Many thanks to Jonathan Gross for his review in this latest issue of the Byron Journal.
READING BYRON: POEMS – LIFE – POLITICS. By Bernard Beatty. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. Pp. xvi + 266. Hardback. ISBN 978-1-80085-462-8. £76.00.
Bernard Beatty’s Reading Byron, edited by David Woodhouse, with a concluding conversation with Gavin Hopps, is divided into three sections: Poems, Life, and Politics. All three sections of Beatty’s excellent new book offer rich readings of Byron’s verse based on years of teaching and lecturing several generations of Byronists, including Alan Rawes, Gavin Hopps, Jonathon Shears and Anthony Howe at Liverpool University, where Beatty taught for many years as a Senior Fellow in the School of English. That he also held a position at St Andrews as Associate Fellow in the School of Divinity is not surprising, for Beatty explores religious questions with erudition and assurance, not as an outsider, but as one who himself has grappled with the meaning of faith in life and literature. Those who have read Beatty’s previous volumes will see a highly engaged discussion of eschatological issues in Childe Harold, Lara, Manfred, Cain, and Don Juan.
In his introduction to the volume, Jerome McGann explains that Bernard Beatty ‘has been one of our time’s most important readers of Byron’s poetry for a simple but crucial reason: his clear grasp of the intellectual power of the verse’. He explores several phrases such as ‘half forgets’, ‘bounding main’, and ‘dark imaginings’ (Lara, I, 317), quoting Beatty’s observation that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is ‘recognizably addressed to our understanding’ even ‘where Byron’s own understanding … was muddled’. McGann makes two crucial points: one is about the darkness of Byron’s verse. The other is about how particular phrases express that darkness. ‘“Half forgets” is a key prosodic annunciation, a leitmotiv in this poem but a recurrent resource for Byron, especially in constructions fostered by the dialectical prosody he lifted from Dryden and especially Pope: “And all my sins and half my woe” (The Giaour, 1201); “And thus, half sportive half in fear, I said” (The Corsair I, 446); “All love, half languor, and half fire” (Mazeppa, 216). These are just three typical prosodic variations of the many he spins from that half/all trope’ (p. 4). At a more existential level, McGann begins and ends with a key insight. ‘The most serious poetry will let you know that you don’t buy significant experience for a song or a poem; and if in the mortal world of getting and spending your experiences were as intense and irregular as Byron’s – ‘unquiet feelings’ driven to an ‘extreme verge’ (DJ IV, 106) – the price to pay for the poems would be very high indeed’ (p. 2).
Part One, for this reader, is the most engaging and informative part of the book. These are new essays, written expressly for this volume, and they are superb. One does not have to agree with Beatty’s assertions to benefit, enormously, from his encyclopaedic survey of religious themes in Byron’s works. For students who cannot identify a single parable of Jesus, Beatty’s book could not come at a better time. Of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Beatty writes: ‘Like Dryden, he took history with biblical seriousness but interrelated and paralleled history with history’ (p. 23). An example of Beatty’s erudition can be found in one representative footnote: ‘Of course, allegorical reading of the Scriptures did not disappear for good in the eighteenth century, despite Swift’s loathing of it in A Tale of a Tub, since it is bound up with liturgical practice, was revived as part of the revival of interest in patristic writings in the nineteenth century and has been extensively commented on in the twentieth century. See for example George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows … and Earl Miner’s Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present’ (p. 23, n. 8). The curated bibliography Beatty provides in his informative notes is highly rewarding, but not surprising.
