In Our Time - Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Episode Date: January 6, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.In 1812 the 24-year-old Lord Byron published the first part of a long narrative poem. It caused an instant sensation. "I awoke one morning and found myself famous", wrote Byron in his memorandum book, and the first edition sold out in three days. The poem narrates the life of an aristocrat on a grand tour of Europe. Its central character is the first Byronic hero, a flawed but charismatic young man modelled on the poet.As well as offering a self-portrait of Byron as a young man, Childe Harold is a fascinating snapshot of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a place ravaged by revolution and war; the poem also gives us an insight into the political and intellectual concerns of its author.With:Jonathan BateProfessor of English Literature at the University of WarwickJane StablerReader in Romanticism at the University of St AndrewsEmily Bernhard JacksonAssistant Professor in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Arkansas.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, U.K. forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, a 21-year-old aristocrat, George Gordon Byron, the sixth Baron-Byrn, left Falmouth on a shipbound for Portugal.

The year was 1809, and for the next two years he travelled through Portugal, Spain, and the eastern Mediterranean. During his time abroad, Lord Byron began to work on a long narrative poem about another young nobleman, Harold, who escapes his woes by embarking on a grand tour. Harold is the first byronic hero.

A youth described in the poem's opening stanzas as a shameless white saw given to revel and ungodly glee. Published in 1812, the first part of Child Harold's pilgrimage sold out within hours. I awoke one morning and found myself famous, he supposed, he wrote. Two further installments only enhanced this fame. The poem is a deeply personal work, full of Byron's ideas and opinions, including modern commentary on the political events of his time,

shadowed by his own publicly scandalous life. With me to discuss Childhall's prerogamage are Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick, Jane St.abler, reader in romanticism at the University of St. Andrews, and Emily Bernhard Jackson, assistant professor in 19th century English literature at the University of Arkansas. Jonathan Bate, let's begin with Byron, born in 1788. Could he give us a sketch of his background? Yeah, he comes from an aristocratic family,

but he wasn't expecting to become a lord. That's to say his grandfather, who was an admiral known as Foulwether Jack, was a younger son of an old aristocratic family, the barons who went back to a man who was given lands for his service to Henry VIII, and then Charles I first created Barron's. a lord. But as I say, Barron's grandfather was a younger son. His father then was a military man. Mad Jack, he was named, Captain Barron, went into the guards, but lived a dissolute, profligate life, left the guards, seduced an aristocratic heiress, and then married her, had a daughter,

that would be Barron's half-sister, who's going to be an important figure in the story. Augusta. Augusta, that's right. Then that first wife died and so mad Jack, the dissolute father, finds himself in debt, on the run from creditors,

needs a second wife, finds a Scottish heiress, a rather plain, plump Scottish girl called Catherine, meets her in Bath, marries her for her money, and those are Barron's parents. And as I understand it,

after three years, he's dead and she's bankrupt. That's right, yeah. He leaves her, he goes off, he dies. She goes back to Scotland, to Aberdeen, and Barron is brought up in poverty by his widowed mother and a very strict Calvinist nurse. So that childhood, can you give us a few two or three points

about his childhood, Jonathan? And also bring in the idea of the, not the idea, bringing the fact of this deformed foot. Yeah, I was going to say. So I think that's probably sort of psychologically the most important thing about his early years and his sense of being an outsider, an oddity, always rather excluded, vulnerable. He had a club foot and he was acutely conscious of that. And there were various operations to try to straighten it.

But he always had that sense of a mark upon him that meant. that he didn't quite have the panache, the normality that a young gentleman would expect. And then I think the absent father obviously is very important as well, and possibly the fact that he was sexually abused by his nurse. Well, that's difficult to prove, isn't it? But as far as my reading of your notice is concerned, but anyway, there it is. It's around in the mix.

We also know that we're told that his mother's family He was one of the most violent families in Scotland. So there's quite a mix going on there. Until the age of 10, he went to the local grammar school. Then he got the title, and off he pushed to Harrow, where he was, we're told, very lazy, but led a lot of classics. Read a lot of classics. Led a little yobbish riot down in Regent Street.

