Byron: More Than a Pretty Face

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Emily A. Bernhard Jackson

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Lord Byron, the 19^th-century Romantic best known for his epic poem Don Juan, has another, little-recognized side. According to Emily A. Bernhard Jackson, a Byron scholar at the University of Arkansas, Byron was a psychologically astute writer who developed a philosophy of knowledge sharply at odds with the thinking of his time.

“People don’t tend to talk about Byron as a philosopher,” Bernhard Jackson said. “Either they talk about his influence or talk about him in historical or cultural terms. He was funny and good-looking, and he didn’t become famous for his thinking but for his selfhood.”

Her article “The Harold of a New Age: Childe Harold I and II and Byron’s Rejection of Canonical Knowledge” was published in the scholarly journal Romanticism on the Net.

In her examination of Byron’s first major work, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Bernhard Jackson revealed the first, important steps in Byron’s philosophical development. She wrote that in cantos I and II of the work, Byron “the intellectual explorer” challenged “the conventional idea of knowledge as stable and reliable.”

Britain in Byron’s time had taken a “turn toward the visual” with opportunities abounding for the public to visit galleries and museums “to see objects and art previously unavailable to them,” Bernhard Jackson wrote. Theater was becoming more of a visual, as opposed to a verbal, experience. Shop windows displayed cartoons and prints of news and scandals freely available for all to see.

To acquire knowledge, it wasn’t enough to simply view something. As a cultured lady of the time wrote in her diary: “There is a great difference between staring and seeing — the one is merely Corporeal; the other unites the mental to the bodily powers and lays in a stock of ideas.”

It became important to develop “the ability to see 'correctly,’ to demonstrate gentility by means of an appropriate response to the visual,” Bernhard Jackson wrote. “The skilled eye, moreover, was understood to be an instructor of morality.”

Soon academies, institutes and popular writings offered instruction in discernment “to lay bare the underlying tenets of taste in order that it might be understood and acquired by those who sought it.” Byron initially presents Childe Harold as a travel narrative offering observations of other lands by an educated member of the upper classes, a narrative that at first “seems to participate in the validation of sight as a conduit to understanding.”

Not so, Bernhard Jackson said. “You can see Byron poking at the 18^th-century idea of how to acquire knowledge — for him, 'different ways of seeing produce different ways of knowing.’”

Rather than leading the reader to comprehension, his description of scenes and events produce disorientation through contradiction and complexities. “The complexities may result not in deeper understanding, but in the impression that there can be no understanding at all. Stanzas undermine themselves, and elements within them destabilize precisely the comprehension and power that sight is supposed to give the viewing reader,” Bernhard Jackson wrote.

Byron ends Childe Harold with a commentary that is a repudiation of the notion of sight producing revelation and comprehension.

“This commentary,” Bernhard Jackson observed, “demonstrates to readers not the power but the weakness of both sight and knowledge: one may see, but one may not necessarily discern; what one knows may be only what one has been taught to believe.”

With cantos I and II of Childe Harold, Bernhard Jackson concludes, “Byron begins a consideration that will end, some eight years later in Don Juan, in a complete repudiation of the possibility of knowing and an embrace of the empowering force of radical skepticism.”

Byron died in 1824 in Greece while supporting the Greek struggle for independence. According to Bernhard Jackson, his philosophy of knowledge — the idea that knowledge is something we make up, rather than something that exists outside of us — meshed with Byron’s concerns with freedom and revolution. To allow people to create their own understanding of the world is a way of giving them the power of philosophy.

Bernhard Jackson is assistant professor of English in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.