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The Dissipated Muse: Wine, Women, and Byronic Song

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The Dissipated Muse: Wine, Women, and Byronic Song Colby Quarterly Volume 20 Issue 1 March Article 5 March 1984 The Dissipated Muse: Wine, Women, and Byronic Song Frederick W. Shilstone Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq Recommended Citation Colby Library Quarterly, Volume 20, no.1, March 1984, p.36-46 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. Shilstone: The Dissipated Muse: Wine, Women, and Byronic Song The Dissipated Muse: Wine, Women, and Byronic Song by FREDERICK W. SHILSTONE URING THE later stages of his literary career, while he was residing D in Italy and composing Don Juan and a series of "closet" dramas, Lord Byron allegedly counseled Thomas Medwin on the course the lat­ ter should pursue in order to become a successful poet: "Why don't you drink, Medwin? Gin-and-water is the source of all my inspiration. If you were to drink as much as I do, you would write as good verses: de­ pend on it, it is the true Hippocrene."l The same years saw Byron attributing his literary genius to sexual activity, intoxication's com­ panion in the dissipated life. A bit of doggerel verse he shipped to his publisher John Murray from Venice in early 1818 contains the poet's wittiest claim on that subject: "There's a whore on my right / For I rhyme best at Night / When a C-t is tied close to my Inkstand."2 Few would dispute the authenticity of these statements. Not only are the works Byron wrote during his Italian residence pervaded with references to intoxication, sex, and dissipation in general; but, further, his public attitude toward himself as man and poet demanded that he appear casu­ al about his craft, ever mixing composition with other, more important pleasures: ". .. if one's years can't be better employed than in sweat­ ing poesy-a man had better be a ditcher" (BL&J, VI, 105). When biog­ raphers portray Byron as a carefree rake and libertine, they do so on the poet's own authority. In addition, Byron's comments on the source and nature of artistic inspiration have served the needs of historians of literary theory, for, when one considers these pronouncements in the context of other Romantic writers' views on the unstudied, unconscious, even irrational nature of the composition process-Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow" and De Quincey's "pleasures of opium," for instance-it is easy to see how attributing poetic skills to "gin-and­ water" and the female anatomy rank among Byron's gifts to the Romantic aesthetic. 3 Nonetheless, however well Byron's claims for the 1. Medwin's Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), p. 267. 2. Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973-81), VI, 5. Further references to this series will be cited parenthetically in the text of my essay, along with volume and page numbers, as BL&J. 3. For instance, M. H. Abrams interweaves Byron's comments with those of the poet's major con­ temporaries-many of whom he openly ridiculed and despised-in Abrams' famous distillation of Ro­ mantic aesthetic theory, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953). 36 Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1984 1 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 20, Iss. 1 [1984], Art. 5 FREDERICK W. SHILSTONE 37 artistic necessity of intoxication and ·sex accommodate biographers and literary theorists alike, the poet's dissipated image has a far more vital contribution to make to our understanding of this writer, that being the manner in which it illustrates how he translated personal experience into myth and used that myth as the basis for metaphors embodying his ever­ changing vision of the world. For the myth of dissipation contributes to the most famous and radical shift in perspective in Byron's entire career, the one responsible for the vacillating, celebratory kaleidoscope that is Don Juan. To recognize how Byron's assumption of a dissipated image tran­ scends mere biographical and artistic posing, one need only examine the particular chronology and circumstances of that image's appearance. First and most important, Byron's studied projection of his dissipation in journals, correspondence, conversations, and published works alike dominated only a relatively brief segment of his career. While occa­ sional references to drinking bouts and sexual conquests appear throughout Byron's writings, his consistent exploitation of such activi­ ties as myth and, in his works, as metaphor is noteworthy only in the period running (roughly) between his completion of Manfred in early 1817 and his temporary abandonment of Don Juan after composing the fifth canto in late 1820. The pervasiveness of the image during that period is reflected in the fact that Byron's use of it went