The Accuracy of Lord Byron

GEORGE WATSON

I To read Byron is to observe the claims he makes for himself as a poet and to see, as he himself saw, how arduous it would be to reconcile them. I propose here to study two of his most strenuously conflicting claims, both of them often reiterated in his verse and letters: the one to factual accuracy, the other to careless composition; and to ask whether they can be reconciled, and with what consequences.

Byron’s most persistent claim to poetic accuracy is in the field of contemporary history. What he gets right, in his own view, is the condition of Europe since the French Revolution, an event which occurred when he was an infant in his second year. By only a mild extension at either end, the grand theme of his poetry could be called the Age of Napoleon, adding a few years before and after : from the Mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 in The Island and the 1790 siege of Ismail in Don Juan viii to the Battle of Waterloo in Childe Harold iii, the Holy Alliance of September 1815 in The Age of Bronze and the suicide of Castlereagh in 1822. Some of the omissions here, it may be said at once, are surprising: nothing on the French Terror, which might have attracted him as a subject, and little enough on the most striking engagements of the Napoleonic Wars before Bonaparte’s exile to EIba in 1814. The Russian conquest of Ismail from the Turks looks like a capricious choice for his most extensive military set- piece. But the events of his lifetime, from the Bounty and the Bastille to his own departure for Greece in 1823 to make a little history of his own, are the chief public theme of his verse.

That is the core of his achievement and not the whole. Byron’s eight dramas are mainly based on remoter subjects in biblical, antique, medieval and early modern history, snatched from a wide and unsystematic reading; and he toyed with similar notions, inclu- ding a tragedy on the Emperor Tiberius. A number of his poems, like ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ and ‘Mazeppa’, treat incidents from the centuries between his own age and the remoter past. Byron was never just a contemporary historian : all his life he could be fired by a hint from a book, like Voltaire’s Charles XII, to inflate it into a poem. Such little metrical histories enrich a sense of Byron, and they are essential to the corpus of his writings; but they hardly relate to one another a5 his views on contemporary events relate to one another. It would be absurd, for instance, to speak of a Byronic view of late medieval Venice on the evidence of Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari. What he thought of his own age, by contrast, aspires to some unity of design. Along with the scandals of his private life, that

136 Critical Quarterly unity was the foundation of his reputation in his lifetime and for the rest of his century.

Accuracy amounts to a claim to describe reality but not, in Byron, to a claim to realism-a word which, in any case, he would not have understood. Realism involves a totality of description. That totality may be limited in its scope, as in Jane Austen, whom he seems never to have read; or as wide as a region or even a nation, as in Scott’s Waverley novels, which he read and reread with avidity. Byronic description is more like a series of tableaux. Arrange them, as if in a gallery, and they create a world; but that world is ideological rather than social. Only in the comedy of manners of the last cantos of Don Juan, which treat of English high society, did Byron approach realism, and there he seems to have slipped unwittingly into a mode where his mastery surprised even himself. For the most part his sense of reality might best be called Napoleonic. His chief enthusiasms in public affairs are heroic, almost messianic; and his heirs, so far as he had any in British public life, lie years forward from his death in 1824, in Young England and, more remotely and indirectly, in Lord Randolph Churchill and his son Winston. Political Byronism is grounded in the cult of a great leader embodying aristocratic virtues and leading a whole people or continent against ancient tyrannies in the cause of human liberty. It has to do with Washington, Napoleon and the Greek cause in which Byron died, little enough with the anxieties of parliamentary and industrial states. That his public reputation should have been more prolonged on the Continent of Europe than in his native land is sufficiently explained by that reflection. England, outside its rare moments of intense crisis, ceased to be fertile ground for political Byronism with the great Reform Acts and the stabilizing of the party system on its new and popular foundations. Byronism is a doctrine that presupposes war and revolution: a natural, almost inevitable assumption in the age of Napoleon. It is also a doctrine that includes a heady element of unashamed power-worship. That fascination is omnipresent in the poetry, where the very blood-beat of the verse often struggles to match the grandeur of mighty causes:

Stop! for thy tread is on an empire’s dust! An earthquake’s spoil is sepulchred below . . .