Anyone who has attended a Byron conference in the last thirty years, or had a conversation with Beatty on a bus, has had the pleasure of hearing his scholastic improvisations, his extended questions, that are marked by nothing if not ‘rhetorical flourishes’ and a spontaneous Socratic engagement with the conference presenter. For example, ‘The Encyclopédie carefully arranged all known knowledge as an anti-Bible by the non-cohering sequence of the alphabet’. That brilliant summary is followed by this one: ‘[Byron] read the Scriptures more in the manner of Dryden than of Lessing, Fichte or Renan. Like Dryden, he took history with biblical seriousness but interrelated and paralleled history with history’ (p. 23). He concludes this interesting section by noting that though it ‘would be absurd to suggest that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a miniature Bible’, ‘it is odd how the typological connection has been missed even in those many studies which have attended to Byron’s religion … Byron did not read the Bible as he read Horace or Virgil, Richard Knolles’s History of the Turks or Gibbon. It is not a matter of the biblical sublime, biblical themes or history, or even of the stylistic features that Erich Auerbach so famously unearthed. What Byron learned and loved – “I am sure that no man reads the Bible with more pleasure than I do” (HVSV, 569) – was the openness of biblical narrative to later insertions that then become the transformed text. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a miniaturized Bible at least in this respect. And there is the whole habit of mind that reads forwards and backwards, defines poetry as “the feeling of a Former world and Future” (BLJ VIII, 37), can find an Exodus in the Return from Babylon and intimates an imminent Destruction in the heedless feasting of the Israelites at Sinai, the courtiers of Sardanapalus at Nineveh or the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball before Waterloo’ (p. 24).
This rich study then proceeds from Childe Harold’s ‘types of history’ to Lara’s ‘acts of will’. Declaring his preference for The Giaour, The Corsair, and Lara, Beatty takes Lara as representative of the Tales ‘because I think that it is the best of them all’. Beatty’s epigraph to the chapter is telling: ‘What determinant is it then that Socrates lacks in determining what sin is? It is will, defiant will’, we read in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. A second epigraph that opens Beatty’s chapter comes from Lara: ‘’Till at last confounded good and ill, /And half mistook for fate the acts of will: …’ (Lara I, 335–36). Beatty is at his best in offering wellchiselled paragraphs that survey the history of ideas with a masterful flourish. ‘The province of Lara, to use its own terminology, is “man o’er-laboured with his being’s strife” (I, 632), a dark metaphysics of a new kind, which yet reopened modes of thinking that the Enlightenment had either ignored or ridiculed. It is more like the realm of Hamlet or the Existentialists, in that Byron links “being” with a concern for the hidden depths of the self and its stricken yet unsubdued awareness of death. Hazlitt, for instance, who did not care for them, said that Byron’s Tales were “flowers strewed o’er the face of death”’ (p. 42).
The book is equally helpful in bringing together works of literature well beyond the Romantic period; it will aid a lecturer in a university, striving to place Byron’s poetry in the larger curriculum of British literature: the references to Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope are masterful, but so are those to Greek and Roman works. ‘It is a commonplace of Byron criticism that he was fascinated by the story of Adam and Eve as archetypal transgressors, but of course the Judaic-Christian tradition was not the only one on which he could draw to deny the Platonic contention that the wellspring of human transgression was a deficiency of reason. Ovid’s Medea, in the seventh book of his Metamorphoses, famously exclaims “video meliora proboque/deteriora sequor” (“I see and desire the better: I follow the worse”). Medea’s sentiment is more or less identical with Saint Paul’s “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I” (Romans 7:15). For both, it is not reason but the will where the fault lies. Paul’s deep concern with this problem is built into his theology, but Ovid’s sense of it is dispersed into the various narratives of his Metamorphoses that present a variety of human experiences, both recognizable and bizarre, where human choices, chance and the different choices of the gods mingle in ways that Plato would regard with distaste. For Ovid and the narrator of Don Juan it is love that conquers reason, but for Saint Paul and the Byron of the Tales it is more mysterious – something innate in the will’ (p. 40). Beatty notes that ‘Sin is real to Byron in a way that it is not to his Romantic contemporaries, even Blake and Coleridge’ (p. 46). ‘Cain claims to “thirst for good”, with theological precision: “And who and what doth not? Who covets evil / For its own bitter sake? – None – nothing”! (II, ii, 238–40)’. Beatty brilliantly notes that there ‘is something wholly familiar and yet wholly inexplicable about coveting and choosing what embitters us. Byron’s Tales ask why this can be, especially in the context of the scale and intensity of human violence. The “Enlightenment” part of him, perhaps most evident in his prose, will seek partial explanations in material circumstances and psychological motivation. There is another part of him, appalled and fascinated, that wonders whether the whole business of human life in its unknown origins is on the side of darkness, hence his interest in Lucifer, Manicheism and demons. But Byron’s deepest compulsion, when wrestling with the condition of “man o’er-laboured with his being’s strife”, is to look back to man’s first disobedience, what he calls “This ineradicable taint of sin” (CHP IV, 126)’ (pp. 46–47).
