Chapter 72 Chapter 23 Byron

The nineteenth century, by comparison with the present age, appears rational, progressive, and content; yet some of the converse qualities of the contemporary age were shared by many of the best minds in the optimistic period of Liberalism.If we look at man not as an artist or a discoverer, not as a man who suits or does not suit his own taste, but as a force, as the cause of changes in social structure, value judgments or intellectual opinions , I feel that because of recent developments, our evaluation has to be readjusted a lot. Some people are not as important as they used to be, and some people are more important than they used to be.Among men of greater importance than he has seemed, Byron deserves an exalted place.In continental Europe, this view would not seem surprising, but in the English-speaking world, it might be considered strange.The place where Byron exerted his influence was on the European continent, so don't look for his spiritual descendants in England.In the opinion of most of us, his poems are often inferior, and his sentiments are often showy and elegant, but in foreign countries, his emotional way and his outlook on life have been spread, developed and deteriorated, and are widely popular. so as to become a factor of major events.

Byron was at the time a typical example of the aristocratic rebel, who is a very different type of person from the leader of a peasant or proletarian rebellion.Hungry people don't need elaborate philosophies to stimulate dissatisfaction or explain it; any such thing seems to them the amusement of the idle rich.They want what other people have 'not some elusive metaphysical benefit.While they may preach Christian love, like the communist rebels of the Middle Ages, their real reason for doing so is very simple: the lack of this love among the rich and powerful causes the suffering of the poor, and in rebellion There is this love among my comrades which they believe is essential to success.But the experience of struggle makes one despair of the power of love, leaving naked hate as the driving force.A rebel of this type, if he creates a philosophy, as Marx did, creates a philosophy designed specifically to prove the ultimate victory of his party, not a philosophy of value.His values ​​are still primitive: what is good is enough to eat, and the rest is idle talk.No starving man could possibly have another thought.

Since the aristocratic rebels had enough to eat, there must have been other causes of dissatisfaction.By rebels I do not include leaders of factions temporarily out of power, but only those whose philosophies demand change beyond personal success.It may also be that lust for power is the underlying source of their discontent, but that in their conscious minds there is a disapproval of worldly politics which, if sufficiently pervasive, takes the form of a Titanic boundless self-assertion, or , in those who retain some superstition, take the form of Satanism.Both ingredients are found in Byron.Both elements prevailed, chiefly through those whom he influenced, in a broad social class which might not be regarded as an aristocracy.An aristocratic philosophy of rebellion, growing, developing, and transforming as it approached maturity, has been the spiritual source of a long succession of revolutionary movements from the Carbonari after the fall of Napoleon to the triumph of Hitler in 1933; at each stage , this kind of rebellious philosophy has instilled a corresponding way of thinking and feeling among intellectuals and artists.

It is evident that an aristocrat would not be a rebel if his temperament and surroundings were not peculiar.The environment at Byron is very special.His earliest memories are of his parents' quarrels; his mother a woman so cruel that he frightened him and vulgarity that he despised him; His limp filled him with shame and prevented him from being part of the group at school.After a period of poverty, at the age of ten he was suddenly made a lord and proprietor of Newstead Hall.He had inherited his great-uncle, the "Lord Evil" who had killed a man in a duel thirty-three years earlier and had been abandoned by neighbors ever since.The Byrons had always been a lawless line, and his mother's ancestors, the Gordons, were even more so.The boy, after his days in the squalor of a poor lane in Aberdeen, was of course rejoicing in his title and mansion, and wished to take upon himself the character of his ancestors in gratitude for the land they had given them.Even if their combativeness had gotten them into trouble in recent years, he had heard it had brought them a reputation in previous centuries.There is one of his earliest poems "On Leaving Newstead Abbey" (On Leaving Newstead Abbey), which describes his feelings at that time. The admiration of ancestors who fought on the Moor of Ston.He closes the poem with this pious determination:

He shall live like you, or shall die like you: When the body rots, may his bones be mingled with yours. This is not the mood of a rebel, but it is reminiscent of the modern nobleman "Child" Harold who imitated the medieval Caichen.When, as a student, he first had his own income, he wrote that he felt independent like "a German lord who coined his own coin, or like a man who coined no coin at all but enjoyed something far more precious, 'freedom'." like a Cherokee chief. I speak of that goddess with ecstasy, for my sweet mother was so tyrannical." Byron later wrote a great deal of lofty poetry in praise of liberty, but we must know that The freedom he sang was that of a German lord or a Cherokee chieftain, not the inferior freedom that ordinary mortals could have imagined.