In this world, as in Disraeli’s and Churchill’s, public events must excite or they are nothing: not for Byron the slow drudgery of committees and assemblies. And power is power or it is nothing. ‘What ! wait till they were in his capital, and then talk of his readiness to give up what is already gone!’ he exclaimed in his journal (9 April 18 14) on hearing of Napoleon’s abdication, which had ‘utterly bewildered and confounded’ him; adding disconsolately ‘But I won’t give him up even now; though all his admirers have.’ Byronism makes small place for failure or for the wistful glamour of defeat.

The Accuracy of Lord Byron 137 The design of Byron’s contemporary world is ample. As a tourist-

observer or Childe Harold, Byron has seen what he tells of, and Harold is best approached as a Baedeker-poem with an added satirical edge in its abundant notes; being mainly written, as the 1812 preface puts it, ‘amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe’. It is characteristic of the young Byron to suppose that this more or less guarantees accuracy: ‘Thus much it may be necessary to state for the correctness of the descriptions,’ he adds with an engaging simplicity. But to observe is the least and earliest of his pretensions. In other roles Byron plainly writes as an insider: as a peer, for instance, he can lay claim to know something of government and of high society from within. He has sat, even spoken, in the House of Lords, and he has lived the febrile and intoxicating life of London levkes and English country-house parties. And he has played the man of action or, more strictly, has struck the attitude of a man ready to play it. Since he wrote no poetry after leaving Italy for the Greek war of liberation in 1823, his last adventure belongs to his poems, strictly speaking, only through the intrusive wisdom of hindsight. But he had helped the Italian liberals in Ravenna in 1820-1 in their vain struggle against the occupying power of Austria; and a claim to be ready to act-to be just about to hurry off to a war- is implicit in much of his verse. After his death that readiness was t o be his badge of honour throughout Europe. Herzen noted years later in his memoirs that one only had to think of Byron to realise the ‘immeasurable distance’ between living men and the remotely abstract lives led by German thinkers and poets. Byron was the poet who lived, and his life (though by no means all of it) is openly proclaimed in his verse. Accuracy and a life of action are pretensions all of a piece here, and they support each other. The historian, if he is more than a drudge, dreams of making history; and the man of action needs to see things straight. His life, after all, may depend on it.

The claim to careless composition stands in an odd and revealing relation to all this. In one sense it can be easily accepted as a natural accompaniment. To the vulgar mind, at least, there would be something odd about a man of action who is also a polished metrician or a wielder of the finely chiselled phrase. The oddity might still be admirable, as in Winston Churchill or T. E. Lawrence. But then Churchill in the Sudan and South Africa, and Lawrence in Arabia, had staked indubitable claims to be men of action before they were known as writers at all. With Byron this was not so. His one con- siderable act of political significance happened only in the last months of his life. Missolonghi 1824 has often been seen, and rightly, as the fittest and most dramatic death ever died by an English poet. But it was also useful to the poetry, and one might almost say necessary to it. Would anybody, if it had not happened, have regarded as anything more than bluff the strident and insistent

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assertions made both in poems and letters to be always something more, and something greater, than a: poet and a lover?

But an incompatibility remains to haunt the mind; and it is one that Byron himself can see, and one he knows his readers cannot fail to see as well. One only has to invent the phrase ‘a careless accuracy’ to see where it lies. Would such a gift (which would indeed be enviable) be enjoyed by sheer good luck, or by some just instinct or intuition? How, if Byron cares about getting it right, can he afford to write at speed? How can historical rigour and lofty aristocratic insouciance be reconciled? Probably they can, in Byron’s own special understanding of those virtues, and he throws the reader clues to help him see how such incongruous attributes might co-exist and even work together. But to see how this might be, the conflicting claims must first be considered separately.

I1 Accuracy. Both in letters and poems, Byron is fond of asserting that he is no mere poet or maker of fictions: but rather one who describes and explains history, and especially recent history. He cannot respect, and can scarcely imagine, a pure fiction. ‘There should always be some foundation of fact,’ he wrote to John Murray (2 April 1817), ‘for the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.’ Sometimes, it is true, the assertion has an ironic edge:

All very accurate, you must allow, And epic if plain truth should prove no bar

he observes dryly of his descriptions in the opening cantos of Don Juan (viii.138). But then the tolerances of Byronic accuracy are