And so we come to his first book of poems in 1807, Emily Bernhard Jackson called Hours of Idleness. Can you say something about the importance of that work and how it was received? Yes. Hours of Idleness is Byron's first widely published work. It's preceded by two more privately published books that it's based on. So he's own any 19, but this is his third book? Well, yes.

Unfortunately, Byron wrote a preface to it, which managed to be a combination of pretentious and overly humble, and the poems themselves were largely derivative. and the book was reviewed in the Edinburgh Review by Byron believed by Francis Geoffrey but in fact by Henry Broom who would later become famous as Queen Carolyn's counsel in her divorce case

and Broom savaged the book and he also savaged the author it was a quite deliberate ad hominem attack and Byron was crushed when it was only 21st, 20, 20, 20, something I'd that anyway, yeah Well, I mean, in a nice demonstration that the means of recovery transcend era, he went out and got completely drunk and then felt better, but not entirely better. And it's clear from his letters that he was very upset, hurt and enraged.

And in response, he wrote English Bards and Scott reviewers, in which he decimated in satire all the major and many minor poets. of his day and indeed the Scotch critics that he believed had savaged the book. And although Byron says that he awoke and found himself famous on the publication of Child Harold, that's not strictly speaking true because it was English bards that brought him to real public prominence. But we must allow him to have some hand in the making of his own miss. Oh, well, absolutely. But I think it's terrific.

This sort of boy just turned on the entire British establishment of people. poetry, letters, the great Edinburgh review, the poetry of the day, wham, he just went for them. It's terrific, isn't it? I mean, you criticise me and watch out. Isn't that what all boys dream of doing? No, but he did it, and he did it in style,

and as you say, it made his reputation. Can you give us some idea of one or two of the things he said and how they reacted, those who were stabbed? Well, it's slightly problematic because it was published anonymously, although everybody knew that it was, in fact, by Byron. He savaged his own. own, he was the ward of the Earl of Carlisle, who had refused to introduce him in the House of Lords. And Byron, Byron was a good hater, as Johnson says. He didn't like to give up on his

hatred, and he didn't give up on his hatred of the Earl of Carlisle, who he was very careful to describe as a terrible poet. Erasmus Darwin, he also thought was ridiculous and said. So the interesting thing is that, first of all, Byron regretted it later in his career. He regretted that he'd said these things. But also, it became a kind of badge of honor to have been savaged in English bards and Scotch reviewers. When he became so famous. Well, even before that.

Let's stick to the point at the time if we can. Sorry about that. He did have a go at a lot of them. I mean, that's the point then. So this boy raised his fist and smashed it through with the English establishment. And they had to take notice because it was so well written and written with such passion.

So it isn't as if this boy is just giving a yelp in the corner. It's coming center stage and taking them on. Yes. It's Byron's first name. You're described as a major work. Then in 1809, just a couple of years later, he left England on the Grand Tour. We're back at war with France. He doesn't join the Army.

He doesn't agree with all that at all. But he goes on the Grand Tour. Can you give, are there any specific reasons he's going? This remains a mystery to some degree. He said in his letters that he had to go, but he was fond of that kind of mystery. It may have been because of his homosexual tendencies, which he felt that he could only indulge in the East. Then a crime, of course. Then a crime.

He may have felt that he had to go for personal reasons. It may have been to do with the kind of sense. He never felt fully at home in England. He felt attracted to the East from a very young age. There was a cult of Hellenism already during the period. All of these seem to have inspired him or to apply. played a role in his leaving. Jane Steyber, sometime on this journey, on the hoop, as it were,

he began to write Child Harold's Pilgrimage. Can we clear up the child first? A child is an unproven knight. It's the standard title for a nobleman who's not yet won his spurs. So Byron is setting himself a task of proving himself in a way. So can you tell us where he went and when he started writing it? Have any idea why he started writing it? We think he started writing it partly because Hobhouse had told him to burn the journal that he was keeping at the time.

