ART: Lost in his own legend
Lord Byron at the National Portrait Gallery
Is there anyone out there who still reads Lord Byron for pleasure, as our forefathers did four or five generations ago? Obviously, on picking up those volumes one quickly remembers that some of the more modest lyrics — So, we’ll go no more a-roving and that sort of thing — still have a bleak ring of truth about them, that Don Juan is still genuinely funny in places, and that the level of sheer technical proficiency is such as to leave one full of respect even where warmer sentiments are lacking. But then there are other poems — On the Castle of Chillon, whole swathes of Childe Harold — which for me, at least, are unreadable as anything other than clinical specimens of a certain sort of dateable romanticism, nested comfortable within a specific historical context in which those references to ‘liberty’ were not haunted by what came afterwards, and in which all those exclamation marks looked something other than schoolgirlish and silly. I don’t think this is uniquely my problem, either. By the time Byron died in 1824, he was already simultaneously the hero and the victim of ‘Byronmania’ — the term dates from his own day — and since then, so many layers of reference, homage and critique have accrued around Byron that we must all despair of ever seeing him as his contemporaries must have done. The legend is greater than the poet, let alone the man.
So it’s probably just as well that the National Portrait Gallery’s thoughtful little exhibition, Mad, Bad and Dangerous: The Cult of Lord Byron, focuses on the legend — how it was nurtured, how it has aged and how it has currency with us still. In doing so, it manages to provide some faint glimpse of how Byron might have looked to his contemporaries, and at the same time to remind us what a long shadow he continues to cast. The exhibition is curated by Fiona MacCarthy. Like her recent biography Byron: Life and Legend, it draws heavily on the archives of John Murray, Byron’s publisher, as well as the National Portrait Gallery’s own collection and assorted other loans.
Roughly, the show — located in the small and faintly cramped Porter Gallery — divides into two parts. The first sets out in some detail the sources from which our vision of Lord Byron derive. George Gordon, the 6th Lord Byron was born in 1788 in London, spent his early childhood in Aberdeen and inherited his great-uncle’s title and Gothic family seat at the age of ten. By the time he left for Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge his deformed foot, however much it continued to embarrass him, made less of an impact on his contemporaries than his sultry good looks, his precocious poetic skill and his propensity for passionate and generally scandalous affairs with anyone and everyone. By the young age of 24, following the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II he had become extremely famous, not only as a poet, but for his political opinions and a string of illicit relationships culminating in rumours of an incestuous affair with his half-sister. Even the Whig socialites who lionised him could not quite accept this latter circumstance as a charming personal quirk. Their disapproval eventually sent him into an exile passed agreeably and productively enough in Geneva, Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, Genoa and ultimately Greece. Here Byron — who had a fondness for dressing up in uniforms to which he was not entitled — wished to participate in the Greek War of Independence. In 1824, while still in Greece, he contracted a fever and died. He was only 36 years old, but had long since worried that he was losing his looks.
Byron was, along with Napoleon, one of the pioneers of that distinctively modern phenomenon, the international celebrity. By its nature, celebrity subordinates actual achievement to more amorphous, subjective qualities such as sexual charisma, charm, a willingness to embrace danger, a tolerance for life lived in the glare of public scrutiny and — perhaps most important of all — the ability to personify and hence give life to abstractions. The way in which Byron was depicted in the 40-plus portraits made during his life underscore all these points, as does the solicitous interest he invariably took in his own image. It was not enough that a portrait should resemble Byron’s physical appearance. Indeed, some of the most popular portraits of Byron — popular, not least with Byron — looked nothing much like him. But that wasn’t really the point. The point was to capture everything that Byron stood for — the melancholy, the sense of danger, the good looks radiating what William Hazlitt called ‘a sort of hermaphrodite softness’ that attracted both men and women. There are accounts Byron’s many admirers swooning over his image, writing to him about how marvellous he looked, and even treasuring a painting of his right eye, for heaven’s sake. After this, then, it comes as something of a relief to find Marianne Hunt writing to Shelley about a portrait in which the pouting poet looks ‘like a great Schoolboy who has had a plain bun given him instead of a plum one’.
