SOURCE: McGann, Jerome J. “‘My Brain is Feminine’: Byron and the Poetry of Deception.” In Byron: Augustan and Romantic, edited by Andrew Rutherford, 26-51. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

[In the following excerpt, McGann traces the development of Byron's verse in the context of sentimental poetry, investigating the neglected influence of Dacre on Byron's juvenile poetry, and, through Byron, offering a conceptual framework within which to better appreciate Dacre's sentimental eroticism.]

I

I begin with a mouldy anecdote, a late supplement to that once-flourishing industry—now part of the imagination's rust belt—called ‘Curiosities of Literature’.

In 1894 a short article appeared in Notes and Queries under the heading ‘Byroniana’. Its subject was a poem entitled ‘The Mountain Violet’ which the author of the article, Henry Wake, attributed to Byron.¹ The case for authenticity was argued on two counts, one archival and one stylistic. The archival argument observed that the poem was printed in an anthology of verse collected by one Charles Snart under the title A Selection of Poems, published in Newark in two volumes in 1807-8. Wake said that he was in possession of a set of Snart's edition with ‘Mrs. Byron’ written in pencil in her hand on the front flyleaf, and with the following notation on the end flyleaf of Volume II: “66 from Nottingham Journal’. The latter was a reference to ‘The Mountain Violet’, which was printed on page 66 of Vol. II. The poem, it turns out, was in fact first printed in The Nottingham Journal on 9 April 1803. Neither printing attributes authorship, but according to Wake the pencil notation at the end of Snart's book is in Byron's hand.²

Wake went on to argue that the poem's style showed remarkable congruities with the style of Byron's early verse. Such matters are difficult to decide, of course, especially when one is dealing with juvenilia. At that stage of a career, an author's style will be derivative, and one expects to observe features which will be common to any number of other contemporary writers. Nonetheless, the stylistic similarities are striking; and this fact, coupled with the archival evidence, led Wake to his attribution. Wake's judgement was seconded by the distinguished Byronist Richard Edgecumbe, who wrote a brief supporting article which appeared shortly afterwards in Notes and Queries. (I pass without comment the importance of Nottingham and Newark since, as all Byronists know, these are places strongly connected with Byron's early verse—the writing of it, the printing, the publishing.)³

I initially became interested in this minor literary incident when I began editing Byron's poetry—that was in 1970. ‘The Mountain Violet’ had never been included in a collected edition of Byron's works, and I had to decide what to do in my edition. For sixteen years that poem remained in my files under the heading ‘Dubia’—in other words, in an editorial limbo, neither in nor out of the authoritative corpus. In 1986, however, I discovered the truth about ‘The Mountain Violet’. Byron did not write it. The poem is the work of Charlotte Dacre, and it was published in her two-volume poetry collection of 1805, Hours of Solitude.

I made my discovery while I was reading Dacre's books, reading them for the first time, I am ashamed to say. It was a discovery I was very happy to have made. But the reading led to another, related discovery about Byron's poetry, and that second discovery is what I want to talk about today.

The title Hours of Solitude, for one who knows Byron, can suggest only one thing: Hours of Idleness, Byron's first published book of verse issued two years after Dacre's book. This verbal echo is in fact only one part of the massive act of allusion to Dacre which constitutes the title page of Byron's book: the format of the latter imitates Dacre's title page in the most remarkable way. As might be expected, the title page signals a series of textual echoes and allusions which are scattered through the ‘Original’ parts of the book Byron subtitled ‘Poems Original and Translated’. Indeed, Byron's misguided plea, in his book's Preface, for the reader's ‘indulgence’ because the poems are ‘the productions … of the lighter hours of a young man, who has lately completed his nineteenth year’ was a move he took over directly from Dacre. In her prefatory note ‘To the Reader’ and then throughout the text, she called attention to ‘the age at which [her poems] were written’ (that is, all before she was twenty-three, and many when she was sixteen or younger).

What most impressed Byron in Hours of Solitude were the poems of sentiment. The poems he addressed to various female persons in his first three books (the volumes culminating in Hours of Idleness), as well as lyrics like ‘The First Kiss of Love’, call back to a number of similar poems in Dacre's work—for example, ‘The Kiss’, ‘The Sovereignty of Love’, ‘To Him Who Says He Loves’, and so forth. In the last section of Hours of Idleness, which comprises a kind of critical reflection on all of his poetry to that point, Byron includes a new poem, ‘To Romance’, where he reluctantly (and sentimentally) acknowledges a failure of the muse of sentiment.

