Flesh in the Age of Reason (67 page)

For the sword outwears its sheath,
     And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
      And love itself have rest.

BYRON

The Enlightenment called into question the pilgrim’s progress, the Christian soul sojourning a while on earth before final translation at the Last Trump to a life glorious and eternal in heaven. The doctrine of the nerves, Locke’s epistemological breakdown of the personality as conscious selfhood, studies of dreams and delusions, Shaftesbury’s glorying in the role of imagination, and myriad other inquiries which made up the emergent human sciences – all tended to dissolve the pilgrim into the unsettled ambiguities of the ego.

At the close of the eighteenth century Romanticism grew out of
such enlightened questings – ‘grew out’ in a dual sense, both drawing upon and casting aside. Most Romantics – Blake pre-eminently – despised the desiccated reductive materialism apparently championed by enlightened science and philosophy, replacing it with an imaginative self, more dynamic, creative, loftier and divine. Romanticism dramatized the struggles of the individual – typically male – portrayed as forming and forging himself over and against the oppressions of power and the stale conventions and numbing constraints of polite society. The Romantic psyche declared war upon the ‘world’ as colloquially understood, and also grappled with its own lower elements. Inner conflict, self-destructiveness even, were integral to the Romantic agony.

In Byron in particular, such Romantic struggles assumed a heroic and dramatic form, but one uniquely (for the Romantics) brought refreshingly to earth by a biting irony, a satirical wit which undercut poetic pretensions. Byron wrote in a destabilizing register; never at rest, never at home, never comfortable, his mind always evoked the might-have-been and the never-to-be: the arch-enemy of cant and hypocrisy, that was one Enlightenment heritage the rebel in Byron never renounced. He famously dubbed Gibbon ‘the lord of irony’; the epithet fits Byron himself no less.

Byron was open about not being a Christian, with all that that entailed: ‘I have lived a Deist, what I shall die I know not; however, come what may,
ridens moriar
.’ ‘In morality,’ he declared, ‘I prefer Confucius to the Ten Commandments, Socrates to St. Paul’ – adding, with a sting in the tail, ‘though the two latter agree in their opinion of marriage’ – ever a sore point after Byron’s own disastrous union with Annabella Milbanke. A restless, sceptical questing streak marked his temper:

‘To be, or not to be?’ – Ere I decide,
     I should be glad to know that which
is being
.
’Tis true we speculate both far and wide,
     And deem, because we
see
, we are
all-seeing
:

For my part, I’ll enlist on neither side,
     Until I see both sides for once agreeing.
For me, I sometimes think that Life is Death,
Rather than Life a mere affair of breath.

‘
Que sçais-je
?’ was the motto of Montaigne,
     As also of the first academicians:
That all is dubious which man may attain,
     Was one of their most favourite positions.
There’s no such thing as certainty, that’s plain
     As any of Mortality’s conditions;
So little do we know what we’re about in
This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting.

Not least, he championed Alexander Pope against those solemnly pious Romantics, notably Wordsworth, who so resented the great Augustan’s ‘tingling, jingling’ verse. Byron is the true descendant of the enlightened coffee-house scoffer, the shade of Rochester the libertine and the Restoration wits. So much is, of course, patently present in his notorious Don Juan philandering-mode but it is equally visible in his disdain for the credulity of those Christians – he was watching the Evangelical revival – who uncritically, if hubristically, embraced notions of immortality based upon literal (that is, naïve) readings of the Bible.

For Byron, the idea of bodily resurrection at the Last Trump was ridiculous, palpably the wish-fulfilment of miserable self-deceiving creatures unable honestly to face the plain facts of death and extinction. And who would want to believe in a Christian afterlife? ‘A
material
resurrection seems strange and even absurd,’ he declared,

except for purposes of punishment – and all punishment which is to
revenge
rather than
correct
– must be
morally wrong –
and
when
the
World is at an end
– what moral or warning purpose
can
eternal tortures answer?… the whole thing is inscrutable. – It is useless to tell one
not
to
reason
but to
believe
– you might as well tell a man not to wake but
sleep
.