far beyond simple praise of intoxication and sex as aids to releasing the poet's sub­ conscious genius (the gist of his comments to Medwin and Murray); for Byron, intoxication and its aftermath became parts of a mythical style of living that merged with sexual excess and, additionally, with alternate bouts of gluttony and fasting, all of which became components of the poetic vision inspired by what I have called the dissipated muse. Under­ standing why Byron assumed this image and how that act explains the poet's changing attitudes during the years 1817-20 first requires a brief look at the general attraction personal mythnlaking held for Byron throughout his life. Byron was always quick to turn outward circumstances to his poetic advantage. His immediate exploitation of personal experiences and con­ temporary written accounts in Don Juan was only the last and most meticulous example of this tendency in his canon. 4 More to the point, Byron was ever prone to seize on some aspect of his life and transform it into a controlling metaphor in his works, his correspondence, his very existence. Byron's literary career began with such an event; faced with hostile criticism of his early volume of lyrics, Hours of Idleness, he immediately assumed the image of the wounded Enlightenment man of letters, wrote English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) and Hints 4. See, for example t Jerome J. McGann t Don Juan in Context (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 134. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol20/iss1/5 2 Shilstone: The Dissipated Muse: Wine, Women, and Byronic Song 38 COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY from Horace (1811), and became Pope's most vocal advocate among the writers of early nineteenth-century England, a stance that, like all those Byron assumed throughout his life, he never completely abandoned. The most obvious example of Byron's artistic use of personal events, though, came later, in the period just prior to his assumption of the dis­ sipated image that is my chief topic in this paper. That was his projec­ tion of himself as a homeless exile following his departure from England in 1816. While no one can doubt that the poet felt at least some despair at his separation from friends, from his sister Augusta, from his daugh­ ter Ada, and perhaps even partially regretted the disastrous failure of his marriage, those feelings were likely nothing to what Byron made of them. All the formal writings of the late 1816-early 1817 period­ chiefly Childe Harold III, Manfred, "Prometheus," "The Prisoner of Chillon," and "Darkness"-are dominated by a theme of personal, po­ litical, and philosophical exile. And that image extends, as always, to the poet's correspondence. For example, as the "exile" wanders through the Alps and keeps a journal for his sister Augusta, he chooses his objective correlatives wisely: "Passed whole woods of withered pines-all withered-trunks stripped & barkless-branches lifeless­ done by a single winter-their appearance reminded me of me & my family" (BL&J, V, 102). No matter that elsewhere (and frequently) By­ ron expresses an increasing repugnance at the thought of ever returning to England;5 the image of exile, and the gloom and alienation it casts over the writings of these months, must serve until another myth and metaphor might supersede it. Ironically, it was the fact (as opposed to the image) of "exile" that allowed Byron to happen upon, almost to stumble into, the situation that would provide his new metaphor, that would change his projected image and with it the nihilistic vision of the compositions of 1816. In the autumn of that year, Byron left Switzerland, whose stark topography and Germanic earnestness had so well suited the tenor of his mind in the months immediately following his abandonment of England, traveled the Simplon Napoleon road to Milan and, ultimately, continued on to Venice. While the changes this movement led to in Byron's vision were not immediate, signs that the brooding exile of the previous months would have to move aside began to appear, if only in a minor key, in the first correspondence Byron posted from his new resting place. While in Milan he wrote to Augusta Leigh: " ... the whole tone of Italian soci­ ety is so different from yours in England; that I have not time to de­ scribe it, tho' I am not sure that I do not prefer it" (BL&J, V, 120). The tentative proclamations of this letter, among the earliest of the poet's re- 5. As one instance, note Byron's comment to Douglas Kinnaird in a letter of December 17, 1816 (while the writings of the "exile" period were being completed and were seeing their way into print): "I have it so much at heart-to divorce myself as much as possible-from all connection with the country called England" (BL&J, V, 140).
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