His aristocratic relatives kept him at arm's length, regardless of his ancestry or title, and made him feel socially alien to them.His mother was hated by everyone, and everyone looked at him with suspicion.He knew she was vulgar, and secretly feared that he himself had the same flaw.Hence the curious mixture of snobbery and rebellion which is so characteristic of him.If he cannot be a modern gentleman, he will be a bold courtier in the style of his crusading ancestors, or perhaps in the fiercer but more romantic style of the emperor's leader. The bold vassals—who cursed gods and men as they marched to glorious perdition.Medieval knightly novels and histories became his etiquette textbooks.He sinned like the Hohenstaufen royals, and died fighting the Moslems like a crusader.

His shyness and loneliness lead him to seek comfort in love, but since he is unconsciously seeking a mother rather than a mistress, all but Augusta fail him. In 1816 he described himself to Shelley as a "Methodist, a Calvinist, an Augustinian," and his constant Calvinism made him feel that his way of life was evil; Evil, he said, was a hereditary blight in his blood, a doom doomed to him by the Almighty.If that were the case, since he must be good, he would be a good criminal, daring to do more than the courage of the hipsters he wanted to despise.He loved Augusta sincerely because she was of his blood--of the Ishmaelite line of the Byrons--and more simply because she had a sisterly sense of his daily happiness. kind care.But that was not all she had to offer him.With her simplicity and her genial gentle disposition, she was the means to furnish him with a most delightful self-indulgent remorse.He could feel himself on par with the greatest of sinners—on a par with Manfred, Cain, almost Satan.The Calvinist, the aristocrat, the rebel were equally satisfied;

Satisfied the romantic lover grieving the loss of the only person in the world who could still inspire affection and tenderness in his heart. Although Byron felt that he could rival Satan, he never quite dared to put himself in the place of God.The following step in the development of arrogance was accomplished by Nietzsche when he said: "If there are gods, how can we endure if we are not gods! Therefore there are no gods." Note the unspoken premise in this reasoning: "Anything that hurts us All matters of self-respect must be judged to be wrong." Nietzsche, like Byron, was religiously brought up, if not more, but because he possessed a higher reason, he found a better escape than Satanism. realistic path.But Nietzsche was always very sympathetic to Byron.he said:

"The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have a rigorous approach to truth in our emotions and intellect, but on the other hand, through human development, we have become very delicate and sensitive and painful , requires a supreme means of salvation and consolation. From this arises the danger that man will bleed to death for the truth he knows. Byron expresses this in immortal lines: Knowledge is misery: he who knows best Must lament most deeply an ominous truth— The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life. " Occasionally Byron also comes closer to Nietzsche's views.But generally speaking, Byron's ethical views, contrary to his actual actions, have always been strictly traditional.

For Nietzsche great men are like gods; for Byron they are usually titans battling himself.But sometimes he also portrayed a sage who is not dissimilar to "Zarathustra" - "pirate". the hearts of men, and make them shudder and bewildered. It is this hero who "hates humanity too much to feel remorse".A footnote here asserts that the "pirate" is humanly realistic, since the Vandal king Gantheric, the Emperor's tyrant Azilinor, and a Louisiana pirate all exhibit the same traits. Byron's search for heroes was not limited to the Eastern Mediterranean countries and the Middle Ages, because it was not difficult to add a romantic cloak to Napoleon.Napoleon's influence on the European imagination in the nineteenth century was profound; the ideas of Clausewitz, Stendhal, Heine, Fichte and Nietzsche, and the actions of Italian patriots were all inspired by him .His specter stalked through the ages, the only force strong enough to rise up against industrialism and commerce, pouring out a mockery of peace and running a shop.Tolstoy's attempts to exorcise the specter were in vain, for the specter was never more powerful than it is now.