This instance of a neglected influence on Byron's juvenile poetry might appear just another item in the shop of literature's curiosities. But the event has an aftermath of real consequence in the history of Byron's work. The event has perhaps an even greater consequence for an understanding of the history and significance of so-called sentimental poetry, especially as it was written by women—but that is a large subject which I shall not, unfortunately, be able to take up here. Today I shall concentrate on the smaller and more local matter, on Byron.

We start to glimpse the complications involved by recalling Byron's attack upon Della Cruscan poetry in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The celebrity of that group of writers had waned since Gifford attacked them in his nineties satires The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795).⁴ Nonetheless, their influence on contemporary writing remained considerable, and can be traced even in writers who are still given prominent positions in our somewhat skewed literary histories: in, for example, Moore and Shelley, as well as Keats and Byron. Dacre published under the Della Cruscan-style pseudonym ‘Rosa Matilda’,⁵ and in English Bards Byron attacks her under that name, and through her the late flowers of the Della Cruscan gardens:

Far be't from me unkindly to upbraid
The lovely Rosa's prose in masquerade,
Whose strains, the faithful echoes of her mind,
Leave wondering comprehension far behind.
Though Crusca's bards no more our journals fill,
Some stragglers skirmish round the columns still,
Last of the howling host which once was Bell's,
Matilda snivels yet, and Hafiz yells. …

(ll. 755-62)⁶

In an attached prose note Byron characterises Dacre as a ‘follower of the Della Cruscan School’, the author of ‘two very respectable absurdities in rhyme’ as well as ‘sundry novels in the style of the first edition of the Monk’ (CPW I, 413). These remarks are laced with witty innuendo. ‘The first edition of the Monk’ (1796) created such a scandal that Lewis was driven to delete and revise the sexual passages which were so offensive to many readers. Byron links Dacre's novel The Confessions of a Nun of St. Omer (1805), which was dedicated to Lewis, with the latter's notorious novel, and when he characterises Dacre's poetry as ‘very respectable’ he wants his irony to be taken. ‘Sentimental’ poetry like that by Dacre, Mrs Hannah Cowley (‘Anna Matilda’), and Mary (‘Perdita’) Robinson (or by Moore and Byron and Shelley) did not go in for the sexual fleshliness that one finds in certain Gothic novels and plays; nonetheless, the sexuality of such writing was explicit even if the diction and imagery were kept, as Byron delicately puts it, ‘very respectable’.

In this context let us recall the crucial bibliographical facts: that Hours of Idleness was published in June 1807, and that English Bards was initially composed between October 1807 and November 1808. It took Byron less than a year to break off his literary liaison with Rosa Matilda, and to publicise their separation. In fact, the breakup took somewhat longer than that, as one can see by glancing at Byron's first two books of verse, both privately printed. Fugitive Pieces (1806), Byron's first book, is distinctly marked by that sort of ‘very respectable’ poetry which English Bards ridiculed in the ‘sentimental’ verse of various writers, and particularly in the work of Dacre and his later close friend Tom Moore.⁷ Byron's second book, Poems Original and Translated (1807), he himself characterised as ‘miraculously chaste’⁸ because it represented a deliberate effort to tone down the ‘sentimentalities’ which had so heated up, in their presumably different ways, the readers of Fugitive Pieces. By the time he gets to writing English Bards Byron has abandoned the sexually-charged poetry—the ‘sentimental’ poetry—which had initially seduced him. Byron becomes ‘very respectable’.

In doing so, however, we have to recognise how Byron has changed the character of his own changes. His turn (between 1808 and 1816) from what he would later call ‘amorous writing’ (DJ [Don Juan] V, st. 2) to a concentration on satire, travelogue, and heroic poetry was a turn from ‘feminine’ to ‘masculine’ modes, a turn from Anacreon to Horace and Homer. When English Bards announced this shift in Byron's work by an appeal to Gifford, the poem was specifically invoking a memory of Gifford's own satiric attack on the Della Cruscans in his two popular satires of the nineties. In Byron's case, however, the turn involved a key self-referential feature which was entirely absent in Gifford's work. Gifford had never felt anything but abhorrence for Della Cruscan and sentimental poetry, while Byron cut his poetical teeth on it. In this respect, English Bards represents a typically Romantic act of displacement. Charlotte Dacre, among other amorous sentimentalists, is ridiculed in Byron's satire, but in truth he simply attacks her for a kind of writing which he himself had been driven from because the writing had offended certain provincial readers.⁹ The attack on Dacre in the satire is distinctly an act of bad poetic faith.