’ avowedly wide: The Kozaks, or if so you please, Cossacks

(I don’t much pique myself upon orthography, So that I do not grossly err in facts,

Statistics, tactics, politics and geography). . . (viii.74)

That is the kind of irony that is uncertain of its own limits, and one where the reader shares the uncertainty of the poet. There are precious few statistics in Don Juan, and the reader is in any case more likely to ask why an epic should include any than to puzzle over errors in those he finds. Still, the assertion of accuracy is too insistent to be brushed aside as a shared joke throughout the poem, and at times it is laid out before the reader as a simple statement of intent. ‘But then the fact’s a fact,’ he remarks, recounting the barely credible story of the Russian officer at the siege of Ismail lSee Anne Barton, Byron and the Mythology ofFact (raottingham Byron Lecture,

’

1968).

The Accuracy of Lord Byron 139

whose leg after the battle still bore the head and teeth of a decapitated Turk :

But then the fact’s a fact, and ’tis the part Of a true poet to escape from fiction

Whene’er he can, for there is little art In leaving verse more free from the restriction

Of truth than prose, unless to suit the mart For what is sometimes called poetic diction,

And that outrageous appetite for lies, Which Satan angles with for souls, like flies (viii. 86).

So the true poet is to be judged in these plain terms: does he get things right? Byron would have been pleased to see tourists at Newstead Abbey with copies of Don Juan in hand; his extensive account of his ancestral seat in the thirteenth canto can still, with due allowances for alterations made since he sold it in 1818, serve well as an efficient guide-book. And that is how Byron himself visited the shrines of literature. ‘I have traversed all Rousseau’s ground’, he wrote to Murray from Ouchy, on Lake Geneva (27 June 1816), ‘with the He‘loise before me; and am struck, to a degree, with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and the beauty of their reality.’ Fiction is vapid, but reality irresistibly charms and compels. Byron remained a passionate tourist to the end, and could labour over descriptions that were meant for almost no eye but his own. In September 1816, shortly after walking Rousseau’s ground, he set down in his journal a minute account of the Alps, with details like the heights of mountains. Statistics, indeed-but meant only for himself and his half-sister Augusta Leigh.

There could be no question, for this poet, of bowdlerization. Reality means not a model or an ideal, but life as it is; and what it is must be told even at the cost of outrage:

But now I’m going to be immoral, now I mean to show things really as they are,

Not as they ought to be, for I avow That till we see what’s what in fact, we’re far

From much improvement. . . (Don Juan xii.40).

And that outrage is seen as deserved: it is the revenge of Byron in exile against what he saw as a hypocritical conspiracy that had hounded him out of England. Don Juan is ‘a modern subject’ in the mock-epic manner of the Italians :

How I have treated it, I do not know;

Who have imputed such designs as show Perhaps no better than they have treated me

Not what they saw, but what they wished to see (iv.7).

This forges a tight link between the outrage offered by the poem and its special claim to report the facts frankly and squarely. Its enemies,

140 Critical Quarterly in this bitter partisan view, cannot tell the truth because they cannot even allow themselves to perceive it. The claim to accuracy, in late Byron, though often humorous, is significantly edged with hatred.

I11 Carelessness. Byron is proud of his ability to write verse at speed, and anxious that his reader should know of it, especially in his later poems. His youthful occasional verses, and early satires like English Bar& and Scotch Reviewers, have a well-worked air, not always to their advantage; and Childe Harold at its best is polished in texture, though never in design. It is careless in the sense that it could go anywhere, like a rich traveller, and stop at any point and for any length of time, or wander on through an infinite journeying of afterthoughts. But Beppo and Don Juan defy the decorum of finished diction in ways beyond all that. They are garrulous poems. Some of the garrulity is .nothing more nor less than amusing, as if Byron were chatting or writing a letter to an intimate friend:

He lived (not Death, but Juan) in a hurry

(Don Juan x.26). Of waste and haste and glare and gloss and glitter.. .

Even granting that ‘Death‘ is the last memorable noun in the preceding stanza, a joke as thin as this is only tolerable on the assumption that the joker is anxious to relax his listeners into an intimacy more profound than decorum. It is the verbal equivalent of a nudge in the ribs. And Don Juan is packed with nudges; much of it is composed in an epistolary manner skilfully perverted into rhyme. It appears to say the first thing the poet thinks of. ‘I am not a cautious letter-writer,’ he wrote to a friend (14 November 1822), ‘and generally say what comes uppermost at the moment.’ That is also true of his mock-epic. It is not merely unplanned, but eager to cock a snook at any notion of a planning:

But the fact is that I have nothing planned, Unless it were to be a moment merry,

A novel word in my vocabulary (iv.5).

