l'existence”). He ranked the English poet among the great who could express a whole age and at the same time point a way to the future:

Ainsi, dans la politique, comme dans l'art, il y a toujours des individus qui conduisent les époques. … il faut suivre leurs traces, comme les navigateurs qui parcourent les mers sont obligés de suivre le chemin de ceux qui ont fait les premières découvertes, sauf ensuite à compléter leurs observations.

Yet, to follow such predecessors does not mean to imitate them, to counterfeit their literary form or their heroes. What should be followed is their spirit (“c'est s'inspirer de leurs esprit”). Mickiewicz's verdict is categorical:

et nous sommes convaincu que ceux-là seulement qui ont saisi ce qu'il y avait de fort, de vrai, de sincère et de profond dans lord Byron, ont été appelés à prendre le devant dans la marche littéraire de notre siècle.

Mickiewicz further explains that many of his contemporaries did not see Byron's works but that they grasped a few lines, a few sounds that were sufficient to inspire them: “La force de cet homme était si grande qu'elle se faisait sentir même dans quelques paroles, et que ces paroles suffisaient pour remuer les âmes et leur faire découvrir le secret de leur propre existence.” Byron, something much more than a distant literary authority, addressed his contemporaries without intermediaries and simply spoke their language.

Juliusz Słowacki, another Polish Romantic poet who antagonized and competed with Mickiewicz, still agreed with him on Byron's position in world literature when he wrote in April 1833:

Dante wrote about Hell at a time when people believed in Hell; Voltaire was in agreement with a materialistic age; Byron while despairing about the future and its uncertainty opened the nineteenth century. These three people represent the epochs in which they lived, their spiritual countenances reflect the faces of their age. If one could put together one single monument of thought out of the thoughts of many people in those days, the statues on the monument would be those of Dante, Voltaire, and Byron.⁶

In short, Byron's contemporaries agreed that he was a personification of the spirit of the age, a voice of the Romantic Zeitgeist. He was, paradoxically, the leader of an international community of solitaries, of egocentrics, of individualists in revolt. Because of the universal appeal of the Byron cult, Romantic individualism did not mean the breaking of communication between people or an expression of doubt about such communication. Byron's language could be used for communication and mutual comprehension by all those who understood it, by those “Byronists before Byron” who experienced painfully the widening gap between their inner experience and the outer world. To them and on their behalf, the poet spoke a language of solitude and despair that at the same time was a language of pride and energy.

Because Byronism was a Continental more than a British phenomenon, the question arises why Byron's works, read in translation or in the original by people who were not native speakers of English, proved so much more interesting abroad than to his own countrymen. Perhaps the answer could be found in the quicker pace of literary developments in the British Isles, where Romanticism was no longer a revelation at the time of Byron's appearance upon the literary stage. In Germany, on the other hand, where the campaign for a national literature had already been successfully carried on by the Storm and Stress movement, where Byron's works could not inaugurate Romanticism, his prestige was very considerable, if not overwhelming as in Central or Southern Europe. Although Germany was as rich as Britain in Romantic inspirations of its own, the German peoples were fascinated with the personality of the English lord and poet. One could perhaps formulate the following principle: the further from Britain, from English literature, and from the actual biography of Byron, the stronger were the impact of the myth of his personality and the influence of his poetical works.

Slavonic literatures and the Polish writers in particular were indeed far away from Britain at that time, but they nevertheless recognized a kinship with Byron. The Polish Romantic artist discovered in him what he wished to be—a non-conformist, a solitary, and a man of magnanimity, a hero of freedom, an incarnation of creative genius. From the protean character and works of the man, Polish Romantics abstracted and formed their own ideal and pattern of an active poet who did not draw limits between literature and life, between his words and his deeds.

