As a young boy up to the age of 8, I attended the splendid Aberdeen Grammar School in my home city. The
front of the granite-clad school was dominated by a large statue of Lord Byron,
the most famous alumnus of the school, who also spent childhood years there up
to the age of 10, leaving in 1798. The statue was of a solemn robed personage
and my young mind assumed he had been a highly respectable member of our
society and an obvious role model.
 |
| Byron's statue at Aberdeen Grammar School |
Of course, he was nothing of the kind. Lord George Gordon Byron
(1788-1824) had an immense talent but he was a shaky pillar of society. So
scandalous was his alleged private life that he left England never to return in
1816 and Westminster Abbey refused to bury him and did not allow a plaque in
his honour until 1969. But in his time he was the most celebrated and admired
poet in Europe.
Byron had a most unhappy childhood. His father “Mad Jack“
Byron died when Byron was 3 and his mother, Mad Jack’s second wife, had been
squeezed by him of her Scottish fortune and they lived impecuniously.
Lochnagar, Deeside and the Grampians made a lasting impression on the young boy
but he had been born with a club right foot which caused him pain all his life,
made worse by his unstable mother’s over-zealous care alternating with bouts of
cruel ridicule of the sensitive child’s handicap. In 1798, his great-uncle died
and George succeeded aged 10 to the title of Lord Byron and the heavily
mortgaged properties of Newstead Abbey and Rochdale.
He moved to England
but initially lived with his mother in rural Southwell, quite near to Newstead
which had been let out. They were penurious aristocrats.
After a spell at school in Dulwich he went to prestigious Harrow. He was a great success, making friends easily.
His bi-sexual nature flourished as he had numerous affairs with both sexes. He
started to write poetry and when he moved on to Trinity
College, Cambridge in 1806, he continued his rather
profligate life-style, ran up large debts, read much but neglected his studies.
His youthful first volume of poetry was harshly criticised by Brougham in The Edinburgh Review and Byron’s
rebuttal was his witty satire English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers in 1809.
In that year he embarked on a Grand Tour with his Whig
political friend John Hobhouse. As the Napoleonic Wars closed off much of
Europe to Englishmen they travelled instead to England’s
allies, Portugal and Spain and to the
Balkans, then remote and under Ottoman control. Byron at that time was
physically very attractive. Despite his club foot he was an excellent swimmer
and horseman and had even played cricket for Harrow against Eton.
 |
| Byron, the handsome Poet |
Byron loved the lively cities of Spain
but was enchanted by the Balkans, by the exotic court of Ali Pasha in Ioannina and
most of all by the tiny “village” of Athens
where he cavorted sensually among the hovel-inhabiting population of about one
thousand amid the splendid ruins of the Ancient World. In the nonchalant
fashion of the time he even carved his name on the bottom of a capital at the
lovely Temple of Poseidon at Sunion. He also visited Smyrna and like Leander swam across the Hellespont.
His muse was inspired and on his return
he wrote the first 2 cantos of Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage, the largely autobiographical narrative poem, where the
protagonist complains of the follies of the world and longs for a life of more
excitement and profundity; the restless “Byronic” hero was born.
 |
| Byron in Albanian costume |
On the publication of
the first parts of Childe Harold in
their Spenserian stanzas in 1812, Byron remarked “I awoke famous”. For the next
3 years he was lionised by English society and the Whig establishment. He was
pursued by many women, obsessively by Lady Caroline Lamb, who immortally
described her Byron as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. He wrote much poetry
with a fashionably Eastern flavour. The political side of Byron was revealed by
his eloquent protest in the Lords in 1812 against the repressive policies
towards organised labour practised by the Tory government:
You call these men a
mob….are we aware of our obligations to a mob? It is the mob that labour in
your fields and serve in your houses, that man your Navy and recruit your Army that
has enabled you to defy the world and can defy you also when neglect and
calamity have driven them to despair.
In January 1815 Byron married Annabella Milbanke, a talented
mathematician – “the princess of parallelograms” he called her. The marriage was
a disaster, they quarrelled, Byron took to drink and in 1816 they separated.
Annabella only claimed he had gone mad, but widely believed stories of Byron’s
fornication, incest (with his half sister Augusta) and sodomy circulated:
whatever their truth Byron left England in 1816, never to return.
He first lived in Switzerland
and was much influenced by the beauty of the Alps and then made a home in Venice where his
dissolute behaviour was notorious. Oddly, he became interested in the Armenian
religious community there, learned its language and was involved in producing
grammars and a dictionary. He wrote more fine cantos of Childe Harold and composed the much-praised The Prisoner of Chillon and the dramatic poem Manfred among others.
He was building a
European reputation, was admired by Goethe, and in 1818 embarked on his
masterpiece, the witty and wide-ranging Don
Juan. The piece turns the Don Juan legend on its head and has the Don as
the victim of voracious women. There are characteristic Byronic moments:
But sweeter still than
this, than these, than all,
Is first and passionate love—it stands alone,
Like Adam's recollection of his fall;
The tree of knowledge has been pluck'd—all's known—
And life yields nothing further to recall
Worthy of this ambrosial sin, so shown,
No doubt in fable, as the unforgiven
Fire which Prometheus filch'd for us from heaven.
Is first and passionate love—it stands alone,
Like Adam's recollection of his fall;
The tree of knowledge has been pluck'd—all's known—
And life yields nothing further to recall
Worthy of this ambrosial sin, so shown,
No doubt in fable, as the unforgiven
Fire which Prometheus filch'd for us from heaven.
But Byron’s life was about to take a dramatic turn, presaged
in Don Juan:
The mountains look on Marathon –
And Marathon
looks on the sea;
And musing there an
hour alone.
I dream’d that Greece
might still be free.
In 1823 he accepted an offer to become the representative in
Greece
of the London Philhellenes, Greek nationalists having risen against Ottoman
rule in 1821. He threw himself into the cause and tried to organise the
ever-exasperating Greeks. He spent £4,000 of his own money (about £200,000
today) in refitting the Greek fleet to attack the Turks.
 |
| Byron at Missolonghi |
Before he could do anything significant he contracted a
malarial fever from the nearby swamps and died in Missolonghi on 19 April 1824.
His death was received as a catastrophe throughout Europe but his sacrifice
hugely boosted the Greek cause, leading to the decisive naval engagement at Navarino Bay in 1827, when a combined British, French and Russian fleet destroyed the Turkish one, and independence came in 1830.
Many years of Greek Anglophilia followed and even today many
Greeks are named Vyron (pronounced “Veeron”) in honour of their national hero.
A statue in Central Athens has a symbolic Greece proffering a laurel crown to
Byron.
 |
| Byron Statue in Athens |
So my piece starts and ends with two statues. Byron is best known in England
for his shorter love poetry like So, we’ll
go no more a-roving or She walks in
Beauty although the greater achievements of Childe Harold and Don Juan
are fully acknowledged. As I sit in my summer house in Samos
– Fill high the cup with Samian wine – I
raise a glass in salute.
What a Life, What a Spirit, What a Genius!
What a Life, What a Spirit, What a Genius!
SMD
29.06.2012
Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2012
Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2012
