This entry goes to Lord Byron
(1788-1824). That he merits an entry of his own is without a question. The only
question should be, why here, and, say, not in Sonnets? Hopefully,
the answer will become clear from the entry below, but for now it may be enough
to say that if Lord Byron has received a personal chapter in Bertrand Russell’s
History of Western Philosophy, all further questions as to why I am
doing the same are best to be redirected to the originator of such a precedent.
Lord Byron’s influence on the
course of Western Civilization has been enormous. I might add, nowhere as
strong as in Russia, where the name of Byron is known to all, and where every
single writer and poet since Pushkin and Lermontov have paid him an exuberant
tribute, and honored him with numerous references and allusions. But this may
be too Russo-centric of me, as I am aware that in Europe, too, the adoration
for Byron was hardly less from the beginning, and probably, the only place
where he was not as much appreciated as everywhere else, was his own England.
Byron provided Europe not so much
with a specific philosophical theory, as with a whole intellectual and cultural
outlook, which affected all sides of the European culture. Goethe wrote of him:
“I could not make any use of any man as the
representative of the modern poetical era, except him, who undoubtedly is to be
regarded as the greatest genius of our century. Byron is neither antique nor
romantic, but like the present day itself. This was the sort of man I required.
Then he suited me on account of his unsatisfied nature and his warlike
tendency, which led to his death at Missolonghi.”
Nietzsche, in Menschliches
#221, calls Byron “a great man, whose instinct
we can trust and whose theory lacked nothing but thirty years more of practice.”
In Menschliches #109, he speaks of him as a bona fide
philosopher:
“Sorrow
is knowledge. How gladly one would exchange the false claims of priests that
there is a God who demands the Good from us, who is guardian and witness of
each act, each moment and each thought, who loves us and wants the best for us
in every misfortune,--- how gladly one would exchange these claims for truths
just as salutary, calming, and soothing as those errors! But there are no such
truths; philosophy can at the most oppose those errors with other metaphysical
fictions (also untruths). But the tragic thing is that we can no longer believe
those dogmas of religion and metaphysics, once we have the rigorous method of
truth in our hearts and heads, yet on the other hand the development of mankind
has made us so delicate, so sensitive, and ailing that we need the most potent
kind of cures and comforts, hence arises the danger that man might bleed to
death from the truth he has recognized. Byron, in Manfred, expressed this in immortal lines:
‘Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The tree of knowledge is not that of life.’”
Bertrand Russell, who has a
special chapter on Byron in his History of Western Philosophy, calls him
an “aristocratic rebel,” and says this of him:
“When we
consider men, not as artists or discoverers, not as sympathetic or antipathetic
to our tastes, but as forces, as causes of change in the social structure, in
judgments of value, or in intellectual outlook, we find that the course of
events in recent times has necessitated much readjustment in our estimates,
making some men less important than they had seemed, and others--- more so.
Among those whose importance is greater than it seemed, Byron deserves a high
place.”
He quickly explains that he is
talking in terms of Byron’s appreciation in England, where he was chronically
underappreciated, whereas on the Continent (which I already had a chance to
emphasize) there never was a need for a readjustment, as Byron’s standing in
Europe has always been of the highest order.
At the end of the chapter,
Russell says: “Like many other prominent men,
[Byron] was more important as a myth, than as he really was.” I
guess that this is put all too modestly. In fact, every heroic personality, any
man of great prominence, necessarily becomes a legend, and only as such
does he enter monumental history. Byron was such a man, and having become a
legend in his own time, he is no less a legend today.
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