Byron: ‘melancholy and sullen detachment’.

Lord Byron

IN THE MONTHS before he wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, John Keats had been in a terrible mood. His friend Benjamin Robert Haydon, the painter, remembers that around this time Keats became ‘morbid and silent’, though he was also prone to outbursts. When a family friend made a comment on Keats’s growing reputation, saying to Mrs Brawne, ‘O, he is quite the little poet,’ Keats angrily exclaimed, ‘You see what it is to be under six foot and not a Lord!’1

Time has been kinder to Keats’s poetry than Byron’s. But in 1818 Keats had good reason to be jealous. It wasn’t just that Byron was tall (he was not quite six foot in fact) or that he was of noble birth. The real reason why Keats was feeling so sensitive was that he’d just learned that Byron had sold over four thousand copies of the last canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This poem, the first two parts of which had been published six years earlier, had already made him incredibly famous.

Byron had written Childe Harold while travelling in Spain, Malta, Turkey and Greece between 1810 and 1812. While abroad he’d lived the life of a libertine: frolicking with olive-skinned youths on the beach, being courted by Turkish warlords and enjoying ‘fooleries with the females of Athens’, as Byron put it.2 As he returned home to England to claim the estate that came with his title, with all the responsibilities that entailed, those two carefree years in the south started to seem more and more like the best years of his life. The future, on the other hand, was almost too grim for the twenty-three-year old Byron to contemplate. He felt done with life. He’d seen the world, and was now looking, he told a friend, for ‘the most eligible way out of it’.3 In this gloomy frame of mind he moved into his dilapidated gothic abbey at Newstead.

While travelling, Byron had been working on a poem. He’d recently changed the name of the protagonist from Childe Burun to Childe Harold, but there was no mistaking him for anyone but his creator — he stands to inherit a title and a ‘venerable pile’, and his travelogue, as described in the poem, is similar to Byron’s.4 This worried Robert Dallas — a family friend of Byron’s who was arranging for the poem’s publication. Dallas loved the poem, but was concerned about the state of its author’s soul. If Byron had done half the things his literary alter ego claimed to have done, he was going straight to hell.

Ah me! In sooth he was a shameless wight,

Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;

Few earthly things found favour in his sight

Save concubines and carnal company,

And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.5

Byron told him he was right to be worried. ‘My whole life has been at variance with propriety, not to say decency’, he admitted, with melancholy resignation.6 This last was the real trick up Byron’s sleeve. The poet Samuel Rogers, who read the proofs of Childe Harold, predicted that it would be a flop because the hero was both an unrepentant sinner and a misery guts. Who would want to read about the doings of a man like that? But this double whammy of debauchery and despondency, as Colin Wilson insists in his book, The Misfits, is exactly what caught the public’s imagination.7 Childe Harold was not a ‘cheerful voluptuary’ in the mode of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He sinned, but he did so with an air of sorrow and detachment, as though there were some terrible sadness in his past that he could never quite escape. This drove the ladies wild. When Childe Harold was published on Saturday 7 March 1812 Byron was a nobody. By the following Monday, he was famous.8 Childe Harold was well on the way to selling out its first print run, and its author was presented in his rooms with a salver full of visiting cards. ‘Women,’ as Wilson writes, ‘begged for introductions.’9

Dallas had guessed that the close identification of Byron with Harold would increase the poem’s appeal, and he was right. He was correct, too, in believing that the poem was something new under the sun. To Dallas, as Byron’s biographer Peter Quennell writes, Childe Harold ‘seem[ed] to catch and concentrate an unresolved element in the life of the period, something to which no novelist or versifier had yet been able to give a literary shape…’10 This was probably the same ‘unresolved element’ that Goethe had isolated thirty-five years earlier — or at least a very similar one. But where the celebrity hunters would later look in vain for Werther in Goethe, they found Childe Harold in Byron. There was, as Goethe himself observed, an unconscious quality to Byron and his work, as though the one simply sprang fully formed from the other, unmediated by any normal artistic process. This makes his poetry a little unsatisfying when compared with Keats’s or Wordsworth’s. But neither of those two achieved, in their lifetime, anything like the fame and notoriety of Byron. Byron was a star, courted by society, endlessly propositioned by female admirers, and studiously imitated by young men.

