SOURCE: "Masses and Solids: Byron's View of the External World," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3, September, 1974, pp. 257-71.

John Locke's theories affected all the major Romantics, even those like Coleridge who repudiated them with such scorn. In particular, they were influenced by his separation of senses into primary and secondary sensations, the external world versus the inner world. The distinctions Locke drew were simple and dramatic: the "primary" qualities of objects—solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number—are those that really exist in the objects, whether anyone's senses perceive them or not; and secondary qualities—colors, sound, tastes, etc.—"in truth are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e., by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts" [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding].

Take away the sensation of them, let not the eyes see light or colours, nor the ears hear sounds; let the palate not taste, nor the nose smell; and all colours, tastes, odours and sounds, as they are such particular ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their causes, i.e., bulk, figure, and motion of parts.

Most of the Romantics, except Byron, were enthralled by the secondary sensations. They dismissed Locke's conception of them as illusory and decided, contrary to Locke, that they were actually as real as the external world of primary sensations. Wordsworth and Coleridge sought to dramatize the interaction of internal and external worlds; Keats and Shelley sought through the visionary experience to find evidence for a world of beauty and truth to which the present external world is inferior and which is indeed molded and shaped by the imagination; Blake boldly reversed Locke's position and saw imagination as the only reality, and the external world as illusory. Indeed, most of the Romantics sooner or later developed such a conception of the imagination and clung to it, even though the younger Romantics like Keats and Shelley became increasingly disillusioned and skeptical about its powers to discern the ultimate truth.

Byron, in contrast, was the only major Romantic poet who wrote within the empirical tradition. The external world is the ultimate reality for him. His poetry abounds with the mountains, seas, and infinite spaces of the physical universe. But he was skeptical of the visionary experience and had little or nothing to do with it. There are surprisingly few images of color, and perhaps a few more of sound; but on the whole Byron uses the secondary sensations sparingly as subsidiary to the primary, except when he is dealing wholly with the human world, as in the third canto of Don Juan (Haidée's feast) or in the last cantos (e.g., the Epicurean feast).

This is not to say that Byron does not explore an inter-relationship between man and the physical world (or more often a relationship between himself and that world). But he confronts the external world not so much through imaginative vision as through the naked ego, defying, supplicating, probing, always seeking some answer, as from an oracle or an allegorical painting, to the mystery of his own identity. For Byron believes that beyond yet immanent in Nature is a power of Mind (though he vacillates on this in his view of nature, which ultimately perhaps he sees as indifferent or hostile, activated by a power or energy similar to mind, but subordinate in the short run at least to the power of mind in the human being). This power manifests itself in reason, which can control both human society and the natural world. One notices that these terms are well-grounded in the eighteenth-century empirical tradition.

Byron's reaction to his world is ambiguous, often contradictory, oscillating back and forth according to his moods and experiences until Don Juan, when his attitude tends to stabilize. There are at least four possible ways in which he views the external world:

(1) as the deteriorating world of a lost pastoral paradise, of which remnants still remain (the first act of Cain, Haidée's island, The Island). The prehistorical earth may have contained superior beings, or there may have been other worlds with such beings before our own, with its inferior beings, was created. At any rate, past nature was the Ideal by which to measure the present.

(2) as a benign universe in which man finds comfort and solace, into which he can project himself, and with which he can identify (the Alps in the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the end of the fourth canto, Haidée's island, and other portions of Don Juan).

(3) as an active, often malevolent universe, both creative and destructive, a world of titanic power which man, to survive, must defy with the power of his mind—or one which Byron can admire and identify himself with as superior to other men—a power of nature himself (Childe Harold, Manfred, the second canto of Don Juan).

(4) as an indifferent world of bleak masses and solids, of an infinity of worlds, unfathomable, other than which there is emptiness, nothingness, meaninglessness; a world that will ultimately sweep away man and his works and leave nothing except a wasteland; beyond this world no God, no purpose, no prime mover ("Darkness," the third canto of Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain, Don Juan throughout).

At the same time, Byron was in conflict; the opposite side of the coin was his conviction that mind was superior to matter and could well prevail. If so, there was a great design beyond nature, an omniscient Mind. Here again Byron comes close to the eighteenth-century tradition, Deism.

Let me now examine episodes in representative poems in illustration of these generalizations.

