Byron's Scottish essence.
Walsh, Patrick J.
Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture, by John Clubbe, Hampshire, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. 345 pp.
WALKING INTO THE OWEN GALLERY on New York's 75th Street in April of 1999, Professor John Clubbe saw a gorgeous portrait of Lord Byron hanging on the gallery wall. It left him utterly astonished. Clubbe stood transfixed staring at Byron's face. A Byron scholar for forty years, he knew all the major portraits of the poet but had never seen this one. His perfunctory judgment told him this was the work of a great master. Below the canvas, a card attributed the portrait to Thomas Sully (1783-1872). For the next six years Clubbe sought out the enigma of the portrait and the painter.
George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824) held both Europe and America spellbound in an age described as Romantic. Romantics reacted against Europe's secular materialism brought about by the rise of deterministic science. Yeats summed up their disgust perfectly--"Newton, Descartes took the world and left us excrement instead." Newton imprisoned man in a world of infinite matter without a beginning or an end, and Descartes removed himself from the world of matter, retreating into abstractions of his mind--"I think therefore I am". Both systems alienated man from himself and from other men. One theory made man a material beast and the other a disembodied intellect. T.S. Eliot described this development as a "dissociation of sensibility," which still afflicts the modern world.
Poets approach the total reality and mystery of human existence and can do so with reverence. They know that human beings encounter things through the senses before they think them. Reverence lends itself to love and to a deeper understanding for the mystery of things, a dimension beyond the realm of science. Mystery involves this question: "Why is there something instead of nothing?" This something of creation suggests a creator. Poets see the created world as a gift of love and declare, "I love therefore I am." This draws them to others as they evoke and recall things loved in a community that transcends time.
The new scientific method rejected the validity of such poetic knowledge. It also rejected past human experience, common sense, and religion. Sadly the Romantics never clearly articulated a refutation against the godless universe of the scientist. Instead of reasoning their way back to sanity by incorporating head and heart, the Romantics tended to deny reason, postulating feeling instead. They turned inward on themselves. Byron defied the modern world with aristocratic disdain. In Don Juan he ridiculed a deracinated world: When Bishop Berkeley said 'there was no matter,' And proved it--'twas no matter what he said: They say his system 'tis in vain to batter, Too subtle for the airiest human head; And yet who can believe it? I would shatter Gladly all matters down to stone or lead, Or adamant, to find the world a spirit, And wear my head, denying that I wear it.
With no deep religious belief to sustain them, the Romantic poets became disconsolate chimeras searching for some abiding spiritual truth. Byron desired a place of refuge from the dominant secular order of godless science, rising commerce, and material innovation--"Inventions that help man as true/ As shooting them at Waterloo." Lord Byron owed no fealty to such a world refusing to "coin his cheeks to smile." Byron, Shelley, and Keats drifted to Rome from which the word romantic comes. Shelley renamed the eternal city--"a paradise of exiles."
For several decades after the fall of Napoleon the Romantics shaded and colored the daydreams of young Europeans and Americans. Curiously its leaders happened to be Scottish aristocrats. Lord Byron became the champion of its poetry while Sir Walter Scott championed its prose. Scott transformed Scotland into a symbol of romance, as Byron seemed to turn himself into one.
Byron appeared to seek in sexual escapades an escape from despair, but experience taught him that despondency only increases. He thought marriage would tame him. Yet, sadly, his marriage dissolved in less than a year. Rumors of mistreating his wife soon hounded him out of "perfidious Albion." In 1816 he left England never to return. Sorely out of humor with the world, he defied it further by asserting his wit, ego, and fearsome pride.
Sir Walter Scott predicted Byron's conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, that is, if he lived long enough. "I don't expect your conversion to be of such an ordinary kind. I would rather look to see you retreat upon the Catholic Faith and distinguish yourself by the austerity of your penances." In a letter to Thomas Moore, Byron wrote, "I am no enemy of religion, but on the contrary ... I incline myself very much to the Catholic doctrines." The furthest Byron got was to have his daughter schooled in a Roman Catholic convent.
Scott also detected Byron's dissatisfaction with sexual licentiousness. Saint Augustine traveled a similar path: "all things in moderation including moderation. For sometimes it behooves a man well to indulge in excess thereby he can find his own humanity and the divinity of his God." We will never know the full extent of Byron's sexual excesses because his friend Thomas Moore destroyed his Journals. What a loss particularly for our debauched age! Byron regretted his sins and believed that his Journals would prove instructive to mankind by showing the emptiness and destructiveness of a life of dissipation.
In exile Byron would have nothing to do with the English who peered at him from a distance through their telescopes. But he had a fondness for Americans. "Americans are the only people whom I never refuse to show myself. The Yankees are great friends of mine." Commodore Jacob Jones invited him aboard the USS Constitution for an official visit as it lay in anchor off Leghorn, Italy, in 1822. George Bancroft, the future American historian also a guest on board that day wrote, "finding all on board to be Americans, Lord Byron's manners became easy, frank and cheerful." Touring another American ship, Ontario, Byron was pleased to find a New York edition of his poems. And in a letter Byron observed, "a manly prowess and marine nerve rapidly taking wing [from England] to America."