In the London of 1812, the Werther face had been replaced by the Byronic limper. Byron had been born with a club foot that gave him a curious and distinctive dragging gait. That his young admirers should start imitating this, his least attractive physical feature, might seem strange. But Byron’s deformity, his ‘mark of Cain’ as he called it, was actually the key to his whole ‘look’ — and much more besides. The club foot had been a source of endless torment for Byron in his childhood. Doctors had prescribed various cures involving braces and harnesses, all of which were physically painful and — much worse — socially crippling. His unlovable mother did nothing to help matters by calling him a ‘lame brat’.11 All of this left him with a desperate need for approval on the one hand, and a deep-seated conviction that he was doomed to be lonely and unhappy on the other. So it made no difference to him how famous he became, how many books he sold, how many times his portrait was painted, or how many girls — or boys — he slept with. He pursued all these things vigorously, but none of them, not fame, money or pleasure, could compensate for the blow he’d been dealt at birth. As Quennell writes, ‘The admiration he might arouse while stationary must vanish, he felt sure, when he crossed the room.’12 His solution to this was to stand still — and here was the origin of the famous Byronic look — the pose people still imagine when they hear the words ‘romantic poet’. Peter Quennell describes it vividly in Byron: The Years of Fame:

As he leant on one elbow, his small white hand clenched beneath his cheek, meditative, immobile…in the anteroom of some brilliant London party — melancholy and sullen detachment pervaded his attitude…13

This stance communicated volumes. As Quennell points out, a young, healthy-looking man like Byron must, it would be assumed, have a good reason for standing still. But since there was nothing obviously wrong with him, his audience was forced to assume that he was paralysed by existential boredom — which was not too far from the truth. This pose, combined with his extremely pale complexion — a side-effect of his brutal skin care regime — created the impression that Byron was a creature from another world. In his heart of hearts, Byron longed to be in the world, to relate to others as an equal. But since he knew this would never happen (because of the terrible curse), he further entrenched himself as an outcast by creating mythologised versions of his suffering self in his poems. These reinforced the impression his insecurities had created until it was impossible to tell where the myth ended and the man began. Tortured poet charisma starts here.

There was in him a vital scorn of all:

As if the worst had fall’n which could befall,
He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurl’d;14

By portraying himself as a solitary, inspired individual, forever cut off from society, Byron was simply acting out the dilemma of all poets and artists since the revolution. But Byron, with his flair for publicity and his gift for self-mythologising, was the first to make this idea popular with a middle-class public.

So much he soar’d beyond or sunk beneath,

The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe,
And long’d by good or ill to separate

Himself from all who shared his mortal state;15

The source of his estrangement, as he explains in ‘Lara’, lay in his childhood. He was born with a double handicap — a deformed leg and an oversized heart.

his early dreams of good outstripped the truth
and troubled manhood followed baffled youth16

The world had already broken Byron’s heart when he was only twenty-three. From there, things could only get worse, and sure enough, they did. His insatiable appetite for kicks conspired with his desperate need for attention to produce a series of scandals that culminated in an affair with his half-sister Augusta in 1814. After that, he went from society darling to social pariah in record time. He left England for the continent shortly after, and remained in exile for the rest of his life. This, of course, only confirmed his belief that he was a man apart.

Like Werther, Byron ascribed almost cosmic significance to his emotions, and the feelings stirred up by the Augusta affair led him to his most spectacular conclusion. He loved Augusta, and for that society denounced him as a sinner. Since his feelings couldn’t be wrong, he must be a sinner, and since, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell says, ‘he must be remarkable, he would be remarkable as a sinner, and would dare transgressions beyond the courage of the fashionable libertines whom he wished to despise’.17 He would become a super-sinner. Byron had seen his way marked out for him even before a furious Madam de Staël told him he was ‘un demon’ — he had already compared himself in verse to a fallen angel.18 Like Don Giovanni, Byron was hell-bound. But unlike the light-hearted seventeenth-century rake, Byron knew in advance where he was headed, and would get there on his own terms.

For the hero of the modern tragedy, there’s no question of survival — he’s doomed before the lights go down. But he can decide how he wants to go out. Werther and the emo singers simply take the path of least resistance and let the world roll right over them. They’re paralysed by the sheer pointlessness of everything, and by the world’s refusal to live up to their expectations. So they wait until life has them boxed into a corner, and slip quietly into oblivion with a heavy sigh. Werther can barely bring himself to commit suicide; he prefers to think that he’s allowed Charlotte to kill him. Byron started out this way: returning from his pilgrimage in 1812 he asked nothing more of the world than a way of walking out of it, and wondered if, somewhere in London, he might find someone who’d be willing to save him the trouble.19

But after the Augusta scandal his position had changed. He’d become a ‘strong’ romantic, the kind who sees that society cannot accommodate him, and so sets out to oppose everything that society stands for. If he’s already doomed, he’s going to do whatever he likes and make as much trouble as possible along the way. What’s more, he’ll have the last laugh. Life might be impossible for the romantic outsider, but he can still go out in a blaze of glory — or hellfire, as the case may be.