The Byron Centenary

by Cain [Aleister Crowley]

Of all those demi-Gods whose paths in the jungle of the world Blake blazed, Byron was the Heracles—the mightiest and most formidably insane.

He is like an ogre in a fairy tale— a [illegible] crashing his way across Europe by dint of whirling arms and legs, his savage club striking at random in his blind agony.

He had no idea where he was going; he doubted whether there was anywhere to go. Nor had he knightly weapons; he was, as an artist, no more than a cave-man carving rude names on well-gnawed reindeer-bones. There is hardly a line of all his large volleys of verse that sticks in the memory, or, when it chances so to do, means anything. The bulk of his work is unreadable, in the true sense: one wades through it, indeed, delights in much of it, perhaps; but one does not go back to it again and again, drawing with each new draught fresh wine from the school of Dionysus [?]. His heroes are all of a type, blackguards, corsairs, rakes, murderers, and madmen,

Is it answered: how then came he to wield, as he did without doubt, more influence over his contemporaries than any other poet of his time, than Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats or Blake? The question draws a smile from Clio. He owed his greatness to those very qualities which have earned him obsolescence in the end. The pell-clad giant, stalking through the trackless forests of Europe, was just the one and only type that could possibly make his mark.

Civilization had gone squash. American Independence and French Revolution had worked civilization and Christianity into a [illegible] — we asked [illegible] of Napoleon Bonaparte!

The  Encyclopoedists had knocked the props from under the gimcrack stucco of the Oeil-de-Boeuf. It was no time for listening quietly to sane plans of reconstruction. No two men could be found to agree on fundamentals. All were agreed that 'a priori' dogma was absurd. God had been dethroned and Reason set up in His place: but what is Reason unless the chaos of odds and ends of partial agreement? So nothing could be heard but blustering voices—Camille Desmoulins, Dauton, Talbin. And these leonine lives lat at the mercy of snakes like Robespierre, till presently came Bonaparte, more violent, cunning, and aggressive than all, with his idea that no human voice could possibly be loud enough to dominate the riot, and therefore—"[illegible] his name"! Those who have read the memoirs of his period—Marbot, the Duchesse d' Abrantes, and the rest—see one thing stand out plain above all else, that the only type of man who could rule was the hot hectoring bully. Successors of the Sea-Green Incorruptible life thrived only in sly secret by-paths of the world.

Now of this huge burly heavy-handed Footfall-Forward kind of man, the type in letters was George Gordon. His hero Knight come of the Vieille noblesse like Marbot, or of the beefiest canaille like Mersat: in every case the type was essentially the same in the spiritual world that of blind Samson, crazed Alcides, Orlando Furioso, the strong man in a lawless land; utterly incapable of seeing his goal, far less of guiding himself towards it, in his bewilderment taking the first glistening pebble for the Pearl of Great Price, and, stung or even wounded, by the swarms of little men around him, going at last clean out of his mind, and moaning "Let me perish with the Philistines!" pulling the temple down about his [illegible] ears!

Consider Byron's aims in life! He never had an aim. He believed in nothing: how could he? so he must grab perforce at the tinsel of romance and swear down his own view of his own folly: "The King's daughter is all glorious within: her raiment is of wrought gold." He ends by taking up the cause of Greece, first ending it the cause of "Freedom"—whatever that might mean! He had no faintest inkling of the merits of the quarrel: he had learnt Greek at school, admired Greek Sculpture, thought Greek costumes picturesque, and Greek brigands fine tall fellows of their lands.

Byron shows nowhere as much intelligence as would serve to guide a gorilla to a coconut. He never thought about anything twice: the pain would have been utterly intolerable. Even to think of a think once—it hurt him so that he had to get rid of it in a melodious  carol[?]!

Therefore, for all his Gargantuan gestures, for all his Titan vehemence, for all his rage for Freedom, he achieved nothing in the cause; as how could he, not knowing what he meant by the word?