So we know that while they're in Albania... Hobhouse is his companion and friend. Somebody who met Cambridge, that's right. From Cambridge. So while they're in Albania together in 1809, Hobhouse comes across this journal, reads it. And presumably because it has details of Byron's intimate friendships for other men, Hobhouse advises him to destroy it. and Byron needs to write, he always needs to write

as an outlet for his imaginative energies. So he turns to writing a poem. Wyatt's in Spencerian, Stanzer is difficult to say. He had a book of elegant extracts with him and Spencer's included in that. He knows Spencer well by this time.

He's read a huge amount by the time he's finished Cambridge and Spencer is listed as one of the poets that he knows. So he turns to Spencer Stanza and write something, it's called Childscent. Burren to begin with and he crosses out Burren

halfway through Kanto 1 and changes it to Harold so it's more closely identified with his own name to start with and it's clearly a way of processing his own experience while he's travelling and the question of what he's going to do with his life which haunts him throughout his career he's graphically describing these places he goes through so in that sense it's a it's a trouble it's a tremendous travelogue a travel poem

used later as we'll mention by people to put in their travel books to give them a sense of poetry whether they're looking at Venice or wherever the Alps or wherever they are. Can you just Is it possible to say briefly what the poems about Jane? It's about It's long.

Do you want me to stick to the first two canters or? Just whip through the whole lot. Wits through the whole lot. Okay well the first two cantoes are about Byron's travels Canto one is Portugal and Spain Canto 2, Albania and Greece and then Canto 3 which comes out later that's 1816 after Byron's left England

as a self-imposed exile that's more about Brussels, Waterloo the Rhine, Switzerland and looking towards Italy and then Canto 4 is firmly located in Italy and particularly Venice and Rome It's rollicking and robust and full of confidence in this old rhyming system

that he's inherited originally from Spencer, but it's been used by Walter Scott, it's been used by Saudi. And it's been used by... And he's got a travel element, as I mentioned, but masses of classical illusion, lots of lovely showing off about his classical learning goes on. You needed notes, don't you?

I certainly should imagine then people did. So was he setting out to just show them again after the Edinburgh attack on the critics that he knew a lot as well as could do this? Yes, I mean, the Spencerian form is difficult, and Byron's setting out to write something that's difficult that proves he can master the craft. But he's also doing something with the tradition.

So whereas Spencer's pilgrimages are sort of stable and patriotic, and in the interest of fashioning a gentleman or a quest for virtue, you've got something very different going on in Child Harrell. As you pointed out at the beginning, you've got this extremely badly behaved night, but also you've got Byron's satirical interventions in a romance travellogue as well. So it's a very hybrid, mixed-up form. It completely wrong-footed the reviewers when it came out.

It sort of comes out under the radar because it's published by Murray. It looks as it's going to be respectable antiquarian travelogue and romance, and it's neither of those things. As you said published by Murray Jane, your hand waved over the first edition you brought along with you, which we're all almost distracted by it. I think it's a terrible thing to bring into this. So there we are with him.

Now, Jonathan, we've talked about this Spencerian stanza. What are they? Why did you use? Let's have a few examples. But first of all, what is it? And why did you want to use them? Okay, so this is a stanza invented by Edmund Spencer, the great Elizabethan epic romantic poet.

Long poem, divided into so-called cantos, segments, and each stanza is of nine lines with an interlocking rhyme scheme. So you go A, B, A, B, and the second pair of rhymes in the first four lines then becomes the first pair of rhymes in the next four lines. And then there's an extra line at the end, which has an additional stress and picks up on the final rhyme. And that ninth line, that longer line, is, I think, the key to the way that the stanza form can give you a lot of variation of tempo. Just to give you an example.

I'm going to think, I've got one for you, in case you haven't got one. I've got one here. What's yours? Mine is a really key, bironic image, but there are wanderers er eternity whose bark drives on and on and anchored ne'er shall be. A very bironic idea of life as a voyage, never coming to an end.