I

The "lost" earthly paradise of Byron was the world of his childhood: the Scottish Highlands, Newstead Abbey, Harrow. In his earliest poems—most of them in Hours of Idleness—he writes about these places frequently with nostalgia and yearning. The poems on the Scottish Highlands indicate the origin of his love of mountains and oceans and point toward Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Manfred, and other later poems. In "Lachin Y Gair" he writes:

And in "When I Roved a Young Highlander" he writes of how he would climb snow-covered Mt. Morven:

and later on, "I lov'd my bleak regions, nor panted for new." Here are the elemental forms which loom so large in Byron's later poems; and here is one of the first expressions of identifying with them—mountains, torrents, crags, rocks, ocean ("Place me among the rocks I love, / Which sound to Ocean's wildest roar," in "I Would I Were a Careless Child"). One other feature goes into these memories of childhood: there is always some human being whom he loves and who loves him. This becomes one of the most poignant and powerful elements in the childhood paradises he so wistfully recalls—giving them the warmth of human love to make the land-scape meaningful.

Newstead Abbey and Harrow are pastoral landscapes described in the traditional language of the English pastoral. As Byron matured as a poet, Newstead became increasingly important to him, and he individualized it more and more. The old Gothic ruins of the Abbey in the center of the lovely landscape gave an additional charm to his memories. In the "Epistle to Augusta" Lake Leman and its environs take on special meaning because they recall Newstead Lake and its environs. But it is in canto 13 of Don Juan, where he describes Norman Abbey, the seat of the Amundevilles, in terms of Newstead Abbey (stanzas 56-58), that he gives his most intense reconstruction of the childhood paradise:

And he describes the stag, the wild fowl nestling in the brake and sedges, the woods sloping downward to the lake.

Byron's paradise is in many respects like Rasselas's happy valley. He seems always to view his paradise through a frame, as if it were a picture, or through a camera obscura. Newstead Abbey is always framed by its woods; the Scottish Highland valleys, by their mountains. An important result is the aesthetic distancing that Byron attains. In numerous poems, he provides a glimpse of an Earthly Paradise (similar to but with no reference to his childhood paradise). In The Prisoner of Chilien, the prisoner climbs to the window where he glimpses the wondrous world surrounding Lake Geneva framed by his prison window. In Manfred, the protagonist has a glimpse through the Chamois Hunter of a pastoral paradise no longer accessible to him. Cain has his parents' memories of Eden. In canto 3 of Childe Harold, Rousseau's Clarens becomes the center of an idyllic landscape. But the two major constructions of dream paradises, wistfully built upon memories and (as Byron knew) impossible hopes for the future, are Haidée's island in canto 3 of Don Juan and The Island. Haidée's paradise, isolated by rugged cliffs, almost impenetrable and ringed by the raging sea from which Juan had been tossed, has all the pastoral beauty of the English landscape that Byron recalls. But it is ultimately marred by the corruption of the human beings who live there, and Byron makes clear how ephemeral it is, acknowledges that Haidée and Juan cannot long enjoy it, and wishes that they could die in the high ecstasy of their love. The Island, ironically perhaps the last work of Byron, except the final cantos of Don Juan (13-17), contains his most unabashed dream picture of paradise. Drawing upon accounts of the South Seas and his own wistful memories and hopes, he describes the ultimate paradise framed by wild cliffs and a dangerous sea. Neuha is truly the innocent savage, more pure and simple than Haidée, enamored of the barbaric splendor of feast and clothing and furnishings. Torquil is the dashing young Highlander, who still recalls the glories of his Highland youth. The astonishing thing is that Byron allows them to escape from their pursuers through the hidden cave and return to the island, there presumably to live happily ever after. Here just before setting off for Greece, he allows himself the indulgence of a dream picture of an enduring paradise.

II

Childhood memories and the influence of Wordsworth by way of Shelley were mainly responsible for Byron's recurrent belief in the benignity of the natural world. A strong pull toward Deism also contributed. In an early poem, "The Prayer of Nature" (1806), Byron writes in echo of the Newtonian-Lockean creed:

In the later poems it is the Wordsworthian creed of the immanence of a living and benign power in natural objects that dominates. This power is most evident in the massive primary forms—mountains, ocean, the physical universe of stars and planets. The most famous passage demonstrating these points is the apostrophe to the Alps in canto 3 of Childe Harold, but similar passages occur in most of the poems. In fact, throughout the four cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, with the exception of the ambiguous apostrophe to the ocean at the end, the beauty and goodness of nature are contrasted with the corruption of man. Even in the most somber poems this motif recurs. In Manfred, though in most of the poem the elements are indifferent or destructive, there is the passionate cry in I.ii:

