This long, digressive satiric poem is a loose narrative held together only by the hero, Don Juan, and the narrator, Byron himself, who maintains a mocking, ironic relationship with the story. Byron claimed that he had no plot in mind as he wrote the poem, and he continued to add episodes as long as he lived, completing sixteen cantos before his death. He began the poem in 1818 in Italy during a period of wild self-indulgence and profligacy. The first two cantos were published in 1819. Like many satires, it was criticized by some as being immoral
STYLE. The Stanza form is ottava rima, an eight-line iambic pentameter stanza with the rhyme scheme ab ab ab cc. The final two lines of each stanza form a couplet which Byron frequently uses for a punch line or comic wind-up. Byron also creates comic effects with his use of forced rhymes ("new one" . . . "Juan") and rhymes of two or three syllables ("intellectual" . . . "henpeckedy you all"). The poem's light tone suggests that Byron does not take the characters and events seriously; the language is colloquial, conversational, and slangy.
THE DON JUAN CHARACTER. Certain incidents and characters are drawn from Byron's life, but he is not Don Juan. He names his hero after the most notorious lover and seducer of women in European literature. Originally a villain in a Spanish story, Don Juan had become the archetype of the heartless, remorseless seducer.
The Don Juan character represents a merely physical desire divorced from any spiritual or even humane feelings. Ironically, Byron gives the name of this cold and callous stock character to his own, more modest hero. Byron's young lover is, at first, simple and naive. Every woman who meets him finds him charming; thus he has not need for force, treachery, or the seductive arts. Byron projects his own, more worldly personality as the narrator.
CANTO I. Canto I presents the birth, childhood, and education of Don Juan up through his first seduction and affair. Don Juan is the son of an aristocratic father and an intellectual mother. After the father's early death, little Juan is educated according to his mother's plan. She has him tutored in arts and sciences, but she forbids him to learn anything "that hints continuation of the species." Further, in his study of classical literature he cannot read any of the "looser" or suggestive poems; he must read only expurgated versions of these. In stanzas 52 and 53 the narrator protests such a distorted education.
The narration moves forward to Juan's sixteenth year, when his mother's friend, Donna Julia, begins to find him attractive. She is a pretty, young woman married to an elderly husband, and she deceives herself into believing that she can subdue her attraction to Juan. She vows not to see him but then goes the next day to visit his mother. Donna Julia imagines that she can maintain a platonic love for Juan, but all her resolve fails when she finds herself alone with him. Naive Juan, meanwhile, does not know the cause of his own discontent. He seeks answers in nature and in philosophy. Stanza 115 pictures Juan and Julia in a garden, half-embracing. The poet undercuts this romantic scene with a mocking tirade against Plato for spreading false ideas about love. In stanza 116 the temptation has become too great, and she "whispering 'I will ne'er consent' -- consented." Byron shows the folly of self-deception that would deny the physical basis of love.
After a digression the poet returns to Julia and Juan six months later. Their affair has intensified, and Julia's husband, Don Alphonso, has become suspicious. He breaks into her bedroom one night with a posse of friends and servants, makes a comic search, but finds nothing. Sending the others away, he apologizes to his wife for his foolish jealousy. As he lingers by her bed, he sees Juan's shoes. Young and slim, Juan has been hiding in the bed clothes all the time. There is a confrontation between lover and husband, but luckily neither has a sword. Juan escapes, but scandal follows. Julia's husband sends her to a convent, and Juan's mother sends him away on a grand tour to, ironically, perfect his morals.
Canto I ends with an address by the poet to the reader in which he claims the story is true and gives as proof the many similar stories that appear in newspapers, plays, and operas.
Then Byron as narrator sets out some poetical commandments by which he claims his writing is governed. Generally, he follows the principles of classical and English poetry and rejects the taste of his romantic contemporaries. He claims also that his poem is moral and promises a very moral conclusion in the final canto.
Finally he comments on his own situation. Finding himself used up and burnt out at the age of thirty, he say, "I have squandered my whole summer while 'twas May" (stanza 213). He laments the loss of freshness and creative power but believes he has gained in judgment. He resolves to live more tamely from now on. Finally, he dismisses fame as a delusion and as a false motive for writing poetry.
SUBSEQUENT CANTOS. The next cantos of this poem describe young Juan's many and varied adventures. He loses his tutor when their ship becomes wrecked. The lovely and innocent Haidee discovers him washed ashore on a Greek island. Their ideal love is opposed by Haidee's father, the pirate Lambro. Juan loses a fight with Lambro and is put into chains. Haidee's heart is broken, and she fades away and dies. Meanwhile, Juan is sold as a slave to a sultana in Constantinople. She also loves him, but when she becomes jealous, Juan fears for his life. He escapes and joins the Russian army, eventually finding himself at the court of Catherine the Great, who, of course, also loves him. She sends him on a diplomatic mission to England.
The final cantos show Juan moving about in English society, providing an opportunity for Byron to satirize contemporary social behaviors of his compatriots. He attacks the hypocrisy of the English, their false morality and their bad taste.
In Don Juan Byron found a form suited to his tastes and abilities. Unconfined by a set narrative line, he allows himself as narrator the freedom to comment ironically on the action and characters, to digress into personal allusion, and to instruct the reader about how to read and judge the poem. having a seemingly endless supply of incidents and comments, Byron might have gone on forever. But the poem was cut short by Byron's heroic and fatal attempt to help liberate the Greeks. 作者: mu 时间: 2005-12-7 18:42 标题: "She Walks in Beauty" "She Walks in Beauty" [1810]
This simple lyric is reminiscent of the Renaissance love lyric, in which the lady's physical beauty is seen as an indication of her inner beauty and purity of soul.
The poem was inspired by Byron's meeting his cousin when she was wearing a black mourning dress. With dark hair and fair face, the lady is a mingling of various lights and shades, comparable to the light and darkness of a night sky with stars.
In the final stanza, the mingled "tints" are signs of goodness, peace, and innocence. The calm, chaste tone of the poem is like the character of the lady.作者: mu 时间: 2005-12-7 18:58 标题: Notes Later Years
In the spring of 1822 a heavy and unlooked-for sorrow befell Byron. Allegra, his natural daughter by Claire Clairmont, died at the convent of Bagna Cavallo on the 20th of April 1822. She was in her sixth year, an interesting and attractive child, and he had hoped that her companionship would have atoned for his enforced separation from Ada. She is buried in a nameless grave at the entrance of Harrow church. Soon after the death of Allegra, Byron wrote the last of his eight plays, The Deformed Transformed (published by John Hunt, February 20, 1824). The sources are Goethe’s Faust, The Three Brothers, a novel by Joshua Pickersgill, and various chronicles of the sack of Rome in 1527. The theme or motif is the interaction of personality and individuality. Remonstrances on the part of publisher and critic induced him to turn journalist. The control of a newspaper or periodical would enable him to publish what and as he pleased. With this object in view he entered into a kind of literary partnership with Leigh Hunt, and undertook to transport him, his wife and six children to Pisa, and to lodge them in the Villa Lanfranchi. The outcome of this arrangement was The Liberal - Verse and Prose from the South. Four numbers were issued between October 1822 and June 1823. The Liberal did not succeed financially, and the joint manage was a lamentable failure. Correspondence of Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828) was Hunt’s revenge for the slights and indignities which he suffered in Byron’s service.
Yachting was one of the chief amusements of the English colony at Pisa. A schooner, the "Bolivar," was built for Byron, and a smaller boat, the "Don Juan" renamed "Ariel," for Shelley. Hunt arrived at Pisa on the 1st of July. On the 8th of July Shelley, who had remained in Pisa on Hunt’s account, started for a sail with his friend Williams and a lad named Vivian. The Arid was wrecked in the Gulf of Spezia and Shelley and his companions were drowned. On the 16th of August Byron and Hunt witnessed the "burning of Shelley" on the seashore near Via Reggio. Byron told Moore that "all of Shelley was consumed but the heart." Whilst the fire was burning Byron swam out to the "Bolivar" and back to the shore. The hot sun and the violent exercise brought on one of those many fevers which weakened his constitution and shortened his life.