But that final line whose bark drives on and on, the extra and on, just giving you that sense of the endless journey. What was yours? Well, I forgot, do you mind? I mean, the Elgin marbles, he was there when they were hacked away. He hated it. He hated the British for that.

He hated Elgin for the rest of his life. It's a good hater, excuse. But that, I just think, this gives an idea of the way is hammering at it. It is best. Some of it, I think, is a bit... Cold is the heart fair grease that looks on thee, nor feels as lovers or the dust they loved. Dull is the eye that will not weeped to see thy walls defaced,

thy mouldering shrines removed by British hands which it had best behoved to guard those relics ne'er to be restored cursed by the hour there when from their isle they roved and once again thy hapless bosom gourd and snatched thy shrinking gods to northern climes have horde

so he can use it for real force can't it like that wonderful description of the bullfight and so on action seems action and venom it seems to me the ways in which he uses this gentle spends Syria and force for the best. That's absolutely right.

And that's the really innovative thing about the poem. There were lots and lots of travel poems in the period. It was a very recognisable genre. But what's unique about Child Harold's pilgrimage is that it's simultaneously a travelogue, a political poem, as you see with the attack on Lord Elgin, and a very personal poem

with all sorts of veiled references to personal scandal. And that's what's new. He's using inherited forms, conventions, kinds of poems. but in a completely innovative way. Emily, Emily Bernhardt-Jackson, could you describe the protagonist of the poem? It's a bit tricky, isn't it?

Because in the first two canters, four canters, four books, really, big books. He says it's not him in the first two canters. He denies it like anything, then he comes back and later writes another two. It stretches on for many years, the writing of this poem. Then he says, well, after all, yes, it is based on me. But it's only based on him.

So what is the relationship between Byron and Child Harold? Well, it certainly was based on him, but as you said, only based on him. The difficulty is to know how much based and how much an active imagination. One of the very interesting things about the poem and the way, and one of the ways in which it's extremely innovative is also that the narrator is also based on Byron to some degree. And so that it becomes very difficult to determine which character when is enacting or speaking what Byron might have spoken or is speaking something totally different. Harold lives in an ancestral home remarkably like Byron's own ancestral home. Newstead Abbey. Yes. The narrator deliberately says, whence his name in lineage long, it suits me not to say, which is one of my favorite lines of the poem, this kind of airy dismissal.

But one theory is that that's quite a deliberate choice on Byron's part because he had been so attacked in hours of idleness for making a big deal about the fact that he was a lord. In this case, he's just not going to discuss his protagonist's background at all. Harold is more melancholy than Byron seems to have been before he decided to model himself on Harold for publicity reasons to some degree. He takes Byron's journey through Europe. He is at the same time a mirror of his author and a way for his author. to consider himself divorced from himself. And that makes it very complicated,

both to separate the two, but also to put them together. Can you give us one or two specific examples? Yes. Actually, perhaps the best examples occur in the later cantoes, precisely because there, it seems, that Harold and Byron are fading together. In the fourth canto, there's just no question that they're the same person.

The poem begins with an announcement that Byron and Harold did the same thing. I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Size. The third canto... That's wonderful, four lines, aren't it? Yes, it's wonderful. Do you want to complete them? Those four lines?

A palace and a prison on each hand. What are the next two? I stood in Venice. I'd love the four things first two. I stood in Venice on the bridge of size, a palace and a prison on each hand. And that's a wonderful moment because of the use of each, which manages to suggest that all palaces are prisons

and all prisons contain the possibility to be palaces, which is a very nice Byronic moment. In Canto 3, Harold, again, takes Byron's journey, but also wrestles with all of the issues that Byron himself was wrestling with in the aftermath of his marriage and his self-exile. The kinds of questions of how you reconstitute a self,

how you reconstitute a self through travel and through landscape, Do you think he was actively trying to do that? Yes, I do think he was actively trying to do that. Reconstitued itself that he thought was inadequate or hadn't reached his full-fool-men. I don't think it was that precisely. I think that the breakup of his marriage was a great trauma for him. I've forgotten to say he got married and it broke out.