And there are the splendid apostrophes to the Witch of the Alps (II.ii), the sun (III.ii), and the moon (III.iv). In Cain, the physical universe, if left alone by God, is serene and beautiful. When Cain is carried up into outer space, he exclaims:

The star had special symbolic significance for Byron; it was a sign of purpose in the universe. He called his destiny or fate a star and saw Augusta as a star guiding him on. The eye of a beautiful woman was like a star. The stars are "the poetry of heaven." Only in Manfred is the star destructive and malign. In Cain, as the quotation indicates, stars are the symbols of eternity and the ultimate mystery, the key to knowledge which Cain thirsts for so desperately. Cain—after his apostrophe—identifies them with good: "Within those glorious orbs … / Ill cannot come: they are too beautiful."

Even in Don Juan in the midst of the most flippant or realistic passages (as in the shipwreck), a nostalgic glimpse of benign Nature intrudes suddenly: in the description of Haidée's island, in the Ave Maria stanzas in canto 4, and in the description of Norman Abbey, for example. In The Island, Nature not only is benign, but actively aids and abets the lovers in their escape—though beyond the islands lie dangerous reefs and turbulent seas.

III

The most recurrent motif is perhaps that of the ambivalence of the beautiful and powerful forces of the physical universe. They are at the same time creative and destructive, indifferent, even hostile, to man, capriciously capable of doing him—according to man's ethical standards—good or ill. With his view of man as part of the physical world, Byron contemptuously called him "clay"—molded from the clay of the earth and doomed to crumple like clay, struggling constantly to transcend his physical limitations through his reason—fighting a continuing battle of the spirit to dominate the flesh—but doomed in the end to destruction by the elemental forces of nature. The most striking example of the ambivalence in nature is given in the apostrophe to the ocean in stanzas 177-84 of canto 4 of Childe Harold. The passage begins with a return to the motif of benign nature in the section on the Alps in canto 3: "Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place, / With one fair Spirit for my minister," and he asks the elements "in whose ennobling stir / I feel myself exalted" if they can find him such a being. "I love not Man the less, but Nature more"—because his experiences in Nature have led him to mingle with the universe. But with the apostrophe to the ocean a shift in mood takes place. The ocean is an indifferent destructive power to man, sweeping away his ships and petty empires, despising "the vile strength he wields / For Earth's destruction." Byron seems to revel in this ruthless description of the meanness and insignificance of man before the titanic powers of the ocean—and the passage suggests that beneath the words "I love not Man the less" there is a partly unconscious Freudian delight in the annihilation of corrupt human beings—who had been responsible for his own exile—by the cleansing power of the ocean. The ocean is also a creative force, as Byron apostrophizes in one of his finest stanzas:

It is with the ocean Byron identifies, superior himself to the rest of mankind. For him the ocean is benign: "For I was as it were a Child of thee, / And trusted to thy billows far and near."

Here, then, the ocean is presented as indifferent and destructive, creative and benign. For Byron the ocean remains a symbol of the awesome power of natural elements. There is the deluge in Heaven and Earth, in which the threat of man's annihilation in canto 4 of Childe Harold is realized, and there is the storm in canto 3 of Don Juan, followed by the description of the protective reef which insures the safety of Don Juan and Haidée; a similar alternation between menace and protection is found in The Island.

In Cain Byron subscribes to the deteriorationism of Cuvier. Once there were other worlds more magnificent than earth; there were mighty beings, "Intelligent, good, great, and glorious things," far superior to man; and there were the great mammoths of the land and leviathans of the sea. Cain views them as phantasms in the dark Hades to which Lucifer has led him. When Cain asks how they were destroyed (II.ii), Lucifer replies, "By a most crushing and inexorable / Destruction and disorder of the elements, / Which struck a world to chaos," and he implies that Cain's earth will be similarly destroyed, as it decays into "dull damp degeneracy."

But the most vivid use of destructive elements is in Manfred. When Manfred conjures up the spirits of earth and air (Li), each declares his power of unleashing destructive forces. And the seventh spirit, no longer the benign star of other poems, is now malevolent. It tells Manfred that his star was once a world as fresh and fair as ever revolved around the sun. But now it is "A wandering mass of shapeless flame, / A pathless Comet, and a curse, / The menace of the Universe," rolling on with innate force, a bright deformity on high.

