chiefly displays his sensibility via a travelogue. ‘Europe he saw’, wrote Pope of an
earlier milord on his Grand Tour, ‘and Europe saw him too.’ The later Cantos 3 and
4 have set-pieces reflecting at Waterloo or in Venice. In Switzerland, Byron writes:I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me, and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture ...This is Wordsworth on a brass instrument. Harold writes in his farewell:There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more ...Wordsworth internalized the external topics of 18th-century sensibility into a
new personal poetry; Byron processed the result for export. Comparison makes clear
the broadness of Byron’s attitudinizing. ‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean –
roll!’, he declaims. Rhetoric, the persuasive rational discourse of Burke and Gibbon,
was now amplified by emotional emphasis, simplification and repetition, in writers
as various as Sheridan, Mary Shelley and Macaulay, and in parliamentary oratory.
Winston Churchill was the last in this style.
Byron worked the crowd with romances and dramatic poems in fluent verse,
posing as himself. Only his liberalism, egotism and scepticism were sincere. Notable
among his doomed self-projections is Manfred (1817), in which the superman
refuses a deathbed repentance, telling the Abbot, ‘Old man! ’tis not too difficult to
die.’ Byron’s sensational romances continued with Cain in 1821. But his verse jour-
nalism also had a more intimate and epistolary side, glimpsed above in ‘Save concu-
bines and carnal companie’ and the irony of ‘E’en for change of scene would seek the
shades below’ – a prophecy ofDon Juan.
Having woken up famous, Byron became more than famous. After flinging herself
at him, Lady Caroline Lamb described him as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. In
1814 his half-sister gave birth to a child said to be his. In 1815 he married a rich, seri-
ous and unlucky wife. Ostracized for incest, he left England for good in 1816, travelled
to Lake Geneva, stayed with the Shelleys, and then moved to Italy. Most days Byron
was a drawing-room milord, but he had wild periods: his debauches in Venice mention
two hundred women; he was also bisexual. He sealed his European reputation as a
rebel by his death while supporting the Greek revolt against the Turks.
Byron’s distinction and originality is found in his anti-romantic Don Juan.He
tired of his own poses and of ‘cant’, the sanctimonious expression of sentiment. His
new irony is much closer to the self he reveals in his sparkling letters. Like Scott,
Edgeworth, Peacock, Landor and Austen, Byron did not think that the Romantic
revolution invalidated rational criticism. Pope he thought far better than any of the
Romantics. His mature voice is first heard in Beppo and The Vision of Judgement.
Don Juan (1818) begins
I want a hero:an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;238 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837