Glory and Nothing: Byron Remembers Wordsworth

PETER T. MURPHY Glory and Nothing: Byron Remembers Wordsworth i T he history of the canon, the story of its changing shape, might be summed up thus: remembering and forgetting. In the last 25 years or so, we have remembered much ofwhat the immediately previous gen­ erations of critics forgot. Byron, for instance, has benefited enormously from our remembering what might be called, simply, his “context.” We have been able to remember Byron’s stardom; “history” has helped us con­ jure up (something like) the presence of the Real Byron, the person who once lived, and who helped create and then underwrote the Byron Phe­ nomenon, or “Byronism.”1 Valuing his pan-cultural presence in this way has involved not so much a recall of fact (for people always have remem­ bered Byron, and his fame), but rather the broad re-creation of a former way of valuing Byron: creating the Byron Phenomenon was cultural work, and a kind of accomplishment we have remembered to recognize. Byron’s poetic purpose, seen from the point of view of Byronism, is the dramatization of his titanic Self. Drama of Self also describes, of course, how so much of his poetry actually functions, the way the presence of the Real Byron underwrote, while he lived, the psychological drama of the poems. Byron’s poetry, described this way, is both a cause and an extension of the Bryon Phenomenon, the multimedia event his life and works be­ came; or, to employ a word he used often, his poetry is both a cause and an extension of hisfame. Byron’s poems had a palpable yet deliciously intangi­ ble relationship to Byron the person, someone you might meet, and he en­ ergized that relationship by circulating in London high life performing the role ofthe famous Lord Byron, “Bold Bad Bard Baron B.,” as Wordsworth I. By “helped create” I mean to summon and agree with Jerry Christensen’s insistence that Byronism was a joint production: “that systematically elaborated, commercially trium­ phant version of himself devised and promoted by his publisher, celebrated and denounced by his reviewers and readers.” From Lord Byron’s Strength, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ versity Press, 1993), 88. Jerome McGann, of course, is the foremost recollector of the Byron Phenomenon in the 1980s, and the most insistent. SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 661 662 PETER T. MURPHY put it in 1816.2 Had a relationship, instead ofthe has of the Critical Present: because Byron the person is dead and gone, and this relationship died with him. That is: remembering Byronism is not the same as experiencing it first­ hand. In a famous and perhaps true story from the summer of 1816, the an­ nouncement of Byron’s arrival at Mme. De Stael’s villa, Coppet, was enough to render a woman at the party (a Lady Hervey, whom Byron de­ scribes as a novelist) unconscious. Like the sun, Byron radiated power, and those who got in his way felt it. But also like the sun, the Real Byron eventually set over the horizon of time, and even though so many later planets continued to reflect his light, eventually that reflection has dimin­ ished too. Without the burning source of Byron himself, the living person who makes it all happen, this kind of power, the power underwritten by the person, the person who looks a certain way, speaks to and touches oth­ ers, becomes a name: a distant reflection of a reflection, a memory of the everyday phenomenon of fame. We forget; and the world forgets too. The radiation of our mortal effects out into the world—the evidence of our existence—eventually fades into darkness. The losses of mortality make room for the remembering ofthe scholar, however, and these losses are en­ abling also. Forgetting creates the space for the story we call history. We want to remember Byronism, but we don’t want to remember all of it. We do not faint upon remembering Byron, nor do we wish to. This part of the Byron Phenomenon is just like Anyone’s Phenomenon, a story of mortality. Byronism may have been a pan-cultural development, but it depended on the bodily Byron, and eventually...