The destinies who do the bidding of Arimanes are akin to, perhaps are, the elements of the first act. But here they are openly destructive (II.iii) of the good—they restore tyrants to their thrones, sink ships, rescuing only the traitor, spread the black plague. And in II.iv they hail Arimanes as

At his will, tempests shake the sea, clouds reply in thunder, sunbeams flee, earthquakes rend the world, volcanoes rise; his shadow is pestilence, and planets turn to ashes at his wrath. The Manicheism indicated here between the evil "God of this World" and what Manfred calls the "overruling Infinite" is developed on a fuller scale in Cain. There the God of Adam is responsible for human suffering, as Lucifer says in I.i:

Lucifer, the tables turned as in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, presents himself as the good, and in Byronic eyes is the good.

IV

Under these varying views of Nature lay a fundamentally bleak view of the natural world as made up of masses and solids, of infinite planets living and dead, and as inexorably moving toward the destruction of earth and its inhabitants. This view, which Byron had held at least from early manhood, lay not far beneath his surface consciousness and erupted at frequent intervals in his later poetry. We find a glimpse of it in the Hebrew Melody "When Coldness Wraps This Suffering Clay" (1815) and a more explicit statement in a letter to Annabella, March 3, 1814, in which he states, "Why I came here, I know not. Where I shall go to, it is useless to inquire. In the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds—stars—systems—infinity—why should I be anxious about an atom?" Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, particularly cantos 3 and 4, and Manfred have references to the earth as "wasteland," "desert," "With blasted pines … barkless, branchless," but these epithets are perhaps mainly the reflection of Byron's own moods. It is in "Darkness" (1816) that he presents a terrifying picture of the earth becoming a dead planet, returning to chaos:

In Manfred, the description of Manfred's star as "The burning wreck of a demolished world" gives us another glimpse into chaos, this time inextricably bound up with Manfred's sense of his own deterioration and doom.

Cain is a vivid illustration of Cuvier's theory of deterioration, which, as the preface indicates, fascinated Byron. Key features are the description of Hades with the dead worlds floating there, along with the titanic beings that once existed and the implication—spelled out by Lucifer—that tiny earth and its inhabitants will be destroyed in the same way, returning the Universe to chaos.

Heaven and Earth is perhaps the most spectacular presentation of the earth being overwhelmed by the surging waters of the ocean. The deluge fulfills Byron's implicit prophecy in canto 4 of Childe Harold. As one of the fiendish spirits says, "Earth shall be Ocean!" Japhet on Mt. Ararat exclaims:

And he muses on the thought that, all other living things dead, serpents shall escape

To hiss and sting through some emerging world,
Reeking and dank from out the slime, whose ooze
Shall slumber o'er the wreck of this….

The fiends tell him that he will survive, but that his race will be inferior to what had gone before, as will other living things. He denies this and dreams of a new Eden.

When the deluge does come, the clouds "fixed as rocks" wait to pour out their "wrathful vials," the stars are no longer glorious, and in the sun's place, "a pale and ghastly glare / Hath wound itself around the dying air." And here, as in "Darkness," the sun is at last obliterated. Mountains collapse, torrents rush down, and rocks crash into the deep. A chorus of mortals rushing by describes the chaos descending upon the world. The final touching note is the cry of a fleeing woman recalling the paradisical world that is being destroyed:

Here is a good time to digress for a moment and write of Byron's influence. In his emphasis on the massive effects of nature, he had little appeal for the poets who followed him—who were mesmerized by the preoccupation of the other Romantics with vision. Browning's Childe Roland and some later poems came closest. But painters and composers were greatly stimulated. In particular, John Martin, the English painter who has only recently come into his own, was spurred to some of his most impressive paintings. One of them, The Deluge, first displayed in 1826, was accompanied by a pamphlet in which he quoted from Heaven and Earth, "that sublime poem." Later, when he did a group of three paintings on the Deluge, exhibited in 1841-42, he again quoted from Heaven and Earth. He was also fascinated by Manfred and "Darkness" and did paintings inspired by them. Indeed, the massive mountains, rocks, and overpowering oceans in his nature pictures become a transformation of Byron's descriptions into painting.

The music of composers like Berlioz was also molded and shaped by the massive forms of Byron and Martin. To both Berlioz acknowledges his debt. The monumental orchestration in works like Harold in Italy, Requiem, Damnation of Faust, and Te Deum, often with several choirs and orchestras, plainly shows the transformation into music of the massive grouping of Byron and Martin. Heine, commenting on the influence of Martin, writes of the "orchestration placed tier upon tier, vistas, in music, disappearing into infinity." Berlioz's influence was not great during his lifetime, but he led the way toward the huge orchestras used by Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, all of whom were influenced also by Byron.