He got married and he made... That was later. Never mind. Yes, 1814. He made a... After the first two counties were published. We haven't got them published yet, but never mind. Okay.

After the first two candidates were published, he got married in 1814 and made a disastrous choice. And then, unsurprisingly, it all went horribly wrong. And he had to leave his country. He had to leave behind the person that he was in his country. This is very freeing to go forward. But at the same time, you lose everything. Jane Stabler, how, can you push on from what Emily? has said and give us some idea of some of the actions and active events that we have,

how they related to what he himself did. I mean, I mentioned, I think I mentioned, I can't remember the bullfight, but there's the famous visit to the battlefields of Waterloo, the place of skulls, and a massively wonderful, and so on and so forth. So this is what he did. Are they in his notes as well? Yes, in the first two cantos, the poem Shadows the tour that Baron and Hobhouse made pretty closely follows the same geographic route

so they turn up at Lisbon with its kind of wonderful image floating over the way and then go into Lisbon and are appalled by the dirt, everything reared in dirt, which is standard travelogue fodder for those days. People always complained about dirt in Portugal. Byron goes on to look at Cintra and we get asides on the disgraceful convention of Cintra,

so a home goal by British foreign policy if you want letting the French get away when they... Making peace with France and letting them take all the... their guns out of Portugal. Yeah, humiliation, which Byron draws attention to in the poem. So that's seen as unpatriotic. Then he crosses over the silver streamlets into Spain.

And as soon as we get into Spain, we get one of those strange dislocations in the poem where Byron addresses chivalry, the spirit of chivalry, and looks at the huge gulf between the old annals of Spain and what's happening here and now in the peninsular war. What he does is he appears to give a first-hand battle account of two battles, Talavera and Alberra.

and in fact he compresses those two events so he didn't actually see either of those he only hears about Tullivera when he gets to Cadiz and Albuera happens two years later but he brings them together to talk about the shame of war, the disgrace of war this is something entirely new in English poetry Ruskin says that Byron's the first Englishman

who feels the cruelty of war and the shame of it and that comes through in what he says about the Peninsula War and that's why there's a bullfight there he's talking about people who regard violence as a sort of spectator sport and he's appalled by that he's appalled by the way in which poets have become accustomed to

to celebrating war but it is or there's not a fantastic standards about the ball fight four or five of them and they're fantastic standards about war so he seems as a writer to be relishing it and going for it and describing it vividly and with passion and then at the end he pulls back and says but I'll have none of it

that's right he does manage to have his cake and eat it so he can set up the glory of war and also the horror Sorry, Jonathan, did you want to get in? No, I'm just loving this. I was thinking about what Jane was saying, about contrasting the past and the present, the old chivalric and the new.

This, of course, becomes crucial in the second canto when he gets to Greece, because Greece associated with the origins of liberty, democracy, the arts, great architecture, but Greece is now under the tyranny, of the Ottoman Empire, the great buildings of ancient Greece are in ruin, and fair Greece, sad relic of departed Worth, the famous lion about Greece.

But he loved ruins, isn't it? He loved ruins because they show the transients of all forms of power and empire. We haven't barely time to do child Harold, but just to say, he did add copious notes on all sorts of subjects. and can you briefly tell us how they enrich the work? What happens, particularly in the first two cantos, he goes to all these places, describes them sort of poetically and sort of gives you a kind of emotional response to them.

But then he puts in notes, giving you sort of travel guide type details. So, you know, he sees some convent in the mountains, and it's an opportunity for a sort of quasi-wordsworthy and piece about the sublimity of the landscape. but then in the note he'll tell you exactly where the convent is and a little bit about the history of it. He was published in 1812, the first two counters, as you know, by Murray,

publishing firm still there in Alba Marstreet in London. And his first two publishers attempted being turned down. Murray took him up. Murray conducted a very interesting campaign, didn't he? And you've mentioned Byron's homosexuality two or three times, but we should also, if you're shoveling this on the table, mentioned that he claimed to have seduced 200 women in the two months carnival in Venice. And Murray put about that he was a great seducer of aristocratic ladies in London.