The reader hardly needs these assurances : it is self-evident that there is no plan behind Don Juan. Some of Byron’s open contempt for design smacks of Tristrarn Shandy, and it is certain from the letters that Sterne was a favourite author. ‘But now I will begin my poem,’ he writes more than half way through the twelfth canto, which is nearly three-quarters of the way through the poem as it exists:

But now I will begin my poem. ’Tis

That from the Grst of cantos up to this Perhaps a little strange, if not quite new,

I’ve not begun what we have to go through. . .(xii.54).

The Accuracy of Lord Byron 141

This rather limits Sterne’s joke, since the point of Tristram Shandy is that stories only artificially have beginnings and ends at all: before you begin any story, you must first explain what happened before the story began, and before that, and before that. . . Since Don Juan has no plot, in the unitary sense, this question does not arise. The only reason Byron offers for beginning his poem, or pretending to begin it, at a point three-quarters of the way through is that he needed to write the first dozen cantos in order (poetically speaking) to limber up:

These first twelve books are merely flourishes, Preludios, trying just a string or two

Upon my lyre or making the pegs sure; And when so, you shall have the overture,

and he goes on to propose that, though he started with the idea of writing ‘about two dozen’ cantos, he now feels ready ‘to canter gently through a hundred’ (xii.55). If the reader were ever tempted for a moment to suppose that Don Juan had a plan or was going anywhere in particular, Byron takes frequent care to disabuse him. Like Childe Harold, it could go anywhere or stop at any point. Both are fragments, but not as The Faerie Queene is a fragment. They are works of indeterminate design from the start. ‘Do you suppose,’ he wrote to Murray (12 August 1819), when the publisher had rashly asked for a plan of Don Juan, ‘that I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle?-a playful satire, with as little poetry as could be helped.’

True, the most recent editors of Don Juan have provided convincing manuscript evidence of extensive revisionL. They are, however, outside the early cantos of Don Juan, the revisions of an avowedly lazy man. Byron openly protested his boredom with copying and proofreadiqg, and his most characteristic form of composition was to scribble at speed, usually in the small hours, and to dismiss to the printer with as little after-care for his poem as his mood permitted. He wrote in sudden effusions. The Bride of Abydos was said to have been written in something between four and seven nights, The Corsair in about two weeks, and Lara in four. Werner and The Two Foscari each took about a month; and the later cantos of Don Juan, after he had settled his mocking ottava rima style, in something between one week and five to each. The first five cantos, as Professor Steffan has shown, show ‘a little mental sweating’, and in the first canto and the preceding Dedication nearly half the lines have manuscript revision. The sweating was needed to establish the manner, and Byron’s own comfortable running inside the harness of his new Italian metre was based on some initial experimentation.

IT. G. Steffan, ‘Extent of Revision’, in The Making of a Masterpiece (Austin, Texas, 1957, revised 1971), volume 1 of the annotated edition of Don Juan by T. G. Steffan and W. W. Pratt.

142 Critical Quarterly But once he had found himself, the poem ran freely and insouciantly within its appointed form. Of all long English poems, this is surely the one that most consistently demands to be read at speed.

IV To resolve the conflicting claims of accuracy and carelessness

must look a thankless and even impossible exploit. And in some ways it is. It goes without saying that the sense in which Byron was accurate in his poems is not a sense that would satisfy, or even interest, a professional historian; unless, that is to say, that historian could stretch his interests to consider a notion of history utterly remote from the professional. To begin with, Byron came to see in English a language unique in its directness and lack of refinement. Unlike French, where speech and writing approximate closely, English at its most native and vigorous rejects as alien the politely thin and the decorously confined. It is a truth-telling language.

But Juan was received with much empressement. These phrases of refinement I must borrow

From our next neighbour’s land, where like a chessman, There is a move set down for joy or sorrow

Not only in mere talking, but the press. Man In islands is, it seems, downright and thorough

More than on continents, as if the sea (See Billingsgate) made even the tongue more free (xi.42).

