The Monsters (18 page)

In Constantinople, the capital of the empire, Byron absorbed all he saw, seemingly without the alienation that most would
feel on first contact with such a foreign culture. He wrote to a friend: “I see not much difference between ourselves & the
Turks, save that we have foreskins and they none, that they have long dresses and we short, and that we talk much and they
little.”

Hobhouse returned to England in July 1810, but Byron stayed on for almost a year longer, mainly in Greece, visiting Mount
Olympus and other important classical sites. Byron made friends among the Greeks and learned how much they wanted to recover
their long-lost independence. He would make their cause his own. On one occasion he intervened to save a young female slave
just as soldiers were about to carry out a death sentence imposed on her by the local Turkish governor. The incident later
became the basis for his poem
The Giaour
.

This was a happy time for him. Seeing a flock of eagles overhead while on the road to Delphi, Byron hoped—a young man’s hope—that
they were an augury that he would achieve fame. The day before, he had written these lines:

Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey,

Not in the phrensy of a dreamer’s eye,

Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,

But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,

In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!

At Malta, on his return home in 1811, he wrote a note to himself: “At twenty three, the best of life is over and its bitters
double.” On his arrival in England in July, he learned that his mother was very ill. He did not reach her before her death.
She was only forty-six, and despite their turbulent relationship, Byron was overcome with grief and guilt. Sitting beside
her dead body, he said to her maid, “I had but one friend in the world, and she is gone!”

Before his mother was buried, Byron learned that a close Cambridge friend had drowned in the River Cam. “Some curse,” he wrote
on August 7, “hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch.”
By October Byron suffered another blow, hearing of the death of Edleston earlier in the year from consumption. It was a blow
that brought down his spirits. Edleston was a person, he wrote, “whom I once loved more than I ever loved a living thing.”
He poured out his sorrow in a lament, camouflaging the sex of his beloved by titling it “To Thyrza.” This poem was a favorite
of Mary and Percy’s.

Ours too the glance none saw beside;

The smile none else might understand;

The whisper’d thought of hearts allied,

The pressure of the thrilling hand;

The kiss, so guiltless and refined,

That Love each warmer wish forbore;

Those eyes proclaim’d so pure a mind,

Even Passion blush’d to plead for more.

The tone, that taught me to rejoice,

When prone, unlike thee, to repine;

The song, celestial from thy voice,

But sweet to me from none but thine;

The pledge we wore—I wear it still,

But where is thine?—Ah! where art thou?

Oft have I borne the weight of ill,

But never bent beneath till now!

In early 1812, Byron made his maiden speech in the House of Lords, in defense of clothworkers who had received death sentences
for destroying spinning machines in factories. Nottingham, Byron’s home, was a center of the Luddite movement, named for a
man who had been thrown out of work by the mechanization of the cloth trade and who began smashing the machines in response.
British soldiers used bayonets to control the Nottingham weavers who had broken into local factories. Despite the inherent
drama of the clash, Byron’s speech, though heartfelt, was not very impressive and he realized that he would probably be bored
in a political career. He was spared that very soon.

Byron had turned the manuscript of
Childe Harold
over to a friend, who found a publisher for it: John Murray, who would publish all of the poet’s work from then on. Byron
did not want his name on the book, but he was persuaded to allow it to be sold as the work of “the author of
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,
” which was sufficient for anyone in the British literary world to know the poet’s true identity. Against Byron’s wishes,
the publisher lined up good advance notices from critics, and the first printing of five hundred copies was sold out on the
day of publication, March 10, 1812. The work was an immediate success. As Byron later recalled, “I awoke one morning and found
myself famous.”

The title character Childe Harold (a “childe” is a candidate for knighthood) was the first Byronic hero, establishing a pattern
of fatal melancholy that provided an irresistible appeal for women. The Childe was “the gloomy wanderer,” “the cold stranger,”
who carried his darkness and his secrets wherever he goes. The distinctive exoticism of the places where he wanders fascinated
the public, who knew little about eastern Europeans and Turks. Particularly intriguing to women was the idea that the character
was in fact Byron’s alter ego. Byron always denied that, saying that Harold was the “child of imagination,” but people would
not be convinced.