And Byron's reputation as that sort of London rake, in a way, I think, but what do you think? Sold a book. 500, well, like these beautiful book on the table, 500 editions were, copies were published, first of all, very, very expensively, and they became the rage of aristocracy. Murray immediately went in with a cheaper version that became the rage of the rest of people. Yes. Certainly his reputation as a regency rake helped.

Murray also capitalized on the fact that he had given a speech in the House of Lords when the book is first published its advertisements say it's by Lord Byron who recently gave this speech. He also capitalized on it. And it was a Republican speech in the month. Yes, it was. In fact, he only gave two speeches and both of them were extremely liberal. his politics were extremely liberal, as Child Harold makes clear,

and that also caused all kinds of trouble with the reviewers in Cantos 1 and 2. They had great trouble with the liberal politics. They found that unacceptable. But he was right to write that he did a way to find himself famous one morning because the book just took off, didn't it, in terms of a publication event that scarcely, if ever, been anything like it? Yes, absolutely. He was famous in a way that it's almost impossible for us to comprehend now

because fame is everywhere, and everybody is famous. He wasn't quite the first celebrity, but he was very nearly the first celebrity and certainly the first in the kind of Chinaware tea towels sense. I mean, his image, his face was everywhere. He was fortunate to have a good face, and Murray recognized that.

And a large portion of his audience was female and responded both to his looks and to his aura of dangerous sexuality, which he cultivated. Yes, it all. all helped. And he came back to London and had four years of, as you say, celebrity fame and the wonder of it all. And then he left in 1816, as it happens never to return, but he left notorious.

He was hist in theatres. He was hissed in the House of Lords. He was more than a scandal. He was an outrage. They wanted him out, out of the country, out of the island. What had happened? Well, he had an affair with his half-sister. of some duration.

And that got out. That got out. Although, interestingly, what seems to have caused more problems were the rumors that he had practiced homosexuality in the East, that he had attempted to perform sodomy with his wife and with Lady Carolyn Lamb,

both. These were all rumors. There was a, when the Byron separated, Lady Viren mounted a kind of campaign to make sure that she would come out well, a very modern campaign. And part of that was spreading these rumors. What credence do you give to them?

I would say he certainly had an affair with his sister. I would say that's beyond question. Although he didn't announce it to the world. I'm far, I'd give full credence to all of them. Her daughter and Adora may well have been by... Yes, it's very possible that she... that she had a child by Byron. And it was a sexual scandal that caused the whirlwind

that drove him to the realization or the conclusion that he'd got to get out. He couldn't live in this city any longer. It was, though, of course, often the case in history, a sexual scandal is a sort of convenient front for getting rid of someone who's politically awkward. If you think of the fall of Parnell at the end of that century. Yes, it was predominantly a sexual scandal,

but this is a time, you know, the period after the Battle of Waterloo, the defeat of Napoleon, when politics are shifting very much to the right. And so to have this dangerously liberal lord in a very kind of prominent position in London society, there were a lot of vested interests politically for whom it was good to have him out of the way. How did that, Jane, how did the dangerous political lord show himself? We know he spoke twice in the House of Lords, once in support of the frame breakers, who are a form of Luddites, really.

But was he that dangerous in society, or did his politics seem something on the side? He was a good weapon for Holland House. He spoke for the framebreakers in favour of Catholic emancipation and in favour of reform too. There's the major cartwright petition in 1813. So all his appearances are good, eloquent and robust

arguments for radical reform as well as that he produces poems which are pro-wig and anti-government so Windsor Poetics is a scathing satire on the Prince Regent

as is lines to a lady weeping these come out anonymously in the morning chronicle but then they're gradually associated with Byron's name and he's a force to be reckoned with meanwhile his literature thing is pounding on in unbelievable ways. The corsair comes out and sells 10,000 copies in a day, which had never, as far as we know, happened in literature ever.

No, he's a phenomenon. That's undoubted. Emily Benn, so he goes away again, and he decides to continue trial Harold. He's had two cantos, we're going to end up with four cantoes. The easy book, four books. He's writing other books as well. Emily Bernardo, one of the most famous descriptions is a description of the battlefield at Waterloo.