Byron's death in Greece played an important part in the shaping of his legend. For contemporary young enthusiasts of political freedom and of Romantic poetry, it was not an accident but the logical outcome of a certain attitude. Moreover, it refuted tales about the dissolute and perverted fiend. Continental poets exalted his death in a crusade for freedom, and Cyprian Norwid, the last of the great Polish poets bred in the Romantic tradition, concluded an evaluation of Byron as follows:

How serious, indeed, is the poet's service and vocation! And yet this truth began to dawn only at the threshold of the present age upon which Byron lies with the lyre of Homer and the sword of Leonidas—a man who might have said about himself: veni, cantavi, vici.⁷

Norwid's parallel, taken from ancient history, illustrates his conviction that Byron's death in a war for the sake of mankind confirms the truth of the poet's works, and that the two symbols of sword and lyre are the attributes of “serious” poetry. A poem is an actual deed, and there can be no boundary between poetry and action. This view is very characteristic for the Polish Romantics, especially after the failure of the uprising in 1830-31. The desperate national situation induced people to think of every possible means of struggle, both ideological and political. For creative artists, action and deed became a category that overshadowed the opposition of the spiritual and the real. One could speak here, perhaps, of a suppression and uplifting of the clash between the ideal and reality. Byron—the poet of freedom rushing to the battle of liberation—provided a sign: he prefigured the future role of poetry, that which would abolish the distinction between word and action.

In order to stress the importance of Byron's mission, Norwid identifies Byron's ancestors as the crusaders for the recovery of the Holy Land. Envisioning Byron's death as the beginning of a new era, Norwid writes about himself in his autobiography: “He saw the world … in the patrimonial estate a few miles away from Warsaw, at the time when Noel Byron was just dying in Greece.” One could treat this reference as a simple stylistic ornament opening an autobiography, but Norwid actually postpones the date of his birth for three years (he was really born in 1821) in order to make it symbolically agree with the date of Byron's death. The beginning of his own life is to be connected with the end of the life of Byron.

Adam Mickiewicz, in his lectures at the Collège de France, best sums up the part Byron played in shaping the ideal of a poet both in Poland and in other Slavonic countries:

Ce qui a élevé, ce qui a facilité la marche des poètes slaves, et ce qui en général pourra rendre plus claire l'idée qu'ils se font de la poésie, c'est la carrière politique de lord Byron. Lord Byron commence l'ère de la poésie nouvelle; lui, le premier, a fait sentir aux hommes tout le sérieux de la poésie; on a vu qu'il fallait vivre d'après ce qu'on écrit; que le désir, que la parole, ne suffisent pas; on a vu ce poëte riche et élevé dans un pays aristocratique quitter le parlement et sa patrie pour servir la cause des Grecs. Ce besoin profondément senti de rendre la vie poétique, de rapprocher ainsi l'idéal du réel, constitute tout le mérite poétique de Byron. Or, tous les grands poëtes slaves ont passé par là. Byron, c'est l'anneau mystérieux qui attache la grande littérature slave à celle de l'Occident.

It does not matter that Byron's biography has been simplified here. It is important to observe that this is how Mickiewicz wants to see, to interpret, and to understand Byron. He really saw in the English poet an example of the principle that “one should live according to what one is writing,” proving that it is possible to bring an ideal close to reality. Such an interpretation was possible, and even natural, in the circumstances in which Polish literature had to operate in the period under discussion. The leading Romantics were involved in political activities; they were looking for effective ways and means of working for their nation. The art of beautiful speech consequently seemed unimportant and a secondary matter. Mickiewicz stopped his literary activities in the very middle of his dazzling career to become a politician, a prophet of a new religion, and finally a soldier. Juliusz Słowacki, the most Romantic of the Polish writers and a Byronist at the beginning of his career, suddenly at the age of thirty-three changed his views of poetry, stopped producing literature, and devoted himself to penetrating the mysteries of Nature and the ways of Creation. He went on writing feverishly, but his later works are visions put down in verse or prose, fragments of a mystical system of the Great Chain of Being and Universal Evolution that would free Poland and all mankind. Like Byron and Mickiewicz, Słowacki finally hurried to the battlefield. At the end of his life he went to the German part of Poland, which was then caught by the fire of the revolution in 1848. He did not die in the campaign like the other two poets, but succumbed a few months later after his return to Paris.

