Byronic Opposition

Byron's expressions of the heroic saliently focused on opposition figures--the Trojan view, Priam's sons, a Turkish infidel and his sons, a cripple--to express that heroism, a thought I'd misplaced from back in the days I was working on that dissertation.

(How odd, especially given that my intended and partially-unexamined title read "With a Trojan's Eye."  I knew Byron was more cosmopolitan, more liberal, of mind and heart than many have given him credit for, but I wasn't quite digesting all that I'd been consuming, reading hugely as I was, and so . . . .)

Byron: "An Erring Spirit From Another Hurled"

Here’s a passage from Lord Byron’s “Lara”, that sequel to “The Corsair”, in which the Miltonic basis of that literary paradigm ‘The Byronic Hero’ can be seen in the first lines of Part 18.  I think we hear a little Pope, Johnson, and Shakespeare in the passage too, but shaken and twisted in that English Romantic hurlyburly of a soul.    Or, that’s what I think.

Here’s the passage, Parts 17 and 18 from Canto I of “Lara”, borrowed from the Project Gutenberg edition:


XVII.
In him inexplicably mixed appeared
Much to be loved and hated, sought and feared;
Opinion varying o'er his hidden lot,
In praise or railing ne'er his name forgot:
His silence formed a theme for others' prate—
They guessed—they gazed—they fain would know his fate.
What had he been? what was he, thus unknown,
Who walked their world, his lineage only known?
A hater of his kind? yet some would say,
With them he could seem gay amidst the gay;
But owned that smile, if oft observed and near,
Waned in its mirth, and withered to a sneer;
That smile might reach his lip, but passed not by,
Nor e'er could trace its laughter to his eye:
Yet there was softness too in his regard,
At times, a heart as not by nature hard,
But once perceived, his Spirit seemed to chide
Such weakness, as unworthy of its pride,
And steeled itself, as scorning to redeem
One doubt from others' half withheld esteem;
In self-inflicted penance of a breast
Which Tenderness might once have wrung from Rest;
In vigilance of Grief that would compel
The soul to hate for having loved too well.

XVIII.
There was in him a vital scorn of all:
As if the worst had fallen which could befall,
He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring Spirit from another hurled;
A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped
By choice the perils he by chance escaped;
But 'scaped in vain, for in their memory yet
His mind would half exult and half regret:
With more capacity for love than Earth
Bestows on most of mortal mould and birth.
His early dreams of good outstripped the truth,
And troubled Manhood followed baffled Youth;
With thought of years in phantom chase misspent,
And wasted powers for better purpose lent;
And fiery passions that had poured their wrath
In hurried desolation o'er his path,
And left the better feelings all at strife
In wild reflection o'er his stormy life;
But haughty still, and loth himself to blame,
He called on Nature's self to share the shame,
And charged all faults upon the fleshly form
She gave to clog the soul, and feast the worm:
Till he at last confounded good and ill,
And half mistook for fate the acts of will:
Too high for common selfishness, he could
At times resign his own for others' good,
But not in pity—not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That swayed him onward with a secret pride
To do what few or none would do beside;
And this same impulse would, in tempting time,
Mislead his spirit equally to crime;
So much he soared beyond, or sunk beneath,
The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe,
And longed by good or ill to separate
Himself from all who shared his mortal state;
His mind abhorring this had fixed her throne
Far from the world, in regions of her own:
Thus coldly passing all that passed below,
His blood in temperate seeming now would flow:
Ah! happier if it ne'er with guilt had glowed,
But ever in that icy smoothness flowed!
'Tis true, with other men their path he walked,
And like the rest in seeming did and talked,
Nor outraged Reason's rules by flaw nor start,
His Madness was not of the head, but heart;
And rarely wandered in his speech, or drew
His thoughts so forth as to offend the view.

Passages: Lord Byron's "A Fresher Growth"

The beings of the mind are not of clay;

Essentially immortal, they create

And multiply in us a brighter ray

And more belov'd existence: that which Fate

Prohibits to dull life, in this our state

Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied,

First exiles, then replaces what we hate;

Watering the heart whose early flowers have died,

And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.

--Lord Byron, from Canto IV of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"

The merest sampling, but a stanza that called to me, as it were.

I hadn't realized how much I miss my Byron--with all the wit, the satire, the wild stories, and the heart, the absolute heart--until I finished Dorothy Dunnett's Checkmate, the final novel in the Francis Crawford of Lymond Chronicles, her own oft-maligned, oft-misunderstood, oh so witty, skilled, and wilful Byronic hero.

I'll have to put my copies of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan a bit closer to hand in the evenings.