The Austrian government would not allow the Gambas or the countess Guiccioli to remain in Pisa. As a half measure Byron took a villa for them at Montenero near Leghorn, but as the authorities were still dissatisfied they removed to Genoa. Byron and Leigh Hunt left Pisa on the last day of September. On reaching Genoa Byron took up his quarters with the Gambas at the Casa Saluzzo, "a fine old palazzo with an extensive view over the bay," and Hunt and his party at the Casa Negroto with Mrs. Shelley. Life at Genoa was uneventful. Of Hunt and Mrs. Shelley he saw as little as possible, and though his still unpublished poems were at the service of The Liberal, he did little or nothing to further its success. Each number was badly received.
Byron had some reason to fear that his popularity was on the wane, and though he had broken with Murray and was offering Don Juan to John Hunt, the publisher of The Liberal, he meditated a run down to Naples and a recommencement of Childe Harold. There was a limit to his defiance of the "world’s rebuke." Home politics and the congress of Verona (November-December 1822) suggested a satire entitled The Age of Bronze (published April 1, 1823). It is, as he said, cries out for notes, but it embodies some of his finest and most vigorous work as a satirist. By the middle of February (1823) he had completed The Island; or Christian and his Comrades (published June 26, 1823). The sources are Bligh’s Narrative of the Mutiny of the Bounty, and Mariner’s Account of the Tonga Islands. Satire and tale are a reversion to his earlier method. The execution of The Island is hurried and unequal, but there is a deep and tender note in the love-story and the recital of the "feasts and loves and wars" of the islanders.
When The Island was finished, Byron went on with Don Juan. Early in March the news reached him that he had been elected a member of the Greek Committee, a small body of influential Liberals who had taken up the cause of the liberation of Greece. Byron at once offered money and advice, and after some hesitation on the score of health, determined to go to Greece. His first step was to sell the Bolivar to Lord Blessington, and to purchase the Hercules, a collier-built tub of 120 tons. On the 23rd of July the Hercules sailed from Leghorn and anchored off Cephalonia on the 3rd of August. The party on board consisted of Byron, Pietro Gamba, Trelawny, Hamilton Browne and six or seven servants. The next four months were spent at Cephalonia, at first on board the Hercules, in the harbor of Argostoli and afterwards at Metaxata. The object of this delay was to ascertain the real state of affairs in Greece. The revolutionary Greeks were split up into parties, not to say factions, and there were several leaders. It was a question to which leader he would attach himself. At length a message reached him which inspired him with confidence. He received a summons from Prince Alexander Mavrocordato, a man of birth and education, urging him to come at once to Missolonghi, and enclosing a request from the legislative body to co-operate with Mavrocordato in the organization of western Greece.
Byron felt that he could act with a "clear conscience" in putting himself at the disposal of a man whom he regarded as the authorized leader and champion of the Greeks. He sailed from Argostoli on the 29th of December 1823, and after an adventurous voyage landed at Missolonghi on the 5th of January 1824. He met with a royal reception. Byron may have sought, but he did not find, "a soldier’s grave." During his three months’ residence at Missolonghi he accomplished little and he endured much. He advanced large sums of money for the payment of the troops, for repair and construction of fortifications, for the provision of medical appliances. He brought opposing parties into line, and served as a link between Odysseus, the democratic leader of the insurgents, and the prince Mavrocordato. He was eager to take the field, but he never got the chance. A revolt in the Morea, and the repeated disaffection of his Suliote guard prevented him from undertaking the capture of Epacto, an exploit which he had reserved for his own leadership. He was beset with difficulties, but at length events began to move. On the 18th of March he received an invitation from Odysseus and other chiefs to attend a conference at Salona, and by the same messenger an offer from the government to appoint him governor-general of the enfranchised parts of Greece. He promised to attend the conference but did not pledge himself to the immediate acceptance of office. But to Salona he never came. " Roads and rivers were impassable," and the conference was inevitably postponed.
His health had given way, but he does not seem to have realized that his life was in danger. On the 15th of February he was struck down by an epileptic fit, which left him speechless though not motionless. He recovered sufficiently to conduct his business as usual, and to drill the troops. But he suffered from dizziness in the head and spasms in the chest, and a few days later he was seized with a second though slighter convulsion. These attacks may have hastened but they did not cause his death. For the first week of April the weather confined him to the house, but on the 9th a letter from his sister raised his spirits and tempted him to ride out with Gamba. It came on to rain, and though he was drenched to the skin he insisted on dismounting and returning in an open boat to the quay in front of his house. Two hours later he was seized with ague and violent rheumatic pains. On the 11th he rode out once more through the olive groves, attended by his escort of Suliote guards, but for the last time. Whether he had got his deathblow, or whether copious blood-letting made recovery impossible, he gradually grew worse, and on the ninth day of his illness fell into a comatose sleep. It was reported that in his delirium he had called out, half in English, half in Italian, "Forward forward courage! follow my example-don’t be afraid !" and that he tried to send a last message to his sister and to his wife. He died at six o’clock in the evening of the 19th of April 1824, aged thirty-six years and three months. The Greeks were heartbroken. Mavrocordato gave orders that thirty-seven minute-guns should be fired at daylight and decreed a general mourning of twenty-one days. His body was embalmed and lay in state. On the 25th of May his remains, all but the heart, which is buried at Missolonghi, were sent back to England, and were finally laid beneath the chancel of the village church of Hucknall-Torkard on the 16th of July 1824. The authorities would not sanction burial in Westminster Abbey, and there is neither bust nor statue of Lord Byron in Poets’ Corner.
The title passed to his first cousin as 7th baron, from whom the subsequent barons were descended. The poet’s daughter Ada (d. 1852) predeceased her mother, but the barony of Wentworth went to her heirs. She was the first wife of Baron King, who in 1838 was created 1st earl of Lovelace, and had two sons (of whom the younger, b. 1839, d. 1906, Was 2nd earl of Lovelace) and a daughter, Lady Anne, who married Wilfrid S. Blunt. On the death of the 2nd earl the barony of Wentworth went to his daughter and only child, and the earldom of Lovelace to his half brother by the 1st earl’s second wife.作者: mu 时间: 2005-12-7 18:59 标题: Some of the Customers' Reviews~ Reviewer:
Byron's poems don't seem to seek to make any statements. Unlike his Romantic contemporaries Keats, Coleride, and Wordsworth, (even Shelley, to some extent) Byron puts forth no idealogy as to what poetry should be. Instead, he relies on certain aspects of that Romantic idealogy, such as frequent parallels between the state of man and the state of nature... however, with few excceptions, this fails to create unique insights, comments, or even descriptions in his writings. What results is florid, wordy, rhyming travel writing, often promoting British or macho ideals. This edition receives a low grade because it fails to lead me to any better of an impression of a poet that has obviously been influential and looked on as an esteemed figure for so many years. This book can be read as an interesting historical document, and, perhaps most importantly, as Romantic poetry falls out of favor, Byron's poetry as collected within helps to explain the reason why.作者: mu 时间: 2005-12-7 18:59
I've been reading this book over the past few days, and already Byron has become one of my dozen or so favorite poets. The third canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" is just brilliant, and many of his shorter poems are unforgettable once read.
But in the process of reading I have come across one problem with the editing of Wolfson and Manning - a problem of notes. All they provide in that way is a short introduction-like essay to each poem in the back of the book, that discusses the history of the poem a little, its reception, and some of its themes. But there are no notes to individual passages, as there are in the other Penguin Classics volume of "Don Juan." Where this becomes a big problem is when Byron quotes a foreign language such as Italian, as he does fairly often - although the editors provide translations for the foreign language epigraphs to the poems, they have none for any foreign language quotations that occur in his notes. Thus the point Byron is trying to make is sometimes lost on a modern reader who doesn't know Greek, or Italian, or whatever.