The life of Juliusz Słowacki is an exemplary Romantic biography in the history of Polish literature. It began with solitude and alienation from the world and ended in the mystical communion with an all-embracing creative evolution. Słowacki is so typically Byronic that his period of Childe Haroldism, of the youthful cult of one's own personality, is followed at maturity by a phase of romantic irony and satire in which Byron served as master and example. Słowacki's Podróz na Wschód (Journey to the East) in six-line stanzas and the digressive poetic tale Beniowski in ottava rima are the best Polish equivalents of Byron's style in Don Juan.

Byron's pattern was followed by young Romantics, by young people searching for their own identity. But he still provided an example of how to render life poetic, how to bring about a close union between poetry and life, when the youthful solitaries grew up to become patriotic leaders, prophets, and spiritual commanders in the war “for our freedom and for yours.” The years 1831 and 1863 were those of tragic Polish national uprisings, but were also the dates of the triumph and the end of great Romantic poetry in Poland. For the Polish Romantic poets who lived during these years, Byron was not a hero of the past. On the contrary, they looked upon him as their forerunner, a John the Baptist of the future, a prefiguration and a mythical impulse that was calling for fulfillment.

There is a striking parallel here with the myth of Napoleon: Byron died on his mission of a liberator, Napoleon did not accomplish his mission. The latter's genius had been tempted by egoism, which made him replace the sword of Europe's liberator and creator of a new order with the imperial crown of dynastic ambitions. In his case, as in that of Byron, the mission had to be taken up and the mystical impulse had to be brought to fruition. In the preface to his translation of The Giaour, Mickiewicz thus establishes a connection between the two geniuses as forerunners of the future: “The voice of the general has called Byron the Napoleon of the poets, while Napoleon has been acknowledged as the only poet of France.”⁸ It is difficult to imagine a more striking declaration of unity between word and deed, between poetry and life. Byron himself had certain reservations about the subject when he treated the parallel between Napoleon and his own person with the irony of a grand seigneur:

Even I—albeit I'm sure I did not know it,
Nor sought of foolscap subjects to be king,—
Was reckon'd, a considerable time,
The grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme.

[Don Juan XI.1v]

For Mickiewicz and other Romantics, equating Byron and Napoleon was not a mere compliment paid to the poet. Mickiewicz was deeply convinced, and Byron and Napoleon served him as examples, that “il y a des signes de parenté entre toutes ces créations, malgré l'indépendance et l'originalité des créateurs.” Characteristically, Mickiewicz stresses the affinity of poetry and practical action produced by a poet and a military leader, and not the links between different arts or between poetry and other kinds of intellectual creativeness. Also Norwid's praise of Byron (“veni, cantavi, vici”) paraphrases the famous words of Julius Caesar—a genius of poetry and a genius of energy and action are again put on the same level. The common denominator between Byron and Napoleon is their moral force that changes people and may shape life itself. This is exactly what, according to Mickiewicz, Byron saw and understood in Napoleon:

C'est le seul des écrivains anglais qui ait compris quelque chose à Napoléon. Il est vrai qu'il l'a réduit aux proportions d'un corsaire. Il comprennait seulement la force que Napoléon exerçait sur ses semblables, force toute morale; il sentait aussi où elle résidait: Napoléon a dominé parce que son âme était toujours en travail; son sentiment ne pouvait dormir. I suoi pensieri in lui dormir non ponno, c'est la devise qu'a choisie lord Byron. Cette âme en travail dévelopait la force qui lui donnaitle pouvoir sur ses semblables.

