Byron and the distorted prism
He looks to her, and rushes on Where life is lost, or Freedom won
Byron still to some extent conforms to well- established literary tradition yet expresses his predecessors’ opinions and emotions ‘ with an intensity hitherto unknown ’ (Spencer, p. 290). In the excitement and emotion of ‘That land is Glory’s still and theirs!’ one can clearly observe the influence of Greek modernity on Byron; the poet uses intense language which compels readers to share in a collective idealized construction of Greece. Schoina limits the extent of Byron’s rebellion to a slight experimentation on conventional musings on the decline of ancient glory, with this experimentation suggested to be the way in which Byron vividly describes Greece’s modern landscape when contrasting this to Grece’s ancient glory (Schoina, 2022, p. 4).However, it can also be argued that in many ways Byron goes further, completely casting off the constricting conformities of fetishization of the ancients, and instead exhibiting in CHP a complete rejection of such unqualified reverence for Greek antiquity when it is bestowed at the expense of recognition for the important modern struggle of contemporary Greece. It has been suggested that Byron’s con demnation of the continual reference to Greek antiquity in which his counterparts engaged is ‘ perhaps the most important example of how the poet undermined his own historical fetishism ’ (Pregnolato, 2018, p. 51). In the Notes to CHP Canto II (Byron, 2011, p. 96), Byron argues how ‘ Of the ancient Greeks we know more than enough; at least the younger men of Europe devote much of their time to the study of the Greek writers and history, which would be more usefully spent in mastering their own. Of the moderns, we are perhaps more neglectful than they deserve; and while every man of any pretensions to learning is tiring out his youth, and often his age, in the study of the language and of the harangues of the Athenian demagogues in favour of freedom, the real or supposed descendants of these sturdy republicans are left to the actual tyranny of their masters, although a very slight effort is required to strike off their chains. ’ Byron expressly condemns the ‘ younger men of Europe ’ who slavishly study Greek antiquity at the ‘ neglect ’ of modern Greece and its political reality. Byron goes further in criticizing those who discriminate against the modern Greeks as a result of their inability to fulfil pre-conceived notions of a fetishized past, comparing such distorted, bigoted views of w esterners to a hypothetical ‘Turk in England [who] would condemn the nation by wholesale, because he was wronged by his lacquey, and overcharged by his washerwomen’ (CHP, II, Notes). Yet Byron himself constantly oscillated between heartfelt approval for the prospect of a seemingly tantalizingly close Greek revolution and vehement cynicism for the prospect of Greek victory. 2 However, such oscillations are a product of a mind attempting to digest the modern reality of what he saw before him, in contrast to either the bitter melancholy or fallacious elation instilled in contemporaries through the toxic effects of Greek antiquity. The Notes to Canto II give an insight into Byron’s conflicting opinions on the G reeks (Byron, 2011, p. 96):
2 ‘The Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns as heretofore, and God forbid they ever should! But they may be subjects without being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they are free and industrious, and such may Greece be hereafter.’ CHP, II, Notes.
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