Beatty sums up Byron’s definition of the Enlightenment by considering the writers he admired. ‘Byron knew his Voltaire, Gibbon and Bayle as well as anybody, and these are some of the writers that come to mind when using the word “Enlightenment” as a shorthand. But it should be remembered that the English authors of the recent past Byron most admired were Dryden, Pope, Swift and Johnson, who have some affinities with continental “Enlightenment” but also separate themselves from it: Dryden became a Catholic, Pope was one, Johnson was a High Anglican, Swift was some sort of Christian. There is a cult of the heroic will in Dryden (partly influenced by Corneille); Pope savages the increasing confidence of science; Johnson is haunted by the will’s tendency to deceive itself in false wishes; Swift’s satire is often directed against rationalism’ (p. 47, n. 10).
Beatty offers two versions of Byron. One is of a serious intellectual, steeped in biblical lore. The other is a mere ‘rotter’, a bad man who did bad things. Both Gavin Hopps and Bernard Beatty come to terms with Byron’s legacy by considering the biographies that treat him as just that. It is not pleasant to read biographies by Phyllis Grosskurth, Benita Eisler, and Fiona MacCarthy that judge him in the balance and find him wanting, as if the life could be separated (precisely as Beatty does here) from the works. Whether one is a New Critic or a New Historicist, the blending of Byron’s life and work has not always accrued to Byron’s credit: Byronists are a congenial lot because, like James Joyce, they recognize Byron’s courageous voice in a conformist world. Byron represented true freedom, not some conformist version of it. It was that courage that led him to be admired and followed by Lermontov, Mickiewicz, Pushkin, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and many others.
I found this Byron in Beatty’s book quite often, while my understanding of Byron’s theology was improved by passages such as these: ‘The dark mystery of Byronic heroes in the Tales never finds light. Byron is both appalled by this and yet in some way celebrates it. He is on both sides in Lara and all the dark poems. He presents with interior sympathy the exaltation of the will in peculiar men and accepts the Romantic version of a Prometheus who will never be reconciled with Zeus, so Lara is presented as a superior and often charming being. He is adored by Kaled and portrayed as the brave and popular leader of an uprising against a corrupt aristocracy. At the same time, he is also cursed, sterile, held by guilt arising from unacknowledged events, and finally, a cypher of negation, shaking his fist against God and the circumstances of life. The reader is led into sympathy with Lara and also to judgement on him, and is intrigued and unsettled by this partly because it uncovers dilemmas and uncertainties in the reader too’ (p. 48). Beatty’s book traces the reader’s response to Byron, without doing so in archly theoretical ways. Yet Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser would have found sympathy with Beatty, who reads Byron as Fish read Milton. Both readers are ‘surprised by sin’. ‘Faced with this convincing self-exultation, we find ourselves therefore refusing to believe that Lara is simply a murderer even though we suspect that he is and therefore that we might, imaginatively, be. Byron plays this game on us again more subtly in Manfred, whereas Cain’s dramatized fratricide shows us directly what Lara and Manfred hide’ (p. 49). Beatty notes that ‘Lara and Byron are cagey about where Lara’s evil originates. Is it evil at all? If so, does it arise from faulty youth, inherent disposition, undisclosed events in an unknown territory, trafficking with spirits, the murder of Ezzelin? In the case of the murder, the tale shows us the before and after, then a rumour and then another little tale. At any point of clarification, we will find that there is some further reference back. This is characteristic of all the Byronic heroes up to Manfred. The concealment of origin in an apparent indication of origin is the métier of sinfulness’ (p. 48).