But Byron was not happy with himself for having bowed to the prudery of Southwell society in suppressing Fugitive Pieces, and Hours of Idleness was an effort to keep some faith with Charlotte Dacre even as he acceded to certain of the wishes of Southwell's ‘knot of ungenerous critics’.¹⁰ In English Bards, however, Byron made a complete—but as we shall see, not a final nor a clean—break with Rosa Matilda, and he did so because Hours of Idleness was still judged too mawkish and sentimental—this time not by a provincial audience, but by the mighty and male Edinburgh Review. Of course, Byron struck back at his accusers with his first famous satire, but in doing so he adopted the style and the language of his attackers. Byron became what he beheld, and in the process Rosa Matilda fell, in Byron's eyes, from grace. The process is one in which Byron tries to redeem himself and his work by making a scapegoat of writers and writing which had given literal birth to his own imagination.

And so ‘The Mountain Violet’ drops away from the Byron canon. It is in fact a spurious text, quite inauthentic; nonetheless, it stands as a sign of a deeper kind of authenticity which Byron would struggle his entire life to regain.

II

‘Sentimental’ poetry—the term will be taken here in its technical and historical sense—was associated with women writers in particular, though a great many male poets wrote sentimental verse. As a pejorative term it came to stand in general for writing which made a mawkish parade of spurious feelings. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, such work was as frequently deplored for immodesty and even indecency; and the attacks were all the more virulent because so many women, both as writers and as readers, found important resources in this kind of work. To many, and especially to those (men and women both) who felt called upon to guard public morals, the whole thing seemed improper or worse; nor were the attacks without foundation.¹¹

Crucial to sentimental poetry is the centrality of love to human experience and—more significantly—the idea that true love had to involve a total intensity of the total person—mind, heart, and (here was the sticking point) body. Love could be betrayed at any of those centres, and a betrayal of the body (through either lust or a prudish fastidiousness) was as disastrous as a betrayal of the mind or heart. Indeed, a betrayal at any point was the equivalent of a sin, for the ‘sentimental’ soul was equally diffused through the entire sensorium. The stylistic index of sentimental poetry, therefore, is a peculiar kind of self-conscious fleshliness. Dacre's poem ‘The Kiss’ provides a good example of the style—for instance, the first stanza.

                    The greatest bliss
                    Is in a kiss—
A kiss of love refin'd,
                    When springs the soul
                    Without controul,
And blends the bliss with mind.

Sentimental poetry strives to be both emotionally intense and completely candid. Its purpose is to ‘bring the whole soul of man [and woman] into activity’, an event which, in the context of such writing, means that it is to bring along the whole person—mind and body as well. So the paradoxes of this poem swirl about the demand for an experience that is at once completely impassioned (‘without controul’), completely physical, and yet perfectly ‘refin'd’ as well. The poem solicits a wild erotics of the imagination where blissful consummations occur in and through, or ‘with’, the ‘mind’.

Byron and all the Romantics wrote a great deal of sentimental poetry—this is precisely why they were attacked by modernist ideologues like Hulme, Babbitt, and Eliot. Keats and Shelley are probably our greatest sentimental poets, but even Wordsworth's verse is marked by sentimentality. Wordsworth, however, made a life's work out of ‘subliming’, as it were, the project of sentimentalism—attempting to show that the ‘sensations sweet / Felt in the blood and felt along the heart’ were actually the impulses of ‘something far more deeply interfused’, something he called ‘the purer mind’ (‘purer’, that is, because it had to be distinguished from the sort of mind that Dacre was describing).¹²

But as Wordsworth was moved by a spiritual transcendence of sensuality and sexuality, Byron plunged completely into the contradictions which sentimentalism had come to involve for him. While these contradictions no doubt have deep psychological roots, I am incompetent to explore such matters. What is clear, at the social and personal level, is that Byron reconstructed those contradictions in his work. …

Byron's argument is that the verse of erotic sentimentality—Charlotte Dacre's ‘prose in masquerade’, John Keats's ‘p[i]ss a bed poetry’ (BLJ, VI, 200)—turns sex from a matter of the body to a matter of the brain. Sex in poetry becomes ‘serious’ when it is delivered over to the imagination. At that point the pleasure of the text becomes not moral but, literally, erotic. It is in this sense that Byron will insist, and with good reason to support his position, that sentimental poets like Dacre and Moore and Keats are the true immoralists. Through them eroticism appears as a behaviour of conscience—as ‘sex in the head’. Unlike sentimental verse, which Byron calls ‘the Onanism of Poetry’ (BLJ, VI, 217), Don Juan takes up its erotic subjects in a deliberately unsentimental way—‘it strips off the tinsel of Sentiment’ (BLJ, VI, 202), he says, and thereby causes offence among those who, while they want sex in poetry, want it in more ‘refin'd’ forms.

