Lord Byron and Mythology

FOREWORD BY PETER GRAHAM

Lord Byron was a self-professed believer in what is real or has been. As he famously puts it in Don Juan, “Besides, my Muse by no means deals in fiction:/She gathers a repertory of facts,/Of course with some reserve and slight restriction,/But mostly sings of human things and acts.” (Don Juan, Canto XIV, Stanza 13, ll. 98–100) The hedging qualifiers of the last two lines quoted tone down the absolute assertion of the first two, but even so the preference for reality over imagination is accurately expressed and entirely characteristic of Byron. Throughout his career as author, or at any rate from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage days’ onward, getting details right was important to Byron. One way to do that was by reading widely and retentively. Another was being on the spot.

But fact is not the only kind of truth, and Byron enduringly believed that too. Like many ruling-class British people of his time, especially the men who had attended such public schools as Harrow and Eton and the ancient universities of Cambridge and Oxford, where education centred on the translation and literary imitation of classical Greek and Latin texts, Byron found examples drawn from Greco-Roman myth and history a semi-instinctive way to understand human behaviour. He felt the truth of classical mythology even when supporting facts were thin or non-existent. And he lived—or sometimes ←ix | x→deliberately ordered—his own life with conscious awareness of analogues from the classical tradition and frequent explicit allusion to them. I’ve argued elsewhere that perhaps the three classical myths most important to Byron were the stories of Leander, Orpheus, and Prometheus.

The first of these inspired Byron’s famous swimming of the Hellespont, shortly after visiting the Trojan plain where he “venerated the grand original as the truth of history and of place.” Repeatedly reporting his natatory re-enactment in letters and in verse alike, Byron revealed how the important re-enact of Leander’s success as a swimmer and lover could be to a 22-year-old Mediterranean traveller, who might need lifelong reassurance that bodily imperfection, such as a club foot, need not keep him from excelling in manly pursuits, whether athletics or romance. Orpheus the [legendary] poet proved a yet more enduring mythic model in Byron’s life. His name figures perhaps most crucially in the stanzas just following “The Isles of Greece!”, inscribed in Don Juan and sung by an opportunistic but eloquent itinerant bard, who temporarily alters reality through his poetic practice. If charming, changeable Orphic poets are liars with lyres, what might a man who combined Orpheus’s poetic talent with unchanging, uncompromising political or moral vision be? He’d be something of a Prometheus, the fire-giving, Zeus-defying titan philanthropist whose various myths figured forth different aspects of the indomitable human spirit for the English Romantics, notable among them the Byron-Shelley circle, and other liberal thinkers of their age. As creator who fashions mankind from mud animated through Olympian fire, as benefactor who makes human civilization possible thanks to the stolen gift of fire, and as noble, defiant altruist enduring chains and torture as a result of defying tyrannical Zeus, Prometheus appealed to (or shaped) Byron’s ethos in various ways. Politically, the titan prefigured the early Napoleon, also a quasi-mythic figure for Byron, who saw himself and the Frenchman as existential twins of a sort—but unlike Prometheus, who was steadfast in his resistance to authority and his support for liberty, Napoleon himself became a tyrant. Byron, channelling the titan’s philanthropy, was a lifelong friend of the people if not one of the people himself, from his early days in Whig politics to his support of the revolutionary Carbonari movement in Italy and of the Greek fight for freedom from the Ottoman Empire. But Promethean fire, in Byron’s mythos, meant more than anti-authoritarian resistance, support for liberty, and philanthropy. It was the spark of poetry, a spark often kindled by suffering. As Byron says in “The Prophecy of Dante,” “For what is poesy but to create/←x | xi→From overwhelming good or ill; and aim/At an external life beyond our fate,/And be a new Prometheus of new men.”

Oueijan arguably deploys his distinctive scholarly background to finest effect as he traces Byron’s mapping of Eastern mythology. The study’s close readings explain and contextualize Byron’s borrowing from myths in Persian and Arabic for his Eastern tales. Ensuing chapters take on the topics of “Nature and Mythology”—an optimistic Schelling-based reading that pays particular attention to the seldom studied “Prayer of Nature” and to Byron’s quasi-Wordsworthian “I love not man the less but Nature more” mood in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III. Returning to Eastern Mediterranean, Oueijan takes on the topics of “Antiquity and Mythology,” where he discusses Byron as a poet of relics, and “Eroticism and Mythology,” Byron’s connection of the exotic and the erotic, a proclivity that as Oueijan sees it more generally explains the sexualization of the East from the Western perspective. “Madness and Mythology” juxtaposes Byron’s work with Gibran’s The Prophet and The Madman and alludes to Stephenson’s Snow Crash before a final chapter on ←xi | xii→“The Mythical Voice” concludes that Byron and his heroes and heroines constitute archetypes rising to the level of mythology.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the Department of English and Translation, Faculty of Humanities, at Notre Dame University (NDU), Louaize, Lebanon, and especially to Professor Kamal Abouchedid, Professor Paul Jahshan and Dr. George Abdenour for their support and encouragement. I am grateful to Professor Elie Bdr, Vice President for Academic Affair at NDU, for his continuous support and encouragement. I am ever indebted to Professor Clement Goode, Professor John Clubbe and Professor Byron Raizis for introducing me to Byronism, and for supporting me in all my scholarly endeavours. I sincerely thank Professor Peter Graham for his valuable comments and advice, and for writing the forward of my volume. I truly appreciate the friendship and encouragements of Professor Jonathan Gross, Professor Christoph Bode and Dr. Stephen Minta. My gratitude is due to Ms. Ghina Awdi, for carefully editing my work, and to Ms. Maria Sfeir, my Graduate Research Assistant, for her great assistance. I also thank all officers and members of the International Association of Byron Societies (IABS). And to all members of my family, and especially to Nawal, my wife, I am forever indebted for their understanding and standing by me at all times.