Can you tell us something about that? I hope can you quote from it? I didn't bring anything to quote. I've got some here. Just a second. Here we are. But anyway, can you tell us about that? Yes. I do think that one thing that is important as background for Harold III, thank you, is that it's not just that people wanted Byron to leave England.

Byron wanted to leave England. And he came into his own after he removed to Europe. He called England that tight little island, and he felt that he was not able to be the person that he could be while he was here. When he leaves, yes, he goes to Waterloo, and he calls it a place of skulls, the grave of France, the deadly Waterloo, how in an hour the power which gave, annulls its gifts, transferring fame as fleeting, too.

In pride of place, here last, the eagle flew, then tour with bloody talon the rent plain. pierced by the shaft of banded nations through, ambitions, life, and labors all were vain. He uses it as a chance to meditate on the fall of Napoleon. And via that also indeed on his own fall. That's how much of the poem works. But as he points out, late in the next stanza,

he says, Gaul may champ the bit and foam in fetters, but is earth more free? This is, yes, Napoleon has fallen. Yes, France and its power have been, contained, but there's really no gain as far as he's concerned politically. It doesn't improve the lot of the earth. And it picks up in this way on the stanzas in one and two about Talavera and Albuera, this kind of sense that war is pointless, ultimately, that the plain of Waterloo is a place of skulls. There's a wonderful moment where he looks at it and he says, he talks about the

battle and he says how that red rain hath made the harvest grow, as if the sense is that it's, that That's all that it's done is just make for richer grass. Yes, and just adding to that, the continuity between one and two is also that Byron pitches himself against Wellington, who's an English national hero at the time. So Byron refuses to celebrate anything to do with Wellington and Waterloo. And Walter Scott's slightly appalled by this.

He says he manages to write about Waterloo without letting one laurel fall on the head of Wellington. It's seen as a sort of scandal that he won't even admit any, he thinks that Wellington was just lucky at Waterloo. There's a fascination with it, apparently. I mean, Napoleon and Barron are the two most famous people in Europe. So for Barron to go to the site of Napoleon's fall, there's an inevitable symmetry there.

And yet that sound of reverie by night, the zest comes in, the ball the night before, you feel he's loving it. He wished he'd been there. Don't you feel that? Well, I mean, it's always... And then charging off on his horse and having a go. No? No?

The problem for a poet who is a man of words always has a fascination with the man of action. Barron is reporting on the great historical events at the time. But Napoleon had actually shaped them. And of course, you can almost begin to see there a gleam in Barron's eyes as he thinks about the idea that he too could become a man of political action, which eventually he does.

I don't think it's quite that cut and dried because I think Barron thought of himself, even at this time, as a man of action, that he had given those speeches. particularly as a form of action. And not only that, but these stanzas of Harold III and Harold III entirely are concerned with the question of how an individual can view and change the world,

even if only in his own brain. And I think that that's a good deal of what's going on here. As you say, he has this kind of zest for the night before the battle, which he then contrasts with the awfulness of the battle itself. But that in itself raises the question, of how you wish to conceive of something. Do you conceive of something as a kind of triumph with a ball beforehand, or do you conceive of it as a terrible loss? Biron did not give up on Napoleon. He wasn't quite like William Hazlett, who just loved Napoleon for his whole life,

but Byron felt that he was greatly distressed that Napoleon didn't commit suicide. He felt that that was a big mistake. But he also didn't, he never lost the sense that Napoleon had being a great man. He felt that Napoleon's problem was basically that he had never made he had made no bones about the fact that he was a great man, that that was the issue. Yes, it's his want

of community with the rest of my mind. Warren Caesar's his big mistake. Jane, the people will know the idea of the byronic man, the bironic hero. Can you tell us what you mean by that? It's a compound of the figures that come out of Child Harold and the Turkish tale. So it's