Not only was Byron pleased by American frigates, he was also impressed by American writers urging friends in England to send him American publications. Washington Irving interested him particularly. Once, hoping to find a copy of Irving's latest work in a trunk sent from England, Byron rummaged in vain. Upon finding a volume by Jeremy Bentham entitled Springs of Action, Byron hurled the book by the English Utilitarian across the room exclaiming, "my prick has more spring in it."
As Byron revitalized poetry for his generation so Thomas Sully, according to Clubbe, "introduced into American portraiture a Romantic sensibility, a livlier palette, a heightened energy and flair, a sense of drama." Most Americans know Sully from his handsome portrait of Andrew Jackson that adorns the U.S. twenty-dollar bill. But Clubbe points out in his book that many of Sully's works are inaccessible to the public. His splendid Washington's Passage of the Delaware remains rolled up in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts despite strong public interest in the subject attested to by David McCullough's 1776 and David H. Fischer's Washington's Crossing, two best sellers by two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors.
Sully's paintings possess a power that captures the "dramatic individuality" of the person. James Fenimore Cooper, a Federalist, and no friend of Jefferson, was overcome with emotion when he viewed Sully's portrait of Jefferson at West Point. Sully spent sixty years of his life in Philadelphia, first settling there in 1810. Originally English-born, he came to America as a child. In England he studied under Benjamin West and Sir Thomas Lawrence. His widely recognized talent was sought after on both sides of the Atlantic. On one trip to England he received a royal commission to paint the young Queen Victoria.
In Italy, Byron appeared to be settling down with the beautiful young Countess Teresa Guiccioli. During their love-making she sometimes paused to make the sign of the cross when she heard church bells in the distance ringing. It was only a momentary interruption to what the late great Pope John Paul II referred to as "the language of the body." Byron was charmed to learn the meaning of the Angelus and that all the body's senses are sanctified at Catholic baptism and in the last rites.
Byron was starting to discern the action of grace in nature ejaculating a lovely prayer to Our Lady in Don Juan-- Ave Maria! Blessed be the hour The time, the clime, the spot where I so oft Have felt that moment in its fullest power Sink o'er the earth so beautiful and soft, While swung the deep bell in the distant tower, Or the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft, And not a breath crept through the rosy air And yet the forest leaves seem stirr'd with prayer.
Yet Byron remained restless. In 1822 Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy. And 1823, brought the death of Byron's daughter Allegra from a fever. At age 36, Byron thought his "days in the yellow leaf/ The flowers and fruits of love are gone/ The worm, the canker, and the grief are mine alone." He sailed for Greece, losing his life there on April 19, 1824, during the rebellion for Greek independence. Byron's death on the anniversary of Lexington and Concord made him all the more popular in America.
Thomas Sully always had a great interest in Byron as did other prominent Philadelphians. Sully's painting was not done ("from life"). Many portraits of famous men were not from life. Napoleon refused to sit for any of Louis David's paintings, instructing him to paint the ideal. He told David that the portraits great men sit for do not capture their illusive essence and that the artist's business was to capture somehow that genius on canvas.
Sully studied all of Byron's portraits, gathering information for years from other painters and from the poet's close personal friends in order to capture Byron. Clubbe believes Sully's skill as a miniaturist painter made him the "most gifted artist ever to render Byron's features." Sully chose the profile pose Byron did for Richard Westfall in 1813. Byron insisted on profiles because he had one eye bigger than the other and of a slightly different color. The poet was sensitive about it though others thought it remarkably striking.
Westfall's portrait as compared to Sully's is too self-absorbed and English--a kind of weak tea of too much milk and sugar. Byron, it should be noted, was more Scottish than English. His poetry is heavily influenced by the tradition of Gaelic songs and ballads rendered into English. His best friend, Irish poet Thomas Moore, shared the same interest in Irish songs and melodies. In Don Juan, Byron declared, "But I am half a Scot by birth and bred / A whole one and my heart flies to my head." Sully's portrait captures Byron's Scottish essence. It is more engaging, confident, and full of life--uplifting and ruddy with Scottish good looks, stiff breezes, and blasts of whiskey.
Clubbe's book has brought a portrait to light, an American masterpiece that has been virtually unknown--"never exhibited, never engraved and never discussed by scholars of Sully or of Byron." Now we have an epic portrait to go with Byron's epic masterpiece, Don Juan.
There is no better summary of Byron or of Don Juan, than the one penned by the American critic Paul Elmer More in his Shelburne Essays. It also deserves to be brought to light: "Out of the bitterness of his soul, out of the wreck of his passions which though heroic in intensity had ended in quailing of the heart, he had sought what the great makers of epic had sought--a solace and a sense of uplifted freedom. The heroic ideal was gone, the refuge of religion was gone; but passing to the opposite extreme, by showing the power of the human heart to mock at all things, he would still set forth the possibility of standing alone and apart from all things. He too went beyond the limits of destiny by laughter as Homer and Virgil and Milton had risen by the imagination and in doing this, he wrote the modern epic."
PATRICK J. WALSH is a regular contributor to Modern Age.