Christian teachings were thus both unfathomable and detestable; their primitive, punitive God did not deserve veneration. It amused Byron to banter against the Churches’ fantasy of life beyond the grave. ‘We are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another,’ he told his friend Francis Hodgson. ‘If men are to live, why die at all? and if they die, why disturb the sweet and sound sleep that “knows no waking”? “Post Mortem nihil est, ipsaque Mors nihil”.’ The notion of neat and tidy piles of the saved and the damned beggared rational belief:

As to revealed religion, Christ came to save men; but a good Pagan will go to heaven, and a bad Nazarene to hell; ‘Argal’ (I argue like the gravedigger) why are not all men Christians? or why are any? If mankind may be saved who never heard or dreamt, at Timbuctoo, Otaheite, Terra Incognita, &c., of Galilee and its Prophet, Christianity is of no avail, if they cannot be saved without, why are not all orthodox? It is a little hard to send a man preaching to Judaea, and leave the rest of the world – Negers and what not –
dark
as their complexions, without a ray of light for so many years to lead them on high; and who will believe that God will damn men for not knowing what they were never taught?

The satirist in Byron, however, felt entitled once in a while to commandeer the Christian master-narrative for seditious purposes. In 1821 Robert Southey published a thumping piece of patriotism, dedicated to King George IV, entitled
A Vision of Judgement
. In it, the Poet Laureate praised the previous reign’s glorious British military achievements, the ‘perfect integrity of the whole administration of public affairs’ under George III, the progress of religion, and so forth. The story-line teetered on the ludicrous: lulled by the death bell of old George III, the poet fell into a trance, and an angel revealed to him the dead king’s spirit ascending to heaven, where the welcoming party included his illustrious royal predecessors, attended by Shakespeare and Milton.

Southey meant his poem as proof of how literature should serve public, pious purposes. Poetry had traditionally indeed been thus
uplifting, but recently, he complained, a ‘Satanic school’ had emerged of poets whose ‘diseased hearts and depraved imaginations’ had rebelled against religion. The reference to Byron was glaring. Byron detested Southey as the arch-priest of cant, renegade from liberalism as he was; and the opportunity of a crushing retort to the turncoat was irresistible. He replied with a work with almost the same title. The opening lines of Byron’s
The Vision of Judgment
(1822), established the tone of urbane scepticism:

Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate:
     His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull,
So little trouble had been given of late;
     Not that the place by any means was full.

Byron made fun of the Laureate’s parade of religiosity. Southey had gloried in the exploits of war: Byron pictured the clerkly angels exhausted at inscribing the names of those slaughtered:

Each day too slew its thousands six or seven,
     Till at the crowning carnage, Waterloo,
They threw their pens down in divine disgust –
The page was so besmear’d with blood and dust.

Southey had apotheosized George III – the king was in heaven, his enemies in hell. Scarred by his ghastly childhood spent in Aberdeen under his orthodox Calvinist mother, Byron hated talk of damnation and the bigotry of public piety:

I know this is unpopular; I know
     ’Tis blasphemous; I know one may be damn’d
For hoping no one else may e’er be so;
     I know my catechism; I know we’re cramm’d
With the best doctrines till we quite o’erflow;
     I know that all save England’s church have shamm’d,
And that the other twice two hundred churches
And synagogues have made a
damn’d
bad purchase.

In Southey’s poem the arrival of George III at heaven’s gates was the occasion for a special fanfare. Byron pictured something quite different:

                                                ‘George the Third is dead.’
     ‘And who
is
George the Third?’ replied the apostle:
‘
What George? what Third?
’

Was there not breathtaking blasphemy in Southey’s suggestion that the Lord of Hosts himself must be impressed by the arrival of the British monarch? In a scene echoing Milton, Byron has the Archangel Michael appearing to conduct the trial of George III, and Satan turning up to claim his victim. The Devil delivers the indictment against the King: the influence of Lord Bute, the loss of America, the war against France, five million Catholics refused political equality, etc., etc.