Childe Harold,
with its sometimes shocking subject matter, fit well the spirit of the time. King George III had been declared mad and his
son appointed regent. The Regency era (1811-20) would be marked by scandals both high and low, and the misadventures of the
prince regent, known as “Prinnie,” and his wife, Caroline, provided fodder for savage cartoons and columns of irreverent gossip
in London’s sixteen daily newspapers.

Scandals at home contrasted with significant international and political events. In 1812, Napoleon unwisely invaded Russia
and British forces scored important victories against French armies in Spain. The tide was turning against England’s archenemy
after a dozen years of French successes. Across the Atlantic, Britain’s relations with the United States were deteriorating,
and the British would go to war there as well. Internally Britain was seething with discontent over the new machines that
threatened the livelihood of many artisans. In that same year, the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated, the
only time in English history this has ever happened. Yet even with all this to discuss, the two most notable events of the
year, from the point of view of London society, were Byron’s sudden fame and the introduction of a shocking new dance—the
waltz.

Byron discovered that he was in demand among women of all ages and classes. Morals in Regency society were nonexistent, as
long as one managed to be discreet. However, Byron became the target of one of the most indiscreet women in London: Lady Caroline
Lamb, wife of William Lamb, a future prime minister of Britain. Their affair was notable even among the scandals of the day.
Lady Caroline, three years older than Byron, was a moody woman with a hot temper, used to getting whatever she wanted. Her
family had suspected she was mad when she was a child, but she grew up virtually unsupervised. She loved to shock people with
her unconventional ways. When she first was introduced to Byron at a party, she turned her back on him, knowing that would
pique his interest. But that night she wrote in her journal her now-famous words: that he was “mad, bad, and dangerous to
know.”

Once Lady Caroline caught Byron’s attention, she pursued him openly, writing love letters, offering herself to him. They had
a brief, very intense affair. Samuel Rogers, a poet and banker as well as an inveterate gossip, wrote:

She absolutely besieged him. He showed me the first letter he received from her; in which she assured him that, if he was
in any want of money, “all her jewels were at his service.” They frequently had quarrels; and more than once, on coming home,
I have found Lady C. walking in the garden, and waiting for me, to beg that I would reconcile them.—When she met Byron at
a party, she would always, if possible, return home from it in
his
carriage, and accompanied by
him
. . . But such was the insanity of her passion for Byron, that sometimes, when not invited to a party where he was to be,
she would wait for him in the street till it was over! One night, after a great party at Devonshire House, to which Lady Caroline
had not been invited, I saw her—yes, saw her—talking to Byron, with half of her body thrust into the carriage which he had
just entered.

Caroline quickly lost all sense of caution, at one point demanding to elope with Byron. Byron, with his many lovers, soon
tired of her, but she refused to accept rejection. She sent him a clipping of her blond pubic hair, telling how she cut herself
while trimming it and cautioning him not to hold the scissors too close when he returned the favor. When Byron ordered that
she not be admitted to his house, Lady Caroline appeared disguised as a pageboy and Byron had to take a knife away from her,
uncertain if she was threatening him or herself. Trying to convince her that her love was futile, Byron confided his homosexual
feelings, an exciting piece of gossip that she later vengefully spread around London. Finally accepting defeat, she burned
Byron in effigy and parodied his family motto by inscribing
Ne Crede Byron
(“Don’t trust Byron”) on her servants’ buttons. Yet when she died in 1828, a rose and a carnation that Byron had given her
were found dried and carefully preserved among her possessions.