Now what are we to say about Don Juan? In this long "medley" of a poem, as John Jump calls it [in his Byron, 1972], Byron is mainly concerned with the relation of his characters to each other and to society, and with their physical vulnerability—the mutability of themselves and their civilization. He is less concerned with the physical universe outside him, except for the raging storm and implacable sea in canto 3. He touches upon every aspect of nature as his mood or the particular context prompts. But implicit in the poem, and increasingly pervasive as it proceeds, is a view of the natural world as, if not meaningless, at least capricious and indifferent to man, without purpose of its own, and ultimately absurd, a "glorious blunder." So he finally anticipates existential and absurdist literature of the present: man is on his own to make what he can of life. In reality, the universe has become unimportant to Byron, as he becomes involved in castigation of the "cant" of civilization, in efforts to promote a moral toughening therein by relentless exposure of the "facts" of human behavior, and therefore in working toward the improvement of civilization. The malevolent or indifferent deteriorating universe, its destruction millennia away, no longer disturbs him in his preoccupation with what man can do with his experience here and now. His new point of view is also affected by his shift from the serious to the comic perspective, always present in the Letters, but now through the ottava rima poems surging up to release Byron as poet in all his potentialities. The perspective of Don Juan, like Pulci's, is essentially comic, and increasingly skeptical as the poem proceeds into the English cantos. Byron questions the reality or truth of everything, except what he feels upon his pulses, as Keats said—in other words, the experience of his senses. But this is enough. The poem reveals throughout Byron's exuberant love of life on its own terms. He writes with gusto and evident enjoyment. He laughs at himself and his characters with genuine humor, and often with boisterous explosions. This is what gives the positive note which dominates the often nihilistic and pessimistic implications of the poem.

The Island, as we have seen, represents a startling change of pace and mood from the satiric realism of the English cantos into which it is sandwiched. Though an uneven poem, it takes on a strange poignancy in the love affair between Torquil and Neuha. This is Byron's most nostalgic dream of the Earthly Paradise, with its innocent lovers (Neuha is Haidée stripped of her barbaric trimmings), secure in the protection of the ocean, rocks, cliffs, and caves.

Byron's death was a sad and miserable anticlimax, the opposite of the glorious death in battle of which he had dreamed. The wretched climate of Missolonghi, plus his own imprudence, killed him. But there was final spectacular moment. On the evening that he died, an approaching storm could be heard, with terrific claps of thunder and blinding lightning. For one who so wanted to identify with the elements, it was a fitting finale to his life.

From the beginning Byron was the spectator standing like Lucifer on his promontory, observing the world as it goes. To him the real world was the Lockean world of massive forms. He was irresistibly drawn to the titanic—the ocean, mountains, cliffs, lakes, storms, thunder and lightning. With these he identified, and felt himself superior to the rest of mankind. And yet he remained restless and dissatisfied. The mind, that "fiery particle," was surely superior to nature and linked to a power transcending both nature and man. In the mind and the reason he found his ultimate source of hope and affirmation. Though them man can control his destiny. He can control his environment, initiate the necessary social and political revolutions, and make a better world for himself. Thus he can triumph over the forces threatening to destroy him, with the exception of mutability and the ultimate deterioration of the universe. But that deterioration was a long way off (and now he was not quite sure that the universe was not eternal).

Byron's confidence in the triumph of mind over matter, if man will only follow his reason (and there is a doubt that he will), occurs as a recurrent theme through the major poems—the fourth canto of Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain, Don Juan. It becomes a more firm and constant conviction as Byron grows older.

Byron's most succinct statement is given in the Detached Thoughts No. 97:

Matter is eternal, always changing, but reproduced, and, as far as we can comprehend Eternity, Eternal; and why not Mind? Why should not the Mind act with and upon the Universe? as portions of it act upon and with the congregated dust called Mankind? See, how one man acts upon himself and others, or upon multitudes? The same Agency, in a higher and purer degree, may act upon the Stars, etc., ad infinitum.

John Martin has painted a memorable water color of Manfred and the Chamois Hunter on the Jungfrau. The mountains are enormous and the figures tiny, insignificant creatures standing at the top of the picture, but placed as they are, they surprisingly dominate the scene. The picture captures Byron's conception of the relation of man to nature, and seems an admirable place at which to leave him for the time being.