SOURCE: Lessenich, Rolf P. “The Danger and Vanity of Human Passions.” In Lord Byron and the Nature of Man, pp. 57-98. Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1978.

[In the following essay, Lessenich explores Byron's characterization of love and war as vain and perilous pursuits, designed to tempt death.]

A) THE DANGER AND VANITY OF LOVE

Though, in Byron's work, love and military glory appear as contrary passions with contrary moral values, they have this in common: their pursuit is both vain and dangerous.

The sufferings of Mazeppa, tied up and turned away on a wild horse, are too obviously reminiscent of the sufferings of the Ancient Mariner to escape notice¹. But, unlike Coleridge's bird-slaughterer, Byron's hero suffers for loving, not for killing². To the old scarred and battle-steeled soldier Mazeppa passing his life in review, his love-affair with Theresa has proved the most dangerous adventure of all his long career.

Byron's morbid concept of the dangerousness of any involvement in love went back to a literary τοπος enlivened by his traumatic experience with an inconstant mother always threatening to replace extreme love by extreme hatred. And his later acquaintances with women, especially with Annabella Milbanke and Caroline Lamb, were hardly of a nature to destroy this early inoculated prejudice:

I am thus far on my way to … the Yungfrau (that is the “Wild woman” being interpreted—as it is so perverse a mountain that no other sex would suit it), …³

The danger of love manifests itself in the adventures as well as in the name of Don Juan. His love-affair with Donna Julia leads to his banishment and a hair-breadth escape from death by shipwreck. His love-affair with Haidée leads to his imprisonment and a hair-breadth escape from death by the sword. His love-affair with Dudù leads to his condemnation and a hair-breadth escape from being drowned in a sack. And the literary tradition of his name suggests that one of his subsequent love-affairs would prove fatal for him⁴, as love had proved fatal for the heroes of Byron's earlier poetical tales, the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, Alp, Hugo, and Mazeppa, for the heroes of Byron's dramas, Manfred and Sardanapalus, and, last but not least, for Tasso, the hero of Byron's dramatic monologue⁵. It is not mere coincidence that Selim, bravely defending himself against the soldiers of the tyrant Giaffir and on the verge of his rescue, falls by Giaffir's shot in an unguarded moment when looking back to see his beloved Zuleika:

Ah! wherefore did he turn to look
          For her his eye but sought in vain?
That pause, that fatal gaze he took,
          Hath doom'd his death, or fix'd his chain.
Sad proof, in peril and in pain,
How late will Lover's hope remain!(6)

Nor is it an accidental invention of Byron's that Alp the Renegade is felled by a bullet in an unguarded moment when paralysed with the unexpected news of his beloved Francesca's death, sneeringly imparted to him at the height of the battle by his deadly enemy Minotti, the Venetian governor of Corinth and Francesca's despotic father⁷. Analogously, Conrad the Corsair loses the battle against the tyrant Seyd which he is on the point of winning because, in the critical moment, instead of pursuing his routed enemies, his love of woman makes him hesitate and save Seyd's harem-slaves⁸. The beautiful Gulnare, rescued on that occasion and firmly resolved to stab Seyd for her love of Conrad, is a symptomatic instance of Byron's fear of the danger which may proceed from the love of woman. Conrad's rescue of Gulnare leads to the loss of his war, the loss of his adored Medora, and the loss of the sense of his life, and Seyd's failure to recognize any such danger leads to his immediate death:

Ah! little reck'd that chief of womanhood—
Which frowns ne'er quell'd, nor menaces subdued;
And little deem'd he what thy heart, Gulnare!
When soft could feel, and when incensed could dare.(9)

In regular descent from these piteous lovers and soldiers, Byron's Don Juan is the helpless victim of a dangerous fate, caused by dangerous women, which drives him from one perilous love-affair to another and to his destined end¹⁰. It has been explained why Byron tends to see the danger as emanating from woman, but the fatality of love resides in the caractère maudit of love itself. To Byron, the homme fatal and femme fatale present but partial symptoms of one of this deterministic world's diseases as provided by a tyrannical God. With all due respect for the intellectual brilliancy of Mario Praz's study of the romantic joy in sensual experience and lapse into erotic deviations¹¹, we must firmly oppose the absurd view of the infernal vampire Byron who glutted over the agonies of his tortured women, both in life and literature, and who shows akin to the Marquis de Sade¹². Biographically, Byron was no Satanic Lord¹³ and his wife no Patient Griselda¹⁴. And in point of literary creation, it cannot escape the notice of an unprejudiced critic that Byron's most active lovers, the Giaour or Childe Harold or Manfred, do not destroy the partners of their love willingly but through the providential constitution of things whose victims they become themselves. Manfred's topical reference to the ill-fated Pausanias, who “slew That which he loved, unknowing what he slew”¹⁵, and his begging Astarte's forgiveness¹⁶, are hardly compatible with a vampire's perverse delectation in arbitrary butchering. Even King Herod, the real murderer of the Hebrew Melodies who has wilfully ordered the execution of his beloved wife Mariamne in frenzy's raving jealousy, torments himself in wild remorse and vain prayer for pardon rather than fiendishly glutting over his crime¹⁷. The case of Don Juan supplies an even stronger argument against Praz. Different from Childe Harold's, Juan's role is that of the passive and seduced lover, a significant inversion of the conventional homme fatal, the actively seducing and wilfully destroying irresistible lover in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century versions of the Don Juan legend¹⁸. Hardly escaped from death by shipwreck, Juan opens his eyes and sees the next fatal claimant of his love, Haidée. Hardly escaped from death by the sword, he becomes the slave of the imperious Gulbeyaz. Hardly escaped from death by being drowned in a sack, he becomes a soldier at Ismail. Hardly escaped from death in battle, he is sent on a diplomatic mission to England and becomes the object of the amorous pursuits of Aurora Raby, the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, and Lady Adeline Amundeville, the “fair most fatal Juan ever met”¹⁹. The inescapable danger into which this latter adventure would have brought the lovers, had the story not been left unfinished by Byron's death, is here foreshadowed:

I'm ‘at my old lunes’—digression—and forget
          The Lady Adeline Amundeville,
The fair most fatal Juan ever met,
          Although she was not evil nor meant ill,
But destiny and passion spread the net
(Fate is a good excuse for our own will)
And caught them.(20)

Julia, Haidée, Gulbeyaz, and Dudù are described with the same halo of fatality and danger hovering about them. Julia, Juan's first seductress, is a proud beauty of Moorish origin, with large dark eyes betraying the erotic fire and boiling blood which she struggles to conceal²¹. The very blackness of her eyes reveals her passion, increased by repression in the “burning core”²² of her heart, and portends imminent danger “as the blackest sky Foretells the heaviest tempest”²³. Her magic charm threatens to destroy the epic hero as the magic charm of Circe, Dido, and Armida threatened to destroy Ulysses, Aeneas, and Rinaldo²⁴:

                                                  … but ne'er magician's wand
Wrought change with all Armida's fairy art
Like what this light touch left on Juan's heart.(25)

Similarly, the black eyes of Haidée are associated with death²⁶. And an image of unexpected deadly danger characterizes the glance of those black, raven fringed eyes:

'Tis as the snake late coiled, who pours his length
And hurls at once his venom and his strength.(27)

While Juan is recovering his health in sound sleep, Haidée bends over him “as death”²⁸, drinking his scarce-drawn breath²⁹, a vampire-like image suggestive of Herodias dancing off the head of John the Baptist³⁰, in blatant contrast to the subsequent comparison of Haidée with “an angel o'er the dying Who die in righteousness”³¹. And again, later, when Juan falls asleep in Haidée's arms, the thought of death overshadows the tender joy of the most natural and least sinful of loves:

There lies the thing we love with all its errors
And all its charms, like death without its terrors.(32)

The happiness of the two unlawful lovers will soon be cruelly shattered, and Byron's complaint about this injustice of Providence is quite serious, though, a stanza later, he again turns it into ridicule and resumes his habitual attitude of resignation to the unalterable state of things as they are:

Oh love, what is it in this world of ours
          Which makes it fatal to be loved? Ah why
With cypress branches hast thou wreathed thy bowers
          And made thy best interpreter a sigh?
As those who dote on odours pluck the flowers
          And place them on their breast—but place to die;
Thus the frail beings we would fondly cherish
Are laid within our bosoms but to perish.(33)

The next perilous adventure in Juan's career is his sale as a slave and secret lover to the beautiful and imperious Gulbeyaz, the fourth spouse of the Turkish Sultan. Her fatality appears in her first encounter with Juan, who is absolutely at her mercy. Byron compares her eyes to those of an antelope which ancient literature represented as a wild and dangerous beast like the panther, the tiger, the boar, and the wolf³⁴, and the allusions to Venus and Paphos as well as Gulbeyaz's sensual ecstasy towards the initially cold Juan suggest the tragic love of Venus for the ill-fated Adonis:

The lady, rising up with such an air
          As Venus rose with from the wave, on them
Bent like an antelope a Paphian pair
          Of eyes, which put out each surrounding gem,
And raising up an arm …(35)

Dudù, Gulbeyaz's rival for Juan's love, also partakes of the nature of the fatal Venus, albeit her character at first appears to stand in sharp contrast to Gulbeyaz:

A kind of sleepy Venus seemed Dudù
          Yet very fit to ‘murder sleep’ in those
Who gazed upon her cheek's transcendent hue,
          Her Attic forehead and her Phidian nose.(36)

This calm and quiet harmony of her outward bearing makes her the more dangerous. Her comparison to the Age of Gold only holds true on the basis of the notorious ancient etymology which derived a word from its opposite: lucus a non lucendo, canis a non canendo. As the Age of Gold is so called because “gold was yet unknown”³⁷, Byron here intimates, Dudù is called kind and gentle because, in fact, she is wild and cruel³⁸. The oxymoron “silent thunder”, another simile which Byron invents for her characterization, gives further emphasis to this contrast of appearance and reality³⁹. The gentleness of her manner serves Dudù as a safe means of satisfying the wildness of her nature, a tool which helps her successfully to accomplish all her plans and which makes her, the slave, triumph even over the beautiful and mighty Sultana. Spellbound by her charms, Juan thoughtlessly surrenders himself to her love, fully aware that this new love-affair will arouse the Sultana's jealousy and expose his life to mortal danger, just as Byron had surrendered himself to the love of Teresa Guiccioli in spite of his suspicion of her husband's possible readiness to have his rival secretly murdered⁴⁰.