Byron's argument, made in a context when the Romantic ideology was establishing itself, will now seem to us, who stand on the other side of the ideology's historical reign, remarkably insightful. And in truth his imagination of the truth is here quite important. Nevertheless, this Byronic imagination is not ‘the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. It carries its own form of special pleading, and that (what must surely be unconscious) allusion to Charlotte Dacre and his earlier act of poetic betrayal returns in Don Juan as a critical opening in Byron's own text, unknown to itself.

Following the concealments and self-deception practised in the poetry of 1808-16, Byron's exilic poetry made a virtue of candour and truth-telling. I pass without comment the important contribution which sentimental poetry like Charlotte Dacre's made toward a poetic ideal of candour and the fulness of truth. These matters we have already touched on, and we have seen the depth of Byron's debt to that poetry. Like Blake's Swedenborg, Byron in 1816 had broken some of the nets that had bound him up, and his escape is registered in his later work. Nevertheless, part of the truth of Don Juan still operates in the mode of deception and untruth.

We observe this by interrogating Byron's masterwork on the issue of the erotics of the imagination, the issue of sex in the head. This is the territory occupied by people like Dacre and Moore and Keats, a territory Byron says he has abandoned, as he abandoned his canting homeland. Byron's critique of cant, however, was partly negotiated through a recovery of certain sentimental attitudes—a turn away from the muscular and moral values which so dominate his work between English Bards and Childe Harold Canto IV. Juan's liaisons with Julia and Haidée are both completely sentimental affairs. Furthermore, Byron's new poetic theory of ‘truth in masquerade’ is grounded in a sympathetic meditation on a certain kind of ‘feminine’ lying. Earlier that sort of deception had served only to drive a wedge between Byron and his sentimental attachments, but in Don Juan he begins to rethink the issues.

The behaviour of Julia (at the beginning of Don Juan) and of Lady Adeline, la donna mobile (at the end), epitomises how theatricality and masquerade—deliberate strategies of deception—can serve the cause of deep truth. These strategies will do so, Byron's work argues, only if they are deployed with complete self-consciousness—that is, only if the theatre of deception, or the masquerade, labels itself as such, and includes itself in its own illusory displays. (To the degree that these displays are sentimental productions, to that extent they are part of the theatre of love in the full sentimentalist sense.) In this erotic theatre, the central figure, for the man, must be the woman, ‘Whence is our entrance and our exit’ (IX, st. 55).

A theory of art, however, once it is deployed through a work, becomes a two-edged sword, and the case is no different for Don Juan. Byron's critique of the sentimental eroticism of Moore and Keats, for example, seems hardly less applicable to many parts of Byron's epic, not least, I suppose, to the scenes in the harem. Criticism might conclude, from this kind of contradiction, that Byron was fabulously self-deceived in thus criticising Moore and Keats; and criticism would no doubt be correct in this judgement. But the exposure of Byron's personal self-deception is far less significant than the way his poetry transforms truth and lies through the artifice of its masquerades. Indeed, the brilliance of the harem episode depends exactly on its having shown so clearly—despite Byron's quotidien pronouncements—the positive relation which operates between sex and the imagination.

This relation is (as it were) dramatised for us in the persons—in the dreams and imaginations—of the young harem women. But the narrator's specular involvement in that drama (and our involvement through him) is equally drawn into the orbit of the poem's theatricality. The harem episode is, in one very obvious sense, nothing more than a distinctly ‘male’ sex fantasy, and hence a voyeuristic spectacle. The narrator is unaware of his voyeurist perspective, however—or rather, he sees nothing in his act of seeing to be critical of. We see this innocence of his mind in his blithe assumption that the scene and events could only be imagined as he has imagined them.

This assumption acquires a critical edge in Byron's poem, however, just because it is a contrived assumption, an artifice. Indeed, the essential wit of the episode arises from the narrator's conscious assumption of an innocent eye, his pretence—as in the narrative of Dudu's dream—that he is himself unaware of the word-plays and double meanings of his own discourse. Unlike Julia in her letter in Canto I, Dudu does not narrate her own dream; the narrator tells it for her in indirect discourse. That indirection underscores the theatricality of his talk, the masquerade in which he is involved. The critical consequence, however, is that the narrator is himself pulled on to the stage of the poem. In that event the narrator is released from the bondage of his own imagination. We are not only able, for example, to ‘see’ and criticise his voyeurism, we come as well into contact with that supreme objectivity which poetic discourse, alone of our discursive forms, seems able to achieve. ‘Byron’ would not have wanted to be told that his masterwork was itself deeply invested in sentimentalism and sex in the head; nonetheless, this is the case, and it is his own masterwork which tells us so.