The exhibition illustrates neatly how the Byron image — the picture by any stray reference to ‘Byronic looks’ — evolved out of mundane reality. It is not simply a matter of actual portraits featuring curling locks, open-necked shirts, dark smouldering eyes or even Albanian fancy-dress. (Byron so admired the costume in which he was depicted Thomas Phillips’ famous portrait that he purchased it himself.) One of the most fascinating items is a set of illustrations by Richard Westall for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, in which Westall is clearly blurring the distinction between the handsome poet and his scandal-prone protagonists. By the time he died, the image of Bryon as a literary figure, famous lover and freedom-fighter had taken on a life of its own. This is starkly illustrated in the contrast between the many theatrical depictions of Byron’s deathbed — well represented here, and reaching their reductio ad absurdam in Josef Odevaere’s ridiculous Death of Byron — and the garbled, misspelled, inarticulate and clearly absolutely heartfelt letter in which Byron’s valet announced his master’s death to the much-put-upon John Murray.
In death, as Auden wrote of Yeats, he became his admirers. By that date his cult had spread far beyond Britain, far indeed beyond Europe, so that the angry young Decembrists aped his taste in neckwear and sensitive young spinsters in provincial Massachusetts sighed over engravings depicting those famous curling locks and strangely lobeless ears. His life and his art influenced Pushkin, Heine, Berlioz and Delacroix, Garibaldi and Mazzini but also Disraeli. He was admired for being an aristocrat and yet a revolutionary, a poet but also a man of action, a man whose personal behaviour scandalised polite society but also an artist whose work approached the sublime. He was, in short, Romanticism personified — a state of affairs only sanctified by the accident of his early and quasi-heroic end. The second half of the exhibition explores Byron’s legacy in ways that are imaginative, often compelling, and only very occasionally a bit silly. I shall never again chance upon the famous Che Guevara image, secular icon of a thousand foetid undergraduate bedrooms, without seeing in it a series of references, explicit and implicit, to Byron. I can well imagine that Ted Hughes liked to imagine himself as a faintly Byronic figure, breaking hearts and writing poems, although it is harder to imagine that Byron, for instance, would have spent so much of his old age in the shadow of a woman whose heart he broke. And if you are going to broaden the definition that much, the cases made for Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Lucien Freud [yes, really] as latter-day Byrons are perhaps reasonable enough. But once you’ve gone that far, why stop there? I suspect a case could be made for Byronic influences on that dark, dashing, paradoxical Trinity College man, Oliver Letwin, for instance, if only someone would take the time to do it ...
But that’s a job for another day. Here and now, Mad, Bad and Dangerous deserves credit for making its points with intelligence, subtlety and imagination. It’s certainly well worth a visit, and not only for Byron enthusiasts, either. The issues are broader than that. As the exhibition makes clear, Romanticism — with its celebration of moral anarchy, its artificial nationalism, its instinctive bias in favour of rebellion and innovation, its dangerous cult of individuality as an end in itself, its studied disdain in the face of ‘decorum’ and ‘patience’ and ‘responsibility’ — is one of those nineteenth century nightmares from which we’ve yet to rouse ourselves, even after a twentieth century spent discovering where all those paths can lead us. This exhibition goes further than many in reminding us how fresh, exciting and compelling all these things must once have sounded, all mixed up with a soap-opera life and some marvellous verse. No, Romanticism was hardly Byron’s fault, but Mad, Bad and Dangerous — the enduring charm of these adjectives makes it own point — demonstrates why his memory, and even his poety, is now so completely inextricable from it.
Mad, Bad and Dangerous: The Cult of Lord Byron will be at the National Portrait Gallery from 20 November 2002 - 16 February 2003 in the Porter Gallery. Admission is free.
Bunny Smedley, November 19, 2002 10:52 AM