This is an exile’s intuition about his native tongue, and distance has helped Byron to see his insular inheritance more clearly. English is a language not for prudery or veiled courtesies, but for plain speech: ‘For downright rudeness, ye may stay at home’ (xi.44). It is for speaking one’s mind in, and not to tell the whole truth is to defy its genius. Byron’s exuberant four-lettering in his letters, and his close approach to sexual frankness in the later poems, are not only a reproach to what he sees as a hypocritical vogue for prudery in Regency London but an assertion of a rude native boldness. Don Juan affronts the restricting decorum of Latin manners and phrasing as well as the manners of an England that had driven him forth to wander. The English are direct in word and deed. The behaviour of the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, in the last cantos of the poem, shows that Regency manners cannot have constricted Byron much.

The directness of English is Byron’s acknowledged master. Lady Byron once called her husband ‘the absolute monarch of words,’ and complained that he ‘uses them as Bonaparte did lives, for conquest, without regard to their intrinsic value.’ This is an intelligent remark, but it raises more questions than it answers. Who is really the master in a rhyming extravaganza like Don Juan-the poet or the language?

The Accuracy of Lord Byron But note or text,

143

I never know the word which will come next (ix.41).

The next word, after all, is largely dictated by the limited rhyming possibilities of the language. This is a new kind of poetry in English, at a polar opposite from the close, ruminative reasoning of Words- worth or Coleridge, or Shelley’s poetic subservience to an over- mastering ideal of universal justice. How many rhymes are there in’English for ‘chessman’? There are many moments when Byron seems to surrender himself to the language, in a sort of joking despair, as to something he cannot resist but may, after all, confide in. W. H. Auden, echoing Lady Byron’s remark, once observed that ‘serious poetry requires that the poet treat words as if they were persons, but comic poetry demands that he treat them as things’.l But then we do not always control our things. Possessions, as Byron came to learn with his own encumbered estate of Newstead, can govern us. Much of Byron’s diction suggests a rueful acceptance of this discomforting truth.

Since true English is downright, it is unacceptable to write unintelligibly in it. This is Byron’s case against Wordsworth and Coleridge; though Shelley, on the Lake of Geneva in 1816, generously laboured to convince him that some Wordsworth poems were worth his attention, and half converted him to taking Keats seriously. The Excursion, as he put it in the Dedication to Don Juan, is Wordsworth’s ‘new system to perplex the sages’:

And he who understands it would be able To add a story to the tower of Babel.

This is the notorious Philistine side of Byron, but it is a vigorously argued Philistinism. Byron is supremely a poet of human manners, of what the eye sees and the ear hears, and he hated the whole unctuous mess of psychological enquiry into which the Lake poets had descended, and in which English fiction was to drown itself in the decades after his death. ‘I hate a motive like a lingering bottle,’ he wrote devastatingly towards the end of Don Juan, but his reasons are compounded of fear as well as tedium:

’Tis sad to hack into the roots of things;

So that the branch a goodly verdure flings,

To trace all actions to their secret springs

They are so much intertwisted with the earth.

I reck not if an acorn gzve it birth.

Would make indeed some melancholy mirth . . .(xiv.59).

There is a note of private revulsion here, as if the poet had a secret horror against any searching analysis of a n d , and especially of his own mind. That would be natural to suppose of Byron; but it is also a fact of his view of others. His historical figures, like Napoleon and lW. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (London, 1963) p.399.

144 Critical Quarterly Wellington, stand erect in his poetry like figures on a canvas, and the virtues and weaknesses he ascribes to them are of allegorical clarity. Often, and even of events close to him in time and in sentiment, like Waterloo in Childe Harold, he writes almost neutrally, as if they offered him no more than a grand Augustan commonplace:

. . , Ere evening to be trodden like the grass Which now beneath them, but above shall gow

In its next verdure, when this fiery mass Of living valour, rolling on the foe

And burning with high hope shall moulder cold and low (iii.27).

No wonder he admired Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes. Much of Byron, early and late, is to an unexpected degree beyond partisan- ship. When he declared himself bored by the ‘mummeries’ of Parliament, as he often did, his rejection of the merely day-to-day, of the accidental and the contingent, is the political aspect of his admiration of Pope and Johnson. To describe what is, for Byron, often means to describe what most permanently and memorably is.