The poems included in this volume are [long poems in capitals, short poems in quotation marks]: "A Fragment," "To Woman," "The Cornelian," "To Caroline," ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS, "Lines to Mr. Hodgson," "Maid of Athens, ere we part," "Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos," "To Thyrza," CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE: Cantos 1-4, "An Ode to the Framers of the Liberty Bill," "Lines to a Lady Weeping," THE WALTZ, "Remember Thee! Remember Thee," THE GIAOUR, THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS, THE CORSAIR, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte," "Stanzas for Music," "She walks in beauty," LARA, "The Destruction of Sennacherib," "Napoleon's Farewell," "From the French," THE SIEGE OF CORINTH, "When we two parted," "Fare thee well," "Prometheus," THE PRISONER OF CHILLON, "Darkness," "Epistle to Augusta," "Lines," MANFRED, "So, we'll go no more a roving," "Epistle from Mr. Murray to Dr. Polidori," BEPPO, "Epistle to Mr. Murray," MAZEPPA, "Stanzas to the Po," "The Isles of Greece," "Francesca of Rimini," "Stanzas," SARDANAPALUS, "Who kill'd John Keats?," THE BLUES, THE VISION OF JUDGEMENT, and "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year."
A legend in his own lifetime, Lord Byron stamped contemporary Western culture with the mark of his dark imagination, and his poetry has lost none of its iconoclastic power today. Without a doubt, this is the finest single-volume edition of Byron currently available. By omitting the rambling satirical romp "Don Juan" (widely available separately), editors Wolfson and Manning leave themselves enough space to provide a truly representative selection of Byron's greatest works. Jerome McGann's "Oxford Authors" volume is a strong competitor, and benefits from superior notes, but only this Penguin collection offers unabridged texts of the three Oriental Tales with which Byron followed "The Giaour"--"The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," and "Lara"--all of which are thrilling narratives, and indispensable for tracing the development of that towering figure of English Romanticism, the Byronic Hero. Thus, this edition presents (for the first time in one volume) a complete portrait of the Byronic Hero in his many guises, from vampire ("The Giaour") to pirate ("The Corsair") to necromancer ("Manfred") to fallen angel ("Cain"). Furthermore, Wolfson and Manning supply the complete text of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (the work that established Byron's reputation in his own lifetime), along with many other rousing verse romances, including "The Siege of Corinth," "The Prisoner of Chillon," and "Mazeppa," as well as a generous selection of Byron's most arresting shorter poems, such as "The Destruction of Sennacherib," "Promethus," and the nightmarish, end-of-the-world fantasy, "Darkness." Fans of Byron's ironic mode will welcome the inclusion of three of his satirical works; however, the strength of this volume rests on the fact that it presents Byron at his most Byronic. These are his most sublime creations-the works that defined the Romantic movement--and to read them is to discover anew why he is still ranked, throughout the world, as the greatest English-language writer after Shakespeare.作者: mu 时间: 2005-12-7 19:06 标题: The Giaour 的赏析 The Giaour (1813) Printer Format
The Giaour is the first important poem that Byron wrote after Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) had made him famous. It began the series of four immensely popular Oriental Tales that he wrote while he was the toast of literary London from 1812 until 1816. These were four verse narratives – The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair and Lara – with exotic eastern settings and brooding, tormented heroes. They were all instant best-sellers.
Byron joked about the unpronounceability of his title – the word is pronounced with a soft “g”, and rhymes with “power”. It is an Arabic word for “infidel” and refers to the poem's hero, who is described by his enemy as “apostate from his own vile faith”. The poem tells the story of the Giaour's flight from the court of the despot Hassan, whom he has cuckolded. Hassan has his concubine, Leila, sewn up into a sack and drowned for her infidelity. The Giaour subsequently ambushes Hassan and kills him. But his revenge is only a hollow victory. Haunted by remorse for his past misdeeds, the Giaour retreats into a monastery, where, tormented by guilt, he declines to take part in the monks' devotions and sees visions of Hassan's severed hand. He refuses to be consoled or absolved, bearing his guilt with a noble superiority. He does, however, confess his crimes before dying, leaving only his story behind him.
Although the story seems an exotic romance, it had its seed in an incident that Byron witnessed when he was in Athens in 1811. He was apparently returning from bathing one day when he came across a procession bearing a young woman sewn up in a sack. She was to have been drowned for infidelity, as Leila is in the tale. Byron intervened, drawing his pistols, and forced the party to return to the Governor of Athens, where, by a mixture of threats and bribery, he secured the girl's release, on condition that she left Athens. Rumour had it that Byron had been the girl's lover, and was indirectly the cause of the sentence. Byron's friends clouded this issue – some of them confirmed the rumour, but his friend John Cam Hobhouse prudently claimed that “the girl whose life lord Byron saved at Athens, was not the object of his lordship's attachment – but that of his lordship's Turkish servant.” The thought that the story contained autobiographical elements, and that the Giaour was at some level a disguised self-portrait, fascinated Byron's first readers and increased his fame still further.
The poem is not a simple linear narrative, but a series of disjointed fragments narrated from a number of points of view, and following no strict chronology. Byron wrote in a note that “The story in the text is one told of a young Venetian many years ago, and now nearly forgotten. I heard it by accident recited by one of the coffee-house story-tellers who abound in the Levant, and sing or recite their narratives. The additions and interpolations by the translator will easily be distinguished from the rest, by the want of Eastern imagery; and I regret that my memory has retained so few fragments of the original.” This was in fact a poetic device, but the fiction of an ur-narrative from which the poem was derived served two important purposes. Firstly, it turned Byron's characteristically accretive compositional practice into a marketing strategy, and secondly it sustained interest in the poet behind the poem.
Byron usually wrote a short first draft very quickly, and then made a large number of alterations and additions afterwards. In the case of The Giaour, his publisher John Murray issued fourteen editions of the poem, many of which contained new sections as Byron produced them. The fragment form and the practice of issuing multiple editions turns Byron's accretive compositional practice into a strategy for arousing and sustaining readers' desire to completely possess the poem; both materially by owning the latest expensive edition from Murray to display on their tables, and imaginatively by possessing the fullest possible details of the poem's plot and characters. The text didn't stabilise until the eighth edition, having sold 13,500 copies by 1819. The additions serially embellished the original version of 684 lines (itself expanded from a proof of 453 lines), to the received 1334 lines, without ever providing all the information that the reader desires. The fragment form makes it impossible to get a complete grasp on the poem, because no matter how many fragments are added, they can't add up to the whole story. To fill all the gaps would require the poem to be recast into a linear narrative – which would make it a different poem altogether.
While the reader has to make some effort to follow the poem's plot, the attitudes of the poet are even more elusive. Byron added notes to the poem in an urbane, quasi-scholarly voice that seemed to contradict the sometimes highly-strung body of the text. The text and the notes provide two versions of Byron, which do not exist in harmony, but which are nonetheless both recognisably him. One example of this split occurs in the famous scorpion image:
So do the dark in soul expire,
Or live like Scorpion girt by fire;
So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,
Unfit for earth, undoom'd for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath,
Around it flame, within it death! (433-38)
This is a moment of high romantic excitement, with rhetorical half-lines building to a final emphatic exclamation mark. But Byron gains some distance from the image with a wry note:
Alluding to the dubious suicide of the scorpion, so placed for experiment by gentle philosophers. Some maintain that the position of the sting, when turned towards the head, is merely a convulsive movement; but others have actually bought in the verdict “Felo de se.” The scorpions are surely interested in a speedy decision of the question; as, if once fairly established as insect Catos, they will probably be allowed to live as long as they think proper, without being martyred for the sake of an hypothesis. (note to line 434)
This nonchalant comedy gives the reader room to wonder where the real Byron is. Does he endorse the high rhetorical enthusiasm of the poem, or the irony of the note? Byron seems to be everywhere and nowhere in the poem, always sticking his head over the parapet to make facetious comments, but never revealing himself for long.
The Giaour is an important poem in Byron's corpus because it develops more fully than Childe Harold's Pilgrimage the characteristics of the Byronic Hero, who will reappear in subsequent poems. A loner and an outsider, he is darkly fascinating. Wracked with guilt for some usually unnamed and unspeakable crime in his past, he nonetheless refuses to be comforted, and bears his tortured conscience with a lordly indifference to consolation. But at the same time that he elaborated this figure, Byron showed his tendency to distance himself from it, presenting an urbane persona, and sophisticatedly undermining the efforts of those readers who would too-closely identify him with his heroes.
Tom Mole, University of Glasgow
First published 21 March 2002 作者: mu 时间: 2005-12-7 19:09 标题: 摘自 A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature（转）
The following biographical note is from A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature by John W. Cousin (London: Dent, 1910).