For a young man who, by mere good or bad luck, escapes such tangible physical dangers, love has prepared another snare which will necessarily ruin him,—the rational motivation though not the real emotional reason for Byron's final abandonment of Teresa Guiccioli⁴¹. Love spares him the death of the body to lead him first to an even crueller fate, the breaking of his vainly panting heart, that most precious and tender part of his soul:

          The tree will wither long before it fall;
          The hull drives on, though mast and sail be torn;
          The roof-tree sinks, but moulders on the hall
          In massy hoariness; the ruin'd wall
          Stands when its wind-worn battlements are gone;
          The bars survive the captive they enthral;
          The day drags through, though storms keep out the
                    sun;
And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on
          Even as a broken mirror …(42)

The accumulated comparisons clearly suggest that the heart's living on in shattered guise, still, cold, and bloodless⁴³, is not a survival, but the ruinous period of withering decay between virtual death and total physical collapse. The death of the heart precedes the death of the body, and acts of love continue as mere physico-mechanical reflexes without any paradisaical illusions and aspirations. It is a death characterized by images of parching drought and barren sterilization, as usual in Byron's descriptions of the illusory and suicidal efforts of the hot passionate soul yearning for eternity⁴⁴. After the death of the heart, there remain

          The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears,
          Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind,
          O'er which all heavily the journeying years
Plod the last sands of life,—where not a flower appears.(45)

The “orphans of the heart” whom Byron advises to contemplate the shattered thrones and temples of Rome⁴⁶ are men of broken hearts, ruins amidst ruins like Childe Harold and Byron himself⁴⁷. It was the same Byron who, in a later poem on the death of Thyrza or John Edleston, felt like a “time-worn slave”⁴⁸ with a heart “cold as e'en the dead can be”⁴⁹, an expired heart reawakened only with thoughts of a better past when “love and life alike were new”⁵⁰. And it was the same Byron who, in one of his later poems written to fit already existent melodies⁵¹, woefully deplored the “mortal coldness”⁵² of his heart and the “wither'd waste”⁵³ of his life in stanzas that adumbrate the beauties of Baudelaire, for whom “L'amour n'a plus de goût”⁵⁴ and “Le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur”⁵⁵:

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay;
'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast,
But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past.(56)

So, in the course of his amorous career, we observe an increasing disillusionment in Don Juan. His initial expectation of regaining a terrestrial paradise in acts of love has proved a mere illusion. The dream of living ever happily on Haidée's fortunate isle has evaporated. The constant confrontation with things as they are progressively supplants the vision of things as the soul would have them, convincing Juan, quite unromantically, that there is no reality in the chimeric desires of his fancy. But the hero in whom Byron most impressively demonstrated the disastrous effects of the heart's death through love is Childe Harold. When Harold is introduced to us, his disillusionment is complete and his amorous feelings are dead. He even believes himself beyond joy and sorrow, seemingly secure and invulnerable in guarded coldness⁵⁷. But this is an error soon discovered. His soul survives in a disintegrated and ruined state, leaving all his non-amorous and non-sympathetical feelings alive, and, in frustrated fits, continues to seek other ways to immortality than love⁵⁸. Impelled by “the strong Necessity of loving”⁵⁹, Harold had too frequently gratified his erotic needs not to comprehend, like Byron himself, that sexual promiscuity yields no lasting satisfaction to the human soul languishing for paradise. Satiated, cloyed, disgusted, unjustly branded with a sin which is no sin, he is doomed to wander restlessly like Cain and Ahasuerus:

It is that settled, ceaseless gloom
          The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore;
That will not look beyond the tomb,
          But cannot hope for rest before.(60)

Here again, as typical of Byron, a religious concept, the disintegration of the soul through sin, has been secularized and adapted to Byron's own indictment of the ways of God to man. It is the narrator's voice, not the poet's, that pronounces Harold guilty⁶¹, the voice of Byron's feelings as opposed to that of his rational conviction. The final death of Harold's body, a meaningfully vague fading away into destruction's mass at the end of the inverted pilgrimage of his life⁶², is a benefit to the man after the death of his heart. Human nature causes him, like all others sooner or later, to fall victim to love's false magic, that “Cherub-hydra”⁶³ with its “dear delusive shape”⁶⁴.

The mortal danger with which love threatens both the bodies and the souls of its helpless votaries vexed and irritated Byron so much the more for its total vanity, a typical Providence of a despotic God. The vanity of love is a theme running through the whole of Byron's poetry and prose to the poem written on the occasion of his thirty-sixth birthday, less than three months before his death at Missolonghi. Byron was no Keats who, on the sight of an urn or on the sound of a nightingale's voice, could ecstatically project himself out of the bounds of time and space into a fancied romantic world of truth correlative to earthly beauty and there freeze things of beauty at their height before their lapse into decay,

For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
          For ever panting, and for ever young—(65)

His conviction that love was a passion for the young which, beyond the age of twenty-five or thirty, could no longer be gratified, and his consequent fear of wrinkles and grey hairs, haunted the unmetaphysically and empirically disposed Byron ever since he had left Harrow for Cambridge⁶⁶:

          Who with the weight of years would wish to bend,
          When Youth itself survives young Love and Joy?
          Alas! when mingling souls forget to blend,
          Death hath but little left him to destroy!
Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy?(67)

This melancholic meditation on the satiated lover's death of heart, published when Byron was only twenty-four, foreshadows his later personal complaints in Don Juan:

Who would not sigh, Αι αι ταν Κυθεϱειαν!
          That hath a memory or that had a heart?
Alas, her star must wane like that of Dian;
          Ray fades on ray, as years on years depart.(68)

But in Don Juan, as distinct from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the complaint of the short-lived nature of happy love no longer stands alone. When surfeited man has, even in his youth, exceeded the age of a lover and “mingling souls forget to blend”⁶⁹, a void is left, the cause of Childe Harold's “life-abhorring gloom”⁷⁰. The author of Don Juan again abandoned such romantic lamentations and turned back to his realistic analysis of the colder passions which must fill that void after the heart's death, ambition and avarice, vices which he had detailed seven years before, in his memorable portrait of “Life's little tale, so oft, so vainly told”⁷¹ in Hints from Horace (1811). The poetic technique changes, the idea remains the same:

          Launch'd into life, extinct his early fire,
He [man] apes the selfish prudence of his sire;
Marries for money, chooses friends for rank,
Buys land, and shrewdly trusts not to the Bank;
Sits in the Senate …
          Manhood declines—age palsies every limb;
He quits the scene—or else the scene quits him;
Scrapes wealth, o'er each departing penny grieves,
And avarice seizes all ambition leaves.(72)
My days of love are over, me no more
          The charms of maid, wife, and still less of widow
Can make the fool of which they made before;
          In short, I must not lead the life I did do.
The credulous hope of mutual minds is o'er,
          The copious use of claret is forbid too,
So for a good old-gentlemanly vice,
I think I must take up with avarice.(73)

The frequency of these complaints annoys many readers of Byron, but these complaints are fully integrated into the intellectual substance of his work. The ephemeral nature of love is a symptom of its vanity. When men have reluctantly “passed life's equinoctial line”⁷⁴, love will remain no more than an erotic impulse of nature, a sexual torso deprived of its original illusory yearning for higher things and better days:

Love lingers still, although 'twere late to wive,
          And as for other love, the illusion's o'er.(75)

The thirty-three year old lover of Teresa Guiccioli keenly felt that degeneration himself. The fire of the Italian love-letters of his last attachment, translated by Iris Origo, belies his sentiment of loss and exhaustion. In his Stanzas written on the Road between Florence and Pisa in November 1821, while he accompanied the divorced Teresa and her parents, the Gambas, to their exile, Byron complained that his wrinkled brow and hoary head betrayed the bygone days “of sweet two-and-twenty”⁷⁶, and that the laurels of fame were a poor substitute for the freshness of youth:

What are garlands and crowns to the brow that is wrinkled?
'Tis but as a dead flower with May-dew besprinkled.
Then away with all such from the head that is hoary!
What care I for the wreaths that can only give glory!(77)

Men's amorous and sympathetic feelings will gradually harden with the approaching death of their hearts, their childish hope to regain an imagined paradise will vanish with age and experience of the world and the world's ways⁷⁸. Scepticism will arise and tell them that such a paradise has never really existed, and that the Fall of man is a mere fiction parabolic of man's foul nature. Wrinkles and grey hairs will make it increasingly difficult to satisfy their remaining erotic desires and they will recur to other, far less positive pleasures such as political ambition⁷⁹, financial speculation⁸⁰, and, above all, the joys of mutual hate which last much longer than the joys of mutual love: “Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure”⁸¹. And hatred, in its most destructive form, manifests itself in war. The young Juan is a lover and soldier full of contradictory illusions of paradise and glory, his older friend Johnson a disillusioned realist whose only remaining passion still to be gratified is that “for pence or praise”⁸² in the military profession. Byron thus keeps the reader aware of the short-lived nature of Juan's enviable success in matters of love which will ebb and dwindle to nothing with his passing years and decaying beauty, unless the dangers inherent in love kill Juan, as they kill Haidée, in the bloom of his youth. The unreal idyll of Juan's and Haidée's love is represented as unearthly and beyond the laws of time and space, only to shatter the paradisaical illusion and to call the reader back to the contrast of tough reality:

Their faces were not made for wrinkles, their
          Pure blood to stagnate, their great hearts to fail.
The blank grey was not made to blast their hair,
          But like the climes that know nor snow nor hail
They were all summer. Lightning might assail
          And shiver them to ashes, but to trail
A long and snake-like life of full decay
Was not for them—they had too little clay.(83)

Clay or dust on the one hand and fire or flame on the other, it has been demonstrated in a study on Byron's imagery⁸⁴, symbolize the two irreconcilable and discordant components of man's antithetically mixed nature, a view sharply opposed to Wordsworth. The one represents all that aspires for eternity and infinitude: the passions of love and glory. The other represents all that frustrates those airy aspirations and renders them illusory by constraints of finitude and limitation: the decay of corporal existence. hence, as has been pointed out several times, Byron usually describes the passionate efforts of the mind or soul, doomed to produce mere illusions in its bodily confinement, under the images of intolerable heat and unquenchable fever. It is the disease of all Byron's heroes, to name but Manfred, who has lived too long “With the fierce thirst of death—and still unslaked!”⁸⁵

That disharmonious conflict of the human soul with the human body forms indeed the central problem of Manfred⁸⁶:

How beautiful is all this visible world!
How glorious in its action and itself!
But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,
Half dust, half deity, alike unfit
To sink or soar, with our mix'd essence make
A conflict of its elements, and breathe
The breath of degradation and of pride,
Contending with low wants and lofty will,
Till our mortality predominates,
…(87)

Manfred, the Child of Dust and Earth with the high aspiring mind, who would rise above the order of his despised race⁸⁸, fails to find the oblivion that would make him forget his agonizing mortal condition⁸⁹. He realizes the truth so often formulated by Byron that, as the sick heart's death is the only cure for its sickness, so the sick soul's only cure is the demolition of its fleshly prison: “Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die”⁹⁰.

Another Child of Dust whose “aspirations Have been beyond the dwellers of the earth”⁹¹ is Rousseau, in the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage⁹². That unusual man, “whose dust was once all fire”⁹³, a Byronic eremite like all aspiring minds, differed from Manfred insofar as he was not aware of his mortal constraints and earthly condition. He lived in an illusory world of pure mind and soul, enamoured of ideal beauty which is not real⁹⁴ and setting the world in flame with erring thoughts and dreams of social equality which cannot come true⁹⁵. His failure in all things showed Byron the immovable limits of bodily mortality which weigh upon and oppress the uprising soul. Only physical death can give the soul the freedom to roam in endless regions congenial to its immortality and to gather endless knowledge congenial to its infinity, “Eternal, boundless, undecay'd, A thought unseen, but seeing all”⁹⁶. An early death is to be welcomed not only for its termination of an increasingly gloomy life of bodily bondage, but also for its initiation of an increasingly joyful life of the mind or soul at last set free:

Above or Love, Hope, Hate, or Fear,
          It lives all passionless and pure:
An age shall fleet like earthly year;
          Its years as moments shall endure.
Away, away, without a wing
          O'er all, through all, its thought shall fly,
A nameless and eternal thing,
          Forgetting what it was to die.(97)

As we have seen⁹⁸, Byron ridiculed Plato's soma-sema-doctrine so interpreted that souls, unconfined by their bodies, could unite in non-erotic and non-physical love. The deeper reason is now obvious. But the genuine Platonic doctrine of the soul yearning to break through its bodily confinement and finding its fulfilment in the hour of death, as discussed in Phaidon, was closely related to Byron's thought, and Byron highly esteemed the value of its numerous emblematical illustrations. So the emblem of the wild-born falcon vainly striving to rise with his clipped wings, as used in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage⁹⁹, offered itself as a picture of man's illusory passions.

