Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  During the next few days and evenings, there was further scary talk at the Villa Diodati. Draft stories were read and their plots discussed. This is how Polidori knew how Byron's story was supposed to end: with the narrator ‘finding [Darvell] alive, upon his return, and making love to his sister’.41 Evidently, Byron had told the others what he knew of the contemporary Greek superstition about vampires. With this information, Polidori had enough to go on, after Byron had announced he was giving up the story, to complete it in his own way. Polidori moved the setting to a better-known destination on Byron's travels, namely Athens, turned the chief character into a recognisable caricature of Byron himself, and gave the completed story a title that shows he had been listening attentively. He called it The Vampyre.

  At least one other member of the party had been listening too. The story that Mary began during those same days has long since eclipsed every other consequence of that late-night pact at the Villa Diodati. Frankenstein is not, of course, a vampire story. The ‘Creature’ that Victor Frankenstein creates is the product of his own human ingenuity. But the raw material Frankenstein uses for the purpose ensures that the unfortunate ‘Creature’ (Mary never calls him a ‘monster’) has all the appearance, as well as the destructive capability, of the living dead of Greek superstition. Frankenstein's method is to reassemble human body-parts taken from ‘vaults and charnel houses’, and then to reanimate the ‘lifeless thing’ that results, by infusing it with ‘a spark of being’.42 At an early stage of his experiments, he even contemplates raising the dead as an alternative: ‘if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption’, he muses.43 Modern criticism often emphasises that the ‘Creature’ is imagined in the novel as a kind of alter ego, or doppelgänger, of Frankenstein himself, his own ‘dark side’. In the words of the hero (whose creator had obviously absorbed Byron's tales from Greece): ‘I considered the being whom I had cast in among mankind…nearly in the light of my vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy all who were dear to me.’44

  One of the most unexpected subtleties of the novel is the innocence of the Creature. ‘Every where I see bliss from which I alone am irrecoverably excluded’, he cries, at the beginning of his confrontation with his creator on the Mer de Glace, above Chamonix. ‘I was benevolent and good: misery made me a fiend.’ Then, at the climax of that scene, the Creature renews his accusation: ‘I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?’45 This aspect of the novel has invited comparison with Rousseau's ideal of the ‘natural man’, with the forces unleashed by the French Revolution, or with the condition of the negro slaves that Mary would have seen in chain gangs at Bristol – not to mention Mary's own self-image as the precocious intellectual ‘creation’ of her father, William Godwin.46 To this list (in principle, open-ended) could be added Byron's account of the modern Greeks, that he had published in the ‘Notes’ to the second canto of Childe Harold: ‘they suffer all the moral and physical ills that can afflict humanity…They are so unused to kindness, that when they occasionally meet with it they look upon it with suspicion, as a dog often beaten snaps at your fingers if you attempt to caress him.’47

  These are not the only ways in which Byron's reminiscences of Greece left their mark on Mary's novel. Frankenstein, now considered a ‘modern myth’, is connected to an ancient one through its subtitle: The Modern Prometheus. The original Prometheus was not only the fire-bringer, punished by the king of the gods, Zeus, for daring to bestow the gift of fire on mortals (and for that reason counted among the inspirers of the ‘byronic hero’). According to a less-well-known version of the myth, Prometheus had also been the creator of mankind, fashioning the first humans out of clay. It is in this sense that Frankenstein can claim to be his modern equivalent. Since the 1960s, scholars have supposed that Mary's source for this version of the myth was Dryden's translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. No doubt she did look up what Ovid had written, in the first century CE, once she was back in England. But Byron knew the story too.48

  It is in Pausanias’ guidebook to Greece, written in the second century, that had travelled all round Greece with Byron and Hobhouse, mostly consulted by the latter. According to Pausanias, the very spot where Prometheus had created the first humans could still be seen in his day. The place is called Panopeus.49 There is no reason to suppose that Byron and Hobhouse actually went there. But, both in Pausanias’ text and on the ground, Panopeus is right next to Chaeronea, the site of an ancient battle that they did visit. This and other battlefields of antiquity are invoked in the new canto of Childe Harold, part of Byron's tirade against what he saw as the hollow victory of Wellington over Napoleon at Waterloo.50 While he was working on this part of his canto, he more than once wrote to Hobhouse in England, urging him to bring with him his copy of Pausanias when he came out to visit – and Hobhouse must have complied, because the book would later be found among Byron's effects at Missolonghi.51

  There was certainly talk of Prometheus at the Villa Diodati, and of what the ancient myth might mean, today, to those who were present. Shelley's apocalyptic celebration of universal liberation, Prometheus Unbound, was still some way off in the future. But the two poets reread together the original Prometheus drama by Aeschylus – or rather, according to Byron's later account, Shelley translated it for him, since he himself was a lazy classical scholar and since leaving school had ‘never open[ed] a Greek book’. Byron wrote his own ode, ‘Prometheus’, in July or early in August.52 In this poem, Prometheus is no longer the benefactor of mankind, but rather ‘a symbol and sign’, a reminder to man that he too is ‘in part divine’ and so capable of making his own bitter victory out of defiance.53