BYRON, GEORGE GORDON, 6TH LORD BYRON (1788-1824). —Poet, was b. in London, the s. of Captain John B. and of Catherine Gordon, heiress of Gight, Aberdeenshire, his second wife, whom he m. for her money and, after squandering it, deserted. He was also the grand-nephew of the 5th, known as the "wicked" Lord B. From his birth he suffered from a malformation of the feet, causing a slight lameness, which was a cause of lifelong misery to him, aggravated by the knowledge that with proper care it might have been cured. After the departure of his f. his mother went to Aberdeen, where she lived on a small salvage from her fortune. She was a capricious woman of violent temper, with no fitness for guiding her volcanic son, and altogether the circumstances of his early life explain, if they do not excuse, the spirit of revolt which was his lifelong characteristic. In 1794, on the death of a cousin, he became heir-presumptive to the title and embarrassed estates of the family, to which, on the death of his great-uncle in 1798, he succeeded. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he remained until 1805, when he proceeded to Trinity Coll., Camb., where he read much history and fiction, lived extravagantly, and got into debt. Some early verses which he had pub. in 1806 were suppressed. They were followed in 1807 by Hours of Idleness, which was savagely attacked in the Edinburgh Review. In reply he sent forth English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1800), which created considerable stir and shortly went through 5 ed. Meanwhile, he had settled at Newstead Abbey, the family seat, where with some of his cronies he was believed to have indulged in wild and extravagant orgies, the accounts of which, however, were probably greatly exaggerated. In 1809 he left England, and passing through Spain, went to Greece. During his absence, which extended over two years, he wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold, which were pub. after his return in 1812, and were received with acclamation. In his own words, "he awoke one morning and found himself famous." He followed up his success with some short poems, The Corsair, Lara, etc. About the same time began his intimacy with his future biographer, Thomas Moore (q.v.), and about 1815 he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, who had refused him in the previous year, a union which, owing to the total incompatibility of the parties, and serious provocations on the part of B., proved unhappy, and was in 1816 dissolved by a formal deed of separation. The only fruit of it was a dau., Augusta Ada. After this break-up of his domestic life, followed as it was by the severe censure of society, and by pressure on the part of his creditors, which led to the sale of his library, B. again left England, as it turned out, for ever, and, passing through Belgium and up the Rhine, went to Geneva, afterwards travelling with Shelley through Switzerland, when he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold. He wintered in Venice, where he formed a connection with Jane Clairmont, the dau. of W. Godwin's second wife (q.v.). In 1817 he was in Rome, whence returning to Venice he wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold. In the same year he sold his ancestral seat of Newstead, and about the same time pub. Manfred, Cain, and The Deformed Transformed. The first five cantos of Don Juan were written between 1818 and 1820, during which period he made the acquaintance of the Countess Guiccioli, whom he persuaded to leave her husband. It was about this time that he received a visit from Moore, to whom he confided his MS. autobiography, which Moore, in the exercise of the discretion left to him, burned in 1824. His next move was to Ravenna, where he wrote much, chiefly dramas, including Marino Faliero. In 1821-22 he finished Don Juan at Pisa, and in the same year he joined with Leigh Hunt in starting a short-lived newspaper, The Liberal, in the first number of which appeared The Vision of Judgment. His last Italian home was Genoa, where he was still accompanied by the Countess, and where he lived until 1823, when he offered himself as an ally to the Greek insurgents. In July of that year he started for Greece, spent some months in Cephalonia waiting for the Greeks to form some definite plans. In January, 1824, he landed at Missolonghi, but caught a malarial fever, of which he d. on April 19, 1824.
The final position of B. in English literature is probably not yet settled. It is at present undoubtedly lower than it was in his own generation. Yet his energy, passion, and power of vivid and richly-coloured description, together with the interest attaching to his wayward and unhappy career, must always make him loom large in the assembly of English writers. He exercised a marked influence on Continental literature, and his reputation as poet is higher in some foreign countries than in his own.
Among ed. of the works of B. may be mentioned Murray's (13 vols. 1898-1904). Moore's Life (1830), Lady Blessington's Conversations with Lord Byron (1834, new, 1894).
SUMMARY.—B. 1788, spent childhood in Aberdeen, ed. Harrow and Camb., pub. English Bards etc., 1809, Childe Harold first two cantos 1812, married 1815, separated 1816, owing to this and financial difficulties leaves England, meets Shelley, pub. third canto of Childe Harold 1816, fourth canto 1817, writes Don Juan cantos 1-4 1818-20, lives at various places in Italy 1816-24 with Countess Guiccioli, finished Don Juan 1822, goes to Greece 1823 to assist insurgents, d. 1824. 作者: mu 时间: 2005-12-7 19:10 标题: 这里也许有些 Why we need Byron
By David Walsh
1 September 1999
Use this version to print
Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, by Benita Eisler, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999, 837 pages.
Lord Byron, the English poet, cast an immense shadow in the first half of the nineteenth century. Only a year and a half after his death, one of the Decembrist plotters against the czarist regime climbed the scaffold in St. Petersburg in 1825 carrying a volume of his poems. Alexander Herzen, a socialist opponent of the czar, would describe the poet a generation later as “a menacing Titan, flinging his scorn in men's faces.” In an article written for a Swiss journal in 1843 Friedrich Engels observed that in England “Byron and Shelley are read almost exclusively by the lower classes.” He repeated the comment in The Condition of the Working-Class in England and praised Byron for “his glowing sensuality and his bitter satire upon our existing society.”
The Brontë sisters avidly read their father's edition of Byron's works; in Wuthering Heights Emily would create one of the arch-Byronic figures in Heathcliff. The poet fascinated the painters Delacroix and Turner. Schumann, Berlioz and Tchaikovsky composed pieces based on Byron's works; Verdi wrote two operas based on his dramas. A circle that included the poet Théophile Gautier devoted themselves to recreating Byron's ancestral home in their Paris café. His influence over European intellectual life was immense during his lifetime and in the decades following his death in 1824.
It is perhaps difficult for us to grasp how strongly he seized the imagination of so many as a figure of passion and opposition. So much of what he represented as a personality to an earlier age has long since ceased to resonate with the audience that might be expected to read him. Society has undergone massive transformations and experienced catastrophic shocks, with corresponding and necessary changes in sensibility. Among opponents of the status quo the “Byronic hero” long ago fell out of fashion. This may be all to the good. The brooding, scornful outcast, standing on a windswept cliff, threatened to become something of a self-parody even in his creator's day.
There is far more to Byron than that, however, and even that contains a fascinating element. A century and three-quarters after his death, I would argue that his massive popularity was not simply an accidental phenomenon, rooted in a passing mood, or based on a misapprehension, so to speak. There was genius in his life and work, and rekindling some of the extraordinary interest in Byron, in his best work and in his example, would have an entirely salutary effect on contemporary culture and society.
Benita Eisler has written a conscientious account of Byron's life. The watchword of the contemporary biographer is detail, and in the all-too-common absence of real historical perspective, one settles, more or less happily, for well-organized and carefully presented detail. Eisler could have done without a few of the facts she includes, but her book builds up a picture of the poet and provides the reader the opportunity to draw further conclusions on his or her own.
As the author explains, the Byron family traced its origins back to two brothers who accompanied William the Conqueror in 1066. The family's ancestral home, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, had been founded by Henry II in the twelfth century as a monastery and sold to John Byron, the first lord of that name, by Henry VIII during the Reformation. At the time of the poet's birth, his granduncle, the fifth Lord Byron—known as the Wicked Lord for his licentiousness and violence—was ensconced at Newstead.
Byron's father, known as “Mad Jack,” was a profligate drunk, who married twice for money (the second time to Byron's mother, Catherine Gordon), slept with his sister and died in poverty of tuberculosis and alcoholism in France at the age of 36. (The same age as his son and granddaughter.) When the Wicked Lord died in 1797, nine-year-old George Gordon, living with his impoverished (and republican) mother in cramped quarters in Aberdeen, Scotland, became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale.
Money problems continued to beset the youthful Byron and would do so for most of his life. His sexual activity began at a very early age, “so early—that few would believe me,” he later wrote. At Harrow, an exclusive private school, and in his early years at Cambridge—where he famously kept a tame bear in his quarters—the objects of his desire were boys and young men.