Man is a conflicting compound of “fiery dust”¹⁰⁰, the one ascending up into the air, the other weighing down unto the earth. In the unreal idyll of their paradise of eternal summer, Juan and Haidée have “too little clay” ever to be the victims of “dull decay”¹⁰¹. But with their reawakening, the illusory dreams of immortality and lasting youth give way to the real facts of slowly approaching old age and death. The death of the heart preceding the death of the body, Byron had sufficiently demonstrated in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, is worse than physical death in the midst of illusory expectations of a terrestrial paradise. The premature demise of the young John Edleston, the choirboy to whom Byron felt romantically attached during his Cambridge days and whose death he half lamented and half welcomed in his Thyrza poems, involved this blessing: it withdrew the imperfections of change and disillusion as well as decay on both sides of the grave from each other's eyes and allowed Byron the survival of an ideal affection¹⁰², just as he could best preserve a loving memory of Augusta Leigh and Teresa Guiccioli from a long distance. In that sense, John Edleston was happy to die before Byron, in those better, illusory days when “love, however vain”¹⁰³, shone warm and expectant:

I know not if I could have borne
          To see thy beauties fade;
The night that followed such a morn
          Had worn a deeper shade:
Thy day without a cloud hath passed,
And thou wert lovely to the last;
          Extinguish'd, not decay'd;
As stars that shoot along the sky
Shine brightest as they fall from high.(104)

Similarly, Haidée's premature decease may be envied rather than deplored because it spares her and her lover the torment of seeing her tender skin wrinkle and her glossy hair turn grey:

                                                                                                                        She was not made
Through years or moons the inner weight to bear,
          Which colder hearts endure till they are laid
By age in earth. Her days and pleasures were
          Brief, but delightful, such as had not stayed
Long with her destiny. But she sleeps well
By the seashore, whereon she loved to dwell.(105)

And, also, it spares her the sad disappointment of seeing her love grow a dull habit¹⁰⁶. Byron's scurrilous digressions on love and marriage must be seen in connection with this symptom of love's vanity¹⁰⁷. Love and marriage bear the same relation to each other as wine and vinegar, the celestial and delicious wine being turned by time to “a sad, sour, sober beverage”¹⁰⁸ with “a very homely household savour”¹⁰⁹. Byron took this for a satisfactory explication of the well-known fact that, in medieval and Renaissance literature, the adventures and sentiments of young lovers are rarely traced into their married lives:

There's doubtless something in domestic doings,
          Which forms in fact true love's antithesis.
Romances paint at full length people's wooings,
          But only give a bust of marriages,
For no one cares for matrimonial cooings;
          There's nothing wrong in a connubial kiss.
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?(110)

This manifestation of love's vanity within the intransgressible limits of bodily existence and cause of man's disillusionment conducive to his heart's death finds an exhaustive treatment in the Egeria-stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage¹¹¹. The would-be romantic dreamer and must-be realist Byron knew that Egeria, the legendary nymph beloved by the legendary Roman King Numa Pompilius, was a mythical creature of the fancy, conceived by some mortal and real man in search of immortal and ideal beauty¹¹². Be it that this man nympholeptically imagined her in his terrestrial despair¹¹³, or that he euhemeristically deified a charming woman of this world¹¹⁴, Egeria is no more than “a beautiful thought … softly bodied forth”¹¹⁵. Only thus can she be immortal and remain unwrinkled with years like the face of her cave-guarded spring¹¹⁶. Only thus could love keep its earliest promise to man, immortalize his transports, and spare his soul “the dull satiety which all destroys”¹¹⁷. But, as things are, this paradise is unreached¹¹⁸ and its celestial fruit is forbidden to our wants¹¹⁹. Whoever tastes of love, that tempting but poisonous apple on the tree of life, Byron slyly insinuates on a second level of meaning, brings death upon himself as, in biblical mythology, Eve brought death upon mankind. The adoring young lover falls sick, his diseased soul fevering into false celestial creation, his alchemical phantasy vainly trying to turn the base metal of this world into the precious gold of paradise, stubbornly refusing to admit that death is the only cure for his raving malady¹²⁰:

          Who loves, raves—'tis youth's frenzy—but the cure
          Is bitterer still, as charm by charm unwinds
          Which robed our idols, and we see too sure
          Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind's
          Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds
          The fatal spell, and still it draws us on,
          Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds;
          The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun,
Seems ever near the prize—wealthiest when most undone.(121)

Love, holy love, thus idolized in sick man's raving brain, was the earliest oracle¹²², an idea suggested by Egeria's enchanted cave, implying that, as usual in classical mythology, the enticing deceitfulness of such divine prophecies only served to drive the victim faster into his destruction. But, though our first experience should teach us love's myths to be unreal and love's oracles to be false, we linger on believing in love, votaries and martyrs of a vain faith, till, disillusion heaped upon disillusion, our heart breaks with our feverish soul's sterilizing disease:

          Oh, Love! no habitant of earth thou art—
          An unseen seraph, we believe in thee,—
          A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,—
          But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see
          The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;
          The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven,
          Even with its own desiring phantasy,
          And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquench'd soul—parch'd, wearied, wrung, and riven.(123)

Another idolized creation of man's own desiring phantasy, resembling Egeria in her dangerous delusiveness, Byron found in the immortal and unearthly beauty of the Venus of Medici in Florence. In those stanzas of the same fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in which he covertly disavows Keats's view of art's reality¹²⁴ Byron loses himself with seeming ecstasy in a drunk and dazzled contemplation of that captivating work of art, and, as usual, abruptly awakens from his seraphic dream of romantic illusion to the bitter bleakness of mortal reality: “… but the weight Of earth recoils upon us:—let it go!”¹²⁵ Another illusion gone, another act of faith destroyed, a further step done on the road to the vain martyrdom of love. To Byron, as opposed to Keats, beauty was not truth. “Beauty is Illusion, Illusion Beauty”¹²⁶, would have been his own substitute for Keats's famous dictum.

This aspect of the vanity of love involves a theme perpetually recurring in Byron's works, love's inconstancy. With respect to women, Byron's persuasion of their inconstancy need not surprise us, being an echo of his earliest experiences as analysed above. Byron's lifelong discord between the allurements of romance and the dictates of reality, his reluctance but need to quit the realms of golden dreams for the realms of truth, had as early as Hours of Idleness associated the faithfulness of a fair smiling woman with the boundless but deceitful reign of fancy of which, in his poem To Romance, he took a pathetic shortlived farewell:

And yet 'tis hard to quit the dreams
          Which haunt the unsuspicious soul,
Where every nymph a goddess seems,
          Whose eyes through rays immortal roll;
While Fancy holds her boundless reign,
          And all assume a varied hue;
When virgins seem no longer vain,
          And even woman's smiles are true.(127)

But, just as the femme fatale and homme fatal are aspects of the divinely decreed danger of love, woman's inconstancy finds its counterpart in man's inconstancy, as parallel manifestations of love's divinely decreed vanity:

And must we own thee but a name,
          And from thy hall of clouds descend?
Nor find a sylph in every dame,
          A Pylades in every friend?
But leave at once thy realms of air
          To mingling bands of fairy elves;
Confess that woman's false as fair,
          And friends have feeling for—themselves!(128)

Sardanapalus is inconstant to his wife, the sister of Salemenes, being too much attracted by the fair boys and girls of his court, and his justification of his conduct in answer to the reproaches of Salemenes sets out from the principle that he only obeys the laws of human nature:

I married her as monarchs wed—for state,
And loved her as most husbands love their wives.
If she or thou supposedst I could link me
Like a Chaldean peasant to his mate,
Ye knew nor me, nor monarchs, nor mankind.(129)

True love is but a momentary “fever which precedes the languid rout Of our sensations”¹³⁰, and the loving of faithful pairs, we have seen, is a mere pretence¹³¹. “… how the devil is it that fresh features Have such a charm for us poor human creatures?”¹³² Byron asks, seemingly perplexed about the fact that Juan completely forgets Julia at sight of the beautiful Haidée:

I hate inconstancy; I loathe, detest,
          Abhor, condemn, abjure the mortal made
Of such quicksilver clay that in his breast
          No permanent foundation can be laid.
Love, constant love, has been my constant guest,
          And yet last night, being at a masquerade,
I saw the prettiest creature, fresh from Milan,
Which gave me some sensations like a villain.(133)

Inconstancy is an inalienable component of love and consequently as uncontrollable as love itself. Inconstancy will have its way, whether one likes it or not, and no rational argument can check its course. Byron illustrates this by continuing the digression in his usual ironical manner:

But soon Philosophy came to my aid
          And whispered, ‘Think of every sacred tie!’
‘I will, my dear Philosophy,’ I said,
          ‘But then her teeth, and then oh heaven, her eye!
I'll just inquire if she be wife or maid
          Or neither—out of curiosity.’
‘Stop!’ cried Philosophy with an air so Grecian
(Though she was masked then as a fair Venetian).
‘Stop!’ So I stopped.(134)

The philosophy which comes to his aid and suppresses the symptoms of his inconstancy is not rational argument, but his jealous female companion demanding her due. Nor can one extenuate this natural ingredient of love by any kind of Platonic sublimation and explain it away as “A fine extension of the faculties, … Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies”¹³⁵. Like love itself to which it is inseparably attached, it is a primarily erotic power calling for physical satisfaction:

          In short it is the use of our own eyes,
With one or two small senses added, just
To hint that flesh is formed of fiery dust.(136)

Even after Juan's tragic love-affair with Haidée, when the reader least expects that Juan would break his solemn vows of constancy, he sees the heroically resolved Juan yield to as trite a motive as the tears of the beautiful Gulbeyaz:

Juan was moved; he had made up his mind
          To be impaled, or quartered as a dish
For dogs, or to be slain with pangs refined,
          Or thrown to lions, or made baits for fish,
And thus heroically stood resigned,
          Rather than sin—except to his own wish.
But all his great preparatives for dying
Dissolved like snow before a woman crying.
As through his palms Bob Acres' valour oozed,
          So Juan's virtue ebbed, I know not how.
And first he wondered why he had refused,
          And then, if matters could be made up now,
And next his savage virtue he accused,
          Just as a friar may accuse his vow,
Or as a dame repents her of her oath,
Which mostly ends in some small breach of both.(137)

Triteness is another aspect which, in Don Juan, unmasks love's profound vanity. Traditional literature showed only half the truth and told plain downright lies when it idealized love and represented it as an ever-burning passion outliving even the lovers and eternalizing their memory. Byron, whose aim it was to show his readers the whole truth with only slight restriction, was naturally anxious to stress the ephemeral nature of love and, in addition to this, to stress its corporeality and materiality in opposition to the wrong literary concept of heavenly and angelical love. This is the true aim and purport of Byron's digressions about love's dependence on food and physical health. Juan's resolution to remain faithful to Julia in his banishment is firm and seemingly unshakeable, but it hardly survives as trite a thing as seasickness:

Love's a capricious power. I've known it hold
          Out through a fever caused by its own heat,
But be much puzzled by a cough and cold
          And find a quinsy very hard to treat.
Against all noble maladies he's bold,
          But vulgar illnesses don't like to meet,
Nor that a sneeze should interrupt his sigh,
Nor inflammations redden his blind eye.
But worst of all is nausea or a pain
          About the lower region of the bowels.
Love, who heroically breathes a vein,
          Shrinks from the application of hot towels,
And purgatives are dangerous to his reign,
          Seasickness death.(138)

The idea of the corporeality of love is most prominent in the Haidée episode, obviously in order to provide the necessary counterpoise to the paradisaical illusion. Here lies the chief function of Haidée's maid Zoe, a character often compared to Shakespeare's Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Though Byron almost certainly misread Romeo and Juliet as the tragedy of two innocent young lovers, it must be kept in mind that the aim of Shakespeare's drama was totally different from that of Byron's epic poem. Shakespeare's Nurse, though like Zoe a comic go-between, emphasizes the sinfulness of the primarily erotic lovers¹³⁹, whereas Byron did not recognize the existence of any form of primarily ideal love and discerned no sin in the frank sexuality of Juan and Haidée. Zoe serves as cook to the young lovers, acting her part as go-between by keeping their love alive with coffee and fried eggs, aware “that the best feelings must have victual”¹⁴⁰. Love is erotic and not ideal, earthly and not paradisaical, and hence it “must be sustained like flesh and blood”¹⁴¹:

For health and idleness to passion's flame
          Are oil and gunpowder; and some good lessons
Are also learnt from Ceres and from Bacchus,
Without whom Venus will not long attack us.
While Venus fills the heart (without heart really
          Love, though good always, is not quite so good),
Ceres presents a plate of vermicelli
          (For love must be sustained like flesh and blood),
While Bacchus pours out wine or hands a jelly.
          Eggs, oysters too, are amatory food,
But who is their purveyor from above
Heaven knows; it may be Neptune, Pan, or Jove.(142)

B) THE DANGER AND VANITY OF GLORY

The dangers of war into which Johnson and Juan bring themselves to quench their “thirst For glory gaping o'er a sea of slaughter”¹⁴³ are too obvious, the description of the gruesome carnage on the battlefield at Ismail is too lively, to need further comment. Byron's exposition of the vanity of all glory, however, requires a detailed discussion. Its close relationship to the vanity of all love is made apparent in the first stanza of canto seven, forming the transition from the love-adventures to the war-adventures of Don Juan:

Oh Love! Oh Glory! what are ye who fly
          Around us ever, rarely to alight?
There's not a meteor in the polar sky
          Of such transcendent and more fleeting flight.
Chill and chained to cold earth, we lift on high
          Our eyes in search of either lovely light.
A thousand and a thousand colours they
Assume, then leave us on our freezing way.(144)

The image of the polar lights, aurora borealis and aurora australis, seen by a wanderer in the arctic regions, again suggests the irreconcilable antithesis of illusion and reality. Man refuses to see this distinction and follows the treacherous will-o'-the-wisps, reaching for the impossible, because, in the “waste and icy clime”¹⁴⁵ of reality, he stands in need of illusions. This is a point in Byron's pessimistic thought that will again claim our attention.

Thus man's airy dreams of military glory must inevitably expire in blank disillusionment. It is this order and law of nature which Byron has in mind when he makes Alp prefer the sight of dying soldiers weltering in their warm blood to the sight of dead soldiers fed upon by vultures, dogs, and worms¹⁴⁶. The first sight still admits notions of fame and honour, whereas the second, the necessary sobering consequence of the first, leaves nothing but the humiliating impression of decay and time's triumph¹⁴⁷. Future glory, Byron comments in an ensuing reflection, must share the fate of all past glory, as future monuments must share the fate of all past monuments, falling a prey to all-devouring and all-oblivious time:

There is a temple in ruin stands,
Fashion'd by long-forgotten hands;
Two or three columns, and many a stone,
Marble and granite, with grass o'ergrown!
Out upon Time! it will leave no more
Of the things to come than the things before!
Out upon Time! who for ever will leave
But enough of the past for the future to grieve
O'er that which hath been, and o'er that which must be:
What we have seen, our sons shall see;
Remnants of things that have pass'd away,
Fragments of stone rear'd by creatures of clay!(148)

The young twenty year old Byron had already discovered the illusory and vain pursuit of immortality through military glory to be one of the ineradicable roots of human misery. As early in his life as 1810, on his first voyage to the East, Byron had paid daily visits to the fabled battleground of Troy¹⁴⁹, “That field which blood bedew'd in vain”¹⁵⁰. He had stood there, thrilled with awe and agitation, musing on the evanescent transitoriness of martial splendour. All that remained of Troy was “a lone and nameless barrow”¹⁵¹. The tombstones outlive the dead, dust outlives the tombstones, but in Troy the “very dust is gone”¹⁵². Without the songs of Homer, none would recall the names of either Dardans or Greeks who sought immortality in the battle of Troy¹⁵³. True, Byron had to admit that the great conquerors of the earth were still sporadically remembered, at least by the educated, but he also knew how short they had fallen of their illusory ambitions. On looking down from the abode of the dead, Napoleon must smile to see the “little that he was and sought to be”¹⁵⁴. And, as far as Alexander is concerned,

How vain, how worse than vain, at length appear
The madman's wish, the Macedonian's tear!
He wept for worlds to conquer—half the earth
Knows not his name …(155)

Ismail, the fortified town in Bessarabia held by the Turks since the sixteenth century and taken by the Russians in 1790, belonged neither to the occupants nor to the assailants. That war between the empires of Turkey and Russia did not count among the romantic wars of liberation which Byron fully sanctioned¹⁵⁶, and in the support of which he finally died¹⁵⁷. The sole political motive behind it was “lust of power”¹⁵⁸. Both the Sultan of Turkey and Empress Catherine of Russia are far away from the scene of action, beguiling their time, the one with his harem of pretty slaves, the other with her guard of tall soldiers¹⁵⁹. To both, politics is a bothersome interruption of their pleasures, and so they confer it upon their plenipotentiaries, to the detriment of their own and their peoples' interests:

Had Catherine and the Sultan understood
          Their own true interests, which kings rarely know,
Until 'tis taught by lessons rather rude,
          There was a way to end their strife, although
Perhaps precarious, had they but thought good
          Without the aid of prince or plenipo:
She to dismiss her guards and he his harem
And for their other matters meet and share 'em.(160)

But as it is, the Sultan leaves the matter of Ismail to his chief Pasha, and Catherine, the “greatest of all sovereigns and whores”¹⁶¹, to one of her six foot high paramours, the Prince Potemkin¹⁶², who orders the capture of Ismail without even consulting the Empress¹⁶³. When the city is taken and lost, the chief Pasha, in his safe stone bastion, at length condescends to ask for information concerning the outcome of the battle, and does not even think it necessary to negotiate and sign the surrender himself¹⁶⁴. Byron's description of his martial stoicism in the midst of his city's ruins is a splendid example of the poem's ironic style:

In the meantime, cross-legged with great sang-froid
          Among the scorching ruins he sate smoking
Tobacco on a little carpet (Troy
          Saw nothing like the scene around), yet looking
With martial stoicism. Nought seemed to annoy
          His stern philosophy, but gently stroking
His beard, he puffed his pipe's ambrosial gales,
As if he had three lives as well as tails.(165)

When, after the Russian victory, Juan leaves for the Court of Petersburg, we see how shockingly the Russian sovereign's interest in the fate of her valiant soldiers resembles that of the chief Pasha. Unmoved by the cruel deaths of so many human beings, Catherine looks on the war as on a cockfight in which she has made her bets, turning the fate of thousands into a pastime for sovereigns:

Don Juan, who had shone in the late slaughter,
          Was left upon his way with the dispatch,
Where blood was talked of as we would of water;
          And carcasses, that lay as thick as thatch
O'er silenced cities, merely served to flatter
          Fair Catherine's pastime, who looked on the match
Between these nations as a main of cocks,
Wherein she liked her own to stand like rocks.(166)

It is in the service of such luxury-spoiled, debauched politicians, far away from and virtually not even interested in the scene of action, that the soldiers risk their lives and vainly die in pursuit of an immortality which glory will never confer upon them. The soldiers promptly swallow the deadly baits laid out for them, in the shape of an embroidered uniform and medals, ironically called “things immortal to immortal man, As purple to the Babylonian harlot”¹⁶⁷. They see glory and run before it as pigs were proverbially (according to one of the old zoological pseudodoxia epidemica) said to see and run before the wind, an image which immediately recalls another, the ship metaphor as discussed above:

But glory's glory, and if you would find
What that is—ask the pig who sees the wind.
At least he feels it, and some say he sees,
          Because he runs before it like a pig;
Or if that simple sentence should displease,
          Say that he scuds before it like a brig,
A schooner …(168)

The implications of these two comparisons are obvious. Glory is an irresistible passion which man cannot help yielding to, although it is mere wind and nothingness. The pig which instinctively runs before that wind reminds us of the ‘nine farrow’ of the sow of glory enumerated in the poem's second stanza:

Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke,
          Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe,
Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk
          And filled their signposts then, like Wellesley now.
Each in their turn like Banquo's monarchs stalk,
          Followers of fame, ‘nine farrow’ of that sow.(169)

This is the actual reason why Byron perverts the traditional presentation of the epic hero in the first lines of his own epic poem:

I want a hero, an uncommon want,
          When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till after cloying the gazettes with cant,
          The age discovers he is not the true one.(170)

It would be a barren oversimplification to see this perversion of the exordial “Arma virumque cano …” as a mere formal sign that Byron was about to write an anti-epic as Sterne wrote an anti-novel. Byron wants a hero because, in his view of things, deeds of valour confer but a short-lived, fickle, and transient glory upon the warrior which is incompatible with the epic immortality of Ulysses and Aeneas, Orlando and Rinaldo as claimed by Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso:

Nelson was once Britannia's god of war
          And still should be so, but the tide is turned.
There's no more to be said of Trafalgar;
'Tis with our hero quietly inurned,
Because the army's grown more popular,
          At which the naval people are concerned.
Besides the Prince is all for the land service,
Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis.(171)

The Marquis Gabriel de Castelnau, upon whose Essai sur l'histoire ancienne et moderne de la nouvelle Russie¹⁷² Byron based his account of the siege of Ismail¹⁷³, despaired of relating all the events even of the first day of the Russian attack and limited his report to the feats of some distinguished strangers fighting on the Russian side, the Prince de Ligne, Langeron, and Damas¹⁷⁴. Byron cites this as another proof of the short-lived nature of martial glory:

This being the case may show us what fame is.
          For out of these three preux chevaliers, how
Many of common readers give a guess
          That such existed? And they may live now
For aught we know. Renown's all hit or miss;
          There's fortune even in fame, we must allow.(175)

The only soldier among the three who can be dimly remembered is Field Marshal Charles Joseph, Prince de Ligne, whose published writings have “half withdrawn from him oblivion's screen”¹⁷⁶. But the memory of the others who fought no less heroically has completely faded, together with the names of innumerable fallen heroes printed in the gazettes:

Of all our modern battles, I will bet
You can't repeat nine names from each Gazette.(177)

Newspaper glory enjoyed for a day after death is one of Byron's favourite proofs of the folly of seeking immortality in war, a folly which he admittedly could not resist himself:

I wonder (although Mars no doubt's a god I
          Praise) if a man's name in a bulletin
May make up for a bullet in his body?(178)

And even this fleeting shadow of glory was insecure insofar as many names were misspelt in the casualty lists:

          Thrice happy he whose name has been well spelt
In the dispatch; I knew a man whose loss
Was printed Grove, although his name was Grose.(179)

Soldiers should realize that their very names struck them from the roll of fame and left them a victim to eternal oblivion. As for the Russian soldiers, they fought as cruelly and valiantly as Achilles himself, but they do not share his immortality for as simple a reason as the harshness of their names¹⁸⁰. The poet, Byron ironically demonstrates, cannot erect a lasting monument to their fame because he will find it quite impossible to harmonize their unpronounceable names with the demand for poetic euphony:

Still I'll record a few, if but to increase
          Our euphony. There were Strongenoff and
                    Strokonoff,
Meknop, Serge Lwow, Arseniew of modern Greece,
          And Tschitsshakoff and Roguenoff and Chokenoff
And others of twelve consonants apiece.
          And more might be found out, if I could poke
                    enough
Into gazettes; but Fame (capricious strumpet),
It seems, has got an ear as well as trumpet
And cannot tune those discords of narration,
          Which may be names at Moscow, into rhyme.(181)

As to the English soldiers in the service of the Russian army, they were Tom, Dick, and Harry, persons of no note at least with respect to their names:

'Mongst them were several Englishmen of pith,
Sixteen called Thomson and nineteen named Smith.(182)

Their Christian names, too, obstruct their road to fame with their commonness. Among the sixteen Thomsons, there were one Jack, one Bill, and fourteen Jameses¹⁸³. Among the nineteen Smiths, there were three Peters and an unspecified number of “Jacks and Gills and Wills and Bills”¹⁸⁴. And, finally, Byron adds, their obscure origin, as well as their common names, exclude them from more than mere newspaper praise:

          But when I've added that the elder Jack Smith
Was born in Cumberland among the hills
          And that his father was an honest blacksmith,
I've said all I know of a name that fills
          Three lines of the dispatch in taking Schmacksmith,
A village of Moldavia's waste, wherein
He fell, immortal in a bulletin.(185)

This also explains Byron's choice of the name of John Johnson. Byron ingeniously contrasts this ordinary name with the man's extraordinary valour to keep the reader constantly aware of the self-acknowledged vanity of Johnson's pursuit of military glory. Here a typically ironic specimen of this technique of satire:

Up came John Johnson (I will not say Jack,
          For that were vulgar, cold, and commonplace
On great occasions, such as an attack
          On cities, as hath been the present case)—
Up Johnson came …(186)

So Byron ridicules the courage of Juan and Johnson, who, with nothing but ephemeral newspaper praise to expect instead of real heroic immortality, cut their way through thousands of dead and dying soldiers, not even able to guess where they might be going,

But fighting thoughtlessly enough to win
To their two selves one whole bright bulletin.(187)

The aimlessness of the two soldiers on the battlefield is symbolic of the aimlessness of their whole engagement in the war. This is made especially plain in the case of Juan¹⁸⁸. Separated from Johnson and his corps, Juan finds himself alone and at odds against the enemy. Neither knowing nor caring where he fights¹⁸⁹, forgetting even the welfare of his own corps¹⁹⁰, he rushes where the hottest fire is seen and the loudest cannon heard¹⁹¹. By comparing him to lonely travellers hunting a will-o'-the-wisp over bog and brake or to shipwrecked sailors looking for the nearest shelter, Byron exposes the vanity and danger of man's passion for glory as well as his instinctive propensity to wreak his own destruction, a component of human nature which we shall have to revert to for a more systematic treatment:

Perceiving nor commander nor commanded
          And left at large like a young heir to make
His way to—where he knew not—singlehanded,
          As travellers follow over bog and brake
An ignis fatuus, or as sailors, stranded,
          Unto the nearest hut themselves betake,
So Juan, following honour and his nose,
Rushed where the thickest fire announced most foes.(192)

There exists, however, another, quite harmless and certainly more positive, mode of pursuing glory, the artist's effort to immortalize both his creations and himself. The creatures of the mind survive the creatures of clay and are “Essentially immortal” in their bodiless existence¹⁹³: Shakespeare's Shylock and Othello, for instance, or Otway's Pierre, famous Venetians in famous English dramatic works¹⁹⁴. It is in them that the poet seeks a refuge from his state of mortal bondage¹⁹⁵, as indeed all poetic creation is, to Byron, an attempt to escape from this dull life into a brighter world and more beloved existence¹⁹⁶. But, again, the would-be dreamer's reason knows and convinces him and us that such escapes are short-lived illusions. Only for a moment could be stand on the Bridge of Sighs, view Venice sink back like seaweed into the sea from which she rose, imagine her decay completed and repeople the solitary shore with Shylock, Othello, and Pierre¹⁹⁷. Then he would infallibly experience the factual world's superior strength and see the real constellations outshine the stars of the imagination¹⁹⁸:

                                                  … waking Reason deems
          Such overweening phantasies unsound,
And other voices speak, and other sights surround.(199)

This further awareness of the impossibility of escaping mortality in this life without indulging illusions does, however, not necessarily involve the impossibility of achieving literary immortality after death. In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, even in the fourth canto published as late as 1818, Byron still held some illusory confidence in a possible immortality of literary creation, though he showed quite uncertain of his own poetical perpetuity²⁰⁰. In undiminished splendour, the works of ancient authors still stand out among the vast heap of ruin and decay which the poet of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is contemplating. Cicero, “Rome's least-mortal mind”²⁰¹, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso have outlived the ruin of both Rome and Italy and will not fall into oblivion²⁰². The proud palaces of Venice are crumbling to the shore, the Rialto is in a state of decay, Tasso's echoes have died with the voice of the songless gondolier, but Tasso's memory survives²⁰³. Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, could humiliate Tasso's body by debasement and imprisonment among maniacs, but, while his own name is rotting in oblivion, he proved unable to quell Tasso's immortal fame:

                                                                      Glory without end
Scatter'd the clouds away; and on that name attend
The tears and praises of all time.(204)

In contrast to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Don Juan contains no such fervid apotheosis of literary immortality. The incredible credo has vanished, biblical transfiguration and hymnic glorification are no longer attributes of fame. Again, a beautiful romantic illusion has evaporated, the illusion of not having lived and worked in vain. In Ravenna, Byron found both the column commemorating the victory and death of the young Gaston de Foix, who, in 1512, had conquered that Italian city for the French King, and the little cupola above the tomb of Dante, whose ambition was not

          To add to the vain-glorious list of those
          Who dabble in the pettiness of fame,
And make men's fickle breath the wind that blows
          Their sail, and deem it glory to be class'd
          With conquerors, and virtue's other foes,
In bloody chronicles of ages past.(205)

True, the peasants show their contempt of the hero by defiling his column with human excrement, whereas reverence is paid to the sepulchre of the poet²⁰⁶. None the less, the monuments of the hero and the poet are subject to the same laws of decay. Dante's humble tomb was opened and desecrated as well as the proud and strong pyramid of King Cheops of Egypt²⁰⁷. In Don Juan, the ashes of Dante are no longer seen as the ashes of Michelangelo, Vittorio Alfieri, Galileo Galilei, and Niccolò Machiavelli, buried in the pantheon of Florence, had been seen in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, dust which is even in itself an immortality. Together with the decay and profanation of their monuments, the memories of the hero and poet will alike fade to nothingness, like the memories of the heroes and poets of remote antiquity. The hero's and the poet's unequal attempts to “identify their dust From out the wide destruction”²⁰⁸ are equally vain:

The time must come, when both alike decayed,
          The chieftain's trophy and the poet's volume
Will sink where lie the songs and wars of earth
Before Pelides' death or Homer's birth.(209)

The principle of litera scripta manet may be allowed to hold a grain of truth insofar as the printed word survives the author's tomb²¹⁰, a thought we have already found in Byron's reflections upon the distinguished foreigners fighting on the Russian side in the battle of Ismail, notably the Prince de Ligne. Deeds of war unremembered in words are doomed to quick oblivion, so that the heroes of Troy would long have been forgotten but for Homer's famous epic²¹¹. But, seen in larger historical dimensions, tempus edax rerum will inevitably prove the stronger principle. One day the author's grave will be a blank and even his nation will exist no more save in chronicles. Then, Byron sarcastically remarks,

Some dull MS, oblivion long has sank,
          Or graven stone found in a barrack's station
In digging the foundation of a closet,
May turn his name up as a rare deposit.(212)

The writings of Georges Cuvier confirmed Byron's scepticism about literary immortality, the gift of Mnemosyne, by setting human civilization into even larger dimensions of time and space. This world of ours, Byron believed, is but one of many worlds to be destroyed like all the worlds before²¹³. And there will arise new worlds to which our civilization will be

Like to the notions we now entertain
          Of Titans, giants, fellows of about
Some hundred feet in height, not to say miles,
And mammoths and your wingèd crocodiles.(214)

It has been contended that Byron's adoption of the cosmic world view of Georges Baron de Cuvier, as well as his acquaintance with Sir John Frederick William Herschel's new stellar discoveries, imbued him with a sense of the immensity of nature which began to enable him to control his passions and assuage his revolt²¹⁵. But Byron's growing awareness of immensity confirmed rather than attenuated his sense of the vanity of human efforts. His proud complaints of increasing depression and melancholy²¹⁶ show that his final resignation was bitter rather than serene. There had arisen nothing in him of “Zuversicht, Hoffnung und tröstlicher Versenkung in die Schönheit und Unendlichkeit der Schöpfung”²¹⁷ when he died over the composition of Don Juan. Nothing had changed since January 1821, when, on reading, in a case of murder, that a grocer at Tunbridge had sold bacon wrapped up in a leaf of Richardson's Pamela, he had written in his diary:

What would Richardson, the vainest and luckiest of living authors (i.e. while alive)—… what would he have said, could he have traced his pages from their place on the French prince's toilets (see Boswell's Johnson) to the grocer's counter and the gipsy-murderess's bacon!!!

What would he have said? What can any body say, save what Solomon said long before us?²¹⁸

Thus Byron wrote his work in spite of his awareness of the vanity of seeking glory and immortality in art²¹⁹, just as he loved and fought in spite of his awareness of the vanity and danger of love and war. This frustrating consequence of Byron's view of human nature is an aspect to be considered in our next chapter.

Notes

1. Byron, Mazeppa, lines 375-795, and Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798, lines 81-546.

2. Also cf. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, p. 309. Gleckner makes the point by way of a casual literary comparison, without realizing the similarities between the two narrative poems.

3. Byron, Letter to Augusta Leigh, 17-9-1816, in Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, London. 1973, V. 94. There is an unconscious seriousness in Byron's bantering, as also in his mocking comment on his mother-in-law's recovery from illness (Letter to Thomas Moore, 28-4-1821, in The Works of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, London, 1891-1901, V. 272):

   Lady Noel has, as you say, been dangerously ill; but it may console you that she is dangerously well again.