  Then, in the autumn, Byron would begin his drama Manfred, which in many ways is his own counterpart to Frankenstein, and draws on the same geographical setting as the novel and some of the same ideas. In Byron's play, the hero avows ‘The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark, / The lightning of my being’.54 Manfred, no less than Victor Frankenstein, has engaged in dark arts in his doomed quest to ‘seek the things beyond mortality’.55 Not long after finishing the play, Byron explained: ‘The Prometheus – if not exactly in my plan – has always been so much in my head – that I can easily conceive its influence over all or any thing that I have written.’56 In the context of that summer of 1816, this has less to do with the ancient drama that Shelley translated for him at the Villa Diodati than with the composite myth of Prometheus as the creator who uses fire to bring his creatures to life. This is what Frankenstein does in Mary Shelley's novel – and, although the company of the Villa Diodati may not have known it, had earlier been imagined by Beethoven in his ballet score The Creatures of Prometheus and by Jean-Simon Berthélemy in his painting of 1802 The Creation of Man, with its evident allusion to Michelangelo's famous depiction of the creation scene from Genesis (Plate 4).57

  The figure of Prometheus would appear yet again, more subtly this time, in the next and final canto of Childe Harold, written the following summer in Italy.58 And, as we shall see in the next chapter, once Byron had read Frankenstein in its published form, he would return to the idea and add yet another resonance to the growing ‘modern myth’ that had been born that summer in Switzerland.

  Love carnal and divine

  The ghost stories had been first thought of on the night of Sunday, 16 June. By the following Saturday the weather had cleared sufficiently that the two poets decided to hire a boat and embark on a week-long tour of the lake together. Polidori was not invited. Neither were the ladies.

  The poets had had enough of ghosts and darkness. With them in the boat, along with the hired crew, they took the novel of romantic love by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie or the New Heloise. The unrequited but unquenchable love between its hero, St Preux, and Julie had been acted out at the far end of the lake from Geneva and Cologny, at Claren
s. Byron had read the book before and urged it enthusiastically upon his companion. Shelley, a reluctant reader of novels, now came to it for the first time. But Shelley had long been an admirer of Rousseau's political ideas, and was easily captivated.59 To reach the scene of the famous love story they had first to make their way along the southern shore of the lake, which at the time was part of the Kingdom of Savoy.

  By comparison with Switzerland, where they were living, they found the Savoyards disturbingly backward. Their first stop, on the evening of Saturday, 22 June, was at the small village of Nernier.60 The inn where they deposited their baggage was ‘gloomy and dirty’, the children they watched playing by the lakeside ‘deformed and diseased’. One child stood out, as Shelley remembered the scene a little over a fortnight later: a ‘little boy’ who ‘had such exquisite grace in his mien and motions, as I never before saw equalled in a child. His countenance was beautiful for the expression with which it overflowed.’ Byron gave the boy a coin. For Shelley, this scene by the peaceful lakeside was all innocence. Not so, perhaps, for Byron. Back at the inn, the pair found that their rooms had been made up during their absence. Shelley recorded: ‘They reminded my companion of Greece: it was five years, he said, since he had slept in such beds. The influence of the recollections excited by this circumstance on our conversation gradually faded, and I retired to rest with no unpleasant sensations.’61

  What can have struck Shelley as so ‘unpleasant’ about his friend's reminiscences that its impression had first to ‘fade’ before he could sleep easily that night? How much might Byron have confided, during that first evening when the two poets were alone in one another's company at the inn at Nernier, to the strikingly good-looking younger man? The beds Byron was reminded of were surely the ones he had shared with Nicolo Giraud, beginning at the Penteli monastery. He must have hinted at something, at least, of the sexual liberation he had found in Greece. Shelley's radical opinions on sex and religion, as Byron would have realised by now, were tempered by an extreme fastidiousness. This would explain the lingering effect of the conversation that Shelley could not entirely elide from his account of it, written a fortnight later – and perhaps also for the unexpected harshness of this judgement, that closely followed: ‘Lord Byron is an extremely interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds[?]’62 Later, there would come other grounds for Shelley's often wildly oscillating judgements of Byron's character. But, in mid-July 1816, less than two months into their friendship and with the lake tour recently behind them, the likeliest spur to this one must have been what Byron told Shelley about those beds in Greece, recalled for him so vividly by the inn at Nernier.

  This conversation, brief and probably mutually embarrassing, was to have a sequel that would leave its mark on the life and work of both poets. Shelley, either that same evening or in the boat during the days that followed, now had all the prompting he needed to embark on a favourite hobby horse of his own. Byron in his letters of the time never mentions his companion on these travels, let alone what they talked about. But another new acquaintance reported of Shelley, when he met him not long after this, that ‘His principle [sic] discourse was…of Plato.’63

  Ever since his last year at Eton, Shelley had known Plato's philosophical dialogue on sex and love, written at the beginning of the fourth century BCE, the Symposium.64 The following summer, he would go back to the Greek text, and in 1818 would translate it, at the same time crafting a thoughtful introductory essay. In this essay Shelley would engage directly with an aspect of ancient Greek society, and more particularly of Plato's ideas in the Symposium, that would not be acknowledged in print in English until much later in the century. As Shelley expressed it in 1818, in ancient Greece, ‘beautiful persons of the male sex became the object of that sort of feelings, which are only cultivated at present as towards females’. To explain this to Byron now was all that Shelley needed in order to elevate the two poets’ discourse to a level more congenial to his own sensibility. Most probably Shelley kept to himself his sense of revulsion from what, a few lines later in the essay, he would term ‘the ridiculous and disgusting conceptions which the vulgar have formed on the subject’ – apparently referring to anal intercourse between men.65 This sudden outburst, which breaks into an otherwise elevated context, is rather reminiscent of Shelley's words on Byron.