Hours of Idleness, Byron's first volume of poems available to the public, appeared in 1807. The Edinburgh Review, a leading literary journal, attacked it violently, prompting a savage satirical reply from the poet. Byron attained his majority in 1809 and thereupon took his seat in the House of Lords. In July of that year he set off on a trip abroad, to Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece and Turkey, that would last two years. The experience provided the basis for the first two parts of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which were published in 1812. The public response to this fictionalized and romanticized account of his travels was instantaneous. He awoke, he said, to find himself famous. He was soon to be notorious.
In February 1812 Byron made his first speech in the House of Lords, denouncing the government's effort to pass a bill, aimed at rioting Nottinghamshire weavers, that would have made destruction of machinery punishable by death. He campaigned as well for the rights of Irish Catholics. He also pursued a number of significant love affairs during this period, most famously with Lady Caroline Lamb, the wife of a future prime minister, and Lady Oxford, a leading Whig intellectual. In 1813 he began a liaison with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron also found time to write a number of Oriental or otherwise exotic poetic tales in 1813-14, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair (whose entire first edition of 10,000 sold out on the day of its publication, a success in poetry that has apparently never been equaled) and Lara.
While continuing his sexual relationship with Augusta, Byron courted and won the heart of Annabella Milbanke. They were married January 2, 1815. The union proved a catastrophe. Byron, filled with self-loathing and guilt and also perhaps horrified by the thought that he had attached himself to someone of a rather conventional character, treated his wife abominably. At one point, for example, the couple paid a two-week visit to Augusta, and brother and half-sister would stay up half the night cavorting while Annabella was sent to her room. A year after their wedding Lady Byron returned to her parents' house; a legal separation was drawn up and signed in April 1816. London society, which disapproved of Byron primarily for his radical political views, took advantage of the scandalous marital break-up and the rumors of incest to snub him. Caroline Lamb's view, that Byron was “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” was apparently shared or at least encouraged by a great many. The poet also faced severe financial difficulties. On April 25, 1816 he left England for good.
Byron settled first in Geneva, where he met up with fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin Shelley and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont (with whom Byron had begun an affair in London and eventually had a child). It was in June 1816, while the company exchanged ghost stories and speculated about both science and the supernatural, that Mary Shelley began working on Frankenstein. Later that summer Byron and Shelley toured the shores of Lake Geneva together, visiting all the places associated with philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. At this time Byron wrote the third canto of Childe Harold and The Prisoner of Chillon. Giving some indication of the reputation Byron then enjoyed, Eisler notes that at one gathering in Switzerland hosted by the renowned Madame de Staël, “an Englishwoman ... fainted with horror upon hearing his name announced.”
In October 1816 Byron entered Italy, where he was to spend most of the remainder of his life. He lived much of 1817 and 1818 in Venice, where he led an existence of “promiscuous dissipation,” in the words of one commentator, conducting “casual affairs with many lower-class women.” He also began work on his masterpiece, Don Juan. In 1819 Byron encountered Countess Teresa Guiccioli, with whom he was to have the most enduring relationship of his life. Through Teresa's brother and father he made contact with Italian patriotic circles and joined a revolutionary society. In early 1821 the abject failure of a planned revolt against Austrian rule deeply disappointed Byron. (Eisler notes Byron's account of a conversation with Teresa: “‘Alas,' she said with the tears in her eyes, ‘the Italians must now to return to making operas.'” “I fear,” Byron agreed, “that and maccaroni [sic] are their forte.”)
After the failure of the Italian revolution the poet, still at work on Don Juan (uncompleted at the time of his death), became increasingly interested in the cause of Greek independence, enlisting as a member of the London Greek Committee in May 1823. Two months later he forsook Italy and Teresa and spent the months of his life left to him in Greece, attempting to help the squabbling nationalist forces organize themselves for the struggle against Turkish rule. He died, from a fever and the mistreatment of his doctors, at Missolonghi in April 1824.
A reactionary age
“I was born to opposition,” Byron said of himself. He had ample opportunity to employ this trait, spending most of his life in a deeply reactionary age. The British ruling classes responded in terror to the French Revolution, creating what Eisler calls, in the opening pages of her book, “a police state.” She points out, “War with France began when Byron was five years old; it would continue until 1815, when he was twenty-seven.” Following the defeat of Napoleon, reaction grew triumphant.
The biographer reports these facts, but they remain largely a passive background. To explore the relationship between historical development and emotional life, relatively unexplored territory even in Marxist literature, would not enter the mind of most contemporary scholars. But let us assume for the sake of argument that entire peoples or social classes as well as individuals experience trauma (from the consequences of counterrevolution or repression, betrayal, the crushing of aspirations, the loss of hope) and that for the most susceptible individuals this will have potentially life-shaping consequences.
In this light, it is tempting simply to note that 1815, during which Byron suffered his greatest personal disaster, was also, from the point of view of mankind's progressive social aspirations, one of history's most disheartening years. It witnessed the conclusion of the Congress of Vienna (that gathering of tyrants which restored the monarchy or traditional dynasties in France, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Sardinia, Tuscany, Modena and the Papal states), the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon's exile in St. Helena and the renewal of the counterrevolutionary Quadruple Alliance between England, Austria, Prussia and Russia.
That Byron happened to inflict extraordinary pain on his wife and himself during those particular 12 months was of course a genuine coincidence—if the personal reflected the historical process so neatly and immediately, there would be no need for analysis at all! In a more profound sense, I would argue for a connection, if only to the extent that Byron's extraordinary anguish of the time had to contain an element of despair, conscious or not, at the restoration of the ancien regime throughout Europe and Tory triumphalism in England. His mental state (also worsened by horrible worries about money) would have made any relationship difficult, and a harmonious union with someone who seemed, through no fault of her own, a representative of the established and offending order, impossible. “I am determined to fling Misery around me & upon all those with whom I am concerned,” he wrote to his sister at the time, and proved as good as his word.
To go beyond this and investigate in detail how the historical enters into the personal is a subject for the specialist, should any such be interested in the matter.
An effort of that sort would not be a substitute for examining an individual's formative psychological life, but it would give that examination a new meaning and concreteness. In Byron's case, both the personal and historical elements are rather spectacular. If one adds the facts of his childhood (the gulf between his paternal family's aristocratic heritage and pretensions and its highly straitened circumstances; an overbearing, emotionally and financially desperate mother and an absent, half-mad and alcoholic father; sexual initiation and physical abuse at the hands of his Scottish nursemaid, etc.) to a political situation that the poet must have found greatly distressing, is it surprising that there is extreme instability and volatility in Byron's conduct? It helps explain the often conflicting moments of insouciance, self-conscious introspection, sparkling wit and disillusionment one encounters in his poetry and prose, sometimes in different works, sometimes, rarely, in combination ( Don Juan, the final cantos of Childe Harold, certain lyrics, his letters).
In a recent review of Eisler's book in the New Yorker, John Updike, one of the finest contemporary American novelists, writes that the biography “leaves us little to like about Byron except his written works.” I don't know to what extent this is a concession to the type of ahistorical character analysis currently prevailing or whether it merely reflects Updike's instinctive aversion to what he perceives to be Byron's “anti-establishment radicalism and anarchy,” but I can't agree with his conclusion. I find a great deal to like and admire about Byron.
He did many arrogant, irresponsible and callous things: he abandoned lovers by the score; he mistreated his wife; he had friends co-sign loans and other financial dealings and, when he couldn't pay, left them high and dry; he placed his illegitimate daughter in a convent and never paid her a single visit before she died; in Italy he bargained with poor and not so poor parents for the sexual favors of their daughters. All this, and perhaps worse.
But Eisler also notes instances of extraordinary unselfishness, patience and warmth, not to mention Byron's undoubted fearlessness and heroism. A young American, George Ticknor, who visited Byron in the summer of 1815, at the height of the latter's celebrity, was astonished to find the poet “in everything ... un-like” the characters he had created. Ticknor referred to Byron's “gentle” manners and his “natural and unaffected character.” After a second visit, he observed, “Of his own works he talks with modesty, and of those of his rivals, or rather contemporaries, with justice, generosity, and discriminating praise.” Even Annabella, in the midst of her wretched year of marriage, noted in her journal “the instinctive goodness of his heart.” How are we to make sense of the man?
