The Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron, and the Adversary

4 Byron’s Familiar Spirit

113 s ByRon’s faMiliaR sPiRiT 4 Satanic Byron . . . men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who . . . labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul! The school which they have set up may properly be called the Satanic school . . . characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of helplessness wherewith it is allied. (Southey, Preface to AVision of Judgment)1 When in 1821 the British Poet Laureate Robert Southey attacked the “Satanic school” in contemporary poetry, it was clear to his readers who, above all others, occupied that bad eminence. The immediate provocation was the opening cantos of DonJuan, a poem that gave huge offense for its perceived immorality and nihilism: but for years Byron had built his immense success around a series of darkly heroic figures who share many characteristics with Milton’s great “archangel ruined.” Byron’s protagonists in the poems that made him famous— Childe Harold, the Giaour, Conrad the Corsair, Lara, Manfred—are charismatic yet profoundly isolated figures, exiles or outlaws from conventional society, alienated by a combination of their superior nobility of mind and some obscure act of crime or transgression in their past. Their consciousness is withdrawn, inflamed, and brooding; the pain they carry within is never fully communicated, but expressed in part by the attitude of disdain, severe and superb, which they show to human 114 The Devil as Muse s weakness in others as in themselves, and also to the littleness of life itself, its weakness to sustain their desires. They are fallen beings—or so at least they experience their existence—but tremendous in their fallenness: they can neither altogether regret what they have become, because of the dark knowledge which they now possess, nor reconcile themselves to their condition, but vibrate between the poles of grim acquiescence and unappeasable rebellion. It often seems to be the intensity of this consciousness itself that constitutes their alienated self: consciousness not only of but also as alienation. This painful intensification of self, and the desire for relief from it, was, Byron believed, what made him a writer: To withdraw myself from myself (oh that cursed selfishness!) has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all; and publishing is also the continuance of the same object, by the action it affords to the mind, which else recoils upon itself.2 That image of the mind’s self-recoil remembers Milton on Satan’s dire attempt which, nigh the birth, Now rolling boils in his tumultuous breast And like a dev’lish engine back recoils Upon himself. Horror and doubt distract His troubled thoughts and from the bottom stir The Hell within him, for within him Hell He brings . . . (iv.15–21) Satan cannot escape himself; and Byron’s word “scribbling” shows how tenuous, how close to self-mocking, was his belief—in 1813, at least—in his poetry as a form of action that could release him from himself. Indeed, most of the poems that made Byron famous are inescapably self-referential; the potency of his “Satanic” heroes was hugely enhanced by his own reputation. “Mad—bad—and dangerous to know,”3 he was understood, like his creations, to walk on the wild side. He had travelled in the exotic East, lived the life of the libertine, taken the radical side in politics, driven his virtuous wife into separation, and was rumored to have slept with his half-sister; now he lived in exile in Italy, where he was said to indulge in all manner of sexual licence, and kept company with the atheist Shelley. His club foot suggested some s Byron’s Familiar Spirit 115 more essential deformity, or brand of distinction, half-concealed like the Devil’s cloven hoof. A plausible anecdote relates that “he used to declare that he was a fallen angel, not symbolically but literally, and told Annabella [his wife] that she was one of those women spoken of in the Bible who are loved by an exile from Heaven.”4 This impulse to court his own damnation in the eyes of the virtuous was to be powerfully expressed by the publication of Don Juan. The proximity of the diabolical was felt by his readers almost from the start. Reviewing the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Francis Jeffrey was...