Shelley, with scarce a life to match his [illegible], did infinitely more for Liberty; since despite his jejune ineptitude, his querulous prejudices, and his vague notions, like thin down-tinged clouds, he had at least a faint-etched image of the Ideal State whose Law should be Liberty; thus those in whose hearts his lightnings kindled the Enthusiastic Energy to awake his dream come true, had a model of attainment towards which to work.

But Byron's Freedom was the ruthless rage of the thunderstorm, a brooding darkness only lit be venomous flashes that blasted where they struck, its fury destined to dissolve itself by its own internal strain and incoherence, leaving no mark of its fulgurant roar but a seared landscape.

Observe a little more in detail this quality of incoherence in that heaped-up agglomeration of stresses! Who can quote any poem of Byron which may stand for the expression of even the ten thousandth part of that stupendous stature? We know this as it were by intuition based upon those myriad fitful glimpses where his flash broke from the storm. There is no verse, no line, no phrase which implies constructive energy, not even the knowledge or so much as the possibility of any knowledge, whereon to build the world anew. He is all furious aimless affirmation and negation, cancelling out, the very image of those opposite strains in the Aethyrs whose clash is [illegible].

Contrast once more with Shelley! He, in his wildest wrath of denunciation, bases his denial on the assumption of some principle of Truth. He only revolts from some injustice because he sees the image of Justice. Byron revolts is sheer Satanic spite. Cain is not the revolutionary who dreams of the Ideal Family, and is ready to kill Abel—and the Old-Folk at Home, too, at a pinch, and whistle for Lilith to come with him and start the whole job over again. He is the Anarchist (the kind imagined in Newspapers) who wants to smash things up like a schoolboy in a fit of temper without the slightest vision—nay, hardly with desire!—of any positive "Good" to replace the "Evil" which he finds intolerable. Here then we come back to our view of Byron as one aspect of the Zeitgeist. The men of the Fourteenth of July cased the Bastille with the definite intention of clearing the ground for the ideal structures indicated by Rousseau, Paine, Jefferson, and their like.

The discovery was then made—by History: men have presently not made it yet!—that the most excellent plans will not work unless the material for the building is prepared beforehand; and this is a matter of centuries. The Experience of the Unconscious determines the destiny of Mankind; and no man is wise enough either to foresee or even to detect so much as the superficial nature of this Mystery.

In consequence, the lath and plaster jerry-building of the New Regime collapsed on the heads of its builders, in most cases severing them neatly from their trunks. Then the machine, blinded in baffled agony, went reeling down to chaos; instead of cutting off the heads of the strictest principles of Fraternal Justice and Aspiration to Universal Goodwill, they cut them off because there did not seem to be anything else in particular to do. The machine at last clogged with its own excrement; all principles alike had perished, and the moment came when the most unscrupulous giant available was free to focus the bewildered attention of the survivors upon himself, and, remarking—in common language!—"I am the Man of Destiny" calmly began to clean up the mess. A few slight obstacles—a [illegible] to threaten the survival of royalty, or a Barras[?] that of parliamentarianism—were easy to remove.

Had Byron lived, he might in his own person have survived the wreak of his prejudices and passions; he might have come to govern himself as Napoleon came to govern France. There is small hint in anything he wrote that he had hopes of finding any such goal to his Pilgrimage. Yea, even so, Napoleon , "strong man armed", could not "keep his goods in peace". The reason alas! no man is strong enough to build for himself and by himself.

But—more than enough of this! it saddens us too much. For we, all of us, all who are with decent burial, love Byron beyond almost any other man of his age; is not he the strong, the self-willed turbulent schoolboy sound in ourselves—the image of our own true birth to consciousness, the outburst of our violent virility?

Not a word more, then, unless this: that as we cannot remember him, so neither can we forget him and gild upon the savage rock that overwhelmed him Shelley's immortal tribute:

"The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame Over his living head like heaven is bent" and gaze thereon, and hush for ever in our hearts the ineffable sadness of the antiphone:

"Verily I say unto you, They have their reward."

[409]