In just this sense, a description is a work of art. Since art delights, description too must never bore. The vogue for continental travel that followed the peace of 181 5 released a good deal that was tedious, and Byron was conscious of the fierce competition that surrounded his chosen activity:

I won’t describe; description is my forte,

His wondrous journey to some foreign court

Death to his publisher, to him ’tis sport,

Resigns herself with exemplary patience

But every fool describes in these bright days

And spawns his quarto and demands your praise.

While Nature, tortured twenty thousand ways,

To guidebooks, rhymes, tours, sketches, illustrations. (Don Juan v.52).

Byron shares the interests of Murray’s guidebooks or Baedeker’s, though he allows less to architecture than they, and more to land- scape and association. But he always claims to offer something above and beyond mere accumulation. His claim is to enliven through truth.

But then, if truth itself is romantic, that is hardly a paradox, though it plainly involves a harsh principle of selection and an instinct where to stop. Literature can fatally cease to excite by an excess of invention. Life itself, after all, is romantic-at least some lives are. Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon (1816), which was based on the events of their brief and hectic love-affair, seemed to Byron deficient in just that way. When Madame de Stael lent it to him in the autumn of 1816, he wrote of it to Thomas Moore (5 December 1 8 16) :

The Accuracy of Lord Byron 145

If the authoress had written the truth, and nothing but the truth-the whole truth-the romance would not only have been more romantic, but more entertaining. As for the likeness, the picture can’t be g o o d 4 did not sit long enough.

That helps to explain the life he lived as well as the verse he wrote. A poet, Byronically conceived, lives through his strenuous afternoons and amorous evenings a life fit to be written about at midnight.

V It is curious that Byron has so few moments of epistemological

doubt about what he is doing. Most poets, on setting out accurately to describe reality in verse, would suffer multiple crises of confidence. They would doubt their own competence, or that of the language, or the reliability of individual perception, or even, in their worst moments, the existence of the real world. Byron’s doubts on such matters are all late in his poetic life, but they offer glimpses of a resolution to a puzzle that had haunted him for years. To some doubts, however, he was always immune. A natural writer, he would have regarded self-doubt on the score of personal competence as old-womanish, and he came increasingly to revere the honesty of his native tongue. As to metaphysics, he left that to poets like the Lakers, and always succeeds in making it sound not just an absurd activity but somehow a vulgar one. Perhaps, by the strictest standards, this is right. Byron is not the only hereditary British peer of modern times to be a poet; but Bertrand Russell apart, no such peer has ever been a philosopher. On the other hand, he is capable of worrying about what might prove an inevitable disjunction between reality and descriptions of reality, though perhaps ‘worry’ is the wrong word to suggest anything as gleeful as this:

And after all what is a lie? ’Tis but The truth in masquerade, and I defy

Historians, heroes, lawyers, priests to put A fact without some leaven of a lie.

This, from Don Juan xi.37, where Juan is being presented as Catherine the Great’s envoy at the Court of St James, suggests either a general scepticism about truth-telling or (more interesting) about man’s ability to know the whole of anything:

The very shadow of true truth would shut

And prophecy, except it should be dated Up annals, revelations, poesy,

Some years before the incidents related.

That, characteristically, puts history and poetry into the same box. A prophesy would validate itself by events themselves : but what is the ‘true truth’ to which neither poet nor historian can reasonably

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aspire? If it means, as seems likely, the absolute truth of what happened in history, or something like Ranke’s ‘how it really happened’, then the passage looks like a reversal of Byron’s claim to accuracy. Absolutely considered, as he came to see, neither,. poetry nor history can tell you how it really happened. This is a brink of scepticism from which Byron anxiously withdraws: ‘He who doubts all things nothing can deny.’ But he withdraws, in a late canto, to a position that looks oddly like something he has often condemned, namely a defence of fiction and the feigning truth of mere invention:

If people contradict themselves, can I Help contradicting them and everybody,

Even my veracious self? But that’s a lie; I never did so, never will. How should I?

He who doubts all things nothing can deny. Truth‘s fountains may be clear, her streams are muddy,

And cut through such canals of contradiction That she must often navigate o’er fiction.