Some degree of historical perspective is surely in order. Byron could not jump out of his skin any more than any of us can. It should only be sufficient to recall, first of all, that he was born into the remnants of the landed aristocracy. (For all his radicalism, Byron retained fierce pride in his title and all it implied. Considering their outcast state and social views, that Byron and Shelley were separated by a barrier, according to Eisler, because the former “never allowed Shelley to forget the distance that separated a peer of the realm from a mere scion of the landed gentry,” says something about the extraordinary and tenacious power of tradition.)
There are episodes in the life of the fifth Lord Byron, the Wicked Lord, his immediate predecessor in the title, that have something extremely primitive and brutal about them, suggestive of feudal times. In 1765 during a dispute in a tavern, for example, the Wicked Lord ran a kinsman through with his sword and killed him, a crime for which he apparently went unpunished. Eisler writes that from a “sense of guilt and grievance, the fifth lord descended into episodic madness.” Stories were told that “his lordship shot his coachman over a trifle, then, heaving the corpse into the carriage with his wife, took the luckless servant's place on the box and drove off. Other rumors claimed that, when displeased, he would throw Lady Byron into the pond.”
This was Byron's social and moral point of departure, notwithstanding the role played by his democratically-inclined mother. Without making any excuses for his reprehensible behavior, I am less astonished by it than by his ability to function emotionally as well as he eventually did, to view quite self-critically and with a great deal of self-deprecating humor his own shortcomings and, moreover, to make a clear-sighted and penetrating analysis of his society and times. I see in this aspect of Byron's achievement an indication of the remarkable mutability and flexibility of human consciousness and its ability to reflect on itself. He made himself into a relatively conscious, modern being. And his work suggests too that by the beginning of the nineteenth century the industrial-technical and human forces capable of making freedom a realistic social proposition, and not merely a noble dream, were coming into existence.
After all, this is a man who wrote three years before his death: “The Powers mean to war with the peoples. Let it be so—they will be beaten in the end. The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.... The waves which dash upon the shore are, one by one, broken, but yet the ocean conquers nevertheless.”
Love of freedom
I don't know that it would serve much purpose to answer with any degree of exactness the question: what was Byron's social outlook? One could say somewhat pedantically that he was a bourgeois democrat, but I'm not convinced, particularly when applied to certain artists, such a phrase has much meaning. Isn't it closer to the truth to say that through the great artistic figure—and this is one of the defining characteristics of his or her greatness—flows the current of the absolute love of freedom, which must necessarily, due to historical and individual circumstances and the nature of aesthetic cognition, find a relative and imperfect expression?
I would take Byron at face value when he writes in his journal, “I have simplified my politics into an utter devastation of all existing governments,” or in Canto IX of Don Juan:
And I will war at least in words (and should
My chance so happen—deeds), with all who war
With thought; and of thought's foes by far most rude,
Tyrants and sycophants have been and are.
I know not who may conquer. If I could
Have such a prescience, it should be no bar
To this my plain, sworn, downright detestation
Of every despotism in every nation.
Byron at one point considered buying land in America. The existence of slavery forestalled him. He noted in his journal: “Two or three years ago, I thought of going to one of the Americas, English or Spanish. But the accounts sent from England, in consequence of my enquiries, discouraged me ... there is no freedom, even for Masters, in the midst of slaves; it makes my blood boil to see the thing. I sometimes wish that I was the Owner of Africa, to do at once what [British abolitionist William] Wilberforce will do in time, viz.—sweep Slavery from her deserts, and look on upon the first dance of their Freedom!”
This same sort of democratic sentiment helps explain his enthusiasm for the task of writing poems which a young Jewish composer and musician, Isaac Nathan, promised to set to music, based on traditional melodies. Already abused as “an infidel,” Byron noted his sister's remark, “they will call you a Jew next.” Eisler observes: “Byron defined himself as a romantic in his intellectual enthusiasm for folkloric archaeology; he was always fascinated by surviving evidence of ancient popular culture.... He felt particularly inspired by ‘remains' that gave voice to despised or forgotten peoples.” Byron wrote some of his more memorable lyrics, including “She Walks in Beauty,” for Nathan's Hebrew Melodies.
In a magazine piece in 1820, Byron wrote: “‘The life of a writer' has been said, by [Alexander] Pope, I believe, to be ‘a warfare upon earth'.” Byron took this proposition seriously. The poet quite fearlessly flung his hatred of the British establishment in its face. While the appeal of his Oriental epics has substantially faded and his portrayals of the tormented, lonely hero in Manfred and elsewhere have to be taken with a large grain of salt, the attractiveness of his corrosive and wonderfully amusing attacks on the powers that be, as well as some of his more relaxed lyrical efforts, has only increased. Byron was perhaps the only one of the Romantic poets to properly value Pope's work, in particular his satires. (Byron took his literary idols seriously. He harbored resentment toward and underestimated John Keats, until the younger poet's untimely death, in part because the latter had expressed dislike for Pope.)
In The Vision of Judgment Byron celebrated the death George III, who died in 1820 after decades of insanity. (“He died!—his death made no great stir on earth ... And when the coffin was laid low,/It seemed the mockery of hell to fold/The rottenness of eighty years in gold.”) This “incendiary” piece, as Eisler terms it, which caused its publisher to be indicted for libel of the King, was a reply to an odious epic, A Vision of Judgment, penned by Robert Southey, England's poet laureate and a one-time radical. Byron had good reason to despise Southey. The poet laureate had accused Shelley and Byron of forming a “League of Incest” and described Byron as leader of a “Satanic School.”
Byron's most devastating attack on Southey and the English establishment generally came in Don Juan. Its Dedication famously begins:
Bob Southey! You're a poet, poet laureate,
And representative of all the race.
Although ‘tis true that you turned out a Tory at
Last, yours has lately been a common case.
. . . . . . . .
You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know,
At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only blackbird in the dish.
And then you overstrain yourself, or so,
And tumble downward like the frying fish
Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob,
And fall for lack of moisture quite a dry Bob.
The last phrase was particularly insulting because, as Eisler explains, “a ‘dry bob' was slang for ‘dry humping.'”
Don Juan is a work that ought to be widely read. Byron's hero is not the womanizing nobleman of Tirso de Molina, Molière or Mozart. He is a shy and relatively passive Spanish youth, a naïf, who wanders about the world and falls into a number of affairs and adventures.
This raises another issue. As Eisler hints at on a number of occasions, although she never steps back and makes much of the fact, Juan was far closer to Byron's self-image than one might at first suspect, based on his reputation as an aggressive sexual predator cutting a swath through the female population of various social classes in several nations. The character of his sexuality and his relations with both men and women would require a special study. This much can be drawn from Eisler's book. However he may have chosen to appear to others, privately Byron felt himself to be at the mercy of female sexuality, a largely passive being, someone acted upon. The attraction of his half-sister, Byron repeatedly insisted, was that she was the only one able to govern or “manage” him.
I think in this light for Eisler to refer on a number of occasions to Byron's “misogyny” really misses the point. It might rather be said, simplifying a complex process, that frightened by the depth of his feelings and his sense of helplessness in the face of the latter he sometimes responded with defensiveness, anger and extreme aggression, channeled through the prejudices and assumptions of his class and epoch.
His inability until late in life, if ever fully, to pursue relations with women of his intellectual equal hardly makes Byron stand out in the history of the male sex. The unique element, contributing to his endless amatory escapades, was a set of circumstances—a psychological make-up from which self-restraint was largely absent, extraordinary fame and, I would suggest, a desire for refuge from a generally dismal political situation—that permitted him to indulge his inclinations.
Satire of abuses
In any event, in Don Juan the protagonist's ramblings and intrigues provide the author an opportunity to express his thoughts about contemporary life and morals. Or, as Byron wrote to his publisher in 1822: “... Don Juan will be known by and bye, for what it is intended, - a Satire on abuses of the present states of Society, and not an eulogy of vice: it may be now and then voluptuous: I can't help that.”
