Byron was born a freedom-lover and his innate ebullience of mind did not deter him from the pursuit of carnal passions. Somehow, in a dissimulating social atmosphere of England in the Regency period, he faced a thick undercurrent of disapproval by a well-entrenched coterie of people, who envied him for his handsomeness and talents. Had he been a child of mediocre talents, he would have fallen in line with the conventional opinion of his time. However, since he had a sense of pride in his aristocratic heritage and belief in basic human impulses, he turned a rebel to English mode of life. Later on he turned to the arms of poesy for all time to come, and therein, he came as a satirist and a rebel.
Not only did he express his views against the established order of things, he also stood by what he said. In this respect he is an existentialist who fights against the heavy odds and affirms his existence without any fear or favor. Byron is the one who, drawing on the famous cliché mauvaise foi, extrapolates one of the most cardinal errors of modern man in remaining false to one’s deep seated urges. Transparently speaking, it means self-deception. This can somehow imply that since man is abandoned in this Godless universe, he is in exile, both in objective and subjective senses.
When we look at the eventful life of Lord Byron in terms of existentialism, we find that Byron remained in continual exile unto himself as also stranger to others by a strange concatenation of circumstances. To be exiled from within one’s self and exiled from society is really an awful situation. Consequently, the hours of poetic composition provided solace to him. This is how Byron was drawn to poetry. For him, it was an existential choice to resort to versification. He wrote: “To withdraw myself from myself (of that cursed selfishness) has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.”1 For a poet, poetry is the way to salvation and fulfillment, for, as one is involved in a creative process, they are free, at least during that time, from burdensome banal existence. T.S. Eliot has something similar to say: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion: it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”2 It means that poetry is an expression of man’s deeper existence. Poetry may incorporate things and ideas of the objective world, but for crystalizing the true poetic spirit, one has to banish ideas and feelings germane to conventionally motivated social existence. Byron became a great poet because he struggled to get out of the cant-ridden English society. His disapproval of the English value-system as it encroaches upon one’s liberty. He tried to maintain peace with his opponents in English society without forsaking his instinctive allegiance to basic human values, but all in vain as he later had to harden himself. He expressed his feelings to his half-sister, Augusta: “My intercourse with the world [has] hardened my heart; it has now become as hard as a Highlander’s heelpiece.”3
Byron does not mince words; he is honest enough to acknowledge the hardening of his feelings toward the English society. In fact, he was cruel, as a defensive measure, to preserve his feelings of kindness from being exploited, misunderstood as also maligned by people hostile to him. In the context of modern society in which a large majority of people remain at cross-purposes vying with one another in stooping down to the worst forms of meanness to achieve their ends, it is magnificently creditable on the part of Byron to maintain an unshakable belief in the basic goodness of man. In terms of existential philosophy of life, it can be safely stated that Byron fought against the dehumanizing forces thriving on the basis of vested interests while maintaining humanistic ethos. His sense of magnanimity and fair-play never wavered even when he was booed and derided by powerful elements hostile to him. It was exacerbated in the wake of an abrupt end to his marriage with Annabella Millbanke in early 1816. Byron expresses his own existential agony among people who treated him as a stranger:
There was in him a vital scorn of all:
As if the worst has fall’n which could befall,
He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurl’d;
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.4
This is from his narrative tale, Lara; and by implication, it has an autobiographical ring. Byron felt exiled among his own people. It unnerved him immensely, and he was saved from being completely wrecked because he had innate aristocratic pride and also because he was a poet with a sharp realistic sense. It enabled him to defy hostile public tribute given to cant, hypocrisy, and dissimulation.
Bertrand Russell has described Byron as ‘Aristocratic Robel’5 and in this capacity, he is quite different from the ordinary type of rebels who have limited aims with a modicum of philosophy. Once the rebellion is successful, these rebels get into the conventional mould. But Byron’s case is quite different. Born with an aristocratic pride in his destiny, he had also a metaphysical love for liberty and basic human goodness. As he did not toe the lines of literary standards and the value-system of that time, he was labeled as the leader of ‘Satanic School’ against which he suitably replied to the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey in his satirical verse ‘The Vision of Judgement.’6 If one takes a reflective view of Byron’s life and eventful literary career, one would find that the elements of Satanism in his personality were the result of the heavy odds he had to wader through to exist with a sense of pride without forgetting his aristocratic heritage.
In some respects, Byron stands on the same footing as Milton who also championed the cause of freedom and self-affirmation, but since the governing circumstances were different for these two great poets, one has to concede the point that Byron could not avoid the strains of misanthropy and Satanism for he had to defend himself, come what it may. What is admirable in Byron is that he did not allow himself to be obsessed with Satanism. In this respect, Bertrand Russell’s attempt to draw comparison between Byron and Nietzsche has a fruitful relevance:
He could feel himself the equal of the greatest sinners – the peer of Manfred, of Cain, almost of Satan himself. The Calvinist, the aristocrat, and the rebel were all equally satisfied, and so was the romantic lover whose heart was broken by the loss of the only earthly being still capable of rousing in it the gentler emotions of pity and love. Byron, though he felt himself the equal of Satan, never quite ventured to put himself in the place of God. This next step in the growth of pride was taken by Nietzsche, who says: ‘If there were Gods, how could I endure it to be no God!.’7
It means that whatever humbles one’s pride has to be adjudged false. Nietzsche like Byron, and even to a greater degree, had a pious upbringing. Apparently, Russell quotes Nietzsche to speak admiringly of Byron, who had a deeper insight into subtle processes of life and religion:
The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly, sensitively suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he recognizes.8
Byron expresses this in immortal lines:
Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.9
These quoted lines of Byron are from his poetic drama, ‘Manfred.’10 Russell’s contention is that the rebellious spirit of Byron took the form of ‘Titanic cosmic self-assertion.’11 This is true because Byron even when driven to the wall did not lose his undying courage. Once again, to ‘Manfred’, where ‘Man’ defies ‘Spirit’ and says:
Back to thy hell!
Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel;
Thou never shalt possess me, that I know;
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine;
The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts, –
Is its own origin of ill and end –
And its own place and time: in innate sense,
When stripp’d of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without,
But is absorb’s is sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.12
Byron’s here implies that man is his own end, and there is nothing apart from him. Man’s true destiny lies in his freedom. This is what Byron exemplified in his life.
REFERENSCES
1. Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, Ed. L. A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1982). P. 90.
2. Selected prose of T.S. Eliot, Ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 43.
3. Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, Ed. R.E. Prothero (London: John Murray, 1989), Vol. I, p. 203.
4. Byron Poetical Works, p. 307.
5. Byron – A collection of Critical Essays, Ed. Paul West (N. J: Prentic-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 151.
6. Byron Poetical Works, pp. 156-169.
7. Byron-A Collection of Critical Essays, Ed. Paul West. P. 153.
8. Ibid., p. 154.
9. Byron Poetical Works, pp. 156-169.
10. Byron Poetical Works, pp. 390-406.
11. Byron-a Collection of Critical Essays, p. 151.
12. Byron Poetical Works, p. 406.
Dr. Torkamaneh