  Byron in 1816 had not read Plato. Indeed, he probably never did, and later would rely for his information on Shelley. In his down-to-earth way, Byron seems to have thought that Plato's ideas were humbug.66 But, that summer, he was ready to seize on what Shelley told him about the idea of ‘intellectual beauty’. This phrase was Shelley's own translation of Plato's Greek, To Kalon, which literally means ‘the beautiful’. To Kalon, according to the ancient philosopher, is the ultimate object of all love, whether carnal or divine. It was this idea that Shelley would address in his poem ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, and would also intrude upon Byron's latest canto of Childe Harold.

  The poets reached Clarens on the Tuesday. It may have been during their twenty-four-hour stay there, or more likely during the days that followed, while their progress was held up by yet more stormy weather, that Byron penned the six stanzas that were almost the last to be added to the canto. The first of them begins: ‘Clarens! sweet Clarens, birth-place of deep Love!’67 These stanzas, in which Shelley's influence has often been noted, are Byron's own ‘hymn to intellectual beauty’. Ostensibly written in praise of Rousseau and the heterosexual tussle between love and virtue that blights the lives of Julie and St Preux, these stanzas address a male god, the Eros of the Greeks, who is also presented as the supreme force that drives both animate and inanimate Nature.68 ‘All things are here of him’, the poet declares:

  the gush of springs,

  And fall of lofty fountains, and the bend

  Of stirring branches, and the bud which brings

  The swiftest thought of beauty, here extend,

  Mingling, and made by Love, unto one mighty end.69

  Byron was ever shy of the kind of philosophical abstraction or generalisation in which Shelley delighted. It is often suggested that ‘Shelleyan’ moments such as these sit awkwardly in their context, or go against the grain of Byron's own poetic instincts.70 In this case it is worth remembering that Canto III of Childe Harold was already finished. These stanzas were written as one of several afterthoughts, or codas. The separateness of this one was then quite deliberately disguised by inserting it to follow the description of the thunderstorm over the lake that Byron had witnessed on 13 June, and before the original ending of the canto. It may have been because he recognised something too personal concerning Shelley, in these stanzas, that after the two poets had returned to Cologny, Byron neglected to give them to Mary to include in the fair copy of the poem that he had asked her to make.71

  When these stanzas are read in their biographical context, rather than the literary one that Byron created for them after the fact, it becomes clear that the ‘deep Love’ addressed in them reaches far more deeply into the poet's experience and aspiration even than his genuine admiration for Rousseau and the beauties of Clarens. In these stanzas Byron was grasping at an understanding of love sufficient to encompass his own transgressive adventures in Greece, as well as all that his new friend had just been telling him about a transcendent ‘intellectual beauty’ to which all human love aspires. Shelley, surely, was the catalyst for this poetic outburst of feeling.

  It is also possible, in some way that may never have been fully acknowledged by Byron, and of which Shelley would have remained always blissfully unaware, that the handsome younger poet had himself stirred something of those deepest feelings in Byron.

  The lake tour ended on the last day of June. The two poets would in future get to know one another better, and to misunderstand one another worse, than they had during those eight days together on the Lake of Geneva. But they would never again be as clos
e. On Thursday, 2 August, Byron summoned Shelley and Claire to the Villa Diodati. ‘I do not [go] for Lord B. did not seem to wish it’, wrote Mary in her journal.72 Claire was pregnant. Byron was reluctant to acknowledge the child as his. It was probably Shelley who persuaded him, but, when he did, it was with conditions that would impose a formidable burden on the Shelley household for the rest of Shelley's life, and would mark the beginning of Claire's undying enmity for Byron. With such practical and embarrassing matters to be haggled over, much of the zest will have gone out of the conversations at the Villa Diodati. At about the same time, Shelley received another summons, this time from his father. For financial reasons, he and Mary and Claire would have to return to England. The summer was ending early.

  Shelley, Mary, and Claire left Montalègre on their journey to England on 29 August. A month later Byron wrote to his friend and banker, Douglas Kinnaird: ‘Pray continue to like Shelley – he is a very good – very clever – but a very singular man – he was a great comfort to me here by his intelligence & good nature.’73 Commentators have noticed ever since that Byron always estimated Shelley more as a man than as a poet. It was Shelley's conversation that held Byron's attention. Byron would often concede that he could easily be influenced, but this was never truer than in the case of Shelley, for whom eventually he would come to entertain feelings close to awe.74