Beatty’s discussion of the English cantos of Don Juan highlights Catholic themes, extending arguments he has made elsewhere, but with particular attention paid to Byron’s literary achievement. His delineation of the English country home led me to think of Lord Henry as Sir William Lamb, with Caroline Lamb and Lady Melbourne appearing as ghosts, but Beatty’s approach is less biographical than eschatological. What is the meaning of Norman Abbey in British religious life? Who incarnates spiritual perfection, Lady Adeline Amundeville or Aurora Raby, Protestant proto-Catholic forms of social being. It is not a question I would have ever asked or even considered (perhaps I have not articulated it correctly here), but it is one Bernard Beatty has addressed again and again. I am sure I will come to understand why as I continue teaching Byron.
The next section of the book is entitled, ‘Life’. Gavin Hopps offers a fine summary of it in the interview: ‘in the Albany chapter, instead of a dashing, posturing, swashbuckling Byron, we see a quieter, more bookish Byron, contemplative as well as adventurous. In the Seaham chapter, instead of the listless suitor and monstrous husband, we find a Byron who fits in, who’s willing to settle – almost, dare I say, a domesticated Byron. And in the Venice to Ravenna chapter instead of, or perhaps alongside, the portrait of Byron as concupiscently challenged or a heartless rake, we are presented with the Byron who is capable of fidelity’ (p. 233).
Beatty explains why his corrective reading of Byron’s life is necessary. ‘When I started off with Byron in the early 60s, the whole world around me was contemptuous or, even worse, praised him as an extraordinarily talented, secondary author who just happens to have the right views on war. Wilson Knight’s essay in The Burning Oracle on the Tales and then his book on Pope, with that very long section of Byron and the Book of Life’ were more positive experiences for Beatty. The ‘received view’ was that Don Juan ‘was basically great because it was a satirical poem, and that it got into Byron’s verse the idiom of his letters, which is so much better than that nasty rhetoric that he used in Childe Harold. That view made me absolutely puke, so I started off there and I’m still there’ (p. 233).
Beatty’s reading of Cain and Don Juan are also helpful, though space necessitates my focusing mainly on the first. The chapter in which Beatty really shines is the one on Cain. I would recommend as required reading for anyone lecturing on the play to read the first five pages of Beatty’s chapter, which wonderfully condense the complex and nuanced history of Christianity in England that we only thought we knew. He touches upon the Bishop of Lincoln, Pitt’s tutor, William Paley’s relationship to the radicalism of Thomas Paine, and John Locke’s On the Reasonableness of Christianity and Letter concerning Toleration. He concludes that most Englishmen did not understand the uniqueness of their version of Christianity. The ‘typical Englishman’, Wilberforce writes, was ‘little acquainted’ with Christianity ‘as distinct’ from ‘religion in general’ and ‘mere morality’ (p. 88). It suited Pitt, Beatty concludes, ‘during a war against a revolutionary France, which now emblematically dissociated Christianity from reason, to try to accommodate Evangelical piety in a national ship where undogmatic, “reasonable” Anglicanism provided ballast’ (p. 88).
Beatty’s summary of Cain is helpful in providing an overview of the play’s structure. ‘Cain is two-thirds ideas with which he disagrees (“argumentative blasphemy”), and one-third dramatic action, which he admires. Yet he neither asks, nor notices that he does not ask: what is the relation of the first two-thirds of the play (ideas) to its last third (action “brought about with great dramatic skill and effect”)? Can a play showing dramatic action to be the disastrous result of the ideas that it has presented “inculcate” those ideas’? After discussing Francis Jeffrey’s view of the play, which he faults for not considering the play as a play, he notes: ‘Cain is about the relation of the first two thirds to the last third, and the concern with ideas in the first two thirds of the play is dramatically instrumental rather than expository. Cain was written by Lord Byron rather than George Bernard Shaw’ (p. 90).