In the harem episode we see Don Juan operating under the illusion of its own self-consciousness. The narrator's amusement is the sign that he is satisfied with his understanding, that he possesses understanding. But his wisdom is an illusion of knowledge which, however, tells a truth about feeling. The harem episode is a theatrical display of a certain kind of ‘sex in the head’—an onanism of poetry fully the equal of Keats's. And it is an onanism of poetry precisely because its eroticism, founded in the sentimentalist project, here executes that project in a space of solitude. The harem episode is an image, in short, not of fulfilled but of frustrated desire. Its pretence to be something else—its pretence to display an ultimately fulfilled eroticism—is an essential feature of its deepest truth.

In Charlotte Dacre's poetry, ‘hours of solitude’ are hours of critical reflection, hours in which one experiences the loss and deprivation of love and in which one recognises the state of the loss. The harem episode in Don Juan means to imagine a way of escaping such solitude and loss, but in the event it succeeds in defining those illusions of escape which serve only to deepen one's awareness of what the experience of loss entails. In this respect the episode is something of a retreat from the philosophical achievement of Canto I. But the text does not revert to the style of the period 1808-16. Byron's feminine and sentimental brain, which emerged between 1815 and 1817, made such a lapse impossible. The eroticism of the harem episode is in certain obvious respects ludicrous and self-deceived, but—like ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, which is quite a comparable piece of work—the episode does not (at any rate) torture sexual feeling with moral instrumentations. It catches, therefore, the true voice of Romantic feeling—even if the feelings involved are not so rich or complex as the feelings at the conclusion of Canto I.

Notes

1. Notes and Queries, 8th series, VI (25 August 1894), pp. 144-5; and for Sir Richard Edgecumbe's piece, noted below, see ibid., p. 515.

2. I have never seen these books described by Wake but his identification of the pencil notations is persuasive. Byron often wrote in pencil in books in this way, especially in his early years.

3. Byron's four early books were all printed in Newark, and of course Byron's life between 1803 and 1807 was closely connected to the Nottingham area.

4. A good brief summary of the Della Cruscan phenomenon is given in John Mark Longaker, The Della Cruscans and William Gifford. The History of a Minor Movement in an Age of Literary Transition (Philadelphia, 1924).

5. The Della Cruscans typically published under pseudonyms, and ‘Rosa Matilda’ is a direct allusion to Mrs Cowley's adopted cognomen ‘Laura Matilda’. It is important to realise, however, that Dacre was not a Della Cruscan herself, but a slightly later writer who came under their influence. Dacre's work exhibits a much more self-conscious employment of the Della Cruscan style: see for example her poems ‘Passion Uninspired by Sentiment’, ‘To the Shade of Mary Robinson’, and ‘The Female Philosopher’.

6. Citations from the poetry are to Lord Byron. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford, 1980-); when it is necessary to refer to this edition, the abbreviation CPW will be used.

7. Throughout his life Byron commented on the erotic elements in Moore's verse, and especially in Moore's Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. (1801). This book, a minor classic in the sentimental style, went through numerous printings, and had an important influence on Byron's early work. For a fuller discussion see Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust. Byron's Poetic Development (Chicago, 1968), Chapter 1.

8. Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, Mass., 1973-82), I, p. 103; hereafter cited as BLJ.

9. The fullest discussion of this event in Byron's life is in Willis W. Pratt's Byron at Southwell (Austin, Tex., 1948).

10. ‘To a Knot of Ungenerous Critics’ is the title of one of Byron's poetical replies to his Southwell critics: see CPW, I, pp. 19-22 (and the related poem at pp. 17-19).

11. Some of Gifford's best lines in The Baviad and The Maeviad involve witty sexual wordplays which call attention not only to the sensuality of Della Cruscan poetry, but to its self-conscious (and hence, from Gifford's point of view, irreal) sensuality. When Byron later saw a similar poetic mode in Keats's work, he ridiculed it as ‘the Onanism of Poetry’ (BLJ, VII, p. 217)—a distinctly Giffordian line of attack.

12. In this respect Wordsworth's was a more successful deployment of the Della Cruscan programme, whose sentimentality inclined toward a travesty of platonic engagement. This travesty, and platonism, are especially clear in the famous poetical ‘love affair’ which Della Crusca and Anna Matilda carried on in the pages of The World in the years 1787-9. The two had in fact never even met.