He also digresses “now and then” from his tale and speaks to contemporary political life. The poem's famous Canto IX directly addresses the Duke of Wellington, then much celebrated in England as the conqueror of Napoleon at Waterloo. The fourth stanza goes:
You are ‘the best of cut-throats.' Do not start;
The phrase is Shakespeare's and not misapplied.
War's a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art,
Unless her cause by right be sanctified.
If you have acted once a generous part,
The world, not the world's masters, will decide,
And I shall be delighted to learn who,
Save you and yours, have gained by Waterloo?
One can be certain without looking into the matter that somewhere there is a “radical” historian or literary critic, or more than one, who has made it his or her business to debunk the myth of Byron as an oppositionist: "This aristocrat, wife-abuser, whoremonger, hypocrite, moral leper!" For my part, when I come across passages such as the attack on Wellington or Byron's unforgiving tribute to Lord Castlereagh, the reactionary cabinet minister and oppressor of the Irish who committed suicide in 1822 (“So he has cut his throat at last!—He? Who?/The man who cut his country's long ago.”), I ask myself who at the time, aside from an individual born into the highest social ranks, would have possessed the knowledge, self-confidence and specific audacity to write such lines, to look the establishment straight in the eye and spit in it? The thought that someone of their own class was exposing their villainy to the world infuriated and terrified the ruling circles in England.
If Don Juan is indispensable, along with a number of his shorter poems, so too are his letters and journal. Marvelously fluid and spontaneous, literate without a trace of affectation, wildly funny, obscene, Byron's informal prose is virtually without equal. Here he hurtles along undisturbed. There is little point in reproducing excerpts, the letters need to be read in bunches. But here is Byron defending Don Juan, or “Donny Johnny” as he called it, to a friend, who criticized its ribaldry: “As to ‘Don Juan'—confess—confess you dog—and be candid—that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing—it may be bawdy—but is it not good English—it may be profligate—but is it not life, is it not the thing?—Could any man have written it—who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a postchaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a Wall? in a court carriage? in a vis-à-vis?—on a table?— and under it?”
Exaggerated credentials
This may not be to everyone's taste, of course. And there are passages which will be to virtually no one's taste. In general, there's no need in the course of gaining all that one can from Byron to lose sight of his shortcomings or prettify matters on any front. The dominant trend in literary criticism today may be to strive to find as little of value as possible in the work particularly of those who were opponents of the existing social order (everyone, it turns out, was a hypocrite, a double-dealer), but the opposite tendency is still sometimes found among us: to exaggerate the artist's progressive political or moral credentials to justify our liking his or her work.
This is something in which Stalinist literary critics have always excelled. Annette Rubinstein's The Great Tradition in English Literature from Shakespeare to Shaw is a valuable work for the material it includes, but its author has a tendency only to find “the best” in people, i.e., their consistently uplifting behavior and democratic spirit. The unpleasant bits tend to be swept under the carpet.
This effort to smooth out history's rough edges can only have a harmful impact. It deludes people about the character of their own time and lulls them to sleep. Moreover, what is the political implication of an argument that tends to suggest that artists of a previous period were well-rounded embodiments of “Democratic” or “Socialist Man”? It is a kind of reformism in reverse. Such an outlook grossly underestimates the damage inflicted by class society and the scars this damage produces. It leaves out of account, specifically, the immense social and psychological pressure exerted on the oppositional artist by the establishment. (E.P. Thompson, in his valuable book, The Romantics, details both the organized and unrelenting hostility faced by William Wordsworth as a supporter of the French Revolution and democratic ideals in the 1790s, and how the poet withstood it, more or less, for 15 years.) In the most general sense, this conception fails to grapple with how badly the present state of affairs needs to be overthrown.
Furthermore, the effort to “improve” the past artist's ideological stance is mistaken because it tends to locate subversiveness in the conscious outlook of the individual artist and not in his or her work. Don Juan, for example, is not simply an “expression” of Byron's views and feelings; groundbreaking work develops its own momentum, the artist goes beyond himself, maximizes his antagonism to the existing state of things, exaggerates it, brings it to a point, precipitates a crisis. In so doing, the artist is not simply drawing on the truth of his inner self as an isolated being, but he is absorbing the most emotionally and intellectually demanding currents from the general atmosphere and adding them to his work.
If the important artist is this sort of “communicating vessel,” there ought to be less interest in the perfection or imperfection of the vessel and more in the purity and implications of the current passing through him.
Byronism and with it, Byron, fell largely out of favor within revolutionary circles by the end of the nineteenth century. (Although it is worth noting that when Trotsky was making his impromptu speech in May 1924 known to us as Class and Art, the first names he thought of to raise against the suffocators of culture in the Soviet Union were those of “Shakespeare and Byron.”) One can see why Byron's work or life had lost some of its allure. There is something of the utopian, premature and futile about the Byronic struggle, at least as it was generally perceived. The growth of modern industry and production, a proletariat and a mass labor and socialist movement put an end to a certain historical stage and its corresponding imagery of opposition, indeed potentially transformed that sort of opposition into something quite different.
Georgi Plekhanov made this point explicitly in his comment on Swedish novelist Knut Hamsun, “Doctor Stockmann's Son” (1909), observing that the contemporary “Byronic type” now reserved its hatred not for those above, but those below. Why, he asked, has this social type degenerated? “Why are ‘outstanding people', who once hated despotism and more or less sympathized with the liberation movements of the peoples, now ready to applaud despots and trample in the mud the emancipatory aspirations of the working class? Because social relations have changed. Bourgeois society is now going through an entirely different stage of its development. It was young when the real (i.e., not degenerate) ‘Byronic type' shone. It is on the decline now, when the Nietzschean type ... is shining in its peculiar way, like a new brass nickel.”
This is a telling argument, but it should not be confused with blaming Byron for the sins of his supposed ideological descendants. Byron was an implacable enemy of reaction in relation to the institutions of his own time. His moral and intellectual equivalents in Plekhanov's day would have been (or were) equally ferocious enemies relative to theirs, that is to say, they would have shed their Byronic skin. Those who were still playing at unalloyed “Byronism” by the beginning of the twentieth century were likely to have played a retrograde role.
More years now separate us from Plekhanov in 1909 than separated Plekhanov from Byron at the time of the poet's death in 1824. What blocks a general revival of interest in Byron under present circumstances, I would guess, is not so much the social changes Plekhanov refers to, nor the peculiarities or archaism of the poet's language, but widespread disillusionment, cynicism and out-and-out corruption within the intelligentsia. What seem so out of place today are the intensity and sincerity of Byron's art.
As to what the attitude should be toward the poet in the camp of political opposition, without belaboring the point, I would merely suggest that the socialist movement too has gone through a number of historical stages. Certain attributes which were deemed passé, rightly or wrongly, 90 years ago or even more recently, may have new significance at a higher stage of the historical process. Revolutionary individualism, genuine independence of thought, hatred of tyranny in all forms, the willingness to take on the established order no matter the cost—would the reemergence of these qualities within a significant segment of the population represent a blow to the cause of human liberation? It hardly seems so. We need Byron, it turns out, with his great genius and great flaws, more than his own time did.
I have not loved the world, nor the world me,
But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things, hopes which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful nor weave
Snares for the failing. I would also deem
O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve;
That two, or one, are almost what they seem,
That goodness is no name and happiness no dream.
(Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III)作者: mu 时间: 2005-12-7 19:13 标题: 最后是唐·璜的一点评论 Don Juan, Canto I
(Note first of all the anglicized pronunciation of the hero's name: in stanza 1, it rhymes with "new one" and "true one.")
Source:
The story of Don Juan first appears in an old Spanish legend concerning a handsome but unscrupulous man who seduces the daughter of the commander of Seville and then, when challenged, kills her father in a duel. In the original version, Don Juan mockingly invites the statue of the father to a feast; the statue appears at the banquet and ushers Don Juan to hell. There are many re-tellings of this story in drama and theatre; Mozart used the story for his opera Don Giovanni (1787).
Hero or Anti-hero
The poem begins "I want a hero"; that is, "I need a hero for my story." Given the glimpse of the time that we are given in stanzas 1 and 5, why is finding a hero in this age difficult?