B
yron was the best-known poet of his time, achieving a celebrity that crossed boundaries and even continents. He possessed
the kind of fame that only certain entertainment stars do today. Claire Clairmont, one of the many women who offered themselves
to Byron—and one of those few who were accepted—recalled many years later, “In 1815, when I was a very young girl, Byron was
the rage. When I say the rage, I mean what you people nowadays can perhaps hardly conceive. I suppose no man who ever lived
has had the extraordinary celebrity of Lord Byron in such an intense, haunting, almost maddening degree. And this celebrity
extended all over the Continent to as great an extent as in England; and remember, in those days there were no railways or
telegraphs.”

Much of Byron’s fame came from his status as a Romantic hero—the product of his careful calculation and the conflation of
his imagined characters with himself. The protagonists of his poems followed the Romantic ideal, expressed by painter Caspar
David Friedrich: “Follow without hesitation the voice of your inner self.” Readers entranced by the adventurous and tragic
figures of Byron’s poetry imagined that he was writing about himself—and he tried to live up to that image.

Byron had imbibed a sense of sin from the Scottish Calvinism in which he was raised. He sometimes saw himself as a fallen
angel and became obsessed with the question of why evil exists. The most popular Byronic heroes were the cosmic rebels and
fallen angels. Particularly appealing to women was the rogue who displayed his dark side, but who could be tamed by love and
tenderness. In Jane Austen’s novel
Persuasion,
written in 1818 when Byron was at the height of his fame, a group of young women discusses how to pronounce
The Giaour,
the title of Byron’s poem about a Venetian nobleman who seeks to avenge the death of his lover, a slave executed by her Muslim
master. That was thrilling stuff for the young women of the quiet English villages where Jane Austen and many other avid readers
of Byron’s poetry spent their lives.

Men too found Byron appealing—for his adventurous exploits and his sense of style. Byron’s boxing skills and his feats as
a swimmer added to his legend. Trying to find the secret of Byron’s appeal for women, many young men imitated him in dress
and grooming. Byron made his curly hair glisten with a preparation called “Macassar oil.” When countless male swains did likewise,
it became necessary for housewives to cover the upholstered backs of couches and chairs with a cloth, so that the oil didn’t
leave a stain. This was the origin of the “antimacassar,” a decorative item in homes that survived long after the fad for
Macassar oil faded.

The early 1800s had seen a revolution in men’s fashion, in which eighteenth-century knee breeches were discarded, and long
pants adopted. The brightly colored silk suits of the past, along with powdered wigs, became unfashionable. The renowned dandy
Beau Brummel, the fashion arbiter of the time, called for simplicity and elegance, with an emphasis on restraint rather than
flamboyance. He popularized wearing black evening clothes. Byron’s obsession with his weight meshed perfectly with this new
style, which emphasized a smooth line from top to bottom. Here too he set the mode that was ardently imitated throughout much
of Europe and America. Before his time, a slim figure was regarded as a sign of ill health or poverty; since then, it has
remained the ideal.

Poet, adventurer, fashion leader—Byron was all these, but that was not enough for his ambitions. His travels had inspired
him to side with the nationalistic struggles of such people as the Italians and Greeks, who were ruled by outsiders. As one
of the first “citizens of the world,” Byron spoke out against tyranny wherever he saw it. In an age that recalled the initial
enthusiasm inspired by the French Revolution, Byron seemed to be one of the few who still carried the torch for freedom. Such
advocacy got attention for the cause, and for Byron.

The Romantics espoused the “great man” theory of history, admiring both the great man of politics and the genius of art and
literature for their own sake—they were above national or political allegiances. Byron, whose greatest poems seemed to be
about himself, or at least the public persona he cultivated, saw himself as the literary version of the emperor, living up
to his soubriquet, “the Napoleon of rhyme.” Byron and Napoleon shared world-conquering dreams. Lady Blessington, who spoke
to the poet in the last years of his life, wrote: “Byron had two points of ambition—the one to be thought the greatest poet
of his day, and the other a nobleman and man of fashion, who could have arrived at distinction without the aid of his poetical
genius.”