During the "Hundred Days", Byron publicly expressed his wish for Napoleon's victory. When he heard of Waterloo's defeat, he said: "I am so sad to death". Only once did he temporarily feel disgusted with his hero: that was in 1814, when suicide was (in his opinion) more honorable than abdication.At that time, he had sought consolation in Washington's virtue, but as soon as Napoleon returned from Elba, this effort was no longer needed.When Byron died, in France "many newspapers said that the two great men of this century, Napoleon and Byron, passed away almost at the same time".Carlyle considered Byron at the time "the noblest man in Europe" and felt that he had "lost a brother"; he later liked Goethe, but still compared Byron to Napoleon: "It has almost become a necessity for your noble people to have some such work of art published in one local language or another. For rightly speaking, except to say that it is your What else but its controversy? Your Byron published his "Lord George's Sorrows" in verse and prose and a host of other things: your Bonaparte delivered his opera Napoleon to the music of cannon fire and murderous cries all over the world; the lighting of his stage is the sky full of fire; his rhythms and recitatives are the steps of soldiers in battle and the sounds of fallen cities ’” Indeed, in the next three chapters, Carlyle issued a categorical order: “Close your Byron and open your Goethe”.But Byron was in his veins, and Goethe was always a passion. For Carlyle, Goethe and Byron were antagonists; for Alfred de Musset, they were accomplices in the crime of infusing the melancholy poison into the jovial Gallic soul.Most French youths of that era seemed to know Goethe only through The Sorrows of Werther, not the Olympian Goethe at all.Musset reproaches Byron for not being comforted by the Adriatic and the Countess of Guitchuli - which is wrong, since he stopped writing Manfried after he had known her.But Don Giovanni was equally poorly read in France, as were Goethe's happier poems.In spite of Musset's bad opinion, most French poets have since made Byronic misfortunes the best material for their songs. In Musset's view, only after Napoleon Byron and Goethe were the greatest geniuses of the century.Born in 1810, Musset belonged to the generation he described as "concusent redeux batailles" (born between battles) in a narrative lyric poem about the rise and fall of the French Empire.In Germany, feelings towards Napoleon were divided.There are those who, like Heine, see him as the mighty preacher of Liberalism, the destroyer of serfdom, the foe of Legitimacy, the man who makes small hereditary lords tremble; The Enemy, the self-appointed destroyer of the noble German nation, was an injustice who had thoroughly demonstrated that Teutonic virtue could only be preserved by an indelible hatred of France.Bismarck completes a synthesis: Napoleon is still the enemy of Christ after all, not just to be hated, but an enemy of Christ to emulate.Nietzsche acknowledges this compromise, and he speaks with eerie delight of the approaching age of classical warfare, a boon not given to us by the French Revolution but by Napoleon.In this way, Byron's legacy—nationalism, Satanism, and hero worship—became part of the German spiritual complex. Byron was not gentle, but violent as a thunderstorm.He spoke Rousseau's words, and he could also apply them to himself.He said Rousseau was on passion cast charm, from distress Wring out eloquent speakers... yet he knows How to add beauty to madness, in the wrong Apply a brilliant shade of color to action thoughts. But there is a profound difference between the two men.Rousseau is sentimental, Byron is fanatical; Rousseau's cowardice is exposed, Byron's cowardice is hidden; Rousseau appreciates virtue, as long as it is simple, and Byron appreciates vice, as long as it is thunderbolt of evil.This distinction, though merely a distinction between two stages in the resistance of the antisocial instincts, is important in that it shows the direction in which the movement is developing. It must be admitted that Byron's romanticism is only half sincere.Sometimes, he would say that Pope's poems are better than his own, but this opinion is mostly just his thoughts in a certain mood.The world has always tried to simplify Byron, to delete the posturing element in his vast despair and explicit contempt for human beings.Byron, like many other famous figures, was more important as a mythical figure than he really was.As a mythical figure, his importance, especially on the Continent, was enormous.