it's a man marked by a guilt and a nameless crime who invites the people who look at him to read into him, to work out what that is. One of the things Wilson says about Byron's poetry, John Wilson, in the Edinburgh, is that every reader feels as though they're an individual. He says, we feel

as though we are chosen from a crowd of lovers. And so the Byronic hero sets up a kind of special, intimate relationship with the reader or with the person who's observing him and invites them to enter into his consciousness. So it's a peculiarly confessional sort of being. Jonathan he was very contemptuous about other

romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth and he's very rude about Wordsworth and yet when I read this and I hadn't read all of it before now the last time I read the parts I read was many years ago. There's an awful lot of nicked from Wordsworth to be quite honest is alone in the mountains and

you think hold on it. We could try and further that to many a poem we know about the words. So what is this rudeness to Wordsworth when he's taking great gobbots of him? That's absolutely right, especially in that third canto, which also relates to the time that he met with Shelley, another poet who was deeply influenced by Wordsworth's vision of... In that little thing where his wife wrote Frankenstein? That's that meeting. That's that meeting. And Baron had another child by... Yeah. That's right.

I mean, the wordsworthy an idea of achieving a kind of wholeness of being, a sublime sense of unity with nature. That is everywhere in Barron. But the thing that Barron doesn't like about Wordsworth is the sense of isolation, the kind of egotism that goes with that. Because Barron, always, going back to what Jane said, loves the idea of a human community.

And that's his beef with Wordsworth, the sense of Wordsworth. He said in the poem that he likes to be alone. He's not of the herd of men. So he had those full of his lush contradictions, That's exactly right. And surely, you know, his erotic life is part of that. I mean, you know, the restless desire to conquer every woman that he finds.

In some sense, he's, you know, he's looking for an ideal partnership, but he never finds it. So he is always at some level alone, always driving on. Emily, Haslid said that of Byron is a martyr in his zeal in the cause of freedom. Is it possible briefly, I'm sorry,

to give the listener some idea of the impact he had on political Republican leaders across Europe. After his death at Missa Longi in Greece, he was a national hero of Greece, and it rippled right across Europe. Yes, actually it is, and there's a nice story that encapsulates this. But first of all, yes, in Greece, he's primarily seen as a political hero, remains a political hero. There was a cult of Byron in every European country after his death, indeed before his death, and that had as much to do with politics as anything else, except for Portugal. There was no cult of Byron in Portugal because he had insulted them so thoroughly that they never forgave him. And interestingly, when Brazil became independent from Portugal, one thing that they did was they set up a cult of Byron,

specifically as an active demonstration, a political demonstration of the fact that they were not Portuguese, his influence. was such. But the idea of Byrne and what he'd said stood for a great, motivated and charged the ideals and actions of a great number of people across Europe. The charges. And leading people. But also the charters to her. That has faded because what we have come to know of Byron is more the Byronic hero than anything else. But it would be a mistake to underestimate his value as a political

personage. Can I ask any of you very briefly, I'm sorry, Anyway, the influence he's had on other artists. That is two has been massive. Do you want to reel off one or two of them, Jane? Berlioz, Harold in Italy. Pushkin, the great Russian poet. Actually, mostly pop music for me. Well, actually, let's say Bram Stoker with Dracula.

Every vampire that you encounter is based on Lord Byron. But other does Verdi and the Schumann. and on it goes, doesn't it? So, I'm quite exhausted. Well, we've got a few more minutes. Oh, we haven't. Oh, yes, we've got one more minute. Tom's got carried away,

and his fingers are going up in different directions in the booth. Is there a final word anyone who would like to give to this programme? Well, I think Emily talks of rock musicians. I mean, if you think of Mick Jagger, that sense of the swammer, the swathe, Daggering, dangerous artists, the rock star. I mean, like it or not, Barron was the rock star of his age. And in that sense, an awful lot of modern culture comes from him.

And yet, at the same time, he was deeply committed to his own culture and a figure of extraordinary political importance, which Mick Jagger isn't. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jonathan Bate, Emily Pernard Jackson and Jane Stabler. Next week we'll be talking about randomness and pseudo-randomness. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.