Apologue, fable, poesy, and parable ’ Are false, but may be rendered also true

By those who sow them in a land that’s arable. ’Tis wonderful what fable will not do! Tis said it makes reality more bearable.

But what’s reality? Who has its clue? Philosophy? No, she too much rejects.

Religion? Yes, but which of all her sects?

Perhaps it may turn out that all were right.. .(xv.88-90).

And so, with a facetious call for another Messiah, ‘some new prophet’, and a new dismissive thrust against metaphysics, he turns away from contention:

Some millions must be wrong, that’s pretty clear;

But here again why will I thus entangle

So much as I do any kind of wrangle. . . Myself with metaphysics? None can hate

To argue is vulgar. But nobody (a hostile witness might here suggest) is more vulgar than Byron himself when he argues. He parades in these stanzas the central argument of Aristotle’s Poetics-and an argument made memorable in English two hundred years before Don Juan, in Sidney and Shakespeare-with all the assurance of someone who has just thought of it for himself. Perhaps, after all (he now proposes), the truest poetry may be the most feigning? Perhaps, after all, fiction has a status as defensible as fact? The admission is late in the day. But then he has already conceded, in a preceding canto, that the real truth of poetry is merely its truth to the poet’s mood:

The Accuracy of Lord Byron

You know, or don’t know, that great Bacon saith, ‘Fliing up a straw, ’twill show the way the wind blows.’

And such a straw, borne on by human breath, Is poesy, according as the mind glows-

A paper kite, which flies ’twixt life and death, A shadow which the onward soul behind throws.

And mine’s a bubble not blown up for praise, But just to play with, as an infant plays (xiv.8).

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That stanza, if one can hold its entire argument in the head without allowing the end to annul its beginning, still leaves an elevated status to the truth of poetry. The straw and the kite, after all, genuinely inform which way the wind blows. It does not, however, leave much status to the individual poem. The bubble bursts, and the straw or kite is tossed away, its purpose served. The most a poet can achieve, in the late Byronic view, is an evanescent reality, and the poem can only give a truth-for-now which the wind of tomorrow will blow away. ‘Why then publish?, he goes on to ask, and the question is a natural one. What, indeed, on this assumption, could be the use of old poems in old books? But the answer Byron provides is an answer only for the poet himself:

In youth I wrote because my mind was full, And now because I feel it growing dull (xiv.10)

Hardly an answer; and what follows is as private and as unconvincing :

I ask in turn why do you play at cards?

It occupies me to turn back regards

And what I write I cast upon the stream

Why drink? Why read? To make some hour less dreary.

On what I’ve seen or pondered, sad or cheery,

To sink or swim. I have had at least my dream (xiv.ll).

That is a reason for writing, but hardly for publishing. And then at last, hacking into the root of things with an appropriate distaste, a deeper revelation of motive occurs :

I think that were I certain of success, I hardly could compose another line.

So long I’ve battled either more or less That no defeat can drive me from tfie Nine.

This feeling ’tis not easy to express And yet ’tis not affected, I opine.

In play there are two pleasures for your choosing: The one is winning and the other losing (xiv.12).

So he does care whom he pleases, like any common author, though not for the usual reasons of authors. In the end, that is all that is all that is left him to care for. Poetry is the last throw of the old rouP,

When we have made our love and gamed our gaming,

148 Critical Quarterly

though there is a paradoxical thrill in losing as well as in winning. The older Byron is in love with a gambler’s uncertainty. That is his cure for ennui, and by now he hardly knows of any other. But as for telling the truth in verse, or some of it, that is no more than a gambler’s chance, A player at roulette has one chance of winning in thirty-seven when he stakes a chip; and in his last days as a poet Byron can have estimated his chance for truth as little higher than that.

LIONEL TRILLING Lionel Trilling’s authoritative biography of Matthew Arnold, fist published in 1939 and unavailable during the last two years, has now been re-issued. ‘The full andfinal word on Arnold for our generation’

W. H. Auden ‘The best-the most comprehensive and critical book on Matthew Arnold that exists’

The Times Literary Supplement ‘An exceptionally thoughtful and interesting book, and one which is likely to remain the standard work on Matthew Arnold‘

Sir Philip Magnus, The Sunday Times €4.95

I GEORGE ALLEN &UNWIN d