Is Don Juan a hero or an anti-hero? How has Byron changed him from the original Don Juan? Compare Byron's Don Juan to Porphyro. Byron's Don Juan is possibly a parody of the romantic hero--acted upon rather than active, putty in the woman's hands, terrorized by her outraged husband, caught in comical and farcical situations that strip him of any supposed dignity. But if he's not the kind of hero to be feared and respected, is there nevertheless something attractive about him? And is he in part likeable for the very things that make him NOT a traditional hero? If so, is there a positive side to "wanting" a hero?
The Educated Intellectual Woman
There's some pretty unkind satire in Byron's treatment of the educated woman (Although Byron denied any connection, certain aspects of this section seem to reflect Byron's attitude to his wife, from whom he separated after one year of marriage.) Note the way that Byron uses bad rhymes to make fun of Donna Inez and to ridicule her seriousness ("so fine as" to rhyme with "the brain of Donna Inez"; "intellectual" to rhyme with "hen-pecked you all.") Part of the humour derives from the apparently-common assumption that the educated and intellectual woman will be aggressive and domineering. Remember that Mary Wollstonecraft , in arguing for a better education for women, felt it necessary to reassure her readers that they need not fear that women would then become "masculine."
Don Juan's Education
One of the reasons why education is mocked is its association with sexual repression and a puritanical approach. (Again, think of Blake's depiction of the repressive and deadening nature of religion in "the Garden of Love.") In stanza 40, Byron exposes the contradiction of elevating the classics as an important part of education, yet then being embarrassed by the sexual component in ancient myth and epic. In stanza 44, Byron has fun with an even more ridiculous aspect of repressive education: The Classics are published in expurgated versions, in which any lines with sexual references in them are removed from the text, so that the text may be taught to schoolboys without fear of corrupting them. But we are then told that, in respect for the great writers, the editors put all the excised lines in an appendix at the back of the book--thus giving the schoolboys a concentrated bit of pornographic reading in one dose.
The Attractive and Sexual Woman
Donna Julia is presented with a mixture of sincerity and fun. In stanza 61, for example, the elevated though rather conventional praise of the woman's beauty is suddenly deflated by the sudden lowering of tone in the last five words. The comic reversal, however, makes fun not of Donna Julia but of the poet, laughing at the lover's tendency to idealize (and at the embodiment of such idealization in the love sonnet) and bringing love down to a matter-of-fact human level.
Donna Julia herself, however, still follows the pattern of the idealized heroine (compare Madeline and Juliet): pretty, gentle, sweet, sexually-attractive and even sexually responsive but also passive, submissive, self-sacrificing, and accepting of her fate to the point of victimization. In the early episode, Donna Julia breaks somewhat out of this role by being the older (23 years old!) married woman and not the innocent girl. Byron thus somewhat reverses gender roles and has the sexually-mature woman take a more active role in seducing the naive and innocent young man. However, at the end of the Canto, Donna Julia's farewell letter to Don Juan (as she departs this life to enter a convent) has her slip back into the patient, faithful, devoted, deserted "wife":
"Mine is the victim, and would be again;" (l. 1532)
"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence;" (ll. 1545-46)
Though Donna Julia goes off to a convent, there is a strong sense of love being her religion: "To all, except one image, madly blind" (l. 1566) Note that when Donna Julia speaks in her own voice, the satire goes into the background; the male idealization of woman reasserts itself for a brief moment.
The Nature of Love
Stanzas 90-94 present a satirical look at the young lover as romantic dreamer. Byron has a lot of fun laughing at philosophical, metaphysical conceptions of life and love, suggesting instead that we would be better to ground our responses in physical reality: "eyes" (l. 1592) and "dinner" (l. 1594)
Note his satirical treatment of Wordsworth and Coleridge (stanza 91). Whereas the Victorian critic Arthur Hallam praised Wordsworth as a "poet of reflection," for Byron Wordsworth's speculations (especially on the spiritual side of life) were out of touch with reality and at worst simply incomprehensible (see also l. 1773).
Later, in stanza 116, Byron again suggests that Platonic idealism is divorced from reality, but here he goes farther to imply that such idealized notions of love function simply as a convenient mask of self-deception and hypocrisy. The more cynical view of love that hovers in this Canto, and that develops more fully in the rest of the poem, is that love is in reality a game of mutual self-deception, whose goal is merely sensual satisfaction.
The Plot
Byron uses the old plot of adultery and revenge but converts it into a bedroom farce. The potentially serious theme is deflated by common details and low characters. Note the ridiculous behaviour of Don Alfonso (stanza 143), the detail of the chamber pot under the bed (stanza 144), the lawyer jokes (stanzas 159 and 164), the near suffocation of Don Juan under the covers between two women (stanzas 165-6), and the use of sudden comic reversal in the discovery of the pair of shoes (stanza 180). Note also the somewhat unheroic manner of Don Juan's escape (stanza 186).
The Narrator
The narrator is in many ways a more important figure than Don Juan in this first Canto. Perhaps the real tension here is between the non-ironic and selfless view of love embodied in Donna Julia's letter and the cynical skeptical view advanced by the narrator. (Like "The Prelude" and "Michael," this poem presents a "double-plot": the story and the writing of the story.)
The narrator remains aloof from his story, refusing to take the role of the serious, reflective poet. The higher aims of poetry are mocked (stanzas 133-4). The figure of the poet himself becomes a figure for laughter with his comic entrance into the story (stanza 24). In his asides and remarks, he remains entertaining, witty, unpretentious, colloquial, and earthy. His attitude seems to be one of world-weariness mixed with sense of humour.
What is Narrator's Point of View?
Regarding idealism, he is clearly dismissive, although charitably so toward the young. Regarding love, he seems disillusioned and cynical. He implies that the real pleasure in love lies in the illusion of romantic passion. This being so, he suggests that reality is self-generated and subjective (stanza 214). Love is a product of desire; we see love's presence because we want it to be there, not because it "really" is.
"The illusion's gone forever" (l. 1717)
"The credulous hope of mutual minds is o'er" (l. 1726)
The narrator suggests that now, in his maturity, he approaches life more realistically, at a lower level of expectation. There is every indication, however, that within cynicism there lurks a buried, lost romanticism. Perhaps the cynic is closer to the romantic than to the realist. The cynic's posture of aloofness derives from the fact that he understands romantic intensity too well.
The Function of Byron's Satire
Like Pope ("The Rape of the Lock"), Byron satirizes his society, but whereas Pope's satire attacks lack of seriousness , Byron's laughter is aimed at pretentious seriousness. Pope's mock epic reminds his audience of the "true values' embodied in the serious epic; Byron's comic epic laughs at the high expectations and ideals embodied in the epic, seeing them as excessive and unrealistic--at least for his time.
If there are positive values endorsed in Byron's poem, perhaps they are the values of frankness and openness. Byron saw himself as the foe of "cant"--the opponent of false virtue and hypocrisy. And he poem is still a celebration of life, and of its pleasures--such that they be.作者: mu 时间: 2005-12-7 19:15
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Originally posted by songbin_1228 at 2005-12-7 16:32:
请帮我找一下拜伦代表作的英文赏析？谢谢
你这个问题问的非常抽象，如果是英文论文，牧人已经帮你搜了不少。如果你自己有明确的感兴趣的方向，输几个关键词在网上是可以搜到不少的。另外推荐几个网站： http://www.byronmania.com/index.html
站长大约是拜伦的超级fans，从日记、书信及传记的记载中理出拜伦每一天的行止，去某地见某人等等，并列成表格，令人叹为观止。而且站长自己也在写拜伦的传记，还未完成，值得一看。 http://www.internationalbyronsociety.org/default.asp
国际拜伦协会，在他们的论坛上也许你可以找到自己感兴趣的话题。他们讨论的范围也很广，作品、生平、人际关系等等。还有中学老师去问如何给学生讲解某一首诗。作者: coco 时间: 2006-11-11 08:49
请帮我找一篇关于Byron's when a man hath no freedom to fight for at home 的赏析..急用.谢谢!作者: byronrilke 时间: 2006-11-18 19:57
原帖由 coco 于 2006-11-11 08:49 AM 发表
请帮我找一篇关于Byron's when a man hath no freedom to fight for at home 的赏析..急用.谢谢!