What is mentioned here is energy, but not energy for its own sake: energy must actively influence other people. Napoleon began the work of Europe's reconstruction and demonstrated man's creative scope and power; a poet should do likewise. Practical influence becomes the norm and canon of poetry. The anticlassical revolution had indeed come to its ultimate limit. By appealing to the memory of Napoleon as a poet of action and to Byron as the leader of souls of a generation, Polish Romantics raised poetry to such a high position that it stopped being what is called an art of language. In their view, poetry was a prediction, an expectation of the fulfillment of a prophecy—“ut sermo … prophetae impleretur,” as John 12:38 states. Poetry was no longer merely literary.

The historical explanation of this strangely utopian and anachronistic view of poetry is to be found in the situation of the Poles and in the situation of Europe on the eve of the revolution of 1848. The lack of real power made men's minds more heated and ecstatic. Words were plentiful and stood for the deeds and actions that were sadly lacking. Here are the sources of the phenomenon of heroizing poetry, of the cult of genius, of the posthumous career and activeness of the spirit of Napoleon. Here is also the explanation of the power of Byronism treated as a source of inspiration and energy. One must always keep in mind that, through Byronism, the poet's work and person were transformed into myth. Only in recent decades has critical examination of Byron's poetic work begun to prevail over biographical studies, over studies of the Byron legend and of the myth of a superman. The turning point was T. S. Eliot's essay on Byron's poetry in 1937. It is certainly important to strip Byron of the Byron mythology, to examine his poems in a critical way by using all the equipment of modern literary criticism. But one must not, in the process, overlook Byronism, a mythic force as real to nineteenth-century Europe as were Byron's poems.

Byronism is an important component of the history of ideas and of the history of literary consciousness. In Poland, the reading public actually acquaints itself with Byron's works through the tradition of Byronism. There is a very good translation of Don Juan, which was quite the rage with schoolboys of my generation. This translation was published in 1883 and is clearly modeled in its style upon Juliusz Słowacki's tale Beniowski, which, in turn, is a Polish replica of Don Juan. Byron's text in Polish was decisively influenced by Byronism as understood by an eminent Polish Romantic poet some forty years before the actual date of translation.

There are, however, reasons of much greater importance for this interest in Byronism and the Byron myth. The presence of Byronism in simple and naive forms—or in complicated and sophisticated shapes—is strong in the works of Polish Romantic literature, as well as in much contemporary literature. One may believe or not in the power of the word to change people's minds or to stir them to action, but in any case Polish readers expect poetry to offer more than linguistic delights or expressions of impotence. The ideal of effective poetry may be a utopia, and it is perhaps wrong to confuse poetry or literature in general with any sphere of activity. But poetry that abandons in advance its claim to the energy of despair and the energy of enthusiasm is not worth reading at all.

In any case, it is certainly worthwhile to continue research on Byronism as a community of the lonely, as a movement from narrow, personal truth to the larger truth of mankind. Sheer curiosity should be sufficient reason—a curiosity to learn something about the exceedingly high tasks that art undertook 150 years ago. By such research, one may observe an international exchange of ideas that still exert their influence on contemporary poetry and politics.

Notes

1. William Rose, From Goethe to Byron: The Development of “Weltschmerz” in German Literature (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1924), pp. 1-2.

2. Letter to Francziszek Malewski, 22 November 1822, in Adam Mickiewicz, Dzieła (Warsaw: Czytęlnik, 1955), 14:207.

3. Mickiewicz, Dzieła, 5:198.

4. H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics (London: Constable, 1966), p. 147.

5. Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves. cours professé au Collège de France (1842-1844) (Paris: Musée Adam Mickiewicz, 1914), pp. 19-20. All subsequent quotations from these lectures are from these same pages.

6. Juliusz Słowacki, Dzieła Wszystkie, ed. Juliusz Kleiner (Wrocław: Ossoleneum, 1954), 2:12.

7. Cyrpian Norwid, Wszystkie Pisma (Warsaw: Przesmycki, 1938), 6:147.

8. Mickiewicz, Dzieła, 2:156.