   Also v. Byron, Hints from Horace, lines 663-664:

   Orpheus, we learn from Ovid and Lempriere,
   Led all wild beasts but women by the ear.

4. Cf. Byron, Letter to John Murray, 16-2-1821, in Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V. 242-243. For a comparative study of the Don Juan legend from seventeenth- to twentieth-century European literature v. Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan, Stanford, 1959.

5. Edward Everett Bostetter points out the tragic possibilities inherent in Juan's situation at Norman Abbey (Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists, p. 246).

6. Byron, The Bride of Abydos, 1813, 2. 563-568.

7. Byron, The Siege of Corinth, 1816, lines 847-896.

8. Byron, The Corsair, 1814, 2. 225-252.

9. ibid. 3. 196-199. Cf. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 199. 1-8.

10. v. Byron, Don Juan, 4. 73. 7-8:

                        Let none think to fly the danger,
    For soon or late Love is his own avenger.

11. Praz, The Romantic Agony, 1933, New York, 1960. Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson.

12. ibid. pp. 61-81.

13. ibid. p. 81.

14. ibid. p. 73.

15. Byron, Manfred, II/2, 184-185. The story is that of Pausanias and Cleonice as told by Plutarch in his Life of Cimon, and retold by Goethe in his review of Manfred, Uber Kunst und Altertum, II, 1820, in Sämtliche Werke, Jubiläums-Ausgabe, ed. von der Hellen, Stuttgart and Berlin, 1902-1912, XXXVII. 185-186. It is, however, doubtful whether Goethe understood the real purport of the story, or whether he mistook it literally for a parallel elucidation of Manfred's guiltless crime.

16. Byron, Manfred, II/4, 153. For Byron's personal dislike to vampires and vampirism also v. his Letter to the Editor of Galignani's Messenger, 27-4-1819, in Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, VI. 118-119, and his self-tormenting regretful words to his wife, “… it is my destiny to ruin all I come near” (Ethel Colburn Mayne, The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella Lady Noel Byron, New York, 1930, p. 190).

17. Byron, Herod's Lament for Mariamne, lines 1-24. To adapt the story to his own purposes Byron deviated from the historical facts in making Herod, in his dramatic monologue, express love and repentance, whereas, in reality, Herod had married Mariamne for nothing but her Hasmonean descent to justify his usurpation of the Jewish throne, and had led a wretched married life.

18. v. Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan, p. 81.

19. Byron, Don Juan, 13. 12. 3.

20. ibid. 13. 12. 1-7.

21. ibid. 1. 60-61.

22. ibid. 1. 72. 5. For the strengthening of the passion of love by hypocritical repression also cf. the images characterizing the apparent indifference of Adeline Amundeville, ibid. 13. 36-39.

23. ibid. 1. 73. 2-3.

24. v. Homer, Odyssey, canto 10; Virgil, Aeneid, canto 4; Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, cantos 4, 7, 10, 14, 15, 16, et 20.

25. Byron, Don Juan, 1. 71. 6-8.

26. ibid. 2. 117. 1-2.

27. ibid. 2. 117. 7-8. For the raven as a literary symbol foreboding death and destruction v. e. g. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, II/3, 97; Troilus and Cressida, V/2, 191; Macbeth, I/5,

28. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 143. 7.

29. ibid. 2. 143. 8.

30. Byron, The Waltz. An Apostrophic Hymn, 1813, lines 87-88.

31. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 144. 1-2.

32. ibid. 2. 197. 7-8.

33. ibid. 3. 2. 1-8.

34. v. e. g. Spenser, The Fairy Queen, 1. 6. 26. 1-5. Also cf. Caroline Lamb, Letter to Byron, 9-8-1812, in Marchand, Byron. A Portrait, p. 130.

35. Byron, Don Juan, 5. 96. 1-5.

36. ibid. 6. 42. 1-4.

37. ibid. 6. 55. 2. For this ancient etymology also v. ibid. 11. 21. 2.

38. ibid. 6. 55. 1-8.

39. ibid. 6. 57. 7-8.

40. Byron, Letter to John Cam Hobhouse, 17-5-1819, in Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, VI. 130-131:

    … the Cavalier Conte G[uiccioli] her respected Lord—is shrewdly suspected of two assassinations already—… be that as it may—every thing is to be risked for a woman one likes—…

    Also cf. Byron, Letter to John Cam Hobhouse, 30-7-1819, ibid. p. 188; and Byron, Diary, 28-1-1821, in Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V. 189, where the poet planned to write a tragedy in five acts on the story of Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo, both murdered by her husband, Paolo's brother, whom she had married for political convenience. Byron apparently never wrote his tragedy, though he had translated the Francesca da Rimini episode from Dante's Inferno in 1820.

41. v. Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. p. 49:

    “… I am worn out in feelings; for, though only thirty-six, I feel sixty in mind, and am less capable than ever of those nameless attentions that all women, but, above all, Italian women, require.”

42. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 3. 32. 2-9 et 3. 33. 1. Here, however, the heart is not broken with the unquenchable fever of love, but with the unquenchable fever of that other great passion, the vain expectation of immortality in military glory (ibid. 3. 31. 1-9): if anything can recall the dead of Waterloo to life, it is the archangel's, not glory's, trumpet.

43. ibid. 3. 33. 6-7.

44. v. p. 72 infra.

45. ibid. 3. 3. 6-9. Also cf. ibid. 3. 6. 9: “… my crush'd feelings' death”. For a further instance v. p. 78 infra.

46. ibid. 4. 78. 1-9.

47. ibid. 4. 25. 3.

48. Byron, One Struggle More, and I am Free, line 37.

49. ibid. line 47.

50. ibid. line 42.

51. Byron, Stanzas for Music, March 1815, line 9.

52. ibid. line 20.

53. For Byron's practice of writing original poems to fit traditional melodies v. Joseph Slater, ‘Byron's Hebrew Melodies’, in SP, XLIX (1952), pp. 75-94, and Thomas L. Ashton, Byron's Hebrew Melodies, London, 1972, passim.

54. Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, ‘Le goût du néant’, 1857, line 7, in Oeuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, 1968, p. 72.

55. ibid. line 10.

56. Byron, Stanzas for Music, March 1815, lines 1-4. At the age of thirty-five, Byron, in a Letter to Count Alfred D'Orsay dated 22-4-1823, expressed his regret that the young twenty-one year old count should have been disillusioned so early in his life (Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, VI. 195):

    But I am sorry for you; for if you are so well acquainted with life at your age, what will become of you when the illusion is still more dissipated?

    Also cf. Byron, Fare Thee Well, 17-3-1816, lines 57-60, addressed to his divorced wife Annabella Milbanke:

    Fare thee well! thus disunited,
              Torn from every nearer tie,
    Sear'd in heart, and lone, and blighted,
              More than this I scarce can die.

    and Byron, The Dream, July 1816, which has been correctly interpreted as “a capsule history of his life from youthful idealism through disillusionment to sad resignation and melancholy despair” (Marchand, Byron. A Portrait, p. 246). For the destruction of Byron's youthful idealism and the unbalancing of his soul by experiences of unfortunate love v. the Maddalo figure in Shelley's Julian and Maddalo (1818), and Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron. The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight, Baltimore, 1976, passim.

57. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 3. 10. 1-5.

58. ibid. 3. 15. 1-9.

59. ibid. 4. 125. 2-3.

60. ibid. ‘To Inez’, 5. 1-4.

61. For an analysis of these two separate voices in Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, analogous to the “empirical I” and the “poetic I” in Dante's Divina Commedia, v. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, pp. 39-90, 225-250, 267-297.

62. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 164. 1-9.

63. ibid. 1. 65. 8.

64. ibid. 1. 65. 9. Note the oxymora characterizing love's enticing appearance and dangerous reality.

65. Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819, lines 26-27, in Poems, ed. cit. p. 535. Byron, in contrast, even felt that his fancying the presence of his late beautiful and beloved chorister John Edleston and of his far-away daughter Augusta Ada led to mere frustration and a sickly, feverish brain: v. Childe Harold's Pilgramage, 2. 95-96; 3. 6-7; and, with general application, 3. 42. 1-9 (note here the usual heat and fever imagery in Byron's descriptions of the mind's and imagination's vain efforts). For the limitations and failures of the mind and imagination, due to man's fragile corporeality, v. the excellent article of Ward Pafford, ‘Byron and the Mind of Man’, pp. 105-127.

66. v. Byron, Detached Thoughts, 72 (1821), in Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V. 445:

    … it was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no longer a boy. From that moment [of leaving Harrow] I began to grow old in my own esteem; and in my esteem age is not estimable.

    Byron left Harrow in the summer of 1805, aged 17. Three to four years later, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (line 1057), he nostalgically boasted of having “so callous grown, so changed since youth”.

67. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 2. 23. 5-9. For Harold's irreparable loss of love also v. ibid. 2. 31. 1-9. This death of the heart occurs even in youth: cf. ibid. 2. 98. 8-9 et 3. 5. 1-3, and Byron, Manfred, III/1, 138-148:

              Look on me! there is an order
    Of mortals on the earth, who do become
    Old in their youth, and die ere middle age,
    Without the violence of warlike death;
    Some perishing of pleasure, some of study,
    Some worn with toil, some of mere weariness,
    Some of disease, and some insanity,
    And some of wither'd or of broken hearts;
    For this last is a malady which slays
    More than are number'd in the lists of Fate,
    Taking all shapes, and bearing many names.

68. Byron, Don Juan, 16. 109. 1-4. The imagery of these lines recalls the famous lyric in Byron's Letter to Thomas Moore, 28-2-1817, in Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, V. 176, expressing the poet's ebbing love under the images of the inconstant moon's fading light and the sword's wearing out its sheath:

    … I find “the sword wearing out the scabbard”, though I have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine.

    So we'll go no more a roving
              So late into the night,
    Though the heart be still as loving,
              And the moon be still as bright.

    For the sword outwears its sheath,
              And the soul wears out the breast,
    And the heart must pause to breathe,
              And Love itself have rest.

    Though the night was made for loving,
              And the day returns too soon,
    Yet we'll go no more a roving
              By the light of the moon.

    For a stimulating formal interpretation of the poem in the light of Byron's gesamtwerk, in conscious opposition to its imaginative disintegrators, v. Hans-Jürgen Diller, Byron: ‘So we'll go no more a-roving’, in Versdichtung der englischen Romantik, ed. Riese/Riesner, Berlin, 1968, pp. 251-262; it is, however, regrettable that Diller's recognition of Byron's continuity of imagination, as also apparent from his earlier study of the poet, does not entail a recognition of Byron's continuity of thought, which would have given more solidity to his aesthetic analysis by setting the lyric into its intellectual context.

69. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 2. 23. 7.

70. ibid. 1. 83. 8.

71. Byron, Hints from Horace, lines 220-262.

72. ibid. lines 243-254.

73. Byron, Don Juan, 1. 216. 1-8. Also cf. Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. pp. 102-103:

    Byron never wished to live to be old … He said, it was a mistaken idea that passions subsided with age, as they only changed, and not for the better, Avarice usurping the place vacated by Love … “And this,” continued Byron, “is what age and experience brings us. No; let me not live to be old: give me youth, which is the fever of reason, and not age, which is the palsy. I remember my youth, when my heart overflowed with affection towards all who showed any symptom of liking towards me; and now, at thirty-six, no very advanced period of life, I can scarcely, by raking up the dying embers of affection in that same heart, excite even a temporary flame to warm my chilled feelings.”

    and Byron, To the Countess of Blessington, lines 9-12:

    I am ashes where once I was fire,
              And the bard in my bosom is dead;
    What I loved I now merely admire,
              And my heart is as grey as my head.

