John Galt published his Life of Lord Byron in 1830, just six years after the poet’s death in Missolonghi, in what is now modern Greece and later part of the Ottoman Empire. Byron had been parading him around the Mediterranean for several years, his entourage much larger than a backpack. Modern readers will need to readjust their travel ideas when they read the details of the actual caravan that accompanied the Good Lord and then immediately understand why it was that wherever he went he was immediately able to access elite society. In modern terms, this is like a billionaire dot-com owner moving into the local property that used to own the town in feudal times. His presence, it seemed, demanded attention. Having said that, he was always short of money.
Aside from the occasional vocabulary we no longer recognize, John Galt’s work is easy to read, remarkably modern in tenor, except on questions of race and religion, where a modern interpretation might be confusing. It is important to understand the assumptions of these people to understand their work. Yes, Wagner was an anti-Semite, but wasn’t everyone else at the time? Rejecting his work on that basis would lead to an equal rejection of other people and institutions who shared the same beliefs, which would automatically include anything to do with Christianity and most writers. Two centuries ago, people did not see the world in the same way and it is through their eyes, not ours, that his work must be seen.
Paradoxically, Lord Byron was perceived as a liberal which, at the time, must have placed him in sympathy with at least some of the goals of the French Revolution. This is interesting, given the title of it, but understandable given the relative scarcity of it. He supported the Luddites in Britain, but his internal political life in the House of Lords was not easy and he was not elected or perhaps fit for a life in public affairs. His identification with liberal politics is exemplified in this passage from Galt, though it should be noted that at the time liberalism did not extend much into the realm of gender relations (a cicisbeo is a lover, by the way).
but young Italian women are not satisfied with good old men, and the venerable count did not object to her taking advantage of the privileges of her country to choose a cicisbeo; an Italian would have made him agreeable enough: indeed, for a time he winked at our intimacy, but finally he made an exception against me, as a foreigner, heretic, Englishman, and, worst of all, liberal”.
However, his liberalism extended to supporting liberation movements, particularly those in Greece, where he is still seen by some today as a national hero. That’s not to say that he was particularly fond of people.
Do you know, he said to the doctor, that I am almost reconciled with Saint Paul, because he says that there is no difference between Jews and Greeks, and I am of exactly the same opinion, because the character of both is different. equally vile.”
The meaning of the above reference to Wagner’s antisemitism now becomes clear. Perhaps we should reject much of the romantic poetry in the canon if we deny Wagner a place. What would be left? Answer – very little…
So what was it that Byron saw as worth fighting and sacrificing to free people he had little respect for? The key, which becomes clearer as Galt’s biography progresses, is that Byron, like other Romantics, had an inner motivation, a personal interpretation whose vivid emotion perhaps raised a screen capable of obscuring, even contradicting, the experience. His response to reality, it seems, springs not directly from the real, but from an idealized knowledge, perhaps preformed through education, birthright, and culture, that was more important, at least to the poet, than the strong evidence. that could be discarded or ignored. Galt sums up the process this way.
“that is another proof, and also conclusive, of what I have endeavored to show, that the power of the poet consisted in giving free rein to his own feelings, and not, like his great brothers, or even the minor ones, in the invention appropriate situations or feelings”
The author describes how Byron was ambivalent towards the reality of classical sites, not showing much interest in archeology or history. Perhaps, through his education in the English public school, he was by the way with the details all the time, so I didn’t need to absorb the direct experience. Perhaps the assumptions of his social class and culture did not admit the contradiction of an already internalized ideal that was simply more important than any concrete reality.
Galt’s account of Byron’s life, however, seems to lack evidence of the hours the poet spent writing. Given that he died in his mid-thirties, he spent eight years travelling, and did fifteen years in the House of Lords and several years in education, one would expect to find him working with pencil and paper most of the time. . But Galt offers little evidence for this, preferring to focus on the journeys themselves, the people he met, and the consequences of the complete breakdown of his family and marital relationships. But Galt quotes extensively from poems that, once we absorb the author’s insight that the work rarely describes anything more than the poet’s own emotional state, become clear statements of personality. One feels that Lord Byron was not prone to great self-analysis or soul-searching. He had his opinions, and those were made of granite.
He campaigned for the independence of Greece and did a lot to achieve what the Greek people wanted at the time. But one feels that for Byron he was working towards the reestablishment of a classical ideal, a quintessential democracy that existed longer in school textbooks than in ancient Greece. Perhaps “liberal” is too strong a word for Byron… Perhaps “libertarian” would be closer to the modern equivalent. He was in favor of individual freedom, what he saw as the natural order, and more democracy, although this probably did not include women or the lower classes.
How far we have progressed in the last two hundred years can be judged by the fact that Byron secured both personal fame and the prestige of office in his own time with certain personal characteristics. He went to public school and to Oxbridge, studied ancient Greek, achieved political status and public fame while largely ignoring the scientific advances of his day, was a libertarian, and had various failures in both personal and family relationships. It couldn’t happen now, right?