The third section of the book, after ‘Poems’ and ‘Life’, is ‘Politics’. Beatty argues that Byron is not a political icon. Before doing so, he provides an extremely interesting account of icons in Christianity, Byron’s spotting of one at Newstead Abbey; on politics more generally, he surveys Cold War liberalism, Lenin’s attempt to canonize Byron as a socialist with a statue, and other odd appropriations. For a writer who appeals to politicians as diverse as Ian Gilmour and Michael Foot, a Tory and a socialist who both admired Byron, one would have to agree with Beatty’s assessment that Byron cannot be appropriated as a political icon: ‘In the sense that I have tried to establish here, Byron is quite clearly not a political icon at all. He has no constituency (with the important exception of the Greek nation, which nevertheless does not have main custody of his image). His image has never been simplified into a single master set of signs. Is he, potentially, a naval hero like his granddad and Nelson, as in the Sanders portrait? Or is he a dashy Oriental voluptuary, as in the National Portrait Gallery’s 1835 replica by Phillips? Or, when the earlier version of that picture is cited (the one painted by Phillips in 1813, now in the British Embassy in Athens), is he perhaps a Lawrence of Arabia guerrilla fighter who has gone native on behalf of a small nation? Everyone who knows Byron knows the difficulty of recognizing him across the various images that we have of him. This is not a difficulty we find with Lenin, or Che Guevara, or for that matter Wordsworth. Byron has no single image, nor does he have a single political legacy. And yet the poet who wrote “there is that within me which shall tire / Torture and Time” (CHP IV, 137) was entirely right. There was. Byron has eyes in death even if we cannot find any image of him that suggests this directly (the Thorwaldsen statue comes the closest in my view)’ (p. 212).
‘Conversations with Gavin Hopps’ includes two ‘connected’ but ‘unrehearsed’ ‘conversations’ about the presentation of Byron in Beatty’s book that took place in March 2021. The conversation begins with an account of the ‘recovery’ of Byron that took place over the last fifty years. Hopps questions Beatty about the difference between McGann’s recovery and Beatty’s (p. 221): ‘McGann emphasizes a kind of Enlightenment Byron and, in the introduction to this book and elsewhere, he talks about a more nihilistic Byron. Whereas you foreground, in a sense, Byron’s interest in and indebtedness to scriptural modes, you also highlight his “Catholic trajectory” and speak about the fact that he’s as much related to Jerusalem as Königsberg’ (p. 221). Beatty argues that ‘Jerusalem’ influenced Byron more than ‘Königsberg’ and that he shares with McGann an interest in Byron’s dark, nihilistic vision. Tellingly, Beatty states that ‘I left Catholicism for about 11 years in 1961. And in that process of leaving Catholicism – I had already become hooked on Byron – I found the articulation of my processes away from Catholicism, and everything it represented, to be articulated for me by Byron’ (p. 222). When he reconverted to Catholicism, Beatty states, he found Byron ‘articulating’ his move back. Fiery Dust was a ‘breath of fresh air’, ‘to have such an intelligent mind reading Byron at a time when Byron’s intelligence was not taken for granted at all’ (p. 222). Hopps explores Beatty’s view that Childe Harold is a ‘a unified whole made up of interrupting and divergent voices’ (p. 223), Beatty’s course on ‘voices in poetry’ and his account of the ‘scriptural structure of the poem and its quasi-musical organization’ (p. 223). Though McGann was a magisterial editor, he was also ‘fantastically’ interested in Byron’s voice, which Byron did ‘as well as anybody’ (p. 223). Byron was interested in screams and shrieks and the book includes a fascinating discussion of both.
Hopps offers a studiously attentive reading of Beatty’s book. For Hopps, Beatty’s second chapter is about the philosophical seriousness of the tales. Hopps assumes that it is an ‘insufficiently contested view’ that Byron is a child when he thinks. Beatty responds as follows. ‘It’s kind of an absurd phrase to use about Byron – in the sense that Kant is manifestly philosophically serious or Leibniz, or one might almost say Saint Augustine. Byron manifestly isn’t exactly like that. He’s not a philosopher. He doesn’t like philosophy. Philosophy normally proceeds in Western tradition through argument, and Byron dislikes argument. He isn’t a particularly good arguer, so in that sense he isn’t philosophical. And “serious”, again, is another odd epithet to use about Byron, since he makes such fun of serious people. In the sense that Wordsworth is “serious”, Byron isn’t serious’ (p. 225). Beatty argues that Byron is ‘serious’, however, because he asks such questions as ‘What is?’, ‘What is the case?’, ‘What is underlying the case?’ (p. 225).