He ever warr’d with freedom and the free:
     Nations as men, home subjects, foreign foes,
So that they utter’d the word ‘Liberty!’
     Found George the Third their first opponent…

Finally, Southey arrived to read his poem in praise of the king, but at the sound of the first lines all the spirits howled and fled, and thus the trial was left incomplete:

All I saw farther, in the last confusion,
     Was, that King George slipp’d into heaven for one;
And when the tumult dwindled to a calm,
I left him practising the hundredth psalm.

Just thinking of the Last Judgement was thus a sordid farce.

Not least for Byron, reincarnation was somewhat disgusting: was not temporal embodiment quite enough? Through the hundreds of stanzas of
Childe Harold
,
Don Juan
and the like, the greasy obesity of the aristocratic high life of the day, the podgy Prince of Wales and all the dowdy dowagers excited the deepest revulsion. The Christian
threat of all that fat flesh further reincarnated did not merely offend Byron’s reason; it turned his stomach.

Byron was wont to assume a lofty disdain for the flesh: he was above all that. Ever the scoffer, however, he equally mocked his own stoical pretensions, and brought himself down to earth. ‘I once thought myself a Philosopher and talked nonsense with great Decorum,’ he confessed, ‘I defied pain, and preached up equanimity… At last, a fall from my horse convinced me, bodily suffering was an Evil, and the worst of an argument overset my maxims and my temper at the same moment.’

This self-criticism helps explain Byron’s contempt for Joseph Priestley. The aristocratic poet looked down upon the petty-bourgeois Yorkshire Dissenter with his earnest but uncritical scriptural belief in progress. How absurd for such a busy little bee to be prating on about such lofty themes! In particular, Byron found the chemist’s solemn theologico-philosophical materialism, which embraced the resurrection of the flesh, particularly galling: what a degrading faith to espouse! Christian or no, Byron certainly did not want the faith sullied by the likes of Priestley. ‘I have often been inclined to Materialism in philosophy,’ he admitted,

but could never bear it’s introduction into
Christianity
– which appears to me essentially founded upon the
Soul
. – For this reason, Priestley’s Christian Materialism – always struck me as deadly. – Believe the resurrection of the
body
– it you will – but
not without
a
Soul
.… I own my partiality for
Spirit
.

Such tosh as Priestley’s ‘Immortal Materiality’ was too ludicrous for words. How insufferable for him to drag the rather noble idea of the spirit down to bourgeois bathos by insisting it was all a matter of atoms and points of force: what a grovelling lack of soul! The patrician opted for true spirit, even if its existence might be a bit of a
jeu d’esprit
.

In his deflating reductionism the satirist himself was perforce a materialist after his fashion. Pomposity, pretensions, high-flown nonsense, flatteries, the vanity of royalty, nobles and the fashionable beautiful people and
bien pensants
– all such are perpetually brought down by his scabrous wit to the most basic, gross material level: the
greed, spite, malice, lust, and above all hypocrisy which were at the corrupt heart of their being. ‘Went to my box at Covent-garden to-night,’ he recorded one evening in 1813,

and my delicacy felt a little shocked at seeing S
^***
’s mistress (who, to my certain knowledge, was actually educated, from her birth, for her profession) sitting with her mother, ‘a three-piled b—d, b—d-Major to the army,’ in a private box opposite. I felt rather indignant; but, casting my eyes round the house, in the next box to me, and the next, and the next, were the most distinguished old and young Babylonians of quality; – so I burst out a laughing. It was really odd; Lady
^**
divorced
– Lady
^**
and her daughter, Lady
^**
, both
divorceable
– Mrs.
^**
, in the next the
like
, and still nearer
^******
! What an assemblage to
me
, who know all their histories. It was as if the house had been divided between your public and your
understood
courtesans; – but the Intriguantes much outnumbered the regular mercenaries.… How I do delight in observing life as it really is! – and myself, after all, the worst of any. But no matter – I must avoid egotism, which, just now, would be no vanity.