74. Byron, Don Juan, 13. 5. 4.

75. ibid. 12. 2. 5-6.

76. Byron, Stanzas written on the Road between Florence and Pisa, line 3.

77. ibid. lines 5-8. Note the past tense of stanzas three and four.

78. v. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, pp. 332-344.

79. Byron, Don Juan, 13. 5. 7-8 et 13. 6. 1-3.

80. ibid. 12. 2. 7-8 et 13. 6. 4.

81. ibid. 13. 6. 8.

82. ibid. 5. 22. 8. I cannot quite agree with the theory that the siege of Ismail is Byron's “terrifyingly coherent vision of the shattered, violent, bestial world that is left after the death of the heart and the loss of Eden” (Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, p. 344). Juan's participation in the battle is not a result of his lost illusions of love, but a manifestation of his antithetically mixed human nature as experienced by Byron himself, enabling him alternately to follow two contradictory illusions, to love and to kill at short intervals. Byron's Conrad is also a splendidly typical example of how the virtue of lawless erotic love may coexist with the vice of reckless war and bloodshed.

83. Byron, Don Juan, 4. 9. 1-8; cf. ibid. 4. 8. 1-8. Also cf. Byron, If Sometimes in the Haunts of Men, 14-3-1812, lines 39-40, on the death of his beloved and beautiful young choirboy John Edleston:

    Thou wert too like a dream of Heaven
              For earthly Love to merit thee.

84. Elledge, Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor, p. 8.

85. Byron, Manfred, II/1, 48.

86. v. Armin Geraths, ‘Lord Byron, Manfred’, in Das englische Drama, ed. Mehl, Düsseldorf, 1970, II. 131.

87. Byron, Manfred, I/2, 37-47. Moreover, Byron repeatedly stresses the disharmony of body and soul in opposition to the Platonic doctrine of kalokagathia, maintaining that the mind may be great and aspiring in the most rotten and deformed body: v. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 20. 1-9, and The Deformed Transformed (with regard to Arnold and Socrates), 1824, I/1, 145-146 et 217-220.

88. v. Pafford, ‘Byron and the Mind of Man’, p. 107:

    … Manfred dramatizes the tragic dilemma of mind aspiring to complete independence but constrained by its fleshly condition within a deterministic universe.

89. Byron, Manfred, II/4, 158-159:

    He is convulsed.—This is to be a mortal
    And seek the things beyond mortality.

90. ibid. III/4, 151. Also cf. ibid. II/2, 172-176:

                                                                                                                  … we can number
    How few—how less than few—wherein the soul
    Forbears to pant for death, and yet draws back
    As from a stream in winter, though the chill
    Be but a moment's

91. ibid. II/4, 58-59.

92. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 3. 76-81.

93. ibid. 3. 76. 4.

94. ibid. 3. 78-79.

95. ibid. 3. 77.7 et 3.81. 1-4. Note the comparison of Rousseau's phrensied equalitarian philosophy (as basis of the French Revolution) to the false Pythian Oracle at Delphi, promising fair things but to lead to disillusion and destruction. Also v. Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. p. 79:

    “Who can walk the earth, with eyes fixed on the heavens, without often stumbling over the hindrances that intercept the path? while those who are intent only on the beaten road escape. Such is the fate of men of genius: elevated over the herd of their fellow-men, with thoughts that soar above the sphere of their physical existence, no wonder that they stumble when treading the mazes of ordinary life, with irritated sensibility, and mistaken views of all the common occurrences they encounter.”

96. Byron, When Coldness wraps this Suffering Clay, lines 9-10.

97. ibid. lines 25-32. Also of Byron, Detached Thoughts, 96 (1821), in Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V. 457:

    The Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, call the present state “a Soul which drags a Carcase”: a heavy chain, to be sure; but chains, being material, may be shaken off.

    Even though meant as a Modest Proposal for mad poets, “To die like Cato” held a certain fascination for Byron (Hints from Horace, lines 823-832), much as he would have preferred not to have lived at all (Detached Thoughts, 95, ibid. V. 456).

98. v. p. 31 supra.

99. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 3. 15. 1-9:

              But in Man's dwellings he [Childe Harold] became a thing
              Restless and worn, and stern and wearisome,
              Droop'd as a wild-born falcon with clipt wing,
              To whom the boundless air alone were home:
              Then came his fit again, which to o'ercome,
              As eagerly the barr'd-up bird will beat
              His breast and beak against his wiry dome
              Till the blood tinge his plumage, so the heat
    Of his impeded soul would through his bosom eat.

100. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 212. 8; v. p. 81 infra. Also cf. Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. p. 68:

     They who accuse Byron of being an unbeliever are wrong … He is a sworn foe to Materialism, tracing every defect to which we are subject, to the infirmities entailed on us by the prison of clay [i.e. the mortal body] in which the heavenly spark [i.e. the immortal soul] is confined.

101. Byron, Don Juan, 4. 9. 7-8.

102. Byron, And Thou art Dead, as Young and Fair, lines 5-45.

103. ibid. line 62.

104. ibid. lines 46-54.

105. Byron, Don Juan, 4. 71. 2-8; cf. ibid. 4. 11. 1-8 et 4. 12. 1-8. Also cf. Byron's reflections on the advantages of Zuleika's very similar premature death from grief in The Bride of Abydos, 2. 641-650:

     Ah! happy! but of life to lose the worst!
     That grief—though deep—though fatal—was thy first!
     Thrice happy …

     and on the tomb of Cecilia Metella in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 102. 1-6:

     Perchance she died in youth: it may be, bow'd
     With woes far heavier than the ponderous tomb
     That weigh'd upon her gentle dust, a cloud
     Might gather o'er her beauty, and a gloom
     In her dark eye, prophetic of the doom
     Heaven gives its favourites—early death …

     Byron disconcerted and worried Lady Blessington with similar ideas, connecting the boon of an early death with his view of life as a progressively destroyed texture of illusions (Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. p. 163):

     “People complain of the brevity of life, (said Byron,) should they not rather complain of its length, as its enjoyments cease long before the halfway-house of life is passed, unless one has the luck to die young, ere the illusions that render existence supportable have faded away, and are replaced by experience, that dull monitress, that ever comes too late? While youth steers the bark of life, and passion impells her on, experience keeps aloof; but when youth and passion are fled, and that we no longer require her aid, she comes to reproach us with the past, to disgust us with the future.”

106. Byron, Don Juan, 4. 16. 1-8.

107. ibid. 3. 5-10.

108. ibid. 3. 5. 6.

109. ibid. 3. 5. 8. Also cf. Byron, The Waltz, lines 93-104.

110. Byron, Don Juan, 3. 8. 1-8.

111. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 115-126.

112. ibid. 4. 115. 1-3.

113. ibid. 4. 115. 3-5.

114. ibid. 4. 115. 6-8.

115. ibid. 4. 115. 9.

116. ibid. 4. 116. 2-3.

117. ibid. 4. 119. 8.

118. ibid. 4. 122. 7. Throughout the twelve Egeria-stanzas, Byron contrasts the paradise of the fancy against the desert or wilderness of the real world.

119. ibid. 4. 120. 9.

120. Note the accumulation of words denoting disease and death in all twelve stanzas. In stanza 126, the last and strongest of the number, the above-mentioned tree of life appears as an all-blasting upas whose leaves and branches are the “skies which rain their plagues on men like dew”, an inversion of the biblical dews of Heaven.

121. ibid. 4. 123. 1-9.

122. ibid. 4. 118. 9.

123. ibid. 4. 121. 1-9. Note the inversions of the Christian credo as well as of biblical imagery, the sacrifice of the broken heart (Psalm 51. 17) and the panting and thirsting of the soul for God (Psalm 42. 1-2).

124. ibid. 4. 48-52. Note the close imitation of Keats's style, his synesthesia (“ambrosial aspect”), his paradox (“the Goddess loves in stone”), his gemination (“there—for ever there”), his sensuous ecstasy of united pleasure and pain (“We gaze and turn away, and know not where, Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart Reels with its fulness”), and his luxuriously erotic images (“thy lips are With lava kisses melting while they burn, Shower'd on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from an urn”).

125. ibid. 4. 52. 5-6.

126. v. Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819, line 49, in Poems, ed. cit. p. 537. The “truth and beauty” of the Venuses of Titian and Giorgione, which Byron claims in Beppo (12. 1), is yet another instance of an illusion soon destroyed. To conclude from stanzas 11-14 of Beppo that Byron, in the last seven years of his life or so, had arrived at a quasi-Platonic conviction of the inseparable integrity of the real and the ideal as well as of body and soul, and of an imparadised earth where man continually finds the equivalent of lost beauty, is to mistake for a philosophical statement what was obviously meant for an ironic contrast (McGann, Fiery Dust, pp. 290-294). Against the background of the Venetian Carnival, itself a symbol of perverted values and disguised truth, Beppo reveals the reality of illusion and deception hidden behind the artistic splendour of “Italian beauty” and “the land which still is Paradise” (46. 1-2), much as Don Juan reveals the reality of illusion and deception hidden behind the beauty and piety of Spain.

127. Byron, To Romance, lines 9-16. Also cf. Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, line 78, “Believe a woman or an epitaph”, and Hints from Horace, lines 689-696, where the poet compares the inconstancy and faithlessness of the Muse to the same characteristics of women in general.

128. Byron, To Romance, lines 17-24. Note the symmetry of lines 19-20 with lines 23-24, in connection with Byron's growing distrust of his erotic love of woman and man.

129. Byron, Sardanapalus, I/2, 213-217.

130. Byron, Don Juan, 9. 75. 6-7.

131. ibid. 9. 74. 2-8; v. p. 31 supra.

132. ibid. 2. 208. 7-8.

133. ibid. 2. 209. 1-8.

134. ibid. 2. 210. 1-8 et 2. 211. 1.

135. ibid. 2. 212. 2-4. Also cf. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1. 83. 1-5:

     Yet to the beauteous form he was not blind,
     Though now it moved him as it moves the wise:
     Not that Philosophy on such a mind
     E'er deigned to bend her chastely-awful eyes:
     But Passion raves herself to rest, or flies.

136. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 212. 6-8. Jerome John McGann's study of Byron's poetic development, Fiery Dust, takes its title from this significant passage. (For the symbolism of fire and dust in Byron's poetry v. p. 72 supra).

137. Byron, Don Juan, 5. 141. 1-8 et 5. 142. 1-8. This is also another instance of Byron's morbid dread of the dangers emanating from women; cf. e. g. his lines on the all-powerful seductive strength of female tears in The Corsair, 2. 543-554:

     Oh! too convincing—dangerously dear—
     In woman's eye the unanswerable tear!
     That weapon of her weakness she can wield,
     To save, subdue—at once her spear and shield:
     Avoid it …

138. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 22. 1-8 et 2. 23. 1-6.

139. v. Franklin Miller Dickey, Not Wisely but too Well, San Marino, 1957, pp. 63-117.

140. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 145. 1.

141. ibid. 2. 170. 4.