Hopps feels that one of the valuable aspects of Beatty’s book is to underline ‘helpful’ and ‘unhelpful’ ways of reading Byron. He sees, quite rightly, that there is a meta-concern to Beatty’s book: how we ‘get at’ Byron. ‘So, for example, [the helpful side includes] thinking about his work in relation to the scriptural model of harmonized but divergent voices, attending to his typological habits of mind, or his way of thinking by means of dramatized action; and on the “unhelpful” side, reading him according to the terms set by the other Romantics, since as you point out towards the end of Part I, Byron’s refusal of the other Romantics’ kind of seriousness has made it hard for us to see his own’ (p. 226).
Beatty emphasizes Byron’s accessibility as an explanatory factor in his success. He suggests that Childe Harold and Don Juan are more readable than Endymion (I have heard Timothy Webb make precisely the opposite point). At the level of rhetoric, perhaps, but not allusion: many students do not know what the Moniteur or Courier are, who Castlereagh was, how to spell Bonaparte, and why William Pitt matters. Close reading does not work with Byron, as the New Critics discovered to their dismay: there’s too much history. And that’s a difference between British and non-British readers of Byron. American readers, for example, sometimes pretend that British culture is more accessible to them than it really is, missing the fact that ‘The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language’, as George Bernard Shaw quipped. And yet Beatty is right: Byron IS accessible rhetorically precisely because of his declamatory style. I can throw a work like The Deformed Transformed at my students in Chicago and they understand it completely. ‘Byron is readable’, Beatty explains. ‘Byron is understandable. Now that makes it very difficult for people brought up in the later nineteenth century who say: “But the whole point of poetry is that it isn’t understandable – it’s obscure – it’s full of concetti – it’s The Waste Land – it’s symbols – it’s the unconscious – it’s anything you like – but it isn’t understandable”. For them, poetry doesn’t have any relationship with normal language or if it does it is a very minor form of poetry’ (p. 227).
Beatty explains Byron and cliché in helpful ways. ‘A whole series of topics that are standard – he voices them, he never fears them. He doesn’t mind cliches. He goes to Rome – he’ll talk about the bloody Coliseum. He’ll talk about the corny statues that everybody sees, and you’ll see a sunset. What else would you expect? So, for those reasons he’s despised. And yet, for those very same reasons, he’s readable. He touches people, all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, and yet, yet, yet this very person, who is so human, who so deeply understands common kinds of human experience, and doesn’t shove them away in the way Keats will shove them away, takes you deeply into all kinds of strange territories, strange connections, strange darknesses, strange brighnesses even’ (p. 227). Beatty and Hopps bring us back to literature’s higher, more existential concerns, and remind us of why people majored in English in the first place.
Bernard Beatty’s Reading Byron, encouraged and edited by David Woodhouse, summarized and appreciated in superb ways by Gavin Hopps, is a gift to Byron scholars and readers, who will learn how to read religious themes in Byron’s poetry in ways that have become almost unrecoverable. The term ‘dazzling’ is often misapplied to a book’s erudition, but Bernard Beatty’s knowledge of Byron is dazzling; he makes a fine case for a spiritual appreciation of Byron’s literary project. His generosity towards younger scholars, as well as those of his own generation, is heart-warming. He shows a catholicity of taste that extends from bus rides with Stephen Minta and Michel Charlot to more pressurized academic panels with the leading Byronists of his generation, of which he, of course, is the leading figure (Hopps is particularly good about where, when, and how we learn literature, what he calls ‘unscripted exchange’ (p. 239)). I would suggest purchasing Bernard Beatty’s complete works if one wishes to teach Byron in a university setting or simply to enjoy the range of his complex thought, the ‘intellectual power of the verse’. And this book is an excellent place to begin, written by a scholar who could not be more knowledgeable about the subject at hand.
JONATHAN GROSS
DePaul University
Comments