‘I will cut a swathe through the world or perish in the attempt’: Byron, aged sixteen. Well, he cut a swathe through the world and perished in the attempt. He died, one of the most celebrated poets in Europe and the most infamous in England, aged thirty-six, a hero and a soldier fighting for Greek independence. It was an act of remarkable courage and self-sacrifice. The historian Macaulay coupled Byron’s name with the hero of his youth, Napoleon: ‘Two men have died within our recollection, who had raised themselves, each in his own department, to the height of glory. One of them died at Longwood, the other at Missolonghi.’ Carlyle considerd Byron ‘the noblest spirit in Europe’ and also linked him with Napoleon. In Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy Byron has a chapter all to himself. The Byronic myth, in which, as John Updike says, ‘the poetry projected a Personality – a personality Napoleonic in its insatiability and capacity for ruinous defeat’, was to inspire painters – Delacroix, musicians – Berlioz, writers – Pushkin, Nietzsche, Goethe (who, according to the American critic Harold Bloom, developed a kind of infatuation for Byron) and the Brontës, most particularly Emily. His arrival in the world, on the twenty-second of January 1788, was as dramatic as his departure. He was born with a caul over his head and talipes (a form of club foot) to The Laird of Gight, Scots heiress Catherine Gordon, and her husband Mad Jack Byron. Jack Byron, father of Byron’s half-sister Augusta from his previous marriage, squandered two matrimonial fortunes and died three years after his marriage to Catherine, leaving her a financially embarrassed widow. Mother and child moved to Scotland and then back to England when Byron, at the age of ten, inherited the Gothic masterpiece Newstead Abbey. But north or south they were not a happy pair. There were rumours of neglect and of possible abuse by his sinister nanny May Gray. Byron was an almost pathologically shy child and became a seriously overweight adolescent. At Harrow he was cruelly mocked for his limp due to the heavy iron brace he was forced to wear under his trousers. He fought back hard, according to school friend Robert Peel, eventual creator of the Metropolitan Police. Keats, Shelley and Lowell were also playground fighters. Poetry is not for sissies. There were homosexual affairs at school, though in the holidays chaste obsessions with Mary Chaworth and Margaret Parker disturbed his family with their intensity. Dante’s belief that such emotional ardour
in youth often indicates exceptional artistic gifts would seem to have been true in Byron’s case. The lover and fighter were foreshadowed early.
So how did the shy, unhappy boy, the awkward, overweight adolescent, become the legendary Lord Byron? The world, it is said, bends to a committed will. Byron starved himself into physical beauty and became one of the great seducers of his time, of both men and women. Harold Nicolson said of him: ‘he was a catalogue of false positions. His brain was male, his character was feminine’. The boy in the iron brace became a legendary swimmer, swimming the Hellespont in under two hours. The boy who cultivated the image of the dilettante and said later, ‘I hate a fellow who’s all author’, in fact read voraciously. Before he went to Trinity, Cambridge, he boasted that he’d read more than 4000 books, including the Old Testament, the classics (particularly Greek tragedy), biography, history and novels and poetry, most particularly Pope, whom he idolised. Then, aged nineteen, catching life and art by the throat, he took his natural narrative gift and his astonishing fluency and dashed into poetry. ‘I can never recast anything. . . I am like the Tiger, if I miss at first spring / I go back growling to my Jungle again – But if I do hit – it is crushing!’
In fact he was hit. His first collection, Hours of Idleness (1807), was cruelly savaged by the critics. Byron, badly wounded by the reviews, went back to his jungle and then pounced. With his clever satire
‘English Bards and Scots Reviewers’ in 1809 he mocked his enemies. In the same year he took his seat in the House of Lords, where he spoke with eloquence for Liberal causes. In 1812, after two years of extensive and sometimes dangerous travel through Spain, Malta, Armenia and Greece, Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and, aged only twenty-four, woke up and found himself famous. He’d invented himself, magnificently. ‘It is only the self that he invented that he understood perfectly’, according to Eliot. ‘Lord Byron,’ wrote Stendhal, ‘was the unique object of his own attention.’ Not quite. Critics and society now showered him with praise. He had no objection. He assiduously polished his image and acquired legions of adoring fans. Amongst them, infamously, was Lady Caroline Lamb, who, when she first saw him, turned and walked away. Alas not for long – though she wrote in her journal that evening that Lord Byron was ‘mad – bad – and dangerous to know’. According to Ruskin, Byron was without mercy, perhaps because he believed that ‘the great object in life is Sensation’, to fill the ‘craving void’. Other than his half-sister Augusta, whom he certainly loved deeply and with whom he probably had a child, and Countess Teresa Guiccioli, whom Iris Origo called ‘The Last Attachment’, few were left unwounded by an encounter with Byron. His wife, the cool, brilliant mathematician Annabelle Milbanke, left him within a year of marriage, taking their child (who as Ada Lovelace would, with Charles Babbage, collaborate on the early computer) amid rumours of sexual abuse within a marriage that was on occasion a bizarre ménage à trois with Augusta. Caroline Lamb added to the scandal when in a fit of jealous rage she implied homosexuality. The charge was serious – in 1806 there’d been six hangings; in Byron’s time imprisonment was common. He was now hounded out of England. Like Shelley, he was bitter. Like Shelley, he wrote on. His output was prodigious: plays, among them Manfred, The Two Foscari, Werner (translated by Goethe), an Armenian dictionary – a notoriously difficult language to master – and of course the poetry. Of Byron’s final masterpiece, Don Juan, Eliot said it contained a satire on English society for which he could find no parallel in English literature. ‘Society,’ Byron wrote, ‘is now one polished horde, / Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and the Bored.’ Though it is the most savagely witty poem in this or any language, it also warns us that ‘If I laugh at any mortal thing / ’Tis that I may not weep’.
Byron’s death plunged all of Greece and much of Europe into mourning. However, because of his scandalous past, he was refused burial at both Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, and was finally interred in the family vaults near Newstead Abbey. The cortège slowly made its way through towns and villages thronged with those who wished to pay tribute. As he was a peer many aristocrats sent their carriages. He was buried as a nobleman and not as a poet. He knew his country well.