Peter Thorslev

The Byronic Hero

Now whatever the virtues of the early eighteenth century, it was not an age of heroes. Perhaps this is so because it was still dominated by the idea of the 'Great Chain of Being,' and through most of the century, at least, this order was conceived of as essentially static; and heroes, especially Romantic heroes, have the quality of always aspiring, or at least of never remaining quietly in place. Or to put it another way: the early eighteenth century was the age of analytic reason, of common sense, and increasingly of sentiment—of what Lovejoy calls, paradoxically, 'rationalistic anti-intellectualism,' culminating in an ethics of 'prudent mediocrity.' It takes no more than a cursory reading of the great satirists of the Augustan age, for instance, to see that overweening pride, or hubris, was still a cardinal sin. It is not difficult to see what Swift and Pope were against. They were against 'eccentric' individualism in whatever manner it appeared: antiquarianism and 'modernism'; linguistic scholarship and the 'new science'; metaphysical speculation and 'enthusiasm' in all its forms. What they were for is perhaps not so clearly defined, but perhaps it would be fair to say that they were generally for excellence in established forms and within established bounds, and above all they were for order and common sense.

Such an age could and did produce great literature, of course, but generally speaking it did not produce heroes, for there is always something of rebellious individualism, of pride, of hubris, about heroes. In the full bloom of the Romantic age, however, these were no longer cardinal sins: they had become instead the cardinal virtues.

For the Romantic Age was our last great age of heroes. It was the era of political and military heroes: heroes of revolution from Washington to Kosciusko, celebrated by most of the Romantic poets; or popular military heroes like Wellington, von Blucher, or Lord Nelson; and, of course, above all. Napoleon, who left his shadow across Europe not only in his lifetime, but through the entire nineteenth century, and whom every hero-worshiper from Beethoven to Nietzsche has at one rime or another taken for a god. It is not merely that these men were actual heroes, since every age has its great men (and the Age of Queen Anne had Marlborough); what is important is that these men were all admired, even loved, and that they became legends and myths while they were still living. The same preoccupation with heroes shows up in the arts of the period: with those two awesome robber barons, Gotz von Berlichingen and Karl Moor, Goethe and Schiller initiated Germany's literary revival, and Werther and Faust, those cosmic egoists, continued it; in England terrifying Gothic Villains shared the stage with Shakespeare's great tragic heroes, and prepared the way for the Byronic Hero himself; and all over western Europe multitudes of rejuvenated Lucifers and triumphant Prometheuses filled the air with majestic defiance and majestic suffering. Even in music: Beethoven wrote the Egmont and Prometheus overtures and celebrated a heroine of freedom in his only opera, and the first great Romantic symphony, initially dedicated to Napoleon, has come to be called 'Eroica.'

To speak of the Romantic Movement as the 'Age of Heroes,' of course, is to say also that a key characteristic of Romanticism is individualism, that this lies at the heart of the movement and is the reason for this preoccupation with the heroic. Individualism may at first seem a negative concept, and to an extent, of course, it is. But the term should connote more than mere eccentricity, whether social or intellectual. Both Romantic poets and their heroes were isolated from the society of their day; they were all in some degree rebels and outsiders.

The concept becomes clearer, I think, with a contrast between the Romantic poets and some of their Augustan predecessors. Dryden, Swift, Pope, or Samuel Johnson were severe critics of the society in which they lived, to be sure, but they were always critics from within that society; they never at any time considered that they had some inner vision of truth not visible to the common readers of their age. They were quite convinced that all men could see as they did, if they but looked at Nature in the light of their common reason and common sense. This was most certainly not so with the Romantic poets: one article of faith in every Romantic's creed was that the artist was solitary and superior, a hero and leader above the common herd. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads even Wordsworth, who was closest of all the Romantics to eighteenth-century theory, viewed the poet as a man 'possessed of more than usual organic sensibility' with a 'greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul' than that of the common man. So that even if Wordsworth is very much concerned to show the poet as a 'man among men,' in actuality he sets him as far outside the common run as his dalesmen were from the normal society of nineteenth-century England. And with the other Romantic poets this feeling of isolation and alienation becomes so obvious (and sometimes so painful) that there is no need to illustrate it. Keats in his letters says he will undertake to live like a hermit, and even thanks the English world for being cruel to poets, so that they can be free to compose. For Shelley, the poet is the 'unacknowledged legislator' of the world; for Byron, of course, he is the outcast who learns through years of suffering that he loves not the world nor the world him.

As the poets considered themselves alienated, isolated from society because of their greater sensibilities, because of their greater closeness to nature or to God, or merely because of their radical ideas in the areas of social, theological, or moral reform, so also they alienated and isolated their heroes. Their heroes were solitaries, like Northumberland dalesmen or disillusioned hermits; they were intellectual rebels like Faust; they were moral outcasts or wanderers like Cain or Ahasuerus; or finally they were rebels against society and even against God himself, like Prometheus or Lucifer.