142. ibid. 2. 169. 5-8 et 2. 170. 1-8.

143. ibid. 7. 50. 6-7. Also cf. Byron, Letter to Thomas Moore, 8-8-1822, in Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, VI. 101:

     … these cantos contain a full detail (like the storm in Canto Second) of the siege and assault of Ismael, with much of sarcasm on those butchers in large business, your mercenary soldiery …

144. Byron, Don Juan, 7. 1. 1-8. For man's vain pursuit of love and glory, illustrated by the image of the meteor's fleeting course, also cf. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 124. 1-9:

               We wither from our youth, we gasp away—
               Sick—sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst,
               Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
               Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first—
               But all too late,—so are we doubly curst.
               Love, fame, ambition, avarice—‘tis the same,
               Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst—
               For all are meteors with a different name,
     And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.

     and Napoleon's dramatic monologue in Byron, Napoleon's Farewell, lines 5-6:

     I have warr'd with a world which vanquish'd me only
     When the meteor of conquest allured me too far.

145. Byron, Don Juan, 7. 2. 4.

146. Byron, The Siege of Corinth, lines 479-484.

147. ibid. lines 485-494.

148. ibid. lines 495-506.

149. Byron, Diary, 11-1-1821, in Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V. 165-166.

150. Byron, The Bride of Abydos, 2. 23. Byron's reflections on Troy in the second canto of The Bride of Abydos were occasioned by the geographical proximity of Abydos to Troy.

151. ibid. 2. 49.

152. ibid. 2. 54.

153. ibid. 2. 26-27.

154. Byron, The Age of Bronze, line 92.

155. ibid. lines 33-36.

156. Byron, Don Juan, 7. 40. 1-4; 8. 4. 7-8 et 8. 5. 1-8.

157. v. Marchand, Byron. A Portrait, ‘A Death for Greece’, pp. 444-460.

158. Byron, Don Juan, 7. 40. 5.

159. ibid. 6. 90-93.

160. ibid. 6. 95. 1-8.

161. ibid. 6. 92. 8.

162. ibid. 7. 37. 1-8.

163. ibid. 7. 40. 1-8.

164. ibid. 8. 120. 1-8.

165. ibid. 8. 121. 1-8; cf. ibid. 8. 98. 2-5.

166. ibid. 9. 29. 1-8.

167. ibid. 7. 84. 3-4. Reference to Revelation 17. 1-5. Byron habitually associated the Babylonian whore's garments of purple and gold with the spilling of blood, as in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1. 29. 6-9, where the Babylonian whore denotes the murderous Roman Catholic Church:

               But here [in Mafra] the Babylonian whore hath built
               A dome, where flaunts she in such glorious sheen,
               That men forget the blood which she hath spilt,
     And bow the knee to Pomp that loves to varnish guilt.

168. Byron, Don Juan, 7. 84. 7-8 et 7. 85. 1-5; v. Steffan's and Pratt's commentary, ed. cit. p. 661.

169. ibid. 1. 2. 1-6.

170. ibid. 1. 1. 1-4. Also cf. ibid. 7. 83. 1-4:

     When I call ‘fading’ martial immortality,
               I mean that every age and every year
     And almost every day in sad reality
               Some sucking hero is compelled to rear.

171. ibid. 1. 4. 1-8.

172. 3 vols., Paris, 1820.

173. v. Steffan's and Pratt's commentary, ed. cit. p. 658.

174. v. Byron, Don Juan, 7. 32. 1-8.

175. ibid. 7. 33. 1-6.

176. ibid. 7. 33. 7-8.

177. ibid. 7. 34. 7-8.

178. ibid. 7. 21. 1-3.

179. ibid. 8. 18. 6-8.

180. ibid. 7. 14. 3-8.

181. ibid. 7. 15. 1-8 et 7. 16. 1-2.

182. ibid. 7. 18. 7-8.

183. ibid. 7. 19. 1-2.

184. ibid. 7. 19. 5-8 et 7. 20. 1.

185. ibid. 7. 20. 2-8.

186. ibid. 8. 97. 1-5.

187. ibid. 8. 19. 7-8.

188. v. ibid. 8. 29. 1-3:

     Juan, who had no shield to snatch and was
               No Caesar, but a fine young lad, who fought
     He knew not why …

189. ibid. 8. 33. 1.

190. ibid. 8. 31. 8.

191. ibid. 8. 33. 5-8.

192. ibid. 8. 32. 1-8.

193. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 5. 1-2.

194. ibid. 4. 4. 5-9.

195. ibid. 4. 5. 2-9 et 4. 6. 1-2.

196. ibid. 4. 6. 3-4. Also v. Ridenour, The Style of Don Juan, p. 33.

197. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 1-5.

198. ibid. 4. 6. 5-9. Also v. Marchand, Byron. A Portrait, p. 270:

     … he [Byron] always returned from the most airy speculations to reason and common sense.

     Byron's emotional love but rational distrust of the imagination is also manifested in his romantic desire yet unromantic inability to find, like Wordsworth, tranquil joy in the remembrance of things past, best expressed in his lyric poem to the moon variously set to music:

     SUN of the sleepless! melancholy star!
     Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far,
     That show'st the darkness thou canst not dispel,
     How like art thou to joy remember'd well!

     So gleams the past, the light of other days,
     Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays;
     A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to behold,
     Distinct, but distant—clear—but, on how cold!

199. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 7. 7-9.

200. ibid. 4. 9. 4-9 et 4. 10. 1-5.

201. ibid. 4. 44. 2.

202. ibid. 4 passim. Byron intimates Petrarch's immortality by presenting him as “Watering the tree which bears his lady's name [i. e. the laurel] With his melodious tears” (ibid. 4. 30. 8-9); the laurel, an evergreen, served as a symbol of immortality, both on the poet's brow and on the believer's tomb.

203. ibid. 4. 3. 1-2.

204. ibid. 4. 36. 8-9 et 4. 37. 1. In view of the fact that Byron had already doubted “the sanguine poet's hope, To conquer ages, and with time to cope” in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (lines 949-960), this apotheosis of literary immortality must be seen in a polemical rather than confessional light.

205. Byron, The Prophecy of Dante, 1821, 1. 53-58.

206. Byron, Don Juan, 4. 103. 1-8; 4. 104. 1-4; 4. 105. 1-8.

207. ibid. 1. 219. 5-8. Also cf. the preceding stanza. For Byron's knowledge of the political attempts to unearth and desecrate Dante's relics v. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 57. 9.

208. Byron, Don Juan, 4. 101. 4-5.

209. ibid. 4. 104. 5-8.

210. ibid. 3. 88. 7-8.

211. ibid. 3. 90. 5. Also cf. ibid. 12. 19. 1-8:

     Why, I'm posterity and so are you;
               And whom do we remember? Not a hundred.
     Were every memory written down all true,
               The tenth or twentieth name would be but blundered.
     Even Plutarch's Lives have but picked out a few,
               And 'gainst those few your annalists have thundered;
     And Mitford in the nineteenth century
     Gives with Greek truth the good old Greek the lie.

212. ibid. 3. 89. 5-8.

213. ibid. 9. 37. 1-8. Also cf. Byron's preface to Cain, 1821, ed. Truman Guy Steffan, Austin and London, 1968, p. 157.

214. Byron, Don Juan, 9. 38. 5-8. Also cf. Byron's Byronically heroic fist-shaking at and braving of time's irresistible tyranny, To Time, lines 33-40:

     One scene even thou canst not deform;
               The limit of thy sloth or speed
     When future wanderers bear the storm
               Which we shall sleep too sound to heed:

     And I can smile to think how weak
               Thine efforts shortly shall be shown,
     When all the vengeance thou canst wreak
               Must fall upon—a nameless stone.

215. Manfred Eimer, Byron und der Kosmos, Heidelberg, 1912.

216. v. e. g. Byron, Detached Thoughts, 73, 74, et 104 (1821), especially 104, where he claims the authorities of Aristotle and Plutarch for his opinion “that in general great Geniuses are of a melancholy turn” and continues (Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V. 460):

     Of my Genius, I can say nothing, but of my melancholy, that it is ‘increasing and ought to be diminished’—but how?

     For the benefit of his ease and comfort, Byron would rather have had it the other way round, the saturnine Sheridan for dinner, the pleasant Colman for supper (Detached Thoughts, 107, ibid. V. 461).

     Byron's deepening pessimism entailed an increasingly dark and bleak view of reality (The Dream, 1816, 7. 177-183):

                                                                                                                             … the wise
     Have a far deeper madness, and the glance
     Of melancholy is a fearful gift;
     What is it but the telescope of truth?
     Which strips the distance of its fantasies,
     And brings life near in utter nakedness,
     Making the cold reality too real!

217. Eimer, ibid. p. 201.

218. Byron, Diary, 4-1-1821, in Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V. 148-149.

219. For Byron's morbid thirst of glory v. Lady Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. cit. p. 222:

     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 actions and real sentiments, and vice versa, and made him appear quite inconsistent and puerile. There was no sort of celebrity that he did not, at some period or other, condescend to seek, and he was not over nice in the means, provided he obtained the end.

     For Byron's exposition of the transience of literary fame in his controversy with Bowles on Pope v. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, II. 123-124.

Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources

Ashton, T. L., Byron's Hebrew Melodies, London, 1972.

Blessington, M., Countess of, Conversations of Lord Byron, 1834, ed. Lovell, Princeton, 1969.

Bostetter, E. E., The Romantic Ventriloquists, Seattle, 1963.

Dickey, F. M., Not Wisely but too Well, San Marino, 1957.

Diller, H.-J., Byron: ‘So we'll go no more a-roving’, in Versdichtung der englischen Romantik, Riese, T. A. / Riesner, D. (eds.), Berlin, 1968.

Eimer, M., Byron und der Kosmos, Heidelberg, 1912.

Elledge, W. P., Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor, Nashville, Tennessee, 1968.

Geraths, A., ‘Lord Byron, Manfred’, in Das englische Drama, ed. Mehl, vol. II, Düsseldorf, 1970.

Gleckner, R. F., Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, Baltimore, 1967.

Goethe, J. W., Sämtliche Werke, Jubiläums-Ausgabe, ed. von der Hellen, 41 vols., Stuttgart and Berlin, 1902-1912.

Marchand, L. A., Byron. A Portrait, New York, 1970, and London, 1971.

Mayne, E. C., The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella Lady Noel Byron, New York, 1930.

McGann, J. J., Fiery Dust. Byron's Poetic Development, Chicago and London, 1968.

Pafford, W., ‘Byron and the Mind of Man: Childe Harold III-IV and Manfred’, in Studies in Romanticism, I (1961-1962), pp. 105-127.

Pratt, W. W., ‘Byron and Some Current Patterns of Thought’, in The Major English Romantic Poets, Thorpe, C. C. / Baker, C. / Weaver, B. (eds.) Carbondale, 1957.

Praz, M., The Romantic Agony, 1933, New York, 1960.

Robinson, C. E., Shelley and Byron. The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight, Baltimore, 1970.

Slater, J., ‘Byron's Hebrew Melodies’, in Studies in Philology, XLIX (1952), pp. 75-94.

Steffan, T. G., The Making of a Masterpiece, in Byron's Don Juan: A Variorum Edition, Austin and Edinburgh, 1957 et 1971.

Weinstein, L., The Metamorphoses of Don Juan, Stanford, 1959.

Wellek, R., A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950.